Tag Archives: Anthony Albanese

Team Dutton duds women; snubs gender equality, bipartisanship and democracy

March 23, 2024
Written by: David Tyler
18 Replies

Actions speak louder than words if not nearly as often, while inactions can speak louder than both. The Liberals are paying lip service to a target of fifty percent women in ten years, after Morrison’s catastrophic election hot mess-dumpster-fire-trainwreck in 2022 triggered an independent review from Peta Credlin’s manbag, Brian Loughnane and jolly Jane Hume. Hume tells women that they just need to work harder. Sweat destroys glass ceilings.

Seventeen Liberal women were elected to the House of Representatives in 2013. Today the number is nine. Crumb-maiden, Hume loves a colourful image. “We should gut the chicken properly before we read the entrails – and there’ll be a lot of gutting.”

There will be. Yet any practical reform like quotas is Liberal heresy. Easier to scapegoat Scott Morrison. It’s Harpo Marx syndrome, as if ScoMo, a lightweight shonk, somehow, is not the product of a party in such decline that it could allow itself to be conned into electing him as leader. But the sole cause? You may as well try nailing a jelly to the wall.

Or try to get any policy detail out of Peter Dutton. After his flirtation with nuclear and his quick whirl with birthday girl, Gina Rinehart, Dutts cuts up ugly, this week, over Labor’s decision not to proceed with the dregs of Morrison’s mis-named religious freedom bill.

Labor wants to delete section 38 of The Sex Discrimination Act, 1984, forced on a Hawke government, which allows churches to discriminate lawfully and “against another person on the ground of … sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or relationship status or pregnancy” in relation to the provision of education or training.

But the PM is not about to get dragged into another culture war which lets the Opposition set the agenda. He will not proceed unless he can count on bipartisan support from the federal Coalition, some of whom are more concerned with which toilet we use than policy on equality, wages or cost of living. Peter Dutton goes bananas. It doesn’t help.

Culture wars, transphobia and hyper partisanship butter no parsnips. Junkyard’s dog in the manger politics won’t win power. Michelle Grattan calls the Coalition, a flightless bird because the Liberals lost their moderate wing. It’s a fair image but ignores the fact that so-called “moderates”, generally, lacked the bottle to rock ScoMo’s boat let alone cross the floor. Save Bridget Archer, now in Dutton’s, new, bijou, backbench purdah for her pains.

In fact, many Lib MPs seem to be in an induced coma, witness hapless Shadow Treasurer, Angus Taylor, afflicted by crippling avolition. As is his new assistant Luke Howarth, who may be a Duttonista in nodding for the camera in Question Time but does little else. A coma won’t help the Libs recover from their mugging by reality, 21 May 2022. Instead, it helps it turn hard right with a vengeance, as if, at last, it’s found true North.

Hume and Loughnane’s party vivisection finds that despite (or because of) His Divine Inspiration, the laying on of hands and frequent recourse to prayer, Holy ScoMo proved deaf to women’s concerns. If only Jen could have told him he had his head up his bum.

“Jenny has a way of clarifying things.” Indebted to his Stepford wife Jenny, for his epiphany into rape being bad for women, Morrison writes off most of the Liberals inner-metropolitan seats and ignored the Teals- after all, they are only women-in his rush to woo the blokes, outer suburban tradies in utes, he imagines might enjoy a return to the 1950s.

Grattan lets him have it. ‘“His arrogant, or ill-informed, assumption seems to have been the teals were just a bunch of irritating women, and that professional people – including and especially female voters – in traditional Liberal seats would buy the government’s insulting argument these candidates were “fakes”.’

Election review box ticked, the next Liberal initiative is a therapeutic group-hug around the “no quotas”, totem allowing The LNP to remain a former private schoolboys’ club. (As is Labor but barely fifty per cent and with fifty per cent women representation.) Jane Hume declares that the quote may work in corporations, but the Liberal Party is a different beast.

It is. Over seventy percent of Liberals and over 65 percent of Nationals attended private, mostly single-sex secondary schools. Barnaby Joyce, the world’s best advertisement for Sydney’s exclusive Riverview, after Old Boy, Tony Abbott. Attended also by loud, lusty, rugger-playing lads who are now almost twenty per cent of NSW’s supreme court judges.

It shows. The Liberal problem with men goes beyond excluding women from power. It has a problem with masculinity itself. As does junior partner, the shagged-out National Party now backed by Big Tobacco and roped into coalition to win power. Three years ago, The Greens’ membership (11,500) overtook the Nationals which continues its free-fall decline.

In Peter “The Protector” Dutton, the Coalition clings to an atavistic paternalism that is unwise, unjust and unsafe. It peddles a testosteronic, if not toxic, masculinity in the myth of the strong, “tough but fair” patriarchal leader, while men tighten their squirrel-grip on power in the scrum as preferred candidates in safe seats.

Just as forty-one per cent of us have been led to falsely believe “domestic violence” (DV) is equally perpetrated by men and women, ABS data reveals, DV is predominantly male violence against women. Yet we are expected to trust Dutton because he’s tough.

The truth is out there. “No Voice for You,” a bad parody of Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi, Dutton is a parody of fearless leadership in protecting a fair and just process in any sphere.

Unerringly, Dutts backs another dud, Nathan Conroy a callow, “small government” stud-muffin from Cork, now man-about Frankston, whose acting mayor is still at school. In Dunkley, the Libs believe a bloke will have more appeal than Jodie Belyea, a woman committed to empowering women; seeking power to achieve social justice? As Belyea is welcomed into parliament this week, Albo notes Labor now has more women representatives than men. But just how many of those are running the joint?

The Guardian Australia’s Amy Remeikis tallies up. “In Queensland, men were preselected for the safe seats of Fadden and Bowman and James McGrath won the Senate ticket battle over Amanda Stoker. Karen Andrews’ McPherson branch … will be deciding between four men for its next candidate. That will leave Angie Bell as the sole woman in the Liberals’ strongest state. Bell is also facing a fierce preselection challenge from men, which if successful would mean out of the 23 seats the LNP hold, Michelle Landry would be the only woman – and she sits in the Nationals party room.”

WA senator, the delightfully named and perfectly formed, Ben Small, will replace Nola Marino as Liberal candidate for Forrest and Dev, “Dave” Sharma is warming the senate seat vacated by low profile, party apparatchik promoted into parliament, Marise Payne.

The Liberals know they lost the last election, largely because they alienate women voters. Hume and Loughnane spell it out delicately behind the screen of perception. Morrison “was perceived” to have a tin ear on women’s issues. But Dutton has industrial deafness.

What better than a safe seat such as Cook, for example, for veteran family advocate commissioner, Gwen Cherne? No endorsement by its incumbent? Yeah. Nah. ScoMo fails Cherne, despite gushing earlier that “he’d love to see” a woman in his vacated seat. Pious piffle. In the end, he backs former McKinsey consultant, carpetbagger, Simon Kennedy.

No-one expects Morrison to keep his word. Just ask Emmanuel Macron.

“Actions define a man; words are a fart in the wind,” Mario Puzo reminds us, while Charlie Chaplin noted, “Words are cheap. The biggest thing you can say is elephant.”

Simon Kennedy, a blow-in who failed in Bennelong, confirms that a woman’s place is not in Liberal politics. Dutton promotes a type of chest-beating pseudo-masculinity. It’s all we need to protect us all. Listen as he derides Albo as “weak and woke”. His office is channeling Republican Nikki Haley. All week, Dutton works the word “weak” into his increasingly strident diatribes against the PM. Soon it will be “limp, weak and woke.”

Similarly, misled by the hairy-chested stereotype of muscular masculinity is former failed PM, macho-man, Tony Abbott, who as a student politician was witnessed throwing punches near the head of his opponent, Barbara Ramjan. Dutton’s soul brother, in his human wrecking-ball, approach to opposition went on to become a clueless PM. (Those punches never happened, Abbott contends, despite eye-witness accounts.)

Now climate-change-is-crap-Abbott’s a Victor Orban fanboy, a right-wing think tank crew member and token anti-woke bloke on the Murdoch’s Fox Corporation’s board. For Tony, women on boards conjures up ironing, not women on boards who run corporations.

The Libs also dump Anne Ruston to elevate Alex Antic, a poor man’s Cory Bernardi to number one spot on the SA senate ticket. It sends a message akin to Tony Abbott’s appointment of himself as Minister for Women or Philosopher Morrison’s IWD speech that equality is done and dusted but we can’t promote women at the expense of men. Listen? Meet their leaders? Women who protest can be grateful they are not being gunned down.

But as the SA senate choice shows, the reverse is perfectly OK. Antic, moreover, will be able to be Dutton’s muppet, saying things the Thug would love to say himself if he could.

“… the ‘gender card’ is nothing but a grievance narrative, constructed by the activist media and a disgruntled political class … we need the best person for the job regardless of race, gender or sexuality,” Antic says.

Ruston will almost certainly be re-elected from second place, but the die is cast.

Built in to the born to rule DNA of the Liberals and the self-righteous, sense of entitlement nurtured on the playing fields of Riverview and fostered by the oligarchs of our nation’s corporate media, is an inability to learn from their mistakes. Similarly with narcissistic personalities such as Morrison. Any review is pure theatre, a ritual which may help ease the pain of loss. Its actors may censure Scott Morrison, but he’ll continue to clap himself on the back. As he did in his farewell speech. As will acolytes and admirers such as Dutton.

“The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history,” is often attributed to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1770-1831 who did, indeed, say something a bit like that in the introduction to his Philosophy of History.

“But what experience and history teach is this, – that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it.”

We can never step into the same river twice. Hegel is warning readers of the madness of extrapolating lessons from a past which has irrevocably changed. But this should not cause us to forget our past. Peter Dutton can huff and puff all he likes but the reality is that women are not after a hairy-chested provider but equality, respect and recognition.

Similarly, Anthony Albanese is entitled to applaud Labor for having exceeded its fifty per cent quota of women representatives in parliament. But it’s slim consolation to all those women MPs who are excluded by gender from the levers of power.

The Liberal Party, with Peter Dutton in the wheelhouse, shows no real commitment to gender equality, bipartisanship, or democracy, preferring instead the wrecking ball that first advanced – then quickly undid another moral and political pygmy, Tony Abbott.

Abbott’s landslide victory only exposed his extensive limitations; he was unfit to govern. In net terms, his government was a disaster for his party. As was Morrison’s. Selecting male candidates for winnable seats will only accelerate the party’s steep decline.

The decline in the number of women elected to the House of Representatives, its reluctance to implement practical reforms such as quotas, ought to be a wake-up call for the Liberals, for whom History seems to have decided, “It’s Time.”

Of deeper concern, however, is the re-emergence of veneration for the strong man in politics, a fallacy once believed to have been consigned to the dustbin of history, is now enjoying a type of renaissance across the globe. George Santayana wrote,

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

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Labor’s “brave” review fails to upstage Morrison’s incompetence

November 10, 2019
Written by: David Tyler
11 Replies

Were politics reset in keeping with the times, the parties would concede that it is not a contest between social democracy and a capitalist free-for-all, or “the light on the hill” and “the forgotten people”, or even conservatives and progressives, but one in which the ghosts of organisations that once had some claim to represent these passions compete to prove themselves the superior financial managers. Don Watson

Attack of the Labor Zombies: “Review of Labor’s 2019 Election Campaign”, the ritual killing of Bill Shorten by hungry ghosts, premiers nationally, this week, six months after Bill’s political death, a fate which the commentariat is still finalising for him despite his promising to “hang around” for another twenty years.

Karen Middleton scoffs at Shorten’s pledge. “He’ll be in his seventies”, she sighs, on ABC Insiders Sunday. Bill will be 72. Four years younger than Joe Biden. Elizabeth Warren’s 70. Billy Hughes served for 51 years; died at 90 before he could get around to thinking about retiring. But it’s not about age.

It’s … the chutzpah. “He’s got to win all those elections.” Shorten won almost a five per cent (4.99%) swing to Labor in his Victorian seat of Maribyrnong, last election. Next, he’s at fault for making his twenty-year pledge before the review comes out to help others decide his future for him.

How very dare he get in first?

MSM is consumed by the review; the review of the review and any excuse at all to kick Bill Shorten.

Kill Bill has become a national sport since Tony Abbott contrived to make “Bill Shorten” a pejorative term, a project taken up shamelessly by Malcolm Turnbull and with glee by bully Morrison.

Interviews with Morrison normalise his bullying, as Dr Jennifer Wilson argues, in analysis of the PM’s manic scattergun barrage of bullshit to cover his running away from the question guerrilla tactics.

Julia Banks quit parliament after only a term because of the level of bullying during the leadership spill.

What’s even more alarming is the subtext that Morrison, miraculously, got everything right. Scapegoats help with that. It’s a by-product of reducing party politics to the popularity of the leader, part of our brave new age of populist personality politics where policy and reasoned argument count less than spin and image. And Morrison’s fevered hyper-partisanship makes Tony Abbott look like a peace-maker.

Albo offers to accompany Morrison to NSW bushfire areas, he tells Fran Kelly, Sunday. His offer is brushed aside. Something about not getting in the way of “the rescue effort”. Later media images show Morrison, alone, comforting victims, as he did with his drought series of visits, grandstanding on grief.

But Labor doesn’t seem to have got the memo that there’s a war on. Blending psychic surgery with forensic post-mortem, Labor eviscerates itself for a ritual cleansing. Bares its soul. And then some. The Review … is an unparalleled, almost naive act of faith. No wonder it gets everyone’s attention.

But why? Is this orgy of over-sharing prompted by some rush of utopian socialism which only true believers can call into being? Or is it folly? It’s unique, says ABC’s Laura Tingle, her take on “brave”.

“That’s very brave of you, minister. An extremely courageous decision,” as Mr Appleby would say.

Yet Labor’s purpose, beside officially defining what went wrong, is to draw a line under its defeat.

Fat chance. Just because closure is a tabloid TV victim’s top buzz-word doesn’t make it achievable. Somehow, there’s something for everybody because, you know, Labor lost. By Sunday’s ABC Insiders, a narrow loss morphs into a rout. Labor can’t even pass its own post-mortem exam, Fran Kelly implies.

It’s not easy. Former Keating speech-writer, Don Watson, notes that Labor’s changing constituency increasingly includes service-sector employees, lower-level managers and healthcare workers, as the middle class itself is changing. Labor’s review even detects an influx of woke, affluent, graduates in Southern states, whom, it contends can afford the luxury of idealism. It’s a dangerous hypothesis.

“Since university graduates, on average, earn higher incomes and have more secure jobs than those without tertiary qualifications, they are more readily able to think about issues such as climate change, refugees, marriage equality and the rights of the LGBTQI+ community.”

But a few rich grads didn’t win Labor any seats, Emerson and Wetherill are quick to note. And if your idealism or concern for justice and the survival of the planet is in proportion to your wealth, heaven help the rest of us. Paul Keating reckons Labor lost because it failed to understand the “new middle-class”.

New? Watson sees a class with no ideology nor even consciousness of itself as a class. Being new it has “no roots beyond its self-interest”. He hopes Morrison hasn’t already press-ganged it into Quiet Australians, another bogus, Silent Majority.

But who needs analysis? Nuance is banished from our national conversation. Labor’s review simply has to make Bill the villain. You can’t trust Bill Shorten. It’s the old Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison melodrama.

News Corp prefers a shifty, shorthand, “dud leader, dud policies, dud strategy”, summation which bears no resemblance to the subtler findings published by Dr Craig Emerson and Jay Weatherill who chair Labor’s inquiry. But given Murdoch’s stranglehold over our media, it will soon become gospel truth.

Paul Kelly, The Australian’s editor at large, wilfully misrepresents the report. Eagerly, he invents a turf war. Two Labor constituencies are at war with each other. Father Kelly fears for Labor – a fear which Fran Kelly and others put to Albo. How can Labor possibly bridge the gap between blue-collar and gown?

“The Labor Party now resembles two rival constituencies fighting each other – their origins embedded in the party’s past and its future – a conflict that extinguished Labor’s hopes at the May election and a chasm that nobody knows how to bridge,” Kelly fantasises. But it’s never had any trouble in the past.

Rupert’s troupers can’t labour Labor’s factionalism enough. It diverts from Coalition disunity. All is not well, for example, in Cockies’ Corner. Nationals Deputy Leader and Minister for Agriculture, Bridget McKenzie, “couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery” one MP tells ABC’s, Lucy Barbour.

McKenzie is under pressure to perform; step up to the plate or step aside. Pauline Hanson’s taken all the credit for saving the dairy farmers and the PM seems to own drought the relief compassion show.

Barnaby Joyce is still agitating for promotion despite spending $675,000 for only three weeks in the field and not providing any reports as special drought envoy. But as media keep the focus on Shorten’s failure and the myth of Labor’s imminent descent into civil war, the Morrison miracle spin gets a further tweak.

(By the magic of implication, the current struggle between Nats and Libs – witness the spat over who owns the theatre of drought relief, or the Liberals capture by climate change denialists – means the Coalition with its three Prime Ministers in six years, rivals The Mormon Tabernacle Choir for harmony.)

Not the Puritan Choir, that’s another, evangelical, faction led by Mr Probity, Stuart Robert, architect of the Turnbull assassination plot. But all is forgiven. He’s repaid $37,975, only $8000 shy of what he had previously claimed as ‘residential internet expenses’. Streaming Christian TV from home is not cheap.

Be fair. Stu’s wife, Peoples’ Pastor Chantelle, can’t run her Pentecostal online evangelism without a decent broadband connection. Robert also says he’s returned a brace of gold Rolex watches, he and his wife – and other Coalition MPs received in 2013 from Chinese instant noodle billionaire Li Ruipeng.

Robert, Abbott and Macfarlane thought the $250,000 worth of watches were fakes, they say. As you do, whenever any oligarch tenders a token of his esteem in expectation of a return favour. Or perhaps not.

Or perhaps you do – if you’re an Australian MP seeking favour. Robert resigned from Turnbull’s ministry when he breached the Ministerial Code of Conduct on a business trip to China for Nimrod resources in which he somehow gave his Chinese hosts the false impression he was in China in an official capacity.

In 2017, Robert’s eighty-year-old father, Alan, discovers that he is a director of one of his son’s companies and that his son has used his Dad’s address on one of his businesses. Without telling him. The private company in question is doing rather well in winning government contracts, until then.

You won’t catch Robert or Morrison holding any public review. It’s against their religion. Look at the trouble Morrison’s mentor Brian Houston is having just complying with NSW police investigation. He’s refusing to answer questions about his father’s child abuse. The tactic seems to be working perfectly.

Frugal with the truth, lest Satan strike you whilst your guard is down, God’s hot-eyed warriors know when to keep stumm. Just as they know that God put coal underground for our blessing and just as they are happy to burn for mining while awaiting the rapture, believing they will be saved by their faith.

Thou shalt not fear fossil fuels preaches Pentecostal Pastor PD King in The Christian Post.

Yet Robert’s god-botherers and coal warriors are not symptoms of deep division in the Coalition. Nor are Tim Wilson, Dave Sharma, Jason Falinski, Katie Allen, Angie Bell and Trent Zimmerman who sign on to parliamentary friends of climate action, “a safe place away from partisan politics”, which has Greens, Labor and cross-bench supporters, only to snub their very first meeting 14 October.

But not all MSM scribes are bluffed. Do what Father Morrison does: walk both sides of the chasm at the same time. Granted, “Shut up and eat your peas, dad is talking” is Morrison’s leadership style, as The Guardian Australia’s Katharine Murphy astutely discerns, but don’t let a paternal despot pull the wool.

“… look at Morrison, who manages to walk every side of every street simultaneously and talk out of both sides of his mouth and suffer no apparent penalty.”

Murphy’s amused by Morrison’s hypocrisy in his illiberal lecture to the mining mafia last Friday week in which he threatens yet another new clampdown, (number 84 and counting) on the civil liberties of illiberal protesters who are exercising their right to boycott businesses who collude with coal-miners to extinguish the planet. She believes he just says this sort of stuff for effect and hopes nobody notices.

Also hypocritical is Morrison’s message that he’ll do everything for coal. Only a few days earlier, he makes a billion-dollar grant to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC). Abbott tried to close down the CEFC along with the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), a move Turnbull reversed.

Morrison’s CEFC grant will help fund new transmission infrastructure to help clean energy access more of the national grid. Next, he agrees to help underwrite the main NSW-Queensland interconnector.

Murphy rightly asks why Morrison is able to shape-shift every day of the week but Labor is excoriated for selling out when it tries to straddle two constituencies. Worse, it must get a real leader, like ScoMo, the actor playing the daggy suburban Pentecostal dad with the Stepford wife, a man we can all identify with.

Shorten’s unpopularity has more to do with his crucifixion by News Corp and its lackeys including, sadly our ABC, than any political reality. Labor’s review concedes, however, that damage has been done.

Labor’s review sums up Labor’s loss as a combination “of a weak strategy that could not adapt to the change in Liberal leadership, a cluttered policy agenda that looked risky and an unpopular leader” – a verdict, writes ANU’s Frank Bongiorno “which belies the sophistication of the report as whole”.

But everyone in the gallery – from Michelle Grattan to Mark Latham – gets to twist the knife. It’s a massive pile-on; way more popular, than Melbourne’s Spring Carnival. Bagging Labor’s failings easily upstages the Melbourne Cup, the race that barely slows the nation, our increasingly anaemic, ritual national blood-sport. Besides schadenfreude is surely part of our tall poppy syndrome.

But like the curious incident of the dog in the night time, nowhere is there mention of News Corp.

“The Murdoch media didn’t merely favour the government over the opposition. It campaigned vigorously for the return of the Coalition. And it is a vast empire, with a monopoly through much of regional Queensland, for instance. It is hard not to see in the review’s silence on this matter a clearing of the way for a future kissing of the ring of the familiar kind.” Frank Bongiorno writes.

Everyone wants to wag the finger; tell Labor where it went wrong and by implication how Morrison’s miracle campaign was so inspired – when in reality it was almost totally negative; long on disinformation and attacking Shorten’s character – including the Daily Telegraph’s attack on his mother’s integrity.

A review of the Coalition campaign? Nasty, brutish and short on policy beyond the promise of tax cuts. The $1080 tax cut may have bought a few votes but it is proving a total failure as a fiscal stimulus.

The retail sector is in its third year of per capita recession. While Frydenberg and Morrison seek to explain it away by online sales, as Alan Austin notes, the ABS figures include online sales.

“Retail sales for the September quarter came to $82.6 billion, up just 2.48% on the same quarter a year ago. With inflation at 1.7% and population rising 1.6%, that is a decline in real terms relative to population. So the sector is now in its third year of per capita recession.”

Luckily Labor Zombies … is a sell-out performance, upstaging the government’s own show, “Geronticide! Hell ain’t a patch on the ways you will suffer in God’s Waiting Room; dying of abuse and neglect in our private aged care homes”, brilliantly scripted by commissioners Lynelle Briggs, AM, and Richard Tracey, AO, in their three-volume Interim Report into Aged Care …, “…a shocking tale of neglect”.

Everything’s apples with aged care with just a few rotten fruit spoiling everything. Besides, Morrison says there’ll be more funds by Christmas. He can’t say how little. No-one would expect his government to have been briefed so soon, given that it’s only Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison’s sixth year in government. Expect Santa Hunt and Morrison to stuff the announcement in a stocking late on Christmas Eve.

In the meantime, despite the commissioners’ finding that commodifying aged care is the core of the problem, the Coalition is proceeding with its plan to privatise the staff who do the assessments.

Amazing new efficiencies will follow; such as we’ve seen in the NDIS, where $1.6 billion is being saved by shunting disabled Australians on New Start instead. Private enterprise is a miracle of profit-driven efficiency. And care. No funds will be wasted on gratuitous compassion or humanity. Or spent in haste.

“We are six years into the rollout and we have heard of people waiting two years for a wheelchair, so it needs concerted attention,” says Kirsten Dean from disability advocate group Every Australian Counts.

Expect the reforms to raise the bar; reducing the number of our elderly folk who qualify for homecare “packages”, which are already very limited in scope and difficult to access even at their most basic level.

Above all, Labor Zombies … is a great diversion from the long list of latest revelations of wrong-doing by Morrison’s mob, especially the Australian National Audit Office’s (ANAO) censure of the pork-barrel party coalition for its shonky award of funding under its $200 million regional jobs and investment packages.

Conceding it might have a bit to hide, a furtive, federal government chooses to release its ANAO report on Tuesday afternoon when it hopes all eyes and ears will be turned to the track at Flemington.

The ANAO is scathing about the Morrison government’s disregard for advice provided by bureaucrats. It is also unhappy with ways the Coalition chooses to ignore guidelines regarding merit and eligibility.

Untrained ministers took over the process, making decisions on their own, unaided by expert advice. No. Of course, they did not bother to take minutes. 64 of 232 applications were scrapped. A total of $75.9m in funding is declined. Yet $77.4m in requested grant funding is approved to 68 applicants, not on the departmental list. Over half the funding is pork forked out of the barrel.

While program guidelines require applicants to declare any perceived or existing conflicts of interest, or declare that they had no conflicts – “no action was taken to give effect to this element of the program guidelines”.

Doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results, is one definition of insanity. Yet, when the Coalition rolls out the pork barrel, this week, in yet another round of drought relief; a billion-dollar “suite of measures” to its backblock pals, as it grandiose handout, once again, to entice farmers to do more of the same, is there method in its madness? Or is it merely Groundhog Day again?

The groundhog factor cannot be ignored. Mugged by an Anthropocene reality; Morrison’s mob have no idea what to do. No policies; no plans. No future. They can only fall back on past practice. And buying votes. Along with nostalgia, the pork barrel is part of every Coalition MP’s mental furniture; it’s in its DNA.

And craving more of the same old, same old means it’s only natural to look backwards; unerringly repeat the same mistakes of the past. Five years ago, then PM Tony Abbott, and his Minister for Agriculture and Water rorts, Barnaby Boondoggle Joyce, announced – a suite of measures offering financial, social and mental health support. Bingo!

But there is method or shrewd craftiness. Evading accountability for starters. Is there any area of public funding less scrutinised than drought relief? wonders Bernard Keane.

Australia would still have a car industry and 50,000 secure jobs for only a third of the amount that the Coalition is prepared to pony up for loans to farmers and small-businesses in drought-affected towns.

But imagine the outcry from News Corp and its claque if workers, or manufacturers, could borrow up to two million interest-free for two years; with no need to pay back the principal until the sixth year.

“Rural communities can’t function without these small businesses – that’s why we’re stepping in to provide this extra support,” Morrison says. But in its Abbott incarnation, the coalition government was perfectly happy to deny SPC Ardmona $25 million just five years ago?

Many workers and their families in other sectors would be glad of the support. Manufacturing, for example, lost 100,000 jobs, or a third of the entire agriculture workforce, in the year to August.

But extra support has limits. State schools won’t be eligible for $10m in new education funding announced in Thursday’s drought package, an “elitist and unfair” if not downright cruel decision.

Australian Education Union president, Correna Haythorpe, argues it’s “another slush fund for private schools” on top of the $1.2bn Choice and Affordability fund for Catholic and Independent schools, which Lenore Taylor reports also included money for drought-affected areas.

In its encore, Drought Relief 2.0 “Suite of measures” this week, Morrison’s travelling roadshow hopes, above all, that the hullabaloo will distract punters from its own Drought Response, Preparedness and Resilience a report which it commissioned from top brass Stephen Day, DSC, AM, the very model of a modern Major General and former Drought Co-ordinator-general.

Somehow it must keep us from the Light of Day.

Drought is not a natural disaster, it’s an enduring feature of the Australian landscape, reports Day. Yet instead of launching into the droughts and flooding plains of Dorothea McKellar’s My Country – and a staple of The Nationals’ MP interview press-kit, Day breaks with climate-denialist tradition.

“While droughts are normal for Australia, drought conditions are likely to become more frequent, severe and longer in some regions due to climate change.”

It’s plain as day that we’re responsible for the drought, with our love of coal-fired power stations, coal mines and our mania for land clearing. It’s a far less romantic notion than playing the hapless victim – Abbott’s “Shit Happens” philosophy, a helpless victim of natural disaster.

But accountability is apostasy, heresy even in the broad church of the Coalition Party Room and especially to the reality denial cabal in the driver’s seat, to say nothing of the God-made-coal-so-we-should-profit-from-his-divine-providence, Pentecostal push that has a hot-line to the current tenant in Kirribilli House.

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The Biggest Consequence of Marriage Equality

June 3, 2015
Written by: Trish Corry
19 Replies

As a self confessed social media junkie and one who believes qualitative analysis is damn sexy; reading the marriage equality debate online across many forums has been like the moment Augustus Gloop saw Willy Wonka’s river of chocolate. Here is Augustus standing at the edge of this stream of endless deliciousness and excitement – the best thing he has seen in his life; and he is hungry for it. He wants to touch it, taste it and be part of it. However, coming up from behind him is this eccentric and very strange man, (who mumbles many, many things that simply do not make sense and answers questions with more questions and never, ever gives a proper answer) screaming at him not to touch the river; not to contaminate his beautiful river or he will ruin it forever.

This is the parallel to the online marriage equality debate. There are couples who are standing at the edge of the real prospect of marriage equality and yet there are those who are caps locking us to death, screaming at us with warnings of the contamination of society and ruining society and marriage forever.

The other parallel to this scene from this 1971 classic is that Augustus enjoyed for a brief moment in time, just a tiny taste of the river before he suddenly went down the tube and the pressure forced him up the pipe into oblivion (well, possibly the fudge room) to be never seen again. Between December 7 – 12, 2013, couples could experience just a taste of marriage equality and couples were married under the new ACT law. However, this suddenly went down the tube and forced up the pipe by the Christian lobby groups and the Abbott Government to the high court just a few days later, where it was blasted into oblivion and never seen again.

The other curious parallel to this scene is this eccentric suit wearing man calls to his little followers, the Oopma Loompas to lead Augustus’ mother up high to where Augustus possibly awaits certain death. Wonka then calls after them “Goodbye! Across the desert lies the promised land.” We can metaphorically link this to the “vast barren desert of no hope” Tony Abbott expects couples to cross before they will reach the promised land of marriage equality.

Interestingly, the Oompa Loompas remain silent and obey Wonka with a nodding of heads and then break into a song about actions and consequences. How peculiar is the similarity to Abbott’s comment on the 12 December, 2013, when the high court overturned the ACT marriage equality laws. Abbott’s comments were about risk in the action of taking the opportunity to marry and having to accept the consequences of this action.

Is this where the comparison ends? The moral of the entire story of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, is if you are honest, good, gracious and kind to others and put others before yourself; your reward will be to inherit a wonderful world to make your own and share with others. Is it possible that Abbott will put his prejudice aside and allow a bill to pass which grants a pathway to a better world? Only time will tell.

The Biggest Consequence of Marriage Equality

The biggest consequence of marriage equality is that we will be able to understand our social fabric as a tightly knitted woven thread. The consequence of not having marriage equality is that our social fabric will remain as one loosely sewn by those of privilege. This is where my primary concern for this debate lies – that we don’t know what this other inclusive world looks like or sounds like. My concern is there is something missing from the narrative in this country and that is ‘the world of married same-sex couples.’ By denying equality, by blatantly discriminating based on gender, we are not allowing our society to develop as a whole in collegiality. We are forcing pockets of silence and darkness upon an entire population of people in this country. We are shutting doors and issuing confined space tickets to same sex couples. We are not granting the space and privilege in society others enjoy.

We are not allowing this space in society to understand marriage for all people. Marriage equality is also such an issue as the social and legal constructs of Australia, predominantly focus on hetero-sexual white (European) thought and many in society tend to view LGBTQIA as ‘outsiders’. Society for the most part stigmatises LGBTQIA people and this is evidenced through existing derogatory language targeting this group, which is often viewed as acceptable ”Aussie slang.’ Extreme difficulties and targeting of people coming out are told in personal recounts, particularly in rural and regional communities ¹. Our legal system also supports such a society. This is evidenced by laws such as the homosexual provocation law still in existence in Australia today and the ongoing and uphill battle to ensure marriage equality for everyone. It is also prefaced by the inability to understand fully the issues facing LGBTQIA relationships through lack of data available on this group. For example, one of my previous blog posts about single parents and welfare discusses the absence of data on single parents resulting from a same-sex marriage / unit breakdown.

Stigma is woven as part of our social fabric

As a member of a regional community, the research I have completed for this article, includes the harsh reality for LGBTQIA people living in regional, rural and remote communities. Depression, suicide, stigma and abuse are common themes, as is leaving their home town, family and friends to move to a larger, more understanding environment. I contemplated what that would be like. I reflected on what it would feel like to be treated as ‘an other’ and feel not fully accepted in my community and alter my life, due to an inherent trait I cannot control. I reflected on what it would be like to feel forced to move away from my loved ones and family, so I could have a ‘stab’ at ‘normal.’

With stigma, society separates the ‘normals’ from the ‘other.’ In this instance it is gender and/or sexuality, which pockets of society choose as the inherent trait to separate as ‘the other’. However, imagine for a second, this inherent trait was blue eyes, or shoe size over size 7, or freckled skin. Imagine being stigmatised, cast aside and unable to access the same rights of others because of your eye colour, shoe size or freckles. These traits are beyond our control and if the examples I have chosen seem preposterous; the active choice to stigmatize any individual or group in society for an inherent trait is exactly that.

Some of the arguments within the marriage equality debate online use Christianity as an excuse to discriminate. Online they patronisingly deliver these judgements against others ‘with love.’ Where is it ever taught in the bible to fight with all your might to make people less equal than you? To make someone believe they are less worthy than you because you were born as a heterosexual? To cause people the pain and grief of stigma and ostracisation? Where does it say in the Bible to do that? If it does say any of these things, it is a seriously sick book that should be banned. Let people be happy and enjoy their lives. We only get one life. That is it. From this day forward no one should every feel alone, isolated, depressed or suicidal because they are attracted to someone of the same sex, or they feel they are two genders, or they aren’t sexually attracted to either sex, or they feel like they were born in the wrong body and want to change that. From this day, right now it needs to stop. Every day you judge, every day you stigmatise, cast aside another as lesser, you take away the joy, love and acceptance that they could be experiencing instead. If this is you. If you do this. Look in the mirror and say “What sort of person am I to do this to another?”

What sort of country are we choose to have a social fabric that is full of holes, instead of whole?

I have hope that this new inclusive and holistic society is well on track to emerge. However, I do not believe it will be in the term of this Government or if this Government is returned to office.

On April, 26, 2015 Tanya Plibersek Deputy Leader of the Opposition of the Australian Labor Party announced that she would be pushing the Labor Party for a binding vote on Marriage Equality and ending the choice of a conscience vote for the party. Plibersek’s argument is that Marriage Equality is a case for discrimination and the Labor Party is the Party opposed to discrimination. On Monday 1st June, 2015, Bill Shorten, Opposition Leader introduced a bill to parliament which proposes to alter the Marriage Act to define marriage as between two people. Tanya Plibersek seconded the Bill. The reason I do not believe that marriage equality will exist under the Abbott Government; is that his Government responded to this bill with contempt, through their silent boycott and absence from the chamber. Every member of the Coalition Government purposely being absent during the reading of this bill, indicates a lack of support for marriage equality and their overwhelming attitude that marriage equality and the rights of LGBTQAI people are irrelevant and are not worthy of their time in Parliament.

Tanya Plibersek believes that the vote should be binding within the Labor Party. As a member of the Labor Party; I fully support this. I support this for the reason that it is discrimination. I listened to Anthony Albanese (Albo) on ABC Qanda on 1 June and he indicated in his response we need to tolerate and respect the views of others to bring them along with us. I question whether this is a necessary patience, or a subconscious accommodation for the class of people who understand discrimination well enough in other contexts; but not when it involves stamping out discrimination for something they fear. The same class of people who use religion and/or prejudice as a shield to ward off progress. As a progressive, I do not feel I need to respect groups or individuals who actively fight against progress and who uphold discrimination.

To me, asking me to respect people’s opinions against marriage equality, is like asking me to respect people who are for racism, ableism and sexism. I don’t respect that. It is not a question of conscience. It is a question of enabling discrimination.

I look forward to a world, where I am not asked or expected to respect people who actively uphold discrimination and who stifle progress.

What are the arguments for marriage equality and discrimination?

Finally, I would like to end this article with research I have completed for an earlier 20103 blog post. I want to re-post it here as I believe it supports Tanya Plibersek’s stance that the Marriage Act in its current form, is discrimination. NB: This research was originally conducted with a specific focus on women and marriage equality. It is not my intent for the purpose of this section to exclude others.

Discrimination against women, through lack of legislation supporting marriage equality.

Although both men and women are discriminated against through lack of legislation supporting marriage equality; my focus at this point is to discuss points of discrimination, particular to women. I will address two areas, discrimination through legislation and discrimination by default through exclusion in society. The Subsection 5(1) of the Marriage Act 1961 defines marriage as ‘…the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.’ The definition of the marriage act, merely states that this is a union voluntarily entered into for life. There are no specific parameters which specify what a union means. This is defined in Mary Case’s journal article, “What feminists have to lose in same-sex marriage litigation’²

A marriage certificate now allows heterosexual couples to have an open marriage, to live in different cities or in different apartments in the same city, to structure their finances as they please, without having their commitment or the legal benefits that follow from it challenged (p. 1203).

As there are very little restrictions relating to the private behaviours of the marital union, this act is discriminatory purely on the grounds of sex. This is only for persons who identify with having physical, hormonal or genetic features that are distinctly characterised as male or distinctly characterised as female. Therefore, marriage as defined as a union between a man and a woman, itself is discriminatory based on sex alone.

Women are discriminated within this act as it focuses on ‘sex’ and not ‘gender. This act excludes all persons who identify with a gender, that isn’t normative to their physically or biologically recognised ‘sex’. This act discriminates against all persons who identify as inter-sex. This Act excludes all persons on the grounds of sexual orientation.

Under the federal Sex Discrimination Act 1984 it is illegal in Australia to discriminate against a person either directly or indirectly on the grounds sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex status. ³

Women are also discriminated against, through legislation informing a society, which excludes understanding and valuing the experiences of unions that are not specifically between a heterosexual man and woman.

Various academic journals discuss that marriage is ingrained in the patriarchal notion that women are subordinate in society. Although this notion is not as entrenched within our whole society today; a quick search of Google for ‘subordinate wife’ will return over six million hits, with a high volume supporting the subordination of women/wives, particularly in a religious context. Through legislating marriage as it currently exists, many women are discriminated against and are exempt from marriage, simply because they choose not to have a union with a man and some because they view marriage as placing women in a subordinate role to men.

Mary Case also highlights in her article, that before becoming pope, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger advocated for a normative view on gender in relation to subordination of women. This is an excerpt of his 2004 Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World.

“This theory of the human person, intended to promote prospects for equality of women through liberation from biological determinism, has in reality inspired ideologies which, for example, call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality… While the immediate roots of this second tendency are found in the context of reflection on women’s roles, its deeper motivation must be sought in the human attempt to be freed from one’s biological conditioning. According to this perspective, human nature in itself does not possess characteristics in an absolute manner: all persons can and ought to constitute themselves as they like, since they are free from every predetermination linked to their essential constitution.”

For Australia to move forward, we need to eradicate the stigma by enabling marriage equality for all. It stands to reason that the existence of ‘unions’ and the ‘recognition of same-sex partnerships has not eradicated the stigma which forms the basis for the opposition to marriage equality. The only way forward is to use legislation as a tool to reform society, which will in turn see marriage equality as a lawful and accepted norm in our society. There needs to be a Golden Ticket to allow us access into this new world and this Golden ticket is the Bill presented by Bill Shorten and seconded by Tanya Plibersek to amend the definition of marriage in Australia and the new world is the world which includes marriage equality for all.

“Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.”
―Erving Goffman

Originally Published on Polyfeministix

Gottschalk, LH 2007, ‘Coping with stigma: Coming out and living as lesbians and gay men in regional and rural areas in the context of problems of rural confidentiality and social exclusion’, Rural Social Work & Community Practice, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 31-46.

2. Case M, 2010, ‘What feminists have to lose in same-sex marriage litigation’, UCLA Law Review, vol. 57, no. 5, pp. 1199-1234

Sex Discrimination Act 1984

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