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Junkyard Dutton ducks for cover under Gina’s nuclear umbrella, but he’s still up shit creek

Junkyard Dutton slinks away from Dunkley in a blue funk, after his humiliating rout as the brains behind the Advance-Liberal (Ad Lib) coalition’s “Rapists, paedophiles and murderers”, fear n’ smear campaign.

No-one can count a club of billionaires’ dark money, but a Qantas Chairman’s Lounge of plutocrats, masquerading as a grassroots outfit “Advance” report $5.2 million in donations and $4.5million on election expenditure up to July 2025. We will never know the true cost of those posters, that social media, the trucks, letterboxing, hype and lies out of a grab bag of the worst of US Republican politics.

We do know the Ad Lib coalition threw buckets of money over its shitshow, dumpster-fire-trainwreck of a campaign, giving voters a real choice between an incoherent, under-prepared, over-scripted Ad Liberal stumblebum who struggled to read a script about crime, cost of living – and Jodie Belyea, an articulate and sincere, woman who dedicates her life to empowering other women in her community.

Dutton’s fingerprints are all over the old fashioned, wholesome, Howard-era hysteria, saturation hate-bombing. So his team’s all OK with posters on trucks depicting China’s president, Xi Jinping, casting a vote for Labor in a desperate frenzy of Labor-bashing? Atop the dung-heap is the lurid lie that Labor has released hordes of sex-crazed detainees at large. Also adorning the ordure is Laura Norder;s cousin Tuff, as in Tough on crime. Then there’s the cost of living and a ute tax.

Howard’s acolyte, Tony Abbott is one of Advance’s advisers. Quelle surprise. Gina Rinehart is a backer, but the outfit likes to keep its profile low by using virtual offices, publishing fake addresses and no phone number. The AEC is waving a bit of limp lettuce, in hot pursuit of Advance’s for ts lies on trucks about Chinese control of Labor.

Dutton does a runner. He’s out of circulation for days. The Incredible Sulk, wants to distance himself as far as possible from the scene of the hate crime. He makes no attempt to reflect on his party’s drubbing in a litmus test byelection. Instead, he flings a dead Schrödinger’s cat on the table. His nuclear energy bid is both simultaneously alive, as a culture war strategy and dead as a dodo as a practical solution.

Dutton is a dead man walking. Former Victorian Liberal strategist and walking, talking, oxymoron and avid recycler, Tony Barry, calls Dutton’s nuclear bid, “the longest suicide note in Australian political history” a phrase he’s pinched from the UK when Labour’s 1983 election pledge was to be more socialist.

Instead, Moses Dutton has come down from Mt Dickson with two stone tables, his face radiant with radioactivity. Plus the hot flush he always gets from being near his sweetie, Gina Rinehart. He decrees that nuclear energy will be the focus of energy, environment and climate. Tony Barry’s a director of political consultancy Redbridge group. He cites research to show that Dutton and his Ad Lib coalition are flogging a dead horse.

“Just 35 per cent of people support the idea of using nuclear to provide for Australia’s energy needs. Only coal was less popular. Where there is support, it is among only those who already vote Liberal or who are older than 65.”

If team Dutton had any sense, it would try to win back the under-35-year-old voters who are deserting the coalition in droves. Any sense? Make that any say in the matter.

As we are tipped willy-nilly out of capitalism into a techno-feudal era, as Yanis Varoufakis calls our new servitude to digital overlords, Amazon, Google, and Meta; as we barter personal data for access to the cloud, our aspiring political Czar, “Kamikaze” Dutton, reminds us, that in a Land Downunder we are still at the mercy of our bunyip aristocracy of corporate uber-capitalists, fat cats and “extractavists”. And Alexander Downer.

Of course, it can pay to ingratiate yourself with the powerful. Donate the odd spare kidney as did personal chopper pilot, Nicholas Ross for his boss, Kerry Francis Bull(y)more Packer. Dutton would love Packer’s negotiating style.

In 1984, Kerry got his prodigal son, James, to contact NSW cabinet ministers.

“The old man told me to ring… This is the message: if we don’t win the casino, you guys are fucked.” Oddly, despite James’ best telephone manner, the Packers didn’t win any casino licence in 1994.

At least Ross had a choice. We hope. Most of us, however, are ambivalent, at best, towards the price-gouging, wage thieving, monopolist, duopolist and oligopolist corporate barons, and billionaire baronesses who run our mines, banks, energy, aged care, insurance rackets, shopping centres and make our cardboard boxes and coffins. But real-estate multi-millionaire, Peter Dutton is sure he’s one of them.

In a stunning getaway in a $5,000 business-class flight, Dutton says he pays for himself, (if we don’t note his free, exclusive Qantas Chairman’s club membership, a perk enjoyed also by Albo and other Labor luminaries), Peter Craig Dutton, steals away from Canberra.

He chem-trail-blazes in a haze of kerosene vapour, toxic oxides and ultra-fine particulate matter, down to the fabled Shangri-Lah the long-lost Liberal seat of Dunkley, that “Religiosity Morrison” says is on the cusp of turning right again. It’s a delusion. The outer suburban ute-belt, is not listening to Team Dutton’s cost-of-living crisis mantra. Nor do they fear freed asylum-seeker rapists. Nor are they overwhelmed when he cuts and runs into hiding for three days, leaving boofhead Nathan Conroy to make paternity jokes while Sussan Ley goes haywire and gives a cheerleader speech that may well end her career.

Niki Savva is savage. “Not on any planet or in any universe could a barely average result qualify as success. Arguing otherwise shows no respect for people’s intelligence.”

But in Trump’s America a third of voters believe a loss is a win; his election was stolen.

Dutts barely touches down and, he’s up, up and away again -off in a puff of toxic volatile particles. Thank former Qantas elfin CEO, Alan Joyce, for boosting shareholder profits not only with his flight cancellation scams, but by curbing inessential spending, such as fair wages for workers and pilots, – and upgrading planes. Like the LNP, QANTAS’ fleet is dangerously old and decrepit if not obsolete.

Yet no expense is spared for members of the Chairman’s Club, a type of top secret, Alice’s Restaurant where you can get anything that you want. At Vanessa Hudson’s restaurant, you can get a free steak or the whole beast, at any time of the day or night. Must cost a fortune. And you may also get to your destination. Unless your flight is among the 15,000 cancelled, a one in four chance in the airline’s operations May to July 2022.

Instead of fronting a Senate inquiry, over its role in getting government to block a bid from Qatar Air to double its flights to big Australian cities, Joyce flees to Dublin. Under Dutton, the Opposition is on a road to nowhere. “The politics of fear and loathing did not work in Dunkley. They didn’t land in Goldstein in 2022 and they won’t at the next election,” says Zoe Daniel, Independent MP for Goldstein.

Dutts exits stage right. Jets clear across a third-degree sunburnt country leaving catastrophic fire danger ratings in Victoria. He can’t wait to bend the knee to Queen Gina and her court plus four hundred time-serving serfs, her adoring staff members, in a giant marquee on the banks of the ephemeral Swan.

Dutton’s top of the bill at his patron’s star-studded seventieth private birthday bash and lovefest. He swoons and fawns for forty-minutes, wolfs down the wagyu, necks a Bollinger, and then jets back to lecture Labor on the hustings about the cost of living.

Hypocrisy gone mad? It’s a nine hour round trip. Even then he’s missed a bit of caviar on his tie. Is he smitten? Very. Last November, at her bush doof, Pete was practically sitting in Gina’s ample lap. Gina makes it very clear that she’s looking for love and that in other places they thank their mining billionaires. Is Dutton more than Rinehart’s meat puppet?

Wild horses wouldn’t keep Gina’s toadies away. Arriving a day early, is Pauline Hanson, another pseudo-populist fraud, racist and xenophobe. The One Nation founder, who flew her team to the US to in 2019, to seek funds from the NRA, arrives Friday, to sign up star recruit and son of a gun, former WA Labor’s Ben Dawkins, who’s in a bit of a pickle over breaching a family violence restraining order. Many times over. But he’s just misunderstood. Pauline’s got soft a spot for the underdog. And she loves a bloke’s bloke.

“Maybe if he got some support, that I believe the Labor Party hasn’t given him, and that’s what people need to do their job,” she sighs endearingly mangling sense and syntax. Support groupie, Hanson will be 70 in May. Gina is bound to get a birthday party invitation. As will Ben.

“He’s been the lone member in this parliament, as I was in 1996, when I was just disendorsed from the Liberal Party, so I’ve been there, I’ve worn his shoes, you haven’t.”

Fully booted and spurred, Guy Sebastian nails Advance Australia Fair, over a troupe on horseback kitted out tastefully in iconic Driza Bones and Rossi, both companies bought by Rinehart last year. They wave Ozzie and Hancock flags to The Man from Snowy River theme while aspiring Liberal candidate for state Premier, and Perth’s Lord Mayor, Basil Zempiras is funny as hell on the microphone as the party’s MC.

Basil is still living down his anti-trans scandal but given Dutton’s sedulous aping of Morrison’s campaign strategy, transphobia along with homophobia, may soon enjoy a revival in the Liberals’ manifesto.

But it may be upstaged by Dutton’s embracing nuclear energy as Coalition one-stop-shop solution to climate, environment and energy this week. Is it a dead cat on the table after his Dunkley debacle?

Of course. Labor’s success in holding Dunkley and increasing its primary vote to 41 percent puts the wind up the Coalition. For Niki Savva, team Dutton’s failure is a masterclass in how not to contest a byelection, but the last thing this Opposition is going to do is to change direction. Even if it could. In a world first, Dutton hastily makes the Liberal front bench bigger than its back, a desperate trick doomed to failure.

In politics, as in life, if you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no-one. Or worse. Already, daggers are drawn and eyebrows raised over the over-promotion of neighbour Luke Howarth as Assistant Treasurer.

Howarth’s a gunner. He’s gonna give back the stage three tax cuts. The poor can keep theirs, he declares, thinking aloud. Angus “airmiles” Taylor is giving him a lot of side-eye.

On the backburner go Dutton and Ley’s released detainee rapist arrested antics. Off with the Phyllis Diller fright wig, Sussan. Expect more where they came from. More will be seen, moreover, of the take-no-prisoners-open war on democracy with Ad Lib’s Orwellian invasion fleet of Truth Trucks plus saturation hate-bombing posters, emails, FB messages, T-shirts and whopping lies about Labor on social media.

Dutton doubles down. It’s a term from blackjack which means to keep betting when you already in a hole. He’s got the email that the small, portable modular nuclear reactor is pure fiction. Now he’s going for the mother of all nuclear policies proposing an atomic plant on the site of the old clapped-out coal-fired generators, we are slowly phasing out. They’re already wired into the grid.

What could possibly go wrong. “Water”, says Anthony Albanese. Nuclear plants use lots of water.

But Opposition MPs has been competing to woo Gina Rinehart. It’s their Trump card. If we even pretend to go uranium, it creates a delay in which we can have business as usual. For the time being. It will kill us all in the end of, course, but it will extend the life and the worth of coal mining.

And Hancock Prospecting shares.

Powerful people seek powerful friends. Media giants, Kerry Stokes and the Murdoch mob are prepared to post a loss if their empires gain them access to government levers. Keith Pitt, on the other hand takes over the intercom on the chartered jet last November, to sing his sweetheart, Gina Rinehart’s praises.

“A mid-air bootlicking,” The AFR’s Mark Stefano calls it in disgust. Not once but three times on the long flight to Perth. Pitt’s craven sycophancy and his FIFO lickspittle routine would be par for the course in the US, but it’s unwelcome in Australia. Has the man no self-respect? Which is why Dutton’s indecent obsession with Gina Rinehart and his recent mad dash westward to her birthday bash will undo him.

A closer look is required.

The cunning stunt involved a dash to Melbourne, Thursday afternoon, followed by a return berth to Perth, notes Stefano.

“… the opposition leader transited for 12 hours from Canberra > Melbourne > Perth > Melbourne just so he could attend the birthday party of Australia’s richest person for … 40 minutes.”

When he needed to be on the job in Dunkley, Dutton was prepared to drop everything to be on the other side of the island continent swooning and spooning with Gina. Not that it’s easy at the top.

You must be discreet. “That red-headed weirdo”, as Trump called Richard Pratt, the multinational cardboard and paper giant whose family, The AFR estimates to be worth $24 billion, and Australia’s second richest man, speaks of his wealth as his “superpower”.

Only it didn’t protect him from Donald’s wrath when Prat blabbed about his former pal’s alarming stories. Secret tapes reveal Pratt explaining how US democracy is bought, “I paid about a million bucks to [Rudy to] come out as a celebrity guest [but] it didn’t happen so now, he calls me once a week,” Pratt says before proceeding to draw a Mob parallel.

“All these guys are like the mafia. Trump, Rupert, Rudy. You want to be a customer, not a competitor. And I am very aware of that.”

Unwisely, Pratt calls out Trump’s key tactic. “… he knows exactly what to say and what not to say so that he avoids jail … but gets so close to it … that it looks like to everyone that he’s breaking the law”.

To cultivate a close relationship with Donald Trump, Pratt invests hundreds of thousands of dollars in membership fees at Mar-a-Largo, Trump’s private resort. He tells us. Not so clear is why Pratt pays a monthly retainer to Tony “Suppository of all wisdom” Abbott, $8000, and Paul Keating $25,000.

What Pratt pays for, what he gets and how long he continues, is kept secret, much like the membership of the invitation-only, elite Qantas Chairman’s Club.

Or being a Freemason, which, not unlike the Liberal Party itself, is a closed shop to women and which both Matthew Guy and Peter Walsh inexplicably leave off their register of interests. They didn’t know they had to declare it. Of course.

(True, women can nominate but not in safe Liberal seats such as Cook where former McKinsey operative, and failed 2022 Bennelong candidate, Morrison-endorsed, Simon Kennedy who gets the nod.)

Why have a lobster with a mobster when you can have a crustacean with a freemason?

A code of silence helps keep the wheels of power tuning smoothly. As former CEO, Alan “Stonewall” Joyce puts it, “I’m not going to comment on Chairman’s Club membership … I’ve got privacy issues where we will not comment on who’s in, who’s been offered it, or why they’re there.”

But only for the ruling class. Qantas is perfectly free to trade your personal information for the reason it collected it Australian privacy law permits any organisation to use or disclose your personal information for the primary reason they collected it including for direct marketing activities.

Varoufakis would beam. We gift them our information. They don’t have to say why and how they use it. They make money out of it. Billions. And the case of glad-handed Pratt? Who is on his payroll and why?

You can bet it’s not altruism says the Centre for Public Integrity. Paul Keating, for example, is a long-time advocate of super funds being able to invest in Pratt’s line of business.

But when it comes to mining magnate, Hancock Prospecting heiress, Gina Rinehart – Queen of WA Inc, with Nicola Forrest, who split from Andrew Twiggy Forrest, to become our second richest woman with unparalleled power over a territory the late Robert Hughes described as “a colony with a body the size of Europe and the brain of an infant” – when Gina calls – you come running.

If you’re Peter Dutton or any other of his conga-line of sycophants. But especially if you’re Peter Dutton and after your Dunkley debacle, you are all boxed in like Tulloch. Expect the fake debate about nuclear power to distract us all from the Opposition’s incompetence. And the culture warriors are already to go.

But let’s not kid ourselves, Dutton’s desperate turn to Rinehart may give him the backer of the richest woman in the world. But neither the desperate lunge towards nuclear power nor his rich and powerful friend, nor promoting his rivals, will prevent his political career crashing and burning around him. He’s up shit creek as they say in Canberra.

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CPAC 2023: the Christian Nationalists taking over the Coalition

It is hard to gauge the importance of the Trumpist Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) event that took place in Sydney this weekend. There were more high-profile figures speaking than previously, and several currently serving politicians alongside white supremacists and antisemites.

CPAC’s budget did not allow the recreation of the Nazi “odal” rune stage shape that emerged in the 2021 American version. The organisers did maintain the spirit of trolling the left into futile outrage against deniable provocations: the weekend’s press passes were slapped with the words “fake news” in large print.

Despite claims that it was a sold-out event, there seemed to be many empty seats. It was streamed live on Alan Jones’s low-rating “network” ADH TV and the production values seemed intent on making the show look a glitzy echo of the American parent on a TV screen. The man behind the “network,” conspiracy-peddling Maurice Newman, was on the speaker list with several ADH TV presenters. This suggests the weekend was as much about raising the profile of Australia’s further-right-than-Sky viewing option for the base. It is not alleged that key ADH TV funder Jamie Packer was present over the weekend.

So, while CPAC remains a fringe event in the Australian scene, there were several key political figures there. Orbanist Tony Abbott gave the keynote speech. Warren Mundine is Board Chairman of the Australian CPAC organisation, so the Coalition’s No campaign to the Voice to Parliament was at the core of the weekend’s speeches.

The Liberal Party insurgency was represented by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Alex Antic, Bev McArthur and Ted O’Brien. Of course, the insurgency’s poster girl Moira Deeming appeared twice. Former Liberal politicians Amanda Stoker, Bronwyn Bishop and Gary Hardgrave also spoke.

The Nationals were represented by current and former leadership: John Anderson, Barnaby Joyce, Bridget McKenzie and Keith Pitt presented. It seems there was no need for the white supremacists to infiltrate the National Party back in 2018; they are now appearing on platforms alongside people posting antisemitic and white supremacist barely-coded material without that coup succeeding.

The threat remains: if these Christian Nationalist, truth-distorting and conspiracy-peddling politicians take the reins of the Coalition fully, a “conservative” vote in Australia becomes a vote for the extreme fringe. Watching what percentage of their base is ready to be further radicalised is key to evaluating our risk.

Moira Deeming’s solo speech on Saturday was redolent with self-pity. She describes herself as an “Independent Liberal” MP and is full of her own martyrdom. She spoke of having been “publicly stoned” for her bad judgement in appearing at a rally where Neo Nazis provided security, over and above the CPAC funding the event had received. Deeming made the typical far right assertion that Nazis are actually socialists to frame distance between herself and fascism. She also appeared mistaken when she asserted that there was no interaction between the Nazis and the anti-trans speakers at the March event.

The weekend’s nadir was a “comedy” routine by the corporate hoax speaker, Rodney Marks. His performance as “Chaim Tsibos” was a diatribe of ghastly anti-First Nations racism in a Jewish caricature. He began with an acknowledgment of “the traditional rent-seekers past, present and emerging” before rejigging his tribute to the “Traditional owners: violent black men” with particular notice for “woman-basher Bennelong.”

Apparently not performing as a failing comedian was former Labor MP Gary Johns, who took recent scandals about blood testing people to determine their degree of Aboriginality and escalated his provocation. He distanced himself from the prejudice displayed in his words by crediting them to Price’s father, Dave Price. “If you want a voice, learn English. That’s your voice.” The only answer, he asserted, is for Aboriginal people to stop sitting “there outside the economy, playing out the role of an Aboriginal person” because “being Aboriginal is not enough.”

American speaker Elijah Schaffer was perhaps the ugliest figure on the list – to the point that CPAC scrubbed his name from the menu of speakers but not his actual speech which went ahead. He focused on fighting white guilt” and opposing immigration’s harm to a (white) Australia. Amongst other (repeat) speakers was Trump’s scandalous former acting Attorney-General Matt Whitaker, who continued spreading Trump’s lies about the 2020 election in Sydney.

Any serving politician who shared a podium with these men ought to be made to answer for their appalling judgement in choosing to appear at CPAC, home to Trumpist troll politics.

The IPA and Menzies Research Centre “think” tanks were enthusiastic participants. Christian Nationalist figures were well represented in the event’s presenters. Rachel Wong of the Christian right Women’s Forum Australia and Lyle Shelton were both speakers. The Australian Christian Lobby CEO Michelle Pearse railed against the banning of human rights-abusing gay “conversion therapy.” Christian nationalist “thought leader” Evelyn Rae was dropped from the speaker list at the last minute.

The weekend continued the usual apocalyptic tone from the Right. The war of values is existential. On the dark side is the Voice to Parliament and climate action. The existence of trans people was constantly demonised, with them depicted wrongly as a threat to women and children. Alan Jones redeployed the ridiculous kitty litter hoax from the American anti LGBTQIA+ propaganda networks. Barnaby Joyce warned against the dangers of politicians with the “wrong conviction,” alluded to supporting abortion as one of the loathed progressive values that we must escape. He bemoaned that being a politician of conviction, by his standards, can look like derision, ridicule, hate, jail and death. The founders of the fundraising platform of white supremacists, Give Send Go, depicted abortion and trans health care as crimes they would not support.

The motto of CPAC Australia 2023 was “We are one,” an echo of the QAnon mantra “Where we go one, we go all.” That apocalyptic conspiracy has pervaded the Christian Nationalist movement, and many disparate factions united at CPAC to fight for their paranoid reactionary politics tied to that banner.

Lyle Shelton quoted Maurice Newman approvingly when he stated, “Laugh it off if you like, but there are parallels between Germany 1933 and Australia 2023.” As one of the few observers who could stand to watch the entire weekend’s events observed: “I actually couldn’t agree more with this, those parallels were on stage at CPACAustralia this weekend.”

This was first published in Pearls and Irritations as The Insurgency

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Scott Morrison’s coercive control of women (part 2)

By Tess Lawrence

Porter reveals he has document signed by Kate!

In her second excerpt on Scott Morrison’s Coercive Control of Women, Tess Lawrence doubles down on her treatise calling out Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s dangerous weak and duplicitous leadership. She asserts the continuous political assault and insult of women spills into his incompetency in foreign affairs and gross mismanagement of domestic policies and argues that the body politic itself is corrupted by toxic masculinity when it comes to the treatment of women.

Please read excerpt one here.

Content warning: This article discusses rape, suicide and institutional political psychosexual violence.

By any abacus, Christian Porter’s Blind Trust adds up to dirty money.

More than that, it smacks of something more ominous and ugly; something sinister; perhaps a cover up.

One consolation for those of us who still mourn the death of the woman known as ’Kate’ who alleged she was raped by Porter when they were both teenagers, is that this outrageous contribution to Porter’s legal fees has resulted in Porter’s overdue resignation as a cabinet minister.

But that’s not enough. As a double act, Porter and Morrison clearly think we are fools. So must Porter’s donors. We need to know who donated those monies. We will find out.

Morrison’s obfuscation at Sunday’s press conference and his continued reticence to call out Porter’s latterly conduct is repugnant. SloMo has priors.

If Porter and Morrison continue to promulgate the myth that it is of no consequence who donated these monies to Porter, to help pay the legal fees for a spurious defamation action he initiated after outing himself as the alleged perpetrator, then I suggest they are deluded. Big time.

Porter saga proves Morrison government unfit for purpose.

 

 

This latest tawdry episode in the Porter saga, again confirms that he and Morrison are undeserving of the trust of the electorate.

The Morrison government is unfit for purpose and well beyond its use-by date.

What if, like former Labor Senator Sam Dastyari, Porter’s sly money was sourced.

Dastyari said it was; “support for settlement of outstanding legal matter.”

Sound familiar?

What if Porter’s donors are far-right supremacists?

What if the monies were donated by a company/individual awarded hefty government contracts rubber stamped by Porter when he was Attorney General or Industry Minister?

What if the donor is a far-right supremacist group, or an international armaments group or a mining company, or a country – Saudi Arabia? Or other conflicts of disinterest? Quid quo pro?

  • Importantly, what if the donors had a vested interest in suppressing any more information relating to ‘Kate’s’ allegations of rape against Porter?
  • What if the donors were part of a Liberal faction slush fund?
  • What if the donors had any influence in Porter’s decision to discontinue the defamation action against the ABC and Louise Milligan?
  • What if the donors had any influence in ‘Kate’s’ decision to withdraw her complaint against Porter?
  • What if the donors had criminal affiliations?

Not only are we voters entitled to speculate on the nature and identity of Porter’s benefactor(s) but he actually invites us to do so by virtue of his Blind Trust.

The subtext to all the above is the utter contempt and disrespect shown towards women – and the flagrant disregard for political ethics and standards.

Let us not forget, we are still awaiting Morrison’s legal advice on Porter’s Blind Trust. Pathetic.

Porter and the hours of power

While researching this article, I see that last year, Porter enjoyed the hospitality of former Fortescue chief honcho, now Perth Airport CEO, Neville Power on several charter flights, the first being in May, mere weeks after Scott Morrison appointed Power as Chairman of the National COVID-19 Coordination Commission (NCCC).

How fortuitous it is then that one of Power’s (great surname for someone on the board of energy company Strike) boardroom colleagues on Strike just happens to be Andrew Seaton, the Managing Director of Australian Naval Infrastructure Pty Ltd.

A curious entity, ANI is owned by the Australian Government represented by two Shareholder Ministers, the Minister for Finance, Senator Simon Birmingham and Il Duce Peter Dutton, Minister for Defence and Prime Minister-in-Waiting.

ANI seems to be an empty vessel at the moment, its assets apparently including six Collins Class submarines.

Ships ahoy! When Porter leaves politics, of his own free will or otherwise, the old boy’s network will surely kick in for him. For your perusal and in the interest of transparency, we include below the text of Porter’s entry to the Register of Members’ Interests, dated September 13, 2021.

This is how the big boys pay their debts. Corporate jobseeker for mates, if you will:

“I wish to alter my statement of registrable interests as follows:

In March 2021, I commenced defamation proceedings in a purely personal capacity against the ABC and Ms Louise Milligan [NSD 206 of 2021]. On 31 August 2021 this matter was finalised by the Court.

Although these matters have been conducted in a personal capacity and all legal services were engaged in a purely personal capacity, out of an abundance of caution and consistent with approaches adopted by other parliamentarians in relation to the provision of reduced fee or pro bono legal services, I advise that, in addition to my own personal funds, the following contributions have recently or may shortly be made:

• As has been publicly reported, as part of the settlement an amount was paid by the ABC to Company Giles. Now that the matter has been resolved the relevant cheque will be deposited in Company Giles trust account and applied to my account.

• Part contribution to the payment of my fees by a blind trust known as the Legal Services Trust. As a potential beneficiary I have no access to information about the conduct and funding of the trust.

• My engagement of Ms Chrysanthou was on a commercial fee arrangement. However, consistent with her practice for individual clients, she did not charge me for all of the time she spent on the matter and in the recent settling of her fees I am aware there has been a reduction in fees which has resulted in me having received some services from Ms Chrysanthou on a reduced fee basis.

Although all of the above contributions were made to me, or were for my benefit, in a purely personal capacity, in the interest of transparency and out of an abundance of caution I make this disclosure pursuant to item 14 of the Register of Members Interest.”

Porter bombshell! He has copy of Kate’s signed document

Porter must have known that this perfunctory entry would unleash another media firestorm, but the statement he posted on his website on Sunday contained a bombshell that seems to have escaped closer scrutiny and yet it reveals so much about the man – the political milieu of Morrison’s collective narcissistic government and the LNP in general.

I’m not alone in noting that in talking about his dead accuser Porter rarely expresses any emotion, even when referring to her suicide.

I prefer the phrase ‘alleged suicide’ in this case not because I think Kate was murdered, but because I am well aware that we human beings can be driven to suicide. And we can be driven to it by individuals, by social media, by the ‘system’ and other factors and triggers.

Note: Here I must state categorically that in no way am I – or The Australian Independent Media Network – asserting or implying that Christian Porter had anything whatsoever to do with Kate’s suicide.

Read Porter’s analysis of Kate’s 88-page signed document!

Reading Porter’s resignation statement, I was struck by these words:

“…I have recently been provided from a source outside the ABC with a copy of the only signed document that the person who made and subsequently withdrew the complaint ever made.

Many parts of that 88-page document are such that any reasonable person would conclude that they show an allegation that lacks credibility; was based on repressed memory (which has been completely rejected by courts as unreliable and dangerous); which relied on diaries said to be drafted in 1990/91 but which were actually words composed in 2019; and, was written by someone who was, sadly, very unwell…”

Porter needs to be questioned about the above paragraphs in particular:

  • How can he be so adamant that the copy of the 88-page document in his possession is the only signed document by Kate that exists?
  • Has Porter given a copy of this signed document to the police?
  • Does Kate’s friend and one of her ardent champions, Jo Dyer have this document?
  • Did Porter show Prime Minister Scott Morrison the copy of this signed document?
  • Has the signature and the document been verified as Kate’s?
  • Was the document sworn and witnessed?
  • Where was it sworn and who was the witness?
  • Was the document stamped?
  • Was the document addressed to anyone?
  • Is the document source connected to Porter’s donor(s)?
  • How long has Porter been in possession of the 88-page document?
  • Does the 88-page document contain Kate’s unsigned statement that was released by the Federal Court in the public interest?
  • Has Porter sent a copy of the 88-page document to the Federal Court?
  • Do Porter lawyers Sue Chrysanthou and Rebekah Giles have a copy of the 88-page document? Are they obliged to forward that document to interested parties?
  • Has Kate’s family got a copy of the document?
  • Was that document produced in Court and/or presented as evidence?

So many more questions. So many more answers to be declined by Porter and the Government.

Federal Court releases unsigned statement by Kate

In March, my article The Night Porter and Allegation of Rape, published in Independent Australia prompted heartening interest and response from informants and sources, not just about the Porter saga but also about other allegations of rape and other forms of sexual violence within and outside of Federal and State Parliaments and invariably coercive control was discussed as a major factor, whether it be in institutions, companies, workplaces, including media outlets, or within households and relationships.

Out of respect for Kate’s own story, her truth as she believed it, of no less value because she is now dead – and because the Federal Court, in a breathtaking decision, thought we the people should hear Kate’s voice – I’m including this comment I posted under The Night Porter article – as is. It has all the links to access Kate’s unsigned statement.

PUBLIC INTEREST BOMBSHELL ! FEDERAL COURT RELEASES ‘ KATE’S ‘ STATEMENT!

* WARNING: KATE’S STATEMENT INCLUDES HER GRAPHIC AND DISTRESSING RAPE ALLEGATIONS AGAINST AUSTRALIA’S FORMER ATTORNEY GENERAL, CHRISTIAN PORTER, WHO REMAINS A CABINET MINISTER IN THE MORRISON GOVERNMENT.

* Dear Readers, we invite you to read ‘ Kate’s ‘ profoundly moving statement along with the preamble sent by her friends

The Federal Court yesterday released the redacted statement in the public interest and I’ve placed links to the actual ‘Exhibit 1’ that is the redacted document, as well as a link to the court case Dyer v Chrysanthou that precipitated its release.

‘KATE’ ALLEGES BRUTAL ANAL AND ORAL RAPE BY PORTER THAT LEFT HER BLEEDING AND ALSO ALLEGES HE SHAVED HER LEGS AND UNDERARMS.

The Federal Court is to be thanked for posting the statement online, so that the wider community has access to what many lawyers, politicians and journalists have been privy to, for some time.

24 June 2021 25 May 2021Exhibit 1 – Dossier + Letter (PDF, 1.8 MB)Second respondent

https://www.fedcourt.gov.au…

‘Kate’ was found hanged in the garden of her home in Adelaide last year. Her statement is a voice from that cold and lonely grave. We cannot exhume Justice for her. But we can at least, listen to her voice and allegations and yes, we can decide whom is more trustworthy – whom is to be believed – Kate or Porter?

 

 

Julian Burnside has spoken up for so many of us on so many occasions, invariably on behalf of the least of us, including indigenous Australians and Asylum Seekers.

In the above Tweet he says he is speaking for himself. But thousands of us will share his views on Christian Porter.

It is sickening to think Porter was once our Attorney General, holding the highest law office in the land. He was appalling then and more so now.

We have listened to him lie and distort the truth. If his reputation is trashed it was he who trashed it. He continues to hold himself unaccountable to no-one save his ego.

He has dashed his hope of becoming Prime Minister.

The Porter affair thus far can be viewed through the prism of institutional coercive control.

Porter’s lust for power is mirrored in Morrison’s ineptitude and mishandling of Porter’s clear political misconduct. Morrison thinks that if he ignores the stockpile of problems exacerbated by his leadership and a Coalition that clearly strives for mediocrity that we will go away – not the problems.

Australia is languishing through lack of leadership. Christian Porter, Scott Morrison and the LNP have forgotten that they are servants to the people. Instead, they are trying to enslave us to a decrepit legacy system that is reliant on coercive control, and social infrastructure drip fed by political bullies.

CONTACTS FOR SUPPORT. Please reach out. You are not alone.

Lifeline
Phone: 13 11 14
Website: www.lifeline.org.au

Blue Knot Foundation
Counselling and support for survivors
Phone: 1300 657 380

Bravehearts Inc
Counselling and support for survivors, child protection advocacy
Phone: 1800 272 831

Continued tomorrow …

© Tess Lawrence

Tess Lawrence is Contributing editor-at-large for Independent Australia and her most recent article is The night Porter and allegation of rape.

 

 

 

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Scott Morrison’s coercive control of women (part 1)

By Tess Lawrence

Tess Lawrence is not known for holding back when holding forth. In this first excerpt from a longer treatise she calls out Prime Minister Scott Morrison, accusing him of both implicit and complicit coercive control over women in Australia, including female cabinet ministers as well as complainants of alleged rape and other forms of sexual assault and harassment.

Content warning: This article discusses rape and institutional political psychosexual violence.

Scott Morrison’s coercive control of women

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has burgeoned into a political psychopath.

His flaccid leadership and the gross logistical incompetence he’s displayed whilst mismanaging the accumulation, distribution and access to coronavirus vaccines for the comparatively small population who inhabit our vast continent are just two reasons why his tenure is doomed.

There are other crises that warrant immediate attention despite his continuing attempts to suffocate public debate. One of them is Morrison’s ‘woman problem.’ His misogyny and contempt for women have long been stripped bare. They are self-evident; two-faced on the one coin.

The government’s shrewd appropriation of last week’s National Summit on Women’s Safety was an indictment of the continuing irrelevance of the Liberal National Party when it comes to self-examination and institutional reform.

The lack of public advocacy by LNP female cabinet ministers and their appalling political subservience to the ‘father’ of the nation is galling, when it comes down to cleansing Parliament of its sleaze and sleazebags and rehabilitating the House of ill-repute it has become.

So is this. Mere days before the summit, Morrison and his desultory flunkies turfed most of the recommendations made by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins for the Australian Human Rights Commission.

 

 

Many good and wonderful women attended the summit and participated in good faith. Many more should have been there. The paltry 48 hours assigned to the summit was cruel insult. As was Morrison’s keynote address. He is a study in hypocrisy.

His twinkling eyes belie a smarmy paternalism. We have watched him slither from autocrat minister to prime minister, snatching the wattle crown with stealth from more politically agile expectants after the Turnbull spillage.

Morrison’s coercive control stem from Christian Sharia

Afghanistan’s Taliban are shameless in their overt control over women, but Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s insidious coercive control of women stems from a fundamentalist white man’s version of Christian sharia that deems women, like animals, are mere chattels owned by men and the state.

Of course, all regimes and governments exercise greater coercive control over women than men. Institutional bullying of women in particular is endemic in the construct of rule and religion. Democracy and the Westminster System alike are founded on the coercive control of women, are they not? In the West we learn how heroic women died in the fight for suffrage. They did us proud. My generation has betrayed them. How so?

Elsewhere and everywhere millions of faceless, nameless women continue to die from the catastrophic realities of simply being born female; remaining third class humans within their family household, the notion of voting or standing for any kind of parliament or public office not even a secret fantasy. We all have a shared history, a shared humanity, a shared inhumanity.

What is our Prime Minister doing about it in our own backyard? Bugger all.

We know enough of Morrison’s past and present to call out his patriarchal authoritarianism.

He is publicly steeped in evangelical, biblical primitivism and the subversive, oppressive white tribalism that fuels racial and male gender supremacy.

The latter marches alongside the latent new dawn of pan aryanism now insinuating its emergence from the darker marginalia of history into the stark daylight of global reality; the memento mori of those black and white Pathe’ newsreels replaced and repurposed with full blown glorious technicolour that capture scenes of terrorism, murder and butchery most foul.

Yet blood shed by all nations is as the same crimson shared on humanity’s own Pantone colour chart, regardless of gender.

Morrison’s laying of hands one thing – what of that other kind of laying on of hands?

Morrison may indeed possess healing powers when it comes to his religious laying on of hands upon unwitting constituents enduring hardship.

But it is his failure to adequately address allegations of the unwanted laying on of multiple hands of another kind by male parliamentary predators within the Liberal Party that renders him liable to being described a facilitator and enabler of such creeps; at the least, a bystander.

Then there’s the many allegations of historical and contemporary rape made against other politicians and staff – not all members of the Coalition either.

Morrison’s remit is Parliament and Australia entire; whether polity or populi. Time and again he has manhandled these allegations. He has weaponized them. He has turned that rapid fire assault rifle on the accusers themselves, forever trying to suppress their speech and control the public and political narrative.

His tolerance of what may yet prove to constitute criminal behaviour is disturbing.

Remember how he contemptuously nominated his bestie Brian Houston to be in Australia’s entourage and a guest at President Donald Trump’s White House state dinner?

Houston, we have a problem!

But hey, with Pastor Brian Houston, we had a problem.

Royal Commission cited Houston over father’s sex abuse.

The New Zealand-born founder of global behemoth Hillsong Church, Houston, Morrison’s religious guru and mentor was cited by the Royal Commission into the Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse for failing to inform police that his own father, Pastor Frank, was a self-confessed child abuser.

That failure dogs the son of the paedophile preacher man to this day. It dogs Morrison too.

Note: Houston was recently charged by NSW police with the alleged concealment of alleged child sex offences. In the United States, Hillsong continues to be mired in sexual scandals as well.

Sources say Oz big bizzo threatened boycott White House dinner if Houston attended.

It was Wall Street Journal’s Vivian Salama who broke the story about Morrison’s failed attempt to secure Houston an invite to Pennsylvania Avenue. And yet before Salama’s scoop, there was loud rumour in diplomatic circles that Trump had given Morrison and Houston the finger.

Now I have learned from former White House insiders that they were not the only ones who didn’t want this episode in the life of Brian to cause political fission. I was told that powerful Australian business interests didn’t want a bar of Houston either.

Of course, Houston had visited Trump’s White House before and after Morrison’s visit but the intervention by some from big bizzo was uncompromising. Some were said to have threatened to boycott the state dinner if Houston attended.

I quote one member of the group who asked not to be identified:

“We don’t want to be in the same room as Houston, whether it’s the White House or the Lodge – let alone sit at the same table with him.”

Further, I was told by a former White House staffer that some of those White House dissidents are also amongst the group of business powerbrokers that recently approached former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to intervene in the lack of vaccines debacle in Australia.

White House rebuff kick in the goolies for Morrison

The fact that even pussy grabbing Trump knocked back the megachurch’s Pastor Houston in this instance was a kick in the goolies for the embarrassed and embarrassing Morrison.

He’d tried in vain to keep a lid on the fact that Houston’s name was on his intimate dance card, once even preposterously asserting that to do so would constitute a threat to national security.

Morrison and Houston were both humiliated by the knockback. I understand our US Ambassador Joe Hockey sided with the business power brokers. Surprise, surprise. Australia now has to endure the historical ignominy of inviting Houston to represent Australia in the first place over arguably worthier invitees.

But wait, there’s more, in less than a fortnight, SloMo is off to the White House again to attend the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue Leaders Summit. President Joe Biden will be doing his darndest to get some sense out of Morrison on the subjects of Covid 19, climate change, cyberspace and oh, yeah, something about a free and open Indo-Pacific. Did someone mention China? No mention of the increasing violence towards women or the disintegration of Afghanistan and particularly the plight of women.

But out of earshot of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan, Morrison will be discussing the implications of the Houston fracas.

Houston episode forensic insight into ScoMo’s psyche

The point is, this White House-Houston episode gives us important psycho-forensic insight into Morrison’s tolerance laissez-faire attitude and mindset about the proliferation and subject of sex abuse in general.

It exposes a worrying personal and political diffidence towards the many historical and contemporary allegations of rape, sexual harassment, insult, abuse and violence made by women – and directed at women within and beyond parliamentary precincts.

It shows too, how Morrison puts his mates first and Australia second. He does this time and again.

Note: Here we must also cite the Coalition’s failure to implement critical aspects of the Royal Commission’s recommendations, specifically the Redress Scheme.

Does Scott Morrison really treat men against whom allegations have been made differently to their alleged victims? Yes. His biases favour males in general and they include alleged male perpetrators.

The siring of daughters has clearly done little to prompt him to be either friend, mentor, protector or prime minister for womankind. We are the last among equals and our Indigenous sisters are the least among the last.

The barbarians at the Holgate

Consider the outrageous bullying and egregious cowardly attack under the protection of parliamentary privilege upon then Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate, by Scott Morrison.

On the morning of October 22, last year, Ms Holgate appeared before Senate Estimates where it was revealed Australia Post had gifted $3000 Cartier watches to four employees, as a bonus for (it has since been revealed) securing contracts worth several hundred millions of dollars.

In feverish delight, Morrison seized the opportunity to put the boot in to Holgate in Parliament, once again displaying his capacity for demeaning women, going so far as to cast aside common sense let alone natural justice and the law:

“She has been instructed to stand aside, if she doesn’t wish to do that, she can go.”

It was a repugnant abuse of power and parliamentary privilege by a Prime Minister who is accustomed to maintaining a political harem of proudly compliant female ministers who lack the moral and political fortitude as individuals or even as a group, to seriously denounce and indict allegations of bullying and sexual abuse within their own party, even within their own cabinet.

Morrison’s notorious corporate slut-shaming and bullying of Holgate is forever documented in hansard and the ugly saga of the barbarians at the Holgate is far from over. Holgate recently received a $1million payout from Australia Post.

Morrison’s outrageous presumption of the woman’s guilt was out of order, given he did not have the facts at sleight of hand. It was an act of political psycho-violence against Holgate; part of a behavioural pattern, coercive control.

He bloody well knew that Australia Post had a history of dishing out opulent bonuses, including those made to Holgate’s male predecessor Ahmed Fahour.

Mathias Cormann, Onan the Invisible v CEO Holgate

Revelling in his power and toxic masculinity, Morrison proceeded to demean and vilify Holgate in the people’s house. In our name. Not only was he her accuser but also the jury and sentencing judge.

But there had been a long-time plan afoot. Months earlier, he’d sent in his bovver boy Communications Minister Paul Fletcher to politically stalk and undermine Holgate.
Go-fetch-her-Fletcher was only part of it.

There was the sneaky skullduggery of Onan the Invincible, former Finance Minister Mathias Cormann, he who was the regurgitator in 2014 of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s offensive “economic girlie man” slur. How is it okay for a minister to use the word ‘girlie’ as an insult?

The Government needn’t have bothered paying for actors for this ‘play like a girl’ ad – it simply should have featured Mathias Cormann and his ‘girlie man ’insult. After all, there’s no copyright on sexism.

Together with certain members of Australia Post’s Board and Executive, the blokes plotted to get rid of Holgate, who’d dug in her high heels, to keep Australia Post intact, despite being subjected to industrial strength gaslighting, undermining, mudslinging and character assassination.

Magna Cartier

She was steadfastly opposed to any Coalition privatisation or divestiture of Australia Post, as had been conveniently recommended in a Boston Consulting Group report.

It just so happened that Boston Consulting’s report happily coincided with the LNP’s intent to sell off AP and sell out Australia’s iconic mail delivery service.

Holgate’s apparent largesse provided Morrison with the perfect sexcuse. The perfidious plan to flay Holgate in public was detonated by the Primed Minister.

The Magna Cartier ‘scandal’ provided him with cover for political thuggery. Or so he thought.

Parliamentary privilege – the politician’s condom and ScoMo’s soiled French letter to Ms Holgate.

There is nothing that I can find to compare with the circumstances and sly subtext of Morrison’s deplorable abuse of privilege – and personal attack on Holgate.

It was malevolent character assassination writ large. She was a soft target. She wasn’t there to defend herself. It was a political mugging and seemingly entertained much of the hypocritical rabble in the well named Lower House. It was below the bikini line for sure and symptomatic of the toxic boy’s club that is our Parliament.

Wearing the politician’s protective condom of parliamentary privilege, Morrison had Holgate by the short and curlies. But it was a soiled French letter that again contained more forensic evidence of his appalling attitude towards women – and the CEO of Australia Post in particular.

Look at his body language in Parliament as he goes in for the Holgate kill. He’s enjoying it big time. He’s getting off on it. No question.

 

 

Prime Minister Scott Morrison – and his government – is guilty of exercising coercive control not only over Australian women, but also those women and children seeking asylum, and refugees seeking a new life in Australia.

The popularity and proliferation of coercive control runs rampant across all societal strata: such is the level of physical and mental sexual violence towards women and girls in Australia, that it may as well be declared a national sport.

It is dangerously close to being described as a bonding mechanism for some males, given vituperative social media posts. For some males it is not a badge of dishonour but rather a campaign medal.

A war on a particular woman so often evolves into a war on all women.

If the sport was granted Olympic status, given our prolific expertise in domestic violence, we would probably win gold, silver, bronze and be runners up as well. This is the ugly reality for so many women in Australia. I know it to be true for my sisters everywhere.

Don’t just take my word for it. Let’s have a shufti at last year’s Parliamentary Inquiry into family, domestic and sexual violence and check out what it recorded about coercive control.

What is coercive control?

4.7: The concept of coercive control was developed by Professor Evan Stark, a sociologist and forensic social worker, who defined it as a ‘pattern of domination that includes tactics to isolate, degrade, exploit and control’ a person, ‘as well as to frighten them or hurt them physically’. Professor Stark describes coercive control as a ‘liberty crime’, and it has also been described as ‘intimate terrorism’.

4.8: Submitters to the inquiry characterised coercive control in various terms, but a common theme in evidence was that coercive control is not incident based, but instead involves a pattern of behaviour.

I rest my case. And for the time being, I rest my heart.

Please Note: If you need any support, please reach out to Lifeline on 13 11 14. You are not alone.

Continued tomorrow …

© Tess Lawrence

Tess Lawrence is Contributing editor-at-large for Independent Australia and her most recent article is The night Porter and allegation of rape.

 

 

 

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Scott Morrison Knows Someone Who Can Change The World!

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’

‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.

‘I don’t much care where -‘ said Alice.

‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.

‘- so long as I get SOMEWHERE,’ Alice added as an explanation.

‘Oh, you’re sure to do that,’ said the Cat, ‘if you only walk long enough.”
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

Ok, consider this: your friend, Jane tells you about her new relationship. “It’s the real thing but we’re not ready to move in together or anything. We both want to lead independent lives.” Fair enough you think, but when you meet her again a few months later and ask how it’s going, she tells you that they’ve been talking about living together but there’s no rush. After a few years of this, she eventually tells you that moving in together isn’t all that important, but Scott is inching his way towards a commitment because he told her that a formal arrangement wasn’t necessary; the important thing is the relationship itself which is better than most people’s, and she’s sure that he’ll be happy to make some sort of promise in the future but at the moment it would cause problems with his wife.

Hands up, if you think Jane is fooling herself… Yep, thought so. The only people who didn’t put their hands up are the Canberra press gallery. Substitute “wife” for “backbench” and even they might get the allegory.

The idea that Morrison is “inching” towards a zero-emissions target does seem at odds with his most recent statements about it being performance rather than promises that count and how Australia delivers – or meets and beats – when it sets a target. If they think that’s moving toward a target they haven’t been paying attention to Scotty “I’m ambitious for this guy” Morrison!

With our PM, there’s frequently a qualifier in the promise and even more frequently, his inability to achieve something is usually glossed over in one of two ways:

  1. He uses some strange interpretation of what he previously said by concentrating on a couple of words or phrases in the original statement to explain that he’s actually done what he said he would. For example, promising that all Australians would be home by Christmas can be explained away by the fact that some Australians have now made their home overseas, so they can be considered home in London or New York or whatever city they currently reside in.
  2. He tells a Trump-like lie. For example, announcing that the vaccine roll-out was ahead of schedule.

Just recently, Morrison made some rather strange claims at a religious conference. Now before I start unpacking these, let me just say that I’m not trying to bully those who are religious. I’m all for religious tolerance. If someone wants to believe that they’re literally eating the flesh and drinking the blood of some guy who died two thousand years ago, I’m not going to get into a fight and suggest that this act of communion is more symbolic than literal just because I happen to have a different set of values. However, when someone argues that I need to allow them to practice their religion because it’s theirs and it involves loud chanting on my front lawn from sunset to sunrise, I think I have the right to tell them to bugger off, or else they may be a lot closer to finding enlightenment than they realise.

And so with our Part-time Mansplainer, I have a real concern that his decision to fly his/the taxpayers’ plane all the way to the conference in order to speak wasn’t all to do with his earthly duties. Of course, this is clearly something where the PM and I would disagree. He would argue that he was put there by God, so every action relates to his divine purpose and everything he does is part of that plan. I would argue that Morrison is full of shit because I’ve been put here by God to say exactly that.

Morrison told people that when he was contemplating his future electoral prospects he asked for a sign and God gave him one: he saw a soaring eagle. So this morning I asked for one too and the first thing that I saw was a dog defecating, so I presumed that God must want me to tell Scomoses that he’s full of shit. Still, the meaning of signs is in the eye of the beholder. How did he know that the eagle wasn’t a sign that he should follow the USA? How did I know that my sign wasn’t that I should watch my step?

Whatever, I find it worrying that our PM would announce to a crowd: “I said, I can’t fix the world. I can’t save the world, we both believe in someone who can”, and no, he wasn’t talking about Alan Jones. This certainly explains his reluctance to hold a hose, run quarantine, set climate targets, work weekends, organise vaccinations or meet with a delegation of women. (For a more comprehensive list of what Scotty doesn’t do, Nadine Von Cohen’s article examines them in detail.)

But perhaps even more worrying was this announcement:

I’ve been in evacuation centres, where people thought I was just giving someone a hug and I was praying. And putting my hands on people in various places, laying hands on them and praying in various situations.”

I don’t know about your professional life so maybe this doesn’t seem strange to you. However, unless you’re a doctor, a masseuse, a sex worker, or one of a very narrow range of professions, the idea of you “putting hands-on people in various places” while going about your job, does seem like it would lead to a conversation about appropriate behaviour, if not a whole milkshake being tossed in your face.

So maybe that’s his whole plan. He’s a “hands-on” PM who is hoping that by simply spending time in prayer (though definitely not the Prayer Room) and touching people occasionally that God will cast out the wicked Twitter from our land and climate change will be no more. Verily, we shall once again walk in the shadow of coal and fear it not, for Scott’s Twiggy and his staff shall comfort us and there will be a go for those who have a go…

Amen.

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Hungry miles

The other day a relative said she felt uneasy and that the present situation seems unreal. She described a sense of foreboding despite warm weather and clear, blue skies.

She is correct. We are experiencing an inexorable transformation. It is quieter. We are adjusting to isolation to save our lives, and by so doing witnessing a transformation on how we carry out our daily tasks.

Each night we watch this phenomena unfold across the world.

July 20 1969 is the last time I recall a similar occurrence, when humanity stopped and watched men walk on the moon. But in this new century, a virus is calling a halt and by so doing changing everything … at least for some.

There is no such change for neo-conservatives. The spawn of Friedrich August von Hayek, Ayn Rand and others, as typified by Donald Trump and Scott Morrison, truly believe business as usual once the pandemic subsides. But nothing could be further from the truth.

As I walk around the block for daily exercise I notice abandoned taxi cabs — parked nose to tail, on quiet inner city streets where I live. And there are tradie vans, valuable work equipment stashed on their roofs, similarly abandoned. Each vehicle is a rusting, dust-covered talisman of a crashing economy.

And yet Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg persist with the notion of Snap Back. In my opinion this is as dangerous an illusion as Donald Trump promoting the virtues of Hydroxychloroquine as a cure for COVID-19.

A democracy beset by deflation cannot and will not return to normal with the snap of a finger. Those abandoned taxis will not pull away from the kerbside and convey passengers to mythical cross-town destinations.

So why persist with the illusion that Australia and the world will return to the way things once were? The answer is stark. Neo-conservatives consider the pandemic an economic rather than a health and social crisis.

When people are ill En masse, as is the case now, they cannot go about their daily lives. Thus our only option is to do as we are doing, namely stop everything, stem the spread of the illness and remove the threat of the virus infecting the citizenry. Developing a vaccine is a hallowed grail, but until this is achieved, it is the role of government to sustain the populace no matter the cost. To not do so is to flirt with social chaos.

As far as I am concerned neo-conservative delusions can take a long walk off a short pier and yet this twaddle peddled by John Roskam of the tax-exempt Institute of Public Affairs, makes yet another neo-conservative demand. You can guarantee this asinine rubbish will become a rallying cry of The Australian newspaper and its addled cousin Sky After Dark. Both enterprises by the way, are haemorrhaging cash, courtesy of a crash in advertising revenue.

If Roskam’s demands are heeded, particularly cutting tax, an accelerated economic collapse is inevitable. Yet this ideologue of the right wing of the Liberal Party ignores stark facts. For example, the dissipation of daily revenue for states and territories due to a shortfall in train and bus fares could endanger a slew of public amenities such as schools and hospitals. So it is fair to demand Roskam’s bankers, the coal industry et al, to pay their fair share. If Roskam or Gina Reinhardt acquires Covid 19, chances are they, like England’s Boris Johnson, will be treated by publicly trained nurses and allied health staff.

Roskam goes on to say, it “isn’t only an agenda for (tax) reform. It’s an agenda to provide what Australia needs most at the moment, which is hope for a more prosperous future”.

There are two problems with his opinion; income is collapsing at an alarming rate vis a vis those abandoned taxis, and hope for a prosperous future is for now, illusory.

Thankfully Australia is led by a National Cabinet comprising three Labor premiers and two Labor chief ministers. As long as this arrangement remains in place, we will probably be spared the worst excesses of those IPA’s spruikers Scottie from Marketing and Peter Dutton, whose culpability over the Ruby Princess debacle verges on the criminal.

Those abandoned taxis I mentioned earlier, line inner city streets which, three quarters of a century ago became known in Sydney as The Hungry Mile.

If we remain calm and ignore the lunatic demands of the far right, we just might avoid the formation of hundreds of hungry miles snaking across the roads and highways of the United States.

So no more calls about tax reform please, Mr Roskam. Instead demand a fair wage for our public health workers, our teachers, our internet technicians, our police officers and the underpaid workers in local grocery stores, who are keeping us fed, healthy and connected.

Henry Johnston is a Sydney-based author. His latest book, The Last Voyage of Aratus is on sale here.

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Enemy of the good

For many years I have been furious with the Greens for their sabotage of Labor’s ETS in 2009. Perhaps the policy was flawed. Certainly it did not go far enough. But it would have been a start. Imagine if the CPRS had begun more than a decade ago? Rather than a decade of arguments over whether we should act on pricing carbon, we could have spent the decade refining the targets and methodologies. I’m still mad about it. But in the wake of the 2019/2020 summer bushfires I’m starting to wonder if maybe I’m making exactly the same egregious error.

More than one opinion article has been published in recent weeks suggesting the Morrison government might use the fires as an excuse, a trigger, to recalibrate the Coalition’s approach to climate change policy. Each time I read such an article I find myself thinking along a well-worn track:

Don’t do it! Don’t start taking climate change seriously. Don’t deal with the deniers in your own ranks. Don’t suddenly start sounding reasonable!

We know that the bushfires have focussed Australia’s attention in a way never before achieved. We know that the last vestiges of AGW denial are crumbling in the real world. We don’t want the Coalition to be a part of the real world. We prefer our Coalition politicians to be outliers, historical artefacts, easily pushed aside in favour of progressive parties whose policies are obviously simply better.

Fantasy politics

There’s a narrative that has the Coalition remaining intransigent on the issue, clinging stubbornly to coal mines and fossil fuel oligarchs, carbon exports and the revolving door of post-politics coal company directorships. In this fantasy world, Labor drops its own recidivist approach, ceases clinging to coal and instead brings a decent selection of climate policies to the next election. And the Australian public, woken up by repeated disasters and environmental collapse, consign the conservative parties to history where they belong and sweep progressives into power across the country.

It’s a good dream – but it’s little more than a fantasy.

2019 was supposed to be the climate change election. The Coalition came into that election clinging stubbornly to coal and gas. By contrast, Labor brought a stable of progressive climate policies, along with the Greens on the far left. This was supposed to be the election at which Australia stated, loud and clear, that the preceding decade of policy stagnation and climate inaction would not continue.

And we know how that turned out.

When polled about important electoral issues, climate change ranked highly in the estimations of Australians. When push came to shove, though, it was not as important as taxes, cost of living and “death taxes”. (Never mind that the Coalition is higher-taxing, presides over escalating costs of living and entirely made up the threat of death taxes.) The Australian people increasingly understand the importance of climate change, but they won’t vote for decent environmental policies if it means foregoing franking credits.

Obviously there were many factors at play in the 2019 election. But that’s the point. There will always be many factors at play in any election. Climate change may persuade some hesitant Australians that environmental policies are needed, but the Coalition can play that game – they like to wave fig-leaf policies around, just enough to assuage conservative voters that they have the issue in hand, while not enough to actually force any kind of change. The expectation that climate change policies will be a vote-changer, let alone an election-decider, has so far proven unfounded.

It’s seductive, thinking that our dying environment (or, really, any one major issue) could be the defining factor in the next election, in the contest of ideas and the competition for government. It’s always foolish. There are no single-issue elections.

What’s a single-issue voter to do?

For many voters, the exigency of global warming and the existential threat to human civilisation trumps all other considerations. To the extent that if the Coalition had the best suite of climate policies on offer (and any feasible likelihood of being serious at carrying them out) a single-issue voter would need to consider voting for them, against their better interest in every other area of social policy. Climate change is so important that it can take priority over healthcare, education, tax policy or industrial relations.

So far in the 2010s and 2020s, there has not been a need to weigh climate change policy against other progressive issues. The progressive parties have also offered the best climate and environmental policies.

But what if the Coalition were to pivot to a decent environment strategy? How would that impact on the left, who fully expect – nay rely on – them to remain troglodytes on the issue?

The problem with being a single-issue voter is that political operators like to neutralise issues. If climate change is a perceived area of weakness – which it undeniably is, for the Coalition – then they will seek to minimise its impact in any election, through a combination of downplaying the issue’s importance, and offering policies so it can appear to be interested in doing something.

Adopting a single-issue approach willfully ignores and demotes the dozens of other defining policy areas on which the parties compete. It relegates consideration of a rejuvenated NBN. It discounts overt corruption, pork-barreling and electoral tampering. It devalues the Coalition’s continual budget cuts to the ABC, childcare, social security and just about any other area excepting the military and politicians’ salaries.

There are so many other political issues worth our attention. But in this hyper-partisan age it hurts us to consider that in any specific area, let alone the area of possibly greatest consequence for the future of the country, the other team might get something right. If it’s difficult for conservative voters to imagine the Coalition’s approach could be wrong, perhaps it could be almost as hard for us on the progressive side to give credit for things they do right.

Of course, this is likely all academic. It doesn’t seem likely that the Coalition will change its stance. They are too riddled through with entrenched climate change deniers. Too embedded with the mindset that coal is the energy source of the future and will be the backbone of Australia’s economy for the foreseeable future. Too dependent on the financial backing of their masters and supporters in Clive Palmer, Gina Rinehart and the Minerals Council of Australia. They seem unable to grasp that the market for coal exports will die, suddenly and quickly, and that climate change action can bring economic benefits rather than costs.

Most likely, I’ll never be confronted with the cognitive dissonance of the Coalition finding the way forward on climate change. I just need to accept that there’s a big part of me that hopes they never will.

 

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The backlash of change

When I was a child, “In the olden days” as my children when younger used to say, Robinson’s jams had a Golliwog emblem and I had a golliwog to play with, as well as traditional dolls.

I also read Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

A decade or so later, my sister was studying medicine in London and brought home a lonely (black) African fellow student to share Sunday lunch.

About this same time, I was reading ‘Cry, the beloved country’.

Learning is not confined to the classroom, and, over time, through expanding our knowledge and understanding, we are offered the chance to cast off prejudices, respect difference and accept that change is a continuing feature of our existence.

That is perhaps an idealised expectation. Not all avail themselves of that choice.

When I was a teenager, homosexuality was a criminal offence throughout the British colonised world, as well as among those of other faiths. In the British context, this was largely a result of the translation of certain passages in the Bible – which was, itself, penned in more ignorant times.

My mother, a dedicated Christian, who was brilliant in English grammar and arithmetic, but totally ignorant of more than basic science, firmly believed in the Genesis story of creation.

Ignorance of scientific discoveries is no excuse for ignoring them once they have been bought to your attention. There is no place in a changing world for ‘believing’ something which has been shown to be false.

It is a fact, which is still being denied by the intransigent, that mankind’s addiction to increasing use of fossil fuels, with the concomitant increase in polluting emissions, is a major contribution to accelerating global warming.

It is a fact that we are running out of time to take the steps necessary to drastically reduce the level of emissions and the damage being done to our oceans by plastic pollution.

Too many wars and conflicts are already occurring around the world, and the expansion of global corporations, encouraging the greed and selfishness of shareholders, are all features contributing to a refusal by a majority of governments to accept the massive task of declaring war on climate change.

Governments think in terms of winning the next election in 3 – 5 years’ time.

This myopic approach denies them the vision of how their current policies will impact the next generation – or they do not care about others enough to think it worthwhile.

When it comes to politics, I sit on the fence.

No one party has all the answers and the way European governments form coalitions from a wide range of parties is, in my opinion, a far healthier way to achieve consensus and develop policies which are not too biased.

The current ‘Coalition’ government in Australia is setting itself up to develop a police state. The AAT is being progressively politicised by appointing liberal members, many with no legal experience and little in the way of other special and relevant expertise.

Our disgusting treatment of refugees and asylum seekers – worse treatment than is handed out to those condemned of serious criminal offences – even Ivan Milat’s cancer was given more medical attention than are the severe traumas inflicted on those confined to Manus and Nauru.

We have a Minister in Peter Dutton who seems obsessed with sadistically inflicting pain and suffering. The Biloela family could have stayed at home, contributing to the community while all their matters went through the courts.

Instead, two innocent little girls have been treated so badly that we have almost certainly breached our obligations under the UN Convention on Children, while they have probably been as traumatised for life as have the victims of institutional sex abuse.

And the cost to the taxpayer has been exorbitant – certainly more than enough to settle all the excluded refugees in jobs and contributing to the economy!

Australia – the Lucky Country? – I don’t think so!

Australia – the land of the Fair Go? – Only if you are white and wealthy!

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The Coalition money shuffle

One of Joe Hockey’s first acts as Treasurer in 2013 was to gift the RBA $8.8 billion. The main reason for this was to make Labor’s deficit look bigger. As a side bonus, it allowed the RBA to invest in the forex market, banking on the Australian dollar losing value as the mining boom subsided.

And that is exactly what happened allowing the government to draw…wait for it…$8.8 billion in dividends over the last six years. That’s all very well (if we ignore how the Coalition screamed like stuck pigs when Labor took a one-off dividend of $500 million in 2013) except Hockey borrowed the $8.8 billion so we are still paying interest on it.

We have also paid a fortune in “fees for banking services” as investment banks have raked in hundreds of millions in trading fees.

Had Hockey not engaged in this political chicanery, we would be billions of dollars better off.

And then there are the six Future Funds which contained $198.8 billion as at June 30 this year.

The direct cost of managing these funds was over $1 billion for the last three years alone.

The DisabilityCare Australia Fund had $16.4 billion sitting in it, which must be aggravating to the many people still waiting to access services or those who have had their services reduced.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Land and Sea Future Fund (ATSILS Fund) was established in February 2019 with a capital contribution of $2 billion transferred from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Land Account.

The purpose of the Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation, to whom the fund will make payments apparently at the discretion of the Minister if the investment mandate targets have been met, is to acquire and manage land, water and water-related rights so as to attain economic, environmental, social or cultural benefits. One wonders how much will actually be handed over for that purpose now that Peter Costello has his hands on it. I am sure the mining companies would prefer that money to be tied up rather than used.

In July, the government deposited another $7.8 billion into the Medical Research Future Fund. As we were still in deficit, this was a pretty amazing feat which must have come at the cost of other research cuts and/or interest costs for the borrowed money. It’s interesting how they can find a lazy $8 billion when they want to.

The Education Investment Fund, originally intended for new facilities in the higher education sector, had payments frozen in 2013 and it has been accumulating funds since. These have now been taken to create the government’s new $4 billion Emergency Response Fund.

Then, on 1 September 2019, the assets of the Building Australia Fund were transferred to the newly created Future Drought Fund.

The original Future Fund was established in 2006, funded in part from budget surpluses but mainly from the sale of Telstra. As at June 30, there was $162.6 billion sitting in it.

Kevin Rudd, as Opposition leader, suggested using $2.7 billion of it to invest in a National Broadband Network with profits being returned to the Future Fund. The Howard government screamed blue murder, claiming that Labor intended to “raid” the Future Fund for their own means. Gee, that has worked out well for us hasn’t it.

While legislation permits drawdowns from the Future Fund from 1 July 2020, the Government announced in the 2017-18 budget that it will refrain from making withdrawals until at least 2026-27.

What on earth is the point of sitting on that pile of money when only 20% of it is invested in Australia?

The ten year return has been 10.4% for the Future Fund which might sound good until you look at Infrastructure Australia’s High Priority Project list where every project has a cost benefit ratio of better than that.

We could be employing people in productivity enhancing infrastructure construction. We could be increasing primary healthcare and reducing hospital waiting times to save money and improve quality of life. We could be investing in research and education, both of which bring a far greater return than 10%.

But the Coalition are obsessed with accumulating cash and apparently have zero understanding of the value of actually using the money for the benefit of our economy and our citizens.

 

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Induced amnesia

By RosewmaryJ36

Nowadays it seems strange watching TV, film productions and documentaries from more than 30 years ago. Nearly everybody in them seems to be smoking cigarettes!

OK, Joe Hockey and Matthias Cormann were caught smoking cigars only a few years back, although that was a drop in the ocean of his stupid behaviour when you think of the appalling budget he had just announced!

Do you remember how strenuously the major tobacco companies worked to deny that smoking tobacco was harmful? Nearly as strenuously as Hardie Industries fought to avoid paying compensation to those whose lives were drastically and painfully shortened because their lungs succumbed to mesothelioma.

It is now old news that in the late 1970s to early 1980s, as coal, oil and gas production was ramping up, some of the major companies involved in that production, commissioned research into the atmospheric consequences of increased emissions of CO2 and their predictions have proved remarkably – and alarmingly – accurate.

They subsequently paid considerable amounts for pseudo-scientists to refute the information. The success of that campaign is such that today, in Letters to the Editor of my local paper, yet one more brainwashed individual decries man-made global warming as a myth.

Feel free to fact-check the above!

What is the connection between this and tobacco?

Greed.

And where does amnesia come into the picture?

Mega global corporations like the oil and gas and, even now, tobacco, companies need to raise large profits to keep their shareholders happy. They have little compunction in lying and cheating in order to ensure those profits keep rolling in.

I was one of many who were conned into feeling more sophisticated if I nonchalantly waved a cigarette around on social occasions and I would have been far from alone in being guilty of causing others to suffer from passive smoking.

I gave up smoking at Easter, 1987, and am aware that I have probably not done my lungs any good. This morning I was talking to a neighbour who has just had surgery on her lungs and is waiting to hear whether further surgery will be required. Needless to say – she is an ex-smoker.

Australians are fortunate that we have had governments who have stood up to the tobacco companies, introduced plain packaging and reduced the numbers of locations where people can continue to smoke.

Unlike Indonesia, our country’s next-door neighbour, the number of smokers here has massively decreased and more and more people are being discouraged from taking up or continuing smoking.

Yet when it comes to our attitude to climate change, we seem to suffer from induced amnesia.

Once more we have major corporations, telling lies to ensure that they can keep the profits rolling in.

I would be curious to know how many of our decision makers have shares in the coal, gas, CSG and oil industries, because they seem desperately reluctant to accept the science and take effective measures to reduce emissions. Maybe the donations are big enough to induce amnesia!

Currently our government, maybe experiencing pangs of conscience over the effects of drought on our farmers, are throwing money around like confetti – some of which is being spent in ways totally unrelated to the drought.

The Murray Darling Basin Authority, having allowed capitalist approaches towards water to encourage non-water users to buy water rights, are responsible for exacerbating the adverse effects of the drought.

We now have rural communities with no potable water, yet, at the same time, big corporations are hoarding water to ensure successfully selling crops which are highly water-dependent. I do not know why we pay our politicians to run the country because by all accounts they are only doing a good job or running it into the ground, saddled with debt and disaster.

Don’t be fooled by the truly mythical importance of having a surplus! We have an overall debt which is massive compared with when the Coalition came to power. And the much-touted surplus is courtesy of taxes, paid by all, including the poor.

I suspect many people do not really understand a country’s finance system, so please bear with me for a necessarily simplified explanation.

Each year, the budget drawn up details what the governments intends spending, on what the money will be spent and how much money the government anticipates receiving from various sources – mainly a range of taxes and sometimes sale of assets.

If, in fact, the balance between income and expenditure is not achieved, then the government ends up with either a deficit or a surplus.

If a deficit, then it simply goes into debt by ‘borrowing’ through issuing government bonds. It will pay interest on these, they can be traded, and when they expire the government has to buy them back. If, however, a surplus is achieved, then the government has more money to either pay for existing or new services, or pay off existing debt by buying back bonds.

The latest tax cutting exercise has not achieved the claimed outcome of boosting spending to enliven the economy, and the people most in need of government assistance are being given short shrift and accused of being on drugs.

Not only that, but the government, has failed to devise any tax measures that ensure that global corporations trading in this country pay their fair share of taxes. Instead it devises possibly illegal schemes to claw back possibly notional debts from welfare recipients.

Talk about robbing the poor to further enrich the wealthy!

Back to the main theme.

The underlying problems which affect us are a result of greed.

Corporations have a duty to act in the best interests of their shareholders – who did very nicely from all the schemes which were exposed during the recent Royal Commission into the finance sector.

We do not help ourselves by allowing ourselves to suffer amnesia.

We forget the history of tobacco so we do not recognise the truth when it comes to global warming/climate change/the climate emergency – call it what you will. It represents a pattern affecting the world, bringing increasingly severe weather events – hurricanes, cyclones, droughts, floods, landslides, rising sea levels, melting polar ice – over which we have little control.

WE DO HAVE SOME CONTROL OVER THE INCREASING SEVERITY IF WE REDUCE EMISSIONS AS MUCH AND AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

That way we can limit the extent to which temperatures will rise but it is now unlikely that we can reverse the situation greed has created!

They say you get the government you deserve.

In that case we all deserve to get the hell out of our world, because the government’s inaction is ensuring that the world will become an increasingly unpleasant place to try to live!

And – sorry! There is no Planet B! Certainly not in the time frame left to us!

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A manifesto for how to tell lies

The Government’s accidental emailing of their confidential talking points is nothing more than a manifesto of how to tell lies, to lie by omission, mislead and generally confuse people.

They have nothing to do with providing the public with information about the Government’s progress in resolving issues, or initiatives in progress, or even the introduction of new ideas.

Lying in government, except for reasons of national security, is wrong at any time, however when they do it with deliberate intention of omission it is even more so. Scott Morrison’s Government, however, seem to do it with impunity.

The document contained an extensive range of talking points over a wide area of policy that including spin about drought assistance, climate change, rising carbon emissions, the banking inquiry, and other matters of embarrassment to the government.

On radio and morning television programs newsreaders and hosts treated the matter as being funny and a bit of a joke.

It isn’t.

The Attorney-General Christian Porter denied it was an embarrassment:

“I didn’t know that they were (distributed),” he told ABC radio on Monday.

“These things happen from time to time.”

He may as well have answered:

“Our government likes it, when we are answering questions to all be lying in unison, all telling the same lie in other words. What’s the point of us all telling different lies? Now that would be embarrassing.”

Here are some examples of the talking points, courtesy of The Guardian:

If you are asked about the ACCC inquiry announced by the Treasurer …

The government has directed the ACCC to undertake an inquiry into the pricing of residential mortgage products, particularly after the banks failed to pass on the RBA’s recent interest rate cuts in full.

The Inquiry will focus on the period from 1 January 2019. Since this date, there have been three cuts (June, July and October) by the RBA to the official cash rate.

Together these cuts have reduced the cash rate by 75 basis points, and the big four banks have passed on an average 57 basis points in owner-occupied home loan rates.

The major banks have decided to put their profits before their customers, and that’s not a good outcome for their customers or the economy.

As the Reserve Bank governor pointed out recently “lower interest rates put more money into the hands of the household sector and, at some point, this extra money gets spent and this helps the overall economy.

The inquiry will ensure the pricing practices of the banks are better understood and made more transparent by; understanding how banks make pricing decisions for residential mortgages – which is particularly important in the current context of banks not passing on the RBA rate cuts in full. Assessing how prices differ for new and existing customers. Investigating barriers to switching.

The inquiry will consider pricing across the entire residential mortgage market by major banks, smaller banks, and non-bank lenders. But the big four banks will be a key focus of this inquiry, given they hold around 75% of residential mortgage debt.

The government is committed to increasing competition in banking and promoting good consumer outcomes in the mortgage market to ensure that consumers can get a better deal.

The consumer data right provides consumers with greater access to their personal information giving them power to securely transfer their banking data to other providers to get a better deal. This is one of a number of policies the government is implementing to increase competition.

If asked how this differs to the royal commission and previous ACCC inquiries …

The financial services royal commission specifically focused on misconduct rather than the way that banks are pricing their mortgages.

The ACCC’s previous residential mortgage price inquiry specifically focused on whether the major bank levy affected the prices charged for residential mortgages.

The government has also decided to acknowledge the IMF climate report, which said Australia would fail to meet its Paris target:

We’re taking meaningful action to reduce global emissions with our $3.5bn climate solutions package that will deliver the 328 million tonnes of abatement needed to meet our 2030 Paris target.

Our national target is achievable, balanced and responsible, and is part of coordinated global action to deliver a healthy environment for future generations while keeping our economy strong.

In the electricity sector, we are reducing emissions while maintaining reliable and secure supply:

The latest official projections show the national electricity market (NEM) is on track to be 26% below 2005 levels by 2022, eight years early.

On the back of $25bn of committed investment in clean energy, Australia leads the world with more than double the per capita investment of countries like France, Germany and the UK.

If asked – IMF climate change report saying we will not meet our 2030 target …

We’ll meet our target without introducing a carbon tax.

When Labor were in government and introduced a carbon tax, energy prices went up and industry threatened to take jobs offshore.

The IMF report does not take into account our $3.5bn package which maps out to the last tonne how we will deliver the 328mt of abatement needed to reduce emissions to 26 to 28% below 2005 levels by 2030.

The report also states that under a $75 carbon tax, retail electricity prices would increase by 70-90% in Australia.

That is not something we are going to do to Australian households and small businesses.

The Guardian adds that:

“When asked about that on Friday, Josh Frydenberg seemed to miss the question and answered along the lines of “Who said that? Labor?” which is a standard response these days.”

“The government is also pretty into what the party who is not in government is doing. Joel Fitzgibbon has given them some extra steam… “

Labor division on energy policy …

Joel Fitzgibbon has backflipped on his recent calls for a carbon tax and again presented yet another position on energy policy – this one driven by self-interest to save his own seat, following huge swings against him at the recent election.

Meanwhile Bill Shorten and Penny Wong have recently said they are “proud” of Labor’s reckless 45% target and made the case to keep it.

This follows calls by the assistant climate change spokesman Pat Conroy to scrap their 45% emissions reduction target but Labor change spokesman Mark Butler won’t commit to anything.

Whether it’s “Chairman Swanny” calling for Labor to keep their $387bn tax and spend agenda or Fitzgibbon looking back to the future then doing a backflip, Labor haven’t learned the lessons from the election and want to rehash policies Australia has comprehensively rejected.

We’re taking meaningful action to reduce global emissions with our $3.5bn climate solutions package that will deliver the 328 million tonnes of abatement needed to meet our 2030 Paris target.

Under our government Australia leads the world with more than double the per capita investment of countries like the UK, France and Germany.

The Guardian also adds:

“But the best thing about this one is that the government actually admits that emissions have increased (at least through its notes). For the records, emissions have increased every year since 2014, when the carbon price was scrapped.”

If asked about recent increases in emissions …

Emissions fell 0.4% over the first quarter of 2019.

Emissions for the year to March 2019 are up 0.6 % or 3.1 Mt. This small increase is due to an 18.8% increase in LNG exports. LNG production related emissions increased 4.7 Mt.

Absent the increase in LNG exports, total emissions would have declined. Australia’s LNG exports for the year to March 2019 are estimated to be worth $47.8bn.

While this industry’s success has increased Australia’s emissions, it has potentially reduced global emissions by up to 28% of Australia’s annual emissions by displacing coal generation in importing countries.

We are nearly half way towards our 2030 Paris target – emissions are down 11.7% on 2005 levels and the emissions intensity of the economy and per capita are at their lowest levels in nearly three decades.

We are also on track to overachieve on our 2020 target by 367 million tonnes.

And these are just some examples from 17 pages of nonsense. A government that finds it necessary to have to mislead the public so openly isn’t worth a pinch of salt, let alone a pot of Fosters.

Just before I finish I posted this yesterday on Facebook:

The Prime Minister’s cancellation of next month’s COAG meeting is yet another example of his government’s inability to govern. Early reports at 6pm on a Sunday night suggest a case of spilt milk over recycling policy and that other than “they had nothing else to talk about.” What a load of hogwash.

My thought for the day

We would be a much better society if we took the risk of thinking for ourselves unhindered by the unadulterated crap served up by the government the media and self-interest groups.

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Morrison’s monumental dysfunctional Pacific “family” failure

No matter how much money you put on the table it doesn’t give you the excuse not to do the right thing, which is cutting down your emissions, including not opening your coalmines.” (Enele Sopoaga, Prime Minister of Tuvalu, 14 August 2019).

“Shove a sock down the throat of Jacinda Ardern” – urges Alan Bedford Jones, 2GB Sydney’s sock-shock jock, another former, failed, Liberal Party candidate and inveterate misogynist,Thursday, as New Zealand’s PM supports Pacific Islanders’ global warming concerns, endorsing the resolutions of all but one of the eighteen countries and territories of this week’s 50th Pacific Islands Forum, (PIF) meeting in Tuvalu’s capital, Funafuti.

Left on its own, promoting global warming is Australia. Ms Ardern says, diplomatically, that our land down-under can answer to the Pacific for itself. New Zealand, or Aotearoa, as its Maori people named it, commonly translated as land of the long white cloud, or, continuously clear light is doing what it can to limit its carbon emissions to 1.5C.

Ms Ardern expects all nations to make a similar commitment but will not lecture others.

Rabid climate change denier Jones turns puce. He rants; spits foam at the microphone. Does ScoMo’s office tell Jones to put the boot in? For Jones and his audience – and, indeed, for much of Morrison’s government, global warming, is a hoax. And an aberration, a perversion of reason. The notion is an unnatural hoax, as is the monstrous regiment of women who dare to demand their fair share of political power from blokes.

“Here she is preaching on global warming and saying that we’ve got to do something about climate change,” Jones harangues listeners from his bully pulpit. His signature outbursts of outrage, his demonising and his scapegoating are his own take on Orwell’s two-minute hate. Jones down low may be heard playing daily in all the best dementia wards in hospitals all over Sydney. Thursday, Jones goes off like a frog in a sock.

Preaching? It’s precisely what the Kiwi PM takes pains to avoid, but Jones rarely lets fact spoil his argument.

New Zealand has cows that burp and fart, he sneers, in a rare, brief, departure into scientific truth.

Jones role has little to do with reporting and even less with respecting fact. In the 1990 cash for comment scandal, where he and John Laws were found to have accepted money from a slew of corporations, QANTA, Optus, Foxtel, Mirvac and big banks, the jocks’ defence was that they were not employed as journalists, but as “entertainers” and thus had no duty of disclosure or of journalistic integrity. Yet Jones hopes the PM is briefed,

“I just wonder whether Scott Morrison is going to be fully briefed to shove a sock down her throat.”

Outraged by Ardern’s audacity – as much as the fact that she’s a Jezebel – a woman brazenly asserting authority, independence and leadership, Jones works up a lather. Arden’s an impudent hypocrite, he squawks. Australia act responsibly or answer to the Pacific on policy? Accountability is heresy in ScoMo’s government. Perhaps Jones hopes that his “sock it to her” will be an Aussie form of “send her back”.

Sending Kiwis home, if Peter Dutton doesn’t like the look of them, is at least one Morrison government policy that’s coherent. Repatriation on “character” grounds saw a thousand forcible deportations between 2016-2018. Under Morrison as Immigration Minister in 2014, the policy was expanded to include all those Kiwi-born residents who’d been sentenced to twelve months or more in prison.

Many of those deported under the “character test” have no family or friends in New Zealand; have extensive family ties in Australia and have spent very little time in New Zealand, having arrived in Australia as children.

It’s another source of friction between Australia, its major trading partner, despite China (NZ$15.3bn) now having eclipsed Australia (NZ$13.9bn) as New Zealand’s biggest export market.

Friday, Jones’ sock-jock mockery continues. “The parrot” ridicules one of New Zealand’s most popular and effective Prime Ministers; alleging Ms Ardern is “a clown” and a “joke” for “preaching about climate change”, claiming, falsely, that New Zealand’s carbon dioxide has increased per capita more than Australia’s since 1990.

The Parrot’s problems with women in power, rival those of the Liberal Party itself. Worrying aloud in 2012 about our Pacific policy and how “women were wrecking the joint” during Gillard’s highly successful minority government, Jones said he was “putting Julia Gillard into a chaff bag and hoisting her into the Tasman Sea”.

Gillard’s government invested $320 million in promoting Pacific Island women’s role in business and politics.

“She said that we know societies only reach their full potential if women are politically participating,” he shrieked in utter disbelief to listeners during an on-air hate update from Barnaby Joyce about the sale of Cubbie Station to a Chinese-led consortium.

“$320 million could have bought the 93,000 hectare Cubbie Station and its water rights, he reckoned. Kept it in Australian hands. There’s no chaff bag big enough for these people.”

“Women are destroying the joint – Christine Nixon in Melbourne, Clover Moore here. Honestly.”

Gillard’s father John a former psychiatric nurse who passed away at 83, “died of shame”, he added in 2012, “To think that he has a daughter who told lies every time she stood for Parliament.”

Also socking it to Jacinda, Jones is joined in combat by another Liberal supporter and climate denialist, One Nation’s resident empiricist, Malcolm Roberts, who knows how much Kiwis love sheep jokes.

“New Zealand has over 60 million sheep. Sheep produce about 30 litres of methane a day. If Ardern was serious about addressing ‘climate change’ shouldn’t she start by culling the entire sheep population of NZ? Or is she just climate gesturing?”

Roberts is wrong in several respects as an AAP fact check demonstrates. He can’t count sheep. New Zealand’s official data agency, Stats NZ, reports the most recent farm census, conducted in 2017, records 27.5 million sheep in the country. A 2018 provisional update reports a drop to 27.3 million.

Nor are sheep the major culprits. New Zealand’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory for 2017, released in April 2019, shows sheep produced 12.7 per cent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Dairy cattle accounted for 22.5 per cent, while electricity generation created 4.4 per cent.

Above all, this year, New Zealand introduced a bill to reduce emissions of methane by animals to 10 per cent below 2017 levels by 2030, and between 24 and 47 per cent below 2017 levels by 2050.

Fellow climate science denier, Mick-Mack, as Coach ScoMo calls our deputy Prime Minister, Michael McCormack, must grab a headline to delay being deposed by Barnaby Joyce. Mick-Mack chimes in with a killer argument. Lenore Taylor says on ABC Insiders Sunday, that he couldn’t be more “offensive or paternalistic” if he tried. Itinerant Pacific Islander fruit-pickers, he says, should thank their lucky Aussie stars.

“They will continue to survive,” the part-time Elvis impersonator says in his most tone-deaf, judgemental manner. “There’s no question they’ll continue to survive and they’ll continue to survive on large aid assistance from Australia. They’ll continue to survive because many of their workers come here and pick our fruit.”

And our tomatoes – for eight dollars an hour, as reported in the recent settlement of a case on behalf of fifty workers from Vanuatu, who suffered bleeding from the nose and ears after exposure to chemicals at a farm near Shepparton under the government’s seasonal worker programme.

Brisbane based Agri Labour Australia refuses to admit liability, even after being taken to court and even after agreeing to an undisclosed financial settlement. The Fair Work Ombudsman takes separate legal action. This results in nineteen workers being compensated $50,283 for wage theft – a crime rife in our migrant workforce be it in horticulture or in hospitality. No records were kept of the workers’ labour over six months.

Seasonal worker and father of six ,Silas Aru, worked for six months, yet was paid a mere $150 in total in farms across Queensland – also as part of a government seasonal workers’ or slave labour scheme. Federal Circuit Court Justice, Michael Jarratt​ struggled to imagine a “more egregious” case of worker exploitation.

Exploited to the point of criminal neglect or abuse, men and women from the Pacific Islands are often the slaves in our nation’s overworked, underpaid, casual or part-time workforce. Mick-Mack knows how to pick ’em. Rip off the vulnerable. Trick them. Rob them blind. Then remind them what a favour you are doing them.

As the bullying of the Pacific Island leaders rapidly turns into an unmitigated disaster, something must be done. ScoMo’s staff work long and hard to orchestrate a shit-storm in response. It’s specialised work. Howard allegedly had an operative in his office solely working on “Alan Jones issues” throughout his term in office, former 2UE Jones colleague and big critic Mike Carlton tells The Saturday Paper’s Martin McKenzie-Murray.

Jones’s confected outrage is a tactical dead cat thrown on the table; distracting media from ScoMo & Co’s default policy of bullying and duplicity. Con-man Morrison promises $500 million over five years for “climate and disaster resilience” but it’s an accounting trick; a shonky repackaging of existing aid. No-one falls for it.

Pacific leaders are insulted, alienated by Morrison’s attempt to con them with a fake bribe. Our PM adds injury to insult by adding a bit of emotional blackmail. Fijian PM, Frank Bainimarama explains.

“The PM … apparently [backed] into a corner by the leaders, came up with how much money Australia have been giving to the Pacific.” He said: “I want that stated. I want that on the record.’ Very insulting.”

Bainimarama is ropeable. By Saturday, he is all over the media after phoning Guardian Australia. ScoMo’s “condescending” diplomacy is as much of a massive fail as his government’s energy or environment policy or overseas aid abroad vacuums. The Fijian PM is clear that by alienating and insulting Pacific Islanders, ScoMo is helping drive the leaders into the arms of the Chinese. In other words, Morrison’s mission is a total failure.

Kick Australia out of the PIF, calls Anote Tong, former president of Kiribati, and veteran advocate for nations battling rising sea-levels caused by global warming. Australia’s membership of the Pacific Island Forum should be “urgently reviewed” for possible sanctions or suspension over the Morrison government’s pro-coal stance, he says. There’s a precedent. Fiji was barred until recently in a move to censure its departure from democracy.

(PIF) … is supposed to be about the well-being of the members,” Tong tells The Sun-Herald and Sunday Age. “If one country causes harm to other nations, such as by fuelling climate change, “there should be sanctions”.

“Pacific people see through this facade. We won’t solve the climate crisis by just adapting to it – we solve it by mitigating it, reducing emissions, investing and transitioning to renewables, not shirking our moral duty to fight,” Greenpeace’s Head of Pacific Joseph Moeono-Kolio says. But our federal government just doesn’t get it.

ScoMo started badly by opting for antagonism and insult. Sending junior minister, coal lobby shill, Alex Hawke on ahead to set up talks did not go over well. Hawke recycles denialist garbage. Human influence on global warming is “overblown” he reckons, while in Tuvalu, he peddles the lie that our economy depends on coal.

In reality, the Morrison government’s dance to the tune of the coal barons costs us a fortune. Avoiding climate change reduces our GDP, by $130 billion a year, reports The Australia Institute, citing calculations by government consultant, Brian Fisher. Yet in the reporting of the Forum, our media helpfully relay the government’s re-framing of our global warming crisis into a choice between jobs or a few more emissions.

We are “family” insists Great White Bwana Morrison. A dysfunctional family where a crafty Father Morrison tells the younger fry lies. The Greens Adam Bandt puts his finger on it. Our wretched carry-over Kyoto credits are yet another shonky accounting trick to allow ScoMo to continue his hollow boast that “we’ll meet and beat” our Paris emissions reduction targets. The stunt certainly does not impress beleaguered Pacific leaders.

“At the moment we are not on track to meet the Paris targets. No one in the world is. We are on track to exceed 3.5 degrees of global warming, which will be a catastrophe. The Pacific Island leaders know this.”

Exploiting “a pollution loophole” is how The Australia Institute (TAI) describes Australia’s bad faith. The “pollution loophole” amounts to about eight years of fossil-fuel emissions from the Pacific and New Zealand combined, calculates, TAI, in a research paper it helpfully makes available to leaders before the Forum. The paper pulls no punches from its title onward: How Australia is robbing the Pacific of its climate change efforts.

Worse, it spells out how Islanders are paying for our denialism. Australia intends to use 367 Mt of carbon credits to avoid the majority of emission reductions pledged under its Paris Agreement target. Meanwhile, the entire annual emissions from the Pacific Islands Forum members, excluding Australia, is only about 45 Mt.

The bad faith continues. ScoMo & Co coerce Island leaders into watering down the text of their draft declaration. Or so it seems, unless you are tuned to Radio New Zealand. Local reports have it that after twelve hours, the PIF comes up with a hollow text that mimics the Coalition’s own climate change denialism.

Pacific leaders released a draft declaration in Tuvalu, Tuesday, calling for “an immediate global ban on the construction of new coal-fired power plants and coalmines” and for all countries “to rapidly phase out their use of coal in the power sector”. It echoes the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ call last May.

All references to coal go from the forum communique and climate change statement. Expunged also, are any aims to limit warming to less than 1.5C or any commitment to a plan for net zero emissions by 2050.

Naturally, the Pacific leaders have the nous to issue their own separate declaration with targets which echo its draft statement and which follow the lead of the United Nations, sadly, a body increasingly ignored – if not ridiculed – by our own government and that of its great and powerful friend the US, among a host of others.

By Saturday, Morrison’s stunt with grateful fruit-picker and sock back-up is unravelling badly. Promising to be “a good friend, partner and brother of Pacific Island countries” is China’s special envoy to the Pacific, ambassador Wang Xuefeng, who is quick to exploit the rift between Australia and its Pacific neighbours.

Morrison insists the Forum is a “family gathering” and that “when families come together they talk about the stuff that matters, that’s most important to them. Over the next few days that’s exactly what we’ll do.” It’s ScoMo code, Newspeak for insulting, alienating and bullying the leaders; trashing their hopes and aspirations.

Let the Pacific Islanders worry about rising sea levels and increasing salinity which is rapidly making their homes uninhabitable. In Australia, government energy policy is dictated by a powerful coal lobby – with powerful allies in the media. The PM who brings a lump of coal into parliament also has an assistant recruited from Peabody Coal and has his fossil-fuel lobby and a daft hard right with the upper hand in mind all week.

The Prime Minister’s performance at the Pacific Islands Forum is a monumental failure. Even if his bullying, his intransigence, his inhumanity and chicanery do impress a few one-eyed partisans at home it has dealt irreparable damage to our goodwill in the Pacific, which has not really recovered since the Abbott government cut $11bn from overseas aid in 2015, a cut which the budgie-smuggler insisted was “modest”.

Fears that China will exploit Australia’s neglectful – if not abusive – relationship with its Pacific neighbours are aired all week but the Morrison government isn’t listening. It does everything in its power to offend and alienate Pacific leaders as it clings to its ideological fixation with supporting a moribund coal industry at home.

Above all, enlisting or inspiring the support of Alan Jones, aka The Parrot, has helped the Morrison government shine a light on the unreason, the bullying, the racism and the misogyny which lie at its heart.

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Wentworth Circus, Elephants In The Room, Jokers In The Pack And Too Many Ringmasters…

The Liberals have lost Wentworth for the first time and so the analysis begins.

We’ve already been told that Malcolm didn’t help. He should have been there, campaigning his little arse off out of gratitude that the Liberals made him PM. Ungrateful wretch.

And, in the washup, Sky News was telling us not to draw too many conclusions because Wentworth wasn’t typical of the rest of Australia…It’s one of the wealthiest suburbs and it does have a significant gay population. True enough, I suppose, but is one meant to draw the inference that other electorates have an insignificant gay population?

However, I keep coming back to a point I make over and over again. We only get to vote once every three years or so and we often make our choice based on who we think is the least worst. Our vote is sometimes the lesser of two evils, rather than a ringing endorsement of every single policy of the party we ultimately vote for. And sometimes, an electorate gets the chance to say, yes, you seem more in tune with what we actually think than either of the major parties.

It’s not that Wentworth is out of step with the rest of Australia on something like climate change. Wentworth has pretty accurately reflected the fact that most people think more should be done on climate change. It’s not that Wentworth is out of step with attitudes to LGTBI issues or children on Nauru; it’s more that the loudest conservative voices have managed to make it sound like they are speaking for the “ordinary” Australian. And it’s hard to get more ordinary than some of the people backing Peter Dutton.

Now, I always suggested that Malcolm Turnbull wasn’t all that left-wing. I know, it’s surprising that a Point Piper multimillionaire Liberal Party leader wouldn’t be an extreme socialist pushing for the overthrow of the corrupt system. Yes, we’ve been told about leftie Malcolm, so often that we overlook the fact that most of his progressive views were consistent with the majority. Backing for the Republic, marriage equality, action on climate change. You name it, there was nothing that wasn’t a popular position. He was always positioning himself for popularity. That is, until he became Prime Minister, where his Faustian bargain left him unable to please either his party or his electorate. While it was one thing to paint Malcolm as progressive; it’s quite another to ask us to believe that a Liberal stronghold – one of its safest and most affluent seats – is a hotbed of out-of-touch elites who were simply angry at the dumping of their man.

It’s worth pointing out that they did so with the full knowledge that, unlike so many by-elections, they had the power to make the Coalition a minority government. If anything, this should have chastened them, made them more circumspet. And it’s not as though, this was a surprise like the 1999 defeat of Kennett in Victoria where people made a protest vote without any expectation that it would result in a change of government.

The electorate made a conscious decision to create a hung Parliament. But to hear Scott Morrison last night, it was all about Malcolm Turnbull, it was all about the “price” of switching leaders. But rest assured, the Liberals would rise again. (I’m sure I heard a few “hallelujahs” at this point from the crowd). Ok, perhaps not in three days, but it certainly sounded like an evangelical meeting at times. He went on to repeat his well-worn slogans of “Those who have a go, will get a go”, “The best form of welfare is a job”, “Jesus was a small businessman” and “I stopped the votes” and several other meaningless phrases, as though these had somehow helped deliver an electoral victory rather than the most embarrassing thing to happen to the Liberals in almost a week.

I guess it’s easy to be pessimistic and shake one’s head. We have a governent voting for a motion then realising that they didn’t intend to vote for it, floating ideas which are against all departmental advice, squabbling internally, considering a disgraced Barnbaby for a return to the Deputy PM role only a few months after his embarrassing admissions. And I know some of you will be worried by the assertions that this won’t flow through to the general election because of Rupert Murdoch or because the Liberals will “get away with it like they always do”.

However, I think that it’s always worth stopping and considering how many impossible things have happened. I mean, not only have the Liberals lost Wentworth – unthinkable just a few weeks ago – but they lost to an openly gay Independent. Yes, I know some of you are thinking, so what? But that’s the point. How long ago would it have been unthinkable for a candidate to have called their same sex partner up on the stage during their victory speech? If you go back to the beginning of this century it would have been talked about for weeks.

Progress may feel like two steps forward and one step back. And even, at times, the other way round. But because progress is slow, we often don’t see how far we’ve come. There’s still a long way to go, of course. For example, I was confused as to why the email suggesting that Phelps had pulled out because she had HIV was reported as being a “smear” and a “slur”. I don’t see having HIV is either of those, any more than a suggestion that she was cancelling an appearance because she had the flu. It was a nasty trick, sure, but why a “smear” as though HIV suggested something immoral about the person.

So, before the media starts talking about how terribly the Labor Party performed and tries to start leadership speculation about Shorten, let’s see this for what it is: a massive wake-up call for Scott Morrison. Unfortunately for him, his speech last night suggested he intended to just keep hitting the snooze button.

Bankers, Tankers, Anchors And The Liberal Party…

One of the things that I’ve learned over the years, is that being honest is usually you’re best option. Of course, like most people, I find myself in situations where I’ve… ah, shall we say, bent the truth. This leads me to another bit of sound advice. If you’re lying, you’re better off saying nothing after it’s clear that you’re lying. Or else, do a full mea culpa and admit that either a) you were mistaken, or b) you lied.

In politics, this is usually looked upon as a refreshing change. Unless, of course, you do it on a weekly basis, in which case it’s not a change at all.

So when it comes to the Liberal Party, I acknowledge that we have a different set of values and while I personally understand that there’s some need for a defence force, I believe that the $200 billion we’re spending on planes and submarines over the next ten years might be more productively spent elsewhere. But, like I said, different set of values. There’s a discussion to be had, when two people have differing priorities and sometimes a compromise can be reached.

On the other hand, lying is a completely different matter. It’s one thing to say that:

We told you that privatisation would make energy prices cheaper, that was before we realised that private companies would put profit before everything – but now we’ve realised that, we’ve put a few safeguards in and any day now you’ll get all the benefits of privatisation. Besides you’ve got energy stocks in your super so you’re ridiculously high energy prices are actually helping you save for retirement.

That still fits under the definition of a difference of opinion. However, when the Liberals start to tell us that the Banking Royal Commission which they opposed has nothing to do with the new penalties that Scott just happened to announce at the same time that everyone is going: “Shock, horror. Banks exploiting their customers. Who would have thought such a thing!”

It’s very hard to believe the Liberals when they tell us:

We argued that there was no need for a commission, but we set one up anyway, and now that it’s finding all these examples of wrongdoing, it’s showing that it wasn’t necessary until we decided it was necessary, and, in spite of all that it’s discovering, it’s not having any effect on us, because all the new oversight and any new penalties are just things that we were going to do anyway.

Or to try and put the government’s position as simply as possible:

  1. There was no need for a Royal Commission because while there were some examples of dishonest or corrupt practices, there was plenty of checks and balances to ensure that these were these practices would be detected and dealt with.
  2. There was suddenly a need for a Royal Commission after some Nationals threatened to break ranks. It became even more pressing and one was announced shortly after the banks suggested that it would be ok by them if we had one.
  3. The Royal Commission starts to discover that the culture in some parts of the banks is even worse than its critics suggested, which doesn’t lead to any action from the Liberals because – according to Scott Morrison – all the new penalties were planned and not in response to anything happening at the Commission. Like the announcement of the Commission itself, the timing was just coincidence.
  4. For the Liberals the Royal Commission will be their equivalent of Schrodinger’s Cat – the thought experiment in Quantum Physics, where a cat in a sealed box can be thought of as both alive and dead. The Royal Commission wasn’t necessary when Labor and The Greens called for one, but became necessary once the Liberals decided that it was, meaning that the Commission is now both necessary and unnecessary. It remains necessary because the Liberals set it up, but it remains simultaneously unnecessary not only because Labor suggested it, but also because nothing it discovers will lead to any admission from the government that their actions have been influenced by it.

Like I said, liars need some consistency, or their story falls apart. On a real level, it would have been refreshing to have heard the Turnbull Terriers tell us that Labor and/or The Greens had raised a convincing enough argument for them to change their minds. But no, instead we have ministers once again trying to justify the unjustifiable.

Ah well, at least now I’ll find it easier to explain quantum physics without having animal rights people ask me why the poor cat was sealed in the box.

The Schrodinger Royal Commission! Mm, it has a certain ring to it…

 

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The Magnificent NBN, Victoria’s “Right-To-Kill Bill” And It’s Just A Flesh Wound…

Writing in “The Herald-Sun” (and no, that’s not really an oxymoron) in May last year, Terry McCrann lauded the government’s NBN success:

 

“RIGHT now, over one million Australians are actually signed on to and using the National Broadband Network. When Labor lost office in September 2013 barely 100,000 were.

So in just two and a half years the number of active users has leapt tenfold — an extraordinary rate of increase in both access and use.

The total number of premises which are able to connect, when and if they choose, has similarly expanded at that spectacular pace, from around 250,000 then to approaching 2.5 million now.

The NBN is finally a done deal. There really is, or should be, no going back to the failed all-fibre $100 billion-plus fantasy of Kevin Rudd and Stephen Conroy.”

 

And just a few weeks ago were told by Malcolm himself, that the NBN was “doing an extraordinary job”. Yes, just a few weeks ago the board that replaced the one that Labor put in place had the situation well in hand and, while even one complaint was too many, now that so many people were being connected then, of course, there’d be more complaints. After all, people are such ungrateful wretches, why look at how some people are complaining about the closure of Manus. As Tony “the Legend” Abbott tweeted: “For years, Greens and Labor allies demanded Manus close. Now it’s closing, they’re still complaining. They just can’t be trusted on borders”. (N.B, NOT SATIRE. ACTUAL TWEET. I know that it’s sometimes hard to tell. Just like when the Australian Border Force told the Senate that sometimes a boat arrival was not a boat arrival. From what I could understand, a recent boat wasn’t an arrival because it happened and we haven’t had one in over a thousand days so,therefore it couldn’t be an arrival, I’m not sure if it was still a boat.)

But more on Tony later… Mm, that last bit should be read aloud. Anyway, just because in a handful of cases, people were being stuck without a landline, they complained. Don’t they understand that this is the “biggest, fastest” thing in the history of Australia? Nay, the world. Why, it’s the biggest, fastest thing since the big bang. (Not the TV show, the Big one!) Don’t they understand that it’s one of Australia’s shining achievements? Why, Turnbull himself listed it and the NDIS as the achievements of his government.

So it comes as a complete shock to me that Turnbull, the man who took over when there was but a “bare 100,000” signed on to the NBN, should suddenly decide that it was a “train wreck”. Well, in case you think that it’s a mea culpa, remember that Malcolm and his Merry Men, don’t need to apologise because nothing is ever their fault. You see, it was because Labor started the project. And they had to take over from where Labor had left it. It’s not like they could put in a whole new management… Oh wait, they did. But it’s not like they could renegotiate the contract and stop the fibre to the premises… Oh wait, they did that too. But I suppose it’s the 100,000 houses that had signed up under Labor who are having the problems… Oh wait, no it’s not.

Anyway, it’s Labor’s fault because it was their idea, like the problems with energy policy: they want a Clean Energy Target but we’ve put in place: A GUARANTEE. And we’re good at things like that. Who could forget “Our Contract With Australia”? You know, the one where we promised to “End the Waste And Debt”?

Mm. Perhaps I’d better move on to Mr Abbott and mention that he “stopped the boats”, which must have fixed up the hospital queues and the traffic problems in Sydney. A remarkable achievement. In a recent tweet, he told us:

Now, I think that we really need to object to his emotive language. Wherever you stand on the issue, the use of the phrase “right-to-kill bill” is an attempt to paint the legislation in negative light. Ok, he probably neither meant to reference Quentin Tarantino nor suggest that Victoria was declaring open season on Bill Shorten… No, it was a really pathetic way of framing a difficult decision as “killing”. Allowing a terminally ill person to end their own life is vastly different from giving people the “right to kill”. Still, one can see why poor Tones might be finding parallels with euthanasia and what the Liberals did to his leadership and that may be what’s making him behave so emotionally.

But perhaps, Tony just likes to impersonate the Black Knight from “Monty Python And The Holy Grail”. You know, “it’s just a flesh wound.” How else could one explain one of his other tweets: “Re AFR story. This isn’t over. There are five million Australians yet to vote and the NO campaign is appealing to every one of them!”

Mm, does Mr Abbott mean that they are making an appeal, or does he mean that the No campaign is appealing to all of them but they just haven’t got around to voting yet?

Whatever, ya gotta laugh. The only other option is for me to decide that I’ve died and I’ve been sent to this absurd Hell, where Donald Trump is president and even after taking the leadership of Abbott, Turnbull behaves like he’s not only betraying all his previous principles, he’s putting his hand up to be the most inarticulate PM since Billy McMahon famously urged people to look at the facts and vote for the ALP… Billy did quickly correct himself, but history would have judged him less harshly if he’d pretended that he meant it. Whatever you think of Tony, he at least gives the feeling that he does have some misguided belief in the things he’s saying, while Turnbull sounds like an understudy who didn’t bother to learn his lines properly, let alone develop an emotional truth.