One of the highlights of recent travel was seeing the Queen of Ireland, Panti Bliss, perform at the Soho Theatre. This esteemed drag performer was pushed to the fore of Ireland’s 2015 marriage equality campaign and came to lead it to its successful vote. 

Rory O’Neill, her creator, describes her as a “giant cartoon woman,” but her most recent performance is less “transgressive, punk underground” Jessica Rabbit and more Grande Dame. Panti is the glamorous aunt you wish you had.

The story that unfolds over the “If these wigs could talk” show is brilliantly crafted. It is a stand-up routine and monologue that makes the audience fall in love with Panti before sharing what it was like to grow up illegally gay in Ireland, and so much more that you must experience without spoilers.

O’Neill began his adult life in art school, but Panti became his living, breathing, evolving work of art. Far more influenced by the vaudeville spirit of British drag and the oral tradition of Irish drag than the glamorous and polished version commonly seen from the USA, Panti has a long history of outrageousness. O’Neill’s creation has also done more than most of her compatriots to foster the embrace of LGBTQAI+ existence in Ireland. Her Noble Call at the Abbey Theatre is one of her most, and justly, famous contributions.

In the documentary about Panti, Queen of Ireland, O’Neill describes the marriage equality campaign as the final battle for equality even though, at the time, he felt uncertain that the Queer world needed this badge of bourgeois normality. What O’Neill knew is that the worst brute could marry, but somehow Queer people were not considered worthy.

It is deeply frustrating that this recent achievement of legal equality in 2015 in Ireland and the USA, and 2017 in Australia, is not the final battle after all. Queer people are once more at the barricades – if they are paying attention – as the Christofascists emanating out of America and Europe lead the battle to erase LGBTQIA+ existence.

The ultraconservatives made it clear at the time that the sky would fall if access to marriage was broadened to same-sex couples. In fact, the sky remained in place, but the billionaire-funded groups that mobilised against extending access to marriage then are now funding the fight to ensure only “traditional” gender and sexuality are legal.

Their initial targets are an intentional conflation of two different categories of people: drag performers and trans people.

Trans people are their gender. Drag, by contrast, is a performance art. In mainstream representation it is largely carried out by cis gay men, but many drag performers and traditions are trans. Performative gender such as drag is at least as old as the theatre itself. And trans existence pervades history and societies; scientific research is illustrating that gender is much more complex than conservative faux-science likes to pretend.

Drag, however, can be outrageous and sexy. Trans people are a tiny minority and can be very visible making them an easy target for cowards. Fewer people know a trans person than know lesbian and gay people. All of these factors enable propaganda manipulating confusion to find fertile soil. Cis people, firmly embedded in their birth-allocated sex, can find it impossible to understand gender dysphoria.

This makes it easy for Christofascists to combine these two categories with all the lies and myths that were told to keep gay men persecuted. None of these categories are dangerous to women or children. Groomers and pedophiles are found in churches, scouts and youth groups, not at drag story hour. The primary threat to women, children – and trans people – remains bad cis men.

Australia has not fully descended into the US attack on LGBTQIA+ people broadly and the UK’s persecution of trans people. The fact that Neo Nazis have joined the women pretending to support women by demonising another vulnerable group alienates most Australians from this toxic bigotry. We cannot, however, be complacent: both Media Watch and 4 Corners recently platformed people of suspect reputation.

The right is more cunning than the centre and left. It sees that history is bending towards diversity and inclusion; it’s determined to fight that development with every word, act and dollar. It coopts the language of rights while aiming to rob everyone except themselves of rights. It exploits the media’s attempts to play fair and balanced by promoting disinformation-heavy bigotry and exterminationism as just another perspective.

Organisations in Australia illustrate the international blurring of goals in their efforts to drive us towards ultra-conservative social positions. The Australian Marriage Alliance body converted its pre 2017 focus on defeating marriage equality to its new manifestation – Binary Australia – which campaigns against any blurring of strict male and female categories.

Citizen Go has recently begun to include Australia in its global far right campaigns. It is a Spanish ultra-conservative Christian platform designed to counter progressive petition sites like Avaaz, Change.org or Get Up. Its funding and board boast a grim roster of figures. Its site shows that it is combining campaigns against the “UN’s LGBT agenda” with fighting against the Voice to Parliament (alongside other ultra-conservative Christian bodies).

Far right groups are eager to use unsuspecting women as gateways to their brutally patriarchist ideology to broaden support. We saw women drawn into the space over covid, combining concern about pandemic health measures with conspiracy stories of tunnels full of abducted children being farmed for hormones. These issues have been subsumed into a campaign based on disinformation about trans healthcare. These women often do not realise that their own human equality and independence is threatened by these far-right fellow travellers.

In looking back at the Irish marriage equality debate, Rory O’Neill joked that he hoped Queer people “don’t end up becoming as boring as everybody else.” The frightening developments that dominate the discussion now make that moment seem a golden age of acceptance. Panti Bliss is asking you not to allow these forces to win, driving us back into the dark ages of persecution of LGBTQIA+ people.

It’s now up to the rest of us to become radical, resistant and irritating. Don’t let the Christofascists drive Queer people back towards the disdained fringe, to exile, to suicide. Whether you are standing up for people’s right to live their gender or embrace their art, you need to be out there standing against the threat alongside those under attack.

Australia must not allow our politicians and “thought” leaders on the right to push us down the destructive path being pursued by the Republicans.

The American right is waging war on modernity. The radicalised right alliance is sacrificing empirical evidence and truth for theocracy, tribal games and lies. It is determined to reverse the achievements of the Civil Rights era: white Christian man will return to his rightful place as delineator of truth. The contingent is destroying America’s standing to achieve it.

Ultimately the factions that make up the American right see non-white people, non-Christians, women and the LGBTQI+ community as not fully human nor deserving of equality. People who struggle financially, physically, mentally: none of them merit human dignity. The radical Christian right demands these lesser beings abase themselves before the laws of God (as defined by these extremists), and before the white men responsible for enforcing those mandates. 

For the plutocrats who fund the right’s activities, the scandals and the progressives’ fight back are all part of a delightful distraction to conceal the funnelling upwards of the nation’s wealth. This group will be well-cushioned from the exigencies of the climate crisis they’re driving us into.

It is easy for progressive factions to see each of their struggles to retain rights as distinct. This is a gift to the right. Women’s right to control their own bodies is intricately interwoven with the LGBTQI+ communities’ battles to control their own bodies too. The threat to the survival of non-white people is analogous to the threat levelled at LGBTQI+ people. Those whose identities place them at the intersection of various categories know best how much more threat they face than, say, middle class white women. LGBTQI+ black and brown people are far more likely to be hurt, raped or murdered even by those appointed to care for them.

The faction nicknamed the Christian Taliban has no qualms about robbing the rest of the population of freedom, even while describing their actions as protecting liberty. The Alliance Defending Freedom, an extreme Christian organisation, bankrolls court cases to test the Supreme Court’s willingness to allow the creation of a segregated economy excluding LGBTQI+ people. Ultimately their goal is to recriminalise sexual acts between consenting LGBTQI+ adults.

The religious right in America is celebrating the overturning of Roe v Wade by working out how it can make abortion illegal nationwide. In the Dobbs case that brought down that partial right to control one’s fertility, Clarence Thomas made it clear that contraception access, marriage equality and even the legality of gay sex should be undermined by similar Supreme Court law-making. 

The damage this is doing to women and more post-Dobbs is already apparent. Care for miscarriages has become fraught in red (Republican) states as doctors become too scared to heal, and pharmacists refuse to issue prescribed medication. Some pharmacies are keeping pregnancy tests behind the counter to monitor who requests one. Users have been warned to delete apps that monitor menstruation for fear they will be used for surveillance. Other social crises follow. Thirty six percent of US counties are already maternity care deserts and America has much higher maternal and infant mortality rates compared to similar nations. Indigenous and non-white people predominate in these deaths: one Louisiana senator said that the state’s appalling statistics cease to be such an outlier if one discounts black deaths, in an appalling confession of apathy.

Republicans are working on ways they can prevent all abortion healthcare (which cripples obstetric care). Strategies are being devised to monitor women’s travel between states to ensure it is not for reproductive healthcare purposes. They are also contriving ways to prevent the postal service being used to send the abortion pills that are making this era’s abortion ban somewhat less deadly than the past’s. People in Tennessee are being threatened with three years jail for “lying” about rape to gain access to abortion. Some politicians and activists are working out how the death penalty might be meted out to doctors or patients.

Donald Trump has begun his second run for President with an announcement that he plans to ban all gender medical (hormone) care for minors. Currently, many red states are introducing a flood of laws to prevent the care of youth wishing to delay puberty and transition (despite the clear evidence that it prevents despair and suicide) with harsh punitive measures for parents and healthcare providers involved. One state is looking to charge parents with felony trafficking crimes for taking their child interstate for care. The states are aiming to push the ban on healthcare up to the age of 25 because that is when young people move off their parents’ health insurance and are likely to face substantial obstacles to treatment. Others are looking to ban all gender-based healthcare for adults too. The plan is the total erasure of trans people, and the activists do not care how many people die to achieve this.

A lack of interest in the number of pregnant and LGBTQI+ people who die, plus efforts to impose surveillance and travel bans is only one of the overlapping aspects of the war. Proposals to check schoolgirls’ genitals to see if they are cisgender in order to play in female sporting teams is victimising them as much as the trans youth excluded from these activities. The plan in Florida to monitor female athletes’ menstrual history in detail is as much a way to monitor their possible access to abortion as it is to exclude trans girls. While too many on the right aim to have all LGBTQI+, and supporters, falsely known as groomers and pedophiles, many Republicans want no minimum age for heterosexual marriage.

The attacks on schools and teachers are emblematic of the unified nature of this war on “minority” populations. Florida pushed the College Board to have the AP African-American studies course stripped of its references to current struggles and to Queer and feminist black activists. The attacks on school (and adult) libraries and classrooms demands that any book that makes white students uncomfortable must be removed (including children’s’ books telling MLK’s life story) since only the white mythology of America’s history is acceptable. Any reference to gender or sexuality is also banned, so books about suffragettes are as likely to make the excluded list as books accepting LGBTQI+ existence. Unsurprisingly, The Handmaid’s Tale is on the list.

At the moment Manatee County, Florida, is at the forefront of implementing Governor Ron DeSantis’s war on “woke.” That means teachers’ personal classroom libraries of lovingly collected treasures are banned to students until a “media consultant” has checked every book for appropriateness. Whether Pulitzer Prize winning books for senior secondary students or bland references to two fathers in a picture book for small children, the dehumanised will not be visible to these students. Teachers are threatened with third degree felony charges (equivalent to manslaughter) if any book seen by students is judged to be “pornographic” but for the radicalised gangs in charge of banning the books, the definition of pornographic can be the mention of gender and sexual identities.

The full obscenity of these book bans is seen when contrasted with the enabling of mass shootings with assault weapons that these same politicians are abetting, even in children’s hands.

The non-white in America are seen as automatically guilty, denied the white man’s plaint that he is owed the presumption of innocence. The regular police lynchings of black men establish that they are presumed not only guilty of a particular crime at that moment but guilty of being a constant threat that can only be halted by death. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, instead of sending adequate aid for those abandoned, New Orleans police and the National Guard licensed an assassination program. People stranded with nothing in the disaster zone were to be shot or thrashed for taking an insulated cooler from a backyard in order to survive. Instead of being seen as worthy of saving, they were misleadingly portrayed as “looters.” There is no ability to reveal and repair this kind of constant slander and oppression in a world where the right demands that the crisis cannot be discussed in the mainstream for fear of making white people uncomfortable.

This automatic assumption that (white) man must be innocent and “minorities” are to be feared, monitored and controlled applies to women. To find an assailant guilty of first degree rape is a monumental project that very few survivors manage to achieve. It is, however, the only way in a number of states to prevent having the rapist able to claim custody of the child the woman was unable to abort. Whether it is an attempt to avoid paying as much parental support or a further effort to torture the survivor, these men are not the figures a state should want rearing children. The men governing these states (and their complicit radical right women accomplices) see the survivors as temptresses or liars.

The religious right does not see these attacks on the freedom of their country people as anything but essential. Partly they believe themselves under existential attack because the recognised existence of others as equal humans is an abomination and genocidal threat. They believe in a literal war of “good” against “evil.” This Spiritual Warfare is waged against the demonic forces of Satan. 

Supreme Court judges (the third branch of government) recently described prejudice against LGBTQI+ people as honourable compared to dishonourable racism (although they build racist barriers at every step while disguising the intent). These national lawmakers described same sex marriage as “bad,” “false” and something fittingly loathed, as offensive to one’s beliefs.

The more secular right is exploring the post-liberal world order, dismayed and disgusted with the messiness of the post-Cold War world. The idea that the preferences of the nation bend to inclusion and acceptance is a toxicity rather than a suggestion that the formerly conservative need to reevaluate their beliefs and bigotries. LGBTQI+ equality is supported by up to 80% of Americans. Some access to abortion is supported by around 60–80% of Americans, and only 13% support a total ban. Just short of 70% of Americans supported the Black Lives Matter protests. The post-liberal thought leaders, including the national conservatism movement, believe this is evidence of the utterly dissolution of the nation into degenerate chaos as a result of liberal tolerance for others’ freedom of choice. If it takes authoritarian imposition of morality and discipline to retrieve America’s “greatness,” that is what must be imposed.

They are supported by a European hard right that is Western chauvinist, deploying Christianity as a trope for white superiority and the base for the imposition of “traditional” lives and “family values.” The most obviously fascistic contender for the next Republican presidential race is Ron DeSantis who is reported to draw on Hungary’s Viktor Orbán’s actions for inspiration. It is not just Eastern Europe where this rages. Transphobia has hollowed out feminism in Britain creating untold harm. Combined with the deep misogyny and bigotry fostered by powerful influencers such as Andrew Tate, the threat is growing. A young British trans girls was just murdered by two teens as she sat in a park.

Australia faces all these same influences seeping in through our politicians, media and the internet. It builds on the fact we share the founding racism that mars American democracy (and the British colonial project). We are bigoted and misogynistic in great swathes of the country. As the right thrashes around, hollowed out by neoliberal extreme ideology, searching for a mandate, it will echo the American decline into division and hatred. That is, unless we make these forces irrelevant. We must make sure they know: we will not be America here. 

We will only achieve this if we stand together, women and LGBTQI+ and BIPOC and all the intersectional identities disallowed and stripped of equal dignity. 

“Scott Morrison had a choice between standing up for ripped off workers or sucking up to a tosser who ripped them off and he chose the tosser. He chose Clive Palmer,” Labor’s Anthony Albanese, MP Federal Member for Grayndler Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Cities and Regional Development Shadow Minister for Tourism

A land down-under stands tall this week as our nation is regaled with tales of former glory from our annual Anzackery bash, vows of congestion-busting and refugee-capping via Coalition focus-groups and a Labor policy with teeth, its $2.4 billion pensioner dental plan – along with a $4 billion boost to childcare subsidies announced Sunday.

William Richard Shorten is also impressing those contacted by News Poll which reports late Sunday his highest approval rating since March 2015, with 39 percent of voters satisfied with his performance. He’s also narrowed the gap between himself and Morrison in preferred Prime Minister to 37 percent compared with ScoMo’s 45 percent.

The poll puts the Coalition 49 to 51, two-party preferred which is an improvement of one point on its last survey, yet  YouGov Galaxy conducted by Sunday News Corp tabloids, published Saturday, has the margin 48-52.

Capturing the nation’s imagination, a last-minute Coalition preference deal with Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party may give Palmer the edge over Hanson’s One Nation and put Malcolm Roberts out of the race. Digger ScoMo, on the other hand, may imagine himself heroically plucking victory from the jaws of disaster; going over the top at The Nek in a Gallipoli all in his own mind, to win a few preferences in some marginal lower house Queensland seats.

History is against Morrison. “In the last three decades, Labor has won 86 seats on preferences after trailing on first preferences. The Coalition has won two,” election analyst, Anthony Green, cheerfully tells ABC TV. Clive was present for 25 of 400 votes last time he was an MP, Labor reminds Insiders. “It’s a marriage between a con-man and an ad-man” ventures Penny Wong leading wags on social media to suggest that ScoMo’s tag should be “failed ad-man”.

It’s a week of mythic stories of larrikin heroes, noble sacrifice, true grit and other inspiring fictions of national identity, our unique courage, enterprise and ingenuity  – our can-do attitude – from ANZAC Cove to Uruzgan, while our amazing run of luck with getting multinational mining companies to dig up our buried treasure, take our water and taxpayer subsidies, wreck our environment, extinguish our unique wildlife and evade paying tax continues.

Exxon Mobile’s $33.1 billion over four years with zero tax paid will be hard to beat – but Adani’s got form.

Adani has breached its licence twice in two years and was prosecuted for releasing coal-contaminated water near the Great Barrier Reef, but its scaled-down, 15 million tonnes a year, mini-monster, a mine opposed by two-thirds of Australians, gets a federal government rubber-stamp on its flawed groundwater management plan.

CSIRO tells the minister the plan is useless given its poor modelling and is riddled with errors and false assumptions.

“The modelling used is not suitable to ensure the outcomes sought by the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Protection Act are met,” the CSIRO and Geoscience Australia state in a joint report.

Adani underestimates how the mine will guzzle bore water local farmers rely on. The water will be drained more severely; more quickly than predicted, the scientists warn. Above all, the mine could drain Doongmabulla an ecologically sensitive ancient natural springs complex, exceeding strict limits on draw-down of the springs’ waters.

But there’s more. Adani also gets a secret sweetheart royalty holiday possibly worth hundreds of millions, unlimited free water, a $100 million access road and an airport funded by Rockhampton and Townsville local councils in a not so open tender deal which has attracted the attention of the Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission.

Giant Canadian uranium miner, Cameco, with its massive Yeelirrie mine, 500km north of Kalgoorlie in Environment Minister “M.I.A.” Melissa Price’s Durack, WA, electorate also gets approval.  Is Price bullied into any decision? Nope, just “intense pressure” over Adani by her QLD colleagues, James McGrath, Matt Canavan and Peter Dutton.

We know from previous incidents, revealed by Julia Banks and others that there’s no bullying in the Coalition. Nor any hard feelings. Julia will now exchange her preferences with Labor in the seat of Flinders, she announces Sunday.

Mad-dog James McGrath merely threatened to call publicly for Ms Price to be sacked if she didn’t sign off on the project. Jacqueline Maley hates that the Coalition campaign is a bit of men’s shed, blokes-only show but that’s what you get with ScoMo who promised to look into the whole bullying thing, last September after Ann Sudmalis quit.

Maley is disgusted by ScoMo’s duck-shoving, not to mention his high-handed if not autocratic, abortion gag.

“There has been no investigation into the claims of misogynistic bullying made following the coup against Malcolm Turnbull, and just before the campaign began, Morrison decreed that the issue of abortion was a “debate” that doesn’t “unite” Australians, and was therefore not “good for the country”.

Mining is clearly good for the country, the Coalition contends, but it has botched both uranium and coal decisions in its rush to win votes and reward a mining lobby which donated $45,000 to the LNP last year. Good for the country? There is every reason, economic, environmental or health, to leave our coal and uranium underground.

“55,000 jobs depend on our coal mining industry. That’s what it does. And I think that’s great for Australia,” crows “Stunts” ScoMo who gained notoriety for waving a lump of coal at the despatch box. But 55,000 jobs is less than half of one per cent of Australia’s workforce. And far from being great for us, it’s toxic and costly. Taxpayers fork out $12 billion, a year in fossil-fuel subsidies alone. Other costs are borne by government. Then there are health costs.

Coal mining is the second greatest source of coarse particle pollution (22%) after metal ore mining (28%). Australia’s 92 coal mines emitted 320 million kg of PM10 (coarse particles) in 2017-18. There is no safe threshold for coal dust. Coal particulates contain heavy metals; toxic at low concentrations.

Coal dust blows out over MacKay from open stockpiles and uncovered rail wagons when the wind is right and port workers along with mine workers contract black lung, a disease thought to have been eradicated in 2015.

What’s great about inhaling lead, mercury, nickel, tin, cadmium, mercury, antimony, and arsenic, as well as radio isotopes of thorium and strontium?  Fine coal dust causes a range of diseases and health problems including an increased incidence of heart and respiratory diseases like asthma and lung cancer.

Coal is toxic; lethal. Along with the enormous, social and environmental costs of coal mining and coal burning are how it helps to shorten our lives. If you live within 50km of a coal-fired power station, you are three to four times more likely to die prematurely than your peers who live further away. Not that our states appear alarmed.

The government’s National Pollutant Inventory NPI’s April 2019 report shows our State governments allow coal-fired power stations to pump out as much as 20 times more toxic air pollution than other countries allow. Coal-fired power stations are the main source of Australia’s fine particle pollution (26% of the national ‘all sources’ total), oxides of nitrogen (26%), and sulphur dioxide (49%). They are responsible for a health bill of $2.6 billion, P.A.

Australia produces 5.5% of the world’s coal. We export more coal than any other nation; 38% of the world’s total coal exports. But there is little to be proud of. Assuming that only two million of the seven million deaths attributed to air pollution are due to coal burning, Australian coal causes 110 000 deaths each year.

All uranium ends up as either nuclear weapons or highly radioactive waste from nuclear reactors. Yet Yeelirrie’s approval is only after the federal government is persuaded to drop a requirement that would render it less hazardous – a requirement that the company demonstrate that no species would be made extinct. This requirement had previously caused the WA EPA in 2016 to issue advice that the mine not be implemented.

Matthias Cormann tells Sky News the approval was made 5 March but it is not until 10 April, the day before the election date is proclaimed, that the news is quietly posted on the department’s website. Australian Conservation Foundation’s national nuclear campaigner, Dave Sweeney, deplores a political decision based on a flawed process.

An environmental catastrophe, Yeelirrie may yield over 35 million tonnes of radioactive waste, consume 10 billion litres of groundwater while 2500 hectares of vegetation will be razed for its nine-kilometre long open pit.

Groundwater levels may drop by 50cm and not recover for 200 years, according to Cameco’s own reports.

“Australia could be a leader and driver of renewable energy tech. Instead, the government is rushing through approvals of the Yeelirrie uranium mine and Adani coal mine in what could be the government’s dying days,” Sweeney says.

Yeelirrie means “place of death” in the language of the local Tjiwarl people who were not notified of the decision.

Place of death? Mining uranium could drive to extinction rare subterranean fauna species and harm other wildlife species like the rare and likely to become extinct Malleefowl, the vulnerable Princess parrot and Greater bilby.

The elusive Price drops off the radar. Labor says she’s in witness protection after another shonky Morrison deal.

Shonky? True, the minister did vow last October to wait until the WA Supreme Court ruled on the legitimacy of state government approvals. Granted also, mining won’t proceed until uranium prices rise, if they ever do, but, in the meantime, what a coup for the rule of brute force, duplicity and stupidity. Bugger science or due process.

Our lucky country’s spoilt for choice, national chaplain, Father Morrison, tells us in what Paul Bongiorno calls the PM’s “warm and cuddly appearances” for nightly television bulletins: remember the fallen, mind our own small business, (the nation’s backbone), have a go to get a fair go and don’t ask questions. Especially on the Reserve Bank’s tipped to cut interest rates or water rorts. Or anything else. ScoMo is into government by announceables.

ScoMo, like Abbott and like Rupert Murdoch and before him the great showman Phineas T Barnum, follow Hollywood’s golden rule, as Jerry Roberts notes in The Dumbing down of politics, religion and trade unions.

“People are stupid. Therefore, they should be fed garbage.  An alternative rule goes back to the Scottish enlightenment and Presbyterian social conscience and says people are stupid because they are fed garbage.”

Morrison talks down to us at his peril. His folksy homilies, collection of caps and his tedious family anecdotes are barely coherent but the intent is clear; he seeks to patronise. Thus he alienates where he seeks to ingratiate. Nowhere is this clearer than in his pathological evasion of questions. His bullying, autocratic ego will be his undoing.

“Canberra bubble stuff” is ScoMo’s pet brush-off. Sometimes he borrows Angus Taylor’s favourite evasion “I’ve already answered that question.” Michelle Grattan notes a third evasive tactic he favours, also given detailed analysis by The Monthly’s Sean Kelly in The Rise, Duck and Weave of Australia’s no-fault Prime Minister.

Q: Should Clive Palmer, given he’s spending $50 million in advertising, pay the $70 million back to the Commonwealth plus the $7 million he owes to workers?

PM: Clive Palmer is making his own statements on those matters.

Plucky Gus, pencil-sharpie of post-modern Aussie mateship and rule by oligarchical collectivism may be our latest national hero, as he almost single-handedly bails out Team Barnaby; plugging leaks in the dyke of Watergate, a boondoggle where government pays $79 million for rain collected by agri-business rich and shrewd enough to build huge levees to divert overland flows into their own dams leaving high and dry the river system nature favours.

And sell it back to us. 28,000 megalitres. At huge profit. Exactly who profits is invisible thanks to cutting-edge Gus’s Cayman Island company, Eastern Australia Irrigation (EAI), parent of Eastern Australia Agriculture, (EAA), a mob the former director has nothing to do with now; knows nothing about. No further questions? But where’s the water?

The Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder confirms to Karen Middleton of The Saturday Paper that the two contentious water licences for which the federal government paid $79 million have returned next to no water to the environment since they were purchased two years ago. Is this why ScoMo and co insist there’s nothing to see here?

Our ABC has a go. ABC RN’s Patricia Karvelas asks Barnaby Joyce some fair and reasonable questions, Monday. Why buy water that cannot be returned to the environment? Why pay so much for rights to water so unreliable? Why no open tender? Who were the beneficiaries? It’s a train-wreck of an interview from an MP who could well be our next deputy PM should the Coalition be returned to office. But only if you’re looking for accountability, lucidity or logic.

Labor. Labor. Labor. Labor. Barnaby seeks to shift the blame. Evade all responsibility. It’s a surreal performance – a Dadaist interpretation of ministerial irresponsibility. “How would I know?” is his most lucid response.

“And Labor did it, too.” The lie is repeated by ScoMo’s daggy dad, avatar, our nation’s post-truth pastor. That Labor ran open tenders, is way too much information for most voters, ScoMo calculates.  Meanwhile, his turd-polishing unit will come up with other trusty falsehoods: Taylor’s water problem is all due to politics anyway. One side is just as bad as the other. The line is now received wisdom on energy, despite its palpable absurdity.

Perhaps, after all, it’s the river’s fault? In a novel twist, former NSW MP Pru Goward blames the victim,

“Governments have struggled with how do we solve sharing a very poor river. Let’s face it, it’s a terrible river, between three states with all these competing interests.”

ANZAC Day brings a brief lull in the slanging-match between our business, banking and mining proxies, the volatile, Liberal, National Coalition, telling lies about Labor death taxes while trying to bribe voters with tax cuts and the representatives of their wage-slaves, Labor, once a workers’ party but, now, badly ravaged by the neoliberal pox.

Coalition campaigning gets a boost from a fake news item in local Chinese language social media about how Labor plans school programmes to instruct youngsters in gay sex. It’s an extension of the disinformation circulated about the Safe Schools anti-bullying programme. A photograph of William Richard Shorten accompanies the article which warns readers of Mandarin using recycled scare tactics from some quarters of the marriage equality debate.

“That men can use women’s toilets. For men to wear women’s clothing. That the following vocabulary cannot be used: dad, mum, older brother, younger brother, older sister, younger sister, uncle, aunt, boy, girl, pregnant, and other gendered words.”

From Queensland, appears a fresh source of hope to the far right or just far out. The civil war the Coalition loves to call its” broad church” whose views on climate change, are enriched by such luminaries as Craig Kelly and Tony Abbott will embrace its recent recruit, Queensland LNP climate nut and (winnable) number three spot senate candidate, Gerard Rennick, whose $30,000 party donation last year is totally unrelated to his pre-selection.

An advocate of a nuclear-armed Australia and a self-professed Russophile, Gerry has a compelling case. He “hates it when we vilify the Russians”, “They don’t want to be hated. I mean, they’re part of the West: they drink, they’re Christians, they play soccer, they’re Caucasians, they have very similar customs and values to us.”

Rennick will not only be a big help to Penny Wong on foreign policy but a boon to the Senate’s deliberations on climate and energy with his belief that the Bureau of meteorology fakes data to pump up global warming hysteria. To be fair to Gerard, this mad claim is one of many circulated to all conservative candidates by our friendly IPA.

Of course, there’s no real cessation of hostilities. ‘Our heroes don’t just belong to the past, they live with us today,’ claims ScoMo in Townsville, where he embraces coal-mining, the Coalition’s back to the future portal with its iconic anti-Greenie, Australia based around real heroes, big blokes digging up stuff in our glorious war on nature and science.

All is well, however, in Rupert Murdoch’s media monopoly where scribes quietly declare their man Morrison to be well in front of shifty Bill Shorten. Others give the Murdoch empire a pat on the back. Election campaign and Canberra bubble veteran, Michelle Grattan, opines,

“Morrison so far has more than held his own on the campaign trail; Bill Shorten has under-performed. Second, the Liberals’ relentlessly negative campaign looks dangerous for Labor. This is especially so as Shorten is facing the full weight of News Corp’s hostility.” 

Grattan is articulating a key component of the upcoming federal election, the mainstream media narrative. The scorer, whom she awaits eagerly is of course News Poll. Expect a frenzy of adulation as “Morrison closes gap”. In truth, the News Poll may well be an outlier while Labor needs a uniform swing of just one per cent to win government. Pre-polling will open Monday and it’s clear that many voters have already made up their minds.

The Coalition’s hasty, flawed, last minute mining approvals are unlikely to provide the boost in popularity it seeks. If public opinion polls are any guide, neither new mine is likely to win hearts and minds. Nor is it certain either will proceed if only on economic grounds and each could face a series of legal challenges over the approval process.

What is clear is that any political party that underestimates voters’ intelligence and common sense is in for a rude awakening. With three weeks until election day and still no sign of policies on energy, environment, education, the Coalition will have to do better than rely on bogus announceables, attacking Labor and lurid scare campaigns.

By George Theodoridis

The performance on last night’s Q&A (8th Nov) was beyond admirable. Beyond shock ‘n awe. Beyond expectation. Worthy of a tragic actor on an ancient Greek stage, one who played Agamemnon, say, or of a Shakespearean stage, one who played Richard II, say.

Actors of the Ancient Greek stage had to be good. Bloody good, since they had to play up to four roles in the one tragedy, roles of men, of women, of children, of servants and slaves, of gods and kings and queens and prophets, of murderers and of men who gouged out their eyes, all behind heavy masks and even heavier costumes, conducting the least possible stage business and exhibiting all of the human emotions.

They had to be good because they were all men and they only had their voice -their man’s voice to perform all these roles. Their full repertoire depended on just that human tool: their voice. Nothing else.

These men were so good at their job that their country often sent them off to other countries to act as diplomats or ambassadors or advocates. Interlocutors. Men like Aristodemos of Miletus for example and Neoptolemos, who, it is said, Demosthenes, the author of legal rhetoric, had paid 10,000 drachmas to teach him how to deliver whole lines of speech (Full stop to full stop) without taking a breath. 10,000 drachmas back then was a sum beyond belief. A soldier would have to survive 10,000 days of service to earn this much!

So yes, ancient Greek tragic actors were good.

Malcolm Bligh Turnbull’s performance was equal if not superior in skill to those ancient Greek actors and to those who played Shakespeare’s works.

When Jones’ introduction ended we could tell that this play would be one of a huge cast, of long held grudges, of Promithean and Epimethean interpreters of events passed and of events to pass, of events of great significance and of events that showed the banality of significant events.

There was our deposed, dumped and politically assassinated Malcolm, cogitating aloud, as was King Richard II to the Duke of Aumerle and as was Aeschylus’ Agamemnon to his brother Menelaos, about the hollowness of crowns, of thrones bereft of honour and of the vacuity of grand titles. The powerlessness of power. And he cogitated with the lyricism and the poetry of Richard II, arguably the most eloquent of all of Shakespeare’s characters and almost as mournful as Iphigeneia’s pleas to her father not to sacrifice her.

And, like the ancient Greek actors, he played many roles.

Malcolm the messiah, was one, Malcolm the king, Malcolm the Phoenix (not a hint of ash about him), Malcolm the Historiographer, Malcolm whose government was “blown up” (as he put it).

What was the number of Caesar’s assassins, as many as those of Malcolm? Sixty, perhaps? The autopsy on Caesar’s body (first ever autopsy) revealed some twenty three stab wounds. The look on Malcolm’s face, though free of any hint of ash, spoke of many more. Too many for him not to say, “I have left politics and I am now back in business.” Some of us could well suggest the man has never left the “business.”

Last night, Malcolm was just one more dumped PM, dumped PMs being a common sight in Australia.

For the first few moments of the show we were asking ourselves if he would reveal his Casca, the first to plunge the sword into Caesar’s body. Was it Scott Morrison himself? Abbott? Dutton? Coremann? Ciobo? That hand around Malcolm’s shoulder was Morrison’s just a couple of days before the dumping. Was that a sign like Judas’ kiss, identifying him to the conspirators in case they got the wrong man?

But we didn’t have to wait long. Malcolm pulled back the black curtains, opening them wide for us to see a phalanx of conspirators, all with knives of glistening steel, shuddering with anticipation: Abbott, Hunt, Cormann, Fifield, Ciobo, Cash, Keenan, Taylor…

Poor Malcolm!

Why did they do it? Why did they blow up the government? Well, Malcolm doesn’t know, and he said that we’ve got to ask them!

Malcolm came on the Q&A stage last Thursday to play the role he knows best: that of the miracle maker: Jesus and Lazarus all rolled into one; in the one act, in the one retelling of the story. Malcolm came on the Q&A stage to resurrect himself, to raise himself from the dead as Jesus allegedly did to Lazarus almost 2000 years ago.

So he listed all his miracles: “We delivered on jobs and growth, strong economic growth, reduced personal income tax, reduced company tax, record investment in infra structure, reformed schools funding, record funding in health and pharmaceutical benefits, record funding and support for Aust. Defence Industry, Australian steel industry, TPP, exemption from Trump’s trade restrictions… the bonking ban, the social reforms, legalising same sex marriage…” and on and on he went reminding us of his miracles. They were endless!

And to play the role of the saviour.

For goodness’ sake, didn’t we, the plebs in the fish markets understand that messiah Turnbull wanted to save us from the devil, Bill Shorten who will indubitably, send us to hell with increased taxes, increased Union power, reduced investment and put our economic growth and the jobs growth at risk?

Didn’t we, in the vegetable stalls and the meat stalls understand this?

Did we not see that Malcolm had descended from heaven to save us from Bill!

Obviously not!

I am still scouring my brain to understand why he gave me and millions of others the right to judge who can love whom and who can marry whom. Why would I be given a right that belongs to someone else? What right did he or any politician have to do that?

I’m still scouring my brain to work out why it is that religious organisations have so much political clout in this country and why schools of a religious “ethos” (scouring my brain to work out what that word means in the context they’ve dumped it in as well) want even more laws to allow them to treat gay students and staff like abhorrent miscreants and to sack them at will.

I’m still scouring my brain to work out why there ever were and still are, refugees who have nothing but good will for this country, who have asked for our help and who found themselves in utter despair thanks to our savage treatment of their country, through bombing and trade restrictions, why are these people suffering Guantanamo-like conditions under our bastardy in Nauru and Manus.

There are lots of other things too, that I am scouring my brain to find an answer to and I know full well that this country has been blown up so totally that this search will bear nothing but despair.

Scomo of course knew and appreciated Malcolm’s acting prowess so he did what Greek Govnt’s did with their best actors: he sent Malcolm to Indonesia to represent Australia as its diplomat in the free trade agreement between the two states, to calm down Mr Joko Widodo who was still unsettled by Malcolm’s dumping and by Scomo’s wish to move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Poor Scomo! Malcolm turned his dream into a nightmare.

Finally comes the removing of the happy mask.

“I’m proud of the achievements I was able to make,” the messiah mused forlornly. And it was genuinely a forlorn sort of contemplation. You could see it in his eyes, lids rising and falling as if the weight of misery was upon them.

“I’m not miserable or resentful or bitter at all,” he said. “I am joyful! I got an enormous amount done… I’m very positive about my time in office. It ended sooner than I would like it to have ended and it ended in circumstances that remain unexplained but nonetheless, it was a time of great achievement… it (his dumping) was crazy, pointless, self-destructive.

I wish Scott all the best, I really do!”

But I could hear the words he was thinking, the words he didn’t dare to utter and they were uttered in Chinese: “I wish Scott an interesting crown.”

One like that worn by Richard the Second:

All murder’d: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour’d thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

Richard II ACT III, Scene ii

Blue ties

Smiling at me

Nothing but blue ties

Do I see

(With apologies to Irving Berlin)

“Blue ties … nothing but blue ties” is the theme of this week’s Canberra soap opera. It’s about the Coalition’s vain attempt to flog off a hugely ignorant, intellectually bankrupt concept which “suppository of all wisdom” Tony Abbott once pitched to Liberal donor and private health Czar, the late Paul Ramsay, as a cure for our national identity crisis.

The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, would confer an undergraduate degree that would supply what ‘this current generation was missing … familiarity with the stories and the values that had made us who and what we are’.

Like any snake oil or hair restorer salesman, Abbott suggested other key deficiencies in our national psyche would also be cured.  Above all, bigotry and dogmatism would thrive. “Almost entirely absent from the contemporary educational mindset was any sense that cultures might not all be equal, and that truth might not be entirely relative.”

Desperately, the Turnbull government begs the ANU to take on The Ramsay Centre; confer ersatz academic legitimacy on a cheer squad for cultural supremacists. It woos the university for six months but is flatly rejected Thursday.

Vice-Chancellor Brian Schmidt BS Phys, BS Astro, AM Astro, PhD Astro is polite but firm  as he lets Ramsay know it’s on the nose. ANU has “serious concerns about its autonomy”, he says. His objections expose The Ramsay Centre utterly. And by extension they are a trenchant criticism of a Coalition keen to undermine if not silence a free and open society.

Professor Schmidt tells  Fairfax Media, Thursday, that the Ramsay Centre had “sought a level of influence over our curriculum and staffing that went beyond what any other donor has been granted, and was inconsistent with academic autonomy”. This would set a precedent that would completely undermine the integrity of the university,” he continues, noting the ANU had declined donations before and “will again”.

The word integrity mystifies the PM of an anti-academic, coal-powered, business-friendly government. He just cannot fathom Schmidt’s decision, he declares sounding less confounded than condemnatory:  “I find it very hard to understand why that proposal from The Ramsay Foundation would not have been accepted with enthusiasm, he tells Fairfax.

Rejecting Ramsay is quickly conflated with rejecting western civilisation. Publicly, the PM vows to drum some sense into ANU’s curmudgeons. PM of a mercantile government of mean, narrow and contracting horizons, Turnbull might find himself out of his depth, however, with Schmidt, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize and leader of the High-Z Supernova Search team which in 1998 made the wonderful discovery that the expansion rate of the Universe is accelerating.

At stake is the very idea of the university, a place for inquiry, academic freedom and intellectual rigour, concepts, ironically that are central to the Enlightenment a part of what it suits some to call the western tradition.

On the other side of the ledger is Paul Ramsay’s $3 billion legacy. The late corporate oligarch, was a former land surveyor who put away theodolite and tape to open a Sydney psychiatric clinic in 1964, a portal into a Mad-man meets Wall Street world of profiteering via his Ramsay Health Care, a thriving private hospital business empire until it “diworsified” overseas.

A market darling, Ramsay Healthcare’s motto is people caring for people. But only for people with money, darling.

While Ramsay may struggle a bit now, with underperforming overseas investments, Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts see a healthy profit in private healthcare. Australian hospitals enjoyed 13% earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization, (EBITDA) margin ten years ago. Now it’s 18%-20%. Ramsay has been a nice little earner.

In the five years to 2016, Ramsay Health Care Limited shares rose 321%: 14.6 times better than the return offered by the ASX during the same time period. Since Winston Howard’s 1997-2000 private health subsidies and other ways of getting government to foster private enterprise in the private health industry, Ramsay has never looked back.

Ramsay’s inspiring devotion to profit, the public good and the undermining of our public health system also included his building regional TV: the mighty Prime Network which along with a mind-boggling swag of products to flog, including  pay-day lenders’ usury, gambling and scams such as health and funeral insurance and banking, still manages to find space for daily crusades to expose welfare bludgers and for other truthiness to enlighten our benighted nation.

An army of jeremiahs at The Australian don sackcloth and ashes. Poison barbs are lovingly fashioned by News Corp hacks. Forget culture war, The Oz declares a holy war.  A broadsheet, broadside ensues. Like the heads Christians cut off the Turkish wounded and dead and catapulted into Nicea in 1097, the word Ramsay is now hurled at all infidels; evidence the great white way of the West is superior to Islam, the East or anything anyone else might have to offer.

Surely all that money talking must be heeded, suggests policy-free, Federal Education Minister, Simon Birmingham, who blames ANU’s student associations and the National Tertiary Education Union for “stoking negativity” about such a “significant bequest”. He warns other universities “to resist politically correct objections” whatever that means.

Never get between a Vice Chancellor and a source of funding say the wags. Sydney University, The Canberra Times reports, now may take the money and run – (the degree). Yet more than 100 of its academics sign an open letter declaring that they are “strongly opposed to the university entering into any arrangement with the Ramsay Centre”..

The Australian smears this protest as “including refugee and pro-Palestine activist Nick Riemer, fellow boycott Israel campaigner Jake Lynch and Tim Anderson, who courted controversy by defending Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.”

On economic fronts it’s all good news for Pollyannas. We are world’s best in the GDP, a contest to equate a statistical blip caused by mining and government spending in health with progress. The economy is booming. Except for wage-earners. For the first time on record, less than half of all workers now enjoy secure work reports The Australia Institute.

Scott Morrison may well boast that real wages for those in the best paid job category – permanent full-time jobs – have grown but wages for casual workers are declining. Part-time workers in marginal self-employed positions, including so-called ‘gig economy’ workers fare the worst, with real wages falling 26 percent in the last five years.

“There are one million more Australians in work than there were when we were elected,” boast con-artists Turnbull and Morrison. No hint that our adult population has grown by 1.4 million in that time. One million jobs is inadequate. An endlessly-repeated hollow boast; the lie has sadly now by dint of repetition become accepted as a Coalition success.

The Australian Financial Review’s Michael Stutchbury appears on ABC Insiders, Sunday, to cheer on the government’s fantasy employment boom although he does get a rise out of News.com.au’s Malcolm Farr when Stutchbury smugly dismisses workers on low wages as “whingers”. Bugger the facts. Everyone is fabulously well-paid at bullshit castle.

Everyone gets a share of our national magic pudding featured in ScoMo and Co’s big show this week. Even his PowerPoint tables groan under the weight of his porky-pies. In a feast of aspirational mind-setting, the treasurer flogs a drop-dead gorgeous set of figures. And takes credit. Our hero is on a mission to ease our “tax burden”.

Like a favourite footy team, homespun metaphor-king Morrison, the Malcolm Roberts of economics, bellows, Australia has “climbed back to the top of the global leaderboard”, growing faster than all seven of the biggest rich countries.”

No. ScoMo our economy only looks as if its growing faster because our population is growing faster.

None of ScoMo’s boast is true. Above all, it is impossible to measure our economy from quarter to quarter. Such is the faith-based fervour a Neoliberal government invests in anything to do with the economy – it’s heresy to dispute ScoMo’s misrepresentation of what’s caused the GDP to become a bigger, sexier figure. Or whether it really has changed.

Ross Gittins in Fairfax points out that for the last two years we’ve endured implausibly weak figures on quarter and implausibly strong the next. The only possible meaning lies in the trend. And even jobs are now 600 a day.

Nor dare anyone dare challenge the Prophet of Trickle Down’s wilful distortion of tax bad; cuts good. Or the tax burden.

Tax burden? Taxes are only a burden if you don’t want roads or schools or hospitals. Spare us your second-hand Tea Party evangelism about burdens, ScoMo. The Treasurer runs into a spot of bother when reporters ask him to comment on how women will do three times worse out his proposed personal tax cuts than men. With a well-practised display of confected anger, he trivialises the issue and patronises all with a quip about tax forms not being in pink and blue.

Job done. Journos are silenced. GDP’s making whoopee and we’ll all be on easy (Ramsay?) street on the back of mining exports; a random figure plucked out for show which looks good only because of government spending on health and its NDIS cock-up. GDP is there to remind us that what matters often doesn’t count and what counts often doesn’t matter.

In other fabulous news, a quixotic Craig Kelly jumps on his high horse and rides off in all directions in search of traitors.

‘Leftist academics’ not only hate ‘Western civilisation’, but they ‘have a dislike of our nation, that is simply why they do not want this course’ blue tie Liberal MP Craig Kelly rants. A grateful nation gives thanks for our heroic monocultural warrior’s wake-up call. Fifth columnists infest our universities. Gays. Feminists. Environmentalists. Cultural Marxists.

Our way of life is at risk. Luckily the anti-government Jihadists at the ABC has been fixed. Mitch Fifield, who sees no conflict between his membership of an IPA dedicated to closing down our public broadcaster and his role as Minister for Communications, has helped his Coalition cut $254 million in funds and cull 600 staff members since 2013.

Complaints have been stepped up in the meantime as resources have been denied in a bastardisation strategy. Fifield slams Barrie Cassidy, ABC Insiders’, genial host with the gentle question technique for allowing Andrew Probyn together with ring-ins Phil Coorey and Mark Kenny, who work for other media, to repeat the “Labor lie” that the Super Saturday by elections date was chosen in an act of political bastardry to conflict with Labor’s National Conference.

Laura Tingle opines that the ABC has morphed from being a perennial political whipping-boy to an election issue in its own right. Some tip an early election to be timed to start with disgraced former HSU head and Coalition model unionist Kathy Jackson’s trial but she may not go before a jury until 2019 given the backlog of trials before the County Court.

Cutting the funding and staffing the ABC needs to do its job while complaining about its performance, is a great way to bully our public broadcaster into submission. But even a government cheerleader can’t get out all the good news.

Christian Porter, the poor man’s George Brandis, urges the nation to get behind the government’s latest attempt to turn the nation into a police state, in its Espionage and Foreign Interference Bill which has nothing to do with foreigners interfering and everything to do with the Turnbull government’s obsession with secrecy.

While Porter screams urgency, it should be remembered that in 2009 it was the Coalition which blocked Labor’s attempts to ban the most direct form of foreign interference, foreign political donations.

It’s an “egregious, blatant breach of the democratic rights and civil liberties of Australia” says GetUp!’s legal director, Alice Drury. Porter’s bill is not about foreign influence it’s about increasing government secrecy laws.

Some of the excesses of George Brandis’ original gonzo legislation remain in the proposed new legislation. Bernard Keane sums up. Whistle-blowers remain unprotected but must go through the labyrinthine APS processes laid down by internal whistle-blower laws.

Worse, you can still be prosecuted for viewing, sharing and republishing Wikileaks-style leaked governments documents unless you can prove you believed the information would not “cause harm to Australia’s interests” and non-journalists who receive or use information can still be prosecuted.

Above all it is a move to silence dissent. GetUp! believes it will be forced to declare it is not independent when its grassroots effectiveness is entirely based on “people power” through the digital and social media revolution with crowdfunding campaigns like marriage equality and opposition to the Adani Carmichael export coal mine in Queensland.

The Turnbull government may say it wants a Ramsay Centre to perpetuate Western Civilisation yet beneath the rhetoric is the desire to promulgate propaganda to support the conservative cause and perpetuate the blue tie ruling elite.

In other ways, also its actions betray a police state agenda. Anyone may soon expect to be asked for their “papers please” at an airport. Your private information can be leaked to damage your credibility if you dare to criticise a government department such as the DHS.

Add growing draconian surveillance laws and factor in the ongoing mistreatment of Witness K a former ASIS agent who revealed ASIS’ illegal bugging of the East Timorese government in 2004 for the benefit of Australian resources companies and you have a brave new Australia that a visitor from 2013 would barely recognise.

Yet with the nobbling of the ABC’s independence and culture warriors such as Abbott and Howard actively undermining the foundations of a free, open and democratic it looks like nothing but blue ties from now on.

Unless, of course, the blue ties have already overplayed their hand and gravely underestimate the power of grass-roots opposition and the average Australian’s capacity to see right through the blue ties’ lies, the spin, the evasions and diversions.

Sunday 25 February 2018

And so it came to pass as these things so inevitably do that Barnaby Joyce will tomorrow step down as Deputy Prime Minister of Australia. Those who seek to rule from the confines of narrow thought and buffoonery always come to the same end. Joyce has a history of ill-considered policies and inept thinking that has been very costly to the Australian taxpayer.

He reached the high altar of leadership with a mixture of country ockerism and controversial speech that persuaded people that he was acting in their best interests when he was really about his own.

No doubt Joyce, like former Prime Minister Abbott, will in due course want his old job back. That is why this resignation must be looked on as an interim measure that may last for just a few months.

Like Abbott he will use his former status as a reason to express his views on all manner of things. He will also use his vote to ride roughshod over a man he detests. And undoubtedly the same dissension will prevail. When he speaks he will do so as a leader in waiting. And if he decides to cut loose he will be much worse than Abbott however, his authority, because of his stupidity, will have been greatly diminished.

He still has many questions to answer. Try these passed on to me by Linda Gardiner. They are not limited to the following:

1. The 3 million dollar security upgrade to that ‘rent free’ property were approved by who and on what basis?
2. Was Barnaby actually an MP or just a ‘candidate’ at the time such security upgrades were a) approved and b) undertaken?
3. Is it standard practise to upgrade security for an MP (presuming he was one at the time), who’s just living somewhere ‘rent free’? I mean, 3 million dollars is rather a lot to spend on a place when there’s not even a lease in place!
4. Now that Barnaby and Campion have moved out of the ‘rent free’ accommodation, how do we, the Australian taxpayers, get our money back on that ‘security upgrade’?
5. When will the investigation commence as to the real machinations of the ‘rent free’ townhouse? Maguire says Barnaby approached him, Barnaby says Maguire approached him.
6. When did Barnaby register this ‘gift’? After he was elected? Well if that be the case, then once again I ask, when were those security upgrades approved and when were they undertaken?
7. Is it coincidence or something else that Maguire, the provider of the ‘rent free’ townhouse just happened to get some rather heavily funded ‘function’ donations?
8. Is it standard practise in government to just ‘create’ a job and employ ‘in house’ without a single advertisement for such ‘job’?
9. What about all those travel expense claims staying out of home? Is there evidence of ‘official’ business being conducted?
10. What about Grimes’ letter questioning Barnaby’s integrity in regard to Hansard? All that taxpayer money used fighting to keep that letter under wraps!
11. Were the people of New England duped? I mean, this is a guy who positioned himself as a conservative, a practising Catholic, sang the praises and sanctity of marriage and all the while he was having an extra marital affair! Isn’t this ‘false, misleading and deceptive conduct’?
12. What about the allegations on another affair with another staffer and an apparent abortion? What about the allegations of the affair with a high power lobbyist?
13. Given that majority of Australia knew about the Campion ‘affair’ and ‘the pregnancy’, how is it that Turnbull ‘apparently’ didn’t? Or perhaps, on this one occasion, when Barnaby claimed the PM was ‘inept’, he had it right!
14. As for the allegations of sexual harassment. Well that is indeed a police matter.

I think the only thing Linda left off are answers sought to the sale of water.

“I’d like to say that it’s absolutely important, it’s incredibly important that there be a circuit-breaker, not just for the Parliament, but more importantly, a circuit-breaker for Vikki, for my unborn child, my daughters and for Nat. This has got to stop. It’s not fair on them.”

The use of the phrase “circuit breaker” to me doesn’t indicate any longevity.

Having said that the leader they choose, likely from Michael McCormack, Darren Chester and David Gillespie, might find the power and the money for that matter, not easy to give up. McCormack is once alleged to have said that:

“Unfortunately gays are here and, if the disease their unnatural acts helped spread doesn’t wipe out humanity, they’re here to stay.”

Sounds like a nice guy.

Darren Chester is a nice fellow and represents my own electorate of Gippsland and was applauded for the work he was doing as infrastructure minister until Joyce, in a fit of revenge, sacked him. But like Joyce none are fit to be Deputy Prime Minister of Australia.

The conflicts between Liberals and Nationals will continue unabated because they are in a mixed marriage that cannot survive. Both have within their ranks conservative extremists who would be better off with Bernardi and his crew. The Nationals have never acted in the best interests of their constituents and would be better off alone uninhibited by those progressives, the small “L” Liberals .

The big winner in this scandal is Malcolm Turnbull, who tried everything to get rid of Joyce and then an allegation from the West did the trick. Maybe now he can reveal the contents of the agreement that has been holding him back all these years. Maybe now he can shrug off the right and go back to his left leaning ways.

However, whilst Turnbull got his way he may have stood on a rusted nail in the guise of two former leaders on the back-bench.

For his part Tony Abbott got slapped down after his “Immigration speech” by all and sundry: both friend and foe. Given his personal arrogance and hatred of Turnbull he will probably continue. Even his most ardent supporter Greg Sheridan got in on the act saying he was 100% wrong. I wonder where blind Freddy was? Perhaps Joyce and Abbott will form a tag team. Goodness, I’m seeing images of Barnaby in red speedos.

Abbott showed he had the gift for a bit of sarcasm by saying:

“… gratuitous criticism from ministers who are only in government because I led them there”, and that “you’d think a government that’s lost the past 27 Newspolls might be curious about how it could lift its game.”

We all have to ask ourselves this question. Why are they all doing this? It certainly isn’t for us?

Bill Shorten can now quietly claim the scalps of a Prime Minister and a Deputy Prime Minister. But as last week,s Newspoll showed, it doesn’t seem to hurt the Coalition at all. Almost half the population think they are doing a fine job.

My thought for the day

“Wouldn’t it be good if in our parliament, regardless of ideology, we had politician’s whose first interest was the people’s welfare and not their own?”

PS: That was the end of Act One. Act two: will Joyce after a month or so on the backbench accept a generous job offer and force another by-election in New England?

I can hear the howls provoked by that headline already but hear me out.

History shows us that the Greens often drag Labor, kicking and screaming, to where they need to be.

Take marriage equality.

This had been a Greens policy for years but, as recently as 2012, a private members bill from a Labor backbencher got only 28% approval in the lower house with both Gillard and Swan voting against it, though I believe Shorten voted yes.

Or a federal anti-corruption watchdog.

In February 2017, at the second reading of the National Integrity Commission Bill 2013, Senator Scott Ludlam gave the following speech:

In 2010, Greens Senator Bob Brown introduced the National Integrity Commissioner Bill. In 2012 our member for Melbourne, Adam Bandt, introduced a similar bill into the House of Representatives. In 2013 Senator Christine Milne introduced a National Integrity Commission Bill. In 2015 Senator Rhiannon introduced a motion calling for a national anti-corruption body and political donations reform. I can remember sitting here on the crossbench and having that motion voted down by the Labor Party and the Liberal Party. If my memory serves me, a substantial number of crossbenchers supported the Greens and of course the major parties did not. In 2016 Senator Rhiannon reintroduced the National Integrity Commission Bill. How long is this debate going to need to run for?

Labor Senator Jacinta Collins said they were still thinking about it.

“Labor is open to the idea that a dedicated federal anticorruption body may be required but, at this stage, a case for one has not been made and it definitely has not been made through the discussions on this bill.”

Yesterday’s National Press Club Address revealed that, finally, Bill has come to the party.

Dying with dignity is another long-held Greens policy.

In August 2013, SBS reported “The Labor Party says euthanasia is a sensitive and complex issue and that members of the community have strong concerns about dying with dignity, compassion and with minimal pain. Labor won’t amend existing Commonwealth laws or seek changes to State and Territory laws at this time which state that euthanasia is illegal in Australia.”

But now the Victorian Labor government has passed the bill, similar legislation was defeated by one vote in Tasmania, South Australia and NSW, and the Queensland government is under pressure to join the debate.

The Greens have an optimistic renewable energy goal of 90% by 2030.

The former Labor government set a target of 20% by 2020.  Bill Shorten has announced a goal of 50 per cent of our electricity generated from renewable sources by 2030.

Other countries are more ambitious, like New Zealand whose goal is 90% by 2025 or Denmark who are aiming for 50% by 2020.

Asylum seekers is one area where Labor won’t budge, still licking their wounds from the Stop the Boats campaign.

But they must have a strategy for dealing with the refugees on Manus and Nauru if the Coalition fail to find them homes before the election.

And they must have a policy that reflects the obligation to provide safe haven for people fleeing war and oppression rather than demonising them for their manner of arrival.  The best way to put people smugglers out of business is to give asylum seekers ways to get here legitimately.  If we reduced the 457 visa rorting, we could accommodate a larger humanitarian intake and employ people to assist them to settle in, perhaps initially, for some, in regional communities who express a willingness and have the capacity to help.

The Greens cop a lot of flak as being job-destroying populist loonies, but it’s informative that, over time, others come to agree with what they have been proposing all along.

I do understand the bad blood that campaigning for the same cohort of votes has given rise to.  Die-hard Labor members do not want the Greens to compete for the progressive vote and resent them fielding candidates in Labor-held seats.  They also accuse them of scurrilous tactics, but I am yet to see a campaign from any party free from the mud-slinging, misrepresentation and dirty tricks that sadly now typify every election.

I don’t expect, or even want, any formal coalition but it would be useful on a policy front if Labor recognised that, in many areas, the Greens actually represent the direction in which community expectations are, or should be, moving.

Sunday 7 January, 2018

Author’s note:

Looking back over my posting in 2017 I came across the following and I’m toying with the idea of doing a series. Up to date comments are in italics.

1 Malcolm Turnbull made a statement, I think on Q&A, before he became Prime Minister. He was espousing virtuous platitudes of political niceties that got him rave reviews for his generosity of spirit.

“Fairness is absolutely critical” he said last January. And since then he has often repeated the same reflection.

But the truth is that this generosity of spirit has not been evidenced by his Government’s actions. Somewhere along the way he lost his appetite for it.

No votes in it, I suspect.

2 Richard Dennis in a piece last year for The Guardian made the point that in the current debate about Centerlink (remember that) recouping overpayments from Welfare recipients that ”billionaires” get more leeway than vulnerable citizens.”

On top of that there seems to be no fairness when MPs use the living away from home allowance to pay for homes through negative gearing or claim expenses that in the private sector would invite dismissal. They fly willy nilly across the country attending weddings, sporting occasions etc at the public’s expense as though it’s a God-given right.

Whatever happened to the report on Politicians expenses commissioned by the Prime Minister and supposedly to be submitted before Christmas?

How many Government MP’s including former ones, could provide paperwork for 6-year-old travel allowance claims?

Yet the poor old welfare recipient is confronted with a letter of retrospective demand decided by and based on a computer algorithm that suggests they might have been overpaid. They have even placed the onus of proof on the citizen many years after the fact. And it’s a Liberal government.

I’m not arguing that it may well be the case that ”some” are overpaid. My beef is with the fairness aspect.

Tasmanian MP Andrew Wilkie has, after receiving more than 100 complaints (including from four people who were suicidal) has suggested that the system be put on hold pending an inquiry:

It is a form of class warfare and it’s the right that are fighting it, not the left.

Then they argue as Dennis says that:

”Like the economic modelling used to argue that a $50bn tax cut for big business is the best way to boost the wages of low paid workers, the data matching algorithm used by Centrelink to identify “overpayment” is only as accurate as the assumptions and data it relies on. As the old adage says: garbage in, garbage out.”

The Government argues that they need to cut spending but never look beyond one sector to do so. Unlike many others they can’t blame Labor for this one. Their default excuse of blaming Labor for everything after they have been in Government for 4 long years is not going to work.Yes Malcolm. ”Fairness is absolutely critical”

Well it’s now 5 years and they are still managing to blame Labor for most most things. One member lost a puppy and …

3 No doubt we have a pro-coal Government. With the Coalition considering a $1 billion loan for Adani’s coal mine project in central Queensland they are coming out all guns firing against environmentalists. It’s just a pity that the planet takes second place all the time.

President Trump even suggested during the cold snap that the US is experiencing that they could do with some global warming. How is that for stupid science?

4 According to conservative commentator Judith Sloan said mid year that the Prime Minister’s report card looks a bit sad. She reckons his efforts in public policy development are unsatisfactory. Little progress has been made in reforming industrial relations, education, health, and energy in the past 12 months. It is particularly disappointing that the federal government did not respond to the recommendations of the Productivity Commission’s report on the workplace relations regulatory regime.

I would suggest that he has been rather busy being berated by Barnaby for not following orders.

5 More empathy in Government maybe? (Another mid year crisis?). Whatever. So my question is if all that education doesn’t make them better citizens, unable to govern the country? Why does Peter Dutton think that by changing the citizenship test to make it tougher he will end up with better citizens?

What makes him think that the standard of Australian citizenship the Prime Minister and his government sets is any better than that of those seeking to become citizens?

They get me so confused at times.

”You see now he is saying that what I thought he said is only a figment of my imagination. That what I think I thought he meant is not what he meant at all. That when he says something and I take it to mean one thing he has the option of saying that what I thought I heard was not what I heard at all. It was only my interpretation of what he meant .I mean, did he say what he meant or did he mean to say what he meant or was what he meant really what he meant.”

6 An observation.

“Modern Australia is “diversity”. In all its forms, together with multiculturalism it defines us as a nation. People of my generation and later should divest themselves of their old and inferred racist superiority.”

7 In January of last year I wrote:

Now a week wouldn’t be complete without Tony Abbott stirring the pot. He makes a speech to the Samuel Griffith Society raising the spectre of another go at repealing 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act.

He described 18c as a: “troubling law. At its worst, it limits free speech merely to prevent hurt feelings”.

Now isn’t that odd? I don’t think I would want to live in a society where people’s feelings weren’t important.

He went on to say that he should have allowed Julia Gillard’s government to implement its so-called Malaysian solution and send up to 800 asylum seekers to that country, to deter the flow of asylum seeker boats.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. No wonder good government evaded him.

And he still contends that his 2014 budget was his greatest gift to the Australian people despite the fact that it was deliberately designed to make the less well off in society pay for the sustenance of the rich and privileged.

How many more weeks of this incompetent government we are supposed to endure I am unable to answer. I only know that my patience is wearing very thin.

Now I’m sure I missed something, but I can’t think what.

PS: Yesterday I wrote about how character effects leadership. Feelings has a lot to do with it.

8 From February 2017:

How dreadful, how disillusioned those good Catholic folk who have their faith at the core of their being must feel. I know our local parish priest does. But having committed the sins it has, it is difficult to see how the Catholic Church has any right to cast moral judgement on others.

The indignation it is showing over accusations about Cardinal Pell is outrageous given the deaths it has caused. So many children abused, lives destroyed and families devastated. To this day I don’t think they fully comprehend the damage they have done. The Vatican still won’t release documents in their keeping. As an institution the Church is morally bankrupt.

More recently the Vatican has indicated it will release some documents and you would have to suppose that they will be ones that support Pell’s case.

9 Goodbye, Harper Lee. As a young boy you changed my life.

10 The Essential Poll published last week posed this question:

“Thursday 26 2017 January is Australia Day. Will you personally be doing anything to celebrate Australia Day or do you treat it as just a public holiday?”

Most people recognised the holiday but only a third of us said we would actively celebrate the occasion.

For most it’s just another and they don’t get too fussed about the reasons behind it.
Just what the future of the national day is, is anyone’s guess. Probably it will just linger on in its present form until a catalyst presents an opportunity to give it sincerity and integrity.
Such a time may very well be when we become a republic. When we have cast away our final ties to the motherland and we can declare that we have arrived at our adulthood, with one of our own as head of state.

Australia Day would then have all the necessary ingredients for a national day of celebration. So I declare that Australia Day should be moved to the date on which we become a republic and cancel the Queen’s birthday holiday.

11 Shane Crocker is a Facebook friend of some years and drives a taxi in Townsville, Queensland. Like most drivers he likes a chat. His hobby is an avid interest in science and is extremely well-informed on the subject. On Sunday he made these observations.
For non- Australians the statement “Australia Day celebrates the landing of Captain Cook” needs clarifying. The far-right Australian politician, Pauline Hanson also made this statement on Australia Day (January 26) last week:

James Cook landed at Botany Bay (now a part of the city of Sydney) on April 19, 1770. Australia Day commemorates the arrival of the First Fleet of British ships on January 26, 1788.

Pauline Hanson, like many right-wing populist politicians, is profoundly ignorant and made a fool of herself by confusing the two events.’’

These are actual statements made by taxi customers in Townsville:

“Not all of them are rednecks. The comment about the Jews bringing the Holocaust on themselves was made by a professional person.”

Things I’ve recently heard around the place from people in Townsville, Queensland, Australia:

“One Nation is going to wipe the ALP off the map.”

“Maybe fascism is what this country needs right now.”

“Gay marriage would bring down society as we know it.”

“God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

“The answer to the crime problem is to bring back the death penalty.”

“Australia should free up the gun laws so we can protect ourselves.”

“The right to keep and bear arms is in the Australian Constitution.”

“The Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves.”

“Muslims should be banned from coming to Australia as well.”

“Refugees get everything for free.”

“Australia was established as a Christian country.”

“Australia Day celebrates the landing of Captain Cook.”

“A lot of people just say they’re Aboriginal so can get everything for free.”

“It should be illegal to speak any other language than English in public.”

“It’s a criminal offence to burn the Australian flag.”

“Hitler had the right idea, his only mistake was to have a war with England.”

The only thing missing from that lot is that the Australian Constitution guarantees freedom of speech.

12 In the month of September rumour has it that Christian Porter will replace George Brandis as Attorney-General who in turn will replace Downer in London.

Wasn’t just a rumour, as it turn’s out.

13 Trump’s public endorsement of Fox News over cable news rivals is something extraordinary. He’s really acknowledging that Fox is now state TV.

14 On 31 January 2016 I wrote:

The Coalition regrets having to announce that good government has been further delayed. At least until after the next election. Circumstances beyond my control. Authorised by Malcolm Turnbull. Canberra.

Still waiting Malcolm but patience sweating thin.

15 Malcolm Turnbull is facing flak from the Abbott conservative forces within his government. There is hardly an issue of any substance where he is showing quality leadership. The issue is again in the headlines with conservatives saying they will not abide by the outcome of the proposed plebiscite on Gay Marriage.

The people won in the end.

In fact they are lining up to say they will vote against. We pay for good government and expect it from day one. Tony Abbott said that we would get it 12 months after the ball had been bounced. Even then it didn’t happen. We are still waiting for Turnbull to stop talking about it and start delivering. By the time the election comes around the electorate will be entitled to ask whether the Coalition can ever deliver on it.

Anyone for tennis?

16 Only in America.

Both the President and the Vice President have made it very clear that the next appointee to the Supreme Court will be an anti-abortionist. I would have thought that the first attribute of a judge of any court would be impartiality. To appoint people who will do your bidding is tantamount to rigging the judicial system.

17 The way Theresa May looked at the President and repeated what they had discussed looked to me like she was wanting it confirmed publicly.

My thought for the day

“For the life of me I fail to understand how anyone could vote for a party who thinks the existing standard of governance is acceptable.”

Friday 17 November 2017

1 On Tuesday this week my daughter, together with her two children, Jack 13 and Riley 11 visited for dinner. It’s a standing date. Jack, who attends a Catholic college had previously told me that the boys had already openly discussed the issue of marriage equality and were on the Yes side.

After they had left I said to my wife; “Do you realise that they will be the first generation to grow up in an Australia that openly and officially celebrates sexual difference? That it will just be normal to them that most folk are attracted male to female but others are attracted to the same-sex and it is also normal.”

“What a wonderful thing equality is,” I thought to myself. Just another small step in the pursuit of enlightenment. How different from my own upbringing when things like homosexuality were discussed among boys through the ignorance of the age. When an inquisitive innocent mind might lead indirectly to being branded a “poofter” with accompanying dangerous consequences, the pain of which has now finally been broken.

The parents and grandparents of today now have the opportunity to explain the second sex with an openness uninhibited by malevolent interpretation. That love is when there is an irresistible urge for the need of the affection of another, and the irresistibility is of its nature mutual. Gender has nothing to do with it.

As David Marr reported in The Guardian:

“For old men like me this is another step on a once-unimaginable journey. Sex was a crime when I made my first stumbling entry into the gay world. Even when those crimes were wiped from the books, so much complicated shame was left to be negotiated. The business of coming out was endless.

The smothering respectability of official Australia back then came back to sex. It was all about sex. But censorship collapsed. The press relaxed. Gays, lesbians, transsexuals and queers began to be accepted in public life.

The obvious became unremarkable. Australia became a better place.”

2 Surprisingly, when commentators have dissected and analysed the data from the survey nobody (bar me, I think) has attributed any influence in the overwhelming “yes” to the general anger in the community with the way they are being governed. Without distracting from the success of the Yes vote I am of the view that a fair portion were just white-hot with anger at the Abbott/Turnbull governments.

Of course, I have no other way of proving it other than to point out the alignment of the Newspoll and the survey itself. Perhaps you can add 60 years of political observation to that.

Regardless, Australians have delivered a stunning rebuke to Dutton (the originator of the survey), and Malcolm Turnbull’s government. Dutton’s survey added an extra 90,000 voters to the electoral roll. I doubt that they all did so to vote for marriage equality.

3 From my point of view the other significant thing to come out of the survey is just how much the Christian religion has declined in Australia. Other than in those electorates with a high concentration of Catholic and Muslim populations, religion had little influence on the result. Had the Christian Church said “no” to such a proposal as Marriage Equality as little as 10 or 20 years ago, the Yes vote would never have gotten up. Faith has never kept up with social change. It, combined with child abuse, in all churches together with better standards of education has seen a rapid decline in its appeal. So much so that it may disappear in 20 years time. (I supported this supposition in my piece Day to Day Politics: The Future of Faith in Australia).

4 To close I have chosen to use the words of my friend, Stuart J Whitman:

“Reflecting on yesterday’s overwhelming YES vote for marriage equality in Australia and the words of Gough Whitlam taught to me by his former chief of staff Race Mathews come to mind …

Good politics is about winning the informed consent of the people for necessary change.

It seems to me if a considerable majority of Australians are able to back same-sex marriage after being better informed, then why wouldn’t they also be prepared to support the just and compassionate treatment of refugees, real action on climate change, constitutional recognition of and a treaty with the First Australian nations, the rich paying their fair share of taxes, a strong social safety net for the disadvantaged, a properly funded NBN and an Australian republic?

We just need politicians with the courage to lead and bring the people with us on these issues.”

My thought for the day

“The secret of change is to focus all your energy on not fighting the old but on building the new.”