If the following words sound familiar, the reason is that l have posted them before. However, it may be best to reread them to understand my thoughts.

Again, I had better pause lest you fail to grasp where I am heading. In Australia, we have a saying, “Only in America.” It’s a phrase we use when something outrageously good or bad happens, as though such excesses can occur only in America.

It might be violent racism, another Columbine, kids being slaughtered – any preventable, tragic loss of life that repeats time and again for which no remedy is forthcoming. All of this is beyond the average Australian’s capacity to understand.

In terms of guns, we would say in our somewhat impulsive wisdom that it is time that those with the capacity to change laws that might prevent the mass murder of children and refuse to do so were made to account. After all, they are as guilty or mad, whatever the case, as the perpetrator himself.

The same is true about people responsible for prosecuting those who have allegedly committed the gravest crimes against the state.

We look upon Americans with a great deal of curiosity. We are the recipients (not necessarily the beneficiaries) of its culture. Its capitalistic financial system. Its warmongering, sport and entertainment.

President Obama once said he would like to have our universal health system, our compulsory voting and our gun laws. But that aside, we are very much like America and generally, what comes to pass in the US will do so in Australia – even its bullshit. Well, to a point.

The United States’ current political crisis couldn’t happen here. Our Constitution (Section 44) doesn’t allow people with criminal records or those on trial to stand for parliament.

Donald Trump, in my view, and I’m not sure how this reads into their constitution, should be ordered to undergo a mental examination to ascertain his fitness to govern the country. If necessary, the supreme court could order him and Biden to submit to a complete physical and psychiatric evaluation if they were not prepared to do so voluntarily.

President Biden appears to be medically fit. His mental faculties seem reasonable from down under, with some doubts about his ageing body.

On the other hand, former President Trump might adequately pass a fitness test. But his cognitive capacity is that of a ten-year-old, and on that finding alone would be disqualified from running.

He is so far ahead of any other Republican in the race to be the next POTUS that he will surely get the GOP nomination. Of course, with the latest indictments from the State of Georgia, he will be battling an election while fighting multiple accusations. How will the different jurisdictions handle all the charges, and in what time frame is a maze too complicated to walk into? And remember, Trump has also been impeached twice.

That there does not appear to be anything to impede him from running makes the American democratic system seem like people of little intelligence put it together. That he could become President and lead the country from a plush cell in a jail of his choosing is more laughable.

In an article for Time, Olivia B Waxman makes some salient points. She asks the question. What happens if Trump wins re-election and is convicted of a felony while in the White House? There is no clear answer.

Without an answer to this question, the USA has a significant constitutional crisis on its hands that might run for years. It would be even more critical than Watergate. A new Attorney General could derail Trump’s Federal cases by simply not turning up, but the Justice Department cannot cease State prosecutions.

If he were to win, he could govern from his cell – a new wing of the White House. He could have international leaders visit him in solitary confinement. It wouldn’t work, of course, and a case for impeachment (a third time) would arise for not adequately doing his job. That might remove the SOAB. In fact, it may be the only way.

There is a slim hope that the Republican Party won’t nominate him as their presidential candidate. You can read the full but complicated explanation here. However, if a new candidate were to emerge in stage three of the election system, Trump might find himself in a lot of trouble, especially in a two-horse race.

That said, a game-changing event has arisen with the indictment from the state of Georgia. If convicted, Trump wouldn’t be able to pardon himself. He and his co-conspirators have been indicted under what is known as Rico law (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) in Georgia, which requires only showing an “interrelated pattern of activity” of a criminal enterprise.

Only in America: How most Australians see the character of Donald Trump

In October 2020, I wrote the following:

From down under, we see a sick deluded man of no redeeming features, full of racial hatred, ignorance, bile and misogyny. A deluded, pathetic liar unsuitable for the highest office in the land, if not the world. He sees complex problems and impregnates them with populism and implausible black-and-white solutions.

He is a person of limited intellect and understanding, only capable of seeing the world through the prism of his wealth. The far edges of knowledge have passed him by. Matters requiring deep philosophical consideration seem beyond him.

His opinions on subjects of internal and international importance are so shallow that one would think he spent the entirety of his youth in the wading pool at the local swimming pool, or six years in grade 6, and never academically advanced.

He is a crash-through politician with a ubiquitous mouth. Trump remains an incoherent mess who bounces back after each disaster thinking he has been impressive while those around him are laughing their heads off. Entertaining in a uniquely American way, he might be to the hillbillies, but leadership requires worldly character.

Since he lost the presidency, Trump has been nothing more than a thorn in the side of American law and its democratic principles.

Is America to have a dumbhead of first world order as President for a second time? After displaying all these character flaws for many years, that there are still enough Americans of his ilk content to elect the grotesque nightmare that he is, says much about the sanity of its people and the structure of its governance. Only in America, indeed. 

President Biden’s achievements are noteworthy. He has a record number of citizens in work. A 1.9tn pandemic relief bill in March. He also got the US to re-join the Paris Climate Conference. Inflation is on a downward trend. He has taken action to lower the cost of health care.

In my view, electing Trump in preference to Biden would be tantamount to electing Dracula President of the Blood Bank. 

With these latest revelations, hope has arisen that the great charlatan has finally met his match and American democracy can sleep well again. Depending on how the cards fall, Trump may even be prevented from running for the prestigious office of President of the United States.

There may be some Coalition politicians and Murdoch employees who are motivated by genuine racism to oppose the Voice to Parliament. Some might believe First Nations Australians are unworthy. Some probably believe in “reverse racism.” That, of course, is the belief that there is a correct direction for racism to travel.

Some undoubtedly believe in a myopic fashion that there is no inherent disadvantage to being indigenous in settler-colonial nations. There is endless research to establish how historical decisions and policy entrench disadvantage and foster social ills; it is not, as some Coalition politicians might argue, the result of a “bad” nature.

For many more Coalition politicians, however, one presumes the decision to oppose the Voice is strategic. They don’t care who is hurt in the process, just as they didn’t care about the escalated persecution that accompanied the plebiscite on marriage equality.

The Coalition and media friends are using the Voice (just as they used refugees) as an implicitly racist tool to galvanise their own vote, but more importantly to divide the electorate. It is part of our conscious echoing of the CRT argument that is burning through America, fighting acknowledgement of systemic disadvantage in that country.

CRT is “critical race theory.” This is a university law school discipline that examines the elements of the racist past that continue in current institutional structures. A Right-wing agitator, Christopher Rufo, stole this term for school studies to allow “conservative” parents to fight any attempt to teach a less bowdlerised view of history and society.

As is standard practice, Sky Australia, The Spectator and other radicalising organs borrowed the American CRT gambit for use in Australia. It can be deeply uncomfortable for Australians brought up on comforting patriotic myths to have their offspring bring home age-appropriate stories of the Killing Times and Blackbirding (sugar slavery). It is shocking to read the ghastly story of cold-blooded massacres of our First Nations people: it is estimated that we killed in various ways around 90% of the Aboriginal people here when colonisation began. It is chilling to envision Australians dropping kidnapped and enslaved Pacific Islanders in the ocean rather than bothering to return them home. Their unmarked graves are strewn across our sugar plantations, with 30% killed by the brutal conditions.

Forgetting can be even more crucial than remembering in the forging of a patriotic narrative.

Deploying race divisions has been crucial to American politics. White southerners were reconciled to the appalling conditions they were granted by the plantation-owning class by the certainty that the worst of them was better than the best Black man. The workers have been divided and disempowered by the resentment fostered between White and “Coloured” workers.

Such was the disgust for Black people that when legal changes forced the desegregation of public swimming pools built during the public works era of the New Deal, communities shut them down for years. They denied themselves the use of these communal facilities rather than share them with Black townsfolk. This dynamic continues in Republican state logic. Most Republican states refused federal money to grant the poorest Whites medical cover because it would aid Black people too.

America’s winner-takes-all capitalism fosters a “myth of scarcity.” This in turn promotes a resentful, zero-sum psychology where another group’s progress is “our loss.”

Australia’s economic model was not one driven by this model of capitalism. Our labour shortages made for a strong class of worker who achieved notable rights. We were considered a labour model in the early decades of the 20th century to the distress of capitalists who planned fascist revolutions. Our neoliberalism saw a less toxic negotiation between capital, state and worker.

In 1975, however, Milton Friedman brought his American winner-takes-all neoliberalism to Australia. His acolytes, like Peter Costello, founded “think tanks” including the HR Nicholls Society to destroy the strength of the Australian worker. The IPA followed them, turning from promoting Australian neoliberalism – Economic Rationalism – to the ultra-free market neoliberalism that so excited America’s richest.

Our society now displays the damage caused by decades of cynical “trickle down” economics and the crippling of worker strength. Just as in America, our chasm between rich and poor is at historic levels. Wealth is now generational, with the American model and our copycat version having almost destroyed aspirational dreams.

While the Labor Party continues to govern more for the nation, it has still embraced the truisms of this debunked economic model. The Coalition, by contrast, governs for the richest. This is the reason that it also copies the Republicans’ culture war battles, aiming to win a majority and government with grievance rather than sound policy.

Dahlia Lithwick described America’s Republican voters thus recently: the “majority of White Americans continue to vote against interest for parties and ideologies that directly contribute to their economic decline.” This is the position for most Coalition voters in Australia. As in America, the strategists are activating racism to promote this grievance.

The Voice to Parliament is not, as they lie, a “third chamber” of parliament or any other such threat to equality. It is literally nothing more than an advisory body to try to ensure that the best policy is deployed to reverse the deep disadvantage faced by First Nations people. It is placed in the constitution to ensure that cynical governments in the future cannot abandon it. The design of the body itself will be built by parliamentary consultation with First Nation representatives.

Some who reject the Voice do so because they believe it to be a sop. The depiction of it as a threat to land ownership is a pathetic and dangerous slander: it is, however, a handy distraction from the prospect of a wealth tax that could raise $29 billion a year.

The idea that society is a zero-sum enterprise where anything gained by anyone else is stolen from you is a distortion of fact and a miserable basis for community. We must not let a wealthy, self-interested elite divide us with racist lies to ensure their own continued grasp on our common wealth.

This essay was first published in Pearls and Irritations.

Peter Dutton has finally become the leader of something. It is a disorganised rabble, but I am sure he is thrilled. Opposition Leader, and he is already talking about swooping in and fixing “Labor’s inevitable mess” in 2025. This is truly delusional, and uncoupled from reality.

It is as if the last nine years never happened. Labor has been in government for a couple of weeks, and they better fix whatever has gone wrong, and quickly. Memo to the Libs: Be ashamed at where a once great party has ended up, with life-long Liberals voting “anything but Liberals”.

They will pile on to the “burn Morrison at the stake” moment, but Morrison led a party of men, and women, who had abrogated their sacred duty to serve the people of Australia.

Instead, they indulged in class politics, climate vandalism, social regression, barely concealed racism, transphobic vilification, anti-intellectualism, and conspicuous corruption. The environment is reeling, the word “green” had become a term of abuse, the disabled and the poor have been routinely pursued through the courts.

The tragedy for Australia is that Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is led by a person who has built his entire reputation on just such a public persona.

Everything Morrison, Joyce, Dutton and Frydenberg did for the last period of government has been either shoddy, dishonest, socially regressive, elitist and or reactionary. I cannot think of one (positive) achievement they could boast of. There are plenty of negatives, but as they say, the vibe has changed.

They tortured the refugees until it became politically embarrassing to keep them locked up, and they were secretly released, with no supports in place.

The Biloela family have finally been repatriated home, and we can blame Morrison, Dutton and Alex Hawke in equal parts for their misery. All duck-shovers and gas lighters. Memo: the reason everyone loathed your time in office was because of such tactics.

Peter Dutton has had a variable time this year. His win in a defamation case, against Shane Bazzi, an unemployed refugee advocate, was set aside by appeal. Bazzi had called Dutton a “rape apologist“.

Mr Bazzi was responding to a statement Mr Dutton had made in 2019. His tweet linked to a Guardian article where Dutton made the claim that rape victims on Nauru were fabricating their claims.

Mr Bazzi used Twitter to make his comment. I suspect that many Twitter readers agreed with his comment, but that is not a defence. It depends on what you feel the word “apologist” means.

And then there is the flawed Australian Defamation Law, where the judge decides what the reader probably imputed from your statement. So you are not judged on what you said, but on what someone else decided you meant to say.

Even Christian Porter wanted to change that aspect of the law, before commencing on his own doomed legal adventures. What can you expect from a government which refused to cease the incarceration of children as young as ten, and which allowed a whistleblower’s lawyer to be tried secretly, because he acted on behalf of the man who blew the whistle on Australia’s security services, for acting unlawfully.

Although it is clear no-one in the coalition has ever heard of Franz Kafka, it should be government policy to only employ people who have read “The Trial.”

“Some people are trying it on,” he said:

“Let’s be serious about this. There are people who have claimed that they’ve been raped and came to Australia to seek an abortion because they couldn’t get an abortion on Nauru.

They arrived in Australia and then decided they were not going to have an abortion. They have the baby here and the moment they step off the plane their lawyers lodge papers in the federal court, which injuncts us from sending them back.”

The same day the tweet was posted, Mr Dutton had said he was unaware of the “she said, he said” details of Brittany Higgins’ rape allegations.

Ms Higgins was claiming she had been raped. Her alleged assailant was not claiming to have been raped, and so there was no moral equivalence.

Those words are ‘police-speak’; formulaic, dismissive and designed to cast equal weight onto the male-female narrative scales. So you would have to be pre-literate to miss the misogynistic framing of that disclaimer. His language speaks to a generation of men who are not interested in fairness, or change.

Peter Dutton was a Minister in Scott Morrison’s Government. Shane Bazzi is unemployed, and his defamation defence was crowd funded. He advocates for refugees. In an ironic sense, Shane Bazzi’s family has itself been ‘defamed’ by Dutton, as he is descended from the Lebanese migrants who arrived in the 1970s. Dutton has pronounced them as irretrievably criminal, and he has the computations to ‘prove’ it.

The problem with Dutton’s public pronouncements is that so many of them are just wrong, or without evidence, or just another way of drawing attention to himself. Many of them are offensive, and many set up ‘straw men’ for the public to fear and loathe.

Paedophiles and pacifists are two groups he targets, and the Chinese Communists are an old standby. “Lefties and greenies’, possibly transgender folk, it is not too hard to fall foul of this man.

He voted against same sex marriage, and he did walk out of the Stolen Generations apology, so he has many unpopular and reactionary opinions, publicly stated, which he will need to reverse, if he is to reinvent himself.

Some can be interpreted as ‘dog whistling’, such as when he demonises refugees, or Muslims, even African gangs. On a more absurd note, he did want to assist white South African farmers in fleeing their own country, because of perceived racial prejudice against them. You cannot make that stuff up.

Dutton, now that he is the leader, will presumably want to project a friendlier face, but his appearances so far suggest that he is incapable, or merely unwilling, to work for Australia, rather than fighting to tear down a Labor government, which has had exactly zero time to settle in.

I think he will find inner Sydney and Melbourne harder to convince of his bona fides. He didn’t exactly cover himself in glory when his first thought, upon taking over Defence, was to cancel funding for “woke morning teas“, where defence force members dress in rainbow colours to signal the department is welcoming towards LGBT members, and possible recruits.

Peter Dutton has recently floated the idea of taxpayers bearing the cost of politicians’ defamation cases, seeing it as a ‘workplace entitlement’. We must remember he is the minister who gave a half billion dollars to Paladin, a company with a shed on a beach for an office. Dutton has got a long row to hoe, if anyone is ever going to like him, let alone vote for him. His wife said recently, “He is not a monster.” Let’s go with that thought.

As a man who is but months away from turning 80 I hope that I have inherited some characteristics of the prudent sage.

A man with awareness, and knowledge, which enables me to speak through my longevity with authority about the society, I have grown up in, taken from and invested in.

Many things disgust me about many societies of the world, none more so than the people’s aptitude for electing moronic individuals who show no understanding of life and the living of it.

In the fool’s paradise of America – who the world once viewed, rightly or wrongly, as the world’s policeman – the people elected a president who in his madness matches that of the Roman Emperor Caligula for his decadence and depravity. He is, in fact and inaction, a mass murderer of his own people.

America has always thought of itself as being exceptional which “as a lie,” has been a magnificent propaganda success.

When Donald Trump promised he would make America great again, “Instead,” writes Noel Turnbull;

“… he has presided over a significant collapse in belief in American exceptionalism.

While the rest of the western world … has always been conscious of what really makes the US exceptional – racism and limited democracy; constant waging of war; appalling health care for poorer citizens; worker exploitation; religious extremism; massive inequality; organising coups and assassinations in nations around the world; torture of prisoners; and the ignorance, hypocrisy and myopia which allows many citizens to deny it all. …and to add to that list of the exceptional, The Economist (20 June 2020) reported that the US is one of only 13 countries (along with Venezuela and Syria) where the maternal mortality rate increased between 2000 and 2017.”

We live in dark times.

The Brazilian people elected a right wing conservative politician in Jair Bolsonaro, 65, as its president. In the past few days he has announced the he has tested positive for COVID-19.

He has repeatedly flouted all of the rules of combating the virus. If infected, he would quickly shake off the illness thanks to his “athlete’s background,” he said.

“There’s no reason for fear. That’s life,” the president added. “Life goes on. I thank God for my life and the role I’ve been given to decide the future of this great nation that is called Brazil.”

Has he really been tested?

In Russia the people have voted to give their president an unprecedented lifetime in office. He is reputed to have made a fortune of $70 billion. How did he get it? No one knows.

We live in dark times.

In Australia where political apathy has grown year upon year it would seem that the worse the government governs, the more popular they become.

We have a Prime Minister on an annual salary of close to half a million dollars (in the top three in the world) saying that the Government will not be increasing the unemployment benefit of $40 a day because it might dissuade people from applying for a job.

It is then that you  understand there is something profoundly wrong, something seriously flawed with his understanding of the world and how people survive in it.

In 2013 Australia’s citizens elected the far-right politician Tony Abbott whose sole aim in life seemed to be to destroy things, not to build things. His first budget was universally acclaimed as the most uncaring ever.

Now approaching their 8^th year in power it is hard to point out any major advances made by the three conservative Prime Ministers of the period. Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison have all been consumed with the power that personal entitlement brings to the job rather than what they could have done bettering the lives of the people.

So corrupt has Australian politics become under these scoundrels, its democracy in tatters, that on questions of trust, Transparency International’s recent research found that 85% of Australians thought that some federal politicians were corrupt.

And now the art of diplomacy has also suffered … in favour of an aggressive defence policy toward China.

We live in dark times.

British citizens, of course, not to be left out of the world’s irrational need of the far-right brought about by endless fear campaigns rejected any hope of a leftist revival by snubbing Jeremy Corbyn over the buffoon Boris Johnson. Now with Brexit behind it the people expect that Conservatives will make things right again.

We live in dark times.

Throughout Europe, France excepted, a swing to the right is occurring with Italy, Germany, Spain, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Poland, Hungry, Slovenia and Greece are tending toward anti immigration, nationalism and far right-policies.

Why then do ordinary folk vote against their own self-interest? Conservatives in Australia have never given pensioners, for example, a raise in their pension. As I said earlier, the dole will be kept low and benefits to the rich and privileged won’t be touched. Yet it is amongst this cohort that the conservatives have their greatest strength. The over 65s form a solid base.

“Just why these people put their faith in conservative leadership?” you might ask. “Why do they instinctively vote for the LNP when it is Labor who is more likely to address their concerns?”

The answer is in a psychology of fear that conservatives portray. A fear of change of instability, insecurity, having something taken away. Conservatives are averse to both change and science.

The conservative has a need to convince his potential followers and adherents that they are always under threat, real or imagined, and it is only their leader who can control events that might affect their well being.

Conservatives also have a built-in fear of the aforementioned and when it overlaps with the same fears in the poor and middle classes they form a mighty powerful voting group.

Religion too plays its part in the psychological fear campaigns of the conservatives. They focus on religions (particularly the Pentecostal) aversion to change and the preservation of life as is.

I previously wrote that:

“I remember as a young boy seeing pictures on posters in trams, in the newspapers, and news shorts at the cinema with pictures depicting the communist hordes thrusting their way towards us. There were others with hundreds of Chinese rolling across Sydney Harbour Bridge in their rickshaws with guns and communist flags.”

If their religion is under threat then so to is their well-being. Threats come in abundance, anything from foreign military threats to domestic terrorism, exaggerated fears of minorities and immigrants, pluralism, disease, violent crime, or government overreach. Even a virus that is a sign from God.

Fear draws people into protection from it. It gives poor people approval to vote against their own best interests.

I began this piece by saying that.

It is so true of Australia. Australian conservatives have long been the champions of fear. They have won many elections with it and will continue to do so until confronted.

We live in dark times.

Mobs are unruly, headless things. The message is the action. The platform is often violence. But what is happening across the United States cannot simply be labelled as a looting-leads-to-shooting episode. It ranks as another chapter of enraged despair and untidy opportunism.

It all began with a savage act in South Minneapolis, a killing grotesque for its indifference. The hunter in this gruesome Monday spectacle of cruelty proved to be a policeman from the 3^rd Police Precinct, Derek Chauvin; the quarry, a black man by the name of George Floyd. As Floyd was held down by the knee for almost nine minutes, suffocating to death as he pleaded for his life, the Chauvin impassively went about his deadly task. The pulse ceased.

A country began to spasm, though it first began with a peaceful march of sorrow at the corner store next to the site of Floyd’s arrest. With the United States topping the global chart in coronavirus deaths, with numerous parts of the country easing lockdown restrictions as unemployment has surged, the release over the week became atavistic, vengeful. Mixed in were also protests of desperate sadness and anger, with sentiment very much against violence as a weapon of choice. Police were attacked but in other cases, notably that of Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson in Flint, Michigan, they joined protests and expressed a wounded solidarity.

Buildings were left burning; stores destroyed and looted. Curfews were imposed. The National Guard was called out – in Minneapolis, for the first time since the Second World War. Tear gas and rubber bullets have been used liberally. Vehicles have been driven into protesters in Minneapolis and New York City. In the chaos, even a crew from CNN was arrested. A fog of militarisation has descended heavily.

The panoramic violence provided sustenance for every interpretation on cause and inspiration. There was the civic-society hating hooligan said to be in the ascendancy; the daring, incendiary white supremacist having a go; the antagonised Black American furious and redressing grievances; the foreign agitator keen to exploit divisions.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s own assessment put the blame on agitators from out of state who cared not one jot for the demise of Floyd. Justice for him, and any endeavours to achieve it for the slain resident, did not “matter to any of these people who are here firing upon the National Guard, burning” businesses and “disrupting civil life.” In agreement, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey dismissed any idea that this was a local poison, making its way through the body of the city. “The people that are doing this are not Minneapolis residents. They are coming in largely from outside of the city, from outside of the region to prey on everything that we have built over the last several decades.”

Such diagnoses ignore the scarring caused by killings inflicted since 2016. Floyd’s death was the fifth caused by police forces since 2018. The norm, generally speaking, has seen those involved spared charges. As Hugh Eakin observes on such prevalent impunity, “Behind such a dismal record of failed accountability, there is now a widespread sense that structural racism in the city’s administration and law enforcement runs deep.” Charges of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter have been filed, but will they stick? Hennepin County Prosecutor Mike Freeman was pleased to note that this was “by far the fastest that we’ve ever charged a police officer.”

Then there was the Trump administration’s own stretched interpretation, presenting it with a chance to settle a long-standing score. In a divided country, you take to barricades rather than remove them. “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization,” came the aggressive tweet from President Donald Trump. A flavour of what is to come was also given by Trump’s ever loyal US Attorney General William Barr on Sunday. “The violence instigated and carried out by Antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly.” Such measures are likely to fall foul of the Constitution, but that is a procedural irrelevance in the game of electioneering rhetoric. Trump’s point is to show that the US is broken, and that he is the best manager of a ruined MAGA Republic.

The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2020

The brutality and poignancy of this Minnesota decline into pyromanic purgatory and tear-stained sorrow was captured by the words of rapper Killer Mike, a man who professes to having “a lot of love and respect for police officers,” being the son of one. “I watched a white police officer assassinate a black man. And I know it tore your heart out.”

At a press conference with Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, he felt “duty-bound to be here to simply say that it is your duty not to burn down your house for anger with an enemy.” Fortify it, he suggested with biblical intonation, “so that you way be a house of refuge in times of organization.” But it was the words that followed that bring the matter into crystalline focus. Unalloyed anger; a desire to build from the ashes, was vital. To have purpose and worth, you needed to burn the whole thing down. Killer Mike’s suggestion, as you preserve your own home, is to take the matches to the system itself, one “that sets up for systemic racism.” Prosecute the offenders; get convictions. Unfortunately for him, that distinction may prove too fine in the groans and recoil that follows. Justice for Floyd, even before it starts in earnest, has already been eclipsed.

Try as I might, I cannot pinpoint the exact moment or instance, when the world’s conservative parties shifted from extolling tradition and practising good manners, to embracing corruption and malfeasance.

So for convenience sake I cite the election of Barack Obama who served as the 44th President of the United States of America.

Yes I know there are thousands of other instances, but stay with me.

Barack Hussein Obama II served as President from 2009 to 2017. He is a Democrat, and the first African-American President of the United States.

Obama electrified the world with the slogan, Yes We Can.

So is it fair to say that race has altered the behaviour of all conservative politicians, and prompted them to behave like James Bond villains?

I realise this might be a bit of stretch especially in Australia which is, so we are told, the most successful multi-cultural nation on the planet.

But allow me to present a couple of examples of race-based spite which proves my point.

Exhibit one. A couple of vile epithets written by a so-called journalist employed by News Corp, which as AIM readers know, aids and abets conservative corruption and ill will.

Exhibit two. The increasingly hysterical reaction to the Corona virus, and exhibit three the failure of the Closing the Gap initiative.

Let’s start with News Corp’s Tim Blair.

Consider these two pejorative examples of Blair’s wit. Sudafednasalspray, and Sweatpeahummusstain – both coined by Blair to belittle Thinethavone or Tim, Soutphommasane.

Soutphommasane, who served as Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission from 2013 to 2018, has so far written and published three books. He is an Oxford graduate, the Director of Cultural Strategy and Professor of Practice (Sociology and Political Theory) at the University of Sydney.

Blair on the other hand peddles his scribbles to Quadrant and News Corp. In a less than stellar career Tim claims to have worked as an elbows-out jobber on Sport Illustrated, Truth and Time.

A simple comparison of both men boils down to the vulgar American colloquialism; shit and Shinola.

Tim Blair’s sustained campaign against Soutphommasane segues to my second example; incipient racism following the spread of the Corona virus.

But let’s stay with the object of Tim Blair’s spite.

Last week Soutphommasane and colleagues at the University of Sydney posted a video on Twitter about the impact of the epidemic.

Soutphommasane, along with academics from across the nation, are acutely aware of the financial catastrophe facing Australian universities, right here, right now.

For the record University lectures begin this week.

Handling the Corona virus requires tact, skill and leadership. But like the elbows-out Tim Blair, the Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton clouded the issue when he said people evacuated from the epidemic’s epicentre Wuhan, to Christmas Island would be expected to pay $1000.

Seriously.

Treasurer Josh Frydenburg quickly closed down Dutton’s gaff on Insiders. Since then Frydenburg has valiantly defended the Government’s ever-shrinking and rapidly disappearing Budget Surplus.

To its credit the SBS is reporting the rise of racism and the Corona virus as per this item by Tom Stayner. So to exhibit three: the umpteenth failure of the bipartisan Closing the Gap initiative.

During Question Time on February 12 2020, the Prime Minister Scott Morrison took an Opposition dixer about the failure of the most recent Closing the Gap report to reach its targets.

Reading from speaking notes, the PM mouthed platitudes. ‘More needed to be done to improve the lot of Aboriginal Australians’, quoth he.

In reality Australia has barely moved an iota toward Closing the Gap since the landmark date of February 13 2008 when Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to Aboriginal Australians.

Mindful of this, Labor Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese offered an olive branch of sorts to the Government. Albanese suggested the Government at least consider a change to the Australian Constitution.

This change Albo argued, conforms with the aspirations of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, a document which outlines a way forward for the recognition of Aboriginal Australians in the Constitution.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart seeks to give Aboriginal Australians a voice in laws and policies made about them … ergo Closing the Gap.

And the Prime Minister’s response?

No We Can’t.

While Australians rightly demand action on climate change, surely we must also call an end to bigotry and boycott racist muck peddlers like Tim Blair.

As mega blazes burn the oxygen we breathe, and one-in-a hundred years floods inundate our homes, it is racism which corrodes the nation’s soul.

Unless we the people vote out the likes of Doctor No and Blofeld and their villainous mouthpieces like Tim Blair, we shall remain vassals of an utterly corrupt global conservative movement.

To paraphrase the words of the John Lennon song Working Class Hero, [the conservatives] “keep you doped with religion and sex and TV. And you think you’re so clever and classless and free, but you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.”

“I would love to read your thoughts on the following concept,” said the message on Facebook. It continued:

“Many politicians in many ways use religion. Our PM uses it to falsely justify his actions that are morally corrupt.

Walking through a street of homeless people while pushing through the phase three tax change, would create guilt in the heart of most of us.

But the Bible justifies the abundance of poverty and the money shower the government pushes from the poor onto the rich is immoral.”

I get many such messages in the course of a week or so and the subject of this one was not unusual.

The only difference seems to be the inclusion of religion.

There are many questions that arise from these words. The first being where does one start. Perhaps the best way might be to simplify the question. Let’s base it on thus:

“It seems to me that since coming to power, increasingly the Prime Minister is, more and more, gradually incorporating his religion into his governance but at the same time it is the rich who seem to be getting the largest slice of the pie.”

So let’s begin by saying that a conservative government won the election, not a liberal one.

Conservative philosophy or ideology believes in the individual’s rights to pursue life and its rewards with a minimum of government interference while at the same time being responsible for his or her own decisions.

The problem with that is that we are not all born equals. We live in a failed system. Capitalism, the conservative measure of all individual success, does not allow for an equitable flow of economic resources.

With this system a small privileged cohort become rich beyond conscience and almost all the others are doomed to be poor at some level.

The ‘know your place’ saying is firmly embedded in the consciousness of all conservatives and was poignantly demonstrated last week.

The born-to-rule cliché about the Liberal Party has been firmly embedded in their psyche for as long as I can remember.

Know your place means to accept your position within society and not seek to improve it. To look upon your superiors with admiration. You will hear the phrase used by older members of the Coalition infrequently but the sentiment still remains.

The first instance of its meaning was when the Minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, an Aboriginal himself, announced at the National Press Club that a referendum to include a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous voice to parliament would be presented in this term of office.

Within 48 hours no less the Prime Minister put Wyatt in his place. Other Ministers followed suit and by the weekend I concluded that it wouldn’t get up.

For me this was just another unedifying example of the same sort of wrecking by the conservatives far right wing of the Coalition has been inflicting on the nation for the past six years. There is no doubt the far right is now very ably led by the Prime Minister, vigorously so, and with the addition of his religious beliefs.

How they expect Indigenous Australians to suffer two rejections of the Uluru Statement and then face, with good will, participation with a good heart for yet another alternative is so beyond me that the words ‘know your place; we were born to rule’ take on sinister implications of racism and return to haunt me and test my thinking.

Aboriginal people were here long before white people. Now, outlandish as it is, they need to ask our permission to be mentioned in their own country’s constitution.

It was only at the beginning of last week that Scott Morrison in front of 21,000 people closed a Hillsong meeting promising a referendum on Indigenous recognition.

The second and equally immoral ‘know your place; we were born to rule’ incident was with the out-and-out unqualified junior minister Luke Howarth telling the homeless to look on the bright side.

In his usual maladroit style Howarth was giving notice of a typically conservative harsh austerity toward anyone doing it tough.

99.5% is the proportion of Australians who are “homed”, according to the new federal homelessness minister, who hopes to “put a positive spin” on the issue.

A half of 1% of the population are homeless.

“Know your place; we were born to rule.”

But don’t miss the point here. If you are on the other side of the coin and you work hard and aspire to move upwards  your efforts will be rewarded collectively with $158 million in tax cuts and various other tax lurks and subsidies guaranteed to reinforce our shift to an even more unequal and friendless society.

The biggest gift to the rich and privileged in Australian economic history.

This of course was the desire of the former treasurer Joe Hockey when he produced his never to be forgotten horror budget of 2014. In its support he said:

“Governments have never been able to achieve equality of outcomes … It is not the role of government to use the taxation and welfare system as a tool to ‘level the playing field”.

Josh Freydenberg in yet another example of Know your place; we were born to rule mentality isn’t allowing anything to get in the way of a surplus. Not even the economic good of the country. It’s not even negotiable.

“Whilst walking through a street of homeless people, pushing through the phase three-tax change, might create guilt in the heart of most of us,” conservatives would think nothing of it.

“Know your place; we were born to rule.”

The less well-off, because they will spend it, have been promised $1080 and are rushing the tax office to get it.

Education and Health are usually the first victims of their austerity. The first victims of equality opportunity.

Those on the right to excuse any real effort against poverty often quote; “The poor will always be with us”. They are mistaken because Jesus was actually quoting another well-known Biblical phrase—from a well-known passage of the Jewish Torah.

Everyone hearing him back then would have caught his drift.

“If among you, one of your brothers should become poor, in any of your towns within your land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be … For the poor you will always have with you in the land. Therefore I command you, ‘You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.’ (Deuteronomy 15:7-11)”

So often the pastors of Pentecostal churches and others of their ilk cherry pick scripture and give it a conversion to mean something else.

When I read the sayings of Jesus Christ I can but conclude that he was the world’s first socialist.

Those conversant with scripture will know that he spoke much about the obligations of the rich to feed and cloth the poor and the dangers of wealth. The origin of the prosperity movement lay squarely with the Pentecostal churches and can be dated back to 1800s.

When Jesus said, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth” (Matthew 6:19), the term ‘lay up’ did not simply speak of having possessions, but of your possessions having you. Lay up could be better translated ‘hoard’ or ‘stockpile.’

The Pentecostal churches took up the ‘greed is good’ standard and when Ronald Reagan invited them into the political fold, greed is good, like rust, permeated all sections of American society.

The Facebook reader in the final part of his question posed the following point:

“But the Bible justifies the abundance of poverty and the “money shower” the government pushes from the poor onto the rich is immoral.”

However, I cannot in good faith give a reasonable answer. That requires some length so I will follow it up in my next post on Saturday 20 July.

I have two daughters, a grand daughter and two grand sons. I have many other relatives, neighbours and friends. Close friends and friends separated by distance. Friends and relatives I love.

The mere thought that someone has hurt a single hair on their heads could well have me feeling murderous and grieving for a long time. If then a creature like Senator Derryn Hinch – cursed be his name and cursed be the Senate that has him in its fold! – decided to publicise the gruesome details of that event (real, alleged or imagined) would make both, my grief and my urge to be murderous near impossible to control.

Hinch has no idea about grief. He has a platform which he has turned into a pulpit of hateful dogmas. He has no idea of what he is saying nor what the effects of his sayings are, how powerfully hurtful they are and how close to being lethal they can be. Hinch does not protest. Don’t make the mistake of thinking his frenzied and mindless attacks are acts of protest. Don’t think that his sonorous accusations, all his drum beating and all his crass and vulgar, his bilious hatred towards a sex offender are acts of protestation.

They are anything but.

They are simply acts.

Acts by a bad actor

They are acts of accusation which, like ancient Greek stage masks, are worn to hide some flaw in his character. Hinch wears a mask to hide his attempts to gain kudos and relevance. Distinction from the rest of us. To hide his lack of, or his inadequacy of, almost anything that a compassionate human has. His loud accusations are nothing more than masks of inhumaneness.

He committed this despicable act of tweeting the gory details of what Aiia Maasarwe had suffered in the hands of a savage, not so as to correct an errant law because if that was his purpose he could have done it by many other means, very powerful means and much more effective means, means that we could all relate to and give our consent; this tweet of his shouted in no uncertain language, “I am your saviour, I am your messiah!”

It is the shouting of delusion, of psychopathy – in any case, of a deep psychological problem, desperately seeking a cure.

And, instead of correcting an errant law, the highly possible change that Hinch has effected would be that he brutalised the law. By this grotesque act, he is urging the masses to put pressure on the legislators to create new laws -or, rather to exhume old laws from the graves civilisation had buried them in a long time ago- and to apply them anew. Old, abandoned brutal laws become the new accepted brutal laws.

Next stop, if Hinch has his way, will be capital punishment or banishment for stealing a loaf of bread.

Hinch was born with a tin howler in his hands which he took for god’s golden mike and so he uses it at every opportunity to tell the world what the principal teacher of morals, according to some, Jesus, would say.

Hinch, like almost all politicians does not want to change the law. Such laws give them air and legitimacy. Something to hang their hat on. An emblem.

No, they are after the tin howler, the one they think god uses to straighten us all up.

I cannot bear to see his face let alone listen to his grating rants. I’ve stopped listening to him pretty much the first time I heard him speak. Can’t remember what it was but no matter, the message hasn’t changed one apostrophe or one exclamation mark since he started. One issue, one solution, one dogma: Stop the law from being the law, be as graphic as you can when describing the brutality a victim has suffered, create even more victims out of that one act of savagery, so that the law would change and so that he, Senator Derryn Hinch would be declared our Messiah.

Never mind that his dogma causes more victims, more grief, more pain, more virulent pain, more lasting pain.

It seems our radio stations, our TV channels, our press and our Parliaments have been, at some point not that long ago suddenly stormed by a horde of bastards and now we hear and see nothing but putrid hatred for humanity.

From George Brandis’ “we have the right to be bigots, you know” to Dutton’s “they’re doing well at Manus and Nauru” to… things said in such number that, well, let me borrow Jack Hibberd’s delicious line, “too numerous to enumerate!”

Bastards, one and all.

What do we do? What do we do in a state where Democracy is the clarion call and “freedom of speech,” its slogan?

The ancient Athenians had an answer. Ostracism.

Aristides and the Citizens

Every year – once only a year and against one only citizen – people in Parliament would be asked if they want to hold an ostracism. If yes, then two months later (enough time for discussions to take place) a minimum of six thousand people would gather in the agora, the market place, the speech making place at the centre of the city and there they would scratch on broken pieces of pottery the name of the man they hated the most and place them in great urns. Men who have done unconscionable wrong or men who, like Aristeidis the Just, simply annoyed people. These were generally rich, influential people who got under the skin of the commoners for one reason or other. I won’t go on discussing this summary law, other than to say that there was no court, no judicial process, no lawyers, no prosecution nor defence lawyers, no involvement by any other person or body of persons. Just you and your ostracon, your shard of pottery. You were asked to participate in a reverse “popularity contest” by scratching on that shard the name of the person you hated the most.

Officials would preside and the person whose name appeared the most would be given ten days to get out of town – for ten years.

These were almost exclusively people of wealth and influence because it was they who could cause the greatest civil agitation and harm.

The banished person would be kept away from Athens for ten years with death being his punishment if he tried to come back any earlier. And when he did, all was forgiven. His property was not confiscated, his reputation – good or ill – remained and he would not be stigmatised for being ostracised.

Only one per year.

It was a way of keeping the political process and the ego of the politicians, just that little bit more sanguine. More circumspect.

It wasn’t an idea that was perfectly executed but certainly one that requires some examination as to how to improve it and make certain that it stays uncorruptedly in the hands of the common citizen.

And although, many rascals (Cleon and Cleophon are two that come to mind) have escaped this process, Senator Hinch, I’m certain, would be told to pack his venom-dripping bags and leave the country. I’d be there, at the agora with enough anger and fury to make sure I’ve spelled his name right:

Ντέρρυν Χιντς.

And please don’t bring up his own story of molestation. Whatever it was, it must have been horrific and would have had enormous impact on his views about paedophiles and sexual miscreants. This should make him think even more about what he is saying about what words he is using about what impact these words have upon the victims and their family.

The incident did nothing of the sort and at the kindest, one would say he is acting so relentlessly out of revenge.

I’m not so kind to people who cause so much grief.

He is doing it so obsessively because it’s the only thing that gives him, in his mind, the legitimacy to hold a mike, a tin howler and I very much wish that someone would take it off him because he is using it to cause harm and not good.

Yes, we could do this done by vote but an ostracon would see him out of the scene quicker and cheaper, which is what is sorely needed.

It’s 2019 and Western Australia is still locking up people for not paying fines. Of course this abhorrent policy barely affects the rich, or the well-employed, or those with financial security. It doesn’t affect those who have access to money, or for whom a $500 – $1000 slap on the wrist is just a matter of flashing the credit card or at worst, waiting until payday. No, it punishes people for being poor, for which $500+ becomes an unmanageable percentage of their income/benefit. And before long, that slap on the wrist becomes a prison sentence.

This policy, which Attorney-General John Quigley can stop right now, is disastrous for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged in the community, those who barely have enough money to pay the rent, or buy food or nappies for babies. These are not violent criminals, or a threat to society. No, these people, many of which are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, cannot afford to pay the most miniscule of fines which have been meted out, not for grievous acts against person or property, but for basic regulatory offences which should never ever see a person imprisoned.

In Western Australia, every day there are approximately 8 to ten people in jail for unpaid fines. These are fathers and mothers separated from their children, vulnerable people separated from their families and incarcerated with prisoners when they have committed no crime. Of these, women are overrepresented, and 64% of the female fine defaulters are Indigenous women.

This is outrageous. And it must stop. Now. Not in six months after yet another review of a dire situation. Not tomorrow, when yet another two people have been arrested for not being able to pay their fines.

Today. Now. Attorney-General Quigley must act now and urgently put forward legislation to stop the abhorrent practice of jailing people who cannot pay their fines.

This isn’t a new idea. It isn’t something which the Western Australian government isn’t critically aware of, although the arrest and imprisonment last week of Indigenous actor and dancer Rubeun Yorkshire has thrown the spotlight on the issue again. It’s a policy which an entire coronial inquest report has recommended against.

In 2014, Aboriginal woman Ms Dhu died in police custody after officers failed to recognise she was critically ill after a rib, broken months earlier by a violent partner, became infected. Ms Dhu was in jail for owing a pitiful $3,622. It cost her life. The Coroner’s report noted that that the series of escalating consequences for fine defaulters, when combined with poverty, result in people being jailed without the safeguard of judicial oversight.

The Coroner recommended that the WA government should change the law and stop the practice of jailing people for unpaid fines. That report was handed down in December 2016.

And what has changed? Nothing. Not a thing. In fact the prison population is still growing, and Indigenous Australians are grossly overrepresented. A 2018 Human Rights Watch report found that “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in prison are the fastest growing prison population, and 21 times more likely to be incarcerated than non-indigenous peers.”

Western Australia is punishing people for being poor. It is punishing people who have been subject all their lives to institutionalised racism. It is embedding a state-sanctioned punitive culture where those who are financially suffering are further shamed, humiliated and punished, despite having no criminal convictions.

Prisons are for criminals, not poor people. Prisons are places of punishment for those who pose a risk to society, not the victims of violence, like the Noongar woman who was arrested and jailed in September 2017 for unpaid fines after police were called to deal with a violent family member.

Attorney-General Quigley knows all this. In October 2018 he told media that jail for fine defaulters was an “economically unsound policy”. Jailing people costs money; approximately $303 a day per person. A person cannot “pay off” a fine through incarceration. It’s nonsensical and prehistoric. Quigley stated that jailing fine defaulters should be “truly a last resort”. This isn’t good enough, when “last resort” it almost certainly means a person has no other option but to give their life for a paltry thousand dollars or so.

And it isn’t good enough to promise to put forward legislation later, another day, another time. It must happen now.

The Western Australian government must act now.

But in the meantime, Australians who are appalled at the gross injustice of jailing people who have committed no crimes are stepping up. While Attorney-General Quigley hides behind bureaucracy, Debbie Kilroy, Executive Director of Sisters Inside, an organization which advocates for the human rights of women in the criminal justice system, has started a GoFundMe fundraiser with the aim to free 100 single Aboriginal mothers from Western Australian prisons.

It has raised over $87,000 in just two days.

This money has already been used to save a single Noongar woman, a mother of three children, from being imprisoned. The accumulated debt of $3100 came from traffic infringements and having an unregistered dog.

Attorney-General Quigley can put a stop to this draconian policy. He can put forward legislation immediately to end the discriminatory practice of jailing people for being poor. He can cease this barbaric action against the most vulnerable in the community. And he must do it now, before another family is torn apart and separated, by imprisonment, or death.

Please donate to #FreeThePeople here.