Difficult to pin down when this narrative actually began, but for argument’s sake I’ll posit its start with the recent Australian Federal Election and the plethora of fake news trumpeting a Labor victory.

A successive run of negative polls published over at least two years, pointed to this mythical Labor win.

Indeed, dire poll numbers prompted Malcolm Turnbull’s putsch, which lead to the demise of Tony Abbott and ultimately the triumph of Scott Morrison.

The script suggested a brave new Shorten Labor Government replete with the sparkling post-modern trappings of a new Whitlam/Hawke/Keating imperium.

But the thumping hangover of this self-inflicted delusion is made worse by recent raids on the ABC and a News Corp journalist, both aided and abetted by the home-grown master of the dark art of fake news, the Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton.

Minister Dutton displayed his mastery of the art during a Kitchen Cabinet interview with Annabel Crabb on ABCTV Insiders.

I don’t often reach for the mute button, but this chat, characterised as a train wreck by the Labor Senator shadowing Dutton Kristina Keneally, bodes ill for the Opposition.

Indeed when the Australian Parliament resumes, Morrison, Frydenberg, Dutton, Christian Porter and the entire triumphant Liberal Front Bench, will deploy fake news with such gusto, the occasional frisson of Question Times past, will be recalled as a golden era.

To be sure the Federal Member for Grayndler and Labor Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese, a known political bare-knuckled brawler of Tories, begins his stint by taking on the Victorian state secretary of the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMMEU) John Setka.

But the NSW branch of the Labor muscling up over the Victorian branch which gifted Australia six years of stability under Bill Shorten, is a mere side show.

The real game is the impending dismantling of the decades-long social compact between a succession of Australian governments and the citizenry.

The Liberal/National Government will achieve this aim by easily shutting down debate.

You can guarantee key Liberal spokespeople will repeat ad nauseam their favoured fake news phrase; ‘we do not comment about on-water matters’.

The global phenomena of fake news began with the election of US President Donald Trump seemingly with the assistance of certain players associated with the Russian Federation. But this brand of psychological operations or psyops is commonly deployed by most governments.

Indeed the preamble to the US Army’s official psyops manual entitled, Psychological Operations Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures, begins with this quote; “all military action is intertwined with psychological forces and effects”. The author is Carl von Clausewitz, taken from his book On War, published in 1827.

Last week an insidious example of fake news or psyops, titillated the global media to wit the vision of smoking oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman.

Photo from nypost.com (Getty Images)

And when British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn suggested the matter might be a false flag, Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun newspaper hit back with this fake news gem.

So who do we believe?

In times past we sought the Superman of news, that purveyor of “truth, justice and the American Way,” the US White House. But any person other than viewers of Fox/Sky News who give credence to the White House and its soon-to-retire press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders are the very same citizens at whom fake news is aimed.

So how readily is fake news being deployed in Australia?

ABCTV on 17/06/2019 broadcast a Media Watch report where Paul Barry analysed this gem of Sky super star Peta Credlin interviewing Mr Adani about the future of the Carmichael Mine in Queensland.

This mammoth, but problematic coal mine delivered the Coalition three more years in Government courtesy of a swag of Queensland Federal seats.

Despite the fact Credlin’s interview is clearly biased in favour of Adani’s business model, the insidiousness of the fake news is not so much Credlin’s obvious frippery, but rather the pedigree of its spruiker.

Peta Credlin’s husband Brian Loughnane is, among other things, an adviser to The International Republican Institute.

Much of this Institute’s funding comes from, surprise surprise, the US State Department currently lead my Mike Pompeo who on June 16 told Fox News Iran had indeed bombed those pesky oil tankers.

Meanwhile in Australia a few months back the Sydney Morning Herald dutifully reported on April 9 2019 former Liberal Party federal director Brian Loughnane pressing Peter Dutton MP to bestow special treatment upon a certain Mr Huang Xiangmo.

But when asked to comment on the matter Peter Dutton MP skilfully deployed a variation of the Liberal Party’s favoured fake news phrase, ‘we do not comment on-water matters’.

As the song says, ‘we’ve only just begun’.

I struggle with long-form essays drafted by economics writers. Like many, I am easily fazed by complex yet important observations crafted by a coterie of well-respected econometricians.

But of all the millions of words written for and against the undetailed or overtly specific party political policies, the truest summation of Australia’s current predicament fell to those who report on the science that deals with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods.

On Monday, May 20 the Australian Stock Market recorded a healthy bounce, but within cooee of this breathless fan prose published in The Australian Financial Review, and spurred on by its managing editor-in-chief Michael Stutchbury, Prime Minister Scott Morrison AKA the Messiah from The Shire contradicted Simon Benson’s story, saying tax cuts would be pushed back by 12 months.

Gee that didn’t take long!

The reality of the current state of the Australian economy, repeated ad nauseam throughout the election campaign by respected econometricians of all stripes, is dire. Classicists, demand-siders, macro and micro boffins, monetarists and supply-side champions, mostly agree: the nation is already in recession.

Indeed the good folk of far North Queensland will tell you their daily lives unfold in the midst of a localised depression, exacerbated by a terrible summer flood. Yet these same Australian citizens chose to believe in a non-existent coal rush of jobs set to unfold in an uneconomic financial mess called the Carmichael Mine located somewhere in Queensland’s vast Galilee Basin.

The bleak appearance of shuttered shop fronts in Townsville and Gladstone is now regretfully, a reality in inner-city enclaves in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and other towns and cities. But this is as nothing to a coterie of citizens who made a small fortune on the ALP’s franking credits fiasco as reported by Michael Pascoe in today’s The New Daily.

But to quote the old Sydney race caller Ken Howard, you can bet London to a Brick that not one of those angry, disaffected citizens in the deep north or the far, far west, read Pascoe’s report. Chances are they chose the prognostications of Terry McCrann, who a few days back penned an article with the headline, Why Pauline and Clive are our saviours, published in The Herald-Sun and syndicated across News Corp mastheads.

Like Michael Pascoe, Terry McCrann is also an economics writer.

But I think it fair to say describing Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer as our saviours, pushes the messianic metaphor just a little too hard. But hey; this is the reality of the era of Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

To put economic reporting in perspective, it is worth browsing a website which processes trillions of financial transactions a year.

The enormity of the world economy is summarised by the brief of a company which describes itself as, ‘the central nervous system of global finance’.

Each day Bloomberg deploys Big Science to lubricate this central nervous system. Every minute it feeds the most advanced data on the planet to its reporters who then analyse everything from climate glitches such as hurricanes to the likelihood of nuclear war in the Middle East.

And in Australia Michael Pascoe, Ross Gittins, Elysse Morgan, Alan Kohler and many more fine business and finance journalists, distil local sources and Bloomberg and Reuters stories as well as those published in other reputable economic conduits, to keep Australia appraised of real, as opposed to fake news.

And yet when it comes to decoding the science of where our finances are actually heading, last Saturday some Australians chose to elect a scientific sceptic par excellence to the incoming Senate.

I leave you with this lucid explanation of Carbon Dioxide in Perspective by the Galileo Movement and urge you never doubt the stupidity of an electorate which never gets it wrong!

By the time this essay is published the current election campaign reaches the ‘magical’ halfway point. The single quote marks around the word magical, denote the idea, a type of invisible hand is moving the electorate toward a decision which might change the nation’s future.

In fact, nothing is further from the truth. By the time the result comes and goes, the majority will simply tune out of the national debate and move on with their lives.

We are Australians after all; sure of our egalitarianism, our sense of the fair go and sceptical of the American notion of manifest destiny. And yet we are a nation wracked by self-doubt, unsure of our place in the world, and annoyed by pesky politicians foisting this or that paradigm upon us at every local, state and federal election. In short, we just want it to go away, but it won’t, nor will the consequences diminish no matter the makeup of the next government. Unsure footed and election weary, we Australians stand at a cross-road.

For some, the fog of uncertainty lifted momentarily during the first televised debate between Shorten and Morrison, and an address to the National Press Club by Greens Leader Richard Di Natale. Yet within days, both leaders scrambled to defend candidates who displayed their true nature on various social media platforms.

For the Liberal Party, it is a faux explanation of sinister forces at work behind the hate speech of Jessica Whelan.

Whereas for Labor it is the argument Luke Creasey was a naughty boy a long time ago, but all is forgiven now.

Thus far the Greens have avoided the spectacle of crest-fallen spear carriers, but in New South Wales that party’s internal war rumbles along.

And this is the ‘magical’ halfway point.

Creasey and Jessica Whelan are just two of a phalanx of fallen electoral aspirants, with the toll likely to increase by Election Day.

Without realising it, many of those among us charged to make sense of this mess – journalists – dutifully record and report two philosophical tropes deployed by contemporary politicians. Moral equivalence and that darling cause célèbre of the far right, political correctness.

It is a rarity to read journalism which avoids these hoary old chestnuts, and I don’t hold out much hope for the situation to change in the near or distant future.

Why?

The best answer comes courtesy of the most incisive analysis of the state of Australian public debate I have read thus far in the campaign.

Writer Richard Cooke lays the blame at the feet of Rupert Murdoch in his essay for the May edition of The Monthly headlined: News Corp. Democracy’s Greatest Threat.

Thankfully there are many splendid, hardworking and honest Australian journalists and writers, but their ranks are thinning fast due to cutbacks, layoffs and redundancies at mastheads big, small, local, regional and national.

My fear is young up-and-coming scribes will not know the difference between moral equivalence and political correctness, or any number of questionable political narratives trotted out by the Jordan Peterson’s and Milo Yiannopoulos’s of this world. And truth be told I am in two minds about banning them as I am about the jailing of Julian Assange.

But as a long-time member of the old AJA, I agree with Peter Greste’s recent assertion that Julian Assange is no journalist.

And though I know this statement might seem politically incorrect to many readers, calling oneself a journalist and a publisher careens from moral to false equivalence, an unsettling transgression borne equally by both the left and the right.

On June 16, 1858 Abraham Lincoln spoke these prophetic words to his peers assembled at the Illinois State Capitol in Springfield: “a house divided against itself, cannot stand”.

Lincoln won the presidency of the United States and a civil war provoked by slavery, an abomination known by the recent ancestors of many Aboriginal Australians.

Lincoln’s seven words launched countless political science theses, and to this day his observation remains a moral actuality among those who aspire to the highest of offices.

I do not know if the Leader of the Opposition Bill Shorten pondered Lincoln’s words when he began his Budget Reply speech in the Australian Parliament on April 4 2019.

But across the despatch box neither Shorten nor the nation, could ignore the self-evident truth of a government utterly divided against itself.

Shorten’s first five words “women and men of Australia” is a deliberate riff on Gough Whitlam’s famous aphorism, “men and women of Australia.” Whitlam’s memorable saying marked the beginning of Australia’s transformation from colonial backwater to one of the most intriguing societies ever to occupy an entire continent.

And yet on the cusp of the most important elections of the century, ABC journalist Leigh Sales concluded her interview by asking; “what would you say to the Australian voter who thinks, “jeez, I just don’t like that Bill Shorten bloke very much. I don’t know if I can vote for him?”

While the full transcript includes Shorten’s response, Sales’ observation poses a raft of questions about how we view ourselves.

No matter who we elect I doubt Australians will ever be fully content with who we are as a people, and the nation will likely continue as “a house divided against itself, [and thus] cannot stand”.

Why?

Shorten alluded to the answer during his speech. In the words of the American author Ken Kesey, it is a great notion whose time is yet to come.

But the idea is given short shrift by media, and the majority of the women and men of Australia know virtually nothing about Makarrata.

I have not read one media report on the Budget Reply Speech which reported Shorten’s reference to a Makarrata.

I find this odd given the Uluru Statement is a modern Australian rhetorical masterwork.

Consider this. “How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years?

“With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.

“Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.”

When asked about Makarrata the former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said; “the constitution cannot be changed by Parliament. Only the Australian people can do that. No political deal, no cross-party compromise, no leader’s handshake, can deliver constitutional change … To do that, a constitutionally conservative nation must be persuaded that the proposed amendments respect the fundamental values of the constitution, and will deliver precise changes, clearly understood, that benefit all Australians.”

Herein is the difference between a conservative right-wing party bereft of ideas and a centre-left party within a whisker of government and led by a man characterised by a senior ABC journalist whose “personal popularity is a bit lacklustre”.

On the contrary.

A politician who opines ‘we owe the Uluru delegates an open mind on the big questions. On the form recognition takes, on treaties, on changes required in the constitution,’ seems to me to have absorbed the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln who said; “I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

Optics is everything in contemporary politics and the Federal Opposition Leader Bill Shorten understands its power.

Shorten takes media advice from among others Dee Madigan of Campaign Edge and Eammon Fitzpatrick of Hawker Britten.

Thus, Bill Shorten’s welcoming of Michael Daley MP at the launch of the NSW ALP election campaign at the Revesby Workers Club on Sunday March 10, bristled with the nomenclature of ‘optics’.

And while various news outlets faithfully reported snippets of the event, the proceedings were streamed via the internet on Facebook and other digital platforms.

Both Madigan and Fitzpatrick are inheritors of the digital age. And winning the votes of those who prefer streaming to free-to-air TV or reading old fashioned ‘inkies,’ could tip the election in Daley’s favour.

Now contrast the Liberal Party launch on the same day with a mute PM Scott Morrison and the Usual Suspects of John Howard et al, dutifully covered by the biggest inky of them all, The Australian no less.

In the optics stakes the winners were undoubtedly Bill Shorten and Michael Daley.

Perhaps the worst example of bad optics is this photograph of the wife and daughter of Ryde ALP candidate Jerome Laxale being mobbed by blue clad Liberal supporters.

So let’s consider what is at stake in Ryde / Bennelong as well as the big Labor seats west of the Sydney CBD. While many of these enclaves remained loyal to the ALP in the Rudd Gillard Rudd years, and stayed faithful to Bill Shorten, their NSW State equivalents, deserted the party in the two previous elections.

Indeed, seats such as Penrith, Revesby, Riverwood and further west Bathurst, must return to the State Labor fold. For it is in western Sydney and its environs NSW will witness the biggest of big infrastructure projects; the construction of the Nancy Bird Walton Airport at Badgery’s Creek.

This is nation building stuff and its impact will be felt for at least a century. Policy wonks and political hard heads are hoping its construction and management is overseen by a sensitive state and Federal government, and not monstered by a Liberal apparatchik such as Max Moore-Wilton, famously given the shortest of short shrift by Anthony Albanese MP.

Labor members in adjacent Blue Mountains seats and local government areas are terrified of an airport built by a Liberal clique currently supervising the Westconnex debacle.

Say what you like about NSW Labor, but it delivered the State, Australia and the world, the best Olympic Games of the age.

Michael Daley knows this and has a Cabinet-level understanding of how enormous projects can be delivered on time, on budget. It is this reason I contend, why he stood up to Alan Jones.

Bill Shorten is familiar with Daley’s Labor pedigree and appreciates the fundamental fact that it is easier to deal with a NSW Labor premier, than a lame duck Liberal premier, whose political future lies in the maw of Alan Jones.

The alternative is a minority Labor State government which may rely on the two Greens State members Jamie Parker (Balmain) and Jenny Leong (Newtown) for Confidence and Supply. Add to this mix Mark Latham as a One Nation MLC and we have a recipe for a debacle.

Given the fact thousands of citizens in western Sydney are about to learn the joys of changing trains in Chatswood to get to the CBD, or losing bus services in and around the Ryde electorate, (see above) March 23 2019 will be one of the most important dates on both the NSW and national electoral calendar.

The ABC program Q&A broadcast on Monday February 4 2019, featured a panel of independent Federal members of Parliament.

The Member for Melbourne and deputy leader of the Australian Greens Adam Bandt, not an independent, joined Tony Jones and other panellists for an hour of probing questions from convenor and audience.

Love it or loath it Q&A alone justifies the ABC budget, but the makeup of this particular programme posited a future scenario which might change the topography of the national political landscape.

The next Australian Parliament could see an Opposition bench comprising these independents, and a slew of others. Judging by the tone of the questions and the Twitter comments rolling across the bottom of my television screen, Australians appear likely to choose an independent over an incumbent sitting Liberal or National Party member.

And it is crystal clear the Liberal Party of Australia is ignoring this threat to its existence. The well-funded campaign of high-profile candidate Ms Zali Steggall OAM in the Federal seat of Waringah is a case in point.

The possible return to the House of Representatives by former Federal member for Lyne in NSW Rob Oakeshott, revives memories of the Gillard minority government, supported by two of last Monday’s Q&A guests; the Greens’ Adam Bandt and Tasmanian MP Andrew Wilkie.

It is unlikely either MP will join a minority Shorten Labor Government, but as key players in an Opposition made up of independents rather than members of the Liberal and National coalition, Wilkie, Bandt, Sharkey, Banks, Phelps et al, could sound the death knell of the loony, conservative Liberal rump.

Furthermore strong independents could emerge from both the right and the left.

Ructions within the Australian Greens might see former Greens candidate for the Melbourne seat of Batman Ms Alex Bhathal who quit the party citing ‘organisational bullying,’ recontest as a left independent.

Similarly NSW MP Emma Husar who lost ALP endorsement for the Federal seat of Lindsay is ‘considering her options‘.

On 7 December last year The Guardian reported an investigation by the ALP found, “Husar had mistreated her electorate staff but did not find evidence to support claims of sexual harassment or of her flashing another federal MP”.

The circumstances surrounding Bhathal and Husar garnered substantial media coverage, but other lesser-known independent-minded political aspirants, such as Liberal blue-blood Oliver Yates, snagged media coverage when he announced he would contest Josh Frydenburg’s safe seat of Kooyong.

Add these potential names plus Steggall to last week’s Q&A line-up, then count Cathy McGowan the independent MP for Indi and Bob Katter the independent MP for Kennedy in Queensland, plus others I might have omitted, and a formidable second tier Opposition bench emerges.

But despite this obvious political threat, the Morrison Government acts as if it has the numbers in the lower House while denigrating perfectly reasonable legislation pertaining to refuges in off-shore detention, put forward by the Federal Member for Wentworth Dr Kerryn Phelps.

When Prime Minister Scott Morrison scorns the Phelps initiative by saying it is, “selling out our border protection to get a cheap opportunistic win in the parliament,” he pushes thousands more electors toward independent candidates, and makes my thesis of an independent Opposition bench more likely.

Add to this the PM’s backing of Liberal MP Tim Wilson over a sham franking credits inquiry just days after the fall-out from the findings of the banking Royal Commission, and it is safe to predict 20 to 30 Liberal/Coalition seats could fall at the next election.

While this figure seems high, swings at state elections in Victoria, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, resulted in miniscule opposition benches.

Like it or not, this is how the nation voted, and woe betide any political party which ignores the signs.

Speaking of portents, millions of dead, stinking fish befouling the rivers of the Murray Darling Basin, means a cohort of National MPs also face the fate of their smug Liberal counterparts.

The Federal Member for Maranoa in Queensland and Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources David Littleproud is I believe, vulnerable to an independent rural candidate who believes in science and climate change.

Speaking of science, Littleproud said this on the ABC Radio AM programme recently:

“This is politics, and when I became the Water Minister, I took the politics out. I didn’t call people names, like what happened in the past. It had to be a mature debate; it had to be predicated on science. The science was predicated, it was put in front of the Parliament, and these people should stop playing politics. They agreed to the science less than three months ago.”

Really?

My long association with the Federal seat of Gilmore commenced a few years before 1984, a seminal time for the Royal Australian Navy and the City of Shoalhaven which lies to the south of the industrial hub of Wollongong in New South Wales.

The cessation of the navy’s fixed wing operations in this year, marked the start of a long and painful economic trough for the Shoalhaven, and especially Nowra, the regional provincial city.

Nowra was, and to a large extent still is, a navy town. Nowadays real estate and tourism are the dominant industries. Spin-off businesses associated with the military while important are barely on the economic radar.

When departing neighbouring Kiama and entering the Shoalhaven region, it is easy to mistake the lush surrounds as a National Party stronghold. Far from it. The Federal seat of Gilmore which encompasses Nowra and its satellite towns is or was blue ribbon Liberal. But Gilmore is about to cross into the Labor column for the first time in many decades.

How do I know?

Prime Minister Scott Morrison recently parachuted Mr Warren Mundine into the seat, metaphorically stabbed the endorsed Liberal candidate Grant Schultz in the back, and earlier allowed the sitting Member Ann Sudmalis, to be thrown under the political bus.

By so doing ScoMo unleashed in Gilmore a full blown death match struggle for the future of Liberals in Gilmore and across Australia.

Gilmore / Nowra tell the tale of two sides of a river. North of the Shoalhaven lie the moneyed bastions of Kangaroo Valley, Berry and Gerringong and Geroa. To the south live some of the poorest, most deprived citizens of New South Wales, who struggle in soul-less housing commission estates. Many of these citizens are expelled from housing commission accommodation in western Sydney.

Nowra, like many rural communities, suffers from the scourge of ice. In my south coast community, a 40 minute drive south of Nowra, 26 houses were robbed in one night. Mine among them. The culprit after an inevitable arrest had his house fire bombed by local vigilantes. In my tiny community, arson, murder, robbery, serious drug dealing, spousal abuse and random acts of violence, are the norm. But most visitors and tourists to the south coast never see this dark underbelly. They are rightly mesmerised by the region’s stunning natural beauty.

Until recently the local Liberal clique of Shelley Hancock (the NSW Parliament’s Speaker), Federal Member Ann Sudmalis and her predecessor Joanna Gash, along with their developer-cum-real estate lackeys were happy for this dreadful state of affairs to continue. Then along came Warren Mundine about whom I make no comment. But I do say this: The Aboriginal citizens of the Shoalhaven / Nowra / Federal seat of Gilmore are among the most put-upon Indigenous people in New South Wales.

Mundine an Aboriginal man who claims ancestral ties to the south coast, lives in Sydney and was the former national president of the Australian Labor Party

There are too many examples of out-and-out racism deployed against the Yuin of the south coast, but the most egregious in my time there, occurred in 1982, when accused anti-Semite councillor Greg Watson, took down and burnt an aboriginal flag made by local auntie, Maude Moore. Watson called the flag a “revolutionary piece of rag’.

Speaking of Jews, Watson reportedly said, “You can say, ‘why don’t you jack the price up? Why don’t you be a good Jew? Why don’t you screw the price of the last dollar out of it like private enterprise would?’” Track down the report on ABC Radio’s PM program of Thursday 1 May, 2008 here and make up your own mind about this less-than-charming individual.

Greg Watson was a key member of the local Liberal clique I mentioned earlier and needless to say Pauline Hanson is very popular in Gilmore. Thus a Liberal candidate of Aboriginal extraction faces endemic racism, even before the poll is announced.

By contrast I make a few observations about the woman whose name adorns this unhappy Federal Liberal seat; Dame Mary Gilmore.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography describes her as a “patriot, feminist, social crusader and folklorist; she has now passed into Australian legend”.

The dictionary also says ,“Mary Gilmore campaigned in the Worker and any other available forum for a wide range of social and economic reforms, such as votes for women, old-age and invalid pensions, child endowment and improved treatment of returned servicemen, the poor and deprived and, above all, of Aboriginals.

“She wrote numerous letters, as well as contributing articles and poems, to the Sydney Morning Herald on these causes and such diverse subjects as the English language, the Prayer Book, earthquakes, Gaelic and the immigration laws, the waratah as a national emblem, the national anthem, and Spanish Australia”.

Read more here.

Of all the aspiring and former politicians who’ve held sway in Gilmore, only the ALP candidate Fiona Phillips comes close to the legacy of the Federal seat’s namesake. And of the soon-to-be-defunct Liberal clique of Gilmore, good riddance to your shameful and wasteful history.