Scott Morrison knows full well that teachers are not the ones making the decisions as to when schooling goes back to normal.

And warranted as the criticism and derision that his video address attracted, I doubt he minds that much. It still achieved his aim of shifting national discourse away from anything that he is directly responsible for.

This is classic ScamMo (definitely not a typo)- the guy who has more deserved derogatory nicknames than policies, and Donald Trump’s Australian protege (although he does have to rely on Barnaby Joyce to cover the sexual misconduct side of that equation).

Turning the spotlight onto teachers and the difficulties of delivering distance learning, whilst emoting about the fate of underprivileged families and their education is good clickbait because everyone has an opinion. But ultimately it is just another example of him trying to change the national conversation around COVID 19 away from his failure to listen to warnings and act decisively (to be fair, cherry-picking science is very on-brand for the Liberal Party), away from the perilous state his government had brought our economy to before the crisis; and away from his putting the needs of his Hillsong religion ahead of the safety of Australians (what a coincidence that social distancing measures came into force the day after the international Hillsong conference ended or that the Ruby Princess had Hillsong members and family of a Liberal Party MP on board).

The mainstream media networks try hard to gloss over much of this (no surprise to see a 40 million dollar stimulus for the media industry announced this week too) but even with their cheerleading, the parallels to his failures during the Bushfire Crisis are clear- at least he couldn’t bugger off to Hawaii again due to the restrictions on international travel.

His apologists will say that he is doing his best in tough circumstances and criticising him at this time is just playing politics, but let me be clear, he invited me to this conversation by gaslighting me and my entire profession. Someone is playing politics in this scenario, but it’s not me or any teacher I know.

If this all sounds an awfully cynical way to describe a national leader and supposedly devout Christian (and you didn’t hear him publicly throw a healthcare worker under the bus to promote a government tracking app last week), consider his history.

This is the man who publicly accused aid workers of coaching refugees to self-harm and then- after reaping months of political capital from the statement- quietly paid over a million dollars of taxpayer money in compensation because he couldn’t substantiate the allegation.

He is also a man, who throughout his time in office, has routinely targeted the most disadvantaged in our community, through cuts to social services, domestic violence services and the NDIS, whilst continuing to redistribute more and more of society’s wealth to its richest members and refusing to raise welfare. For this reason, it is hard to see this sudden concern for the poor as genuine. If he was truly concerned with the educational disadvantage of underprivileged students, he would not have fought against Gonski funding recommendations or continued to facilitate the rivers of taxpayer money being funnelled into private schools.

Don’t be fooled by crocodile tears and emotive appeals from a deeply dishonest, cruel and empty human being. ScamMo’s words are not be trusted, as he will say whatever he thinks will deflect attention away from conversations he doesn’t want us having. A lot of conservatives and media pundits will let him, too, giving him a pass for pretty much anything, just like they do with his mentor, Trump.

Scott Morrison is an empty liar and creep, but we have known that for years. However, he is not single-handedly responsible for bringing on these catastrophic bushfires.

I need to stress that because there is much he is guilty of, but the media campaign to protect him will be intricate and will capitalise on any inaccurate criticism; even as they mesh truth with fiction to form their alternative narrative. It is said that truth is the first casualty of war and it was a similar story here. There have already been some ridiculous claims made that would be laughable if the matter wasn’t so serious. I was initially reluctant to write about the fires whilst people’s lives were still at risk, but eventually decided actually we need to talk about them whilst the reality of their devastation is obvious to everyone. And with the maelstrom of spin, exaggeration and outright lies being thrown around right now- with due respect and genuine sorrow for all those whose lives were lost- I thought it important to put a few things in context.

To begin with, if you’re going to tell me climate change isn’t proven and that we have always had bushfires, stop there. If you believe that you know more than the global scientific community, then your peer group is made up of anti-vaccers and flat-Earthers. You should stick to chatting with them because I’m not writing this for you.

Another embarrassingly stupid false narrative is that The Greens are somehow responsible for these fires because they stop hazard reduction burns. There is a seductive appeal to these lies, because accepting them is going to be a lot more comfortable for many people than admitting they have been wrong about climate change. Even so, it’s a really stupid argument. Despite the fact, that the Greens do not have a position against back burning, or hold majority government in any state, this narrative (which has repeatedly debunked by fact-checking) has been pushed so hard by unscrupulous politicians, shockjocks and newspaper hacks (if you work for the Australian I’m probably talking about you) that some people are falling for it. Sadly, some people don’t just drink the conservative Kool-Aid Rupert Murdoch and his goons provide. They practically swim in it.

Another good example of this are those who inexplicably still try to defend Morrison’s gross negligence and misjudgement at jetting off on holiday as his country faced a disaster with the argument, “Well it would be even worse if Bill Shorten was Prime Minister.” Believe it or not, I have seen this written a number of times without a trace of irony (or self-awareness it seems) so I’ll take a moment to consider it. Scott Morrison is the only Australian Prime Minister I can remember who would consider trying to downplay (he really isn’t getting value for money from his empathy consultant) the challenges and suffering of those affected by the bushfire whilst heading overseas for a luxury holiday. I would say it is a pretty safe bet that Bill Shorten would understand exactly how important it was that a leader step up and be present in times like this, as he showed with his actions during the Beaconsfield disaster. Moreover, Bill Shorten went to last year’s election with a policy that explicitly recognised the dangers of extreme bushfires and would have allocated millions of extra dollars to firefighting resources! If he was in charge, it is actually arguable the damage from these fires would be less.

But it is also overreach to claim that these fires are the primary result of Coalition climate policy. Don’t get me wrong. Australian climate policy (or lack thereof) is atrocious and is contributing to continued global heating, but the increasing air temperatures, the drought and the drying of the vegetation are all the product of decades of global inaction. The Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison government have been disgusting in their refusal to act and their efforts to downplay the real threat of climate change, but Australians re-elected them to office knowing full well how dismissive they were towards the threat of climate change. So while they are certainly complicit in these fires (especially Morrison considering his refusal to listen to warnings and allocate greater resources for this year) and those of the future, the government is unlikely to have prevented them simply by adopting a more sustainable policy in recent years.

The only way changing climate policy would have stopped these fires would have been if we had used diplomacy and climate policy to drive a world-wide policy shift to make a difference ten years ago (when scientists were already warning of these exact fires in the future), so it isn’t fair to suggest Morrison could have prevented them by embracing renewable energy. So while the fires seem to have made clear what a growing threat climate change presents (in a way that all of the previous “once in a generation” extreme weather events we have seen over the last ten year haven’t), you can’t lay all the blame on Scott Morrison and Gina Reinhart. Given the utter lack of morals Morrison has shown during his time in politics, I wouldn’t feel too bad for him if you did, but if there is one thing rich conservatives are good at it, it’s playing the victim (hello, Israel Folau). This type of hyperbole can undermine genuine criticism of both the Liberal government and the coal industry. And both of these entities have serious questions to answer.

This certainly doesn’t excuse our government’s wilful (arguably traitorous, given most of them benefit financially from the coal industry) negligence, but this victim narrative has already begun, especially in the Murdoch Press (which is also highly culpable for its long-running efforts to discredit climate science). The fact that Morrison could not have stopped global climate change is erroneously morphing to a narrative that he had no power to affect the extent of this crisis; and that his party’s long-running platform of science-denial and soft corruption involving the coal industry is not a problem. And this is blatantly false. Our government and our Prime Minister still have a lot to answer for

Against a global backdrop of international efforts to curb emissions, the Liberal and National Parties (along with their proxies in One Nation) have done everything they can to hinder and undermine any attempt at responsible climate policies and to discredit the warnings of climate scientists. And Morrison- famous for bringing a lump of coal into parliament- has been one of the worst. Even having seen the damage of the fires he has stated there will be no change the government’s climate policy. So they can certainly be more fairly blamed for their part in fires of the future.

Moreover, Morrison could have done a lot more to reduce the magnitude and impact of this disaster. These fires were not impossible to predict. They actually HAVE BEEN PREDICTED by climate scientists with uncanny accuracy in previous years. Even if he wanted to remain dogmatically against renewable energy, the Prime Minister could still have listened to warnings he has been receiving, by providing greater funding and resources to the fire services (as Bill Shorten would have). But he didn’t because he didn’t like the optics. Declaring a national emergency (which seemed a no-brainer at the time), increasing funding for firefighting services or appealing for international aid might have given greater ammunition to critics of his government’s climate policy at home and abroad. So he did nothing. He is such an empty PR-driven fraud that he is more concerned about the damage these fires can do to him politically than about the damage they are doing to real people’s lives.

And that is the true measure of him. Empty. Fraudulent. Useless.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Prime Minister and the party he leads.

Okay the title is admittedly an awful pun but that seems kind of fitting. In my view, everything to do with Fraser Anning being hit with an egg was bad.

I’ve already written one post about Anning tonight and I so even the fact that I am writing about that lowlife again frustrates me, but so does everything about this episode.

How there are still people that want to hear the senator speak at an event is another slightly depressing aspect of this whole saga, but regardless of my disdain for the senator, I didn’t like anything about this story.

I hated reading about a young kid being set upon with manifestly excessive force by a group of thugs. It will be interesting to see whether any charges can be laid, or whether he looks at civil litigation.

I won’t argue that Anning is scum. But I can’t condone any kind of unprovoked attack on a politician (or anyone really) no matter how abhorrent I may find his views. Similarly, when a self-described anarchist headbutted the loathsome Tony Abbott in a Hobart park, there was no way I could condone such as action no matter how much I detest our former PM.

“It’s just an egg,” you might say. Fair enough, but what does it represent? If you think that comparing throwing an egg to a violent assault is a bit of a stretch, let’s consider a more similar example.

Alan Joyce experienced a similar attack when he had a cake shoved in his face at a public event by an opponent of marriage equality. Even though there was no injury caused, this was widely – and quite rightly – condemned as unacceptable. Why? Because the offender in question had no legal right to physically interfere with Mr Joyce and the implication is that the victim is not safe from this type of harassment at any moment they are in public. This is not peaceful protest. It is intimidation.

The major difference between the attack on Mr Joyce and the one on Mr Anning appears to be that most of Australia thinks the egg was okay because the senator deserved it. Maybe he did – or even something worse – but it wasn’t kid’s place to decide.

I’d hate to see a society where if your views were judged too divergent from mainstream, you were free game for people to harass in the street. Who would make the distinctions about who deserved this type of treatment and what level of harassment was considered fair? A couple of years ago, my views about our disgusting treatment of refugees seemed to be far removed from the majority of Australians. That could have made me a fair target under such a paradigm.

And that is what we are tacitly condoning as we continue to lionise this attack and the boy behind it.

​People are going to tell me the kid was standing up against bigotry and to that I would say, I applaud his passion but he should find a better way. Equally, I don’t seek to question the boy’s motives or integrity, but the internet has no shortage of people looking for their 15 minutes of fame. What do you think this public adulation of this kid means for the likelihood of copycats? Let’s not forget that this young kid copped a pretty heavy and disproportionate assault in response. I don’t want to see any more young kids getting hurt like that (or worse) in an effort to achieve internet stardom.

Lastly, Anning deserves a nation’s disgust- not our sympathy. Don’t give him any chance to play the victim (conservatives will do this at the first opportunity). Public dialogue in this country is for once focused on inclusion and tolerance. This is a conversation people like Anning, Hanson and Abbott have no place in. Let’s leave them sidelined and take the conversation further. Arguably, incidents like this give Anning relevance when we could move on without him.

It’s neither ignorant nor foolish to feel you have been poorly treated and even failed by the parliamentary system of late. You probably have been and it is no wonder people are disillusioned with both our political system and the major parties that control it. Most of us would probably agree that the government and many of its bureaucrats serve themselves far more than they serve us, but I have to admit I am one of the lucky ones. Those in dying industries and those who can’t find work, or are locked out of the housing industry have far more reason to resent the seemingly out of touch political establishment than I.

This comment does not only apply to our current government. While the Abbott-Turnbull government has set a new standard (at least in the Australian context- let’s not look across the Pacific) for outrageous ineptitude, heartlessness and avarice, they didn’t create our political system complete with its cronyism, its lobbyists and its entitlements on their own. Past Labor governments also have to take responsibility for the conditions they have contributed to in the power duopoly they have enjoyed for decades.

In the face of egregious expense scandals such as Sussan Ley and Bronwyn Bishop, the equally ludicrous expenses of sitting ministers such as Barnaby Joyce and Julie Bishop, and the ridiculously out of touch Ian McDonald raging incoherently at losing his lifetime gold card, how is someone who struggles to pay their bills meant to believe that politicians of any stripe care about them?

There is a Great Deception being perpetuated against the Australian people. We most definitely live in a country of increasing inequality yet The Great Deception blinds or distracts many to it, by turning their fears and anger in another direction.

I don’t need an economics degree to join the links between the fact that the rich are getting richer and that the rest of us are comparatively poorer. Throw in the fact that our politicians are regularly recipients of gifts, hospitality and donations from the wealthy benefactors who benefit most from their policies and it paints a pretty clear picture (ever wondered why the one promise Turnbull seems determined to keep is his 50 billion dollar company tax cut). Minimum wage was once enough to support a family. Now it isn’t. And at the same time, millionaire elites own more and more of the country and cavort in the public eye. Two people in Australia are now wealthier than a fifth of Australians combined!

I am outraged at this. You should be too- even more so if you are under financial duress or have concerns about your employment future. You have every right to be furious. Our government (and this one more than any before it) serves its own interests and that of its benefactors more than it serves everyday Australians. Yet this stark reality doesn’t seem to garner the level of public anger one might expect.

The fact that many Australians are not angrier at this state of affairs is a testament to the effectiveness of this deliberate misdirection. The Great Deception uses exaggeration and spin to redirect the worries and misery of Australians who are being let down by their government to an easy and obvious (but undeserving) target. Like a carnival magician, our government urges us to concentrate fully on the ‘threat’ of terrorism and the social and financial costs to this country of refugees and Muslim immigration, so that we don’t notice the impact of its domestic economic policies.

Refugees, immigration and foreign aid are unjustifiably blamed for everything from unemployment and a shrinking economy, to housing affordability, congestion and crime. At the same time, the worst representatives of the Islamic religion are cherry-picked and used to promote the argument that Australian lives and cultural norms are under threat. The Great Deception itself spawns any number of related lies, usually transmitted as memes of false choices (which I have spoken about in greater detail here) with no substantiating evidence, but large text imploring others to ‘share’ without thinking critically about the subject.

It’s all rhetorical smoke and mirrors though. I have previously covered the exaggerated fears of terrorism in another post, so I won’t repeat it here. In this essay I will consider the common refrain about the cost of refugees. In this context, let me say again, two people now own as much as one fifth of Australia combined! A third of Australia’s large corporations paid no tax last year and The Commonwealth Bank just posted a half-yearly profit of 4.9 billion dollars. Let all of that that sink in before you tell me that soft diplomacy programs such as foreign aid and our refugee intake are the reason we can’t afford to house our elderly, homeless and veterans.

Contrary to what people like Hanson and other right wing mouthpieces would like you to believe, refugees accepted into Australia do not get more generous conditions than other Australian welfare recipients. If found to be refugees, they receive the same welfare benefits as other Australians (along with minor initial support such as language lessons to maximise their chances of assimilating and contributing to Australian society).

The Australian newspaper is a strong proponent of The Great Deception (in fact if the paper were to rename itself, The Great Deception, it would be a much more appropriate name) and last year they reported with suitable horror that refugees cost over 100 million dollars in welfare payments a year (this is of course a tenth of what it cost to keep a fraction of this number of refugees in offshore detention for the same year but I’m sure that wasn’t considered relevant). While Fact Check could not verify this claim I’m not going to dispute the figures, I’m disputing the reporting. Fulfilling our humanitarian obligations will cost money and there are many other costs of refugees not even covered in the report. But the paper also didn’t include the context that this cost comes out of a budget of over 434.5 billion for that year, meaning it is roughly 0.0002% of the total budget. That leaves 99.9998% of the budget (or the other 434.4 billion) that could be used to pay for policies to reduce inequality and support Australian families.

The problem isn’t the money we are spending on refugees, it’s what we are doing with the rest of it.

After many years, The Great Deception is developing cracks. The incredible greed and disconnect of people like Joyce, McDonald and Ley, juxtaposed against government indifference to the struggles of many Australian families is becoming too blatant to ignore. Moreover, the market hegemony of commercial media giants such as Newscorp- who as large corporations themselves, benefit from keeping our attention from the inequality that favours them- is slipping. More and more Australians are taking note of the outrageous disparities within our own country and demanding answers.While one manifestation of this anger is interconnected with the regrettable rise of the detestable alt-right movement, a demand for answers and better government policy isn’t a bad thing in itself. We just have to consider the answers we are given critically and rationally. It would be a shame to replace one Great Deception with another.

This article was originally posted on Quietblog

For someone who had considerable success in merchant banking, Mr Tremble seems to have difficulties making deals without giving out major concessions. I make this comment based on his complete capitulation to the ultra conservatives in his party and his inability to make deals with either the Nationals or the cross bench, without giving up everything he stood for.

I am not actually planning on writing much about Donald Trump’s policies on this site, as they are being breathlessly analysed all over the world. However the revelations of the conversation between Trump and Tremble over refugees were frightening. I am far from the only person to be concerned with how this conversation panned out, but there was one significant aspect of the discussion that I thought might have raised more concern than it did.

Now I don’t for one minute disagree that these detainees that our government has imprisoned for years are our responsibility. There is no consistent economic, humanitarian or border protection reason for keeping them imprisoned any longer. I would like to see them brought to Australia, but given that seemed unlikely, I was cautiously in favour of the agreement struck with the Obama administration. But although it seemed to capture the majority of attention and coverage in relation to this issue, the fact that this deal seemed in jeopardy once more was not my biggest concern.

I also wasn’t completely surprised by Tremble’s silence in a time when many other world leaders were speaking out about the unconscionable travel ban. Aside from not wanting to upset the far right of his party, perhaps he felt he could handle the condemnation, if that was what it took to rid himself of the serious political difficulties his government faces over refugees (remember when New Zealand offered to take several hundred of them and Dutton rejected the offer). After all, we have already seen Tremble appears to value his job above anything resembling his values or his dignity.

But it wasn’t going to be that easy. President Trump has made it quite clear he is very unhappy about accepting any refugees, describing them with his typical lack of class as “the next wave of Boston Bombers.” Yet as I write this the deal lives on. One wonders why. There has been some discussion and analysis suggesting it may still go through, which makes Trump’s bluster look more like a deliberate bargaining strategy. Sickening as it sounds, they were basically haggling over the fate of these asylum seekers the way we haggle over the price of a used car.

By publicly slamming the agreement, Trump could be preparing the ground to ask for something more in response, whether it be now or in the future. Reportedly this may include military activities, such as a freedom of navigation exercise in the South China Sea. This is what really alarms me. Surely our Prime Minister would not put Australian servicemen’s lives in danger and at the same time antagonise China just to rid himself of a domestic political trouble? Would he?

What scares me is that it isn’t even hard to believe that he would. The Coalition has a strong recent history of relying on ‘national security’ to deflect attention from their incompetent management of the economy, backwards social policies and outright corruption. According to the then US ambassador to Australia, Tremble’s predecessor, Abbott was reportedly itching to send soldiers to Syria a few years ago too. For someone as notoriously bad at making deals to be using our military as a bargaining chip is not just an affront to the courage and dedication of our servicemen. It is downright scary.

Recent history may have tied our foreign policy to the United States, but as Trump has bluntly showed, we are entering a new era of realpolitik and we must ensure Australia is making foreign policy decisions in the nation’s best interest. With our American ally increasingly erratic and unpredictable, Australia cannot assume action taken today will mean anything tomorrow. It would be irresponsible and foolish to anger a regional neighbour as important and powerful as China, especially with Trump showing no sign that we can rely on American support in anything that does not benefit the USA.

I should add that the Prime Minister has actually come out publicly and said there will be no quid pro quo, but he has said a lot of things and not many people place much faith in his words. This was most likely already a bargain of some sort- remember we paid Cambodia several million dollars to settle three refugees in 2015. The question is whether the terms of the deal have shifted further in America’s favour. If America does end up resettling some of these unfortunate human beings, and then sometime down the track our soldiers are committed to a conflict that has little bearing on our national interest, we give political support the USA at cost to our own multilateral relationships, or we agree to favourable trading conditions for our larger ally; it would not be hard to believe the two events were connected.

The refugees in offshore detention are not a problem for Australia. They are a problem for the Coalition government though. Allowing them into this country would actually be of benefit both from a financial perspective and our international reputation. As such, for our Prime Minister to make concessions at the cost of the Australian people for purely his own and his party’s benefit is morally indefensible.

To borrow a line from Andrew O’Keefe, the words Tremble needs to remember are, “No Deal!”

This article was originally published on Quietblog

On the other hand I do feel my views around the date of Australia Day are shifting and I now disagree with some of what I wrote. As I said in last year’s article, I have no attachment to the date, January 26. It was neither the date the country was discovered (by Aboriginals or Europeans) or founded. Having said that, last year I did not support calls for changing the date.

I felt this debate was something of a distraction from more pressing issues such as Indigenous incarceration and mortality rates, as well as ongoing racism in Australian society. I said this with full sympathy and complete acceptance that European colonisation – or invasion – had catastrophic impact on Australia’s Indigenous population. I am not sure there is anything that can be done to properly atone for the crimes committed in the past. For this reason I wrote that priority for effort should be to address extant challenges of the present. And with the increasingly strident efforts of a conservative groups to push the narrative that Anglo Saxon Australians are somehow the true victims of multiculturalism, you know that every concession or initiative made towards addressing issues such as indigenous health or education will be held up as another example of how ‘Australian values’ are under threat from political correctness. For this reason I thought maybe Aboriginal activists would be better served by saving their energy for fights that would have immediate impact on the welfare of indigenous Australians and not poke the angry white bear over more symbolic issues.

I’m a little embarrassed about writing that now as I was looking at that backwards. The fact that something costs political capital to a movement is hardly a good argument not to do it. If there is a good reason to do something, especially if it goes some way to righting a wrong, should we be dissuaded by the fact that it may be difficult politically? Indigenous Australians would argue there is certainly a reason, as the date, January 26, to them represents genocide and abuse. Whether or not you feel that Australia day represents something different to you or that the continued focus on the distant past is unhelpful, the argument that celebrations around this day are offensive to many Indigenous Australians, and as such hinder our progress towards true reconciliation, is valid nonetheless.

Instead of telling Indigenous Australians to ‘get over’ a brutal history at the hands of Europeans, something that everyone would ‘get over’ a whole lot more easily would be doing something as simple as changing the date. I started thinking, who would actually suffer if we did? Who is it insulting? It isn’t taking anything away from other Australians, it is just making many of the first Australians more comfortable joining in our celebrations. Borrowing a phrase from a good friend of mine, you are not being oppressed when others are being treated with the same respect and sensitivity you always have. That’s equality.

Those who have fought vocally against the change may be a little uncomfortable having perhaps backed themselves into a corner with their choice of rhetoric, but that is the most anyone has to fear from a change of date. Being ‘on the wrong side of history,’ is not just a pithy catchphrase. It is a pretty powerful and accurate description of people advocating a course of action that in future years will be looked back on the same way we now look back on other outdated notions such as apartheid, slavery and tolerating domestic violence. I don’t like to think that I was on ever on that side, but in arguing that the positives of moving the date of Australia Day were outweighed by the negatives of upsetting conservative white Australia, perhaps I was toeing that line.

In any case, I was dead wrong. Changing the date is a no-brainer. It will mean a lot to many Australians and be another step towards reconciliation. At the same time it will not really hurt anyone anything more than a bit of embarrassment or anger at not getting their way. The debate will be another rallying point for the right-wing extremist groups such as Reclaim Australia, but it can hardly make them more racist.

I am pretty confident that the date of Australia Day will be changed in the near future, over the protestations of the last diehards and I look forward to that day. As a society, we are maturing each year and, as with many issues of social justice, large sections of the community are leading the government.