From time to time I like to remind people of the wonderful poem, “Said Hanrahan” which I’ve included at the bottom for those who don’t know it. But basically, Hanrahan announces how “we’ll all be rooned” any day now.

While it’s basically about the trials of the farmer, it has a certain modern appeal for anyone listening to anything that any economist predicts after they’ve spent an hour or so gazing at the latest statistics.

The stock market on the other hand, is a different beast from your average economist, and rather than rely on the cold hard statistics or the cold, squishy entrails of a chicken, the share market is rather more emotional. That’s not to say that everyone playing the share market is irrational; some of them are just trying to make money out of someone else’s irrationality.

In the simplest terms possible let me declare: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ECONOMIC GOOD NEWS!

Now, I know that many people will dispute this but it helps to remember that economics is like the AFL premiership. Some people will be happy if one team wins, but most supporters of the other teams will be disappointed. And, let’s be clear here, most of the rest of the world will be unaffected and not care, but simply wonder what all the fuss is about.

So it is with economics. We can interview an Australian economist who tells us how terrible it is that house prices are slipping, even though last year, the interview was with someone who thought that it was terrible that house prices were rising because it either a) created a bubble which would eventually lead to tears, or b) keep first home buyers out of the market. Whichever way it goes, someone will be cheering, but, unlike sports commentary which tends to focus on the winners, most of the economic focus will be about who’s likely to lose badly.

I couldn’t help but wonder why the media keeps focusing on vested interests without stopping to point out that they are only interviewing these folk in the hope that they’ll give us some greater insight than – to paraphrase – “We don’t think we should be the ones to suffer, so please consider us and ignore the losers because they’ve always been losers and we’re not, so don’t change it so that we have to give up some of our booty because it’s really not that much in the scheme of things and if a few thousand need to go hungry or homeless or both it’s a small price to pay to ensure that nothing upsets those who’ve sacrificed lots to make sure that they’ll one day have a shitload of money…”

I always notice the little tricks with statistics at such times and the emotive plea to help those “mums and dads” who are never “dads and mums” or even “aunts and uncles”. And they’re certainly never “stepdads and mistresses”.

No, it seems that most landlords only own one property and the handful who own upwards of fifty properties each can be ignored, even though it works out that the ones who own more than one sometimes own lots more than one, so it does work out that even though there are more of the poverty-stricken mum&dad single owners than multiple rental property owners, the latter group still own most of the rental properties…

But leaving aside statistical tricks, I heard one amazing thing from an interview today. I joined late, so I can’t name the man who said this but he was asserting that some of these mums and dads who’ve only bought a property to finance their retirement (not for the tax advantage of negative gearing so I guess they haven’t bothered to claim anything there!!), will be forced to sell thanks to Dan Andrews proposed “rent freeze”. This will be awful, not just for them but it won’t help in any way because – and you may need to think about this – they won’t be bought by renters or investors!!!

Now, I would have expected that if there were a flood of properties on the market that at least some of them would be purchased by non-struggling investors, keen to add to their portfolios at bargain prices given – as the interviewee suggested – Andrews freeze would drive up rents.

But if they were driving down house prices, I would have also thought that some people saving to buy a house would be renters and that when they bought a place then that would be at least one or two out of the rental market.

However, no. Neither a renter nor an investor will be those who are buying these properties from the mums and dads and uncles and aunts or anyone with a grandfathered investment. Verily I ask, who shall these buyers be that are neither an investor nor a renter? Just some average home owner who wants to expand next door?

It’s a mystery.

Anyway, as I said at the start the conclusion of any economic news is that we’ll all be rooned any day now. To quote Hanrahan directly:

SAID HANRAHAN

“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,

In accents most forlorn,

Outside the church, ere Mass began,

One frosty Sunday morn.

The congregation stood about,

Coat-collars to the ears,

And talked of stock, and crops, and drought,

As it had done for years.

“It’s lookin’ crook,” said Daniel Croke;

“Bedad, it’s cruke, me lad,

For never since the banks went broke

Has seasons been so bad.”

“It’s dry, all right,” said young O’Neil,

With which astute remark

He squatted down upon his heel

And chewed a piece of bark.

And so around the chorus ran

“It’s keepin’ dry, no doubt.”

“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,

“Before the year is out.

“The crops are done; ye’ll have your work

To save one bag of grain;

From here way out to Back-o’-Bourke

They’re singin’ out for rain.

“They’re singin’ out for rain,” he said,

“And all the tanks are dry.”

The congregation scratched its head,

And gazed around the sky.

“There won’t be grass, in any case,

Enough to feed an ass;

There’s not a blade on Casey’s place

As I came down to Mass.”

“If rain don’t come this month,” said Dan,

And cleared his throat to speak–

“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,

“If rain don’t come this week.”

A heavy silence seemed to steal

On all at this remark;

And each man squatted on his heel,

And chewed a piece of bark.

“We want a inch of rain, we do,”

O’Neil observed at last;

But Croke “maintained” we wanted two

To put the danger past.

“If we don’t get three inches, man,

Or four to break this drought,

We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,

“Before the year is out.”

In God’s good time down came the rain;

And all the afternoon

On iron roof and window-pane

It drummed a homely tune.

And through the night it pattered still,

And lightsome, gladsome elves

On dripping spout and window-sill

Kept talking to themselves.

It pelted, pelted all day long,

A-singing at its work,

Till every heart took up the song

Way out to Back-o’Bourke.

And every creek a banker ran,

And dams filled overtop;

“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,

“If this rain doesn’t stop.”

And stop it did, in God’s good time;

And spring came in to fold

A mantle o’er the hills sublime

Of green and pink and gold.

And days went by on dancing feet,

With harvest-hopes immense,

And laughing eyes beheld the wheat

Nid-nodding o’er the fence.

And, oh, the smiles on every face,

As happy lad and lass

Through grass knee-deep on Casey’s place

Went riding down to Mass.

While round the church in clothes genteel

Discoursed the men of mark,

And each man squatted on his heel,

And chewed his piece of bark.

“There’ll be bush-fires for sure, me man,

There will, without a doubt;

We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,

“Before the year is out.”

John O’Brien

I’m currently out of the country so I’m only catching up on the greatest disaster in the history of Australia. Apparently cancelling a contract is the sort of thing that can do world-wide damage to our country’s reputation.

No, I’m not talking about Scott Morrison’s decision to cancel the subs deal with France. That was fine. No, I’m talking about Dan Andrews cancelling of the Commonwealth Games which has apparently sent shock waves everywhere including countries who aren’t in the Commonwealth and can only watch with the sort of envy that makes them wonder why any country would demand their independence from Britain when we have such wonderful side benefits as our own games. Something that rivals US baseball’s World Series which only includes American teams.

Speaking personally, it did strike me as strange that most of the criticism was about the cancellation rather than the original decision to bid for them. Particularly as it came from the same quarters who’ve been complaining about the Victorian government’s spending and debt. As I see it this is like me putting down a deposit on a Maserati only to discover that this didn’t lock in the price and that, while I could sell my house and close the deal, I’d be homeless and unable to afford the upkeep of the car. By all means, attack me for being silly enough to put down the deposit but surely you shouldn’t be telling me that withdrawing from the sale was a foolish thing that’ll ruin my credit rating.

Anyway, I’ve been keeping up with what’s happening in my home state via the media which seems to only be able to find people critical of the decision. Even the good old ABC is only balancing the people who are highly critical of this decision with people who are highly critical of everything that Dan Andrews has ever done.

Phil “Gladys Saved The Nation” Coorey wasn’t content to rebuke Andrews, but suggested that Victorian voters were fools and insisted that Dan had gaslighted Victorians just like he did with the pandemic when he dared to adopt a different strategy from Phil’s “let her rip” heroes of Scotty and Gladys. Ok, in real terms neither of them were ever prepared to totally let it rip, but it always struck me as odd that the same people who were advocating no lockdowns were also hypercritical of Andrews for the virus escaping hotel quarantine.

Sure. People have a right to criticise Andrews but to suggest that anyone who disagrees with him is somehow mentally defective seems a trifle arrogant. Like I always say I don’t expect everyone to agree with me all the time but when they start disagreeing with themselves in the space of one opinion piece it’s a worry. Like when people who are complaining about laws against misinformation are censorship and an outrage, only to turn around and demand that Big W stop selling a book because they think it should be banned.

When they do it in the space of one post on Twitter, it’s an even bigger concern…

Without naming the person and leading to a possible pile-on, there is one person who keeps popping up in my Twitter feed and I’m trying to work out why unless it’s part of Elon Musk’s cunning plan to drive all the woke people off Twitter. Said person has been railing against the Labor government calling them communists, socialists and evil people who are dividing the country. Albanese is even worse than Whitlam who destroyed the country. Included in her tweets was:

“We are all aware on Tweeter (sic) that not everyone agrees with our views. But there are people who are also mentally unstable and have their own agendas to challenge anything to create a situation”

Which would be fine. Everyone’s got a right to an opinion, etc. However, today this person posted the following:

“The abuse that is levelled at people who are against the “voice” is sadly indicative of the intolerance towards people who have a different opinion. It’s the most divisive issue that we have ever seen.”

So, it’s all right to suggest that some of the people challenging you are “mentally unstable” but just make one or two little comments like “this will give the Indigenous population “the power to challenge any decision or legislation of the government of the day”, and people start suggesting that you might be racist because you seem to be ignoring that the status quo is that anyone can already do that, so why should we be concerned that a Voice with no veto powers could do what everyone can already do… Ok, people may not get very far, and the Voice may get a bit more media coverage if they suggest that what the government it doing lacks input from the people most affected, but the point remains.

Anyway, I’m sure that I could spend several useless months picking up all the inconsistencies of people and talk at length how confirmation bias means that two people can look at the same by-election and conclude that Fadden was a poor result for Dutton because he only got something like the expected swing in spite of spending ten times more than Labor, while someone else may look at it and think that it was a great result for Peter because he received more first preferences than the percentage of people who have him as preferred PM…

Whatever, I recommend taking a stoic path and deciding that you can’t do anything about the inconsistency of others, so you’re best to control your own. It might be wise occasionally to take a step back and say, “How would I feel if the other side did this? Would I justify it? Would I say no big deal? Or would I be demanding that King Charles break with protocols and declare martial law until a government who understands the meaning of integrity is returned, no matter how many elections that takes.”

As I mentioned at the start, I’m out of the country but we did receive our energy bill while away making us wonder if it would be cheaper to extend our holiday indefinitely even if it meant moving to a five-star hotel. I do remember sometime last century, Jeff Kennett privatising everything he could manage in order to make it all more efficient and cheaper. Imagine how expensive it would be if it were still in public hands…

There have been quite a few articles about the Fadden by-election telling people: “The Honeymoon Is Over For Labor”. Actually there have been a number of pieces written speculating about how the honeymoon is over for about ten months now.

Ok, people, one does have to stick with this analogy and ask: If the honeymoon is over, how’s the marriage looking?

There seems to be an assumption that once the honeymoon is over then couples are ready for a divorce, not that they’re ready for the more realistic relationship that makes a successful marriage and…

Yeah, you’re right. Your relationship with your government isn’t really a marriage and it isn’t really a honeymoon. Why writers keep using the same tired metaphors is anyone’s guess. It’s sort of like when government is compared to a household budget. Or a business.

Don’t get me wrong. Comparisons are fine for helping people understand a difficult concept, but they’re also flawed and the fact that you’ve needed to simplify something ultimately means that your comparison is rather like a model of an aircraft. It may look like the real thing. It may even fly. But don’t jump on it and expect to make it to New York.

So when it comes to Fadden, we’re being asked to choose between the spin of Labor’s “nothing to see here” and the Liberals “this is the beginning of our successful 2025 election campaign.” In truth, neither view is completely accurate but let’s look at each a bit more closely.

First the Liberals are asking us to believe that this is a great result because it’s no worse than it was at the previous election. In fact, it’s a little better. And this is all due to people being upset about the cost of living, the Voice and Federal Labor not dealing the state issue of crime in the streets of the Gold Coast. I don’t actually know what the crime rate is in the electorate of Fadden but it must be high because it was apparently a concern. Perhaps they were including white collar crime and people understating their income for tax purposes…

As a little aside here, how many of you read that wonderful article about Fiona uh“Not Your Typical Landlord” Martin in the Nine papers? It was a strange article because it was trying to suggest that most landlords weren’t rich fat cats with multiple properties at the same time as saying that the focus of the article wasn’t that either, so in one sense she was your typical landlord. It conveniently overlooked her role on a landlord advocacy group but, hey, you can’t cover everything in one article.

The article also pointed to the fact that many, many landlords had very low incomes. Some of their incomes were below the poverty line which would make you wonder how they got the money to buy an investment property unless you stop to think about the fact that negative gearing is designed to reduce your taxable income and enable you to pay as little tax as possible. The article didn’t say, for example, Thaddeus McGillicuddy only has a taxable income of $200 after paying interest on his 93 investment properties.

Of course, it’s a good result for the Liberals in the sense that it’s the first time that it hasn’t been a bad result. To borrow an analogy (flawed I know), this is like a tennis player who’s lost the first two sets and down four games to love in the second, holding serve. It’s a good result but if they lost serve here, their chances would be almost zero, instead of slightly better than almost zero. Whatever, it’s a good result for Dutton because it means that Sussan won’t have the numbers and Sussan is very concerned with numbers. As you’re aware, numerology is why she put the extra “S” in her name, so she’s not going to challenge unless she finds a way to put an extra few MPs in her suppporerss.

However, Labor shouldn’t take things for granted that just because the by-election didn’t produce a significant swing against them that there’s nothing to learn here. Saying it doesn’t matter and we’re getting on with the job might start to sound a bit arrogant if they say that about the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. It’s good to say, “We’ve heard the message” occasionally particularly if you don’t say what the message you heard was. That makes it sound like you’re listening even if you’re not.

The great thing for Labor is that the by-election ensures that Peter Dutton keeps the leadership. While there have been a large number of unelectable leaders elected in the past ten years and a number of surprise results in elections, Dutton has one thing going against him that most of the others didn’t. His inability to maintain a populist line.

While others have run an appeal to the hip pocket or the out of touch politicians, Dutton has taken the Coalition on a roller-coaster, demanding that the budget be in surplus, then when it was, arguing that they’d have had a bigger surplus, and now that it’s bigger, it’s too big and it’s all because Labor are taxing too much. Of course, this overlooks the fact that the surplus potentially allows Labor to announce either popular initiatives – which Dutton will attack – or tax cuts for those under $100k a year – which Dutton will say we can’t afford and that they’ll be inflationary, even though it’s probable that inflation will be lower and the concern will be a possible (or actual) recession.

While opinion polls have been wrong in the past, if you take the average of the reputable ones, you’ll find that there have been very few results that were outside the margin of error. Usually it’s been the interpretation of the polls that has been the problem. For example, the fact that Trump was only given a small chance of winning in 2016 led people to interpret that as no chance. Similarly, Labor was regarded as a certainty in 2019. However, if you look at the current polling, Dutton has a long way to go to get his approval rating above fifty per cent.

And that’s just in the Liberal party room.

First, I read the headline: “Dutton rules out two frontrunners for RBA governor.”

Then I read that Mr Dutton had said:

“We’ve made it clear to the government we don’t believe it should be somebody who is familiar, if you like, to the government, somebody who has been working very closely with the Treasurer, or the finance minister, or the prime minister.”

Next, I read that Jane Hume said that it shouldn’t be someone from the Public Service who’d been “doing the bidding of the government.”

All of which leads me to the belief that the whole Robodebt fiasco seems to have washed over their head without them picking up some of the fundamental lessons that should have been learned.

Starting with Senator Hume, she seems to have missed the fact that the Public Service are not there to simply do “the bidding of the government”. But then she was the one who was expressing the idea that Phillip Lowe should have his term extended because he was really only the poor man who’d had to raise interest rates because of the poor performance of Labor. We could have a long conversation about the truth or otherwise of that statement. Suffice to say, I don’t think that she’s going to win a lot of hearts with sympathy for the man who told us that rates wouldn’t rise until 2024 and, ok, that was wrong but if you just take in boarders or get a second job or spend less, then you’ll be ok.

As far as the idea that the Public Service are simply there to implement the government’s policy, it seems appealing enough at first glance. However, BJH (Before John Howard), there was a concept that they were there to give frank and fearless advice. I’m sure that you’ve heard that phrase before but basically it means that there were times when a public servant needs to explain to the minister the difficulty or, in some cases, the impossibility of what he or she intends to do.

“Yes, minister, giving everyone a million dollars will make everyone a millionaire, but the resultant inflation will make the Weimar Republic look like a minor economic hiccup… the Weimar Republic… you know, Germany before Hitler… inflation was… no, minister, I’m not sayin’ that you’re a Nazi, but…”

While the “Yes, Minister” aspect may drum up images of the recalcitrant public service of Sir Humphrey Appleby and the reluctance to embrace change, the fact remains that a newly elected MP will have a lot to learn and simply believing that one has a mandate to exclude anyone who votes for the opposition parties should have their vote disallowed on the grounds of mental incapacity doesn’t mean that it can happen overnight, even if it’s a firmly held belief of the incoming Prime Minister, Craig Kelly.

One of the major problems with Robodebt was the way that people acted to please the minister. At the moment, the Coalition are attempting a lot of rewriting of the Royal Commission’s findings. As well as the “Well, income averaging was started by Labor,” we also have the idea being floated that it was the public servants who failed to make the poor minister aware of the problems in the scheme. Morrison’s press release contained no mea culpa but was a typical response from He Who Does Not Hold A Hose.

All the evidence suggested that not only were ministers unwilling to listen to any problems raised by those responsible for implementing the scheme, but some were complicit in covering up legal advice and any commonsense suggestion that averaging someone’s income out over a period of time would not tell you how much they earned in a shorter period of time. Otherwise, we could possibly disqualify most aged pensioners on the grounds that they worked too many hours over the previous fifty years, and it puts them over the allowed hours for the pension.

Thankfully the media have learned a valuable lesson from this which is if they ignore something there’s a pretty good chance they won’t be held responsible when it all goes wrong. After all, in spite of the praise the Royal Commissioner gave to social media and independent journalists in uncovering this whole mess, there’s very little reporting of that in the media that was criticized for their lack of interest in doing any more than acting as ChatGPT and rewriting press releases from the government. Strangely criticism of the mainstream media from Catherine Holmes is also missing from most of the mainstream media.

And to move on to the terrible problems of the gas producers, I read in The Australian Financial Review a description of how bad recent changes were and how this terrible Albanese government had made all these decisions which were holding up projects which was leading to a supply shortage… Strangely there was no comment from the government, or even an energy expert critiquing the views of those with a vested interest in making as large a profit as possible.

Now I’m not knocking those wishing to exploit our national resources at the expense of everyday householders to make as big a profit as possible… Mm, when I put it that way…

Anyway, my point was simply that the media are once again acting as stenographers for a vested interest feeding them a story rather than questioning, investigating and presenting an alternative view.

Ok, in a few hours we’ll have the results of the Fadden by-election. In spite of the fact that Aston was the only federal by-election where the government has won a seat from the Opposition in a hundred years, some of the media were speculating about Labor winning. By-election typically swing against the government, there’s the cost-of-living problems and Dutton is trying to make it a protest vote about the government and the Voice in what is a conservative seat, so how anyone could even contemplate Labor winning is strange.

I guess it just means that if the Liberal candidate only limps across the line the media will be able to talk about the turnaround in Dutton’s fortunes and what a great result it was.

Goldfish 1 – Did you know that we only have a memory span of three seconds?

Goldfish 2 – That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard!

Goldfish 1 – What is?

Ok, that’s not a very good joke and I’m sure someone will point out that the goldfish memory span of three seconds is an urban myth… possibly started by someone who found it impossible to train his or her goldfish.

Anyway, while goldfish may have a greater memory span than a few seconds, so does just about everyone else apart from political journalists and politicians being questioned by anti-corruption bodies. In the latter case, if anyone has, “I don’t recall” on their drinking bingo card is likely to end up in hospital with alcoholic poisoning.

So I couldn’t help but wonder what Peter Dutton was hoping to achieve by suggesting that the release of the Robodebt Royal Commission report was timed to coincide with the Fadden by-election. Maybe he was hoping that nobody would remember that the release date was set before the Honourable Member, Stuart Robert announced that he wouldn’t be coming back to Parliament because he wanted to focus on his family. Maybe he was hoping that nobody saw a connection between the timing of the by-election and the fact that it was family man, Robert, chose to go before the release of the report.

Whatever…

He was certainly hoping that nobody could see a connection between the fact that Robodebt victims were being asked to prove that they didn’t owe the money and the presumption of innocence. After all, how could any say that Mr Albanese was trying to unseal the contents of the confidential part of the report and follow it up with “There is a presumption of innocence.”

Or have I misunderstood the notion and the presumption of innocence only applies to Coalition MPs? Unless, of course, they betray the party like Peter Slipper and must stand down as Speaker owing to the things they’ve been accused of. (And certainly don’t mention Craig Thomson here. Or David Hicks, Christina Holgate, Katy Gallagher… Ok that’s just off the top of my head.)

And when Peter Dutton said that Robodebt scheme was stopped as soon as the government became aware of the problems… Well, is he hoping that we’ve all forgotten how many times over a number of year that the government was made aware of potential problems before it was stopped, or is he simply hoping that we’ve all forgotten the meaning of the words “as soon as”?

However, that’s nothing compared Scott Morrison. Yes, he’s had to interrupt his time in Italy, and yes, he’s up to his old tricks. The first of these, of course, is that he rejects what he’s been accused of. We all remember the “I reject the premise of the question” being trotted out whenever the interviewer asked him something difficult. Now it’s become “I reject the premise of the Royal Commissioner” because, being just a silly woman, she doesn’t understand government. If she did, she’d know that what he was doing was just fine because, well, he said so and after all, he was the person in charge, so he’d know. When he was giving evidence, she just kept interrupting and making him answer a completely irrelevant question and she doesn’t seem to have accepted all the documentary evidence of the fact that he knew nothing. And he completely rejected all adverse findings against him before adding that executive government would be “completely unworkable” if ministers couldn’t rely on public servants for advice.

Now, apart from the fact that so much of the advice seems to have been ignored or deliberately hidden, Scotty from MuckingItUp is overlooking a key thing here: During the Sports Rorts controversy when Morrison was being questioned about making decisions that were inconsistent with the guidelines and over-ruling certain projects in favour of others who just happened to be in electorates that the Coalition needed to win, he asserted that it was politicians who “lived and breathed in their electorates” were the best ones to make decisions and that this “advice” from public servants wasn’t something to be relied on. It was merely a thought bubble rather like the Canberra bubble that needn’t be reflected in the eventual awarding of grants and ministers could do things like determine that a pool in North Sydney was worthy or a regional grant or that clubs could be given money to build female change rooms on the off chance that they may wonder have a female team.

Morrison also added that he didn’t hold a hose, telling us: “The proposal was initiated within the public service and was not a government-initiated measure by ministers. It was initiated by departments before I became the minister for social services.” See, nothing to do with him; he was just standing there waiting for a photo…

And that silly Commissioner’s account “fails to take into account the context and environment in which the measure was conceived”. Strangely he didn’t elaborate on this, so one must presume it was get the Budget back to surplus no matter even if we have to ruin a few thousand lives to do it.

Commissioner Holmes also ignores the part of the story where he ensured that nothing he did was traceable back to him because, he didn’t do anything. Again, a familiar pattern.

I was surprised that we didn’t hear that it was only after Jen explained to him that it would be terrible if one of his daughters was saddled with a debt she didn’t owe that he stopped the scheme.

Language is a great thing. The way in which you frame something makes all the difference. Consider the following truly frightening government positions:

• All Australian states have colluded to pass legislation that allows an unelected official to determine who is fit to drive. In order to be allowed to drive on the roads, you will be required to pay for a “licence” and the rules and costs vary from state to state.
• Unless the elites at some university agree, you are not allowed to practice medicine and to call yourself a doctor.
• Government legislation will prevent you from marrying the person of your choice without consent.

Ok, they all sound pretty scary… unless, of course, you think about them and realise that we’ve had driving licenses nearly as long as we’ve had cars, it would be terrifying to discover that the person about to amputate your leg has had no formal training and that the consent referred to means the consent of the person, not the consent of the government.

And, while I’ve grown used to picking apart the rantings of Andrew Bolt and other nuts, the way in which Peter Dutton has started to frame things is making me start to wonder exactly what he’s hoping to achieve. The Liberals are sounding less like an alternative government and more like that uncle who tells you that he’s no longer going to vote for Pauline Hanson because she’s too much of a lefty.

Now let me be quite clear here: I think that there needs to be a massive reset in Australian politics. For too long we’ve had the Labor Party referred to as the left and socialists when most of their policies are less socialist than the Nationals who seem to believe that we should be subsidising all sorts of things like mining companies, farmers and country pubs where drought envoys stop off to send the odd text telling the PM that the biggest single cause of a drought is the lack of water but beer may work as a substitute. For too long we’ve had the Liberals referred to as the conservatives when their policies on everything from industrial relations to climate change has nothing to do with keeping things the way they’ve always been but ripping away any institution which prevents them from doing exactly as they like.

I don’t accept the view that the two major parties are just as bad as each other but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a number of areas where Labor need to lift their game. The trouble with the current state is that when you have The Greens telling the world that Labor aren’t doing enough and the Coalition saying they’re doing too much, Labor are in an electoral sweet spot where they seem to the average person not paying attention to be doing just fine.

But back to Peter Dutton. At the moment, he’s pinning all his hopes on scuttling the Voice referendum and using that to make Albanese look bad. The trouble with this strategy is twofold. First, if he loses after opposing the Voice it’ll be the first time a Constitutional referendum has succeeded without the support of both major parties. Second, there’s not a lot of people who are going to change their vote over his “success” in stopping those “elite Canberra Indigenous” from having a voice. When you have the likes of Andrew Bolt in your corner, you’re not going to win over many people who don’t already think that we spend far too much time and money on people who should just get on with their lives and be successful by doing what Gina Rinehart did and work hard.

Yes, attacking big companies may have some support amongst the left, but when you follow it up and suggest that they really don’t support the Voice and that they’re just doing because they’re not prepared to stand up to woke bullies, you seem to have lost the plot if only for the fact that you’re suggesting that a powerful executive is likely to be bullied by Socialist Sally who works at the Vegan Grocery store.

Ok, ok, that’s a slightly absurd stereotype but the point remains. For Dutton to suggest that secretly people agree with him but they’re not prepared to say so publicly for fear of upsetting the “elites” is the sort of nonsense that we’re used to hearing from One Nation senators. Oh, and apparently Linda Burney is an elite, according to Dutton.

Then I suppose in Dutton’s world view anyone who disagrees with him and has sufficient profile to be reported IS an elite and the only people we should listen to are the ones who aren’t saying anything because, in all likelihood, they agree with him.

I’m looking forward to the framing of the Fadden by-election as a referendum on the Voice. An interesting take, given we’re going to have an actual vote on the Voice in the next few months, but…

Anyway, in the next couple of weeks the polls on the Voice will jump around amazingly because the methodology of the various companies taking them is so widely different, making them almost useless. Each poll will undoubtedly be reported as though it’s 100% accurate and reflects the fact that several million people have changed their mind in just a week. We’ll have discussions about the by-election being an indication of how much ground the Liberals are making up on Labor even though at this stage of the electoral cycle in a safe Liberal seat at a time of rising interest rates and inflation a five percent swing to the Liberals wouldn’t be a bad result for Labor… And finally, sometime after the Voice referendum, we’ll have someone put their hand up for the Liberal leadership…

Probably not Scotty from Marketing. Although he may decide that it’s the only job that he’s qualified for.

Someone needs to tell him that he wasn’t even qualified for that one.

Now, I know that some of you have no interest in sport so the fact that I’m using a sporting analogy may put you off, but if you just remember it’s an analogy and stick with it, you’ll soon see that it was an appropriate comparison. On the other hand, when I start talking about AFL football some of you won’t see past the fact that I’ve suggested that Port may lose a game some time in the near future and you’ll be sending off a complaint about my lack of understanding about their invincibility and that last week’s game was never in doubt even if it relied on a kick after the siren.

Anyway, when trying to tip future winners, all one can do is rely on past results even though past success is no guarantee of what’s going to happen this week. Given that Port have won several games in a row and West Coast have lost several games by huge margins, when Port eventually comes up against West Coast it seems reasonable to bet the house on Port. (No, I’m not encouraging gambling and the Sportsbet ad that pops up is just coincidence!)

Except that it’s never reasonable to bet the house on anything because the future is always uncertain. It’s only in retrospect that we can say: “Well, that was obvious, wasn’t it?” The difficulty of making predictions is that they’re about the future and one can never be sure. If Port did struggle to beat West Coast in a future game, we wouldn’t know if West Coast have made a stark improvement or whether Port have gone off the boil but the week after’s results may go some way to answering that question, but until the future happens, your guess is as good as the average economist on whether Phil Lowe will raise interest rates this afternoon.

So, just like footy tipsters examining the entrails of the previous games, economists look at economic data to predict the future and the past doesn’t tell us the future, it only gives us likely outcomes. When it comes to interest rates, we have economists trying to predict the likely outcome of the decision which is all about what the prognosticators at the Reserve Bank are predicting about the likely direction of inflation and how many interest rate rises they need to inflict on the poor people with mortgages and businesses with loans in order to stop them doing things like expanding their businesses, going to work, paying their bills, eating and living in a house.

Yes, I said that it’s wrong to bet the house on anything but I was overlooking the fact that it’s fine to bet the house when you’re Reserve Bank governor and it’s someone else’s house. Mr Lowe has made it clear that he wants to keep his job and it’s been made pretty clear that he feels the best way to do that is to ensure a hundred thousand or so lose theirs, taking the unemployment rate up to a more acceptable 4.5%.

Some economists are concerned that in spite of the interest rate rises, the economy remains stubbornly healthy. Some people are continuing to spend and, even though the most recent inflation figures suggest that it’s on the way down, there’s still concern that only some things are coming down. Wages, for example, are almost keeping up with inflation and this is a terrible thing because it enables people to spend. Nobody seems to be pointing out that some people will actually have more disposable income, owing to the great interest they’re receiving on their bank deposits or superannuation payments, but hey, they’re not the ones that interest rates are targeting because they’re the sort of people who might be economists.

Of course, everything that happens now is Labor’s fault. I’m not trying to suggest that Labor can get away with blaming world events outside their control or the previous government forever… That’s the prerogative of the Liberal Party… I heard Jane Hume on the radio yesterday and it was a fascinating interview. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone contradict themselves in the space of two questions quite as often. For example, the government should be doing more to help people with the rising cost of living, but it shouldn’t be spending anything to do it and, yes, we voted against the energy relief package, and yes, it may have brought inflation down by three quarters of a percent, but the problem is that it’s only temporary, and while giving people money might be inflationary the Stage 3 tax cuts are just fine because some of the cuts are to people on $60,000 and they need help and surely you wouldn’t want to hurt the struggling peasants…

Mind you, I am only loosely quoting here so Senator Hume may say that my interpretation is only loosely based on reality, which is appropriate given her description of the world isn’t even that.

Well whatever happens with interest rates this afternoon, I’m looking forward to Uncle Phil’s advice in the next few days where he suggests that if we’re struggling we can do something like spending less, taking on extra work or selling one of the children which both brings in extra revenue AND reduces expenditure. I’m surprised that he hasn’t suggested it already!

“Excuse me, but it’s a condition of this public bathroom that I inspect your genitals!”

“Oh, but I’m clearly in the right bathroom… You can’t suspect me of…”

“Sorry, but there was a trans woman in here last week and nobody noticed, so we’re being extra careful. And she matched your description.”

“But you’re a man. You shouldn’t even be in here.”

“No, on the contrary, I was born a woman but I’ve always felt that I was, well, a man and given the new restrictions where you can only use a bathroom based on the sex on your birth certificate, I felt the safest thing to do was to take this job guarding the female bathroom.”

Ok, in one simple dialogue I’ve managed to take a highly emotive issue and annoy just about everyone by completely over-simplifying it and showing that, as a man, I have no understanding whatsoever of any of the concerns of anyone.

Yep, it’s what I do.

I figure if Andrew Bolt and Paul Murray and Alan Jones have made more money than I get for trying to educate young minds then it’s only a matter of time before someone connected to Rupert thinks that I’m outrageous enough to offer me a column or a show where I reduce any situation to my opinion – or an interview with someone who agrees with my opinion – and I’ll be paid such vast sums that will give me the chance to do an incredible amount of good… only to decide that doing good is a waste of time because when I tried to do good, I was paid so little that I was only able to do a little good and now I’m being paid excessively I’ll be inclined to go: “Why didn’t I do this earlier?”

Anyway, as to the whole issue of trans women in female bathrooms, I’d like to announce I am a completely disinterested party here because a) I’m not a female; b) I’m not trans and c) I’m not a bathroom.

Having again said something that I’m sure will upset people so much that they’ll attack me so much that even if I don’t get to take over Bolt’s spot at least more people will respond than listen to his show on Sky After Dark (SAD, as I call it).

The whole thing seems to me that there are some legitimate points of view here that need to be worked through in a respectful and careful way.

1. Women need spaces where the feel that they are safe from men
2. Trans people who identify as a woman need spaces where they feel safe from men.
3. Everyone needs a place where they can pee in peace.
4. People should not make rash generalisations about other people without evidence.
5. Point 4 is a rash generalisation but I’m writing this so, in the spirit of Bolt, it’s a legitimate point of view and doesn’t need evidence.

However one feels about the whole issue, I must say that when I read things from people that say that one can always tell a woman, I feel a little bit confused because I want to know how they know that they were right?

And however one feels about the issue, maybe we need to remember that there are plenty of people who need consideration and protection and we need to respectfully hear and consider different points of view…

Ah shit, I’ve just ruined my chance of becoming a rich, Murdoch mouthpiece…

The recent proposal for legislation to require social media companies to crack down on misinformation and disinformation has some positives but it’s also something that needs careful consideration.

For a start there’s a big difference between misinformation where a person is just repeating incorrect information because they believe it to be true and disinformation where someone is deliberately spreading lies in order to weaken the case of an opponent. However, the big problem is deciding at what point an unpopular point of view becomes misinformation. Take Nick Coatsworth’s comments about Covid-19 not being airborne in the early days of the pandemic. Given he was one of the “experts” leading our response, would contradicting that have been misinformation?

And take this exchange on Twitter:

Apart from the fact that the writer of the tweet liked my retweet with the comment “Own goal?”, there’s a strong argument that asserting that Dutton was right about the “serious damages claims” following the Apology to the Stolen Generation could be considered misinformation. But Andrew Bolt would argue that there was no Stolen Generation, so the tweet could also be considered misinformation on the grounds that it talks about something that Bolt denies even exists so…

But I do find it interesting that supporters of the No campaign are the ones who seem to be most upset about any potential legislation to ban misinformation. It’s almost like saying without misinformation, we got nothing…

Perhaps I’ve got it wrong but there’s a very clear racist element to what some people are saying about the Voice. Let’s leave aside the areas of dispute which I’ll categorise as follows:

• The structure of the Voice will be determined by the Parliament and if it were to be problematic in any way, Parliament could restructure it. The Constitution will only be require that there be some form of Indigenous Voice to Parliament. This is disputed by the anti-Voice campaigners who argue that the lack of detail may mean that the Voice will be given wide-ranging powers by those leftie judges on the High Court.
• The Voice has no real power and will simply advise Parliament meaning that like all sorts of advice to Parliament from experts to Royal Commissions to bodies set up specifically to take the politics out of decisions, the advice could be ignored. This is disputed by some who argue that the Voice will have the power to insist that we change the date of Australia Day, move out of our houses if an Indigenous person wants it, stop the Reserve Bank from raising interest rates and force us all to become vegans.
• The Voice referendum came about after years of consultation culminated in the Uluru Statement from the Heart called for it. This is disputed by some who argue that Anthony Albanese just thought of it because he wants some sort of vanity project and it’ll be a Canberra voice and it’s all the Labor Party’s idea because they want someone else to have the power to make all the decisions.
• It’ll be a Canberra voice and we shouldn’t listen to Canberra voices unless they’re members of the Liberal Party.

So leaving aside the areas of dispute, it does seem strange when Sussan Ley gets up in Parliament and asks if the Voice will be able to advise the Reserve Bank… I mean, leaving aside the whole idea that the Reserve Bank is independent and doesn’t even have to listen to the government and the Voice is a voice to Parliament and the Executive and it doesn’t mention the Reserve Bank anywhere in the Referendum so you might as well ask, “Will the Voice be able to give advice on what shows I should watch on Netflix?” or “Will the Voice be able to give me advice on whether I should add any extra letters to my name in the hope that it gives me extra ssuccesss?”

But apart from Sussssann’ss absurdity, there does seem an underlying element of the Voice being just a bit too uppity. You know, stepping outside their area. You know, giving advice to more than just, well, things that should concern them… You know… like well, I’m not racist but we know that some of those people, you know… And, you know, if they were to express an opinion, you know… I mean, as if they’d know, you know… As if it’d be worth listening too…

Well, I’m not racist but…

And as for Peter Dutton, well, he’s a swell guy who just wants what’s best for everybody and the idea that foreigners could come here on boats and disrupt the whole way of life for those living here is something that only convicts from a couple of centuries ago should be able to do. As for African gangs, that wasn’t racist because we all know that African gangs are scarier than Caucasian gangs… Don’t believe that leftie stuff about Dutton! He’s a swell guy with a great sense of humour… Don’t you remember his great joke about Pacific Island people having no sense of time with water lapping at their door? Not racist at all.

In terms of the whole the interesting question is whether trying to portray Dutton as a great humanitarian could be considered misinformation.

While the opinion polls are telling us that support for the Voice is slipping, one has to take the polls with a grain of salt. After all, I remember that the opinion polls were telling us that the Victorian election would be close and that Andrews may lose his seat.

Of course, I am overlooking the possibility that it was those Dominion voting machines that were rigged and that the polls were right. Ok, the Victorian Electoral Commission says that it doesn’t use voting machines but how do we know that isn’t disinformation?

Over the past few years, I’ve read a lot of books about education. Most of them sound impressive and I’m sure that a lot of people will read a particular one and go, “Yes, that’s it, that’s what’s wrong with the education system and if only schools would all do this then everything would be fixed…”

The trouble with nearly every idea on education is that the person writing the book has started with an assumed aim about the purpose of education and then worked backwards to show us that the best way to achieve this purpose is to adopt a particular strategy by presenting all sorts of evidence about how it’s worked really well in such and such a place and therefore it should work everywhere.

Often they’re not wrong.

The trouble is that their original assumption about the purpose of educating our young people may not be shared by everyone. Usually this isn’t obvious because their aim isn’t explicitly stated or else it’s expressed in terms that nobody could disagree with like:

“Schools need to be places of empowerment where we give students the skills to be self-actualised, articulate leaders taking their place in a global 21st Century world where they can thrive as literate, numerate adults with the capacity to shape their lives in positive ways.”

Now, who could disagree with that? Certainly nobody ever says: “The aim of schools is to spend a few years giving kids some basic skills and after that we have to fill in their time for a number of years after because someone got rid of this child labour laws so we can’t send the difficult ones out to work in the fields or the factories once they turn seven…”

If you believe the aim of school is to maximise academic success, you can dismiss a lot of the subjects and activities as a distraction. On the other hand, if you feel that the aim of school is to create future workers, you may be dismissive of academia and, depending on your focus, you may think it should be developing practical, hands-on capabilities or soft skills like team-work and communication. On yet the third hand, you may feel that the aim is to develop happy, well-balanced individuals who have fulfilling lives following their dreams and not worrying about the fact that they only have two hands.

These are not the only ideas that people have about the function of schools, so it’s not wonder that education becomes a bit of a political football. If schools start succeeding in a particular area, someone will undoubtedly say, “Yes, but what about Latin? We’re neglecting Latin and when I said to a teenager the other day barba crescit caput nescit, he had no idea what I meant!”

And so this is one of the main problems with any educational improvement. When students were first allowed to use biros last century, some people decried it because they wouldn’t learn to mix their own ink. Until we have a clear agreed idea of what society wants from its education system, there’ll always be a haphazard chaotic approach that succeeds in some areas and fails in others, only to refuse this trend when people demand that schools stop doing what they’re succeeding at, in order to address the areas where they’re failing.

Which brings us to politics. Political parties usually have two clear aims:

1. To achieve particular objectives such as the redistribution of wealth. (In some cases making wealth more equally distributed; in others directing it to a particular group)
2. Winning government so that they can achieve their objectives.

Obviously it’s better when both these things align, but sometimes political parties find it… I am unsure whether to use the word “necessary” or the word “expedient” here… Let’s settle on “easier”… Sometimes political parties find it easier to let people know what they plan after the election. This doesn’t mean that every broken promise was a lie, any more than it means that an elected government are telling the truth when they say that this will be good for you in the long run.

Over the past several decades, it’s usually only been Labor or the Liberals in Coalition with the Nationals who’ve been able to aspire to achieving the second aim. The minor parties have usually had to work to persuade or manoeuvre the government party into making some sort of deal, just like Jacqui Lambie did when she repealed the Medevac laws. In return she got something that she couldn’t tell us about but whatever it was she got a promise that the Coalition would do it. Similarly, The Greens pushed for concessions before they passed the legislated emissions target.

When you don’t have to worry about the second aim because you have no chance of forming government in the near future, your path is clear. You do what you can to get as much of what you want as possible. This means that you don’t have to worry about the consequences in quite the same way. You’re able to play to your audience with the knowledge that it’s likely you’ll still wield the same about power after the next election so you’re more concerned with keeping your support base onside than winning over the swinging voters.

If we look at recent events, we can see that The Greens are still behaving like a minor party. However, while they’re holding up the Housing Future fund legislation in order to get what they want, the motives of the Coalition are different. Peter Dutton seems to be taking the Abbott path of stopping Labor achieving anything so that they can say, “Look, this party hasn’t done anything, so vote for us.”

This tactic gave some success to Abbott and had some suggesting that he was the most effective Opposition leader in our history. In fact, he was so good at being Opposition leader he continued to perform as Opposition leader once he became PM, preferring to attack Labor rather than get on with the business of government.

In Dutton’s case, it seems that he’s starting to behave more like the leader of a minor party, rather than one who is the alternative government. He seems to be playing to his rusted-on base rather than trying to win back seats from either Labor or the Independents. However, rather than trying to use his power to extract small concessions from the government, he seems content to issue a flat no and leave it to The Greens to push the government further to the left.

If I were advising Dutton, I’d suggest that he start learning how to compromise with Labor like a minor party would because the way things are going, his Liberals may end up being one before too long.

This morning I made myself a cup of tea. While this is a normal occurrence, I usually use a teabag but this morning I used loose leaf tea and a few moments later my wife opened the pantry cupboard and told me that there was tea all over the floor.

Just to make sure that she wasn’t exaggerating I went over and checked. Sure enough, there was no more than a few tablespoons of tea but, even though I pointed this out, she was still critical of my motor skills.

“How do you know that I was the one who spilled the tea?” I asked, in effort to placate her. “After all, I have no memory of doing so, and you weren’t in the room…”

“You’re the only one who drinks tea!” she asserted, adding that there was no tea there last night.

“I think your lack of procedure fairness is worse than the Liberal Party’s,” I told her.

Strangely she did not find this amusing and she continued to clean up the mess without so much as a smile. Even worse was her reaction when I explained that my last comment was an attempt to make fun of David Van’s comment about procedural fairness and how I was sending up the whole notion of male privilege.

“I mean,” I continued, “the tea notwithstanding, do you understand what I mean about David Van…”

She insisted that she had as good an idea about male privilege as anyone. I immediately explained how that wasn’t true and anyway, I’m now waiting while I get her a takeaway coffee and writing this on my iPad as she seemed to think that somehow that would be the best thing for my wellbeing. While I can’t see how, there seemed to be no reasoning with her this morning and she’s normally such an intelligent, even-tempered sort of woman.

But enough about me. The topic of the week is: WHO KNEW WHAT AND WHEN!

It started out with the Liberals trying to weaponise the information that Katy Gallagher may have misled the Senate when she said that she didn’t know about certain events and that wasn’t trying weaponise the fact that there had been an allegation of something happening which needed a steam cleaning to destroy the evidence before the potential crime was reported to the AFP who would have had to suggest that there wasn’t enough evidence to look at the alleged couch.

However, the emergence of allegations about David Van has meant that the WHO KNEW WHAT AND WHEN! has moved across to what the Liberals knew about the various allegations prompting swift action from Peter Dutton to make it look like everything was a complete surprise to him. Scott Morrison felt it necessary to assure us that – as per usual – he didn’t know anything at all and if he was informed he promptly forgot it as he explained that it wasn’t his job to hold a memory.

Outraged that he should be asked to sit outside the party room while Peter Dutton looked into the situation, Senator Van has resigned from Liberal Party. Dutton was at pains to say that he wasn’t presuming anything about the allegations but that the right thing to do was to appear to be taking some sort of action, but Senator Van found the whole idea that we should take the word of three women when he’d has already said that nothing happened is just another example of how several women of differing political persuasions can all make up stories and ruin the career of a man that nobody seems to have heard of, even though “The Australian” seemed to suggest that knowledge of his behaviour was so widespread that the Liberals weren’t even going to try to blame Katy Gallagher for anything.

I can’t help but feel that the Liberals are like a group of insurgents who decides to bomb their opponents and in order that nobody can see the bomb one of them decides to sit on it until the time comes to set it off. Usually, they forget that it’s their side sitting on it and all that happens is that one of them gets their arse blown off and their opponents are relatively unscathed…

Yesterday I read a comment on social media that “Dutton was starting to find his feet as a leader…”

I couldn’t help but wonder why he didn’t think of looking in his mouth sooner!

Sometimes it’s hard to write things without sounding like a complete wanker…

Although when I think about it, there’s nothing wrong with being a wanker and it could be considered consensual sex with someone I love… Certainly we’ve seen a bit of that from some people in politics lately…

But seriously, when I write about some things it sounds like I don’t appreciate the seriousness of what I’m writing about because I come from the privileged position of being a white male of a certain age…

Believe me, I do understand poverty, powerlessness and a whole range of things that it may appear I’ve never experienced. And yes, my experience of such things has only been like dipping my toe in the water and saying, “It’s cold!”, while other people are drowning in the same lake.

That said, I’d like to say that one of the things I learnt is that life is like a game of soccer: most of the time nothing is happening, so we all over-react when it looks like something is about to happen.

Like I mean that we get over-excited or ridiculously stressed even though – on the balance of probabilities – the ball will just sail over the crossbar…

Ok, yes. It is stressful if you happen to be the goalie or the goalie’s friend… Or even the striker who’s missed such an easy shot… or the father of the manager who won’t be able to manage his disappointment.

Ok, some people’s lives more resemble a game of tennis where there are points scored all the time and I’d have to admit that seems a lot more like things are happening but in the end you’ve only lost a point and if you regroup you can still win the rest of the points and the game, the set, the match…

But sometimes, it’s just not about winning…

Sometimes it’s just about saying that someone is hurting here and we need to get the first aid onto the ground and we need to just stop the game for a while and look after people.

And if we can’t do that, we’re fucked…

I had a lot more to say but, for once, I feel like I should just let the people who look after people do what they need to do.

Apparently, it was Amanda Stoker who came forward and followed through with her threat about David Van… Nothing more because I don’t want a letter from his lawyer because I have enough to read and won’t get round to that reading it until another testament of the Bible is written…

Ah, shit. I always just wanted to be a poet but the world moved on…

Now, Katie Gallagher is accused of misleading Parliament. Of course, this is not a hanging offence! I remember hearing that a number of times over the past few years.

“So and so has been accused of something that’s technically against the rules, but let’s be fair, it’s not a hanging offence…”

I was always tempted to point out that Chopper Read admitted to murder but, well, here in Australia, that’s not a hanging offence… just a very serious crime that will have you jailed for years. Not a hanging offence though, because we don’t have capital punishment in this country.

Logically then, if a politician were to be guilty of murder, he or she could be sent to jail but they wouldn’t lose their ministry because, it isn’t a “hanging offence!”

In the good old days, if a politician misled Parliament they’d be expected to stand down. If you didn’t know something, then you didn’t make something up; you took the question on notice and replied when you had all the facts. Under John Howard, it became, “Look, Sir Les may have given incorrect information but he was under a misapprehension so he didn’t deliberately mislead, so we can forgive him (or her)!”

Anyway, back to the “embattled” senator.

It seems that a large number of people aren’t sure what this is all about, but that hasn’t stopped certain people from declaring that she’s guilty. Let’s be clear, misleading Parliament is not only not a hanging offence, but it’s not even against the law and as such, she doesn’t deserve the presumption of innocence.

So what’s actually happened? To recap:

• Before the 2019 election, there was an alleged incident in what was alleged to be a minister’s office. However, subsequent events have been unable to find any proof that Linda Reynold’s was a minister so we have to work on the theory that they’re may or may not have been something that happened in her office.
• After someone ordered the steam-cleaning of the office on a Sunday, it was thought that it wouldn’t be a good idea to inform the PM because he’d be as cross as Punch about the waste of taxpayer money with the Sunday penalty rates.
• One Liberal staffer was sacked because he came into work after hours which is apparently a sackable offence because nothing else was ever proven.
• A few years later, Brittany Higgins made a complaint which I won’t go into here because I’m sure you all know about this.
• When asked whether he knew about the incident, Scott Morrison announced that he wasn’t told by anyone. When asked about his office knowing, he said that he wasn’t sure who knew what and, being a busy man, he didn’t have time to ask them, so he appointed Phil Gaetjens to inquire who knew what and when.
• Around this time, it was suggested that Labor may have known about the “late work” incident and that they were planning to weaponise it to make the government look bad.
• Katy Gallagher denied this in the Senate.

It has since emerged that it’s possible that David Sharaz may have told Senator Gallagher and, if she knew when she said that she didn’t, she’s guilty of misleading Parliament. While it would be obviously the right thing to do to ask Phil Gaetjens to launch an inquiry into which Labor MPs knew what when, he’s still busy trying to find out about who knew anything in the previous PM’s office. So far, he doesn’t seem to have found any evidence that any of them knew anything about anything, even if most of the Liberal MPs knew about the man who was sacked for working late.

We’ve reached a point where a number of people are suggesting that Labor used this to bring down the Morrison government as though this is what was uppermost in people’s mind at the last election and not the Coalition’s constant announcements followed up by sweet bugger all, Scott’s refusal to hold a hose but happy to hold a pose, the Sports Rorts, the text messages that formed the basis of a report that cost over half million dollars which said that droughts were caused by a lack of rain, the fact that it wasn’t a race and just about everything else about them.

So how does this all play out?

Well, I suspect that Labor will try to ignore it, the Coalition will try to make an issue of it and come July they’ll start to realise that it’s not the sort of issue that the media will stay interested in. Once it’s been established that someone has done the wrong thing, they tend to bay for blood before losing interest when they don’t get any. (I am aware that even those who aren’t in the Murdoch stable stay on Labor’s case a little longer than the others. The Murdoch media don’t stay on something like this for too long though, because they have other things to blame Labor for such as world-wide inflation or the way the debt rose when the Coalition were in government or the pharmacists who won’t give anyone two month’s supply which they say is because of the shortages caused by people getting two month’s supply!)

And, if the Liberals have any sense, they won’t want to pursue it because it just reminds people of the whole sorry incident. Of course, that’s a pretty big qualifier!

Someone has assured me today that Price, Waterhouse, Cooper did not change their name to PwC in the hope that they’d be able to hide the names… Although he wasn’t so sure about the change of Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC…

Whatever, there’s a series of interesting series of events playing out and by “interesting” I mean things that one has to be careful about in case one has to take on the might of individuals who seem too able to mount very expensive legal cases. Ok, we know that Ben Roberts-Smith had some backing from Kerry Stokes but the person behind the million-dollar blind trust that Christian Porter had access to is still a mystery to all but a handful of people including we’re led to believe, Porter himself. That’s Christian Porter, I have no way of knowing whether Porter’s father knows the identity but, if he does, he’s certainly kept it from Christian.

Of course, it’s a bigger mystery that Porter’s million-dollar windfall was referred to as a “blind trust”, when the whole purpose of a blind trust is that you don’t know how the money is being invested, so you’d be unaware of decisions you make benefitting the trust thus protecting you from conflicts of interest. Are we to presume that the Porter blind trust was set up in a way that young Christian wouldn’t know how it was to be spent? It was only blind in that nobody knew who the donors were apart from a handful of people which I won’t name because it might look like they’re the donors and they seem to be the sort of people who like funding court cases.

But speaking of mysteries, there’s been quite a few pop up this week:

• When talking about PwC, the unstoppable (particularly when being asked a question she has no answer for) Jane Hume asserted that the privacy provisions of the ATO were totally necessary and – in spite of the recent PwC revelations “99.9%” of all the other occasions when firms had access to information they were behaving ethically. This is a mystery because I can’t work out how she knows this when the privacy provisions dictate that – even if they were aware of dodgy dealings – the ATO couldn’t tell the minister.
• Why the ATO couldn’t tell the relevant minister anything because the legislation prohibits them revealing tax information, even if it relates to potential wrongdoing, but the ATO could share information with Centrelink to check people just in case they’d done something wrong and Centrelink could send out Robodebt notices just in case people owed them money.
• The AFP couldn’t investigate PwC because there wasn’t enough evidence to start an investigation. On various occasions the AFP seem to have decided not to look for evidence because they didn’t have enough evidence and the mystery of this is that I thought it was the role of the police to look for evidence after a report, not to simply say, “Can you prove this allegation of a crime because you’ll need to be able to prove it and without solid evidence we’re not going to go looking for any because that might lead to us finding some?”
• According to reports, Scott Morrison is considering a job offer. The mystery is that we’re still expected to believe this when he was considered too much of a risk for PwC.
• Phil Lowe’s “Hope to see you in October” at the end of his appearance at Senate Estimates. This is a mystery because his suggestion that people move in together to reduce the demand for rental accommodation was the perfect line to enable Jim Chalmers to announce that they’ll be getting the new governor to move into the Reserve Bank with Phil. (Now, don’t get me wrong about Mr Lowe’s suggestion of people sharing houses. In economic terms, he’s absolutely right. Just as, in economic terms, we need to put a few people out of work so that they can’t afford rent and will need to sleep in their cars – if they have one – and this will reduce the demand for housing. In economic terms, if it’s a particularly cold winter some of those without housing may freeze to death, further reducing demand. And, in economic terms, if we follow Jonathan’s Swift “A Modest Proposal”* and allow the poor people to market their babies as gourmet food, we’ll pretty much have gone a long way to solving all our budgetary problems.)
• And finally, complaints about “elites” advocating for a Yes vote on the Voice. As the meaning of elite is “a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society”, I would have thought it only sensible to listen to the elites. Surely we shouldn’t be ignoring those who are superior in quality to listen to the likes of Malcolm Roberts! The idea that we should ignore those people that even Mr Dutton calls elite seems rather mysterious to me!

Hopefully the coming days will clear up some of the mysteries. Particularly the one about Scotty getting a job. Maybe Labor could offer his old job back at Tourism Australia. I mean, Mr Morrison will always be synonymous with “Where the Bloody Hell Are You?”

*Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” was written in 1729 and is one of the greatest satires on economic solutions that don’t take into account basic humanity.

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