Mark Latham found himself a cushy number after he lost the leadership of the federal Labor Party. He nominated himself for a seat in the NSW Upper House, the Legislative Assembly, representing Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party : In March 2019, he was elected for an eight year term.

In the NSW Legislative Assembly you don’t actually have to do much apart from appear on Sky after Dark periodically and give the impression of being a man of the people. But Mark’s ambition has been to get more One Nation representatives into the NSW parliament. Not the lower house as they would actually have to be elected, rather the upper house where they aren’t accountable to an electorate. So Mark has come up with a wheeze to get somebody into parliament without actually being elected.

The idea is that with four years remaining in his appointed term, he’s going to resign and create a casual vacancy. Under the Constitution Act 1902 (NSW) the procedure for filling that vacancy does not require a by-election (it’s the upper house you see) but calls for the state Governor to convene a joint sitting of the Legislative Council and the Legislative Assembly to elect a person to fill the vacant seat.

The person nominated for election to fill a vacant seat – and this is where Mark has been doing his homework – must be a member of the same political party as the member he or she replaces at the time that member was elected.

So, Mark resigns and another One Nation luminary takes his place – they call it parachuting – and Mark goes off into semi-retirement somewhere on the NSW North coast ? Not on your Nelly ! Remember, it is Mr Latham’s intention to get more One Nation people into the NSW parliament and this strategy doesn’t achieve that – one out, one in doesn’t work.

This is where it gets tricky as Mark intends to nominate himself again at the state election in March 2023. He’s relying on his name recognition and the ‘donkey vote’ to achieve this. All going to plan, he will be elected for an eight year term next March and will join the person who took his place following his retirement.

This is all legal but is it ethical ? Is it democracy at work ? You be the judge.

The current parliamentary sitting has been noteworthy for the attempts by the opposition to ‘ping’ Labor ministers for being in breach of the new code of conduct. It seems that the opposition have dedicated the time of their staff to combing through ministerial declarations of interests trying to find instances where a minister may be in breach of the new code.

Albanese has gone to some considerable lengths to present a ministerial code of conduct that leaves little wriggle room for ministers and clears up the loopholes that the former coalition government ministers were able to exploit.

In particular, the use of Blind Trusts has been outlawed : who can forget the use of a blind trust by former Attorney General Christian Porter to pay legal costs for a defamation action he launched against the ABC using funds, the source of which has never been disclosed.

The new code requires that: “Ministers will not have any direct shareholdings. Ministers are required to divest themselves of shareholdings, except in superannuation and other broadly diversified managed funds. There will be no ‘blind trust’ arrangements,” under this code.

“Ministers will be personally responsible for their private interests. Ministers won’t be allowed to delegate that responsibility to anyone else, such as in a ‘blind trust’ arrangement.”

This is the full code for those interested.

Probably the only criticism of this code is that, in trying to be proscriptive it can be confusing as Attorney General Mark Dreyfus found in Question Time on Thursday following a barrage of questions over his self-managed superannuation fund : fortunately the code allows for external scrutiny and advice in circumstances where there is ambiguity which seems to be the case with Dreyfus.

On the positive side, it is good that the Albanese government has moved quickly to update the code of conduct for ministers and to address some of the glaring omissions of the past – for instance as was noted in the parliament on Thursday pretty well all of the former governments’ ministers would have been in breach of this code of conduct and several engaged in multiple breaches.

I’m no economist but neither am I a fool. When somebody tells me that inflation has taken off in Australia and that the cause is largely due to an escalation in the prices of goods and services driven by wage and salary increases and the costs of production I start to take interest.

For a start it can’t be spiralling wages as they have been stuck in the doldrums for years while corporate profits have surged and executive bonuses have ballooned. So we need to look elsewhere.

The Reserve Bank of Australia says that they have to dampen down spending because you and I (well not so much me, more you) have been borrowing too much money and spending it on buying up residential land and houses like the much maligned drunken sailor – you have been doing this because money was so cheap that you would be a fool not to do so ; also you were cheered on by successive governments who gave you generous negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions to encourage you in your wanton spending.

Well, on Tuesday the Reserve Bank will take a big stick to us (well, more you than me) and probably increase interest rates by at least half of one percent if not seventy five basis points (that’s the clever way of saying .75%). This will quickly be passed on by the banks and will, they hope, quell your lust for borrowing and all will be well.

My response to that economic thesis can be summarized in one word : piffle !

My normal source for economic commentary and advice is my local IGA manager so I put it to him to explain why pretty well every product in his store had gone up in price in recent weeks and months : he gave me three reasons.

First and foremost was the cost of freight, more specifically petrol and diesel which due to embargoes and sanctions on oil production in places ranging from Venezuela, Iran, Iraq and the Russian Federation has meant that the world is reliant on Saudi Arabia and the UAE for our oil supplies and they are quite content to screw us for all we’re worth while they can – they see the coming revolution in electric vehicles and transportation as impacting their business model so they are getting in for a quick quid while they have a captive customer base – hence fuel is costing a lot more money at the pump and goods are landing on the shelves at IGA with an additional premium.

The second reason is climate and floods mainly impacting lettuce, tomatoes and other fresh veggies : this he says will pass as we move towards spring and domestic production gets back online – who eats salads in winter time anyway ? Oddly in my local area growers have been harvesting and dumping large quantities of Avocado in recent times as there is evidently a glut and it’s not worth taking them to market – go figure.

The third reason is a very human attribute summed up as hopping on the bandwagon. A very cynical approach by some suppliers of goods and services who see prices going up all around and decide to bump up their prices just for the sake of it.

Image from australianunions.org.au

So, the question is will actions taken by the Reserve Bank on Tuesday, by way of increasing interest rates, ease inflation in Australia. My IGA manager, adopting a term favoured by economists, says : pig’s arse they will !

What do you think ?

PS : The captioned photo of Clive Palmer has nothing to do with this article but I couldn’t resist it – this was one of the few occasions, when as a sitting member, he actually made it to the parliament and stayed awake (briefly).

The right-wing nutters on Sky-after-Dark are beside themselves with righteous indignation that prime minister Albanese is spending so much time overseas when he should be visiting flood inundated suburbs in Sydney.

They liken Albanese’s overseas trip to that of Scott Morrison’s family holiday in Hawaii during the 2019 bushfires – a holiday that the opposition knew nothing about and even the Deputy Prime Minister seemed unaware that he was leading the country.

Just how a so-called news organisation can equate a family holiday in Hawaii with a trip to war torn Ukraine beggars the imagination.

But then, Sky is not really a news organisation in the traditional mould. Their evening offering is all about confected outrage usually aimed at those they see as Lefties and of course the ABC.

Just to be clear the prime minister has been away for little over a week on official trips to a NATO leaders’ summit in Spain, mending fences with President Emmanuel Macron in Paris, rekindling a free trade arrangement with the EU and a high-security trip to Kyiv to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

How dare he screeches Murdoch owned Sky, hasn’t he got a phone? Presumably, according to Sky, if it’s good enough for Rupert to divorce the long-suffering Jerry Hall by email why can’t ‘Airbus Albo’ communicate with world leaders by Twitter.

Despite all the trips being official business and in the national interest, Newscorp are not happy that a Labor prime minister is hobnobbing with world leaders when he could be filling sandbags in Parramatta.

On social media some outraged nutters have taken to the hashtags ‘Airbus Albo’ and ‘Where’s Albo’ and others labelled him ‘Anthony Overseasy’.

In my opinion, Albo is a refreshing change and is letting the world know that Australia is back and that we do actually believe in climate change and that we have a contribution to make on global issues and that we will do our bit.

Remember the NEG, the National Energy Guarantee ?

Introduced by Malcolm Turnbull in 2017. The idea of the NEG was to establish a national energy policy to tackle rising energy prices in Australia and to introduce a bipartisan national policy on power and energy. It was also designed to give confidence and clarity for energy producers to invest in energy infrastructure into the future.

The overriding commitment of the NEG was to combine emissions reductions with stability and continuity of energy supply at stable prices as we transition away from fossil fuels.

Malcolm Turnbull was tossed out of office in August 2018 and his successor, Scott Morrison announced in September 2018 that the government would henceforth focus on cheap electricity prices and Australia would scrap the NEG and all would be well – and some of us fell for it : whatever the case it was off the table.

The important components to the new Morrison plan were not to mention the NEG ever again and certainly not to mention Malcolm Turnbull – in fact, they talked about throwing him out of the Liberal Party.

So, in effect nothing was done beyond burying data on energy shortages and ignoring warnings of price spikes coming.

Interestingly, WA introduced gas reservation as a policy in that state : if you were a gas producer you had to reserve fifteen percent of production for domestic consumption in Western Australia. The ACT introduced renewable energy targets and obligations which have shielded them from the current price fluctuations in domestic gas (and coal) markets.

Beyond that nothing was done other than, in the last few days, when the coalition now in opposition decided that what was happening was all Labor’s fault and if you believe them, the energy market has crashed in the last ten days due to the election of a Labor government.

At the time this bipartisan policy was dumped it is worth noting that Centre Alliance MP Rebekha Sharkie urged the Morrison Government to find an agreement with Labor, saying the industry needed a bipartisan policy for investment certainty.

“We are in a paralysing policy vacuum and the dumping by the Government of their own policy [the NEG] was nonsensical. The NEG was a compromise, but we were prepared to support it,” she said.

This fell on deaf ears as the coalition under Morrison by this time had moved on to more important things like, religious discrimination laws.

Labor have said that they will revive the NEG.

On 30 April, less than a month before the election I penned this piece, about the foreshadowed spike in energy prices, about to hit Australian consumers: Coalition promises higher electricity costs!

I wrote it because it was quite clear that the Coalition were not going to come clean before the election and it was a known major factor that was going to hit Australian businesses and consumers as winter came on.

The prices for coal, gas and petroleum products are all being hit largely due to the Ukraine war, the sanctions placed on the Russians, profit gouging by OPEC and, in the domestic context, a complete malaise on energy policy over the ten years of Coalition rule.

Clearly, we can’t do much about the supply of petrol and diesel products as we are wholly reliant on offshore producers and refiners and OPEC have told the world that they will not be increasing production to ease the shortages. However, we could start by accelerating the transition to electric vehicles now that we know that the man, who said they wouldn’t tow your boat or get you and your family to your favourite camping spot, was lying.

In the meantime we still need petroleum products to get us through the transition.

Interestingly, Venezuela holds the planet’s largest reserves of untapped oil but that won’t help us as the US have sanctions on the Venezuelan government – evidently they don’t like President Nicolás Maduro. Another fun-fact: Iran holds the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves but their exports are also under US bans and sanctions for much the same reasons.

As regards coal and gas, we are major producers of both and we have the ability to reserve or hold back a portion of our production for domestic consumption at prices that are not determined by world market fluctuations. Something that is obviously necessary until we can break the grip of fossil fuels and replace them with price-stable renewable resources – Vladimir Putin does not control the supply of sunlight or wind although he may think he does.

In the UK the conservative government has imposed a twenty-five per cent ‘windfall profits tax’ on oil and gas companies. A windfall tax being a one-off tax imposed by a government on producers and suppliers who, through no effort on their part, were lucky enough to benefit from something they were not responsible for – in other words, a windfall profit.

Our gas and coal producers are also in the fortunate position of being recipients of these windfall profits due largely to geopolitical happenings in other parts of the world: the question is, should they reap these windfall profits and should we be funding them?

The former Coalition government knew that this supply and demand price crunch was coming, it’s been forecast for over twelve months, but they suppressed the release of information because it didn’t fit with their election narrative and apart from that they love to see ‘can do capitalism’ in action. From comments made by the new leader of the Coalition, they will now be using these price spikes to attack the new Labor government for incompetence in office even though, you will note, the new government were only installed a matter of days ago – that’s Voldemort for you.

You may recall that the Gillard government enacted The Minerals Resource Rent Tax (MRRT), a tax on profits generated from the mining of non-renewable resources in Australia. It was a replacement for the proposed Resource Super Profit Tax (RSPT). The tax, levied on 30% of the “super-profits” from gas production and the mining of iron ore and coal was introduced on 1 July 2012.

The Coalition, led by Tony Abbott, went to the 2010 and 2013 elections promising to repeal the tax. They considered the tax to be the actions of a socialist regime and when they won office at the 2013 election the tax was repealed. I wonder what they now think of Boris Johnson’s actions with his windfall profits tax which, is essentially the same thing?

Surely it is time that we had some coherent taxation laws governing the extraction and sale of our non-renewable resources until such time as we can put in place reliable renewable energy infrastructure, which will not be subject to geopolitical price manipulation. We need to ensure continuity of price-stable energy rather than pandering to the multi-national mining conglomerates.

I have a great deal more confidence that the new Albanese government will do this contrasted with the flashmob we have just cartwheeled out of office – don’t let us down, Albo!

We know that the coalition are better economic managers because they told us so. The coalition are also good on one liners. As Josh Frydenberg told us during the budget speech “The government is delivering on its commitment to secure affordable and reliable energy supply and has achieved its goal of wholesale electricity prices under $70/MWh”.

The worrying thing is that they now lie to us without hesitation : Josh Frydenberg at every opportunity tells us how electricity prices have fallen 8 per cent since the last election due to the ‘steady as she goes’ coalition management of the economy. What he doesn’t mention is the 10 per cent lift in car prices, the 8 per cent increase in milk prices, the 11 per cent jump in furniture prices or the 13.5 per cent increase in childcare costs since 2019.

But even on electricity costs they are telling lies. The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) said in recent days that wholesale electricity costs have soared 141 per cent in the three months to 31 March 2022 compared with the same period last year and these increases will be passed on to consumers (probably after the election).

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that :

Frydenberg is in denial and has yet to acknowledge this massive increase in electricity costs but when he does he will undoubtedly lay the blame with … wait for it … the Labor party and the best way of avoiding these increases is to re-elect the coalition.

Morrison has said that the reasons for the increases, apart from Labor, are the war in Ukraine which has created shortages of coal and gas and according to Scott the rigid laws of supply & demand require that we pay more for our own coal when it’s in short supply in Europe – go figure !

The solution to this global market disruption according to Morrison – I don’t hold a shovel mate – is not to vote for Labor or the TEAL Independents and all will be well.

You know and I know that the real problem is that we are locked into global markets for the supply of fossil fuels and until we start to take seriously the transition to renewable energy we will continue to be price takers when it comes to coal and gas even though we are one of the world’s major suppliers of both commodities.

Meanwhile, the coalition have dropped the economy as being their strong suit and have moved on to national security and preparations for war. Over to you Captain Mainwaring.

Seriously, how could anybody re-elect this mob ?

Did you know that the United Nations has a Human Rights Council made up of forty-seven nations who each sit on the Council for three years, elected on a rotational basis from the 193 UN members. On 1 January 2021 they elected the following countries for a three year term, to oversee human rights on behalf of all nations.

Bolivia, China, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, France, Gabon, Malawi, Mexico, Nepal, Pakistan,
Russian Federation, Senegal, Ukraine, United Kingdom and Uzbekistan.

These 15 members will serve three-year terms beginning on 1 January 2021. Do you notice anything odd about these nominees ?

Yes, you spotted it. Both Russia and Ukraine were sitting side by side on the human rights council : today the UN has suspended the Russian Federation from the council, I wonder why.

Then you have the UN Security Council which has primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. It has 15 Members, and each Member has one vote. There are five permanent members (USA, UK, France, China and Russia). The UN Security Council gives veto powers to its five permanent members, which means essentially that any resolution put to the security council can die instantly if one permanent member of the council says ‘nyet’. So, if there was a vote to remove, for instance, the Russian Federation from the security council it would have to have Russia’s approval to go ahead.

It seems that the only thing the security council can regularly achieve unanimous agreement on is a resolution to break for lunch !

From time to time the UN is characterised as a nut house and it does seem that Alice in Wonderland was adopted as a template – you be the judge :

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

You may well think that the United Nations no longer has a place in the modern world but, like coal mining its supporters say, it provides employment : what more could you ask ?

This is a little piece I penned (and published) in 2018 when the Liberal Party in NSW were trying to make their pre-selection process more democratic. It was known as the Warringah Motion and was driven by Tony Abbott, and it was adopted. This meant that the pre-selection of candidates would be a matter for individual branches without federal interference or factional stacking.

That worked out well, didn’t it ?

The Liberal Party is nothing if not democratic : perhaps it’s closer to being nothing after what happened over the Craig Kelly preselection for the NSW seat of Hughes.

Last year the Liberal party in NSW voted on what came to be known as the Warringah Motion sponsored by Tony Abbott and vigorously supported by temporary senator, Jim Molan.

The so-called Warringah motion was designed to reform the Liberal preselection process and ensure a members’ plebiscite to select candidates for state and federal seats in NSW. The motion passed 748 votes to 476 at a party convention in Sydney in July last year.

Tony Abbott emerged victorious from the NSW Liberal Party convention after his motion to give party members a greater say in selecting candidates was passed. “This, gives grassroots members more power in selecting candidates,” Abbott said. He went on to say that it would create a more democratic Liberal Party and end the potential for corruption : “It’s a clear road ahead to one member one vote preselections, a clear road ahead to a democratic political party which is controlled by its members not by lobbyists, not by factionists, not by strong pullers.”

“I think this is a great day for the NSW Liberal Party. And because it’s been a great day for the NSW Liberal Party, I think it will be good for our Government in Canberra and I think it will be very good for Australia” Abbott concluded.

So, a jubilant Tony Abbott must have been a bit non-plussed when this new era of democratic preselections was thrown under a bus at the first available opportunity, essentially to preserve a numpty by the name of Craig Kelly who is nominally the member for Hughes in the federal parliament. Nominally because he seems to spend more time waffling on the Sky-after-dark Muppet Show than he does making a useful contribution to our parliament.

When the preselectors in Hughes were showing signs of getting themselves a decent local member in the lead up to the 2019 election, Kelly made it known that if he was dumped by the grass roots membership, he would go to the cross-benches for the remainder of this parliamentary term and further erode the authority of this already lame minority government ; perhaps even bring the government down .

Our prime minister acknowledging the power of the Right, in an act of desperation, capitulated and decided that expedience was the way to go and that preselections by the grass roots Liberal membership was all very well but only when they do as they are told. Clearly in Hughes they were not prepared to preselect Craig Kelly, so our action-man prime minister quite incredibly called on the NSW Liberal party executive to scrap all democratic processes and re-endorse all sitting members – including of course, Kelly – without the need for the messy and inconvenient involvement of the party membership : and that’s just what they did.

Ironically, the Warringah Motion was promoted as broadening the democratic processes within the Liberal party which in turn it was thought would boost branch membership, a win win it was suggested.

The question is, when the executive of a political party are prepared to scrap their own democratic principles and processes to appease threats of blackmail from a person like Craig Kelly, is that the sort of party with which you would wish to associate yourself ?

Zali Steggall has been a target of the Liberal Party ever since she dared topple Tony Abbott, in the 2019 election, in the seat of Warringah.

So, it now seems there has been a political hit on Steggall over electoral donations she received from the KInghorn Family Trust which had donated $100,000 to Steggall’s campaign. This donation was in one cheque but represented pledges of $12,500 each on behalf of eight members of the family trust.

The eight separate donations at $12,500 fell below the disclosure threshold but the AEC quite correctly noted that the payment by a single cheque exceeded the threshold and required further disclosure: this disclosure was corrected by Steggall in February 2021.

The threshold for donations requiring disclosure at that time was $13,800 since then it has been increased by indexation to $14,500. The system at the federal level was running quite well with a disclosure threshold of just $1500 until 2006 when John Howard decided that was too low and increased it to “more than $10,000” with annual indexation : that’s when the rot set in and neither party has been prepared to address the growing problem since.

This practice of donation splitting, when payments are divided into smaller amounts so that large payments can be kept under the disclosure threshold, has been widely adopted by all political parties and is still quite common and legal. Where Steggall came undone was that the established political parties are alert to the need to keep the individual donations under the threshold ; that’s why they are calling Steggall’s blunder a rookie mistake.

So, in effect nothing illegal has occurred and when the oversight was brought to the independent member for Warringah’s attention, it was corrected.

Does it warrant a media hit? I don’t think so but there is no doubt that the whole of the regulatory system governing political donations badly needs to be overhauled. When you consider that just $17.9 million worth of individual donations were declared for the 2020 – 2021 year compared with the almost $177 million received by parties you would be forgiven if you thought that the disclosure regime was better described as a non-disclosure scheme.

Personally, Steggall’s oversight doesn’t concern me but I am far more concerned that our former Attorney General, Christian Porter, was able to receive and conceal an anonymous donation said to be in the order of a million dollars. In Porter’s case he threw a legal doona over the donation by calling it the proceeds of a blind trust and thus he could not reveal either the source of the funds or the donor – all legal according to him, wink wink, nudge nudge !

Not to mention the potential for disruption to our democracy, not from overseas interests as Peter Dutton would have us believe, but closer to home in the form of Clive Frederick Palmer who spent $60 million in the lead up to the 2019 election without much of a return on his money. But he threatens to spend even more this time around and may well be able to insert one or more of his stooges into the senate: that’s what ASIO are worried about and we should be too.

Originally this draft legislation dealing with religious freedom was proposed by the coalition government to comfort religious sensibilities which may have felt threatened when the nation went to a Clayton’s ‘referendum’ to change the Marriage Act to permit same-sex marriage – the federal marriage act having been changed by the Howard government in 2004 to prohibit same-sex marriage – go figure!

In fact, it wasn’t a referendum or even a plebiscite as the senate had rejected those mechanisms, insisting that if an act of the federal parliament (the Marriage Act) was to be changed then it was the duty of the federal parliament to follow conventional democratic procedures to effect that change: common sense from the senate!

Ultimately it became a non-binding voluntary postal survey and it passed with 61.6% of the eligible voters approving marriage equality.

Having gone through that ordeal it was considered by some in the coalition that religious freedoms were being eroded and to appease these folk a religious freedoms act was placed on the coalition wish-list. The only thing that changed as the draft legislation was promulgated was that it became a religious discrimination bill rather than a religious freedoms bill.

The Morrison government have made it an article of their faith to get this legislation through before they announce an election and prorogue the parliament. That means that this legislation must get through in the scheduled eight sitting days of the House of Representatives between February and April (after which we will be in caretaker mode leading up the election, probably in May).

Among the contentious provisions of the Bill are:

Section 7

(2) Subject to subsection (6), a religious body does not discriminate
against a person under this Act by engaging, in good faith, in
conduct that a person of the same religion as the religious body
could reasonably consider to be in accordance with the doctrines,
tenets, beliefs or teachings of that religion.

and

(4) Subject to subsection (6), a religious body does not discriminate
against a person under this Act by engaging, in good faith, in
conduct to avoid injury to the religious susceptibilities of adherents
of the same religion as the religious body.

These are the provisions which, despite the wording of the section, allow for a religious body to discriminate both subjectively and objectively: this is not religious freedom it is blatant religious discrimination.

Interestingly, the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) already has a wide exemption for religious educational institutions under section 38.

Educational institutions established for religious purposes

38 (1) Nothing in paragraph 14(1)(a) or (b) or 14(2)(c) renders it unlawful for a person to discriminate against another person on the ground of the other person’s sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or relationship status or pregnancy in connection with employment as a member of the staff of an educational institution that is conducted in accordance with the doctrines, tenets, beliefs or teachings of a particular religion or creed, if the first‑mentioned person so discriminates in good faith in order to avoid injury to the religious susceptibilities of adherents of that religion or creed.

This type of exemption appears in several pieces of legislation and generally gives religious bodies the freedom to discriminate in their employment practices even though many of these bodies, whilst posturing as private institutions, are substantial recipients of public funding.

Even the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) gives religious institutions an exemption.

51 Discrimination

(1) An employer must not take adverse action against a person who is an employee, or prospective employee, of the employer because of the person’s race, colour, sex, sexual orientation, age, physical or mental disability, marital status, family or carer’s responsibilities, pregnancy, religion, political opinion, national extraction or social origin.

(2) However, subsection (1) does not apply to action that is:

(c) if the action is taken against a staff member of an institution conducted in accordance with the doctrines, tenets, beliefs or teachings of a particular religion or creed—taken:

(i) in good faith; and

(ii) to avoid injury to the religious susceptibilities of adherents of that religion or creed.

The point being, that there are already many overlapping exemptions granted to religious bodies to allow them to discriminate in any number of ways: do they or we really need any more?

To work through this hotch-potch of existing legislation and bring some clarity and common sense to the whole issue of religious discrimination, the Australian Law Reform Commission was asked to report on the Framework of Religious Exemptions in Anti-discrimination Legislation.

The only problem is that the ALRC are not reporting back to government until twelve months after the Religious Discrimination legislation is passed: cart before the horse?

So, the question has to be asked: why is it so critical for this legislation to be enacted by our parliament in the dying days of this term of government when clearly it hasn’t had sufficient thought or consideration and when we haven’t even had the opportunity of seeing what the Australian Law Reform Commission have to say on the subject. Could it be that the Morrison government who have an appalling track record on legislative integrity want at least one run on their scoreboard before they whisk us away to an election?

Clearly, they don’t consider a federal integrity commission to be such a priority!

Scott Morrison loves slogans but slogans have a habit of coming back to bite you on the bum.

For instance, if you were to ask him about the years he got out of Labor’s Debt and Deficit Disaster he would probably look at you blankly and say he doesn’t recall that.

Another that was road tested recently and quickly consigned to the bin was Can Do Capitalism. In Queensland, in particular, this brought back some painful repressed memories of a tragic time in the sunshine state when the LNP foisted on an unsuspecting electorate an upstart they called Can Do Campbell. A diminutive man called Campbell Newman, who bears a striking resemblance to Gollum of Tolkien’s middle-earth series, who seized office in Queensland on the back of this slogan but only for one term as the people of Queensland soon discovered that he was in fact No Can Do Campbell. He was consigned to history at the next election, at least that’s what we thought : he has recently resurfaced from that Augean Stable we know as Sky-after-Dark where he has been languishing with other political ne’er-do-wells – evidently he will be seeking a federal Senate seat in the next election and has embraced Clive Palmer : quite a stretch you may well think.

The Australian Way was dropped on an unsuspecting world at the COP-26 in Glasgow and nobody knew what he was talking about – ultimately they found out that what it means is to tell lies about net zero by 2050 but not actually do anything – after all as Scotty noted at the G20 we’re good at digging things up.

That brings us to Technology Not Taxes which went down quite well with the focus groups and seemed to get Angus Taylor quite excited but then a question was asked : what exactly does it mean ?

Now that we know that an Electric Vehicle will tow your trailer and will tow your boat and will get you out to your favourite camping spot with your family, does that mean that EV’s are now part of the new technology and will help in reducing our emissions ?

The answer of course is yes and, as EV’s are part of the technology not taxes slogan why is it that governments insist on imposing punitive taxes on imported EV’s ? For instance an imported EV will attract a Luxury Car Tax of 33% on values above the declared threshold plus a GST of 10% and a state Stamp Duty of around 5%. In the case of the popular Tesla Model 3 the federal taxes amount to approximately $10,000 (LCT $2,029 and GST $7857) plus around $3500 in state stamp duty.

So the slogan is going to have to be tweaked perhaps to technology and taxes on a need to know basis – and you don’t need to know and Scotty will deny it anyhow !

With great and perhaps undue haste the government wants to introduce legislation before the next election that will require you to carry suitable and acceptable personal ID when you next vote.

The need for this legislation we are told is to maintain voter integrity, in particular to avoid voters voting multiple times ; even though, there is no evidence that this has been a problem in the past.

The government have resisted calls for the AEC to actually issue a voter ID to all registered voters before the election in 2022. The reason they will not do this is that it would ideally have to be a photo ID and this goes against the conservative grain as it implies too much government in our lives ; something the coalition are positively against. So, the responsibility falls back on the individual to provide personal ID and for the election booth official to verify this on the day.

In my regional area the process so far has been that you front up, give your name and address and the official manually draws a line through you name on a hard-copy of the electoral roll ; for some reason we haven’t got the roll online but perhaps that will change (anybody know ?). Having a manual system is, of course open to voter fraud as you could easily pop along to an adjoining suburb, enter another booth, have your name and address again pencilled through and vote for a second time and that would only come to light some months later if at all.

Personally, I have retained a post-card sent to me by the AEC some years ago when our electorate boundaries changed. This card tells me my name, address and details of my electoral division and confirms my registration. I normally take this card along when I vote just in case and will continue to do that. Just as an exercise, this morning I thought that I would check my electoral status on the federal electoral roll – guess what, after several attempts it could not find me – check it out for yourself here.

The odd thing is that, if on the day the electoral official cannot find me on the electoral roll and refuses to allow me to vote, I can expect to be fined some time in the future for failing to vote as required by law !

As I mentioned elsewhere the other day, I have written to my local member asking him to insist that, if this legislation goes through as the government insist it must, that the AEC be required to send a personal ID postcard to every registered voter prior to next election (inevitably for a number of reasons it would not be a photo ID but it would be something). I suggest you could do likewise but you will have to be quick as they want this legislation through the House next week.