Following the repeal of the Medevac Laws, a number of asylum seekers are caught up in an exquisite political conundrum which nobody in the Morrison government, least of all Spud Dutton, want to discuss.

So, I’ll call on to the readers of AIMN to come up with a solution: after all, I didn’t vote for this mob.

Firstly, you will remember that in April 2016 the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea ruled that the detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island was illegal. The five-man bench of the court ruled that such detention breached the right to personal liberty in the PNG constitution. The Supreme Court ordered the PNG and Australian Governments to immediately take steps to end the detention of asylum seekers in PNG.

“Both the Australian and Papua New Guinea governments shall forthwith take all steps necessary to cease and prevent the continued unconstitutional and illegal detention of the asylum seekers or transferees at the relocation centre on Manus Island and the continued breach of the asylum seekers or transferees constitutional and human rights,” the judges ordered.

In response, minister Dutton ordered that a legal fiction be created: he deemed that by opening the gates of the detention centre, building new accommodation at Lorengau on Manus Island and allowing the detainees to walk free during daylight hours would demonstrate that these people – most of whom had been deemed to be genuine refugees – were not detained, they were merely subject to another legal dictum – introduced by the pop group, The Eagles in their classic Hotel California – and now part of settled Australian asylum seeker law :

‘You can check out any time you like, But you can never leave!’

Fast forward to Melbourne today and we find that there are around 45 asylum seekers who had previously been detained in PNG but who had, under the Medevac Laws, been brought to Australia for urgent medical attention. The men are currently, following their medical treatment, detained on one floor of the $180-a-night Mantra on Bell in Preston, which is off-limits to other guests and patrolled by private security guards.

The difficulty facing Spud Dutton is that he cannot easily return these folk to detention in PNG as – unlike Australia – it is unconstitutional under PNG law to hold people against their will unless they have been charged and convicted of a crime and sentenced in a properly constituted court of law; always remembering that seeking asylum is not a crime. So PNG is unlikely to take them back, as to issue them with a tourist visa would be taking migration law into the realms of Monty Python.

So, in between cameo appearances on 2GB and Sky and television ads with uniformed AFP personnel, minister Dutton is pondering his next move having effectively painted himself into a corner with little room to maneuver.

When repealing the Medevac Laws senator Jacquie Lambie, whose vote was pivotal, evidently called on the government to find a durable resettlement solution to secure her vote. Not only for these 45 men surviving on room service at the Mantra on Bell in Preston but for those other poor souls still in PNG and on Nauru and those scattered around Australia including the unfortunate family of four still in punitive detention on Christmas Island.

So far the government have been unable to come up with a solution beyond saying that ‘it’s a matter of national security’ (code for not saying anything) and that they will not accept the very reasonable offer, made by successive New Zealand prime minister’s, to take 150 such people a year for resettlement.

As my inspiration and mentor, Oliver Hardy would say, ‘well that’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into, Spud’!

Seeing Liberal Party goons in our parliament congratulating themselves and sharing high-fives following the repeal of the Medevac Laws was not only obscene but also quite worrying. It brought to mind the verse attributed to Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) which I have slightly modified here:

First they came for the asylum seekers, and I did not speak out –
because I was not an asylum seeker.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out –
because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.

It is fitting that we remember that it was the death of 24-year-old Hamid Khazaei that gave impetus for a caring nation and their parliament to enact the Medevac Laws in the first place.

Back in September 2014 this young man died in a Brisbane hospital after he had contracted a leg infection on Manus Island where he had been held in detention by Australian immigration authorities. Brisbane Coroner Mr Terry Ryan found his death followed a series of clinical errors and delays, including a lack of antibiotics on Manus Island to treat tropical infections and a failure by Australian immigration officials to urgently grant a doctor’s request for the twenty-four-year-old asylum seeker to be transferred to Australia for life saving treatment.

The coroner found the Australian Government had not met its responsibility to detainees such as Mr Hamid Khazaei to provide health care that was “broadly comparable” to that available in Australia.

The coroner recommended a systemic overhaul of healthcare responses in offshore detention, including a new policy to allow doctors on the ground, rather than Canberra officials, to approve medical transfers.

That systemic overhaul recommended by the coroner came into being in the form of the Medevac Laws that have now been repealed.

High-Five, Jacqui!

Coroner’s Report in full here.

This government seem absolutely committed to wasting the time of our parliament (both Houses) with their silly ideological tantrums. After losing the union bashing vote for the totally inappropriately named Ensuring Integrity legislation they now want to repeal the Medevac legislation for the poor souls who are still stuck in detention on Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

You may remember the Migration Amendment (Urgent Medical Treatment) Bill 2018 was introduced at a time during the last parliament when the coalition were in minority. The Bill provided for the temporary transfer to Australia of persons on Manus Island or Nauru, and their families, if they were assessed by two or more treating doctors as requiring medical treatment and required the temporary transfer of all children and their families from offshore detention to Australia for the purpose of medical or psychiatric assessment.

The law allowed for Australian-based doctors to recommend a refugee or asylum seeker offshore be transferred to Australia for care rather than just leaving it in the hands of bureaucrats although it still allowed the minister to refuse if he disagreed with the clinical assessment – in which case it goes to the independent medical panel for review – or if he has concerns based on security or criminal grounds.

Peter Dutton hated this legislation as it took some of his power away but certainly didn’t stop him from interfering with a medical transfer if there were security or criminal considerations : Dutton maintained that the majority of these folk who have been detained offshore for more than six years are rapists, pedophiles, murderers and/or terrorists yet he does so without evidence and none have been charged with crimes either by the authorities in PNG or Nauru or Australia.

It seems that Jacqui Lambie is the crucial vote needed by the government to repeal this legislation but she has evidently placed a condition on the government for her support. She maintains that the real objective of the government should be resettling these folk rather than restricting their access to medical services. It is reported that she has called on the government to accept the resettlement offer made consistently by New Zealand to take 150 asylum seekers a year from Australian detention and then close the detention centres : considering there are only 263 people on Manus (and elsewhere in PNG) and 221 on Nauru this seems like a reasonable request from Lambie but Dutton has, we are told, rejected this demand.

Last week the full bench of the Federal Court threw another spanner into Dutton’s manoeuvrings as one of the arguments the government have been pushing is that medical assessment by an Australian doctor of an offshore patient (by way off reviewing case notes and online video assessments where possible – although Nauru have been blocking these) was not acceptable medical practice and thus according to our government, the assessment must be left to doctors on Nauru and in PNG and evidently bureaucrats in Canberra. The Federal Court ruled that assessments done remotely by doctors in Australia were quite in order and reflected acceptable healthcare practice already taking place daily for Australian patients, particularly those in regional and remote areas.

The government have already signalled that they will be shelving their Religious Freedoms legislation until the new year after concerns were raised by various community groups including church groups about the extent of exemptions allowed to faith aligned educators, hospitals and aged-care operators who had stressed the importance of retaining a “religious ethos and culture” within their organisations. This included the extent to which such organisations could restrict employment by excluding those of other faiths or of no faith in general occupations including cleaners, gardeners, teachers, doctors and nurses. There is also a push from some denominations to allow them to be selective, based on religious criteria, on who they take in or to whom they provide their services or accommodation.

This so called Religious Freedoms legislation is turning into a real can of worms for the government and has the potential to split us into a society divided along lines of faith rather than the secular model we have aspired to since federation.

The question is, having lost the union bashing exercise and shelved the religious freedoms legislation, will they let go of the Medevac repeal or are they desperate for a year-end win at any costs?

It has just come to my notice, following reports of the News Corporation annual general meeting in New York, that I have something in common with Rupert Murdoch.

We are both codgers – a delightful term usually adopted affectionately, to refer to an eccentric but amusing old man, not to be confused with an old duffer referring to an incompetent or stupid older person and occasionally directed at Rupert Murdoch.

Last year I was having my annual competency test to retain my driver’s licence which involves a very patient nursing person asking trivial questions to ascertain if you have all your marbles or at least some of them and having you gaze at a distant chart of wiggly alphabetical characters to determine the extent of your failing vision.

This was taking place in August last year and the simple questions included today’s date, my own date of birth, what season it was and the curly one: who is the current prime minister? This was at a time when Malcolm Turnbull was the prime minister with the overwhelming and vocal – albeit brief – support of his party, having just won a challenge from Peter Dutton 48 to 35: somewhat decisive you may think. But then the people’s favourite Peter [call me spud] Dutton had another urge to have a go as he evidently thought there may have been a miscount or that members of the party may have not understood what they were voting for – even the suggestion of voting instructions in Mandarin Chinese [a favourite ploy of the Liberal party] may have added to the confusion. So Pete again put himself forward and once again got trounced. In desperation the Liberal party, faced with the worrying prospect of a new leader in the form of a woman [Juie Bishop] making the cut, reached out to a man who we are told wasn’t even in the race and who staunchly supported Turnbull. A man who would become known as Scomo sounding more like a cleaning product for shower screens than a prime minister, who grinned a lot and who has a habit of saying ‘how good is that’ whenever there is a lapse in conversation.

So back at the surgery with the nurse looking at me expectantly for an answer, I told her that I wasn’t sure who the prime minister was right now and this had little to do with the onset of dementia and more the political state of the nation. She insisted on a response so, glancing at my watch, I told her I thought it was Malcolm Turnbull and waited for her reaction. As she was also of a certain age and probably didn’t follow politics closely, she accepted my answer. I then told her that it’s complicated and to demonstrate that I was a modern age ‘wake’ – whatever that means – codger I briefed her on the shenanigans going on in the Liberal party : she duly awarded me a pass and I toddled off to see if I could remember where I had parked my car : just as well they have those little buttons on your car key, you just hit the unlocked padlock symbol and bingo your car responds with a flash of lights as if to say ‘over here you silly old bugger’!

At the News, AGM Rupert was thrown a curveball in the form of a question from the floor by a proxy for Andrew Mayne – an Australian shareholder activist. Murdoch was asked about the company’s “stance on climate change”.

The questioner asked: “What do you believe is the global role of News Corp in the geopolitical climate? If you do believe in climate change, why [is it that] News Corp gives climate deniers like Andrew Bolt and Terry McCrann so much airtime in Australia?”

His answer was dismissive: “there are no climate change deniers around [News Corp] I can assure you.”

This from a man who has presided over a publishing and broadcasting empire that has become synonymous with climate change denial and obfuscation, fiercely disputing and mocking science and providing a global sanctuary and a platform for those who promote the primacy of coal and fossil fuel interests.

Did he have a senior’s moment, did he not hear the question, does he not read, listen or watch his own media outlets in the USA, the UK and Australia: or was he just telling porkies?

Do you think there are editorial meetings taking place right now at Newscorp Australia and Sky-after-Dark trying to read between the lines of what the oracle in New York may have been saying? Should Andrew Bolt, Chris Kenny, Peta Credlin, Paul Murray, Rowan Dean and the host of hangers-on who had previously signed an oath never to acknowledge climate change, clean out their desks and be escorted from the building – is the party over?

Or has the codger transitioned to an old Duffer no longer a fit and proper person to be heading up a global media organisation?

On Thursday, the Member for Hughes, after a long lunch, struggled to his feet, adjusted his belt over his ample belly, wiped some egg from his tie, farted and proceeded to address our national parliament. His purpose was to convey a message to us all but to the younger generation in particular whom he had been informed were planning to wag school the following day on some trumped-up business about climate change. The member for Hughes is utterly opposed to anybody wagging off on POETS Day although it was noted from the gallery that he himself would be heading off for a long weekend as soon as he had delivered his speech to the nation.

The parliament were as always eager to hear from Mr Kelly as are his devoted followers on Sky-After-dark (SAD) where he appears far too often.

Craig Kelly, you will recall, was about to be dumped from pre-selection by the wise burghers of the federal Liberal seat of Hughes prior to the last election. But Kelly, being a man with immense talent and wisdom as yet untapped, declared that if he was not pre-selected to run again, he would spend the remaining parliamentary term on the cross-benches making rude noises and gestures in the general direction of the government benches. The Prime Minister, having noted the incredible contribution of Mr Kelly to the governance of our nation immediately called for a halt to all pre-selections in all seats in New South wales, thus ensuring that Craig would remain the honourable member for Hughes, and so it came to pass that Craig was duly re-elected as the member for that long-suffering electorate.

And how right the PM was, a man of undoubted perception, seeing in Craig Kelly something that had eluded the rest of us. Namely his grasp on climate science and his ability to understand and explain to the uninformed the vagaries of climate change.

I give you the honourable member’s speech to our parliament as recorded by Hansard :

Mr CRAIG KELLY (Hughes) (13:55): I understand how persuasive peer group pressure can be for teenagers, with their desire to conform and fit in with the crowd. However, I would say to any student considering joining the so-called climate protest: don’t be a sheep; think for yourself. You are being used and manipulated, and everything you are told is a lie. The facts are: there is no link between climate change and drought. Polar bears are increasing in number. Today’s generation is safer from extreme weather than at any time in human history. There is no 97 per cent consensus. Such claims are a fraud. Crop yields have increased remarkably. Wildfires have declined 25 per cent over the past two decades. We are seeing fewer cyclones, not more. Cold weather kills many times more people than hot weather, including here in Australia. The sea ice is not melting away; in fact, where the ill-fated Franklin expedition sailed in the year 1845 is blocked by thick sea ice this year. Renewables ain’t renewables, and they certainly don’t make electricity cheaper.

This speech was met with mixed feelings by the House of Representatives, perhaps best summed up by Stephen Jones (the member for Whitlam) who responded on behalf of us all by calling out (and I again quote from Hansard) : You are completely bonkers !

So, here’s a tip : instead of installing solar panels on your roof you would be better advised to duck down to Bunnings and get some polar bear proof fencing – they also have an aerosol I understand – before it’s too late !

‘Ooroo !

Hands up how many of you have seen both so-called leaders’ debates? Not too many I will wager.

It seems that the Liberal party got to choose the venues, the times and the broadcaster and in Perth that was The West Australian as moderator and Channel Seven’s second channel as a broadcaster. Some of the questions were loaded but fairly evenly : Morrison was asked twice about his preference swap deal with Clive Palmer but wasn’t able to reassure the audience that it was just normal politics : Shorten was pointedly asked about border security and Labor’s record in a loaded question prefaced by “800 boats carrying more than 50,000 illegal arrivals flooded into Australia; 1,200 people lost their lives at sea under Labor” straight out of the Liberal party songbook.

Of the 48 undecided invited guests, 25 gave the win to Shorten 12 to Morrison and 11 remained undecided.

Then the Liberals chose Brisbane, the Courier Mail and SKY News for last Friday’s debate : nobody watched as it cut into footy time (both AFL and NRL) and this time there were 100 supposedly undecided voters invited although one woman – could have been Dorothy Dix – who was worried about her religious freedoms clearly wasn’t going to vote Labor any time soon.

Morrison had evidently been advised to intimidate Shorten and crowd his personal space in a Trump-like manoeuvre: didn’t work as planned with Shorten going for the zinger and calling him a “classic space invader” which sent Morrison scuttling back to his corner and much laughter from the crowd.

This time it was 43 to Shorten, 41 to Morrison and 16 still undecided: SKY called this a draw! I wonder how they score the footie?

Shorten will be doing a solo appearance on the ABC’s Q&A program on Monday, May 6 taking questions from the audience but so far Morrison has not committed to doing the same. Labor has also proposed a third debate at the National Press Club on May 8 with journalists from Nine, the ABC and another media outlet on a panel but Morrison has yet to confirm on this one either. Perhaps the initial enthusiasm for public confrontations is no longer so popular with the Liberals who have also been accused of hiding their ministers in witness protection – some of them should be in solitary confinement as far as I’m concerned!

Overall, Shorten has benefited from these debates as it has given those who bothered to watch a clear contrast between the two men and has shown Shorten to be well briefed and have a positive vision for the future, and a mischievous sense of humour; these qualities are not so evident in a somewhat wooden Morrison. He comes across as bombastic and evasive particularly when it comes to the potential chaos that this preference swap deal with Clive could have in a future Senate.

It seems that Shorten has gained confidence and that the punters are warming to him………let’s hope so.

Pork-barrelling is a metaphor for vote buying in particular electorates to secure votes, normally for the incumbent politician. It involves appropriating public funds – that’s important, you never use your own money or that of your party – prior to an election and applying them to normally worthy causes but with the prime purpose being to secure votes. It goes on in almost every democracy and can involve roads and bridges to nowhere or, literally in PNG, distributing pigs to remote villages in return for votes.

The Energy Assistance Payment announced by Josh Frydenberg last week is a classic case of pork-barrelling. The one-off payments of $75 for singles and $125 for couples will go to 2.4 million pensioners, 744,000 disability pensioners, 280,000 carers, 242,000 single parents and 225,000 veterans and their dependants (and belatedly to those on Newstart). It is supposed to convey to the section of the electorate who receive this largesse that the coalition has an energy policy and that they are thinking of you : in reality they don’t and they are not.

The so called Community Environment Program is another example but it is a little more tricky as it doesn’t actually exist yet. As the Department of Environment assistant secretary Steve Costello, noted at Senate Estimates last week : the proposed program “is not open for applications, there is no successful grant under that program because the money is not appropriated, there has been no application process.”

So that’s fairly straight forward isn’t it ? There evidently will be a Community Environment Program but it won’t be open for applications until the new financial year and the grants will not be announced until September and to run its course, the coalition have to be re-elected and the recipients selected.

So why in March was Chris Crewther Liberal member for the seat of Dunkley (held by a margin of 1.4 per cent) along with hapless Environment Minister Melissa Price award almost $40,000 of non-existent environment grants to community groups in Crewther’s marginal Victorian seat ? Well, the answer to that lies in the words : marginal seat .

In several social media posts last month, Crewther, announced grants of between $7,500 and $20,000 under this Community Environment Program and he included video coverage of himself and Minister Price shaking hands with all and sundry to congratulate them on their successful grant applications : the posts have now been deleted.

When quizzed about this in parliament Minister Price said that “if you’re going to pork-barrel in an electorate you need to do it before the election not after it, you effing idiot.”

Well, that’s not precisely what she said but it’s what she meant. What she actually said was that the government had not announced any money and the trip with Crewther related to “expressions of interest” for the program and he had invited her “to speak to a number of really good local community environment projects.” At which point she had to hastily leave the parliamentary chamber as her pants spontaneously combusted.

But Labor’s environment spokesman, Tony Burke, then read from a media release issued by Crewther on March 15, which quoted the minister and announced funding to four community groups in Dunkley including video clips featuring himself and the minister with announcements of $10,000 in Frankston, $7,500 in Boggy Creek and $10,000 at Downs Estate.

“If no announcements under the program had been made, why does the minister appear with quotes in the media release and each of these announcements is accompanied by a video with the minister present. How can it be that she claims none of it ever happened when she’s quoted in the media release and is personally in the video?” Mr Burke asked.”

This important question was left hanging, as our accidental prime minister advised the speaker that this seemed to be a good time to wind up Question Time and the forty-fifth parliament.

Whatever it takes !

I wrote this back in December and it is worth repeating to keep in context the Bill that Kerryn Phelps will present to the parliament next week, the Migration Amendment (Urgent Medical Treatment) Bill 2018: it has already passed the Senate :

“Back in September 2014, a young man died in a Brisbane hospital after he had contracted a leg infection on Manus Island where he had been held in detention by Australian immigration authorities. Brisbane Coroner Mr Terry Ryan found his death followed a series of clinical errors and delays,” including a lack of antibiotics on Manus Island to treat tropical infections and a failure by Australian immigration officials to urgently grant a doctor’s request for the twenty-four-year-old asylum seeker to be transferred to Australia for life-saving treatment.

The coroner found the Australian Government had not met its responsibility to detainees such as Mr Hamid Khazaei to provide health care that was “broadly comparable” to that available in Australia.

The coroner recommended a systemic overhaul of healthcare responses in offshore detention, including a new policy to allow doctors on the ground, rather than Canberra officials, to approve medical transfers.

So why raise this matter now, we all know that the medical welfare of asylum seekers held indefinitely on Manus and Nauru has been a highly toxic political issue for some years. The coalition government go to great lengths to argue that healthcare available to asylum seekers on these islands is of a high standard and equivalent to that available in regional Australia. But then we have organisations like MSF saying it was deeply concerned for the health and well-being of patients and described the mental health situation of asylum seekers and refugees on the island (Nauru) as “beyond desperate”: MSF were then ejected from Nauru.

More than 4700 Australian doctors and medical professionals have signed a new appeal asking Prime Minister Scott Morrison to reconsider his refusal to transfer sick refugee children and their families off Nauru (and Manus) for medical care.

When Dr Kerryn Phelps was elected to the federal seat of Wentworth, she took it as a personal crusade to bring the children on Nauru to Australia (or New Zealand who have consistently offered to take 150 asylum seekers a year since 2013) with no further delay and to streamline the medical evacuation process. As had been noted by the Brisbane Coroner, in the Khazaei case, there is a very opaque system in place that involves bureaucrats in Canberra who will frequently override medical advise when it comes to evacuating a patient (or they will send people to Port Moresby or Taiwan rather than bring them here).

The parliament was due to knock-off for the summer holidays last Thursday but before that occurred, a Bill was passed in the Senate to change and streamline the medivac process and leave it to two medical professionals to authorise a medical evacuation with the minister having ultimate discretion : in circumstances where the minister went against medical opinions and disallowed the medical evacuation he or she would be answerable to the parliament. Clearly, in these circumstances, the minister would be chancing his or her arm to go against professional medical advice.

In the Senate, there was much filibustering and waffling to avoid this Bill being passed and going before the House of Representatives. Morrison had a win by shutting down the House early so that the Bill could not be presented or voted on.

Clearly, the system of medical evacuation needed upgrading, the Brisbane coroner noted that, but the coalition are against any change and they have suggested that to improve the medical evacuation system will lead to detainees engaging in self-harm to expedite an evacuation: does that mean that the current cumbersome system discourages self-harm?

Scott Morrison got a bit shirty about the proposed legislative changes saying in an intemperate and rather bizarre and impromptu news conference that :

“I will do everything in my power to ensure that these suggested changes … never see the light of day,” Mr Morrison said. “I will do whatever I can. I will fight them using whatever tool or tactic I have available to me to ensure that we do not undermine our border protection laws.”

Why do you think that our prime minister would say this, does he believe that taking such decisions out of the hands of unqualified bureaucrats and giving them to doctors will really undermine our border protection laws rather than just save lives?

It seems that what really is getting up Morrison’s nose is that over eighty percent of the detainees on Nauru and Manus have been found to be genuine refugees and as such can claim protection and sanctuary if they come to Australia, and this is the point. The whole offshore detention policy was designed to get these people out of Australia and beyond the reach of Australian law and jurisdiction and Morrison is worried that, as the majority of these people are suffering from undiagnosed mental illnesses, they will all end up here, assert their refugee status, claim protection as they are entitled to do and Bob’s your uncle.”

The Phelps Bill, the Migration Amendment (Urgent Medical Treatment) Bill 2018 reflects the recommendations of the Brisbane Coroner and will require that two doctors, usually one on the island in question and another doing an electronic case evaluation from Australia will be able to initiate and streamline a medical evacuation where in their joint opinions it is warranted based on medical grounds. The minister still has right of veto if there are pressing security factors that override the medical considerations: hard to think that such a situation could arise but Scott Morrison considers that some of the refugees could be rapists, murderers and pedophiles. If they are, then it seems strange that after five years in detention they have not been detected and criminally prosecuted.

Both the government and their handmaiden Newscorp have gone into overdrive to stop this Bill passing in the House of Representatives and they say that if it passes among other things, the sky will fall in and the sun will not rise and a plague of toads will visit this wide brown land – and that it will cost the taxpayer a minimum of some $1.4 Billion to medivac and attend to these sick people. They even say that they will have to reopen the Christmas Island detention facility as they anticipate that all of the remaining detainees on Manus and Nauru are suffering from some physical or mental condition and will require medical evacuation: in this, they are probably right. Mr Dutton also helpfully adds that if the legislation is passed an armada of boats will imminently put to see from Indonesia – he fervently hopes.

So, we have a perfectly sensible piece of legislation that may very well be defeated depending on how the Independents and crossbenchers vote; Bob Katter has already been bought off and it seems that Cathy McGowan is the wild-card – we shall see.

After the recent US transfers from both islands, there are now roughly one thousand detainees left who have been held without trial for over five years. Isn’t it about time that Australia stood up and told these buffoons, masquerading as a government, that Enough is Enough?

Over the Christmas break, at a time when the last thing anybody wants to be thinking about is Peter Dutton, he came out with a nasty personal spray against the former prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull.

One of the things he said about the former PM was that “he (Turnbull) doesn’t have a political bone in his body and it’s not a criticism, but without political judgment you can’t survive in politics and he didn’t.”

Well, actually it is a criticism !

Dutton is a man who knows all about political jockeying, after all he mounted two attempts to unseat a sitting prime minister to install himself as our leader and failed in both. In the first attempt on 21 August last he missed out by 13 votes and maintained after the party-room snub that he is still the “best prospect” to lead the Liberal Party, but said that he will respect the result of the vote and support Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

That, of course was a lie : nobody believed him and sure enough Pete was still doing the numbers three days later when he mounted another challenge. This time he thought he had it all sewn up, having phoned all his mates who naturally pledged their undying support for his leadership. What it seems he didn’t know was that as he was phoning his supporters, Morrison was on call-waiting ready to convince them to vote for him, which is precisely what they did. So, in a deft display of political stupidity, Dutton managed to get the numbers wrong again. In the words of Oscar Wilde you could say that to get the numbers wrong once may be regarded as a misfortune, but to do so twice looks like a diabolical stuff-up !

Ever the optimist, Dutton was reported to have said that despite the loss, he still harboured the ambition to lead the Liberal Party but in the meantime he would give Scott Morrison his unwavering support and undying loyalty : Oh yeah, we’ve heard that one before somewhere !

Dutton quickly assumed his old job under the Morrison administration with barely any criticism for the damage he had inflicted on the Liberal party and the disruption to the orderly functioning of our parliament merely for him to pursue his own self-serving ambitions : he did however lose responsibility for immigration presumably because he had been calling for a reduction in immigration numbers without actually formulating an immigration policy as would normally be expected from somebody purporting to be responsible for immigration.

Then we had the unusual and yet to be explained issue of terrorism suspect Neil Prakash who was born in Australia of a Fijian Australian father and a Cambodean Australian mother. When Prakash was first arrested entering Turkey in 2014 , Julie Bishop as Foreign Minister cancelled his passport which restricted his ability to move around the world and expunged his rights as a citizen to return to Australia. For no apparent reason, Dutton then announced a week ago that he was exercising his ministerial discretion to take away from Prakash his Australian citizenship. It turns out that this was a bungle too as he could not do that. Prakash is not a citizen of Fiji as Dutton maintained and, under our legislation and in accordance with international law, we cannot make a citizen stateless at the whim of a poorly advised minister.

Fiji has confirmed that Prakash is not a citizen of theirs and did not meet the criteria for Fijian citizenship and noted that they were not impressed with an Australian politician trying to pass off a troublesome Australian citizen to a near and friendly neighbour. Dutton has dug in his heels and continues to maintain that he knows more about both Australian citizenship laws and those of Fiji : he doesn’t, he was wrong and he now leaves it to Scott Morrison to go cap-in-hand to Fiji and try to patch up yet another embarrassing blunder by the hapless Dutton.

Interestingly, Australia had an extradition application with Turkey to return Prakash to Australia to face the courts here. Traditionally, common-law jurisdictions like Australia have tended to exercise extra-territorial jurisdiction over their citizens only for very serious crimes. The Prakash case falls into that category. So, Australia could claim jurisdiction over Prakash because he was an Australian citizen, as a country has the ability to prosecute and punish its citizens solely on the basis of their nationality, wherever their alleged offence takes place. But by withdrawing his citizenship Dutton has effectively limited our ability to deal with Prakash by way of extradition processes.

As a wrecking ball, the Liberal Party has no further to look than Dutton. A man who manages to sail under the media radar by rarely making himself available to media scrutiny unless it happens to be a weekly love-in with Ray Hadley on 2GB or a scripted interview on Sky-After-Dark.

Even as the dust was settling over the leadership debacle Dutton declared that he had no regrets about bringing on a week of drama that had split the Liberal Party and halted Parliament. He continued to describe himself as a “better person” and a “person of greater strength and integrity to lead the Liberal Party” than Malcolm Turnbull.

You be the judge !

Back in September 2014 a young man died in a Brisbane hospital after he had contracted a leg infection on Manus Island where he had been held in detention by Australian immigration authorities. Brisbane Coroner Mr Terry Ryan found his death followed a series of clinical errors and delays, including a lack of antibiotics on Manus Island to treat tropical infections and a failure by Australian immigration officials to urgently grant a doctor’s request for the twenty-four year old asylum seeker to be transferred to Australia for life saving treatment.

The coroner found the Australian Government had not met its responsibility to detainees such as Mr Hamid Khazaei to provide health care that was “broadly comparable” to that available in Australia.

The coroner recommended a systemic overhaul of healthcare responses in offshore detention, including a new policy to allow doctors on the ground, rather than Canberra officials, to approve medical transfers.

So why raise this matter now, we all know that the medical welfare of asylum seekers held indefinitely on Manus and Nauru has been a highly toxic political issue for some years. The coalition government go to great lengths to argue that healthcare available to asylum seekers on these islands is of a high standard and equivalent to that available in regional Australia. But then we have organisations like MSF saying it was deeply concerned for the health and well-being of patients and described the mental health situation of asylum seekers and refugees on the island (Nauru) as “beyond desperate” : MSF were then ejected from Nauru.

More than 4700 Australian doctors and medical professionals have signed a new appeal asking Prime Minister Scott Morrison to reconsider his refusal to transfer sick refugee children and their families off Nauru (and Manus) for medical care.

When Dr Kerryn Phelps was elected to the federal seat of Wentworth, she took it as a personal crusade to bring the children on Nauru to Australia (or New Zealand who have consistently offered to take 150 asylum seekers a year since 2013) with no further delay and to streamline the medical evacuation process. As had been noted by the Brisbane Coroner, in the Khazaei case, there is a very opaque system in place that involves bureaucrats in Canberra who will frequently override medical advise when it comes to evacuating a patient (or they will send people to Port Moresby or Taiwan rather than bring them here).

The parliament was due to knock-off for the summer holidays last Thursday but before that occurred, a Bill was passed in the Senate to change and streamline the medivac process and leave it to two medical professionals to authorise a medical evacuation with the minister having ultimate discretion : in circumstances where the minister went against medical opinions and disallowed the medical evacuation he or she would be answerable to the parliament. Clearly, in these circumstances the minister would be chancing his or her arm to go against professional medical advice.

In the Senate, there was much filibustering and waffling to avoid this Bill being passed and going before the House of Representatives. Morrison had a win by shutting down the House early so that the Bill could not be presented or voted on.

Clearly the system of medical evacuation needed upgrading, the Brisbane coroner noted that, but the coalition are against any change and they have suggested that to improve the medical evacuation system will lead to detainees engaging in self-harm to expedite an evacuation : does that mean that the current cumbersome system discourages self-harm ?

Scott Morrison got a bit shirty about the proposed legislative changes saying in an intemperate and rather bizarre and impromptu news conference that :

“I will do everything in my power to ensure that these suggested changes … never see the light of day,” Mr Morrison said. “I will do whatever I can. I will fight them using whatever tool or tactic I have available to me to ensure that we do not undermine our border protection laws.”

Why do you think that our prime minister would say this, does he believe that taking such decisions out of the hands of unqualified bureaucrats and giving them to doctors will really undermine our border protection laws rather than just save lives ?

It seems that what really is getting up Morrison’s nose is that over eighty percent of the detainees on Nauru and Manus have been found to be genuine refugees and as such can claim protection and sanctuary if they come to Australia and this is the point. The whole offshore detention policy was designed to get these people out of Australia and beyond the reach of Australian law and jurisdiction and Morrison is worried that, as the majority of these people are suffering from undiagnosed mental illnesses, they will all end up here, assert their refugee status, claim protection as they are entitled to do and Bob’s your uncle.

Morrison could very well take out his frustrations on the half-smart lawyers who devised the offshore detention fiasco by adopting what Oliver Hardy would say to Stan Laurel when he had stuffed up again; “Well there’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into.”

It seems that in politics telling lies, fabricating half truths and being wilfully misleading is now par for the course in this game of crazy golf.

Trump has turned it into an art form ; that is, if you are not much of a connoisseur when it comes to modern art : which reminds me of the true story of an attendant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York who had to inform a group of people staring transfixed at an item adorning a wall that, what they were looking at was in fact an air conditioning duct. That may or may not be a true story : you be the judge.

In the past couple of weeks, our new prime minister has been flailing around looking for a policy or at least something to wack Bill Shorten over the head with. Inevitably it has come down, once again, to the dire consequences facing Australia and possibly the planet if Labor gets into office and does away with negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions currently available to those who engage in churning existing housing stock at the expense of new home buyers. It seems to add some weight to Scomo’s argument to paint these property speculators as mums and dads and he frequently mentions nurses, ambulance drivers, police and other such ordinary people. So far he has stopped short of suggesting that homeless people will have their investment opportunities curtailed by not being able to negatively gear their investment portfolios.

Morrison fails to mention that the Labor proposal will only affect existing housing stock and thus should encourage investors to put their money into building new houses and apartments which is generally seen as a good thing. He also overlooks the fact that the Labor policy will not impact existing negatively geared investments : they call it grandfathering.

They also put their fingers in their ears and sing lah lah lah whenever they are referred to the observations of their former Treasurer Joe Hockey who, in a moment of economic clarity, which coincided with him leaving the parliament for a cushy job in the USA, told us that :

“negative gearing should be skewed towards new housing so that there is an incentive to add to the housing stock rather than an incentive to speculate on existing property.”

So, lying also takes the form of obscuring or rewriting historical fact to suit changed or changing circumstances or to fit in with the narrative that you have chosen for the day. Malcolm Turnbull was recently on Q&A embellishing his legacy and throwing in a couple of curved balls for antiquity :

You know, think of the big social reforms, legalising same-sex marriage. I mean, what a gigantic reform that was, I was able to do that … I legislated it, right? So I delivered it.

Well, that was a big fib because, as we all know, Malcolm allowed a noisy group of nut-jobs to divert the parliament from its proper course and forced upon a reluctant nation a postal plebiscite. A plebiscite that would not be binding on the parliament, would cost a fortune and the financing of which was never approved by our parliament (in fact it was knocked back in the Senate) and which proved to be socially divisive.

A big fib can have consequences if spotted by a dogged fourth estate of investigative journalists and media hounds dedicated to uncovering the truth (and I wouldn’t wish to imply that this is the business model of Fox, Sky-after-dark or news Corp). Richard Nixon found this out and he was ultimately brought down over a fairly innocuous raid on the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington. The raid was engineered by the Republicans for the purposes of planting listening devices which it was hoped would assist the party and Nixon in achieving their re-election ambitions. What brought down Nixon was not the raid but his emphatic denial of any knowledge of the scam and subsequent revelations that proved he had been fibbing.

Secret raids, listening devices, political advantage, doesn’t that ring a bell and bring us closer to home ? Our very own Watergate involving government authorised bugging of the Timor Leste parliament offices for political, commercial and territorial gain during the reign of John Howard and his Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer. When the scam became public the leading protagonists covered themselves in a blanket of national security and once again, stuck their fingers in their ears and sang lah lah lah in unison. To add a very Australian twist to the story, they decided, in an act of cold-blooded retribution, to prosecute the whistleblower and his lawyer for telling the truth and are currently trying to have the matter heard in secret : national security and all that dont’cha know !

Then you have what Winston Churchill referred to as Terminological inexactitudes which are still lies but are dressed up in their Sunday Best so as not to look like a bare-faced lie. For instance, former President Clinton said “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky”. Well, that may well have been technically true depending on how you define sexual relations but it’s obviously not an excuse that, say for instance, Barnaby Joyce could have volunteered, is it ?

In recent days we have observed a sudden need for a show empathy towards asylum seekers on the part of former hard-nosed immigration ministers. Purely it seems for political purposes as the mood of the nation changes and as a federal election beckons. This, after five years of name calling with racist overtones directed towards Illegals, requires some deft gymnastic backflips in what amounts to the weaving of what the Brits would call a tissue of lies and a veil of deception.

The spinmeisters for former Immigration ministers Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton have been working overtime : yes, they do still get penalty rates as political advisers !

So, we have been told by Peter Dutton that :

“I think in the Immigration portfolio, you are defined by Nauru and Manus. Now, I didn’t put any people on Nauru and Manus, I got people off. I would love to get everybody off there tomorrow — if I could have brought them to Australia in a charter flight overnight I would have”.

and from Scott Morrison, who said he has :

… cried ‘on his knees’ for the plight of asylum seekers held offshore.

Speaking at a lunch organised by suicide prevention service Lifeline, Mr Morrison said he had prayed for the children still on Nauru, confirming there were still just over 30 on the Pacific island.

Morrison said he had prayed for the children in detention on Nauru and he hoped it had made a difference.

I don’t know about you, but my heart bleeds for these two men who have been so deeply conflicted between their obvious compassion as Christians for refugees and asylum seekers and the demands of their political antennae. If I was either of these two blokes and if I know anything about Christian Gods, I would be watching out for thunder-bolts from above after those elaborate and breathtaking fabrications.

There are about 119 children currently detained with their families on Nauru – this number fluctuates, as children are often taken from the island temporarily for emergency medical treatment ; many of these children were born on Nauru.

Back in 2013, John Key, the then prime minister of New Zealand offered to break the Australian political stand-off and take 150 refugees each year from Australian detention centres. This offer has been renewed each year and was most recently re-confirmed by Jacinda Ardern at the Pacific Islands Forum held on Nauru in September.

Peter Dutton as Minister for Home Affairs and formerly as Immigration Minister has been a vocal opponent of accepting this gesture from New Zealand. At various times he has argued that should these asylum seekers go to New Zealand they would, once having gained New Zealand citizenship, seek to visit Australia through the back-door as he calls it. An argument that he doesn’t use against those asylum seekers already resettled in the USA – under the deal struck during Barack Obama’s presidency – which has resettled 183 people, including 15 children, according to Australia’s Asylum Seeker Resource Centre.

Dutton also, at various times introduces other spurious arguments including that resettling these folk in New Zealand will send a signal to people smugglers that the doors are now open to Australia via New Zealand and that the armada of vessels from Indonesia will launch imminently. Again, he doesn’t say that resettlement in the USA would act as a pull factor from Indonesia, I wonder why not ?

For Dutton the continued indefinite detention of asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Islands appears to be a major form of demarcation for the coalition to use against the Labor party and so far it has worked for the Liberals but obviously not for the detainees (who they annoyingly call transferees : when does a transferee become a detainee, is five years enough ?). Labor, sadly, have been weak and indecisive throughout, being afraid to blink and allow Dutton to deliver the wedge that Labor are weak on border protection.

New Zealand have approached this whole debacle with an adult maturity that has been entirely absent in Australian politics in recent years and had we accepted the generous offer made by John Key back in 2013, all of the detained asylum seekers on both Nauru and Manus would by now be living new lives in New Zealand.

In the last few days before the Wentworth by-election Scott Morrison has been bending over backwards to accommodate any policy twist that will win favour with the voters in that electorate, ranging from the desperate dog-whistling to the Jewish community to offering a glimmer of hope for the children and their parents on Nauru.