What we do know about Australia’s population is that it will achieve 25million in August of this year, some twenty-four years ahead of government predictions : former Treasurer Peter Costello told us is 2002 that we would achieve this figure sometime in 2042.

What we also know is that the population growth and migrant intake in the past five years has exceeded one million which happily coincides with the one million new jobs the coalition have told us they have created since coming to office : so that’s one job for every new migrant, right ? Not quite, as explained by the Department of Home Affairs “Some migrants also do not participate in the labour force or have limited work rights (for example, long-term visitors, students and working holiday makers) but still consume goods and services and therefore still add to job creation.”

Even so, that increase in population of one million in the last five years is a record but this is where things get confusing. Peter Dutton commented over the weekend that this growth was due to Labor’s tick and flick immigration policy which evidently means that it is a bad thing. But it tends to ignore the fact that the coalition have been in office during the past five years and, surprise, surprise, Mr Dutton may or may not have been responsible for immigration policy during that period – that morsel of information may of course be confidential and even the responsible (I use the term loosely) minister is not always aware of the scope or breadth of his job.

Then you have that pesky filing cabinet in that second-hand shop in Deakin which seems to have contained all of the data on immigration policy of which Mr Dutton was unaware and which fell into the hands of, you guessed it, the ABC. So, you can see the pattern here : Labor policy (bad), missing population policy (unfortunate) and the ABC (bad).

In the meantime, Scott Morrison and Malcolm Turnbull have both rejoiced in this new population data and said it’s all good as every new migrant is a consumer which means that they pay taxes, buy stuff – not houses obviously but they rent those from negatively geared mates of the coalition and they buy imported cars because we don’t make them anymore – and the fact that our road and transport infrastructure, our health and our education systems are barely coping is clearly due to Labor having had insufficient policies and foresight when in office.

In the interim, Mr Turnbull and Mr Dutton announced, whilst visiting the North Brisbane seat of Longman, that the reduction in immigration numbers that 162,417 people permanently migrated to Australia in 2017-18 – well under the 190,000 cap and down from 183,608 the year before was a positive thing and fitted in nicely with the preference deal done with Ms Hanson in Longman. Mr Morrison evidently was not in the loop on this one as he warned that lower immigration levels cost the budget.

When asked by a journalist, who was responsible for population policy in Australia Mr Turnbull, Mr Morrison and Mr Dutton pointed at each other : tune into 2GB where Ray Hadley will be allocating portfolios on Thursday.

This unfolding story is worth watching as it appears to have the cold hand of Peter Dutton all over it.

The government of Nauru has blocked the ABC from covering the Pacific Islands Forum, refusing to issue its journalists visas because of allegations of bias and false reporting.

The Nauruan government have, however, said that “at least one Australian TV outlet” would be allowed to cover the forum, to be held in the first week of September ; I may be way off here but I’m seeing Foxtel/SKY as probably getting a guernsey.

Nauru is almost entirely dependent on Australian aid for its ongoing economic survival [and to maintain the lavish lifestyle of its politicians and their hangers on]. So, the continued existence of the detention centre on that island is central to their political and personal interests. In round figures it costs $400,000 a year to maintain each detainee in the offshore detention centres and the last thing that the Nauruan government want to see is the resettlement of the asylum seekers and closure of this camp.

Save the Children and Unicef found that Australian taxpayers had spent as much as $9.6 billion on offshore detention since 2013 – Australian government figures are a bit rubbery on this – while a Parliamentary Library report released in 2016 found Manus Island alone had cost taxpayers about $2 billion since it was reopened. Manus of course is no longer a detention centre following a PNG Supreme Court ruling that such detention of non-citizens who had not committed any crime was constitutionally illegal. Like a scene form Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch, our minister for Home Affairs has decreed that nobody is now detained on Manus (or Nauru for that matter) they’re just not allowed to leave … as I’ve noted elsewhere, Peter Dutton’s version of the Eagles’ Hotel California : ‘you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave’.

What the ABC have done to encourage this visa ban is quite horrendous, they have reported the news factually, impartially and without bias and that infuriates not only the Nauruan officials but also, it seems, the current Australian government. In March the ABC reported what a senior United Nations official had said after inspecting the detention centre : he called for the Australian Government to reconsider its offshore detention policy as concerns about detainees’ mental and physical well being were growing. Indrika Ratwatte, the Asia Pacific director for the UNHCR, described the conditions as “shocking”. “We must make every effort to get refugees out of this situation” the ABC reported him as saying.

What you may say is wrong with reporting what a UN official has to say about a detention centre funded by the Australian taxpayer on a remote Pacific island ? Well, in case you haven’t noticed over the past five years this whole thing is shrouded in secrecy and when you are the only news outlet prepared to report factually, in this brave new world of alternative facts, you leave yourself open to attacks from those who not only oppose public broadcasting, but who also will not tolerate criticism or analysis of government policies.

Don’t for a moment confuse this media ban with stopping the boats ; one is a policy and one is a wedge, you decide. This is all about petty politics within the coalition and the hatred many of them hold for public broadcasting and in particular the ABC coupled with some vested interests on Nauru who would never bite the hand that feeds them.

With a Nauruan official having come out and said that “ … no representative from the [ABC] will be granted a visa to enter Nauru under any circumstances,” you would expect an immediate reaction from our prime minister defending free speech and the right of Australia to decide on which of its media outlets should be able to report on this important regional forum. Whilst there has been outrage from the Australian parliamentary press gallery, from our prime minister just a wishy-washy statement to the effect that Nauru retains the right to decide who should report on this forum and the manner in which they should report : ‘it’s a question of sovereignty don’tcha know’.

Following our prime minister going to water on this, can we now expect our Foreign Minister or the Minister for Communications or our Minister for Home Affairs to come out strongly and support our ABC and Australia’s right not to be dictated to by a foreign government ? You would have to tune into radio 2GB or SkyNews for the answer to that, but don’t hold your breath.

There has been a disturbing urgency on the part of the Turnbull government to slash personal and corporate taxes prior to the next election, due by May 2019. Disturbing because this frenzy of tax cuts really don’t have their major impacts on our economy until fully implemented six years hence when the flattening of the personal income tax rates take place and the proposed big business corporate tax cuts to 25% take effect, in 2024.

Why the urgency, why can’t we wait a few years and, if future government revenues are as good as predicted and debt repayment is on schedule and the deficit is under control and we are adequately funding healthcare and education and the myriad of other services we rely on, then start looking at these tax cuts ?

Is it solely to wedge Labor into the future ? This certainly seems to be part of the coalition strategy, as an incoming Labor government in 2019 would, if all these cuts go through, be faced with a revenue strait-jacket imposed by their coalition predecessors for the whole of their first and second terms. They could not initiate meaningful social reform measures because a former coalition government had given away and severely impeded ongoing revenue streams.

Labor have the very difficult and potentially election losing alternative of pledging to roll back the tax cuts when in office. But, as we are already seeing, this is fraught with difficulty as part of the wedge is to portray Labor as a high taxing party contrasted with the very competent and generous coalition.

As Michael Pascoe noted in his article for the New daily this style of politics fits the definition of conservatism identified by John Kenneth Galbraith : ‘The modern Conservative is engaged in one of mans oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness’

The choices for Labor are fundamental to their chances of forming government next year and it will take clear enunciation by Shorten and a perceptive and receptive electorate to expose the truth and to understand that the coalition strategy of cutting taxes so far in advance of supporting economic data are politically motivated and are imprudent and potentially reckless.

I don’t know if you’ve been following the very odd goings on between the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation (aka The Muppets) and the Australian National University (ANU) but it has been quite bizarre and has brought into a clear focus the schism that exists between those who believe that they are born to rule and the rest of us, in this case the academic independence and autonomy of one of our foremost learning institutions is under threat.

The Ramsay Centre [for Western Civilisation] represents a foundation set up by Paul Ramsay, a wealthy entrepreneur who made his fortune building and operating private hospitals around the nation and who benefited substantially from successive coalition policies to subsidise private health insurance companies who inevitably direct patients to these and other private hospitals: Ramsay was also a golfing buddy of former PM John Howard.

The objectives of this foundation are:

“… to advance education by promoting studies and discussion associated with the establishment and development of western civilisation, including through establishing scholarship funds and educational courses in partnership with universities”.

So far, so good, some worthy aspirations there and nothing is more aspirational than a group of conservative white men who want to tell the rest of us how we should behave and who happen to be in charge of a three-billion-dollar bequest.

John Howard – well known for the political trifecta of losing his seat, losing the prime ministership and losing government in one hit – heads up the foundation as its chair and Tony Abbott features as one of its directors. Another director, Kim Beazley who was evidently there for balance, noted that:

“This is not a left or right think tank. The values of freedom, human rights and representative government have their origins in Western civilisation. Yet the historical, philosophical and cultural base of that tradition is of diminishing saliency in our academic institutions. It does not need dominance. It needs a systematic voice.”

I’m not sure what Kim was getting at as it clearly is a right-wing tank but whether it thinks or not is another matter and it really doesn’t matter anyhow as soon after he was appointed, the Ramsay Centre announced, “the Hon Kim Beazley AC resigned as a Director on 18 May 2018, following his appointment as Governor of Western Australia.”

That just left one token left-winger in the form of Joe De Bruyn who you may recall was a great supporter of John Howard in efforts to stop lesbians from having IVF babies and later strongly advocating the ‘NO’ case in the marriage equality debate. His standing in the Labor Party was always a bit wobbly and despite his union credentials, he infuriated many of his colleagues with his conservative views on social matters. He also provided Gough Whitlam with one of his more memorable one-liners: in a speech to a union gathering a few years ago, Whitlam described the Netherlands-born de Bruyn as “a Dutchman who hates dykes.”

Recently the Ramsay Centre entered into discussions with the ANU to fund by way of a bequest a Bachelor of Western Civilisation degree to commence next year. The course was to be an Australian version of the great-books courses taught at America’s leading liberal arts colleges. More than half the students were to be on scholarships based on the Tuckwell model that has now been operating at the ANU for some years. The Tuckwell Scholarship Program at the ANU is an undergraduate scholarship program whereby every year, twenty-five talented and motivated Year 12 students from across Australia are invited to take up a place at ANU.

Still looking good!

But then Tony Abbott let rip with one of the brain-farts for which he has become infamous and which, in the form of knighthoods for Princes and Dukes, characterised his forgettable tenure as our prime minister. In a nondescript article in the Right-wing journal Quadrant he noted, on the subject of this degree course on Western civilization, that the curriculum would be ‘for’ western civilization, implying that any critical analysis or comparative content would not be welcome.

He went on to say that:

“Teaching will be tutorial-based in the spirit of Oxford and Cambridge. A management committee including the Ramsay CEO and also its academic director will make staffing and curriculum decisions.”

And, didn’t the proverbial hit the fan with that one!

ANU vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt – a man who has contributed much to Western (and global) civilisation – evidently asked Howard to ‘walk back’ Abbott’s comments as they obviously compromised the negotiations taking place between ANU and Ramsay and attacked the very integrity and autonomy of the university: Howard declined to contradict Abbott, indicating that he too saw it as appropriate for the Ramsay Centre to assume the universities cherished role of making its own staffing and curriculum decisions.

There followed an unseemly jihad on Schmidt and the ANU with the Newscorp numpties at The Australian leading the charge. Their focus and the basis of their criticism seemed to be that the university should never look a gift horse in the mouth, just accept the money and abandon your integrity and principles. But the university are digging their heels in and insisting that it is they who will design, teach and deliver their own courses without the interference of external ideological groups: a bequest is after all a gift and it is tarnished and diminished if the giver places on it conditions for its use and application.

So, discussions between the ANU and Ramsay reached a stalemate and even the prime minister was called on to intervene and bring the ANU to heel and right on cue Senator for the IPA, James Paterson, demanded that the ANU be punished by having its funding cut – just like the ABC. He would say that, wouldn’t he, it’s in his IPA implanted DNA.

So far, the ANU and Vice Chancellor Schmidt have maintained a dignified and calm demeanour saying only that their priority for the university is its integrity as a respected international place of learning and its absolute insistence that it retain autonomy over its course curriculum and staffing. At no stage has the ANU, as has been suggested elsewhere, shown any reluctance to deliver an undergraduate course on Western civilisation, a tradition that itself was founded and thrives on the autonomy of these institutions of higher learning.

Let’s assume that the Ramsay model of course funding is the way of the future and gains acceptance in our universities. Could we then see a bequest from the likes of Pauline Hanson for the teaching of the Foundations of Conversational English or the Clive Palmer bequest for the Teaching of business principles and ethics with lecturers and curricula provided by these individuals?

It’s not as silly as it sounds!

ABC: Good morning PM can we start by asking if you will take your corporate tax cuts to the next election so that the Australian people can give you a mandate for what you now call your signature policy ?

PM: No way Jose. We are committed to getting these tax cuts through before the election, I’ve promised the chaps who fund the Liberal Party that we will do this.

ABC: It’s not Jose but anyhow. If you take this signature policy to an election and win, you will have the backing of the Australian people.

PM: You must be a Labor Party stooge, if we took this dog of a policy to an election. we would be thrown out. No, we believe that if we can catch Pauline after a few Chardonnays she’ll come around and we can do this democratically.

ABC: You were incensed when Labor claimed that you were privatising Medicare. How do you respond to claims that your governments’ policies are degrading Medicare services ?

PM: Have you asked Greg Hunt my excellent Health Minister ?

ABC: Well, yes we have : he told us to fuck-off !

PM: Well there you go : my government’s approach to Medicare is to point out to the public that we are subsidising private health insurance companies to the tune of $6.8 Billion a year. So, it’s quite obvious where people should go isn’t it ?
Our approach to Medicare is consistent with our approach to, for instance, the ABC. We starve these socialist collectives of funding and people then go to where they can get better service. Have you got a Foxtel subscription ? I suggest you get one if you want to watch any cricket this summer.

ABC: The Liberal Party conference unanimously voted in favour of privatising the ABC other than in regional areas. Minister Fifield has said that this is not coalition policy, will it become policy ?

PM: You have to understand how policy works in the Liberal Party : we have unanimous support to privatise the ABC from the rank and file other than in regional areas – a very popular policy but it would only proceed with a mandate from the Australian people and if we get back into office at the next election that will be a mandate : that’s how democracy works.

ABC: But how can you privatise one broadcasting platform in the cities and retain free to air services in the bush, isn’t that discriminatory ?

PM: We have already had exploratory talks with Foxtel and we have been given an assurance from a great Australian in New York that we can achieve this highly desirable objective with subsidies, just like we do with health insurance. Eventually everybody will have a Foxtel subscription and then, like Medicare, you won’t need a government funded system : it’s win win !

ABC: You seem committed to holding people in indefinite detention on Manus Island and Nauru purely for political mileage. When will you resettle these people who have now been detained without trial for over five years in many cases ?

PM: Have you asked the the excellent minister for everything, Peter Dutton ?

ABC: No, he won’t speak to the ABC, he has an exclusive contract with SKY.

PM: You see, that’s why you need a Foxtel subscription. But no, you are wrong. these people live on Nauru and Manus, that is their home. Why would we want to uproot them now, after all five years is when you put down roots. How would it be if busybodies from the ABC came around to Lucy and I at Point Piper or at the Lodge and asked us to move to, say, the Cayman Islands : we probably wouldn’t like it would we ?

ABC: Isn’t there a difference to you living in a Point Piper mansion or the Lodge in Canberra and these people living in a tent on Nauru ?

PM: Typical ABC nit-picking as usual.

ABC: The Australian Electoral Commission gave you a range of dates for the upcoming Super-Saturday by-elections together with Pros and cons for each date : you chose 28 July which was the scheduled date of the ALP national conference……

PM: Oh, was it, I didn’t realize that, what a pity, never mind (goes into fit of giggles).

ABC: Michaelia Cash seems to go from one drama to another and tries to lie her way out of every situation or hide behind a whiteboard. When will you call her to account ?

PM: The matter you are talking about is currently under investigation by the Australian Federal Police and has been for seven months and I couldn’t possibly comment on matters that are the subject of this investigation.

ABC: Do you think that we will ever get to the bottom of these raids on the AWU offices and the involvement of Minister Cash and her department in alerting the media in advance ?

PM: I sincerely hope not !

ABC: John Howard has declared his support for the Turnbull government and expects that you will get re-elected. Coming from a man who lost his seat, lost the prime ministership and lost government, do you take heart from this endorsement or do you consider it a kiss of death ?

PM: What was it that Greg Hunt told you to do ? I share his sentiments !

I have just been reading about the bizarre goings on in the WA parliament and the barefaced lies told by former Labor MP Barry Urban who was forced to resign before they expelled him and then his replacement, Colleen Yates, who was to stand in the by-election for the state seat of Darling Range, who also sought to deceive the electors and the parliament about her credentials.

First, Barry Urban who had claimed that he held a university degree obtained from the University of Leeds in the UK : that was a lie and Urban not only mislead Parliament and the electorate about his qualifications, he sought to deceive a parliamentary committee by providing a forged degree from the University of Leeds. It appears that Urban had been an English copper in a previous life – he would now be classed as a toe-rag I think is the term. He was then spotted wearing an English police service medal during an ANZAC day parade : he wasn’t entitled to that medal and had bought it online.

As he resigned from parliament before being expelled he is reported to have said : “I am paying a hefty price for my mistakes.”

So, then to his pre-selected replacement, Colleen Yates, who was about to present herself to the WA electorate when an astute journalist decided to run a fairly superficial check on the qualifications she had listed for herself online. They included an MBA from the University of WA on her LinkedIn profile and a Bachelor of Engineering, Master of Architecture from Washington University, among other accomplishments. All turned out to be fake : she had no tertiary qualifications whatsoever. Ms Yates resigned on Friday as Labor’s candidate for Darling Range after admitting to “minor mistakes” on her LinkedIn social media profile.

So many questions arise from these disclosures ranging from the very poor candidate checking procedures within the WA Labor Party to the quality of people putting themselves forward to serve their communities. But, what is quite startling is that when they are caught out they use terms like : “I am paying a hefty price for my mistakes” and reluctant admissions of “minor mistakes”.

In both cases these people use the term ‘mistake’ to explain their propensity to lie and deceive and, turning to the dictionary I find that mistake is defined as an action, decision, or judgment that produces an unwanted or unintentional result. Well, there certainly was an unintended result : they got caught out !

But what I’m not hearing is an apology for misleading and deceiving their political party, and the Australian public. OK this was WA but if two candidates for the same seat both turn out to be lying toads what are the odds spread across all parties, federal and state, nationally : those of you with a mathematical bent may be able to calculate those odds but it can’t be looking good.

Come the next election, I may just become a fake elector and tell everybody that I voted when in fact I had drawn something rude on the ballot paper !

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Do you carry ‘papers’? You know the sort of thing we saw in the movie Casablanca where Nazi SS officers would demand to see your papers and if you didn’t have any or they weren’t in order, you would be in big trouble. Generally speaking, we don’t carry ‘papers’ in Australia but Peter Dutton is going to change all that.

You probably heard that the Federal Government wants to give police and the ABF the power to carry out random identity checks without cause at the nation’s airports, with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull citing the “dangerous times” facing the nation as justification.

Mr Turnbull and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton will unveil plans to roll out new legislation along with an already announced $294 million package to boost security at domestic airports and introduce new measures in regional centres.

The Prime Minister said anyone travelling through the nation’s airports could be subject to the new powers.

“The justification for changing the law so that police at an airport can ask you to identify yourself, the justification is the safety of the Australian people,” Mr Turnbull told reporters at Melbourne Airport.

Under current laws, police can only ask for proof of identity with reasonable cause if they suspect a person has or will commit a serious offence.

“There’s certain conditions that need to be met at the moment before police can ask for that identification, which is an absurdity, and it is an issue the police have raised with us,” Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton argued.

So, if you’re off to the airport to pick up Aunt Maud and you just slip on a T-shirt and shorts and head off make sure you take your ‘papers’ with you because Peter Dutton wants to see them and he doesn’t mean your Coffee Club loyalty card. He wants to know why you are at the airport, what your name is and where you come from; if you don’t have photo ID with you, you will be escorted to one of those unmarked rooms at the airport for questioning … and it won’t be the Qantas Club lounge. Mr Dutton would then like to waterboard you – you can never be too careful he says – until you confess to being a foreign agent or even a member of the Labor Party. Aunt Maud will probably also be taken down as she enters the arrivals lounge.

Do you remember back in August 2015 when Peter Dutton wanted Australian Border Force (ABF) officers to check people’s papers on the streets of Melbourne? Officers were to be positioned at various locations around the city and would speak “with any individual we cross paths with”, ABF regional commander for Victoria and Tasmania Don Smith said in a statement.

That little adventure was quickly knocked on the head when there was a massive public outcry about the creation of a police state and racial profiling. But Mr Dutton hasn’t finished with us yet, he has a very singular view of Australians, possibly formed in the years when he was a Queensland copper; he thinks we are all shifty and unreliable and he will frequently support this view by reference to the fact that some of us vote for Labor and the minor parties.

The next move by Obergruppenführer Dutton will surely be the issue of Australia Cards with photo ID and to receive one of these you will need to know the names of all Liberal Prime Ministers since federation and the political hierarchy of the Downer dynasty including Georgina the most recent political aspirant from that family, fresh from the IPA indoctrination camp.

The introduction of the Australia Card with Iris recognition algorithms is inevitable in the brave new world of Duttomania. Let’s just consider the aforementioned Aunt Maud who had been taken into an unmarked interrogation room at the airport and subjected to questioning and a strip-search but because she doesn’t drive she doesn’t have a photo ID driver’s licence and whilst she proffered her Medicare Card and her Woolies orange Rewards Card these were insufficient proof of her indentity. The options for the ABF are to return her on the first available flight to Mildura or hold her in detention indefinitely until a third country claims her.

The question for you is, do you know where your maiden aunts are right now?

Well, you thought he couldn’t do it; you thought that Tony Abbott was indulging in intemperate exuberance [or telling fibs] when he said in 2013 that during the first five years of his reign as Emperor of Australia, he would create one million new jobs.

Well, you would have to eat your words now, wouldn’t you? Because not only did he achieve his goal, he did it mostly from the back-bench and that’s not easy. One million new jobs, WOW!

But, as frequently happens with our former Prime Minister’s moments of triumph, there is always some smart-arse lefty statistician running around ready to prick Tony’s balloon with annoying facts.

In this case the party-pooper is none other than Chris Richardson of Access Economics, annoyingly using Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data to support his comments, by saying:

“Check out ABS Labour Force figures over the last 15 years. They show, on average, 200,000 new jobs have been created each year.”

Those of a mathematical persuasion will notice that 200,000 new jobs a year translates to one million new jobs every five years for the last fifteen years.

So what’s going on? The coalition wouldn’t be spinning yarns would they? Surely, that nice Mr Turnbull wouldn’t be selling us porkies [as well as stealing Tony’s moment in the sun] would he?

Well it seems that Tony’s achievement was not such a big deal after all; some would say he just had to keep the ship of state on an even keel and he would reach a safe harbour and be home and hosed, whatever. He could have spent his time chasing female staffers around the ‘monley-pod’ to have achieved the same result – or is this just the prerogative of National Party leaders?

In coming months we will be told ad-nauseum that the coalition created one million new jobs over the five years from 2013, which we now know to be a furphy. Even former coalition Treasurer Joe Hockey said on more than one occasion that government’s don’t create jobs, businesses do. This is the same Joe Hockey who, incidentally, on the subject of housing affordability offered this insight:

“The starting point for a first home buyer is to get a good job that pays good money.”

He also noted, when defending proposed changes to the fuel tax in his 2014 budget that the increased fuel tax “will hit higher income households harder, as poorer people don’t have cars or actually don’t drive very far”.

Not surprising that the coalition shortly thereafter helped Joe pack his suitcase and sent him off to graze in the ‘long paddock’ of Washington DC.

So remember, whenever coalition politicians say, in coming months as they surely will, that they have created a million new jobs over the last five years that, by their own reckoning, Labor did a spiffing job over the period of the GFC in maintaining relatively high employment. Or, you may think that none of them ever created any jobs at all, which is probably closer to the truth.

The murky depths of greed and incompetence within the financial services sector embracing banks, insurance companies, intermediaries and so-called financial planners and retirement and investment counsellors are being stripped bare by the Royal Commission and it’s not a pretty sight. In many respects what has been going down is similar to a ponzi or pyramid scheme where everybody inside the tent is getting some of the action, from the chief executive down to those generating the sales and for the model to work (for them) there have to be plenty of ‘us’ feeding the beast.

Labor tried to overhaul this sector when in office but that was against the background of a powerful lobby opposed to change, regulation and oversight and as always, the Liberal Party was stridently opposed to anything that Labor proposed. Indeed, when Abbott achieved office he tried to repeal FoFA but the Senate blocked him. Despite a massive onslaught of misinformation and negativity led by Tony Abbott there were some improvements in disclosure and transparency written into FoFA but obviously not enough and certainly with insufficient oversight by APRA, ASIC and ACCC.

Acknowledging that many of these financial products are sold by frequently poorly trained individuals who are remunerated by sales and trailing commissions with their income periodically bolstered by volume bonuses, Labor initially tried to outlaw some of these practices in favour of a transparent, upfront fee for service model – most of the consumer related problems now being revealed are connected to hidden commissions, camouflaged and inflated fees and other such opaque practices. But they inevitably met with strong opposition from a sector not used to being open about what they charge you for the services that they frequently don’t even deliver on. This led to a flawed compromise bringing about the introduction of a new section 923A in the Corporations Act (2001).

This new section restricted the holder of a financial services licence – both companies and individuals need a financial services licence to operate in this sector – from using terms such as independent, impartial and unbiased in describing their services in circumstances where they receive any part of their remuneration in the form of commissions, volume or sales bonuses or other gifts that could reasonably be expected to influence the licence holder. In other words, if a bank or insurance company are paying a sales agent, mortgage or insurance broker a sales commission or a bonus based on the volume of sales or if they are flying these people off to Bali for a conference, they cannot put themselves out there as being independent, impartial or unbiased. It doesn’t however, place an obligation on the sales agent to inform the customer that he/she does have a bias or to tell the customer how much they are receiving by way of such commissions or bonuses or that they might win a prize for dodgy conferences in Bali depending on how much they sell : they just can’t describe themselves as independent, impartial or unbiased.

Clearly the compromise by Labor has not worked and neither could it have as it places the responsibility back on the punter, the person seeking the financial service, to ask the licensee or sales person “are you independent, impartial and free of bias?”

The original intent of this area of the FoFA reforms was to place an obligation on sales people to make these disclosures upfront but the industry argued that, if they did introduce that level of transparency it would damage their business model. Well, would you buy a financial product or accept advice from a sales representative who upfront told you that he was ‘not independent, was biased in favour of a particular principal and was not impartial and received his remuneration in the form of a commissions taken out of your pocket but not disclosed to you and was in line for a bonus based on his sales volumes and if he sold you more than you need, he could qualify for a trip to Bali which, incidentally, you would also be paying for’? The chances are that you would be loathe to seek financial advice in those circumstances but, that is what has been happening!

The Royal Commission has a long way to go and the more we learn of what has been going on the more we are going to be alarmed about the lack of adequate regulation, transparency and oversight that we have been prepared to stomach for so long and, when the Commission reports, will this government have the will to legislate change or are they more interested in giving corporations a tax cut?

Here is just one example from the Royal Commission of the sort of rorting that has been taking place:

An AMP financial planner gave advice to a young couple – a tradesman and stay-at-home mum with a combined income of $73,000 – with a one-year-old daughter, who sought advice about insurance. The planner recommended the couple replace their existing insurance policy with one from AMP.

They were told the new insurance would be about $1000 cheaper per year. But the planner’s advice was wrong perhaps even deceptive. The new AMP premiums were about $1000 more per year. The premiums were being deducted from the couple’s super so they didn’t notice the increase and it wasn’t brought to their attention.

Why this, one of many, examples, is significant is that it clearly shows the conflicts of interest that exist: the financial planner to earn his/her commissions needed a new sale even though the existing insurance appeared to have been adequate for the client’s purposes and was cheaper – the model relied on to get away with this scam was that the customer would not see or be aware of the increased premium as these were merely being deducted periodically from the customer’s superannuation nest-egg. For this scam to work, there has to be a shroud of misinformation hidden behind a veil of deception and that’s how it works.

There is a long way to go with this Royal Commission!

The broadcasting anti-siphoning regime was intended to preserve access to major sporting events to so called free-to-air and public broadcasters and the anti-siphoning list mandates that broadcasting rights cannot be acquired by a subscription broadcaster unless they have first been offered to or acquired by a free-to-air broadcaster who has either declined or otherwise failed to broadcast.

Well, it seems that the goal posts have been shifted and Cricket Australia have done a deal with Channel Seven and Foxtel, putting One Day Cricket Internationals and the T20 Internationals behind the Foxtel pay wall exclusively for the first time.

The Broadcasting Services Act lists those sporting events that will be reserved for free-to-air broadcasting, this is the section dealing with cricket:

4 Events or events of a kind the televising of which should be available free to the general public.

The events specified in the Schedule are events, or events of a kind, the televising of which should, in my opinion, be available free to the general public.

(3) Each one day cricket match that:

(a) involves the senior Australian representative team selected by Cricket Australia; and

(b) is played in Australia.

(4) Each Twenty20 cricket match that:

(a) involves the senior Australian representative team selected by Cricket Australia; and

(b) is played in Australia.

(5) Each match of the International Cricket Council One Day International World Cup that:

(a) involves the senior Australian representative team selected by Cricket Australia; and

(b) is played in Australia or New Zealand.

(6) The final of the International Cricket Council One Day International World Cup if the final is played in Australia or New Zealand.

(7) Each match of the International Cricket Council World Twenty20 tournament that:

(a) involves the senior Australian representative team selected by Cricket Australia; and

(b) is played in Australia or New Zealand.

(8) The final of the International Cricket Council World Twenty20 tournament if the final is played in Australia or New Zealand.

So, that’s fairly clear and it would seem that the Foxtel deal would contravene these regulations but, the Minister responsible, Mitch Fifield, has a lot of discretion when it comes to what can be gifted to pay TV broadcasters for exclusive broadcasting.

Section 115 of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 (BSA) empowers the Minister to gazette a list of events, or events of a kind, the televising of which the Minister believes should be available free to the general public but having said that, the Minister can also delist an event and take it off the list. The act gives an example of the sort of discretion the Minister can apply:

Note:

The following are examples of situations in which the Minister might exercise the power to remove an event from a notice:

Example 1

The national broadcasters and commercial television broadcasting licensees have had a real opportunity to acquire the right to televise an event, but none of them has acquired the right within a reasonable time. The Minister is of the opinion that removing the event from the notice is likely to have the effect that the event will be televised to a greater extent than if it remained on the notice.

So, that’s self-explanatory, isn’t it? A free to air broadcaster and that includes the ABC and SBS must have had a real opportunity to acquire the right to televise an event but if they have not taken up that right and broadcast the event, the Minister can remove the event or events from the list of events reserved for free to air and that gives pay TV carte blanche. But does that mean that T20 and ODI have been offered to free to air broadcasters but they have failed to take up that right and thus the Minister has taken them off the list and gifted them to Foxtel? I can’t answer that, but I have noticed that Senator Fifield yesterday stated that:

“The negotiation and allocation of broadcasting rights is entirely a matter for sporting bodies and commercial broadcasters. Government has no role in these negotiations.”

Senator Fifield said it was up to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to consider key industry developments to ensure that industry complies with the rules.

“Whilst the anti-siphoning list mandates that broadcasting rights cannot be acquired by a subscription broadcaster unless they have first been acquired by a free-to-air broadcaster, it does not and never has reserved broadcasting rights exclusively for free-to-air broadcasters or required free-to-air broadcasters to acquire rights to these events,” he said.

Make what you will of that statement. In one respect he says that the government has no role in the allocation of broadcasting rights but then he says that ACMA will act as the gatekeeper and in his final statement he throws the whole thing up in the air: he could have added, ‘as long as Rupert’s happy, that’s all that matters.’

This Minister is what my mother would have called ‘a bit of a worry’. Remember, it was he who gave Foxtel $30 million last July for no apparent reason and when asked why he had done so he got all vague. When probing journalists asked the federal communications department for this information they refused to release details because, they said, in true Yes Minister fashion: “documents about the deal do not exist”. It was said at the time that Foxtel were given the thirty million to encourage the development and broadcasting of minority sports. When it was suggested that the broadcasting of minority sports could be much better accommodated by public broadcasters such as the ABC and SBS and thus gain much broader community coverage than by being restricted to a subscription broadcaster that you had to pay for, the response was inaudible.

Watch this space!

I’m trying, I really am trying to keep pace with President Trump’s so called Tariff War with the Chinese but then I get confused when Ms Huckabee Sanders explains to us that President Trump reserves the right to retaliate to the unfair and punitive tariffs that the Chinese have imposed on US imports (which were in response to unfair and punitive tariffs that Trump imposed on imports from China).

I do understand that all of this is to do with making America great again and the rest of us not so much, but what I failed to appreciate was the impact that tariffs have on global trade, as indeed did our BFF Donald. He tells us that, just like the Mexican wall, somebody else will pay and it’s going to be win-win all the way. But is it?

I’ve been doing some reading and I understand that a tariff is an imposition that an importing country places on imports at their point of entry, either all imports or selected commodities, services and manufactured goods: what Tony Abbott would call a ‘Great Big New tax’ if it was being imposed by anybody but him and our good mate Donald. The tax is payable by the importer and thus lowers the importer’s margin of profit when he on-sells the goods etc: that last was a fib, the importer actually passes on the tariff tax to the consumer.

So what happens to the tariff once collected as a tax on imports? Well it goes straight into the government’s back pocket. As some uncharitable people would say, as a means of offsetting the corporate tax revenue losses to government when you give big companies a massive tax cut as Trump has just done: so, the punter also known as the man (or woman) on the street and previously known in legal circles as the ‘man on the Clapham Omnibus’ cops it in the neck or rather it comes straight out of your back pocket and into the government’s. So it’s all good, the government’s loss of revenue due to corporate tax cuts is made up for by the tariff impositions which are paid for by the bloke in the mirror: the old pea and thimble trick.

As I understand it, the idea behind the tariff tax on imports is to encourage punters to buy locally made goods as, theoretically, they will be cheaper than imported goods because of the tariff imposed. A bit like, if you will, Australia imposing a tariff on imported automobiles so that instead of you mob buying your Audis and BMWs you buy a Holden thus supporting employment and the economy of … err South Australia Korea: not such a good example, but you get the picture.

So, Turnbull with much enthusiasm says that he too will cut company taxes but unlike Donald he doesn’t have a plan B to recoup the diminished government revenues but then, who needs hospitals, schools, roads and all those other uppity socialist things. We’ll just privatise healthcare, put tolls on roads and everybody can go to a private school. In the May budget, which in many respects will be the election budget he will, to get his company tax cuts through the Senate, foreshadow a reduction in personal income taxes, again unfunded. This personal income tax cut will probably be scheduled for the first year of a post-election government which will be his principal gambit for re-election and also a firm wedge on Labor who will find it very hard to campaign against tax cuts.

We live in interesting times: I just hope that our children and grandchildren will find it in their hearts to forgive us for what we are doing to their endowment.

We’re going to have a public enquiry headed up by Philip Ruddock into religious freedoms and religious protections. Submissions are called for from all sectors of our community and based upon the findings of the Expert Panel and their report to the government, we can anticipate that legislative change may follow: that’s how democracy works. Right?

The Expert Panel comprises:

• the Hon Philip Ruddock (chair)
• Emeritus Professor Rosalind Croucher AM
• the Hon Dr Annabelle Bennett AO SC
• Father Frank Brennan SJ AO
• Professor Nicholas Aroney

Philip Ruddock is an odd choice as Chair of this enquiry as it was he who on 27 May 2004 as the then federal Attorney-General introduced the Marriage Amendment Bill 2004 to incorporate a definition of marriage into the Marriage Act 1961 to outlaw the recognition of same-sex marriages in Australia and to make it unlawful to recognise the marriages of same-sex couples lawfully entered into in foreign jurisdictions. This is the legislation that was finally repealed in favour of marriage equality. He hardly comes to this matter with clean hands.

The other experts are a highly qualified group but, and I may be wrong in this, don’t appear to represent religious beliefs beyond those of the Christian faith.

Emeritus Professor Rosalind Croucher AM is President of the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Hon Annabelle Bennett AO SC is a retired Judge of the Federal Court of Australia and was an additional judge of the Supreme Court of the ACT. Fr Frank Brennan SJ AO is an Australian Jesuit priest, human rights lawyer and academic. Nicholas Aroney is Professor of Constitutional Law at The University of Queensland. He is also a Fellow of the Centre for Public, International and Comparative Law, a Research Fellow of Emmanuel College at The University of Queensland, a Fellow of the Centre for Law and Religion at Emory University

This group will accept submissions up to 31 January and will report back to the government by 31 March 2018, a very tight schedule for such a vast subject: their brief requires them to receive submissions, consider and report on the following:

• consider the intersections between the enjoyment of the freedom of religion and other human rights
• have regard to any previous or ongoing reviews or inquiries that it considers relevant
• consult as widely as it considers necessary

Submissions by 31 January 2018 can be submitted on this form: Religious Freedom Review Submission.

Normally submissions to an enquiry of this sort would, in the democratic tradition, be published online along with the final report to the government. But it seems that there is a push to keep the submissions secret in a marked departure from normal processes. The PM’s department, which has control of the inquiry, said it would not publish the submissions but gave no reasons for this departure from normal procedure. Late on Tuesday, however, Mr Turnbull’s media team sought to intervene by suggesting that enquiry chairman Philip Ruddock would decide if submissions were published. The PM’s office then instructed his own department to issue a new statement to that effect.

The PM’s department then issued a statement saying that decisions on releasing submissions would rest on “whether individuals have provided consent“. A very strange approach, surely? Wouldn’t you think that an organisation or individual making a submission to a public enquiry would expect and even insist that their submission get a public airing even if for reasons of sensitivity you remained anonymous: why would you want to keep your views and opinions secret?

It is expected the inquiry will attract submissions from Australia’s biggest churches, including the Catholic and Anglican archdioceses of Sydney and Melbourne together with Muslim groups who will seek recognition of some aspects of Sharia law in Australian legislation and Jewish groups all of who have their own barrow to push and that includes issues such as abortion and contraception. Then you have human rights groups and inevitably atheists who will seek to have human and secular rights protected. It presents an opportunity for all of these groups and other advocates to spell out the exact changes to the law they believe are necessary and we, the long-suffering public, deserve the right to see and consider these submissions and their likely impact on us if adopted.

The expert panel will meet for the first time next week on Wednesday and will make the decision on whether to publish submissions then. Ruddock has said that “what I sought when I was first asked to chair this inquiry was whether or not a decision had been taken on how these matters would be dealt with. It became clear when I spoke to the prime minister’s office that this would be decided when we met and that is what I thought would be the appropriate approach.”

So, whilst the PM’s office have shown their preference for not allowing the submissions to be published they have grudgingly accepted that this is a decision that must be left to the Expert Panel, otherwise what’s the point of an independent public enquiry? If the expert panel decides not to publish submissions then you can anticipate that this whole enquiry is a sham and was merely been set up to appease the Right wing of the LNP in the lead up to the same-sex marriage vote.

Ruddock also said, “In all of these things, there are always some circumstances where if people have a view that there is material that they want to provide but it is sensitive – yet they want it brought to the committee’s attention but not necessarily the public’s – then you have to have some regard for that.” He said his personal view, from his experience sitting on other committees, was that it was important for people to be able to maintain anonymity if requested.

I agree absolutely that anonymity should be protected where it is sought but for the life of me, I cannot understand how a submission to a public enquiry which is designed to influence the decisions of the expert panel and ultimately the government should be withheld from public scrutiny.

The Australian Greens are planning on using this federal review of Australia’s religious freedoms to put the idea of a bill or charter of rights back on the political agenda. They argue, why just provide rights and protections for religious groups when the country is badly in need of basic human rights along the lines of the various UN Conventions we have signed but never adopted into Australian law: that inevitably will be a topic for discussion on another day.

Then we have the curly question that was part of the Racial Discrimination Act section 18C discussion. The right-wing of the coalition were passionately opposed to the provisions of the section which makes it unlawful to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people in circumstances where this is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group. Scott Morrison seems to want to extend this prohibition to include religious groups but, confusingly he still says that such protections in the context of racism infringe on the democratic right to freedom of speech: he has yet to explain his rationale for that line of thought.

By this time next week we will know if the expert panel will permit submissions to be made public and if they decide against doing so we will also know that this public enquiry is a sham. However, I believe that the participants on this panel are fundamentally people who believe in transparency, democracy and the rule of law and that it would be anathema to them to be subjected to politically motivated censorship. We shall see!