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Dutton’s bid for nuclear power: hoax or reckless endangerment?

It’s incredible. Such is our love-in with Peter “Junkyard” Dutton, our former Border Overlord, who used to play the bad cop dispensing rough justice–doing whatever it took to keep us safe-that today, he’s being cheered by most of the press gallery for reckless endangerment in his punt on nuclear energy.

Is it just to please his sponsor, Gina Rinehart and other richly attractive mining oligarchs who will make a few extra billion out of delaying the end of coal-fired power generation? Even if they do hasten the end of the world, they do get to star in their own perverted, planet-destroying mother of all snuff movies?

Or… brace yourself- does “Dutts” blunt truth and other fiction’s pin up boy-harbour ulterior motives?

Of course. A whiff of Emu Field, Montebello and Maralinga on the campaign trail helps with Coalition branding and product differentiation. “I’m with nuclear, stupid” would be a killer of an election slogan. Albo and Dutts could get together to whip up a referendum for the next federal democracy sausage BBQ. Besides, no-one in the nuclear power side hustle isn’t also itching to develop his or her own nuclear weapon cycle. Nuclear energy only makes sense if you are a nuclear arms manufacturer.

And what a boon for democracy. Voters choose between the pro-mining, colliery-opening, Labor Party and the pro-mining right-wing rump of a moribund Liberal Party, only in the race because of its secret agreement with the National Party, a mob of pro-mining, faux populists who pose as saviours of The Bush and its battlers, such as Riverview Old Boy, Barnaby Thomas Gerald Joyce’s Weatherboard Nine.

Or Bob Katter’s family which includes the incredibly successful arms manufacturer, son-in-law Rob Nioa.

Nuclear is also a feint in the climate wars. Let’s talk tactics. Team Dutton can say that Labor is on the right track but has “no credible pathway” unless you have nuclear energy in the brew, firming up your mix. The Liberal Party plays the front end of the Coalition panto horse; the Nationals bring up the rear.

And just as he did after defeat in Aston, Dutton dashes into nuclear after his Dunkley debacle. Note he’s now a big reactor man, having got the email that small modular reactors are scarce as rocking-horse manure. It’s a revolutionary turn. A year or so ago, Dutts opposed, “the establishment of big nuclear facilities”. But being a conservative in Australian politics means, you don’t have to explain or apologise.

Nor do you have to heed our scientists. “… the CSIRO has made clear, large reactors are too large for our small grids, and small reactors are still unproven commercially.”

Smear them. Say it’s a discredited study.

Sean Kelly sees Dutton’s pro-nuclear vision as a way of buying unity. Nobody on Dutton’s team thinks it’s a real policy, he claims, and it’s a long-term fantasy, so they won’t buck Dutton’s wilful stupidity. He’s sniping at CSIRO, too, which always wins friends amongst a growing anti-science brigade, a resource tapped into shamelessly by such figures as, “planter saint”, Barnaby Joyce; off his nut about the “green peril”. The former deputy PM also calls windmills, “filth” whilst renewable energy is a “swindle”.

The Coalition attack on CSIRO parallels its harassment of a now cowed ABC, on which it inflicted a barrage of criticism, funding cuts and Morrison’s captain’s pick of Ita Buttrose as chair. Cutbacks in the CSIRO have also taken their toll but their CEO, Professor Doug Hilton publicly rebukes Dutton.

“For science to be useful and for challenges to be overcome it requires the trust of the community. Maintaining trust requires scientists to act with integrity. Maintaining trust also requires our political leaders to resist the temptation to disparage science.”

Kelly might add that the Coalition is riven by at least ten factions, post-Morrison, and has rivals hatching plots of helping their leader by taking his job away from him. One of these, with some experience of edged weapons, is former SAS Patrol Commander, Captain Andrew Hastie who must have been cheered when in 2017 the AFP cleared of war crimes, an SAS soldier who cut the hands off two suspected Taliban fighters. Handy Andy was in command of some other soldiers at the scene. Hastie’s mentor is none other than party kingmaker, Big Mining Shill and fellow happy clapper, the Nationals’ John Anderson.

A spill now could avoid some bloodletting in the next federal election, a surgical strike, perhaps.

Rex Patrick sees Peter Dutton’s move as a “nasty” political wedge given that the federal Labor government has already signed us on to Morrison’s AUKUS which guarantees a small modular nuclear reactor inside a submarine moored near you if you happen to live close to HMAS Stirling Naval Base in Perth, the Osborne Naval Shipyards in Adelaide, SA or the yet to be opened mystery envelope containing only three options, Sydney Harbour, Wollongong/ Port Kembla or Newcastle.

Hint. The Royal Australian Navy berths in Sydney Harbour.

Moreover, the disposing of nuclear waste is also well in hand, notes Patrick.

“In the last few months, we’ve seen a bill introduced into the Parliament by the Labor Government that legalises the acceptance of nuclear waste from the UK and US and provides the Government with the power to nominate any place in Australia as a nuclear waste site, with no requirement to consult with local communities or other interested groups.”

In the bigger picture, AUKUS depends upon a gamble that nuclear power will be the naval fuel of the future. And the even bigger gamble that submarines are not yet obsolete. Yet even today it’s uneconomic and fraught with a perplex of disposal and safety issues. Dutts the Kiwi Bikie Gangster Deporter, Dual Citizenship-Stripper, Dole-bludger-buster, or the African Gang vigilante; dog-whistling racism, fear and division, demonising the other, is as complex as the next bloke. But he is not a big ideas man. Fizza Turnbull has never heard Peter propose a single constructive idea.

Dutton’s mentor, John Howard was rarely troubled by big ideas either. But now, Dutton is calling for “a mature debate™” on a nuclear energy, we don’t need, can’t afford, could never rely on and can’t fuel. We’d be importing expensive fuel rods we can’t make at home for reactors which would never be built in time (without a slave labour workforce like the UAE) to replace our rapidly clapped-out coal-fired plant.

The latest that coal burner stations will be decommissioned is 2038. We couldn’t get atomic energy working until at least the 2040s. But let’s not let practicality get in the way of progress. We are already being sold a mythical new generation of reactor, now that the small, modular model has imploded.

Whoever is backing the Coalition’s nuclear crusade, however dark, the money trail, we can expect a litany of lies about the most expensive, unsafe and least reliable energy, we could hope for.

Nuclear energy lacks the flexibility we need to switch around a modern grid. It cannot “firm” renewables. Even if we could change the laws of every state and territory which currently make nuclear reactors illegal – because of the risk to the environment and to public health. And welch on our obligations as global citizens under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, (NPT).

And that’s before we get to solve the problems of where to build our reactors or what to do with their toxic waste. Of course, we could grovel to the US; beg to join the nuclear arms production club. Experts have tried. Why repeat the humiliation of public refusal?

Above all, a nuclear reactor is not emissions free once you tot up the cost of the long and complex build and once you factor in the cost of a long decommissioning – plus transporting live and spent fuel rods or factor transportation emissions to the equation.

“In one life cycle study, Netherlands-based World Information Service on Energy (WISE) calculates that nuclear plants produce 117 grams of CO2 emissions per KWH. Other studies have similar findings.”

Given the cost, nuclear power plants would be possible only with massive government subsidies. In 2023, the French government had to nationalise its nuclear power industry, responsible for generating seventy per cent of its energy. France has had a mere seventy-eight years in which to make nuclear energy pay its way. But who gives a fig about the experience of a major nuclear nation?

Instead of slogans about reliability and endurance, why not heed the US example where twenty plants had to be shut down well before they reached the claimed forty-year life span? Mostly, the failures are in the steam generators but there’s also a built-in source of degradation.

“In addition to normal industrial wear-and-tear, nuclear plants have the unique and often irreparable liability of having their components continually exposed to varying levels of radiation. Over time, radiation embrittles and/or corrodes the infrastructure (metal components in particular) and will eventually lead to structural failure.”

Yet Dutts is up for a debate which will help us decide whose reactors will come into our national grid and the circumstances in which they come. His “debate” will kill time while global heating soars and the owners of coal-fired plants and other Liberal donors are laughing all the way to the bank.

Is Spud, a paperback Howard? The same message but less weight? Lech Blaine sees him that way, even if that’s unfair given that John Winston Howard never betrayed any intellectual breadth or depth. Under Dutts, the Coalition is “One Nation Lite”, says Tasmanian Liberal, MP for Bass, Bridget Archer. Both are helpful assessments of his character but it would be fatal to underestimate Dutton’s tactical nous.

After denouncing The Voice, as a conspiracy of elites against ordinary Australians, stoking race, immigration and gender culture wars, the LNP knight-errant is off on a new, nuclear-powered, pseudo-populist quest to help make Australia hate again. His minders borrow from the Trump playbook.

There is something eerily familiar about Dutton 2.0’s crazy-brave new world, in which old hatreds blaze anew in a series of assaults on reason, decorum, parliamentary convention, renewables and CSIRO. Truth. It’s a world where a “reasoned debate” about nuclear energy is code for stalling to keep coal.

Blaine sees Dutton as a Tony Abbott without the Rhodes Scholarship and bizarre religious hangups. And without, we must add, the St Ignatius Riverview elite private school old-boy power network.

Ambitious and strategic, Dutton would rather be a wolf in wolf’s clothing. Yet LNP history is littered with con men who’ve posed as strong men. In 2015, after rave reviews from his own comms department on Border Protection, the fabulist, Scott Morrison, styled himself as the “tough cop” on the welfare beat. But what ensued was a politically expedient, vindictive cruelty towards the poor and vulnerable.

Dutton does love Big Mining. In April 2010, Labor proposed to tax mining companies’ super-profits. This would kill mining overnight, Abbott ranted. Yet it’s impossible to see how. In the five years to 2020, the top fossil fuel mining companies were paying little or no tax, reports Michael West.

Yet The Liberals’ scare campaign had to hit pause, briefly, because Dutton had bought shares in BHP just after the policy announcement. As you do. “I bought them to put in the bottom drawer,” he says.

Is Dutt’s the thinking man’s Pauline Hanson? Currently undertaking a reverse ferret on nuclear energy, the goose-stepping Coalition is taking such a hard right turn that it’s back to budgie-smuggling.

Only with added hyperbole. Forget the $100 lamb roast or Whyalla being wiped off the map, it’s how renewables will steal a third of Australia’s agricultural land.

So, says, Queen Gina Rinehart, The AFR’s 2024 “Business Person of the Year”, who with 12 million hectares here and in the USA, is also the world’s biggest individual landholder.

Renewables may take up 0.27%. But Ms Rinehart said her “meticulous research” is done by The IPA to whom, she is a major donor. As Richard Ackland notes,

“This, once again, is a glimmer into how the world works. Rino gives the Institute pots of money garnered from publicly owned quarry assets, the institute then concocts “research” favourable to her interests, which she publicly proclaims to be “meticulous”.”

Dutts is hell-bent on steering his crew back to a Tony Abbott future of opposing everything Labor proposes. Onion-breath-opposition for its own sake. Especially on energy. Take a bow Big Ted O’Brien. Federal shadow minister for Climate change and Energy and Fortescue Metals shareholder, the LNP’s beige cardigan, Ted O’Brien could be a younger Scott Morrison’s body double.

Ted’s certainly a spiritual twin in his industrial-strength hypocrisy.

In 2019, Mr O ‘Brien chaired a committee which found that:

“Australia’s rich renewable energy sources are more affordable and bring less risk than the elevated cost and risk associated with nuclear energy,”

Federal Minister for Fairfax, a Gold Coaster who was pipped by 53 votes by white-shoe brigadier, Clive Palmer in 2013, a legend in his own lunch-bucket, who set a new national record for MP least likely to show up to work in 2014, O’Brien is a dead ringer for the former member for Cook, Scott “no mates” Morrison, whose farewell dinner at the Shire is “adjourned” because none of those invited would show up. Perhaps they turned up to Ted’s party instead. “Time for Ted” was his election slogan.

Yet not only is Edward Lyneham O’Brien, the spitting image of Scott John Morrison, with less hair loss but he also sounds just like him. Listen to him bull-doze his host, ABC 7:30’s Sara Ferguson, badgering her with non-sequiturs. Sound-bites. Lies about non-existent small, modular nuclear reactors. Labour refusing to have a mature debate. How Australia has some of the highest energy prices in the world. Premature evacuation.

“We should not be closing our coal-fired power stations prematurely.”

Most of our coal-burners are clapped-out already, AEMO reports and will expire well before we’re ready with nuclear replacements – or the wiring required. Ten have shut since 2012 and the remainder may be wound up three times faster than their operators say.

The smug, arrogance is at play, too. Not only is Ted right about how nuclear energy will firm up the grid, hopelessly flaccid under woke solar, wind and batteries, he’s doing us a favour in pointing it out.

Be a breeze to get the odd SMR up and running over Easter. Just copy the bijou miracle of the UAE, an iconic dictatorship and a triumph of can-do capitalism, reliant on South Korean funding and millions of migrant slave-workers, mainly from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

So US giant Westinghouse declared bankruptcy in 2017 following its disastrous reactor construction projects in South Carolina and Georgia? There’s always the UK.

OK, Britain’s nuclear power industry went bankrupt years ago. France bought it, then the French nuclear industry went bankrupt. In Gallic desperation, it has now been fully nationalised – just to keep it going. Expensive. The South Korean utility KEPCO which achieved a miraculously quick nuclear installation for the UAE which the Coaltions keen to tell us about, is in big trouble. Its debt is now A$224 billion.

So? We could look to Japan. Japan’s nuclear industry never recovered from Fukushima.

“By giving in to the climate deniers and nuclear cheerleaders in his own show, Dutton shows his preparedness to consign the Australian community to an expensive, disaster-prone, and dangerous future for the sake of protecting his own position,” Labor’s Josh Wilson says.

But that’s only half the story. Dutton’s nuclear dream is a dead cat on the table to distract us from his Dunkley debacle. When he proposes a debate, the last thing he wants is us to have a conversation. The debate will help keep fossil fuel giants in the play; delay the uptake of renewables. Make billions for Gina Rinehart, whose businesses are flat-lining right now. The LNP is big on corporate welfare.

But beyond the tactics of Labor-baiting and the politics of diversion and the need for Dutton to keep himself safe from the empty chair he defeated in the last Liberal spill, lurks the original – and only – economic rationale of nuclear power – as an adjunct to a nuclear arms industry.

Add in the (now-delayed) AUKUS submarines which need to refuel in Australia and the fake debate which the Opposition leader is calling for could be gazumped by an agile federal government with an honest and open conversation. Professor Matthew Kearnes, Professor of Environment and Society in the UNSW School of Humanities and Languages, observes,

“When we say ‘We need to talk about nuclear technology’, it matters who speaks and who is in the room to be a part of that conversation. If we are going to have a conversation then it needs to be an open one where there are lots of possible inputs into that discussion.”

What we don’t need is the fog of obfuscation and deceit, Peter Dutton’s team is intent on giving us instead. Call his bluff, Labor. Have a real conversation. Be time to even whip up a bit of a plebiscite. But one with all the facts spelled out in writing.

 

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Junkyard Dutton ducks for cover under Gina’s nuclear umbrella, but he’s still up shit creek

Junkyard Dutton slinks away from Dunkley in a blue funk, after his humiliating rout as the brains behind the Advance-Liberal (Ad Lib) coalition’s “Rapists, paedophiles and murderers”, fear n’ smear campaign.

No-one can count a club of billionaires’ dark money, but a Qantas Chairman’s Lounge of plutocrats, masquerading as a grassroots outfit “Advance” report $5.2 million in donations and $4.5million on election expenditure up to July 2025. We will never know the true cost of those posters, that social media, the trucks, letterboxing, hype and lies out of a grab bag of the worst of US Republican politics.

We do know the Ad Lib coalition threw buckets of money over its shitshow, dumpster-fire-trainwreck of a campaign, giving voters a real choice between an incoherent, under-prepared, over-scripted Ad Liberal stumblebum who struggled to read a script about crime, cost of living – and Jodie Belyea, an articulate and sincere, woman who dedicates her life to empowering other women in her community.

Dutton’s fingerprints are all over the old fashioned, wholesome, Howard-era hysteria, saturation hate-bombing. So his team’s all OK with posters on trucks depicting China’s president, Xi Jinping, casting a vote for Labor in a desperate frenzy of Labor-bashing? Atop the dung-heap is the lurid lie that Labor has released hordes of sex-crazed detainees at large. Also adorning the ordure is Laura Norder;s cousin Tuff, as in Tough on crime. Then there’s the cost of living and a ute tax.

Howard’s acolyte, Tony Abbott is one of Advance’s advisers. Quelle surprise. Gina Rinehart is a backer, but the outfit likes to keep its profile low by using virtual offices, publishing fake addresses and no phone number. The AEC is waving a bit of limp lettuce, in hot pursuit of Advance’s for ts lies on trucks about Chinese control of Labor.

Dutton does a runner. He’s out of circulation for days. The Incredible Sulk, wants to distance himself as far as possible from the scene of the hate crime. He makes no attempt to reflect on his party’s drubbing in a litmus test byelection. Instead, he flings a dead Schrödinger’s cat on the table. His nuclear energy bid is both simultaneously alive, as a culture war strategy and dead as a dodo as a practical solution.

Dutton is a dead man walking. Former Victorian Liberal strategist and walking, talking, oxymoron and avid recycler, Tony Barry, calls Dutton’s nuclear bid, “the longest suicide note in Australian political history” a phrase he’s pinched from the UK when Labour’s 1983 election pledge was to be more socialist.

Instead, Moses Dutton has come down from Mt Dickson with two stone tables, his face radiant with radioactivity. Plus the hot flush he always gets from being near his sweetie, Gina Rinehart. He decrees that nuclear energy will be the focus of energy, environment and climate. Tony Barry’s a director of political consultancy Redbridge group. He cites research to show that Dutton and his Ad Lib coalition are flogging a dead horse.

“Just 35 per cent of people support the idea of using nuclear to provide for Australia’s energy needs. Only coal was less popular. Where there is support, it is among only those who already vote Liberal or who are older than 65.”

If team Dutton had any sense, it would try to win back the under-35-year-old voters who are deserting the coalition in droves. Any sense? Make that any say in the matter.

As we are tipped willy-nilly out of capitalism into a techno-feudal era, as Yanis Varoufakis calls our new servitude to digital overlords, Amazon, Google, and Meta; as we barter personal data for access to the cloud, our aspiring political Czar, “Kamikaze” Dutton, reminds us, that in a Land Downunder we are still at the mercy of our bunyip aristocracy of corporate uber-capitalists, fat cats and “extractavists”. And Alexander Downer.

Of course, it can pay to ingratiate yourself with the powerful. Donate the odd spare kidney as did personal chopper pilot, Nicholas Ross for his boss, Kerry Francis Bull(y)more Packer. Dutton would love Packer’s negotiating style.

In 1984, Kerry got his prodigal son, James, to contact NSW cabinet ministers.

“The old man told me to ring… This is the message: if we don’t win the casino, you guys are fucked.” Oddly, despite James’ best telephone manner, the Packers didn’t win any casino licence in 1994.

At least Ross had a choice. We hope. Most of us, however, are ambivalent, at best, towards the price-gouging, wage thieving, monopolist, duopolist and oligopolist corporate barons, and billionaire baronesses who run our mines, banks, energy, aged care, insurance rackets, shopping centres and make our cardboard boxes and coffins. But real-estate multi-millionaire, Peter Dutton is sure he’s one of them.

In a stunning getaway in a $5,000 business-class flight, Dutton says he pays for himself, (if we don’t note his free, exclusive Qantas Chairman’s club membership, a perk enjoyed also by Albo and other Labor luminaries), Peter Craig Dutton, steals away from Canberra.

He chem-trail-blazes in a haze of kerosene vapour, toxic oxides and ultra-fine particulate matter, down to the fabled Shangri-Lah the long-lost Liberal seat of Dunkley, that “Religiosity Morrison” says is on the cusp of turning right again. It’s a delusion. The outer suburban ute-belt, is not listening to Team Dutton’s cost-of-living crisis mantra. Nor do they fear freed asylum-seeker rapists. Nor are they overwhelmed when he cuts and runs into hiding for three days, leaving boofhead Nathan Conroy to make paternity jokes while Sussan Ley goes haywire and gives a cheerleader speech that may well end her career.

Niki Savva is savage. “Not on any planet or in any universe could a barely average result qualify as success. Arguing otherwise shows no respect for people’s intelligence.”

But in Trump’s America a third of voters believe a loss is a win; his election was stolen.

Dutts barely touches down and, he’s up, up and away again -off in a puff of toxic volatile particles. Thank former Qantas elfin CEO, Alan Joyce, for boosting shareholder profits not only with his flight cancellation scams, but by curbing inessential spending, such as fair wages for workers and pilots, – and upgrading planes. Like the LNP, QANTAS’ fleet is dangerously old and decrepit if not obsolete.

Yet no expense is spared for members of the Chairman’s Club, a type of top secret, Alice’s Restaurant where you can get anything that you want. At Vanessa Hudson’s restaurant, you can get a free steak or the whole beast, at any time of the day or night. Must cost a fortune. And you may also get to your destination. Unless your flight is among the 15,000 cancelled, a one in four chance in the airline’s operations May to July 2022.

Instead of fronting a Senate inquiry, over its role in getting government to block a bid from Qatar Air to double its flights to big Australian cities, Joyce flees to Dublin. Under Dutton, the Opposition is on a road to nowhere. “The politics of fear and loathing did not work in Dunkley. They didn’t land in Goldstein in 2022 and they won’t at the next election,” says Zoe Daniel, Independent MP for Goldstein.

Dutts exits stage right. Jets clear across a third-degree sunburnt country leaving catastrophic fire danger ratings in Victoria. He can’t wait to bend the knee to Queen Gina and her court plus four hundred time-serving serfs, her adoring staff members, in a giant marquee on the banks of the ephemeral Swan.

Dutton’s top of the bill at his patron’s star-studded seventieth private birthday bash and lovefest. He swoons and fawns for forty-minutes, wolfs down the wagyu, necks a Bollinger, and then jets back to lecture Labor on the hustings about the cost of living.

Hypocrisy gone mad? It’s a nine hour round trip. Even then he’s missed a bit of caviar on his tie. Is he smitten? Very. Last November, at her bush doof, Pete was practically sitting in Gina’s ample lap. Gina makes it very clear that she’s looking for love and that in other places they thank their mining billionaires. Is Dutton more than Rinehart’s meat puppet?

Wild horses wouldn’t keep Gina’s toadies away. Arriving a day early, is Pauline Hanson, another pseudo-populist fraud, racist and xenophobe. The One Nation founder, who flew her team to the US to in 2019, to seek funds from the NRA, arrives Friday, to sign up star recruit and son of a gun, former WA Labor’s Ben Dawkins, who’s in a bit of a pickle over breaching a family violence restraining order. Many times over. But he’s just misunderstood. Pauline’s got soft a spot for the underdog. And she loves a bloke’s bloke.

“Maybe if he got some support, that I believe the Labor Party hasn’t given him, and that’s what people need to do their job,” she sighs endearingly mangling sense and syntax. Support groupie, Hanson will be 70 in May. Gina is bound to get a birthday party invitation. As will Ben.

“He’s been the lone member in this parliament, as I was in 1996, when I was just disendorsed from the Liberal Party, so I’ve been there, I’ve worn his shoes, you haven’t.”

Fully booted and spurred, Guy Sebastian nails Advance Australia Fair, over a troupe on horseback kitted out tastefully in iconic Driza Bones and Rossi, both companies bought by Rinehart last year. They wave Ozzie and Hancock flags to The Man from Snowy River theme while aspiring Liberal candidate for state Premier, and Perth’s Lord Mayor, Basil Zempiras is funny as hell on the microphone as the party’s MC.

Basil is still living down his anti-trans scandal but given Dutton’s sedulous aping of Morrison’s campaign strategy, transphobia along with homophobia, may soon enjoy a revival in the Liberals’ manifesto.

But it may be upstaged by Dutton’s embracing nuclear energy as Coalition one-stop-shop solution to climate, environment and energy this week. Is it a dead cat on the table after his Dunkley debacle?

Of course. Labor’s success in holding Dunkley and increasing its primary vote to 41 percent puts the wind up the Coalition. For Niki Savva, team Dutton’s failure is a masterclass in how not to contest a byelection, but the last thing this Opposition is going to do is to change direction. Even if it could. In a world first, Dutton hastily makes the Liberal front bench bigger than its back, a desperate trick doomed to failure.

In politics, as in life, if you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no-one. Or worse. Already, daggers are drawn and eyebrows raised over the over-promotion of neighbour Luke Howarth as Assistant Treasurer.

Howarth’s a gunner. He’s gonna give back the stage three tax cuts. The poor can keep theirs, he declares, thinking aloud. Angus “airmiles” Taylor is giving him a lot of side-eye.

On the backburner go Dutton and Ley’s released detainee rapist arrested antics. Off with the Phyllis Diller fright wig, Sussan. Expect more where they came from. More will be seen, moreover, of the take-no-prisoners-open war on democracy with Ad Lib’s Orwellian invasion fleet of Truth Trucks plus saturation hate-bombing posters, emails, FB messages, T-shirts and whopping lies about Labor on social media.

Dutton doubles down. It’s a term from blackjack which means to keep betting when you already in a hole. He’s got the email that the small, portable modular nuclear reactor is pure fiction. Now he’s going for the mother of all nuclear policies proposing an atomic plant on the site of the old clapped-out coal-fired generators, we are slowly phasing out. They’re already wired into the grid.

What could possibly go wrong. “Water”, says Anthony Albanese. Nuclear plants use lots of water.

But Opposition MPs has been competing to woo Gina Rinehart. It’s their Trump card. If we even pretend to go uranium, it creates a delay in which we can have business as usual. For the time being. It will kill us all in the end of, course, but it will extend the life and the worth of coal mining.

And Hancock Prospecting shares.

Powerful people seek powerful friends. Media giants, Kerry Stokes and the Murdoch mob are prepared to post a loss if their empires gain them access to government levers. Keith Pitt, on the other hand takes over the intercom on the chartered jet last November, to sing his sweetheart, Gina Rinehart’s praises.

“A mid-air bootlicking,” The AFR’s Mark Stefano calls it in disgust. Not once but three times on the long flight to Perth. Pitt’s craven sycophancy and his FIFO lickspittle routine would be par for the course in the US, but it’s unwelcome in Australia. Has the man no self-respect? Which is why Dutton’s indecent obsession with Gina Rinehart and his recent mad dash westward to her birthday bash will undo him.

A closer look is required.

The cunning stunt involved a dash to Melbourne, Thursday afternoon, followed by a return berth to Perth, notes Stefano.

“… the opposition leader transited for 12 hours from Canberra > Melbourne > Perth > Melbourne just so he could attend the birthday party of Australia’s richest person for … 40 minutes.”

When he needed to be on the job in Dunkley, Dutton was prepared to drop everything to be on the other side of the island continent swooning and spooning with Gina. Not that it’s easy at the top.

You must be discreet. “That red-headed weirdo”, as Trump called Richard Pratt, the multinational cardboard and paper giant whose family, The AFR estimates to be worth $24 billion, and Australia’s second richest man, speaks of his wealth as his “superpower”.

Only it didn’t protect him from Donald’s wrath when Prat blabbed about his former pal’s alarming stories. Secret tapes reveal Pratt explaining how US democracy is bought, “I paid about a million bucks to [Rudy to] come out as a celebrity guest [but] it didn’t happen so now, he calls me once a week,” Pratt says before proceeding to draw a Mob parallel.

“All these guys are like the mafia. Trump, Rupert, Rudy. You want to be a customer, not a competitor. And I am very aware of that.”

Unwisely, Pratt calls out Trump’s key tactic. “… he knows exactly what to say and what not to say so that he avoids jail … but gets so close to it … that it looks like to everyone that he’s breaking the law”.

To cultivate a close relationship with Donald Trump, Pratt invests hundreds of thousands of dollars in membership fees at Mar-a-Largo, Trump’s private resort. He tells us. Not so clear is why Pratt pays a monthly retainer to Tony “Suppository of all wisdom” Abbott, $8000, and Paul Keating $25,000.

What Pratt pays for, what he gets and how long he continues, is kept secret, much like the membership of the invitation-only, elite Qantas Chairman’s Club.

Or being a Freemason, which, not unlike the Liberal Party itself, is a closed shop to women and which both Matthew Guy and Peter Walsh inexplicably leave off their register of interests. They didn’t know they had to declare it. Of course.

(True, women can nominate but not in safe Liberal seats such as Cook where former McKinsey operative, and failed 2022 Bennelong candidate, Morrison-endorsed, Simon Kennedy who gets the nod.)

Why have a lobster with a mobster when you can have a crustacean with a freemason?

A code of silence helps keep the wheels of power tuning smoothly. As former CEO, Alan “Stonewall” Joyce puts it, “I’m not going to comment on Chairman’s Club membership … I’ve got privacy issues where we will not comment on who’s in, who’s been offered it, or why they’re there.”

But only for the ruling class. Qantas is perfectly free to trade your personal information for the reason it collected it Australian privacy law permits any organisation to use or disclose your personal information for the primary reason they collected it including for direct marketing activities.

Varoufakis would beam. We gift them our information. They don’t have to say why and how they use it. They make money out of it. Billions. And the case of glad-handed Pratt? Who is on his payroll and why?

You can bet it’s not altruism says the Centre for Public Integrity. Paul Keating, for example, is a long-time advocate of super funds being able to invest in Pratt’s line of business.

But when it comes to mining magnate, Hancock Prospecting heiress, Gina Rinehart – Queen of WA Inc, with Nicola Forrest, who split from Andrew Twiggy Forrest, to become our second richest woman with unparalleled power over a territory the late Robert Hughes described as “a colony with a body the size of Europe and the brain of an infant” – when Gina calls – you come running.

If you’re Peter Dutton or any other of his conga-line of sycophants. But especially if you’re Peter Dutton and after your Dunkley debacle, you are all boxed in like Tulloch. Expect the fake debate about nuclear power to distract us all from the Opposition’s incompetence. And the culture warriors are already to go.

But let’s not kid ourselves, Dutton’s desperate turn to Rinehart may give him the backer of the richest woman in the world. But neither the desperate lunge towards nuclear power nor his rich and powerful friend, nor promoting his rivals, will prevent his political career crashing and burning around him. He’s up shit creek as they say in Canberra.

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Dunkley sends all of us a message

“If you live in Frankston, and you’ve got a problem with Victorian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor. “If you do not want to see Australian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor. Send Labor a message.”

Labor easily wins Dunkley, increasing its primary vote to forty per cent. As no-one predicted. On her way to Canberra is Jodie Belyea, who introduces herself as “a mum from Frankston with two dogs and a mortgage” and a local woman dedicated to empowering other women. The likeable, highly-respected and refreshingly unassuming, local community activist and founder of the Women’s Spirit Movement (2018) is the candidate preferred, at last count, by at least 52% of the 133,000 registered electors who cast a valid vote, in the Port Phillip Bay sand-belt electorate where On the Beach 1959, a film about the end of the world was shot.

It’s another crushing defeat for Peter Craig Dutton, who is now lying low over Anklegate a scandal in which a released detainee fingered by Dutton and deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley in Question Time for sexual assault and stalking turns out to be the wrong man – because the data from his electronic ankle bracelet wrongly put him at the scene of an alleged crime.

It’s par for the course for Dutton – a serial dud in every portfolio he’s ever held, from Health to Home Affairs. He’s now following Morrison’s delusion that Liberal Party salvation lies in the outer suburbs. The lie that Labor would tax utes and family cars when, in fact, its vehicle emissions standards will save money and help preserve what’s left of our planet’s atmosphere apes ScoMo’s abortive bid for the vote of a mythical outer suburban tradie.

But there’s more. Everybody loves trains. $900 million will treat rail travellers to an upgrade of the link to Baxter in the very Liberal seat of Flinders, should they wish to brave Stony Point mosquitoes in their eagerness to take a day trip to see how the other half lives.

For Liberal candidate Nathan Conroy, it’s all over. He did his best with a bad script about how bad crime was. Locals love that stuff. Is he a sore loser? It’s fashionable, in the heady hyper-partisan slanging match our politics is today, to maintain your hate. A developer-friendly Frankston Mayor for three years in a row, with a rate rise every year to show for it, Conroy, formerly of Cork, is a big man with a slab of a face such as you might encounter in a friendly punch-on in a rugby scrum or in a grudge-match of Gaelic football.

Thirty-one-year-old Conroy, who boasts he once ran a multi-million dollar business -as manager of a Richmond bowlo- (that’s a lot of parma)-is the Liberals’ archetypal pin-up boy. White, straight and blokey. With the business background, he could be another Bruce Billson who held Dunkley until he got a job representing small business, for which he was being paid months before he quit politics. Conroy is slow to congratulate his opponent – as are other Liberals – but he does publicly congratulate himself on his wife’s pregnancy.

He doesn’t know where he found the time … (to make a baby) … but he did, he says.

Conroy grins, sporting teeth like a barracuda. They are neat teeth in a crooked smile.

Mrs Conroy doesn’t know where to look. Does hubby think he’s at a buck’s night? Ley, who is as high as a kite, comes to the rescue; proclaims Nathan a national Liberal hero. Even better than making babies, he’s made Dunkley marginal. The truth is, the absence of One Nation and UAP from the ballot accounts for what Murdoch and our corporate media brand a four percent swing to the Coalition.

“We are coming for you,” Ley warbles, adding that a three to four percent swing across the nation would win the Coalition government. It wouldn’t. It holds fifty-five seats. Twenty-one are needed to form a majority government. The swing looks around 3.4 per cent at the AEC Tally Room, Sunday. But bunkum and bluster are the order of the day in the politics of a post-truth, Trumpian age era. Expect more “alternative facts” after Sky’s Peta Credlin stoutly declares that Dutton resonates in Dunkley.

Credlin strikes gold on the night. The heartland. It’s the Liberals’ Lassiter’s Reef. And it’s in Dunkley. Ground zero is probably half-way up Oliver’s Hill, under that cantilevered bungalow, where the late Graham Cyril Kennedy, AO, had an unimpeded view of Port Phillip Bay.

“… the base is back, the Liberal heartland is back”!

“Coming for you” means more smear ‘n fear. Look out, Albo. Albo is at least in Dunkley. Unlike Dutton, who does a bunk and is QANTAS clubbing his way back to Dickson. Classy.

The electorate is named in honour of feminist, telegraphist and union leader, the fearless, tireless, eloquent, advocate for equal pay for women in the public service, Louisa Dunkley 1886-1927. Victorian Liberal senator, Crumb-maiden Jane Hume, who is also at the Liberal campaign wake, thinks quotas are OK for corporations, but the Liberal Party is “a different beast”.

Discretion is the better part of valour, but it does mean Spud’s abandoned Ley and Hume at the bar to do the obsequies? At least former Frankston school-boy and Liberal fund-raiser, Jeffrey Gibb Kennett, is celebrating his 76th birthday there. It leaves Peter time to warm up the party bus. Tomorrow, Ley will be the scapegoat for that stunt about the released detainee being arrested by the police on charges of sexual assault and misconduct. After howling down Albo in parliament about his dereliction of duty in failing to defy the High Court and lock up all the detainees, most of whom, Team Dutton reckons, are hardened criminals and all primed to rape, pillage and “re-offend”.

Some detainees have already been locked up for a decade. Some have been offenders, but all have done their time. For most, their only “crime” is to seek refuge here by boat. We lock them up for the rest of their lives and when a High Court forces us to let them out we insist that the harmless and innocent majority wear ankle-bracelets alongside the few who have committed serious crimes? What could possibly go wrong?

But it’s not about justice, it’s about the theatre of cruelty as deterrence, and was once very popular. We’re so proud of our boat turnarounds, we’ve exported the idea to Rishi Sunak’s Littler Britain, where “illegals” will be exported at great expense to Rwanda.

Or back to certain death. Dutton once locked up “Deva”, a blind, mentally ill Sri Lankan man for ten years who sought refuge after being tortured by the Sri Lankan army, a fact established by Australian authorities. He could choose to go home, a type of death sentence. Or stay in detention. But we were flexible.

The Minister might grant him a visa. In the future. Which he wouldn’t get because the Minister had decided he had failed the character test. Concerns were raised then about Dutton’s use of the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose, god-like, arbitrary power the Home Affairs Minister has to either grant or deny visas at whim.

In his decision, Federal Court Justice Rares called it “absurd” and “unacceptable” to put forth that Dutton might issue Deva with a visa in the future when he had just found – on grounds not disclosed – that the mentally ill refugee failed the character test. The justice found that the government’s position was unreasonable and legally invalid.”

It may be rhetoric when Team Dutton pledges to lock asylum-seekers with criminal records up again. That is, whilst the Coalition is in opposition. But cheap words cheapen lives. Demean our own. Not to be outdone on “sovereign borders” a high-sounding nonsense in the game of chicken that is our asylum-seeker debate in Question Time, Labor has already been forced into the squalid compromise of the ankle-bracelet.

Perhaps there’s a glimmer of hope. Demonising can be a vote winner. But not in Dunkley. It might have worked once for Howard and again for Abbott, who in turn fostered con-artist Morrison, who gave us his tough cop on the beat, while letting Mike Pezzullo take charge via intermediary Scott Briggs. For five years, Pezullo gave the orders. Not that Morrison has anything to atone for because his God forgives him. It’s in his valedictory speech. And Ley has still not retracted her women-assaulted-by-foreign-criminals tweet on X.

An increasingly rubbery figure, Ley easily wins most mobile face on a night of such jubilation and jocund hilarity you would swear that the Liberals had won. At least she’s fronted up. Eighty percent of success is showing up, Woody Allen reckons.

Delivery? Ley puts so much into it that it’s exhausting just to watch. Has she had elocution lessons from Michaelia Cash, the lip-reader’s friend? She somehow finds extra facial muscles to come up with the whopper of the night. Tonight’s swing will win us government.

You know, she knows it’s a monstrous lie by the way she moves her jaw. Like a python swallowing an ox.

Dunkley, take a bow. The electorate is still “reeling”, as the Canberra gallery loves to say – it’s what you do after “bracing” yourself – another favourite cliché. But there is no word for how you recover from a sordid, multi-million dollar, US-style shit-storm of lies, stunts, and slurs amidst the static of Ley’s disgraceful racism, pitched so low it sounds as if it’s scripted by a tipsy One Nation intern.

The high spending low-punching campaign of fear, hate and racism is new to Dunkley, where the exotic and the aberrant are mainstream but try not to make eye contact after dark, especially in Young Street, Beach Street and around the train station subway. Even unflappable, seasoned, seen-it-all-before Frankston has never seen this before.

Ley may be a contender for a door prize, but what really steals the show is Advance. The Liberals are outspent by their bag-men and women, the billionaire, dark money propaganda unit Advance. But unlike The Voice, this time, the punters are not buying it. Cynics would say that the stage three tax cut beat Advance to it – a negative campaign doesn’t do so well against money in your pocket. But this battle for the hearts and minds of Dunkley probably is its own worst enemy. More than overkill, there is a sterling failure to communicate. And it’s hard not to see the whole, baroque excess of the assault, as something out of Monty Python; a futile exercise in lurid self-parody.

Perhaps we can take heart in the defeat of billionaire-backed Advance’s hate-bombing saturation campaign of lies, aggressing voters; “hammering letter boxes” texting, in-your-Facebooking, tweeting and other anti-social media sledging and its fleet of Truth Trucks, the mother of all defamatory mobile billboards. One features Chinese president, Xi Jinping, voting Labor insinuating that our ALP is somehow a crypto-Communist party. But the billionaires are thrifty. It’s the same image Advance deployed in the 2022 federal election.

It’s a wonder they weren’t laughed out of town. Advance’s outrageous assault on truth, democracy and decency belongs in Trump’s America. It’s an import we don’t need and won’t heed, however much a group of tone-deaf billionaires want it. But, it won’t stop trying. As Dr Jeremy Walker points out, behind Advance is the Atlas foundation, a global network of over six hundred libertarian think tanks.

Advance is a shadowy group funded by billionaires, including Gina Rinehart, also a queen pin in the IPA’s opaque funding and the man who did so well out of pro-coal Coalition energy policy, Trevor St Baker. It easily outspends the million dollar plus Liberal budget. It played a key role in sabotaging The Voice, but in Dunkley, failed to reprise its undermining of established democratic processes. As far as we know. We need, nevertheless, to demand to know who is behind it and what it is up to. Anthony Klan reports for Michael West Media, that Advance is being investigated by The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) because of its peculiarly opaque ownership structure.

Just as worrying is Advance’s calculated misrepresentation as some type of grassroots movement, a concept which Advance has already capably seeded in a corporatised and monopolistic Australian MSM where you can hear your ABC selling it as just a right-wing equivalent of Get-Up or the Unions. Every channel has the same pitch. We are being sold a pig in a poke.

In the meantime, we are vulnerable to a powerful propaganda machine, which may be crude at this stage but which will certainly be capable of refining its techniques.

We need to know just how tightly Advance has bound itself to the Coalition. The negativity of the “Noalition’s” campaign is an alarm call. Forget policy, issues, leaders’ integrity or party achievements, the Dunkley by-election is reheated leftovers and the Coalition’s happy place – rapists, paedophiles all aboard Tampa Redux; Howard’s trump card, politics as theatre of cruelty.

And Anklegate. Much as there will be a scapegoat at hand, the fiasco raises such serious questions about the role of the police and the liaison between it and the Coalition that in a healthy democratic system, Peter Dutton and Sussan Ley would already have resigned.

Sending Labor its threadbare message is less a federal opposition than the remnants of Morrison’s divide and rule legacy, not so much a Liberal parliamentary party as ten separate factions, headed by a duo of desperadoes, Peter “Paladin’s Cave” Dutton and deputy Sussan Ley who resigned from “Fizza” Turnbull’s cabinet over her 2015 “impulse buying” of a $795,000 Main Beach, Gold Coast investment property -from a Liberal vendor and party donor, whilst a gullible nation paid her travel bill to fly to Wesley Hospital in Brisbane to list new medicines on the PBS list. As you do. Team Dutton has swallowed Trump’s playbook whole in its bid to get attention; its eagerness to embrace the dark arts of media manipulation, disinformation. Lying its head off.

Flooding the zone with shit, Steve Bannon calls it. In other words, as Mike Seccombe explains in The Saturday Paper:

“Make outrageous populist pronouncements and then wait for the mainstream media to report them. Inevitably the other side will seek to debunk them. Ed Coper, Ed Coper, CEO of progressive communications outfit Populares. calls it the “weaponisation of lies”.

We should not be too startled by the right’s uptake of the tactics. Lying is a Liberal tradition. Wanton wastrel, a sterling pioneer in the politics of squander, John Winston Howard, took the proceeds of a mining boom and blew it on the middle class and the rich. Lied his eyebrows off over babies overboard to win the 2001 election. Howard is still lying about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. He “misled parliament” or lied to the house that our illegal attack of Iraq was constitutionally justified. He’d taken expert advice.

Failed priest, Tony Abbott, who crashed and burnt as PM because although he had the keys to the Lodge, he had no idea how to drive it, tipped off a startled nation in 2010 that you could only take as the “Gospel truth” stuff which he had written down.

But it’s not just the lies that paint Labor as an enemy of the people. Beneath the rabid dog-eat-dog, rancorous, hyper partisan, post-truth politics of our increasingly rattled right wing you can feel the fear and the desperation mounting. Link it with unlimited resources – and what could possibly go wrong?

Let’s put the band together. Supercharged with fear and the dark money of billionaires’ right-wing lobby mob, Advance, lead vocalist, Federal Coalition deputy-leader, Siren Sussan Ley, belts out her wog rapist in our midst shtick. Her leader and stand over tactician for Xenophobes-R-Us Benito Dutton, currently in witness protection because Victorians hate him – is on percussion. The Big Lie is that Labor (rather than the High Court) has released 149 former indefinite detainees into the community, a Goebbels-type lie central to a campaign of primal fearmongering, racist dog-whistling in conjunction with his corporate media backers.

Forget the light on the hill, we are out in the paddock in the ute, at night, roo-shooting, but with “rapists, paedophiles and murderers” in the spotlight. And not just at home. In the world theatre, “human animals” are to be exterminated by zealots.

Dunkley is won by a woman dedicated to the empowerment of women; Jodie Belyea represents some of the best values which are part of Labor’s democratic, social justice, working class heritage. Her victory gives us hope.

On the Coalition’s side of the ledger of party politics appears a yawning chasm of moral deficit and at times comically incompetent leadership, a party ripe for exploitation by Advance, a sinister organisation with its own agenda masquerading as a popular, home-spun movement. This enemy of the people is controlled by a small group of powerful billionaires with international links. Beneath the theatre of the by-election and the alarming spectacle of the Liberal Party’s decline are symptoms of its capture by a secretive, self-interested cabal which warrant urgent, extensive and through investigation.

 

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Open Justice?

“I fought the law and … Bruce won”: may not be one of the biggest hits of 2023, but it’s currently rating off the charts in the “can’t be unseen” and “stupidest own goal” categories. Picture incel-pinup-Bruce Lehrmann in celebration mode; singing and chug-a-lugging along on Bundy and Coke to a Sonny Curtis and the Crickets’ (post Buddy Holly’s own tragic exit) song about a criminal loser which was a big hit for The Clash.

Whoever leaked it has a sense of humour. Couldn’t possibly be a stitch-up. Kompromat? It’s more than compromising. But will it win him any more fans?

Lerhmann gets over a million views on TikTok. It’s all over corporate media around day five of Bruce Lehrmann v Channel Ten, a brace of concomitant civil defamation cases brought by the self-styled former Liberal “senior adviser” against Ten and tarnished star, Lisa Wilkinson.

Logie and Walkley Award winner, Wilkinson, still has many loyal fans. Yet Ten’s exciting 2024 schedule fails to mention the veteran journalist – despite her being contracted to them until the end of 2024. Suing your boss to meet your legal costs may not be the best career move. Yet it might be your only option. Especially if you are an outspoken woman who espouses progressive causes.

Should your commentary align with iconic establishment folk heroes, Christian Porter, Ben Roberts Smith or even Bruce Lehrmann, however, you’re spoilt for choice between blind trusts, a Kerry Stokes’ company or Advance with its deep pockets and close links to LNP amongst a rash of new sponsors of our good old (white) men-on-top-status quo.

Wilkinson demands her $700,000 costs now, rather than after Federal Court Judge, The Honourable Justice Michael Bryan Joshua Lee’s judgement. Lee is currently writing that up based on his 15,000 pages of transcript and 1000 separate exhibits, including hours of CCTV footage as well as audio and video recordings. It may take some time.

“Justice must be seen to be done” Lee, an open justice fan, intones, opening twenty-two days’ proceedings, after dismissing four lame arguments from Ten to have Bruce Lehrmann’s civil defamation case taken off-line.

Yet some matters are strictly off-limits in an open society which can arrest anyone it chooses, provided it can invoke national security or detain those who have already served their sentences if they happen to be asylum-seekers; a nation where a government official can be secretly imprisoned in a Canberra gaol.

Similarly, despite its election vows, Labor has rejected a bipartisan Senate report mid- December that finds FOI is not “functioning as intended”; crippled by under-resourcing and resulting in years of delays. More than broken, our FOI system works to obstruct the timely access to information that is the lifeblood of an open, just and democratic society.

On the other hand, the law protects a person’s right to a fair hearing by preventing others from publishing information that may improperly influence a jury or witness.

Lee worries away at the speech Wilkinson gives in June 2022 on accepting a Logie for the Ten interview, a spray which causes the Lehrmann rape trial a three month delay. Lee can’t believe she’s taken prior legal advice. Crown Prosecutor Shane Drumgold says he does warn Wilkinson (who can’t recall his warning) that any publicity she might give to the case could cause Lehrmann’s defence team to apply for a stay. But he declines to vet the speech, “we are not speech-editors.”

Lehrmann Trial Judge, Chief Justice Lucy McAllum, thinks Wilkinson goes way too far.

“What concerns me most about this recent round is that the distinction between an allegation and a finding of guilt has been completely obliterated… The implicit premise of [the speech] is to celebrate the truthfulness of the story she exposed.”

Steve Whybrow SC is more upbeat in an interview with The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen.

“Frankly, if it wasn’t for Lisa Wilkinson’s speech at the Logies, Bruce would probably be in jail. Thank God for that speech.”

But he would say that wouldn’t he? Steven Whybrow SC says that without the extra material from the interview, together with evidence from the subsequent ACT Sofronoff inquiry, Lehrmann’s defence team would have had eighty percent less on which to build a case.

It would all have been sorted, Whybrow claims, in his summation, if Ms Higgins had gone to the cop shop before the knocking shop of corporate media. It’s in an aside that defies all evidence. Women report bad experiences when they try to report rape to the police. It’s intimidating, degrading, humiliating, embarrassing and mostly futile.

Only one in ten cases of reported sexual assault results in a conviction, although ABS figures show 22% of women and 6.1% of men have experienced sexual violence since the age of 15. 92% of women who experience sexual assault do not go to the police.

Seen to be done? So far we’ve seen justice undone in a trial aborted because a juror left his “internet research” into women rape victims who lay false allegations lying in the courtroom.

The pernicious but persistent myth that women lie about rape flies in the face of all evidence but it is behind a rash of tacky tabloid stories. Brittany Higgins is said to have hit the jackpot and now lives high on the hog at taxpayers’ expense. Our corporate media loves to stunt the brain cells of the nation, with cheap populism, fear and sensation while usurping the role of an Opposition in symbiotic thrall to its LNP partners and enablers.

But make no mistake about the Higgins pile-on being exemplary punishment. It’s an effective deterrent to any other woman laying claims of rape. Or in any other way challenging vested interests in our patriarchal corporate state where Murdoch’s powerful media oligarchy effectively tells us all what to think, while others such as Seven, Ten and increasingly our ABC, tag along.

Such is the power of the media that some of our power elite don’t know they’ve been boned until they read about it in one of Uncle Rupert’s tissues. Justice Sofronoff’s probe into the fiasco of Rex v Lehrmann’s rape trial is as toxic as a Menindee fish kill, especially when he emails his report to Janet Albrechtsen; blindsiding the ACT government, which commissioned the inquiry before it has time to process any of it. And pity its DPP.

Former ACT Director of Public Prosecutions, Shane Drumgold, is even more surprised to first read in The Oz, that he’s been soundly chastised by “Cossack” Sofranoff for his “lack of objectivity” and failing to act with fairness and detachment. He applies for a judicial review on the grounds that the Sofronoff inquiry failed to give him a fair hearing, denied him natural justice, breached the law and “gave rise to a reasonable apprehension of bias”.

The report, on the other hand just gushes praise over the virtues of an embattled AFP which does not put a foot wrong ever. Meanwhile a lot of personal data is leaked from Ms Higgin’s phone, surrendered to AFP, because rape is a criminal offence. Yet well after the abortive trial, her texts are being leaked to The Australian’s “planet” Janet Albrechtsen.

You don’t have to confiscate a mobile to access its data, however. When Brittany Higgins says she believes her phone was remotely wiped, Llewellyn says it’s probably a stuff up. Yet seven years ago, government contracts show that ASIC, ATO, AFP and Defence, were paying to use the services of Cellebrite and other phone-hacking programmes. We happily gave them the right to hack our devices two years ago.

However they were obtained, strategic leaks to media fuel a relentless persecution of Ms Higgins. The young woman cannot even seek sanctuary in another country without the kangaroo court vigilantes of a misogynistic media publishing images of her “French Chateau” bought with her “multi-million taxpayer funded compensation payout”.

The “chateau” is a modest house in the sticks and it’s been enabled by a CommInsure compensation payment as a result of the Morrison government’s abdication of duty of care as an employer. But why publish the truth? What readers crave is fiction. Morrison’s office was quick to tell all its friends about a Labor plot to cruel the Coalition’s election chances. It’s now the dominant narrative.

Brittany Higgins’ fiance, David Sharaz is painted as the eminence grise in this myth, a type of malignant puppeteer who uses an impressionable Ms Higgins to embarrass Brigadier Linda Reynolds and destabilise a government. It’s malicious nonsense which above all deprives the young woman of any agency but it’s now so firmly embedded that it has acquired a type of orthodoxy. Allusions to it appear in The Australian’s (paywalled) “Sharaz the Where’s Wally in Higgins’ saga” reporting of Justice Lee’s courtroom drama.

It’s a hoot when Ten, a media company, actually begs a judge to suppress stuff. Lee, who can be a crack-up with his acidulous wit, refuses noting, with unintended irony, above all, that the applicant, Bruce Emery Lehrmann’s, express preference is for live-streaming. He must have seen Lehrmann’s funniest home video.

Ten fails to convince HH that live-streaming is not in the best interests of “litigious” Linda Reynolds’ self-styled “senior adviser”. At one point, its silks dip into speculation. People could get hurt. Again, Lee gives them a serve.

“Open justice should not yield to hypothetical risks of abuse by bad actors.”

Indeed. The show must go on.

And on. Lee live-streams twenty-two days of defo-drama and petti-foggery in Lehrmann v Channel Ten Network Pty Ltd, a marathon of badgering, Whybrow-beating and endless twitting of witnesses who don’t have autobiographical recall of events four years ago. Hours are spent on helping them find the place in the court’s ring-binders.

Any moment now, a replica of the vinyl couch in Linda Reynolds’ office will pop up in court to allow team Lehrmann to demonstrate the improbability of any bruise being sustained while the alleged rapist is drinking whisky, perusing secret files and writing Dorothy Dixers for the incomparably well-briefed ADF Reservist Brigadier Reynolds, who totally dominates Senate QT with her oratory and mastery of detail.

The courtroom drama is a bit tricky because in order to establish its truth defence, Ten has to make a case on the balance of probabilities that Lehrmann did rape Brittany Higgins. This is a civil defamation case about an allegation of rape, a criminal offence. The Briginshaw Principle requires that more convincing evidence is required to establish an allegation on the balance of probabilities if the allegation is of a particularly serious nature.

At the bleeding heart of the case is Lisa Wilkinson’s chat with Brittany Higgins, aired in an episode of The Project, 21 February 2021. In that interview, Lehrmann alleges, he was accused of raping Ms Higgins. Anyone who knew him would have known that it was him.

That three other women have now accused Lehrmann of rape is immaterial. Equally irrelevant is that Lehrmann texted a pal asking ‘got any gear’ and saying ‘need bags’ on the night Brittany Higgins’ rape allegations became public, court documents reveal.

Lee reminds all parties of the supremacy of open access to justice and court proceedings. “The decision is a clear statement that Courts will not infringe upon the transparency of court proceedings without a very compelling reason to do so. Issues such as embarrassment, stress or reputational damage will generally not be sufficient note McCullough Robertson’s Guy Humble and Alan Wrigley.

The applicant is former “staffer”, Bruce Lehrmann. Staffer? It’s a grand term for a briefcase-carrier. Office-boy. The only qualification is a show of allegiance to a party.

But where else can any talentless nonentity brown-nose and big-note so much? It’s a gift to any oleaginous grifter with an eye for the main chance. Bruce certainly dreams big and talks himself up to “senior adviser”, even if his CV is full of little gigs. A Walter Mitty who moonlights as an ASIO spook? Bruce is always bigging himself up. Especially on Twitter.

Time for a quick ad-free cross to the inner Lehrmann; a brief update on his latest testimony.

Lehrmann just has to nail what he’s picked up in a bar about a French sub deal. He dashes back to the office at 2:00am Saturday 23 March 2019. The Minister must be briefed for QT at all costs – even if parliament isn’t meeting for at least a week. (The Incredible Sulk, Scott Morrison was, at that stage, hell-bent on having as few sittings as possible.) On principle.

You can tell Lehrmann’s a man with principles. You don’t like his principles? He’s got others. He’s the caring boy-friend in tale 2.0. He dashes back to pick up his house keys. Avoid waking his girl-friend. Higgins says that she woke up to find him raping her.

Forget the keys. It’s a late scotch-on-the-job, despite admitting he tells the AFP that there’s no grog in his office. Of course, that necessitates another lie. In a fourth explanation he tells police he’s working on some of the industry programmes, particularly the Air Force.

Lehrmann is a bit of a party animal. Along with a quiet snort of Bolivian marching powder, he keeps his own mini-bar at work; a single malt or three, along with a bottle of gin.

And boy, can he network. Soon Kerry Stokes, the selfless benefactor of lost causes and savvy recruiter of clickbait, is his pal. The big-hearted, billionaire spots Lehrmann a year’s rent in a luxury pad in Maroubra NSW with bay views. A golden ankle bracelet. All Bruce has to do is to make himself available for the odd on air massage; tell his side of the story.

Bruce can be a goose, it’s true. He has lied, he admits, and he lies about lying but star witness Fiona Brown, does him down. Chief of staff despatched by Morrison to run Defence Industry because the job is just too big for Reynolds, Brown hounds Lehrmann when he forgets to put away a top secret document which he should not have had in the first place. Yet she’s a useless witness. Sex? Can’t rule it in. Can’t rule it out.

Or is the document a ruse? A way to dismiss Lehrmann without a whiff of being on the job in flagrante delicto? Lehrmann says Brittany Higgins was OK around 2:00 am in the early hours of Saturday morning, when he left her naked on a couch where no sexual intercourse took place in Defence Industry Minister Linda Karen Reynolds’ CC office.

Lee is all for open justice. At its heart, he explains “… the open justice principle finds reflection in the requirement to conduct hearings in public and to allow the public to have access to the evidence adduced.”

It’s not to be confused with the buzz-word, transparency, a popular panacea for politics, government, a fanciful alternative to regulation but which ignores the reality that anything that happens in court is accessed mainly via commercial media; mediated in a hostile environment where reporting is seldom objective and which is open to leaks from anyone with a dog in the fight. It also underestimates the nexus between Peter Dutton’s Coalition, and its corporate media supporters, ever-ready since Morrison to politicise or even weaponise reports of the case, as a way of attacking Labor.

Hence Sharri Markson on Sky, Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian and others are quick to publish secret tapes alleging that David Sharaz is helped in coaching Ms Higgins’ by her lawyer, Leon Zwier, on how to answer questions in December’s defamation case. It boosts the dominant popular narrative in which Higgins is defamed as a dishonest gold-digger who fabricated allegations, at first to save her job and then to seek damages. It also adds to the fantastical myth that Sharaz is some kind of Svengali who is cynically deploying his fiancee as a pawn in his politically-charged pro-Labor strategy.

This hypocritical conspiracy theory initially fostered by Scott Morrison’s office with its backgrounding of journalists is above all a cynical distraction from acknowledging the power of the tens of thousands of women attending March 4 Justices rallies across Australia. It seeks to undermine the legitimacy of the protests against a government indifferent to its responsibilities to provide safer, healthier, saner workplaces. Ignore their rights to equality, justice, respect and an end to gendered violence.

Bullying, sexual harassment, discrimination and violence are currently being normalised, as her boss Linda Reynolds says (paywalled) to Brittany Higgins as “things that women go through”.

Higgins’ allegations are diminished and explained away in an onslaught of media attacks fuelled by a steady stream of leaks from a fixer keen to protect vested interests.

Crikey’s Bernard Keane argues, the women’s movement “… could not have been an authentic reaction to a government profoundly out of touch with, if not actively hostile to, the idea of safer workplaces and better protections against sexual assault, bullying and harassment. Instead, it must have been the result of a left-wing conspiracy.”

Lehrmann’s defamation case isn’t up for speculation but it is instructive to note some of the processes by which the judge reaches his verdict. Identity is key.

A cardinal issue is whether it’s possible to identify Bruce Lehrmann from Lisa Wilkinson’s interview. Lawyer and writer Crikey’s Michael Bradley notes that if this is established, there is the matter of Ten’s defences. The truth defence turns on the credibility of both Lhermann and Higgins’ testimony. Ten must prove on the balance of probabilities that Higgins’ allegation of rape is substantially true – which goes to the judge’s assessment of their credit.

The strategically leaked video of Lehrmann, whilst unlikely to further his career, or win him any recording studio contract is ultimately irrelevant. His revised version of I Fought the Law can only win him more incel fans. Let’s just hope it’s not prophetic.

 

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Narcisuss drowning? Morrison, Robodebt and love-rat Dutton.

Scott Morrison smirks and sniggers as Bill Shorten shreds the ex PM’s attempt to play the victim over Robodebt. Mugs the camera. Peter Dutton needs a stunt to distract from his deal with a corrupt contractor Nauru. Or the stench from his rejection of six indigenous applications to the 2019 safer communities fund. But it takes more than chutzpah to repudiate a Royal Commission.

Dismissing Catherine Holmes’ report as “unsubstantiated, speculative and wrong”. Morrison denies all responsibility and blames public servants for keeping him in the dark. As for his not giving truthful evidence, the notorious liar simply says Holmes is wrong. We can take his word for it.

You can’t swagger and sit at the same time but somehow Morrison manages to drape himself over the green leather of the back bench as if it’s a throne. I’m still Boss Cocky, the body language says. John Howard shrank his party and the nation to fit his meagre, “mean and tricky” leadership.

A deluded egomaniac, Morrison fancies he can still cut Labor down to size. And he’s always fancied himself as a black belt in rebarbative wit. The Sultan of Sting.

Instead, Morrison’s an epic failure; he’ll go into the record books as the Liberal’s most talentless has-been, or never-was PM, a fraud who fluked a second term in office he didn’t deserve and whose Rorts R-Us racist, sexist, chauvinist government was contracted out to the gas lobby only to waste years in office doing nothing.

His bogan chauvinism? OK, he’s the only PM to wear the Australian flag on his face.

Or unless you count epic corruption; the Buttrosing of our ABC; an eagerness to appease corporate greed and tax cuts for the rich. And galloping inequality.

The PBO finds that the stage three tax cuts will cost $20.4bn in their first year, 2024-25 and increase every year to $42.9bn in 2033-34. Yet 3.3 million people now live below the poverty line; 761,000 of whom are children. Let’s not talk about AUKUS and the four hundred billion dollars we plan to sink on obsolete, nuclear submarines that we can’t fuel, dock or crew. That’s a lot of aged care or welfare. Buy a lot of social housing.

Flash back to that Robodebt moment in Question Time, another parliamentary convention Morrison continues to abuse. Parliament is lessened by the presence of an ex-PM and poly-minister, under a cloud whose legacy includes his Robodebt monster; his undermining of responsible, democratic government, a holiday in Hawaii and that kamikaze ending – in which his embrace of ugly transphobic bigots and his capture by the dirty liars of coal and methane mining helped the federal Liberals destroy themselves.

But how he smirks. Scotty could smirk for Australia. You wonder what’s wrong with him. Or, perhaps, like Macron, you don’t wonder, you know. ScoMo’s a sociopath. Not just naff; grotesquely inappropriate. Dangerous.

Shorten talks of the human cost; lives ruined. Or poor people who took their own lives to escape ScoMo’s shakedown extortion racket. As he acted out the tough new cop on the welfare beat, a Kafkaesque terror was unleashed on the poor, the weak and the vulnerable. Nearly half a million of us received false debt notices, some with AFP logos. We were told we would go to jail, victims say. Or they punished us for speaking out.

Take a bow Alan Tudge. To “Tudge” should be a transitive verb in the vocabulary of state sanctioned violence. To Tudge is to order your underlings to get the personal files of everyone who complained about Robodebt and then leak their details to mates in the media. Alan Tudge did that.

Michael Towke, pre-selected for Cook, suffered something very similar, except his vilification ran for four excoriating articles in The Daily Telegraph filled with lies. One claimed Towke faced jail; a headline that sent his mother in hospital while eminence grise Morrison got the nomination for the safe Liberal seat in a second ballot.

Unless you’re a Scott Morrison, or a Tudge or a member of the Coalition who condoned if not cheered them on – or any one of the countless public servants who went along with Robodebt. It’s unfathomable. You wonder what it takes to be a Minister who demands the files of every public complainant about an illegal income average strategy to levy false debts on people who couldn’t pay. Wonder what it says about us.

What is not in doubt is that as PM Morrison knew exactly what was going on. His utterly unrepentant denial is completely at odds with the reports of his colleagues.

Fran Bailey at Tourism Australia, his boss from 2004-2006, reports a complete lack of trust. Says Morrison hasn’t changed. Cites his need for secrecy, lack of consultation and a “supreme belief that only he can do a job”.

Or take credit for others’ dirty work. To the average man or woman, Morrison’s boat trophy boast “I stopped these” would evoke the destruction of so many lives. Terror. Separation from family. Crushing poverty. The death in life of indefinite detention.

It gets weirder when you know it’s a lie. Rudd stopped the boats.

Morrison’s disconnection is disturbing. Imagine. You withhold vital information from your cabinet; duck your duty to inform your colleagues and wage a dirty war on Australia’s poorest and most vulnerable. Only to achieve abject failure.

“Not my doing” you lie to the Royal Commission and you bully Rachelle Miller, who worked closely for former Human Services Minister, Alan Tudge.

Although Morrison swears that he ceased his Robodebt involvement once he got promoted, Miller confirms that it’s just another lie.

“We were getting feedback from the PM’s office that this was playing quite well in the marginal seats, Western Sydney, that sort of thing.”

Back to the chamber. Government Services’ Minister, Shorten, uses last Tuesday’s (1 August) Question Time to rebuke the disgraced former PM over his self-indulgent statement on indulgence the previous day.

A brazen kleptocrat who stole five colleagues’ portfolios from under their noses between 2020 and 2021, Morrison just loves to steal any show. Bad news is good news in the moral algebra of the post-truth- post shame ScoMo-Dutton-Trump era.

Never waste a good crisis; even if you have to set your own pants on fire.

“Very personal, Bill…And we all know why,” Morrison heckles across the chamber stooping to personal innuendo himself. But the sly dig only encourages the Sisyphean Bill Shorten, one of Labor’s top performers. Bill knows he’s drawn blood.

Shorten belabours the failed federal Liberal Leader over ScoMo’s lonely, tone-deaf, off-key solo played to a deserted chamber, Monday 1 August, in which the dreadful ham plays the victim of a political lynching.

It’s a TKO. In a powerful, mounting incremental repetition, Shorten lists a dozen real victims of Robodebt to ridicule Morrison’s public display of self-pity. Here’s a couple.

“The real victims were those who suffered trauma, anxiety, distress. The real victims were those who took their own lives. The real victims are the mothers of those who took their own lives.”

“The real victims are all those Australians who lost trust in government because of an unlawful scheme run for four-and-a-half years.”

“One person who is not a real victim is the member for Cook.”

Morrison’s snide riposte accuses his nemesis of personal revenge, payback for ScoMo’s key role in Kill Bill, a campaign of AFP raids, ridicule, innuendo, slander and bastardry which Liberals have run since 2013 but only with the collusion of our MSM and with our ABC increasingly over-eager to join the anti-Labor fray.

Shorten’s under no illusions about ScoMo. Bill’s late mother, Ann, was not off-limits. Lies appeared about her in The Daily Telegraph, in May 2019, alleging her son had lied about his mother’s “illustrious career as a lawyer”.

Some hear a dig about 2019 where Labor lost the unlosable election largely in Queensland and chiefly because of Clive Palmer and Pauline Hanson. But the Liberal team plan is to pummel Labor at every turn, as it does via the reporting of Morrison’s melodramatic stunt almost alone in the chamber Monday.

It’s a dramatic contrast to last November and Labor’s censure of his secret powers; appointing himself to other key ministries. In the end, Morrison was in charge of six of the fourteen departments of state, as former High Court Judge Virginia Bell notes, early in her report. Then, Dutton organised a show of solidarity with a notorious liar who continues to undermine our democracy. Morrison is the Dutton regime’s totem.

In November, every Opposition MP was rounded up by Whips despite klepto-Mo’s dim defence of his multiple ministry megalomania. He had to keep his new portfolios secret so that his colleagues wouldn’t have to second-guess themselves. But he expected them to find out when it was all gazetted?

Of course, nothing was gazetted. And Greg Hunt was told. Another lie is called for. His lawyer writes to Bell adding another crazy evasion.

The public statements by Mr Morrison were directed to the fact that he did not inform all relevant ministers or members of the public of the ministerial appointments by way of media release or public statement. However, this in no way suggests that he did not expect that the usual practice would apply and that PM&C would publish the appointments in the Gazette.

As in Robodebt, Morrison poses as the innocent victim of dud public servants. Which brings us back to his latest one-man political lunatic fringe festival show.

You could hear a pin drop, says Paul Bongiorno wryly – not because Scotty from marketing has his audience rivetted but because there’s no-one there. But be fair. The theatre of self-pity can be a lonely place. And let’s not kid ourselves that “Optics” Morrison’s orchestrated performance falls on deaf ears.

Or that professional nihilist, Peter Dutton, is not in on the act. He has the Whip hand. In a flash, Uncle Spud’s on plasma TVs across the nation: “Mr Morrison has put a very strong case in relation to his position”. Archly, Dutts adds, “He is right to put it in parliament and he is right to serve in parliament after having been elected.”

Dutts is all loved-up, buff, refreshed and reset after a quick second honeymoon – all part of his reinvention as a loving husband and family man – which buys him some time to ring the odd mate in the AFP and dodge a bucket of dung dug out of the muck-heap that was his realm as Czar of Home Affairs and Minister for stopping people at random on Melbourne streets in 2015.

Did Dutton do a deal with a dodgy contractor, Mozammil Gulamabass “Mozu” Bhojani? At first, AFP spokespersons claim they tipped off the Minister that Mozu was bribing local politicians on Nauru. Seriously? It would be news if he were doing business without bribes. Is that possible on Nauru?

“The AFP acting commissioner provided a verbal briefing on the investigation to the then minister for home affairs on or around 12 July 2018.”

Minister of Home Affairs Supremo, Spud-who-just-can’t-recall anything is briefed Bhojani is under AFP investigation, on Nauru, a twenty-one square kilometre island of fossilised bird turd which is now eighty percent mined out, a uninhabitable and infertile wasteland, leaving its people to eke out survival on its coastal rim; a tribute to our proud history of colonial exploitation. Or is he?

The time frame is telling. Dutton returns, aglow with connubial bliss, flash as a rat with a gold tooth. Now the AFP retracts its claim. What it could have done is “used tighter language”, is their latest response to Labor senator Helen Polley, earlier this year.

Polley knows something. She asks if AFP told Dutton or his office that it was investigating Mr Bhojani for foreign bribery prior to September 2018.

At first AFP say they provided “a verbal briefing on the investigation to the then minister for home affairs on or around 12 July 2018.” Now it claims that it warned of the danger an over AFP presence might pose to diplomatic relations.

That exceeds peak implausibility. This is the same Nauruan government which in 2015 is reported to have colluded with Australian Immigration Department officials in the persecution of public enemies. Yet our dodgy dealings go back a long way.

The former island paradise is now a wen of nepotism and corruption, run by gangsters; a tribute to the civilising mission of Australia’s imperial past. We had the power to help make the place whatever we desired but instead, with our customary colossal colonial conceit, we have fashioned it in our own image.

A type of portrait of Dorian Gray, the ravaged wasteland of what was once a fertile Pacific idyll is now a desolate, barren husk where Islanders struggle to exist on the rim. Nauru attests to our appetite for environmental degradation. Most of the island’s vegetation is replaced by unsightly mining tailings. Using the miracle of mercantile enterprise and The Pacific Phosphate Company much of Nauru disappeared long ago; fertilising paddocks all over Australia and New Zealand.

“A worked-out phosphate field is a dismal, ghastly tract of land, with its thousands of upstanding white coral pinnacles from ten to thirty feet high, its cavernous depths littered with broken coral, abandoned tram tracks, discarded phosphate baskets, and rusted American kerosene tins,” Photographer Rosamond Dobson Rhone, writes in 1921 for National Geographic Magazine

The people of Nauru took us to the International Court of Justice in 1989 seeking compensation for mining away their home. They won a pittance. Since then, Australia has been involved with economic help and most recently with its regional processing centre but under the relationship corruption has flourished.

Mozu was up to no good. Even if bribery is endemic. What could come out about Nauru may help terminate Dutton’s career. But, stop. Look over there!

Within hours, Morrison’s package of lies; his capture of the narrative is faithfully relayed on all MSM stations across the nation, in all its defamatory glory, with ScoMo safe in coward’s castle; parliamentary privilege.

Scott Morrison accuses Labor of a campaign of political lynching, The Guardian Australia, happily gurgles, regurgitating a key theme in Opposition HQ comms. It does help to flood the zone with shit, as master of disinformation, Steve Bannon, puts it. MSM help him subvert the narrative of the Royal Commission’s indictment of Morrison for failing to act responsibly in presenting Robodebt to cabinet whilst knowing that it was illegal.

Of course, there’s more. Morrison lied. Commissioner Catherine Holmes also found the liar from the shire lied to the commission. Or presented untrue evidence. No-one ever told him income averaging was an established practice yet he claims he was given verbal assurances of this fairytale.

It not only beggars belief that Morrison had nothing to do with Robo-debt after he became Treasurer or PM, as he claims, it upends ministerial seniority. In ScoMo’s absurd version, he grew less responsible the higher his rank.

It gets worse. Echoing Julia Banks who says that he was a “menacing, controlling wallpaper”, Commissioner Holmes found that Morrison then bullied public servants; or “pressured departmental officials” over Robo-debt.

Liberals knew Robo-debt was illegal in 2014, before the scheme even started. David Mason, Acting Director within The Department of Social Services DSS told its delivery arm, then known as the Department of Human Services

“We would not be able to let any debts calculated in this manner reach a tribunal,” Mason warns.

“It’s flawed, as the suggested calculation method averaging employment income over an extended period does not accord with legislation, which specifies that the employment income is assessed fortnightly.”

Robo Debts are still being collected. Those who were coerced into paying back an illegally assessed debt and money they didn’t owe are still meeting instalment arrangements which Centrelink says must be honoured. The culture of the department administering them hasn’t changed even if the rhetoric of its Minister is upgraded.

As ever, there’s a touch of the torch song of unrequited love from Morrison. Narcissus drowning. Tragically, grotesquely overcome by self-love and self-pity, a vainglorious lout who is in love with himself, can have no rivals.

Mixed with bile and venom, ScoMo’s swan song (we can hope) is a bizarre, discordant, contortion of lies, crack-pot logic and Trumpery which slanders the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme as a part of quasi-legal political lynching while the coward in him abuses parliamentary privilege.

Morrison who is fresh back from serving his electorate of Cook by holidaying in Italy and Greece, is “a bottomless well of self-pity with not a drop of mercy for all the real victims of Robodebt”, Shorten tells Parliament.

But it’s worse than that. Our attention is turned away from some serious corruption to an easier narrative; the fiction of Labor’s vendetta or political lynching of poor Scott John Morrison whose own version of the truth – a bit like the apocryphal tale of the boy who put his finger in the hole in the dyke -he was only maintaining the system’s integrity and saving taxpayer dollars is grotesque and insulting but a cunning parody, nevertheless.

Worse. Trumpista Morrison would have us believe that he is the victim and that Commissioner Catherine Holmes, a former Chief Justice of Queensland, has let herself become a Labor Party stooge in Shorten’s vendetta. It’s defamatory and untrue but our parliamentary privilege convention makes it all somehow OK if it’s said in parliament?

As with Trump, there is the chance of legal proceedings against those mentioned in the sealed section of Holmes’ report. Holmes also warns of victims suing individual ministers for misfeasance in public office.

A fitting outcome would be the prosecution of both Dutton and Morrison over their engagement of a contractor known to be corrupt given he was sentenced before the then PM and Home Affairs Ministers renewed his contract.

But who knows what other evidence of misfeasance may turn up? Dutton and Morrison must have upset enough AFP and Border Force operatives in their race to the bottom that more damaging evidence of corruption Is highly likely.

Not that you’d wish a prison sentence on anyone. Some community service on Manus Island or Nauru would be most appropriate for either as long as the pair are kept apart. Indefinite detention, whilst fitting, is probably a patrol boat bridge too far. But no mobiles, no conjugal rights and don’t let Morrison near a camera. Ever again.

 

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Zombie Policy Apocalypse Part 2: Cruel Britannia

Continued from Part 1

From Cruel Britannia, Land of Grope and Tory – a scandal-ridden post Brexit economic basket-case, The Sick Man of Europe, or gaga but stable as described in Colin Hay’s “catastrophic equilibrium”, a simultaneous failure and stability, comes news of a new probe into old allegations against former party Whip, Chris Pincher, MP for Tamworth, who now sits as an independent while The Australian Solution to asylum-seekers offers no quick fix at a time when City puppet Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is preparing another set of cuts to spending and tax increases which will do nothing to ease stagflation or the long-term damage caused by George Osborne’s austerity measures in his first budget in 2010.

Chris Pincher is to be investigated. Revisiting “Pestminster” is the last thing Rishi Sunak needs. The oxymoronic office of the UK Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards Kathryn Stone OBE, opens the investigation on 20 October, into “actions causing significant damage to the reputation of the House as a whole, or of its members generally”.

There’d be a horde of Tories ducking for cover under this rubric – notorious serial sex pest, Chris Pincher is the fifth in three months – but Johnson whose regime is a string of scandals since 2019, promotes a known abuser, normalising abuse by describing Pincher as “handsy” and referring to him as “Pincher by name and Pincher by nature”.

All of which speaks volumes about Tory sleaze-baggery and locker room culture; while for Johnson, his trivialising of Pincher’s sexual offending means his lies must find him out.

Pincher allegedly, sexually assaulted two men at the elite, members-only, Carlton Club, a Tory political incubator. Battling to keep the lid on the Tory dumpster-fire, is poor little rich kid, billionaire PM Rishi Sunak, another City of London catspaw, who rues the day he re-instated failed Home Secretary, Cruella Braverman, rewarding her support in his bid to be PM.

Crazy Braverman breaks Home Office security rules six times, whilst ignoring legal advice on catastrophic overcrowding in Manton, a former RAF base in Kent, where four thousand men, women and children are crammed into a facility designed for a thousand.

Children’s hands reach out through chain mesh and tarpaulin covers. Hungry youngsters huddle together under a thin blanket on the plywood floor of a marquee. Such highly visible reminders of policy failure and the public spectacle of an ineffectual and rogue Home Secretary, are already casting doubt on Sunak’s political judgement.

There’s a fabulous plan to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda but that’s run into a legal hitch.

Johnson’s government cancels its first deportation flight in June when the European Court of Human Rights rules that the stunt carries “a real risk of irreversible harm.”

The scheme is now being tried in the UK’s High Court. But there’s no shortage of support from the arse-end of the earth from a former Liberal Foreign Affairs Minister who tells The Weekend Australian,[paywalled] he’s set his sights on becoming the next Lord Mayor of Adelaide.

“Put them onto stable craft and drive them back to France – that’s the simple solution and would destroy the smugglers’ business model in a week,” Alexander Downer chortles.

“Short of that, [make] sure they can’t settle in the UK under any circumstances – the [agreement the] government negotiated with Rwanda – is a good solution as well.”

Sound familiar? The eternally vigilant Liberal Party’s elder statesmen never sleep.

“Suppository of all wisdom”, Tony Abbott hawked his boat-stopping to former Tory governments, even though asylum seekers boats had stopped under his predecessor, Labor’s Kevin Rudd, 19 July 2013, two months before the election.. It’s become Liberal Party dogma; a xenophobic, cynically opportunistic, contempt for international law and human decency, not merely inhumane but gratuitously cruel. When you sell someone else your barbarism, it makes your own monstrous indifference to others; your squalid moral bankruptcy; your poverty of mind and spirit seem less abhorrent.

Somehow.

Downer always seems to be able to go lower. In February, former Johnson regime unparalleled failure, Home Secretary Priti Patel invited him on to her Rwanda committee – bugger-human-rights-and-international-convention-send-them-on a one way journey to a Central African nation with a bad human rights record. He’s into it like a rat up a drainpipe.

Now Big Al or Bunty as he’s fondly known at home, a patrician fop with a lordly sense of entitlement honks out the heartless xenophobia that has worked so well for MPs here.

Drive asylum seekers back to France from whence they come like moths to a flame? Or shivering from hypothermia, drenched to the bone, exhausted, in leaky, overloaded rowboats, navigating only by eye toward the white chalk cliffs of Dover.

Over 35,500 asylum-seekers cross the channel this year; up from 28,000 in 2021.

Dozens have drowned in the attempt.

All hands to the bilge pump to dispel the “southern invasion” of Albanian economic migrants as asylum-seekers in small boats are misrepresented in The Daily Fail and by Home Secretary, raving Cruella Braverman.

The Home Office worries that the make-up of people on small boats is changing. From January 2018 to June 2022, it claims that Iranian (28%) and Iraqi (20%) nationals represented nearly half of all small boat arrivals. In the first six months of 2022, over half (51%) of small boat arrivals were from three nationalities – Albanian (18%), Afghan (18%) and Iranian (15%). These figures are unverified.

From May to September 2022 Albanian nationals alone comprised 42% of small boat crossings, with 11,102 Albanians arriving by small boat in those five months.

The Home Office claims that Albanians don’t need asylum because they come from a “safe” country. The data suggests otherwise. In the year ending this June, 53% of Albanian claimants were granted asylum, or other forms of leave to stay in the UK, on first decision, and a higher proportion on appeal.

Dressed to kill, in Top Gun pilot’s helmet and flak jacket, Braverman commandeers a Chinook military helicopter which “can lift anything and go anywhere” to travel thirty kilometres from Dover to an overcrowded migrant gulag at Manston. Is Suella morphing into android or super hero mode? What’s clear is she will fight them on the beaches in her own chauvinistic Churchillian movie, acting her socks off as a loyal defender of the realm.

But don’t sell her short. Ruthless Rishi’s record sprint to the top job means he’s done deals all over the shop. Crazy Ms Braverman who is unlikely to outlast a Tesco tomato, owes her unholy resurrection to a Sunak deal. Who knows whom else he owes? Virtual political Mayfly, Truss, a fifty-one day dud, is a well-grubbed Tufton Street mole.

Is the fast-tracked Sunak human? A bot, programmed, like the Tory Party itself, to self-extinguish? The political knackers’ yard beckons the new PM, even without his Infosys slave-trading gig or his “brave” deal to reinstate Leaky Sue, (Send them) Home Secretary Suella Braverman, Tory arch bigot and anti-immigration dog-whistling xenophobe.

“Either he appointed a home secretary with a vicious demagogic streak knowing she is useless, in which case he has wilfully sabotaged one of the most important departments in Whitehall for no obvious gain, or he did it because he is blind to Braverman’s deficiencies, in which case he shares them,” writes The Guardian UK’s Rafael Behr.

On the third hand, it’s certain that the tabloid-orchestrated chorus of xenophobia – an “invasion on our southern coast” according to Sue, is the Sun and others running distraction for a Tory regime that’s a vortex of ineptitude, bad policy and worse PR.

What possessed Sunak to boast to Tunbridge Wells’ Tories he was Robin Hood in reverse; that he had diverted public funds from “deprived urban areas” to “areas like this”?

Sunak has blood on his hands. As BoJo’s Chancellor, Sunak’s £850 million “eat out to help out” meal and drink subsidy stunt drove new COVID-19 infections up by between 8 and 17% in the second wave of the pandemic in 2020.

Sunak, like BoJo or our ScoMo, doesn’t consult any experts.

It’s all part of our postmodern, post truth, faux-populist, global right-wing politics’ anti-intellectualism. Why would Chancellor Rishi Sunak consult public health experts before inflicting his ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ stunt in the UK Summer of 2020?

What would they know about a healthy economy? The £10 discount scheme, which provides cheaper meals to diners going out to their local curry house, restaurant or Pizza Express, (plus a bonus free COVID exposure), is “epidemiologically illiterate” sniff experts interviewed by The Institute for Government (IfG) for its report – a formal indictment of the cloud of unknowing at the heart of Torydom from BoJo to ScoMo.

“At times it was very unclear, outside the inner circles, just who would be involved, how decisions were taken and on what basis.”

Similarly self-harming are Sunak’s vows to stop crops of solar panels popping up in fields; or halt onshore wind farms, pledges aimed to attract party carbonari during his summer campaign failure to outbid Tufton Street muppet, Libertarian crash test dummy Liz Truss.

His emotional bypass may suggest Rishi’s a robot – as with Liz, but it’s not true. They’re zombie economics fanatics who will do whatever it takes to make the rich even richer.

So, too will LNP serial dud, Peter Dutton, another political Loaded Dog who claims “tax cuts boost economic activity” but who shows he doesn’t know his Yeppen from his Yeppoon, a gaffe which Coalition women try to bury by accusing Albo of bullying Michelle Landry.

Truss believes that if you just make the rich richer, (an imperative in an era of record profit, off-shoring and price-gouging), through tax cuts, subsidies and deregulation, it creates a virtual Niagara Falls of wealth for everyone else.

Oddly, no-one has ever seen it. In reality, wealth tends to trickle-up. Yet this is to miss its true function. Richard Denniss, The Australia Institute’s Chief Economist explains,

“The power of trickle-down economics has never been its economic logic but rather its political logic. Thatcher created a suite of rhetorical and policy tools that consistently united middle-class and high-income voters in the belief that the lower their taxes, the better their country would be.

The genius wasn’t selling the direct benefits of tax cuts to those who would get the cash, it was arguing that helping the rich was actually the best way to help the poor. And so “compassionate conservatism” was born.”

Truss is a rusted-on devotee of the IEA, a “”cell of Libertarian extremists which styles itself as “an educational research group which furthers the dissemination of free-market thinking” but like our IPA, won’t disclose its donors.

What you don’t know can’t hurt you? Spoiler alert, ExxonMobil gave Policy Exchange $30,000 in 2017.

The “think tank” went on to recommend the creation of a new anti-protest law targeting the likes of Extinction Rebellion, which led to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. Protesters can be banned from future protest, be fitted with tracking devices and worse.

Labour peer Lord Hain sees the law as “the biggest threat to the right to dissent and the right to protest in my lifetime.” It would have “throttled” protests by the suffragettes, he adds. Suella Braverman says it is not a human right to vandalise property.

Or not pay their power bills. E.ON, a German-owned energy giant which forecasts a profit of £3.6bn in global pre-tax earnings for 2022 spent its last summer lobbying Kwasi Karteng against capping of energy bills and also warning about what it sees as an “existential” risk posed by campaigners who threaten to stop paying their gas and power.

Also clear is the link between fossil fuel industries and the IEA; Truss’ mother-ship. The American Friends of the IEA pocketed a $50,000 gift from ExxonMobil in 2004, while the UK branch HQ of the IEA has received donations from BP every year since 1967.

OpenDemocracy reports, ‘Truss is particularly close to the IEA, having founded its parliamentary wing FREER in 2011 and hired its former communications director Ruth Porter to run her campaign, later rewarding her by making her deputy chief of staff’.

Tim Montgomerie, a former Johnson advisor, tells Twitter the Truss budget is a “massive moment for the IEA”. “They’ve been advocating these policies for years. They incubated Truss and Kwarteng during their early years as MPs. Britain is now their laboratory.” Director General Mark Littlewood is said to be distraught over how the market repudiated his group’s free-market experiment.

Some Trickle-downers trace their faith to a Will Rogers joke or a sketch on the back of a table napkin in the 1980s, the Laffer Curve, drawn by Reagan era economist Arthur Laffer, who also argues that government spending depresses the economy.

In reality, cutting taxes to increase prosperity is David Hume’s idea in his 1756 essay Of Taxes, as University of Newcastle economist Professor Bill Mitchell patiently points out.

It defies all evidence. Especially historical. In the 1940s and the 1970s in the US top rates were anywhere between seventy and ninety-four percent, yet the nation posted record growth in GDP. After the 1980s, top rates began to come down yet GDP never recovered Iits post war boom. In reality, the rich tend to hang on to a tax windfall or spend extra funds buying back shares in their own company boosting its market value.

Zombie economics get another run in the UK. Coined by economist and Nobel Laureate, Paul Krugman it’s the free market gospel that somehow comes back from the dead to despatch the hapless Truss. It helped turn the US into the world’s biggest creditor nation into the world’s biggest debtor nation in Reagan’s two terms in office.

Frydenberg’s stage three tax cuts are a brazen, unfunded, unnecessary bribe to its donor class to vote for the Liberal Party, wrecking a progressive tax system and promoting inequality.

Labor promises to keep the cuts – who wants to get wedged in an election campaign? -but now Lucky Jim Chalmers calculates that the cuts will cost $254 billion over ten years, meaning so much less to spend on schools, hospitals, or the NDIS just to benefit a wealthy elite who already have the means to access tax minimisation schemes and don’t need it baked into the system.

Bank CEOs, surgeons, and federal politicians will get a windfall tax cut of $9075, while aged care workers, disability carers and those on minimum wages will get nothing.

Despite all her policy nonsense, it is chilling just how quickly Truss is trounced, bounced and hounded into resignation by the 1922 committee of hacks or backbenchers the Conservative Party keeps under the counter for just such emergencies.

It was only yesterday that Tory “grandees” were praising the new PM for her refreshing iconoclasm. Her show of blithe unconcern as to where the money was coming from? Too much. A volatile market was spooked and it cost the Bank of England at least $65 billion in a bond buy- back as it frantically- and far from convincingly – tried to calm the farm.

Her resignation speech mirrors her premiership or footage of Truss being received by the Queen at Windsor “haphazard, uncomfortable to watch, and almost comically short.”

Will the myth of trickle-down also be laid to rest? Not with Jeremy Hunt at the helm. Brought on by Truss to replace Chancellor Kwasi Karteng, with just a little prompting from Sir Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 Committee, who hints of a glass of whisky and a revolver, is Jeremy Hunt who caused a stir when he set up arms sales to the Saudis, worth at least $20 billion since 2015.

The issue is not how quickly Truss is undone but how she became PM at all. And how quickly and cruelly she is disabused of her delusions. Johnson’s, prank candidate, Libertarian free-marketeer and Maths whiz, Liz- as she prefers to be known-goes into a dizzy downward spiral of U-turn after U-turn, desperately trying to dodge a barrage of opposition to her mini-budget’s rejection by the market – only to be bullied into resignation. Humiliated as Jeremy Hunt publicly, sadistically, undoes every strand of her £460 billion bold new plan.

A plan not to raise corporation tax, and a plan to cap energy bills without resorting to a windfall tax on energy company profits. It ends with us having none of these things, writes Loughborough University, London’s Dr Gerhard Schnyder who notes that the battle was not between good and bad economics but which bad prevailed over worse.

Luckily, austerity is well in hand. In two weeks, rhyming slang Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and his PM will collude in ruining the lower orders with “fiscal tightening”, a fertile formula for the ruling elite, which involves cutting government services for the masses, raising interest rates, just as gas and electricity corporations price three quarters of households out of the market while a quarter must buy groceries on their credit cards.

Austerity is calculated to line the pockets of pawnbrokers, loan sharks, usurers, banks and other money lenders while energy corporations jack up the price of gas and electricity (elevenfold since 2019), leaving the poor to starve in the cold and dark as winter approaches. UK natural gas prices rose nearly 96% in the year to July.

The Conservative Party itself is riddled with corruption far more toxic beyond Johnson’s faux populism, his vainglorious loutishness or his malignant narcissism, making it more of a push of spivs than an outfit seeking to revive life as it was in 1922, only with a personal hedge fund manager, a peerage for beer money and a personally curated concierge service.

Revelations of dark money contributions and paid lobbying abound in conservative parties worldwide, although UK Tories have an edge. Even its honours system is up for sale.

Fifteen out of 16 Tory party treasurers in the past seven years donated £3 million to the Tory party. Every one of them is offered a peerage. The sublimely named Peter Cruddas, a former Conservative Party treasurer, donated £30 million over ten years only to give the Tories £500,000 three days after taking his seat in the House of Lords in February 2021. Cruddas was busted soliciting cash for access to David Cameron, ten years earlier, a process now streamlined into a club named The Advisory Board run by Tory entrepreneur Ben Elliott.

Elliot, who sees himself as a “willing slave to the stars”, a luxury lifestyle consultant made his name running Quintessentially, a “concierge” company and aristocrat life support ecosystem that caters to the caprices of the rich, from shipping a dozen albino peacocks to a party for Jennifer Lopez to airlifting elm tea bags to Madonna.

All in a day’s work, the 45-year-old Etonian and son-in-law of rock star Steve Winwood tells the Financial Times in 2011. Securing services for his wealthy clients is all about knowing the right people to contact for the right favour.”

Elliot has the right connections. The nephew of Camilla, he was once accused of offering access to then Prince Charles in exchange for a lucrative Quintessentially membership.

But there’s more. With wealth comes power and with both comes The Advisory Board. Businessman and Tory donor, Mohamed Amersi tells The Guardian that Elliott’s Advisory Board Conservative club is “like the very elite Quintessentially clients’ membership: one needs to cough up £250,000 per annum or be a friend of Ben.”

Elliot has made the Advisory Board the number one club in the Conservative Party. Members got monthly access to Johnson or then chancellor Rishi Sunak, say insiders.

Tory Warlords claim the Advisory Board evolved before Boris took power, but won’t say when. Nor is it named in any party literature. A senior minister in David Cameron’s administration says: “I’ve never heard of it.”

Interviewed by The Guardian UK, Labour party chair Anneliese Dodds is blunt:

“This appears to be less of an advisory board than a means for a select group of elite donors to gain privileged access to the prime minister and the chancellor.”

Above all, the seeds of Brexit bear bitter fruit. Leaving the EU helps create division and instability while conferring none of the riches its advocates promised. Gone is instant EU access, exporters now face thirty days’ delay. The bureaucracy of the EU is now replaced by UK officialdom. Trickle-down Trussonomics builds on Brexiteers’ magical thinking; blending a defiance of expert consensus and the market with contempt for Britain’s partners.

Brexit has proved an unmitigated disaster to the UK economy, according to a wide range of commentators from academics and left-leaning journalists to growing numbers of bankers such as Citibank’s Chief Economist, Benjamin Nabarro.

But rotten as it may be, the party has its elite stormtroopers who move like a wolf on the fold when self interest is at stake. The party that pays lip service to liberty calls in its own Bank of England stooge, Jeremy Hunt, when the market panics at rising interest rates fuelled by a Trussian October Revolution of unfunded tax cuts, fuel subsidies and state spending.

Truss’ vision of an agile, lightly-regulated, innovative, entrepreneurial Britain with a Melbourne Cup field of “investment zones” where can-do capitalism can knock itself out free of red tape (or green) would not be out of place in a Malcolm Turnbull speech and is cut from the same international think-tank boiler plate. Build it and they will come. Especially with favourable tax and planning approval. It is more Singapore on Thames, critics sniff, than a practical solution to Britain’s real economic challenges of under investment, inflation, spiralling inequality and recession.

Others point out that it’s handing a blank cheque to businesses who’d have to force themselves to have a ten year tax holiday at the government’s expense. In the meantime, the government still has to pay to keep its projects afloat.

Pet projects grow into white elephants. Turnbull’s Snowy 2.0 pumped Hydro pipe dream with subsidies boondoggle – a bargain at $2 billion in its initial “under-cooked” quote – is now estimated to cost at least $10 billion and could be on stream by 2028 at the earliest.

It’s a snip compared with Inland Rail, the Nationals holy grail, which experts advise the Senate will cost at least $20 billion and counting.

Lean green machines, they are not. Utopia’s Rob Sitch, says the grid as it stands means that “pumped hydro is like trying to charge a Tesla with a diesel generator.”

Liz is a fizza but shadow lenders, unregulated, unaccountable and untouchable, increasingly deal themselves into the high-stakes poker of the biggest game in town.

The Tory Party’s abrupt reversion to orthodox, austerity economics is testament to the power of the old guard at the City of London to dictate economic policy.

Or is it a last-ditch attempt to dictate government economic policy by the unelected BoE board? As our Reserve Bank is currently making. Unfortunately, full steam astern will only lead the nation deeper into recession.

But it will be cruel Britannia all the way with all the help that tabloid media can supply about the need for a nation to take its medicine – and not to fuss itself over the prescription. The Bank of England Bank Governor and his pliant board will raise interest rates on household mortgages to halt inflation caused by corporate price gouging at the supermarket, the privatised supply of gas and electricity and the economic disruption of Russia’s War on Ukraine.

If that sounds like our own charismatic dynamo, Philip Lowe that ‘s because he’s reading from the same zombie apocalypse script. It will help protect the fortunes of the ruling elite but it will be the average wage earner who is forced to pay for it all.

 

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Zombie Policy Apocalypse Part 1

Taking Britain and Putin’s oil and gas war-disrupted Covid-stricken world markets by storm is Trussed!, another spectacular episode of trickle-down and double backflip, a 45 day far-right detour in Little Britain’s post-Brexit Tory Story, an action-packed, adrenaline junkie’s in-flight entertainment featuring political jokes, fiscal hocus pocus, bitchy infighting, breathtaking ineptitude, self-parody and inglorious failure. Spoiler alert. There is no happy ending. Whilst Marx said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, the surreal spin cycle of UK Tory politics will continue to inflict misery and suffering on the poor.

Have the Tories come full circle? “The UK is once again in the grip of austerity and anti-democratic politics – when we got into this crisis precisely because of austerity and democratic failure. The vast spending cuts made by George Osborne wrecked our hospitals, our schools and our town halls, and stoked the frustrations that ensured Brexit,” writes Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty. Now there will be more.

Mary Elizabeth Truss, is a product of Tufton Street, a hotbed of fossil fuel lobby groups and right-wing think tanks that have colonised government. Political activists Led by Donkeys’ latest video depicts three members up a ladder placing a mock blue plaque on 55 Tufton Street in Westminster, central London, a Georgian townhouse serving as HQ to right-wing zombie idealogues who spout the dud policies so popular with Truss.

“The UK economy was crashed here,” reads a “Liz Trussorative” sign, dated 23 September 2022, the day Ms Truss’s ex-chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng announces his uncosted “mini-Budget”, cunningly named to avoid Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) scrutiny. Proposing big tax cuts and heavy borrowing at a time of high inflation, lifts interest rates, shaves three percent off the value of the pound, upsets the bond market and has the Bank of England in damage control.

Within days, high profile Sunak supporter, Jeremy Hunt, a former Health Minister under David Cameron and Theresa May, pops up like the White Rabbit and proceeds to shred every thread of the Trussian roulette crazy plan. He vows to set up a new economic advisory council, with four crack economists already on board, Rupert Harrison, George Osborne’s former chief of staff, and a JP Morgan executive. George Osborne, the king of cuts?

All is not lost. Hunt keeps the uncapped bonuses for bankers, a vital fiscal reform.

Britain’s third PM in four years, a fanatical Libertarian Free Market Neoliberal, who acted her idol, Baroness, Margaret Thatcher in primary school, is dumbstruck; heartbroken to be booed off stage by The City, financial centre of the world, if New York.

Trussed! is a cautionary tale of a hapless, half-baked Thatcherite who strikes fear and loathing into the heart of the market she worships; a tale which may help dispel some of the voodoo economics of neoliberalism if not point to its death – as our own national living treasure, The Australia Institute’s Chief Economist Richard Denniss writes.

“It took Liz Truss just 45 days to destroy Margaret Thatcher’s life’s work. For 40 years the idea that tax cuts for the rich would trickle down to help the poor has not just dominated the rhetoric of Western politicians but aligned the ambitions of those who already have the most and those who wish they did.”

But it may be premature to dance on the grave of middle-class welfare or government run by a privileged elite on behalf of that elite at the expense of the pathologically lazy wage slave, as Truss and her pals, all members of think tank The Free Enterprise Group, “encouraging classical liberalism” slander British workers in Britannia Unchained, (2012), her manifesto.

“Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.”

Truss is hounded into resignation soon after her opening solo, Trickle Down, an attempt to woo the oligarchy and schmooze the rich, leads to her being replaced by Rishi Sunak, a former Goldman Sachs Hedge Fund manager when the firm brought on the 2008 recession.

“Dishy Rishi”, as tabloids dub him, goes on to marry fashion designer, venture capitalist and software heiress, Akshata Murty, whose father N.R. Narayana Murthy, founded tech sweatshop giant, Infosys which, incidentally, twenty years ago contracted to do a lot of IT work for Telstra. Whilst his affairs are hidden in a blind trust, the little battler, whose father was a doctor and whose mother owned a pharmacy, does very well for himself.

It’s cheering to see Sunak unchained, slaving to overcome a privileged upbringing in Hampshire, one of England’s most affluent counties. Our hearts go out to Rishi as he battles his way through an elite prep school, Stroud, before Winchester (£45,936 per annum) where he’s made head boy and then he’s up to Oxford, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE). Later he’s on a Fulbright Scholarship doing an MBA at Stamford. There follows a stint where he is director of his father-in-law’s company. But can he do something useful with his life?

True, only in a parallel Tory Universe could a billionaire whose family fortunes are linked with labour outsourcing and who keeps his affairs secret, ever be a successful PM, just as any government on behalf of a wealthy elite will tend to perpetuate injustice, inequality and indifference to those lower on the ladder.

IT outsourcing itself is a paradigm of inequality, a neoliberal magic wand to make IT costs disappear, only to appear in a developing nation, for example, in 2017, a typical IT Indian worker would be paid $5,000 while their US counterparts can expect north of $100,000. Another part of the magic is that as IT costs disappear, so, too do jobs.

Already in the UK the poor are poorer. There are plans to cut government spending because Trussonomics causes a £70 billion black hole, or so Hunt declares, (sound familiar?) which will mean cuts to schools and hospitals already in crisis due to under-funding. Even the fuel cap on household gas and electricity bills is cut from two years to a token six months.

Sunak is not popular with his party. Just last month, given a choice between Sunak and Truss, Tories voted for the untested, wild-eyed ideologue. Sunak solves his lack of support – for now – by recycling ministers from the fabulously impressive Johnson and Truss governments. Keeping RWNJs close. We’ve seen how well this tactic works in recent Coalition governments in Canberra.

Sunak strategically re-appoints, as Home Secretary, the anti-immigration, anti-protest right winger, Suella Braverman, who lampoons dissent on energy and environment policy as the work of “tofu-eating wokerati” an MP who sees opponents as “the anti-growth coalition.”

Is Barnaby Joyce moonlighting? Or is the anti-progressive invective multinational?

But it’s a risky gambit. In forgiving Braverman for her breach of security only six days after she resigns over sharing a confidential document, the new PM inflames Tory divisions over political direction and probity that could cause him to lose authority. No big deal.

Former Tory party chair Sir Jake Berry accuses Braverman of “multiple breaches” of the ministerial code; calls her Leaky Sue”. He tells TalkTV that, far from coming forward and admitting her mistake, she has only fessed up when confronted with the evidence.

Minutes later, another Tory MP, Mark Pritchard, helpfully suggests that MI5 lacks confidence in Ms Braverman and that Sunak needs to do something about the situation.

Also helpful are Harry Cole and James Heale whose ebook on the rise and fall of Liz Truss, Out of the Blue, to be published 1 November, (desperately brought forward one month), claims Braverman also leaked market-sensitive information when home secretary. These trifling matters aside, the MP is irrepressible; always keen to stir up racism, xenophobia and gratuitous cruelty.

Braverman will be cheered, she says, when the first plane load of asylum seekers is sent off to Rwanda. “I would love to have a front page of the Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession.”

But rehabilitating Braverman who breached the ministerial code by sending a cabinet document by personal email, dog whistles the Tories’ right wing. And may win Sunak some Johnson supporters. What could possibly go wrong?

Sunak’s clearly no slouch. He’s also fixed up the misunderstanding which forced his wife to not pay tax on her £400 million share in Infosys, because of her non-domicile status saving her £20 million in taxes on her annual dividends of around £6 million.

At first, Sunak argued his wife was entitled to the tax break but now declares that she will pay all taxes. That’ll fix it.

To briefly recap the plot, with a warning that this account features names of people who are politically deceased, Liz follows Boris’ Level Up, an utterly gutted slogan so hollow it’s a virtual black hole, with Zombie Apocalypse Now, a free market-libertarian burlesque where Truss pledges to shower Londongrad, HQ of the UK’s fabulously wealthy oligarchy, in buckets of borrowed money.

The City promptly swoons; the pound falls to a new low almost on parity with the US dollar, interest rates rise and pension fund managers struggle to keep away from upper-storey windows. Truss’ Bold New Plan involves unfunded tax cuts for the rich. And £100 billion in home fuel subsidies. All on tick. But it’s less the plan itself than how it snubs the very idea of budgeting, a process which has morphed into a form of performance art about credibility. Balancing the books is prudent government – if you believe the Tories and their tabloids.

The City is thunderstruck. BT’s pension fund, one of Britain’s biggest, is filthy. BT loses £12bn in the mayhem after 23 May when Truss and Kartweng spin their mini-budget thingie.

Pension funds are made up of a range of investments and encourage gambling with other peoples’ money and betting on interest rates and bond yields.

Unfortunately, along with energy oligopolies’ price gouging and mortgage rate hikes, pension funds can fuel inflation.

Increasingly, funds invest in basics which increase your shopping bill and what you pay for petrol. More than €30bn is tied up in European pension funds, which are used to bet on the price of raw materials like food and fuel.

Nick Dearden, Director of campaign group Global Justice Now, explains that pension funds are “gambling on food prices, in the process driving up those prices and fuelling the cost of living crisis for all of us.”

The UK is the second largest source of foreign investment in Australia. DFAT says its stock of investment was valued at $574.8 billion in 2018. But we’ve nothing to fear.

Otherwise, our media would be on it like a blowfly in a pickle bottle. If they’re not all worn out telling us our fundamentals are sound.

We’re all safe as houses because of the great shape that the Morrison government left the economy in, as Spud Dutton and his team of small potatoes keep telling us.

Putting a trillion dollars of poorly structured debt to one side and overlooking his government’s energy, pandemic and environment catastrophes, ScoMo’s greatest legacy is the damage he did to the Coalition with his decision to whip up transgender prejudice, euphemistically termed culture wars instead of protecting Liberal heartland.

Liz Truss is similar. Like Morrison, she, too, inherits a party of disunity and disorder.

But take a bow, ex-Prime Minister Truss. Typhoid Mary of Torydom, is a huge role, in itself. Egomaniac, liar, grub and complete imposter Boris did a lot to wreck the Tories, single-handedly, although any party that would elect Boris as its PM has to be beyond all surgery. Yet now, the former Minister for Trade, who became a born again Brexiteer to get the gig, sends world financial markets into a death spiral. The Tory-fawning UK press is most unkind. Reviews are quite hostile. Bring Back Boris is the worst.

You can’t blame the actor. The superbly named Sir Tom Scholar, Treasury Secretary, is sacked. Experts ignored. Being “Trussed”, or showing contempt for reason, is part of a wider cult combining racism, tribal stupidity and borrowing heavily on the fashion for showing contempt for all forms of expertise, now taking the world by storm. All with Rupert Murdoch’s help. Let’s not forget, it was largely his company’s paper The Sun wot got Brexit done.

Truss blusters about how she’s going to take a stand against all that nanny state nonsense apart from the afterthought of a household energy cap which would rescue struggling energy corporations anyway. Pensioners can suffer penury for their work-shy lifestyles and their wilful lack of thrift. Corporate welfare is cool. And cutting tax for the rich is a must if you are going to encourage entrepreneurs, attract startups and lure Russian oligarchs.

Eyebrows arch in the City of London. Or Londongrad. Wags note that the financial capital’s prime locations are now owned by Russian Oligarchs. The purchase of a pad in Hampstead, Knightsbridge or Belgravia was an easy way for Putin’s kleptocracy to launder fortunes amassed from stripping former Soviet state assets.

Alas, it’s not so easy these days in an era of sanctions against Russia over its war on Ukraine. Blinds are down and drapes are drawn in entire Kensington streets, today. Asses are frozen. And who knows what else. Banks did fabulously well, of course, as did the City, as the financial district is known.

London was a mecca for Russian oligarchs seeking foreign capital-raising. Shonky operators flocked not only for the money but for a listing which would fake international financial respectability. Over twenty firms, with a total market value of more than 400 billion pounds ($536 billion), are listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE).

Financial skulduggery isn’t just something that happens in the UK; there has been a concerted and decades-long effort to encourage it to do so’ writes former Russia correspondent, Oliver Bullough, who has led “kleptocracy tours” of London notes Dean Acheson’s observation, in 1962, that Britain had “lost an empire but not yet found a role,” Bullough hints that it did find a role in keeping with its decadence, as a mum’s-the-word- butler – full body massage or crypto-therapy, sir? -to Russian Mafioso and other Muscovy movers and shakers, opening doors to capital markets, prime real estate, shopping at Harrods, and the best private schools money can buy,

Naturally, included in the deal were mining and Murdoch corporation-class tax evasion accountants, attorneys for legal spats, and “reputation managers” for inconvenient backstories. It starts with visas; any foreigner with adequate funds can buy one, by investing two million pounds in the U.K.

After permanent residency, sir?

Ten million pounds.

While the laundering of money, the growth of shadow lending and the growth in the power of dark money are international trends, Londongrad’s The Financial Times’ editorial board gets huffy, telling the new PM that she should stop playing free market libertarian and knuckle down current economic orthodoxy; play by the rules.

But did Liz fall or was she putsched? Her successor, “Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look,” Rishi Sunak, is a power-hungry oligarch, a puppet of The City of London. Big Finance took over Westminster in the 1980s. Sunak’s a former Goldman Sachs chap, the firm that lit the touchpaper on the recession of 2008, that we choose to call the GFC.

What iscertain is that Britain is once again in the grip of a zombie policy apocalypse – austerity is being touted as the only way out of a mess all of the Tories’ own making, when it can only lead to further suffering. Here’s Nobel Laureate, economist Paul Krugman writing seven years ago,

“… all of the economic research that allegedly supported the austerity push has been discredited. Widely touted statistical results were, it turned out, based on highly dubious assumptions and procedures – plus a few outright mistakes – and evaporated under closer scrutiny.

It is rare, in the history of economic thought, for debates to get resolved this decisively. The austerian ideology that dominated elite discourse five years ago has collapsed, to the point where hardly anyone still believes it. Hardly anyone, that is, except the coalition that still rules Britain – and most of the British media.”

For Britain, substitute Australia. Could we be having our own zombie policy apocalypse, too? In Part 2, the sleaze, decadence and corruption of the modern Tory Party beckons.

Link to Part 2

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New Parliament promising but Team Dutton disappoints

On the opening of the forty-seventh parliament with thirty-five new members, a nineteen gun salute and one cool, new diverse, vibe, 26 July, a decimated Opposition – twenty-two fewer in the House of Reps – reverts to playing dirty pool.

In contrast, the extra virgin, Albanese government begins with a show of compromise. Can we deal with Greens and teals? Labor makes a big deal of agreeing to make its emissions reduction target of 43 percent by 2030 based on 2007 “a minimum”.

It’s no flaw to have a floor and even if we won’t match it with a ratchet mechanism our target will rise over coming years vows Chris Bowen. Bowen is the federal government’s Climate Change and Energy Minister and must know he’s a marked man. Peter Dutton, promises to pick on Bowen because you go for the “weak links”.

Yet to be seen, however, in Labor’s newly “Dutton-proofed” draft legislation – which will now – as the UN framework mandates – spell out that future emissions targets can only increase – is any pledge to phase out gas and coal exports.

Nor is there a ban on new gas and coal. But while the law is set to come before the lower house, Wednesday, it will not be before the Senate until September. With the clock at one minute to midnight on The Doomsday Clock, there’s more room than time for improvement.

Reform could begin with repairing a democratic process long hijacked by lobbyists, especially the monstrous fossil fuel lobby guzzling $12 billion in federal government subsidies, $8 billion of which is a fuel tax credit scheme, entrenching the use of petrol, diesel and natural gas.

It costs a billion in subsidies just to fuel the rigs to get the stuff out of the ground.

It won’t be easy for Labor, given its business friendly election promises and the links already forged which brought it $75 million between 2012-20 from mining or banking and finance for example, or media, alcohol and gambling but anything less than independence and integrity will be political suicide.

What’s certain, however, is that after nine years’ failure, the Coalition needs to get out of the road. Australia’s action on climate is ranked as dead last in the world by the UN.

Alas, for Dutton’s mob, (corporate receipts ($125 million 2012-20) it’s deja vu all over again. Back to the future. Bugger the concept of an opposition offering an alternative vision. It’s learned nothing and whatever he believes, $coMo’s political road-kill. There’ll be no resurrection. So what does it do?

Dutton reprises Abbott’s wrecking-ball, hyper partisan politics. At least opposition for its own sake is a game it knows. Team Dutton has no concept of collaboration and even less idea of what it means to be out of power.

For four years, $coMo & Co sought power for its own sake while servicing corporate sponsors, within a carbon captured state. Responsible or democratic federal government was just window dressing at best. At worst its gas-led recovery was nothing less than open surrender to Santos.

But let’s be fair, why bother trying to be taken seriously, when you already get more than enough attention for self-parody? Much to our Murdoch controlled media’s delight, “Boofhead” Dutton, another useful, disposable idiot, will head an insane clown posse out to attack Labor on everything, foot and mouth, climate, environment.

Disorganised? It can’t even get its act together on whether we should close our borders to Indonesian foot and mouth disease. But who needs coherence when you’ve got sound and light?

Dutton calls for “the border with Indonesia” to be closed, unlike Big Dave Littleproud who sides with totally objective industry leaders, who – Deidre Chambers what a coincidence – want no such restriction, while the Nationals leader calls for more science.

It’s a remarkable pivot given that only last August, Dave wrote to the CSIRO protesting at its inclusion of fake meat in its digital tuckerbox suggesting science should be a little less scientific or perhaps not so mean to meat, “provide balanced support to Australian industries”.

Agriculture minister, “Murray Grey” Watt has the Opposition’s number. Muzza tells RN Breakfast that the opposition’s calls to close the border are damaging our nation’s agricultural reputation. But, as The Monthly’s Rachel Withers asks, “when has the national interest ever stopped the Coalition from trying to score a political point?”

Dutton is struggling to keep his team on message. But what has the serial dud ever succeeded at? He’s The Peter Principle personified.

Media signs are promising. Team Spud may better its predecessor’s record for SNAFU-driven negative advertising. In the hotly contested teamwork event, Karen Andrews pushes her former PM under a bus when he uses her to create a refugee boat arrival election stunt. Not only is Sussan Ley busted for suppressing a major report on the environment, she doesn’t give a fig.

The Fourth State of the Environment (SOE) Report from the CSIRO is a comprehensive assessment of the state of our environment put out every five years by the Australian Government.

It has to be. Independent and evidence-based, the review is mandated by the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. It’s not something you throw in your school bag and don’t show your parents.

But what to do? It’s an indictment. The report shows the adverse effects of climate change on the health and well-being of Australians. Climate change is exacerbating pressures on every Australian ecosystem. Australia now has more foreign plant species than native.

Australia’s environment is terminally ill. Pressures of climate change, habitat loss, invasive species, pollution and mining have deteriorated over the past five years. Our natural world holds the key to human wellbeing and survival, scientists warn.

The Morrison government acts with typical maturity, responsibility and openness. It sits on the report for six months lest it jigger its re-election prospects. The SOE would have just been quietly buried had $coMo & Co been returned to office.

Two years ago the federal government was told it had failed in its duty to protect the environment in its delivery of Australia’s national conservation laws in a scathing review by the national auditor general. It ignored that, too.

Former Minister for no responsibility to future generations for climate change or the Environment, Sussan Ley is unavailable for comment, last Tuesday, the day of the SOE’s final release. Or since. But Ms Ley is planning a national listening tour to discover why women didn’t vote for the Coalition.

The Coalition blames voters for the Morrison government’s rout -(just not listening, says Deputy leader Su$san Ley- especially women) – only to be upstaged by reports that boat whisperer, ScoMo, architect of his party’s near-death experience whistled up a Sri Lankan boat, or two, right on polling day, 21 May, to stop the votes-for Labor.

Karen Middleton gets the scoop for The Saturday Paper. A Sri Lankan contact says that the departure of two asylum seeker boats bound for Australia “was being facilitated” by Sri Lankan authorities. They are scheduled to arrive in Australian waters “around the 21st of May 2022, election date”, he says. It’s designed to be “an election stunt”.

There’s the usual Canberra flap. The PM’s Office puts the hard word on Home Affairs to go from “caretaker to scaremaker”, in Phil Coorey’s phrase on ABC Insiders.

Karen Andrews defends the heroic resistance of her then Home Affairs staff who refuse to do a press drop to journos. Yet a blizzard of spam text messages tell voters of an “illegal boat” from Sri Lanka being intercepted by Border Force as it tries to enter Australia 21 May.

“Keep our borders secure by voting Liberal today,” the text message ends. There’s a link to a Liberal-endorsed website, vote.liberal.org.au.

Shadow Home Affairs Minister Andrews defends her role in the Morrison government’s decision to publicise the turnback of a people smuggling vessel on election day.

Andrews tells Today that the former PM got her to issue the statement. Ouch. No chance of another curry in a hurry chez ScoMo and family. She rejects any suggestion of her department being pressured.

One press gallery journo joins the dots. Did Morrison engineer the departure of the boat to fit the Coalition fear campaign that boats would start again under Labor?

Bruce Haigh has little doubt. “In my belief, the Australian government has been involved outside of normal channels with various agencies in Sri Lanka to prevent the boats coming to Australia,” Former Deputy High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, Haigh tells Karen Middleton of The Saturday Paper.

“Within that relationship, there was the capacity to also send boats.”

It’s a revelation that eclipses Scotty’s “We don’t trust in governments … or the UN”, sermon and love-in with fellow evangelical, homophobe, Margaret Court at Perth’s Victory Life Centre, pentecostal church. Morrison’s all-God’s-children-got-to-chill theme in his fifty-minute harangue, however, is alarming. “Be anxious for nothing” is his Biblical text.

For the true believer, God has overcome fear Morrison believes. But it sounds very close to “I just don’t care” as he explained his composure to Annabel Crabb on Kitchen Cabinet.

Founder, Marg’s a big fan of Scott; not just because of a $500,000 plus a $50,000 “cash-flow boost” her Centre got from JobKeeper in 2020.

Most of this went into a bank account, $37,000 in the red in 2019. Like Lazarus, the balance was brought back from the dead; a $258,000 surplus by June 30, 2020.

Money can’t buy you love, however, and Liberals have colourful pork’n rort spreadsheets to prove it. It’s pretty clear Morrison’s desperate bid to cede the party’s inner-city heartland to woke greenies and teals and put transphobia first in a ploy to win big in the outer suburbs was a dumb idea. Just as cynically courting the far right undid him. Just as it undid Howard, whose calculated shift to the right ultimately cost him his own seat of Bennelong.

Today’s Liberals can always rely on right wing nutjobs to rally around in a crisis. Like flies around an outback dunny. As PM Albanese’s dusting off the mining lobby’s “clean coal” bullshit disgusts the teals, the Greens and many in his own party, the LNP’s lunatic right dives into the dustbin of history to recycle garbage.

“There is a real risk that the wrong lessons will be learnt by the Liberal Party about the reasons for the federal election loss, and the path back to government.”

Amanda Stoker, self-proclaimed “misunderstood conservative”, a dry, white former Queensland LNP Senator, veteran Coalition content creator and now team coach, wags her finger from a new pulpit, scolding players for “caving to leftist positions” in her post-election rout analysis- in a bold new column in The Australian Financial Review.

Don’t adjust your set, the fault lies with reality. Let other, misguided, souls see the Coalition’s defeat as part of its alienation of women, or its being a front for the fossil fuel industry, or a judgement on its catastrophic ineptitude on climate, energy, economy, environment and pandemic, Stoker’s urging a return to the same – only harder right.

Our former assistant Minister for Women-who-want-to-be-crumb-maidens already fixed the Coalition’s women problem. In her own low-rent attack on Julia Banks’ book in July 2021, the veteran attention-seeker accuses Banks of seeking a “cheap headline”, adding the Liberal Party line on its endemic, sexist bullying:

“I certainly haven’t seen in my personal experience the matters of which she complains.” In 2018, she calls Banks’ allegations “pathetic” and “bizarre”.

“Solidarity” Stoker is “the voice for Morrison’s quiet Australians”, Janet Albrechtsen (paywalled) purrs in Liberal Party Pravda The Australian, another money-losing Murdoch publication, $60 million in the red in 2021. With that type of backing, Stoker’s a shoo-in for the next LNP casual vacancy in the senate, which is only ever a parachute away.

Oxymorons pave the race to the bottom. Not only does the voice of Morrison’s quiet Australia belong to one of our loudest Tories, the headline-seeking lunatic right complains bitterly that it is silenced. Cancelled.

“Captain’s pick” for Warringah, unsuccessful Liberal candidate, the transphobic Katherine Deves, had Scott Morrison swear he wouldn’t let Deves be “silenced” as the party split in two over her candidacy.

Matt Canavan nails defeat down to his party’s failure to heed quiet Australians, such as Senator Hollie Hughes. The self-effacing Hughes, shadow assistant minister for Climate Change Denial takes us back at least to 2014, with a reheated fossil fuel lobby leftover as she declares “climate change is not an Australian problem.”

Not our problem? Australia should try that line on Pasifika Leaders who fear Labor’s climate policy of an inadequate emission target of 43% by 2020, paired with plans for new gas and coal. Hughes knows Australia is directly responsible for just over 1% of global emissions (1.13%). Yet, when added to emissions from fossil fuel exports this rises to 3-4%.

We have a big problem. We are the world’s largest gas exporter and second largest coal exporter. Although only 0.33% of the globe’s population, we rank with the world’s top culprits. Our average carbon footprint of 16 tonnes per capita, is over three times the global average.

Government figures project an increase in coal production of 4%, a 12% increase in gas production and a 32% increase in oil production up to 2030itters of carbon emissions with an average carbon footprint.

And we’re increasing it. Yet the line Dutton’s opposition will push is the lie that any energy source other than fossil fuels will lead to huge price rises. It’s old mining company propaganda but it’s run on Sky News by Stoker among others.

Stoker, aka Draymilla Burt, in Shaun Miccallef’s Mad as Hell puts a lot of spin into her political shtick, a caricature of gob-smacking sophistry, hot-button-bigotry and lies. The religious right loves her. Parachuted into the senate, only to crash and burn in a term, Stoker can’t wait to lecture the Liberals on how they can win next time.

Stoker’s seen her patron, Scott Morrison, another of the Lord’s anointed, whose persona also taps pathological exhibitionism, egotism and unwitting self-parody, not only fudge an election but gut his own party. So? It’s just that he didn’t go far enough right.

Shunning safe inner-city seats to woo a mythical, horde from outer suburbia; a HiLux ute muster of King Gee Liberal tradies, Morrison’s blunder is a gift to the teals. It also unseats the odd dud. Josh Frydenberg is snapped up by Goldman Sachs, the giant vampire squid of what we call the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, a world recession to everyone else.

Goldman Sachs was fined $5bn for its role in the 2008 financial crisis in a settlement holding the bank accountable for its ‘serious misconduct’ in falsely assuring investors that securities it sold were backed by sound mortgages.

It’s a neat fit for a former feckless treasurer whose idols are Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. So he accidentally gave away fifty billion of JobKeeper to the likes of Gerry Harvey? They could repay it if they wanted to.

Scotty partners Margaret (hard, clay, grass or carpet) Court. Doubles can be tricky because, as Maggie says herself, “Tennis is full of lesbians.” But not only does Morrison find a fellow homophobe, the spotlight enables our greatest failure to imply he’s a winner because God loves him. Its politics and governments that are fallible.

It’s practically a badge of honour to stuff up as PM;

“We trust in Him. We don‘t trust in governments. We don’t trust in United Nations, thank goodness. We don‘t trust in all of these things as fine as they might be and as important as the role that they play. Believe me, I’ve worked in it. But as someone who’s been in it, if you are putting your faith in those things, like I put my faith in the Lord, you are making a mistake. They are fallible.”

Sadly, many tradies hate ScoMo for his ineptitude, cynical pragmatism and repudiation of duty of care. Especially aged care, climate and environment. Many follow their parents’ political preferences leftward. But let’s not confuse a popular cause with a populist cause.

Both Morrison and Stoker are like Trump who turned anti-abortion only when he saw votes in it. Stoker’s truckling to Dutton who returns from Washington pumped with Republican culture war tactics to follow his war on woke classrooms.

Pete’s head is on the one-eyed god in the lounge room. ABC TV. We could be at war with China or Russia any minute, he rants. Imagine if we locked in a 47% by 2020 emission target! His plan is to attack Labor’s woeful emissions target plus new coal and gas with his own mob’s woeful emissions target plus new coal and gas.

What could possibly go wrong?

“The greatest challenge facing the defeated federal Liberal Party is not whether to move to the right or the left, nor whether to court voters in the outer suburbs or try to win back its once blue-ribbon seats. It is how to stay relevant and it’s a challenge the party seems barely to recognise,” writes Judith Brett.

The major challenge for Labor is not what the emissions reduction target should be so much as stopping new coal and gas and how soon it can kick big coal and the oil and gas industry out of the temple before its true believers lose their faith entirely.

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Interest rate hike upstaged by Dutts’ and Barilaro’s Circus

“Marxist” teachers are teaching our kids “absolute leftwing rubbish.” NSW Senator, Hollie Hughes, Shadow Minister for denying climate change and promoting fossil fuels, moonlighting as Opposition national curriculum cop, reads from the Republican playbook’s false alarmism about critical race theory and gender whispering being taught in schools. The Coalition sideshow is pumping now Dutton’s obsessed with vetting what goes on in the classroom because it works for right-wing politicians in the US.

Marx? No one’s sure if she’s talking about Groucho, Harpo or Karl. Having lost the plot long before it lost power, the opposition will struggle to hold Labour, or anyone else to account, but at least it can do some public good by holding itself up to ridicule.

Dutton’s on a week’s leave so “Lying Cow” Linda Reynolds tries a bit of biting self-satire with her “targets with teeth”, a way of talking about quotas without mentioning the “Q” word. “Inaction is not a strategy”, she tells Sky News, a refreshing insight from a former minister in a government which gave new meaning to inaction, inertia and ineptitude.

Reynolds’ best gag, however, is her claim that her government “did more for women than any other”. This is the same government that helped push Australia further and further down the greasy pole of the Global Gender Gap Index.

Standout performer in the well-contested absolute rubbish arena, however, goes to the Reserve Bank of Australia’s top tipster, Phil Lowe. Phil’s RBA has a patchy track record but to our right-wing media controlled by vested interests, he’s some type of High Priest instead of an investor-class shill who can fiddle the till by printing money.

Phil’s out and about peddling the lie that we’re in a wage-price spiral. Given real prices have been going backwards for a decade it’s not strong on logic but it meets the Reserve Bank brief which is for its CEO to come out as required to beat down wages, in the name of “stability”. Hiking interest rates does, however, leads to joblessness which neoliberal governments love to use to suppress wages – even if it is utterly at odds with the RBA’s other goal of full employment.

Although not counted in the CPI, mortgage payments and rents are nudged up by interest rates which now rise every time the banksters and usurers’ pals on the RBA Board attend their monthly meetings. Real estate values fall as the cost of borrowing goes up, while a price-profit spiral beggars the poor and threatens the wealth of our investor class.

Our celebrity media does its best. Even our ABC repeats the old gag that it’s a wage-price spiral. Blames selfish low-paid workers for daring to get a pay “rise” below inflation.

Inexcusable, however, is Phil Lowe’s cameo appearance on ABC 7:30, jaw-boning the lie that wages rises equals inflation which is easily kept in check by raising interest rates. In reality, none of this is true. But he’s a performer in a circus where illusion is everything.

Phil’s got a great sense of humour, too. All those years he’s been dog-whistling wage rises and now he turns around and blames inflation on greedy workers asking for enough pay to buy groceries and pay the power bill. And look how he stooged us all with his “No rate rise before 2024.” What a crack-up. Especially to those who borrowed big on the strength of his prediction and now face job losses. You’re a funny man, Phil, even if you’re full of bullshit. All you care about is protecting investors’ profits. And your board is a dud.

Five out of nine RBA board “business leader” members have no qualifications whatsoever in setting monetary policy, the bank’s core business. Overseas, reserve banks attract the top echelon, the experts who write the textbooks. Luckily, Phil’s RBA minutes are secret.

It’s impossible to find out how the RBA reaches its decisions. Or makes so many mistakes. Like the National Cabinet, there’s no record of who said what. But it all ends up costing a fortune – not just Phil’s million-dollar salary but in unemployment growth.

Keeping the cash rate too high in the four years before the pandemic cost us 270,000 jobs, reckon Dr Zac Gross and Dr Andrew Leigh, our assistant Treasurer, in fresh research out this month. Dr Gross notes, for perspective, that closing down coal mining tomorrow would cost only 38,100 jobs. Lowe is on ABC 7:30, however, telling tired old lies about our inflation being a wage-price spiral when it’s driven by profits and price-gouging.

No one asks Lowe about the massive debt his bank helped create over the last few years, ostensibly, to get us through the pandemic by throttling back interest rates whilst printing money, a nifty trick known as quantitative easing. Pioneered by the Japanese in the 1990s, it didn’t work for Japan either but it’s a sure-fire way to devalue assets and elevate Australian household debt to around $2.5 trillion, a record 120% of GDP.

Household debt as a proportion of disposable income is at a historic high; all of which is oddly dissonant with Lowe’s mantra that we’re all cashed up at home. Sitting on an extra $240 billion because we couldn’t go out and spend during lockdown.

“We have a big potential problem courtesy of the way we have run our housing system, for not just the last decade but for the last at least three decades,” says Chris Martin, UNSW’s City Futures Research Centre Senior Researcher.

Martin’s concerned policies such as low-interest rates, negative gearing and capital gains tax discount encourage punters to take on more debt, particularly to purchase investment properties. The latter two benefit the top ten percent and drive up house prices, argues The Australia Institute’s Matt Grudnoff.

Never to be upstaged, there’s a Barilaro of laughs in the Big Top of Politics Oz. The former deputy Premier of NSW will still call Australia home after being forced out of a cushy new $500,000 post in New York, a fabulously public-spirited boondoggle he set up for himself. Shit happens, Tony Abbott says, but now Bruz is Perrottet’s unflushable turd.

Where would we be without Barra? John “Save the Brumby” Barilaro, rips up his ticket to ride in a boilover at the starting gate in the Dom Perignon New York Stakes, a race identical to the Berejiklian event run last year. He’s forced, Barilaro says, by The Media, out of the saddle of firm favourite, New York under syndicate instructions.

Given that his rival, top hoop, Jenny West, won Berejiklian’s race only to be disqualified afterwards, like Dancer’s Image in the 1968 Kentucky Derby, “Bruz ” thought he was unbackable. Whilst an inquiry learns that West was “overqualified”, that wouldn’t help her.

The rules are changed after the start as Amy Brown, CEO of Investment NSW explains, to eliminate West, in a late “change in government policy to convert the roles into statutory officers appointed by a minister”. No wonder Barilaro feels ripped off. His sense of injury is no doubt assuaged as Ms Brown explains the Investment NSW process.

“We give it to God and pray and pray and pray, and he will work out his purposes.”

Our showbiz-MPs, with their performative rorts, ugly skulduggery and shagadelic sleaze-baggery, work hard on their show routines, while they cook the books and the planet. Say what you may about the light on the hill, or the deep twilight of a captured state; the venality, corruption and deceit, our politics is still show business for ugly people.

But we’ll have no appearance-shaming here, given the peculiar potency of our defamation law to silence criticism and dissent. Giovanni Barilaro is a winsome, over-achiever of inestimable talent and a natural crowd-puller. A stud muffin. True, he’s the Barnaby Joyce of NSW politics because he’s so divisive. But you can’t pull all of the people all of the time.

He hasn’t won over Barnaby. Barilaro is “grating and pushy” Joyce says.

Politics, of course, is also a means to wield power for its own sake in every possible way, as it is for the incredible sulk, False-Messiah Morrison, a man who heard voices and saw a vision in an eagle photo, telling him he was chosen by God to lead us out of the wilderness. He is now in witness protection, surely, after driving his Liberals into a mountain.

Morrison’s means included disinformation, weaponisation of asylum seekers, and the stacking of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT), the ABC, The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and other bodies. Labor promises its federal ICAC by the year’s end, while it says that the AAT, a fabulously well-paid dumping ground for failed Liberal politicians and retired party apparatchiks. will have to be disbanded and rebuilt fit for purpose.

Former family joinery artisan, a man who knows all about opening doors, deputy NSW Premier, National Party star, Barilaro is a barrel of laughs as he handcrafts his own plum job in The Big Apple. But he’s not just a funny man.

John’s public-spirited, humble and self-reflective, too. Two years ago, he pulled out of preselection for the Nationals’ ticket in the Eden-Monaro federal byelection. Why?

“In politics, ego can quickly skew decisions … In this time of self-contemplation, it is clear I can do more as NSW Deputy Premier,” he promises, selflessly.

A day later, his text to Deputy PM Michael McCormack takes another tack.

“The Nats had a chance to create history, to change momentum, and you had a candidate that was prepared to risk everything to make it happen”.

Barilaro is right the first time. Do more? He games the game of mates. Takes jobs for the boys to a new dimension with his DIY, $500,000 a year plus $100,000 perks, New York-based gig as Senior Trade Commissioner to the Americas. What does such a Trade Commissioner do? He does lunch. And he does dinner, too, on the taxpayer dollar.

But always in style. Amy Brown, CEO of Investment NSW, advises a parliamentary committee of inquiry that the fit-out for a New York office for Barilaro cost $AU 1.3 million.

Oddly not in the news is that Austrade, the federal government department for wining and dining prospective investors and carpet-baggers, already has a Trade and Investment Commissioner in its very capable General Manager for The Americas, Tony Davis.

An engineer with computer science qualifications, Tony is a highly experienced businessman whose career has spanned three decades leading highly complex Industrial, Energy, Aerospace and Defence domestic and international organisations, whose career includes a former CEO of Rolls Royce Royce Power Systems AG.

Barilaro has a TAFE Certificate IV in Real Estate. But heaps of experience, as Kate Carnell tells those still watching ABC’s The Drum, where the former ACT Liberal Chief Minister and pharmacist, gets a regular spot to barrack for the blue team, now hyper partisans peddling disinformation are deemed to supply balance on our ABC. In Carnell’s view, it must be just bad luck Barra has not one but two separate inquiries into the scandal. Or is it now three?

Joe Aston’s not amused. The AFR’s most trenchant critic of poseurs is agape.

“A person labouring under the Dunning-Kruger effect is like a gruesome traffic accident: repulsive but impossible not to stare at.”

Not so funny is former Investment NSW deputy secretary, Jenny West’s story. The senior public servant is told the job is hers, only to hear, subsequently, that the offer is rescinded. Later she pens a forty-five-page letter to get a few things off her chest. West fronts the state parliamentary inquiry, 11 July, in an appearance, she requests, be kept private. Tragically, this is overruled by the Greens Senator chairing the committee.

It will take all of forty-five pages to chronicle Barilaro’s byzantine, self-promotion, self-demotion and the metamorphosis of his New York post; a statutory appointment, then a public service process. NSW Libs love a game of musical desks, Twister, or pass the parcel. But it won’t end well for the Premier. Barra-gate may bring Dominic Perrottet’s demise. Guardian Essential’s latest poll shows support for the Liberals is now below 40%.

In the end, politics can also be an old black ram tupping your white ewe, as Iago tells Brabantio, which, despite the racism of Shakespeare’s day, is not a bad way of portraying what is done to innocent Australians every day, by the powerful in their determination to have their way. And not just in NSW.

Barilaro may bring Perrottet down, while Dutton’s opposition can only further disgrace itself and the Liberal brand of expediency, deceit, self-aggrandisement and naked self-interest. Meanwhile, the RBA is exposed as an accomplice in the redistribution of wealth from labour to capital that has disgraced our politics since Neoliberalism took hold of Hawke and Keating.

It is to be hoped that the new Labor government has the bottle for long-overdue reform, not just of the RBA but of the corruption, the venality and degeneracy of our politics itself.

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Scrap the digital workhouse. An open letter to Tony Burke.

We know you are new in your job, Tony and face not only the huge demands of your portfolio but a backlog of catastrophic ineptitude and deceit left you by a Morrison government whose criminal negligence of health and welfare was rivalled only by its pandering to corporate oligarchs and its bent for wholesale corruption, but can you, please, reconsider Pbas?

Pbas is the points-based system that the Coalition was keen to inflict on job-seekers, a jobactive revamp it promoted as “more flexible” than mandatory job application. It’s not. It’s Liberal propaganda designed to pillory job seekers for being out of work. Lazy dole-bludgers. Political point-scoring. Baked into it is unconscionable, sadistic cruelty and victim-blaming. It’s the antithesis of everything we’ve come to associate with Labor.

Above all, Pbas won’t work. It’s too complex. It’s discriminatory and opaque. Users are at the mercy of a computer that decides if they’ve earned enough points. Of course, there are numbers to ring and visits you can make but have you ever tried to visit or ring Centrelink? Now Services Australia, another brave new oxymoron, says it is cutting work to outsourced call centres by thirty per cent. It’s as if they’ve set up the new system and Labor to fail. It’s a $7 billion dollar booby trap. You don’t want to crash and burn so soon after winning office.

Clients also are set up to fail. 200,000 people every month had payments suspended in Jobactive. Who knows how they met their rent or bought their groceries? ACOSS warns that Pbas will replicate this cruelty. It takes the Jobactive debacle and makes it worse.

It’s cruel. Pbas will make it harder for the poor and needy to get support, in the same ways that Morrison’s regime restricted access to the NDIS and individuals had their funding cut. Liberals love to scare us into believing that welfare is a crippling financial liability. Yet corporate welfare is vital. Billions are blown in subsidies to wealthy corporate donors. But look after the aged, the disabled, the poor and the needy? A burden we can’t afford. Nonsense. In fact, there are huge economic benefits in being a responsible government supporting and empowering all Australians. Take the NDIS as an example.

The economic benefit of the NDIS in 2020/21 was $52.4 billion, according to Per Capita. It adds economic activity worth $29 billion to $23.3 billion in NDIS spending. $2.25 was delivered to the economy for every dollar spent, it calculates. Conversely, there are huge costs beyond every pension dollar withheld. Consider the harm Pbas does to a jobseeker’s self-esteem. Bad enough you’re between jobs – or that you can’t get enough hours. Now you’re going to incur demerits as you lose points on Pbas.

Imagine the emotional labour and frustration of having to navigate a system so absurdly arbitrary and punitive that it is dubbed “Hunger Games meets Black Mirror”.

No wonder job seekers sampled recently used the word “suicidal” in their responses to how the new scheme could make them feel. Surely Labor could heed the warnings. No-one has forgotten or forgiven Robodebt. Do you really want to go down this path?

Not only will many be set up to fail the test, which favours the more literate job-seeker with resources such as access to a digital device, internet and time, but Pbas fails us as a compassionate, civil society. It fails Labor, too. If Labor still believes in a fair go. Has Labor done any research? Monash University’s David O’Halloran has conducted an online survey. His 447 job seekers were not only worried about getting a hundred points, a key feature of the system, they were afraid they’d be penalised, another design highlight.

Best heed the early warnings. Listen, as the PM promised he would listen to all Australians. Do you really want to continue the welfare terrorism of Coalition governments?

O’Halloran reckons, “ … harm was actually being designed into the system”.

In his view it’s “still based on the assumption, if you’re unemployed, you don’t want to work”.

I know, Labor supported Pbas in the last government. It’s tricky. Small target strategy can mean you snooker yourself. But you are the government. You can scrap it tomorrow. I’ve read your press releases. You’ve “tweaked it”, you say. But you can’t polish a turd. Pbas is hurtful. It’s been designed that way.

The same crew who brought us Robodebt. presents, Robo Task. Ta-Da. Starring a nifty computer algorithm to cut off your funds. Pbas is not a humane welfare system – but a digital workhouse set up to brutalise people in desperate economic need and push them out of the system and onto the street,” warns The Unemployed Workers Union. Bill Shorten uses the same image.

You’ll need to be computer-savvy, too. As ACOSS helpfully points out. “Your payment may be suspended if you do not complete the report for your points at the end of your reporting period. You will need to report these points to stop your payment from being suspended.” But let’s say you get your hundred points. How helpful is the site?

I just did a search on your new Jobactive 2.0 website. Guess what? As with everything else Morrison, it’s a dud. There’s not a single job in our regional town of around 9,000 people. Petrol is up to $2.20 a litre in town but there are a few jobs if you travel an hour each day. That’s just if you are lucky enough to get an interview. The bigger centres have plenty of locals on their books and an industry of job agencies. But PBAS is more than a website, of course, it’s a points system masquerading as self-help in that unctuous, patronising, condescending tone trademark of the Morrison horror-show.

Here’s a sample.

“Do you want to improve your English, reading and writing skills? Improving these skills could help you find a job or lead to other study or employment opportunities. The Skills for Education and Employment program is a free program that can provide you with training to improve your reading, writing, maths and digital skills.” Of course, it will. It will also improve the bottom line of the Pbas tutorial agencies that will pullulate, like mushrooms in the dark, all over the country, overnight.

The SEE program will help you overcome obstacles and achieve your career goals. You’ll gain new skills and confidence and learn alongside others with similar experience. The training is flexible to suit you, so you can do full or part-time, in a classroom or at home. You can even gain a certificate-level qualification through the SEE program. To see if you can join, contact your Employment Services Provider or Centrelink.”

Life’s hard enough if you’re one of the 1,360,100, the ABS reckons are unemployed, underemployed or unlucky enough to be retired but too young to go on the pension. You must make do on a pittance that is below the poverty line.

There is a full-blown crisis affecting hundreds of thousands of Australians who face vegetable price rises of 27% annually, pro-rata over the first three months of this year. Basics such as baked beans and sausages are up 20%-30%.

The penurious amount paid to Centrelink pensioners is a national scandal that governments are able to ignore because they are marginalised and voiceless. Helping is a Murdoch-led media which is keen to scapegoat those out of work as bludgers. Yet steep rises in the cost of food, rent, power and fuel are turning crisis into catastrophe. You own five houses, Tony, You enjoy a high salary, generous allowances, a top superannuation scheme and you’ve just had a 2.75 per cent pay rise. Can you even begin to imagine what it’s like to have to get by on fifty-four dollars a day? (With rental assistance.)

We have a clear idea because our wonderful 37-year-old daughter has to do just that. Matilda’s degenerative bone disease means she’s in continuous pain. She’ll need two new hip replacements shortly. It’s seven months to see a pain specialist.

Centrelink puts hurdles in her way. Her pain can only get worse yet Matilda must continuously get certificates from a GP to be exempt from applying for jobs she’s got no show of ever getting, let alone doing and which are scarce enough in a regional town. Fifty-four dollars if you qualify for rent assistance looks pitiful against the $291 per day that you can claim for accommodation in Canberra. It’s more if you have to stay in other cities. Unlike your job, Tony, with your accommodation and your travel allowances, there’s no fringe benefits in Matilda’s job. Matilda doesn’t get enough hours at her workplace where she’s worked for seven years without sick leave or benefits because she’s a “permanent casual”, an oxymoronic term embracing up to a quarter of the workforce.

The way workplaces are run these days means that more and more Australians are working casual shifts. It saves the boss a fortune but work itself becomes ever more precarious. And stressful. Along with many other young workers with special needs, our daughter has difficulty coping with change. I’m our daughter’s nominee in dealing with Centrelink but there’s been no warning of the change. It starts July 1st. Granted, no-one will be penalised in the first month but it will take all of that to get over the shock of having the rules changed so suddenly and without any consultation, whatsoever, with prospective users. The PM promises a government that will listen. How hard would it be to consult those vulnerable men and women who must suffer your grand design? At $7 billion dollars, Pbas is an unwarranted extravagance for any government let alone a Labor government which has its origins in looking after workers and their families. It’s just another costly way to punish the 548,100 unemployed and the 821,000 the ABS tells us are underemployed. (It’s far more than these statistics show given the way data is collected.)

You are not unemployed for example if you live on a family farm or are part of a family business and do one hour’s work a week unpaid. You do not enter unemployment statistics if you have given up looking for work. Or if you have given up on the system altogether because it’s all too hard. Is that your aim, Tony? Save the welfare spend by getting the poor job-seeker to drop out? We hope not. But if you continue with Pbas that’s what will happen. Not to mention the confusion, suffering and distress you will inflict on some of our most vulnerable by proceeding with a points-based system that is unworkable, unfair and downright cruel.

A society can be judged on how it treats its most vulnerable members. So far, Labor is breaking its election promise to be a government for all Australians by proceeding with a job-seeker system that discriminates against the powerless, poor and marginalised worker who has too few hours or who, increasingly, may be unable to find work. Would the women and the young people who voted for you, have done so had they known you were simply going down the Morrison government’s road of punishing the poor and vulnerable? You say it’s too late to change. It’s not. You’re in government. You can halt Pbas immediately. Dismantle the digital workhouse. Jobseekers, the aged and the disabled don’t need more ways to make them feel they are a burden. Take the $37 billion you are going to give to the rich. Use it to help create fair and liveable pensions instead.

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A real wage cut? What’s the go, Albo? (Part Two)

Continued from Part 1

I want to be a prime minister who represents the entire country, our cities, our regions, our rural communities,” the PM says, following The Fair Work Commission’s (FWC) 18 June decision to lift the minimum wage to $21.38 an hour, a 5.2% boost for 186,000 workers, yet those on awards get 4.6%. 2.7 million workers will directly benefit.

NewsCorp goes ape. It’s as if a streaker jumps the SCG fence to run on to the pitch. Pay rises strike at the very heart of the wage-slavery so vital to the profiteering of the investor and business classes which have successfully frozen real wages for nigh on a decade. Thankfully, there’s still usury to fall back on with interest rates set to rocket.

The Coalition counter offer? Attack Albo. Call for wages to fall. Slur, sneer and smear.

So it’s a win for Labor? On points. Real wages will fall. But not as much, thanks to the FWC. Millions of workers suckered into selling themselves and their labor short under enterprise bargaining agreements, (EBA) on 2-4% rises will fall even further behind. QANTAS offers even less; 1.5% over five years, with a $5000 bribe to sign its EBA.

You can’t get real wage growth if wages stay below inflation. Forty dollars a week for the 186,000 of Australian workers on the minimum wage amounts to a 5.2 % rise. They’ll barely keep up with our price and profit spiral inflation. Currently it sits at 5.1% but it’s rapidly rising.

Workers in “rural communities” can travel an hour each way every day to work and back. They’ll feel forgotten once again, whatever Albo may hope. The Community buzz-word does a lot of heavy-lifting. Already, low wage earners have lost a mozza under nine years of Coalition rip-offs despite Porter’s Omnibus Bill being gutted in the senate, March 2021.

The bill would be law now but for the dissenting vote of Centre Alliance’s Stirling Griff.

Porter’s law aimed both barrels of the Morrison IR shotgun at workers. Slash wages by degrading an awards system which sets minimum wages and conditions across industries and weaken what little remains of unions’ bargaining power. Workers are marginalised.

Women are hit hardest. Labor must know this. Almost half of women workers are part-time in an increasingly casualised workforce. (One in four workers). And under-employed. Young women are much more likely to be underemployed (18.3%) than men (15.0%)

Compounding the injustice, Australia women get paid less for the same work than men.

The full-time total earnings gender pay gap, which includes overtime payments, is 16.4%. A woman’s average weekly total full-time earnings are $316.80 less per week than a man.

And prices keep rising. Essentials are up 6.6% in the year to March. Even the RBA’s gnomic rate-whisperer, Philip Lowe tips 7% inflation by 31 December. Growth in real wages was Labor’s campaign catch cry. Economic vandalism, Bulldozer Morrison sneered.

But can Labor deliver?

Most of our 2.7 million workers on a few dollars more than the minimum will receive a 4.6% rise – in effect – a real wage cut, given the rising cost of food, shelter, healthcare and other necessities which the ABS coyly terms “non-discretionary expenditure”.

It all adds up. From 2012 to 2019, cumulative non-discretionary inflation was 14.8 per cent, whilst discretionary inflation was 12.9 per cent.

And it’s worse than it looks. The much-feted pay increase won’t take effect until November for tourism, hospitality and aviation workers. Casuals? Forget it. Retail wage-slaves must wait until September – despite the FWC acknowledging that retail has recovered.

Recovered? Is the FWC looking at liquor sales which the ABS says jumped 27%, 2019/20. Or hardware, electrical and furniture, up 14% over the year as we spent online and on home projects when we couldn’t get out and about?

Murdoch minions are screaming about a wage breakout. Reserve Bank muppet, Phil Lowe, a type of pythian oracle, Still Livin’ in the ‘70s, whose $1m PA salary keeps him in touch with average households, warns us off bids for “unrealistic wage increases [which] could fuel inflation and risk a rerun of a 1970s style wages breakout.”

You want to buy groceries, pay the rent and the power bill? Dream on.

It’s a low blow because we are in a price profit spiral – not a wages breakout, writes Richard Denniss, The Australia Institute’s Chief Economist. Phil’s perpetuating a myth that’s hardened into orthodoxy. Like Howard’s whopping lie that Liberals are better at managing the economy. It’s a go-to for the pocket sages who pop up on The Drum or on Q&A or Insiders, along with every Liberal MP’s favourite “downward pressure on prices”.

Downward pressure is usually a lie about how electricity or gas will be cheaper because the industrial cartel owning generation and often retail, which colludes in price gouging, in the same way banks collude in rate fixing, is imagined to be in competition. Yet downward pressure is everywhere, depressing the value of the working woman’s labour.

Every time workers seek a pay rise, the tamed estate clutches its pearls and reaches for smelling salts. Without a skerrick of evidence, our media, wail, prices can only go up.

Theatrics abound. TV news even features vox pops with sobbing coffee bar proprietors and café owners who fear they must shut up shop as a result of paying staff the new minimum wage. In fact, you’d be paying another nine cents for your four dollar flat white.

Lowe needs to lift his game. Get real. Or get out. Acknowledge, as Richard Denniss prompts, that current inflation is the result of worldwide increases in the price of energy and a wide range of consumer goods. Huge profits are driving our inflation, not wage rises.

It’s “cost-push inflation” Denniss writes.

“Hitting the Australian interest rate brakes will not do much to lower our inflation when there is a global freight train pushing it along.”

Those brakes themselves are defective, too. A third of Australians have mortgages. Businesses who borrow may trade a little less but a lot of things have to happen along the way before the rate rise curbs spending. Lowe must know this. He should level with us.

The RBA Governor is also out of date. Oddly de trop. A bit fey. Fawning audiences, hanging on every syllable, parsing even your pauses can do that. Turn your wisdom into an in-joke.

Lucky Jim Chalmers who’s as smart as a whip, reminds ABC’s Insiders of Labor’s review of the RBA in train. Lowe’s job is up next year. Chalmers chooses his words shrewdly.

Sally MacManus doesn’t mince words. Lowe’s fear of wage breakout is a “boomer fantasy”, retorts the ACT secretary. Our workforce has been de-unionised and centralised wage fixing is long gone, thanks to the same bosses, Libs lobbyists and our business-friendly, media oligopoly who now scream that we’ll all be ruined if employers have to pay workers a few cents more. Meanwhile business profits are up 20%.

So what’s the go, Albo? A “real pay rise” that few of us will get? A wage cut in real terms? Is it just a bit of spin? There’s nothing wrong with PR, of course, for a good cause. But that’s all the last mob did. Pat itself on the back in public. Make announcements.

As for being inclusive, Julia Gillard warns that the times make it even harder for women to get recognition and due recompense for their labour.

“There’s a risk that if nothing else changes in five years’ time, what we’ll see is a pattern where women have chosen, particularly in the family formation stage, disproportionately to work from home,” Gillard says.

“And men, who have been much more regular attenders at the office … that very visibility, if nothing else changes, will show in who’s been considered for promotion, sponsorship, mentorship. The women will be kind of invisible behind the screen.”

We know, of course, there’d be no rise at all from the casualised, wage-slave precariat that lies at the sclerotic heart of any Labor-bashing, Coalition government’s IR. Yet helping workers feed their families has to be a core promise from the workers’ party – at least historically. What’s the go, Albo? You tell us you promise to listen.

Time to turn to the new PM’s second major pledge.

“And I want to make sure, as well, that we listen to Australians wherever they live, whoever they voted for. We will be a government that represents the entire nation. And I want to bring the country together and concentrate on what unites us rather than look for division, which is what characterised the former government.”

Listening seems to be going well in work towards an indigenous voice to parliament. It’s part of Jim Chalmers’ spiel on ABC Insiders where the Federal Treasurer agrees there should be an ACTU representative on the Reserve Bank Board. He’s having talks with pensioner organisations and others to seek their input on a range of social justice issues.

Jim’s keen to “have a conversation” as part of the RBA review. Ensure the review examines the composition of what is currently a very narrow board of mainly business-class types.

We must ask, he says “whether it’s broad enough, in geographic terms and gender and all the important considerations, but to also make sure that the right voices are represented around the table, that the board is of the right composition and size”.

You always feel cheered by Lucky Jim because he’s on the ball. He exudes intelligence, principle and decency. Despite inheriting a trillion dollars of debt. No doubt, he’ll already have mapped out possibilities in his own mind. He’s had nine years to think about things. But due process has to be done and seen to be done.

But is Labor listening to its arch-enemy, The Greens? The Greens and 34 crossbenchers – 16 in the HOR and 18 in the Senate wail that their advisors are a quarter of the previous government’s staffing largesse. Not feeling the love from Labor at the moment?

Here, you can’t fault Albo’s unity pitch. Morrison’s doubling the staffing for crossbenchers to buy their support is one of the many boobytraps left in the wake of his electoral rout.

A new PM should seek parity in the parliamentary workplace. Equal support staff. Expect this to be beaten up into an attack on democracy itself, despite being regularly treated to MSM stories on how The Greens will wreck everything- including our national flag fetish.

True, Labor’s listening to The Greens hasn’t started so well. The PM bags Adam Bandt when the Greens’ Leader removes the flag with a Union Jack, Commonwealth Star and The Southern Cross, a symbol of oppression for first nation’s peoples, from his presser.

But it’s the Vision Thing. You can’t quibble, carp or cavil. Nor can Dutton’s flummoxed opposition, even if it does have trouble finding its own bum with both hands. (Angus “air-miles” Taylor is Shadow Treasurer. Brave choice. Shady Taylor holds a press conference. No-one turns up.) If you hold a presser and no press attend …?

Shady’s innumeracy is legendary. Wind? “By 2020, the impost on Australian electricity bills will amount to about $3 billion a year,” he warned. He is only $3 billion out.

Gus miscalculated on renewable compliance certificates remaining high because of Abbott’s threat to abolish the RET. Their price plummeted. As Shady posts on his own FB account, “Fantastic. Great move. Well done Angus”.

Unity? “It’s the vibe of the thing …” for Loose Units and Liberals. Word-salad whiz, ScoMo, spins similar, hokey, platitudes, in August 2018, when helped by Murdoch and Cormann “the ultimate seducer and betrayer” he knifes Fizza, “fraudband” Turnbull and undermines Spud.

But Murdoch does the groundwork. In 2018, The AFR and ABC both report that Murdoch tells Stokes, Seven chairman and victim of Ben Roberts-Smith backer, that Turnbull needs to be replaced as PM. Thirty straight NewsPoll losses help.

Having pumped Dutton’s tyres in an earlier ballot, ensuring Turnbull’s defeat, Duplicity Morrison gets key backers to switch their votes to himself 45-40. Then the PM for himself alone promises to be a responsible leader. Having Corman on camera, too, makes it democratic.

“We will provide the stability and the unity and the direction and the purpose that the Australian people expect of us as leaders,” he lies. “We are on your side..”

Sceptics may demur, but as La Belle France’s toy-boy, Emanuel Macron, president of a self-deceiving, soi-disant, “Pacific Power” knows, Scotty is an inveterate liar. And with the help of Murdoch, Trump, Costello and Stokes, we do live in a post truth world. How else can $u$$an Ley keep a straight face when she claims she’s listening to women?

There’s no sign she understands remotely what they are saying.

“What you hear from the opposition is this long, ongoing, bleak, dreary narrative about entrenched disadvantage. And, you know, it’s just so last century.”

That may be the case for high-flyers such as herself, (a pilot, Ley did get into trouble booking her air miles up to taxpayers) but a glance at ABS statistics show she’s ignoring a very modern injustice. Government gender workplace data includes an array of evidence.

As of 24 February 2022… “full-time average weekly ordinary earnings for women are 13.8% less than for men. This has decreased by 0.4 percentage points since May 2021.” Instead, Ley gushes about opportunities. As fact-free as her love-in with Dutto.

Ley praises the new soft and cuddly Dutton 2.0 who in 2019 accuses women of faking being raped so they get their ticket of leave from Nauru to give birth in Australia.

In 2016, a federal court finds him guilty of breaching his duty of care to an asylum seeker who became pregnant after being raped on Nauru, and exposed her to serious medical and legal risks. Dutton had her flown to Papua New Guinea for the procedure, despite abortion being illegal in that country and the hospital lacking the expert staff and equipment required to make the operation as safe as possible. The abortion would have placed the woman at risk of criminal prosecution, Justice Bromberg found.

In the midst of the Covid pandemic, the former head of Home Affairs Peter tried to sneak through an Amendment to the Migration Act (1958) to give Australian Border Force power to confiscate the phones of asylum seekers and refugees being held in detention. He nearly succeeds, but for Jacqui Lambie’s dissenting vote in the Senate.

“I think he’s quite unassuming. I know that isn’t what people see, but it is what I see. He’s much more of a modern person than people realise.”

Dutton is a dead man walking. Another serial failure in every portfolio he’s been given, he will be another Abbott wrecker but with a smaller parliamentary cheer squad. Spare us the spin. Tell us the truth about COVID. Our lucky country is struck by a pandemic killing fifty a day as it mutates, yet barely makes the news. The cabal we let buy, redesign and ruin our semi-national grid is price gouging, leaving us in the cold and dark as it boosts a profit-driven inflation spiral with government subsidies. Yet workers must not seek wage rises lest they add to inflation, grins winsome Phil Lowe.

Helped by our blinkered “news media”, we are busy violating China’s Economic zone. An embedded media never reports how we drop sonobuoys, small portable radar units, which will help the US detect and destroy China’s subs in its next act of military madness. Better to pretend we are innocents abroad in international waters.

Yet far worse occurs – the triumph of experience over hope. Jerry and Rupert are to split.

A teary nation grieves the cleavage of Jerry Hall (65) from her crocodile man bag, Rupie (91), our own Australian Fairy Godfather, who uses his supernatural powers to choose our governments, make life hell for Dictator Dan and ruin any other Labor upstart Down Under, while still finding time to be the perfect Murdoch Mafia don. And wage war on the truth and climate science. Not to mention his unceasing campaign against unions and workers.

How does he keep it up? There is some hope he is starting to struggle financially.

Two years ago, Michael West reports, the Murdochs ripped a cool $1.4 billion in salary and bonuses from public companies since 1999. Now the family fortune is sunk in Disney+ shares, a deal which excludes Rupert and Sons from any seats on the board. The shares are sinking and the Murdoch empire may already have halved in value.

Albo’s “I will unite” stuff really bucks us up just when we need to toughen up to cope with the big stuff. A split in the October-December marriage of two star-crossed lovers.

But six years hence, Jerry sensibly gave Mick Jagger the flick to reset her love-life, seeking the romance she so richly deserves. And now Rupe and Jerry are getting unhitched? Jerry married the love of her life only to find old age creeping up on her?

That bastion of plagiarism, The Daily Mail claims Rupe told Jerry to butt out. He doesn’t like her smoking in the house. Sounds plausible. Be a drag on any relationship.

Some wags unkindly suggest that Jerry expected Rupert to peg out a little earlier. No wonder she’s on edge. Did she fail to understand that no one sees off The Dirty Digger?

Besides, he’s a man on a mission. Marina Hyde understands.

“Rupert will be one of Earth’s last-surviving life forms, affectlessly inciting the tardigrades to insurrection and publishing grotesque lies about the cockroaches.”

Beware. Rupert is now free to follow his heart. Do what he loves. Destroy our Labor PMs.

No-one can cavil at the way our new PM hits the ground running on the Albanese Labor Government project, a work very much in progress. The vibe is right. Team Albo seems intelligent, articulate, co-ordinated and decent, even allowing for a halo effect bestowed on any act following the Morrison omnishambles.

Experienced, too, which is what we need with The World Bank tipping economic recession for most of us. Plus a return to seventies stagflation. The US economy will tip into a recession next year, say 70 per cent of leading academic economists polled by the Financial Times. That’s two consecutive terms of negative GDP.

It’s not just the threat of Murdoch god-like power. Albo knows, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.” If not, he isn’t listening to Kevin Rudd.

On all sides, Labor is in danger of being mugged by ugly realities. Already, it’s struggling to put its money where its mouth is – even if you can’t fault its rhetoric.

If Albo wants unity, however, he needs first to deal with the divisive disinformation, the undermining of Labor and the abuse of power that is the malignant Murdoch empire’s stock in trade. What’s the go with Rudd’s call for a Royal Commission?

Similarly, a “business friendly” Labor government needs to reassure true believers that it still cares about workers, a quarter of whom are now casual and exploited mercilessly.

Late last year, The Australian High Court ruled that, if an employment contract says you are a casual worker, then you must be a casual worker – even if you work regular, ongoing hours. This denial of workers’ rights is a massive wrong that needs to be put right.

A token rise in the minimum wage is a start, but our whole IR system lies in ruins after nearly a decade of Coalition onslaughts. Our workers suffer one of the most draconian, anti-union IR regimes in the democratic world, in which they have all but surrendered their rights to organise; their rights to withdraw their labour; take industrial action.

But can Labor make a move whilst an American billionaire runs the country? Before Murdoch sells News Corp, (if indeed, he still owns it – you’d never know with an outfit registerd in Delaware) time to get that federal ICAC into gear.

Albo promises that it will be ready by the end of the year. There’s a lot of questions about the rorting, the corruption and the colluding with the nation’s power-generating oligarchy that the previous mis-government needs to answer. Just don’t expect Murdoch’s hacks to be happy about it. In the meantime, make nice with the Greens. Hold a truth and reconciliation commission, if you need to, Albo.

Time to get over the Malaysian solution and the carbon tax betrayals. Your new Labor government needs to be fair dinkum about unity and be a genuine workers’ party if it is to achieve the pressing reforms on the IR front that are at least nine years’ overdue. It needs to be fearless about climate change, reducing emissions and renewable power generation. Most important, it needs to follow through on its commitment to women’s safety. At least seven hundred women have been killed in the twelve years since Labor tabled the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children.

Above all, those women who helped you to win deserve to be listened to, too.

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What’s the go, Albo? (Part 1)

OK, Albo’s no Italian stallion – despite the euphoria of love on the rebound – especially after our abusive relationships with a series of cads, war criminal Howard, then “me myself and I” – Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison-too much in love with themselves to brook any rival – whose neoliberal religion sees people as mere consumers; or commodities in a transaction. So it’s not quite love at first sight yet and we’re not quite over the moon, however wonderful it is to see a normal human being become Prime Minister.

Barely a month has passed since amateur DJ, Albo moved his shaving kit into The Lodge bathroom and stashed his Midnight Oil, Spiderbait and Powderfinger amongst his trove of classic vinyl into the spare room yet we’re wondering about the new bloke. OK. He sounds decent, speaks sense and doesn’t lie his head off. That’s refreshing.

But is it enough? Did anyone expect Albo to be in such an oil-fired-nuclear-powered hurry to kiss Biden’s arse? Suck up to Soekarno puppet, Joko Widodo? Where in the pre-nups does it say that, We the People, agree to turn Darwin into a US Marine Base of over 2000 troops on a rotational basis? Whatever that means. The Marines are part of a Top Secret Plan in which Australia helps the neo-con hawks in the Pentagon goad China into a nuclear war over Taiwan. Soon. What could possibly go wrong?

Madeleine King certainly strikes a bum note when she calls for coal to step up to fill the void to push power prices down. There is no void. But our generators can play funny buggers with the supply if they want to create a crisis. Hold a gun to our heads. We know that Australia is a carbon capture state but King still shocks us.

Has Labor learned nothing from the Teals’ performance at the last election? Does it want to alienate the very MPs it will need to support its legislation in the Senate?

And who isn’t blind-sided when Albo dons the Morrison cloak of a secret National Cabinet – or COAG on stilts? Doesn’t he know that the cloak is a poisoned robe like the shirt of Nessus? Look what it did to Bulldozer Morrison.

COAG is a Keating stunt from 1992. It doesn’t need re-heating. There are already calls for local councils to participate. But why stop there? Those at home, such as age pensioners who must choose between paying the power bill and eating could join those who will now be sick with worry that they won’t even get Jobseeker.

All could rack up points just by logging in. Amazing Julie Bishop didn’t think of it. In 2015, her DFAT was gutted but she did get her hipster innovation Hub? A “gorgeous little funky, hipster, Googly, Facebooky-type place” it was supposed to come up with clever ways to run foreign aid on no money. Yep. Look where we are now.

The poor and needy will just have to eat less. So the minimum wage is lifted by 5.2%. An extra $20 per week? Whoopie do. It won’t even cover the rise in the price of petrol. With inflation tipped to hit seven per cent by market whisperer, the superbly reserved, Phil Lowe, by this time next year, our lowest-paid workers will suffer a cut in their real wages. Phil’s the lad from the Reserve Bank, an outfit from 1960, who knows we’ve all forgotten that nowhere in its charter is the notion that it will control inflation.

It can’t. You can’t control inflation caused by external causes including Putin’s genocide in Ukraine and the global Covid pandemic that, with the blind eye of authorities, is on track to kill 15-18,000 of us before the year ends. Our COVID case and death rates are one of the highest in the world. Super news, for all of us but Rupert who controls our mainstream news, seems to have kept the facts away from his newshounds.

You wouldn’t read about it in any mainstream news, including our ABC, which Morrison’s captain’s pick, Ita Buttrose, decides needs an entirely redundant Ombudsman to report directly to its Liberal-stacked Board. It’s a slap in the face for hard-working investigative journalists such as Four Corners, even if they do get Matthew Carney to replace Sally Neighbour. OK. Joel Tozer from Sixty Minutes gets 7:30 but he’s ex-ABC.

Covid is your own responsibility now, kids. Inflation? Think of the economy, (amen) as The Australia Institute’s Richard Denniss reminds us, “while high inflation is bad news for the budgets of 10 million Australian households, it’s good news for the bottom line of the commonwealth budget. While rapidly rising prices for groceries, coffee, petrol and building supplies mean tough choices are being made around Australia’s kitchen tables, those same price rises mean government revenue from the GST are set to surge.”

Those left jobless, by the recession we’re rushing into, carrying a trillion dollars in debt – thank-you Josh Frydenberg – will be further pilloried by the seven billion dollar Morrison scheme of requiring job seekers to rack up points before getting forty dollars a day to live on or $200 a fortnight below the Henderson Poverty Line.

Can’t be fixed now. Tony Burke tells us he’s inherited a war on the poor that’s too late to end. Far too hard to raise Jobseeker above the poverty line? What’s the go, Albo?

Unfixable is the Morrison-Taylor energy crisis. He may sound a bit dim but don’t be deceived. Angus Taylor’s a smart cookie. There’s not only the family firm that former Water Minister, Barnaby Joyce gave $80 million to in the Watergate scandal, involving the Taylor family’s East Australian Agriculture with an HQ in the Caymans. Plus another firm which sprayed Roundup on endangered native grassland that he has to manage. With a bit of help from a mate. Cayman Islands? It’s all a mystery, but as Gus assures sticky-beaks, such as Fran Kelly, all the best companies do it.

Thank goodness newly appointed US Trade and Investment Commissioner Giovanni Pork Barilaro is able to draft Taylor’s family firm a cool $130,000 in 2018 for a project to prove that it wasn’t poison. Grass has its bad days, too, you know. Best of all, Gus Taylor is able to keep the lights on just until Labor won the election. Doubtless Gus will be cheered to learn that a federal ICAC, an election promise, the PM is determined to keep, will be set up by December.

Well done, Albo – and Attorney General Mark Dreyfus QC. But The Greens want the ICAC up and running before the October Budget. Helen Haines, they argue, already has a model ready to go. And the cross bench will have the power.

So what’s the go with Coal-Keeper, Albo? The Energy Security Board (ESB) is one of a bevy of at least half a dozen, vital to ensuring that coal remains king, while government subsidises the massive profits of largely private companies which don’t pay tax – with the exception of Queensland whose state generators are into profiteering anyway. The ESB claims in its newest report that it isn’t a coal-keeper at all, yet the fine print admits that keeping the coal fires burning – using public funds to subsidise a few fabulously wealthy multinational corporations – just might happen anyway.

The wonderfully named Anna Collyer, chair of the ESB, is in The AFR, Monday, 20 June

“… in the past, the concept of a capacity mechanism has been dubbed ‘coal-keeper’. It is a catchy line, but it is not the intent. The intent is to design a tool that provides more certainty around dispatchable capacity – that is capacity that can respond to a dispatch signal on demand.”

Yet as Crikey’s Bernard Keane notes, the ESB admits that, in the fine print, “a capacity provider may decide to factor in refurbishment or retrofitting costs into their bid and if this is cost-competitive against new capacity, then customers receive the reliability benefit of this asset remaining in the market.”

Now Chris Bowen is shovelling money into the off-shore accounts of our nation’s energy racketeers, paying generators to keep the lights on in a system rigged to reward the big investor while it leaves families in the cold and dark. We’ve shacked up with Labor for at least three years? Single-term governments are rare in Australian politics.

Of course, it’s early days. Of course, we’re jumpy. Years of suffering abuse, neglect and gaslighting in a serial relationship based on lies, the demeaning cruelty of coercive control and gaslighting is enough to give anybody PTSD.

And when the wide boys in power have been milking the till, fiddling the books and colluding in the game of mates behind a thick veil of secrecy – all to enrich the top end of town, almost anyone honest, decent or fair would be better.

Yes. We know Albo’s got to keep his head down. But is it a small Target Strategy or no bottle? Labor won the election. It now holds seventy-seven seats in the lower house and the senate has enough Greens and Independents to be workable. Even with one UAP senator in the upper house. If they don’t stick their heads up soon, the ruling Murdoch-Stokes-Costello-ABC media oligopoly will destroy Labor.

It’s a relief not to see a PM giving out ukuleles to Pacific leaders. But Albo has to be decisive. He is. But it’s all a bit frantic. Nine years too late to put the dumpster fire that the LNP made of our financial aid to our Pacific neighbours.

ScoMo didn’t carry a hose. Albo’s dashing all over our the Pasifika dousing embers. Our formidable Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, is run ragged. But it’s been nine years since Abbott and Hockey slashed $4.5 billion from Foreign Aid, a move they followed up in their second budget raid on Julie Bishop’s kitty with another $3.5 billion “efficiency dividend” of a billion dollars a year over three years.

Much as he may and try to please our US masters who fear that Pacific Islands nations now turn to China after being given the cold shoulder by Australia, it’s a bit late. China has outbid us in the battle for hearts and minds. The China-Pacific Island Countries Common Development Vision is a plan extended to at least a dozen Pacific states.

Granted, Penny Wong is on to it. She says; “China has made its intentions clear. So too are the intentions of the new Australian government. We want to help build a stronger Pacific family.” Is the language right? It’s dangerously close to the patronising duplicity of the previous regime. Island leaders scorn “boomerang” aid that largely benefits the Australian donor. But there’s more, Wong touts more of Kanaka 2.0 where Pasifika workers fly in and pick our fruit, tend our vines and labour in our vegetable market gardens but she’s got to combat the lived experience of workers who have made the long trip, worked all season only to return out of pocket to their labour contractor.

In a desperate pitch, along with “our Pacific labour programs” a modern form of slavery for many, she offers new permanent migration opportunities.” The last bit’s tricky. It may, sadly, be just practical given the rate at which our heavily subsidised fossil-fuel industry contributes to rising sea levels through exported coal and gas. Emissions rise as other countries burn our exported fossil fuels. They are now more than double Australia’s domestic emissions.

But won’t The Australian, The Daily Telegraph and The Herald Sun have fun with the permanent migration? Morrison used to go off his chops about “sugar on the table.” Pull factors only in the Murdoch-approved Coalition fiction of events. No hint that people get into leaky boats to escape hell on earth at home.

Rudd stopped the boats, by declaring that no-one arriving by boats would be settled in Australia in his flawed, 2013 Pacific Solution. But expect a re-run of the lie. Already there are images of boats of asylum-seekers from Sri Lanka appearing in Murdoch’s gutter press. The implication that boats are arriving because Labor is soft on borders ignores the worst economic crisis to ravage the nation since 1949, forcing the nation to default on its loans and creating grave political and social unrest.

And as we love-bomb bemused Pacific Islanders, we are doing very little for Sri Lanka, save turning back at least three boats in violation of UN law on refoulement and in repudiation of our obligations under international law.

Hockey and Abbott hollered for years about a debt and deficit disaster and how there was a budget emergency. Then Hockey went on The Nation in New Zealand in July 2014 and admitted he’d been making it all up. Luckily our ABC did the right thing and no-one else in the mainstream media picked it up either. In case you missed it, here’s what he said.

“The Australian economy is not in trouble… There’s no crisis at all in the Australian economy.”

Of course, Sleepy Joe Biden’s got Albo on the hop. The big shock is not that Labor’s all the way with the USA. That’s the Labor path, not that history exists anymore given the eternal present bestowed upon us by Odin’s Eye, our MSM Cyclops, working tirelessly around the clock to produce a virtual national frontal lobotomy. If the past and its study were permitted to exist, we’d know that Labor is very much in favour of the alliance. Or we’d form the foolish notion, even after the publication of Jenny Hocking’s research in the Palace letters, that we are in charge of our own destiny.

And our great and powerful friend, Washington, has never upped the peppercorn rent that we charge for its bases at Nurrungar and Pine Gap that are so handy in guiding its missiles and drones. If we’re squaring off to go to war with China, Pine Gap is critical, according to a couple of high-ranking military types who fired a shot over our bows down under, ahead of the Morrison’s government’s massive loss on 21 May.

Admiral John “Lung” Aquilino, boss of the US Indo-Pacific Command, last year declared that war against China was “much closer than most think,” described Australia as an “extremely high-end partner.”

“Lung” is a hawk and was Trump’s pick for the job in December but after Biden’s victory, he needed to be reviewed. Nice work, Biden.

On backup vocals during the visit, is General James Dickinson, another hawk, head of US Space Command. Australia is a “critical partner” in space warfare, including to monitor Chinese space operations, he gushes – guardedly.

“This is the perfect location for a lot of things we need to do,” he tells London’s The Financial Times. “Things” include going to war with China over Taiwan, another military adventure in which Australia will tag along without any tedious parliamentary debate. Or gesture towards democratic process.

Even Little Britain goes through the process of parliamentary debate. (Not that it stopped Thatcher’s madness in The Falklands, another coup for Rupert’s press.“Stick it up the argies” one tasteful banner screamed. Nor did it impede the neocon New Labour’s Tony Blair from war crimes in Iraq.)

Shooting down China’s hypersonic missiles is also on Aquilino’s list whilst – another “thing”- the US expands its base in Darwin to accommodate storage of 300 million litres of fuel.

Third, what is described as “over two thousand Marines” are now deployed in Marine Rotational Force-Darwin. Could be two hundred thousand as far as we know.

“Marry in haste repent at leisure” my Dad, a Royal Navy veteran, used to say, in that way he had of firing bits of folk wisdom, wise old saws and music hall ditties into the void between us; along with shafts of rebarbative dockside-matey’s wit that you suspected were aimed at you. “Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes, son.”

Not that we’re married to Albo or his Labor government. Indeed The Narrative, aka “The National Conversation” on vacuous chat shows like The Drum, refreshed each morning by The Australian, the Pravda of a uniquely concentrated, inbred and incestuous Australian mainstream media oligopoly, says no. Our MEDIUM says we’re having a fling and the Coalition is still the government in exile and eternally newsworthy.

Insiders features serial failure, Spud the dud, Peter Dutton while Dave Littleproud bones Barnaby Thomas Gerard Barnaby Joyce, the knight in shining armour and Riverview Old Boy, a loving silver-spoonful, who brags that his parents are “quite rich” is on Sky in his heroic fight for the Weatherboard Nine of Warwick and the shareholders in Santos.

“I didn’t give a toss for where power comes from, but one of the greatest afflictions for people in the weatherboard and iron is they can’t afford power,” he says in 2018. That’s working well for BJ at present, as the other remarkable cartel in all our lives, the electricity generators get the red card from the regulator for withholding supply to bid the spot price up. An industry allowed to set its own regulations by captive politicians

Abusive relationships seldom end well. There are the highs; elation when you discover that your new partner seems to care, like when the Biloela family is allowed to come home. We hope it’s not just a token. Or joy when you see he can lead a team; delegating to capable ministers instead of overshadowing, upstaging, micromanaging and having an affair with his own image in the lens of his personal photographer.

But then there are the lows. Julian Assange? Letting Jobseekers suffer a new set of petty cruelties? Keeping Morrison’s National Cabinet – and keeping it top secret? An energy Minister sucking up to the mining oligarchy? Madeleine King, a coal shill?

When Employment Minister Tony Burke says it’s too late to abandon the Morrison misgovernment’s $7bn point system Pbas to qualify for a jobseeker payment that is well below the Henderson Poverty Line, it’s a worry. Burke says contracts have been awarded. But try telling that to Emanuel Macron. Burke is saying all the right things but it does seem as if the Coalition has booby-trapped the incoming government; poisoned the chalice of electoral victory.

“What the government’s designed, some of it’s more punitive than actually getting the job done. We want to make sure, and I’ll be changing it over the course of the next week, to make sure that we can have a system that’s designed to get people into work, rather than some media stunt to punish people.”

Burke needs to speak to a few job seekers. There’s enough of them around. Half don’t make it into official statistics. They’ll tell you how demeaning it is to prove yourself worthy of a pittance. It doesn’t matter how much you dress it up or claim you have a system up your sleeve, it’s completely irredeemable. Any civil society worth its salt knows that support for the needy and vulnerable should be unconditional. Scrap it. Put the money into fixing the NDIS which the Liberals have done their best to scupper.

But there are lows and lows, Albo. You dash off to Tokyo like Joe Biden’s bellhop. Far too keen to get your riding instructions as deputy sheriff of our bit of the Pacific. You’d barely been sworn in? Putting Penny Wong on how many charm offensives to counter China’s designs? She’s barely time to re-pack her travel bag. What’s the go Albo?

Snap out of it. Yep, we’ve all got PTSD thanks to being monstered by the fat controller Morrison and his gaslighting, happy clapping bullies, still feted and enabled by the gang of five led by Lizard of Oz.

We all get the face we deserve, but Murdoch’s wizened, fissured mug looks like an elephant’s scrotum, with apologies to David Hockney who on seeing WH Auden said if that’s his face, imagine what his scrotum must look like. One comfort is that having sunk half the family fortunes into Disney +, the patriarch has halved his family’s net worth. Another small consolation is that only about half the population “use news” on any given day. Then, there’s the tragic decline of print media. Rupert’s rags may have to fold. Or they may already be sold. Given News Corp’s secrecy, we’d never know.

Don’t let it spook you, Albo. The Pacific Islanders want us to commit to zero emissions. That’s better than your charm offensive. No matter how brilliant she is, Penny Wong will never match the Chinese budget for aid. War with China? Hold your nerve. Don’t fall for the cock and bull of neocon loonies in the Pentagon. Look where it’s got us in the past. A winnable nuclear war? Mutually assured destruction? MAD. Nah. Just madness.

Hold your fire. There’s heaps to do at home. A Voice to Parliament. Energy. Welfare. Education. Higher Education. Health. Wages. The Arts. Climate. Everything worthwhile’s been neglected under the fossil fuel muppets of the last nine years.

And do bring on the Royal Commission into Murdoch. As soon as you can.

Morrison didn’t just drive the Liberal Party into a mountain. He and his predecessors dismantled our democratic, civil society. You call yourself a builder in the election campaign. Let’s see some of that. So what’s the go, Albo?

Link to Part 2

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A Tinpot Dictator?

When Scott John Morrison takes his Sunday fly-drive to leafy Yarralumla to visit His Excellency, David Hurley, AO, a former NSW Governor and his “captain’s pick” for GG, the jig is up; now everyone knows a federal election will be held 21 May and, sadly, the guess-the date-games must end, despite Morrison’s addiction to secrecy, quibbling and game playing. Things that help him lord it over other people.

Morrison loves evading or concealing truth as much as lying. “I just don’t care,” he tells ABC’s Annabel Crabb. It shows. Politics is mostly just a game to him. At the hint of a threat to his power, however, his game morphs instantly into Mortal Kombat.

ADF crew salute him, a Morrison idea, as our malignant narcissist-in-Chief alights Shark One, the QANTAS A330 VIP executive jet, his favourite boy’s toy, a Big Dick clubhouse with wings, done up to look like a business executive’s office suite with $250 million of public money. It’s more than PR. He loves to pretend he’s not just a sad, gutless, gas industry puppet. He’d take his jet to fetch the girls from school if he could.

Following protocol, Morrison knocks up his vice-regal manservant, low profile Governor-General, Dave Hurley to kick-start the election. It won’t be about policy, or even playing the game, it will be a rabid hyper partisan attack on Labor, especially its leader, Anthony Albanese. And pork-barrelling. While Shark One may soar, Morrison’s politicking plumbs the depths of the lowest gutter.

In a damaging flashback, former rival for Cook, Michael Towke, pops up to accuse Morrison of racism. Towke accuses the PM of resorting to “racial vilification” to overturn the initial ballot which Towke won convincingly. Morrison allegedly insinuated that Cook’s voters wouldn’t accept a Lebanese Australian candidate.

“At the time [in 2007] he was desperate, and it suited him to play the race card,” Towke tells The Project’s Waleed Aly,

By remarkable coincidence, during the 2004 federal campaign, when Morrison was state director of the Liberal Party, racist tactics were used against Labor candidate for Greenway, Ed Husic, not a practising Muslim.

A day before the election, a fake ALP brochure was distributed in Greenaway. “Ed Husic is a devout Muslim. Ed is working hard to get a better deal for Islam.”

Morrison wins no friends by leaving his GG call to the last possible moment – but that’s his trademark. He’d be late to his own (political) funeral. As events may prove, given the way he’s alienated women across the nation and more than a few in the Liberal branch of NSW, once a powerhouse the Coalition hoped might counter losses in other states.

Then there’s the pandemic failure. Going AWOL during the bushfires. The submarine fiasco which cost us at least $5.5 billion. The trade war with China that’s helping ruin our export trade and a fair bit of tertiary education. Morrison’s list of failures is huge.

Loyal Deputy Barnaby Thomas Gerard Joyce keeps the faith, however, if only with his followers who count on him to pick a winner. In a sensational leaked text from the Nationals’ leader composed in March 2021, Joyce confides that he does not “get along” with Morrison.

“He is a hypocrite and a liar from my observations and that is over a long time. have never trusted him, and I dislike how earnestly [he] rearranges the truth to a lie.”

A High Court challenge mounted by Matthew Camenzuli, from Parramatta, an IT mogul from the NSW Liberal conservative faction, aligned with former Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells slows things up but, here, Morrison’s only himself to blame. Getting his envoy, Alex Hawke to stall and delay local pre-selection meetings until the Federal executive would have to step in has not endeared him to everyone in the NSW branch nor nationally. Hawke is widely reviled.

Many Liberals resent his high-handed intervention in branch pre-selection. Retiring senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, stiffed for a winnable place on the ticket, calls Morrison a tyrant and a fraud who hides behind the façade of his church-going.

Others accuse him of remaking the party in his own image. Departing NSW Liberal, Catherine Cusack, joins a swelling chorus of women in Liberal politics who call Morrison a bully. He’s “ruined” the Liberal party, she says. She will not vote for him or the party at the federal election.

If you can’t run a Liberal branch, how can you run the country?

But there’s a ray of hope for ScoMo. Camenzuli’s lawyers fail to overrule Morrison’s intervention to save Environment Minister Sussan Ley, Immigration Minister Alex Hawke and North Sydney MP Trent Zimmerman from a local preselection battle that could threaten their political futures. Camenzuli sought an injunction to block the preselection of nine Liberal candidates which would bar the party from printing their names on the ballot paper.

Keeping everyone else waiting while he gets his act together gives Morrison time to win his high-stakes game. Pick his favourites. Remake the party in his own image. Above all it gets him attention. Forget the daggy dad act. This PM is a ruthless Machievallian.

Will he pull the fat out of the fire? Critics of our PM’s self-abrogating demeanour still decry the way Morrison hogged the show at last January’s Australia Day awards ceremony. Worse, Grace Tame was threatened by someone from the Office. Women vote. They won’t forgive or forget the Morrison government’s record of sexism and misogyny. Nor will they overlook the spate of Liberal women who have recently spoken out against him.

Former commercial rose-grower, Minister for Family Service and manager of government business in the senate, Anne Ruston, Minister for Women’s Safety, fails her first real test. Who threatened Grace Tame? The former Australian of the year used a Press Club Address to explain that someone from “a government-funded organisation” rang to tell Tame she must not say anything “damning” about Morrison so close to an election.

Mystified. Jane Hume adds a bit of hand-wringing. We don’t even know if it were a man or a woman, she wails. Clearly, no-one’s tried very hard to find out. Tame says that she’d prefer that the person who felt they needed to make the call should out themselves. An investigation into the call is “the very same embedded structural silencing culture that drove the call in the first place and misses the point entirely. It’s not about the person who made the call, it’s the fact that they felt like they had to do it,” Tame explains.

It’s sexism; the age-old gendered response of doubting and discrediting the victim’s story when the victim is a woman. But it’s no vote winner for over half the population.

Yet the PM seems happy. Morrison promotes Ruston to Liberal Campaign Spokeswoman. Her Labor counterpart, Katy Gallagher will not give up on women so readily.

But look over there – how good is our invisible Governor General? A big gig every three years, if only to help a PM call a fresh election or witness signatures whenever Ministers are appointed. Morrison loves pomp and ceremony. It adds a legitimacy he craves and a distraction he badly needs. Dave Hurley’s happy. He’s hoping to win a trifecta.

The Governor General’s hazy job profile makes Morrison appear almost industrious by contrast. Being GG, on the other hand, keeps you busier than “the arts” or in tertiary education, both spurned by Frydenberg in JobKeeper, despite his forty billion dollar (Joe Aston calculates) windfall, for businesses in profit despite the coronavirus pandemic.

Fan-boy Greg Jennett, a Tarzan of adulation, if not fatal attraction to the PM, and Jane Norman, the John and Betty of ABC afternoon political television, become a hot mess of running commentary on the twenty minute meeting, breathlessly spilling the beans on such essentials as Morrison’s coffee with the Governor General.

Greg and Jane kindly remind us that Yarralumla sits in 58 hectares of Canberra prime real estate, in case we miss how the trappings of office are lavished on our ruling class, while others die of malnourishment, neglect and the latest mutant strain of coronavirus in “aged care facilities” a gulag of misery where our poor, wretched, vulnerable elders pass their final days in a fog of antipsychotics in state subsidised granny farms staffed by some of the lowest paid, most highly casualised workers in Australia.

The Coalition’s Aged Care Act 1997, ushered in a flood of private investment in the exploitation and commodification of the elderly. Private equity firms, new foreign investors, superannuation and property real estate investment trusts “entered the residential aged care market.” Data on residents’ safety and wellbeing must be kept top secret.

Our current aged care crisis stems from Howard’s Aged Care Act, writes Dr Sarah Russell. His government subsidised private health insurance is still helping scupper Medicare.

Amazingly, Dave, a spry 68 year-old corporate state welfare beneficiary with all his own teeth, is at Yarralumla this weekend and not entertaining Prince Andrew, who’s been known to slip in, sans fanfare, for a quick visit, as he did in 2018, to promote Pitch@Palace, his matchmaking of investors and corporate partners with startup companies. Now it’s wound up after Andy’s misadventures with underage women abroad, stories which his mother, Queen Elizabeth II refuses to believe, preferring the much more plausible “I was at Beatrice’s Birthday at Woking Pizza Express” alibi.

Pitch generated £1.345 million in economic activity, 6,323 jobs and 39% of its winners were women. Andy did quite well, too. Pitch@Palace Global Ltd, the private company set up to run the events, had a clause in its terms and conditions about its entitlement to a 2% equity share for three years for any company that went through its program.

Other royals also are put up at Admiralty House, the GG’s other historic pad on Sydney harbour with ten bedrooms enjoying views of the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge. Hosting VIPs keeps the Hurleys busy. Then there’s Linda’s staff singalongs.

And her serenades. The Guardian Australia reports Hurley wandering betwixt tables of war widows (average age 81, according to Dave), microphone in hand, leading them in song over cucumber and smoked salmon sandwiches. Bit of dill with that, dearie?

“You are my sunshine” is the unofficial vice-regal national anthem – but only the chorus. The verses are a bit downbeat if you Google them. Don’t try this at home.

A staff of seventy-six don’t just run themselves and there’s travel involved in GG. All adds up. Representing HM at home and Australia overseas costs a million a year.

But the nation has to look after its investment. Hurley’s annual salary is around half a million. Of course, a governor general does get a generous pension scheme with that.

As Morrison arrives, his white BMW 7 Series Prime Ministerial limousine with AFP escort ghosting up the long drive, Dave’s lurking purposefully near the entrance to Yarralumla, a “colonial revival” pile set in what remains of an historic sheep station.

The property retains the original shearing shed atop a tumulus of a century and a half of merino droppings. A heritage overlay of decaying sheep shit is a fitting tribute to the types who led the colonial frontier wars waged by European imperial invaders on indigenous Australians in the name of the same British Crown that Governor-General Hurley represents.

The GG has his Mont Blanc Meisterstück Gold-Coated Fountain Pen uncapped, ready to sign a chit to let Morrison dissolve parliament and call a federal general election, a minefield of lies, furphies, turpitude and gratuitous character assassination which our GG can avoid entirely by express permission of the electoral commission. But he does get to look on.

A federal election campaign is a made for TV event just like Master Chef or Hard Quiz or The Melbourne Cup and corporate media regale us with the day’s political stunts.

There’s a scorecard on performance in The Herald Sun and The Daily Telegraph and The Australian as in any horse race commentary. Tallying up the pratfalls displaces any more insightful commentary on commercial TV – Buckminster Fuller’s “bubblegum for the eyes.”

Analysis of issues and policies is supplanted by spectacle and mindless Vox Pops. In a rare departure, this year, however, the Sydney Morning Herald takes Morrison to task for his broken promise over a federal ICAC. Attempting to blame Labor doesn’t pass the pub test.

Imagine if Dave Hurley were to put his mouth where his money is. Our GG, would refuse Morrison permission to hold an election. Nope, ScoMo you’ve abused the trust of the Australian people. Piss off back to Bronte and stop wasting my time.

If only. A relic of colonial rule, a GG hasn’t colluded with the judiciary and The Palace to remove a PM since Whitlam, but it pays to keep him on side and avoid bagging Pine Gap, 16 km south west of Alice Springs, the eyes and ears of the US military, since it went on line in 1969. One of its uses is to provide information to aim drones.

If there’s a moral problem with hosting an outfit which is staffed largely by employees of Boeing Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics – along with niche companies that work exclusively for the CIA and NRO, such as Leidos, Scitor and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) our government doesn’t see it. Put simply, we host companies who profit from war and enable them to collect the data they need to make war.

In fascinating technological updates the satellites have multiplied to at least thirty-eight, which have the capacity to monitor everything from your text message to Dominos to thermal evidence of Chinese hypersonic missile launches. All of this vastly increases our value as a nuclear target. It could give us leverage in a more equal relationship with the US but given our lickspittle foreign policy don’t hold your breath.

Above all, Pine Gap makes Australia complicit in war crimes. Last December, the New York Times lists over 1300 reports of civilian casualties since 2014. Many are children, in wars that the US portrays as being waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.

Yet, “American air wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan have been plagued by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, thousands of civilian deaths – with scant accountability.”

But does our GG task our PM with this problem? Nope. Dave’s famous for his saying “the standard we walk by is the standard we accept.” He’s a big fan of ethical leadership, a political oxymoron “borrowed” by David Morrison in a sermon on another unicorn, gender equality in the army. Dave M later confesses on Q&A he’s “pinched” the line.

The PM just loves Dave H and the whole vibe of the ethical leader thing, which like cleanliness, is next to godliness and getting professionally photographed at a Hillsong service, eyes wide shut. Photographed? At least one former member of the parliament has read her King James Bible,

“And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites. are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and. in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.”

“His actions conflict with his portrayal as a man of faith; he has used his so-called faith as a marketing advantage,” says senator Concetta Fieravanti-Wells.

Federal Election 2022 is to be a forty-one day endurance event, not simply in order to dazzles us with hi-viz photo-opportunities, vapid talking points, or disgruntled punters in pubs, but to buy time, a gamble given incumbents generally decline in popularity over a long campaign. Opinion polls predict a Coalition defeat, Liberal/National 34%, ALP 36%. -7% swing against the Coalition but just a 2.6% swing in favour of the ALP

Perhaps, like Mr Micawber, Morrison is hoping something will turn up. As it does. Albo doesn’t know what the cash rate is and he can’t recite the official unemployment rate.

Of course there’s outcry from the usual suspects, “Unfit to be PM,” decrees Murdoch’s top toadie, Terry McCrann in the expatriate billionaire’s Australian, while AFR, shocker, Phil Coorey gasps “A horror,” leaving Professor Judith Sloan, alone, to hype the Labor leader’s howler into his “Party’s complete misunderstanding of the jobs figures.”

Seriously? Even John Howard who failed the same gotcha in ‘07 is underwhelmed. Babies Overboard Howard bobs up in WA to spare Morrison getting the bum’s rush. Again. Abbott has Covid. Or he’d be there with (bicycle) bells on. Don’t discount a late showing.

True, the Man of Steel’s got other things on his mind like minding Ken Wyatt in Hasluck – it’s not so long ago that Joe Aston had word Kenneth might defect to Labor.

And Swan’s Kristy McSweeney is busted misquoting herself on how if you can’t tell a bloke from a sheila just walking down the street, you probably shouldn’t be aiming for Canberra.

Is that a serious question? Okay, well Anthony Albanese didn’t know the unemployment rate. So what?”

Morrison’s first gaffe is a big one. He fudges when asked whether Alan Tudge, guardian of the curriculum from the left-wing, is currently education minister – (a Tudge of class?)

His reply that Al is “technically” still in cabinet is at odds with earlier assurances that he’d resigned. Of course, this could be merely another Morrison lie, but it does seem to be a clumsy attempt to divert press from a half million payout to former staffer Rachelle Miller which fails to keep the (unconsummated) affair off the front page.

First up, Tudge claims, “we never had sex.” They were “intimate” four times; sleeping naked together but there was no funny business. Sounds very plausible.

The minister without portfolio may be inspired by Gandhi’s tales of sleeping naked with young women who also took their clothes off just to test his chastity.

With Tudge mounting such an impregnable defence, it is little wonder that Morrison has had to pivot on his earlier version of events in which the Education Minister had surrendered his portfolio for his own sake.

No point asking why Miller was paid “well over $500,000”, if nothing untoward transpired between minister and media adviser. $500,000 is the sum whispered to have been his payout when Morrison himself was sacked as head of Tourism Australia citing irreconcilable differences with boss, Fran Bailey amidst claims tendering processes were not adhered to.

As for any ministerial code violation, the non-bonking occurred before the advent of Morrison’s code. Yet Miller was promoted while in an intimate relationship with her boss. The PM is OK with that. Yet Miller wants the details released. Samantha Maiden reports that legal costs in six figures are also to be paid by the Morrison government.

“He has chosen for the sake of his health and his family for a period of time to stand aside from the ministry,” Morrison claims.

“But here’s been no other education minister sworn in, no-one went out to the Governor-General, we’re very transparent about all of that.”

Morrison is creating an issue for himself in refusing Miller’s request that he release details. Unwisely.

Moonlighting as Education Minister, albeit unsworn, is Stuart “Rolex” Robert, the PM’s prayer partner, a tricky phrase now, given recent whistle-blower revelations that senior Liberal Party figures abuse the parliamentary prayer room for congress of a baser nature.

None of the parties implicated: MP Tim Wilson, former defence minister Christopher Pyne and others, or the investigating law firm Sparke Helmore, even try to rebut the story, notes Michael West. Give it time.

More of a problem to his own side than any scandal involving rent boys plying their trade in consecrated space within the House is Mendacity Morrison’s contempt for democracy and his addiction to micromanagement.

Notorious for his pledges that never eventuate, the PM is now hated by NSW Liberals for being too “hands on”.

Former Cook MP, Stephen Mutch, a self-styled moderate who credits himself with inventing the term if not founding the group, calls Scotty a “tinpot dictator” for riding rough-shod over democratic local branch pre-selection processes, to choose his own candidates for key NSW seats. Mutch is shocked at the way the moderate minority now runs the branch.

“Over decades … I saw how the faction changed from a relatively informal group of friends with a fair degree of collective decision-making into a more formalised operation run by politicians, staffers and some party activists,” Mutch tells The Saturday Paper.

As the former moderate explains, the moderates became more high-handed, serving the personalised agendas of a few at the top. Later, the faction morphed into “a professionalised, essentially privatised operation, run by a small coterie of business lobbyists.”

Which is where we are today.

All is not lost, however. Scotty is still a useful tool to the fossil fuel lobby, an old mate of Big Mining and our media oligopoly, Rupert, Kerry and tagalong Peter along with other shonks, shills and big-shots in Australia’s oligarchy.

But just to nip it in the bud, a few of his man-servants in the PMO, big up Morrison with Bushmasters and coal, while Rio shows it hasn’t blown up all its moral high ground along with the 46,000-year-old rock shelters at Juukan Gorge, by taking over RUSAL’s twenty per cent share in QAL’s aluminium smelter, in response to Russia’s attempt to obliterate Ukraine. That’s fixed Putin’s wagon.

How good is a Morrison government which struts the world like a colossus, punching above its weight? Shirt-fronting Putin. “Keeping Australia Safe” is not just hairy-chested electioneering or the Crosby-Textor textbook stunt of creating an external threat tactic.

Nor is this self-interested opportunism by Morrison’s omnishambles of a government plumbing record lows in all the opinion polls. Throw another dead cat on the table. We are the hawks of AUKUS keepers of the sacred flame of the temple of the rules-based order to which Australia, as US deputy Marshall, is so solemnly and selflessly pledged.

Not only does ScoMo continue to wow the international community with his statesmanship, he buys seventy thousand tonnes of Whitehaven coal which the big Liberal donor can’t sell, it’s still sitting in Newcastle until a hapless crew is press ganged into taking it to Odessa, currently in range of Russian rocketry, and on to Ukraine.

True, he’s copped a few shockers recently, including that’s just the price of decisive leadership. OK he may be “a complete psycho”, a “hypocrite and a liar “a fraud” to his own team, but a clutch of Liberal women, his “crumb maidens” as Amy Remeikis calls the women who support Morrison’s patriarchy for scant reward, step forward to back up his latest claim that his high-handed intervention in NSW politics stems from his unbridled feminism and his need to step in to protect a few good women.

It’s farcical, writes The Monthly’s Rachel Withers that Morrison can claim that he stood up for women in an intervention intended to save the seats of two men and woman.

Is he all fake religion and no moral compass? Morrison simply cannot be trusted, warns Fierravanti-Wells who is dropped to an unelectable spot on the Liberal senate ticket in favour of party apparatchik, Marise Payne, in number one spot for time-serving, with another former army officer, Jim Molan, butcher of Fallujah, in at number three.

It’s already turning nasty: in second spot is Nationals’ top NSW Senate candidate, Ross Cadell, another Nat in a hat, who threatens to “drop shit” on the party’s Hunter candidate James Thomson in a public row at Warners Bay Hippo Espresso cafe 20km south of Newcastle, if Thommo does not redistribute $120,000 in donations.

You can see why Cadell has beaten the venerable, born-again John Anderson, Joyce’s mentor, a man with a Big Mining background as well as a former Nationals leader.

“While professing to be a man of faith,” the retiring senator says, sporting a huge crucifix in her bitter Goodbye To All That speech, he is “adept at running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds, lacking a moral compass and having no conscience.”

Don’t hold yourself back, Connie. (As Morrison and his team insist on belittling the former Liberal senator, much as the PM does with “Grace” and “Brittany”.)

Team Morrison rushes to point out that hell hath no fury like a NSW senator relegated on the ballot paper. Connie’s just disappointed. A pile-on of other furious colleagues ensues, including much of the NSW Liberal Party. But ScoMo, a work of performance art in progress, won’t let a few dud reviews put him off his game.

Good Friday, Morrison tells national media how Jen and the girls go to church at Easter. Albo, Tony Abbott and 5000 others also attend Sydney’s Maronite Christian Mass. Easter is a time of hope he says, while claiming on national TV, religion is such a personal thing for him.

But there’s revived interest in how the PM deposed Lebanese-Australian and Maronite Christian Michael Towke in a dirty bid for pre-selection in Cook in 2007. So Morrison chooses a service in Victoria at Syndal Baptist Church with Gladys Liu MP, who failed to disclose her links with the Chinese government before preselection in Chisholm, a marginal Liberal seat.

There were also issues with an undisclosed donation to the Liberals of $37,000, together with questions as to how exactly the MP raised a million dollars for the party.

But Easter is a time of hope. No doubt Dave gives Scott a few pointers on the PM’s integrity commission model. Its architect, former Attorney-General, Christian Porter resigned over an anonymous donation or blind trust he’d accepted to pay his legal fees in a defamation case against ABC investigative journalist, Louise Milligan, a case he abandoned.

Ethical leadership is costly. The PM spends big money to get his own way in a high stakes poker game which goes right to the High Court over whether he can override local branches’ preferences in Liberal preselection in NSW. Chief Justice, Susan Kiefel says he can.

Not that Morrison gives a toss. It’s our money he’s spending. Has there ever been a bigger spending, higher taxing government? But the political cost of alienating so many NSW Liberals is huge. It’s already undone him in Warringah where his transphobic captain’s pick, Katharine Deves, proves a dud, with her social media post about “surgical mutilation”.

Having the arrogance to believe you know best and bypassing the local democratic process (with a bit of help from Premier Perrottet) leads to a poor choice?

Who’d have known?

Anti-trans activism could derail the Coalition’s election campaign. It triggers a pivot. Morrison backflips on his plan to dog whistle prejudice, intolerance and ignorance. He withdraws his support from Tassie Senator Claire Chandler’s bill banning transgender women from playing women’s sports, after he cops flak from Liberal “moderates” and independents.

Incredibly, the PM lies about why he pulls rank on NSW pre-selectors. The “menacing controlling wall-paper”, as former Liberal MP Julia Banks calls him, pretends to ABC 7:30 he’s a knight in shining armour rescuing women from “factions” whom he leaves unnamed, as if he’s just being protective; one of his most outrageous lies to date.

“Sussan Ley, one of my finest cabinet ministers and one of our most successful women members of parliament, was under threat. She was under threat from factions within the Liberal Party and I decided to stand up to it,” Morrison says.

“I’m very serious about having great women in my ranks…Fiona Martin was another.”

But Julia Banks tells a different story. “It was the three months of Morrison’s leadership that … was definitely the most gut-wrenching, distressing period of my entire career.”

Morrison an advocate for women? It’s risible and – as The Monthly’s Rachel Withers notes, it’s insulting to women.

“The claim is laughable. If there’s anyone Morrison was trying to save it was factional consigliore Alex Hawke in the seat of Mitchell, and his overarching aim was to maintain control of the numbers in the party. At the end of the day, the only person Scott Morrison truly stands up for is Scott Morrison.”

 

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The First Casualty

If truth is the first casualty of war, it is also under constant attack in the Morrison-Joyce regime’s love-in with spin enabled by Murdoch and a media oligarchy who help the Coalition demonise China and Russia, “shape the narrative” of foreign affairs, to distract us from its terminal, internal disunity and its own catastrophic incompetence.

Emperor Morrison has no clothes, Paul Bongiorno says. And his policy cupboard is bare. Since Malcolm Fraser, our foreign policy has become “narrower, more inward-looking and mean” warns former ambassador to China, Geoff Raby, in his Fraser Oration in Melbourne recently. Abandoning those who helped us in Afghanistan is a serious lack of moral leadership.

And empathy. If Ukrainians apply to come here, they will “go to the top of the pile”, Morrison beams ABC listeners a warm and fuzzy vibe without a skerrick of commitment.

Raby could also add insincerity, hypocrisy and venality, also superbly illustrated in its current rhetoric denouncing Putin, but keeping our $0.5bn trade with Russia in alumina and $100m live sheep under the table – lest our own party donor oligarchy take offence.

Denouncing Putin as a bully is ironic, tokenistic and is not backed up by real action such as targeting elites enabling Putin. Russian diplomats could be expelled, tourism could be halted except for those with humanitarian visas. We could cease importing Russian oil and fertiliser and send home the thousand or so Russians who are studying here.

Above all there could be honesty, accuracy and independence in our government’s depiction of the situation in Ukraine, a state whose pro-western government was installed in 2014 by a US-backed coup.

US influence continued in 2019 with the election of former comedian and actor in a popular TV series, Servant of the People, who played the part of a teacher fed up with corrupt politicians who accidentally became president, 44-year-old Volodymyr Zelenskiy, promised peace with Russia but quickly got a phone call, July 25, 2019, from then President of the USA, Donald Trump. Trump wanted a political favour and was prepared to suspend US aid to Ukraine.

$400 million in military aid for Ukraine already approved by the U.S. Congress, was put briefly on hold by Trump who urged Zelenskiy to investigate the son of a political opponent, Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Republican senators say that the funds were held up while the US checked whether the new candidate was pro-Western or pro-Russian. A month later, Trump released the funds, but his attempt to pressure Ukraine’s new president became the subject of a US Senate impeachment inquiry, September 24 2019, which failed on party lines. alleging disloyalty, Trump turned on senior officials. Lieut. Col. Alexander Vindman, Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, was fired, and the post of U.S. ambassador to Ukraine stayed vacant beyond the end of Trump’s term.

We can oppose the Putin government’s horrific invasion without capitulating to the prevailing MSM narrative of virtuous western democracy versus Russian tyranny. Caricatures of evil Putin merely recycle US propaganda. We deserve better. Refugees everywhere deserve better.

It takes neither courage, nor leadership, notes Raby, “to stoke fear of the other, to set the community on edge, to find threats and enemies at every turn”.

What Raby doesn’t say – or can’t -in a formal encomium – is that whilst Fraser may have (unsuccessfully) called for a sporting boycott of the Moscow Olympics, when the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1980, yet he wouldn’t block our export of wool to the USSR, including wool from his own farm, nor would he join Carter’s wheat export embargo.

Boasting about its defence spending, however, simply draws attention to the Coalition’s submarine debacle, the scuttling of a contract in favour of a promise of nuclear subs we can neither service nor crew, via AUKUS, another acronym to embellish buying obsolete US ships and planes. We are now ludicrously ill-prepared. As Rex Patrick notes, the new subs will be beaut when we get them in 2040 – if they arrive with a time machine.

Ambushed by his own impotence in almost every arena, Morrison’s latest setback occurs at 10:00 pm Friday, when the PM is thwarted by Supreme Court Justice, Julie Ward, who rules against the legality of his cunning plan to declare the NSW branch of the Liberal Party in breach of its constitution, because it has not yet held an annual general meeting.

It will be harder now for him to draft his own servile candidates, Trent Zimmerman, Alex Hawke and Sussan Ley, instead of fussing with the fol-de-rol of a democratic plebiscite, an Abbott innovation. Or risking losing key toadies in the only battle Morrison is committed to, the fight to keep himself in the top job. And how good are yes-men and women?

Friday’s outcome is bad for the PM’s increasingly tenuous grip on his leadership. NSW is revolting. Niki Savva reveals insider tips that senior NSW Liberals threaten to “bring the show down” if there is intervention in the state branch, or if Morrison attempts to impose his candidates without letting members vote in pre-selections, given his stooges are said to have stalled procedures to get their own way.

Whilst the federal party can still overrule the NSW Liberals’ branch executive, Morrison spent much of his party’s federal executive meeting last week – called to resolve the NSW preselection fiasco – “yelling and thumping the table” to get his way, while reminding colleagues that he was the PM, Ms Savva reports.

Perhaps like Nikita Khrushchev, in the 1960 UN General Assembly, he could take off a shoe to hammer home his waning authority. Or read the room.

On the Sino-Russian Fronts, our lucky country is vastly cheered to hear our top bully say he will stand up to bullies, (keeping Xi in his sights as well as Putin). Thursday, he uses “bully” or a variation twenty times in two hours, notes The Monthly’s Rachel Withers.

“This is about an autocratic, authoritarian government that is seeking to bully others,” he tells Sunrise. “There are consequences for this threatening and bullying and aggressive behaviour,” he claims on Today. But so far, our sanctions look lame.

Reviled by his own party’s rump, the PM uses Putin’s invasion of the parts of Ukraine which are not already under Russian control to pose as a strongman who might shirtfront Vlad, as Tony Abbott failed to do, (he left it to Julie Bishop) but – as in When Harry met Sally, he’s having what Boris is having but without Johnson’s hint of military intervention. Has the man with the toddler haircut learned nothing from Afghanistan?

Our sanctions mirror the UK’s heavy breathing against some oligarchs and banks but at least Morrison is refreshingly upbeat, upfront and insightful about their impotence.

“I don’t necessarily expect it to deter an authoritarian, autocratic leader .. intent on taking [the] opportunity to pursue their own interests by violating another country’s sovereignty,” he says. Nor will the sanctions take effect until late March.

While tales of Vlad the Impaler of Ukraine add a Gothic touch to Liberal fearmongering, China is the federal government’s arch nemesis. Not only will China buy wheat to help Putin’s war against neo-Nazism and genocide in Donbas, in The Shining, the PM turns to horror and science fiction to lure us into a sense of insecurity. It’s a spooky story.

A ghastly green shaft of laser light reveals the underbelly of an elderly Poseidon RAAF P-8A Maritime Patrol Aircraft, spy plane, a converted Boeing 737-800, burning 3409 litres of fuel an hour. Over its life-span, it will spew a million tonnes of CO2 into our global greenhouse gas trap, cooking the planet; causing freak weather disasters.

While our fourteen P-8As and, indeed, our entire navy are but a drop in the ocean, tragically, given all the other nations burning fossil fuels and polluting in the name of keeping us safe, it all adds up. “If the US military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.” report researchers in the UK.

Then there’s China’s vast war machine. Beijing rules the waves. And waives the rules. Or the rules-based order fantasy, US neocon cowboys expect of everyone but themselves. Marise Payne recites the phrase to chide Vlad, the bad actor on the world stage, but she never explains what it means. China is too big to have to explain itself.

Put to sea anywhere and you’re bound to see a PLA-N ship or two. China will have 420 ships in 2025 and 460 in 2030, according to the US Congressional Research Service.

But it’s not just the pollution taking place in the name of being tough on national security. So wedded is the world to hydrocarbon burning armies, navies and air forces that any serious attempt to curb fossil fuel usage faces stiff military opposition.

Yet to former party apparatchik, ScoMo, the glad-handed former tourism salesman, a man who reveres Trump, a fabulist who is more a fan of Captain Kirk than Cook, as Guy Rundle wryly notes – a PM facing a re-election while fighting a war to get the NSW candidates he wants, the story is all big bully China picking on plucky little Australia.

It’s bizarre if not surreal. A sailor on a ship owned by our largest trading partner fires a shot across the bows of our starship, by shining a laser at one of our spy planes?

Being a strong “middle power” doesn’t come cheap. We now have fourteen Poseidons at Edinburgh base in SA. Apart from being environmental hazards, they are expensive to fuel. Each takes 34 tonnes of Jet A1, currently priced at US$871.40 per tonne, or US$29627.60 a full refuel. Putin’s putsch can only increase the cost of a top-up.

Boosting CO2 is only one way that the military makes our world a safer place, a mission statement seldom far from our federal government’s epic self promotion. Today’s commercial Boeings will exude a million tonnes of CO2 over their twenty-year plus working life-span. Organophosphate esters (OPEs) are not just the mainstay of pesticides, they are sprayed out in unburned jet engine lubrication oil – a big part of aircraft emissions. And they don’t dissipate, they accumulate over time.

Other costs are huge, such as depreciation over the P-8A’s twenty year life span; a new plane sets you back US $1,6 billion. Without them we’d have to use drones to spot refugees in leaky boats as well as spooking sailors with lasers all the way from China. Most prudent refugees and asylum-seekers, of course, pay for their own air tickets.

In the meantime, the cost of boat-stopper Morrison’s fleet is top secret because it’s on an on-water matter. And there are forty-six government agencies involved. Or as the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre notes, “transparency in budget reporting of related expenditures has deteriorated further. Published costs and arrival numbers are extremely limited and available information does not add up.”

Yet profligacy is a badge of honour when it comes to military spending. Tony Abbott’s completely arbitrary stipulation, in 2012, that two percent of GDP be spent on Defence was just a cudgel to beat Gillard’s Labor crew which it accused of the lowest defence spending since 1938. None of this made sense then. Nor does it make sense now.

But the canard is resurrected by Morrison who is desperate to paint Labor as being weak on national security. The lie gets stronger by repetition. An ABC’s Insiders’s panel nods sagely when the furphy of Labor’s under-spending on defence is regurgitated as established fact. Yet reason and empiricism have never been the Coalition’s strong suit and this campaign begins with another shrill, baseless slandering.

It’s boosted by a manufactured incident about China’s aggression towards one of our spy planes, a charge based largely on lies and wilful disinformation. And a single laser.

All hell breaks loose amidst the feral roos and the asylum of loons in the nation’s Top Paddock over our Poseidon misadventure. Canberra rants fit to pop its bubble wrap. The ADF, on standby for senior services in the federal government’s criminal neglect of our elders held captive in gulags, cloaked in NewSpeak as aged-care residential facilities, claim the lasering is akin to firing a missile. Everybody knows that before you shoot down any aircraft, you bathe it in laser-light.

Laser pointing could be “separated from firing a missile with hostile intent by a mere split second” ANU’s John Blaxland, a professor in international security, intelligence and freelance warmonger, helps the federal government fear campaign by noting China was flashing our chopper pilots in 2018, a topic on which Dr Graham is a world expert.

Dr Euan Graham, a hot-shot in maritime security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore, is sure the laser is a flash on a bridge too far.

“…this act has crossed a red line in terms of what Australia considers normal or acceptable and it’s decided to name and shame accordingly”. It’s “an extremely serious incident” that risks “injury or worse”.

Worse? Imagine the Chinese crew when the Poseidon retaliates. The Australian reports, “Defence confirms a RAAF P-8A maritime patrol aircraft dropped anti-submarine sonar buoys around two Chinese warships in the Arafura Sea last week to check for “subsurface contacts”.

Only after China’s Defence Ministry releases, via The Global Times, the voice of the Chinese government, an image of an orange buoy, do the Morrison government’s accusations abate.

The Poseidon’s patrolling the Arafura Sea between the NT and Papua, spying on a brace of Chinese ships, a Peoples’ Liberation Army’s Navy (PLA-N) Luyang-class destroyer and its comrade in arms, a Yuzhao-class amphibious transport dock, two of 355 vessels – and counting – in the biggest navy in the world, as they steam east across Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone, (EEZ), a kleptocratic, grab for vast resources.

Dangerous? Our spy-plane is four kilometres away when it is lit up by China’s laser sighting. Almost. A Chinese matelot points a laser at an Australian spy plane? Outrageous. Defence Minister and childcare millionaire Peter Dutton and current PM Scott Morrison, go off like a frog in a sock; or two bullfrogs vying for the same slimy rock atop a toxic swamp.

Dutton packages the act for the few still watching Sky News in vain hope that it will improve. It’s “aggressive bullying” which can cause “the blindness of the crew, … damage of equipment,” Dutton bullshits in that contemptuous-of-his-audience’s intelligence, free-wheeling, fact-free way that is the Morrison government’s communications’ signature.

Spud is spitting chips. And Our Prime Minstrel is fit to kill. If his murdering of a Dragon hit doesn’t do it, he will gong someone with his ukulele. He takes time out of his hard-hatting cosplay. Gives himself a flash from a welder when he lifts his auto-darkening visor but you can tell he’s not just some dork from central casting or a party apparatchik who’s never had a real job. Sunday we see images of him in a chopper over a flooded Brisbane River. Climate change is conspicuously absent from the commentary.

“I can see it no other way than an act of intimidation, one that was unprovoked, unwarranted,” Morrison huffs and puffs, Media mavens helpfully spin one laser into “lasers” plural. Suddenly they become “military-grade”. Is this our own Gulf of Tonkin incident, the pretext for the US military’s illegal incursion into Vietnam in 1964?

“Australia will never accept such acts … It was a reckless and irresponsible act and it should not occur. We are raising those issues directly through the diplomatic and defence channels.”

Laser-gate provokes cries of outrage from our tough on national security border bouncers ScoMo and his rival Dutton, in an incident that evokes John Howard’s 2003 Babies Overboard lie, an excuse for demonising boat people to win votes.

In reply to what the PM pretends are representations to Beijing through all official channels, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Wang Wenbin, eventually accuses Australia of maliciously spreading disinformation, Tuesday. Lasers are part of modern range-finders, found on ships in navies all over the globe, including our own. He’s right.

In 2018 SAAB proudly announced that it will supply all twenty-five patrol boats once known as Armidale but soon to be re-named Arafura class with its state of the art lasers. “The Vidar advanced laser rangefinder … designed primarily for anti-aircraft operations as an integral part of a weapon system or surveillance system.”

Such rangefinders use a laser beam to measure the distance to the target.

But those who recall Dutts’ insistence, early in 2018, that Victorians were terrified of going out to eat because Melbourne was overrun with African gangs, which would follow diners home from restaurants, will understand that Morrison’s government, like that of Boris Johnson, or his mentor Trump, never lets fact get in the way of a fear campaign.

A priceless 11 million square kilometres of ocean, our EEZ contains oil and gas fields, and shipping lanes. And creatures of the deep. The destroyer is in the Arafura Sea, one of the world’s richest fisheries, between the NT and Papua, on its way through the Torres Strait at the top end of Down Under, to a spot in the Coral Sea off the Queensland coast to watch our naval exercises.

It’s almost as entertaining as our Tongan volcano relief show. Our navy’s pride of the fleet, HMAS Adelaide runs out of power just at the moment when we’re keen to be seen as Tonga’s rich and powerful friend. China seems to have no such problems when two vessels turn up a week or so later bearing a cargo of aid.

What the skippers and their crews don’t realise is that they are cruising for a bruising. First, there’s the Morrison election campaign’s war of words; bagging China, bully-shaming Putin, and high-fiving Biden, as befits our role as US imperialist running dogs, a cringe-worthy toadying to Washington that earns us Beijing’s enmity, costs us dearly in trade and lowers our credibility in any international forum, let alone in the White House or the Pentagon.

What it means to our relationship with Russia is less certain, but Murdoch media is keen to warn us that as “allies of Ukraine ” we face a crippling wave of cyber warfare.

This line of thought is quickly soft-pedalled. Perhaps advisers fear it might invite attacks. We mustn’t poke the bear too much. No-one mentions our trade surplus with Russia, although Crikey’s Bernard Keane notes that if Morrison had the ticker, he’d stop supplying Moscow with alumina and seize RUSAL’s twenty percent share in QAL, Rio Tinto’s Queensland alumina plant. They can take it. We could also halt our $100 million live animal exports.

World’s third-largest aluminium producer, Rusal, posted a profit of $2 billion in the first half of last year’s trading. World aluminium prices rose by thirty percent per tonne in the same period.

But seizing RUSAL’s share in QAL could cost votes in rural seats and upset key party donors. And the Nationals love to pretend that the live sheep trade is worth a fortune, when it’s a dead loss – Pegasus Economics calculates that stopping the trade would cost $9 million a year for WA farmers. But it could also lead to 350 jobs at West Australian sheep-meat processors. Cruelty to animals intrinsic to the trade would cease.

Whatever happens, Putin’s Russia is cosying up to fellow extortionists oil producer Saudi Arabia, another despotic regime which likes to kill its critics when they are in other countries. They have us over a barrel – and they know it. The pair will help push up the price of fuel and inflate the cost of everything, a way of hastening a global economic recession, already imminent if the overheated stock market is any indication.

More troubling is Dutton’s cheapjack sabre-rattling and the Coalition’s war on Labor, whom the three arch-rivals, Frydenberg, Dutton and Morrison, claim is joined at the hip with Beijing, weak on national security and unworthy of a vote in May or whenever an election is called.

Dutton politicises ASIO, a move which top spook Mike Burgess says is unhelpful. The Defence Minister claims the Chinese government had picked Albanese “as their candidate”. Worse, he says he bases Thursday’s inflammatory allegation – ruled by the Speaker to be out of order – on “open source and other intelligence”.

By Friday, after a top performance, the day before, from the PM in which Russia is denounced as a bully, the Morrison government’s talking-points revert to China because it’s harder to wedge Labor by railing against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

China’s villainy increases when it offers to buy Russia’s wheat, a deal denounced by government spin as a “lifeline” to Putin, virtually enabling Russia to run amok in Ukraine.

Under parliamentary privilege, Morrison dubs Richard Marles the “Manchurian Candidate”, a droll jibe, he withdraws, after the damage is done. Albanese, he jeers, is the nag China is backing. David Speers on ABC Insiders tries to get Penny Wong to look weak on bullies.

In reality, Labor is in lock-step with the Coalition.

Why be a big target on hot-button issues? Expect Russia to revert to its historical hegemony. The West helped it follow a traditional path – when the USSR’s communism, a state capitalism melted under Boris Yeltsin’s charms.

Yeltsin helped the new boyars – robber barons amass fabulous power, presiding over a crony capitalism which would make our own “can-do” capitalists blush. A few dodgy oligarchs became rich beyond belief while most of the population were driven into poverty.

To close observers of inequality in Australia and Little Britain these are familiar trends.

Yeltsin’s “shock therapy” economic reforms, masterminded by Anatoly Chubais and supported by Washington in the early 90s, were radical, causing a collapse in living standards” which helped Putin to impose his strong man act as the only solution.

Following the debacle of defeat at the hands of his own party, over his religious bigotry bill- a stunt to wedge Labor, which ends up wedging only his own backbench, blind rage grips our ukulele-packing paterfamilias, Bunnings’ influencer and default PM. ScoMo can live with being called an absolute arsehole, and a menacing wallpaper.

Old news. Besides, insults are a badge of honour to any malignant narcissist. But it hurts to hear his team now call him a fraud, a hypocrite, a liar, a horrible, horrible person in a new series of leaked SMS.

And as for “psycho”, that’s rich coming from any member of a party who assents to (and enables) the indefinite detention of children, deporting Kiwis caught jaywalking and any refugee who arrives by boat. Not to mention his obsession with secrecy. Besides, who doesn’t beg the producer to let you play the first verse of Dragon’s take me to the April Sun in Cuba in your own mockumentary, Meet the Morrisons?

Observant viewers with the stomach to sit through the ScoMo propaganda segment of Nine’s 60 Minutes, ScoMo-ProMo note that neither resident grandmother is present at the family curry. Aged care is so politically sensitive these days. ScoMo’s mother and mother-in-law are probably watching cricket. Eating KFC.

But it’s enough to make you choke on your chicken tikka. Not only is he publicly pilloried by anonymous assailants from his own cabinet, ScMo’s impotent. The PM, clearly, has less control over his party than over his ukulele. Things turn ugly.

Now five MPs have crossed the House of Reps floor, he’s lost control of the Senate and even Murdoch’s suggesting he’s toast, Morrison has blood-lust Dutton and “NFI” Frydenberg, all over his “comms” unit these days, like flies on an outback dunny.

Too cute for words, these two smell the death of a salesman. They’re jockeying to depose Morrison, a dead man moon-walking-even as opposition leader after May.

(His attack on Albo, the small-target, Opposition Leader coincides with The Lantern Festival and other celebrations of the Chinese lunar new year, The Year of The Tiger.)

Complicating matters is a report from Karen Middleton that “key Liberals” are plotting to block Dutton before he cherry-picks the leader’s job for himself. Ms Middleton regales Saturday Paper readers with the hilarious scenario of several feckless and ineffectual Morrison muppets brokering what is described as a Left-Right deal between “Dutts” as he is known and the “Kooyong Dolt”, as Joe Aston calls the feckless feather-brained Treasurer, to prevent a coup by the current Minister for Defence.

Should Dutts take revenge on “Bonkers” Morrison, the incumbent psycho, all hell would break loose. Even with the $16bn which trusty Frydo stashes in a brown paper bag at his PM’s request in order to buy victory with pandemic relief handouts or tax-rebates or some other grubby scheme to court the majority who don’t follow politics with an appeal to self-interest.

Hence the recent bottom-feeding frenzy in Question Time. Morrison slanders Albo to get below Dutton in the gutter.

“Bonkers” Morrison howls the house down in question time; accusing Antony Albanese of being weak on national security, a cheap stunt from the Crosby-Textor playbook, while throwing a dead cat the size of China, on the national table, as Bernard Keane puts it.

Now that five MPs defy him to vote down his signature legislation, his impotence as leader is revealed and he must muscle-up to compensate. What could possibly go wrong?

Shout? You can hear him in Beijing. Or Kharkiv.

No-one will ever teach Morrison that it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt. Not that he cares just how awful he is with his harangue of the Opposition Leader for “being a small target” “or just small”?

But it won’t be his reducing of Question Time to howling abuse, that decides this election, nor will it be his despicable treatment of women, particularly his office backgrounding against Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame, although that could play a big part.

It is unlikely that any of Morrison’s chest-beating posturing on foreign affairs, reciting US talking points, will convince anyone that a PM who can’t control his own party is a strong man who will keep the nation safe. Nor will the happy family man fantasy even begin to atone for the leaked texts which reveal how much he is reviled by his party including his deputy PM.

The decider could be the sixteen billion dollar election war chest. Unless, of course, voters worry where the money’s coming from. Or have relatives in aged care. Or have a disability or care for someone who has. Or the PM puts his money where his mouth is and funds refugee to flee Ukraine, in the humanitarian crisis that is already on its way.

 

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Morrison’s Coup De Grâce

“Human beings are social beings, who need to be able to rely on each other. That requires trust, and trust requires truth-telling.” (Quassim Cassam).

Grace Tame looks daggers as the PM fakes cordiality and avuncular affability for the camera. A black belt in subterfuge, deception and betrayal, ScoMo™ has also mastered the dark political art of baring his top teeth whilst feigning conviviality, positively radiating goodwill and patent insincerity. His office invites 2022 finalists for Australian of the Year for a cup of tea and photo opportunity at The Lodge, his Canberra pad – on occasions when his main place of residence Kirribilli doesn’t suit.

It also sets ScoMo™ up to pretend to Brisbane 4BC, later, that Ms Tame’s an ingrate who’s abused his hospitality whilst he and Jen have invited her into their own home. A farrago of lies of course. Passive-aggressive and patronising, he diminishes and demeans her.

“Grace is a passionate person who’s raised important issues. She’s had a terrible life ordeal, you know, things happen to her, her ordeals, the abuse. It’s just awful.”

Back at the Lodge, Morrison’s toothy rictus evokes the look he had for press gallery cameras just before he knifed Malcolm Turnbull in August 2018, declaring “this is my leader and I’m ambitious for him.”

With no policy achievements and a catastrophic failure to protect us from the pandemic, The Coalition knows the election campaign must be a horse race between ScoMo™ and Albo. Of course, as Paul Bongiorno warns, the Coalition may hold the half senate election in May as it is obliged to. Leave the lower house until September. Punt on the pandemic receding. But odds are long.

For now, it’s character. Whom do you prefer? And therein lies the problem. As Laura Tingle implies, whilst Murdoch’s claque is busy with the myth that we don’t know who Albo is, Faux-Mo’s problem, as a public figure made entirely of smirk and mirrors, is that we do know who he is.

Tame’s face, moreover, evokes some of the ways we know, notes Laura Tingle:

“… other unfortunate handshaking incidents during the bushfires; the excruciating moment when banking royal commissioner Justice Kenneth Hayne refused to be part of Josh Frydenberg’s photo opportunity by shaking hands and smiling with him; the widely circulated photo of Scott Morrison looking at his phone in the Parliament, having turned his back on Labor’s Tanya Plibersek as she addressed him across the chamber.”

There are many others. It’s Cobargo 2.0. Cue the NSW south coast, destroyed by freak bushfire fanned by his government’s policies of climate change denial. Local mother, Zoey asks questions only to have the PM turn his back and walk away from her in early January 2020.

“I have lost everything I own,” Zoey says in a social media post, with footage of the destruction. “My house is burnt to the ground and the prime minister turned his back on me.”

Given his government treats women as second-class citizens and worse, Ms Tame is in no frame of mind to be called into Morrison’s shonky photo-op. Be compromised. She’s brave. On cue, boys’ club commentators and big swinging dick club apologists, rush to attack her display of integrity.

“Sourpuss” sneers Miranda Devine. The News Limited flack, currently based in New York, accuses “Graceless” Tame of “ignorance, petulance” and “churlishness”. And a great deal more.

Morrison is “a leader of a middle power”, Devine ventures, as well as “our elected representative” who is owed respect for his high office alone, a gibe based on a lie about how we choose our PM, whilst she claims a former Australian of the Year (AOTY) is just an ambassador for a specific cause.

The “historic” Lodge also is defiled in Devine’s view. Sacrilege? Clearly, in the next phase of Murdoch’s Americanisation of our politics, it will be sacred. Our White House. A sacred shrine.

Devine’s rant in The Daily Telegraph, also trashes AOTY in a swinging denunciation, a hatchet job worthy of a PMO in full campaign mode. She dog-whistles culture warriors and the hard right.

“The AOTY is rarely representative of the Australian people but instead caters to a tiny base of Twitter brokens obsessed with prosecuting boutique ideological issues borrowed from overseas, usually to do with identity politics, “existential” climate alarm, the evil patriarchy, “toxic masculinity” and “systemic” racism.

Even if the AOTY were to start off as a normal person, by the end of their year in the spotlight they will have been thoroughly shaped into a left-wing activist by the media.”

“Ungracious”, Professor Peter Van Onselen also puns on her name, “rude” and “childish”. James McGrath, dropped in 2008 from Team BoJo for his comments in The Spectator calling African-Caribbean immigrants, “picaninnies” weighs in with “partisan, political and childish.”

There’s much more in this vein but a wave of approval far outweighs the sexist carping and character assassination, rejects Devine’s grotesque exaltation of our least trustworthy PM into an iconic national leader. Devine claims that to snub ScoMo is to insult the Australian people.

Most observers applaud Tame’s integrity. And how would Murdoch’s partisan hacks know what integrity looks like? ScoMo represents everything Ms Tame opposes. Such a pile-on, does, however, suggest a PMO aware that Tame is a major threat to their campaign to re-elect Morrison. A shonky product, which never really passed the sniff test, now smells well past its use-by date.

Perhaps Tame recalls ScoMo™’s office leaking against Brittany Higgins’ partner, David Sharaz. Or Chief of Staff John Kunkel’s “review” that found he was “not in a position to make a finding that the alleged activity took place”. (Sue Gray, take note for your Boris’ knees-up report.)

A helpless young woman is allegedly raped near his office, but the PM doesn’t know, let alone take any responsibility. God forefend he owes any duty of care. Or honesty.

But Morrison’s lies are world-renowned, largely thanks to Emmanuel Macron, and, for him, everything is someone else’s responsibility.

Almost. He’s a dab hand at captain’s calls and gratuitous cruelty. His appointing Amanda Stoker as Marise Payne’s underling, assistant Minister for Women to an invisible Minister for Women looks like an act of sadistic revenge.

The Queensland senator supported a “fake rape crisis tour” that inflicted great suffering on survivors, such as Ms Tame.

Or is it his failure to provide a safe workplace? Tame may have had in mind, Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Kate Jenkins’ finding that sexual harassment and assault were so pervasive in Parliament with its toxic workplace culture that, “women told us they felt ‘lucky’ if they had not directly experienced sexual harassment and assault.”

Who’d want to shake the hand of a PM who pats women on the head and tells the nation “we are dealing with this as no other government has done before”?

Saying “she’s had a terrible life” is the most condescending, ignorant & utterly disempowering comment to make about Grace Tame.

Grace’s whole message is that as survivors, we are not defined by our experiences of sexual violence,” tweets Nina Funnell who worked with Grace Tame on her original campaign #LetHerSpeak,

ScoMo’s government’s record is of evasion, inaction, lies and leaking against victims and their families. Contempt is only part of its orchestrated disempowerment of women.

Dealing with? Jenkins, in a separate process, recommends imposing a duty of care on employers to stamp out sexual harassment – only to have this rejected by the Morrison government.

Senator Jenny McAllister reminds us that, in 2013, Tony Abbott appointed himself Minister for Women. Eight years later, the contempt continues. ScoMo says women who march on parliament to publicly call for justice, equality and safety are lucky not to be shot. He snubs them anyway.

“This is a vibrant liberal democracy, Mr Speaker, not far from here, such marches, even now, are being met with bullets, but not here in this country, Mr Speaker,” Morrison says to boos, jeers and looks of total incredulity.

Why should Ms Tame, a passionate advocate for victims of sexual violence compromise everything she stands for by being a prop in the PM’s propaganda photo? Even in his words to those invited to the Lodge, ScoMo acknowledges Tame’s engagement to her fiancé, Max Heerey, not her work.

As with his struggle to understand that rape is a crime, ScoMo might need his Jen to clarify his slight – on all women. He’ll have plenty of time after May. Or September, should he take the punt.

Labor’s Jenny McAllister does acknowledge Grace Tame’s work, “together with other survivor advocates, she has driven a lasting national conversation about the treatment of women, and the prevalence of physical, emotional and sexual violence against women and children.”

It’s the eve of Invasion Day or ‘Straya Day as Morrison’s Ocker avatar outside The Lodge would have it. ScoMo’s™ moved on, prompted by focus groups. Sixty per cent of Australians support a change of date, according to a Guardian Essential Poll, taken a few days ago. Meanwhile, his commentary shifts to that of some didactic voiceover to a whitewashing of war and dispossession.

“A story,” he pens for Nine’s claque, mustering his typical fog of abstraction, cluttered with buzzwords and double-speak, “of strength and resilience that spans 65,000 years, of a continent that we love and contend with, and of a free and fair people who live in relative harmony.”

“Remarkable” would have been better than “relative”. And speaking of relatives, Morrison’s great-great-aunt, utopian socialist, poet and former Paraguayan commune member (in 1896), Mary Gilmore, a Dame who wrote for a communist newspaper, would turn in her grave.

Yet only his pet rag, The Daily Telegraph, runs the line that “the arrival in Australia of the First Fleet in 1788 was the initial step towards multiculturalism.” Shades of Tony Abbott’s defining moment.

Grace Tame’s “side-eye” defines our times. Why collude in a photo-op to normalise our criminally, negligent MPs with their hands in the till or doing favours for rich mates? Why approve of skiving off to Hawaii, padding travel allowances or taking a few days off to watch the cricket. Sam Maiden reports Tim Wilson Liberal MP Tim Wilson leaves Victoria for 95 nights, charging taxpayers $37k.

A vibrant liberal democracy does not normalise corruption while it disenfranchises women, the aged, the poor and first nations. It is not a regime of coercive control by old white men that opposes constitutional recognition of first peoples and rejects The Uluru Statement from the Heart.

A voice to parliament enshrined in the Constitution is not only long overdue, it would also enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to provide advice to the Parliament on policies and projects that impact their lives. Instead, ScoMo™ & Co. come up with a co-design report. What does it do? It sets up further consultations to establish regional and local voices.

“The only thing the government has managed to achieve is more delays and more processes. What the government is proposing gives the Voice no security. They even banned their co-design committee from speaking about constitutional recognition,” Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney calls out the time-wasting duplicity inherent in the process.

Why help normalise a clown? The PM’s “vibrant liberal democracy” allows Clive Palmer to boast he’ll outspend his $93m last election, lying about Labor’s policies. Paul Bongiorno reports Labor strategists who call out Australia’s Clown Prince of Politics for what he is – a way of extending the Liberals’ media campaign budget, which, scandalously, remains uncapped.

“He’s a Liberal and will shovel votes back to them at the end of the day.”

Bongiorno is outraged:

“…the government has done nothing to contain the obscenity of a billionaire being able to distort the democratic political contest in such a blatant way.”

Australia’s reputation for corruption is at its lowest level since ratings began in 1995, reports Transparency International. Morrison’s Covid Commission is a sterling example. A mob assembled by the PM, ostensibly for Covid crisis management turns out to be a gas industry support group.

The scandal of our RATs instant millionaires is another.

Pandemic rages, with at least ninety-eight deaths, Friday, as a government, “getting out of peoples’ lives,” stops sitting on its hands only to point the finger of blame.

Omicron spreads to more than 700 aged-care homes, Rachel Withers reports for The Monthly. Staff struggle to cope in over half of all facilities in NSW. A grieving daughter tells SBS News that her father died of COVID-19 alone in his locked-down aged-care home, while waiting for an overdue booster shot, on the day after Aged Care Minister Colbeck takes three days off to watch a cricket game. Morrison defends Colbeck by telling us we don’t know how hard the Minister works.

Lives have been lost but Colbeck will “take this on the chin,” he adds obliquely. Accountability is not part of his vocabulary. An incompetent spared, ScoMo hopes is a future ally; bound to him in gratitude.

Students will return to school so parents can get back to work. Teachers are put at risk and their value impugned by being seen solely as babysitters in a post-industrial society. And expendable. Vulnerable retired teachers and inexperienced graduates are said to be ready to fill the gaps.

It’s an era of personal responsibility, ScoMo and Perrottet claim. But just try to buy a RAT. Unless you happen to be Motion One, a firm run out of a two-roomed apartment in Sydney’s Elizabeth Bay where Pilates franchise CEO, Austyn Campbell secures a $26 million contract to import RATs.

She flogs them online for $12.50. Identical tests are purchased by importers and sold to Australian retailers for as little as $5 per unit.

A former Liberal Party “digital strategist”, Campbell runs a communications firm, Agenda C, with Parnell Palme McGuiness, another lucky punter who’s also done work for the Liberal Party.

Also doing nicely is Julie Bishop’s beau, David Panton, formerly an all-night chemist in Mornington, Victoria, who with his daughters runs Pantonic, a pharmaceutical supply company. Tests start at $11.

Will it be a RAT-led economic recovery? An overvalued stock market totters, tech stocks shedding value first – Barnaby fan, Georgina Hope Rinehart gets a gong for services to mining, community and sport, just before she’s declared an Olympic sponsor.

Hang on. Help is on its way from BoJo.

So touching to discover that the mother country still loves her delinquent ex-colony. Or not so ex.

Thank God, Queen and her palace that John Kerr, her GG could keep the con in our constitutional monarchy as we were weaning ourselves off the breast of empire, onto a neo-colonial formula.

Our co-dependence helps us feel relaxed and comfortable about the capitulation of national sovereignty that is AUKUS, a pact yet to be defined, but which has a very colonial nostalgia vibe.

Not everyone loves Kerr. A ”rorty old, farting Falstaff …” an elderly lizard” is Patrick White’s vivid impressions of the Governor-General, a respected jurist and former Chief Justice of the NSW Supreme Court, who invoked his “reserve powers” to dismiss Whitlam’s Labor government in 1975, to the immense good fortune of Liberal Malcolm Fraser, a Western Districts grazier. How we miss such giants.

Mal is the last farmer to become Prime Minister, something the Nats have never got over and the only PM to visit to a seedy Memphis hotel, only to lose his trousers – just one leg of which, could be pressed into service as a shroud for his chief legacy, his treasurer. John Winston Howard, monarchist, devout Neoliberal and US lickspittle, who did so much to dash the hopes of voters who sought enlightened, progressive, federal policies which might heal division, promote equality and independence.

As for the AUKUS submarine plan, it’s a fiasco. Eight nuclear subs we cannot crew, or fuel, which need a whole new industry to maintain, with a price tag of at least possibly $170 billion, allowing for inflation, are thrust upon us much to Macron’s chagrin, or emmerdement, a word our prissy press pretend is “piss off” but any Frenchman will tell you means shat upon.

Macron hates our PM for lying to him that the sub deal was real until one day before it wasn’t. It’s a breach of good faith which will set back our trade with the EU circus, of which La Belle France is 2022’s ringmaster. Carbon tariffs could be slapped on our exports. Also, we alienate another power with a presence in the Pacific.

In the meantime, we may have to retire the Collins class subs which will be rust buckets well before our “new” nuclear submarines are ready in the early 2040s. By then, crewless subs and drones will have superseded anything AUKUS hawks us.

But all is not lost. Diplomatic genius, carbon tariff expert and Joke PM, Tony Abbott has been seconded to the BOT, Board of Trade, an outfit long dead in the water until revived by Teresa May as something she could announce that might offset the stench of a hard Brexit.

Tony’s bound to come up with something. Always does. Even if it’s only shirt-fronting Macron.

His work is cut out for him. Career liar, Boris Johnson brags that:

“… our ambitious trade deal with Australia will include a substantive article on climate change which reaffirms both parties’ commitments to the Paris Agreement and achieving its goals, including limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees.”

Tony’s carbon tax expertise will add a bit of finesse to the UK Australia Free Trade Deal virtually inked last month. It’s worthless according to Moody’s. Our beef and veal are more likely to go to more accessible markets which offer higher prices. As Moody’s puts it:

“Australian exporters garner higher prices for their beef products in countries like South Korea, Japan and the US. Also, Australian beef exports recently dipped because of drought conditions. Such conditions are expected to occur more regularly in the future and could restrict exports.”

Glen Dyer and Bernard Keane note that the Coalition refuses to allow the Productivity Commission or any other objective body to analyse the agreement because the benefits are minuscule. Even these dwindle in the light of the extra paperwork required to meet bureaucratic country-of-origin requirements for accessing the deal.

“Given the trivial economic impact of the UK-Australia free trade agreement, we won’t be updating our growth forecasts for the UK economy,” Moody’s conclude.

But it’s worse than nothing. Boris gets rolled. Barnaby Joyce’s carve-out means Morrison won’t have a bar of any deal that breathes a word about net-zero.

Australia’s negotiators demand that temperature targets have no part in the trade deal. When the Brits insist that The Paris Agreement to keep the global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees, and preferably to 1.5 degrees at least gets a mention, that’s all it gets and only over Morrison government objections.

But who’s going to notice the cave-in when the party’s all agog at revelations that Boris has lied about at least eleven parties that broke Covid isolation rules?

Party piece of party gate is surely BoJo’s glorious anniversary of his own birth, alas, another mental blankety-blank which he either can’t recall or, like fellow amateur casuist, ScoMo, argue wasn’t a party at all.

Boris’ colleagues are a riot of goodwill, a British ten-minute effusion of camaraderie, a happy birthday dirge and a cake with a Sue Gray file in it.

BoJo’s birthday party that his (fairly) newly-wed, a May bride, organised for him is the latest episode of Carrie On Upstairs, a fitting sequel to the mystery of who paid for the 840 pound a roll golden wallpaper in the refurbishing of Boris and Carrie’s flat over number eleven Downing Street, traditionally reserved for the chancellor of the exchequer except when Boris needs it for himself, his partner and growing family.

If we are conned on trade and it looks as if we’re roped into buying obsolete subs we won’t have any time for our war on Beijing, Keane suggests we just tell China to hold off for a couple of decades while we get our nuclear underwater shit together. What could possibly go wrong?

It’s not clear which of our neo-colonial masters will actually supply the ships. Morrison loves secrecy as much as indecision. DFAT tells us that by 2020’s end, Australian investments in the US totalled $864 billion – almost as much as the Great Satan – as America is revered in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan whose peoples it has liberated, with our assistance – the USA has invested in the Land of Oz while our investment in the UK was $615 billion – and the Old Dart has $737.6 billion invested here.

All of this is a prelude to hope. Amidst the amazing Grace Tame’s refusal to grin and bear the PM’s charm offensive, a perfunctory line congratulating her on her engagement rather than her work as Australian of the Year, the shortage of RATs and ScoMo™ & Co’s abandonment of all pretence at protecting us from Omicron, the arrival, Friday, of UK Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, aboard a Global Britain private Airbus jet is a cunningly orchestrated stunt that gets BoJos rival out of his hair while providing audio-visual proof of ScoMo and Cos trade deals.

True, Little Britain’s Labour Party is outraged at the A$1 million price ticket but wait until they discover that the Free Trade Deal with the land Downunder is just another bit of window dressing.

Hawk Talk is also a big part of Truss’ mission. Eager to be Boris’ replacement and one of our neo-colonial mistress’ Britannia’s debauched ruling elite, Truss pops in to warn us that the Chinese Panda is plotting with the Russian Bear to blow us all up, a warning that Paul Keating calls demented.

Truss attacked Dan Tehan last year, because she felt slighted but now, she is practically one of us after being made honorary Ocker of the Year, last year by The Australia Day Foundation.

The dodgy Foundation is a cabal of climate deniers, mining shills and lobbyists with links to the ultra-right Policy Exchange, a group affiliated with those who spread disinformation on climate change and covid.

Many see Liz as Little Britain’s next Tory PM, if only party animal and pants-man, Boris Johnson would admit the carnival is over. Or Sue Gray busts him for breaking his own social distancing rules by holding parties. Seriously.

Her man bag, Ben Wallace, is a Boris-follower, too, over-promoted for his loyalty to Defence Secretary.

Ben and Liz are AUKUS hawks who talk up a Blairite WMD-type case for declaring war on Russia, just because America wants them to, a scenario, the invisible Marise Payne and Minister for Defence, Peter Dutton find incredibly compelling and not just as an election campaign stunt.

All is well in the Land of Oz, even “a smoking ruin” of democracy as Guy Rundle praises us. Deputy PM and MP for Santos, Barnaby Joyce tells ABC RN Breakfast’s Patricia Karvelas that “people aren’t dying” in the Lucky Country of Covid. Rats are wrecking his government’s superbly orchestrated pandemic testing kit rollout by hoarding their RATs (Rapid Antigen Tests) – or flogging them at prices to rival the can-do capitalism of professional gougers and your local Chemist Warehouse portal.

Finally, Labor’s leader responds to Andrew Probyn asking who he is:

“My first campaign, I was 12 years old,” Albo tells the Press Club. “We organised a rent strike. We took petitions around to everyone. That was my experience of that. That drove me. That was my first political campaign. And, by the way, we won.”

“Just ‘pushing through’ this pandemic is not enough,” he argues. “We need to learn from it, we need to use what the last two years have taught us to build a better future.”

We need “a government that steps up to its responsibilities and fulfils its most fundamental roles: to protect our people, to act as a force for good, and to change people’s lives for the better.”

No wonder Morrison’s running scared. But pumping social media with Clive$’ lies about Labor’s failings is unlikely to cut it when your record reeks of corruption, ineptitude, dud deals and untrustworthiness. The worst PM of the century can’t even show some grace under friendly fire at a reception for Australian of the Year, a miserable morning tea, brightened only by a bevy of nominees for awards, any one of which is likely to show up his own inadequacies as a man and as a leader.

To pick a fight with Grace Tame, moreover, and to go on radio, later, to belittle her, may cost Morrison any last skerrick of credibility. His pot-shot at Grace Tame, Australian of the Year 2021 is by extension an attack on all women and every woman’s right to expect a government that offers equality, justice and safety for all Australians, instead of a racket run to benefit a privileged few.

Given his lies, his stunts, his broken promises, his empty promises, his protection of incompetent ministers and worse, together with his government’s catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic, his pot-shot at Ms Tame maybe his coup de grace.

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