“This is literally a war and we know we’ve been in a war for some time but never to this extent.” (Gladys Berejiklian).

“Stay calm. Delta is here.” Dazzling the entire nation with her gold standard sang-froid and petulant self-righteousness, a plucky Gladys Berejiklian, premier of The Premier State, claims to be at war with the deadly Delta variant of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus) – whilst heading a government which is in bed with the enemy; the fat cats, thin spivs, coffee bar-keepers, garden centres, Bunnings theme parks, IKEA, QANTAS and the “gaming” and liquor “industry” touts, who lead the NSW push to open for business. That’s even before you get to the ex-bankers running its Treasury.

Or Glad’s deputy, “Let ‘er rip” Dominic Perrottet, another fine young, aspiring, right wing chap is captured by private sector finance emigrants, warns AFR’s Joe Aston, who’ve “effortlessly colonised state government enterprises.” Treasury is run by Westpac alumnus Mike Pratt, a former deputy chairman of the troubled icare $60bn government workers’ compensation scheme. Former Macquarie banker, Michael Carapiet and NAB director Peeyush Gupta are part of his team.

Being at war for a Berejiklian-Barilaro government, looks and sounds more like unconditional surrender. Or a rout.

“We accept that Delta is here, we accept heading to zero across the nation, especially once you open up and live freely will be an impossible task,” the premier says with a Morrisonian Gish-gallop -baffling, if not infuriating to the novice. When Glad comes out each morning, talking up the jab-rate, she goes for a Phil Spectre wall of words, just like her mentor Scott Morrison. The trick is to ignore the verbiage and watch what she does.

Nothing.

Small wonder, then that the AFR has the premier as its April cover-girl and dubs Gladys The Woman Who Saved Australia, while Gladys fan-boy, Phil Coorey, mounts the curious argument in a follow up -that by her bungling, the ineffectual, Berejiklian liberates us from COVID-zero’s gilded cage; forces us all to enjoy what it’s like to live (or die) with the virus.

Delta infection rockets up in Gladys’ eight-week mock-down. Friday, 470 people are in hospital; 80 in intensive care. 27 on ventilators. Saturday, 825 new cases are reported. Another three people are dead. Between ten and thirty per cent of the NSW cases may go on to develop Long Covid, a poorly understood but chronic, debilitating illness.

A third of patients being admitted to hospital are aged 30 to 49. Nearly half of all hospitalisations involve patients 49 and under; those with the least access to vaccinations. Cue “This is not a race” – a Morrison government which refused to concede any need for urgency in order to hide its failure to seal a deal with Pfizer; to secure and supply enough vaccine, or to build dedicated quarantine facilities, is helping turn NSW into a disaster zone.

While Berejiklian’s “Delta is different” defence is logically unassailable, her response amounts to her confessing that she chose to bring a knife to a gun fight. Her minders just ignored Delta’s dawn overseas? Leading epidemiologist, Professor Mary-Louise McLaws, from the University of NSW, says Sydney’s escalating outbreak is driven by a rising trend of people who are infectious in the community. Australia’s been given ample warning of Delta in other countries. The government should have locked down Sydney much sooner, a view hotly contested by the Berejiklian team.

McLaws would like NSW Health to provide more detail and suggests that it’s likely to be essential workers causing much of the spread. Currently the term essential worker is so broadly defined that it offers little useful diagnostic data.

“What the government is not telling us, which they need to, is how many of those not in isolation were essential services workers who inadvertently acquired it at work and then took it home to their household and caused ‘x’ number of people in their households to be infected,” Professor McLaws says. She could also point to local examples.

Victoria’s short, sharp lockdowns succeed. Our media is on to this. They add them up. Even the ABC uses “Dan’s 200 days of lockdown” to divert from NSW’s debacle and to foster the pernicious myth that the Andrews’ Labor government in Victoria is the real villain of the pandemic, a theme embraced by Murdoch’s hacks. It’s part of the PM’s subterfuge that what is really at stake is our “freedom” – not his government’s duty of care to help keep us safe.

Gladys uses the word freedom freely while meeting later to rush through laws which restrict it. One source in her crisis cabinet tells The Guardian Australia’s Ann Davies,

“We make decisions there that would take 18 months under normal circumstances and would require legislation through parliament. We’re taking decisions that curtail people’s freedoms or pay out millions in an afternoon.”

It’s also the refrain of a federal government that defines itself by what it’s not and must ever attack its opponents, especially now its neoliberalism is exposed as a hoax. Or, like the PM and his deputy, all hat and no cattle. Tragically, however, the neoliberal yen for cutting public health and outsourcing to the private sector is taking its toll.

In just one week, NSW Covid-19 patients requiring ventilators will double and intensive care admissions will rise by 70 per cent, a paper marked “sensitive” leaked from Morrison’s gagged COAG, his supposedly top secret, “National Cabinet” Rick Morton reports. Just over half the state’s total staffed ICU beds – 444 of 863 beds – are already in use.

A continuation of the rise in patients, as predicted by Glady’s advisers, will stress a system that is already stretched, especially the state’s capacity to staff intensive care units, putting ICU patients of all types at risk, warns the paper.

We knew that vaccines could halt the spread of infection but the federal government failed to vaccinate younger people, our most socially mobile group. Instead, the Morrison roadmap put great stress on vaccinating the most vulnerable in its 1A and 1B phases of its five-then-four phase model, while failing to get enough vaccine in time to achieve even that. Morrison will, doubtless, blame ATAGI or “medical advisers” but his roadmap is fit only for lining the parrot-cage.

The phony war on Covid is over. Could it be curtains for the terminally conflicted premier’s chequered political career? Berejiklian has stared down a few big scandals, including her dalliance with debonair Daryl McGuire, her Wagga wannabe, a liaison she packaged as a “mistake in my personal life” when it may involve abuse of her public office.

Glad doesn’t want to be reminded of her mistakes. She fires up when ABC’s Paul Farrell raises the Clay Target shooting club in McGuire’s electorate which receives a $5.5m grant after a first application doesn’t quite hit the cost-benefit analysis target but, eighteen months later, succeeds with some help from her office, according to evidence at ICAC.

Crikey’s Bernard Keane sums up, A large grant of public money was given to a project which had clearly failed the test when conducted at arms’ length. The premier requested that the test be attempted again, and the evidence suggests she was taking particular interest in it. The test was passed, and the public money flowed, as the premier’s secret boyfriend had been seeking all along. Will Farrell now drop the potential, perceived conflict of interest? Unlikely.

In public life, Gladys has been unsinkable. Berejiklian and Brad Hazzard, her exquisitely named Health Minister, survive the 2020 Ruby Princess fiasco with its 662 Covid cases and 28 deaths,, despite Commissioner Bret Walker SC’s report of his Special Commission of Inquiry, that “…NSW state health department officials made ‘inexcusable’, ‘inexplicable’ and ‘serious mistakes’ in the Ruby Princess handling.” Doubtless, they’ll all have learned from their mistakes by now.

Walker makes few recommendations, but he does say that he shouldn’t have to tell Health to do its job properly.

More serious threats to Glady’s tenure come from her partner in criminal negligence, Scott Morrison, who knows that one of them is going to cop the blame for a corrupted Fed-State Liberal pandemic policy dictated by the top end of town that helps infect not only the rest of Australia but our trans-Tasman dormitory suburbs of Auckland and Wellington.

The fix is in, however, as his office continues to background against the premier, the PM elevates the status of the state premier’s agreement to the Doherty Report or to what Morrison pretends the report says. Friday he proclaims it’s an agreement with the Australian people that states open up on 70-80 per cent vaccination. We’ll get there by December.

Frydenberg steps up to threaten premiers. Don’t expect government funds if you aren’t all open by Christmas.

But that’s assuming that there are enough doses of vaccine available – and Doherty makes no hard and fast prediction. It is a nuanced prediction based on there being only a few cases of infection in the community. Several premiers point this out. Other experts query the percentages. 20 or 30 per cent unvaccinated is way too high with Delta, they say. Look at Israel. Israel is not the only source of data suggesting that current vaccines may need boosters or are less effective against “variants of interest” of which Delta is but one example.

“Two doses of Pfizer-BioNTech have greater initial effectiveness against new COVID-19 infections, but this declines faster compared with two doses of Oxford-AstraZeneca,” researchers at Oxford University report. The decline period is a few months. Yet so much of the government discourse in Australia implies two doses confer lasting immunity.

Allied to this disinformation is the mantra of vaccinating being the way out for Sydney. And blaming those slow to come forward for their jabs as recalcitrant misreads the reality. Kiwi migrant workers, for example, are one of many groups in Western Sydney’s precariat whose members may not even qualify for a Medicare card.

Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud, or long white shroud, in Kiwi satirist Peter Harcourt’s 1959 classic album, New Zealand, is the country of origin of an Australian resident population of at least 600,000, over a third of whom are some of our most vulnerable workers in a pandemic being unable to access any form of welfare.

Along with residents are the many classes of visa holder which are similarly abandoned in a lockdown. Include Sydney’s share of the 60,000 who have overstayed or are “undocumented” and the government’s police and ADF show of force is both ill-conceived and counter productive. But it may play into the politics of Morrison’s tired, tough-on-borders rhetoric.

Being in a war, of course, is not the same as being at war, as Glad’s Clayton’s lockdown parody reveals, yet she bangs on about NSW being under the harshest restrictions in Australia, when any Victorian could tell her it isn’t.

“We’re doing everything we can, we’re throwing everything at this … It is time for all of us to bunker down and take this as seriously as we can,” she lies, Friday, in yet another of her fact-free, Trump stump pressers – bulked up with bumper sticker slogans, platitudes and lies – before she snubs a reporter who asks about indigenous peoples at risk. In vain, she tries to evade reporters’ questions suggesting that she delayed imposing stricter lockdown measures.

Hiding behind the skirt of your Chief Health Officer or the cap, braid and epaulettes of your Police Commissioner does nothing for your public image. Yet it’s clear evidence of the desperation that results from poor planning.

Gladys Berejiklian is at war on many fronts, none of which feature her as a Xena Warrior Princess. Remotely.

The war talk evokes her own guerrilla campaign for political survival. And her war on the truth. Before the week is out, Glad the Liberator is spruiking “exciting opportunities” and promising freedoms in a frenetic turd polishing of her own failure to run a timely, proper lockdown. Or a successful presser – as opposed to a bragging and gaslighting bull-session, which includes her lying about her own fatal errors, while imploring everybody else to do the right thing. Because it’s all their fault. Never her own colossal stuff-up.

Never a hint of her own ineptitude – eight weeks wasted as she feebly tries a velvet fist in a velvet glove approach, that she hoped would win the hearts and wallets of her party donors, while posing as a sweet and reasonable consensus authoritarian. At Friday’s presser, journalists probe her dithering and deadly time-wasting. One flourishes a list.

‘This is the list of things we could do earlier, so why is the question, why didn’t we do it earlier?’

It’s a list she received only last night, she cries, begging her top cop and doctor to back her up before scuttling into the wings. In fact, Gladys is as tough as teak. Indecisive? Sure. Ineffectual? Only when it comes to policy. In clinging to power, she’s a black belt. “Excuse me, it’s not your press conference,” she tells Sky News’ Andrew Clennell when he asks how many days it will take to impose a real lockdown. Does anyone expect this premier to be held to account?

Or set some coherent rules. Say something that makes sense. Instead, we get vacuous, patronising entreaties and beseeching to be good boys and girls because our governess will reward us. Bizarrely, she can’t say how. Like National Cabinet proceedings, until Rex Patrick’s challenge this week in the AAT, it’s classified confidential.

“NSW is up to 5.5m jabs. When we get to 6m jabs, those that are vaccinated will have the opportunity to do something that they can’t do now.”

Glad channels Mary Poppins, about to get her children to laugh so hard they fill with their own laughing gas and float up to the parlour ceiling. Her promised secret reward is in itself laughable.

There’s very little Sydney-siders haven’t done already, judging by scenes of a crowded Bondi and unmasked Passeggiata in busy streets. Saturday brings reports of open defiance from Western Sydney, framed helpfully in Chairman Peter Costello’s Sydney Morning Herald, which increasingly runs a pro-Morrison line. Saturday’s paper makes short work of scapegoating those who have to go to work to pay the rent, keep the power on and buy the groceries.

“Young men in south-west Sydney who are refusing to heed lockdown laws have sparked the NSW government’s about-face on harsher restrictions, which Premier Gladys Berejiklian says is the state’s last stand against the Delta outbreak.” Just in case anyone was in any doubt who to blame for Sydney’s stricter lockdown. Strict? The Berejiklian government just got around to mandating mask-wearing in public, this Friday. But not for exercise.

Of course, things have tightened up, hugely, since the phony war of the first few weeks of her Clayton’s lockdown. Helping tremendously, “Can I just ask everybody to care…” is Gladys’ outsourcing of her own responsibility.

Gladys deserves gold for her Olympic spin; a desperate pivot to necessity as she touts her state’s rising vaccination rates Thursday, (because they are increasing) and for her industrial-strength gaslighting lie that her government’s catastrophic failure to contain the pandemic is, in fact, cutting-edge – the best in Australia, if not a world-beating exemplar of “learning to live with COVID”, (because you’ve utterly failed to contain it). Morrison parrots the same phrase.

Gladys is upbeat about how she and her PM have engineered what Crikey’s Bernard Keane and Glen Dyer term the greatest public policy failure since the Iraq and Afghan wars – but it’s worse than that. The NSW Premier, with the assistance of the Morrison government, has contrived to turn a public health crisis into a catastrophe.

“What I am absolutely convinced about is that NSW can lead the way,” she claims. “If we keep people out of hospital, we keep people out of intensive care, we stop people dying, that means we are starting to live with COVID.”

Lead the way? There is little sign of anything but catastrophic failure in each of her three conditions.

Glad follows her former number one fan-boy, turned arch nemesis, the spineless, Scott-forgot-to-buy-the vaccine-Morrison, as she confuses the need to do something with a cue to declare war on the poor workers of Western Sydney, a bellicose rhetorical flourish, she hopes will make her sound like a leader. A woman with a plan.

Joining Gladys in The Joy Of War chorus is alleged war criminal, John Winston “babies overboard” Howard, another foghorn of moral authority, with a compassion bypass. Despite a deathless role in public life that is a bit like the ABC’s over reliance on repeats of Grand Designs, JWH is yet to enter the lists of the insightful or original thinkers, let alone the interesting, yet he’s ever-ready to add his thin, adenoidal descant to Morrison’s lie that our Afghan defeat was worth fighting.

Readers will recall that the “lying rodent”, as gorgeous, George Brandis called his then PM, misled parliament 18 March 2003 that he had legal opinion that made our illegal invasion of Iraq not only lawful, but a moral imperative.

Since then over 9 million Iraqis have been displaced either internally, or forced to seek refuge in other countries. Many of those who came to us in boats; (Howard helped persuade us were “illegal immigrants”, another fiction,) – still remain in indefinite detention.

Legal, no doubt, were weapons which used depleted uranium, a substance which is still, today, causing birth deformities in Iraqi babies born near Tallil airbase, site of the US-led military “coalition of the willing”. Almost as cruel is the legacy of Islamophobia played upon by Morrison’s rival, Peter Dutton, who is in no rush to rescue Afghan interpreters because they may be terrorists; members of Al Qaeda or Taliban.

It’s a toxic dog-whistle which can only add to the hardship faced by migrant workers struggling to survive the pandemic in Western Sydney, or elsewhere in Australia. Yet the NSW Premier cranks up her scapegoating and victim-blaming.

Gladys takes a leaf out of our PM’s playbook, while Police Commissioner Mick Hillsong Fuller muscles in on her patch, calling in the troops he hopes will make him look good, as he further white-ants Gladys’ hopelessly undermined premiership. Mick auditions for Liberal pre-selection as Sydney’s super-hero, while the mutant variant goes viral.

In NSW’s production of the Premier Prima donna, Morrison’s former Golden girl, the ineffectual, Gladys Berejiklian declares war on Delta and on Western Sydney – together with any hack who disrespects her – in any presser, surprising many, including the PM’s Office fixers, who make her life hell by beavering away; “backgrounding”, a gutless type of backstabbing by dripping poison into the well-pricked ears of select media hacks in the Canberra gallery.

The toxic drops just don’t stop. Constant undermining, the Premier’s office screams, Sunday, in an internal brawl with key ministers. Mick Fuller, meanwhile, who is commended in earlier despatches as the Morrison family’s loyal bin-retriever, morphs into a State Emergency Operations Controller, Obergruppenführer with seven hundred soldiers to help his ten thousand cops kick a few heads in Western Sydney. They’ll make life hell for the “non-compliant”.

Rome wasn’t sacked in a day. Sydney’s decline has been unwinding since 1856, when the Emerald City was but a pup, begat in one thrust by an upright Colonial secretary, honest Edward Deas Thomson by the bestowal of power upon a democratically-elected parliament and premier. The rot set in immediately.

To local conservatives, notes historian John Hirst,

“it appeared as if the government had been debased into a giant system of corruption with needy ministers and members bound together by their joint interest in plunder.”

Little has changed. If anything, corruption is more overt in a government where a Premier can survive a Daryl McGuire, an enterprising, close personal friend, who admits pocketing thousands of dollars in a dodgy visa scam; using his office for private business gain, even using lounges in the premier’s office suite to stage a $350 million land deal. But it’s no biggie, Glad tells Sydney radio – just a poor choice in men, or as gallant Malcolm Turnbull, author of the Bonk Ban in Federal Parliament and an insufferable know-all, “she fell in love with the wrong guy.”

“These things happen in Australia says Scott Morrison. People do things and then they regret them.”

Its not just that its soft, rotten, heritage underbelly of rorts and dodgy deals may be normalised by a pork-barrel Premier, who shrugs off corruption as “just politics” – but The Emerald City’s dependence upon the top end of town and its business-class oligarchy has left it politically impotent. Now as the pandemic rages, a state government stalls and a premier dithers while her PM stitches her up.

Scott told Glad to lockdown heaps earlier, The Daily Telegraph dobs. But would she listen? Incredibly, at that very moment, The Sydney Morning Herald also reports “an anonymous source in the PM’s office” briefing, exactly the same thing to one of their hacks. Deidre Chambers, what a coincidence!

Glad is not happy. The worm has turned; Glad’s fling with National Cabinet’s Fat Controller, is going the way of the laptop and phone that Dazza McGuire ran over with his tractor. In this case, however, Scott Morrison’s desperate to push Glad under a bus before she drags him under with her, a fate, Niki Savva believes he can’t escape.

Hill Singer and Liberal political aspirant, Police Commissioner Fuller cranks up the militarisation of the Sydney Shitshow™; ordering up ever more mission creep, highly trained, culturally sensitive troops in camo to fix up morale of Western Sydney’s working poor. Boosting numbers to nigh a thousand lads and lasses winning hearts and minds by daily door-knocking, roll-calls and generally enforcing compliance. Choppers fly overhead. Meanwhile there’s a mad scramble for vaccine, as the AFR puts it delicately.

It’s all the vision of the PM, who first showed a fetish for uniform back in his time as border enforcer, when he militarised compassion and helped our nation rat on the refugee convention, according to a plan drawn up by Jim Molan, the butcher of Fallujah, in which asylum seekers became illegals and we cheerily put them into indefinite detention, which the UN told Tony Abbott is a form of torture, only to be told by the suppository of all wisdom to butt out.

If the thrill of seeing our army lads and lasses out on the streets at all hours ensuring everyone does as they are told is not enough to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, Morrison government’s technology investment roadmap turns out to be a love note to the fossil fuel gang, a multinational corporate mafia who play us for suckers while we give them ten billion dollars a year in subsidies, a favour returned in donations to a Coalition of mutual self-interest which has long lost its base.

“This is all about balance” cries Angus Taylor while his PM, ScoMo, channels Mandrake the Magician’s rapid hypnotic technique helped by the jungle drumbeat of the Murdoch media, Morrison and Taylor.

Not helping Scott Morrison’s distress is news that contrary to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s insistence, a ruling by Justice Richard White in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) confirms that all working documents for the meetings of federal, state and territory leaders are accessible under freedom of information law.

Karen Middleton reports in The Saturday Paper that the PM could be in strife with his fetish for secrecy. The AAT ruling may scupper the device Morrison uses to extend federal cabinet’s secrecy provisions … the cabinet office policy committee, or COPC. Since he invented it in 2019, Scotty uses this committee, of which he is the only permanent member, to claim cabinet confidentiality extends over anything he wants shielded from public view. If it sounds far-fetched, if not patently absurd, it probably is, but there’s no denying the PM’s zeal to keep everything under wraps.

Without dipping into the late, unlamented, Donald Rumsfeld’s known unknowns, it’s certain that none of this will turn out well for Gladys or for her former fanboy Morrison. Numbers will continue to soar in NSW because contact tracing is now impossible due to sheer numbers of COVID infections. Vaccine supplies are not assured for those most at risk – and for those most mobile, the younger victims now showing up in statistics, despite whatever the PM may announce.

It may be too cynical to say that the failure of COVID-zero was contrived to force the “learn to live with it” option – the Boris Johnson con over the Dan Andrews’ strategy. But, as Mick Young said, whenever the choice is between a conspiracy and a stuff-up, go with the stuff-up every time. Expect numbers of cases to soar in NSW because even its tough new measures are too little too late. Expect Berejiklian to run up the white flag and declare an easing of restrictions as soon as she can. The results will be horrendous. Expect her PM to continue his undermining until Gladys resigns.

Enter her deputy, Dominic Perrottet, who’s always quietly advocated letting her rip, to be Morrison’s new gold standard, golden-haired boy.

“If they open up at 50 per cent, that would be insane. Even at 70 per cent they are going to have to be massively careful.” Professor Peter Doherty

Hoots and jeers break out from socially distanced Coalition MPs, with some zooming in from home lockdown as a depleted, motley, crew, who by chance and a good deal of Clive Palmer’s money, find themselves in government if not in power, continuing to show scant respect for Parliament, the people or the truth, as the clock ticks down on Team Morrison’s weakening grip on power, given its criminal neglect of its duty of care and its betrayal of the people’s trust; both brought dramatically into focus by the virulent, fast-spreading, Delta variant of SARS-Covid-19. And now the sixth IPCC panel report.

Not only is the rollout a race, the virus is winning. And we still don’t have nearly enough vaccine. Morrison lies to cover up how badly he and his team botched vax supply and distribution. Health Minister Hunt huffs and puffs on ABC Insiders, Sunday.

Tells us how lucky we are that we’re not Indonesia or India or Mexico – and how fabulously well we are by comparison and to deny there was any Pfizer deal.

But a deal was underway. The crisis in vaccine supply is entirely the Morrison government’s responsibility. We have Norman Swan’s word for it, supported albeit, by anonymous sources and by the Victorian government.

“From Pfizer’s perspective, I have been told they think there’s nothing in it for them to sour their commercial relationship with the government by getting caught up in a political row,” Swan says.

Despite a concerted coverup, a deal was aborted by Morrison, who insulted the giant multinational corporation’s head in sending a junior bureaucrat to negotiate; who then tried to haggle over the price and intellectual property rights. Hunt does himself and his government no favours in trying to fix the record with a semantic quibble. If all had gone to plan, why did Australia get so much less out of Pfizer than other countries?

The UK agreed to purchase 30 million Pfizer doses on July 20, the US followed with a deal for 100 million on July 22. Japan signed for 120 million doses on July 31, and Canada made its first agreement with Pfizer for 20 million doses on August 5, reports Rachel Clun, federal political reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald.

James Merlino is unequivocal. “There is no doubt at all. Meetings occurred. Negotiations occurred,” says the Victorian Deputy Premier. “The deal was not sealed, whereas other nations aggressively pursued Pfizer and got the vaccines that they needed for their community. We did not.”

Responding to climate change and global heating is also a race. Denialists hold sway in the federal government but it is our responsibility as global citizens to reduce our carbon emissions and to cease pretending that in exporting coal we’re not big polluters.

Just as Howard got Robert Hill to scam future generations with our dodgy Kyoto credits in 1998, an agreement his government didn’t deign to sign, the Coalition’s climate change canards are coming home to roost, Other countries will soon charge us a carbon tax on our exports. We are already the climate pariahs of our Pacific neighbourhood. And beyond. To say nothing of the legacy we leave our children.

Digging in, Tuesday, our coal lobby puppet-PM refuses to set a goal of net zero by 2050 because he’s scared he’ll be rolled by Dutton or what Barnaby and the boys might think, after an international “code red” warning is issued by global leaders. The least worst scenario is that urgent, concerted action between now and 2030 in doing everything we can to curb emissions will see a 1.5 degree rise which will go higher but then settle slightly below. The consequences of the least worst case will be felt for millennia.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases the first instalment of its landmark Sixth Assessment Report (1). It’s the most comprehensive and authoritative overview of the physical science of climate change to date. The scale and pace with which humans are altering their environment is unprecedented, certainly in the last two thousand years, it reports. It’s accelerating, every fraction of a degree matters and we must do everything we can to lower emissions.

Forget the Canberra Press Club bubble nonsense of moving towards zero in 2050 as being in any sense a commendable commitment, the line the PMO is spinning, the report shows that the globe will warm by 1.5 degrees well before the end of 2040

Yet Morrison is not moved. He sets up a straw man, the lie that we don’t know what we are signing up to, if we commit to emission reduction targets. The other lie is that such targets cost people jobs – when the alternative is neither jobs nor planet – and when jobs may be created in renewable energy – if the government had another set of donors.

“I won’t be signing a blank cheque on, on behalf of Australians to targets with no plans,” Morrison says. (It didn’t hold the Coalition back from giving $440 million to its Great Barrier Reef Foundation boondogglers) – which the auditor general found had almost no useful detail in its plans at all apart from vaguely aiming at:

“improved management of the Great Barrier Reef” and “management of key threats to the Great Barrier Reef.”

How good is having no targets? Instead, Morrison’s minders have got him to add as much of the word “Australia” he possibly can into every word salad. It’s cheapjack nationalism, he’s whipping up, a narrow and potentially dangerous brew which is based on the lie that there is somehow only one Australia.

But you can’t have an aim or a target if you don’t really believe climate change is real.

“It’s really important that this government actually resolves its internal issues and starts acting with intent in relation to action on climate change,” Deputy Labor leader Richard Marles says, urging the government to commit to a net zero target by 2050.

“To have the government party room full of a whole lot of people who are essentially denying the science of climate change in 2021, is genuinely unbelievable.”

What is also unbelievable is the Abbott-like determination to oppose everything Labor proposes. In full mock outrage mode, the PM squawks like a cornered galah, when Labor proposes a $300 incentive to encourage the eighty percent of the nation who remain unvaccinated, to get a jab. Perhaps Albo is winding ScoMo up. It works.

Outside, the virus rages out of control in NSW, fanned by the state’s Clayton’s lockdown, a lack of vaccine and an underclass of essential workers who cannot afford to take a day off, let alone a month or two of lockdown. The state has a record 356 cases by Tuesday and now six deaths, but gas-lighter-Hunt, on ABC Insiders, praises the job the premier has done in containing infection.

It’s a refrain which fails to distract from Ms Berejiklian’s affair with the-tractor-ate-my laptop, disgraced former man bag and bag man, Daryl McGuire, as ABC 7:30 Report has documents linking the then treasurer with the grant of a tidy five and a half million dollars to a shooting club in McGuire’s electorate. 7:30’s Paul Farrell is rebuffed by the Premier, Tuesday morning on the grounds that his questions are disrespectful.

“I refer you to my previous answer and please respect this press conference.”

Everyone knows what a bastard the truth can be; so it’s heart-warming to hear Gladys evading a question which goes to the heart of her integrity and credibility on the grounds of respect for what is, at best, a disastrous PR exercise.

How good is Covid Shield in protecting an unwary Premier from a matter she’d prefer kept off the record? If the NSW Premier keeps this up, she’ll be upstaging the Morrison government, the most secretive in our political history.

Given that the gun club grant is reassessed after she directly intervenes, when the original submission fails a cost-benefit analysis, a problem which never worries the PM with his sports rorts and his pork ‘n ride car parks, it would seem Gladys’ dismissal of the question shows her disrespect for the public; a shying away from her responsibility to act accountably with public funds.

But it’s no big deal, just a conflict of interest that would have the Newscorp pack howling had she been a Labor premier. Besides, she’s a minnow compared to the PMO with its colour-coded spreadsheet apportioning of the notorious sports rorts. And the sports rorts pale by comparison with Morrison’s $660 million carpark pork-‘n ride scandal.

Morrison appeals to national pride. It’s every Australian’s patriotic duty to comply with a corrupt, double-dealing state government, insanely keen to re-open at the end of August. NSW’s Delta variant now reaches Tasmania, while infection spreads in Victoria, South Australia and Queensland. Learn to live with it, he says. In the meantime, there’ll be a zillion doses of vax arriving next month or next year – and we’ve just got our hands on some Moderna, a vaccine which other countries procured months ago.

We’re “hitting our marks”, Morrison lies. Not only do those marks change daily, Greg Hunt, our lame duck Health Minister quacks that “so far” fewer than 57% of residential aged care workers have had their first vaccination dose. Group 1A is of course, the Bronte Python’s Flying Circus’ highest priority group. No mention is made of personal carers who make door to door home visits. They’ve been left out of the plan.

(Python here has a less familiar meaning: a person who is possessed by a spirit and prophesies by its aid.)

“This plan is a bubble without a thought,” sneers Moriarty Morrison, troubled by Labor’s $300 carrot. (Baker Street fans will know Moriarty, a sadistic, psychopath who shows fiendish cunning, grandiosity, incapacity for remorse, arrogance, and overweening self-confidence. Machiavellian, Moriarty commits no crimes directly, but shrewdly uses his networks to get others to carry out his dirty deeds for him.)

Naturally, Moriarty’s character traits are found also in other colleagues but he is the archetype of our post truth, post modern, PM. Just add a dose of raging mythomania and a mentor who runs a megachurch, or a multinational corporation, selling its flock a prosperity theology; God loves you if you’re rich, Moriarty.

It pays to belong to Hillsong. Being granted riches is part its gospel. Serve him well and ye shall receive material wealth. Morrison’s mentor, Brian Houston, whom the police are charging with concealing his father’s alleged child sexual abuse, has written a book about the subject. You Need More Money: Discovering God’s Amazing Financial Plan for Your Life. Yet Morrison baulks at paying punters to get the jab.

It’s out of the question, he barks. First and foremost, the government doesn’t have nearly enough vaccine to want to boost demand. Secondly, it’s really not a race. Suppliers won’t be hurried and the government has changed its tune from suppressing the virus to “learning to live with it” – or die as the case may be.

And there will be a lot of deaths to live with even the vague 70-80 per cent vaccination rate that our Prime Weasel is now making noises about. Up to two thousand in six months. Third, it’s a good idea- even if it is heresy to true believers; Albanese is turning his back on the Labor ethos, to Guy Rundle’s disgust; putting the cash nexus above solidarity forever. Cue ancient, false analogies, comparing Covid with the flu.

It’s all on ATAGI or Doherty advice of course, which is another conundrum the government loves. When it suits its case, the Morrison government would have us believe it is like putty in the hands of expert bodies. Yes sir. No sir. Three bags full sir. At other times, the PM boasts without spelling it out, of bullying ATAGI into line.

“And doing it for the CASH, this is not what would motivate an Australian.” Morrison goes off like a frog in a sock. Or “like a dropped scrabble-box”, tweets Labor’s Graham Perrett, as the PM leaps to his feet, this week, to “Holgate” a Labor proposal; denouncing Albo’s $300 offer to entice us to get vaccinated.

“A vote of no confidence” in the Australian people, bellows the PM, whose government is prepared to splurge on carparks in the air, (only two were ever built); $660m handpicked by the government on advice of its MPs and candidates; “sports rorts on steroids” says Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Andrew Giles, all to buy votes in marginal electorates – 77% of the car parks were in Coalition-held electorates. 10% were in six non-Coalition held electorates after a word with candidates.

It’s a bit rich for a government of spivs, shonks and expense account rorters to pretend that it’s un-Australian to do it for the cash. Especially, given the government’s entire flat-tax proposal is engineered to buy votes and reward its pals. And the wannabes. Whilst it chiefly benefits its fat cat pals, earning over $200,000, other lower-paid workers are enticed by the delusion that, one day they, too, could be big earners.

As for doing it for the cash, Morrison’s government condoned Job-Keeper rorts by thriving firms, such as Harvey Norman, a franchise operation which supplies stock on credit at a rate that would shame a pay-day lender. Clearly not satisfied with its windfall, Hardly Normal seeks to freeze retail wages via the National Retail Association.

It didn’t need $20.6 million. Gerry Harvey, himself, netted $70 million in dividends. As for Un-Australian, thousands of millionaires claimed JobSeeker unemployment pensions from Centrelink when the assets test was temporarily lifted for six months in 2020.

Guardian Australia reports in July that Wesley College, a fabulously well endowed, elite Melbourne school for the privileged, offered fee discounts of 20% last year after banking $20m in JobKeeper payments.

As this generosity is extended, however, with no expectation that fat cats who never needed JobKeeper have to refund their windfall, the federal government demands that unless 11,771 poor Centrelink clients pay back any overpayment, they will be slugged with an interest fee.

“As at 30 April 2021, approximately $32.8m in debt has been raised through completed reviews,” the agency tells Greens senator Rachel Siewert.

“This is not a game show,” harrumphs a PM whose government evolved from The Price is Right, or the AWB wheat for oil scandal, exposed in The Cole Inquiry of 2006, in which we paid Saddam Hussein’s government $300 million in bribes in violation of UN Sanctions. Alexander Downer endorsed the wheat exporter. In true game show spirit, the Coalition sprung a $40 million door prize on Rupert Murdoch so that Fox could do a bit more on women’s sport or something – no strings attached. No questions asked. Gave money to polluters to plant trees they would have planted anyway.

Morrison’s manufactured outburst is a sure sign that the government has, itself, canvassed jab incentive payments. Just as it’s likely to be embarrassed by any increase in demand for vaccines which it has contrived to under-supply. As for material reward, it’s certainly talking to TABCORP about a lottery open only to those who’ve had a jab and booster.

Running Operation Covid Shield is Lieutenant-General JJ Frewen, whose uniform adds an illusion of authority and authority to Morrison’s ShitShow™. JJ’s candid about cash incentives being on the table, just as he does not hold back in his public attack on Gladys Berejiklian the week before when she asks for more. Vaccine, that is.

Of course we’re kept in the dark as to whether he’s in charge or just another Morrison stooge; firing the PM’s bullets. Either way, his rebuke of a state premier is way out of line. Under any other Prime Minister, it would lead to his resignation.

The incident passes without mention because it is reported by Rick Morton of The Saturday Paper and later commented upon by The New Daily’s Bruce Pascoe.

“The most extraordinary newspaper story over the weekend disappeared with little trace, swamped by broader, more immediate COVID issues, the Olympics and journalism’s frequent failure to follow up another paper’s exclusive – the “not invented here” syndrome.” Pascoe writes.

Most of us are prevented from learning that an unelected official fires a broadside at a State Premier and that this is condoned by the PM who speaks after the Lieutenant General, of Operation Khaki Creep as The Australia Institute’s Allan Behm puts it.

Naturally, Morrison would be looking at gambling, gimmicks, tricks and spot prizes, perhaps even a getaway to Hawaii, if and when it ever re-opens. It is his stock in trade. His failure to lead in a pandemic is now a running sore even with rusted-on Tory supporters, such as Denis Shanahan, economics editor at, The Australian.

It’s also on the nose in Newspoll’s online survey, published Monday, which continues to show the Coalition’s downward trend in all other recent opinion polls. And the PM’s.

“Scotty’s incessant jawboning, self-promoting and self-applause – “don’t just do it, talk about it” is alarming. His personal approval rating, whatever that means, is negative, whilst not yet the -16 percentage points of his Tory mentor, Boris Johnson.

The Morrison misgovernment and its Covid Shit-Show™, as Bill Shorten dubs it, are now as unpopular as in the Black Summer fires – largely over its capacity to turn crisis into catastrophe; its scandalous ineptitude in every aspect of its pandemic response from supply to distribution to quarantine. Yet there’s no chance of a bipartisan approach to promote vaccination.

For Morrison, the promise of incentives is merely another chance to be hyper partisan, the doom loop of mutual mistrust which has severely corroded democracy in the US and in the UK, as parties and their voters retreat into tribal epistemologies, an increasingly incompatible set of facts, alternative facts and first principles – except that Labor has dropped its opposition to the Coalition’s plans to give a third bracket of tax cuts to the rich – to present a small target. But the government’s intent on giving in to the business class’s demands to open up shop, come hell or high fever, however it dissembles – and especially in its theatrical faux deference to the best medical advice and its fetish for acronyms such as ATAGI and TGA.

In The Mystery of the Miraculous Moving goalposts, the latest ripping yarn from our Prime Mini-serialist, Morrison, part of his prolific Roads to Nowhere series, a 75 per cent vaccination rate – suddenly drops to 56. Risky, irresponsible and out of step with overseas experience and local expertise, his roadmap out of Covid takes us down a one-way, dead-end street, at speed with no brakes, no-one at the wheel and the lights out.

Meanwhile, a virus spreads out of control in NSW into Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania, largely because the Morrison government botched its deal with Pfizer, underestimated the time it would take to produce sufficient quantities of AstraZeneca – and failed to set up an effective vaccination programme or quarantine system. Its lukewarm effort, its failure to secure vaccine and its insistence this is not a race, suggest more than ineptitude at play.

Remember, before his last-minute pivot, Morrison was, like Boris Johnson, happy to let ‘er rip. Above all, hovers the hypocrisy of a PM of handbrake turns; it was Pivot Morrison and his claque of ministers who urged open borders and railed against lockdowns, an idea, writes SMH’s economics editor, Ross Gittins,

“… eagerly pursued by the business lobbies and business’ media cheer squad. In his efforts to score points off Andrews, no one worked harder than Treasurer Josh Frydenberg to propagate the mythology that only Labor premiers were so dictatorial and disregarding of business wellbeing as to lockdown and close state borders at the first sneeze, whereas Liberal premiers knew how to get results with superior testing and contact tracing.”

Mystery is ghost written for the PM by his right hand man, John Kunkel, the PM’s Principal Private Secretary and his left hand man, former Crosby Textor CEO, Yaron “The Fixer” Finkelstein. There’s a bit of input from the Group, an assorted baker’s dozen of brown-nosed MPs, (Hunt’s in there), the odd hard-nosed miner, department head, past and present along with a clutch of big business and big banking bovver boys.

Mystery is about our path to a normal that doesn’t exist, as Pacific leaders remind Australia’s PM, who appears on Zoom, ripping into a slice of toast like a famished Mako shark at the Pacific Island forum leaders, 51st Meeting. It’s a confronting image of neo-colonial rapacity and Australia’s Pacific Aid.

The toast doesn’t stand a chance.

Incredibly, leaders are offended by vision of Morrison Zooming while on the tooth – not just because many Pasifika peoples consider it impolite to guts yourself while someone else is talking to you – especially the leader of Tuvalu – but because it’s clear that Morrison doesn’t give a toss about climate change; an existential threat to Islanders ahead of the rest of us. There’s also more than a hint of white privilege.

Minders are meant to make sure that the PM doesn’t disgrace himself in public. Do everything but eat his toast for him, Kunkel and Finkelstein are the masterminds behind the chaos, catastrophe and corruption of Scott Morrison’s Gaslight Orchestra but can reasonably disavow all responsibility for the PM’s “learn to live with it” speech last Friday.

Morrison confuses everyone, partly because what he says bears scant resemblance to the Doherty Report, on which it is based and partly because it just doesn’t make sense.

There is no normal after this pandemic, Rick Morton points out in The Saturday Paper.

“The figures don’t provide for it mostly because they can’t.”

Cue the spin doctors. No-one knows Morrison’s pet-name for his minders, Fink ‘n Kunk? “Funk” has a ring about it given the desperation in the office these days with the PM’s perceived pandemic management plummeting, as it frets over a slew of bad opinion polls; Morrison’s negative popularity and the Coalition’s fading electoral prospects.

Friday, the PM makes another palaver about a Pandemic Exit Plan an “updated four-phase road map” that, in fact, has only two phases – only gets us six months down the track and contains absolutely nothing about the thousands a week likely to die once we “ease” restriction. As if that matters. Even 70 per cent means 2000 deaths over six months.

There’s nothing you can’t achieve if you lower your goals – as you see in a suite of federal policies from energy to environment to elder abuse and neglect in “aged-care facilities” locked down in profit-driven private prisons, staffed by underpaid, overworked casuals who are forced to share their services or COVID across several institutions.

And you can fox clever. Friday, our wily PM slyly mis-reports The Doherty Report as way out of our Delta blues. If we have three quarters of any one Australian state vaccinated and provided the Australian nation meets the same goal, lockdown will be lifted and we can go back to our Australian lives of blissful, contented fulfilment. Bingo. Feet up. Name your poison.

Gladys Berejiklian’s clearly smoking something. Several days in a row she’s been talking up a fifty per cent vaccination rate allowing restrictions to be lifted in most places. Kerry Chant’s on record Tuesday saying this would not be a good idea. Boris Johnson’s adopted the hands-free-let-‘er-rip approach to steering Little Britain through the UK’s Covid crises, driven by the latest headlines. My, it’s been a tremendous success.

For the virus, that is. Modelling suggests that the central case for UK daily hospitalisations at the peak of the third wave – expected at the end of August – could be between 1,000 and 2,000, with deaths predicted to be between 100 and 200 per day.

Last Friday sees the fiftieth “National Cabinet” another of Morrison’s fantasies, according to a recent verdict of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, explaining that it’s not an extension of cabinet; which means he can’t claim confidentiality. It’s a pity because, for a while it seemed such a neat way to get the premiers to do all the work while the federal government took the credit. It’s not working the way it should.

Now it’s Australian to do whatever the PM suggests. Australian content in the PM’s Shouty-McShoutface-oratory has been absurdly increased lately; but if patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, his first refuge is the barefaced lie. Scott Morrison’s no ordinary mythomaniac, however, nor pathological liar, he actually believes that because he’s said a thing, then it is true – not only true and incontrovertible but a precedent.

Strap yourself in, Australia. It’s going to be a wild Australian freedom ride.

“So, last Friday I announced Australia’s plan to live with the virus. I announced the whole country’s plan to get us back to that position where we can ultimately live with this virus, in the same way that we live with other infectious diseases that are present in the community, and we can get on with our lives.”

Aussie Morrison wraps himself in the flag and kids us it’s Australia’s plan, when in fact it’s a federal rather than a national plan. More specifically, it’s his government’s bid to appease Liberal Party donors who care more about their profits than our health. If it’s a plan at all, given that it’s not compulsory and there’s no timeline. No way known to man of calculating when we enter the last two phases.

Could be a few thousand dead each month, says Doherty, but, Morrison has been told, we’ve got to learn to live with the virus.

Or not as the case may be. The plan is a marvel of lucidity, cogency and futility.

“Phases [are] triggered in a jurisdiction when the average vaccination rates across the nation have reached the threshold and that rate is achieved in a jurisdiction expressed as a percentage of the eligible population (16+)…”

But if a crap vaccination state is stuck on fifty, the rest of the nation can still party on. (Lift your game NSW) but that’s the joy of federation, the rest of us need not hold back. And won’t. Given the state’s track record of infecting the rest of the nation – surely, it’ll be the other way round. Other countries, such as the US warn of the danger of localised pockets of pandemic, typically where anti-vaxxers are active.

Big business and high finance will be over the moon, however. A baker’s dozen strong, Morrison’s Group, a cabal of MPs, corporate heads, merchant bankers, civil servants, past and present, seem bent on an October election. Former Crosby Textor CEO, Finkelstein has mapped out the narrative.

Behold! Morrison, a deeply spiritual, otherworldly, almost saintly being, whose religion is everything to him, according to recent PMO press and emetic puff pieces, is now reborn, remade and with added hair plugs.

Let ‘er rip. Stop all this lockdown oppression. Open those borders. All hail our liberator, a sort of Simon Bolivar of Sutherland Shire in reverse.

Holy ScoMo will give us our freedom by lifting lockdown, just as a stash of vaccine arrives on our shores, which he defends from The Evil Empire of the Expanding Panda, China, a bad actor, which flouts a new Us-led global rules based order (neo-colonialism), runs bat-infested wet markets, does us down on trade and spies on our war games with the US. Cue a lot of play-acting which includes an Uncle Arthur slide-show or a presentation where the print is too small to read.

It’s not a bug. It’s a design feature. Morrisonian Democracy, invisible to the naked eye.

Affecting an eye-catching red, yellow and black, patterned neck-tie in a beguiling, serpentine, indigenous motif, borrowed from Ken Wyatt, perhaps, Snake oil Morrison is spruiking the success of his mob’s billion dollar reboot, or Closing The Gap 2.0, Thursday, when he abruptly abandons Ken.

It’s his style as laid down in crisis management 101; when the pandemic hit plague proportions, when you’re called out over your rorts, your pork barrelling and your diabolical failure to order enough vaccine, let alone discharge your responsibilities to those in aged care or those who must be put in quarantine – put out a good news story.

Slap on the snake oil. Smirk. Don’t twerk- leave that to Clive Palmer – Find something upbeat. Or beat something up. But Thursday, the Crosby-Textor playbook, the strategists who did so well for Theresa May and Malcolm Turnbull, lets a rattled PM down. He cuts and runs. Beats a hasty retreat. Makes a disgraceful exit.

What prompts Morrison to hurriedly exit stage right, pursued by a bear, like Antigonus who abandons the baby Perdita in The Winter’s Tale? A reporter asks about carparks.

It’s another stellar performance from a government which excels in showing itself up despite all its brilliant minders, its fixers and the grubs that “background” against their enemies, as they do against Brittany Higgins by leaking against David Sharaz, her partner.

Our PM blows hard, ending his homily on working together with our indigenous peoples by abandoning his Minister for Indigenous Australians to face a feral press on stage, alone.

Morrison pivots, Ducks and weaves out of the line of fire into the haven of a PMO where his minders, fixers and flunkeys are working out how to tell him that the carnival is over now that the AAPT has ruled that the PM has no grounds to keep his “national cabinet” proceedings secret given that it is not a subcommittee of the federal cabinet .

But don’t get your hopes up. There are no minutes. Just a record of outcomes such as Morrison announces after every meeting. No chance at all of unearthing any real dirt, such as what JJ – Lieutenant General John Frewen said when he monstered Gladys Berejiklian last week.

Ken’s breakthrough is that communities are involved. Apart from its title sounding enough like the Coalition to confuse unwary punters with Liberal Party which shacks up with the boondoggling, pork-barrelling, Akubra-wearing Nats, in a ruse to get enough seats to form government, the Coalition of Peaks represents community organisations.

Badly. It’s an outfit which senior Aboriginal leaders, including Noel Pearson, Professor Megan Davis and Roy Ah-See Pat Dodson claim lacks a mandate and is not representative of Aboriginal people. But you’ll hear nothing but good news of the breakthrough – which meets only three targets, can’t measure another seven, but gets the Coalition of Peaks on board. Nor will you hear anything but praise about carparks.

In a scene straight out of Utopia, Simon Birmingham tells former Sky News political editor, David Speers, now helping to turn away audiences as host of ABC Insiders:

“The Australian people had their chance and voted the Morrison government back in at the last election and we are determined to get on with local infrastructure, as we are nation-building infrastructure,” Birmingham tells Speers.

Poor Ken Wyatt, already a conflicted figure in a mining-lobby dominated government denying constitutional recognition and a voice to parliament by pretending it is a request for a third chamber in a bi-cameral parliament which can barely cope at that, left in the lurch once again … as the new plan is air-brushed to cover its conceptual failure, the notion that if old white men keep estimating indigenous disadvantage every year, systemic racism, paternalism and inequality will disappear but not as rapidly as the heat-evading missile that is the PM this Thursday.

“We’re doing things differently with accountability and transparency, and in true partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders,” Morrison’s statement, says.

“We are a good team and good teams know how to win when they are behind in the heavy weather on a hard and muddy track. That’s how you know you are a good team.”

That and moving the goalposts. Opening up at fifty per cent vaccination will be a disaster for NSW. And the percentages which Morrison is throwing around are shonky. Neither of his 70 or 80 per cent vaccination targets include children under sixteen. Above all, Morrison is misrepresenting the Doherty Report which is not a plan to open up prematurely at all but as a cover for his intentions to follow Boris Johnson.

As Morton points out the Doherty Report is no “roadmap to freedom.”

Under an 80 per cent vaccination scenario, the report is careful to underscore that low public health measures may be enough to control an outbreak. But to reduce the transmission potential of the Delta strain below one – similar to a virus reproductive number, below one demonstrates control – the Doherty work indicates moderate public health responses including stay-at-home orders will be needed at 70 per cent and possibly even at 80 per cent.

But that’s not what the Prime Minister is saying. But since when, in any field of endeavor, particularly climate science or medicine has Morrison ever been constrained by what the experts have to say? What he’s about to do now is not merely foolhardy, it’s an act of dereliction of duty of care, an act of criminal negligence. And rather than egg her on from the sidelines, he needs to let Gladys know that opening up NSW on a fifty per cent vaccination rate will bring no her state no freedoms. But it will invite disaster.

Don’t you just love the suspense? A tiny peepshow of a lectern opens on your widescreen as Fauziah Ibrahim interrupts her “show” as she is wont to call ABC News 24; the PRIME MINISTER, is about to make an announcement (all brought to you less by the ABC than by mining magnate and Titanic liar, billionaire Wide-Boy Clive Palmer).

Indirectly. Clive’s $80 million negative advertising blitz on MSM and social media won the Coalition an election it fully expected to lose in 2019. Hence ScoMo’s massive, rorty cash splash. But how good were UAP’s anti-Labor, Shifty Shorten lies? Expect another round, when Morrison calls a snap khaki-Covid 2021 election with Lieutenant-General JJ Frewen in support; waiting at attention in the background.

There’s billions in the war chest, in large part, thanks to Liberal bag-man and Reaganite Josh Frydenberg who speaks softly and carries a big debt; his deficit binge is unprecedented. Of course it’s not all on our tab. It’s topped up by corporates and other donors with deep pockets but shallow arms when it comes to paying workers or taxes.

But how good’s the AEC now no-one can tell just how far you are open for business?

The AEC’s just come up with a nifty way of making it even harder to track donations – the new, you-beaut “other receipts” category in which donations over $14,300 are left to the discretion of giver or receiver, reports Luke Stacey for Michael West Media on the latest scam to corrupt our democracy.

But the money’s in the bag, as Bernard Keane notes, a pair of $100 billion deficits, the biggest in our history outside an economic crisis, despite unemployment being predicted to dip under five per cent.

“If the government can’t win an election with this cash splash, it should give up politics.”

And the PM’s always in election mode. Morrison’s legacy to Australian politics will not just be his petty point-scoring or his toxic hyperpartisanship – or behaving like a vainglorious lout – that all started with Abbott, who was also a notorious liar – nor his gargantuan gaming of funding schemes to funnel billions into electoral campaigns, nor as Bill Shorten says on ABC Insiders, his obsession with secrecy, running his government inside a “black box” – although any one of these would earn The Prime Gas Lighter undying notoriety, as would his lies, in any other government were it not so utterly, wantonly corrupt and inept.

This is what gaslighting looks like, tweets Bradpsychology.

March 2020: “I’m going to watch the Sharks while I still can.”

July 2020: “We’ve got to live with the virus.”

Yesterday: “I’ve been calling this a national emergency for two years.”

Whilst this is, indeed, Olympic class gas-lighting, Morrison will go down in history as the PM who pork-barrelled vaccines. He’s got something up his sleeve. Gladys has been publicly begging other states for their share of vax so that she can be seen to be doing something other than pleading with the great unwashed from her balcony. All of this runs through your mind while you try to follow Fauzia but that peephole is so distracting.

Perhaps the PM will roll out a barrel of vax Friday, you wonder, as he’s about to dash out of another COAG, meeting, which it suits him to dress up as “National Cabinet”; the delusion of a constitutional nincompoop but a grandiose title, Morrison feels can only add to his importance. Ionesco worried about how such abuse of language robbed us of our individuality and humanity. To say nothing of integrity and truth.

But it bigs our Bald Prima Donna up – as he shrewdly calculates.

As does keeping the nation waiting. Yet he’s got to be careful with the optics.

Big-noting yourself can backfire a bit in politics as in the real life. Hubris, the ancient Greeks called it, excessive pride, violating the bounds set for humans. And it was punished by the gods. Well, the PM is being put back in his box by Pfizer.

Morrison keeps us waiting even when his presser’s held at his home at Kirribilli. As it almost always is now. No good knocking. Clearly, like the porter in Macbeth, Morrison has a bit of trouble opening his own door. The Porter, nevertheless, has Morrison The Prime Equivocator’s number in Macbeth;

Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. O, come in, equivocator.

Why it was only in May that Scotty modestly declared victory over Covid. We are “out of the emergency phase” he says. Disbands his Covid Commission Advisory Board. Job done. Mission accomplished. Huge back-pat of self in public. Group hugs. Selfie sticks a-hoy. Stellar A-listers, such as Jane Halton, a former chair of what Paul Barratt agrees was the “appallingly named” People Smuggling Task Force – of Babies Overboard and Crown notoriety can always get a government out of a tight spot.

Halton has been a boon also to Crown’s board despite a fragile memory, although counsel assisting the NSW Crown Resorts casino inquiry, Adam Bell SC, accuses her of playing semantics. Splitting hairs, playing semantics or casuistry is a big part of the Canberra Babel-bubble that is ScoMo-town.

The COVID-19 Commission Advisory Board was established by the federal government to have a go-to panel of experts that would help it ‘troubleshoot in the crisis management phase of the pandemic’ Morrison bullshits, but don’t you love his officalese? You can tell he’s an apparatchik from way back by his verbiage. Today, three states in lockdown may be cursing the PM for his boondoggle.

Nifty Nev Power, formerly of Fortescue Metals and other business-class blowhards were supposedly meeting, and pooling their experience; “looking at things from a business perspective”. AKA putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse.

How do we profit out of Covid? It’s beyond business types to think of others. Pop over in our private jet to Dr Albert Bourla the Pfizer-Kaiser, uncrowned emperor of the Southern world? Go down on bended knee? Never was going to happen.

Ensure we had adequate supplies of vaccine secured? A viable distribution or quarantine system? Never crosses their minds unless they can cut a deal. If only CSL and AstraZeneca had paid off. Morrison’s Covid commission con will cost him dearly. Some of the tamed estate are already connecting the dots between the Prime Time Waster, the pandemic and his criminal neglect of critical responsibilities.

Of course, like leading the world and being at the head of the queue it was another Morrison con. The outcome, after a year of expensive deliberations, was the “gas-led recovery” another pipe-dream. Gas will be so costly it will impede any recovery. Not to mention its dirty little secret – methane emissions. No-one could call it green energy. We’ll soon be paying an external carbon tax because we ditched our own.

Yet Power’s ploy serves the gas industry. Appeases the mining industry. Wins votes in Queensland electorates and in big mining muppet Joel Fitzgibbon’s benighted Hunter.

“Remember, my value is: we look after our mates,” Morrison told us 6 September 2018.

And ourselves first. Like a self-inflating Michelin man, Scotty’s been puffing himself up ever since he bought his miracle win. Yet, at the risk of hurting thin-skinned Clive’s feelings, we can’t leave Murdoch’s puffery out of the picture. Nor its uncanny capacity to turn on ScoMo’s frenemies.

Witness the Daily Tele’s bagging Glad recently. Papped as she and new beau, defamation silk, Arthur Moses SC, duck out unmasked on a morning coffee run.

How very dare she? Her mask-wearing rules are “ambiguous”, thunders the Tele. My, the PMO’s fixer has been busy. The Australian’s Katrina Grace Kelly also does a reverse ferret back-flip, (UK journo Kelvin MacKenzie held that a good reporter should stick a ferret up a public figure’s trousers), based on the Northern sport of ferret-legging. Fawning and flattery saw him run out of his office shouting, “Reverse Ferret!”

MacKenzie would keep very fit in Australia media establishments. KG Kelly, too is exercised, even though her gymnastics may be triggered by a press drop from a PMO fixer. Whatever its origin, the rebuke is clear. And a fair call.

“The NSW government must be held to account. Its actions endanger its own people and the rest of the nation. Failure will cause misery, illness and death, and eliminate our one strategic advantage – isolation and international border closures.”

But it’s not just a pliant press, billion dollar handouts to the likes of Gerry Harvey, via the heavily rorted JobKeeper and powerful media mogul mates prop up our dud PM – whom Hugh McKay says is not even a good salesman;

“In the world of commercial product marketing, brand integrity matters. Honesty matters. Sincerity matters. Delivering on your promises matters. And so does some grasp of the psychology of communication. Yet Morrison shows no evidence that he understands any of this.”

Along with a fawning claque of press gallery courtiers posing as reporters, credit for Morrison’s miracle win and the stupor mundi that is his rapidly unravelling misgovernment is also due to carparks in the air, SportsRorts© – dwarfed tenfold or eleven according to Michael Pascoe by the Community Development Grants program and pork-barrelling; an election bought with rorts; so on the nose that you get a fishy whiff every time Morrison is due to speak.

A fish rots from the head down, but this government is also rotten to the core. From Robo-debt’s extortion of the poor and the tightening of NDIS – a sadistic cruelty which McKay believes Morrison appears to enjoy – through to the 1000% mark up on the Leppington triangle land for a Liberal donor, wall to wall corruption.

From leaking against Julia Banks and David Sharaz, partner of Brittany Higgins, whose alleged rapist appears to have vanished, to the $3.7 million the government is prepared to spend in the prosecution of Witness K and Bernard Collaery – just to deter to any would-be whistle blowers in the future – corruption.

It’s a study in putrescence rotten with sleaze, self-interest, scams, rorts and malice aforethought.

South Korean contemporary sculpture and installation artist Lee Bul, whose work “questions patriarchal authority and the marginalization of women by revealing ideologies that permeate our cultural and political sphere” captures our federal government’s essence with her Majestic Splendour, (1991-2018) a series of sequin-covered rotting fish she displayed at London’s Hayward Gallery.

Tragically, Majestic Splendour catches fire as it is being removed. Lee had added potassium permanganate to attenuate the stench. In an otherwise flawless 1997 showing at New York’s MoMa, Majestic Splendour’s stench makes visitors puke. But the chemical is also an accelerant.

Only minimal damage is done to the gallery thanks to the London Metropolitan Fire Brigade who are quick on the scene to extinguish the exploding fish but Morrison may not be so lucky.

Trashing Labor helps. Flash forward to Saturday’s Dan Bash. Richard Willingham tells ABC viewers that “frustration is mounting” with the Victorian government when a trio of orchestrated demonstrations against lockdown, vaccination, 5G, reason and common-sense, bring thousands into the streets of Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide. Things turn ugly. Violent. A man punches a police-horse in Sydney.

Dan is almost done according to Willingham who detects “a general shittiness around the community over the latest lockdown. His article’s headline reads,

“Premier Andrews needs to offer hope to ease mounting anger, but it’s a nearly impossible task”

Oddly, apart from the PM’s favoured Newscorp stable, there is generally less censure for Gladys. But give it time.

For Sydney in a Clayton’s lockdown, there are fears that this will prove a super-spreader. The super-spreader, however, is Morrison who’s knocked back vaccines offered by the almighty Pfizer Corporation, failed to discharge the federal government’s responsibility for quarantine and totally failed the supply and distribution challenges of a vaccine roll-out. But what will be his spiel on Friday?

We are besides ourselves in anticipation.

No. He’s not coming out to tell us he didn’t shit himself in Engadine Maccas. He did that a week ago on Sydney radio’s top-rating Kyle and Jackie O Show, while the city is locked down in a pandemic of epic proportions for, which Morrison is largely responsible. He brings it up, himself. Priorities.

When Gladys was on KIIS she came bearing gifts, a set of cuff-links for a man who never wears a shirt and a bottle of red and a white. That’s when she swore she would never ever impose a lockdown.

But look over there. Up pops a lonely lectern in a little picture frame all on its own down low. It’s OK, you can still read the chyron. How good is a single wooden prop to build our mounting excitement? Waiting for ScoMo. There’s a lot of Beckett’s theatre of the absurd about the entire Morrison production. He’s kept us all waiting for years. And frustrated. Existential angst? Who can forget the balding prima donna’s bravura performance in The Boat Stoppers, a long-running theatre of cruelty soap opera?

At first a weekly presser with a mute, uniformed Angus Campbell doing backup vocals as ScoMo militarised our compassion. No. You can’t ask questions about any on water matter. National security is at stake. Then the weekly Canberra soapie moved to Sydney so ScoMo could be home for tea. After a few heady, histrionics from the man who would keep us all safe, the pressers became more infrequent until they petered about altogether, in line with every enterprise Morrison has ever been involved in.

The suspense of awaiting his Prime-ness to bless us with his presence mounts as Scott Almighty Morrison keeps the nation waiting, as he does last Friday, only to bust out of the almost suburban door of the Lodge, interior all done up nicely on a frugal budget of $8.8 million by Tony Abbott and his Canberra landlady Peta Credlin.

Tragically, Abbo never got to move in thanks to Fizza Turnbull knifing him and the Morrisons are never there, expect on sufferance, under Covid.

And the last Trump shall sound. Morrison dashes out of the Lodge to appear at a greatly relieved lectern. His face is a study. Things are not going well in the National Cabinet. The premiers have been used to fighting the pandemic by themselves and now for the PM it’s like herding cats. Morrison’s upstaged by his own pretension. Mike Seccombe’s impeccable contacts give us the inside story.

Straight into the call, the New South Wales government minister was ripping into Scott Morrison. The prime minister had two jobs, he said: roll out the vaccination program and fix the quarantine system. “And he stuffed it.”

When it was suggested to the minister that he sounded as if he was reciting Anthony Albanese’s talking points, he replied: “Well Albo’s absolutely correct.”

The Lodge looks scruffy on the outside. Needs a paint job. No wonder ScoMo spurns it in preference to playing King of Kirribilli. But then again, he has tickets on his tickets on himself. He is as Katharine Murphy says, aspirational; a project still in process.

Morrison’s speech is ordinary, too, when at last we get to hear it. He’s an Olympic standard word salad tosser and a Gish galloper who’s almost impossible to parse or follow. Sets out to overwhelm his audience with as many arguments as possible, with no regard for the accuracy, validity, or relevance of those arguments.

The Delta variant completely changes the game, he tells us. And off he gallops using a favourite personal brow-beater, the completely spurious list. My, how he loves to list information already well known. It gives him time to think, of course; a temporizer, but it’s also a tactic he knows will wear his listeners down. Here he goes

“… the Delta variant presents a very fresh challenge and we have to adapt and we have to change on occasions how we do things, just as countries are all around the world, whether they be in Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, indeed of course here in Australia and across Europe and other parts of the world. That’s the nature of the Delta variant.”

Masochistic readers can enjoy the full text of his edited presser themselves. By the second paragraph he’s come up with the solution. We’ve got to soldier on.

“So, in New South Wales, as we continue to combat this in Sydney, what I want to say to those in Sydney is we’ve got to press on. We’ve got to continue to show that strength. We’ve got to continue to support each other. There are no easy solutions here. There are no silver bullets, just as there were not last year when Victoria went through their prolonged lockdown. This thing only gets beaten by suppressing it. Of course, vaccines can put wind at the back of those who are trying to achieve that outcome, and that’s what we have to do.”

If only we’d remembered to buy the vaccines, which are morphing here from a shot in the arm to a tailwind for those of us who are keen to stay alive or out of an ICU. If only we’d got them into peoples’ arms. We’ve had plenty of time to do both.

Spoiler alert: the day after his presser in which he publicly sends Gladys “Oliver” Berejiklian, who dares asks for more, away with an empty vax bowl, in another Oliver Twist (remember he played the Artful Dodger in his High School production, in 1982 – the PM or his fixer comes up with a solution. He has a secret stash of vaccine.

Sceptics wonder if this just a virtual surplus vaccine derived by extending the Pfizer second shot from three to six weeks – against all medical advice.

(“I’d Do Anything” is the anthem of the resourceful pickpocket and street urchin). So well cast. Right on cue, The Dodger finds some more vaccine in a national stockpile that must have fallen down the back of the sofa – no- not that sofa. The next day.

As the learned Dr Sheep Devil Person aka Dr Jennifer Wilson tweets,

Morrison says he has “found” 280,000 Pfizer doses. But he couldn’t “find” anything when Queensland asked two weeks ago? Only the most vile person would play games with vaccines in this way.

Buddy, our PM’s photogenic pet black Schnoodle, gets his own column (paywalled) in our yellow press; The Daily Telegraph. Bet you never had Schnoodle on your ScoMo winter bingo card. Schnoodle could become a transitive verb, given the recent dip in approval ratings for Morrison in three major polls; Guardian Essential, Nine’s Resolve Monitor and NewsPoll.

Trust that mongrel, Morrison, to schnoodle up to us after failing to deliver on any vaccination promise, people could say. But how good, how quick are his new promises? If stringing a country along were an Olympic event, (and Covid’s entrance in this year’s $20bn Tokyo Olympics may cause its committee chief to pull the pin). Morrison would be sensational; a world champion, instead of making Australia a pariah over its lame “zero by 2050, preferably, BS. And now we’re a laughing stock. The BBC, CNN and NYT are asking how Australia could botch its pandemic response so comprehensively.

Now Scotty’s let everyone in Australia down. Three states are in lockdown because he couldn’t get his vax act together. Five people have died in NSW. ICUs are filling up with people who need intubation just to breathe. Your heart goes out to the family of the mother in her fifties who is found dead in her home, Saeeda Akobi Jjou Stu, 57.

Her twin sons Roni and Ramsin Shawka, 27, are charged by police for allegedly working while infectious with coronavirus. They say a language barrier is to blame. They didn’t fully understand how the lockdown applied to them. NSW Health authorities claim the deceased woman was offered “alternate” meaning alternative care. Vaccination would have helped. The Health Minister and his PM are full of lame excuses as to why vaccine supply is too little and too late.

Or silence. Other countries could secure a billion does, Chris Bowen claims. Kevin Rudd has a virtual meeting with the Pfizer CEO and Chairman Albert Bourla to ask if a million doses can be brought forward. Bourla is insulted by Morrison’s attempt to bargain through a junior bureaucrat. Rudd says our PM has not bothered to pick up the phone to Bourla.

Morrison certainly knows how to use his ScoMobile. He makes fifty-five calls to thirty world leaders to get Mathias Cormann a post as top dog of the OECD, in a job-seeking junket that cost us $11,000 per day, but he can’t place a single call with the Pfizer Czar? Even that genocidal crook, Packer’s pal, Bibi Netanyahu, could make nice with Pfizer.

“Netanyahu was obsessive, calling me dozens of times, even at 3 AM!” Dr Bourla laughs. But what seals the deal is that Israel boasts one of the most advanced health services in the world – every Israeli, Jew or Arab, young or old, is enrolled in a public health service. Highly organized, it could immediately begin to inject millions with the vaccine very quickly.

Israel puts us to shame. Morrison goes fully Bodmin to gate-crash a G7 in Cornwall, but does he button-hole a single leader who could help us? No he skives off on a pub crawl and he just must look up a felon in his family tree.

Current opinion polls are a slap down; rebuking the federal government and its leader for stuffing up. You had only two jobs to do. Vaccination and quarantine. Albo likes to remind him. You did neither. Punters blame the federal government for the mess we’re in with Delta. No-one buys the bullshit of a brand-new, four phase plan. It’s just the old five phase plan with bit of pruning, although to hear Morrison spin you would expect at least a bit of topiary.

In the eternal sunshine of Scotty’s spotless mind, he has already won. Of course. Not only will Buddy turn all this around like a border collie with wayward mob of merinos, Dr Doolittle will skip away unscathed. But others beg to differ.

“… a drover’s dog could lead the Labor Party to victory the way the country is and the way the opinion polls are.”

Bill Hayden was miffed in 1983 to be stiffed by the silver bodgie; rolled for the leadership by Robert James Lee Hawke, (1929-2019). But Bill could be right on the money again. There’s talk of Albo needing a bit more of a combover, or a makeover or a total replacement but such misgivings may be redundant. In Australian politics, oppositions don’t win elections; governments lose them and Morrison is shaping spectacularly as a loser; a reverse Steve Bradbury.

This week brings news of another huge SNAFU. Instead of discovering how to prevent and treat COVID-19, the Morrison government frittered its research investment on the now-discredited hydroxychloroquine treatment, according to the Medical Journal of Australia. Craig Kelly is out but Clive Palmer must have friends in high places. Or a big war chest.

With over half the nation’s population now locked-down, uptight or out of sight in the Morrison Shit-Show™ as Bill Shorten calls the federal government’s delta debacle; its failure to deliver on any of its vaccination promises is telling. No-one trusts its offers of support: you get no money if you’re already on a pension.

But you do get the compassionate Anne Ruston looking after you with her industrial-strength tough love – or is it withering contempt? Coercive control?

Who can forget her slur on those out of work, that raising Newstart would be a gift to drug dealers?

While a yellow press uses lurid features and sensationalised reports in newspapers, along with dog stories and beat ups featuring druggie dole-bludgers, to entice readers and boost circulation, The Terrograph or Smellograph as it is also known, is also, like Sky and The Australian, larding Murdoch’s sewer with a fatberg of Liberal propaganda.

Where does Murdoch begin and Morrison end? They are joined at the hip-pocket.

In Morrison’s case, moreever, The Daily Telegraph helped a hugely unpopular candidate but a useful idiot cheat the system. Himself.

The Tele helped create Morrison, MP. News Corp’s notorious, dog-eat-dog Tory dung-heap-raking, dirt sheet gave Morrison a way to hack into post-truth federal politics. He’s always keen to think outside the box. The ballot box.

In four articles in July 2007, “The Tele” defames Lebanese Christian Michael Towke; causing NSW Libs to dump ScoMo’s democratically pre-selected rival candidate for blue ribbon Cook. Towke is pilloried as some type of imposter; a serial liar. Accusing another of your own behaviour is a classic gas lighter’s tactic. Towke wins a defamation case which News Limited settles out of court. But irreparable harm is done to Towke and his family. The stress puts his mother into hospital.

Faking a family pet’s perspective is another nifty initiative from the same creative whiz behind the fifty-five million dollar fiasco of the 2014 Cambodian Solution, which resettles two refugees -another Morrison Shit-Show™ stunt, light years ahead of its time. And how good are budgie smugglers? Morrison’s unique genius in marketing NSW Liberal Peter Debnam in his swimmers helped him lose the 2007 NSW Liberal election Shit-Show™. Labor had a field day.

“The member for Vaucluse barely ventured outside his harbourside comfort zone. But when he did, it was for staged stunts in his Speedos. That’s not listening to the community, it’s offending common decency,” then NSW Transport and Police Minister, who later become Labor Deputy-Premier, John Watkins, calls out ScoMo’s modus operandi.

Robodebt is another Morrison brainwave, hatched in his thirteen months’ stint as Minister for Social Services, a brief role which, nevertheless, created interminable suffering for victims. Apart from those who took their own lives.

At least 2,000 vulnerable citizens who had received a Robodebt notice between July 2016 and October 2018, died during that period, although with no official coroner’s report, it is not known how many were driven to suicide.

Robodebt went beyond offending common decency and into court where the government wasted $1.2 billion settling a case it should never have brought. The total comprised refunds of $721 million to 373,000 people, $112 million in compensation and $398 million in cancelled debts.

Given the PM’s pathological obsession with secrecy, no-one will ever know just how many similar triumphs he or his office are behind. Or why. There’s the baffling disappearance of Brittany Higgins’ alleged rapist who once had access to the entire ministerial wing at Parliament House and who could knock up security in the small hours. If he were a Labor staffer, there’d be such a brouhaha and a hullaballoo from the Murdoch media you’d never hear the end of it.

This week comes news of an optional online learning module of two hours for staffers and one hour for MPs. Brilliant. Fix up all that disrespecting. Of females. The women who marched on parliament have been studiously insulted. Mocked. Abused.

Sends a clear message to all serial sex pests. The boys’ club rules, OK?. But there are signs of waning support for the PM and his government among women. Finger On the Button, Dutton keen to keep himself relevant as his PM crashes and burns, beats up two Chinese spy ships lurking in international waters off Queensland to watch our navy’s sailors play war games with America’s.

Settle down, Dutto. Chinese ships visited when the biennial games started in 2017 and again in 2019. Let’s not pretend it’s up there with malicious cyber warfare, although it’s touching to see how we come running, panting, when our US masters need token support from their imperialist running dog lackeys as we were in Mao’s era. Bound to help our merchants solve China’s current Aussie export embargo.

If spying’s old hat, it also seems the hard way to garner Oz-defence secrets. All it takes to get into the defence minister’s office is a Liberal junior staffer or two with a pass, even at absurdly early hours of the morning. You don’t even have to be sober. Any security guard who challenges this system and speaks on ABC will be sacked.

If a Yellow Peril 2.0, doesn’t put the wind up you, a blue Katie Hopkins™ pops up on the starboard bow just when the PM and his open-all- hours poster girl, Gladys Berejiklian, need another Shit-Show™ distraction. Hopkins’ claims to fame include being caught en flagrante delicto frolicking naked in a field with Mark Cross, a former married colleague, but her racist bigotry and attacks on refugees make her a serious threat to the Coalition’s One Nation supporters.

“Get over yourself,” Katie tells a UK journo. I’ve stolen both my husbands. There’s a tip right there, Kerry and Peter, for Farmer Wants a Wife.

Billed as a “far-right provocateur” and a “reality TV personality”, both iron-clad guarantees of security – if not integrity – in our state-sponsored dog whistling racist political culture, Hopkins is astonished to be given the bum’s rush after she flouts quarantine rules by refusing to wear a mask or anything else in her luxurious quarantine hotel, a grave risk to our multi-skilled AFP wallopers on room service calls. She hopes to “frighten the shit out of them” by answering the door naked, she boasts.

Hopkins’ deportation mirrors the overkill of Morrison’s slathering attack on Christine Holgate, over the Cartier watches she gave a few workers as bonuses. We all know, now, that Holgate was not on board with his plan to privatise Australia’s Post. Had to go. By bullying a woman, from the floor of the House, protected by parliamentary privilege, Morrison hopes to pose as an authority figure who just happens to go MIA whenever there’s set of bad opinion poll results, or a Covid or a bushfire crisis.

Barking Barnaby Joyce, a changed man, he tells us, also gets a chance to butch up and put the boot in on Insiders. If he’s going to be paid a Deputy Prime Minister’s salary, he might at least pretend to take the high moral ground with Ms Hopkins over her breach of quarantine etiquette, even if he is upstaged by his mate Kerry Stokes’ outfit Channel 7 whose business end terminates Katie’s Celebrity Big Brother contract, given the threat that advertisers might boycott his Olympics broadcasts. If there is an Olympics.

Behind his Po-face, however, WA’s bantam rooster and Ben Roberts Smith godfather, billionaire mining, construction and media showman Stokes is laughing all the way to the bank. We’re all in this together, as Morrison says. To all his A-lister associates and toadies. In Western Sydney where the workers live, it’s a different story.

NSW police are demanding ID on the street or wherever they knock you up. Some even helpfully rummage through your Westie shopping bags, a welfare call, to help poor working class consumers determine which of their purchases are essential.

Invasive? Discriminatory? Legal? All of the above. It’s another top idea made flesh under emergency super powers the Coalition gives itself, in the interests of public health. States rush to follow suit. Some more quickly than others.

But help is on its way. The Indue cashless debit card for all welfare beneficiaries including age pensioners will quickly sort out the vexed issue of taking the discretion out of discretionary expenditure.

Cunning stunt of the week, however, goes to the Shit-Show™ that is the federal government in secret squirrel mode for its refusal to release details of fixer Phil (The Ferret) Gaetjens’ secret enquiry into Bridget McKenzie’s role in the Morrison scandal known as the Sports Rorts Affair.

Sports rorts are minor compared to the $600 million car parks in the air scam.

Why buy one election when you can buy three? The budget-minded need fear no more. Michael West reports Jimmy Tee’s 2020 research which shows team Morrison has stashed away billions in the Community Development Grants Program to buy at least the next two elections. The official extension of the CDG “provides the government with yet another campaign war chest of $1 billion for the next election in 2022 and a yet-to-be-determined figure for the election after that in 2025 — a case of rolling rorts.”

Another day, another government corruption scandal. The plot thickens in senate estimates, reports The Monthly’s Rachel Withers; the same PMO staffer enabling the “sports rorts” corruption is confirmed “as the contact for the car parks fund, for which a list of the top 20 marginal seats was created to canvas for projects – not just for commuter car parks, but for the entire $4.8 billion Urban Congestion Fund.”

FOI requests are rebuffed because the Rorts Report was commissioned for Cabinet ministers’ eyes only, a bluff that rather defeats the object of FOI laws, but in our brave new world of government by disinformation, deception and double-speak, a world in which Barnaby can stand in a paddock in a corn pone hat and blow his bags about how he’s the Deputy Prime Minister and not just some random Nationals leader.

And how Hopkins better remember how he dealt with Johnny Depp.

But Morrison’s circus is not just a flea-bitten dog and (corn)pony show, there are clearly big ideas in the offing.

Next the chooks will be cackling on 2GB. Other pets are bound to follow. History lessons from The Morrison Goldfish, Shark. ScoMo’s QAnon bestie, Tim Stewart, will pen a personal reflection: So Your Family Dobs You in to the National Security Hotline? Stewie could also do the odd family friendly report on our war with satanic paedophiles. Be just the sort of re-set we all need given the Morrison’ government’s monumental ineptitude; a paralysis that is turning a coronavirus crisis into a catastrophe.

Not everyone’s taken in. The vaccination disaster is the worst national public policy failure in modern Australian history, rivalled only by Paul Keating’s early-1990s recession “we had to have.” ANU Historian, Professor Frank Bongiorno writes in Inside Story.

Malcolm Turnbull cuts to the chase on The Project. The inability of the federal govt to secure enough Pfizer vaccines for Oz is “an epic fail”. It is the biggest failure in public admin he can recollect.

“The vaccines were able to be got, because other countries got them. What we lacked was leadership.”

Morrison could never be accused of being a leader. Or much of a success, really. His career is filled with stunts that blow up in his face. “Crass and sickening” The Greens call his decision to rock up twenty minutes late to the Cambodian debacle – and then to break out the champagne. Toasting his Cambodian “dirty deal” with champagne would be one of the lowest points of his political trajectory if there weren’t so many rivals.

Keating observed that Peter Costello, Howard’s eternal bridesmaid, was, a low altitude flyer. Morrison claims to have heard the voice of God in a painting of an eagle. He’s a low-flyer, too. Eagles may soar but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines.

As the PM’s career goes to the dogs, you are struck by a groundhog day vibe.

In a career spanning a series of election campaign failures, notes Bernard Keane, Morrison’s employment pattern is to leave or be shown the door before his contracts end. It’s a bit like serial monogamy. Coitus interruptus? Or chronic incompetence? .

Scotty’s NSW Liberal godfathers, John Howard and Bruce Baird helped Morrison become NSW Liberal Party Director and Toe-Cutter, 2000-2004. Next, “Where the Bloody Hell Are You?”, he’s Lara Bingle’s travel agent (2006). An even more hypomanic period follows where the quick change artist and protean, shape-shifter poses as a federal MP who claims to be Minister for Immigration and Border Protection and Treasurer. What we have here is chronic case of delusions of grandeur.

For some time now Morrison’s been insisting that he’s PM. Julia Banks vividly recalls Morrison telling her; “Julia. I. Am. The. Prime. Minister,” Paul Bongiorno, notes that he’s made himself King of Kirribilli with more than a hint of The Castle in his claims to legitimacy, abandoning The Lodge to those of less exalted status.

Now, as Delta exposes Morrison to be a dangerous sham, it’s time for the Bronte Bogan to mimic something more presidential. The affection of a literary pet should do it. The tradition dates to 1789 when George Washington brings Polly, to his administration. While George’s parrot’s commentary is unknown, during the period between his death in and internment, in 1845, the earthy Andrew Jackson’s Poll, another African Grey, turns the air blue with obscenities.

Is it grief? Or Old Hickory’s faithful, feathered, two-legged companion’s playback, payback, panegyric? All we know for sure is that the parrot has to be removed from the premises. Reverend William Menefee Norment, who presides at Jackson’s funeral, observes that the ex-presidential parrot is, “excited by the multitude and … lets loose perfect gusts of ‘cuss words.’” People are “horrified and awed at the bird’s lack of reverence.”

Buddy Morrison has a hard act to follow. A Schnoodle is not renowned for causing shock and awe. Yet everyone is cheered by a shaggy dog story, especially when times are rough if not downright impossible. Despite Glad’s Gold Standard Clayton’s lock-down of Botany Bay, the omphalos of Oz and spiritual shopping centre of our corporate oligarchy’s universe continues to put on a brave face. Seldom does it deign to wear a mask.

There’s business class muppet, Gladys Berejiklian’s mock-down fiasco, a spectacular leadership debacle and toxic by-product of the ongoing failure of a morally and intellectually bankrupt federal government to govern, let alone lead.

A NewsCorp photograph of Gladys and her new squeeze, hot shot defo lawyer, Arthur Moses, unmasked on a morning Macciato run doesn’t augur well for the Premier. Watch out for that bus. Nor does her mentor’s disappearance bode well for Glad. RoboScomo doesn’t give an Engadine Maccas whom he pushes under a bus if it saves his own hide.

And as for all those stricken with the deadly Delta variant of Sars-Covid 19 -and all those who worry about their friends, their neighbours; their family members’ safety, especially mothers bearing the bulk of the emotional labour of parenting – and even more in an era where women are forced into insecure underpaid part-time casual work.

“I”ve just learned not to care,” Morrison tells Annabel Crabb.

“And I really don’t that much.”

It shows. Increasingly, as a pandemic rages that could so easily have been brought under control just with vaccination and a dedicated quarantine system. A plan that’s not just four, vapid, flatulent phases of evasive rhetoric.

And a government with its heart in the right place from the start. A government fit to govern. One that honours its contract with the people. Not an endless series of announcements; a cynical shitshow™ of promises to be broken.

“Australians all let us re-Joyce.” The second coming of Weatherboard Nine Messiah, Barnaby Joyce, causes much glee amongst cult devotees and much clutching of pearls within Coalition circles.

Multitasking, miracle-worker and maven of lost causes, Peta Credlin, AO, Tony Abbott’s stage mother and former front-end of the pantomime horse that was his government, a two year IPA triumph, jumps for Joyce, also a Riverview Old Boy. Calls Joyce a fellow “conviction conservative” who is just what the doctor ordered.

If Barnaby can’t put lead in the Nationals’ pencil, then, who can?

Not only will BJ miraculously resurrect a party shagged by agribusiness, done over by beggar-thy-neighbour neoliberals, populist grifters and carpet-baggers; under a coercive “partner” and in terminal decline since the fifties; now in a long twilight of bewildered nostalgia. He’ll shift the whole Coalition clown-show stage-right. Seriously?

Of course, this is what Credlin is paid to say. She’s another Murdoch handmaid, servant of an oligarchy that makes its money by investing in Big Mining, Big Pharma, Big Cotton and other soulless corporations; who enable an intensive multinational capitalist agriculture that brings with it deadly new viruses.

“COVID-19 should not be seen as an exogenous shock (that is, something coming from the outside) to our otherwise healthy social system. Rather, the pandemic is a side effect of capitalism’s extractive relationship with the natural world, mediated through and multiplied by globalised chains of production, distribution and travel. This growing likelihood of global pandemics is just one example of how this dynamic will have deadly consequences far beyond planetary warming,” writes Omar Hassan.

On the other hand, or in Joyce’s case, ham-fist, Regional Coalition MPs, Anne Webster and Michelle Landry fret that BJ will frighten the fillies. Joyce 2.0 will not go down well with women voters.

Founder of Australian Women in Agriculture, Alana Johnson, tells Guardian Australia it is “astounding” the Nats would reinstate Joyce. “like a dog returning to his vomit”; The Australian‘s Troy Bramston, puts it nicely.

Barnaby’s a Brahman bull in a China shop, whose animal spirits coupled with his blunt, outspoken oratory can crash through all affectation, civilised decorum and the rule of law to get results, his fanatical followers fondly believe. Who cares if a Taylor mob business’s Cayman account gets $80 million in a water rort? That’s BJ’s “retail” political genius. He’s also Scott Morrison’s useful idiot; a timely distraction in a crisis.

Joyce rushes into Alan (The Parrot) Jones’ studio for a quick benediction from The Sky Priest of Coalition Politics. Racist, misogynist, mining shill “I don’t swallow all this zero-emissions rubbish” Jones eagerly obliges.

Ratings can only improve with a deputy PM on his “very pro-coal” Sky TV show, piped free like Zyklon-B into every parliamentary office. And into the better class of private dementia wards in Sydney.

Joyce, ever the celebrity politician, gets a pat on the head for his word-perfect recital of the coal-miners’ creed. Backs both coal and nuclear power to make electricity we already make more cheaply and more reliably with wind, sun and hydro. Basking in the Sky-light, recycling mining companies’ lies, Joyce helps paint Morrison positively green by comparison, with his vapid, “… towards zero by 2050, preferably” Clayton’s commitment.

Having BJ, the clown, around is very timely. Upstaged, momentarily, is the horror show Morrison government’s criminal negligence in aged care, (910 fatalities to date and counting). Add its catastrophic failure to secure a nation’s vaccination or provide an effective quarantine system, declining Pfizer’s offer to provide any amount of vaccine in July 2020. How good is AZ? A dud vaccine, you can’t even make enough of in time?

Monday, Morrison blames the pandemic for the NSW crisis. It’s a desperate bid which won’t wash with the public. The Guardian’s Katharine Murphy notes,” … coronavirus didn’t stop Australia getting Pfizer, or failing to vaccinate workers, or failing to roll out dedicated quarantine facilities.” Morrison’s government did that.

Rachel Withers, in The Monthly, generously speculates that Morrison is tired; in a slip of the tongue, he declares AstraZeneca fit for all Australians. He has to be seen to be doing something. The latest wave of infections which began in NSW has his name on it. The AMA or ATAGI won’t have a bar of it.

The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) advises the Minister for Health on the National Immunisation Program (NIP) and other immunisation issues. Or that’s it’s official rationale.

But Hunt ignores ATAGI. In pure pandemic politics, Health Minister and Chief Medical Officer rush to support a PM. In a revealing, parallel tactic, leaks against Health Department Secretary Brendan Murphy find their way to media outlets who regularly help a Morrison regime with the scapegoating so vital to good governance.

On Sky, or its website, we can read just how Brendan Murphy is “a big problem in the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.” Sky News Editor, Andrew Clennell, explains how Morrison and Hunt have been misled by Murphy on vaccinations in stadiums, on getting your jab at your local chemist – how he opposed regional quarantine; how he was confident in the AstraZeneca; how he’s been usurped by Lieutenant-General JJ Frewen, (you can always trust a man in uniform).

Ominously, Clennell adds a thinly disguised call to sack Murphy,

“Scott Morrison needs to show leadership… Yes, you listen to the health advice but at the end of the day, you’re in charge.” Clearly, Clennell is misinformed. Morrison doesn’t hold the swab. The PM’s whole modus operandi is to deny responsibility. Unless singing his own praises. It’s hypocritical from a government which has long preached how every decision taken is on medical experts’ advice. Above all, it’s dangerous to public health.

“It’s a train wreck” says former Federal Health Department Secretary, Professor Stephen Duckett, now of The Grattan Institute. For Duckett, the federal government’s vaccination fiasco is a staffing failure at heart. Many of the ‘over-hyped and under-delivered’ failures of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout have origins in another pandemic; a neoliberal ideology which led LNP and Labor governments to strip the APS of its resources and expertise over decades. Atop these dire shortages, the Morrison government imposed a staffing cap.

After six weeks, Duckett criticised the vaccine “stroll-out” for the wrong pace, phasing, model and messaging. Now, four months in, he says, there still no real sense of urgency. Health-care, quarantine, disability-workers, aged-care workers and residents have still not been fully vaccinated. Mass vaccination requires vaccination centres and whilst there’s been some movement towards these, the Pfizer phase reverts to a GP model.

Finally, he notes the damage done by the wrong messaging, the relentless self-congratulatory boosterism, the endless shonky, dishonest superlatives in which we were the world’s best ruled out admitting mistakes.

And learning from them. Mid-week, Health Minister Hunt is corrected by Simon Birmingham: we’re not first in the queue for Pfizer, we’re last in the queue. Greg Hunt is still spinning the lie that we lead the world in vaccine uptake. In fact, we are last in the OECD, with five percent of our population fully vaccinated says Nine’s Waleed Aly on The Project. He flashes a graph from Our World in Data.

“Envy of the world” bullshits the PM. Yet both the BBC and CNN ask what is wrong with Australia’s rollout. In the end, his government’s vaccine advice has been bewildering. Incoherent. Confused and contradictory.

Calling in men in uniform can misfire, too. Drafting a navy commander, an army general, and now the national security committee of cabinet into Operation Covid Shield not only sounds over the top, it further undermines an Australian Public Service already browbeaten, underfunded and outsourced – a privatisation by stealth.

What we can rely upon is the government’s inconsistency. Hunt’s upbeat and down about the AZ vaccine, launching a scare campaign about blood clots, which have afflicted sixty-four Australians so far according to ABC’s Ellen Coulter. Two so far have died. The overall case fatality rate in Australia is 3%. Today, Hunt’s commending AZ – adding a bit of gas-lighting – “always been our policy” when it clearly hasn’t.

The Federal Health Minister’s embraced five official changes of position on who AstraZeneca is safe for.

One moment, Hunt declares a moratorium; the vaccine will be withdrawn in October. Now he’s suddenly advising everyone over eighteen to have a jab. Doctors will be given legal immunity, he promises. (Patients can fend for themselves?) It’s hardly a resounding vote of confidence in the vaccine.

Oddly, doctors want to see that in writing. Legal experts politely suggest GPs already have indemnity.

Why the change? Morrison’s made a captain’s call, long after the Premiers have switched off his virtual national cabinet meeting microphones and cameras. It’s just COAG by another name but like all of MC Morrison’s moves it sounds impressive. MC? He doesn’t do stuff, he just makes announcements.

Did he order the Pfizer. Or just talk about it? Do we really have only 300,000 does of AZ left?

Premiers are not happy. It’s a desperate attempt to cover up the mess that he’s got us into. Wednesday, they distance themselves from Morrison’s decision. It did not come from national cabinet, they say, despite Hunt’s insistence that it was “noted”.

Queensland is vehemently opposed to Morrison’s big new idea. Its protest can only add to an undermining of public confidence in AstraZeneca, a confidence the federal Health minister and his PM have already wrecked.

More damage is done when Queensland reveals that its requests for more Pfizer are being denied by the federal government. Is the PM’s lifting of AZ age restrictions, in fact, a desperate move to cover up an acute shortage of Pfizer vaccine? Queensland says it is, The Monthly’s Rachel Withers, reports.

But look over there. The Auditor General releases a report condemning Al Tudge and Mick McCormack’s Infrastructure Department’s $600 million plus car-park-pork-barrel bonanza. Part of a larger rort, the $4.8 billion Urban Congestion Fund dumps truckloads of public funds in forty-seven electorates in a bid aimed at saving Liberal seats in Melbourne and Labor’s marginal seats such as Lindsay in the 2019 election campaign.

No process, guidelines or criteria need apply, notes Bernard Keane. The never-say-sorry Morrison mob says it’s all OK, they were “election commitments,” aka bribes.

Another dead cat is on the table is called for. How good are Crosby Textor playbook trained minders? The cat is very dead. Scotty’s convict ancestor, William Roberts was born on Cornwall’s Lizard Peninsula in 1755.

Scotty has convict ancestors? Who would have thought? Flashback to his OS junket where he acts the fawning colonial with the Queen venturing the palpable lie that HM’s presence at a G7 was anything but inappropriate;

“Quite the hit, your Majesty,” he toadies. Betty Windsor winces. After getting the bum’s rush from Biden at a G7, he gate-crashes, he looks up a family felon in a Cornish pub-crawl. As you do.

Oxymoron alert. Online rag, Cornwall Live, tells a bemused reader that our PM just has to tear himself away from the G7 to visit three pubs because he’s in quest of his fifth great grandpa William Roberts.

Convicted of stealing “five pound and half weight of yarn” from William Moffatt of Launceston, Cornwall, Roberts was packed off to Botany Bay for seven years. But don’t try this at home, unless you are a Kiwi.

Roberts spent time in Bodmin Jail and St Keverne, which his great grandson just has to visit, too. It’s all totally innocent and not at all doing personal stuff on the public purse, Morrison protests on Monday to Ben Fordham on Sydney’s 2GB where the PM’s always up for a rigorous, on-air, full body massage.

What the PM doesn’t explain, (no-one tells him), is that behaving oddly is known to locals as going “a bit Bodmin”. Aussies stranded overseas are unimpressed with Scotty’s soft-diplomacy, as Simon Birmingham describes it. Catching up with family on a taxpayer funded junket? If only they could do the same.

Never missing a trick, Labor Senator, Kristina Keneally, is quick to take up their cause;

“Aussies can’t visit loved ones overseas and stranded Aussies can’t get home,” she says.

“In November, I said goodbye to my dying father on Zoom. Haven’t yet visited his grave in the USA. A secret trip to visit UK relatives who died 200 years ago. One rule for Scott …”

Pulling the wool runs in Morrison’s family. How good is a black sheep? Ask Fran Bailey who had Morrison sacked a year before the end of his contract in 2006 over his departure from established tender processes, a breach that just can’t be traced. Incredibly, Morrison may have lied at the time, reports Michael West.

“FoI documents … reveal the PM either lied about a critical probity report, or numerous government departments and agencies are so incompetent that all of them – together, coincidentally, jointly and severally – lost it.” Morrison lie? Documents? “Where the Bloody Hell Are You?”

But don’t look over here. Look over there! Murdoch’s claque which usurps an independent press in most of Australia – and which even sets the agenda for our ABC, is applauding NSW for imposing a lockdown – after spending a fortune rebuking Dan Andrews for his government’s handling of the pandemic in Victoria.

There’s at least 177 victims of the Morrison Pandemic in the Bondi cluster this Thursday day; NSW’s biggest Covid cluster, yet. Worryingly, as it was with the Ruby Princess the state may be, again, a super spreader.

Number one fangirl, Gladys Berejiklian, puts “gold standard” NSW under lockdown, an act of apostasy that ScoMo can only admire by complimenting the virus on its fiendish virulence. The virus made her do it.

Ex-beau, Daryl Maguire? Not guilty. Thrown under his own tractor. Gladys’ new squeeze, Arthur Moses SC, who is also appearing for the plaintiff in Ben Roberts’ defamation soap opera loves a full brief. Handy pal to have should victims or families of those suffering effects of a botched rollout bring charges of negligent homicide. Yet all is not lost on the dog-eat-God dung heap that is our national body politic.

He’s back. Dan Andrews, that is. Scotching loopy Louise Staley’s malicious myth-making and Murdoch’s conspiracy theorists who accuse the Victorian premier of lying down on the job just to fake a sickie, Long running daytime TV show Dan in Dock resumes transmission in Spring Street this week.

Series critics, Sky’s Peta Credlin and News Corp’s Rachel Baxendale are already booked to do their infamous, fatuous nit-picking, innuendo, airing of rumour and lynch mob parody aka Dan’s press conference.

He’s back 2.0. Cue Alice Cooper’s theme song from low budget slasher, Friday 13 part VI: Jason lives as Santos’ man in the populist mask, Tamworth Tupper, Oz-politics’ answer to bonking Boris, Barnaby Thomas Gerard Joyce bobs up in the murky undertow of Nationals’ politics like a turd in the surf at Bondi.

One term of Barnaby as Nats’ leader was bad enough – but, as Niki Savva sniffs, two begin to look like sheer carelessness.

Is Niki right? Did Morrison’s overweening ego and contempt for McCormack lead him to abandon the Kabuki theatre of deference toward the Coalition’s junior partner and pave the way for Joyce’s coup?

Or did he shrewdly engineer the return of the man who kindly reminds us that regional dwellers like himself “don’t give a shit” about what happens in Melbourne. Because beef and coal are up.

Perhaps the PM has a similar indifference to BJ’s elevation. Joyce can only make the PM look good – And Morrison can certainly use a bit of distraction. Currently, he couldn’t look any worse. Why waste energy?

Even though ScoMo can’t abide Mick-Mack, he could hide it better. Captain Smirk of the Liberal starship Enterprise may have just given up pretending McCormack is a leader. Macca’s so dull he could bore for Australia. Even 2GB’s Coalition catspaw, Fordham sees it.

Calling for the current rural mouse plague to gnaw inner city trendies, however, suggests aberrant thinking.

Mice “rehomed” to inner-city suburbs to nibble the feet of animal rights activists and “scratch their children at night”, Michael McCormack, tells parliament whilst Morrison is drinking beer in pubs in Cornwall.

But the homophobic Elvis impersonator is not just a master of rebarbative wit in the lower house.

Getting his Infrastructure Department to rort the Urban Congestion fund over $600 million to buy seats in electorates the Coalition needed to win in 2019, was a stroke of genius. The funds ended up in places where congestion either wasn’t a problem or the carpark for rail commuters, proposed could never be built.

Why pretend that the Nationals, a rump of rorters and spivs from central casting stand for anything beyond pork barrelling, shilling for mining corporations and losing seats to Liberals?

Things come to a head when Morrison drops his “net zero emissions preferably by 2050” trick slogan with no consultation. Not cabinet. Not with anyone, let alone the Coalition’s “junior partner”.

Where experts such as ABC psephologist, Antony Green will tell you that for thirty years, the Nationals mostly lose their seats to Liberals and hardly ever win them back, Morrison already has the party dead and buried. Yet without the Nats’ RM Williams’ moleskin bums on seats, the Libs would be just another clapped-out, Tory party failing in opposition. As in WA, Victoria, Queensland or the NT.

(Although in Victoria, lobster-with-a-mobster Libs may become another chapter in the Book of Mormon.)

If Mick-Mack lowers the tone, the re-elevation of Joyce, another climate denier and mining shill, leaves the PM without even a hollow promise to lowering carbon emissions. It’s more bad news for anyone who has grandchildren or who cares about the planet; anyone who isn’t a mining company tout. Or a Murdoch.

Above all, BJ’s big step up is a resounding slap-down for women. Not only is there every chance that another misogynist will step into McCormack’s place on Morrison’s Task Force for Patronising Women but we now have two cabinet members with unresolved allegations of sexual misconduct or worse against them in a cabinet in which includes Linda Reynolds who calls Brittany Higgins “a lying cow”.

A petition demanding Joyce’s removal is currently only about 400 signatures short of its 25,000 target, reports Crikey’s Charlie Lewis. Another petition on GetUp to remove Joyce for corruption is doing well, too.

Naturally, our Murdoch-controlled press is tickled pink to see the BJ (beetroot jus) soufflé rise twice. Our man from Pravda, (The Australian’s) Greg Sheridan, hails his pal Barney’s return, as “a high-wire populist leader”.

It’s a big stretch. Even for fossil-fuelled, Sinophobic, warmonger and Trump fanboy Greg Sheridan. Leader?

Next it will be “visionary”. (On carbon emissions, Joyce reckons 2050 is too far away to be sure of anything, other than that most MPs will be dead.) Fans reach for easy clichés. Barn’s a “retail politician” who could sell you anything and who achieves “cut-through”, a buzz-word for Trumpian vulgarity, upstaging, buttock-pinching and harassing a seventeen year old woman in the Ladies’ toilet of a Canberra pub, it is alleged.

A Murdoch media fawns over Joyce. His copy writes itself, as with Trump or Boris.

Sometimes it has to. A few praise Joyce for his jazz-like improv work. Unlike Trump or Boris, Barn segues effortlessly – fearlessly – from the logical to the scatological. Take his recent riff on a recent Q&A

“I don’t want their problems in our streets … If I get engrossed in Palestinian/Israeli politics, I take my mind off here … I don’t want to see someone else’s turd in my toilet and if you come into our country … flush it.”

Barn has a few fans, but probably not amongst Palestinian refugees. He’s “the perfect political animal,” gushes Richo a flush former (Labor) Party animal and fellow dodo himself. But Joyce 2.0 is fit, rested. Restored. In epic and abject inadequacy, he tells us he’s a reformed character. Often.

I’ve become “a better person”, he claims. Person? The women’s allegations go to his workplace behaviour. But, let’s be fair, Barnaby, like Joh, doesn’t do coherence. Or contrition. His rise will do nothing but add to the Coalition’s problem with women – women voters that is.

Flash as a rat with a gold tooth, he’s off like a frog in a sock after being back-benched after Catherine Marriott’s allegation that that two years prior, after a 2016 Canberra function, he sexually harassed her.

Marriott is a prominent, highly respected WA agricultural businesswoman.

Must be lying.

BJ made the news, just prior, by going public with details of his long-term relationship with his former media adviser, Vikki Campion, who has since become mum to his two sons, Sebastian, who was born in April 2018 and then Thomas, born in June 2019. He still says he believes in the sanctity of marriage and spoke against enabling free Gardasil vaccination against HPV because it would make young women promiscuous.

Sebastian is a sensation at Dave Hurley’s joint as he tears into frame, fit to wreck any Governor General’s decorum, kneecaps or antique furniture. So comforting to see Seb’s a chip off the old block, as Barn gets sworn in a second time as Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, a preposterous legacy of a Coalition deal that perpetuates the lie that the two parties’ union is anything but a marriage of political convenience.

Or that we actually have a functioning Prime Minister instead of an observer, someone who makes tedious, flatulent, announcements about vaccine supplies but who never really ever gets around to getting any. (Show us the vaccine, Morrison.)

Or that the Nats are anything but an historical atavism, or, as Morrison implies this week, a very junior partner. A Britney Spears’ type of conservatorship may well be the new paradigm. The secret agreement will not be re-written just because the Tamworth Tupper gets the hollow crown. Nor will the vitriol from the PM’s office now oozing into favoured media outlets ever let up. Morrison’s reliable that way.

Joyce drunkenly “… pinched me on the bottom” following a 2011 awards ceremony at a Canberra pub, claims another woman who must be making it all up. Joyce complains that his political rivals have fabricated malicious stories about him. Yet in 2011, he was just a Queensland senator. Just a bloke behaving badly in a pub according to John Clements, former chief adviser to Tony Windsor.

Joyce denies it all. His own party could reach “no determination”, on the allegation after eight months’ deliberation. Yet the Federal Nats did throw due process to out the window by immediately leaking Marriott’s confidential complaint to News Corp. Naturally, the party refused Marriott’s repeated requests to make their deliberations public. It’s how it is in the boys’ club of Australian politics. Secret men’s business.

“I walked up to my hotel room and I burst into tears. I then couldn’t sleep that whole night. I didn’t actually sleep for a week,” Marriott recalls, in her account of the aftermath of her encounter with Joyce.

Barney’s elated. He’s off his chops to be top dog again. Yet he wins last Monday’s Federal National Party spill by one vote; eleven out of twenty-one. His appointment confirms that the National Party is not listening to women, say a number of rural women leaders reports The Guardian’s Sarah Martin. Nationals’ Michelle Landry and Anne Webster both believe restoring Joyce to the leadership will alienate women voters.

But always back the horse named self interest. The Nationals morphed into Rorts R Us long ago, opines Crikey’s Bernard Keane.

“Always remember that the Nationals are, foundationally, not a political party, but a conspiracy to rort taxpayers. And that will always come through in whatever they do.”

Now the mining corporation shills have their work cut out to keep up the pretence that they’re a political party or that they represent the bush. Desperation rules. Recycling a diabolical liability in favour of ScoMo’s muppet, the dud, homophobic Elvis impersonator, Invisible Mick, “Get off the Grid” McCormack is one way of keeping yourself current. Hell would freeze over before Mick would listen to the Greens on climate change.

“Unplug ya mug.” Mick is already a legend for his advice to all latte-sipping, hemp shirted, mung-bean sandal, inner-city hipsters and any other critics of Coalition’s plans to build new coal-fired electricity plants.

“We absolutely need high-efficiency, low-emission coal-fired power stations,” Joyce tells Alan Jones. As if they exist. As if they are not more mining company propaganda. On climate, BJ is Tony Abbott in an Akubra.

“No one likes big holes in the ground … but the point is, you like your health system, you like your education system.” Another lie. Subsidies enjoyed by mining plus the cost of the damage done to environment and climate far exceed any income they provide us.

Joyce says small modular reactors could “power the city of Tamworth, the city of Armidale and a lot of other towns beside” with technology you could transport “on the back of a truck”.

Except they don’t exist outside of mining corporation propaganda. A single 300 MW reactor operating at 90 percent capacity factor would withdraw 160 million to 390 million gallons of water every day, heating it up before discharge. SMRs are a chimera. They will not play any real role in climate change mitigation.

Nor is there a role for Darren Chester as Barnaby swiftly rewards those who backed his coup and punishes those who did not. “Flash bit of kit”, champion sports roster Bridget McKenzie is now back in cabinet proving you can rort all you like. An MP can get away with anything in Morrison’s government. It’s his insurance policy.

Whether Morrison will get away with neglecting the Liberals’ relationship with the Nationals or engineering Barnaby Joyce’s resurrection through wilful neglect of the Coalition’s junior partner remains to be seen. What seems inevitable is that Joyce will cost the Coalition votes in the next election, at least amongst women.

Equally inescapable is the conclusion that the Morrison pandemic is a catastrophic failure to organise an adequate supply of an appropriate vaccine and an effective distribution system – just as it’s clear the government has failed in its responsibility to the vaccinate the elderly and frontline workers.

It has also ducked its duty to set up an effective quarantine system and instead wasted time criticising hotel quarantine in Victoria.

But look over there. The arrival of Joyce on the scene may be a welcome distraction for a PM who thrives on evasion and may even gain from a climate denier and coal lobby shill even shriller than himself or his own right wing ginger group. On the other hand, Bramston, a favoured Morrison government flack, thunders;

“Joyce has little credibility in rural and regional Australia. He is a turn-off for most voters, including those who vote traditionally for the Nationals, and especially women. Nationals voters are typically socially conservative. They will recoil at the return of Joyce, his bumbling manner and soap-opera life. He was once a great retail politician but his life became a train wreck. He is a wrecker and a spoiler.”

In the end, the Joyce factor may end up multiplying Morrison’s challenges and highlighting even further his government’s corruption, ineptitude and inadequacy; its lies and, above all, its catastrophic failure to protect its people.

“Future generations will thank us not for what we have promised but what we will deliver – and on that score Australia can always be relied upon,” Scott Morrison.

“PM, good morning to you. Do you have blood on your hands?” chirps a chipper Karl Stefanovic, who wears the same suit on Nine’s Today for a year to point up the sexism behind critics of former co-host, Lisa Wilkinson who dared wear the same shirt twice in four months. No-one noticed Karl; proving a breakfast TV point about sexist objectification which is neither original, unresearched, nor something not well understood by half the population. Perhaps in his next stunt he could don a dhoti – if he wants to disappear completely.

Everybody notices Morrison’s racist dog-whistle, “we’ll decide which of our citizens return to Australia and the circumstances in which they do so.” It’s a Tampa-style homage to his mentor, “lying rodent” John Howard. Thanks to both, it’s OK if our PM abandons the rule of law to be “tough on borders”. Or is it?

The criminalising of citizens just because they want to come home from pandemic-ravaged India is unprecedented. Experts warn that it may not even be legal. Former Race Discrimination Commissioner, Tim Soutphommasane asks what citizenship means if you can’t rush home from OS in time of crisis. Morrison’s practising discrimination; promoting an Australia where some are more Australian than others.

Typically hypocritical, Scott Morrison was quick to bag Queensland, last September, for closing its border, a move by a state aimed at saving lives, but one which drew the PM’s ire for risking Australia’s “humanity”.

Not that the federal government is keeping us all safe at home. The New England Journal of medicine reports new research suggesting Astra Zeneca, the mainstay of Australia’s vaccine program, is just 10% effective against the virulent South African Covid strain, which is found in Bali and Djakarta this week.

A range of vaccines would have been a wiser choice. Pfizer, for example, shows 75% effectiveness. Yet we’ve been unable to secure adequate Pfizer supplies. Nor do we have the multinational’s consent to manufacture our own even if we were all tooled up and ready to brew up a batch, as is CSL’s Melbourne lab, whose output the Morrison government keeps secret, in case we discover just how inadequate it is. Calculation based on current production, however, suggests it will take until 2024 before we’ve all had an AZ or Pfizer jab.

Preferably Pfizer. Because the SA variant shares key characteristics with another highly infectious variant which emerged in Brazil, (P.1) AstraZeneca’s vaccine may also have low efficacy rates on P.1. But Mum’s the word. Besides the government is in crisis management mode bringing citizens home from India. Or not.

Worse, the PM cops flack from unexpected quarters including the PM’s own back-bench, its chipper TV breakfast show hosts and its fair weather friends, Australia’s mainstream media. Even Tory hacks, such as Andrew Bolt say the decision to lock out brown Australians “stinks of racism”.

The death of any one Aussie will shame the PM, Bolt warns. By Saturday, one death is reported but this prompts the PM to declare that we don’t repatriate people with Covid-19. Always been policy. Standard practice globally. The man’s family is incensed. Even worse, “pushback” transcends mere mortals to reach the divine-pavilion of celebrity-cricketers, (Amen). Morrison just has to walk it all back. Duck, weave, deny and lie.

Karl’s first up on the PM’s media crab-walk, Tuesday. Our nation’s divinely ordained pastor, Morrison, to whom God speaks through a Ken Duncan photo of an eagle, confirming that he chose Scott ‘n Jen to lead us all, tries to weasel out of all responsibility for his SNAFU-prone government’s dumbest stuff-up.

Karl’s co-host, Allison Langdon, is on the (eye)ball, however. She cuts to the chase,

“The problem you have here, Prime Minister, the optics of threatening your own people with jail and huge fines is not a good one.” Criminalising citizenship? Definitely not a good look for a government which has busted a gut ear-bashing us all with how Aussie citizenship is a privilege not a right. Like extra virgin oil. Here’s Dutto blowing his bags over a bill entitled, Strengthening the Integrity of Australian Citizenship in 2017.

“Membership of the Australian family is a privilege and should be granted to those who support our values, respect our laws and want to work hard by integrating and contributing to an even better Australia.

Citizenship is at the heart of our national identity. It is the foundation of our democracy…”

Work hard? Morrison’s off like a frog in a sock. Like a democracy sausage – all sizzle and no meat. His mission? He wants to con us that his fiat banning all travel from India is no big deal. What began as a brown ban is quickly toned down to a “temporary pause” until 15 May. It’s a worry. There’s a temporary pause on investigation into the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins, two years ago. As always, there’s a herd of scapegoats to whom he can pass the parcel of blame, this government’s next best game after its game of mates.

It’s the media’s fault. It hasn’t been helpful for “these things to be exaggerated,” he tells reporters, Tuesday.

It’s the doctors. The government’s acting only on the best advice of its medical experts – we are told ad nauseam – despite Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly making no such advice. In fact, the CMO alerts the federal government to the dire health risks to citizens who will be trapped in India by any travel ban.

It’s the law’s fault. Hunt tells a sleepy nation at just past midnight Friday a week ago, but this just buggers up Morrison’s attempt to blame the media for the threat of fines and gaol sentences. Hunt is unequivocal,

“Failure to comply with an emergency determination under the Biosecurity Act 2015 may incur a civil penalty of 300 penalty units, five years’ imprisonment, or both. The temporary pause will be reconsidered on 15 May by the government following advice from the chief medical officer (CMO).”

Morrison, however, can’t resist one last squeeze of the lemon even though the pips are squeaking.

“I’m not going to fail Australia. I’m going to protect our borders at this time.”

A duly sceptical Dennis Atkins in The New Daily won’t have a bar of it. Gutless Morrison “tried to pretend this didn’t happen six days later by saying it was the media’s fault, but he and his health minister did it. They did it for one reason: to get a tough guy headline, and that mission was accomplished.”

And because they could. The Biosecurity Act 2015 gives unbelievable power to the government, says Marque Lawyers partner, Michael Bradley, once a human biosecurity emergency has been declared.

Section 477 gives the health minister power to “determine any requirement that he is satisfied is necessary to prevent or control the entry of the disease into Australia.” This can include “requirements that restrict or prevent the movement of persons between specified places.”

But Greg Hunt’s got to watch himself. Measures must be “effective, appropriate and no more restrictive than necessary” – lyrical legalese from the unacknowledged poets of the world, as Shelley nearly said. A legal challenge on these grounds is mounted by Marque Lawyers, who file a case against Hunt in the Federal Court, Wednesday, on behalf of Gary Newman, a 73 year-old, who’s been banged up in Bangalore since last March.

Justice Stephen Burley will expedite the case for a hearing the following week.

Whilst there may be an implicit constitutional right to return, which courts would be unlikely to find unlimited, Bradley argues, the current ban is illegal – because it exceeds what is appropriate – and because it’s outside the powers which the constitution gives to federal government. Bradley echoes many others in noting that there are means by which the government could have rescued its 9000 citizens, concluding that its actions are “unlawful, disgraceful and racist.”

Another shot across the bows of Scotty’s Tampa 2.0 is fired by the UN’s commissioner for human rights, Rupert Colville who lets our federal government know that what it’s proposing flouts Australia’s human rights obligations; breaches international law.

“In particular, article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which is binding on Australia, provides that no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country.”

Elvis, aka his impersonator, Michael McCormack rushes on to ABC radio to repeat ScoMo’s sophistry that his government has to take a hard line but it never meant to lock anyone up … At this time.

Given his past record, Morrison, as did Abbott before him, is likely to tell the UN to stop meddling in our affairs, which rather defeats the object of signing up to international agreements.

“We can never answer to a higher authority than the people of Australia,” Morrison said two years ago. “We should avoid any reflex towards a negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often ill-defined borderless global community and, worse still, an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.”

Is the PM is channelling Trump? It won’t wash. The Human Rights Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, has already warned our PM that the scrutiny Australia is receiving is based on the high standards we ourselves helped create.

Marque Lawyers may well contend the ban is unconstitutional, but Morrison repeats no-one is going to gaol or anything. Welcome back to a Joh Bjelke-Petersen moonlight stage-like age of innocence and endemic corruption where the separation of powers can’t exist if your leader’s never heard of them. Not to be outdone, Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews pops up to take matters from the subliminal to the ridiculous.

Always a barrel of laughs, a boss whom a senior Liberal adviser alleges to be “disrespectful, humiliating and demeaning,” Karen Andrews cracks hearty, at Wednesday’s chook-feeding presser. The best way to avoid doing time would be to stay where you were, if you were stuck in a raging pandemic, quips Kaz.

What a scream. Morrison’s cabinet is full of stand-up comics but lately it’s pure theatre of the absurd.

Only a ScoMo government could have a minister opine that your right to return is perfectly safe – provided you don’t try to exercise that right. Phil Ruddock is similarly reassuring in his religious freedom to discriminate bill which seems to have risen without trace to the Prime Minister’s orifice. But let’s not race ahead.

“Jailing and fining returning Aussies, I mean, as a sitting prime minister, it is incredibly heartless,” Karl Stefanovic says.

“Pretty much zero” chance of that happening replies Morrison, scrambling the separation of powers.

ScoMo tells Karl he doesn’t mean anything by his threats, Karl. His government’s vibe, Karl, is just one big warm and fuzzy buzz, Karl; like Strawberry Fields, Karl, where “nothing is real; nothing to get hung about.”

Karl’s keen to shirt-front Morrison but the PM’s dog-whistle is already exploding in his face as his hard borders, brown ban on Australian citizens’ trying to return from India earns a serve from “cricket great” Michael Slater. Meanwhile talking heads defend the PM; tell us how popular hard borders are with voters.

The messaging from the PM’s office is determined to blur the distinction between closing a state border and preventing Australians returning home from a nation which faces a catastrophic Coronavirus pandemic.

ScoMo’s speaking eagle must have been a wedgetail. He’s in a tight spot. Add in our pretensions to do business or be done over by Adani and how Modi loves our true blue, clean as a whistle Aussie coal. The ban has the government wedged between a black rock and a hard place. Aussie icons as Michael Hussey, who’s got Covid, David Warner, Steve Smith and Pat Cummins are stuck in Delhi. (Note: these men are cricketers a sport in international decline before Coronavirus struck, yet still more popular than religion in Australia.)

When Cricket Australia (CA) talks, governments take notice. On ABC TV’s PK show, some suit from CA, one of our Kafkaesque sports bureaucracies – aka “controlling bodies” that rival the medieval papacy for administrative bureaucracy – and alleged corruption – warns us that cricketers, bless their flannel trousers, may be super-heroes but some may still need a bit of TLC or an 1800 number state of the art type telephone counselling service when they return to the unreality of their Peter Pan lives.

Yes. It’s the poor hard-done by cricketers who tug CA’s heartstrings not those suffering the worst Covid outbreak yet, a pandemic which could reach a million cases per day. And unlike our own hospitals, or those to which cricketers would have access, India must deal with a dire shortage of essential supplies such as oxygen.

But no such TLC from CA nor from Barry O’Farrell our invisible ambassador to India for Sonali Ralhan’s father who dies in a New Delhi hospital Wednesday. Ralhan says she contacted consular officials with “great hopes” at first that her parents would be helped home. Instead, she finds herself mourning the death of her father.

“I write to you with so much anger brewing inside me,” Ralhan writes 6 May. “I am an Australian citizen and highly disappointed to be one today. What nation disowns their own citizens? (It) is a matter of wonder for the entire world.”

The family’s suffering is not helped by what seems to be Australia’s unjust targeting of citizens in India.

No ban happened with the UK or the USA, commentators helpfully chorus. They overlook at least 40,000 poor souls stranded overseas, whom Deliverance Morrison promised to bring home by Christmas, past. Plus both nations had more infections per capita than India, busting open the PM’s specious, “safety first” argument.

It doesn’t help Morrison when he claims that he’s halting all flights to safety from a pandemic ravaged land just so he can bring more Australians home safely. The fruit-loop is drowning in his own word salad gloop.

But blood on his hands? Is Karl plagiarising the late, great, Richard Carleton? Or paying homage? Or is he just quoting Slater, former Aussie cricketer cum presenter? Either way, Karl gets up Morrison’s nose.

“No, Karl,” the PM snaps. “We haven’t had a shift. How you’re reporting it is a shift.”

Mission accomplished. Morrison reverts to his government’s Trumpian default. Any unwanted criticism is fake news. He rebukes his genial host before falsely accusing a servile media for misrepresenting his government’s position. Position(s). It’s so simple a young child could grasp it, as The Monthly‘s Rachel Withers explains.

“The government will be defending the ban, which it insists it has the power to implement, but it won’t be imposing it, despite deliberately invoking it.”

It’s not an invisible pivot. It’s more of a flip-flop with a lot less flip than flop. Morrison is just making empty threats to act tough. Again. Like the war with China, pencil-rattling Pezzullo is picking in his bid to get back to Defence. Insiders say it will never happen. The Pezz is also over-stepping the mark for a shiny bum; an unelected pencil-pusher, even if his boss sees fit to over pay him nearly a million dollars a year.

Morrison utterly contradicts his Health Minister. Huntaway Hunt our fearless leader’s cub was baring his fangs and howling at the moon, midnight Friday. You could be banged up for five years or fined $66,600 if you even looked like you were an Aussie booking a flight home to safety. No wonder Labor is having fun accusing the Coalition of chest beating gone wrong. It’s easy to understand. But first make sure you have a chest.

Slater’s stuck on the subcontinent as Big White Bwana Aussie cricket commentators love to dub India, unable to get back to his Island Continent home on the NSW waterfront somewhere- just because the federal government’s sprung a travel ban. He’s not a happy camper. He nicks off to the tropical haven of the Maldives, a “no news, no shoes” Shangri-La, haunt of the rich and infamous, where COVID-19 is still a risk along with insect-borne diseases such as dengue, Zika virus and chikungunya. Falling coconuts can kill you, too.

China’s Long March 5B, which sounds as if it should be a pencil but is, in fact, a spacecraft plunges into the sea nearby but as its government says, most of the rocket burnt up on re-entry and besides it’s too early to know if any of the debris from the ten storey cylinder actually fell on any of the Maldives 1192 islands.

Slater’s not going anywhere. But the biggest threat to life in the low-lying islands is climate change, which for Morrison, or his former finance minister and newly appointed secretary-general of the OECD, who takes up his five year term in June, Mathias Cormann, will all be solved by exporting our super high-grade, extra clean coal to India where its cheery blaze will lift millions out of poverty as it heats the planet into oblivion.

Ninety islands have disappeared so far and even by the typically generous projections of climate scientists, the entire Maldives archipelago will be underwater in eighty years. Ironically, in a microcosm of parts of Australia’s economy, the tourism, on which islanders depend, fuels the global heating which will drown them. But to a man of Morrison’s faith, it’s all part of God’s plan. Whilst many churches are concerned about climate change, there is not a murmur from any evangelical group. It’s a perfect setting for Slater’s attack on Morrison.

Of course Morrison’s got blood on his hands. With this happy clapper, punters are spoilt for choice. And Karl knows it. It’s dramatic irony – if you could call Today’s cheesy infotainment a drama. A woman is killed a week by a current or former partner. Experts warn the Morrison government that its recent abolition of the family court will help cause a spike in men’s violence (or domestic violence as it’s officially euphemised). As Abbott’s border enforcer, we can only guess how many of Morrison’s boat turnbacks ended badly.

We do know that 23 year-old Iranian Kurd, Reza Berati was bludgeoned to death inside the Manus Island gulag, one of our offshore prisons we’ve been happy to call detention centres. Witnesses say guards were in a frenzy and jumped on the man’s head in a rage.

Despite first telling parliament it happened outside the compound during the riot where dozens were injured on Manus 17 February 2014, despite assuring all parties that G4S were able to maintain security without the use of force, Morrison did update his story several days later. Naturally, then PM Tony Abbott was quick to defend his captain’s pick.

After Morrison is caught out lying, Abbott helpfully declares that Morrison’s doing a “sterling” job, adding that “you don’t want a wimp running border protection.”

Blood? Morrison knifed his own PM, Turnbull in August 2018. Then, there’s the two thousand Australians who died after receiving Centrelink Robodebt letters of extortion. Thank heavens we don’t have a wimp in charge. But boosting a macho man image means putting in the hard yards. Take Scotty’s marvellous Barnes dancing.

Scott Morrison and Andrew Twiggy Forrest at Christmas Creek FMG mine site

Shots of Twiggy and Scotty in hi-vis rig stretching to Jimmy Barnes’ Working Class Man along with 300 Fortescue Metals Group miners in a workout routine at the Christmas Creek iron ore mine in WA, also reassure a nation sick with worry over PMs turning wimpy or compassionate or that the Coalition is soft on its promises to dance in step with mining oligarchs. After a night on the beers, Scotty’s up early the next morning for the workout photo-shoot travesty.

Whilst statistics show our average worker may be a woman health professional, tradie votes depend on spinning work as blokey and physical; something you do outdoors in your hard hat and Yakka overalls, Bro.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Fortescue Metals chairman Andrew Forrest join workers for morning exercise during a visit to the Christmas Creek mine site in The Pilbara, Western Australia, Friday, April 16, 2021. (AAP Image/Pool, Justin Benson-Cooper)

Just in case limbering up to “Barnesy” isn’t enough bullshit in itself, Twiggy leaves nothing to chance, Fortescue’s owner tells Sam Maiden and other media hacks on tap that a bend and stretch routine is vital to get its workers ready for a long hard day’s work in the mine.

What isn’t spelled out is how highly automated and (buzzword-alert) “autonomous” modern mining is. While fitters have light, driverless, vehicles to fetch spare parts, even the big trucks can drive themselves. Fortescue boasts a fully automated haulage operation.

Still, it would pay to limber up before hitting the computer console or checking the smart sensors and drones.

Similarly, Scott Morrison’s office has cleverly taken much of the drudgery out of the PM’s work, substituting instead hand-crafted moving pictures of our leader being a man of the people, celebrating small business heroes in barre classes, building a Bunnings kit-set chook house or fawning all over the nation’s richest man, iron ore miner, Dr Twiggy Forrest, who in 2020, completed a PhD in marine ecology. As you do.

Scotty sucking up to Twiggy? Check. Hamming it up? Check. Token women workers taking part? Check. There’s even more talk, again of a gas-fired power station at Kurri Kurri in the Hunter. Visionary. We’ll all be paying for it in the Coalition’s insatiable appetite for state socialism despite its gospel of self-help, small government and the invisible hand of capitalism. The word is Snowy Hydro’s already approved the little beauty which is said, variously, to be set to deliver anywhere from 350 to 1000MW – but you know how good our Minister for fossil fuel Energy, Angus Taylor, is with figures. And doctored documents. Just ask him. Or Clover Moore.

One thing not in dispute is the buckets of money Coalition government’s lobe to shower over the fossil fuel industry. A ten billion dollar a year annual subsidy helps the little Aussie billionaire battlers.

Who’s beating the drums of war? Just in case anyone, anywhere, is in any doubt as to who’s a climate criminal, mining muppet Scott Morrison, the only PM to flash his pet black rock in parliament, seals the deal for Australia when he takes his mark at the back of the pack of forty world leaders at the USA’s virtual Earth Day climate summit, 22 April. On ANZAC Day, Mike Pezzullo, deftly turns our attention to the fact that those drums of war don’t beat themselves in the mother of all beat ups our war with China over another bit of China.

In a forum set up so that forty nations can increase their commitment to fighting global heating, ahead of a Conference of Parties, (COP26) scheduled to be held in Glasgow, this November, Morrison pledges to do nothing. Nothing but spin. Australia will make “bankable” reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, he says; even without a concrete 2050 net-zero target.

Cutting emissions by 26 to 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, our current target, is already “insufficient” in the eyes of Biden’s administration.

As for being relied upon, just look at Kyoto, another meeting with the aim of producing binding commitments to reduce emissions. We are the world’s Artful Dodger, (a type-cast role played by “I’d Do Anything” Morrison at fifteen in the 1982 Sydney Boys High School production of Oliver!)

Kyoto credits – brainwave of John Howard’s Environment Minister Robert Hill are now off the Coalition table but that doesn’t mean other nations have either forgotten or forgiven our chicanery and bad faith.

Even a late spot on the programme flatters Morrison. He’s lucky to be invited to speak at all. Perhaps he believes in doing nothing because, the end times are upon us, as all good Pentecostalists believe.

Australia gets the Graveyard shift on a Long Earth Day’s Night. So why not tell the world just how much his government is a front for fossil fuel corporations who would kill the lot of us just to boost a balance sheet?

President Joe Biden sensibly leaves before ScoMo gets his slogan mojo on. Nature abhors a vacuum. “It’s not the when or the why it’s the how,” he says as if he’s doing some cheesy infomercial to teach teenagers, how good is consent. But he has no “how” to demonstrate and his insistence that carbon capture and storage is a viable technology makes us a laughing stock. We’ve spent nearly a billion dollars failing to make it work.

The Earth Day Zoom meeting is an international forum which acts as a prelude for heaps of other huff n’ puff stuff. BoJo is holding a G7 while Norway is getting the whole band back together.

Scotty’s also a hot prosperity gospeller. Believers get rich. The godly become wealthy and the wealthy become godly. If global heating means the world is going to fry like a fisherman’s basket, that’s God’s plan. Try to combat that? Sacrilege. Or even sin. Nothing to be done. Yet as one of the saved, our wealthy PM’s our to save others. Because he knows it’s what God wants him to do. Even if it means a Yuri Geller truth-bender. Not only does our happy clapping, rapture-rat, evangelical fabulist and con-artist, PM lie about Australia’s climate change policies, he bags every one of the forty nations who pledge to slash their greenhouse gas emissions.

The summit may be seen as the United States’ homage to the potlatch, a traditional, ceremonial gift-giving amongst some North American first peoples in which goods are given away for power in a complex ritual which includes the reaffirmation of family, clan and international relationships. The US opens the bidding with a pledge to cut emissions 50-52% below 2005 levels by 2030.

While a terrified nation hides under the doona, our PM spruiks hydrogen. Not just any hydrogen or the green hydrogen advocated by some climate change experts but hydrogen that will be produced by burning coal or gas. The details are murky. Morrison’s a big picture man. As big as possible when he’s in the frame, posing as a tough on borders populist or a mate of Twiggy Forrest and his working class men. No hint emerges from the PM or his government that extending fossil-fuel usage is an act of wilful criminal negligence if not homicide.

His answer to what Biden calls “the existential crisis of our time”? Hydrogen valley. Where the fatuous meets the vacuous. Setting up a totally unnecessary coal-fired power station in the Hunter. Seriously.

It’s not the why or the when it’s the how. It doesn’t help that Scotty’s still a rusted-on fanboy of The Donald or that his microphone is off or – he’s on mute – as he is in half of all households around the country. The President has already left the building. This administration will decide later how it will reward Australia’s obstructing global consensus in curbing carbon emissions and embracing renewable energy.

Trade Tariffs may well be added to nations such as ours which seek to evade their international responsibilities with regard to curbing greenhouse gas emission and climate change abatement. It will not go well for us.

Joe Biden knows that Morrison’s not speaking to him. The PM’s not trying to reach an international audience. His remarks are for domestic consumption. Our totally transactional PM is frantic to appease the right wing of his party which, he believes, will see him as a true believer with his hard-line stance on border protection. Yet it is, in fact, an act of calculated, callous inhumanity which goes against the spirit of our constitution and against the letter of international agreements to uphold human rights which we once helped to write.

Morrison is right – but not for his vacuous rhetoric. Future generations will judge us on what we deliver. Just as they judge us today on what we do rather than whatever our government might say – and then pretend it didn’t say or try to crabwalk away from. The inaction of this government to honour its obligations to its citizens in its travel ban on those trapped in India – or its chicanery on energy or climate change, its betrayal of its stewardship, or duty of care of the planet for future generations, is an indictment of its motives to seek and hold power for its own sake and a travesty of democratic principle and responsibility to its people. It is also a declaration of moral bankruptcy.

Warning: this article contains material which will shock monarchists everywhere, especially citizens of the south Pacific island of Tanna in the Vanuatu archipelago who once worshipped Prince Philip as a spirit or a god and who now must transfer their adulation to Charles, the son of (their) god.

Keeping a Morrison government honest is like trying to nail a jelly to a wall, as Teddy Roosevelt wrote of his efforts to get an agreement with Columbia in April 1912. Or the ABC’s work to take the twerk hurt out of 101 Doll Squadron’s sensational dance rendition of Koffee’s Toast (remix) for the “launch event” of HMAS Supply II in Woolloomooloo, (not be confused with HMAS Supply I a vessel which was actually launched where it was made in Spain in 2018).

The ABC is told to undo a video edit creating an image of top brass watching – Governor-General David Hurley, Chief of Navy Vice-Admiral Michael Noonan and Chief of Defence General Angus Campbell “observing the performance.”

The women complain ABC camera angles amount to upskirting which is then shown to the world. They feel “threatened and exploited.” Defence Minister Dutton declares that future ship launch celebrations will be twerk-free zones.

101 Doll Squadron

Hurley and Noonan claim they arrived post-“Toast”. The ABC releases Toast 2.0 which does show just a sole, impassive, Campbell mentally rehearsing his tribute to the late Prince Philip; doubtless pondering what Philip – both a sailor and a pants man might have made of proceedings. Meanwhile Liberal MPs are unhappy at the dance/warship fusion. They sook about how our armed forces are now too “left” and “woke” at a cost to their core business of killing people.

It’s another top opportunity for the PM to bash the ABC and throw another dead cat on the table to distract from his vaccination debacle. He brands the ABC camera woman’s work “disrespectful to the performers,” on Thursday. “To suggest the Governor-General or others were in attendance there in that way I think was dishonest.

The twerk angle is escalated into a major issue for all armed forces and Morrison’s standards: “ … standards have failed, and so I think Defence will look at these matters and make whatever changes they wish to in the future.”

Standards? Morrison’s invoking standards? What a crack-up. Kristina Kenneally finds her flight to Christmas Island cancelled by Peter Dutton a few hours after she’s made it. She wishes to visit the Biloela family in indefinite detention and she plans to take her joint parliamentary committee with her. Dutton says no suitable aircraft are available.

Ever resourceful, committed to the cause of open government and justice, Kenneally secures a Virgin flight.

“Peter Dutton did the one thing he could as defence minister and cancelled the committee’s flight on a Government Special Purpose Aircraft,” she says. “This from the same Minister who didn’t hesitate in spending $36,000 of taxpayers’ money flying himself on the same Government Special Purpose Aircraft from Queensland to Tasmania to announce a highly political “Safer Seats Rorts” grant during the Braddon by-election.”

Scott Morrison’s government has standards. And to adapt Groucho, if you don’t like those standards, it’s got others.

It’s a week of revision and revisitation. After five abortive tries to get a vaccination programme happening, the PM just gives up. If at fifth you don’t succeed, why try again? Scotty screws up his vaccine roadmap. He’s not playing the jab-plan game any more. Instead, National Cabinet, another Morrison, Secret Squirrel comic fiction, will Zoom bi-weekly to nut out a vax plan. Of course that doesn’t prevent the PM from hinting broadly, Friday, at open borders and quarantine at home for vaccinated Aussies returning from foreign locations. At least 40,000 stranded Australians are in limbo. They are still waiting for him to honour his promise to have them all home by last Christmas. National Cabinet will fix that, too?

So he’d love us to believe. He needs another scapegoat. And headlines. Wrest the narrative from his bullying of Christine Holgate, the interview he’s promised Brittany Higgins, her upcoming book – or reports that Ben Roberts-Smith buries a pink plastic children’s lunchbox of USB flash drives in his backyard. The drives, sources report, contain images that may implicate fellow diggers, a violation of Justice Brereton’s 2016 request that soldiers surrender any such material.

The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes have evidence that Roberts-Smith intimidated witnesses to prevent them giving evidence at the Brereton Inquiry. The media also have Images which show elite, Perth-based SAS troops at a fancy dress party at The Fat Lady’s Arms, an unauthorised bar, frequented by both officers and men in Tarin Kowt in Southern Afghanistan. One wears a Ku Klux Klan costume. Friends of his, dressed in similar outfits are alleged to have executed fathers, brothers, sons say locals in a series of complaints, dating from 2006.

A midweek press drop is called for. In synchronised stenography, surely a future Olympic Event – our media flacks oblige with “Back on war footing amid vaccine mercy dash to Europe.” It’s just another desperate Morrison stunt; set up another story that casts himself if not his motely crew of rorty, incompetent failures as valiant, chivalrous heroes.

Mercy dash? Knight errant, valiant, Dan Tehan kits up. Booted and spurred, he’s off to tilt at Brussels’s windmills. Another stunt. None of it fools Niki Savva, whose basilisk stare turned Gillard to stone, or so Savva swears.

“First Australia was in the front of the queue, then it slipped towards the back of the queue, now there is no queue, no timetable and no targets. All too hard.” The Liberal insider, scoffs at Morrison’s farrago of lies in the party’s Pravda, The Australian. To her, the PM’s a dead man walking. The pandemic will be the kiss of death because it reveals his government’s utter incompetence -when it comes to governance. And ScoMo has Pinocchio’s nose. His government’s paralysing ineptitude is compounded by its mythomania; its pathological inability to tell the truth.

But the Morrison omnishambles does some things rather well. It’s a well-oiled machine when it comes to injecting money into the economy via Job Keeper. Over a billion dollars went into some of Australia’s biggest and most profitable companies last year, boosting a $3.6 billion return to shareholders. A few will repay $78 million in return. Corporations don’t have to repay – unlike Centrelink beneficiaries receiving overpayments who get debt collectors set on to them.

Where the Morrison government really excels is being frugal with the truth. While it bullshits about its affection for small government, what it loves most is secrecy and deception. And it’s not just good at lying its head off, it’s mean and sneaky. It’s a black belt in the dark arts of persuasion such bullying Holgate, who cops a bucketing from Jared Lynch for her grandiose ideas, which did not endear her to the government, as he tells the story, in Friday’s The Australian. Add in the backgrounding against Brittany Higgins and David Sharaz or steam-cleaning a sofa. Anything underhand.

Or under Hunt. Down. Down. Down. Monday’s jab tally sags to 56,000. By Wednesday it is only slightly better at 63,633. No biggie, lies our Health Minister who, like his PM, would con us that in a pandemic, best to be the tortoise in any race to the mortuary. Or how we always stuff up on the best expert advice. Professor Murphy says so. “Vaccination alone,” moreover, “is no guarantee you can open up.” Yet last month, Morrison was promising an October jab-by-date.

A travel backflip is not without its risks. QANTAS’ ruthless CEO, one of the highest paid executive in Australia (total salary last year of $24.8 million) a $700 million government corporate welfare recipient, Alan Joyce, is overjoyed that domestic travel is back to eighty per cent of pre-pandemic level, whatever that means in an industry of brutal cutbacks. Joyce is still barracking for open skies in October, despite the Morrison’ latest dummy-spit on setting any target at all.

Alan’s not alone. Others join Joyce in intoning “October” as if it were some holy mantra – as if by power of repetition the month will bring news that we’re all vaccinated and back to business as usual. All our trading partners fit and well again.

You can always trust Hunt to plant his feet firmly in the air. Our thoroughly post-modern Health Minister Greg Hunt is always up for a back-flip. Or pivot. Or somersault. Just don’t ask him to reverse his refusal to testify to what he saw at the Intervarsity Debating Tournament in 1988, attended also by Christian Porter and Paul Fletcher.

For Hunt, there’s no open border on the horizon, ever. Nope. Nope. Nope. No commitment to when we’ll all have had the jab. Even when we do have everyone vaccinated, borders may stay shut. It’s a last-ditch effort to dump the whole vaccination distribution debacle back on to state laps. But before any smartarse can query the futility of more talk about distribution without having any supplies, Holgate-gate breaks, a public name and shame of bully-boy Morrison.

Clad in suffragette white, Christine Holgate appears before a senate committee to accuse the Prime Misogynist of trashing her reputation; gaslighting her resignation, in an orchestrated psychological war on one woman that she says leaves her suicidal. All too much for Scotty. He vastly prefers the old Holgate who was a self-serving corporate hack and Murdoch lackey on Ten. Scotty steals away on Shark 1. Jets to the western front for photo ops, a cash splash for Seroja cyclone victims and perhaps a single malt with merry, Kerry Stokes. WA is showered in handouts, a token five hundred dollars for kids and twice that for adults -just enough to big-note the PM but useless to those who must rebuild.

Shark 1 is a modest one hundred and two seater, a Qantas A330 converted in 2015 by Airbus to a freighter and air-to-air refueler. The RAAF KC30-A tanker is set up to ferry the PM and claque of embedded journos on big overseas trips. If he gets to make another: Morrison flew to Japan, last November. Foreign Minister, Marise Payne and former Defence Minister Linda “Lying Cow Reynolds” flew Shark 1 to Washington but PM’s office told them not to use the VIP suite.

Nor its comfy bed. The $250 million re-jig is worth every cent. A nation wonders how any PM ever did without it. No doubt it will come in handy if it ever becomes safe for any leader to jet away. The pandemic is raging globally.

WHO reports a rise in new COVID-19 cases around the world – for the seventh, consecutive week. Over 4.5 million new cases are reported, as of last week. 76,000 new deaths are reported. Alarmingly, the number of new deaths continues to rise over four consecutive weeks. It’s up by 7% compared to last week. Our PM would do well to heed this trend.

In the meantime, he’s desperate to wrest control of the narrative which entails despatching former DFAT pen-pusher and onetime diplomat in our nation’s Embassy in Mexico, dapper Dan Tehan, Minister for TTI, trade, tourism and investment to EU HQ to plead for more vaccine, even though we don’t deserve it. Dan’s had stellar success in Education, which he equates with training for jobs. Why, he singlehandedly doubled the cost of an arts degree, while helping ensure that Universities and the like did not qualify for Job Keeper. Bet that wins him fans in academia worldwide.

Perhaps the flight will also give Morrison time to reflect on his peroration on the dying of Abbott knight, Sir Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, for whom tributes still flow, thick and slow. Scotty’s no Boris Johnson who fancies Philip as an expert carriage-driver, whose racism and misogyny were just ways to “break the ice; get people laughing.”

“You look like you’re ready for bed!” he tells the President of Nigeria in 2003, dressed in traditional robes. It’s a quip that’s guaranteed to build respect and rapport between the two leaders and their respective nations. Just ask Boris.

It’s a tough gig. Morrison’s got a bit of competition, too. The demise of the notorious gaffer, the fabled Duke of the eponymous Scheme and self-reliant to the last, inventor of his own, patent, modified Land Rover hearse springs a gush of tributes. It’s tricky territory, which Marina Hyde reminds us, reveals more about the author than the subject.

” … neither royal fans nor royal detractors care entirely selflessly about what the royals want. Emotions are for us, not them. They are mostly required to serve as Rorschach blots, in which we see only what we wish and reveal only ourselves. Knowingly or otherwise.”

Many of us warm to Britain’s royalty, described by US Ambassador, William Crowe, in 1997, as the royal family mourned Diana as “aloof, rigid and lacking in empathy.” Many of us don’t. We project what we believe we see; and even that projection is shaped by others. Hamlet asks Polonius. “Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?

Polonius: By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed.

Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.

Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.

Hamlet: Or like a whale?

Polonius: Very like a whale.”

Prince Philip and Elizabeth in Australia

“The Duke’s life was one of duty and of service, of loyalty and of honour,” Morrison intones, unwittingly evoking his own back-stabbing, duplicity. The citing of the dutiful, master-servant, a mythological beast is compulsory. Unsaid are the hard facts of privilege. Despite Philip’s apocryphal stories of his poverty, he got by with a bit of help from his family including his grandmother, Princess Victoria at Kensington Palace, and later, his guardian Uncle George, Marquess of Milford Haven. His mentor was the distinguished Uncle Dickie, Lord Louis Battenberg, also renamed Mountbatten to disguise his German ancestry, but not his paedophilia, described in FBI files as his “perversion for young boys.”

Philip himself spent his married life playing gooseberry to a Queen’s love affair with her own royal duty. It did not sit well with him. “I am nothing but a bloody amoeba. I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children.” Self-disparagement aside, he generally did as he pleased, if not without a certain ironic resignation.

Less well-aired are Battenberg’s views on the social picnic, although on one occasion, Philip did demand service. The Duke knew what he wanted but never really got it, a tragic subtext the obsequies of mourning clogging our screens.

“Bugger the table plan, just give me my dinner.” Cut off in his prime at 99, HRH, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, is said to be a “shock death”. The consort, on sufferance, of Queen Elizabeth, the Second, whom he said was “only interested in something if it farts and eats hay, is admired for daring to share his inner vulgarian. Yet the Duke knew that fine words butter no parsnips. He’d be quick to deplore our media’s manic eagerness to fawn over him on his demise.

The gush threatens to become a deluge. Our own closet monarchists on The ABC are awash with tosh. They prattle endlessly, recycling well-worn, clichés and reheating stale platitudes. We learn yet again how Philip “modernised the monarchy” or how his gaffes were really helpful in instructing us what to avoid. Or taken out of context.

Yes. He was a devoted family man. Royal biographer, Sarah Bradford writes, of the younger Philip, “the women he goes for are always younger than him, usually beautiful and highly aristocratic … He has affairs and the Queen accepts it.

The BBC creates a dedicated complaints form on its website to cope with a volley of protests from viewers who find its royal fawning emetic. Many object to East Enders, Gardeners’ World and the final of MasterChef being replaced by simulcast pre-recorded tributes from Philip’s children. Randy Andy, Jeffrey Epstein’s pal, who was sired, by Lord Porchester, The Seventh Earl of Carnarvon is very much in frame. As is Harry, whose paternity is also controversial.

The BBC form’s a handy counterpoint to the sycophantic, bollocks of countless, mindless, fatuous, fact-free eulogies.

Philip did marry well. It should be his obituary. Being born an aristocrat was another stroke of luck. Forget the myth of his poverty. His people knew people who knew people with money. And mansions in England. Philip fled Corfu in 1922; smuggled out in an orange crate borne aboard HMS Calypso. (Greek: she who hides). The plan was to evade anti-monarchists out to kill his Papa, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, brother of King Constantine of Greece.

King George sent a Royal Navy gunboats around, as you do, when a rellie is in spot of bother. He’d never forgiven himself that time when he was too slow to pull the fat out of the fire for his other cousin, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia whose main claim to fame is that he had no idea how to be a Tsar. Nor did he want to be Tsar. Russia was less than understanding. It ended badly for Nick and family. Now things were looking crook for cousin Constantine.

Con was forced to abdicate. Grovelers gush that the sea rescue kindled Phil’s interest in the navy, but that’s a bridge too far. He was an eighteen-month old tot at the time. He could hardly be expected to know his Navel from his Naval. Oddly, he has no fond memories of Greece or the Greeks especially the Greek who shot his uncle George in 1913.

King George I of Greece and Denmark was on an afternoon stroll in the streets of Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, when shot in the back by Alexandros Schinas, who declared that he shot George for refusing to give him money. He’d even petitioned the palace a few years earlier. Philip took the story to heart.

Schinas, whose tubercular delirium may have triggered his shooting, as he claimed, died six weeks later in a fall from a window of the Magistrate’s Office.

Like LEGO, the Greek monarchy, in 1922, was an expensive Danish toy, imposed on the Greeks by a referendum in 1862, after thirty odd years’ under Bavarian import, King Otto of Wittelsbach, a dud they fell in love with at first sight but whom they later came to detest, depose and expel. Surprisingly, there was no mad rush of candidates to replace him.

Prince Wilhelm of Denmark, the eventual winner, received a paltry six votes. More popular candidates, include Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, another debauched party-goer. Instead, Alfred is sent on tour to Australia, by his mother, Victoria, partly to curb her son’s appetite for society high-life. A bullet which lodges near your spine can also have that effect. Prince Alfred, Earl of Kent and Earl of Ulster, is the only royal known to have been shot whilst on a visit to Sydney.

Henry O’Farrell shoots Alfred in the back in a visit to a picnic, a fund-raiser for the Sydney Sailors’ Home held at Clontarf Reserve in February 1868, the first royal tour of Australia. Men and women faint. Tears are shed. Tempers flare. A few quick-thinking bystanders barely manage to prevent O’Farrell from being torn asunder on the spot. An “Indignation Meeting, only a day later, draws 20,000. Things turn ugly for Irish-Catholic Australians across the nation.

O’Farrell fesses up to being a lone wolf. Just before he’s hanged, he disavows any link with any other Fenian, much to the relief of NSW cops who are quite unable to find evidence of any fellow terrorists.

O’Farrell is fuelled by Fenian republican sentiment; the desire to liberate Ireland from British tyranny. Prince Albert made an heroic recovery by the end of March yet he was not destined to become the king of Greece.

“Affie” as Prince Alfred was fondly known to his family, won 230, 016 votes. Yet he was forced to politely decline the offer to become King of Greece, however, flattering largely because his mother, Victoria, disapproved. He would later marry Duchess Marie Alexandrovna, the only daughter of Nicholas II and Marie Alexandrovna of Russia and on the death of his uncle Ernest II, in 1873 took up the duchy of Saxe Coburg and Gotha and gradually became popular and was well regarded by his subjects on his death in 1900. Fast forward.

The Calypso took Philip to Italy and he went on to Paris. Philip never looked back. Or forward. Phil, the Greek, or Stavros or The Hun as the Queen Mother called him, may technically have been a Greek prince, but he neither lived in Greece nor spoke Greek. French and German were his languages. As a young child in Paris, he saw himself as a Danish prince.

At seven, he was abandoned by his father Andrew who left to set himself up in Monte Carlo with his mistress, while his strikingly beautiful mother, Alice Battenberg, profoundly deaf, but who could lip read in several languages, believed herself to be a nun and the only woman on earth and married to Christ. A doctor diagnosed her as a paranoid schizophrenic. Philip’s grandmother was persuaded by psychiatrists that Alice was best placed in a secure sanatorium.

Alice did not go willingly. In Easter 1930, the highly distressed woman was physically subdued by the doctor, sedated and taken by car to a clinic near Lake Constance. His mother’s committal, 2 May is the end of Philip’s family life.

Alice of Battenberg, Prince Philip’s mother

Philip did not reconcile with Alice until 1967, when they were re-united and they spent her last days together.

Philip was sent to England to live with his maternal grandmother. His childhood was chaotic and infused with tragedy, writes Andrew Scott in Politico. He was cared for by his grandmother, Princess Victoria in England at first and was later in the guardianship of his uncle. Gordonstoun school and later the Royal Navy were to be profound influences on his character and personality.

As an adult he retreated into a Colonel Blimp caricature, a public persona that could be an irascible racist and sexist. Examples abound. Philip once asked a group of women community workers in the East End of London who presented the Queen with a sponge cake, whom “they were sponging off.” “Do you meet for a gossip?” he added.

Did he fill the House of Windsor’s random stand-up comedy slot? Leaven her Majesty’s chit-chat and banter? He was far too shrewd to be its court jester. Philip is credited with introducing a business like approach to the royal household and he did notch up an Olympic record of seventy six years as her Britannic Majesty’s “Cookie’s” chief squeeze.

Hacks at The Daily Telegraph and other sycophants enjoyed creating the myth that Philip was a no-nonsense man of the people but he showed no great fondness for commoners. He was no democrat. He greeted the brutal Paraguayan dictator General Alfredo Stroessner in 1963: “It’s a pleasure to be in a country that isn’t ruled by its people.”

The man, however, remains an enigma. Much is made by British media of the royals’ charity work and there is no doubt it is hard work. Perspective matters, however. Whilst Tory tabloid toadies love to fawn over Philip’s statistical record of 22,219 “engagements” in his capacity as the Duke of Edinburgh over six decades: “… most such engagements, involving anything from launching battleships and unveiling plaques at town halls to guzzling drinks and tucking into banquets in the company of other reactionary toffs, lasted on average an hour.”

His working week averages about 350 hours a year of seven hours a week over sixty-four years. For his he earned a stipend of £360,000 PA. All expenses, such as travel, accommodation and meals were paid for him. A complex and reticent figure despite his rhinoceros hide, Philip is not found in his obituaries or the obsequies of public figures.

Another baffling enigma, Scott Morrison is back into his cosplay, the mainstay of his Prime Ministry, doing stretch exercises with mining workers (but not twerking) to the strains of Jimmy Barnes’s Working class Man. It’s quite a stretch even for our protean PM. He tells pet journos that we could be all be jetting OS again, Friday.

“The doctor ate my homework,” or the experts told us to take a punt on a few vaccines are its first line of defence. But when the going gets tough, Morrison gives up. Fail to honour a single pledge to meet any vax distribution deadlines? It’s the only thing, for which federal government will take direct responsibility. Now it refuses to even have a plan. You can’t criticise a plan that doesn’t exist. Just as you can’t be held to account for a rape you don’t hear about.

The non-plan won’t catch on. Vaccination rollout an omnishambles? All of us have skin in the game. Morrison’s inspired decision to abandon all targets is all lamely explained away by scapegoating suppliers. Uncertainties such as vaccine nationalism have been known since the first vaccines appeared. Labor’s Antony Albanese warmed the government of the risk of putting all our eggs in one basket at the time.

Critics such as a left-wing ABC or the sewer rats of social media are confounded. Great solace is to be had that we rank just ahead of Bangladesh or one hundred and fourth in the global vaccination race?

Of course it’s just a walk in the park; not a race and we’ve lost only a total of 909 says the PM in a video he posts on Facebook, a type of social media he tells Australians not to trust, Laura Tingle, reminds Greg Hunt.

“We’ve been very clear to point out where you get your information from. You don’t get it from Facebook. You get it from official government websites,” Morrison patronises our National Press Club, 1 February, this year.

Yet our dilemma deepens – and with it Morrison’s problem. New evidence from researchers at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital indicates that just counting fatalities does not begin to assess the effect of the pandemic because it ignores Long Covid which may afflict at least nineteen per cent of all Australians who contract acute COVID-19.

“Long COVID hits women more often than men, affects young and old, and while more common in those who had severe symptoms in the acute stage, it can also afflict those who had only a mild course of COVID-19,” reports Crikey’s Jason Murphy.

Health Secretary Brendan Murphy praises the rigour of St Vincent’s research model which selects patients before they succumb to COVID-19 and which tracks them after they do. The experimental design side-steps some vociferous critics of studies which include non COVID-19 sufferers who dismiss Long Covid as all in the mind.

But don’t call Dr Laming. Liberal love rat, Andy Laming, the LNP’s upskirter can’t get enough of Facebook. He has a swag of fake Facebook community and news pages. The AEC is looking into the Queensland MP’s failure to make any political disclosure. Given the AEC’s record of investigations clearing Liberals in Kooyong for example, he’s got nothing to fear.

But Laming is in a spot of bother over his awarding a $550,000 govt grant to a rugby club in his electorate with links to one of his electoral staffers. Worse, the grant which comes from funding aimed at female participation, goes to the Southern Cyclones rugby club, which does not even field a women’s team?

MP for Bowman, Laming flip-flops on his vow not to stand for re-election thereby making himself a “de-selected candidate” who is entitled to a $105,625 resettlement allowance , explains researcher and Walkley finalist, William Summers. A net loss to his own party in terms of scandal, Laming will exit politics at our expense. Yet Morrison’s refusal to stand the MP down is yet another sign that the PM lacks the bottle to be an effective leader; much as he lacks the moral compass to condemn the behaviour of a party member who is a stalker and a troll who bullies women online.

Finally it’s still a shock to many that the PM takes it upon himself to offer an Easter Message. Worse, the sentiments expose the inadequacy multiplied by the inhumanity and sadistic cruelty of his government’s policies

“A very special time when people and families come together?” OK. Not so much for forty thousand Australians stranded overseas by his government. Or the Biloela family in indefinite detention, a type of torture according to the UN, on Christmas Island. Not for the poor whose numbers his government’s IR and economic policies have vastly expanded. 3.24 million of us are forced to live below the poverty line of half the minimum wage, ACOSS calculates.

But how good is The PM’s Easter Massage? Lynton Crosby may throw a dead cat on the table to distract us but it takes a Scott Morrison to get Jen to pet someone else’s live labradoodle. Get real.

A nation goes wild over platitudes and re-hashed homilies as we are left pondering his parable of the girls who must grow up but who’ll never lose their love of chocolate. Tony Abbott’s mentor, Cardinal “Melbourne Solution” George Pell reinvents Easter in an op-ed in The Australian in which he bullshits that the pagan festival has Christian origins.

But imagine if the Easter Message were not words at all but deeds; a commitment to a living minimum wage. Businesses can afford higher wages. The Guardian’s Paul Jericho reminds us businesses can afford higher wages. Profits increased by 15% in the last 12 months. It’s the first recession in Australian history when profits got bigger, not smaller.

Women would benefit the most. Two thirds of all award-dependent workers are women. Yet government policy increases inequality. As women returned “to part-time, casual and low-paid roles last year, the gender pay gap across all jobs (including part-time and full-time) widened from May to November, reaching 31%.

The federal government needs to do more than hand-ball the pandemic to the states to deal with. If it can’t secure enough vaccine, then say so. Call an election. But at the same time it needs to heed the women who marched on parliament not patronise and divide them or buy them off with a women’s cabinet taskforce.

A real boost to the minimum wage would not only help address the gender pay gap and the scourge of inequality, it would stimulate an economy that is coming off job-keeper in a world in which the coronavirus pandemic still rages, only to be depressed by the application of austerity economics – as seen in the shameful measures mooted by a Morrison government to make it harder for our most vulnerable to access the NDIS.

Time to drop the evasion and the indecision, Prime Minister, the nation is calling out for leadership not only in obtaining adequate and timely supplies to ensure a successful vaccination roll-out – but leadership in applying consequences to the likes of Andrew Laming. Above all leadership and vision is required from your government in boosting the minimum wage to stimulate the nation’s prosperity and to attack the scourge of violence against women at of its key origins – the undervaluing of women’s work and gender inequality in the workplace.

“I know perfectly well that it can’t last. Whatever we think, we are courtiers in an oriental Sultanate, and there is a corps of janissaries, with bowstrings at the ready, at the palace door.” Hugh Trevor Roper

Imagine half a million Australians, a record 501,876 to be precise, petition for a royal commission into your patron, rabid reactionary, Rupert Murdoch, billionaire media monopolist and monster powerbroker. Does our PM, whose Liberal Party is effectively a wholly-owned subsidiary of News Corp, act democratically?

No. Head Office steps in. Sharri Markson and Richard Ferguson of Murdoch’s The Australian publish an article, Kevin Rudd’s Bangladeshi ‘bots’ in media royal commission petition, Thursday 11 February, quoting a “Nicholas Smith”, who claims to have paid an overseas freelancer to “sign” the petition “hundreds of times” in order to “demonstrate to you how easy it is to manipulate our own government’s website.”

Smear tactics. Neither mud-slinger Markson, nor feckless Ferguson take the next responsible step: concede that even without this stunt, there are more names on Rudd’s e-petition that any other. Ever.

And just who is this Smith and his podcast The Turncoat? The story is a fake. SBS notes that The Turncoat’s Facebook page is littered with posts that have been flagged as misinformation, baseless claims about the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, and others, expressing support for President Trump.

Shades of Craig Kelly, MP for Hughes, who despite his dressing down from his PM, immediately returns to Facebook to promote more toxic nonsense about fake cures for Covid-19 and to sow doubt about vaccines. Former furniture rep Kelly appears regularly from his chair on Murdoch’s Sky News, beaming his dangerous disinformation around the country and – via the internet – around the globe – from whence it came.

There’s a restless, recycling in Kelly’s quest. As Crikey’s David Hardaker observes, “the outrageous nonsense spouted by the renegade Liberal MP is mostly spun from generic alt-right conspiracies and ideas.”

News Corp also loves nonsense. Dr Daniel Angus, Associate Professor of Digital Communication at the Queensland University of Technology says The Australian’s story is a “beat-up” and “bereft of any substance.” Dr Timothy Graham, Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at the Queensland University of Technology, who researches bots and misinformation, notes that there is no evidence that Kevin Rudd is linked to the bots.

“The headline of this article is misleading because it tries to weaponise the context of the fact that yes, it is possible to game these systems or any number of petitions,” he tells SBS. “The only influence is the unnamed individual, who paid someone overseas.”

The Ferguson – Markson abortive muck-raking comes on top of a slew of smears including alleged links between Rudd and Jeffrey Epstein. Almost every Murdoch paper runs a story about the International Peace Institute, chaired by Rudd, accepting US$650,000 from Epstein’s charities between 2011 and 2019.

Rudd says he convened a board meeting on December 4, 2019, to recommend an amount comparable to Epstein’s donations to the IPI be forwarded to charity. He said it was important to remember that Epstein’s foundations were donating millions of dollars to “dozens and dozens of charitable organisations” and he had never “to his knowledge” met him.

“I recommended to the board, and the board accepted my recommendation, that a donation of comparable amount be made to a charity, so that we would not in any way be a beneficiary of the cumulative donations from Epstein over a long period of time,” he tells ABC radio on Thursday, adding that he regarded Epstein as an “odious character in the extreme.”

Enter the Daily Telegraph, a Murdoch paper which defamed Michael Towke who was pre-selected hands down 82-8 for Cook, in July 2007. The Tele ran four articles, by four different journalists, two of them very senior. They defamed him, destroyed his political career, and caused untold stress to his family.

”These stories sent my mother to hospital. ‘They demonised me. I wanted to confront them in court.”

The false stories also caused the Liberal Party to rescind his nomination, allowing Scott Morrison to walk unelected into the seat. Never lacking in creativity, the Tele now tries a Hunter Biden yarn.

In this surreal spin, jailed business partner of presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter claims ex-PM Kevin Rudd was coming to one of their company’s banquets in order to celebrate a controversial Chinese takeover deal. But Rudd was in London and Abu Dhabi that week, as ABC’s Media Watch’s Paul Barry points out. But that doesn’t stop Murdoch hacks, from just making stuff up. Take a bow, Peta Credlin.

Sky hack Peta Credlin is forced to apologise for falsely calling Rudd’s petition just “a data-harvesting exercise,” part of a defamation settlement. “An egomaniacal fantasist, notes the AFR’s Joe Aston, Credlin is a flack who derided the jabbering nobodies and has-beens on Sky News while deciding which prestigious corporate role she would accept post-politics, only to become a jabbering has-been on Sky News.”

Murdoch allegedly colluded with miner, broadcaster and warmonger, Kerry Stokes, to help Morrison knife his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull. How dare Kevin Rudd get up an e-petition to call for a royal commission into the Murdoch empire’s ways and means? Of course, the empire strikes back. And misses. Spectacularly.

But there are more ways to kill a porcupine than smothering it with lotus petals. The PM steps up. Or does he? What would you do if you were Murdoch’s minion, Scott Morrison? Or Morrison’s catspaw? Organise an award, of course. Time it to coincide with Straya Day, a national holiday, 26 January, now colonised by its largely Liberal Party Committee to reward supporters and obscure the sordid reality of European invasion.

Thus “His Excellency”, Keith Rupert Murdoch is lauded for transforming the media landscape. The “how” is left unsaid. Buying competitors and selling controversy is key to his seamy business model. And sexploitation sells; look at his titillating page three girls. As does publishing lies about climate science, inventing a sinister agenda behind moves towards gender equality and defaming opponents, especially Labor and union figures.

Oddly, not everyone approves of Murdoch’s business model. Dacre deplores its vulgarity and vitriol.

I felt that whatever Murdoch touched went down-market, though it also moved from loss into profit. For the sake of sales, he aims to moronise and Americanise the population.

He also wants to destroy our institutions, to rot them with a daily corrosive acid… He certainly has a hatred of what he considers the stuffiness of the British establishment.

Being Morrison, someone else does the award. Of course. The PM’s Principal Private Secretary Yaron Finkelstein, spin doctor and former CEO of Crosby Textor knows whom to call. Of course, Scotty knows nothing. Chinese warlord, Feng Yü-hsiang, baptised his troops with a hose. Morrison is similarly doctrinaire and just as much of a control freak, whilst always disclaiming responsibility, I don’t hold the hose, mate.

Rupert’s rags attribute the Lifetime Achievement Award to The Australia Day Foundation UK a cabal of well-heeled, Tory corporate elitists, with rent-free offices in Australia House. The Foundation first gave out awards in 2003, the year of his illegal invasion of Iraq, under John Howard, who lied to parliament about it.

Some of these achievements are unique. Eight years ago, Murdoch’s News of the World, a now defunct UK Sunday tabloid, whose prurient interest in sex scandals earned it the soubriquet news of the screws, delighted readers by publishing pictures and video of Max Mosely, son of British fascist, Oswald Mosely.

The then UK Formula One Boss, indulged in a five-hour sadomasochistic session with prostitutes in a Chelsea apartment. News Group Newspapers, the tabloid’s publishers, had to pay £60,000 for grossly invading Mosely’s privacy. His sadomasochism he freely admits to. But much more damaging to Mosely is the News of the World’s false assertion that the motor-racing boss took part in a Hitler-themed orgy.

There was no Sick Nazi Orgy, as News maintains, he successfully argues in court – just a private “party” for himself and five like-minded, consenting women, and there was no public interest in reporting it.

Our government uses Australia House for the virtual ceremony. As taxpayers we pay (and pay) for a large part for Murdoch’s honour, while the pot is topped up by donations from Woodside Petroleum, in the news again for reaping a bonanza, after Alexander Downer helped bug East Timor’s cabinet in 2004 under cover of an aid project. Witness K, the ASIS agent involved in the bugging turned whistle-blower, is currently on secret trial in Canberra in a travesty of justice because he’s embarrassed the government in telling the truth.

Rio Tinto contributes, Anglo American, energy giant Worley resources and billionaire hedge fund manager Sir Michael Hintze’s own asset management fund CQS. In brief, a claque of Murdoch media icons.

News of the award is not just a rude shock. It’s a mystery. Who gonged the Doctor Evil of Global Media? Not that invisible hand of capitalism again? Each of us working for his or her own gain, benefiting us all? Scott Morrison just loves to keep us in the dark. Especially as the alternative could be as embarrassing as former half-term PM Tony Abbott discovered with his Sir Philip knighthood. But Murdoch won’t blab.

Rupert’s addicted to power. And he’s had a sniff. Eminence grise in Blair’s family affair, Trump’s enabler and dinner guest. And now, Muppet Morrison’s puppeteer. Or is it self-help? His devout faith in money and power, helped Rupie buy a papal knighthood in 1988, by donating to a Church education fund and chipping in $10 mill to help build LA’s Catholic cathedral, thus buying the right to be addressed as “His Excellency.”

Who’d honour an Establishment reject? Well, we did, in effect. And we paid for our part. Just as we stuff $40 million into the Murdoch family’s pockets for Foxtel, to do something with women’s sport. Michael West believes Murdoch may have recently, quietly sold Foxtel- but the Coalition is keen to see Google and Facebook pay the Murdoch empire (and the boutique Nine Newspapers, now under Chairman Costello, a Liberal rag appended to its real estate business) for bringing visitors to his dying pay-walled newspapers.

Google knows search engines are not killing mainstream media. Its advertising didn’t kill the classified ads that paid for newspapers. Specialised online sites did that. Above all, Canberra’s plan is an “unworkable” dud.

You wouldn’t read about it – at least not in mainstream media. But Rupie has the gall to play the victim. Claims he’s being muzzled. He’s clearly dog-whistling not only those who have no bullshit filter but those who fear wokeness, a state of being socially aware, especially of issues of justice, inequality and racism. He protests,

“For those of us in media, there’s a real challenge to confront a wave of censorship that seeks to silence conversations. To stifle debate and ultimately stop individuals and societies from realizing their potential.

This rigidly enforced conformity, aided and abetted by so-called social media, is a straitjacket on sensibilities. Too many people have fought too hard in too many places for freedom of speech to be suppressed by this awful woke orthodoxy.”

Murdoch’s hypocrisy does not go unnoticed by the lynx-eyed, Rudd who had the wit to observe in Copenhagen in Christmas 2009, that “those Chinese fuckers are trying to rat-fuck us.”

“Rank hypocrisy from Murdoch accepting an Australia Day award. He pretends to champion freedom of speech, but he’s spent decades abusing his monopoly to bully Australians he doesn’t like into silence. Murdoch invented “cancel culture” in Australia,” he tweets.

But an “achievement award”? True, His Excellency helps pick our PM; set his agenda. And granted, Rupert always does his level best to help capital protect itself from the curse of working voters. But achievement?

“If you’re just choosing from people in OECD countries, ostensible liberal democracies, Rupert Murdoch has to be up there as the most-single-handedly destructive person of the last three decades, right?” MSNBC anchor, Chris Hayes, is stung by the brazen duplicity in Fox’s peddling the Hunter Biden laptop canard. He may as well be talking about how Murdoch has stymied carbon abatement or backed the Iraq incursion. On a national level he could be talking of how the empire has destroyed progressive candidates’ lives.

Rudd, who unlike our current charlatan, was a real PM, sees Murdoch as “a cancer on our democracy.”

Worse, Rupert enables mob violence. For The Washington Post’s, Margaret Sullivan , the mob that stormed and desecrated the Capitol, 6 January, 2021, could only exist in a nation radicalized by the urging of Murdoch’s factoid Fox News. Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham all helped incite that riot.

Perhaps, in a post-modern, post structuralist, post-truth, world, inciting destruction is a type of achievement. Yet given his history in the British newspaper business, few would mistake Murdoch’s award for anything but a set-up. Rupert’s gong is an award conferred on the other side of the world, aimed squarely at an Australian audience. Kevin Rudd – and the signatories to his e-petition – will have no difficulty recognising the target.

It’s unlikely Murdoch will feel the need to add the Lifetime Achievement award to his CV for his next big commercial adventure. The News Corp CEO and his right-hand woman, Rebekah Brooks have held a series of meetings with the orchestrated catastrophe that is Boris Johnson’s Conservative government. Sam Bright in Byline Times reports that the pair had seven meetings with five senior ministers last August-September.

It’s clear that the Murdoch empire proposes to open an “opinionated” news channel, News UK TV which some worry will turn out to be just another version of the highly profitable Fox. The banner headline in The Sunday Mail is a hint, Top Tory Launches Rival to Woke Wet BBC.

While the Murdoch channel may struggle to achieve a big audience, its influence may be much larger. Fox News, for example, one of the most popular US networks, reaches fewer than four million primetime viewers. But it’s a sterling example of how even a shameless train-wreck of opinionated hackery can have a significant intermedia effect, setting the agenda of mainstream network news as well as its cable TV rivals.

Similarly The Australian can set and frame the news agenda on any given day in Australia with even the ABC taking its lead from the stories that News Corp publishes. Murdoch pretends that he doesn’t tell his editors what to print. The truth is that each editor is left in no doubt. And Murdoch is in constant communication. His power over his papers and over many of the governments they are published in is enormous.

But power does not confer acceptance. His experience in the UK is instructive. To the establishment, Murdoch is the archetypical antipodean gold-digger, a crassly ambitious vulgarian for whom no gutter is too deep. This reputation was earned when his News of the World ran Christine Keeler’s memoirs in 1968. The Aussie nonentity morphed effortlessly into the Dirty Digger inside six months.

“It was his first very big story in his first very big British newspaper,” writes The Guardian’s Steve Hewlett. If it won few friends in high places, it got attention. It earned him a reputation for muck-raking for personal gain. Later, of course, Murdoch would ingratiate himself with the power elite only to ultimately alienate it.

Murdoch’s illegal Phone Hacking Scandal, nearly finished him in Britain. Only nine years ago, a cross-party UK parliamentary committee tells the News Corp chief he “lacks credibility,” his son, James, “appears incompetent” and the company is guilty of “wilful blindness” towards its staff at The News of the World.

Murdoch is not, they conclude, a fit and proper person to run any sort of rag. Luckily for “Pops” as he’s known to his kids, his pal David Cameron’s four Conservative MPs on the ten person committee loyally dissent.

Elisabeth Murdoch is ropeable. As Rupert’s only daughter and the child with the most business acumen, puts it with characteristic Murdoch delicacy, her brother, James and Rebekah have “fucked the company.”

And as the revelations reverberate, The Guardian’s John Harris fears, quite reasonably, the duo may have done the self-same thing to UK politics and public life. As in Australia.

It’s not just the mogul’s dominance, or his petty vendettas against progressives and his pleasure in ruining people’s lives, his prurient eagerness to drag us into the gutter, his brazen fabrication and his outright lies, there’s the damage Murdoch does as he debases public discourse.

Roger Ebert’s account of the uber-grub’s arrival at the Chicago Sun-Times, reveals something more than an assault on decorum and decency, a perverse, pernicious vulgarity.

“… first day of Murdoch’s ownership, he walks into the newsroom and we all gather around and he recites the usual blather and rolls up his shirtsleeves and started to lay out a new front page. Well, he was a real newspaperman, give him that. He throws out every meticulous detail of the beautiful design, orders up big, garish headlines, and gives big play to a story about a North Shore rabbi accused of holding a sex slave.”

Rudd protests the ways the Murdoch empire’s power is routinely used and wantonly abused, “to attack opponents in business and politics by blending editorial opinion with news reporting. Australians who hold contrary views have felt intimidated into silence. These facts chill free speech and undermine public debate.”

True. Our trust in institutions, including democracy itself, not to mention our sense of integrity, is polluted by Rupert’s alarmism, climate denialism, muckraking, titillation, innuendo and character assassination, although it’s not spelled out in Rudd’s petition. But schlock and horror is just the dirty digger’s house style.

For Murdoch and his family firm, media ownership is a means to power. He is the most powerful single force in Australian politics, “bigger than the major parties or the combined weight of the unions,” says veteran Labor politico, Bruce Hawker, in The Rudd Rebellion. Bigger than Big Gina and Twiggy combined.

Power confers contempt. He lets his useful idiot, Donald Trump call him “Rupie”. Rupie calls Trump a “fucking moron” behind his back.

And the Murdoch family business’ power is metastasising further, thanks to the Coalition gifting Foxtel $40 million to make three out of four Australians lose free access to sport. Not that Foxtel is making any money as far as anyone can tell – now that Murdoch has “disappeared” the company to the secret state of Delaware, the small Eastern U.S. State, which boasts more corporate entities—public and private—than people.

The ratio stands at 945,326 to 897,934, at last count.

Helping the dynasty increase its power, is the Morrison government with its Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code a form of extorting money from Google and Facebook on the lie that the social media giants profit unfairly from news. Or else Microsoft’s Bing gets it. Morrison licks his lips at the APC.

Bing is the winner in a 2019 Stamford study which shows the search engine is far more likely to return disinformation, misinformation conspiracy and white supremacist sites. Out of 600 results for 12 search queries, Bing returned 125 sources of disinformation while Google returned 13.

Microsoft is pleased, too, because whilst it commands 30 per cent of traffic in the US, Bing currently has only 3.6 per cent of traffic. In response to queries for vaccines autism, Bing returns six anti-vax sites in its top 50 results. Google, in contrast, shows none. In general, Bing directs users to conspiracy sites even if they are not looking for them. Our PM is either unaware of this research or it fits his friendship with QAnon follower, Tim Stewart whose wife Lynelle is paid $80K PA with a car allowance to be Jenny Morrison’s special companion .

The tech giants face payments which will flow to News Corp and Nine helping them increase their dominance at the expense of smaller, more independent publications and as Kevin Rudd puts it “media diversity.”

A code should not just profit two giant companies, Chair of Private Media and Solstice Eric Beecher argues,

“This ‘ground-breaking’ legislation, as the government and its big media supporters constantly describe it, should not just be a mechanism to ensure the bulk of Google and Facebook money lines the pockets of a couple of multibillion-dollar public companies for whom news journalism is a small part of their business.”

News journalism is not a big part of Murdoch’s business. News Corp is more a propaganda operation masquerading as a news service, argues academic Denis Muller, a role which Sally Young notes is how the business began its corporate life in 1922 as News Limited. Secretly established by a mining company owned by industrial titans of the day, it was created for the express purpose of disseminating “propaganda.”

Rupert did not invent the tabloid, although he’d love to take credit. Edward Lloyd (1815-1890), published the first newspaper to sell a million copies a hundred years earlier. And while Murdoch is always happy to take kudos for “writing what the public want to read”, a Lord Northcliffe motto, his papers and his TV shows are part of more complex and more pernicious transactions than simply pandering to base or popular appetites.

“Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste, and end by debauching it,” quotes The Monthly’s Richard Cooke. The insight’s attributed to TS Eliot in The Pilkington Report on Broadcasting, 1962, which opposed commercial broadcasting in the UK.

Murdoch knows the tabloid’s days are numbered, like all print newspapers, along with the days of their most successful modern exponent. It’s not just the Internet. In Britain it’s the pandemic. Which is why it doesn’t hurt to get out the turd-polish. Murdoch has a big TV project in the wings and his lifetime achievement award is a kick in the teeth for Rudd and a timely bit of a back scratch from Morrison in advance of an early election.

News of the World was ultimately wound up after a notorious phone hacking scandal led to an eight month trial in which Murdoch did not appear. Instead his money did the talking. Editor Rebekah Brooks was his proxy, just as Andy Coulson was a de facto proxy for the PM at the time David Cameron and his political reputation.

It cost Murdoch over a billion dollars to engage top silks and assistants, a tour de force which overwhelmed the state’s prosecutor, one assistant and meagre resources.

Yet it was not the indictments in court that were at stake, less about journalists behaving badly so much as the power of money and the abuse of that power, an issue which is very much alive in the incorporation of a “charity” The Australia Day Institute, UK, so that members of the power elite can applaud each other

“… the perception that some news organisations were all too happy to invade privacy and ruin lives in order to sell more papers; that they regarded themselves as not only above the law but above the government, which would do their will or suffer for it; that they had poisoned the mainstream of public debate with a daily drip-feed of falsehood and distortion.”

Achievements? Inciting riotous insurrection via Fox in the US and colluding with the Morrison government in promoting climate science denial on Sky and in his News Corp papers in Australia – now quietly relocated to Delaware? As Michael West reports, Murdoch has already funnelled his Foxtel monopoly out of Australia into a new company, or “mysterious entity” as West puts it, set up in the secrecy jurisdiction of Delaware where shareholders, directors and other picayune details remain hidden from public scrutiny. A ScoMoesque move.

Delaware seems to be part of a radical restructure of News Corp’s Australian assets in preparation for sale. Yet Rupie even at 89 is his dynasty’s biggest asset.

Rupert poses; flash as a rat with a gold tooth in what seems to be a budget hotel bathroom. He’s spent his life crushing editors and standards even for hacks of the gutter press. Setting the bar lower than a snake’s belly.

”Silence. I am the billionaire tyrant Rupert Murdoch,” says Murdoch’s avatar on an episode of The Simpsons as he commands attention to open the Super Bowl. A man with a massive ego, writes Paul Barry, an elephant hide and an extraordinary sense of entitlement. A mammoth sense of his own self worth.

Fox sponsors Trump’s conspiracy theory of election theft and voter fraud just because it makes money. But the outlook is not rosy. As with News Corp, the rivers of gold are drying up and it’s time to move on and sell up.

Is the gong Morrison’s revenge on Rudd whose petition for a Royal Commission into News Corp gained over half a million signatures? Investigative journalist Ronni Salt traces our PM’s links with the mysterious Foundation, which include a one-time PR manager for our PM during his brief time at Tourism Australia.

Ronni generously calls the award “a fabricated piece of performance frippery” and an after-thought.

“It’s that long forgotten party hat left under the stairs given to that extra birthday party guest at the last minute.”

But even at 89 it would be dangerous to write Rupert off yet. His mother lived to 103. Surely he can live long enough to be arraigned before Rudd’s Royal Commission.

Deck the halls with vows of folly. How good are good tidings, lies and promises you never, for a moment, intend to keep? All Aussies stranded overseas home by Christmas? Ho. Ho. Ho. Australia ‘among the first’ to receive the world’s most promising vaccine? “We could begin manufacturing it by year’s end.” Ho. Ho. Ho. “NSW is the gold standard [of contact tracing]. I don’t spend too much time worrying about NSW.” Ho. Ho. Ho. Santa Morrison’s on top of his game.

The killing season segues into the silly season, a surreal appendix to our political advent calendar. Our coal-lobby’s PM, a fossil with a baseball cap, Keating calls him, indefatigable self-promoter, Santa ScoMo, mugs for official photographer, Adam Taylor, a News Corp recruit hired to show a wholesome 1950s household ruled by a practical but pious, devoted Dad. If the Liberal Party is News Corp’s local political wing, Adam Taylor is its Leni Riefenstahl.

But hark! Hear ye not the Angel Song? Avalon toffs begin to cough and splutter. ‘Rona clusters erupt over Sydney; Croydon, Gosford, Katoomba, Cronulla – now even reach rust-belted Wollongong, site of the grand failure of the first coal port in 1868, constructed by government at great expense.

Will Morrison rise to the (photo)-opportunity? He soars above the pack.

Leadership? He’s all over it. Our nation’s relatable mate, bonds with his tradie base, teaming natty RM Williams red and blue themed check shirt with chinos. He’s up a ladder having a red hot go posing as a DIY festive decorator, oozing practicality; a handyman dad. Blue sky framing the shot evokes Our Comeback™ campaign.

Abbott created the PM’s official photographer role to ensure we see the PM our PM needs us to see. Now press photography is decimated; casualised by News Corp and by the few remaining other mastheads’ kamikaze cost-cutting. A politicised propaganda photo from an embedded happy snapper is increasingly the only political photo we are likely to see. Resilient photojournalists can always transition to posters of the Santos gas pipeline.

Tony Abbott needed two photographers, of course. Turnbull had but one. Gillard dismissed the idea as too narcissistic. But Morrison’s smitten; in love with his own turd polish; his staged image. And how good is being your own sock puppet? A goofy, blokey, populist persona helps cocoon you from accountability, for starters. As does the fun father act. Sociopathic control freaks affect an air of equable laid-back informality with ease. Morrison can even feign the po-faced international statesman.

And the act travels well. Our PM’s junket to Japan is a runaway success. Call me Yoshi, says Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga. Or so Morrison claims, in his press release to The Australian, the Liberal Party’s Pravda. Like Sydney’s New Year’s Eve fireworks, the relationship gets off to “a cracker of a start”. The Yoshi and ScoMo show further winds up China with a mutual defence pact, the Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) which makes it easier to play war games but means that our diggers in Japan could face the death penalty. We’re still working on that.

Also in progress is RCEP, a regional comprehensive economic “partnership” led by top dog China, a huge win for us but no-one can explain why- helped enormously by an image supplied by PM’s Office. Morrison achieves a suitably inscrutable, sourpuss scowl. He’s clearly calculating that when he gets back, fourteen days of self quarantine mean he’ll escape the controversy over allegations of SAS civilian murders and get to spend some more quality time with his personal photographer.

The quarantine gallery of poses includes a suit jacket worn with shorts, a desperate sort of Dave Hughes’ sight gag to humanise the monster who plans to incentivise job seekers by cutting back allowances (“tapering”) so that millions out of work or underemployed will be unable to pay rent, power bills or put food on the table.

But some local images are a triumph. Taylor’s June shot of the PM at the Eden chip mill, Victoria, against the light is just magical. Whilst it’s billed as a $50 million bushfire recovery fund for the forestry industry, readers discover that Morrison’s government is a ray of sunshine for the community which is entirely at the mercy of the local timber mill. None could possibly be redeployed into a less ecocidal, more sustainable line of work.

600 workers’ jobs are at stake, Scotty lies. In fact, there’s more work in the arts and sport in the region, explains South East Region Conservation Alliance spokesperson, Harriet Swift, who sees the grant as a tragic waste of money and opportunity. Fires have burnt 80 per cent of State forest available for logging on the South Coast.

Senator Jim Molan’s announcement of a million dollar grant 6 November is, in fact, the re-announcement of projects to make pallets and briquettes announced well before the bushfires. Our mainstream media’s current nanosecond attention span and a 24 hour news cycle makes recycling old announcements so much easier.

The remainder of the “recovery fund” is buried deep in labyrinthine, bureaucratic complexity. Communities have to resort to full time grant application writers to even engage with the process.

It’s a different story for big Liberal donor, Anthony Pratt, Australia’s second-richest man whose multi-national-VISY, one of the largest paper companies in the world, gets a ten million dollar handout for its undamaged mill at Tumut. (The mill does suffers widespread loss of plantation timber as 62,000 hectares of NSW state forest are lost.) The grant is guaranteed to create jobs, according to federal government, but The Greens point out that the funding goes to a stacker-reclaimer, an automated piece of machinery built overseas. Few Australian jobs are in the deal at all.

Then there’s the inconvenient truth that waste from the paper mill goes into landfill in towns around the Riverina.

But it’s all in the call. Nick Feik in The Monthly calls Morrison The Announcement Artist – because it’s more refined than bullshit artist. Morrison can’t help himself. He’ll announce anything. Do nothing. Deny everything. Take his infamous hollow promise on aged care.

“… the Australian Government will be responsible for residential aged care facilities”, he bullshits in February in his great palaver over his fifty-six page Coronavirus Emergency Response Plan, that turned out to lack any plan at all. Not everyone’s forgotten. Few families forgive him.

The PM was helping too blue to be true, former teacher, Reservist, cattle and truffle-farmer, RFS Volunteer, Lifeline Counsellor, Anglican Church Property Trustee and Oxfam Director, Fiona Kotvojs, an unwitting self-parody of Liberal Party “values”, lose the Eden-Monaro by-election to Labor’s Kristy McBain, as it happened.

Or was he? A few electors may have recognised Morrison as the bloke who took a holiday during the bushfires or who forced the odd local to shake his hand. The unsuccessful Liberal candidate may not have been helped by Morrison’s mug shot on each of the seventy polling booths, however talented the official photographer.

Today, there’s no hint of apology for the PM’s role in clear-felling Victoria’s timber export industry as a result of his government’s abortive trade war with China. Our former best customer is declining any logs from Australia. Expect Fiona to be parachuted into the senate or AAPT on to the ABC board, or all three, as Our Comeback™ plays out.

All his political career, Morrison’s worked hard to remove himself from the frame. He spins, ducks weaves and deceives in a frenetic blur of role-playing self-promotion, sophistry and evasion. You can’t pin anything on him. Especially not blame. Sean Kelly calls him our “no-fault PM”. If only that were not -in itself- a massive fault.

In frame is a festive, fire-truck-red aluminium step-ladder and a tantalising background glimpse of the pluto-populist’s million dollar Sydney harbour view. Just an hour up the road, is Avalon, named after King Arthur’s isle, a refuge to cure Arthur of his mortal wounds but, today, it’s the centre of a Coronavirus cluster of 144.

Cricket Australia overrules doctors and dictates to the state government, the New Year’s Test will go ahead.

“The best health advice tells us outdoor ticketed seated events are safer than household gatherings, and that’s just a fact,” Premier Gladys Berejiklian bullshits. 25,000 fans will throng public transport. Masks will be optional.

Experts fear a super spreader event. But it won’t be Morrison’s fault. Nor will Hillsong Church be in any way be held responsible, despite images of mass beachside gatherings of non-social distancing prosperity-gospellers.

Our PM has long since abdicated his federal responsibility for quarantine to the state but is on standby to issue vital statements commending the embattled premier Gladys Berejiklian on her heroic non-lockdown or her capitulation to the vested interests of commercial sport, alcohol and gambling.

(The) … major reason for success with Covid 19 directions was that the messages were coming from health professionals, hence trusted. The politicians, PM with Brendan Murphy and Gladys with Kerry Chant have used them to sell a different message. Undermining our need to trust science, tweets Tony Windsor.

Charismatic Gladys appears daily in turgid TV pressers pleading with viewers not to travel – unless they have to. Nags them to wear masks. If they feel like it. She is the very model of libertarian authority. Her personal relationship with medical science is also uneasy. Don’t go to the fireworks unless you feel compelled? She could be Deputy-Head-Mistress of a progressive private school. If she were a leader or public speaker. Or just in charge.

“Limit your mobility … we are far from out of the woods.” “This is a very unpredictable, contagious disease, but we also appreciate that we don’t want to put more burdens on our citizens than we need to. It’s a very fine line,” Gladys agonises. Real leaders such as Dan Andrews or Anastasia Palaszczuk just draw the line.

And take expert advice. Ms Berejiklian permits Christmas gatherings of children because, she claims, children are not transmitters. Yet other countries’ research shows children and young adults to play key roles in the spread of the virus. Schools have been a driver of the second wave in Europe, India, Canada, the UK and elsewhere. Children account for three of the six cases of Coronavirus in western Sydney’s Croydon Coronavirus cluster.

Morrison appointee, CMO Kelly says he wouldn’t take his kids to any cricket match but it’s OK for the public.

No buy-in from PM? Scott’s just a humble dad, at heart, taxed by putting up family Christmas decorations. Mulling over his New Year’s word salad about our optimism and confidence. Being handy is such a relief from his day job, evading quarantine responsibility, waging war on the poor, the aged and his pet project of blowing up the economy by suppressing wage growth, depressing consumer spending and alienating our main trading partner.

And grovelling to Rupert Murdoch is hard work- pleasing our Dear Leader demands all his intuition . “It’s like News Corp editors; they know to anticipate god’s wishes, they don’t need to be told how to cover stories.” But they never cease worrying over getting it right.

Above all, Santa Scotty’s plumb tuckered out just from reshuffling his cabinet. Making Greg Hunt Minister for the Aged while allowing him to keep the Health portfolio is a snub to the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, whose media release on its interim report is entitled A Shocking Case of Neglect.

Commissioners Tracey and Briggs call for comprehensive reform. In August, senior counsel assisting, Peter Rozen QC, voices his scepticism. Rozen can find no evidence of any plan at all. Just evidence of months of under-resourcing, lack of planning and wage theft. Following the deaths of 685 aged-care residents, minister Richard Colbeck loses his COVID-related responsibilities. Not that he admits to any responsibility.

“I don’t feel responsible personally for the deaths that have occurred, as tragic as they are, which were caused by Covid-19,” Colbeck tells a Senate estimates hearing. It’s the death of ministerial responsibility, writes Dr Sarah Russell. Morrison’s re-shuffle seems to be based on little more than looking after his mates. Yet never was a talent pool so shallow.

Why was “criminal act” Al Tudge promoted from acting Immigration or David Coleman’s locum to Education? Why reward his contempt for the law? Hawke’s perfect in Immigration- already big-noting himself; calling for visas to be revoked in Northern Beaches’ – because tourists are so anti-Australia in failing to social distance.

Attorney-General “Public Bar”, Christian Porter is still the very model of a modern Liberal attorney-general by continuing to conduct the secret trial of whistle-blower, Witness K, a trial which his lawyer, Bernard Collaery, says has destroyed his Canberra legal practice.

Our democracy is fragile, Collaery tells ABC’s 7:30 Report. “Publicity is the soul of justice.”

Our PM is not wearing The Legion of Merit, a fab new decoration, which Murdoch papers insist, is a top military honour from his mentor, fellow war crimes enthusiast and Kleptocrat in Chief, Donald Trump, another family guy who stuns everyone with his refusal to be the only outgoing president of the US to be voted out of office. Not only is he refusing to accept the will of the people, his crackpot accusations of voter fraud will undermine the Biden Presidency’s legitimacy enough to sabotage the incoming administration before it’s even sworn in.

Shinzo Abe and Narendra Modi get the Merit gong, too, a nod to the Quadrilateral alliance of India, Japan, Australia and the US which resurrects the gang of four; Quad 2.0 to keep China in its place. It’s working flawlessly so far to cause a dramatic cut in our export trade. Yet has the US made the Morrison government an offer it can’t refuse? There’s no overt reason why the Coalition would go out of its way to poke the panda.

Jack Waterford notes that iron ore prices may temporarily, in total value, compensate for the losses faced by coal miners, wine, fish, barley, timber, lobsters and any other item China chooses for impact on the Australian economy and Australian public opinion.

“But it is China setting the pace, not us.”

Over 50 Australian coal ships are still stranded off China’s coast, held up by an import ban, despite the nation facing coal shortages and one of its worst power blackouts in years, reports The Guardian’s Helen Davidson.

Imports of timber from NSW and WA are also halted. Local customs officers find pests in cargoes from those states, the General Administration of Customs says late on Wednesday.

Perhaps Australia is not aligned with the U.S. to protect itself from China. Australia is aligned with the U.S. to protect itself from the U.S. As a Twitter follower recently observed, the US doesn’t have allies, only hostages.

US political analyst, neorealist, right wing John Mearsheimer put his view less delicately last year to the CIS.

“You’re either with us or against us,” he says. “And if you’re trading extensively with China, and you’re friendly with China, you’re undermining the United States in this security competition. You’re feeding the beast, from our perspective. And that is not going to make us happy. And when we are not happy you do not want to underestimate how nasty we can be. Just ask Fidel Castro.”

It’s all far too hard for Morrison. Yet there’s little sign that his doctrinaire approach to applying neoliberal austerity to Australian workers is likely to pay any dividends beyond securing the continued support of party donors.

Merry Christmas, reads a Bunnings sign in another shot in ScoMo’s promo. Yet for millions of Australians, whom Morrison’s government is depriving of income support, Christmas is miserable. In a last act of bastardry, the 2020 parliament cuts incomes of the poor. Two million have no paid work. A further million children live in these families.

Rather than a safety net for a marginalised minority, as the Coalition has it, short-term reliance on Newstart is relatively common, at nearly a quarter of the workforce, from 2001 to 2016, the latest figures available for study, according to a recent study by The Brotherhood of St Lawrence in conjunction with ANU and RMIT.

“Despite record high unemployment and underemployment, the Government is cutting income support at Christmas time, down to $50 per day, almost taking us back to the old, brutal Newstart rate of $40 a day,” despairs Dr Sandra Goldie, ACOSS, CEO.

Since March, a quarter of a million more of us are forced to seek work while Scotty’s party helps usury prosper by axing responsible lending laws just as eviction moratoriums expire.

Homelessness will rise nine per cent in the New Year while housing stress will afflict an extra 24% of families.

You can’t fault the choreography even if the plot’s a turkey and the lead character’s a ham. Scotty the fawning, shape-shifting sycophant – “I don’t hold the pose, mate,” – is a Karma Chameleon, a man for all seasons’ greetings.

The one constant in Scotty’s approval-seeking is his indifference to others’ suffering, his empathy bypass, as vital to his evasion of responsibility as it is to his capacity for gratuitous cruelty, evident in his indefinite detention, a form of torture of asylum seekers, through to his signature Robodebt’s extortion with menaces; all his own work.

“Contrary to the assertions of Stuart Roberts … the (Robodebt) disaster was not a logical development from data matching schemes of previous governments going back to Bob Hawke. It was the extra leavening of bias, malice, inverted onus of proof, major jump of logic and administrative and bureaucratic arrogance that sheets the conception home to Morrison himself,” notes former Canberra Times news-sleuth Jack Waterford, AM.

For Murdoch’s media, our ABC and other camp followers of the News Corp behemoth, monster Morrison morphs into a harmless if not endearingly incompetent suburban middle class dad puzzling over electrical connections of his modest Christmas light show. Yet even uber-orchestrated, Scotty’s retro Xmas show betrays a toxic nostalgia for gender inequality.

In Morrison’s 1950s division of labour, a fun father mucks around with festive fairy lights, while mum, left with all the real work, especially, the family’s cognitive and emotional labour, which so often includes relentless, corrosive maternal guilt, has a nervous breakdown in the pantry.

Mum’s infinitely elastic role includes kitchen galley slavery, extra housekeeping on top of Everywoman’s traditional yuletide role as chief scapegoat and emotional hostage. Domestic violence, the euphemism for male violence is rising over the pandemic and during the Christmas season, yet there is no hint that this government is willing to increase funding for refuges or provide any real support for women in crisis.

The level of artifice in Scotty’s Xmas sales pitch is astonishing. He publishes a manipulative letter to “his girls”, daughters, Abbey and Lily, in which he claims that Dad just has to be away from home a lot because the country needs him to help people look after the environment, get a job, a house and pay for their retirement.

Or doctors, hospitals and drugs. He reminds his daughters that if the economy can’t afford drugs for a child their age with Cystic Fibrosis, the child doesn’t get to breathe. No pressure. No emotional blackmail. What a mensch! What a man for our times. Yet as the pandemic becomes endemic, as his government’s debacle in its megaphone diplomacy with China begins to cost, the Morrison’s government’s hollow promises, lies and incompetence will be its undoing. Looking at the debacle that is the NSW government’s response to what may well prove to be a new wave of coronavirus cases surely no-one can miss the criminally negligent federal government behind the scenes. Our challenge is to hold it to account.

Australians swell with pride; hi-five each other – as they wait patiently to be ripped off at local supermarket duopoly checkouts, Monday – or vastly overcharged for cheap, dirty petrol amongst the worst in the OECD, over news that Abbott fan and Dutton numbers man, Belgian waffler Mathias Cormann zips around Europe in an RAAF Dassault 7X jet schmoozing OECD big-shots in his ridiculous bid to become its Secretary-General.

The jokes – and the jet are on us. At $4305 per hour, no tax-payer or Job-seeker looking forward to starving on forty dollars a day in January, could possibly begrudge the cost. As Nine Newspapers’ Liberal shill, Bevan Shields points out, we’re keeping The Cormannator safe from Covid and bigging up ourselves on the economic stage. He’s also got a staff of eight and a doctor just to ensure he’s not over-stretched or overwhelmed by Covid-19.

“There’s 36,000 Australians currently stranded as a result of border closures; they don’t get this sort of treatment, having an RAAF jet,” Shadow Minister for foreign affairs, Penny Wong objects. Nor do other candidates for international positions, particularly if they happen to be women not in the Liberal Party.

Natasha Stott Despoja is able to successfully run her UN campaign entirely from home via Zoom. She’s recently been appointed to the UN Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, CEDAW.

But could this be yet another stroke of genius from a Morrison government just busting with big ideas? Prepared to think big. Impose our own Australian-Belgian talking points on what neoliberals believe is the “world economic stage.”

We could even be a voice for the Indo-Pacific Region – another Trumpism replacing Asia-Pacific. We don’t even have a PM who can speak for his own party. Or rise above platitude. And you may as well try to nail a jelly to a wall when it comes to getting any accountability out of him but ten countries and 650 million people should be a doddle.

Read all about it in the PMC’s drops to media. What you won’t see is any hint that Scotty is shitting himself that the OECD will impose trade sanctions on Australia because his government won’t get real about climate change.

Luckily, we may not need free trade in future. Be free of trade itself. China’s tariffs put the brakes on, Hockey and Abbott ran our car industry off the road. Farmers can’t pick produce, given a pandemic drought of backpackers and Kanakas 2.0 .

Luckily, as Scotty tells us, we’re transitioning to a service economy. We’ll surge to prosperity on the wave of an economy based on taking in each other’s washing. And dry-cleaning our leaders’ trousers.

No RAAF jet lacks a trouser press but top of Cormann’s CV, must be his role as the one and only – One Nation-Whisperer. Who could forget when, in October 2018, his mis-management of government business in the senate led to a vote in support of Pauline’s motion that it’s OK to be white. Coalition MPs “only mistakenly” supported the motion, Cormann quickly pointed out – and he wasn’t even in the chamber when the racist motion was passed.

Keating’s unrepresentative swill clearly includes government senators who can’t or won’t think for themselves. Cormann, himself, was once just a loud stooge; echoing Tony Abbott’s Labor debt and deficit nonsense.

“For me personally, this is severely embarrassing,” Cormann explained. Happily, Labor agreed to having another vote, which unanimously opposed the motion but with leadership skills like this, Cormann will go far. He’ll need to. Why not a shot at a pro-renewable and climate change woke OECD? All Mathias needs to do to create the perfect CV is to go through and delete all references to anything he’s ever said or done on energy. Or debt and deficit.

The result will look a bit noir; like the stygian pages of Justice Brereton’s redacted report on alleged SAS war crimes and atrocities in the narco-state of Karzai’s kleptocracy of Afghanistan which Morrison repeatedly warns us will be shocking (if we could read it). The print job is likely to use a whole new black toner cartridge but, heck, with a planet to fry and entire species to exterminate, who’s counting the Officeworks budget?

It’s unfair to bring up the hypocrisy in Morrison’s well-rehearsed attack on former AusPost CEO’s Christine Holgate’s profligacy in buying watches for a few executives, although Katharine Murphy does her best against the odds on ABC Insiders which, along with David Speers, is once again well stacked with Liberal shills.

Besides, the Aussie candidate is a top bloke, all the other blokes agree. Advancing his career is a win for all men – and not just another win, win, win for Morrison and his network of alpha mates – or that’s the dominant narrative.

Just as with only a few bad apples to weed out and a culture to re-boot, no-one in uniform appearing in our media to re-work the story of the US invasion of Afghanistan bothers to count the 1,300 civilians, including hundreds of children, who were killed in Afghanistan in the first six months of the year, according to the UN.

Army Chief, Angus Campbell maintains that nineteen years of war has improved outcomes for the Afghan people when in fact, the Taliban has never been more powerful and even its leader admits that US dollars have helped create a hopelessly corrupted nation.

“The US went into Afghanistan in 2001 with the lofty goals of democratizing and modernizing it. Today, neither has been approximated and the goals seem naïve or foolhardy. The effort has failed, though no one in Washington wants to admit it. The political system is hopelessly corrupt, incompetent, and unstable. Ethnic and tribal mistrust is higher than ever,” writes national security analyst Brian Downing.

No-one in Canberra wants to admit it either. Instead the consensus is that our brave lads are beyond reproach. While Campbell has agreed with Brereton that meritorious service citations be stripped from 3000 special forces personnel, the decision has abruptly been taken out of the Chief of Army’s hands by Defence and in the end it will be a matter to be decided by government. By Scott Morrison.

In brief, no action will be taken. There may be a puerile justification along the lines of the injustice of punishing all for the sins of a few but this ducks the issue of Justice Brereton’s finding of a toxic SAS culture in which “blooding”, brutality and inhumanity were allegedly normalised. Canada disbanded their unit for similar reasons.

The war on terror, an unmitigated disaster and a boon only to arms dealers, which the US began in 2001, will have cost six trillion dollars before 2020 ends, calculate Watson Institute researchers at Brown University. 21 million Afghan, Iraqi, Pakistani, and Syrian people are war refugees and internally displaced persons, in grossly inadequate conditions. But few deplore the human costs. Heroes, like David McBride, face life in jail for blowing the whistle.

Recommendations in the report of Inspector General of The Australian Defence Force, Justice Brereton’s inquiry, will be furthered stymied by the federal government’s AFP handball – Team Morrison is happy to hand over the task of prosecution to a force which, as Jack Waterford points out in Investigating Murder is not an AFP key Competency is just not up to the task. The force lacks the experience and the resources. Missing from current narratives is any sense of reality. As for Afghanistan, no-one is prepared to admit mission failure.

Certainly not Angus Campbell, current Chief of Army who knows corruption well, having been squeezed uncomfortably into frame whenever Morrison was building his career as boat stopper and refoulment operator as Minister for illegal detention by refusing questions on internment. Or turnbacks. Or anything else falling into an on-water or operational matter – as it does in a war on those seeking our mercy; craving our asylum by sea.

Yet not everyone is wishing Cormann bon voyage. The Monthly’s Paddy Manning is scathing. And spot on.

“… it sticks in the craw that Mathias Cormann – the world’s first and only Finance Minister to abolish a functioning carbon price … who has plumped for the Coalition’s denialist wing in every toxic leadership contest – is now touting his “green recovery” credentials and supporting “net zero emissions as soon as possible”.

Sorry, you don’t get to argue against climate action in Australia for seven years and then jet off at taxpayer expense and say exactly the opposite.”

Manning is a model of economy and restraint but he’s clearly not buying the twenties’ post-fact Trumpian zeitgeist where integrity is a dirty word and public life is filled with charlatans who lie at every conceivable opportunity, boosted by Keith Rupert Murdoch, one of the most toxic oligarchs in the world, whose propaganda machine media empire corrodes democracies with a noxious miasma of alternative facts. Or lies. Where useful idiots, such as Trump, Johnson and Morrison are exalted while Dan Andrews is torn down – relentlessly.

But two cheers for Scotty. Our Panda-poking PM, is not only madly popular at home, but a hero in London. It’s another reason for Aussies to be singing in the aisles of Liquorland although the billionaires who invested in the Chinese wine export market are about to have his guts for garters. Better get used to it. The fossil-fuel lobby driven Coalition is just not good for business. Joe Biden’s incoming administration could also impose trade penalties on climate deniers. But there’s more to Morrison’s trade debacle than a loss of exports.

It’s not just a 200 per cent tariff on wine, it’s the collapse of the million Chinese tourists a year market, the tertiary education student business, the coal, the copper, the lobsters, the sugar, the barley, the timber – all of which add up to six billion dollars in trade per year – because it suited Morrison to suck up to Trump by megaphoning his criticisms of Beijing.

Of course, other factors help alienate our biggest trade partner, our war games with Japan, the Huawei paranoia, the delays instituted by the secret Foreign Investment Review Board, FIRB, under former spook, David Irvine, which Paul Bongiorno reports could stall a Chinese-Australian property investment transaction for twelve months.

“Why are they picking on us,” one Chinese-Australian constituent asks his MP.

More deeply problematic is Frances Adamson, head of DFAT our nation’s top wolf diplomat who warns that China, as a global power cannot “escape scrutiny and debate” and condescendingly warns its government that it is not at the point where it can set the terms of its engagement with the world.” Her comments are on a par with Simon Birmingham’s patronising praise on ABC’s Insiders for China having lifted millions out of poverty.

Even the ABC’s Stan Grant warns that these words may merely further provoke a great power who intends to act like a great power. Expects to be respected as such. Adamson and Birmingham’s rebuke may invite the retaliation they seek to avert. ANU’s Hugh White notes the Trumpist in Morrison’s mis-reading of our relationship with China

“Morrison … seems to think that Australia can set the terms of the relationship unilaterally. Again and again over the past few months, as things have plunged to new lows, he has told Australians that there is simply no choice but to defy Beijing the way he has done. Anything else would betray Australia’s interests and impugn our sovereignty. This absurd oversimplification of such a complex and important issue is … an insult to our intelligence.”

Equally insulting is his brazen public embrace of internationalism and rules based order, which rings both expedient and hollow, given his record in Immigration Minister and the gratuitous secrecy and cruelty layered on top of the inhumanity and abdication of refugee convention that was Operation Sovereign Borders.

“Morrison was willing … to barter with the fate of the most vulnerable simply to get his way,” recalls Shaun Hanns, former public servant in Home Affairs’ refugee assessment. Few forget his pressers in which he indulged his fondness for sophistry and logic-chopping. Whatever his intent, Morrison came across as a sadistic smartarse.

Luckily, Scotty’s flip-flop, weathervane approach to world events and his lusty rendition of Yellow Peril 2.0 is a big hit with that other international contradiction in germs, (like herd immunity) Bozo Boris Johnson and his handlers, the Policy Exchange (PE) who are working extremely hard to make Britain little again as quickly as possible. Johnson, a total failure of a leader of a failing state has nothing better to do than to butter up Morrison at a PE bunfight.

Our PM is given the Grotius Award, something PE fellows dream up to recognise his genius for diplomacy and staunch support of rules-based world order. Is it a terribly tongue in cheek rebuke? Or a lame attempt to let China and America know that the worm has turned. Behold, Scotty 2.0 – a man of the new world order.

What’s escaped the attention of many is that whilst Morrison’s megaphone diplomacy, his bagging of Beijing for allowing festering wet markets to create a coronavirus which has already killed 1.45 million and is destroying the world economy, has not gone down well with President Xi or the mandarins in China’s vast bureaucracy, it’s been brilliant for US farmers and wine-makers who have actually expanded their trade with China at our expense.

Some pundits claim that Morrison is dumb to be suckered by Trump but let’s be fair. Scotty doesn’t hold the wine hose, mate. PVC and rubber hoses are used to transfer liquid around wineries. Wineries that remain in business.

So Scotty’s the first Australian PM since Billy McMahon not to wangle an invitation to Beijing? It may have a bit to do with allowing his team to publicly proclaim that China’s like Nazi Germany. But Morrison doesn’t hold the whip, mate. He’s not the sort of leader to pull handy Andy Hastie or Eric Abetz into line just for Sinophobia.

Why? Few members of our fourth estate bother to ask. On ABC Insiders, Sunday, Trade Minister, Simon Birmingham is clear that we’re the injured party and that if need be, we’ll take our case to the WTO. So there. No-one apart from The Guardian’s Katharine Murphy attempts to even sketch the context of calculated offence.

Morrison does attempt to bullshit things to rights in his UK Policy Exchange waffle but his words serve only to trigger a list of fourteen grievances from the Chinese Ambassador to Australia – almost the day following his naff repositioning. Trade is only a minor – China finds fault in business, media, defence and national security. Its list includes:

• Banning Huawei from the roll-out of 5G over “unfounded” national security concerns
• Foreign interference laws, “viewed as targeting China and in the absence of any evidence”
• Calls for an inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus – “siding with the US’ anti-China campaign”
• Speaking out on the South China Sea
• Speaking out on human rights allegations in Xinjiang, accusing the government of “peddling lies”
• “Thinly veiled” allegations against China on cyber attacks which Beijing says lacks evidence
• And new foreign relations laws which give the federal government power to veto state, or local government agreements with foreign governments.

By incredible coincidence, PE’s council of Conservative old fogeys, toads-in-the-hole and Colonel Blimps is chaired by Alexander (Bunter) Downer, a former Liberal leader and low achiever who won foreign minister, by stepping aside for John Howard to become leader. Scandal-ridden Downer urged his nation to join George W Bush’s illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq, an oil-war in which Howard misled Parliament that he’d gained favourable legal advice.

Downer’s notoriety – which embraces his pledging to repeal Native Title at a League of Rights meeting in the 80s and initially refusing US entreaties, in 1999, to help America prevent Indonesian atrocities against East Timorese- peaked in 2004 when Billy Bunter, as Keating dubbed Downer, ordered the bugging of East Timor’s cabinet during negotiations over how much of its off-shore oil reserves Australia could steal. The move richly benefited Woodside Petroleum, who later employed Downer out of sheer gratitude for his magnanimity and altruism.

Downer’s work helped a Howard government cheat the Timorese out of billions of dollars in oil and gas revenue for years. Naturally, the Morrison government rules out any compensation for the depleted fields that it now concedes belong to East Timor. You get that sort of outcome with a rules-based approach to exploitation.

Awkwardly for Morrison, reports the Human Rights Law Centre, prominent international figures, including former Presidents of Timor, Xanana Gusmao and Jose Ramos Horta, urge him to shut down the outrageous secret prosecution of Witness K and his lawyer Bernard Collaery – two heroes who helped to expose the skullduggery to which Australian Government cowboys stooped to filch Timor’s oil and gas. The petition is stonily ignored.

As is much of Downer’s contributions to statecraft. But not his latest finger-wagging, Sunday in The Australian Financial Review where he notes that the Chinese are famous for playing the long game. Quoting Sun Tzu is bound to be a big hit with Beijing – especially when Bunty proceeds to take the opposite tack himself in an incendiary put-down that can only strengthen the suspicion he’s channelling Trump.

“Banning Australian exports of wine, barley and lobsters as well as disrupting coal exports is an act of real aggression. It needs to be understood for what it is. This is a totally inappropriate way for a sophisticated modern nation to behave. Governments are expected to discuss differences and negotiate outcomes, not engage in brutal aggression of the kind we have seen from China towards Australia over the past few months,” Billy Bunter blusters..

Downer fans still chuckle over his being accused of being a leftist spy by Trump. Now a lame duck, he accused the monarchist and Thatcherite of being a Clinton errand boy after a night on the turps at a Kensington wine bar in 2016. So Alex knocked back a late-night noggin with George Papadopoulos, an oxymoron – a foreign policy adviser to Trump’s campaign? Luckily Alexander’s able to clear all that up. Some day.

Of course there’d be no Downer diatribe without Morrison. And no Morrison without Murdoch. How good is News Corp’s fearlessly fair and accurate YouGov Galaxy News Poll? Keeps us up to speed with what matters, “who would make a better PM?” Is far more diverting than any two party preferred polling. And even more meaningless.

Naturally, Morrison’s mob wants to give even more money to Murdoch. Kissing-Christian Porter is poised to slip in a News Media and Digital Platforms Bargaining Code into parliament’s last bench-polishing for the year next week. Make big tech pay. AG and party-boy Porter’s proposed Robin Hood law helps the Coalition to steal from the rich and give to those crying poor, especially billionaire victim Murdoch and Nine’s Chairman Pete Costello. Even the ABC stands to benefit – but you can be sure subsequent ABC funding will be reduced accordingly.

Heist hundreds of millions from Google and Facebook to give to News Corp and Nine? Why? News and Nine claim the two tech giants make a mozza out of news content, report Crikey’s Bernard Kean and Glen Dyer. Yet our ACCC has already disproved the claims. Tech giants’ theft of news is not killing newspapers. They’re doing that nicely all by themselves via Domain and real estate.com.au, which have stolen rivers of gold from classified advertising.

Happily help is on its way. The fabulous Paul Fletcher has given ten million to News to do what it likes with it. Even better, Tim Wilson is campaigning to open up super to home-buyers, a move to undermine super funds, outfits Liberal hate because they threaten their power – and transfer wealth to the poor. This will push up home prices but boost advertising in Pete and Rupert’s geese that lay the golden eggs, their online real-estate sections.

Goodness, Grotius Me: Scotty, we learn, wins the inaugural Grotius Award, a novelty door-prize, for his “support” of “the international rules-based order” a concept which – like Morrison himself -is very much a work in progress, from UK Tory sausage-fest The Policy Exchange (PE). Its think kitchen is big on Brexit and knocks up “bonkers” Boris Johnson’s other top ideas. At the moment, it’s Brexit or bust. Or if not bust, just a failed state. Or three.

Boris’ current brainwave is the alliterative Build Back Better, code for dismantling Britain’s planning system and handing over power to private developers. Our local Liberals are up with this game, of course, especially in NSW, where glad-handed Premier Berejiklian and her grifter associates help NSW taxpayers pay ten times its value for western Sydney airport land. All the go this week in the UK, however is A Very British Tilt, which Morrison plugs shamelessly, which is all about Albion keeping the aspidistra flying in a fantasy land called The Indo-Pacific Region.

Naturally, the plan to play war over Asia and the Pacific will gladden the hearts with anyone with shares in arms dealers Thales, BAE and other merchants of death. Britannia may no longer rule the waves but PE believes it can still waive the rules. The rules of logic, common sense as well as international law. As the Barclay Brothers’ Daily Telegraph unkindly points out, the nation of once proud warriors now has rather more hairdressers than soldiers.

All that’s needed is the delusion that the UK can even afford to mount a show of force on the other side of the globe or that China will not retaliate with trade sanctions at the slightest hint of gunboat diplomacy. But let’s not get bogged down in practicalities. Like Gallipoli it’s a brilliant plan. The Panda must be put back in its cage.

“The UK government should expand the deployment of Royal Navy assets, RAF aircraft and Army (including Special Forces)/Royal Marines personnel to achieve uninterrupted, year-round UK military presence in the IPR (both on operational and training missions).”

Britain can talk loudly even if it can carry only a little stick.

PE’s council is a neo-con choir of Tory corporates, a retired First Sea Lord and a former Army Commander. Of course, below the upper crust, a colony of boffins, beaver away giving the Tory party all its inspiring ideas. Imagine our IPA running government. Or our CIS. Menzies Institute? All three? Whilst it pretends to be an “independent, educational charity”, PE was founded in 2002 by Conservative MPs, Francis Maude and Archie Norman. First chaired by Michael Gove, it has provided Conservative governments with personnel and policy ever since.

The election of stand up comedian Boris and the astonishing success of Brexit in tapping British xenophobia to no real purpose save self-destruction are signs it’s a runaway success. But both got a lot of support from the Rupert Murdoch mafia, a political party and a propaganda machine for any Tory twat who boosts the worth of the family’s investment portfolio.

Fizza Turnbull, who against all advice, created Dutton’s monster, Home Affairs, got PE’s Disraeli Prize, in a 2017 visit to Blighty when he waxed lyrical about A Free Society. When Dutton deposes Morrison, it may well be the Molotov. No-one knows who funds the secretive, powerful right-wing lobby group, one of the UK’s largest.

Nor will Policy Exchange divulge who funds its campaigns, for example, who paid for its report labelling Extinction Rebellion (XR) “extremists”. The Gloucestershire-based conservation group was upset to find itself on a list of terror groups shared across government. A spokesman explains,

“It was shocking because our only aim is to make the government tell the truth and act on the climate and ecological crisis. We have never picked a fight with the police, only asking them to respect the right to protest, and to join us because it is not possible to safely police a society that has collapsed because of climate breakdown.”

PE is bound by wealth, privilege and status into a ruthless, uber-capitalist propaganda unit or Thatcherite think-tank lodged in two Tufton Street town houses at the top end of London town. St James Park, Big Ben, The Cenotaph and Westminster Abbey are only minutes away.

PE’s mission is to wrest influence from similar groups and shift power into the PM’s office, a project paralleled by Morrison’s own inner circle, which hack Simon Benson assures The Australian reader represents,

“… an unprecedented dismantling of power bases dominated by ­bureaucratic fiefdoms and the ­political class.” Why? Bundle of laughs, Benson bullshits that it’s to “… to boost productivity and service delivery for Australians.” But it’s really about centralising and expanding a ruthless and controlling Prime Minister’s power.

“To accumulate power,” writes George Monbiot, “a government with authoritarian tendencies must first destroy power. It must reduce rival centres of power – the judiciary, the civil service, academia, broadcasters, local government, civil society – to satellites of its own authority, controlled from the centre, deprived of independent action. But it must do this while claiming to act in the people’s name.”

A pandemic can help greatly, too, as even The Conversation‘s Michelle Grattan cautions, over Morrison’s creation of a national cabinet, which constitutional experts note is not a cabinet at all, but a cabal which helps greatly with “congestion-busting”, code for the Prime Minister getting his own way. PE toffs love strong, secretive leaders.

Founded but eighteen years ago, The Exchange is a parvenu, but you’d never know it from its exclusive location. Or its claims to be a brains trust or moral compass for a venal, vacuous, UK political establishment more interested in power and profit taking than government.

It’s a venue perfectly suited to our Liberal PMs. Or former PMs. Tony Abbott, for example, recently whinged that the media overhypes Coronavirus. Instead of “preserving every life at almost any cost ..” we need to ask many deaths we can live with. Turnbull merely shared with the Exchange his government’s aim to access encrypted data to bring evil-doers to their knees. Now, up pops Tosser Morrison with an astonishing policy U-turn.

Hugo Grotius, an “Arminian” Calvinist, abhorred the notion that God could create justice by absolute decree. He’d find himself completely off-key in Hillsong, or at the Exchange, unlike Morrison, but it’s not his theology or his legal philosophy that interests the fat cats of the exchange – even slightly. Hugo is now a father of international law – a brave new religion which – like Saul on the road to Damascus – Scotty 2.0 is suddenly converted.

Sadly, for all parties, a global coronavirus pandemic stops Tosser from attending in person but via Zoom, the born-again internationalist preaches his new credo. Morrison must forgo the iconic central London landscape and make do, somehow, with the spartan Kirribilli House with its priceless harbour views and an attendant private jet.

We must “make our world more Grotian and less Hobbesian” Morrison tells PE worthies. Put simply: give up the dog-eat-dog, win at all costs, beggar thy neighbour mercantile individualism of Liberal Party foreign policy for the last eight years. Co-operate and respect each other?

Tosser’s sucking up to Biden. But he’s also desperate to crab-walk away from poking the Panda. His megaphone diplomacy demanding an inquiry into who caused the Wuhan flu provokes an irate China to do us slowly. Over 600 ships are stranded at sea; prevented for months now from unloading their Australian coal.

Gone is all sign of the Border enforcer, his boat-stopping, turning back or lock ’em up forever tough-cop persona. It’s a dramatic about face. But Scotty’s face is always a work in progress. A year ago, Morrison told the UN it could butt out; let Australia violate international agreements and human rights with impunity.

Latika Bourke, Julie Bishop’s former Fairfax puffer, bills political weather vane Morrison’s spray as an “olive branch to China”, when it’s clearly a total repudiation of his fan-boy Trumpism.

Rules? Morrison is doing a risky, public back-flip. Only last year, flushed with Trumpism after a visit to his mentor’s Fox-hole in The White House, an already orange-hued Morrison was putting on a show at the Lowy Institute; blow-torching multilateralism. Rubbishing the UN. International institutions were an “unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.” They “demanded conformity rather than independent cooperation on global issues.”

Policy Exchange is part of a flourishing infrastructure of persuasion and the second-hand dealers in ideas who oversold us neoliberalism, who help replace civic power with the power of money. Watchers of ABC’s The Drum, Q&A, or The Leigh Sales Show, would recognise just how regularly our local dealers bob up like turds in the surf off Bronte beach be they IPA, CIS, Menzies any other of forty-six special interest groups which hi-jack public policy.

Rules-based order is top contender for most vacuous nonsense of the decade but it’s up against some stiff competition from our own PM’s virtual atlas of road-maps to claims that a few bad apples in our SAS fell victim to their own culture, as if accidentally poisoned by a tub of yoghurt left uncovered in our national war refrigerator in Canberra, the AWM, which is stacked with Liberals in the government’s mission to own the military.

The AWM also doubles as a pro-war propaganda unit, sponsored by Thales and other top arms manufacturers. Chairman Kerry Stokes will have to modify the SAS display to depict how its Special Forces soldiers’ allegedly would cordon off a whole village, taking men and boys to guesthouses.

“There they would be tied up and tortured by Special Forces, sometimes for days. When the Special Forces left, the men and boys would be found dead: shot in the head or blindfolded and with throats slit,” SAS soldiers tell a military sociologist.

Australia, Coca-colonial US satellite and missile guidance base is abruptly distracted from its Dear Leader’s sweet dream of a gas-led El Dorado; a nation great again with tax cuts and other handouts to the rich; a people soon to be joyously back at toil in workshop, sweatshop or even chook shed kit assembly- making things with our own hands again – manufacturing – when disaster befalls our great and powerful friend.

A dark angel hovers over Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC. A Sikorsky VH-92 Marine One helicopter, a giant, sinister, olive, tin dragon fly with white-top toupee livery oddly evocative of Trump’s combover, buzzes The White House Lawn, Friday.

The whopper chopper’s rotor blades’ force shreds plants and mulches grasses; plays hell with the presidential pompadour but what’s a military rescue mission without collateral damage? Cue shock, awe and suspense. And horror. Is the invincible, priapic, Pussy-grabber in Chief so stricken with ‘Rona he needs a helicopter medivac? Or has the Biden debate TKO’d the obese, sclerotic, seventy-four year old with hypertension?

Worse. Is this the beginning of the end for reality TV President Donald and the fawning claque of loyalist incompetents who make up his blighted, backstabbing, maladministration? Or is this just the end of the beginning of another cunning stunt? A twist in the plot? Trump trumped cos Corona is all reality and no show?

It’s certainly right on script, notes Megan McCardle in The Washington Post.

“The past four years have proceeded eerily as if they were being scripted by an HBO showrunner, complete with an antihero protagonist, and a deus-ex-machina pandemic, and the obligatory Helicopter Flight over the darkening D.C. skyline, all seemingly designed to revive fan excitement after viewers became jaded by the vulgar antics of the first few seasons.

With Trump, what’s certain is uncertainty. Fellow-kleptocrat Vladimir Putin’s patsy, Trump sows confusion. He’s an open-cut mine of disinformation. His tsunami of untruths, numbers 20,000 lies by 9 July, reports The Post, which keeps count on a large database. Above all, he’s an uber-kleptomaniac. It’s part of his malignant narcissism, a pathological inability to differentiate between himself and the rest of the world.

“The president can’t have a conflict of interest,” he claims. Human Rights Watch’s Sarah Saadoun sees the self-dealing Trump as a poster-boy for Kleptocracy International. (They have chapters everywhere – especially Canberra). Corruption cripples the state and reaches beyond achieving “transnational ripple effects”.

“Where there is impunity for official corruption,” writes Saadoun, “government itself becomes a means for the elite to enrich itself and silence its critics.” Morrison’s Covid Commission is a local example. Yet abusing your political office for personal profit is only part of the Trump strategy. Abusive relationships are key, also.

Late last year, as our own PM, Pauline Hanson, Hillsong Global Senior Pastor and founder, Brian Houston and other local Trump fanboys, who mentor Scott Morrison and who are under “ongoing” NSW police investigation will recall, the US Klepto-in-Chief was seeking to hold the G7 at his Miami resort. At business class rates. Currently, the Secret Service can pay up to $650 per night for rooms at Trump’s properties.

Trump’s outfit received $471,000 from the Secret Service between January 2017 and April 2018.

“I thought I was doing something very good for our Country,” Trump tweets, before upbraiding his critics for their “Crazed and Irrational Hostility.” Upholding the rule of law is irrational hostility? Trump is gas-lighting.

Gratuitous gas-lighting is a big hit with Trump fans. Two years ago, Jenna Price reports, Scott John Morrison told a range of people that bullying and harassment within the Liberal Party did not exist. Asked if he was 100 per cent confident bullying was not an issue in the federal parliamentary party, the PM replied: “I am.”

Clearly deluded, Julia Banks quit the party over it and Linda Reynolds, (a former defence industry lobbyist whose work for Raytheon in no way compromises her role as Defence Minister) was hallucinating when she thought she saw Liberal MPs bullying over the leadership spill orchestrated by Scott Morrison’s team but which Scott knew nothing about.

Gaslighting is an integral part of modern right wing politics, given the way the world stubbornly refuses to return to the 1950s and now neoliberalism’s absurdities are exposed, as state fiat conflicts with individual responsibility in our own local social distancing fiasco and our border wars.

Work experience Treasurer, Frydenberg, gaslights Andrew Probyn and ABC viewers Sunday. Hungarian Josh may change the subject but he never changes the lie that the high-taxing, high-spending Coalition is the party of lower taxes and spending. Or that tax cuts are a stimulus. Or that our economy was not tanking well before COVID-19. Or that a Morrison government is not just a junta of miners, banksters and business organisations.

But it takes stable genius, to blend useful idiocy and nepotism with tax fraud. The shit hits the fan for the Trump mafia with revelations that the Trump Organisation’s paid Trump’s daughter, Ivanka $747,622. There’s even talk of a criminal prosecution. Donald’s lily-white reputation is in peril. Conspiracy theorists go wild with the notion that Ole Bone Spurs’ fakes Covid to evade accountability. Not only is his hectoring of Joe Biden not even a debate, let alone presidential, he’s caught fiddling his tax return because Ivanka fudged the cover-up.

A consultancy fee for Ivanka pops up in The New York Times’ investigation of Trump’s tax returns. His daughter’s disclosure of receiving fees for consulting on hotel projects in Hawaii and Vancouver, British Columbia matches exactly the $747,622 which the Trump Organisation is claiming on its tax. By pretending that its employee, Ivanka Trump is, in fact, a consultancy firm. Not that the First Daughter received any money personally. Well, not technically. A company she co-owns banks the cheque.

Helping whittle down the family tax bill is only one of Ivanka Trump’s profitable roles in the Trump presidency of ever-declining vital signs. There’s the thirty-four lucrative Ivanka Trump “Yiwanka” trademark business deals in books, housewares, cushions and so much more in China way back when Xi Jinping and Trump were pals. The presidency is an Aladdin’s cave of business opportunities for godfather Trump and his family firm.

Ivanka is, moreover, senior adviser to her Daddy and architect of brilliant PR strategies such as his fabled St John’s Episcopal Church High Noon with Bible homage – after armed police clear the way by firing rubber bullets and tear gas at protestors – “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God.”

A sitting president commits a blasphemous act of aggression against his own people for the sake of a tacky photo op? Clearly, Ivanka has inherited her father’s “good genes”, his stable genius. But she excels herself Sunday with a PR coup – a drive-by (in an armoured, black, Chevrolet Suburban) royal wave to QAnon conspiracy theorists, followers of falsehoods, misinformation super-spreaders and other “great patriots” who picket Walter Reed Military Hospital to tell the world the President is a hero who has “god-tier genetics”.

Our MSM refer to the crowds as Trump’s “base” but QAnon is more than a fan club. They’re a fight club, too. Besides helping to spread dangerous disinformation about COVID-19, there is the fantasy that defeating COVID-19 will become just the latest thing to add to Trump’s “list of legendary feats. They’re hanging out on Wisconsin Avenue to get a ring-side seat at the fight of the century. Trump doesn’t disappoint.

Not everyone is as impressed. “Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential ‘drive-by’ just now has to be quarantined for 14 days,” tweets James P. Phillips, a Walter Reed doctor who is also a professor at George Washington University.

“They might get sick. They may die. For political theatre. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theatre. This is insanity.”

Insanity? Trump’s first pick for running mate in 2016, was Ivanka. As her father explained to bemused aides –

“She’s bright, she’s smart, she’s beautiful, and the people would love her!”’

That’s Rick Gates’ testimony. The former campaign deputy and first big fish indicted in Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference. It’s all in Gates’ Wicked Game which will also reveal,

“… how the current state of presidential politics is tearing apart the very fabric of our democracy.”

Ivanka talks her Dad out of making her his running mate. Republican Party cigar store Indian sans feather bonnet, Mike Pence, the Mick-Mack of US politics, gets the gig after his “vicious and extended monologue” bagging Hilary Clinton wins Trump over. A round of golf – in which Pence gushes that Trump, a notorious, blatant cheat, beat me “like a drum” – helps seal the deal. Trump treats Mike like a hick from the sticks.

A principle of perversity applies to Trump’s picks, a principle echoed by acolyte Scott Morrison in choosing for example, Angus Taylor, a climate denier, LNG advocate and carbon capture fantasist, for Energy and Emissions. Similarly, Sussan Ley is a Minister for an Environment who poses her own threat to biodiversity.

Let the UN warn that a million species across the world face extinction. Ms Ley says she is “concerned” about the problem, but doubts land clearing is to blame. Has she read her own government’s reports? Over 400 ecologists, including leading conservation scientists from Australia and around the world, issued a declaration in 2016 warning of the devastating impacts of land clearing on Australia’s biodiversity. The World Wildlife Fund says land clearing is the main cause of habitat loss in its Living Planet Report 2020.

But Ms Ley promises to cut green tape for big projects – just as Trump has done in the US. Despite opposition from environmental and indigenous groups, his administration exempts the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska from a 2001 prohibition on commercial logging and other development.

The Tongass is an enormous carbon sink. Its store of carbon is equivalent to taking 650,000 cars off the road each year, Andy Moderow, Alaska director of the Alaska Wilderness League, estimates.

A fossil fuel lobbyist heads up America’s EPA, assisted in its toxic chemicals programme by an industry insider. Ken McQueen, a former oil executive, who pooh-poohs manmade global heating, is top Environmental Protection Agency official in the South-Central US, a fossil fuel industry hub and site of recent climate-driven disasters such as Hurricane Harvey. Trump’s made it much easier to drill for oil in national parks.

Similarly, Pence is a perfect fit on public health. A Big Tobacco stooge, he says in an opinion piece, “Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.” Yet, two out of three smokers die from a smoking-related illness, according to medical research. Smoking kills half a million Americans a year.

As Governor of Indiana, the “cross-roads of America”, where intersecting highways mean increased risk of infection, Pence cut funds, forcing HIV test stations to close, banned needle exchanges and helped create the largest outbreak of HIV in state history. Who better to lead Trump’s coronavirus task force?

The VP’s performance has not been without incident. Pence’s use of his personal AOL account for State of Indiana business is eerily similar to Clinton’s abuse of protocol for which she is still mercilessly pilloried.

Totally different, Pence defenders snort. Yet Mike’s account was hacked into. Pence’s contacts were startled to receive desperate emails claiming Mike and Mother (as the VP insists on calling his wife, Karen) were attacked on their way back to their hotel in The Philippines and needed money urgently. A scammer claimed the Pences had lost all their money, bank cards and mobile phone. Luckily they still had their faith.

“Startling” and “extraordinary”, The Washington Post calls the mixed messaging over Trump’s health. Oddly, there is nothing remotely approaching Vice Presidential leadership from Pence or any official statement from the leader of the Trump Administration’s Coronavirus SWAT team. Is Pence too busy getting himself tested?

We do know that he believes God has a plan for him and that entails “servant leadership”.

“Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave.” Yet we also know that when The Washington Post published the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasts of grabbing women “by the pussy”, 7 October 2016, Pence was contemplating a coup.

Should Trump die or become incapable of serving as President, Pence will step into his shoes. But that does not mean that he will automatically become the Republican Party’s candidate in 3 November. The Republican National Committee makes that decision. There is no question that Pence has his eyes on 2024.

Is Trump still alive? Has he been saved by a cocktail of experimental drugs? By Saturday, peak uncertainty is reached. Exceeded. Yet later that day, his doctor “clarifies”. Trump will stay at Walter Reed Military Hospital “for an indefinite number of days.” He’s placed on a five-day antiviral drug regimen for COVID-19. Evidently, Trump’s condition may be more serious than official briefings suggest. He has only himself to blame.

Trump is the single largest driver of false and misleading information about the coronavirus, report Cornell University researchers who publish a study this week showing that Russia’s chump makes up nearly 38 per cent of what they coyly describe as the overall “misinformation conversation,” based on 38 million articles in English language media around the world. Trump’s toxic bullshit covers eleven main topics, but the most prevalent, ironically, is his promotion of untested miracle cures, including anti-malarial and disinfectants.

Currently, the president is reported to be taking not one but two experimental treatments; a hint of panic in medical ranks. Saturday, a swarm of white coats from central casting, appear; an homage to Big Tobacco’s classic advertisements where doctors swear that smoking is good for you. Trump’s in great shape, they lie. He continues to improve, they claim since Saturday and could be released as early as Monday.

The team confirms Trump had lowered oxygen levels at one point. They won’t answer questions about whether the president has suffered lung damage. If this is their damage control, it has the opposite effect. Again Trump and his team have seen to that personally.

“We’re in an environment where conspiracies are thriving, in part because the president encourages them,” says Melissa Ryan, CEO of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation.

“And we have a White House comms operation that gives the press and public disinformation constantly.”

Yet, exercising reasonable scepticism is to miss the theatricality; the magical surrealism of Trump’s presidency. Above all, even down under, Trumpism entails the willing suspension of disbelief.

All eyes are on China Flu in The White House, a special effects episode of the epic TV soap that is the Trump Dynasty presidency – a perverse parody of Camelot, a festering wen of turpitude and lies in a dis-United States of degeneracy, deceit and greed presided over by huckster Donald Trump and his grasping, venal family.

“The president has never overnighted at a hospital before” squeaks an aide from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Overnighted? Trump’s boasts of invincibility already look sick. Delusional. Rapidly, the narrative becomes “a few days’ stay”. The hospital is named after the US Army doctor whose 1901 work on the role of mosquitoes in spreading yellow fever helped pioneer biomedicine and epidemiology.

Reed’s work also allowed the US to complete a Panama Canal which would make America a world economic powerhouse. Above all, by linking its growing Pacific power to its traditional Atlantic allies, the canal was a geopolitical strategy to make the United States the most powerful nation on earth. Now it’s a pariah nation, thanks in no small part to Trump’s foreign policy failures – and, of course, his administration’s coronavirus mismanagement.

Walter Reed is a thirteen minute drive away – the chopper on the White House lawn is overkill. Yet it adds some of the grand-standing, big-noting, big-hair, big-orange Bronx Colors brand face make up melodrama which fuels Trump’s tacky, stage-presidency.

Not to be overlooked, however, is Trump, the authoritarian’s fetish for all things military, currently echoed in our own PM’s incessant attacks on Dan Andrews who is constantly rebuked for failing to call in the ADF, thus causing Victoria’s corona-crisis.

In President Bone Spurs’ suite, reserved for high-ranking soldiers, distinguished draft-dodgers and other public heroes, the man who scorns the pandemic as a hoax and who mocks Joe Biden for wearing a face mask is lethargic. He has some trouble breathing and his blood oxygen levels have caused doctors some concern. Medical experts are divided. Some subscribe to the view that to be prescribed a cocktail of experimental drugs plus dexamethasone, means that Trump must be severely ill.

Dexamethasone is a steroid used to head off an immune system overreaction that kills many COVID-19 patients reports The New York Times. It is generally reserved for those with severe illness. Yet there is another equally plausible scenario. Trump himself is directing his own treatment. If he’s able to overrule doctors and visit fans in his SUV, he’s quite capable of ordering a hamburger with the lot.

Suddenly they’re throwing the kitchen sink at him, says Dr. Thomas McGinn, a top physician at Northwell Health, the largest health care provider in New York State.

“Is he sicker than we’re hearing, or are they being overly aggressive because he is the president, in a way that could be potentially harmful?” Or is Trump dictating his own medication regimen, oblivious to the risks of ingesting a cocktail of unproven drugs?

“Am I dying?” is one of the first questions Trump asks doctors at Walter Reed. The answer may be yes but it is just as likely at this stage, that the autocratic malignant narcissist is bossing the doctors around, demanding, as his right what he believes is the best of everything. He may have VIP Syndrome.

‘VIP syndrome,‘ describes a phenomenon in which medical treatment of a famous, powerful, or influential patient, even a celebrity president, is compromised precisely by the patient’s fame, power, or influence. Complications can arise when doctors are pressured into decisions which diverge from the normal routine of care into treatment which may ultimately turn out to be detrimental to the patient’s health.

Trump may, of course, already have compromised his health by choosing to leave the hospital in a drive-by flirtation with his deluded fans. The stunt has all the hallmarks of Ivanka’s direction but it may have been entirely his own idea. What we do know is those close to him would endorse if not applaud Trump’s latest act of genius. Such are the potentially deadly perils of surrounding yourself with yes-men – and women.

Whether Trump survives or not, there is the vexed question of his legacy. When he leaves the presidency it will be in far worse shape than he found it – but in the meantime – two hundred and ten thousand Americans have perished and 7.44 million are infected with the virus. This need not have been the case.

Had his administration shown leadership, or even competence, the tragedy of America’s coronavirus experience may have been averted or at least attenuated. Instead, like fellow narcissist and buffoon, Boris Johnson, Trump set a tone of hubristic denial and worse. He actively perpetrated disinformation, disparaged science, suppressed information, advocated bleach or hydroxychloroquine, sunlight and other quackery.

Of immediate concern are the lives of those workers in The White House and those members of the Republican Party who have been needlessly put at risk by a Presidency that is more than dysfunctional, more than corrupt and self-serving; a presidency that could not even acknowledge the need for basic precautions, such as the wearing of masks or social distancing let alone exercise its duty of protecting the American people.

Whether he recovers or not, Trump’s presidency is moribund; so utterly corrupted it is rotten to the core. Mendacity and recklessness are two of its worst traits, notes Frank Bruni. Add a third: Trump’s petty tyranny.

If you wanted the boss to be happy, you left your mask at home, report Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman of The White House’s top-down culture of fear. A staff too frightened to displease their boss cannot tell him the hard truths he needs to know. In the end, this is the illness that has undone Trump. He is the architect of his own decline.