In any other universe, recovering from one public health crisis by worsening another would spark immediate backlash. An “asbestos led recovery” would be career-ending; as would a “tobacco led recovery” or a “AK-47 led recovery”. But fossil fuels have locked their harm so deeply into our lives that we have become desensitised to this incredible, radical significance of proposing to hurt humans as a pathway to helping them. What is happening here is simultaneously deadly and ludicrous. (Ketan Joshi Renew Economy).

In pristine white hard hat and air sea rescue orange Hi-Viz vest fluoro fancy dress, Scott Morrison is like some surreal, grotesquely upscaled, Lego minifigure in a budget horror movie as he bobs up like a turd in the surf off Nobby’s Beach to spruik his latest role as our national saviour in Santos and Origin’s Gas Chooses itself.

After spending a week singing an aria to himself and his government which gets things done – because “that’s what we do” as he tells Coalition toady, David Speers, on ABC Insiders, by Sunday, he’s changed his tune. His threat to build a massive new 1GW gas-fired power station to replace Liddell won’t be happening.

Yep. Scotty’s “can do” government can also undo. Why? Morrison bullshits about how private enterprise has saved us from yet another crisis. As if he’s talked them into it. Why, Energy Australia has a fabulous new gas-fired generator in the wings and – look over there – corporations have batteries and stuff just waiting to go.

No mention of Mike Cannon-Brookes who throws down the gauntlet, declaring he’ll bid for Liddell’s replacement if Scott Morrison can identify the rules of engagement. Calls Scotty’s bluff. Worse.

“Giant fossil fuel companies need subsidies to extract gas and export it? No they don’t, that is bullshit. So declare the rules of the game. That’s the way to get assets built.”

Bizarre? It’s what we’ve come to expect from a government which has no energy policy. Not a clue. But what a stunt! Trust Scotty to launch his gas-led recovery show in Tomago, home to another aluminium smelter, Coalition policy is helping to kill. It’s twenty-two minutes inland from coal terminal and post-industrial rust-bucket Newcastle. Described – along with winsome Wollongong – by John Quiggan as a “vibrant and diversified” regional centre, Newcastle has a ten per cent unemployment rate; a seventeen year low.

The Tomago smelter, one of the Hunter’s last big metal producers, is 51% owned by model corporate citizen, Rio Tinto. Drawing twelve per cent of NSW’s electricity, it’s the state’s biggest user. At mates’ rates, of course.

Our smelters typically rely on heavily subsidised coal-fired electricity with gas back-up plants. If they shut their doors, as Rio keeps threatening, power companies’ would have to shut a few generators down, too.

Tomago claims rising power prices will force it to close. But experts point to a glut of aluminium world-wide. China produces 62 per cent to our 3.3. In 2017, moreover, Tomago forged an eleven year baseload power supply contract deal with Macquarie Generation. AGL is plans to build a 250MW back up gas generator at Tomago but it costs three times as much to burn gas to make electricity than to burn coal.

Smelters account for sixteen per cent of greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector but there has been not a hint of any Coalition roadmap towards encouraging the industry to adopt renewables. Conspicuously lacking from Morrison’s roadmap is any acknowledgment that unless Australian industry invests in green energy then it will decline along with fossil fuels.

“Australia is one of the world’s most emissions-intensive aluminium producers. Deployment of renewable electricity is a path out of this quagmire, and the rapid fall in cost of renewables makes it more viable than ever before.” Clark Butler reports for The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA)

Simon Holmes à Court argues, Tomago’s crippled by Coalition incompetence; politicised mismanagement.

Australia’s four aluminium smelters are salvageable. They also offer stability to our national grid. Above all, they provide employment and support whole communities. They will be scrapped because Morrison’s government won’t admit that renewable energy is the key to their future. Will it clean up its act? Phase out fossil fuels as soon as possible? Pigs might fly. Instead the PM has a surreal cop-out, “Gas Chooses Itself”.

Sure it does. Despite being flogged as a transition fuel, gas is not good for the environment. Morrison’s messaging on gas originates in US industry bodies and think tanks. The fantasy that gas is a “transition fuel” or a “bridge” to renewables stems from the 1990s. The spin was fabricated by the American Gas Association as more evidence emerged on global warming.

Crikey’s David Hardaker refers to Marian Wilkinson’s The Carbon Club which traces the influence of US fossil fuel lobbyists to 1997 when the Frontiers of Freedom Foundation fossil lobbyists arrived in Canberra to work us over before we sent our representatives to cheat at Kyoto – “It’s not global and it won’t work.”

Wilkinson’s book begins by noting that when Tony Abbott became PM, a raft of legislation was introduced to shut down everything from the emissions trading scheme, the CEFC and the Climate Change Authority. Tim Flannery recalls being sacked from the Climate Commission. It was the first act of the Abbott government and Flannery doubts that cabinet had even met. Morrison’s leadership is still appeasing the same push.

As for (mainly methane) natural gas being any type of bridge to renewables, the notion is risible. If fully unleashed, Australia’s gas resources could be responsible for up to three times the annual carbon emissions of the entire world, reports The Australia Institute in a landmark new report, Weapons of Gas Destruction.

“Gas is a high-pollution industry that won’t create jobs while unleashing triple the world’s annual emissions into the atmosphere. To say it is ‘lose-lose’ is an understatement,” concludes Climate and Energy Program director, Richie Merzian.

Of course Gas Chooses Itself is a winner for the gas industry which is a huge user of gas, burning twice as much gas as Australian households and nearly as much as our manufacturing sector. But ScoMo’s no fool.

The plot reworks an old routine. Santos and Origin make a mozza from rigging the already extortionate price of gas. Laugh all the way to the bank. Demand booms, thanks to the Coalition’s, Gas-led Recovery Plan. Santos and Origin also rake in millions in subsidies for their Pythonesque carbon capture and storage (CCS) scam.

CCS is ludicrous. Capture, transport and bury millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from coal power plants? How good is Peabody Coal’s propaganda unit? US Coal baron Robert Murray freely admits that CCS is baloney. A fantasy. Murray says CCS is a con. It ‘does not work’ and ‘is just cover for the politicians.’

Trust Scotty to promise a con that the UN Development program says would “arrive on the battlefield far too late to help the world avoid dangerous climate change”. Bush fire victims know all about his late arrivals.

CCS is expensive and impracticable. Not only is energy wasted burying carbon, retrofitting a 2100-megawatt brown coal-fired power station in Victoria would “conservatively” cost a whopping $2.45 billion per boiler.

Governments showered $1.3 billion on CCS from 2007-13 with not one commercial working model to show for the money, but “simp” Scotty from marketing believes in it; he’ll surely find a bit extra in the kitty for his mining pals. Cut back on social services, hospitals and widows’ pensions. Incentivise self-reliance.

Scotty’s chosen the right setting to announce his gas-fired delusion. Newcastle is spiritual godfather to our state of the art asylum-seeker gulags and our perverse delight in punishing the elderly, infirm and those out of work. Debit where debit is due, our PM himself, was quick to back our Robodebt extortion scam which led some pensioners to take their own lives. Over 2000 people died after receiving Centrelink debt notices.

Yet their debts outlived them. Anastasia McCardel received a call from a Centrelink in May. Told her son Bruce owed $6,744.52. When would she repay his debt? Bruce had died six months earlier, in November 2018, aged 49. He was born with Noonan syndrome, a genetic condition that affects the heart and other vital organs.

You can’t just blame Scott Morrison. Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan. As treasurer in 2016, former social services supremo, Morrison was supported by Christian Porter, Alan Tudge and Stuart Robert, who were high-fiving and jiving at the promise of automated welfare debt recovery. But not this week.

The Federal Court learns at a pre-trial hearing on Monday that Gordon Legal plans to argue that Big Al Tudge, who was Human Services minister in 2016-17, either knew or was “recklessly indifferent” to the fact the botched program was unlawful. Luckily Tudge, is tied up at the moment explaining how he had nothing at all to do with the taxpayer paying $30 million for a $3 million parcel land for a Sydney airport.

The Australian National Audit Office finds that the federal government bought land from dairy farmer and Liberal Party donor, Leppington Pastoral Company, at 10 times its market value while developing Western Sydney Airport. Urban Infrastructure Minister, Tudge has a stunning reverse Nuremberg alibi.

There “is no question of ministerial involvement”, he swears. The matter “goes to the administrative actions of the department, more than two years ago”. Doubtless Big Al will quickly get Robodebt to retrieve the overpayment from Leppington Pastoral. The letter threatening debt collection’s already in the mail.

Beyond the joy it gives our MPs to further impoverish men and women struggling to exist on forty dollars a day by imposing debt repayments, while fat cats in our gas industry cartel get massive handouts, double punishment is a tradition: like double standards, it is rooted deeply in our convict colony origins.

Newcastle, like Norfolk Island, was a penal settlement inside a penal colony – or a place of secondary punishment for convict re-offenders until 1813. For nearly 20 years, wayward convicts were flogged amidst idyllic natural beauty, a place where summers are warm and humid and winters are short and cool. Plants flourished in fertile, soft, absorbent carbon rich soils until cloven-hoofed sheep and cattle ruined them.

Punishment, however, is perennially problematic. Although it was easy to dispense, flogging was not foolproof. It often killed the convict or reduced his capacity to work. Furthermore, when convicts were unable to work because they had been flogged, they needed to be flogged again for not working.

Similarly, job-seekers cut off from all extra support on New Year’s Day 2021 will need to present themselves at job interviews they can’t afford to attend – having frittered away their recklessly generous work incentive-sapping allowances on op-shop clothing, fares, haircuts and the chore of having to feed themselves.

Or pay the gas bill.

Unemployed or underemployed workers are already punished by the humiliation of having to apply for jobs under the Job Active scam, a privatised “job-provider” service they may not be able to get to and double punished should they not attend. Their meagre payments can be suspended. Meanwhile, Rick Morton estimates that job-providers have banked $500 million of taxpayers money during the pandemic.

But Morrison’s got that covered. As he explains, gas will bring back jobs. At least for a few mates. Scotty’s role has a touch of the post-apocalyptic zombie as he helps the Liberal Party’s craven mining oligarchy mates prop up dying coal and gas industries as they collude to cook the planet and snuff out life as we know it.

Left-leaning, (as our national media love to dub any outfit not funded by our barons of industry) Grattan Institute calculates that ScoMo’s gas led recovery” would benefit fewer than 1% of Australian manufacturing jobs currently in gas-intensive industries. The report is leaked to the left-leaning The Guardian Australia.

15 facilities that together employ just 10,000 people consume two-thirds of gas used in manufacturing.

“There are almost no jobs in [gas] … If we were going to see a massive boom in gas-based manufacturing, we should be seeing it right now. And we’re not seeing it,” says The Grattan Institute’s Tony Wood.

Gas Chooses Itself features our elected representatives tipping buckets of public money into a failing private cartel. Origin and Santos. Scotty promises subsidies of $52.9m, support to “open up” five new gas basins and a beaut new National Gas infrastructure plan.

His announcement sounds eerily similar to a leaked paper from a working party of his gas-industry dominated cabal, the National Covid Coordination Commission (NCCC) which meets in secret under the stewardship of nifty Nev Power to further its own interests under the guise and confidentiality of a cabinet committee.

But there’s more. Santos and Origin will be subsidised under the carbon capture and storage boondoggle. The Australian Renewable Energy Agency will be tweaked so it can fund CCS, a scam which has already cost us a fortune. He’ll also kill off innovation, undermine renewable energy and prop up costly failing fossil fuels, warns Christine Milne, global Greens ambassador and former leader of the Australian Greens.

The world’s largest coal port, Newcastle’s is also NSW’s post-industrial rust belt: 4000 manufacturing jobs vanished since 2015. Green steel made with hydrogen is the answer says The Grattan Institute. Not coal. Nor gas. Hydrogen is also proposed for aluminium smelting. But you can’t tell the PM anything. He’s out overacting again; hamming it up in his blokey construction costume; lying about gas and coal.

Talk about miracle Morrison. Gas will bring back Australian manufacturing (like Lazarus from the dead).

He’ll say anything. On ABC Insiders, he tells David Speers that “Gas has chosen itself” just in case you think his decision has anything to with his secret cabal of gas industry barons cunningly dubbed his Covid Commission. Coal is the key way to keep electricity prices cheap he bullshits.

“In Australia, you cannot talk about electricity generation and ignore coal,” he rants in his pants on fire plan.

Coal, Morrison says, will not only “continue to play an important role in our economy for decades to come”, but “with new technologies such as carbon capture and storage continuing to improve, it will have an even longer life”. New? Continue to improve? CCS has never worked. KFC employs more of us than thermal coal.

The proportion of the total workforce employed in thermal coal is one quarter of one per cent of our total workforce of twelve million – or around 20-25,000. The ABS calculates, on the other hand, that 20,000 of us work in renewable energy activities.

Oddly Scotty doesn’t mention steel. While one in five local youngsters are seeking work, the steel town is in the Hunter whose iconic thermal-coal-mines employ at best five per cent of NSW’s workforce, whatever its MP, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Resources, Joel Fitzgibbon wants us to believe. Or Morrison or Matthew Canavan whose brother is big in coal mining for that matter. And thermal coal is plunging to an average price of $60-70 a metric tonne from $100 in January.

Peabody plans to sack half its workforce at Wambo, blaming Coronavirus but demand for coal is dropping in Europe and the US while China is using more domestic coal and less of the more expensive imported black rock, especially from Australia. Aping Trump’s poke a panda policy is costing us dearly.

Even so, why does, our Trumpista PM head to coal central to promise his preposterous gas-led recovery?

Could it be just bastardry? Fitzgibbon is Labor’s shadow minister for resources. So entrenched is Labor bashing that already 9 News is crowing about a Labor split over gas. This is part of Morrison’s crafty plan.

So, too is the nobbling of any emissions target. The government’s position is not to have a position.

“The renewable energy target is going to wind down from 2020, it reaches its peak in 2020, and we won’t be replacing that with anything,” climate denialist Energy Minister Angus Taylor boasts.

But what’s this? Not even Simon Benson is in attendance, Tuesday – Scotty from marketing heroically risks anti-climax or exposing his signature, saponaceous, insincerity. Of course, his list of talking point slogans, boasts and empty promises is dropped to every media outlet in the land – and beyond – his government is gunner,

“… reset the east coast gas market … create a more competitive and transparent Australian Gas Hub by unlocking gas supply, deliver an efficient pipeline and transportation market, and empower gas customers.”

Perhaps it’s prudent that, he holds no “How good is gas?” presser afterwards. Embracing Big Gas as our saviour, creating jobs and driving down prices, may trigger a repeat of his Cobargo bushfire reception where he was run out of town.

Of course, crocodile teary Scotty could still be smarting from his rebuke over bullying Annastacia Palaszczuk to secure a quarantine exemption for Sarah Caisip to attend her stepfather’s funeral in Queensland. Palaszczuk’s office reports Morrison shouting down the phone, “You will do this.” Then there’s his politicising private grief.

In an open letter to the PM, Caisip’s stepsister Alexandra Prendergast excoriates Morrison for using her grieving family “to try and advance your political agenda”. But Morrison will stop at nothing.

As Christine Milne opines in The Guardian Australia, as she calls out the government’s wilful sabotage of its renewable energy agency, there is one certainty you can rely on in Australia. “Namely the Morrison government’s championing of fossil fuels, relentless attacks on renewable energy, lies about its commitment to emission reductions, openness to fossil fuel donations and sabotaging any institutional framework that works in driving investment in the technologies desperately needed to get us to a zero emissions future.”

It’s a calculated snub. If Morrison intended to do anything about emissions or energy he would not have Angus Taylor as Energy and Emissions Minister. But how good is Gus at browning off greenies?

Whether it’s poisoning endangered grasses or trashing Clover Moore’s environmentalism by falsely accusing her of jet-setting based on a web document no-one’s been able to find, go-getter Gus is always on the go. Like his PM, he’s all for “moving on – I’ve dealt with that.”

Don’t even try to bring up the $79 million, Eastern Australia Irrigation, his Cayman Island registered company made in 2017 from selling overland flow water licences, on its Clyde and Kia Ora farms after the same sort of water at two southern Queensland cotton farms, nearby, was valued at zero.

OK, Barnaby Joyce signed off on the record closed tender deal. But he was only the Water Minister at the time. And, as he tells ABC’s Pats Karvelas, any claims of any wrongdoing are “an absolute load of horse poo.” Curiously, his puerile protest is repeated in every major daily and every online regional newspaper in the land.

This week, Taylor and Morrison send the whole country back to the future with a gas-led recovery plan boondoggle: a plan to have a plan to sell us methane – always spun as “natural gas” king – along with a vision of a West-East trans Australia pipeline. But, wait, there’s more. Before, seven days’ later, it’s revoked.

A state-run, gas-fired power plant will replace Liddell in Hunter, Joel Fitzgibbon’s electorate. If need be. Only a week later, it’s not. Morrison’s “major speech” on energy policy is a tour de force of absurdist theatre. If it ain’t broke, don’t mean we won’t bullshit about fixing it. And if it’s broke, don’t mean we can’t make it worse. Gas powered electricity will only serve to push up prices and help cook an overheated globe.

“We are in the ludicrous situation of having a gas policy we don’t need, and none of the climate policy that we actually do,” warns The Saturday Paper’s Mike Seccombe.

Yet Taylor’s on thin ice. Only two years ago, Gufee Pty Ltd (as Angus James Taylor calls himself in his personal private company) was colluding over sushi, tempura washed down with a frosty XXXX Gold at Kagawa in Dickson, to install Spud Dutton and topple Kermit Turnbull, the PM his deluded opponents see as a Green-Left Galaxy mole, according to Morrison stenographer at The Australian, Simon Benson.

Liberal renegade Mal’s NEG emissions target is the last straw. Benson claims a senior cabinet minister blabs,

“I have been wrong all along. I thought he should have joined the Labor Party. Turns out he should have joined the Greens.” Yet not one Liberal opposed Turnbull’s $1.75m donation to help buy it the 2016 election.

But the coup proves a fiasco. Numbers man, Matthias Cormann can’t add up. Dutton’s cabal is stooged by another player. Spud’s weights are put up by party race fixer, soapy ScoMo, whose followers first fake a plunge on Dutton, to force a spill only to change their votes to Morrison in a second ballot.

Disraeli called soapy Sam Wilberforce, unctuous, oleaginous, saponaceous, in the 1860 Oxford evolution debate. He could have been describing our current PM. But only if he overlooked the killer instinct.

No good deed goes unpunished in Scotty’s playbook. Duttonista Gus finds his mind greatly exercised now that Scotty’s just slipped Spud a political Novichok cocktail. Dutton will find his new dog’s breakfast of Defence and Border Force just as unworkable as Turnbull’s Home Affairs of federal police, ASIO, Australian Border Force, immigration, counterterrorism and emergency management.

Samuel Johnson knew a thing or two about Taylor’s likely frame of mind, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Morrison’s not going to push Gus under a bus tomorrow but pushing him out on stage and praising him as a deep thinker; the intellectual heavyweight of the Coalition energy team cannot bode well. The PM’s hyperbole is damning.

“He brings an enormous amount of intellect and experience to these tasks.”

“What we are speaking of today really is the extraordinary work that Angus has done in this portfolio as energy and emissions reduction.”

Some accuse Gus of being a lightweight. Or dilatory. But that would be to wilfully misread our political class. True, seven years down the track, the Coalition has no energy policy. But that’s its policy. Just as Morrison’s way of dealing with the pandemic and a collapsing economy is business as usual.

So calamity Taylor takes a gas axe to renewables this week. Bugger the planet. Gunner Morrison’s fossil fuel energy and noxious emissions minister can’t say when or how but he’s in the job to profit the Liberal Party’s mining industry mega-donors. Crony capitalism. Scott’s been promising we’re gunner have a gas-led recovery. Or snap-back as our ruling elastic band of Liberal toadies and big business and banking sycophants has it.

But Gus is not all gaseous catastrophe, however much the assonance appeals to Katharine Murphy. To Murpharoo, Scott Morrison’s power plan is nothing but a gas-fuelled calamity. A rump in the government even protests Morrison’s prioritising of gas over coal, as David Crowe reminds the rapidly declining readers of Nine newspapers Friday. Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon is cheering them on. Yet things could turn bad in November.

Perhaps Morrison’s been tipped off that Russian interference in the US Presidential election, will confer victory upon Trump, the useful idiot who has been putty in the hands of American fossil fuel barons.

The alternative is sobering. “The Biden administration will impose carbon adjustment fees or quotas on carbon-intensive goods from countries that are failing to meet their climate and environmental obligations.”

Or as Peter Brent writes, “Australian global warming politics is broken. If we’re too hopeless to price our carbon, someone else should price it for us.”

Pulling the pin on wind and solar? News this week confirms hard-nosed investors have taken flight; fled the electricity generating field by the gigajoule, which is how you measure the energy content in natural gas if you can afford any. Utility scale generation of green energy dropped by half during 2019 thanks to “Herbicide” Taylor’s climate-denialist sabotage of our children’s futures. But you can’t blame him for our gas cartel which fixes prices to suit itself and which is not even obliged to let the government know its reserves.

If you want affordable Australian gas, best emigrate to Japan. Customers in Japan buy Australian gas more cheaply than we can, reports Michael West. Some of this gas is drilled in the Bass Strait, piped to Queensland, turned into liquid and shipped 6,700 kilometres to Japan … but the Japanese still pay less than Victorians. It’s enough to drive a family back to burning dung. Two billion people worldwide swear by it.

But you’d be hard pressed to pick our venture capitalists’ mass stampede. All round business investment is plummeting. Bernard Keane reckons it’s at 2010 levels – propped up only because China is smiling on our mining exports. For the time being. Poking the Panda may look cute to our US overlords but China is poking back. Private investment in infrastructure has dipped to 2006 levels. Blind panic seizes our intrepid profiteers. After seven years of obstruction, obfuscation and chicanery – and Abbottising of our energy policy

It’s no mean feat. Renewables are hugely profitable compared to fossil. Yet ensuring the bottom falls out of investment in safe, clean power generation in the land at the arse-end of the world, as Keating fondly called his home, is the one enduring achievement of Scotty’s kakistocracy. Gus Taylor, take a bow.

True, Snowy 2.0 is still in the frame, despite a $10bn cost blowout, experts warn, but like Fizza Turnbull’s other dud, his high speed fibre to the node NBN, now fourth slowest in the OECD and one of the most expensive in the world, Snowy 2.0 is shaping to be another gigantic white elephant.

A Dear John letter from a group of no fewer than thirty-seven eminent Australian energy, engineering, economic and environmental experts, reaches Teddy Kunkel former Rio Tinto lobbyist and other former mining industry executives and coal lobbyists who dominate Scott John Morrison’s office Friday.

“It is now even more clear that there are numerous alternatives that are lower cost, more efficient, quicker to construct, and incur less emissions and environmental impacts,” the letter warns. AEMO forecasts that “inefficient, unnecessary and damaging Snowy 2.0” will never pay for itself; nor be needed until the 2030s, when emerging technologies like battery storage and demand response will have come into their own.

Unless you are a gas or coal baron, that is. Then you can count on gorgeous Gus, the Morrison government’s high-maintenance Energy and Emissions Minister to bring home the bacon; put a bit of pork on your fork.

Luckily, pumping water uphill will still require a shitload of fossil fuel so mining companies will still do well out of the twelve billion dollar pipe dream – especially big donors Santos, Origin and Woodside who funnel money into Liberal Party coffers. So what if Snowy 2.0’s pumped hydro will hike power prices and diminish supply?

Has Gus pulled the plug? Star of byzantine epic “Watergate”, featuring fellow silvertail and veteran game of mates grifter and Nats’ sideshow carnival barker, Barnaby Joyce, “Grassgate” a Tarantino homage to herbicide as an obliging Environment Minister, played by Josh Frydenberg helps Gus farewell some of the last remnants of all-but extinguished temperate grasslands and the whodunnit “Clovergate” fake document download scandal knows how to power down. In renewables, that is.

Less than two years after his PM set him up as muppet for our mining barons, aka Energy and Emissions Minister, silvertail Gussie’s buggered new wind and solar farm start-ups from near-record highs to near-record lows. Only three new projects reached completion in the last quarter – and 90 per cent of that capacity came from a single solar farm courtesy of the Queensland Labor government.

Morrison’s theatre of the absurd energy policy show is no roadmap to lower emissions, cheaper power or more jobs. It is just another calculated insult to those who have worked to honour our Paris agreement; to those who have worked tirelessly to decarbonise our economy. The rug has been pulled out unceremoniously because that’s what Scotty does best. And he’s been watching his mentor and enfant terrible Trump.

Scotty’s right wing coal warriors such as Matt Canavan may be appeased – for five minutes – Nats with interests or mates with interests in the gas industry may tolerate the sociopath and bully in him a little better, while his embrace of gas will appease key Liberal Party donors. Above all, Morrison will shrewdly have done the bidding of his cabal of mining industry executives under the guise of a coronavirus recovery plan while setting up Angus Taylor to take the blame when the inevitable repercussions are felt.

Best of all he will wedge Labor over their policy on gas.

Where it will all go pear-shaped is when gas becomes even less affordable and fails to provide jobs, let alone fulfil his rash and glib promise of bringing back a manufacturing sector – now around ten per cent of the economy – that neoliberal ideology is helping to banish forever. Emissions will continue to climb. The need for “new technology” he preaches will be exposed as a sound-bite sham. There are no new technologies that need to be developed to be decarbonised. There are, however, sports rorts yet to be accounted for.

Worse, Morrison may be exposed as a bare-faced liar as CCS is seen to be a coal industry fiction and an expensive indulgence of powerful party mates as the economy further contracts in 2021 with his ill-advised and inhumane cutting back on pensions for those out of work and those unable to work given their disabilities. The Panda factor can only exacerbate a downturn in our trade in a Coronavirus recession world

Trade with China is suffering because of Morrison’s witless desire not only to align with Trump’s trade war with Beijing but to enlist as an active belligerent. China will do us slowly write Crikey’s Michael Sainsbury. Unemployment and underemployment will soar in the New Year. Morrison has already alienated thousands of university teachers. His promised IR reforms threaten to make a bad system worse. As Dennis Atkins warns,

The all too apparent human toll of this insecurity is not enough to deter the Morrison Government from its determination to further deregulate the labour market.

The “energy roadmap” in all its intellectual and moral poverty is studded with disinformation. Despite what he claims, for example, renewables can’t “stand on their own two feet”. The Prime Minister’s gaslighting merely underlines his abdication of responsibility; his failure to provide real leadership when it was most needed.

Morrison may already have neutralised rivals, Dutton and Taylor but he will rapidly lose the confidence of MPs in marginal seats and despite his daggy dad routines; his carefully orchestrated relentless curry and cubby home-loving hubby PR campaign, voters are not mugs. They know when they’re being taken for a ride.

It may take a while given our Murdoch orchestrated cheer squad that is the mainstream media but truth will out. Especially when you can’t get work or the hours you need to put food on the table and pay the rapidly rising power bills the Prime Minister falsely promised his gas-led recovery would reduce.

“Trump puts his stamp on the politics of other countries … both overtly and subtly. Populists, nationalists and authoritarians look to Trump and know that they may proceed unchecked. Countries more committed to the decades-long liberal international order scramble to respond to scrapped cultural, institutional, diplomatic and policy norms.” (Mary Jo Murphy The Washington Post).

Donald Trump, a silver-spoon buffoon who got away with the biggest con job in modern history, a type of Gordon Gekko, the character who had a moral bypass at birth, was set to play himself in the 2010 sequel to Oliver Stone’s Wall St: Money Never Sleeps but his outrageous demands – most of which were to do with his hair – were so over the top that his scene – in which Trump bumps into Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in a barber shop – ended up on the cutting room floor.

Mega-diva Donald’s bizarre list of demands include forcing a contract upon everyone in the scene not to touch his topknot. Hair today, gone tomorrow, Donald, just read Samson and Delilah, Judges 16.

Today, Trump’s hair is causing more grief. Again, it may cause him to fail to make the final cut; cost him re-election in November. His fear that his combover would come unstuck in the rain caused him to abort his 2018 chopper ride to honour American soldiers slain in battle. Now it threatens his re-election.

Trump pulled the pin on a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018. Rain forced his last-minute cancellation, he lies “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Another lie. The truth is more prosaic. Trump feared that rain would mess with his hair and makeup; undermine the pompadour he teases over his bald pate, to say nothing of his waterproof foundation which Washington Post pundits believe to be Bronx Color – a fourteen euro Swiss cosmetic.

Fear of cosmetic or wardrobe malfunction can paralyse public figures. Doubtless, after his “I shall return”, uttered not in The Philippines but in fact back at Terowie Train Station Alice Springs, Douglas McArthur added “but only if it’s not raining and I still look good in a bomber jacket with slacks”.

Trump’s re-wind is contradicted by four first-hand witnesses’ evidence, painstakingly recorded by Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, who pursues the president’s total incomprehension of patriotism, service and sacrifice since Trump attacked the late senator John McCain’s war record.

“We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” Trump rages, despite being not invited, report witnesses. Washington’s navel-orange-in-chief, President Trump sees White House flags at half-mast.

“What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” Trump tells his claque; the bitching, backstabbing, festering, toadying grovel of sycophants, formerly White House aides who him prop up. The White House flag is back at full mast Monday morning – before being lowered again Monday afternoon – up and down like the zipper on JFK’s chinos; or a media whore’s drawers.

Time wounds all heels, however. In an age of pivot and spin, what’s certain is that by 20 January 2025, Trump’s enablers will be exposed. And even his most powerful collaborators have bound their fate to his.

As to the lies Trump told when cancelling his visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018 at the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the original Armistice Day, they won’t fly.

First, Marine One, the Presidential helicopter can’t fly in the rain? It’s almost plausible. Yet the weather has to be extremely cold, with risk of icing up or risk of thunderstorms. Neither was the case. Moreover, former aides confirm there’s always a back-up plan. Luckily The Secret Service won’t blab. For now.

Crippling vanity aside, Trump’s larger concern is his own toxic turpitude. Let his deluded following ignore the Coronavirus pandemic, there is no escape from the pox of Trumpism itself, now endemic in so many bodies politic including our own federal government – brought into being by the same forces which helped to take us from greed is good to greed is God, the Hillsong heresy. Trump is an enabler.

For Hungary’s neo-fascist PM, Viktor Orban who, like his US mentor, favours rule by decree, Donald Trump represents “permission” from “the highest position in the world ” Tyrants all over the globe from Brazil’s “strongman”, Jair Bolsonaro, to Cambodia’s fascist Hun Sen, or Scott Morrison, Trump’s mini-me down under, are vastly encouraged by the US President’s increasing disdain for the rule of law.

“I not only weaken the opposition, I’m going to make them dead … and if anyone is strong enough to try to hold a demonstration, I will beat all those dogs and put them in a cage.” Hun Sen boasts 2011 on suggestion he should be worried about the overthrow of a Tunisian dictator in the “Arab Spring”.

Whilst his captain’s-picked cabal of gas company executives and mining industry shills, the oxymoronic Covid-19 Co-ordination Commission, led by former Fortescue top dog, deputy chair of Strike Energy, nifty Nev Power meets in secret to plot pipe-dreams in pursuit of the chimera of a gas-led recovery and the stranded assets of new, uneconomic pipelines, Morrison steps on the gas.

Oxymoronic? There is no federal co-ordination. Morrison’s tactic is to politicise the pandemic. Relentlessly he bags Daniel Andrews for ruining the national economy with his frivolous lockdowns.

MSM continues the assault, taking its lead as always from Liberal propaganda organ The Australian. Show us your road map, he chants. Shrewdly he writes a threatening letter to the Victorian Premier attaching Frydenberg and Hunt’s names to his own. It will help him with a talking point evading responsibility; shifting the blame. Scotty, you are a born leader. Not only that you are our nation’s saviour, reminding us that we are all in this together.

In fact, Morrison is using the pandemic to divide and conquer. He ridicules Victoria’s effort because Dan’s health workers are just crap at contact tracing. Just look at Australia’s gold standard, New South Wales.

Overlooking the federal government’s Ruby Princes debacle is not easy but Morrison is brazen. It will be his undoing. Cases may well rise in NSW. The state’s contact tracing may be more thorough because it has fewer cases. If the number spikes it could all change. The Kirby Institute’s Infectious diseases expert, Raina McIntyre, points out that Victoria’s health system has been cut to the bone.

“When it comes to public health infrastructure and resources per head of population, Victoria is much worse off than any other state in Australia,” she says.

“Victoria is just a shell of a system, it’s just been decimated, and that’s fine in the good times, you can get by on a minimal model, but when there’s a pandemic all those weaknesses are exposed.”

McIntyre stops short of tracing the neoliberal origins of the state’s poor health system. “Economic rationalisation” under Jeff Kennett’s Liberal Coalition government during the 1990s devastated the Victoria’s health care system. Of course, Kennett claimed it was all Labor’s fault.

In microcosm, Kennett’s attack parallels the Morrison government’s upcoming austerity budgeting federal solution. Labor governments plunge the state into deficit, therefore “reforms” must be made. Kennett pursued a radical privatisation. Public services were contracted out to private operators, an approach which has helped cripple the state’s health care system, today.

Labor is to blame? Scapegoating is in full swing. Ben Fordham appears on ABC The Drum to spread the rumour that Andrews will resign. “People are saying that Dan Andrews is contemplating his future.”

The PM presses the pedal to the metal. It’s total war on every front – Labor, international student farming, The Arts, arts and humanities, which the federal government sees as hotbeds of sedition, Super, especially industry super. But as Crikey’s Guy Rundle observes, nothing it does leads “to any conclusion other than that everything can be trashed to get a political edge.” Pure Trumpism in other words.

Trump’s war on Democrats and the media gives dictators like Hun Sun an alibi for their own attacks on the opposition, protest and freedom of the press. When, in 2014, Morrison devised his Cambodian solution, to handball 1000 refugees from our care, blithely outsourcing our obligation to provide asylum under international law, Australia told the south-east Asian nation it needed to stop its military from killing street protesters, violently crushing political opposition and detaining people without trial.

But it didn’t stop the deal – one of Morrison’s follies, abandoned, out of sight and out of mind. Another thing “we are not here today to talk about” if reporters dare raise the issue at a presser. After Australia’s caution, Cambodia’s government has continued to crush dissent. And the Opposition.

“Videos of police dragging peaceful protesters on the street and forcibly jamming them into vehicles should raise global concern for police abuse in Cambodia,” says Phil Robertson, Human Rights Watch deputy Asia director. “The authorities should immediately end violent tactics against peaceful protesters and respect the rights to free expression and assembly.” Yet Trump undermines all that.

When the US embassy in Phnom Penh joins condemnation, Hun Sen calls on Trump to overrule his staff, “Your policy has been changed, but the embassy in Phnom Penh has not changed it yet,” he says.

Dictators feel affirmed by Trump’s trashing of the media; his fake news. His contempt for such basic democratic principles as the right of US Democrats to vote. Or how he urges supporters to vote twice. Or how he’s preparing to demand that all postal votes be scrapped because they shouldn’t count.

The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland notes, Trump’s seen data that predicts postal voters are more likely to support Biden. On 4 November, he’ll demand that tens of millions of postal votes be disallowed – leaving only votes cast on election day, from which Trump reckons he could achieve a narrow victory.

Poster-boy for petty despots and crazed crackpots world-wide, a monster man-baby whose name now surfaces as a rallying cry or potential “liberator” to Germany’s neo-Nazis and other far right extremists, America’s paranoid conspiracy theorist in chief; malignant narcissist and pathological liar, Trump is not, of course, responsible for the decline in freedom around the world. Yet he is an accelerant.

Now he “pivots” into damage control. Despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, he denies he ever called US troops who died in war “losers and suckers”. But will denial work? And what does his insult reveal about Trump and his many fans including our own Trumpista Scott Morrison?

First, denigrating the military could prove a fatal error in Trump’s campaign for re-election. With fewer than two months until America votes, his minders fear he may have alienated a key component of his base at a critical time. Support amongst active service men and women is now down from 46 per cent at his inauguration to 38 per cent approval in a recent Military Times poll.

Trump’s supporters comprise a disproportionately high percentage of veterans. Aides panic. SBS reports a video is concocted in which four veteran stooges testify to their undying love of all things Trump.

In the meantime, Australia, which fancies itself as a US deputy sheriff, but which is closer to a servile lackey or “US imperialist running dog” is up shit creek without a paddle. In a barbed wire canoe.

We poked the Panda, as The Donald wanted but the Panda poked us back threatening our trade, expelling our journalists and detaining our citizens. Team Trump won’t help. They’re too busy in damage control – dispute, deny and discredit.

“It’s a fake story and it’s a disgrace that they’re allowed to do it,” Trump tells reporters in the Oval Office. Why, he respects all troops. “To me, they’re heroes,” he says. “It’s even hard to believe how they could do it. And I say that, the level of bravery, and to me, they’re absolute heroes.”

Deny, dispute and discredit. It’s Trump’s signature strategy, aped by admirers world-wide including Scott Morrison, who continues to deny his key role in defrauding amateur clubs to help Clive Palmer business buy the election victory his business needed – a steal at only $67 million, in Scotty’s sports rorts scandal.

Yet much as Trump may protest, “I never called John a loser,” his bluster is also contradicted by video and Twitter which both show him doing just that in 2015.

Via @fitsnews: “Donald Trump: John McCain Is ‘A Loser’” http://t.co/sgiETvdUqi

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 18, 2015

Fifteen hours later, his aides are in full flight and panic mode. VoteVets, a progressive veterans’ organization and never a fan of Trump, releases an online ad featuring the parents of troops slain in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each parent declares that their son or stepson was neither a “loser” nor a “sucker.”

Why such contempt? Why does it appeal? Papa Trump is popular in “the shit-hole countries” as he fondly refers to sub-Saharan African nations such as Nigeria and Kenya, who rank number one on the US Security and Assistance Monitor; continue to thrive on US economic aid.

Why does it appeal to our local faux-populists such Morrison and Pauline Hanson? Trump and his acolytes in our pick-a-winner wide brown land cannot see the point of doing anything without monetary reward. Sacrifice? Dying for a cause? None of this makes any sense when your one true love is yourself; your only cause is your own self-promotion.

Lying’s hard work but The Donald’s protestations don’t deter him from his mission: beating Biden in November. Trump’s gone postal. Mega donor Louis DeJoy, whose name makes him sound as if he belongs in a fly-spray commercial, is President’s pick for PMG. Louie is joyfully ripping out mail boxes and scrapping sorting machines in any electorate where a hapless Democrat might try to cast a postal vote.

Since May, DeJoy has brought in reforms, which he claims cut costs. These reduced overtime and limited deliveries that postal carriers say created backlogs across the country.

Trump’s 2020 appointee, Post Master General DeJoy (the cheque’s in the mail) is now accused of paying former workers bonuses to reimburse them for donating to the Republican Party. The Washington Post speaks to seven former employees of his former business New Breed Logistics whom DeJoy forced to donate to GOP candidates. An unconcerned Trump says he’ll act if DeJoy has done anything bad.

Such a practice violates both North Carolina state and federal law. Yet it’s an insight into how the party enabled the rise of a Donald Trump. DeJoy’s rapid rise in Republican politics was helped greatly by his ability to multiply his fundraising through his company; increasing his influence in the GOP.

“Louis was a national fundraiser for the Republican Party. He asked employees for money. We gave him the money, and then he reciprocated by giving us big bonuses,” says David Young, DeJoy’s veteran director of human resources, with access to payroll records at New Breed from the late 1990s to 2013 and is now retired. “When we got our bonuses, let’s just say they were bigger, they exceeded expectations — and that covered the tax and everything else.”

The Washington Post reports that between 2000 and 2014, 124 workers together gave more than $1 million to federal and state GOP candidates. Many had not previously made political donations, and have not made any since leaving the company, public records show. During the same period, nine employees gave a combined $700 to Democrats.

While Mail voting sabotage is an irresistibly “authoritarian power grab,” team Trump, is supported by states’ refining ID requirements while it rigs every other aspect of the US vote it can get away with. This includes gerrymandering of electorates and removal of places of voting.

Since 2010, twenty-five states have enacted new voting restrictions, such as strict photo ID requirements, early voting cutbacks, and registration restrictions. The land of the free is busy making it even harder to vote. Especially if you are poor, a person of colour or you live in a remote area.

Our own father of lies, Donald’s disciple the besotted Scott Morrison is on the tools again. Mugging for the Scott Cam camera he reprises his role as daggy Dad with Ryobi saw. Perhaps Cam does the building off-camera. It would be a fair return for his $300,000 salary. Achieve more than his former role as Careers Ambassador, another Morrison debacle.

But why is Scotty building the same Bunnings kit cubby house, his press agents gushed about in June? So high is staff turnover everywhere in our commonwealth public service, so savage are the cuts, there’s barely anyone around to turn the lights off. It’s systemic dementia, a loss of institutional memory.

Collective amnesia may create stuff-ups – promote the discovery learning that hapless Tassie battler Dick Colbeck whimpers about. Aged care is not perfect but that’s OK because it’s learning to be better.

Yet it’s also perfect for the evading of responsibility and accountability which fuels the duck and weave of our modern political Quotidien. Senators at estimates hearings have been told that there is no-one left at the department to answer questions about all sorts of rorts and activities that have occurred within even the previous few years.

Churn and the rise of the PA mean an even chance we’ll see the same promo with bells on at Christmas.

But we may have to be careful with our Christmas carols. As Crikey’s Charlie Lewis notes after years of allowing neo-Nazis, various terrorist groups, conspiracy theorists and democracy warping fake news to flourish, Facebook has finally cut down on the scourge of blog posts featuring Spotify playlists.

Will Trump’s “losers and suckers” undo him? Lose him votes among the veterans he counts on to vote for him? It certainly will do him some damage. Add in the cost of his coronavirus debacle and its economic consequences. But it must not be forgotten that the Republican Party that stands behind Trump, the party apparatus and the massive network of donors which enables him is hopelessly corrupted as the curious case of Trump’s Postmaster General, DeJoy suggests.

Whatever happens, the end of Trump will not be the end of Trumpism. Nine out of ten Republicans are fans of the job he is doing as president, David Smith notes in The Guardian. And who would replace him?

Smith points to an alarming paucity of alternatives: in SurveyMonkey poll for Axios last December, Republican voters’ favourites for 2024 were Mike Pence, with Donald Trump Jr in second place, followed by Nikki Haley, Ivanka Trump, Marco Rubio and Mike Pompeo.

If “losers and suckers” does help Trump lose, however, the gaffe illustrates a mentality which Trumpism has nurtured – a complete incomprehension of service, sacrifice or dedication to principle. It’s a perspective which Gordon Gekko, a fictional caricature, would instantly recognise – as would anyone attending a recent Senate Estimates committee. Or who follows the current attack on Dan Andrews.

“Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” The embodiment of the false creed of neoliberalism, Trump cannot fathom any human action that cannot be reduced to a transaction. He cannot comprehend volunteers because that involves altruism and empathy.

The narcissistic materialist is equally confounded; discomfited to discover that over 1,800 US Marines lost their lives at Belleau Wood. He sees them as “suckers” for getting killed.

In brief, as Goldberg sees, Donald Trump suffers the delusion that “nothing is worth doing without the promise of monetary payback, and that talented people who don’t pursue riches are “losers.”

It’s not hard to hear the same delusion at work in the News Corp journalists who endlessly, every day twit Dan Andrews with the same questions. Why should the state pursue public health and safety instead of profits for business at any costs?

Similarly, in his tedious repetition of his vacuous slogan “open the nation for business”, Trumpista Scott Morrison exhibits the same pathological indifference to others; the same failure to imagine another’s pain, along with an alarming poverty of mind and spirit which simply make him unfit to lead. He should resign over the sports rorts alone.

In their own ways, the rise of Trumpism and the coronavirus pandemic have helped create an environment where Morrison and Murdoch’s minions’ claims that we must endlessly pursue selfish competition – that greed is good and might is right – are so vividly exposed as toxic aberrations and hopelessly, grotesquely inadequate to the times’ need for compassion, co-operation, community and humanity.

We must expose their lies; continue to hold them to account.

We have to think that we have to work together as a human species to be organized to care for one another, to realize that the health of the most vulnerable people among us is a determining factor for the health of all of us, and, if we aren’t prepared to do that, we’ll never, ever be prepared to confront these devastating challenges to our humanity. Canadian Bruce Aylward, leader of independent WHO mission to study the spread of the virus in China).

In the dark night of the soul, the pall cast over us all by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, a pandemic virus strain that causes coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19, a respiratory illness, which also triggers fear and despair, there is more than a glimmer of hope.

While the toll is shocking, COVID-19 infects almost 2.5 million and causes over 170,000 to die, (2:00 pm) Tuesday 21 AEST and puts our global economic and social interactions into deep freeze – and while WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warns “the worst is yet ahead” countless acts of kindness, courage, decency and humanity, shine through.

A Sydney local fills a wooden mailbox with books and pantry supplies, urging passers-by: “take what you need.” In the UK, over four thousand doctors and nurses come out of retirement; risking their lives to help in understaffed hospitals. Dr Alfa Saadu, 68, dies of coronavirus caught while volunteering at the Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital, in Welwyn, Hertfordshire. He is one of four – all minority ethnic doctors -to lose his life so far.

Rethink Food, a New York local non-profit organisation, launches a pop-up soup kitchen outside Salem Methodist church, forced to close its own kitchen because its volunteers are elderly and at too high a risk from infection, serves 600 to 1,000 meals a day, five days a week.

“We could easily do 5,000 meals a day,” Rethink founder Matt Jozwiak says. And lines would be even longer were it not for fear of infection. Endless numbers of other acts of compassion, altruism and self-sacrifice are taking place around the world as people follow their hearts.

“Tireless healthcare workers and researchers seek medical breakthroughs to prevent and cure this new disease. Countless healthcare providers care for the sick, often putting themselves at risk, particularly before the nature of the disease was known. Even the heartache of families who wait helplessly as a beloved family member dies alone quarantined in a nursing home reminds us of the deep bonds that hold us together,” writes Search Institute’s Eugene C. Roehlkepartain.

But Donald Trump’s Operation Re-open America is only about following the cash nexus.

“LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” “LIBERATE VIRGINIA.” He tweets. Crowds of protestors magically appear for news cameras in the streets of centres in key states. Give me Liberty or Give Me COVID-19 reads a sign held by a young man in a red cap in Austin Texas. He seems to have utilised a torn-up cardboard carton to add credibility to his improvised sign.

It’s certainly no improvised protest. The demonstrations are orchestrated by a group of far-right, pro-gun Facebook groups calling for anti-quarantine protests throughout the US, reports The Washington Post’s Isaac Stanley-Becker and Tony Romm. The images help skew viewers’ impression away from the reality that most Americans want the shutdown to continue.

Nearly 70 percent of Republicans say they support a national stay-at-home order, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll. Ninety-five percent of Democrats back such a measure in the survey.

The work of the work of Ben Dorr, “political director” of a group called “Minnesota Gun Rights,” and his brothers, Christopher and Aaron, the groups attract 200,000 members combined. They continue to expand rapidly in the days after Trump endorses such protests by suggesting citizens should “liberate” their states. Expect to see more images.

“Jesus is my vaccine,” reads a message on a tractor, driven past the crowded statehouse in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Monday. “Shutdown the Shutdown” says a Maryland sign.

Like Scott Morrison’s Pro-Growth Agenda, Trump’s campaign to shut down the shutdown implies a false choice mimicked in Australia and elsewhere; we need to get back to work; back out into social circulation, rather than remain at home for everyone’s safety or we blow up the economy. Trump has his devotees here. Our Prime Minister is a big fan. So, what is going on?

Health crisis or economic crisis? An open letter published Monday is signed by 157 economists who call it a “false distinction”. While the economists, who include RBA board member Ian Harper and former member Warwick McKibbin, back the government’s $200 billion-plus spending measures they oppose prematurely loosening social distancing restrictions.

They also warn of the consequences of a second wave of infections: “We cannot have a functioning economy unless we first comprehensively address the public health crisis.”

Is the President of the United States actively promoting insurrection? A second Civil War? Washington Governor, Jay Inslee, accuses Trump of encouraging “illegal and dangerous acts”.

Or is Trump merely campaigning in his typically gonzo fashion? Each state has a Democrat Governor; Michigan could be crucial to Trump’s re-election campaign in November’s General Election. As a rule, it’s all about Trump. And as another rule you can’t trust a word he says.

“It’s not about me,” Trump says during Sunday’s briefing. Yet he just has to be at the microphone for all but 13 of its 90 minutes. “Nothing’s about me.”

If the Donald doth protest too much, his toxic tirades are over the top. “He is putting millions of people in danger of contracting COVID-19. His unhinged rantings and calls for people to “liberate” states could also lead to violence. We’ve seen it before,” Democrat, Inslee tweets.

The reality TV star has completely politicised this pandemic, writes Charles M Blow for The New York Times. Blow argues Trump’s “briefings” are his political tool to achieve this. “He is standing on top of … 40,000 dead bodies and using the media to distract attention away from them and instead brag about what a great job he’s done.”

Trump’s call to citizens to rise up against state governors does little to comfort those friends and family mourning over 42 thousand deceased. Nor does it inspire hope in the 792,913 victims of COVID-19 (Tuesday 21, 3:30 pm AEST) yet another scourge of globalisation, the destroyer of space and distance which surged in 2001.

Why? China joined the WTO and modern India forsook its nationalist economic and social ideals to embrace neoliberalism, an ideology which puts the market above the state and which commodifies human relationships. By 2001, global travel and globalisation had ceased to be the privilege of an elite and began to reach deep into the hinterland of these vast populations, as Guy Rundle reminds us. Coronavirus coincides with this new level of globalisation.

The coronavirus is now setting off a cascade of health, economic and social effects that may lead to a collapse of economic globalization, writes Anthea Roberts. This may play out better for Trump than his bungling of America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. He knows his re-election depends on voters’ perceptions of his handling of the crisis. So he has a cure.

The golf-cheat-in-chief, himself, unable to play in lockdown is quick to exploit a snake oil sales opportunity. Trump promotes the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a possible cure for COVID-19. It’s untested – clinical trials are too small and inconclusive. Experts warn against it.

Some of the twenty-two million Americans, who are now out of work, doubtless, will rush to be guinea-pigs. In Australia, we’ve fast-tracked it so that it can be used in hospitals. After all, anything Trump is spruiking has to be good. Our Chief Medical Officers appear impotent.

Clive Palmer has invested a lazy million dollars of his own money to a “coronavirus action fund” to develop the anti-malaria drug which has toxic side effects when used inappropriately.

It’s OK when treating malaria or lupus or rheumatoid arthritis but perpetrating the myth that it is a cure for COVID-19 is reckless endangerment. It also has led to stockpiling of the drug with the result that those who genuinely need the treatment cannot obtain it.

“Liberate” is more than a bizarre word for men, women and children who are merely obeying the advice of their public health officials and their state government; citizens who are not being repressed or incarcerated but merely complying with advice to self-isolate for their own sake, their community and the nation.

It is pitched to resonate with the alt-right, a dog whistle to all gun nuts, psychopaths and others who mistakenly believe the Second Amendment was written to enable the citizenry to violently resist the government of the United States.

“Liberate” is an abdication of responsibility, by a malignant narcissist who cannot feel for others but who is acutely attuned to the stock market. Trump is gambling that a return to work will somehow restore the nation’s prosperity. He never ceases to fret about his own.

The Trump Organisation needs to service its debt. With some Trump golf courses and hotels closed in the coronavirus lockdown, the family firm, trading since 1923, is seeking to defer payments on some loans and dues such as its lease payments to Palm Beach County to run its golf course on county land. But it’s all cool. Trump calls himself “the king of debt”.

To safely reopen businesses, shops, schools, more COVID-19 tests need to be done. Because tests are scarce, largely due to Trump’s bungling administration, they are rationed to America’s sickest people. In order to liberate; re-open closed businesses and revive social life, those tested must include all those likely to spread the disease – not just the sickest.

Trump’s option is a type of roulette, a gamble on herd immunity, a phenomenon which first requires a vaccine to be invented, a breakthrough which may never come. Even then, experts warn, herd immunity may not even exist for COVID-19. If the four coronaviruses in the common cold are a clue, immunity may be ephemeral, lasting only a few months to a year.

Too little is known about the novel coronavirus and too much is known about other coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS to make it safe to assume that exposure will confer lasting immunity. Too little credence is given to the fundamental truth that a healthy population is the key to a prosperous economy. Much time and money are spent in media worldwide prompting us to choose jobs crisis from the false dichotomy jobs or health.

In Canberra, Trump’s satellite of love and public health pioneer, our PM aka “steam me up Scotty”, star of “The Love Rub”, a 1970s Vicks Vaporub commercial, now re-appears as Our Nation’s Saviour, a miracle play from Pandemic Promotions. Scotty’s just busting to follow Trump’s lead. Saviour is a show with two flags, medical experts and regular egging-on from Health Minister, the unctuous Duttonista, Greg Hunt, who patronises us for our obedience; praising our curve-flattening, as if we’re all on some bizarre weight-loss contest.

Saviour makes a beaut distraction from reports of shortages; stories of doctors and nurses who are forced to re-use single-use masks or who are told to wear plastic aprons because there are no gowns. Psychiatrist Karen Williams’ survey of 245 Australian frontline medical workers finds sixty-one per cent of doctors feel pressure from other staff not to wear a mask, and more than half feel guilt or shame for wearing one.

“The chickens have come home to roost” for Tasmania’s healthcare system and a “decade of austerity” explains Tim Jacobsen, Tasmanian state secretary of the Health and Community Services Union, who reports to The Saturday Paper’s Rick Morton of such dire shortages that staff are forced to rob Peter to pay Paul; “strip” supplies from some parts of hospitals in order to plug gaps in more exposed areas.

“No one has said this overtly, but we clearly have national shortages of personal protective equipment,” Jacobson says. “Masks, gloves, the protective jumpsuits: they have all been very, very difficult to source. It is all being rationed. We have seen mixed messages going out to staff over the last three weeks. Reuse your masks, you need to keep your masks, that sort of thing…”

Yet, however much Hunt pats us on the head, for the “sustained and genuine” way we self-isolate, his PM quickly queers his pitch. Morrison shrinks his six-month lockdown into “a four-week minimum”. Saving jobs outweighs saving lives. Besides if Trump’s America is open for business, how can its client-state stay closed?

Helping the Health Minister succeed, former PM, Malcolm “Fizza” Turnbull’s memoir, “A Bigger Picture” doesn’t flatter Hunt; painting him as a potty-mouthed prat whose abusive, vulgar language and overweening ambition helped everyone to hate him, while Morrison is merely untrustworthy. Scotty damaged his government with leaks that put the government on the back foot, Turnbull reports. Yet Morrison was offside with some major players.

“Mathias regarded Scott as emotional, narcissistic and untrustworthy and told me so regularly,” Turnbull writes. Dutton was also hostile to Morrison. “Of course, if Mathias had a poor opinion of Scott, Dutton’s dislike of him was even stronger,” he says. It’s evident in the strained working relationship between the pair in drought and pandemic.

Yet Greg Hunt seems to have made himself universally detested. Turnbull recalls the day his successor, the Machiavellian Morrison, won the Liberal leadership ballot over his challenger Peter Dutton, the Home Affairs Minister.

“If looks could have killed, Hunt would have fallen over dead. He’d been Dutton’s wannabe deputy and had been working towards this day for months. Never liked, he’d never been more despised than he was at that moment.”

“None of us are perfect, I absolutely acknowledge that,” Hunt says archly. Tellingly, no Liberal MP contests Turnbull’s verdict on Scotty. Or Dutto. Or Hunt. Marise Payne, fails to persuade ABC Insiders’ host, David Speers, or any of his viewers, with her lame claim that she “received and deleted” her pirate copy of A Bigger Picture. When she declares she did not receive her emailed copy from the PM’s office, she reveals that other Liberals were emailing, too.

It seems to have been a bit of a hoot. Take the Toff down a peg. But nothing Turnbull says, now, will dent the commanding fictional narrative the Morrison junta has established; how it acted quickly and, in the nation’s, best interests and how citizens have been so compliant that we’ve stopped the toxic pathogen in its tracks. Besides, Hunt rises to the occasion; takes any high road he can salvage by saying he won’t be reading Turnbull’s The Bigger Picture.

A blizzard of electronic copies of Turnbull’s book is pirated by a staff member in the Prime Minister’s Office, publisher, Hardie Grant alleges, Saturday. Recipients obligingly forward them on. For Hardie Grant, it’s malicious conduct and a massive breach of copyright. Not only were unauthorised copies freely distributed, recipients were urged to forward them to others. Some MPs report receiving five or six copies reports Malcolm Farr for The Guardian Australia.

A letter of complaint is sent on Saturday to senior Morrison adviser Nico Louw by Nicholas Pullen of lawyers HWL Ebsworth, on behalf of Turnbull and his publishers. Louw admits to forwarding 56 copies. Pullen writes that he has been instructed Louw was “responsible for unauthorised distribution of my client’s book” in digital form.

While the publisher threatens to refer potential criminal breaches of the law to the AFP, copyright lawyers advise a civil lawsuit may be more productive. Hilarious. The AFP has never, since its inception in 1979, brought a case that would embarrass a sitting government.

A journalist receives half a dozen. It’s a rip-off on “a massive scale”, say Turnbull and his publisher’s lawyers, a state of affairs that would trouble legitimate purchasers seeking Turnbull’s explanation of his National Broadband Network (NBN) debacle, a $51 billion catastrophe which has spectacularly failed to deliver.

Readers pay good money expecting to learn Turnbull explain why for at least twenty years, Snowy 2.0 will store coal-fired electricity. Not renewable. Snowy 2.0 will also create additional demand for coal-fired generation; increase greenhouse gas emissions. Why? ABC 7:30 Report’s Leigh Sales fails to put these posers to Tuesday night.

A letter of complaint is sent on Saturday to senior Morrison adviser Nico Louw by Nicholas Pullen of lawyers HWL Ebsworth, on behalf of Turnbull and his publishers. Pullen writes that he has been instructed Louw was “responsible for unauthorised distribution of my client’s book” in digital form.

But amidst Turnbullian threats by the publisher to refer potential criminal breaches to the Australian federal police, copyright law specialists say the company and the former PM might have a better chance of bringing a civil lawsuit. But look over here!

When all else fails, cue the spin-machine. Or the dead cat on the table. Forget quarantine, or social isolation, Scotty’s fellow evangelical, prosperity gospeller and prayer-mate, walking disaster area, Stuart Robert has knocked off a fabulous app from Singapore we can all put on our blue-tooth-enabled phones. Download. If we want to.

It’ll be an opt-in thing, Scotty says, airily, back-flipping only one day after threatening to make it compulsory. He’s working hard at what he does best, stirring up a diversion.

Apart from the ten per cent of us who don’t own a mobile phone. It’s “a big Team Australia moment” says the Services Minister, wowing us with his oratory and his capacity to reference notorious Liberal Party Luddite, a keenly contested title, tiny Tony Abbott.

“There is no geolocation, there is no surveillance, there is no tracking,” Robert promises. Besides, a lot of that stuff can be got from the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) which has been spying on citizens for years. As Sally McManus says, you expect your phone to be tapped.

Various other intelligence agencies pitch in. Federal and state police, can also request access to your telephone and internet records. These can reveal information about your whereabouts and whom you talked to, emailed or messaged. As Turnbull boasts in A Bigger Picture, as he takes credit for creating the Office of National Intelligence (ONI), PM had access to the collective wisdom and insights of our 7000-person-strong intelligence community.

Yet as Singapore’s increasing rate of infection shows, either contact tracing is too slow, or SARS-CoV-2 is too fast to enable intervention to slow community transmission.

At least the app will help keep more tabs on us. What could possibly go wrong? Above all, Morrison loves the war-talk his mentor, America’s most revered Vietnam bone-spur deferment veteran, uses to inspire states to rebel.

It’s no less than an … “historic battle against the invisible enemy” that amounts to the “greatest national mobilisation since world war two”, says Trump’s autocue.

It’s rhetorical nonsense, probably penned by slumlord millionaire, and “tier-one predator”, son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump’s fixer on Middle East peace, or Opioid crisis which may have killed 450,000 Americans since 1999, or winning hearts and minds by dithering with COVID-19.

Six weeks are lost as a result of Trump’s dithering and downplaying of the crisis when the virus first struck. His administration’s initial response is “one of the greatest failures of basic governance and leadership in modern times” says Jeremy Konyndyk, a central figure in the US battle against Ebola. The Morrison government dithered, too, before the secretary of the Treasury, aided by Labor and the Unions pressed for a stimulus package.

Trump’s number one fan Downunder, Aloha Morrison is keen to match his mentor’s rhetoric while basic governance and leadership have eluded him from the start. He’ll never recover from his Hawaiian holiday nor his plan to go to a Rugby League game.

Now he’s channelling Trump in his bullshit that we must put the economic crisis ahead of the pandemic; rush back to the workplace just in time to catch or infect workmates with the ‘rona.

The next few weeks will severely tax the PM. Lacking his party’s trust, unable to delegate, let alone work with others, Morrison’s done well recently out of letting the real leaders, particularly Labor Premiers tell him what to do, especially over schooling.

Now he’ll have to do some work himself; something he can’t abide. Being awarded Turnbull’s Plumber’s mate award for his leaks, is unlikely to deter Scotty from his “front-running” – media leaks that weaken the government during high-stakes cabinet debates. After all, his office leaked advance freebies of Malco’s new e-book.

Being “emotional, narcissistic and untrustworthy” won’t bother Morrison, either. Since when did he give a fig? Besides, he’s already got his revenge. The bootleg preview of A Bigger Picture came from a senior staffer – before being forwarded so eagerly to a cast of thousands – copyright given such a thorough thrashing that the memoir, its author and his entire political career became some sort of electronic piñata.

But pushing Trump’s rush-back-to-work barrow is going to be hard yakka. Especially when there isn’t any work for millions of workers to return to, in an economy bled dry after six years’ Coalition mismanagement – before the virus helps tip it into recession.

Above all, his “pro-growth agenda” which is austerity budgeting under an Orwellian name is nothing but a desperate attempt to walk two sides of the fence. Granted it’s Morrrison’s speciality but no good can ever come of it. The Keynesian stimulus giver cannot reveal himself “on the other side” as a monetarist with a closed fist.

“On the other side of this virus and leading on the way out we are going to have to have economic policy measures that are going to have to be very pro-growth, that is going to enable businesses to employ people, that is going to enable businesses to invest and businesses to move forward”. Scott Morrison

It’s going to take a lot more than stale rhetoric. Or platitudes about growth. Lies about the “other side” don’t cut it either. Australians expect the truth, harsh as it may be, not some pie in the sky. There can be no snap back. The world has changed forever.

Morrison’s hollow words reveal that he has no idea what to do to get Australia open for business again. He knows only how to close things down. The nation deserves better; real leadership – for starters – of the sort we’ve seen from some state premiers.

Humanity is a big part of the leadership required. We see it everyday from extraordinary “ordinary” people just doing their best; doing their jobs. Taking care of one another. That’s where true hope lies. Not in sucking up even more to the business class.

Keep the National Cabinet going until 2022, Scotty; you just keep low in the back seat.

By Sunday, novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 causing COVID-19, a respiratory illness and worse has infected 157,197 and killed at least 5,839 in 146 countries in just three months; a 3.4 per cent mortality rate, WHO estimates.

No-one knows when the pandemic will peak. Yet just as incalculable is COVID-19’s capacity to disrupt the world economy. The virus, moreover, is advancing faster than any financial crisis; government officials who must deal with it, risk becoming infected by a deadly pathogen, which is pretty enough under the microscope to be mistaken for a spring blossom, Maureen Dowd discerns.

Jason Furman, Barack Obama’s chief economist warns that coronavirus could harm the economy more than the GFC. Worse, he frets that politicians can’t fashion an adequate response. Certainly, that’s abundantly true in Australia.

“If two months from now we go back to normal, I think we’d be OK. If this lasts six months or longer — and I think that’s the more likely scenario — all of that just compounds. Even if you discover a cure in December, you still have people out of jobs, broken balance sheets, bankrupt companies that won’t be particularly eager to hire.”

Its economic effects are bound to outlast COVID-19’s impact on our health. Unlike Australia, where some token stimulus measures are applied, even if three out of four dollars is spent on business, in the US, the world’s largest economy, rescue measures betray no sign that the administration even understands the nature of the task before it.

Morrison at least uses the coronavirus to hide the Coalition’s seven years of economic mismanagement. Of course, the PM was treasurer or PM for only five of these years and on that basis, given his Sports Rorts inquiry model, is completely innocent of any fiscal negligence or the fact that the Australian economy has not once grown above its trend rate.

Scotty’s recent shot at Coronavirus busting, something, he says, will soak up $17.6 billion is a ruse. It has to be seen, Richard Denniss argues, in the context of the PM’s failure to do a single thing to the fix the economy his own party has wrecked. Just as he did with the bushfires and just like his mentor Trump, he’s airily dispensed with expert advice. He’s never once seen fit to take advice from an economist. He’s not waving; he’s drowning in malignant narcissism.

Even the RBA can go down on its knees to plead he do something to stimulate the economy as it did in July 2019. But instead of listening, Scotty from marketing and Josh the wannabe stand-up comedian slapped each other’s backs in public about how they were back in black – next year; how the economy was about to take off.

Instead, it tanked. It’s been tanking for seven years. Just take the ABS record of increase in household incomes. 1995 to 2012, sees a healthy increase during the Howard and then Rudd/Gillard governments. It collapses in 2013; never to recover.

Morrison’s rosy picture of the economy is based on a farrago of lies. Labor’s shadow finance minister, Katy Gallagher, is quick with some key facts; net debt has more than doubled under the Coalition even before the outbreak, from $175 billion or just under 11 per cent of GDP in September 2013, to $430 billion or over 21 per cent of GDP seven years later.

Back in black was never going to happen. There is no budget surplus of $7.1 billion as predicted. Never would have been – coronavirus or not. Even the “back in black” slogan was ripped off from former Kiwi PM John Key’s 2014 ad which appeared on a Young Nationals’ Facebook page. Back in black is also an AC/DC song, a tribute to late singer Bon Scott.

In 1998, Sneaky Pete Costello used “back in black and back on track” in his budget speech. What he forgot to explain is how he squandered the proceeds of the mining boom on middle-class welfare and lowering taxes, as part of Howard’s cunning plan to put short-term vote-winning policies ahead of the long-term interest of the nation.

Sound familiar?

Apart from a $750 sop to pensioners and others on government payments, which may help a few pay the arrears on the electricity or gas bill, or pay the rego on the car, the stimulus package is pretty much a non-event. True, there is a great, big, huge, instant tax write-off. But all this does is tweak the depreciation schedule from $30K to $150K.

To stimulate the economy, you have to be a business rushing out to invest thousands in plant, just because you can write it off – at a time when you’re likely to struggle to earn enough just to stay in operation – especially in tourism, hospitality or education.

Paying half the wages of 120,000 young apprentices is good if the boss has the work to keep them on. Until we know the severity of the recession we are about to enter, it’s impossible to estimate how many apprentices will still be laid off.

As for the grant of $25K to small business, that is small beer to a Small to Medium Enterprise in tourism or hospitality whose work has dried up as a direct result of travel bans or a pandemic keeping people at home. Even to flourishing businesses, it is more of a reward or an insurance policy to the Liberal Party’s traditional base in case, as is not impossible, things really go belly up.

In brief, Morrison’s Clayton’s stimulus only makes Donald Trump’s look good. Trump announces a US$50 billion loan program for small business, subject to congressional approval. Nothing says borrow money more than discovering your income is collapsing.

Trump will get Treasury to defer $200 billion worth of tax payments. Businesses who struggle to turn a profit now will love having their tax-deferred. It sure beats watching demand dry right up.

Then Trump runs out of ideas. True, he hankers after cutting payroll tax which Crikey’s Bernard Keane sees as a good idea. Yet he’ll need Congress to support it.

Both Democrats and Republicans call for stimulus measures, but getting them to agree on any one package is fraught. True Democrats have cooked up a batch of measures but we’re yet to see if the GOP will back it and Trump will sign it.

A virulent disease, COVID-19’s rapid spread is sped up by the wilful stupidity; toxic, populism and malignant narcissism afflicting many current world leaders and the even greater number of frauds, from BoJo to ScoMo, who simply pretend to be leaders. Badly. Enter Nemesis, punisher of hubris, writes The NYT’s Bret Stephens.

Nemesis is a Greek goddess of divine retribution who avenges evil deeds and undeserved good fortune. She will level the jumped-up; often Trumped-up post-truth poseurs, hypocrites and con-men who clog up the top jobs.

Also known as Adrasteia, “the inescapable”, Nemesis, hates injustice and rushes to help the arrogant, insolent and depraved get what they deserve. Who better to reveal the empty rhetoric and lies of our top imposters?

Past peak vacuity and a top contender in the keenly contested policy stupidity stakes is political clown prince, Britain’s PM, Boris Johnson. Not for Boris are restrictions, nor indeed policy; that’s for sooky-la-la countries. Boring. Instead, Boris reverts to his signature buffoonery; do nothing.

It’s a novel response to a novel virus. And it’s cheap. When most of the world is hell-bent on prevention, Boris wants Britons just to lie back and think of England.

BoJo’s latest stunt, the non-response, is billed as a “herd immunity” approach. The uncertainty is thrilling. No-one knows if it will work; how long it will take to work, or just how many will die in the process. Yet it parallels Chris Uhlmann’s “war footing” a chilling buzz-phrase which evokes the jingoistic mania which led us into disaster at Gallipoli, The Great War, Viet Nam, Korea, Iran, Syria, or our longest war in history, the war in Afghanistan.

Herd immunity does not spring fully-formed like Pallas or Athene from the head of her father, Zeus. Typically it’s only seen as a preventive strategy in vaccination programmes. If we don’t have a vaccine – as we don’t for COVID-19 – achieving herd immunity would require massive numbers of Britons to be infected and then recover from COVID-19.

Has anyone ever made a vaccine for a coronavirus? Currently circulating in humans are four coronaviruses which cause the common cold. We are yet to create a vaccine for one of them. Pesky, beta coronaviruses are most likely to just become endemic. New variants would crop up each year.

At least it would liven up the doctors’ waiting rooms. Dull and boring cold and flu season could soon become quite a bit more exciting: a cold and flu and COVID season.

Doing bugger all is of course richly attractive to BoJo and many of his compatriots. The theory is inertia will help Britons catch COVID-19 as quickly as possible in the hope – fingers crossed – that when up to seventy per cent of the population is infected, some type of immunity will develop. Genius. If it’s only forty per cent, Daily Kos’ Mark Sumner extrapolates from Italy’s mortality rate, this would cause 27 million cases and about 2 million deaths.

It’s likely to be more. At least sixty per cent of the population – possibly seventy – will need to become infected and recover to create immunity, suggests, Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser.

Paediatrician and former WHO director Anthony Costello, says that the UK government is at odds with other countries in proposing herd immunity. Shifting from containment to mitigation is “wrong and dangerous”, he says. He doubts COVID-19 herd immunity would even last. It’s possible that like ‘flu, new strains will emerge each year and it will need repeat vaccines. By Saturday, Boris is happily selling his brainwave, however, to PM Morrison.

ScoMo and BoJo have discussed international co-operation in responding to the coronavirus pandemic in a telephone call, Boris Johnson’s office says. “The two leaders updated each other on their countries’ respective responses to the virus and agreed on the need to take a science-based approach to mitigate its impact.”

Science-based? There’s little science in either PM’s brief. We are trying to contain; not mitigating. Aren’t we?

But we can’t let Boris steal the hotly contested title Imposter of the Week so easily. Donald Trump misreads his teleprompter in his rushed, unrehearsed and wooden address to the nation Wednesday night. His miscues panic the stock market, prompting an overnight sell-off on Wall Street Friday 13 March which helps erase most of big gains since Trump took office in 2017, gains, albeit, more the result of Obama policy than anything Trump ever did.

Karma? Or more of a SNAFU? His gaffe comes on top of claiming to close borders which happen to be still open. “As you know, Europe was just designated as the hot spot right now and we closed that border a while ago,” he lies. It’s vastly reassuring, nonetheless, to learn that Covid-19 is a nasty un-American foreign disease.

The Donald oozes reassurance. Part of his charisma. An alleged sexual predator, he is accused of 26 incidents of “unwanted sexual contact” plus 43 instances of inappropriate behaviour detailed in a new book last December.

Trust him? Trump can’t lie straight in bed. He did impose a raft of travel restrictions on 26 European countries, Wednesday night, but they were effective midnight Friday. They are not a total shutting down of the border.

A pal of fellow travellers, Prince Andrew and the late financier and convicted paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, Trump was a passenger on Jeff’s private jet, nicknamed “The Lolita Express” as 1997 logs show. In 2002, Trump called Jeffrey “a terrific guy and a lot of fun to be with.” Doubtless, the feeling was mutual given that Epstein had fourteen numbers for Trump and his staff in his phone book, leaked in 2009. Yet everybody lies but The Donald.

“Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign,” the Republican nominee said at a 2016 rally. “Total fabrication. The events never happened. Never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over.”

Trump falsely blames Obama for testing shortages Trump himself has helped create. Whilst COVID-19 is now thought to have evolved in China in November, Trump’s administration is only putting key elements of US testing strategy in place, Friday, two months after the danger of the outbreak was communicated by China in January.

With a highly contagious virus that is lethal to vulnerable populations, the delay amounts to criminal negligence.

The Guardian Australia reports Dr Anthony Fauci, a top US official dealing with the crisis, calls US testing a failure on Thursday. South Korea tests up to 15,000 people a day. More than 230,000 people have been reached. The US, has managed only 11,000 in total. The USA’s per capita rate is about 130 times lower than in South Korea.

There have been delays and stuff-ups with botched testing kits but the origin of the problem lies in The White House. Trump has seen COVID-19 as a foreign problem. Yet he has it all under control. Or so he believes.

In his address to the nation, Wednesday, Trump calls it the “foreign virus”, a dangerous misnomer. Remarkably, he still rambles on Friday about combating coronavirus through “a very strong border policy”, when COVI-19 has clearly been spreading inside the US, undetected, for weeks. Then, incredibly, he invents a Google solution.

“I want to thank Google. Google is helping to develop a website, it’s going to be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past, to determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location,” he waffles and lies, hyping a pilot screening service, which is actually being built by Alphabet subsidiary Verily, a site limited to health workers in the Bay Area, which is still being developed.

Such disinformation will help kill his presidency, which is now terminal, given last week’s stock market losses.

Our pseudo-populist, Team Australia’s Scott Morrison, Bronte’s bogus bogan with the slogan, a conman with a cap for all seasons, will not escape either. COVID-19 may not strike him down, as it has Peter Dutton, but it is setting acid tests of his leadership, especially in public health policy and economics that he is already, comprehensively, failing.

How good are the Sharkies? Originally from the Emerald City’s rugby-loving eastern suburbs, Morrison professes his passion to watch his beloved Sharkies, a Cronulla NRL team he adopted only in 2009, dismissing any hint that he act like a leader and self-isolate, especially since he’s up close and personal with Peter Dutton in cabinet since Tuesday.

There’s a bit of a fuss on Sunday’s ABC Insiders regarding Morrison’s intention to flout his own Chief Medical Officer’s recommendation. Whatever that is. From Monday, we’re supposed to self-isolate; stay away from gatherings of five hundred or more. Whew! This gives Scotty and other Hillsong well-wishers a free pass to mingle at Hillsong’s Colour Conference Sunday at the Hillsong Convention Centre in Baulkham Hills in Sydney’s north-west, Saturday.

The venue has a capacity of 3,300.

“A journalist needs to come straight out and ask Morrison if his reluctance to stop large gatherings is related to the big Hillsong Church gathering with people from all over the world attending. Why only stop gatherings larger than 500 people, Chief Medical Officer?’ a concerned Australian tweets.

“Massive Hillsong conference over two weeks finishing this weekend in Sydney. Tens of thousands of people from all over the world tightly packed in. Millions of tax-free dollars for our PM’s best friend and mentor. No wonder there is no shut down of mass gatherings yet,” writes another.

Even more baffling is Morrison’s live broadcast to the nation from Kirribilli Thursday. In true Scotty from marketing style, he doesn’t give away much information but there’s a lot of spin about how well his government’s doing at the economy; keeping people safe; all the regular bullshit and buzzwords. As Matilda’s Chris Graham notes, it takes Scotty barely fifty seconds before he’s into party political mode; back in the Trumpian bubble of his eternal campaign.

“I want to assure you and your family tonight, that while Australia cannot and is not immune (sic) from this virus, we are well prepared and we are well equipped to deal with it, and we do have a clear plan to see Australia through.”

Morrison keeps his speech brief, only 605 words, but, as Graham notes, “plan” gets a plug once in every hundred.

There’s a “clear plan” at the beginning, a “plan [with] three goals”, a “national health response plan”, an “economic stimulus plan”, “targeted local recovery plans”, and another “clear plan” at the end.

This is classic Crosby Textor marketing. It is all to do with pitching and spin; the man with the plan thrashes the living daylights out of the word “plan”; banging on and on about his coronavirus stimulus package at his presser earlier.

Seven times in under two minutes, you hear him utter the words “clear plan”. Evading a question from a journo minutes later, he abuses the word plan” another seven times.

Some are troubled by Scotty’s hypocrisy. Oddly, it’s never worried him. After bagging Labor mercilessly, stimulus is not only OK; it’s the new black. The complete U-turn bothers the man who did help get us through the GFC, Wayne Swan.

“For six years,” says Wayne Swan, “there virtually wasn’t a day where they didn’t pour shit all over me, telling lies about the effectiveness of the stimulus.”

The lies have hardened into orthodoxy with the help of the News Corp megaphone. School halls which employed locals and which function today as multi-function community centres remain a brilliant investment in social capital as well as being textbook examples of public money wisely invested. As does the much-maligned home insulation scheme, thank you News Corp.

The opposition’s framing of the issue was reflected in most reporting and commentary, writes Rodney Tiffen. The narrative was one of disaster and incompetence, especially as the controversy gathered intensity. He sums up

As a tool of economic policy, the stimulus worked. Although other factors, including the strong demand from China and the sound position of Australia’s banks, were also important, the stimulus played a central role in making sure that Australia suffered less of a downturn than most other developed countries.

The opposition has criticised the public debt that resulted, but compared with most other developed nations this is fairly small. Moreover, the capacity to repay that debt – and, in the meantime, to service it – has been greatly aided by the success of the stimulus in minimising unemployment and boosting output.

Pensioners the length and breadth of the land enjoy homes made more comfortable. Better insulation has also meant lower heating and cooling bills despite electricity’s continuous rise to record levels due to the rising cost of gas and coal and the abject failure of coalition governments to evolve an energy policy.

The coronavirus crisis is a catastrophe in both public health and in its depression of economic activity. Alternative facts do not help leaders in times of recession, as Trump and Morrison are discovering. Trust and credibility are not rebuilt by talking quickly or by simultaneous mass press drops. A leader who cannot be believed will not be followed – especially in an emergency, Bret Stephens reminds us.

Does Team Australia inspire anything but derision? Did it ever inspire? Morrison will learn to his cost, Team Australia is too closely associated with suppression of dissent; the hoax prime ministership of Tony Abbott, a brief but convincing demonstration of a leadership job that was too big for the man. As for patriotism, it is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

The Canberra Bubble has been used so often by Morrison to rule out questions he wishes to dismiss out of hand. It has come to signal a reluctance to be accountable, responsible or open – transparent in the jargon of the day. First, there are testing kits in abundance; later in the day, the Chief Medical Officer warns they are in short supply.

In these ways, the coronavirus health and economic crisis will be Morrison’s nemesis as it will his mentor Donald Trump. As Bret Stephens concludes

It should not have had to take a deadly virus to expose this presidency (or prime ministership) for what it is. But it’s fitting that it has. A man who thinks he can twist every truth to suit his needs has at last discovered that he cannot twist the truths of nature and of one of nature’s gods. Her name remains Nemesis.

“Australia is the poster-child for irresponsibility on climate change” laments Christiana Figueres, former head of The UN Framework Convention On Climate Change. A key architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement, Dr Figueres is currently in Australia on a speaking tour. She deplores our PM’s latest “technology target” stunt.

Figueres dismisses Scotty from marketing, our coal lobbyists’ puppet PM and his weasel-worded “technology not taxes” evasion of responsibility; a dereliction of his duty to at least reduce emissions to net zero by 2050. But she may as well be talking about our bizarre determination to pursue the fiction of Kyoto carry-over credits.

Or the Coalition’s recent crazy decision to finance a four million dollar feasibility study into a coal-fired power station at Collinsville in North Queensland, a project that is destined to become a white elephant. Demand is flat and there is no shortage of electricity in supply in the area.

Tropical North QLD also has an abundance of renewables, wind, solar and hydro.

Morrison is concocting a fake substitute. Details remain top secret even to his own cabinet but he’s calling it a technology goal, so as not to upset the coal warriors who run his coalition. All will be revealed at the 2020 UN Climate Change Conference, to be held 9-19 November, in Glasgow.

Working on it now, doubtless, is Gus Taylor, the government’s undisputed computational champion following his sensational calculation that Sydney’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore’s annual travel amounted to an astonishing $15 million a year, a figure which was leaked to News Corp’s Daily Telegraph, in an apparently doctored report, by Taylor’s office, an action calculated to damage Moore’s reputation.

Happily, NSW Police were able to hand-ball the investigation of the forgery to the AFP which hadn’t “bothered” to look for the information required. As Clover Moore, herself observes,

“The people might pay the [AFP] salary but they work for the government who appoints them.”

Similarly, Figueres is not fooled by Morrison’s proposal of an alternative, Clayton’s commitment of his own. “I frankly think every industrialised country has to take on an economy-wide target,” she declares.

According to The Australian, (the Liberal Party’s Pravda), Morrison’s conflicted Coalition will oppose any proposal to adopt a long-term emissions goal, such as Labor’s net zero emissions target by 2050, which the Opposition announced this week. Already, crackpot Craig Kelly is calling it “an economic suicide note” on Sky.

It it’s suicide, then also committing economic self-slaughter are Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Bahamas, Barbados, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Cape Verde, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Comoros, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Democratic Republic of Congo, Denmark, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Ethiopia, European Union, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Finland, France, Germany, Grenada, Guyana, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Kiribati, Lao PDR, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Maldives, Mauritius, Mexico, Monaco, Namibia, Nauru Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niue, Pakistan, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Portugal, Republic of Marshall Islands, Samoa, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, South Sudan, Spain, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Sweden, Switzerland, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Vanuatu. Add in all Australian state governments including Liberal.

But don’t expect Morrison’s mob to be shamed into accepting their fair share of decarbonisation. Amy Remeikis notes in Monday’s The Guardian Australia the paucity of the Coalition’s latest threadbare case as it airs the Kiwis’ cow, sheep-fart and Fergie tractor exhaust exemption.

The government’s killer argument against Labor’s zero emissions by 2050 policy, is that the Kiwis have quarantined New Zealand’s agriculture industry from Aotearoa’s target.

“So suddenly, after years and years of rhetoric over how we don’t need to look to other countries for our policies, including NZ, in the wake of its offers to take additional refugees from Nauru, New Zealand is the gold standard of policy.”

But no-one expects, logic, consistency or sanity from Morrison. Most of the time now we are surprised, if not somewhat dismayed, that he remembers to show up for work.

Trying hard to be wily, Scotty recycles tactics Howard used to dodge emissions targets in the Kyoto Protocol negotiated in the 1990s. “Investment targets or goals” for technologies will help the Coalition continue to abdicate all responsibility for being the planet’s highest per-capita greenhouse gas polluter, amongst advanced countries.

The dirty trick of focussing on investment is a legacy of climate contrarians such as Bjorn Lomborg, the world’s most active luke-warmer. Lomborg doesn’t deny the physics of the greenhouse effect, but instead cherry-picks information to deny that the risks of climate change are large enough to justify strong and urgent action.

Morrison’s technology hoax contains the specious case that governments should develop new technologies to drive down costs, before actually deploying the new technology. It is simply another criminally irresponsible, flawed, stalling tactic. Labor’s climate change spokesperson, Mark Butler calls out Scotty’s latest, futile, subterfuge.

Morrison’s ” … latest thought bubble of a “technology target” is just a throwback to the Howard era when he and George W Bush rejected emissions reduction targets in the Kyoto Protocol in favour of a so-called “technology approach” which boosted nuclear power and so-called ‘clean coal,’” Butler says.

Serial ministerial failure, Greg Hunt, Abbott’s environment minister patsy, who gave the nation “soil magic” or direct action is a huge Lomborg fan. Greg tried to stump up $4 million in taxpayer funds to pay for Lomborg’s appointment to an Australian university. Hunt’s opposition to the carbon tax cited Lomborg’s nonsense.

Scotty’s mob denies that we live in a climate emergency. Refuses to even say “climate change“, let alone admit that it is a result of anthropogenic global heating or link this to our recent catastrophic megafires. And worse. Kelly’s all for distributing climate change lies in schools so that children can make up their mind based on falsehoods.

Kelly’s a fan of Advance Australia – which bills itself as a right-wing version of progressive lobby group GetUp. Advance Australia plans to develop materials on climate change targeted at children. Their fossil-fuel propaganda would include a “Smart Scientist’s Kit”, a misinformative e-book of “10 climate facts to expose the climate change hoax”, as well as an “educational video and speaking tour” by a “renowned climate scientist”. Nine Newspapers reports.

Liz Storer, the former, silver-tongued, Liberal adviser behind the development of the kiddies’ kit of lies is a model of halcyon objectivity and tolerance as is evident in her views on the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. (CEFC)

“We (recently) saw our PM give $1 billion more, taxpayer dollars, to the CEFC. For what? These guys started back in 2012 as a Labor-created, snot wad of a useless body,” she sneers. Useless snot-wad? Perhaps she should talk to CEO Ian Learmonth who notes in CEFC’s latest Annual Report,

We are proud to report that, since inception, CEFC investments have helped drive more than $24 billion in additional private sector (clean energy) investment commitments Australia-wide. Yet her PM is no better.

Scotty resurrects all his favourite flawed arguments as he Gish-Gallops away reducing greenhouse emissions.

“Currently no one can tell me that going down that path won’t cost jobs, won’t put up your electricity prices, and won’t impact negatively on jobs in the economies of rural and regional Australia. And my Government is absolutely committed to the jobs of rural and regional Australians,” he spins his hurdy-gurdy of vacuous, dishonest garrulity.

Scotty is totally surprised to get a bit of a hand from bush-lawyer Barnaby Joyce who can’t resist his own garbled Gish-Gallop, either, as he vents in a parliament’s hallway, shouting over the top of Joel Fitzgibbons’ Monday morning conference. Joyce is right on cue. It’s almost as if his outburst is scripted by the PM’s office.

“What a load of rubbish. What a load of pig manure. He’s going to reach out to you. He’s going to reach out to the coal mines. Don’t worry, fellas, we’re reaching out to you. We’re reaching out and saying you’re going to lose your job. Reaching out, that’s how you’re going to do it. You’re going to make the equation work by putting trees back on people’s properties whether they like it or not. We’re going to let the shrubs grow back on the country.”

You can’t beat parliament’s hallways for a bit of sober, civilised, rational discourse. Putting trees back? Oh, the horror of wanton reforestation.

No-one asks Morrison of the negative impact of doing nothing – especially when that means continuing the $42 billion a year subsidy which fossil fuel industries enjoy in the absence of carbon pricing. That would be cabinet in confidence and/or commercial in confidence and above all a matter of national security.

No-one can tell Scotty anything – unless, it’s former coal lobbyist John Kunkel or one of other nine former mining industry suits whom he’s recruited on staff. Or the claque of former News Corp hacks, who join them.

Australia would prosper – if only it had a government responsible enough to take real action on climate change, according to a range of experts. These include CSIRO calculations that we would spend 58-64% less on electricity under a shift to 100 per cent renewables.

Above all, it exposes the Coalition’s reversion to the hype of $100 lamb roasts, as cynical, disinformation. In fact, renewables bring huge economic benefits.

The CSIRO’s Australian National Outlook report finds bold action on the uptake of renewables could lead to GDP growth of 2.76% to 2.8% annually, a 90% increase in real wages and net zero emissions by 2050.

Monday, Pravda is full of Morrison’s drop that Cabinet ministers, the National Farmers’ Federation and freight lobbyists are all calling for Anthony Albanese to cost his economy-wide target of net-zero emissions by 2050, despite all states in nation having already made their own independent commitment. It’s the same wedge tactics we heard from Tony Carbon-tax Abbott with his $100 lamb roast and Whyalla off the map hype.

Oddly, The Oz fails to include the relative cost of inaction — which the Climate Council estimates at over $2 trillion by 2050 for Australia’s agriculture, property and productivity sectors.

But ScoMo knows that when you’re a government in an abusive relationship with the electorate, you gaslight the nation, you insist repeatedly that renewables are so costly they will wreck the economy. Or you make cryptic references to developing technologies – only to be blown out of the rapidly heating water in one of the best good news stories of the week.

“The technologies are here,” software billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes says as he announces a $12 million plan to fund solar and battery off-grid system to provide clean and reliable power to communities hit by bushfires and other disasters.

In delivering the first two of what could be one hundred off-grid solar and storage systems – using rapid solar deployed by Australia’s 5B, and Tesla batteries , Cannon Brookes is struck by how surprised people are that such technology is available now. They tell him they thought such technologies were a decade away.

Such misconception is rife in the general community as it is amongst our ruling class. Yet disinformation about energy and denigration of renewables is the mainstay of much of mainstream media – the Murdoch papers, Sky News and toxic talk-back radio’s investment in recycling ignorance, prejudice and superstition. Even our ABC is not immune. Who can forget or forgive Chris Uhlmann’s mis-reporting that the SA grid had collapsed not because of freak weather but because of over-reliance on renewables.

This Sunday, David Speers on ABC Insiders, whose objectivity is imperilled by its increasingly framing discussion by reiterating federal government policy, twits Albo eight times about a carbon price in the desperate search for a gotcha headline that is neither in the nation’s interest nor in the interest of informative, objective journalism.

At the arse-end of last week’s government by announceables and cheering ourselves on until we are hoarse over such big wins as an Aussie Coronavirus cure; a billion dollar spend for Tindal air base, near Katharine, to upgrade it to re-fuel US long-range bombers, a bit of maintenance on the US Alliance we must pay for ourselves, dynamic duo, Dan Tehan and Greg Hunt shuffle on stage right, Saturday to pin the tail on the donkey of the body politic, a Liberal party game of upbeat stuff and nonsense where self-congratulatory bullshit masquerades as fact.

This week’s show’s subtext is abuzz with feel-good fantasies. Good old Aussie know-how and “working around the clock” will produce an anti-Covid-19 Coronavirus vaccine any day soon, whereas, other scientists in other countries are also researching and any vaccine is years away from licence and use in the community.

Professor Warwick McKibbin, director of the Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis at the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy, argues that government money would be best spent on advertising public hygiene, given that simple hand-washing is the single, best preventative against the virus.

The Covid-19 Coronavirus has been contained in Australia, claims Hunt, a fair stretch, given that the Morrison government is again putting the interests of trade and investment ahead of any woke city latte-sippers’ concern for public health.

Worse. The much-vaunted China travel ban was relaxed last week when a series of its cargo ships were allowed to dock regardless of the compulsory 14 day exclusion period. Shocking as this may be it’s hardly a surprise.

If the travel rorts have taught us anything, it is that Morrison’s government is flexible in applying regulations. Yet Health Minister Hunt’s quite happy to take a punt on helping turn Covid-19 into a global pandemic, if there’s a quid in it. It’s our government keeping us safe. Tarric Brooker in Independent Australia, notes,

By choosing to partially lift the China travel ban, the Morrison Government has chosen to bet the wellbeing of the Australian public on coronavirus statistics coming from the Chinese Government. The same government that lied about the impact of SARS and, even as late as January, was persecuting whistle-blowers who were trying to warn the world about coronavirus.

Yet Morrison’s government – can now add a brand new slogan. We’re the only party that didn’t stop the boats. New Zealand, on the other hand, has extended its ban on arrivals from mainland China into a fourth week, Kiwi PM Jacinda Ardern announces Monday 24 February. The ban would be reviewed after that, she says.

Of course, it’s difficult to get a fix on the facts amidst background noise from other competing narratives; the cheering on of UQ researchers who are “just days away” from testing a COVID-19 vaccine on animals while dapper Dan’s on hand to spruik up getting “normality” back into the international student market.

Nothing is remotely normal about the international student market which Liberal con-artists such as Immigration Minister David Coleman claim is worth a whopping $35 billion in export revenue. Luckily, Dave was addressing Gerald Henderson’s Sydney Institute last August and no-one was paying much attention.

Coleman is wrong. It’s not export revenue, as Leith Van Onselen points out. International students studying in Australia are legally allowed to work 20 hours per week. Many also work illegally. Because the income earned is used to pay for either tuition fees or living expenses, it is not a true export but merely economic activity.

International students working and supporting themselves are no more an export than domestic students living away from home. It pays to take boasts about total numbers of international education exports with a grain of salt, however much Dan Tehan loves to blow his own trumpet. We just don’t know the facts.

Tehan dynasty scion, Dan, an Education Minister, who knows the price of everything we can charge a fee for and the value of nothing that accrues from study let alone learning, struggles a bit to get his message out.

The guts of it is that he’s going to take China’s reassurances at face value because we’ve got to get those Year 11 and Year 12 fee-paying students back into the country or all hope of any sacred surplus materialising is buggered.

In fact, given “political tensions” and diplomatic ineptitude, the result of our government’s US sycophancy, numbers of students from China are declining while those from India and Nepal are on the rise.

Leith Van Onselen worries given the ABC’s Four Corners expose of plagiarism, academic misconduct, and students from India failing their courses, that standards may be lowered in order that the government can pump up numbers.

Or, in other words, that we continue to prostitute our tertiary institutions to boost our “export” earnings, however, dodgy or “Gussied” up they may prove. Yet there’s no way to “Gussie up” or put lipstick on the pig of Morrison government’s energy debacle.

Our corrupt, coal-fired climate science denying Coalition is crippling investment in renewable energy, according to COAG’s Energy Security Board (ESB) which released its annual Health of the National Electricity Market report on Friday. It confirms recent reports that investment in renewable energy in Australia has slumped 40% in 2019.

Yet as Giles Parkinson writes in Renew Economy The only thing that is getting in the way of a zero emissions target is a government refusing to acknowledge it is possible. And that’s because it doesn’t set a plan that federal regulators and rule-makes can follow, and which can provide a signal to business and investors.

The ESB pulls no punches. It’s time we called sabotage for what it is. The Morrison government is sabotaging the uptake of renewables in order to build a case for the fossil fuel industries which are among its principal backers and donors.

In its report, the Energy Security Board observes

The lack of a strategic direction has led to stakeholders deferring investment in the maintenance and construction of new generation, especially in flexible dispatchable generation. This has increased reliability risks, undermined affordability and slowed progress on emissions reduction. It has also raised barriers to entry and constrained competition in the market. With political uncertainty investment planning becomes very difficult and this has impacts well beyond the electricity industry.

The undermining of affordability of renewables is exactly what those who drive the coal-powered Morrison puppet government desire. It is part of their game plan. With every delay and cynical evasion, the Morrison government reveals itself to be hopelessly, irretrievably corrupted; captives of a fossil fuel industry which is interested only in the profit that comes from expansion even if this means destroying the planet.

At a time when all around it, is the evidence of irreversible global heating, drought, catastrophic megafire, rather than take action to pledge to limit greenhouse gas emissions the Morrison government prefers to play politics; weaponise climate change; rather than act in the best interests of the people it is elected to represent.

Labor’s pledge of net zero emissions by 2050 is neither controversial nor radical. Experts argue we should do much more. This week, it is abundantly clear, however, that the Morrison government, hopelessly in thrall to the coal and gas barons would rather wedge Labor than pursue an emissions policy which could help save the planet.

Its hoax of a technology target or goal is a ploy to get away with doing nothing when every indication from every expert is that we should do all we can and more.

Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor reduces our responsibility as global citizens to a despicable semantic quibble today. Australia has committed to a net zero emissions target by 2050 under the 2015 Paris Agreement?

“That’s incorrect,” said Taylor. “We signed up to the Paris Agreement, which involves the world achieving net zero in the second half of the next century.” We are not part of that world? Only a fool could be happy living in such a fool’s paradise.

“They are trashing our democracy in the way they are dealing with this disgusting political cover-up,” Penny Wong [says] on Wednesday. “… This is all about protection of the prime minister, who is up to his neck in the sports rorts scandal. Well, I’ve got some news for the government: it’s too late. It’s too late for a cover-up when you’ve already been caught.”

Is it consternation or apoplectic rage? The shocked disbelief on Senator Erich Abetz’s typically saturnine features, Thursday, at a senate select committee on Administration of Sports Grants, or sports rorts sums up a disastrous fortnight for the Morrison-Gaetjens duumvirate that rules Australia when it’s not blaming the states, the COVID-19 Coronavirus, The Greens “creeping environmentalism” or Labor for its own failures.

“I seek to clarify, you did find that no ineligible project or application was funded?” leads the Tassie Liberal Party Czar who proceeds, in faux legalese, to verbal Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) boss, Brian Boyd, Friday 14 February, a joust sure to enter the lists of epic political failure as Eric’s Valentine’s Day self-massacre.

Seek to clarify? It’s a clumsily disingenuous attempt which even Samantha Maiden sees as Abetz’ bid to lob a Dorothy Dixer which will let him repeat the lie that all projects were eligible. It’s the PM’s favourite talking point. Albo reckons Scotty’s misled parliament by repeating this disinformation sixteen times in the house.

Government by spin spawns MPs who believe their own propaganda. Originally billed in a blizzard of press snow drops as “a reset” and a chance for our jelly-back PM to re-assert himself, the parliamentary fortnight ends in a debacle. Abetz is gob-smacked when he collides with reality at the sports rorts senate inquiry.

David Speers exposes ScoMo’s sophistry in ABC Insiders. The AG says, “no applications assessed as ineligible” received money. Morrison spins this into, “every single one of the projects that was approved was eligible”.

Morrison conveniently conflates application with project. It’s lie which Abetz discovers to his chagrin.

“No, Senator, that’s not what we found,” Boyd replies. “… around 43% of those which were awarded funding, by the time the funding agreement was signed were ineligible.”

Abetz, clearly, hasn’t bothered to read the report, a practice not uncommon amongst Coalition Senators. In 2015 Chair into the Forgotten Children report, Ian MacDonald, declared he hadn’t read Gillian Triggs report. Nor did he know what the Human Rights Commission was. April 2016, Triggs observed in The Saturday Paper that politicians were “usually seriously ill-informed” and had “lost any sense of the rule of law”.

For Samantha Maiden it’s a spectacular political own goal, “inadvertently demolishing the PM’s central sports rorts defence and revealing a stunning 43 per cent of projects that secured funding were ineligible.” Abetz’ stunt is nearly as inept as Mick-Mack’s dying duck in a thunderstorm performance on ABC Insiders Sunday.

Many projects were ticked off by Sport Australia as meeting the criteria, but 270 clubs over-eager to receive funds disqualified themselves by starting building works before the final paperwork was completed. Grants were restricted solely to clubs who were yet to begin works. A few others disqualified themselves by completing work before receiving funds or amending their applications or missing the application deadline.

In brief, Sport Australia got hundreds of applications from clubs. Some were eligible. Others were not.

In addition to the $100m scandal which has cost (then) Sports Minister Bridget McKenzie her place in the ministry, details of a $150m rort obtained, by Labor, through FOI, emerge this week.

Poorly entitled, the “female facilities and water safety stream program”, when it clearly was aimed at women, it was announced by the Coalition less than two months before the election. Funded in the 2019 budget for providing women’s change rooms and swimming pool upgrades, it was supposed to go to regional and remote communities.

In reality, only $10 million went to rural projects in four electorates held by National Party MPs. The bulk of the money – nearly $110 of the total four year fund was spent on projects in urban Liberal-held electorates

Pearce and Corangamite, two key marginal seats were given almost 40% of the total funding pool.

Women’s change rooms pose a particular problem. Scott Morrison and deputy Mick-Mack seem obsessed with evoking images of women changing behind trees and in cars. Why this fixation? No-one in his staff of fifty-odd boffins can stop the PM and his deputy? The scenario is insensitive, if not totally inappropriate.

And dishonest. Grants were rushed along or even stream-lined to protect women’s modesty, or so they seem to leer;

“because we didn’t want to see girls changing in cars or out the back of the sheds rather than having their own changing facilities”. The verb “see” puts the male gaze where it should not be. Try “make” or “have”.

The alacrity with which the claim is made suggests it may have been part of a focus group but when repeated, ad nauseam, the image evoked betrays a pre-occupation; almost a type of voyeurism on behalf of the PM and his Deputy – an attitude to women which not just women find repugnant. The claim is also based on a lie.

Sports rorts were not a flood of money to respect women’s needs to have their own change rooms. The PM dwells endlessly on women’s change rooms, in the hope that this issue will distract us from his vote-buying.

In fact, as Christopher Knaus and Sarah Martin report for The Guardian the Coalition rejected Sport Australia recommendations. At least twelve proposed grants for women’s change rooms at local sport grounds were overturned by the minister, including one where women and girls are currently changing in tents.

Making stuff up, includes inventing new reasons to avoid any kind of scrutiny. Or gaslighting the nation that its approval of 290 ineligible sports grants, through Bridget McKenzie’s office is all OK. Phil Gaetjens says so.

Morrison’s former Minister for sport is not allowed to be a good sport. Rather than accept the National Audit Office umpire’s decision, her PM has a vested interest in arguing the toss. Now clear links emerge between McKenzie’s office and his office, Canute-like, he foolishly tries to countermand the ANAO.

Morrison’s own dodgy inquiry adds injury to injustice as he hand-balls to his pal, Phil Gaetjens, the task of being his alternative fact-finder in a secret inquiry. New sophistry, casuistry and specious argument don’t help.

Morrison and Gaetjens demean the PM’s office and the nation. Worst is “fixer” Phil Gaetjens’ straw man that McKenzie is exonerated by ignorance. She didn’t even see the colour-coded spreadsheet designed to guide her department fund projects, not on merit, but in areas where they might buy Coalition MPs a few more votes.

“Her Chief of Staff also told the Department of the Prime Minster and Cabinet that the Adviser had categorically stated she had not shown the spreadsheet to the Minister.”

Gaetjens’ claim is absurd. The former Morrison and former Costello chief of staff hopes to hoodwink us into thinking that the sports minister handles every piece of correspondence personally or that her former ministerial responsibility somehow excluded colour-coded spreadsheets which her staffers may have used.

Ministers “have large staffs of advisers, liaison officers and media people to handle their paperwork … the whole point is that, if you’re going to rort something, you make sure the minister doesn’t have direct oversight of it. Staff (who, conveniently, can’t be called before Senate committees) do it.” Writes Bernard Keane.

New lies abound. These include the lie that an inquiry into ministerial misconduct (a code of conduct said to embrace integrity, fairness and accountability) is automatically elevated into the status of a cabinet document and is thus protected by the pixie-dust of cabinet confidentiality – unless, as in Abbott’s case you leak the lot to damage then opposition leader Kevin Rudd over the pink batts affair, where four young installers lost their lives in a highly successful 1.1 million home insulation initiative which the Murdoch press mercilessly pilloried.

Morrison’s cover-up is a bit of shadow puppet theatre in which McKenzie gets sent back to the back bench for her gun club misdemeanour as part of his regime’s constant stream of disinformation, lies and secrecy.

Minister for Sports Rorts, Bridget McKenzie is found guilty of a breach of ministerial standards, but Morrison, unlike Trump, cannot prevent public servants from testifying at the senate inquiry. In his best SNAFU tradition, his Gaetjens’ fix serves only to highlight tell-tale signs that the $100m pork-barrel was run out of his office.

Clearly, Morrison should stand aside himself. But then, so, too should gorgeous Gussie Taylor Minister for Energy and Emissions reduction who has never satisfactorily explained his role in the uttering of forged documents, published in The Daily Telegraph to discredit Sydney’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore after Moore declared a climate emergency in 2019. An AFP investigation would up on 6 February

“The AFP assessment of this matter identified there is no evidence to indicate the minister for energy and emissions reduction was involved in falsifying information,” an AFP spokesman says.

“The low level of harm and the apology made by the [minister] to the Lord Mayor of Sydney, along with the significant level of resources required to investigate were also factored into the decision not to pursue this matter.”

Taylor has also failed to offer convincing explanations of his role in water buybacks to the total of eighty million dollars, which has yet to materialise. Then there’s his intervention in the clearing of protected native grasses on behalf of a constituent or so he claims but one which benefited a company in which his family holds a financial interest.

But with a quick application of lipstick, the Coalition government pig is transformed by a fabulous free trade deal with Indonesia. A Gamelan orchestra of Aussie spin-doctors begins gonging on endlessly. We hear them spin the usual inanities; how near, how big, how good is our is our trading neighbour? In the meantime, the highly protectionist Indonesians view Australia through narrowed eyes.

Gamelan derives from the Indonesian word to hammer, a perfect verb for the Coalition’s frantic attempts to ear-bash us into submission with talking-points, inane slogans and saturation media drops. Yet MPs insist their self-interested, self-deceiving indoctrination and propaganda campaign is a “national conversation”.

And how good is Jokowi, a human rights abuser who gets to travel to Canberra like some travelling saint of free trade? How good is an Indonesian free trade deal years in the making which is now re-announced? You’d swear the government were looking for a diversion. Megawati’s puppet, Joko Widodo fits the bill.

In 2015, on the day of his inauguration, Jokowi, as he is known, sat in the front row, party chairperson, Megawati Soekarnoputri, harangued him from the lectern. He owed the presidency to her, she said. He was to do as he’s told. Perhaps there’s a message in Jokowi’s visit for our National Party leader.

The free trade deal which is neither free nor about trade, has that nifty investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) clause to it which will help transnational companies sue our government should our laws imperil any of their profiteering. Sheer democratic genius.

The deal will also promote a flood of compliant temporary visa workers in 400 occupations who will be able to call Australia home, a move sure to cheer “chefs, nurses, plumbers, carpenters, bricklayers, tilers and many more workers who are already struggling to find enough work,” ACTU President Sharan O’Neil observes.

It’ll help put downward pressure on wages to use a favourite government slogan which is just what the economy and working families don’t need but employers and other wage thieves will be tickled pink.

Amnesty International Australia and Indonesian human rights lawyer Veronica Koman urges the Australian government to raise the human rights situation in West Papua during bilateral talks this week.

Koman’s has many concerns about the Indonesian government’s human rights abuses:

A joint military and police operation in Nduga regency of Papua province has taken place since early December 2018. As a result, according to a regency official, as many as 45,000 people, half of the regency’s population, are displaced in neighbouring areas.

The Humanitarian Volunteer Team, a local grassroots community, has been collecting data on the operation’s casualties and reported that as of 2 February 2020, 243 civilians have died due to violence by the security forces and hunger and illness from the displacement.

Fifty-six indigenous West Papuans and one Jakarta-based Indonesian were arrested merely for expressing their opinion during mass protests against racism and for the independence referendum in August and September 2019 and during commemoration of West Papua’s national day on 1 December 2019, Konan notes.

They are currently awaiting trial and face life imprisonment. Yet on 10 February the Indonesian leader gives a speech in our House of Representatives in which he urges

“We must continue to advocate the values of democracy, human rights, stop intolerance, stop xenophobia, stop radicalism and stop terrorism.” In a sign of the Morrisonian times, journalists could not ask questions.

Nor does anyone in Canberra talk about Pork’n ‘Ride. Car parks in the air. Michael West’s Jommy Tee, writes of a $500m Commuter Car Park Fund (CCPF) set up ostensibly to provide car parking at rail stations which turns out to be a brazen vote-buying gambit. Thirteen lucky winners are announced in the pre-election pork-fest. It’s big; $149 million worth of projects. All are Liberal-held seats with six in marginal NSW and QLD electorates.

Yet state governments and councils cannot say where exactly any of these mysterious new spaces will be.

A miracle of modern micro-targeting is at work. As Jommy Tee explains, micro-targeting is as simple as it is cynical. Ask a member or candidate to spot a public need. Develop a petition around that issue. Use the data collected (names and addresses of constituents). Mine that data accordingly, fund the project, and then promote the outcome to the petitioners. Generate publicity. NB: Labor seats along the tracks get nothing.

But Banks gets $15m, Dickson $11m , Petrie $4m, Robertson $35m. Everyone is told the value of the pork on their fork. But the parks just don’t seem to exist. Funds just go to swell local party campaign coffers.

The Age calls out Pork ‘N ‘Rides in Victoria. It’s got the ring of a Ponzi scheme to it – except that taxpayers pay.

“So sparse were details of exactly how these six parking lots would grow, neither the state government nor in large part local councils could say where the expansion would occur”.

Nor do experts ever suggest that busting urban congestion is ever achieved with car parking or road space alone. It’s about the quality of the public transport service; its quality and interconnectivity.

The rorty story is a gift that keeps on giving. Thursday, the ANAO makes it clear at the senate committee on the Administration of Sports Grants that the PM’s Office worked closely with the sports minister’s office over six months, between October 2018 and April 2019. Yet it’s Bridget McKenzie who is made the scapegoat.

Porkie pies fly in all directions once the pork-barrel is busted. Like his mentor Trump, Morrison just makes stuff up to cover his hide. Here are two of examples of his insidious disinformation.

“all we did was provide information based on the representations made to us, as every prime minister has always done”. It’s a lie. 290 projects, 43 per cent of all approved, were ineligible under program guidelines.

“the auditor-general found that there were no ineligible projects that were funded”.

Another lie which just re-hashes his notorious – “every project which was funded was eligible.”

Aloha Scotty, our fair weather PM, and his beleaguered crew’s legitimacy and credibility cop a hiding as reports of rorting and pork-barrelling confirm vote-buying is the Coalition’s sole campaign strategy.

Adding instability, is the Nationals’ failed DIY arsehole transplant, to apply former Minister for Digital Transformation, Michael Keenan’s parting shot at his “absolute arsehole” leader, Scott Morrison.

In other words, Barnaby Joyce’s abortive coup deals Mick-Mack’s leadership a mortal blow while three resignations and a spill put the skids under the Nats while Scotty’s numbers are looking crook. And it’s only February, two weeks into the parliamentary year, as brief as that may be under a Morrison government.

“In three times in less than two years I’ve been endorsed” says McCormack, who gets votes because he’s not Barnaby. Yet Mick-Mack claims that Joyce and Canavan have said they will support him.

Do you believe them? “Speersy” asks. “I always believe country people when they look me in the eye and say something and you’ve got to take people on their word.”

“The fact is, I’m the leader and I’m going to lead the Nationals to the next election,” Mick-Mack says scotching all hope of his announcing his retirement in order to devote himself to his Elvis impersonations.

“I haven’t thought it, I haven’t said it, [stepping down] and I’m not quite sure why it was written in that way, he deftly ticks off the media whom everyone knows should only write what is first authorised by politicians.

It’s a direction of state known all too well to our ABC which learns from Justice Wendy Abraham of the Federal Court, Monday, that its legal challenge is dismissed. The ABC must now pay costs. An appeal is being considered. ABC careerist who worked his way up to news director, Gaven Morris ruminates

The decision is “really disappointing” and a blow to press freedom and the public’s right to know.

ABC Managing Director David Anderson goes to the heart of the matter in this part of his statement.

“When the AFP executed its search warrant here at the ABC last June 5th, its raid was seen – internationally – for exactly what it was: an attempt to intimidate journalists for doing their jobs.

Not just the journalists named on the search warrant, but all journalists.”

Back in Mick-Mack land, our deputy PM is on thin ice. For Wagga’s Elvis, “There’s a whole lotta shakin goin on.” Like Turnbull, he believes he can count on ScoMo.

“I have the prime minister’s full support.” But so did Bridget McCormack – and look at her now. Besides, the country can’t even count on the PM’s full attention when it’s on fire. Good luck with that, Mick-Mack.

Clive Palmer could make the same claim here now it’s clear from even the limited reporting by The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) on 3 February.

Despite publishing too little, too late, of political campaign donations, it’s clear from the AEC just how much Morrison owes him. Via his flagship company Mineralogy, Palmer spent at least $83,681,442, much of which went to fund targeted social media publication of anti-Labor lies.

His propaganda was alarmist and untrue: Bill Shorten’s economic policy would make “four million older Australians homeless and destitute”.

Palmer helped defeat Labor through harvesting preferences for the Coalition. He says he decided to polarise the electorate to ensure a Coalition win. Palmer says his shift to attacking Shorten and Labor immediately “improved the government’s position” and that they won a majority on the back of his preferences.

“Ninety per cent of those preferences flowed to the Liberal party and they’ve won by about 2% so our vote has got them across the line.”

The authoritative Australian Election Study (AES) reports,

“Measured by first preference votes, there was a swing against both the Liberal-National Coalition (-0.6%) and Labor (-1.4%) in the election. The Coalition managed to secure a greater number of seats than in 2016, despite the lower primary vote. The Coalition won the election through preferences flowing from the minor parties;” specifically, UAP and One Nation, which won 6.5 per cent of the primary vote between them.

Is it a flying pig? A pork barrel bigger than our parliament itself? Or pig ignorance? Protecting government from being accountable, this week, is Pauline’s party of two performing its traditional back-flip with pike.

“What I’m concerned about is setting a precedent here in this chamber where a senator can be thrown out of the chamber by the majority,” blathers Hanson. What the senate motion seeks to do is beyond her ken. It’s an attempt to get the Coalition to release Phil Gaetjens’ report – if any such report exists.

“Senator Cormann is an elected member of this chamber,” La Hanson declares, in a desperate lunge at high-sounding principle; only to lapse into pious piffle. “He has a right to his place in this chamber. It is not up to us to take away that right that was given to him by the Australian people when they voted for him.”

No-one is taking away Cormann’s rights. One Nation’s two votes torpedo the Senate motion. A corrupt government escapes accountability for its brazen bribing of electors in marginal electorates or sports rorts.

Worse it gaslights the nation. We are to believe that the Auditor-General’s ten month report is inferior to something quickly whipped up by the PM’s former chief of staff, Phil Gaetjens; a secret report which somehow exonerates dishonesty and duplicity. And which earns Gaetjens a promotion. The Liberal Party apparatchik is Morrison’s captain’s pick to be the most politicised, least qualified Secretary of the Treasury in history.

At the end of his first two weeks, Scotty may shout a lot about how his government is honouring the promises it took to the people. But surely that’s irrelevant when you buy the election. Surely also, given its record of deception and ineptitude, any credibility the nation may have extended toward this government is now completely shot to pieces.

Above all, at every opportunity on parliament’s return, this Coalition of secrets and lies which rorted and bought its “miracle election” shuns all accountability.

Now as it suppresses and intimidates the press, Christian Porter announces legislation to further silence dissent. At each turn, this government is trashing our democracy.

“We have just seen the stability of the Coalition on full view, for all to see – government members running against each other for a position of deputy speaker … and for the prime minister to stand up and to pretend somehow this is a win.”

A Prime Minister rises to his feet to claim his humiliation, if not his rout, is a victory for parliament and for the voter? The death of shame infects our politics. Hypocrisy is no longer a thing. Shame is now just something only the other side should feel, while telling the truth when it doesn’t suit you is seen as a type of madness.

It wasn’t always thus. During the reign of Elizabeth I, the Earl of Oxford farted while bowing low before the Queen, records John Aubrey. So utterly mortified was Oxford, that he fled the country for seven years.

On his return, Elizabeth welcomed him but could not resist the quip “My lord, I had forgot the fart!”

Labor’s Anthony Albanese, may be a raving woke, latte-sipping, inner-city greenie to the Coalition’s pixilated right wing. This includes some Nationals who rebel, this week, against lame-duck leader, Michael McCormack. It adds a riot of colour and movement to the orchestrated litany of lies and chaos that is the Morrison government.

Yet, unlike the government, not only does Albo have a sense of humour, he can summon a dry wit,

“I congratulate the prime minister on his capacity to make anything into a marketing proposal.”

Barnaby Joyce, having botched his leadership spill, has stirred up enough trouble to get a few of his backers to attack his nemesis, the hapless Michael McCormack. Mick-Mack and his puppet-master Morrison are blindsided by an unprecedented public display of wilful insubordination by some Nats and cross-bench MPs who help Labor to elect Llew O’Brien over ScoMo’s tame deputy of choice, Damian Drum.

It’s a useful, if unwelcome diversion, to Morrison’s plight. The PM performs some shabby sleight of hand where he hopes to trick the nation into accepting that Phil Gaetjens’ quickie report on Bridget McKenzie’s Sports Rorts trumps the lengthy, forensic, investigation carried out according to due process by Auditor-General, Grant Hehir.

Or the AFP gives up on Gus Taylor, or someone from his department, uttering a forged document designed solely to discredit Sydney Lord Mayor, Clover Moore by leaking it to The Daily Telegraph. It couldn’t have been Taylor’s staffer, Josh Manuatu, formerly of Eric Abetz’ staff, who is now promoted Director Canberra’s Liberals.

Only a “low level of harm” AFP decides, deploying its Star Chamber function. Anyway, the minister apologised. Take too many resources. Case closed. Unlike the journalist Annika Smethurst, whose investigation is, ominously, still ongoing.

The duelling reports as News.Com.au misrepresents them (implying they are equal) evoke Trump’s Counsellor to the President, Kellyanne Conway 2017 defence of Sean Spicer’s absurdly inflated estimate of attendance at the President’s inauguration.

“I have alternative facts.”

Let the AG find that McKenzie flouted guidelines and broke the law with her abuse of her authority as sports minister in allocating funding solely according to colour-coded criteria for political advantage, the PM can whistle up an alternative secret report and find McKenzie guilty only of a minor breach of ministerial standards.

Similarly, Attorney-General The Christian Porter argues that the AG is wrong but refuses to publish his own argument. Now, McKenzie stands aside, clearly convinced all she has done wrong is give funds to a gun club of which she was a member. Her penance will be brief. Soon, she’ll be back in cabinet. But what of Mick-Mack?

Will our deputy PM survive? Barnaby is emboldened by O’Brien’s contempt for Mick-Mack’s authority. It’s all going to plan for BJ’s next assault on the top job.

Mick-Mack leads a double life as a casual Elvis Presley impersonator. Will Elvis now be forced to leave the building? Or will he just have to quit his day job impersonating a party political leader? McCormack may squawk a lot at the despatch box. Puff his feathers. Flap his wings. But he’s kidding no-one. Least of all himself.

A former editor of Wagga’s Daily Advertiser, who was sacked in 2002, prompting him to set up the now defunct online MSS Media, Mick-Mack will never truly be Boss Cocky of the regional rednecks, pork-barrel populists and climate-denying, mining lobby shills and agribusiness spivs who masquerade as a National Party.

Yet unlike Barnaby Joyce, McCormack poses no threat whatsoever to Scott Morrison, apart from when the Nationals’, neoliberal puppet leader falls off his perch as he did when Joel Fitzgibbon said that the Nationals should stop banging on about how tough it is for farmers. And “do something about it.” For years, the Nats have been lickspittles to Agribusiness and have eagerly helped Liberals get stuck into welfare and unions. Opposing raising minimum wage, penalty rates or increasing NewStart.

Is it the tail that wags the Coalition dog once again? The noisy Nationals’ are the coalition’s uppity rump, zealously promoting the myth, even at its inception in 1920, that we are an agricultural nation awash with pioneer spirit, despite the fact that most of us live in suburbia and work in health and social services.

The Nationals’ tail also wags the electoral dog; the party gets seven times the number of seats for fewer than half the number of votes won by The Greens, thanks to our atavistic, gerrymandered, electoral system, based on location; a scheme that assumes where you come from is more important than who represents you.

But help is always at hand whenever the poor, innocent, vulnerable handmaids and manservants of capital are attacked. Fran Kelly, a stalwart ABC RN Coalition advocate, naturally blames Albo, Tuesday, for the chaos in Coalition ranks. How very dare he vote for O’Brien, knowing the trouble it would cause? Isn’t that politics? What is she implying? Why can’t he be more like Tony Abbott, that icon of positivity, in opposition?

On cue, MSM are a forum for those who blame the climate megafires on The Greens’ “creeping environmentalism” as Matt Canavan calls it, in a flurry of news conferences Tuesday morning. His scapegoating is boosted by the PM’s bogus call for more fuel reduction firms – a cynical deflection which Victorian Fire Chief, Steve Warrington dismisses as “an emotional (and combustible) load of rubbish.”

Fran’s antsy about Labor’s backing Nat rat Llew (Who?) O’Brien who wins deputy-speaker over Coalition patsy Victorian MP Damian Drum, a Mick-Mack man. O’Brien quit the Nats after Joyce’s spill was unsuccessful. It is hardly the Abbott Opposition’s relentless pursuit of speaker Peter Slipper via James Ashby and Mal Brough.

Writer and lawyer, Richard Ackland, terms this “one of the grubbiest assaults on a government in recent memory.” The Coalition has no moral high ground to take over the O’Brien stunt. But it will try. And try. With a bit of help from its Murdoch pals.

Labor’s National Party Deputy Speaker tactic is an act of open defiance of Mick-Mack, the spectacularly inept Nationals’ leader. And his leader, the PM. For those who support O’Brien, it’s an act of open insurrection. Nats’ rats include Barnaby Joyce, Llew himself – and Ken O’Dowd, who, as Nats Whip, is responsible for party discipline.

Ken blots his copybook by openly confessing that he voted for O’Brien. Will Mick-Mack take the hint?

It’s a proxy war over the government’s direction, trumpets Nine Newspapers, as if the Morrison omnishambles has a direction – unless running from truth, science and brazen, bare-faced rorting – or “fraud, theft and massive corruption” – as lawyer, Michael Bradley, calls it out in Crikey -mutates like Orwellian Newspeak into policy direction.

The MSM narrative, being obligingly framed for Morrison, is that the Nats want more coal-mines whereas the Libs want fewer, a lie which conveniently overlooks a slag-heap of coked-on Liberal coal-holers from the PM down.

Scotty’s spin doctors have the Coalition “planning to set a 2050 strategy this year” to go beyond its (laughably inadequate) existing reduction targets. It’s billed as some sort of breakthrough in its climate denialism. Incredible initiative. Especially since each state has already set a target of net zero emissions by 2050. But hang out the flags.

There’s dancing in the street this week. Not just vague promise of a plan to set a 2050 strategy sends us wild with delirious joy. Unless you’re in Far North Queensland or NSW or other parts of our wide brown land’s east coast where the heaviest rains in twenty years bring flash floods forecast years earlier in the BOM’s warning on the freakish consequences of global heating on Pacific weather patterns.

Weekend storms devastate eastern NSW; causing flooding, power outages and commuter chaos. 391.6mm of rain falls over Sydney in four days, reports the BOM the most since 414.2mm fell from 2 to 5 February 1990.

Will our PM for all seasons, Morrison scramble a squad of ADF Super Soppers to mop up the deluge? Build more dams? Fund a totally redundant four million dollar Collinsville coal-mine study? Nope. This week Coach Morrison’s wholly focussed on practicality. He gives us all a pep talk from the sidelines. Bugger reducing greenhouse gas emissions, resilience and adaptation are what we need to survive climate catastrophe.

Better, he channels “don’t you worry about that,” Joh Bjelke Petersen and Liberals’ St John Howard who led our nation toward being “relaxed and comfortable” as he helped big business and banking do us over; squandering the mining boom on buying votes and allowing miners to be lightly taxed.

Howard’s toxic legacy lives on in many battles Australians face today; the casualisation of the workforce, underemployment and low wages growth produced by his industrial-relations policies, culminating in WorkChoices, Crispin Hull pointed out in the Sydney Morning Herald, three years ago. But it’s back to the future with Morrison.

Waffle-gab world champion, Morrison claims Australians want to have a ‘level of comfort’ and have confidence about our level of resilience. “We need to have a good stocktake of that …” whatever that means. In other words, while he disconnects the petrol gauge and closes gas stations, it’s up to us to check that we have enough fuel in our tanks.

“It’s remarkable, notes Dr Jennifer Wilson, “that the least resilient, most non-adaptive Federal Government in living memory should now urge its citizens, in the face of horrific bushfires, to prove our resilience and adaptability by learning to put up with weather conditions that are hostile to human life.

Remarkable? It’s an outrageously cynical con. Morrison has no intention of reducing emissions or alter one iota of any other aspect of our ecocide. Rather it is every one of us who must adapt and show resilience so that he and his minders may profit.

There is shameless, hypocrisy here, too. Witness how the Coalition slashed funding to the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF) in 2017.

Crippling this vital adaptation research body three years ago has left Australia “not well positioned” to deal with fires, the “silent killer” of drought and other global heating impacts, its director, Jean Palutikof, explains.

Morrison, as Treasurer, took the axe to funding which gutted the research community. This means that our “capacity to take action on climate change is smaller than it was decade ago”.

The Guardian’s Paul Karp reports that the NCCARF, a Griffith University research facility, began under Howard and was funded in the 2008 budget by the Rudd government. It continued under the Abbott government with $9m over three years in the 2014 budget. The environment department reports that the body has produced 144 adaptation research projects since 2008 with a total of $56.3m in federal funding.

Yet in 2017, Morrison reduced its funds to $600,000. On this pittance, it had to continue its existing online platforms that inform decision makers seeking to adapt to changes in climate. But there would be no ongoing federal funding from 2018.

“I worry if it starts to rain and bushfires cease to be an immediate risk some money will be pumped in and then we’ll forget about it. The government will call it adaptation and resilience but people will be left in the same vulnerable state they were when these bushfires hit,” explains The Australia Institute’s (TAI) deputy Director, Ebony Bennett.

Bennett adds that the government’s new embrace of adaptation and resilience is the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff approach.

“To reduce the amount of gas and coal mined and burned in Australia is the [better] response … to prevent hotter and drier summers in future.”

Labor’s climate spokesman, Mark Butler, says: “The Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments have cut funding for significant adaptation work at CSIRO, completely de-funded the NCCARF and produced a national disaster risk reduction framework that failed to take climate change seriously.”

“The 2017 review of climate change policies completely excluded climate adaptation.”

The government holds a press conference in Canberra announcing extra bushfire payments to families, where Morrison Gish Gallops, a favoured evasive tactic named after US Creationist Duane Gish. Gish would spew as many half-truths and untruths as he could fit in his answer time so that questioners became overwhelmed.

You have no time to respond to each point, let alone refute its inaccuracy or challenge its relevance. Here’s Morrison’s original Gish Gallop, then, we’ll break it down exposing its monstrous lies.

At a press conference in Canberra announcing extra bushfire payments to families, Morrison says the hazards of “longer, hotter, drier summers” had “always been acknowledged by the government.”

He says that adaptation measures including hazard reduction, building dams and learning from Indigenous burning practices are “a part of that important response.”

“Our policy is to reduce emissions, to build resilience and to focus on adaptation,” he said. “All of these are the necessary responses to what’s happening with our climate. They are not either or, they are not one instead of the other.”

Here’s a bit of decoding. It’s a service which could be provided in the ribbon that runs across the bottom of TV broadcasts. It should be part of every journalist’s toolkit.

• Morrison claims the hazards of “longer, hotter, drier summers” had “always been acknowledged by the government” which is OK if it were not on record as denying or minimising those hazards. He follows this lie by proposing facile solutions which are then followed with a medley of buzz-words and platitudes.
• “Adaptation measures including hazard reduction,” except for all the expert advice showing that hazard reduction has no effect on megafires. Indeed, the current bushfire crisis has reached catastrophic severity in former logging areas.
• … building dams and learning from Indigenous burning practices are “a part of that important response.” Here ScoMo yokes two entirely separate proposals.

The Australia Institute’s Maryanne Slattery has tirelessly exposed the errors behind advocating dams. It doesn’t make it rain. First, there’s already been a spate of dam-building. Twenty or thirty at least, but the government won’t talk about those – event though tax-payer funds helped build them. Why? They go to irrigation; not towns.

Second for each dam built, an adjacent dam or aquifer must compete for groundwater.

Above all, dams which are built are drained by agribusiness giants such as Big Cotton. The additional water reserves are not the issue. It’s all about the fairness of that water’s allocation. It’s pointless building more dams so that billionaire companies can continue to plant water-intensive almonds or rice or cotton, what is needed is policy that works to fairly share the water with the community and with the environment.

• “Our policy is to reduce emissions, to build resilience and to focus on adaptation,” Morrison burbles.

Again he’s diminishing the vital task of emission reduction by linking it in the same breath to buzz-words that are in fact excuses for not addressing causes but which in effect transfer responsibility to victims.

This, as Dr Wilson notes, fits neoliberalism’s central tenet that individuals work out their own solutions with as little help as possible from governments. Above all governments can boost resilience by cutting welfare. This toxic nonsense has already corrupted our welfare, age pension and disability services – boosted by the need to take from the suffering, the poor and the vulnerable so that the government can create a surplus.

• “All of these are the necessary responses to what’s happening with our climate.” Morrison deploys the shabby trick of imputing false equivalence. They are not either or, they are not one instead of the other.”

But they are. Let’s get back to basics. Putting a price on emission such as the Gillard government successfully achieved resulted in a drop in greenhouse gas emissions.

Since Tony Abbott decided to play political games at the expense of our planet’s survival; since his cabinet’s group hug on the axing of the carbon tax – a tax which his Chief of Staff admits was just a rhetorical device, a lie to help build confusion and opposition, emissions have risen.

So let’s see the party games in Canberra for what they are – a diversion – albeit a significant attack on both Morrison’s authority and that of his decoy deputy, McCormack. Mick-Mack may go soon but whoever replaces him will do even less to help us understand and respond to global heating and the climate wars.

Let’s also reject the false MSM dichotomy – Nats bad vs Liberal moderates or changes of policy; there are many Liberal die-hard climate denialists, including Scotty himself. We must not be softened up to believe that Morrison’s government has the slightest intention of doing anything significant to mitigate global heating.

Above all, a critical reading of Morrison’s adaptation and resilience buzzwords is vital. Jennifer Wilson writes brilliantly about how this shifts all the responsibility on to the individual citizen while Scotty and his corporate state continue business as usual; laughing (and smirking) all the way to the bank.

Finally we must not let Morrison get away with the Gish Gallop, a cynical tactic to defeat any form of accountability and to evade questions which might expose his government’s duplicity, dissembling or disastrous wilful ignorance. Call him out on it. Blog it. Tweet. as Bret Walker notes here, it’s your right. Social media and non MSM are vital.

“I don’t care if it’s the first or only time they publish … they should have the same protection [as journalists]. The idea that people’s right to know should be filtered first by government and then an intermediary class of journalist I find really offensive … I’ll be damned if I’m going to give a monopoly to [officially approved] journalists. I don’t want the government to be giving badges to people, here are our licensed critics – that’s nonsense.” Brett Walker

“There are many “rules”, and none of them support making grant decisions based upon the location of recipients in targeted and marginal seats for party-political advantage. This is because the primary rule, as recognised by the High Court, is that Members of Parliament and Ministers are obliged to act at all times, in fulfilling their official duties, in the public interest.” ( Anne Twomey, Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Sydney).

“There’s always a bit of heaven in a disaster area,” Hugh Wavy-Gravy Romney told Woodstock fans in 1969.

Expert in turning crisis into catastrophe, Aloha Scotty from marketing, an artisanal wool-puller, hand-crafts the most disastrous start to a parliamentary year in Australia’s political history. It’s quite an achievement. A catalogue of political failure.

Highlights include Scotty’s pissing off to Waikiki to keep the family happy while Australia burned in its worst bushfire crisis yet – something he says he can safely leave to the states – to his “Fuck Off Morrison” failed charm offensive on return.

Scotty’s empathy by-pass, his dud political judgement and leadership deficit disorder are all compounded by his government’s ignoring requests to support aerial fire-fighting which were made in 2017, a contempt echoed in Scotty’s eagerness to spurn expert advice on return, all dividends on his hefty investment in climate denialism multiplied by his breath-taking inability to even recognise, let alone respond to a crisis.

A wen of incompetence and corruption, the Morrison government begins 2020 mired in sports and sundry other rorts scandals. MPs spend as if there’s no tomorrow; dole out sports and other grants solely to buy marginal political seats. Buy-back, not fight-back is the PM’s brazen strategy.

Yet a strange elation stirs the nation. Cheers, cat-calls and shouts of unbridled joy erupt across our mega-fire-burnt land for Nationals’ favourite son, Barnaby Joyce, a fearless defender of the “Weatherboard Nine” and oppressed peoples in regional Australia everywhere. Joyce will step up to the top job, if his party asks him. Or not.

Raised in a world of privilege and entitlement, the Riverview old-boy and family-trust silvertail, Joyce is lightning-quick to announce his bid to recover his rightful role as Nationals’ leader for life. Its saviour. Perhaps he’s channelling Chris Kenny’s lickspittle piffle that Joyce is the “spiritual head” of the National Party.

Others buy Abbott’s “greatest retail politician” tag, which is just as preposterous, given Joyce and his party clearly alienated many voters in his electorate, especially women, when 2012 WA Rural Woman of the Year and Broome Councillor, Catherine Marriott’s sexual harassment accusations against Joyce were leaked to the press. Joyce has always denied all accusations. On ABC Radio this Tuesday he dismisses them as slander.

The Nationals NSW Branch was unable to make a finding “due to insufficient evidence” after a long delay. It’s not a problem that holds Jim Molan back. “I’m not relying on evidence for climate change” he tells Q&A, Monday.

Whilst Joyce may pose as a man of the people, it’s just retail politician bullshit. In reality he’s voted against issues such as increased support for childcare, marriage equality, a Royal Commission into violence against people with a disability, increasing funding for legal aid, increasing housing affordability.

He’s voted strongly against increasing the age pension and increasing trade union powers at work. He does not support public transport and he opposes public protest. Increasing the Newstart allowance? He abstains.

In fact, Joyce has a track record of being hostile to the battler. Yet he cosies up to big business. He has many close links with the mining lobby including prominent former Nationals leader, John Anderson. BJ’s a member of the pro-coal Monash Group along with Eric Abetz, Craig Kelly and George Christensen. Despite his populist rhetoric, Joyce is a well-heeled, big fan of big mining, who has spruiked for Santos on radio.

In December 2018, Joyce announced that he was selling up over 1000ha of marginal NSW farmland covered by a coal-seam gas exploration ­licence that he vowed to sell more than five years ago because of conflict-of-interest allegations. He has yet to allay those concerns. He told The Australian he was selling the land, with an asking price of $878,000, to free up cash for his divorce settlement with wife Natalie.

Joyce claims that he didn’t realise the blocks in the Pilliga region between Coonabarabran and Narrabri were subject to a petroleum exploration licence (PEL) when he bought them, despite his friendship with former Nationals leader, John Anderson. Anderson became chairman of Eastern Star Gas in 2007. Eastern Star co-owned explorations rights to a nearby area – PEL 428 – before the company was taken over by Santos.

Rohann Boehm, co-founder of Anyone But Nats a group which campaigned against Joyce last election, adds

“For the last 10 years the Nats have been very, very clearly in favour of coal seam gas. The Nats have been absolutely going really hard on supporting new mines and new gas fields, and the community has been universally against those proposals.”

Joyce is a mate of Gina Rinehart’s. She’s presented him with two cheques, one for $50,000 in 2013, which he kept; one for $40,000 in 2017, which he returned. Should Adani, Rinehart’s G V K Hancock joint venture partner proceed, her firm will benefit from the rail which will allow her company to mine the Galilee Basin, an act of ecocide.

He’ll run on his record, Joyce declares of his bid to depose McCormack. Not his backing of Santos or Rinehart. Not just his silver-tongued oratory and debonair charm. Joyce points to “… huge changes (he’s) delivered.”

What changes? Well, the Inland rail boondoggle, Regional Investment Corporation pork-barrel, country of origin labelling, (after extensive lobbying as part of a CHOICE campaign initiative). Water rorts.

It’s a record that speaks for itself – and often has to – which brings us to BJ’s Drought Envoy gig where he racked up a record $675,000 in expenses – plus two staffers at $200,000 but spent less than three weeks on the (dry) ground. Joyce submitted no final report but says he sent an “awful lot of texts” to his PM, which, Scotty says, will be kept top secret along with Phil Gaetjens’ report exonerating Bridget McKenzie.

Also speaking volumes are several “prominent women” who beg the National Party not to reinstate Joyce because he has too many skeletons in his closet. Scandal could return to haunt the Nationals? Seriously?

Founder of Australian Women in Agriculture, Alana Johnson, says “the rehabilitation of the former deputy prime minister would send the wrong signal to regional communities, and particularly women.”

But Barney’s got himself a flash new RM Williams kit. It’s two years now since his former wife, Natalie, tipped his entire wardrobe out on the lawn and mowed down the louche Lothario’s best moleskins, shirts, brass-button blazers, fancy belts and men’s chinchilla-cognac boots with the ride-on mower.

It was Natalie’s considered response to news that Barnaby was expecting a baby with former staffer Vikki Campion.

Barney tells his pals at The Australian that he’ll stand for the leadership, if there’s a spill, Tuesday. Akubra-wearers throw their hats skyward while others punch the air, or knuckle each other, in sheer delight. Bernard Keane is left spluttering,

“On a day that was supposed to have been given over to the political class paying respects to the victims of the bushfire catastrophe, a significant section of the Nationals decided that a climate denialist and target of serious accusations of sexual harassment should be elevated to the second highest political office and restored to cabinet.”

Less generous critics see a PM grandstanding on grief, buying time before the hyper-partisan shouting and finger-pointing resumes. His government has a lot to answer for. But it’s not that type of government. To answer entails accepting responsibility.

Late Monday, Joyce’s former chief of staff, Matt Canavan whose brother John is MD of miner Winfield, announces he’s resigning from cabinet to back Barnaby’s bid to be leader. The plot thickens. But after Tuesday’s party room meeting, dynamic Michael McCormack retains the leadership by eleven votes to ten – not that these figures will be made public because the open and transparent Nationals never release spill figures.

It’s a stunning result for McCormack who now can refute critics who accuse him of being only half a leader with empirical evidence that he has fifty-two per cent of his parliamentary party solidly behind him.

If Canavan stays. Senator Canavan says he has referred himself to his PM over a possible conflict of interest having failed to disclose a membership. It slipped his mind that as a regional supporter of the North Queensland Cowboys, he’s entitled to a membership of its leagues club. Incredibly, only last November the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility (NAIF) gave a loan to the same club.

By what stretch of even the northern imagination is a football club a NAIF infrastructure project? Surely there are other grants for sport? Commercial sponsors? The club was granted a $20m loan for a community, training and high performance centre next to its Townsville stadium, on top of a $15m grant extended in March 2019.

The latest baroque twist in the tale of Barnaby’s comeback dovetails beautifully with the labyrinthine plot of the Morrison government’s sports rorts scandal. After Bridget McKenzie steps down as Agriculture Minister and Deputy PM, suddenly the Coalition is awash, if not drowning, in a slurry of slush fund scandals.

It’s clear that given the betting odds of a loss last election, the Coalition threw money around like confetti – and now at least four funds are implicated; exposed. Increasingly, Morrison’s win looks less miraculous and more like vote-buying, augmented by Clive Palmer’s anti-Labor $90 million negative advertising campaign. $165 million in donations to the Liberals in the year prior to the election, helped a tad also.

In the spotlight now is Building Better Regions (by buying votes) Fund, (BBR) another “regional infrastructure grants program” – nudge, nudge. Say no more. In a spooky coincidence, this pork barrel is run by Mr 52 per cent, Deputy PM Michael McCormack. Amazingly, Macca’s BBR awarded 94 per cent of its grants to electorates held or targeted by the Coalition in the months leading up to the federal election.

How good are colour-coded spread-sheets? But let’s get sports rorts, NAIF pork-barrel and BBR into perspective. May 17, one day before the 2019 federal election, the Morrison Government gave over $15 million to a major political donor. The funding had been set aside to alleviate grinding Aboriginal poverty.

The grant is made through the Indigenous Advancement Strategy (IAS), the Morrison government’s controversial main Aboriginal affairs funding pool. Just three months prior, its recipient– Wesfarmers, one of the wealthiest corporation in Australia – announced a record half-yearly profit of $4.5 billion.

The nation’s largest private employer in 2018, with over 222,000 staff including, it claimed, over 5,200 Indigenous staff. An IAS “funding stream” the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet calls the ‘Employment Parity Initiative’, means governments grant large corporations funds to employ Indigenous people.

Does it work? An Australian National Audit Office report shows the IAS lacks any effective framework to evaluate outcomes. Yet it’s spent $5 billion over five years, Chris Graham reports in New Matilda. A great hue and cry is raised over $100m of sports rorts but where’s the outcry over rorting $5 bn sensitively ear-marked for “Indigenous Advancement” and supposedly intended for our Indigenous peoples’ benefit?

Senator Pat Dodson says the IAS has ‘basically folded up Aboriginal controlled organizations’ and set out competitive tenders for people to fight for funding amongst private business and non-government organisations. It is the result of Tony Abbott’s scandalous 2014 budget captain’s call which collapsed over 150 programs into five funding streams, without consultation and cut $500 million from indigenous spending.

Could Macca be in the gun? And if Bridget McKenzie has to resign, why not Angus Taylor? And Matt Canavan?

Phil Gaetjens bones Bridget McKenzie. It’s announced Sunday.

Incredibly, Scotty’s mate – and former Chief of Staff – Gaetjens’ secret report finds no wrongdoing in the way grants were distributed, overruling Auditor-General, Grant Hehir, who finds McKenzie handed out $100m in sports grants before last year’s election without apparent legal authority, favouring marginal seats.

“Triply outrageous” fumes The Monthly’s Paddy Manning. How can partisan piss-ant Phil Gaetjens, OK a $100 million Community Sports Infrastructure grants program in a report that will remain secret?

Doubly outrageous, is PM and Deputy PM McCormack’s Trumpist love song of duplicity duet: McKenzie exercised her ministerial discretion over the scheme? Nothing wrong with that. Liberal Phil Gaetjens says so.

Grant Hehir, clearly condemns it? Scotty’s alternative expert – Attorney-General Christian Porter simply says the Auditor-General is wrong. As Groucho says, “These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.”

However, constitutional expert, Anne Twomey, cites a series of clear legal constraints to the exercise of ministerial discretion, all of which McKenzie has ignored.

It is triply outrageous for Scotty to preach high ministerial standards and keep Energy and Emissions grifter Angus Taylor in cabinet. It seems to upset even the Nats.

Peter Van Onselen tweets. “Nationals MP to me: if McCormack is prepared to let the PM throw Bridget under a bus for something his office was part of, yet protect Angus Taylor, it’s time our party stops being a lap dog to the Libs.”

You came to Casablanca for the waters? Taylor forgot to let on about his ties with a Cayman Islands company that benefited hugely from the Commonwealth in a miraculous waterless, water buyback scam.

Also slipping Gussie’s memory is Taylor’s duty to disclose his interest in Jam Land a company that stood to benefit from removal of restrictions on grass clearing that he was lobbying for.

Add the hilarious Keystone Cops ruse where Gus Taylor could be subject of an AFP Flying Pig Squad investigation into who gave the forged documents to The Daily Telegraph in a bid to put Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore’s weights up. Is there one rule for McKenzie, but no rules at all for Taylor?

Since its inception in 1979, the AFP has never made any investigation that embarrassed a sitting government.

Piss-ant Phil, a Liberal staffer, becomes Australia’s most politicised head of Treasury, overnight, for services rendered. We’re teetering on the edge of recession so a party hack at Treasury’s helm could be just the ticket.

Josh Frydenberg take a bow. It hasn’t been easy, but his government has now taken Australia’s federal net and gross debt to record levels. The Coalition has added 52% of all debt accumulated by the nation since 1854.

The “Flash Bit of Kit” as suave, sophisticated icon of urbanity and wit, Barney, a hard pooch to keep on the porch, once publicly praised McKenzie in a late night sitting – has proved a flash in the pan.

Dashed are the hopes of those awaiting the gun-toting, straight-shooting Senator for Elwood to also do some plain speaking. She could name staffers in Scotty’s office who appear to have been closely involved in the Sports Rorts Scandal and whether or not the sports pork-barrel was part of Scotty’s miracle election-winning strategy.

At the National Press Club, Wednesday, Morrison’s government by rort turns up in force to help Scotty from marketing make his pitch. Old wine in new bottles. A babble of righteous indignation and self-entitled arrogance. Why can’t Coalition MPs fund gun-clubs and phantom women’s rugby clubs in marginal seats?

Pork-barrelling is all about buying votes. Perfectly legal. MPs know where the money should go; why should Sport Australia put its oar in? Does it matter to the modern neoliberal? Ian McAuley offers this explanation.

“If you believe that nothing of value comes from the public sector, it doesn’t matter how public money is spent. A grant to a gun club, a new railway, Medicare… it’s all waste, and may as well be spent in order to maximise the government’s chances in the next election.”

It’s part of political economy theory dubbed “public choice,” a theory that arose in the US in the late twentieth century but which, he notes, took off in our universities in the 1980s. Or is it superseded in the post-fact era?

The Auditor General got it wrong, Attorney-General Christian Porter snorts. But no-one’s allowed to look at his reasons. If he has any. No laws were broken; every application had merit, Morrison bullshits.

In fact, the Senator for Elwood presented Sport Australia with a list of 236 projects for funding. Only 73 of these met the original merit-based criteria in Round Two according to independent analysis.

But hark! It’s a RESET, chorus spin doctors and media minions. Flashback to Wednesday’s rally at the Canberra Press Club and witness the miracle of a Morrison government reset which looks and sounds exactly like the old set. Cheerleader Scotty from Fossil fuel and Climate Science Denial Marketing suddenly appears, swinging his pom-poms, punching up and doing the high V.

The crowd goes wild. How good’s Scotty’s “2020 Opening Address”? Stacking the gathering with his professional Liberal claque helps. So, too the blizzard of press drops from his office. Climate Action Now (CAN) is Scotty 2020’s brand-new Orwellian slogan. But only the slogan is new. Morrison has no intention of curbing emissions or easing back on cooking the globe. He’s full of bullshit about mitigation and adaption. And gas. It’s more dangerous than coal when it leaks methane during mining.

“… there is no credible energy transition plan, for an economy like Australia in particular, that does not involve the greater use of gas as an important transition fuel … ” Morrison bullshits.

But look over there! How good is Scotty’s calling out of ADF reserves? True, one MRH-90 helicopter did cause Canberra’s most serious bushfire since 2003, by setting fire to grass in the Namadgi National Park while landing with lights on to help visibility in smoky conditions. But it’s our first bushfire lit by a copter landing light. Another first!

There are other firsts to follow. Morrison’s government will fast-track new law to make it easier for him to call out troops to disaster areas or help quell anti-mining demonstrations or extinction rebellion protests. It’s hard, unglamorous work but police states don’t just happen by themselves, you know.

During question evasion time at the end of Scotty’s embarrassing failure to come up with any vision while embracing all the old lies, Morrison’s bullshit is briefly slowed by The Guardian’s Sarah Martin who asks if it is wrong to misappropriate public funds.

Does he think it wrong, “as a matter of principle”, Martin asks, for public funds to be spent on party political pork-barrelling? Morrison gaslights. “That is not what the government has done,” he lies.

It’s precisely what Scotty’s government has been doing. It doesn’t think it’s wrong. Morrison’s government continues to abuse its elected authority; betray the public’s trust that it will act in the public interest.

“I am asking as a matter of principle, if you accept that,” Martin asks.

“It is — of course. That is like, do I believe the sun should rise tomorrow? Yes I do, and it will,” he smirks.

Climate action? Scotty’s climate science denial and his government’s inept handling of our bushfire crisis won Australia First Fossil of the Day from the Climate Action network of 1300 nations, COP25 in December. Nothing has changed. Nor will it. Ministerial responsibility? We’ll refer Angus Taylor to an AFP that will take forever to do nothing. Bridget McKenzie? An icon of integrity for upholding ministerial standards by resigning.

This is not a Prime Minister who merely lacks credibility. Nor one who just breeds cynicism, distrust and denialism, although he excels at all of these. This is a hollow man; an utterly vacuous man with neither policy, practicality, real plan nor moral compass, a smirking, spinning, vortex of self-righteous egotism.

Sarah Martin raises a matter of principle. It’s clear that the Prime Minister has no idea what she’s talking about. For Morrison and his MPs the notion holds no meaning.

“The link between the fires, drought, and climate change is clear. For decades, climate models have predicted a hotter, drier Australia thanks to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Were greenhouse gases at pre-industrial levels, natural factors alone would produce a year as hot as 2019 just once every 360 years. But add the effect of human-emitted greenhouse gases and the probability drops to one year in eight—a forty-five-fold increase in probability.” Tim Flannery

Scotty from Marketing, as The Betoota Advocate dubs our Schlockmeister of spin, is busier than a one-eyed cat watching two rat-holes. The parliamentary year from hell awaits. After his “miracle victory” pitch, an upset helped hugely by political cane toad, Clive Palmer, and his gift of sixty million dollars of anti-Labor negative advertising plus Scotty’s own campaign of outright lies about Opposition policy and endless defamatory attacks on Bill Shorten’s character, Scotty’s political future is already in extremis.

“PR is the place people end up when all other professional options fail, writer and lawyer Richard Ackland, unerringly, observes, “and now Schmo has failed at the failures’ last resort.”

Arrogant, hopelessly out of touch, fearless cheerleader, Scotty, has botched his one big chance to fake empathy and leadership, opinion pollsters suggest. How? A lot of it is simply not turning up to the gig. Going AWOL. Hanging loose on Waikiki. Catching up with his loopy QAnon pal, Tim Stewart who believes that the world and its media are run by a conspiracy of Satan-worshipping paedophiles.

Woody Allen reckons, eighty percent of success is just showing up. Murdoch’s latest News Poll, fresh out of rehab, and Guardian Australia oracle, Essential, both agree that Morrison’s on the nose. His government, like a fish, is rotting from the head down – despite Scotty’s best charm offensive; repairing trust by forcing bushfire victims to shake his hand; visiting fire-ravaged areas only to be told to “fuck off”.

Who would have thought? Why should our worst bushfire crisis ever deprive Scotty of his right to a Waikiki Holiday? Who’d have guessed blaming Jen and the girls would have alienated the Australian nation? Will blaming Bridget McKenzie for his own sports-rorts pork-barrelling similarly backfire? Will the Senator for Elwood get the last laugh?

Even Simon Benson, The Australian’s top Coalition flack, notes 12 January’s News Poll has produced the worst numbers for Scotty since he knifed Turnbull in August 2018. Morrison’s now on par with Bill Shorten at his least popular. Now, Labor’s Anthony Albanese easily pips Morrison as preferred PM.

Essential’s Peter Lewis notes that “good in a crisis” is down 35% amidst a decline in Morrison’s personal standing. One in seven Australians have changed their minds about Scotty from Marketing in a month – but the surprising thing is not that he’s “taken a personal hit but that it isn’t a walloping.”

Yet there’s hope. Blaming Greens and arsonists cuts it with Morrison’s base. In a parallel with Trump supporters, just when the leader is most conspicuously not a leader’s bootlace, his base locks in.

Scotty will claw back some kudos by blaming arsonists and demonic Greens who oppose hazard-reduction, despite expert evidence that catastrophic fires burn even where the forest floor is clear. ABC Fact Check experts concur that it is highly unlikely arson is the cause of most of the current bushfires.

Scapegoating aside, Scotty will rebuild trust with a farrago of lies. He tells ABC viewers,

“It is, and always has been, the policy of our government to understand the need to take action on climate change and the impact that has on the world’s broader weather systems and climate systems,” Morrison bullshits to Michael Rowland on ABC 7:30, more an on-air massage than an interview.

Understand the need to take action? Morrison makes not cooking the planet sound like remembering to floss your teeth. The coalition government has no climate change policy. The claim is absurd. Look how quickly it got rid of Malcolm Turnbull when its right wing rump feared that he might adopt one.

Turnbull previously lost his party leadership to Abbott in 2009 by supporting carbon emissions-trading. Nick Feik, editor of The Monthly sums up some of the other inconvenient truths undermining Morrison’s hollow claim. Far from understanding the need for action, his government has opposed it at every turn.

“(It) killed the emissions trading scheme and the climate change portfolio; tried to kill the renewable energy target and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation; defunded the Climate Council; supports Adani’s massive proposed coalmine; has no significant emissions-reduction or energy policy; and is populated with climate deniers.” And those deniers show no sign of any Damascene conversion.

Someone needs to call bullshit on Morrison’s brand new mantra, “it has always been our policy.”

Last September, for example, David Littleproud professed not to know whether the global heating crisis was man-made. This month, Science Minister, Karen Andrews, says the “science is settled” but the Coalition will do nothing to lift its woefully inadequate carbon emissions targets.

And only last September, Ms Andrews was making the big pitch that

Harnessing new technologies in the mining, oil and gas industries will add $74 billion to the Australian economy by 2030 and create more than 80,000 new local jobs. Jobs and growth? All sorted then. But ABS figures suggest nothing like this.

Time to phone a friend. Federal energy minister Angus Taylor has an “expert panel” –led by former Origin Energy CEO and president of the Business Council of Australia, Grant King, along with Susie Smith, the CEO of the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network, which represents many of Australia’s largest emitters.

Taylor claims his panel will identify new opportunities to achieve emissions reduction – without explaining how. The panel has undertaken a closed consultation to which the public has not had input with Taylor’s handpicked group of representatives heavily stacked towards the fossil fuel industry and Australia’s largest emitters, reports Renew Economy’s Michael Mazengarb.

Angus Taylor’s list clearly indicates a government in cahoots with the polluters causing global heating. But Taylor’s case is fair and reasonable compared to Matt Canavan’s.

How does Scotty explain Canavan, the self-styled “Mr Coal from Australia” who tells Sky News calls to reduce emissions, especially by Greta Thunberg, are about social engineering than climate change?

“Their policy prescriptions aren’t actually about reducing carbon emissions, it’s about the radical massive changes to our economy and society and culture.”

Seriously? As opposed to the radical changes caused by doing nothing?

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists executive chair of its Science and Security Board, former Governor of California, Jerry Brown, exposes Scotty’s posturing. “The Australian government is in utter and complete denial. Under its current leadership, Australia is fostering denial in an incredibly mendacious way.”

Now is not the time to talk about Greg Hunt’s soil magic but our ABC could at least hold the PM to account on how our bushfire catastrophe burns a hole in Hunt’s Direct Action tree-planting boondoggle.

“Carbon credits counted in government projections can, quite literally, go up in smoke and blow out the emissions side of the CO2 ledger,” ANU climate scientist, Will Steffen explains.

There’s also more bullshit of “evolving” climate policy and other ScoMo-hoaxes to cloak the reality that his mining lobby muppet government has no intention of curbing emissions or fostering renewables.

True, the PM’s crafty plan runs up against a raft of inconvenient truths such as The Greens not actually being in power or billionaire climate science denier Michael Hintze’s funding of Liberals for years, but, as Lewis points out, supporters will grab on to whatever they can in order to maintain their world-view.

The PM could explain why Hintze, a crusading Neoliberal who disputes scientific evidence that carbon emissions are rapidly helping cause irreversible global heating, donated $75,000 to former, fellow dud Prime Minister, Tony Abbott’s 2013 election campaign – amongst other Liberal Party support over the years. Hintze also enjoys a cordial long-running business relationship with Energy Minister Angus Taylor.

Only a year ago Morrison was preaching to us in The Daily Telegraph that Australians can always be counted on to make and keep our commitments. Exposed is his own utter lack of commitment to lead or to plan or to heed climate scientists’ or accept expert fire-fighters’ advice. Instead, he is a total liability.

Recent Australia Institute polling leads senior researcher, Tom Swann to conclude.

“Australia is in the grip of a national climate disaster. The social, economic and medical impacts are vast and only just starting to become clear,”

“Our research shows that it’s likely more than 5 million Australian adults, along with many children, have suffered negative health impacts as a result of the fires and at least 1.5 million have missed work.”

Lying about climate policy is taxing. Yet Scotty suddenly has a crisis on his hands – the Coalition’s $100 million sports rorts scandal reveals a government avidly milking the till, ripping off the taxpayer and other more deserving local sports clubs in favour of buying support in marginal seats.

In brief, then Sports Minister, Bridget McKenzie took it upon herself to decide which clubs got the grants. It turns out that she has no legal authority to do so. The Auditor-General, Grant Hehir is underwhelmed.

If only, in 2019, Georgina Downer hadn’t flashed a giant polystyrene cheque for $127, 373. Downer wished to “make sure the Yankalilla Bowling Club’s Community Sport Infrastructure grant application was successful”. It was. And battling Adelaide Hills Council also got almost $500,000 to upgrade change rooms at the oval.

Downer’s oversized cheque leads the Auditor-General to uncover a $100 million pork-barrel racket under the aegis of then Minister for Sport, Bridget McKenzie, with the help of two members of the PM’s staff.

Australians are still coming to terms with Morrison’s deceit and his fake apology and whilst the sociopath in him would like to con us that we’ve “moved on”, it doesn’t work like that. The rorts will do little to curb growing suspicion of his government’s corruption, incompetence and sheer contempt for due process.

“The past is not dead. It is not even past”, William Faulkner observed. Scotty’s shameless dereliction of duty, his substitution of PR strategy for policy and his contempt for accountability continue to eat away at his credibility as the bushfire crisis and the sports rorts scandal take their toll. As do his gaffes.

Monday, he stuffs up comprehensively, promising Nine’s Today that over ten years, “Our per capita emissions will fall by half”. This adds up to a massive forty-two per cent reduction. Even his own Environment Department boffins predict only a four percent over the same period – a decline from 532 million tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent in 2019 to 511 million tonnes in 2030.

Michael Pascoe boggles: not only does the PM clearly not know what he’s talking about, his hosts, Karl Stefanovic and Allison Langdon don’t notice. Hosts are only there to fawn over the most inept PM in our nation’s history. Show business for ugly people, celebrity back-scratchers.

As Pascoe notes, no-one pays attention, cares or follows whatever inanity comes out of the PM’s motor mouth. And to be fair, you do tune out after a while.

When he promised to “burn” for us, Morrison’s vision did not include megafires for which he’s completely unprepared. Then there’s his sports rorts; the scandal of doling out grants he isn’t entitled to. Will these prove to be his minister’s auto da fe?

Now Scotty’s doing the hard yards, slaving away back at the PM’s office, signing press drops disclaiming all responsibility for sports rorts or doing nothing at all to curb global heating and less than nothing to heed expert advice that we need to prepare for a terrible new type of bushfire. But, seriously, what would a mob of dedicated, distinguished and experienced former fire chiefs know about anything?

Also missing in action is Il Duce, Peter Dutton, our ambitious Home Affairs Czar whose duties include “Commonwealth emergency management and natural disaster relief, recovery and mitigation and financial assistance”. More powerful than the PM, Dutton has yet to do a tap – a sure sign that he’s keen to foster resilience and promote self-help by doing nothing at all for bushfire victims.

Dutto oozes natural leadership with his Queensland Drug squaddie jollity, his compassion and his endless hypervigilance over scoundrels who might rort our Border Protection by faking illness just to get into a mainland hospital but his emergency role, so far, is limited to accusing Labor of pork-barrelling, too.

Morrison’s nemesis, Malcolm Turnbull weighs in, Wednesday. Scotty double-double crossed his PM with the most brazen lie in our political history on 22 August, 2018. Morrison threw an arm around Turnbull, “This is my leader and I’m very ambitious for him”, he said in a rare break from plotting to knife his PM in the back.

Still wounded by the betrayal, Turnbull can’t fathom Morrison’s conduct, he helpfully tells BBC listeners. Revenge is a dish best served cold.

“I can’t explain why he didn’t meet the former fire commissioners who wanted to see him in March last year to talk about the gravity of the threat. Everybody knew we were in a very dry time and as a consequence the fire season was likely to be very bad.

“So rather than doing what a leader should do and preparing people for that, he downplayed it and then of course chose to go away on holiday in Hawaii? At the peak of the crisis? I just can’t explain any of that. It’s just not consistent with the way in which a prime minister would or should act.”

In the far pavilions of Victoria’s Liberal festering wen of corruption, rising evangelicals and intrigue, the lobster with the mobster crew in Victoria are no help at all. Current leader Michael O’Brien, elected for not being Matthew Guy, calls on the federal government to adopt long-term “sensible” emissions reduction targets. Communities and businesses need certainty beyond 2030. It’s the old, trite, tired slogan.

And it’s bullshit. O’Brien still wants native forest logging, so vital to micro-climate, ecology and to species survival and he’s full of guff about how gas is heaps better than coal because – you know … transition to renewables. He’s just another Liberal fossil fuel shill pretending to take global heating a little bit seriously.

Natural gas is a bridge to nowhere. It comprises mainly methane, a greenhouse gas that plays a big role in cooking our planet. When it first enters our atmosphere, it’s 120 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in trapping heat. Over twenty years, it’s eight-six times more powerful.

Methane leaks from natural gas extraction and production. This may make natural gas extracted from shale rock worse than coal in terms of its greenhouse gas footprint. The chemicals used in fracking fluid can easily end up contaminating groundwater. And drilling can be enormously polluting.

But it’s all OK, Scotty knows what to say. He deploys the lame “if anyone’s offended” cop-out to cover absconding to Hawaii. Besides, as everyone knows, bushfires are totally a state matter. Expect a piece in the Murdoch press quoting unnamed high-ranking Liberals exposing O’Brien as a hopeless bed-wetter.

Above all, not one catastrophic inferno could ever be linked to Morrison’s government’s crusade to mine, sell or burn coal, for its fossil-fuel industry robber baron sponsors. Long may their tax-payer funded subsidies suck dry the funds that should go towards running schools, hospitals and making payments to disability pensioners.

No-one’s making the absurd claim that any single fire is solely caused by climate change but Morrison just loves the straw man logical fallacy – almost as much as he loves scapegoating and slurs.

As everyone knows, everything is always Labor’s fault. Tim Wilson, IPA MP for Goldstein instead of IPA fellow Georgina Downer, bags Daniel Andrews for slack hazard reduction. It’s as dishonest and as baseless as Tim’s election campaign franking credits farce. But it fits the PM’s lie that bushfires can be blamed on Greens, Labor -anyone. For seven years, Wilson was IPA Director of Climate Change Policy to protect mining.

Look over here, calls Morrison, Tuesday. I’ve got a little list. It’s more than a bid to look busy. Morrison is out to create a fake climate agenda by proposing a “national register to ensure hazard reduction transparency at a federal level”. Karen Andrews has also been on the front foot to ensure that we just stop talking about how fossil fuels are helping us to fry the planet and instead talk about land-clearing.

“My starting position in the discussion tomorrow will be that the climate has changed and it continues to change. We need to focus on the steps to adapt and mitigate the impact of those changes.” Karen is Morrison’s Science Minister, a captain’s pick which confirms his perverse delight in choosing MPs whose views are antithetical to the portfolios they are assigned. Adapt and mitigate is coal lobby nonsense.

And it’s disingenuous. Australia is experiencing unprecedented, unpredictable and devastating climate change and we should be taking steps to reduce the carbon and other emissions that are part of its causation. Her “discussion” is a version of Morrison’s NRA gun lobby mantra: “Now is not the time …”

The national register is all part of Scotty’s team plan to divert attention from his government’s monumental failure of leadership in all aspects of the current bushfire crisis by blaming the states for not preventing the fires.

After unprecedented, catastrophic fire consumes 10 million hectares, destroys over 2,000 homes and kills at least 28 people, destroys some of the oldest forests in the world, kills nearly 500 million animals and causes the loss of sites that hold the timeless history of First Nations’ cultures, there’s nothing like a bit of scapegoating to restore the nation’s faith. Cue hypocritical hand-wringing from the Murdoch press.

Fearless advocate of fossil fuel and an early champion of “axing the tax: as Australia’s successful price on carbon, 2012-2014 was cynically misrepresented, The Australian now laments part of the costs.

The Oz estimates that the bushfire crisis has cost $2 billion in lost business revenue, forward sales and the physical destruction of tourism facilities, and could cost an additional $4.5 billion by season’s end.

Scotty’s non-apology helps us all heaps. We treasure his “regret” for “any offence caused to any of the many Australians affected by the terrible bushfires by my taking leave with family at this time”.

Scotty’s always got a glib comeback; an adman’s spin. He totally gets that we all like to see him take charge in times of crisis. Besides Jen and the girls needed a break. He pushes them under a bus. It’s something he’d like to do with Bridget McKenzie, but can’t – yet – because she’s a National and can do more or less what she likes according to the secret agreement that lies at the Coalition’s sclerotic heart.

In the end, Scotty spins. Wednesday, he makes a big deal out of announcing that the Auditor-General’s adverse finding that the allocation of funds intended to be awarded by Sport Australia is a process which appears to have be ignored or suborned by the then Minister for Sport and her PM.

It’s a headache. Not only did McKenzie hand out $100 million without legal authority on the basis of her own, political criteria, more worthy but unsuccessful grant applicants who followed a merit-based process could sue. Slater and Gordon is looking into a class action for those who missed out on grants.

Morrison refers former sports minister McKenzie’s handling of the $100m sports grants program to his own department to investigate whether ministerial standards were breached – even though the Auditor-General is concerned that it’s a tad more serious. Neither McKenzie nor Morrison have legal authority to hand out sports grants.

But don’t think the big guns aren’t being brought in. Attorney general and national paper tiger, our nation’s legal guardian, Christian Porter pretends to defend McKenzie after it’s revealed that she approved a $36,000 grant to a shooting club of which she is a member, claiming being a “paper member” of a club raises no probity issue.

The “only a paper member” defence is a stroke of forensic genius.

Sheer genius also is Ms McKenzie’s claim that she did not know she was a member of the club until her mother told her, a variation on Signor Matt Canavan’s “my mother made me an Italian” defence.

By Sunday, in the cross-hairs at Scotty’s political roo-shoot is the incredible Bridget McKenzie. McKenzie is already a VIP as a former sports minister. Does it get any more important than sport? OK, there may be a few minor peccadilloes such as our modern gladiators’ doping scandals, off-field homophobia, misogyny, match-fixing, substance abuse and FIFA’s corruption -but sport is huge.

And you’ve got to be in it to win it. Bridget packs a double-barrelled Beretta Silver Pigeon over and under shotgun. Loves being a sporting shooter. Killing puts her in touch with nature.

“I know it will sound incongruous to people but hunting is about connecting with nature and the outdoors. You have to understand nature to reap the bounty of it,” she tells The Age’s Matthew Knott. Or have powerful automatic weapons such as the Adler A110, a banned rapid-fire shotgun.

Nothing says understanding nature more than the wild terror inflicted by the fearful noise of the shotgun. Just the sound of exploding black powder severely interrupts feeding and breeding. Quick kills are rare. Many animals suffer prolonged, painful deaths when hunters severely injure but fail to kill them.

The prohibition of the A110 was no real problem for McKenzie and our gun lobby to overturn quietly. Nor was there a single comment from then Attorney-General George Brandis or then Justice Minister Michael Keenan, who drew fire for heeding the gun lobby. In the year to March 2017, political parties pocketed over $300,000 in donations from the firearms lobby, gun suppliers and manufacturers.

Above all, McKenzie commands respect because she’s deputy leader of a mob of regional, parochial, benighted, mining Muppets who absurdly posture as The Nationals. Without the Nats to make up the Coalition’s numbers, however, the Libs are cactus.

Scott’s non-apology sets the tone for his government and for what is already proving to be a beaut new year of Coalition incompetence, evasion, denial and outright lying. Who will ever forget the inspiring leadership Morrison showed when he expressed “regret” for “any offence caused to any of the many Australians affected by the terrible bushfires by my taking leave with family at this time”.

Leading from the front this time, Scotty, himself, seems to have found $200,000 for a local Sutherland Shire Lilli Pilli Soccer club at least three weeks before grants were decided. A series of experts point out, yet again, that the PM has no legal authority to disburse funds designated for Sport Australia.

Nor does Bridget McKenzie. If he plays his cards right, Morrison will be able to handball Bridget McKenzie’s demotion to his own office’s Phil Gaetjens while he continues to snub a nation increasingly concerned that his government has no policy on greenhouse gas emissions.

Adding insult to injury, he will insist that his government “is evolving its policy” on climate change.

Scotty’s case is helped immensely, Monday, by his ugly personal and political attack on NSW Liberal Matt Kean, a state environment minister, who dares suggest that the federal government heed those voters who want the federal government to do something to protect our environment.

Other Liberal coal lobby shills, such as NSW deputy-leader John Barilaro quickly put the boot into Kean. As does Samantha Maiden in The New Daily who attacks the “Senator for Elwood”, as Bridget McKenzie is known in a helpful piece that will buck up the government’s spirits no end. It begins,

“Accused pork-barrelling minister Bridget McKenzie accepted a free Christmas ham from the pig industry, but took three months to declare her purchase of a $2 million investment property in beachside Melbourne.”

Looks like Bridget’s in deep trouble but will Morrison once again walk away – miraculously – Scott-free? Or will the Senator for Elwood have the last laugh after all?

“There is no link, the facts that cause the fires are the drought and the drying of the environment,”

“I follow the science,” lies Craig Kelly, MP for Hughes, who lobs on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, a pulpit for Piers Morgan, a Daily Mirror, former editor, sacked in 2004, for publishing fake images purporting to show British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners.

Kelly’s claim is as ludicrous as his PM’s own palpable falsehood. It’s in this week’s talking-point kit. Suddenly government MPs are all trotting out the same bullshit.

“Our view of climate change is that it’s real. We accept the science,” Josh Frydenberg lies in a drop to every media outfit in Australia. Yet the Coalition, steadfastly, ignores all scientific advice linking global heating to climate change.

Scott Morrison’s government favours the straw man fallacy. No-one accuses them of denying the reality of climate change – that’s a distortion of the argument that climate change or global heating contributes to the new bushfire holocaust we are suffering – a fire so severe; so intense that it defies all conventional means to bring it under control.

Can Piers Morgan or co-host meteorologist, Laura Tobin tell Kelly that climate change causes the drought and dry? It’s difficult given that Kelly holds that there’s no evidence that climate change is making Australia hotter and drier. It’s woeful, wilful ignorance.

An exasperated Tobin berates Kelly for ignoring scientific reports that 2019 is our hottest and driest year on record.

“At the moment we want everyone to commit in the world to be one and a half degrees to lower our global temperature rise,” Tobin says. “You can’t even commit to two degrees.”

Kelly’s as plausible as an arsonist with a box of matches and a jerry-can of petrol who says he’s only helping other volunteers put out fires. Some punters say he’s been banned from Q&A so he’s now speaking out on “Pommy” TV as he calls it.

Or is he sent by the PM? Fair dinkum, says Craig. Australia’s fire catastrophe was no reason for Morrison to cancel his planned family holiday in Hawaii. The situation is totally under control and besides, fire-fighting is a state matter.

Neither Morgan nor Tobin ask why a plan to prepare for climate change-related natural disasters was left to gather dust in Peter Dutton’s Department of Home Affairs for eighteen months before catastrophic bushfires hit last month.

The bushfire crisis now includes a “mega blaze” of half a million hectares on both sides of the Murray in the Snowy and Upper Murray. The flames have cost twenty-seven lives, destroyed at least 2079 homes, damaged over 800 others and have burned or are currently burning 8.4 million hectares – an area the size of Ireland or Austria.

We can only guess at the loss of wildlife. Above and beyond the human trauma and loss in fire grounds, Australian Academy of Science Fellow, Chris Dickman estimates that 1 billion animals have now been killed in the bushfires — a figure that includes mammals, birds and reptiles, but not bats, frogs, insects or other invertebrates.

A National Disaster Risk Reduction report containing a national implementation plan was published just before Malcolm Turnbull was double-double crossed by Morrison. Then Dutton put it away. But you can bet he was under instruction from his new PM.

Kelly can claim he’s following the science, but follow the (current) leader appears to be the only Liberal game in town. Morrison leaks against you otherwise, as his government has with Gladys Berejiklian, claiming she’s being obstructive of federal efforts to help.

As luck would have it, Good Morning Britain is another show with no scruples at all. Self-styled “climate science-follower”, a dubious generic tag evoking a voyeuristic ambulance-chaser, Craig Kelly does not expect a hostile reception. More a back-rub.

A former editor of Murdoch’s now defunct tabloid rag, News of the World, whose then editor, Andy Coulson, resigned before it closed in 2011 after he’d been caught hacking the phones of dead children, Morgan admits to BBC Desert Island Discs in 2009 that gutter publishing corrupts much of Britain’s print media – as it does in Australia.

“I simply say the net of people doing it was very wide, and certainly encompassed the high and low end of the supposed newspaper market.”

The “everybody does it”, argument is hugely reassuring to all who expect a bit of truth in their news and a few less monsters in their politics, but Morgan, like Morrison and Trump are creatures of a post-truth era in which everyone just makes stuff up.

We must be careful, however. When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion, and we are admonished not to call it “fake news” in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful. Not that it ends there. Morrison’s priority as PM, he claims, is to protect freedom of religion, even though this is already guaranteed in our constitution.

Christian Porter is slaving over a new bill to allow churches to discriminate against workers provided that the school or hospital or op-shop “publish policy” explaining its ethos and rules, (something of a challenge given explaining exclusion implies that it stems from reason and not faith or prejudice). But it’s all very fair and merciful.

Religious hospitals, granny farms and retirement homes will “preference” members of their own faith to preserve their “religious ethos”. Unbelievers can die on the streets.

Dutton supporter, Kelly looks more pub bouncer than MP in blue suit and red tie rucked up under a thick, red, neck. He’s eager to get his mug on ITV to help repay the favour he owes the PM by acting as mouthpiece for Morrison’s own climate science denialism.

Big Craig is the founder of bipartisan buddy-club, Parliamentary Friends of Coal Exports, (PFOC) a climate criminal and mining lobby catspaw self-help group which includes Joel Fitzgibbon. Mike Freelander, who holds the south-west Sydney seat of Macarthur, swells the throng, as does the invisible Member for Paterson, Meryl Swanson, and the Member for Oxley, the euphonious, Milton Dick.

Kelly continues to bullshit Morgan.

“On this, climate scientists down here have been very clear and they have said there is no link between drought and climate change.” Kelly outdoes even his PM.

Kelly, as Morrison’s emissary and coal lobby shill, already has zero credibility before he even gets to his own batshit crazy blame-it-on-the big dry and I-follow-the-science big fat lie. His hosts do their homework. Laura Tobin, the woman Kelly calls a “Pommy weather girl” has a degree in physics and meteorology.

A former RAF forecaster for four years, Tobin has also worked as a broadcast meteorologist for twelve years. She’s completed a climate course with the World Meteorological Organisation. Kelly’s sexist weather girl slur is superbly misjudged.

But Kelly barely gets to open his mouth before Tory pit-bull and professional bully Piers Morgan, leaps down his throat. Morgan’s the other co-host of Good Morning Britain ITV’s daily carnival of interrogation, right-wing rants celebrity gossip and fashion tips.

Morgan attacks Kelly for taking a “nothing to see here, nothing to worry about” approach as “your entire country is eviscerated by fires”.

“You are facing now one of the greatest crises you have ever faced, and there is you Mr Kelly, with respect, a senior politician who still doesn’t think this has anything to do with a heating-up planet,” Morgan snorts and rages. Senior?

Kelly, who’s been warned off spruiking climate science denial on SKY, bobs up like a turd in the surf off Bondi, on Morgan’s show. But is there a bit of divine intervention, behind the scenes, to help Craig get a live TV link to London? If he’s free-lancing, it’s not going to help Humpty-Dumpty Morrison win back any credibility as a leader.

“I did @BBCRadio4 against him Sunday. The producer said they had asked for a senior government rep and this is who @ScottMorrisonMP thought was the best person to represent his government,” tweets Labor’s Catherine King.

Kelly denies it. He’s never said anything to the PM but Morrison did warn him off SKY. A “government spokesman” bags the suggestion as“fanciful”. But it’s way too much to swallow. The same PM’s staff denied that he had deserted the nation in its hour of need when he nicked off to Waikiki. Sprung, he blames Jen and the kids – as he blames our failure to reduce fire hazards and arson as the causes of our worst bushfires ever.

Kelly’s interview is widely written off as a car crash but sometimes people do survive car crashes. Both Kelly and his PM have the skids under them. Aloha Morrison is done for.

“Car crash” also unfairly diminishes the salesmanship of our crack elite of climate science denialists. They’re out to crash the planet. Every time Kelly repeats a lie, it gains legitimacy. And like a rat up a drainpipe, Josh Frydenberg’s able to bucket us in more bullshit by publicly correcting Craig and boosting the red-herring of fuel load.

Frydenberg rat-cunningly corrects Kelly. The “government’s view is that climate change is causing hotter, drier summers”, but he shrewdly endorses the popular troll-bot myth that fuel load is “a contributing factor” to the bushfires.

“Hazard reduction is just one way of preparing for bushfires – it doesn’t remove the threat of fire,” explains a spokesperson for the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment. And the terrible new fire leaps fire breaks.

Kelly’s a useful idiot. The former Rugby knucklehead would be back selling furniture, had not Scott Morrison lobbied NSW Liberals to skip pre-selection for all sitting Liberal members; torpedo party democracy just to keep Kelly on the team. And out there selling denialism. As Chris Graham argues in New Matilda, there’s nothing that Craig Kelly recites in his Liberal talking points that Aloha Morrison hasn’t already said since he rinsed the sand out of his budgie smugglers on return from Waikiki.

Of course, there’s more to it than Morrison’s need to keep Kelly on board. Malcolm Turnbull weighed in to lobby the NSW Party Executive to waive its emergency powers; drop the Morrison plot to help Kelly dodge a bullet. Had pre-selection proceeded, a more moderate Lib/Lab MP, Kent Jones, would have unseated Kelly.

“Today I learned there was a move to persuade the State Executive to re-endorse Craig Kelly as Liberal candidate for Hughes in order to avoid a preselection – in other words to deny Liberal Party members in Hughes the opportunity to have their say.” Turnbull tweeted just over a year ago.

Besides, Kelly threatened to stand as an independent and cross the floor if he didn’t get pre-selected. Malcolm Turnbull weighed in on behalf of his imaginary friends, the Liberal moderates of Hughes, a south Sydney electorate, who are stoked to have a coal lobby shill represent an electorate where the monstrous new bush fire still rages today.

Hold it right there. Kelly is quickly gagged in the name of transparency and broad churchiness that is today’s Liberal Party- where any MP can say anything – provided his PM agrees. Sky News “Political Editor” Andrew Clennell claims, on Thursday, control freak Morrison, “… requests MPs don’t do any international media interviews …”

It’s a dig at Kelly. But only if Sky News had a skerrick of credibility. The supposed ban could well be a PM’s office drop to help boost Morrison’s floundering leadership. There’s no real evidence that this PM has any more sway over his right wing than Turnbull.

Above all, the government insists, now is not the time to talk. Unless you are the PM who gets a fab, fur-lined, fully scripted, designer interview with David Speers on ABC, Sunday to help narcissistic Scott Almighty from marketing to sing his own praises.

My, he’s called out the military. (Reserve). No-one’s done that before. He lies. Black Saturday in Victoria 2009 saw 600 ADF personnel deployed. But Speers can’t go there. Victoria doesn’t exist in the Canberra bubble – nor can the past intrude upon the eternal present of “news”. But, man, can motormouth Morrison talk up one simple phone call.

“I mean, the scale of these fires going across two very large jurisdictions reached an unprecedented level and that required an unprecedented response at that time and one was delivered and delivered very quickly.”

How many reservists have been deployed? If employed they have to get leave from work. “You may not be forced to take any form of paid or unpaid leave.”

How well trained are they? What was the call-up? “We are caught up in an unprecedented, catastrophic and uniquely dangerous bushfire crisis. Drop whatever you’re doing and join us?” A rapid, mass deployment may not be easy.

Morrison expects applause for a desperate afterthought after four years of his government ignoring warnings. Friday, over 30,000 people march in Sydney, alone, in a series of nation-wide demonstrations, quiet Australians take to the street to demand Morrison be sacked over his government’s lack of action on climate change.

Overseas protests are held from London to Lima. Morrison sooks on 2GB. John Stanley’s minding the mike while Alan Jones is on holiday. Oddly, the PM’s courage evaporates when Stanley asks him to book an ear-bashing with Alan on his return.

It’s “disappointing” that people are conflating the bushfire crisis with Australia’s emission reduction targets, ScoMo-Pinocchio tells 2GB Friday.

“We don’t want job-destroying, economy-destroying, economy-wrecking targets and goals, which won’t change the fact that there have been bushfires or anything like that in Australia,” he dog-whistles up a farrago of lies.

We? Only the federal government wants inaction on carbon and greenhouse gases. In fact, every state and mainland territory government in the country has made either aspirational or legislated commitments toward zero-emissions. Victoria has legislated a target of net zero emissions by 2050, while the ACT aims for net zero by 2045.

Job destroying; economy wrecking? The coal industry employs less than 0.4% of the Australian workforce and its royalties contribute just 2% of revenue to NSW and Queensland budgets. That’s before we subtract national, annual tax-based subsidies of $12 billion to boost fossil fuel production and consumption. Tax-payers subsidise wealthy companies?

Abreast of science; prompted by years of first-hand observation and experience, former emergency chiefs step up to write the PM an open letter warning about funding cuts to fire services, the coalition’s criminal negligence of the facts of global heating and the fatal consequences of following ignorance, self-interest and the sirens of the coal lobby.

“In the last year we’ve seen unseasonal fires in Tasmania, Victoria, NSW, Queensland and Western Australia, floods and twin cyclones in parts of northern Australia, longer bushfire danger periods and fires burning in rainforests,” the statement, signed by 23 representatives from each state and territory, says.

“Rising greenhouse gas pollution from the burning of coal, oil and gas is worsening extreme weather and putting people in danger.”

Now “pants-on-fire” Morrison gallantly blames yet another woman. (First it was Jenny and the girls.) This time, it’s NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian. She’s refusing federal help to fight fires. Gladys is furious. NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner, Shane Fitzsimmons simply says “it just didn’t happen”. Senior Liberals rush to support their premier, united against the PM’s dishonesty; his latest act of evasive misogyny.

Greens are to blame, lies barking Barnaby Joyce, throwing a hissy fit of relevance deprivation to divert a bit of heat off the PM. Always keen to recycle disinformation, Joyce repeats the old canard that “green caveats” for preventing hazard reduction burns led to the current bushfire catastrophe. Fitzsimmons rejects Joyce’s claims, saying the biggest challenge with hazard reduction is the “weather and the windows available” to do it safely not “environmental clearances.”

On Saturday, his shifty PM is keenly scapegoating, saying people “who say they are seeking those actions on climate change” could also be the same people who “don’t share the same urgency of dealing with hazard reduction”.

None of this is true. It’s easier to blame arsonists and greenies than to act on expert advice. It may divert attention from the government’s lack of consultation and its failure to delegate or deliver collective action, as Monash University’s James Walter observes.

But it highlights Morrison’s own incompetence; his preference for divisiveness in a crisis. This is a government without a clue and a leader without a plan beyond diversion, evasion and scapegoating, lying and gaslighting. It is a travesty of the notion of governance in the public good. Australians deserve better than this grifter.

Above all the ScoMo show has no scruples. A PM who is happy to recycle lies is not a leader – just a dangerous bullshit artist. Up there with Trump and his BFF Putin.

US philosopher Harry Frankfurt argues that whereas the liar cares about the truth – their aim is to prevent others from learning it – the bullshitter does not care about the difference between the truth and falsity of their assertions. They just pick ideas out, or make them up, to suit their purpose. This makes them more dangerous than liars.

“Bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant.”

But it can’t happen so easily without a servile press. Hero of the week is Emily Townsend who leaves The Australian under a cloud – with a silver lining.

“I find it unconscionable to continue working for this company, knowing I am contributing to the spread of climate change denial and lies. The reporting I have witnessed in the Australian, the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun is not only irresponsible, but dangerous and damaging to our communities and beautiful planet that needs us more than ever now to acknowledge the destruction we have caused and start doing something about it.”

Commercial finance manager who reads between the lies, Emily Townsend emails executive chairman Michael Miller in a sensational open email to all staff.

News Corp papers highlight issues such as arson and hazard reduction to divert readers from climate change’s role in creating longer, more severe fire seasons. Arson may be responsible for one or two fires so far but it’s a major cause in the Oz.

Hazard reduction is no longer quite so relevant to today’s climate. Former NSW fire and rescue commissioner Greg Mullins tells ABC 24 climate change means it’s often too dangerous to burn: “Extreme drought like this, underpinned by 20 years of reduced rainfall, has meant the window for hazard reduction is very narrow now.”

Cutbacks in forestry and national parks personnel mean hazard reduction has fallen to volunteers. But in the end, the best hazard reduction is in calling bullshit to climate science deniers, for ultimately they are a type of arsonist, too.

Naomi Wolf is checking Bullshit Morrison’s dubious claims that the Australian government has sought overseas fire assistance. Dr Wolf calls Morrison’s office. It stonewalls. She’s amazed at how we Australians just take this lying down, tweets indefatigable, investigative reporter Ronni Salt.

“His office is not aware if either offers have been accepted”? In a working democracy the head of state knows if national offers of crisis assistance have been accepted. As does his office. “It’s alarming how they’ve tried to habituate people to no response,” she tweets. It’s even more alarming how the PM will just make up stuff.

War breaks out between NSW Liberals and Pinocchio Morrison, over his incredible story that the state government rejected offers of navy ships to help evacuate bushfire victims from Mallacoota and other fire-ravaged south coast towns. Further stretching credibility is that the story is dropped by the PMC to The Daily Tele’s Sharri Markson.

Labor also is losing credibility as an effective opposition on the need to get real about global heating. Terminally conflicted opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, wrings his hands in despair. Yet his recent advocacy of coal exports aligns him with other Labor MPs in the Kelly gang; the Parliamentary Friends of Coal Exports, (PFCE).

Albanese articulates his vision as shadow Prime Minister. He gets up to over-share his despair. No, Albo, no. Read the government and other, independent modelling that shows our economy will grow at just the same rate without coal.

“Despair not just that Craig Kelly has those views and continues to advocate them, not just here in Australia, but globally, and be seen to be representing the Australian government’s position, but the knowledge that he’s one of the people who has held back action,”

Albo sobs, backing the Coalition’s coal export toxic nonsense. Can our shadow PM not see how promoting coal makes him another “one of the people” to hold back action? Shut your coal-hole, Albo.

“I have seen a number of people suggest that somehow the government does not make this connection,” Morrison says deploying Trump’s favourite clapped-out bandwagon tactic “people say” followed by a fishy red-herring “The government I lead has always made that connection and that has never been in dispute.”

The Bureau of Meteorology’s clear advice is that climate change is “influencing the frequency and severity of dangerous bushfire conditions in Australia and other regions of the world, including through influencing temperature, environmental moisture, weather patterns and fuel conditions”.

In the 2008 Garnaut Climate Change Review of the scientific evidence of the impacts of climate change on Australia and its economy, Ross Garnaut predicted that without adequate action, Australia would face a more frequent and intense fire season by 2020.

The bushfires that have ravaged our nation over the last four weeks, and which are likely to burn for at least a month more, are not just devastating farms, homesteads and forests. They also expose the wilful abdication of responsibility of a government in thrall to the coal-lobby and its servitude to a small but shrill group of climate science-deniers.

While Craig Kelly has widely been pilloried as a national embarrassment and a disgrace, he may have done us all a favour. His ITV interview debacle helps reveal the monumental ineptitude of the Morrison government he represents.

Above all, Kelly epitomises the Coalition’s dangerous, wilful ignorance, its mining industry muppetry as much as it helps expose the toxic nonsense of the climate science deniers and coal lobby shills which poison its ear and hence corrupt our body politic.

Scott Morrison and his government are as straw men in a firestorm.