Hatred

By Bert Hetebry I was sent this quote by Bertrand Russell this morning: “When…

Queensland Futures: Massaging Labor’s Primary Vote

By Denis Bright Labor’s Alternative Policy Direction can be packaged as an…

Handmaiden to the Establishment: Peter Greste’s Register of…

When established, well fed and fattened, a credible professional tires from the…

Queensland Futures: A LNP Landslide on 26 October…

By Denis Bright Clutching their Little Blue Book of Motherhood Statements in…

Sensor trial hopes to empower managers to monitor…

Bushfires are one of Australia’s greatest challenges and are becoming more frequent…

Conflict ‘deepens and amplifies’ gender inequality – new…

New global research involving over 10,000 children and young people from 10…

$100 Billion since 2023: Australia missing out on…

While private Chinese investment into Australia seriously lags, there are unparalleled opportunities…

Aged care providers must not shirk scrutiny

The National Health Services Union has strongly endorsed an open letter from…

«
»
Facebook

Be kind

By 2353NM

You would think after a month or two, Senator McKenzie’s ‘own goal’ in the allotment of sporting grants would have subsided. If anything, the stench is now worse than when McKenzie’s largess to shore up political positions first came to light. In Senate hearings, an executive of the Australian Audit Office, Brian Boyd, restated the Audit Office findings on the record in the middle of February (thanks to Tasmanian Senator and cultural warrior Eric Abetz asking the question when he really didn’t want the honest response).

The 290 ineligible projects that were funded included:

  • 272 projects that had started work by the time agreements were signed;
  • eight that had completed work before the agreement was signed;
  • five late applications that were accepted; and
  • four applications that were amended after they were assessed.

“The guidelines’ eligibility requirements don’t end just when you’ve lodged the application — this is common across many grants programs,” Boyd said.

There is also some evidence of the now infamous colour coded spreadsheets going through the Prime Minister’s Office.

Deputy Prime Minister, Infrastructure Minister and recent victor over Barnaby Joyce apparently also has questions to answer about equity and fairness, with Nine Media reporting that McCormack awarded 94% of the value of some infrastructure grants to Coalition marginal seats in the period just prior to the last election.

There is a certain cynicism and contempt that allows behaviour demonstrated by McKenzie, McCormack and others to be considered acceptable. When former Liberal Leader and Prime Ministerial hopeful John Hewson writes the following in Nine Media’s papers, you really have a problem (if you hadn’t guessed it already).

Scott Morrison read selectively from the report by Phil Gaetjens, his former fixer and now secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, on the sports grants affair. Gaetjens found — no surprise –– that the then sports minister, Bridget McKenzie, had a clear conflict of interest in failing to declare her membership of a clay-shooting club to which she made a grant.

McKenzie went down like a clay pigeon but when it came to the rest of the grants, the Gaetjens report simply “disagreed” with the Auditor-General that the whole business was crook –– that these grants were being distributed to buy votes in marginal seats. No, it said, the grants were “eligible”. Nothing to see here.

We’ll see about that. There will still be a parliamentary inquiry into this and other grants schemes.

Voters, certainly, are sick to death of it. The National Party carries on, seeing such programs as slush funds for the Nationals’ interest, not the national interest, blithely disregarding the erosion of their standing in regional Australia. On they go, pushing for the government to fund a new coal-fired power station in North Queensland in defiance of all logic: there is no net demand for electricity in North Queensland; banks won’t fund it; insurers won’t insure it; renewables are cheaper and have significant export potential.

Hewson goes on to suggest a six-stage plan to bring some accountability and honour back to the political system. It’s well worth a read (and yes, it does include a ‘Federal ICAC’).

You can also understand why there isn’t a line of community organisations trying to hand the money back. Certainly in some cases the executives of the organisations would have known exactly what was going on, there are certainly also those community organisations where the midnight oil was burnt trying to justify a government grant in a few hundred words and just happened to be geographically in an area where McKenzie wished to influence. Their good fortune will most certainly assist the individual organisations to provide services to our community.

Influence is where the real problem is. There seems to be a groupthink in political parties that justifies the end — retention of power — over the means — acceptance of the rules and actually doing their job, which is the representation of the views and needs of the communities that represent them.

Former Minister in the Newman Queensland LNP Government and member for Currumbin in the Queensland state Parliament Jan Stuckey announced some time ago that she would not be standing for re-election in the scheduled October 2020 state election. At the time, Stuckey claimed that she had been in Parliament for a considerable period of time and it was time to go. More recently, Stuckey announced a change of plans and announced an immediate retirement due to her ongoing clinical depression.

According to Stuckey, who would have a better idea than anyone else, one of the causes of her depression was the vilification by her colleagues in the LNP after voting in favour of the decriminalisation of abortion in Parliament during 2019. Stuckey was one of three LNP Queensland Members of Parliament to support the legislation in an allegedly ‘free vote’. Arguably, Stuckey would have consulted with some in her electorate as well as her local party members prior to the vote, so she was doing her job. Those who vilified her in contrast were allowing groupthink to outweigh a politician’s responsibility to those that elected them and accepting that others have a different viewpoint.

On 17 January 2020, The Canberra Times published an open letter to Prime Minister Morrison written by a resident of Malua Bay on the New South Wales South Coast discussing the total contempt with which Morrison and his colleagues have treated anyone that raised concerns about climate change in the years preceding the recent catastrophic bushfires. One of the observations in the letter is:

I paddled onto Newcastle Harbour, the largest coal port in the world, with hundreds of kayakers in a symbolic closure of the port for one day. I sat down on the floor of Parliament House as part of the People’s Parliament for action on climate change. Your party chose to trivialise the issue and to brand me as a criminal who needed to be handed increased penalties, including prison sentences.

Like Stuckey’s experience, it seems that alternative opinions to the groupthink are ridiculed and those expressing the differing opinions vilified.

There are plenty of examples around that would suggest that there are plenty of alternate views to the groupthink, should politicians venture outside the ‘Canberra bubble’. This site could be one of them, another could be the groups of ‘quiet Australians’ of various ages and past histories that are concerned about the Morrison Government’s lack of real and genuine action on climate change.

Most of us react badly to the groupthink. Let’s face it there is only a small group of people that even consider putting their hand up to be members of political parties, let alone the representatives of those parties in Parliament. While all politicians in theory represent their electorates, we all know the reality is frequently different. Conversely, there have been good results when the promotion of collaborative behaviours and just being kind to others are implemented. Some scientists are promoting a theory where kindness to others has beneficial results to society as a whole

“We can change society, and can change it for the better,” argues evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University in the US.

He says experiments using his particular brand of evolutionary theory have shown encouraging kindness and collaboration in schools can help students on the cusp of dropping out, to thrive.

If it was applied to political life it can’t be worse that the currently accepted norms of bullying, vilification and groupthink, can it?

What do you think?

This article was originally published on The Political Sword

For Facebook users, The Political Sword has a Facebook page:
Putting politicians and commentators to the verbal sword

Like what we do at The AIMN?

You’ll like it even more knowing that your donation will help us to keep up the good fight.

Chuck in a few bucks and see just how far it goes!

Donate Button

11 comments

Login here Register here
  1. Pingback: Be kind #newsoz.org #auspol - News Oz

  2. New England Cocky

    “… it seems that alternative opinions to the groupthink are ridiculed and those expressing the differing opinions vilified.”

    The attitude/strategy only makes sense when you realise that having no polices of their own, save to remain in power at every cost to Australian voters, the Smirkie Sacked from Marketing Liarbral Nazianal$ misgovernment only has unfounded criticism of anybody and everybody who has a better idea for improving Australia for Australian voters.

    Remember the Himmler edict; tell a lie enough times and it becomes “the truth”.

    The facts are that this misgovernment could not scratch its backside and get it correct, but the too tame MSM glorify each and every misgovernment press release without any critical comment. Things are desperate when Media Watch is the only media programme commenting accurately upon the media performance.

    Read up on German history between 1918 and 1935 because we are seeing a rerun in Australian politics in the 21st century.

  3. totaram

    NEC: Just for the record, I think it was Josef Goebbels, who was the propaganda minister. Himmler was head of SS, gestapo etc.

  4. Vikingduk

    How does one be kind to a worthless, sanctimonious smirking sack of shit and this fascist farce called government? They commit crimes against humanity on a daily basis. Treasonous, cunning shithouse rats, lying hypocrites, psychopathic ego trippers. Betrayed we are by these garbage gobbling arsewipes, these putrid pustules have given up their rights to be considered human. Fck them all.

  5. DrakeN

    Perhaps the kindest thing that we could do is to put them out of our misery and inter them face down in lead lined coffins, enclosed in heavy sarcophagi, and buried where the Nuclear waste is stored for all time.

  6. New England Cocky

    @totaram: Thank your for the edit. Of course you are correct. Memory needs replenishing.

  7. Kerri

    I think the bully boys club has the attitude that if you can’t take it then you best be leaving.
    Sadly their tactic appears to be working.

  8. paul walter

    Phil Gaetjens investigating the mess?

    A bit like Sam Giancana investigating Vito Genovese?

  9. Baby Jewels

    Any voter who still believes a word out of #scottyfrommarketing’s mouth can only be viewed as a complete fool.

  10. Ill fares the land

    Poor Phil Gaetjens. His demise will simply be dismissed as “one for the team”. His willingness to write a nonsense report at the demand of Scotty from Marketing is understandable, but he clearly wrote what he was told to write. This will, more or less have been; “divert attention from the eligibility of the grants by claiming they were all eligible; draw attention to a minor breach of parliamentary etiquette to justify McKenzie being removed if she won’t resign and don’t worry about facts”.

    This is the sort of Public Service Scotty from Marketing refers to. One that blindly does his bidding. Much is made of Morrison’s bizarre faith and how it informs his ideology and infects his decisions, but less is made of his abjectly neurotic refusal to take the counsel of anyone else.

    He has displayed this trait throughout his decidedly checkered professional career (notably, being sacked as CEO of Tourism Australia by an LNP Minister!!). The only way I can see to properly interpret his history and his actions as PM is that he is, like Trump, a total autocrat. He is, presumably, so enamoured with himself and deluded about his level of ability and his intellect, that he is utterly convinced his role as PM is only to tell others what to do and to surround himself with sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear – most likely out of fear, because when all is said and done, Morrison is a genuine boofhead who likes to intimidate his detractors, opponents or anyone who simply doesn’t wholeheartedly support him. That might be tolerable except for the fact that as we saw in brutally sharp relief during the bushfires that not only is Morrison devoid of leadership skills, his only reference point is how everything affects him. He might intellectualise someone else’s position or circumstances, but his responses are superficial and disconnected (e.g.,forced handshakes with people who had clearly rejected his overtures), because so is he.

  11. crypt0

    Actually that sounds exactly like Trump!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

The maximum upload file size: 2 MB. You can upload: image, audio, video, document, spreadsheet, interactive, text, archive, code, other. Links to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other services inserted in the comment text will be automatically embedded. Drop file here

Return to home page