Despite the headlines on Sunday morning, it seems that the vast majority of the attendees at Mardi Gras last weekend were in fact ‘feeling the love’

police said the overall behaviour of 120,000 spectators and 12,500 participants on Saturday night was “pleasing”.

There were no major incidents other than the arrest of the seven men and two women.

Rev Fred Nile, who made a political career out of praying for rain on the night of the Mardi Gras must be singularly unimpressed. Those arrested were protesting a lack of ‘queer solidarity with Palestine’ and not the parade.

It’s actually wonderful that a group of over 130,000 people can gather together in a major city with so little in the way of disruption. While the Mardi Gras started off as a protest rally, it’s now a celebration and certainly a boost to the Sydney and New South Wales economy. It also demonstrates that there is a lot of good in humanity – arguably something that is completely missed by political operatives.

There have been many reports of the campaigning that occurred in the lead up to the Dunkley by-election. While both sides claim to have won, the reality is the swing to the opposition was within the usual expectations for a by election and governments vote didn’t do what it usually does in a by-election and go backwards. The new Member of Parliament will also be sitting on the government benches, so it’s not that easy to find any validity in the opposition’s claim of a famous victory.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton had been visiting the electorate and in his usual practice making statements before the facts were checked,

It was question time on Thursday, two days out from the Dunkley byelection. Victoria Police had just confirmed the arrest of a man released from immigration detention who was issued with four assault and stalking charges.

The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, made the alleged incidents in Richmond the centrepiece of the Coalition’s question time attack; soon after his deputy, Sussan Ley, tweeted an inflammatory claim about “foreign criminals”.

But just hours later, Victoria Police conceded they had got the wrong man. After reviewing footage, they no longer believed the person involved was someone released from immigration detention.

The was also a concerted campaign by a conservative activist group Advance, who according to Crikey, introduced a ‘new, nastier brand of politics’ in an attempt to win the Dunkley by-election for the opposition.

According to Crikey, Advance’s advertising claimed that the ALP ‘engineered’ the High Court decision to release the refugees and asylum seekers that had been placed in ‘permanent detention’. Not only that, but the implication was that every one of them was going to reoffend, despite not all of them offending in the first place. In the same article, it’s claimed that Advance spent $350,000 in Dunkley in the lead up to the by election and as we know now it didn’t affect the outcome at all.

Advance’s ultra-negativity is reasonably new to Australian politics and is a reflection of the conservative right in the USA. The difference in the USA is that elections are not compulsory, so if there is an increase in voters, organisations similar to Advance (as well as organisations such as ‘Occupy Democrats’ and ‘The Lincoln Project’ from the progressive side) can arguably claim that they increased the number of people voting, which is seen to be good for democracy.

Advance’s problem is it can’t point to any evidence that it increased the number of people voting or changed the vote outside what would be expected at a federal by-election. While super aggressive advertising may appeal to a small sector of the community, to most it is just another reason to turn away from any interest in politics whatsoever. We need people to be involved so that a representative group of people are sitting in our Parliaments making the laws for us all.

The biggest loser from the Dunkley by-election seems to be Advance. The unfortunate thing for all of us is they will probably ‘double down’ and try to be angrier and more aggressive next time around. We don’t really need or want US style politics in Australia, despite the aggro and hate, it leads to the ridiculous situation where the Democrats in the USA reckon they have a chance of getting an endorsement from Taylor Swift, who has already suggested to her fans that they should enrol to vote. And the Republicans Donald Trump is courting the Christian religious broadcasters in an attempt to gain support from their listeners. At their National Convention (despite their ‘tax-exempt and non-profit’ status prohibiting political comment)

Trump promised to create a new taskforce to counter “anti-Christian bias” by investigating “discrimination, harassment and persecution against Christians in America”. He vowed to appoint more conservative judges, reminded the audience of his decision to break with decades of international consensus and move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and assured them a future Trump administration would take particular aim at transgender people – for example, by endorsing policies to restrict access to gender-affirming healthcare.

While some things that are made in America are good, political marketing isn’t one of them. And before anyone suggests that the progressive side of politics in Australia wouldn’t stoop so low, some of the advertising from the ALP and Greens for the upcoming party political Brisbane City Council election (which is the Coalition’s last toehold of power on the Australian mainland) isn’t too far behind the efforts of Advance and the Coalition that we have been criticising here.

It’s time for the political parties in general to tell us what they will do better, rather than tearing the other side down. Sure, tearing down is easier – but it leaves us with a diminished understanding of the ideals and policies of the eventual victor.

By James Moore

Anyone who knows the Texas and Mexico border in any manner even approaching familiarity, would have laughed in D. Trump’s face during his news conference at Eagle Pass. Technically, there was nothing news worthy about his appearance on the banks of the Rio Grande and he did not answer questions. Instead, he did what he always does, which was to stand in front of a microphone, ramble and lie, prolifically, while what passes for media duly recorded his words and dispatched them outbound to distort America’s perceptions and ruin any hopes for true understanding of La Frontera. I cannot recall a time when I saw a reporter call out Trump’s or Abbott’s lies that serve their politics.

In a considerably inarticulate attempt to increase the phobias being pushed by his party and by the angry little man serving as the governor of Texas, Trump explained that jails and prisons in the African Congo are being emptied of killers and various types of criminals and they are flooding across the border into Texas. No, they are not, but no one called him out on this most fantastical of his lies, either, during that photo op. Instead, the head of the Texas National Guard, a man who is expected not to make political appearances in a uniform, stood in the rear and affirmatively nodded his head at every outrageous claim that slipped between the dead, dry lips of America’s most legendary liar. Suelzer continued to smile, smirk, and nod as Trump made up numbers regarding how many miles of border wall had been built during his administration. We must at least give the pathetic soul credit for not claiming Mexico paid for the construction, as he had promised. Someone, though, had probably told him the Congo was over near Arizona.

Maj. Gen. Thomas Suelzer, who has led the Texas Military Department for the past two years, was violating both rules and norms about a service member participating in political endeavors while in uniform. U.S. history and tradition have long made it standard that political behavior that appears to represent the military violates the apolitical stance that must be exhibited by the armed forces. Suelzer was appointed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, which makes it unsurprising that he might be used in an unconventional fashion to promote a political point of view regarding the border. His metronomic nodding in approval as Trump prevaricated, however, was an indication of his personal beliefs, and they have no business being exhibited during his service. National Guard officials are looking into Suelzer’s decision to appear with the former president but I would expect nothing to come of their likely pro forma investigation.

Abbott remains unabashed about using state resources to promote his political agenda, and nothing is more important to him than the border. His focus has little, if anything, to do with solving the immigration problem. Instead, he has created a multi-billion dollar issues platform to raise his political profile, and Texas taxpayers are funding the entire operation. Abbott brags consistently about the work being done on the border by Texas Guardsmen and women but there is nothing in evidence that proves the concertina wire and razor buoys in the river and young men with guns have done anything to stop, or even reduce, the flow of people. He bragged earlier in the week that his project was having results because migrants had started crossing in greater numbers in Arizona. This is not solving a problem, it’s relocating it, much the way border pressure in the 80s prompted drug cartels to move their product through Florida and up the East Coast of the U.S. and away from Texas and the Southwest.

Abbott spent the day smiling like a fanboy of Trump’s as they paraded through what has come to look like a cheap set for B-grade prison breakout film. When Trump later told a network TV interviewer that Abbott was on the short list for vice president, the governor insisted he wanted to remain in Texas. Why wouldn’t he? The man can waste billions in tax dollars, screw up everything from school funding to Child Protective Services, and he still wins elections. He is pleased with himself and his border battlements even though word has gotten around south of the Rio Grande that Abbott is providing free airplane and bus rides to the North, if you can just get across. Instead of stopping immigrants, his policies are only seducing them to keep coming. After stepping off a plane or bus north of the Mason-Dixon Line, an immigrant can melt away into the population and never return for any scheduled court dates or follow up processing.

Abbott does not want the immigration problem solved any more than does his hero Trump. When it goes away, so does their notoriety and the cameras. There is no more dangerous place to be in all the land than between Donald Trump and a TV camera. Instead of working with Democrats and moderate Republicans to approve a measure that experts consider the strongest set of immigration regulations ever passed, Trump has urged his party to not let the legislation get through the U.S. House. The Speaker, a man who claims his god speaks to him often and is guiding his decisions, is paying more attention to the disembodied voice of Trump, who has told Speaker Moses to kill the bill. If the border situation were to improve from the passage of bipartisan legislation, what would the crumbling GOP have to whine about? President Biden, who was in Brownsville the same day Trump was with Abbott in Eagle Pass, offered to work with the Republican to get the new law passed, which is about as likely as the two sitting down for drinks and dinner. Abbott, meanwhile, tweeted or Xed or whatever it is now, that the death of the Georgia student by an illegal immigrant meant that Biden had blood on his hands. Abbott has kept his hands clean from blood by never even mentioning the names of the Guard soldiers who died while serving in his Operation Lone Star or the 74 people who died on this side of the Rio Grande as a result of high-speed chases precipitated by his pet project, including a 7-year-old bystander.

While Abbott was strutting his wheels in Eagle Pass, an exercise that had no purpose other than stroking the pitiful ego of the former president, Texas was afire. The Smokehouse Creek Fire, the largest wildfire in the state’s history, was racing across the Panhandle and burning a million acres and Abbott was too busy to deal with it because he was tied up holding Trump’s hand. The flames, whipped by winds, tore across the famed Turkey Track Ranch, northeast of Borger. The 80,000 acre property was recently on the market for $200 million dollars and appears to have lost much of its grasslands and several buildings. The Turkey Track is also the site of a bit of Texas history as the location of the two Battles of Adobe Walls, where Kit Carson concluded the Indian wars against the Comanche.

After six days had passed and the fire was still out of control, Abbott decided to finally express an interest. He put on his newest and starchiest disaster shirt, bearing his name and title over the pocket, and flew to Borger to hold one of his lecture series, which mistakenly gets referred to as a news conference. While reporting on damage and commending the bravery of firefighters, Abbott, almost unbelievably, used a line that he first uttered during his only appearance at the mass shooting in a Uvalde school. “It could have been a lot worse,” he said. Actually, it could have been much better if the thousands of Texas National Guard soldiers stationed on the border were redeployed to fight the fires and undertake a task that helps Texans and saves people instead of wasting their own lives as political pawns of a cravenly ambitious governor.

Abbott made it clear to Trump and his sycophants that he planned to run for reelection as governor of Texas. Maybe he arrived at that decision flying back to Austin from Eagle Pass, a town literally being ruined by his policies. The flight path would have taken Abbott directly over Uvalde, a sad spot that he has not returned to since the day of the mass slaughter of children attending school. Everywhere he goes, tragedy and failure are oversized come-alongs. His ability to ignore Uvalde, though, and avoid political consequences, may have offered some inspiration to guide his reelection decision. I have a bit of political experience on my airframe and I think I can provide him a tagline for his next campaign: “Greg Abbott for Governor: It could have been a lot worse.”

Though I cannot imagine how.

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continued from Authoritarianism is taking over the world. Will it snare Australia?

To recap, in Part 1 I wrote that:

In recent years, we have witnessed three individual politicians who have used the techniques of the authoritarian leader, fear, negativity, misinformation and lies. I refer to Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison and the now opposition leader Peter Dutton. All have used the methods of an authoritarian ruler.

The best way to guard against a takeover by a popular authoritarian is to create the best democracy possible.

Democracy is a complex political system that involves various components. Still, at its core, it is about individuals with similar beliefs and values collaborating to create a set of principles that guide their actions and decisions. It is a process that requires active participation and engagement from all members of the community, with a focus on inclusivity and equality. Democracy is a mechanism for achieving consensus and promoting the common good through dialogue, debate, and compromise.

They then become the foundation of political parties. These ideologies pull in different directions in a quest for majority approval by the people. It is a far from perfect system that has variations all around the world. It is elastically flexible, unpredictable and, at its worst, violent and highly combative.

The system of Australian Democracy, when it functions optimally, is characterised by a sense of dignity and constructive engagement. It effectively serves society’s needs and can accommodate a broad range of ideas and perspectives, regardless of their extreme. However, it is worth noting that the Australian democratic system is not perfect; it is far from ideal.

What’s wrong with our Democracy?

In their article The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule, Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz contend that:

“Undemocratic leaders and their supporters in democratic environments have worked to reshape or manipulate political systems, in part by playing on voters’ fears of change in their way of life and by highlighting the very real failures of their predecessors. They have promoted the idea that, once in power, their responsibility is only to their own demographic or partisan base, disregarding other interests and segments of society and warping the institutions in their care so as to prolong their rule. Along the way, the democratic principles of pluralism, equality, and accountability – as well as basic stewardship and public service – have been lost, endangering the rights and well-being of all residents.”

In fact, it can sometimes be cumbersome and unwieldy, and there have been instances where it has failed to meet the expectations of its constituents. Despite its imperfections, the Australian democratic system remains an important and valuable institution that plays a critical role in shaping the nation’s future.

Common to most Western Democracies (without anything better), it has a capitalistic economic system. One that is badly in need of an overhaul.

In Australia, the right to vote is the gift that democracy gives. People are free to vote for whichever party (or individual) they support, but overriding this is the fact that people cannot possibly believe in democracy if, at the same time, they think their party is the only one that should ever win.

A clear indication of an Australian democracy in decline is that people are giving up this voting gift, literally saying: “A pox on both your houses”.

The 2022 election had the lowest turnout for a century:

“For the first time since compulsory voting was introduced for the 1925 federal election, turnout fell below 90%.”

Our political system is in crisis because our solicitations need to speak with clarity on issues that concern people, particularly women.

I would argue that an enlightened democracy should give the people a sense of purposeful participation. It should forever be open to regular improvement in its methodology and implementation. Its constitutional framework should be exposed to periodical revision, renewal, compromise, and bipartisanship when the common good cries out.

But above all, its function should be that regardless of ideology, the common good should be served first and foremost. A typical good, healthy democracy serves the collective from the ground up rather than a top-down democracy that exists to serve secular interests.

Every facet of society, including the democratic process, needs constant and thoughtful renewal and change. Otherwise, we become so trapped in the longevity of sameness that we never see better ways of doing things.

Unfortunately, Australia’s version of the democratic process has none inherent in it and is currently sinking into a quagmire of American Tea Party hypotheses.

I am not a political scientist, historian or a trained journalist. I write this as a disgruntled and concerned citizen because it seems that the Australian democracy I grew up with no longer exists.

The demise of Australian democracy originates in a monumental shift by both major parties to the right, with the result that neither seems to know exactly what they stand for.

They are now tainted with sameness.

The Liberal Party has been replaced by neo-conservatism, authoritarian leadership.

Labor has lost its zeal for change and how to go about it.

We have ended up with an individual identity against a collective one, and old-style Liberalism no longer has a voice. There is little or no difference between the Liberals and the National Party, who seem irrelevant as a political force. Conservatives have gone down the path of inequality with a born-to-rule mentality that favours the rich.

They still carry the “lifters” and “leaners” tags so popular with the Abbott era.

“It is a distillation of the idea that there is no such thing as society, that we are only responsible for our own circumstances”. (Tim Dunlop, The Drum, 4/7/2014).

Labor seems unable to walk over the shadow of its past, a time when it did great things to advance the nation.

The Labor Party needs to rid its party of outdated objectives and invest in a social, philosophical common good. And recognise that the elimination of growing inequality is a worthwhile pursuit.

To do nothing is to allow the authoritarian his or her way. I don’t wish to sound alarmist, but…

In recent years, we have witnessed three individual politicians who have used the techniques of the authoritarian leader, fear, negativity, misinformation and lies. I refer to Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison and the now opposition leader Peter Dutton. All have used the methods of an authoritarian ruler.

Next week: Ideas for change.

The starvation regime continues unabated as Israel continues its campaign in the Gaza Strip. One of the six provisional measures ordered by the International Court Justice entailed taking “immediate and effective measures” to protect the Palestinian populace in the Gaza Strip from risk of genocide by ensuring the supply of humanitarian assistance and basic services.

In its case against Israel, South Africa argued, citing various grounds, that Israel’s purposeful denial of humanitarian aid to Palestinians could fall within the UN Genocide Convention as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

A month has elapsed since the ICJ order, after which Israel was meant to report back on compliance. But, as Amnesty International reports, Israel continues “to disregard its obligation as the occupying power to ensure the basic needs of Palestinians in Gaza are met.”

The organisation’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, Heba Morayef, gives a lashing summary of that conduct. “Not only has Israel created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, but it is also displaying callous indifference to the fate of Gaza’s population by creating conditions which the ICJ has said placed them at imminent risk of genocide.” Israel, Morayef continues to state, had “woefully failed to provide for Gazans’ basic needs” and had “been blocking and impeding the passage of sufficient aid into the Gaza strip, in particular to the north which is virtually inaccessible, in a clear show of contempt for the ICJ ruling and in flagrant violation of its obligation to prevent genocide.”

The humanitarian accounting on this score is grim. Since the ICJ order, the number of aid trucks entering Gaza has precipitously declined. Within three weeks, it had fallen by a third: an average of 146 a day were coming in three weeks prior; afterwards, the numbers had fallen to about 105. Prior to the October 7 assault by Hamas, approximately 500 trucks were entering the strip on a daily basis.

The criminally paltry aid to the besieged Palestinians is even too much for some Israeli protest groups which have formed with one single issue in mind: preventing any aid from being sent into Gaza. As a result, closures have taken place at Kerem Shalom due to protests and clashes with security forces.

Their support base may seem to be small and peppered by affiliates from the Israeli Religious Zionism party of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, but an Israeli Democracy Institute poll conducted in February found that 68% of Jewish respondents opposed the transfer of humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza. Rachel Touitou of Tzav 9, a group formed in December with that express purpose in mind, stated her reasoning as such: “You cannot expect the country to fight its enemy and feed it at the same time.”

Hardly subtle, but usefully illustrative of the attitude best reflected by the blood curdling words of Israeli Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, who declared during the campaign that his country’s armed forces were “fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly” in depriving them of electricity, food and fuel.

In December 2023, the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding, among other things, that the warring parties “allow and facilitate the use of all available routes to and throughout the entire Gaza Strip, including border crossings.” Direct routes were also to be prioritised. To date, Israel has refused to permit aid through other crossings.

In February, the Global Nutrition Cluster reported that “the nutrition situation of women and children in Gaza is worsening everywhere, but especially in Northern Gaza where 1 in 6 children are acutely malnourished and an estimated 3% face the most severe form of wasting and require immediate treatment.”

The organisation’s report makes ugly reading. Over 90% of children between 6 to 23 months along with pregnant and breastfeeding women face “severe food poverty”, with the food supplied being “of the lowest nutritional value and from two or fewer food groups.” At least 90% of children under the age of 5 are burdened with one or more infectious diseases, while 70% have suffered from diarrhoea over the previous two weeks. Safe and clean water, already a problem during the 16-year blockade, is now in even shorter supply, with 81% of households having access to less than one litre per person per day.

Reduced to such conditions of monumental and raw desperation, hellish scenes of Palestinians swarming around aid convoys were bound to manifest. On February 29, Gaza City witnessed one such instance, along with a lethal response from Israeli troops. In the ensuing violence, some 112 people were killed, adding to a Palestinian death toll that has already passed 30,000. While admitting to opening fire on the crowd, the IDF did not miss a chance to paint their victims as disorderly savages, with “dozens” being “killed and injured from pushing, trampling and being run over by the trucks.” The acting director of Al-Awda Hospital, Dr. Mohammed Salha, in noting the admission of some 161 wounded patients, suggested that gun fire had played its relevant role, given that most of those admitted suffered from gunshot wounds.

If Israel’s intention had been to demonstrate some good will in averting any insinuation that genocide was taking place, let alone a systematic policy of collective punishment against the Palestinian population, little evidence of it has been shown. If anything, the suspicions voiced by South Africa and other critics aghast at the sheer ferocity of the campaign are starting to seem utter plausible in their horror.

The silly will make print and leave bursts of digital traces; the idiots will make history, if only in small print. One such figure is the shortest serving UK Prime Minister in living memory, the woeful, joke-packed figure of Liz Truss who lasted a mere 50 disastrous days in office. She was even bettered by a satirical, dressed-up lettuce, filmed in anticipation of her brief, calamitous end.

With such a blotted record, the vacuous, inane Truss felt that her experiences were worthy of recounting to the Conservative Political Action Conference, held at National Harbor, Maryland between February 22 and 24. The gathering, conducted since the 1970s and organised by the American Conservative Union, has become something of a mandatory calendar event for US conservative activists. Those from other countries have also tried to make a splash – keeping Truss company was the demagogic voice of Brexit, Nigel Farage, arguably the most influential British politician not to hold a seat in Parliament.

A self-believer of towering insensibility, Truss oversaw during her flashpoint stint in office mind boggling budgetary decisions. On winning the Tory ballot after the fall of Boris Johnson in 2022, she promised £30 billion in tax cuts via an emergency budget, reversing the rise in National Insurance and a range of energy-price guarantees. That these tax cuts – eventually amounting to £45 billion – were primarily skewed to benefit those at the higher end of the scale did not bother her. “The people at the top of the income distribution pay more tax – so inevitably, when you cut taxes you tend to benefit the people who are more likely to pay tax.” What logic; what reasoning.

With figures of such incompetence, responsibility for failure is always attributed to someone, or something else. In Truss’s case, blame initially lay with fellow comic villain and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, with whom she had taken a wrecking ball to the UK economy and the British pound. With Kwarteng, she had previously authored a dotty pamphlet “Britannia Unchained”, warning that Britain should not emulate the economic model of southern European countries, saddled with poor productivity and growth, along with hefty and inefficient public services.

The Economist tasted the irony of it all, seeing Trussonomics as typical of “Britaly”, a country “of political instability, low growth and subordination to bond markets.” A further irony was that the horrified market reaction to Truss suggested her inability to understand the very forces she prefers unleashed over the wickedness of big government and bureaucratic interference. Live by the free market; die by the free market.

What, then, to tell her New World colleagues? At first blush, nothing new. In April 2023, she had already made it across the Atlantic to speak to the Heritage Foundation, where she gave the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture. Monumental failure can undergo changes in transatlantic journey, and the conservative think tank omitted mentioning her spell of prime ministerial lunacy, impressed, instead, by her “long-standing” advocacy “for limited government, low taxes, and freedom, both at home and the UK and around the world.”

The speech was barbed, resentful and absurd, an attempt to channel a politician she resembles in no serious respect, bar certain Little England prejudices, with a smattering of superficially similar economic beliefs. Truss complained of “coordinated resistance from inside the Conservative Party”, “the British corporate establishment”, “the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and even from President Biden.” She grumbled of “a new kind of economic model” that was taking hold in the UK and US, “one that’s focused on redistributionism, on stagnation and on the imbuing of woke culture into our businesses.” Seen from another perspective, this “anti-growth movement”, to use Truss’s daft terminology, had been responsible for her demise.

In her CPAC display, we see an attempt to flatter Donald Trump, drawing from the well of Deep State rhetoric, and various scripted points about insecurity, immigration, terrorism, gender, “wokenomics”, “the power of the left and the power of those bureaucracies.” There are also some head-scratching remarks that lent a cartoonish feel to the mad bat: “you can’t triangulate with terrorists, you can’t compromise with communists, you have to fight for what you believe in.”

The speech is not entirely nonsensical, though Truss misses the significance of any pertinent observations. “What has happened in Britain over the past 30 years is power that used to be in the hands of politicians has been moved to quangos and bureaucrats and lawyers so what you find is a democratically elected government actually unable to enact policies.” While the estrangement of the elected from the elector, aided and abetted by unelected bureaucracies, is hard to deny, Truss is merely implying that an unaccountable dictatorship would surely be far better and representative.

To demonstrate the point, Truss raged against the Office of Budget Responsibility and the Bank of England who “sought to undermine the policies.” Again, the IMF, along with Biden, featured as targets. Again, ignorance of the free market and her ruin by its very dictates, was proudly displayed.

Decoding the Truss basket case of beliefs yields this question: Why were there such impediments to my mad realisation? It was far better, she proposed, to get “a bigger bazooka in order to be able to deliver. And I think we have got to challenge the institutions themselves.” A challenge is a good thing, but best bring a well thought out policy with you when going into battle.

By Denis Bright

The hopeful possibilities of reaching out to build a better future for Australians and for our peaceful regional neighbours are under challenge across the political spectrum from more opportunistic political goals. There are possibilities of a return to more social democratic agendas through better policy management in our existing market economy.

The Poll Bludger has conveniently summarized the political milestones which can be scarred by such manipulative politics. Perhaps positive existential changes are in the autumn winds for consolidation by Easter 2024.

Political Milestones Ahead

Here is a quick glance at just three emergent milestones in Dunkley on Outer Melbourne’s Southeast, Ipswich West in Queensland and Tasmania.

Dunkley by-election – 2 March

Inala by-election – 16 March

Ipswich West by-election – 16 March

Queensland councils – 16 March

Tasmania – 23 March

Dunstan by-election – 23 March

Cook by-election – Early 2024

Tasmanian Legislative Council – 4 May

Northern Territory – 24 August

NSW councils – 14 September

Australian Capital Territory – 19 October

Queensland – 26 October

Western Australia – 8 March 2025

Federal election – By 24 May 2025<

Introducing Dunkley Electorate

The federal LNP will benefit from the campaign by Advance as it strives to convince voters that their cost-of-living concerns are all due to the Albanese Government. There is not a scrap of evidence that the Albanese Government is fuelling inflationary pressures by over-spending. If there is a policy negative it is due to overly cautious responses to cost-of-living challenges.

Nikki Savva’s opinion piece in the SMH (15 February 2024) captured the mindset of Peter Dutton on his mission to win Dunkley for conservative populism. Dated polling released through Wikipedia for Dunkley shows that Labor is slightly ahead in polling from uComms.

The polling predicts a remarkably close result. Expect updates later this week to show the impact of the aggressive style of campaigning by both the LNP and the Advance lobbying network. The funding and steering committee of Advance should be fully investigated by mainstream media as this lobbying group seeks to have a higher profile in Australian political life.

Waiting for a Polling Update in Dunkley

A better-than-expected result for Labor’s Jodie Belyea in Dunkley, might make Peter Dutton a casualty of the by-election campaign.

Now Moving onto Ipswich West in Queensland

Once again, conservative populists have tried to make the Ipswich West by-election results an embarrassment for Labor’s Premier Steven Miles with a focus on tough on crime strategies.

Readers can listen to the tone of political discussion in Ipswich West as reported by Radio 4BC to evaluate the even-handedness of the interview between Peter Gleeson and the endorsed LNP Candidate, Darren Zanow.

The negative coverage of the performance of the Queensland Labor Government in this Radio 4BC interview on issues relating to crime and cost-of-living increases contrasts with the current government towards the City of Ipswich.

Both tough on crime strategies and attacks on levels of government spending have a long political history in Ipswich.

Almost a century ago now, the state seats of Rosewood and Ipswich fell temporarily as the Great Depression approached in 1929, a few months before the Great Crash on Wall Street. The seat of Bremer remained with Labor. Both William Cooper in Rosewood and Dave Gledson in Ipswich failed to win their local seats that year. The current state seat of Ipswich West now includes parts of the Ipswich and Rosewood electorates. This gives Ipswich West a level of volatility which has sent two separate LNP representatives to parliament since 1960 and a One Nation state member.

Responding to concerns about crime in Ipswich, the Queensland Premier and Police Minister Mark Ryan announced the following initiatives on 24 February 2024:

The Miles government is making a further significant investment in the capabilities of the Ipswich Police District.

Following a request from the Queensland Police Service for additional police resources for the Ipswich Police District, the government is providing the Queensland Police Service with a funding boost of $37.6 million to deliver the following additional resources:

Premier Steven Miles assured the voters in Ipswich West that:

… Every Queenslander should feel safe in their homes and community. There will always be more police under my government.

This investment will see dozens more police officers, mobile police beats, and extra resources.

This is to keep residents safe, and to catch offenders…

But Labor’s Tough on Crime Strategies must always be embedded in Labor values to protect human rights with the delivery of sustainable and socially just economic and community development policies. This contrasts with the imprisonment of the now deceased Bob Gibbs MLA (Wolston electorate in Ipswich) for joining in Right to March resistance during the Bjelke-Petersen era in the 1980s.

Street crime is not the only form of criminal activity which state Labor governments have successfully confronted. Previous Labor Governments of Queensland have come down heavily on corrupt practices in the corridors of power and influence within the former Independent Ipswich City Council. This Council was placed under the control of a team of administrators with criminal convictions and even prison sentences to the worst offenders (Brisbane Times 9 January 2020).

Labor also formed the Queensland Investment Corporation (QIC) under the Goss Government in the 1990s as an income earner for the people of Queensland through strategic investment programmes. Unlike Queensland Treasury investments in the Bjelke-Petersen era, the QIC became a quasi-independent investment arm of the Queensland Government. Although the state premier and state treasurer are the only supervising shareholders in the QIC, it is quite unethical for them to be involved in day-to-day operations of the investment fund. However, the Queensland Government can make recommendations to the QIC to implement its planning goals (ShapingSEQ Plan 2023).

Premier Steven Miles in his capacity as Minister for Infrastructure was quite prepared to note my suggestions about the use of QIC investment and direct state government funding for the redevelopment of parts of the Ipswich CBD at a social function at parliament house in November 2023. It is an asset to have such approachable leaders in office with polling profiles that are tracking upwards in the latest poling from uComms in The Courier Mail (24 February 2024).

Co-investment between government agencies and the private sector can strengthen the economic, social and environmental goals embedded in the ShapingSEQ Plan 2023. It is an outreach of the New Keynesianism which has no rapport in far-right LNP circles with their fixation on the bricks and mortar of suburban shopping complexes in places like Yamanto in the Ipswich West electorate. Responsible government intervention can broaden the base of such projects.

Yamanto Shopping Village is a neighbourhood centre anchored by a high performing Woolworths supermarket, Super Amart, McDonalds, Caltex and another 25 specialty tenants. The village is situated on a prominent corner location 35km south-west of Brisbane and 5km south of Ipswich City Centre.

It is a credit to the Queensland Government that revenue from the QIC is available to enhance community development options across Ipswich. QIC returned $127.1 million in profits to the state government with a return of 20 percent on assets in the latest available annual report for 2022-23 from assets under management.

Not all its decisions have great logical appeal, including the wisdom of some QIC’s property investments in the USA in shopping malls and offices to deliver profits back to Queensland.

At the far-off Ohio State University in Columbus, the QIC invested $US483 million in the management of CampusParc to manage the car-parking facilities for students and staff as well as clients to the Wexner Medical Centre on Campus in 2012. This property asset has almost doubled in value according to Bloomberg’s Company News Report (27 September 2023). QIC has invested in similar facilities at Northeastern University in Boston with another 50-year contract. Profit taking on such deals can provide additional revenue for the Queensland Government.

A cool one billion dollars at least would be available from the sale of some US property assets from the still lucrative US property market could assist in revitalising the Ipswich CBD through new co-investment arrangements to transform Top of Town in Ipswich which has suffered from decisions by previous Independent Ipswich City Council administrations to move the hub of retailing across the Bremer River to the Riverlink Shopping Centre with great problems to cross-river traffic flows.

The movement of the hub of retailing in Ipswich to the Riverlink Shopping Centre in North Ipswich through the efforts of insiders in the former Independent Ipswich City Council still needs further investigation by Queensland CCC. Hopefully, QCC’s prior investigations of these issues are not permanently closed.

Installing a new member of parliament at a mid-term by-election is always challenging as shown by the close results in a previous by-election which made the transition from a retiring Ivor Marden MLA to Vi Jordan MLA in 1966. This was indeed a close call. This time Wendy Bourne does not have such high-profile contenders to challenge her transition to serve the people of Ipswich West (Images: Wikipedia).

And Onto the Tasmanian Elections

Any tidal wave of favourable LNP election results in Dunkley, Inala and Ipswich West, would create some momentum for survival of the Rockliff Liberal Government which is the last cab off the rank in this round of elections in March 2024 (Image: Wikipedia)

The Current State of Play in Tasmania

Available polling from Tasmania still predates the decision of the currently dissident Independents and former Liberal Party members to bring down the government. The Jackie Lambie Network (JLN) is now a significant factor in the forthcoming Tasmanian election. JLN was outpolling the Greens in the now dated YouGov polling (Image: Wikipedia):

If the JLN co-operates with Tasmanian Labor, Rebecca White could be premier after the Tasmanian elections. This would be a historic first to have Labor in-control of all Australian states and territories with Anthony Albanese in charge of the national government.

By the next full moon at Easter, these trendlines will have become political reality with immense longer-term impact on Australians. Keep watching the events as they unfold. Don’t be afraid to have your say on the AIM Network Feedback line unless you want the secretive streeting committees of Advance to have greater controls over our political futures.

Your critical responses are a real barrier to more sleep-walking into the future and more compromises with national sovereignty by obscure lobbyists.

It’s widely acknowledged that Tony Abbott came to be Prime Minister because he continually listed some ‘critical’ failures of the then Rudd and Gillard Governments using three-word slogans. Current Opposition Leader Dutton seems to be attempting to follow the same strategy however he seems to be having difficulty in finding a line of attack that cannot be easily debunked. In reality, the restructuring of the Stage 3 Tax Cuts was his time to ‘shine’, however the government clearly won the marketing battle by making the tax cuts fairer to all. Discussing why legislation passed in an era prior to a number of economic shocks may not be ‘fit for purpose’ now – if it ever was probably helped. It’s not hard to see why the Coalition has been dubbed the ‘Noalition’.

It’s also a shame the Albanese Government hasn’t announced real and substantial reform in a number of areas including tax, healthcare and housing to improve the standard of living for all Australians while further isolating the Opposition who seem to be in the business of opposing for oppositions sake (after all it worked for Abbott).

The Opposition’s job is to consider the government’s agenda and either suggest improvement or present a rational and coherent discussion on what they would do better. Dutton seems to be incapable of doing either of these objectives to a satisfactory level. Saying ‘no’ because the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison Government didn’t do it is not rational or coherent.

After Parliament resumed for the year, Dutton claimed that Immigration Minister Andrew Giles is incompetent because the High Court determined that Coalition era legislation regarding detention of refugees were unlawful. So for a number of days all the Coalition could contribute to Parliament’s Question Time was asking Minister Giles why he didn’t amend the laws before the High Court had passed judgement. Apart from the general absurdity of the logic here, people who have committed heinous crimes (and that’s not saying for a minute that all of the refugees in question were convicted of heinous crimes) are released from the prison system every day across Australia. While each state has their own processes that might allow for some monitoring of people released from prison, no state has the power to assume someone is forever guilty based on a previous crime where the person has ‘done the time’.

When some refugees arrived by fishing boat and wandered into a remote community in Western Australia recently, Dutton commenced a campaign suggesting that the Albanese Government has cut funding to the Coalition era border protection program so beloved of Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton (to name a few). A week ago, Dutton claimed:

“They’ve ripped a cumulative $600 million out of Operation Sovereign Borders and Border Force.”

Actually ‘they’ haven’t according to Head of Australian Border Force, Michael Outram in a statement issued a couple of days later,

“Border Force funding is currently the highest it’s been since its establishment in 2015, and in the last year the ABF has received additional funding totalling hundreds of millions of dollars, to support maritime and land-based operations,”

Dutton, ably supported by some interested spectators such as Toyota and Mazda, have claimed there are various dire consequences that will result from the introduction of the government’s New Vehicle Emissions Scheme. Not only will it ruin everyone’s ability to buy the vehicle that is capable of driving to Cape York even though the furthest off-road it will ever go is to jump a traffic island, every tradie in the land will go broke if their vehicle is subject to emissions regulations. When even the internet sites that promote all things motor vehicles are saying that’s not correct, such as here and here there is a problem for Dutton.

Dutton’s claims clearly don’t stand up to scrutiny. In fact, fuel efficiency regulations help the consumer to drive a car that uses less fuel and is cheaper to run (as well as creating less pollution). It’s also interesting the vehicle importers complaining about the speed or severity of the forthcoming regulations generally are also the companies that haven’t been all that serious about introducing more efficient cars into their Australian catalogues – even though they are available overseas where there is already regulation on fuel efficiency and/or emissions.

It was difficult for Dutton to win the debate over the Stage 3 Tax Cuts when sections of the media were headlining their reporting with ‘Working class communities in Coalition held seats the biggest winners in Labor’s stage three tax cuts overhaul’. It’s also difficult to argue that mandating better emissions control or better fuel consumption is a retrograde step for the consumer and the environment.

It’s a pity that the ALP Government seems to have done nothing to broaden the tax base away from wage and salary earners as our population ages or provide assistance to those who literally can’t find a house to rent. Maybe reinstating the former state government operated ‘housing commissions’ would help as the current programs to ‘assist’ housing affordability just don’t work. And while increasing the ‘incentive’ to bulk bill the elderly and children at the doctors may be having some effect, there is a large number of people who still have to work out if they should go to the doctor or eat more than one meal a day this week.

The Albanese Government has demonstrated that substantial policy changes can be made so they are beneficial to a lot more Australians. The political battle can also be won. The more beneficial change that occurs the more evidence there will be that Dutton’s scattergun approach is similar to the boy crying wolf. The ALP has a chance here to embed itself in government for a generation – the question is do they want to take it?

If only we could say that Peter Dutton, Australia’s federal opposition leader and curator of bigoted leanings, was unusual in assuming that granting humanitarian visas to Palestinians might be problematic. But both he, and his skew-eyed spokesman on home affairs, James Patterson, have concluded that votes are in the offing. Refugees may be accepted from the Ukrainian-Russian War, as long as they are Ukrainian, but anything so much as a whiff of a Palestinian fleeing the Israel-Hamas conflict is bound to be concerning. Ukrainians are noble victims; the latter might be terrorist sympathisers or Hamas militants.

This view started being floated in November last year, when Dutton began warning the public that visitor visas for Palestinians could result in a calamity. (At that point, 860 visas had been issued to Palestinians.) “The inadequacy of these checks could result in a catastrophic outcome in our country,” he foamed. “Taking people out of a war zone without conducting the checks, particularly those that are available to us in the US, is reckless.”

No concern was voiced about the possibility that Israelis, who had also been offered 1,793 visas, might pose a problem to the heavenly idyll of Australian security. It is also worth mentioning that Dutton, when home affairs minister, approved over 500 visas a week to Syrians fleeing the civil war. Ditto the granting of 5,000 visas to Afghans the month the Taliban resumed control of Kabul in the aftermath of retreating Western armies.

Dutton’s arithmetic is that of the typical copper: simple, direct, amateurish. Among the Palestinians, “one person, or could be 10 people, I don’t know” might be of concern. His concerns are feverishly listed: “Have interviews been conducted, do we know people’s ideologies, do we know their interest in the west, why they want to come to Australia.” This template would be applicable to every group of visitors or migrants seeking to come to Australia at any one point. No one is likely to say on their visa application: “I come to see your new country and hope to commit atrocities.”

Given the number of conflict zones on Planet Earth, Dutton was offering an obtuse statement calculated to boost flagging popularity. It was also timed within a matter of hours after the declaration of a four-day ceasefire in Gaza. While proving, at times, sketchy in her role as Home Affairs Minister, Clare O’Neil was close to the mark in stating that, “Dutton is a reckless politician who will do and say anything to score political points – even if it puts the national security of Australians at risk.”

But Dutton did not want to be dismissed as a paranoid former police officer who sees criminals everywhere and innocence as a constipated afterthought. “The prime minister here needs to hit the pause button – I’m not saying people shouldn’t come at some point – but people should come when all the checks are conducted.”

Again, a strange sentiment, given that visa applicants tend to face a series of tests that are more demanding than most when seeking to visit the Down Under Paradise where perfection is assumed. “If a visa applicant is assessed as posing a risk to the health, safety or good order of the Australian community, their visa may be considered for refusal,” were the dull words of a government spokesperson.

With the arrival of irregular migrants on the shores of Western Australia this month, cockeyed bigotry again assumed its role on the podium of Australian politics. Seeking to tie the arrivals as connected with shoddy security credentials, the opposition fanned out the implications of granting up to 2,000 visas for Palestinians, a fact seen as particularly galling to the shadow home affairs minister. “In the middle of an unprecedented antisemitism crisis, the government should be taking much greater care in granting visas to people from a war zone run by a terrorist organisation,” bleated Patterson. “How can they possibly assure themselves there is not one Hamas supporter among them? And how will it help social cohesion if they manage to slip through?”

By this logic, no one should ever leave a war zone, an area of devastation, a territory blighted by terror. You just might be a regime supporter, a sympathiser, despite suffering possible harm, even death. But there is an inadvertent slant coming through in Patterson’s mangled world view: Palestinians, having been maimed, murdered and traumatised, might wish to take out their grievance on a foreign power, possibly one sympathetic to Israel. Ignore the survival imperative, the desire to find, rather than abandon, security; focus, instead, on the motivation for vengeance. Even this view suffers for one obvious point: those wishing to avenge their families and friends are bound to wish to stay in Gaza and the West Bank, rather than flee and plot from afar.

With the current arrivals from Gaza – some 340 or so have managed to drip themselves from the Palestinian territories – the bedwetting fantasies of terror being induced by the opposition seem absurd and callous. But absurdity is a proven calculus for electoral success – at least sometimes.

It would seem that many countries around the world have decided that democracy has run its race. Russia, India, Hungary, Turkey, Poland, China, Slovakia, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Guinea-Bissau, Iran, Libya, Laos, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan have-authoritarian-governments.

An explosion of elections is due now or into the near future that will see far-right authoritarian leaders elected who have parroted:

“Amidst all the chaos and uncertainty in the world, it seems that some politicians are trying to gain our trust by making big promises. They pledge to tackle issues like promiscuity, immigration, and corrupt leaders. Do you think they’ll be able to follow through on their promises?”

Many people are concerned about the increasing popularity of right-wing populism, nationalism, and worldwide polarisation. In just a few years:

Within just a few years, we’ve witnessed the election of Donald Trump in the US, the Brexit decision in the UK, the rise of Matteo Salvini in Italy, Victor Orbán in Hungary, the Freedom party in Austria and the Law and Justice party in Poland. The world’s largest democracy, India, is menaced by a newly virulent nationalism and xenophobia.

And last year, the Philippines elected Ferdinand Marcos’ son as President, signalling their preference for strongman politics.

President Putin is expected to secure a victory in the upcoming Russian election. The President has criticised the Western concept of gender, labelling it as a “perversion” and a “complete denial of man.” According to him, the idea is part of an “overthrow of faith and traditional values” by the Western elites.

Many nations and their leaders have discarded democratic practices and turned towards authoritarianism, while some democracies have been shaken by populist forces that reject fundamental principles. Countries with authoritarian powers are banning opposition groups, jailing their leaders, and tightening the screws on independent media.

Findings, released as:

“… part of the 2023 ANU Crawford Leadership Forum, show 77.4 per cent of Australians say they are satisfied or very satisfied with Democracy compared to 81 per cent in 2008.”

Political scientists will tell us that:

“Authoritarianism is the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom. It has a lack of concern for the wishes or opinions of others.”

And that:

“An authoritarian government is also one that inflicts strict rules that limit the personal freedoms of its people. Citizens of countries that have an authoritarian government have diminished rights and privileges and are typically unable to freely practice their faith, fully express themselves, or choose their leaders through free and fair elections.”

When in 1991, the USSR collapsed, to the surprise of many in the West, what materialised was not a liberal democratic government. It was not the end of soviet history as we knew it, for what emerged was Authoritarianism. Since then, it has slowly crawled like rust into a world uncertain of its future.

To vote for these authoritarian, often corrupt figures, the citizens of democratic governments have to be monumentally dissatisfied, firstly, with the governance of their country, secondly, with their leader. Then, they give in to the favoured candidate.

After that, they are confronted with rigged elections.

Having accepted authoritarianism, the peoples of all the nations mentioned increasingly have less to say about their destiny. They are victims of their ignorance and the misinformation used to scare them.

Unfortunately, many voters lack sufficient political awareness, creating a situation where less informed voters outnumber the more politically aware. Consequently, conservative politicians often resort to misleading information to sway public opinion. Such misinformation contains many untruths propagated through various channels to achieve their political objectives. This phenomenon undermines the democratic process and may lead to detrimental outcomes for the general public.

We have to ask why it was that when Russia tumbled, communism wasn’t replaced with some form of Liberal Democracy. Therefore, the invasion of Ukraine, a democratic European country, by an authoritarian regime should have come as no surprise.

Over the past 15 years, the principles of Liberal Democracy have been experiencing a decline and have rapidly retreated. This trend has recently reached a point that was once considered impossible to imagine. A study by Professor Nicholas Biddle said that:

“… the most significant change was fewer Australians being ‘very satisfied’ with Democracy than 15 years ago – 14.2 per cent compared to 23.4 per cent.”

Within many liberal democracies, authoritarian leaders continue to gain strength and popularity

A new report by The Global State of Democracy 2023 says that the erosion of democratic norms has been engineered by leaders claiming to speak in the name of and with the people’s authority.

In many parts of the globe, the fundamental principles of democracy are threatened by various populist leaders whose only interest is in the power they can obtain and the privileges that go with it.

When looking for those ingredients that make a democracy, ask yourself:

Are there free elections?

Is there an independent law system?

Is there a separation of powers?

Is there any transparency in government?

Is there a real opposition?

Who is in control of the budget?

Are ideas and diversity trashed?

Are those who vehemently oppose authoritarianism brushed aside?

I understand that it can be disheartening to see the decline of Liberal Democracy worldwide. It is difficult to accept that this trend has been ongoing for the last decade and a half, and understandably, such an outcome would be hard to imagine.

Is Australia at risk? Could we have a better Democracy?

In recent years, we have witnessed three individual politicians who have used the techniques of the authoritarian leader, fear, negativity, misinformation and lies. I refer to Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison and the now opposition leader Peter Dutton. All have used the methods of an Authoritarian ruler.

The best defence against authoritarianism is to create the best Democracy possible

Democracy is a complex political system involving rules and conventions with various other components. The essence lies in the coming together of people who share common beliefs and values, working in unison to establish a framework of principles that serve as a compass to direct their conduct and choices. It is a process that requires active participation and engagement from all members of the community, with a focus on inclusivity and equality. Democracy is a mechanism for achieving consensus and promoting the common good through dialogue, debate, and compromise.

They then become the foundation of political parties. These ideologies pull in different directions in a quest for majority approval by the people. It is a far from perfect system that has variations all around the world. It is elastically flexible, unpredictable and, at its worst, violent and highly combative.

Having declared authoritarianism a form of dictatorship, next week I will look at a better democracy and how to achieve it.

On February 21, the Royal Courts of Justice hosted a second day of carnivalesque mockery regarding the appeal by lawyers representing an ill Julian Assange, whose publishing efforts are being impugned by the United States as having compromised the identities of informants while damaging national security. Extradition awaits, only being postponed by rearguard actions such as what has just been concluded at the High Court.

How, then, to justify the 18 charges being levelled against the WikiLeaks founder under the US Espionage Act of 1917, an instrument not just vile but antiquated in its effort to stomp on political discussion and expression?

Justice Jeremy Johnson and Dame Victoria Sharp got the bien pensant treatment of the national security state, dressed in robes, and tediously inclined. Prosaic arguments were recycled like stale, oppressive air. According to Clair Dobbin KC, there was “no immunity for journalists to break the law” and that the US constitutional First Amendment protecting the press would never confer it. This had an undergraduate obviousness to it; no one in this case has ever asserted such cavalierly brutal freedom in releasing classified material, a point that Mark Summers KC, representing Assange, was happy to point out.

Yet again, the Svengali argument, gingered with seduction, was run before a British court. Assange, assuming all the powers of manipulation, cultivated and corrupted the disclosers, “soliciting” them to pilfer classified government materials. With limping repetition, Dobbin insisted that WikiLeaks had been responsible for revealing “the unredacted names of the sources who provided information to the United States,” many of whom “lived in war zones or in repressive regimes”. In exposing the names of Afghans, Iraqis, journalists, religious figures, human rights dissidents and political dissidents, the publisher had “created a grave and immediate risk that innocent people would suffer serious physical harm or arbitrary detention.”

The battering did not stop there. “There were really profound consequences, beyond the real human cost and to the broader ability to the US to gather evidence from human sources as well.” Dobbin’s proof of these contentions is thin, vague and causally absent: the arrest of one Ethiopian journalist following the leak; unspecified “others” disappeared. She even admitted the fact that “it cannot be proven that their disappearance was a result of being outed.” This was certainly a point pounced upon by Summers.

The previous publication by Cryptome of all the documents, or the careless publication of the key to the encrypted file with the unredacted cables by journalists from The Guardian in a book on WikiLeaks, did not convince Dobbin. Assange was “responsible for the publications of the unredacted documents whether published by others or WikiLeaks.” There was no mention, either, that Assange had been alarmed by The Guardian faux pas and had contacted the US State Department of this fact. Summers, in his contribution, duly reminded the court of the publisher’s frantic efforts while also reasoning that the harm caused had been “unintended, unforeseen and unwanted” by him.

With this selective, prejudicial angle made clear, Dobbin’s words became those of a disgruntled empire caught with its pants down when harming and despoiling others. “What the appellant is accused of is really at the upper end of the spectrum of gravity,” she submitted, attracting “no public interest whatsoever”. Conveniently, calculatingly, any reference to the enormous, weighty revelations of WikiLeaks of torture, renditions, war crimes, surveillance, to name but a few, was avoided. Emphasis was placed, instead, upon the “usefulness” of the material WikiLeaks had published: to the Taliban, and Osama bin Laden.

This is a dubious point given the Pentagon’s own assertions to the contrary in a 2011 report dealing with the significance of the disclosure of military and diplomatic documents by WikiLeaks. On the Iraq War logs and State Department cables, the report concluded “with high confidence that disclosure of the Iraq data set will have no direct personal impact on current and former US leadership in Iraq.” On the Afghanistan war log releases, the authors also found that they would not result in “significant impact” to US operations, though did claim that this was potentially damaging to “intelligence sources, informants, and the Afghan population,” and intelligence collection efforts by the US and NATO.

Summers appropriately rebutted the contention about harm by suggesting that Assange had opposed, in the highest traditions of journalism, “war crimes”, a consideration that had to be measured against unverified assertions of harm.

On this point, the prosecution found itself in knots, given that a balancing act of harm and freedom of expression is warranted under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. When asked by Justice Johnson whether prosecuting a journalist in the UK, when in possession of “information of very serious wrongdoing by an intelligence agency [had] incited an employee of that agency to provide information… [which] was then published in a very careful way” was compatible with the right to freedom of expression, Dobbin conceded to there being no “straightforward answer.”

When pressed by Justice Johnson as to whether she accepted the idea that the “statutory offence”, not any “scope for a balancing exercise” was what counted, Dobbin had to concede that a “proportionality assessment” would normally arise when publishers were prosecuted under section 5 of the UK Official Secrets Act. Prosecutions would only take place if one “knowingly published” information known “to be damaging.”

Any half-informed student of the US Espionage Act knows that strict liability under the statute negates any need to undertake a balancing assessment. All that matters is that the individual had “reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the US,” often proved by the mere fact that the information published was classified to begin with.

Dobbin then switched gears. Having initially advertised the view that journalists could never be entirely immune from criminal prosecution, she added more egg to the pudding on the reasons why Assange was not a journalist. Her view of the journalist being a bland, obedient transmitter of received, establishment wisdom was all too clear. Assange had gone “beyond the acts of a journalist who is merely gathering information”. He had, for instance, agreed with Chelsea Manning on March 8, 2010 to attempt cracking a password hash that would have given her access to the secure and classified Department of Defense account. Doing so meant using a false identity to facilitate further pilfering of classified documents.

This was yet another fiction. Manning’s court martial had revealed the redundancy of having to crack a password hash as she already had administrator access to the system. Why then bother with the conspiratorial circus?

The corollary of this is that the prosecution’s reliance on fabricated testimony, notably from former WikiLeaks volunteer, convicted paedophile and FBI tittle-tattler Sigurdur ‘Siggi’ Thordarson. In June 2021, the Icelandic newspaper Stundin, now publishing under the name Heimildin, revealed that Assange had “never asked him to hack or to access phone recordings of [Iceland’s] MPs.” He also had not “received some files from a third party who claimed to have recorded MPs and had offered to share them with Assange without having any idea what they actually contained.” Thordarson never went through the relevant files, nor verified whether they had audio recordings as claimed by the third-party source. The allegation that Assange instructed him to access computers in order to unearth such recordings was roundly rejected.

The legal team representing the US attempted to convince the court that suggestions of “bad faith” by the defence on the part of such figures as lead prosecutor Gordon Kromberg had to be discounted. “The starting position must be, as it always is in these cases, the fundamental assumption of good faith on the part of those states with which the United Kingdom has long-standing extradition relationships,” asserted Dobbin. “The US is one of the most long-standing partners of the UK.”

This had a jarring quality to it, given that nothing in Washington’s approach to Assange – the surveillance sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency via Spanish security firm UC Global, the contemplation of abduction and assassination by intelligence officials, the after-the-fact concoction of assurances to assure easier extradition to the US – has been anything but one of bad faith.

Summers countered by refuting any suggestions that “Mr Kronberg is a lying individual or that he is personally not carrying out his prosecutorial duties in good faith. The prosecution and extradition here is a decision taken way above his head.” This was a matter of “state retaliation ordered from the very top”; one could not “focus on the sheep and ignore the shepherd.”

Things did not get better for the prosecuting side on what would happen once Assange was extradited. Would he, for instance, be protected by the free press amendment under US law? Former CIA director Mike Pompeo had suggested that Assange’s Australian citizenship barred him from protections afforded by the First Amendment. Dobbin was not sure, but insisted that there was insufficient evidence to suggest that nationality would prejudice Assange in any trial. Justice Johnson was sharp: “the test isn’t that he would be prejudiced. It is that he might be prejudiced on the grounds of his nationality.” This was hard to square with the UK Extradition Act prohibiting extradition where a person “might be prejudiced at his trial or punished, detained, or restricted in his personal liberty” on account of nationality.

Given existing US legal practice, Assange also faced the risk of the death penalty, something that extradition arrangements would bar. Ben Watson KC, representing the UK Home Secretary, had to concede to the court that there was nothing preventing any amendment by US prosecutors to the current list of charges that could result in a death sentence.

If he does not succeed in this appeal, Assange may well request an intervention of the European Court of Human Rights for a stay of proceedings under Rule 39. Like many European institutions so loathed by the governments of post-Brexit Britain, it offers the prospect of relief provided that there are “exceptional circumstances” and an instance “where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.”

The sickening irony of that whole proviso is that irreparable harm is being inflicted on Assange in prison, where the UK prison system fulfils the role of the punishing US gaoler. Speed will be of the essence; and the government of Rishi Sunak may well quickly bundle the publisher onto a transatlantic flight. If so, the founder of WikiLeaks will go the way of other prestigious and wronged political prisoners who sought to expand minds rather than narrow them.