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Category Archives: Politics

Forget Carr’s tweet, Morrison made it harder for him to be toppled

By TPS Newsbot  

Bob Carr unexpectedly outing Peter Dutton has the mystery texter has many predicting the leadership challenge is nigh. But is it?

Last night, a hefty slab of beef was unexpectedly slammed on the table, as Bob Carr (of all people) named Peter Dutton as the mystery author of the text messages that criticised Scott Morrison early last week.

On Twitter, Carr wrote: “The minister who shared the text with van Onselen and gave permission to use it was Peter Dutton. If PM Morrison has one more week in free fall the prospect of a leadership change pre-election is real. Party rules don’t count if most MPs think you will lead them to defeat.”

The tweet (of course) kicked off a wave of speculation on the platform, as users wondered a) does this mean the spill is upon us and b) why would Bob Carr know?

It mattered little, as the provocation pulled Peter Dutton out of hiding, tagging Carr, saying: “@bobjcarr’s tweet is baseless, untrue and should be deleted.”

 

 

So, is the spill incoming, and can Peter Dutton win? The answer comes in the wake of the leadership spill he lost to Scott Morrison in 2018.

At a news conference after the ballot, Malcolm Turnbull lashed out at the “determined insurgency from a number of people both in the party room and backed by voices, powerful voices, in the media” that brought him down.

“Peter Dutton and Tony Abbott and others, who chose to deliberately attack the government from within – they did so because they wanted to bring the government down, they wanted to bring my prime ministership down,” Turnbull said.

The motion for a spill of the leadership was carried 45-40, an unexpectedly close margin and an indication that Malcolm Turnbull retained substantial support even amid the chaos. Turnbull, prime minister since he deposed Tony Abbott in 2015, had promised not to contest the subsequent ballot if the spill was carried.

At the time political analyst Michelle Grattan noted that; “…the result is a massive rebuff for Peter Dutton and his conservative backers who have consistently undermined Turnbull’s leadership. Abbott, who backed Dutton and believes Morrison betrayed him in the 2015 leadership coup, declared: ‘We have lost the Prime Minister, there is a government to save’.”

In the press conference that followed, Scott Morrison labelled himself; “the future of Liberal leadership”, before sharing his most notorious fallacy: “If you have a go in this country, you will get a go. There is a fair go for those who have a go. That is what fairness in Australia means.”

In December of the same year, the population was out for blood. Scott Morrison disappeared (for the first time) while New South Wales was on fire, and without an election on the horizon, many were clamouring for another spill to undo the last one.

Yet, a week later, Morrison unexpectedly called upon his flock to toggle the rules, thereby making it harder for a sitting leader to be knifed behind a curtain. It would now take a two-thirds majority to bring about the Ides of March and topple a leader.

In his own words, it was a move inspired by “listening to the Australian people”, with Morrison believing that the problem at the top was invalidating our votes. Therefore, he was doing us a favour by making it harder to remove him, who, at the time, wasn’t actually chosen by the people.

 

This article was originally published on The Big Smoke.

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A prime ministerial address or a media undressing?

The Prime Minister’s National Press Club address

No, it isn’t the most straightforward job on earth. The hours are horrendous, and the expectations unimaginable. No one would take it on thinking it was a piece of cake. That’s why people are paid an enormous sum. Some do so for the power it gives them; others are genuine in their desire to create a better place. Whatever it is, you must accept the responsibilities that go with it.

Sometimes when things go pear-shaped, a leader has to stand before his distracters and confess his wrongdoings. Scott Morrison went partway in doing just that when he addressed the National Press Club last Tuesday. Did he show enough contrition equal to his deplorable governance? Well, opinions might vary, but for me, he showed little that would match his inability to govern with any quality of leadership.

His speech wasn’t an apology, nor was it a confession that he had made many mistakes and shown little foresight in confronting the issue of COVID-19. It was a grim speech, never mentioning climate change and produced little to excite a nation worn out by the invading pandemic and its variants.

Morrison had his back to the wall. One could cut a knife through the suspense. There was an expectancy on his part that the audience would be understanding of the difficulties of governing. He toyed with a self-desired sympathy for his efforts that weren’t forthcoming.

Then he suggested that the devil you know is better than the one you don’t. The Coalition was still the better money manager, and their born to rule right still applied.

For me, many factors explained his unpopularity. Before giving his address, I believed that the media in general only attributed his handling of the virus to his recent bad polling. After question time, I concluded I was wrong. The journalists were ruthless in their cross-examination of the Prime Minister, covering a wide range of subjects of a controversial nature.

The air between them and the Prime Minister was as thick as I have experienced. Maybe they were sick of being lied to.

The Guardian reported on one of those ruthless questions:

“Laura Tingle (not exactly a favourite of the PM) asked Scott Morrison if he was going to apologise for ‘the mistakes he has made as prime minister’, citing the Government’s handling of the pandemic but also Morrison’s holiday to Hawaii during the black summer bushfires in 2019 and cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).”

He didn’t directly answer the question but did admit that:

“I haven’t got everything right. And I’ll take my fair share of the criticism and the blame… We’re all terribly sorry for what this pandemic has done to the world and to this country.”

An excellent example of not answering the question.

The Liberal Party has always been a party of elites. The idea that economics and society are intertwined is abhorrent to them. Economics is the domain of the wealthy and privileged, and society belongs to those of class and privilege.

Defence involved in rollout of vaccine

The Prime Minister didn’t say sorry; he did say that if he had his time again, he’d have done the vaccine rollout differently:

“If I had my time over, I would have put [the rollout] under military operation from the outset, and not later in the year,” he said.

“As we went through those early months and we had the challenges that we had with the Health Department… I took the decision to send in General (John) Frewen and change the way we did it.

“[We] set up a change in the command structure, how logistics were managed, how it was planned.

“And it worked but I wish I’d done that earlier, and that’s a lesson.”

“Mr Morrison also said the confusion around whether and when aged care patients could be taken to public hospitals was another issue that proved challenging during the outbreaks in 2020.”

Lieutenant General John Frewen was responsible for the oversight of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

Safety in Parliament

The Prime Minister was asked what changes had been made to make Parliament and its political offices safer this year than last year.

Morrison answered that the most crucial difference this time around was the independent complaints body that was in place for anyone who was previously too worried about coming forward.

That, I think, assists everybody who works in that building,” he said. “Not enough,” l thought.

Unemployment rate

Mr Morrison was exuberant when talking about the difference in the unemployment rates between now and the last time he addressed National Press Club a year ago.

“Unemployment is at 4.2 per cent. When I stood here a year ago, it was 6.6 per cent,” the Prime Minister said.

I find the unemployment figures being thrown around at the moment almost unacceptable, including folk who work one hour a week as in full-time employment totally inappropriate. A new method of measurement needs to be found.

Cost of living

When asked about what his Government would, or could, do to ease the rising cost of living for millions of Australians. Mr Morrison’s answer was an off the shelf one:

“That is why good economic management was more important than ever.”

The truth is that the cost of living will be a significant item in this election.

When asked a standard stock question on how much a loaf of bread, a litre of petrol and a rapid antigen test cost, Mr Morrison replied that:

“I’m not going to pretend to you that I go out each day and I buy a loaf of bread and I buy a litre of milk.”

“The point is that I do my job every day to ensure that those things are as affordable as they possibly can be for Australians every single day.”

In any campaign, an answer is essential, and candidates should know it off the top of their heads. Indeed, he drives past a servo in his travels.

How do you know if he is telling the truth?

A long line of journalists asked further questions about the public anger with the PM, a few on aged care, a royal commission question on COVID-19 to which Morrison gave a non-committal answer.

Samantha Maiden asked about government members claiming expenses when staying in their own homes. He was okay with it so long as they weren’t breaking the law. David Crowe queried the availability of RATs.

Andrew Probyn asked why the prime minister thought he was the best person to lead the country. Still, the most controversial was by Peter van Onselen about tweets concerning the former Premier of NSW Gladys Berejiklian. It caused a bit of a stir that forced the Prime Ministers eye blink rate into overdrive. I’m sure there is more to come on that one.

All in all, it was a most unsatisfactory performance by a Prime Minister with his back to the wall. His Ministers, who would remain much the same if he wins the election, need shoulder much of the blame. It is as well the National Press Club address isn’t a viewing highlight of the week for the general population. They would have been very disappointed.

To those who say Albo doesn’t have charisma, I ask which of the following. Did:

John Howard, Julia Gillard, John Hewson, Bob Hawke, Gough Whitlam, Bill Shorten, Kim Beasley, Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Fraser, Anthony Albanese and Scott Morrison?

There are three, and they are all Labor.

My thought for the day

Power is a malevolent possession when you are prepared to forgo your principles and your country’s wellbeing for the sake of it.

 

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Morrison is an “arsehole”, just ask his colleagues

It seems whatever he does, Scott Morrison leaves a bevy of disgruntled colleagues in his wake.

An early job was with the Tourism Task Force where he was 2IC. After he jumped ship to join its main rival, Tourism Council Australia run by Bruce Baird, the TTF was unimpressed and changed its employment contracts to prevent others from “doing a Morrison”.

From there, Morrison moved on to the Office of Tourism and Sport in New Zealand.  Within weeks, the tourism board’s three most senior figures – the chair, the deputy chair and the chief executive – were gone.

“I suspect it was just about power,” said board member Gerry McSweeney. “You had the meeting of two people [Morrison and Tourism Minister Mike McCully] who were very ambitious.”

The Auditor-General was scathing about Morrison’s role in commissioning PwC to conduct a secret review of the board and then recommending they be sacked.

“We were surprised by the vehemence and timing of this advice,” the auditor-general commented. “Mr Morrison was aware that the board’s directors (including the chairperson) had deliberately been excluded from the review process, as part of the terms of reference.”

When interviewed last year, McSweeney said of Morrison, “Picking off soft targets, seems to have been a career projection of your PM.”

McCully resigned over the scandal and, with a year still left on his contract, Morrison returned to Sydney in March 2000, where he took up a position as the state director of the NSW Liberal Party.

After four years in that role, in a move that reeked of political cronyism, Morrison was rewarded when Joe Hockey, then tourism minister, gifted him the $350,000-a-year job as chief executive of its newly created tourism body, Tourism Australia where he, once again, ran foul of the board.

Its members complained that he did not heed advice, withheld important research data, was aggressive and intimidating, and ran the government agency as if it were a one-man show.

Confident that John Howard would ultimately back him, Morrison reportedly boasted that if then tourism minister Fran Bailey got in his way, he would bring her down. When board members called for him to go, however, Bailey agreed, and soon it was Morrison who was on his way. “Fran despised him,” says an industry insider. “Her one big win was ousting Scott. His ego went too far.”

“He was an invisible MD, he wasn’t present, he wasn’t around, he wouldn’t know anyone’s names,” one long-time staffer said.

A subsequent report from the Auditor-General regarding three contracts worth $184 million may shed more light on the real reason Morrison’s contract was terminated a year early.

The audit report revealed that information had been kept from the board, procurement guidelines breached, and private companies engaged before paperwork was signed and without appropriate value-for-money assessments.

Out of a job, Morrison found his next sinecure after being parachuted into Cook, the seat of his former boss, Bruce Baird. And even that was dodgy. He failed dismally in the preselection ballot until the Telegraph did a defamatory hatchet job on the successful candidate, Michael Towke, who was then disendorsed by the executive.

Purportedly a moderate, as the party lurched to the right under the leadership of Abbott, so too did Morrison. “Supreme opportunism,” scoffed one senior Liberal when asked about the one-time moderate’s confrontational approach on asylum seekers. The more publicity that came Scott Morrison’s way, the more hardline he became.

According to Niki Savva’s book about the spill that installed Morrison as leader, Plots and Prayers, at an April 2018 lunch Michael Keenan, who served as justice minister when Morrison was immigration minister, told his West Australian colleagues, including Finance Minister Mathias Cormann, Attorney-General Christian Porter and Mr Morrison’s chief ally Ben Morton, that Morrison was an “absolute arsehole“.

“Porter joined in, saying he did not think Morrison was a team player. Cormann said he had seen Morrison up close now, and, in his opinion, Dutton was better,” Savva wrote in her book.

Julia Banks described Morrison like “menacing controlling wallpaper” during the period where she decided to leave the Liberal party after Malcolm Turnbull was deposed as prime minister.

“It was the three months of Morrison’s leadership that … was definitely the most gut-wrenching, distressing period of my entire career.”

Leaked texts between Gladys Berejiklian and a current Liberal federal cabinet minister during the 2019-20 bushfires suggest they share that low opinion.

“In one, [Gladys] described you as a horrible, horrible person, going on to say she did not trust you, and you are more concerned with politics than people,” Peter Van Onselen said at the National Press Club on Tuesday.

“The minister is even more scathing, describing you as a fraud and ‘a complete psycho’.”

And who could forget the French president who didn’t mince his words about Morrison’s lack of integrity – he’s a liar.

These criticisms are all coming from people who have worked closely with Morrison, people from his own side of politics, people who are supposedly part of his “team”, and other world leaders.

I can only concur with their informed opinions.

 

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Chalk up another couple for the Government

Election diary No 9. Wednesday, 2 February 2022.

1 All governments make mistakes, but this one’s capacity for cock ups is becoming legendary. So consistent are they that they are like a daily thunderstorm of crisis downpours.

This time, pharmacists have their knickers in a knot over the prime minister’s “free” rapid antigen test program.

News.com.au reported that they have dubbed the RAT test debacle as “reckless and negligent.” If this is so, it could cause trouble for the Government.

According to pharmacists, the so-called “free” rapid antigen test program with a $10 rebate that won’t cover the wholesale cost and won’t be refunded for weeks.

It means that the Government expects the pharmacists (small businesses) to hand out the tests free to concession cardholders, leaving them out of pocket.

The crux of the matter, according to the pharmacists, is that had the Government ordered the tests directly from wholesalers in November and December, it could have handed them out free or at a cost to taxpayers of $5 per test.

Conversely, the Government is:

“… offering a rebate of double the amount – $10 for a single test to chemists – when soaring demand means that the wholesale price is now more than the rebate.”

How stupid is that?

The wholesale price has risen to $12 “off the back of” huge orders placed by state and federal governments during January:

“Pharmacists say they are paying as much as $12 or more for the tests wholesale in some instances, as demand soared off the back of massive orders from state and federal governments in January.”

Adding to the frenzy, the scheme started last Monday with pensioners and concession cardholders unable to sauce the “free” tests.

It was last August that Scott Morrison first raised the issue of RATS tests. No excuses on this one.

Chalk this up as a massive fail.

Lies continue to flow from the Prime Ministers lips with all the frequency of opinions from Andrew Bolt.

The campaigns

2 The Prime Minister continues his preliminary Clayton’s campaigning, trying to convince all and sundry that he is responsible for everything good that happens as if it is a gift from a higher order. At the same time, he refuses to “risk his parliamentary majority” by condemning ministers in his party who cross the fine line of incompetence. The hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed.

3 Last Sunday, 30 January, the consensus on the first Insiders panel seemed to be that although Labor was well ahead in the polls and would win if an election were held now. The Coalition still had plenty of time to recover.

Later the same day, Newspoll released its first poll for the year and described it as a horror result for the Government. 56-44 to Labor. Read more at The Poll Bludger.

The importance of this poll is that it is the first one close to the election that signals how people will vote. Generally, in the election cycle, polls only measure how people are thinking at the time. From here on in, they measure peoples voting intentions.

Albanese speaks to the National Press Club

4 In a very down to earth speech to the National Press Club the Opposition Leader impressed with his sincerity.

During the questioning period, the ABCs, Andrew Probyn, asked Albanese to explain who he was. The obvious inference was that nobody knew him. He gave his standard stock answer that he will probably repeat a hundred times during the campaign, but I would make the point that there isn’t a lot to know. And I would add to that, that ALP campaign strategists should make a virtue of it.

Compare Morrison, a Prime Minister embroiled in corruption, an unhealthy attitude toward women with a fundamentally conservative narrow world view versus Alabanese, a clean skin with no hint of controversy, a progressive who sees things as they are and could be. A man for the times.

Just because clowns govern us, it doesn’t mean it is a laughing matter.

Accountability

5 Worth repeating this from January 2020, but a few months after the 2019 election, the McKenzie Sports Rorts scandal seems to be growing legs by the day. With the PM making a major speech at the National Press Club on Wednesday, he won’t want this on his head unless he wants to face a line-up of the best journalists in the land.

For me, it is inconceivable that in the process of making announcements daily during the election, he knew nothing of how they came about. He must have taken part in the process to have authority over his statements.

It still follows him everywhere here he goes.

Uncoloured waters

6 Another ongoing crisis has been the state of the Great Barrier Reef. It has been in crisis for as long as I can recall, yet the Morrison Government now decides on the eve of an election that they can spare a billion dollars over ten years to fix things up.

Pub test, anyone?

7 The response has been a resounding voice of disbelief from the scientific community, who with raised voices of a resounding crescendo saying, “you fix it when you fix climate change, you fools.”

And whatever happened to the $440 million Malcolm Turnbull gave to some little tinpot show up north with liberal party connections?

Telling the truth should not be delayed because we are not sure how people might react to it.

Responsibility

Let’s be serious. Richard Colbeck would not be the Aged Care Minister if a better person were available. Instead of giving his portfolio his full attention when asked to attend a Senate Enquiry, he said he couldn’t justify diverting his time. He was at the cricket for three days. There wasn’t a crisis at the cricket, but there is in aged care.

 

Cartoon by Alan Moir (moir.com.au)

 

Writing in The Monthly, Rachel Withers reported the Prime Minister’s response in unglowing terms:

“Morrison defended his minister against the “knockers”, insisting that Colbeck – who has been slammed in the past for not knowing how many aged-care workers had been vaccinated or how many residents had died – works very hard. Pushed on the fact the incident did not pass the pub test, the PM insisted that Colbeck had taken the feedback “on board”. “He will take that criticism on the chin,” Morrison said, “and he’ll get back to work, which he does every single day.” One wonders whether those “knockers” who have lost loved ones in residential aged care (415 residents have died this year alone) or the overworked staff will also be willing to take it on the chin.”

The left of politics is concerned with people who cannot help themselves. The right is concerned with those who can.

9 When he was elected, Tony Abbott was quick to have a Royal Commission into four pink batts deaths. Still, a more practical examination of the occurrences of covid would be to look at the separation of the politics from the event to find the best path forward should a future event occur.

My thought for the day

In 2011 Malcolm Turnbull didn’t think there was a need for an inquiry into the news media but agreed with the then PM Gillard that Newscorp should stop publishing crap. They still do.

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How are you going to pay for it?

The Coalition stakes a lot on the perception of them as better managers of the economy. In the past, they have relied on ‘debt and deficit disaster’ rhetoric with promises of surpluses. That’s out for the foreseeable future.

They are now spruiking a low unemployment rate without ever acknowledging the impact that no foreign workers may have had on that. Nor do they ever speak of the precarious nature of employment and stagnant wages. They speak proudly of growth in GDP, not admitting that government spending (read debt) is driving it, and glossing over the increasing cost of living that inflation brings.

Another tactic they persistently use to undermine Labor policies is asking how much they will cost and how are they going to pay for them.

At the last election, Labor had excellent policies for taxation reform that a misinformed electorate rejected. It was too much for people to comprehend and, as such, was easily weaponised with the old adage about Labor will tax you more even though what they were mainly doing was closing loopholes and distortions thrust on us by the profligate Howard government.

The Coalition were able to get away with asking how much action on climate change would cost while never answering how much inaction would cost.

Well this time around, Labor could have an easy answer to how they will pay for policies whilst reducing debt if they are brave enough to use it – delay/abandon the stage 3 tax cuts.

The cuts, set to come into effect in 2024, apply a standard 30 per cent income tax rate to those who earn between $45,000 and $200,000 a year.

The reason given for this is to reverse bracket creep – where a pay rise puts an individual’s income over the threshold for the next tax bracket.  (It should be stressed that the higher rate only applies to the excess over that threshold, not your whole income.)

The only way to truly eliminate bracket creep is to make annual adjustments to the thresholds as explained by a very interesting paper from the Parliamentary Budget Office, Bracket creep and its fiscal impact, released in September last year.

“In the absence of the Stage 3 tax cuts, bracket creep over the next decade would be projected to reduce net debt in 2031‑32 by $276 billion.”

What the government is proposing is “projected to add around $197 billion to net debt in 2031‑32.”

That’s a $473 billion difference in net debt, and it doesn’t keep up with bracket creep anyway.

“The impact of the Stage 3 tax cuts will be more than offset by bracket creep by 2031-32. In that year, the tax cuts are estimated to cost just over $30 billion, while bracket creep is projected to have added $57 billion in additional revenue.”

Research by The Australia Institute shows the benefit from the cuts would predominantly go to high income earners.

“In 2024-25, when stage 3(a) first comes into effect, almost a third of the benefit goes to the top 10 per cent of taxpayers and the top 20 per cent will get more than half of the benefit. At the other end of the distribution the bottom 10 per cent gets none of the benefit while the bottom 20 per cent gets less than one per cent of the benefit.”

As most women are middle to low income earners, these cuts disproportionately favour men according to analysis prepared by the parliamentary budget office for the Greens.

“Men will receive about $2 for every $1 women receive between 2024 and 2031 under the tax plan, receiving a total of an extra $121.7bn compared with $62.4bn for women over the period.”

The wealthy have already been doing quite well out of the pandemic with property and share prices ballooning. Low interest rates and government stimulus have made an ideal environment for those able to take advantage.

Giving the rich more isn’t necessary to stimulate an economy with low unemployment and growth in the target range.

Lifting the tax-free threshold would have a far more beneficial flow-on effect giving assistance where it is most needed, knowing it will be spent, and saving more people from having to fill in a tax return for the ATO to process.

Governments face a trade-off between returning bracket creep and allowing bracket creep to reduce debt faster.

With December’s MYEFO projecting net debt will peak in 2025 at $915 billion, it would be fiscally responsible for Labor to say now is not the time for this tax cut, which would then put their second term budget in far better shape than the Coalition’s.

As the Coalition goes to an election promising to spend hundreds of billions on obsolete and inappropriate armaments and hundreds more on tax cuts for the wealthy, perhaps it’s time to ask them about everything else they promise…

How are you going to pay for it?

 

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Albanese needs to ‘Step up to the Plate’ and not avoid debate on Aged Care, Health and Welfare Reform

Labor Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese has come under fire from the Conservative Coalition Government for suggesting on the ABC’s ‘Insiders’ program that extra funding may be made available for Aged Care, Health, and perhaps welfare reform. This in a context where billions of subsidies have been provided to businesses due to Covid, and yet many businesses who managed to remain profitable regardless of Covid have simply kept these subsidies provided for them in the form of pure profit. While the Federal Government ruthlessly pursues welfare recipients over any debts incurred (and even some that have turned out to be unreal), corporations enjoy public money without accountability.

The simple fact is that public spending commitments in social services and infrastructure are not necessarily ‘irresponsible’ or ‘wasteful’. Often Government needs to invest in the health and happiness of the people to ensure the best outcomes. What needs to be understood is that social spending is a form of ‘collective consumption’ where we gain a better deal in areas like health by purchasing crucial services more efficiently and collectively as taxpayers, rather than being isolated and fleeced as private consumers. Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme are important examples of collective consumption.

Albanese has spoken of the “habitual buck passing” of the Morrison Government on Aged Care. Failure to attract new workers into the field with fair wages and conditions, and respect for workers; and failure to ensure necessary staffing levels including the presence of Registered Nurses – remain sore points even after the Conservatives’ response to the Aged Care Royal Commission. The training, wages and conditions of Personal Care workers who help many elderly remain in the community are also in need of further funding; and packages must be available to all with the need upon demand; and without cruel waiting queues.

The reality also is that Aged Care reform needs to go beyond the bare essentials to address broader quality of life issues; so that in the future Aged Australians with have access to social engagement; and where those in residential care will enjoy privacy, access to information technology, access to gardens and pleasant surrounds. They must not just be locked in their rooms or sat down in front of TVs in common rooms all day. Our vulnerable elderly need social engagement. Everything from discussing their lives to enjoying games, listening to music, or discussing the issues of the day. Dementia training is also essential to ensure the best quality of life to those affected; and those around them. Quality of food also needs to be monitored closely; and without meeting staff quota targets, Aged Care workers will remain rushed in the business of helping to dress and shower residents daily; or may not be able to respond in a timely manner to situations such as where sheets are soiled. The consequences of under-resourcing have been trauma and suffering for vulnerable aged Australians.

Yes, this will cost billions on top of those limited initiatives already announced. But most of us will grow elderly and frail one day; and even if ourselves we do not experience this, surely we will have family who are affected by a neglected Aged Care sector. Rather than backing down, Albanese needs to ‘step up to the plate’ and confidently put the case for progressive collective consumption of Aged Care; and a much better deal for both ‘consumers’ and for workers in the broader Health sector.

There will also be a significant backlog in waiting lists for supposedly ‘elective’ hospital procedures thanks to the pressure Covid has placed the health system under. This was already a crisis; but has been significantly magnified with Covid. Medicare needs to be extended into dental, optical and prosthetics; but the broader health system needs to be expanded to ensure timely care, breadth of coverage and quality of care.

Australian of the Year, tennis star Dylan Alcott has also highlighted the high unemployment levels (over 50 per cent) for disabled Australians. The focus here was mainly on those with physical disability ; but exclusion from the labour market also applies to those with psycho-social disabilities. Exclusion is a vicious circle which needs to be broken. Sometimes it goes on for years. Often it is permanent. Government needs to intervene directly to provide opportunity for all; and employment needs to be made more viable by lessening means tests for Pensioners in the workforce. Also there need to be viable career paths, and not merely ‘dead end jobs’.

Importantly, Labor needs to pitch to ‘average’ workers as well. Labor needs to pitch to the majority to enjoy electoral success; and provision for equity groups alone will not win government. Delivering wage gains and improving the bargaining position of average workers in the labour market is important here. As is a restructuring of the broader tax system: delivering distributive justice outcomes not only for the most vulnerable, but also the majority of workers. Further; improvement of the Aged Pension could act as a ‘bridge’ which enhances the case for reform of other pensions. Labor needs to build a ‘bloc’ based on solidarity and mutual recognition rather than allowing the Coalition to ‘Divide and Rule’ – which so often has been the case.

So come on, Albo, ‘step up to the plate’. A ‘small target’ can take us so far; but as the campaign progresses voters will want a clearer sense of what Labor is going to do. Labor will need to have answers. And it must not ‘back itself into a corner’ where it cannot deliver significantly to its constituents. Early signs suggest some hope.

This article was originally published on ALP Socialist Left Forum.

 

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Lies, lies, lies – and the lying liars who tell them

Politicians, predominantly on the right, have repeatedly been caught lying in direct contravention of video evidence. The falsifications aren’t minor.

In Canberra at the moment there is an almost total lack of accountability. Any effort to confront Prime Minister Scott Morrison or his cabinet with their lies, corruption and ineptitude is met with deflection to a disingenuous list of “achievements” or more lies. Without effective supervision and repercussions, the threat this poses to our democracy will only become more dire.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is potentially facing repercussions after years of lying to the electorate. Whether or not he does so, the damage to British democracy taking place under the Tories is confronting. In the US, Donald Trump’s lies have been embraced by the party he led and the majority of Republican voters. Deception is widespread in that party’s efforts to subvert the possibility of Democrat victories in the future. The American Republic’s democratic processes are already undermined; whether they will survive the next decade is in doubt.

From Plato’s time, philosophers have noted the instability of democracy. Its freedoms – including freedom of speech – are the seeds of its own destruction. Would-be tyrants and their propaganda have the capacity to end the system we prize, even without us noticing. Truth, and trust in what is being said, is crucial to the democratic system.

Deceit is at the heart of the problem. Sometimes it is the insidious propaganda that aims to (mis)represent our nations as well-run liberal democracies. At other times the stratagem is outright demagoguery that seems likely to end in bloodshed.

In Australia, Crikey in particular has been tracking the lies that mark Morrison’s government. While there has long been an expectation that politicians aren’t always truthful, the scope of deceit that has besmirched the performance of the Coalition, just like this era’s Republican and Tory parties, is enough to shove the timid media beyond euphemisms.

The brazenness of the deceit is the factor that has provoked that shift. Politicians – predominantly on the right – have repeatedly been caught lying in direct contravention of video evidence of their own previous statements. The falsifications aren’t minor: some are complete inversions of earlier positions. In America some Republican politicians supporting Trump’s Big Lie do so because they literally fear for their lives. Without an armed and angry base to threaten them back into line, Australian and British leaders have little justification beyond knowing that there are no consequences any more.

In January 2022, as Australians largely fail to find the rapid antigen tests (RATs) we need to participate in society in a pandemic, the government is running advertisements that boast it has them. Nobody is sure whether these are the collation of RATs that have been taken from private and public sector organisations’ deliveries, or an inflated boast. As with so many other (in)actions of this government, the disaster follows supply offers and warnings made months before, instructing the government that millions would be necessary. According to the AMA, the government refused to purchase them, wanting to let the private sector profiteer.

In the wake of the Park Hotel Djokovic drama, Morrison misinformed radio listeners about the refugee status of the people imprisoned for months in the Alternative Place of Detention (APOD). When confronted he disingenuously asserted he hadn’t “said” what he’d clearly implied. Given that the innocent men (some then boys) were placed in indefinite detention by Morrison as immigration minister eight years ago, his claim to vagueness on the cases seems disingenuous.

Over COP26 in Glasgow last year, the Australian delegation was reviled for its blatant climate action disinformation. French President Emmanuel Macron’s assertion that Morrison is a liar was confirmed by the Prime Minister’s former colleagues. It’s not just our own civic space under threat from constant deceit, but our standing among nations.

Part of the dissimulation is intended to suggest that the system is functioning well. In none of the three countries is that the case, and healthcare workers have been bearing the brunt of the pandemic mismanagement. NSW nurses held a stopwork protest in mid-January because their workplace is unsafe for them and their patients in the Omicron surge. Their exhaustion and the nurse-to-patient-ratio blowout are making hospitals dangerous. In the face of constant federal and state government mantras that they are coping, the nurses’ signs said they are not.

Rather than listening to poorly paid frontline workers exhausted by the third year of bearing the brunt, Josh Frydenberg mislabelled them “militant unions”. He hoped thus to nullify a cry for help for his voter base. The former “essential worker” praise was quickly inverted to disdain when the nurses drew attention to being Sisyphus borne down by the weight of government “let it rip” apathy.

The moment where the crisis of truth in “conservative” Anglosphere politics and some parts of the media became obvious might be pinned in 2016 when “post-truth” became word of the year. The fact that Trump’s victory and the Brexit referendum occurred in that year is not unrelated.

Many factors made the truth harder to detect at that moment: the swirl of social media disinformation; its targeting by bad actors like Cambridge Analytica; increasing competition in the attention economy; and the internet’s devastating impact on legacy media (partly celebrated initially because of the establishment’s own failures to convey truth, such as The New York Times and its assertion of the presence in Iraq of WMD).

It did not begin that recently, though. In 2004 George Bush adviser Karl Rove was alleged to have said that the US government did not function in the “reality-based community,” instead having the ability to “create our own reality.” Fittingly, he denies having said it.

The following year, commentator Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness” which became the American 2006 word of the year. It is intended to cover the sense or feeling that something feels true on intuition rather than requiring data to bear it out. It was meant to satirise the Tea Party development in Republican politics and its unhinged assertions. In Trump’s era, Kellyanne Conway called truthiness “alternative facts.”

Now Republican politicians and pundits spew the “blue lies” that divide tribes, and even the “accusations in a mirror” of total inversions of truth that precede horrors. Their followers often appear to see lies as weapons of war rather than necessarily a matter of sincerity. Verifiability does not matter as much hurting the loathed enemy.

The internet has unleashed those alternative realities. Right-wing thought leaders such as Joe Rogan on podcasts and YouTube and social media speak to millions around the world. They have a much more powerful impact than radio shock jocks or “conservative” media pundits. Provocative communications are shared to provoke “lib tears” and then these right wing figures “rage farm” the resultant furore.

Part of the long-term crisis is based in the role of PR in politics, with the right over the decades deploying increasingly effective marketing and communications strategies. Funded by the ultra wealthy and honed through free-market think-tanks, this strategy was intended to counteract alienating policies meant to benefit only the donors.

The Coalition government is much more concerned with messaging than being able to do the job of creating policy that benefits the country. It is aided by co-operative media that is satisfied to echo government talking points in gormless stenographic journalism. The fact that Morrison’s own marketing background is not strewn with successes might explain lacklustre efforts such as under-age forklift drivers.

Rather than finding strategies to solve the massive challenges of living through a pandemic, the government is involved with the spin project of their religious “freedom” bill or the ability to unmask anonymous “trolls” on the internet. This is intended to enable Coalition politicians to sue internet commentators for defamation if they expose government misdeeds. The point is to chill criticism of government (in)action, hardly consonant with their posture as “free speech” warriors. It sits well, however, with the government’s many efforts to prevent transparency over the years, including working to silence charities.

Structuring a narrative to sell a government as successful and a country as efficiently navigating difficult times is not the same as being successful or dealing with challenges. Lies and misleading messaging buttressed with strategies to silence criticism leave us with a crisis of trust, and with cynicism. This is combined with the swirl of internet misinformation centred in America but with enthusiastic adherents here. The result is a total inability to agree on a shared data-based reality that must ground our decisions as we face the much bigger crisis of the climate emergency.

The Coalition must confront its decision to pursue the American right into a focus on culture wars and spin. The US is proving to us that this divisive propaganda can only be destructive. We must transform the supervision of Australia’s federal government to ensure truth, integrity and accountability. Without those steps, we too risk losing our liberal democracy.

Lucy Hamilton is a Melbourne writer with degrees from the University of Melbourne and Monash University.

 

 

This article was originally published on Pearls and Irritations.

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The best a man can get

When the Prime Minister chooses his Ministry, he has many things to consider – reward for support, factions, states, urban/country, diversity, longevity of service.

Merit doesn’t get a look in.

Or perhaps this bunch are the best the Coalition has?

“If you vote Coalition, you get Barnaby Joyce as Deputy Prime Minister” has become a campaign on its own and, for mine, that alone is sufficient reason to change government.

Until recently, we had an Attorney-General who thought it was fine to take anonymous donations to fund a private lawsuit against the national broadcaster.

He has been replaced by a woman who threatened to slut shame parliamentary staff, to “noim noims”, a Minister who refused to co-operate with police regarding the illegal tipping off of the media about an impending raid on union headquarters.

The Minister for Education and Youth has been stood down pending an investigation into allegations of domestic violence by a staffer he admits to having had an affair with.

Not that being stood down means much.

Bridget McKenzie was stood down for using sports rorts to give money to her gun club in 2020. In 2021 she was promoted to Minister for Regionalisation, Regional Communications and Regional Education plus Minister for Emergency Management and National Recovery and Resilience.

Likewise Sussan Ley, who was forced to quit as Health Minister amid investigations into expense claims which included billing taxpayers to attend two New Year’s Eve events hosted by a prominent Queensland businesswoman and donor and the “impulse purchase” of a luxury Gold Coast apartment while on a taxpayer funded trip. She is now Minister for the Environment.

Her predecessor in the portfolio, Melissa Price, will be remembered for insulting the former President of Kiribati by saying, when introduced to him at dinner by Pat Dodson, “I know why you are here, it’s for the cash. For the Pacific, it’s always about the cash. I have my chequebook here, how much do you want?” After being dubbed the “Invisible Minister” for her obvious disinterest in the environment, Price was “demoted” to Minister for Defence Industry and Minister for Science and Technology. Because that’s what happens when you do a crap job?

Take Linda Reynolds, who had to give Peter Dutton Defence after calling Brittany Higgins a lying cow. She only got the gig to keep her quiet after she made a speech in the Senate about the bullying during the leadership spill which she completely forgot about with her short-lived promotion. She is now Minister for Government Services and Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Which I thought was Stuart Robert’s portfolio but I am so yesterday. Since the 2013 federal election, Robert has been appointed the Assistant Minister for Defence, the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, Minister for Human Services, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Centenary of ANZAC, Assistant Treasurer, Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme, Minister for Government Services and, most recently, Minister for Employment, Workforce, Skills, Small and Family Business, with responsibility for whole-of-government technology through the Digital Transformation Agency.

He is most remembered for Robodebt and charging us tens of thousands for his home internet. Oh and being a fellow Pentacostal who, along with Hillsong attendee Alex Hawke, did the numbers for Morrison’s leadership coup.

Hawke, who has only ever worked for the Liberal party (unless you count Woollies in uni holidays), was rewarded with Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs. Alex has the certainty that being a religious conservative Young Liberal bestows, which didn’t go over so well in his previous gig when he tried to convince Pacific leaders that Australia was doing more than enough on climate change.

I mean look who we have taking care of it for us – Angus Taylor who entered politics to protect his family’s view from wind farms and their right to poison whatever damn grass they please. Angus, who writes Facebook messages congratulating himself (whilst forgetting to change his name), will be most remembered for giving a forged document to the Murdoch press, and quoting it in parliament, to try and belittle an opponent’s attempt to reduce emissions. The police couldn’t work out where Angus got the document because they didn’t ask him. Case over.

As Assistant Minister to the Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction, we have the archetypal dilettante Tim Wison, well suited for the job after his apprenticeship with the IPA where he penned a glowing review of Ian Plimer’s climate denial book. Tim now wanders around the country having his photo taken with solar panels.

Keith Pitt’s combined water and resources portfolio is presumably to make sure the coal mines, and nuclear power plants if the Minister gets his way, have all the water they need.

We have a health Minister who tells us that Australia has done the bestest in the whole wide world in dealing with the pandemic as our infection rate surges past the US, UK and India, RATs become rarer than numbats, and daily deaths hit new highs.

We have a Treasurer who thinks the most important part of his job is a slide show of cherry-picked graphs and smiling photo ops with the latest brochure.

We have a defence Minister, who talks very loudly and carries a tiny widdle stick, eagerly agreeing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to take obsolete weapons off the hands of the US and UK armaments industries.

The Minister for Aged Care has given up all pretence of knowing or caring what he is doing and gone to the cricket instead.

If, as the old Gillette ad goes, these are “the best a man can get”, a change of government isn’t just desirable, it’s a national imperative.

 

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Morrison’s Coup De Grâce

“Human beings are social beings, who need to be able to rely on each other. That requires trust, and trust requires truth-telling.” (Quassim Cassam).

Grace Tame looks daggers as the PM fakes cordiality and avuncular affability for the camera. A black belt in subterfuge, deception and betrayal, ScoMo™ has also mastered the dark political art of baring his top teeth whilst feigning conviviality, positively radiating goodwill and patent insincerity. His office invites 2022 finalists for Australian of the Year for a cup of tea and photo opportunity at The Lodge, his Canberra pad – on occasions when his main place of residence Kirribilli doesn’t suit.

It also sets ScoMo™ up to pretend to Brisbane 4BC, later, that Ms Tame’s an ingrate who’s abused his hospitality whilst he and Jen have invited her into their own home. A farrago of lies of course. Passive-aggressive and patronising, he diminishes and demeans her.

“Grace is a passionate person who’s raised important issues. She’s had a terrible life ordeal, you know, things happen to her, her ordeals, the abuse. It’s just awful.”

Back at the Lodge, Morrison’s toothy rictus evokes the look he had for press gallery cameras just before he knifed Malcolm Turnbull in August 2018, declaring “this is my leader and I’m ambitious for him.”

With no policy achievements and a catastrophic failure to protect us from the pandemic, The Coalition knows the election campaign must be a horse race between ScoMo™ and Albo. Of course, as Paul Bongiorno warns, the Coalition may hold the half senate election in May as it is obliged to. Leave the lower house until September. Punt on the pandemic receding. But odds are long.

For now, it’s character. Whom do you prefer? And therein lies the problem. As Laura Tingle implies, whilst Murdoch’s claque is busy with the myth that we don’t know who Albo is, Faux-Mo’s problem, as a public figure made entirely of smirk and mirrors, is that we do know who he is.

Tame’s face, moreover, evokes some of the ways we know, notes Laura Tingle:

“… other unfortunate handshaking incidents during the bushfires; the excruciating moment when banking royal commissioner Justice Kenneth Hayne refused to be part of Josh Frydenberg’s photo opportunity by shaking hands and smiling with him; the widely circulated photo of Scott Morrison looking at his phone in the Parliament, having turned his back on Labor’s Tanya Plibersek as she addressed him across the chamber.”

There are many others. It’s Cobargo 2.0. Cue the NSW south coast, destroyed by freak bushfire fanned by his government’s policies of climate change denial. Local mother, Zoey asks questions only to have the PM turn his back and walk away from her in early January 2020.

“I have lost everything I own,” Zoey says in a social media post, with footage of the destruction. “My house is burnt to the ground and the prime minister turned his back on me.”

Given his government treats women as second-class citizens and worse, Ms Tame is in no frame of mind to be called into Morrison’s shonky photo-op. Be compromised. She’s brave. On cue, boys’ club commentators and big swinging dick club apologists, rush to attack her display of integrity.

“Sourpuss” sneers Miranda Devine. The News Limited flack, currently based in New York, accuses “Graceless” Tame of “ignorance, petulance” and “churlishness”.  And a great deal more.

Morrison is “a leader of a middle power”, Devine ventures, as well as “our elected representative” who is owed respect for his high office alone, a gibe based on a lie about how we choose our PM, whilst she claims a former Australian of the Year (AOTY) is just an ambassador for a specific cause.

The “historic” Lodge also is defiled in Devine’s view. Sacrilege? Clearly, in the next phase of Murdoch’s Americanisation of our politics, it will be sacred. Our White House. A sacred shrine.

Devine’s rant in The Daily Telegraph, also trashes AOTY in a swinging denunciation, a hatchet job worthy of a PMO in full campaign mode. She dog-whistles culture warriors and the hard right.

“The AOTY is rarely representative of the Australian people but instead caters to a tiny base of Twitter brokens obsessed with prosecuting boutique ideological issues borrowed from overseas, usually to do with identity politics, “existential” climate alarm, the evil patriarchy, “toxic masculinity” and “systemic” racism.

Even if the AOTY were to start off as a normal person, by the end of their year in the spotlight they will have been thoroughly shaped into a left-wing activist by the media.”

“Ungracious”, Professor Peter Van Onselen also puns on her name, “rude” and “childish”. James McGrath, dropped in 2008 from Team BoJo for his comments in The Spectator calling African-Caribbean immigrants, “picaninnies” weighs in with “partisan, political and childish.”

There’s much more in this vein but a wave of approval far outweighs the sexist carping and character assassination, rejects Devine’s grotesque exaltation of our least trustworthy PM into an iconic national leader. Devine claims that to snub ScoMo is to insult the Australian people.

Most observers applaud Tame’s integrity. And how would Murdoch’s partisan hacks know what integrity looks like? ScoMo represents everything Ms Tame opposes. Such a pile-on, does, however, suggest a PMO aware that Tame is a major threat to their campaign to re-elect Morrison. A shonky product, which never really passed the sniff test, now smells well past its use-by date.

Perhaps Tame recalls ScoMo™’s office leaking against Brittany Higgins’ partner, David Sharaz. Or Chief of Staff John Kunkel’s “review” that found he was “not in a position to make a finding that the alleged activity took place”. (Sue Gray, take note for your Boris’ knees-up report.)

A helpless young woman is allegedly raped near his office, but the PM doesn’t know, let alone take any responsibility. God forefend he owes any duty of care. Or honesty.

But Morrison’s lies are world-renowned, largely thanks to Emmanuel Macron, and, for him, everything is someone else’s responsibility.

Almost. He’s a dab hand at captain’s calls and gratuitous cruelty. His appointing Amanda Stoker as Marise Payne’s underling, assistant Minister for Women to an invisible Minister for Women looks like an act of sadistic revenge.

The Queensland senator supported a “fake rape crisis tour” that inflicted great suffering on survivors, such as Ms Tame.

Or is it his failure to provide a safe workplace? Tame may have had in mind, Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Kate Jenkins’ finding that sexual harassment and assault were so pervasive in Parliament with its toxic workplace culture that, “women told us they felt ‘lucky’ if they had not directly experienced sexual harassment and assault.”

Who’d want to shake the hand of a PM who pats women on the head and tells the nation “we are dealing with this as no other government has done before”?

Saying “she’s had a terrible life” is the most condescending, ignorant & utterly disempowering comment to make about Grace Tame.

Grace’s whole message is that as survivors, we are not defined by our experiences of sexual violence,” tweets Nina Funnell who worked with Grace Tame on her original campaign #LetHerSpeak,

ScoMo’s government’s record is of evasion, inaction, lies and leaking against victims and their families. Contempt is only part of its orchestrated disempowerment of women.

Dealing with? Jenkins, in a separate process, recommends imposing a duty of care on employers to stamp out sexual harassment – only to have this rejected by the Morrison government.

Senator Jenny McAllister reminds us that, in 2013, Tony Abbott appointed himself Minister for Women. Eight years later, the contempt continues. ScoMo says women who march on parliament to publicly call for justice, equality and safety are lucky not to be shot. He snubs them anyway.

“This is a vibrant liberal democracy, Mr Speaker, not far from here, such marches, even now, are being met with bullets, but not here in this country, Mr Speaker,” Morrison says to boos, jeers and looks of total incredulity.

Why should Ms Tame, a passionate advocate for victims of sexual violence compromise everything she stands for by being a prop in the PM’s propaganda photo? Even in his words to those invited to the Lodge, ScoMo acknowledges Tame’s engagement to her fiancé, Max Heerey, not her work.

As with his struggle to understand that rape is a crime, ScoMo might need his Jen to clarify his slight – on all women. He’ll have plenty of time after May. Or September, should he take the punt.

Labor’s Jenny McAllister does acknowledge Grace Tame’s work, “together with other survivor advocates, she has driven a lasting national conversation about the treatment of women, and the prevalence of physical, emotional and sexual violence against women and children.”

It’s the eve of Invasion Day or ‘Straya Day as Morrison’s Ocker avatar outside The Lodge would have it. ScoMo’s™ moved on, prompted by focus groups. Sixty per cent of Australians support a change of date, according to a Guardian Essential Poll, taken a few days ago. Meanwhile, his commentary shifts to that of some didactic voiceover to a whitewashing of war and dispossession.

“A story,” he pens for Nine’s claque, mustering his typical fog of abstraction, cluttered with buzzwords and double-speak, “of strength and resilience that spans 65,000 years, of a continent that we love and contend with, and of a free and fair people who live in relative harmony.”

“Remarkable” would have been better than “relative”. And speaking of relatives, Morrison’s great-great-aunt, utopian socialist, poet and former Paraguayan commune member (in 1896), Mary Gilmore, a Dame who wrote for a communist newspaper, would turn in her grave.

Yet only his pet rag, The Daily Telegraph, runs the line that “the arrival in Australia of the First Fleet in 1788 was the initial step towards multiculturalism.” Shades of Tony Abbott’s defining moment.

Grace Tame’s “side-eye” defines our times. Why collude in a photo-op to normalise our criminally, negligent MPs with their hands in the till or doing favours for rich mates? Why approve of skiving off to Hawaii, padding travel allowances or taking a few days off to watch the cricket. Sam Maiden reports Tim Wilson Liberal MP Tim Wilson leaves Victoria for 95 nights, charging taxpayers $37k.

A vibrant liberal democracy does not normalise corruption while it disenfranchises women, the aged, the poor and first nations. It is not a regime of coercive control by old white men that opposes constitutional recognition of first peoples and rejects The Uluru Statement from the Heart.

A voice to parliament enshrined in the Constitution is not only long overdue, it would also enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to provide advice to the Parliament on policies and projects that impact their lives. Instead, ScoMo™ & Co. come up with a co-design report. What does it do? It sets up further consultations to establish regional and local voices.

“The only thing the government has managed to achieve is more delays and more processes. What the government is proposing gives the Voice no security. They even banned their co-design committee from speaking about constitutional recognition,” Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney calls out the time-wasting duplicity inherent in the process.

Why help normalise a clown? The PM’s “vibrant liberal democracy” allows Clive Palmer to boast he’ll outspend his $93m last election, lying about Labor’s policies. Paul Bongiorno reports Labor strategists who call out Australia’s Clown Prince of Politics for what he is – a way of extending the Liberals’ media campaign budget, which, scandalously, remains uncapped.

“He’s a Liberal and will shovel votes back to them at the end of the day.”

Bongiorno is outraged:

“…the government has done nothing to contain the obscenity of a billionaire being able to distort the democratic political contest in such a blatant way.”

Australia’s reputation for corruption is at its lowest level since ratings began in 1995, reports Transparency International. Morrison’s Covid Commission is a sterling example. A mob assembled by the PM, ostensibly for Covid crisis management turns out to be a gas industry support group.

The scandal of our RATs instant millionaires is another.

Pandemic rages, with at least ninety-eight deaths, Friday, as a government, “getting out of peoples’ lives,” stops sitting on its hands only to point the finger of blame.

Omicron spreads to more than 700 aged-care homes, Rachel Withers reports for The Monthly. Staff struggle to cope in over half of all facilities in NSW. A grieving daughter tells SBS News that her father died of COVID-19 alone in his locked-down aged-care home, while waiting for an overdue booster shot, on the day after Aged Care Minister Colbeck takes three days off to watch a cricket game. Morrison defends Colbeck by telling us we don’t know how hard the Minister works.

Lives have been lost but Colbeck will “take this on the chin,” he adds obliquely. Accountability is not part of his vocabulary. An incompetent spared, ScoMo hopes is a future ally; bound to him in gratitude.

Students will return to school so parents can get back to work. Teachers are put at risk and their value impugned by being seen solely as babysitters in a post-industrial society. And expendable. Vulnerable retired teachers and inexperienced graduates are said to be ready to fill the gaps.

It’s an era of personal responsibility, ScoMo and Perrottet claim. But just try to buy a RAT. Unless you happen to be Motion One, a firm run out of a two-roomed apartment in Sydney’s Elizabeth Bay where Pilates franchise CEO, Austyn Campbell secures a $26 million contract to import RATs.

She flogs them online for $12.50. Identical tests are purchased by importers and sold to Australian retailers for as little as $5 per unit.

A former Liberal Party “digital strategist”, Campbell runs a communications firm, Agenda C, with Parnell Palme McGuiness, another lucky punter who’s also done work for the Liberal Party.

Also doing nicely is Julie Bishop’s beau, David Panton, formerly an all-night chemist in Mornington, Victoria, who with his daughters runs Pantonic, a pharmaceutical supply company. Tests start at $11.

Will it be a RAT-led economic recovery? An overvalued stock market totters, tech stocks shedding value first – Barnaby fan, Georgina Hope Rinehart gets a gong for services to mining, community and sport, just before she’s declared an Olympic sponsor.

Hang on. Help is on its way from BoJo.

So touching to discover that the mother country still loves her delinquent ex-colony. Or not so ex.

Thank God, Queen and her palace that John Kerr, her GG could keep the con in our constitutional monarchy as we were weaning ourselves off the breast of empire, onto a neo-colonial formula.

Our co-dependence helps us feel relaxed and comfortable about the capitulation of national sovereignty that is AUKUS, a pact yet to be defined, but which has a very colonial nostalgia vibe.

Not everyone loves Kerr. A ”rorty old, farting Falstaff …” an elderly lizard” is Patrick White’s vivid impressions of the Governor-General, a respected jurist and former Chief Justice of the NSW Supreme Court, who invoked his “reserve powers” to dismiss Whitlam’s Labor government in 1975, to the immense good fortune of Liberal Malcolm Fraser, a Western Districts grazier. How we miss such giants.

Mal is the last farmer to become Prime Minister, something the Nats have never got over and the only PM to visit to a seedy Memphis hotel, only to lose his trousers – just one leg of which, could be pressed into service as a shroud for his chief legacy, his treasurer. John Winston Howard, monarchist, devout Neoliberal and US lickspittle, who did so much to dash the hopes of voters who sought enlightened, progressive, federal policies which might heal division, promote equality and independence.

As for the AUKUS submarine plan, it’s a fiasco. Eight nuclear subs we cannot crew, or fuel, which need a whole new industry to maintain, with a price tag of at least possibly $170 billion, allowing for inflation, are thrust upon us much to Macron’s chagrin, or emmerdement, a word our prissy press pretend is “piss off” but any Frenchman will tell you means shat upon.

Macron hates our PM for lying to him that the sub deal was real until one day before it wasn’t. It’s a breach of good faith which will set back our trade with the EU circus, of which La Belle France is 2022’s ringmaster. Carbon tariffs could be slapped on our exports. Also, we alienate another power with a presence in the Pacific.

In the meantime, we may have to retire the Collins class subs which will be rust buckets well before our “new” nuclear submarines are ready in the early 2040s. By then, crewless subs and drones will have superseded anything AUKUS hawks us.

But all is not lost. Diplomatic genius, carbon tariff expert and Joke PM, Tony Abbott has been seconded to the BOT, Board of Trade, an outfit long dead in the water until revived by Teresa May as something she could announce that might offset the stench of a hard Brexit.

Tony’s bound to come up with something. Always does. Even if it’s only shirt-fronting Macron.

His work is cut out for him. Career liar, Boris Johnson brags that:

“… our ambitious trade deal with Australia will include a substantive article on climate change which reaffirms both parties’ commitments to the Paris Agreement and achieving its goals, including limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees.”

Tony’s carbon tax expertise will add a bit of finesse to the UK Australia Free Trade Deal virtually inked last month. It’s worthless according to Moody’s. Our beef and veal are more likely to go to more accessible markets which offer higher prices. As Moody’s puts it:

“Australian exporters garner higher prices for their beef products in countries like South Korea, Japan and the US. Also, Australian beef exports recently dipped because of drought conditions. Such conditions are expected to occur more regularly in the future and could restrict exports.”

Glen Dyer and Bernard Keane note that the Coalition refuses to allow the Productivity Commission or any other objective body to analyse the agreement because the benefits are minuscule. Even these dwindle in the light of the extra paperwork required to meet bureaucratic country-of-origin requirements for accessing the deal.

“Given the trivial economic impact of the UK-Australia free trade agreement, we won’t be updating our growth forecasts for the UK economy,” Moody’s conclude.

But it’s worse than nothing. Boris gets rolled. Barnaby Joyce’s carve-out means Morrison won’t have a bar of any deal that breathes a word about net-zero.

Australia’s negotiators demand that temperature targets have no part in the trade deal. When the Brits insist that The Paris Agreement to keep the global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees, and preferably to 1.5 degrees at least gets a mention, that’s all it gets and only over Morrison government objections.

But who’s going to notice the cave-in when the party’s all agog at revelations that Boris has lied about at least eleven parties that broke Covid isolation rules?

Party piece of party gate is surely BoJo’s glorious anniversary of his own birth, alas, another mental blankety-blank which he either can’t recall or, like fellow amateur casuist, ScoMo, argue wasn’t a party at all.

Boris’ colleagues are a riot of goodwill, a British ten-minute effusion of camaraderie, a happy birthday dirge and a cake with a Sue Gray file in it.

BoJo’s birthday party that his (fairly) newly-wed, a May bride, organised for him is the latest episode of Carrie On Upstairs, a fitting sequel to the mystery of who paid for the 840 pound a roll golden wallpaper in the refurbishing of Boris and Carrie’s flat over number eleven Downing Street, traditionally reserved for the chancellor of the exchequer except when Boris needs it for himself, his partner and growing family.

If we are conned on trade and it looks as if we’re roped into buying obsolete subs we won’t have any time for our war on Beijing, Keane suggests we just tell China to hold off for a couple of decades while we get our nuclear underwater shit together. What could possibly go wrong?

It’s not clear which of our neo-colonial masters will actually supply the ships. Morrison loves secrecy as much as indecision. DFAT tells us that by 2020’s end, Australian investments in the US totalled $864 billion – almost as much as the Great Satan – as America is revered in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan whose peoples it has liberated, with our assistance – the USA has invested in the Land of Oz while our investment in the UK was $615 billion – and the Old Dart has $737.6 billion invested here.

All of this is a prelude to hope. Amidst the amazing Grace Tame’s refusal to grin and bear the PM’s charm offensive, a perfunctory line congratulating her on her engagement rather than her work as Australian of the Year, the shortage of RATs and ScoMo™ & Co’s abandonment of all pretence at protecting us from Omicron, the arrival, Friday, of UK Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, aboard a Global Britain private Airbus jet is a cunningly orchestrated stunt that gets BoJos rival out of his hair while providing audio-visual proof of ScoMo and Cos trade deals.

True, Little Britain’s Labour Party is outraged at the A$1 million price ticket but wait until they discover that the Free Trade Deal with the land Downunder is just another bit of window dressing.

Hawk Talk is also a big part of Truss’ mission. Eager to be Boris’ replacement and one of our neo-colonial mistress’ Britannia’s debauched ruling elite, Truss pops in to warn us that the Chinese Panda is plotting with the Russian Bear to blow us all up, a warning that Paul Keating calls demented.

Truss attacked Dan Tehan last year, because she felt slighted but now, she is practically one of us after being made honorary Ocker of the Year, last year by The Australia Day Foundation.

The dodgy Foundation is a cabal of climate deniers, mining shills and lobbyists with links to the ultra-right Policy Exchange, a group affiliated with those who spread disinformation on climate change and covid.

Many see Liz as Little Britain’s next Tory PM, if only party animal and pants-man, Boris Johnson would admit the carnival is over. Or Sue Gray busts him for breaking his own social distancing rules by holding parties. Seriously.

Her man bag, Ben Wallace, is a Boris-follower, too, over-promoted for his loyalty to Defence Secretary.

Ben and Liz are AUKUS hawks who talk up a Blairite WMD-type case for declaring war on Russia, just because America wants them to, a scenario, the invisible Marise Payne and Minister for Defence, Peter Dutton find incredibly compelling and not just as an election campaign stunt.

All is well in the Land of Oz, even “a smoking ruin” of democracy as Guy Rundle praises us. Deputy PM and MP for Santos, Barnaby Joyce tells ABC RN Breakfast’s Patricia Karvelas that “people aren’t dying” in the Lucky Country of Covid. Rats are wrecking his government’s superbly orchestrated pandemic testing kit rollout by hoarding their RATs (Rapid Antigen Tests) – or flogging them at prices to rival the can-do capitalism of professional gougers and your local Chemist Warehouse portal.

Finally, Labor’s leader responds to Andrew Probyn asking who he is:

“My first campaign, I was 12 years old,” Albo tells the Press Club. “We organised a rent strike. We took petitions around to everyone. That was my experience of that. That drove me. That was my first political campaign. And, by the way, we won.”

“Just ‘pushing through’ this pandemic is not enough,” he argues. “We need to learn from it, we need to use what the last two years have taught us to build a better future.”

We need “a government that steps up to its responsibilities and fulfils its most fundamental roles: to protect our people, to act as a force for good, and to change people’s lives for the better.”

No wonder Morrison’s running scared. But pumping social media with Clive$’ lies about Labor’s failings is unlikely to cut it when your record reeks of corruption, ineptitude, dud deals and untrustworthiness. The worst PM of the century can’t even show some grace under friendly fire at a reception for Australian of the Year, a miserable morning tea, brightened only by a bevy of nominees for awards, any one of which is likely to show up his own inadequacies as a man and as a leader.

To pick a fight with Grace Tame, moreover, and to go on radio, later, to belittle her, may cost Morrison any last skerrick of credibility. His pot-shot at Grace Tame, Australian of the Year 2021 is by extension an attack on all women and every woman’s right to expect a government that offers equality, justice and safety for all Australians, instead of a racket run to benefit a privileged few.

Given his lies, his stunts, his broken promises, his empty promises, his protection of incompetent ministers and worse, together with his government’s catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic, his pot-shot at Ms Tame maybe his coup de grace.

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For ‘lack of integrity’ the Morrison government scores an A+

Election diary No 8. Saturday, January 29 2022.

As one summers day oozes into the next and the heat on small bald feet diminishes, kids, prepare for the start of another school year, having learned that it isn’t as bad as they thought.

Having downed his last stubbie and Mum having prepared her last meal in unfamiliar surroundings, both give their thoughts to returning to work.

Unlike most years, this one is different. Mum and Dad and all those 18 and over will have to vote, some for the first time. And others like my wife and I will be doing so for the umpteenth time.

Some take it seriously. Others do so because they are expected to. Most vote for the same party every time. Too many, because they are dissatisfied with the system, don’t vote at all. And then some vote after giving serious consideration to why they are doing so.

With a likely May election, now is the time we all pay more attention to what our politicians are doing and saying. Given that the stakes are so high in this election, people may give their thoughts over to things like integrity now that the current media focuses somewhat on politicians’ behaviour.

When l say the stakes are high, I’m not kidding. This Government collectively is a bunch of the most corrupt, self-serving politicians who will further destroy our democracy if given the opportunity.

There is an abundance of evidence to support my claims. Even now, we have a repetitive TV commercial that claims emissions have come down by 15%, whereas The Guardian reports they have risen by 7%. It might just be me, but I’ll take The Guardian‘s word over the Government’s any day.

The pre-election period is when the Government thinks it’s perfectly alright to spend our taxpayer’s money on falsehoods that make them look good. The budget for this lying rises considerably before each election.

If you live on a hill, look out for the pork barrels

There is always the temptation to use taxpayers’ money in marginal seats in the pre-election period. No doubt, most will recall the Sports Rorts affair when in the lead-up to the 2019 election, the Government used the $100m community sports grants program to prop up many seats. Later a massive scandal broke when the Auditor General found the grants were not awarded consistent with assessed merit and were biased in favour of marginal electorates.

This was followed by the revelation that the Auditor General also had a problem with $660m allocated to 47 sites for commuter car parks. 77% were located in Coalition electorates. Headlines like; Sports rorts on steroids’: scathing report finds Coalition car park program not effective or merit-based followed.

With a significantly increased war chest of $15.9bn in unidentified spending for “decisions taken but not yet announced,” a whopping increase on the previous year’s December budget update figure of $1.5bn.

We must be vigilant and watch out for the Government’s pork barrelling attempts in marginal seats. It is difficult to see them trying to put one over on the electorate again, but it isn’t beyond them.

The money rolls in

Political donations begin to roll in during the pre-election period to back the winner and buy influence into the future.

The big story in the 2019 election was Clive Palmer’s $60m to fund his own campaign. There wasn’t a suggestion of illegality, and he failed to win a seat; however, there can be no doubt that his repetitious anti-Labor advertising made a considerable difference to the Coalition’s vote.

Yes, you’re correct. Grattan Institute analysis tells us that the parties’ top 5% of donors account for more than half of their declared donations. And guess who they might be.

We all know of the subsidies given to the gambling companies property, mining and construction companies that would be better spent elsewhere. No wonder their donations are so sizable.

Something urgently needs to be done about political donations and their disclosure. An excellent first step to squashing this grey corruption is making it more visible.

Real-time disclosure is a must. The Grattan Institute reports that:

“… we won’t find out where the money came from until February 2023 because donation disclosures are only published annually. And even then we will only get a partial picture because high declarations thresholds and big loopholes mean that the major parties generally declare less than 60% of their total private funding.”

Taxpayer-funded political advertising

Governments frequently significantly bolster taxpayer-funded advertising in the months before election campaigns.

The guidelines are supposed to restrict taxpayer-funded advertising for political purposes. However, the Grattan Institute examinations tell us:

“… that over the past five elections, federal governments have doubled their spending in the two-to-three months before an election, compared to the previous three months.”

With a budget in March, goodness knows what they will throw into their electioneering.

The analysis published in The Guardian suggests another 59 million dollars will be spent on advertising.

The “positive energy” campaign and advertisements about the Government securing more rapid antigen tests have already hit our screens. Both are full of inaccuracies, I suggest. Or just plain propaganda.

Government appointments galore, or is that galah?

The Grattan Institute reports that:

“Ministers are responsible for filling hundreds of positions on independent government boards and agencies. In the lead-up to an election, there seems to be a rush to fill these spots – even some of the ones that aren’t currently vacant.

Governments like to control who sits in powerful positions, even more so when these positions are prestigious or well-paid. A forthcoming Grattan Institute report will show that appointing “political mates” to these positions is becoming more common.”

There isn’t much to be done except to highlight the hypocrisy. These appointments of former politicians and staffers need to be forensically examined by the media and Labor. Hopefully, the press will provide background on those who get a position.

We dislike and resist change in the foolish assumption that we can permanently make us feel secure. Yet change is, in fact, part of the very fabric of our existence.

Looking at a way to boost integrity?

Opposition leader Anthony Albanese, in his address to the Press Club on Tuesday, January 25, placed great emphasis on the restoration of the dignity that once was the Australian parliament. Making things transparent that have been allowed to disappear will take more effort, and still more challenging will be the replacement of those who have made it all possible. It won’t be easy to suppress the influence of money and corruption after it has flourished carte blanche for a decade or more. But all of it must be done.

Elections allow all of us a chance to change things. They afford us the opportunity to right wrongs and start afresh.

In his speech, Albanese said:

“A country and a people as extraordinary as ours deserve a government to match. A government of competence and a government of integrity. A government that doesn’t get out of the way but helps to create the way.”

Hear hear, Albo. Hear hear.

My thought for the day

Just because we are governed by clowns doesn’t mean it is a laughing matter. The first duty of any government, if they don’t already have it, is the acquisition of integrity.

PS: When actions speak louder than words. Congratulations, Grace Tame.

 

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Richard Colbeck should have been sacked over this 2021 scandal

By Andrew Wicks  

The last time Richard Colbeck made headlines was the discovery that no one knew how many aged care workers were vaccinated.

Richard Colbeck has done it again. As reported by Josh Butler of The Guardian, “Scott Morrison has backed the embattled aged care minister despite saying he can ‘understand the criticism’ of Colbeck, who attended the Ashes cricket match in Hobart on the same day he failed to front a parliamentary inquiry into the Covid crisis. The finance minister, Simon Birmingham, also defended Colbeck on Friday, saying people could ‘walk and chew gum at the same time’. He noted the aged care minister – who is also the sports minister – had held Covid meetings earlier in the day before attending the Test match a fortnight ago.

“Colbeck declined to attend the Senate Covid-19 committee on 14 January. He cited the need not to divert health department officials from their “urgent and critical” work but it was revealed this week he attended three days of the Hobart Test from Friday 14 January to Sunday 16 January.”

In June of last year, Colbeck hit the headlines, as the nation realised that we didn’t know how many aged care workers had been vaccinated, as there was no one keeping track of who has received the vaccine, and who hasn’t. After sustained backlash, the Department of Health said that work was “underway” to survey aged care workers at the nation’s facilities (read: literally counting heads).

At the time, we wanted to know who was responsible for this monumental cock up. According to Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck, it’s not him. Fronting a senate committee this morning, Colbeck was asked by Senator Katy Gallagher whether he thought he was responsible, yes or no. Colbeck proclaimed that it wasn’t “a yes or no answer.”

Interestingly, Birmingham appeared in this issue as well, telling ABC News Breakfast, “I do accept that it has not gone as we would have hoped.”

However, Birmingham was quick to shift blame, stating that the rollout was primarily hampered by the availability of vaccines. Birmingham took it further, claiming that the reason why 600 aged care facilities haven’t been vaccinated was primarily down the 12 weeks period between jabs with the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Yet, prior to the rollout, residents and workers in aged and disability care were told that they’d receive the vaccine within the first six weeks.

As journalist Christopher Knaus noted, “…a key area of responsibility for the federal government is vaccinating aged care staff and residents who are both in the highest priority group for vaccinations – phase 1a. Initially, the government said it had planned to complete phase 1a within roughly six weeks of the program’s commencement on 22 February. That included vaccinating 190,000 aged and disability care residents and 318,000 aged care and disability staff.”

“We know we aren’t where we want to be but we don’t know where we are,” Gerard Hayes, secretary of the Health Services Union in NSW, said of record-keeping in the sector’s “haphazard” rollout last year.

In early April, Health Minister Greg Hunt said that the program was “accelerating as intended” and “We were conservative in our estimates.”

Hunt also mentioned at that time that “we remain on track to complete first doses for all Australians who seek it by the end of October.”

As The Big Smoke reported, “Pre-rollout, Prime Minister Scott Morrison suggested the rollout capacity will start at around 80,000 doses per week and increase from there. That’s 16,000 a day (over five-day weeks), well short of the required 200,000 a day. The planned peak capacity hasn’t been announced, but even back-of-the-beer-mat calculation would suggest a minimum of 167,000 vaccines per day to give two doses each to 20 million Australians in the eight months between March and October 2021. The longer it takes to reach such capacity, the higher that daily number will get – or we will not reach the target vaccination percentage this year.”

In conversation with The Guardian, The Council on the Ageing chief executive, Ian Yates, claimed that the government overpromised, and underdelivered the vaccine. Yates also highlighted the lack of a plan for vaccinating aged care workers a month into the rollout.

 

Cartoon by Alan Moir (moir.com.au)

 

This article was originally published on The Big Smoke.

 

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Grace (Un)Tame(d) Provokes Conservative Outrage

The media has made much of ‘that photograph’ of 2021 Australian of The Year Grace Tame glaring daggers through The Lodge Occupant. The Good Dr. Jennifer Wilson has penned a great piece for this website about the photo and the amazing cultural subtext, and I encourage you to check it out here. I want to focus on the media reaction, and discuss the breathtaking hypocrisy on display from those on the right. I also want to look at an excellent piece by Samantha Maiden on news.com.au (of all places). Maiden rightly puts Tame’s critics in their place.

The response from the media, by and large, has been to condemn Ms Tame as ‘uncivil’ (consider Peter Van Obsolete as Dr Wilson called him). Essentially, this photo-op is a yearly tradition and Ms Tame ruined it by refusing to be a good girl and ‘give us a smile, sweetheart’. It is worth noting that neither Ms Tame, nor anyone else, is obligated to give Scotty from Marketing a good photo-op. She, like most people, has a political stance, specifically an opinion on The Lodge Occupant. She conveyed that opinion and it is somehow a problem.

First, Have No Standards: The Hypocritic Oath, Part One: Free Speech

Many of Ms Tame’s most vocal critics on the right (including Miranda Divine) are part of the ‘free speech’ crowd. As is becoming increasingly clear, the conservative definition of this ‘right’ (which Australia does not have by the by, we never quite got to the whole ‘bill of rights’ thing) is ‘we get to say what we want and the rest of you fall in line’. In other words, for me and mine, not thee and thine. Standard practice? Maybe, but it still reeks.

Ms Tame expressed her political opinion of The Lodge Occupant in the most public and viral way possible. As we will see in the Samantha Maiden piece, Ms Tame knew exactly what she was doing. But back to the point: Ms Tame does not have ‘muh freeze peach’? Or does that sacred concept only apply to certain opinions? That consistency has never been the strong suit of the right is well known, but this gives whiplash.

First, Have No Standards: The Hypocritic Oath, Part Two: The Media and The Office of The Prime Minister

The Murdoch Media Menagerie has made much in the last day or so of ‘respect for the office of The Prime Minister’. The idea here is that even if you dislike the occupant, you show respect for the office. Anyone inclined to make such a suggestion regarding Ms Tame I direct to the following image, borrowed from the Facebook page of a Mr. Kevin Rudd:

Seems the ‘respect’ due to the office of The Prime Minister changes according to whether or not the occupant is from the right party. The brass b*lls it takes to bellyache about ‘disrespecting the office of The Prime Minister’ only when your guy is in there is something to behold. There is a real sense of ‘know your role, shut your mouth’ here that is most unbecoming. Now, am I suggesting that, as a sexual assault survivor and advocate that Ms Tame is insulated from any and all criticism? No. But of all the things to criticise someone with her past about, smiling? Seriously?

But Why So ‘Untamed’?  

It should be clear that Ms Tame’s actions do not need ‘justification’ from me or anyone else. But I thought it might be useful to look at history for some motivation for her giving The Lodge Occupant the evil eye. One possible explanation for her ‘icy’ demeanour toward The Lodge Occupant might be his utter lack of action around sexual assault and family violence, specifically his defense (before the facts were known) of Non-Christian Porter around the rape of Brittany Higgins. A little detail here worth recalling is The Lodge Occupant discussing the rape of Ms Higgins with his wife, who encouraged him to think about the incident as ‘the father of two daughters’. Ms Tame rightly obliterated this nonsense when she said:

It shouldn’t take having children to have a conscience

Ms Tame does not evidently understand how the conservative mind works: something has to affect them before they care.

Now, this is but one incident, and it is not the whole story of course. But sexual assault advocacy was her issue. The Let Her Speak campaign was what brought her to prominence in the first place. Of all the issues for The Lodge Occupant not to act on, this was likely to poke the bear

Play it Again, Sam: Samantha Maiden to The Rescue

In a fantastic piece for news.com.au, actual journalist Samantha Maiden eviscerates the right wing narrative around this incident. She notes the hypocrisy of the government by pointing out (with photos) times when LNP cabinet members were playing on their phones while turning their backs on Tanya Plibersek as she addressed the House. Maiden also notes the utter non-issue that was Justice Kenneth Hayne of the Banking Royal Commission saying ‘nope’ when asked to shake hands with Treasurer Josh Frydenburg in 2019. But Grace Tame is the issue because she refused to ‘be a good girl and give us a smile, love’ to The Lodge Occupant? Spare me.

Maiden notes that the critics of Ms Tame are actually attempting to control her behaviour, a harkening back to the abuse she suffered as a child. I had not thought of it this way, and the suggestion is intriguing. But what is the most interesting part of Maiden’s piece is the comment that, through her facial expressions, Ms Tame has taught us something about activism.

The suggestion seems to be that activism comes in many forms, and this was a powerful one for Ms Tame. Her knowledge of how much The Lodge Occupant loves his photo-ops doubtless made this a tempting target. Maiden comments that Ms Tame ‘knew exactly what she was doing’ and I am inclined to agree. She hit The Lodge Occupant where she knew it would hurt him: public image. His obsession with marketing (despite his seeming incompetence at it) made him vulnerable there. She exploited that.

Conclusion: Nous Sommes Grace Tame

The lesson from this is that activism need not be bricks through windows, or even fiery rhetoric. Through her simple facial expressions and the fire in her eyes, Grace Tame has conveyed the outrage of the considerable segment of the population that has, to put it mildly, an unfavourable opinion of The Lodge Occupant. As much as her critics like to complain about her ‘lack of civility’, it is precisely that lack of civility, the idea of not being ‘the good little girl’ that makes her statement so powerful.

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What is required of a woman if she wants a seat at the powerful men’s table? That she smile.

2021 Australian of the Year Grace Tame yesterday met with Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and she did not smile at him.

In fact, Ms Tame used powerful body language and a steely side-eye to convey her disdain and contempt for the man.

Watching this act of subversion from Ms Tame was liberating. Like many other women, I recall, with equal parts rage and sorrow, the times in my life I have smiled when my true feeling was fury, or hurt, or shock or despair, or even just excruciating boredom with the men. To smile in such circumstances always cost me because it was a denial of my truth, and my authenticity. Nobody can deny their truth and authenticity without paying a price, and this particular price is extracted from girls and women from the moment we are born, and does not cease until the day we die.

Predictably, Ms Tame’s stance aroused the self-righteous ire of the civility police, notably academic and Murdoch hack Peter van Onselen, best known for using the intimate writings of the deceased alleged victim of his best friend, alleged rapist Christian Porter, in a most uncivil attempt to invalidate allegations of anal rape by the former federal Attorney-General. This gives you some indication of the man’s ethics.

Pete van Obsolete rushed to produce a thundering column in The Australian ($) decrying Ms Tame’s refusal to play the game a woman is expected to play when encountering the Prime Minister, or just about any man, to be honest. Juvenile, lacking in manners, childish, attention seeking, brazen, are just some of the adjectives Pearl Clutcher Pete used to condemn Ms Tame. He then went on to state in an interview later that evening that if Ms Tame couldn’t smile she shouldn’t have gone, and there we have it, in a nutshell.

What is required of a woman if she wants a seat at the powerful men’s table? That she smile.

This knowledge comes as no surprise to most women. What is surprising is that a man actually says it out loud. Thanks, Petey. You’ve confirmed what we’ve always known and now we can quote you.

Certain men require that women perform their ideal of femininity, an ideal that has at its centre a compliant woman. If we smile (though our hearts are aching), smile (even though they’re breaking) our smile reassures these men that whatever vile thing they’ve done to us is not really that bad because look, we are smiling!

A woman’s smile is an essential tool in the ongoing patriarchal project to minimise and deny the rampant misogyny that continues to control the lives of women and girls.  A refusal to smile is a refusal to accept the status quo. It is a refusal to play the game. It is a refusal to enable and minimise our own mistreatment and the suffering it brings. That is why they want us to smile, and that is why they are so enraged when we don’t. The refusal to smile is the refusal to be complicit in our own oppression.

Ms Tame campaigned last year for the recognition of victims of sexual assault. Scott campaigned last year for the protection of alleged rapist Christian Porter whom he (erroneously) declared to be “an innocent man under the law” Scott has also been accused of covering up the alleged rape of Ms Brittany Higgins in Parliament House in 2019. I can’t think of one reason for Ms Tame to smile at Scott.

What Ms Tame demonstrated is that it is not necessary for women to play nice with powerful misogynists. With one gesture, she smashed through conventions that only serve to keep women subjugated. The outpouring of support for her stance only proves that we are more than ready for this moment.

Those men (and women) condemning Ms Tame for what they perceive as her incivility, her lack of manners, and her impoliteness need to get out of the way, because their opinions are obsolete. Women increasingly understand how demands that we smile (and I use this as a metonym throughout this piece) work to oppress us, and are indeed designed for that outcome.

I’m not smiling. I’m baring my teeth.

 

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The longevity of conservative bullshit clogs their veins with hypocrisy

Election Diary No7, Wednesday, January 26 2022

People need to wake up to the fact that Government affects every part of their lives and should be more interested. But there is a deep-seated political malaise that is counter to representative democracy.

Less informed voters, unfortunately, outnumber the more politically aware. Therefore, conservatives feed them all the bullshit they can. And the menu generally contains a fair portion of hypocrisy and lies.

Hypocrisy is one area where conservatives dwell on the unthinking individual who has no idea of the ideological beliefs of different parties: the hundreds of thousands of people that take little notice of politics.

The word hypocrisy means a pretence to have a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not possess. A façade of having some desirable or publicly approved attitude. Or a situation where someone pretends to believe in something they don’t, or the opposite of what they do or say at another time.

1 When as Treasurer Scott Morrison repeatedly said of negative gearing that there were “excesses in the system” and decided to do nothing about them, it would be reasonable to conclude that he is a hypocrite.

Not long ago, former Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull co-wrote a paper that suggested that negative gearing skewed “national investment away from wealth-creating pursuits, towards housing.”

Could we be blamed for saying “bloody hypocrite” when he did an about-turn on climate change policies that he had assured the people he believed in to attain the leadership over a long period?

Like when you profess to be fixing a problem when you are doing the opposite. Examples are many. In 2016 Malcolm Turnbull said that negative gearing was “tax avoidance”; it could be seen as gross hypocrisy in light of his support for it later on.

Another example of hypocrisy: In 2015, 500 workers who benefited from Gillard’s edict that non-faith-based workers be allowed in our schools were replaced by chaplains sourced predominantly from big Christian organisations. It is a secular public school system, and it is fundamentally wrong be you religious or not.

In 2016 it seemed that Evangelical Christians were gaining most from the National School Chaplaincy scheme, earning millions of dollars. Kirsty Needham, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald that year reported that:

Generate Ministries has won $4 million to provide chaplains to 202 of the 438 NSW schools participating in the scheme in 2016.

The Hillsong-linked Your Dream will earn $1.4 million for 70 schools (up from 50 last year), while Macquarie Life Church will provide chaplains in 20 regional schools.

We are supposed to have a secular public school system. Religious Chaplains in secular schools was hypocritical.

When in his maiden speech, the present Prime Minister alludes to good Christian commonplace values of compassion and love for his fellow humans and then behaves entirely differently toward asylum seekers; then again, I suggest he is being hypocritical:

“From my faith I derive the values of loving-kindness, justice and righteousness; to act with compassion and kindness, acknowledging our common humanity and to consider the welfare of others; to fight for a fair go for everyone to fulfil their human potential and to remove whatever unjust obstacles stand in their way, including diminishing their personal responsibility for their own wellbeing; and to do what is right, to respect the rule of law, the sanctity of human life and the moral integrity of marriage and the family. We must recognise an unchanging and absolute standard of what is good and what is evil. Desmond Tutu put it this way: … we expect Christians … to be those who stand up for the truth, to stand up for justice, to stand on the side of the poor and the hungry, the homeless and the naked, and when that happens, then Christians will be trustworthy believable witnesses. These are my principles. My vision for Australia is for a nation that is strong, prosperous and generous: strong in our values and our freedoms, strong in our family and community life, strong in our sense of nationhood and in the institutions that protect and preserve our democracy; prosperous in our enterprise and the careful stewardship of our opportunities, our natural environment and our resources; and, above all, generous in spirit, to share our good fortune with others, both at home and overseas, out of compassion and a desire for justice.”

A close observation of his words reveals the narrowness and simplicity of his thinking; his views seem to be closed to other people’s values, thoughts and ideas. His standards are those he thinks others should have, his family, church, and the community, so everyone should have them. His words seem to represent a world long gone without considering what the future offers. “Well, that’s what my father believed in, and he was a good bloke” seems to be what he is trying to tell people, but society is changing quicker than he can think. The hypocrisy of not seeing it is blinding.

Do you shape the truth for the sake of good impression? On the other hand, do you tell the truth even if it may tear down the view people may have of you? Alternatively, do you simply use the contrivance of omission and create another lie. I can only conclude that there is always pain in truth but there is no harm in it.

2 When will an election be held?

The Government has issued a parliamentary sitting calendar indicating that it intends to hold the federal Budget on 29 March 2022. The Government can change the sitting calendar, and there is no guarantee that the Budget will be held on that day however if it is that only leaves 3 possible election days (7, 14 and 21 May).

Any 2022 election held before 7 May 2022, would, according to the proposed sitting calendar, only have the Parliament sit during the February sitting weeks (and only the first week for a 19 March election). This means that any legislation the Government wants to pass in the current term would need to be passed by both Houses by the end of that sitting. An election on 14 or 21 May would potentially allow the March and April sitting periods to also go ahead.

A total of 10 sitting days before the election. Isn’t that deplorable?

The One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson, and sidekick senator Malcolm Roberts say the Coalition should not expect their votes until the Government rolls back the state-based vaccination mandates and border restrictions. It has never meant much in the past.

So, May 21 looks to be the date we will vote to see who will lead us into the future. One way or the other.

3 Weight problems.

Clive Palmer’s mind, like his body mass, is highly inflated, but he does carry a lot of weight into this election. I read recently that he plans an even bigger spend for the 2022 election. It will exceed $80 million. Yes, it is a lot of money to prevent the Labor Party you dislike from gaining power and electing a known fool instead.

As reported in the Brisbane Times, the unvaccinated mining billionaire says the United Australia Party “will run the most expensive political campaign in Australian history” at the next election. He would also lead the UAP’s Queensland Senate ticket.

4 Speaking of a strange character who is a member of the Coalition, George Christensen, as reported in The Guardian, will not be standing at the upcoming election. Still, it looks as though he will turn up the volume on his conspiracy theory and anti-vaccination commentary.

The Prime Minister has described his commentary as dangerous; however, nothing seems to discourage this thick head from his own stupidity.

In recent months, Christensen’s commentary has varied from the ludicrous to the idiotic.

His public commentary has included pushing anti-vaccination messages, climate change denial, conspiracy theories, and comments that have vandalised his own Government’s public health messaging. One headline in The Guardian read; “George Christensen advocates for civil disobedience as vaccine mandates rock Coalition.” Not a nice person.

5 On top of that, the other nutter Craig Kelly who thinks he knows more than those with the brightest minds, is set to join others to make the first sitting week of the Parliament a misery for the Prime Minister.

Neither of these (Christensen and Kelly) represent their respective parties in the usual way, speaking out against it at every opportunity. However, today’s circumstance dictates that Morrison cannot dismiss them without using some principle.

It remains to be seen who the nutters are who will replace them.

The mainstream media will only ever print or say whatever is in its best interests. Then it might say something interesting and truthful.

My thought for the day

A commitment to using critical reason, factual evidence, and scientific methods of inquiry, rather than faith and mysticism, is the best way to solve human problems. That leaves conservatives out of the equation.

 

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Modern Monetary Theory and The Great Fraud of Neoliberalism

The time has come to expose the great fraud that has been perpetrated on the West in the last forty years. Once we have even a surface-level understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), the great lie that is Neoliberalism will come crashing down.

Now, this has been outlined and discussed in detail by far greater minds than my own; this is not original to me. But I thought it might be useful to offer a brief description of MMT, how it works and then use these basics to expose the great Neoliberal fraud.

MMT, Part One: Currency and Its Relationships

In every economy that has its own currency (Australia, the US, the UK etc), every entity in that economy has one of two relationships to that currency. One is either a user or an issuer. Obviously, the federal government is the monopoly issuer of currency (hence counterfeit money laws). So the government issues the currency, and everyone else (including state and local governments and the citizenry) uses the currency.

Currencies such as the Australian Dollar, the US Dollar, the Pound etc are called Sovereign Currencies or Fiat Currencies. This means that when the government goes to do something, it simply goes to the central bank (the Reserve Bank in Australia or The Federal Reserve in the US) and says ‘we need this amount of money to be created’ and the bank, through several keystrokes, brings that currency into existence. Similarly, the relevant bank accounts of the recipients are also augmented using keystrokes. This may seem counterintuitive, but think about it this way. Consider the recent spending of $3.5b on tanks. Are we to believe that the government went to a physical bank vault filled with stacks of $100 notes? In light of the amount of money spent by the government on the regular, this would be impractical. Government spending is essentially EFTPOS on a grand scale.

MMT, Part Two: Tax Does Not Fund the Government

Since the government simply creates (issues) the currency it uses, government spending is not ‘paid for’ in that sense. It does not need tax to fund its spending since it is spending currency it issued itself. Tax revenue, I say again, does not fund the government. This lays to rest the zombie lie that a government has to ‘live within its means’ or ‘has a budget like a household’. Households do not issue their own currency, so this statement is a lie. Government ‘living within its means’ is naught but a lie designed to justify cutting funding for things neoliberals do not like, such as universal healthcare, education, pensions and generally anything that benefits anyone making less than $250k per year.

I should be clear: taxation does not fund federal government spending. It is true that tax does fund state and local government since these entities are still currency users (recall it is the federal government that issues the currency).

MMT, Part Three: The Purpose of Taxation

A natural follow-up might be to ask

If  tax does not fund [federal] government spending, why have tax at all?

I think the best answer to this was provided in a New Economic Perspectives article

[Another] reason to have taxes is to reduce aggregate demand. If we look at the United States today, the federal government spending is somewhat over 20% of GDP, while tax revenue is somewhat less—say 17%. The net injection coming from the federal government is thus about 3% of GDP. If we eliminated taxes (and held all else constant) the net injection might rise toward 20% of GDP. That is a huge increase of aggregate demand, and could cause inflation

What this seems to mean is that the act of ‘taxing’ a unit of currency serves to eliminate it from the economy. Taxation seems to have the purpose of being a sort of ‘inflation break’, removing a certain amount of currency from the economy to prevent too much currency from flying around which could lead to inflation.

The Other Great Zombie Lie: How Will You Pay For It?

You have doubtless heard some version of this whenever a policy is proposed that would help the peasants. Any talk of, for instance, raising Newstart is met with loud screams of ‘HOWYIGONPAYFRIIIIIIIIIIT’ (how are you going to pay for it) or ‘we cannot afford it’. It is unclear whether those asking making these asinine statements are not aware of the fiat currency the Australian Federal Government uses, or if they are being deliberately deceptive. I leave that decision up to you all individually.

Not only is ‘how will you pay for it’ a ridiculous statement, but its application is also highly selective. Have you ever heard this question, or some variant of it, asked around, say, the military budget (pick your country, but the Americans are the most egregious)? How about corporate subsidies? How about politicians’ own outrageous perks and entitlements?

It is almost like they know that they have a fiat currency and intentionally lie to the people about ‘debt and deficit’ whenever they do not like something, typically for ideological (or corrupt) reasons. Whether it is funding Medicare (consider Mr Morrison’s recent removal of more than 900 items), investment in renewables or anything else the Liberal National Coalition is (in my opinion) paid to oppose, they become penny-pinchers when their ideology gets in the way. Yet hypocritically when it comes to war, corporate looting of the treasury and their own perks, they are reckless. Enough.

Conclusion: The Great Fraud

Since the advent of Reagan and Thatcher, politics in the west has taken a very selfish, individualistic turn. Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is a popular Neoliberal mantra. Government has to live within its means is another. MMT shows that the very idea that a government has ‘limited means’ has narrow basis in reality. It is a monopoly currency issuer. It is, in a very real sense, not possible for a government with a fiat currency to ‘run out of money’.

I have said this before, but it is worth repeating: When it comes to helping the people, it is not money these sociopaths lack, it is the will to do it.

Governments with fiat currencies have all the money they could ever need. They could do so many wonderful things to improve society in so many ways. Means is not the issue. Conviction is. MMT, with its focus on fiat currencies, helps to expose the great hypocrisy at the core of the Neoliberal disaster of the last four decades. In an economy with a fiat currency, the use of fear-mongering about ‘debt and deficit’ to suppress policies that could help broad swaths of the population is dishonest beyond measure.

Epilogue: Still Learning

I am very much still learning about MMT, and doubtless, I have gotten some things wrong here. I encourage you to check out this podcast for detailed discussion of the theory and its applications. I hope this piece has provided a basic discussion of MMT and given some insight into the rot that is Neoliberalism.

 

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