By Denis Bright
The LNP’s advertising agencies continue to compromise our national sovereignty. Voter choice continues to be compromised by slick marketing strategies employed at the recent Queensland elections. The return to truth-telling should surely be taken up on both sides of the political divide by candidates like Maggie Forrest as the federal LNP’s challenger in Ryan:
I am a practising barrister who has appeared in the High Court of Australia, studied criminology and counterterrorism at the University of Cambridge, and worked in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
Already, the most vulnerable sections of Queensland society are the targets of the LNP’s punitive initiatives as reported by Andrew Messenger in The Guardian (28 November 2024):
Queensland’s human rights commissioner says the state’s new hardline youth crime laws – which could result in life sentences for children “who still have their baby teeth” – are evidence of a “society that has lost its way”.
The legislation will require the third override of the state Human Rights Act in two years. All three permitted the state to imprison more children in the youth justice system.
The Queensland human rights commissioner, Scott McDougall, said the state was risking its international reputation by “removing the rights of children”.
Children as young as 10 will also be subject to the same maximum sentence as adults for 13 offences, including unlawful use of a motor vehicle and entering a premises and committing an indictable offence.
Under the legislation, children can be sentenced to life behind bars for five offences, including manslaughter, grievous bodily harm and a form of robbery and burglary.
If convicted of murder, they must be sentenced to life, with a minimum 20-year non-parole period.
Expect less truth-telling from the LNP and the minor far-right parties to blame the Albanese Government for every negative economic and social trend. No mention will be made in the LNP’s advertising outreach of the economic and social crises at play in other Middle Powers from Japan to South Korea, France and Germany. In the latter, an overly compromising Social Democratic Party is now third in INSA public opinion polling after the main Conservative Union (31.5 percent) and the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD 18.5 per cent).
Recent Australian GDP data can easily be applied to instill fears about the future after several consecutive quarters of negative per capita GDP data (ABS 4 December 2024):
The election date for 2025 is still open with the added variable of the WA election on 5 March. A late May election will have the new budget parameters in place and more responses to the effects of the Trump tariffs on the global economy.
Peter Dutton should be asked which cost-of-living and environmental relief measures will be axed for ideological reasons. This curtailment of government spending will be at the expense of grant allocations to the states and territories which cover up to 60 percent of all revenue in Tasmania and the NT.
MAGA politics from the incoming Trump administration favours the economic development of the US at the expense of other middle powers with the added burdens of defence purchases by Australia from military industrial complexes and systematic tax avoidance by multinational companies. High profile LNP shadow ministers apologize for these excesses and are overly tolerant of tax avoidance by multinational companies in Australia.
ABC News shows that the list of multinational companies engaging in tax avoidance has grown exponentially:
More than 1,200 large companies paid no tax in 2022-23, an Australian Taxation Office (ATO) report reveals.
The ATO’s tenth corporate tax transparency report, which covers 3,985 entities that lodged tax returns in 2022–23, found that while the amount of tax collected increased due to higher mining and oil and gas company profits, there were still 1,253 entities (31 per cent) that did not pay tax.
The report attributes no tax being paid to various reasons, including companies making an accounting loss or claiming tax offsets that reduced their tax bill to zero.
Readers can check on the tax payable by their favourite corporations by scrolling through the list provided by ABC News to the latest full budget year:
SBS News (31 July 2023) also notes the extent of multiple home ownership amongst our national leaders. There is no national housing crisis in these more elite levels of society.
Despite all these exercises in tax avoidance and write-offs for negative gearing on investment properties, public sector spending at national and state levels is carrying the economy forward at a very sluggish pace (ABS 4 December 2024):
Turning the ship of state back to neoliberal values will be difficult even if Peter Dutton makes it over the line in Election 2025. Our own social divide has grown so much under a new global hegemony that threatens every remaining social democratic government.
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Avoiding Lost Causes
Trump’s tariffs rise,
A superpower’s economic plight.
LNP advertisers
Must generate fright
Perhaps Aussies will resist
And question why
Middle Powers are under fire
Forge a political front with a left-leaning spire.
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Australia Post offers a timely reminder of those dreamtime realities that occasionally colour the night sky in the darkest of seasons in Southern Australia. Will resistance to another decade of neoliberalism and strategic conflicts emerge out of resistance to those overpowering political jingles that seem to triumph in the most disadvantaged regions and outer metro electorates?
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