It’s down to us
It’s very convenient for Opposition Leader Peter Dutton that a lot of us are not overly interested in politics and can’t remember what we had for lunch last Tuesday. It gives him the chance to suggest that white is white today and suggest black is white in a month’s time.
According to Dutton and the Opposition, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been too busy jetting off overseas to understand the nominated issue of the day, whether it be interest rates, refugees or some other confected crisis that will destroy the country because the Prime Minister is not in his office in Canberra. As this is being written, Albanese is in San Francisco, attending an APEC meeting. It is his 18th trip overseas in his 18 months in office. San Francisco has its charms but its a pretty good bet that Albanese and the other Asia-Pacific leaders won’t be riding the cable cars or ‘chillin’ out’ with some legalised cannabis. Dutton’s criticism is probably based around attempting to make the argument that ‘Airbus Albo’ is travelling far more frequently than the ‘gold standard’ in Australian political leadership – recent Coalition Prime Ministers.
Well he’s not. According to RMIT’s FactCheck unit, Albanese’s 18 trips
nudges him slightly ahead of former prime ministers Scott Morrison (17 trips) and Tony Abbott (16) at the same point in their tenure.
Morrison clocked up his 17 trips in 14 months before his ill-fated family holiday to Hawaii. which was disclosed only after Morrison was photographed in Hawaii during the severe bushfires on the east coast of Australia in 2019. Despite the lack of travel that was a fallout of his ill-timed vacation to Hawaii and a long period without travel due to the pandemic, Morrison still clocked up 24 overseas trips in his term. Abbott did 21 in 2 years while Turnbull travelled overseas 23 times in his 3-year Prime Ministership. As RMIT FactCheck notes
For all the criticism of Mr Albanese, the Coalition has itself defended the necessity of prime ministerial travel, at least for Liberal prime ministers.
“Every trip the prime minister makes is to advance Australia’s interests [by] strengthening our trading relationships and strengthening our national security,” a spokesperson for Mr Morrison told SBS News in 2019.
“… he only travels overseas when it is necessary and will deliver outcomes that benefit Australian families and businesses.”
As recently as last month, Dutton was telling us the Constitution of this country was sacrosanct. Any change to it, such as recognition of First Nations people and creating a mechanism where the was a Voice to Parliament enshrined in the Constitution was effectively heresy. Yet, when the High Court rules that a number of refugees and asylum seekers are to be released from indefinite detention, the Coalition is claiming as some of them are reputed to have committed ‘heinous’ crimes the government needs to ignore the High Court. The government has pointed out that not all of the indefinite detainees were found to be guilty of a criminal offence and those who were released have completed their term of imprisionment.
Despite the claims of the Coalition, people are released into the community every day who have been found guilty of heinous crimes and have served their punishment. There are a number of well tried and tested measures in place to manage the release of former criminals into the community. It is not a national emergency, despite the Coalition’s claims. According to the Parliamentary Education Office
The High Court of Australia and other federal courts have the power to interpret laws made by Parliament and judge if laws are consistent – valid – with the Constitution.
The Parliament and the Judiciary are independent of each other. This allows each to keep a check on the actions of the other. However, the Parliament, Executive and Judiciary are not completely separate; for example, the Parliament can create Federal courts and the Executive appoints High Court judges.
So the Coalition suggestion to ignore the ruling of the High Court breaches the Constitution that a month ago the Coalition said was never meant to be changed.
The Coalition claims they are the better economic managers. Yet the government cancelled $30Billion or so in transportation projects that the Coalition promised but never actually funded or started. While the cancelled projects may have sounded like a good idea, no one had put much thought into them except the (Coalition) politicians announcing them presumably to gain additional votes. As the ABC News website suggests
Now, some of these were kind of pie-in-the-sky anyway, having either been promised by a past Coalition government convinced it was about to lose which then awkwardly didn’t, or offered as a squeaky toy to distract Barnaby Joyce from COP26.
Five commuter car park projects (remember those?) were quietly euthanased among a bunch of other largely unviable plans…
For an opposition, the chance to curry electoral favour by theatrically mourning the loss of amazing things that you rashly promised to do to curry electoral favour but then didn’t actually have to do because you lost is … well, it doesn’t come along all that often, so you enjoy it when you can.
It’s true that this week’s news is next week’s fish and chips wrapping but there is a larger issue here. Week in and week out Dutton and the Coalition make statements that are calculated to cause damage and division. It’s a sad reflection on all of us that instead of discussing how the Coalition might do things better than the government, they are attempting to tear it down. The ALP isn’t much better when in opposition as the conventional wisdom suggests that the release of any policy document leaves the party open to a death by a thousand cuts – as was recently demonstrated in the referendum campaigns. It’s not a recent thing as the same tactics were used by the Coalition against Shorten’s ALP in the 2019 election and by the ALP against Hewson’s Coalition when it proposed a GST in the early 1990s.
There is a maxim that we get the government we deserve. Arguably we deserve better than a Opposition that changes position faster than fast food chains serve burgers, a government that trashes its own party policy on refugees and the environment and a potential alternative that claims to have an environmental focus but will happily vote against environmental legislation because its only 60% of what they want.
The media won’t change it, the ‘conventional wisdom’ won’t change it – so it’s down to us.
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Return to home pageMy God, if there was an OLYMPIC GAMES for heinous, self-serving HYPOCRISY, the callously inhumane, obscenely corrupt, self-serving, pathological liar, Dutton and the repugnant, elitist political psychopaths in the LNP, would win GOLD, SILVER and BRONZE in EVERY event!
Dutton, the brown sty dropping, seems to forget the invasive idiocy of Morrison, the utter negativity and emptiness of Abbott and the self focussed magnificence, recognised only by himself, of Turnbull. There is nothing in, about, or contained by Dutton resembling talent, manners, intellect, decency, civilised attitude or basic sense (it is not common as we know). We can only fear for the nation’s future as it chokes and gasps due to foreign interference and intrusiveness in corporations, media, finance, military matters, social and political attitudes. Few good examples exist of anything much, and, we must copy and follow…to hell?
Whilst I have a great deal of confidence in our High Court I have to say that this episode where the Chief Justice chose to depart from convention and announce a decision via the media without also publishing the rationes decidendi or the reasoning behind the decision, is far from satisfactory.
The CJ must have known that there would be a political eruption and should have taken measures to ensure that both the decision and the reasons were available simultaneously.
Gageler is a new Chief Justice and must learn that political opportunism will always follow controversial decisions.
Methinks Boofhead Duddo aka Toxic RAbbott 2.0 is planning to introduce legislation to make all political commentary by unauthorised political spokespersons illegal.
.
It is only in this manner that Australian voters will be unable to escape what is becoming common knowledge that the only thing Duddo (and Scummo) have to offer voters is their respective resignations from Parliament ASAP.
OOOOOh Goody ….. somebody (Katie) is challenging PP for the most concisely verbose description of incompetence of Duddo & any representative of the COALition.
As long as Der Spud and the rest of The Spudettes have the Rupert/Lachlan sleaze meedja (and to a lesser extent Costello and Stokes) backing them then Labor will always be on the receiving end of the never-ending tactics of dirt and attacks.
I take it that Dutton from public pronouncements targeting PM/ALP, or more to the point Murdoch, 7, 9 and their regional media who helped the No campaign on The Voice (to keep Dutton leader), have started the LNP election campaign?
Good luck with that, the Libs are going to struggle with Dutton as leader and with policies the same as last election (none?) in cities especially Sydney & Melbourne, the former ‘jewel in the crown’. Though one is sure many non QLD etc. Libs will wish that Yes prevailed in The Voice and Dutton was ditched, so now they will try to sell QLD LNP policies…. and Littleproud has little to be proud of; is he related to a large think tank donor like Joyce was?
A dickhead on X farted that Potty Boy Dutton was doing a good job. Anybody who believes that Potty Boy Dutton is anything but a dickhead and a divisive dickhead at that is a dickhead! Well, to be fair, Potty Boy Dutton is an arsehole as well as a dickhead! And a fascist. He farted to Paul Murray that people call him a racist, a fascist and a Nazi and that’s not what he’s about, but anybody who claims that Parliaments are a hindrance to good governments and attacks the High Court like he does is a fascist!
I just saw a poll suggesting support for a treaty has slumped. So the uncle toms have sunk the indigenous hopes for another generation. Hope they are now happy little munchkins.
Which brings me to the thought. The biggest saboteurs in history have always been home grown zealots.
The self serving righteous, so convinced of the legitimacy of their actions, seek to use any weakness in the system as a battering ram for their ambitions. Destroying from within.
I am telling you folks, democracy has its own cancers. I see no cures in sight.
Our choices of representatives keep pushing those of us with grave concerns for the nation into greens or Independents.With Labor unable or unwilling to make the decisive moves urgently required,and the conservatives awash with total fuckwits,what other choices are there ?.I see this as the last stand of the former duopoly.The primary votes of the majors last election should have sent chills through them.
Albanese has had to go overseas quite a bit to clean up all the messages created by the previous Morrison government.
My biggest fear,the average voter is an idiot. Easily conned by the MSM,when they bother to pay attention.
Labor has to also stop with the softly softly spineless approach. They need to be tougher,bolder,and quickly too. Egs: Stop the hand outs to the well off,they don’t need them,the country can’t afford them,and they continue to increase inequality. This includes changing or dumping the inflationary 3rd stage tax cuts,that will increase inequality even more. Defend your reasoning too,do not apologize for doing the right thing.Screw breaking an election premise.A promise Labor should never have made.Plus,they have already broken the promise they were going to scrap them. IE: DO THE RIGHT THING.
Otherwise we are going to get the corrupt self serving scum of the COALition back into government, sooner,rather than later. Then Labor will be out, with no real great positive long lasting change left from them.
Harry, you raise an interesting point. Where are we to go. I have another observation. people who vote liberal are supposedly saying that they beleive in the liberal ideology of individual freedom. The Menzies doctrine…( for want of a better description).
How do they tolerate the intellectual dissonance in having shits like the last few liberal PMs.
Its a personal dishonesty that i find quite disturbing. So many so called smart people cant see the shit being dished to them. But they will vote Teal. Its the total dishonesty of the sales tax, the total dishonesty of work choices, the total dishonesty of robo debt, the total dishonesty of off shore processing, the total dishonesty of the Iraq and Vietnam wars, the total dishonesty of privatisation, the total dishonesty about global warming and lately the total dishonesty around the voice. What does it take for these so called smart people to realise they have been had?
@ andyfiftysix: An interesting analysis that starkly shows the too many flaws in present politics. Somehow, not too soon down the line, Australia has to return to the egalitarian model of ”a fair go for everybody” with ”everybody contributing to the common wealth according to their ability” and receiving ”returns according to their needs” .
Sadly, too many of the so-called ”smart people” have egos considerably bigger than their innate abilities.
When Oz has the great exploiters, relics of the Crown and its sectarian cover, Rupert, LNP and Atlas, and the banks, exploiting and manipulating the dullards and feckless aspirants, they too most often become the new exploiters.
It’s a merry-go-round of greed and stupidity, a belief and irrationality that historically isn’t overcome by political means and logic, only by demonstrable wreckage and depletion – of economy, ecology and humanity.
I guess Oz has to continually wonder whether the imported perpetrators of war, and those fleeing them, have any wisdom learned to bring, or whether they arrive as and remain deperados?
I guess we only have science, and objective history to rely on – but the exploiters tend not to like that, and ignore it. And that is the challenge of politics in this rapidly changing ring-fenced world.
There are signs we are at the edge of an abyss, and the move towards multi-polarity brings some hope.
Poider Tuffspud is very worried:
@12.56pm
https://www.smh.com.au/national/australia-news-live-worst-offenders-face-return-to-custody-under-terror-style-laws-optus-searches-for-new-ceo-20231121-p5eli6.html
Reads more like: “They’re my detainees and “criminals” and I want them all locked up again so I can torture them when I take over.”
“When I first saw little Spudley pulling the wings from butterflies I should have said ‘enough already, Spudley, why can’t you just torment the dog like other children’ and now it’s come to this.
To think that he could have been beating up prisoners on remand like other normal Queensland coppers. But no, he got in with a bad crowd in Canberra who taught him to tell lies and turned him into an unfeeling monster ” says suburban housewife Dorothy Dutton in a tell all interview with Sky News.
@andyfiftysix ‘I just saw a poll suggesting support for a treaty has slumped. So the uncle toms have sunk the indigenous hopes for another generation. Hope they are now happy little munchkins.
Which brings me to the thought. The biggest saboteurs in history have always been home grown zealots.’
Just for fun, given Juukan, might not the vile yummymummy be an exception to the home-grown saboteur theory?
https://www.afr.com/rear-window/ex-rio-chief-s-wife-lashes-botched-indigenous-heritage-laws-20231016-p5eckk
And as if that weren’t enough:
https://www.smh.com.au/cbd/french-yummy-mummy-quits-bastion-of-wokeness-company-directors-group-20231121-p5elqa.html
(paywalled)
Lehrmann is doing a astonishly brilliant job at sinking himself deeper into the shit he’s creating.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/watch-live-lehrmann-faces-grilling-about-night-of-alleged-rape-20231123-p5emh7.html
https://www.news.com.au/national/courts-law/i-lied-bruce-lehrmann-grilled-on-whiskey-claim/news-story/7b493ab6ecfa4880aa39cb2ddda00499
GL:
Lehrmann should have learnt from history that “I lied then, twice, but I’m telling the truth now” never ends well.
The grave that Bruce is digging for himself getting ever deeper.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/the-questioning-that-made-bruce-lehrmann-s-brain-freeze-20231124-p5emjp.html
https://www.news.com.au/national/courts-law/mystery-over-bruce-lehrmanns-bank-statement-from-night-of-alleged-rape/news-story/6413aa376f13a914c1b0e9ad31cac588
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/nov/24/bruce-lehrmann-defamation-trial-brittany-higgins-drunk-canberra-pub-cctv-footage-denial-channel-ten-ntwnfb
This political commentary sheds light on the Opposition’s critique of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s overseas travels, suggesting a double standard compared to previous Coalition leaders. The writer highlights the inconsistency in Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s stance, pointing out shifts in positions on issues such as constitutional change and the recent High Court ruling on refugees. It’s a reminder of the dynamic nature of politics, where perspectives can evolve based on political convenience. On a separate note, for reliable court reporting services, I recommend checking out A Plus Reporting Service at https://aplusreportingservice.com.They play a crucial role in maintaining transparency and accuracy in legal proceedings.
For those who’ve commented on Lehrmann v. Network Ten and Lisa Wilkinson, the livestream feed from the Federal Court in Sydney has been a riveting experience. Highly recommended viewing for the vicarious followers of the alleged rapist’s action against these parties.
Available through this link, for who knows how many more days.