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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