Does the Coalition have a woman problem? Or a “female” problem as Education Minister and Gonski-con-artist, simple Simon Birmingham puts it? Or just your everyday, run of the mill, neoliberal lack of humanity problem?

Certainly, our heart of stone; our national emotional deficit and compassion bypass, betray us this week as parvenus on a world stage of freakish weirdness which features US Evangelicals blessing Trump’s moving the US embassy from the Sodom and Gomorrah of modern Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move which sees Israeli snipers open fire on unarmed Palestinian protestors, a move we alone condone by voting with the US against any UN inquiry.

Weirdness? As all true believers know in their hearts, Hallelujah, Trump’s removalists will hasten the final trump, the apocalypse, the rapture in which all (evangelical) Christians living and dead will be united.

Trump himself, on the campaign trail in 2016, displays a Bible in which, he says, his mother has written his name and address, “She wrote the name and my address and it’s just very special to me,” he said, in a quiet voice. Your name generally is.

It’s as touching as the label on Paddington Bear but it’s hailed by Fox News cubs as incontrovertible evidence of The Donald’s moral rectitude and piety. No true believer worries much when the next day the President mistakes the silver communion plates that are passed around for the offering plates, at church in Council Bluffs Iowa reaching for dollar bills from his pocket. No Trump voter would find reason to question he often he attended such services. Others will find the gaffe quite telling.

Our own divine afflatus – our ascent to the UN Human Rights Council is similarly moving. We mealy-mouth all the right platitudes about how we care about human rights; how much we love a “rules-based order”, a meaningless American buzzword Julie Bishop invokes incessantly – while pretending the Rohingya genocide isn’t happening or is something else, a benign or even blessed event, she archly calls a Myanmar “security operation”.

It works. We’re elevated to the council, up snug alongside The Philippines with its you-beaut-shoot-first rule of law, networking with Burundi, Egypt, Rwanda, Cuba, Venezuela, China, India, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – all of whom share with us the distinction of being censured by the UN for their human rights violations

So what can little Australia do? This week we show how we alone can publicly suck up to Trump; prove ourselves US zǒu gǒu, as the Chinese call running dogs or lackeys, much to our global infamy, ignominy and shame.

We are the only nation in the world to side with the US in voting against the UN Human Rights Council‘s (UNHRC) call for an international inquiry into the state of human rights in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

Why? The UNHRC condemns Israel for shooting dead over sixty protesters including civilians, journalists, children and armed militants, in the Strip. Injured are hundreds more, at a mass protest in which tempers are inflamed by America’s recent pro-Likud decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem – a promise Mafioso Don says he must honour. He cares more about re-election than the lives and rights of or any human beings; let alone Islamists.

Is there something cultural about chicanery, bigotry and cold-blooded murder? Something we don’t get?

The massacre ends six weeks of protests at the Gaza border, part of the “Great March of Return” led by Gaza’s rulers, Hamas, the largest of several Islamist Palestinian groups. Israel is given ample warning. The UNHRC and many other observers, shocked by the brutality, call out Israel for acting illegally; using disproportionate force.

It’s not as there’s no time to prepare a more humane and proportionate response. Hamas made it clear it would intensify its protests before Tuesday, when Palestinians hold their annual commemoration of the Nakba or Catastrophe. The foundation of Israel on 14 May 1948 forced 750,000 Palestinians from their homes into exile.

Australia’s opposition to the inquiry has been deplored  by human rights groups, who say Australia has broken its pledge to uphold human rights and improve its own human rights record – in particular its abysmal record on indefinite offshore detention, as well as structural Indigenous disadvantage, juvenile justice and disability rights.

Lachlan Strahan, Charge D’Affaires of Australia’s mission to the UN in Geneva, gave the “incoming members’ pledge” publicly mouthing our nation’s undertakings to fight for human rights when joining the UNHRC.

Just for the record we are committed to promote gender equality; good governance; freedom of expression; indigenous rights; and strong national human rights institutions. (Nothing as naff as demanding ID at airports).

Yet for many, including Daniel Webb of the Human Rights Law Centre, words are cheap. “It’s important to hear our government promise to strengthen the UN system and to start respecting human rights findings,” he says. “The world will be a fairer and more humane place if we have a strong and effective international human rights system.

“But just saying over and over again that you respect human rights doesn’t make it true, not for the innocent human beings warehoused on Manus and Nauru for the last five years, or the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men, women and children being forced into prisons away from their families and communities at obscenely high rates.”

Anthony Albanese asks the government to explain itself and cops a hammering on ABC Insiders, Sunday, from Barrie Cassidy who’s after a gotcha moment. He presses Albo to endorse the NSW ALP’s conference’s motion to unilaterally recognise the state of Palestine.

Imagine what the Daily Telegraph or The Australian could do with news of Labor endorsing Islamic terrorists.

Albanese blusters; comes up with the Two State Solution, which sounds like a dance step or something you’d use in a chemistry lab but gives life to the absurd but pernicious myth that Palestine and Israel are equal.

The two state solution, is neither confined to two states nor a solution but a war of attrition backed by The Great Satan (as the US is fondly reviled in the Middle East). It originates in the UN’s 1947 division of Palestine into two states with a large area around Jerusalem to be run by the UN.  Over half the country was to go to 34 per cent of the population; the Jewish minority. The smaller part of the country went to the overwhelming Arab majority.

Arabs rejected the partition resolution. They could see how unfair it was. The injustice still rankles; festers.

For Hamas, which came to power in Gaza in 2007, Monday’s border protest is the culmination of a week -long campaign to try to break Israel’s blockade. The group has led weekly protests near the border with Israel since late March. Over 100 Palestinians are shot dead. Hundreds are wounded in the series of weekly protests.

The dead include eight children under the age of sixteen while 2,700 people are wounded.

The UNHRC votes 29-2 with 14 abstentions to back a resolution that also condemns “the disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force by the Israeli occupying forces against Palestinian civilians.” An “independent, international commission of inquiry” mandated by the council will be asked to produce a final report next March.

Luckily, local right wing scribes such as Gerard Henderson and fellow Catholic Boys’ Daily (The Australian) pontificator Greg Sheridan are on hand to explain to our nation how the deaths are all the fault of the Palestinian victims who were in the process of “pulling a fence down” and deliberately exposing babies to danger evoking John Howard’s 2001 “babies overboard” canard, a lie which helped him win an election.

Sheridan  sagely and courageously choruses, “As Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull pointed out, the terror group Hamas, which controls Gaza, purposely pushed tens of thousands of rioters towards the Israeli border in the certain knowledge that the Israeli defence forces would not allow them to breach that border.”

Australian media generally, however, follow Julie Bishop’s lead. Bishop reiterates the US line; framing a war crime with no perpetrator. No hint that 750,000 Palestinians were displaced in the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. No point in recalling Israel’s Irgun strategy of a series of selected killings of Palestinian civilians from 1930.

From 1930, Guy Rundle writes, Irgun, a group of young bloods … injected into clashes between Arabs and European Jews a new element: precise, targeted terror against random Arab civilians.

In our postmodern, lobotomised, mass-mediated world, complex issues, events and conflicts are tidied up by obliterating historical context. It makes finger-pointing, demonising and confected outrage; mass manipulation so much easier.

Palestinians suffer institutionalised discrimination by Israel, reports Human Rights Watch. It’s apartheid. In its 50-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel’s systematic rights abuses include collective punishment, routine use of excessive lethal force, and prolonged detention, without charge or trial, for hundreds.

Palestinians are daily made to suffer human rights violations surpassed only by the indefinite detention we inflict on those whom we catch seeking refuge in Australia by sea. To say nothing of our no dobbing laws, The Australia Border Force Act 2015, which prohibits doctors, media, professional groups, international human rights bodies, NGOs and others from blowing the whistle on brutality and inhumanity.

Many Palestinians caught in videos of the recent “riots” in Gaza are refugees. Yet erased from our mainstream media is the history of Israeli construction of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank; how Israel steals Palestinian land and water and how its much vaunted “two state solution” is a way of diverting attention from its apartheid regime; from burdens it imposes on Palestinians but not on settlers, restricting Palestinians’ access to basic services and making it nearly impossible for them to build in much of the West Bank without risking demolition.

Israel repeatedly denies Palestinians permits to build schools in the West Bank and demolishes those built without permits denying access to education for thousands of children, Human Rights Watch reported, last month.

Israel’s decade-long closure of Gaza, supported by Egypt, severely restricts the movement of people and goods, with devastating humanitarian impact, reports Human Rights Watch.

Extremism is all corrupting writes David Brooks in The New York Times. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza both sharply restrict dissent, arbitrarily arresting critics and abusing those in their custody. The process is not unknown in Australian conservative political circles but we excel at extradition and rendition.

Bishop expresses the government’s “deep regret and sadness over the loss of life and injury”, in a press release entitled Palestinian Protests in Gaza as if some natural catastrophe has killed sixty Palestinians rather than Israeli Defence Force snipers’ bullets and tear gas. Israelis call their anti-terror programme “cutting the grass”.

Israel makes Gazans non-persons and thereby all the easier to mow down. Similarly Peter Dutton’s personal fiefdom, The Department of Home Affairs, confirms, this week that it is ending financial assistance to “transitory persons” who haven’t returned to Nauru or Papua New Guinea after coming to Australia for medical treatment. It’s as dehumanising and as criminally contrary to our human rights obligations as calling those wretched souls who seek our refuge by boat “illegals”.

$200 per fortnight of housing assistance and income support is stripped mainly from families with young children. But Home Affairs is all heart. It generously gives most of the refugees six weeks to find new shelter and a source of income. Others are given three weeks to find accommodation but lose income support immediately.

Charity begins at home, of course, and the nation wakes Monday to learn that the wondrously named, Jane Prentice, Assistant Minister for Disability Services is the latest victim of our federal government’s inherent sexism and dog-eat dog philosophy. She loses pre-selection to Julian Simmonds, a younger, sexier male party member, a fate which government MPs rush to assure us is the Liberal Party’s democracy in action. Or meritocracy.

Gerard Henderson kindly sinks the slipper by accusing Prentice of under-performance, a novel political criterion which if it were to be applied rigorously would certainly terminate the careers of Tony Abbott, all-hat and no cattle Barnaby Joyce and even our puppet of the right Prime Minister himself to name but a few recent stellar duds.

Beyond Abbott and other political mediocrities is a long line of hapless male MPs which neatly counter the argument Coalition blokes put up against quotas for women preventing MPs from being elected on merit. Merit? Barnaby Joyce?

Only 22.6 per cent of federal Liberal MPs are women. Of 76 Coalition MPs in the lower house, only 13 are women. And only 35 per cent of women voted for the Coalition last election. The two statistics cannot possibly be related.

Discussion veers hard right (as always) this week to posit a Liberal party political machine which is responding to hard times by wheeling further to the right. It’s not sexism or misogyny but just an accidental turn of the political screw.

ABC panel members on The Drum or Insiders and other huff and fluff shows, in particular air the view that the party’s discrimination against women is all ideological. Perhaps they’ve missed how in general, on average, Australian women have to work an extra 56 days a year to earn the same pay as men for doing the same work.

Ann Sudmalis may also lose pre-selection for Gilmore to real-estate agent Grant Schultz, son of the late, great (John) Alby Schultz. (Alby, federal MP for Hume 1998-2013, was one of several Liberals along with Don Randall, Wilson Tuckey, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, Dennis Jensen and Sophie Mirabella, who boycotted Parliament on the day that the formal apology to the Stolen Generations was made by then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.) Clear merit is apparent in the Schulz bloodlines.

By Thursday, “Birmo” has sized up the problem. “Blokes face just as many preselection challenges as females,” he tells ABC radio. Sure they do, Birmo. We know. And all over Australia Liberal blokes are being challenged by women. Nothing his government of reality denying privilege protectors can do about it.

Just as his government has no plans to address the injustice of our nations’ workplaces where women earn on average $48,690 in 2015-16, yet $63,000 is the median taxable income for men. In fact, according to the National Foundation for Australian Women, its tax offsets proposed for 2018 increase the effective marginal tax rate by 1.5% within the taper zone, which increases work disincentives for women and other low earners.

As Matt Holden notes in Fairfax, when a Coalition bloke challenges another, it does nothing to make our government any less of a patriarchal atavism. Only 21% of Liberal Party federal MPs and a mere 14% of the Nationals’ representatives are women. And falling. Luckily Liberal sophist Scott Morrison has the answer.

“Politics is a contestable process” booms party queue-jumper, Morrison, who owes his own safe Liberal seat of Cook less to his own merit than to The Daily Telegraph‘s four defamatory 2007 attacks on Michael Towke, a character assassination which led the NSW Liberal Party to dis-endorse his Lebanese-Christian opponent.

Morrison lost pre-selection comprehensively on first ballot, in July 2007, receiving 8 votes to Towke’s 82.

Two senior Liberal blokes then phoned The “Tele” which ran four stories painting Michael Towke as a liar. Towke contends that the third story entitled ”Party split as Liberal candidate faces jail,” put his mother in hospital.

Towke would eventually win his legal war, but his political career was ruined. ScoMo’s story shows that conservative politics is eminently contestable if you are a WASP bloke with powerful old white male party pals.

No hope for Jane Prentice. A sorcerer’s apprentice in reverse, her role consisted largely in keeping mum about how, like its predecessor, the Turnbull government continues to kick welfare expenditure reduction goals by “transitioning” a weasel word for denying disability support pensioners to the needy.

They’ll thrive on the starvation rations of the Centrelink Newstart program. Yet Prentice is clearly an MP with a love of family. She claimed $14,039 for her husband to fly between Canberra and Brisbane 24 times during her first term in Parliament. Twenty-one trips were in business class. Her claim of $352 for her spouse to be chauffeured, however, shows exemplary frugality and should inspire all other MPs to follow suit.

Two days before former Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce resigned last week, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull referred allegations that Joyce had breached ministerial standards to Martin Parkinson, Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, for investigation on the following grounds:

The Ministerial Code of Conduct Section 2.23 states:

Ministers’ close relatives and partners are not to be appointed to positions in their ministerial or electorate offices, and must not be employed in the offices of other members of the Executive Government without the Prime Minister’s express approval. A close relative or partner of a Minister is not to be appointed to any position in an agency in the Minister’s own portfolio if the appointment is subject to the agreement of the Minister or Cabinet.

Turnbull suffered considerable angst as he attempted to redefine “relationship” in a manner that would not include an ongoing sexual affair and pregnancy, thus exonerating Joyce from the allegation of breaching ministerial standards because he wasn’t in a “partnership” with Ms Campion at the time of her employment.

Turnbull’s definitions were in stark contrast to those of Centrelink that govern the rest of the population, as I unpack here.

Turnbull’s motives for referring the matter to Parkinson are as yet unclear. We might speculate that increasing public ridicule forced his hand. Perhaps there was a deal with Joyce: you resign, mate, and I’ll see the investigation is dropped. Requesting an investigation created the appearance of a much-needed distance between Joyce and the Liberals. Please feel free to come up with your own explanation, however, what has very quickly become apparent is that the investigation was never genuine.

No sooner did Joyce resign from the DPM position, than Parkinson wrote to Turnbull, stating that in view of Joyce’s resignation nothing was to be gained by pursuing his investigation, and the matter is now closed.

Letters between Malcolm Turnbull and PM&C boss Martin Parkinson about investigation into Barnaby Joyce #auspol #estimates pic.twitter.com/rkAMuwu8ih

— Tom McIlroy (@TomMcIlroy) February 26, 2018

If the matter was worthy of investigation whilst Joyce was DPM, it is worthy of investigation after his resignation. The allegations concern the period when he was a minister, and the fact that he is no longer a minister does not negate the seriousness of the allegations. Presumably, were we to extrapolate this insane reasoning to other situations, someone who embezzled funds from their employer no longer needs to be held to account if they leave that workplace. A priest who assaults children need not be held to account by his church if he leaves that church.

While ministerial standards are not laws, the principle is the same.

Had Joyce been found to be in breach of the standards, next in the line of fire would be Senator Matt Canavan, who employed Campion when it was determined by Joyce’s Chief of Staff, Di Hallam, that Campion had to get out of her lover’s office. Then we turn to Turnbull himself, who, having denied all knowledge of the nomadic Ms Campion’s employment history, a denial contested by other accounts of the debacle, breached his own standards by not giving the express approval to her various employments, as required by the Code.

All in all there was little to be gained, as Parkinson points out, in pursuing the investigation, and a great deal, as Parkinson does not point out, to be lost.

This article was originally published on No Place For Sheep.

In an article titled Inside the terrifying mind of Tony Abbott, Bernard Keane quotes a study from 2015 which looks into the psychological basis for climate change denial and why one particular demographic — older white males — tends to dominate the ranks of climate denialists.

The study identified that “denial is driven partly by dominant personality and low empathy, and partly by motivation to justify and promote existing social and human-nature hierarchies.”

I was immediately reminded of an article that Tony Abbott wrote in the Bulletin in 1987, six months after he left St Patrick’s seminary, in which he blames the church for not living up to his ideals, and the response written a week later by Father Bill Wright, a priest and church historian, who was vice-rector at St Patrick’s whilst Tony was there.

Father Bill said Tony was a controversial figure at the seminary.  Whilst some seemed to admire him, others found him “just too formidable to talk to unless to agree; overbearing and opiniated”.  After the heady days of university, “Tony was not, on the whole, impressed by his companions”.

“I do not recall that he ever talked about theology while at Manly.  His concern was with churchmanship.”

Tony confirms this in his own article.  He wanted hierarchical power but had no interest in empathy and pastoral care.

“Looking back, it seems that I was seeking a spiritual and human excellence to which the Church is no longer sure she aspires. My feeble attempts to recall her to her duty — as I saw it — betrayed a fathomless disappointment at the collapse of a cherished ideal.

In addition, a “cooperative” style of management ran counter to the Church’s age-old hierarchical structure.

The more they played up lay ministry and ecumenism and played down the unique role of the priest in the one true Church, the more the struggle seemed pointless.

l felt “had” by a seminary that so stressed ”empathy” with sinners and “dialogue” with the Church’s enemies that the priesthood seemed to have lost its point.”

Fr Wright goes on to say “Tony is inclined to score points, to skate over or hold back any reservations he might have about his case.”

This lack of empathy and desire to maintain the privileged status quo manifests itself in so many areas of Abbott’s thinking and public life.

In 2007, on the tenth anniversary of the Bringing Them Home report about the Stolen Generation (and before Kevin Rudd delivered his historic Apology), then Health Minister Abbott gave a speech in which he said “the debate on indigenous affairs had moved on from the issue of an apology”.  What’s there to be sorry for after all.

Tony speaks of welfare “cheats” and “leaners” who rip off decent workers.  The only reason they aren’t working is because they are lazy.  Best way to deal with it?  Starve them.

After he was assaulted by a man who “just wanted to nut the c#nt” because he had “always hated him”, Abbott immediately engaged in cynical political opportunism, saying “The love is love brigade aren’t showing a lot of love” and the “ugliness” and “intolerance” is coming from “those who tell us, in the name of decency and fair-mindedness and freedom, we’ve got to allow same-sex marriage”.

As Bernard Keane points out

he sees LGBTI people as threatening — not, of course, to his physical self, but to his social status. He put it even better when he explained his “threatened” comments by saying homosexuality “challenges orthodox notions of the right order of things”, revealing how LGBTI people conflicted with his hierarchical, “right order” view of the world.

We see the same lack of empathy when it comes to dealing with the humanitarian crisis of refugees.  Abbott’s response about settling supposedly “illegal” asylum seekers here was a heartless simplistic “Nope, nope, nope.”

Abbott is a monarchist who sees any push for a republic as “the latest instalment in the green-left’s war on our way of life”.

He does not support quotas for female political representation saying “It’s up to every pre-selection panel to choose the best candidate regardless of gender.”  Obviously he didn’t think much of the women in his party when handing out Cabinet jobs.

Keane sums up Abbott well when he says

through a prism of hierarchy, it becomes easier to understand why Abbott clings to the heterosexual, coal-fired, monarchical Australia he believes he grew up in, because that delivered him, as he sees it, to the top of the “right order of things” and anything that contradicts it must be fought as a kind of existential threat.

Abbott and his mates are happy with the status quo and they sure don’t want anyone upsetting the apple cart on their privileged advantage.

Friday 1 September 2017

On Wednesday in my Trump report I drew attention to the enormity of his lying. In the comments section people had some interesting things to say on the subject. For example, the comments of ‘Wam’ alluded to what he described as my fixation on the subject. I’m not suggesting that he was being critical. To the contrary, I believe he is just giving an honest appraisal of my thinking.

Wam wrote:

”The Lord has a fixation with the word, diannart, (another commentator) and cannot accept that the Abbott as opus dei cannot lie. He does not accept a pragmatic approach and is honest in his belief that there is a truth and demands it of politicians as of himself. Truth before consideration of consequences. Following his comments are my extended thoughts on the subject.”

”Truth is a fact or belief that is accepted as true’ is the normal definition.”

”I believe truth needs proof which absolves me from god’s truth, Malcolm Roberts truth and Abbott’s truth.”

”Perhaps, he cannot understand how, with hindsight or science, a truth today could be a lie tomorrow.”

”No person can tell the truth other than what is believed to be true. Careful choice of words(not my forte) can, may, might, lead your leader.”

”I expect that ‘honesty’ is a quality that politicians feel is missing from journalists’ character in equal measure as politicians other than themselves.”

”International police? The septics spend more on defence than the next 8 countries (including Russia, China, France and the poms) combined.”

Why I think the truth is a necessary part of society and in particular politics

How important is truth in politics? As a writer who happens to love the way words can be constructed to shape a thought, send a message, express love, anger, or convey an action I am lost without them. Without them something vanishes from our discourse. Without words the ability to communicate the seemingly endless aspects of human emotion is taken from us.
Words of course are at their best when they are accompanied by a factual truth of what they are wanting to convey.

An observation

”Have we reached the point in politics where TRUTH is something that politicians have convinced us to believe, “like alternative facts” rather than TRUTH based on factual evidence and sound arguments”

The acceptance of lying generally and more particularly in politics is not only alarming but is also a reflection of the decline of ethical standards in society.

It would appear now that with the election of Donald Trump all understanding of political truth has been destroyed. Read my piece on Trump.

Honesty isn’t popular anymore. It doesn’t carry the weight of society’s approval it once did. The rise of the right has brought with it a new political language. One that has not yet been classified because it defies any normal understanding as to whether truth has a place in it.

What we do know is that at its base is an absence of truth. Everyone would be aware of what Trump said during the election campaign. Here are some examples:” On day one of the Trump administration we will ask congress to immediately repeal Obamacare”

Throughout his campaign he said that Obamacare was dead and buried. It cannot be more unequivocal than that, yet we now know that most of it will be retained.

The building of a wall and making Mexico pay for it was a core promise, ”Mark my words” he said repeatedly. Absolutely unambiguously you might say.

Yet Newt Gingrich has admitted the presidents promise to get Mexico to pay for it may have been a”campaign device”. Although now he is threatening to close down the Government if the don’t come up with the money.

”He may not spend much time trying to get Mexico to pay for it”, Gingrich said.”But it was a great campaign device.”

Then there was the end of ”War on coal”

”The Democratic Party does not understand that coal is an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource. Those who mine it and their families should be protected from the Democratic Party’s radical anti-coal agenda”

He strode through the American rust belt shouting: “End the war on coal”.

It was clear to all and sundry from what he said that he vowed to restore coal jobs, dismissing clean energy as part of President Obama’s ‘war on coal’.

But Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said it’s “hard to tell” if the government will be able to expand the coal industry in a meaningful way.

“We are going to be presenting to the new president a variety of options that could end this assault on coal”, McConnell said. “Whether that immediately brings business back is hard to tell because it’s a private sector activity”.

Another core promise was that he would deport illegal immigrants through mass deportations. It was explicit, a cornerstone of his campaign.

Trump: “We’re rounding ’em up in a very humane way, in a very nice way. And they’re going to be happy because they want to be legalized. And, by the way, I know it doesn’t sound nice. But not everything is nice”.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebusy has said Trump is no longer calling for “mass deportation” and is instead calling for the deportation of criminals.

The Iran peace treaty will be gone, he promised. Indisputable his words were.
He would “renegotiate” the agreement. He said the deal was the “stupidest deal of all time” and running mate Mike Pence said that the deal would be “ripped up”. When one might ask?

Trump adviser Walid Phares now claims that the treaty will instead be “renegotiated”.
So what were his words worth? The same could be said of Tony Abbott when he was leader of the Australian Opposition leader and later Prime Minister.

Abbott said that what he said shouldn’t be taken seriously unless it was written down. An American friend said that Trumps words should be taken seriously but not literally.

An observation

‘When you tell a lie you deny the other person’s right to the truth.”

Well I suggested to him that It is better to be comforted with the truth than be controlled by lies. Continuous lying breaks down trust and destroys our means of communication. As does lying by exaggeration or omission.

It all gives rise to the question of the value of the words politicians’ use. I for one would never believe a word Abbot said, then or now. There is ample evidence that he is a liar, and he has declared so himself.

But let’s take a look at the broader picture and ask ourselves what is a lie in general and what constitutes political lying.

We know that a lie has three essential ingredients; it communicates some information. The liar intends to deceive or mislead. The liar believes that what they are ‘saying’ is not true. And we call people who use these three principles blatant liars.

When it comes to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts” (Michael Ende, The Never-ending Story).
”If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed”. (Goebbles)

On a more personal level there are what we call white lies where we deliberately color what we say in shades of hue to protect the feelings of others or ourselves, or to avoid argument.

”Clinton lied. A man might forget where he parks or where he lives, but he never forgets oral sex, no matter how bad it is” (Barbara Bush).

Consider the case where telling a lie would mean that 10 other lies would not be told. If 10 lies are worse than 1 lie then it would seem to be a good thing to tell the first lie, but if lying is always wrong then it’s wrong to tell the first lie… When politicians lie over a long period of time. It only serves to denigrate the liar, and show contempt for the voter’s intelligence. Especially if the lies are chronic and systemic. The current use of the term “no direct knowledge” is a lie within a lie pretending to absolve a person who is fully conversant with the facts.

”Oh, what a tangled web we weave … when first we practice to deceive”

Walter Scott Marmion says that ”Lying is probably one of the most common wrong acts that we carry out (one researcher has said ‘lying is an unavoidable part of human nature’), so it’s worth spending time thinking about it. Why is lying wrong? There are many reasons why people think lying is wrong; which ones resonate best with you will depend on the way you think about ethics. Lying is bad because a generally truthful world is a good thing: lying diminishes trust between human beings: if people generally didn’t tell the truth, life would become very difficult, as nobody could be trusted and nothing you heard or read could be trusted – you would have to find everything out for yourself and an untrusting world is also bad for liars – lying isn’t much use if everyone is doing it”

In the US election Republican Donald Trump took lying to an unprecedented level. The same fascination for untruth by conservatives in America has been exported to Australia. We should all remember that when they lie they deny us our right to the truth. It is totally unacceptable.

My thought for the day

“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 might often be pain in truth but there is no harm in it.”

PS: and another thought

“The word ”lying” (in political terms) has been replaced with the more subtle reference of ”overstatement”.”

By 2353NM  

The Beatles released ‘All you need is love’, written by John Lennon and Paul McCarthy, 50 years ago this month during the first global satellite television broadcast, Our world. June 1967 was the summer of love where it is claimed that up to 100,000 people congregated in the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood in the city of San Franscisco. The two events are related as far as The Beatles by that stage were a studio only band and seeking alternative lifestyles.

While the words and motives of All you need is love might be seen as idealistic in 2017, with the bombing of a pop concert in Manchester and a gunman shooting 28 Coptic Christians in Egypt both occurring in the same week, on the face of it there isn’t a lot of love in the world at the moment. Perhaps there should be more love used to retain law and order, rather than the current approach of using a bigger stick.

Various news reports in the days after the Manchester bombing have stated that the British are ‘stoic’ people and will overcome the justified sorrow and questioning that occurs after events like the bombing. They probably will, considering the British people have a history of living with domestic terrorism that precedes the current fanatical claimed Muslim extremists, or the fanatical Irish Republican Army of the late 20th Century, the bombings of World War 2 and potentially also before the days of Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators attempting to blow up the houses of Parliament in 1605.

However, when confronted with some form of rebellion (be it internal or external), the authorities seem to always resort to the use of a bigger stick. For example, when the USA and the USSR both developed nuclear weapons in the 1950’s; they boasted that if attacked, they would retaliate. In a concept known as mutually assured destruction, by the 1980s

. . . the Soviet Union had many more warheads, and it was commonly said that there were enough nuclear arms on Earth to wipe the planet out several times.

Clearly there is only one earth – so having the capability to destroy the planet more than once is wasteful and frankly ludicrous. In a similar way, there is logically a limit to the size of the stick. Larger and more complicated weapons designed to kill and maim probably makes millions for those who design and manufacture the implements, but at some point, there has to be a practical limit.

Guy Fawkes was seeking religious freedom, eventually granted in England, Rudolf Hess (Hitler’s second in command) flew to Scotland in 1941 to, in his mind at least, negotiate a peace treaty with Churchill and the IRA finally agreed to cease terrorist action when a negotiated power sharing arrangement was implemented.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce was interviewed by SkyNews on 25 May and, as you would expect given the timing of the interview, he was asked for his opinion on the bombing in Manchester. After the usual (and correct) condemnation of the attack, Joyce went on to say (as reported by The Guardian):

These people have always been around and every religion has them at their periphery. I’m Catholic, in Northern Ireland we had the IRA, who decided they were going to change the world by murdering people. I don’t agree with that. These people believe they are going to change the world by murdering people. We have seen it in Buddhism, we have seen it in Hinduism. It’s murder. It’s wrong and we have got to make sure as a nation, people can go to the cricket, can go to the rugby, go down the street, go to the park, enjoy life, be Australian and leave other people alone to have their beliefs because they are probably different to yours. Don’t change the world by violence, change the world by argument, cogent argument.

Joyce went on to suggest

People say it all sounds a bit old fashioned but it’s not. If you really had an empathy for other people around you, you wouldn’t want to blow them up. You would say they’re just like me. Leave them alone.

Joyce makes a good point. Rather than using a bigger stick to alter people’s behaviour to something that suits your norms, why not try empathy.

Sean Kelly, writing for The Monthly on 26 May reports of an exchange between Senator Hanson and the head of ASIO, Duncan Lewis during the recent Senate Estimates process. When asked by Hanson about the threat of terrorism being introduced by middle eastern refugees,

Lewis, widely respected within his field, made the factual situation very clear, “I have absolutely no evidence to suggest there’s a connection between refugees and terrorism.”

Hanson asked about the burqa, to which Lewis said, “We’ve made it plain on a number of occasions, senator, that we have no security reason to be concerned about the wearing of a burqa – other than the requirement for individuals to identify themselves to authorities, and there are regulations in place for that.”

Hanson also asked whether all attacks and thwarted attacks since 2014 had been perpetrated by Muslims.

Lewis replied, “Of the 12 … thwarted attacks, one of those, indeed, involved a right-wing extremist … So the answer is they have not all been carried out by Muslims … But I’ve got to stress, senator – this is very important – ASIO does not make its inquiries or its assessments on the basis of somebody’s religion. We are only interested in people who are exhibiting or offering violence, and to the extent that there is violent extremism – which is very frequently inspired by a warped version of Sunni Islam – that’s when our interests are invoked.”

Duncan Lewis deals in facts which apparently do not support the claims of Hanson et al. In a similar way, we have the current Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, claiming that refugees who were settled in Australia and not yet completed formal documentation processes are ‘fake’ and will be deported if their claims are not formally lodged by October this year (while reducing the ability of staff to process claims).

Joyce seems by contrast to be on to something.

In a headline that really is quite chilling; Cops in this City haven’t killed anyone since 2015. Here’s one reason why: Huffington Post describes the de-escalation process employed by Salt Lake City Police in the USA.

The officers being trained in de-escalation are encouraged to communicate and empathize with suspects, take stock of the factors contributing to a confrontation, and consider ways to disengage before the situation spirals out of control, leading to the use of force.

The Salt Lake City Police have identified 37 occasions where de-escalation has worked in preference to the use of lethal force in the past 18 months.

It would be a huge step for the Hansons and Duttons of this world to use empathy rather than try to wield the bigger stick. Unfortunately, I have a better chance of winning Lotto tonight. Australia has been fortunate that there have been no large scale terrorism attacks in our country since the Port Arthur event some years ago. Negotiation and giving some ground has been much more effective than ‘the bigger stick’ to solve disputes across history, as witnessed by the Truth and Reconciliation system in South Africa, the power sharing arrangements in Northern Ireland and the re-unification of Germany.

As the Salt Lake City (and other) police forces around the world are demonstrating, empathy and de-escalation are useful tools to reduce injury and death while permanently resolving conflict. Barnaby Joyce has a point, just as The Beatles did 50 years ago. Rather than Hanson’s racist rhetoric or Dutton’s ‘fake refugee’ comments, when will we learn the lessons of history?

By John Haly

“We are bringing the 457 visa class to an end”, announced Mr Turnbull after Easter, “…We will replace it with two new temporary skills visas.” With a quick slight of hand, Turnbull re-branded the much criticised 457 visa with two – as yet unnamed – programs to bring foreign workers to Australia. Though new rules and security checks were mentioned, he ensured that he would guard us from the impeding “threat of permanent citizenship” of intelligent and skilled foreigners whom our employers have sought out. Rest assured, Turnbull has proclaimed he will keep us safe from having people of this caliber, stay in Australia.

As Australia returned to work after the Easter long weekend, Malcolm Turnbull reminded us we were a nation of immigrants but we should not be overrun by too many more. With the Australian workforce apparently foremost on his mind, Turnbull told the nation (first via Facebook) that the 457-visa program was being scrapped for two new innovative temporary foreign worker schemes to tackle our unemployment issues. In restricting that program and although unnamed, he proposed two new visa programs with fewer job role options, new market tests, English language, skills and experience requirements.

The first reminder that comes to the fore concerning these new reforms that “put Australian’s first”, is a reference to similar policy I’ve previously heard. Didn’t Julia Gillard propose something similar herself in 2013? Didn’t Malcolm Turnbull criticize her for striking at the “heart of the skilled migration system”?

457 in decline?

Leaving Turnbull’s change of perspective aside, the numbers of 457 workers in Australia have been a subject of much speculation and false rhetoric by politicians seeking to introduce alternative facts and in some cases, outright bigotry. 457 visa numbers have been following a pattern of decline in the last few years but a significant aspect of that in the annual cyclic pattern.

In terms of the 2016 decline of numbers in Australia in any quarter – providing you limit your scope – it looks significant. The first quarter of 2016 (March) there were about 177,390 people in the country working under 457 visas.

Annual patterns of 457 workers in Australia

Since then it dropped slightly to 170,580 (June), up a little to 172,187 (Sept), and dropped significantly to 150,219 (Dec). Now, while these last figures may create the illusion of a significant fall, you need to look at the annual pattern of numbers over the last few years. Stepping back and reviewing the last seven years, a pattern emerges for every year. (Rising sharply, slight fall, slight rising, sharp fall). The pattern – as graphed here – will show you that it is about to jump back up again, so there is a deception inherent in quoting the last quarter’s figures of any year as indicative of where 457 figures are or will be. 457 visa figures have a predictable annual cyclical pattern. Turnbull’s timing made before the Department of Immigration released the last quarter’s figures creates the short-term illusion in media reporting that the coalition is indeed clamping down on 457 workers.

Workers come and go. Totals expressed in net movements of visa entrants – over periods such as a year – hide the significant seasonal change in numbers in the country. So when it is stated that 33,340 of the 40,100 primary applicants lodged 457 visa requests in the first quarter of 2016 were successful, and that this is a decrease from the same time last year, what is notably absent is how many 457 workers left. This is also dependent on which quarter you choose. So pointing out that – during the third quarter of 2012 under Gillard – that 35,452 foreign workers entered the country, ignores that only 14,665 entered in the last quarter of 2009. The coalition cherry picking numbers from specific quarters to disparage Rudd/Gillard’s record – that in actuality had both the highest and lowest intake of 457 Visa workers – is perhaps a tad disingenuous.

Annual cycle aside, it is still true to say the average number of 457 workers in the country since the coalition took power has been larger than the number of government recorded job vacancies in Australia. To keep it in the context of the last 457 worker totals released by the Immigration department, there were 165.9K vacancies in Dec 2016. 457 workers had done their customary annual December quarter drop to 150K, down from 172K for the previous quarter. Unemployment at the time (Roy Morgan’s figures) was at over 7 times that amount at 1,186K or 9.2%. If you added Morgan’s December underemployment numbers to the unemployment, then you reach a number nearly 16 times the vacancy rate at 2,584K. I am not going to entertain the ABS figures because of their inherent inaccuracy.

So even if you threw out all the 457 visa holders in December representing less than 1% of the workforce and made all their jobs available, it would have little impact on the 2.5 million both under and unemployed. This is particularly so as the presumption is there are no available Australians in the market who have the skills necessary to fill these roles. This begs two questions.

1. Why is it so?
2. Is it so?

Why 457?

Introduced by John Howard in 1996, the 457 Visa program has been beset by concerns about fraud, corruption and need. Fraud, we will get back to, but the need for it is still a failure of policy. Howard claimed it was to enable employers to address labour shortages in the Australian market and yet after 20 years, we still need to address skill shortages? You’d have to wonder after 20 years, about an economy and a national policy framework that has so failed to raise the skill levels in Australians, that we still need 457 visa workers. How is that “in the national interest” as Mr Turnbull so frequently repeated? A medical degree takes 6yrs, engineering 5yrs and a commerce degree 3yrs. So what has the government been doing in the last two decades? Why have we been unable to educate and upskill our population? Why is this foreign labour market even necessary? To answer that, we need to go back initially to Howard and ask how he began to prepare our children.

As a western nation which once boasted of free education for it’s population, the growing restriction of education to the people has had consequences for our labor market. Howard changed how education was funded by allocating considerable funding to private schools and undercutting public schools. Students drifted away from public schools to the better-funded private schools, where they could afford the luxury. The public school system was left with a community of poorer demographics with less time or capacity for higher education and an increasing inequality of educational results. The social class division between the affluent and the underprivileged then began at school for children. Two decades later the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey shows Australian children falling behind in education. Segregating our schooling system by either academic or social class boundaries have been largely to blame for our children’s poor performance. Our ranking for investment on the OECD league tables for education is 22 out of 37 1n the OECD. Low expenditure is followed by low results.

Whitlam onwards

Leaving high school for TAFE or University has done little to revoke the class distinctions established by Howard’s redistribution of school funding. Whitlam abolished fees for TAFE and university students and provided support for apprenticeships through the National Apprenticeship Assistance Scheme (NAAS). Hawke reduced funding and re-established costs to students as well as changing labour market programs around apprenticeships and introduced traineeships as a major response to rising youth unemployment. Trade apprenticeships flourished as the government focused on traineeships. Mr Keating started governments down the neo-liberal path of privatising the public sector. The problem with privatising the public sector was that these were the main generators of apprenticeship training such as electricity utilities, telecommunications, defence industries, rail, roads, and Australian airlines. Howard also continued to undermine the public sector which contributed to a reduction in skills training – via public sector apprenticeships. Howard quickly consolidated apprenticeships and traineeships under a single umbrella and wrested it away to unions and into the hands of employers. Skewing support for apprenticeships heavily in the interests of employers was followed by a decline in training delivery, apprenticeship completions, pay and conditions. None of which was aided by the further dismantling of the industrial relations system, through the introduction of enterprise bargaining. While Rudd and Gillard dismantled Howard’s “work choices”, they still followed the traditions of the Hawke/Keating legacy by “make[ing] concessions to the big mining companies, reduc[ing] corporate tax, and restrict[ing] unions rights and push[ing] through spending cuts to maintain a budget surplus.” The decimation of manufacturing under Abbott destroyed yet another training base for trades, and reduced the intake of apprentices.  The budget cuts of his administration also severely impacted apprenticeships. Tracking the causes, consequences and level of damage to our employment economy have been made all the more difficult by Abbott’s savage dismantling of expert advisory panels as compiled by Sally McManus.

The combination of factors including the dismantling of education, expert advice, the industrial relations system and the public sector meant that a four year apprenticeship in the building trade gets replaced by a shallow sixteen week CBT course as the bare minimum for that specific role. The results have been described as “a disaggregation of skill which is ‘modularised’, ‘flexible’ and ‘atomised’ … [that] will ultimately leave skills ‘fragmented’ at their core.”

Many apprenticeships as a means of training up in skills for increasing levels of youth unemployment have largely vanished by comparison. For example, Federal funding for NSW Tafe reached it’s zenith in 2011 and thereafter decreased. Deregulation of training provision meant funding to non-TAFE and private providers increased by 20%. The consequence of this produced the rise of dodgy private providers of vocational education and also the unscrupulous practices by some private providers which have become a scandal in Australia.

No matter the skill training, your always schooled in Finance!

Add too, what Abbott euphemistically referred to as “Fee Deregulation”. Attempts to rectify the class based education system via Gonski funding were scrapped and the vocational education sector simply received new student loan systems, all of which has done little to encourage Australians to “buy” education. The end result has been a drop-off in education in Australia as students fall by the wayside, get ripped off or – even if they do complete their degrees – are faced with indexed debts that limit their employment capacities in a market of decreasing full-time jobs, low vacancies and enormous competition from other under and unemployed members of the workforce. Skills shortages have been a function of deteriorating access to Education driven by political policy.

Is there a skills shortage?

The distribution of 457 visa workers (image from The Guardian)

It is, of course, true to say we do have skill shortages. The question as to what extent any occupation is genuinely suffering from a skill shortage – is problematic. Questions arise as to whether the request for that skill simply represents an opportunity for an employer to take advantage of a compliant, cheap and deunionised workforce. Most reports whether from Flinders University or the National Institute of Labour studies have all rather reflected the opinion of the Flinders University report that “Despite the attention paid to skill shortages, the evidence used to evaluate their incidence and the causes and responses by firms remains thin.”

The problem predominately is that the labor market testing for skills shortages will still be conducted by employers – not by an independent panel. This will do nothing to affect the corruption at the core of exploitation of 457 workers.

Turnbull has announced that 216 job roles will no longer be covered by the renamed 457 visa scheme. The problem is that Turnbull’s new visa jobs list would affect just 9 per cent of the current 457 visa holders. So essentially he has cut an already redundant list of skills requirements – at least a quarter of which have never been applied for in the last year. Turnbull has not addressed the issue of employer rorts because the determination of a genuine skills shortage has been so easy to defraud. Underpaying 457 workers has been pervasive amongst dishonest employers.

In the absence of a plan to rectify education, the public sector, independent labour market analysis, unemployment, jobs and growth Malcolm Turnbull’s reinvention of the 457 visa scheme does little to aid Australia out of the economic malaise. Without attention to these issue now, we’ll be obsessing over skill shortages and “temporary” foreign workers in another twenty years.