“If they open up at 50 per cent, that would be insane. Even at 70 per cent they are going to have to be massively careful.” Professor Peter Doherty

Hoots and jeers break out from socially distanced Coalition MPs, with some zooming in from home lockdown as a depleted, motley, crew, who by chance and a good deal of Clive Palmer’s money, find themselves in government if not in power, continuing to show scant respect for Parliament, the people or the truth, as the clock ticks down on Team Morrison’s weakening grip on power, given its criminal neglect of its duty of care and its betrayal of the people’s trust; both brought dramatically into focus by the virulent, fast-spreading, Delta variant of SARS-Covid-19. And now the sixth IPCC panel report.

Not only is the rollout a race, the virus is winning. And we still don’t have nearly enough vaccine. Morrison lies to cover up how badly he and his team botched vax supply and distribution. Health Minister Hunt huffs and puffs on ABC Insiders, Sunday.

Tells us how lucky we are that we’re not Indonesia or India or Mexico – and how fabulously well we are by comparison and to deny there was any Pfizer deal.

But a deal was underway. The crisis in vaccine supply is entirely the Morrison government’s responsibility. We have Norman Swan’s word for it, supported albeit, by anonymous sources and by the Victorian government.

“From Pfizer’s perspective, I have been told they think there’s nothing in it for them to sour their commercial relationship with the government by getting caught up in a political row,” Swan says.

Despite a concerted coverup, a deal was aborted by Morrison, who insulted the giant multinational corporation’s head in sending a junior bureaucrat to negotiate; who then tried to haggle over the price and intellectual property rights. Hunt does himself and his government no favours in trying to fix the record with a semantic quibble. If all had gone to plan, why did Australia get so much less out of Pfizer than other countries?

The UK agreed to purchase 30 million Pfizer doses on July 20, the US followed with a deal for 100 million on July 22. Japan signed for 120 million doses on July 31, and Canada made its first agreement with Pfizer for 20 million doses on August 5, reports Rachel Clun, federal political reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald.

James Merlino is unequivocal. “There is no doubt at all. Meetings occurred. Negotiations occurred,” says the Victorian Deputy Premier. “The deal was not sealed, whereas other nations aggressively pursued Pfizer and got the vaccines that they needed for their community. We did not.”

Responding to climate change and global heating is also a race. Denialists hold sway in the federal government but it is our responsibility as global citizens to reduce our carbon emissions and to cease pretending that in exporting coal we’re not big polluters.

Just as Howard got Robert Hill to scam future generations with our dodgy Kyoto credits in 1998, an agreement his government didn’t deign to sign, the Coalition’s climate change canards are coming home to roost, Other countries will soon charge us a carbon tax on our exports. We are already the climate pariahs of our Pacific neighbourhood. And beyond. To say nothing of the legacy we leave our children.

Digging in, Tuesday, our coal lobby puppet-PM refuses to set a goal of net zero by 2050 because he’s scared he’ll be rolled by Dutton or what Barnaby and the boys might think, after an international “code red” warning is issued by global leaders. The least worst scenario is that urgent, concerted action between now and 2030 in doing everything we can to curb emissions will see a 1.5 degree rise which will go higher but then settle slightly below. The consequences of the least worst case will be felt for millennia.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases the first instalment of its landmark Sixth Assessment Report (1). It’s the most comprehensive and authoritative overview of the physical science of climate change to date. The scale and pace with which humans are altering their environment is unprecedented, certainly in the last two thousand years, it reports. It’s accelerating, every fraction of a degree matters and we must do everything we can to lower emissions.

Forget the Canberra Press Club bubble nonsense of moving towards zero in 2050 as being in any sense a commendable commitment, the line the PMO is spinning, the report shows that the globe will warm by 1.5 degrees well before the end of 2040

Yet Morrison is not moved. He sets up a straw man, the lie that we don’t know what we are signing up to, if we commit to emission reduction targets. The other lie is that such targets cost people jobs – when the alternative is neither jobs nor planet – and when jobs may be created in renewable energy – if the government had another set of donors.

“I won’t be signing a blank cheque on, on behalf of Australians to targets with no plans,” Morrison says. (It didn’t hold the Coalition back from giving $440 million to its Great Barrier Reef Foundation boondogglers) – which the auditor general found had almost no useful detail in its plans at all apart from vaguely aiming at:

“improved management of the Great Barrier Reef” and “management of key threats to the Great Barrier Reef.”

How good is having no targets? Instead, Morrison’s minders have got him to add as much of the word “Australia” he possibly can into every word salad. It’s cheapjack nationalism, he’s whipping up, a narrow and potentially dangerous brew which is based on the lie that there is somehow only one Australia.

But you can’t have an aim or a target if you don’t really believe climate change is real.

“It’s really important that this government actually resolves its internal issues and starts acting with intent in relation to action on climate change,” Deputy Labor leader Richard Marles says, urging the government to commit to a net zero target by 2050.

“To have the government party room full of a whole lot of people who are essentially denying the science of climate change in 2021, is genuinely unbelievable.”

What is also unbelievable is the Abbott-like determination to oppose everything Labor proposes. In full mock outrage mode, the PM squawks like a cornered galah, when Labor proposes a $300 incentive to encourage the eighty percent of the nation who remain unvaccinated, to get a jab. Perhaps Albo is winding ScoMo up. It works.

Outside, the virus rages out of control in NSW, fanned by the state’s Clayton’s lockdown, a lack of vaccine and an underclass of essential workers who cannot afford to take a day off, let alone a month or two of lockdown. The state has a record 356 cases by Tuesday and now six deaths, but gas-lighter-Hunt, on ABC Insiders, praises the job the premier has done in containing infection.

It’s a refrain which fails to distract from Ms Berejiklian’s affair with the-tractor-ate-my laptop, disgraced former man bag and bag man, Daryl McGuire, as ABC 7:30 Report has documents linking the then treasurer with the grant of a tidy five and a half million dollars to a shooting club in McGuire’s electorate. 7:30’s Paul Farrell is rebuffed by the Premier, Tuesday morning on the grounds that his questions are disrespectful.

“I refer you to my previous answer and please respect this press conference.”

Everyone knows what a bastard the truth can be; so it’s heart-warming to hear Gladys evading a question which goes to the heart of her integrity and credibility on the grounds of respect for what is, at best, a disastrous PR exercise.

How good is Covid Shield in protecting an unwary Premier from a matter she’d prefer kept off the record? If the NSW Premier keeps this up, she’ll be upstaging the Morrison government, the most secretive in our political history.

Given that the gun club grant is reassessed after she directly intervenes, when the original submission fails a cost-benefit analysis, a problem which never worries the PM with his sports rorts and his pork ‘n ride car parks, it would seem Gladys’ dismissal of the question shows her disrespect for the public; a shying away from her responsibility to act accountably with public funds.

But it’s no big deal, just a conflict of interest that would have the Newscorp pack howling had she been a Labor premier. Besides, she’s a minnow compared to the PMO with its colour-coded spreadsheet apportioning of the notorious sports rorts. And the sports rorts pale by comparison with Morrison’s $660 million carpark pork-‘n ride scandal.

Morrison appeals to national pride. It’s every Australian’s patriotic duty to comply with a corrupt, double-dealing state government, insanely keen to re-open at the end of August. NSW’s Delta variant now reaches Tasmania, while infection spreads in Victoria, South Australia and Queensland. Learn to live with it, he says. In the meantime, there’ll be a zillion doses of vax arriving next month or next year – and we’ve just got our hands on some Moderna, a vaccine which other countries procured months ago.

We’re “hitting our marks”, Morrison lies. Not only do those marks change daily, Greg Hunt, our lame duck Health Minister quacks that “so far” fewer than 57% of residential aged care workers have had their first vaccination dose. Group 1A is of course, the Bronte Python’s Flying Circus’ highest priority group. No mention is made of personal carers who make door to door home visits. They’ve been left out of the plan.

(Python here has a less familiar meaning: a person who is possessed by a spirit and prophesies by its aid.)

“This plan is a bubble without a thought,” sneers Moriarty Morrison, troubled by Labor’s $300 carrot. (Baker Street fans will know Moriarty, a sadistic, psychopath who shows fiendish cunning, grandiosity, incapacity for remorse, arrogance, and overweening self-confidence. Machiavellian, Moriarty commits no crimes directly, but shrewdly uses his networks to get others to carry out his dirty deeds for him.)

Naturally, Moriarty’s character traits are found also in other colleagues but he is the archetype of our post truth, post modern, PM. Just add a dose of raging mythomania and a mentor who runs a megachurch, or a multinational corporation, selling its flock a prosperity theology; God loves you if you’re rich, Moriarty.

It pays to belong to Hillsong. Being granted riches is part its gospel. Serve him well and ye shall receive material wealth. Morrison’s mentor, Brian Houston, whom the police are charging with concealing his father’s alleged child sexual abuse, has written a book about the subject. You Need More Money: Discovering God’s Amazing Financial Plan for Your Life. Yet Morrison baulks at paying punters to get the jab.

It’s out of the question, he barks. First and foremost, the government doesn’t have nearly enough vaccine to want to boost demand. Secondly, it’s really not a race. Suppliers won’t be hurried and the government has changed its tune from suppressing the virus to “learning to live with it” – or die as the case may be.

And there will be a lot of deaths to live with even the vague 70-80 per cent vaccination rate that our Prime Weasel is now making noises about. Up to two thousand in six months. Third, it’s a good idea- even if it is heresy to true believers; Albanese is turning his back on the Labor ethos, to Guy Rundle’s disgust; putting the cash nexus above solidarity forever. Cue ancient, false analogies, comparing Covid with the flu.

It’s all on ATAGI or Doherty advice of course, which is another conundrum the government loves. When it suits its case, the Morrison government would have us believe it is like putty in the hands of expert bodies. Yes sir. No sir. Three bags full sir. At other times, the PM boasts without spelling it out, of bullying ATAGI into line.

“And doing it for the CASH, this is not what would motivate an Australian.” Morrison goes off like a frog in a sock. Or “like a dropped scrabble-box”, tweets Labor’s Graham Perrett, as the PM leaps to his feet, this week, to “Holgate” a Labor proposal; denouncing Albo’s $300 offer to entice us to get vaccinated.

“A vote of no confidence” in the Australian people, bellows the PM, whose government is prepared to splurge on carparks in the air, (only two were ever built); $660m handpicked by the government on advice of its MPs and candidates; “sports rorts on steroids” says Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Andrew Giles, all to buy votes in marginal electorates – 77% of the car parks were in Coalition-held electorates. 10% were in six non-Coalition held electorates after a word with candidates.

It’s a bit rich for a government of spivs, shonks and expense account rorters to pretend that it’s un-Australian to do it for the cash. Especially, given the government’s entire flat-tax proposal is engineered to buy votes and reward its pals. And the wannabes. Whilst it chiefly benefits its fat cat pals, earning over $200,000, other lower-paid workers are enticed by the delusion that, one day they, too, could be big earners.

As for doing it for the cash, Morrison’s government condoned Job-Keeper rorts by thriving firms, such as Harvey Norman, a franchise operation which supplies stock on credit at a rate that would shame a pay-day lender. Clearly not satisfied with its windfall, Hardly Normal seeks to freeze retail wages via the National Retail Association.

It didn’t need $20.6 million. Gerry Harvey, himself, netted $70 million in dividends. As for Un-Australian, thousands of millionaires claimed JobSeeker unemployment pensions from Centrelink when the assets test was temporarily lifted for six months in 2020.

Guardian Australia reports in July that Wesley College, a fabulously well endowed, elite Melbourne school for the privileged, offered fee discounts of 20% last year after banking $20m in JobKeeper payments.

As this generosity is extended, however, with no expectation that fat cats who never needed JobKeeper have to refund their windfall, the federal government demands that unless 11,771 poor Centrelink clients pay back any overpayment, they will be slugged with an interest fee.

“As at 30 April 2021, approximately $32.8m in debt has been raised through completed reviews,” the agency tells Greens senator Rachel Siewert.

“This is not a game show,” harrumphs a PM whose government evolved from The Price is Right, or the AWB wheat for oil scandal, exposed in The Cole Inquiry of 2006, in which we paid Saddam Hussein’s government $300 million in bribes in violation of UN Sanctions. Alexander Downer endorsed the wheat exporter. In true game show spirit, the Coalition sprung a $40 million door prize on Rupert Murdoch so that Fox could do a bit more on women’s sport or something – no strings attached. No questions asked. Gave money to polluters to plant trees they would have planted anyway.

Morrison’s manufactured outburst is a sure sign that the government has, itself, canvassed jab incentive payments. Just as it’s likely to be embarrassed by any increase in demand for vaccines which it has contrived to under-supply. As for material reward, it’s certainly talking to TABCORP about a lottery open only to those who’ve had a jab and booster.

Running Operation Covid Shield is Lieutenant-General JJ Frewen, whose uniform adds an illusion of authority and authority to Morrison’s ShitShow™. JJ’s candid about cash incentives being on the table, just as he does not hold back in his public attack on Gladys Berejiklian the week before when she asks for more. Vaccine, that is.

Of course we’re kept in the dark as to whether he’s in charge or just another Morrison stooge; firing the PM’s bullets. Either way, his rebuke of a state premier is way out of line. Under any other Prime Minister, it would lead to his resignation.

The incident passes without mention because it is reported by Rick Morton of The Saturday Paper and later commented upon by The New Daily’s Bruce Pascoe.

“The most extraordinary newspaper story over the weekend disappeared with little trace, swamped by broader, more immediate COVID issues, the Olympics and journalism’s frequent failure to follow up another paper’s exclusive – the “not invented here” syndrome.” Pascoe writes.

Most of us are prevented from learning that an unelected official fires a broadside at a State Premier and that this is condoned by the PM who speaks after the Lieutenant General, of Operation Khaki Creep as The Australia Institute’s Allan Behm puts it.

Naturally, Morrison would be looking at gambling, gimmicks, tricks and spot prizes, perhaps even a getaway to Hawaii, if and when it ever re-opens. It is his stock in trade. His failure to lead in a pandemic is now a running sore even with rusted-on Tory supporters, such as Denis Shanahan, economics editor at, The Australian.

It’s also on the nose in Newspoll’s online survey, published Monday, which continues to show the Coalition’s downward trend in all other recent opinion polls. And the PM’s.

“Scotty’s incessant jawboning, self-promoting and self-applause – “don’t just do it, talk about it” is alarming. His personal approval rating, whatever that means, is negative, whilst not yet the -16 percentage points of his Tory mentor, Boris Johnson.

The Morrison misgovernment and its Covid Shit-Show™, as Bill Shorten dubs it, are now as unpopular as in the Black Summer fires – largely over its capacity to turn crisis into catastrophe; its scandalous ineptitude in every aspect of its pandemic response from supply to distribution to quarantine. Yet there’s no chance of a bipartisan approach to promote vaccination.

For Morrison, the promise of incentives is merely another chance to be hyper partisan, the doom loop of mutual mistrust which has severely corroded democracy in the US and in the UK, as parties and their voters retreat into tribal epistemologies, an increasingly incompatible set of facts, alternative facts and first principles – except that Labor has dropped its opposition to the Coalition’s plans to give a third bracket of tax cuts to the rich – to present a small target. But the government’s intent on giving in to the business class’s demands to open up shop, come hell or high fever, however it dissembles – and especially in its theatrical faux deference to the best medical advice and its fetish for acronyms such as ATAGI and TGA.

In The Mystery of the Miraculous Moving goalposts, the latest ripping yarn from our Prime Mini-serialist, Morrison, part of his prolific Roads to Nowhere series, a 75 per cent vaccination rate – suddenly drops to 56. Risky, irresponsible and out of step with overseas experience and local expertise, his roadmap out of Covid takes us down a one-way, dead-end street, at speed with no brakes, no-one at the wheel and the lights out.

Meanwhile, a virus spreads out of control in NSW into Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania, largely because the Morrison government botched its deal with Pfizer, underestimated the time it would take to produce sufficient quantities of AstraZeneca – and failed to set up an effective vaccination programme or quarantine system. Its lukewarm effort, its failure to secure vaccine and its insistence this is not a race, suggest more than ineptitude at play.

Remember, before his last-minute pivot, Morrison was, like Boris Johnson, happy to let ‘er rip. Above all, hovers the hypocrisy of a PM of handbrake turns; it was Pivot Morrison and his claque of ministers who urged open borders and railed against lockdowns, an idea, writes SMH’s economics editor, Ross Gittins,

“… eagerly pursued by the business lobbies and business’ media cheer squad. In his efforts to score points off Andrews, no one worked harder than Treasurer Josh Frydenberg to propagate the mythology that only Labor premiers were so dictatorial and disregarding of business wellbeing as to lockdown and close state borders at the first sneeze, whereas Liberal premiers knew how to get results with superior testing and contact tracing.”

Mystery is ghost written for the PM by his right hand man, John Kunkel, the PM’s Principal Private Secretary and his left hand man, former Crosby Textor CEO, Yaron “The Fixer” Finkelstein. There’s a bit of input from the Group, an assorted baker’s dozen of brown-nosed MPs, (Hunt’s in there), the odd hard-nosed miner, department head, past and present along with a clutch of big business and big banking bovver boys.

Mystery is about our path to a normal that doesn’t exist, as Pacific leaders remind Australia’s PM, who appears on Zoom, ripping into a slice of toast like a famished Mako shark at the Pacific Island forum leaders, 51st Meeting. It’s a confronting image of neo-colonial rapacity and Australia’s Pacific Aid.

The toast doesn’t stand a chance.

Incredibly, leaders are offended by vision of Morrison Zooming while on the tooth – not just because many Pasifika peoples consider it impolite to guts yourself while someone else is talking to you – especially the leader of Tuvalu – but because it’s clear that Morrison doesn’t give a toss about climate change; an existential threat to Islanders ahead of the rest of us. There’s also more than a hint of white privilege.

Minders are meant to make sure that the PM doesn’t disgrace himself in public. Do everything but eat his toast for him, Kunkel and Finkelstein are the masterminds behind the chaos, catastrophe and corruption of Scott Morrison’s Gaslight Orchestra but can reasonably disavow all responsibility for the PM’s “learn to live with it” speech last Friday.

Morrison confuses everyone, partly because what he says bears scant resemblance to the Doherty Report, on which it is based and partly because it just doesn’t make sense.

There is no normal after this pandemic, Rick Morton points out in The Saturday Paper.

“The figures don’t provide for it mostly because they can’t.”

Cue the spin doctors. No-one knows Morrison’s pet-name for his minders, Fink ‘n Kunk? “Funk” has a ring about it given the desperation in the office these days with the PM’s perceived pandemic management plummeting, as it frets over a slew of bad opinion polls; Morrison’s negative popularity and the Coalition’s fading electoral prospects.

Friday, the PM makes another palaver about a Pandemic Exit Plan an “updated four-phase road map” that, in fact, has only two phases – only gets us six months down the track and contains absolutely nothing about the thousands a week likely to die once we “ease” restriction. As if that matters. Even 70 per cent means 2000 deaths over six months.

There’s nothing you can’t achieve if you lower your goals – as you see in a suite of federal policies from energy to environment to elder abuse and neglect in “aged-care facilities” locked down in profit-driven private prisons, staffed by underpaid, overworked casuals who are forced to share their services or COVID across several institutions.

And you can fox clever. Friday, our wily PM slyly mis-reports The Doherty Report as way out of our Delta blues. If we have three quarters of any one Australian state vaccinated and provided the Australian nation meets the same goal, lockdown will be lifted and we can go back to our Australian lives of blissful, contented fulfilment. Bingo. Feet up. Name your poison.

Gladys Berejiklian’s clearly smoking something. Several days in a row she’s been talking up a fifty per cent vaccination rate allowing restrictions to be lifted in most places. Kerry Chant’s on record Tuesday saying this would not be a good idea. Boris Johnson’s adopted the hands-free-let-‘er-rip approach to steering Little Britain through the UK’s Covid crises, driven by the latest headlines. My, it’s been a tremendous success.

For the virus, that is. Modelling suggests that the central case for UK daily hospitalisations at the peak of the third wave – expected at the end of August – could be between 1,000 and 2,000, with deaths predicted to be between 100 and 200 per day.

Last Friday sees the fiftieth “National Cabinet” another of Morrison’s fantasies, according to a recent verdict of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, explaining that it’s not an extension of cabinet; which means he can’t claim confidentiality. It’s a pity because, for a while it seemed such a neat way to get the premiers to do all the work while the federal government took the credit. It’s not working the way it should.

Now it’s Australian to do whatever the PM suggests. Australian content in the PM’s Shouty-McShoutface-oratory has been absurdly increased lately; but if patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, his first refuge is the barefaced lie. Scott Morrison’s no ordinary mythomaniac, however, nor pathological liar, he actually believes that because he’s said a thing, then it is true – not only true and incontrovertible but a precedent.

Strap yourself in, Australia. It’s going to be a wild Australian freedom ride.

“So, last Friday I announced Australia’s plan to live with the virus. I announced the whole country’s plan to get us back to that position where we can ultimately live with this virus, in the same way that we live with other infectious diseases that are present in the community, and we can get on with our lives.”

Aussie Morrison wraps himself in the flag and kids us it’s Australia’s plan, when in fact it’s a federal rather than a national plan. More specifically, it’s his government’s bid to appease Liberal Party donors who care more about their profits than our health. If it’s a plan at all, given that it’s not compulsory and there’s no timeline. No way known to man of calculating when we enter the last two phases.

Could be a few thousand dead each month, says Doherty, but, Morrison has been told, we’ve got to learn to live with the virus.

Or not as the case may be. The plan is a marvel of lucidity, cogency and futility.

“Phases [are] triggered in a jurisdiction when the average vaccination rates across the nation have reached the threshold and that rate is achieved in a jurisdiction expressed as a percentage of the eligible population (16+)…”

But if a crap vaccination state is stuck on fifty, the rest of the nation can still party on. (Lift your game NSW) but that’s the joy of federation, the rest of us need not hold back. And won’t. Given the state’s track record of infecting the rest of the nation – surely, it’ll be the other way round. Other countries, such as the US warn of the danger of localised pockets of pandemic, typically where anti-vaxxers are active.

Big business and high finance will be over the moon, however. A baker’s dozen strong, Morrison’s Group, a cabal of MPs, corporate heads, merchant bankers, civil servants, past and present, seem bent on an October election. Former Crosby Textor CEO, Finkelstein has mapped out the narrative.

Behold! Morrison, a deeply spiritual, otherworldly, almost saintly being, whose religion is everything to him, according to recent PMO press and emetic puff pieces, is now reborn, remade and with added hair plugs.

Let ‘er rip. Stop all this lockdown oppression. Open those borders. All hail our liberator, a sort of Simon Bolivar of Sutherland Shire in reverse.

Holy ScoMo will give us our freedom by lifting lockdown, just as a stash of vaccine arrives on our shores, which he defends from The Evil Empire of the Expanding Panda, China, a bad actor, which flouts a new Us-led global rules based order (neo-colonialism), runs bat-infested wet markets, does us down on trade and spies on our war games with the US. Cue a lot of play-acting which includes an Uncle Arthur slide-show or a presentation where the print is too small to read.

It’s not a bug. It’s a design feature. Morrisonian Democracy, invisible to the naked eye.

Affecting an eye-catching red, yellow and black, patterned neck-tie in a beguiling, serpentine, indigenous motif, borrowed from Ken Wyatt, perhaps, Snake oil Morrison is spruiking the success of his mob’s billion dollar reboot, or Closing The Gap 2.0, Thursday, when he abruptly abandons Ken.

It’s his style as laid down in crisis management 101; when the pandemic hit plague proportions, when you’re called out over your rorts, your pork barrelling and your diabolical failure to order enough vaccine, let alone discharge your responsibilities to those in aged care or those who must be put in quarantine – put out a good news story.

Slap on the snake oil. Smirk. Don’t twerk- leave that to Clive Palmer – Find something upbeat. Or beat something up. But Thursday, the Crosby-Textor playbook, the strategists who did so well for Theresa May and Malcolm Turnbull, lets a rattled PM down. He cuts and runs. Beats a hasty retreat. Makes a disgraceful exit.

What prompts Morrison to hurriedly exit stage right, pursued by a bear, like Antigonus who abandons the baby Perdita in The Winter’s Tale? A reporter asks about carparks.

It’s another stellar performance from a government which excels in showing itself up despite all its brilliant minders, its fixers and the grubs that “background” against their enemies, as they do against Brittany Higgins by leaking against David Sharaz, her partner.

Our PM blows hard, ending his homily on working together with our indigenous peoples by abandoning his Minister for Indigenous Australians to face a feral press on stage, alone.

Morrison pivots, Ducks and weaves out of the line of fire into the haven of a PMO where his minders, fixers and flunkeys are working out how to tell him that the carnival is over now that the AAPT has ruled that the PM has no grounds to keep his “national cabinet” proceedings secret given that it is not a subcommittee of the federal cabinet .

But don’t get your hopes up. There are no minutes. Just a record of outcomes such as Morrison announces after every meeting. No chance at all of unearthing any real dirt, such as what JJ – Lieutenant General John Frewen said when he monstered Gladys Berejiklian last week.

Ken’s breakthrough is that communities are involved. Apart from its title sounding enough like the Coalition to confuse unwary punters with Liberal Party which shacks up with the boondoggling, pork-barrelling, Akubra-wearing Nats, in a ruse to get enough seats to form government, the Coalition of Peaks represents community organisations.

Badly. It’s an outfit which senior Aboriginal leaders, including Noel Pearson, Professor Megan Davis and Roy Ah-See Pat Dodson claim lacks a mandate and is not representative of Aboriginal people. But you’ll hear nothing but good news of the breakthrough – which meets only three targets, can’t measure another seven, but gets the Coalition of Peaks on board. Nor will you hear anything but praise about carparks.

In a scene straight out of Utopia, Simon Birmingham tells former Sky News political editor, David Speers, now helping to turn away audiences as host of ABC Insiders:

“The Australian people had their chance and voted the Morrison government back in at the last election and we are determined to get on with local infrastructure, as we are nation-building infrastructure,” Birmingham tells Speers.

Poor Ken Wyatt, already a conflicted figure in a mining-lobby dominated government denying constitutional recognition and a voice to parliament by pretending it is a request for a third chamber in a bi-cameral parliament which can barely cope at that, left in the lurch once again … as the new plan is air-brushed to cover its conceptual failure, the notion that if old white men keep estimating indigenous disadvantage every year, systemic racism, paternalism and inequality will disappear but not as rapidly as the heat-evading missile that is the PM this Thursday.

“We’re doing things differently with accountability and transparency, and in true partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders,” Morrison’s statement, says.

“We are a good team and good teams know how to win when they are behind in the heavy weather on a hard and muddy track. That’s how you know you are a good team.”

That and moving the goalposts. Opening up at fifty per cent vaccination will be a disaster for NSW. And the percentages which Morrison is throwing around are shonky. Neither of his 70 or 80 per cent vaccination targets include children under sixteen. Above all, Morrison is misrepresenting the Doherty Report which is not a plan to open up prematurely at all but as a cover for his intentions to follow Boris Johnson.

As Morton points out the Doherty Report is no “roadmap to freedom.”

Under an 80 per cent vaccination scenario, the report is careful to underscore that low public health measures may be enough to control an outbreak. But to reduce the transmission potential of the Delta strain below one – similar to a virus reproductive number, below one demonstrates control – the Doherty work indicates moderate public health responses including stay-at-home orders will be needed at 70 per cent and possibly even at 80 per cent.

But that’s not what the Prime Minister is saying. But since when, in any field of endeavor, particularly climate science or medicine has Morrison ever been constrained by what the experts have to say? What he’s about to do now is not merely foolhardy, it’s an act of dereliction of duty of care, an act of criminal negligence. And rather than egg her on from the sidelines, he needs to let Gladys know that opening up NSW on a fifty per cent vaccination rate will bring no her state no freedoms. But it will invite disaster.

“Future generations will thank us not for what we have promised but what we will deliver – and on that score Australia can always be relied upon,” Scott Morrison.

“PM, good morning to you. Do you have blood on your hands?” chirps a chipper Karl Stefanovic, who wears the same suit on Nine’s Today for a year to point up the sexism behind critics of former co-host, Lisa Wilkinson who dared wear the same shirt twice in four months. No-one noticed Karl; proving a breakfast TV point about sexist objectification which is neither original, unresearched, nor something not well understood by half the population. Perhaps in his next stunt he could don a dhoti – if he wants to disappear completely.

Everybody notices Morrison’s racist dog-whistle, “we’ll decide which of our citizens return to Australia and the circumstances in which they do so.” It’s a Tampa-style homage to his mentor, “lying rodent” John Howard. Thanks to both, it’s OK if our PM abandons the rule of law to be “tough on borders”. Or is it?

The criminalising of citizens just because they want to come home from pandemic-ravaged India is unprecedented. Experts warn that it may not even be legal. Former Race Discrimination Commissioner, Tim Soutphommasane asks what citizenship means if you can’t rush home from OS in time of crisis. Morrison’s practising discrimination; promoting an Australia where some are more Australian than others.

Typically hypocritical, Scott Morrison was quick to bag Queensland, last September, for closing its border, a move by a state aimed at saving lives, but one which drew the PM’s ire for risking Australia’s “humanity”.

Not that the federal government is keeping us all safe at home. The New England Journal of medicine reports new research suggesting Astra Zeneca, the mainstay of Australia’s vaccine program, is just 10% effective against the virulent South African Covid strain, which is found in Bali and Djakarta this week.

A range of vaccines would have been a wiser choice. Pfizer, for example, shows 75% effectiveness. Yet we’ve been unable to secure adequate Pfizer supplies. Nor do we have the multinational’s consent to manufacture our own even if we were all tooled up and ready to brew up a batch, as is CSL’s Melbourne lab, whose output the Morrison government keeps secret, in case we discover just how inadequate it is. Calculation based on current production, however, suggests it will take until 2024 before we’ve all had an AZ or Pfizer jab.

Preferably Pfizer. Because the SA variant shares key characteristics with another highly infectious variant which emerged in Brazil, (P.1) AstraZeneca’s vaccine may also have low efficacy rates on P.1. But Mum’s the word. Besides the government is in crisis management mode bringing citizens home from India. Or not.

Worse, the PM cops flack from unexpected quarters including the PM’s own back-bench, its chipper TV breakfast show hosts and its fair weather friends, Australia’s mainstream media. Even Tory hacks, such as Andrew Bolt say the decision to lock out brown Australians “stinks of racism”.

The death of any one Aussie will shame the PM, Bolt warns. By Saturday, one death is reported but this prompts the PM to declare that we don’t repatriate people with Covid-19. Always been policy. Standard practice globally. The man’s family is incensed. Even worse, “pushback” transcends mere mortals to reach the divine-pavilion of celebrity-cricketers, (Amen). Morrison just has to walk it all back. Duck, weave, deny and lie.

Karl’s first up on the PM’s media crab-walk, Tuesday. Our nation’s divinely ordained pastor, Morrison, to whom God speaks through a Ken Duncan photo of an eagle, confirming that he chose Scott ‘n Jen to lead us all, tries to weasel out of all responsibility for his SNAFU-prone government’s dumbest stuff-up.

Karl’s co-host, Allison Langdon, is on the (eye)ball, however. She cuts to the chase,

“The problem you have here, Prime Minister, the optics of threatening your own people with jail and huge fines is not a good one.” Criminalising citizenship? Definitely not a good look for a government which has busted a gut ear-bashing us all with how Aussie citizenship is a privilege not a right. Like extra virgin oil. Here’s Dutto blowing his bags over a bill entitled, Strengthening the Integrity of Australian Citizenship in 2017.

“Membership of the Australian family is a privilege and should be granted to those who support our values, respect our laws and want to work hard by integrating and contributing to an even better Australia.

Citizenship is at the heart of our national identity. It is the foundation of our democracy…”

Work hard? Morrison’s off like a frog in a sock. Like a democracy sausage – all sizzle and no meat. His mission? He wants to con us that his fiat banning all travel from India is no big deal. What began as a brown ban is quickly toned down to a “temporary pause” until 15 May. It’s a worry. There’s a temporary pause on investigation into the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins, two years ago. As always, there’s a herd of scapegoats to whom he can pass the parcel of blame, this government’s next best game after its game of mates.

It’s the media’s fault. It hasn’t been helpful for “these things to be exaggerated,” he tells reporters, Tuesday.

It’s the doctors. The government’s acting only on the best advice of its medical experts – we are told ad nauseam – despite Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly making no such advice. In fact, the CMO alerts the federal government to the dire health risks to citizens who will be trapped in India by any travel ban.

It’s the law’s fault. Hunt tells a sleepy nation at just past midnight Friday a week ago, but this just buggers up Morrison’s attempt to blame the media for the threat of fines and gaol sentences. Hunt is unequivocal,

“Failure to comply with an emergency determination under the Biosecurity Act 2015 may incur a civil penalty of 300 penalty units, five years’ imprisonment, or both. The temporary pause will be reconsidered on 15 May by the government following advice from the chief medical officer (CMO).”

Morrison, however, can’t resist one last squeeze of the lemon even though the pips are squeaking.

“I’m not going to fail Australia. I’m going to protect our borders at this time.”

A duly sceptical Dennis Atkins in The New Daily won’t have a bar of it. Gutless Morrison “tried to pretend this didn’t happen six days later by saying it was the media’s fault, but he and his health minister did it. They did it for one reason: to get a tough guy headline, and that mission was accomplished.”

And because they could. The Biosecurity Act 2015 gives unbelievable power to the government, says Marque Lawyers partner, Michael Bradley, once a human biosecurity emergency has been declared.

Section 477 gives the health minister power to “determine any requirement that he is satisfied is necessary to prevent or control the entry of the disease into Australia.” This can include “requirements that restrict or prevent the movement of persons between specified places.”

But Greg Hunt’s got to watch himself. Measures must be “effective, appropriate and no more restrictive than necessary” – lyrical legalese from the unacknowledged poets of the world, as Shelley nearly said. A legal challenge on these grounds is mounted by Marque Lawyers, who file a case against Hunt in the Federal Court, Wednesday, on behalf of Gary Newman, a 73 year-old, who’s been banged up in Bangalore since last March.

Justice Stephen Burley will expedite the case for a hearing the following week.

Whilst there may be an implicit constitutional right to return, which courts would be unlikely to find unlimited, Bradley argues, the current ban is illegal – because it exceeds what is appropriate – and because it’s outside the powers which the constitution gives to federal government. Bradley echoes many others in noting that there are means by which the government could have rescued its 9000 citizens, concluding that its actions are “unlawful, disgraceful and racist.”

Another shot across the bows of Scotty’s Tampa 2.0 is fired by the UN’s commissioner for human rights, Rupert Colville who lets our federal government know that what it’s proposing flouts Australia’s human rights obligations; breaches international law.

“In particular, article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which is binding on Australia, provides that no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country.”

Elvis, aka his impersonator, Michael McCormack rushes on to ABC radio to repeat ScoMo’s sophistry that his government has to take a hard line but it never meant to lock anyone up … At this time.

Given his past record, Morrison, as did Abbott before him, is likely to tell the UN to stop meddling in our affairs, which rather defeats the object of signing up to international agreements.

“We can never answer to a higher authority than the people of Australia,” Morrison said two years ago. “We should avoid any reflex towards a negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often ill-defined borderless global community and, worse still, an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.”

Is the PM is channelling Trump? It won’t wash. The Human Rights Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, has already warned our PM that the scrutiny Australia is receiving is based on the high standards we ourselves helped create.

Marque Lawyers may well contend the ban is unconstitutional, but Morrison repeats no-one is going to gaol or anything. Welcome back to a Joh Bjelke-Petersen moonlight stage-like age of innocence and endemic corruption where the separation of powers can’t exist if your leader’s never heard of them. Not to be outdone, Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews pops up to take matters from the subliminal to the ridiculous.

Always a barrel of laughs, a boss whom a senior Liberal adviser alleges to be “disrespectful, humiliating and demeaning,” Karen Andrews cracks hearty, at Wednesday’s chook-feeding presser. The best way to avoid doing time would be to stay where you were, if you were stuck in a raging pandemic, quips Kaz.

What a scream. Morrison’s cabinet is full of stand-up comics but lately it’s pure theatre of the absurd.

Only a ScoMo government could have a minister opine that your right to return is perfectly safe – provided you don’t try to exercise that right. Phil Ruddock is similarly reassuring in his religious freedom to discriminate bill which seems to have risen without trace to the Prime Minister’s orifice. But let’s not race ahead.

“Jailing and fining returning Aussies, I mean, as a sitting prime minister, it is incredibly heartless,” Karl Stefanovic says.

“Pretty much zero” chance of that happening replies Morrison, scrambling the separation of powers.

ScoMo tells Karl he doesn’t mean anything by his threats, Karl. His government’s vibe, Karl, is just one big warm and fuzzy buzz, Karl; like Strawberry Fields, Karl, where “nothing is real; nothing to get hung about.”

Karl’s keen to shirt-front Morrison but the PM’s dog-whistle is already exploding in his face as his hard borders, brown ban on Australian citizens’ trying to return from India earns a serve from “cricket great” Michael Slater. Meanwhile talking heads defend the PM; tell us how popular hard borders are with voters.

The messaging from the PM’s office is determined to blur the distinction between closing a state border and preventing Australians returning home from a nation which faces a catastrophic Coronavirus pandemic.

ScoMo’s speaking eagle must have been a wedgetail. He’s in a tight spot. Add in our pretensions to do business or be done over by Adani and how Modi loves our true blue, clean as a whistle Aussie coal. The ban has the government wedged between a black rock and a hard place. Aussie icons as Michael Hussey, who’s got Covid, David Warner, Steve Smith and Pat Cummins are stuck in Delhi. (Note: these men are cricketers a sport in international decline before Coronavirus struck, yet still more popular than religion in Australia.)

When Cricket Australia (CA) talks, governments take notice. On ABC TV’s PK show, some suit from CA, one of our Kafkaesque sports bureaucracies – aka “controlling bodies” that rival the medieval papacy for administrative bureaucracy – and alleged corruption – warns us that cricketers, bless their flannel trousers, may be super-heroes but some may still need a bit of TLC or an 1800 number state of the art type telephone counselling service when they return to the unreality of their Peter Pan lives.

Yes. It’s the poor hard-done by cricketers who tug CA’s heartstrings not those suffering the worst Covid outbreak yet, a pandemic which could reach a million cases per day. And unlike our own hospitals, or those to which cricketers would have access, India must deal with a dire shortage of essential supplies such as oxygen.

But no such TLC from CA nor from Barry O’Farrell our invisible ambassador to India for Sonali Ralhan’s father who dies in a New Delhi hospital Wednesday. Ralhan says she contacted consular officials with “great hopes” at first that her parents would be helped home. Instead, she finds herself mourning the death of her father.

“I write to you with so much anger brewing inside me,” Ralhan writes 6 May. “I am an Australian citizen and highly disappointed to be one today. What nation disowns their own citizens? (It) is a matter of wonder for the entire world.”

The family’s suffering is not helped by what seems to be Australia’s unjust targeting of citizens in India.

No ban happened with the UK or the USA, commentators helpfully chorus. They overlook at least 40,000 poor souls stranded overseas, whom Deliverance Morrison promised to bring home by Christmas, past. Plus both nations had more infections per capita than India, busting open the PM’s specious, “safety first” argument.

It doesn’t help Morrison when he claims that he’s halting all flights to safety from a pandemic ravaged land just so he can bring more Australians home safely. The fruit-loop is drowning in his own word salad gloop.

But blood on his hands? Is Karl plagiarising the late, great, Richard Carleton? Or paying homage? Or is he just quoting Slater, former Aussie cricketer cum presenter? Either way, Karl gets up Morrison’s nose.

“No, Karl,” the PM snaps. “We haven’t had a shift. How you’re reporting it is a shift.”

Mission accomplished. Morrison reverts to his government’s Trumpian default. Any unwanted criticism is fake news. He rebukes his genial host before falsely accusing a servile media for misrepresenting his government’s position. Position(s). It’s so simple a young child could grasp it, as The Monthly‘s Rachel Withers explains.

“The government will be defending the ban, which it insists it has the power to implement, but it won’t be imposing it, despite deliberately invoking it.”

It’s not an invisible pivot. It’s more of a flip-flop with a lot less flip than flop. Morrison is just making empty threats to act tough. Again. Like the war with China, pencil-rattling Pezzullo is picking in his bid to get back to Defence. Insiders say it will never happen. The Pezz is also over-stepping the mark for a shiny bum; an unelected pencil-pusher, even if his boss sees fit to over pay him nearly a million dollars a year.

Morrison utterly contradicts his Health Minister. Huntaway Hunt our fearless leader’s cub was baring his fangs and howling at the moon, midnight Friday. You could be banged up for five years or fined $66,600 if you even looked like you were an Aussie booking a flight home to safety. No wonder Labor is having fun accusing the Coalition of chest beating gone wrong. It’s easy to understand. But first make sure you have a chest.

Slater’s stuck on the subcontinent as Big White Bwana Aussie cricket commentators love to dub India, unable to get back to his Island Continent home on the NSW waterfront somewhere- just because the federal government’s sprung a travel ban. He’s not a happy camper. He nicks off to the tropical haven of the Maldives, a “no news, no shoes” Shangri-La, haunt of the rich and infamous, where COVID-19 is still a risk along with insect-borne diseases such as dengue, Zika virus and chikungunya. Falling coconuts can kill you, too.

China’s Long March 5B, which sounds as if it should be a pencil but is, in fact, a spacecraft plunges into the sea nearby but as its government says, most of the rocket burnt up on re-entry and besides it’s too early to know if any of the debris from the ten storey cylinder actually fell on any of the Maldives 1192 islands.

Slater’s not going anywhere. But the biggest threat to life in the low-lying islands is climate change, which for Morrison, or his former finance minister and newly appointed secretary-general of the OECD, who takes up his five year term in June, Mathias Cormann, will all be solved by exporting our super high-grade, extra clean coal to India where its cheery blaze will lift millions out of poverty as it heats the planet into oblivion.

Ninety islands have disappeared so far and even by the typically generous projections of climate scientists, the entire Maldives archipelago will be underwater in eighty years. Ironically, in a microcosm of parts of Australia’s economy, the tourism, on which islanders depend, fuels the global heating which will drown them. But to a man of Morrison’s faith, it’s all part of God’s plan. Whilst many churches are concerned about climate change, there is not a murmur from any evangelical group. It’s a perfect setting for Slater’s attack on Morrison.

Of course Morrison’s got blood on his hands. With this happy clapper, punters are spoilt for choice. And Karl knows it. It’s dramatic irony – if you could call Today’s cheesy infotainment a drama. A woman is killed a week by a current or former partner. Experts warn the Morrison government that its recent abolition of the family court will help cause a spike in men’s violence (or domestic violence as it’s officially euphemised). As Abbott’s border enforcer, we can only guess how many of Morrison’s boat turnbacks ended badly.

We do know that 23 year-old Iranian Kurd, Reza Berati was bludgeoned to death inside the Manus Island gulag, one of our offshore prisons we’ve been happy to call detention centres. Witnesses say guards were in a frenzy and jumped on the man’s head in a rage.

Despite first telling parliament it happened outside the compound during the riot where dozens were injured on Manus 17 February 2014, despite assuring all parties that G4S were able to maintain security without the use of force, Morrison did update his story several days later. Naturally, then PM Tony Abbott was quick to defend his captain’s pick.

After Morrison is caught out lying, Abbott helpfully declares that Morrison’s doing a “sterling” job, adding that “you don’t want a wimp running border protection.”

Blood? Morrison knifed his own PM, Turnbull in August 2018. Then, there’s the two thousand Australians who died after receiving Centrelink Robodebt letters of extortion. Thank heavens we don’t have a wimp in charge. But boosting a macho man image means putting in the hard yards. Take Scotty’s marvellous Barnes dancing.

Scott Morrison and Andrew Twiggy Forrest at Christmas Creek FMG mine site

Shots of Twiggy and Scotty in hi-vis rig stretching to Jimmy Barnes’ Working Class Man along with 300 Fortescue Metals Group miners in a workout routine at the Christmas Creek iron ore mine in WA, also reassure a nation sick with worry over PMs turning wimpy or compassionate or that the Coalition is soft on its promises to dance in step with mining oligarchs. After a night on the beers, Scotty’s up early the next morning for the workout photo-shoot travesty.

Whilst statistics show our average worker may be a woman health professional, tradie votes depend on spinning work as blokey and physical; something you do outdoors in your hard hat and Yakka overalls, Bro.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Fortescue Metals chairman Andrew Forrest join workers for morning exercise during a visit to the Christmas Creek mine site in The Pilbara, Western Australia, Friday, April 16, 2021. (AAP Image/Pool, Justin Benson-Cooper)

Just in case limbering up to “Barnesy” isn’t enough bullshit in itself, Twiggy leaves nothing to chance, Fortescue’s owner tells Sam Maiden and other media hacks on tap that a bend and stretch routine is vital to get its workers ready for a long hard day’s work in the mine.

What isn’t spelled out is how highly automated and (buzzword-alert) “autonomous” modern mining is. While fitters have light, driverless, vehicles to fetch spare parts, even the big trucks can drive themselves. Fortescue boasts a fully automated haulage operation.

Still, it would pay to limber up before hitting the computer console or checking the smart sensors and drones.

Similarly, Scott Morrison’s office has cleverly taken much of the drudgery out of the PM’s work, substituting instead hand-crafted moving pictures of our leader being a man of the people, celebrating small business heroes in barre classes, building a Bunnings kit-set chook house or fawning all over the nation’s richest man, iron ore miner, Dr Twiggy Forrest, who in 2020, completed a PhD in marine ecology. As you do.

Scotty sucking up to Twiggy? Check. Hamming it up? Check. Token women workers taking part? Check. There’s even more talk, again of a gas-fired power station at Kurri Kurri in the Hunter. Visionary. We’ll all be paying for it in the Coalition’s insatiable appetite for state socialism despite its gospel of self-help, small government and the invisible hand of capitalism. The word is Snowy Hydro’s already approved the little beauty which is said, variously, to be set to deliver anywhere from 350 to 1000MW – but you know how good our Minister for fossil fuel Energy, Angus Taylor, is with figures. And doctored documents. Just ask him. Or Clover Moore.

One thing not in dispute is the buckets of money Coalition government’s lobe to shower over the fossil fuel industry. A ten billion dollar a year annual subsidy helps the little Aussie billionaire battlers.

Who’s beating the drums of war? Just in case anyone, anywhere, is in any doubt as to who’s a climate criminal, mining muppet Scott Morrison, the only PM to flash his pet black rock in parliament, seals the deal for Australia when he takes his mark at the back of the pack of forty world leaders at the USA’s virtual Earth Day climate summit, 22 April. On ANZAC Day, Mike Pezzullo, deftly turns our attention to the fact that those drums of war don’t beat themselves in the mother of all beat ups our war with China over another bit of China.

In a forum set up so that forty nations can increase their commitment to fighting global heating, ahead of a Conference of Parties, (COP26) scheduled to be held in Glasgow, this November, Morrison pledges to do nothing. Nothing but spin. Australia will make “bankable” reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, he says; even without a concrete 2050 net-zero target.

Cutting emissions by 26 to 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, our current target, is already “insufficient” in the eyes of Biden’s administration.

As for being relied upon, just look at Kyoto, another meeting with the aim of producing binding commitments to reduce emissions. We are the world’s Artful Dodger, (a type-cast role played by “I’d Do Anything” Morrison at fifteen in the 1982 Sydney Boys High School production of Oliver!)

Kyoto credits – brainwave of John Howard’s Environment Minister Robert Hill are now off the Coalition table but that doesn’t mean other nations have either forgotten or forgiven our chicanery and bad faith.

Even a late spot on the programme flatters Morrison. He’s lucky to be invited to speak at all. Perhaps he believes in doing nothing because, the end times are upon us, as all good Pentecostalists believe.

Australia gets the Graveyard shift on a Long Earth Day’s Night. So why not tell the world just how much his government is a front for fossil fuel corporations who would kill the lot of us just to boost a balance sheet?

President Joe Biden sensibly leaves before ScoMo gets his slogan mojo on. Nature abhors a vacuum. “It’s not the when or the why it’s the how,” he says as if he’s doing some cheesy infomercial to teach teenagers, how good is consent. But he has no “how” to demonstrate and his insistence that carbon capture and storage is a viable technology makes us a laughing stock. We’ve spent nearly a billion dollars failing to make it work.

The Earth Day Zoom meeting is an international forum which acts as a prelude for heaps of other huff n’ puff stuff. BoJo is holding a G7 while Norway is getting the whole band back together.

Scotty’s also a hot prosperity gospeller. Believers get rich. The godly become wealthy and the wealthy become godly. If global heating means the world is going to fry like a fisherman’s basket, that’s God’s plan. Try to combat that? Sacrilege. Or even sin. Nothing to be done. Yet as one of the saved, our wealthy PM’s our to save others. Because he knows it’s what God wants him to do. Even if it means a Yuri Geller truth-bender. Not only does our happy clapping, rapture-rat, evangelical fabulist and con-artist, PM lie about Australia’s climate change policies, he bags every one of the forty nations who pledge to slash their greenhouse gas emissions.

The summit may be seen as the United States’ homage to the potlatch, a traditional, ceremonial gift-giving amongst some North American first peoples in which goods are given away for power in a complex ritual which includes the reaffirmation of family, clan and international relationships. The US opens the bidding with a pledge to cut emissions 50-52% below 2005 levels by 2030.

While a terrified nation hides under the doona, our PM spruiks hydrogen. Not just any hydrogen or the green hydrogen advocated by some climate change experts but hydrogen that will be produced by burning coal or gas. The details are murky. Morrison’s a big picture man. As big as possible when he’s in the frame, posing as a tough on borders populist or a mate of Twiggy Forrest and his working class men. No hint emerges from the PM or his government that extending fossil-fuel usage is an act of wilful criminal negligence if not homicide.

His answer to what Biden calls “the existential crisis of our time”? Hydrogen valley. Where the fatuous meets the vacuous. Setting up a totally unnecessary coal-fired power station in the Hunter. Seriously.

It’s not the why or the when it’s the how. It doesn’t help that Scotty’s still a rusted-on fanboy of The Donald or that his microphone is off or – he’s on mute – as he is in half of all households around the country. The President has already left the building. This administration will decide later how it will reward Australia’s obstructing global consensus in curbing carbon emissions and embracing renewable energy.

Trade Tariffs may well be added to nations such as ours which seek to evade their international responsibilities with regard to curbing greenhouse gas emission and climate change abatement. It will not go well for us.

Joe Biden knows that Morrison’s not speaking to him. The PM’s not trying to reach an international audience. His remarks are for domestic consumption. Our totally transactional PM is frantic to appease the right wing of his party which, he believes, will see him as a true believer with his hard-line stance on border protection. Yet it is, in fact, an act of calculated, callous inhumanity which goes against the spirit of our constitution and against the letter of international agreements to uphold human rights which we once helped to write.

Morrison is right – but not for his vacuous rhetoric. Future generations will judge us on what we deliver. Just as they judge us today on what we do rather than whatever our government might say – and then pretend it didn’t say or try to crabwalk away from. The inaction of this government to honour its obligations to its citizens in its travel ban on those trapped in India – or its chicanery on energy or climate change, its betrayal of its stewardship, or duty of care of the planet for future generations, is an indictment of its motives to seek and hold power for its own sake and a travesty of democratic principle and responsibility to its people. It is also a declaration of moral bankruptcy.

By John Haly

Morrison announcement of “permanently increasing the rate of working-age payments by $50 a fortnight from 1 April 2021” received a lacklustre response. The Australian reporting about the lead-up to this said, “The base rate of JobSeeker is currently $570.80 a fortnight. But pressure has been mounting on the government to raise the rate with the $150 coronavirus supplement for welfare recipients ending in late March.”

Small bickies

The Australian Council of Social Service’s disappointed response reported that they would have preferred $25 extra a day rather than a week. The cheapest coffee I can buy around in my suburb is $4, an extra $3.57 a day is hardly enough. It has, although, lifted our unemployment allowance from 37.5% to 41.2% of the national minimum wage. That means we will no longer have the lowest level of unemployment benefits as a percentage of the average salary in the OECD. Fifty dollars lifts us above Greece to second-last place. Mind you, the original Covid Jobseeker supplement incrementally lifted the unemployed for the first time, above the Henderson Poverty Line.

Paying such low levels “under the false pretence of encouraging more unemployed Australians to look for jobs” has no evidentiary basis. The international market demonstrates it has the opposite effect. Higher unemployment payments internationally are more often correlated with lower unemployment rates. More money flowing into Jobseeker generates spending in the economy, and drives demand. The multiplier effect of which, our country in recession has shown it desperately needs to boost the economy.

Australian Welfare no longer in last place.

Training?

Despite the Coalition undercutting higher education, Michaelia Cash supported the idea that after six months on Job Seeker, recipients undergo training to help them get a job. Department of Employment figures show the smallest job market in January were the unskilled labourers (8.1%), Sales Workers (7.7%), Machinery Operators and Drivers (5.9%). This collection of low skilled jobs (37,975) are in rare supply in the Australian economy. Therefore, any Jobseeker training to elevate them to the skill level needed to widen their prospects would require extensive TAFE/University level education; well beyond “approved intensive short courses.“

Job vacancy classification breakdown

Dob ’em in

These were not the only changes Morrison implemented to job welfare. That Australian article also reported, “Under a raft of welfare reforms, Employment Minister Michaelia Cash said employers would be able to dob in unemployed Aussies who don’t take up jobs they are offered.” A move even Business groups denounced, let alone the welfare groups and unions. Social media references to “Dob a bludger!” accompanied curiosity as to the probability of emerging hotlines for “Dob in a wage thief” for businesses that were “accidentally underpaying workers“. Further suggestions provided ideas to establish hotlines for dob in a rorter, silencer of whistleblowers, white supremacist and sexual predators. It is tantamount to licensing abuse and employee exploitation which already occurs in industries like farming, retail and service.

Michaelia Cash's “Dob a bludger!” hotline is a license for employers to misuse & exploit vulnerable unemployed people during a recession. It will be rife with questionable subterfuges for unscrupulous employers do demand unethical acquiescences to their whims & advances. #auspol https://t.co/aRiqeFAX0x

— 🦉🤝🌍 Johnboy Halyucinations (@Halyucinations) March 5, 2021

Get off the couch!

The prevalent attitude towards the unemployed by politicians suggests that the unemployed are dominantly lazy, and distracted by Netflix as Nationals leader Michael McCormack claimed, or on drugs as our currently on leave, Attorney-General Christian Porter claimed when Social Services Minister. Several Federal ministers like David Littleproud MP, Senator Michaelia Cash, Senator Gerard Rennick, and Colin Boyce MP attacked the unemployed demanding they “get off the couch”, and get farmhand jobs that Australians discovered were not available. Others would suggest this patronising attack on people who, because of a recession and the pandemic, are without work, is merely targeting “low hanging fruit“. These Federal Ministers all would have us believe jobs are plentiful.

They are not alone in spouting propaganda that jobs are readily available. Minister for Families and Social Services Anne Ruston, in a Triple J Hack interview with Avani Dias on the 23rd of February, repeated the fallacious claim. That there are “plenty of jobs” in her region. This was demonstrably wrong. Based in Renmark, her territory in the Murray had 8,364 people on Jobsearch in Jan 2021 but only 626 job vacancies (13 times less than the people looking for work). That ratio is better than the national average (approx 18x), so perhaps she might have had something to boast about if she had only bothered to tell the truth.

Job Vacancies in Murray District, SA

Unemployed in Murray District, SA

Anne Ruston's region of Renmark in the Murray had 8,364 people on Jobsearch in Jan 2021 but only 626 job vacancies which is 13 times less than the people looking for work in her electorate.
I suspect getting a job in your region is not something easily done, Anne.#auspol #jobs https://t.co/LoPxvq8NoS pic.twitter.com/cuOToGgoot

— 🦉🤝🌍 Johnboy Halyucinations (@Halyucinations) March 3, 2021

What jobs?

It isn’t easy to be finding a job in our economy, as reflected by any measure or methodology:

– jobs claimed by ABS (254,400 jobs), Dept of Employment (175,100 jobs), Seek (182793 jobs);

verses

– the unemployed registered by Jobseeker (1.236M people), ABS (877,600 people) or Roy Morgan (1.68M people). [All Stats currently published as of the end of Feb 2021 for January 2021]

These measures demonstrate that irrespective of what stats you accept, there are far more unemployed than available jobs. Beyond understanding the basics of how unemployment is measured, it is crucial to understand what some methodologies do not appraise.

The difference between ABS and Roy Morgan’s stats are considerable, and while the government and Main-Stream Media lean heavily on the ABS measure, we should appreciate what it represents. I have for a long time explained the ABS’s shortcomings from its

• exclusions of anyone doing any work in a month,
• exclusions for unpaid work in a family business,
• exclusions of foreign workers through 12/16 rule,
• hiding the increasing gig / part-time economy,
• exclusions of persons unable to take up immediate work,
• hiding unemployment via the government PaTH program.

Statistical variations of Unemployment reported.

Subsets

These exclusions mean that what the ABS measures is not our internal domestic unemployment, but a subset of the numbers of unemployed for reasons of international comparison. A long-time economic analyser of ABS statistics, Alan Austin, expressed similar conclusions, to that of my recent article on this subject.

To be clear, ABS measures a subset of our internal unemployment, as are JobSeeker numbers. The disparity between them illustrated in the variations graph depicts the entire period over which Job Seeker has existed. ABS’s subset, guided by the ILO methodology, facilitates international comparison, but does not measure any country’s national unemployment numbers. These stand in stark contrast to Murdoch and Nine Media’s claims that unemployment is a single whole digit percentage rate. Roy Morgan reveals unemployment hasn’t been under 10% since February 2020, and neither has under and unemployment been under 20%.

Under and Unemployment vs Job Vacancies

So ABS’s claimed 877,600 unemployment numbers are a subset of the domestic reality. Similarly, ABS claimed a 2.08 million subset of under and unemployed. Alan Austin and I are in enthusiastic agreement that “It might be time for the unemployment rate published by Australia’s Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to be put out to pasture.” Alan continued affirming “the steam engine that is Roy Morgan’s real unemployment rate”. Roy Morgan shows in January 2021, unemployment is 1.68 million people, and adding underemployment reaches 3.118 million souls looking for a decent job. The Department of Employment’s IVI job vacancy report for January reveals that over three million people in Australia are competing for 175,100 jobs. Nearly 18 people for every job advertised, and we are not even beginning to deal with the logistic issues of job searching.

Location, location, location

Beyond Australia’s 19 cities, over 100K population, there are 1700 towns with populations between that and a thousand people. Spreading 175,100 jobs across a continent representing 5% of the earth’s landmass, when the towns are dominantly coastal, represents the first challenge to job seekers. An “off the back of an envelope” averaging for any given town/city would tell you that more than 100 jobs in a given population centre mean you are probably living in a city. Which might mean less than ten jobs advertised in that region will be for unskilled labour (8.1%). That’s not a nuanced presumption, as industry and commercial activity vary considerably from place to place, and I’ve given no consideration to rural areas. Still, one might understand that job locality has to be one of the most considerable obstacles for the unemployed.

The government’s expectation announced on the 23rd of February is “job seekers will be required to search for a minimum of 15 jobs a month from early April, increasing to 20 jobs per month from the 1st of July”. Purely considering the subset of the unemployed on Jobseeker (1.236M people) generating 15 applications per month creates 18 million letters and has the potential to cover every advertised job in Australia 105 times until July, when it will be 141 times. Given the likelihood of the number of jobs existing in your city or town as aforementioned, just how long will it take any given unemployed person to run out local employers?

Limitations to employment are locality and factors such as job requirements for education and/or skills, competition for work, financial limitations/burdens, physical/mental impediments, security clearances, pay awards not commensurate with needs and employment discrimination and/or exploitation.

Nobody in the coalition government is prepared to concede they are failing the unemployed. The party of “Jobs and Growth” has in reality been expanding “Unemployment and Recession” for years and no policy the government has implemented in Morrison’s $9B Social Security Safety Net seems capable of changing that path.

“I know perfectly well that it can’t last. Whatever we think, we are courtiers in an oriental Sultanate, and there is a corps of janissaries, with bowstrings at the ready, at the palace door.” Hugh Trevor Roper

Imagine half a million Australians, a record 501,876 to be precise, petition for a royal commission into your patron, rabid reactionary, Rupert Murdoch, billionaire media monopolist and monster powerbroker. Does our PM, whose Liberal Party is effectively a wholly-owned subsidiary of News Corp, act democratically?

No. Head Office steps in. Sharri Markson and Richard Ferguson of Murdoch’s The Australian publish an article, Kevin Rudd’s Bangladeshi ‘bots’ in media royal commission petition, Thursday 11 February, quoting a “Nicholas Smith”, who claims to have paid an overseas freelancer to “sign” the petition “hundreds of times” in order to “demonstrate to you how easy it is to manipulate our own government’s website.”

Smear tactics. Neither mud-slinger Markson, nor feckless Ferguson take the next responsible step: concede that even without this stunt, there are more names on Rudd’s e-petition that any other. Ever.

And just who is this Smith and his podcast The Turncoat? The story is a fake. SBS notes that The Turncoat’s Facebook page is littered with posts that have been flagged as misinformation, baseless claims about the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, and others, expressing support for President Trump.

Shades of Craig Kelly, MP for Hughes, who despite his dressing down from his PM, immediately returns to Facebook to promote more toxic nonsense about fake cures for Covid-19 and to sow doubt about vaccines. Former furniture rep Kelly appears regularly from his chair on Murdoch’s Sky News, beaming his dangerous disinformation around the country and – via the internet – around the globe – from whence it came.

There’s a restless, recycling in Kelly’s quest. As Crikey’s David Hardaker observes, “the outrageous nonsense spouted by the renegade Liberal MP is mostly spun from generic alt-right conspiracies and ideas.”

News Corp also loves nonsense. Dr Daniel Angus, Associate Professor of Digital Communication at the Queensland University of Technology says The Australian’s story is a “beat-up” and “bereft of any substance.” Dr Timothy Graham, Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at the Queensland University of Technology, who researches bots and misinformation, notes that there is no evidence that Kevin Rudd is linked to the bots.

“The headline of this article is misleading because it tries to weaponise the context of the fact that yes, it is possible to game these systems or any number of petitions,” he tells SBS. “The only influence is the unnamed individual, who paid someone overseas.”

The Ferguson – Markson abortive muck-raking comes on top of a slew of smears including alleged links between Rudd and Jeffrey Epstein. Almost every Murdoch paper runs a story about the International Peace Institute, chaired by Rudd, accepting US$650,000 from Epstein’s charities between 2011 and 2019.

Rudd says he convened a board meeting on December 4, 2019, to recommend an amount comparable to Epstein’s donations to the IPI be forwarded to charity. He said it was important to remember that Epstein’s foundations were donating millions of dollars to “dozens and dozens of charitable organisations” and he had never “to his knowledge” met him.

“I recommended to the board, and the board accepted my recommendation, that a donation of comparable amount be made to a charity, so that we would not in any way be a beneficiary of the cumulative donations from Epstein over a long period of time,” he tells ABC radio on Thursday, adding that he regarded Epstein as an “odious character in the extreme.”

Enter the Daily Telegraph, a Murdoch paper which defamed Michael Towke who was pre-selected hands down 82-8 for Cook, in July 2007. The Tele ran four articles, by four different journalists, two of them very senior. They defamed him, destroyed his political career, and caused untold stress to his family.

”These stories sent my mother to hospital. ‘They demonised me. I wanted to confront them in court.”

The false stories also caused the Liberal Party to rescind his nomination, allowing Scott Morrison to walk unelected into the seat. Never lacking in creativity, the Tele now tries a Hunter Biden yarn.

In this surreal spin, jailed business partner of presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter claims ex-PM Kevin Rudd was coming to one of their company’s banquets in order to celebrate a controversial Chinese takeover deal. But Rudd was in London and Abu Dhabi that week, as ABC’s Media Watch’s Paul Barry points out. But that doesn’t stop Murdoch hacks, from just making stuff up. Take a bow, Peta Credlin.

Sky hack Peta Credlin is forced to apologise for falsely calling Rudd’s petition just “a data-harvesting exercise,” part of a defamation settlement. “An egomaniacal fantasist, notes the AFR’s Joe Aston, Credlin is a flack who derided the jabbering nobodies and has-beens on Sky News while deciding which prestigious corporate role she would accept post-politics, only to become a jabbering has-been on Sky News.”

Murdoch allegedly colluded with miner, broadcaster and warmonger, Kerry Stokes, to help Morrison knife his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull. How dare Kevin Rudd get up an e-petition to call for a royal commission into the Murdoch empire’s ways and means? Of course, the empire strikes back. And misses. Spectacularly.

But there are more ways to kill a porcupine than smothering it with lotus petals. The PM steps up. Or does he? What would you do if you were Murdoch’s minion, Scott Morrison? Or Morrison’s catspaw? Organise an award, of course. Time it to coincide with Straya Day, a national holiday, 26 January, now colonised by its largely Liberal Party Committee to reward supporters and obscure the sordid reality of European invasion.

Thus “His Excellency”, Keith Rupert Murdoch is lauded for transforming the media landscape. The “how” is left unsaid. Buying competitors and selling controversy is key to his seamy business model. And sexploitation sells; look at his titillating page three girls. As does publishing lies about climate science, inventing a sinister agenda behind moves towards gender equality and defaming opponents, especially Labor and union figures.

Oddly, not everyone approves of Murdoch’s business model. Dacre deplores its vulgarity and vitriol.

I felt that whatever Murdoch touched went down-market, though it also moved from loss into profit. For the sake of sales, he aims to moronise and Americanise the population.

He also wants to destroy our institutions, to rot them with a daily corrosive acid… He certainly has a hatred of what he considers the stuffiness of the British establishment.

Being Morrison, someone else does the award. Of course. The PM’s Principal Private Secretary Yaron Finkelstein, spin doctor and former CEO of Crosby Textor knows whom to call. Of course, Scotty knows nothing. Chinese warlord, Feng Yü-hsiang, baptised his troops with a hose. Morrison is similarly doctrinaire and just as much of a control freak, whilst always disclaiming responsibility, I don’t hold the hose, mate.

Rupert’s rags attribute the Lifetime Achievement Award to The Australia Day Foundation UK a cabal of well-heeled, Tory corporate elitists, with rent-free offices in Australia House. The Foundation first gave out awards in 2003, the year of his illegal invasion of Iraq, under John Howard, who lied to parliament about it.

Some of these achievements are unique. Eight years ago, Murdoch’s News of the World, a now defunct UK Sunday tabloid, whose prurient interest in sex scandals earned it the soubriquet news of the screws, delighted readers by publishing pictures and video of Max Mosely, son of British fascist, Oswald Mosely.

The then UK Formula One Boss, indulged in a five-hour sadomasochistic session with prostitutes in a Chelsea apartment. News Group Newspapers, the tabloid’s publishers, had to pay £60,000 for grossly invading Mosely’s privacy. His sadomasochism he freely admits to. But much more damaging to Mosely is the News of the World’s false assertion that the motor-racing boss took part in a Hitler-themed orgy.

There was no Sick Nazi Orgy, as News maintains, he successfully argues in court – just a private “party” for himself and five like-minded, consenting women, and there was no public interest in reporting it.

Our government uses Australia House for the virtual ceremony. As taxpayers we pay (and pay) for a large part for Murdoch’s honour, while the pot is topped up by donations from Woodside Petroleum, in the news again for reaping a bonanza, after Alexander Downer helped bug East Timor’s cabinet in 2004 under cover of an aid project. Witness K, the ASIS agent involved in the bugging turned whistle-blower, is currently on secret trial in Canberra in a travesty of justice because he’s embarrassed the government in telling the truth.

Rio Tinto contributes, Anglo American, energy giant Worley resources and billionaire hedge fund manager Sir Michael Hintze’s own asset management fund CQS. In brief, a claque of Murdoch media icons.

News of the award is not just a rude shock. It’s a mystery. Who gonged the Doctor Evil of Global Media? Not that invisible hand of capitalism again? Each of us working for his or her own gain, benefiting us all? Scott Morrison just loves to keep us in the dark. Especially as the alternative could be as embarrassing as former half-term PM Tony Abbott discovered with his Sir Philip knighthood. But Murdoch won’t blab.

Rupert’s addicted to power. And he’s had a sniff. Eminence grise in Blair’s family affair, Trump’s enabler and dinner guest. And now, Muppet Morrison’s puppeteer. Or is it self-help? His devout faith in money and power, helped Rupie buy a papal knighthood in 1988, by donating to a Church education fund and chipping in $10 mill to help build LA’s Catholic cathedral, thus buying the right to be addressed as “His Excellency.”

Who’d honour an Establishment reject? Well, we did, in effect. And we paid for our part. Just as we stuff $40 million into the Murdoch family’s pockets for Foxtel, to do something with women’s sport. Michael West believes Murdoch may have recently, quietly sold Foxtel- but the Coalition is keen to see Google and Facebook pay the Murdoch empire (and the boutique Nine Newspapers, now under Chairman Costello, a Liberal rag appended to its real estate business) for bringing visitors to his dying pay-walled newspapers.

Google knows search engines are not killing mainstream media. Its advertising didn’t kill the classified ads that paid for newspapers. Specialised online sites did that. Above all, Canberra’s plan is an “unworkable” dud.

You wouldn’t read about it – at least not in mainstream media. But Rupie has the gall to play the victim. Claims he’s being muzzled. He’s clearly dog-whistling not only those who have no bullshit filter but those who fear wokeness, a state of being socially aware, especially of issues of justice, inequality and racism. He protests,

“For those of us in media, there’s a real challenge to confront a wave of censorship that seeks to silence conversations. To stifle debate and ultimately stop individuals and societies from realizing their potential.

This rigidly enforced conformity, aided and abetted by so-called social media, is a straitjacket on sensibilities. Too many people have fought too hard in too many places for freedom of speech to be suppressed by this awful woke orthodoxy.”

Murdoch’s hypocrisy does not go unnoticed by the lynx-eyed, Rudd who had the wit to observe in Copenhagen in Christmas 2009, that “those Chinese fuckers are trying to rat-fuck us.”

“Rank hypocrisy from Murdoch accepting an Australia Day award. He pretends to champion freedom of speech, but he’s spent decades abusing his monopoly to bully Australians he doesn’t like into silence. Murdoch invented “cancel culture” in Australia,” he tweets.

But an “achievement award”? True, His Excellency helps pick our PM; set his agenda. And granted, Rupert always does his level best to help capital protect itself from the curse of working voters. But achievement?

“If you’re just choosing from people in OECD countries, ostensible liberal democracies, Rupert Murdoch has to be up there as the most-single-handedly destructive person of the last three decades, right?” MSNBC anchor, Chris Hayes, is stung by the brazen duplicity in Fox’s peddling the Hunter Biden laptop canard. He may as well be talking about how Murdoch has stymied carbon abatement or backed the Iraq incursion. On a national level he could be talking of how the empire has destroyed progressive candidates’ lives.

Rudd, who unlike our current charlatan, was a real PM, sees Murdoch as “a cancer on our democracy.”

Worse, Rupert enables mob violence. For The Washington Post’s, Margaret Sullivan , the mob that stormed and desecrated the Capitol, 6 January, 2021, could only exist in a nation radicalized by the urging of Murdoch’s factoid Fox News. Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham all helped incite that riot.

Perhaps, in a post-modern, post structuralist, post-truth, world, inciting destruction is a type of achievement. Yet given his history in the British newspaper business, few would mistake Murdoch’s award for anything but a set-up. Rupert’s gong is an award conferred on the other side of the world, aimed squarely at an Australian audience. Kevin Rudd – and the signatories to his e-petition – will have no difficulty recognising the target.

It’s unlikely Murdoch will feel the need to add the Lifetime Achievement award to his CV for his next big commercial adventure. The News Corp CEO and his right-hand woman, Rebekah Brooks have held a series of meetings with the orchestrated catastrophe that is Boris Johnson’s Conservative government. Sam Bright in Byline Times reports that the pair had seven meetings with five senior ministers last August-September.

It’s clear that the Murdoch empire proposes to open an “opinionated” news channel, News UK TV which some worry will turn out to be just another version of the highly profitable Fox. The banner headline in The Sunday Mail is a hint, Top Tory Launches Rival to Woke Wet BBC.

While the Murdoch channel may struggle to achieve a big audience, its influence may be much larger. Fox News, for example, one of the most popular US networks, reaches fewer than four million primetime viewers. But it’s a sterling example of how even a shameless train-wreck of opinionated hackery can have a significant intermedia effect, setting the agenda of mainstream network news as well as its cable TV rivals.

Similarly The Australian can set and frame the news agenda on any given day in Australia with even the ABC taking its lead from the stories that News Corp publishes. Murdoch pretends that he doesn’t tell his editors what to print. The truth is that each editor is left in no doubt. And Murdoch is in constant communication. His power over his papers and over many of the governments they are published in is enormous.

But power does not confer acceptance. His experience in the UK is instructive. To the establishment, Murdoch is the archetypical antipodean gold-digger, a crassly ambitious vulgarian for whom no gutter is too deep. This reputation was earned when his News of the World ran Christine Keeler’s memoirs in 1968. The Aussie nonentity morphed effortlessly into the Dirty Digger inside six months.

“It was his first very big story in his first very big British newspaper,” writes The Guardian’s Steve Hewlett. If it won few friends in high places, it got attention. It earned him a reputation for muck-raking for personal gain. Later, of course, Murdoch would ingratiate himself with the power elite only to ultimately alienate it.

Murdoch’s illegal Phone Hacking Scandal, nearly finished him in Britain. Only nine years ago, a cross-party UK parliamentary committee tells the News Corp chief he “lacks credibility,” his son, James, “appears incompetent” and the company is guilty of “wilful blindness” towards its staff at The News of the World.

Murdoch is not, they conclude, a fit and proper person to run any sort of rag. Luckily for “Pops” as he’s known to his kids, his pal David Cameron’s four Conservative MPs on the ten person committee loyally dissent.

Elisabeth Murdoch is ropeable. As Rupert’s only daughter and the child with the most business acumen, puts it with characteristic Murdoch delicacy, her brother, James and Rebekah have “fucked the company.”

And as the revelations reverberate, The Guardian’s John Harris fears, quite reasonably, the duo may have done the self-same thing to UK politics and public life. As in Australia.

It’s not just the mogul’s dominance, or his petty vendettas against progressives and his pleasure in ruining people’s lives, his prurient eagerness to drag us into the gutter, his brazen fabrication and his outright lies, there’s the damage Murdoch does as he debases public discourse.

Roger Ebert’s account of the uber-grub’s arrival at the Chicago Sun-Times, reveals something more than an assault on decorum and decency, a perverse, pernicious vulgarity.

“… first day of Murdoch’s ownership, he walks into the newsroom and we all gather around and he recites the usual blather and rolls up his shirtsleeves and started to lay out a new front page. Well, he was a real newspaperman, give him that. He throws out every meticulous detail of the beautiful design, orders up big, garish headlines, and gives big play to a story about a North Shore rabbi accused of holding a sex slave.”

Rudd protests the ways the Murdoch empire’s power is routinely used and wantonly abused, “to attack opponents in business and politics by blending editorial opinion with news reporting. Australians who hold contrary views have felt intimidated into silence. These facts chill free speech and undermine public debate.”

True. Our trust in institutions, including democracy itself, not to mention our sense of integrity, is polluted by Rupert’s alarmism, climate denialism, muckraking, titillation, innuendo and character assassination, although it’s not spelled out in Rudd’s petition. But schlock and horror is just the dirty digger’s house style.

For Murdoch and his family firm, media ownership is a means to power. He is the most powerful single force in Australian politics, “bigger than the major parties or the combined weight of the unions,” says veteran Labor politico, Bruce Hawker, in The Rudd Rebellion. Bigger than Big Gina and Twiggy combined.

Power confers contempt. He lets his useful idiot, Donald Trump call him “Rupie”. Rupie calls Trump a “fucking moron” behind his back.

And the Murdoch family business’ power is metastasising further, thanks to the Coalition gifting Foxtel $40 million to make three out of four Australians lose free access to sport. Not that Foxtel is making any money as far as anyone can tell – now that Murdoch has “disappeared” the company to the secret state of Delaware, the small Eastern U.S. State, which boasts more corporate entities—public and private—than people.

The ratio stands at 945,326 to 897,934, at last count.

Helping the dynasty increase its power, is the Morrison government with its Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code a form of extorting money from Google and Facebook on the lie that the social media giants profit unfairly from news. Or else Microsoft’s Bing gets it. Morrison licks his lips at the APC.

Bing is the winner in a 2019 Stamford study which shows the search engine is far more likely to return disinformation, misinformation conspiracy and white supremacist sites. Out of 600 results for 12 search queries, Bing returned 125 sources of disinformation while Google returned 13.

Microsoft is pleased, too, because whilst it commands 30 per cent of traffic in the US, Bing currently has only 3.6 per cent of traffic. In response to queries for vaccines autism, Bing returns six anti-vax sites in its top 50 results. Google, in contrast, shows none. In general, Bing directs users to conspiracy sites even if they are not looking for them. Our PM is either unaware of this research or it fits his friendship with QAnon follower, Tim Stewart whose wife Lynelle is paid $80K PA with a car allowance to be Jenny Morrison’s special companion .

The tech giants face payments which will flow to News Corp and Nine helping them increase their dominance at the expense of smaller, more independent publications and as Kevin Rudd puts it “media diversity.”

A code should not just profit two giant companies, Chair of Private Media and Solstice Eric Beecher argues,

“This ‘ground-breaking’ legislation, as the government and its big media supporters constantly describe it, should not just be a mechanism to ensure the bulk of Google and Facebook money lines the pockets of a couple of multibillion-dollar public companies for whom news journalism is a small part of their business.”

News journalism is not a big part of Murdoch’s business. News Corp is more a propaganda operation masquerading as a news service, argues academic Denis Muller, a role which Sally Young notes is how the business began its corporate life in 1922 as News Limited. Secretly established by a mining company owned by industrial titans of the day, it was created for the express purpose of disseminating “propaganda.”

Rupert did not invent the tabloid, although he’d love to take credit. Edward Lloyd (1815-1890), published the first newspaper to sell a million copies a hundred years earlier. And while Murdoch is always happy to take kudos for “writing what the public want to read”, a Lord Northcliffe motto, his papers and his TV shows are part of more complex and more pernicious transactions than simply pandering to base or popular appetites.

“Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste, and end by debauching it,” quotes The Monthly’s Richard Cooke. The insight’s attributed to TS Eliot in The Pilkington Report on Broadcasting, 1962, which opposed commercial broadcasting in the UK.

Murdoch knows the tabloid’s days are numbered, like all print newspapers, along with the days of their most successful modern exponent. It’s not just the Internet. In Britain it’s the pandemic. Which is why it doesn’t hurt to get out the turd-polish. Murdoch has a big TV project in the wings and his lifetime achievement award is a kick in the teeth for Rudd and a timely bit of a back scratch from Morrison in advance of an early election.

News of the World was ultimately wound up after a notorious phone hacking scandal led to an eight month trial in which Murdoch did not appear. Instead his money did the talking. Editor Rebekah Brooks was his proxy, just as Andy Coulson was a de facto proxy for the PM at the time David Cameron and his political reputation.

It cost Murdoch over a billion dollars to engage top silks and assistants, a tour de force which overwhelmed the state’s prosecutor, one assistant and meagre resources.

Yet it was not the indictments in court that were at stake, less about journalists behaving badly so much as the power of money and the abuse of that power, an issue which is very much alive in the incorporation of a “charity” The Australia Day Institute, UK, so that members of the power elite can applaud each other

“… the perception that some news organisations were all too happy to invade privacy and ruin lives in order to sell more papers; that they regarded themselves as not only above the law but above the government, which would do their will or suffer for it; that they had poisoned the mainstream of public debate with a daily drip-feed of falsehood and distortion.”

Achievements? Inciting riotous insurrection via Fox in the US and colluding with the Morrison government in promoting climate science denial on Sky and in his News Corp papers in Australia – now quietly relocated to Delaware? As Michael West reports, Murdoch has already funnelled his Foxtel monopoly out of Australia into a new company, or “mysterious entity” as West puts it, set up in the secrecy jurisdiction of Delaware where shareholders, directors and other picayune details remain hidden from public scrutiny. A ScoMoesque move.

Delaware seems to be part of a radical restructure of News Corp’s Australian assets in preparation for sale. Yet Rupie even at 89 is his dynasty’s biggest asset.

Rupert poses; flash as a rat with a gold tooth in what seems to be a budget hotel bathroom. He’s spent his life crushing editors and standards even for hacks of the gutter press. Setting the bar lower than a snake’s belly.

”Silence. I am the billionaire tyrant Rupert Murdoch,” says Murdoch’s avatar on an episode of The Simpsons as he commands attention to open the Super Bowl. A man with a massive ego, writes Paul Barry, an elephant hide and an extraordinary sense of entitlement. A mammoth sense of his own self worth.

Fox sponsors Trump’s conspiracy theory of election theft and voter fraud just because it makes money. But the outlook is not rosy. As with News Corp, the rivers of gold are drying up and it’s time to move on and sell up.

Is the gong Morrison’s revenge on Rudd whose petition for a Royal Commission into News Corp gained over half a million signatures? Investigative journalist Ronni Salt traces our PM’s links with the mysterious Foundation, which include a one-time PR manager for our PM during his brief time at Tourism Australia.

Ronni generously calls the award “a fabricated piece of performance frippery” and an after-thought.

“It’s that long forgotten party hat left under the stairs given to that extra birthday party guest at the last minute.”

But even at 89 it would be dangerous to write Rupert off yet. His mother lived to 103. Surely he can live long enough to be arraigned before Rudd’s Royal Commission.

By 2353NM

Given recent events in Australia, you could say the price of political ideology is $1.2 billion, as that is the settlement the Coalition government negotiated to make the ‘robodebt’ class action go away without a court case. Probably more telling is there appears to be nothing for the thousands that are suffering long term psychological effects as a result of being falsely accused of large debts or even more sadly, nothing for relatives of those who felt the only way out of the financial issues caused by the Coalition’s systemic use of the ‘income averaging’ process to calculate Centrelink debts was suicide. The Conversation provides a detailed timeline of what it calls the fiasco as well as a discussion on Centrelink’s apparent long standing policy of settling any legal disputes resulting from ‘robodebt’ letters before they reached a court determination.

Despite the evidence of the former head of the Department of Human Services at one Robodebt Senate Enquiry claiming the scheme wasn’t linked to anyone’s death it seems there are a number of people with first-hand experience that have a different recollection

Handwritten letters were submitted to a Senate inquiry this afternoon by Queensland mothers Kath Madgwick and Jennifer Miller.

The women were responding to a comment made by Department of Social Services secretary Kathryn Campbell at a previous senate hearing on July 31 that assertions people had died over robodebt were “not correct”.

In her statement, Ms Madgwick wrote of her “amazing, caring and intelligent boy” Jarrad, who died on May 30 last year.

Others have claimed the death toll from robodebt is 2030 people, a number far higher than the Australian death toll from COVID-19 (at the time of writing this article).

Robodebt is a process within Centrelink that matches income reported through various government computer systems over a financial year and compares the income with benefits paid by Centrelink throughout the year. The problem is where a recipient doesn’t receive the annual income on a consistent basis.

For example, a student earning the (apparently mythical) $3,000 a week picking fruit over the three month Christmas break will report no income to Centrelink for the period of the year they are studying full time. As the wages earned run out, the student honestly reports no or minimal income in a Centrelink income support application as they are a full-time student. Centrelink assesses the claim and pays the relevant payment according to its rules.

When the student completes their tax return sometime between July and October and submits it, the ATO computer reports to Centrelink that the student received $36,000 from an employer in the past financial year. The Centrelink payment received while the student is studying full time is (according to the ideology of the Coalition) undeserved as it will be frittered away on trivialities but in reality is spent on essentials such as rent, food, uni fees and so.

Centrelink’s robodebt system then comes into play, looks at the $3,000 a week income earned in 3 months picking mangoes in northern Australia in the height of summer, annualises the income and sends a letter out some time later to the student saying they were overpaid. The justification for the letter is the automated system believes our student ‘earned’ close to $700 a week for the entire year. By the time the robodebt letter is sent, the student has moved, uses a different email address and knows nothing until a debt collector (whose job it is to get the money as per the details provided, not re-assess the accuracy of the claim) comes knocking on their door, chasing the original but incorrectly calculated debt, plus debt collector fees plus interest.

If only there was a way for someone to look at the computer calculated claim and follow the trail before sending out the letter. Well there was; until the Coalition in their ongoing battle to victimise those that need assistance, tweaked the system

In the past a Centrelink officer would do a basic investigation before deciding whether to send out a letter. But since July 2016, the computer prints out and sends the letter on its own.

The letter asks people to log on to myGov and explain why the income they’ve reported to the welfare agency is different to what their employer has reported to the tax office.

Before the system was automated, only 20,000 interventions were made a year. Now the amped up system is running at 20,000 a week [in 2017]

The Government says it’s wrong to characterise these as “debt letters” — Centrelink is just trying to get more information about what’s behind the discrepancy.

‘Gaining more information’ is probably fair enough as Centrelink does have an obligation to recover benefits claimed incorrectly, but oversight by someone that can make a judgement call is far preferable to reliance on a machine that applies the logic it has been programmed to apply. If 20,000 ‘information’ letters are sent out in a week rather than the previous 20,000 a year, surely someone would have noticed (even when boasting they had exceeded their performance indicators if nothing else).

You would have also thought that if a considerable number of people are complaining about a process to their local MPs and the media, the responsible minister would have asked for some information on how the system was working and if it was legal. Apparently not. It took two Senate Enquiries and a class action to find out what was happening.

The Coalition Treasurer in 2016 was Scott Morrison. He announced the change from human oversight to reliance on data matching as a part of a plan to expand automation, implemented to save costs just prior to the 2016 budget. “Responsible” ministers for the operation of robodebt also include Alan Tudge and Stuart Robert, both of whom seem to have an interesting set of moral and ethical values.

Settling this class action has cost $1.2 billion, plus the fees and costs associated in the negotiation of the settlement. It took two Senate Enquiries to publicise the details of the people having long term financial or psychological problems because our government was effectively acting illegally. And most importantly, the Coalition’s settlement doesn’t help and support those who felt so alone and depressed they took their own or their families’ lives. The Coalition claims that the ALP used a similar system, and they did. But the ALP system had human oversight which implicitly understood the truism that not all income should be annualised.

In January 2020, Morrison only committed $2 billion to bushfire recovery across the nation. It cost $1.2 billion to buy their way out of the robodebt fiasco they created, and we don’t know the cost of the legal and administration fees on top of that. Shows where the Coalition’s priorities lie, doesn’t it?

What do you think?

Australia, Coca-colonial US satellite and missile guidance base is abruptly distracted from its Dear Leader’s sweet dream of a gas-led El Dorado; a nation great again with tax cuts and other handouts to the rich; a people soon to be joyously back at toil in workshop, sweatshop or even chook shed kit assembly- making things with our own hands again – manufacturing – when disaster befalls our great and powerful friend.

A dark angel hovers over Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC. A Sikorsky VH-92 Marine One helicopter, a giant, sinister, olive, tin dragon fly with white-top toupee livery oddly evocative of Trump’s combover, buzzes The White House Lawn, Friday.

The whopper chopper’s rotor blades’ force shreds plants and mulches grasses; plays hell with the presidential pompadour but what’s a military rescue mission without collateral damage? Cue shock, awe and suspense. And horror. Is the invincible, priapic, Pussy-grabber in Chief so stricken with ‘Rona he needs a helicopter medivac? Or has the Biden debate TKO’d the obese, sclerotic, seventy-four year old with hypertension?

Worse. Is this the beginning of the end for reality TV President Donald and the fawning claque of loyalist incompetents who make up his blighted, backstabbing, maladministration? Or is this just the end of the beginning of another cunning stunt? A twist in the plot? Trump trumped cos Corona is all reality and no show?

It’s certainly right on script, notes Megan McCardle in The Washington Post.

“The past four years have proceeded eerily as if they were being scripted by an HBO showrunner, complete with an antihero protagonist, and a deus-ex-machina pandemic, and the obligatory Helicopter Flight over the darkening D.C. skyline, all seemingly designed to revive fan excitement after viewers became jaded by the vulgar antics of the first few seasons.

With Trump, what’s certain is uncertainty. Fellow-kleptocrat Vladimir Putin’s patsy, Trump sows confusion. He’s an open-cut mine of disinformation. His tsunami of untruths, numbers 20,000 lies by 9 July, reports The Post, which keeps count on a large database. Above all, he’s an uber-kleptomaniac. It’s part of his malignant narcissism, a pathological inability to differentiate between himself and the rest of the world.

“The president can’t have a conflict of interest,” he claims. Human Rights Watch’s Sarah Saadoun sees the self-dealing Trump as a poster-boy for Kleptocracy International. (They have chapters everywhere – especially Canberra). Corruption cripples the state and reaches beyond achieving “transnational ripple effects”.

“Where there is impunity for official corruption,” writes Saadoun, “government itself becomes a means for the elite to enrich itself and silence its critics.” Morrison’s Covid Commission is a local example. Yet abusing your political office for personal profit is only part of the Trump strategy. Abusive relationships are key, also.

Late last year, as our own PM, Pauline Hanson, Hillsong Global Senior Pastor and founder, Brian Houston and other local Trump fanboys, who mentor Scott Morrison and who are under “ongoing” NSW police investigation will recall, the US Klepto-in-Chief was seeking to hold the G7 at his Miami resort. At business class rates. Currently, the Secret Service can pay up to $650 per night for rooms at Trump’s properties.

Trump’s outfit received $471,000 from the Secret Service between January 2017 and April 2018.

“I thought I was doing something very good for our Country,” Trump tweets, before upbraiding his critics for their “Crazed and Irrational Hostility.” Upholding the rule of law is irrational hostility? Trump is gas-lighting.

Gratuitous gas-lighting is a big hit with Trump fans. Two years ago, Jenna Price reports, Scott John Morrison told a range of people that bullying and harassment within the Liberal Party did not exist. Asked if he was 100 per cent confident bullying was not an issue in the federal parliamentary party, the PM replied: “I am.”

Clearly deluded, Julia Banks quit the party over it and Linda Reynolds, (a former defence industry lobbyist whose work for Raytheon in no way compromises her role as Defence Minister) was hallucinating when she thought she saw Liberal MPs bullying over the leadership spill orchestrated by Scott Morrison’s team but which Scott knew nothing about.

Gaslighting is an integral part of modern right wing politics, given the way the world stubbornly refuses to return to the 1950s and now neoliberalism’s absurdities are exposed, as state fiat conflicts with individual responsibility in our own local social distancing fiasco and our border wars.

Work experience Treasurer, Frydenberg, gaslights Andrew Probyn and ABC viewers Sunday. Hungarian Josh may change the subject but he never changes the lie that the high-taxing, high-spending Coalition is the party of lower taxes and spending. Or that tax cuts are a stimulus. Or that our economy was not tanking well before COVID-19. Or that a Morrison government is not just a junta of miners, banksters and business organisations.

But it takes stable genius, to blend useful idiocy and nepotism with tax fraud. The shit hits the fan for the Trump mafia with revelations that the Trump Organisation’s paid Trump’s daughter, Ivanka $747,622. There’s even talk of a criminal prosecution. Donald’s lily-white reputation is in peril. Conspiracy theorists go wild with the notion that Ole Bone Spurs’ fakes Covid to evade accountability. Not only is his hectoring of Joe Biden not even a debate, let alone presidential, he’s caught fiddling his tax return because Ivanka fudged the cover-up.

A consultancy fee for Ivanka pops up in The New York Times’ investigation of Trump’s tax returns. His daughter’s disclosure of receiving fees for consulting on hotel projects in Hawaii and Vancouver, British Columbia matches exactly the $747,622 which the Trump Organisation is claiming on its tax. By pretending that its employee, Ivanka Trump is, in fact, a consultancy firm. Not that the First Daughter received any money personally. Well, not technically. A company she co-owns banks the cheque.

Helping whittle down the family tax bill is only one of Ivanka Trump’s profitable roles in the Trump presidency of ever-declining vital signs. There’s the thirty-four lucrative Ivanka Trump “Yiwanka” trademark business deals in books, housewares, cushions and so much more in China way back when Xi Jinping and Trump were pals. The presidency is an Aladdin’s cave of business opportunities for godfather Trump and his family firm.

Ivanka is, moreover, senior adviser to her Daddy and architect of brilliant PR strategies such as his fabled St John’s Episcopal Church High Noon with Bible homage – after armed police clear the way by firing rubber bullets and tear gas at protestors – “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God.”

A sitting president commits a blasphemous act of aggression against his own people for the sake of a tacky photo op? Clearly, Ivanka has inherited her father’s “good genes”, his stable genius. But she excels herself Sunday with a PR coup – a drive-by (in an armoured, black, Chevrolet Suburban) royal wave to QAnon conspiracy theorists, followers of falsehoods, misinformation super-spreaders and other “great patriots” who picket Walter Reed Military Hospital to tell the world the President is a hero who has “god-tier genetics”.

Our MSM refer to the crowds as Trump’s “base” but QAnon is more than a fan club. They’re a fight club, too. Besides helping to spread dangerous disinformation about COVID-19, there is the fantasy that defeating COVID-19 will become just the latest thing to add to Trump’s “list of legendary feats. They’re hanging out on Wisconsin Avenue to get a ring-side seat at the fight of the century. Trump doesn’t disappoint.

Not everyone is as impressed. “Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential ‘drive-by’ just now has to be quarantined for 14 days,” tweets James P. Phillips, a Walter Reed doctor who is also a professor at George Washington University.

“They might get sick. They may die. For political theatre. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theatre. This is insanity.”

Insanity? Trump’s first pick for running mate in 2016, was Ivanka. As her father explained to bemused aides –

“She’s bright, she’s smart, she’s beautiful, and the people would love her!”’

That’s Rick Gates’ testimony. The former campaign deputy and first big fish indicted in Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference. It’s all in Gates’ Wicked Game which will also reveal,

“… how the current state of presidential politics is tearing apart the very fabric of our democracy.”

Ivanka talks her Dad out of making her his running mate. Republican Party cigar store Indian sans feather bonnet, Mike Pence, the Mick-Mack of US politics, gets the gig after his “vicious and extended monologue” bagging Hilary Clinton wins Trump over. A round of golf – in which Pence gushes that Trump, a notorious, blatant cheat, beat me “like a drum” – helps seal the deal. Trump treats Mike like a hick from the sticks.

A principle of perversity applies to Trump’s picks, a principle echoed by acolyte Scott Morrison in choosing for example, Angus Taylor, a climate denier, LNG advocate and carbon capture fantasist, for Energy and Emissions. Similarly, Sussan Ley is a Minister for an Environment who poses her own threat to biodiversity.

Let the UN warn that a million species across the world face extinction. Ms Ley says she is “concerned” about the problem, but doubts land clearing is to blame. Has she read her own government’s reports? Over 400 ecologists, including leading conservation scientists from Australia and around the world, issued a declaration in 2016 warning of the devastating impacts of land clearing on Australia’s biodiversity. The World Wildlife Fund says land clearing is the main cause of habitat loss in its Living Planet Report 2020.

But Ms Ley promises to cut green tape for big projects – just as Trump has done in the US. Despite opposition from environmental and indigenous groups, his administration exempts the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska from a 2001 prohibition on commercial logging and other development.

The Tongass is an enormous carbon sink. Its store of carbon is equivalent to taking 650,000 cars off the road each year, Andy Moderow, Alaska director of the Alaska Wilderness League, estimates.

A fossil fuel lobbyist heads up America’s EPA, assisted in its toxic chemicals programme by an industry insider. Ken McQueen, a former oil executive, who pooh-poohs manmade global heating, is top Environmental Protection Agency official in the South-Central US, a fossil fuel industry hub and site of recent climate-driven disasters such as Hurricane Harvey. Trump’s made it much easier to drill for oil in national parks.

Similarly, Pence is a perfect fit on public health. A Big Tobacco stooge, he says in an opinion piece, “Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.” Yet, two out of three smokers die from a smoking-related illness, according to medical research. Smoking kills half a million Americans a year.

As Governor of Indiana, the “cross-roads of America”, where intersecting highways mean increased risk of infection, Pence cut funds, forcing HIV test stations to close, banned needle exchanges and helped create the largest outbreak of HIV in state history. Who better to lead Trump’s coronavirus task force?

The VP’s performance has not been without incident. Pence’s use of his personal AOL account for State of Indiana business is eerily similar to Clinton’s abuse of protocol for which she is still mercilessly pilloried.

Totally different, Pence defenders snort. Yet Mike’s account was hacked into. Pence’s contacts were startled to receive desperate emails claiming Mike and Mother (as the VP insists on calling his wife, Karen) were attacked on their way back to their hotel in The Philippines and needed money urgently. A scammer claimed the Pences had lost all their money, bank cards and mobile phone. Luckily they still had their faith.

“Startling” and “extraordinary”, The Washington Post calls the mixed messaging over Trump’s health. Oddly, there is nothing remotely approaching Vice Presidential leadership from Pence or any official statement from the leader of the Trump Administration’s Coronavirus SWAT team. Is Pence too busy getting himself tested?

We do know that he believes God has a plan for him and that entails “servant leadership”.

“Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave.” Yet we also know that when The Washington Post published the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasts of grabbing women “by the pussy”, 7 October 2016, Pence was contemplating a coup.

Should Trump die or become incapable of serving as President, Pence will step into his shoes. But that does not mean that he will automatically become the Republican Party’s candidate in 3 November. The Republican National Committee makes that decision. There is no question that Pence has his eyes on 2024.

Is Trump still alive? Has he been saved by a cocktail of experimental drugs? By Saturday, peak uncertainty is reached. Exceeded. Yet later that day, his doctor “clarifies”. Trump will stay at Walter Reed Military Hospital “for an indefinite number of days.” He’s placed on a five-day antiviral drug regimen for COVID-19. Evidently, Trump’s condition may be more serious than official briefings suggest. He has only himself to blame.

Trump is the single largest driver of false and misleading information about the coronavirus, report Cornell University researchers who publish a study this week showing that Russia’s chump makes up nearly 38 per cent of what they coyly describe as the overall “misinformation conversation,” based on 38 million articles in English language media around the world. Trump’s toxic bullshit covers eleven main topics, but the most prevalent, ironically, is his promotion of untested miracle cures, including anti-malarial and disinfectants.

Currently, the president is reported to be taking not one but two experimental treatments; a hint of panic in medical ranks. Saturday, a swarm of white coats from central casting, appear; an homage to Big Tobacco’s classic advertisements where doctors swear that smoking is good for you. Trump’s in great shape, they lie. He continues to improve, they claim since Saturday and could be released as early as Monday.

The team confirms Trump had lowered oxygen levels at one point. They won’t answer questions about whether the president has suffered lung damage. If this is their damage control, it has the opposite effect. Again Trump and his team have seen to that personally.

“We’re in an environment where conspiracies are thriving, in part because the president encourages them,” says Melissa Ryan, CEO of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation.

“And we have a White House comms operation that gives the press and public disinformation constantly.”

Yet, exercising reasonable scepticism is to miss the theatricality; the magical surrealism of Trump’s presidency. Above all, even down under, Trumpism entails the willing suspension of disbelief.

All eyes are on China Flu in The White House, a special effects episode of the epic TV soap that is the Trump Dynasty presidency – a perverse parody of Camelot, a festering wen of turpitude and lies in a dis-United States of degeneracy, deceit and greed presided over by huckster Donald Trump and his grasping, venal family.

“The president has never overnighted at a hospital before” squeaks an aide from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Overnighted? Trump’s boasts of invincibility already look sick. Delusional. Rapidly, the narrative becomes “a few days’ stay”. The hospital is named after the US Army doctor whose 1901 work on the role of mosquitoes in spreading yellow fever helped pioneer biomedicine and epidemiology.

Reed’s work also allowed the US to complete a Panama Canal which would make America a world economic powerhouse. Above all, by linking its growing Pacific power to its traditional Atlantic allies, the canal was a geopolitical strategy to make the United States the most powerful nation on earth. Now it’s a pariah nation, thanks in no small part to Trump’s foreign policy failures – and, of course, his administration’s coronavirus mismanagement.

Walter Reed is a thirteen minute drive away – the chopper on the White House lawn is overkill. Yet it adds some of the grand-standing, big-noting, big-hair, big-orange Bronx Colors brand face make up melodrama which fuels Trump’s tacky, stage-presidency.

Not to be overlooked, however, is Trump, the authoritarian’s fetish for all things military, currently echoed in our own PM’s incessant attacks on Dan Andrews who is constantly rebuked for failing to call in the ADF, thus causing Victoria’s corona-crisis.

In President Bone Spurs’ suite, reserved for high-ranking soldiers, distinguished draft-dodgers and other public heroes, the man who scorns the pandemic as a hoax and who mocks Joe Biden for wearing a face mask is lethargic. He has some trouble breathing and his blood oxygen levels have caused doctors some concern. Medical experts are divided. Some subscribe to the view that to be prescribed a cocktail of experimental drugs plus dexamethasone, means that Trump must be severely ill.

Dexamethasone is a steroid used to head off an immune system overreaction that kills many COVID-19 patients reports The New York Times. It is generally reserved for those with severe illness. Yet there is another equally plausible scenario. Trump himself is directing his own treatment. If he’s able to overrule doctors and visit fans in his SUV, he’s quite capable of ordering a hamburger with the lot.

Suddenly they’re throwing the kitchen sink at him, says Dr. Thomas McGinn, a top physician at Northwell Health, the largest health care provider in New York State.

“Is he sicker than we’re hearing, or are they being overly aggressive because he is the president, in a way that could be potentially harmful?” Or is Trump dictating his own medication regimen, oblivious to the risks of ingesting a cocktail of unproven drugs?

“Am I dying?” is one of the first questions Trump asks doctors at Walter Reed. The answer may be yes but it is just as likely at this stage, that the autocratic malignant narcissist is bossing the doctors around, demanding, as his right what he believes is the best of everything. He may have VIP Syndrome.

‘VIP syndrome,‘ describes a phenomenon in which medical treatment of a famous, powerful, or influential patient, even a celebrity president, is compromised precisely by the patient’s fame, power, or influence. Complications can arise when doctors are pressured into decisions which diverge from the normal routine of care into treatment which may ultimately turn out to be detrimental to the patient’s health.

Trump may, of course, already have compromised his health by choosing to leave the hospital in a drive-by flirtation with his deluded fans. The stunt has all the hallmarks of Ivanka’s direction but it may have been entirely his own idea. What we do know is those close to him would endorse if not applaud Trump’s latest act of genius. Such are the potentially deadly perils of surrounding yourself with yes-men – and women.

Whether Trump survives or not, there is the vexed question of his legacy. When he leaves the presidency it will be in far worse shape than he found it – but in the meantime – two hundred and ten thousand Americans have perished and 7.44 million are infected with the virus. This need not have been the case.

Had his administration shown leadership, or even competence, the tragedy of America’s coronavirus experience may have been averted or at least attenuated. Instead, like fellow narcissist and buffoon, Boris Johnson, Trump set a tone of hubristic denial and worse. He actively perpetrated disinformation, disparaged science, suppressed information, advocated bleach or hydroxychloroquine, sunlight and other quackery.

Of immediate concern are the lives of those workers in The White House and those members of the Republican Party who have been needlessly put at risk by a Presidency that is more than dysfunctional, more than corrupt and self-serving; a presidency that could not even acknowledge the need for basic precautions, such as the wearing of masks or social distancing let alone exercise its duty of protecting the American people.

Whether he recovers or not, Trump’s presidency is moribund; so utterly corrupted it is rotten to the core. Mendacity and recklessness are two of its worst traits, notes Frank Bruni. Add a third: Trump’s petty tyranny.

If you wanted the boss to be happy, you left your mask at home, report Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman of The White House’s top-down culture of fear. A staff too frightened to displease their boss cannot tell him the hard truths he needs to know. In the end, this is the illness that has undone Trump. He is the architect of his own decline.

So, the man who has spread more misinformation about COVID-19 than any other individual on the planet has caught the coronavirus. The fact that he will now not be able to campaign personally will, ironically, perhaps save some lives.

On October 1 President Donald Trump announced via Twitter that:

Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!

What would his supporters be thinking? He told them it was all a joke and with the breeze it would wistfully flutter away. Even his tweet makes a nonsense of all his prophecies.

Only the like-minded would fall for his uneducated divinations and insights that have their genesis in an unsound mind.

Donald Trump may not have acted swiftly to contain the spread of the virus, but he hasn’t remained silent on the subject (most of which are bizarre and pushing crazy conspiracies). There are many to quote, but here are just a few of his thoughts on COVID-19.

On January 22, when the disease started to raise a few eyebrows he tried to put everybody’s mind at ease with this little lie:

“We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

Then five weeks later on February 27 he brushed the virus aside:

“It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

And this gem on April 23 as a possible cure:

“I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that.”

On August 20 Trump publicly:

“… praised the supporters of QAnon, a convoluted, pro-Trump conspiracy theory, and suggested he appreciates their support of his candidacy.

At a news conference at the White House on Wednesday, Mr Trump courted the support of those who put stock in the conspiracy theory, saying, “I heard that these are people that love our country.” It was his first public comment on the subject.”

On September 9 the nation learned what Trump really thought:

“He (Trump) knew (about the dangers posed by COVID-19), and purposefully played it down. Worse, he lied to the American people… And while this deadly disease ripped through our nation, he failed to do his job – on purpose. It was a life-and-death betrayal of the American people.”

No doubt tying to come up with an election winner on September 16 he boasted that a COVID-19 vaccine could be ‘three weeks, four weeks’ away.

Democratic Party’s presidential nominee Joe Biden, somewhat more rationally pointed out the next day that:

“The idea that there’s going to be a vaccine and everything’s gonna be fine tomorrow – it’s just not rational.”

Joe you of all people should know the POTUS have never been and never will be rational.

He was quick to blame China for the virus (again) on September 22 in remarks delivered remotely to the U.N. General Assembly, he said that:

“We must hold accountable the nation which unleashed this plague onto the world, China … The Chinese government, and the World Health

Organization – which is virtually controlled by China – falsely declared that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission.

Later on, they falsely said people without symptoms would not spread the disease … The United Nations must hold China accountable for their actions.”

At the risk of sounding sarcastic, he has with his own words his own cure. By all means, check it out.

Back on July 10 Dr. Andrew Pastewski, ICU medical director at Jackson South Medical Center in Miami, lamented that:

“It’s just disheartening because the selfishness of (not wearing a mask) versus the selflessness of my staff and the people in this hospital who are putting themselves at risk, and I got COVID from this.”

Dire warning, indeed. Did Trump listen? And how many have died? Well it’s fast approaching 210,000.

Universally this virus has proven to be a tragedy for the world. That it has been treated so flippantly by men such as the POTAS is further proof that the world needs men and women in leadership who speak words of truth, of love, of compassion, of equality. Not gutter language that maltreats the office of the President.

Not those of insanity as expressed by President Trump. It is a time in world history for those with calm thoughtful voices to overshadow those crass voices of hatred, the dictators think they know all, but in reality, know very little.

From our own SBS:

“US President Donald Trump has been the world’s biggest driver of COVID-19 misinformation during the pandemic, a study from Cornell University said Thursday.”

Yet Trump kept rolling along spreading misinformation, leading Twitter to temporarily block Trump’s campaign account for spreading this misinformation:

“The authors found that comments by Mr Trump drove major spikes in the “miracle cures” topic, led by his 24 April press briefing where he mused on the possibility of using disinfectants inside the body to cure the coronavirus.

Similar spikes were seen when he promoted unproven treatments like hydroxychloroquine.

We conclude therefore that the president of the United States was likely the largest driver of the COVID-19 misinformation ‘infodemic’, the team wrote.

Attacks on US government scientist Dr Fauci, references to the debunked “Plandemic” video, and blaming the virus on Chinese people consuming bat soup rounded off the list.”

Now the President must face the reality of his own disbelief. He also needs to be upfront with the people of not only the United States but the entire world and say that he was wrong.

He must explain to us where he gets his information from and how he fact checks it.

Within his own body this virus dwells. Was he lying when he said he had taken a course of Hydroxychloroquine? He choose to play politics with this most deadly disease but it has caught up with him.

Just how seriously he has it is anyone’s guess. Whatever the case he will, I’m sure, twist it to his own advantage unless it is life threatening. If it is mild, he will make himself into the “it couldn’t defeat me” man and continue with his propaganda.

If it is serious, he will suffer for his apathy. He will have on his conscience the words “If only I had taken it seriously and believed the scholarship. The science spoke but I knew better.”

In any other universe, recovering from one public health crisis by worsening another would spark immediate backlash. An “asbestos led recovery” would be career-ending; as would a “tobacco led recovery” or a “AK-47 led recovery”. But fossil fuels have locked their harm so deeply into our lives that we have become desensitised to this incredible, radical significance of proposing to hurt humans as a pathway to helping them. What is happening here is simultaneously deadly and ludicrous. (Ketan Joshi Renew Economy).

In pristine white hard hat and air sea rescue orange Hi-Viz vest fluoro fancy dress, Scott Morrison is like some surreal, grotesquely upscaled, Lego minifigure in a budget horror movie as he bobs up like a turd in the surf off Nobby’s Beach to spruik his latest role as our national saviour in Santos and Origin’s Gas Chooses itself.

After spending a week singing an aria to himself and his government which gets things done – because “that’s what we do” as he tells Coalition toady, David Speers, on ABC Insiders, by Sunday, he’s changed his tune. His threat to build a massive new 1GW gas-fired power station to replace Liddell won’t be happening.

Yep. Scotty’s “can do” government can also undo. Why? Morrison bullshits about how private enterprise has saved us from yet another crisis. As if he’s talked them into it. Why, Energy Australia has a fabulous new gas-fired generator in the wings and – look over there – corporations have batteries and stuff just waiting to go.

No mention of Mike Cannon-Brookes who throws down the gauntlet, declaring he’ll bid for Liddell’s replacement if Scott Morrison can identify the rules of engagement. Calls Scotty’s bluff. Worse.

“Giant fossil fuel companies need subsidies to extract gas and export it? No they don’t, that is bullshit. So declare the rules of the game. That’s the way to get assets built.”

Bizarre? It’s what we’ve come to expect from a government which has no energy policy. Not a clue. But what a stunt! Trust Scotty to launch his gas-led recovery show in Tomago, home to another aluminium smelter, Coalition policy is helping to kill. It’s twenty-two minutes inland from coal terminal and post-industrial rust-bucket Newcastle. Described – along with winsome Wollongong – by John Quiggan as a “vibrant and diversified” regional centre, Newcastle has a ten per cent unemployment rate; a seventeen year low.

The Tomago smelter, one of the Hunter’s last big metal producers, is 51% owned by model corporate citizen, Rio Tinto. Drawing twelve per cent of NSW’s electricity, it’s the state’s biggest user. At mates’ rates, of course.

Our smelters typically rely on heavily subsidised coal-fired electricity with gas back-up plants. If they shut their doors, as Rio keeps threatening, power companies’ would have to shut a few generators down, too.

Tomago claims rising power prices will force it to close. But experts point to a glut of aluminium world-wide. China produces 62 per cent to our 3.3. In 2017, moreover, Tomago forged an eleven year baseload power supply contract deal with Macquarie Generation. AGL is plans to build a 250MW back up gas generator at Tomago but it costs three times as much to burn gas to make electricity than to burn coal.

Smelters account for sixteen per cent of greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector but there has been not a hint of any Coalition roadmap towards encouraging the industry to adopt renewables. Conspicuously lacking from Morrison’s roadmap is any acknowledgment that unless Australian industry invests in green energy then it will decline along with fossil fuels.

“Australia is one of the world’s most emissions-intensive aluminium producers. Deployment of renewable electricity is a path out of this quagmire, and the rapid fall in cost of renewables makes it more viable than ever before.” Clark Butler reports for The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA)

Simon Holmes à Court argues, Tomago’s crippled by Coalition incompetence; politicised mismanagement.

Australia’s four aluminium smelters are salvageable. They also offer stability to our national grid. Above all, they provide employment and support whole communities. They will be scrapped because Morrison’s government won’t admit that renewable energy is the key to their future. Will it clean up its act? Phase out fossil fuels as soon as possible? Pigs might fly. Instead the PM has a surreal cop-out, “Gas Chooses Itself”.

Sure it does. Despite being flogged as a transition fuel, gas is not good for the environment. Morrison’s messaging on gas originates in US industry bodies and think tanks. The fantasy that gas is a “transition fuel” or a “bridge” to renewables stems from the 1990s. The spin was fabricated by the American Gas Association as more evidence emerged on global warming.

Crikey’s David Hardaker refers to Marian Wilkinson’s The Carbon Club which traces the influence of US fossil fuel lobbyists to 1997 when the Frontiers of Freedom Foundation fossil lobbyists arrived in Canberra to work us over before we sent our representatives to cheat at Kyoto – “It’s not global and it won’t work.”

Wilkinson’s book begins by noting that when Tony Abbott became PM, a raft of legislation was introduced to shut down everything from the emissions trading scheme, the CEFC and the Climate Change Authority. Tim Flannery recalls being sacked from the Climate Commission. It was the first act of the Abbott government and Flannery doubts that cabinet had even met. Morrison’s leadership is still appeasing the same push.

As for (mainly methane) natural gas being any type of bridge to renewables, the notion is risible. If fully unleashed, Australia’s gas resources could be responsible for up to three times the annual carbon emissions of the entire world, reports The Australia Institute in a landmark new report, Weapons of Gas Destruction.

“Gas is a high-pollution industry that won’t create jobs while unleashing triple the world’s annual emissions into the atmosphere. To say it is ‘lose-lose’ is an understatement,” concludes Climate and Energy Program director, Richie Merzian.

Of course Gas Chooses Itself is a winner for the gas industry which is a huge user of gas, burning twice as much gas as Australian households and nearly as much as our manufacturing sector. But ScoMo’s no fool.

The plot reworks an old routine. Santos and Origin make a mozza from rigging the already extortionate price of gas. Laugh all the way to the bank. Demand booms, thanks to the Coalition’s, Gas-led Recovery Plan. Santos and Origin also rake in millions in subsidies for their Pythonesque carbon capture and storage (CCS) scam.

CCS is ludicrous. Capture, transport and bury millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from coal power plants? How good is Peabody Coal’s propaganda unit? US Coal baron Robert Murray freely admits that CCS is baloney. A fantasy. Murray says CCS is a con. It ‘does not work’ and ‘is just cover for the politicians.’

Trust Scotty to promise a con that the UN Development program says would “arrive on the battlefield far too late to help the world avoid dangerous climate change”. Bush fire victims know all about his late arrivals.

CCS is expensive and impracticable. Not only is energy wasted burying carbon, retrofitting a 2100-megawatt brown coal-fired power station in Victoria would “conservatively” cost a whopping $2.45 billion per boiler.

Governments showered $1.3 billion on CCS from 2007-13 with not one commercial working model to show for the money, but “simp” Scotty from marketing believes in it; he’ll surely find a bit extra in the kitty for his mining pals. Cut back on social services, hospitals and widows’ pensions. Incentivise self-reliance.

Scotty’s chosen the right setting to announce his gas-fired delusion. Newcastle is spiritual godfather to our state of the art asylum-seeker gulags and our perverse delight in punishing the elderly, infirm and those out of work. Debit where debit is due, our PM himself, was quick to back our Robodebt extortion scam which led some pensioners to take their own lives. Over 2000 people died after receiving Centrelink debt notices.

Yet their debts outlived them. Anastasia McCardel received a call from a Centrelink in May. Told her son Bruce owed $6,744.52. When would she repay his debt? Bruce had died six months earlier, in November 2018, aged 49. He was born with Noonan syndrome, a genetic condition that affects the heart and other vital organs.

You can’t just blame Scott Morrison. Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan. As treasurer in 2016, former social services supremo, Morrison was supported by Christian Porter, Alan Tudge and Stuart Robert, who were high-fiving and jiving at the promise of automated welfare debt recovery. But not this week.

The Federal Court learns at a pre-trial hearing on Monday that Gordon Legal plans to argue that Big Al Tudge, who was Human Services minister in 2016-17, either knew or was “recklessly indifferent” to the fact the botched program was unlawful. Luckily Tudge, is tied up at the moment explaining how he had nothing at all to do with the taxpayer paying $30 million for a $3 million parcel land for a Sydney airport.

The Australian National Audit Office finds that the federal government bought land from dairy farmer and Liberal Party donor, Leppington Pastoral Company, at 10 times its market value while developing Western Sydney Airport. Urban Infrastructure Minister, Tudge has a stunning reverse Nuremberg alibi.

There “is no question of ministerial involvement”, he swears. The matter “goes to the administrative actions of the department, more than two years ago”. Doubtless Big Al will quickly get Robodebt to retrieve the overpayment from Leppington Pastoral. The letter threatening debt collection’s already in the mail.

Beyond the joy it gives our MPs to further impoverish men and women struggling to exist on forty dollars a day by imposing debt repayments, while fat cats in our gas industry cartel get massive handouts, double punishment is a tradition: like double standards, it is rooted deeply in our convict colony origins.

Newcastle, like Norfolk Island, was a penal settlement inside a penal colony – or a place of secondary punishment for convict re-offenders until 1813. For nearly 20 years, wayward convicts were flogged amidst idyllic natural beauty, a place where summers are warm and humid and winters are short and cool. Plants flourished in fertile, soft, absorbent carbon rich soils until cloven-hoofed sheep and cattle ruined them.

Punishment, however, is perennially problematic. Although it was easy to dispense, flogging was not foolproof. It often killed the convict or reduced his capacity to work. Furthermore, when convicts were unable to work because they had been flogged, they needed to be flogged again for not working.

Similarly, job-seekers cut off from all extra support on New Year’s Day 2021 will need to present themselves at job interviews they can’t afford to attend – having frittered away their recklessly generous work incentive-sapping allowances on op-shop clothing, fares, haircuts and the chore of having to feed themselves.

Or pay the gas bill.

Unemployed or underemployed workers are already punished by the humiliation of having to apply for jobs under the Job Active scam, a privatised “job-provider” service they may not be able to get to and double punished should they not attend. Their meagre payments can be suspended. Meanwhile, Rick Morton estimates that job-providers have banked $500 million of taxpayers money during the pandemic.

But Morrison’s got that covered. As he explains, gas will bring back jobs. At least for a few mates. Scotty’s role has a touch of the post-apocalyptic zombie as he helps the Liberal Party’s craven mining oligarchy mates prop up dying coal and gas industries as they collude to cook the planet and snuff out life as we know it.

Left-leaning, (as our national media love to dub any outfit not funded by our barons of industry) Grattan Institute calculates that ScoMo’s gas led recovery” would benefit fewer than 1% of Australian manufacturing jobs currently in gas-intensive industries. The report is leaked to the left-leaning The Guardian Australia.

15 facilities that together employ just 10,000 people consume two-thirds of gas used in manufacturing.

“There are almost no jobs in [gas] … If we were going to see a massive boom in gas-based manufacturing, we should be seeing it right now. And we’re not seeing it,” says The Grattan Institute’s Tony Wood.

Gas Chooses Itself features our elected representatives tipping buckets of public money into a failing private cartel. Origin and Santos. Scotty promises subsidies of $52.9m, support to “open up” five new gas basins and a beaut new National Gas infrastructure plan.

His announcement sounds eerily similar to a leaked paper from a working party of his gas-industry dominated cabal, the National Covid Coordination Commission (NCCC) which meets in secret under the stewardship of nifty Nev Power to further its own interests under the guise and confidentiality of a cabinet committee.

But there’s more. Santos and Origin will be subsidised under the carbon capture and storage boondoggle. The Australian Renewable Energy Agency will be tweaked so it can fund CCS, a scam which has already cost us a fortune. He’ll also kill off innovation, undermine renewable energy and prop up costly failing fossil fuels, warns Christine Milne, global Greens ambassador and former leader of the Australian Greens.

The world’s largest coal port, Newcastle’s is also NSW’s post-industrial rust belt: 4000 manufacturing jobs vanished since 2015. Green steel made with hydrogen is the answer says The Grattan Institute. Not coal. Nor gas. Hydrogen is also proposed for aluminium smelting. But you can’t tell the PM anything. He’s out overacting again; hamming it up in his blokey construction costume; lying about gas and coal.

Talk about miracle Morrison. Gas will bring back Australian manufacturing (like Lazarus from the dead).

He’ll say anything. On ABC Insiders, he tells David Speers that “Gas has chosen itself” just in case you think his decision has anything to with his secret cabal of gas industry barons cunningly dubbed his Covid Commission. Coal is the key way to keep electricity prices cheap he bullshits.

“In Australia, you cannot talk about electricity generation and ignore coal,” he rants in his pants on fire plan.

Coal, Morrison says, will not only “continue to play an important role in our economy for decades to come”, but “with new technologies such as carbon capture and storage continuing to improve, it will have an even longer life”. New? Continue to improve? CCS has never worked. KFC employs more of us than thermal coal.

The proportion of the total workforce employed in thermal coal is one quarter of one per cent of our total workforce of twelve million – or around 20-25,000. The ABS calculates, on the other hand, that 20,000 of us work in renewable energy activities.

Oddly Scotty doesn’t mention steel. While one in five local youngsters are seeking work, the steel town is in the Hunter whose iconic thermal-coal-mines employ at best five per cent of NSW’s workforce, whatever its MP, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Resources, Joel Fitzgibbon wants us to believe. Or Morrison or Matthew Canavan whose brother is big in coal mining for that matter. And thermal coal is plunging to an average price of $60-70 a metric tonne from $100 in January.

Peabody plans to sack half its workforce at Wambo, blaming Coronavirus but demand for coal is dropping in Europe and the US while China is using more domestic coal and less of the more expensive imported black rock, especially from Australia. Aping Trump’s poke a panda policy is costing us dearly.

Even so, why does, our Trumpista PM head to coal central to promise his preposterous gas-led recovery?

Could it be just bastardry? Fitzgibbon is Labor’s shadow minister for resources. So entrenched is Labor bashing that already 9 News is crowing about a Labor split over gas. This is part of Morrison’s crafty plan.

So, too is the nobbling of any emissions target. The government’s position is not to have a position.

“The renewable energy target is going to wind down from 2020, it reaches its peak in 2020, and we won’t be replacing that with anything,” climate denialist Energy Minister Angus Taylor boasts.

But what’s this? Not even Simon Benson is in attendance, Tuesday – Scotty from marketing heroically risks anti-climax or exposing his signature, saponaceous, insincerity. Of course, his list of talking point slogans, boasts and empty promises is dropped to every media outlet in the land – and beyond – his government is gunner,

“… reset the east coast gas market … create a more competitive and transparent Australian Gas Hub by unlocking gas supply, deliver an efficient pipeline and transportation market, and empower gas customers.”

Perhaps it’s prudent that, he holds no “How good is gas?” presser afterwards. Embracing Big Gas as our saviour, creating jobs and driving down prices, may trigger a repeat of his Cobargo bushfire reception where he was run out of town.

Of course, crocodile teary Scotty could still be smarting from his rebuke over bullying Annastacia Palaszczuk to secure a quarantine exemption for Sarah Caisip to attend her stepfather’s funeral in Queensland. Palaszczuk’s office reports Morrison shouting down the phone, “You will do this.” Then there’s his politicising private grief.

In an open letter to the PM, Caisip’s stepsister Alexandra Prendergast excoriates Morrison for using her grieving family “to try and advance your political agenda”. But Morrison will stop at nothing.

As Christine Milne opines in The Guardian Australia, as she calls out the government’s wilful sabotage of its renewable energy agency, there is one certainty you can rely on in Australia. “Namely the Morrison government’s championing of fossil fuels, relentless attacks on renewable energy, lies about its commitment to emission reductions, openness to fossil fuel donations and sabotaging any institutional framework that works in driving investment in the technologies desperately needed to get us to a zero emissions future.”

It’s a calculated snub. If Morrison intended to do anything about emissions or energy he would not have Angus Taylor as Energy and Emissions Minister. But how good is Gus at browning off greenies?

Whether it’s poisoning endangered grasses or trashing Clover Moore’s environmentalism by falsely accusing her of jet-setting based on a web document no-one’s been able to find, go-getter Gus is always on the go. Like his PM, he’s all for “moving on – I’ve dealt with that.”

Don’t even try to bring up the $79 million, Eastern Australia Irrigation, his Cayman Island registered company made in 2017 from selling overland flow water licences, on its Clyde and Kia Ora farms after the same sort of water at two southern Queensland cotton farms, nearby, was valued at zero.

OK, Barnaby Joyce signed off on the record closed tender deal. But he was only the Water Minister at the time. And, as he tells ABC’s Pats Karvelas, any claims of any wrongdoing are “an absolute load of horse poo.” Curiously, his puerile protest is repeated in every major daily and every online regional newspaper in the land.

This week, Taylor and Morrison send the whole country back to the future with a gas-led recovery plan boondoggle: a plan to have a plan to sell us methane – always spun as “natural gas” king – along with a vision of a West-East trans Australia pipeline. But, wait, there’s more. Before, seven days’ later, it’s revoked.

A state-run, gas-fired power plant will replace Liddell in Hunter, Joel Fitzgibbon’s electorate. If need be. Only a week later, it’s not. Morrison’s “major speech” on energy policy is a tour de force of absurdist theatre. If it ain’t broke, don’t mean we won’t bullshit about fixing it. And if it’s broke, don’t mean we can’t make it worse. Gas powered electricity will only serve to push up prices and help cook an overheated globe.

“We are in the ludicrous situation of having a gas policy we don’t need, and none of the climate policy that we actually do,” warns The Saturday Paper’s Mike Seccombe.

Yet Taylor’s on thin ice. Only two years ago, Gufee Pty Ltd (as Angus James Taylor calls himself in his personal private company) was colluding over sushi, tempura washed down with a frosty XXXX Gold at Kagawa in Dickson, to install Spud Dutton and topple Kermit Turnbull, the PM his deluded opponents see as a Green-Left Galaxy mole, according to Morrison stenographer at The Australian, Simon Benson.

Liberal renegade Mal’s NEG emissions target is the last straw. Benson claims a senior cabinet minister blabs,

“I have been wrong all along. I thought he should have joined the Labor Party. Turns out he should have joined the Greens.” Yet not one Liberal opposed Turnbull’s $1.75m donation to help buy it the 2016 election.

But the coup proves a fiasco. Numbers man, Matthias Cormann can’t add up. Dutton’s cabal is stooged by another player. Spud’s weights are put up by party race fixer, soapy ScoMo, whose followers first fake a plunge on Dutton, to force a spill only to change their votes to Morrison in a second ballot.

Disraeli called soapy Sam Wilberforce, unctuous, oleaginous, saponaceous, in the 1860 Oxford evolution debate. He could have been describing our current PM. But only if he overlooked the killer instinct.

No good deed goes unpunished in Scotty’s playbook. Duttonista Gus finds his mind greatly exercised now that Scotty’s just slipped Spud a political Novichok cocktail. Dutton will find his new dog’s breakfast of Defence and Border Force just as unworkable as Turnbull’s Home Affairs of federal police, ASIO, Australian Border Force, immigration, counterterrorism and emergency management.

Samuel Johnson knew a thing or two about Taylor’s likely frame of mind, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Morrison’s not going to push Gus under a bus tomorrow but pushing him out on stage and praising him as a deep thinker; the intellectual heavyweight of the Coalition energy team cannot bode well. The PM’s hyperbole is damning.

“He brings an enormous amount of intellect and experience to these tasks.”

“What we are speaking of today really is the extraordinary work that Angus has done in this portfolio as energy and emissions reduction.”

Some accuse Gus of being a lightweight. Or dilatory. But that would be to wilfully misread our political class. True, seven years down the track, the Coalition has no energy policy. But that’s its policy. Just as Morrison’s way of dealing with the pandemic and a collapsing economy is business as usual.

So calamity Taylor takes a gas axe to renewables this week. Bugger the planet. Gunner Morrison’s fossil fuel energy and noxious emissions minister can’t say when or how but he’s in the job to profit the Liberal Party’s mining industry mega-donors. Crony capitalism. Scott’s been promising we’re gunner have a gas-led recovery. Or snap-back as our ruling elastic band of Liberal toadies and big business and banking sycophants has it.

But Gus is not all gaseous catastrophe, however much the assonance appeals to Katharine Murphy. To Murpharoo, Scott Morrison’s power plan is nothing but a gas-fuelled calamity. A rump in the government even protests Morrison’s prioritising of gas over coal, as David Crowe reminds the rapidly declining readers of Nine newspapers Friday. Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon is cheering them on. Yet things could turn bad in November.

Perhaps Morrison’s been tipped off that Russian interference in the US Presidential election, will confer victory upon Trump, the useful idiot who has been putty in the hands of American fossil fuel barons.

The alternative is sobering. “The Biden administration will impose carbon adjustment fees or quotas on carbon-intensive goods from countries that are failing to meet their climate and environmental obligations.”

Or as Peter Brent writes, “Australian global warming politics is broken. If we’re too hopeless to price our carbon, someone else should price it for us.”

Pulling the pin on wind and solar? News this week confirms hard-nosed investors have taken flight; fled the electricity generating field by the gigajoule, which is how you measure the energy content in natural gas if you can afford any. Utility scale generation of green energy dropped by half during 2019 thanks to “Herbicide” Taylor’s climate-denialist sabotage of our children’s futures. But you can’t blame him for our gas cartel which fixes prices to suit itself and which is not even obliged to let the government know its reserves.

If you want affordable Australian gas, best emigrate to Japan. Customers in Japan buy Australian gas more cheaply than we can, reports Michael West. Some of this gas is drilled in the Bass Strait, piped to Queensland, turned into liquid and shipped 6,700 kilometres to Japan … but the Japanese still pay less than Victorians. It’s enough to drive a family back to burning dung. Two billion people worldwide swear by it.

But you’d be hard pressed to pick our venture capitalists’ mass stampede. All round business investment is plummeting. Bernard Keane reckons it’s at 2010 levels – propped up only because China is smiling on our mining exports. For the time being. Poking the Panda may look cute to our US overlords but China is poking back. Private investment in infrastructure has dipped to 2006 levels. Blind panic seizes our intrepid profiteers. After seven years of obstruction, obfuscation and chicanery – and Abbottising of our energy policy

It’s no mean feat. Renewables are hugely profitable compared to fossil. Yet ensuring the bottom falls out of investment in safe, clean power generation in the land at the arse-end of the world, as Keating fondly called his home, is the one enduring achievement of Scotty’s kakistocracy. Gus Taylor, take a bow.

True, Snowy 2.0 is still in the frame, despite a $10bn cost blowout, experts warn, but like Fizza Turnbull’s other dud, his high speed fibre to the node NBN, now fourth slowest in the OECD and one of the most expensive in the world, Snowy 2.0 is shaping to be another gigantic white elephant.

A Dear John letter from a group of no fewer than thirty-seven eminent Australian energy, engineering, economic and environmental experts, reaches Teddy Kunkel former Rio Tinto lobbyist and other former mining industry executives and coal lobbyists who dominate Scott John Morrison’s office Friday.

“It is now even more clear that there are numerous alternatives that are lower cost, more efficient, quicker to construct, and incur less emissions and environmental impacts,” the letter warns. AEMO forecasts that “inefficient, unnecessary and damaging Snowy 2.0” will never pay for itself; nor be needed until the 2030s, when emerging technologies like battery storage and demand response will have come into their own.

Unless you are a gas or coal baron, that is. Then you can count on gorgeous Gus, the Morrison government’s high-maintenance Energy and Emissions Minister to bring home the bacon; put a bit of pork on your fork.

Luckily, pumping water uphill will still require a shitload of fossil fuel so mining companies will still do well out of the twelve billion dollar pipe dream – especially big donors Santos, Origin and Woodside who funnel money into Liberal Party coffers. So what if Snowy 2.0’s pumped hydro will hike power prices and diminish supply?

Has Gus pulled the plug? Star of byzantine epic “Watergate”, featuring fellow silvertail and veteran game of mates grifter and Nats’ sideshow carnival barker, Barnaby Joyce, “Grassgate” a Tarantino homage to herbicide as an obliging Environment Minister, played by Josh Frydenberg helps Gus farewell some of the last remnants of all-but extinguished temperate grasslands and the whodunnit “Clovergate” fake document download scandal knows how to power down. In renewables, that is.

Less than two years after his PM set him up as muppet for our mining barons, aka Energy and Emissions Minister, silvertail Gussie’s buggered new wind and solar farm start-ups from near-record highs to near-record lows. Only three new projects reached completion in the last quarter – and 90 per cent of that capacity came from a single solar farm courtesy of the Queensland Labor government.

Morrison’s theatre of the absurd energy policy show is no roadmap to lower emissions, cheaper power or more jobs. It is just another calculated insult to those who have worked to honour our Paris agreement; to those who have worked tirelessly to decarbonise our economy. The rug has been pulled out unceremoniously because that’s what Scotty does best. And he’s been watching his mentor and enfant terrible Trump.

Scotty’s right wing coal warriors such as Matt Canavan may be appeased – for five minutes – Nats with interests or mates with interests in the gas industry may tolerate the sociopath and bully in him a little better, while his embrace of gas will appease key Liberal Party donors. Above all, Morrison will shrewdly have done the bidding of his cabal of mining industry executives under the guise of a coronavirus recovery plan while setting up Angus Taylor to take the blame when the inevitable repercussions are felt.

Best of all he will wedge Labor over their policy on gas.

Where it will all go pear-shaped is when gas becomes even less affordable and fails to provide jobs, let alone fulfil his rash and glib promise of bringing back a manufacturing sector – now around ten per cent of the economy – that neoliberal ideology is helping to banish forever. Emissions will continue to climb. The need for “new technology” he preaches will be exposed as a sound-bite sham. There are no new technologies that need to be developed to be decarbonised. There are, however, sports rorts yet to be accounted for.

Worse, Morrison may be exposed as a bare-faced liar as CCS is seen to be a coal industry fiction and an expensive indulgence of powerful party mates as the economy further contracts in 2021 with his ill-advised and inhumane cutting back on pensions for those out of work and those unable to work given their disabilities. The Panda factor can only exacerbate a downturn in our trade in a Coronavirus recession world

Trade with China is suffering because of Morrison’s witless desire not only to align with Trump’s trade war with Beijing but to enlist as an active belligerent. China will do us slowly write Crikey’s Michael Sainsbury. Unemployment and underemployment will soar in the New Year. Morrison has already alienated thousands of university teachers. His promised IR reforms threaten to make a bad system worse. As Dennis Atkins warns,

The all too apparent human toll of this insecurity is not enough to deter the Morrison Government from its determination to further deregulate the labour market.

The “energy roadmap” in all its intellectual and moral poverty is studded with disinformation. Despite what he claims, for example, renewables can’t “stand on their own two feet”. The Prime Minister’s gaslighting merely underlines his abdication of responsibility; his failure to provide real leadership when it was most needed.

Morrison may already have neutralised rivals, Dutton and Taylor but he will rapidly lose the confidence of MPs in marginal seats and despite his daggy dad routines; his carefully orchestrated relentless curry and cubby home-loving hubby PR campaign, voters are not mugs. They know when they’re being taken for a ride.

It may take a while given our Murdoch orchestrated cheer squad that is the mainstream media but truth will out. Especially when you can’t get work or the hours you need to put food on the table and pay the rapidly rising power bills the Prime Minister falsely promised his gas-led recovery would reduce.

“Trump puts his stamp on the politics of other countries … both overtly and subtly. Populists, nationalists and authoritarians look to Trump and know that they may proceed unchecked. Countries more committed to the decades-long liberal international order scramble to respond to scrapped cultural, institutional, diplomatic and policy norms.” (Mary Jo Murphy The Washington Post).

Donald Trump, a silver-spoon buffoon who got away with the biggest con job in modern history, a type of Gordon Gekko, the character who had a moral bypass at birth, was set to play himself in the 2010 sequel to Oliver Stone’s Wall St: Money Never Sleeps but his outrageous demands – most of which were to do with his hair – were so over the top that his scene – in which Trump bumps into Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in a barber shop – ended up on the cutting room floor.

Mega-diva Donald’s bizarre list of demands include forcing a contract upon everyone in the scene not to touch his topknot. Hair today, gone tomorrow, Donald, just read Samson and Delilah, Judges 16.

Today, Trump’s hair is causing more grief. Again, it may cause him to fail to make the final cut; cost him re-election in November. His fear that his combover would come unstuck in the rain caused him to abort his 2018 chopper ride to honour American soldiers slain in battle. Now it threatens his re-election.

Trump pulled the pin on a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018. Rain forced his last-minute cancellation, he lies “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Another lie. The truth is more prosaic. Trump feared that rain would mess with his hair and makeup; undermine the pompadour he teases over his bald pate, to say nothing of his waterproof foundation which Washington Post pundits believe to be Bronx Color – a fourteen euro Swiss cosmetic.

Fear of cosmetic or wardrobe malfunction can paralyse public figures. Doubtless, after his “I shall return”, uttered not in The Philippines but in fact back at Terowie Train Station Alice Springs, Douglas McArthur added “but only if it’s not raining and I still look good in a bomber jacket with slacks”.

Trump’s re-wind is contradicted by four first-hand witnesses’ evidence, painstakingly recorded by Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, who pursues the president’s total incomprehension of patriotism, service and sacrifice since Trump attacked the late senator John McCain’s war record.

“We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” Trump rages, despite being not invited, report witnesses. Washington’s navel-orange-in-chief, President Trump sees White House flags at half-mast.

“What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” Trump tells his claque; the bitching, backstabbing, festering, toadying grovel of sycophants, formerly White House aides who him prop up. The White House flag is back at full mast Monday morning – before being lowered again Monday afternoon – up and down like the zipper on JFK’s chinos; or a media whore’s drawers.

Time wounds all heels, however. In an age of pivot and spin, what’s certain is that by 20 January 2025, Trump’s enablers will be exposed. And even his most powerful collaborators have bound their fate to his.

As to the lies Trump told when cancelling his visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018 at the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the original Armistice Day, they won’t fly.

First, Marine One, the Presidential helicopter can’t fly in the rain? It’s almost plausible. Yet the weather has to be extremely cold, with risk of icing up or risk of thunderstorms. Neither was the case. Moreover, former aides confirm there’s always a back-up plan. Luckily The Secret Service won’t blab. For now.

Crippling vanity aside, Trump’s larger concern is his own toxic turpitude. Let his deluded following ignore the Coronavirus pandemic, there is no escape from the pox of Trumpism itself, now endemic in so many bodies politic including our own federal government – brought into being by the same forces which helped to take us from greed is good to greed is God, the Hillsong heresy. Trump is an enabler.

For Hungary’s neo-fascist PM, Viktor Orban who, like his US mentor, favours rule by decree, Donald Trump represents “permission” from “the highest position in the world ” Tyrants all over the globe from Brazil’s “strongman”, Jair Bolsonaro, to Cambodia’s fascist Hun Sen, or Scott Morrison, Trump’s mini-me down under, are vastly encouraged by the US President’s increasing disdain for the rule of law.

“I not only weaken the opposition, I’m going to make them dead … and if anyone is strong enough to try to hold a demonstration, I will beat all those dogs and put them in a cage.” Hun Sen boasts 2011 on suggestion he should be worried about the overthrow of a Tunisian dictator in the “Arab Spring”.

Whilst his captain’s-picked cabal of gas company executives and mining industry shills, the oxymoronic Covid-19 Co-ordination Commission, led by former Fortescue top dog, deputy chair of Strike Energy, nifty Nev Power meets in secret to plot pipe-dreams in pursuit of the chimera of a gas-led recovery and the stranded assets of new, uneconomic pipelines, Morrison steps on the gas.

Oxymoronic? There is no federal co-ordination. Morrison’s tactic is to politicise the pandemic. Relentlessly he bags Daniel Andrews for ruining the national economy with his frivolous lockdowns.

MSM continues the assault, taking its lead as always from Liberal propaganda organ The Australian. Show us your road map, he chants. Shrewdly he writes a threatening letter to the Victorian Premier attaching Frydenberg and Hunt’s names to his own. It will help him with a talking point evading responsibility; shifting the blame. Scotty, you are a born leader. Not only that you are our nation’s saviour, reminding us that we are all in this together.

In fact, Morrison is using the pandemic to divide and conquer. He ridicules Victoria’s effort because Dan’s health workers are just crap at contact tracing. Just look at Australia’s gold standard, New South Wales.

Overlooking the federal government’s Ruby Princes debacle is not easy but Morrison is brazen. It will be his undoing. Cases may well rise in NSW. The state’s contact tracing may be more thorough because it has fewer cases. If the number spikes it could all change. The Kirby Institute’s Infectious diseases expert, Raina McIntyre, points out that Victoria’s health system has been cut to the bone.

“When it comes to public health infrastructure and resources per head of population, Victoria is much worse off than any other state in Australia,” she says.

“Victoria is just a shell of a system, it’s just been decimated, and that’s fine in the good times, you can get by on a minimal model, but when there’s a pandemic all those weaknesses are exposed.”

McIntyre stops short of tracing the neoliberal origins of the state’s poor health system. “Economic rationalisation” under Jeff Kennett’s Liberal Coalition government during the 1990s devastated the Victoria’s health care system. Of course, Kennett claimed it was all Labor’s fault.

In microcosm, Kennett’s attack parallels the Morrison government’s upcoming austerity budgeting federal solution. Labor governments plunge the state into deficit, therefore “reforms” must be made. Kennett pursued a radical privatisation. Public services were contracted out to private operators, an approach which has helped cripple the state’s health care system, today.

Labor is to blame? Scapegoating is in full swing. Ben Fordham appears on ABC The Drum to spread the rumour that Andrews will resign. “People are saying that Dan Andrews is contemplating his future.”

The PM presses the pedal to the metal. It’s total war on every front – Labor, international student farming, The Arts, arts and humanities, which the federal government sees as hotbeds of sedition, Super, especially industry super. But as Crikey’s Guy Rundle observes, nothing it does leads “to any conclusion other than that everything can be trashed to get a political edge.” Pure Trumpism in other words.

Trump’s war on Democrats and the media gives dictators like Hun Sun an alibi for their own attacks on the opposition, protest and freedom of the press. When, in 2014, Morrison devised his Cambodian solution, to handball 1000 refugees from our care, blithely outsourcing our obligation to provide asylum under international law, Australia told the south-east Asian nation it needed to stop its military from killing street protesters, violently crushing political opposition and detaining people without trial.

But it didn’t stop the deal – one of Morrison’s follies, abandoned, out of sight and out of mind. Another thing “we are not here today to talk about” if reporters dare raise the issue at a presser. After Australia’s caution, Cambodia’s government has continued to crush dissent. And the Opposition.

“Videos of police dragging peaceful protesters on the street and forcibly jamming them into vehicles should raise global concern for police abuse in Cambodia,” says Phil Robertson, Human Rights Watch deputy Asia director. “The authorities should immediately end violent tactics against peaceful protesters and respect the rights to free expression and assembly.” Yet Trump undermines all that.

When the US embassy in Phnom Penh joins condemnation, Hun Sen calls on Trump to overrule his staff, “Your policy has been changed, but the embassy in Phnom Penh has not changed it yet,” he says.

Dictators feel affirmed by Trump’s trashing of the media; his fake news. His contempt for such basic democratic principles as the right of US Democrats to vote. Or how he urges supporters to vote twice. Or how he’s preparing to demand that all postal votes be scrapped because they shouldn’t count.

The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland notes, Trump’s seen data that predicts postal voters are more likely to support Biden. On 4 November, he’ll demand that tens of millions of postal votes be disallowed – leaving only votes cast on election day, from which Trump reckons he could achieve a narrow victory.

Poster-boy for petty despots and crazed crackpots world-wide, a monster man-baby whose name now surfaces as a rallying cry or potential “liberator” to Germany’s neo-Nazis and other far right extremists, America’s paranoid conspiracy theorist in chief; malignant narcissist and pathological liar, Trump is not, of course, responsible for the decline in freedom around the world. Yet he is an accelerant.

Now he “pivots” into damage control. Despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, he denies he ever called US troops who died in war “losers and suckers”. But will denial work? And what does his insult reveal about Trump and his many fans including our own Trumpista Scott Morrison?

First, denigrating the military could prove a fatal error in Trump’s campaign for re-election. With fewer than two months until America votes, his minders fear he may have alienated a key component of his base at a critical time. Support amongst active service men and women is now down from 46 per cent at his inauguration to 38 per cent approval in a recent Military Times poll.

Trump’s supporters comprise a disproportionately high percentage of veterans. Aides panic. SBS reports a video is concocted in which four veteran stooges testify to their undying love of all things Trump.

In the meantime, Australia, which fancies itself as a US deputy sheriff, but which is closer to a servile lackey or “US imperialist running dog” is up shit creek without a paddle. In a barbed wire canoe.

We poked the Panda, as The Donald wanted but the Panda poked us back threatening our trade, expelling our journalists and detaining our citizens. Team Trump won’t help. They’re too busy in damage control – dispute, deny and discredit.

“It’s a fake story and it’s a disgrace that they’re allowed to do it,” Trump tells reporters in the Oval Office. Why, he respects all troops. “To me, they’re heroes,” he says. “It’s even hard to believe how they could do it. And I say that, the level of bravery, and to me, they’re absolute heroes.”

Deny, dispute and discredit. It’s Trump’s signature strategy, aped by admirers world-wide including Scott Morrison, who continues to deny his key role in defrauding amateur clubs to help Clive Palmer business buy the election victory his business needed – a steal at only $67 million, in Scotty’s sports rorts scandal.

Yet much as Trump may protest, “I never called John a loser,” his bluster is also contradicted by video and Twitter which both show him doing just that in 2015.

Via @fitsnews: “Donald Trump: John McCain Is ‘A Loser’” http://t.co/sgiETvdUqi

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 18, 2015

Fifteen hours later, his aides are in full flight and panic mode. VoteVets, a progressive veterans’ organization and never a fan of Trump, releases an online ad featuring the parents of troops slain in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each parent declares that their son or stepson was neither a “loser” nor a “sucker.”

Why such contempt? Why does it appeal? Papa Trump is popular in “the shit-hole countries” as he fondly refers to sub-Saharan African nations such as Nigeria and Kenya, who rank number one on the US Security and Assistance Monitor; continue to thrive on US economic aid.

Why does it appeal to our local faux-populists such Morrison and Pauline Hanson? Trump and his acolytes in our pick-a-winner wide brown land cannot see the point of doing anything without monetary reward. Sacrifice? Dying for a cause? None of this makes any sense when your one true love is yourself; your only cause is your own self-promotion.

Lying’s hard work but The Donald’s protestations don’t deter him from his mission: beating Biden in November. Trump’s gone postal. Mega donor Louis DeJoy, whose name makes him sound as if he belongs in a fly-spray commercial, is President’s pick for PMG. Louie is joyfully ripping out mail boxes and scrapping sorting machines in any electorate where a hapless Democrat might try to cast a postal vote.

Since May, DeJoy has brought in reforms, which he claims cut costs. These reduced overtime and limited deliveries that postal carriers say created backlogs across the country.

Trump’s 2020 appointee, Post Master General DeJoy (the cheque’s in the mail) is now accused of paying former workers bonuses to reimburse them for donating to the Republican Party. The Washington Post speaks to seven former employees of his former business New Breed Logistics whom DeJoy forced to donate to GOP candidates. An unconcerned Trump says he’ll act if DeJoy has done anything bad.

Such a practice violates both North Carolina state and federal law. Yet it’s an insight into how the party enabled the rise of a Donald Trump. DeJoy’s rapid rise in Republican politics was helped greatly by his ability to multiply his fundraising through his company; increasing his influence in the GOP.

“Louis was a national fundraiser for the Republican Party. He asked employees for money. We gave him the money, and then he reciprocated by giving us big bonuses,” says David Young, DeJoy’s veteran director of human resources, with access to payroll records at New Breed from the late 1990s to 2013 and is now retired. “When we got our bonuses, let’s just say they were bigger, they exceeded expectations — and that covered the tax and everything else.”

The Washington Post reports that between 2000 and 2014, 124 workers together gave more than $1 million to federal and state GOP candidates. Many had not previously made political donations, and have not made any since leaving the company, public records show. During the same period, nine employees gave a combined $700 to Democrats.

While Mail voting sabotage is an irresistibly “authoritarian power grab,” team Trump, is supported by states’ refining ID requirements while it rigs every other aspect of the US vote it can get away with. This includes gerrymandering of electorates and removal of places of voting.

Since 2010, twenty-five states have enacted new voting restrictions, such as strict photo ID requirements, early voting cutbacks, and registration restrictions. The land of the free is busy making it even harder to vote. Especially if you are poor, a person of colour or you live in a remote area.

Our own father of lies, Donald’s disciple the besotted Scott Morrison is on the tools again. Mugging for the Scott Cam camera he reprises his role as daggy Dad with Ryobi saw. Perhaps Cam does the building off-camera. It would be a fair return for his $300,000 salary. Achieve more than his former role as Careers Ambassador, another Morrison debacle.

But why is Scotty building the same Bunnings kit cubby house, his press agents gushed about in June? So high is staff turnover everywhere in our commonwealth public service, so savage are the cuts, there’s barely anyone around to turn the lights off. It’s systemic dementia, a loss of institutional memory.

Collective amnesia may create stuff-ups – promote the discovery learning that hapless Tassie battler Dick Colbeck whimpers about. Aged care is not perfect but that’s OK because it’s learning to be better.

Yet it’s also perfect for the evading of responsibility and accountability which fuels the duck and weave of our modern political Quotidien. Senators at estimates hearings have been told that there is no-one left at the department to answer questions about all sorts of rorts and activities that have occurred within even the previous few years.

Churn and the rise of the PA mean an even chance we’ll see the same promo with bells on at Christmas.

But we may have to be careful with our Christmas carols. As Crikey’s Charlie Lewis notes after years of allowing neo-Nazis, various terrorist groups, conspiracy theorists and democracy warping fake news to flourish, Facebook has finally cut down on the scourge of blog posts featuring Spotify playlists.

Will Trump’s “losers and suckers” undo him? Lose him votes among the veterans he counts on to vote for him? It certainly will do him some damage. Add in the cost of his coronavirus debacle and its economic consequences. But it must not be forgotten that the Republican Party that stands behind Trump, the party apparatus and the massive network of donors which enables him is hopelessly corrupted as the curious case of Trump’s Postmaster General, DeJoy suggests.

Whatever happens, the end of Trump will not be the end of Trumpism. Nine out of ten Republicans are fans of the job he is doing as president, David Smith notes in The Guardian. And who would replace him?

Smith points to an alarming paucity of alternatives: in SurveyMonkey poll for Axios last December, Republican voters’ favourites for 2024 were Mike Pence, with Donald Trump Jr in second place, followed by Nikki Haley, Ivanka Trump, Marco Rubio and Mike Pompeo.

If “losers and suckers” does help Trump lose, however, the gaffe illustrates a mentality which Trumpism has nurtured – a complete incomprehension of service, sacrifice or dedication to principle. It’s a perspective which Gordon Gekko, a fictional caricature, would instantly recognise – as would anyone attending a recent Senate Estimates committee. Or who follows the current attack on Dan Andrews.

“Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” The embodiment of the false creed of neoliberalism, Trump cannot fathom any human action that cannot be reduced to a transaction. He cannot comprehend volunteers because that involves altruism and empathy.

The narcissistic materialist is equally confounded; discomfited to discover that over 1,800 US Marines lost their lives at Belleau Wood. He sees them as “suckers” for getting killed.

In brief, as Goldberg sees, Donald Trump suffers the delusion that “nothing is worth doing without the promise of monetary payback, and that talented people who don’t pursue riches are “losers.”

It’s not hard to hear the same delusion at work in the News Corp journalists who endlessly, every day twit Dan Andrews with the same questions. Why should the state pursue public health and safety instead of profits for business at any costs?

Similarly, in his tedious repetition of his vacuous slogan “open the nation for business”, Trumpista Scott Morrison exhibits the same pathological indifference to others; the same failure to imagine another’s pain, along with an alarming poverty of mind and spirit which simply make him unfit to lead. He should resign over the sports rorts alone.

In their own ways, the rise of Trumpism and the coronavirus pandemic have helped create an environment where Morrison and Murdoch’s minions’ claims that we must endlessly pursue selfish competition – that greed is good and might is right – are so vividly exposed as toxic aberrations and hopelessly, grotesquely inadequate to the times’ need for compassion, co-operation, community and humanity.

We must expose their lies; continue to hold them to account.

We have to think that we have to work together as a human species to be organized to care for one another, to realize that the health of the most vulnerable people among us is a determining factor for the health of all of us, and, if we aren’t prepared to do that, we’ll never, ever be prepared to confront these devastating challenges to our humanity. Canadian Bruce Aylward, leader of independent WHO mission to study the spread of the virus in China).

In the dark night of the soul, the pall cast over us all by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, a pandemic virus strain that causes coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19, a respiratory illness, which also triggers fear and despair, there is more than a glimmer of hope.

While the toll is shocking, COVID-19 infects almost 2.5 million and causes over 170,000 to die, (2:00 pm) Tuesday 21 AEST and puts our global economic and social interactions into deep freeze – and while WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warns “the worst is yet ahead” countless acts of kindness, courage, decency and humanity, shine through.

A Sydney local fills a wooden mailbox with books and pantry supplies, urging passers-by: “take what you need.” In the UK, over four thousand doctors and nurses come out of retirement; risking their lives to help in understaffed hospitals. Dr Alfa Saadu, 68, dies of coronavirus caught while volunteering at the Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital, in Welwyn, Hertfordshire. He is one of four – all minority ethnic doctors -to lose his life so far.

Rethink Food, a New York local non-profit organisation, launches a pop-up soup kitchen outside Salem Methodist church, forced to close its own kitchen because its volunteers are elderly and at too high a risk from infection, serves 600 to 1,000 meals a day, five days a week.

“We could easily do 5,000 meals a day,” Rethink founder Matt Jozwiak says. And lines would be even longer were it not for fear of infection. Endless numbers of other acts of compassion, altruism and self-sacrifice are taking place around the world as people follow their hearts.

“Tireless healthcare workers and researchers seek medical breakthroughs to prevent and cure this new disease. Countless healthcare providers care for the sick, often putting themselves at risk, particularly before the nature of the disease was known. Even the heartache of families who wait helplessly as a beloved family member dies alone quarantined in a nursing home reminds us of the deep bonds that hold us together,” writes Search Institute’s Eugene C. Roehlkepartain.

But Donald Trump’s Operation Re-open America is only about following the cash nexus.

“LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” “LIBERATE VIRGINIA.” He tweets. Crowds of protestors magically appear for news cameras in the streets of centres in key states. Give me Liberty or Give Me COVID-19 reads a sign held by a young man in a red cap in Austin Texas. He seems to have utilised a torn-up cardboard carton to add credibility to his improvised sign.

It’s certainly no improvised protest. The demonstrations are orchestrated by a group of far-right, pro-gun Facebook groups calling for anti-quarantine protests throughout the US, reports The Washington Post’s Isaac Stanley-Becker and Tony Romm. The images help skew viewers’ impression away from the reality that most Americans want the shutdown to continue.

Nearly 70 percent of Republicans say they support a national stay-at-home order, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll. Ninety-five percent of Democrats back such a measure in the survey.

The work of the work of Ben Dorr, “political director” of a group called “Minnesota Gun Rights,” and his brothers, Christopher and Aaron, the groups attract 200,000 members combined. They continue to expand rapidly in the days after Trump endorses such protests by suggesting citizens should “liberate” their states. Expect to see more images.

“Jesus is my vaccine,” reads a message on a tractor, driven past the crowded statehouse in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Monday. “Shutdown the Shutdown” says a Maryland sign.

Like Scott Morrison’s Pro-Growth Agenda, Trump’s campaign to shut down the shutdown implies a false choice mimicked in Australia and elsewhere; we need to get back to work; back out into social circulation, rather than remain at home for everyone’s safety or we blow up the economy. Trump has his devotees here. Our Prime Minister is a big fan. So, what is going on?

Health crisis or economic crisis? An open letter published Monday is signed by 157 economists who call it a “false distinction”. While the economists, who include RBA board member Ian Harper and former member Warwick McKibbin, back the government’s $200 billion-plus spending measures they oppose prematurely loosening social distancing restrictions.

They also warn of the consequences of a second wave of infections: “We cannot have a functioning economy unless we first comprehensively address the public health crisis.”

Is the President of the United States actively promoting insurrection? A second Civil War? Washington Governor, Jay Inslee, accuses Trump of encouraging “illegal and dangerous acts”.

Or is Trump merely campaigning in his typically gonzo fashion? Each state has a Democrat Governor; Michigan could be crucial to Trump’s re-election campaign in November’s General Election. As a rule, it’s all about Trump. And as another rule you can’t trust a word he says.

“It’s not about me,” Trump says during Sunday’s briefing. Yet he just has to be at the microphone for all but 13 of its 90 minutes. “Nothing’s about me.”

If the Donald doth protest too much, his toxic tirades are over the top. “He is putting millions of people in danger of contracting COVID-19. His unhinged rantings and calls for people to “liberate” states could also lead to violence. We’ve seen it before,” Democrat, Inslee tweets.

The reality TV star has completely politicised this pandemic, writes Charles M Blow for The New York Times. Blow argues Trump’s “briefings” are his political tool to achieve this. “He is standing on top of … 40,000 dead bodies and using the media to distract attention away from them and instead brag about what a great job he’s done.”

Trump’s call to citizens to rise up against state governors does little to comfort those friends and family mourning over 42 thousand deceased. Nor does it inspire hope in the 792,913 victims of COVID-19 (Tuesday 21, 3:30 pm AEST) yet another scourge of globalisation, the destroyer of space and distance which surged in 2001.

Why? China joined the WTO and modern India forsook its nationalist economic and social ideals to embrace neoliberalism, an ideology which puts the market above the state and which commodifies human relationships. By 2001, global travel and globalisation had ceased to be the privilege of an elite and began to reach deep into the hinterland of these vast populations, as Guy Rundle reminds us. Coronavirus coincides with this new level of globalisation.

The coronavirus is now setting off a cascade of health, economic and social effects that may lead to a collapse of economic globalization, writes Anthea Roberts. This may play out better for Trump than his bungling of America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. He knows his re-election depends on voters’ perceptions of his handling of the crisis. So he has a cure.

The golf-cheat-in-chief, himself, unable to play in lockdown is quick to exploit a snake oil sales opportunity. Trump promotes the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a possible cure for COVID-19. It’s untested – clinical trials are too small and inconclusive. Experts warn against it.

Some of the twenty-two million Americans, who are now out of work, doubtless, will rush to be guinea-pigs. In Australia, we’ve fast-tracked it so that it can be used in hospitals. After all, anything Trump is spruiking has to be good. Our Chief Medical Officers appear impotent.

Clive Palmer has invested a lazy million dollars of his own money to a “coronavirus action fund” to develop the anti-malaria drug which has toxic side effects when used inappropriately.

It’s OK when treating malaria or lupus or rheumatoid arthritis but perpetrating the myth that it is a cure for COVID-19 is reckless endangerment. It also has led to stockpiling of the drug with the result that those who genuinely need the treatment cannot obtain it.

“Liberate” is more than a bizarre word for men, women and children who are merely obeying the advice of their public health officials and their state government; citizens who are not being repressed or incarcerated but merely complying with advice to self-isolate for their own sake, their community and the nation.

It is pitched to resonate with the alt-right, a dog whistle to all gun nuts, psychopaths and others who mistakenly believe the Second Amendment was written to enable the citizenry to violently resist the government of the United States.

“Liberate” is an abdication of responsibility, by a malignant narcissist who cannot feel for others but who is acutely attuned to the stock market. Trump is gambling that a return to work will somehow restore the nation’s prosperity. He never ceases to fret about his own.

The Trump Organisation needs to service its debt. With some Trump golf courses and hotels closed in the coronavirus lockdown, the family firm, trading since 1923, is seeking to defer payments on some loans and dues such as its lease payments to Palm Beach County to run its golf course on county land. But it’s all cool. Trump calls himself “the king of debt”.

To safely reopen businesses, shops, schools, more COVID-19 tests need to be done. Because tests are scarce, largely due to Trump’s bungling administration, they are rationed to America’s sickest people. In order to liberate; re-open closed businesses and revive social life, those tested must include all those likely to spread the disease – not just the sickest.

Trump’s option is a type of roulette, a gamble on herd immunity, a phenomenon which first requires a vaccine to be invented, a breakthrough which may never come. Even then, experts warn, herd immunity may not even exist for COVID-19. If the four coronaviruses in the common cold are a clue, immunity may be ephemeral, lasting only a few months to a year.

Too little is known about the novel coronavirus and too much is known about other coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS to make it safe to assume that exposure will confer lasting immunity. Too little credence is given to the fundamental truth that a healthy population is the key to a prosperous economy. Much time and money are spent in media worldwide prompting us to choose jobs crisis from the false dichotomy jobs or health.

In Canberra, Trump’s satellite of love and public health pioneer, our PM aka “steam me up Scotty”, star of “The Love Rub”, a 1970s Vicks Vaporub commercial, now re-appears as Our Nation’s Saviour, a miracle play from Pandemic Promotions. Scotty’s just busting to follow Trump’s lead. Saviour is a show with two flags, medical experts and regular egging-on from Health Minister, the unctuous Duttonista, Greg Hunt, who patronises us for our obedience; praising our curve-flattening, as if we’re all on some bizarre weight-loss contest.

Saviour makes a beaut distraction from reports of shortages; stories of doctors and nurses who are forced to re-use single-use masks or who are told to wear plastic aprons because there are no gowns. Psychiatrist Karen Williams’ survey of 245 Australian frontline medical workers finds sixty-one per cent of doctors feel pressure from other staff not to wear a mask, and more than half feel guilt or shame for wearing one.

“The chickens have come home to roost” for Tasmania’s healthcare system and a “decade of austerity” explains Tim Jacobsen, Tasmanian state secretary of the Health and Community Services Union, who reports to The Saturday Paper’s Rick Morton of such dire shortages that staff are forced to rob Peter to pay Paul; “strip” supplies from some parts of hospitals in order to plug gaps in more exposed areas.

“No one has said this overtly, but we clearly have national shortages of personal protective equipment,” Jacobson says. “Masks, gloves, the protective jumpsuits: they have all been very, very difficult to source. It is all being rationed. We have seen mixed messages going out to staff over the last three weeks. Reuse your masks, you need to keep your masks, that sort of thing…”

Yet, however much Hunt pats us on the head, for the “sustained and genuine” way we self-isolate, his PM quickly queers his pitch. Morrison shrinks his six-month lockdown into “a four-week minimum”. Saving jobs outweighs saving lives. Besides if Trump’s America is open for business, how can its client-state stay closed?

Helping the Health Minister succeed, former PM, Malcolm “Fizza” Turnbull’s memoir, “A Bigger Picture” doesn’t flatter Hunt; painting him as a potty-mouthed prat whose abusive, vulgar language and overweening ambition helped everyone to hate him, while Morrison is merely untrustworthy. Scotty damaged his government with leaks that put the government on the back foot, Turnbull reports. Yet Morrison was offside with some major players.

“Mathias regarded Scott as emotional, narcissistic and untrustworthy and told me so regularly,” Turnbull writes. Dutton was also hostile to Morrison. “Of course, if Mathias had a poor opinion of Scott, Dutton’s dislike of him was even stronger,” he says. It’s evident in the strained working relationship between the pair in drought and pandemic.

Yet Greg Hunt seems to have made himself universally detested. Turnbull recalls the day his successor, the Machiavellian Morrison, won the Liberal leadership ballot over his challenger Peter Dutton, the Home Affairs Minister.

“If looks could have killed, Hunt would have fallen over dead. He’d been Dutton’s wannabe deputy and had been working towards this day for months. Never liked, he’d never been more despised than he was at that moment.”

“None of us are perfect, I absolutely acknowledge that,” Hunt says archly. Tellingly, no Liberal MP contests Turnbull’s verdict on Scotty. Or Dutto. Or Hunt. Marise Payne, fails to persuade ABC Insiders’ host, David Speers, or any of his viewers, with her lame claim that she “received and deleted” her pirate copy of A Bigger Picture. When she declares she did not receive her emailed copy from the PM’s office, she reveals that other Liberals were emailing, too.

It seems to have been a bit of a hoot. Take the Toff down a peg. But nothing Turnbull says, now, will dent the commanding fictional narrative the Morrison junta has established; how it acted quickly and, in the nation’s, best interests and how citizens have been so compliant that we’ve stopped the toxic pathogen in its tracks. Besides, Hunt rises to the occasion; takes any high road he can salvage by saying he won’t be reading Turnbull’s The Bigger Picture.

A blizzard of electronic copies of Turnbull’s book is pirated by a staff member in the Prime Minister’s Office, publisher, Hardie Grant alleges, Saturday. Recipients obligingly forward them on. For Hardie Grant, it’s malicious conduct and a massive breach of copyright. Not only were unauthorised copies freely distributed, recipients were urged to forward them to others. Some MPs report receiving five or six copies reports Malcolm Farr for The Guardian Australia.

A letter of complaint is sent on Saturday to senior Morrison adviser Nico Louw by Nicholas Pullen of lawyers HWL Ebsworth, on behalf of Turnbull and his publishers. Louw admits to forwarding 56 copies. Pullen writes that he has been instructed Louw was “responsible for unauthorised distribution of my client’s book” in digital form.

While the publisher threatens to refer potential criminal breaches of the law to the AFP, copyright lawyers advise a civil lawsuit may be more productive. Hilarious. The AFP has never, since its inception in 1979, brought a case that would embarrass a sitting government.

A journalist receives half a dozen. It’s a rip-off on “a massive scale”, say Turnbull and his publisher’s lawyers, a state of affairs that would trouble legitimate purchasers seeking Turnbull’s explanation of his National Broadband Network (NBN) debacle, a $51 billion catastrophe which has spectacularly failed to deliver.

Readers pay good money expecting to learn Turnbull explain why for at least twenty years, Snowy 2.0 will store coal-fired electricity. Not renewable. Snowy 2.0 will also create additional demand for coal-fired generation; increase greenhouse gas emissions. Why? ABC 7:30 Report’s Leigh Sales fails to put these posers to Tuesday night.

A letter of complaint is sent on Saturday to senior Morrison adviser Nico Louw by Nicholas Pullen of lawyers HWL Ebsworth, on behalf of Turnbull and his publishers. Pullen writes that he has been instructed Louw was “responsible for unauthorised distribution of my client’s book” in digital form.

But amidst Turnbullian threats by the publisher to refer potential criminal breaches to the Australian federal police, copyright law specialists say the company and the former PM might have a better chance of bringing a civil lawsuit. But look over here!

When all else fails, cue the spin-machine. Or the dead cat on the table. Forget quarantine, or social isolation, Scotty’s fellow evangelical, prosperity gospeller and prayer-mate, walking disaster area, Stuart Robert has knocked off a fabulous app from Singapore we can all put on our blue-tooth-enabled phones. Download. If we want to.

It’ll be an opt-in thing, Scotty says, airily, back-flipping only one day after threatening to make it compulsory. He’s working hard at what he does best, stirring up a diversion.

Apart from the ten per cent of us who don’t own a mobile phone. It’s “a big Team Australia moment” says the Services Minister, wowing us with his oratory and his capacity to reference notorious Liberal Party Luddite, a keenly contested title, tiny Tony Abbott.

“There is no geolocation, there is no surveillance, there is no tracking,” Robert promises. Besides, a lot of that stuff can be got from the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) which has been spying on citizens for years. As Sally McManus says, you expect your phone to be tapped.

Various other intelligence agencies pitch in. Federal and state police, can also request access to your telephone and internet records. These can reveal information about your whereabouts and whom you talked to, emailed or messaged. As Turnbull boasts in A Bigger Picture, as he takes credit for creating the Office of National Intelligence (ONI), PM had access to the collective wisdom and insights of our 7000-person-strong intelligence community.

Yet as Singapore’s increasing rate of infection shows, either contact tracing is too slow, or SARS-CoV-2 is too fast to enable intervention to slow community transmission.

At least the app will help keep more tabs on us. What could possibly go wrong? Above all, Morrison loves the war-talk his mentor, America’s most revered Vietnam bone-spur deferment veteran, uses to inspire states to rebel.

It’s no less than an … “historic battle against the invisible enemy” that amounts to the “greatest national mobilisation since world war two”, says Trump’s autocue.

It’s rhetorical nonsense, probably penned by slumlord millionaire, and “tier-one predator”, son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump’s fixer on Middle East peace, or Opioid crisis which may have killed 450,000 Americans since 1999, or winning hearts and minds by dithering with COVID-19.

Six weeks are lost as a result of Trump’s dithering and downplaying of the crisis when the virus first struck. His administration’s initial response is “one of the greatest failures of basic governance and leadership in modern times” says Jeremy Konyndyk, a central figure in the US battle against Ebola. The Morrison government dithered, too, before the secretary of the Treasury, aided by Labor and the Unions pressed for a stimulus package.

Trump’s number one fan Downunder, Aloha Morrison is keen to match his mentor’s rhetoric while basic governance and leadership have eluded him from the start. He’ll never recover from his Hawaiian holiday nor his plan to go to a Rugby League game.

Now he’s channelling Trump in his bullshit that we must put the economic crisis ahead of the pandemic; rush back to the workplace just in time to catch or infect workmates with the ‘rona.

The next few weeks will severely tax the PM. Lacking his party’s trust, unable to delegate, let alone work with others, Morrison’s done well recently out of letting the real leaders, particularly Labor Premiers tell him what to do, especially over schooling.

Now he’ll have to do some work himself; something he can’t abide. Being awarded Turnbull’s Plumber’s mate award for his leaks, is unlikely to deter Scotty from his “front-running” – media leaks that weaken the government during high-stakes cabinet debates. After all, his office leaked advance freebies of Malco’s new e-book.

Being “emotional, narcissistic and untrustworthy” won’t bother Morrison, either. Since when did he give a fig? Besides, he’s already got his revenge. The bootleg preview of A Bigger Picture came from a senior staffer – before being forwarded so eagerly to a cast of thousands – copyright given such a thorough thrashing that the memoir, its author and his entire political career became some sort of electronic piñata.

But pushing Trump’s rush-back-to-work barrow is going to be hard yakka. Especially when there isn’t any work for millions of workers to return to, in an economy bled dry after six years’ Coalition mismanagement – before the virus helps tip it into recession.

Above all, his “pro-growth agenda” which is austerity budgeting under an Orwellian name is nothing but a desperate attempt to walk two sides of the fence. Granted it’s Morrrison’s speciality but no good can ever come of it. The Keynesian stimulus giver cannot reveal himself “on the other side” as a monetarist with a closed fist.

“On the other side of this virus and leading on the way out we are going to have to have economic policy measures that are going to have to be very pro-growth, that is going to enable businesses to employ people, that is going to enable businesses to invest and businesses to move forward”. Scott Morrison

It’s going to take a lot more than stale rhetoric. Or platitudes about growth. Lies about the “other side” don’t cut it either. Australians expect the truth, harsh as it may be, not some pie in the sky. There can be no snap back. The world has changed forever.

Morrison’s hollow words reveal that he has no idea what to do to get Australia open for business again. He knows only how to close things down. The nation deserves better; real leadership – for starters – of the sort we’ve seen from some state premiers.

Humanity is a big part of the leadership required. We see it everyday from extraordinary “ordinary” people just doing their best; doing their jobs. Taking care of one another. That’s where true hope lies. Not in sucking up even more to the business class.

Keep the National Cabinet going until 2022, Scotty; you just keep low in the back seat.