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Tag Archives: Mike Burgess

The First Casualty

If truth is the first casualty of war, it is also under constant attack in the Morrison-Joyce regime’s love-in with spin enabled by Murdoch and a media oligarchy who help the Coalition demonise China and Russia, “shape the narrative” of foreign affairs, to distract us from its terminal, internal disunity and its own catastrophic incompetence.

Emperor Morrison has no clothes, Paul Bongiorno says. And his policy cupboard is bare. Since Malcolm Fraser, our foreign policy has become “narrower, more inward-looking and mean” warns former ambassador to China, Geoff Raby, in his Fraser Oration in Melbourne recently. Abandoning those who helped us in Afghanistan is a serious lack of moral leadership.

And empathy. If Ukrainians apply to come here, they will “go to the top of the pile”, Morrison beams ABC listeners a warm and fuzzy vibe without a skerrick of commitment.

Raby could also add insincerity, hypocrisy and venality, also superbly illustrated in its current rhetoric denouncing Putin, but keeping our $0.5bn trade with Russia in alumina and $100m live sheep under the table – lest our own party donor oligarchy take offence.

Denouncing Putin as a bully is ironic, tokenistic and is not backed up by real action such as targeting elites enabling Putin. Russian diplomats could be expelled, tourism could be halted except for those with humanitarian visas. We could cease importing Russian oil and fertiliser and send home the thousand or so Russians who are studying here.

Above all there could be honesty, accuracy and independence in our government’s depiction of the situation in Ukraine, a state whose pro-western government was installed in 2014 by a US-backed coup.

US influence continued in 2019 with the election of former comedian and actor in a popular TV series, Servant of the People, who played the part of a teacher fed up with corrupt politicians who accidentally became president, 44-year-old Volodymyr Zelenskiy, promised peace with Russia but quickly got a phone call, July 25, 2019, from then President of the USA, Donald Trump. Trump wanted a political favour and was prepared to suspend US aid to Ukraine.

$400 million in military aid for Ukraine already approved by the U.S. Congress, was put briefly on hold by Trump who urged Zelenskiy to investigate the son of a political opponent, Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Republican senators say that the funds were held up while the US checked whether the new candidate was pro-Western or pro-Russian. A month later, Trump released the funds, but his attempt to pressure Ukraine’s new president became the subject of a US Senate impeachment inquiry, September 24 2019, which failed on party lines. alleging disloyalty, Trump turned on senior officials. Lieut. Col. Alexander Vindman, Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, was fired, and the post of U.S. ambassador to Ukraine stayed vacant beyond the end of Trump’s term.

We can oppose the Putin government’s horrific invasion without capitulating to the prevailing MSM narrative of virtuous western democracy versus Russian tyranny. Caricatures of evil Putin merely recycle US propaganda. We deserve better. Refugees everywhere deserve better.

It takes neither courage, nor leadership, notes Raby, “to stoke fear of the other, to set the community on edge, to find threats and enemies at every turn”.

What Raby doesn’t say – or can’t -in a formal encomium – is that whilst Fraser may have (unsuccessfully) called for a sporting boycott of the Moscow Olympics, when the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1980, yet he wouldn’t block our export of wool to the USSR, including wool from his own farm, nor would he join Carter’s wheat export embargo.

Boasting about its defence spending, however, simply draws attention to the Coalition’s submarine debacle, the scuttling of a contract in favour of a promise of nuclear subs we can neither service nor crew, via AUKUS, another acronym to embellish buying obsolete US ships and planes. We are now ludicrously ill-prepared. As Rex Patrick notes, the new subs will be beaut when we get them in 2040 – if they arrive with a time machine.

Ambushed by his own impotence in almost every arena, Morrison’s latest setback occurs at 10:00 pm Friday, when the PM is thwarted by Supreme Court Justice, Julie Ward, who rules against the legality of his cunning plan to declare the NSW branch of the Liberal Party in breach of its constitution, because it has not yet held an annual general meeting.

It will be harder now for him to draft his own servile candidates, Trent Zimmerman, Alex Hawke and Sussan Ley, instead of fussing with the fol-de-rol of a democratic plebiscite, an Abbott innovation. Or risking losing key toadies in the only battle Morrison is committed to, the fight to keep himself in the top job. And how good are yes-men and women?

Friday’s outcome is bad for the PM’s increasingly tenuous grip on his leadership. NSW is revolting. Niki Savva reveals insider tips that senior NSW Liberals threaten to “bring the show down” if there is intervention in the state branch, or if Morrison attempts to impose his candidates without letting members vote in pre-selections, given his stooges are said to have stalled procedures to get their own way.

Whilst the federal party can still overrule the NSW Liberals’ branch executive, Morrison spent much of his party’s federal executive meeting last week – called to resolve the NSW preselection fiasco – “yelling and thumping the table” to get his way, while reminding colleagues that he was the PM, Ms Savva reports.

Perhaps like Nikita Khrushchev, in the 1960 UN General Assembly, he could take off a shoe to hammer home his waning authority. Or read the room.

On the Sino-Russian Fronts, our lucky country is vastly cheered to hear our top bully say he will stand up to bullies, (keeping Xi in his sights as well as Putin). Thursday, he uses “bully” or a variation twenty times in two hours, notes The Monthly’s Rachel Withers.

“This is about an autocratic, authoritarian government that is seeking to bully others,” he tells Sunrise. “There are consequences for this threatening and bullying and aggressive behaviour,” he claims on Today. But so far, our sanctions look lame.

Reviled by his own party’s rump, the PM uses Putin’s invasion of the parts of Ukraine which are not already under Russian control to pose as a strongman who might shirtfront Vlad, as Tony Abbott failed to do, (he left it to Julie Bishop) but – as in When Harry met Sally, he’s having what Boris is having but without Johnson’s hint of military intervention. Has the man with the toddler haircut learned nothing from Afghanistan?

Our sanctions mirror the UK’s heavy breathing against some oligarchs and banks but at least Morrison is refreshingly upbeat, upfront and insightful about their impotence.

“I don’t necessarily expect it to deter an authoritarian, autocratic leader .. intent on taking [the] opportunity to pursue their own interests by violating another country’s sovereignty,” he says. Nor will the sanctions take effect until late March.

While tales of Vlad the Impaler of Ukraine add a Gothic touch to Liberal fearmongering, China is the federal government’s arch nemesis. Not only will China buy wheat to help Putin’s war against neo-Nazism and genocide in Donbas, in The Shining, the PM turns to horror and science fiction to lure us into a sense of insecurity. It’s a spooky story.

A ghastly green shaft of laser light reveals the underbelly of an elderly Poseidon RAAF P-8A Maritime Patrol Aircraft, spy plane, a converted Boeing 737-800, burning 3409 litres of fuel an hour. Over its life-span, it will spew a million tonnes of CO2 into our global greenhouse gas trap, cooking the planet; causing freak weather disasters.

While our fourteen P-8As and, indeed, our entire navy are but a drop in the ocean, tragically, given all the other nations burning fossil fuels and polluting in the name of keeping us safe, it all adds up. “If the US military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.” report researchers in the UK.

Then there’s China’s vast war machine. Beijing rules the waves. And waives the rules. Or the rules-based order fantasy, US neocon cowboys expect of everyone but themselves. Marise Payne recites the phrase to chide Vlad, the bad actor on the world stage, but she never explains what it means. China is too big to have to explain itself.

Put to sea anywhere and you’re bound to see a PLA-N ship or two. China will have 420 ships in 2025 and 460 in 2030, according to the US Congressional Research Service.

But it’s not just the pollution taking place in the name of being tough on national security. So wedded is the world to hydrocarbon burning armies, navies and air forces that any serious attempt to curb fossil fuel usage faces stiff military opposition.

Yet to former party apparatchik, ScoMo, the glad-handed former tourism salesman, a man who reveres Trump, a fabulist who is more a fan of Captain Kirk than Cook, as Guy Rundle wryly notes – a PM facing a re-election while fighting a war to get the NSW candidates he wants, the story is all big bully China picking on plucky little Australia.

It’s bizarre if not surreal. A sailor on a ship owned by our largest trading partner fires a shot across the bows of our starship, by shining a laser at one of our spy planes?

Being a strong “middle power” doesn’t come cheap. We now have fourteen Poseidons at Edinburgh base in SA. Apart from being environmental hazards, they are expensive to fuel. Each takes 34 tonnes of Jet A1, currently priced at US$871.40 per tonne, or US$29627.60 a full refuel. Putin’s putsch can only increase the cost of a top-up.

Boosting CO2 is only one way that the military makes our world a safer place, a mission statement seldom far from our federal government’s epic self promotion. Today’s commercial Boeings will exude a million tonnes of CO2 over their twenty-year plus working life-span. Organophosphate esters (OPEs) are not just the mainstay of pesticides, they are sprayed out in unburned jet engine lubrication oil – a big part of aircraft emissions. And they don’t dissipate, they accumulate over time.

Other costs are huge, such as depreciation over the P-8A’s twenty year life span; a new plane sets you back US $1,6 billion. Without them we’d have to use drones to spot refugees in leaky boats as well as spooking sailors with lasers all the way from China. Most prudent refugees and asylum-seekers, of course, pay for their own air tickets.

In the meantime, the cost of boat-stopper Morrison’s fleet is top secret because it’s on an on-water matter. And there are forty-six government agencies involved. Or as the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre notes, “transparency in budget reporting of related expenditures has deteriorated further. Published costs and arrival numbers are extremely limited and available information does not add up.”

Yet profligacy is a badge of honour when it comes to military spending. Tony Abbott’s completely arbitrary stipulation, in 2012, that two percent of GDP be spent on Defence was just a cudgel to beat Gillard’s Labor crew which it accused of the lowest defence spending since 1938. None of this made sense then. Nor does it make sense now.

But the canard is resurrected by Morrison who is desperate to paint Labor as being weak on national security. The lie gets stronger by repetition. An ABC’s Insiders’s panel nods sagely when the furphy of Labor’s under-spending on defence is regurgitated as established fact. Yet reason and empiricism have never been the Coalition’s strong suit and this campaign begins with another shrill, baseless slandering.

It’s boosted by a manufactured incident about China’s aggression towards one of our spy planes, a charge based largely on lies and wilful disinformation. And a single laser.

All hell breaks loose amidst the feral roos and the asylum of loons in the nation’s Top Paddock over our Poseidon misadventure. Canberra rants fit to pop its bubble wrap. The ADF, on standby for senior services in the federal government’s criminal neglect of our elders held captive in gulags, cloaked in NewSpeak as aged-care residential facilities, claim the lasering is akin to firing a missile. Everybody knows that before you shoot down any aircraft, you bathe it in laser-light.

Laser pointing could be “separated from firing a missile with hostile intent by a mere split second” ANU’s John Blaxland, a professor in international security, intelligence and freelance warmonger, helps the federal government fear campaign by noting China was flashing our chopper pilots in 2018, a topic on which Dr Graham is a world expert.

Dr Euan Graham, a hot-shot in maritime security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore, is sure the laser is a flash on a bridge too far.

“…this act has crossed a red line in terms of what Australia considers normal or acceptable and it’s decided to name and shame accordingly”. It’s “an extremely serious incident” that risks “injury or worse”.

Worse? Imagine the Chinese crew when the Poseidon retaliates. The Australian reports, “Defence confirms a RAAF P-8A maritime patrol aircraft dropped anti-submarine sonar buoys around two Chinese warships in the Arafura Sea last week to check for “subsurface contacts”.

Only after China’s Defence Ministry releases, via The Global Times, the voice of the Chinese government, an image of an orange buoy, do the Morrison government’s accusations abate.

The Poseidon’s patrolling the Arafura Sea between the NT and Papua, spying on a brace of Chinese ships, a Peoples’ Liberation Army’s Navy (PLA-N) Luyang-class destroyer and its comrade in arms, a Yuzhao-class amphibious transport dock, two of 355 vessels – and counting – in the biggest navy in the world, as they steam east across Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone, (EEZ), a kleptocratic, grab for vast resources.

Dangerous? Our spy-plane is four kilometres away when it is lit up by China’s laser sighting. Almost. A Chinese matelot points a laser at an Australian spy plane? Outrageous. Defence Minister and childcare millionaire Peter Dutton and current PM Scott Morrison, go off like a frog in a sock; or two bullfrogs vying for the same slimy rock atop a toxic swamp.

Dutton packages the act for the few still watching Sky News in vain hope that it will improve. It’s “aggressive bullying” which can cause “the blindness of the crew, … damage of equipment,” Dutton bullshits in that contemptuous-of-his-audience’s intelligence, free-wheeling, fact-free way that is the Morrison government’s communications’ signature.

Spud is spitting chips. And Our Prime Minstrel is fit to kill. If his murdering of a Dragon hit doesn’t do it, he will gong someone with his ukulele. He takes time out of his hard-hatting cosplay. Gives himself a flash from a welder when he lifts his auto-darkening visor but you can tell he’s not just some dork from central casting or a party apparatchik who’s never had a real job. Sunday we see images of him in a chopper over a flooded Brisbane River. Climate change is conspicuously absent from the commentary.

“I can see it no other way than an act of intimidation, one that was unprovoked, unwarranted,” Morrison huffs and puffs, Media mavens helpfully spin one laser into “lasers” plural. Suddenly they become “military-grade”. Is this our own Gulf of Tonkin incident, the pretext for the US military’s illegal incursion into Vietnam in 1964?

“Australia will never accept such acts … It was a reckless and irresponsible act and it should not occur. We are raising those issues directly through the diplomatic and defence channels.”

Laser-gate provokes cries of outrage from our tough on national security border bouncers ScoMo and his rival Dutton, in an incident that evokes John Howard’s 2003 Babies Overboard lie, an excuse for demonising boat people to win votes.

In reply to what the PM pretends are representations to Beijing through all official channels, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Wang Wenbin, eventually accuses Australia of maliciously spreading disinformation, Tuesday. Lasers are part of modern range-finders, found on ships in navies all over the globe, including our own. He’s right.

In 2018 SAAB proudly announced that it will supply all twenty-five patrol boats once known as Armidale but soon to be re-named Arafura class with its state of the art lasers. “The Vidar advanced laser rangefinder … designed primarily for anti-aircraft operations as an integral part of a weapon system or surveillance system.”

Such rangefinders use a laser beam to measure the distance to the target.

But those who recall Dutts’ insistence, early in 2018, that Victorians were terrified of going out to eat because Melbourne was overrun with African gangs, which would follow diners home from restaurants, will understand that Morrison’s government, like that of Boris Johnson, or his mentor Trump, never lets fact get in the way of a fear campaign.

A priceless 11 million square kilometres of ocean, our EEZ contains oil and gas fields, and shipping lanes. And creatures of the deep. The destroyer is in the Arafura Sea, one of the world’s richest fisheries, between the NT and Papua, on its way through the Torres Strait at the top end of Down Under, to a spot in the Coral Sea off the Queensland coast to watch our naval exercises.

It’s almost as entertaining as our Tongan volcano relief show. Our navy’s pride of the fleet, HMAS Adelaide runs out of power just at the moment when we’re keen to be seen as Tonga’s rich and powerful friend. China seems to have no such problems when two vessels turn up a week or so later bearing a cargo of aid.

What the skippers and their crews don’t realise is that they are cruising for a bruising. First, there’s the Morrison election campaign’s war of words; bagging China, bully-shaming Putin, and high-fiving Biden, as befits our role as US imperialist running dogs, a cringe-worthy toadying to Washington that earns us Beijing’s enmity, costs us dearly in trade and lowers our credibility in any international forum, let alone in the White House or the Pentagon.

What it means to our relationship with Russia is less certain, but Murdoch media is keen to warn us that as “allies of Ukraine ” we face a crippling wave of cyber warfare.

This line of thought is quickly soft-pedalled. Perhaps advisers fear it might invite attacks. We mustn’t poke the bear too much. No-one mentions our trade surplus with Russia, although Crikey’s Bernard Keane notes that if Morrison had the ticker, he’d stop supplying Moscow with alumina and seize RUSAL’s twenty percent share in QAL, Rio Tinto’s Queensland alumina plant. They can take it. We could also halt our $100 million live animal exports.

World’s third-largest aluminium producer, Rusal, posted a profit of $2 billion in the first half of last year’s trading. World aluminium prices rose by thirty percent per tonne in the same period.

But seizing RUSAL’s share in QAL could cost votes in rural seats and upset key party donors. And the Nationals love to pretend that the live sheep trade is worth a fortune, when it’s a dead loss – Pegasus Economics calculates that stopping the trade would cost $9 million a year for WA farmers. But it could also lead to 350 jobs at West Australian sheep-meat processors. Cruelty to animals intrinsic to the trade would cease.

Whatever happens, Putin’s Russia is cosying up to fellow extortionists oil producer Saudi Arabia, another despotic regime which likes to kill its critics when they are in other countries. They have us over a barrel – and they know it. The pair will help push up the price of fuel and inflate the cost of everything, a way of hastening a global economic recession, already imminent if the overheated stock market is any indication.

More troubling is Dutton’s cheapjack sabre-rattling and the Coalition’s war on Labor, whom the three arch-rivals, Frydenberg, Dutton and Morrison, claim is joined at the hip with Beijing, weak on national security and unworthy of a vote in May or whenever an election is called.

Dutton politicises ASIO, a move which top spook Mike Burgess says is unhelpful. The Defence Minister claims the Chinese government had picked Albanese “as their candidate”. Worse, he says he bases Thursday’s inflammatory allegation – ruled by the Speaker to be out of order – on “open source and other intelligence”.

By Friday, after a top performance, the day before, from the PM in which Russia is denounced as a bully, the Morrison government’s talking-points revert to China because it’s harder to wedge Labor by railing against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

China’s villainy increases when it offers to buy Russia’s wheat, a deal denounced by government spin as a “lifeline” to Putin, virtually enabling Russia to run amok in Ukraine.

Under parliamentary privilege, Morrison dubs Richard Marles the “Manchurian Candidate”, a droll jibe, he withdraws, after the damage is done. Albanese, he jeers, is the nag China is backing. David Speers on ABC Insiders tries to get Penny Wong to look weak on bullies.

In reality, Labor is in lock-step with the Coalition.

Why be a big target on hot-button issues? Expect Russia to revert to its historical hegemony. The West helped it follow a traditional path – when the USSR’s communism, a state capitalism melted under Boris Yeltsin’s charms.

Yeltsin helped the new boyars – robber barons amass fabulous power, presiding over a crony capitalism which would make our own “can-do” capitalists blush. A few dodgy oligarchs became rich beyond belief while most of the population were driven into poverty.

To close observers of inequality in Australia and Little Britain these are familiar trends.

Yeltsin’s “shock therapy” economic reforms, masterminded by Anatoly Chubais and supported by Washington in the early 90s, were radical, causing a collapse in living standards” which helped Putin to impose his strong man act as the only solution.

Following the debacle of defeat at the hands of his own party, over his religious bigotry bill- a stunt to wedge Labor, which ends up wedging only his own backbench, blind rage grips our ukulele-packing paterfamilias, Bunnings’ influencer and default PM. ScoMo can live with being called an absolute arsehole, and a menacing wallpaper.

Old news. Besides, insults are a badge of honour to any malignant narcissist. But it hurts to hear his team now call him a fraud, a hypocrite, a liar, a horrible, horrible person in a new series of leaked SMS.

And as for “psycho”, that’s rich coming from any member of a party who assents to (and enables) the indefinite detention of children, deporting Kiwis caught jaywalking and any refugee who arrives by boat. Not to mention his obsession with secrecy. Besides, who doesn’t beg the producer to let you play the first verse of Dragon’s take me to the April Sun in Cuba in your own mockumentary, Meet the Morrisons?

Observant viewers with the stomach to sit through the ScoMo propaganda segment of Nine’s 60 Minutes, ScoMo-ProMo note that neither resident grandmother is present at the family curry. Aged care is so politically sensitive these days. ScoMo’s mother and mother-in-law are probably watching cricket. Eating KFC.

But it’s enough to make you choke on your chicken tikka. Not only is he publicly pilloried by anonymous assailants from his own cabinet, ScMo’s impotent. The PM, clearly, has less control over his party than over his ukulele. Things turn ugly.

Now five MPs have crossed the House of Reps floor, he’s lost control of the Senate and even Murdoch’s suggesting he’s toast, Morrison has blood-lust Dutton and “NFI” Frydenberg, all over his “comms” unit these days, like flies on an outback dunny.

Too cute for words, these two smell the death of a salesman. They’re jockeying to depose Morrison, a dead man moon-walking-even as opposition leader after May.

(His attack on Albo, the small-target, Opposition Leader coincides with The Lantern Festival and other celebrations of the Chinese lunar new year, The Year of The Tiger.)

Complicating matters is a report from Karen Middleton that “key Liberals” are plotting to block Dutton before he cherry-picks the leader’s job for himself. Ms Middleton regales Saturday Paper readers with the hilarious scenario of several feckless and ineffectual Morrison muppets brokering what is described as a Left-Right deal between “Dutts” as he is known and the “Kooyong Dolt”, as Joe Aston calls the feckless feather-brained Treasurer, to prevent a coup by the current Minister for Defence.

Should Dutts take revenge on “Bonkers” Morrison, the incumbent psycho, all hell would break loose. Even with the $16bn which trusty Frydo stashes in a brown paper bag at his PM’s request in order to buy victory with pandemic relief handouts or tax-rebates or some other grubby scheme to court the majority who don’t follow politics with an appeal to self-interest.

Hence the recent bottom-feeding frenzy in Question Time. Morrison slanders Albo to get below Dutton in the gutter.

“Bonkers” Morrison howls the house down in question time; accusing Antony Albanese of being weak on national security, a cheap stunt from the Crosby-Textor playbook, while throwing a dead cat the size of China, on the national table, as Bernard Keane puts it.

Now that five MPs defy him to vote down his signature legislation, his impotence as leader is revealed and he must muscle-up to compensate. What could possibly go wrong?

Shout? You can hear him in Beijing. Or Kharkiv.

No-one will ever teach Morrison that it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt. Not that he cares just how awful he is with his harangue of the Opposition Leader for “being a small target” “or just small”?

But it won’t be his reducing of Question Time to howling abuse, that decides this election, nor will it be his despicable treatment of women, particularly his office backgrounding against Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame, although that could play a big part.

It is unlikely that any of Morrison’s chest-beating posturing on foreign affairs, reciting US talking points, will convince anyone that a PM who can’t control his own party is a strong man who will keep the nation safe. Nor will the happy family man fantasy even begin to atone for the leaked texts which reveal how much he is reviled by his party including his deputy PM.

The decider could be the sixteen billion dollar election war chest. Unless, of course, voters worry where the money’s coming from. Or have relatives in aged care. Or have a disability or care for someone who has. Or the PM puts his money where his mouth is and funds refugee to flee Ukraine, in the humanitarian crisis that is already on its way.

 

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ASIO bill reforms aren’t enough, say MEAA and Greens

Wedged between the recent passage of legislation expanding Australia’s spy agency’s powers and a date for a Senate inquiry into press freedom after the New Year, Attorney-General Christian Porter and the Morrison government announced on Wednesday a range of measures aimed at enhancing public interest journalism and the protection of whistle-blowers.

However, both the Greens and the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) have criticised the government’s announcement, claiming it doesn’t go far enough to prevent the persecution of journalists and others acting in the public interest.

And those bodies collectively warn that such persecution can ultimately lead to prosecutions unless further revisions are taken.

“Under the reforms proposed by the Attorney-General today, journalists can still have their homes or workplaces raided without prior knowledge,” said Sarah Hanson-Young, holder of the communications portfolio for the Greens, in a reaction to Porter’s announcement.

“Journalists and their employers will still not have the right to appear before a judge and contest a search warrant before it is executed.

“Journalism remains a crime and journalists can still be jailed under these reforms,” added Hanson-Young.

Marcus Strom, the MEAA’s media federal president, called for greater action to counter any shortcomings that a Peter Dutton-sponsored piece of legislation passed in Parliament’s final sitting fortnight contained in the way of oversights and transparencies.

“The impetus for this review was the raids on consecutive days in 2019 of the home of News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst and the ABC offices in Sydney,” Strom said.

“Government agencies can still obtain warrants to investigate journalists in secret, and journalists and their sources can still be jailed for truth-telling.

“There is an urgent need for much broader reform to remove laws that criminalise journalism,” Strom added.

Dutton’s piece of legislation was aimed at increasing the powers of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) to include investigations aimed at anyone from private citizens and residents, even as young as 14 years of age, to anyone acting in a public-interest capacity, such as journalists and whistle-blowers.

And while Hanson-Young and the Greens had already arranged and announced a Senate inquiry into media freedom in Australia to take place in February after Parliament reconvenes after its summer break, Porter defends his department’s announcements as being a step in the right direction.

 

 

“Transparency is a key foundation of a healthy democracy and these reforms support the right of journalists and whistle-blowers to hold governments at all levels to account by shining a light on issues that are genuinely in the public interest,” said Porter.

Specific to journalists and public-interest journalism, amendments to Dutton’s recently-passed legislation would include:

  • only Supreme or Federal Court judges would have the ability to issue search warrants against journalists for disclosure offences
  • warrants would only be issued against journalists for disclosure offences after consideration by a Public Interest Advocate
  • greater justifications would have to be given in relation to warrants exercised against journalists, and
  • the government would be required to consider additional defences for public interest journalism for secrecy offences.

“Our reforms will ensure the [ASIO Amendment Bill] is clear and understandable and provides an effective legal framework that supports and protects public sector whistle-blowers, while balancing important national security considerations with regard to the unauthorised release of sensitive information,” said Porter.

However, bodies such as the Public Interest Journalism Initiative (PIJI) have said that the inquiry to be chaired by Hanson-Young must include press freedom areas among:

  • enshrining a positive protection for freedom of speech and freedom of the press in Australian law
  • with regard to broadening shield laws, Protection would have to be extended to all those involved in the newsgathering and publication process whose material or evidence may tend to reveal the identity of a source
  • journalists and their employers should be informed when enforcement agencies seek access to their metadata and journalist information warrants should be contestable by the subject of the warrant and their employer
  • and the public interest consideration required before issuing a journalist’s information warrant should be expanded to consider the potential harm that could be done by the issuance of the warrant and the public interest in a free press.

“Journalists should not be charged for doing their jobs full stop. They should not have their homes raided. They should not be intimidated or threatened. They should not be attacked by the government for reporting what is in the public interest,” said Hanson-Young.

Hanson-Young also envisions areas of reporting that can be opened up without the government scrutiny which may theoretically be applied under the current legislation, should new press freedom laws become enacted.

“We have seen in recent months, vindication for those journalists whose homes and workplaces were raided over their reports on alleged war crimes and the government’s plans to spy on Australians. Public interest journalism is vital to our democracy,” she said.

“We need proper protections for journalists including a contested warrants process to be enshrined in a Media Freedom Act,” she added.

Meanwhile, Mike Burgess, ASIO’s director-general of security, feels that any reforms to the ASIO Amendment Bill – even at the reward of protecting public interest journalism, journalists, and whistle-blowers – need to be taken within the agenda of the nation’s greater interests.

“I acknowledge ASIO is granted extraordinary powers – but they are rightly subject to strict safeguards and oversight. Australians should be confident that ASIO acts in a targeted, proportionate, ethical way, and wherever possible, uses the least intrusive method available to collect security intelligence,” Burgess said in reaction to the bill’s passage last week.

“We do not just do what is legal, we do what is right,” Burgess added.

 

 

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A Whale of a Taylor – too.

“People aren’t spending” sighs Fran Kelly at the end of ABC Insiders Sunday, blaming us for the government’s epic failure to manage the economy. It’s always the victim’s fault. Yet if you don’t have it, you can’t spend it.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) records a snail’s pace in the latest increase in household incomes. ABS data shows a healthy increase from 1995 through until 2012, the period of the Howard and then Rudd/Gillard governments. Then it collapses in 2013. It is yet to recover. No wonder 9,300 retail stores will close their doors this year.

Average wealth per adult Australian, also fell by $US28,670 in 2018-2019 reports Credit Suisse in its annual global wealth report. Although Credit Suisse’s calculation includes falling house prices and a falling Australian dollar – and despite Australians remaining among the wealthiest in the world, the report confirms economic mismanagement.

We are one of a tiny minority of countries with wealth per adult lower in 2019 than back in 2012.

Vast amounts of wealth are being shunted offshore with little or no benefit to the people of Australia.

“There is no mineral resources rent tax, no other scheme to retain wealth in Australia, tax avoidance and evasion are rife, the Tax Office’s audit and enforcement divisions are severely understaffed and the Government keeps giving handouts to its foreign corporate mates,” writes Alan Austin.

What is improving is the Coalition’s strangle-hold on the media, helped in the ABC’s case by $84 million budget cuts, intimidating calls to head office, stacking of the board and a PM’s captain’s pick of Ita Buttrose as ABC Chair. AFP raids on working journalists help to increase the state’s pressure on everyone not to criticise; step out of line.

Journos pick up the vibe. Last week, Kelly’s love-in with work experience kid, Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg aids and abets Coalition’s lies about its comprehensive, colossal failure to manage the Australian economy.

“When we came to government, unemployment was 5.7%. Today it’s 5.3%. We have a record number of Australians in jobs. We have just produced the first current account surplus since 1975 … the budget is back in balance, already delivered, for the first time in 11 years. And we’re going to deliver a surplus. That means paying down Labor’s debt. Right now we have an interest bill of around $19 billion a year …”

“So what we need to do is build the resilience of the Australian economy and face those domestic and global economic headwinds that all countries are facing, particularly the trade tensions,” Frydenberg lies.

OK, Josh. Perhaps you’d like to take credit for at least half of that debt and rising interest yourself. Hey Big Spender, your government spends like a drunken sailor. Since March, Australia’s gross debt was $543,409,430,000. Double all debt accumulated by every government from Federation to the 2013 election. Just tell the truth.

Global headwinds? Mathias Cormann – who’s never been the same since his arithmetic failed him as Dutton’s numbers man in the Liberals’ last leadership coup – has been wearing out this excuse since he become finance minister. Luckily, he need suffer no longer. He’ll quit politics at the end of this parliamentary session according to Paul Bongiorno. Cormann should go. Ten years ago, the nation was praised for its success during the GFC.

Now we lag the field. Global wealth grew during the past year as the five-year international boom in trade, jobs, investment, corporate profits and government revenue continues, although Alan Austin reports some easing with the new record high adult wealth reaching $70,850 or just 1.2% below last year’s record.

There are no global headwinds. The excuse is invoked whenever jobless figures rise, interest rates are cut, GDP per capita is lower than last year and declining productivity, among other factors, show our local economy stalling.

We’re all at sea. The mutinous dog in the captain’s rig may have seized the helm in last year’s dirty double, double-crossing of Turnbull. But the usurper has no charter; no vision. His first mate can’t read a compass and the crew are frigging in the rigging or sleeping in a cabin far below. No wonder Chief Purser Cormann is about to jump ship.

With Fran’s help, Frydenberg’s farrago of lies includes his party’s whopper that it has a record number of Australians in jobs. Yet Australia’s population growth of 1.7 million people (over 15 years old) during the same period, “created” those jobs. And a record number of deaths, too, not that you hear any boasting on that score.

Even if you take figures at face value, ABC, you could query the quality of those jobs. As in the US, many Australian workers are waiting up to a decade for a pay rise, income inequality is at record levels, working hours are long or unpredictable and penalty rates are being cut or do not exist. Conditions are also rapidly getting worse.

Wage theft is becoming the new normal as every month another corporation is found underpaying its workers.

“For many workers, there is no on-the-job training or chance for career progression, stress related illnesses due to intense work pressures are common and large sections of the workforce live in fear of being sacked without notice or redundancy pay because employment security provisions have been eroded,” reports the ACTU.

Above all, as The Australia Institute’s Richard Denniss asks, “… if the Coalition is managing the economy, why did they grow the population rather than create jobs for those who were already unemployed?” We need to explode the pernicious myth of the coalition as good economic managers. And as Denniss puts it, the economy’s effect on the budget vastly outweighs the effect of any budget on any economy.

Budgets are important but budgets are not central to the management of the economy.

Context matters. Unemployment was indeed 5.7% at the end of the financial crisis or global recession of 2013 but that rate still put us eighth in OECD rankings – as contrasted with our 21st place today at 5.3% as shown in last month’s ABS data. That’s our lowest ranking since records have been kept. But no-one holds Josh to account.

The budget is not back in balance. As Finance Dept data reveals, the deficit at the end of October is around $14.7 billion. A surplus is predicted for next June. Alan Austin spells it out, that’s seven months away.

Above all, as Ross Gittins and others point out, any surplus requires a series of heroic assumptions which include expecting government spending to grow by just 0.1% in real terms – as opposed to 4.9% last financial year.

Then there are the decidedly unheroic calculations and assumptions of this government. Helping create a sacred surplus are cuts to NDIS, although the preferred term is “underspend”. Chief amongst these is the $4.6bn that has not been spent on NDIS, or to use the bureaucrats’ jargon, the “… slower than expected transition of participants into the NDIS and lower utilisation of participants’ individual support packages”.

In other words, our most vulnerable experience delay or denial as more stringent assessments reduce the numbers who qualify for NDIS. Wheelchair Basketball and Tennis, Paralympian Dylan Alcott is disgusted.

“I see the heartbroken families of people who try and try to get funding but can’t, robbing them to be independent, contributing members of society. Fix it.”

Then there’s the timing of receipts. Bringing forward the collection of tobacco excise collections, for example, Shane Wright reminds us, boosts the bottom line by several billions in the new financial year. But wait!

Look over there! In an “explosive allegation”, a Chinese spy ring, exposed by Nine’s 60 Minutes, Sunday, may involve the late Bo “Nick” Zhao, (32) a former luxury car-dealer in leafy Glen Iris in Melbourne’s sleepy eastern suburbs who was offered one million dollars to be a Chinese agent of influence in Australian federal politics.

Or so the self-professed Manchurian candidate, Bo told ASIO a year ago. Is Glen Iris the den of sedition, our ex-pat local sage and dramaturge Barry Humphries, has always warned us about? Sandy Stone now a suburban guerrilla?

A nation is shocked to learn of the plot to parachute Bo into the Liberal seat of Chisholm. Bo would then be injected like a bacillus into the fibrillating heart of our body politic, our parliament, like Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) in the train to the Finland Station in April 1917. Seriously? More panic from Canning MP, Andrew Hastie.

“I heard that he was a 32-year-old Melbourne resident cultivated by the Chinese Government to run as a Liberal Party candidate,” Chair of Parliamentary Joint Subcommittee on Intelligence and Security Hastie breathlessly tells Channel Nine whose chairman is former Liberal Treasurer and current chair of the Board of Guardians of our $148 billion (that won’t be invested in education, health or welfare) Future Fund, nest-egg, Peter Costello.

Sadly, it turns out Bo’s in jail awaiting trial for fraud in October when Chisholm’s preselection takes place. Gladys Liu, who also boasted she could raise a million dollars for the cause, takes his place. Bo’s bid would be a Chinese Communist Party long-term strategy, helpfully suggests Alex Joske, Australian Strategic Policy Institute analyst.

Did Bo know too much? Tragically, he is found dead of a drug overdose in a Mount Waverly motel after tipping off ASIO that Chinese intelligence operatives would give him a million dollars to run for Chisholm. What could possibly have gone wrong? The party would even have given him a hand with the odd fake AEC polling booth or two.

Mandarin language electoral booths in Chisholm and Kooyong and in several other electorates with Chinese speakers instruct unwary voters to unwittingly tick the box to elect the Liberal candidate. These appear to be authorised by the Australian Electoral Commission. Prove they affected one vote say government lawyers.

Cases have been brought against the two candidates by climate campaigner Vanessa Garbett and unsuccessful independent Kooyong candidate Oliver Yates. The fake poll booth case is currently before the full federal court.

Former acting Victorian Liberal party state director, Simon Frost, has testified that signs written in Chinese at polling booths on election day were designed to look like official Australian Electoral Commission signage. Preliminary comments from the bench are not encouraging. At least the spy scandal gets our PM’s attention.

“Deeply disturbing”, Scott Morrison finds the spy claims, he says, while Liberal MP for Canning, first talent-spotted by Greg Sheridan, and an Abbott, captain’s pick, former SAS Captain, Andrew Hastie, cranks up the hysteria.

A state-sponsored attempt to infiltrate our Parliament using an Australian citizen and basically run them as an agent of foreign influence in our democratic system,” cries Andrew “handy Andy” Hastie, who chairs the Australian Parliament’s oxymoron – its intelligence and security committee.

It seems to give Hastie a lot of prominence if not power.

Incredibly, another self-proclaimed Chinese spy, Wang Liqiang, who also comes to Hastie’s attention, is the star of a 60 Minutes’ show when he comes forward with sensational allegations. Wang claims he worked as a secret Chinese operative for five years. Worse, Beijing has directed overseas assassinations, including on Australian soil.

Yet barely a week passes before our spooks conclude the self-proclaimed Chinese spy is not a highly trained intelligence operative dispatched by Beijing to wreak havoc on China’s enemies. At most, they suggest, he may be a bit player on the fringes of the espionage community. But what a star. Let’s hope he’s awarded asylum.

“We develop friendly co-operation with Australia and other countries based on mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit,” a foreign ministry spokesman says. “We have not interfered and are never interested in interfering in other countries’ domestic affairs.”

That settles that, then. Meanwhile, it seems Wang may have some charges to face should he return to China. The Chinese Embassy insists he is merely a “self-proclaimed intelligence agent” and a convicted fraudster who was sentenced to one year and three months in prison, with a suspended sentence of a year and a half.

The embassy cites a Shanghai police statement of an investigation into Mr Wang they opened in April, after he allegedly cheated 4.6 million yuan ($960,000), in a “fake investment project”, involving car imports in February.

Chinese spies is the latest episode of Morrison’s Police State which stars our fearless anti-hero the PM as daggy-Dad, a NSW copper’s son, making yet another dud judgement call. Rather than get his Minister for Energy, Emissions, water-rorts and Round-Up, Angus Taylor, to explain who cooked up the dodgy document Taylor used to falsely impugn Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore – he rings Mick’s mobile. Is Mick’s number on Scott’s speed dial?

So our PM phones a friend; his former neighbour and bin brother, top cop, Mick Fuller. Mick’s NSW Police Commissioner, a passionate advocate of strip-searching minors, the separation of powers and augmenting the rule of law with a little bit of fear.

Young people should have a “little bit of fear” of police he tells the fear-mongering Sydney tabloid The Daily Telegraph. It’s a view which former AFP chief Mick Palmer does not share. He says it is frankly frightening.

Morrison tells parliament that Strike Force Garrad (SFG) won’t be going anywhere. He implies Mick’s told him.

SFG is the NSW police investigation of Gus Taylor’s use of doctored documents to ridicule Sydney’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore for declaring a state of climate emergency over some forged travel figures, Gus swears were downloaded from Sydney City Council’s website, a claim contradicted by the council’s website metadata.

Doubtless, no crime will be found to have been committed but no-one will believe Morrison hasn’t leaned on Fuller to back off.

Happily, our spooks are up to snuff. The Australian even suggests that Morrison could learn from their approach. Don’t turn crisis into catastrophe. Spymaster, ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess looms up late Sunday night to assure all loyal Australians that not only is ASIO aware of the matters but is “actively investigating them“.

A former Telstra information security chief, Mike’s a top bloke says Peter Dutton. Last August Mike “moved across” to head ASIO after heading the Australian Signals Directorate, (ASD). He was on deck to News Corp Annika Smethurst whose scoop, April last year busted an ASD plan to spy on all Australians. Mike says it’s bollocks.

Mike Burgess and two departmental heads, (always better than one) issued a rare public statement disputing the report. Later Smethurst’s home was raided by the Australian Federal Police, reports Michelle Grattan, looking for anything which would lead them to her source.

Since then, there’s been a lot of fuss and bother about the role of the free press, a debate in which News Corp is handicapped by the baggage of having urged Coalition governments to increase state powers to spy on us all.

News of the Chinese plot is enough to put a nation off its Uncle Toby’s Weeties, Monday morning and quite upstages Evangelical Stuart Robert’s frantic attempts to hose down the government’s dumpster fire which erupts when, as it knew would happen, its Robodebt assessment or extortion of the poor is ruled illegal Wednesday by the Federal Court. The Morrison government may have to repay hundreds of millions of dollars.

While MSM faithfully report that it’s a shocker of a week for Morrison, it is, in fact, a very positive week for the Australian worker. Bill Shorten also is in top form. He raises the following matter in parliament. He asks

“Given that the government has now suspended robodebt after three years of operation, is it because the Coalition government at the time of creating it either, a) didn’t seek legal advice, or b) had inaccurate legal advice or c) received legal advice but just didn’t think that Australians would notice the government unjustly enriching itself at the expense of the most vulnerable in Australian society.”

It’s a bad week for Scott Morrison chorus Nine Newspapers following News Corp’s lead. But it’s far from that. It’s a good week or at least a hopeful week for ordinary Australians. What is bad is that Ensuring Integrity and repeal of Medevac are not remotely necessary.

Worse, Jacqui Lambie and Pauline Hanson note the hypocrisy, the double standard applied to workers and Westpac bankers who have just been called out by AUSTRAC on twenty-three million counts of money-laundering.

“The Prime Minister himself came out and said ‘it’s not up to us to deal with it, it’s up to the board to deal with the banks’ – but that’s not good enough,” senator Hanson says.

In the end, the Morrison government’s just not good enough, Pauline Hanson nails it. Or big enough.

One bill before the senate extends the government’s campaign to cripple unions; reduce further the power of workers to organise and exercise industrial action while the other is more a fit of pique – a sure sign that petty political point-scoring matters more than the human rights of asylum-seekers – or our compassion, humanity – or our doctors’ Hippocratic oath. Morrison’s government hates any law that Labor may have had a hand in.

Finally, there’s the robodebt debacle. The government has been happy to connive at extortion but even when called on it’s illegal averaging to raise a debt, all its Government Services Minister Stuart Robert can offer is;

“This government does not apologise -” Yet apologise it must. And fitting restitution must soon follow. No government can treat its people with such contempt; nor in reversing the onus of proof put itself above the law.

As for Yellow Peril 2.0, its spy drama, cooler, wiser heads must prevail. Andrew Hastie’s Sinophobia has all the hallmarks of an orchestrated diversion, designed to distract us from a government in deep trouble.

This week Scott Morrison reveals he understands neither the separation of powers nor the rule of law in our democracy; he acts the can-do PM; markets himself as a man of action. Yet this does not give him permission to ring the NSW Commissioner of Police in the midst of a parliamentary sitting to seek details of an investigation it is not his business to ask nor the Commissioner’s business to tell. Both parties are now irrevocably impugned.

Viewed in conjunction with his eagerness to silence dissent and his government’s passage of at least eighty laws increasing the powers of the state to spy on its citizens, his behaviour is not only entirely inappropriate it is truly alarming. The road toward a police state is paved with such incursions into liberty, democracy and justice.

Just as the incessant repetition of party propaganda and lies mask a grave unwillingness to consult others, let alone fairly and effectively manage our nation’s economy and resources whilst elevating illusion over truth.

Yet this tyranny is not inevitable. Armed with knowledge we can resist. We must. Our democracy depends upon it.

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