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Tag Archives: Scott Morrison

Perhaps, I Really Am Clairvoyant Or Is Politics Just That Obvious?

The wonderful serendipity of the internet caused me to stumble across something I wrote or in February, 2017. (You can read the whole thing if you like by clicking on this link: The Future Is Different! If That Seems Obvious Then Why Are So Many Acting As Though It Isn’t!).

Anyway, remembering this was written in 2017 which was before 2019 where those with long memories will remember that Scott Morrison told us that Bill Shorten would destroy the weekend with his plan to have a 2030 target for EVs of fifty percent of new cars sold. Those with long memories will also remember that Mr Morrison assured us in 2022 that he said nothing against electric cars and that he was just against Labor’s policy of “forcing” everyone to have one by adopting a target of 50% electric vehicles at a date ten years into the future. In the 2017 piece I wrote:

Actually, I wonder if Tony and Malcolm and Scott had been alive a hundred years ago whether we’d have heard something like this:

“The horse and cart will be part of our transport mix for a long time to come. Some states are putting unrealistic targets on the number of automobiles and are suggesting that by 1930 we’ll have as much as fifty percent of our goods moved by truck. Let’s be clear we need a baseload system and you can’t go past the horse for that. While some people are complaining about the horseshit, we think that it’s important to remember that it’s a naturally occuring thing and good for plants, so how could it be damaging to anyone’s health? The fact remains that automobiles are currently much, much more expensive to run than horses and they are nowhere near as reliable. The idea that they’ll ever be produced in the sort of numbers that would bring their price down to where they’d be able to compete with horses is just a silly dream. Besides, it’s all right for those in the city, but once you venture into the country, where will you get the petrol from? It’s not like they’ll ever have a way of providing petrol outside the major cities like Sydney and Melbourne. No, we in the Liberal Party are committed to the horse and cart, while Labor are pushing transport costs higher with their suggestion that the new, expensive invention can provide a reliable means of transport.”

I must say that I’ve decided that I shouldn’t be writing satire. Instead I should be writing speeches and electoral material for the Liberal Party because I imagine that it’s a very well paid job. Ok, I might have to tone down the irony a bit, but if that’s too hard, I could always write David Littleproud’s speeches, or take over Vikki Campion’s column, unless the latter job comes with the requirement of marrying Barnaby.

Speaking of Ms. Campion, I notice that she was quoting “research” which suggested that wind farms could make bushfires worse because there’d be a “drying effect” downwind. While I’m not an expert in the field but, unlike Andrew Bolt, I actually have a tertiary degree even if it is in Arts with a Drama Major, I still feel that I am qualified to ask respectfully, “What the actual fuck is the person on?”. If someone has more expertise than me on the topic, I’d like to know how placing a wind turbine or two in front of a wind would create more a stronger wind behind the wind farm and whether that would lead to a significant drying of the bush.

Notwithstanding my objections to Peter Dutton’s world view, I am quite prepared to forego that if the price is right and offer a few thoughts for his attempt to pretend that the Coalition have actually developed an energy policy that will last longer than Liz Truss’s tenure as British PM once they were in government.

Liberal Energy Talking Points for Election:

  • Renewables need renewing whereas once we’ve used uranium in the nuclear plant we won’t be using it again.
  • Wind farms will slow the wind which will make the planet hotter.
  • While gas and coal can be taxed, we can’t tax the sun or wind, so there’ll be less money for things like hospitals and roads.
  • The sun won’t last forever and once it goes, solar won’t work.

Mm, I hope Mr Dutton doesn’t see these and purloin them without giving me a job!

 

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The Lehrmann show may hasten the demise of a hopelessly corrupted corporate media

When Taylor Auerbach gets revenge on Seven West Media, Bruce Lehrmann and his former close friend, Steve “Jacko” Jackson, producer of Seven’s 2023 Trial and Error, an exclusive interview with the alleged serial rapist, all hell breaks loose.

You can’t fault Taylor’s timing. Nor the dirt he’s about to dish. At the eleventh hour, Auerbach jets back from a NZ holiday, subsidised, no doubt, by Seven’s six-figure payout in a confidential settlement of an injury case against Jackson and Executive Producer Mark Llewellyn. His lawyer, Rebekah Giles, tells the court that Auerbach’s claim included allegations that her client suffered long term “bullying” and “anti-Semitism.”

A huge bonfire of the vanities is soon ablaze with police Cellebrite copies of personal text messages, amongst 2300 pages of documents, tendered in the Federal Court, in an affidavit from Auerbach. The fresh evidence helps Ten get Justice Michael Bryan Joshua Lee to reopen Lehrmann’s defamation case against Network Ten and Lisa Wilkinson. Lehrmann claims he was defamed by Wilkinson’s February 2021, interview with Brittany Higgins, when the young former Liberal staffer in former Defence Minister, Linda Reynold’s Office, says she was raped by a senior office colleague whom she does not name.

Everything is at stake – especially the colourful career of Seven’s Spotlight’s Executive Producer, Mark Llewellyn, an old school media veteran, who allegedly punched a colleague in 2014. Within a few hours, there are more bodies on stage than in the last act of Hamlet.

Self-styled conning-tower connoisseur, an underwater matters maven, bon viveur and a man who counts as a close pal, ASIO boss Paul “Up Periscope” O’Sullivan, Lehrmann is high maintenance. It’s not just the cocaine, masseuses or the beachfront penthouse near Balgowlah, Seven is said to have funded. Lehrmann is a one-man Bermuda Triangle.

“Thinking my next hustle is running brand rehabilitation for all the guys burned by the Lehrmann yarn by taking them to Gaza to feed starving kids,” writes former Liberal staffer, John Macgowan. “A safer alternative to being anywhere near that story”.

If Llewellyn is colourful, Macgowan is in inglorious Technicolor. He’s a contact Bruce has on speed dial for “baggies” when he has an insuperable urge to “get lit,” in anticipation of a fat defamation payout, on the night of the Higgins Interview. And a powerful figure.

In February 2019, Macgowan took the helm of the NSW Liberals’ Orwellian Accountability Unit, a self-parody of a name for its dirt unit. Did Mcgowan help Auerbach with his research? There’s no reason to disbelieve his story that it came from Lehrmann. But how did Bruce, a former defendant, come to have a copy of an AFP e-brief in electronic form?

Best stick to the facts. There are corpses everywhere. Murdoch agent, Walter Soffranof’s done his dash. Shane Drumgold’s all stitched up. ScoMo’s over and out, replaced in Cook by a McKinsey wonk, Simon Kennedy, a man who claims credit for Job-Keeper. Llewellyn’s in limbo. About to be TKO’d. Photos of Jacko with a naked NSW socialite have cost him a job as NSW Police’s top spin doctor. And Auerbach’s brilliant career is up the spout.

Tay may pick up again with the Daily Fail. Or run Programming at Kim’s ABC.

Once, fully paid-up members of Stokes’ Blokes; those hard-working, hard-playing, frat-boy party animals who make our news, shape our views, and undermine our democracy, create their own suicide-bomber. Auerbach is a kiss-and-tell-renegade on a deathly mission.

He holds a bizarre, manic presser outside his Elizabeth Bay home. His weirdly off-piste street theatre sets off a firestorm. He torches every reputation in reach. It’s a fatal attack on Lehrmann’s already, terminally impugned credibility. Seven allegedly paid $2940 for sex and drugs and wining and dining the Liberal staffer for his exclusive story. Auerbach also serves notice he may sue his scoop for defamation. He has his silk, Rebekah Giles, serve a notice of defamation concerns on Lehrmann. It’s a Ninja warrior soap opera.

Auerbach attracted him, Lehrmann tells him, in the days when he was tarting himself around Sydney media, less because of the $200,000 his agent promises but because he knows Seven’s crew to be sympatico, or as Auerbach helpfully explains, in the Lehrmann V Network Ten Pty Ltd, defamation case, his 2000-page affidavit helps him re-open,

“He appreciated … that I wasn’t sitting with the rest of the feminazis in the press pack.”

More of Lehrmann’s views may be obtained from the fabulous fifth columnist, rape culture apologist and fake psychologist, Men’s Right’s activist, Bettina Arndt, AO, who is holding a series of fund-raising events. You also get a cup of tea and a sandwich to help open your wallet. Keen legal student, Bruce will share his insights into the justice system. It’s a steal for a hundred dollars a pop. Arndt could open her show by explaining why she called Ms Higgins “a lying, scheming bimbo who destroyed a man’s life to save her career”.

Someone should ask Lehrmann where he got the AFP transcript of his trial, together with the texts from Brittany Higgins’ mobile phone. And why he saw fit to photocopy “about five hundred pages of documents” to give to Seven. Auerbach is a sworn witness to this.

Tay-Tay will be otherwise engaged. Possibly with his lawyer or just hangin’ with Macgowan.

Who named this assassin? Kudos. Taylor Auerbach could be a Paddington boutique, or a brand of cologne, or even a legal firm, if you were just looking at the name on the debit entry on a corporate Amex statement. Instead, he is a type of picture of Dorian Gray, the quintessence of our click-bait shop of a debauched, dog-eat-dog, corporate card, fourth estate turned fifth column – less Thomas Carlyle’s watchdog on the constitution than a lapdog; not scrutinizing our ruling elite but getting into bed with them.

At the heart of the drama, is the Morrison government’s bungled cover-up of an alleged rape of a naive, vulnerable, young woman whose ideals attracted her to serve as a junior Liberal staffer to one of the most underperforming ministers in Morrison’s paranoid, bullying, overweening government of corruption and underperformance. The ensuing debacle helped destroy his chances of re-election while Nine’s The Project 21 February interview with Brittany Higgins in which the former Liberal staffer claims she was raped by an un-named senior staffer, The Saturday Paper’s Rick Morton notes, sets off a concatenation of events,

“… civil suits, counter suits, an ACT inquiry into the criminal trial, and then an inquiry into the inquiry into the criminal trial, and more civil suits springing from the ACT inquiry.”

Chequebook journalism is not new. Nor is it new to see news as just another commodity. But a thirty-thousand-dollar Bangkok back-rub and blow bill is nothing to be sniffed at. Finger-wagging, fuddy-duddying and illicit Class A drugs aside, you get a fair picture of the lengths Seven is prepared to go to get an exclusive on an alleged serial rapist. Give him anything he wants. Chuck in another lazy hundred grand for a year’s rent in a beachside – near Balgowlah apartment with spa and pool and “with amazing water and coastal views.”

In an age of decadence and excess when too much is barely enough, there’s more. Auerbach adds a little shock value in his own funniest home video of himself snapping the shafts of former close pal, Steve Jackson’s $2000 golf clubs. Golf’s a blokes’ religion, before we delve into any Freudian layer of meaning. What a way to end a bromance.

Yet we are dealing with an industry whose stock in trade is sensation. Not only is there the horror of taboo violation, but Seven’s silks are also working desperately on the notion that Auerbach’s vendetta discredits his testimony, a fallacy, Lee is quick to dismiss.

“The shorter the iron, the more difficult it is to break.” Justice Lee is such a crack up.

But best straight man goes to Executive producer, Mark Llewellyn who tells news.com.au last May that the Seven Network did not pay Lehrmann for the exclusive interview.

“No one was paid,” Mr Llewellyn tells news.com.au.

Embellished with a paper trail of receipts and invoices, Tay-Tay’s hissy fit is spliced into the Thousand- and One-Nights narrative of how alleged rapist, former Liberal senior adviser to ex-Defence Minister Linda Reynolds, walking advertisement for Bolivian Marching Powder, Thai massage and Walter Mitty spook, Bruce Lehrmann, sued two TV channels for (not naming but still shaming) and defaming him. He thought he had it in the bag.

Now the cat is out. Taylor’s former close friend Jacko’s in the middle of just getting over being given the flick as NSW Police sultan of spin before he’s had time to update his bio on LinkedIn. It’s a sensational subplot but it’s a “rabbit hole”, as Lee puts it, that briefly illuminates the bond between corporate media and police. But not in a good light.

His honour is moved to curtail Taylor Auerbach’s performance on the second day. But not after he’s noted how he’s allowed the young cub to take his revenge strategically, in the privileged and protected (largely male) pulpit of federal court testimony. Of course, some of the testimony will discredit further Lehrmann. If that’s possible. If he’s used material from one court for another purpose, that’s potentially a criminal matter.

Expect Lehrmann’s defamation case to be upheld. But expect damages to be five cents, the lowest denomination coin of the realm. But still worth more than our corporate media which is revealed to be morally bankrupt, if not craven, in pursuit of tabloid sensationalism.

The Devil wears Prada. Auerbach turns out to be a freshly barbered, thirty-something man in dark suit, skinny black tie and fitted white shirt whose tie-pin flashes as he spins on his heel, jaunty as an AFL star fronting an acquittal. Or the picture of Dorian Gray.

In Courtroom 22A, Justice Michael Bryan Joshua Lee reopens and closes the Taylor Auerbach kamikaze attack on his enemies who are bit-players in the Bruce Lehrmann V Network Ten defamation saga, a sitting of The Federal Court in Sydney’s Queens Square.

All of Lehrmann’s bootleg testimony is now on file for public access, thanks to Auerbach.

“Let sunlight be the best disinfectant,” Justice Lee reflects. Yet some things cannot be unseen. Witness the sordid spectacle of two major media corporations in a race to the bottom, where tabloid sensationalism and ratings trump truth-telling; a race where illicit drugs, Thai massage services, fine dining, even golf are all part of the do-whatever-it- takes; pay-whateve-it-costs battle to capture our jaded attention. Monetize our attention spans.

It will take more than sunlight to reform our bounty-hunting, boys’ club that rules the roost in a corporate media captured by billionaires who care less about profit than ways their share of our attention can give themselves access to power. But it’s a good start. Ironically, our nation’s flawed defamation laws which so severely curtail speaking truth to power that our fourth estate is a tamed estate if not a fifth column – may have triggered an exposure of such rampant corruption, on such a wide scale, that the genie is now out of the bottle.

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“Political lynching”: Scott Morrison and Trumpian tactics

We have seen various flood metaphors used to describe ways to distort and destroy the democratic project in the Trump era. Scott Morrison’s accusation that he is the subject of a “political lynching” in the Robodebt inquiry fits neatly into the paradigm.

One of the strategists at the centre of creating President Donald Trump is Steve Bannon. He encouraged Trump to escalate his firehose of lies. The concept of a “firehose of falsehood” is a form of propaganda exploited by Putin constantly. The Rand corporation identified it and gave the device that label. The strategy involves a figure or regime lying hard and long enough, echoed through various platforms, to confuse the public.

Not only does the strategy escalate way beyond the ability to fact-check, but the public’s entire sense of faith in the institution of government is destroyed. This promotes helplessness and apathy.

Bannon encouraged the mendacious Trump to flood the zone with shit” to neutralise the impact of a media that could not be controlled and intimidated in quite the way that Putin’s media could. The Democrats did not concern Bannon as antagonists: removing the ability of the media to expose Trump’s hollow venality and vindictiveness in any powerful way served the team better.

Flooding the zone with shit involved maximising the use of Trump as an outrage generator. The more totally unprecedented and unhinged actions and quotes he spewed, the harder it has been for any media outlet or individual to maintain horror at a single instance. The new “normal” becomes something that would have been unthinkable a single presidential term back.

The Dark Money funded “think tanks” and strategists had spent decades creating an alternative reality for the “conservative” voter. With the aid of social media, Trump’s presidency took that basis and forged an epistemic crisis. There is no longer a shared knowledge base or ethical framework for making decisions about what a society needs to accomplish.

Trump and team’s lies about the 2020 election theft have led to the shattering of faith in the electoral process amongst Republicans. It is a dire development. The irony is that Republicans have been working for decades to tilt the electoral playing field even further in their favour than even the original structure had leaned. It is the Republicans who consistently “steal” elections.

All these lies have created a divorce between realities that it is fostering a second American civil war. The MAGA world believes that demonic forces of “woke” are an existential threat to themselves and the nation. The fact-based world fears the cultish MAGA Right will bring their guns to destroy what they fear.

One outcome of the firehose of lies and flooding the zone with shit is the discovery that breaking norms and the law are more tolerable if heaped up. A single wrong held to account is something society understands. When many wrongdoings are held to account, the situation can look like a “witch-hunt” by the opposition. One impeachment is comprehensible: two must mean the Democrats are anti-democratic.

The reward lies in doing as much wrong as can be managed.

The MAGA Right believes that old-school Republicans and the Democrats are lying about Trump’s crimes. The more repercussions he faces for the many norm-shattering acts and crimes that he has committed, the more certain they become that Biden leads an authoritarian state that works to try to destroy its opposition rather than contest it fairly.

So at every stage, Trump messages to that MAGA base that he is the target of a witch-hunt, or subject to the kind of horror perpetrated by Nazi Germany. Not only does he feed the grievance that enrages the crowd, but he also fundraises off it. It’s a lucrative con.

Australia is somewhat protected by compulsory voting, preferential voting and our independent electoral commissions from the perversions of democratic process that so mar the American system. The Albanese government is slowly deciding whether and how to tackle money and lies in politics to help arm us against America’s fate.

We have much to undo. The Coalition had taken us far down the competitive authoritarian pathway to illiberalism, echoing the Republican Party’s strategies. Corruption was so widespread in the Coalition decade that the National Anti-Corruption Commission is set to struggle to select the most pressing of the high number of referrals it has received.

Like the MAGA Republicans, Right wing figures here have begun to discredit the integrity of our elections.

Scott Morrison’s government used enough misleading material to warrant the publication of a book on the topic.

The US culture war “idiot balls,” like gas cooktops, keep bobbing up to distract from the monumental challenges that our era is facing. Even more shocking is the decision to use the benign Voice to Parliament both as a weapon against Albanese and to enrage their base with lies.

We must not allow our politicians to copy the MAGA Republicans’ despicable strategy that dictates a single wrongdoing is a mistake, but multiple wrongdoings can become the weapon to achieve victory. This is so even if politicians are only trying to save their reputations.

A firehose of wrongdoing must not become good political strategy here too.

 

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Fact hunt – the worst person of 2022

The End of an Error

Nominating those most worthy of their fall under the 2022 karma bus provides both a shortlist for fuck-knuckle of the year (FOTY) and solid evidence that the human species is at an evolutionary dead end when such bilge is the best we can come up with to run the world. It’s also a somewhat cathartic end to the year to call out these cockwombles, and it holds out some small hope for a better 2023.

I’ve pruned back a long list and may have overlooked some strong contenders – if you think someone truly worthwhile has not got a mention then please nominate them in the comments.

The Liberal Party. One of the great oxymorons of Oz politics, the Liberal (sic) Party is a collective noun for losers.

Corrupt by inclination, incompetent through habit, mean and nasty by nature there is no con they’re incapable of in any attempt to recapture the graft.

Kicked in the nuts at state, territory and federal levels, 2022 may have been the beginning of the end of this cabal of dolts, vandals and thieves.

Their dissolution can’t come soon enough – replaced by sensible independents and Greens with a few harmless nutters like Bob The Mad Hatted Katter retained as a repository for the irredeemable RWNJ vote and as occasional comedy relief – it can only be a good thing.

 

Image from Twitter (@TomRed43)

 

Spud and Suss – the meritocracy that is the “natural party of government” threw up the tuberesque undertater and his whiney sidekick. Bubba and Squeak are the best that Schrödinger’s opposition has to offer. These two are so ineffectual they barely even register as bad guys.

Liz Truss may have survived longer if she’d also gone that extra consonant – “Liz Trusss” has a certain multi-dimensional, reptilian cold bloodedness that could’ve keep the warm & fuzzy milquetoasts of the British financial establishment at bay until she fully sank the economy.

The horseshit producers from the Murdoch stable are another collective nomination. The plagiarists, phone hackers, bin rummagers, fossil fuel boosters, airheads and entropied fuddy duddies from the outrage factory of a withered, tax avoiding sociopath were left sobbing into their Tanqueray London Drys as their best efforts to turn Oz into a neo-liberal hellscape came to nought. $40 million in Lib government grants provided some consolation. Phil Coorey from planet Costello is an honorary member of this shameless Tory cheer squad.

Vladimir Putin‘s award of murderous psychopath of the century is likely assured but karma won’t have finished with him until his bloodied corpse is pelted with potatoes as it’s dragged behind a tractor through Red Square. Next year maybe. In the interim Vlad will not be admiring the views from any high windows.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest shitposter torched US$44 billion for Twitter and tanked Tesla shares as a consequence simply to show the cool guys how funny he is. He’s just a gormless twat with inherited wealth and Saudi riyals to squander but it’s his now revealed autocratic RWFWery that earns him a place on any list of prominent arseholes.

Honourable mentions

Cookers. No crazy is crazy enough for these whackadoodle ‘sovereign citizens’. Nutters desperately seeking relevance and importance as revealers of great truths in their otherwise dreary, meaningless existence?

They could be laughed off except these are the same types of deluded beer belly putschers, gravy seals and ammosexuals who invaded Washington’s Capitol seeking to murder Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi and are of the type who did murder two young coppers and a neighbour in Queensland.

Barnaby Joyce. No list of fuckwits is complete without Baranaby’s name being included.

Matthew Guy. “Call me Matt” ex-Vic Lib leader and the loser of losers smashed by Dan Andrews at the last state election. Not the worst of the worst because he’s such a loser and so never achieved the level of prominence that would have allowed him to let loose his worst mobster instincts.

Brian Houston‘s invisible BFF rewards the worthy with riches so with the tithe taps turned off Brother Brian is learning what it’s like for those of us who are out of favour with the Big Guy in the sky. Karma ran over his prosperity dogma. Sad!

Katherine Deves. Apparently there’s blokes going about chopping off their cocks so they can win ribbons at women’s swimming carnivals but like most, I can spot a genuine minge a mile away.

The final contenders

The final three are possibly obvious – they have in common a natural affinity with lying, a talent for the grift, a narcissistic self-belief that goes beyond delusion and a physical presence that would make a cadaver dog gag. They are the smirking, prosperity god-fodder who disproved the Peter Principle six jobs ago, an adulterous £5 haircut on an unmade bed and an apricot-coloured fatsuit filled with congealed hamburger grease.

ScoMo, BoJo and Fuckhead.

After an uninterrupted run 2016-2020 Trump misses out this year, a has-been loser wandering the despot kitsch of Mar-a-lago accosting patrons with his tired schtick of the Big Lie as the walls close in on him.

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson still maintains the collosal conceit of a Churchillian resurrection of his interrupted career as one of Britain’s great PMs. A dilettante, a wastrel, a shambolic opportunist and agent of chaos with no fixed principles he gave top spot as FOTY a good run but conceded the win to our very own Grange label on a goon bag – Smirko von Skidmark.

Purging Scott Morrison from our system requires that we be exposed to some bit more Scott Morrison. The brighter the light shone on the behaviour of Resting Smug Face, that reprehensible black hole of honesty where truth bends around him, the less likely it is that hypocritical God shoppers like him will ever again steal such high public office.

Smirko’s shortcomings are many, manifest and of consequence. A colourless non-entity who through happenstance, arrogance and a disdain for common courtesies and proprieties, whose abuse of trust and loyalty gained him a role for which he was entirely unfit. Devoid of decency this Jesus-espousing hypocrite bullied and hectored those least able to fight back. A mongrel; a coward loathed by those who know of him and those who know him.

The final, public humiliation of Scooter Morrison is a play in two parts – his parliamentary censure and his appearance at the Royal Commission into Robodebt.

His Scotty The Saviour-themed response to parliamentary censure included apocalyptic eschatology (“staring into the abyss”), blame-deflecting and, self-congratulatory claims to the efforts of others and wholly-invented assertions of heroism. His responses to questioning at the Royal Commission were a Morrisonian masterclass in deflection, avoidance and dissembling. If anyone was to blame it was those public servants, who upon his gaining office he instructed to do only what they were told and no more. What a gold-plated minger he is.

If justice prevails there will be part 3 – Smirko fronting the The National Anti-Corruption Commission. Perhaps there the dawning realisation that he is the most widely loathed politician in our history will elicit some <sarcasm> genuine contrition </sarcasm>.

*The End of an Error – from a sign held up at the inauguration of Joe Biden.

Former prime minister Scott Morrison does not intend to remain in parliament for the long term and is likely to start thinking about pursuing a business career in the new year, according to confidants. (Aaron Patrick, Australian Financial Review, 22/12/2022).

Who can imagine the standards of any organisation that would employ this POS?

 

This article was originally published on Grumpy Geezer.

 

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Australians must not ignore the Religious Right’s global warnings

Australians have begun to see the new face of extreme religion in our “conservative” politics. The international influences are varied and interconnected. These radical forces are not a private feature in politicians’ lives, but threaten the freedoms we value. It is only through better understanding the global impacts that we can protect our democracy.

There was jubilation around Australia at the defeat of the Morrison government in May. Some rejoiced at ousting the man himself. For others the relief was inspired by the majority uniting against a government signifying climate inaction or corruption or misogyny. Scott Morrison’s insertion of American-style religion into the Australian civic space contributed to his loss. If Australians had understood how alien this ideology is, it would have been much more central. The defeat of Morrison, however, is not the end of that religious intrusion into Australian “conservative” politics; it is part of the global phenomenon of reactionary Religious Right authoritarianism. In the month Morrison left the Lodge, the American majority was reeling at the implications of the leaked Supreme Court decision on Roe v Wade. In Europe, Queer Ukrainians were finding themselves pincered between the deep sexual stigma that pervades the culture of the invading Russians as well as the countries like Poland and Hungary where many are finding refuge. The Australian Religious Right draws on the power of the global movement’s successes like the Dobbs decision. It becomes more dangerous in its merging with secular bigotries and reactionary forces. Reflecting global political trends, it works not for “the next election, but the next generation.” It, and the culture wars that harness its votes, will not be backbenched with Morrison.

It is not only the faith-driven that make Religious Right politics a threat. These forces are bolstered by marriages of convenience between apparently incompatible forces. Secular libertarian members of the Republican Party embrace social conservatism and even perform devotion to faith to draw in the energised Religious Right voting bloc. British Tories are a dominant model for the Australian secular Right politicians with their boisterous “war on woke” which carries out overlapping attacks without the religious foundation. LGBTQI people and reproductive rights are the crucial targets for the interlinked movements. Trans people’s existence provides the wedge towards driving all LGBTQI people back into the closet. Britain has fallen from first to 14th place in LGBTQI rights rankings in only seven years, concurrent with the Tories’s Brexit debacle. Attacks on feminism from the traditional sex-role obsession of the Religious Right and defensive traditionalism of the secular Right are underpinning attacks on access to abortion. Driving women back out of the civic space and into the home is a shared passion. These campaigns are expanded in daily retail politics through disingenuous Right Wing media outlets in their culture war battles against the Left.

For less faith-driven “conservative” politicians, religion can also be deployed as a core characteristic of an embattled – mythical – national culture. Throughout the West this manifests as denoting Christianity as an integral component of Western Civilisation, also coded as White.(1) Any attention granted to First Nations or non-White people within the Right’s self-defined White nations is defined as divisive rather than reparatory. Reversing the various gains of the civil rights era is the goal. The blending of misogyny and various bigotries into the “conservative” supporter base draws misogynist Men’s Rights activists and White Supremacists into the cohort. There is a strong thread of this in Australian “conservative” politics with Tony Abbott (alongside his Budapest posse) as the most obvious warrior in defence of “Western Civilisation.” In Australia, we recently saw Bob Katter and Pauline Hanson touting their sudden interest in our Christian roots, with Katter even emulating Trump holding a bible aloft. This was posed as a rebuttal to Labor discussing a First Nations Voice to Parliament as well as the question of the relevance of Christian prayer in a secular Parliament. Inclusion is depicted as a destruction of all the glories of tradition. Diversity is an existential threat.

Pentecostal implacability

Given that the Australian “conservatism” has modelled itself particularly on its American partners for decades now, the US provides us with a critical warning. In America, the electoral contest is no longer a tussle between competing political platforms and styles; Religious Right dominance of the “conservative” party has made democracy literally impossible. Ezra Klein has analysed the current polarisation of their politics and noted that the overlap of many aspects of social identity has made political ideology far more tribal than it was historically. More problematic than that, however, is the certainty in Religious Right politics that the Left is an existential threat with no right to form government. While conservative Catholics and other faiths buttress the causes of the Religious Right in America, its dicta are dominated by Evangelical/Pentecostal tenets.(2) In this version of Christianity, Dominionism is central. This is the idea that Evangelical versions of Christianity must dominate the Seven Mountains of the civic space including government. The purity of the nation must be legislated and enforced. Within this cosmology, a secular state is a Satanic obstacle. Perhaps worse is the fact that natural disasters are seen as harbingers of End Times, so the more dramatic the impacts of the climate emergency, the more rapidly purified the nation must be.

The degree to which the growing Pentecostal movement is a poor fit with democracy requires understanding. Most institutions preach “spiritual warfare” where “literal demons” are present in people and events. Trump’s neo-charismatic “personal pastor,” Paula White, preached that Trump was fighting “a worldwide demonic conspiracy.” In this fringe world, LGBTQI people smell of demons and African and Asian sorcerers are a threat. Catholics and Mormons are said to practise dark magic. They argue that places and institutions such as bureaucracies, universities and journalism itself can be taken over by demonic forces. Spiritual warriors saw the Republican red of the map illustrating Trump’s victory as showing the “blood of Jesus” cleansing America’s sins. His election signified the looming overthrow of “Jezebel,” the literal demonic spirit behind reproductive and LGBTQI rights. The fantastical ideas that are compulsory parts of faith in these churches ready its adherents to accept other fantasies. In the pandemic era, the rapid growth of QAnon pervaded the evangelical churches, evident in Pentecostal Scott Morrison’s apology for “ritual” child abuse in Australia. QAnon’s focus on evil progressive elites stealing children was a comfortable fit for a faith that sees progressive political parties as evil. Much of the Trump support has taken on a religious devotional tone where he is the new saviour from the demonic Left.

Most Pentecostal/Evangelical traditions furthermore believe in a Rapture or Millennial Kingdom which destroys any impetus to tackle the climate crisis. Looming “End Times” create enormous anxiety about current moral status, but not about the future of the planet. This majority believes that storms and plagues are further signs of the imminence of the desired Premillennial moment. Geopolitical tensions arising from climate pressures will only be interpreted as more apocalyptic signs. Global action involves working with global political entities. Global entities, however, are depicted as aligned with the Antichrist. This is compounded by strategists within the fossil fuel sector driving Evangelicals to embrace these mineral resources as God’s gift which it would be ungrateful to leave in the ground. Rational debate is scotched in the face of divine mandate.

In this worldview, progressives are “godless.” Secularism is still linked to Communism. The freedom they demand is not “freedom from” but “freedom to.” The freedom to “force others to be free” only possible by “obedience to one narrow understanding of God’s plan.” Secular freedom, by contrast, leads to “chaos” and authoritarianism because tolerance is an imposition. The Evangelical movement’s pressure on American politics is such that no movement to protect equal rights is safe. The purity mission drives illogical policy making as well as being harmful to individuals within the churches. The attack on LGBTQI rights is such that the Southern Poverty Law Center has labelled a number of these lobby groups and churches as hate groups. The Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade and the resultant extremity of several states’ abortion laws illustrates the degree to which reproductive-aged women and AFAB people will be constrained and surveilled. Removing access to contraceptives has been raised too. The implication is that women’s access to the civic space will be revoked by uncontrolled fertility, and LGBTQI existence will be erased either visibly or actually.

This is not a movement that thinks in election cycles. It has taken almost a century for American businessmen and preachers appalled by atheist communism to make over the Republican Party as a Christian Libertarian force. Civic programs and civil rights were seen as the work of the enemy, crushing liberty. The government had no place in replacing elective charity with state programs. Instead of the sexual tolerance of libertarianism, however, this ideology is controlling. Socially, reactionary White Christians wanted their wives obedient, Segregation in place and their youth docile and chaste. Racism was inherent in White Evangelical churches, and a toxic emphasis on women’s purity and submission accompanied this. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority took the decision to unify the movement over the issue of abortion and it became a powerful force against political liberalism through the 1980s. Together with Billy Graham they brought Christian Libertarianism and the Evangelical bloc ever closer to the levers of power.

Pentecostal/Evangelicals are now central to Republican power. Donald Trump received 80% of the white Evangelical vote in 2016 and 75% in 2020. They form 35% of the Republican coalition. Trump’s personal sins are dismissed in the pursuit of the rewards he could grant for their loyalty. In 2022 his demographic offers even more fervent support for his Big Lie with the convergence between Evangelicals and Qanon followers. The labels Christian Nationalist and even Christian Fascist are being embraced by the MAGA Right now. Trump surrounded himself with Evangelical and conservative Catholic figures. He achieved the primary goal of this coalition when he handed them control of the Supreme Court, one of America’s primary law-making institutions. The Federalist Society which gave Trump the names to place on the court is led by Opus Dei-linked Leonard Leo who has packed the court with “radical schismatic Catholics.”

#TradCaths and Rad Trads

Support for Evangelical positions comes from besieged “Rad Trad” Catholics in the Religious Right coalition who believe the Catholic church has been subverted from within. For some, Pope Francis’s institution is an “an antichristic church.” Others believe that he represents “the replacement of Catholicism with a globalist, multicultural “eco-theology,” grounded in socialism.” It is out of this fear and anger that Archbishop Viganò wrote to Donald Trump in 2020 supporting a Qanon-infused crusade against the liberal elite. This crusade is intricately intertwined with a European defence of “Judeo-Christian values” and of Western Civilization. These are coded messages in the White Supremacist perception that that old Europe is being overwhelmed by an Islamogauche (progressives aligned with Muslims) takeover.

Bill Barr, Trump’s last Attorney General, delivered an address at Notre Dame university in 2019 that illustrated the anxieties in ultra conservative Catholic circles. The “militant secularists” were executing a “campaign to destroy the traditional moral order.” All kinds of “social pathology” were undermining America as a result of this progressive war on the “traditional Judeo-Christian moral system.” Groups like Church Militant present a crusader model of Catholicism which fights alongside Evangelical Christians for an end to abortion and a return to “traditional” sex roles. Church Militant is also fighting alongside Groypers – the White Supremacist trolls and thugs that threaten anyone depicted as Other, who are becoming more overtly religious in their rhetoric.

The Christian Libertarian ideology is present in this Catholicism too. Steven Bannon, Trump ally, represents the most extreme libertarian position as well as ultra conservative Catholicism. His economic position was captured in his fostering what he described as Trump’s “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Bannon embraced this as part of his anarcho-capitalist project to destroy the system. He was posited as the antithesis to the Pope in the battle for Catholic allegiance and was at the forefront of the resistance to a diverse and inclusive church, as well as America. Bannon actively worked to spread Neo Nazi messaging in his time as Breitbart executive.

European Nativist/Religious fascism

This trend coincides with a worldwide resurgence of authoritarian regimes. In classic fascist mode, a central feature is intolerance and bigotry associated with the defence of a mythical past of national glory. Religion is a key component of the culture defended, of a homogenous nation these movements believe can be recreated if only its defenders are ruthless enough. It not only excludes those who are of different “race” and religio-cultural traditions, but also the liberal and inclusive blocs within the state. The coercive push to dictate how private lives are lived, and what life choices become criminalised, is central to these populist authoritarian forces. The defence of “family values” or “traditional culture” is used to justify persecution of the targeted “out groups” in typical fascist identity politics style. These regimes depict theoretically traditional roles for women and the exclusion of LGBTQI people as critical for public safety, community, and even national security. This is true in Russia, Republican America, Poland, Hungary, and Brazil. This trend is not limited to Christian nations. Modi’s “Hindu India” vision, for instance, embraces the same “tradition” justifications for oppression.

Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant traditions all become part of a Christian fight for a West they believe to be at risk of destruction. Last year in his state of the nation address, Russian Orthodox Putin declared the “Spiritual and moral values which some countries have started to forget have made us stronger, and we will always defend them.” Both ultra conservative Catholics and American Evangelicals have seen Putin – and his Hungarian Reformed Church echo, Orban – as a hero fighting back against the marauding non-whites, liberals, perverts and feminists of the modern world. Bannon factions in Catholicism revive the belief in Moscow as the Third Rome, believing that Putin’s Russia can be a bulwark against secular modernism. Pat Buchanan speculated that Putin might give the keynote speech at the World Congress of Families a few years back, summarising the perception: Putin’s stalwart fight for the “family values” campaign contrasted shamefully with an America that had capitulated to “a sexual revolution of easy divorce, rampant promiscuity, pornography, homosexuality, feminism, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, assisted suicide – the displacement of Christian values by Hollywood values.” Russian and American Evangelical “family values” groups have been working together since the 1990s. Having fought back their own godless totalitarian regime, nationalist Orthodox Christians tell their fellow “family value” activists that the Russians have the ability to help the Westerners defeat the new liberal totalitarianism. (This extreme end of the Republican Party also supports his invasion of Ukraine which is characterized as a defence of Christian Russia from Western weakness and homosexual dissolution.)

These prejudices permeate society in the former USSR. The Tokyo Olympic coverage in Russia featured derogatory talk about the taint of “perverts” and “psychopaths” at the games. Commentators complained in horror at LGBTQI athletes, who should be segregated into their own games away from wholesome athletes. Parliamentarians joined in expressing their disgust. In Russia’s neighbour Georgia, the 2013 “pogrom” against the LGBTQI rights parade is celebrated in these circles. Levan Vasadze, Georgia’s “family-values superhero” described it as the day Georgians “pushed back against the agents of the Western ‘totalitarian dictatorship of liberalism.’” The totalitarianism these former Iron Curtain dwellers – and their Western allies – imagine is characterised as the “total exclusion of religion and religious thought.” Within this international “family values” army there is absolutely no space to allow LGBTQI existence. In their essay on this united movement in 2015, journalist and author Masha Gessen interviewed the man about to lead the World Congress of Families. This took place two years after Gessen moved from Russia to America to protect their rainbow family. They asked him if they gave up some of the rights and freedoms that, effectively, marked them as equal, could they live alongside his Christian family in amity. He said starkly: “No.”

The accelerated changes of the modernising world have been particularly challenging for the countries long kept isolated by the Iron Curtain. Modern nations in the West embracing diversity in changes such as the legalising of same-sex marriage is only part of the challenge. The exodus from the Middle East and Africa of those displaced by climate and geopolitical crises (often created or exacerbated by Western interventions – regime change, military incursions, World Bank strictures) has added to the tensions in Eastern and Western Europe. Manipulated by Right-Wing movements and parties, “offering visions of a simpler, better society: a return to a romanticised vision of the nation,” the discomfort with rapid change is funnelled into virulent bigotry. This draws on 19th century quasi-religious conceptions of the nation with moral qualities implicit: the “cultural nation” was seen as rooted in religion, the most important of the “cultural goods.”(3) The “third wave” of radical Right activity in Europe brought religion back onto its agenda. Religion has become part of distinct version of ultra-nationalism and, to some degree, a cause of it. This is the identity politics that is invisible to the mainstream, linking conservatives and the radical Right.

While the radical Right’s identity politics is distinctly national, it is international too. Orban’s ideological influence is visible in Australian “conservative” circles. On the weekend of Morrison’s defeat in Australia, the hard right American “conservative” conference CPAC was hosted in Budapest. The attendees represent the most radical and Trumpian end of their political movement, gathered in the country that overtly represents their goal for home. Orban models virulent defence of Christian and Western civilisation in his overt focus on ethnic homogeneity. Elected originally as the cool leader of the youth party, he now instead boasts of making Hungary an “illiberal democracy.” Western liberalism represents weakness, miscegeny and immorality. CPAC’s organiser described Hungary as “one of the bastions of the conservative resistance to the ultraprogressive ‘woke’ revolution.” Orban opened the conference calling for the assembled to unite. “We need to find friends, and we need to find allies. We need to coordinate the movement of our troops, because we have a big challenge ahead of us.” They share the sense that the Great Replacement is a real threat: Jewish forces are importing Third World immigrants to replace the White Christian patriots. At home in America, the New York Times reports that the Murdochs are complacent about their chief pundit regularly promoting the theory. They also report that Australian News Corp editors are taking their instructions from Carlson’s show. Carlson made the CPAC visit possible when he broadcast for a week from Budapest in 2021, celebrating authoritarian order. Orban appeared at the Dallas CPAC event in August, repeating these toxic sentiments but will leave that to his acolytes in the Sydney CPAC to take place in October.

Australia

This decade of Coalition government in Australia has been deeply shaped by the international radical Right. The influence comes from the top through opulently-funded thinktanks to the mass’s conspiracy wild-lands, connected by internet platforms. The demographics are entwined by the Right’s media ecosphere fomenting panics across the socio-economic and educational strata. They infuse a mixture of deep belief and shared strategy. The manifestation of the battle and its constant effort to radicalise are focused in “culture wars” about distortions of trivial examples of liberal speech. Its bigotry has been on display from decades of abuse of refugees exercising their right to seek safe haven through to the cynical deployment of transphobia in the 2022 election. These bigotries reflect cultural anxieties amongst conservative groups but are justified and cleansed by an association with religious doctrine and superiority.

In Australia, the combined ethnonationalist and religious fearmongering has been domesticated into the Coalition’s own policies and messaging. The growth of the Religious Right faction in the parties has come to the fore over Morrison’s tenure. Its most divisive manifestation in this last term was the attempt to pass a religious discrimination bill. The core aim of the bill was to allow religious groups, dissatisfied by the passing of marriage equality legislation, the ability to discriminate according to the tenets of their faith. In the final week of the campaign, Morrison not only reignited talk of the bill, but allegedly had transphobe Katherine Deves’s campaign out of his office. Niki Savva described moderate Liberals as believing Morrison was aiming to purge the party of the figures described as “bedwetters.” Labor stepped carefully through the landmine of the religious discrimination debate. It had traditionally been a home of a working-class Catholic vote in Australia and retains politicians from that socially conservative demographic. Apparently, Anthony Albanese worked constantly communicating with progressive and faith-driven parliamentarians to unite to negotiate a path created to wedge them. Their goal was a version that would protect faith communities of all kinds without the harmful aspects of the bill.(4) Now fringe “conservative” politicians to the right of the main parties are working with conspiracy groups such as the “freedom” network, where Pentecostal religion is evident too.

In Australia, conservative religious movements have been recorded as branch-stacking LNP branches. Candidates are selected that do not reflect the values of the party or of the region to be represented. The result is that to vote “conservative” can mean to vote Religious Right. The campaign to co-opt the Victorian Liberal Party in particular has been documented in the press. In 2017 and 2018 journalists recorded factional opposition to Mormons, conservative Catholics and Pentecostal groups targeting branches. The current campaign sees a number of very conservative preselections in the face of an attempt by the party to present itself as a progressive choice. The most notable is Moira Deeming who represents anti-trans and anti-abortion politics and was considered too extreme by Scott Morrison’s federal bloc. Last week, a new report emerged of stacking and attempts to take positions in the party’s internal state assembly.

An Existential Threat

The combined forces of religious extremism with religion as a central cultural attribute of a mythical national identity makes it a deeply dangerous force, with any groups in the community marked as a threat to the imagined homogeneity of the traditional nation targeted for increasingly ugly retribution. This perilous bigotry is used to garner support for hollowing out democracy in the interests of controlling diversity. The divisions and resulting democratic recession are disastrous in the face of the climate emergency. As the mainstream political Right becomes more colonised by these interconnected radical forces, it cripples the national and international ability to act on crises that threaten even human civilisation. As governments fail us, people in their desperation and anxiety turn to counterproductive “solutions.” The disasters and pressures inherent in the climate emergency serve to pour energy into the movements that most cripple our ability to minimise or respond to the challenges. Pentecostal religion in particular is tied to authoritarian movements around the world.

Progressives in Australia as elsewhere tend to focus on shorter term goals and risk much by ignoring the long-term strategising of the Right. The origins of the American radical Right’s production of the current moment’s crises can be sited in the Cold War, or even the Civil Rights era, depending on the narrative. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority decision in the Dodd case that overthrew Roe is only one of the cataclysms. Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence illustrates that he sees parallel precedents that made homosexuality legal and access to contraceptives possible should be overthrown too. Leading Republicans are now discussing making abortion illegal nationwide when they next hold power and moves to reverse LGBTQI equality have also been mooted. These impositions of extreme religious morality on a majority that does not support them are a culmination of years of work by political entrepreneurs of the Evangelical minority, bolstered by conservative Catholics. Legislating minority morality is only possible by undermining democracy. These same forces are at work in Australia, their enthusiasm to strip rights from Others within the nation galvanised by their peers’ success in America. The Coalition’s disdain for women in the civic space was a key factor in their May defeat. Their attacks on the nature of our democracy were legion. They continue to focus on American-style culture war battles to gin up the base even in the clear evidence of the disaster it has caused there. In concert with radicalised ethno-nationalist figures who see Christianity as a core marker of White Australian nationalism, the parties of the Australian Right are utterly infused with a toxic international Right’s concerns and strategies.

It is not just the rights of individuals but the (flawed) democracies that have gradually made room for civil rights for more groups than just property-owning White men that is at stake in the rise of the authoritarian Religious Right. These democracies are more likely than authoritarian regimes to protect the equality of Others, preventing the persecution and even the atrocities that religion-infused extremism can foster. Without data-driven secular governments, our capacity to tackle the climate emergency is crippled. It is critical that we perceive the risk that is reflected in the speeches of Scott Morrison to his Pentecostal audiences. It is not merely a foreign faith movement uncomfortably shoe-horned into our secular state; it is a threat of incalculable scope. We must work together to keep authoritarian religious radicalism out of our government.

(1) This is not limited to the West. Nor is Christianity the only faith drawn into the nativist nationalist trend. In India, the Hindutva movement aims to subdue all Indians within a Hindu nation with one faith and language. Shinto is central to a Japanese nationalist movement. Buddhism is key to Myanmar and Sri Lanka’s nationalist movements. Israel is self defining as a Jewish nation and imposing second class status on non-Jews within its borders.

(2) The overlaps and distinctions between Pentecostal and Evangelical protestant Christianity can be hard to delineate. The Pentecostal movement is the heart of the democratic crisis, with many churches infused with the Pentecostal ideas. It is the Pentecostal movement that is at the heart of the idea of Spiritual Warfare, Seven Mountains and Dominionism. Some Evangelical churches eschew these trends, but the overlap is strong particularly in the White Evangelical sphere. In the Trump and pandemic era, the American fashion has become strongly interwoven with QAnon and a deep devotion to Donald Trump. Elle Hardy’s account of the rapid growth of Pentecostalism around the world is important reading. Some institutions that are clearly Pentecostal deny the label because of the weight it has accrued. The most important unifying feature is the individual’s direct experience of the Holy Spirit. Pentecostalism is non-denominational and outside the traditional hierarchical Christian churches. Hardy estimates that globally 30% of Christians are now belong to the aberrant Pentecostal form of the faith and that by 2050, 1 in 10 people will belong to the movement.

(3) German historian Friedrich Meinecke writing in 1908 quoted in Michael Minkenberg’s chapter “Religion and the Radical Right” in the Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right. Minkenberg explores the complexity of religion as part of nationalism in increasingly secular societies.

(4) This was gleaned from a lengthy off-the-record conversation with a – then – Shadow ministerial staffer.

 

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A Tinpot Dictator?

When Scott John Morrison takes his Sunday fly-drive to leafy Yarralumla to visit His Excellency, David Hurley, AO, a former NSW Governor and his “captain’s pick” for GG, the jig is up; now everyone knows a federal election will be held 21 May and, sadly, the guess-the date-games must end, despite Morrison’s addiction to secrecy, quibbling and game playing. Things that help him lord it over other people.

Morrison loves evading or concealing truth as much as lying. “I just don’t care,” he tells ABC’s Annabel Crabb. It shows. Politics is mostly just a game to him. At the hint of a threat to his power, however, his game morphs instantly into Mortal Kombat.

ADF crew salute him, a Morrison idea, as our malignant narcissist-in-Chief alights Shark One, the QANTAS A330 VIP executive jet, his favourite boy’s toy, a Big Dick clubhouse with wings, done up to look like a business executive’s office suite with $250 million of public money. It’s more than PR. He loves to pretend he’s not just a sad, gutless, gas industry puppet. He’d take his jet to fetch the girls from school if he could.

Following protocol, Morrison knocks up his vice-regal manservant, low profile Governor-General, Dave Hurley to kick-start the election. It won’t be about policy, or even playing the game, it will be a rabid hyper partisan attack on Labor, especially its leader, Anthony Albanese. And pork-barrelling. While Shark One may soar, Morrison’s politicking plumbs the depths of the lowest gutter.

In a damaging flashback, former rival for Cook, Michael Towke, pops up to accuse Morrison of racism. Towke accuses the PM of resorting to “racial vilification” to overturn the initial ballot which Towke won convincingly. Morrison allegedly insinuated that Cook’s voters wouldn’t accept a Lebanese Australian candidate.

“At the time [in 2007] he was desperate, and it suited him to play the race card,” Towke tells The Project’s Waleed Aly,

By remarkable coincidence, during the 2004 federal campaign, when Morrison was state director of the Liberal Party, racist tactics were used against Labor candidate for Greenway, Ed Husic, not a practising Muslim.

A day before the election, a fake ALP brochure was distributed in Greenaway. “Ed Husic is a devout Muslim. Ed is working hard to get a better deal for Islam.”

Morrison wins no friends by leaving his GG call to the last possible moment – but that’s his trademark. He’d be late to his own (political) funeral. As events may prove, given the way he’s alienated women across the nation and more than a few in the Liberal branch of NSW, once a powerhouse the Coalition hoped might counter losses in other states.

Then there’s the pandemic failure. Going AWOL during the bushfires. The submarine fiasco which cost us at least $5.5 billion. The trade war with China that’s helping ruin our export trade and a fair bit of tertiary education. Morrison’s list of failures is huge.

Loyal Deputy Barnaby Thomas Gerard Joyce keeps the faith, however, if only with his followers who count on him to pick a winner. In a sensational leaked text from the Nationals’ leader composed in March 2021, Joyce confides that he does not “get along” with Morrison.

“He is a hypocrite and a liar from my observations and that is over a long time. have never trusted him, and I dislike how earnestly [he] rearranges the truth to a lie.”

A High Court challenge mounted by Matthew Camenzuli, from Parramatta, an IT mogul from the NSW Liberal conservative faction, aligned with former Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells slows things up but, here, Morrison’s only himself to blame. Getting his envoy, Alex Hawke to stall and delay local pre-selection meetings until the Federal executive would have to step in has not endeared him to everyone in the NSW branch nor nationally. Hawke is widely reviled.

Many Liberals resent his high-handed intervention in branch pre-selection. Retiring senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, stiffed for a winnable place on the ticket, calls Morrison a tyrant and a fraud who hides behind the façade of his church-going.

Others accuse him of remaking the party in his own image. Departing NSW Liberal, Catherine Cusack, joins a swelling chorus of women in Liberal politics who call Morrison a bully. He’s “ruined” the Liberal party, she says. She will not vote for him or the party at the federal election.

If you can’t run a Liberal branch, how can you run the country?

But there’s a ray of hope for ScoMo. Camenzuli’s lawyers fail to overrule Morrison’s intervention to save Environment Minister Sussan Ley, Immigration Minister Alex Hawke and North Sydney MP Trent Zimmerman from a local preselection battle that could threaten their political futures. Camenzuli sought an injunction to block the preselection of nine Liberal candidates which would bar the party from printing their names on the ballot paper.

Keeping everyone else waiting while he gets his act together gives Morrison time to win his high-stakes game. Pick his favourites. Remake the party in his own image. Above all it gets him attention. Forget the daggy dad act. This PM is a ruthless Machievallian.

Will he pull the fat out of the fire? Critics of our PM’s self-abrogating demeanour still decry the way Morrison hogged the show at last January’s Australia Day awards ceremony. Worse, Grace Tame was threatened by someone from the Office. Women vote. They won’t forgive or forget the Morrison government’s record of sexism and misogyny. Nor will they overlook the spate of Liberal women who have recently spoken out against him.

Former commercial rose-grower, Minister for Family Service and manager of government business in the senate, Anne Ruston, Minister for Women’s Safety, fails her first real test. Who threatened Grace Tame? The former Australian of the year used a Press Club Address to explain that someone from “a government-funded organisation” rang to tell Tame she must not say anything “damning” about Morrison so close to an election.

Mystified. Jane Hume adds a bit of hand-wringing. We don’t even know if it were a man or a woman, she wails. Clearly, no-one’s tried very hard to find out. Tame says that she’d prefer that the person who felt they needed to make the call should out themselves. An investigation into the call is “the very same embedded structural silencing culture that drove the call in the first place and misses the point entirely. It’s not about the person who made the call, it’s the fact that they felt like they had to do it,” Tame explains.

It’s sexism; the age-old gendered response of doubting and discrediting the victim’s story when the victim is a woman. But it’s no vote winner for over half the population.

Yet the PM seems happy. Morrison promotes Ruston to Liberal Campaign Spokeswoman. Her Labor counterpart, Katy Gallagher will not give up on women so readily.

But look over there – how good is our invisible Governor General? A big gig every three years, if only to help a PM call a fresh election or witness signatures whenever Ministers are appointed. Morrison loves pomp and ceremony. It adds a legitimacy he craves and a distraction he badly needs. Dave Hurley’s happy. He’s hoping to win a trifecta.

The Governor General’s hazy job profile makes Morrison appear almost industrious by contrast. Being GG, on the other hand, keeps you busier than “the arts” or in tertiary education, both spurned by Frydenberg in JobKeeper, despite his forty billion dollar (Joe Aston calculates) windfall, for businesses in profit despite the coronavirus pandemic.

Fan-boy Greg Jennett, a Tarzan of adulation, if not fatal attraction to the PM, and Jane Norman, the John and Betty of ABC afternoon political television, become a hot mess of running commentary on the twenty minute meeting, breathlessly spilling the beans on such essentials as Morrison’s coffee with the Governor General.

Greg and Jane kindly remind us that Yarralumla sits in 58 hectares of Canberra prime real estate, in case we miss how the trappings of office are lavished on our ruling class, while others die of malnourishment, neglect and the latest mutant strain of coronavirus in “aged care facilities” a gulag of misery where our poor, wretched, vulnerable elders pass their final days in a fog of antipsychotics in state subsidised granny farms staffed by some of the lowest paid, most highly casualised workers in Australia.

The Coalition’s Aged Care Act 1997, ushered in a flood of private investment in the exploitation and commodification of the elderly. Private equity firms, new foreign investors, superannuation and property real estate investment trusts “entered the residential aged care market.” Data on residents’ safety and wellbeing must be kept top secret.

Our current aged care crisis stems from Howard’s Aged Care Act, writes Dr Sarah Russell. His government subsidised private health insurance is still helping scupper Medicare.

Amazingly, Dave, a spry 68 year-old corporate state welfare beneficiary with all his own teeth, is at Yarralumla this weekend and not entertaining Prince Andrew, who’s been known to slip in, sans fanfare, for a quick visit, as he did in 2018, to promote Pitch@Palace, his matchmaking of investors and corporate partners with startup companies. Now it’s wound up after Andy’s misadventures with underage women abroad, stories which his mother, Queen Elizabeth II refuses to believe, preferring the much more plausible “I was at Beatrice’s Birthday at Woking Pizza Express” alibi.

Pitch generated £1.345 million in economic activity, 6,323 jobs and 39% of its winners were women. Andy did quite well, too. Pitch@Palace Global Ltd, the private company set up to run the events, had a clause in its terms and conditions about its entitlement to a 2% equity share for three years for any company that went through its program.

Other royals also are put up at Admiralty House, the GG’s other historic pad on Sydney harbour with ten bedrooms enjoying views of the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge. Hosting VIPs keeps the Hurleys busy. Then there’s Linda’s staff singalongs.

And her serenades. The Guardian Australia reports Hurley wandering betwixt tables of war widows (average age 81, according to Dave), microphone in hand, leading them in song over cucumber and smoked salmon sandwiches. Bit of dill with that, dearie?

“You are my sunshine” is the unofficial vice-regal national anthem – but only the chorus. The verses are a bit downbeat if you Google them. Don’t try this at home.

A staff of seventy-six don’t just run themselves and there’s travel involved in GG. All adds up. Representing HM at home and Australia overseas costs a million a year.

But the nation has to look after its investment. Hurley’s annual salary is around half a million. Of course, a governor general does get a generous pension scheme with that.

As Morrison arrives, his white BMW 7 Series Prime Ministerial limousine with AFP escort ghosting up the long drive, Dave’s lurking purposefully near the entrance to Yarralumla, a “colonial revival” pile set in what remains of an historic sheep station.

The property retains the original shearing shed atop a tumulus of a century and a half of merino droppings. A heritage overlay of decaying sheep shit is a fitting tribute to the types who led the colonial frontier wars waged by European imperial invaders on indigenous Australians in the name of the same British Crown that Governor-General Hurley represents.

The GG has his Mont Blanc Meisterstück Gold-Coated Fountain Pen uncapped, ready to sign a chit to let Morrison dissolve parliament and call a federal general election, a minefield of lies, furphies, turpitude and gratuitous character assassination which our GG can avoid entirely by express permission of the electoral commission. But he does get to look on.

A federal election campaign is a made for TV event just like Master Chef or Hard Quiz or The Melbourne Cup and corporate media regale us with the day’s political stunts.

There’s a scorecard on performance in The Herald Sun and The Daily Telegraph and The Australian as in any horse race commentary. Tallying up the pratfalls displaces any more insightful commentary on commercial TV – Buckminster Fuller’s “bubblegum for the eyes.”

Analysis of issues and policies is supplanted by spectacle and mindless Vox Pops. In a rare departure, this year, however, the Sydney Morning Herald takes Morrison to task for his broken promise over a federal ICAC. Attempting to blame Labor doesn’t pass the pub test.

Imagine if Dave Hurley were to put his mouth where his money is. Our GG, would refuse Morrison permission to hold an election. Nope, ScoMo you’ve abused the trust of the Australian people. Piss off back to Bronte and stop wasting my time.

If only. A relic of colonial rule, a GG hasn’t colluded with the judiciary and The Palace to remove a PM since Whitlam, but it pays to keep him on side and avoid bagging Pine Gap, 16 km south west of Alice Springs, the eyes and ears of the US military, since it went on line in 1969. One of its uses is to provide information to aim drones.

If there’s a moral problem with hosting an outfit which is staffed largely by employees of Boeing Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics – along with niche companies that work exclusively for the CIA and NRO, such as Leidos, Scitor and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) our government doesn’t see it. Put simply, we host companies who profit from war and enable them to collect the data they need to make war.

In fascinating technological updates the satellites have multiplied to at least thirty-eight, which have the capacity to monitor everything from your text message to Dominos to thermal evidence of Chinese hypersonic missile launches. All of this vastly increases our value as a nuclear target. It could give us leverage in a more equal relationship with the US but given our lickspittle foreign policy don’t hold your breath.

Above all, Pine Gap makes Australia complicit in war crimes. Last December, the New York Times lists over 1300 reports of civilian casualties since 2014. Many are children, in wars that the US portrays as being waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.

Yet, “American air wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan have been plagued by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, thousands of civilian deaths – with scant accountability.”

But does our GG task our PM with this problem? Nope. Dave’s famous for his saying “the standard we walk by is the standard we accept.” He’s a big fan of ethical leadership, a political oxymoron “borrowed” by David Morrison in a sermon on another unicorn, gender equality in the army. Dave M later confesses on Q&A he’s “pinched” the line.

The PM just loves Dave H and the whole vibe of the ethical leader thing, which like cleanliness, is next to godliness and getting professionally photographed at a Hillsong service, eyes wide shut. Photographed? At least one former member of the parliament has read her King James Bible,

“And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites. are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and. in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.”

“His actions conflict with his portrayal as a man of faith; he has used his so-called faith as a marketing advantage,” says senator Concetta Fieravanti-Wells.

Federal Election 2022 is to be a forty-one day endurance event, not simply in order to dazzles us with hi-viz photo-opportunities, vapid talking points, or disgruntled punters in pubs, but to buy time, a gamble given incumbents generally decline in popularity over a long campaign. Opinion polls predict a Coalition defeat, Liberal/National 34%, ALP 36%. -7% swing against the Coalition but just a 2.6% swing in favour of the ALP

Perhaps, like Mr Micawber, Morrison is hoping something will turn up. As it does. Albo doesn’t know what the cash rate is and he can’t recite the official unemployment rate.

Of course there’s outcry from the usual suspects, “Unfit to be PM,” decrees Murdoch’s top toadie, Terry McCrann in the expatriate billionaire’s Australian, while AFR, shocker, Phil Coorey gasps “A horror,” leaving Professor Judith Sloan, alone, to hype the Labor leader’s howler into his “Party’s complete misunderstanding of the jobs figures.”

Seriously? Even John Howard who failed the same gotcha in ‘07 is underwhelmed. Babies Overboard Howard bobs up in WA to spare Morrison getting the bum’s rush. Again. Abbott has Covid. Or he’d be there with (bicycle) bells on. Don’t discount a late showing.

True, the Man of Steel’s got other things on his mind like minding Ken Wyatt in Hasluck – it’s not so long ago that Joe Aston had word Kenneth might defect to Labor.

And Swan’s Kristy McSweeney is busted misquoting herself on how if you can’t tell a bloke from a sheila just walking down the street, you probably shouldn’t be aiming for Canberra.

Is that a serious question? Okay, well Anthony Albanese didn’t know the unemployment rate. So what?”

Morrison’s first gaffe is a big one. He fudges when asked whether Alan Tudge, guardian of the curriculum from the left-wing, is currently education minister – (a Tudge of class?)

His reply that Al is “technically” still in cabinet is at odds with earlier assurances that he’d resigned. Of course, this could be merely another Morrison lie, but it does seem to be a clumsy attempt to divert press from a half million payout to former staffer Rachelle Miller which fails to keep the (unconsummated) affair off the front page.

First up, Tudge claims, “we never had sex.” They were “intimate” four times; sleeping naked together but there was no funny business. Sounds very plausible.

The minister without portfolio may be inspired by Gandhi’s tales of sleeping naked with young women who also took their clothes off just to test his chastity.

With Tudge mounting such an impregnable defence, it is little wonder that Morrison has had to pivot on his earlier version of events in which the Education Minister had surrendered his portfolio for his own sake.

No point asking why Miller was paid “well over $500,000”, if nothing untoward transpired between minister and media adviser. $500,000 is the sum whispered to have been his payout when Morrison himself was sacked as head of Tourism Australia citing irreconcilable differences with boss, Fran Bailey amidst claims tendering processes were not adhered to.

As for any ministerial code violation, the non-bonking occurred before the advent of Morrison’s code. Yet Miller was promoted while in an intimate relationship with her boss. The PM is OK with that. Yet Miller wants the details released. Samantha Maiden reports that legal costs in six figures are also to be paid by the Morrison government.

“He has chosen for the sake of his health and his family for a period of time to stand aside from the ministry,” Morrison claims.

“But here’s been no other education minister sworn in, no-one went out to the Governor-General, we’re very transparent about all of that.”

Morrison is creating an issue for himself in refusing Miller’s request that he release details. Unwisely.

Moonlighting as Education Minister, albeit unsworn, is Stuart “Rolex” Robert, the PM’s prayer partner, a tricky phrase now, given recent whistle-blower revelations that senior Liberal Party figures abuse the parliamentary prayer room for congress of a baser nature.

None of the parties implicated: MP Tim Wilson, former defence minister Christopher Pyne and others, or the investigating law firm Sparke Helmore, even try to rebut the story, notes Michael West. Give it time.

More of a problem to his own side than any scandal involving rent boys plying their trade in consecrated space within the House is Mendacity Morrison’s contempt for democracy and his addiction to micromanagement.

Notorious for his pledges that never eventuate, the PM is now hated by NSW Liberals for being too “hands on”.

Former Cook MP, Stephen Mutch, a self-styled moderate who credits himself with inventing the term if not founding the group, calls Scotty a “tinpot dictator” for riding rough-shod over democratic local branch pre-selection processes, to choose his own candidates for key NSW seats. Mutch is shocked at the way the moderate minority now runs the branch.

“Over decades … I saw how the faction changed from a relatively informal group of friends with a fair degree of collective decision-making into a more formalised operation run by politicians, staffers and some party activists,” Mutch tells The Saturday Paper.

As the former moderate explains, the moderates became more high-handed, serving the personalised agendas of a few at the top. Later, the faction morphed into “a professionalised, essentially privatised operation, run by a small coterie of business lobbyists.”

Which is where we are today.

All is not lost, however. Scotty is still a useful tool to the fossil fuel lobby, an old mate of Big Mining and our media oligopoly, Rupert, Kerry and tagalong Peter along with other shonks, shills and big-shots in Australia’s oligarchy.

But just to nip it in the bud, a few of his man-servants in the PMO, big up Morrison with Bushmasters and coal, while Rio shows it hasn’t blown up all its moral high ground along with the 46,000-year-old rock shelters at Juukan Gorge, by taking over RUSAL’s twenty per cent share in QAL’s aluminium smelter, in response to Russia’s attempt to obliterate Ukraine. That’s fixed Putin’s wagon.

How good is a Morrison government which struts the world like a colossus, punching above its weight? Shirt-fronting Putin. “Keeping Australia Safe” is not just hairy-chested electioneering or the Crosby-Textor textbook stunt of creating an external threat tactic.

Nor is this self-interested opportunism by Morrison’s omnishambles of a government plumbing record lows in all the opinion polls. Throw another dead cat on the table. We are the hawks of AUKUS keepers of the sacred flame of the temple of the rules-based order to which Australia, as US deputy Marshall, is so solemnly and selflessly pledged.

Not only does ScoMo continue to wow the international community with his statesmanship, he buys seventy thousand tonnes of Whitehaven coal which the big Liberal donor can’t sell, it’s still sitting in Newcastle until a hapless crew is press ganged into taking it to Odessa, currently in range of Russian rocketry, and on to Ukraine.

True, he’s copped a few shockers recently, including that’s just the price of decisive leadership. OK he may be “a complete psycho”, a “hypocrite and a liar “a fraud” to his own team, but a clutch of Liberal women, his “crumb maidens” as Amy Remeikis calls the women who support Morrison’s patriarchy for scant reward, step forward to back up his latest claim that his high-handed intervention in NSW politics stems from his unbridled feminism and his need to step in to protect a few good women.

It’s farcical, writes The Monthly’s Rachel Withers that Morrison can claim that he stood up for women in an intervention intended to save the seats of two men and woman.

Is he all fake religion and no moral compass? Morrison simply cannot be trusted, warns Fierravanti-Wells who is dropped to an unelectable spot on the Liberal senate ticket in favour of party apparatchik, Marise Payne, in number one spot for time-serving, with another former army officer, Jim Molan, butcher of Fallujah, in at number three.

It’s already turning nasty: in second spot is Nationals’ top NSW Senate candidate, Ross Cadell, another Nat in a hat, who threatens to “drop shit” on the party’s Hunter candidate James Thomson in a public row at Warners Bay Hippo Espresso cafe 20km south of Newcastle, if Thommo does not redistribute $120,000 in donations.

You can see why Cadell has beaten the venerable, born-again John Anderson, Joyce’s mentor, a man with a Big Mining background as well as a former Nationals leader.

“While professing to be a man of faith,” the retiring senator says, sporting a huge crucifix in her bitter Goodbye To All That speech, he is “adept at running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds, lacking a moral compass and having no conscience.”

Don’t hold yourself back, Connie. (As Morrison and his team insist on belittling the former Liberal senator, much as the PM does with “Grace” and “Brittany”.)

Team Morrison rushes to point out that hell hath no fury like a NSW senator relegated on the ballot paper. Connie’s just disappointed. A pile-on of other furious colleagues ensues, including much of the NSW Liberal Party. But ScoMo, a work of performance art in progress, won’t let a few dud reviews put him off his game.

Good Friday, Morrison tells national media how Jen and the girls go to church at Easter. Albo, Tony Abbott and 5000 others also attend Sydney’s Maronite Christian Mass. Easter is a time of hope he says, while claiming on national TV, religion is such a personal thing for him.

But there’s revived interest in how the PM deposed Lebanese-Australian and Maronite Christian Michael Towke in a dirty bid for pre-selection in Cook in 2007. So Morrison chooses a service in Victoria at Syndal Baptist Church with Gladys Liu MP, who failed to disclose her links with the Chinese government before preselection in Chisholm, a marginal Liberal seat.

There were also issues with an undisclosed donation to the Liberals of $37,000, together with questions as to how exactly the MP raised a million dollars for the party.

But Easter is a time of hope. No doubt Dave gives Scott a few pointers on the PM’s integrity commission model. Its architect, former Attorney-General, Christian Porter resigned over an anonymous donation or blind trust he’d accepted to pay his legal fees in a defamation case against ABC investigative journalist, Louise Milligan, a case he abandoned.

Ethical leadership is costly. The PM spends big money to get his own way in a high stakes poker game which goes right to the High Court over whether he can override local branches’ preferences in Liberal preselection in NSW. Chief Justice, Susan Kiefel says he can.

Not that Morrison gives a toss. It’s our money he’s spending. Has there ever been a bigger spending, higher taxing government? But the political cost of alienating so many NSW Liberals is huge. It’s already undone him in Warringah where his transphobic captain’s pick, Katharine Deves, proves a dud, with her social media post about “surgical mutilation”.

Having the arrogance to believe you know best and bypassing the local democratic process (with a bit of help from Premier Perrottet) leads to a poor choice?

Who’d have known?

Anti-trans activism could derail the Coalition’s election campaign. It triggers a pivot. Morrison backflips on his plan to dog whistle prejudice, intolerance and ignorance. He withdraws his support from Tassie Senator Claire Chandler’s bill banning transgender women from playing women’s sports, after he cops flak from Liberal “moderates” and independents.

Incredibly, the PM lies about why he pulls rank on NSW pre-selectors. The “menacing controlling wall-paper”, as former Liberal MP Julia Banks calls him, pretends to ABC 7:30 he’s a knight in shining armour rescuing women from “factions” whom he leaves unnamed, as if he’s just being protective; one of his most outrageous lies to date.

“Sussan Ley, one of my finest cabinet ministers and one of our most successful women members of parliament, was under threat. She was under threat from factions within the Liberal Party and I decided to stand up to it,” Morrison says.

“I’m very serious about having great women in my ranks…Fiona Martin was another.”

But Julia Banks tells a different story. “It was the three months of Morrison’s leadership that … was definitely the most gut-wrenching, distressing period of my entire career.”

Morrison an advocate for women? It’s risible and – as The Monthly’s Rachel Withers notes, it’s insulting to women.

“The claim is laughable. If there’s anyone Morrison was trying to save it was factional consigliore Alex Hawke in the seat of Mitchell, and his overarching aim was to maintain control of the numbers in the party. At the end of the day, the only person Scott Morrison truly stands up for is Scott Morrison.”

 

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Scott Morrison’s national security fail

The Morrison Government likes to flap their arms and say they’re strong on national security, but the evidence actually proves otherwise.

It has been reported today in The Guardian the American Government is privately saying that Australia has dropped the ball when it comes to the Solomon Islands. Indeed, the foreign minister hasn’t visited the Solomon Islands to discuss the situation with China, nor has Mr Morrison for that matter, and this national security failure in our backyard has disappointed the Americans.

This situation regarding the Solomon Islands only proves the Morrison Government is incompetent on national security, for many reasons.

I kindly ask you take your minds back to 11 September 2015, when The Guardian published footage of Mr Dutton, Mr Abbott and Mr Morrison indulging in Mr Dutton’s recorded comments of; “Time doesn’t mean anything when you’re, you know, about to have water lapping at your door.” Mr Abbott laughed at the remark, and Mr Morrison nodded his head before realising the boom Mike and cameras were on. This insensitive, or may I even say incendiary, remark by Mr Dutton enraged our Pacific neighbours. It was a huge diplomatic blunder that enraged our Pacific island neighbours, and despite as reported in The Guardian on 13 September 2015 an apology was made by Mr Dutton he still managed to further outrage our Pacific neighbours by saying, “it was a light-hearted moment with the Prime Minister.” What could possibly be light-hearted about island nations going under water because of climate change? Neither Mr Abbott nor Mr Morrison made any form of apology to our Pacific neighbours, nor did they admonish Mr Dutton.

As reported in the Australian Financial Review on 21 August 2020, short-term thinking by the Morrison Government towards foreign policy had become by then the political norm. The Morrison Government placed 1,000 potential coal jobs ahead of the Turnbull Government’s ‘Pacific Step Up’, announced in 2017 to counter China’s growing influence in the Pacific. Once again, this failure in foreign policy and national security by the Morrison Government enraged our Pacific neighbours who were having to address climate change driven rising sea levels.

To add insult to injury Mr Morrison further insulted our Pacific neighbours at the Pacific Islands Forum in October 2019. The Guardian reported on 23 October 2019, the former prime minister of Tuvalu said he was “stunned” by Scott Morrison’s behaviour at the Pacific Islands Forum, which he thought communicated the view that Pacific leaders should; “take the money … then shut up about climate change.” Fiji’s Prime Minister, Frank Bainimarama, described Australia as “very insulting and condescending” in climate talks. The Pacific leaders also said the funding was repackaged from the existing ODA [official development assistance] to the Pacific and other sectors. That is a familiar story when it comes to the Morrison Government.

In an open letter dated 1 December 2020 all the leaders of our Pacific neighbours criticised Australia’s response to climate change (reported in The Guardian on 1 December 2020). Rather than being conciliatory and seeking to come to a mutually agreeable position, Mr Morrison maintained his rambunctious attitude towards the Pacific leaders by saying; “Australia is successfully meeting our commitments and our targets and in fact we are exceeding them,” a claim which was substantially untrue.

On 2 November 2021 it was reported in the PNG Attitude Mr Morrison was still not listening to the Pacific leaders about climate change, a matter of major international embarrassment for Australia regarding our ongoing failure with our foreign affairs and national security policies in the Pacific. Mr Morrison announced at Glasgow in November 2021 an extra $100 million a year for the next five years to cover all Pacific Island and South-East Asian countries which left his audience cold. Pacific leaders had told Mr Morrison they would rather he made sharper cuts to Australia’s emissions. Fiji Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama said he told Morrison to slash Australia’s emissions by 2030. Mr Morrison has of course remained obstinate even up to today with an ineffectual 2030 target of a 28% reduction in emissions by 2030.

So, this national security and foreign policy failure is not a recent phenomenon, it has been 7 years in the making of successive Liberal governments insulting our Pacific neighbours, including how the Liberals have treated our Pacific neighbours’ concerns about climate change. What is most concerning is that after it was reported a number of weeks ago the Solomon Islands was entering into a closer relationship with China, not one single member of the Morrison Government travelled to the Solomon Islands to address the relationship with China, until last night after Mr Albanese called out the government for this national security disaster.

Of course, the majority of the Fourth Estate have ignored the Morrison Government’s massive national security failure, but the Americans aren’t happy with Australia for dropping the ball, and of course, the Port of Darwin has been previously leased to China.

This is undoubtedly the most embarrassing era for us in foreign affairs policy, and the Morrison Government has compromised our national security in the Pacific.

Vote the Morrison Government out, Australia.

 

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Labor, Schrodinger’s Cat And The Amazing Disappearing Man…

It’s quite interesting to examine the contradictions as politicians face the coming election.

Take Labor. We’re told that Labor are captive of the unions, that they spend too much and that they tax too highly, However, as the campaign begins we are also hearing that we have no idea about Labor in government and that they aren’t putting their policies out there. The political equivalent of Schrodinger’s Cat.

Schrodinger’s Cat for those of you who haven’t either read up on Quantum physics or watched “The Big Bang Theory” wasn’t an actual cat, but a thought experiment where Schrodinger’ theorised about a cat trapped in a box with a vial of poison which may or may not have been opened. Therefore, Schrodinger argued that until we open the box, the cat can be considered both alive and dead, which I’d argue that after a few days with no food or water the cat can pretty much be considered dead, but for the purposes of Schrodinger’s thought experiment, the fact of the cat being both alive and dead was central to some point he was trying to make about the problems with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics…

The best way to understand it, is to think of Alan Tudge. He was cleared of breaching ministerial standards by an investigation which didn’t speak to his accuser and then he stood down from his ministerial role, but – according to Mr Morrison yesterday – Tudge is still in the Cabinet. Like the cat, Mr Tudge is in a sealed space and we have no way of knowing whether he’s actually going to be a minister or not until the Cabinet is opened after the election.

Anyway, the Coalition and some of the media have found their own version of Schrodinger’s cat when it comes to the Labor Party: We don’t know enough about them and, rather than take a chance on the unknown, we should stick with Scot Morrison because we know what he’s like and it’s better to stick with a lying, cheating, bullying, rorting incompetent who makes curries every time something bad happens in the hope that people will mock his curry making and forget whatever disaster happened in the precious week. On the other hand, Labor is clearly the party that can’t be trusted with the economy because well, it’s in a difficult position at the moment and you don’t want to hand it over to someone else because the Liberals were the ones who’ve presided over the first recession in Australia for nearly thirty years, but now everything’s ok again, and we’ll drag out the Back In Black mugs to show just how well, we would have done if only we hadn’t had things go wrong which -even though it was under our watch – it was nothing to do with us because who can control the economy? Until we open the box, Labor is both a mystery with no policies and also the party who has all the wrong policies.

The Liberals also understand about cost of living pressures. The Budget included measures to help with these: If you’re on a welfare payment you get $250 which should tide you over for the next three years. However, if you’re a low-income worker, you’ll get (up to) an extra $450 when you do your tax return which is a one-off measure to help with your decision to vote for the Coalition.

Whatever happens in the next few weeks, this election will be all about character. Again we’ll be given the choice between a STRONG leader who stands up to people and how some people call it bullying just because he calls people into a room and threatens them with consequences over their recent behaviour, and an Opposition leader who is too weak to answer questions… Yes, I can see Anthony Albanese standing at a press conference being asked why he won’t appear at press conferences and answer questions about whatever it is that Scotty has told the press pack to ask, only to have Albo point out that he’s just answered the question without rejecting its premise even though the premise was completely rejectable… This will be followed by a question about why Labor is a policy-free zone, where he points out policies on Aged Care, Childcare, the environment, climate change and an integrity commission… Then he’ll be asked how he’s going to pay for the policies he doesn’t have.

Yes, one of the charges that will be levelled at our Prime Minister is that he has misunderstood the old saying that when the going gets tough, the tough get going,, and that it doesn’t actually mean that you’re meant to disappear in a crisis. However, calling the PM names like “The Invisible Man” and “The disappearing actor” or “That Cowardly POS” is not really fair, because, well, it’s Anthony Albanese who seems to have disappeared without trace.

There seems no acknowledgement of his twenty-six years in Parliament, his campaign against nuclear energy, his role as manager of Opposition business, his ministerial roles as in Infrastructure & Transport and in Regional Development, or even his role as Deputy PM. Although the role of Deputy PM is clearly not a very important one because the Liberals allow the Nationals to pick it. It’s rather like when you let your children decide what they’ll have for dinner because it’s their birthday. It may be a shocking choice in the healthy eating department but it’s not like you’re going to let them have their choice about anything that has long term consequences.

Yes, it seems that Anthony Albanese is the one who’s disappeared and not Scott Morrison… although we never seem to hear about why he was sacked by Fran Bailey when he was at Tourism Australia.

 

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Fake democracy

Leaders from “approximately 110 countries were invited to take part in” President Biden’s two-day Summit for Democracy.

The complete list of participating countries can be found here. You’ll notice that Australia attended (represented by Prime Minister Prime Minister Scott Morrison), which I will get to shortly.

President Biden focused on a few issues, including “election integrity, countering authoritarian regimes and bolstering independent media.”

It is the latter that I wish to comment on.

The President clearly takes independent media seriously, requesting “$236 million dollars in the 2022 budget to support independent media around the globe, announcing that:

“A free and independent media [is] the bedrock of democracy,” Biden said in remarks kicking off the virtual Summit for Democracy. “It’s how the public stays informed and how governments are held accountable.”

Let’s repeat that. “It’s how the public stays informed and how governments are held accountable.”

Scott Morrison should have excused himself at that very moment. If a democracy means that you encourage independent media or independent journalism, then ours is a fake democracy.

Why?

Consider this:

Amendments to the Federal Treasurer’s media bargaining code will be tabled in the New Year.

In a nutshell, if passed, it will mean that in Australia, Facebook and Google can only publish articles from the Murdoch media, Kerry Stokes media, and Fairfax/Channel 9.

Basically, it will be ensure that the voices of independent (or dissenting) media is muffled in the lead up to the next election.

Consider also, that the largest media empire in Australia, the Murdoch media, do absolutely nothing to hold the Morrison government to account. If anything, they seem to behave like the government’s mouthpiece.

The two considerations above should disqualify us from calling ourselves true democracy.

 

 

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Morrison woos Gladys to attack ICAC

You can smell the exhaust, the burnt rubber and a thousand cigarettes, this is a crowd in love with living dangerously, breaking rules, especially the dictates of reason and common sense – the perfect setting for larrikin-lad, Scott Morrison, to head down to the racetrack at Bathurst’s Mount Panorama leaving Labor’s leader Anthony Albanese in Ashfield, flower of Sydney’s inner west to promise A Better Future, winning his listeners with a speech of passion, principle and authenticity.

The Liberal Party revs its gas guzzling 5.4 litre double-overhead cam V8. 447kW. It’s a grunt stunt. Our bloke’s bloke, PM –one of Morrison’s favourite avatars- along with Bunnings Dad’ and The Chosen One, to whom God speaks out of a photo of an eagle -is strapped into a Gen3 Ford Mustang for a mad lap at Bathurst, NSW’s petrol-head heartland, a bastion of toxic masculinity in an act of homage to a St Hydrocarbon shrine.

The ritual visit offers testosteronic risk-taking, horsepower and reckless endangerment – (how good is a near death experience?) – and at flag fall, high on hi-octane nitro, Morrison declares war on ICAC; calls the commission a kangaroo court.

Not that Scotty’s word means much, even this egregiously false smear. Macron destroyed forever the Liar from the Shire’s plausible deniability, outing, for the world to see, a deceitful, dishonest shonk. “I don’t think. I know.” Our PM’s a type the bard had in mind, “… a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker, the owner of no one good quality.”

Coalition water-boy Simon Birmingham rushes out of Kirribilli’s BS Castle and on to the field of Mars or Sky News or the Coalition’s ABC, to douse the flames after Macron sets fire to Morrison’s name. Dares call out a liar when he sees one. It’s all the fault of the media, says Birmo.

It’s only an issue because it’s being reported on. Just a beat-up, he says, as his PM’s reputation amongst key leaders of state becomes synonymous with deceit, distrust and duplicity. And disinformation, as in his latest slur on the NSW ICAC – a desperate attempt to discredit a body or its federal analogue which he knows full well would have a field day with his own corruption.

Not that Morrison will do anything. Act on his ICAC misgivings? He’s all talk. Scotty’s just a passenger along Conrod Straight, but in a post-Cobargo Australia, no-one expects him to hold a steering wheel.

Yet he’s firing on all three cylinders. An air kiss to Grid Girl, Gladys, completes the PM’s triple-pronged attack. He wows those few who revere St Gladys as a martyr to a monster ICAC, by cheering his favourite filly on in a race, whom, “close sources” say, is a hundred to one chance to even enter. There is also the teensy problem of Morrison’s picks all being duds, like Warren Mundine in Gilmore.

Morrison doesn’t stoop to ask the disgraced premier. He’s The Prime Minister, as he made clear to Julia Banks and other Liberal women he’s coerced. Of course, Glad’s hot to trot – she just can’t wait to be Morrison’s quocker-wodger after being bullied in National Cabinet. Privately, she calls Morrison “evil” and “a bully”, according to Peter Hartcher’s impeccable contacts.

But the PM has plans for her. The Australian reports that Morrison’s even intervened to extend the deadline for pre-selection applications, to 16 January, a move which, some gush, will give Glad more time to make up her mind, but which is also Morrison’s cynical each-way bet to accommodate the ICAC finding.

Even, then her odds are a bit iffy. True, The Warringa Liberal Preselection Stakes has only once not been won by a Tory candidate since its inception in 1922. Yet, apart from Zali Steggall, who won with a thirteen percent swing against Tony Abbott, in 2019, it’s also been a blokes-only show.

In a Steggall-Berejiklian contest, the incumbent must start as favourite, surely, before you even get to the political back-flip Gladys would have to do on climate change. In a state that’s run by the coal industry she, like former Energy Minister Matt Keane, favour a 50 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Morrison would have her scream at Labor for daring to suggest 43 percent?

While you can always back a nag called Self Interest because you know it will run on its merits, even folk in Sydney’s richest electorate are increasingly averse to cooking the planet, polluting precious waterways or voting for a candidate who helped bring COVID to Australia. Not just once.

But this is no spontaneous joy ride or gibe. Or punt. Everything with Morrison is a calculation.

Morrison’s 220 kph spin screams “un-woke bloke”- just as his gibe at the ICAC is so wrong that top silks take him to task. Expect to see a signed page in The Australian paid for by eminent judges, QCs, SCs and other members of the legal fraternity condemning Morrison for his slurs on the ICAC.

Let them protest. It’s all publicity. Tough-guy branding. Aloha, ScoMo the Brave. Above all, it’s part of his eternal, personal jihad on accountability as is his outrageous spruiking of Gladys Berejiklian.

Backing ScoMo’s captain’s call are a swag of Liberals. The PMO’s even dragged alleged Iraqi war criminal, John Howard, a narrow, mean-spirited little man, the “lying rodent” as George Brandis calls him, a moral and intellectual pygmy who frittered the proceeds of the mining boom on tax breaks for the wealthy while giving Australia a meaner, more divided society, but with school chaplains, babies overboard, more funds for private schools and Robert Hill’s Kyoto credits scam.

Howard raised up the rich and the strong, corporations over the vulnerable, the poor and wage earners. He divided us across most public policy areas notes The Canberra Times Crispin Hull.

Yet he’s a Liberal icon whose backing ensures Gladys’ preselection. If Gladys were to run.

Glad’s Morrison’s human shield, observes Katharine Murphy in a shrewd insight into Morrison’s war on an external scrutiny he can’t control and doesn’t care for. Berejiklian, certainly would feel used being dragged into the PM’s defence of his indefeasible delay of a federal ICAC nor the absurdly, toothless tiger proposed by the sandgropers’ Solon; MP for Pearce, retiring scion of a Liberal dynasty, Christian Porter – son of Olympic high jumper Chilla Porter – for whom no bar was too high – a limbo bar ICAC model (how low can you go?) which is designed to further hide MP’s corruption from the light of day. Even their fake proposal fails to get up because Morrison fears amendments that may give it teeth to bite him. Luckily, there’s always a scapegoat in the house.

In Morrison’s virtual reality, Labor is to blame for a thousand days’ delay in his government’s slow bicycle race to get its Clayton’s Federal ICAC bill through parliament and on the statute books. The claim is balderdash yet it gets repeated verbatim on the news. As does Berejiklian’s fake Warringah candidacy – who is not only applying for pre-selection, she’s in like Flynn according to most outlets.

Or giving former Winter Olympian Zali Steggall a downhill run for her money.

Oddly, Vox pops with voters in Warringah suggest Gladys would have Buckley’s chance of victory as federal Liberal candidate for Warringah, Tony Abbott’s former electorate, a Northern Sydney, former Liberal stronghold, whose current incumbent, independent Zali Steggall, cares about the environment, climate change and the need to preserve a world for our children. And has integrity.

Gladys for Warringah is, moreover, an untried filly over the distance with a lot of lead in the saddle. Her preparation for a shift into federal politics has been less than ideal. That’s the track talk.

Changing metaphor, in honour of the Bard, to Bathurst, the talented Joel Jenkins sums up the tactic,

The LNP, desperate from the loss of experienced crew and some promising drivers, looking at its outdated build and realising this might be its last attempt at glory, is looking toward former disgraced and disqualified prodigy, Gladys Berejiklian, to add some much needed calm into the team. This is despite her bringing the sport into disrepute, awaiting a decision from the race marshals and in spite of no indication from her personally.

The ordure first hits the fan, October 12, 2020, when Berejiklian outs secret lover, Wagga Wagga MP, rustic charmer, and notorious urger of the first degree, spiv, Daryl Maguire.

Silver-tongued Dazza sweeps Gladys off her feet, with his debonair charm, wit and his schemes to make himself rich out of their liaison. But true love never runs smooth. Especially in the classic country and western, Gladys finds herself in. So, she says. He was her man, but he was doing her wrong. Yet they are Frankie and Johnny for at least five years.

September 13, 2015, the premier of the premier state ditches Daryl and agrees to support an inquiry into his business interests. Yet, out of the blue appears a silver lining to the gold standard bust-up when who should happen along but high-profile barrister Arthur Moses, SC, who represents Gladys at the corruption hearing into Maguire. By June 2020, Arthur and Glad are seeing each other.

Daryl turns out to be such a political liability that Gladys tells her on-air confessor, spiritual adviser, KIIS 106.5 Sydney’s, Kyle Sandilands, that she’d fallen for the wrong fella – an MP for whose electorate she helps, loosening state purse strings by over $30 million, as Treasurer and later Premier, to fund a clay target shooting club, already flush with funds, and a conservatorium.

Liberals love the weak-headed woman alibi. How good is demeaning all women? Whilst some uphold her as a trail-blazing feminist, Gladys hawks her victimhood bid around all media.

Anyone who claps eyes on Mr Maguire, or does deals with him, would have trouble seeing him as a lady-killer. Nor is Gladys any shrinking violet. But it’s a pitch that resonates with respondents to a recent Essential Poll, who get almost all their news from a Murdoch-led media.

Now Berejiklian finds herself awaiting the deliberations of the ICAC, a body akin to a Royal Commission, not a court, on whether she breached public trust. Was her conduct in relation to decisions about funding grants dishonest? Did she breach public trust in failing to report her relationship? Could her conduct have allowed or encouraged corrupt conduct by Maguire?

“Even those who admire Berejiklian for many of her qualities when she was premier, realise there has to be a serious inquiry into the situation that arose … in unloading millions of dollars of public money into the Wagga electorate at the same time she was in a relationship with the member for Wagga,”

Chair of the Centre for Public Integrity, former NSW supreme court judge, Anthony Whealy, is alluding to to the Wagga Wagga Clay Target Club’s a $5.5 million upgrade and a $20.5 million plan to build a recital hall for the Riverina Conservatorium of Music.

“For Morrison to dismiss that as being of no significance, is to trash integrity and accountability in the most terrible fashion,” Whealy proceeds, unloading on a PM who is a household weasel-word.

But the fix is in for Morrison, a man Berejiklian loathes, after much bad blood between them during the NSW bushfires and her Delta disaster. He pretends he doesn’t understand, bizarrely touting the former NSW bean-counter-cum Premier as a candidate for Warringah. Anyone who can bring both alpha and delta strains of COVID-19 into Australia is bound to win big with voters.

What’s baffling is that Gladys still has any support in NSW despite her Ruby Princess and Limousine Man track record of incompetence, evasion and self-promotion as the “Gold Standard”, a title given her by Morrison. The PM hopes to harvest Glad’s fans by boosting her stakes as a candidate, a desperate bid to boost his tanking popularity, a tactic noted by Nicholas Cowdery QC, member of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties and a former Director of Public Prosecutions for NSW.

Morrison’s perverse wooing of Gladys is also a cruel trick to let him bag ICAC calling it a kangaroo court and abusing parliamentary privilege to paint Berejiklian as the poor victim of witch hunt – and more. Spraying disinformation wildly as is his wont, he lies that the ICAC is a monster capable of

“… political vendettas, as we have seen in New South Wales with disgraceful treatment of the former premier … who was chased out of office before that even made a finding”.

“It’s absolutely outrageous,” sputters Labor’s Climate spokesperson, Chris Bowen, “the prime minister of the day has undermined the ICAC,” noting that his politicised kangaroo court smear was how the PM was undermining all independent anti-corruption bodies across the country.

Morrison’s heavily tarnished, gold standard diva, Australia’s Typhoid Mary, who let the Ruby Princess disembark and introduce the alpha strain of the virus to the nation, an act of “criminal negligence” is eclipsed by her role as “The Woman Who Saved Australia” an accolade the Australian Financial Review was soon to regret, as her government bungled vaccinating an airport chauffeur in his sixties plying a limousine ferrying aircrew between Sydney and its airport.

Her Limo-gate debacle will forever link her government with both alpha and delta strains of COVID-19 entering the country. Gladys get herself pre-selected for Warringah? Talk about recycling the trash. If Morrison pulls off this risky stunt, it will be the most cynical pivot in Australian politics.

Morrison’s muppet is being talked up as a proxy for an attack on ICAC as much as a pile-on on Zali Steggall – and all other independents across Australia, including the impressive Helen Haines whose prominence owes much to voters’ disgust at the corruption as normal routine of Coalition politics.

“Gladys was put in a position of actually having to stand down, and there was (sic) no findings of anything,” Svengali Morrison lies Friday. The facts are the premier chose to resign and ICAC’s inquiry is still in train. It has yet to hand down its findings. Morrison is in contempt of ICAC. Other stooges dutifully appear, Simon Birmingham, the Noddy in Toyland of the federal bikie gang.

“… by openly downplaying the seriousness of corruption, don’t the Liberals realise they are adding credibility to pro-integrity independent campaigns across the country? The Monthly’s Rachel Withers warns. Let’s hope Ms Withers is correct.

By Wednesday, Morrison is walking back his rhetoric, Gladys or Arthur or both have told his office it’s just not going to happen. Yet in the meantime, Morrison has used her to take a pot-shot at ICAC making great mileage out of disinformation and popular myth while normalising corruption and signalling that the NSW carbon emissions target needs to be trimmed back in line with federal policy.

The PM repeats his mantra that Gladys has not been charged with a criminal offence, wilfully obscuring the nature of the ICAC whilst narrowing the definition of corruption; restricting it to acts which are illegal. He dog-whistles the anti-vaxxers with a Bathurst analogy,

“What we’re about is getting government out of your lives, because I think Australians have had a gutful of government in their lives over the last few years, and they’re looking forward to getting back in the driver’s seat,” he lies about a Coalition which is uniquely involved in our lives.

For Jacqueline Maley there is a conundrum behind the rhetoric akin to a Zen koan.

The leader of a government lamenting government intervention is too brain-boggling a thing to ponder deeply, a sort of deep-state stoner’s dilemma: if the head of the government wants government to get out of our lives … isn’t that government telling us what to do with our lives?

Yet what if big government is actually good for us, as many respected economists suggest. What if we’d been denied, for example, the Rudd government’s $52 billion stimulus package?

This big government protected us from the recession which we know as the global financial crisis. Without big government, Australia would have suffered recession with the rest of the world.

The Australia Institute’s (TAI) Ebony Bennett reminds us how public investment, trend growth in public sector employment and household consumption drove Australia’s growth. Australia Institute polling shows most of us agree the stimulus package kept Australia from recession.

The final implication in Morrison’s rhetoric and the subtext of his key ministers in their retro campaign kick-off with its calculated swipe at regulation its salute to simple-minded hedonism is that the tap that was turned on to prime the economy during COVID-19 must now be turned off.

And although his stunts are wacky, embarrassingly corny, there is method in Morrison’s madness. He’s sowing the seeds of a simple-minded return to the world of the V8, a world in which you could burn rubber and hydrocarbon fuel like there was no tomorrow – a world with no COVID and no threat of anthropogenic climate causing irreversible global heating and our extinction.

A type of 1950s post-war Nirvana is within our grasp if politicians are allowed to go about their business growing the economy, doing deals with their mates without being pilloried by kangaroo courts. If politicians are just allowed to get on with their whatever it takes politics, Gladys Berejiklian would still be Premier of NSW. The ICAC forced her to resign, he lies, in flagrant Trumpian alternative factual zone of his own but with a petulant show of contempt for the historical record and the judiciary and the rule of law upon which our civil society is based.

Above all, Morrison’s backing of Gladys helps normalise corruption as a way of government and the price of doing business. Whilst it’s a dog-whistle to the “freedoms” mob demonstrating against being vaccinated and imported lies and conspiracies about a deep state, it is also an act of desperation born out a Machiavellian realpolitik that tells him his government needs to win at least one other seat in NSW.

“Politics is governed by the iron laws of arithmetic” his mentor Howard drily opined in an absurd reduction that helps our democracy drown in cynicism and distrust. In reality as Tony Fitzgerald argues, we need every politician to acknowledge that “membership of a political party doesn’t excuse them from their personal obligations to act honourably, and political parties to understand that voters will only vote for politicians who make and keep promises to act ethically.”

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The Morrison enigma

By Ad astra

It’s becoming alarming. Every day our Prime Minister becomes more verbose, more shouty, more insistent. The old-fashioned word ‘blatherskite’ comes to mind. Listen to him as he fronts journalists, answers questions in Question Time, or delivers his characteristic off-the-cuff oratory on any subject he chooses, from protestors to carbon capture and storage to electric cars.

In a cute appraisal in The Guardian you can read how Sarah Martin mocked his electric car approach with these acerbic words:

In a galling pivot, Scott Morrison hopes he can peek under the bonnet of an EV and be accepted as a convert.

Not so long ago he said Labor’s electric cars policy would ‘end the weekend’, and now he’s spruiking his own plan, but there’s no substance to it.

It’s hard to say which element of Scott Morrison’s new electric vehicle strategy is most galling. If you missed the unveiling on Tuesday, there’s not much to catch up on, given the strategy has all the substance of a Corn Thin.

The Coalition’s “strategy” for electric vehicle take-up contains $178m of government spending on EV infrastructure but no new policies, just like its “Australian Way” plan to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. It rebuffs calls for vehicle emissions standards and provides no market signal to incentivise take-up – the two measures viewed by experts as the most important to drive change.

But while a policy document three years in the making that is entirely bereft of substance is certainly offensive, it is nowhere near as galling as the way in which Morrison expects voters to forgive and forget the Coalition’s position on electric vehicles ahead of the 2019 election.

As he unveiled the government’s new clean car policy that embraced electric cars, Morrison attempted to deflect accusations of hypocrisy by denying he had attacked electric vehicles before the 2019 federal election when he had insisted Labor would end the weekend.

The government has already ruled out subsidising the expansion of electric and hybrid vehicles through rebates or tax breaks, saying it expected only 30% of new sales to be EVs by 2030 – a date by which a growing number of countries plan to ban altogether the sale of new petrol and diesel cars.

The “future fuels and vehicles strategy” instead includes $178m of new funding, mostly for new EV and hydrogen refuelling infrastructure and to help businesses set up charging stations for fleets. It said the government would “co-invest with industry” to install an estimated 50,000 smart chargers in homes. Under questioning at a press conference in Melbourne, Morrison denied he had criticised EV technology before the last election. But the records show that at that time he had insisted: ”battery-powered cars would ‘not tow your trailer’; ‘not tow your boat’; ‘not get you out to your favourite camping spot with your family’.” Touché!

Morrison claimed his criticism had been limited to Labor’s then-policy, not the technology itself, and that he did not regret saying EVs would “end the weekend”.

“I don’t have a problem with electric vehicles, I have a problem with governments telling people what to do and what vehicles they should drive and where they should drive them, which is what [former opposition leader] Bill Shorten’s plan was,” Morrison said at Toyota’s hydrogen centre in suburban Altona.

“I’m not going to put up the price of petrol [for] families and make them buy electric vehicles, and walk away from the things they have. That is not the Liberal way and the Nationals way.”

The Shorten-era Labor policy was not to tell people what vehicle they should drive, require anyone to buy an EV or put up the price of petrol. It included a non-binding target of 50% new car sales being EVs by 2030 and the promise of a vehicle emissions standard to reduce the average carbon pollution of the national car fleet.

Morrison stressed the government would not “be forcing Australians out of the car they want to drive or penalising those who can least afford it through bans or taxes. Just as Australians have taken their own decision to embrace rooftop solar at the highest rate in the world, when new vehicle technologies are cost-competitive, Australians will embrace them too”.

The expansion of rooftop solar – which, according to the Clean Energy Council, has now led to 3m systems being installed across the country – was encouraged for more than a decade through federal and state incentives and subsidies.

The government vehicle strategy suggests its approach will have only a limited impact as a climate policy. It is projected to cut greenhouse gas emissions by just 8m tonnes – less than 2% of the national annual total – over the next 14 years.

Transport emissions are nearly 20% of the national total, were increasing rapidly before Covid-19 lockdowns and are projected to escalate in the years ahead.

Opposition Leader, Anthony Albanese, said the future policy was “another pamphlet, rather than a serious announcement”. He said a Labor government would make EVs cheaper by removing import and fringe benefits tax. “I think people will look at Scott Morrison today and this announcement and just shake their head and say, ‘What’s changed?’,’This is a guy who says he’s about new technology. Yet he’s resisted it.”

The energy and emissions reduction minister, Angus Taylor, said the government’s strategy of helping install charging infrastructure, rather than phasing out fossil fuel cars, was about helping motorists “embrace the increasing range of technologies available to keep them moving in an informed and fair way”. He claimed credit for the number of low emissions vehicle models available in Australia increasing by 20% over the past eight months, but did not explain how the government’s policy had contributed to this.

Car manufacturers across the globe have released a wave of new EV models as governments have announced emissions limits for passenger cars and future bans on fossil fuel cars. Industry representatives say Australians have fewer options than comparable countries due to a lack of policy support.

Once more, Australians face the risk of being left behind. What’s new!

This article was originally published on The Political Sword

For Facebook users, The Political Sword has a Facebook page:
Putting politicians and commentators to the verbal sword

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Electric Car Delusions

Fresh from attending COP26 in Glasgow, Prime Minister Scott Morrison was keen to impress the Australian public that he was willing to make good his word about the role technology would play in combating climate change. An important component of his limited strategy lies in the realm of electric cars, the very thing he warned Australians against in 2019. His then opposite number, Labor’s Bill Shorten, was accused by the prime minister during the election campaign of wishing to end the Australian weekend. “I’ll tell you what, it’s not going to tow your trailer. It’s not going to tow your boat,” he warned.

Things, however, had changed. COP26, pressure from other countries, and potential electoral pressure within traditional Coalition seats, had made the prime minister shift his position. In a joint press release from the Prime Minister and Energy Minister Angus Taylor, the government promised, as part of the Future Fuels Fund investment, $250 million on vehicle charging and hydrogen fuelling infrastructure; heavy and long-distance vehicle technologies; commercial fleets and household smart charging.

In terms of numbers, 400 businesses, 50,000 households will be affected, and 1000 public charging stations created. With an eye towards private investment, the hope is that there will be over $500 million “of combined private and public co-investment directed into the update of future fuels in Australia and the creation of more than 2,600 new jobs.”

When asked why he had essentially adopted, if only in lite version, a variant of the condemned Labor opposition policy from 2019, Morrison gave a ducking answer. “I don’t have a problem with electric vehicles, I have a problem with governments telling people what to do and what vehicles they should drive and where they should drive them, which is what [the opposition’s] plan was.”

On the commercial breakfast show “Sunrise”, the Prime Minister found himself being corrected by host Natalie Barr like an errant school child. “The Labor Party were not forcing people. It was not a mandate at the last election that they were introducing, it was a non-binding target of 50 percent [of new EVs by 2030].” Morrison, balletically evading the point, insisted that Labor “were going to put up the price of fuel.”

The new EV policy did little to move Electric Vehicle Council chief executive Behyad Jafari. “We’ve been waiting some two years for this policy that’s already about a decade overdue,” he told Radio 6PR Breakfast. The policy was “the first five pages of a book, rather than the whole thing.”

Australia’s hostility to EVs has not gone unnoticed. In 2020, the rise in battery-powered vehicles in the European and the UK came in at 10%. In Australia, it was a barely nudging 0.7%. In terms of efforts to decarbonise road transport, Australia has been ranked in the lower tiers of the Group of 20, lagging behind Turkey and Indonesia.

Such figures have done little to impress carmakers such as Volkswagen AG, who stated earlier this year that its ID.3 and ID.4 electric vehicles were unlikely to appear in Australia before 2023. “Hardly a day goes by when we don’t get an inquiry from someone who would dearly love to buy a Volkswagen electric vehicle,” stated the company’s Australian chief, Michael Bartsch in March, “and we have to tell them we don’t know when we can introduce them.”

The office of the Energy Minister, Angus Taylor, officiously dismissed such remarks at the time, suggesting that Australia would not “be lectured about vehicles emissions by a car manufacturer that has a track record of deceiving motorist and violating clean-air laws.”

The modest attempt to redress this state of affairs does not compare with incentives that are being promoted at the state level. The New South Wales government has promised to contribute more to the entire program in the state than the Commonwealth will across the entire country. NSW Treasurer Matt Kean may well be from the same party as the Prime Minister, but on environmental policy, their song sheets are markedly different.

A day after Morrison’s announcement of a future fuels fund to build charging stations across the country, Kean revealed that $105 million in additional funding to encourage EVs in his state would be provided. This would complement the June commitment by the NSW government valued at $490 million, which involves waiving stamp duty on EV purchases, $3,000 rebates for up to 25,000 vehicles under $68,750, deferring road user charge until 2027 and expenditure on charging infrastructure. “This is a revolution which is coming whether [Deputy Prime Minister and Nationals leader] Barnaby Joyce likes it or not,” promised the Treasurer.

On the ABC’s 7.30 program, Kean also had a few words regarding Morrison’s own EV initiative: “the funding they’ve put on the table doesn’t even match the funding that we’ve put here just for the state of NSW.”

The NSW policy did much to stir Bartsch. The state had “shown its federal colleagues and its counterpart in Victoria the way to bring about mass ownership of affordable electric vehicles.” Kean could not be faulted for his “targets for private ownership and fleet take-up of EVs.” But the NSW Treasurer has gone further, announcing that his government will be signing the COP26 Declaration on the transition to zero-emission vehicles by 2040, thereby setting a target Morrison has been loathe to commit to.

The reluctance on the part of the Commonwealth to do more in terms of subsidies, rewarding EV manufacturers, and establishing enforceable CO2 emission standards will continue to make car vendors seek other markets in the green transition. Australia may well escape the potential fate of being a third world dumping ground for polluting car technology, but at this point, it is in no danger of moving into the first world of battery-powered efficiency.

 

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What could possibly go wrong?

By Kathryn

Why on earth would a climate-change-denying PM who shows 100% support for the filthy, polluting coal-mining and environmentally destructive gas fracking industries attend the COP26 (climate change conference) in Glasgow? Wasn’t this the same fool who dragged a piece of coal into Parliament House and declared – in front of a gleeful Barnyard Joyce – that “there is nothing to be afraid of – it’s just coal! Nothing to see here!It came as no surprise that the yellow-bellied coward, Sloth Morrison, slunk away and returned back to Australia right before the conference even started! Why? Because he knew that his climate-change-denying ideology will be held up for ridicule on the world stage at any international summit on the emergency to address important issues on a subject the LNP do not believe in! That is exactly the type of disgraceful, cowardly behaviour we have come to expect from a useless, non-achieving PM who expends more energy trying to get out of work and totally avoiding any of his responsibilities as one of the highest paid “leaders” in the free world!

When we recall how Morrison hid behind a deck chair in Hawaii when his own state of NSW nearly burnt to the ground last year; when Australians recognise that this lazy, bone-idle political parasite delegated 99.99% of his job to the hapless State Premiers; When he tried to steal the “limelight” from the Ruby Princess aka Gladys Berejiklian when he thought she was the “Golden Girl” only to betray and abandon her the second he (and we) realised that she was not – it provides anyone with an IQ >10 a thorough insight into the self-serving, smirking entitlement of a stone-cold, ineffective, callous and contemptuous Sloth Morrison!

Now we have the LNP at State and Federal level making ridiculous claims to have some type of non-existent plan set up to halve emissions by 2030 – WTF??? Anyone with any semblance of foresight combined with a sense of reality knows that it is highly unlikely that the LNP will even be in power at that time! Truly, Morrison is right up there with John Howard (who has been likened to a war criminal), and that useless, swaggering, smirking misogynist, Phoney Abbott, as the three worst, most inept, stratospherically arrogant and totally corrupt politicians in Australian history! What makes them even worse is that, despite their appalling cowardice, despite their increasing level of corruption, their never-ending lies and broken promises, the way the LNP literally thrive on hate, fear, division, misogyny, chaos, dysfunction and war – especially when they are backed into a corner or right before an election; despite the LNP wasting countless billions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars (that Australians can ill-afford) on useless weapons of war that will soon become obsolete – they remorselessly try to hide all this appalling depravity behind a thin, transparent cloak of sanctimonious bible-thumping hypocrisy!

The fact that Morrison is a signed-up member of a notorious, alleged paedophile-protecting cult of Hillsong and, indeed, stacking his cabinet and staff with other Hillsong members, should be a red flag warning that this dangerously undemocratic autocrat is determined to increase his sick, twisted and dangerous mix of politics with the rabid, misogynistic flat-earth ideology of Hillsong!

Ever since Morrison rose to power on the back of his treacherous, backstabbing betrayal of Michael Towke and Malcolm Turnbull, the level of political subterfuge, self-serving corruption, rorting and waste of hard-earned taxpayer dollars has risen to an alarming level together with Morrison’s smirking arrogance, secrecy and autocracy which is now bordering on fascism. The sooner this monstrous and totally depraved regime are kicked to the kerb, the better for everyone.

The tragic fact is that the LNP – at State and Federal levels – are wrecking balls destroying, annihilating, vandalising and defunding everything Australians value including our taxpayer-funded ABC (into which they are parachuting obsequious right-wing sycophants like Lisa Millar and David Speers), Medicare, Aged Care and just about every socially-responsible program devised to protect our environment and the most vulnerable people in our society!

 

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Why Did We Need Katie Hopkins When We Have So Many Unemployed Bigots Here Already?

Ah, cancel culture strikes and Katie Hopkins is sent away simply because she refused to obey the law… The outrage industry strikes again.

I know I’m repeating myself, but well, isn’t history just littered with people who repeat themselves until somebody says why didn’t they say that before and when the person says that they did, they’re asked why they didn’t say it more often…

Ok, in capitals so we all hear it:

WHY ARE THE PEOPLE WHO ARE ACTUALLY PAID TO BE OUTRAGED ALL THE TIME LIKE BOLT AND JONES, THE VERY PEOPLE WHO ACCUSE OTHER PEOPLE OF BEING PART OF AN ‘OUTRAGE INDUSTRY”???

But then there’s a lot of things I don’t understand!

For example, what are we to make of this?

“Prime Minister Scott Morrison says his government is in ‘constant appeal’ for the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation to change its advice on the AstraZeneca vaccine.” Sky News

However the matter doesn’t end there with Scotty thundering at reporters: “Are you suggesting that the government when advised by the technical and advisory group on immunisation, some of the most senior level scientific medicos in the country, tell the government that the preferred vaccine for people of particular ages is 50 then they changed it to 60 that the government should refuse that advice?”

Yep, but the recent brouhaha with Katie Hopkins confuses me even more.

Ok, it’s true that there’s a certain irony that someone who is so hostile to lockdowns would come all the way to Australia just so she could be locked down in the Big Brother house, However, one wonders whether she was ever more than a publicity stunt for Channel 7. You know, “We’ll pay you X amount to come to Australia and be so offensive that we sack you. You can go back home and every news outlet will be giving us free publicity and then you can go back home and do some interviews about cancel culture!”

Win/win!

Anyway, I sort of have trouble when “conservatives” decide that they can break the law because they don’t agree with it. Yeah, yeah, I get that people need to break laws when they feel that they’re unjust or something… But when someone like Sally McManus – that union person – says something about being prepared to do just that, wasn’t she’s told that the LAW is sacrosanct? It’s not up to us to decide, to pick and choose what laws to follow – but hey, she wasn’t a CONSERVATIVE saying that we should break the law. She was one of those people who don’t understand their place and who thinks that they can break laws just because they want to, as opposed to people who have lawyers who can get them off…

Hmm, I’m tempted to make some tasteless joke about Gladys dating her lawyer because she needs someone who can get her off, but that may seem sexist to some and I may be forced to do that optional training that’s meant to solve sexual harassment and bullying in Federal Parliament. Oh wait, it’s optional. Yes, well that should make about as much difference as Scotty’s recent hair transplant makes to the vaccine rollout.

Yes, compare the favourable coverage some publican in Echuca received from Nine News when he decided to defy the lockdown and stay open with how they react when some poor casual worker decides to keep working in breach of health orders. One is doing it because it’s hard to keep a business afloat so we need to be understanding of the pressures, while the other is only doing it so that they can eat.

Whatever, it was good to see the PM demonstrate to us all that he’s still alive by holding a press conference where he announced that things were basically on target but just a little bit late and that’s mainly the fault of ATAGI… which, apart from the fact that he told us earlier this year that they wouldn’t be setting targets, does use the term «on target » in a rather unique way. «I was basically there for the ten o’clock meeting, apart from the fact that it started at ten and I arrived at midday! »

Of course, it was offensive of one journalist to suggest that the government do anything other than follow the health advice. That’s why the PM is adopting the Great Barrier Reef strategy. It would be wrong to ignore an independent body, so we’ll do the best we can to pressure them to give us the advice we want to follow. And if that doesn’t work, we can cut their funding like we did with the audit office… Mind you that only works if they’re funded by the government.

Yes, sometimes Scott Morrison just rambles on with meaningless waffles and lies, but other times, he disappears and says nothing.

Either way, his detractors are never satisfied… and speaking of Dutton and Frydenberg, apparently, Dutton thinks he has the numbers but without Mathias there to confirm them, he’s not willing to move. Josh was sure he had the numbers but after a recount, he discovered that he was short by sixty billion…

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One Sign Of Intelligence Is Being Able To Change Your Mind or Why Scott Morrison Is Einstein!

Remember just a few years ago when we were told that we needed to be “energy agnostic”. Well, all that’s out the window. Apparently we now have to build a church to gas because the private operators have decided that they’d rather invest in something profitable.

Why do I call it “a church”? That’s because – like a church – it will be large and unused for much of the time and in future generations people will look at it and go, “Wow, what a large structure. I wonder why they spent so much money and something with no practical purpose. They must have really believed that someone would reward them in the next life!” (In the case of the Coalition, that’s Life After Politics!)

It’s very tempting to point out that once we took it for granted that governments would be responsible for building the infrastructure that enabled us to generate energy, but we were told by the Liberal Party that private industry was a lot better at it and market forces would make the whole thing a lot more efficient. Now we’re being told that the market has failed because the market relies on making a profit and nobody in private industry is keen to build a gas-fired power station for the simple reason that it’s not economically viable.

Of course, I shouldn’t criticise the Liberals for changing their mind and completely repudiating their free market principles and totally embracing socialism. After all, it’s only the intelligent who can change their minds. At least I think that’s true…

Whatever, the Liberals are certainly good at changing their minds. Sometimes they’ll even do it from one interview to the next.

Remember when they told us that people don’t need the government making decisions for them and that individuals were best placed to decide what to spend their money on… Of course, this was before they realised that once they got the Indue card out and accepted, they could eventually roll it out to pensioners and then the rest of us and we could only shop at approved Liberal donor stores.

Remember when Scotty was all about opening up the borders but then he saw how successful various state premiers were with their border closures. Now he’s determined to keep Australia’s borders closed until… well, it’s not like he intends to set a date because targets are for the accountable. We can’t say when borders will be open again, even with the majority vaccinated. As he put it: “Even in that circumstance, you’re talking about many Australians, millions of Australians, who wouldn’t have been vaccinated. Because A, they’re children or B, they’ve chosen not to be [vaccinated].” Unvaccinated children a concern? Is this different from “Schools are safe, I can’t be any clearer than that!” Too right it is, which just shows the intelligence of the man because he’s apparently changed his mind.

Remember when they labelled that ad about the vaccines with the Liberal Party logo? Well there’s another example of them changing their mind. Now they want bipartisan support for the rollout. Surely, Labor have to take part responsibility. Why? Well, they said that the logo shouldn’t be there because it was the government who were providing the vaccines and aren’t Labor an alternative government?

And then we have the NDIS which just a couple of Budgets ago was so awash with funds that Josh Frydenberg could take $4.7 billion from it to put us into surplus. While at $4.7 billion, those “Back In Black” coffee seemed overpriced, that’s nothing compared to the unsustainable nature of the NDIS now. We need to stop those “empathetic public servants” from giving wheelchairs to people. Everyone needs to stand on their own two feet even if they have no legs. Yes, social media was very cruel and mocked Linda Reynolds about her heart condition, but even she agrees that’s better than being awash with empathy like those public servants who fail to push those on the NDIS to get better. Our PM does believe in miracles, as we all know.

And Scotty’s changed his mind on debt and deficit too. We’re going to have deficits for the next ten years according to #Scottyfromannouncements. Yes, ok, Hockey said that the Liberals would deliver a surplus in their first year of government and every year thereafter but they changed their mind about that, as well as Hockey being Treasurer. And about having a stable government who didn’t change Prime Ministers. Of course it would be unfair to bring up how the Liberals changed their minds about Abbott’s rolled gold maternity leave, because that’s so many Prime Ministers ago.

Some of you will be expecting that I’ll also be pointing out the PM’s changing his mind on electric vehicles, but apparently he hasn’t. He told us that he never mocked EVs in the lead up to the 2019 election. No, no, he was complaining about Bill Shorten ruining the weekend by simply being PM and that would have ruined the weekend of everyone who mattered so EVs had nothing to do with it.

Yes, I can certainly recommend that you vote for Scott Morrison in the upcoming election which he assures won’t be held until next year, so I’d expect it in about three months. Even if you don’t like his policies and what he announces, there’s a better than fifty percent chance that they’ll never be implemented and that he’ll change them before the month is out. You can be content knowing that if you don’t like, for example, his intention to build a gas-fired power station, that once they’ve bought the land from the Liberal donor, and once they’ve spent a few million on consultants, they’ll change their mind and sell the land to a firm who wants to make electric vehicles or develop it for social housing.

I suppose you’ve noticed that lately, Mr Morrison seems to have a booklet in hands every time he appears in the media. Perhaps he’s working on the next slogan. “Liberals: We Have A Plan AND a Pamphlet.”

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