It seems the Coalition under Dutton isn’t planning to work with the government anytime soon. Dutton and his cohort are throwing whatever they think it takes out there to go negative. Any positive measures (such as a second referendum to acknowledge First Nations people in the Constitution) are reversed almost before they are announced. After all, absolute opposition eventually got Abbott the Prime Ministership. ‘Back to the Future’ was a successful movie franchise and Dutton’s betting it is a good political strategy as well.
Not that the ALP is much better. While the referendum failed, there are a number of ways for the Albanese Government to legislate for a fairer and more equal society. While the move to ensure ‘labour hire’ staff are paid the same as employees doing the same work and laws around the deliberate use of mis-information are a good start, there is a number of additional measures that should be undertaken.
In an environment when state and the federal governments are all claiming they cannot afford to deliver basic health, transportation and education needs to all in the communities they service, the lack of resolve to cancel or at least significantly reduce the cost of the Stage 3 Tax Cuts is criminal. Supporters of Modern Monetary Theory may disagree with claims of balanced budgets and so on, but the ‘conventional wisdom’ is that governments don’t have limitless credit cards and taxes are one of the measures used to engender trust in a sovereign currency. So if there is a need to fund education, transportation and health services equitably to most if not all Australians, why is the government committed to a previous governments failed re-election strategy of handing money back to those that have less absolute need for it rather than actually benefitting the community?
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the operator of the ‘off-shore’ asylum and refugee processing and detention Centre in Nauru has been paid $1.82 Billion over the past 5 years to run the facility on your and my behalf. The payments haven’t decreased in line with the reduced number of refugees being held in what the PNG Court system determined was an illegal detention system when a similar scheme was operational in that country.
There are now more New Zealanders and ‘others’ in some form of ‘onshore’ immigration detention in Australia due to cancelled visas than ‘Unauthorised Maritime Arrivals’ according to the government’s own report yet there is no apparent need to fly them around the South Pacific to ‘suitable’ places of detention at your and my expense. It is still the case that a large number of asylum seekers are in fear of their lives if they return to their homeland. It doesn’t necessarily follow that Australia should be seen to be still running pseudo-concentration camps as a deterrence measure to address a confected political issue where both sides of politics have been equally culpable until now. Onshore detention is equally as horrid – as demonstrated by the plight of the Murugappan family from Biloela. There has to be a better and more humane way to do establish bona-fides quickly and settle people into our community permanently.
With frequent reports of the earth getting close to a tipping point where climate change will be irreversible, transport is one of the more obvious areas to work on and clean up (pun intended). The Coalition Government pushed actual action on doing anything about reducing the emissions and average fuel consumption of any vehicles into the weeds by commissioning report after task-force after strategy. The ALP Government has at least determined that something has to happen. However in the past 18 months, we are still stuck in a limbo where yet another strategy is being developed to determine how to do some things that have been in place in the majority of the economically developed world for decades. There is no local manufacturing industry that has to be given time to adapt – all our vehicles are imported (thanks to the Coalition). Even the USA has fuel efficiency and consumption standards that are yet to be beaten by Australia.
The thing is that the ALP doesn’t need to rely on Coalition support to implement anything. There are enough Greens and independent Members of Parliament to legislate a fairer and more equal Australia tomorrow if the ALP had the political will to work with others to achieve a solution. Rather that talking about it, they could be implementing appropriate funding of services designed to help those who need a hand, remove the stain of inhumane practices to asylum seekers and refugees or pick some more low hanging fruit in the battle to reduce emissions before the planet cooks.
Certainly, Dutton and his cohort of media mouthpieces will scream blue murder, however the proof is in the pudding. If the ALP, the Greens and the independents can go to the next election with well marketed evidence that they have actually made a positive difference to everyone’s lives and the future of the planet in the past 3 years, they have a pretty good shot at re-election. As Leader of the House in the Gillard minority government, Albanese knows how to do it – he just needs the political courage to actually commit.
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