Head bowed, a manacled cardinal is led hobbling out of court into a prison van, a shocking image calculated to rock our nation’s Tories to the core, last Wednesday, as Victoria’s Court of Appeal upholds Cardinal George Pell’s conviction on five counts of child sexual assault, for offences committed against two thirteen year-old altar-boys in a priest’s sacristy at St Patrick’s Church, in 1996 and 1997, whilst Pell was still Archbishop of Melbourne.

By Sunday, thank God and Rupert Murdoch, it’s all OK – at least, in Australia’s News Corp-led “mainstream media” as our corporate, oligarchical, media tribe is typically misnamed, whose stories quickly turn a convicted predator into an innocent victim. OK, too, in our progressive, post-modern, post fact, Trumpian universe of discourse, our collective, international pandemic of unreason led by lords of misrule from Boris to Bolsonaro to The Donald.

Bugger the facts, it’s the vibe that counts. As former PM Turnbull, pre-knifing by Scott Morrison, told Glyn Davis, Vice Chancellor of The University of Melbourne when Davis challenged Turnbull’s spin that all was rosy between town and gown. Davis dared air his heretical view that collaboration between business and university was crap.

“This is, by the way, you running against the vibe. You haven’t got the new zeitgeist. The new zeitgeist, Glyn, is to believe in yourself, is to have a go.”  Did Mal’s liberating ideology help spawn ScoMo’s “have a go to get a go”?

Bugger “police, the prosecutors, the courts, the jury system, the burden of proof and the entire rule of law. In its place is the new primacy of feelings: they feel Pell must not be guilty, therefore he is innocent. All else — most significantly, the fully tested testimony of the victim that they have never seen — gives way before their emotional need.” writes Crikey’s legal beagle, Michael Bradley. Above all, our establishment must protect one of its own.

Pell can’t be guilty: he’s part of the power elite, as untouchable as Casino King, James Murdoch. Pell’s protection is necessary to preserve the power of our monocultural bunyip aristocracy. However, it’s a secular crusade now, David Marr reflects. “Rome somewhere in the past few years lost the power” to protect men like Pell.

Above all, however, is the political purpose served by the all-consuming pseudo-debate over Pell’s innocence, a diversion adroitly exploited by a Coalition keen to soft-pedal its announcement that it is eagerly doing the US bidding; taking up gunboat diplomacy in the Persian Gulf because this will help “de-escalate tensions”.

Foreign Minister, Marise Payne keeps a straight face on ABC Insiders, Sunday; farcically claiming we are part of an “international mission” which is “modest, meaningful and time-limited”. In reality, we are offering Trump a blank cheque. It’s all about restoring “rules-based order and the rule of law”. No-one mentions the fact that we are about to break international law. Trump’s administration clearly hankers for the good old days when it ran Iran.

With British help, America overthrew Iran’s democratically elected conservative Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh’s nationalist parliamentary government, in 1953, to install Shah Reza Pahlavi, a dictator who gave 40% of Iran’s oil concessions to US oil companies. America supported the corrupt dictator until his overthrow by a popular mass movement in 1979. As punishment, the US backed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the Iran–Iraq War, 22 September 1980- 20 August 1988.

It is estimated one million Iranians died defending their country. Up to half a million Iraqis also lost their lives.

The international team comprises ourselves, the Great Satan, as Iran once called the US, Little Britain under Boris Johnson, a professional clown, now playing Albion’s accidental PM and Human Rights Watch pin-up, Bahrain, a state of unabated repression whose rulers’ crack-down on dissent has eliminated all opposition banned independent media and peaceful dissidents are roughed up, arrested, prosecuted and stripped of their citizenship.

Clearly, there’s a bit our government could yet learn from Bahrain and embedding our troops with theirs is a move guaranteed to bring mutual enlightenment, the rule of law and stability to a region where eighty million Iranians are starved of daily necessities from food to medicines as a result of forty years of US sanctions.

It’s possible, of course, that the sudden appearance of an Australian cruiser in January 2020 “for six months” or a P-8A Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft to the Middle East for one month “before the end of 2019” will prove immensely re-assuring to Iran’s government and cause citizens to hi-five and hug each other in sheer relief.

Aussie diggers posted to Bahrain, super-charged with ANZAC can-do, could repair the nation’s moral high ground.

Luckily for Morrison’s government, the Cardinal Pell in the Pokey show is the perfect distractor; a timely bit of cultural warfare guaranteed to upstage any grovelling capitulation to the whims of hawks such as Bolton or Pompeo who run demented Donald Trump and his mad, neo-con, anti-Iranian, administration.

Hard right hacks, Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Bettina Arndt rush to defend Pell. Left out of the moral outrage are the 1900 child sex-offenders, identified in Australian Catholic churches, whose 4,444 victims were on average under twelve years old, according to the 2016 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to child sexual abuse. Eclipsed almost entirely, is the suffering of thousands of abused children; or how their lives were ruined.

And who knows how many victims there are in the sexual abuse of nuns by priests, abuse which Pope Francis acknowledged last February? Catholic women are speaking out, too, under the #NunsToo hashtag. In the meantime, a sanctification of Pell proceeds, by some of our best and finest reactionary media mavens.

Poor George, whose Dad, a Ballarat publican, David Marr reports, ran an SP book from the public bar of The Royal Oak, from 1953 to 1976, becomes, by mythic invention, an icon of apostolic poverty, humility, chastity and saintly compassion who will appeal to The High Court. The magical thinking of his backers has him acquitted already.

A man of such grace and standing (Peter Kidd, Chief Judge at his sentencing commented on his “staggering arrogance”, in committing crimes he thought he could get away with), will automatically be granted leave to appeal. But in the eternal interim, the very idea of a fallen Pell is a monstrous offence against nature.

Worse, the appeal judgement is a heresy right up there with Aurecon’s shunning of Adani, a move which resources High Priest, Matt Canavan says is as “weak as piss” before calling on the energy oligopoly to “shun and shame“ Aurecon. The Australian and others in the stable eagerly recycle the lie of Pell’s unblemished record.

Yet there is no question that Pell is the reactionaries’ reactionary, a one-stop shop for any crusade against change.

Pell held that abortion was “a worse moral scandal than priests sexually abusing young people.” is Papal-royalty. Boys driven to take their own lives through homophobia only had themselves to blame, Pell maintained;

“It is another reason to be discouraging people going in that direction. Homosexual activity is a much greater health hazard than smoking.”

Pell denounces concern about climate change as “a symptom of pagan emptiness” The Greens? “Anti-Christian”.

Pell’s perspective on accountability is clear in his view, given in 2014, that “the church’s responsibility to those abused by priests is comparable to the responsibility of a trucking company to a hitchhiker raped by a trucker.”

Monday, Pell’s media acquittal continues. The Australian’s Mirko Bagaric blusters “… it debases the legal and democratic process for anyone to insist — as a few prominent commentators have in recent days — that it is impertinent to believe that Cardinal George Pell is innocent despite losing his case in the Victorian Court of Appeal.

News Corp’s contempt for the rule of law is as staggering as the propaganda it peddles to buy its monstrous power. Its defence of St George, moreover, reveals Australia’s follow-the-leader-media rushing pell-mell to fall in behind Papal knight Sir Rupert’s News Corp’s Cardinal-as-Victim story-tellers.

Part of this narrative involves appeals to sympathy for “an old sick man” “who might well die in gaol” as the current Archbishop of Melbourne, Peter Comensoli tells 3AW’s Neil Mitchell. Bizarrely, Comensoli maintains Pell is innocent – and the victim is telling the truth too. It was another priest who committed the sexual abuse.

Easy for a thirteen year-old altar boy to get one 190 cm priest mixed up with another.

The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian and the odd guest on The Drum hold that Judge Weinberg’s dissenting view is the only one that matters or proof that our legal system is broken and or grounds for High Court appeal.

Paradoxically, another part of the story is that Pell is Australia’s most senior cleric, internationally renowned, a pal of Rupert Murdoch’s, a tall poppy cut down in his prime. The facts suggest otherwise.

At the end, Pell’s power in the Vatican rapidly waned, despite a promising start in modelling austerity by big spending. Outrage broke out over his choice of a 5100 euro a month apartment requiring he spend 87,000 on new furniture; employing an assistant on a 21,600 a month salary and even 6,650 euros on kitchen sink fittings.

Somehow word got out to Italy’s L’Espresso weekly of detailed opposition to Pell’s financial reform; not helped by his Secretariat for the Economy racking up a half-million dollars in expenditures in the last six months.

True, Pell rose to become Cardinal, but Francis, shrewdly diverted the ambitious antipodean prelate into the Sisyphean labour of draining the swamp of the Vatican’s scandalous financial mess, an impossible task – and one fraught with peril, for anyone, let alone a boy from Ballarat, who knew neither Vatican culture nor the rudiments of diplomacy or tact, author of The Melbourne Response, another monumental failure of Christian charity and human compassion which capped compensation clerical sexual abuse victims at $50,000.

They saw him coming, a retired priest says on The Drum. Rubbed them up the wrong way say Vatican insiders. Francis himself believes “Behind rigidity something always lies hidden,” he says. “In many cases, a double life.”

But nothing may detract from the Tory postmodern narrative of St George The Martyr. A man as powerful as Pell, a priest who could command a character reference from a former Prime Minister, (gasp) just cannot be guilty. The Pell pillar must be protected or the entire edifice of conservatism may be revealed to be rotten to the core.

It’s a monstrous spectacle made all the more shocking, somehow, by technical glitches which cause the live broadcast to freeze, the court website to crash and by appellant judge, Chief Justice, Anne Ferguson’s funereal delivery which brings “all the drama of a dead wombat to reading a summary of one of the most important criminal judgments of the year”, reports seasoned legal commentator, lawyer and writer, Richard Ackland.

The Tory world is in turmoil. Right-wing hacks and flacks led by News Corp, nutcase Andrew Bolt, thresh about protesting victim Pell’s innocence, slagging off Victoria’s judiciary and declaring war on the rule of law.

“Never any hope of justice for George Pell. He was too big a scalp for the howling mob,” tweets Bettina Arndt.

Could a Cardinal be so publicly undone? Could a high priest of our ruling elite, a fully-paid member of the board of Reactionary Australia Inc. be brought to heel? Could our rulers be held accountable? Perish the thought. Look at Crown.

The kid gloves are on in the federal government’s treatment of St James Packer’s Crown Casino where there is report from a whistle-blower that ought to be hair-raising. It’s a whale of a tale of high-rollers being fast-tracked through immigration, equipped with escorts before a restorative punt is followed up by a refreshing wildlife shoot.

Crown is a cathedral to our new age of mad depravity, infinitely more popular than any offering of the Catholic Church and more powerful. Crown’s backers rule our politics as the gun lobby does America’s, as former Victorian Premier John Cain observes.

Cain, whose government decided as early as 1983 that to build a casino would be to invite organised crime, warned of the power, grace and charm of casino lobbyists in 1990,  “Within three weeks of me going in August 1990, they had not only battered the doors down, but they were in the lounge room pissing on the furniture.”

Sensibly, heeding their mandate from silent Australians to leave no depth unplumbed, the Morrison government summons a toothless watchdog, no-one’s ever heard of.

Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity (ACLEI), a Clayton’s investigator, is agreed upon by both major parties, to allow our gambling lobby to continue to uplift the moral tone of the nation, growing jobs and building wealth, especially in the off-shore bank accounts of Crown Casino and its coterie of money-launderers.

Conspiracy theorists swarm to depict poor, vulnerable Georgie Boy as the innocent victim of a Gillard-leftist-Victoria Police-Nine News plot. In the midst of this fertile, national conversation, Scott Morrison shrewdly chooses to announce he’s just engulfed us in another US oil war which his BFF, another vainglorious lout, the dangerously demented Donald Trump is brewing up against arch-fiend Iran in the Straits of Hormuz.

“200 troops”, he says out of the corner of his mouth. “Limited to six months,” he says. “Or longer, as the case may be” he says, skipping away.  Marise Payne, repeats his de-escalation double-speak, almost word-perfect as so sundry other MPs as interviews are merely an excuse for the re-iteration of central minders’ talking points.

Happily, the week brings the anniversary of Scott Morrison’s hugely undistinguished year in office, after knifing Malcolm Turnbull in a double, double-cross. His government has no energy, no environment, no economic or climate change policies, no vision and no shame. But it’s cranking up Robo-debt to go after elderly age pensioners. That blessed surplus won’t accrue all by itself.

No-one in government fusses over the two thousand who die after receiving Robo-debt letters between July 2016 and October 2018.  It’s not difficult to envisage a link between their deaths and the debt letters.

Yet Morrison is now the best PM ever, according to the worst, “lying rodent” John Howard, the PM who did most to unpick the threads of a prosperous, progressive, cosmopolitan and egalitarian society and who lied to parliament and people that he had legal opinion to join the illegal US war in Iraq.

Howard also wrote a glowing reference for George Pell.

 

No matter how much money you put on the table it doesn’t give you the excuse not to do the right thing, which is cutting down your emissions, including not opening your coalmines.”

Enele Sopoaga, Prime Minister of Tuvalu, 14 August 2019

 

“Shove a sock down the throat of Jacinda Ardern” – urges Alan Bedford Jones, 2GB Sydney’s sock- shock jock, another former, failed, Liberal Party candidate and inveterate misogynist,Thursday, as New Zealand’s PM supports Pacific Islanders’ global warming concerns, endorsing the resolutions of all but one of the eighteen countries and territories of this week’s 50th Pacific Islands Forum, (PIF) meeting in Tuvalu’s capital, Funafuti.

Left on its own, promoting global warming is Australia. Ms Ardern says, diplomatically, that our land down-under can answer to the Pacific for itself. New Zealand, or Aotearoa ,as its Maori people named it, commonly translated as land of the long white cloud, or, continuously clear light is doing what it can to limit its carbon emissions to 1.5C.

Ms Ardern expects all nations to make a similar commitment but will not lecture others.

Rabid climate change denier Jones turns puce. He rants; spits foam at the microphone. Does ScoMo’s office tell Jones to put the boot in? For Jones and his audience – and, indeed, for much of Morrison’s government, global warming, is a hoax. And an aberration, a perversion of reason. The notion is an unnatural hoax, as is the monstrous regiment of women who dare to demand their fair share of political power from blokes.

“Here she is preaching on global warming and saying that we’ve got to do something about climate change,” Jones harangues listeners from his bully pulpit.  His signature outbursts of outrage, his demonising and his scapegoating are his own take on Orwell’s two-minute hate. Jones down low may be heard playing daily in all the best dementia wards in hospitals all over Sydney. Thursday, Jones goes off like a frog in a sock.

Preaching? It’s precisely what the Kiwi PM takes pains to avoid, but Jones rarely lets fact spoil his argument.

New Zealand has cows that burp and fart, he sneers, in a rare, brief, departure into scientific truth.

Jones role has little to do with reporting and even less with respecting fact. In the 1990 cash for comment scandal, where he and John Laws were found to have accepted money from a slew of corporations, QANTA, Optus, Foxtel, Mirvac and big banks, the jocks’ defence was that they were not employed as journalists, but as “entertainers” and thus had no duty of disclosure or of journalistic integrity. Yet Jones hopes the PM is briefed,

“I just wonder whether Scott Morrison is going to be fully briefed to shove a sock down her throat.”

Outraged by Ardern’s audacity – as much as the fact that she’s a Jezebel – a woman brazenly asserting authority, independence and leadership, Jones works up a lather. Arden’s an impudent hypocrite, he squawks. Australia act responsibly or answer to the Pacific on policy? Accountability is heresy in ScoMo’s government. Perhaps Jones hopes that his “sock it to her” will be an Aussie form of “send her back”.

Sending Kiwis home, if Peter Dutton doesn’t like the look of them, is at least one Morrison government policy that’s coherent. Repatriation on “character” grounds saw a thousand forcible deportations between 2016-2018. Under Morrison as Immigration Minister in 2014, the policy was expanded to include all those Kiwi-born residents who’d been sentenced to twelve months or more in prison.

Many of those deported under the “character test” have no family or friends in New Zealand; have extensive family ties in Australia and have spent very little time in New Zealand, having arrived in Australia as children.

It’s another source of friction between Australia, its major trading partner, despite China (NZ$15.3bn) now having eclipsed Australia (NZ$13.9bn) as New Zealand’s biggest export market.

Friday, Jones’ sock-jock mockery continues. “The parrot” ridicules one of New Zealand’s most popular and effective Prime Ministers; alleging Ms Ardern is “a clown” and a “joke” for “preaching about climate change”, claiming, falsely, that New Zealand’s carbon dioxide has increased per capita more than Australia’s since 1990.

The Parrot’s problems with women in power, rival those of the Liberal Party itself. Worrying aloud in 2012 about our Pacific policy and how “women were wrecking the joint” during Gillard’s highly successful minority government, Jones said he was “putting Julia Gillard into a chaff bag and hoisting her into the Tasman Sea”.

Gillard’s government invested $320 million in promoting Pacific Island women’s role in business and politics.

“She said that we know societies only reach their full potential if women are politically participating,” he shrieked in utter disbelief to listeners during an on-air hate update from Barnaby Joyce about the sale of Cubbie Station to a Chinese-led consortium.

“$320 million could have bought the 93,000 hectare Cubbie Station and its water rights, he reckoned. Kept it in Australian hands. There’s no chaff bag big enough for these people.”

“Women are destroying the joint – Christine Nixon in Melbourne, Clover Moore here. Honestly.”

Gillard’s father John a former psychiatric nurse who passed away at 83, “died of shame”, he added in 2012, “To think that he has a daughter who told lies every time she stood for Parliament.”

Also socking it to Jacinda, Jones is joined in combat by another Liberal supporter and climate denialist, One Nation’s resident empiricist, Malcolm Roberts, who knows how much Kiwis love sheep jokes.

“New Zealand has over 60 million sheep. Sheep produce about 30 litres of methane a day. If Ardern was serious about addressing ‘climate change’ shouldn’t she start by culling the entire sheep population of NZ? Or is she just climate gesturing?”

Roberts is wrong in several respects as an AAP fact check demonstrates. He can’t count sheep. New Zealand’s official data agency, Stats NZ, reports the most recent farm census, conducted in 2017, records 27.5 million sheep in the country. A 2018 provisional update reports a drop to 27.3 million.

Nor are sheep the major culprits. New Zealand’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory for 2017, released in April 2019, shows sheep produced 12.7 per cent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Dairy cattle accounted for 22.5 per cent, while electricity generation created 4.4 per cent.

Above all, this year, New Zealand introduced a bill to reduce emissions of methane by animals to 10 per cent below 2017 levels by 2030, and between 24 and 47 per cent below 2017 levels by 2050.

Fellow climate science denier, Mick-Mack, as Coach ScoMo calls our deputy Prime Minister, Michael McCormack, must grab a headline to delay being deposed by Barnaby Joyce. Mick-Mack chimes in with a killer argument. Lenore Taylor says on ABC Insiders Sunday, that he couldn’t be more “offensive or paternalistic” if he tried. Itinerant Pacific Islander fruit-pickers, he says, should thank their lucky Aussie stars.

“They will continue to survive,” the part-time Elvis impersonator says in his most tone-deaf, judgemental manner. “There’s no question they’ll continue to survive and they’ll continue to survive on large aid assistance from Australia. They’ll continue to survive because many of their workers come here and pick our fruit.”

And our tomatoes – for eight dollars an hour, as reported in the recent settlement of a case on behalf of fifty workers from Vanuatu, who suffered bleeding from the nose and ears after exposure to chemicals at a farm near Shepparton under the government’s seasonal worker programme.

Brisbane based Agri Labour Australia refuses to admit liability, even after being taken to court and even after agreeing to an undisclosed financial settlement. The Fair Work Ombudsman takes separate legal action. This results in nineteen workers being compensated $50,283 for wage theft – a crime rife in our migrant workforce be it in horticulture or in hospitality.  No records were kept of the workers’ labour over six months.

Seasonal worker and father of six ,Silas Aru, worked for six months, yet was paid a mere $150 in total in farms across Queensland – also as part of a government seasonal workers’ or slave labour scheme. Federal Circuit Court Justice, Michael Jarratt​ struggled to imagine a “more egregious” case of worker exploitation.

Exploited to the point of criminal neglect or abuse, men and women from the Pacific Islands are often the slaves in our nation’s overworked, underpaid, casual or part-time workforce. Mick-Mack knows how to pick ’em. Rip off the vulnerable. Trick them. Rob them blind. Then remind them what a favour you are doing them.

As the bullying of the Pacific Island leaders rapidly turns into an unmitigated disaster, something must be done. ScoMo’s staff work long and hard to orchestrate a shit-storm in response. It’s specialised work. Howard allegedly had an operative in his office solely working on “Alan Jones issues” throughout his term in office, former 2UE Jones colleague and big critic Mike Carlton tells The Saturday Paper’s Martin McKenzie-Murray.

Jones’s confected outrage is a tactical dead cat thrown on the table; distracting media from ScoMo & Co’s default policy of bullying and duplicity. Con-man Morrison promises $500 million over five years for “climate and disaster resilience” but it’s an accounting trick; a shonky repackaging of existing aid. No-one falls for it.

Pacific leaders are insulted, alienated by Morrison’s attempt to con them with a fake bribe. Our PM adds injury to insult by adding a bit of emotional blackmail.  Fijian PM, Frank Bainimarama explains.

“The PM … apparently [backed] into a corner by the leaders, came up with how much money Australia have been giving to the Pacific.” He said: “I want that stated. I want that on the record.’ Very insulting.”

Bainimarama is ropeable. By Saturday, he is all over the media after phoning Guardian Australia. ScoMo’s “condescending” diplomacy is as much of a massive fail as his government’s energy or environment policy or overseas aid abroad vacuums. The Fijian PM is clear that by alienating and insulting Pacific Islanders, ScoMo is helping drive the leaders into the arms of the Chinese. In other words, Morrison’s mission is a total failure.

Kick Australia out of the PIF, calls Anote Tong, former president of Kiribati, and veteran advocate for nations battling rising sea-levels caused by global warming. Australia’s membership of the Pacific Island Forum should be “urgently reviewed” for possible sanctions or suspension over the Morrison government’s pro-coal stance, he says. There’s a precedent. Fiji was barred until recently in a move to censure its departure from democracy.

(PIF) … is supposed to be about the well-being of the members,” Tong tells The Sun-Herald and Sunday Age.  “If one country causes harm to other nations, such as by fuelling climate change, “there should be sanctions”.

“Pacific people see through this facade. We won’t solve the climate crisis by just adapting to it – we solve it by mitigating it, reducing emissions, investing and transitioning to renewables, not shirking our moral duty to fight,” Greenpeace’s Head of Pacific Joseph Moeono-Kolio says. But our federal government just doesn’t get it.

ScoMo started badly by opting for antagonism and insult. Sending junior minister, coal lobby shill, Alex Hawke on ahead to set up talks did not go over well. Hawke recycles denialist garbage. Human influence on global warming is “overblown” he reckons, while in Tuvalu, he peddles the lie that our economy depends on coal.

In reality, the Morrison government’s dance to the tune of the coal barons costs us a fortune. Avoiding climate change reduces our GDP, by $130 billion a year, reports The Australia Institute, citing calculations by government consultant, Brian Fisher. Yet in the reporting of the Forum, our media helpfully relay the government’s re-framing of our global warming crisis into a choice between jobs or a few more emissions.

We are “family” insists Great White Bwana Morrison. A dysfunctional family where a crafty Father Morrison tells the younger fry lies. The Greens Adam Bandt puts his finger on it. Our wretched carry-over Kyoto credits are yet another shonky accounting trick to allow ScoMo to continue his hollow boast that “we’ll meet and beat” our Paris emissions reduction targets. The stunt certainly does not impress beleaguered Pacific leaders.

“At the moment we are not on track to meet the Paris targets. No one in the world is. We are on track to exceed 3.5 degrees of global warming, which will be a catastrophe. The Pacific Island leaders know this.”

Exploiting “a pollution loophole” is how The Australia Institute (TAI) describes Australia’s bad faith. The “pollution loophole” amounts to about eight years of fossil-fuel emissions from the Pacific and New Zealand combined, calculates, TAI, in a research paper it helpfully makes available to leaders before the Forum. The paper pulls no punches from its title onward: How Australia is robbing the Pacific of its climate change efforts.

Worse, it spells out how Islanders are paying for our denialism. Australia intends to use 367 Mt of carbon credits to avoid the majority of emission reductions pledged under its Paris Agreement target. Meanwhile, the entire annual emissions from the Pacific Islands Forum members, excluding Australia, is only about 45 Mt.

The bad faith continues. ScoMo & Co coerce Island leaders into watering down the text of their draft declaration. Or so it seems, unless you are tuned to Radio New Zealand. Local reports have it that after twelve hours, the PIF comes up with a hollow text that mimics the Coalition’s own climate change denialism.

Pacific leaders released a draft declaration in Tuvalu, Tuesday, calling for “an immediate global ban on the construction of new coal-fired power plants and coalmines” and for all countries “to rapidly phase out their use of coal in the power sector”. It echoes the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ call last May.

All references to coal go from the forum communique and climate change statement. Expunged also, are any aims to limit warming to less than 1.5C or any commitment to a plan for net zero emissions by 2050.

Naturally, the Pacific leaders have the nous to issue their own separate declaration with targets which echo its draft statement and which follow the lead of the United Nations, sadly, a body increasingly ignored – if not ridiculed – by our own government and that of its great and powerful friend the US, among a host of others.

By Saturday, Morrison’s stunt with grateful fruit-picker and sock back-up is unravelling badly. Promising to be “a good friend, partner and brother of Pacific Island countries” is China’s special envoy to the Pacific, ambassador Wang Xuefeng, who is quick to exploit the rift between Australia and its Pacific neighbours.

Morrison insists the Forum is a “family gathering” and that “when families come together they talk about the stuff that matters, that’s most important to them. Over the next few days that’s exactly what we’ll do.” It’s ScoMo code, Newspeak for insulting, alienating and bullying the leaders; trashing their hopes and aspirations.

Let the Pacific Islanders worry about rising sea levels and increasing salinity which is rapidly making their homes uninhabitable. In Australia, government energy policy is dictated by a powerful coal lobby – with powerful allies in the media. The PM who brings a lump of coal into parliament also has an assistant recruited from Peabody Coal and has his fossil-fuel lobby and a daft hard right with the upper hand in mind all week.

The Prime Minister’s performance at the Pacific Islands Forum is a monumental failure. Even if his bullying, his intransigence, his inhumanity and chicanery do impress a few one-eyed partisans at home it has dealt irreparable damage to our goodwill in the Pacific, which has not really recovered since the Abbott government  cut $11bn from overseas aid in 2015, a cut which the budgie-smuggler insisted was “modest”.

Fears that China will exploit Australia’s neglectful – if not abusive – relationship with its Pacific neighbours are aired all week but the Morrison government isn’t listening. It does everything in its power to offend and alienate Pacific leaders as it clings to its ideological fixation with supporting a moribund coal industry at home.

Above all, enlisting or inspiring the support of Alan Jones, aka The Parrot, has helped the Morrison government shine a light on the unreason, the bullying, the racism and the misogyny which lie at its heart.

 

 

Describing the US-Australia alliance as “unbreakable”, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he hoped the junior ally would partner with America on “some of the most pressing foreign policy challenges of our time” including “Iran’s unprovoked attacks on international shipping in the Strait of Hormuz”.

Mike Pompeo’s press-ganging of Australia, one of its few remaining useful idiot allies, into a crazy, navy-battle with Iran is upstaged by Trump’s stupidity, surely the top “pressing foreign policy challenge of our time”, Monday, as the USA’s tariff war provokes a Chinese burn. Beijing lets China’s currency slip below seven renminbi to the US dollar.

It’s a dip in value not seen since 2008. Instantly, $38 billion is wiped off the Australian Stock Exchange, Monday; the worst day of the year for our stock traders. Stock markets in Tokyo and Hong Kong where trade is troubled by impertinent serfs wanting independence, fall 2 percent. Futures markets suggest Wall Street will open lower, too.

Even worse, Trump’s kamikaze trade war with China is based on his peerless ignorance and delusion. Blatant falsehoods and misconceptions lead him to blow up world trade in his crusade to make America great again.

“Tariffs are NOW being paid to the United States by China of 25% on 250 Billion Dollars’ worth of goods & products,” he tweets in May. “These massive payments go directly to the Treasury of the U.S.”

Nope. They don’t. But no-one can explain that to Trump. China is as likely to hand over billions of yuan for Trump’s tariffs as Mexico is to pay for a border wall. Instead, tariffs fall on American importers of Chinese goods, who then put up prices to American consumers. Every time Trump raises tariffs, he raises costs on families and businesses.

Eager to divert the Donald, Trump’s helpers urge on an unwinnable war with Iran. Seventieth Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, a former CIA Director briefly, (January 2017 to April 2018) who is now intelligence Czar by default of the most irrational, least cerebral White House in US history, flies in, Sunday, to dine with fellow evangelical weirdo, and Trump fan-boy “Gung-Ho” Scott Morrison. Pompeo lies about Iran. Suckers us into a tanker war. It works.

“Like us the UK are equally alarmed by the increasing tensions in the Gulf region and they also strongly condemn Iran’s attacks on shipping in the Gulf of Oman, given some of their vessels have been subject to attack,” Reynolds reads aloud. Defence Ministers now simply copy and paste US spin. Presto! Instant press release. In reality, Minister Reynolds, the attacks are a response to the US persuading Britain to seize Grace 1. It is a manufactured crisis.

And it is also a folly. Trump’s Gilbertian Gulf Protection Force will fail, just as its predecessor failed thirty years ago.

Reynolds should buck the Coalition trend of ignoring expert research or history or common sense and at least read Robert Fisk who reported 30 years ago on his experience of the ill-fated first tanker war,

“What afflicted most of the seamen in the Gulf was the heat. It burnt the entire decks until they were, quite literally, too hot to walk on. British sailors stood on the edges of their shoes because of the scalding temperatures emerging from the steel. The depth-charge casings, the Bofors gun-aiming device, were too hot to touch.

On the helicopter flight deck, the heat rose to 135 degrees, and only a thoughtless leading hand would have touched a spanner without putting his gloves on. It created a dull head, a desperate weariness, an awesome irritation with one’s fellow humans on the foredeck. Inside the ship … the heat shuffled through the vessel faster than the seamen.

The officer’s mess was a cool 80 degrees. One glass of water and I was dripping. Open the first watertight door and I was ambushed by the heat … After the second door, I walked into a tropical smelter, the familiar grey monochrome sea sloshing below the deck. How can men work in this and remain rational?”

There’s talk about how we could become a US missile base but Reynolds denies it later. So it could well be true. Reynolds also denies that the Liberal Party has a culture of bullying or misogyny. Her invisible friend Foreign Minister and Minister for Women Marise Payne does very little to earn either portfolio. She equivocates on missiles.

Who cares if the last tanker war in the 1980s ended in disaster? When our great and powerful friend tells us to jump, we just ask how high. Where are the details of the flotilla of the willing? What is the battle plan? In the 1980s Iran simply had to place a few antique mines in the water and the thin-hulled US vessels were in trouble.

A US tanker, The Bridgeton hit a mine 24 July 1987 but was able to limp home followed by a clutch of US warships forced to steam behind for their own protection like a gaggle of ducklings behind their wounded mother duck, much to the amusement of the Iranian navy. The American humiliation will not be forgotten. Except by News Corp.

Father Paul Kelly of The Australian bloviates glowingly of a “declaration by Pompeo that the US expects all nations with commercial interests in free navigation in the Straits of Hormuz to participate in intervention against Iran to protect the waters. This has been put as a general US appeal, not an alliance issue. But past experience suggests if the US assembles a broad coalition of nations then Australia will be involved.

No-one on the ABC and certainly no-one representing government points out that there are one or two tiny hitches. The US president and Commander in Chief, Donald Trump, will not, cannot even read a briefing paper. Staffers claim he does not believe in objective reality. He gets his policy ideas from Fox News. Pompeo was brought in to clean up the mess. His job, as the New York Times puts it is to travel the world cleaning up Trump’s messes.

Trump has no clue what he is doing. He fires anyone who disagrees with him. Pompeo, who prides himself on being a Donald whisperer is the last man standing of his original staff but Pompeo also believes in The Rapture. Iran must be crushed as part of God’s plan to send Jesus to return to an Israeli-owned Jerusalem. Trump’s current trade war with China, meanwhile, may lead to a world recession – yet no effort is pared to normalise the maniac.

Mike does suggest we set up a missile base in the NT. Point it at China. What could possibly go wrong? The former Tea-Party Congressman from Kansas is Trump’s willing partner in the politicisation of intelligence.

Whilst the CIA found evidence that Saudi Crown Prince MBS ordered Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, Pompeo told journalists there was no direct reporting that linked the prince to the order to kill Khashoggi.

Naturally, it’s a secret meeting to best serve the interests of transparency in a world run on by rules-based order. A further secret meeting follows with the PM in which he will eagerly volunteer to do anything Mike says.

Over 700,000 Australians struggle to survive on $40 dollars a day yet our government will provide $200 billion over 10 years for Australia’s military to support US wars, says the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network. (IPAN)

“Many are homeless, going without food and unable to pay for basic necessities like gas, electricity, education and health”.  The Coalition’s recent gift is $73 billion in tax free contracts to multinational weapons manufacturers.

IPAN Spokesperson, Shirley Winton says

“It is a disgrace that in a wealthy country like Australia, government benefits for unemployed people is the lowest of all OECD economies, while billions of dollars in taxes that people pay for a society to provide social and community services, health, education and public housing are being syphoned off to prepare for US wars of aggression and to subsidise the military-industrial complex.”

Australia, our ABC dutifully reports, is considering a “serious and complex” request from the United States to help protect oil shipments against Iranian interference in the Persian Gulf. Reynolds repeats the lie of our independence.

“We will ultimately as we always do, decide what’s in our sovereign interests.” Or whatever the US tells us to do. The word “lockstep” is used, a step above Turnbull’s image of mutually incapacitating affliction – “joined at the hip”.

The US peddles the lie that its allies have a say in its tanker wars. It’s visiting us just to check with Linda Reynolds and Marise Payne, who have no veto over ScoMo’s PM’s final call. Of course we yearn to be part of another illegal coalition of the willing. The US has not learnt a single lesson from its past disasters in the 1980s. Nor have we.

Nor has Britain, whose delusion that it is still a great naval power, lets itself be conned into piracy. Its seizure of Grace 1, an Iranian tanker, off Gibraltar, is illegal. It violates Part III of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea

Iran responds tit for tat. It seizes a British tanker, The Stena Impero, in the Strait of Hormuz, again an illegal act, but with due provocation. It is irrelevant that the tanker is attempting to breach sanctions by delivering oil to Syria. Yet there has been not a whisper of protest from our invisible Foreign Minister Payne or US toady, ScoMo.

Craig Murray, former head of the Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and alternate head of the U.K. Delegation to the UN Preparatory Commission on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea is disgusted. He both negotiated, and drafted parts of, the Protocol that enabled the Convention to come into force.

“The hypocrisy of arresting the Iranian ship and then threatening war when Iran commits precisely the same illegal act in retaliation is absolutely sickening,” is his informed judgement. Expect a different spin from Admiral ScoMo.

Donald Trump may never grasp the gravity of the events but his minders know that the collapse of the crucial international law on passage through straits would have devastating effects on the world economy.

No-one in our MSM, apart for Phillip Adams’ guest, Christopher Dickey of The Daily Beast on ABC’s Late Night Live with 350,000 listeners a week points out that the Brits have found themselves the pawns of the Americans. Now in deep trouble, fabulously untalented new PM Boris Johnson and his government are left on their own to work it out.

An incremental war is brewing – as it did in September 1980 turning the straits of Hormuz into Exocet ally, leading to a full scale war in 1986 and the US backing Iraq against Iran including the contra scandal.  1987 Operation Earnest Will saw US vessels outwitted by Iran and ended in another humiliation for the Reagan administration. Under Trump’s even more inept performances as Commander in Chief, Tanker war 2.0 will also end badly for America.

Perhaps our talented maritime experts in the Coalition will be asked to help lobby Iran to release the Stena Impero.

“Whose side are you on”, cries ScoMo & Co all week as he is forced to turn to internal politics and jeering at Labor. The PM and his motley crew, snipe at the Opposition with a new hyper-partisan, rallying cry. Morrison loves to pretend everything is black and white. No-one will ever accuse him of sophistication, complexity or depth.

Besides, ScoMo’s got to kick up a bit of dust to cover the Crown scandal which threatens to expose ministers and staff in organising junkets to woo whales (big gamblers) from China, where gambling is illegal, to Australia and then fast-track them through Immigration to Crown Casino and more, according to whistle-blower Roman Quaedvlieg.

Exocet missile and Attorney-General the very Christian Porter is on to it. The scandal is handballed to Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity (ACLEI) which has jurisdiction only over law enforcement and which is so underfunded it may well have to ask Crown to look into itself. In the meantime, the affair is punted off limits.

Because allegations have been referred to ACLEI, it’s not proper to comment, says Mathias Cormann with a straight face, reports The Monthly’s Paddy Manning. Above all the PM “is not aware of any of his ministers breaching ministerial standards”. Not aware? To The Greens’ Nick McKim, it’s a “pathetic” response. He says the referral to ACLEI is “convenient” – given it cannot investigate sitting politicians – and calls Porter’s stunts a “cover-up”.

McKim is right on the money. Crown, however, will not so easily be dealt with given its apparent scale and given that it follows a mini-series of rollicking scandals which includes grass-gate, where Jam Land’s endangered grasslands are given a good spray of Glyphosate herbicide, despite their protected status, a scandal Angus Taylor can’t defuse even with his top suggestion that we form a committee or something to look into nuclear power stations.

Nuclear power is too expensive, takes too long to build and needs abundant water as a series of past reviews have duly reported, but when you have no policy agenda and a cluster headache of scandals breathing down your neck, it may at least give you a breather. Or at least the Taylor family hopes so. Unhelpfully loitering the background are Reef-gate, Helloworld, Watergate and questions unanswered about a closed tender for security on Manus Island.

Crown, a big donor to both major parties, is even dubbed “The Vatican” because it is a law unto itself but although he hopes it can all be buried in a review, ScoMo throws a dead cat on the table. “Whose side are you on?” implies that Labor cannot be trusted or that they betray the decent, quiet Australians who star in Coalition spin.

ScoMo’s politics sounds a lot like kids choosing sides in some playground game, although the least helpful thought bubble by a country mile this week has to go to troubled Terry Young, the Queensland LNP MP for Longman, who suggests in his first speech in the House of Representatives that schools should teach both sides of the climate change debate in school – to prevent them being “brainwashed with extreme left or right ideologies”.

Only it’s far more sinister. “Unfunded empathy”, is Morrison’s brave new taunt of the week. He sneers at Labor for showing compassion, he says we can’t afford – despite the IMF’s May report showing that Australian taxpayers subsidise fossil fuel industries by a whopping $29 billion a year. Raising New Start is small beer in comparison.

Yet “unfunded empathy” is worse than nonsense. It betrays Australia’s long tradition of egalitarianism and attacks the very heart of the social contract. It’s odd that a man that so publicly professes his religious faith does not seem to know the injunction that to give is to give and not to count the cost.

it’s OK for his Coalition spendthrifts to blow over $4 billion a year on Operation Sovereign borders, a fortune on paranoia, xenophobia.

“We believe what Australians believe.” Coach ScoMo tells his team they need to show voters they’re on their side when they jet home business class for their well-earned late winter break and to spend their electorate allowance ?

What better way to divide a diverse, far-flung, failing nation state, less a democracy than a oligarchy, ruled by a rat-pack of business, mining, media, banking and gambling magnates? In its place, MPs exchange matey barbs on the banality of breakfast TV; leaders in the babel of much of our national conversation, where daily we run up the white flag in the battle to separate fact from fiction. For Facebook, a lie is just a demoted truth.

Facebook is in the gun for publishing Labor’s evil plan to bring in a death tax should it have won the May election. It’s fake news. “False” says an independent fact-checker. Yet the social medium’s executive and word weasel, Simon Milner says it’s something else. Not just fake news but also something a political party doesn’t care for.

“We do not agree that it is our role to remove content that one side of a political debate considers to be false.”

Labor’s death tax is demoted not deleted. Communications Minister Paul Fletcher, a former Optus “Yes” man who, like his predecessor, Fifield, is one of our less communicative MPs, says he’s sympathetic to Facebook. It’s a remarkable turn-around for a government threatening to bring the socialists and keyboard warriors on Facebook and twitter to heel; slap them down with a huge new ACCC report. Fletcher is happy to parrot Milner.

“I don’t think we can dismiss reality – a digital platform is a different kind of business to a traditional media organisation that has editorial obligations.”

You’ve got to keep on the right side of this Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison government. No good coming out from France and making a documentary about our dying reef as Hugo Clement discovers. No good bleating to Mistress Tingle on 7:30 Report “But I thought Australia was a democracy”. Anyone could see whose side Monsieur Clement was on.

Did the cheese-eating surrender monkey think he could inspect bleaching in the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef? Film protestors at Adani’s sacred site? Defile the miracle of our extra virgin clean coal which will be mined in our heroic, philanthropic mission to lift Indians out of indigence and into penury by charging them double the average tariff thanks to an MOU with crony Modi’s business-friendly government?

Of course we run him in. Clement and his three musketeers are manacled and man-handled by Queensland’s top cops, herded into divvy wagons, thrown in the slammer at Bowen for seven hours, and released on bail until September. Of course, police say nothing. Quiet Australians are everywhere these days. No fuss. Just the bare minimum “get in the van” and the obligatory “spread your legs” for the body cavity strip search.

“They didn’t give us an explanation when they arrested us and they are not giving us an explanation now when they are saying ‘OK, it is over’,” Clement shrugs. Later it emerges police are keen to press a charge of trespass. Trespass is big in the news this week and it’s going to help protect farmers’ rights to practise animal cruelty, without being exposed by animal activists.

Luckily, Quiet Australians are on the right side. Hardworking Australians, mum and dad investors, self-funded retirees are still on Team ScoMo and the side still includes heroic small business folk, frantic to spend their tax cuts to create another casual part-time job for another underpaid, over-worked employee. How good are jobs? At least this is the drama in the eternal sunshine of the PM’s spotless mind. Perhaps they are all on the same team.

Thank God for ScoMo! Our divisions are healed by the miracle of Pastor Scott’s sublime gift for leadership and nation-building. This week’s building includes attacking Albo, vilifying John Setka and mocking Labor for calling for an increase in the New Start pittance. “Unfunded empathy” sneers our PM. You can hear the word of God in him.

Being a Pentecostal prosperity-gospeller must be a huge inspiration to our man at the top. Paul is all over the need to choose sides and put down others when he says “Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.” – 1 Thessalonians 5:11.  Or when he tells the Galatians to “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfil the law of Christ.” — Galatians 6:2

But “The Bible is not a policy handbook”, says the old fox Morrison “faith in Jesus Christ is not a political agenda”. It’s another of his many acts of dissembling. It’s impossible, argues James Boyce to understand the PM’s political career without considering his religion.

Uplifted, we soar above a barrage of scandals, “Grass-gate”, “Water-gate”, “Hello World” and even damning allegations of ministers of the Crown (Casino) who intercede to smooth the path of the holy high roller.

Whistle-blower and former Border Force Commissioner, Roman Quaedvlieg supports others who blow the whistle on how Crown Casino had a hotline to Immigration to help its whales (wealthy Chinese) avoid being beached by petty rules or having their bags searched.

Quaedvlieg says Crown’s fast-tracking of Chinese VIP gamblers into Australia, including on private jets, raises major security concerns. By Tuesday, the issue seems to have been eclipsed by thought of a glorious new war with Iran. But you can’t blame the whistle-blower, although experts will be working on ways to silence or arrest him.

“My immediate reaction was there was an enhanced risk … Who was coming on these flights? They were being coordinated, organised, through junket operators which are widely known, not just in the public sphere, but certainly within the law enforcement context, as being a triad-affiliated,” Mr Quaedvlieg says.

Luckily, the matter will be taken care of by an underfunded and limited ACLEI task force. Nothing to see here. It’s the same winning formula with Liberal women who just won’t go to the police to get the run-around on rape claims.

Former NSW Premier, Nick Greiner’s sage counsel is keep calm and carry on undeterred by claims of a Liberal Party culture of bullying, misogyny and accusations of attempted rape – they are state affairs and they happened long ago

“They are not federal examples, they are historical and besides we have no knowledge of them.”