Category: Political Comment

Abetz aids and abets Abbott’s anti-Union witch hunt in campaign against workers and women.

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When it comes to visits to the doctor, Australians are told to ‘tighten belts’ and to expect increased fees. These are laughably termed ‘price signals’ as if the spin makes it easier to accept the increased cost. Yet when it comes to union bashing, the government is happy to spend like a drunken sailor, a phrase it popularised whilst in opposition.

And when it combines its union bashing with an equally unfair and unbecoming vendetta on former PM Julia Gillard, a uniquely capable and respected politician who also just happens to be the woman who publicly called him on his misogyny, Tony Abbott is awash with funds; he has buckets of money to splurge, regardless of the outcome. With the nation’s indulgence, he has spent their money on his own blood sport.

The latest union bashing is both expensive and appears at first glance a poor investment. Abbott has spent one hundred million dollars on his Royal Commission into Trades Union Governance and Corruption without claiming the scalp of its chief target, Julia Gillard, and without finding any evidence of criminal conduct by any union representatives. Yet the dynamic of persecution continues unchecked. The show is guaranteed to continue as long, (or as short as) he is in office.

100 million is a hefty sum to squander on a wild goose chase. There is no sign, however, of any let-up in one of the most cynical witch-hunts against organised labour this nation has seen. Instead, the inquiry has been extended for another year, which, amazingly, as luck would have it for the PM, places it in the election year of 2016.  And because evidence is as scarce as hobby horse manure, it has requested public servants to help it with a fishing expedition.

Remarkably, to help fish up some ‘evidence’, all federal departments and agencies are being asked to disclose every contact with any trade union for any reason over the past decade in response to a “scoping questionnaire”. Not only is this outside the commission’s terms of reference it is predicated on the assumption that any contact or association with workers’ representatives is somehow illicit.

Vividly revealed in this move are the Abbott government’s prejudices against organised labour. Unions, unionists and rank and file members are not only suddenly persona non grata, this government is willing to go to extreme lengths to bring them into disrepute.

It is a fine line it treads. Should it prove that Abbott’s cabinet ministers are behind the ‘scoping’ it is a clear-cut abuse of power. Accordingly the ACTU is currently using FOI to investigate the involvement of Abetz and Brandis. No good looking in the report, of course, for this is a report with a highly selective focus: workers and their representatives are the villains of the piece. The employer is as ever beyond reproach. And the former PM is found to be at fault for showing impatient or sounding rehearsed. With these caveats, Commissioner Justice Dyson Heydon’s report makes diverting and instructive reading.

The Commission tabled its three volume 1800 page plus report on 19 December. Already, rating itself off the charts, it is a must-have Christmas gift for those who enjoy reading crime fiction over the Christmas holidays. The plot is compelling, the characters are colourful and it is all lavishly produced, no doubt with an eye to a musical or a mini-series.

(Proposed titles so far include The Hunt for Red Julia, Ranga Banga Party (a nod to Silvio Berlusconi’s cultural gatherings) or Julia’s big fat Greek Reno.)

No expense has been spared in production and two volumes are available for download now. The third volume is embargoed because someone may kill you if you read it, according to Employment Minister Eric Abetz who was careful to make the claim when interviewed by Leigh Sales last week on ABC TV.

Sales quoted the Commissioner’s wish to protect witnesses by suppression of volume three and his fear of something larger, something undefined, elliptical, something we can only guess at.

“It reveals grave threats to the power and authority of the Australian state.” Yet when pressed by Sales to elucidate, Abetz went coy. Or he didn’t know either. But the slur was all in a good cause. The cause of recruiting workers to the Coalition’s new or refurbished organisations:

Sales: What is this grave threat that he’s talking about?

Abetz: I’m not going to try to second guess His Honour. The commissioner has made these statements. One assumes that a former High Court judge would not make such a statement lightly, but it is indicative of the seriousness of the matters that are being dealt with, and that is why I call on the Labor Party to no longer run the apologies for the trade union movement, but get on board with our Registered Organisations Commission legislation and the reintroduction of the Australian Building and Construction Commission. We need the rule of law to apply in the trade union movement and on our building and construction sites.

The hundred million could have done a lot of good had it been invested in health, or education to name but two areas where funds have been slashed.  It could have saved Commonwealth legal assistance funding from the massive cuts inflicted upon it. It could have even gone towards salaries in public service.

Indeed, those public servants just put out of work by the Abbott government’s cuts might be forgiven for feeling a little sensitive, a little vulnerable, if not downright angry at the Abbott government’s priorities; a government which has seen fit to cut one public servant in eight from the workforce.

Surely it would have made economic if not also moral sense to put some of these families first? Put the security of the worker before the need to run expensive show trials for political purposes? Or is that just too much compassion and common-sense?

Sadly, neither the cost of continuing the Royal Commission, nor its failure to produce evidence has sated the Coalitions’ appetite for extravagant union-bashing. The Abbott government will happily spend further millions to indulge itself in its own blood sport.  And if it all looks a bit thin, you can always talk up the problem, as AG George, ‘soapy’ Brandis, a former QC, and member of the all-male Savage Club of Melbourne did recently.

The government, he claimed, extended its open season on the unions by another year because as the problem is just too big to deal with any sooner:

“It is very plain that the problem of criminality and the associations between certain unions, and certain union officials, and crime is a much more widespread problem than appeared to be the case when at the beginning of this year the government decided to establish the royal commission,” Senator Brandis said.

There were no specifics either in his statement or in the commission’s report, a report in which volume three was withheld from publication because it contained information too dangerous to share. This is a big problem the government tells the nation, so big and bad we can’t even tell you all the detail; so big and bad we don’t need to show you the proof. So bad you would not want to know. Just trust us on that.

But who needs proof, especially when you have got the bosses in your pocket and the Murdoch press in your corner? Slur and innuendo will do the trick. Mix in a good dollop of righteous indignation and prejudice. Let this mixture be whipped up by shock jocks, the Andrew Bolts and the many LNP MPs who go for this type of thing. It’s quickly become the government’s house style. Slur and innuendo are the Abbott government’s signature, its tried and tested fall-back strategy, always at hand just to keep things moving along.

Last week we were treated to a bravura display of smear tactics on ABC TV from Eric Abetz, a former Tasmanian lawyer in an attack on Gillard which stopped a micron away from defamation.  Although there are few who take Abetz terribly seriously, especially since his claimed link between breast cancer and abortion, he has clearly been sent forth to put the team case and to keep the witch-fires well-stoked. His first comment to Leigh Sales began with a lie and ended with a nifty side-step-slur which ensured that ‘other findings’ concerning Julia Gillard were still alive, despite the disappointing finding of lack of criminality on her behalf.

This inquiry has its genesis with a lot of people coming forward saying that there was something terribly rotten with the Australian Workers Union of that period where a slush fund was established with hundreds of thousands of dollars. We have people, no less than Ian Cambridge, a Fair Work Commissioner, Robert McClelland, a former Labor Attorney-General, seeking an inquiry to get to the bottom of all the allegations that were circulating. Clearly, today the Royal commission’s report indicates that Ms Gillard was not engaged in criminality. It has made some other findings which I don’t need to amplify or comment on in relation to Ms Gillard.

The genesis of the inquiry in fact was the Abbott government’s determination to pursue Julia Gillard, whom George Brandis, under protection of parliamentary privilege had referred to as a criminal in the lodge. He declined to repeat the slur outside the house.

Conjecture about Gillard’s involvement in an AWU slush fund was kicked off by Kennett in 1995 and dogged her all her political life. She has been grilled on her relationship with former partner and AWU organiser Bruce Wilson and with her knowledge of the fund for twenty years. No-one but Abbott would have re-opened speculation and smear. Nothing to see here boys, run along sonny, might well be the advice any reasonable human being would give her current persecutors. Yet it goes deeper than that both politically and personally for Abbott.

First, the commissioner is able to proceed in a way that attacks Gillard’s reputation without the typical legal constraints of evidence. Thus despite Commissioner Dyson Heydon being unable to find wrongdoing by Gillard in her work on the fund, he can still find a “lapse of professional judgement” on her part. As if that were a crime. As if that not something she shares with millions of other professionals in the nation. As if the phrase is not a juicy titbit for tabloid radio and other mindless reputation wreckers in the land including Eric Abetz who appeared to savour the phrase in his interview with Leigh Sales last week. Then the commissioner is free to speculate on the witness’ motives in a most damaging fashion; in a way that exacts maximum revenge. His report says:

 … there could be alternative explanations for Gillard’s testimony. The first was that she wanted it to be true that she had paid for all the renovations; the second was that she knew her testimony to be false.

It was very unlikely that Gillard’s testimony proceeded only from “some unconscious transmogrification of the truth proceeding from velleity”, the report says.

“Taking together the incorrectness of her evidence, the strength of her motives, and her demeanour in giving evidence, the inference is strong that she consciously chose to adopt the clean course of flat denial.”

A long-running union bashing show is handy on the IR front. Abbott may have declared Work Choices is “dead, buried and cremated” but it’s not what his party and his backers want to hear. And after all, they appreciate that it was just one of his verbal promises. No-one got it in writing. His hard right colleagues and his supporters still salivate their pockets off over getting Work Choices or key ingredients of their favourite dish back on the table. For them it was never really off the menu.

Abbott has flicked the technical fix off to a Productivity Commission his government has already started to stack with former political staffers.

As to a political fix? Well, a long-running inquiry that might weaken trade unions and dirty-up political opponents would just about be the dog’s bollocks. Working Life.

On the personal level, it is clear that by refusing to get off his hobby horse, Abbott has confirmed in spades Julia Gillard’s appraisal of his misogyny, a disorder well-represented amongst those males who bond around the cabinet table and throughout the LNP parliamentary party and its supporters. And there are no price signals for the Prime Minister: he is more than happy to spend whatever it takes on a continuing witch hunt fixture to keep bosses on top, workers under the thumb and women out of the workshop.

Abbott re-shuffles marked deck: Morrison to turn back oldies, job-seekers, needy in ‘new’, dry, right Cabinet.

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Tony Abbott was the man who could never be prime minister. “He’s just too right-wing,” a colleague told the Courier-Mail. “Too hardline,” said another to Abbott’s face. “He’s very much a mid-20th century sort of a bloke,” declared Labor strategist Bruce Hawker in early June, only to be trumped the following evening by Kevin Rudd, on the 7.30 program, who called him “one of the most extreme right-wing conservative leaders or politicians that the Liberal Party has thrown up”. Waleed Aly

Announcing his much vaunted Cabinet re-shuffle today, Prime Minister Tony Abbott confirmed that he is incapable of listening to the electorate’s serious concerns with his uncaring, unfair, autocratic style of government and signalled instead that he intends even more of the same. A beleaguered Prime Minister has shuffled a marked deck only to play cards which follow suit. Under pressure, he has retreated further into his atavistic mid-fifties reactionary hard-line political shell but it is unlikely to help him – or his nation.

Tony Abbott has found it impossible to make the leap from Leader of the Opposition to Prime Minister. He is seen as dishonest, untrustworthy, remote and unfair. Now, under huge pressure in the polls and facing a growing backlash within his own party, he has drifted even further to the right. Instead of any broadening of its base, his Cabinet will be narrower with fewer dissenting voices and more triumphal nonsense from those like himself he’s promoted, members of the far, dry right. Fed by the legions of spin doctors in its employ, nourished by the tabloid press, the spin is that we are on the right track. The fatal error is that it appears to have fallen for its own rhetoric.

The new Cabinet choices will continue his government’s remote, autocratic and unresponsive regime. It is a regime in which a balanced budget matters more than caring for people; a budget which matters more than inclusiveness, acceptance, equality or justice. It continues, moreover, the priorities of a government which exists to serve the interests of business and capital and to put those interests above the more challenging and less financially rewarding responsibilities of looking after the people, looking after the planet.

There may be no directorships on company boards for retiring politicians accruing from it, but the ultimate test of the humanity of any regime is how it deals with those at the margins, the poor, the weak, the elderly, the infirm, the alienated and the dispossessed. In this crucial test, this government has been a total failure. Yet the Prime Minister has chosen to tough it out.

Abbott’s regime, so far, has courted the big end of town with all manner of financial incentives, preserving privilege and entitlement and tax breaks whilst neglecting its responsibility to provide for the welfare of ordinary Australians, cutting welfare, education, health and effectively reducing pensions to balance a budget which it has already blown out by thirty billion in a series of dubious spending decisions including an unrequested, unwanted $8 billion gift to the Reserve Bank, its $2.5 billion unproved, untested Direct Action policy and its $2.5 billion military intervention in Iraq.

The Prime Minister who suffers the lowest approval rating in the history of Australian politics, today announced changes which confirm clearly once again why he has alienated so many in such a short space of time; changes, especially in social services which will surely net him even more opposition and hasten his political oblivion. Today’s tinkering indicates a continuing instinct for coercion and imposition from above rather than governing by consensus, co-operation and negotiation; changes which reveal why the nation is convinced he is just not up to the job. Abbott just doesn’t get it. He will never get it.

Terming the changes ‘reforms’, his government’s newspeak for any kind of change it thinks it needs to impose without adequate consultation or research, Abbott squinted into the afternoon Canberra sun as he outlined a series of changes which will be both unpopular and ineffective; changes calculated to accelerate his own demise.

Nowhere is this seen better in his demotion of Scott Morrison, a potential rival his own position and tipped by many in the press as a possible future Prime Minister. Morrison will get Kevin Andrews’ post as Minister for Social Services.

Scott Morrison, the soft, pliable, and nurturing former Immigration Minister is notorious for his intractable, overbearing and confrontational approach to those who dare to question or challenge his approach to his portfolio. An evangelical Christian, he has presided over a draconian quasi-military solution to stopping the boats, an extreme interpretation of his government’s political need to show a decrease in asylum seekers reaching Australia. In every aspect of his language and his actions, he has demonstrated a calculated inhumanity and cruelty from calling refugees, ‘illegals’ to letting children remain in indefinite detention, a situation which has only recently partially eased with the promised re-settling of asylum seeker children from Christmas Island, a concession he offered along with having children phone key cross-bench senators, in order to secure passage of his new migration legislation in which his own powers are enhanced and Australia’s responsibilities to refugees under the UN convention of 1951 are traduced.

It must be noted that Morrison has waged war against an illusory enemy. Very few of Australia’s ‘illegal immigrants’ as they are termed arrive by boat. Yet the facts have counted for little in the battle of reality versus misperceptions and widely held prejudices.

Morrison has appealed to right-wingers, xenophobes and all those whose prejudices are massaged by the nation’s talkback shock-jocks, tabloid press and all other pedlars of lies, misinformation and mistrust who seek the collusion of a mass audience in a collective hysteria which finds its expression in cruelty and hostility to complete strangers.

The former Immigration Minister has also gone out of his way to court these groups in what many have described as Australia’s ‘race to the bottom.’ With this type of audience egging him on, his approach in his new portfolio will be blame the victim and to lapse into a judgemental approach which labels unemployed as lazy and which peddles the myth that there are sufficient jobs ‘out there’ if only unemployed people would look harder.

The consensus in the popular press is that Morrison has done a good job. His image of a man of action who delivers results has been effectively sold using all the support of the tabloid media and a phalanx of Ministerial spin doctors. In reality, however, he has denied justice, denied humanity and presided over a department which either by negligence or by equal measures of incompetence, indifference and cruelty has seen asylum seekers dying from violence or from preventable infection.

Morrison who has adopted extreme measures lest Australia practise compassion, or even accept its UN obligations to refugees and asylum seekers is now to be Minister for Social Services, a role previously discharged ineptly by the immensely powerful Kevin Andrews, a conservative who has added a 1950s touch to his shaping of key elements of Abbott policy behind the scenes.

Morrison, who has the negotiating skills of a rutting warthog is the standout bad choice in a handful of minor Cabinet changes and edge-tinkering. There are some other disturbing choices in which promising unknowns of the right political colour have ‘stepped up’.

The cabinet as a right wing claque will only be strengthened when the former reactionary assistant Education Minister moves up to cabinet to take up Health. Sussan Leahy, will be feted as another woman in Cabinet given Health, yet if her words in parliament are any sign, is likely to be much more like Morrison in her approach to her duties and responsibilities. Expect more rhetoric about self-reliance and higher medical costs, especially for the poor.

New Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, seen by some as compassionate, is unlikely to release his department’s iron grip on those victims of war and other upheaval who have sought our clemency and compassion. The babies may be released from Nauru but the rest of the outrageously inhumane and cruelly punitive Border Protection practices will continue as the Abbott government repeats its boat-stopping as one of its big successes. If only it realised what this shameful disgrace really adds up to in terms of our international reputation and above all in our own sense of everything that is decent and right and proper.

The tacking on of Science into Industry is an insult and one which reveals the Abbott government’s complete misunderstanding of the value of scientific research. It does not redress the original fault, it merely compounds its error. In this, as in all other decisions regarding his cabinet, Tony Abbott has, in desperation lunged further to the right. It is his comfort zone but it will not save him. Rather it will hasten the demise of his own career and ensure that the LNP coalition enters the records not just merely as a one term government but a one term disaster; if not the worst government to ever accede to office.

Australia’s ‘brush with terror’ leaves Abbott with much to explain yet little wriggle room.

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”He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security.”

Benjamin Franklin

The Sydney siege has left Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott with a lot of questions to answer in a climate of expectations with little wriggle room, a climate of shock and fear and doubt, a climate in which his typical evasiveness will appear even less credible, and in which his attempts to exculpate himself could find him fighting for his political life.

First he must deal with the security breach. Abbott justified his government’s increased security measures and its heightened national terror alert as a trade-off: the need to give up some freedoms in order to make us all more secure. Now he must account for the demonstrable failure of these measures to protect Sydney and by extension the whole nation.

“Regrettably for some time to come, the delicate balance between freedom and security may have to shift he said in September, “there may be more restrictions on some, so that there can be more protection for others, he promised.

“Creating new offences that are harder to beat on a technicality may be a small price to pay for saving lives and for maintaining the social fabric of an open, free and multicultural nation,” he reasoned.

At the time, Abbott laboured the sacrifices which the nation would have to endure, but now the circumstances of the Sydney siege are causing his ‘ordinary Australians’ to question what they have received in return; challenge whether he has kept his side of the bargain. His political compact with the people is looking daily more fragile; wearing dangerously thin.

It does not matter if, as Abbott is now reasonably claiming, there are no measures which could have prevented mad Man Monis’ deranged act of hostage-taking. The Australian public does not want nuanced excuses, it expects the PM to deliver the increased security he promised. It matters little that, once again, as in economic matters, his government may have over-promised and under-delivered. Security is a much more immediate basic need. There are no second chances; no appeasement by enquiry for a public that feels let down, scared.

Abbott, the would-be ‘protector’ is trapped in the gilded cage of his own rhetoric as defender of public safety. His climate of expectations may have been a selling point in justifying increasing security but it has now turned into a noxious miasma of doubt, disappointment and betrayal which threatens to choke him and his government. The public will not be bought off with a token inquiry, in which those AFP, ASIO and police responsible agree to look into their behaviour.

The public, moreover, does not want to hear of bungling or systemic failure, although such lapses appear at every turn. There is the curious quest to discover Monis’ gun licence which ended with the AFP admitting it had wrongly advised the PM that the man ever held one. Despite the logical impossibility of anyone having a licence for a pump action shotgun, a prohibited weapon, the PM’s insistence on its existence just diminished his credibility. The nation is not reassured to learn that the AFP mistakenly advised the PM. How much other dud advice is he receiving at our expense? Then there is the regrettable and curious fact of Monis entry into Australia whence he fled from Iran claiming political persecution, an event which Attorney General, George Brandis, on Radio National this morning was unaware of but which he assured listeners would be looked into.

Historically, Australia’s ignored Iran’s plea for Monis extradition to answer criminal fraud charges at home.

“We have no extradition treaty with Iran, George Brandis has pointed out, failing to acknowledge that treaty or no treaty, the government failed to co-operate with Iran at the cost of accommodating a criminal fraudster and imposter in Australia.  There are many other failures, indeed, too many other failures in this tragedy of errors. These include the failure of our legal system to protect its citizens from a serial sexual offender who was a suspect in the murder of his own wife, a criminal with a history of erratic and extreme behaviour including writing abusive letters to widows of soldiers who had died in Afghanistan.

Abbott committed Australia to military intervention in Iraq, a failing nation state in a dangerously unstable region on the grounds that this would help make Australia safer. Now has some very difficult explaining to do even before the general public learns that our boys are indeed aiding and abetting a regime which is both corrupt and in league with its own local terror squads. It is not a venture that engenders reassurance.

As the tragic events of the Martin Place siege recently demonstrated, the much vaunted Abbott government safeguards that are in place don’t seem to be working. Just the reverse. Whilst the link with IS in the Sydney siege is tenuous, it seems any overseas military presence may attract the wrong sort of attention from certain mentally disordered, marginalised, misfits in our community.

Of course, ultimately, the PM’s assurances were mere rhetoric. Australians are no safer in fact than we were before Abbott’s anti-terror crusade. More to the point, nor do they feel safer: public opinion polls indicate that Australians feel less safe now than when the PM started his sabre-rattling militaristic foreign policy and his hairy chest beating internal security measures.

The only certainty is our new uncertainty. Abbott has increased our anxiety about our personal privacy and liberty whilst conspicuously failing to deliver his promised extra security. Our chief unease is that the state has greatly increased its authority over individuals whilst reducing its need to be open and accountable for the uses or abuses of that new power. This internal threat to our peace of mind outweighs our fear of any overseas, external enemy.

Abbott’s terror security package has not come cheap. The cost of the war in Iraq, to call it what it truly is, amounts to 2.5 billion so far, and is likely to demand more as an increasingly hawkish US foreign policy discovers what advisors have said all along, that you can’t win a war from the air. In terms of its damage to his political credibility and in terms of its abrasion of the fabric of society and the body politic, Abbott’s whole security and terror campaign appears to have backfired badly as wiser heads could have warned him had he been keen on taking any wide advice. Now the ex-pugilist has boxed himself into a corner where the gap between his promises and his capacity to deliver is illuminated by the public’s disappointed expectation of safety, a harsh and unforgiving scrutiny which may well end his bout.

For in the final analysis, there is no abstraction, no form of words that can ease the nation’s suffering, salve its grief, heal its bewildered pain at learning that a dangerous lunatic was able to end the life of respected barrister Katrina Dawson, a young mother of three, kill a ‘special’ boss and colleague, a brother and a son, Manager Tori Johnson who bravely attempted to wrest the gunman’s weapon from him by all accounts. Then there are the shattered lives of those who survived that cannot be mended by any glib assurances, apologies or excuses. These wounds are deep beyond words, these lives lost a sacred trust that all of us who mourn feel each one of us neglected; somehow failed to properly protect.

Sydney Siege Gunman killed by police mentally disturbed and acting alone not a terrorist.

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Sydney siege gunman, Man Haron Monis, said to be aged either 49 or 50, a mentally disturbed Iranian-born Sydney resident was shot dead by police when they stormed the Lindt café St Martin Place in central Sydney, where he was holding patrons hostage.

It seems clear from all available evidence that Monis, known to NSW police and judiciary for his letters to deceased soldiers’ families and released on bail on a charge of being an accessory to the murder of his wife and mother of his two children, acted alone and for personal motives. There is no reason, at this stage, to link him with ISIS or any other terrorist organisation, despite such speculation in some sections of the media.

Tragically two hostages were also killed. They were Sydney lawyer and mother of three Katrina Dawson, 38, and the day manager of the Lindt cafe Tori Johnson aged 34. It is yet to be determined whether they were executed by Monis, as he had threatened, or tragically caught in police cross-fire when police stormed the building shortly after 2:00am after hearing gunfire from within.

It is not known what motivated Monis, despite his communication with police negotiators during the sixteen hour siege which began around 9:00am in the café in the heart of Sydney’s business centre. Subsequent comments from his lawyer suggest that his motives were typically confused and contradictory, although there is evidence he was angry with the judiciary over failing an appeal over a court sentence.

Monis took 15 café staff and patrons hostage on the day after courts refused his appeal against his community work sentence for his conviction for writing bizarre letters to the families of soldiers who had served in Afghanistan.

Monis, aka Sheikh Haron and Mohammad Hassan Manteghi, and known to some Sydney residents as ‘The Fake Sheik’ was a self-proclaimed cleric, with a history of mental illness, and convictions for sexual assault who came to Australia in 1996 as a refugee from political persecution in Iran.

Most recently, he was charged with over 50 allegations of indecent and sexual assault relating to time allegedly spent as a self-proclaimed “spiritual healer” at a premises in western Sydney over ten years ago.

During the patron’s sixteen hour ordeal, Monis, an Iranian Shiite Muslim forced them to contact media with requests which included an ISIS flag. It is clear from Monis’ lawyer interviewed on ABC radio today that the hostage-taker was not a member of ISIS and that the request for the flag represented yet another attempt to gain publicity by the mentally ill man whose previous attention-seeking behaviour includes a series of online tirades directed at various Australian politicians and chaining himself outside Sydney courts.

It is important to note that there is no evidence whatsoever to link this disturbed individual to any organised terror group. His bizarre and pathetic, Walter Mitty style request that police procure an ISIS flag for him because he had the wrong flag is enough to sound a note of caution to those commentators who seek to speculate about his links with terror; a warning to those who would embellish or dignify the manifest symptoms of insanity with more organised thinking and motivation.

The would-be terrorist’s flag was an innocuous Shahada, or profession of faith in Islam, which asserts: “There is no god but Allah; Mohammed is the Messenger of Allah.” To a population already sensitised to terrorist threats and to a media saturated with reports of ISIS beheadings, however, it was at first sight evidence of something sinister, a visual cue to link a mentally ill individual to ISIS, a movement which PM Tony Abbott has chosen to describe to the nation as the ISIS death cult. To members of the Muslim community, it was a distressing type of betrayal, an ambiguous and potentially provocative signal to those non-Muslims fuelled by anti-terror propaganda keen to link Islam and terror. It was also a clear indication of the gunman’s confusion and mental disorder.

What went right during the siege was the way the police appeared to manage the situation, in particular their control of information. It seems that radio stations, TV and other media were able to co-operate with the police in restricting speculation and in limiting their coverage to a few simple facts. Whilst this may have made for boring TV, it doubtless saved lives.

Radio stations were contacted by terrified hostages, yet all were able to refuse Monis’ demands, including the nature of those demands. Monis, however, was able to force his hostages to post videos on social media. Standing in front of the black and white Shahada flag they talk of bombs and Islamic State. They are made to call Monis “the brother”.

“We’re held here hostage and the brother has three requests. One is to get an IS flag and he will release one hostage.

“The second is for the media to inform the other brothers not to explode the other two bombs which are also in the city. There are four bombs altogether here.

“The third is for Tony Abbott to contact the brother via live web, somehow, and he will release five hostages.

The skill with which these demands were parried is a tribute to all those involved in the handling of the disturbing incident. Monis was, thus, effectively deprived of a forum. Whether his frustrations ultimately led him to shoot two of his hostages will not be known until police conclude their inquiry into what is termed a ‘critical incident.’

What is perhaps less skilled has been the appearance of media experts who seem fascinated with ‘lone wolf’ terminology.  This has led to an unhelpful circularity of thought, a type of Catch 22, in which it is held that Mons acted alone therefore he is a lone wolf but given that ISIS encourages lone wolves, then he could still be part of the ISIS pack.

His social media statements are similarly adduced as evidence of his wider influence, his further connectedness in the web of terror. Let’s just say at this stage that he posted his delusional thoughts on social media. It is not in itself evidence of anything more sinister. Did he have a following? Again, on the evidence, it seems most unlikely.

Clear heads have prevailed so far. Clear thinking needs to continue. On all the evidence, so far the gunman was motivated by the delusional thinking and false logic symptomatic of a profound mental disturbance or disorder. His aberrant behaviour clearly included the capacity to inflict his pathological violence on others, and possibly on himself. Calls for strengthening terror laws, speculation on links with ISIS are less than rational and are unhelpful to our understanding and our capacity to deal effectively with what has been a shocking and frightening incident. Let us proceed cautiously by objectively and dispassionately adhering to established fact, with all due compassion for those who have suffered and are suffering as a result of the actions of this madman. Only then will we be best placed to understand and to support, to heal and secure a community which is grieving and in shock.

Put Hockey out of MYEFO misery before he inflicts more damage on himself and his nation.

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Treasurer Joe Hockey said the Government had “made a good start”.

“There is more work to be done but we are on the right track,” he said.

Put Joe Hockey out of his misery, please, someone. Someone he will listen to needs to, kindly but firmly, take him aside and let him know that his government has held office over a year. Certainly, the Coalition’s grip on governing, as with its grip on many day to day realities, has been tenuous, uncertain and weakening daily but Hockey needs to be told he’s in the driver’s seat now. He needs to know. There’s a big difference between running an opposition campaign and running the country.

Yet, from the way Hockey’s sooking over his MYEFO today, he just doesn’t get it. Or he doesn’t want to get it – any more than he wants to face his budget’s role in helping create the $17 billion blowout in the deficit, the LNP’s own MYEFO black hole, formally announced today.

MYEFO shows peak debt rising to $460 billion and the Budget balance deteriorating by $68.1 billion in just three months. This includes additional spending of $13.7 billion in just 101 days since the government was elected.  Unemployment is rising to stay at 6.25 per cent from 2014-15.

Break it gently to Joe, the reality of his position will clearly come as a big shock to one so under-prepared to take power; but it’s for his own sake, for everyone’s sake. And it’s only fair. It will give him a personal taste of what he has inflicted on so many other Australian workers whose Christmas surprise will be to be told by the boss they are dismissed or, in emulation of world’s best practice in HR, an email telling them their services are no longer required.

Unlike Hockey, of course, there will be no prospect of a cushy job on the board of the Reserve Bank or any other bank or financial outfit he’s helped look after in office. Just growing unemployment and worsening job conditions and real wages. And amidst rising utilities costs, more than a hint of a GST hike to look forward to.

Hockey can’t seem to look forward but he does need to stop deluding himself he’s still back in his larrikin glory days when he gave them heaps every day in parliament. He saw it all differently then, of course. Not for Hockey were there any extenuating circumstance, or headwinds, no such thing as a drop in receipts. He was merciless, excoriating towards the then Treasurer, World’s best finance Minister for 2011, the impressively successful Wayne Swan whose policies helped Australia weather the GFC.

How Hockey jeered and heckled then. How he preened and crowed.

“Old Swanny likes to blame everyone else.”

“The trouble is he gets his numbers wrong in the first place and again if you were a company director you would go to jail.”

Now it has all come back to haunt him. Hockey faces some of the very same challenges Swan had to deal with. Yet he’s hoping we have forgotten how badly he behaved then. He hopes that we will be generous and forgiving today where he was remorselessly critical, unfair and cruel only yesterday. The hypocrisy is breath-taking. He needs to wake up to himself before it is all over.

It’s time Hockey stopped obsessing over Labor’s Bolshevik conspiracy, the Black Hand of Trade Unionism and other paranoid fantasies; it is time he faced the real enemy, his own government’s fiscal ineptitude under his leadership as Federal Treasurer.

Put the bluff and bluster aside, Mr Hockey, the truth is that you don’t know what you are doing: your government has no coherent economic plan. Bullet points and slogans may have worked in opposition but their usefulness has long expired. Knee-jerk reflexes to cut spending such as sacking seven percent of the public service workforce and making whopping cuts to health and education will only compound the problem by depressing economic activity and lowering confidence.  You bang on about small business being the backbone of the country but in cutting public service positions you effectively destroy small business’ custom.

Let’s be clear about cause and effect here. It is true that we face challenging external factors in world commodity prices which are beyond anyone’s control such as the drop in the price of iron ore or the drop in oil and natural gas but Hockey’s got a lot to directly account for himself.

Consumer and business confidence continue to fall while unemployment rises. Money is cheap but no-one thinks it’s a good time to borrow. ‘Ordinary Australians’ are unhappy with the Abbott government’s dismal performances. They worry about their job security, whether they can pay their bills, or is they can afford to buy a home.  They expect their government to do something to help them, not make things worse. They expect the Federal Treasurer to know what to do, not come running to them with apologies, lame excuses and more hollow promises.

Contrition doesn’t cut it, Joe, the electorate wants effective action informed by understanding and insight; not a series of desperate experiments but an intelligent, practical plan. Australians look to you for real leadership. Yet all you have to offer in return, it seems, is finger-wagging, fibbing and evasion.   You need to take a long hard look at yourself. Perhaps you may then wake up to what you look like to others, others who are heartily sick of your errors, your evasions and your lies.

What do the Australian people see when they look at you, Mr Hockey? They see a treasurer who doesn’t care, an unfair treasurer, a treasurer who makes excuses, a treasurer who can’t keep his promises, a treasurer overwhelmed by his portfolio.

No good taking credit for the infrastructure Labor promised, Mr Hockey, your government won votes by promising to build infrastructure but so far it’s done nothing, a nothing which is worse than nothing given the state of the rest of the economy. Finance is unlikely to ever be much cheaper, the economy needs the boost of public spending yet all you can do is bite your nails and whinge about being blocked by the Senate. Oh, and dishonestly claim credit for projects started under Labor.

Mr Hockey you are not still in Opposition: blaming others for your own mess was never a good idea and right now it can only simply further damage the Australian economy and shred the few remaining threads left of your own reputation. $17 billion in the hole in such a short time is an indictment but passing the buck here is a fatal error to you, your government, and Australia’s economy.

You are in the driving seat, Mr Hockey, despite your evasion and your denial. It’s an alarming, prospect, we grant you but it has to be faced.

Those at the Abbott government wheel appear to be facing backwards, looking to the past for direction, suckered by trickle-down and other rightist myths of economic management, itching to cut and shuttle back the engine of recovery.

The ‘adults in charge’ Abbott government bickers and blames Labor; blames the drop in international commodity prices; blames any independent press and still tries to take its hard dry right hands off the wheel while its ‘open for business’ juggernaut veers alarmingly out of control and all over the road. Skittling sundry unwary advisers, former employees, contractors and the odd supporter it accelerates madly downhill towards its inevitable fatal collision with destiny.

Mr Hockey, who until recently drove like Mr Toad of Toad Hall, now in MYEFO dock adopts a different guise, a different plea: he wants to beg the nation’s mercy, admit he got things wrong.

It’s not what the electorate wants to hear. Mr Hockey. It is not good enough. It would be better for all of us if you could tell us what you’ve learnt. Contrition doesn’t cut it. Let’s hear what you have learned from your mistakes. What exactly it is that you plan to do differently this time around? MYEFO appears to be more of the same disaster. It seems to set us up for further massive cuts in the next Budget, assuming that is you draw the line sometime under your current long-running farce, the Budget and the Senate that wouldn’t budge.

Before we offer you our indulgence, Mr Hockey, before we let you try another crank with less choke and a little more accelerator this time, you need to show us that you understand what went wrong, and what it is that you did wrong. It’s not so crazy. One definition of insanity, after all, is expecting different results after repeating the same mistakes.

Those mistakes are serious and include the budget debacle, the higher education fiasco, the unfair GP co-payment, in brief the Abbott government’s expensive, overpriced, overhyped, paralysing lack of significant achievement, discounting its dubious asylum seeker solution and its abandonment of a couple of useful taxes on carbon and a mining.

The MYEFO exposes the Abbott government’s utter lack of credibility, its failure to act like a government. Despite Mr Hockey’s best efforts today and Matthias Cormann’s breathtaking gift for understatement these are not however remotely endearing or excusable oversights or minor frailties, rather they are signs of terminal illness. MYEFO is no beacon guiding us to recovery, Mr Hockey. Instead we are trapped in Uncle Arthur’s parlour while he tries to find out how to switch on his slide projector. In the dark.

Mr Hockey, you and your LNP mob have had long enough to get it right. If you couldn’t do the job, why did you put your hand up for it in the first place? Spare us your ‘reboot’ analogy. An economy is not a computer. Best you think an economy as a real, living thing, an organism which involves real people, ordinary people whose real lives depend on leaders knowing what they are doing. You have a responsibility as Federal Treasurer to ensure their trust is not betrayed. MYEFO could have been a circuit-breaker for you, a genuine opportunity to reflect and take stock. If you are not up to any of that your best option is to withdraw, resign, make way for someone who is.

Abbott’s Peta Credlin: the power behind the Tone will cause his undoing.

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credlin and abbott

Lacklustre, gaffe-prone, hapless, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott will be undone, ultimately, not solely by his legion of ‘underperforming’ ministers, nor by his legislation blocked by the Senate, nor by any other of his government’s many serious deficiencies which include the lack of a coherent policy agenda and a loss of trust and credibility, but by a surfeit of competence within his own office. Outsmarted, overwhelmed and intellectually outclassed, Tony Abbott will in the end be irreparably undone by his own chief of staff, the highly capable and experienced but imperious and controlling micromanager and political adviser Peta Credlin.

This is not to accuse Ms Credlin of any delinquency or disloyalty but rather to suggest that she has become a major catalyst in Abbott’s downfall because her role and her conduct of her duties have created a focal point for the disquiet and discontent festering within backbench Coalition MPs, a disquiet generated by the government’s poor performance. They want to blame her. It is easier than looking at their own performances and a myriad of sources of deepening dismay and discontent including the Coalition’s declining popularity and trustworthiness, its budget debacle, its negotiating legislation through a hostile Senate and its failure to collaborate with the electorate in making effective policy and effective day to day decisions.

This last failing is misrepresented and misunderstood as failing to explain or failing to get its message out. In reality, it cuts much deeper. The failure of much of Abbott’s legislation, as with its day to day conduct has to do with his government’s singular lack of understanding of the need for collaboration. This is not helped by an apparent arrogance and lack of patience with the average voter which accompanies the hard-right attitudes and reactionary world views of its members and its backers, none of which make for policies which are inclusive or progressive or which are shaped to fit the peculiar circumstances and needs of a contemporary Australian economy facing declining commodity prices but which otherwise has much to commend it.

Yet rather than share the grounds for reasonable opposite, the Abbott government has chosen to base its economic decision-making on a lie, its palpably untrue debt and deficit disaster slogan.­

Key macroeconomic indicators, including GDP, unemployment, inflation, Current Account Balances, and debt, indicated an Australia which compares very favourably with the rest of the world. Our GDP has been growing consistently, and our unemployment rate has been consistently lower than most OECD economies since the GFC.

Australia has the lowest debt (measured by Gross Financial Liabilities) in the OECD. In 2013, Australia’s Debt to GDP ratio was 34.4 %, Germany was 80.9 %, the UK at 111.6 %, USA at 106.5 % and the OECD average was 112.0 %. Debt crisis? What debt crisis? Raja Junankar Honorary Professor, Industrial Relations Research Centre at UNSW Australia Business School

Peta Credlin stands accused of shielding Abbott and his government from reality. She is accused of monopolising his short information span. Critics within government claim that he pays attention only to information she provides him. This is hardly Credlin’s fault, however, it is Abbott himself who has created this dangerous and damning dependency. Not renowned for the width or depth of his own scholarship, his independent reading of reports and other vital information, Abbott is content to be guided by material provided by his advisors.  This is not something to be laid at Credlin’s feet. She is simply doing what a good advisor has to do. And there was not a peep of discontent from the same politicians when the Coalition was in opposition.

Much is said about the Abbott government’s failure to sell its message, chiefly by itself, but little if any time is spent on negotiation and sharing the problem-solving with the community. Much is said about getting the message out but if that message appears palpably unfair, out of date and reactionary it will not help the government at all. Nor is the government apparently able to learn from its mistakes.

Even at this late stage, Joe Hockey’s message of contrition, his latest strategy, is that his government did not explain itself well. He doesn’t get it. Neither do the legions of government ministers who bang on about not getting the message out. In fact, the message is well and truly out. In most cases it is rejected because it is either unfair or it is predicated on something we have to take on faith, such as the budget emergency or the debt and deficit disaster. The electorate is smart enough to reject the over-hyped problem and intelligent enough to discern that it is being stampeded into decisions and changes to laws or new laws which will not benefit the majority. It is rejecting a government which appears remote, patronising, out of touch or else downright mean and sneaky. And with the passage of the latest amendment to the Migration Act, monstrous, mean and sneaky.

The GP tax is a prime example. The problem it was intended to solve remains elusive. If it were to meet the increased costs of the medical system, then why put the funds into a research fund? Not only was it a solution in search of a problem, however, it was at base unfair. All very well for the Treasurer on his income to tell voters that it was only $7 or less than the price of two middies of beer. What hurt was the lack of understanding that the plan would hurt the vulnerable and needy far more than the haves. That hurt has not been assuaged by anything the government has done since.

Joe Hockey is hardly alone in helping this government towards a richly deserved single term.  There are a string of contenders including Kevin Andrews, Christopher Pyne, Peter Dutton and David Johnston whose under-performance in their respective ministries has included the neglect of any dialogue with the electorate. Now instead of trust and respect, they are met with suspicion and scorn. They have richly earned their public opprobrium, not Peta Credlin.

Abbott, however, has been typically ham-fisted. By choosing to play the gender card he has ensured that the problem of his chief of staff will continue to fester. He appeared hypocritical when yesterday on ABC he asked political reporter Lyndal Curtis, rhetorically if Peta were spelt Peter, there would be so much fuss. Had he not lampooned Julia Gillard when she objected to the barrage of sexism and misogyny he eagerly, relentlessly directed towards her? Does he expect the electorate to share his own apparent amnesia and short attention span?

Abbott needs to get real. Discontent has focused on Peta Credlin as a proxy for his own incompetence. If he really wants to protect her, the answer is not some humbug lecture or expression of gender political outrage, it lies squarely with himself and his own ministers low performance standards. Instead of giving the press yet another red herring to distract, it would be better if he addressed the root causes of discontent. This is a government seriously out of its depth, a government which has lost all credibility and trust with the electorate. And it is a government of men who when the chips are down will quickly blame someone else. They are focusing on Peta, Mr Abbott because they are fed up with you.

No-one doubts that some of the unreconstructed males in Abbott’s government resent being told what to do by a woman. They need to get over their gender bias and listen to the truth. The public is sick of excuses for non-performance. It is sick of lies and incompetence. It wants and needs a government that is for the people and answerable to the people, a government that is switched on to modern realities including macro-economic theory and practice that is prepared to act responsibly in the public interest. If that’s too hard and on past performance it is impossible to hold any optimism, the next best course of action is to seek a double dissolution and let the people decide.

Monstrous, mean and sneaky Abbott government delivers on message for Christmas.

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It was the beginning of the festive season in Canberra and a small balding man with jug ears and bandy legs who walked uneasily as if he were carrying a pig under each arm strode towards the steps of parliament while appearing to address a claque of journalists who tottered after him, a tangle of cameras, blazing lights, some waving microphones disguised as woolly bed-socks, other offering phones with recording apps; phones so intelligent they outsmarted their owners.

‘Solid achievement …,’ the Prime Minister, intoned, squinting as he feigned a reflective pose whilst wincing inwardly and avoiding catching David ‘Paddler’ Johnston’s eye as he lurched in late, ‘a year of solid achievement…’

Abbott was multi-tasking, as he liked to call it: talking to reporters on the fly whilst readying himself and his government for photographers on the steps of parliament on the last sitting day of the year. In reality he was rashly attempting two tasks either of which would have been better delegated to someone else yet there was no-one else he could trust not to stuff it up either.

“The carbon tax is gone,” he said. “The mining tax is gone. The boats are stopping. The roads are building. The budget is coming into better shape. The three free trade agreements that have been successfully negotiated will set our country up for the long term … I know that appearances do count and I concede that the appearance last week was a bit ragged but, in the end, nothing matters more than performance and this is a government which has a very solid year of performance under its belt.

His government, that false and faithless bosom of buried scorn, flanked him like a whelp of hungry mongrel pups performing nods, eyebrow stretches and other intended expressions of solidarity for the camera, most of which were completely lost in translation and which ended up instead making some of them look like a cat with a fur ball, or a dog when you put its medicine on its tongue. Most, however, just looked like exhausted and clapped-out character actors after a long season on the boards before hostile provincial audiences, hamming it up for the camera con brio lest unemployment come before they had paid the gas bill.

Bruce (small business) Billson should really give up the garlic, he thought, if he can’t stop sticking his face in other people’s businesses. And give up all the hearty hail fellow well met stuff. Such an unctuous toad. Besides, that’s my routine. Bet Frankston’s happy when he’s in Canberra, oleaginous, grasping, self-propelling bag of fart gas.

The unemployment rate has hit 6.3% the highest since Abbott was Minister for Employment and Industrial Relations in 2002. Business and consumer confidence are at an all-time low. Other financial measures suggest that Australia may well be headed for an economic recession.

‘…Achievement,’ he continued, giving himself thinking space to work out where he was, what day it was and where his weekday Malvern star was parked. Trust Johnston to stand upwind and near him. You could fuel a small gas bar-fridge on the alcohol on his breath. Glad that he’s so close to Ian MacDonald, the double-crossing, back-stabbing, pompous misogynist. How dare he accuse me of over promoting Peta Credlin?  If only he knew how much I owe, how much we all owe to Peta. She even does the Cabinet footy-tipping. Ungrateful bastard!

Stopped the boats; scrapped the carbon tax;

Abbott has delivered on his campaign to roll back action on global warming and has effectively thrown the off switch on the booming renewable energy industry …direction action, the so-called centrepiece of his government’s climate change policy is a hoax.

‘Solid achievement’ chorused the Treasurer, the Foreign Minister, the Trade Minister and all the other overlooked Ministers for whom the Christmas photo is as close as they will ever get to their PM. They packed closely in around their hapless leader like pin-striped blowflies on a country dunny, in a parody of solidarity whilst nudging one another aside for a bigger share of the lens. It was the last parliamentary steps photo-opportunity of the year. Some reckless pundits were musing that it could be Abbott’s last ever.

Health, Education and Community services have all been cut savagely…while the Abbott government has shown the interests of big business and mining interests will always come before the needs of communities and the environment.

Features contorted into toothy grins, manic rapture, bucolic reverie, mindless ecstasy and other grotesquely insincere affectations of guileless bonhomie and esprit de corps for the camera.  Christopher ‘Glad hands’ Pyre pumped Peter Dutton’s hand on the pretext of endorsing the Health Minister’s latest Medicare fiasco whilst hoping against hope to forge some covert alliance of desperate mediocrity which might be traded upon in the future. Greg Hunt shook his own hand, there being no-one more worthy or suitable nearby or in the entire government, come to think of it.

Inwardly all members of government were filled with various forms of bickering and dissension, each herniated with self-pity and gall at their misfortune, each cursing their luck to have such a dud leader, each bitter and miserable about their PM, Peta Credlin’s high-handed control over every detail of their lives and their government’s record-breaking low performance in the polls and each fearing unemployment next election.

The Abbott government has increased secrecy and cruelty towards vulnerable people seeking asylum. Domestically, it has undermined attempts to address discrimination in society regarding sexuality and race.

All present, of course, were singing from the same song sheet, namely Peta ‘chokehold’ Credlin’s daily song sheet of talking points, a type of scripted autopilot-autocue provided daily or more often as required for the mentally challenged, enfeebled, bone idle, brain dead and any other members of the Abbott government. It was a stunning display of solidarity, unanimity and state of the art micromanagement.

Fittingly, capping a busy, busy, busy and richly productive year, in which its myriad achievements appear daily ever more solid and uplifting, and in David Johnston’s Defence, also very much more liquid, not forgetting so much offered that was simply rarefied and gaseous, the Abbott government then reached deep into its chest cavity to furnish its long-awaited, hand-crafted, homespun, heartfelt, Christmas message to the people of Australia.

Its mug filled to overflowing, with the business, the small business-and-lifeblood-of-our-nation-amen business, of dispensing (with) largesse, the (dried) fruits of prosperity and stale beer-nuts of good cheer, the Abbott government with typically reckless generosity bestowed its spirit of mean and sneaky upon every household in the land. The photographer, a wag from way back, cleverly by-passed ‘say cheese’ in favour of something much more suited:

‘Say: Mean and Sneaky,’ he instructed, test camera aloft.

‘Mean and Sneaky, they chorused, bubbling with festive spirit and goodwill to all men and one woman in the cabinet.

‘Monstrous, mean and sneaky, thought the man with the automatic weapon on terror alert as he surveyed the lot of them, his gaze coming to rest on Scott Morrison’s features, which were ablaze with such crazed, rampaging zealotry that he would have immediately called for reinforcements had he not been sure that he was one of the most popular and widely respected members of the Abbott cabinet. They are all a worry, he thought, his forefinger on the trigger of his assault rifle, and especially when the best of them, in their own eyes, in their own esteem, is a raving psychopath.

Julie Bishop coughs up loose change for climate in Peru; taunts China, USA to show her the money.

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Julie Bishop coughs up loose change for climate in Peru; taunts China, USA to show her the money.

Global warming may well increase rather than diminish the chill experienced by Julie Bishop, Australia’s foreign minister at the UN Climate Change Convention’s Meeting in Lima, today. Lima is the planning session before serious national commitments to curb global carbon emissions are made in Paris next year and Bishop, one of Australia’s most ambitious yet least successful foreign ministers in the nation’s chequered history, has just incurred further icy disdain after presenting her paper justifying Australia’s position on not paying less than its fair share amount into the UN Green Climate Fund (GCF).

Bishop’s paper also rationalises other obstructive and unhelpful Abbott government actions calculated to lower the cooling climate of world opinion towards itself and Australia’s status as a global citizen.

In her typically abrasive and ill-considered manner, Bishop has further stunned delegates and observers from the 194 nations attending the talks by suggesting China’s commitment to cap its emissions before 2030 is a sham, stating that China’s commitment amounts ‘to nothing more than business as usual.’

The Minister’s condemnation, which is markedly less well-researched, substantiated or well-measured as one might expect, or, indeed, require from a Foreign Minister has already quickly been refuted as a baseless slur:

“If implementing carbon pricing, seeing a peak in coal consumption around 2020, and building renewable energy capacity the size of its current coal capacity is business as usual for China, Australia should be reconsidering its own business as usual path,” the Climate Institute’s Erwin Jackson said.

Yet not all of Bishop’s speech was directly offensive. In a rapid change of heart, or in a concession to pressure from other nations as voiced by China, Bishop did make a surprise announcement that Australia will pay $250 million into UN Green Climate Fund but experts have already described this as substantially below the nation’s fair share of the load. Aimed at raising $100 billion a year in government and private finance, the UN fund is seen as vital to gain agreement between developed and developing countries. China’s lead negotiator Su Wei last week criticised Australia’s decision as “disappointing”.

But if Australia’s change of heart is to silence China, the amount is not designed to mollify.

For Climate Institute’s Erwin Jackson the total amount is “modest” given it “falls short of the $350 million per year [we] suggest is the minimum fair contribution to climate financing from Australia. Yet others are worrying where the money is coming from.

Has the Minister had to dip into her own ministerial budget? Some commentators, including Greens Christine Milne, note the sum is coming out of an already cash-strapped foreign aid programme and protest that it is ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul.’

Revealingly, the diversion of funds from foreign aid into climate change betokens a weather-change from Bishop or, indeed, another broken promise from her government. Bishop was adamant in an ABC interview in 2012, when in opposition, that climate change funding should not be “disguised as foreign aid funding,” adding: “We would certainly not spend our foreign aid budget on climate change programs.”

It is not hard, in the end, to detect an unseemly haste as befits her beleaguered government’s increasing adhockery: Bishop’s gesture has been made quickly, without any clear plan or properly funded strategy. Did she do it off her own bat and out of her own portfolio, knowing there would be other source of funds? If so, is she being penalised by PM Abbott for her initiative; punished for her quick thinking?

What is clear is that Australia was forced into this decision. It comes at the end of weeks of censure after the Abbott government tried to bump the fund off a G20 communique and after Australia snubbed other world leaders by refusing to attend a Berlin conference designed to raise an initial $10 billion for the Green Fund. Yet this has not prevented Greg Hunt from spinning a different scenario, albeit a fantastically implausible scenario. Speaking on ABC Radio News this afternoon, Hunt surprise informed listeners with the line that Lima was ‘the conference’ where it was always going to happen. What he meant was that Australia always planned to contribute. If this were the case, why then was Abbott planning to send no delegates at all? Why was there no budget for this planned contribution? As always with his government’s attempts to explain its erratic decisions, even an inconvenient lie is its preferred option.

We know, too from the interview she gave with the AFR, that Julie Bishop practically had to head-butt Peta Credlin and to call a meeting of cabinet to be permitted to attend Lima and even then her paranoid PM insisted she be chaperoned by climate change sceptic Andrew Robb. The ad-hoc nature of her attendance will not have gone unnoticed by other governments all around the world.

Although she has managed to offend a good many nations including China, The United States and Indonesia, Bishop’s cold shoulder is not completely personal,: the rest of the world is getting heartily sick of Australia’s unhelpful denialist attitude, its lack of good faith and its bad global citizenship which includes the advocacy of fossil fuels, the promotion of Direct Action, an untried, unworkable, specious plan to curb emissions by paying polluters to clean up their act, and its senior Ministers’ denial of climate change.

Other snubs and slights have been keenly felt by UN members. In a calculated pattern of offensives, Australia has until now refused climate finance, rubbished the actions of China and the US, the two most powerful nations attending, cut funding to a key UN body, distanced itself from a group of progressive nations, joined with others to delete text that would require a review of its pre-2020 commitment, and despatched climate sceptic Trade Minister Andrew Robb to accompany Bishop at the talks.

Recently, as G20 meeting host nation, in Brisbane, Australia won no hearts and had many world leaders scratching heads when Canute-style it vainly and foolishly attempted to keep climate change off the agenda, despite climate’s rightful primacy over any mere economic or financial discussion and despite its being in other ways also the most pressing issue facing all nations.

Australia’s recalcitrance dates from the 2010 Copenhagen Accord on global warming and climate change, and has helped spur Barack Obama and China to chide the nation it for its dereliction of duty of care towards the planet and towards its own world heritage site, The Great Barrier Reef. Bishop and Abbott may be seething about Obama upstaging their G20, but truth be known, it was bound to happen; it was something their own attitudes invited.

The Abbott government which originally planned to show its hand by boycotting the Lima meeting and which openly advocates the burning of coal to generate electricity has now run to wilful obstruction. Australia’s latest transparent ploy is to stymie any effective international action on climate change by proposing that Paris targets be legally binding.

So far, the reaction from the French, who are committed to making the Paris conference succeed, has been to contemplate not inviting PM Abbott, or indeed any other government leaders, at all but rather, in the spirit of practicality confining attendance to those lower-ranking delegates who would create less obstruction and who would actually do the work required to reach agreement. The world would be grateful. In the interim, Julie Bishop will continue to spread Christmas cheer by sneering at other governments’ efforts to reduce carbon emissions and join with Minister Hunt in promoting Australia as a paragon of climate responsibility because of its small total of emissions, even if per capita it remains one of the world’s worst polluters.

Australia continues to rapidly alienate the rest of the world because of its global delinquency. Is it any wonder that it finds itself increasingly isolated, meeting by meeting, day by day and that it will soon find itself a total pariah, backward looking and ignorant, spurned by all as an unwelcome brake on the efforts of responsible progressive governments to achieve consensus in combating global warming, the biggest challenge faced by all nations to our continued existence; a cause above petty rivalries, self-interest and wilful ignorance.

Australia is sending the wrong message and the wrong messengers to UN climate change talks in Lima.

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Greg Hunt looking wounded

Environment Minister Greg Hunt told to stay home from Lima, the most important meeting of his career so far.

Oh where Oh where has my little dog, gone?

Oh where Oh where can he be?

With his ears cut short and his tail cut long.

Oh where Oh where can he be?

Where Oh where is Greg Hunt? This is the question on everyone’s lips amongst international delegates to the UN climate show at Lima concerns Australia’s missing Environment Minister, work experience boy Greg Hunt who not only failed to show up at roll-call on the first day of the United Nations Conference but, it seems, will now never show up at all. ‘He is a nice boy, kinda preppy, goofy and not as smart as he thinks he is but loveable, reminded us of a Labrador pup’, a spokesman who prefers to remain anonymous, ‘swallow anything, devoted to his master, always up for a pat or a treat and stubborn, never, never let go of the bone. Not like him to go AWOL at such an important event in his career. Besides he’s cute, kinda like the way a mascot or a stuffed toy is cute and kinda helpless, vulnerable and useless. The Lima conference is a step towards the Paris summit on climate next year, due to conclude a new international agreement.

We were worried that he been kidnapped by ISIS or something because he had upset someone or other. We know people who know people who arrange that type of thing. They call it pest control.’

The harsh reality is Hunt got bumped as international negotiator some time ago by the ruthlessly ambitious over-achiever fifth columnist and Fifth Avenue Fashionista Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, who in turn just got bumped sideways for Lima by Andrew Robb by an Abbott government increasingly mistrustful of Bishop and fearful she might make some sort of commitment to reducing carbon emissions, a commitment that the Abbott government will avoid to the end, which is increasingly looking like another two years.

“It was never on the cards that he was going to go”, claimed a spokesman for the Environment Minister whilst Hunt maintains that it is right and proper that he stay at home with a good book and a Milo because, after all, he is quick to point out Lima is more of a DFAT thing.

Robb, whom government sources claim would already be in South America on other business, has come out with an equally unbelievable statement about his own reluctance to attend and is understood to be keenly looking up the words duenna, chaperone and Best Eats in Lima on Wikipedia, sharing all of Hunt’s bookmarks and Pinterest pins.

Of course it’s unfair – and on all of us, not just on Hunt. Our Environment Minister has an impeccable case for being in the hunt at Lima, and not just as Julie’s younger man-bag nor to carry Bishop’s baggage, although it is understood that he would discharge either duty impeccably.

Most countries will have their environment ministers there and none will have a trade minister. Hunt is nominally in charge of what passes for climate policy in the Abbott government and he is the fall guy for the direction action plan which generous souls reckon is the mainstay of the government’s climate policy. Most in Cabinet openly snicker at the mention of the scheme and deride Hunt for being too close to their other object of derision the fairies at the bottom of the garden party, The Greens.

Certainly it will fall to Hunt to engineer his Direct Action into something which works, like a market-based scheme if Australia is to meet any emissions reduction targets the government sets for beyond 2020 or any proposals that emerge from Lima and are signed in Paris.

Sources near the PM’s office, however, suggest that Hunt is being demoted from the 2015 Cabinet anyway, given that no-one pays the annoying little dweeb the slightest attention. As to attending at Lima, the PM’s Office says that we just don’t trust him: Hunt, it must never be forgotten, supported an ETS for a long time. Not only that, the last thing we want is the little pill rabbiting on and embarrassing everyone with his direct action lunacy; everyone knows it’s a complete fantasy which won’t work, has never worked and which will cost us billions we don’t have. We’ll be scrapping direct action for something more economically responsible in the New Year when we demote him. Hunt can go and get sequestrated.

Of course, Hunt might be spared a mauling from the Giant Panda China, which, keen to get its own back on Julie Bishop for her insults earlier this year has just criticised Australia at the conference for refusing to contribute to the Green Climate Fund, set up to help developing countries deal with climate change. The Chinese have not forgotten Bishop’s first disastrous gig as Foreign Minister when she managed to infuriate the Chinese by criticising its air defence zone in the East China Sea and they had to put her firmly in her place:

“It is completely a mistake for Australia to make irresponsible remarks on China’s establishment of an air defence identification zone in the East China Sea, and the Chinese side will not accept it,” foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said. “China urges Australia to correct its mistake immediately to prevent damaging Sino-Australia relations.”

In a year of ‘solid achievements’ in the recent words of the Prime Minister, being criticised by China is a rare feat which must not be overlooked. It is a unique distinction for the Australian government if not the last time the Abbott government is admonished for its bonkers approach to a global emissions reduction agreement, to say nothing of the green economy.

Other conversations Hunt will be happy to be out of the way of will involve almost any other UN delegate, should the issue of refugee conventions come up. The recent legislation passed by means of Scott ‘Mad Dog’ Morrison’s blackmailing the Senate has hardly boosted Australia’s image as a responsible international citizen both for what it represents, a complete abnegation of UN, as for the underhanded way it was achieved.

Whilst it will not be an official item for discussion in a conference about climate change, Bishop and Robb, no doubt will look forward to fielding hostile informal questions from UN delegates as to why Australia has passed a law which removes any duty for the government to comply with international law or act fairly when detaining asylum seekers at sea; why it is introducing fast-tracking refugee status determinations, a step which will see some returned to places where they face persecution and torture and blocking asylum seekers’ right to claim protection on national interest or character grounds without further explanation.

Asylum seekers will no longer have access to the Refugee Review Tribunal, which has had the power to correct processing mistakes by the immigration department. Instead, they can apply for a desktop review by a new Immigration Assessment Authority, though some groups won’t have access to that either. The law strips out references to the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees – the 1951 document that defines who is a refugee, their rights and countries’ legal obligations of countries.

Of course, it may well be that a cold shoulder is shown Robb and Bishop because as the world community understands, the dynamic duo’s presence is not so much to contribute but to act as a handbrake, hindering progress in Lima by insisting any agreement drafted for the Paris meeting next December is legally binding, a process which will scare off other countries and help sabotage the spirit of the talks nicely.

Hunt is better off out of the bear pit, but for his sake and for Australia’s sake, it is a poor decision to sideline him at such an important meeting.

Julie Bishop goes bananas: off to Lima, Robb in tow, to downplay climate change and promote coal.

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credlin and abbott confer

Abbott and Credlin decide to send Robb to keep an eye on Bishop at Lima. Greg Hunt, Environment Minister not considered fit for purpose.

Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop went bananas last week. No, it was not Carmen Miranda bananas nor a Josephine Baker dance routine but a most un-mellow yellow. On learning by letter that Trade Minister, and aspiring banana republican, Andrew Robb would be accompanying her to Lima, Foreign Minister, Bishop flew into a rage. It was, she fumed, just too much monkey business all round, from control-freak Top Banana Peta Credlin, aka ‘P Who Must Be Obeyed’. To say nothing of what it implied in lack of trust, respect and gratitude for her own distinguished service which, everyone agreed, was far and above the best thing going for a government which was on the rocks. Demoted to Robb’s second banana; really it was the last straw!

Bishop boiled with anger and self-righteous indignation. Already the rug had been pulled from under her, when Abbott and Credlin decided it would be a pointedly token visit: the UN Framework Convention Lima Climate Change Conference in Lima actually began 1 December.

But they could not just leave the matter there. It was not enough to just cut down Bishop’s presence, and capacity for mischief, the duumvirate had decided that the Foreign Minister, who could be trusted to host the UN Security Council all by herself, needed a minder on this occasion, and that minder had to be notorious climate sceptic and melancholic Andrew Robb, a man whose seat, the ambitious Credlin is said to be chasing, when he retires soon. Bishop’s pitch was queered.

Abbott had treated her badly. Part of Bishop’s meltdown arose, she maintained, from the insulting, cowardly, high-handed, indirect and abrupt way the decision was communicated to her, or at least those are some of the words she used when she rounded on him in his office, flourishing his ‘disgusting’ page of correspondence.

Bishop had received a terse letter signed Tony Abbott from Peta Credlin’s office last Thursday. Andrew Robb got the same letter, too, only with his name on it, at the same time, although he chose to quickly speak to reporters, claiming that playing duenna to the Foreign Minister in Lima, would not have been his choice of the top ten ways to start his parliamentary break, but he’d do it anyway – thereby clumsily adding insult to injury for both Credlin and Bishop camps.

If he were upset by his indirect and impersonal letter from the PM, it did not show but then Robb is more practised at dealing with pathological behaviour including PM’s advisors and other egotistical, vindictive, paranoid, micro-managing control-freaks and he could use a few more frequent flyer points.

Yet Bishop has a point. Abbott can threaten to shirtfront Putin but struggles with the personal stuff when it comes to consulting his own foreign minister. This frailty is alarming and it is especially rich coming from the man who has been taunting Bill Shorten as weak in parliament recently, a process which has, nonetheless, found some favour with Speaker Bronwyn ‘Kerosene Bath’ Bishop.

Bishop is the most partisan and least competent speaker in the history of the House whose smile has more teeth than a basking shark’s and whose end of term valedictory remarks included a professed fondness for running a disorderly house, a comment which has supporters of democracy and justice on both sides of the house scratching their heads. Her attempt last week, in her closing address, to put a positive gloss on the degeneration of debate since 2010, a lowering and an abuse of parliament which will be Tony Abbott’s single greatest legacy continues the farce that is her attempt to fairly regulate parliamentary debate and is in effect an endorsement of the aggression and petty point-scoring abuse that displaces any reasoned examination, discussion or dispute.

A larger part of Julie Bishop’s banana routine was learning that her PM did not trust her. He’s wise there, and he has unequivocal support both in and out of political life. Bernie Banton’s wife and children, for example, would totally concur, along with all other families of asbestosis sufferers who died while their case for compensation was stalled by Ms Bishop in her former real job as a heartless, ruthless, unscrupulous, corporate lawyer, a profession widely held to provide the requisite training for some many political aspirants.

What Abbott was toey about, no doubt, was that the Princess Mesothelioma would commit us to some real target in reducing carbon emissions. We can’t have that. Abbott has recently gone into spin over how we have to be mindful of our economic prosperity thus bravely contradicting his soon to be sacked failed Treasurer Joe Hockey who told Australian viewers of the G20 circus that economic activity and global warming were unrelated.

Many questions are raised by this final piece of political theatre from the Abbott government, a government quite unlike any other in its determination to deny reality and to deny climate change and should the occasion present itself denying its denials.

Bishop of course issued a statement denying that she was miffed and that the bananas report was totally without foundation. She was delighted to be paired up with Andrew Robb and looked forward to a lambada and a Latin foxtrot with him at one or two of the après-conference functions. So much better on his feet than that clumsy Hunt. A deal taller, too. He knows the hospitality trade inside out. Why they might even hit a late-night alpaca tapas bar, the meat is so good for you, and partake of a few tax-payer funded palate-cleansing Pisco sours together.

Party animal Andrew Robb owns one or two restaurants himself and has shares in some others including Sydney’s Boathouse Palm Beach, showcased on Tourism Australia’s “Restaurant Australia” website, just launched this May, as the “ultimate day trip destination.” So he’ll be keen to pick up tips about tourism, eating and its promotion. Hell, they might even tour the catacombs together after that; in Lima, after all, political corpses still enjoy a type of public life, a richly attractive theme to pursue later over drinks with both Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey and just the type of thing the whole party might well take lively interest in.

Had diplomatic protocols permitted, Bishop could also have thanked bag-man Robb for his heavy lifting on her behalf when he attacked Barack Obama over his concern for the Great Barrier. According to Abbott government lickspittle, The Australian, Robb gave Obama quite a serve.

“Obama’s speech on climate change and its effect on the Great Barrier Reef were unnecessary, misinformed and wrong. He found the content and the timing of the speech were not appropriate. He believed that the American president was not informed enough before talking about Australia‘s achievements in climate change and environmental transformation. Obama had apparently defied the advice of the U.S. embassy on the matter. The embassy reportedly asked him not to place his comments on climate change in such a manner that the Australian government found it disobliging.”

So Robb has done some dirty work for the Foreign Minister, despite sources close to the dirt preferring for the time being to remain unsullied by volunteering names or anything else quite so naff. Robb’s dirty work has nothing, however, on Ms Bishop’s agenda, who having been slighted or sprung – or both – climbing over anything in her way to supplant Tony as top banana, is now working the predictive text on her iPhone feverishly as she plots to get him back and to do Credlin down.

One other type of prediction is in order: the bananas incident will go down in history as Abbott’s biggest slip. He’s got his arch-rival off-side, his back-bench, already baying for Peta Credlin’s blood will be emboldened by finding a rising if somewhat temperamental star in Julie Bishop to hitch their wagons to and if they can’t quite manage insurrection, will whinge and bicker off the record enough to seriously upset his canoe. Mortal damage, moreover, is also likely to be done to the Abbott government’s reputation and credibility on the world stage.

Trade Minister Andrew Robb, who now finds himself travelling to Lima for climate talks and all the alpaca you can eat, will be looking forward to meeting his guru at the conference —Abbot’s favourite charlatan, the apologist for inaction on climate change Bjorn Lomborg who will be speaking at an event sponsored by big coal company Peabody Energy. Robb is, of course, on the record as a big coaler and like his PM happy to consign the world to oblivion in return for the certain expectation of reward from the big polluters.

Sending Robb to Lima, apart from to keep an eye on Julie Bishop’s ambitions has all international observers puzzled. He will be prominent, it is certain: no other nation is sending a trade minister.

Closer to home it puzzles even the best Abbott government experts because it is yet another flip-flop, a disconcerting change of direction.

Why are we suddenly sending Robb an “economics” minister to a “climate” event? The Abbott government refused to talk about climate at the G20 claiming that it was all about economics and it refused to talk about climate at the free trade agreement negotiations with China, claiming that the two were quite separate.

Robb may well be detailed to expound the Abbott government’s position, which is both intellectually and morally bankrupt. Settle down, he will say, Australia believes climate change is no pressing issue. There is no emergency, no case for urgency. There is no rush, indeed before we deploy expensive new technologies such as solar and wind shouldn’t we do some more research? In the meantime let’s sell more coal: our bigger priority is to sell coal to poor countries to alleviate “energy poverty”.

And Julie Bishop will be able to say her piece about nuclear energy and how it is now back on the table as an option for Australia.  In brief, we are all right, Jack. Bugger the rest of you, stop worrying and believing scientists, everything will be OK. Especially if you buy our coal – and our uranium.