Category: Political Comment

Abbott government announces major cuts to ABC funding; lies about election promise.

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Abbott and Turnbull collude to deny election promise.

“It is an absolute principle of democracy that governments should not and must not say one thing before an election and do the opposite afterwards.” Tony Abbott 2011

Tony Abbott is a bare-faced liar. On the eve of the Federal election he promised no cuts to the ABC or the SBS. His words were:

“… no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS”.

It was a catchy slogan designed to inspire trust in his government’s agreement to respect areas of the Australian economy and society vital to the national good; essential to every Australian’s quality of life. It sounded fair and reasonable. What fools we were to trust him.

Forgotten, it seems, was his very own warning against our trusting a word he said. Overlooked, it appears was his own, earlier inner truth parrot’s candid admission of his innate dishonesty. The truth parrot that so often queers his pitch by suddenly squawking the inopportune truth, told the nation that whilst Abbott might say one thing, that didn’t mean Abbott wouldn’t just do the opposite.

Or did we simply not believe him? There is every chance that he was simply disbelieved by the fair-minded and good-hearted who gave Abbott’s blathering the benefit of the doubt. No doubt many decent folk who could not believe their ears, yet kindly put it all down to another Abbott episode. Abbott’s own confession that he could be fast and loose with the truth raised only one public eyebrow.

His Liberal party already had form in this area. This sophistry. John Howard confessed to making core and non-core promises. Now under Howard’s junior successor, the distinction gets even worse. There are real promises and Abbott promises.

Helpfully, keeping a straight face for national TV, Abbott volunteered the tip that voters should get Abbott promises in writing if they intended to believe them. The rest might be tricked up to look good in the show ring but are headed straight for the abattoir afterwards.

This week, barely a year down the track, a track that is treacherous under foot; slippery, steep, strewn with hazards, litter and rough under foot, Abbott’s failing government announces a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of cuts to ABC and SBS.

Its dishonesty is breathtaking in this area alone to say nothing of its indecent haste in trashing its record in the other areas in his election eve pledge, Health, Education, Pensions, GST.  It is not the first cut. Federal Finance Minister Matthias Cormann’s announcement of a $256 million dollar cut to the ABC and SBS is on top of a 4.6 % cut already imposed. Who believes the cuts will stop there?

Malcolm Turnbull is quickly despatched to Q&A and 7:30 Report to rescue his leader. Settle us down. Soften us up. The broken promise, it seems is all our fault. We must be disabused of our delusions. Oozing condescension and oleaginous smarm, he patronises everyone, yet all the while smiling indulgently as if dealing with a child who has become fractious over a lost toy at bedtime. His smile, however, reveals piranha teeth.

Mesmerised, horrified, we watch as he sets out to correct our defective memories. Brazenly, bizarrely, Turnbull claims we misheard Abbott.  He has shed the customary leather jacket. His own hide is no doubt, thicker, more protective. With lines worth of Yes Minister, fixer Turnbull wants to soothe things over.

He did not believe the Prime Minister intended to give the impression the national broadcaster would be exempt from any future belt tightening. The belt tightening image is a spin doctor’s clumsy softening of the reality. The belt is already tight. Tighten it any further and it is life-threatening: you risk potentially fatal constriction of the patient’s circulation.

The rest of the case is curiously presumptuous. In an interview on ABC’s 7.30 on Wednesday, Turnbull alleges he and Joe Hockey had made it clear during the election campaign that cuts to address the budget deficit had to made across the board and that “the ABC and SBS couldn’t be exempt and that we would be seeking to address waste and inefficiencies”.

What could this mean? Should we have ignored Opposition leader Abbott’s election eve promise because Hockey and Turnbull had spun a different line.  Pull the other one. So the great gods Turnbull and Hockey had more authority? More credibility? Save us.

Or is Turnbull offering a type of performance art, an absurdist stand-up routine, an homage to Abbott and Costello’s skit Who’s on First? Very funny, Malcolm. We get it. You are a crack up.

Taking the farce even further into absurdity, Liberal Party Belgian Shepherd, Matthias Cormannn simply barks “well, they’re not cuts”. What they are it seems are ‘efficiency dividends.’ Yet, curiously, his master, Abbott was to be believed after all, even if we silly voters get the c word confused with our efficiency dividends. Or vice versa. “The Prime Minister absolutely told the truth. We are not making cuts. What we are making sure happens with the ABC is what happens with every other taxpayer funded organisation across government and that is to ensure that it operates as efficiently as possible,” barked Inspector Rex.

Cormann explained that the broadcaster should not be allowed to dodge efficiency dividends hitting the rest of the public service. “The ABC has been exempted from efficiency dividends for the last 20 years …” Past cuts, it is clear are an illusion, another function of our defective collective memory.

Implied was the clear message: the efficiency dividend is not a way of constraining the ABC from its independence, an independence unique and invaluable in Australian politics and society. Since there are no cuts, there is no way that the Abbott government is paying out on an ABC which dares to tell the truth about a government which continues to tell lies and lies about its lies.

So there we have it. The explanation is Orwellian Newspeak. A cut is not a cut when it is an efficiency dividend. A dividend is not money you get but rather money that is taken away from you. The ABC is not being reduced or diminished. Instead it’s getting a tune up. Its operation has been dodgy in the past but now it will be put back on the straight and narrow. With caring, attentive, nurturing personal trainers, Cormann, Hockey, Turnbull and Abbott, the ABC will be put on a low carb, no fat diet.

In other words, our national broadcaster is under a death sentence. It will be expected to do more and more on less and less. Until it is completely gutted and it expires of malnutrition. The last word is in Wronski’s freely adapted recall of what may have been one of the tales of Nazreddin Hodja.

A mean, rich merchant boasted to his neighbour how he fed his camel less and less each day. ‘Look, neighbour,’ he said. ‘Last night only a handful of barley. Tonight half a handful.’ ‘That is amazing,’ the neighbour gasped. ‘How much money you must be saving on camel feed.’ ‘I know,’ said the merchant proudly. ‘Look at him! So lean and so healthy. He works every day from dawn to dusk. Does everything I say. No complaining.’ The next day the merchant’s camel dies. The merchant is beside himself with grief and anger. He curses and he sobs. ‘Just my luck, said the rich man. Just when I have almost taught my camel to live on nothing, suddenly death comes along to rob me of my greatest achievement.’

Alan Jones blows Abbott off on air over G20.

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Alan Jones

When Alan Jones blew off his old pal Tony Abbott on air this Monday, Sydney sat up and took notice. The relationship between the nation’s talkback shockjockracy and Australian politics is a complex and symbiotic interweaving yet it is central to understanding the contemporary climate of unreason which squats like a venomous toad on the Australian body politic.  That zeitgeist has many components. Chauvinism, parochialism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, fear, ignorance, cultural cringing, prejudice and superstition – to name but a few – are all constituents. And nowhere are all strands represented better than in the Prime Minister’s regular meetings with Alan Jones, the Sydney radio mouthpiece of all that festers in our national conversation.  Nowhere better seen are its dangers.

When Abbott fronted card-carrying misogynist 2GB shock jock Alan Jones, for his regular, cosy rubdown on Sydney morning talkback, the unsuspecting PM copped a bucket of abuse. Jones, the Bondi trout of Australian media, blindsided Abbott with an outburst of invective, screaming insanely at his guest. Jones’ extreme manner channelled Zimbabwean dictator, Robert Mugabe, another rabid old man, whose pathological rantings stand as a textbook caution to all other tin-pot potentates of the dangers of leaving your syphilis untreated.

‘Jonesy’ was unhappy with Tony. And he lost no time in letting him know. The customary mutual fawning foreplay was ditched in favour of a full-frontal attack. Lips puckered, eyes closed, the PM received no tenderness in return but, instead, was dealt a resounding slap in the face. Abbott’s affections were spurned, his fond hopes dashed with an ice-bucket of scorn. For any lesser mortal it would be a wake-up call, but if the PM heeded his rebuke, only time will tell.

Jones was all worked up. Mouth frothing, he unleashed his yellow-peril-spittle fury all over his studio and hapless guest, flecking the PM’s comb-over and new-look intellectual style rimless spectacles. ‘Jonesy’ ranted about RET, free trade deals with China; how everyone knows the Chinese were buying up Australia; and how, as a result, Abbott was a dead man walking. You don’t have a mandate for this type of free trade, he cautioned.

Jones let it rip. Such was the force of his animation that free trade with China became momentarily almost real, conjured somehow into being from its status as quintessential oxymoron, a contradiction in terms equivalent of a binding agreement with Vladimir Putin or an indemnity from the Iraqi government. Or perhaps a self-regulating command economy. But it was all a scam to Jones and his listeners. Or scam, scum and humbug.

Begrudgingly, Jones acknowledged that Abbott got something right. He had spruiked dirty coal to a visibly alarmed G20 meeting of world leaders many of whom were affecting a new public display of energy-cleanliness. This concession aside, the scheduled post-summit frottage session then plummeted off script, departing its typical mutual pleasuring and dog-whistling agenda.

Jones attacked the Federal Renewable Energy Target for preventing growth. He even declared that Mr Abbott was failing the “pub test” with his imminent free trade agreement with China.

“You know that wind turbines are a fake and heavily subsidised by the taxpayer. Global warming is a hoax, we’ve had nothing for 18 years,” the 2GB breakfast host waded in, massaging two noxious prejudices in the same toxic breath whilst causing mangy dogs to howl from Balmain to Bondi and, on the home front, no doubt earning himself a lifetime’s supply of briquettes from a grateful coal industry.

“People listening to you now say, well he’s talking economic growth, but hang on, the cost of energy with renewable energy targets is crippling economic growth. They’re saying to me ‘we used to have the cheapest energy in the world. Now because of all of this, we actually cannot afford to go on doing what we’re doing, and jobs are being lost here’. Doesn’t economic growth start at home?”

Ears ever attuned to things domestic, Abbott leapt at the opportunity to repeat Goebbels-like the lie that his government’s axing of the carbon tax had hugely reduced power bills across the nation. His listeners, would, however, be under no illusion. Most Australians have seen little or no reduction in their electricity bills. Nor will they. On the contrary, both power and gas are set to increase significantly in the near future.

What listeners missed most, however, was any attempt by their Prime Minister to challenge Jones’ lie.

Why? Abbott is content to collude with Jones’ arrant nonsense. It has worked for him so far. Granted, he knows it is nonsense: his government’s own research shows the opposite is true. Its hand-picked economic modeller which evaluated the impact of the Renewable Energy Target, ACIL-Allen, has found that a wind-back of the scheme’s target would end up costing electricity consumers money, to the benefit largely of fossil fuel suppliers and generators.

Similar conclusions have been reached by other major Australian energy market modelling analysts – including ROAM Consulting, Sinclair Knight Merz, Intelligent Energy Systems, Schneider Electric and Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Abbott could have chosen to share this truth and refute Jones. Yet what listeners heard from the Prime Minister’s lips was more raw Bondi effluent:

“I still think they’re high… one of the reasons we want to scale back the Renewable Energy Target is because we want to further reduce power prices,” he said.

“I can’t work miracles Alan, there is no magic wand.”

The Abbott-Jones show is the collusion of two deceivers. One is a folksy-sounding politician who cynically trades in simple conservative slogans and sound-bytes which he hopes people want to hear. The other is a self-interested commercial demagogue who inflames prejudice while pretending to act in the public interest. Constructed on the Abbott-Jones show by the Abbott-Jones show is a two-dimensional black and white Prime Minister working to entice the primitive in the electorate, a public leader in retreat from reason, science and research. Dumbing down, on the other hand, engages all his energies and attention. A leader content to feed us lies, he prefers to buy votes where he may, however he may, at the cost of our country’s future. It is, of course, an ultimately unsustainable strategy. And it will be the end of him.

Jones raged that US President Barack Obama had upstaged Abbott with an “absolutely meaningless” climate pact with China. On rubbishing the climate pact, Jones, Hunt, Abbott, Hockey and Turnbull are on the same song sheet. It is a petty, desperate tactic unworthy of any reasonable adult, let alone a federal government. Yet there was a twist. On foreign ownership, the going was all Jones’ who argued that, of course, there would be free trade because such future trade would involve Chinese companies in Australia dealing with companies in China. Jones claimed this was one-sided. The yellow peril was advancing.

“Hang on… China are giving us nothing. The dairy farms are owned by China,” Jones cried.

In Western Victoria, Jones bellowed, 50 dairy farmers had already signed deals to sell to China.

The Van Diemen’s Land Company, a big Tasmanian dairy outfit, was also preparing to sell to China.

“By this time next week, who is going to own little Tasmania,” asked Big Alan.

“The public are very, very angry Prime Minister about this I can tell you.”

Abbott did do his best to mildly placate if not entirely rebut Jones anger but by then the show’s wilful damage had been done. Renewable energy had taken a hit amidships; the value of the world’s most significant climate change agreement had been trampled in the mire; and fear of overseas ownership had been boosted. And Abbott was in trouble with the people.

Abbott got across his own spin: including the outrageous assertion that he and Barack Obama were on good personal terms, a palpable falsehood given Obama’s address on climate change was virtually a direct personal rebuke in public of him. Yet the exchange was one-sided if not wounding and if Abbott landed the odd punch he was lucky.

He who sups with the devil must have a long spoon. Whatever he has got out of the show does not diminish its potential to continue to harm Abbott. Jones’ latest tantrum shows his hospitality is finite. Above all, Abbott will be paid back in his own coin. The lowest common denominator is a savage beast which grows in appetite by what it feeds on. A hungry beast awaits Abbott outside the studio, waiting to drag him down whenever it can. Just as he has used the beast to drag down his nation’s politics; turning ignorance, fear and falsehood to temporary advantage; his nemesis daily gathers strength, preparing, in the end, to devour its master.

Glossary:

Blow off: to get rid of something or someone.

A Bondi trout: Australian vernacular phrase meaning untreated faecal matter released into the Bondi sea water prior to the advent of sewage treatment systems.

G20 Jaws of Disaster for Abbott and his government yet Obama rises magnificently to the occasion.

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Snatching victory from the jaws of disaster, whilst providing an instructive and much-needed illustration of the type of leadership a real politician can provide, US President and orator Barak Obama gave his inspiring, highly acclaimed climate change ‘off-G20’ address at Queensland University, a change of venue and strategy necessitated by Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a self-professed climate change sceptic who, Canute-style, had issued an edict to bemused world leaders that climate change was off the ‘major’ G20 agenda. Obama’s speech pointedly personalised climate change with references to drought, increasing university fees, the decline of the Great Barrier Reef, the case for same sex marriage amongst other Abbott government pressure points.

Abbott’s backup artist, cuddly muddle-headed wombat Joe Hockey, another political Walter Mitty, and erstwhile personable, blokey, breakfast television boofhead, made a further futile attempt to rescue his leader from his own stupidity by kicking yet another own goal the following morning on national TV.

In a disturbing attempt to contextualise his perspective for TV audiences, ‘we are doing the best we can, Barry’, Hockey explained straight-faced he had not ‘caught’ Obama’s speech because of his own ‘hard work on the treadmill’. Virtuous, hard graft, it seems, prohibited any decadent indulgent frippery such as “the vision thing’. Viewers were also meant to swallow the whopper that Obama’s complete upstaging of Abbott’s show could ever conceivably have passed him by. Treadmill or no treadmill. Or his staff. Or that there would be not a transcript available. In advance.

Reprieved from talking about anything significant, Hockey then proceeded to claim that climate change was no impediment to world growth. ‘Look at China’. Indeed. Viewers were instead transfixed because Joe appeared to have gone the full Menzies eyebrow makeover in his latest personal grooming session, giving the impression of two sceptical crows disturbed by the ruckus below and about to take wing, completely upstaging the otherwise sound work the Treasurer was putting into supportive facial expressions. No impediment? One only hopes he notifies Greg Hunt. Save billions on direct action.

A shoo-in already for nomination in the highly contested Darwin award for his performance yesterday, Abbott will clearly go down in history as some type of pioneer. In future, supposing the G20 survives his concerted attack on its already shaky foundations, ‘off G20’ will become the real G20. Anything of interest, substance or anything remotely worthwhile, will take place off-G20 where real people who are also political leaders will genuinely engage with real issues before appreciative audiences. Obama’s words will live on. Abbott will be remembered, if at all, for other reasons.

‘It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to…’, Abbott, succeeded only in snatching disaster from every conceivable opportunity and even further afield, by hi-jacking his own G20 show and the attention of the world, for domestic purposes, clumsily framing his ‘leaders retreat’ as a type of DIY therapeutic AA style confessional.

Leaders were mystified, angry and embarrassed rather than edified by the PM’s descent into that most private of personal hells – his own sinkhole of self-pity. Abbott’s contribution to leadership was to initiate a tacky process of over-sharing by airing a revealing story of his own, consisting of some badly edited selected highlights chosen from the vast wealth of his own political ineptitude. If I could kick off, he began, deploying a venture into Ozzie colloquialism which, like his talk would be lost in translation.

Unabated, Abbott then went off the cuff over carbon tax, illegal boats, roads, (his government apparently has discovered them) and getting the budget under control (a lie about another lie) before talking about how hard it was to get people to pay for a doctor or pay through the nose for a degree. It was a clumsy attempt to secure a global endorsement for Joe Hockey’s second bite at the budget cherry. Other power-hungry mediocrities, narcissists and Adlerian psychopaths assembled in the room, yawned, snatched a power nap or looked away in sheer disbelief, disinterest and disgust.

‘Bury me when I need publicly to tell other leaders my first year of failure’, Putin is believed to have muttered in contempt before resuming his jottings on calibrating the range of sea-borne tactical nuclear warheads. Abbott, however, thus ensured his own special place in history as the antipodean political bantam who fell asleep in public dreaming aloud of being a rooster. He would be forever, however, reviled by world leaders as a prime time waster and flashy narcissist, the excessively matey man in the tight shiny suit with the extreme comb-over who grabs your hand, holds you to his chest and breathes down your throat while pumping your hand into submission. Not letting go until every camera battery in the room is flattened.

Abbott did set the bar high in some respects. An ‘Abbott handshake’ is guaranteed to be top of the list of diplomatic no-nos for decades to come. Indeed, such was the flesh pressing exhibited by ‘I wanna hold your hand,’ Abbott that it has attracted the attention of clinicians world-wide and may in future be used in some form of stress test to be deployed by psychologists interested in researching human responses to the sudden invasion of personal space, physical over-sharing and violation of etiquette, decorum and other social norms.

Abbott’s bizarre behaviour on the first day of the G20 earned the censure of climate change experts world-wide including no less an authority than  Nicholas Stern who lamented the Australian Prime Minister’s need to successfully put political dogma ahead of the best interests of the rest of the world.’

It was, according to Stern and countless others, ‘outrageous.’ The nation’s women, meanwhile, were astonished to learn that whilst the talk-fest was underway, leaders’ wives had been escorted safely away from the realm of ideas, the dangers of controversy and the seat of power to a more feminine environment – photo-opportunities with furry animals. This acknowledgment of women’s roles and gracious concession to the more limited proper orbit of women’s perspectives, intelligence and attention spans, can only have been engineered by the Minister for Women himself, self-proclaimed ‘feminist’ Tony Abbott who has included one token woman head-prefect Julie ‘I did it my way’ Bishop in his cabinet and who continues unabated on his own, inimitable, lumbering run to fulfilment in his chosen role as his party’s gift to women, Tone, the tone-deaf piano tuner of Australian gender politics.

Abbott government crisis: G20 Show undergoes urgent revamp.

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CHINA APEC SUMMIT

Public derision from any quarter is confronting to anyone. But members of political elites are especially susceptible. When one is derided by 6 billion people, it may well hurt just that little bit more. Even case-hardened psychopaths can prove sensitive, as the contemporary case of Tony ‘Shirtfront’ Abbott superbly demonstrates. Having made a complete international laughing stock of himself with Vladimir Putin and his moronic, mindlessly self-destructive yet sycophantic atavistic ranting about coal and humanity, a pale and visibly shaken Australian PM, Abbott has been forced to ‘rush through’ a total revamp of the G20 show in BrisVegas tomorrow.

Entitled ‘Operation Panic Button’, the remodelled show is supercharged with adrenaline, testosterone and sheer terror. Upstaged from the start by his own complete inexperience, Abbott is galvanised by a terrifying reality – being relegated into perpetual irrelevance and obscurity by a series of real world events, including Ebola, ISIS, Russia’s resolute determination to annex Ukraine and the recent announcement of a deal on carbon emissions between China and the United States.

Clearly angered at being blindsided by the shock announcement from US president Barack Obama and Chinese premier Xi Jinping of new national climate change goals and the way it has trashed his own G20 agenda, Abbott appears to be struggling to maintain any semblance of forward momentum, let alone any show of composure, especially now he has the added distraction of bits of the Russian navy up his clacker.

Having successfully made a personal lifelong enemy of Putin, the world’s most powerful and dangerous psychopath, Abbott is believed to be anxiously receiving regular special naval briefings on the accuracy and range of Russian missiles, nuclear weapons and other sea-borne armaments. Advertisements for auditions for the role of Abbott body double have appeared on all social media, in the press and on selected supermarket community noticeboards in all major capital cities. A food taster has been engaged for all official banquets and refreshment stations. Abbott in the meantime, has issued a statement which has only served to further alarm mental health experts and others who remark the disunity his cabinet demonstrates under pressure.

Spin doctors have been performing emergency triage on the Abbott government. Yet the patient’s vital signs continue to provide cause for concern. Media comments by a politically phlegmatic Julie Bishop and others have provided little but unintended comic relief. When the going gets tough, the Abbott government gets spinning. Avoid the truth at all costs: ‘Of course, the Russian Navy is always doing this sort of thing. It is only to be expected. They are in international waters. We have been monitoring them for some time.’ Hardy ha ha ha!

Australians are left scratching their heads trying to recall the last time a small fleet of Russian vessels was off the coast of Queensland during any international gathering. For those who still don’t get it, Russia has personalised Putin’s gun barrel diplomacy by pointedly claiming, tongue in cheek, that a purpose of their naval voyage is to seek information about climate change.

The government has been skittled. Abbott government unity, as distinct from Peta Credlin’s iron fist, is chimerical. Liberal unity is a contradiction in germs, given its lack of any coherent ideology and the peculiar circumstances of its origin. It is called Liberal because Menzies did not want the electoral handicap of the appropriate word ‘Conservative’. Certainly, on this occasion, it was all over the shop or, giving another dimension to the term, as it is fondly and blasphemously whitewashed, a broad church.

Anti-environment Minister and work experience student, Greg Hunt hollowly applauded the US-China deal in a Monty Python moment of magnanimity and irrationality. Like the Black Knight, his own imminent mortality was not in contention. Yet again, no one paid any attention.  Smart-arse, Julie Bishop claimed she was not surprised. She knew, ‘already, she said.’ The accommodating, avuncular and ponderously inept Joe Hockey deemed it an ‘acceptable item for discussion’ within a larger topic, the world economy, typically missing the point that global warming is the larger topic.

Abbott, finally, took off like a startled hare, bolting along on yet another tack, ‘We are talking about the practical. We are talking about the real. We are not talking about what may hypothetically happen in fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty years down the track. We are talking about what … what we will do and are doing right now, and that is what the Australian people expect of us. I’m focusing not on what might happen in sixteen years’ time. I’m focusing on what we’re doing now, and we’re not talking, we’re acting.’ Sheer spin, fantastically out of control from a febrile leader who is neither talking nor acting but denying. Someone needs to take his temperature.

Abbott’s dizzy spell to one side, boffins are working feverishly around the clock to pull the fat from the fire. Joe Hockey’s original Headland PowerPoint: ‘Who has the key to a bigger GDP? Is now a snappy: ‘Catch the Rats who won’t pay Tax,’ and has been creatively re-crafted into a sultry torch song come bump n grind dance bracket format entitled: ‘Screw you over, give you the bill’: Australia – open wide for business.  

Sharing centre stage, but Miss Piggy style hogging the limelight, Foreign Affairs Minister, the incomparable Julie Bishop will perform her own lap (band) dance whilst belting out a fetching rendition of ‘Hey, Big Spender, while Smoking Joe steps through a specially choreographed IMF routine assisted by ‘The Hendersons will all be there’, an IPA giant dancing puppet troupe and led by a special Australian armed forces massed brass band supported by the Jacqui Lambie backing singers.

A second provisional number, ‘I will survive’ is a less certain Hockey offering, although it is rumoured that the Foreign Affairs Minister has expressed keen interest in putting her own stamp on this classic.

Global warming is back on the agenda. Once opposed as an agenda item (and indeed as anything of significance) by the same man who could not refuse Putin’s attendance because the G20 runs on consensus, will now be fully and energetically embraced in a late night team building and bonding workshop at the Viper Room, a world-class adult entertainment centre in Brisbane’s red light district. Featuring a complimentary international smorgasbord of divertissements, refreshments will include Scots whisky, Cuban cigars, Kiwi green, Cabramatta hydro and Bendigo ice. IMF and World Bank Paramedics will be on standby with wads of money to revive the fortunes of those who may become indisposed, in return for sovereign rights to that country’s economy in perpetuity.

 

The shirt front that roared.

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When Tony Abbott threatened to ‘shirt front’ Putin, he put a lot on the line. He told journalists that he was going to shirt front the Russian president on the sidelines of G20 summit over the tragedy of the Malaysian airliner crash in the Donetsk Region of Ukraine in July.

What was he thinking? What did he hope to achieve? Who knows with Abbott? What is certain is that the gesture got him a lot of media interest. A bit of this was benign and non-intrusive. Some media types even looked up the term and explained thoughtfully on TV that it was an expression from Aussie Rules football. It was hopeful but did not really explain or excuse anything. The net effect, moreover, was to hang an albatross around Abbott’s neck.

Perhaps the shirt front was calculated to appeal to the alpha male. Perhaps it did win Abbott a flicker of attention if not admiration from macho types who believe that assertiveness equals being ready with your fists. Ironically, however, the same types would be irrevocably alienated by the lack of action. You can’t make a threat you are not prepared to carry out. Whatever modest gain in attention, the challenge is likely to have cost him further credibility. And the rest of us have probably had enough machismo to last a lifetime. Or Abbott’s political lifetime.

The shirtfront venue was first set for Brisbane at the G20 which Abbott is pretending to chair. Yet even Abbott subsequently realised that a shirt front was an unnecessary complication at a meeting which would require every ounce of his energy, just to appear to be in control. The distraction of an impending punch up out the back could be a tad distracting. Accordingly it was brought forward to APEC. (Entrepreneurs are probably hard at work as we speak creating an iPad  shirtfront booking app for that.) And there Abbott would be happy to let the matter lie. But some matters will not just lie down and die.

The shirt front is irresistible on many fronts. It conjures up an attractively incongruous image. Its inappropriateness appeals, especially given Abbott’s aspirations on the international stage. And the media would not leave it alone. Even as he stepped on to the carpet at his APEC meeting, there was a man or two chasing the PM with a microphone asking if ‘the shirt front was on’ at APEC. (APEC, by the way, is the meeting John Howard liked to talk up. APEC is the one where they all get dressed up in funny shirts for a photo opportunity. It is uncertain what else it achieves.)

In the event, there was no shirt front. Tony toned it down almost immediately. By the next day he was telling reporters that he was absolutely determined to have a very robust conversation with the Russian president.” Instead, he appears to have had a quick private whinge to Putin. No doubt he got on to the Russian leader’s complicity in the death of innocents in the shooting down of MH17. No doubt also Putin could have raised Australia’s appalling human rights record on asylum seekers and its recent indictment by the UN committee on torture.

It does not seem to have gone all that well. His promised great remonstration with the Russian leader is said to have lasted a whole fifteen minutes. He claims to have raised the issue of compensation by offering an indirect analogy. The US offered compensation when they accidentally shot down a passenger jet. Putin’s response is not known but can safely be guessed at it.

Ты меня достал! (You piss me off.)

The shirt front was more than an embarrassing gaffe. It will haunt Abbott for some time to come. It has got him the sort of attention that he would rather have done without. Naff. Limited. Testosteronic. Not flattering. Not useful. But enduring. And it even attracted the attention of the Minister for Foreign Affairs. You know you are in trouble when Julie Bishop goes into bat for you.

Putting, as usual, an impossible spin on it, Bishop claimed this week that the term has now entered the diplomatic vernacular. It’s not a gaffe but a nifty new term for a diplomatic confrontation. Abbott did not lose control after all. On the contrary we should all be grateful for his talent as a wordsmith. Quite the Shakespeare of the world stage.

If you swallow that you are in deep trouble. Next you will be believing that Tony Abbott is capable of leading the G20 through the next meeting. Or that he has prepared for the task. Or that he has the capacity to follow the discussion, let alone make a useful contribution.

What is more likely is that this lapse will prove a defining moment. When the world leaders look up at him at the podium on 16 November in Brisbane, it is likely to be through the lens of the shirtfront. They will wonder how a man who has trouble being in charge of his lip could ever be in charge of anything bigger, even if the chairmanship of the G20 will last only a year. They will not be happy with his almost complete lack of preparation; his ideological bent towards letting the market sort things out for itself when many of them have put in the hard yards intervening to prevent financial meltdown. They will see a man with anger management issues, a man who has trouble keeping his temper. They will see a parochial primitive predisposed towards a reductive approach to conflict resolution, a sort of spaghetti western hero who will invite adversaries out the back where we can settle this with our bare fists, man to man. And they will be antagonised, if not downright angry. Who knows, one of them might offer to take him out the back and sort out his attitude for him.

Blood on Scott Morrison’s hands.

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funeral of bahari

Funeral of Reza Barati.

On 17 February 2014, men armed with guns, machetes, knives, pipes, sticks and rocks, systematically and brutally attacked asylum seekers detained on Manus Island. Reinforced by PNG Police and the PNG ‘mobile squad’, who pushed down a fence to join the fray, the assailants carried out acts of violent retribution to asylum seekers who had been protesting for three months, demanding that their claims be processed.

Reza Barati, a 23-year-old Faili Kurd from Iran was murdered in the attack. At least 62 other asylum seekers were injured. One man lost his right eye, another was shot in the buttocks and another was slashed across the throat.

The attack needs to be kept in sharp focus as the Abbott government, despite many protests and appeals from the local and international community, seeks to consolidate its high handed arbitrary approach while priding itself on the efficacy of its practices.

Changes to the Migration Act currently before the house, extend Maritime Law, redefine Australia’s responsibility to refugees and effectively give unprecedented powers to Minister of Immigration, Scott Morrison. Also slated is a plan to create a new super Ministry of Homeland Security with Scott Morrison at its head.

The legal changes proposed by the Immigration Minister would re-introduce temporary protection visas to be applied to about 30,000 asylum seekers still living in Australia. Asylum seekers found to be refugees would get a three-year visa allowing them to work, but they would ultimately have to return to their country of origin. Maritime powers would be expanded, covering people detained at sea, and allow Australian law to significantly limit the country’s responsibilities under international human rights laws.

Especially draconian is the intent to raise the risk threshold for sending arrivals in Australia back to another country. Currently, people will not be returned to the country they came from if there’s a 10 per cent chance they will suffer significant harm there. The Government will now raise that risk threshold to greater than 50 per cent. Mr Morrison says the higher threshold is the Government’s interpretation of its international obligations. Greens Senator Hanson-Young says the bill will result in more asylum seekers lives being put at risk. “This is a mean, dangerous law from the Government,” she said. “If this was not so serious, if it was not about life or death, it would actually be a joke.”

Whilst Morrison’s colleagues hold him to be one of his government’s ‘top performers’ for stopping the boats, this is no commendation. Indeed, their high regard is an indictment on the rest of the cabinet. It also reflects poorly on both sides of Australian government and, indirectly, on the Australian public who have allowed themselves to accept their country’s hard-line approach.

Morrison is not the man to promote. Not remotely. Outside of the government’s joy in turning back the boats, few Australians would approve of his self-abrogating approach or his performance in his portfolio. Most of us feel a deep sense of anger and shame. Many eminent Australians in many walks of life have called for the Minister to resign.

Julian Burnside added to the calls with his public claim this week that the Minister of Immigration bribed witnesses to Reza Barati’s death to retract their testimony in return for transfer to Australia.

Burnside’s claim is, sadly no bolt out of the blue. It comes at the end of a long series of sordid reports of cover up and whitewash by the Abbott Government.

It is, nevertheless, a typically courageous challenge by a highly regarded champion of human rights and deserves to be heeded as a timely reminder of the alarming track record of this government’s cruelly punitive approach to asylum seekers. Sadly it was rejected with typical hostility by Morrison who launched a libellous attack on Burnside for his opposition, malice and lack of evidence.

“This is a false and offensive suggestion made without any basis or substantiation by advocates with proven form of political malice and opposition to the Government’s successful border protection policies. The government once again rejects these claims,” Mr Morrison said. Yet there is independent evidence that Burnside’s account is correct.

An asylum seeker at the Manus Island detention centre has alleged 3 November that he and another detainee were tortured, physically assaulted, threatened with rape and forced to sign papers withdrawing their witness accounts about the night Iranian asylum seeker Reza Barati died.

The man, aged in his 20s, has spoken publicly for the first time about what he said Wilson Security guards and Transfield staff did to him in a secret compound called Chauka. The asylum seeker making the claims said he was too scared to be named.

Ben Pynt, director of Human Rights Advocacy at Humanitarian Research Partners, a non-profit human rights and humanitarian research organization is clear that the witnesses are speaking the truth.

“The specificity of their claims is such that you couldn’t make it up. Dates, times, places, people and then the documents corroborate all of those things,” he said.

“It really makes me think there’s no doubt.

“Quite frankly, I don’t believe the Minister and neither should the Australian public. The Minister’s denial has no factual basis.

“He hasn’t responded to any of the individual claims and he hasn’t asked an independent person to find out what happened.

He has been in regular contact with the two asylum seekers and raised their allegations of mistreatment with the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the office of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR).

What caused the violence in February on Manus Island? It was not the suppression of a riot. The savage attack was the authorities’ response to a protest. More an armed attack than a ‘response’, the action was utterly unjustified, totally inappropriate and, in Reza Barati’s case, ultimately fatal. Detention Centre personnel were not attempting to quell any riotous assembly at the detention centre despite Immigration Minister’s version of events. Indeed, it seems, at the time of the incident, things had settled.

The previous day, 35 protestors had escaped. Yet by the day of the attack, only one individual remained protesting. The brutal, violent assault has been widely misreported as a riot in a whirlwind of spin generated by Morrison and his department in order to shift the blame from those running the camp and by extension himself.

How did Reza Bararati die? Julian Burnside QC gave this account last Wednesday. One G4S worker bashed the Iranian asylum seeker with a piece of wood which had two nails driven through it. His scalp torn open, Barati fell to the ground and was then kicked repeatedly by a dozen employees from within the detention centre including two Australians.

They kicked him in the head and stomach as he tried to protect himself with his arms, Mr Burnside recounted for the audience at his Sydney peace prize award last Wednesday. He said another employee took a rock and smashed it on Mr Barati’s head with “such ferocity, it killed him”. Other reports had stated that Mr Barati died of a head injury on the way to Lorengau hospital in PNG.

The morning after Reza Barati’s death, the story had been given a different spin. Minister for Immigration, Scott Morrison laid the blame squarely at the feet of the asylum seekers.

On 26 May, retired senior Australian Public Servant Robert Cornall’s report found Barati’s death occurred after guards entered the centre to suppress the protest. His ‘administrative review’ for the Federal Government revealed that contractors working for the Australian government were responsible for the death of one asylum seeker, the serious injury of others, and the mass trauma of dozens.

Yet Scott Morrison took the review as an exoneration. The evidence? Morrison instances the fact that Cornall found it was not possible to isolate one factor that could have mitigated injuries or damage.

Cornall’s 107-page ‘administrative review’ concluded that the ‘incidents were initiated by transferee protests’.

Its recommendations included increased security and reducing the processing time for refugee claims. It reaffirmed that no one could be resettled in Australia. By and large it said what the government wanted it to say. It sent the ‘right message’. Yet it must not remain unchallenged.

Long before Barati was killed, whistle-blowers provided sufficient information to prevent his tragic death. He did not have to die. But Morrison does have to come forward, accept the truth and his responsibility.

Former G4S former safety and security officer Martin Appleby quit because he found management ignored his concerns about the violent and volatile conditions.

“I couldn’t handle what was going on; no one wanted to listen,” he told Crikey. “I wrote many reports, and nothing was ever taken up. The lead-up started a long time ago.”

Manus Island is a hell.  The single men there face indefinite detention, without timeline, without information, without hope. Supplies are meagre. Facilities are few. It is hot and crowded.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

Asylum seekers have been denied adequate water and soap supplies or even urgent medical attention. They suffer “snakes inside their accommodation, malaria, lack of malaria tablets, no mosquito nets, [and] inedible food that often has cockroaches in it.

Manus Island offshore detention centre represents a flagrant disregard for human rights, justice or compassion. It is, moreover, an expensive and indefinite detention. One billion dollars has been spent to detain 2000 asylum seekers offshore on Manus and Nauru but, since 2012, only one has been processed. All up the Coalition has budgeted $2.87 billion over the next year to run Manus and Nauru. Transfield Services’ contract alone is worth $1.22 billion to run both camps for the next 14 months. The cost of holding one asylum seeker in offshore detention was found to be more than $400,000 per year by the Commission of Audit. The Refugee Council calculates this cost to be five times that of ‘processing’ in Australia.

Yet for all the money spent, the quality of care provided to detainees is substandard. The death of 24-year-old Hamid Khazaei, an Iranian on September 5 was entirely preventable. A cut on his foot led to septicemia. The tragedy resulted from a simple lack of basic first aid. Not only was it totally unnecessary, it has come to represent the ugly side of a deliberate policy of deterrence. In most civilized societies, it would be regarded as an act of criminal neglect.

Political commentator, former diplomat, Bruce Haigh believes Morrison should step down, ‘The Minister for Immigration, Scott Morrison, should resign. He is not a fit and proper person to be responsible for vulnerable lives.’

Haigh instanced the Manus Island assault and problems with our neighbor, Indonesia. ‘Without any help, Mr Morrison has taken the relationship with Indonesia to its lowest point since the mid-1980s. He appears to understand nothing and listens to no one…’

Christine Milne has similarly called for Morrison to resign. Tasmanian Independent Andrew Wilkie has formally asked the International Criminal Court prosecuting authority to investigate whether the treatment of asylum seekers contravenes international conventions.

In the meantime, immune to all criticism, the government presses on with its plans to settle 1000 asylum seekers in Cambodia. Scott Morrison is seeking to change the law to give the Abbott government even greater authority. To this end, he introduced the “Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment” in September. Morrison argued:

“The new statutory framework will enable parliament to legislate… without referring directly to the Refugee Convention and therefore not being subject to the interpretations of foreign courts or judicial bodies which seek to expand the scope of the Refugee Convention well beyond what was ever intended by this country or this parliament.”

The controversial bill is now in its third reading. It is a bizarre attempt to twist a treaty to suit the Abbott government’s own agenda. “It’s a sudden and unilateral reinterpretation of a treaty which has been signed by 145 countries around the world and has been the cornerstone of international refugee protection for over 60 years,” according to Daniel Webb, director of legal advocacy at the Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC) in Melbourne. Meanwhile, Cambodian officials are travelling to Nauru, for what Webb calls “an active selling of the refugee transfer arrangement by members of the regime that stands to profit from it”. 1,000 detainees from Nauru are slated to be transferred to Cambodia in exchange for US$35 million in aid. Cambodia has treated past asylum seekers poorly; it lacks the capacity to care for 1,000 newcomers.  Above all, details of the proposed plan have not been made sufficiently clear. The Australia-Cambodia Memorandum of Understanding does not specify how much money will be allocated for temporary accommodation and basic needs – or who will decide how the money is budgeted. It is simply one more damning move in Australia’s practice of deterrence which masks a callous indifference at best and at worst an unrepentant and calculated cruelty to innocent victims.

Under the Abbott government and its gung-ho Immigration Minister, Scott Morrison, the treatment of asylum seekers is a travesty of our international obligations and an affront to our humanity.

Moreover, as Julian Burnside reminds us this week, we have a minister whose department has not only shown gross negligence leading to accidental death, it has also been complicit in the brutal suppression of a protest on its Manus Island detention centre in February which resulted in the murder of an innocent victim. All the evasions and forced retractions in the world cannot wash away the blood on the Minister’s hands.

The Brandis touch: the kiss of death for freedom and trust.

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 “Fundamental to our rights as citizens is the right to be free. The power to detain without warrant, without charge, without access to legal advice is normally reserved for dictators and tyrants. No free society unnecessarily cedes to its government powers of detention without review,” Australian Lawyers Alliance (ALA) in submission Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security about the Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment (Foreign Fighters) Bill.

What is it about Attorney General George Brandis that makes us uneasy? What is it about him that does not inspire trust? Confidence? Quite a lot when you think about it.

First he reassures too much. Part of the Brandis problem is that he’s always offering reassurances; placating us with the lie that he’s making us safer. Don’t you worry?  We know best. We know what’s best for you. Trust us, he says.

Trust? Not a chance, not when you look at what he is doing; what he has done. Alarm bells ring.

Next comes the rest of the Brandis bedside manner: his condescension; the supercilious way he talks down to ordinary mortals. Common folk are invariably mistaken, in his eyes, whatever their point of view, and often before he’s fully considered it. Don’t ruffle my feathers, don’t demean me with your specious arguments, I am Cock of the Walk.

An ugly arrogance lurks behind the Mr Magoo spectacles fuelled by an intelligence which suffers fools constantly and painfully. Beneath his avuncular demeanour, burns a profound conviction in his own righteousness. Above all, his certain belief in his own moral and intellectual rectitude creates deep misgivings in the rest of us. And it was quick off the blocks.

Our disquiet with the current Attorney General began early when the recently appointed AG was caught rorting expenses. For any politician, let alone an AG, this was disturbing. For Brandis it was also hypocritical. In Opposition, the same George Brandis had ferociously attacked Peter Slipper for visiting a winery and charging the taxi ride to the Commonwealth.

Brandis excoriated Slipper on the former speaker’s dishonesty. Yet he had a blind spot with any similar inspection of his own misconduct. It was perfectly reasonable to attend a friend’s wedding at the Commonwealth’s expense, he claimed. Even when discovered, two years later, Brandis repaid the $1,600 and maintained he had done nothing wrong.  As Julian Burnside writes colourfully:  haughty, supercilious, self-righteous George Brandis was at the trough with the best of them.

Of course it could be argued that Brandis was simply following his leader. Tony Abbott billed the Commonwealth for every fun-run and each pollie pedalling.  His Tamworth photo opportunity cost the rest of us in Team Australia about ten grand. We’ve invested a fair bit in him over the last few years.  Abbott has claimed $3 million from the Commonwealth. Brandis, in this light, is merely one junior member of corrupt, hard right-wing Liberal government, led by self-seeking hypocrites. But it’s no excuse. The Nuremburg defence of following orders or example founders on the rock of individual adult moral autonomy. You knew it was wrong and you did it, George. The buck stops with you.

Beyond this flaw, the Brandis problem is even greater than the morally blind leading the blind. The Attorney General is working to put the skids well and truly under our freedom and security. With the National Security Monitor out of the way, the path has been cleared to introduce sweeping changes without real public scrutiny. George is eagerly beavering away to push through laws that will profoundly alter our society with only perfunctory consultation and review.

The Abbott government is intent on increasing the state’s powers of surveillance. Vastly. There is a rush on to get its data retention bill passed before Christmas. Caesar’s omniscient mad black eye may well be ever upon all of us by the New Year, thanks in no small part to you, George.  The state will have carte blanche to spy on its citizens.

Nothing to worry about if you are good, says Brandis. Everything to worry about if you value your privacy, your civil rights and if you understand that in our information age, secure data is an oxymoron. ISPs will keep massive databases. Worry about the security of this data. Worry about authorised access. As Chris Berg says, your data will be only a subpoena away with the passing of the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2014.

Worrying in the extreme is Brandis’ Foreign Fighters Bill. Drafted ostensibly to curb overseas travel for would-be Jihadists, disturbingly, the law reverses the burden of proof. Also disturbingly, it reveals George’s role as a keen collaborator in the Abbott government’s fear campaign; a key player in the manufacture of paranoid anxiety for political ends. The Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment (Foreign Fighters) Bill 2014, due to be signed into law within days, will give law enforcers powers to query, arrest and charge people who travel to countries such as Syria, Iraq, or proscribed zones (so-called “declared areas”) therein, without a valid reason.

Yet the provisions embrace far more than foreign fighters and violent extremism. They amend 20 Acts including social security. The Australian Lawyers Alliance (ALA) warned in submission to the joint parliamentary committee that the new laws “threaten the independence of the judiciary, introduce retrospective warrants and more than triple the period an individual can be detained without others being notified.”

Brandis is least reassuring when he changes tack, as he has with regard to the proposed Department of Homeland Security. A month ago at the Press Club in Canberra he was opposed to any new super-Department, implying it wasn’t happening. Now it is likely to happen soon and Scott Morrison will be in charge. Perhaps Brandis himself has been surprised by this turn of events. Either way, it is an alarming indictment of an AG who asks to be trusted.

Technical matters are not Brandis’ forte. He was mocked for being unable to define metadata. Now his answer is that metadata will be defined in the legislation. All very well and good but we’d be a bit more at ease with an AG who could explain it; talk us through it as they say; a man as they say who was on top of his brief. Despite your talk and in some ways because of it, we firmly expect to end up like the US.

Data will be kept on everyone; the state will have access to everything. Your metadata waffle is a sideshow; a sop to those who like to be fobbed off with meaningless assurances dressed up with technical jargon. Yet, increasingly, Brandis, Abbott and other Team Australians slip up and reveal a glimpse of their true intentions. They are disquietingly far-reaching incursions into our freedoms, which are announced in a manner which inspires neither confidence nor trust.

In August, Tony Abbott admitted in a television interview that requiring internet service providers to retain data on their customers’ activity was not just about anti-terrorism and national security but could be used to fight “general crime”. More recently, AFP Commissioner Andrew Colvin also let the cat out of the bag.

“Absolutely, I mean any interface, any connection somebody has over the internet, we need to be able to identify the parties to that connection … So illegal downloads, piracy … cyber-crimes, cyber-security, all these matters and our ability to investigate them is absolutely pinned to our ability to retrieve and use metadata. “

There has been an attempt subsequently by key Abbott ministers to back away from this but no-one is convinced, let alone reassured.

Brandis’ chutzpah and disdain for others’ views is deeply worrying. He insults his audience’s intelligence with tired rhetorical devices to fob off questions. On Q&A, in response to a question regarding the harm done by the government’s fondness for the divisive Team Australia slogan and stance, he claimed that PM Abbott addresses the cabinet as ‘team’. This is somehow expected to convince us that the PM is an egalitarian leader who happily places his faith in democratic consensus. This was expected to satisfy the question of whether the term Team Australia is exclusive. Who are you kidding, George? Of course it is. And perhaps you need to be more alert to your leader’s use of irony. Exclusive, indeed, Team Australia has proved.

When in August some Islamic leaders refused to attend meetings with Tony Abbott in Sydney and Melbourne, Abbott described their boycott as “foolish”. There was, he elaborated, a “Team Australia” spirit among those who did join in. Muslim community members have not missed the point of the team analogy. Yet Brandis has told them to their faces they have got this wrong.

What Brandis had offered was token consultation. Leaders were permitted half an hour to read over draft legislation before being expected to comment. The proposed laws were to curb young Muslims from heading off overseas to fight with ISIS and other ‘foreign conflicts.’

Brandis’ avuncular manner patronises those who attempt to challenge, those who question. The subtext is: We know what’s best for you. Even if you don’t quite understand. We will take your freedom away. You have to give up some freedoms to be safe. If you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about. A strong state means safer citizens. A strong state is good for business.

A month ago, Senator Brandis solemnly told the National Press Club that the Australian people should trust the Coalition, because Liberals are historically freedom loving:

“The side of politics which has in its DNA to keep governments small and to keep freedom large, can be better trusted to handle these matters without over-reaching than the side of politics which believes that expansion of the power of the state is the solution to every problem”.

Spare us the rhetoric Mr Brandis. No-one is fooled. Your government has done more than any other to curtail the freedoms of the Australian people. Trust is something you earn. Your words have to match your deeds. Your deeds entail a vast expansion of the powers of the state, in haste and often by stealth. Trust is not something you or your government will ever inspire. You don’t keep your promises to the Australian people. You seek to limit our freedom. You pretend that it is for our own good. You and your government will go down in history as cynical, dishonest and morally bankrupt; not servants of the people working for the common good; but a self-serving elite unworthy of respect or trust; our greatest betrayers.

Direct Action: all bets are off.

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Greg hunt with flag looking mad

Pity poor Greg Hunt. Abbott’s Minister for the Environment, aka the work experience boy, may well be chuffed to have the PUP on board his DAP (Direct Action Policy) but there is precious little to make anyone else happy. Unless you count Hunt’s certain political oblivion as cause to throw a party. Some unkind souls might. Here at the Wronski institute we are more charitable. We feel for the man. But we feel for our country and our planet and our children’s children rather more.

Hunt is on a hiding to nothing. He’s the fall guy, the unwary lightweight apprentice hoop saddled up with the donkey. It is a dark horse. Direct Action, a dodgy nag out of Do Nothing and Deny You Need To, is a donkey out of IPA’s stable of mystery imports with shadowy connections rumoured to be worth squillions. The nag has no form whatsoever and is completely untested over the distance. The most likely result will be that the gelding will break poorly, pull up at the first hurdle and break down well before the end of the race. A few punters think it will run backwards given the jockey’s previous form on ETS.

In another bizarre twist in the tale, trackside touts report recent workouts in which jockey Hunt appeared to be attempting to ride while be facing the rear of his mount. He’s a brave boy. Turning mid race is extremely hazardous to say nothing of what it does to your chances of finishing the race.

Justice will be done and seen on TV starring men with hats several sizes too small. There’ll be a steward’s inquiry as to why the horse did not run on its merits. Metabolite of testosterone test results will be instanced. A strikingly smaller man out of the saddle, jockey Hunt will appear, completely buggered, on camera squeaking up in defence of his riding but the result will be a foregone conclusion. Finito. He’ll be sent packing. A disqualified person.

It won’t be easy. Hunt’s put everything on his riding a winner. It won’t be any small step down. Never short of a word, or shy of a wager, he’s wind-bagged to journalists that he’ s staking his reputation on DAP giving a good account of itself. True enough. In fact, in the event, he’ll be lucky to get a job riding track work. Or in the knackery.

Direct action is a dud. It has no body of evidence to support it and a Melbourne Cup field of experts who warn us it’s a fraud. It’s a handout to polluters, and a nag that failed in the past, when it pulled up lame and had to be put down when it ran for the Gillard stable.

The $5.5 billion Contracts for Closure fund under the Gillard Government’s Clean Energy Futures legislation failed to bring about any reduction in Victoria’s polluting brown coal fired power generation and was abandoned by the government.   Moreover, it is an expensive fraud. It is unlikely to meet the emissions reduction target, and it will cost billions of dollars. Indeed, experts predict an ever expanding cost as it fails to deliver.

A key part of the DAP involves burying carbon. ‘Dappers’ claim that soil carbon storage and $3 billion in funding for emissions reduction projects will achieve a 5 per cent reduction in emissions. It is a long shot. No scientific evidence exists to show it could reduce Australia’s carbon emissions at all, as the CSIRO’s review into soil carbon storage  concludes. CSIRO warns that despite its theoretical potential, storing carbon in agricultural soils is untried, un-researched and impossible to measure.

Even if it did reduce emissions, 5% by 2020 is far too low a target to do us any good. As the Climate Change Authority concluded in its Final Report in February, we need to aim much higher. 15% below 2000 levels should be our the minimum target.  We could get 5% by doing nothing, as the economic slowdown and the rising price of electricity and gas curbs output. Some sceptics suggest that the very modest 5% target is a cunning ploy, a figure that its authors know will be reached without doing anything and then used to justify the DAP.

The DAP has no teeth. They say that if you are a polluter and you put your hand up for the money, that’s it.  You don’t even have to prove you have cut emissions at the end of your five years. In a process Abbott and Hunt poetically describe as a ‘reverse auction’, (in reality polluters are chosen by the government), you won’t have any penalty if you don’t make your target. You can take the money and run. The taxpayer’s money. A look at the fine print suggests that this is not strictly true but two thirds of industries are exempt from any expectation to show results.

Not only is direct action on the nose in the real world; in the world of those who know and care about climate change, it has its open critics even within Liberal ranks.

In 2009, Malcolm Turnbull described the policy as bullshit:

…the fact is that Tony and the people who put him in his job do not want to do anything about climate change. They do not believe in human caused global warming. As Tony observed on one occasion “climate change is crap” or if you consider his mentor, Senator Minchin, the world is not warming, it’s cooling and the climate change issue is part of a vast left wing conspiracy to de-industrialise the world.

The Liberal Party is currently led by people whose conviction on climate change is that it is ‘crap’ and you don’t need to do anything about it. Any policy that is announced will simply be a con, an environmental fig leaf to cover a determination to do nothing.

Direct action was dreamed up by Alan Moran director of the Deregulation unit in  the Institute of Public Affairs as part of IPA’s standing brief to lobby for traditional industries and generally keeping things as they are. Direct action was invented by elements of the far-right and is backed financially by those with vested interests in maintaining the status quo. It is designed to buy time. No one really expects it work. It is and always was a ‘Clayton’s’ policy. And it was eagerly embraced by an expedient Tony Abbott as the policy you have when you are not having a climate change policy. Abbott doesn’t believe in it. He has thrown Hunt 3.2 billion and told him to go away and play with his model. There won’t be any more money. Get back to me when you can show it works.

Greg Hunt is a dead man walking with his DAP. His integrity has already been seriously compromised by his flip flop conversion from passionate ETS advocate in Howard’s government to the mouthpiece of direct action under Abbott. Now he is headed for ignominy and almost certain political oblivion. He has staked his reputation on proving a type of alchemy. And his cynical boss, Abbott, has been happy to send him on this fool’s errand.

Greg Hunt can look to his ambition to work out what went wrong.. For all other Australians, Direct Action will cost us dear in the billions we pay polluters and the damage it will permit to be caused to our environment. And if it seems cruel of Abbott to exploit the callow Hunt, what are we to make of a government that is prepared not only to shirk its obligations to the rest of the world but which is prepared to trade its children’s futures for its own selfish short term gain?

Julie Bishop for PM?

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Mr Pyne: “I think she’s a great role model to everyone, not just women, by the way. I think she’s a great Foreign Minister but we have a fantastic Prime Minister, I want her to be Prime Minister for 10 years and after that people can worry about the next 10 years.

Interviewer: You want her to be Prime Minister for ten years?

Mr Pyne: Tony Abbott. I said we have a great Prime Minister and we want him to be Prime Minister for ten years. I said him.

His official transcript fixed the misspeak, but that minor slip did nothing to deflect attention from Julie Bishop’s growing stature within the Government.

Recent media speculation that Australian Foreign Affairs Minister, Julie Bishop could be our next Prime Minister needs to be beaten down with a cold spoon. Not a chance. Not yet. Not ever. There is little in Bishop’s achievements so far on the world stage and less in her achievements in other spheres that commend her as a potential Prime Minister. In terms of political power, she is a very doubtful starter. Her WA seat means that she is at a disadvantage because the power base of the LNP is located in Sydney and Melbourne. Typically NSW and Victorian MPs determine the leadership because the more populated states hold a higher number of seats in the parliament.

Yet, we should not be too alarmed or surprised at such reports. When it comes to predicting leadership challenges, elements of the Australian media have an insatiable appetite. It’s an absorbing ticket-selling spectacle, in its own right. Primitive, visceral, it can become an all-consuming orgiastic feeding-frenzy, such as occurs between praying mantis and mate. Or between politicians themselves as occurred when in 2013 Abbott’s attack dog Bishop tore into Prime Minister Julia Gillard on the pretext of uncovering the AWU slush fund affair. Make no mistake, it is a blood sport; part of its appeal is the thrill of the kill.

It’s not all morbid, some thoughtful souls see a curious life of its own created in leadership speculation.  Some claim the speculation to be an eager political player in its own right. Whatever the explanation, however, we have come to expect such things as part of who we are. If not the natural corollary to our national obsession with gambling, or our penchant for serial marriage, it fits our psyche. To say nothing of our fractured attention span. No doubt it is also feels healthy if not empowering: our tall poppy syndrome mixes with our mythic egalitarianism in our enjoyment of the ‘swallow the leader’ ritual. Other parts of our complex selves, even paradoxically the parts that venerate the strong leader may also be indulged. Above all there is  the sheer entertainment value of the whole circus with its inherent tendency towards self-parody. At times it resembles Abbot and Costello’s Who’s on First Base?

The lack of suitable leadership contenders does not put us off. We are a flexible, resourceful people. Instead of betting on two flies walking up a wall, other insects will do. So what if one turns out to be a sand groper? (Except of course for the matter of the sand groper’s handicap but we will discuss that later.) And in our media obsession, the calibre of the candidate becomes ever less relevant. Julie Bishop can talked up despite a patchy record. Despite being the wrong person for the job.

Why do we do it? For the media, speculation is easy. It doesn’t require too much research, it seems simple enough for most to follow and it makes for a handy moment in interviews when you have run out of other material. Ask the subject of speculation about the leader’s baton you think you discern in their knapsack.

It may also be that the current crop of contenders have so little going for them as politicians that the only thing real left to focus on is their ambition.  As with Abbott, ambition is Julie Bishop’s strongest suit. Since her days as Head Prefect at St Peter’s Girls in Adelaide, or her days in corporate law, she has been disciplined, diligent and highly successful in getting to the top. As a lawyer she was tough. Determined. Opinions vary as to how successful she was, but her career forged ahead. She seems to have been a tough boss to work for when she rose to lead the firm and not every other step of her ascent saw Bishop distinguish herself by an excess of humanity. Nor did she allow her too many compunctious visitations of nature impede her legal career at CSR.

Bishop’s critics, including Slater and Gordon founder Peter Gordon, allege that lawyers for CSR used their financial power to drag out the cases of dying men to avoid compensation. He told Australian Doctor magazine in 2007:

“We had to fight even for the right of dying cancer victims to get a speedy trial. I recall sitting in the WA Supreme Court in an interlocutory hearing for the test cases involving Wittenoom miners Mr. Peter Heys and Mr. Tim Barrow. CSR was represented by Ms. Julie Bishop (then Julie Gillon). (She) was rhetorically asking the court why workers should be entitled to jump court queues just because they were dying.”

Robert Vojakovic of WA-based Asbestos Diseases Society says Bishop “had a take-no-prisoners approach”.

NSW Labor MP Stephen Jones comments: “You can’t judge anyone by their clients, I suppose. But she had some pretty dodgy ones in my view.”

Bishop, naturally, angrily rejects the accusations, blaming the courts for controlling the pace of proceedings.

“We did everything we could to fight the case professionally – when I say fight it, to test the legal propositions, knowing that the other cases potentially rested on this,” she says.

“Did I stand there and say ‘no, I have a moral objection to working on this case’? Of course not.”

Of course not. Bishop is entering a version of the Nuremburg defence. Whatever its value in the legal field, the defence of just following orders, of having no individual moral autonomy, is in this instance more than unbecoming in an aspirant for politics’ top office. It is, surely, a prima facie disqualification.  Her record of success as a corporate lawyer is unimpeachable. Whether it prepares her to be a Prime Ministers is another question altogether.

Much has been made of Julie Bishop’s success as Foreign Affairs Minister. Some of this praise has been over generous. The record has been patchy. We need not dwell on her provocation of China by intemperate language early in her portfolio. Perhaps as Alexander Downer has said, she has grown into the job. Perhaps also her record of success is enhanced by spin rather than empirical evidence.

Interviewed in March on British radio she made less than compelling defences of Operation Sovereign Borders. Pressed on the treatment of detainees she said:

“… they’re not holiday camps… I have visited there and I am satisfied [that] people are treated appropriately.”

The asylum seeker who had his head broken when an attendant hit him with a piece of wood would no doubt completely agree that he was treated appropriately.

In the course of the interview and elsewhere Bishop has revealed a patchy grasp of her portfolio.

She asserted that the claims of asylum seekers ”are processed in third countries, and then we look for resettlement in other countries, including in Australia – and we’ve done this before and it worked”. It is not true.

Scott Morrison’s official message to boat arrivals is that they will never be resettled in Australia.

The only resettlement option for those on Manus Island whose refugee claims are recognised is resettlement in Papua New Guinea, even though this is a matter of conjecture in PNG. There is, of course, resettlement on Nauru, a ‘solution’ in serious trouble, it would seem from recent reports.

Bishop asserted, ”people are clearly having their applications for asylum processed there [on Manus and Nauru] and if they are found not to be genuine asylum seekers, they are returned [home]”.

The problem here is that no determinations on refugee status have been made – aside from one positive decision on Nauru – and the UN  refugee agency has serious doubts about the capacity of either country to make determinations and give adequate protection to those who have fled persecution.

Perhaps even more disturbing was Bishop’s attempt to defend Australia’s treatment of children:

“Their children go to school, they have community centres … the standard of accommodation and the standard of support they receive, in many instances, is better than that received by the people of Papua New Guinea.” This is not what has emerged at the Australian Human Rights commission’s hearings into the detention of children, Ms Bishop.

Despite being filmed talking to Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Asia-Europe economic summit in Italy  for example, and despite the publication of a claim that she met him for 25 minutes, there appears no formal outcome. The pair discussed MH17, the dangers posed by ISIL and the upcoming G20 summit in Brisbane, in a 25-minute meeting.

Despite having claimed success over having obtained a legal framework towards Abbott’s much-vaunted holy grail of an Iraqi government indemnity for our commandos in Iraq, they are still awaiting a green light. In the light of current political and military realities in Iraq as detailed recently for Fairfax by Paul McGeough, a signed indemnity looks ever more unlikely.

Is Julie Bishop’s gender also a handicap to high office? The short answer is yes. It is highly unlikely that the conservative, male-dominated hard-right power brokers in her own party would ever move to elevate her current status as token female in cabinet. The same doubts they expressed about Julia Gillard, unmarried and with no children would be voiced. It is further unlikely that her party would see her promotion as one which gave them any kind of electoral advantage, especially given the misogynistic treatment meted out to Julia Gillard from parts of the Australian community, whipped up by shock jocks and others in an appalling campaign of persecution.

In the end, however, it comes down to merit, especially job performance and relevant personal skills and qualities. Julie Bishop’s record as Minister for Foreign Affairs does not suggest anything like the level of performance required to merit the spin which is currently propelling her into the prime ministerial stakes. Her record of achievement in other spheres, moreover, in opposition and in corporate law would suggest that Australians be very cautious, indeed, before championing her as a candidate for PM or rushing to conclude that she has any real qualifications to lead us at the top.

Julie Bishop and the F word, a grave disservice to herself, to women, to all of us.

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Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop delivered a thoroughly mind-numbing, vapid speech to the National Press Club in Canberra yesterday in which she reconfirmed that she prefers neither deep nor original thinking although she is certainly an assured and self- confident speaker who enjoys the limelight even when her memory for face and job recognition let her down badly at one spot. The consensus in today’s media, with its obsessive appetite for style over substance seems to be that it all went swimmingly. Some air heads and politics-wonks are even gushing that she appeared Prime Ministerial. They should all take a Bex and have a good lie down. Let’s not over-gild the lily, especially as we are a nation which has only recently demonstrated that any woman in the PM job, no matter how clever, capable or worthy will be crucified by the misogynists. Yet, to her credit, Bishop certainly proved she could remain blithely upbeat, upright and smiling while continuing undeterred despite some distinctly negative non-verbal feedback from her largely female audience; women she proceeded to patronise and diminish by the bouquet of platitudes, anecdotes and undisguised affection if not reverence for the patriarchal status quo that was the substance of her speech. Equality after all is something we can safely leave to up to powerful men to look after. I am absolutely confident at the right time the Prime Minister will promote other talented women we have in our party. It is held to be good manners to modestly acknowledge your privileged background. Bishop did this quite successfully without going into any real detail. She shared that she knew she had been very lucky. But she tried to pretend that even a life of privilege was in fact pretty ordinary. I acknowledge I have a very privileged upbringing as many women in Australia have. As a few of us have, Julie, you could almost hear her audience thinking. Acknowledging others present, however, proved not so easy. Nevertheless her efforts did add a bit of light and shade to her dull list of things to get through that were her notes. Some of this grated especially her faux sister-hood special hellos and twinkly grins of recognition to individual women she appeared to recognise even if she couldn’t get them on side. Intelligent women, educated women, distinguished women who battle inequality daily without feeling the need to pretend that it doesn’t exist. Women who were likely to be further alienated by her discourse’s end. Bishop’s performance was not unlike that of a plucky beginner unlikely to plunge into the deep end but a swimmer nevertheless and one who is not so risk-averse that she cannot enjoy herself even if her modest skills limit her to the shallow end of her 1950s tepid public swimming pool. If you tuned in hoping for a real contest of minds, however, you would be disappointed. It was not communication but more a sort of shallow interior monologue in which Bishop talked to herself in public, reassuring herself in a Panglossian delusion that we lived in the best of all possible worlds before an audience who knew better but were mostly too polite to tell her. Weary faces, set faces, disbelieving faces, bored faces looked up at Julie Bishop as she downloaded a tedious series of dreary clichés, commonplaces, unexamined assumptions, superficialities and tepid banalities in what you could tell she thought would be the sort of speech that all those women in the media were expecting of her. It was not. Instead she clearly bored most of her audience witless and inflicted upon them the curiously patronising complacency indulged in by privileged winners who conclude that because they have made it there must be nothing wrong with the system. Bishop also disclosed without intending to why she is part of the problem. Her attitudes, her perspective, her language all proceeds from a web of assumptions spun to help maintain the status quo. She appeared unrepentant and unaware of her role as an apologist for patriarchy and privilege. Some of her speech was saccharine. Some of it was sanctimonious. I pay tribute to all the women who have been cabinet ministers before me. It is not an inappropriate rhetorical gesture. But it is not something you do just by standing up in public and uttering thank you. It’s what you do. Many in the room were wondering how Julie Bishop’s deeds came anywhere near paying tribute to other ministers, especially given her reticence to lift a manicured pinky to protect Julia Gillard from the excoriating abuse and invective that characterised the best work of the opposition in its crusade to ditch the witch. Some, no doubt were muttering that it is politicians of her ilk that make the future even harder for the 1% of Australian women who even plan to enter politics. Questions frequently tested the deeper end of the pool. Surely, journalists assumed, lurking somewhere in the depths of a successful woman’s psyche is the motivation to work towards gender equality. Bishop’s words gave no hint of this. She settled instead for a type of girl guide’s promise. “The challenge I have set for myself is to do the best I can for those who will follow me. I feel that responsibility every day.” Doubtless Baroness Margaret Thatcher comforted herself nightly with similar platitudes. On the issue of gender barriers in politics, Bishop made very little sense at all other than appearing to be in deep denial. Or she pretended not to understand the question. Certainly she did not answer it. There were almost audible gasps from feminists attending her show as she neatly side-stepped structural gender inequality . I don’t think there is such a divide [between genders], in cabinet we deal with a whole range of issues and I have an opinion on every single one, likewise the males, of course they have opinions. But we do need to be more representative generally, we need diversity in our Parliament. Sharing her thoughts on the glass ceiling proved to be a continuation of Bishop’s blinkered run along the inside barrier. Here she makes a virtue of her habit of denial. Yet her description of her path to success does nothing to empower others, especially other women. I refuse to acknowledge it. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, I’m not saying that at all. If I want to do something I will work hard and try to do it. If it doesn’t happen I’m not going to blame the fact that I’m a woman. I’m not going to see life through the prism of gender. Please don’t misunderstand my point, I’m not saying there is no glass ceiling but I’m not going to say my career has been stymied because of the glass ceiling. That would be inappropriate for someone in my position. As Minister for Foreign Affairs, Julie Bishop would have ready access to United Nations documents. Perhaps we could direct her towards this UN summary: Women in every part of the world continue to be largely marginalized from the political sphere, often as a result of discriminatory laws, practices, attitudes and gender stereotypes, low levels of education, lack of access to health care and the disproportionate effect of poverty on women.  http://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/leadership-and-political-participation#sthash.WSIliEXn.dpuf From her answers at the Press Club, it is clear that Bishop would tell these women that they must not blame the fact that they are women. The answer, it would seem, is simple. They must work harder. By the end of her speech it was clear that Julie Bishop would see to it personally. Part of this would be achieved by having a public dig at feminism which in the Bishop scheme of things appears to be some optional extra, a type of optional accessory one may get along perfectly well without. It’s just not a term I use. I self-describe in many other ways. It’s not because I have a pathological dislike of the term, I just don’t use it. It’s not part of my lexicon, I don’t think anybody should take offense. I’m a female politician, I’m a female foreign minister. Yeah well? Get over it. There are many of us who can’t get over it Julie Bishop. You are an influential person from a privileged background and you occupy a position of no small social and political responsibility. You have done well and you are proud of it. The cards you were dealt from birth as you admit were stacked in your favour. Yet there is little in your speech to give hope to other women from less privileged backgrounds, the majority of women in the real world in their daily struggle for justice; their struggle for equality. There is little in your words of reassurance for them to take comfort in. There is on the other hand a disturbing complacency, a self-satisfaction and an almost wilful ignorance that will make the road you have travelled so much harder for other women.