“I said to them, how on Earth could it have been that in the period coming up to the 4th of May, you must’ve known about this direction, you were helping draft it, the Parliamentary Counsel knew about it, the attorney knew about it, his staff knew about it. “How on Earth could it have been that the one person who needed to know wasn’t told?”

Former Solicitor General Justin Gleeson

Break out the brandy and cigars. There’ll be chest-beating and drinks all round at the exclusive, all-male Savage Club a refuge where member George Brandis can kick back and forget his responsibility as Attorney-General to uphold anti-discrimination laws. Megalomaniac Brandis, a cane-toad in pin-stripes from the deep North, a legal giant who got his QC only after arriving in Canberra, has got his way at last. Forget the constitution. Forget justice. What matter is that Brandis rules thanks to his cunning plan to remove the Solicitor General, Justin Gleeson, a highly regarded, constitutional expert and independent legal advisor. All that remains, now, is to get a Liberal lickspittle to replace him.

Gleeson’s dismissal has not been achieved directly, of course, the Solicitor-General is a tenured public servant. Or was. Nor has his stitching up been easy. It has taken effort to make it impossible for the Solicitor General to continue to offer independent, expert legal advice that looked to the law rather than flattering the government and its power-mad, accident-prone, incompetent Attorney General. In the end, boys-club Brandis simply over-reached his authority in May. Imperiously, he directed that all requests for Gleeson’s legal expertise to come through his office first — a matter Gleeson was not consulted on beyond the idea being “raised” in a November meeting.

All that remained, then was to pretend Gleeson was consulted and when an inquiry arose Coalition bovver boys, Senators Ian Macdonald and Barry O’Sullivan could take the SG out the back and give him a good working over. They, too, must be so proud of themselves, now. It’s a win for the bullies. The dismissal has been achieved the Brandis way, using the sort of bastardry applied to Gillian Triggs to remove her dissenting, independent self from the head of the Human Rights Commission last year.

Gleeson, like Triggs, is accused of being political. How dare either of them offer criticism or expert, independent advice to a born to rule government’s right to ride roughshod over human rights or the nation’s constitution?

Spin doctors in damage control now have MPs bucketing Justin Gleeson for talking to Mark Dreyfus during an election campaign – as if this is an act of treason or a betrayal of office. Put this behind us and move on is the line heard on ABC Radio from MPs spruiking today’s Coalition talking points – after they trivialise and put the boot in. Nothing to see here. Nobody will believe the Attorney General who overreached himself and misled parliament.

Dreyfus rang Gleeson to ask him if he thought he had been consulted and if he was happy to be sidelined, he explains. Gleeson gives an honest no. For this, Macdonald tells him he ought to enter politics directly. Gleeson says he also gave Malcolm Turnbull legal confidential advice in January but this seems to attract no comment. What is needed now is for the former SG to be demonised for his outrageous political intervention.

Anyone who saw the treatment meted out to Triggs in February 2015 when the President of the Commission was also falsely accused of being politically partisan would recognise the shameless, relentless and misogynistic bullying.

“I thought you might like to hear a man’s voice” boomed Queensland Senator Barry O’Sullivan last year, randomly interrupting the senate estimates hearing for no other purpose than to make a sexist tool of himself. At other times, he and Ian MacDonald barked at women senators. Undismayed by such boorish bully-boy antics – and giving them his tacit approval, Brandis said he had no confidence in Triggs. He wanted rid of any critic of his government’s glorious policy of locking up children indefinitely in offshore hell-holes to punish them for not drowning at sea.

Gleeson also gets the Macdonald – O’Sullivan treatment in a senate committee just over a week ago – a hearing which was delayed as Macdonald sought to have the hearing held in camera – or behind closed doors, aka “out the back”. Scrupulously impartial and fastidious with regard to procedure, Macdonald declares at the outset that the senate inquiry is an “absolute waste of time”.

Despite the hazing, Gleeson demonstrates calmly and capably that Brandis misled the Australian Parliament. Macdonald does his best to treat the SC with utter contempt – as he did when he told Gillian Triggs he had not even bothered to read her magisterial Forgotten Children report. Why would he? He knew it was biased. Way to go Macca. Don’t let the facts get in the way of a reputation-trashing. Macdonald cuts off Gleeson three times and when cautioned by the chair says he always gives witnesses “the respect they deserve”.

Disrespect is modelled by Brandis. Not only has the Solicitor-General’s office been side-lined by Brandis’ naked power grab, he has also had his advice ignored and misrepresented as when Brandis lied to the house that the Solicitor-General had backed the legal land mine that resulted from the Brandis’ decision to rush up a law to appease his then PM, Tony Abbott, another Liberal who likes to play fast and loose with the rule of law, who wanted to score political points by threatening to strip dual nationals of their citizenship.

Brandis’ first attempt was an unworkable mess. It was reviewed by the circus known as The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, which is currently chaired by deadly Dan Tehan who daily, it would seem finds new evidence of fiendish terror plots against us to report. The second draft attracted no fewer than 27 recommendations for change.

As it is the law contains the legal fiction in section 33AA revocation of your citizenship just happens if you do something which might roughly be some sort of breach of the criminal code – unless you happen to be in Australia at the time of your offence to vaguely defined provisions in the criminal code, subject to one exception. Worse, it appears that it could be construed as a punishment and beyond the authority of the executive arm of government. No wonder the AG is a bit sensitive to criticism.

Brandis has acted illegally in demanding that all those who seek the solicitor general’s advice must come via the Attorney-General. In the words of a former solicitor General and Howard legal advisor, Gavan Griffith, the direction is not only unlawful, it would reduce the SG’s independence to that of a dog on a leash. Brandis has also lied about having consulted Gleeson as to his intentions, despite much unedifying quibbling from the Pettifogger General over the definition of consultation, a matter he is prepared to settle, like a schoolboy debater, with a dictionary definition.

In fact he is wrong at law about consultation, just as he over-stepped his authority in demanding control over the solicitor general’s office. There are grounds to accept that the term is used legally to mean something more than just “raising an issue” telling another party what you intend to do – after you have done it.

Brandis has an issue with consultation. As Arts Minister for an Abbott government which did not have an arts policy, much less have much time for such matters, he simply made up his own, not deigning to consult with the arts community before reducing arts grants to create his own award for excellence, which quickly became known as the George Brandis slush fund. His unwillingness to release his electronic diary to corroborate his claim that he met with representative has now cost taxpayers $50, 000 under FOI challenges and appeals.

Brandis’ power grab has been simplified by a media dedicated to preserving us from complexity to a personal spat between the two men, ignoring the constitutional issues involved and reducing the Attorney-General’s high-handed arrogance to a clash of personalities – or even more disingenuously – a fight between two leading lawyers. Gleeson may be a top silk. Brandis is not. A pettifogging legal piss-ant with monumental delusions of grandeur, his officious bungling and over-reach of his authority will continue to create crises for himself and his government. He is almost certain to be censured when the senate committee concludes its inquiry in a few weeks.

In the meantime the saga of Brandis’ war on his Solicitor General reveals a Coalition of petty despotism, convinced of its own infallibility, immune to criticism and contemptuous of due process, happy to misrepresent itself in its determination to impose its will at all costs; its desperate desire to silence its critics whatever it takes.

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

A muffled thumping disturbs the chamber this Thursday as our PM and his predecessor, in turn, throw each other under a bus, to use Omnibus Bill Shorten’s colourful phrase.  Guardian Australia’s Katharine Murphy, who continues to hold a torch for the PM, has never seen anything like it in twenty years of parliamentary reporting. The Coalition is openly at war with itself.

 After a two week niggling campaign, Tony (Gospel Truth) Abbott brands Malcolm Turnbull a liar for suggesting the Abbott regime struck a deal last year with Senator David (happiness is a warm Adler A-110 lever action shot-gun) Leyonhjelm. Turnbull counters that the Prime Minister’s Office knew of the deal. It has documents. Pyne, Dutton and Keenan back their PM. Abbott says he’s been “grievously” misrepresented but it’s his flat denial against the word of two ministers involved plus an entertainingly self-parodying denial from Turnbull camp clown Christopher Pyne.

 The Abbott-Leyonhjelm deal involved lifting import restrictions on the weapon in return for the Senator’s vote on stripping home-grown terrorists of their dual citizenship but at stake now is Turnbull’s authority; his capacity to maintain what remains of his Liberal leadership. Rightist Michael Sukkar, Member for Deakin, supports Abbott, feebly, saying there is “no strong evidence” for a deal. Turnbull nurtures his inner political death-wish by dithering; he allows two days to pass in which it seems as if a deal is still on the table.

 Astonishingly, ABC listeners are immediately treated to National Party’s Troy Grant passionate case that every farmer needs to be able to shoot eight rounds in eight seconds or be overrun by feral pigs. An Adler 110 lever-action rapid fire shotgun is vital to the survival of the entire NSW rural sector if not the national economy. To dare suggest that shotgun might fall into the wrong hands is to cast a hurtful slur upon responsible gun-owners everywhere despite the fact that the  Adler is precisely the sort of weapon most commonly stolen according to Gun Control Australia.

 Deadly David Leyonhjelm, whose 2014 maiden speech was peppered with references to philosophers such as John Locke, John Stuart Mill and David Hume who helped convince him that no government – indeed, no-one tells him what to do (although he does seem to expect others to fall in line with his views) is a gun nut. A down-under NRA Charlton Heston, to quote Mike Seccombe, Leyonhjelm is full of dangerous nonsense about our right to bear arms and the right of the citizenry to rise up against “over-governing, over-taxing and over-riding ways”.

 Leyonhjelm moonlights for the NRA in a video released last year slamming Australia as a “nation of victims”. His view is we’d be safer if we were all armed. “We love the NRA here in Australia amongst us gun owners and in fact we rely on you guys to also help us hold the line in Australia,” he riffs in the clip. In his libertarian view, it is the government which has to make a case for banning rapid-fire weapons – not the farmer or sporting shooter who wants to buy one.

 Bikies have the same right. At a rally outside Queensland’s Parliament in late 2013, the Senator decried new laws potentially denying gun licences to affiliates of outlaw motorcycle gangs.

 The 2015 deal traded guns for votes, Labor helpfully points out, attacking Abbott’s honesty and exploding the Member for Warringah’s pose of being tough on gun control, which, along with his tough on borders posturing, helped the former PM convince his right wing he could make Australia safe again – or as he likes to put it – protect our national security. Stopping the guns, like stopping the boats, or his puerile threat to shirt-front Putin, however, is pure Abbottry, that specious, empty rhetoric he substitutes for real communication or conviction.

 Abbott has no right to claim a legacy of public safety. He made Australia less safe by re-entering conflicts in Iraq and Syria, in a calculated political strategy that had nothing to do with Australia’s national security that would further radicalise some within Australia’s Muslim minority and increase the domestic terror threat. “They are coming after us” he said of ISIS inflaming paranoia increasing anxiety and adding his own note of hysteria to public alarm.

 Abbott indulged in dangerous and divisive dog whistling about terrorists on boats.  While he sloganeered on protecting our freedom, he restricted our civil liberties and shackled our watchdogs with laws which retain people’s metadata for two years and laws which could make it offence for journalists to report on spying. And he was useless in the Lindt café crisis in December 2014; too busy to speak to Man Haron Monis as the Inquest heard this April.

 What is at stake, Bernard Keane points out is Abbott’s ego. The facts don’t fit his macho image. “It doesn’t fit the hard man image, the image of the prime minister who trashed civil rights and threw money at security agencies to fight terrorism, the man who attacked Muslims for failing to talk about the peaceful nature of Islam, to be seen as having connived at a deal to allow high-capacity shotguns into the country.”

 Is Abbott lying about the Adler? We’d be foolish to expect truth. In 2010, Abbott explained that unless you had it in writing, you’d be unwise to believe him. As it turns out, Abbott is contradicted by the evidence: an email from his office, sent 15 August 2015, published by Paul Bongiorno in this week’s The Saturday Paper supports Turnbull and Leyonhjelm’s version of events.

 “We confirm that ministers Dutton [Immigration] and Keenan [Justice] have agreed that the government will amend the Customs (Prohibited Imports) Regulations 1956 to insert a sunset clause of 12 months into the recently amended provisions which ban the importation of lever action shotguns with a magazine capacity of more than five rounds.”

 Leyonhjelm, nevertheless, carried out his side of the deal which was to “vote against the Labor amendments to the Migration Amendment (Strengthening Biometrics Integrity) Bill”. It was a straightforward trade of a gun for a vote. Now, the former Liberal, who resigned from the party in 1998, in protest over John Howard’s gun control laws, is threatening to pull the pin on his support for the union-bashing ABCC legislation despite his reservation that the bill infringes civil liberties.

 The PM’s public slap-down of his predecessor may cost Turnbull his ABCC legislation. Even those few Australians yet unpersuaded by the patronising arrogance of a Coalition who reign over us by birthright and by force and such other means as are from time to time necessary must applaud the Turnbull government’s wondrous capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

 Not that applause is necessary. Those who dissent from its plans are dismissed as too stupid to know what’s good for them such as the Coalition’s dream of a deregulated, causualised, de-unionised part-time workplace, already on its way, glimpsed, for example, when backpackers and their tax appear up for discussion in another fiasco or when Seven-Eleven is revealed by Fair Work Australia to have worked its employees twice as long for half the going pay rate.

 Fair Work Australia’s fresh investigation 27 August follows an ABC and Fairfax lead but a frenzy of union-bashing erupts this week to assist with the passage of the ABCC in another orchestrated attack on organised labour and the rights of Australians to a fair wage and decent conditions. Although barely 15 per cent of workers are union members, the ILO reported in October last year, 60 per cent of Australian workers are employed under conditions that were collectively bargained for, far above the rate of many countries with higher union densities.

 The week begins so promisingly too. A faction-riven Coalition rabble is somehow marshalled by comical cat-herder Christopher Pyne. The government lines up the crooked CFMEU and nasty Bill Shorten in its sights. It guillotines debate to get its ABCC bill rail-roaded through the lower house. Labor is allowed to speak once. You don’t need democratic debate when you have an election mandate. Pyne gags that everyone’s views have been heard before in the two previous failures to pass the legislation, despite the presence of new MPs who have never spoken on it. Malcolm Turnbull accuses Bill Shorten of being in debt to the CFMEU and shows a video.  

But it all goes bad by Wednesday and ends in catastrophe with the Prime Minister shooting himself in the foot, destroying any vestige of doubt as to his political ineptitude by helping get Tony Abbott back on to the ABC’s 7:30 Report (bumping unhappy deputy Liberal leader, Julie Bishop) on Wednesday night. Tony clearly believes he is once again a contender for the top job even if he forgets to say he stopped the boats.

 The week should have featured a virtuoso performance by immigration intellectual Peter Dutton doing a number on the ABC; rebutting the Four Corners expose of cruelty and child abuse on Nauru by shooting the messenger: calling the whole programme an orchestrated litany of lies and accusing the ABC of being “on a crusade against government policy”.

Why? Dutton’s raving: “because they hate the fact that we’ve stopped boats and they believe we should have open borders and they’ve turned themselves into political operatives,” – adding for good measure, in some alarming former drug squad code all his own, “drinking the Kool-Aid”.

 Who knows what Dutton’s been drinking but Thursday, The Border Enforcer is inspired to a piece of performance art which links bikies, The CFMEU, Bill Shorten and Labor with the high price of apartments and the fact that decent young Australians can’t afford to buy a home.

 Meanwhile, in a senate committee, veteran plot-spotter Eric Abetz tells Michelle Guthrie she’s been captured by the leftist conspiracy which runs Radio National and infects the rest of the ABC. Tenderfoot Liberal Senator Jane Hume dismisses the Four Corners Report as selective. Where are the refugees who were happy with their lives on Nauru? She wonders if “all we heard on this program were the representatives of Save the Children and Amnesty (International) and the stories they wanted to tell, and selected stories from the young people on Nauru?”

Eric Abetz wonders if ABC reporters are not siding with activitsts.

 Way to go Senators. Show us all the fun side of indefinite open detention, ABC, on 21 square kilometres of abandoned guano mines, a ravaged moonscape of an island the size of an international airport. Report on the joys of living with the daily fear of assault in a failed state run by a corrupt oligarchy with a corrupt police force, where 90% of the population of 9,000 are jobless and suffer extreme levels of diabetes, heart disease and obesity.

 Have the senators read The Moss Review (2015), the Senate Select Committee Inquiry into the Nauru Detention Centre (2015) or the Report by Australian Women in Support of Women on Nauru (2016)? These reports document endemic gender-based violence systematic abuse carried out on Nauru against asylum seekers and refugees, abuse condoned by the Nauruan and Australian governments. Rape, assaults and indecent assaults are an inescapable part of life on Nauru and the government knows it.    

 Central to Dutton’s regime is the precept that refugees are to be punished for not drowning by being locked up in a hell-hole on Manus or Nauru, as Julian Burnside notes. The UN has recently confirmed that Nauru is one of the world’s worst in a report presented by doctors and officials from the United Nations’ refugee agency, to senior immigration department staff 11 October.

 Dutton and his 82 communications staff provide no response to the UN’s investigation. He has successfully prevented or discouraged anyone but The Saturday Paper from reporting even on the leaked report. Instead he deploys the Coalition’s favourite ploy: attack the messenger, as it did when in August The Guardian leaked case notes of 2100 actual investigations.

 In a masterpiece of spin, the Minister then accused The ABC and Guardian Australia of ‘trivialising’ grave issues ‘by trying to promote the 2,100 reports as somehow all being serious when they’re not.’ Dutton also falsely accused Save The Children of leaking the reports. It’s a quality response as might be expected from a Minister with 82 communications staff, 22 of whom are dedicated to its “24/7 media operations”, including social media.

 Immigration also had eight non-permanent communications staff earlier in the year. It paid Talkforce Media more than $225,000 for training after its Operation Fortitude fiasco in Melbourne last August – on top of $1 million on external media monitoring staff and another $7 million on public relations and internal communications staff.

 Will the PM survive his showdown with Tony Abbott? Will the party now break down into two armed camps, the right wing troglodytes affiliated with Abbott versus the Trotskyites who lean towards Malcolm Turnbull, a PM in the words of Kate McGregor on The Drum recently more of a progressive Labor leader than a conservative? Will Leyonhjelm be wooed by another deal?

 What is certain is that Fizza Turnbull will continue to face challenges to his authority as his incapacity to lead, his instinct for poor judgement, his capacity to turn crisis into catastrophe is daily revealed to be a liability to the interests of his party’s big business backers; an impediment to the Neocon agenda of the IPA and other powerful lobby groups. Julie Bishop is staying out of things, appearing on an ABC story about sportswomen as befits her feminist inclinations – you can bet she won’t be backing equal pay -and keeping herself nice for when Turnbull needs to be knifed.

 Meanwhile the ABC will continue to be derided and defunded and accused of bias whenever it dare report the truth instead of doing its job as the government’s cheer squad. Whether the over-hyped ABCC bill passes or not, the government will not ease up on its war on workers while the gulags on Nauru and Manus will not go away, however much the government invests in their denial. Like the rotting prison hulks of yesteryear they are a reminder of how badly a nation can go wrong when it prefers the politics of cheap populist hysteria over humanity; tries to hide from its own conscience; its moral responsibility.

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Creepy Clown hysteria sweeps the nation, this week. Almost trumping The Donald, CC’s upstage AFL trades and eclipse politics. Is it a cult? Is it a craze? No-one thinks it will end well. Police beg copy-cats to end “this dangerous and stupid trend.”  While reported sightings may distract us from assessing clown-prince Turnbull’s government’s performance, however, the Creepy Clowns illuminate far more than they obscure.

Take LNP Senator Ian MacDonald for example. He’s a standout as Pozzo, Samuel Becket’s bullying clown modelled on the Keystone Cops character, in the Senate Inquiry side-show into megalomaniac George Brandis’ misleading of parliament over his subjugation of the solicitor-general in his government’s push to politicise our public service. And the Great Grimaldi, himself, would be delighted to own as his protégé the hapless, petulant, incompetent Mal Turnbull pathetically playing someone he can never be: anyone but himself – let alone another clown.

Turnbull’s first hundred days are a bungling reprise of the shtick of Coalition “Auguste” clown, Tony Abbott: union-bashing, poor-trashing, pro-coal, anti-welfare, education and environment in a government paralysed by division, its PM led “like a dog on a lead” by the right.  Playing politics on marriage equality, its plebiscite hoax which would promote homophobic attacks while postponing legalisation is finally exploded this week in a type of anniversary gift, by Labor, The Greens, three Xenophons and Derryn Hinch. Turnbull’s regime sinks to Abbott-era depths in NewsPolls. Luckily, Eric Abetz has an innovative solution.

Come out of the closet, urges perennial unicorn chaser the agile Abetz, who blames media bias for not celebrating or honouring people who “come out” and switch from a homosexual to a heterosexual lifestyle. Abetz, one of four remaining Tasmanian Liberal Senators fighting for attention in Federal Parliament, is banking on a grateful media, free at last to give heterosexual Australians who have come out straight the attention they merit.

Abetz is also keen to share with reporters his completely rational, objective and measured conspiracy theory that there has been a campaign under way since the 1970s to deconstruct marriage and rob it of its meaning. He is there to  launch a book with the most innocuous title Stealing from the Child: The Injustice of “Marriage Equality” by Australian Marriage Forum president David van Gend, a book that promises to lay bare the “breathtakingly subversive redefinition of marriage” and expose the “genderless agenda” that comes with genderless “marriage”.

“His call to celebrate people turning from gay to straight is just the latest line of attack against gays in long political career that bears all the hallmarks of a religiously-fuelled, personal moral crusade,” writes James Norman in the SMH. Yet overall the media has framed its reporting of the plebiscite along government lines. It is Labor which is said to have “scuttled the coalition’s plan” for a plebiscite

Reading Abetz ‘s views, is to be confronted with direct evidence which contradicts his PM’s comments in parliament this week that waive aside the reality of entrenched and active bigotry which is well-funded and politically powerful, with an airy “trust” in the Australian people to be nice or the specious argument that it is “only a minority” which is likely to suffer homophobic abuse.

Whatever his personal beliefs, Turnbull himself is beholden to a powerful and intolerant minority whose prejudicial influence upon a community he says he supports he cannot blithely wish away any more than he can will himself into any real control over the disparate, divisive and defiant elements that have ruined his own authority and legitimacy.

A hundred days in office, certainly, have not seen the Coalition develop its parliamentary skill. “There has never been a more chaotic government, there has never been a more chaotic parliament and there has never been a leader of the house that has had to endure humiliation from his colleagues on such a regular basis,” Manager of Opposition Business Tony Burke tells Parliament after Financial Services Minister Kelly O’Dwyer votes against her own government, endorsing a bill amended by Labor, which calls upon the Government to close tax loop-holes and increase transparency.

Labor’s Jim Chalmers attacks O’Dwyer’s history of lapses: “Given the Minister for Revenue can’t answer basic questions about her legislation, contradicts the Prime Minister on house prices and negative gearing and was the original architect of the Census disaster, can the Minister please a very interested House about what other spectacular policy achievements lie ahead, or is this the high point of your brilliant career?” he says. O’Dwyer can only head upward from here.

Not all is flagging; Petti-fogger General Brandis rogers the Solicitor-General while Turnbull gets into bed with One Nation. Pauline Hanson is helped on to the  Joint Standing Committee on the National Broadband Network which exists in order to “inquire into and report on the rollout of the national broadband network”. Numbers have been boosted from 7 to 17 members this year but doubtless it will be vital to have Pauline and her vast technical expertise on board.

These are top-quality performances. Either professional clown is up to Trump or any other international pick-up artist in sophisticated seduction or the vital matter of consent.

But look over there! Crippled by crushing welfare debt? Embarrassed by your nation’s quick whip round to give big business a bit of a handout? Fear no more. Worry yourselves sick, instead, over cyber-attacks. The nation is treated to a frenetic tap dance from Dan – “close the doors they’re coming in the (MS) Windows ™- Tehan.” The Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Cyber Security,  executes a frenzied buck and wing in tribute to his government’s need to spy on us, keep our data and lie about it, hyping “cyber” terror, xenophobia and paranoia in this week’s coalition circus Oz.

Deadpan Dan, enhances his tap-dance by unfurling something called The 2016 Threat Report, the work of professional fear-mongers, The Australian Cybersecurity centre and revealing chilling news: the intelligence service of an unnamed country hacked into our Bureau of Meteorology last year. No! Next we know, our weather will be on Wiki-Leaks.

But wait; there’s more. Tweaking things a little, Dan says the ACC warns public servants of cyber-devastation in three years – (He must mean government departments still in operation after Coalition savings and efficiency dividends.) – 

The report, however, clearly  states: “…it is unlikely terrorists will be able to compromise a secure network and generate a significant disruptive or destructive effect for at least the next two to three years”.

It don’t mean a thing if it aint got that spin. Desperate Dan milks further applause with a coy revelation. Reassuring us all that he will not sit idly by while we become victims of international cyber-crime, he reveals that Australia has (gasp!) cyber offensive capacity. Pressed for details of this creepy secret weapon, Dan tells Kim Landers on ABC Radio he can’t say because it wouldn’t be secret. Be alert, not informed. Mum’s the word. He also refuses to name any names about our cyber attackers although his vacuous drivel next day in party propaganda organ The Australian calls them ISIS.

“When it comes to, when it comes to intelligence matters there’s a long history of us not publicly broadcasting what we’re doing in this area,” says the little Aussie bottler. Indeed. Add that history to Border Security’s selective catatonia, targeting of whistle-blowers or mad King George Brandis’ two year, $50,000 tantrum over refusing Labor his diary least it confirm he cut arts funding without consultation – a word very much in the air Friday in a senate committee set up to help O’Sullivan and MacDonald bully Justin Gleeson the Solicitor General. The duo give him the Gillian Triggs treatment for daring to challenge King George’s megalomania or his lie to parliament that Gleeson was happy to be shafted.

Mad King George claims, like a schoolboy debater, that the whole sorry business is a matter of definition. He waves his dictionary, a pocket Napoleon brandishing his pocket Oxford. He misses the mark. The net effect is more of a sulky Humpty Dumpty. He’s decreed that all who seek the Solicitor General’s advice must have the Attorney General’s permission first and he’s told Gleeson afterwards, a process he claims is consultation.

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

By Friday, the latest chapter in megalomaniacal George Brandis’ self-aggrandisement, his misleading of parliament, his attempt to sideline the Solicitor General in a radical and unprecedented diminution of the second law officer’s authority had been trivialised into a “breakdown.” It is as if the two are naughty boys who ought to have their heads knocked together – a view favoured in the ABC’s framing of the conflict in its news bulletins and on The Drum which gets its name from the wrong part of a washing machine. It’s the filter that collects all the fluff and lint.

 Barry O’Sullivan and Ian McDonald abuse Solicitor General Justin Gleeson SC because he took a phone call from Mark Dreyfus during the election, surely a communication entirely legal and within his role. Was he consulted about being demoted to Brandis’ subordinate? Was he happy about it? No and no. Expect Brandis high-handed abrogation of power to be overruled by the senate in due course. The Attorney General’s original instructions tabled in the senate are  a “disallowable instrument” and can be overturned by a Senate vote.

Until then, Gleeson will disregard what he believes is an unlawful instruction. Expect the framing to continue, however. The media prefers us to see a brawl, a face-off, a feud, a tiff that distorts and distracts from Brandis’ naked power grab.

A Newspoll published Monday shows the Coalition once again trailing Labor 52-48 two party preferred as Turnbull’s lame duck government clocks up an underwhelming one hundred days in office.  Its vaunted omnibus bill merely  enables it to pass savings slated in Abbott’s first dud budget but it has achieved some dangerous union-bashing as the senate passes its amendment to the Fair Work Act to ban the inclusion of certain “objectionable terms” in enterprise agreements covering workers employed by a “designated emergency management body” (such as the CFA). Clauses requiring management to consult with the relevant union are considered “objectionable”.

In November last year, CFA management was rebuked by a senate committee for refusing to supply vital information into the operation of its training college at Fiskville, where trainees were sent after the site was found to be contaminated with carcinogenic chemicals.  Fiskville was finally shut in 2015 after a cancer cluster was discovered among those who lived and worked there since the 1970s.

A Victorian government inquiry has found that “The CFA withheld test documents that confirmed the site was unsafe, yet insisted publicly that everything was OK” according to United Firefighters Union head Mick Tisbury and has criticised WorkSafe and the Environmental Protection Authority for their poor oversight of Fiskville. Yet, workers, paid and unpaid will continue to be at risk as a result of a massive union-bashing campaign driven by Volunteer Fire Brigades Victoria (VFBV), the Murdoch press and the Liberal Party. The issue has been successfully framed in the media as one of noble volunteers being at risk of thuggish union control. Our lawmakers even seem to have heeded the rhetoric.

One Nation’s vote was vital in getting the CFA Volunteers Bill through the senate Tuesday even if they don’t seem to have a clue what it’s about. Party empiricist, Malcolm Roberts calls the matter an issue of freedom versus control:  “The control mechanism proposed is an EA [enterprise agreement] that gives union bosses the right to dictate the daily operations of the community-based rural fire brigades,” he says; talking through his tin-foil hat.

Doug Cameron points out it’s the opposite: “Career fire-fighters who place their lives in danger to protect the community are entitled to documented, enforceable health and safety conditions in their enterprise agreements,” Senator Cameron told the chamber. “The volunteer fire-fighters union, basically, want power and control. There is no doubt about that.”

Nor is there any doubt about Donald Trump. Australia heaves a sigh of relief this week as Tony Abbott rates Donald Trump’s policies as “reasonable enough,” while he concedes that the Republican candidate’s views on women are “gross.” Abbott cherry picks for praise Trump’s “cutting tax” and “boosting foreign policy”, neither of which are more than banner headlines in The Donald’s policy-free platform.

Elder statesman Abbott, Bronwyn Bishop and John Howard’s political love-child and suppository of all knowledge, icon of the Liberal Party’s hard-right rump, former PM and Minister for Women, is keen to open another split between himself and Turnbull by defending Trump against the unfair bad press the Republican presidential candidate has been receiving lately largely over his pickup artist tips and lies spread by women claiming he abused them.

Allegations of misconduct against Trump are false, Campaign spokesperson Hope Hicks explains. They are all part of a “political attack designed to tear down Mr. Trump,” and nothing to do with his policies which include building a wall across the United States to keep would-be immigrants back where they belong, an eerie echo of Abbott’s own Sovereign Borders fantasy and with as much feasibility.

While Abbott may be merely attempting to dog-whistle conservatives and to provoke Turnbull, he is displaying a Trumpish lack of judgement in parading his own glass house of boorish ignorance, social incompetence and political ineptitude. Rat cunning is no substitute; nor will it fund a comeback. Turnbull loses the judgement challenge, however, responding by asking if Abbott has read Trump’s views against Free Trade. Abbott by then doesn’t need to.

Keen to make rating The Donald a proxy war between right and moderate Liberals, NSW’s Parliament’s Upper House passes a motion which censures Trump for being a revolting slug.

Doing its bit for the Turnbull government’s desire to re-heat Abbott’s terror hysteria to distract, divert and divide us, home-grown terrorists are being bred in Goulburn’s Supermax prison, “Australia’s toughest jail,” investigative journalist Chris Masters sensationally reports on Four Corners. Two sixteen year olds, it reports later are arrested for planning a terrorist attack.  Not content with promoting fear of renewable energy, the national broadcaster is further able to boost its usefulness to government by adding xenophobia and Islamophobia as it claims our best prisons are breeding “the worst kind of terrorist”. Be alert and alarmed.

Ignorance, superstition and partisan political spin appear increasingly part of the mix as our ABC re-interprets its “innovative and comprehensive services” to include many feel-good stories during the week about how coal-mining really has a future in the country now that the coal price is up. Interviews with community business people celebrating news that the Collinsville mine in Queensland’s Bowen Basin help put the case that coal-mining is really about local jobs.

Similarly, Resources Minister Matt Canavan is heard deploring BHP’s decision to pull the pin on oil drilling in the Great Australian Bight muttering about the ugly edge of green activism. Green activists, it seems, have been “swilling champagne” while people lost their jobs.

The ABC’s coverage of the SA blackout which scapegoated renewable energy reliance as the cause is a good example of how a dominant frame, once established, can exert a long-lasting influence over media coverage of a particular event, writes Ben Eltham in New Matilda. So, too with the simplistic framing of the week’s reports on coal into a choice between coal-mining or jobs.

Has it really taken only ten months for the Turnbull government to morph completely into the Abbott government on the environment and on energy? Are we really prepared to abandon everything we have gained in environmental education and awareness, everything we have learned about fossil fuels and climate change or the effects of mining on the environment, everything we have learned to accept as our international responsibility to curb carbon emissions that we can allow our state broadcaster to ally itself to a political party which is captive to the resource industry and oblivious to any real concern about the nation’s future. 

 

 

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News emerges this week of another Coalition cover-up as a UN investigative report is leaked which exposes conditions on Manus and Nauru. Not only are asylum-seekers found to be in poor physical health, they also suffer extraordinary rates of mental disorder. The government has known this unofficially for months but has done nothing.

The United Nations refugee agency, UHCR will meet Immigration officials 11 October, to share the findings of its April and May investigations into the physical and mental suffering of those whom Australia has expediently locked up forever and forgotten on Manus and Nauru Islands. Informal briefings, provided months ago, were pointedly ignored by a government that, like its predecessor, “will not be lectured” by the UN. 

“Eighty-eight per cent of asylum-seekers and refugees assessed were suffering from a depressive or anxiety disorder and/or post-traumatic stress disorder,” the draft report says. “These are extremely high rates, among the highest recorded of any population in the world, but a predictable outcome of protracted detention.” 

Putting the lie to myths of luxury nurtured by Immigration Department propaganda provided for Peter Dutton, it is revealed this week, by a spin army at a cost to tax-payers of $8 million, inspectors found unusable toilets, broken washing machines and dilapidated gym equipment. Dwellings allocate each detainee 1.6 square metres, half the minimum international standard for prisons. Unlike Australian prisons, Wilson staff routinely dismiss as unsubstantiated allegations of sexual assault. The report recommends Australia accept all refugees or find a suitable third country.

Should these findings prove too confronting, the government has thoughtfully provided us a full card of diversions including a bankers’ circus, a renewed war on renewables, an innovative front in its war on government spending, a data-driven war on the poor, while The Budgie Nine provide a class act and The Australian breathlessly reports Saturday that up to 22 Syrian refugees set to come to Australia may have links with terror. Tony Abbott, meanwhile, touring the Old Dart in his own take on Waiting for Godot, vows “I will return” in a travelling side-show psycho-drama all his own. 

Also featuring are some quality fringe productions, such as Brandis Pettifogger-General and The Budget Repair Crisis. Rubbery figure Federal Treasurer Scott, “Black Hole”, Morrison and self-parodying Finance Minister Mathias Cormann, lampoon “open and transparent” government in an hilarious satirical sketch, part of the long running Budget Repair Series in which a fictitious crisis is repaired by cutting taxes to companies and the rich while slashing welfare and government spending, increasing poverty and inequality and tearing up the fabric of an open and civil society, while Labor is blamed for everything that can’t be pinned on” external economic headwinds”. 

Simon Birmingham, another class act, lampoons some flaky TAFE courses. He is helpfully exposing dreadful rorts by private tertiary education providers to divert us from the fact that his government is cutting $3.2 billion from tertiary funding and imposing restrictions which will severely limit access to technical education. Dubbed “a total overhaul”, The Birmingham Solution includes changes for the HECS scheme to get students to pay back loans sooner and a means to keep may Australians out of tertiary education forever.

But the bean-counting black hole spotters who pretend to run the economy take the cake. Entitled “taking out the garbage” the ScoMo-Cormann Grand Final routine sees the comedy duo secretly bury the Coalition’s final 2015 budget outcome, near its NBN, its tax reform fiasco and Abbott’s promised surplus in the first year of government. Unconfirmed sources also report discovering a freshly prepared plot nearby bearing a sign: The Turnbull Experiment.

No press conference is held; not a jock shocked; not a word is heard from a treasurer who can talk the hind legs off a deaf donkey.  History is made. Coalition openness and transparency 2016-style is a post on a Treasury website on a Friday of a Grand Final holiday, confirming that the government’s unchecked spending has doubled its budget deficit in three years. For years Liberals howled about Labor’s debt and deficit disaster. Now they are shamed into silence.

 The following Monday, on ABC 7:30, Leigh Sales shirt-fronts Cormann over the Coalition’s reckless over-spending.

“When you first came to power you predicted that the 2015/16 deficit would be $17.1 billion. What you posted on Friday showed that actually in reality what it’s turned out to be is $39.6 billion,” Sales begins, icily, turning Stormin’ Cormann to boudin water; swiftly tipping his liquidity into the dark abyss between Liberal rhetoric and reality. Fall-guy Cormann, to his credit, turns in a performance worthy of Peter Sellers’ Inspector Jacques Clouseau, another archetypal buffoon whose paté-thick accent and surreal logic could fox any questioner. Not that he’s trying to be funny. As Clouseau, himself, once observed. “There is a time to laugh and a time not to laugh, and this is not one of them. “

The Finance Minister’s answer to how his government could more than double the deficit? Cormann’s evasion is fluent gobbledegook. “We have several budget updates since the one that you mentioned and we have explained in some detail how, for example, external global economic headwinds and the impact on global prices or key economic exports and the like impacted on our revenue collections in particular.” Bravo! Eat your heart out, Donald Trump.

The economic headwinds are a carefully nurtured fiction like the crippling cost of health or how education must be flushed of corruption or how our unsustainable welfare spending will send us bust. Similarly unreliable renewable energy, we are told, threatens to destroy the national grid and lead to a massive increase in power bills. These myths help justify or disguise the transfer of costs from government to an increasingly impoverished public, a process of redistribution of wealth and power upwards that, sadly, began under the Hawke and Keating governments.

 Sales does not ask Cormann how tax cuts for business and for wealthier Australians will help. Tax evasion by multinational companies doing business in Australia has clearly nothing to do with the budget deficit.

Black Hole Morrison is obviously not going to appear. He’s got real blokes’ stuff to do; talking footy on commercial media. And Cabinet doesn’t just leak by itself. As for 7:30’s side of the sideshow, no-one on the show will nail Nigel (Sgt. Schulz) Scullion on news of several government briefings surfacing this week which prove he lied when he knew zip, nada, nothing of Don Dale. The Nationals’ Nigel Scullion is another MP, who, like the Treasurer, is in cabinet only to make up the numbers. And after Chris Uhlmann’s scapegoating renewables for causing disaster in SA there are simply no questions left and no-one to ask them as to why the ABC led the government jihad on clean energy.

Thank God, we have profiteering banks to keep us safe and a government which has the nous to get tough on turbines.

But look over there! A massive $4.8 trillion welfare burden is set to destroy us all in seventy years.

 Eight out of ten Australians go to work so they can fund the nation’s welfare bill, The Daily Telegraph lied to readers last November as part of its brief as the propaganda arm of Tory government in Australia. The Tele trusts its readers will be too shocked to notice it’s nonsense: for starters, only half of government comes from income tax anyway. War-lord Christian Porter plucks an even scarier figure out of a Pricewaterhousecoopers report, hoping no-one can calculate that $4.8 billion is a drop in the bucket of the $360 trillion estimated to be government revenue over the same period. 

Facts don’t matter. That his government has been spending like a drunken sailor does not stop Porter, on Q&A Monday from his war on the poor and the elderly. They are ruining us, he says, with their wilful, expensive dependency. Eva Cox points out that his scary figure which includes child care is further boosted by counting in the elderly and the age pension.” Since 70% approximately of the population ends up on the aged pension, it means it looks much bigger and much worse than it actually is.” An expert and a woman over a certain age, Cox is dismissed, derided and ignored.

Porter’s expensive new data-sets and algorithms, “as used by insurance companies”, – no less –  will get bludgers off welfare and into non-existent jobs, but leave untouched tax cuts for the rich, superannuation breaks, negative gearing among other all middle-class handouts. It helps the government pretend that it is doing something new, when, in fact, research on welfare goes back to Ronald Henderson’s report in 1973. Henderson gave us the poverty line, research which is sufficient for the Australia Institute to calculate that there is now an unprecedented gap between the poverty line and what an unemployed family receives.

“A single adult is $189.71 below the poverty line,” Senior Research Fellow at The Australia Institute, David Richardson reports and a married couple with two children is $210.96 below in just two of what are welfare’s truly shocking figures. Porter’s reforms mean reducing even further our cruelly inadequate, demeaning and begrudging support. War on the poor, nevertheless, helps the Coalition distract us from the fact that it is cutting the family allowance amidst other ideologically driven government spending cuts. Turnbull must keep sweet with his hard right even if it means turning himself inside out as he does with lunatic logic over renewable energy this week.

SA’s power crisis proves we need more government-subsidised coal-fired power plants to secure our energy from natural disasters caused by global warming caused by carbon emissions caused by burning coal to make electricity –  not that a Coalition, whose MPs still mostly believe that climate change is crap – will ever admit to the connection. Renewables are to blame.

 Our ever-vigilant, agile, innovative, protective but fetchingly slender, federal government has re-invented “energy security” to keep us safe from “aggressive renewable targets” and other evils which threaten to destroy our nation’s way of life. Green energy undermines our core beliefs and values and our massive subsidies to miners, coal-burning electricity generators and other multinational corporations out to do us over and destroy the planet.

Energy security, (think Peter Dutton with a three-pin plug and an endless extension lead), will protect us from natural catastrophe and bodgy base-loads caused by fickle wind and solar power which everybody knows by now caused a massive blackout in South Australia when freak storms –  nothing to do with climate change, knocked over 23 pylons.

Everybody including Greg Hunt gets into the coal lobby sponsored act. Their performance has nothing to do with upstaging Tony Abbott’s Quadrant revival tour of the old country in which he’s clearly campaigning against Turnbull. Abbott has no show but then, neither did Turnbull until opinion polls reached Turnbull’s current record low. How long will it be this time before the sinking ship deserts the rat?

Tasmanians thrill to “interconnectors” a country and western number by Wichita lineman Greg Hunt who takes Monday morning off to jam with the big boys in the band in a song about how baseload supply won’t ever let you down. 

“This means that the states will have to consider new or upgraded interconnectors between Tasmania and the mainland, and South Australia and the eastern states,” he says contradicting The Australian Energy Market Operator which identifies South Australia’s extreme weather last week as the prime cause of “multiple transmission system faults.”

Hunt is on song with his Australia to continue to have reliable baseload power supply, for the states to engage in better planning of renewables expansion and for a more integrated system of providing consumer and investment security. Mr Coal, Environment and Energy Minister Josh Freydenberg, holds a make-believe conference of state energy ministers which he spins into a big win for energy security. It’s a first step, surely, towards getting back into coal and gas fired generation as states are pressured to revise their renewable targets downwards.

Seldom has an Australian government been so obsessed with evasion, under-handedness; seldom such meanness of spirit and deceit. Never has the nation’s expectations of fair dealing and decency been met with such contempt.

Luckily another outrage diverts our attention. Scions of the nation’s ruling class, the Budgie Nine, at a loose end in KL, set out to boost Australia’s international dick-head standing, by mooning 29 million Malaysians and one or two international viewers of Formula 1 on TV.  At least the boys have the foresight to plan their wardrobe; each silly young thing wears what appear to be a Cranston class set of matching scanties, sportively printed in motifs from their hosts’ national flag.

Whatever were they thinking? Did someone put them up to it? Did anyone think they would not get away with it?

 Boys will be boys. The Daily Telegraph loves the thirty-something larrikins.  The Australian salutes their heroics.  The media is seized by a frenzy of fawning indulgence that is typically reserved for male footballers, cricketers and other sporting heroes whose misbehaviour we licence as diminished responsibility; they are just being one of the boys.

The Budgie Nine’s antics upstage our banking bosses who bare their bums at the government in Canberra this week. How dare the government even to pretend to hold a fake inquiry into how they rig the whole system and destroy thousands of ordinary decent Australians’ lives?  The four fat cats waddle down to Canberra to put on such a floorshow of sincere contrition it invokes Al Capone’s undying regret that he didn’t always manage to remember to pay his taxes. 

Instead of a banking industry, as it is fondly termed, we have an oligopoly which functions as a cartel to enable our big four banks to achieve the highest profits in the OECD.  State-sponsored – or at least condoned – collusion is their business model. God preserve them from competition. It might push down costs to clients.

Like the Budgie Nine, the big four bankers, too, are rich and powerful and male enough to know they can get away with saying and doing just about anything. Like Pyne’s advisor, (Dak-less) Jack,  Walker, caught with his pants down, they’ve got mates in high places. Naturally they act as if they own the show: the rest of us are paying for their entertainment.

To Ian Narev CEO of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia goes a Wronski award for the biggest whopper of the week. Narev – and his henchmen reckon profiteering makes our banking system strong. Amazingly, he’s allowed to get away with the lie that obscene profits and even worse executive salaries are justified because they make our banking system strong. Wrong! The strength of our banks is where they invest and how they invest and how much confidence we have in them.

Had it not been for the Rudd government protecting their Triple A rating during the GFC, our big four might be dancing to a different tune. As it is they have been more profitable than banks overseas because, largely our banks heavily rely on domestic loans, particularly the low risk household sector. As household indebtedness rises, it may be problematic to have so many eggs in one basket.

As the IMF warned Thursday, over the past 20 years, total household debt in Australia has soared from 75 per cent of total disposable income to more than 180 per cent – one of the highest debt-to-income ratios in the developed world. Mortgage debt is the main cause of this increase. Helped by our banks and their government protected oligarchy, households have racked up a rising mountain of debt. Banks will stay strong as long as we can pay it all back. In the meantime, forget the other shenanigans, they run the show. Like the Turnbull government their preference is to be accountable only to themselves.

Greg Hunt begins the week in attack dog mode. Bill Shorten is “… a blinding hypocrite … a fraud, a charlatan … an absolute failure of leadership,” yaps the Industry and Innovation paragon. Killer Chihuahua Hunt, a former Environment Minister who famously puts coal above coral, is a climate guru, who simply made up the numbers for Australia’s 2030 emissions reduction pledge in Paris last year, a senate enquiry this week reveals. Why would a world’s best minister need to bother with modelling?

When PM Turnbull attacks states’ renewable energy targets in the wake of SA’s power failure he appears similarly unfettered by empiricism; equally keen to blame Labor states’ “aggressive” targets.

 News that the nation has no modelling for emissions beyond 2020 or for when emissions might peak does not seem to take any of the shine off “My work is done” Hunt’s record, it seems. Instead, it gives him moral authority to savage Shorten, Monday on Sky for putting people before the politics of a plebiscite, a petard of its own devising which appears about to destroy the Turnbull government.

 Hunt’s Bill overkill echoes the Liberals’ denunciation of Julia Gillard and their demonisation of both Labor leaders in the witch-hunting hysteria promoted under Abbott’s leadership. Beneath the suave leather jacket of the Turnbull experiment lurks a beast reared on the politics of the lynch mob, not responsible government.

 Hunt’s timely derision of Shorten comes just as his government assures us that same sex marriage supporters will not be abused by well-funded nutters on the right but it must fight to make itself heard above the din which erupts when Marriage Alliance’s Sophie York calls marriage equality supporters the “Pagan Caliphate” a term some Islamic representatives attending her organisation’s one hundred strong meeting in Sydney, Monday oddly take exception to whatever they make of her assertion that polygamy will surely follow any move towards marriage equality.

 While Hunt’s attack may be beyond all parody, however, it signals something’s up. Even a government accustomed to lurching from crisis to catastrophe can panic when it looks about to run itself off the road thanks to Abbott’s wretched plebiscite.

 However scurrilous Hunt may paint him, Shorten will scuttle a dud plebiscite. Dead in the water is the Coalition’s non-binding, expensive and divisive plebiscite on marriage equality which, as The Age notes Sunday, violates the “general principle that the right of minorities should never be subjected to a popular vote”.  Paul Bongiorno thinks that Turnbull’s rigidity over the plebiscite will ruin him just as Howard was undone by his refusal to say sorry to Indigenous peoples but ruin is only part of the disaster-prone, self-sabotaging government’s latest crop of misfortunes.

 Hunt, whose $1.7 billion Direct Action, fairies at the bottom of the garden carbon abatement plan, pays polluters to plant trees but does nothing to curb emissions, accuses the Opposition leader of deception. He should know. His Monday mongrel routine, however, is to distract us from his party’s gift for turning government into crisis management. Not everyone is deceived, however.

 “Neither Menzies, Howard nor Whitlam would have held a plebiscite” offers former High Court judge Michael Kirby, boosting growing concern over Turnbull’s poor judgement before warning. “Parliamentary democracy … is central to our version of democracy. We should be strengthening that formula, not undermining it.”

Kirby’s words fall on deaf ears. One day, dreams Eric Abetz, Hunt will be able to say what he really thinks of Bill’s feeble opposition to having a human right “decided” by plebiscite. And it’s not just Hunt who benefits. 18C of the Racial Vilification Act, Abetz believes, is holding back decent, ordinary, Australians from the all-in, no holds-barred, state-sponsored, cage-fight that we all need should a plebiscite be publicly canvassed. Propagandists opposing same sex marriage need help.

 As in Ireland’s same-sex marriage plebiscite campaign, homophobia is dressed up as concern for children. Gays make unsafe parents. Same-sex marriage will increase sexual diseases. Drug use will rise. Jobs will go, warn pamphlets already circulating from opponents who include Chris Miles, former Howard government Liberal M. His speech ought to be liberated, according to Abetz’ nonsense, if he were not fettered by 18C. Tell us what he really thinks. Make us really afraid.

 If the federal government lacks the fibre to change the law, moreover, Tasmania will lead the nation. On Monday, Abetz commends Premier Hodgman’s move to amend Section 18C to permit religious bigots to vilify whomever they please  – even if he has failed to make any case. To those who warn that the new law will sanction hate speech, Eric generously offers his “confidence in my fellow Tasmanians to have free speech and to exercise it responsibly”.

 Be fair. Abetz is making an heroic effort to deal with his AIS, (acquired irrelevance syndrome.) Doubtless it helps to keep yourself busy when you’re no longer wanted in cabinet.  Long may he bleat into the island’s prevailing westerlies about how racial abuse is vital to freedom of speech. He can only gain insight into the nature of power and his own insignificance. Right now he’s not making sense. Next thing you know he will be on about a conspiracy.

 “Free speech is a precious yet fundamental freedom which has been eroded under the guise of political correctness,” Abetz claims without a shred of evidence. It’s a baseless but persistent lie like the myth that the coalition is better at managing the economy. But it’s in good company. Attacking political correctness mirrors the lunatic logic of the coalition’s case against windfarms or its po-faced advocacy of Direct Action, both clear cases where ideology conspires with the bidding of its powerful backers in the mining industry to blind it to reality.  Or adjust its perception.

 In May The Climate Institute reported that Direct Action and its Emissions Reduction Fund had increased Australia’s emissions levels at a cost of $90/tonne while in February, Melbourne-based RepuTex revealed government figures show Australia’s emissions increased by 1.3 per cent in 2014-15, the first annual increase in emissions since 2005-06. Yet none of this is any concern to Turnbull’s government which seizes upon SA’s power failure to attack renewable energy in a political point-scoring exercise as remarkable for its invective as its cavalier denial of reality and responsibility.

 Turnbull decrees that the SA blackout means we need to ease our “extremely unrealistic renewable” energy targets. He can offer no evidence whatsoever, of course. Six years ago he was in favour of 100% renewable energy by 2020. Now Malcolm Turnaround claims that half the target in twice the time is a recipe for disaster.  An innovative PM is taking us back to the future. Tony Abbott wanted no targets at all. But Turnbull’s is no lone, lunatic, voice. Barnaby Joyce and other MPs including Nick Xenophon are a mine of misinformation and alarm. Anyone might think that there’s a well-resourced, industry-based propaganda campaign at work to prolong the use of fossil fuels.

 The Climate Change Authority and The Climate Authority report that the only way to meet our Paris targets, in fact, is to keep existing state targets: Victoria’s 40% renewables by 2025, South Australia’s 50% by 2025, Queensland’s 50% by 2030 as Lenore Taylor writes in The Guardian Saturday.

 Yet the week sees a concerted attack on our clean energy targets. The ABC takes first prize for its leadership of the case for scapegoating renewable energy and the dissemination of misinformation. Chris Uhlmann is a stand out when he claims “Forty percent of South Australia’s power is wind generated, and that has the problem of being intermittent — and what we understand at the moment is that those turbines aren’t turning because the wind is blowing too fast.” ( In Germany an increase in solar and wind power generation has led to a more stable grid and a halving of costs.)

 Other complete nonsense follows. “Windmills produce asynchronous power” a challenge that was met years ago. There was no base load power – apart from the fully operational gas standby. The power went out because storms destroyed the grid. As SA Premier Jay Weatherill points out the blackout was caused by multiple failures of high voltage transmission infrastructure. It would not have mattered if the grid had been completely fossil fuel powered.

 No-one listens. There is no retraction; no apology on ABC. Radio National’s Fran Kelly seems to accept Weatherill’s verdict but pursues a mayor in SA who confirms local people are blaming renewables. The Grattan Institute’s criticism of renewables gets much free air support from the National Broadcaster. As Lenore Taylor writes, ‘ one big storm and our climate and energy debate is surging back to peak stupid.

 Never one to let a crisis go unexploited, Energy and Environment Minister Josh “Mr. Coal” Freydenberg calls for a COAG energy summit in yet another bid to reduce renewable targets and prolong further the use of coal fired electricity generation before Stuart Robert can explain why property developer Sunland writes his speeches for him.

 So ends a week of finger-pointing and death-defying, reality-denying stunts featuring real linesmen and a state power supply as Barnaby and his baloney benders straddle a high wire between willful ignorance and stupidity while on the sawdust far below, a crew of Coalition clowns fall over each other to blame Labor for everything from robbing Gonski to acts of God in South Australia.

 Best special effects award goes to Greg Hunt for his replay of Kill Bill. Hunt is just one of a number of Coalition throwbacks still stuck in the glorious past of Dyson Heydon QC’s Royal Commission into the working class.  Special thanks must go to the ABC for their hard work in support of Greg and of the Prime Minister and his attack on renewable energy.  

 ABC Radio National Breakfast eagerly rehashes Hunt’s confected rage in its daily serve of coalition-flavoured commercial tidbits but, as always, there’s a great risk. Will listeners mistake The World’s Greatest Minister’s words for a confession of his own failure as Environment Minister? Or will Turnbull be seen as his target? Hunt’s words could be a cleverly nuanced assessment of his current Prime Minister whose government’s primary vote is now below 40% for the first time according to Newspoll. At 38% the coalition’s primary vote is lower than when Tony Abbott was deposed by Turnbull.

 Plebiscite support is also plummeting – down to 39 from 70 per cent earlier this year according to Newspoll who report that 48 per cent of respondents favour a vote by MPs to resolve the issue, an outrageous suggestion.

 The plebiscite, along with the war on William Shorten, is a legacy of the Lycra-larrikin, shirt-fronter in Tony Abbott’s sophisticated leadership repertoire akin to sprinkling tacks on the road ahead of his pursuers. At the time Abbott was desperate to stay ahead of the pack. Cutting Gonski funding hadn’t won him any advantage, a move Education Minister, Simon Birmingham, tells the nation is vital if we are to fix the great big mess Labor caused by following its ideological obsession with wasting money providing educational opportunity for the poor.

 Federal Education department data published during the week indicates that as many as one in five private schools may be getting more government funding than they should but Birmingham appears to be keener to talk up a “corruption” he perceives at the heart of the Gonski model as a pretext for “rationalising” (always code for cutting) the patchwork of agreements left him by his predecessor Christopher Pyne who was happy to label the report a “conski” without even reading it.  

 Whatever claims he makes, Birmingham is unlikely to recover any public confidence in the government’s intentions in school funding after his predecessor’s performance and especially after the COAG meeting in March when Malcolm Turnbull threatened to withdraw from school funding altogether – public school funding that is, doubtless to the cheers of his right wing minders for whom public education is to be viewed as an encumbrance and a cost.  

 Abbott’s cynical plebiscite tactic was calculated to avoid a parliamentary vote on gay marriage and to keep himself nice as poster boy – pin up for the party’s conservative rump. Cory Bernardi comes out this week with a call for the Liberals to express a nuanced version of “go back to where you came from”, “Islam is not a religion” its climate denial and other planks from the One Nation platform. Someone needs to tell Cory that the project is already well in hand.

 

Eric Abetz upstages his Prime Minister Sunday with a quick media blitz to reassure a grateful nation that thanks to his heroic efforts in writing to his PM there will be no change in the distribution of the GST for some years to come. Tasmanians especially will be overcome with gratitude at the Senator’s selfless dedication and letter writing. Once again we give thanks for something the government is not doing.

 Thunderous applause, spontaneous outbursts of Hallelujah and impromptu gospel singing also break out at the United Nations Refugee Summit in New York this week as Malcolm Turnbull, and his minder, Peter Dutton reveal with similar modesty that Australia is there to help the world solve its refugee crisis.

It is Australia’s duty as a world leader in humanitarian assistance, a nation prepared to invest over $40 million to re-settle one Rohingya man in Cambodia, but we must be cruel to be kind.

Turnbull explains, “Because we are able to say that we decide who comes into Australia and how long they stay, because we have control of our borders, we are able to deliver that generous humanitarian program.”

“Look to us,” the PM urges humbly, our solution is the “best in the world … we … create order from chaos.” Delegates go wild. A fabled faith-healer whose Neo-con nostrums, a trickle-down here, a tax cut there, have worked miracles at home, he is a natural on the international circuit. Leaders cheer, clap and stomp along to the sonorous rhythms of his spell-binding oratory as he tells how they, too, can be saved. Hallelujah!

Dutton bids up his government’s success, “Australia’s recent history has seen extraordinary challenges to our sovereignty,” he lies. But by being tough we are able to “keep up confidence in our migration policy and practice,” at a bargain price of $9.6 billion over three years and with the suppression of a few civil liberties.

Confidence is boosted by keeping details of its “border protection” operations secret and by ignoring the 2000 Nauru incident reports published in the Guardian last month –  8000 pages which depict widespread child abuse and trauma and reflect a regime of routine dysfunction and cruelty which Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International call “deliberate abuse hidden behind a wall of secrecy.”

“These policies and practices were not developed from a basis of fear,” explains the Immigration Minister whose own plain-speaking on the threat posed by migrants constitutes the Coalition government’s gold standard in dog-whistling bigots.

“They won’t be numerate or literate in their own language, let alone English. These people would be taking Australian jobs, there’s no question about that. For many of them that would be unemployed, they would languish in unemployment queues and on Medicare and the rest of it so there would be huge cost and there’s no sense in sugar-coating that, that’s the scenario.”

Dutton understates his case. “Being tough” is Dutton-speak for punishing all boat people we catch as a deterrent to others, or as they themselves describe it, a form of torture.

Or in a boomerang strategy boat people are sent back to suffer. Of course, it’s illegal. We break international law and turn back boats; delivering those fleeing persecution into the arms of their tormentors.  No. Of course it’s not fair. We are tough on border protection – unless you are wealthy. 1228 migrants with $5 million to invest were permitted entry as Significant Investors in the last four years.

A better, quicker route is available. Premium Investor Visas are granted to individuals who invest $15 million over only one year in a scheme which a Productivity Commission Report this week says offers an easy shortcut to Australian residency for rich foreigners – mainly from China – or anyone keen to launder money. We decide who will come into this country just as soon as you show us the colour of your money.

Unlike New Zealand’s similar investor scheme, prospective migrants undergo few checks on how their money was obtained. Furthermore, it is revealed this week, the department tasked with policing our fabulously secure borders appears to have a few major gaps in its own defences.

The Productivity Commission’s findings coincide with a Rand investigation also published this week which depicts a Department of Immigration and Border Protection which is so over-invested in stopping the boats of asylum-seekers that it is vulnerable to criminal exploitation, a department which suffers inadequate intelligence and staff-vetting procedures. It is estimated that it will take eight years to fix.

In the meantime, if you want to migrate to Australia, the only difference between being consigned to rot in hell forever and a red carpet welcome is the price of an air fare and a spare $5 million dollars.

But Turnbull is not in New York to spruik Australia’s fly-buy migration scheme. Nor is he there to be a wuss like the other fifty odd nations at the summit who collectively agree to double the refugee intake. Publicly he endorses Tony Abbott’s refugee intake target of 18,750, but spins this as a “permanent increase”.

Nobody’s fooled. Turnbull’s there to preach his nation’s wildly popular tough-on-border-protection nonsense or anything else which he believes makes himself look strong or which will play well at home. He’s all for strong borders, especially if it buys him time with the Coalition’s hard right wing.

What to do with the 65 million displaced people in the world? Apply some of Australia’s Border Protection, a patent pending combined refugee repellent and conscience salve which may be whipped up quickly and cheaply at home in even the poorest nation from local ingredients of fear, bigotry and ignorance.

All these years, says President Obama, leaping to his feet. All these years we put the influx of refugees down to civil war and catastrophe. All these years we believed refugees were fleeing persecution and famine. Now we know we were wrong. It was our wimpy border security that was the problem all along. Hallelujah!  

Turnbull does sell us a bit short. There’s more to our border security policy than persecuting the innocent. It’s a lot more than the inhumane, illegal and mutually degrading practice of banishing to faraway island gulags men, women and children who dare to seek our mercy.

It’s more than setting up refugees to be abused by guards or driven mad by the death in life of deprivation, neglect and indefinite off-shore detention although this is often mistaken for the glamorous high end of our operations.

Along with the 2000 in offshore gulags there are 29,000 asylum-seekers in limbo in Australia. They are on Temporary Bridging Visas which mean, in general, that they cannot work or access education or healthcare. They are not locked up in centres but they are locked into a vicious cycle of poverty, uncertainty and despair which causes increasing numbers to take their own lives, as in the case of tragic suicides amongst Hazara, a persecuted minority people from Afghanistan reported this week.

The rate of suicide amongst detainees or refugees on TPVs does not appear to affect the government’s resolve. The Minister loves to remind us how “tough border protection” prevents deaths by drownings but this week Turnbull goes further. A brutal detention regime helps us focus our compassion. Hence the Australian Border Force Act 2005 outlaws whistle-blowers. We don’t want refugee advocates, doctors or teachers or other workers distract us from “focusing humanitarian assistance on those who need it most.”

Turnbull’s “risk mitigation” includes turn-backs, violations of international law including in 2014, returning two boat-loads of Sri Lankan asylum seekers to the Sri Lankan navy and into certain danger after on-board refugee “assessments.” Some of these people were arrested on return. Where are they now?

Operation Sovereign Borders’ Andrew Bottrell, told a Senate estimates hearing in February that 23 boats and “more than 680 people” were returned to their country of departure but what became of them, then?

No-one knows, moreover, the fate of those terrified, desperate souls on board when in May 2015, Australian officials paid USD $32,000 to six crew who had been taking 65 people seeking asylum to New Zealand and told them to take the people to Indonesia instead.  Nor is anyone permitted to ask since we militarised our compassion in the wilful self-delusion we are at war with asylum-seekers.

Not all dissent has been silenced, however. The secrecy provisions of the 2015 Border Force Act have compromised Australians’ basic democratic rights and damaged Australia’s international standing, the Human Rights Law Centre tells the United Nations in a statement to the Human Rights Council.

The lame duck PM’s hard line abroad show he’s desperate to take a trick at home. Pauline Hanson helps him link asylum-seekers and terror. She’ll decide who comes into this country. Essential reports this week that 49% of a thousand responses to its online polling oppose Muslim immigration mainly because of fear of terrorism and because Muslims don’t assimilate or share Australian values.  The Drum pulls some Muslims off the street to explain themselves.

Turnbull’s Trumpery underwhelms the current US administration. Barack Obama warns that nations who build walls or close doors will be judged harshly by history. “This crisis is a test of our common humanity – whether we give in to suspicion and fear and build walls, or whether we see ourselves in another,” he says.

UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, has already denounced Australia’s asylum seeker policy as “a chain of human rights violations.” Turnbull’s case for Australia to be admitted to the UN Human Rights Council for the 2018-2020 term is not shaping well.

Posturing as a strong leader abroad, however, cannot make up for Turnbull’s being Australia’s most disappointing Prime Minister at home. Let him talk tough on terror and turn-backs. Let him dress up in Abbott’s rhetoric. The PM’s hard-line posturing only serves to highlight his moral bankruptcy; his self-serving surrender to the cynical capitulation to populist scare-mongering that has been his party’s immigration policy at least since Howard’s despicable lie of babies overboard in 2004.

Nor is the UN bluffed. Turnbull’s claim that Australia is a world leader in humanitarian aid is so transparently false, so out of line with our deeds, that the Prime Minister unwittingly demonstrates the truth. With the shameful exception of Australia, a relatively prosperous nation, world leaders agree to donate more money, accept more refugees. Even Ethiopia, 14th poorest country on earth, commits to educate refugees from the primary to tertiary level, and to set aside 10,000 hectares of arable land for use by refugees.

Fortunately there is more war on the poor at home this week to take the heat off the government’s abortive campaign in New York and to distract from the cost of tax cuts to business, the need to look after the rich and where to send our Manus Island detainees now that PNG has told us to pack our bags, an ultimatum which the government appears to be ignoring along with its trouble keeping its contractors.

Connect Settlement Services, the latest contractor to walk away from our world class offshore detention regime is leaving Nauru, it is said, over insufficient mental health and childcare provisions. An embarrassing number of other firms are also having trouble sharing the Coalition’s pride in its world-beating system.

The government prevented Ferrovial, the Spanish firm  which owns Broadspectrum from pulling out of Nauru and Manus Island in February. Ferrovial will now leave in October next year while Wilson Security has indicated it intends to get out of the offshore detention centre business. Luckily news that we are on the verge of a “revolution” in welfare arrives to take our minds off a detention system in utter crisis.

An innovative Christian Porter wants to deny Newstart for a month to new applicants, a move he swears that is not ideologically based or coloured by assumptions that the poor and the jobless are lazy and a burden on the rest of us. Let them survive on fresh air and sunshine.

His other ideas are not so original. Impressed by New Zealand’s welfare-bashing investment approach which is based on spreading alarm at how much it might cost to look after people, Porter wastes time in a National Press Club Address this Tuesday with an absurd claim based on dodgy budget figures.

“We face a total estimated future lifetime welfare cost of the present Australian population of $4.8tn”.

What’s missing is the whopping $360.5trn which represents the Federal government’s revenue on the same figures over the same period. Like all true conservatives, Porter would have us believe nation will be ruined if we continue to waste time and money, including our precious tax receipts on the poor.

­So far the only person showing fear is the Treasurer. A threatened Scott Morrison quickly stakes his own claim. “When I was Social Services Minister we picked up a new approach from [New Zealand], to help get our welfare system under control … It was called ‘the investment approach’.” The team player explains that “Christian Porter is now leading the next phase of ‘investment approach.” Morrison’s job is safe after all.

Porter, a former WA State Treasurer, once proposed that Newstart benefits be suspended unless applicants were prepared to chase work in other states. Clearly, he puts poor people in the same boat as refugees and asylum-seekers. Both pretend to suffer misfortune in order to live the high life on welfare payments.

Never mind that government statistics reveal that young people out of work and out of education are at record lows. Or that our border protection is based on demonising innocent victims of circumstance for petty political advantage or that beneath the rhetoric is a department, a system, a government in crisis.

 

 

In a death-defying acrobatic routine in Canberra this week, the nation’s lame duck PM performs an astonishing back-flip on the high-wire without a safety net in a Coalition Circus show-stopper before a three week break in the slow trick bicycle race that is the 45th Parliament.  Pantomime legend, funny money man Treasurer Scott Morrison kids audiences along that his government is not breaking an election promise. 

 Breaking Turnbull’s “absolutely iron-clad campaign pledge” on superannuation law changes to suit the top one per cent at the expense of poorer retirees is just responsible government.  It mirrors Tony Abbott’s “good government” which honoured his promise of no changes to health and education by delivering cuts of $80 billion after a landslide victory.

 Its super backdown competes with news this week of Morrison’s failure as Minister for Immigration to notice a contractor add $1.1 billion to its tender to run the gulag on Nauru and Manus when his department suspended public service tender rules in face of our imminent invasion by waves of dole-bludging job-stealing, illiterate immigrants, as Peter Dutton loves to remind us. A confected emergency is ScoMo’s normal operating environment.

“…When you’re in government you have to solve problems, you have to work issues and you’ve got to get to conclusions and that’s what we’ve done today…” explains the Ming dynasty worthy Morrison who demolishes other considerations such as principle, honesty and integrity with effortless ease and more than a dash of self-parody. No-one mentions the massive problem his PM’s double whatsit created in the senate, Manus Island, his NBN or the four banks who hold the country to ransom under government protection. Arch pragmatist Robert Menzies would be proud.

News of Turnbull’s astonishing stunt, naturally earns thunderous applause from high income earners and is the finale to a four day extravaganza which includes omnibus billing, more flogging of dead horse Dastyari, the plebiscite dance marathon and the mother of all fool’s errands, a race to praise Malcolm’s first year as PM.

Not to be outbid in the absurdity stakes, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton pledges to take Australia’s “good UN story” on refugees to the UN next Monday. He recycles the canard that we lead the world in refugee resettlement reprising the old lie that Australia takes the most refugees per capita of any country in the world, so favoured by his idol Tony Abbott.

The lie misrepresents our role in the UNHCR resettlement programme, which takes only 1% of the world’s estimated fifteen million refugees, as evidence that we lead the world in resettling all refugees. It wilfully obscures the 1577, including children, we currently imprison indefinitely in detention centres including on Christmas Island, and the 1296 incarcerated on Nauru and Manus Island.  Worse, Dutton’s lie implies that these are not genuine refugees.

 “We don’t just provide a refuge, we guide people into a new life; a safe, healthy and hopefully a happy life, ” Dutton boasts in The Australian. “Our humanitarian programmes have helped tens of thousands.” The two thousand incidents of abuse exposed in The Guardian’s recent release of reports by officials on Nauru clearly don’t count.

 Nor do those 30 asylum seekers Dutton has put on Christmas Island to enjoy the company of 200 of what the Border Supremo calls “some of the country’s most hardened criminals” at the discretion of the Minister who applies his character test. Two Brigidine sisters report not happiness but fear and despair on the island. “What we witnessed was a group of men utterly without hope, almost all of them broken human beings,” they tell Fairfax Media this week.

Our cruelty is not only wrong it is expensive. This week sees both a Save the Children and a UNICEF report reveal off-shore detention has cost us $9.6 billion since 2013 – more than the UNHCR’s total global budget for programs this year. The reports coincide with an Audit Office report that puts the cost per detainee at $1570 per day or enough to put each asylum-seeker up in a Hyatt hotel and pay them the pension fifteen times over, calculates Fairfax’s Peter Martin.

 The Audit Office report shows that not only did the Coalition government breach public service tender guidelines, it created a false sense of emergency to allow it to dispense with proper procedures permitting the successful contractor to add an extra $1.1 billion to its bid without facing any counter-bid. The department of Immigration kept this additional premium secret from then Immigration Minister Scott Morrison who was also not told of the price per head.

 Also kept secret is Malcolm Turnbull’s own donation to his party campaign war chest made in the second half of the eight week election campaign although he has volunteered that he chipped in $2 million rather than the $1 million originally reported. It is still a good investment should he last three years. Turnbull  is the only PM in Australian political history to have bought his own mandate but, oddly, no-one brings this up as his greatest achievement. 

Indeed, Coalition MPs appear challenged to find any achievement at all to mark The PM’s first year in office. Most instead settle on competing to tell the most outrageous lie while an oleaginous Josh Frydenberg admits his boss has been “a good friend of mine” before praising him as ” a very successful Prime Minister.”

 A rising conga line of suck-holes is utterly upstaged, however, by George Brandis, a toad in pinstripes, who puffs his pal Malcolm into the equal of Sir Robert “and the great John Howard;” “one of the great Australian prime ministers”, praise so nauseatingly unwarranted, so patently untrue that even Howard The Great must set the sycophant straight.

 “I think those sort of comparisons at this stage in Malcolm’s career are a bit unfair and premature,” Howard tells ABC radio. Fresh from recording his own two part ABC hagiography on his idol and fellow philistine, Pig Iron Bob, helpfully scheduled this Sunday, Howard is quick to cut Turnbull off at the knees. “The most immediate thing he can do in emulating Menzies is to successfully go to an election with a majority of only one and increase his majority.”

 Ouch!. No matter how bad it gets Malcolm is still the leader, team player George Christensen ventures helpfully.

Others outside the parliamentary party also see Turnbull as a fizza. A D+ is awarded by 50 business leaders, former Liberal politicians, academics, economists, administrators, lawyers and lobbyists who grade the PM for the AFR Weekend. Turnbull has failed to translate our joyous excitement over his rolling of Abbott into any action at all. Nor has he hung on to that surge of popularity. Even Newspoll reports that what it coyly terms satisfaction levels with the Prime Minister are down six percentage points to 34 per cent since the July 2 election.

 Yet there is no shortage of vacuous, self-interested puffery from Liberal MPs to inflate the PM’s party balloon this week.

“This Turnbull Coalition government has much to do and much to get on with — indeed, that is the business of government. We get on with it,” pronounces maiden Liberal Senator Jane Hume in a gesture of utter absurdity. As her 18th Century namesake David Hume advised, a wise woman proportions her belief to the evidence.

 Senator Hume, a former bank manager who currently works for  a superannuation fund, with absolutely no conflicts of interest, wins biggest whopper in a week of lies and desperate dissembling. The Coalition government has nothing to do and less to go on with. There is not even an agenda for the senate, Monday. Everything grinds to a halt forcing Liberal Senators to filibuster, fidget or even pedal backwards as they frantically try to stay in the saddle until Question Time.

 Government senators pad out their speeches to twenty minutes to stretch things until Question Time. Bridget McKenzie back-handedly grabs a chance to call Nigel Scullion a “deep thinker” despite appearances and to praise a colleague from Tullarook but the National Senator can’t recall his name or place, “Andrew, it will come to me she says.” Party amnesiac, Arthur Sinodinos grins infectiously.  George Brandis government leader in the senate is, once again, missing in action.

 What follows is strangely edifying. Whilst having senators speak without prompt or preparation produces some of the most tedious, trivial if not excruciatingly inept speechifying in history, it also provides a privileged peek into a government upper house consciousness unsullied by thought, reflection or wretched talking point.  In this space also, Pauline Hanson makes the second maiden speech of her career, calling for Muslims this time, to go back to where they came from. This is our country, our land our lifestyle, she says. “Take advantage of our freedom” and leave.

 Greens senators stage a walkout yet Michaelia Cash embraces the One Nation leader to remind all of Turnbull’s one true legacy, a cross bench of misbegotten populist monsters. While One Nation owes its much of its revival to the PM’s double dissolution fiasco, its members also faithfully reflect the way the Liberal Party continues Howard’s tradition of gleefully dog-whistling up the bigoted, the racist and xenophobic amongst us to achieve its political agenda.

 George Megalogenis in Australia’s Second Chance traces migrant bashing to 1840 when Horse Tray Yah was threatened by 4000 orphan girls, economic migrants seeking asylum from persecution and Ireland’s Great Famine. Since then it’s been the turn of other groups to be vilified and persecuted, as Annabel Crabb cheerily notes in The Age as if the idea that this too will pass may somehow comfort or compensate victims of state sanctioned abuse. Or right any wrong.

 Helping any who may misread Ms Cash’s public embrace of Pauline Hanson, gorgeous George Christensen, Dawson Pauline-whisperer is quick to tell the Australian that Hanson’s views are “largely those of the Liberal Party rank and file.” It emerges that George arranged a cosy deal with Pauline not to stand a One Nation candidate against him in the last election. Julie Bishop also endorses former Liberal Hanson, cutely saying she does “not agree with all” of Pauline’s views.

 Cory barnyard Bernardi is off to New York to observe the UN a body which he, too, along with One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts has called “unelected and unaccountable.” If Cory’s not in bed with One Nation, he’s smoking the same stuff.

 Like One Nation Pokémon Malcolm Roberts, Bernardi fears we are “outsourcing aspects of our national sovereignty to unaccountable foreign organisations like the United Nations,” or the Chinese or else hordes of alien invaders from the planet Zorg. Bernardi will be right at home in New York where wacky is normal but surely he will need to be recalled when the party’s Turnbull experiment is blown up by Abbott’s marriage plebiscite time bomb.

 Neither Bernardi nor Christensen will have to cross the floor, however, because the Labor party won’t play the game on a plebiscite which was less about seeking the will of the Australian people than about the rat cunning of a Tony Abbott desperate to defeat the do-gooders in his own party room. But what’s a broad church without a narrow, rigid and remote pontifex?

 In the interim, national discourse is drowned by disingenuous drivel from right wingers who pretend that government funding to both sides is some sort of equaliser.

 The same dangerous nonsense is buried in the clamour of Bernardi’s band wagon to repeal 18 C of the racial discrimination and vilification act and his crusade against safe schools. He and Leyonhjelm certainly know better although the less said about the rest of Turnbull’s freak show of a cross bench the better.

 What matters is power. Funding those who already enjoy immense wealth and power is no way to promote anything but bullying and the more effective dissemmination of hate speech. Stripping away safeguards for the vulnerable, the disadvantaged and the marginalised in order to add further to the power of ruling classes is no way to achieve social harmony – or democracy. If only like the PM everyone were rich enough to fund their own campaign.

 Luckily our PM has never been too shy to blow his own trumpet. Malcolm Bligh Turnbull has been quick this week to point out what an incredible asset he is to the nation with his genius for economic management. He takes full credit for rubbery figures suggesting business is booming. Like Arthur Sinodinos we must all put out of our minds all memory of the Reserve Bank lowering interest rates to boost a flagging economy or of wages flat-lining for three years at least. If we are not technically in recession we need to have a hard look at the way we measure it.

 Our leaders want us to applaud the ABS. Crippled by funding cutbacks, a failure over its census, the ABS coughs up some dodgy figures about GDP being up just as it produces wildly erratic and unreliable unemployment statistics because it is pushed to report on what it can’t afford to count properly. More reliable is the news that a third of us now put off or avoid entirely going to the dentist because we can’t afford the cost.

 Luckily birthday boy Malcolm Turnbull will take time out from his first anniversary and being bullied by Eric Abetz, George Christensen and other right-wing nutters who run his government to bask in the admiration of leaders overseas. 

 Turnbull will dazzle the world with his agile, innovative shtick, his economic trickle-down wizardry, his war on the poor and Australia’s abuse of asylum-seekers’ human rights. DIY two million dollar mandates from the one seat wonder from down under, will go over well, especially after his predecessor’s G20 talk on GP co-payments, his lecturing the UN about how sick we are of being lectured by the UN and his mad plans to invade Syria or to send Aussie troops into Ukraine.

 It is Senator Jane Hume and her fatuous speech, however, who sets the week’s tone by exposing her government’s illegitimacy. Despite its overweening arrogance, triumphalism and braying inanity, the Turnbull government cannot disguise the fact that it has nothing to say. It is hopelessly and utterly seduced by the delusion that it is back on top where it belongs; all that it needs now is to talk itself into a government.

 

 

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“Back home Bill Shorten is standing up for Sam Dastyari’s right to take from a company associated with a foreign government.” M. Turnbull Hangzhou September 2016.   

Sweet Custard Bun, as Malcolm Turnbull is known in Hangzhou, checks in to the G20 club, for an annual, ritual mutual tail-sniffing of capitalist running dogs, this week. Suddenly he rears up on his hind legs.

Along with a yen for dressing up as a statesman, Bun loves the idea of one day taking a trick against Labor. Any trick will do for The Great Dilator, whose foghorn of lofty aspiration and fear-mongering of disaster by debt or by terror belie an abyss of empty promises within. Impulse overtakes him. It’s one way of breaking his perpetual, crippling indecision.  He lashes out at Sam Dastyari and Bill Shorten for lacking judgment to dismiss Sam immediately, unlike his own excruciatingly slow response to Stuart Robert’s scandal involving a Chinese business in February.

Polling this week shows Turnbull is now Australia’s least popular Prime Minister in forty years.  Something must be done. Bun lashes out. Never shy to sink the slipper but hopeless when it comes to timing, Turnbull joins in Cory Barnyard Bernardi’s gang-bashing of Sam Dastyari, the best political game in town, all week. “

Double-agent Dastyari is “…associated with a foreign government…” claims the PM in a shrill dog whistle to all Sinophobes, anti-communists and members of the lunatic right of his own party within earshot. It will do Turnbull little good in the end to paint Dastyari as a traitor.   It is impossible to throw stones at Labor’s venal Chinese mole Dastyari without smashing some glass in his own party’s hothouse.

Bashing Dastyari is, nevertheless, top story for a mainstream media pack which sniffs blood. Mal’s pal, Michelle Guthrie’s ABC is well in the hunt, despite a bit of yapping for attention from junk-yard dog Abbott who howls down Turnbull’s impulsivity in calling his Royal Commission into juvenile detention in the NT.  

A Royal Commission is an “over-reaction” to news of abuse at the Don Dale Detention Centre, says the former PM, a politician whom Eddy Jokovich playfully  describes as a Derridan paradox: a nihilistic choice between the absence of presence, or the presence of absence.  

Abbott defines himself by not being Labor. Turnbull defines himself by not being Abbott. A protege of lying rodent Howard, Abbott must play while the cat’s away despite his promises of no sniping; no undermining. Some fancy Abbott will replace Turnbull, a PM whose only real appeal was that he was not himself but this takes nihilism too far.

Others appeal more in Liberal leadership stakes. Perennial bridesmaid Julie Bishop is keeping herself nice. What seems clearer each day, however, is that after his failed election double dissolution gambit, Turnbull is now Liberal leader in name only.   He’s a dead man walking.

Whilst the Turnbull experiment has clearly failed, it would be impossible for Abbott to regain the leadership. Not only does he have few followers, he continues to reveal himself to be more of a poseur than the current, incumbent. Witness his hypocritical pretensions to advance the cause of Aboriginal communities.

Abbott goes bush for a week a year. His much publicised ritual bonding with Aboriginal peoples and the odd smuggled-in Clonakilla Hilltops Shiraz enables him to tap into their condition; be their advocate in a mutually demeaning show of friendship which masks a patronising condescension, if not contempt, when it comes to consultation or funding.

Abbott set up his own Indigenous Advisory Council headed by Gerard Henderson’s son-in-law, the conservative, god-fearing Warren Mundine who was elevated over more representative leaders while he slashed $534 million from Indigenous Affairs funding, chiefly from health and justice budgets in 2014.      

 Aboriginal people have suffered friends like Protector Abbott before. His paternalism is as unwelcome a stunt as is his latest outrageous accusation that his PM has been frightened into an over-reaction. Is he suggesting that the abuse of human rights and other injustices revealed in the Four Corners documentary on Don Dale Detention Centre should be downplayed? Is this how he advocates for Aboriginal peoples?  We should be complacent that over half of children in detention in Australia are indigenous?

Abbott should spare us his own panic attack at increasing relevance deprivation. Retire. Spare us his hypocrisy. Many of his own calls, such as his plebiscite on gay marriage were equally desperate and just as cynical a delaying tactic as his PM’s Royal Commission. Is Shorten’s mob paying Junkyard to stay on just to cruel Turnbull’s faint hopes of success? 

Abbott does not revisit marriage equality this week, preferring instead to re-heat an IPA leftover. The government should be “very careful” he says about making retrospective superannuation changes. Very careful. Junkyard has no hope, however, of upstaging Dastyari who is in the limelight for all the wrong reasons. Sam puts on a shocker of a show of public confession and contrition, “What I did was within the rules but it was wrong,” he says as if somehow he can still bet each way on his own culpability. 

Dastyari declares that Labor doesn’t need his distraction. More fish to fry. He resigns. Cue J S Bach’s, St. Matthew Passion depicting Judas’ guilt on betraying his Lord. An already frenzied media pack goes feral. 

Senator Sam Dastyari or Dasher, as he is to his NSW Right pals, (Nifty was already taken) is the new anti-Christ according to Murdoch papers which have him in bed with communists. “Dastyari’s donor has party cell” thunders The Australian. Leigh Sales savages him. It’s not so much that he took Chinese money, a practice unknown to Liberal MPs, but that he spruiked Chinese policy. He must be hung, drawn and quartered. And burnt in effigy.  

Sam, it seems, didn’t parrot the US line that China needs to get out of the South China Sea, which amazingly is also Australia’s own position thanks to ANZUS, the lynch-pin of our independent foreign policy, and why we follow the USA in regime change in Iraq or invading Syria.  Suddenly, it seems, Dastyari’s inspiring a Chinese takeover. An AFR opinion writer claims that Chinese tourists pose a Yellow peril security risk.    

Dasher can’t remember what he said about China’s policy, he says. Amnesia’s always a bit of a worry, tuts AFR’s Laura Tingle on last week’s Insiders thinking doubtless of Arthur Sinodinos, an MP who does not recall receiving funds from anyone anywhere, even if he were treasurer of The Free Enterprise Foundation, an organisation set up solely to receive funds from property developers and other donors to the NSW branch of the Liberal Party in 2011. The AEC was obliged to freeze four million dollars of Liberal campaign funds.

Memory lapse aside, Dastyari always backed Labor’s policy, he claims. Sadly the record tells against him. He softened Labor’s stance. “The South China Sea is China’s own affair,” he is quoted as telling Chinese media on June 17. “Australia should remain neutral and respect China on this matter.”

Bill Shorten’s been tough on Sam, he says. Next sound bite he promises Sam another portfolio sometime later. “Sam is a young bloke with a bright future ahead of him. He has a lot more to offer Labor and Australia,’’ Shorten says, but clearly Sam’s offerings are to be put on ice for some time.   

Bun sounds as if he’s insulting his Chinese hosts, the ones he’s just bragged he’s done a deal with. Or does he mean the ChAFTA “spectacular,” the best thing since Marco Polo, especially if you are a Chinese investor seeking to deploy a Chinese work force in Australia? With few tariff restrictions left as bartering chips, the negotiators traded away Australian workers’ conditions but don’t expect to hear this explored much in parliament at the moment.

The lugubrious former trade minister Andrew Robb is, however, refreshingly untroubled by his own legendary friendship with the very same Huang Xiangmo head of YUHU group who was so quick to come to the party when Sam couldn’t quite pay his $1700 travel fees or his $5000 legal bill, a fee The Australian has as $40,000. You will hear that in the house Tuesday.  

Yuhu group companies made $500,000 in political donations including $100,000 to Andrew Robb’s Bayside Forum a fund-raising entity the day the trade deal was signed. But this is quite a different matter says the Liberal-News Corp-ABC affiliated slayers of Sam and no defence at all of his conduct. Nor does it matter that the PM himself was a keen comprador for a Chinese firm with equally inescapable links to the Chinese government.

Nor is it relevant, it seems, to dwell on the power of Huang Xiangmo, a Chinese-Australian billionaire who has given $1.8 million to the University of Technology in Sydney to help establish an Australia-China Relations Institute, replacing a more independent body. Now both sides of parliament are supplied with pro-China “research” to enable them to come to the right decisions on such matters as ChAFTA and how it’s great for Aussie workers.

Not so long ago Bun wanted Chinese electronics giant Huawei to be permitted to bid for what would be our national telephone carrier if we hadn’t flogged it off to Telstra, a mob which models its customer relations on the big four banks. Labor raised issues of national security and the thought-bubble was pricked.   Sam’s pitch pales by comparison.

It seems unwise for the Coalition to go so hard after the senator over a two-year old matter he did declare at the time. The PM delays a couple of days before joining Bernardi’s attack on Dastyari, although this may just reflect his lame duck leadership, especially when overseas. Labor is calling for a ban of all foreign donations to politicians or parties calling upon Malcolm Turnbull for support. Expect more noises about reforming the system to be upstaged by further revelations when Parliament resumes with more MPs ducking and weaving for cover. 

Leigh Sales raises the $50,000 Gina Rinehart put into coal mining champion Barnaby Joyce’s campaign coffers in 2013. This is clearly a different matter, the funny-man- cum deputy PM huffs and puffs, because it was at arm’s length and auditable. He’s a crack-up. Did the money affect his support for mines?  Did his support attract the money?

‘What do you think that you have to give her in response? Is it access? Why does she give that money? What does she expect?’ Sales asks on her ABC’s 7.30. She could have also raised the $500,000 in donations received over two years by Julie Bishop on behalf of the WA Liberal Party from the same Yuhu group of property developers. The donations cannot possibly be linked to Ms Bishop’s public gushing admiration of Huang’s entrepreneurship or business skills.

Cory Bernardi has opened Pandora’s box. Now the target will shift from Dastyari to donations themselves and some key Liberals may be asked to do some explaining. The government will struggle to put the lid back on when Parliament resumes Tuesday. Expect a volley from an opposition that’s had a week to prepare.

George Brandis is already targeted over his May 2016 $370,000 appointment to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal of Queensland solicitor, Teo Tavoularis, a Liberal Party donor and a lawyer who also defended George Brandis’ son.

 The bashing of Dastyari will help conceal the government’s real agenda of making it almost impossible to check the operations of private companies, as the Turnbull Government’s plans to privatise ASIC’s corporate database move closer to fruition next month. Only two companies are listed on the stock exchange. The database currently permits public access to details of millions of other companies.  

 The move will frustrate journalists’ and academics’ attempts to hold corporations to account; to investigate corporate illegality and has provided a means to the detection of illegal activities discovered in past scrutiny such as money laundering, financing terrorism, labour exploitation and human trafficking.

 The ruckus over donations will also displace attention from the way in which the government has helped keep a lid on CUB’s sacking of maintenance workers at its main brewery in Melbourne.  In a move reminiscent of Dollar Sweets’ 1985 landmark lockout of workers, where young lawyer Peter Costello successfully brought a common law action against a union for damages suffered by the employer during the course of the strike.

CUB expects its workers to sign up again with a 65 per cent pay cut. To help play its part in promoting jobs and growth, the government through the Fair Work commission has ordered the striking workers to refrain from insulting or offensive language.

 Suddenly the raucous far right of the Coalition, sundry senate cross benchers and the other outspoken advocates of the abolition of section 18C who claim the law curtails freedom of speech all fall silent.

 

 

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The jig is up by 5:00 PM Thursday. Canberra’s Liberal Party drovers, dog handlers and the capital’s baggage handlers are stunned to discover that the government’s much vaunted “strong working majority” is no majority at all when self-styled Liberal leadership contender Peter Dutton and several other MPs enact their commitment to smaller government by leaving the House of Representatives early, causing riotous disarray and ignominious defeat – followed by a frenzied volley of finger-pointing.

Welcome to Calamity Turnbull’s 45th parliament of chaos and catastrophe.

Bored to tears, baffled by the lack of any team plan, Immigration Minister “Spud” Dutton, Justice Minister Michael “Fibs” Keenan and Social Services Minister Christian “War on the Poor” Porter and a few other battle-weary MPs, steal away from the chamber early, allowing Labor to defeat an adjournment motion and to present its full case for a Royal Commission into the banks, a hot button electoral issue which has already passed the Senate earlier that day.

All is not quite as it seems. The Mouth that Roars, Christopher Pyne, has given Monkey Pod Supremo “Spud” Dutton permission to bail out early. God knows why. Presumably the human life preserver has more drownings to prevent. Or a new Manus to manufacture. Perhaps Spud’s planning a bit of urgent follow-up on the 2000 recently leaked Nauru incident reports.

It’s a tad embarrassing. A majority government trading on its stability loses control of parliament for the first time since windy Pig Iron Bob Menzies fifty years ago, a PM who also lost the support of the Liberal party room, for all his speechifying, his insufferable egoism and his union-bashing.

“A government which cannot run parliament cannot run the country,” crows Labor in a dig at Pyne who made this claim repeatedly in opposition to Julia Gillard’s successful minority government.

Who is running the Turnbull government? Upstaged by its own arrogance, its complacency and its utter disorganisation, the government, according to the AFR’s headmistress Laura Tingle, is acting as if it “doesn’t give a rat’s” about its prospects. She’s referring to Cory Bernardi’s stunt in getting up a senate backbench mutiny against Calamity Turnbull on 18 C but it’s surely something broader. A mania for self-destruction sweeps the parliamentary Liberal party.

Perhaps the Libs are still in shock; paralytic after their near-defeat. Two months’ preparation and great expense, not to mention the odd crate of Grange, has gone into failing to plan for something Blind Freddy could have foreseen. A small fortune is outlaid on party Whips and on Leader of the House, Christopher Finger-point Pyne to prevent such mishaps – not to flap his gums on the Today Show about Labor’s stunt.

Peter Hartcher calls for Pyne to go but that would wreck Lucy’s seating plan at Point Piper’s select inner circle dinners: Pyne is her husband’s chief cup bearer. Above all other sycophants, even Sinodinos and Brandis, Pyne has a gift for telling his prince what he wants to hear.

Nola Marino, enigmatic, self-effacing Chief government whip, who won her preselection for the WA seat of Forrest with Turnbull’s backing is paid $250,790, an extra 26%, to enforce party discipline while “The Fixer” Pyne gains an extra 75% salary loading for his role as Leader of the House, boosting his salary to $348,320 or enough to give a year’s New Start to twenty-five unemployed car workers.

Perhaps it’s not enough. Certainly leadership and discipline are missing in action on Thursday, something no amount of recrimination and blame can alter even if they play well on television.

The Coalition loses a series of votes before Dutton and Porter are hauled back cursing into the Chamber as the motion comes to a final vote. Crossbenchers Andrew Wilkie and Rebecca Sharkie vote with Labor. The vote is 71-71. Speaker Tony Smith follows convention to side with Labor enabling Labor to put the Opposition case for a Royal Commission at length.

In shock and awe over the inexplicable malfunction of the party’s well-oiled machinery, Liberals fall back on their strongest suit; blame, a fail-safe device which allows master tactician, Pyne to continue to draw a salary only $160,000 less than his prime minister.

Pyne’s has the PM’s backing. Turnbull quickly steps up to tell anyone who might believe him that his favourite is not to blame, a theme his minister and inner circle confidante is always quick to inspire.  The former Education Minister consults his lesson plan.

A man yet to be introduced to shame, Pyne tells Channel Nine the Liberals were up for a bit of discovery learning: “What happened late yesterday afternoon was a stuff up and those people who weren’t there obviously they learnt a valuable lesson.”

In brief, the blame lies with them, not him. Pyne doesn’t repeat his line from opposition that Menzies resigned after three defeats in the House. Turnbull would have only two losses left.

No less valuable, and uniquely excited to be Australia’s PM Malcolm “blithe excitement” Turnbull lectures his errant ministers for their “complacency” in leaving early, from the heights of his own unassailable smugness and superiority. Had he not given the party the immaculate gift of himself? A reprimand will surely bring them to heel – and deflect from his own incompetence.

Liberal party helicopter duenna now authority on self-restraint and political propriety, Bronwyn Bishop gives her former colleagues, her own inimitable brand of tongue-lash and finger-wag. The former speaker tells Sky News that Liberal complacency must be rectified right now. She’s about to work her nemesis Tony Abbott into the blame zone but she’s cut short. Besides, Abbott is smirking like a Zen Ninja at Calamity Mal’s latest collision with reality.

Abbott taps his moment of satori to recycle a Norman Lamont line from 1993 that the Liberal Party is “in office but not in power.” Someone looked that up for him on Google. A master of mayhem or perhaps a black belt, he knows he can laugh. Fairfax’s Adam Gartrell comments,

“Abbott’s government was an incompetent mess from top to bottom; a circus that lurched from one self-inflicted crisis to another until it finally tore itself apart. But at least it never lost a vote in the house.”

Greg, “Wikipedia” Hunt, stung by Bronnie’s bromide Googles complacency. It’s no help. Rectifying or removing the complacency of the party of the born to rule may prove even trickier than paying polluters to clean up their act.

Complacency underpins Liberal policy from climate to its economic world view to its strategy.  Complacency was the party’s only coherent game plan in its last long election. Hunt goes back to his big new statement on Science he has warned us all is imminent. His job is done.

The parliament is already undone. The government is being pushed under its own Omnibus by a bill which doubtless looked a ripper in planning at Point Piper but turns out to be an utter turkey in terms of tactics. The Coalition’s 26 bills in the first week stunt is designed to make it look as if it has a plan but it will all go to hell when things stall, as they must, in the senate.

The plebiscite hoax is clearly going nowhere. A by-product of “lying rodent” John Howard’s 2004 ramming through of a narrowing of the definition of marriage to exclude same sex couples, it is another legacy, along with babies overboard and the ripping apart of social safety nets; the war on families, of the “Howard’s” ten years of making Australia a smaller, meaner society, a trend which his successors so avidly follow.

There’s always the Coalition war on workers but you can’t bash the unions senseless every session. What do they do now?

Luckily a diversion is always at hand. Cory Barnyard Bernardi, who was stood down four years ago for claiming same sex marriage would lead to bestiality, is able to recruit all but one of his party’s senate backbenchers in a push for a private member’s bill to repeal section 18C of the racial vilification act. His bill will not get lower house support. It has no chance of being more than an attention-seeking time waster and a calculated gesture of defiance of his PM.

Our Racial Vilification law was a response to the reports from the 197-1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody but it is today wrongly held by the barking hard right to impede free speech by which they mean the incalculable cruelties of racial abuse which helps cause vulnerable, alienated, marginalised and dispossessed people to take their own lives.

Thursday’s fiasco takes some heat off Sam Dastyari – who, not content with his proposed halal lunch pack date with Pauline Hanson, is now single-handedly about to destroy Australian politics forever by accepting $1670 from a Chinese firm. ABC radio has a week of Sam slamming. Dastyari’s donations become the soft target of the political week. Never to be overlooked, Cory Kung-Fu Panda Bernardi also goes after Dastyari in a campy demon dragon-slaying worthy of Monkey Magic.

Not to be monkeyed with is Foreign Minister show pony Julie Bishop who has links with Chinese businessmen who have donated half a million dollars to the Western Australian division of the Liberal Party during the past two years, despite having no apparent business interests in that state. Naturally overseas donors are not bound by AEC rules of disclosure, an AEC spokesman helpfully points out,

“While the commission can seek compliance, overseas donors cannot be compelled to comply with Australian law when they are not in Australia”.

Yet clearly they expect a little more bang from their bucks. Helpfully, Huang Xiangmo, chairman of property developer Yuhu Group and a big mover in Australian-Chinese business circles – and himself one of Australian politics most generous donors cautions the Chinese community in Australia not to let itself be viewed as little more than a “cash cow” by either of the two federal parties it makes donations to.

Stuart Robert was forced to resign in February over using his office for fund-raising but there’s not a whisper to suggest that Bishop has any explaining to do. Nor does former Trade Minister, Big Spender Andrew Robb whose trade deal in May was the trigger for a Chinese government-backed propaganda unit and a swag of companies that stand to gain from the China Australia Free Trade Agreement to invest over half a million dollars of political donations in Victoria.

Instead Robb, veteran of the long Yum cha gets the nod to do the Liberals’ review of their election disaster in which Turnbull will be found entirely blameless. Their failure will be found to have been caused by Labor’s illegal Medicare scare tactics.

Yet Robb will be sorely taxed by his task. Apart from his rewriting history challenge, he will be greatly exercised choosing where to invest his fee least he fall foul of the proposed super changes.

Robb figures if he waits a few weeks Mad Dog Morrison will have watered the changes down as the IPA has dictated. In the meantime, however, he’s tasked with an impossibility. Reviewing the Liberals’ last election disaster will be like nailing a jelly to a wall.

Jelly? That’s it. Call in Matt Cormann. His wibble wobble jelly routine is a standout routine and will stand him in good stead should  he have to seek real employment in commercial media. Yet, sadly, like everything else this week it’s ineffectual. Labor’s not a jelly on a plate. It’s disciplined. It knows minority government and it has big win in the first week. Even name-calling has to fit.

The PM’s off on his summit season junket which includes a meeting with what some wag is bound to call the G 19.5 in honour of Australia’s less than full-blooded presence. Stand by for some rhetoric worthy of Menzies. Yet even a “put your money back in your pocket and get off those islands in South The China Sea” spray from Mal won’t turn the tsunami like tide of his domestic failure. Week one of the forty-fifth parliament is a washout. His career is wrecked.

Happily, Calamity Turnbull is able to leave the ship of state in safe hands. Johnny Depp’s nemesis, Barnaby part-tomato Joyce is rising to the occasion already by promising never to leave early again. What could possibly go wrong?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Where does he get them from? Funny money man, Scott (Black Hole) Morrison, hilariously miscast as Federal Treasurer, is up to his tricks again this week in Sydney talking up recession, budget repair and telling Australians half of us are worthless parasites. It’s back to the future as ScoMo reprises Joe Hockey’s lifters and leaners. It worked so well for Joe.

Morrison’s data is old news, too. In 2014, The National Centre for Economic and Social Modelling (NATSEM) found that half of Australians pay no income tax. Scott Morrison’s had time to digest the trend but he’s feigning shock-horror as he belly-aches about a crisis.

His audience gasps when he pulls a trillion dollar black hole out of his back pocket. He waves it around, like a matador’s cape lest anyone get the idea he’s not serious. We are headed for recession. Gone also are our cute triple A ratings if we don’t knuckle down to budget repair.

Are we up for Budget Repair? One easy $6.5 billion down payment, he tells the crowd. One size fits all. ScoMo’s got legislation on standby, or in the pipeline or somewhere. All Omnibus Bill Shorten has to do is close his eyes, sign his credibility away and we’ll all be saved.

The crowd goes wild. With a few silly charts and digs at Labor’s class war on the rich and privileged, he could be back on the hustings; or replaying his government’s first display of budgetary incompetence. Say what you like about his ham acting, the man’s a natural crowd-pleaser and so versatile moving from utter buffoon to an effortless Pantalone.

A declining income tax take is one of the logical consequences of an ageing society. Morrison refuses to accept that. He’s equally clueless about how government can invest in key infrastructure to stimulate useful economic activity and build foundations for more. Austerity budgeting hastens recession. But there is an upside. He will sacrifice the bludgers to save the rest of the nation. What could possibly go wrong? Everybody loves blood sports.

‘We have to work together to find better and more innovative ways of delivering our services, particularly in areas such as health, welfare and education and human services that delivers for citizens and is affordable and sustainable.’

Note the deft use of innovative and the weasel words service delivery. No one boos. At an invitation only Bloomberg “summit” Thursday, he’s the darling of a fawning flock of fellow fiscal illiterates, bankers, miners and professional rent-seekers. Bloomberg’s infested with HR Nicholls’ fans. Everybody wants less tax and lower wages. They all enjoy a good war on the poor, too.

Jargon aside, the wild and wacky treasurer wants to cut government spending on pensions, schools and hospitals. He’s blind to any alternative. Nor can he see the economic folly of further cutting poor people’s spending power. You can’t have a pantomime without a villain.

He’s got some other funny throwaway lines too. A free trade deal with China is vital to our growth; he tells business types who will make millions just out of funding the shipping insurance. Bilateral trade agreements have never benefited Australian industry. Or workers.

It’s not all bad, though. Some ChAFTA elements may favour Australian winegrowers selling to China, for example. Yet other provisions permit Chinese entrepreneurs with as little as 15% investment in projects over $150 million to bring a totally Chinese workforce to Australia. How will this boost the job prospects, wages or conditions of Australian workers?

Morrison knows how to pick his mark. He’s got no beef with big businesses, a third of whom paid no tax in 2014. His government’s fetish for military expenditure, including $50 billion, at this stage on submarines or $24 billion on Tony Abbott’s joint strike fighters is not at issue.

Equally, the Coalition’s pledge to spend of 2% of GDP or a trillion dollars on defence over the next twenty years at the expense of foreign aid is a wise investment. Government must also subsidise private health insurance by $11 billion per year to give consumers choice.

So, too, $5 billion a year in subsidies must go to mining corporations to create wealth for everyone and not just boost Liberal Party funding. We must continue to spend billions of dollars on ports and railway lines. New mines “need to be competitive”.

Yet no-one could say the coalition is profligate with its business handouts. The half billion needed to keep a car manufacturing alive and 200, 000 Australians in work made no sense to Joe Hockey and Tony Abbott. Besides, car workers can retrain as venture capitalists and prosper in the new knowledge start-up industries sure to sweep Elizabeth and Geelong. Boutique home-office spaces will replace GMH plant at Melbourne’s Fisherman’s Bend.

Killing the car industry will not cause any family to seek welfare payments. Not one of the 200,000 unemployed car workers will be forced to sign on to Newstart. Unlike needy mining corporations, workers receive $38 per day, a pittance which has remained unchanged for twenty years, despite calls by groups such as ACOSS and even KPMG in April this year for an increase because it is not enough to keep a budgie alive.

Blowing a billion a year on offshore detention is OK? Morrison’s $55 million Cambodian Solution resettled four refugees, but has now dwindled to one. Not a word about any of this.

It’s not our banks or mining corporations. Nor is it the mega rich whom we subsidise with tax cuts or those billionaire bludgers who pay no tax at all. And it’s certainly not the $14 billion per year of unfunded company tax cuts his government is determined to put through. It’s the bludgers on welfare who are the problem.

Welfare recipients, nearly half of whom are aged pensioners, are second class citizens and if not he’ll do his best to make it so. A “great divide”, he adds helpfully, comes between us. Overlooking the GST paid by all of us and ignoring government data reflecting a long term trend away from welfare support, Morrison breaks the nation into two: the taxed and the taxed-not. If you’re not paying income tax you’re a worthless, shameful failure.

ScoMo knows all about failure. As Tourism Australia head, his 2006 “Where the bloody hell are you?” sledge campaign cost $180 million and got a lot of laughs but it failed to bring any more tourists to visit us. Morrison fell out with Tourism Minister Fran Bailey and was sacked. Naturally, this meant being paid out of his contract.

Today, many stellar underperformances later, the Treasurer is even further out of his depth as Federal Bean-Counter than he was waging war on the poor as Social Services Minister. Only the target hasn’t changed. Or the gallows humour.

ScoMo’s a crack-up with his solid gold “taxed and taxed nots” routine. It’s a fair segue from his Hockey’s toxic lifters and leaners. But there are further shocks in store. The other enemy is populism – it leads to evil protectionism and must be shunned unless it involves doubling the cost of submarines by preferring a local build to save Liberal seats in South Australia.

The crowd hiss and boo. Populism also leads to demands for Royal Commissions into banking. Everyone knows that ASIC is doing a fabulous job now despite being cut $120 million in 2016 and having half of this put back to take some of the sting out of Labor’s case.

True, Alan Fels has said it’s too cautious- but what would he know? Granted, Jeff Morris who blew the whistle on the banks’ dodgy financial advice says it’s “ludicrous” to claim ASIC is akin to an RC. So what if in May, Karen Chester found ASIC was defensive, inward looking and risk averse in her review of the Keystone Cop on the beat’s capability.

The Budget Repair routine is done so well that it now orthodox to suppose that the key to prosperity is to cut government spending and that if Labor was halfway serious it would as seek the “sensible middle ground” and capitulate to the government’s demands in a radical round of austerity budgeting and other zombie measures including cuts to business tax.

The Budget Repair bandwagon is built of neoliberal ideological myths and has at its core the populist misconception that a government’s budget is the same as a family budget. Unlike a family, however, it can never run out of money. It issues currency and it is in charge of the Reserve Bank and its accounting arrangements with it and not vice versa as economists such as Richard Denniss or Bill Mitchell, patiently explain.

 If anything, public spending ‘crowds in’ private investment because the private sector leverages off public infrastructure – transport systems, better health and education etc.

We should borrow while rates are cheap to invest in infrastructure to promote growth.

Morrison tries to rationalise budget cuts by an emotive appeal to provide for his children. Seriously. What he needs to do is to explain how lowering standards of public services and boosting unemployment is good for anyone. He should also explain how his government’s dodgy Direct Action on climate change or its war on renewable energy industries which crippled 85% of investment and burnt our solar industry has helped create a safer or more sustainable future. Thousands of jobs have been lost. Hundreds of businesses have closed.

The Budget Repair Scare is a spectacular show however and its comeback tour is already playing to packed houses across the nation. Evil Bill Shorten will be a villain, it is certain, but for the real culprit of the trillion dollar black hole expect more demonising of the poor.

Threatening to steal some of the limelight and also back by popular demand, the NBN show is touring Canberra in a performance which entails Federal Police raids on documents and facilities normally protected by parliamentary privilege.

Whilst Labor’s Shadow Communications Minister Senator Conroy maintains that such raids strike at the heart of our democracy both in endangering the right of parliament to deal freely with information in the national interest, Shadow Attorney General Mark Dreyfus expects all senators to uphold claims of parliamentary privilege over the documents which have been forwarded by NBN workers frustrated by cost blowouts and delays.

When asked on Sunday’s Insiders why, if everything was going so well, should it matter if the leaked documents came to light, an open-necked Prime Minister who may have thrown away his tie in quest of some casual spontaneity to boost his weakening public standing in opinion polls was tongue-tied.

In the end, his claim that the raid has no political links, if it can be taken at face, merely points up NBN’s desire to take revenge on its whistle-blowers. His claim, however, fails to explain how the AFP was given admission to Parliament without the consent of the Presiding Officers. Nor does it explain why the AFP claimed national security was at issue.

The Prime Minister was not asked why Parliament House staff, led by the Serjeant-At-Arms, tried to prevent journalists from seeing and filming the activities of the AFP officers in the basement area of Parliament House as reported by Bernard Keane and Josh Taylor in Crikey.

Labor claims the raids are illegal because the NBN is neither a public authority nor part of the Commonwealth and thus not bound by public service confidentiality protocols.

Regrettably before the 45^th Parliament has even resumed, a shadow is cast upon our elected representatives’ capacity to go about their work without fear or favour, while for a second time, following an AFP raid on the homes of Labor staffers in May, a police raid has followed public criticism of the NBN, a project formerly the responsibility of the Prime Minister.

Ultimately the raids must be placed in the context of a government increasingly keen to pursue whistle-blowers over asylum-seeker conditions and treatment such as the leaked reports on the operations of the detention centre on Nauru.  Such leaks reveal abuses of human rights and other miscarriages of justice including the suppression of information which it can be argued is truly in the national and public interest to be made known.