Blood on Scott Morrison’s hands.

November 8, 2014November 8, 2014 ·

Funeral of Reza Barati.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 5, 2014November 5, 2014 ·

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Direct Action: all bets are off.

November 3, 2014November 3, 2014 · 1 Comment ·

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 2009, Malcolm Turnbull described the policy as bullshit:

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

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

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

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

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

Julie Bishop for PM?

November 1, 2014November 1, 2014 ·

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 30, 2014October 30, 2014 · 3 Comments ·

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

Australia: wake up to yourself. Stop the war on asylum seekers and refugees. Take in the suffering and the needy.

October 29, 2014October 29, 2014 ·

When then opposition leader, Tony Abbott announced his new ‘Border Protection’ asylum-seeker and refugee policy in July 2013, it seemed at first as if it were a bad joke: a grotesque parody of our nation’s rights and responsibilities as much as an absurd over-reach to a politically sensitive but minor issue: the arrival of sea-borne refugees on our shores. The name did not help. The term ‘border protection’ itself is grandiose and deceptive. It misleads by implying that our borders are threatened by asylum seekers and refugees. Typically from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan our asylum seekers and refugees flee by boat from the Taliban, from civil wars and dangers we can barely guess at. Many of these are women and children. Boat arrivals represent a tiny fraction of those who arrive via our very porous borders. On average 1000 per year come by sea. Contrast this with 150,000 arriving annually by air. Border protection, like ‘turn back the boats’ is a costly political stunt which exploits ignorance and xenophobia for narrow political advantage. Ultimately it injures Australia’s international reputation, betrays our common humanity and consumes billions of dollars which could and should be better spent in education and other real priorities.

In 2013 Australians were promised that a ‘three-star commander’ would be put in charge of a military-led border protection campaign. It was a perplexing term to most of us. The US Army ranks generals with stars; perhaps, we wondered, this might be a new, local variant. It wasn’t. Australian forces use stars differently. But it worked, to some degree, as an attention-seeking attempt to bestow legitimacy and status. It sounded impressive if somewhat forced. The times demanded no less: Abbott proceeded to talk everything else up. Most notably he declared the waves of asylum-seekers arriving by boat to be a ”national emergency”, a term he has subsequently stretched to fit the economy and the ISIS and other jihadists’ threat. A three star commander, it was implied, surely would have the rank and the nous to fix the problem. And the power. As time would tell, however, this pseudo-military footing permitted the government to avoid accountability in “Operation Sovereign Borders”. Key questions as to what was happening were met with stony silence. Answers could not be provided to ‘operational matters.’

Operation Sovereign borders would not only boast a three star commander, it was to be a hamburger with the lot. Touting a streamlined efficiency that Liberal leaders love to pretend characterises their ‘business-like’ approach to government, Abbott promised that his ”Operation Sovereign Borders” would combine 12 agencies involved in ‘border protection under one command’, a military supremo to be recommended by Chief of Defence, General David Hurley yet not answerable to him. Commander kangaroo would instead report directly to no less an exalted entity than the immigration minister. But no-one need be told the substance of that reporting. It was left to speculation as to how this secretive streamlined unity would be achieved or how well it would work. Also left unsaid was that Hurley did not endorse the proposal. Nor was he consulted.

The irregular power structure was commended to the electorate as ‘a unified chain of command’. Again, anyone would think we were at war so greatly was the package larded with pseudo-military terms and assumptions. Anyone might have wondered at the proposal’s implicit advocacy of a military solution to a complex issue. When all else fails, fall back on brute force. Was this, somehow, the best our little nation could come up with? Some of us wondered whether the next step would be the proclamation of martial law.

For many the first reaction was disbelief. Surely no-one would take this Gilbertian dictatorship seriously. Surely anyone could foresee a problem with the chain of authority and its opaque operational secrecy. Surely the three stars would quickly lose their shine as commander kangaroo was laughed out of the water, or lost at sea. Surely we would come to our senses and remember our legal and moral obligation to those forced to seek asylum. Sadly, this was not to be. Quite the contrary: instead appear increasing signs of a widespread belief that “Operation Sovereign Borders” is ‘working’, as a Labor politician put it this week, (before others in the party remonstrated). The same comment by a journalist from the Guardian newspaper on Q&A a few days ago drew a round of applause. it was a chilling illustration of the power of propaganda.

Sadly, ‘border protection’ appears now to be embedded in Australian government policy and practice. It has seeped into our collective unconscious, that part of the national psyche too fearful to think straight. It is found in that unreasoned acceptance of rebranded, re-packaged cruelty, hostility and indifference to others in danger and distress that finds expression in ‘turn back the boats’, Abbott’s endlessly repeated slogan. And immigration minister Scott Morrison acts as if he is accountable to no-one, including the President of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Professor Gillian Triggs as evidenced in his boorish, bullying behaviour whilst giving evidence to The National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention. Certainly he has been able to spend billions, at a time of budget emergency.

Border protection dovetails neatly with the heightened paranoia recently invoked by the Abbott government in which it is held that we are at grave risk of attack from ‘those who hate our way of life’. Ostensibly to protect ourselves from terrorists, we accepted new liberties with language and have agreed to new laws which effectively permit the state to increase its surveillance and power over its citizens. The theatre of national security has also scored political popularity points for a poorly polling government into the bargain. A poll published in The Age today indicated a disturbing doubling of those Australians who felt their government could be trusted.

Border protection rears its ugly head in what is fondly misnamed our national conversation, a conversation which is so dominated by the agenda of vested interests and media that it is neither national nor a conversation. As Julian Burnside observes in his foreword to Marc Isaacs, The Undesirables, the phrase is misleading. For despite the newspeak, and despite the Abbott government’s militaristic procedures and posturing, the fact is that asylum seekers have a right to come to Australia. It is their human right. Australia is, of course, a signatory to the universal declaration of human rights, a declaration our nation helped to create.

Australia has an obligation under international law to admit asylum seekers. Instead, for narrow political gain, our leaders have persuaded us to pretend we are at war with them. It is time we completely threw out this case. it is untenable. it is mutually destructive. It does not become us. It does not meet our commitments to human rights. It denies our humanity. And it will break our budget. We do not have the resources to fight a war on asylum seekers on the water and a war on jihadists in the Iraqi desert. In the interests of humanity and our dwindling material resources, it is high time we stopped the Border Protection nonsense. Operation Sovereign Borders should be scrapped immediately. Scrap the language of illegals, border protection and all the associated newspeak which condones cruelty and promotes hatred. Send the three star Commander back into the navy. Billions of dollars could then be diverted into an investment in education. Australians could be helped to rediscover their true role in a world that is likely to have more rather than fewer asylum seekers and refugees. We could lead the world by demonstrating our enlightened understanding and natural compassion in taking in those who seek refuge here. And in the process, perhaps, we could rediscover what it means to be human in a world of growing hostility, division and indifference.

Renewable energy target cutback: dirty trick; dirty work and dirty business.

October 28, 2014October 28, 2014 ·

Australia is one of the best-placed countries in the world to take advantage of wind and solar energy. The country should lead the world in the use of renewable energy. Everyone could be winners: consumers, producers, our children, their children and of course the planet. And it is the people’s choice. The Australia Institute found 86 per cent of respondents want to see more renewable energy and 79 per cent think governments should support an expansion in renewable energy. There is also very strong support for more electricity generated from hydro (72 per cent), wind (80 per cent) and solar (90 per cent). By comparison, only 11 per cent wanted more electricity generated from coal. So not only are we are naturally blessed with abundant resources of sun and wind, surveys suggest that we have a population which is strongly in favour. You would think that any sane government would act in accordance with these facts.

Yet, instead, a dirty business is set to be the winner if our government gets its way. Solar will be stopped in its tracks in favour of dirty old king coal and later, nuclear. Power companies and industry associations will demonstrate once again that the Abbott government is their puppet. Some dirty work has been deployed to contravene the will of the people.

The coalition’s dirty work was brazen. When the Abbott government made a big effort to appoint climate change denier, businessman and former RBA member, Mr Richard Francis Egerton-Warburton, aka `Dick’, in charge of a ‘review’ of Australia’s Renewable Energy Target, it sent a clear signal to all parties that its previous commitment to renewable energy targets was to end. And, as it did with the commission of audit and the national curriculum review, the coalition pulled a dirty trick. It hired a third party to do the dirty work.

The decision to mount its own inquiry was, in itself, cause for concern for those in the renewable energy sector. Why did Abbott not leave the review in the hands of the climate change authority? The authority was already scheduled to carry out a review. It seems, however, there are reviews and ‘reviews’. The Abbott government did not, in fact, want any independent evaluation or analysis, it simply wanted to justify turning back the clock to support its allies in the coal-fired electricity generation business. And as the cynical old adage has it: only commission an inquiry when you know the outcome beforehand. On this Tony Abbott and Vladimir Putin should have something in common should they meet in a fortnight in Brisbane during the G20 shindig.

In the case of Tony and Dick’s RET review, it was not a review which the government was after: it wanted a result. It wanted to stop the renewable energy industry in its tracks by watering down the RET, a closing of the scheme to newcomers and, if Abbott’s instructions were to be adhered to, abolished altogether. Old king coal stood to gain a new lease on life; his backers stood to pocket billions.

As things turned out, it was not an easy scheme to pull off. The appointment became a little controversial when Warburton, the favoured candidate, attracted the attention of the federal police. Hand-picked by Abbott, who faced down more than a whiff of scandal over allegations of bribery in a foreign venture, Warburton was engaged as Abbott’s hired gun. It was to be a double-barrelled gun. A self-professed climate sceptic, with connections to fossil fuels, Warburton was also the author of a Quadrant essay in 2008 in which he argued that Australia’s only alternative fuel option was nuclear. For many observers, the outcome of Warburton’s review appeared a foregone conclusion.

And so it has proved. Despite his disavowal that being a climate change sceptic would not in any way affect the outcome, Warburton’s panel report is clearly the product of those who cannot see the need for renewables; those who see all too clearly their duty to protect dirty coal powered generation. It recommended the RET either be closed to new entrants or increases in the RET be limited to half the increase in electricity demand — a “real 20 per cent’’ scenario. It must be noted that the RET is 41GWH. It has never been a percentage. Australia’s RET goal is for large-scale generators to deliver 41,000 gigawatt-hours or enough to power about 6.2 million households.

In proposing a ‘real 20%’, the government will cut the RET by 40% to 25-26 GWH. If adopted, the recommendations will decimate the local industry. The lights will go out in local wind and solar industries. Estimates are that 13 billion dollars of investment would be lost or one per cent of Australia’s GDP. Regional areas would bear the brunt of the lost investment in manufacturing wind turbine towers from Australian steel, and for other Australian products and services.

Obsolete coal burning plant will, however, be given a new lease on life. Existing power suppliers who are chiefly in the dirty business of burning coal to produce electricity stand to gain as much as $8 billion. Old, inefficient, obsolete plants previously decommissioned would be recommissioned. Power costs to consumers will rise. Research by Bloomberg New Energy Finance shows wholesale electricity prices could increase by $5 a megawatt hour by 2020.

Abbott’s appointment of Dick Warburton reveals his own and his party’s connection to big business and obsolete, dirty technology. It also hints at a potential nuclear future. Warburton is a highly successful businessman who has enjoyed lucrative directorships on many business boards including Caltex Australia. Yet his career has not been free from controversy. A director of Note Printing Australia, his firm was investigated by Federal police for alleged bribery throughout Asia between 1998 and 2008. Consequently there was some discussion over his suitability to head the review, but Abbott was prepared to make his captain’s call and appoint Warburton personally.

Abbott was aware at the time of appointment of a secret internal investigation into Warburton’s role as a former director of a firm involved in Australia’s worst foreign bribery scandal. Abbott personally approved the appointment despite serious questions about the role of Mr Warburton and his fellow former NPA directors in overseeing a company that police allege engaged in repeated foreign bribery. Accordingly, it has come as no surprise that the recommendations of his review represent bad news for the renewable energy sector, the Australian people and the planet.

RET backflip by LNP defies reason; denies reality but protects old king coal.

October 26, 2014October 26, 2014 ·

Ian McFarlane appeared on ABC Insiders today, Sunday 26 October to confirm that the Abbott government wants to wind back renewable energy targets. He also continued the Abbott ministry’s special blend of specious argument, deception and denial and its commitment to serving yesterday’s vested interests and industries. Interviews such as this increasingly reveal a government prepared to go to great lengths to misrepresent; delay, prevaricate; do almost anything rather than give any honest or open account of itself. Ministers increasingly seem to act as misrepresentatives of the people; ministers who misrepresent themselves and their actions with impunity as if that’s what all good politicians must do. The recent demise of Gough Whitlam should be sufficient example to dispel their cynical delusion were it not for their inherent wilful blindness.

Now, Ian ‘Chainsaw’ Mcfarlane is not a bad sort of a bloke for a native of Kingaroy. As Climate Change Spokesman for the Coalition in 2009, he worked on a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme with Minister for Climate Change Penny Wong, before a leadership spill deposed then party leader Malcolm Turnbull allowing Tony Abbott,to narrowly win leadership. Soon after, the policy was overturned. The member for Groom probably works well on bipartisan committees but it was painful to watch his attempts to defend his government’s reneging on an election promise. Painful also was the elephant in the room. Old king coal is alive and well and in control of LNP decision-making. Even worse was Chainsaw’s attempt to hide the decision behind statistics.

Questioned closely but good-naturedly by Barry Cassidy, McFarlane stonewalled. He resisted any construction Cassidy might offer on our behalf, especially that it was a broken promise and one which was calculated to cause hardship to those in the renewable industry. Instead of even the most modest concession all he could do was repeat his claim that everything was OK; the percentage as a real 20 percent. It was as if he believed viewers were stupid enough to be confused by the figures or taken in by the evasion. Or that if they weren’t it didn’t matter. His masters would look after the next election victory, too.

Other probing questions from Cassidy sought to provide valuable context into the decision making and the level of the government’s commitment. They were good questions which deserved straight answers. Straight answers might inform the people or fulfil the Minister’s duty to satisfy the people’s right to know. But once again, in what is becoming the Abbott’s government style, the people’s right to straight answers was brushed aside.

The minister kept his cards close to his chest, protesting that he was not going to negotiate on TV. Why weaken his position before beginning talks with other parties? Yet there were surely some details, he could concede, some insights he could safely communicate. A little less of the overweening contempt for being held to account would have been useful, too.

In the end, Chainsaw chose to be unhelpful. This tactic is becoming all too familiar. The style of his approach, his strategy of denial and withholding information resembles the would-be minister for Ebola, redoubtable Immigration Minister Scott Morrison who approaches interviews with all the hide, tact and tractability of a Mallee bull. Communicated is a smug superiority assisted by a condescending unwillingness bordering on contempt that he could ever get real, ever engage in real dialogue. The subtext is ugly. It is dismissive and vainglorious. Because you don’t count. We are in power. We will do whatever we can get away with. Run along Sonny, nothing to see here.

It was depressing TV. Here is an elected government in a western democracy once again flouting its responsibility to work towards a sustainable future, a democratically elected government that cannot muster the courage to make a straight statement about cutting its commitment to renewable energy. Mcfarlane explained the agreed target of 20% would now be revised downward to match the drop in energy sales. In other words, the energy policy on renewable targets is largely dictated by dinosaur mates in the coal-burning power generation industry.

In real terms it means a cut of about 40% and threatens many who have committed to the manufacture and installation of renewable power. It is another ignorant and retrograde step from a government that is prepared to back big capital and bugger the survival of the planet. A government that looks to its rich and powerful mates for its action plan rather than heed reality or look to the future. Or listen to its electorate. It’s always about short term political advantage. Climate change is absolute crap. Pollution doesn’t matter so long as the power company leaders continue to make obscenely fat profits.

The RET target back down is another broken promise in a series from our political leaders who promised whatever it took to get elected without any real conviction or commitment. One in power, it has practised a ruthless pragmatism in the service of vested interests who have everything to gain by winding back renewable energy targets, as if there were no tomorrow.

The G20 monster circus in Brisbane: an almost total waste of time and money.

October 24, 2014October 24, 2014 ·

The $45 million the Australia government is wasting hosting a G20 meeting in Brisbane 15-16 November is disgraceful. It is a shameful waste of money for an exercise in flatulent fatuity; a meeting that will once again produce a communique that no-one can understand and which no member has to abide by. Take this most recent example produced in Paris after an all-night meeting:

“Today we agreed on a work program aimed at strengthening the functioning of the IMS, including through coherent approaches and measures to deal with potentially destabilizing capital flows, among which macro-prudential measures, mindful of possible drawbacks; and management of global liquidity to strengthen our capacity to prevent and deal with shocks, including issues such as Financial Safety Nets and the role of the SDR.”

Clearly the G20 is not a meeting that one attends to achieve anything. G20 began in 1999 to achieve co-operation in world financial system but quickly became a meeting about meeting. For a moment in 2008 when even its members recognised that a world financial crisis was upon them and that it posed some immediate threat to capitalism, it proposed a complete reform of the international monetary system but then, characteristically and reprehensibly did nothing.

G20 is that type of meeting. It is a meeting that one attends to be seen attending. It is an extravagant indulgence in showmanship, compulsive attention-seeing and mutual self-congratulation by a self-appointed club serving the interests of a powerful but threatened elite, an elite with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and a complete incapacity to agree on any single significant policy. Or even make sense to each other, let alone the rest of us. The meeting of G20 finance ministers in February has thus, accordingly cleverly set an agenda of achieving 2% growth for November’s meeting. No concrete plan, however, other than the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting action plan, which aims to prevent multinational corporations from taking advantage of low taxing countries. Yep. We all know how well that’s tracking.

Expect a lot of waffle about growth. Like motherhood, it is good for you but the photo opportunities are less pleasing. Expect gratuitous expressions of ersatz solidarity over the three days which will last as long as it takes for members to get home and perhaps annex another country or impose another tariff as Russia has done in the past.

Why bother? Another expensive self-deluding side show is not what any of us need. It comprises neither real nor effective symbolic leadership. Above all it sets a poor example at a time when the world needs leaders prepared to marshal every possible resource to ensure our continued survival. In an era of peak oil, rapid climate change, species extinction, water scarcity, widespread political conflict, and looming economic crises, not to mention an Ebola epidemic, what the world needs is real leadership. It deserves no less. Expect instead photographs of Joe Hockey or Tony Abbott making expansive hand gestures and generally hamming for the camera. Look at moi! Look at moi! ‘Two per cent growth agreed’ the picture may well be captioned by the spin doctors of whom there will be a record number attending the Brisbane spin-fest.

Humanity needs leadership by example, leadership that does not vaunt itself, indulge itself or flatter itself on its fame or friendship with famous names. It demands leaders who will think and act; not fritter away their energies in mutual back-slapping and schmoozing amidst the ritual exchange of vacuous slogans that characterise the typical G20 junket.

Above all the world needs leaders who are prepared to roll up their sleeves and quietly get on with the job of dealing with the many challenges confronting all of us; the many challenges to our continuing existence. There is no time to waste on bread and circuses. G20 leaders should wake up to the fact that they have more pressing priorities; more urgent tasks to attend to than shaking hands and listening politely once again while an antipodean treasurer stumbles to extol the virtues of venture capital, free markets and small government. G20 leaders should stay at home. Save the air fares. Save the planet. Get on with the job. Get on with the real business of governing. Scrap all future meetings. Use existing UN organisations before they atrophy from disuse.

Expect a lot of jargon about cost benefit analyses. But don’t expect anyone present to take it seriously or this to apply to the meeting itself. The cost even to host the circus vastly exceeds its usefulness. And its symbolic significance. The world would be a better place if G20 delegates had a change of heart, met by video-conference and saved conferences costs for something that makes a difference. Imagine if just $40 million were to be diverted into fighting Ebola in West Africa, donated to refugee organisations, or invested in education and health for the poor. What a difference that could make.

Instead, the G20 juggernaut trundles out of control through another shameless orgy of self-promotion and photographs as the self-important posture in the midst of widespread suffering and serious instability.

It promises to be a big show. There will be a lot of new faces in town: up to 4,000 delegates are expected to attend with around 2,500 media representatives. Expect a lavish do. Australia has spent up large as Bob Ellis observes:

Abbott was revealed to have spent 254,000 on a table and some chairs and their transport to the APEC summit, money that might have gone to our soldiers, or our dead soldiers’ children, plus 150,000 on some computer tablets, 120,000 on ‘advice’ on ‘leasing armoured vehicles’, 34 million for security guards and 10 million for hotels. The 44 million 524 thousand thus spent would have kept ten small theatre companies going for a thousand years on the interest alone. But it was ‘well worth the expense,’ Abbott said, ‘to keep the mass murderer Putin comfortable for three days, and well fed on Queensland rump steak, and anxious to buy more of it, which he has unaccountably, lately, refused to.’

It would be nice if the G20 leaders stayed at home without telling Putin. One of the major drawbacks of meetings about meetings such as G20 is that they are opportunities for the unprincipled to exploit to help manufacture acceptance and legitimacy. Leaders such as Putin can use the facts that they were invited and that they attended to continue to pretend to be real leaders, with something to contribute, instead of crazed psychopaths who murder their opponents at home while invading neighbouring countries, shoot down passenger aircraft, support the Syrian genocide and generally follow a policy of brutal, ruthless expediency and single-minded, blind self-interest.

So far, the G20 has failed to muster the resolve to disinvite the Russian leader. Perhaps there is poetic justice in the end, however, in the forcible detention of such leaders in a venue which is likely to be stuffed full of false friends, false plans and filled with hot air. If he cannot be held to account, he will doubtless be made to suffer, if only briefly. Perhaps in the intolerable, longwinded longeurs of an address by chairman Joe Hockey or any other comfortably self-satisfied representative of the privileged and irresponsible, there will be just a touch of terror at the prospect of death by Powerpoint.

And beyond that excruciating horror, a nightmare vision may emerge unbidden. The many-headed monster of mutual self-destruction appears, made visible through the abdication of world leadership. Nurtured by unreason, wanton self-deception and vested self-interest, it threatens everyone’s future as it vitiates the spirit and usurps the practice of common humanity. Feasting greedily on the remains of international cooperation is the G20 beast slouching roughly towards Bethlehem.

Australia needs to get real on Ebola crisis

October 22, 2014October 22, 2014 ·

When the going gets tough, in Billy Ocean’s song, the tough get going. Yet when it comes to Ebola, Australian PM, self-styled tough guy Tony Abbott, wants to firmly stay put.

Abbott’s advisors need to work harder. They need to tell the PM frankly that putting his head in the sand is not a good look; opting for non-involvement is not an option. They could start with the message that his non-involvement sends. It is not flattering: it he doesn’t suit his macho man of action image and it certainly does not signal any deep concern or even a sound grasp of realities. Indeed, he is choosing to ignore local experts; ignore popular opinion.

Abbott’s stance is not representative of all Australians. Certainly, it fails to meet the expectations of Australian health care professionals. Australian medical experts understand that Ebola concerns us all. They want the government to see that the disease demands an effort from all nations. And they want their government to act immediately.

AMA President, A/Prof Brian Owler, sees an evolving international humanitarian crisis, in which Australia must provide urgent direct assistance. Australia should be providing more money to help contain the spread of the disease, and we should also be sending teams of medical and health professionals to help treat the thousands of people, across several countries, affected by Ebola.

“The AMA acknowledges the recent commitment of $18 million by the Australian Government, but it is clear now that much more needs to be provided. If the Government can get military arms airlifted to northern Iraq at short notice, surely we can airlift medical arms and legs to West Africa just as quickly to save lives. Australia and other developed nations must show leadership and act immediately to provide greater support to WHO and the people of West Africa affected by this human tragedy,” A/Prof Owler said.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop is quick to remind us, Australia has virtuously contributed 18 million dollars but will not send medical personnel. Why? The Abbott government’s reasons sound like excuses. West Africa is too far away from Australia. We are already donating money. We need to have safety guarantees.

Many individual Australians see it differently; they have not hesitated to exercise their humanity. They have no trouble ‘getting it’. They have quickly shown greater insight and understanding than their government can muster. Australian volunteers understand that money is not enough. Personnel are urgently required. On the ground. Ebola is a big enough threat to world health to risk your life fighting.

Accordingly, thirty Australians are estimated to be working in West Africa for organisations such as the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières fighting Ebola. Their commitment is admirable, reassuring. These men and women understand what needs to be done and they get on with it. They appreciate that Ebola is everyone’s business, the collective responsibility of every one of us.

Disappointingly, Abbott appears determined to ignore Australia’s responsibility as an international citizen. What is he playing at? His cautiously timid response contrasts markedly with his other forays into international relations such as his recent hairy-chested response to ‘shirt-front’ Vladimir Putin. No shirt-fronting here. Just a quick side step or perhaps a duck and weave, keeping his head down.

Abbott’s response is also in dramatic contrast to his eagerly pledging Australian Military support to the United States call for a joint mission to fight ISIS in the Iraq and Syria. He made the pledge before being asked. Despite having no clear strategy, carrying high risks and with no Iraqi legal indemnity in place except for a loose agreement on a legal framework, Australia has agreed to commit half a billion dollars a year at least to the ‘humanitarian mission.’

Abbott has been quick to fend off critics. He counters suggestions Australia is not doing enough to fight Ebola, by working the responsibility angle: he claims it would be “irresponsible” to send personnel to West Africa without ‘an iron-clad guarantee’ that any health worker requiring treatment after becoming infected with the lethal virus would receive it from one of Australia’s political allies.

Health Minister Peter Dutton argues that an infected person would not survive the 30-hour flight to Australia if they were to contract the virus in West Africa. Government officials claim it could take up to a week to evacuate an infected person to Australia. It hasn’t stopped the volunteers. And it ignores potential medical care for infected personnel partnerships in other countries such as Cuba.

On the face of it, Australia’s response is damning. Australia’s donation of 18 million dollars, is ‘lethally inadequate’ according to Médecins Sans Frontières International, Dr Joanne Liu who contends that ‘The fight against Ebola is like a war and we need to send a clear chain of command.’

Some wars, it seems, are more popular than others to Australia’s leaders. The Australian government is perfectly willing to commit at least half a billion a year on air strikes and military advisers which are guaranteed to ensure the deaths of innocent men, women and children in Iraq. It is willing to give millions to Cambodia with no strings attached to induce that country to take asylum seekers. It is prepared to spend billions on off-shore camps for asylum seekers. Yet it baulks at rolling up its sleeves and fighting Ebola.

All of this begs the question of Australia’s priorities. Our present stance is both unrealistic, unsustainable and unworthy. We pride ourselves on our national mythos of capability and mateship. We are proud to take our part on world agencies. If we are genuinely deserving of our seat on the UN Security Council or our place in G20, however, we need to put up or shut up.

The Ebola outbreak is our worst on record. 9000 people have been infected. More than half those affected have died. On 8 August, the World Health Organisation (WHO) described the epidemic as “the most severe, acute health emergency seen in modern times”.

The UN has given the world a deadline of 60 days to get the disease under control or face “unprecedented situation for which we don’t have a plan”, warning Africa could see up to 10,000 new Ebola cases a week if the disease is not contained.

Australia needs to take its head out of the sand and act in a way that equates with its responsibilities as a world citizen.

Urban Wronski Writes

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