Monthly Archives: January 2021

Australian Politics

Voters need to wake up, before they steal all the silver

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Gradually Australians are coming around to the fact that governments are different now. There was a time when all governments were terrified when Budget Night came around. If there was to be an increase in the price of cigarettes, or a pot of beer, there would likely be a wave of popular disgust.

This form of increase in the excise tax was typically announced once a year, and the next morning’s newspapers either frothed at the mouth, or conversely, praised the decision. It could even decide the fate of the government at the next election.

These days, with an overabundance of ‘data’, technical explanations of reasons for and against, the voter is often left in the dark, because of the sheer volume of information, which is often buried beneath layers of spin, and also by the use of grandfather clauses, and other drafting tricks. So the law can change, unannounced. Or it can be restricted, as “commercial in confidence”, or maybe because it deals with “operational matters”.

Of course that is the stock in trade of most neoliberal governments, because the compact between the governors, and the governed, is fractured. Their promises are empty, they no longer govern for all, and they refuse to be held accountable. They no longer serve at our discretion. They have moved beyond asking for our permission.

Getting a good go, if you have mates

These days many decisions are explained as a part of a necessary budget repair, or as a vital part of macroeconomic planning. If it pertains to national security then we must agree to take it on trust that getting submarines from Japan, or France, or Timbuktu will turn out to be a masterful decision. Years later, unfulfilled contracts, often with huge amounts of damages, are no-one’s fault. We are asked to look away. Probably the fault of both sides, term after term. All care and no responsibility.

Matters of equity are no longer hot button issues, because if you are doing well in Australia, you like the sound of the cult of competitive capitalism. You send your children to private schools, because you want your children to prosper, and you’d prefer they did not rub shoulders with the plebs.

No problem that the funding you receive is often stolen from the public education budget. Funding formulas are so complex that you must have a degree in mathematics to understand why already wealthy schools need anything from the public purse.

Similarly for health. Get your knee looked after, immediately, in the fancy private hospital, and have the whole thing subsidised by the public health sector. I wonder why these users of the private education, and private health systems want handouts from the government, in the form of subsidy from the public. If you want to go private, then do it properly. Go private!

Not so good if you are not a mate

Of course, if you are not doing very well, then you are probably too busy trying to juggle work-shifts and childcare, and finding the basics of life, to worry about reading the fine print of how recent governments will govern. You know that you will be vilified and blamed for your lack of resources, even as they give tax cuts to the rich, and indulge in the cargo cult called “trickle down theory”.

If you suffer a disability, or are disadvantaged in any number of ways, you are probably rorting the system. That is because such governments as ours no longer care, and they distrust the motives of the poor.

Some still pay lip service to the conventions of caring, but you will have noticed that announcements very seldom eventuate, because the news cycle has passed on, and your grant served its purpose as an announcement.

Certain members, even ministers, routinely make statements so distasteful, that only a generation ago, such words would cause immediate shame and resignation, but now it is excused under the banner of free speech, or “our party is a broad church”. This is code for he (mainly men) is an unmannered brute, but he votes for me in the party room, so there’s not much I can do.

For the first time in our history there is a good chance that our parliamentarians are all time-serving careerists, and if there is any guiding principle then it would be “feather your nest, because the good times may not last”.

It looks bad that such hacks are so insanely well paid, considering their obvious lack of skills, empathy, intelligence, or character. Many were political advisers, before they became politicians, and the chief qualifier for that role is that you were a loud mouth at university, or you were related to a politician.

The private sector is even worse. The average multiplier between the salary of a CEO and a shop floor worker is now sitting at 78 times. If you had had experience of some of the CEOs I have worked for, weep again. Most of them couldn’t find their lunch without help.

What can we do?

We have to start paying attention. We have to decide whether this system is good enough. We have to decide if apathy is better than engagement. And we have to stop being nostalgic for the good old days, when the people in power really had the interests of the country, and its people, in their hearts. Those days are gone. Embrace the new realism.

If you want to live in a system which routinely duds the working person, then do nothing. Otherwise, act on your rights. Defend the ABC. Demand explanations for decisions. Pester your local member. Make them work for you, because that is why they are paid so much.

Scott Morrison is not a political genius. He is a chancer, and he has managed to keep one step ahead of the posse so far. He manages to look good because he leads a team which may be the worst, and the shallowest, in living memory.

They are all skating on thin ice, hoping we won’t wake up until their superannuation is safe, and the natural path from government to industry is still available. But as with all things political, the wheel turns.

Biden has replaced Trump. Johnson has so stuffed up the UK that he will eventually be forced to own his stupid mistakes. The world is watching as Trump is brought to book, and all the tin-pot authoritarian leaders are stepping carefully.

The neoliberal fraud has been around for about forty years now, and it must run aground soon. We need to hold them to account. Every day their lies and dishonesty cause more harm, and our fellow citizens need to concentrate.

Australian Politics

Some Coalition members want voter suppression here

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Many of us in Australia are now mightily impressed with the state of our nation, especially when we compare it with our rich and powerful ally, the USA.

We have managed to somehow avoid the utter chaos and devastation, which they have endured now, for close to a year, during a once in a century pandemic. Our Government(s) made plenty of mistakes in handling the pandemic, but nothing on the scale of the criminal negligence President Trump and his Republican Party allies were guilty of.

But there are gathering signs that we have a particularly malicious set of parliamentarians, and their fellow travellers, who are keen to import some really bad American ideas.

The reason the American system has faltered recently is that the traditions and the myths of their origin story have been hi-jacked, and politicised, and the myths have won out, over common sense.

Some examples include the notion of personal liberty outweighing the public good, the flawed view that public health systems are socialist, the idea that education is not a human right, but something to be purchased.

Other caustic ideas include the notion that regulations on the private sector are always bad, that global warming is rubbish, that welfare paid is money wasted, that citizens should have the right to bear arms, that any relationship, or family, based on anything other than the classic nuclear family is immoral, that reducing taxes on the rich does anything other than increase inequality, and that poverty is a sign that a vengeful god is punishing the poor, because they deserve to be punished.

There are many other areas to examine, but I want to highlight the matter of voter suppression, which is definitely on the radar for our very own Trumpist government.

Voter suppression is a first step to authoritarianism

Voter suppression is an ancient, and honoured tradition in America, and it continues today. Since 1870, when the Fifteenth Amendment was passed, all men (later broadened to include women) were guaranteed the right to vote. This included men of all races, and specifically former slaves. Southern states, still smarting from their loss in the Civil War, set about limiting black access to the vote.

These methods included a poll tax, which charged a fee to lodge a vote. Poor whites could gain an exemption from paying the fee, but not poor blacks.

Literacy tests were also routinely applied, with many more black Americans being excluded than white Americans. This often related to the education available to black Americans, which was in most cases inferior, if it was even available. But in other cases, the tests applied were selective, with African-Americans often receiving more difficult tests. These measures were gradually phased out during the 1960s, but not before they had disenfranchised generations of otherwise entitled voters.

More recently the Republican Party has refined its methods, to suit the times. In Florida, for example, until recently convicted felons were ineligible to vote. Many with similar names to felons were wrongly purged from the electoral rolls.

That law was reversed in 2018, but the Republican State Government managed to circumvent the intention of the statute, known as Amendment 4, by making restoration of the right to vote almost impossible. Do not forget the election of George W Bush in 2000 was decided by less than a thousand votes, while convicted felons, and those with similar names, were purged from the electoral rolls. Convicted felons were, by a huge margin, more likely to be black, and to vote Democrat.

Although the election last year was not decided by a tiny number of votes, Florida voted for Trump. As many as 1.4 million voters were eligible to be restored to the rolls, but only 300,000 were allowed to register. That is 1.1 million voters disenfranchised. That would make a difference to the result.

That couldn’t happen here

Of course that could never happen here, could it? We have no voter fraud here, so there could be no reason to change the voting rules. Well, yes it could, As Caitlin Fitzsimmons recently reported in the Herald Sun, of all newspapers, the (Australian) federal government’s joint standing committee on electoral matters recently included a recommendation to require ID to vote, and another recommendation to require ID to enrol or change address.

Liberal members of the committee made similar recommendations in their reports on the 2013 and 2016 elections as well. They quoted several submissions in support, from the Institute of Public Affairs, and others. Labor and the Greens opposed the recommendations, but were outvoted.

There is a cynical reason for such a simple rule. The more disadvantaged you are, the more difficult it is to conform to what look like petty requirements. And the ID of choice for the majority of Australians is the driver’s licence. Petty for you, and me, but not if you have insecure housing, or are forced to live on the starvation line, or if you are fleeing domestic violence. And many disadvantaged people do not own, or drive, a car. That means they do not necessarily own a licence, and yet they may need to buy a licence, in order simply to vote.

The Liberals think that the disadvantaged are more inclined to vote for Labor, so any measure which makes voting or registering to vote more difficult, is a good thing. There is a reason why most Australians despise the IPA and its ilk. They appear to be staffed by weird and strangely cruel people, who desperately want to be characters in Atlas Shrugged. Strange, but true.

Australian Politics

Trump’s Australian fans are as stupid as you would expect

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Although the US election is done and dusted, and Donald Trump now faces an uncertain future, most of the democratic world seems to have formed a consensus that the scenes in the Capitol were scandalous, and terrifying. They might still lead to criminal charges against the President; they have already caused him to be impeached, for a genuinely “unprecedented” second time.

The fact that the crowd was incited by Trump is seemingly settled, and leading parliamentarians from around the world have weighed in to condemn both the actions of the murderous mob, and also those of the ‘Instigator in Chief’.

Those leaders include Boris Johnson, Nicola Sturgeon, Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ardern, and even Vladimir Putin. They all condemned the revolt, but in good old Australia we weren’t that concerned, it seems.

Our Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, expressed his “distress”, but he could not bring himself to connect the actions of the mob with President Trump. That is a disgraceful omission, for a democratically elected leader, considering that Trump’s goal was to incite a violent insurrection, with the possible outcome of seizing power, perhaps permanently. Do not forget that Trump is still the “Commander in Chief” of the most powerful nation on earth.

Some MPs thought Twitter was more at fault than the President

Michael McCormack was our acting Prime Minister last week. He was asked whether he condemned Trump’s actions, but then he went on to answer that “violence is violence and we condemn it in all its forms,” and then he compared the Black Lives Matter demonstrations with the attack on the Capitol. He did not want to be drawn on who was to blame.

Liberal MPs Craig Kelly and Dave Sharma, Nationals MP George Christensen, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and acting Prime Minister Michael McCormack are among government members who have condemned the “silencing” of Trump.

This is presumably because they believe that your right to incite violence is more important than the competing right of having your vote counted, and not overturned by a mob of illiterate thugs. It also shows that these ‘luminaries’ are woefully ignorant of the exceptions to the First Amendment. These are as follow:

Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, and commercial speech such as advertising. Wikipedia (Categories in bold type are those Trump habitually uses.)

Why would Morrison not condemn Trump?

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has always been embarrassingly taken in by Trump’s ‘braggadocio’ (an apt term, meaning boastful or arrogant behaviour). Morrison has stopped far short of condemning the President, an extraordinary omission from the leader of a liberal democracy, considering Trump’s goal was to violently overthrow the results of a democratic election and retain his power.

A complicating factor is that much of Trump’s electoral success has been built on the white evangelical vote. Footage of charismatic Christians ‘laying hands on’ Trump in the White House may be viewed as quaint in Australia, but is Morrison ‘blinded by the light’ when it comes to Trump? We can only hope he does not see Trump as “the chosen one”, as Trump has been described in the US.

Well after Trump lost the election, he awarded Morrison a Legion of Merit, for leadership which if it wasn’t so tragic, would be funny. Presumably he did not mean the award to be for addressing global warming!

So John Howard gets a medal, and we go to war in Iraq. Scott Morrison gets a medal, and we defend Trump’s right to attempt to overturn an election.

Trump has been exposed over the last four years as a violent sexual predator, an adulterer, a white supremist, an anti-semite, a religious bigot, a homophobe, a fraudulent businessman, a liar, a thief, an environmental vandal and a putative dictator, and yet many of our elected representatives appear to support his right to invalidate elections and to undermine the rule of law.

The death and destruction he caused by mis-handling the pandemic is yet to be finally calculated, but the fallout will continue for years, I suspect. Will he ever be brought to book for that? As he kills his supporters they continue to flock to his side, so maybe not. Again, where were Australia’s leaders standing as he touted dangerous and stupid solutions? If you are Craig Kelly, shoulder to shoulder.

These matters are not mere mannerisms, or a lack of style. They set him apart from most of humanity, and it is worth thanking fate for his incompetence, and lack of care for detail. At least we have been spared the damage he could have caused if he was half-way competent. The US is still a democratic republic, and we can only hope Joe Biden can repair some of the damage.

But what of the state of our own democracy? A Government obsessed with secrecy, faux threats to our security, unaccountable, most of the members in the grip of the neoliberal sickness, and some individuals who appear to be in personal thrall to the departing, failed President. How many times must we utter “Poor Fellow, my country”? It might be time for Australians to actually stop, and think. This is serious.

Australian Politics

Morrison’s shallow talent pool

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As a general rule, upon election, it usually took Parliamentarians some time to show what they were made of, and gradually those with the best minds, and the greatest capacity, worked their way up through the ranks. In political life that has always meant attaining ministerial appointment. If one was unfortunate enough to be seated on the ‘wrong’ side of the chamber, one gained ‘shadow’ ministerial experience.

Often the Minister, and his or her shadow, continued in the same portfolio, over a period of years. In this way each became expert in the area covered by the job. For example, when the Government was changed by the electorate, the Shadow Minister was able to step into the ministerial role almost seamlessly, and often with shared goals. That approach was known as bi-partisanship.

This served to illustrate the maxim that the Cabinet is there to serve the country, rather than the party. In the best of times the Minister and his or her shadow were able to work together, with the goal of achieving improvement, for the country as a whole. This really came to an end with the Howard Government.

How did Howard change things?

To many Australians John Howard was known as honest, earnest and relatively harmless. But that persona was carefully crafted. His Government was described as ‘mean and tricky’ in a report Howard himself commissioned, from the Liberals’ own president, Shane Stone. Howard was on a mission in 1996 to re-make Australia, into a faux Thatcherite society, and he used the oldest trick in the book – a faux ‘budget emergency’.

Serving as a beacon to Tony Abbott in 2013, Howard ‘manufactured’ his budget emergency, and embarked on a ruthless project to rid his Government of debt, by imposing strict savings on reluctant Ministers, and selling off the country’s silver.

Some of the more notable pieces of silver were the sale of Telstra, and the privatisation of both the Commonwealth Employment Service, and the Aged Care sector. The damage these own goals have caused, has cascaded throughout the years, and continues to cause the country to bleed.

This served Howard in two ways. Firstly he engineered “cabinet solidarity” on solving the ’emergency’, thus mandating even unreasonable savings, and he isolated the so-called ‘wets’, many of whom fought for their portfolios’ funding.

‘Wets’ was another term for moderates, who generally believed in a type of humanistic Conservatism, where they achieved economic goals, while protecting the poor. Some of his best performers were either sidetracked, or actively removed from the parliament, through selective organisational targeting.

The party is of course now stacked with time-serving, narrow, ideologically motivated drones, whose life experience is usually having served as an ‘adviser’ to a parliamentarian hack, or as a lawyer. That does not deepen the gene pool, but it does provide malleable cattle with which to work.

What happened to bi-partisanship?

Cabinet ministers are now chosen on the basis of loyalty to whomever is sitting in the prime ministerial chair. Talent is in such short supply that someone like Michaelia Cash, a former lawyer, is now a cabinet minister. Her portfolio area is Employment, Skills, Small and Family Business. With her unreasoning loathing for all things union, who could she work with, across the aisle? And working at a major law firm, as a taster for small business?

Angus Taylor is a former Rhodes Scholar, and he has worked as a management consultant for twenty years or so. He must know about risk management, or he would not have been employed in management consulting. And yet, in possibly the most important role he will ever be employed in, that of reducing Australia’s emissions in a pre-apocalyptic world, he adheres to the anti-science rhetoric, and apparent obfuscations of a global heating denialist. The only possible explanation for his behaviour is that he is unable to read a risk profile, or he cannot escape the shackles of his denialism.

The Hon Melissa Price MP was Vice President of Legal and Business Development for Crosslands Resources, an iron ore miner, before she was appointed to the Environment Ministry. As Peter Fitzsimons asked on television, “If a million dead fish at Menindee doesn’t attract your attention as the environment minister, what does it take?”

She also approved the Adani Mine’s groundwater plan just days before the 2019 election, although the plan was riddled with errors. It puts her in line to contest the Worst Environment Minister in History Award, with Greg Hunt and Josh Frydenberg also in the running.

Was the Prime Minister joking with these appointments?

One theme runs through this tiny sample of ministerial misfits. It can be read as being the best we can do, with a shallow pool to pick from, or did Morrison actually choose ministers who would so underperform that he could show his contempt for the very areas they represent.

Considering the IPA obsession for small-to-no-government, could this be, like Trump’s, a new low in ministerial commitment, as we head to low-to-no regulation, and really ugly capitalism?

Politics has been called, unkindly, show business for ugly people, but it should not be taken so lightly. Politics is a deadly serious undertaking, because it has real, tangible consequences. That is why it constantly surprises us that politicians think that they have some form of pass, that they will not be judged for their actions. Because their decisions often have real-world consequences.