Tag Archives: peter dutton

Australian Politics

Peter Dutton – a man on a mission, or just a wrecker?

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The Liberal Party of Australia continues to present its worst face to the electorate. One would have assumed that Peter Dutton, one of the most unpopular politicians in Australia’s parliamentary history, could not possibly have been elected to lead an already discredited party.

But to the party which selected Tony Abbott in 2009 to the same position, one bad decision is never enough. After disposing of Abbott, who to his credit did actually win an election, they eventually woke up and replaced him with Malcolm Turnbull.

Of course, Turnbull was far too clever to be left in power, so the party chose Scott Morrison to lead them. He was meant to present a more likeable leader than his opponent, Peter Dutton. So far, there is very little to choose between the two. If you are a Liberal voter, you appear to be stuck between a rock, and a hard place.

Dutton’s public pronouncements do not help his cause

Over the years Peter Dutton has sought to present himself as a no-nonsense ‘straight talker’. It is hard to reconcile his public statements with the pleasant, personable man that some of his supporters attest to.

He described the belongings brought to Australia by refugees as, “the world’s biggest collection of Armani jeans and handbags up on Nauru waiting for people to collect it when they depart.”

When commenting on past immigration under Malcolm Fraser, he stated, “The advice I have is that out of the last 33 people who have been charged with terrorist-related offences in this country, 22 of those people are from second and third generation Lebanese-Muslim background.”

He decided that “the reality is people (in Melbourne) are scared to go out at restaurants of a night time because they’re followed home by these gangs, home invasions, and cars are stolen and we just need to call it for what it is. Of course, it is African gang violence.”

He was much more sympathetic towards white South African farmers, however. “I do think on the information that I’ve seen, people do need help, and they need help from a civilized country like ours.”

Heaven help them if they should become pregnant, though. “Some people are trying it on. Let’s be serious about this. There are people who have claimed that they’ve been raped and came to Australia to seek an abortion because they couldn’t get an abortion on Nauru. They arrived in Australia and then decided they were not going to have an abortion. They have the baby here and the moment they step off the plane their lawyers lodge papers in the federal court which injuncts us from sending them back.”

This statement was a factor in Shane Bazzi’s tweeting that Dutton was a “rape apologist”. Dutton then sued, and won, only for the original verdict to be overturned on appeal.

Adding to his sense of frustration with migrants, or refugees, or both classes of people not from South Africa, he elaborated on the theme of “anchor babies”, an anti-immigration term popularised in Trump’s America.

This was in relation to two specific children, and their parents of course; Sri Lankan couple Priya and Nadesalingam and their Australian-born daughters Kopika, and Tharunicaa. “It’s been very clear to them at every turn that they were not going to stay in Australia, and they still had children. We see that overseas in other countries, anchor babies…the emotion of trying to leverage a migration outcome based on the children,” he told Macquarie Radio.

Dutton has been accused of being racist

We can only really list his mis-statements, and allow readers to draw their own conclusions.

Dutton walked out on the apology to the Stolen Generation, and proffered the following apology for his boycott, “I didn’t appreciate the symbolism of it, and the importance to Indigenous people.”

He was caught making a joke about the rising sense of doom amongst Pacific Island nations, as they face possible extinction of their homelands, due to climate change: “Time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to have water lapping at your door.”

Is Dutton just another naysayer?

His grandstanding about the Voice to Parliament is grating, because it seems to be playing a non-existent tune. The Voice has been explained, ad nauseum, as an advisory body, only.

It will not be a third chamber to the Parliament; it will not legislate. It will advise the mostly non-indigenous parliamentarians about purported effects of legislation affecting indigenous Australians. It will not advise on national security, nor will it advise on defence matters.

And yet, ignoring his seeming irrelevance in modern Australian political life, Dutton continues to be treated as if his concerns are real. As the Prime Minister bends further backward to appease Dutton, the rest of us are forced to watch, and listen, as he inches towards understanding.

The remaining two Liberal premiers have now joined the Federal Government, and the other state premiers, in supporting the Voice to Parliament.

Dutton is isolated on policies, and on attitude

So now Dutton is marooned with the likes of the crew at Sky News, and David Littleproud’s strange fringe party. He then made the effort to attend George Pell’s funeral, and he was outraged by the decision to leave King Charles off the $5 note.

These are the current issues which marginalise him even more from mainstream Australia, or at least those voters who are under seventy years of age, and not conspiracy theorists.

Add it to his climate skepticism, and the Liberal Party of Australia is doomed to spend a very long time out on the fringes. It begs the question of how long he can be allowed to make the party not only irrelevant, but one which seems to delight in choosing unpopular causes to champion.

He seems to be channelling Tony Abbott, and we know where that leads.



Australian Politics

Scott Morrison has destroyed the LNP, possibly for generations

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Even typing those words leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Will he attempt a come-back? Will his poisonous personality rear up out of the darkness? Or will he pull the pin on his parliamentary career, and move to the U.S., where nobody will know him, and he can make lots of money preaching to the terminally lost souls of the Trumpian world?

It is hard to put into words the dread that Morrison caused in many vulnerable Australians. There was something missing, something which suggested a break in the human connection between Morrison and the rest of us.

The single worst prime minister in our history, aided and abetted by the most aimless, and spineless collection of chancers and rent-seekers ever gathered. And yet he went close to setting up a government which was almost impossible to remove.

The power of the Murdoch press pack is still very much in evidence in Australia, but the rise of the independent media, and the very powerful effect of the twitter sphere, undermined what looked like a forever government.

Anthony Albanese’s day 1 failure to name the unemployment figure also gave rise to fears that Labor’s run would be sabotaged. The performance of the ABC and its political commentators was woeful, probably fuelled by the constant threats of funding cuts, and the intimidation by the Morrison ministry.

But failures in disaster management, naked vote-buying which favoured, as always, LNP electorates; the performance of electoral liabilities like Matt Canavan and George Christensen was a reminder of how low our democracy had fallen.

On any measure now the opposition will continue to be made up of the remnants of the shattered Liberal Party, and also by those in the National Party who escaped annihilation by the skin of their teeth, but are too stupid to know that their time must be nearly up.

Peter Dutton is so spectacularly unsuitable as a leader of anything, that it immediately forces one to cast around for something, anyone, to present an alternative government. Of course looking at Dutton’s performance since rising to the leadership could fill one with despair.

Instead of looking contrite and accepting the crushing verdict of the voters, his first words as opposition leader were to suggest that he would be ‘on hand’ to clean up Labor’s “inevitable mess” in 2025.

No sense of looking for redemption. No shame regarding his own failures, from his first days as a minister. No embarrassment regarding Australia’s fall from grace within the international community. No regrets about the fate of refugees, stranded and victimised by a series of contracted bullies, as Morrison allowed his cabinet to participate in some group cruelty.

Appointing Angus Taylor as the Treasury shadow serves to highlight the lack of able members to choose from. He has a proven difficulty with numbers, a la Clover Moore. He struggled to even pretend that he was committed to reducing carbon emissions.

He is vulnerable on questions of integrity. He has shown a chronic inability to meet deadlines when releasing data and commissioned reports. This all means that possibly the most important role in opposition is being filled by someone who will struggle, especially against such a polished performer as Jim Chalmers.

There was never any acknowledgement that the election was fought on climate action, fixing corruption and a demand for accountable and humane government. Every action the LNP took, from the botched pre-selections in New South Wales, to the last minute weaponisation of prejudice against trans-gender kids, to the excesses and cruelty of Robodebt, added up to a tone-deaf government which people did not just want gone, but one that many actually feared.

The only possible excuse for the conscious bastardry shown by the LNP through nine long years is that they were all struck with a group hysteria, in which they lost their minds, and their moral compasses, in the naked arrogance of never-ending power.

That is why so many in the community, with little or no interest in politics, finally woke up to the nasty excesses, the blame shifting and the outright theft, and mis-use of taxpayers’ funds.

How can we be expected to accept members of parliament with the obvious character flaws of some of the casualties of ‘the reckoning’? For such it was.

We woke up that the leader was from a religious cult, who only this year admitted, through a ‘sermon’ he gave at Margaret Court’s very own church, that he doesn’t believe in government, and thus does not believe in democracy.

As seems the case with the whole of the Pentecostal movement, it is their inability to understand the message of the New Testament which confuses us most.

Was Christ’s movement elitist, obsessed with money and material success, and a ‘closed door’ society? Could you be guaranteed a place in heaven, as long as you were baptised twice? The question must be asked: Do any of them actually read, and understand, the written word?

His beliefs are central to who he is, and they are incomprehensible. They have no connection to the Christianity most of us recognise, whether we believe or not.

The Prosperity Gospel is similarly impossible to reconcile with the ideas of Christ, who was apparently at pains to protect the meek from the powerful, and who espoused the virtue of spiritual grace above material wealth.

Morrison’s depiction of welfare as wrong-headed and immoral is further proof that he was always unsuitable for any position in government. He was, at the end of the day, unable to leave his self-affirming beliefs behind.

Even the Romans knew that at the least the people must be fed. Otherwise they will rise up, and the state will be consumed by revolution and turmoil. Morrison’s appearance at the Robodebt Royal Commission paid lip service to the notion of welfare, but he then had to be the ‘cop on the welfare beat’.

His playbook was spectacularly unsuited to Australian conditions. We are not a nation of religious bigots. We are not a nation of patriarchal misogynists. We are a nation which has always honoured the principles of fairness and justice before the law.

We have always believed that our representatives must act in a manner befitting their high status, and the rewards which accrue to politicians.

Morrison and his ‘vandals’ trashed the conventions, laying bare the lack of regulation and accountability, which had never been so nakedly exposed as it was by the behaviour of the LNP government.

If you are confronted by visions of Barnaby Joyce, apparently the worse for wear railing about whatever the issue of the day was, then Australia’s voters decided to disempower this collection of misfits, and to give the other team a go.

Anthony Albanese is not much of a speaker, and he can stumble on a simple answer, but he appears to be decent, caring, and competent. These qualities are in short supply, and especially on the opposition front bench.

Simon Birmingham is what I would call an old fashioned Liberal. He appears to be decent, caring, and competent. I expect that in the not too distant future, the LNP rump, following a couple more disastrous polls on Dutton and Ley, will decide the neo-liberal far right experiment has failed, and will attempt to reset the coalition.

Sadly the coalition parties have been stripped of talent, and so we could see a Labor government for years to come. That poses a series of future problems. A good government needs a good opposition. Morrison has pretty much made that impossible.

This article has been updated, to better reflect the writer’s current opinion.

Australian Politics, COVID-19

Too little, too late, for everything

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When a politician rises to the top of his profession we expect that he or she has always wanted the job, and that he or she has meticulously planned every step along the way. I would argue that Morrison is aware of his limitations, but he rose to the top despite not having a plan. He believes in his own luck, because he really believes that God has a stake in the game. Why not throw your hat in the ring, if you believe in divine providence?

Scott Morrison seems never to have planned for anything. He wasn’t ready for the Prime Ministership. He just put his hand up when it became clear that Malcolm Turnbull lacked the political skills to protect his position, and that Peter Dutton was unacceptable, not only to the Liberals who were voting for a new leader, but for the Australian electorate at large. So his run was fortuitous, and landed him the top job, with no preparation, and no relatable skills with which to sell himself to us.

Some of the antipathy toward Dutton has dissipated. That will be attributable to his change of portfolios, and also to the nature of the Ministry of Defence. His role at Home Affairs was too powerful to trust him with, and Defence is the sort of portfolio where most of us are happy to see someone who can focus, and stay relatively quiet, and in the case of Dutton, stay out of our private lives and communications. It is after all, the portfolio which directs our armed forces, and most citizens are content to allow our defence chiefs to potter about, and to not smash the china (pun intended). So unless the U.S. wants another war, we’re close to being safe. Australia does not elect to go to war by itself.

The bushfires of 2019-2020 were our first exposure to Morrison, and he showed us what he was like from the outset. It was all about him, and what he would deliver to those who needed help. The Defence Force was his to deploy, the payment of volunteer fire fighters was his decision, the excuses were picked up from the side of the road (definitely NOT climate change related; arsonists lit most of the fires; the fuel load was high, which could be conveniently used to divert blame to the states.

With responsibility comes reward. It was not a huge leap for him to choose a holiday in Hawaii. He felt he deserved it, and as befits a small time thinker, he would take the reward before he had earned it. He then tried to hide it, which provided further proof that he was not up to the job.

Morrison on holiday

He must have felt that he could leave the country to its own devices, and that no-one would enquire as to his whereabouts. Leaders of modern nations have responsibilities, and obligations, to a wide range of stakeholders. Citizens, Ministers, other Governments, both inside Australia and internationally, need to know that there is somebody in charge. In emergencies they need to be ‘on the ground’.

It is beyond understanding that he would absent himself from his duties during an existential crisis for the whole of the East Coast. Secondly he put his staff members in an unenviable position, in that they were expected to join in on the deception. This attitude of protecting their boss at the expense of the rest of the nation, has fuelled distrust of the Prime Minister’s Office ever since.

We now wonder why he visited his family in Sydney for Fathers’ Day, when so many others of us had been stopped from seeing our families. We have all heard tales of children being kept apart from their parents, of cancer patients not permitted to access treatment if they live on the wrong side of the border, even of dying parents left to die alone. That did not bother Morrison. He has risen further than he expected, and the privileges of rank are there to be used. He earned them. I am sure he reminds himself often that it is his due.

The explanation lies in the particular nature of this accidental Prime Minister, and his choices and work history. He has always managed to be appointed to plum jobs because of his connections. Those jobs have been mainly middle to upper management, as a sort of Regional Manager. He appears to last a couple of years, and to then move on, leaving behind conflict and, as often as not, there are legal or accountability issues. Reports into his corporate behaviour seem to go missing, and there is always a patron willing to put him forward for the next gig.

He fell into parliament, after a smear campaign against his pre-selection opponent. That campaign was later proved to be false, but the damage was done. An amusing sideshow has been the career of Craig Kelly. Destined for the electoral scrap-heap, he was saved by a direct intervention by Morrison. Morrison over-rode the Liberal Party’s decision to dis-endorse Kelly at the 2019 election. He saved him, only to lose him to the cross bench, and then, more odiously, to Clive Palmer.

His record over the pandemic has been similarly mercurial. Pro-lockdown, anti-lockdown, pro-income support, anti-income support. Won’t build quarantine stations, yes he will. Will buy vaccines, but he wants the cheap ones. Totally transparent, as when he told us all to not accept the AstraZeneca vaccine, and then in favour of it, to almost every age. It is definitely not a race, it is a race. Now it is a race which can be won by starting slowly, but then powering home. In other words, he is making it up. The worst part is that he changes his mind according to reactions to his last pronouncement, rather than for the country’s good.

Our decent Prime Ministers have a larger calling. Their remit appears to have been to work for the good of Australia, whereas Scott Morrison’s motivation appears to be getting his pay, taking his holidays when he is ready, see the family when he wants to, and win the next election.

Scott Morrison needs to reflect on why he seems to be so unpopular, and why his every action is endlessly dissected. It is because he doesn’t hide his disdain for the common people, and the people are discovering that fact. He also appears to be fairly keen on Scott Morrison.

Australian Politics

Is Peter Dutton ‘Quite Right’?

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Why is it important to ask the question?

Peter Dutton is arguably the second most powerful person in Australia, after his boss, Scott Morrison. That means that we should be very mindful of his character, and his morals, his prejudices and his quirks, even his intelligence, because he, in his enormous portfolio, wields tremendous power, which can make or break lives.

The job was handed to him by Malcolm Turnbull, in one of his less savvy moments. Turnbull increased the department’s oversight, and hence Dutton’s responsibilities, to include national security, border control and law enforcement agencies of the government. This was at a time when there was speculation that Dutton needed to be distracted, due to raging ambition for the top job, and Turnbull’s apparent inability to control the right wing of his party. This gave Dutton access to almost unlimited power.

Wikipedia’s description is enough: The Department of Home Affairs is the Australian Government interior ministry with responsibilities for national security, law enforcement, emergency management, border control, immigration, refugees, citizenship, and multicultural affairs. Considering that Dutton’s performance at Immigration had been sub-optimal, and getting worse, it was like a gift for bad performance.

Remember this is the person once voted the worst Health Minister in history, worse than Tony Abbott even. His record at Immigration was equally appalling, and Home Affairs is now a champion in not meeting statutory targets, and as for budgeting, and staff morale, it ranks lowest of all Commonwealth departments. I sometimes think that, by keeping this person in the Ministry, Turnbull handed his eventual executioner the knife.

We need to trust him. But for many reasons we cannot. These are some of them:

He boycotted The Apology

He publicly refused to attend the National Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples, delivered by Kevin Rudd, in 2008. The apology was directed to the Stolen Generations, for the actions and policies of successive governments, which “inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians”.

He was the only Opposition front bencher to boycott the Apology, and in Kevin Rudd’s words, “Dutton was an MP for 7 years and was 38 when he boycotted the apology to first Australians. A grown man, experienced politician who knew what he was doing – sending a dog-whistle to racist sentiment. A question of character.For this reason alone, he should never be Prime Minister, in what can only be seen as a slap in the face for those affected.”

In 2010 he stood by his decision, deeming the apology irrelevant. In 2017, a full six years later, he said he had misunderstood the importance of the occasion, and regretted not being there. This stands as one of the two occasions I can recall, where he has expressed doubts about either his words, or his actions.

Is it time to re-assess him?

He has said many unacceptable things along the journey; the list is too long, and too tedious to reproduce here. But the theme is one of unrelieved hard-right intolerance. He does not even try and moderate his image.

He claims not to have been misunderstood, nor has he been mis-quoted. He takes pride in being direct, and in generally refusing to apologise, no matter what he has said. He proudly carries the banner for the far-right in the Morrison Government, and many believe that, should Morrison falter, Dutton stands ready to pounce.

Unlike Morrison there is not a shady history of him being removed from past jobs, no history of behind the scenes politicking. He was a policeman, then he was an MP. His public life is our only real source material, but he has been very open about his opinions, and he has delivered an unvarnished version of himself.

The only time he has attempted a ‘make-over’ was when he challenged for the Prime Ministership. He toyed with the idea of re-packaging himself for the public, and he was photographed smiling. Upon losing he appeared destined for the scrap heap, but Morrison probably believes that the old adage “Keep your friends close, and your enemies even closer” is good policy. Anyway, he stayed in the ministry, in his super-sized ministry.

In 2016, while Immigration Minister, he stated that Malcolm Fraser had made a mistake by letting in Lebanese-Muslim migrants in the 1970s. His reasoning is, as usual for Mr Dutton, shallow, misleading and discriminatory, both racially and religiously.

He believes that, no matter how long these people are in Australia, they, and their descendants, are more likely to commit criminal offences. While mathematically totally impossible to prove, or to disprove, when queried on his statement, he responded that the figures supported him, and that he would not be intimidated into re-considering his stance.

This is directly accusing immigrants, who arrived fifty years ago, of being stained with some sort of invisible criminal gene, which has managed to survive the many, many thousands of genetic permutations which have occurred since then. If it quacks like a racist duck, it probably is one. On a personal note, I am directly descended from Irish ‘criminal’ stock. Imagine if one of my relatives had married a third or fourth generation Lebanese. Would a ‘multiplier effect’ kick in? Surely the very basis of Australia is that Australians are all equal, no matter where your family came from, and no matter which version of God you believe in.

Again, when speaking out against refugees in 2016 he stated that many of them would take Australian jobs, while languishing in unemployment queues, and using Medicare. It is hard to languish in a queue when you’re in a ‘stolen’ job. And what is wrong with using Medicare, if you are paying taxes, in that same ‘stolen’ job? The logic is as twisted as his mind appears to be. Does he mean these things, or is he using the classic dog-whistle to excite the right? And we should not forget his statement, that Melbournians are too afraid to go out to dinner, because we fear African gangs so much. These statements came directly from a Cabinet Minister, in charge of IMMIGRATION matters.

Surely his attitude is dangerous?

The question I ask is “Should he even be there? Is he suitable to sit in the Parliament? Does he meet minimum standards? Can he make the country better, for his being there? So I am not asking whether he would make an enjoyable dinner party guest, but rather does he suit the role of a leader, of a person with a vision? ALL Parliamentarians profess that they want to make a difference, but do his ideas and standards drag us back to an earlier, less caring time, when overt racism, homophobia and religious intolerance were proudly on show.

In a recent appearance on Sky TV he appeared to show where his thoughts really lie: – “I have always seen parliament as a disadvantage for sitting governments”. This was based on the theory that, for good government, you need to sometimes make tough decisions, which might be messy and unpopular, but really, you need to do what must be done. There speaks a despot in training. A dangerous despot.

Australian Politics

Why can we not like the Libs?

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A friend of mine asked me the other day why I seem to only criticise the conservative side of politics. My answer was that they have been in power for six years now, so if anything is conspicuously wrong with the country, it is probably their fault. And also they appear to be generally a callous and clueless lot. I remember when Liberals with a social conscience were dubbed ‘wets’. That was probably the end of their credibility, when the so-called ‘dries’ gained the ascendancy.

Our government, like western civilisation, is deemed to generally be on an upward trajectory, as conditions improve for most of us, across the board. These days we forget, but state governments used to have slum clearance departments, and the idea of workers’ compensation for workplace injuries was once relatively new. Pensions for single mothers as well, although the current crop of small minded penny – pinchers appear hell-bent on punishing single mothers.

Years ago we had an eminent history professor who was almost run out of town, because he argued that increased Asian migration was possibly ahead of public opinion. Consider Peter Dutton’s recent comments on third generation Lebanese Australians, where he suggested that they were more inclined to criminal behaviour than others in the population. Twenty years ago he would have been driven from office, by an outraged citizenry as well as by his own party hierarchy. Now he actually believes he is Prime Ministerial material.

Australia is still a relatively benign place to be born, but something has been lost. There is a hard edge to many governmental decisions taken now, and an expectation that the voters have become de-sensitised to acts of governmental bastardry, and the perpetrators, the Ministers in charge of such decisions, will be judged not as cruel or vicious, but as practical, or pragmatic, getting the job done.

When we look overseas we see many exemplars of woeful behaviour, and sadly Australian politicians are largely lacking in imagination, and slavish in their imitation of dodgy role models. So the Trumps and Johnsons of this world have their acolytes here. However the prime takeaway from the ‘drying out’ of politicians is their total lack of shame.

When the matter of robo-debt is raised, with its tales of widespread and often unintended misery, not to mention plain inefficiency, the minister in question does not hang his head in shame. No, he states, in complete denial of the facts, that the system is working.

We cannot defeat shameless, because a part of any society’s regulating behaviours is the ability to reflect on one’s own behaviour, and if it falls short, we must be able to recognise where we fell short, and reform ourselves.

I sometimes wonder when the rot really set in. Was it when Peter Reith allowed the use of ex – military men with guard dogs to break a union on the waterfront, in 1998? Was it when John Howard lied about the refugees from the Tampa, accusing them of throwing their children overboard? It might have been when Australians began approving of the offshore gulags in Manus and Nauru. None of these horrible examples, of either lying for personal gain, or using tactics from the 1920s, made anyone resign, let alone hang their heads in shame.

Whatever the moment, we have certainly got the government we deserve. Last week the acting Prime Minister stated that Pacific Island nations facing the loss of their actual homelands would survive, because they could always come here to pick fruit. That statement is so ‘off’, on so many levels, and yet Scott Morrison remained silent. That was his “Pacific Family” that Michael McCormack was speaking of. Never forget that the standard you walk past is the standard you accept.

Until this Government develops a conscience my friend will continue to be disappointed when he reads this blog. Or maybe enlightened.

Australian Politics, Biographical

Ask Santo Santoro – he can arrange it

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It is often great to catch up with folk we have forgotten about. One such individual is Santo Santoro, a man with an interesting background, and clearly a big future.

Like many of our candidates for the “He’ll Never be Prime Minister Award” Santoro was never elected to his position in the Senate. That is correct – he was appointed by the Queensland Government, to replace a retiring senator, without receiving a single vote to become a Senator.

To be entirely truthful he was not overly stellar in his performance, although he did accuse the ABC of being “disloyal” to Australian soldiers serving in Iraq, because the staff were advised to not refer to them as “our troops”. Presumably this was in response to many in the Australian electorate (with whom Senator Santoro had had limited prior contact, due to his not having been actually elected) who considered the war in Iraq to be wrong, and not “our war”.

Be that as it may, he then had a slight stumble over some shares, and was found to be in breach of the Senate’s rules concerning declaring his interests. He resigned from the Senate. Apart from the fact that he was confused about the difference between a charity and a political lobby group, he left with apparently no stain on his character, as he next became a Liberal Party Vice-President.

He then became a full-time lobbyist, or as he seems to suggest in his marketing materials, he provides “introductory services” to politicians. He has apparently got Peter Dutton on speed-dial, and he will arrange a meeting with the Minister, for a figure of $20,000. Does this make him a sort of ‘matchmaker’? For a fee?

This is a disgraceful situation for our democracy. The Minister asserts that he gained nothing from his meeting with Huang Xiangmo, a man who is barred from visiting Australia, because he is suspected of being a Chinese agent. And yet a Minister of the Crown is spoken of as someone who can be somehow wrangled into a meeting, just by the lobbyist picking up the phone. This lobbyist is obviously a man with considerable pull to achieve such a meeting.

If nothing else, Peter Dutton has brought the Ministry into disrepute, again. Remember when Andrew Burnes from Helloworld stated that Joe Hockey ‘owed’ him? This seems to be eerily similar, in that past or present Ministers of the current Liberal Government, appear powerless to resist the blandishments of those who call upon them for favours. No wonder even Malcolm Turnbull is appalled! Never a better time for a federal ICAC.