New Politics: Australian Politics, News, Analysis & Commentary

Superannuation is a boring topic of conversation at the best of times, but the government can see that it can save a substantial sum of money by closing off a loophole and has introduced a higher level of tax on superannuation accounts holding over $3 million. And the opposition can see an opportunity to claim that the Prime Minister has broken an election promise. The Liberal Party does have this great skill in being able to magnify the small issues into large scale calamities. There have been some comparisons made with the franking credits campaign from 2019, where they made everyone believe that they were going to lose their franking credits, even for those people who didn't own shares. But it's hard to mount these types of scare campaigns when you're in opposition and the Labor government should probably cut the superannuation benefits even further.

The Attorney–General Mark Dreyfus has met with news agencies and media unions to discuss national secrecy laws and improve protections and press freedoms for journalists and people working in news gathering and political reporting. These are important issues, but it's difficult to talk about press freedoms when Julian Assange is still languishing in a British jail – or the fact that Australia's has the least diverse media landscape in the Western world. It would be better for the government to focus on media ownership laws and create a stronger and enforceable code of conduct for the media.

The Robodebt Royal Commission continues and the role of the former Government Services Minister, Stuart Robert, has been in the spotlight. The Minister was informed by the Secretary of Human Services that the Robodebt scheme was unlawful, which he ignored and said that he would “double down” on the scheme. Officials within the department who supported the Minister's agenda were rewarded, and the others who provided negative advice were punished. It’s one of the biggest scandals to hit Australian politics but, curiously, the mainstream media hasn’t had the stamina to report on this Commission.

It’s one year since Russia invaded Ukraine – it was only meant to last a few days, but it's still going on and unlikely to stop for some time to come. War is an extension of politics by another means and this one is likely to continue until both sides are exhausted and realise there's no point in going on. Russia is still the big loser here and Vladimir Putin’s quest to rework European geopolitics hasn't paid off so far. But the bigger issue is that so many people have died – up to 300,000 people on both sides – with around six million people displaced. And, as with most wars, it's not the political leaders who are paying the price: it's the innocent civilians and soldiers.

The Australian Federal Police is in the news again, and this time it’s through a newspaper interview with the former Defence Minister, Senator Linda Reynolds – and this relates to the allegations of a rape that occurred in Parliament House in 2019, just a few weeks before the federal election was announced.

And, somehow, the personal diaries of Brittany Higgins were leaked to News Corporation and formed a large part of the story about Linda Reynolds – the diaries were provided to the federal police to assist with the Bruce Luhrmann court trial – but here they are being published in a News Corporation newspaper.

There’s currently an ACT government investigation into the behaviour of the police and the trial of Bruce Luhrmann – a trial that was aborted – but the leaking of this private material to News Corporation is another issue that needs to be investigated, as is the role of the Australian Federal Police.

There is an election coming up in NSW next month, and there’s been a raft of resignations in recent times and this follows on from other resignations over the past year – Gladys Berijiklian as well – and there’s other ministers who won’t be contesting at the next election. This is the sorry sight of politics in NSW – it doesn’t really matter who’s in office, corruption and mismanagement is always close by – and this really has the feeling of the last days of a dying government in NSW.

Sometimes a political culture grows from bad beginnings – NSW was founded as an illegal settlement all the way back in 1788, and then there was the Rum Corp that ran for about 30 years or so – and once a poor political culture becomes established, it’s very hard to shake off, even after 235 years.
There’s also been a batch of recent opinion polls and all of them are suggesting a dip in support for the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and a slight improvement of support for the Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton – and as a result, we’ve had the predictable headlines of ‘the end of the honeymoon for Albanese’.

Most of this noise is media amplifying the issues that they want the public to believe in, but there’s still a great deal of support for the Labor government. This will start to wear off, especially when the Labor government does things like approve 116 coal seam gas wells in Queensland and still sticks with supporting the Stage 3 tax cuts – but this is the time they really need to start performing and stick to the agenda they took to the Australian public at the last federal election.

There was another session of Parliament this week and we found out that the federal government has spent $7.6 million to prosecute whistleblowers – while most of that was expended by the previous Coalition government and although the Labor government did drop the cases against Bernard Collaery and Witness K – the cases against David McBride and Richard Boyle are still continuing and they need to stop.

The highlight of the week was the commemoration of the 15th anniversary of the National apology to the Stolen Generations. But the apology that has sucked all the attention is the one from Peter Dutton, who now says he didn't understand the significance of the apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008. If Peter Dutton is truly sorry for his actions from 2008, he’d backtrack on his opposition to the Voice to Parliament and he’d stop opposing for the sake of opposing. We don’t want to hear another apology from Peter Dutton in another 15 years’ time, for not understanding the significance of the occasion – it will be far too late for that. He needs to understand the significance of the occasion right now.

There will be a byelection in the Melbourne seat of Aston caused by the resignation of former minister Alan Tudge, and it's been labeled as a big test for Peter Dutton. But it's also a big test for Anthony Albanese and the federal government. There can be endless opinion polls and speculation about public sentiment for the government and for the Opposition, but the real test in politics comes in when real votes are lodged at the ballot box.

Aston hasn't been held by the Labor Party since 1990 and it has been a safe Liberal seat for most of that time since. An incumbent government hasn't won a seat off an Opposition in a byelection since 1921. But the electorate usually votes against the party that caused the by election first place – the Labor government is riding high in the polls and the Liberal–National party isn't. So it's a seat that the Labor Party could win. Equally, it's a seat that the Liberal Party should hold. But in byelections, a lot of political rules get thrown out the window.

Political donations have come under the spotlight with revelations of the Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland receiving two donations from Sportsbet in the lead up to the 2022 federal election. And she was the Opposition spokesperson on online gambling and now as Minister of Communications, she's got responsibility for the Interactive Gambling Act and the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

Sportsbet makes substantial donations to both the Liberal and the Labor parties but this is not a good look, and it's a corruption of the political process: that's one problem. The fact that all of this is legal, is a travesty. Disclosure laws need to change, as well as major reforms to the political donation system.

Parliament has returned for the year, with the government keen to implement its agenda, the Opposition trying to make itself relevant, and everyone else trying to influence all the political outcomes.

There’s been a great deal of focus on The Voice To Parliament in the lead up to the first week of parliamentary sittings, but there’s other issues in the spotlight – the Robodebt royal commission, the economy, reform of Medicare, an interest rate rise, the cost of living issues that keep coming up, and offshore immigration detention has also make a comeback.

Senator Lidia Thorpe has resigned from the Australian Greens and will sit on the crossbench as an independent Senator, and decided to resign when it became clear that the Greens were going to support the “Yes” campaign for The Voice To Parliament – Thorpe feels it’s more important to have a treaty first – but this has worked out best for both parties – the Greens can campaign for the “yes” vote, and Lidia Thorpe can campaign against it, if she wishes to, and then pursue the treaty, and promote the Blak Sovereignty Movement.

Taking Australia’s history into account, European invasion and settlement after 1788 and federation after 1901 – there should be a treaty if this is the wishes of First Nation’s people – and it’s obvious that many do – it’s difficult to know what the results will be from Thorpe’s resignation from the Greens will be, but she will become another Senator the government will need to negotiate with to have their legislation passed by the Senate. So, it could give her some more control in the Senate to achieve these agendas – but on the other hand, it might not.

There’s been some internal discussions within the Liberal Party – and some disquiet about Peter Dutton and the electoral prospects of the Liberal Party. Dutton is not the right person to lead the Liberal Party at this point of time in its history – but there was nobody else who wanted the job just after a big election loss and there was nobody else who was leadership material.

But Dutton is just not getting any traction, and it seems that the perceptions of Dutton as the hard man of politics are set and unlikely to change – and this is at a time when the electorate is looking for a softer and less brutal side to politics.

It might be a case where Dutton is so negative – and that this is what people expect to see from him – that he’s preaching to the converted – or his own conservative backbench that keeps him in the leadership position – and even if he became more positive, that no one would believe him. He’s so dour and negative and really hasn’t got much to offer in policy terms – all he’s doing is offering a culture of complaint. This might have worked in the past, but it’s not going to work this time in Australia’s political history.

It’s hard to believe how bad and illegal Robodebt was, but when you have the most incompetent government ever, anything’s possible.

There was a massive amount of explosive evidence to come out from the Robodebt Royal Commission this week, with ministers, political staffers and public servants all coming in to show how inept, corrupt and deceptive the scheme was – an illegal system that was created and instigated by the previous Coalition government, in the hope that nobody would ever find out.

Most of the evidence presented to this Royal Commission is unbelievable – that ministers could be so corrupt and negligent, public servants could be so incompetent, and political staffers could be so ignorant and dense. The Royal Commission is not a court of law, so it can’t prosecute anyone, but some punitive measures need to be taken, even if it is to make sure that these people can never again serve in public life ever again. That’s how bad all of this is.

The Treasurer Jim Chalmers has published a major article titled “Capitalism After The Crises” and the right-wing media had yet another field day – it’s too ambitious, it will end in disaster and the Treasurer is being too arrogant with his suggestion he might be able to re-define capitalism.

Chalmers wants to introduce values-based economics to the Australian community – harnessing the dynamics of technological change, the role of the public sector in innovation, and broadening the spectrum of finance and economics so it closely aligns to human wellbeing and behaviour, and not just a set of numbers.

And this sets up a series of exciting possibilities for the Australian economy – but it’s all been attacked by conservatives – they lack the imagination to understand what the future could look like, and they’re failing to understand history – and in terms of the economic changes that are happening around the world, Australia has to adapt to new economic thinking: otherwise, it’s going to be left behind.

The Australian media usually stays away from New Zealand politics but News Corporation had a field day when Jacinda Ardern announced her resignation, suggesting all of her instincts were bad, she shut down the engines of economic growth and she was a dreadful Prime Minister who failed.

These comments and negative articles were made by male journalists at News Corporation and continues their long tradition of sexism and misogyny. They attacked New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark when she left office in 2008, and it’s difficult to overlook those three long, hard years of sexism and misogyny from News Corporation directed at former Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Connecting all of dots – Ardern, Clark, Gillard – they were successful politicians; they were from the left. They were from a political party which represents unions and workers. And the big factor: they are all women. And that's the big issue that News Corporation just doesn't seem to be able to handle very well.

The Prime Minister visited Alice Springs in response to rising crime rates in the town. And as usual, the media decided Anthony Albanese was terrible for not going to Alice Springs and, then when he did go, he was also terrible for doing that as well. It’s hard to appease the media, who can't seem to decide what's right or wrong.

Peter Dutton has been railing against the Voice to Parliament for several months, asking for more details when all the details are already out there. And he ramps up every conceivable problem in the Indigenous community and then asks how the Voice to Parliament is going to fix them. During the week, Dutton was also in Alice Springs, highlighting all the crime problems in the city and calling on the government to send in the defence forces – and when Dutton speaks, the media obliges. Now the media has claimed Albanese buckled under pressure, even though he was planning to make the trip in December, but was afflicted with COVID. Then he rescheduled the trip just over a week ago, before Peter Dutton ramped up his fake outrage – and Albanese was then criticised for failing to address a major problem in a regional town.

There's no doubt crime is a problem in Alice Springs. But most of the rise in crime rates occurred before Albanese became Prime Minister and crime and policing is the responsibility of the states and territories, not the federal government. If only political reporters understood politics more and reported accurately, instead of always siding with the likes of someone like Dutton, who just seeks division and trouble at every opportunity.

Dominic Perrottet claims that he was naïve and didn’t really understand the consequences of his actions of wearing a Nazi costume to his 21st birthday party but, to put this in context, Perrottet is 40 years old, which means his 21st was held in 2003 – and at that time, he was a member of the Young Liberals, he was in his third year of university, and any reasonable person with half a brain would realise that wearing a Nazi costume to their 21st birthday party is probably not the wisest thing to do, especially if you’ve got political aspirations.

But this has got nothing to do the costume itself: it’s more to do with political payback and who’s going to lead the Right faction of the Liberal Party after a likely election loss at the NSW state election in March.

George Pell died last week – conservative MPs and mainstream media, especially News Corporation have lauded Pell as a “saint of our times” and running reams of favourable coverage about how he was persecuted for his beliefs when he spent 18 months in a Victoria jail. But George Pell was not a hero at all.

He failed to report child sexual abuse in Ballarat, he practiced that long held Catholic tradition of moving offending priests from one parish to another, he wasn’t interested in listening to the victims of child sexual abuse, there were a number of allegations of historical child sexual abuse that never made it to court – Pell was found guilty of child sexual abuse in Victoria, before the high court overturned the decision 18 months later – he was also a climate change skeptic, and wanted to reduce the role of women within the Catholic church.

George Pell was a seriously flawed character and signified everything that is wrong with the Catholic church in Australia and it would have been better if his supporters acknowledged this.

It’s still quite early in the year but already, there’s a big focus on The Voice To Parliament – the Prime Minister has started mapping the timeline for when the referendum might take place – and it could be as early as August this year – the Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney has outlined what the Voice to Parliament will look like and how it will work, but that doesn’t seem to be enough for the Coalition – who make all the noises about being supportive of Reconciliation, as long as they don’t have to do anything about it.

Already, the National Party has said that they won’t support The Voice To Parliament; the Liberal Party are doing their best to create division, fear and confusion within the community, and this is all being amplified by conservative media interests – but following on from the federal and Victoria elections last year, could this be another case where the electorate ignores what the Liberal Party and the media is telling them, and go on to support an issue that is in the interests of Indigenous people?

And, late last year, the Liberal Party released their election review, and it was released just before Christmas, so maybe they didn’t want too many people reading it – and it reads like a document of paranoia, a war-gaming plan to attack the teal independents in future election campaigns, and suggests that party needs to move even further to the right to differentiate itself from the Labor Party.

It could be a case where the Liberal Party doesn’t really know how to prepare a good election review after it’s lost an election – Labor’s losing election reviews are generally more concise and definitive because they’ve had more of them in recent times – but based on what’s in Liberal Party election review, they might be in Opposition for some time to come.

For most of this year, it looked like Scott Morrison and the Liberal–National coaltion was going to lose the election, but because the opinion polls got it so wrong in 2019, very few people were prepared to predict the election result in 2022.

But it was obvious that Morrison was going to use the same tactics from 2019 to try and win this election – photo and media opportunities, and it was almost like Season Two of At Home With The Morrisons.

Scott Morrison was seen as a formidable campaigner, but that was a charade and a paper tiger – Morrison was a hopeless campaigner and thrown out of office at the May election.

We were strong critics of Morrison during his time as prime minister – and it seems the electorate agreed with us at the federal election. But with all the material and information that’s coming out about Morrison since that election loss, not only was he the worst prime minster in Australia’s history, he was on the way to becoming one of the more dangerous prime ministers.

It was a big year in politics and the biggest event was the federal election in May. It wasn't clear who was going to win the election, even though opinion polls were suggesting Labor was going to win. In that first hour after the polls closed on election night, it seemed the Coalition was on track to achieve their second consecutive surprise election victory – didn't quite work out that way though. Labor achieved a narrow victory, there were many seats won by independent candidates, and the Coalition lost badly. Paul Keating once said that when the government changes, the country changes as well and Australia now has a new government, new prime minister in Anthony Albanese, and an opportunity to steer the country in a new direction. And, despite what the media kept saying, this was an exciting election campaign, and one of the most important in Australia’s history.

Looking at Labor has been performing since the election in May, it appears the election result has been validated – they've implemented anti-corruption commission legislation, reformed industrial relations, repaired the relationship with Pacific Islands and started to repair the relationship with China. They've put the Voice to Parliament on the political map, they've introduced legislation to stabilise energy prices. This is a government that wants to do things, they don't want to waste time. At looking at some of their achievements over the past seven months, they’ve achieved more than the Coalition managed to achieve over nine years They are riding high in the polls at the moment but that's not going to last forever. But it also suggests the electorate is happy with the choice they made at the 2022 federal election.