New Politics: Australian Politics, News, Analysis & Commentary

Australia has become lockdown central, with its two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, going into two different types of lockdowns – Sydney has a modified version where shops are still open and people seem to be able to freely move about (except for those migrant-working-class-Labor-voting-sub-classes in Fairfield), and Melbourne – a city which takes this process far more seriously – instigating a short sharp five-day lockdown. Professional. Not that it's a competition, but we suggest Melbourne will be the winner in this COVID battle because the NSW Government seems to be on the verge of a ‘live-with-the-virus’ anti-lockdown strategy. At least Sydney will be receiving the $500 million-per-week federal government support that was denied to Melbourne.

And could the real Prime Minister please stand up? Business leaders, frustrated with the slow progress on the supply of vaccines, asked Kevin Rudd – out of office for eight years – to lobby Pfizer to fast-track the delivery of one million vaccines. Whether or not Rudd was responsible for this delivery is immaterial: the fact business leaders saw Rudd as someone who could get this done, rather than Scott Morrison, speaks volumes. But it does beg the question: aside from blaming everyone for his mistakes and faults, what exactly does Morrison do with this time?

The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tony Smith, is retiring from politics. What does this mean? After 20 years in Parliament, he’s had enough? Does he believe he won't be able to retain his seat of Casey? Or that he believes the Liberal Party won't win the next federal election? Perhaps he reprimanded Morrison too many times during Parliament Question Time. And that might have been his biggest mistake.

The Sydney lockdown continues into its third week and the Gladys Berejiklian show moves into the full public relations mode and spin cycle to get itself out of political trouble. It’s almost as though if the NSW Government put as much effort into managing the effects of COVID-19 as they put into media manipulation, there would be no lockdown to speak of. But where is the challenge in doing the right thing in the first place?

The facade of “The Woman Who Saved Australia” so prominently promoted in the media just a few weeks ago has receded into the distance, and slowly being replaced with an understanding that Berejiklian is now the woman who let her ideology stand in the way of the public interest.

And she was all on her own, as the Prime Minister for Sydney – who is also in the position of Prime Minister of Australia but that seems to be a lesser role – disappeared for five days. Strangely for a Prime Minister who loves to make announcements, there was no announcement of his whereabouts, but he did return with what appeared to be a new tonsure and extra hair implants.

And what of the Liberal Party? Scott Morrison seems to be the end point of a lineage that commenced in the early 1990s, when the Liberal Party purged all of its moderates and turned itself into a fully-fledged conservative party, based on all the worst attributes of the US Republicans and the British Conservatives. And it's not a very good look, as can be attested by the former Liberal Party member for Chisholm, Julia Banks, who provides an excellent description of Scott Morrison: a menacing and controlling wallpaper.

The Liberal Party needs to be reformed from the rank conservative party it has become, into a political party Menzies and Fraser could be proud of, but that may have to wait until it finds itself in opposition again. And after the mismanagement of vaccination, quarantine and now the Sydney lockdown that didn’t need to happen, that stint in opposition might not be too far away.

The NSW Government’s ‘gold standard’ in COVID management has soured into a more tarnished puce colour, with Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s reluctance to shut down Sydney a week earlier, resulting in a more protracted lockdown than would otherwise have been required.

Aside from the extra billions of dollars it will cost the NSW economy, it took a full 24 hours before Berejiklian could even mention the word that shall not be mentioned: LOCKDOWN – a dastardly word that fellow Liberals were ridiculing just the day before the lockdown was announced, and suggesting it was something only those lunatic states run by the Labor Party would think about doing.

But we are all lockdowners now. And it’s a reflection of the national ‘debts and deficits’ argument: Liberal Party lockdowns, good; Labor Party lockdowns, bad. It’s beyond belief that conservative politics in Australia can be so infantile.

We can debate the merits of lockdowns, but the recent spate in Sydney, Perth and Brisbane could have been avoided with a more competent federal government in office. The federal government just had two jobs for 2021: rollout the vaccination program across Australia effectively, and repair the hotel quarantine system. And a failure of leadership by the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has assured that both of these critical issues have been poorly managed or non-existent.

The disasters of the vaccination rollout and quarantine management cannot be underestimated: this was meant to be Australia’s pathway out of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as providing a pathway towards a victory for the Liberal Party at the next federal election. But it’s all gone to seed.

Morrison has released a four-phase ‘plan’, but it seems like it's just another set of announcements: there are no targets, there are no definitions, there’s no guide for Australia to move through these four phases. But one aspect is becoming clear: Morrison might not be the Prime Minister to lead Australia through these stages. He’s had a go to have a go; and now, it might be time for him to go as well. It’s really had become that bad.

Australia could have been close to reaching herd immunity but a poor Australian government decision to turn its back on an excellent Pfizer deal means the national level of vaccination is at 3%, one of the lowest rates in the world. The anger in the medical community is palpable, but will the electorate blame the government for this error? And, for a government that was so keen to open up the economy as soon as possible, this foolishness is difficult to understand.

The mainstream media wanted to position Scott Morrison as a key member of the G7 meeting, but he was anything but: Australia is not a member of the G7, it only had observer status at this meeting and it seems the US President, Joe Biden, was keen to let Morrison know about this. It was a ‘much ado about nothing’ kind of meeting for Morrison, he signed a few long-term agreements which are not worth the pen and paper they were created with, and a free trade agreement with the UK – which will negotiated over the next 15 years. And a sideshow to explore his personal ancestry, a visit to a church, and drinks all round for his personal staff at a few drinking holes in Cornwall. Something had to be retrieved from the G7 meeting and this provided for excellent photo opportunities.

The legal dispute between NSW National Leader, John Barilaro, and Jordan Shanks-Markovina (aka Friendly Jordies) has been ramped up and Barilaro has used anti-terrorism legislation to arrest the Friendly Jordies producer, Kristo Langker, all because he made a little bit of fun about him and exposed him for corruption. It’s so ‘New South Wales’ for a politician to want to lock up a journalist who gets in the way – but this is not just a battle between a politician and a journalist, it's a battle between legacy media and new media.

Australia has a new Deputy Prime Minister, same as the old one: come on down, Barnaby Joyce, alleged sexual harasser of women, philanderer, drunk, morally bankrupt and possibly corrupt. Only in Australia (and Britain, US, Brazil, Hungary, Belarus) would the public accept this kind of politician as a leader. A retail politician who tells the electorate what they want to hear, not what needs to be done – the worst and most dangerous kind of politician.

And it’s also so ‘New South Wales’ for the corruption of a Premier to be overlooked with soft media pampering and delicately placed stories about her new love life – who just happens to be the lawyer who represented her at the ICAC. COVID-19 cases are rising in Sydney and the NSW Government, far from the ‘gold standard’ we keep hearing about, has allowed complacency to set it and has mismanaged key aspects of this pandemic. Will it be as bad as the Ruby Princess disaster in 2020? But let’s not worry about that, all should be fine, because ‘Gladys is in love’.

Victoria will complete a two-week lockdown soon but if the Morrison government had done its job properly on quarantine management and the vaccination rollout, the lockdown – which will cost around $2 billion in lost revenues and other expenses – may have been avoided. And it’s nobody’s fault, except for the fault of the Morrison government. And their performance has been so bad that it’s a performance that seems to have been directed by the Big Q. It’s frustratingly puzzling as to why they are refusing to build quarantine managements centres across Australia.

Conservative governments are usually the advocates of free speech but in shades of the infamous East German Stasi secret service, the Liberal National government now wants to monitor the social media accounts of ABC journalists, publicly humiliate them, and sack them. The only parts that are missing are the megaphones shouting out “you know what you've done wrong” and the re-enactment of Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ will be complete. Of course, it's free speech for all, except for you, you, you and you, and anyone else the government disagrees with.

The NSW Labor Right faction is an unusual beast in Australian politics, and in most cases is more concerned about its own influence, rather than the critical task of winning elections. They were the instigators of the resignation of NSW Labor leader, Jodi McKay, and now they have their man in the leadership, Chris Minns. And no-one should kid themselves that the Liberal Party is the only party that treats its women poorly: Labor has close to 50–50 gender equality within its ranks, but that doesn't stop it from undermining the women already in leadership positions, or making sure they don't get there in the first place.

It’s Budget time and we've spent the last week analysing the third Budget announcement from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. Our verdict? Don’t believe the hype: it's not a ‘big-spending’ Budget; and it’s not a Budget the Labor Party would have introduced. We think it's yet another lost opportunity for the Australian economy and the community – just like Peter Costello squandering the mining boom in the early 2000s, this could be another chance to make positive long-term changes to government spending that ends up being flushed down the drain.

What would Labor do? We don't know: it's not the role of the Opposition of the day to provide itemised line items and specific policies the government and the media can then dissect and misrepresent – Albanese won't make the same mistakes Shorten made with the franking credits policy, where he allowed the Liberal Party too must scope to completely distort the intention of the scheme. Just the broad brush strokes of policy is all that's needed at the moment.

Will the Budget swing the next election for the Liberal–National Coalition? Both the Budget and the Budget Reply will be forgotten at the time of the next election, and the verdict will still come down to competence and who the electorate will trust on debts and deficits.

The world is slowly moving towards climate change solutions and, once again, Australia is the laggard on the world stage but trying to tell everyone how well it's performing, even though no other world leader believes it. And this is the modus operandi of the Morrison government: lie, mispresent the data, gaslight, or divert the attention somewhere else. The US President, Joe Biden, might be an old man but he’s not a fool and knows a fool when he sees one. It’s obvious Morrison wants to lead a government that acts as the world’s double-exhaust pipes, and accede to the wishes of the many vested interests in the mining and oil sectors. But he’ll be in for a huge shock when he sees the size of the tariffs imposed on Australian goods and services exports.

A milkshake video was released through a government-managed website – The Good Society – and if a casual viewer wasn't told about what the video was about, they'd be scratching their head trying to work out how smearing a milkshake in a man’s face relates to sexual consent and the serious issues of sexual harassment, rape and assault. But the content of these videos provides an insight into the mentality of the government that commissioned the videos in the first place: a government that wishes to impose its narrow-minded conservatism upon the community and searching for a teenage community that doesn't seem to exist anywhere in Australia. And its a conservatism based on the Pentecostal beliefs of the Prime Minister.

Prime Ministers have the complete right to believe – or not believe – in any religion they choose, as long as it's a private matter. There is a church-state separation in modern democracies – for very good reasons – but Morrison wants the church to creep over in the political sphere. And it shouldn't be there.

And the vaccination rollout keeps creating political problems for the federal government and they keep looking to apportion blame to everyone – except for themselves. Why did they take on the program in the first place? They provided massive amounts of stimulus funding to the state and territory governments and the states and territories ending up getting all the political credit, much to the chagrin of Morrison and Josh Frydenberg. They weren't going to allow that to happen again. So, they took on the implementation of the vaccination program, something the federal government has never done before, hoping to get all the political benefit, and a clear pathway to victory at the next federal election. And the pear-shaped result is exactly the result the federal government deserves.

The vaccination program is now officially in fiasco territory, with error after error and now another announcement of 20 million Pfizer doses "secured" after problems with the AstraZeneca vaccines. Which, of course, is not the same as actually having the doses in doctors’ surgeries all around Australia. We feel that it’s almost like the program has been designed to fail, because surely no government could handle such an important event so badly. If only Scott Morrison could stop overpromising and underdelivering, everything would be so much better for him.

Is the feminisation of the Liberal Party actually taking place, or is it another case of window-dressing? It might be just another charade: it's not just a case of adding "women" into the titles of ministries, or the Prime Minister being photographed with more of the women who make up 51% of the population. Or deciding to wait four months for an urgent women’s safety summit. And after waiting 13 months to release a national sexual harassment report, Morrison’s behaviour shows that it's all about politics.

The Labor National Conference was a virtual event this year, which means no backroom deals or incidental meetings to stitch up deals. Everything occurred online and in chatrooms rather than the backrooms, but a relatively sedate event suggests Labor believes it’s still likely that a federal election will be held this year. Otherwise, the conference would have seen old-school open brawls, hostilities between the factions, all of which would have been lapped up by the media. Best to wait for a non-election year.

And most chatter in the media has been "who will Scott Morrison’s opponent be at the next election". But this might need to be switched around a little bit to suggest "who will Anthony Albanese’s opponent be at the next election". That’s how poorly Morrison is performing.

The many women of Australia have said “enough is enough”, and said it loudly through the March 4 Justice campaign. But the Prime Minister is hard of hearing and wants it all to be on his terms, refusing to meet the organisers of the rally in public, wanting to meet behind closed doors and in private. Which is exactly what a rapist would do. And, of course, Attorney–General Christian Porter decided to launch his defamation case on the same day of the March 4 Justice rallies. Tone deaf!

Vaccinations are another area which the federal government has totally mismanaged, and yet another example of incompetence which Scott Morrison, Greg Hunt and Chief Medical Officer are trying to spin their way through. The government promised the vaccination program would be completed by 31 October 2021, and have been using a megaphone to let everyone know. But now that the vaccination program is not going be completed by 31 October 2021, the government is adamant that they never actually said that. Apparently, everyone else in Australia has a collective case of mishearing and misinterpreting what Scott Morrison said, because he is always correct, even when he is wrong.

One landslide election victory is rare; a second consecutive landslide victory has never happened before in Australian politics. Until the Western Australian election victory – a 9% swing in 2017, and a 13% swing in 2021. And the Liberal Party has been left with two seats in a chamber of 59 seats. That really is a wipeout – the Liberal Party also lost the seat of Nedlands, home of Gina Rinehart and Kerry Stokes. When the Liberal Party loses a seat like Nedlands, it really means the party might be over.

The message? Competent governments are being rewarded at the ballot box. It will be interesting to see what the result will be for an incompetent government, which the federal government clearly is. Their time will come soon.

Christian Porter’s political career is over. There won't be any legal proceedings arising from an allegation of rape in 1988 but the political repercussions will be far-reaching. And as long as the Prime Minister keeps resisting a call for a public inquiry into these events, this issue will keep burning in the background: for sure, there is a presumption of innocence within Australia’s legal system, but there also has to be a presumption of justice. Justice not only needs to be done, but it has to be seen to be done: and as it had been for many women in Australia for too long, justice has been left out of the equation.

The Royal Commission for Aged Care Quality and Safety has released its report and it has outlined a 25-year disaster that started off when Prime Minister John Howard reformed the sector in 1997 to create business opportunities for Liberal Party donors and the involvement of the private and corporatised sector into social services. And it's a mixture that simply does not work. For-profit thinking shouldn't be anywhere near the provision of aged care services.

The Media Bargaining Code is just one short step away from being law but, already, Google has signed deals with News Corporation, Nine Network, Seven West Media, The Guardian, and deals coming up soon for the ABC and SBS: $100 million from Google and another motza being delivered by FaceBook! And is this good for public interest journalism? Absolutely not, it's not even mentioned in the legislation. This is all about the government placing the media in its pocket in the lead-up to the next federal election. And a bucketload of money for legacy media, it's money for jam. It's actually a sad day for journalism and for the taxpayer.