New Politics: Australian Politics, News, Analysis & Commentary

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.

The Labor review of the 2022 election has been released, and it’s a much better read than the reviews from the previous three elections which were all lost by the Labor Party. Of course, Labor did win the 2022 election, and while they’ve highlighted all those things that went right for them, they also outlined all the areas they need to improve on if they want to win the next election and the one after that. The report is titled “Election 2022: An opportunity to establish a long-term Labor government” – so it’s obvious what they’re after — Labor does want to have that winning complacency knocked out of it and wants to be in office for the long term, so it can implement as many of its ideas as possible.

The Royal Commission into Robodebt is continuing and the news is becoming more and more damning for the former Coalition government and for the former Prime Minister Scott Morrison. There is a lot of buck-passing going on within this commission – the former head of the Department of Human Services Kathyrn Campbell keeps saying that she wish she’d taken more notice of the legality of Robodebt, and just assumed that it legal because nobody had said that it wasn’t. This is what happens when you have a compromised public service – everyone assumes everyone else is doing the work, no one takes responsibility, and in the meantime, there’s a whole lot of deliberate incompetence that ends up destroying people’s lives.

And there’s more revelations coming out about the Bruce Lehrmann case – and he was facing allegations of committing rape at Parliament House in 2019 – the first case resulted in a mistrial after misconduct by one of the jury members, and the second case was due to be held in February, but the department of public prosecutions dropped the charges due to health concerns for the complainant, Brittany Higgins. There have been allegations that the Australian Federal Police disclosed evidence they held – including psychological counseling notes from Brittany Higgins – to Lehrmann’s legal term – it seems that there has been a lot of interference in this case – they got involved in June 2021, raising concerns about any possible prosecution – and that was before any charges were laid. The Australian Federal Police has been politicised by the Liberal Party over the past two decades – and there were some suggestions that it was like a private militia for Liberal Prime ministers – but there probably needs to be further investigations into their behaviour.

The final opinion polls for the year have been released, and they both show Anthony Albanese is going everywhere, and Peter Dutton is going nowhere. In the Resolve Poll, the primary vote for Labor is at 42%, and that’s about 10% higher than their election result, and for the Coalition, it’s down to 30% – the preferred Prime Minister metric has Albanese at 54%, and Dutton at 19% – Albanese’s net approval rating is 36% – 60% approve, and 24% disapprove – Dutton’s net approval is minus 14. The Prime Minister and Labor did finish the parliamentary year well, but this is the icing on the cake – their election review suggests that they’re trying to remove as much complacency as possible within the ranks, but it might a bit difficult with an Opposition that’s performing so poorly.

The Victoria election was held last weekend and, contrary to what everyone in the media wanted and predicted, it was another crushing defeat for the Liberal Party. It wasn't even close. For the past three months, many in the mainstream media predicted Daniel Andrews had to lose the election; it was going to be very close; there was a surge for the Liberal Party; Andrews was possibly going to even lose his own seat. While there was a 3 per cent swing against the Victoria government – seat wise, it's more or less the same result as the 2018 election: Labor has won twice as many seats than the Liberal–National Coalition. And this was despite the entire media edifice – News Corporation, Seven West, Nine Media, the ABC – fully campaigning against Andrews and the Labor Party, not just during the election campaign, but for the past three years.

Scott Morrison has been censured by the parliament for secretly acquiring five ministries in 2020 and 2021. And while what he did was not unlawful, it’s one of the most bizarre incidents in Australia's parliamentary history: there was no need for him to do this; there was absolutely no need for him to keep it a secret; he hasn’t actually offered any valid explanation for it; it totally undermined the principles of Westminster democracies. The Opposition labelled this censure as a grubby political exercise but it's a situation that couldn't just be left behind or forgotten about. It’s an action that should never have happened and the public needs to keep being reminded about it, so it doesn’t happen again.

The parliament has ended for the year – Labor's industrial relations and National Anti-Corruption Commission bills were passed by the Senate, and these are two massive legislative victories for the Labor government. Anthony Albanese ends the parliamentary year high in the polls, and he was able to relax and go to a Nick Cave concert in Canberra during the week. These moments have to be lapped up because they're not going to last for too long – Kevin Rudd also enjoyed high support six months into his prime ministership in 2008, and Labor occupied every single state and territory government around Australia. Many people at that time said that Labor was going to be in office for at least the next decade or two, but it didn't quite turn out that way. But after seven months in office, the Labor government should be content with its achievements so far.

Industrial relations are once again in the spotlight, with the mining industry and Qantas joining the Coalition in their attacks on the Labor government’s proposed legislation.

And the big sticking points for these large companies is that issue of workers from different companies to collectively negotiate pay rises – but it seems that business just wants everything on its own terms.

It’s the weekend of the Victoria election – and we think that it’s one of the most important state elections for some time – not so much about the result, but the behaviour of the Liberal Party and the mainstream media. A three-year anti-Daniel Andrews campaign that commenced during the pandemic, with all of the media’s anti-lockdown stories, interviewing café owners, gym owners and pub owners about how unfair all of this was, and now filling the campaign with as much hate and bile as possible – we’ve just never seen anything like this in an election campaign before.

The court cases against whistleblowers David McBride and Richard Boyle are ongoing, but the Attorney–General, Mark Dreyfus needs to use his discretionary powers to drop the charges and set them free.