New Politics: Australian Politics, News, Analysis & Commentary

he politics of the COVID pandemic are still being played as hard as possible – at a time when the public craves unity and expecting governments to manage the crisis in the best way possible. It would seem that the Queensland and Western Australian Governments are doing well – case numbers are zero – but they are the governments the media are attacking (as is the federal Liberal Party), while ignoring the problems in NSW, where 1431 cases were recorded yesterday. It doesn’t make sense, until you realise who owns most the media.
Tribal partisanship is perhaps at its worst level ever in Australian history, as is the partisanship within the media, which is keen to see a return of this federal government at the next election. And the election may be with us early than we think: the theory is that NSW will open up in late October – irrespective of how high the daily case numbers are – and hold an election in November. It’s a radical plan, as is the radical belief of the NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, to allow as many deaths as the coronavirus will accept, all for the sake of a sacrifice to the altar of rampant capitalism. And for the NSW Liberal Party. It will be a day of shame, not a day of celebration.
Are we seeing the end of the Liberal Party? It’s not the party of Robert Menzies, but more like the party of John Howard: it’s illiberal, it’s intolerant, it neglects the people on the periphery. The modern Liberal Party is a conservative outfit which has adopted the worst traits of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Political parties need to be relevant to the needs of the community, but as the world makes a turn to more communitarian values, Australia is stuck with a reactionary group of extremists who are increasingly out of touch. This doesn’t mean the Labor Party will automatically win the next federal election: they have their own problems, and will still need to convince the electorate that they can be a viable government. But they have a better chance of winning the election than they did at the beginning of 2021.
The report into “who knew what” about the sexual assault of Brittany Higgins at Parliament House in 2019 was meant to have been completed several months ago – but how can a report be released if it doesn’t exist? We doubt that it will ever be released – and if it is, that’s the end of Scott Morrison – and the Liberal Party, and possibly for a long time.

The Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, now wants Australia to “live with the virus” and “get out of the cave”. But why the big rush? Essentially, it’s to cover over the mistakes of the NSW Government during this wave of the Delta outbreak, and remove himself of political problems in the lead up to the next federal election.

And “live with the virus” is a mantra also picked up by the mainstream media, keen to let everyone know that now is the time to open up, because the vaccine is here to protect everyone. But is vaccination the only pathway out of this pandemic?

What is ignored by the media is 94% of the 14,000 active coronavirus cases across Australia are in New South Wales – Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania did not record a single case today. Why should they open up their communities and let the virus spread, just because of the serious mistakes of one state government, and be part of a process that is more about securing the next election for the Liberal Party than anything else?

And on a day of a record 1029 COVID cases in NSW, three deaths, entire families with infections in south-west Sydney, the first question asked of the NSW Premier by the media was: “do we need to wear a mask in outdoor environments” when the family picnics become available on September 13, a public relations exercise thrown at the families of south-west Sydney for achieving 6 million vaccinations, a number which has no epidemiological relevance or medical sense.

A NSW Government more intent on spin and deception, in conjunction with the mainstream media, continuing the dissonance between this right-wing cabal, and the public. It’s not going to end well.

And it’s also a part of the federal government’s narrative to return to the ways of the past, the economy of the past, and the society of the past. But history has shown that the countries that embrace innovation and forward-thinking during a time of crisis are the ones that succeed. Looking to the future at this stage can’t be coupled with an obsession to a world that we might never be able to return to: new thinking is required, but we are stuck with government that hasn’t got the creativity to imagine what Australia could be, once the pandemic is over – if it ever gets to that.

The health outcomes for Indigenous Australian are the poorest in the country, and it’s a shocking shame that this is still the case. And they were promised that they would be the first to be vaccinated, because of their vulnerabilities. The small remote town of Wilcannia has a disaster unfolding there because of a break of promise by the federal government, and the negligence of the NSW Government to allow the Delta outbreak to spread to vulnerable communities. And all they’re receiving is blame from the government, even though the community of Wilcannia has been warning them about this possibility for 18 months. Once again, people on the margins have been forgotten by government.

The Delta version of coronavirus has taken hold in Sydney and if the NSW Government doesn’t take action to reverse the tide, the daily case numbers are going to reach 2,000 and it’s an number that is unlikely to be palatable to the electorate. And if it continues to spiral out of control, it’s likely to take hold of the NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, who is now facing pressure to resign.

Every historian for perhaps the past two hundred years would recommend that Afghanistan is a difficult country to invade, and best left alone: its terrain is difficult to navigate, and there are many hills for local armies to hide and launch attacks against unwanted imperialist forces. But successive empires have ignored history: the British Empire waged three wars during the 18th and 19th centuries and retreated in each war (they are slow learners); the Soviet Union between 1979-1989; and the United States during 2001-2021 (slow learners, but over a longer period). And each of these empires has left behind humiliating defeats.

The Taliban has returned and will retaliate against the Afghan interpreters who assisted Australian forces in Afghanistan. Morally, the Australian Government has an obligation to support these Afghan interpreters, but this is a government without morals or ethics. Best to whip up a frenzy against these people, lest they seek asylum in our land of milk and honey (sans ethics), and even make the claim that these people – who risked their lives and the lives of their families to assist Australian forces – are now a national security threat to Australia.

One war ends, but another war continues – Australia’s longest running war, the culture and history war. The Minister for Education, Alan Tudge, has decided that he won’t approve the new national curriculum because it’s “warped” and “neo-Marxist rubbish”. A well-read Minister for Education would understand that Marx said history repeats first as tragedy, the second time as farce, but it seems Tudge has repeated history as a calamity and disaster in his own mind.

This is one of the worst public health and economic disasters ever in Sydney but what is even worse, is the entire crisis could have been avoided. Why would the NSW Government avoid implementing the plans that were so successful in every other state and territory across Australia – hard, fast and early lockdowns – when it was obvious that this is what was needed to avert the Delta outbreak? Does the NSW Government have health officers and epidemiologists who have trained at unusually different universities? Or is the Delta virus behaving differently within the borders of NSW?

When governments act in a way that’s different to the prevailing orthodoxy, it’s best to look behind the scenes to see what’s really going on. The NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, was going to be rolled by her Liberal Party Cabinet if she implemented a hard lockdown – it’s a divided Cabinet comprising a relatively palatable right wing, and a hard-right wing religious faction that wants to flex it’s muscle and show the Premier who’s really got all the control.

So, a factional backroom brawl manifests itself in public in the worst way possible: an out-of -control Delta outbreak with a record 390 cases daily, deaths and economic chaos. Politics played in a way that damages the public and the economy.

The climate change wars continue and the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, repeated his three-word slogan – technology, not taxes – and thundered that he’s not prepared to sign a blank cheque for unknown targets in 2050. It’s in response to the latest climate change report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is no longer a “wake-up call”: it’s too late for that, this is a red code for humanity.

And the federal government’s response to the IPCC report? Gas, more gas, and even more gas. Gas is the solution to everything for this government – the pandemic? Gas. The economy? Gas. Climate change? Again, it’s gas. There have been climate change solutions on offer for well over 50 years; even US President Richard Nixon was considering radical climate change options in 1968. UK Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher also wanted to adopt climate change remediation in 1987. And the rejection of all of these solutions over the past 50 years makes for depressing reading.

And the wrap of the week in federal politics. But at a time when a Delta strain is ruining the state of NSW, and a planet that’s warming so far so it might be uninhabitable by the end of this century, perhaps it’s not such a critical time to report on these matters…

The federal government and its best friend – the NSW Government – are sinking in the polls because of one key issue: the mismanagement of the pandemic. Qualitative and quantitative research is showing a rapid decline in the support of both of these governments and their efforts to spin, manipulate and gaslight the public are falling on deaf ears.

Both Scott Morrison and Gladys Berejiklian have lost the trust of the electorate and the rhetoric behind the gold standard management of the pandemic has turned to ersatz, and a far more inferior standard. They are now tied together and they will either rise or fall in unison: and it seems it’s going to be a fall, rather than a rise. And the vaccine rollout has really become like the Hunger Games, all controlled by an incompetent federal government.

Is offering incentives to encourage vaccinations ethical? Economists believe if it results in good public health outcomes, then it will result in good economic outcomes. So, Anthony Albanese’s proposal to offer $300 for each vaccination completed by December 31 receives the thumbs up from economists and the electorate, but not from Morrison, who must be fuming that he didn’t think of this idea first. And is this is all sounding like a medical games show? Yes it is, and if the price is right, people will “come on down”.

And a return of federal Parliament has seen a return of Barnaby Joyce’s alcohol issues. But he’s not a Les-Paterson-type of maverick backbencher MP – he’s actually the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia. Drinking in Parliament? Perhaps it’s time to remove alcohol from Parliament House because there are too many MPs with drinking problems.

Christian Porter is acting Leader of the House of Parliament and for Morrison to install a man who has serious sexual assault allegations hovering over him, its a slap in the face for women of Australia, according to Australian of The Year, Grace Tame. And it’s hard not to disagree.
Closing the Gap is only reaching three of the 16 progress targets, and it’s still a massive stain on the psyche of the Australian society. But, it’s all OK: Morrison wore an Indigenous tie for the entire day, and said “more needs to be done”.

And Brian Houston has been charged for failing to report allegations of sexual abuse. This is Morrison’s mentor and close friend and, as someone who surrounds himself with good news, it will be interesting to see if Morrison decides to cut him lose once Houston becomes an inconvenience for him.

There are too many vested interests in Sydney and it makes it difficult for the NSW Government to act in the public interest and, because of this, the city is now in a nine-week lockdown, with no end in sight.

Gladys Berejiklian says “but there is no guidebook for a pandemic”. Actually, there is, and we provide a five-point plan, which would be obvious to anyone looking at what’s been happening all around the world, including Australia. But, evidently, it’s not obvious to the NSW Government, or to the Prime Minister.

Western Sydney has been sacrificed and next on the block are Year 12 students, who are returning to schools in two weeks’ time: this is a precarious situation, but the private school lobby has decided expensive tuition must be delivered, and the high HSC results they’re expecting from exams much be fulfilled. And Berejiklian has agreed, because that’s how power in NSW works.

The political theorist, Niccolò Machiavelli asked the question: “is it better for a leader to be loved or loathed”, before deciding leaders seeking the love and attention of the electorate are destined for failure. Scott Morrison is seeking tonsorial splendour and is far more focused on his appearances – and trying to make himself loved by the populace – rather than the needs of the electorate but he really needs to decide if he wants to be Prime Minister of Australia, or the next contestant on The Bachelor: he can’t be both.

Prime ministers do need to worry about how they appear in public, but spending time during a pandemic to keep up their appearances? Morrison is fixated on the winning the next election and he’s going about it the wrong way about it. And qualitative research agrees.

McKinsey & Company is a consulting firm with close ties to the Liberal Party and it has received a $2 million contract for [redacted] – no one knows what it is for and the government is not releasing any information about it. So we can only assume that it’s public money used for the benefit of Liberal Party. $108 million has been paid to McKinsey since 2018 – $36 million per year – and that’s a great business model, for McKinsey. But not for the public.

And the Labor leader Anthony Albanese is offering support for the Stage 3 round of tax cuts, to be introduced in 2024. It mainly favours higher-income earners, costs the budget $18 billion each year, widens inequity within the community, is lousy policy, doesn’t even need Labor support to be implemented but yet… the Labor Party is supporting it anyway.

Why? Because politicians should never stand between a bucket of money and the electorate, irrespective of how much it costs, or how inequitable the policy is. And Labor wants to win the next federal election, and one cannot be shot if they don’t have a target on their back. A win for politics, but a disaster for low-income earners, supposedly the supporter base of the Labor Party.

Political games are never far away when it comes to COVID-19 management in Australia and, of course, it’s across the political divide: the Liberal Party of NSW and the federal government on one side, and Labor Premiers on the other. If only the NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian had shown some sympathy to Victoria when they went through their lockdowns, perhaps that could have been repaid and requests to access more Pfizer vaccines would have been more receptive. Far from being a victim of success, the NSW Premier has been a victim of her own hubris.

As for the Prime Minister, the mismanagement of the vaccination rollout is quickly becoming a political headache: corruption and mismanagement in other programs – sportsrorts or unwanted carparks in marginal seats, for example – don’t affect everyone, and governments can easily gloss over these problems. But COVID-19 affects every single person in Australia. Which means that it affects every person who votes at election time, and it’s not looking for Scott Morrison, or for the Liberal Party.

Should Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk have made the trip to Tokyo to receive the news of Brisbane becoming an Olympic city in 2032? Perhaps she should have stayed home, but if the media is going to attack her, where were the voices when Scott Morrison went overseas? Or Mathias Cormann? Or Adrian Shrinner? Or Sussan Ley? Never mind, they’re from the Liberal Party, so that’s all alright.

Eddie Obeid, Moses Obeid and Ian McDonald have been found guilty of corruption and they are likely to end up in jail. And that’s good riddance to bad rubbish but 13 years after the corruption was committed in 2008? That’s too long for the wheels of justice to turn, but better late than never.

And there are calls for the JobKeeper program to be reinstated but it needs to be reformed. $7 million went to the Perth private school, Hale School – after they made an $8 million surplus, and while universities across Australia received $0 – and $17 billion was paid to businesses that didn’t need JobKeeper support and didn’t qualify, including $21 million to Harvey Norman. But, all is well: the Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg says – nudge nudge, wink wink – no need to pay it back. That energy will be spent chasing up overpayments to Centrelink recipients, where the real rorting is happening. Apparently.

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.