New Politics: Australian Politics, News, Analysis & Commentary

Mr Morrison went to Tokyo and returned empty-handed. But the 24-hour trip was never about Japan, it was all about continuing to avoid scrutiny and land the Prime Minister into a two-week quarantine at the Lodge – just enough to avoid the final Question Time of the year. Very convenient. And, of course, two weeks with the official photographer, ready to snap every pair of board shorts, thongs, exercise bikes and COVID test. It's outright propaganda.

Meanwhile, Mathias Cormann is using a taxpayer military jet (and eight government staff) to boost his chances of becoming the Secretary-General of the OECD. But when your chances were zero, any kind of support is not going to make too much difference and we suspect this is a gig Cormann will not get. But which Prime Minister is going to stand in the way of the ambition of someone who collated all the numbers to bring him the primeministership in the first place?

How many pizzas are needed to lock down an entire city? No, it's not an Adelaidian joke, it's a serious concern in the City of Churches. But it wasn't the "pizza guy" who caused the lock-down, it was government incompetence.

The Brereton Report outlined allegations of war crimes against Australian military personnel in Afghanistan, and we’re sure this is going to create a great amount of angst within the military community – as well as guaranteed to ensure Scott Morrison keeps aways from tanks at the next election campaign.

And will the December “killing season” cause any problems for the Labor leader, Anthony Albanese? We think it could be on the cards.

The 2020 US Election has brought in a new President (we think) and the key question will be how an incoming Democrats administration will affect political behaviour in Australia and whether the Morrison government feels the need to do anything at all on climate change. Or change its economic philosophy. Or even feel the need to be more truthful with the Australian public, but we feel this is most unlikely. And will the media turn down the volume on Scott Morrison, as they did with Donald Trump? We don't think so, their courage is in short supply.

US elections are always big news around the globe but the news Trump was on the verge of eviction from the White House was blown away by the revelation Ministers Christian Porter and Alan Tudge were having affairs with their female staffers, smooching in late-night bars in Canberra, and then getting rid of these staffers when they no longer suited their purposes. If only these men in positions of power could keep their hands to themselves and understand that a workplace isn't a place where we all go to have sex and drink alcohol – the world would be a much better place.

We also report on the Queensland election result, the likely outcome for the next series of Australian elections, the bizarre decision of the ALP’s Joel Fitzgibbons to announce his resignation just when the government was on the back foot with its sexual harassment scandals – maybe that's what his intention was all along.

Also, it's NAIDOC week and the government refused to fly the Aboriginal flag at Parliament House. Because nothing upsets a conservative government more than ceding an inch to Aboriginal people or engaging in symbolism that would have cost absolutely nothing.

There's far too much corruption in politics but what can be done about it? There's a compliant media that is always at hand to cover over any corruption performed by conservative governments, and they were at their best when it came to the NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian. A high stinking pile of corruption is slowing being uncovered at the hearings held at the NSW ICAC but the media decided to ignore all of that, and go for the ‘girl-in-lurve-dudded-by-the-bad-man’ angle, so the allegations of corruption could be easily swept away. Who needs the years of progress of feminism when there's a damsel in distress who needs to be rescued?

Kevin Rudd, the self-named ‘determined bastard’, has launched a petition for a Royal Commission into the Murdoch media empire. And it's something that's well overdue. Murdoch’s influence over the media in Australia is offensive, pervasive, and it's almost like The Joker is in charge of Gotham City. As Rudd says, News Corporation is a cancer on the Australian political landscape. A Royal Commission won't occur if a Liberal Government controls the levers, it will have to wait until a Labor Government comes into office. But Rudd might be the right person to make this happen.

And why did the Prime Minister go for an all-out postal attack on Australia Post? Of course, it was all about the $20,000 spent on Cartier watches but it was more than that. Morrison is under pressure for not introducing a national corruption commission, and the attacks on Australia Post were all about creating a diversion. This Liberal–National Government is all about smokescreens, and this was another one. Government by smokescreen. It's a very apt title for this Morrison Government.

It's that time of the year when we look at the federal Budget (seasonally adjusted), and the Treasurer has announced a $213 billion deficit. We have no complaints: Governments need to spend money according to the circumstances and with a national government debt reaching $944 billion, the main benefit the Australian electorate will receive is an end to the maniacal debates about “debts and deficits” and “how ya gonna pay for it”. Don't believe the neoliberalist tripe: governments can always pay for the things they need to pay for, austerity will never resolve economic problems.

Anthony Albanese’s Budget Reply speech was regarded as “a line in the sand”, and a “make or break” moment by many in the media. Of course, a Leader of the Opposition is always going to be under pressure to perform, and this year is no different. His Budget Reply speech hit all the right points and focused on universal child care and early education and a streamlined national energy grid. But will it be enough to close down the background murmurings about his leadership?

The COVID Recession, or the Morrison Recession? We suggest all the economic data and evidence points to the Morrison Recession, and we're surprised it has taken Labor so long to start using this well-deserved moniker. It's the result of seven years of poor economic management by the Liberal–National Government; the coronavirus sealed the deal. There is absolutley no question about this, despite the media arguing the opposite.

The mainstream media and the federal government are still making their push to open borders, even though the continuing threat to public health is still there. Border closures are quite popular in the states and territories – 91 per cent support in Western Australia – and it's difficult to understand why vested interests are making this push, when the public support to open up borders is not there. But as we all know, anything is possible when vested interests hold hands with the Liberal government, which seems to be more often than not.

The federal government is also in the habit of recycling, but not in the way we’d expect them to. Old programs, old ideas, old announcements are spruced up, polished and re-issued, sometimes the announcements contain exactly the same words as their previous announcements – coronavirus vaccines, "gas-led recoveries”, for example. It's a sign of a government that doesn't know what it's doing and doesn't have ideas.

Problems in the National Party? Of course there are: it's a moribund organisation, and in such personality-based political party, it's always going to cause trouble for its Coalition partner.

It's not a week in politics unless there's a report of more corruption in the federal government. A parcel of land worth $3 million was purchased by the government for $30 million. If only the government was able to purchase integrity, but how much would that cost?

The NBN is supposedly going to be fibre-to-the-premises in three years time, but it's all smoke and mirrors, just to create a positive media message. Did anyone mention a ‘back-flip’.

What does a government Minister have to do to lose their job? Losing control of aged care homes and allowing coronavirus to cause the death of over 400 people isn't enough these days. How we long for those good ol’ days when a Minister could be stood down for possessing a oversized teddy bear or filling out the wrong form. But that was so 1980s, and it's now the year of the pandemic: 2020. Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck still remains in his job, but we're really not sure why.

The tedious and totally predictable border war continues, and while it's not quite like the Battle of Stalingrad, the federal government (Liberal, by the way) is taking aim at the governments of Queensland, Western Australia and Victoria (Labor, by the way) over border closures. But, apparently, “we're all in this together”, so (cynicism warning) it couldn't be anything to do with the Liberal Government playing base politics.

And whenever this federal government is in trouble, it has two cards it can play: race and hate. This time around, it's all about China. The Belt and Road Initiative is a China investment program that Scott Morrison spoke glowingly about in June 2019 but has decided that he never said anything good about the program, never supported the Victoria–China deal in 2018 (yes, he did), and will now veto these projects. This all came out of the blue, and is all about ramping up pressure on Daniel Andrews and the Victoria Labor Government. Who’s got time for the national interest or eliminating coronavirus when there are political points to be scored by using the Royal Flush of race and hate cards?

In shades of Orwell’s Animal Farm, Liberal Party foreign investment: good; Labor Party foreign investment: bad. It really is as simple and basic as this, a philosophy implemented by a government filled with simpletons. It’s like a Ship of Fools.

The public’s patience with Scott Morrison’s constant obfuscation, deflection and outright lies is starting to wear thin. As Abraham Lincoln said “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time”. And we think Morrison may have reached the point of no return: once the public image of serial lying is set in stone, there's no turning back. It might not be so evident right now, but this sentiment is starting to gain traction. And there’s no ‘Real Scott’ campaign to fall back on, because what the public sees with Scott Morrison is what they get. This is very real.

We were surprised to hear the hardware giant Bunnings is receiving JobKeeper subsidy support, even through their turnover is up by 19 per cent this year. And we were also surprised to hear some high-end accounting firms are also receiving JobKeeper. It's the price to be paid for getting the stimulus funding out as soon as possible, but surely the government could have foreseen some of these inequities and cleaned up the system so at least those in the cultural industries and the university sector could receive some of this support. Apparently, we’re all in this together. Just not everybody.

But we weren’t surprised to hear the Liberal Party is using Parliament House to hold three fundraising events and we think it's the only reason why Scott Morrison changed his mind about holding Parliament again: to raise money for the Liberal Party. Parliament House is not quite like a church or a sacred site, but there is something very off about using the seat of government to hold party-political fund raising events. It’s seedy.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan instigated a brand of neoliberal economics and politics that affected the world for almost four decades. They left the political scene over 30 years ago, and whatever people think about their economic practices and policies – we think they were an absolute disaster for the world – they were major political figures of history steeped in the politics of the Cold War. But they were people of the 1980s and 1990s, and their policies are not the right policies to even remotely think about if we're looking at resolving all the economic issues of the 2020s. New thinking is required but is the Liberal–National Party the party that has the right ideas? Is Josh Frydenberg the right Treasurer for the times? We don’t think so.

And the politics of COVID-19 continues, and it seems to be business as usual. Whatever people might think about the Premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, he turns up every single day of the week, delivering all the bad news about increasing numbers of coronavirus cases, facing the pressure forced upon him by the media and his many political opponents. And this is what the electoral expects from our leaders. Face the music. And lead.

But where is the Prime Minister? As far away as possible from the problems, campaigning in Queensland, inspecting tuna fish at a Liberal–National Party donor’s seafood company, and heaping more political pressure on Andrews from a far-away distance, and supporting Clive Palmer’s High Court case to re-open the Western Australian borders. This is not the right leadership for the times.

Just when we might think corruption might be over in government corporations, or directors might be more circumspect after all the focus on financial services and a Royal Commission into the sector, there's another large scale scandal occurring in iCare, the worker’s compensation scheme managed by the NSW Government. Or mismanaged. But whichever way, at least Eddie Obeid can longer be blamed for corruption: this is all on the heads of the NSW Liberal–National Government.

It's a by-election the Liberal Party should have won, but didn't. Eden-Monaro. Despite all the resources put into the campaign, the Government nudged the margin by just 0.45% – not much and certainly not the massive swing and "brutal lesson to Labor" the New Corporation reported with glowing headlines in their local versions of Pravda and The North Korea Times.

For all the glowing support provided to Scott Morrison by the mainstream media, there's an underbelly of electoral negativity that will come back to haunt this Government. The electorate is in a holding pattern to see how the Government responds in the long-term to COVID-19 and the downturn in the economy: if they mess this up, they can expect to be defeated at the next federal election in 2022. That's the main message from the Eden-Monaro by-election. And choosing strong local candidates is another key message.

The Palace Letters were always going to be controversial, irrespective of their content: did they reveal too much about the 1975 Dismissal? Or too little? Either way, the release of the Letters will bring up the inevitable debates about should Australia become a republic. The British Monarch had too much influence in 1975, but 45 years later, it's a constitutional appendix that has no need and is an irritant on our political system. And, like an appendix, it's an operation that needs to be performed sooner rather than later.

Hold the crisis: it's really time for the football. And for the Prime Minister, that really means going to the corporate box at Kogarah Oval to watch some grown men kick an oval-shaped pig-skin on grass, schmooze with business leaders and a former Liberal Party director, the one who somehow forgot he had donated $165,000 to the Liberal Party. That tends to happen to a political party that represents capital interests and big business. And that Liberal Party donor – also known as Scott Briggs – is someone who is keen to snatch the business of a privatised Australian visa processing system.

Anyway, who's got time for a national crime and corruption commission to look into something like this. Don’t interrupt: there is a football game to watch, schooners to sip from, sponsors and donors to meet and greet. The wife and daughters are away too, so, it's time to drink up. The national interest can wait.

McCarthyism was that awful US syndrome from the 1950s, where the mention of ‘communism’ was like a combination of the bubonic plague, 1918 virus and COVID-19. It was a virus we thought the world might have rid itself of, but it's alive and well in 2020. It's no longer the Soviet Union causing all the trouble, but the Chinese Government, and the conservatives have a problem with them.

And the politicised Australian Federal Police is always going to play its part, helping to stitch up a NSW Labor politician who mentioned a few nice words about the Chinese President. And, in case you missed, that's a NSW Labor politician, announced with a large megaphone.

Are the Barbarians at the gate, and do they raise their guns at the mention of culture? It seems they do, with their constant attacks on the ABC and a meagre $250 million rescue package for the arts, screen and entertainment industry that's likely to kill it off, rather than save it. $783 million of funding has been cut from the ABC since 2014 and the government keeps saying “there is no cut to the ABC”. But, as George Constanza loves to say: it's not a lie if you truly believe it.

And the politics of COVID-19 continues. Far from being the time where, as Scott Morrison said, “politics are to be left at the door”, this has been a time of more political ideology, more unhinged attacks, blame-shifting and targeting of the poor. One gets the feeling the government is getting a little bit inebriated on the Prime Minister’s high approval ratings and picking up that tried and tested attribute that accompanies political arrogance: tone-deafness.

Will there be a political price to pay? We'll find out after the Eden-Monaro byelection.