Australia's values-free PM

[barney]

Australia's Prime Minister hilariously yesterday said he planned to make the next election about values. He has utterly no values or principles apart from re-election; at least none that can be discerned without an electron microscope. He's straight out of 1984 in the way yesterday's truth is today rewritten as a lie that he never said.

Below, an excellent oped about how Scomo is such a values-free zone.



Our walking, talking, weaving, wedging Prime Minister
Niki Savva
Niki Savva
Award-winning political commentator and author

Unlike his backbenchers and frontbenchers, journalists are not obliged to dive into the swamp to try to rescue the Prime Minister when they know his own words and deeds have plunged them all into a foul mess.

A few in the media choose to do it willingly, eagerly, either in hope of reward, out of fear of punishment or because it’s all part of the bribery and blackmail transactional play that occurs between reporters and their subjects which often ends in tears for one or the other or both. Or they do it because they lean more to one side than the other. That leads into a swamp too.

Most journos simply do their jobs, asking difficult questions of powerful people then reporting what they say regardless of whether it is helpful or not. That is what happened last week in Rome when the ABC’s Andrew Probyn, assisted by Pablo Vinales from SBS, intercepted then steered Emmanuel Macron to an impromptu doorstop with Australian media. They asked Macron a number of pertinent questions, then Bevan Shields from this masthead got the killer line, “I don’t think, I know” when he asked the French President if he thought Scott Morrison had lied to him.
Those words will forever brand the Prime Minister, but then in a judgment clouded by anger and arrogance, Morrison and his staff struck on a brilliant idea to retaliate by leaking a private text message from the President, spinning it to say it was Macron who was lying, not him. Morrison broke accepted protocols to prove nothing except that if an opponent goes low and wounds him, he will go lower, guaranteeing the leak and the leaker became the story.

Morrison responded with one of his dizzying pivots to seek refuge in patriotism. This from a government that refused to allow Australians to return home during the Delta outbreak in India, threatening to jail them if they dared try, then sought to reignite the culture wars by complaining schools were failing to teach kids how good it is to be Australian.

Morrison was desperate to shift the focus from his trustworthiness and judgment to a debate about whether the media and Labor sided with France against Australia. Asked on Newcastle radio 2HD on Monday if his image had been tarnished by his sojourn, Morrison persisted with a re-writing of recent history. “Well, Labor always sort of sticks up for people who have a crack at Australia.”

Morrison is a walking, talking, weaving, wedging, endlessly posing advertisement for Sean Kelly’s excellent and exquisitely timed book The Game, which forensically dissects the Prime Minister’s character.
Morrison’s career has been built on self-ghosting. He vanishes an old personality, or an inconvenient event, only to emerge reborn soon after with no regard for, or acknowledgement of, whatever has preceded.

A prime example. Campaigning on April 7, 2019, he said then opposition leader Bill Shorten wanted to “end the weekend” by forcing Australians to buy electric vehicles that could not tow their trailers or boats to their favourite holiday spot, unlike their SUVs, which they should kiss goodbye.

Then on Tuesday, surrounded by furiously nodding vulnerable Liberal MPs, sounding like he could do with a battery recharge after garbling out “Anthony Albany”, Morrison denied he had opposed EVs, said it was a Labor lie, and announced an electric vehicle policy. Yesterday never happened.

Risking their own credibility, Morrison’s ministers and MPs have dutifully defended every U-turn, but it has been especially excruciating watching them squirming under questioning about his leaking of Macron’s text message, which they know was wrong, whatever the provocation, because if Macron was a target so was everyone. Maybe even them.
Finance Minister Simon Birmingham struck on a tried and true strategy by blaming the whole sorry mess on journalists. It wasn’t part of a grand plan, but it worked a treat shifting the debate from questions about Morrison’s inappropriate conduct to whether journalists had behaved contrary to the national interest by asking Macron inappropriate questions.

Birmingham said it once on ABC’s Radio National at 7.45am. Realising it was a personal rather than a political mistake, by 9.20am he was walking it back on his regular Sky spot.


All the nonsense about that and about lefties picking on Morrison or siding with France brought back memories of Paul Keating, who could be both brilliant and bad, calling the Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, a “recalcitrant”. At least that was spontaneous – not a pre-meditated strike – for which he subsequently apologised.

Prompted by a story in The New York Times, Ten Network’s bureau chief Paul Bongiorno had asked Keating about Mahathir’s absence from the 1993 Seattle APEC summit.

“APEC is bigger than all of us – Australia, the US and Malaysia and Dr Mahathir and any other recalcitrant,” Keating said, hugely irritated by the question and by Mahathir “thumbing his nose” at the summit.

On the press bus on the way back to the hotel, I borrowed the fixed phone next to the driver and filed to a copytaker just in time for the front page of the last edition. No mobiles, no laptops, so the whole bus, including Keating’s press minders, heard me dictating how the Australian prime minister had attacked a prickly foreign leader.

Later the PMO complained to other journalists that it was my fault the story had taken off because it had set the tone for the subsequent reporting. As if Bongiorno and Laurie Oakes needed me to point them towards the story.

When all else fails, blame the media. Like Morrison seeking to belittle journalists by wrongly accusing them of taking selfies with Macron. Or like one of his senior staff, quoted by Nick Tabakoff in Monday’s Media Diary in The Australian, dropping sly hints about what happens to journos who fail to toe the line. “Those who complained loudest were the ones who didn’t get the leak,” he said. Put it another way. Those who complain or criticise don’t get the leaks. A crude technique, often effective, until it blows up in your face.

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[maestrob]

Barney, MHO is that both Scomo & Boris Johnson have proven the accuracy of what we call the Peter Principle: you rise to the level of your incompetence. This includes business leaders as well as politicians, of course.

A bit of humility would be in order here. Out of his depth would be an apt description, I think.

[Holden Fourth]

My issue with this is that Scomo's major competitor - Albanese (rhymes with greasy) is even worse.

[barney]

My issue with this is that Scomo's major competitor - Albanese (rhymes with greasy) is even worse.

I'm not particularly a fan of Albanese either, but I suppose it's too late for Labor to change leaders now. But, as you know, Governments more often lose elections than Oppositions win them, and it's time for this corrupt and incompetent bunch to go (in my view - not at all sure the nation agrees). Morrison is a Trump acolyte in his ability to simply ignore what he said in the past and change 180 degrees - eg electric vehicles. His callous personality came out in his immediate response to the fall of Afghanistan - we're not letting any more into Australia - until he realised how out of step he was with the country. His non-existent leadership on COVID, leaving as much as possible to states and employers. I could go on all day, but neither of us has time.

[jserraglio]

“The Roost” by David Rowe for the AFR (Australian Financial Review). Published November, 2021.

[maestrob]

Absolutely brilliant find, Joe!

[jserraglio]

Albanese (rhymes with greasy)

I tried, unsuccessfully, not to take this epithet as an ethnic slur.

[maestrob]

Albanese (rhymes with greasy)

I tried, unsuccessfully, not to take this epithet as an ethnic slur.

Hmmm...

Yes.

[Belle]

Absolutely priceless. Perhaps our PM needs to emulate Biden; forget his lines, use his palm cards and remain hostage to the California hyena!! What a great state that is now, by the way!!

[Belle]

Albanese (rhymes with greasy)

I tried, unsuccessfully, not to take this epithet as an ethnic slur.

Yes, it's your default position on everything; a slur, victimhood, grievance. Waaaaaysist.

Bwaaaa. (Toys hurled from cots)

Just so happens Albanese is the master of elisions; Pri Minser, Dee-Sishyuns, Mischa Schpeeka and so on. Super embarrassing, actually. No sociological imagination and not an economic progressive.

[jserraglio]

Book review: Sean Kelly’s The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison
https://theconversation.com/book-review ... son-171489

“How can you tell if a politician is lying?” It is a favourite joke of my grandfather’s, and the punchline is all too obvious: “His mouth will be moving.”

The joke gives succinct expression to a cynicism that has shaped Australian politics since the introduction of self-government in the 1850s. The implication, of both the joke and the culture informing it, is that the politician’s lies reflect solely on their kind and reveal nothing about the rest of us.

In his newly published profile of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Sean Kelly flips this way of thinking on its head. The Game offers many powerful and revealing insights into Morrison’s career and the tricky political tactics that have characterised it. But the most important revelations in this book are about the society that created our prime minister, and the structures and cultures that facilitated his path to the Lodge.

Kelly explains, for example, that Morrison worked hard to be a “blank canvas” in the public eye until perhaps 2015, at which point he became the more recognisable suburban “good bloke down the road”.

This persona, replete with the “ScoMo” nickname, has characterised his public performances ever since. But the performance only matters because it finds in the Australian community “a willing audience” who, recently at least, like to have what novelist E.M. Forster called “flat characters” (or instantly recognisable “types”) in their newspapers and their parliaments.

Formerly a self-described “spin doctor” for both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, Kelly studies Morrison’s public persona not just with the eye of a Canberra insider, but also with the lens of a cultural critic. In this “land of extremes”, he says, Australians are

always splitting ourselves in two, then ignoring the half that discomfits us.
For Kelly, this mentality explains why the so-called “quiet Australians” have indulged “the game” that Morrison plays, while the others have rejected him entirely (“I am completely different”).

Given Kelly’s Labor connections, cynics might expect a partisan hit-job on the prime minister. This portrait is no hit-job, but it is, unsurprisingly, unflattering.

Read more: Grattan on Friday: If the government is re-elected it may be in spite of Scott Morrison rather than because of him

Kelly gives Morrison the benefit of the doubt with respect to the early stages of the pandemic, “a situation unlike anything those involved had dealt with before”. There is recognition, too, of the burdens that Jenny Morrison and her daughters have borne in service of public life. But the portrait of Morrison himself is a study of duplicity and hollowness.

There are criticisms of Morrison’s more tone-deaf and morally dubious performances, none more so than the forced handshakes with reluctant bushfire survivors and firefighters during that black summer of 2019-20.

But the most important conclusion about Morrison in this book relates to the way he thinks. Kelly suggests Morrison’s mind does not think in narratives, but only in images or snapshots (think of the punchline of the tourism ad he commissioned, “Where the bloody hell are ya?”). This, Kelly reasons, is why he can say one thing with such apparent conviction today, and the opposite with equal fervour tomorrow.

For a public figure, this inconsistency would be impossible “if it were not a central aspect of their experience of the world”. The psychological analysis here is sweeping, its inferences devastating.

There are many praiseworthy qualities in Kelly’s study. Serious issues, from asylum-seeker policy to the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine roll-out, are given ample coverage. But this is no traditional biography, and these debates are not its central concern.

The main subject of this book is the performance of politics itself, and the narratives that mediate the public’s relationship with its representatives. The idea of “performance” seems resurgent in political theory and history, and its capacity for revelation is rich.

In some ways, Kelly’s book builds on an older tradition of political profiles that took performance as their main subject. Graham Little’s Strong Leadership (1988) and Judith Brett’s Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People (1992) stand tall in that tradition, using psychosocial theory to unpack the hearts and minds of Australian liberals from Menzies to Malcolm Fraser. Don Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (2002) is equally important, part-memoir, part-meditation and part-psychological study of Paul Keating as prime minister, written from the intimate perspective of a prime ministerial speechwriter.

In each case, the biographer’s goal was to explain not just who the prime minister was, but how their way of thinking engaged with the world around them.

Kelly does not try to discover the “real” Scott Morrison, a task rendered almost impossible by the vacuousness of the prime minister’s performances and the role of the media in presenting him to us.

Instead, he evokes the divided community to whom Morrison performs, and the social and cultural processes that allow those performances to take place and, at least sometimes, hit their mark. Kelly’s method is to home in on public speech, its sounds and cadences, as well as the often elusive messages and impressions that Morrison seeks to convey with his words.

The chief limitation of The Game is that, relying largely on public material, it cannot take us into the institutions that empower Morrison, other than the media.

We don’t learn much about the Prime Minister’s Office, other than that it failed to respond to Brittany Higgins’s alleged rape in Parliament House in an appropriate fashion.

Parliament itself is a stage here, but scarcely recognisable as an institution that makes laws. The public service is invisible. National Cabinet is, according to Kelly, little more than an “aesthetic change” from the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) that preceded it.

It says something about the condition of contemporary politics that it is hard to say whether these absences are a flaw in the author’s approach, or inevitable given the style of leadership it so astutely anatomises.

In the end, The Game invites us to look toward the next election. That poll will, Kelly implies, reveal something more of ourselves, or at least those “quiet” Australians who are supposed to have voted for Morrison in 2019. Like most of us, Kelly is unsure who will have the last laugh.

[jserraglio]

Perhaps our PM needs to emulate Biden . . . remain hostage to the California hyena!!

Bigotry.

[barney]

I hadn't seen that review in the Conversation, Joe, so thanks for posting it. Kelly puts far more eloquently my own view that Morrison is utterly hollow, that he has no principle other than personal ambition. He leads perhaps the most ethically challenged government of my lifetime. Conservatves in Australia are not good at ethics. The Government is under pressure to create a national integrity watchdog, and has proposed a disgraceful version that would instead protect corrupt politicians. John Howard introduced a ministerial code of conduct when he was Prime Minister, but quietly dropped it when it cost him too many cabinet ministers. This is not to say the left would be any more moral, but they are not in power.
Morrison's stock reply is to say, for example when discovered rorting government money to prop up marginal seats twice now, "oh that's just the Canberra bubble. Real people aren't interested in that." I think he's wrong; we are.
This sort of behaviour is absolutely corrupt, although to the likes of Belle it would just be good politics - remember her savaging Labor a couple of years ago for playing the "race card", then switching to strong defence when Morrison did precisely the same thing? If I may quote a regular poster here, "epic hypocrisy".

[jserraglio]

I hadn't seen that review in the Conversation, Joe, so thanks for posting it. Kelly puts far more eloquently my own view that Morrison is utterly hollow, that he has no principle other than personal ambition.

I am fascinated by Australia these days. It all started, not with the written word but with editorial political cartoons and the travelogue Great Australian Railway Journeys with Michael Portillo.

[maestrob]

I hadn't seen that review in the Conversation, Joe, so thanks for posting it. Kelly puts far more eloquently my own view that Morrison is utterly hollow, that he has no principle other than personal ambition.

I am fascinated by Australia these days. It all started, not with the written word but with editorial political cartoons and the travelogue Great Australian Railway Journeys with Michael Portillo.

Australia is certainly a welcome distraction from our own troubles, eh?

It seems, gentlemen, that Conservatives have been in the minority for some time, as their "policies" have proven over and over again to be not only ineffective but quite harmful to society at large. Thus the retreat into obfuscation and massive tax cuts that starve our infrastructure and populations of vital repairs and services.

America is the only advanced country without paid family leave or high speed rail, as two examples. It's quite shameful that we have such a massive national debt while 700+ billionaires reside within our borders and yet our minimum wage in most Republican states remains at $7.25/hr. Not to mention the cost of healthcare, cable TV and internet services!

[jserraglio]

I never saw a Moor —
I never saw the Sea —
Yet know I how the Daintree looks
And what Tribulation be.

[maestrob]

I never saw a Moor —
I never saw the Sea —
Yet know I how the Daintree looks
And what Tribulation be.

I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.

[barney]

I'm pretty sure Scomo has not read Emily Dickinson.

[barney]

Our ethics-free PM was at it again in Parliament yesterday, explaining that he won't have a federal integrity commission (as the states do) because it would be a kangaroo court, commenting on the current case of the NSW Premier who had to resign after acknowledging improper behaviour. As a senior jurist said this morning, had he said this outside Parliament (which confers protetction of Parliamentary privilege) he probably would have been hauled before the court to explain why he was not guilty of contempt.

This is looming as a major election issue. I've written to my MP explaining it may well be a vote-decider for me. The general public is strongly in favour of a proper integrity commission, but what the Government prepared was a sleazy document that instead protected corrupt MPs by, for example, making whistle-blowers illegal. Incredible!

The longer Morrison governs, the more contemptible he becomes. His background is in marketing, and it shows - his only answer to every problem is spin. Unfortunately for him, his personal trustworthiness has come under scrutiny - especially since Macron branded him a liar - and he's not coming up well. Even the far-right commentators so beloved by Belle complain that he has no policies, no agenda, no vision for a better Australia, only a shifting pattern of personal survival.

[barney]

A friend posted this on Facebook. It's a genuine hatchet job, but makes good points just the same. From The Shot, and I've no idea what that is.

Scott Morrison: not with a bang, but a whimper
November 26, 2021


RonniSalt
WRITTEN BY
RonniSalt
The Shot
By RonniSalt
November 26, 2021

Australians had some world-class news coverage this month when Scott Morrison slumped in a barber’s chair before thrusting a limp sausage at unsuspecting RSL veterans, all in the name of political journalism. Unlike other times in his career, however, this time Morrison knew where the sharp blade was coming from.

I’m no expert in newsroom ratings, but I’m pretty sure watching a Prime Minister’s haircut is right up there with televised earwax moulding and people who post script-font quotes on Instagram. But, lols, it’s theatre guys, colour and movement for all those reality-telly-Facebook comment votes, designed to drown out that feeling of dread you get when you realise the Australian government went to the world climate change conference to save the planet with some Year 12 PowerPoint graphs and a gas company paying for the coffee stand.

In his recent speech to world leaders at COP26 with no world leaders listening, Scott Morrison unsurprisingly promised to do nothing about global warming, which makes a pleasant change from his other promises to do nothing because doing nothing is the hallmark of Scott Morrison’s prime ministership.

He’s the do-nothing Prime Minister who insists on staying in charge, not to lead us to a better Australia, but to drag us into his own shrunken version of the place; a smaller Australia, one that has dried and atrophied itself down to meet his own limited expectations.

Where Paul Keating saw growth and opportunity in the Indo-Pacific, Scott sees creeping refugee boats and creepy China and lots of chicken-chest beating at fabricated enemies. Where Julia Gillard saw an Australia free from sexism and misogyny, Scott sees women as a problem to be ignored until the entire shitshow can no longer be tolerated, and instead of touching the icky women problem with his own hands, sets up women’s committees full of Clown McClownfaces to solve the problem for him and quietly drown down the back.

This is the only area Scott Morrison reigns supreme: running away from the bad people that make him look even worse than he already is. When he wants to play broom-brooms with army tanks or stroke his Messiah complex on an RAAF red carpet, Scott in his military camo playsuit is all in. But when an Afghanistan war crimes report needed a leader to face up to it, to stand with Australia’s military head and be accountable our Scott suddenly found himself in his Sharkie jet on a pointless trip to Japan, like a schoolboy spoiling for a fight and then running home to mummy.

A man who’d be lucky to win fourth prize in a David Brent impersonation contest has been elevated to the highest office in the land. And why? So he can run away from long-term projects like Australia-wide rail links and building effective geo-political relations. Because who wants to be friends with China when there’s more to be gained from unzipping and taking your China out and waving it in front of fearful voter’s faces?

That Scott Morrison is simply a suit full of lies and favours should be common knowledge by now. Or at least it would be if only we had a media prepared to treat his every utterance as the coughed up political furball it is.

Instead, we get newsrooms pretending to disapprove of Morrison and his lies in the one breath before scrambling to report on yet another Morrison announcement of worderrhoea, breathlessly recording his speeches and policies as if they were fact and not the sentient ramblings of a proven, recidivist bullshitter. But hey, look over there, what about that sausage sizzle, and now back to the studio.

Time and time again, Scott Morrison has shown us all who he is and what he represents. He sits atop the most misfit, inept federal government in living memory; a claque of Ayn Rand fetishists, hucksters, visionless shills, money wasting corporatists, amoral science-denying reprobates and degenerate liars, indulging in an orgy of self-interested greed and duplicity that will be read about in the history books of our generation.

Australia’s Prime Minister is the Bermuda Triangle in human form, a place where nothing happens and yet everything disappears. He ignores the gutsy issues that require real determination and work, like an anti-corruption commission or a human rights act, and plays in the corner with left-over scraps from the Problems That Don’t Exist Box, like suburban railway carparks without a railway, forcing compulsory voters to compulsorily prove they’re already compulsorily registered, and making sure Christian schools don’t have to hire too many of the gays.

A rudderless, directionless puppet installed dangling into the Lodge purely to uphold the troika of a media billionaire, a mining confederacy and the economic harveynormal status quo, if he is lost and Morrison eventually does find his moral compass, then the needle will be set to himself, because he alone is his one true north.

Australia for Scott Morrison is purely a vehicle for him to wallow inside while he laps up all the complimentary bar drinks and leaves the engine running. His prime ministership is a pointless exercise for a pointless man. Nothing has been achieved in the Australia he has run except the enrichment of his cronies, the degradation of our natural environment and the reduction of political journalism to a daily reliance on contrived leaks and drops for the gleeful sell-outs and free rides in the Prime Minister’s plane for the more reluctant sell-outs.

Bereft of ideas or vision, Morrison oversees a grift-machine disguised as a government where statements without truth, spending without probity and promises without delivery are not just the order of the day, but served as our permanent menu.

We have watched the leader of Australia lurch from one crisis to the next during his tenure, from disappearing while the nation burned, to forgetting to put Australia’s coronavirus vaccine order on the room service door handle, to skulking away from a multi-billion dollar defence deal via a midnight text, and yet still he spins his top hat in the middle of the circus ring shouting: “Do I not entertain you? Never mind the incompetence, never mind the rampant corruption. Watch ladies and gentlemen, watch as I get my hairs cut!”

And now his days are numbered. The polls he refuses to speak about are disastrous. The election must come. The doomed man must keep walking toward the platform. Journalist David Marr spoke in 2017 of, “the desperation of politicians who are facing a loss; of the stupid, damaging things they will do in a desperate attempt to stay in power.”

Watching Scott Morrison now as he flounders from one didn’t-I-tell-you-I-went-to-Hawaii gaffe to the next, one crisis to a hill of crises, increasingly losing control of his troops Mr Speaker, and desperately throwing up ever more frantic announcement balls in the air is like watching Nero piddle while Rome burned. It’s not that the wheels have fallen off the bus careening along the Australian Way, it’s that the bus has crashed and the passengers have legged it.

When we look back on the legacy of what Scott Morrison did for Australia there will be nothing there. Sure, we’ll have photos of pasta making and haircuts and a Prime Minister in a discarded G-string face mask, but for most of us, Scott Morrison’s Australia existed solely for the purposes of Scott Morrison.

All we had to do was live it.


RonniSalt
WRITTEN BY
RonniSalt
The Shot

[maestrob]

Brilliant and scathing, Barney, thank-you.

I had a particularly violent and refreshing belly-laugh over this paragraph:

Australia’s Prime Minister is the Bermuda Triangle in human form, a place where nothing happens and yet everything disappears. He ignores the gutsy issues that require real determination and work, like an anti-corruption commission or a human rights act, and plays in the corner with left-over scraps from the Problems That Don’t Exist Box, like suburban railway carparks without a railway, forcing compulsory voters to compulsorily prove they’re already compulsorily registered, and making sure Christian schools don’t have to hire too many of the gays.

And what's this in your previous post about whistle-blowers being made illegal????

Yikes! Even our former guy couldn't bring that off! No matter how often he harassed and fired them, it was still illegal to do so.

[barney]

No indeed, Brian. On a scale of one to ten on whistleblowers, the US is probably nine. They are encouraged and protected. Australia, at minus 568, prefers to jail them.

[barney]

A local news organisation published an oped by Michael McKinlay accusing Scomo of running a kakistocracy, “a government by the least suitable or competent, or even the worst, citizens of a state”. He was, of course, absolutely right. I was taken in particular by this letter to the editor:

Michael McKinley encapsulates the problems Australia has with our federal Parliament. With possibly the most inept and narcissistic prime minister in our history, aided and abetted by ministers who seem to lack any real desire or competence in their ministries it is hardly surprising our parliament is in a parlous state. The political agenda for the past three years has been one of photo opportunities and word grabs for the next day’s press, actual achievement is not in the frame. No long term vision or planning is occurring. Even the few things this government promised at the last election, for example a federal integrity commission, have not materialised. Corruption and poor behaviour are endemic. It is little wonder that the public hold our parliamentarians in disgust and contempt. It is nearly impossible to think of a single positive achievement by the Morrison government in the past three years. Frankly the term kakistocracy is inadequate in describing this federal government. I believe the Dunning-Kruger effect better describes this government. It is: “A cognitive bias where people of little expertise or ability think they have superior expertise or ability. This overestimation occurs as a result of the fact that they don’t have enough knowledge to know that they don’t have the necessary expertise or abilities.” —

I agree. Morrison is not only a values-free zone, but so are his advisers and colleagues, and they all seem to imagine they are smarter than the rest. This actually isn't a government. they don't actually DO anything, including keeping election promises. Still I remember a London Review of Books piece by John Lancaster saying that Belgium had been without a functioning goverment for 18 months at the time. And the European country that had performed best economically in that time? Belgium.

[Rach3]

Still I remember a London Review of Books piece by John Lancaster saying that Belgium had been without a functioning goverment for 18 months at the time. And the European country that had performed best economically in that time? Belgium.

Key: No government.

Unfortunately, it seems Oz and USA have functionary governments.

[barney]

Another squalid revelation about a very squalid Prime Minister. He has absolutely no shame. He's politicised the system of federal grants so his party's seats got $1.9 billion, and Opposition seats got $530 million, about a quarter as much, or 20% of the total. He and his advisers are an ethics-free zone. From the Age.

How $2.8 billion of your money is spent – it grossly favours Coalition seats

The multibillion-dollar grants system used by MPs and federal ministers has become so politicised that Coalition-held seats around the country received more than $1.9 billion over three years while Labor electorates received just under $530 million.

The Age analysed 19,123 grants worth $2.8 billion over the past three financial years to uncover these figures.

Grant by grant, electorate by electorate (you can see them here), “it became apparent these grants were flowing in particular directions” write senior economics correspondent Shane Wright and political reporter Katina Curtis. Their conclusion: the system is irretrievably broken.


How hard can it be? Find out how The Age combed through 19,123 grants to discover which electorates the money had gone to – a task Finance Minister Simon Birmingham said would not be possible for his department, given the time it would take.

[maestrob]

Yikes!

Barney, the concept of fair play has indeed gone by the wayside. This clearly underlines the deterioration of democratic norms, doesn't it?

I wonder how long ScoMo can survive.....

At least Australia has a non-partisan oversight committee for your elections, the lack of which is clearly endangering our own future.

[barney]

Yes, Brian. I'd like to claim we were far-sighted, but I suspect it's a matter of luck. But it's hugely important.

[Belle]

Perhaps our PM needs to emulate Biden . . . remain hostage to the California hyena!!

Bigotry.

Not like the cant written about Morrison in a book by a former Chief of Staff for former Labor PM Julia Gillard!! But that's the kind of credibility you can expect from people who imbibe partisan activist journalism.

The former Fairfax media Sydney Morning Herald (now shackled to failing free-to-air television) has sacked one of its totemic progressive female journalists because she was criticizing a candidate for a local council without bothering to fess up to being a political candidate herself. The epic hypocrisy of the inner urban green left media just blows the sox off ordinary people. These idiots think the people are mugs.

Meanwhile, the taxpayer is picking up the tab for the mounting legal bills from defamation actions (taken out by high profile male politicians) from our grubby national broadcaster: the media of choice for those people who've outsourced their thinking and reading. The serial offender, feminist Louise Milligan, is a graduate from our University of Technology Communications degree run by a well-known feminist marxist. Her (ironic) name is Wendy McCarthy!!!

I was at a public function recently with the PM we had a brief exchange about the political situation. He took the trouble to come over and speak to me.

Children, mothers, family; these are values our PM holds no matter what particular political weaknesses he might have, and I'll defend him in the holding of them. So yesterday, I know. His wife Jenny keeps a low profile and that still isn't enough to prevent the vicious Left getting stuck into her. In a vile public outburst a well know media "identity" (a lesbian, as it happens) made appalling comments about the PM's wife, which reflected very poorly on the individual making the criticism - LOL she now hosts a game show!! Not a word in defense of Mrs. Morrison from the feminist Left. Of course. The hypocrisy continues to be EPIC when a women who happens to be conservative and married to our serving PM is fair game for haters. She's a good person and so is her husband.

As my Gastroenterologist says of the haters, "they can't help it; they're born that way".

[jserraglio]

As my Gastroenterologist says of the haters, "they can't help it; they're born that way".

Dyspepsia.

[maestrob]

I thought she drank Coca-Cola...

[jserraglio]

I thought she drank Coca-Cola...

Coala-Cola…

[maestrob]

Again!