This is how the world sees Australia and Australians in January 2020

A British perspective.....

"..the boys from the Morrison campaign were the Neville Chamberlains of Australian politics who had convinced Australians to ignore the greatest threat to their nation’s security" [TheObserver columnist Nick Cohen writing in The Guardian, 5 January 2020]

The Guardian, 5 January 2020:

There are worse leaders than Scott Morrison. The “international community” includes torturers, mass murderers, ethnic cleansers 
and kleptomaniacs beside whom he seems almost benign. But no 
leader in the world is more abject than the prime minister of Australia.

He cuts a pathetic figure. A leader must speak honestly to his people in a crisis.The sly tactics of climate change denial, the false consoling words that it’s a scare and we can carry on as before, have left Morrison’s words as meaningless as a hum in the background. Nothing he says is worth hearing.

Australian English is rich in its descriptions of worthless men: as useful as tits on a bull, a dry thunderstorm, a third armpit, a glass door on a dunny, a pocket on a singlet, an ashtray on a motorbike, a submarine with screen doors, a roo-bar on a skateboard. Morrison is all of the above, but a British saying sums him up: “too clever by half”. Morrison won last year’s Australian general election, although his conservative Liberal party was expected to lose, by slyly mobilising opinion against tax rises in general and environmental taxes in particular.

The climate change denialism he espoused is a moving target. In the 1990s, lobbyists funded by the oil industry acted as if the overwhelming majority of scientists who understood the subject were in a conspiracy against the public. They accused the authors of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports of being guilty of a “major deception” when they discussed the human influence on climate. Many still hold to the original sin of this denialism.

Even as Australia burned last week, Tony Abbott, Morrison’s conservative predecessor, was still saying the world was “in the grip of a climate cult”. Abbott proved he was willing to make others suffer for his wilfully ignorant belief by scrapping a carbon tax when he was in power in Australia in 2014. A fallback position is emerging. It accepts that manmade climate change is real but withdraws the concession as soon as it has been made and loses it in an obfuscatory smoke.

The final fallback and the final degradation will come, I predict, in the mid-2020s when the right abandons denialism completely, admits that climate change is catastrophic, but adds it’s far too late to do anything about it, which it may well be.

Scott Morrison is hunkered down in stage two. He grudgingly acknowledges the existence of man-made climate change but hurriedly adds that other causes are at work. The climate has always changed and it’s not worth bearing the costs of challenging a polluting culture. It worked in last year’s elections, but sounds absurd today.

“By not recognising climate change as a serious threat you fail to prepare overworked, underappreciated first responders for larger, more frequent bushfires that devastate communities,” said one previously solid Morrison voter, after he had learned the truth about conservatism as his family waited to be evacuated from a New South Wales beach.

Despite its failure, perhaps because of its failures, the do-nothing Australian right remains admired across the conservative world. The 2019 election was meant to be a climate change election about the killing of the Great Barrier Reef, the extreme drought and average summer temperatures across the continent hitting 40C. Yet Morrison and his campaign team managed to turn it into an election about the Australian Labor party’s tax plans.

So impressed was Boris Johnson that he hired Morrison’s boys to win the British general election. Fawning coverage followed of the digital “whiz-kids” from New Zealand: Sean Topham, 28, and Ben Guerin, 24. In Australia, the hotshots refined their technique of dumping hundreds of crude variations on the same theme on social media. They described how Labor would raise taxes and warned that a proposal to encourage electric cars threatened motorists. Labor wanted to hit “Australians who love being out there in their four-wheel drives”, said Morrison, as his propagandists targeted ads at owners of Ford Rangers, Toyota Hilux and every other popular model, saying that Labor would increase the price of “Australia’s most popular cars”. In Britain, the same team banged home the crude message in a thousand different ways that Johnson would “get Brexit done”.

Politicians and political journalists who eulogise the cunning of clever operators aren’t being wholly asinine. How a party wins a campaign remains a matter of importance. But not one of them added, after the praise for the wise guys and whiz-kids had ended, that the boys from the Morrison campaign were the Neville Chamberlains of Australian politics who had convinced Australians to ignore the greatest threat to their nation’s security. It’s as if crime writers spent their time detailing the cunning of criminals while never mentioning the victims left bleeding on the floor.......

Read the full article here.

An American perspective.....

"Perhaps more than any other wealthy nation on Earth, Australia is at risk from the dangers of climate change. It has spent most of the 21st century in a historic drought. Its tropical oceans are more endangered than any other biome by climate change. Its people are clustered along the temperate and tropical coasts, where rising seas threaten major cities. Those same bands of livable land are the places either now burning or at heightened risk of bushfire in the future." [Journalist Robinson Meyer writing in The Atlantic, 4 January 2020]

Headlines of the Week

The start of 2010......

"NSW bushfires destroy dozens of properties on South Coast, ABC understands" [ABC News online, 1 January 2020]

"Supercell bushfire thunderstorms and other deadly fires that spin" [Journalist Kate Doyle, writing in ABC News online, 1 January 2020]

And two I missed from last year......

"We Are A Burning Nation Led By Cowards" [National Affairs Editor Hugh Rimminington writing on 10 Daily, 19 November 2019]

"Scott Morrison, the flim-flam man who rode the Peter Principle all the way to the Lodge" [Leo D'Angelo Fisher in a blog of that name, 2 October 2019]

Tweets of the Week

What, like, "on the other hand, it's ONLY 4.6 million hectares of Australia that are burning". A rare editorial engagement: go fuck yourself https://t.co/wcIaU7q2eQ

— Laura Tingle (@latingle) December 31, 2019

Do Australia’s politicians feel that children should be huddled in cars fearing for their lives at all times?

It’s 2020. The time to act on climate is now.⁣
⁣#ExtinctionRebellion #auspol pic.twitter.com/wBczdwp0lk

— Extinction Rebellion Australia (@XRebellionAus) December 31, 2019

How fabulous! Scott Morrison the most reviled man in Australia was forced to flee by car from #Cobargo due to the force of anger from #bushfirecrisis affected residents Whoever thought it was a good idea for PM to go out in public thought wrong

— SeditiousSarah💧VictoriousVictorian 🌱 (@WhistlingWhist) January 2, 2020

An angry protester has told Scott Morrison he should be "ashamed of himself" and that he's "left the country to burn" during a tour of the burnt out town of Cobargo late this afternoon. #auspol #NSWbushfires

— Victoria Pengilley (@vicpengilley) January 2, 2020

Disaster tourists Scott and Jenny Morrison have been booed out of Cobargo this afternoon.

This. Is. The. Australia. I. LOVE! #WeAreAllCobargo#cobargo#AusPol#ScottMorrison

— Susie (@TheSusieTweets) January 2, 2020

Yes, just saw a snippet on ABC24 news.
Morrison was snarky when asked about it and Jenny looked rattled. #Cobargo #WeAreAllCobargo#NSWbushfires

— Susie (@TheSusieTweets) January 2, 2020

YES just saw #Morrison having abuse hurled at him, victims venting at him, called him an idiot, he had to be hurried back to the car! #deserved #auspol
Also @The_Nationals copped an absolute bollocking!@MadFckingWitch @slpng_giants_oz

— 💧The Angry Goddess (@Bishop64) January 2, 2020

Australian Election Study survey conducted after 2019 federal election found Scott Morrison is most popular leader since 2007 - but not as popular as Kevin Rudd in his heigh day

The Australian Election Study (AES) has surveyed voters since 1987. With the exception of 1987 and 2007 the survey has been funded by the Australian Research Council and its predecessors.

AES surveyed a nationally representative sample of 2,179 voters after the 2019 Australian federal election to find out what shaped their choices in the election.

The respondents were composed of two groups - those who originally took part in the 2016 Australian Election Study and those who were newly surveyed for the 2019 study.

apo.og.au, Australian Election Study, 6 December 2019, Sarah Cameron, Ian McAllister, 2019 Australian federal election: results from the Australian Election Study, Description, excerpt: 

Highlights: 

Policy issues 

• A majority of voters (66%) cast their ballots based on policy issues. 

• The most important issues in the election identified by voters include management of the economy (24%), health (22%) and environmental issues (21%). 

• Voters preferred the Coalition’s policies on management of the economy, taxation, and immigration. 

• Voters preferred Labor’s policies on education, health, and the environment. 

Leaders

• Scott Morrison is the most popular political leader since Kevin Rudd in 2007, scoring 5.1 on a zero to 10 popularity scale. [Note: In 2007 AES recorded Kevin Rudd as 6.3 on a zero to 10 popularity scale**]

• Bill Shorten is the least popular leader of a major political party since 1990. 

• A majority of voters (74%) disapproved of the way the Liberal Party handled the leadership change in 2018, when Scott Morrison replaced Malcolm Turnbull. 

Political trust 

• Satisfaction with democracy is at its lowest level (59%) since the constitutional crisis of the 1970s. 

• Trust in government has reached its lowest level on record, with just 25% believing people in government can be trusted. 

• 56% of Australians believe that the government is run for ‘a few big interests’, while just 12% believe the government is run for ‘all the people’.  [my additional notation]

According to AES in 2007 eighty-six per cent of Australians were satisfied with the way democracy was working. However since then democratic satisfaction has fallen by twenty-seven per cent and “there has been a pattern of declining citizen trust in the political system. Trust has not declined significantly since the 2016 election, but nor has it recovered from record low levels”. 

That 2019 record low trust level represented a twenty percent decline after 2007.

In the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison years the perception that people in government look after themselves rose from 66% in 2013 to 74% in 2016 and 75% in 2019.

After the 2019 federal election only 1 in 4 Australians believe that people in government can be trusted to do the right thing.

The complete study can be read and downloaded here.

** other leaders besides Kevin Rudd who have gone to an election with an AES popularity score higher than that of Scott Morrison were; Bob Hawke (1987 & 1990), Kim Beazley (1988 & 2001), John Howard (1993,1996, 1998, 2001, 2004) and John Hewson (1993).

Australian political leaders and voter perception at the end of 2019

On 8 December 2019 The Australian published its final Newspoll survey for the year.

This YouGov poll of voter intentions/attitude is now an online survey of 1,519 respondents.

It is interesting to note that although both leaders' net satisfaction ratings are in negative territory (Anthony Albanese -1 and Scott Morrison -3) it is Scott Morrison who has been trailing since 10 November 2019.

One has to wonder if the prime minister's underwhelming performance during this unprecedented bushfire season has begun to change voter perceptions.

The Australian, 9 December 2019, p.4:

While Mr Morrison was regarded as being a stronger and more decisive leader than Mr ­Albanese, voters believed he was also more arrogant....

On this measure, 58 per cent of people described the Prime Minister as arrogant compared with 40 per cent assigning this attribute to Mr Albanese.

Both leaders were regarded as being more or less equally trustworthy, which reverses the trend between Mr Morrison and Mr Shorten where the gap was seven points in favour of Mr Morrison. Mr Albanese also levelled the playing field on likeability, with Mr Morrison previously holding a large margin over Mr Shorten.

On the measures of being in touch with voters and understanding the major issues, there was little daylight between the leaders.

But Mr Albanese was regarded as being more caring for people, while Mr Morrison was regarded as being more experienced.....

Cartoons of the Week

David Rowe

David Rowe

Cartoons of the Week

David Rowe

@cathywilcox1

Quote of the Week

"We mustn’t bring politics into the disastrous situation that was created by ... wait for it ... POLITICS"

First Dog on the Moon writing & drawing in  The Guardian, 13 November 2019

Quotes of the Week

"Even inside the Liberal party, there is some discontent with what MPs say is an increasingly dictatorial style of Mr Morrison. One described the Prime Minister as ‘‘Caesar’’.  
[Political Editor Phillip Coorey, writing in the Financial Review on 23 October 2019]

“Last year, a Royal Commission found that a Pentecostal leader covered up the abuse of a seven-year-old. Yesterday, Scott Morrison wilfully shared a stage with him. His apathy toward victims is painfully clear”  [Dr. Jennifer Wilson writing in The Big Smoke (Australia), 11 July 2019]

Australian Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction & Liberal MP for Hume Angus Taylor is not having a good year

The Guardian, 26 October 2019:

Clover Moore rejects Angus Taylor's explanation of document he used to attack her............ Sydney’s lord mayor has categorically rejected Angus Taylor’s version of how he came to rely on 
inaccurate figures of the council’s travel spending to attack her, saying “there were no alternative versions of the document” on 
the council’s website at any time.

INFOGRAPHIC: Energy Minister Angus Taylor has once again 

repeated a misleading claim on inheriting an "emissions deficit" 

from Labor. (RMIT ABC Fact Check), 24 October 2019

The Guardian at 4:05pm on 24 October 2019 reported that Labor will refer the matter of the alleged false documents used by Minister for Energy Angus Taylor to the police under Sect 253 of the Crimes Act 1900 if the federal government doesn't do so within 24 hours.

The Guardian, 23 October 2019:

Angus Taylor baselessly accused Sydney’s lord mayor of driving
up carbon emissions by spending $15m on travel, a claim that was 
later backed up with a doctored council document provided to the 
Daily Telegraph, which reported the figure.

On 30 September, the Telegraph reported on page three that the 
“City of Sydney Council’s outlay on flights outstrips that of 
Australia’s foreign ministers”.

The story quoted a letter sent by Taylor to the mayor, Clover 
Moore, saying the council’s annual report for 2017-18 “shows 
your council spent $1.7m on international travel and $14.2m 
on domestic travel”, contrasting the spending with Moore’s 
declaration of a climate emergency in June.

City of Sydney’s publicly available annual report shows 
councillors spent $1,727.77 on overseas travel and $4,206.32 
on domestic travel. 

In total, the council spent $229,000 on travel during 2017-18, 
under its $300,000 budget.After the story was published, Moore
vigorously disputed the figures on Twitter. In subsequent emails 
between the Telegraph and Moore’s office, the paper justified the 
figures using a document supplied by Taylor’s office, purporting 
to be the council’s annual report.

But the document provided to the Telegraph shows wildly different 
figures, which appeared in a strange format unlike the one used 
elsewhere in the annual report.

It is unclear who altered the document. There is no suggestion 
that Taylor himself was responsible.

The council is adamant that it did not alter the figures. It said it 
had checked the metadata to establish that the report had not 
been changed on its website since being posted in November 
2018.

The Daily Telegraph & ANGUS TAYLOR ‼️

3 options you could be:

STUPID
DISHONEST
BOTH

No one expects any better from the Murdoch Press then again no expects any better from Angus Taylor just waiting for his next sleazy deal.#Auspol

Link to full story: https://t.co/3mZTUud5oN pic.twitter.com/b6PGDdJfMR

— 💧 Sleeping Giants Oz 📣 (@slpng_giants_oz) October 23, 2019

The Guardian, 24 August 2019:

Angus Taylor did not declare at a meeting with environment 
officials about critically endangered grasslands that he had 
a financial interest in a company that was under investigation 
for poisoning them.

And no notes were taken by the senior department official 
who attended the meeting in 2017, a Senate committee has
heard.

Officials from the environment and energy department gave 
the evidence at a special hearing of the Senate’s inquiry into 
the extinction crisis on Friday....

ABC News, 20 August 2019:

New figures show Australia's carbon emissions are continuing 
to climb despite Federal Government assurances it has the 
policy framework to address climate change.

In the year to March, emissions rose 0.6 per cent on the previous 
year, according to data released by Energy and Emissions 
Reduction Minister Angus Taylor......

The Guardian, 2 May 2019:

The energy minister, Angus Taylor, has denied he played a role 
in structuring the company which received an $80m government 
buyback of its water rights through the tax haven of the Cayman Islands.

Taylor, who was a director of Eastern Australia Agriculture between 
2008 and 2009 and who described himself as a co-founder of the 
company, told ABC Radio National on Thursday morning he was 
involved only in advising on the agricultural side of the investment.

He said he severed all involvement in the company prior to being 
elected to parliament.

EAA was paid $80m for its overland flow water rights without 
tender in 2017 when Barnaby Joyce was agriculture minister......

Cartoons of the Week

Alan Moir

A Costa

Tweets of the Week

Unity message to the government from Australia's papers #mediawatch #rightoknow pic.twitter.com/wuE9ZyGjQx

— Media Watch (@ABCmediawatch) October 20, 2019

Scott Morrison’s arrogant dodging of questions is spreading through his Department - nobody is prepared to reveal the truth on the PM’s attempt to get a White House invitation for Brian Houston. #righttoknow #estimates pic.twitter.com/uBAIRG5ZZR

— Senator Penny Wong (@SenatorWong) October 21, 2019

Cartoons of the Week

 Andrew Dyson, The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 October 2019

Mark David in Independent Australia, 4 October 2019

From The Guardian, 24 September 2019, Comment is Free - Get all your needs met at the First Dog shop if what you need is First Dog merchandise and prints.

Australian Politics 2018 to 2019: as good an explanation as any

This is an excerpt from a version of the speech delivered by RMIT University Adjunct Professor Barrie Cassidy at the Capitol on 3 October 2019:

Consider this. The Labor Party in Australia has now won a 
majority of seats in the House of Representatives, where 
governments are made and unmade, a majority just once in 
the last 26 years. Once since Paul Keating won the 1993 
election. That once was Kevin Rudd in 2007. Julia Gillard 
didn’t do it. She won minority government only. And in May 
Labor failed again. Not against well-established Liberal Party 
heavyweights like John Howard and Peter Costello – but 
they lost to a government led by Scott Morrison, a 
government that Morrison himself described as ‘The Muppet 
Show’. And a government that lost so much talent from its 
front bench when so many moderates simply couldn’t go 
on any longer. 

So why? What happened? What’s going on? 

So much of went wrong for Labor is only transparently 
obvious after the event. But it’s obvious just the same. First 
and foremost, their agenda was too ambitious – too cluttered. 
Kevin Rudd won with a single-minded attack on work choices. 
Paul Keating with an attack on John Hewson’s Fightback 
document, Bob Hawke with a non-specific promise of bringing 
Australia together. 

Labor this time had a myriad of policy and political approaches. 
A combination of poor planning and poor salesmanship led to 
hundreds and thousands of people who will never see a 
franking credit in their lives, fearing they were about to lose 
something. Fearing it to such an extent that, faced with a blunt 
choice – franking credits or increased childcare benefits – they 
chose the franking credits. 

Now franking credits are unsustainable and at some stage 
something will have to give; the numbers in just a few short 
years from now will be compelling. The cost will grow 
exponentially. There will have to be at the very least a trimming 
of the benefits.

But having said that, it wasn’t sensible to go so hard right off 
the bat at the problem, and it wasn’t sensible to put the policy 
out so far ahead of time. It went out in isolation from the upside
 – the benefit to community – the revenue … the money that 
would then flow to other priorities. 

Here’s the evidence for that. The Age and the Sydney Morning 
Herald, to their credit, put out these numbers themselves. They 
surveyed their own papers and what did they find? The dental 
plan that was to be paid for with the franking credits policy – 
that got 10 mentions; the cancer funding, virtually free cancer 
treatment for older Australians – that got 21 mentions. 
Franking credits ... 700. 

That’s how big a start that issue – the negative issue – got over 
the positive. 

Same with negative gearing. It wasn’t just the policy shift – but 
what in their minds it represented. 

To so many it was an illustration of Labor’s inability to manage 
the economy; to threaten economic welfare. 

A huge lesson: you can’t take anything away from people 
without a very good reason. If it’s hard to explain then it’s easy 
to exploit. But more than that, the policies left Labor exposed to 
a government campaign built around higher taxes. They built a 
fear that taxes would go up across the board, to such an extent 
that an internet-led scare campaign around death taxes even 
got traction. 

In retrospect, Labor would have been better off running a far 
narrower campaign built around climate change and wages. 
The rest could have waited until after the election. That is not 
to say Labor should be forever gun-shy: too timid now to 
address long-term budgetary problems that negative gearing 
and franking credits represents. They should not be gun-shy. 

As I said, those issues will have to be dealt with, by either a 
Labor or a coalition government. But more gradually, certainly 
initially impacting on fewer people. 

But what we are seeing right now is a Labor Party knocked 
about by a shock loss and in real danger of overreacting … 
ready to abandon so much; a party that now seems hesitant to 
take on the government even on some of the bigger issues. 

Herein lies the dilemma now for Labor. Research has shown 
that at the last election – if that election had just been held in 
Victoria, NSW and the ACT – Labor would have won 48 seats 
to 37. That’s probably not surprising. But throw in SA, 
Tasmania and the NT – a large part of the country – and Labor 
still wins 57 seats to 43. Now add the capital cities of Brisbane 
and Perth – still Labor by 67 seats to 54. That only leaves the 
rural and regional seats of Queensland and WA: but there are 
a lot of them. 25 in fact – and 23 of those went to the Coalition. 
That put the Coalition comfortably in front. 

Now I’m not suggesting in any way that skewers the result. It 
doesn’t. The people in those rural areas are Australians too. 
Their vote counts in the same way as those in the capital cities. 
The point though is this. That demographic carried it for the 
Coalition. The rest of the country voted marginally Labor. 

So how does Labor deal with that? What do you say to 
Queenslanders? I recall 30 years ago saying to Bob Hawke: 
I’ve noticed when you’re in WA you remind people that you 
were educated there; when you’re in SA you remind them that’s 
where you were born; when you’re in Victoria you talk about 
your ACTU days; and now as PM you spend most of your time 
in NSW. What are you going to say to Queenslanders? And 
he said with a twinkle in his eye. I could tell them that’s where 
I’ll retire! 

But the serious dilemma now for Labor is essentially this. 
Do they abandon policies because regional Queensland hates 
those policies? Do they appease Pauline Hanson and her ilk? 

Do they make compromises simply aimed at winning back a 
share of that vote? Do they appease the regions of Queensland 
but in the process risk looking and sounding wishywashy in 
other parts of Australia? 

One answer surely is to be true to yourself. Back yourself to 
grow the vote in the rest of Australia; without abandoning 
Queensland altogether. Sort out what you stand for and be 
resolute behind those values. 

Labor lost the last election, sure, but by and large they died 
on their feet. If they’re not careful they’ll over analyse and die 
on their knees at the next one.

Read the full speech here.