@Broelman |
Saturday 8 February 2020
Cartoons of the Week
Friday 7 February 2020
Vast amounts of money potentially influencing the May 2019 Australian federal election will not be disclosed to the public
CPI, Briefing Paper, 2 February 2020 |
The Centre for Public Integrity, media release, 3 February 2020:
Thursday 6 February 2020
Political Donations 101: cause and effect 2019-2020
THE CAUSE: Reliance on political donations
Individuals and corporations making large or regular political donations are rarely giving money for philanthropic reasons - they usually want something in return.
Sometimes it is access to a prime minister or premier, sometimes access to a particular minister and sometimes it is a barely concealed bribe in order that the donor gets a specific outcome from a particular government.
Analysis by the Centre for Public Integrity shows that $1bn in party income has not been disclosed between 1999 and the last reporting year, almost 36% of total party financing.
He also recently struck a a $2bn deal with the New South Wales government to increase gas supply and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector…..
Within the 8 months following the May 2019 federal election the Morrison Government acted to benefit certain of its donors in the gas industry sector.
Santos Limited which had donated a combined total of $42,723 to federal Liberal and Nationals coffers in 2017-18 went on to donate another $78,854 in 2018-19, with this result......
On April 5, $12,500 was donated to the Liberal Party; that was four days before then-Environment Minister Melissa Price signed off on the groundwater management plans for Adani's central Queensland mine.
Saturday 1 February 2020
Saturday 25 January 2020
Quotes of the Week
Tuesday 7 January 2020
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]
Australia is caught in a climate spiral. For the past few decades, the arid and affluent country of 25 million has padded out its economy—otherwise dominated by sandy beaches and a bustling service sector—by selling coal to the world. As the East Asian economies have grown, Australia has been all too happy to keep their lights on. Exporting food, fiber, and minerals to Asia has helped Australia achieve three decades of nearly relentless growth: Oz has not had a technical recession, defined as two successive quarters of economic contraction, since July 1991.
But now Australia is buckling under the conditions that its fossil fuels have helped bring about. Perhaps the two biggest kinds of climate calamity happening today have begun to afflict the continent.
The first kind of disaster is, of course, the wildfire crisis. In the past three months, bushfires in Australia’s southeast have burned millions of acres, poisoned the air in Sydney and Melbourne, and forced 4,000 tourists and residents in a small beach town, Mallacoota, to congregate on the beach and get evacuated by the navy. A salvo of fires seems to have caught the world’s attention in recent years. But the current Australian season has outdone them all: Over the past six months, Australian fires have burned more than twice the area than was consumed, combined, by California’s 2018 fires and the Amazon’s 2019 fires.
The second is the irreversible scouring of the Earth’s most distinctive ecosystems. In Australia, this phenomenon has come for the country’s natural wonder, the Great Barrier Reef. From 2016 to 2018, half of all coral in the reef died, killed by oceanic heat waves that bleached and then essentially starved the symbiotic animals. Because tropical coral reefs take about a decade to recover from such a die-off, and because the relentless pace of climate change means that more heat waves are virtually guaranteed in the 2020s, the reef’s only hope of long-term survival is for humans to virtually halt global warming in the next several decades and then begin to reverse it.
Meeting such a goal will require a revolution in the global energy system—and, above all, a rapid abandonment of coal burning. But there’s the rub. Australia is the world’s second-largest exporter of coal power, and it has avoided recession for the past 27 years in part by selling coal.
Though polls report that most Australians are concerned about climate change, the country’s government has so far been unable to pass pretty much any climate policy. Infact, one of its recent political crises—the ousting of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in the summer of 2018—was prompted by Turnbull’s attempt to pass an energy bill that included climate policy. Its current prime minister, Scott Morrison, actually brought a lump of coal to the floor of Parliament several years ago while defending the industry. He won an election last year by depicting climate change as the exclusive concern of educated city-dwellers, and climate policy as a threat to Australians’ cars and trucks. He has so far attempted to portray the wildfires as a crisis, sure, but one in line with previous natural disasters.....
Read the full article here.
Saturday 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?— Extinction Rebellion Australia (@XRebellionAus) December 31, 2019
It’s 2020. The time to act on climate is now.
#ExtinctionRebellion #auspol pic.twitter.com/wBczdwp0lk
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.
— Susie (@TheSusieTweets) January 2, 2020
This. Is. The. Australia. I. LOVE! #WeAreAllCobargo#cobargo#AusPol#ScottMorrison
Yes, just saw a snippet on ABC24 news.
— Susie (@TheSusieTweets) January 2, 2020
Morrison was snarky when asked about it and Jenny looked rattled. #Cobargo #WeAreAllCobargo#NSWbushfires
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
— 💧The Angry Goddess (@Bishop64) January 2, 2020
Also @The_Nationals copped an absolute bollocking!@MadFckingWitch @slpng_giants_oz
Monday 16 December 2019
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.
- 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.
- 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]
The complete study can be read and downloaded here.
Sunday 15 December 2019
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.