Meme of the Week

Meet Australian Prime Minister Smirky McSmirkface.....

Former Australian PM John Howard speaks up in support of current PM Scott Morrison

Former Australian prime minister John Winston Howard began 2020 by praising the current prime minister and closet climate change denier, Scott Morrison.

Apparently Howard has long shared Morrison's denialist world view. Do readers remember this?

ABC News, 13 December 2011:

Former prime minister John Howard has lent his support to a book aimed at school children which argues the theory of human-induced global warming is a scam. 

Last night, the former prime minister launched the publication, the latest from controversial geologist Professor Ian Plimer. 

The book, called How to Get Expelled From School, rejects the predominant scientific opinion on climate change. The book is billed as "an anti-global warmist manual for the younger reader". 

Professor Plimer launched the book, a follow up to his book Heaven and Earth, at the Sydney Mining Club. 

The new work includes 101 questions which it says students can use to challenge their teachers on climate science. 

Professor Plimer says worried parents prompted him to write the book. 

"After Heaven and Earth came out I had many parents write to me and say, 'Look, what do we do, our kids are being fed activism. 

I want my children to have the basics of scientists, I don't want to be fed activism'," he said. Mr Howard helped launch the book and last night said the "progressive left" had a "grip on the commanding heights of education instruction in this country"....

Think how many Australian lives, homes and forests could have been saved if Scotty From Marketing had done this in September-October 2019

Australian Prime Minister and Liberal MP for Cook Scott Morrison literally spent months denying the widespread mega fires were something that as a nation and as a people we had never experienced before.

He stubbornly and callously ignored the mounting death toll, the loss of so many homes and businesses, the environmental devastation, the crushing fatigue of volunteer firefighters, because he wanted to stay on message - coal is king and climate change is something 'greenies' use to scare the kids.

It wasn't until bushfire victims and firefighters began to get right in his face, when he realised that he might lose that lucrative prime ministerial paypacket, that he finally began to provide a decent level of federal assistance.

It's just a pity that this below is over four months too late for most of New South Wales from the Great Dividing Range to the Pacific Ocean.

We’re putting more Defence Force boots on the ground, more planes in the sky, more ships to sea, and more trucks to roll in to support the bushfire fighting effort and recovery as part of our co-ordinated response to these terrible #bushfires pic.twitter.com/UiOeYB2jnv

— Scott Morrison (@ScottMorrisonMP) January 4, 2020

Meme of the Year

Photoshop image: @janeyhasmoved

State of the Australian economy as it enters 2020

On 16 December 2019 Australian Treasurer and Liberal MP for Kooyong, Josh Frydenberg, put out a glowing media release concerning the health of the national economy which bears little resemblance to data his own department released on that same day.

Treasury on behalf of the Morrison Coalition Government informed Australia that it now has less income than was anticipated just prior to the 2019 federal election and, that economic growth is now slower.

Total receipts have been revised down by about $3.0 billion in 2019-20 and $32.6 billion over the four years to 2022-23.

These falls are due to less money coming into Treasury from individuals taxes, company tax and superannuation tax, as well as less dollars being collected through the tax on goods & services (GST) and lower non-tax income.

Federal government net debt is expected to be $392.3 billion in 2019-20 (19.5 per cent of GDP). Gross debt now stands at over $560.8 billion.

Slower economic growth is explained as due in part to decreased production and lower export levels in the farming sector, a decline in iron ore prices, softer wages growth, diminished business confidence & investment uncertainty.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) nominal growth is 3.25 per cent but is expected to fall to 2.25 per cent in the coming financial year.

Wages growth is still under performing at 2.5 per cent and, there is no guarantee that the revised projection of 3 per cent wage growth by 2022-23 is achievable.

Unemployment is beginning to rise.

The number of people who had jobs fell by 19,700 individuals between the May federal election and October 2019. Employment numbers are projected to fall over the next 5 years in Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing, Manufacturing and Information, Media & Technology.

Cost of living (CPI) is not coming down. CPI rose 1.7 per cent through the year to the September 2019 quarter. This followed a through the year rise of 1.6 per cent to the June 2019 quarter. Retail prices, particularly for clothing, footwear, meat, dairy, bread and cereal products, have risen.

As for the much lauded budget surplus for 2019-20, it has shrunk from $7.1 billion to $5 billion. While the rubbery figures in forward estimates see the expected surplus for 2020-2021 reduced from $11 billion to $6.1 billion, then from $17.8 billion down to $8.2 billion in 2021-22, with the fiscal year after that supposed to bring in a surplus of only $4 billion instead of the projected $9.2 billion.

One can almost hear Morrison ordering a funding red pen through even more health, disability and welfare services/programs in a vain attempt to avoid intensifying the economic squeeze his flawed political ideology is imposing on the nation.

Notes:

* Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg 16 December 2019 media release at 

http://ministers.treasury.gov.au/ministers/josh-frydenberg-2018/media-releases/2019-20-mid-year-economic-and-fiscal-outlook

* Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) December 2019 at https://budget.gov.au/2019-20/content/myefo/download/MYEFO_2019-20.pdf

* Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Outlook (PEFO) April 2019 at https://treasury.gov.au/publication/2019-pefo

* Australian Office of Financial Management (AOFM) federal government debt updates at https://www.aofm.gov.au/

* Cost of Living data at https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/6401.0Media%20Release1Sep%202019?opendocument&tabname=Summary&prodno=6401.0&issue=Sep%202019&num=&view=

* Labour Market Information Portal, “Industry Projections – 5 years to 2024” (Excel) at http://lmip.gov.au/PortalFile.axd?FieldID=2787734&.xlsx

It's hard to decide if Australian PM Scott Morrison is tone deaf or coldly callous

via Richard Chirgwin, 8 December 2019

via Daily Mail (UK), 21 November 2019

Bushfires that are unstoppable and relentlessly merge into mega fires. In NSW alone over 2 million hectares burnt out to date and 724 homes lost (276 more fire damaged) along with more than a thousand out buildings now just ashes.  Six people confirmed dead as we enter the second week of the fourth month of major bushfire activity in the state and hazardous air quality has seen a spike in hospital presentations for respiratory problems.

Yet this is Scott Morrison's attitude as captured by The New York Times (online), 6 December 2019:

Australia Burns Again, and Now Its Biggest City Is Choking.....

In Australia, however — where the air in Sydney was ranked among the worst in the world last month — Prime Minister Scott Morrison has resisted.

“The response has been to double down on denialism,” said David Schlosberg, director of the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney.....

Instead of addressing the public’s concerns, Mr. Morrison has suggested that some forms of protest should be outlawed, while refusing to meet with retired firefighters who have warned for months that more resources are desperately needed to battle the blazes.

On Friday, Mr. Morrison merely acknowledged that the haze in Sydney “has been very distressing to people.” He recommended downloading an app that tracks the fires.

Asked about a new report questioning Australia’s stewardship of the Great Barrier Reef, which is being killed by climate change, he repeated a false assertion that Australia’s carbon emissions are declining (scientists have shown that they are still rising).

Some critics are starting to wonder how long the government’s position can last......

Few Liberal-Nationals politicians have ever understood the strength of community in the NSW Northern River region

Few Liberal-Nationals politicians have ever understood the strength of community in the NSW Northern Rivers region or the passion of locals to protect their families, neighbours, the land, rivers, forests and native animals from those who threaten all six. Including those who threaten by refusing to take meaningful action to mitigate climate change.

Here is yet another Northern Rivers resident speaking up.....

The Guardian, 2 December 2019:

Melinda Plesman stands with the remains of her burnt-out house, destroyed in the NSW bushfires, outside Parliament House in Canberra. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

Melinda Plesman and her partner, Dean Kennedy, lost their family home of 35 years after bushfires tore through Nymboida, south of Grafton in NSW, last month.

Plesman said she wanted to show Scott Morrison the direct result of climate change.

“It’s happening now and this is what climate change looks like,” Plesman said.

“I’m losing my home, whole communities are losing their homes ... and the prime minister said we’re not allowed to talk about it.

“He said he was going to pray for us. And that was the last straw.”.....

l'état, c'est moi: Australian Prime Minister & Liberal MP for Cook Scott Morrison is acting more like an autocrat every day

"Until this week, I’ve felt that comparisons between Morrison and Donald Trump have been way overblown. Now, I’m not so sure."  [Journalist Katherine Murphy writing in The Guardian, 28 November 2019]

In which it is revealed that Scott Morrison made a 'perfect' phone call à la Trump......

Crikey Worm: For the early birds, 28 November 2019:

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is coming under increasing fire over his phone call to the NSW police commissioner, with a former top judge calling it an inappropriate use of his position.

Former ICAC commissioner David Ipp said the call appeared to have been made in the interests of political decision-making, rather than in the interest of the state, telling The Guardian “an ordinary citizen would not be able to get that information from the police … so what is it about the prime minister that entitles him to that information?” Ipp joins former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and Labor leader Anthony Albanese in condemning the call. The prime minister has refused to release notes from the call with the police chief, despite differing accounts of what was discussed, The New Daily reports.

THEY REALLY SAID THAT? 

“	Being blunt about it, it is a call I would not have made. — Malcolm Turnbull

The former prime minister offers his two cents on his successor’s decision to ring the NSW police chief.

NSW Police investigating Australian Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction & Liberal MP for Hume Angus Talyor's use of an apparently fraudulent document

SBS News, 26 November 2019:

NSW POLICE ARE INVESTIGATING A FRAUDULENT DOCUMENT USED BY ANGUS TAYLOR'S OFFICE TO CRITICISE CLOVER MOORE

NSW Police has opened an investigation into an apparently fraudulent document used by federal energy minister Angus Taylor to attack Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore over her council's travel expenditure.

A spokesperson for the Lord Mayor confirmed that "the Office of the Lord Mayor has been contacted by NSW Police regarding its investigation into falsified City documents used to inform Minister Taylor's correspondence with the Lord Mayor. The City will fully cooperate with the police investigation."

NSW Police confirmed that an investigation is underway, telling SBS that "the NSW Police Force is in the early stages of investigating information into the reported creation of fraudulent documentation."

"Detectives from the State Crime Command's Financial Crimes Squad have launched Strike Force Garrad to investigate the matters and determine if any criminal offences have been committed. As investigations are ongoing, no further information is available."

Controversy over the document in question began in September when the Daily Telegraph reported that the City of Sydney Council spent more on domestic and international flights than Australia's foreign ministers.

The story quoted from a letter sent by Mr Taylor to Clover Moore, which claimed that the City of Sydney's 2017-18 annual report "shows your council spent $1.7m on international travel and $14.2m on domestic travel".

These figures differed significantly from the council's publicly available annual report, which reported spending of $4,206.32 on domestic travel and $1,727.77 on international travel.

In emails to Ms Moore's office obtained by The Guardian, the Daily Telegraph said the figures in its story were drawn from a copy of the City of Sydney's annual report provided to the newspaper by Mr Taylor's office.

In Parliament, Mr Taylor has repeatedly claimed that the document in question was "drawn directly from the City of Sydney's website" and was "publicly available".

The City of Sydney says that the documents on its website have not been altered since they were uploaded in 2018.

Mr Taylor has since refused to answer questions about the document......

With 6 people burnt to death to date during the current NSW 2019 fire season, one reputable Australian journalist pointed the finger squarely at who and what is to blame

TheGuardian, 16 November 2019:

The history of climate policy in Australia is a history of self-interest, posturing and shameful inaction. Photograph: Sam Mooy/Getty Images

In a dispiriting political week like the one we’ve just had, it helps to keep things simple. Let’s begin with the organising idea of the week, where various politicians asserted, both in measured ways and unhinged ways, that it was inappropriate to talk about climate change while bushfires ravaged the country.

Let’s be clear about what this line of argument is.

It’s self-serving crap.

It is entirely possible to have a sensible discussion about climate change and the risks it poses, including the risks of longer and more intense fire seasons, and still do all the things that need to be done to protect lives and property.

We have that bandwidth. In fact Australia demonstrated amply over the course of the past few days our collective capacity to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Despite all the finger waggling from politicians, or perhaps because of it, the climate conversation happened in tandem with heroic efforts by emergency services workers to save lives and contain the damage. In fact, the most compelling part of the conversation about bushfires being a symptom of climate change was led by emergency service workers: a coalition of former fire chiefs, who point blank refused various invitations from politicians to shut up.

Given there is no law that says bushfires preclude sensible, evidence-based policy conversations, it’s reasonable to ask why this particular prohibition was asserted.

The answer to that is simple. The Coalition does not want its record raked over at a time when Australians are deeply anxious, because it’s hard to control the narrative in those conditions. The government does not want people who are not particularly engaged in politics, and who make a point of not following Canberra’s periodically rancid policy debates (and climate is the most toxic of the lot), switching on to this issue at a time where they have a personal stake in the conversation.

While Scott Morrison has acknowledged there is a link between climate change and natural disasters, and in attitudinal terms that acknowledgement is a positive development, it’s not really in the prime minister’s interests for anyone to press very assertively on that pressure point, particularly not at a time when the prolonged drought (another symptom of climate change) is already making the Coalition’s supporters restive.

Morrison doesn’t invite the climate action interrogation, because the government’s record is abysmal, and I don’t invoke that word lightly. The Liberal and National parties have done everything within their collective power to frustrate climate action in Australia for more than a decade. The Coalition repealed the carbon price. They attempted to gut the renewable energy target. They imposed fig-leaf policies costing taxpayers billions that have failed to stop emissions rising every quarter.

Lest this wrecking, self-interested, destructive behaviour seem a quirk of history – a quaint vestige of the Abbott era curtailed by the sensible man in the Lodge – be reminded that the Liberals blasted Malcolm Turnbull out of the prime ministership only last August in part for the thought crime of trying to impose a policy mechanism that would have reduced emissions in the electricity sector.

Reflections on a catastrophic week of bushfires

Not content with that, the Coalition, Morrison and his ministers, also claimed during the May election that an emissions reduction target broadly consistent with climate science would be a wrecking ball in the Australian economy. Not content with that, Morrison and his ministers characterised a sensible policy by Labor to try and encourage the electrification of the car fleet to reduce emissions in transport as a “war on the weekend”.

What Australian voters needed after the election in May was a government of whatever stripe prepared to put the country on an orderly path towards decarbonisation.

But what the Coalition needed was different. It wanted to remain in power, and one of the principle means to power it deemed necessary proved to be convincing voters in the outer suburbs and regions that Bill Shorten was crazy and shifty about climate change and would confiscate your ute.

To put this point very starkly, there was a climate election in May, and the climate lost.

I hope it’s clear by now, as a consequence of this heart-warming romp through recent political history, that the arbitrary prohibition of the week – we can’t talk about climate because the country is burning – is about politics, and about self-interest, and not about anything else.

And rather than applying false balance and blaming everyone and declaring the whole business of politics and democracy a debacle, let’s also acknowledge that everyone has certainly stuffed up at one point or another, but one political movement more than any other bears the responsibility for Australia’s failure to get on with the necessary transition to low emissions.

That’s the Liberal and National parties.

Read the full article here.

The dead to date in the 2019 NSW bushfire season

77 year-old man & 68 year-old woman burnt inside their home on Deadman Creek Road in Coongbar, Upper Clarence Valley in October

53 year-old woman burnt in her home at Johns River, north of Taree in November

elderly man found in a burnt out car at Wytaliba, east of Glen Innes in November

68 year-old woman burnt on her property at Wytaliba in November

58 year-old man burnt at the southern end of the Kyuna Track at Willawarrin, 34km west of Kempsey in November

This political comment says it all.......

David Rowe

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison brings shame on all of us who arrived in the country from 1778 onwards

And Jenna Price* expresses that shame for us all......

The Canberra Times, 25 October 2019:

It's the only night legendary Australian band the Go-Betweens are playing in Sydney and the audience is keyed up. A woman gives a very moving Acknowledgment of Country - you know, the ones which are more than just the nod to elders past, present and emerging. The ones which talk about rivers and sky, kin and skin. It's Wiradjuri woman Yvonne Weldon, chair of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, whose ability to hold an audience is epic.

Midway, a bloke in the audience starts heckling. Get a move on, he says, and worse.

"I paused. And then I said, 'This is exactly for you, we are the oldest living cultures of the world'," Weldon remembers.

There was a moment of silence before people started telling him to shush - but in stronger language. Weldon continued. Her aim, she says, was to address a big-mouthed, small-minded person.

Now the Prime Minister is doing his own interrupting, colonising these acknowledgments with his own version. Last Saturday, at a Liberal function at Parliament House, he acknowledged the Ngunnawal people. And then he said: "Can I also acknowledge, as is my habit, anyone who is serving in our defence forces and certainly those who are veterans, and simply say on behalf of a very grateful nation, thank you for your service."

It's his own thing. Six words about the traditional owners and entire sentences about everyone else. He didn't just do it at the Liberal Council. He also did it at the Migration and Settlement Awards and at the Prime Minister's Literary Awards. Morrison has decided to add non-Indigenous people to the acknowledgments without reflecting on what that means and how it diminishes Aboriginal people.

Wurundjeri elder Aunty Joy Murphy-Wandin performs
a Welcome to Country and Acknowledgment of Country
beforea State of Origin game in Melbourne. Picture:
Getty Images

Why does this matter? We know we are on Aboriginal land. We know Australia wasn't blank earth when colonised 200 years ago. Since the arrival of Cook and company, Aboriginal people have been raped and murdered, stolen from their families, had their cultural practices and beliefs erased. They earn less, learn less, die early. There is a lot we can do to redress that, but the very least we could do is to acknowledge that we are on Aboriginal land. It's a couple of minutes out of our respective days and might even encourage a tiny bit of reflection on the part of those of us who are listening. It's not a big ask to be part of a ceremony that has its traditions going back thousands of years (yes, yes, they didn't have exactly this before white people arrived, but Aboriginal people had their own ways of welcoming to country). 

In the aeons before, the Welcome to Country was a sign of peace. And it's this which irks D'harawal scholar Gawaian Bodkin-Andrews, a professor at the University of Technology Sydney (I work there too), the most. Bodkin-Andrews, who has researched Welcome to Country controversies, says the Prime Minister has appropriated an act of peace and embedded war. 
Bodkin-Andrews reminds us that Welcome to Countries (delivered by traditional custodians) are about Aboriginal people sharing their histories and their connections to Country. Acknowledgments (given by Aboriginal people who are not custodians of the land or by non-Aboriginal people) should respect this. 

"It's asking for understanding and demonstrating that our arms are open to you. Military personnel can be agents of war and Morrison's comments are warmongering in a symbol of peace. That is ultimately disrespectful." 

It's also puzzling. Why acknowledge that particular category of Australian?

"It's reflective of his mentality and the party he stands for."

NOTES

* Jenna Price, BA (Communications) (NSWIT), MA (UTS), PhD (Sydney), Senior Lecturer, Journalism Program, University of Technology Sydney.

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]

NSW Liberal-Nationals Government to forbid planning agencies to consider potential impacts of climate change

Nature Conservation Council of NSW, media release, 22 October 2019: 

Planning changes deny our biggest challenge – climate change

The Nature Conservation Council condemns the NSW Government’s plans to forbid planning authorities considering the full climate impacts of coal mines and gas projects.

“The government is effectively banning planning bodies from considering the biggest environmental challenge of our age,” NCC Chief Executive Chris Gambian said. 

“The state government has cravenly capitulated to pressure from the Minerals Council, raising serious questions about who controls planning policy in NSW.

“Minister Rob Stokes announced a review into the Independent Planning Commission just days ago and has already undermined it with proposed legislation.

“For the past 12 years NSW has had a planning policy to consider the climate damage of coal produced in this state. 

“It is reckless and irresponsible to gut this policy when dangerous climate change is on our doorstep with fish kills and more extreme heatwaves and bushfires every summer.

“Courts and planning authorities have been trying to deal with climate change because the government has utterly failed. 

“Now the government is tying planning authorities’ hands and undermine the science-based, responsible decision making the people of NSW want.

“No wonder people are marching in the streets for urgent action on climate.” [my yellow highlighting]

Lock the Gate Alliance, 22 October 2019:

Berejiklian back down: NSW Government capitulates to coal lobby

A NSW Government proposal to prevent the Independent Planning Commission from considering downstream climate emissions when assessing mining projects is a terrible mistake that will be remembered by future generations, according to Lock the Gate Alliance. 

It is being reported the government will move to restrict the IPC from considering the effects of "scope 3" greenhouse gas pollution when considering coal mining projects, with new laws to be introduced to parliament this week.

Scope 3 emissions are the greenhouse emissions produced when coal is burned at its final destination. 

Lock the Gate NSW spokesperson Georgina Woods said the legislation would be remembered by future generations as a shameless capitulation to the coal lobby that would harm communities in NSW.

“The government is capitulating to mining industry pressure and winding back laws to address the most important strategic, economic and environmental challenge of our century," she said.

“This is a regressive and fatal mistake that will be remembered for generations.

"New South Wales is right now experiencing a severe and unprecedented bushfire season and one of the worst droughts on record due to climate change. There is so little time left to prevent the problem escalating beyond our control. 

“The public expects all responsible agencies to use the powers available to them to act to avoid harm to our communities and our environment. 

"This is absolutely the wrong move at the wrong time for the Berejiklian Government. A petty political act of vandalism against the urgent needs of their constituents, particularly those on the frontline of global heating in rural Australia.

"Instead of pretending we have no stake in global action on climate change, we need a plan that recognises that the Hunter region will need to adjust to declining coal use worldwide and to prepare our communities for the severe weather extremes that are bearing down on us."

BACKGROUND

The Guardian, 22 October 2019:

The New South Wales government has announced it will introduce legislation to try to stop planning authorities from blocking mine developments based on emissions from coal once it is burned.

The push is a response to the historic Rocky Hill verdict delivered by the NSW Land and Environment court earlier this year and comes just days after the government launched a review of the state’s Independent Planning Commission (IPC).