Political bias and the lack of diversity in Australia’s media have received increased attention since former PM Kevin Rudd began a petition for an inquiry regarding these issues. Australia’s media is the most concentrated of any democracy in the world. The largest stakeholders (and chairpersons) of the three largest media companies in Australia – News Corp, Nine Entertainment Co and Seven West Media – all have known links to the Liberal Party. The ABC is also chaired by Ita Buttrose, another person with links to the Liberal Party. This overwhelming ownership (and management) of Liberal-aligned persons in Australian media has resulted in obvious bias in Australia’s media content, which is hindering democracy.
Why do we forget the LNP has a Dirt Brigade that briefs Morrison?
Scott Morrison’s dirt unit – the one that briefs the Prime Minister on gossip about press gallery bureaux but apparently not about alleged rape in a minister’s office down the hall – is worse than it seemed last week.
His problem is neither Christian Porter nor Linda Reynolds, the two ministers who for different reasons have caused so much political pain, volunteered to take one for the team.
They budgeted to spend $140 Bill and spent $90 Bill and are now turning it off having given profit making corporations the bulk many making profits.
The $90b JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme has ended, with a million workers still relying on it JobKeeper may have been propping up businesses that won’t survive Insolvencies are set to rise as the support ends
Only 1 in 4 graduates are unemployed the LNP insist it’s not good enough
more than one in four graduates can expect to be either unemployed or underemployed four months after completing their undergraduate degree. So how did that happen?
This government looks mean and tricky. They look mean because people – staffers, constituents being trolled online by their local member or the walking innocent caught up in robo-debt – have been treated like political problems that are often slimed or managed. They look tricky because everything is swamped by Canberra Bubble word-salad where process and middle management blather are used to hide bad behaviour, inaction or cover-up.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison is being urged to take action against one of his veteran MPs, Andrew Laming, who late on Thursday was forced to apologise to two women for trolling them on Facebook.
After months of repeatedly assuring Australians public our vaccine rollout is on track, health department secretary Brendan Murphy has conceded it is behind schedule. “Clearly our rollout was slower than we originally anticipated,” Professor Murphy told a Senate estimates hearing on Wednesday.
Scott Morrison has pointedly left in doubt the future of Christian Porter as Attorney-General, saying he is presently considering advice on Porter’s situation in the context of the “ministerial guidelines”.
But it was little-known Nationals backbencher Michelle Landry who stoked controversy early on Tuesday, after praising the man who allegedly committed an act of self-pleasure on the desk of his boss.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his Party now acknowledge that migration is crucial to economic growth and prosperity, writes Dr Abul Rizvi. AFTER TELLING temporary entrants to “go home” just 12 months ago and cutting the Migration Program ceiling by 30,000 per annum to “bust congestion” as part of his 2019 pre-election Population Plan, Scott Morrison now says we must overhaul temporary migration in the post-COVID era to fill rapidly emerging skill shortages.
Since the Coalition won government in 2013, everything remaining that was good and worthwhile in this country has been trashed by the idiots who are theoretically in charge of running the country. All they are actually achieving is running us and our standards down to the level of the convicts and their keepers who first invaded this land. I am no Labor supporter, either, but I do want a government which shows a capacity to understand and cater for people’s needs. And, most importantly, recognises that equality of opportunity is a universal right! Instead we have a national government which has dragged a country, which once had enormous potential, into a ramshackle mess.
More than 250,000 virus jabs have been administered in Australia so far, a long way off the four million Prime Minister Scott Morrison said would be complete by the end of March.
A federal Labor MP has accused the Coalition of only taking national security threats seriously when it’s “politically convenient”, after the Australian spy agency, Asio, changed the language used to describe the rising threat of rightwing extremism. Ed Husic, who became the first federal MP to be sworn in on the Qur’an in 2010, said he and other Muslims had previously faced repeated calls from conservatives to condemn Islamist extremism “louder, stronger, and more regularly”. But Husic noted that some politicians in government ranks had taken exception to the term rightwing extremism now they were “being asked to confront an errant, ugly streak within conservatism”.
The workplace abuses of the 18th and 19th centuries have returned under the guise of the gig economy. The Morrison government has now proposed sweeping changes to labour laws that will cut wages, entrench precarious work, cripple unions and hand absolute power to bosses. But the assault on casual workers is just the beginning. If the IR bill becomes law, permanent workers will also be affected. Alison Pennington reports.
It was with a sense of exhaustion and despair that I attended the women’s March for Justice yesterday. I’ve been attending similar protests for most of my adult life and yet, here we are, facing a Federal Government that offers us less justice than any other in my memory.
Writing in The New Daily, it was Dennis Atkins who drew our attention to the notion that we had a ‘transactional’ Prime Minister. He recounted an exchange between Nick Xenophon and the PM when Xenophon asked him if he’d like to catch up for a coffee to have a chat about issues, to which Morrison responded: ‘What for?’ ‘No, mate. I’m purely transactional.’ It was Morrison’s way of saying: “What’s in it for me?’. Reflect on that and then ask yourself how often he behaves in this self-seeking way.
The US will spend, if we want to be purists, $716 billion on the military. It’s actually a lot more because the National Security Agency is part of the military, and the CIA to all intents and purposes is military in nature and between them their secret budgets top more than the $50 billion that was leaked in a Congressional hearing eight years ago, and could be double that now since so much more US military activity is now handled by Special Forces acting under the direction of the CIA, but for sake of argument let’s just leave it at $716 billion. Russia’s military budget is $65 billion, and even if you tripled that to account for how much more expensive everything is in the US from soldiers’ pay to weapons systems would represent less than a third of what the US spends. China’s military budget $183 billion, and again, you could double that if you like to account for different costs and it would be less than half of the US military budget.
Over the years Australians have witnessed behaviours from the members of our government institutions that can be depicted as lacking. These days we have a word that is becoming increasingly common in our society, gaslighting; more specifically political gaslighting. Described by Medical News Today, “Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse where a person or group makes someone question their sanity, perception of reality, or memories. People experiencing gaslighting often feel confused, anxious, and unable to trust themselves.” The description provided by the Political Dictionary is, “Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group”.
As we face a mounting ecological crisis, combined with racism and violence against First Nations people and refugees, Australia’s state and federal governments are ramping up anti-protest laws and even harassing the media. We need an organized fightback.
Like a bushfire – all it takes is a spark that is given time to develop. The Abbotts and Jones’ of this world do need to worry as their control is slipping day by day. What do you think?
Nobody in the coalition government is prepared to concede they are failing the unemployed. The party of “Jobs and Growth” has in reality been expanding “Unemployment and Recession” for years and no policy the government has implemented in Morrison’s $9B Social Security Safety Net seems capable of changing that path.
Christian Porter is responsible for serial breaches of the law, as documented here last year. These revelations alone should be enough to see Porter removed from official duties but his relentless persecution of Witness K and Bernard Collaery – both denied natural justice and prosecuted in secret – are hardly the stuff of a model litigant. Yet now the besieged Attorney-General calls for rule of law to apply in respect of the rape allegations against him. Elizabeth Minter reports.
When Young Liberals in Chris Hartcher’s Terrigal electorate were inspired by Brad Pitt’s Fight Club to head out late at night on what they called “Black Ops” to tear down opposition election posters, one could perhaps, despite the illegality, dismiss this as kids going a bit too far. The fact that Liberal hopeful Aaron Henry signed his email call-to-action as ”Tyler Durden” (Brad Pitt’s character) shows just how juvenile this crowd were. But when one of them then tried to destroy the career of Sydney Water chief Dr Kerry Schott via an anonymous email detailing a false complaint to the NSW ICAC, they moved from silly kids to dangerous. Carrying on in the same vein, there is a parliamentary group who call themselves the “Wolverines”, a nod to the 1984 Hollywood film Red Dawn, about a team of high school football jocks thwarting a Soviet invasion of the United States.
AN ALLEGATION OF the brutal anal rape of a child in 1988 has been made against an unnamed minister in the Federal Government Cabinet. The victim took her own life in June 2020. NSW Police have confirmed that a criminal investigation into the allegation dies with the victim.
An allegation of the brutal anal rape of a child in 1988 has been made against an un-named minister in Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s cabinet. The victim took her own life in June 2020. NSW police have confirmed that a criminal investigation into the allegation dies with the victim. Despite their knowledge that police will not investigate because the complainant is dead, government ministers and some journalists continue to claim that the matter must be left to the police. All of them are wrong, according to police.
Dutton’s idea of making things better is, first make them worse,
One of the greatest challenges for a political commentator in recent years has been keeping track of the Morrison government’s lies and obfuscations. These have escalated considerably in the last couple of weeks, since former media advisor Brittany Higgins revealed she had allegedly been raped in Parliament House by a senior staffer. Since then, ministers, MPs, Senators, their advisors and staffers have devoted an inordinate amount of their taxpayer-funded time to covering their backsides about who knew what and when. According to estimates by the ABC’s 7.30 program last night, there appear to be thirty or more people with knowledge of the so-called “serious incident” in 2019, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison conspicuously excluded from the circle of knowledge. The latest government member to speak up is Home Affairs Minister, Peter Dutton. Dutton is, among other things, the minister responsible for the Australian Federal Police, as well having once served as a police officer in the Queensland Police sex offenders’ squad. You need this background as context for what comes next.
In November 2020, Four Corners aired a program titled Inside the Canberra Bubble. The Morrison government went to great lengths to try to prevent the program going to air, and then threatened the ABC to the extent that the broadcaster’s Chair, Ita Buttrose, publicly defended the program. Alan Tudge, Minister for Population, Cities and Urban Infrastructure, who campaigned on family values, was revealed to have had an extra marital affair with staffer, Rachelle Miller, who has now lodged formal complaints of bullying against him, and against Michaelia Cash. Attorney-General Christian Porter was alleged in the program to have a history of sleazy sexist behaviour towards women. Porter immediately announced he was taking legal action against Four Corners. However, we have heard nothing further about any such action. The number of Morrison’s ministers involved in allegations of sexual harassment and the concealment of sexual violence against women in their workplace is astounding. The message to women working in Parliament House is clear. No minister will support you. At time of writing Linda Reynolds, who was due to appear at the National Press Club today, has been admitted to hospital. Reynolds was expected to come under intense scrutiny at the Press Club today over her management of the Higgins rape allegations. The alleged rapist is also in hospital.
While Australia criticises other countries for their expansionist policies, it claims to own 42% of Antarctica. And although citing a “staunch commitment” to environmental protection of the Antarctic, proposes to build a $2 billion concrete aerodrome at its Davis base. Brian Toohey reports.
As a high-income-earning mortgage holder, my windfall has been twofold. First, last year’s tax cuts have delivered a boost to my take-home pay of about $93 a fortnight, or $6.66 a day. Meanwhile, the interest rate payable on my $700,000 (ish) mortgage has fallen from 2.69 per cent to about 2.13 per cent (thanks also to some savvy shopping around). This boosts my bottom line by about $150 a fortnight, or $10.74 a day.
THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA is reporting that the Nationals are revolting on climate change, demanding the new $1 billion Grid Reliability Fund be allowed to invest in coal and nuclear power.
Now Three accusers Morrison not interested in their names
Journalist: A second woman has been raped. Prime Minister: I don’t need to know who that is. Imagine for one moment the tremendous privilege Mr Morrison enjoys that allows him to choose not to know. By any measure this is a bizarre reaction to such news, and one wonders why the Prime Minister felt compelled to let everyone know that he doesn’t know the name of the second victim, and, even more oddly, that he does not need to know.
THERE WAS NO question which the world’s most admired country in 2011. Australia’s achievements included: The world’s highest median wealth, according to Credit Suisse; The greatest economic freedom in the OECD, according to the Heritage Foundation; 20 years of continuous GDP growth, alone in the developed world; Triple A credit ratings with all three global agencies for the first time in history; A jobless rate down to 4.92% in June, among the lowest five in the OECD and a level not achieved since; The Australian dollar hit a 30-year high of 1.095 U.S. dollars; The world’s best Treasurer, according to other global finance ministers; Australia’s first carbon pricing scheme was enacted, thereby joining the world on climate action; Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s speech to the U.S. Congress was interrupted six times for standing ovations, ten times for seated applause and received a record three-minute standing ovation at the end; and Australia was nominated at the 2011 G20 leaders’ summit to chair the G20. That’s the top ten. There were plenty more. ANU astrophysicist Brian Schmidt won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics; Samantha Stosur won the U.S. Open; and Sally Pearson was named IAAF world athlete of the year. It was a great year for global recognition. It’s a pity that so few successes were reported in Australia. Fast forward one decade and Australia is now condemned globally for its abject failures on more than ten substantial issues.
Google good, Facebook bad. That sums up mainstream media coverage of the Coalition government’s bizarre new media code. That’s because Google paid up, Facebook decided it was extortion and called Josh Frydenberg’s bluff, banning Australian news. Kim Wingerei and Michael West report on the corruption of mainstream media. As if Rupert Murdoch and the Coalition had not already flubbed Australia’s credibility around the world for their failure on climate change, now we look like we don’t know how the internet works.
The pathetic Morrison government protecting media monopoly against free circulation! Ah ha ha! Crumple. Back and forth, unable to know who to hate more. The government’s News Corp tax has turned a rich tangle of contradictions into a political event. The pleasure of watching the Morrison government’s face change as it slowly realises it might have bitten off more than it can chew is only mitigated by the haunting feeling that we will all lose whatever happens. At the topmost level is the most obvious political political advantaging of News Corp, by the government, requested or otherwise. News Corp may have said nothing explicit to Scott Morrison’s government but it didn’t need to; it’s been campaigning against tech/social media on its front pages for years. This global historical moment in tech v old media — the producers of Succession must be furiously rewriting episode nine of the coming season as we speak — has come about in Australia because we’re the “weak link” in the sham idea of a free press and democracy. We’re a Murdochracy, bought and sold, especially, but not only, when the Coalition is in power.
You wouldn’t necessarily know it from a media obsessed with posturing about Facebook, but it’s hard to overstate just what a disastrous week Scott Morrison and the rotten — in all senses of the adjective — government he leads has just had. Overlooked this week in the focus on Brittany Higgins and the implosion of the news media bargaining code was how deeply and bitterly divided the Coalition is. Scott Morrison was forced into the humiliating position of withdrawing a key bill — his legislation to push the Clean Energy Finance Corporation into funding gas projects — because his own backbenchers, led by former cabinet ministers Barnaby Joyce and Matt Canavan, intended to make it a vehicle for government funding of coal-fired power stations.
Why is this all happening? Our gutless Government is owned lock stock and barrel by conservative media. Our monopoly mainstream media is jousting with the monopoly social media platforms to gouge whatever they can out of each others’ revenue streams. Without the backing of monopoly level conservative media our current Government would have been chucked out long ago. So no surprise that the Coalition is sucking up to Murdoch. Bit trite for our Government to argue on behalf of Murdoch et al about how their revenue streams are being ripped off by the larger social media platforms, when that same Government is flaying the revenue streams of the ABC.
Tony Abbott closed Radio Australia down and let the Chinese in to take that space. Now the Morrison Government is preventing Australian News reaching the Pacific again giving that space to the Chinese while they slash the ABC’s budget instead 0f expanding it to to compete with Facebook. The LNP is supporting Murdoch and Costello’s private interests in exchange for political influence and ensuring fake news is concentrated in their hands. LNP are certainly the Pillocks of the Pacific( ODT)
Facebook’s move has also drawn an angry response from Pacific community groups in Australia. Nai Tuuut from the Pacific Community Council of Far North Queensland said her organisation relied on Facebook to share community news, as well as vital public health information in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Without us being able to share Australian news or even the Queensland Health is unable to post on Facebook, that just makes it extremely hard to keep our community up to date and just aware of what’s going on,” she told the ABC.
The LNP government is pulling out all stops to help Murdoch and Costello before the next election. If they truly wanted a real diverse information service rather than police Google and Facebook they should have enabled the ABC to develop a public rather than controlled service and invested funds instead of cutting those of the ABC. The ABC has protected us from the absolute crap and propaganda promoted on our privatized MSM. We as tax payers have seen our taxes abused, politicized and promises broken by the LNP at the fastest and most egregious rate in the past 8 years. How can the unions, multicultural, indigenous and critical communities communicate? At election times the LNP certainly doesn’t want them to.
Facebook blocking such a broad range of content will have a disproportionate impact on small community organisations and independent media, and in turn harm marginalised groups who have come to rely on the accessibility and ease of Facebook in accessing critical services and information. The code was never written with these groups in mind.
Former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins on Wednesday accused Scott Morrison of “victim-blaming rhetoric” – as the Prime Minister sought to explain why his own staffer failed to tell him Higgins had alleged she’d been raped. Malcolm Turnbull cast doubt on Morrison’s claim his office only knew of the allegation last week, saying it was “inconceivable” key members of the Prime Minister’s staff did not know earlier. Higgins, who worked for then defence industry minister Linda Reynolds, claims she was raped by a colleague after the two returned to the minister’s Parliament House late one night in March 2019. She has said she was very drunk and the assault occurred when she fell asleep on the minister’s couch. Morrison says he only learned of the rape allegation this week and his office only “became aware of this issue on February 12 of this year.”
With his government now engulfed in the scandal of its mishandling of the alleged rape of staffer Brittany Higgins, Scott Morrison faces the consequences of two long-running features of his political persona. There is now an obvious and serious discrepancy between what Higgins has said about the role of the Prime Minister’s Office in the aftermath of her alleged assault in Parliament House, and Morrison’s own claims — reflected in material circulated to journalists — that she is wrong. In short, Higgins says Morrison’s private secretary, former Crosby Textor luminary Yaron Finkelstein, contacted her in relation to the matter. Morrison says it didn’t happen and his office only became aware of the alleged rape last week.
Since World War II Australia has progressively ceded its sovereignty to the United States. The process was hastened by former Prime Minister John Howard who had little sense of national independence. Australia is now tied to a state suffering economic decline, a collapse in political consensus that may turn violent and diminishing international influence. In order to maintain supremacy, America has decided to confront rather than co-operate with China. And Australia is allowing itself to be dragged along behind the back of the truck.
A few weeks ago, Peter Dutton decided to release dozens of refugees who had been held in Melbourne hotel rooms for more than a year because it was “cheaper for people to be in the community than it is to be at a hotel or for us to be paying for them to be in detention.” What a revelation. Dutton told 2GB radio the released men had been assessed as not being a threat. Which is a turnaround from his fearmongering 2 years ago that the medevac bill, allowing these refugees to receive medical treatment on mainland Australia, would lead to “Alleged murderers, rapists and paedophiles” coming to Australia. Speaking of not being a threat, another court decision will be made today about the ongoing detention of the Biloela family. Priya, Nades, and their Australian-born daughters, Kopika, five, and Tharunicaa, three, were taken from their home in Queensland and moved to Melbourne in March 2018 and have been detained on Christmas Island since August 2019. Department figures provided to the Senate estimates process last month show keeping the family detained has cost $1.4m in the past year.
olddogthoughts 
You must be logged in to post a comment.