Morrison coined the term “On the Water Matters” and flooded the Government
In days gone by, government ministers never survived misleading parliament, for example. But Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s offensive, bellicose ramblings about former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on Monday (7 December), provide another case study in how to avoid scrutiny. Morrison was asked by Deputy Opposition Leader Richard Marles in Parliament: “Why have Tony Abbott and Alexander Downer been able to leave and re-enter Australia multiple times this year when there are thousands of vulnerable, stranded Australians who haven’t been able to get home once?” Morrison replied by alleging Rudd had also obtained privileged travel exemptions. Except Rudd hadn’t.
Porter’s attack on workers will do something else as well. It is workers and households that have been the heroes of the recovery. While business has hidden in its bunker, Australians have endured lockdown, complied with often draconian restrictions on their freedom, then emerged to get back to work and start spending in exactly the way the government has urged them to. Their reward for that? Workchoices 2.0, designed to undermine their wages and further tilt the industrial relations playing field in favour of employers. It’s vicious, ideological and idiotically self-defeating.
Remember the promise of the Casual worker’s bonus for benefit sacrifice that was a Trumpian promise still in waiting.
The government sat on a report into the retirement income system for four months because it was so politically sensitive and then released it on the day the Brereton report into potential war crimes in Afghanistan was released. Harry Chemay looks at what’s at stake in the debate around the rise in superannuation guarantee levy.
The nation’s domestic intelligence agency will be able to spy on Australians who have been working for a foreign power when they return from overseas under the biggest overhaul of Australia’s national security laws in four decades.
Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg billed taxpayers almost $5,000 to take the prime minister’s private jet on a whirlwind trip to Sydney on the night of Lachlan Murdoch’s Christmas party, leaving Canberra after 6pm, attending the Bellevue Hill soiree and then returning to the capital before 9am the next morning.
There are voluntary redundancies going on left right and centre. For people who rely on research funding, I think this is the final straw.” University of Western Australia genetic disease researcher Dr Gina Ravenscroft found herself shaking as she read the grant results, on which the employment of her colleagues depended. “It is not a way to live, where you are so worked up and stressed about whether or not you’re going to be able to keep employing people,” she said. “There is just no way that is a sustainable way to fund research.”
Clay foot diplomacy is all the rage in Canberra, and the Australian government has become a solid practitioner. Having stuck its neck out across continents and seas to proclaim the need to investigate China over the origins of the novel coronavirus, the Morrison government now finds itself in the tightest of corners. Very much one to bite the hand that feeds it, Australia is trying to prove in international relations that you can, from behind the curtain, provoke your largest trading partner while still hoping to trade with it.
It is time the Australian Bureau of Statistics changed the way it reported unemployment figures, writes Alan Austin. Australia’s real unemployment rate is closer to 13% than 7%.
If Newspoll is to be believed so far the Prime Minister is getting away with his evasions and obfuscations, but the two-point lead in the preferred party lead suggests the government hasn’t got a comforting buffer. Indeed, it is within the margin of error for a lineball result.
Australian governments and their defence leaders, with help from lobbyists, choose immensely complex, overpriced and overmanned weaponry. Wasteful spending has to end, writes Brian Toohey.
Morrison and his Minister really care about the the invisible Australians
My stomach has really toughened up since working in aged care,” Nicole* told the ABC. “I once saw a sign in the kitchen saying ‘essence of chicken’ in a big bucket … it is a disgrace. Ads showing ‘nutritionally balanced’ food are blatant lies.”
As Australia is a global pariah on climate change, it is a pariah for not cracking down on money laundering and financial crime that facilitates child exploitation and terrorism. But with the Greens’ amendment to the anti-money laundering/counter-terrorism financing bill to be debated this week, Labor, the Coalition and the cross-bench senators will have to decide: are they owned by the powerful property, accountancy and legal industries or not? Tasha May reports.
More than 120 consumer, legal and other associations and almost 100 “prominent individuals” have signed an open letter to MPs urging them to reject a bill that would axe important borrower protections.Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s decision to overhaul the National Consumer Credit Act is an attempt at making it easier for consumers to obtain loans and spur growth as the economy slides into recession.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Australia’s top diplomat, Frances Adamson, have both set out a vision for Australia that accepts the old order is changing.
Yes, I’ve noticed over the years that the Liberals often have excellent solutions to problems that would be the perfect answer except for the fact that there’s no explanation about the steps to get to the actual solution. In much the same way that we were told that the answer to unemployment was to create jobs and growth, Joe Hockey told people that the way to buy a house was to get a better job, and that the best form of welfare was a job, we now have Timmy Wilson telling us that it’s better to buy a house than to increase your superannuation. Of course, how people on lower incomes manage to buy a house when they’re getting enough for an extra cup of coffee, well, that’s not really addressed.
Scott Morrison says Australia’s position has been wrongly interpreted as siding with the US over China. Yet two of the main funders of the Federal Government-owned think-tank ASPI, a constant critic of China, are the US State Department, whose secretary Mike Pompeo has led the charge of global anti-China sentiment, and foreign weapons makers. Marcus Reubenstein investigates.
Scott Morrison’s attempt last week to crab walk away from his government’s insistence on being able to use so-called “Kyoto credits” to achieve Australia’s formal commitments under the Paris Agreement was inevitable. Morrison’s position was not only legally baseless and at odds with the rest of the world, it did nothing for the atmosphere.
So much for “we stand alone” stance insisted by Morrison. Broadsides coming from America suggest otherwise. (ODT)
Senior United States Senator Marco Rubio has lashed the Chinese government for its “economic coercion” against Australia, saying it is important for a global alliance of democracies to speak up in support of Canberra. The intervention from the former Republican presidential candidate followed a sharp escalation in rhetoric from Beijing as it doubled down on its claim that the Morrison government is solely to blame for deteriorating relations between China and Australia.
Morrison’s On The Water Matters Department is excelling itself (ODT) Scott Morrison’s office complied with legally imposed deadlines in just 7.5% of the freedom of information requests it received last year.
What the national audit office found was a carbon copy of the criticism that a 1999 New Zealand audit report had levelled at Scott Morrison when he was head of NZ’s Office of Tourism and Sport. Morrison had moved to NZ in 1998, reporting directly to the NZ tourism minister, as the inaugural director of the office. The NZ minister, Murray McCully, and Morrison were locked in a power struggle with the independent NZ Tourism Board. The NZ audit office report devoted a whole chapter to Morrison’s deceptive behaviour, which involved changing the focus of a consultant’s review to align it with Morrison’s political agenda and without conferring with the board or his minister. Morrison mysteriously departed the NZ Office of Tourism and Sport one year before the end of his contract term. Morrison’s disdain for transparency and the shirking of accountability, so evident during his tenure at Tourism Australia, persists to this day, with his continual deflecting and “move along, nothing to see here” attitude to journalists asking questions. Given the importance of the KPMG report the question can surely be posed “So where the bloody hell is it?”
The senior ministerial media adviser who went public with her workplace treatment following her intimate relationship with her boss at the time, Alan Tudge, may have lost further work after speaking out about her experience. Rachelle Miller had been due to start a contract with a defence contractor, but Guardian Australia has confirmed a tweet from Louise Milligan, the ABC journalist Miller told her story to, that the offer was now under consideration. Miller declined to comment further.
Defence investigates itself How “independent” or effective a review is it when a department secretly investigates itself and its contractors by appointing an existing contractor to conduct the review, does not make public the review’s existence or its terms of reference, and keeps any resulting report secret?
Defence says the review found “no evidence” of inappropriate excess charges. This is despite three stories the same day in The Weekend Australian containing detailed allegations. So serious were the allegations, they were escalated up to Defence’s assistant secretary of fraud control who reportedly then referred several matters to the Independent Assurance Business Analysis and Reform Branch of Defence. Is Defence saying multiple audit and fraud officials, including at the most senior levels, all got it wrong? Are we being asked to conclude that senior Defence fraud officials cannot accurately identify inappropriate excess charges? It seems there is a serious problem then, no matter which way we look at it.
Nine Entertainment chief Hugh Marks dumped for having sex, Christine Holgate chopped at Australia Post over $20,000 in bonuses. Meanwhile, the top brass at Lendlease, having presided over a billion dollar tax scam, nonchalantly claim they are “continuing to engage with the ATO and await the finalisation of its draft determination”. Michael West reports.
The gas industry will inevitably decline as an energy source for industry and homes due to both economic and environmental issues, and will not deliver the Morrison government’s promised “gas-led recovery”, a new report finds.The gas industry will inevitably decline as an energy source for industry and homes due to both economic and environmental issues, and will not deliver the Morrison government’s promised “gas-led recovery”, a new report finds.
AS THE QUESTION of behind-the-scenes bonking within the Federal Government came to the fore once again this week, Morrison provided evidence – in case anyone thought more was needed – of the dismissive culture towards women that characterises his prime ministership.
WHEN JOE HOCKEY, former cigar-chomping Australian Treasurer in Tony Abbott’s government and Australian ambassador to the USA between January 2016 and January 2020, made it clear that he agreed with his golfing buddy Donald Trump that fraud “for sure” characterised Democratic Party voting and that “there’s plenty of good reason to have litigation, I mean it is a complete dog’s breakfast right across the country,” he did more than jump into the unaerated, putrid goldfish bowl. He inadvertently shone a light on the real nature of the relationship between the current Australian Government and the Trump White House, a relationship which exposed the Australian Government as a kind of ex-officio branch of the Trump Republican Party.
Why should Christian Porter be given the benefit of silence when Australians aren’t. Why shouldn’t MP’s practice what they preach and their pasts remembered. The ABC informs us Morrison wants it shut down. So does Rupert.
The Australian’s editor-at-large, Paul Kelly, said on Q&A that Porter was “trashed” by the program, adding
The rush by the government and its media supporters to attack last night’s Four Corners as not in the public interest is not merely wrong, but offensively so.
Morrison has sought to weaken institutions. He was happy for Parliament not to sit at times during this crisis. Under his leadership, misleading Parliament no longer seems an important offence. After the Audit Office criticised the government’s sports rorts, its funding was cut back. Morrison has put the ABC board on notice, more or less told public servants to get back in their box and mocked international bodies. Secrecy dominates. On a surprising number of occasions, Morrison has made claims that are not, by any measure, true – that, for example, he has not said things he is on record as having said. A lot has been written about the war on truth, the loss of a common set of facts from which we can proceed. I am concerned just as much with something slightly, but significantly, different. Politics is not just based on facts; it is, at its heart, a collective quest to discover what the facts are, and then to act on them. Morrison addresses the media on Sunday outside Kirribili House. Morrison addresses the media on Sunday outside Kirribili House.Credit:Edwina Pickles It is this idea, of politics as a search for truth, that we are on the cusp of losing; the idea that, together, we can muddle towards consensus on what issues are real and pressing, and in this way make a better world, or at least a better country – and hopefully both. This is the role of the institutions our Prime Minister doesn’t like; this is why it is important that our politicians tell the truth and that the media holds them to that standard.
Senator Eric Abetz has been criticised for asking Chinese-Australians to denounce the Chinese Community Party during a Senate Committee, writes Peter Henning.
The claim Both the Coalition and Labor have in the past argued that paying off Commonwealth debt is a benchmark of economic success in Australian politics. But Treasurer Josh Frydenberg recently warned Australians that his July budget update was going to contain “eye watering numbers around debt and deficit”, saying: “The coronavirus has required the Government to spend unprecedented amounts of money to support people in need”. The following day, in an interview with ABC News Breakfast, shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers said the Government must not be allowed to “pull a swiftie” by pretending the red ink in the budget was a consequence of the virus when the vast majority of the debt had piled up beforehand.
If the Coalition was serious about helping those who have a go, they would be giving larger tax cuts to those who would value the extra $20 or thereabouts a week and spend it on fixing the car, paying the outstanding bills or going away for the weekend for the first time in years, rather than those who really won’t even notice the extra $20 a week in their bank accounts. Morrison and Frydenberg had the perfect opportunity to make a real change for the better. Did they take it? – nope, of course they didn’t.
The delayed Integrity Commission proposed by the Government is drawing criticism for its possibility to make parliamentary corruption worse. Investigations editor Ross Jones reports.
While US Republican politicians and conservative commentators were quick to condemn President Trump, not so Australian conservatives, despite their professed love for freedom. Bernard Keane reports.
Hundreds of communities across Australia are hurtling towards the coal and gas cliff as politicians obsess over Cartier watches and pandemic politics. Michael West reports on the spectre of plunging demand for fossil fuels and the savage effects it will reap on regional communities.
Systemic Graft and Corruption revealed daily and Morrison reacts to AUS Post watches
Prime Minister Scott Morrison swung the spotlight away from the mounting evidence of the misuse of taxpayer funds and on to AusPost’s CEO Christine Holgate. The media was only too happy to oblige. Michael Tanner reports.
A crossbench plan to implement a federal anti-corruption commission has lit a fire under the federal Coalition and upped pressure on Scott Morrison to act on mounting government rorts.
In my opinion, what this means is that the Government would like the ACCC to facilitate NBN Co to increase their prices. I will come back to this in a bit more detail. But in essence, the Government would like to create a better financial position for the NBN to put it up for sale. The alternative I have advocated now for many years is to write down some of the NBN costs.
New Zealand and the US compile public registers to ensure their Jobkeeper-type subisidies are not rorted by businesses. But no such transparency for Australians. As the Government singles out bureaucrats such as Australia Post chief Christine Holgate for corporate excesses, Tasha May shines the torch on pandemic rorting at the top end of town. JobKeeper is the single largest piece of government spending in the country’s history. Yet despite taxpayer funding this hundred billion dollar wage subsidy, there is no public database to see whether JobKeeper is being used appropriately. From the limited information that has come to light, it seems clear that it is not. A report from governance advisory service Ownership Matters reveals four kinds of appalling activity by business.
The arms company at the centre of a deadly criminal saga and numerous global corruption scandals, Naval Group, was selected by the Australian government to build our new fleet of submarines – a deal heralded as ‘one of the world’s most lucrative defence contracts‘. How did this happen? In this special investigation Michelle Fahy discovers significant gaps in anti-bribery and corruption measures on this massive procurement project. The message communicated far and wide is that our standards are lax; grey areas are tolerated; and we’ll bend the rules and look the other way.
The hypocrisy is extraordinary. On the one hand the Coalition Government reluctantly concedes that climate change exists at all and does little of substance to try to counteract it . Yet on the other hand it is dedicating substantial resources to establish a wide-ranging and powerful authority to tackle what it sees as the perceived threats of disaster from climate change. A bill being rushed through parliament – the Defence Legislation Amendment (Enhancement of Defence Force Response to Emergencies) Bill 2020 – is raising concerns that the Government is preparing for a militarised response to climate breakdown. Freedom of Information requests show that Defence is already planning towards extreme climate change impacts. References are made in the document of the need to “prepare for significantly more disaster support operations and potentially operations involving support to the civil power such as policing the population under exaggerated stresses such as food and water security”.
Morrison who has no faith in science and readily cuts back on research prefers to get his political advice from God and his only son Lachlan. which miraculously appears on the front pages of Australia’s media. Wh would anyone intentionally sabotage Victoria’s lock-downs by sending 55 NZers across the border to simply flout the States efforts to save lives and then blame the State? Simply because he can and has Ruperts blessing (ODT)
The frosty relations between the federal government and Mr Andrews continued on Sunday, with Mr Morrison and his two most senior Victorian ministers – treasurer Josh Frydenberg and health minister Greg Hunt – saying the easing of rules needed to go further.
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