Morrison Laps Up Alan Jones Shock Jock Spray

Of all the choices Scott Morrison could take, the decision to sink the boot into Malcolm Turnbull for telling the truth was not the wisest.

A few facts:

Morrison, the new Prime Minister, chose to send Malcolm Turnbull, the leader he replaced, to a conference in Indonesia because he couldn’t go himself, and he wanted “to ensure that we had very senior-level representation.”

In fact, Morrison could hardly attend, having just announced, apropos of nothing but panic at the byelection in Turnbull’s former seat of Wentworth, that he was thinking about moving Australia’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Anyone who thought about it for more than a second knew such a thought-bubble was guaranteed to inflame relations with Australia’s nearest large neighbour. Indonesia is the most populous Muslim-majority nation in the world.

Sure enough, within hours, Indonesia started threatening the trade relationship with Australia.
Meanwhile, Morrison’s ham-fisted attempt to win over Jewish voters in Wentworth turned out to be worthless: the conservatives lost the seat for the first time in 117 years.

In sending Turnbull to Indonesia for talks with the Indonesian President, Joko Widodo, did Morrison imagine the subjects of Jerusalem and trade wouldn’t get a solid workout?

Well then. Surprise, surprise.

Turnbull, asked about the out-of-the-blue Jerusalem proposal, declared "there is no question, were that move to occur, it would be met with a very negative reaction in Indonesia."

The only controversial aspect of that comment is that it is the plain truth.
It’s a truth, of course, that the new PM couldn’t stomach. It showed him up as an amateur in international affairs and an opportunist in domestic politics.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has taken a swipe at his predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull, saying he should stay out of politics on Alan Jones' show on Thursday. Audio source: 2GB
Still, it is hardly unusual for political leaders to find themselves chewing on unpalatable facts. The more sensible of them swallow uncomfortably and move on.

Morrison, instead, doubled down by going on Alan Jones’s regularly hyper-hysterical Sydney radio program to declare (a) that Turnbull won’t be representing his government overseas again, and (b) that Turnbull had overstepped what he was authorised to discuss.

"The issue of trade and other things was not really part of his brief,” said Morrison.

Once Turnbull had calmed enough to use his tweeting thumb, he let fly, essentially accusing Morrison of lying.

"A few facts," Turnbull tapped. "Scott Morrison asked me to discuss trade and the embassy issue in Bali and we had a call before I left to confirm his messages which I duly relayed to [President Widodo].

“There was a detailed paper on the issue in my official brief as well."

Oh, dear. A detailed paper.

That sounded very ominous indeed. It's known in the legal trade as a smoking gun.

Morrison, in short, turned a boneheaded idea, first championed by Donald Trump, into proof that just when he needs political momentum, he is capable of transforming a minor embarrassment into a full-blown shambles.

Shortly after Turnbull's fact-dealing tweet, Morrison rushed out an egg-on-face statement admitting that he had over-egged his confection.

"As head of delegation, he [Turnbull] was briefed on appropriate responses on other issues that could be raised in any direct discussions with the President, in his role as head of delegation," panted Morrison, clearly having lost his nerve at the whiff of smoking gun.

"Accordingly there were briefings dealing with the issues he has referred to."

Yes, indeed. A shambles of the first order.

Morrison announces wasteful and ineffective apprentice scheme

2 November 2018

The peak body for working people condemns the Morrison Government’s so called ‘bush wage’ – a hugely wasteful and ineffective band aid over the massive funding cuts made by the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison government to apprenticeships and vocational education and training.

If rolled out nationally the new program is projected to cost $11 billion over four years with the aim of placing just 1630 apprentices.

Between Sep 2013 and Sept 2017 apprentice and trainee numbers dropped by a staggering 150,000. A 37% drop over the life of the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison government.

The TAFE sector lost one-sixth of its financing in 2016, with operating revenues falling 16.8 per cent to $8.14 billion.

Quotes attributable to ACTU Secretary Sally McManus:

• “The Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison Government refuses to invest in apprenticeship programs that we know work and instead continue to give handouts to big business.
• “We have seen through the PaTH program, through CDP, and now this thought bubble, that this Prime Minister and his Government do not care about working people or developing skills, they simply want to funnel public money into private business.
• “This program provides a perverse incentive to employers to stop and restart apprentices in order to get the subsidy. This program, like all other employment and skills programs created by the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison government, treats workers as disposable.
• “We need to change the rules to make sure young people get proper skills training which will set them up for a good steady job, not sell them out to big business to be churned through meaningless programs.
• “The Morrison Government is demonstrating yet again that it will always side with business over ordinary working Australians.”

Anzac Spending Spree and the Denial of Frontier Violence

A few years ago the Australian historian and novelist Peter Cochrane wrote: “Drape ‘Anzac’ over an argument and, like a magic cloak, the argument is sacrosanct.”

And so it is, apparently, with the decision to spend $498m on an upgrade of the Australian War Memorial, Australia’s secular shrine for the worship of all things Anzac.

Where was the political argument about spending such an enormous amount of money on a public establishment whose budgetary treatment would appear favourable to that afforded other national cultural institutions that are buckling under constant pressure of doing less with more?

Missing in action – that’s where. Missing in action because the (political) fix has been in on this decision since April when war memorial director and former defence minister, Brendan Nelson, foreshadowed the spend in an ABC story that, from his point of view, couldn’t have gone more swimmingly.

Instructive in that story were the director’s comments that, “As a nation we have a responsibility perhaps to do better and in this regard we have received very strong support from our government, supported by our opposition.”

On the potential cost of the venture, he said, “Whatever the cost is, as one man said to me, ‘We’ve already paid. We’ve paid in blood, and whatever the government spends on the Australian War Memorial ... will never be enough’.”

Paid in blood ... really?

It seemed unusual at the time that such an expensive project would be foreshadowed by an institution director rather than the relevant minister or, indeed, the prime minister. But that is the political power and, perhaps, the cultural potency of Anzac in 2018 Australia whose narrative has, especially during the past four years of the centenary of the first world war, become ever-increasingly militarised.

 But that is the political power and, perhaps, the cultural potency of Anzac in 2018 Australia
Did federal cabinet even debate it? Or did it just get the rubber stamp because of the magic Anzac cloak? What about the federal opposition: has it held – or will it hold – the proposal up to the budgetary light and scrutinise the sums, as it would, on far smaller infrastructure spends?

But questions need to be asked about the profligacy of this spending on more Anzac commemoration. This is especially so because $498m commitment comes after the $600m-plus of (mostly) government spending on (what I believe to be the over-the-top) four year commemoration of Australia’s involvement in the first world war.

Australia’s spending on commemoration during Anzac 100 has dwarfed that of other participant nations in the first world war, even though other countries experienced many more combatant and civilian deaths. Indeed, Australia has spent the equivalent of almost $9,000 for every soldier killed, compared with the United Kingdom ($110m, or $109 on each of its 1.01 million dead), New Zealand ($31m, or $1,713 on each of its 18,100 soldiers killed) and Germany (2.8 million fatalities, $6m total, $2 on each).

Add that to the cost of the memorial expansion and you get $1.1bn. That’s an awful lot of Australian war commemoration, money that might be better spent on the living.

The expansion is expected to effectively double the display areas of the memorial so that more military hardware such as helicopters can be displayed. This bucks the modern museological trend whereby institutions are doing more with less space and “democratising” collections by spending on digitisation to enhance online access.

Under the planned expansion visitors to the memorial would apparently be able to watch soldiers at work in real time. Quite how this fits the memorial’s mandate of helping Australians “remember, interpret and understand” their country’s war experience is quite unclear, especially as it’s only with the benefit of hindsight, due analysis and scholarship that a war can be properly interpreted.

Just on Wednesday I visited in Sydney a memorial to the first world war soldiers built by Indigenous man Douglas Grant, who fought in the first world war and was captured and imprisoned in Germany. I’ve written extensively about Grant before, including here and here. The life of Grant – who became an advocate for the Indigenous victims of mass killings on the Australian colonial and postcolonial frontier after the 1928 Coniston massacre, ironically, perhaps, perpetrated by an Anzac – is emblematic in some ways of the tensions at the heart of Australia’s modern foundation narrative.

A massacre survivor himself, he was stolen from the Queensland rainforest by white invaders, raised in Sydney by a non-Aboriginal family, fought for the empire and his country (in both the Indigenous spiritual and nation-state sense) and became a fierce advocate for Indigenous human rights.

The war memorial clings to the “black digger” (that is, soldier of the Empire) trope that attaches limpet-like to Grant (even claiming he was orphaned due to tribal violence), though it will not tell the stories of the Black warriors who defended their continent from the invaders.

Peter Cochrane’s “magic cloak” of Anzac denies oxygen to the true foundation story of colonial and federated Australia: the frontier violence that spread like wildfire across the continent post-1788 after Indigenous people resisted the red coats, “settlers”, raiding parties and militias.

In Canberra, a city of monuments supposedly serving national memory, there is still no official memorial to the Indigenous dead of the frontier wars, who numbered, by credible estimation, up to 60,000 in Queensland alone – the same as Australian personnel killed in the first world war.

Meanwhile, Douglas Grant’s little memorial in front of the old Callan Park mental hospital at Rozelle, where he lived on and off while coping with his shell shock, is rusting and its concrete foundation decaying. Its little wishing well centrepiece is filled with fetid water.

How appropriate it would have been to spend a few thousand dollars of all that Anzac centenary money on this modest memorial that can evoke such truth about Australia’s alternative, real foundation story. Better still – how about a little bit of the $498m about to be so profligately blown on the Australian War Memorial?

The Future "America" Then as Now

The Future "America"

My country, 'tis of thee,
Land of lost Liberty,
Of thee we sing.
Land which the millionaires,
Who govern our affairs,
Own for themselves and heirs--
Hail to my king.

Land once of noble braves,
But now of wretched slaves--
Alas ! too late
We saw sweet Freedom die,
From letting bribers high
Our unprized suffrage buy ;
And mourn thy fate.

Land where the wealthy few
Can make the many do
Their royal will,
And tax for selfish greed
Thy toilers till they bleed,
And those not yet weak-kneed
Crush down and kill.

Land where a rogue is raised
On high and loudly praised
For worst of crimes.
Of which the end must be
A bell of cruelty,
As proved by history
Of ancient times.

My country, 'tis of thee,
Betrayed by bribery,
Of thee we sing.
We might have saved thee long
Had we, when proud and strong,
Put down the cursed wrong
That makes thy king.

Notes

From the Queensland Newspaper The Darling Downs Gazette 18 May 1889 p. 6.

Bill Shorten pays tribute to Turnbull

Bill Shorten paid tribute on Saturday to Turnbull’s service to the country and offered congratulations to Morrison for his elevation to the top job.

“For all the fierce words of disagreement, I do not doubt for one second that Mr Turnbull was a loyal servant of Australia,” Shorten told reporters at a Melbourne market.

The real problem the government has is they’re still selling the same product.

But he pulled no punches over the government’s disarray, likening it to “shifting deckchairs on the Titanic”.

“I think what they’ve done is they’ve sacked a more popular salesman for a less popular salesman. But the real problem the government has is they’re still selling the same product,” he said.

“They’ve got a new fella called Scott Morrison who half of Australia hasn’t heard of.”

The political instability could damage Australia’s standing on the world stage, Shorten warned.

“It doesn’t sit easily I think with the Australian people – this knowledge that internationally they look at us and [think] there is no point in a world leader wanting to get to know a prime minister because there will be someone new here next week,” Shorten said. “People think that’s really disturbing.”

Shorten accused the new prime minister of trying to “airbrush history”, labelling Morrison the “architect, the author, and the creator” of bad policies such as the corporate tax cuts.

“We’ve got a situation right now in Australia where everything’s going up except people’s wages, and that’s Mr Morrison’s fault,” Shorten said.

“It’s not the leaders who need to change, it’s the policies.”

He called for a swift election. “I think the sooner the people get a say, the better for Australia,” he said.

“Tony Abbott and Peter Dutton are not going away. The hatred, the bitterness, the backstabbing is not going away.”

Shorten saidLabor had learnt its lessons from its own round of prime ministerial musical chairs.

“What I want to promise Australians is that the Labor party is united and we are stable.”