ABBOTT "TEA PARTY" CONSERVATISM

Journalists reporting on asylum seekers referred to Australian police

2015-01-21T14:44:00.001-08:00

Journalists reporting on asylum seekers referred to Australian police

AUSTRALIA IS NOW AN LNP FASCIST STATE

Journalists reporting on asylum seekers referred to Australian police

Exclusive: Journalists covering the Australian
government’s asylum seeker policies are repeatedly reported to federal
police in bid to uncover sources

Read the referral documents

A boatload of asylum seekers arrive at Christmas island in December
2013. Journalists reporting on asylum seeker policies have been referred
to police. Photograph: Jon Faulkner/AAP

Paul Farrell

Thursday 22 January 2015 07.15 AEST

2,141

Comments
126

Journalists reporting on the federal government’s asylum-seeker
policies have been repeatedly referred to the police in attempts to
uncover confidential sources and whistleblowers, a Guardian Australia
investigation can reveal.

Over the past 12 months federal government agencies have referred stories by journalists from Guardian Australia, news.com.au and the West Australian
to the Australian federal police (AFP) for their reporting on the
government’s asylum seeker operations during the time Scott Morrison was
immigration minister.

Almost every referral made to the AFP by federal government agencies
“for unauthorised disclosure of commonwealth information” since the
Coalition took office in September 2013 has been directly related to
immigration reporting by journalists.

At
least eight referrals to the police were made on the subject of asylum
seeker stories, and active police investigations continue into a number
of the referrals. One referral related to a non-immigration matter was
made by the integrity commissioner.

West Australian journalist Nick Butterly was referred twice – once in February 2014 for a story about people smugglers struggling to fill boats and once in May 2014 for a report on an intercepted asylum seeker vessel – by the head of the Australian Customs and Border Protection Services, Michael Pezzullo.

“On review of the article, it appears that several of the claims may
have drawn upon classified information. This suspected disclosure of
this classified information relates specifically to operational and
assessment activity that is not available through open sources or
authorised media releases,” Pezzullo wrote in one letter sent in
February 2014, obtained by Guardian Australia.

“I would be grateful if your agency would accept the responsibility
for investigating this matter with a view to identification and, if
appropriate, prosecution of the persons responsible.”

Guardian Australia’s report that an Australian customs vessel entered much deeper into Indonesian waters than previously disclosed was also the subject of a referral by Pezzullo. A police investigation is still active.

“The AFP can confirm it has received a referral in relation to this
matter from the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service,” a
spokesman said.

“The investigation is ongoing and while this process is occurring, the AFP will not be providing further comment.”

In a third referral, on 9 December 2013, the defence department
referred to the AFP a news.com.au article by Ian McPhedran about an Australian patrol boat sinking an asylum seeker boat after it was towed from Christmas Island.

“This incident constitutes a potential breach of operational security
and potentially the commission of a criminal offence under the
commonwealth Crimes Act,” an officer from the defence security authority
wrote.

There have been several other referrals by the immigration department
and customs – with some investigations still active – but both agencies
have refused to release further details about the nature of those
investigations.

Guardian Australia understands that one of the other reports referred
to the AFP by Pezzullo concerned the vessel holding 157 asylum seekers
that was diverted to the Cocos islands
in July. An AFP spokeswoman would not confirm the referral concerned
that report, saying it would not be appropriate to comment on an
“ongoing investigation”.

A spokeswoman from the Department of Immigration and Border
Protection said: “Any unauthorised disclosure of information is an
offence, the portfolio will continue to refer any matters to relevant
agencies for consideration and investigation.”

The details of the referrals have emerged from freedom of information
requests to customs and the AFP, and separate investigations by
Guardian Australia.

The requests sought from immigration, customs, the AFP and defence
every instance in which the federal police were asked to investigate
unauthorised disclosures of information under the Crimes Act.

This is the section used to prosecute whistleblowers and leaks by federal government employees and private contractors.

The Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) has previously recommended
this offence be wound back because it had “real concerns” that
“disclosure of any information regardless of its nature of sensitivity”
could be caught by the offence.

The chief executive officer of the Media, Entertainment and Arts
Alliance, Paul Murphy, told Guardian Australia the attempts to prosecute
sources undermined legitimate reporting.

“What we see in these disclosures is a brutal, heavy-handed response
by government agencies to legitimate news stories,” he said. “The aim is
to punish and silence those who inform the wider community of what is
being done in their name. It aims to capture legitimate reporting by
journalists and media organisations of activities in the public
interest.

“Rather than moving in line with recommendations we’ve made or the
ALRC made, the disturbing thing is that the government is moving in the
opposite direction to further criminalise public interest disclosures.”

Rossleigh's Predictions For 2015 - The AIM Network

2014-12-27T21:46:00.001-08:00

Rossleigh's Predictions For 2015 - The AIM Network

Rossleigh’s Predictions For 2015

December 28, 2014
Written by:
Rossleigh
23 Replies

Now, I know that many of you will be aware of the fact that I
predicted that I’d never be the sort of person who made predictions.
Particularly after Tony Abbott actually made it to Prime Minister.

However, I feel that, as nobody in the media ever seems to feel
embarrassed that their predictions have proven spectacularly wrong, I
might as compile my own prediction list, just so I can claim how
accurate I was if I’m right. If I’m wrong, I can just ignore it and
never mention it again, just like all those ads that were telling me how
to prepare for the stock market crash of 2013.

Ok, predictions for 2015! Here goes:

Abbott will be asked if he thinks that he should appoint someone
else as Minister for Women but he’ll assure us that he’s the only person
in his government who trully “gets women” and understands the
particular problems some of them have getting pregnant – like
infertility or not having a man.
There will speculation about a possible leadership challenge from Julie Bishop.
Speculation will intensify when Bishop says categorically that she has no desire to be PM.
Steve Bracks will make a bid for a seat in federal politics leading to speculation about him as a future PM.
Christopher Pyne will suggest that the words “hypocrite” and “inconsistent” should be considered unParliamentary.
Joe Hockey will claim wages being too high is the reason for high unemployment.#
Joe Hockey will claim a lack of wages growth is the reason for his inability to get the Budget back into surplus.#
Sources “high up in the Liberal Party” will be critical of Tony
Abbott, but tell everyone that he is safe because everyone is too scared
of Peta Credlin to launch a challenge.
David Leyonhjelm will announce that we use introduce a “user pays”
system when voting in elections, before asserting that if everyone
carried a gun, there’d be no need for elections.
It will be discovered that Bronwyn Bishop is completely deaf in her
left ear, and has only been ejecting Labor MPs after secret signals from
the Government side.
Scott Morrison will tell everyone that he has a soft spot for people
who’ve been on benefits for more than a year. It will later be
discovered that by “soft spot” he meant a boggy swamp where they could
all be hidden.
A scandal involving the misappropriation of funds by a prominent
Liberal will be headed “Labor Fail To Notice Dishonesty” in the Murdoch
Papers.
Rebekah Brooks will be given a job in Australia leading to some
nasty comments that a couple of hundred years ago it was the ones who
were found guilty who were sent to the colonies.
One of Abbott’s ministers will be praised as one of their best
performers, only for it later to be discovered that he/she has been
suffering from agoraphobia and hasn’t left their home for the past year.
Barnaby Joyce will tell us that the Senate should be abolished as
it’s unnecessary, a waste of money and a frustration for democratically
elected government. When asked if felt this way when he was a senator,
he’ll argue that back in those days the Senate was fulfilling the
worthwhile role of stopping the Labor government from introducing an
Emissions Trading Scheme.
Some readers will attempt to use reason and logic to argue with one
of the trolls making comments, when the person making the comment
clearly has a limited relationship with the real world, so abstract
concepts like coherent arguments will bounce off them like bullets off
Superman’s chest. (Like Superman, these trolls will often have a secret
identity and feel very sure of themselves, but unlike Superman, they’ll
never actually accomplish anything apart from making people wonder
whether the education system is failing or whether it’s just a few
Queenslanders who’ve spent too long in the sun.)

That’s it. We’ll see how many I get right.

# Yes, I know this has already happened, I’m predicting it’ll happen again. And again.

Accurate predictions for election result, Melbourne Cup and the stock market

In "Rossleigh"

The future is a fiction

In "Rossleigh"

Predicting the future is hard, but predicting the past is an oxymoron

In "Rossleigh"

THE YEAR THAT WAS - The AIM Network

2014-12-23T18:42:00.001-08:00

THE YEAR THAT WAS - The AIM Network

THE YEAR THAT WAS

December 24, 2014
Written by:
John Lord
20 Replies

MY TOP 30 POLITICAL THOUGHTS FOR 2014

Author’s note: On Facebook, I post on a daily basis
continuous political commentary. Here is a selection. Please vote for
one of the following or nominate your own:

1 Scott Morrison has been promoted to Social
Services Minister. Start praying for pensioners, the disabled, those
looking for work etc. He demonised those seeking a better life. Now it’s
their turn.

2 The government’s own Climate Change Authority has
questioned the effectiveness of “Direct Action” saying the scheme won’t
deliver on long-standing emissions reduction targets.

Can’t be any more direct than that.

3 Has Australia ever elected a Prime Minister so
ignorant of technology, the environment and science? So oblivious of the
needs of women and so out of touch with a modern pluralist society.

4 The PM continues to tell the blatant and obnoxious
lie that households received $550 of their energy bill as a result of
the repeal of the carbon tax. Total bull. Now on top of that he sees it
as his greatest achievement for women. Words fail me.

5 Today the characteristic that most defines modern
Australia is “diversity”. In all its forms, together with
multiculturalism it defines us as a nation. People of my generation and
later should divest themselves of their old and inferred racist
superiority.

6 The murder of three people in Sydney was carried
out by a deranged, religious fanatic with a criminal record. It was not
by a terrorist organisation. People should keep this in mind.

7 Joe Hockey confirms bigger budget deficit; admits
Coalition failures in communicating policies. True, but they still
cannot bring themselves to admit it was unfair.

8 Hockey’s current budget dilemma reinforces how
stupid it was to curtail the price on carbon. However, he could easily
fix the problem by eliminating the 15% tax discount given to high income
earners. It is nothing more than a legal tax dodge supplemented by
low-income earners. It’s worth $12 billion plus PA. What about it Joe.
After that you could look at the billions given to mining companies in
subsidies.

9 Do you really think my chief of staff would be
under this kind of criticism if her name was Peter as opposed to Peta?”
Mr Abbott asked the ABC’s Lyndal Curtis.”

“Do you really think I would be attacking the Prime Minister in the
manner I do if her name was James and not Julia” John Lord thought.

“I think people need to take a long hard look at themselves with some of these criticisms” to quote the PM.

10 George Brandis wins a Walkley award for his “what is metadata” interview.

Well-deserved too.

11 The art of international diplomacy.

Our PM plans to “shirtfront” Vladimir Putin. Once a thug always a thug?

12 In an attempt at self-justification the PM is telling lies to defend lies already told. It never works.

13 It is said that truth is the first casualty of war. Unfortunately it is also the first causality of Australian politics.

14 My condolences to all those Coalition supporters
who were wetting themselves at the prospect of Julia Gillard slitting
her wrists at the Royal Commission. Particularly the Liberal National
Chat Page.

15 Ah the law is a strange thing. Ashby brings
charges against Slipper. After a long dalliance with legal argument
Ashby drops the case. Slipper is left with a huge legal bill and Ashby’s
lawyers say “No charge mate” There should be a law against it.

16 You would seriously have to wonder exactly what
brand of Christianity it is that Scot Morrison practices. Fancy drinking
champagne to celebrate sending refugees to one of the world’s poorest
and most corrupt nations.

17 The list of companies avoiding tax is again
headed by Murdoch. Others include Frank Lowy’s Westfield. It’s seems
that it’s ok for them to lean but we must all lift. Common Joe change
the law. Or is it the donations????
18 It would seem that the Abbott Government has given
up on their remaining budget cuts. And it should be remembered that they
were not opposed on the basis of prudence but unfairness.

19 The purpose of propaganda is to make you feel good about the wrongs being perpetrated on you.

20 The common good should be at the very heart of
every political philosophy””When talking about the cost of living I
think people get confused. There is a big difference between the cost of
living and cost of lifestyle. A recent survey found that 56% of those
complaining about the cost of living had taken an overseas trip in the
same year. And a further 52% had reduced dining out from three to two
times a week”

21 Australia does not, at this time, have a clearly articulated and legislated policy on climate change. Why.

22 Prime Minister Tony Abbott has denied he has
broken a pledge not to cut funding to the ABC and SBS, telling
Parliament his government had “fundamentally kept faith with the
Australian people”.

Lying is wrong but lying to defend a lie is appallingly immoral.

23 Yesterday’s attempt by the PM to legitimise lying is like saying we are no longer communicating in English.

24 The most simple way to turn the profession of politics on its head would be to demand they tell the truth.

25 It may be a good thing that some asylum seeker
children might now have a future but I find it chilling that Scott
Morrison has effectively used kids as hostages to pass his legislation.

26 Less informed voters unfortunately outnumber the
more politically aware. Therefore, conservatives feed them all the
bullshit they need. And the menu generally contains a fair portion of
untruths”

27 When asked about the Green Fund at a joint press
conference with President Hollande the PM said that we already had a
Direct Action fund of 2.5 Billion and a Clean Energy Finance Corp 10
Billion fund. The only thing wrong with the answer was that the first
won’t work and it is Government policy to abolish the second. His lying
knows no bounds.

28 What would an intelligent 18 year old about to vote for the first time think of this statement yesterday by our PM?

“As for Australia, I’m focusing not on what might happen in 16 years’
time, I’m focusing on what we’re doing now and we’re not talking, we’re
acting,”

29 The G20 meeting gave Prime Minister Tony Abbott a
powerful stage to articulate his vision for Australia. So he spoke
about his inability to pass his unfair budget. Now that’s statesmanship
for you

30 In 2015, 500 workers who benefited from Gillard’s
edict that non-faith-based workers be allowed in our schools will be
replaced by chaplains sourced predominantly from big Christian
organizations. This in a secular public school system is fundamentally
wrong be you religious or not.

A LATE ENTRY

My wife is upset that we didn’t get the carbon tax refund when every
other family did. I’m struggling to give her an explanation.

Like this:

The Liberals' review of workplace relations is critical to unmaking our social democracy | Adam Giles and Terri Butler

2014-12-21T23:16:00.001-08:00

The Liberals' review of workplace relations is critical to unmaking our social democracy | Adam Giles and Terri Butler

The Liberals' review of workplace relations is critical to unmaking Australia's social democracy

The Productivity Commission’s review shouldn’t start with the ‘wages
explosion’ of conservative politicians’ imaginations, but with fairness

‘The mention of WorkChoices sends shivers down Liberals’ spines.’ Employment minister Eric Abetz. Photograph: AAP

Andrew Giles and
Terri Butler

Monday 22 December 2014 11.46 AEST

507

Comments
122

What the Liberals really want for Christmas is a labour market overhaul, though they dare not say so aloud.

Since the Your Rights at Work campaign, most Liberals stay silent
about how they’d like to reconstruct industrial relations laws. The
mention of WorkChoices sends shivers down their spines.

That’s where the Productivity Commission comes in. To give themselves cover, the Liberals said that if elected they would ask the commission to review our workplace laws.

On
Friday, Joe Hockey finally delivered his terms of reference for the
review. They are so wide that everything that matters for everyone who
works for a living is up for grabs.

The review is critical to the Liberals’ scheme to remake Australia’s social compact. Alongside the Commission of Audit, the trade unions Royal Commission,
the tax white paper, and the reform of Federation white paper, it forms
part of their blueprint to unravel our social democracy.

Our present industrial relations laws and institutions promote
collective ahead of individual bargaining (which is consistent with our
international obligations), provide for freedom of association, and help
resolve disputes. It’s a better system than the Liberals’ last attempt,
as well as a fairer one.

Though you won’t hear the Liberals acknowledge it, labour
productivity has been rising faster under our Fair Work system than it
did under WorkChoices.

Conservatives have done nothing about industrial relations in the
past 20 years save to try to reduce unions’ power, undermine collective
bargaining, and erode its companion, the right to strike.

These are not abstract issues. Questions of power at work, job
security, and wages and conditions, affect governments, and they affect
households.

These questions affect governments in obvious ways. Income tax
revenue is related to incomes, and, as Myefo showed this week, bracket
creep (or the lack of it) affects family tax benefits and other
income-based transfers as well.

Industrial relations
settings that promote inequality are bad for our economy. In a
well-reported speech this year, International Monetary Fund managing
director Christine Lagarde spoke of the risks of excessive inequality.

She said it makes capitalism less inclusive, creates division, and
undermines democracy. The IMF’s research over the last 50 years “found
that more unequal countries tend to have lower and less durable economic
growth”.

Industrial relations settings that affect people’s ability to obtain a
living wage, decent conditions, and a secure job, also affect
households’ ability to manage their costs of living. Consumer group
Choice’s pulse survey – which looks at cost-of-living stress on
households – notes that people’s fear of losing their jobs contributes
to financial stress, as does whether they can “get by” on their income.

So, cost-of-living pressure comes not just from prices, but from insufficient income and job insecurity.

That’s one reason why it’s important to understand what’s happening
in the world of work. The Australian social compact is being eroded.
That key part of the social wage, Medicare, is under attack. We are in
the midst of the slowest wages growth since the wage price index began
in the 1990s.

Our minimum wage, as a proportion of our average wage, has been
falling. On its current trajectory, it could be where the US minimum
wage is now within a generation.

Australians should not be relaxed, or comfortable, about the state of
household incomes, or their prospects for curbing our nation’s growing
inequality.

The Productivity Commission’s starting point shouldn’t be the “wages
explosion” of conservative politicians’ imaginations. It should be how
the Fair Work system can help put people in a position to support
themselves, and their families, and how it can help promote growth
that’s more inclusive.

And the commission should, in meeting the requirement in the terms of
reference to consider “protections” for workers, offer advice about
dealing with rising job insecurity. While, no doubt, casual or temporary
work suits some, there are many more who want more work, more security,
or both. There’s a lot of people in our community whose working life is
a long way from a career, even though they may want that.

Instead, for people worried about losing their job, or about getting
enough hours, work is a source of anxiety: an uncertain means of staying
afloat. That so many lives are “on hold” is a tragedy and a waste.
Without security, people can’t make plans confidently, and so can’t
invest in their future.

Incomes, wealth, and curbing inequality affect the national interest.
If we want to ease financial pressures on households, let’s not forget
that the costs of living – the prices of the things that people need –
is only half the story.

In this review, the commission must think broadly, and about
fairness. Industrial relations settings should serve the interests of
working people, firms, and everyone who relies on Australia having a
strong economy.

Industrial relations
Australian politics

So much for Christmas cheer

2014-12-19T00:58:00.001-08:00

So much for Christmas cheer

Jennifer Brassel 19 December 2014, 12:00pm 30

Community Environment Human rights Life Politics

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Under the Abbott government, Australia is now a cruel,
mercenary and pessimistic country. Author Jennifer Brassel reflects on
the battered psyche of the once 'Lucky Country' and urges us all to
embrace the true 'spirit of Christmas'.

I'M NOT religious and never have been. Christmas in our house was
about family getting together, even if only once a year, exchanging
gifts, laughter, and of course, eating and drinking too much.

In the world I grew up in the outer western suburbs of Sydney, we
didn’t have a lot but we still thought we were lucky. After all, all our
lives we were told that this was the ‘Lucky Country’ and we appreciated
the good fortune that such a credo stood for.

What the term ‘Lucky Country’ meant might have been different for
each person, but on the whole we thought nobody starved and there was
help available for everyone if they really needed it. And that we had
opportunities!

Each of us had an opportunity to make a great life. Naive perhaps,
but on the whole Australians were always generous people. It was country
I was proud of.

And indeed I was lucky. I got to attend university, the first in my
family to have that privilege, during the so-called ‘free university’
period that Whitlam began. I also had a lot of opportunities throughout
the years, as did other members of my family, and if we grabbed those
opportunities, worked hard, we made something of ourselves.

We could dare to dream of a rewarding and prosperous future.

(image courtesy of John Graham)

In a way, that is what makes me so sad about the Australia we now
live in. No longer can we say we’re the ‘Lucky Country’. In many ways
we’ve become a cruel country. A mercenary country. A pessimistic
country.

Recent government policy measures don’t draw on that reserve of
positive humanity that I grew up feeling. Most are downright mean. From
asylum seeker policy to education policy, to employment policy and
climate change denial, I see a country veering sharply away from
inclusiveness and opportunity, to a place of exclusion and lack of
innovative thinking.

Instead of sending a price signal to polluters to stop polluting and
halt the quickening march to planetary destruction, this government
wants to send price signals to the ill so they won’t seek help. Such a
short-sighted, skewed set of priorities simply boggles the mind and
certainly doesn’t pass any ‘Christmas Spirit’ test.

I remember some years ago, the then Opposition screeching at the
government that they are miserly and should raise the aged pension
immediately. Yet the current government is intent on reducing the
pension by stealth and eating away at that needed rise. Nope — no
Christmas cheer there either.

Perhaps the most saddening result of this government’s policies is
the lack of hope in our youth. Youth unemployment is growing
exponentially, and yet our government wants to save its dollars by
denying any unemployment benefit for the first six months.

I presume this is in the hope that family will pick up the slack, but
the hopelessness this existence creates will likely lead to
progressively more youth suicide. And at the same time the government is
closing down channels for training and education, locking in a
generation of under achievers and welfare recipients.

Fr Bower's sledging of Abbott's anti-humanitarian policies have gone viral thanks to Facebook & Twitter

And now, the most recent ‘policy triumph’, the new asylum seeker laws
leave me sick to my stomach. Our current government is stacked with
religious types, from ‘happy clappers’ to Opus Dei yet NONE show a shred
of the humanity their doctrines espouse. The hypocrisy is staggering
and I thank the universe I’m an atheist and not subject to the
contradictory doctrine of absolution that allows these people in power
to set aside their consciences whenever they deem it convenient.

This asylum seekers policy comes at the end of some seven years
well-orchestrated use of media (I don’t say manipulation because I
believe it has been with most outlets’ acquiescence), designed to
stimulate all the worst aspects of human nature. Headlines in the
Murdoch press, especially, have played on bigotry, greed, and the
downright selfishness of pockets of our community. As well there has
been a deliberate censoring of any positive, progressive and innovative
information that would help the community to be better informed about
issues. Christmas cheer? Bah, humbug!

If I were religious, what would I pray
for this Christmas? I’d pray that the community opens its eyes to how
we’ve been manipulated. How our apathy has allowed black to become
white. I’d pray that we’d understand how destructive this government has
been to our way of life. That we’d find a way back to the principles
that made us the ‘Lucky Country’ so that maybe I could again be proud to
call Australia home.

She won’t be right, mate. No it won’t. Not until we all remember the true ‘spirit of Christmas’.

Jennifer blogs at www.jenniferbrassel.com

(image by John Graham)

Buy John Graham originals from IA's online store.

If you get this upset from a gesture of goodwill like #illridewithyou, @GChristensenMP,should we ask people to avoid wishing you Merry Xmas?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License

Merry Christmas Gina and Rupert - The AIM Network

2014-12-17T16:10:00.001-08:00

Merry Christmas Gina and Rupert - The AIM Network

Merry Christmas Gina and Rupert

December 18, 2014
Written by:
Kaye Lee
1 Reply

If you go to Tony Abbott’s
facebook page, at time of writing, you will find six threads about the
Martin Place siege and one about the slaughter of innocent children in
Pakistan. Four days after its release, you will not find any comment
about Hockey’s MYEFO. That in itself should be cause for concern.

Tony Abbott has admitted he has little interest in the “dismal
science” of economics and it appears he is hoping that applies to the
rest of us. He is sticking to his forte – death cults and
shirt-fronting.

Despite telling us all to carry on our lives as normal, he seems
determined to class the acts of one deranged individual as a terrorist
attack on home soil.

When Australians responded by showing solidarity with the Muslim
community through the “I’ll ride with you” campaign, the odious Miranda
Devine found a new target.

“Thus it was that on Monday, while real people were
suffering at the hands of an Islamic State-inspired terrorist in Martin
Place, hashtag activists sprang to the defence of theoretical victims of
an Islamophobia that wasn’t occurring.

The meaningless, narcissistic, one-sided nature of this “near silent
encounter” perfectly symbolises the leftist approach to Islamist
terrorism.

Denial, deflection, projection. They see themselves as morally
superior to the rest of Australia, which they imagine as a sea of
ignorant rednecks. In their eyes the threat is not terrorism but
Islamophobia.”

This view was endorsed by LNP member for Dawson, George Christensen who tweeted

“#illridewithyou is a typical pathetic left wing black
arm band brigade campaign, casting Aussies as racists who will endanger
Muslims”

The colourful characters who frequent Andrew Bolt‘s blog joined in with a barrage of hate.

Whilst Abbott, Devine, Bolt and Christensen continue to pander to the
minority of xenophobic racist rednecks, others have been commenting on
the policy direction of this government and none of it is good.

Firstly, Joe Hockey has cost us $28.6 billion in foregone revenue over the forward estimates through his own decisions.

Carbon Tax                                                         $12.8 billion

MRRT                                                                    $3.4 billion

FBT on cars                                                           $1.8 billion

Tax on super earnings                                          $313 million

Work-related self-education                                $266.7 million

Closing corporate tax avoidance                           $775 million

RBA                                                                      $8.8 billion (classed as foregone dividends)

Add to that his spending on Direct Action, the “war on terror” at
home and abroad, and the extra spending on Operation Sovereign Borders
and PPL and we would go close to wiping out his deficit of over $40
billion.

So when you hear the girlinator Cormann talking about Layboor’s debt
and deficit disaster, understand you are being sold snake oil by a con
man.

Speaking of con men, the G20 leaders must be wondering about our
commitment to join the war on corporate tax avoidance which has been
shown to be yet another example of Joe “over my dead body” Hockey’s ‘tell em what they wanna hear’.

The head of the Australian Tax Office, Chris Jordan, has described a
tax lurk for multinational companies that is being retained by the
Abbott government as having been “abused” by foreign corporations at a
cost of “hundreds of millions of dollars” a year
to the Commonwealth but Hockey, following consultation with the big
four accountancy firms and the Corporate Tax Association, which
represents the biggest listed companies, decided not to tinker with
section 25-90 of the act. And they had the hide to criticise Gillard
and Swan for caving in on the mining tax though that was one time I
found myself in agreement.

And they will have more pressure coming as the world insists that we take action on climate change.

During an appearance before a British parliamentary committee meeting
held early Wednesday morning Australian time, British Prime Minister David Cameron
was asked by an MP whether there was hope Australia would do more
because “the new Australian government is in denial” on the issue.

Mr Cameron did not disagree and told the hearing there was hope Australia would step up its efforts.

“Australia will respond to international pressure and do more on
climate change because it will not want to be seen as the “back
marker”.”

The new revised GP co-payment has also been blasted.

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) has expressed its formal
opposition to the Federal Government’s new co-payment model, labelling
it a “wrecking ball”.

“That this should be instituted and ready to go by January 19 is, I
think, absurd,” Associate Professor Owler said. “Particularly when
there has been absolutely no consultation on this issue.”

The OECD
was also not impressed with Hockeynomics slamming his budget measures
and stating that ‘close monitoring’ was required mentioning everything
from changes to Newstart and pensions through to Direct Action,
deregulation of uni fees, and choice of infrastructure spending. They
were particularly critical of superannuation tax concessions. The
overall implication was “you haven’t thought these measures through”.

And as Abbott has his photo taken in front of lots of Christmas trees, presents are being delivered around the country.

Up to 100 ABC journalists have been told they will become redundant and ADF personnel will face rent increases as well as other charges for live in accommodation and meals.

Australia has transformed into the global Scrooge just in time for Christmas, with spending on foreign aid set to plunge compared to other wealthy industrial countries.

An analysis of Treasurer Joe Hockey’s $3.7 billion cut to the aid
budget announced on Monday – on top of the $7.6 billion cut in May –
reveals that Australia’s generosity towards the world’s poor will fall
to an all-time low.

Australia will soon devote a paltry 22¢ cents in every $100 of
national income to foreign aid – less than half the amount spent by the
Coalition government more than 40 years ago.

This is the news Tony Abbott and his band of elves don’t want you to
discuss as they take from the poorest in the world to give generously to
wealthy corporations and mining companies. Gina and Rupert should be
well pleased.

Some barnacles can't be removed in time for Christmas

2014-12-14T14:38:00.001-08:00

Some barnacles can't be removed in time for Christmas

15 December 2014, 12.47am AEDT

article by Michelle Grattan

Some barnacles can’t be removed in time for Christmas

Treasurer Joe Hockey has sought to make a virtue of what will be a substantial worsening of the projected deficits.
AAP/Lukas Coch

Some barnacles are not, it seems, able to be removed –
certainly not in time for Christmas. As the political year grinds to its
end, the Prime Minister’s Office is under almost as much attack as that
of Kevin Rudd in 2010, and the Treasurer has a budget update heading in
the wrong direction.

The last Newspoll for 2014,
published in Monday’s Australian, shows the government trails 46-54% in
two-party terms, unchanged from a fortnight ago, despite Tony Abbott
backtracking on the Medicare co-payment and paid parental leave.

On Sunday, two senior ministers left Abbott swinging in the
controversy over the apparently excessive power held by his chief of
staff Peta Credlin.

Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull refused to be drawn, saying
he intended to remain “very taciturn” on the matter because it was not
productive to have the business of the PMO on the front pages.

Sensible, at one level. But Turnbull also said, in an interview on
Sky: “Any views I have on matters of that kind I’ll share with Tony
Abbott”. As the astute Turnbull would know, this left wide open the
possibility there could be views to share.

Earlier, deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop rejected out of hand Abbott’s Friday suggestion that sexism was behind attacks on Credlin.

In the Sunday Telegraph,
Liberal backbencher and one-time whip Warren Entsch had fuelled the
Credlin row, not only attacking Abbott’s sexism claim but also drawing
attention to the problem – complained about for years by some Liberals –
that having Credlin as the leader’s chief of staff while her husband
Brian Loughnane is Liberal federal director is too incestuous to make
for good politics.

Fresh from her Lima trip, Bishop gave Abbott a lesson in astute
presentation in a long television interview, coming across as polished,
reasonable and able to talk her way out of awkward spots, like the issue
of the PMO’s initial knockback of her travel to the climate conference.

“I just thought it was the wrong call, that’s all, and so I raised it
in cabinet, said ‘What does everybody think? Should I go?’” They had a
“good discussion” about it “and the PM said ‘yeah, I understand where
you are coming from’”.

Very cool. Gloved iron fist stuff. The PMO won’t be saying no to
Bishop again without an internal focus group on the likely consequences.

Although her actions have ventilated the discontent with Credlin,
Bishop vigorously defended the embattled chief of staff (“an essential
part of our team”, “a great support to the Prime Minister”) but bluntly
disagreed with her leader invoking the gender defence.

Abbott on Friday said Credlin’s treatment would be different if she
was P-E-T-E-R not P-E-T-A. Many Liberals winced, remembering Abbott’s
assault on Julia Gillard for, he said, playing the gender card.

Bishop said: “Well that’s not the way I would put it. I have been on
the record many times saying that I don’t view the world through a prism
of gender – I never have, I never will”. No-one could miss the
distancing, even though it came well-wrapped in general support and
advice that if people had a problem with the PMO they should talk to the
Prime Minister.

Bishop said she thought Abbott’s comment “is reflecting the Prime
Minister’s frustration that anonymous sources have been making
complaints about his chief of staff”.

If Abbott is frustrated, so are people in his government. Not only
are many of them critical of how the PMO is run, and fed up with seeing
Credlin get so much publicity, but now Abbott invites charges of
hypocrisy by suggesting sexism.

It’s not the only front where there is the whiff of hypocrisy. On the
eve of announcing worse-than-forecast budget numbers, Hockey on Sunday
insisted his revisions were not to be compared in any way with those
constantly made by Labor.

Hockey sought to make a virtue of what will be a substantial worsening of the projected deficits. A report in Monday’s Australian
says the update will show a A$40 billion blowout in the deficits which
were forecast at budget time to be worth $60 billion from this year
until 2018.

Hockey told reporters: “The government has decided to use the budget,
which is stronger than it was 12 months ago, as a shock absorber for
the biggest fall in our export prices in many years. If we don’t use the
budget as a shock absorber for this extraordinary fall in our terms of
trade, then Australians will lose jobs and we will lose our prosperity.”

Hockey said the government had “put in place the structural reforms
that have helped strengthen” the budget. Well, not exactly. Some of
these structural reforms have so far not been able to navigate
parliament.

The government tipped out to News Corp a list of some 175 bodies that
will be scrapped, absorbed into departments or merged for an estimated
saving of more than $500 million over the budget period.

They cover almost every field of public activity, from health and
education to animal welfare and biosecurity. Apart from savings and
efficiency, it’s also about ideology – smaller government and paring
back the public service.

You can also bet this exercise will produce a fair amount of of grief
for the government from many quarters – nasty little pin pricks for
ministers to deal with. The Vietnam veterans are already speaking out
over being caught up in the hits.

One thing though – the horrors of the budget update should take attention away from the Credlin story.

Rundle: Napthine’s loss the beginning of the end for the Right –

2014-12-02T09:45:00.001-08:00

Rundle: Napthine’s loss the beginning of the end for the Right –

Rundle: Napthine’s loss the beginning of the end for the Right

Guy Rundle
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Dec 02, 2014 1:19PM

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Denis Napthine’s government has been comprehensively booted out of Victoria in a historic loss for a one-term government. And Crikey’s writer-at-large says there is more to come.

There were probably better things to do in Atlantic City in
the early hours of Friday night/Saturday morning than watch the ABC feed
on bad wi-fi, but truth be told I couldn’t think of any. I could have
set the laptop up on the tables at the Trump Tower, or stage side at
Scores by the Boardwalk, but nothing could match the sheer deliciousness
of watching the Napthine government bubble down the drain of history.
From the early and unmistakable trends away from the government to the
strong showing by the Greens in Melbourne to the rapidly forming
certainty — that was exactly what you want from a vote count. None of
that heart-stopping coming-from-behind sudden-reversal stuff. This was
steady and remorseless erasure, exactly in line with the polls.

True, there was a bit of a wobble with The Age’s
Napthine endorsement, but that just turned out to be another instalment
in the world’s longest suicide note. Other than that, it was steady all
the way. The first one-term government in Victoria since 1955, the
pundits said, omitting to remark that that had occurred during a
wrenching split down the middle of the ALP, with Labor (anti-communist)
preferences going to the Libs. To try to find a common-or-garden
first-term defeat you’d have to go back I dunno how far into our
electoral history.

The significance of the victory can’t be understated for
Victorian politics. Given a fixed four-year term, by 2018 Labor will
have ruled Victoria for 24 of the last 36 years — 28 of the last 40, if,
as seems likely, the party wins a second term. That is domination of
politics over an era, with the consequent shaping of the political
culture. Whatever lasting depredations Jeff Kennett left us — a
Mordor-style casino “awarded” (with monopoly privileges!) to a Liberal
Party treasurer like the place was Louisiana, a needlessly vandalised
school and hospital system — or the attempt by Matthew Guy to kill the
livability of the city in a single term, they haven’t had lasting
purchase.

Thus, the history of the Victorian Liberal Party in the
post-Hamer period is a history of failure. Liberal parties, based on a
philosophy of individualism, do not weather opposition well — people
depart quickly for fresh opportunities rather than face the bitter task
of opposition. The Victorian Libs are engaged in a continuing struggle
between a Christian Right and the old business establishment party. If
the suburban god-botherers take control of the party, they could keep
the Libs out of power indefinitely.

Post-election analysis has pointed to the various national
and state-based factors responsible for the Napthine government’s
defeat, with the emphasis on the Abbott factor foremost. Yet the
Baillieu/Napthine government was in trouble from early on, long before
the shenanigans with Geoff Shaw started. And trying to attribute blame
to particular policies ignores a key fact: across the English-speaking
world, the Right is in trouble. When you put Victoria together with the
federal government and add in the Cameron government in the UK, three of
its major governments are facing a one-term proposition. The Newman
government in Queensland would be in the same boat, were it not for the
vast majority it gained on election. And in the US, the Right can only
win seats via gerrymandered Congressional votes — the Democrats win the
presidency and an overall majority in the raw vote for the House.

Everywhere, the Right is losing its legitimacy, and the
Victorian election can be seen as a small example of that. That lost
legitimacy is the key factor — without that loss, the Napthine
government might have received the benefit of the doubt traditionally
extended to a first-term government. The problem for the Right is not
the superficial screw-ups or the federal contamination effect — it’s
that the social-cultural ground is shifting beneath their feet in ways
that benefit the progressive centre.

That is especially so in a place like Victoria, dominated by
Melbourne, which is in turn coming to be dominated by knowledge,
science and culture industries. The growth of such industries creates a
growth in the numbers of a particular type of
professional — knowledge-oriented, reflexive, universalist and global.
They are, in some ways, a distinct social class in themselves, but they
can also be seen as a recomposition of the bourgeoisie. The old ranks
that made Victoria the jewel-in-the-crown of liberalism are thinned and
transformed by these new groups. They do not, of course, have the
numbers to change the political culture by themselves, but neither did
the old professional bourgeoisie. Rather, there is a sort of
“leadership” effect whereby the rising social power of a small class
will change the wider political culture more generally.

In Victoria, decades of this process have accumulated,
expressing itself in neighbourhood change, cultural change and social
activism, which makes the state inherently progressive. The Cain (Jr)
government of the ’80s nurtured much of this by creating a whole
quasi-state apparatus network of arts festivals, small group grants
funding, multicultural networks and the like, reaching far into every
aspect of social life. Kennett wisely decided not to attack this
structure en toto, merely to prune it back and redirect some of the
cultural activity away from the community and towards the commercial. A
decade later, that distinction has somewhat collapsed, and the
Cain-Kirner-Kennett model of Victoria continues to infuse society with a
progressivist, statist ideal of how society should work.

But to varying degrees that is happening everywhere. Every
four years, a cohort of voters from the old class division check out for
good, and a new cohort of voters turn 18, or equally importantly, pass
from youth into their 30s retaining much of the progressive political
thinking they had as teenagers or students. This is not because they
have become more idealistic. It is because the progressivist
message — that society should be steered by rational, socially just,
best practice, systems-oriented thinking, with universal equality of
gender, race, sexuality etc — is simply the base idea of their social
class and of the world they have started to build around them. The sad
fantasy of Bolt, Roskam, James Paterson et al — that if only the party
had stuck to a more hard-Right austere classical liberal message — does
not even begin to fit the current situation. It’s the endless nostalgic
reprise of Thatcherism — and of Kennett. It takes those
victories — which arose from the collapse of post-war social democracy
under the weight of its own contradictions — and mistakes their one-off,
system-rebooting moment for a general principle.

There’s never going to be a time from now on when it’s a
smart move to combine social conservatism with free-market liberalism.
Social conservatism doesn’t even fit the form of social life we now
have, the hybridity and fluidity that was edgy in the ’80s and ’90s and
is now central to the culture and the economy. As for the free-market
austerity, the swingeing cuts, the low-church moralising about earning
and saving, well, we are all not merely Keynesians, but also Rawlsians
now. It’s precisely because people want the dynamics of freer markets
that they also want the recuperative effects of the current
progressivist formulation of how economy, state and society works. The
Right can come up with whatever fantasy it wants — Chris Berg’s (the
Build-A-Bear classical liberal) assertion that fixed terms are to blame
is my favourite — but unless it begins to reflect on the composition of
its polticial philosophy, it’ll be one, two, many Victorias from here on
in.

ABBOTT "TEA PARTY" CONSERVATISM: Abbott Must Clear More Than Barnacles To Stop The ...

2014-11-27T15:40:00.001-08:00

ABBOTT "TEA PARTY" CONSERVATISM: Abbott Must Clear More Than Barnacles To Stop The ...: Abbott Must Clear More Than Barnacles To Stop The Coalition Ship Sinking | newmatilda.com Abbott Must Clear More Than Barnacles To Stop The...

Abbott Must Clear More Than Barnacles To Stop The Coalition Ship Sinking | newmatilda.com

2014-11-27T15:38:00.001-08:00

Abbott Must Clear More Than Barnacles To Stop The Coalition Ship Sinking | newmatilda.com

Abbott Must Clear More Than Barnacles To Stop The Coalition Ship Sinking

By Ben Eltham

Keywords:

peter dutton

tony abbott

GP co-payment

university deregulation

With
Dutton's medical co-payment on the rocks, the government can only
recover if it navigates away from the rocky seas of its own budget,
writes Ben Eltham.

The Abbott government is in deep trouble.

That’s the take-home message from a turbulent week of federal
politics, in which the possibility of a first-term Coalition defeat
began to be seriously discussed.

Talk is cheap. But the scale of the government’s recent blunders have
started to shake the long-held consensus that the Abbott government
would eventually be able to arrest its unpopularity and campaign
strongly for a second term.

The government has trailed in the opinion polls for most of the year,
but recent surveys have seen its support sink to new depths. A
short-lived bounce from the government’s pivot towards national security
and foreign affairs petered out after a dismal G20 meeting. New
calamities seem ready to engulf Abbott and his front-bench at any
moment.

The government’s handling of the funding cuts to the ABC and SBS is a
case in point. The Coalition has been badly wrong-footed by the
intensity of the public backlash; worse, the controversy bled quickly
from anger at Malcolm Turnbull into a damaging debate over whether the
Prime Minister had broken an election promise.

Abbott is now struggling to right a listing ship, telling the Coalition party room this week that he is prepared to knock some “barnacles off the ship” – in the form of unpopular policies.

This is presumably why the government is reported to be planning to abandon the unpopular $7 fee proposal.

Actually, “abandon” might be too strong a word. The measure,
announced in Joe Hockey’s disastrous May budget, has never even made it
to Parliament. Unlike Christopher Pyne’s equally contentious university
reforms, the $7 co-payment hasn’t had any legislation introduced.

Should a bill be introduced, it’s unlikely it would pass the Senate.
Labor and the Greens remain vehemently opposed, while few of the
cross-bench Senators have signaled their support.

The very fact that the $7 co-payment proposal is still being debated is a sign of the Abbott government’s political challenges.

This is one of the Abbott’s cherished fiscal reforms from the May
budget. But it is deeply unpopular, not just in the health sector and
among doctors and policy experts, but throughout the electorate.

The fee is sometimes describes as a GP tax, but that’s actually
underestimating its impact. The fee will be levied on all basic
pathology and radiology tests, effectively imposing a consumption tax on
health services across the board.

And yet, despite the government’s rhetoric about the fee being
necessary as a “price signal” to make the health system more
sustainable, the money raised by the fee won’t actually go back to the
health system. Instead it will be quarantined in a medical research
fund, to support basic research in health and biomedical science.

As with so many of the government’s neoliberal convictions, there is
precious little evidence to suggest the $7 fee will work. A Senate
Committee took extensive submissions on the issue earlier this year, and
concluded the fee would be counter-productive.

A huge evidence base across the world shows that the best way to
improve health outcomes is to fund and support public, primary health
care. The government’s health policies do precisely the opposite, by
attacking the universality and accessibility of primary care.

Indeed, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that forcing poor
people to pay an extra $7 just to see a doctor or get a scan will only
make the health system more costly and inefficient. Public hospitals in
particular are terrified of the proposal, which they believe will cause a
flood of presentations for minor ailments to emergency departments.

Modelling recently released by the New South Wales Health department shows that the fee could lead to an extra half million people seeking treatment in public hospitals in the state. Grattan Institute health economist Stephen Duckett agrees and told a Senate committee earlier this year
that “if more than one in three of these patients go to an emergency
department [instead of visiting a GP] there will be no saving to the
government.” To top it all off, recent government health statistics show that Commonwealth health spending is actually falling. So much for the unsustainability of the health budget.

The contrast with Pyne’s higher education changes is instructive. The
Education Minister may not be everyone’s idea of an effective political
operator, but he has at least organised a coalition of support for his
changes – including a chorus of highly-paid Vice-Chancellors and the key
universities lobby group, Universities Australia.

In contrast, Health Minister Peter Dutton has been conspicuously
unable to win the support of doctors or health groups. The AMA, normally
a supporter of a more privatised health system, remains opposed to the
$7 co-payment, as do patients’ groups and many health policy experts.

The ongoing speculation over the co-payment is damaging the government politically. In a recent Essential poll
on government decisions, the GP fee racked up a hefty 66 per cent
disapproval figure. The only decisions more unpopular were the
university changes and the Abbott government’s massive cuts to public
hospital funding.

The morass of health policy is a mark of this government’s poor
political acumen. Not only is the government copping flak for a proposal
that hasn’t even been voted on by the Parliament, it’s also directing
the electorate’s attention back to an area where the Coalition is
mistrusted.

And yet the government still can’t seem to bring itself to axe the unpopular policy. While journalists are being backgrounded about the $7 fee being dropped, Dutton is still holding the line that the co-payment will go ahead.

Some kind of circuit breaker is clearly required: a ministerial
reshuffle, perhaps. But a reshuffle won’t remove the real albatross
around the government’s neck: its demonstrably unfair budget, and the
resolute judgment that voters have passed on it.

In similar tight squeezes, John Howard was adept at crafting
political compromises, in ways that wedged his opponents and reinforced
his claim to occupy the middle ground of Australian politics. Tony
Abbott has showed little of that tactical nous, time and again taking
hardline positions far to the right of the cautious conservativism that
Howard made his own.

Polls come and go. But if the government continues to blunder and
drift, Abbott’s own leadership will inevitably come into question.
Coalition backbenchers are far more loyal than their Labor opponents.
But they’re not stupid.

If the political standing of the government continues to deteriorate
in the new year, leadership speculation will begin in earnest.

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LNP ( LIARS NASTY PARTY ) aka ABBOTT AND CO.: Coalition’s mid-term blues deepen as Abbott looks ...

2014-11-21T00:31:00.001-08:00

LNP ( LIARS NASTY PARTY ) aka ABBOTT AND CO.: Coalition’s mid-term blues deepen as Abbott looks ...: Coalition’s mid-term blues deepen as Abbott looks back to McMahon – Coalition’s mid-term blues deepen as Abbott looks back to McMahon...

It’s all about the jobs, bout the jobs, no trouble - The AIM Network

2014-11-17T16:24:00.001-08:00

It’s all about the jobs, bout the jobs, no trouble - The AIM Network

It’s all about the jobs, bout the jobs, no trouble

November 18, 2014
Written by:
Kaye Lee
16 Replies

Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey have been at pains to tell us it’s all
about “jobs and growth”. Now that we have “a number” the economies of
the world will be saved. But how do we intend to reach this magical
figure of “2% growth above what is expected”?

The government’s action plan has listed five “key commitments” to underpin its pledge.

The first key commitment to expanding economic activity is
infrastructure spending, including its “asset recycling initiative” –
encouraging state governments to privatise assets and then plough the
proceeds into new projects.

Considering we are selling the profitable Medibank Private to invest
in railways for dubious Indian coal mining ventures, this seems an
avenue to privatising profits and socialising losses. No doubt some
Liberal Party donors will do well out of it.

“Employment welfare reforms” is ranked as the No 2 commitment, and
notes that the changes will “strengthen participation and activation
strategies”.

By cutting payments entirely to some unemployed and requiring
jobseekers to search for more jobs to qualify for payments, the
government argues it will spur the unemployed to look for work rather
than live on welfare, thereby boosting economic activity.

But that boost can only come if there are jobs for the unemployed to
get and there seems little in the way of a plan to create jobs beyond
“axe the tax” and “build some roads”.

Anglicare Australia commissioned a report called “Beyond Supply and Demand”
which rubbished the Abbott government’s treatment of the long-term
unemployed, calling for a “life first” rather than a “work first”
approach to end joblessness.

Anglicare executive director Roland Manderson said

“It’s a problem if the public debate hinges on an assumption that
people can just try harder and get work, that’s not true. What is true
is that people can get work and develop really great work but you need
to put that investment in at the front end. The problem with the ‘earn
or learn’ (budget measure) is it makes the assumption that any training
will do the trick. It’s disempowering to train people who might find
work for a short time, but then are out of work again because they
haven’t worked through their life barriers.”

Labor assistant treasury spokesman Andrew Leigh said cuts to welfare
payments such as the unemployment benefit, family tax benefits and the
pension would act to suppress economic growth.

“If you produce a budget that reduces the income of the poor, it has
an impact on consumer demand because they spend everything they’ve got,”
he said. “That will detract from economic growth.”

The other key commitments are “cutting red tape”, “contributing to
global trade liberalisation” and “creating self-reliant industries”.

If one thing came out of the many millions spent on inquiries into
the Home Insulation Program, it was to underline the dangers of “cutting
red tape” and oversight.

The most obvious result of this commitment is to fast track
development and mining approvals without regard to environmental
impacts, and to remove rights of appeal.

The detail of the China Free Trade Agreement, or Memorandum of
Understanding to be more accurate, is yet to be released so it is
difficult to assess its impact but one concession we made was to allow
Chinese companies to bring in their own workers. I’m not sure how
selling our assets to foreign companies who send their profits back home
and who employ foreign workers will actually boost our economy.

Andrew Robb also admitted that Treasury has not done modelling on the
overall impact of this agreement and he does not know how it will
affect our balance of trade.

The commitment to “create self-reliant industries” seems to fly in
the face of Abbott’s staunch resistance to reducing fossil fuel
subsidies. And how does Newman’s Galilee railway and Hunt’s Emissions
Reduction Fund fit into that plan?

As was forcibly pointed out over the weekend, renewable energy is an
industry of the future, but rather than taking advantage of the billions
available for investment in this area, Abbott seems determined to kill
off this industry and the tens of thousands of jobs that go with it,
presumably because it offers competition to those humanitarian coal
producers and users.

Which seems strange as the Coalition’s plan for more jobs is based on improving productivity and competitiveness.

Across the globe, mining productivity has declined by 20 per cent
over the past seven years, despite the push for increased output, and
declining market conditions.

Efficiency in the Australian mining industry has received a stern
rebuke from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), rated as one of the least
productive regions in the world.

The damning report ‘Mining for Efficiency’
states that Australia is the second least productive mining region in
the world, with Africa taking the wooden spoon, and North America
beating Australia on all classes of equipment.

The report claims there is an inherent conflict between the
productivity plans of the mining boom which were based on increased
volumes, and plans based on cost reduction which are now coming to the
fore of business strategy.

Despite claims by industry lobby groups that high wages in Australia
will impact on our competitiveness, results actually show “significant
divergences” between mines in close proximity chasing the same minerals
under the same industrial relations conditions.

Equipment and the way it is used is a key focus of the report, which
shows that productivity differences between the best and worst
performing mines are stark, with some of the best practice outputs
coming in at more than 100 per cent greater than the median performers.

“The popular tagline of the mining sector is that the miners are serious about productivity,” PwC states.

“We suggest that most are reducing costs and increasing volumes but
there are precious few with legitimate claims to improving core
productivity in their open cut operations.”

Comments in the report echoed the new fashion for cost reduction
employed by the major miners who continue to sell off ‘non-core’ assets,
such as BHP Billiton had done earlier this year with Nickelwest
operations.

“Miners are banking the first available dividend, selling or
segregating mines deemed too hard to fix and tempering expectations of
further productivity gains by citing a combination of labour laws, high
costs, regulatory hold ups and mine configuration constraints,” Lumley
said.

And then this morning, we are hit with the news that the axe has fallen again at Australia’s research agency, the CSIRO, with another 75 researchers retrenched across the organisation’s future manufacturing, agriculture and digital productivity programs.

All three affected areas belong to the CSIRO’s flagship “impact
science” division, set up in 2003, which aims to partner with
universities and the private sector to bring “large scale and mission
directed science” to bear on major national priorities.

Future manufacturing research will be hardest hit, losing up to 45
full-time positions, including in advanced fibres, biomedical
manufacturing and high-performance metals.

Among the work to which future manufacturing research scientists have
contributed is state-of-the-art ceramic body armour for Australian
soldiers, the southern hemisphere’s first Arcam additive manufacturing
facility, which enables 3D printing of metals, and a spray-on topcoat
for aircraft.

But this shouldn’t surprise us from a government who thinks coal is
the industry of the future and a Treasurer who thinks that climate
change is “absolutely not” an impediment to economic growth

Like this:

Tony Abbott and the Age of Stupid

2014-11-13T09:51:00.001-08:00

Tony Abbott and the Age of Stupid

Lyn Bender 13 November 2014, 6:30pm 38

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The death of Gough Whitlam reminds us that the great man was everything our new prime minister is not, writes Lyn Bender.

A GIANT EXITS AND A PYGMY ENTERS. Let the booing go on.

The results are in. Tony Abbott is a colossal non-hero and Gough Whitlam’s evil twin.

He is a master promoter of folly and disaster. Now languishing on the
sidelines, as China and the United States do a deal on big emissions cuts, he is left with only his feeble impotent direct action as his climate plan.

Meanwhile, the Russians
are ship-fronting Australia as he postures ineffectually on the bridge.
Abbott is exposed as the inept captain of a floundering vessel.

Tony Abbott is our modern Les Patterson abroad; he is as excruciating as any Barry Humphries caricature. Abbott is our own you bet, Putin defying shirt fronting, suppository of wisdom. He is very good at being deeply and undisguisedly bad.

He is our salutary lesson; he shows us where we must not go.

Abbott attacks science, supports the rich elites, and increases the hardships of the young, elderly, and the most vulnerable. He is as vividly explicit as the portrait of Dorian Gray in the attic, except his gruesome moral failings are on display for all to see.

In just a little over a year in power, Tony Abbott has

turned a blind eye to human rights abuses, in Sri Lanka;
returned refugees to potential danger in defiance of the Refugees Convention;
repealed the price on carbon, and other effective measures, when other nations like China and the US, are ramping up climate action;
put in place a worse than useless climate program called ‘Direct Action’, that pays polluters ‒ with taxpayer’s money ‒ to please pollute less, but only if they feel like it;
doubled the deficit;
increased Australia’s terror threat, arguably, by hastily ‒ without parliamentary debate ‒ sending Australian forces to another war in the Middle East;
made cuts to the CSIRO and science funding, including crucial climate science.

All this is terrible for Australians and the planet, but at least it is unequivocal.

Abbott tells us many lies, but it is his superficial selfies that truly demonstrate his narcissism.

Here is a sample:

Lifesaving Tony in red speedos — showing us he is physically fit to rule.
Lycra Tony on his bike —don’t look at my policies, look at my pins!
G.I. Tony, working out with the troops — but don’t expect good pay and benefits, veterans!
Fireman Tony, doing his bit to help fight fires — but not to fight climate change and reduce their risk.
Fighter Pilot Tony in a Striker Jet cockpit — can’t wait to use those on a “humanitarian” bombing mission.
Coal miner Tony, opening a “good for humanity” coal mine while stifling renewables — no worries, Gina!

When it comes to talk about increased fire prevalence and
intensity being induced by climate change, Tony will have none of it. UN Climate negotiator Christiana Figueres, was ‘talking through her hat’, he declared.

Abbott has almost entirely dismantled or reduced investment confidence in climate change action and renewables. This is a disaster but he has never pretended to care about climate change. His position has wafted from pronouncing it to be ‘crap,’ to a grudging acknowledgement of climate change being ‘real’. But Tony has stuck by his position of supporting fossil fuels, recently declaring that coal is good for humanity.

With Tony Abbott we should no longer be under any illusion. He is in
the pocket of his fossil fuel backers and has no interest in the well
being of Australians or future generations. In psychiatric terms, his
actions would be analysed as psychopathic.

Writes clinical psychologist Lisa Johnson:

‘If the Abbott government was an individual, he would be a psychopath.’

In the opinion of this psychologist, if the Abbott government were
your boyfriend it would be time to dump him and take out an apprehended
violence order.

The Institute of Public Affairs ‒ IPA‒ has even anointed
Tony Abbott to be Gough Whitlam’s [evil twin] successor, instructing
Tony Abbott to emulate Whitlam’s transformation of Australia; but in the
opposite direction. It delineates Whitlam’s ‘most left wing’
reforms in education, health, social justice, welfare, women’s and
indigenous rights, proposing that Tony reverse them — and fast. It lists
75 radical ideas to transform Australia — Tony has already embarked upon these.

Bob Ellis writes of Gough’s memorial

‘Farewell to a giant’.

But we could add:

Moral pygmy enters stage right.

Or even:

As the pygmy arrived, the crowd booed.

Paul Keating has said, Whitlam changed the country’s idea of itself and changed its destiny.

Now Abbott wants to create an Australia with a new mean spirited
self-destructive idea of itself and a new and terrible destiny — its own
extinction.

His goal is to transform Australia into a country that is mean, inequitable, and an irresponsible global citizen.

None of us can claim that we don’t know. Unlike the German citizens in denial, who were marched past the corpses in the concentration camps by the conquering allies — we know.

Tony Abbott is destroying our children’s inheritance.

David Suzuki regards climate change denial as extremely dangerous. He has accused Abbott of willful blindness and criminal negligence.

Coal is not the future. Coal is not ‘good for humanity’. Coal is not ‘the foundation of prosperity for the foreseeable future’

Abbott is brutally and methodically dismantling much that has made this nation progress towards equity prosperity and fairness.

When he said that he is a PM of no surprises, he was declaring his gotcha moment. He will consistently lie and cheat, whenever it suits him. He will implement the agenda of big coal. He will keep his promises to his backers and friends - including Gina Rinehart and Rupert Murdoch - and the right wing think tank - The Institute of Public Affairs.

That is why Abbott was heartily and deservedly booed at the Gough Whitlam Memorial service. We all know what Tony Abbott is on about, now.

He is no role model for the future. He is no hero. He is part of what has been dubbed ‘The age of stupid’ — the age that jeopardizes its own survival. In this paradoxical way Tony Abbott reminds us to:

Remember Gough. Maintain the protest. Maintain the scorn. Maintain the rage.

Maintain the booing!

You can follow Lyn Bender on Twitter @Lynestel.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License

Tony Abbott, Iraq and the Anzac myth

2014-11-06T09:41:00.001-08:00

Tony Abbott, Iraq and the Anzac myth

Bruce Haigh 6 November 2014, 4:00pm 13

Politics

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Abbott's public comments
about war have not always appeared to agree with his private thoughts
(Image from Channel Seven news report at end of piece)

PM Tony Abbott is using the centenary of WWI and the
spirit of Anzac' as a cynical propaganda exercise to build support for
our latest foreign military adventure, writes Bruce Haigh.

IN ALBANY OVER THE WEEKEND, the Australian prime minister delivered what no doubt will be the first of many testimonies over the next five years to Australian involvement in WWI.

He spoke of Australian sacrifice, but not of the horror of war. And he did not place this sacrifice within the global context that marked this unnecessary war.

The substance of the address was as superficial and shallow as the
man delivering it. With a limited knowledge of Australian history,
Abbott was prepared to trot out the hoary old chestnuts that Australian sacrifice at Gallipoli and on the Western Front shaped the future of the nation.

This has become the central theme of the Anzac myth. It is conveyed as a positive, as nation building.

Would Abbott be prepared to claim that British sacrifice in WWI
brought in a new golden age in the United Kingdom? Or rather would he be
prepared to acknowledge that many British historians speak of the death of a generation? Would he concede that the bitterness of German sacrifice and defeat ushered in the rise of the Nazi Party?

WWI hastened the onset of the Russian Revolution,
an event that Abbott has not publicly lauded. And WWI led directly to
WWII. Is Abbott going to celebrate this disastrous development?

Young Australian men, their heads full of British, Australian and
Empire propaganda rushed to the colours, much as young men are swallowing Islamic State propaganda
and mistakenly rushing to the black flag. That is the fatal mix for
young people — propaganda, emotion, a quest for adventure,
dissatisfaction with current circumstances and off they go to meet the
demands of cynical power brokers, who rarely fight.

Right wing historians like to demonstrate the extent of the sacrifice Australia made to WWI. They cite the number of volunteers ‒ 416,809 ‒ in comparison to the number of white males — 2,470,000 out of a population of 4,870,000 at the 1911 Commonwealth Census. Aboriginal people were deemed non persons in 1911 and were not eligible to enlist, although some did.

Of those Australians who enlisted,
331,946 served overseas and 61,720 were killed or died of wounds and
disease. Of the total number who went overseas 181,221 were injured. The
ratio of 3:I of wounded to deaths also applied to some other combatant
nations, although a ratio of 2:1 was more common.

However, to put the Australian sacrifice in perspective,
8,600,000 combatants, stretcher bearers and medical staff were killed
from 1914-1918, of whom 774,402 were British; 1,385,000 French;
2,050,466 German; 1,200,000 Austrian and Hungarian; 1,700,000 Russian;
460,000 Italian; 463,241 Romanian and Serbian; 115,660 American; 300,000
Turkish; 38,172 Belgian; 101,224 Bulgarian; 7,222 Portuguese; and
203,621 from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and India.

In the first three months of the war, France lost 300,000 killed and
600,000 wounded, by 1918 there were 630,000 war widows in France. Martin Gilbert in his book the, First World War, says on average 20,000 soldiers were killed every four days throughout the war.

Not all statistics are quoted by right wing Australian historians.

Of the Australians who went overseas 150 in every 1,000 contracted venereal disease
. The French averaged 83 cases per 1,000 and the Germans 110. The
Australian rate was amongst the highest. Perhaps Abbott can weave that
into one of his speeches?

The First World War was an unequal contest between men and machines, which the German artist Otto Dix graphically portrayed.

Nothing similar was produced by Australian war artists, who produced sanitised and romantic images of the Boys Own type — consciously or sub-consciously designed to keep the public onside should it be necessary to fight another war.

The official historian CEW Bean
was a primary promoter of the Anzac and nation building myth. Bean was a
man on a mission. He all but airbrushed the horror, anarchy and
futility of the war from his history and extolled the virtues of
Australian mateship as part of the myth.

Mateship was not unique to the Australian army. The German, British and French armies all had strong traditions of mateship fostered and exploited by the military hierarchy as a morale boosting and motivational tool to achieve difficult outcomes.

Bean, as part of his mission, swept post traumatic stress under the
carpet, yet most of the troops who returned from overseas service
suffered from it. Bean knew, but it did not fit the stereotype of the
Digger he had created. In this he was aided by the Repatriation Department, who sought to limit the number and type of war service claims.

Bill Gammage, in his book The Broken Years, says that in 1939 there were 49,157 WWI veterans still in hospital.

No nation was ever built as a result of war. Nations are built as a
result of individual endeavour combining into collective enterprise
overseen and guided by good governance of a type we have not seen in
Australia for some time.

WWI gives the lie to Christianity as a civilising influence.

For those at the front forced to endure days of high explosive shell
fire ‒ to the point that they cried with terror, went temporarily or
permanently mad, defecated and urinated involuntarily and then crawled
out of trenches to face machine gun fire of between 500-700 rounds per
minute ‒ it could be said that they were in Dante’s Inferno. Christianity failed to prevent the Armageddon of WWI and some might argue that it contributed to its onset.

The story of war, particularly the First World War should be told as
it was and not as part of a propaganda exercise to get the Australian
public to accept, yet again, the deployment of Australian forces to war on the sole discretion and authority of a prime minister who has not had the courage to send Australians overseas to fight Ebola in case they return with the disease and threaten his comfort zone.

Bruce Haigh
is a political commentator and historian, who has written a book on WWI
called ‘Australia’s Armageddon, The AIF on the Western Front,
1916-1918’. He is looking for a publisher who is not in thrall to Anzackery and Abbott’s celebratory jingoism.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License

Upside down downunder - The AIM Network

2014-10-28T17:26:00.001-07:00

Upside down downunder - The AIM Network

Upside down downunder

October 29, 2014
Written by:
Kaye Lee
3 Replies

We sure do things upside down downunder.

Tony Abbott’s chief business adviser first tells us we are unprepared
for global cooling, followed by lashing out at the UN response to the
Ebola outbreak and labelling the world body a “refuge of anti-western
authoritarians bent on achieving one-world government”.

Newman
wrote an opinion piece for the Australian newspaper in which he said
the UN’s “leanings are predominantly socialist and antipathetical to the
future security and prosperity of the west”.

“The philosophy of the UN is basically anti-capitalist,” he writes.
“Countries that pay the most dues, mostly rich Anglo countries, are
those to which the world body shows the greatest disdain.”

Is he suggesting that we should receive foreign aid in thanks for
using up all of the world’s resources while killing the planet?

Aside from Maurice Newman’s bizarre ravings, our inaction on climate
change, our inadequate response to the Ebola crisis, the chief executive
of Whitehaven Coal telling us that coal “may well be the only energy
source” that can address man-made climate change, and the sheer
bastardry of cutting real wages and entitlements to defence personnel as
we send them off to war…..we are also ignoring the call from the rest
of the world to take action to address income inequality.

Despite being one of the richest nations on earth, one in seven Australians are living in poverty.
Thirty per cent of Australians who receive social security payments
live below the poverty line, including 55 per cent of those on
unemployment benefits. Fifteen per cent of aged pensioners live in
poverty.

So it seems unfathomable as to why these people would be targeted when the government is looking for savings.

Since 1980, the richest 1 percent increased their share of income in 24 out of 26 countries for which the IMF have data.

In the US, the share of income taken home by the top one percent more
than doubled since the 1980s, returning to where it was on the eve of
the Great Depression. In the UK, France, and Germany, the share of
private capital in national income is now back to levels last seen
almost a century ago.

The 85 richest people in the world, who could fit into a single
London double-decker, control as much wealth as the poorest half of the
global population– that is 3.5 billion people.

With facts like these, it is no wonder that rising inequality has
risen to the top of the agenda—not only among groups normally focused on
social justice, but also increasingly among politicians, central
bankers, and business leaders.

Our politicians are telling us that they want to provide the
opportunity for each person to be their best selves but the reality is
that we do not have equal opportunity. Money will always buy
better-quality education and health care, for example. But due to
current levels of inequality, too many people in too many countries have
only the most basic access to these services, if at all. Fundamentally,
excessive inequality makes capitalism less inclusive. It hinders people
from participating fully and developing their potential.

Disparity also brings division. The principles of solidarity and
reciprocity that bind societies together are more likely to erode in
excessively unequal societies. History also teaches us that democracy
begins to fray at the edges once political battles separate the haves
against the have-nots.

A greater concentration of wealth could—if unchecked—even undermine
the principles of meritocracy and democracy. It could undermine the
principle of equal rights proclaimed in the 1948 Universal Declaration
of Human Rights.

Redistributive policies always produce winners and losers. Yet if we
want capitalism to do its job—enabling as many people as possible to
participate and benefit from the economy—then it needs to be more
inclusive. That means addressing extreme income disparity.

One way to address this is through a progressive tax system but
instead, our government is looking at regressive measures like
increasing the fuel excise and the GST. These will impact far more
greatly on low income earners.

Another avenue is to expand access to education and health but
instead, our government is cutting needs-based education funding, making
the cost of tertiary education prohibitive, and introducing a
co-payment to discourage people from seeing the doctor.

Abbott, Hockey and Cormann assure us that if we make the rich richer
we will all benefit. Everyone from the Pope to Rupert Murdoch knows this
is rubbish.

Two weeks ago In Washington, in a speech to the world’s most powerful finance ministers and central bankers, Rupert Murdoch accused them of making policies to benefit the super rich.

In it, he blamed the leaders for increasing inequality, said the
ladder of generational progress was now at risk, and warned that a
moment of great global reckoning had arrived.

I note that his criticism of poor policy does not stop him from
taking advantage of said policies. “I’ll only be as good as you make me
be” seems to be the prevailing principle.

Hockey’s response to Murdoch’s barrage was interesting.

“Certainly, as he says, loose monetary policy has helped people who
own a lot of assets to become richer, and that’s why loose monetary
policy needs to be reversed over time, and we’ll get back to normal
levels of monetary policy, normal levels of interest rates,” Mr Hockey
told AM’s presenter Chris Uhlmann.

“Governments, on the other hand, have also run out of money and can’t
keep spending money – particularly on the credit card – to try and
stimulate growth.

“So, if loose monetary policy is not available and actually makes the
rich get richer, and governments have run out of money, how are we
going to get growth going in the world economy over the next few years?
And the only way to do it is through structural changes that make us
better at what we do.”

The structural changes suggested by Mr Hockey will increase
inequality and send more people into poverty which is indeed what
Coalition governments are good at doing.

Pope Francis recently tweeted “Inequality is the root of social evil.”

In last autumn’s essay, Evangelii Gaudium, Francis wrote that: “Just
as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to
safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘Thou shalt
not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills …
Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival
of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a
consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalised:
without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape. Human
beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then
discarded.”

The claim that human beings have an intrinsic value in themselves,
irrespective of their usefulness to other people, is one that unites
Christianity and socialism. But if you think the market is the real
world, it makes no sense at all, since in the market, value is simply
the outcome of supply and demand.

A recent article by Lissa Johnson discusses decades of research into political psychology.

“Another ubiquitous finding is that conservatism is inversely related
to the pursuit of social and economic equality. Conservatism correlates
strongly with a preference for fixed social hierarchies entailing
inequality between social groups, along with punitive attitudes towards
marginalised and/or non-conforming members of society, who are seen as
destabilising elements that threaten social cohesion.”

Australia is indeed a wondrous place where coal will save us from
climate change, where helping the rich to get richer will make us all
happier, and where the poor will be asked to pay off the nation’s debt.

Like this:

A Week is a Long Time in Politics - The AIM Network

2014-10-27T19:20:00.001-07:00

A Week is a Long Time in Politics - The AIM Network

A Week is a Long Time in Politics

October 28, 2014
Written by:
John Lord
7 Replies

If ever a week in politics supported a
headline it was the week that Gough Whitlam died. In the main the death
of this, undeniably charismatic, but gifted man was met with sadness by
both supporter and foe alike.

The
exceptions who didn’t were Bolt and Jones. Yes, the two who write and
comment outrageously on the basis of payment for controversy didn’t but
eventually they will pass on as Gough did.

They will be quickly forgotten but he will go down in the annals of
Australian history as a decent, sanguine, passionate and sagacious Prime
Minister who made an enormous contribution to Australian society.

Something they could never aspire to do.

Yes the week was filled with controversy that only a government devoid of any semblance of leadership could muster.

In
Parliament the Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce (The probable deputy
PM if Abbott wins the next election) got the details of how many
Australians have received drought assistance completely and utterly
wrong.

Shadow Agriculture Minister Joel Fitzgibbon called him out but as you
would guess, Bronny Bishop ruled he didn’t have to answer. It wasn’t
until early evening he skulked back into the chamber and quietly
corrected his answer. It’s hard to explain what Barnaby said. If you can
decipher it you deserve a medal.

“…you actually get the money until the department decides
that you are not allowed to get the money, and at this point in time.
So you keep on getting the money, you keep on getting the money, until
such time as, on the application being assessed, they decide you are not
eligible for it. But it is not the case that you apply for the money
and then you have to wait for your application to be approved, you
actually get the money straight away.”

Anyway on Tuesday of this week he got a whiff of his own ineptitude and tried to change the official Hansard record.

Then
the Government for a Royal Commission into anything Labor refused to
hold one into the Commonwealth Bank of Australia as part of its response
to a landmark Senate inquiry. This is one of the worst scandals in
Australian corporate history. It has ruined the lives of thousands of
people but the government’s approach seems to be to let financial
planners proceed as if nothing has happened.

During all this the boss of the corporate regulator, ASIC said.

‘’Australia is too soft on corporate criminals and increased civil penalties including more jail terms are needed.’’

“Australia is a paradise for white-collar crime.” He said.

On Royal Commissions that are politically motivated John Howard had this to say.

“I’m uneasy about the idea of having royal commissions or inquiries into essentially a political decision…”

“I don’t think you should ever begin to go down the American path of using the law for narrow targeted political purposes.”

Abbott obviously believes in the total obliteration of one’s opposition and will even provide cabinet papers if he has too.

In
senate estimates we heard from treasury officials that the Prime
Ministers Paid Parental Leave Scheme has ground to a halt. According to
senior insiders, it is in serious trouble and loathed by virtually every
minister in cabinet.

Our Prime Minister once again showing that he is incapable of governance for the common good.

In the midst of all this we had talk of Malcolm Turnbull replacing Hockey as treasurer.

“It’d be a game changer,” one minister summarised. No one disagreed with
the soundness of the idea. True, he would bring competence and
authority to the Treasury portfolio. He has the ability to articulate a
message clearly and forcefully.

But the mere suggestion that this might happen is a reflection of the
total incompetency of this Abbott led bunch of out of touch morons.

We
were greeted with another headline that the whistle-blower Freya Newman
had had her sentence deferred until November. Did she break the law?
She did, but in so doing revealed yet another instance of the Prime
Ministers use of his office for personal gain further defining his
personal lack of integrity. As if it could degenerate any further.

The curriculum taught in our schools never seems to go away when conservatives are in power.

For
its review the coalition appointed its usual array of religious zealots
and those of indigenous indifference, all sympathetic to the
government’s point of view. But this time one of the appointees,
Professor Barry Spurr, further advanced his expertise in all things
conservative with some emails that could only be describes as indecent.
He said they were part of a ‘linguistic game’. Ah the games people play.

Perhaps the PM might consider some people of independent mind for future inquiries instead of the usual hacks.

But there’s more. It was a long week.

It
seemed that Scott Morrison wanted to be the minister for everything.
When interviewed on AM he denied that other ministers were resentful of
him trying to take over part of their portfolios. But members of the
press gallery confirmed it.

When asked in question time how his portfolio crossed over with
Foreign Affairs, Defense, Agriculture, Health, Defense,
Attorney-Generals and Prime Minister and Cabinet it wasn’t only the
Labor side of the chamber laughing at him.

But Bronny Bishop ruled he didn’t have to answer.

And to add to the weeks worries the Government still cannot get its budget passed. To quote Lenore Taylor in the Guardian.

The Abbott government’s “Operation Budget Repair” appears to have morphed into “Operation Let’s Salvage What The Hell We Can”.

Kevin Andrews said he would consider “any reasonable offer” from
crossbench senators in a last-ditch bid to get at least some of his
$10bn in stalled welfare changes through the Senate. On top of that
there is the fuel excise, that Medicare co-payment and the dramatic
changes to higher education. What a bloody nightmare. It’s a pity Abbott
doesn’t have the negotiating skills of Gillard.

He and Joe have never been able to admit why the electorate so
comprehensively rejected the budget? We all know that the savings fell
heaviest on those least able to pay. Now they are saying they will
reveal more in the mid-year budget update. This can only mean more
unpopular cuts. Or a mini budget.

The
Essential Poll during the week found 72% felt the cost of living had
become worse in the past 12 months and 48% believe that over the past
two years their income has fallen behind their cost of living. That
figure rises to 57% for those earning less than $1,000 a week.

It was the worst received budget in many decades. Spending cuts have
to be fair, and be seen to be fair, but people also need to understand
the overall plan, the purpose, dare we call it the program.

Later in the week when talking about Federal and state responsibilities Abbott said.

“It is in this great country of ours possible to have a better form of government”

I would have thought a good place to start would be to stop telling lies.

Having
appointed a group of climate deniers to report on the Renewable Energy
Target and Tony Abbott wanting it removed altogether the government, in
the face of public opinion, now finds itself in a dilemma. It wants to
compromise on the 20% target saying electricity usage has already
declined. Shorten should not fall for that nonsense. Add in their
ridiculous Direct Action policy and you can see we have, in spite of
their various university degrees, a bunch of dunderheads governing us.
Perhaps I should have said dickheads.

To be honest I could go on for another couple of thousand words but
I’m exhausted. I haven’t mentioned Bishops aspirations for leadership,
the credit card negotiations with the banks on welfare payments and fact
that his sisters have joined the chorus of condemnation for a privately
owned aged-care facility on public parklands at Middle Head.

Then there’s the criticism of the proposed Medibank float that has
been described as laughable. Oh, then of course reports that Chrissy
Pyne was backing down on his university policy. He said he wasn’t but
then I’m not that sure he would know himself.

Goodness I have left out the most serious issue of Ebola. The
government’s response has been abysmal to say the least. Just another
example of their ineffectiveness. The AMA was right to give Abbott a
serve.

In an effort to sound amusing and to allay the fears of those who think I am being overly negative I will close with this.

I promise this is true. Greg Hunt, is the man who some people refer to as the Environment Minister.

In Opposition he advocated for the protection of the Tasmania Tiger,
extinct since 1936. In Government he’s turned his attention to the
Antarctic Walrus – population: zero. Walruses live in the Northern
Hemisphere.

Oh wait, bugger I almost forgot. Were you also aware that Catherine
King exposed how it would soon cost up to $2,207 for someone to have
their liver metastasis diagnosed? Tony Abbott refused to say how many
people will miss out on being diagnosed as a result of the hit to
imaging and diagnostic services.

But the week did began with the Speaker announcing she would not
continue with the policy of segregation which had been announced as
Parliament rose a fortnight earlier.

Hopefully we can now go back to segregation being something kids
learn about in the courtroom scenes of To Kill a Mockingbird not during
their excursion to Canberra.

The final word for ‘’A week is a Long Time in Politics’’ must
go to Newspoll which had the Opposition six points up on the Government
without so much as them striking a blow.

The inconvenient link between mental health and ‘lone wolf’ terrorism

Bernard Keane | Oct 27, 2014 12:57PM |

The reality of radicalisation and terrorism is far more complex than the simplistic, self-serving narratives offered by politicians and the media.

Security at Parliament House was “boosted” after last week’s shootings at Canada’s National War Memorial and parliament in Ottawa, one media outlet reported on Thursday, although the boost was perhaps merely in relation to visibility — a “symbolic” move, the ABC said. Security at Parliament House is plainly a touchy subject now, after revelations last week that the circumstances that led to the now-rescinded decision to separate visitors because of their religious beliefs and confine them to a glass chamber, were confected. Coalition politicians Bronwyn Bishop and Stephen Parry overruled advice from officials in order to exploit an invented claim about a burqa-based protest at Parliament House — phoned in to a radio station — to claim there was a plot to disrupt parliamentary proceedings.
Just for a moment, we saw publicly exposed how politicians exploit terrorism, producing national security based on bigotry, bullshit and Chinese whispers.
But why had security been boosted on Thursday, symbolically or otherwise, because of events on the other side of the world? That wasn’t explained, or asked — people simply accepted that that’s what one does in such circumstances. It was up to Tony Abbott to make clear the link. He convened a meeting of the national security committee (sans the Defence Minister, who correctly observed he had nothing to offer) and declared the attack was “further confirmation that the threat to free countries and free institutions is very real indeed”.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop went further, diagnosing terrorism at work. “The Canadian authorities haven’t made the connection, but I have to say it does have a hallmarks of a terrorist attack,” said Bishop. On Friday morning, Abbott singled out the Last Post, a daily ceremony at the War Memorial, as a specific terrorist target, despite the head of the War Memorial, Brendan Nelson — a former Coalition defence minister, as well as opposition leader — saying there had been no threat.
But the lack of evidence of a threat isn’t a problem any longer, because the “lone wolf attack” is the new black in terrorism narratives. “Lone wolf” terrorism is an answer to what you do when you can no longer credibly talk of an “existential” terrorist threat. There will continue to be efforts to claim Islamic State has access to weapons of mass destruction: it now controls Al Muthanna, where Saddam-era chemical weapons, purchased by Iraq from the West with US support and funding, had been stockpiled (albeit in conditions as dangerous to the handlers as to intended targets), while conjecture about, if not Ebola bombers, then bubonic plague bombers, could yet breathe some bacilli-laden life into the theme. But after hyping the threat of Al Qaeda and its putative arsenal of dirty bombs, chemical weapons and bioweapons for much of the 2000s, authorities were left in a quandary in their efforts to sell the threat of IS by the apparent decline in the ability of contemporary terrorists to successfully conduct mass casualty attacks, especially given security institutions advised IS presented no threat to countries like the US.

“Recognising that mental illness may play a role in some circumstances where an individual embraces political or religious violence might … disrupt the convenient notion that we are innocent, passive victims of irrational evil.”

Thus, self-radicalising “lone wolves” have now become the new threat, extremists who determine to engage in small-scale attacks using whatever resources come to hand, without communicating with anyone about it. They may not be able to do much damage, but the sheer randomness of their attacks somehow makes up for that. One “expert” even claimed such attacks could be “more powerful in terms of its psychological impacts” than mass casualty attacks.
The “lone wolf” theme complements the “viral” theory of terrorism, that Islamist extremist terrorism does not — as repeatedly argued by intelligence and law enforcement agencies — happen in response to Western military interventions in Muslim countries, but because individuals somehow contract the disease of terrorism, either via interpersonal encounters or, increasingly, via exposure, to use David Irvine’s wonderful phrase, to unfettered ideas on the internet. And while devoting law enforcement and intelligence resources to stopping “lone wolves” is considered a waste, the positive side is that they can justify a permanent heightened sense of fear about the terrorist threat.
The reality of “terrorism” is rather different. We’ve noted previously the way in which political violence by white people, mostly white males, isn’t seen as terrorism in the same way that violence by Muslims is. And the role of mental illness and drug use in terrorism receives little attention. Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the Ottawa gunman, was a crack addict with a long history of drug addiction and mental instability who had repeatedly tried to get imprisoned in order to escape drugs. In New York, the Newburgh Four, a group serving 25 years in jail for a 2009 plot to bomb synagogues and shoot down military aircraft — a plot organised and led by an FBI informant from the start — involved a group of desperately poor drug users and a schizophrenic.
In fact, the FBI has a history of entrapping mentally ill people in terror plots: a Californian man sentenced to 15 years in prison for planning to blow up a bank as part of his “jihad” had a history of mental illnesses and substance abuse. Like the FBI, terrorist recruiters also tend to target the mentally unstable as likely to be more responsive to their overtures. Australian IS member Mohammad Baryalei also has a history of drug abuse and mental illness; another Australian involved with IS, Khaled Sharrouf, was diagnosed as having chronic schizophrenia, delusions, and a long history of drug use.
This doesn’t fit the national security narrative particularly well: politicians and the media prefer to portray terrorism as binary — you’re either a terrorist or you’re not, you’re wilfully evil or you’re not. Recognising that mental illness may play a role in some circumstances where an individual embraces political or religious violence might — like recognising that “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies” — disrupt the convenient notion that we are innocent, passive victims of irrational evil. It might encourage the idea that we are not targeted purely because of our Western values, but rather for what we do or fail to do — like failing to provide sufficient resources to ensure vulnerable, marginalised people can access effective mental health services.

Understanding the Conservative Mind - The AIM Network

2014-10-26T23:22:00.001-07:00

Understanding the Conservative Mind - The AIM Network

Understanding the Conservative Mind

October 27, 2014
Written by:
John Kelly
7 Replies

Psychologist, Lissa Johnson (pictured above) has
given us a revealing insight into the mind of the political
conservative, in an article published in New Matilda. Lissa is a
clinical psychologist interested in the psychology of ideology and
politics, and the philosophy and politics of psychology.

“If the Abbott Government was an individual, he would be a psychopath,”
she begins before giving a detailed description of the mindset that
happily allows and promotes ultra-right wing extremism. The article
should be compulsory reading for those of us who constantly struggle
with certain aspects of the mainstream media.

Detailed studies into the difference between the psychological right
and left have been going on in earnest for the past 20 plus years. The
results are now in the public domain for all of us to examine and, I
have to say, there is not much there that surprises me.

The conservative mind is indeed a curious animal and betrays itself
through language and form. Johnson, in her article, sets about
dissecting the Abbott government’s aversion to equality for all, their
resistance to change and explains the reasoning behind their attitude to
the unemployed, the disadvantaged and those on the lower levels of the
socio-economic ladder.

They have an aversion to social and economic equality. They suffer
from ‘Right Wing Authoritarianism’ which rejects openness and
accountability. They are hierarchical in structure, anti-egalitarian
which Johnson tells us, “correlates with conservatism but also with the
‘dark triad’ of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism and
Psychopathy.”

But,
conservatism comes in degrees and not all who vote conservative
necessarily embody these characteristics. For those who enter politics,
however, the stronger the psychological underpinning, the stronger the
views.

For example, conservatives have a pressing need to arrive at fixed
and firm answers to complex questions, described by psychologists as a
need for cognitive closure. In other words, they need to keep things
simple. One can only presume that they have a short attention span and
this pressing need is for their benefit, rendering any further review
unnecessary.

Their need for cognitive closure means they shun open mindedness, and
they are suspicious of science and the arts and distrust foreign food
and culture. Already we can see how this manifests in policies on boat
people and climate change.

As
I read Johnson’s article, I could not help comparing it with my own
upbringing as a Catholic. The hierarchy, the inflexibility of rules, the
dominance, inequality and resistance to change. The Catholic Church was
able to maintain this inflexibility through relentless psychological
pressure and trauma.

It makes me wonder if the Catholic contingent in the Abbott
government’s ministry, is a reflection of an elite conservative mindset
finding justification for its lack of compassion, humility and empathy
toward the disadvantaged; a justification that allows them to keep it
that way.

My own view is that conservative parties are only interested in
governing for today. They have no vision for tomorrow, no grand plan.
They would rather let tomorrow take care of itself. They will say what
is necessary to win support, concealing their true intent. Their intent
is being the government rather than about governing.

Johnson says that a full and frank disclosure of their intent would
render them unelectable. So they cleverly disguise their inner drive
when addressing a predominantly egalitarian society by sugar-coating
their aims and by ‘legitimising myths’ that reinforce fear and scarcity.
They use the stereotype (poor people don’t have cars) or fear (budget
emergency) to illustrate various myths.

The wearing of the Burqa is a classic example. So too, the
uncertainty of debt and deficit, ‘age of entitlement’ and the like, all
of which appeal to an elite which is itself uncertain and fearful and
perceives these issues as a threat to its way of life.

And
then there is the issue of prejudice, a conservative log jam that
breeds racism and the belief that underprivileged minorities are
responsible for their own circumstances; that sexual minorities and the
unemployed, welfare recipients and single mothers threaten the good
order and structure that society must uphold and maintain.

And so, after having gained power, conservative governments begin
winding back the clock, repealing uncomfortable reforms that promote and
support a more egalitarian society.

They conveniently forget or simply discard their pre-election sugar
coating and engage in legitimising their myths to justify restructuring
society back to the hierarchical, authoritarian model. They move on
dissenting voices, invoke extreme and unnecessary legislation to
‘protect’ their prejudices and reinforce their two principal aversions:
equality and change.

Johnson’s article quite neatly encapsulates what most of us on the
left either already know or have long suspected. Not that we are without
fault but at least we err on the side of compassion, empathy and
fairness. But, by knowing how to identify the idiosyncratic oddities of
the conservative mindset, we are better able to articulate a more
socially responsible alternative.

You can read the full article here.

Like this:

What Makes Them Tick: Inside The Mind Of The Abbott Government | newmatilda.com

2014-10-25T17:21:00.001-07:00

What Makes Them Tick: Inside The Mind Of The Abbott Government | newmatilda.com

What Makes Them Tick: Inside The Mind Of The Abbott Government

By Lissa Johnson

Keywords:

dr lissa johnson

abbott government

john jost

professor barry spurr

jim sadanius

george w bush

If
the Abbott Government was an individual, he would be a psychopath. And
you wonder why they're frightened of science! Clinicial psychologist Dr
Lissa Johnson explains.

Decades
of research in political psychology has opened a window onto the
psychological heart of politics. The Abbott Government embodies the
conservative psyche in pasquinade form.

With a prime minister who threatens to shirt-front the Russian
president, a finance minister who calls the opposition leader a
girlie-man and a government advisor for whom “Abos”, “darkies” “muzzies”, “chinky-poos” and “whores” rolls comfortably off the tongue, it is little wonder people are asking what goes on in the minds of our politicians.

For different reasons, academic psychologists have been asking the same question for some time.

They say that it takes 20 years for knowledge in academic psychology
to make its way into the public domain. If that is the case, the
political psychology literature is just coming of age.

Thanks to an invigoration in 2003 of research that had been gathering
steam in the 1990s and before, we now know with considerable clarity
what separates the left psychologically from the right. And the picture
is revealing.

Political vaudeville aside, the Abbott Government offers a vivid case
study in conservative psychology that breathes life into the very
definition of conservatism.

In the political psychology literature conservatism is defined in two parts,
resting on the pillars of equality and change: accepting versus
rejecting inequality and advocating versus resisting social change.

By this definition, the conservative position on any issue involves
promotion of inequality and resistance to change. Where conservative
change is sought it is typically in the direction of inequality, winding
back historical egalitarian change.

As a case study, the Abbott Government illustrates not only these two
principles, but also their psychological building blocks, identified in
a vast number of studies from institutions around the world. These
studies, emanating from the likes of Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, NYU,
UCLA and countless other universities, have been replicated time and
again by different researchers using different measures (self-report,
implicit tests, peer-ratings, behavioural indices) and different methods
(correlational, experimental and longitudinal). In short, a reliable
body of research.

One consistent finding in this literature is that conservatism involves a cognitive tendency known as the need for cognitive closure.
This entails an impetus to arrive at fixed and firm answers to complex
questions, motivated by the drive to resolve uncertainty and ambiguity.
It manifests in seizing and freezing on opinions and ideas, or
swiftly and resolutely reaching final conclusions on complicated topics,
which then remain closed to further review.

Our government’s policy on climate change, for instance, comes to mind. As does its haste to pass legislation without debate.

The conservative need for cognitive closure is broadly rooted in a
personality style that psychologists call “closed-minded” or often
simply “closed”. It involves low levels the personality trait Openness to Experience, which is widely accepted as one of the five core dimensions of personality.

People low on Openness prefer certainty, order, structure, the
familiar, predictability, simplicity, and sticking with the tried and
true. They dislike change, complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, novelty
and flexibility. They are less intellectually curious than their more
open counterparts, disinclined to examine their own ideas and views, and
as a result are often suspicious of science and the arts. They also
tend to dislike new experiences, frequently including but not limited to
foreign people, culture and food.

Our government’s distaste for science ministers and asylum seekers, then, makes sense.

Another ubiquitous finding is that conservatism is inversely related
to the pursuit of social and economic equality. Conservatism correlates
strongly with a preference for fixed social hierarchies entailing
inequality between social groups, along with punitive attitudes towards
marginalised and/or non-conforming members of society, who are seen as
destabilising elements that threaten social cohesion.

This anti-egalitarian psychological characteristic, with over 50 years of research behind it, is known as Right Wing Authoritarianism. It is predicted by low levels of Openness, with the associated need for a predictable, orderly and controlled social world.

Right Wing Authoritarianism has a younger cousin, with 20 years of research behind it, known as Social Dominance Orientation.
A darker pathway to ideological views, Social Dominance Orientation is
more a ruthless and competitive form of anti-egalitarianism. It not only
correlates with conservatism but also with the ‘dark triad’ of
personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism and Psychopathy.

In newer research, conservatism has also been found to correlate
inversely with compassion, humility, dispositional fairness, altruism
and empathy.

So robust are the psychological findings that John Jost of NYU
and his colleagues propose that political orientation “may be
structured according to a left-right dimension for primarily
psychological (rather than logical or philosophical) reasons… linked to
variability in the needs to reduce uncertainty and threat”.

Of course not all people who vote for conservative political parties
embody all, or even necessarily some, of the psychological correlates.
What the research indicates is that the more conservative a person is,
on average, the more strongly they are likely to display these
characteristics. Fortunately none of us, as individuals, is entirely
average.

In fact, some studies have found that the more politically active a
person is the stronger the psychological underpinning of their ideology
is likely to be. Thus we could expect our leaders’ political views to be
more, rather than less, psychologically driven than our own.

And more hell bent on inequality and opposing change.

In a world of increasing egalitarianism the conservative position can
make for a hard sell. Politicians with an agenda as conservative as the
Abbott Government’s can’t to go to the polls wearing their manifesto on
their sleeves. “We promise to preserve and intensify privilege,
entrench disadvantage and wind back egalitarian change, putting a halt
to its further spread.”

As a result, in order to gain power conservative political parties
are compelled to sugar-coat their agenda to be palatable in a putatively
egalitarian world. A conservative stock-in-trade to this end is what
political scientists call ‘legitmising myths’, or ideologies that
justify discrimination against disadvantaged groups.

Legitimising myths typically appeal to fear, which increases
political conservatism; scarcity, which increases competition between
social groups; and stereotypes, which smooth the way for discrimination
against less privileged members of a society. For instance,
“Burqa-wearing women are potential terrorists who threaten our safety
and our way of life” is a myth that appeals to all three.

While the Abbott Government relied more heavily on lies than
myth-making on its way to the election, since gaining office Abbott and
his ministers have had a crack at a few legitimising myths of their own.

They have been successful with some, for example ‘The carbon tax will
cripple the economy (fear and scarcity)’. They have limped along lamely
with a few, such as the ‘Budget emergency’ (fear and scarcity again)
and ‘Age of entitlement’ (stereotype).

Other efforts at legitimising mythology have received hostile
reception, for instance ‘The unemployed just need to try harder’
(stereotype), and ‘Poor people don’t have cars’ (stereotype again). Some
are just plain silly, such as ‘Coal is good for humanity’ (tempting to
type ‘insanity’ here).

On Aboriginal people, the Government has opted for the most effective
and time-honoured myth of all, ‘They don’t exist – at least not
really.’ Silence and collective blindness have worked for governments
until now. This kind of psychological apartheid (literally
“apart-hood”), keeping races psychologically apart, is a stealthy
variety of stereotype that serves to obscure the very existence and
legitimacy of an entire race.

A prime example is the call for a more westernised version of history
in the national curriculum, one that emphasises Judeo-Christian
heritage and scales back focus on Aboriginal history. It not only seeks
to reverse historical egalitarian change, but also serves to push
Aboriginal Australians even further out of our collective awareness and
understanding.

The Government’s most recent legitimising rhetoric, ‘The war on
terror at home’, is probably the most potent and promising of all. In
numerous studies, invoking fear and even simply thinking about death
increases self-reported conservatism and endorsement of conservative
policies, candidates, and values.

For instance, in time series analyses George W Bush’s approval
ratings and policy support soared after every upgrading of the national
terrorist alert. Similarly, priming threat by asking people to rate
statements such as “I worry that terrorists might strike any time
anywhere” raises levels of both closed-mindedness and conservatism.

So strong is the fear connection that a brain structure integral to
fear - the amygdala - is larger, on average, in conservatives relative
to their ‘small l’ liberal counterparts.

Jost explains it thus: “Stability and hierarchy appear to provide
reassurance and structure inherently, whereas social change and equality
imply greater chaos and unpredictability…. People may be
psychologically unwilling or unable to embrace the unpredictability
associated with social change and increased equality when they are
feeling threatened or experiencing aversive levels of uncertainty”

Exploiting ISIS for all it’s worth, then, is Tony Abbott’s best hope. The “death cult” refrain no doubt helps. Although Australians are at greater risk of death from falling off a ladder or out of bed, a cult is far more scary. And better on which to build stereotypes.

Given that stereotypes and prejudice feed and thrive on fear and
justify inequality, it is perhaps not surprising that prejudice has been
found to correlate with conservatism in a number of studies.
Conservatism is most often associated with racism, particularly of the
“modern” kind, which holds that underprivileged racial groups are
responsible for their own disadvantage, but also prejudice in general,
including prejudice against sexual minorities, women, and other
disadvantaged or marginalised groups.

The attitudes of Professor Barry Spurr – the Sydney University
academic and contributor to the review of the National School Curriculum
who was suspended after a series of racist, misogynistic emails - may
be more prototypical than we would like to think.

Jim Sidanius of UCLA and colleagues say, “Political conservatism and
racism should be strongly correlated, because both ideologies are
motivated by a common desire to assert the superiority of the in-group
over relevant out-groups, and they justify such group superiority in
terms that appear both morally and intellectually justifiable.” Or at
least they try.

With prejudice, in pursuit of inequality we have seen the Abbott
Government target “entitled” pensioners, welfare recipients, young
people, single parents, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Australians, the chronically ill and the disabled for a good kicking
down the economic hierarchy. We have seen treatment of “illegal” asylum seekers sink to new lows,
efforts to keep those with modest bank balances out of tertiary
education, and to make healthcare inaccessible to low income groups.

These latter measures are important if inequality is to be a stable feature of a society, as they lock disadvantage in place.

Winding back egalitarian change has also proceeded apace. There has
been the repeal of the carbon tax, axing of numerous climate change
research and advisory bodies (ensuring inequality between current and
future generations), abolishing a dedicated Disability Discrimination
Commissioner, seeking, albeit unsuccessfully, to water down racial
discrimination legislation, seeking to scale back focus on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history
and Asia in the national curriculum, disbanding the Immigration Health
Advisory Group, and proposing regressive changes to migration law described by legal experts as cruel and inhumane and designed to subvert international law.

Not to forget the rushed changes to national security legislation, under fire from legal experts for encroaching on fundamental human rights and damaging the democratic cornerstone of press freedom.

Increasing a Government’s powers to jail journalists and removing journalists’ rights to defences such as public interest is one way to keep a society in its place. As is giving ASIO the power to "add, copy, delete or alter" information on computer devices. But there are others.

For instance, the Government’s introduction of social media guidelines prohibiting public servants from criticising the government. Or the gag clauses on community organisations such as Legal Aid Centres, also to prevent them from criticising the Government.

And what of mission creep in the war on criticism?

If the Government fails to expand and protect its borders around
secrecy, then whistleblowers and ‘citizen/academic/activist journalists’
might continue speaking out.

The two ideals most dear to our Government’s extremist ideological
heart could be exposed for what they are: change-aversion and
inequality.

Our leaders’ policies might be outed as fanatical versions of these ideals, worthy of a terror alert all their own.

That would never do.

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Putin-Abbott showdown to derail G20

2014-10-17T22:15:00.001-07:00

Putin-Abbott showdown to derail G20

Paul Bongiorno

There’s
no doubt our former journalist prime minister knows how to craft a
tabloid headline. He operates always with an eye to maximising his
domestic political advantage. And in recent months he’s been scoring
points. But this week he became the headline rather than writing it.

The government’s recovery in the opinion polls can be directly linked
to its handling of the July MH17 airline atrocity in Ukraine. Tony
Abbott was first out of the blocks internationally to blame Russia and
accuse it of complicity in murder. But when Labor’s Bill Shorten painted
him as a wimp, all talk and no action for failing to prevent president
Vladimir Putin from coming to the Brisbane G20 summit, the prime
minister played haplessly into the politics: “Look, I’m going to
shirtfront Mr Putin – you bet I am.”

As a headline, it was solid gold. And for good measure he ran his
“murdered” accusation again. The outburst drew yet more lurid tabloid
headlines, this time from the old Soviet mouthpiece Pravda.

The elegantly monikered Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey, a veteran columnist
for Pravda.ru with impeccable Kremlin connections, let fly. Not once,
but two days in a row. “It was the most blatant example of shit-faced
ignorance and pig-headed arrogance the world has seen,” he thundered,
“since the likes of Hitler or Pol Pot.”

Cutting through the hyperbole from Moscow, Australia’s last
ambassador to the Soviet Union and first envoy to the Russian
Federation, Cavan Hogue, said: “It’s pretty clear that he’s [Putin] not
really interested very much in what our prime minister says.” He told
the ABC’s RN Breakfast that the cut-through message was Australia is “ignorant and Russia has already offered co-operation”.

That co-operation came with Moscow fully supporting, not vetoing,
Australia’s United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the
downing of a civilian aircraft and calling for an unfettered
investigation and access to the crash site.

Before he tried to out-macho Shorten, as the colourful senator Jacqui
Lambie put it, Abbott was much more measured: “I don’t believe for a
moment that President Putin wanted that plane brought down. But
obviously Russian policy has brought about a situation that caused this
atrocity to take place.”

So far, the Dutch investigators have not reached that conclusion and a
senior Russian parliamentarian, Vyacheslav Nikonov, is sticking by the
claim that the missile was a Buk-M1, not used by the Russians but
modified by the Ukrainians.

Meanwhile, relatives of the 38 Australian citizens and residents who
died in the crash are, like the rest of the world, still waiting for
credible answers. Hogue and other diplomats say the Abbott approach is
counterproductive and embarrassing. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov,
told the ABC the president was still to officially confirm his
participation in Brisbane. But there would definitely be an opportunity
to exchange views at the meeting, preferably he said, “in a more
diplomatic way”.

The prime minister seems to acknowledge his play for domestic
plaudits in this instance was at best inelegant, at worst demeaning. He
refused to repeat the “shirtfront” line when prompted by journalists.
But it is too late to prevent the Putin–Abbott showdown derailing one of
the most important summits to be held in this country.

Ironically, the leading role Australia played in the Security Council
on MH17 came from the grace and favour of the Rudd government’s push to
gain a seat on the powerful body. A major component of that campaign
was hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to African countries to
garner their votes. The Abbott opposition, with a firm eye to the
domestic audience, slammed the bid as a waste of money. Australia’s
national interest was, in its view, closer to home.

But West Africans haven’t forgotten Australia’s commitments to them.
The unfolding catastrophe wrought by the horrible Ebola virus has
claimed more than 4000 victims this year. Canberra has directed $18
million to the World Health Organisation’s efforts to contain the
disease. The United Nations is grateful but the president of Sierra
Leone, a front-line state bearing the brunt of the epidemic, says what’s
needed are “boots on the ground”.

President Ernest Bai Koroma has written to Abbott telling him further
support is needed to scale up his national response with education
efforts as well as infection control measures. Experts say that while
Ebola has a 70 per cent death rate, it can be relatively easily
controlled if properly quarantined.

“Having watched the response of the Australian military to similar
humanitarian emergencies, most recently Typhoon Haiyan in the
Philippines, I know that it is uniquely placed to help us in the fight
against Ebola,” he wrote. “We are counting on Australia to send us the
military personnel we so desperately need to fight back against the
virus and prevent the positive developments of the last 10 years from
being undone.”

Labor’s shadow health minister, Catherine King, says it’s time for
Australia to do more. She backs the Australian Medical Association’s
(AMA) call for urgent action. “As the AMA notes, the government has
well-trained Australian Medical Assistance Teams … that can rapidly
respond to crises like the Ebola crisis,” she said.

But this time, playing on the world stage is not so appealing to the
prime minister: “We aren’t going to send Australian doctors and nurses
into harm’s way without being absolutely confident that all of the risks
are being properly managed.”

Evacuation of affected Australian health workers is a major stumbling
block. The Public Health Association and the doctors find this reason
for rejecting more concrete assistance incredible. Britain and Germany
already have arrangements in place; if Canberra had the will it could
use them.

Maybe there are more votes in fighting Islamic extremists in
countries remote from Australia than there are in fighting disease. But
the AMA says the same logic applies. We are in the Middle East to
contain a terrorist threat. It argues we should be in West Africa to
contain a threat to world health. It points out that 750 people travel
from West Africa to Australia every year. Among them, heroes such as
Cairns volunteer Red Cross nurse Sue Ellen Kovack. She is still under
quarantine as a precaution for suspected Ebola.

The Abbott government, so keen to be in lockstep with Washington in
Iraq, is reluctant to follow its American ally into West Africa. The
Obama administration sees Ebola in international economic and security
terms. It has a similar view about climate change. Again there’s a
parting of the ways.

For the first time in five years of G20 summits, climate change is
not on the core agenda. Labor’s former treasurer Wayne Swan attended
every one of those events. He told the Lowy Institute this week there is
anger and alarm within the international community at Australia’s
stance as the first nation to go backwards.

“In the corridors of Washington, Berlin and elsewhere, there is
genuine dismay about the lack of attention to climate change in the G20
agenda,” he said.

Abbott thumbs his nose at such sentiments. “Coal is essential for the
prosperity of Australia,” he said at the opening of the Caval Ridge
mine in Queensland. “Energy is what sustains prosperity and coal is the
world’s principal energy source and it will be for many decades to
come.”

Never mind that the mine’s joint partners, BHP and Mitsubishi, are
busy diversifying into alternative energy sources with a firm eye to a
less carbon intensive future.

This prime minister is busy running lines prepared by the coal
industry and hardly, if ever, mentions the worth or potential of
Australia’s other natural riches, wind and solar. His scarcely concealed
agenda is to dismantle the renewable energy industry. So far only the
senate is standing in his way.

Swan says that “at best, Australia has gone from leader to laggard on
climate change. At worst it’s gone from lifter to leaner. And this at a
time when significant players such as the US and China are more willing
than ever to address climate change.”

Abbott is preparing to vanquish an old foe on a fading battleground.
He warns that Shorten’s Labor will bring back the “carbon tax”, threaten
jobs and hike electricity prices. He clearly believes by keeping his
head in the sand on climate change a majority of Australian voters will
join him with their buckets and spades on the beach.

Shorten’s mettle will be tested but he won’t be gifting Abbott a
divided Labor Party and a leadership merry-go-round. Nor will he be
doing deals with doctrinaire Greens.

He will need to convert into convincing arguments the overwhelming
consensus of the world’s scientists that the extreme weather we are
experiencing is tied to our unfettered use of fossil fuels.

It would be folly to underestimate this opposition leader. He has
Labor ahead in the polls. He goaded the prime minister into his foolish
Putin bravado and his exploitation of the government’s unsaleable budget
shows he can seize a political opportunity.

Tony Abbott can ill afford too many more own goals.

Suppose They Gave A War and Nobody Came? - The AIM Network

2014-10-13T10:32:00.001-07:00

Suppose They Gave A War and Nobody Came? - The AIM Network

Suppose They Gave A War and Nobody Came?

October 13, 2014
Written by:
Sean Stinson
11 Replies

Image: dailymail.uk

Jane Caro tweeted recently “Reviewing a national curriculum that
has only just begun to be rolled out is, as a friend put it, a case of
premature evaluation.” If only it were as simple as that.

If there was one thing our former PM Julia Gillard was passionate
about it was education, but like so many other great reforms of the
previous 6 years, the Abbott government seems determined to vandalise
our education system as well. As if its well publicised attacks on
higher education weren’t enough, the coalition has just published a
report recommending greater emphasis on ‘morals, values and
spirituality’ and ‘the contribution of western civilisation’ in the
national curriculum. As a student of history this fills me with dread.
The word ‘fascist’ is often used loosely, but the early indoctrination
of children is quite literally straight out of Mussolini’s playbook.

Of course moral crusaders of the calibre of Bernardi and Abetz
probably see themselves as having a mission to uphold the moral
standards of our society, even as they go about trying to degrade our
real values. Tolerance, understanding, generosity, and egalitarianism
are things of which we all should be proud, both as a nation and as
individuals. These are the true moral standards we should be teaching
our young. Instead we have a government which encourages bigotry,
divisiveness, racial hatred and fear. Pathetic, ignorant and cruel are
but a few adjectives which come to mind.

I have written elsewhere on the dangers we face from Christian
fundamentalism in our parliament. Imagine the religious authoritarianism
of Francoism let loose on Australian society and you wouldn’t be far
off. The separation of Church and State exists for a good reason. Aside
from the Guttenberg press, it remains arguably the greatest legacy of
the Enlightenment.

One needn’t delve too far into history to see the atrocities which
have been committed in the name of religion. While there are stand-out
examples in the inquisition and the counter-reformation, one would be
foolish to think we have advanced much. While religious war may have
cooled down in the west, it is still raging hot in the Middle East. Just
the other day I heard these words from a Kurdish Peshmerga fighter
(presumably one of Abbott’s ‘goodies’) “God willing, we will drive the
infidels from our lands.” Just when I thought I had a sense of right and
wrong in this latest war, this hit me like a ton of bricks.

Like Reagan before him, the Bush Jr. presidency was largely made
possible by the backing of Christian fundamentalist preachers who
whipped their congregations into a frenzy of fear, nationalism and moral
indignation, urging them to vote Republican, and we all know how that
worked out. A war on terror costing millions of Iraqi lives and
trillions of dollars, and a debt crisis from which the US may never
recover are just the tip of the iceberg.

Our Prime Minister’s summation of the situation in Iraq and Syria
brings to mind a certain Nazi propaganda film in which the French were
accused of ‘medieval barbarism’ for recruiting fighters from their
African colonies. Of course racism had had plenty of time to fester in
Germany from 1933 onwards. But seven years is a short time, and with the
memory of the war to end all wars still fresh in the imagination of millions, it beggars belief that it could all turn so bad, so quickly.

I have long believed that we could rid ourselves of war within a
generation by giving children everywhere a sound, publically funded,
secular, science-based education which promotes humanist values. While
social engineering on this scale is well out of the ambit of this (or
any) government’s short sighted vision, it’s wholly unsurprising that
Abbott, Pyne and co should want to shift the emphasis in education away
from critical thinking and back to the ‘three r’s’, anyway from human
geography and back to physical geography, away from multiculturalism and
back to Judeo-Christian orthodoxy.

Some will argue that wars are always waged by the rich and fought by
the poor, and certainly there is evidence that the military industrial
complex exists to serve its own ends anyway (or that of the bankers).
But what happens when soldiers refuse to fight? Notwithstanding the
horrors of a war which claimed 10 million lives and left 20 million
casualties, it’s worth remembering that WWI might have been fought to
the last man had the Kaiser’s troops not mutinied. Imagine if they’d all
refused to go to war in the first place? There is no greater threat to
tyranny than a well informed and educated populus.

Five reasons terror laws wreck media freedom and democracy

2014-10-12T19:37:00.001-07:00

Five reasons terror laws wreck media freedom and democracy

The Conversation 13 October 2014, 12:00pm

Crime Human rights Law Media

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(Image via The Greens)

The Abbott Government’s new security and
counter-terrorism laws represent the most concerted attack on journalism
in the modern era, writes Professor Mark Pearson from Griffith University via The Conversation.

The Abbott government’s latest tranches of national security and
counter-terrorism laws represent the greatest attack on the Fourth
Estate function of journalism in the modern era. They are worse than the
Gillard government’s failed attempts to regulate the press.

Unlike most other Western democracies, Australia has no
constitutional instrument protecting free expression as a human right.
Few politicians can resist the temptation to control the flow of
information if the law permits.

Here are five reasons that this latest move is damaging the democratic cornerstone of press freedom.

1. It is legislative over-reach

These laws go too far and inflict unnecessary collateral damage on
journalism. Since the 2001 terrorism attacks on the US, Australia has
passed more than 50 security laws, many of which have impacts on the
work of journalists. (State and territory governments have enacted
scores more.)

Despite some in-built “sunset clauses” in the legislation, some military experts have predicted a 100-year war on jihadi extremism, so ongoing renewals are likely.

Australians have been given remarkably little explanation of why most
of the new laws are needed. Even those that seem well founded could be
amended to include a clear public interest, free expression or
journalism exemption.

Existing laws worked well enough to enable the arrests and convictions of at least 15 people on terrorism charges in Australia since 2003. These laws allowed a series of operations this year including one involving more than 800 police and an unknown number of ASIO agents.

Federal Police powers were strong enough to obtain warrants to raid
Channel Seven headquarters in Sydney in February. Officers seized
computers over an unsubstantiated allegation that Seven had paid for an
interview with convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby. The AFP later apologised.

2. It gags reportage of a key public issue

National security and counter-terrorism activity is a major
Commonwealth budget item. The 2014-15 budget estimates allocate more
than $4 billion a year to public order and safety. Since the budget, counter-terrorism has received an extra $630 million over four years, including almost $200 million for ASIO.

Such a sizable area of government merits maximum media scrutiny and
transparency. It is the media’s role to act as a watchdog on how well
governments perform all their duties, including security. In a
democracy, that means striking a reasonable balance between preserving
the integrity of intelligence and police operations and allowing enough
information flow to permit scrutiny and informed public debate.

The responses to questions to the attorney-general from the ABC’s Media Watch last week raised more issues than they answered about the ability to report national security news under the new Section 35P of the ASIO Act (1979).
It was said the legislation did not “target journalists”. Yet it
criminalises any disclosure, whether deliberate or not, of information
about a “Special Intelligence Operation” (SIO).

That is basically what journalists do – disclose information. Just to
do so in this case carries a five-year jail term, or ten years if they
jeopardise the operation.

Remarkably, a journalist would have to phone the ASIO media office
hotline to ask whether an operation that had come to their attention was
deemed a SIO. The Attorney-General’s assurances that journalists are
not targeted might well be sincere, but the legislation now sits there
for any future government to apply against anyone who dares to mention
such an operation.

That is quite a chill factor. One can imagine that ASIO media hotline
getting considerable traffic in coming months and years. Journalists,
bloggers and social media users will have to phone it to see whether
they can safely report or post a status about an unfolding event.

3. It compromises the separation of powers

A significant change was made between the second and third readings
in parliament so that it became the attorney-general, not the ASIO
director-general, who authorises a SIO on request from any member of
ASIO (Section 35B).
This raises important separation of powers issues, particularly in
light of recent government information policies. Only this year a court suppression order was granted on the government’s application “to prevent damage to Australia’s international relations”.

Successive governments’ restrictions on media access to detention centres and Immigration Minister Scott Morrison’s refusal to give details
about “current or potential future on-water operations” involving
asylum seekers are other examples of denying the public information on
crucial issues that Australians have a right to know about.

Journalists’ exposure of cover-ups by politicians of all colours at all levels of government have dominated the Walkley Awards for decades. Their revelations have triggered inquiries like Queensland’s Fitzgerald Inquiry and New South Wales' recent ICAC hearings.

These new gags give current and future governments the opportunity to
avoid such scrutiny by claiming national security is involved.

4. It spells the end for the confidential source

The effects of s35P on disclosures, surveillance powers, including access to all of Australia’s IT networks with a single warrant, and metadata storage and access obligations
effectively sound the death knell for the whistleblower as a
confidential source in this country. When combined with data sharing
between government agencies, CCTV surveillance and device and social
media tracking, it means a source like Watergate’s “Deep Throat” can no longer deal with journalists without a genuine fear of detection.

The shame is that this comes just as journalists have been celebrating
the effectiveness of new shield laws in other reporting contexts.
Sadly, national security is a standard exemption to shield law
protection.

The Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment (Foreign Fighters) Bill
2014 now before parliament does offer a journalism exemption to the
10-year jail penalty for entering a declared terrorism area in a foreign
country, which is indeed what war correspondents sometimes do. However,
that exemption requires the journalist to prove what they were doing.
And that may betray the identity of their sources.

5. Exemptions effectively license old media over new media

The exemption applies strictly to a “person working in a professional capacity as a journalist” (or assisting). This raises the recurring question of what defines a “journalist” in this new era.

The issue arises time and again as more people practise what we know
as journalism. Bloggers, students, academics and “citizen journalists”
are now valuable sources of information for the public. Yet many of them
are not necessarily working in a professional capacity as a journalist.

Thus the new law would privilege the 20th-century definition of “journalist” and is a form of licensing.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Tony Abbott's problem with Australia's most venerable institutions

2014-10-09T11:24:00.001-07:00

Tony Abbott's problem with Australia's most venerable institutions

In
its one year in power, the government that Abbott leads has amassed a
dismal record of bullying, belittling and meddling with some of
Australia’s most venerable institutions

- David Ritter
- theguardian.com,
  Wednesday 8 October 2014 09.03 AEST
- Jump to comments (238)

Prime minister Tony Abbott: a conservative politician facing venerable institutions.
Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty Images

Should every TV and radio weather presenter in Australia call prime
minister Tony Abbott and his advisors for their daily forecast? According to Abbott’s advisor Maurice Newman last week, the Bureau of Meteorology
was wrong about, well, the weather. Abbott should have defended our
national weather agency against his advisor’s harmful overreach. Instead
the attack was allowed to stand.

But the besmirching of Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology is far from
an isolated incident. In their first year of government, Abbott and his
closest advisors have been leading radical attacks on some of
Australia’s most important institutions.

In his 2009 book Battlelines, Abbott argued that the Liberal party of
Australia is Australia’s party of conservatism. Indeed for many, Abbott is “the archetypal Australian conservative”.

But one of the central tenets of conservatism is supposed to be
respect for inherited institutions. In Battlelines, Abbott quotes a 1980
statement from Malcolm Fraser with approval, that “[o]nce liberal
institutions are installed in a society, a government which wishes to
preserve them must be in some sense conservative”. Traditional
conservatives mistrust the arrogance of political actors in the present
who would reconstruct institutions in accordance with fashionable
thinking or petty partisan advantage. As Abbott wrote, the “conservative
appreciates that judgement is essentially provisional, wisdom relative,
and success transient.”

Yet in its one year in power, the government that Abbott leads has
amassed a dismal record of bulling, belittling and meddling with some of
Australia’s most venerable institutions.

The CSIRO, founded in 1926, has been the subject of unprecedented budget cuts and political interference. The high court,
established by the constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia and
founded in 1903, became so threatened by budget cuts that chief justice
Robert French had to take the extraordinary step of writing to the prime minister to remind him of the court’s constitutional independence.

Australia’s university system has been subject to enormous
interference, as the government seeks to overturn practices that have
been in place since the 1940’s Menzies era by complete deregulation of
fees. The ABC, established in 1932, is the subject of constant belittlement and denigration by the Abbott government and faces budgetary evisceration.

And of course the most venerable national institution of all is
Australia’s physical environment. Conservatives should, at base, have a
predisposition for conserving the environment. Nothing could be more
profoundly radical than Abbott’s de facto denial of climate change and wilful negligence towards the national natural estate.

In addition to the overt political assaults on our institutions, the
Abbott government is also conspicuous in its unwillingness to think or
act institutionally.

In his short book On Thinking Institutionally,
the American academic Hugh Heclo defines thinking institutionally as a
kind of “respect-in-depth” for the rules of the game rather than mere
preoccupation with winning. According to Heclo, this “respect entails a
deferential regard for something beyond one’s self”.

While noting that a failure to think institutionally might be
intuitively expected to be more common on the radical left, Heclo
acerbically observes that when “results-oriented ‘conservatives’ are not
getting the partisan results they want, you can expect that you and
your institutional values will be thrown overboard”. In other words, if
the political right is not getting the best within liberal institutions,
they will abandon conservative principle and attack the rules of the
game which they are no longer winning.

In recent Australian political history, Abbott and his pack have made
an art of putting short term political gain ahead of the greater good
of the system. Whether it is the confected budget emergency that even
treasurer Joe Hockey has effectively admitted is not real; or bad faith appointments like climate sceptic Dick Warburton reviewing the Renewable Energy Target or Janet Albrechtsen being appointed to the panel that oversees nominations to the ABC Board; the use of royal Commissions to pursue petty political vendettas; or the absurd extension of doctrines of secrecy
to keep Operation Sovereign Borders from being subject to reasonable
public scrutiny, this is a government that values ephemeral advantage
above custodianship of our institutions.

As institutional economists, historians, sociologists – and plain old
common sense – will tell us, a big part of what makes a country
peaceful and prosperous is having stable institutions. From an
environmental perspective, strong and durable institutions are crucial
to lasting sustainability. Our national institutions bind us together;
they are the source of our sense of community, common obligation, and
nationhood.

None of this is to say that institutions do not need to reform, adapt
and change to meet the needs of the times. But nobody could seriously
argue that this is what the Abbott gang has in mind if they attack, say,
the ABC or the Bureau of Meteorology.

Our institutions should embody the spirit of our shared life and be
above the petty ruckus of day to day political advantage. Attacking
Australia’s institutions spreads mistrust, erodes cohesion and gives
life to an ethic of ‘anything goes’ in the name of winning among our
political class. These are all outcomes that conservatives should
deplore.

In their 2008 work, The Times Will Suit Them: Post-Modern Conservatism in Australia,
political scientists Geoff Boucher and Matthew Sharpe diagnosed the
contemporary Liberal Party as having “jettisoned their belief in the
liberal institutions and democratic ideals that founded modern
Australia”. It is a book worth dusting off to help understand the Abbott
government.

In seeking to achieve narrow political advantage, the Abbott
government is happy to denigrate and damage decades of accumulated
institutional wisdom and practice. Far from being conservative, in its
anti-institutionalism, Abbott is running a radical government that is
attempting to pull up the root and branch of our national life.

It's war, not 'a mission': Abbott incorrect on Iraq action

2014-10-03T11:24:00.001-07:00

It's war, not 'a mission': Abbott incorrect on Iraq action

Updated
yesterday at 12:32pmFri 3 Oct 2014, 12:32pm

Photo:
It's war, not 'a mission': Abbott incorrect. (AAP)

Related Story:
Fact check: Who has a say in sending Australian troops to war?

Map:
Australia

Cabinet has authorised Australian air strikes and the
deployment of Australian special forces to fight Islamic State
militants in Iraq, Prime Minister Tony Abbott has announced.

"ISIL has effectively declared war on the world," Mr Abbott said on October 3. "The world is responding."

"Earlier
this week Royal Australian Air Force aircraft began flying support
missions in Iraq. Today Cabinet has authorised Australian air strikes in
Iraq at the request of the Iraqi government and in support of the Iraqi
government," he said.

"Also, subject to final legal
documentation, Cabinet has authorised the deployment of Australian
special forces into Iraq to advise and assist Iraqi forces."

Mr Abbott warned the deployment could be lengthy - "certainly months rather than weeks".

Asked if Australia was now at war, he said: "I know that you'd love to have that headline, but it's not strictly accurate."

This has been Mr Abbott's position since mid-September, when he first announced that Australia would send up to 10 air force planes and 600 personnel to the Middle East.

"I think strictly speaking it's best described as a mission rather than as a war," he told Radio 3AW on September 16.

ABC Fact Check investigates whether Australia's commitment in Iraq constitutes a war.

The claim: Tony Abbott says Australia's commitment in Iraq is "best described as a mission rather than as a war".
The verdict: Experts
say war is determined by the intensity of hostilities and whether the
opposition is an organised armed group. Mr Abbott is incorrect.

Abbott's three reasons to call it 'a mission'

Mr Abbott has repeatedly cited three reasons for describing the military action as "a mission".

The
first is that Australia is responding to an invitation from the Iraqi
government. "We are not in combat against another country. We are
engaged in combat operations against an insurgency in support of
the legitimate government of Iraq," Mr Abbott said on October 3. He told
the Nine Network
on September 15 that being welcomed by the Iraqi government was "one of
the fundamental differences between this potential commitment and the
commitment that was made 11 years ago". In 2003 troops from Australia,
Britain and the United States invaded Iraq in the Second Gulf War.

The
second reason is that the objective is humanitarian. "It is a
combat deployment but it is an essentially humanitarian mission to
protect the people of Iraq and ultimately the people of Australia from
the murderous rage of the ISIL death cult," Mr Abbott said on October 3.

Video: Experts tell Fact Check Australia is at war with Islamic State in Iraq.
(ABC News)

The third reason is that Australian forces will not act alone. Asked at a media conference on September 16
why he didn't use the word "war", he said: "Australian forces have no
intention of engaging in independent combat operations." In his 3AW
interview he told host Neil Mitchell: "And I stress, Neil, that we're
not talking about independent combat operations by Australia, we're not
talking about ground combat operation by Australia, we're talking about
military advisers to be placed with the Iraqi security forces and the
Peshmerga Kurdish forces."

Other government figures have also rejected the word "war".

Attorney-General George Brandis called
Australia's involvement a "humanitarian mission, with military
elements" on September 15. "I don't think it's correct to describe what
we are speaking of as a war in the first place," he said.

Treasurer Joe Hockey told a media conference
the same day that Australia had to "fight back" against IS. Asked by a
journalist if that meant Australia was at war with IS, he said: "No,
there's specific definitions about those sorts of things... this is a
humanitarian initiative."

Fact check: Who has a say in sending Australian troops to war

Fact
Check looks at Foreign Minister Julie Bishop's claim that "the
government of the day has the ultimate responsibility for decisions
involving Australia's military".

Can war be defined?

Several Australian and
international experts tell Fact Check that legal definitions of war are
no longer straightforward. As an international legal term, "war" faded
when the UN Charter came into being after World War II. "Armed conflict" has become a more widely used legal term ever since the Geneva Conventions of 1949 laid down humanitarian rules that should apply when conflicts break out.

In 1995 the Appeals Chamber of the International Tribunal on the former Yugoslavia, established by the UN, found that
"an armed conflict exists whenever there is a resort to armed force
between States or protracted armed violence between governmental
authorities and organised armed groups or between such groups within a
State".

Two years later, the tribunal discussed
this definition, saying it "focuses on two aspects of a conflict; the
intensity of the conflict and the organisation of the parties to the
conflict". It said where non-government parties were involved, the
definition distinguished an armed conflict from "banditry, unorganised
and short-lived insurrections, or terrorist activities, which are not
subject to international humanitarian law".

Professor Ben Saul, an
expert on the law of war at the University of Sydney, says the
definition of war matters for several reasons.

"If we are engaging
in military hostilities or supporting others to engage in military
hostilities then the Geneva Conventions apply to our forces in Iraq.
That means we are responsible for not targeting civilians, not causing
excessive civilian casualties, complying with all the rules about the
means and methods of warfare and the right weapons to use and so forth,
and at the end of the day Australian forces have war crimes liability if
they overstep the mark," he told Fact Check.

The Macquarie
Dictionary defines war as "a conflict carried on by force of arms, as
between nations or states, or between parties within a state".

The internationally recognised Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), at Sweden's Uppsala University, defines
a "warring party" as a "government of a state or any opposition
organisation or alliance of organisations that uses armed force to
promote its position".

Marc Weller, Professor of International Law
from Cambridge University, tells Fact Check that lawyers look at the
definition of war in two ways:

One relates to the set of rules in the Geneva Conventions on conducting hostilities, or "humanitarian law".
The other relates to the legality of sending armed forces abroad, or "the law on the use of force".

Photo:
Ground crew assist as RAAF F/A-18F Super Hornets prepare for departure to the Middle East. (Australian Defence Force)

What the experts say

Professor Weller
says where the legality of sending armed forces abroad is concerned,
the Australian government is right to say that the issue of "war" does
not arise. "This is an operation conducted (at least in Iraq) with the
consent of the Iraqi government," he said. "Hence it is not legally
controversial and no additional legal justification for the use of force
is required."

Professor Saul agrees that in this regard
Australia's 2014 commitment differs from 2003. "Here, I think, the
international community recognises that the current Iraqi government is
the legitimate government of Iraq, entitled to request foreign states to
come to its assistance; so our involvement in Iraq is entirely legal
under international law."

But he considers Australia is at war.

"What's
critical here is whether Australian forces are directly engaging in
military hostilities in Iraq, and potentially in the future in Syria as
well, and if the answer to that is yes because we are bombing IS forces,
we're flying air cover for others who are bombing IS forces, then the
answer is very simple: yes we are at war," Professor Saul said.

"If
on the other hand we are just providing humanitarian relief for food
drops and so on, then in that case we are probably not at war in the
legal sense."

He also says IS meets the condition in the UN tribunal's test of being "an organised armed group".

On
Mr Abbott's point that the operation is humanitarian because
Australia's objective is to "protect", he says: "Legally, what really
matters is what we are doing not why."

Mary Ellen O'Connell,
Professor of Law and International Dispute Resolution at Notre Dame
University in the United States, tells Fact Check the relevant criteria
in international law are "very different from Mr Abbott's".

"Australia
is in a 'war' or armed conflict when it engages in intense armed
fighting with another organised armed group. Airstrikes using military
planes, launching missiles and dropping bombs against the IS fighters
are engagement in combat - regardless of the purpose," Professor
O'Connell said.

Both parties can deny the existence of war for political reasons, and yet as a factual, objective matter, they would be at war.

Gabriella Blum

Sidney Jones, a terrorism expert and director of the
Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict in Indonesia, says: "Yes, I
think it is a war. From the beginning, the conflict in Syria [from where
IS spread into Iraq] was seen in apocalyptic terms as a battle between
good and evil."

James Brown, the Lowy Institute for International Policy's military fellow, agrees that Australia is at war.

"Defence
looks at these kind of operations and classifies them in two ways: are
they war-like or are they non-war-like," he said.

"If they're
war-like there's a chance of combat against an armed adversary and
there's a chance of casualties too, and this deployment will be a
war-like deployment, so it is a war."

On the Prime Minister's
claim that Australia's commitment in Iraq is best described as a
"mission", Mr Brown says: "If we were sending commandos on a 24-hour
raid you might call it a mission, but if you're sending military forces
on a sustained military campaign that's expected to last months if not
years, which is the case here I think, you'd be calling it a war."

He
says "twisted terminology" is being used "to distinguish from the 2003
Iraq military campaign and I think to avoid legitimising IS as a state".

Gabriella
Blum, Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Harvard Law
School, says: "Whether a war can be fought against a non-state actor is a
question of much controversy among international lawyers, but as a
factual matter, the answer is yes. Think Israel vs Hezbollah or Hamas,
the US vs Al Qaeda."

Professor Blum dismissed a warring party's
choice of terminology. "The existence of war (or, more correctly, an
armed conflict) depends only on the level and scale of hostilities
between the warring parties, not on any unilateral declaration or
description," she told Fact Check.

"Both parties can deny the
existence of war for political reasons, and yet as a factual, objective
matter, they would be at war."

Photo:
F/A-18F Super Hornet aircrew head to their aircraft in preparation for departure to the Middle East, September 2014. (Australian Defence Force)

What the US is calling it

Terminology among US officials has been fluid, sometimes contradicting Australia's descriptions. Secretary of state John Kerry said
on September 14 there was "a kind of tortured debate going on about
terminology". Like Mr Abbott, he made a distinction with the 2003 Iraq
war.

"If people need to find a place to land in terms of what we
did in Iraq originally, this is not a war," he said. "This is not combat
troops on the ground. It's not hundreds of thousands of people. It's
not that kind of mobilisation. But in terms of Al Qaeda, which we have
used the word war with, yes, we went - we're at war with Al Qaeda and
its affiliates. And in same context, if you want to use it, yes, we're
at war with ISIL in that sense."

Did the last war ever really end?

Professor
Tim Dunne and Dr Emily Tannock, of the School of Political Science and
International Studies at the University of Queensland, argue that the
war itself has never ended. Writing for the Lowy Institute think tank's
blog The Interpreter, they describe the latest involvement as part of "an Iraq war that has been waged across a quarter of a century".

This
"long war in Iraq" has "three incarnations": the UN-led intervention of
1990-91 to liberate Kuwait; the war of "regime change" of 2003; and
'the third war". They describe this one as "the war against the Islamic
State".

Professor Dunne and Dr Tannock acknowledge that Iraq's
request for military assistance in the "third war" makes it different
from the second one, when the US and its allies invaded Iraq.
Nonetheless, they maintain that each stage of the "long war" has
"recurring themes". In all three conflicts, the West has cited
humanitarian and national security issues, and has seen the battles as a
"war for civilisation against barbarism". They conclude: "Each campaign
has produced endings which later turn into periods in which the
intensity of violence has lessened, only to escalate again as the long
war continues."

Australia's Chief of Army, Lieutenant General
David Morrison, appeared to take a similar view in a speech on September
23. Fairfax Media reported him
as saying that the "ongoing battle against Islamic militants" may come
to be seen as one lengthy and protracted set of conflicts, presenting
"almost existential challenges". He said: "I do wonder whether we are
actually in the early days of the next long war... I sense with some
despair that we probably are."

The bottom line

Mr Abbott's
point that Australia has been invited to send troops by the Iraqi
government is relevant to the legality of Australian actions under the
international law on the use of force. However, it is not relevant to
the question of whether Australia is at war.

Experts tell Fact
Check Mr Abbott's second point - that the objective is humanitarian -
does not affect whether it constitutes war. And his third point - that
Australian forces will not act alone - is also not a decisive factor.

Experts say war is determined by the intensity of hostilities and whether the opposition is an organised armed group.

The verdict

Mr Abbott's claim that Australia's commitment in Iraq is "best described as a mission rather than as a war" is incorrect.

Sources

Topics:
unrest-conflict-and-war,
federal-government,
government-and-politics,
world-politics,
abbott-tony,
liberals,
australia,
iraq,
syrian-arab-republic

First posted
yesterday at 9:44am

Our values define us not our race or religion

2014-09-30T00:32:00.001-07:00

Our values define us not our race or religion

Date: September 30, 2014 - 12:00AM

15 reading now
Comments 94

Tim Soutphommasane

Political philosopher and regular columnist

View more articles from Tim Soutphommasane

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Illustration: Jim Pavlidis.

It is said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Today we have many reasons to be watchful. All of us are rightly
disturbed by the prospect of terrorist acts on Australian soil.
Counter-terror raids in Sydney and Brisbane, and the shooting of
teenager Numan Haider in Melbourne, have heightened community concern.

Yet we must also be vigilant on more than one front. We must
be united in countering terror. We must not allow fear and suspicion to
triumph.

Unfortunately, there are elements that would like to see
nothing more than social division. Nothing would please ISIL extremists
more than to see Muslim Australians being alienated or ostracised. Were
this to happen, ISIL's job becomes easier – it would help them recruit
disaffected Muslims to their heinous cause.

Race discrimination commissioner Tim Soutphommasane.

At the same time, there are xenophobic factions that see an
opportunity to spread their messages of hate. Muslim communities have
reported an increase in hate attacks. There has been abuse of Muslims on
streets and graffiti on mosques. There have been violent threats: last
week a man armed with a knife entered an Islamic college in south-west
Sydney.

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Anti-Muslim bigotry is now contaminating community harmony at
large. For example, Sikh Australians say they are becoming targets of
racial abuse because people are linking turbans to terrorism.

Bigotry has no place in our society. There is no right to be a
bigot. Every person in Australia should be free to live without being
subjected to harassment or humiliation. As a liberal democracy we uphold
the freedom to practise your religion.

These tenets of our public life usually require no repeating.
They are simple expressions of fairness and decency. But at times of
community anxiety we should remind ourselves of our most basic values.

In the weeks and months to come, there will be further debate
about national security. Already we have seen some ill-judged
statements that have inflamed sentiments about Muslims and Islam.

There is a special responsibility for our elected
representatives to set an example. No one benefits from ignorant
rabble-rousing. Social cohesion mustn't be sacrificed for soundbites.

The tone of leadership matters. One message in particular
must get through: Let's not judge entire communities by the actions of
extremist minorities. ISIL and its supporters are not representative of
Islam.

Indeed, while a small number subscribe to their abhorrent ideology, the overwhelming majority of Muslim Australians do not.

Why would they? Of those lives claimed by ISIL's cultish
aggression in Iraq and Syria, the majority have been Muslim. More to the
point, ISIL's aims are incompatible with Muslim Australians getting on
with their lives. Why would they support a group whose actions are
certain to make their life more difficult?

It makes little sense to define the many by the actions of a
fanatical few. It's not only misguided, it's also deeply unhelpful. It
does nothing to aid the efforts of moderate Muslim community leaders to
stamp out the embers of radicalism.

Muslim Australians are entitled to a fair go. The vast
majority are law-abiding citizens who are committed to this country.
Earlier this month in the Sydney suburb of Lakemba I attended a
community barbecue organised by Lebanese community leader Dr Jamal Rifi.
Thousands from the community attended under the banner of "Muslims Love
Australia". They are evidently patriotic.

The patriotism I saw in Lakemba was a particular kind. It's
the patriotism of migrants, a love of country that comes not from
ancestry but from citizenship. I know it well as a first-generation
Australian who arrived as a child of migrants. For those who seek to
make a new life here, there is no stronger aspiration than to become an
Australian – for their children to become Australian.

Such patriotism is typically a pride that lies within. But
it's the right kind of pride for a multicultural Australia – a modern
Australia that has been built on immigration. We are a country that is
today defined by our values, and not by race or religion.

Multicultural Australia involves a compact. Everyone should
feel relaxed and comfortable in their own skin. Everyone should enjoy
the right to express their heritage or practise their faith.

But multicultural Australia has its limits, too. Rights come
with responsibilities. Everyone should be committed to parliamentary
democracy, the rule of law and an Australian national identity. Where
religion or culture clashes with any of these things, the demands of
citizenship must prevail. Our civic identity is paramount.

This bargain is written in the oath that every migrant takes
when they become a citizen: "I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its
people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I
respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey."

These are terms all Australians can abide by. At a time when
our liberties and security are being rightly debated, it is only right
that we return to our social contract.

Most of all, we must remember that national security can
never be divorced from cultural harmony and social cohesion. And we are
always better placed to combat threats when we are united rather than
divided.

Tim Soutphommasane is Australia's Race Discrimination Commissioner.

ABBOTT "TEA PARTY" CONSERVATISM

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Our values define us not our race or religion

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Political philosopher and regular columnist