By Ad astra It’s becoming alarming. Every day our Prime Minister becomes more verbose, more shouty, more insistent. The old-fashioned word ‘blatherskite’ comes to mind. Listen to him as he fronts journalists, answers questions in Question Time, or delivers his characteristic off-the-cuff oratory on any subject he chooses, from protestors to carbon capture and storage…
By TBS Newsbot Gladys Berejiklian managing to resign in disgrace, face the ICAC and bag a better job is emblematic of Australia becoming more corrupt. Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before, but it seems that yet another public servant mired in political scandal will not only go unpunished, but will…
Over the last few days, there has been a full court press by senior Liberals to get Gladys Berejiklian to run against Zali Stegall for the Federal seat of Warringah. This necessarily involves attacking the NSW ICAC for what Scott Morrison described as their “shameful pile-on”. “We have seen plenty of these things and recordings…
Stick to the script: owe that duty of care to your population, so the legal experts in government tell you. Self-interest pays, if in small amounts. These rigid, formulaic assumptions have done wonders to harm and deter any spirit of cooperation regarding dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. History’s record of humanity’s response to plagues, pandemics…
Scott Morrison’s reaction to the Kate Jenkins’ review was to make it very clear that it wasn’t just his side that behaved deplorably towards women. Whilst no doubt true, it’s a pitiful comeback which invites a response. Remember in 2011 when Tony Abbott attended an anti-carbon tax rally where he spoke in front of placards…
While it may be fair for us, the hoi polloi, to address insults to our politicians because they are unequal to our expectations, it is not so, for those politicians to do the same to each other. We have heard the insult “boofhead” from the leader of the Opposition, Mr Anthony Albanese. It’s not pretty,…
By John Haly Predictably the crises of climate change and the pandemic highlighted deficits in health services, markets, welfare and education. Both have accelerated a predictable economic recession. To understand the early signs of an economic downturn, we need to go back to when politically acknowledged signs of a faltering economy appeared. The GDP downturn in the third…
The history of humanitarian or policing missions is a history of taking sides, disruptive partiality and the forfeiture of the very object powers claim when intervening in another country. Things become particularly absurd when the individual or government pleading for such help to an outside force is struggling to survive yet making grand statements about…
By Denis Bright At a time of internal chaos in the federal LNP Government, political fragmentation still offers a lifeline back to government by Scott Morrison or one of his successors if current polling levels continue to deteriorate in 2022. Beyond the more mainstream of the far-right minor parties with recent federal parliamentary representation, there…
That the people of Australia have lost faith in our system of Government is unsurprising. To say that we are ambivalent about our politicians is an understatement, and we are now ashamed. To say that our democracy has taken a beating from the hard-Right of Australian politics over the past decade is no exaggeration. …