Did Scott Morrison want the last sitting period before the winter recess — some speculate the last sitting period before an early election — to be dominated by topics from when Julia Gillard was prime minister, topics most of us — whether Liberal, Labor, Green, conservative, News Corp, whoever — thought were settled?
How about the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, which was legislated in 2012? Sure there’s been debate and changes over how to achieve water savings — with the Coalition preferring to waste money in irrigation infrastructure ahead of water buybacks, and NSW allowing irrigators to rort with impunity — but the broad principle that the system needed to be managed to provide environmental flows along its length and into South Australia has been settled for nearly a decade.
Or maybe not so much: the Nationals in the Senate, led by Bridget McKenzie and Matt Canavan, tried to use a bill finally toughening up enforcement provisions in the plan to crack down on water theft to gut the plan and prevent Commonwealth water buybacks. Indeed, their amendments went further and would have freed up the funding for water buybacks to be pork-barrrelled into other uses.
The instinct to rort, you see, runs deep within the Nationals. Deeper than the Murray-Darling — and certainly after irrigators have finished with it.
This led to Liberal senators having to vote down their own colleagues’ amendments to government legislation, and South Australian senators venting their fury.
And women in the workforce?
It’s been an article of faith among policymakers since the Howard years that increasing female participation in the workforce is crucial in an economy facing the challenge of an ageing population. That means a dramatically greater need for childcare, and childcare subsidies have been steadily growing since then. Again the debate is around the detail of such a policy, not its broad direction. And after the Gillard government introduced a paid parental leave scheme, it was Tony Abbott, whose views on women date from the 12th century, who wanted to top it with a “Rolls-Royce” model.
And female participation has been one of the few triumphs of the Coalition’s time in government, going from below 59% in 2013 to 61.7% in May — more than recovering from last year’s dip.
But the government’s most recent expansion of childcare subsidies — intended to counter Anthony Albanese’s major reforms proposed after last year’s women-unfriendly budget — are opposed by Nationals.
Canavan again, and fellow far-right Queenslanders like MP George Christensen and the bizarre Senator Gerard Rennick, want handouts for women who stay home to look after children, which would actively negate measures to increase female participation.
Along the way, Christensen suggested working mothers were outsourcing parenting, a comment that went down about as well as a morals crusader in a Manila topless bar. It elicited a rebuke not merely from female Liberal colleagues but his own party’s Perin Davey.
Ah, those celebrated “retail political skills” in action.
Overturning the Murray-Darling Basin Plan and sending women back to the kitchen were unlikely to be top of the list of topics that Morrison, confined to The Lodge after his G7 trip, would have liked to dominate the headlines. Particularly given his struggles this year on gender issues. Particularly given Barnaby Joyce remains the subject of unresolved and serious sexual harassment complaints.
The back to the future pattern persists even on climate policy. Morrison is a modern denialist. Not outright denial of climate change as per Abbott: Morrison’s denialism is of gaseous form, with his commitment to a “gas-led recovery” and funding for LNG expansion and the new tech panacea of hydrogen, with a bet on carbon capture as well. His commitment to fossil fuels has little room for coal-fired power. It’s never to be dismissed outright, but it’s no longer on his agenda given the rotten economics of making electricity from burning the stuff, even if you can capture the carbon. Which you can’t.
But the Nats under Joyce have that old-time denialism, the pure kind you now only get in the rural tent with the thundering preacher. Gas is all very well, but they’re for the hard stuff. There’s nothing vaporous about Nationals’ denialism. They want more coal dug up and a lot more of it burnt, even if taxpayers have to subsidise it and electricity users have to pay more for it.
The criticism of Morrison was always that he was not moving on climate action even as the planet cooked, Australia burned, and the rest of the world committed to greater and more urgent action. But the Nationals actively want to drag Australia back. The growing realisation is that Joyce and his supporters have a much more encompassing vision for travelling backwards than just on climate.
It is hard for me to grasp that mindsets like Barnaby’s still exist in 2021. Where has this idiot been all his life? He has learned nothing.
…. Try a butterfly net?
He’s learned way more than you and me I’d hazard….he’s at least learned how to ensconce himself in the middle buffet carriage on the gravy train.
The 4% of the national vote of the Nationals yields them 10 seats , whereas the 10.4% vote of the Greens gives them only one seat. This imbalance is what allows the corruption of the National Mining Party to persist
Considering the area the Nats cover the distribution isn’t miles off, but agri business and mining ride shotgun completely distorting the picture.
Peter Ross Edwards would not be impressed, I’m guessing.
If there’s a more succinct and greater example of the malfeasance and corruption of “National Party Sense of Entitlement” in this, their obsession with thinking they can use such a scheme as the M-DBA (paid for by all tax-payers to the tune of “$13 billion”?) to benefit a few affluent Upper Darling irrigator donors, to siphon off and leave that water in what is little more than “evaporation ponds”, ’til they “need” it : while robbing the environment and their fellow Australians down-stream of their rights – I don’t know what is.
THE FIRST ACTION of any responsible government – this necessarily excludes “Labor” in its past & current form – would be to obliterate the flood plain dams of Cubby.
Not gonna happen.
Yes, I keep hoping.
Google earth shows just how much damage has been done to the country by these agricorps. Huge diversion dams, scars visible from space. Getting rid of Cubby would be the best, followed by the other dams further south.
It doesn’t seem possible that people still doubt that climate change is a huge threat – but then along comes Barnaby.
Don’t voters worry about bigger hotter worse fires, the drying up of our rivers in some places, flooding in some areas, trees destroying properties due to more destructive storms and temperature fluctuations that are ‘unprecedented’? Do people not see that trashing the environment has some negative effects?
Clearly not. Barnaby and his ilk are living in “beer goggles”…
When you’re nothing more than a “Political Front for the Fossil Fools of the Fossil Fuel Industry” (as Cousin Jethro’s gNats are) I’m pretty sure “seeing” doesn’t come into it.
I can see why Morrison and his Pentecostal lot aren’t worried, they all expect to be “saved” so are busy doing the Corporate Raider trick. Strip all assets from a dying Earth and believe Jesus will help them carry them to the new Earth where they can build their Unca’ Scrooge money bins and spend forever diving and swimming through them. How Good is that!
Correct that the PM of Australia in his heart is, unlike the overwhelming majority of Australians. is really not concerned with the prospect of any coming climate change catastrophe, from bushfires to flooding to sea level rises and worse, when he foolishly believes that his own salvation is assured?”
For his Pentecostalism a chiliastic eschatology, now also wrapped in the so called Prosperity Gospel, that has all the true believers, that is those that are Pentecostalists, will be taken from the earth by The Rapture…while all others, atheists and those that follow any other religion, Christian or otherwise will be subject to The Great Tribulation…where they will all experience worldwide hardships, disasters, famine, war, pain, and suffering, which will wipe out most of all life on the earth before the Second Coming takes place.
He may well consider there is no point in mere mortals campaigning on climate changebecause the fate of the Earth and humanity, according to his cult,is to be determined by the interaction of so called supernatural forces, suchas the Devil and the return of Jesus Christ to earth.
There is going to be a lot of jostling when the Rapture arrives as according to Revelation 7 and Revelation 14:1-4 KJV, there are only to be 144,000 saved… for all those Jehovahs Witnesses, Mormons, Pentecostalists, of various cults, also many other Protestants, Seventh Day Adventist and Unitarians all believe that they are the blessed 144.000.
But it might best dressed first Raptured…when Israel invaded the Lebanon, yet again, in 2006 Lebanon War, there were some reports of women in the USA from Evangelistic and Pentecostalist Cults going out to get their hair and nails done to be prepared for the possible the Apocalypse preceding The Rapture.
Is it any wonder that the DSM V finds that religion is really a delusion. but then as there are so many so widely held then exempts religion from the psychiatric diagnosis of delusion.
However in the important respect of being an incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained and one that defies credibility, religion is a delusion.
I’m not sure it is possible to be human and not deluded in some manner. Morrisons exclusive righteousness looks dangerous to me. his political survival instincts and that social media and independent media could release the grip by uncle Rupe and co on our collective minds is where hope exists.
Allowing mainstream media with its profligate agenda as guidance with no equally powerful alternative for information is more destructive than anything else.
It is apparent that the majority of churchgoers are intelligent, thoughtful, kind and decent people that benefit from their experience.
I will get the Tardis to swing by. With its expansive interior we should be able to accommodate Hayseed and all of his brethren for a trip to a galaxy far, far away. I can promise them an amazing experience as It has been revealed that the Tardis is fuelled by a single lump of coal which regenerates itself every millennium much as Hayseed was resurrected by that lump he proudly handled in our Parliament, not long enough ago for my taste.
Did Barnaby do that too? Scomo did that.
When the Speaker chided Scummo for breaching the Standing Orders on the use of props – after allowing his spiel for 10-15 seconds – he handed it to the Gestapotato who looked at it longingly before passing it onto the Rootbeeter to fondle… after which nobody would touch it so he kept it on his lap.
Which some people have been known to touch, at least in the past.