No wonder Scott Morrison wants to talk only about submarine bases and national security and military spending all the way until election day. Morrison — the man who gave us “Operation Sovereign Borders” — thinks military force is usually a pretty good option.
After all, his one admission of failure in relation to the pandemic was his wish that he had placed the disastrous vaccine rollout under military control at the outset. And, with Peter Dutton, he overcame his reluctance to acknowledge the crisis in aged care and deployed Defence personnel as urged by both employers and unions — albeit very slowly and in small numbers.
Too slow and too small is the emerging theme of the ADF role in the combined federal-state response to the flood crisis in northern NSW too, which has prompted an apology from the major-general in charge of the operation.
In truth, though, the ADF should be playing only a support role to emergency and recovery institutions at the state level. And it’s clear that in NSW those institutions have failed — for the second major disaster in that state in a row. NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet, who looks badly rattled by the crisis, admitted as much this morning.
Communities have been left to look after themselves. Perrottet admitted that too: “Had neighbours not got in boats then I believe the death toll would have been much higher.”
If you’ve been caught up in a natural disaster of any kind, you may be familiar with the horrible fear that surfaces when you realise things are out of control and normal government emergency mechanisms to keep you safe aren’t going to be able to help.
It’s the realisation you’re on your own and no one is coming, at least not soon. It’s just you and your neighbours facing what’s heading your way, whether furnace-like wind from a bushfire or an incessant torrent of water.
Tens of thousands of people in northern NSW have lived with that feeling for days. Not minutes or hours, but days, stretching now into weeks.
Many people on the NSW south coast who still haven’t been able to rebuild their homes have been stuck with a similar sensation for two years. Forgotten, abandoned.
There are limits to what state agencies and emergency personnel can do in a crisis, of course, but people being left to themselves afterwards is a crime.
However, it’s all too familiar across the country. The vaccine rollout during the pandemic. The hundreds of deaths in aged care due to COVID. The persistent crisis in aged care that only seems to grow worse and worse. The failures of Closing the Gap. The failure to halt domestic violence and homicide. A sense that governments can’t, or won’t, address problems that cost lives and inflict misery.
And that’s before we get to high-level national issues where there is a complete and utter failure to govern — on climate, on energy, on Indigenous recognition.
The failure of the Morrison government to lead has repeatedly seen state governments take control — on the vaccination rollout, on climate policy, on energy — doing the job the federal government should do but won’t. But as the NSW flood crisis shows, the enfeeblement of government, the incapacity to provide the basic service of keeping citizens safe, isn’t a problem confined to Morrison.
The NSW government has shown strong leadership in areas like climate, energy and economic reform, but it can’t keep its citizens safe.
They’re on their own.
This is a new twist of a longstanding sense of alienation on the part of voters. Trust in governments began materially diminishing 20 years ago, and not just in Australia, but across the West. The sense that governments governed not for their citizens but for vested interests, grew and was dramatically accelerated by the financial crisis.
Years of wage stagnation and the emergence of a class of tech billionaires did nothing to allay voter concerns that governments didn’t have their interests at heart. Even in countries that handled the pandemic well, that handling transformed many people into outright conspiracy theorists convinced their governments were plotting against them.
The grim truth on offer in towns in wrecked, mud-filled northern NSW is not that governments work against their citizens, but that they don’t work at all, that the only people who’ve got your back when disaster comes are your family, your friends and your community.
It’s a painful and traumatic realisation. What political fruit it will bear in coming years isn’t yet clear. We’ve all talked for years about the need to rebuild social capital and community cohesion. But we rely on, and pay, governments to keep us safe. And Morrison capering and gambolling on the national stage talking about nuclear submarines isn’t what most of us have in mind.
“We’ve all talked for years about the need to rebuild social capital and community cohesion.”
Maybe that was Dutton’s aim when he told ordinary Australians ‘Go fund yourself’.
“But we rely on, and pay, governments to keep us safe.”
It runs much deeper than failing to keep people safe, though that is one result. What we are seeing now is exactly what anyone would expect from a government with no interest in governing. When the government brings a bill to parliament its purpose is only a ‘test for Labor’ and it is therefore deliberately bad legislation designed to provoke a fight. The qualities required for someone to be made a ministers do not included competence or even some genuine interest in the portfolio. These appointments are enough on their own to show the government is not interested in good outcomes. Some ministers appear to be not just indifferent but actually hostile to the purpose of their ministry. They take all the perks of office, they scatter largesse to their mates, they cultivate the corporate connections that fund their party and their subsequent careers, they raid public funds for party political purposes, they grind down the remnants of public services, they seek opportunities to inflict pain and misery on the vulnerable and at the end of the day feel very pleased with a job well done.
The other huge problem is the gutting of the public service. This has been carried out incrementally over decades. It has reached the point where even if a minister had the extraordinary notion of carrying out some worthwhile reform to improve the way government works the APS is incapable of providing advice or implementing the change. The consultants that are used instead are paid huge sums of money, are unaccountable, and provide self-serving advice that only makes things worse either deliberately or through their boundless incompetence.
Well Said!
Underfunding of oversight bodies have been a worldwide staple of the NeoCon era, justifying elimination and or scapegoating.
Not voting in your own best interests is a mark of the Murdoch sphere, enhancing the opportunity for chaps to deal with likeminded chaps, and behind the smokescreen of wealth envy/dole bludgers, and the standard fear n loathing campaign run by Peta Credlin’s hubby (the knighthood is in the mail Brian).
Absolutely. Rebuild the public service. Ministers should be listening to them, the experts, not bullying them.
Rebuild? It needs a full demo, redesign and new construction. Seriously it needs a complete Restructure at all levels, a change in culture to one of actual public service, serious performance standards and all of the deadwood removed.
And yet most voters seem happy to vote for those governments that espouse crystallised capitalism.
“crystallised capitalism”? I’m not sure what that is.
The classic version of capitalism would not involve government interventions such as subsidies paying workers so that businesses can operate without spending money on paying proper wages and so convert the subsidies into boardroom bonusses and dividends. It would also involve competition rather than government-approved monopolies in sectors such as tthe one operated by the Murdoch media empire. This government believes in crony capitalism for its mates and a hefty dose of Soviet-style command-and-control when it sees the market moving to threaten one of its sources of party funding and great ideological fixations, such as the coal industry.
The outsourcing of public service advice to ‘consultants’ (read LNP donors) has seen the death of the effective delivery of government programs and services. Public servants spend their time writing briefs for consulting firms who then rearrange those words into reports to hand back to the government to gather dust at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Both Perrottet and Morrison are out of their depths. Neither are capable of doing the jobs that taxpayers pay them to do. I’d go so far as to say that Scotty in particular has no desire to do the job, he farms it out to mates at exorbitant costs to taxpayers.
All Scotty has is a plan to plan a plan to announce an announcement.
Fully in the Trump, Boris de Pfeffel Johnson incompetence mould, as approved by our Rupert….the common denominator.
The three stooges?
And since he is useless at the job he knifed Turnbull to get, his cabinet ministers
walk all over him knowing he can’t sack them because he’ll lose that precious one
seat majority and that will be the end of him – again. Hopefully the voters are now
aware of how hopeless he is at anything and vote him and his maaates out.
I did but I didn’t have respect for Malcolm Turnbull but at least he actually worked for Australia. Scotty works for himself.
Scotty works for Washington make no mistake about that. When he got the red carpet treatment in Washington you know someone greased his dirty paws.
Turnbull worked for Murdoch. How smug of him to sit back now and criticise the government. My message to him is “If you haven’t resigned from the party, your opinion isn’t worth sh1te and you should S.T.F.U.”
The proof that Talcum is a principles free zone is that, after his yooog electoral victory in 2016 – reduced to a single seat majority – he could have said to the trogs. & knuckle draggers in the LNP party room, “Back me totally or I’ll quit, you’ll lose the by-election and be out on your fat faces.” Q.E.D. – see Phelps, K.
They would have caved to protect their places at the trough.
That he did not do so shows he was never anything but a selfish, ego driven chancer.
Not at crush depth yet – but getting there. Put them in a Collins Class to a 5 year mission and give a green up a chance to clear up the mess.
green/grown
That wasn’t a Freudian slip was it, John?
If I read you correctly…bye bye Scotty.
No, good riddance! – ‘bye‘ is an abbreviation of an old blessing which even an antitheist such as I would not sully on the excrescence currently squatting in the Lodge.
You’re an antitheist, that’s why you know about ancient trivial Jewish stories. lol
“I am Legion.”
Your last line, unfortunately all to true…
the decline in faith in our governments has been orchestrated by the Right for decades – and it is now bearing fruit when the world needs competent, compassionate and fact-based action from our governments like never before
if civilisation does end with a whimper, rather than a bang, it will be some oligarch whining in their fortified compound, bemoaning the fact that the masses just didn’t take enough personal responsibility
—
side note – an editorial suggestion: perhaps Crikey could begin to referring to Western billionaires as “oligarchs” – as there is little to no difference between ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’
In fact the word has its roots in Greek.
It really just seems to be used in the Western World as a derogatory term for Russian Billionaires.
And I agree, there is little difference between Russian Billionaires and Western Billionaires, as they both use their wealth to influence Governments.
If we want to be etymological about it, it is the ancient Greek negation suffix attached to ‘polli‘ –
which means ‘many’ – ‘gnoi’ is the suffix.
As in hoi polloi.
I fully agree. However, when I mentioned it to friends, I am given the political and the media version why Oligarchs are bad and Plutocrats are good. Reason Oligarchs are supported by Putin and got rich by building their business with money that belongs to the Russian people, Oligarchs influence politicians and governments. Very true and I agree, that is terrible.
In contrast, Western billionaires and plutocrats hide their money and don’t pay their fair share of taxes, their companies are often subsidising by governments. Subsidies are taxpayers’ money, money belonging to the people. Did we not just had a special government cabinet to decide on the best way forward for an economic Covid recovery. Every special cabinet member was a Gas, Coal baron etc. Surprise, surprise – the recovery must be government subsidised Gas and Coal exploration. Does the Australian population know what else has been promised to use taxpayers (Australian peoples) money might be used for? Of course not, as it could jeopardized the countries security. These Oligarchs, my apologies, I meant honest western business expert have only the future of Australia in mind. I guess that is the big difference, or?
The septics, in a more honest era, called them ‘robber barons’ – as in rail, iron or coal.
Further to my comment below, As I continued reading todays Crikey edition, there are two headlines: “Morrison delivers big fossil fuel win for major donor Santos”
“Mystery US outfit gets millions to frack Beetaloo”
Further, Rio Tinto is linked to two oligarchs, e.g., they have an 80% stake in the Queensland Alumina joint venture with Moscow-based aluminium company Rusal. Rusal is owned by 2 Russian billionaires, who are a close associate of Putin. Tigers Realm Coal has counted Russia’s sovereign wealth fund as one of its key shareholders. Origin Energy, and government subsidies, a key project in the government’s “gas -fired recovery” is the Beetaloo Basin joint venture between Origin Energy, which has a 77.5 per cent stake and Falcon Oil Gas controls 22.5 percent. A Russian owns 16%. Apparently, A Russian businessman has stepped down from the board. However, it has been called window-dressing. The Oligarchs Vekselberg stands to personally benefit from any successful exploration that Origin is conducting in the Beetaloo Basin.
How bad are the Russian Oligarchs and how honourable are Western multinational companies? How honourable is our government?
Not a bug but a feature of the ‘dominant paradigm’.
Bernard, you can trace much of this malaise back to the privatisation fad, premised on the notion that governments cannot be competent or efficient. Self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one.
The damaging aspect of pursuing neo liberal policies for decades is most in society are now experiencing a deficiency dividend from their governments rather than the efficiency dividend so highly prized by advocates of privatisation, that goes to the few very wealthy elite.
Pretty sure that one ‘writer’ (aka Quisling) for more than a decade wrote here advocating exactly that.
Fortunately I’ve forgotten its name – ring any bells, BK?
Don’t expect an answer from Keane. Unlike Rundle, he never gets down and dirty with us here in the comments.
this is the outcome that Morrison explicitly asked for, in his Hillsong sermon…less reliance on government, and more of the “little home on the prairie” stuff with small communities helping their neighbours.
Unfortunately, i don’t think Morrison’s “big picture’ philosophy is a coherent, sophisticated panorama of a future that actually functions – more of a cobbled together bunch of brain f*rts, immature desires and random panels cut from a Jesus comic, resulting in the shambles we have going on right now.
Society created government, to do things for the benefit and care of all, and the people who get voted in and handsomely paid, owe a duty to carry out that role, or get the hell out.
Imagine if the public library system just decided one day that they were over lending out books to the public, and if people wanted a book, they should go and buy it from a private business. And in the meantime, still wanting to be funded and so forth. How long would the public put up with that sort of bs?
Yet here we are, with a social construct ie the federal government, grown too big for its boots, and deciding it has had enough of serving the people.
This coming election is really distilling down to a very basic choice – the way of Morrison, of a redundant and very costly government that has abnegated all the responsibilities it was originally created for…or a new government that is prepared to start operating properly once again and doing the actual job of governing.
If the second choice is the one that gets up, hopefully it will be with such a powerful sweeping election victory that it will give it a mandate to implement paradigm changes that will start repairing the rot of the last 40 years of neo-liberalism, and give us some hope of a sustainable and more fair society. Big fundamental changes are best done while the people are all arced up, and full of spirit, before the inevitable inertia resets and people start going…..
“it wasn’t all that bad, was it? Did it even happen? I think it might have all been fake news….”