My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 31 May 2022

Our new government need to act on this new climate data There have been some encouraging conclusions to draw from the 2022 federal election result, especially with regards to climate action. “The results of the federal election were overwhelmingly that 2022 was, finally, the climate election” wrote veteran journalist Laura Tingle for the ABC. It wasn’t just that the independent candidates running on climate change made spectacular gains. There was also a swing to the Greens, gaining them two more seats in the House of Representatives and more Senate seats. Even in the so-called “coal” seats like Hunter and Flynn, there was not a huge swing, as had been predicted, towards the Coalition because of fear of loss of coal jobs, but in fact towards Labor. Given this encouraging news it is appropriate to point out that the latest climate report is a call for urgent action. Critical climate indicators broke records in 2021, according to the UN in a report issued last week. The UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said these were clear signs of humanity’s impact on the planet, which was bringing long-lasting effects such as droughts, fires and floods. It found the past seven years have been the hottest recorded. “Today’s State of the Climate report is a dismal litany of humanity’s failure to tackle climate disruption. Fossil fuels are a dead end – environmentally and economically,” said António Guterres, the secretary general of the UN. “The only sustainable future is a renewable one. The good news is that wind and solar are readily available and, in most cases, cheaper than coal and other fossil fuels,” he said. Guterres’s warnings were echoed in Australia by five medical colleges from across Australia and New Zealand, with more than 56,000 members, who have written to federal, state and territory leaders and energy companies calling for Australia to replace coal power by 2030. Dr Karen Price, president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, said “Pollution from Australian coal-burning power stations was recently estimated to kill 785 people every year, as well as causing 14,434 instances of children experiencing asthma symptoms and 845 babies to be born with low birth weight.”

This election, more people list climate change as their number one issue, according to ABC’s Vote Compass. It is clear that climate change sharpened as a central issue this federal election. 

So what is the situation now that we have a new Labor government?

Labor set an “emissions targets that falls short of Paris climate targets, while the Greens and most “teal” independents offer policies compatible with 1.5C of warming” noted the ABC.

Modelling commissioned by Labor suggests the policies will meet the emissions target and create jobs. It also suggests it will lower power bills, something the Coalition has disputed.

However, according to Climate Analytics, Labor’s 2030 target is consistent with 2C of warming, which would breach the Paris Agreement, in which Australia promised to keep warming “well below” 2C.

So negotiating Labor’s climate polices through the House of Representative will not be easy, given the number of ‘teals’ MPs elected, and the increased Green representation.

Also, given that Labor doesn’t control the Senate it will have to undertake some serious negotiating with the Greens, who hold the balance of power in that chamber.

The Greens have a comprehensive climate policy backing targets in line with what scientists say is needed to do our fair share of stopping warming at 1.5C, such as a 75 per cent cut in emissions by 2030.

The party also has a policy to immediately stop the approval of new coal, oil and gas infrastructure and also want to end the export of thermal coal by 2030 and stop oil and gas exports by 2035.

“Greens leader Adam Bandt said the party would push Mr Albanese for faster climate action” advised The New Daily.

Mr Bandt said “Voters have made it clear they want the Greens to push the Albanese government to go further and faster on climate change and inequality”.

As The Saturday Paper reported “Bandt said the Greens surge creates a mandate to end development of new fossil fuel projects in Australia”.

So to get any action on climate through Parliament Labor will need to listen, and act appropriately.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 24 May 2022

Media manipulation during the federal election

Regardless of the outcome, this year’s federal election campaign seems to have been increasingly influenced by a one-sided approach by much of the media. Advocacy for the conservative side rather than unbiased reportage has been the flavour of the 2022 campaign. The Daily Advertiser, in contrast, has not been guilty of this charge.

Having been observing this phenomenon over the past few months I’ll focus my analysis on three very apparent aspects. I’ll begin with an overview, followed by the pernicious influence of the Rupert Murdoch media empire. I’ll conclude by analysing the increasing swing to the right of the ABC.

Though this right-wing media onslaught has thankfully failed, we need to note that Australia has fallen to 39 in the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index for 2022. The report found press freedom in Australia is “fragile” because of “ultra-concentration of media ownership”, comprising “two giant firms”, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Nine Entertainment which includes newspapers such as The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and the Australian Financial Review, as well as television’s Channel 9. It is a very big Liberal Party donor and its coverage of the election is blatantly pro-Coalition.

Murdoch’s media empire, including Sky News and newspapers such as Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, Melbourne’s Herald Sun, Brisbane’s Courier Mail and nationally The Australian all take a deeply conservative bent, shamelessly advocating for the Liberal Nationals coalition government through banner headlines and biased editorial comment.

Since 2007 through to 2010, 2013, 2016 and 2019, the Murdoch media, representing some 70% of the nation’s total print media, has spread strong anti-Labor Party propaganda. More broadly, they despise the progressive left, including The Greens. In this election they are also campaigning strongly against the ‘Teal’ independents. They will do anything within their power to keep Labor out of office and the Coalition in power.

Murdoch’s mastheads are also driving anti-China hysteria with “Reds under the beds” rapidly morphing into the “Yellow Peril”. This is a huge throwback to 1950s McCarthyism, where any dissenting views are attacked as being in Beijing’s pocket.

And for those who think it will all expire when Rupert dies, there’s another Murdoch in waiting. Lachlan is every bit as conservative as his father, including being a climate change denier.

The Liberal Nationals coalition is fond of accusing the ABC of having a left-wing bias, but as the Guardian Australia wrote “Far from having a left-wing bias, the ABC has been tamed by cuts and incessant attacks.

“Under the Coalition, the national broadcaster has been domesticated to the point of overcorrecting for perceived partisanship” the paper noted.

The ABC has, over the past decade of conservative rule, been gradually tamed by an unrelenting campaign of funding cuts, bullying, intimidation and delegitimisation.

The clearest example is the ABC’s budget. Despite a crystal-clear election promise in 2013 of “no cuts to the ABC”, the national broadcaster is facing $1.2bn of cumulative cuts over a decade. These cuts have felled two television programs that were crucial to government accountability, Lateline and the state-based 7.30 program (once known as Stateline), among many others.

The Coalition government also exerts control by quietly stacking the ABC’s board with directors hand-picked by the minister, directly ignoring the recommendations of independent merit-based selection processes established under legislation. This includes Ita Buttrose, a former Murdoch editor and Liberal party fundraiser, as its chair.

But the most insidious way the government domesticates the ABC isn’t through budget cuts or board appointments; it is through incessant attacks on the national broadcaster over alleged systemic left-wing bias in its news and current affairs.

Examples of the ABC’s move to the right include the interviewing technique used by its current affairs hosts. From the Q+A program, host David Speers relentlessly  pursued Anthony Albanese over ‘NDIS-gate’. A second example also includes Speers. During the ABC’s ‘Insiders’ Sunday current affairs program Speers interviewed guest Adam Bandt. He continually interrupted Bandt, not letting him finish his answers, with the obvious aim of belittling him.

What needs to be done is a simple question with complex answers too lengthy to fit into the word limit of this column, but I’ll conclude with one straightforward option. The time has come for a full royal commission into the ownership and operation of the media in this country.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 17 May 2022

Morrison is using fear to persuade voters

As election day is now imminent it is timely to point out that the campaign by Morrison & Co to persuade voters not to cast a ballot for independents or minor parties is a hollow scare campaign, for Australia has a long history of ‘hung’ parliaments, where neither major party has a majority.

The Liberal MPs in danger of losing their seats to independents, backed by an alarmist chorus from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, are warning of wild consequences if some of these MPs on whom the next PM relies for his numbers are not subject to the discipline of the party whips.

As Rick Morton wrote in The Saturday Paper “The papers have been “frenzied” in their approach to the “teal independents” backed by Climate 200’s Simon Holmes à Court. As a former senior media executive says, “They have been absolutely feral about the independents.”

Which is ironic given how much of the past nine years has been characterised by indiscipline and chaos. So let’s see if the hysteria Morrison is trying to generate has any validity.

“The factions in both parties have been behaving like unruly independents for 15 to 20 years, sacking leaders willy-nilly and controlling government policy” wrote Alan Kohler in TND.

The fossil fuel warriors removed Malcolm Turnbull as leader in 2009 and again as PM in 2018. He was then replaced by Scott Morrison, who applied for the job in February 2017 when he was treasurer by waving a lump of coal around in Parliament. His application was accepted.

Last year, the Nationals and the Liberal Party’s right wing allowed Morrison to do a partial pivot on climate change ahead of the Glasgow conference as part of a deal in which they were threatening to cross the floor. In other words, they behaved like independents.

The result is minority rule, since a clear majority of Australians want stronger action on climate change.

And now as a direct outcome of that inadequate deal, the members of the Liberal Party’s moderate faction who lost the argument in the party room are facing the loss of their jobs to a wave of climate change independents. The MPs include Treasurer Josh Frydenberg.

The right-wing “independents” within the Coalition, including but not limited to the Nationals, and the fossil warriors in News Corp have only themselves to blame for the prospect of a hung Parliament.

But it just means the balance of power would switch from independents within the parties to independents without, and from secret deals in the party room to transparent ones in Parliament. This is a contrast to be welcomed.

Would it be chaotic and unstable? That depends on whether the PM who had persuaded enough independents to support him delivers on the promises he made to get that support.

Julia Gillard delivered on her promises to Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott between 2010 and 2013 and, as a result, 561 pieces of legislation were passed, more than Kevin Rudd managed between 2007 and 2010 and even more than John Howard got through when he controlled both houses of parliament between 2005 and 2007.

During the only other hung Parliament, between 1940 and 1943, the two independents who supported Robert Menzies as PM did bring him down after 12 months, in 1941, and installed opposition leader John Curtin.

But in The Conversation, Frank Bongiorno, professor of history at ANU, and David Lee from UNSW, argued that “the instability of that Menzies government had nothing to do with the independents. Its problems were self-inflicted, coming from within.”

Curtin then led a stable government that implemented ground-breaking legislation, including the uniform tax laws that led to the federal government monopolising income taxation.

The idea that chaos will haunt any Parliament in which independents and minor parties hold the balance of power is ridiculous, especially given what’s been going on within the parties over the past 20 years.

Their job is to represent their electorates, push any policies they campaigned on, such as climate change and a federal corruption commission, and support someone to be prime minister who can then choose a cabinet and run the country.

And if that PM doesn’t do what he said he would do, then they should withdraw their support, of course.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 10 May 2022

Morrison is economic with the truth about his economic management

As early voting has started for the federal election it is high time to expose the truth about Morrison’s oft repeated boast that the Liberal Party’s strength is its economic management of Australia.

It’s Scott Morrison’s greatest boast: “Strong economic management is more important now than it’s ever been – and we have the runs on the board here,” he told Sky in February.

Yet many commentators claim this is an idle boast bordering on an outright lie. For example, “We know that Morrison has failed” wrote George Megalogenis in the Sydney Morning Herald.

So let’s check out the truth about Morrison’s economic credentials.

“Morrison is now guilty of abject failure in the two fundamental federal functions where he claims to be so masterful” wrote Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald. The first federal function Mr Hartcher refers to is Economic Management, and the second is Defence, which I will explore in a subsequent column.

The man who accuses Labor of being unable to manage money has put Australia under its heaviest debt load since 1956. Not in dollar terms, because that would be an unfair comparison, but as a share of GDP. Worse, the budget shows that this will only increase in the years ahead.

In 1956, Australia was still paying down the extraordinary debts incurred in fighting World War II. In 1956, the debt load was on its way down. The Morrison-Frydenberg budget is post-pandemic and the emergency spending, they tell us, is over, yet still the debt load is still going up.

And they can’t use COVID-19 as their excuse. Before we’d even heard of COVID-19, this government already had the worst fiscal record of any post-war government. Morrison’s debt run-up makes Labor leaders such as Whitlam, Hawke, Keating, Rudd and Gillard look like skinflints.

The Coalition inherited gross national debt at 20 per cent of GDP. By the time COVID-19 struck, they had run it up to 28. There’d been no crisis, yet it created the biggest load of national debt since 1958, drawing on the budget papers and a 2019 Treasury research paper, A History of Public Debt in Australia, which provides a consistent time series back to 1908.

Today the Morrison-Frydenberg gross national debt is 42.5 per cent of GDP. Peak Whitlam was 24.5. Peak Hawke-Keating was 24. Peak Rudd-Gillard Government debt was 20.

Let’s be clear about this. When Morrison and Frydenberg claim that Labor “can’t manage money”, they are being shamelessly hypocritical. Their budget papers project that the debt will continue to rise to peak at 44.9 per cent in two years’ time. Close to twice as bad as the worst performance by a Labor government in the last half-century.

It has been said that “debt doesn’t matter”. That held true recently, as interest rates have been at their lowest for many decades.

That cycle has turned. As we now all know, inflation is rising and interest rates are rising with it. Debt is about to matter a great deal in the years ahead.

Even since the budget just over three weeks ago, Australia’s bill has gone up. The Commonwealth already was paying $18 billion a year in interest on the national debt. And the budget forecast a rise to $26 billion a year within four years. That’s over $2 billion in interest payments every month.

And Morrison is leading Australia into this future carrying the biggest load of debt since the 1950s, and getting bigger, as interest rates rise. A prudent country would be preparing for its next crisis by reducing debt, as the IMF has been advising, not increasing it.

As John Hewson wrote in The Saturday Paper, “Morrison has tried to set employment as the benchmark for good economic management, but the detail doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.”

Moreover, the figures should not be allowed to be used to divert attention from the government’s economic policy failures. Let’s not forget the government’s record inflationary spending and waste, the rorts and overpaying of pandemic support to corporate mates, the high taxation through reliance on bracket creep, the unaffordable and inequitable personal tax cuts, as well as the huge structural budget deficit and record debt.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 3 May 2022

Why Morrison is dodging an Integrity Commission

“Morrison’s broken promise on creating an integrity commission, his misleading rationale for why it didn’t happen, and his reason for ditching a meaningful and effective commission is gobsmacking” wrote former Liberal MP Julia Banks in The New Daily.

There is a very simple reason why Prime Minister Scott Morrison broke his pre-2019 election promise to introduce into parliament legislation to establish a Commonwealth integrity commission.

It wasn’t only that it was attacked as being too weak by the Greens and the Labor Party, independents, retired judges and some of his own backbenchers.

“One reason was because if he had brought the legislation into Parliament he would have lost control of it”, wrote David Solomon in Pearls and Irritations. He knew he could not trust all of his backbenchers to support the government’s line, and that enough of them would have voted with Labor and the independents to transform his proposed ineffective integrity commission into one with teeth, one that could investigate the misdeeds of politicians such as himself, and hold public hearings that could damage them politically, akin to the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC).

He also didn’t have the numbers in the Senate, where the independents would have joined with the Greens and the Labor Party to transform the Morrison Bill and give it the powers and jurisdiction that almost everyone other than the Prime Minister considers to be essential. He didn’t even have the numbers in the House of Representatives, where a few of his own backbenchers would have voted for a strong integrity body rather than the neutered, ineffective body that the Prime Minister requires.

In his mind, the Commonwealth integrity commission would become a ‘kangaroo court’, his description of the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption over its treatment of former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian. Actually, all ICAC did was to reveal her long-running relationship with a Liberal MP and some of the ways in which her decision-making may have been affected as a result. It has not yet made a  finding against her. She resigned her premiership and from parliament before counsel assisting the commission had provided her with the submissions about her conduct that he was proposing to make to ICAC. She made her own judgment about what ICAC might decide.

Mr Morrison’s desperate concern to be free of scrutiny on integrity issues would not come as a surprise to most Australians. Public opinion polling suggests that three out of every four voters believe that people in government can’t be trusted. Only one in four consider that people in government can be trusted.

It looks as though an integrity commission with teeth is uppermost in the minds of many during this election campaign. It figures strongly in the campaigns of the Greens, the ‘teal’ independents standing in previously safe Liberal seats, and to a lesser degree in the ALP’s campaign. 

A further justification for a federal ICAC is because of the wanton disregard for the dangers of climate change exhibited by Morrison & Co over the last three years.

As David Shearman wrote recently “Indeed it seems inconceivable to rational thinkers that many of the Government’s destructive environmental decisions made over the past 3 may fall within the aegis of a national ICAC once this is formed”.

In analysing these events we also have to be aware of the worldwide influence of the fossil fuel industries on all levels of governance documented in many countries by non-government organisations and some of the media, for example Pearls and Irritations with its series on Lobbying. The influencers and lobbyists have such power they have become an identifiable but murky industry immune from government control. 

Indeed these activities have suddenly become even more concerning with information from an academic peer reviewed study of the activities of the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) which has successfully worked to influence and downplay the findings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Examples include pushing for voluntary action as the key to reducing emission as a way to pre-empt government regulation.

We need a federal ICAC to bring these environmental wreckers to justice, as well as to expose the corruption of many in politics.