My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 25 July 2023

Voice ‘No’ campaign straight out of Trump’s playbook

The ‘No’ campaign to the Voice has very questionable allies, and is up to many dubious tricks to persuade many good-hearted folk to vote No.

I won’t waste time by dwelling on the first one, Peter Dutton’s robotic ‘Abbottesque’ negativity and ‘Dr No’ type utterances, nor on the way the Nationals are using their First Nations members as their front: both have underlying white folks’ racist campaigns.

Instead I’ll look in details at where the No messaging is coming from, and the hidden agendas of those behind the campaigns.

Investigative journalism has shown up the dastardly tricks of the powers behind much of the No campaign. Once I looked at where these messages were coming from I was immediately reminded of the misleading and downright false propaganda put out by Donald Trump’s allies in the extreme right-wing so called Christian evangelical movement. 

So of particular interest to us here is the No campaign’s deep links to right-wing and very conservative American Christian politics, including a US-headquartered marketing and fundraising firm. The Guardian Australia’s investigation also shows links between the No campaign and the failed conservative push to defeat the marriage equality postal survey in 2017.

The public tactics of the No campaign are heavily influenced by conservative American politics, social media experts say.

“Importing US approaches into Australia [during election campaigns] has rarely worked … but a referendum is very different,” said Axel Bruns, a professor in Queensland University of Technology’s digital media research centre. “The choice is similar to US voting.”

The most prominent organisation in the no campaign is Fair Australia, which is an arm of a conservative lobby group called Advance. The former prime minister Tony Abbott is a member of Advance’s advisory board and Country Liberal Party senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is Fair Australia’s spokesperson.

Fair Australia, in turn, is one half of the Australians For Unity organisation, which the federal government gave deductible gift recipient status last month, in effect recognising it as the primary  No campaigning vehicle. The other half of Australians For Unity is a group led by Warren Mundine called Recognise a Better Way.

Ed Coper, a global expert on misinformation and politics online, said the No campaign’s strategy was to appeal to people “on a very emotive level, to simplify the issue, and play on people’s emotions and fears”. Coper is the director of strategy group Populares, and has given advice about misinformation to both the government’s referendum working group and the Yes campaign. “The playbook is very similar to the Donald Trump ecosystem,” he said.

Fair Australia and Advance share much of the same content on their Facebook pages, including criticism of the minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney, and prime minister, Anthony Albanese, praise of the No campaign leaders Mundine and Price, and scepticism of the Voice.

The pages regularly post heavily edited graphics featuring unflattering photos of Labor politicians or voice campaigners, often tinted red or made to look out of focus.

Advance is also running another Facebook pages. It’s Referendum News portrays itself as a neutral news source.

Coper said “The reason you set up a Referendum News page is to dupe people into the mistaken belief they’re seeing neutral info – of course that’s not what they’re seeing, they’re seeing no campaign messages masquerading as news.

“That’s straight out of the Republican playbook in the US that has been used for several years. It’s very effective.”

Advance made headlines recently with an a full page newspaper advertisement  featuring a cartoon depiction of the Yes campaigner Thomas Mayo, Curtin MP, Kate Chaney, and her father, Wesfarmers boss Michael Chaney, who is supporting and funding the Yes campaign. Many rightly described the cartoon as “racist”. Advance stood by the ad, but even Abbott said “If it were me, I wouldn’t have published it.”

It was the latest salvo in a sustained negative campaign targeting Mayo over recent weeks, highlighting his views that the voice would be “a black political force to be reckoned with” and that politicians who ignored the voice would “do so at their peril”.

Descending into personal attacks is just one of the many ways the No campaign is dishonestly trying to influence voters – and if the opinion polls are accurate, their dastardly tricks are succeeding.  

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 18 July 2023

Morrison & Co did abuse their powers over robodebt

The Coalition’s Robodebt scheme was illegal, unfair, cruel, failed to achieve its goals and was the result of the Department of Human Services misleading both the Department of Social Services and cabinet. Scott Morrison allowed cabinet to be misled as to the legal status of the scheme.

“That’s the conclusion of the recently released Robodebt royal commission report by Catherine Holmes AC SC”, reported Crikey.

It names Scott Morrison, and relevant ministers Christian Porter, Alan Tudge and Stuart Robert as all being culpable. The Guardian Australia notes that at least seven public servants are also listed.

The report found Mr Morrison gave “untrue” evidence to the royal commission, an offence that can lead to criminal charges, reported The New Daily.

Scott Morrison has “rejected completely” findings that he misled Cabinet on the legality of the Robodebt scheme.

Quite rightly, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese accused his predecessor Scott Morrison of showing “no contrition whatsoever” after he was named in the report.

When Mr Morrison approved the initial scheme during his time as social services minister and it passed through federal Cabinet “with remarkable speed” in February 2015, it was expected to save the Commonwealth $1.7 billion over five years.

Eight years later it has cost not just over $2.2 billion in taxpayers’ money, but the lives of those who were affected by the “neither fair nor legal” mechanism for quantifying debt.

Robodebt involved a process of data-matching and debt-raising in instances of overpayment, where the Department of Human Services (DHS) would obtain income information from the ATO and compare it to what had been declared by the welfare recipient. If the data did not match, the amount owed would be averaged across a period of 26 fortnights based on the data provided by the person’s employer.

In the report’s overview, it said Robodebt was a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal, and it made many people feel like criminals.

“It was a costly failure of public administration, in both human and economic terms.”

Before the scheme was launched in 2014, the Department of Human Services (DHS) already had legal advice that the method of collecting debt might be illegal.

Christian Porter, social services minister from September 2015 to December 2017, “could not rationally have been satisfied with the legality of the scheme on the basis of his general knowledge,” according to the report.

Former government services minister Stuart Robert told the commission that he had made public comments about the scheme that he knew were false, that went “well beyond supporting government policy”, report The New Daily.

“He was making statements of fact as to the accuracy of debts, citing statistics which he knew could not be right,” the report said.

The report linked multiple deaths by suicide to the scheme, and said: “The Commission is confident that these were not the only tragedies of the kind.

“That DHS was aware of this likelihood – that it dealt with suicides frequently – makes the implementation of the scheme all the more egregious, particularly when there was evidence that they were raising inaccurate debts,” it said.

The report details how Alan Tudge, who at the time was social services minister, made decisions for his office to publicly release personal details of those critical of the scheme.

“Mr Tudge’s use of information about social security recipients in the media to distract from and discourage commentary about the scheme’s problems represented an abuse of that power.”

In a statement, Mr Tudge said he strongly rejected the Commission’s comments on the way he “used the media and that I abused my power in doing so”. Of course he did.

Two important points in conclusion. Firstly, veteran journalist and wise commentator Michelle Grattan wrote in The Conversation that “The sealed chapter of the Robodebt report should be released.  The commission has been scathing about many individuals. There is a strong case for revealing what actions it believes should be taken against which people.”

And to conclude, the report made 57 recommendations ranging from making it easier for advocacy groups to engage with Centrelink, including legal advice with new policy proposals, and establishing a body to monitor and audit automated decision-making. Let’s hope the Albanese Labor government moves very quickly to implement them.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 11 July 2023

Sorry Libs, ICAC did its job fair and square

Today I’ll make the case that former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian did engage in seriously corrupt behaviour, examine why the Liberals misguidedly won’t accept her guilt, and as much as space allows, look at the wider implications of ICAC’s findings.

Here in Australia corruption has a specific image. We learnt in school of the Rum Rebellion. More recently we are all familiar with money in brown paper bags. Bureaucrats on the take from developers. Politicians giving themselves and their mates lucrative opportunities. And the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) has served up plenty of those in its time.

“According to ICAC, Daryl Maguire fits the pattern: an MP on the grift, always looking for an opportunity to make money and unafraid of using his political connections — including his girlfriend, the treasurer and later premier — to exploit them. In corrupt scheme after scheme, the former Wagga Wagga MP abused his office, public resources, code of conduct requirements and basic standards of integrity, albeit to little gain. It’s traditional “black” or “hard” corruption” truthfully wrote Bernard Keane in Crikey.

In contrast, Gladys Berejiklian gained nothing material from her corrupt conduct: intervening in decisions to allocate taxpayer funds; failing to disclose her conflict of interest; refusing to report Maguire’s obvious corruption to ICAC. There were no brown paper bags, except the ones she or Maguire brought the shopping home in at their shared residence. No lucrative opportunities, no private money ready to flow if a result could be delivered.

But she acted corruptly nonetheless, by allowing her affection for Maguire to influence decisions to allocate public money, to breach the ministerial code of conduct, and to fail to comply with her statutory obligation to report corruption. Her corrupt conduct was of the softer, “grey” variety — but corruption nonetheless.

To reach that conclusion, ICAC has relied in part on transcripts of messages between the two. The material demonstrates the depth of their relationship, and thus the former premier’s motivation to behave the way she did — to look after someone she described as “family”.

The downplaying extends to many of her former colleagues in the Liberal Party, and a number of journalists, especially those from the Murdoch owned Australian, Daily Telegraph, Herald-Sun and Sky News, which have a visceral hatred of the threat anti-corruption bodies pose to the Liberal/National coalition.

But apart from that expected knee-jerk reaction, why are the Libs so fervent in their defence of Ms Berejiklian’s proven corrupt conduct?

As Michael Pascoe showed in a New Daily Opinion Piece, “Ms Berejiklian’s confession was part of the extraordinary unfolding of 2020 that started with the Bridget McKenzie/Scott Morrison #sportsrorts scandal and led to a major evolution in acceptable political behaviour.

The media has in recent years exposed a steady stream of rorting of federal grants – several billion dollars worth.
The Morrison government’s lack of integrity became one of the triggers for the rise of the Teals.

It now seems that there’s no going back from here, or so we should hope not. That’s why Gladys Berejiklian cannot be excused.
And it is also why Peter Dutton has rushed to defend her.

He leads a party that remains full of politicians who refuse to acknowledge the evolution, who pretend they did nothing wrong and want to continue their old ways.

When confronted with the Car Parks scandal in 2021, then finance minister Simon Birmingham justified it with “The Australian people had their chance and voted the Morrison government back in.”

He didn’t actually raise a middle digit to the electorate – well, not that I saw – but he may as well have.

Peter Dutton, Simon Birmingham and the rest in the Coalition’s leadership team were either active participants in or happily waved through an unprecedented level of taxpayers’ money for their political ends.

The “daddy of all the rorts” (TND), the community development grants scheme, was specifically designed to enable government members to splash dosh on pet projects (i.e. electorates) without any interference from public servants or the Auditor-General.

Mr Dutton’s problem is that if he admits Ms Berejiklian failed to meet ethical standards, he and nearly all his federal colleagues also failed.

The federal equivalent of the NSW ICAC has now officially officially started. It should be very busy.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 4 July w023

It’s time get homes off gas

There’s ‘No time to waste’: getting Australian homes off gas is crucial for meeting net zero targets, a new report says

The analysis in the recently released Grattan Institute recommends governments help households transition to electric, and ban new gas connections for homes and businesses

Getting households off gas for heating and cooking would cut energy bills and improve people’s health, and is necessary for Australia to have any hope of reaching net zero greenhouse emissions by 2050, the new analysis says.

The Melbourne-based thinktank called on state and territory governments to set dates for the end of gas use and launch campaigns to encourage and help households become “all electric”, running on renewable energy.

It recommended governments also ban new gas connections for homes, shops and small businesses and set dates to phase out the sale of gas appliances and by which rental homes have to be fitted with electric cooktops and water and home heating systems, the Guardian Australia reported.

The proposal to end new gas connections to new subdivisions was the subject of a Notice of Motion to Wagga Wagga City Council by Greens Deputy Mayor Jenny McKinnon. It was pleasing to see this referenced in the report of the Grattan Institute’s recommendation in a recent Daily Advertiser by journalist Dan Holmes.

Mr Holmes quoted Councillor McKinnon as saying “Wagga has new developments, new subdivisions are happening quite regularly and I’m really worried about hearing people  with stranded assets. I’ve heard stories about people in different states and territories having to pay really large amounts to have gas disconnected from their property , so if we can stop them being connected to gas in the first place , I think we are doing the community a favour.”

At this point I must mention that neither I nor Grattan or Councillor McKinnon are advocating an immediate end to the use of gas installations. All current users will be ‘grandfathered’.

The report said the transition to running on electricity will be challenging – about 5m homes across the country use gas. In Victoria, the most gas-reliant state, getting off the fossil fuel by 2050 would require an additional 200 households to get off it every day until then.

But it said the cost and health benefits would be significant. It recommended governments pay for upgrades to social, community and Indigenous housing and for a limited period offer low-interest loans and tax incentives for other households and landlords.

On health, the report cited studies that found gas stoves released nitrogen dioxide and tiny PM2.5 particles that irritate lungs and have been linked to substantially higher asthma levels in children. Gas stoves may leak particles even when not in use, it said.

The “Health and financial befits of moving away from gas to fully electric households” was also an important part of Councillor McKinnon’s motion.

“There will be costs to the great energy transition, and governments will need to decide who pays, how much, and when,” the report said. “But we must do this for our hip pockets, our health and our environment.”

The report said it currently usually costs more to buy an electric appliance than a gas equivalent, but electric options were more efficient and cheaper to run. The lower running costs of efficient electric appliances allowed households to recover more than the upfront cost over the lifespan of an appliance in nearly all cases.

Exceptions were for some homes in Western Australia, where gas is much cheaper than in eastern states, and for households that bought cheap, inefficient electric appliances.

Not surprisingly, the gas lobbying group, the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, has launched a national advertising campaign to bolster gas use, claiming it is “cleaner” than coal and crucial in getting the country to net zero. All to keep up their super-profits, no doubt.

For in truth gas is a fossil fuel that adds methane and carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, increasing global warming. The Grattan Institute report said Australia would use it “for a while”, but it must be cut to zero if the country was to reach net-zero emissions. It said gas consumption forecasts were continually being revised downwards, but the current projected decline was not fast enough.

Tony Wood, the lead author of the report, said there was “no time to waste”.