There’s been a major breakthrough in the diplomatic relationship between Australia and China, with the Australian Prime Minister and Chinese president holding a meeting at the G20 summit in Indonesia. And this is a process initiated by both Anthony Albanese and Xi Jinping – it follows years of hostility from the previous Coalition government directed towards China, and a great deal of commentary verging on racism from the mainstream media. The low point in the relationship was when the former Pr...
Nov 18, 2022•41 min
There’s a lot of issues that are starting to build up in federal politics and with just a few more weeks of sitting days before the end of the year, the Labor government is trying to fit in as much as possible before they all go home for Christmas. And major issue that they’re trying to push through as quickly as possible is their industrial relations bill, and the main agenda here is increase wages, especially for low-income workers, improve working conditions and create a better balance betwee...
Nov 11, 2022•48 min
The Budget is all over, and just like many of the previous Budgets, it’s almost disappeared from the news cycle, although there’s still some remnants that are being discussed, and the two big issue s are inflation and tax cuts – the Reserve Bank did raise interest rates during the week, and that’s the seventh consecutive interest rate rise – and the Reserve Bank Governor Phillip Lowe said that the rates will keep rising, although we have to remember he also said interest rates wouldn’t rise unti...
Nov 04, 2022•44 min
The second Budget for 2022 has been released, and it’s Labor’s first budget in nine years – it’s a Budget that’s been prepared in very difficult circumstances – there’s a national government debt of almost a trillion dollars – inflation is now running at 7.3% – and there’s a whole lot of demands about what the government should be doing with taxpayer funds over the next few years. But economics isn’t just about debt and inflation, there’s a wide range of issues to take into account – there’s rev...
Oct 28, 2022•37 min
The floods in eastern Australia have been the focus of political attention over the past week, with major flooding events in Victoria, southern New South Wales and the northern parts of Tasmania – there are parts of Australia that going through their third once-in-a-hundred year flooding event over the past two years, and some areas are getting their second major flooding event, just after the previous one is receding. In total, that’s eight major floods over the past two years, and as predicted...
Oct 21, 2022•43 min
There have been calls for a parliamentary inquiry into media diversity in Australia, and generally, the behaviour of the mainstream media – and these calls have been made for about 20 years or so. The independent member for Goldstein, Zoe Daniel – and she used to work as a journalist before entering parliament – she currently has a motion in parliament, and that was introduced in early September, with secondary debates in the final week of the last parliamentary session about whether an inquiry ...
Oct 14, 2022•47 min
The Conservative Political Action Conference rolled into Sydney last week, and it’s an extreme libertarian group who are maniacally angry, loud, abrasive, in-your-face, and filled with endless complaints about everything in their sights. A culture of complaint but without any solutions and without any responsibilities. They’re anti-socialist, anti-woke, anti-republic, anti-cancel culture. What are they actually for? Is there anything positive in their agenda? No. It’s destructive, not constructi...
Oct 07, 2022•43 min
The anti-corruption commission is one step closer to reality – the Labor government tabled its Bill in Parliament this week, despite all the claims from conservative media that the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, was stonewalling the commission and using excuses, such as the death of the British monarch, to withhold the legislation and stymie the commission. It can never be underestimated how far the mainstream media will go to de-legitimise this Labor government, with the Australian Financial...
Sep 30, 2022•41 min
After a fortnight where most of Anglosphere was preoccupied with the death of a British monarch, life is getting back to normal and to the real things that matter: there’s a Budget coming up soon, and there’s been a hint from the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, of “substantial temporary taxes” to repair the national figures and start managing the trillion dollar government left behind by the Coalition. Already, the media and the Opposition are pushing the idea that Labor is the party of big taxes and s...
Sep 23, 2022•48 min
Australia lost a head of state last week, and gained a new one, even though nobody voted for King Charles, and nobody was asked about it. And this will keep happening until Australia becomes a republic. The Queen has died, and people can pay their respects if they wish to, but it’s time for Australia to move on with its own future and its own destiny – it can’t be hamstrung by some dysfunctional family in a faraway country that couldn’t really care about what happens in Australia. And it needs t...
Sep 16, 2022•43 min
The federal government is still feeling the warm inner glow after the Jobs and Skills Summit, which was the first public display of the consensus politics the Prime Minister talked about during the federal election campaign. And getting corporate, union and political leaders together is no mean feat: agreement is the harder part though, and it seemed to work out well. But now the difficult part – the Budget. Anthony Albanese has been pushing out the messages that we’re in difficult economic circ...
Sep 09, 2022•46 min
Robodebt was one of the most disastrous acts of public administration in Australia’s history and the condemnation has arrived from all sides of politics – former Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, Labor, the Australian Greens, the federal court – and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced a Royal Commission into this scheme. All up, it’s a scheme which cost taxpayers $1.8 billion, over 2000 people suicided from the stress and anxiety created by the scheme, and over 470,000 were asked to pa...
Sep 02, 2022•43 min
As the rumblings of Scott Morrison’s secret ministers become louder, the Liberal Party – and their friends in the media – are keen to dismiss Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s decision to hold an inquiry into how and why these appointments were ever made. No suitable explanation has been provided by Morrison – or the Governor–General David Hurley – and it’s essential to find out why. Democracies depend on people of good will, but our system shows that it doesn’t cater for people of ill will or u...
Aug 26, 2022•41 min
Irrespective of how much effort conservatives and the mainstream media are putting into downplaying the significance of the secret ministries of former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the fact that the two people at the apex of Australia’s political system – the Prime Minister and Governor–General – made secret executive decisions, will reverberate for some time to come. Secrecy and low levels of accountability – or in Morrison’s case, no accountability at all – are the hallmarks of autocratic so...
Aug 19, 2022•43 min
A lull in politics gives us some time to assess how the political parties are travelling, and since the May election result, most of the focus how been placed on the Coalition – the messages that it can take from their election loss and how they can become a better political party and return to office at some point in the near future. But what are the lessons for the Labor Party? The did win the election, but victory tends to gloss over any problems a political party might have, and move those p...
Aug 12, 2022•42 min
The details for the Voice To Parliament have been released by the Prime Minister, and it’s three simple changes to the Constitution, but already, conservatives are circling the wagons and claiming that that it’s a document that has kept Australia safe since 1901 and is too precious to change. But it’s an exclusionary document; it was founded on a racist agenda from yesterday and Australia is now a far more sophisticated society than when it was founded in the early part of the twentieth century....
Aug 05, 2022•49 min
The 47th Parliament has commenced and the new Labor government wants to implement its agenda as soon as possible. After nine years of a Coalition government seemingly unwilling to implement anything meaningful, it’s a shock to the body politic to see new leaders wanting to do things, rather than applying the dark arts of politics to spin, diffuse, negate, and ultimately ignore acting on behalf of the community. Climate change comes to mind, and the Coalition has decided to play itself out of the...
Jul 29, 2022•36 min
After several months of absence from the national stage, former Prime Minister Scott Morrison made an appearance on a different kind of stage – the pulpit of the Victory Church in Perth, announcing that he still believed in miracles. And that he doesn’t trust in government or the United Nations. As the distance between Morrison’s tenure as prime minister and the current events of today become greater, it becomes more apparent that his tenure was a morass of anti-government paranoia, inaction on ...
Jul 22, 2022•41 min
Foreign affairs is still a dominant issue for the Albanese government – and why not – so many relationships to repair after a neglectful nine years of Coalition government which left the Pacific islands behind. The Prime Minister is also putting out the strong message to the world that there is a new government in office and is taking climate change seriously. But words are one thing; action is another, and we’ll have to wait to see what Labor actually does on climate change, once parliament mee...
Jul 15, 2022•39 min
There’s a madness in the media and hard to see when it will stop. The Prime Minister has returned from the recent NATO meeting – which included a visit to Ukraine – and the media wanted to create a false equivalence and criticised Anthony Albanese for spending too much time overseas. Why? Because they criticised former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, when he made his secret family holiday trip to Hawaii while half of Australia was burning away in 2019. So, it’s time to criticise Albanese too, eve...
Jul 08, 2022•40 min
How many political staffers does it take to change a piece of legislation? Independent MPs have been outraged about the Prime Minister’s decision to reduce the number of political advisers from four down to one – which means they will have a total staff of five – and decided to take their outrage directly to the media. But what is the correct number? Some MPs could have a staff of 100 and still be quite incompetent: others seem to be effective and efficient with the bare minimum of political sta...
Jul 01, 2022•39 min
The Australian Greens have had their most successful election campaign ever – four seats in the House of Representatives, 12 Senators and 12.25% of the primary vote all across Australia. These are excellent figures and a promising result for progressive politics. But how well will they be able to work with the new Labor Government? To pass their legislation, Labor will need the support of these 12 Greens Senators – and one other, likely to be independent Senator David Pocock – but what will Labo...
Jun 24, 2022•40 min
The biggest war is not the one in Ukraine – there are no generals in this war, there are no medals to hand out, and it’s possibly a war without end. And, of course, it’s a war that’s been concocted by the mainstream media and the Opposition, mainly to put pressure on the new Labor government. Yes, it’s the energy war, which is a war on public sensibilities and could end up being a war on the credibility of the media. For nine years, the media barely focused on the failures of the Liberal–Nationa...
Jun 17, 2022•41 min
How much can a new government be held responsible for the mistakes of the previous government? And how much time should this new government be given to resolve all of these problems? Easy answer: if it’s an incoming Labor government, they are cause of all these problems from the moment they are elected, and must resolve these problems within, say, three weeks of assuming office. The rules for the Coalition are different – they can endlessly remain in office, cause as many problems as they like, ...
Jun 10, 2022•33 min
The final assessment is in and the Labor Party has won 77 seats, enough to form government in its own right, without needing the support from the crossbench to pass legislation. But is this the best outcome? The number of crossbenchers has risen to 16 and it would be wise for Labor to engage this substantial group of MPs, and keep that buffer between them and the Liberal and National parties, who are languishing behind with 58 seats. The new Labor Ministry has been finalised and there are 10 wom...
Jun 03, 2022•33 min
The 2022 federal election turned out to be one of the interesting and exciting results in Australian history. Not that you’d get an understanding of this while watching any of the mainstream media coverage on election night: their presentation and analysis of the result was as abysmal as their campaign coverage and, as soon as it became obvious their favoured political team was not going to win – far from it – it was time to start picking holes at Labor and what went wrong for Anthony Albanese. ...
May 27, 2022•54 min
And so, it has come to this. The day of the 2022 federal election. Week 6 of the campaign wasn’t that different to the previous five weeks: an array of announcements from both sides of politics, a campaign launch from the Liberal–National Coalition – held in the final week so they could maximise their funding from the public coffers before they had to start paying for the campaign themselves – and a clamour from the media about Labor Party policy costings, ‘gotchas’ and the screams of “how ya go...
May 20, 2022•48 min
Scott Morrison must now be rueing his decision to embark on a six-week election campaign, and it appears the longer it continues, the worse his position has become. Week five of the campaign commenced with a leader’s debate which closely resembled a combination of a rugby scrum and an all-out brawl, before the sands of time put an end to proceedings, leaving the public no wiser as to who was the better performer. This was Nine Media’s version of a leaders’ debate, and a semblance of normality re...
May 13, 2022•56 min
Four weeks into the campaign and real votes are being cast, with the acceptance of postal votes and the prepoll period commencing soon. In 2019, Labor won the two-party preferred vote – but lost the vote by a wide margin during the prepolling period and, as a result, has reworked it’s campaigning processes and is viewing the 2022 election not just as ‘election day’, but the ‘election fortnight’. Some people were bemused by Labor’s relatively early campaign launch, but it makes sense when taking ...
May 06, 2022•46 min
Anthony Albanese was missing from the election campaign for one week, and didn’t the media have a field day. Unfortunately, the media has it in for Albanese, and instead of the predicted nightmare disaster that was meant to be caused by their leader’s absence, Labor managed to highlight key members from their frontbench – the differences between the two sides of politics could not be more stark. Perhaps it might have been better to focus on all the occasions Scott Morrison has been absent over t...
Apr 30, 2022•45 min
