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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast Scare campaigns need to have a semblance of truth behind them to work effectively and Labor’s strategy of making pensioners think they’ll have their income managed through the cashless debit card if the Coalition wins the federal election, does gave some solid foundations. For a start: the scheme already exists. And the legislation to apply the scheme to age pensions also exists. And footage of many ministers outlining their support for the scheme – that also exists as well. Is it a “scare campa...
Apr 22, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast A very hostile first media conference for Anthony Albanese in the marginal seat of Bass in Tasmania, where he couldn’t answer or gave the wrong answers to two questions from a journalist: what’s the Reserve Bank’s cash rate, and what is the official unemployment rate. A classic ‘gotcha’ question from the media, and it’s just another example of how poor political journalism is in Australia, where the value of catching a politician out – and getting the headline propaganda – is placed far higher t...
Apr 15, 2022•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast We’ve never seen a government in so much trouble entering an election campaign and it’s just a question of whether Scott Morrison has the political skills to turn matters around. But before everyone starts drawing a line through the Liberal–National Coalition and ending nine years of brutally poor government and incompetence, it has to be remembered that we’ve seen this story before – 2016 and 2019 – when a divided Coalition was expected to at least lose one of those elections – 2019 – before be...
Apr 08, 2022•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast The Budget was announced this week, and not only was it one of the most political ever, it was also one of the most expensive job applications in history for the federal Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, who is clearly angling for the leadership of the Liberal Party after the next election, win or lose. Is this a good Budget? Budgets should be all about the community and the economy but, once again, the media has focused on whether the Budget will be enough to get the Coalition government re-elected o...
Apr 01, 2022•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast The electorate in South Australia has removed a one-term Liberal Party government and installed a Labor government under Peter Malinauskas. And with a state election so close to a federal election, will there be any implications for Scott Morrison? We keep being told that there’s no relationship between state and federal issues, but we think there is much for the Morrison government to be worried about. In almost every election result since the pandemic commenced, aside from a state election vic...
Mar 25, 2022•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast It was Anthony Albanese’s turn to appear on 60 Minutes, but not as much enthusiasm as they displayed for Scott Morrison, even though more people tuned in to watch Albanese, compared to Morrison’s episode several weeks earlier. And his appearance brought the ire of Morrison, who complained about Albanese’s weight loss, his lack of interest in Italian cakes and his choice of glasses. In Morrison’s mind, these are critical issues for choosing a prime minister and it explains why his time as prime m...
Mar 18, 2022•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dedicated to the memory of Senator Kimberley Kitching. The floods in northern NSW and Queensland are causing major political headaches for the Morrison government and, as the floodwaters flow back into the oceans, their ideological obsession with small government has been laid bare. Communities expect governments to act when events occur that are beyond their control and beyond their abilities to repair. Otherwise, what is the point of government? Are they not also made up from the people that l...
Mar 11, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast The war in Russian invasion in Ukraine is escalating, and it’s difficult to know how this will end. But Vladimir Putin has already lost, irrespective of the outcome: a crashing Russian economy, the Rouble has collapsed, and receiving opprobrium from most of the rest of the world. As well as what populist dictators hate the most: removal of the Russian football team from World Cup games. And is has also provided an opportunity for the Australian Prime Minister to talk tough. It’s obvious Scott Mo...
Mar 04, 2022•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton are keen to mention the Community Party of China at every opportunity and how terrible they are – ignoring the fact that China is Australia’s number one trading partner and Australian athletes recently competed at the Winter Olympics in Beijing (so surely it can be all that bad) – and making the link between bad China and the Labor Party, especially its leader, Anthony Albanese. And creating that link between Albanese and pinko-communist-leftist-Maoist-Guevarian-s...
Feb 25, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
