Numbskull Authors have Learned Nothing from Bondi

Being on summer break the last few weeks, I've had more time than usual to stay abreast of current events in the news. Frankly, this hasn't been at all good for my state of mind.

Apart from the usual floods, fires and other disasters that typically happen at this time of year, there's been a healthy dose of Trump behaving like Trump, the Iranian government slaughtering thousands of its citizens, ICE agents in Minnesota shooting a couple of people for looking at them the wrong way and Marnus Labuschagne still being in the Australian cricket team.

However in spite of all this, the story that I've been following that's really set me off has been the hullaballoo over the Adelaide Writers Festival and the circumstances that led to both its cancellation and the resignation of the entire festival board, caused initially by the refusal to allow the Palestinian-Australian author and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah from appearing.

Imagine for a moment that an Israeli or other Jewish author had wanted to attend the festival, but had either published material on-line or been interviewed both scoffing at the civilian victims of the Gaza incursion and calling for Palestine to be wiped off the map. Given the delicate state of the current ceasefire and the scale of human suffering caused in Gaza (by what, frankly, has been a cynical over-reach by Netanyahu and his government to extend the hostilities in order to avoid or delay their prosecution for corruption), the inclusion of this author in the programme would clearly be inflammatory and insensitive. Therefore, if you were the organiser of the festival you'd be well within your rights to say, sorry pal, you can't come. Moreover there is no way that this decision would cause a mass boycott by authors planning to attend the festival.

So when a Palestinian author fronts up wanting to attend but is on the public record mocking the Israeli hostages seized in the October 7 attacks and basically calling for the eradication of Zionists, surely with the Bondi massacre fresh in everyone's mind, it's also appropriate for a person with such inflammatory views to be refused permission to attend? No problem with that? At least that's what the organisers thought. 

However, in doing so they clearly didn't understand or appreciate the idiotic group-think of so-called modern "progressives", in whose judgement double-standards don't apply when you are dealing with an "oppressed" group like Palestine and an "oppressor" group like Israel.

Cue a boycott of about 180 authors, led by the prodigiously untalented Trent Dalton (has anyone else read that "Boy Swallows Universe" dross, what a miserable and unoriginal load of codswallop that was) followed by the inevitable cancellation of the whole thing - after all there's no show without Punch.

But that wasn't enough to satisfy the shrill outrage of the mob. Following the cancellation, the whole board of directors of the festival had to resign and the organisers were forced to issue an apology to Abdel-Fattah for impugning her "right to free speech". Never mind that she was almost certainly going to use her platform to pour more scorn and insults on Jews still suffering from the aftermath of the Bondi massacre.

Then again, this sort of thing is the ugly face of what modern "progressiveness" has become. If you are a person with a public profile who dares disagree with whatever cause they are promoting, no matter how patently ridiculous it is, then be prepared for these people to stop at nothing to destroy your reputation and livelihood. Just look at the vitriol hurled in J K Rowling and Graeme Linehan's direction for daring to suggest that someone who looks like a man and still has all the genitalia of a man, perhaps shouldn't be legally allowed to call themselves a woman and inhabit "women-only" spaces.

It's a real pity because until not so long ago, "progressives" used to stand for noble and just causes - to name a few, the abolition of slavery, civil rights, anti-discrimination laws, no-fault divorce and more recently, marriage equality for gay people. Nowadays their only cause-celebres seem to be supporting repressive or terrorist Islamic regimes that oppose the USA and Israel; transexuals; imposing world-record economy-screwing COVID lockdowns; and ruining the lives of anyone who disagrees with them. I can't help but wonder what great proponents of reform from yesteryear like William Wilberforce and Martin Luther-King would make of preferred pronouns and cancel culture. I don't think they'd be particularly impressed.

It's tempting just to roll your eyes at these authors and their idiotic way of thinking and move on because thankfully, other than at universities, this nonsense hasn't really taken root in the real world. However I believe in this instance it needs to be called out because what went on last week just adds to the already tangible dangers facing Jewish Australians.

Like a lot of people I got irritated by the selfish and inconsiderate rent-a-crowd that used to invade the city every single f..ing Sunday (funny isn't it how their weekly crusade about slaughtering innocents has suddenly stopped in the wake of the Iran government's actions - oh that's right, Iran is the enemy of their enemy Israel so any atrocities they get up to are just fine by them). 

However my main gripes at the time were the appalling waste of police resources having to follow these morons around all day and the impact on businesses and people enjoying their weekend. It was only in the wake of the Bondi massacre that I realised these incessant marches with their Hamas flags and slogans calling for an end to Israel had a more insidious effect by slowly but surely normalising the hatred of Jews. Which is what the decision of these authors in defending a vindictive anti-semite like Randa Abdel-Fattah is doing as well.

As someone who lives in a suburb where a lot of Jewish families live, even before October 7, I realised a long time ago the hatred of Jews is real. The local synagogue on Balaclava Road has been heavily secured on Saturday morning for as long as I can remember as have many of the Jewish schools in the area.

Since the Gaza incursions in the aftermath of the 7 October kidnappings things have got a whole lot worse with the local Hannukah festivities previously held in Caulfield Park having to be held behind closed doors at Caulfield Racecourse, and synagogues and Rabbis in Elsternwick being regularly targeted. This despite the vast majority of the people attending being either locally born or from places other than Israel and therefore having little or nothing to do with what the government of that country does. 

Hardly a "safe place" to practice your faith now, is it, modern progressives? It's therefore not surprising in hindsight that with governments tolerating these endless anti-semitic protests that some zealot Islamic nutjobs became emboldened to take things to the next level and open fire on the festival at Bondi.

Encouragingly since the Bondi tragedy, some governments have shown some real intent and leadership in standing up to the "progressive" movement and are taking steps to stamp out anti-semitism. Not Jacinta Allan of course, she's shown as much interest in policing these weekly rallies as she has in stamping out criminality in the CFMEU, ie. none. Although admittedly she has been busy implementing Victoria's unelected and unrepresentative third chamber of Parliament.

Not Albanese either, by nature always a fairly timid politician, his objection to holding a Royal Commission might seem bizarre to some but it no doubt stemmed from a fear of being subjected to the same type of pressure heaped on the Adelaide Writer's Festival organisers and leaking votes to the Greens.

Full marks though to Chris Minns in NSW and Peter Malinauskas in SA, the first for standing up and making a strong stand against anti-semitism including banning "rent-a-crowd" rallies for the time being, and the latter for standing up to Abdel-Fattah, who predictably seeing he has dared to disagree with her, is now threatening to sue him. Geez I hope she loses convincingly in court and has to pay millions in costs.

As for the 180-odd writers who boycotted the festival, I'm going to give you a taste of your own "progressive" medicine and cancel you from my book collection (past, present and emerging). Based on my experience of Trent Dalton's work I don't expect that I'll be missing much.

Can't Find a Better Band

If there is one happy consequence of the COVID pandemic (and there aren't many), it is the proliferation of bands currently getting on the road and touring. Having had their livelihood shredded both by the shutting of music venues for the best part of two years and the emergence of streaming services like Spotify, a lot of groups nowadays need to earn their keep predominantly from doing live shows. 

Gratifyingly, this applies not just to young bands trying to make a name for themselves but to international acts in my age group's hitting zone. In the last few months we've had Devo, the Dandy Warhols and many others come through town, with the Dirty Three, Boney M and The The all visiting later this year. Perhaps best of all though, in November Pearl Jam are back in the country for the first time in 10 years. As I was about to go on-line and get tickets, I went through the motions of asking my spouse if she wanted to tag along, and got the expected prompt rejection. What surprised me however was our son, who was in earshot, piping up and saying "I'll come".

This was unexpected for a couple of reasons. First, this was not the sort of exchange I would ever have had with my own father. Dad seemed to regard any form of music as an acoustic sensation somewhere on the scale between fingernails scraping on a chalkboard and a cat howling after it had been dropped in a swimming pool. Plus once a balding white bloke from Michigan called Bill Haley started singing in the mid 1950s about Rocking Around the Clock, it was clear to him that society had gone to hell in a hand basket, so the prospects of us ever going to a concert together were somewhere on the scale between none and Buckleys.

Secondly, I had no idea that he might have been into Pearl Jam. After all, this was a band that emerged in about 1990, roughly 10 years before he was born. That would be like someone my age being into Jerry Lee Lewis or Elvis, or Bill Haley for that matter, who were all fine in their own right I suppose, but I'm happy to leave them to the octogenarians to enjoy. However, when I thought about it at more length and considered the state of the world now to how things were when I was his age in the early 1990s, it kind of made sense.

As anyone who lived through the early 1990s would agree, it was a quite anxious and unsettling time. The recession we had to have was in full swing, unemployment in Australia hit 11% at the same time official interest rates were at 18% - both numbers that would be unthinkable today. To top that off, the Soviet Union had just collapsed leaving a reckless drunk called Boris Yeltsin in charge of Russia's nuclear arsenal and Saddam Hussein decided to waltz over the border and annex Kuwait, triggering the first Gulf War.

So when grunge started to emerge not long after, I totally got it. Somehow all of a sudden the music in vogue such as Kylie Minogue singing about being "lucky lucky lucky" or Rick Astley wanting to tell you how he's feeling just didn't cut it any more and reflecting the zeitgeist, things became a lot more gritty and real world. Along with Nirvana, Pearl Jam were at the forefront of this change, with songs about mental illness ("Even Flow"), domestic abuse ("Daughter", "Better Man"), gun enthusiasts ("Glorified G") and dysfunctional families ("Alive", "Jeremy") - topics no artist in the Stock Aitken Waterman pop stable would have touched with a 10 foot bargepole.

While grunge came along too late to be part of my formative years, nonetheless songs from that era  still feature prominently in my playlist and they always serve to evoke my memories of what was a fairly difficult and confronting time. Not dissimilar, I imagine, to how young adults are finding the present.

Often its the practice of older generations to complain about and criticise those following about having it easy, but to my mind younger Millenials or Generation Z have every right to be angry about their circumstances. Not only have they just had to sacrifice 2 years of their precious youth locked down for their parents and grandparents benefit, but decades of failed housing policy in this country means that many of them will never be able to afford to own their own home, and to add insult to injury, if they want to undertake tertiary study then they have to spend years paying off a HECS debt for an education that their parents were able to get basically for free. Plus the world's geopolitical situation in 2024 is arguably worse than it was in 1991.

Which then begs the question, where is their generation's musical response to all this? In the manner of grunge in the early 1990s and punk in the late 1970s, we should be expecting the current times to give rise to a new trend which knocks the likes of Taylor Swift off their perch. However, aside from a few acts such as local band Amyl and the Sniffers (who I'd hoped might get the gig supporting Pearl Jam, as they'd be a great fit), the Viagra Boys and one or two others, there does not seem to be an international groundswell yet. Which may be why younger people like my son need to look to the music of their parents' generation to find expression for their angst.  

Whatever the reason for his interest, it promises to be a fantastic show and I look forward to dressing up in black, and railing against shitty times past and present while singing along to some classic tracks. 

Ding Dong, the Despot's Dead

We all tend to remember where we were and what we were doing at certain seminal moments in history. Like for instance when Princess Diana was killed, I clearly recall being in the back yard pulling out weeds when my wife came out to tell me the news. Not being particularly interested in things to do with the royal family I nodded in acknowledgement and went straight back to the gardening. Similarly when Australia II won the America's Cup in 1983, I remember being on school holidays on the Gold Coast and getting up to watch the race at the crack of dawn, never an easy thing for a teenager. 

Then, 40 years later to the day, sitting in the office on an otherwise non-descript Tuesday afternoon when one of my co-workers turned to me and passed on the announcement that after almost 9 years, the ghastly reign of Dan Andrews was about to come to an end. Needless to say, I wasn't expecting this given his previous assurances that he intended to serve out his term, but as someone who has turned breaking promises and lying into an art form during his time in power, in hindsight it is probably not that surprising.

One can only speculate on his reasons for getting out now, but the circumstances surrounding his sudden departure were replete with the sort of reprehensible traits which categorised his time in office. Aside from breaking a key election promise, there was the contempt shown to his fellow parliamentarians by keeping his decision secret and having them find out only shortly before his press conference. But then again, the sheer arrogance of the man meant that the government has only ever been about him and his appointed lackeys in the Premier's department, and to his mind, the rest of the ministry and party room were only ever there to be the stooges doing his bidding, or to take the fall when things go horribly wrong (remember Jenny Mikakos anyone?). 

Then, once the chaos caused by his snap decision to resign manifested itself in a grubby factional squabble, and meant that his anointed successor could have been rolled in favour of Ben Carroll, he delivered one last petulant dose of trademark Andrews bullying, hectoring and hurling profanities at his factional opponents in a party room meeting described as "nuclear" until he finally got his way. God knows why he cared so much given his stated intention of riding off into the sunset to play golf and read books, but I know for sure we will never find out. Being forthcoming and transparent was never his thing. 

As I reflect back now over Andrews' time in office and find myself flying into an apoplectic rage worthy of Basil Fawlty, it's easy to forget that not all measures taken on his watch were bad. As anyone who has tried to battle the Melbourne traffic would testify, removing a bunch of redundant level crossings was most welcome, and assisted dying laws now allow anyone with a terminal illness to end their lives with dignity and without having to endure unnecessary suffering and palliative care. And just maybe recent laws curtailing the ability of Councils and NIMBYs to reject what are otherwise eminently sensible housing developments will in time help to ameliorate the current housing shortage and enable our young people to be able to afford their own home.

However these things pale in comparison with things like the reckless financial spending, the appalling state of the health system, the falling standard of living of Victorians relative to the rest of the country, and last but not least, the ham-fisted and overly-oppressive manner in which the Andrews government handled the COVID pandemic.

The irritating thing is that many of these things we have had to endure and the state Victoria finds itself today arose as a direct result of the autocratic, arrogant and secretive way in which Andrews ran his government, and could easily have been averted with a greater commitment to transparency, consensus and ministerial responsibility in the normal manner of the Westminster system.

But no, Dan in his hubris always knew best, even when he patently didn't. And his insufferable ego never permitted him to admit to any mis-steps, much less apologise for them. 

Taking up the offer to use the military to oversee hotel quarantine? No, stuff it, I've got a better idea, just get an untrained private security firm to do it.

Illegally signing up for an infrastructure programme promoted by the Chinese government and not tell anyone about it until I get busted? Great idea. Oh and then after I've tried to lumber the state with this shitty agreement and I go on a trip to China, I'm not going to tell you why I'm going.

Run our build projects by experts at Infrastructure Australia to see if they're really worth the enormous cost? No, what the hell would they know. And if they don't go ahead I miss out on getting the new tunnel named after me ! 

Submit myself to media interviews where Virginia Trioli or Neil Mitchell might question my decisions? The temerity of them ! No, they're blacklisted, instead I'll  just communicate by Facebook or Twitter where I can't be scrutinised.

The cost of servicing the state's debt sure become a challenge. That can't be because I spent too much can it? No, its the Reserve Bank's fault for putting up rates !

The legacies left by the appalling financial and societal management by the Andrews government over the past 9 years include a government debt dwarfing all other states and territories; the highest state taxes (small wonder over 7,000 business left Victoria in the last financial year); a generation of young people suffering mental illness caused by 291 days of lockdown; a state that now has the 2nd lowest income per household in the country and which will soon be overtaken by resource-poor South Australia; and CBD and St Kilda Road precincts blighted by endless ugly construction hoardings for projects running years over schedule. Those are some serious problems to fix, and I wish Jacinta Allan good luck in her attempt to address them. She is going to need it.

I sometimes idly speculate on the identity of Dan's political muse, the person who most informed his ideology and style. It's certainly not one of the great modern Labor leaders in Bob Hawke or Paul Keating. Hawke was well-known for empowering his ministers and making full use of the considerable talent in his party room, something that was anathema to Dan. Keating recognised the importance to the economy of a vibrant and competitive private sector, introducing policies that allowed it to thrive, whereas Dan showed little interest in private business other than as a piggy-bank to pay for his pet projects.

Or funnily enough, might it be Donald Trump? The two share many similarities in that they both have colossal egos, are terrible with money, they both screwed up on pandemic management and they repeatedly trash institutions that are vitally important to a thriving democracy, like the courts, the free press and anti-corruption bodies.

But no, I think the best fit is Erich Honecker, the sinister former Chairman of East Germany who was no doubt the inspiration for many a Bond villain. When you think about it, it makes sense. Certainly Melbourne during the pandemic came to feel like East Berlin during the Cold War, as the oppressed citizens on the wrong side of the wall looked wistfully towards the west with all its political and personal freedoms and significantly better standard of living. Leaving the regime was prohibited, and anyone trying to flee across the wall into the west was shot on sight by the Stasi. 

As a puppet state of communist Russia the government controlled the economy and most other aspects of daily life in much the same way that Victoria was run during the pandemic. And when the wall finally came down and Germany was re-unified, the western part of the country was horrified when it saw how badly the east had been run down in 45 years, much like my reaction when I saw the Melbourne CBD for the first time in 6 months when the lockdown nightmare finally ended in October 2021.

When the extent of Honecker's abuses of power became fully known, he fled to Chile to escape prosecution and eventually died there in 1994. Unfortunately that's where I think the similarities with Dan end. While his time in office has left Victoria a damaged state with serious financial difficulties, his conduct was probably not criminal. Or if it was, after the Fitzgerald inquiry in Queensland which led to the jailing of several members of parliament, governments with dirty laundry they don't wish to be aired are now are careful to limit the frame of reference of royal commissions or other inquiries.

So I think we'll just have to take satisfaction from the fact that this abhorrent individual is finally gone from public life. If there has ever been a more mean-spirited, arrogant, autocratic, sneaky, mendacious, incompetent, petulant bully to darken the door of an Australian parliament I can't readily think of one.

Good riddance, Despot Dan, and may we never see your like again.

Let's Smoke our Way Out of the Red

Following the RBA's unexpected decision to raise the cash rate this week, it was interesting to watch the reaction from the east coast Premiers at the National Cabinet meeting the next day. Our own teflon-coated Victorian leader Daniel Andrews was particularly vocal, claiming that what the RBA was doing wasn't working to bring down inflation (note: it IS working, just not as quickly as everyone would like), and citing that his main concern was for home-owning families who would struggle to make mortgage payments.

However, no-one who observed Andrews' behaviour during the dark days of the pandemic would be fooled by this apparent display of empathy, where it quickly became apparent that he possesses about as much empathy as your average cane toad. What he is really worried about is that with state government debt about to hit an eye-popping $160 billion, every 0.25% increase in the cost of debt raises the annual interest bill by $400 million, which leaves him with less taxpayer cash to waste on things like buying a netball team, giving everyone $500 for uploading a copy of their power bill, setting up a new state electricity commission and state funerals for coffee shop owners.

While Victoria represents an extreme case, it does beg the broader question of how in this suddenly alarming interest rate environment, the states are going to be able to rein in debts racked up during the pandemic. Cutting spending too much at a time when most states are dealing with atrocious health systems, falling education standards and the urgent need for extra housing probably isn't going to be an option, so they're going to need to get bold and creative about raising extra revenue. And having recently been over to the USA and seen how they're doing things there, one obvious and rich vein of revenue is there for any government with the gumption to implement it - cannabis.

Of course, there are reasons that recreational drugs like cannabis and cocaine are currently illegal in most parts of Australia. As the comedian Jim Jefferies so deftly put it, they are similar to the reasons why ownership of guns is heavily restricted here. For every 1000 people who harmlessly enjoy the odd spliff now and again or who keep guns on their property to control foxes and other pests, there is one person who will develop mental health problems or go crazy shooting people down at Port Arthur.

However, there are fairly strong arguments that run counter to this and support the case for cannabis to be made legal. First of all, cannabis has been made legal now in almost half the states in the USA and while the stories of mass shootings coming from there hit the news with depressing regularity, any negative effects of legalising cannabis in terms of increased crime, addiction or other health effects certainly haven't been newsworthy. Also the legalising of cannabis has dragged its sale out of the shadows and in places like New York you can now easily purchase your products from clean, accredited dispensaries instead of some seedy back-street dealer.

Secondly, this wouldn't be the first time a state government has legalised something that might have adverse social effects. It's hard to imagine now with the abundance of poker machine-infested pubs and incessant gambling advertisements on the TV, but many forms of gambling weren't legal not too long ago. I remember moving to Melbourne at the start of 1992, at which time there was no casino or poker machines in the state, obviously no on-line gambling and pretty much the only things to wager money on were horse and greyhound racing. Sadly the subsequent liberalisation of gambling laws has led to social problems, but as state governments have become heavily addicted to the revenue, it's very difficult to see a reversal happening any time soon. But by the same token, could any adverse societal effects from legalising cannabis be worse than what the relaxation of gambling laws have created? The evidence from overseas would suggest not.

There are plenty of good reasons to justify legalising cannabis but if you needed any more, perhaps the government could give an undertaking that any taxes raised would only be applied to a particular area which needs urgent attention, which in Victoria frankly is not building train lines between outer suburban stations but fixing the public health system. A quick look online at government revenue raised by the Colorado government (a state with roughly the same population as Victoria) since it legalised cannabis in 2014 shows that over $2.4 billion has been collected, with annual taxes raised now running at between $300-$400 million a year. Surely that would go a long way to helping attract and train nurses, fix up emergency departments and bolster the ambulance system.

However compelling the arguments though I don't see Andrews buying them. First of all, taking cannabis can be fun and make you giggle uncontrollably, and fun and laughter are two of the things that Andrews seems to hate most in life. Secondly, why go to the bother introduce a fresh stream of revenue when instead you can just hit private business (another thing he hates) with more payroll and land tax? 

I don't know what horrors he and Treasurer Pallas are proposing in the state budget in a few weeks to deal with the crippling state debt but I know its not going to be pretty. I just wish I could get hold of a nice joint to smoke to help me deal with the pain.

It's the Voice, can you Understand it?

Since getting back from Christmas holidays, its been impossible to turn on the TV or pick up a paper without being bombarded by articles or stories concerning the proposed indigenous "Voice to Parliament". Like most people I've been aware of different proposals that have been floating around for years to recognise First Nations people in the Constitution, however now it's clear that barring a major U-turn, the government is going to take a specific proposal to a referendum later this year, which prompted me to go on-line and find out more about it.

After looking in a few places to see what specific question we're being asked to decide, it looks like being some variant of the proposal on the "From the Heart" website, which broadly, is to ensure there is a body enshrined in the Constitution which would enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to provide advice to Parliament on things which affect them.

It sounds simple enough but like most proposed constitutional amendments, contains no detail on how the Voice might work beyond that, a point which the Opposition has seized on and which the Government has so far pushed back on. To be fair to the Government, when changes are proposed to the Constitution, it is fairly usual practice for good reason to not provide a lot of detail at the time, as it is the role of Parliament to then debate and pass legislation which is made pursuant to that new power. For example, if the Japanese have started raining bombs on Darwin all of a sudden you want the government to have flexibility to pass laws and take action in a hurry, not wait for some esoteric argument to play out in the High Court about the extent of the "Defence" power. 

What I was however a bit surprised about was why they look to have decided to enshrine the Voice in the Constitution, instead of just enacting legislation, as the Commonwealth already has the power dating back to 1967 to make special laws affecting Aboriginal people. I suppose putting something in the Constitution ensures the permanence of the Voice, and that it can't be legislated away like previous indigenous bodies such as ATSIC. However the problem is that referendums to change the Constitution are notoriously hard to get through.

First you have the issue caused by our unrepresentative, regressive and outdated Federal system, the farce of which was on full display during the COVID pandemic, which means that not only an absolute majority of people have to vote for the change, but also a majority of states. 10,000,000 plus NSW, Victorian and Queensland residents might approve the change, but if 2,500,000 people from WA, SA and Tasmania don't, then the whole thing is a dead duck. But aside from that, the fact is that no matter how worthy the Voice might be, there are a lot of people who just won't vote for it.

People, for instance, who are battling with cost of living pressures and who think the government should be concentrating on more pressing things like energy policy, fixing the health system and housing affordability instead of spending so much time and effort on what, to them, is a fairly remote and abstract issue.

People who live in areas where indigenous crime is a long-standing problem and who for that reason are unlikely to be in a charitable frame of mind come referendum day.

Recent migrants who are facing their own challenges fitting in to their new country and either don't have knowledge of or aren't all that interested in Australian history, and are therefore less likely to understand the context of how the Voice has come about.

Then there are people who after 3 years of the COVID pandemic are thoroughly sick of the government interfering in their lives and for that reason will be less inclined than usual to support something the government wants.

Recognising the possibility that the referendum will be rejected, Albanese has left the door open for the Voice to be subsequently legislated, but this strikes me as politically untenable. If you've just had the voters reject something by referendum, how do you then turn around and say, we're going to ignore what you want and enact it anyway? So if as now seems likely, the Government does decide to put the Voice to a referendum, their one shot in the locker is to try and bring the voters with them.

Which brings me to the question of the Voice's merits. Everyone will have an opinion on this and mine is I would like to be able to support it. I don't think anyone would dispute the fact that having their lands over-run 250 years ago by a technologically superior civilisation had devastating consequences for indigenous Australian which has led ultimately to an entrenched cycle of disadvantage relative to the European settlers. 

To the extent that the Voice takes heed of what the leaders of those communities say and enables government to take positive steps to break that cycle and improve the lot of indigenous Australians, then that has to be a good thing. The problem though with many a sensible or well-meaning initiative is that once it reaches the political sewer of Canberra, it either gets knocked on the head completely (remember the emissions trading scheme anyone?), gets warped into something it was never intended to be (NDIS), or the execution of it gets completely messed up (Robodebt, which was meant to clean up welfare fraud but wound up being an unmitigated disaster).

Right on cue the political wrangling has started with the Nationals opposing it, the Liberals yet to declare their position, and the Greens likely to oppose it because it doesn't go far enough. In view of this and with the polling tight, it's unclear what will happen in the months ahead other than the Government has got its work cut out trying to promote the "Yes" case and also stop the proposal being bastardised in the process. 

Unlike Dutton I don't expect full enabling legislation to be presented ahead of the referendum but I do have some concerns about how the referendum process will play out in the months ahead, and that the Voice might become something it was never supposed to be, or lead to other unintended consequences. 

Therefore, with apologies to John Farnham for appropriating his lyrics for this blog title, to assist with everyone's understanding I don't think it's unreasonable for the Government to answer some key questions, including:

• What sort of issues the Voice will provide advice to Parliament on: there are the obvious ones of course, but if taken literally, the wording of the referendum question could mean the Voice will have a say on every piece of legislation brought before Parliament, because as citizens of Australia, ipso facto every law "affects them". I am sure that is not the intention but it is something that needs to be made clear.
• To what extent is it intended Parliament must have regard to the Voice, and how will any limitations on its powers be enshrined in legislation: the Government has been at pains to stress that it is an advisory body only, however in the future if the Greens or another party on the extreme left ever got the balance of power in the House of Representatives, there is the risk that the Voice may be strengthened to become a de facto unelected third chamber of Parliament with real power. Having been locked in my house by Brett Sutton for the best part of a year during the pandemic, I for one have a violent objection to unelected officials or bodies being given significant powers by the government, and so it's important to know this can't happen.
• Given the failure of other indigenous representative bodies in the past such as ATSIC, what practical measures is the government intending to take to make sure the Voice doesn't go the same way: this is even more critical seeing the Voice will be a permanent fixture of the Constitution and it would be a shameful outcome if it failed and sat forever in the Constitution as an indictment on Australia's inability to reconcile with its First Nations people.  
• What will this mean for the 96% of Australians who aren't indigenous: I raise this because increasingly these days, its impossible to attend any event no matter how mundane or catch a plane without having to sit through "welcome to country" rituals of varying complexity or paying respects to the traditional owners of the land. I find this irksome for 2 reasons, one is that a tedious legal seminar on something like the reform of State property taxes has nothing to do with indigenous affairs, and the second is that it smacks of the shallow tokenism people or organisations increasingly adopt in the Digital Age as a substitute for doing something meaningful and involving genuine self-sacrifice to support a cause. My concern is that rather than focus on the difficult problems the Voice is meant to try and solve for indigenous people, it is used as a pretext by the "woke" brigade as a means of imposing more and more observances and requirements on the rest of us, which will not only have zero effect on improving things for indigenous people but will instead just create more division.

As the referendum is still a long way off, hopefully the answers to these and some other questions are provided, but unlike the 1967 referendum and the same-sex marriage plebiscite, I think this is going to be close run thing. To get it through, the government is going to have to work hard to properly make its case, not just bat away questions or criticism as they have done so far. 

I really hope the Government can get this right, because if the Voice does get rejected, that won't be regarded well internationally, but more critically, it would be potentially devastating for indigenous people.

What's not OK in Other Walks of Life is Fine in Politics

Four years ago during a cricket test in South Africa, television cameras caught Australian fieldsman Cameron Bancroft rubbing the ball with something in his pocket that turned out to be a strip of sandpaper. In the inquiry that followed, it turned out that this was a plan hatched by the Australian vice-captain David Warner to try and rough up one side of the ball to get it to reverse-swing and thereby gain a competitive advantage for his team. The outcome of this action which was contrary to the laws of the game was that Warner, Bancroft and Australian captain Steve Smith were banned from international and state level cricket for a year. Darren Lehmann, the Australian coach at the time, also resigned from his post shortly after the bans were handed down.

Also four years ago, the Banking Royal Commission among other things found that National Australia Bank had continued charging fees to dead superannuation clients. After some initial resistance, the Chief Executive Officer Andrew Thorburn and Chairman Ken Henry eventually tendered their resignations.

In 2020, the headmaster of the Melbourne private catholic school St Kevin's, together with the head of sport, resigned from their posts when it emerged that they had provided character references for an external athletics coach who was subsequently convicted for "grooming" an underage student at the school.

No-one suggested that any of Lehmann or the people from NAB or St Kevin's condoned or in some cases even knew about the matters that led to their resignations. However, they nonetheless understood that as the people in leadership positions, the buck stopped with them and to appease their stakeholders and enable their organisations to move forward from what had happened, they needed to fall on their swords and resign.

On the other hand, there is a stark contrast to what happens in politics. Consider this - in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Victorian government refuses military assistance from the Federal government for its hotel quarantine program, and instead hires a private security firm. It quickly becomes apparent that the firm is ill-equipped for the job, and so while the rest of the country emerges from the initial lockdown and remains largely COVID-free for the rest of 2020, Victoria's programme leaks like a sieve and the state is plunged into a 4 month lockdown. Businesses fail, children miss out on months of schooling, state debt starts to escalate at an alarming rate and worst of all, 800 deaths happened that could have been prevented but for State government hubris.  

When the news breaks about the problems with the quarantine program, the Premier goes on the news and promises to be accountable for his government's actions. However in spite of calls for his resignation as a result of presiding over the most serious administrative cock-up in Victoria's history, he remains in his post. A few months later when an inquiry into the disaster took place, he claimed not to recall who made the decision to engage the private firm and instead of taking responsibility for it himself, he blamed it on the health minister who of course then had to resign. 

Not exactly how "accountability" is defined in the Oxford Dictionary, but no matter, one thinks - if he won't do the honourable and appropriate thing and resign himself, then he'll get his come-uppance at the next election.

Of course though, that's not how things played out yesterday, with the Victorian government being returned with more or less the same majority as 2018. As someone who was brought up understanding the need to take responsibility for one's actions, and who has only ever worked in organisations where malfeasance or incompetence had serious consequences for those concerned, I find this incredibly frustrating and saddening. Because if we don't hold political leaders to account in the same way that we do leaders in other fields, then the country is heading towards a very baleful place.

The pandemic cock-ups are one thing, but in re-electing the Andrews government people also seem to have forgotten or are willing to overlook a whole host of other concerning matters that have gone on in the last 8 years - misappropriating public money for political ends; signing illegal agreements with a hostile foreign power in China; serial lying from both the Premier and senior ministers; multiple IBAC investigations including one involving the Premier himself; launching recklessly into mind-blowingly expensive infrastructure projects of dubious economic benefit; and the concentration of power in the Premier's office at the expense of the due process of the Westminster system of government to name but a few.

People might argue that the Liberal party opposition didn't present a good alternative and maybe that's the case. However as we see all the time in business, sport and other areas outside politics, when leadership changes, organisations find a way to survive, move on and occasionally, thrive. Certainly Cricket Australia , NAB or St Kevin's don't seem any worse off as a result of the changes they made.

However, for better or worse, Victorians elected not to go down that path, and I fear we will be much the worse for it. Having got away with everything he has over the past 8 years with no electoral blowback, how emboldened will the Premier be now to lie, break the rules and deflect scrutiny to his own ends?

I say this because I've seen this script play out before with a long term government. Growing up in Queensland, the Joh Bjelke-Petersen government engaged in all manner of ghastly behaviour before finally being thrown out after 20 years and then having multiple ministers and senior public servants put in jail. 

I just hope that if the voters won't hold the Andrews government to account, then there is a young Tony Fitzgerald clone currently working his way up through the Victorian legal ranks who ultimately will.

My Submission to the Shergold Inquiry on the Management of the Pandemic

 

To the Panel,

First of all, I welcome the fact that an independent inquiry has been established to review the period of the pandemic, and I assume, the conduct of all governments state and federal during this time.

As a resident of Melbourne which bore the brunt of the longest lockdown in the world, I’m aware that our experience was very different to the rest of the country. Nonetheless, given the extreme restrictions that were imposed by governments during the pandemic in what was supposed to be solely for the purpose of protecting the health system, the actions of all require proper scrutiny from a truly independent body, not some hastily convened Kangaroo-court with a limited frame of reference like the Victorian Coate inquiry.

I’ll address some specific matters later in this submission, but as a general observation, if you take the view that the object of the pandemic response was to prevent people in Australia from contracting COVID-19 until such time as vaccines could be developed and administered, and that was pretty much the only thing that mattered in Australian society, then on the metric of hospitalisations and deaths, you would say Australia handled things fairly well.

However, to suggest governments should take this approach to running things is complete nonsense. Even in times of crisis, there are so many other things that governments need to take account of like children’s schooling, people’s ability to earn a living, our relations with other countries, mental health, families who live interstate from each other and not least, public finances, so that they have the capacity to deliver services to their constituents in the future.

Therefore, the different premiers standing up day after day and saying their actions were just determined by the medical advice was an abnegation of the role they were elected to do. Yes, by all means they should take account of the medical advice, but their job as elected officials is not to simply do what a public health officer tells them but to weigh up what they say as well as all the other things they ought to be considering.

Too often the obsession with eradicating COVID at all costs (which itself was a ridiculous aim as COVID-averse places like WA, New Zealand and China are now finding out) led to the sledgehammer approach of repeated lockdowns, the repercussions of which will be felt for years. Of course, this is a very polarising issue and there will be many people who agree with the COVID-zero approach taken. However, that certainly wasn’t the approach taken by most other developed countries, and after having both (a) observed the effect 291 days of lockdown had on Melbourne; and (b) recently travelled to the UK and Ireland and seen how they are managing COVID, I’m certainly not convinced.

Leaving aside however the relative merits of the Australian approach, I have 3 specific areas of complaint that I would like to highlight to the panel.

The first concerns the closing of the international border to outbound travellers. If the whole point of closing the border is to try and prevent COVID-19 from entering the country, I fail to understand how someone leaving the country represents a health risk to Australians. Also, if a citizen has things to attend to overseas and a foreign country is happy to let them go there, then what business is it of the Australian government to try and stop them?

The second concerns the lack of a consistent national approach to the handling of the pandemic and the hi-jacking of the response by the states, some of which had premiers who cynically exploited the situation for electoral gain. Of course, the Federal government has a lot of culpability here. I think it was Winston Churchill who said, “never waste a good crisis” but this is precisely what they did. When confronted with a virus that isn’t constrained by either state or international borders, and knowing that federal money would be needed in order for the states to stay economically afloat, the federal government missed a golden opportunity to take charge and transfer power away from what in the modern world is an entirely regressive and more or less obsolete level of government. By not insisting on a nationally co-ordinated response in exchange for pandemic relief, the state governments were free to run amok, gleefully fanning jingoistic state rivalries and imposing a bunch of entry rules that often were inconsistent and more often, simply cruel to families separated by arbitrary state borders.

Aside from being unable to visit my elderly mother for the best part of 2 years, in mid-2021 I experienced first hand the sort of idiocy that happens when each state makes its own rules. On a rare occasion where Victoria had shut to parts of Queensland as opposed to the other way around, I was able to go the Gold Coast for business, but if I set foot in Brisbane, I would have to quarantine for 2 weeks on my return. However, at the same time, anyone who lived in Brisbane was able to travel freely to the Gold Coast while I was there and presumably, infect me with COVID-19. This sort of thing is exactly why a national approach is needed to pandemics. It would also stop the 2 levels of government trying to blame each other for things like nursing home deaths, quarantine facilities and vaccine rollouts because the buck would stop with one level of government.

The third and final objection relates to the deliberate actions and stuff ups by state and federal governments during the period of the pandemic which needlessly prolonged both the pandemic and lockdowns. As you would be aware, the conditions of lockdown imposed by state governments were incredibly severe. You could only leave your house for four reasons, and even then for 2 hours a day (in the case of Victoria you couldn’t even do that after 9pm), and when you did leave you were forbidden from going more than 5 km from home let alone interstate or overseas.

You couldn’t visit friends or relatives, all the shops and restaurants were shut, you had to home-school your children, you had to wear a mask every time you did leave your house, and if you so much as sneezed the government required you to go queue in a line, sometimes for hours, in order to get tested.

Therefore, given the extreme measures the government were requiring its citizens to take, surely in return those same citizens were entitled to expect that governments would leave no stone unturned to manage the pandemic properly so that the prison-like restrictions could be removed as soon as possible. But no, instead here are just a few examples of them not doing this: 

• In WA, the government allowed weddings to be held in quarantine hotels

• In NSW, after vaccines were available, the government let unvaccinated drivers ferry quarantine travellers to their accommodation, one of whom started a cluster than shut down NSW and Victoria for 4 months last year

• The federal government failed to diversify its vaccine supply, so when the Chief Medical Officer in Queensland went on the television and deliberately destroyed public confidence in the Astra-Zeneca vaccine, the rollout was delayed until such time as further Pfizer vaccines could be sourced – and therefore prolonged the 2021 lockdowns in our 2 biggest states

• In Victoria, the government refused help from the military to run hotel quarantine, and instead engaged a private contracting firm, whose staff both fornicated with quarantine guests and allowed them to leave their rooms at will. When questioned about this at the Coate enquiry, the Chief Medical Officer said he didn’t think it was important that he read the email about who to engage on quarantine, and the premier claimed not to remember who made the decision.

It's simply not good enough, and if God forbid this happens again, a few things need to change.

We need a thorough review of lockdown measures, and whether there is a better way to contain the next pandemic which doesn’t involve a complete shutdown of society.

We need a national approach, as the one adopted last time led to vastly unfair and inconsistent outcomes depending on where you happen to live, and viruses don’t tend to pay heed to arbitrary lines on a map.

We need to be better prepared with proper quarantine facilities, and not use hotels which proved time and again they weren’t fit for purpose.

And most of all, we need people in charge who know what they are doing and can manage things properly, not a bunch of provincial politicians who keep messing things up and seem more interested going on TV for 120 days in a row to lecture everyone instead of fixing the problem.

I wish you well with the conduct of your inquiry.