A colleague of mine posted a meme on Facebook concerning new postage stamps being issued to celebrate Brexit, the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union (EU). There…
Everybody with even a passing familiarity with the current news either on free-to-air television, radio or newspapers will have realised that former deputy leader of the parliamentary National Party, Bridget…
I was in the middle of writing a piece about the sports rorts disgrace, when this, from Catherine Marriot came across my Twitter feed: “The Nationals have a real opportunity…
Everybody with even a limited intelligence knows Donald Trump lies, and that his lying is almost beyond comparison and that it is pathological1,2,3. Australia has had its political liars too,…
If Mr. Morrison’s government genuinely believed the science, it would immediately put a price on carbon, declare a moratorium on all new fossil fuel projects and transfer the fossil fuel subsidies to the renewables industries. It would go to the next round of global climate talks in Glasgow in November allied with other nations on the front line of this crisis and argue for quicker and deeper cuts to carbon emissions around the world. Anything less is to collaborate in the destruction of a country.
But the government is intent on doing nothing.
And to the names of those historic betrayers of their people — Vidkun Quisling, Benedict Arnold, Mir Jafar — perhaps one day will be added that of Scott Morrison, the prime minister of Australia who, when faced with the historic tragedy of his country’s destruction, dissembled, enabled, subsidised and oversaw omnicide, until all was ash and even the future was no more.
In the UK, the Football Association (FA) runs an elimination competition called the FA Cup and in the 1988-1989 competition, Liverpool played Nottingham Forest in a semi-final at a neutral…
And being PM means taking responsibility for handling what befalls the nation. Our history is full of Prime Ministers who had events turn against them, whether it was James Scullin becoming PM two days before the 1929 stock market crash, or Robert Menzies turning up just in time to have WWII declared on his watch, or Gough Whitlam's optimistic new government colliding with the Energy Crisis, or John Howard facing the horror of the Port Arthur Massacre, or Kevin Rudd being in the chair for the GFC.
All stepped up and faced the challenges, and in several cases paid a terrible personal and political price.
But until now no PM had ever responded to a devastating national emergency by denying it, then saying it was a state issue, then blaming their wife for them taking a holiday, then systematically failing to take timely action before waging a propaganda war starting with "arsonists" and ending with an attempt to spin it such a way as to benefit mining companies.
That takes a very particular type of coward.
I had a short conversation online a couple of days ago, where the others arguing against me were asserting that it was more important to indulge in innovation than to…