Queensland, USA

Whoever wins the U.S. election, Queensland state election results show MAGA nonsense is already winning here.

 

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King Andrew for an Australian Republic

 The release this week of the so-called "Palace Letters", correspondence between Australian officials and the British Monarch leading up to the 1975 dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, has been an absolute bombshell of nothing we didn't already know.

Historian Jenny Hocking campaigned for years to have the contents of the letters released to the Australian public and she is to be commended for her efforts but really, the letters contain no startling revelations. We already knew the gist. John Kerr was a bit of a bastard, the Royal posterior was protected at all times, and there is no good reason why the Australian Governor General should need the input, assent or advice of the British Crown to change the government (whether the Governor General should have that right at all is a topic for another day). But the events of the dismissal have reignited once again talk of the need for an Australian republic, because there's nothing to fire up the punters and get the attention of the person in the street like the finer points of constitutional law. 

I've got a better reason we should become a republic.

This guy.

No, not the dead one. The bloke on the left.

Australia must become a republic, and Prince Andrew is why. The realisation that Australia is one accident of chromosomes away from having the BFF of a convicted sex offender who has himself been credibly accused of rape should be enough to make even Tony Abbott into a republican. 

Because that's the thing with a monarchy. We get what they give us. We have to put up with whatever quirk of DNA they give us, whether it's someone who gives 65 years of devoted ribbon cutting, or a loser drongo who lucked out on the primogeniture. We don't even get to have our own drongos. And it should sober up a champagne brunch at the ACM to realise that if Prince Charles hadn't been first born, if those two smitten globs of 23 strands of DNA hadn't united first, we'd be facing the very real prospect of Prince Andrew becoming King when the Queen dies in another 47 years. We'd have no say in the matter. That's how monarchy works. You take the good with the bad. Prince Andrew could well hope that with Epstein dead, everyone will move on and he can get back to royal life, which if he was next in line to the throne, might have meant taking the Crown.

What if Prince Andrew had been the oldest son? (Women didn't get to take equal place in line to the throne until recently; Princess Charlotte outranks her brother Louis). Some may argue that Andrew's sense of responsibility and duty would have tempered his behaviour, much as William has always been more restrained than Harry. Well, maybe. But I know lots of people who aren't in line to the British throne, and none of them have been credibly accused of sexually assaulting underage women on a private island owned by their billionaire mate. And all of them sweat a normal amount*. The point is, even if Andrew is the biggest shit in the world, and he seems pretty shitty, if the wheels of fortune had spun on his number in monarchy roulette**, we'd be stuck with him as King to be. 

Luckily, we don't need to worry about this. Our future is in the safe hands of a man who once wanted to be his then-lover's tampon***, and two people living on the public purse who keep having more kids. That's enough of a worry itself. Because as long as we're a monarchy, we have to accept whatever the Windsors give us, our constitution is actually an act of the British parliament, and even though he only came third in the royal race for the nappies, protocol dictates that Prince Andrew if he shows up here is still entitled to pomp, ceremony, curtsies and bows. And that's just gross.

* Except for Ursula but that's an unpleasant subject we don't need to discuss here.

** Is this how roulette works? I don't gamble. 

*** As if things weren't bad enough right now, I've made you remember this. 

Politics is not a team sport

 One of the primary dangers of patriotism is when it induces a sort of blindness to the failings of your own country.

This tendency can result in evil - such as when George H.W. Bush said he would never apologise for America, when American guided missile cruiser floating in Iranian waters shot down a scheduled Iran Air flight, killing 290 civilians - or just plain stupidity, as seen when the same people who question why refugees don't stay in their own countries and fight their oppressors insist that lefties who don't love their country should leave. Per Al Franken:

"[Conservatives] love America like a 4-year-old loves his mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a 4-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow.”

Unfortunately this blind adoration of the child has spread to politics. Or perhaps the love could be better compared to the affection one has for one's sports team. It doesn't matter what your loved one says or does, you'll support them regardless and anyone who criticises them is bad. 

Daniel Andrews has done many good things during the recent flare of COVID-19 cases in Melbourne. He's worked seven days a week for months, first during the January bushfires and now in pandemic response. Meanwhile, Scott Morrison is at the footy this weekend without his during his family during his week off for family time. They were probably glad to be rid of him for a few hours.

But it's hard to deny that the lockdown of nine public housing towers in Melbourne, home to many people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and Melbourne's most vulnerable residents, has a distinct whiff of racism about it. And it's been poorly handled; residents unable to access necessary supplies such as nappies, tampons and Ventolin; residents being delivered expired food; a lack of cleaning supplies to reduce transmission in the buildings, and uniformed police stationed on every floor and around the building to enforce the lockdown. There seems to be little plan to prevent transmission within the buildings, only to keep the residents confined so their poverty skin colour illness can't infect others. You can read a statement from community groups representing tower residents here. 

Daniel Andrews has come under sustained attack from sections of the media, but not for the public housing lockdown. The flying monkeys at the Herald Sun judged that it's Andrews' fault that the virus got out of control because he somehow allowed a security guard supervising returning passengers in hotel quarantine have sex with one of the guests, as if that was something he should have foreseen and specifically forbidden:

Yep it was the security guards that spread this virus, not lack of lockdown - conservatives hate the lockdowns; it was the initial lockdowns that prompted them to name Dan Andrews "dictator Dan" in the first place. But they just hate Dan Andrews in the first place. Victoria is the most left wing state in Australia and as the leader, Andrews is the target of the opprobrium of conservatives who want to maintain their Melbourne smugness but loathe semi-effective social services. 

At least the supposed sex scandal has given them a break from being racist for a few days, and allowed for such gems as this from Peta Credlin, now awarded a plum job writing and presenting for News Corp despite her only real qualification being her inability to get Tony Abbott to keep his shit together:

"I’m in Melbourne at the moment and it’s a plague-ridden city in a basket case state led by a man who is a lethal mix of political rat cunning, PR spin and unwarranted self-belief."

Plague ridden? Could we be overreacting? I do note that Ms Credlin is also disdainful of Mr Andrews for using call centre staff to carry out contact tracing instead of Australian Defence Force, "the best logistics experts I know". Well the ADF might be tickety boo at trucking water to bushfire hit communities, but what experience do they have in work like tracing people's contacts? Surely that's a job for police detectives or better yet, get the members of any true crime forum onto the job. I guarantee you'll have the kindergarten best friend of any COVID-19 patient identified, tracked down at their workplace and possibly doxxed before you've had time to practice reciting Murdoch's assigned talking points before tonight's appearance on Sky News. 

So I can see that the sustained attack on Andrews is spiteful, partisan and illogical whilst also despairing of the situation for residents of the locked down towers. But the defence of Andrews has swung too far in the opposite direction in some quarters. Just as there were a few years there where you couldn't criticise the Iraq war without being asked if you wanted Saddam Hussein back in power there, so too criticism of Andrews' handling of the towers' lockdown is seen as an attack on all that is good and true by some of Labor's most vociferous Victorian supporters. How can you criticise him at such a difficult time when he's under such attack from the right? People who criticise Andrews are dragging down the left, too ideologically pure and have no idea of the complexities of running a government.

But if I defend aspects of Andrews' actions from the worst of the attacks from the right, I don't want to be misunderstood that I'm not dismayed and disgusted by the implementation of the hard lockdowns at the social housing towers. Because politics isn't an all or nothing proposition. It's not a team support. You shouldn't be for or against Dan Andrews or any other politician. There hasn't been such a sustained attack on a political figure in Australia since the pile on on Julia Gillard, whom I also defended against misogyny even though I disagreed with her on gay marriage, welfare reforms, environmental action, asylum seekers and wearing blackface. It's the same with Dan Andrews. The attacks on him from the right are partisan, nonsensical and exhausting. But in saying that the public housing lockdown in Melbourne was rushed, poorly executed and has a whiff of racist opportunism (which obviously failed to placate the braying Murdoch mobs) I'm not attacking Dan Andrews, but evaluating one of his policy decisions in the face of the evidence - and acknowledging the real human suffering it has caused.

No one is all good or all bad (well, there are a few exceptions). Turning politicians into cartoonish figures of adoration and loathing does no one any good, least of all those affected by political decisions. Evaluate each decision on its own merits, not by cheering or booing the decision maker based on your allegiance. And that my friends, is how you think for yourself. 

Pauline Hanson Weaponises Her Wilful Ignorance. Why Can’t We Call It Out?

This post was originally published on New Matilda. Reproduced with permission.

Pauline Hanson has learnt nothing. With the recent bushfire crisis and the outpouring of evidence, from the Rural Fire Service to bushfire experts from around Australia, stating that the fires were largely not caused by arsonists or lack of fuel reduction burns, but were exacerbated by climate change, Hanson has used her media platform to repeat the false information spreading on social media via another of her regular spots on Seven Sunrise.

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Disability welfare reform must start at the top

Yet another terrible story of a seriously ill person being told by Centrelink that they don't qualify for the disability support pension.

Single father Robert Laughlin is battling stage 3 bowel cancer. He's currently in a Melbourne hospital, unable to speak or move much, and being fed via tube; obviously unable to work or look for work. Centrelink have denied his Disability Support Pension application, forcing him on to the lower rate Newstart unemployment payment, with its "mutual obligation" requirements to report to Centrelink offices and apply for 20 jobs a fortnight.

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ABC bias and other urban legends

The Coalition government would like to privatise the ABC. Of course they would, because they can't see the value in anything you can't turn a profit from, especially not one that allows the unwashed masses access to better investigative journalism, local news, drama, comedy, arts and music than they can enjoy on any of the free commercial networks.

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The weird psychology of Barnaby Joyce and the Right

Oh, for a skilled political journalist to have handled the Channel 7 interview with former Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and his former staffer turned partner Vicki Campion last night. Then maybe we would have had some answers to the questions that really matter - or at least had those questions asked in the first place. 

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Not a good look

I felt annoyed, kinda disgusted and above all, tired when I saw this photo of NSW Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham at a Greens trivia fundraiser. But I was just plain furious in the aftermath. 

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The appalling legacy of Jocelyn Newman

Howard government minister, political matriarch, social reformer and Godmother of Centrelink Jocelyn Newman passed away over the weekend at the age of 80.  Don't go to a Centrelink office to express your grief, though; security guards are trained to surround you if you cry. Instead, I thought we'd take a chance to reflect on Ms Newman's terrible legacy.

No, not him.

When I refer to Jocelyn Newman as a social reformer, it is not a compliment. Ms Newman was architect and engineer of Centrelink, the interface of the Australian welfare system. Centrelink was established on Ms Newman's watch in 1997, combining several previous government departments such as the Department of Social Security and the actually useful Commonwealth Employment Service into a one stop shop of human misery. It's worth reflecting that it whilst the Liberal party claims to be for individual choice and small government, it was a Liberal government who created a horrifying byzantine bureaucracy. They labelled it all under the auspices of choice but for Australia's disadvantaged, the "choice" means submitting to the routine humiliations of Centrelink, or resorting to poverty and potential crime. And for all the rhetoric of a single government agencies reducing inefficiency, duplication and waste, the myriad sections of Centrelink are often completely separate from each other, unable to access each other's systems or even contact other departments.

A full account of the miseries Centrelink uses to punish those who require its services would be depressing to write and tedious to read. The mainstream media brings us frequent accounts of Centrelink woes, sometimes ironically, such as in this article from the Daily Telegraph about the Welfare Super Bludger, which is not a really shit new children's superhero but a mythical recipient of Newstart allowance with the article highlighting one putative job seeker who stuffs up. (Apparently the guy misbehaved at 99 job interviews. How does anyone get 99 job interviews in a single year, let alone through employment service providers?!). There's little indication of larger issues, such as the cost of all the monitoring, the fact that people with disabilities are largely forced to rely on Newstart (and comply with "mutual obligation" requirements) instead of receiving the disability support pension let alone basic problem the ratio of jobseekers to jobs. 

It all feeds in to the myth of the welfare bludger, whom everyone seems to know - any facebook post about the low rate of Newstart is flooded with irate commentators describing their neighbour who's been on the dole for years, spending all day playing video games, getting tattoos and going on holidays - triggering endless audits and crackdowns that but never shows up in audits. When there are not enough jobs to go around - especially with the loss of blue collar and unskilled employment - demanding job seekers comply with mutual obligation requirements is a farce. Requiring job seekers to show up at an office for a day a week applying for jobs that don't exist without addressing any of the reasons why they became unemployed serves little purpose other than to punish the job seeker for being unemployed in the first place. It's not at least giving them a chance or getting them out of the house; it is demeaning, humiliating and horrible.

And today we won't even get started on the changes to granting of the disability support pension with insanely restrictive criteria forcing thousands of ill and injured people to deal with the job search system and providers with no understanding of disability - again, all to catch out the mythical bludger:

From July 2016 to Nov 2017 the department of human services conducted 30,056 reviews of people on disability welfare and only found 16!!!! who were wrongly claiming $$. pic.twitter.com/9CVL7OWd9C

— Alice Workman (@workmanalice) March 1, 2018

"The best form of welfare is a job" is the homeopathy of social services. It doesn't work and it makes no sense, but its adherents cling to it with religious fervour and become defensive and angry when challenged.

Jocelyn Newman cannot of course solely be blamed for the sorry state of affairs for Australian job seekers today, just as Centrelink cannot really be blamed for the policies they are forced to enact, like denying dying people the disability support pension. It's takes an entire government, and their mindset of the disadvantaged as a societal evil writ in policies punishing the poor for their very existence, for that. (Not that Labor is ever much better; witness the Gillard Labor government turfing single parents, regardless of training or childcare or anything else, off single parenting payments and onto Newstart).

In truth, it's been decades of bloody minded adherence to neoliberal policies in spite of all evidence that has created the whole welfare hell; but in creating Centrelink, Jocelyn Newman opened up a corporatised, centralised portal to that hell.

It's worth examining how far the current Australian welfare system has strayed from the ideals under which it was established in the days after World War Two: 

"The moment we establish, or perpetuate, the principle that the citizen, in order to get something he needs or wants and to which he has looked forward, must prove his poverty, we convert him into a suppliant to the state for benevolence.

That position is inconsistent with the proper dignity of the citizen in a democratic country. People should be able to obtain these benefits as a matter of right, with no more loss of their own standards of self-respect than would be involved in collecting from an insurance company the proceeds of an endowment policy on which they have been paying premiums for years."

Which raging lefty socialist uttered these words? Why, it was Robert Menzies. Now there's a legacy I'd like to see revived.

The only guide you'll ever need to the Reserve Bank of Australia Museum

Some people mark the end of their treatment for cancer by going to Disneyland or swimming with dolphins. I celebrated the end of my treatment for carpal tunnel syndrome by visiting the Reserve Bank of Australia museum. Don't hate me cause you ain't me.

You may not even have known there was a museum at the Reserve Bank of Australia HQ, which is on Martin Place in the Sydney CBD, bucking the trend of Australian government entities being based in Canberra. I didn't know there was a museum there, until I happened to be walking past after completing treatment at the Sydney Hand Hospital and saw the small sign proclaiming the existence of a museum. I decided to go in and take a look. I figured somebody should.

I neglected to take a camera to capture my experience in the full, rich detail it deserved, so photos are from the Reserve Bank Museum website. It was less busy when I visited. Considerably less busy. In fact I was the only person there, and the nice but not overly friendly lady behind the desk look slightly startled to see me (although people often look slightly startled to see me, once including John Cleese. But that's another story). She walked me in, explained the layout and exhibits, and told me there was a university group visiting from Sweden I think it was? and I was welcome to join their tour if I wanted, but I'm sure none of you will need smelling salts to learn that I decided I'd have a look around for myself.

The museum is dedicated not to the economic history of Australia in general, with all its panics, crashes and housing bubbles, but to the history of Australian currency manufacture, a very specific and odd focus, considering Australian money is printed elsewhere - at Cragieburn in Victoria, for those of you playing at home - and one that may well be rendered completely redundant by technology in a few years. They do not give out free samples, although I'm sure every Dad whose ever visited asks.

For history buffs or those who like to reminisce fondly about old money, the museum is interesting enough in a low grade sort of way, with chronologically organised displays ranging from a brief and unsatisfactory paragraph about the barter system in traditional Aboriginal society; through rum currency; shillings and pence, the introduction to decimal currency (Menzies wanted to call the Australian monetary unit the Royal, I learn with very little surprise) and on to the bragging rights to our world leading polymer currency. I never did find the Swedes, but I did run into a class of bored and unhappy 12 year olds being lectured by a museum guide about the introduction of polymer currency, with the new $5 featuring a portrait of the Queen "...of course this was in 1992, when she was considerably younger". "Well, we've all lost some bounce since then", I chimed in sympathetically, but met only with blank looks, I decided it was time to call a halt to my brief new career as assistant docent, and moved on.

I was pretty much done with the museum after about fifteen minutes, but didn't want to leave quite so soon. When I visit these niche museums, I'm always worried that if I leave too soon, I'll hurt the staff's feelings. You walk past the guides on your way out, and feel you've let them down somehow. "I'm sorry, you've got a great little museum here, but it's just not what I'm looking for right now." But I was hungry and tired, and decided I was going to have to make a break for it. Luckily on my way out the nice guide lady was busy with actual Reserve bank staff, so I was able to leave without upsetting anyone, unless they read this guide, and I'd like to think I'm actually encouraging people to check it out for themselves.

The Reserve Bank of Australia Museum is located at 65 Martin Place, Sydney, and is open from 10:00am to 4:00pm Monday to Friday excluding public holidays and NSW bank holidays. The author traveled on an Opal and has this weird itch on the back of her knee.