New Politics: Australian Politics, News, Analysis & Commentary

It’s the final week of Parliament for 2021 and it’s much the same as all the other ones in recent weeks: chaos and dysfunction, and a peculiar interest in all of the issues that don’t really matter too much. This week’s interest? The anti-troll social media legislation which no one has ever asked for, would be ineffective (in the unlikely event that it was ever actually made into law) – but at lea...

This term of Parliament is descending into chaos, and it’s almost as though the anarchist society has taken over the Senate and House of Representatives. But it’s not the anarchist society: it’s the Liberal–National Coalition which is now resembling a thoroughly disorganised rabble. The Voter ID and Religious Discrimination Bills are in tatters – legislation that is not needed and no-one has asked...

It’s increasingly obvious the Prime Minister is using the final stages of this Parliament to roadtest a number of different election slogans. Last week it was ‘Australians taking back their lives’, followed by ‘Australians have had a gutful of being told what to do’, interspersed with ‘cost of living’ and ‘can-do capitalism’. This week it was ‘moving forward’. But where are we moving forward to? W...

Once again, the Liberal–National Coalition is attacking the ABC, and doing the bidding of News Corporation in its quest to remove the ABC from government ownership and sell if off to the highest bidder. And several state divisions of the Liberal Party – and all the Young Liberal branches – have already passed resolutions to privatise the ABC and it’s also one of the key objectives of the Institute...

Australia is seeking national leadership at this point of time to ward off the threat of extremist behaviour in Melbourne but instead of trying to dampen the enthusiasm of QAnon, neo-Nazis, fascists, sovereign citizens and assorted fringe dwellers, Scott Morrison is hoping to hang onto their votes at the next federal election and he decided the best course of action is to just keep quiet, lest he...

Paul Keating was a hit at the National Press Club address during the week, but members of the federal government were not so happy about this. Because he spoke positively and realistically about China and Australia’s place in the world: which rubs against the grain of the government’s narrative of depicting China as a massive threat to Australia. And the media is happy to jump in and offer their s...

There won’t be a federal election in the short term, but that doesn’t mean campaigning can’t start early. It feels like the election campaign has already commenced, with Scott Morrison wanting to ‘move on’ from all the errors from the past and present his best face to the public. But this depends on the fine art of the political lie, of which Morrison is happy to contribute to. In 2004, John Howar...

The Prime Minister was reluctant to go to the COP26 climate change conference and it’s obvious to see why. To say it was a diplomatic disaster is an understatement and the more Scott Morrison makes politics all about him, the more he is exposed as an ineffective prime minister who appears to be severely out of his depth. It’s one thing to create a diplomatic problem with a long-term European ally,...

What is Scott Morrison? A brand name? A theme, a hologram, a Prime Minister, an advertisement, a football coach?… or just a person? It’s hard to know, because Morrison reveals so little of who he actually is. But does it really matter? We reveal all in a conversation with Sean Kelly, discussing his brand new book, “The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison”, published by Black Inc. Books. We try to p...

The Plan To Deliver Net Zero is much like the Morrison government: it’s insubstantial, inadequate, filled with political marketing and spin and, ultimately, does very little to act on climate change. It’s all about politics and directed at those people in the electorate who might be thinking about switching their vote away from the Liberal and National parties at the next election, of which there...

The latest opinions polls show Scott Morrison is still on the nose and might have reached the point of no return. It’s currently 46% to the LNP and 54% to Labor in the two-party preferred voting and while it’s always possible for governments to make up ground, it is a difficult task. Morrison is looking panicked and a panicked prime minister will always start rolling the dice more erratically, or...

Recent events in NSW have shown that its Independent Commission Against Corruption is doing its job, despite the protests of Scott Morrison: the Obeids and Ian Macdonald have been sentenced to jail for attempting to embezzle $100 million through a coal mine lease licence between 2007-2009. It was the NSW ICAC which commenced proceedings against these former NSW Labor MPs; and it’s the same NSW ICA...

Scott Morrison has changed his mind and will now attend the COP26 climate change forum in Glasgow. It was obvious Morrison didn’t want to got to COP26 for a number of reasons: it’s all about climate change action, which is anathema to the Liberal–National Coalition; it’s an international meeting where Australia’s embarrassingly poor policies on climate change action – among the worst in the OECD c...

How many times have we been told by conservative business groups in Australia that minimum wages need to be kept low so businesses have more finances to employ more people? And not just minimum wages, but all wages? The only problem is this erstwhile neoliberal pipedream doesn’t actually work and there’s a recent Nobel Prize for Economics out there to prove it’s absolutely false. Since 2013, wages...

The most surprising part of News Corporation’s greenwashing of the Liberal Party is not so much that it’s occurring right now, but the fact that it’s happening so quickly. The Liberal Party – working hand in glove with the Business Council of Australia, and their erstwhile friends at News Corporation – has resisted all action on climate change ever since they returned to government in 2013: they r...

There’s continuing fallout from the broken French submarines deal, and a humiliated country will seek retribution in other ways. Australia didn’t learn the lessons given by China, where the Australian government pressured the WHO to investigate the origins of coronavirus and Defence Minister, Peter Dutton, decided to directly blame China for releasing the virus to the rest of the world. The result...

There’s been far too much adulation from the media for the former Premier of New South Wales, Gladys Berejiklian, who took the decision to resign from Parliament, after the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption declared she is a person of interest in a corruption investigation. Politicians are not rock stars, and journalists are not their groupies, even though that’s how they behave: too c...

It happened quickly but it wasn’t really a shock when the NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, resigned after it was revealed that the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption was commenced proceedings to investigate whether she acted corruptly in the award of community grants between 2012 and 2018. There were many tears and Berejiklian resigned reluctantly, giving the impressive that the ICAC wa...

The United Nations Climate Change Conference – COP26 – is coming up soon, but Scott Morrison is toying with the idea of not attending the event in Glasgow. This is the most important climate change conference since 2015 – and possibly ever – but Morrison isn’t interested, too busy fondling the lump of coal he dragged into federal Parliament, a rock which has become symbolic of his prime ministersh...

Melbourne has had a big week: it’s long suffering populace had to put up with a barrage of abuse from the Melbourne conservative media, a rent-a-crowd protest dressed up like union members and 74-year-old grandmothers attacked the city and, to top that off, they also had a 5.8 Richter magnitude earthquake. Of course, there were union members within the rent-a-crowd but it wasn’t an event organised...

The Labor factions are at it again, this time creating a preselection problem in South West Sydney. Kristina Keneally is a former NSW Premier and sits in the Senate, but if she wanted to continue in politics, she had to be parachuted into the seat of Fowler, which is specifically a back-up-seat when preselection problems arise. It means whoever has been preselected in the seat of Fowler has to sta...

It has been confirmed that the federal government was contacted by Pfizer in June 2020 to provide Australia with 40 million doses – which wasn’t taken up by the government – after months of denying the story and suggesting that everyone else was wrong. There’s two issues here: the constant denials – which continue to be provided by Scott Morrison and the Minister for Health, Greg Hunt – and a deal...

he politics of the COVID pandemic are still being played as hard as possible – at a time when the public craves unity and expecting governments to manage the crisis in the best way possible. It would seem that the Queensland and Western Australian Governments are doing well – case numbers are zero – but they are the governments the media are attacking (as is the federal Liberal Party), while ignor...

The Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, now wants Australia to “live with the virus” and “get out of the cave”. But why the big rush? Essentially, it’s to cover over the mistakes of the NSW Government during this wave of the Delta outbreak, and remove himself of political problems in the lead up to the next federal election. And “live with the virus” is a mantra also picked up by the mainstream media,...

The Delta version of coronavirus has taken hold in Sydney and if the NSW Government doesn’t take action to reverse the tide, the daily case numbers are going to reach 2,000 and it’s an number that is unlikely to be palatable to the electorate. And if it continues to spiral out of control, it’s likely to take hold of the NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, who is now facing pressure to resign. Every h...