The massive media fail, Morrison censured and Labor ends the year on a high

12/02/22 • 41 min

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The Victoria election was held last weekend and, contrary to what everyone in the media wanted and predicted, it was another crushing defeat for the Liberal Party. It wasn't even close. For the past three months, many in the mainstream media predicted Daniel Andrews had to lose the election; it was going to be very close; there was a surge for the Liberal Party; Andrews was possibly going to even lose his own seat. While there was a 3 per cent swing against the Victoria government – seat wise, it's more or less the same result as the 2018 election: Labor has won twice as many seats than the Liberal–National Coalition. And this was despite the entire media edifice – News Corporation, Seven West, Nine Media, the ABC – fully campaigning against Andrews and the Labor Party, not just during the election campaign, but for the past three years.
Scott Morrison has been censured by the parliament for secretly acquiring five ministries in 2020 and 2021. And while what he did was not unlawful, it’s one of the most bizarre incidents in Australia's parliamentary history: there was no need for him to do this; there was absolutely no need for him to keep it a secret; he hasn’t actually offered any valid explanation for it; it totally undermined the principles of Westminster democracies. The Opposition labelled this censure as a grubby political exercise but it's a situation that couldn't just be left behind or forgotten about. It’s an action that should never have happened and the public needs to keep being reminded about it, so it doesn’t happen again.
The parliament has ended for the year – Labor's industrial relations and National Anti-Corruption Commission bills were passed by the Senate, and these are two massive legislative victories for the Labor government. Anthony Albanese ends the parliamentary year high in the polls, and he was able to relax and go to a Nick Cave concert in Canberra during the week. These moments have to be lapped up because they're not going to last for too long – Kevin Rudd also enjoyed high support six months into his prime ministership in 2008, and Labor occupied every single state and territory government around Australia. Many people at that time said that Labor was going to be in office for at least the next decade or two, but it didn't quite turn out that way. But after seven months in office, the Labor government should be content with its achievements so far.

Previous Episode

Miners attacking IR changes, despicable media in Victoria, and drop the whistleblower charges now!

Industrial relations are once again in the spotlight, with the mining industry and Qantas joining the Coalition in their attacks on the Labor government’s proposed legislation.
And the big sticking points for these large companies is that issue of workers from different companies to collectively negotiate pay rises – but it seems that business just wants everything on its own terms.
It’s the weekend of the Victoria election – and we think that it’s one of the most important state elections for some time – not so much about the result, but the behaviour of the Liberal Party and the mainstream media. A three-year anti-Daniel Andrews campaign that commenced during the pandemic, with all of the media’s anti-lockdown stories, interviewing café owners, gym owners and pub owners about how unfair all of this was, and now filling the campaign with as much hate and bile as possible – we’ve just never seen anything like this in an election campaign before.
The court cases against whistleblowers David McBride and Richard Boyle are ongoing, but the Attorney–General, Mark Dreyfus needs to use his discretionary powers to drop the charges and set them free.

Next Episode

Labor election review, gormless Robodebt, AFP interferes in Lehrmann case, and final 2022 opinion polls

The Labor review of the 2022 election has been released, and it’s a much better read than the reviews from the previous three elections which were all lost by the Labor Party. Of course, Labor did win the 2022 election, and while they’ve highlighted all those things that went right for them, they also outlined all the areas they need to improve on if they want to win the next election and the one after that. The report is titled “Election 2022: An opportunity to establish a long-term Labor government” – so it’s obvious what they’re after — Labor does want to have that winning complacency knocked out of it and wants to be in office for the long term, so it can implement as many of its ideas as possible.
The Royal Commission into Robodebt is continuing and the news is becoming more and more damning for the former Coalition government and for the former Prime Minister Scott Morrison. There is a lot of buck-passing going on within this commission – the former head of the Department of Human Services Kathyrn Campbell keeps saying that she wish she’d taken more notice of the legality of Robodebt, and just assumed that it legal because nobody had said that it wasn’t. This is what happens when you have a compromised public service – everyone assumes everyone else is doing the work, no one takes responsibility, and in the meantime, there’s a whole lot of deliberate incompetence that ends up destroying people’s lives.
And there’s more revelations coming out about the Bruce Lehrmann case – and he was facing allegations of committing rape at Parliament House in 2019 – the first case resulted in a mistrial after misconduct by one of the jury members, and the second case was due to be held in February, but the department of public prosecutions dropped the charges due to health concerns for the complainant, Brittany Higgins. There have been allegations that the Australian Federal Police disclosed evidence they held – including psychological counseling notes from Brittany Higgins – to Lehrmann’s legal term – it seems that there has been a lot of interference in this case – they got involved in June 2021, raising concerns about any possible prosecution – and that was before any charges were laid. The Australian Federal Police has been politicised by the Liberal Party over the past two decades – and there were some suggestions that it was like a private militia for Liberal Prime ministers – but there probably needs to be further investigations into their behaviour.
The final opinion polls for the year have been released, and they both show Anthony Albanese is going everywhere, and Peter Dutton is going nowhere. In the Resolve Poll, the primary vote for Labor is at 42%, and that’s about 10% higher than their election result, and for the Coalition, it’s down to 30% – the preferred Prime Minister metric has Albanese at 54%, and Dutton at 19% – Albanese’s net approval rating is 36% – 60% approve, and 24% disapprove – Dutton’s net approval is minus 14. The Prime Minister and Labor did finish the parliamentary year well, but this is the icing on the cake – their election review suggests that they’re trying to remove as much complacency as possible within the ranks, but it might a bit difficult with an Opposition that’s performing so poorly.