Other politics
The Commission into defence and veterans’ suicide
The seven-volume final report of the Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide, with its 122 recommendations, was delivered last Monday.
It has received a great deal of media attention, but so far there has been little comment from those who have had the resources to study it in depth. Even its summary runs to 73 pages!
Ben Wadham of Flinders University and James Connor of the University of New South Wales, writing in The Conversation, have given us a short summary: “Didn’t care enough”: here’s what the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide found.
The commission’s work is not only about the stress of those who have been engaged in combat. In fact veterans most at risk of suicide are those who haven’t been deployed overseas to fight.
That’s why the report’s focus is on the culture and administrative systems in our defence forces. To quote Wadham and Connor:
The defence force is a hierarchical institution with a command and control culture. The rank system is legitimised through the military justice system. Commanders have complete control over their subordinates.
This may be useful in conflict, but it’s exploited negatively in everyday service. The costs of service can be as great as the costs of war.
Organizational rules can be re-written and as the Commission has recommended, a new mechanism of independent scrutiny can be established. But organizational culture is much harder to change. It has its own inertia.
Military service is tough: it has to be. Order and responsiveness are essential. But those very requirements give everyone from the corporal through to the general the power to go beyond those requirements and to make life intolerably miserable for their subordinates. Abuse of that power comes at a huge cost both to individuals and to our defence capability.
What’s up with the Liberals in New South Wales and South Australia?
New South Wales – disorganized and too far left for Dutton
NSW – too far left?
Until it lost office last year the New South Wales Coalition government stood out in areas where Coalition governments are usually found wanting. It had a strong renewable energy program and it invested heavily in public transport infrastructure. The Labor government is now cutting the ribbons of those projects.
The same cannot be said for the Liberal Party’s administrative wing. We still don’t know why, exactly, they failed to lodge nominations for 150 of their candidates for local government elections. We might believe that in a factional battle there was a fight over the nominations, but the SBS’s Madeleine Wedesweiler has a more banal explanation. The staff were overworked and couldn’t get the nominations in on time: The NSW Liberals’ “mind-boggling” council elections drama.
This stuff-up has led to a federal takeover of the New South Wales branch, although it is hard to see how a case of management incompetence should lead to such a drastic intervention. Writing in the Saturday Paper – Dutton intervened to save NSW party director – Mike Seccombe explains at length the branch’s mess, including some poor choices of candidates in the 2022 election. We might recall how Katherine Deeves, obsessed about transsexual athletes, helped independent Zali Steggall hold on to the once blue-ribbon seat of Warringah. Seccombe writes that the “whole affair has exposed once again the deep factional divisions that have been eternally present in the branch”.
(For those without a Saturday Paper subscription, Schwartz Media offers access to one free article a week. And The Guardian’s Paul Karp and Tamsin Rose have a short article describing the main characters involved in the intervention.)
It seems from Seccombe’s article that conflicting ideologies have been only one issue in the din of personal rivalries, blame-shifting, stuff-ups and factional fights. He reports that Liberal insiders from the state’s dominant moderate faction see the intervention in ideological terms, noting Dutton’s appointment of federal director Brian Loughnane to do a snap assessment of the branch, and to recommend a three-person committee to replace the state executive.
Both articles suggest that there has been a takeover of the branch by the hard right, in time for the 2025 federal election. Loughnane doesn’t have a strong public profile, but he has been highly influential as a political strategist for the party. His wife, Peta Credlin, has a much more prominent political profile.
The New South Wales party incurred the wrath of the federal party over its policies on renewable energy. Matt Kean, energy minister in the Berejiklian government and treasurer in the Perrottet administration, incurred the wrath of the federal party and its right-wing media cheerleaders, because of the state’s strong renewable energy policies. The ultimate insult has been his appointment by the Albanese government to chair the Commonwealth Climate Change Authority.
These differences around energy policy are significant. New South Wales is not only Australia’s largest economy; it is also the state with the highest dependence on coal for electricity generation. If coal cannot be saved in New South Wales, it cannot be saved anywhere.
Ideologies alone don’t provide a full explanation. Seccombe quotes an unnamed party source, commenting on the appointment of managers: “If the party’s trying to win back women and younger people, putting in two conservative octogenarians seems like a bizarre strategy”. There is even a credible fear that Loughnane’s temporary managers are proposing to appoint Tony Abbott as branch president.
He’s describing the Liberal Party’s demographic problem, a problem it shares with the National party, and to an extent with Labor. As political scientist Tom Schelling described in his (much misinterpreted) “tipping” middle, many organizations lose adherents in a process that starts at the periphery and slowly moves inwards, until only a small hard core remains. In political parties these tend to be the older and most ideologically flexible.
In a 2022 Conversation article Hunter Fujak of Deakin University wrote about the “terminal trajectory” of party membership. The Liberal Party had about 200 000 members in the 1960s – about one member per 50 Australians at the time. By 2022 it was down to 40 000 members, or about one per 600 Australians. Other old parties are suffering the same decline.
If you add up Fujak’s numbers and make some generous guesses about other parties, your best estimate is that only about one in about 200 Australians belongs to any political party. By comparison China’s Communist Party has about 100 million members, or one for every 14 people. In other words, even though we live in a representative democracy, it could be claimed that China has a political system that is more representative than ours. Of course there are more features of democracy than representation, and there are forms of representation other than party membership, but our old political parties are losing any claim to be representative.
South Australia – even further to the right than Dutton?
SA – too far right?
Out of all Coalition administrations in recent years, the Marshall government, that held office between 2018 and 2022, was probably the most reasonable. But in opposition the state Liberal Party seems to have drifted to the right, and David Speirs, who was opposition leader until he resigned last month, says he considered placing the state branch of the Liberal party into federal administration because it had moved too far to the right, according to South Australia ABC journalists Stephanie Richards and Rory McClaren: Former SA Liberal leader says federal takeover of state division should be “seriously considered” amid surge of “populist ideology”.
Ever since the end of Tom Playford’s long period as Liberal Premier from 1938 to 1965, South Australia has been tough territory for the Coalition. Because its population is concentrated in Adelaide (1.4 million out if 1.9 million) it has never had a National Party. According to research by polling firm Wolf & Smith, reported on William Bowe’s Poll Bludger, the Liberal vote in South Australia is 28 percent and the TPP vote is 60:40 in Labor’s favour.
Federally the Liberal Party holds only one of seven Adelaide seats, and it holds that seat, Sturt, in Adelaide’s eastern suburbs, on a 0.5 percent margin. One of the state’s three non-metropolitan seats, Mayo (the Adelaide hills and Kangaroo Island) is held solidly by an independent, Rebekha Sharkie, with a 12.3 percent margin.
The state party has endorsed Nicolle Flint for the Adelaide seat of Boothby, an urban electorate which Labor won with a 3.3 percent margin in 2022. Flint has held the seat before, but with her deeply conservative views – opposition to same-sex marriage, opposition to renewable energy, and vehement opposition to an Australian head of state – she seems to be particularly unsuited for an electorate in a socially progressive city heading to self-sufficiency in renewable energy.
It’s not clear what the issues are in the South Australian Liberal Party, but it seems to be suffering the same discord as its New South Wales counterpart, manifest in a different way.
Thomas Mayo on The Voice
Thomas Mayo talks about his just-published book, Always was always will be: the campaign for justice and recognition continues, on Radio National’s The year that made me program. He describes the book as presenting a vison for what comes next in the work of achieving recognition and justice for First Nations Australians.
In this 22-minute discussion Mayo gently describes the bitter disappointment felt by people who had worked hard and patiently to achieve support for the Voice referendum. They had prepared the ground and had achieved strong support across the political aisles, but it failed, because, in order to advance their own political ends, a small number of people wanted the project to fail.
In a way that few others do, he calls out this bad behaviour, softly and without bitterness:
So the Coalition deciding to take that proposition that was really quite modest, just as an advisory voice and to turn it into something that scared a lot of Australians, was just a disgrace, and I hope that there’s no reward for that political discussion come the next federal election. I know that there are many other things that Australians think about but who would want a leader that would be so selfishly opportunistic?
His criticism is not aimed specifically at Dutton. There will always be “bad actors” in any political campaign. Those seeking change should help people understand what the bad actors are up to, and that their behaviour is explained by their drive to achieve their own political ends, rather than any consideration of public policy.
Nor does he blame the “No” voters. Their decisions were quite understandable in view of the amount of misinformation and fearmongering to which they were subject.
There are many wounds to be healed, but the work to bring about the outcomes of the Uluru Statement will go on.
You can hear (and see) Mayo on a shorter (5 minute) ABC interview, covering much of the same ground, but without his personal history. And on Schwartz Media’s 7am podcast he talks about the continuing campaign for recognition. He calls out not only the Coalition, but also the Labor Party in government, who have gone to water in their interpretation of the referendum’s failure:
I would rather see some backbone from our government, to stand up to the opposite side that confused and fearmongered last year in the referendum and continues to do so. There is so much truth that is behind standing up against their lies and tactics of intimidation.
These interviews give us an opportunity to hear a public figure engage the community in a discussion characterized by a dignity that is absent in most of our political discourse, while he does not sheepishly refrain from calling out those who are behaving badly.
Oxygen thieves
Here is a sure-fire strategy for an opposition party seeking to create a distraction from the government’s achievements.
- Bring an issue to the table, even if you have to invent one – the government is too concerned with woke issues, the government is letting terrorists into the country, the government wants to appoint CFMEU officials to the Reserve Bank board.
- Allow the government to respond. The more way-out and factually incorrect the issue, the more difficult will it be for the government to respond, and the more clumsy its response will appear.
- Let the press, both the partisan press and the non-aligned press, run with the story.
- When the analysts say “the opposition has deprived the government of oxygen”, you know your job is done.
Dutton didn’t invent this strategy: it’s always been in the toolkit of opposition parties. But for Dutton it’s almost his only strategy. Perhaps that is all he can do leading a party that has a terrible record on economic management and has nothing to offer.
Why does the media, including journalists in the ABC, keep falling for it?
Laura Tingle exposes this tactic in her post Is a lack of oxygen to blame for Australia's perplexing political debates about national security, the census and the economy?.
She mentions the census and the Palestinian refugee issues in this context, with emphasis on the latter, because here was a case where the opposition went too far. In saying “ASIO is not conducting checks and searches on these people”, and suggesting that the government has instructed ASIO to go easy on scrutinizing these refugees, Dutton overstepped the mark. It is outrageously irresponsible for a public figure to suggest for the world to hear that we have weak checks on visa applicants.
Tingle explains that ASIO explicitly rejects these allegations. She also draws attention to ASIO’s comments on those who distort their public statements on terrorism.
This probably refers to remarks by opposition immigration spokesperson Dan Tehan, who last week, on a Radio National interview, accused the prime minister of misrepresenting a statement by ASIO head Mike Burgess about security checks on refugees from Gaza (who cannot leave Gaza anyway). Tehan asserts that the prime minister won’t rule out visas for people who express sympathy for Hamas. Because he repeats the word “sympathy” it is clearly a deliberate choice.
It’s an idiotic assertion to which no-one could give a sensible reply. Most reasonable people would have sympathy for Palestinians in the war zone, many would support Palestinians’ desire for a two-state solution, many would agree that Hamas has tapped into some genuine grievances, but only a tiny minority on the political extremes would support Hamas’s objective of eliminating Israel and approve of the brutal methods they employed on October 6. Burgess made it quite clear that explicit support for Hamas would always trigger an adverse security assessment. We live in a society where people hold a variety of beliefs, but what should be of concern to our security services is the risk that people holding extreme beliefs could move to action on those beliefs. Beliefs alone don’t make one a risk to society.
Tehan may choose to present himself as the slow-thinking country lad, but he is actually one of the few people on the Coalition front bench with a solid postgraduate education. It’s hard to conclude that his use of the word “sympathy” was simply sloppy language rather than a deliberate attempt to confuse and misrepresent both the prime minister and our security services.
Burgess is deliberately vague when he simply says that “people have chosen to distort what I said”, but it’s reasonably clear that he’s referring to people from the opposition.
Tingle notes, however, that the Coalition’s irresponsible treatment of national security seems not to have hurt it politically:
It's perplexing how Peter Dutton continues to get kudos for being the go-to politician on the national security beat, when he has so clearly not just ignored the advice of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, but undermined the agency's credibility.
In any normal time, such a rebuttal of the actions of our alternative prime minister by our chief spy would be a reasonably significant news story.
She goes on to write:
But somehow, it has continued to be reported this week, after an earlier Burgess intervention in an ABC News online piece, as a reflection on the prime minister.
The sure-fire strategy has worked once again. Journalists have taken the bait, and without further consideration have concluded it was a government indiscretion.
From Murdoch to Musk
A family feud is playing out in a courtroom in Nevada. The family is the Murdoch family. On one side is Rupert and his eldest son Lachlan, who from last year has been running the Murdoch media empire, and on the other side are two of Murdoch’s other children, Elizabeth and James.
At stake are the provisions of the Murdoch family trust, drawn up in 1999 when Rupert Murdoch and his first wife Anna divorced. The trust specifies who will have control of the business on Rupert’s death. The case has some elements of a contested will, but it’s not about who gets the house, who gets the car and who gets the dining room table: the Murdoch offspring seem to be well catered-for materially. Rather, it’s about who is going to run the Murdoch media in the US and in the rest of the world, including in Australia. The case has some resonance with the TV series Succession, but the Murdoch family is far more disciplined than the fictitious Roy family.
As it is written, the trust passes control of the media empire to four children – Lachlan, Elizabeth, James (Anna’s children) and Prudence (from an earlier marriage). Rupert wants the “irrevocable” trust altered to favour Lachlan.
If control passes to Lachlan, which would see him continuing in his job, there wouldn’t be much change in the Murdoch media’s hard right line, and its support for populist politicians such as Trump and Dutton. The most loyal readers of Murdoch media, who have funded the empire’s expansion, are people who believe in conspiracy theories, who are attracted to simplistic policies such as tax cuts, tariffs and closure of borders, and who feel threatened by social change, particularly the displacement of a “white” majority.
James, however, would take it in a different direction, more in line with traditional truth-telling journalism. We don’t know the particular reason. Maybe it’s about his dislike of his father’s and Lachlan’s ideology, although that right-wing populist slant may simply be about maximizing profits. It may be that he seeks to avoid the odium surrounding the Murdoch empire. Perhaps as one who has been somewhat detached from the businesses, he realizes, in a way that Rupert and Lachlan don’t, that traditional media doesn’t have a future, and that the empire needs a different business model. Or perhaps he has a stronger moral compass than his father and brother.
This conflict, in all its detail and complete with family photographs, is described by the ABC’s Greg Hassel: Lachlan Murdoch controls his family's media empire, but for how long and at what cost?. It’s also the subject of a three-part series Making Lachlan Murdoch, on the ABC’s Australian Story. The first session covering the build-up of the media empire and Lachlan Murdoch’s early years, including his introduction to Immanuel Kant’s philosophy at Princeton, went to air on Monday.
The broader media story is in a Conversation contribution from Matthew Ricketson of Deakin University and Andrew Dodd of the University of Melbourne: Murdoch to Musk: how global media power has shifted from the moguls to the big tech bros.
It’s a story of a completely changed media landscape. “Under the old regime, press barons, from William Randolph Hearst to Rupert Murdoch, at least pretended they were committed to truth-telling journalism”.
Ricketson and Dodd describe media without journalism, where the only guiding principle is “free speech”, unshackled from any constraints of responsibility. They write:
If media moguls since Hearst and Northcliffe have tap-danced between producing journalism and pursuing their commercial and political aims, they have at least done the former, and some of it has been very good.
The leaders of the social media behemoths, by contrast, don’t claim any fourth estate role. If anything, they seem to hold journalism with tongs as far from their face as possible.
Essential poll on education and economics
The latest Essential poll has a set of questions on education and economic issues.
Education:
We are reasonably in favour (69 percent support) of capping the number of international students “in order to reduce the number of international students using courses as a backdoor to live and work in Australia”. Just over half of us (53 percent) think that the government’s cap of 270 000 international students is “about right”, while 37 percent of us think it’s too high. (Presumably the other 10 percent are vice-chancellors.) Coalition voters are more likely than Labor voters to think that the cap is too high.
There is a set of questions on our attitudes towards international students studying in Australia. Our attitudes are fairly positive. We recognize that they help subsidize local students. But we believe (58 percent of respondents) that “universities should be responsible for the impact of overseas students such as providing accommodation”.
There is a strange question on Australia’s overall intelligence. Do we think “Australia as a nation is becoming more or less intelligent?” with more/the same/less as options. About half think we’re not changing, which is about the only answer that has some credibility. But among the other half, particularly older people and Coalition voters, most people think we’re becoming less intelligent. Is that a judgement on our political choices in 2022? We might speculate how Coalition voters would have responded had we re-elected Scott Morrison.
There is a set of questions on our perception of the quality of education provided by a range of learning institutions. We rate universities and TAFEs more positively than we rate schools and early learning. There isn’t much difference relating to age or voting intention. Men are a little more satisfied with our learning institutions than women, and those with a university degree are more satisfied than those without one.
Respondents are asked to indicate what they think is the most important aspect of our education system. “Basic literacy and numeracy” comes out on top, particularly among older people and Coalition voters. Women are much more likely than men to answer “the health and wellbeing of young Australians”. Unsurprisingly those with a university education give a comparatively high rating to the choice “that students leave with the ability to think critically” – a capacity not the first choice of Coalition or Labor voters (17 percent and 16 percent respectively).
The last set of education-related questions asks for our personal experience of education. Overall we’re reasonably satisfied – but do we know what we might have missed? Older people are less satisfied than younger people, and Coalition voters are more satisfied than other voters. (Do private schools have something to do with this?) Those with a university degree are much more satisfied than those without one. This last finding may simply mean that graduates are satisfied with their degrees because they opened the way to good jobs, without indicating anything much about the quality of education.
Economics:
Respondents are asked to choose which industries, from a list of six, are important in driving Australia’s wealth. The only industry with a poor rating is “arts and culture”. (We need a comparison with France.) Women are more likely than men to nominate “education” and “health and care sectors”. Older people and Coalition voters give high rankings to “mining and resources” and “manufacturing”, and particularly low rankings to “arts and culture”. An unfortunate omission from the list is farming, because similar surveys often result in an exaggerated perception of the role of farming.
Th next question is about support for the Made in Australia policy. It meets with approval: 53 percent approve and 18 percent disapprove, but there are strong partisan differences. Labor voters like it much more than Coalition voters. By region it has most support among inner metropolitan respondents, and less support in outer metropolitan and provincial regions, even though projects are least likely to be located in inner metropolitan regions.
We guessed wrong
Respondents are asked what proportion of electricity on the national grid is generated by renewable energy. We underestimate that proportion: 57 percent of respondents guess that it’s less than 30 percent, when in fact it’s about 35 percent. Older people and Coalition voters are most likely to underestimate the percentage.
Respondents are asked what they believe to be the causes of interest rate rises. They can choose more than one from a list. The main responses are: “Prices going up” – 58 percent, “The federal government” – 44 percent (up from 38 percent last year), “The Reserve Bank of Australia over-reacting” – 37 percent. Coalition voters are most likely to blame the federal government. Homeowners with a mortgage tend to blame the Reserve Bank for over-reacting.
Finally there is a set of questions about people’s attitudes to gender and sexual orientation in the census. Respondents are presented with several possibilities, one of which is for “no questions”, supported by only 25 percent of respondents. There is very little difference in responses by age, gender, or voting intention. Dutton must surely be surprised to learn that three-quarters of Australians are so woke.
Crispin Hull’s search for the Albanese Australians voted for
In a post Wherefore art thou Albo? Crispin Hull describes the paralysis that seems to be gripping the Albanese government.
His government’s policies seem more driven by What Will Rupert Think and What Will Dutton Do than What is Best for the People Who Vote for Me.