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Category: Government

16/11/2022

BUGA UP Nostalgia

16 November 2022

BUGA UP (Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions) was most active fro m 1979-1985, and had a big effect on tobacco and smoking. It was also a high point in the demand for advertising to be responsible for the consequences of its use of its products.

In the end, the advertisers accepted a ban on tobacco to keep the threat of stronger regulation at bay. They cut back on sexism a bit and the movement to regulate them died down. So alcohol, gambling annd junk food ads have survived.

Here is a link to some of the TV programs from that time and a little after.

www.youtube.com/user/BUGAUPTube

15/11/2022

Submission to Inquiry into Online Gambling

11 November 2022

Dr Arthur Chesterfield-Evans

The Internet Problem

The issue of online Gambling is similar to many problems in that online gambling involves an area of activity that is largely beyond the direct control of the Australian Parliaments, or indeed any single Parliament. The internet was designed to be anarchic, and so it is.

Programs to deal with gambling regulation are thus ineffective, but the limited terms of reference of this inquiry suggests that governments are not thinking in terms of what they can do at a systemic and global level and are turning instead to a focus on the individual.

Need for an Industry focus rather than an Individual Focus

It must be noted that where creating public health problems benefits an Industry, the response must be against that Industry. Concentrating on individuals while the Industry markets to the world is a very inefficient strategy. To use a historical example, the Tobacco Industry marketed with ubiquitous ads, sponsorships, product placements and many other techniques, yet wanted medical professionals and school education to be the only techniques used against them, framing the issue as personal choice (and responsibility) and ‘smokers v. non-smokers’ requiring courtesy (and no criticism and restrictions).

This is the situation that the Gambling Industry is in now. They demand to be able to market to the world, but want all harm minimisation programs directed at individuals. They know that this is a winning strategy for them.

What the Federal Government Can Do

While it is true that the Australian Federal government has no effective jurisdiction over the internet, and does not licence or control the Hotels, Clubs and Casinos with their poker machines, it has control over Australian media advertising laws and also allocates grants to States. The Federal government could ban all Gambling advertising on electronic media in Australia, and lessen grants to States in proportion to their revenue from Gambling. This would stop the States getting any benefit from gambling revenue, which they rely on quite highly. Western Australia, which is missing out on Gambling revenue would certainly support this.

The ban on tobacco advertising and sponsorship has set a precedent for action on public health issues, and there was censorship of certain opinions that were antithetical to a national COVID strategy, so the idea of a ban on Gambling advertising is not new or radical. VicHealth also replaced tobacco advertising with ads for healthy lifestyles and anti-Gambling advertising could replace ads for Gambling. The protest group, BUGA UP (Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions) in the 1980s used satire of tobacco advertising to sharpen the focus on the Tobacco Industry’s absurd imagery and callous disregard for the lives of their customers. They won hearts for their Robin Hood approach to the entrenched power of the Tobacco Industry and set the world standard for action against tobacco, because compared to their actions, everything else became ‘moderate’. But less recognised than their billboard campaign was the re-framing of the debate from ‘smokers v non-smokers’ and ‘personal choice’, to a ‘Tobacco Industry campaign to make a profit even though it kills people’. This reframing in the public mind allowed governments to stand up to the Tobacco Industry and forced political parties to eschew their donations (at least publicly)..

Gambling Industry Strategy

The Gambling Industry’s ads are very clever, appearing to take the loser’s side to identify with (usually) him and dangle the prospect of a win, though of course this is statistically impossible in the medium term. They are perverting the idea of ‘mateship’ to a group Gambling session with a cheery comparison of who they are backing as they watch sport. This would be very vulnerable to a satiric response, based on a commiseration as to which mug lost the most and a final comment that ‘gamblers are losers’.

Laissez-faire v. Health

The Federal government is responsible for the health of Australians and with an increasing percentage of health problems being related to lifestyle choices, the government cannot simply ‘leave health to the market’. ‘The market’ will sell anything that makes money irrespective of whether it has good health outcomes or not, so leaving the national wellbeing to ‘the market’ is a highly flawed strategy as the government in the end picks up the tab for all problems. The Federal government should unashamedly promote sales and practices that are good for health and discourage things that are not.

Encouraging good personal decisions

Any reasonable management textbook will say that the best way to manage things is to have good decisions made at the lowest possible level within the organisation. Yet gambling advertising uses distractions and dreams of riches that are statistically extremely unlikely to encourage people to gamble, and thus not use their money wisely. If the ads said ‘Do not contribute to superannuation’, ‘Do not save’, Do not worry if you do not have enough money to feed your kids’, there would be a huge outcry. Yet this is the outcome with a large percentage of gambling money received being from people who cannot really afford it. The social problems created take an immense amount of effort from government and NGO charitable organisations to try to rectify them. Often they cannot. This problem is entirely created because of bad decisions on gambling made by people who the Gambling Industry has conned. It is exactly like people taking up smoking. It was portrayed as a bit of harmless pleasure, but when people were hooked, it did them immense harm. Gambling is the same.

Need for Gambling Research

One the other problems of Gambling is that the research is funded by the industry, so its scope and nature are controlled. The amount of harm that it does is poorly quantified, so that there is little evidence for those opposing Gambling to use in political debate. The lack of evidence and the lack of debate suits the Gambling Industry fine- they are more than happy to continue and extend the status quo. Given that the Federal government is a major player in cleaning up the social problems created by the Gambling, it should insist that there be well funded research on the social consequences of Gambling, and the nature of this research should not be determined by the Gambling Industry. The Gambling Industry in Australia is extremely large by world standards, perhaps the largest in the world apart from little enclaves like Monaco or Macau where the money is retained by the State and the social problems are either ignored or assumed to be manifest elsewhere. The social indices of distress are very high in Las Vegas. It might be said that the Gambling Industry in Australia is like the gun lobby in the US; it is almost unchallengeable. This must change, and the Federal government must initiate the change.

Off-line Gambling

It is interesting that the Clubs lobby is under challenge at a state level. The origin of this is uncertain. There has always been a lobby against Gambling, and this may have been helped by the rapid rise in the inflation rate which is straining the family budget, particularly of disadvantaged people, who are the ones most affected by Gambling losses. It is also no doubt helped by the revelations that the Casinos have happily laundered money for organised crime, by-passing their regulatory systems, and being perceived by organised crime as an easier target than foreign jurisdictions. The public also notice that the Casino boards were well stacked with ex-politicians, who were presumed to be there to smooth the political pathway of the Casinos in their dealing with regulation or (even) enforcement. It might be noted that despite the huge amounts of money being laundered and the findings that the Casinos were not fit to have licences, their share prices have only suffered modestly, showing that everyone knows that eventually their licence will be restored and it will be ‘business as usual’. The public is also well aware that the charade, ‘’I had no idea what was happening’ from the politically connected people at the top, merely leads to a resignation or two, but there is no penalty on the individuals. An aboriginal youth can go to gaol for petty theft, but laundering billions for organised crime merely leads a Casino director to a sojourn in the yacht club. While the major political parties have been very reluctant to upset the Hotel and Club industry, as evidenced by the 20 year delay in introducing smoke-free indoor air legislation, the rise of the Teal candidates threatening once safe seats, has pressured the major political parties to take a more ethical stance, and also blunted the financial advantage that support from the pubs and clubs lobby gives to their campaigns.

Online v. Off-line Gambling

But the final possibility for the pressure on the Clubs and Hotels may have come from the Online Gambling lobby. If it is assumed that people who want to gamble will use what is available, there is a real possibility that the lack of poker machines availability in pubs and clubs may lead to an increase in online Gambling. Supporters of the pubs and clubs are quick to point out that the clubs are non-profit and spend their monies enlarging their premises and providing facilities in Australia, as well as paying at least some tax to State governments. If there were a change towards online Gambling this money would go overseas. This overlooks the social context of gambling. Playing a poker machine is quite different from going online, so there is unlikely to be a direct transfer, even if the online experience is made more similar.

Need for Federal Government Action on all Gambling

The lesson for the Federal government, however, is that Gambling must be discouraged at both the pub and club level, and online at the same time. Both have similarly detrimental financial consequences for the players and punters, though the industries are distinct. From the public’s point of view, it is worrying that the terms of reference of this inquiry neglect that issue of Gambling in pubs, clubs and the TAB, as it suggests that these influences have restricted the terms of reference. The regulation of the internet is also a wider problem, which usually comes into focus with the issues of inflammatory hate speech, medical disinformation, defamation or an aspect of pornography. Gambling for money should be in a similar category to these and discussed in a similar context.

Recommendations:

The Federal Government should recognise that the Gambling Industry and its power is the reason that Australia has a worse Gambling problem than almost any other developed country and the the Gambling Industry has a hold on Australian politics as strong as the Gun lobby in the USA, and with a detrimental effect that could be of similar magnitude.
The Federal government should take an unequivocal stand that Gambling is harmful in that it encourages poor financial decision-making which puts a strain on the whole welfare system, Federal, State and NGO.
The Federal government should recognise that all forms of Gambling need to be discouraged, pubs, clubs, TAB, on-course and online and this needs to be an unequivocal campaign, similar to Quit or for the necessity for vaccination.
The campaign against Gambling needs to be in schools and have both a mathematical component as part of statistics, and a more practical part looking at online Gambling, and the social institutions which encourage Gambling.
The campaign against Gambling must involve electronic media advertising bans on TV and all advertising and sponsorship. It must involve active ads against Gambling as well as merely bans on pro-Gambling ads. It should use satire and be prolonged.
The control of online Gambling should be seen in the context of minimising the harm of the ubiquitous internet, and research on how to lessen Gambling should be pursued with endeavours to lessen other social harms such as child sexual exploitation, bullying, vaccine disinformation, tobacco and vaping advertising and disinformation, hate speech, video games that promote violence and defamation.
The Federal government should fund Gambling research so that the social consequences can be quantified and rational decisions made about the cost-benefit to society. Gambling research should not be neglected, limited, financed and controlled by the Gambling Industry as is currently the case.
There must be support for people who have a gambling problem. Such services need to be publicised, and destigmatised, as happened for those with mental illness. However, individual services must not be a substitute for a more systemic industry-focussed approach.
There needs to be a national register of addicted gamblers to allow better exclusion from gambling facilities. If this were comprehensive, it could be used to prevent addicts losing money online with a caveat emptor for those who took the bets from registered addicts. The credit card companies could be recruited not to allow Gambling to such addicts and not to honour Gambling debts incurred by registered addicts.
The Federal government should consider family support for addicted gamblers in the same way that child support is available for at risk families.

About the Author

Dr Arthur Chesterfield-Evans is medical doctor, who trained in surgery and became a tobacco-control advocate, then an Australian Democrat MLC in the NSW Upper House. He is currently working as a GP.

12/11/2022

Albanese seeks to meet Chinese President, Xi Jinping

12 November 2022

Anthony Albanese has made no secret of his desire to meet the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, or the Premier, Li Keqiang at the current pair of Summits in Cambodia and Indonesia.

There is an ASEAN meeting in Phnom Penh. Australia is not a member of ASEAN, but there is also an East Asian Summit at the same time with major world leaders. President Biden is there, with Chinese Premier, Li Keqiang, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol as well as Ukrainain Foreigh Minister, Dmytro Kuleba, Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov and others.

The G20 Conference in Bali immediately after Cambodia will have both Biden and Xi Jinping.

Albanese wants to get the Chinese to lift sanctions on Australian products. He will have some work to do. Going for him is the fact that he is not Morrison and presumably would not have been so inept as to demand the UN investigate China’s early handling of the COVID crisis that caused such needless offence to the Chinese, but he has stuck with the silly AUKUS submarine deal, which just seemed to be Morrison finding a foreign distraction for his own ineptitude. Albanese has also allowed the US to put B52 bombers in Darwin- surely another silly and needless provocation that he is responsible for.

Here is an excellent analysis of what is wrong with the submarine deal.
www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/opinion/topic/2022/11/12/the-definitive-case-against-nuclear-subs#mtr

10/11/2022

Vaping- A WHO Guide

10 November 2022
The World Health Organisation is trying to lessen vaping, which is now reaching epidemic proportions in young people. The attached article clarifies the tobacco Industry’s gobbledygook, though it is fairly soft on their rapacious marketing.

Social media has allowed the tobacco industry to target children and young people without adults noticing, which is different from the tobacco marketing days, when everyone saw the same ads.

The Industry claims that since vaping is less harmful than smoking, it should be legal, and most importantly that they should not have to prove it is safe. They have achieved this latter, and now because this has allowed them to achieve high sales they have made it hard to ban. They also use a lot of kids marketing to kids, as happens with illicit drugs, to make it harder again.
Of course not very many people use vaping to quit, and it now seems that vaping is a gateway to smoking, and a way of not quitting. But do not expect the Industry to do anything except maximise their profits.
The health interests are ponderously getting their resources together, for a battle that will take a generation or two, if tobacco, asbestos, lead etc are any guide.
www.facebook.com/groups/GlobalTobacco/?multi_permalinks=5906974112658360&notif_id=1668001224984823&notif_t=group_activity&ref

05/11/2022

The Twitter Story- and the bigger subtext

5 November 2022
Elon Musk likes to play in every game. His car company existed on hope for many years, but has at last ramped up production. He is in software, AI, batteries, cars infrastructure with tunnelling and trains, space rockets, investments, and now politics.

Twitter has established itself as the world’s political events exchange platform. A new concept like Twitter, which allows direct person to person contact was a good idea. Naturally if there is to be a conversation, everyone has to be in it, so a monopoly system is favoured if the system is new and is seen to work. So Twitter has become unique and immensely powerful. But the technologies that have everyone able to have an equal voice enable radical and socially damaging perspectives to be aired and publicised, legitimised by their ubiquity. Radical groups can link up with others anywhere, adding strength to isolated opinions and tending to lead to discussions that become even more radical and may lead to action.

So the social effects of the new technologies have created new and effectively unaccountable power structures. The regulation of these can be by government edict, as in China, or left to the corporate owners as in the West. Both these regulatory actions and the lack of them are controversial and many have long term political and social effects.

Now Elon Musk seems to have offered to pay too much for Twitter. He tried to withdraw his offer, but was forced to honour it. Having paid too much, he now wants to cut staff numbers radically. I was under the impression that social and political pressure was making Twitter more responsive to concerns about its social and political effect and its staff were part of an effort to minimise any harm it might do. If this is so, it is likely to be, no staff = no action.

So looking at Twitter as purely a financial entity verges on the absurd, but that is what is happening. And a financial mistake by Musk, and his corrective action in sacking people may have considerable effects. Commentators are already talking about the polarisation of US politics and the rise of violence with the storming of the US Capitol and the easy and unsophisticated attack on Paul Pelosi.

So the subtext of the situation is that an unregulated world market allows the immense concentration of power such that when the world’s richest man corrects what is for him a relatively minor financial error a major world information system is significantly disrupted and may become dysfunctional. (Whether it was considered dysfunctional before is a matter of opinion- it is hard to get an exact understanding of how much power the Twitter information model has).

One of the more ridiculous features of our society is that those with money, or who know about it are assumed to know about everything. They know about money, and have usually specialised in making it to the exclusion of other concerns. Often, it is dubious that they have the faintest idea about the implications of their actions.

Because the world’s economy advisers have allowed the world to become just a market we have the equivalent of elephants in China shops and we wait and wonder which way they will turn. A more cynical view would be that we have a situation where the playthings of the rich can have massive uncontrolled consequences and there are no regulatory mechanisms that have either the will or the power to influence the situation in the public interest.

The jobs of the Twitter employees are the tip of a very large iceberg, and the stories of Twitter’s share price have a much larger subtext. Here is an article from today’s SMH:

Twitter staff shut out as global purge starts
Zoe Samios, Nick Bonyhady

Twitter Australia staff were being locked out of their company accounts yesterday as billionaire Elon Musk’s job cuts hit the local office in Sydney, which employs about 40 people.
Musk told confidants he planned to eliminate half of Twitter’s workforce to slash costs at the social media platform he acquired for $US44 billion ($70 billion) last month.
Local staff in marketing and news curation were shut out of Twitter’s systems after receiving an email signalling layoffs but without any official confirmation that their jobs were being axed. Others were waiting to see if they would still have a job come Monday.
One employee said there was a sense of relief. ‘‘It’s not the company that we joined, and it’s not the app that we all love any more,’’ they said.
Others familiar with the company said the news team, which selects articles on topical moments in the national discourse, is among the largest local units and had about 10 staff. Some communications staff for the Asia-Pacific region have also been locked out.
Twitter’s local public relations representative declined to comment.
Australian staff received an email yesterday morning saying Twitter would ‘‘go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce’’. Staff were to be told whether they still had a job via email by 9am Pacific Standard Time, or 3am AEDT yesterday, but the lockouts started early.
‘‘We recognise that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward,’’ the email, which was obtained by the Herald, said.
The Herald revealed in July that Twitter was closing its Australian office in Sydney, with staff to work from home.
All told, Musk wants to cut about 3700 jobs at San Francisco-based Twitter, people with knowledge of the matter said this week. The entrepreneur had begun dropping hints about his staffing priorities before the deal closed, saying he wants to focus on the core product.
‘‘Software engineering, server operations & design will rule the roost,’’ he tweeted in early October.
Twitter was sued over Musk’s plan to eliminate the jobs, with workers saying the company is doing without enough notice in violation of federal and California law. A class-action lawsuit was filed on Thursday in San Francisco federal court. The federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act restricts large companies from mounting mass layoffs without at least 60 days’ notice.
Security staff at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters carried out preparations for layoffs, while an internal directory used to look up colleagues was taken offline on Thursday afternoon, people with knowledge of the matter said.
Employees have been girding for firings for weeks. In recent days, they raced to connect via LinkedIn and other non-Twitter avenues, offering each other advice on how to weather losing one’s job, the people said. with Bloomberg

01/11/2022

The Queen and I

9 September 2022

I cannot say I ever met the Queen, or that she had a clue who I was, so if you are looking for that, read no further.

I was at the Coronation amazingly enough, as my father went to England to study surgery and I was taken to the parade and was apparently old enough to wave a flag, but not old enough to remember doing so. (No sums please).

A friend from school, whose father was a parson and who was a very decent fellow went to London for life experience and got a lowly place at a respected PR firm. It turned out that the PR firm did the PR for the Queen and he was attached to the small unit that did it. His major boss was promoted to head the whole organisation and the next boss left suddenly and he, at a relatively young age became the Queen’s personal PR agent.

He was there for some years then came back to Australia, as he wanted his kids to grow up as Aussies. He was much admired for his work there and was naturally quizzed at some length about how things worked. He said that the Queen was very hard working and always very thoroughly briefed about everyone she was meeting, both their personal background the political or social issues that they were interested in. He said she was astute, conscientious, kind and decent. But she was not a Pollyanna. She was realistic about people. If they were silly, she would tacitly acknowledge this as she sought a strategy to deal with the situation. He was very discrete about specifics and did not mention that he was rushed back to London to deal with the Royal fallout from Diana’s famous TV interview, but he did let one significant issue slip. He was asked about the Queen’s attitude to Australia becoming a Republic.

You may recall that a majority of Australians wanted Australia to be a Republic but they were split over whether the President should be a figurehead like a Governor-General or Queen, or whether he/she should have executive powers as in the USA. John Howard therefore arranged that Electors were asked on 6 November 1999 whether they approved of:

A proposed law: To alter the Constitution to establish the Commonwealth of Australia as a republic with the Queen and Governor-General being replaced by a President appointed by a two-thirds majority of the members of the Commonwealth Parliament.

This naturally split those who wanted a Republic into those who wanted a President appointed by Parliament and those who wanted an elected President. This carefully crafted split allowed the No vote to win.

The Queen apparently felt that it was inevitable that Australia should become a Republic and that it should stop silly-shallying with it and get on with it as Canada had done. Naturally she did not say so, and my friend, who has since died would roll over in his grave if he knew that I was taking the role of a gossip columnist in writing this.

But I believe this story to be true, significant and a tribute to the Queen’s realism.

My view is that we should have a President who is non-executive, and we need major constitutional change as to how Parliament works at the same time. The latter half may be a hard ask.

But there is no doubt that the Republican debate is coming soon.

01/11/2022

Pressure increases on Governor General David Hurley

8 September 2022

Motions to disallow the Morrison-organised grants to Hurley’s Leadership Foundation have been moved in both houses of Parliament.

Here is an article in Michael West Media.

There might actually be an outcome here…

Royal Favours: pipe and slippers time for David Hurley and Scott Morrison

01/11/2022

Victory of Liz Truss in UK: Style over Substance

7 August 2022

Liz Truss is Britain’s new Prime Minister. A few things are worthy of comment. She was elected by the members of the Conservative Party 81,326 votes to 60,399 for Rishi Sunak.

Prime Ministers used to be elected by their Parliamentary colleagues, which is obviously a lesser number but at least has people doing the job assessing the candidates’ competence. I am not a huge fan of Presidential systems, but the 141,725 Conservative members who were in the ballot are only 0.002% of the UK population and the Conservative party members are 63% male, 58% over 50 and 80% in the top half of the class demographic spectrum. So much for government ‘by the people’.

Her defeated rival, Rishi Sunak, had at least been Chancellor of the Exchequer (Treasurer) and had resigned to force Boris Johnson’s resignation. He was a multi-millionaire in his own right, having worked for Goldman Sachs and being involved in hedge funds. His wife, Akshata Nurty was one of India’s wealthiest women as an heiress of Infosys and worth 690 million. Together they were said to be worth 730 million pounds. He was also dogged by stories that his wife had the money offshore in various trusts and paid minimal tax. (ww.india.com/explainer/rishi-sunaks-net-worth-how-he-entered-uks-super-rich-list-explained-5523793/ ) Some commentators said that his Indian heritage may have been a problem with the Conservative party membership.

It is part of the continuation of mediocre candidates winning in Anglo elections. Trump, Johnson, Morrison, Truss. Something is clearly wrong with our systems. My view as often stated is to go to Swiss-style Direct Democracy. Politicians are part-time and keep their previous jobs, which they return to after the maximum two terms. People can collect signatures to force debate on issues or even overturn Federal legislation with quarterly referenda. Political parties exist as here and the Parliament in similar, but the party hierarchies are much less powerful as there is no long-term career as a politician.

Here is a better summary of Liz Truss than I could have written. It has been in a number of papers and journals:

www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/liz-truss-triumph-style-over-substance

01/11/2022

Want to know about high energy prices?

4 September 2022

It is about market failure. When public power utilities were privatised a market was set up and power producers could bid into a market to supply at a certain price for each period of time. But obviously if someone bid in at a low price for part of the market, they would then watch as others bid in higher and made more money. So the price to all producers was set at the last bid, so the cheap producers made a lot of money.

There were a few problems. The amount of electricity needed varies widely. Coal fired power is not very flexible-it needs a constant load, cannot be stopped and can vary its output only slowly and within a limited range. When renewables came, solar is only in the daytime, and wind varies, so the system had a problem with ‘stability’- the ability to dispatch power when it was needed.

Another problem was rorting, though no one wanted to talk about this. There were big players who could withhold power so that there was a shortage; the price went up, and then they all cashed in. ‘Imperfect competition’ as economists would call it. No one wanted to build coal plants and there was not enough storage to let renewable energy last overnight or for dull or windless days. So the Morrison government said that gas was a ‘transition fuel’ and more gas plants would be built.

Meanwhile the Australian gas industry agreed to massive export contracts on the assumption that they could frack Australia as the US had been fracked. But the environmentalists realised the harm this did and resisted. So our price of gas went up. So the companies pressured the Albanese government, which is now breaking its election promises and approving fracking. Sorry environment- what is a bit of permanently polluted groundwater and desertification between friends?

Of course years ago, publicly owned utilities run by professional engineers were charged with providing electricity and gas to the public on a non-profit basis. They charged enough to cover their costs with some money for maintenance and future planning. The price was the average price of generation, not the most expensive component. The model worked quite well and could again. The change to a ‘market’ was ideological.

At an international level, the problem is similar, but it all being blamed on Russia, which is only partly true. Naturally in a globalised world, we are also affected by the European gas market, but less directly, especially if we frack to get out of it; which is a very bad solution, substituting a long-term problem for a short-term one.

Here is an international article:

https://eand.co/this-is-why-your-energy-bills-are-going-through-the-roof-cc99e2a59d12

01/11/2022

Bribing the Governor-General?

4 September 2022

The antics of Scott Morrison were bad enough when he was Prime Minister. Since he left two journos, Simon Benson and Geoff Chambers wrote a book, ‘Plagued- Australia’s 2 Years of Hell’, about how he had 5 ministerial portfolios.

There were quite a lot of questions arising out of this.

It was not illegal, which was presumably obvious. Who would pass a law saying ‘The Prime Minister shall not secretly give himself Extra Cabinet portfolios’? It would not occur to anyone that this was possible.

Also ‘Corruption’ seems to be defined very narrowly in law- someone has to make money, usually personally. Corrupt process does not seem to count. When I was in Parliament a whistle-blower, Nola Fraser told me about corruption in SW Sydney Area Health Service. The first question I asked her was, ‘Do you mean someone was taking money, or do you mean that the processes were corrupt?’ She said, ‘No, its not about money, they are just killing people by pushing complaints sideways. They are supposed to be helping people, but they are doing the opposite’. So I helped her and we had an inquiry into SW Sydney AHS. Then ICAC got on the case and had an inquiry that cost more than a million dollars, and said that she had no credibility as she had no evidence of money changing hands. They wasted a million dollars and trashed her reputation because they used their definition of corruption and did not bother to ask hers.

So probably Morrison is not corrupt either. The Solicitor-General did not just say briefly that it was legal, he wrote quite a lot saying in essence that was highly undesirable.

One of the journalists, Simon Benson, was the editor of the Daily Telegraph and must have known about this before the election, but chose to reveal it in a book after rather than in a news story before. In that this would have made a lot of difference to the election and Morrison might have been defeated by even more, it is a decision that frankly bothers me. I knew Simon Benson as the News Ltd journo in the NSW Parliament when I was there. He was a Murdoch man and had nothing but contempt for the cross-bench; an interest in power rather than procedure.

The other aspect is that the Governor-General knew about it and did nothing. In that the 1975 Governor-General was vilified when he sacked Whitlam, it could be argued that Governors- General since will obey their Prime Ministers and not question them. But they are there ‘above politics’ to see that the interest of the Australian people is served, and when the unusual appointments were not announced, the Governor-General should have both known and acted on it. It is strange how little criticism he has had. I wonder if this is because this is being stored up as evidence that we need an elected President rather than a figurehead one when we become a Republic. Those who would criticise the G-G are mostly Republicans.

But now The Saturday Paper has a story by Karen Middleton that Morrison gave $18 million to a leadership program that was suggested by the Governor-General, David Hurley. Hurley is an ex-military man. The military naturally do leadership training and according to two of my nephews who have been in the military do it very well. Various ex-military types have leadership training as part of elite Management Courses which exist commercially. But whether leadership should have a large subsidised program seems dubious to me. It sounds like an elite getting even more resources. Church schools are subsidised and it seems just to be governments paying to increase social inequity. Surely if leaders are going to emerge, they should do so from the rough and tumble of life. The military, private schools and Management seem more than capable of looking after their own.

So what did Hurley want, how indebted was he to Morrison, and did this have any bearing on his response to Morrison’s dubious activities in personal Kingmaking?

www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/post/max-opray/2022/08/15/morrisons-secret-resources-portfolio