Christian Porter's Spot of Bother, Part 2

He's Most Probably Guilty

So a few days ago Christian Porter one on the offensive and claimed he didn't commit an act of rape and he's only met the woman when she was 16 and he was 17. He made a few other ambit claims which at the time seemed neither here nor there so in my naiveté I thought it was prudent to give the guy the benefit of the doubt. 

All of that was predicated on not having read what the actual allegations are, and if we were being strictly principled about it, we would not form opinions without knowing what the allegations were. Quite simply he had denied the rape and then pointed to the presumption of innocence that is standard in the court of law. 

Well, Crikey has come out with an article overnight which details a good deal of what the allegations are, and how they might relate to Christian Porter. The article was penned before Porter's presser so the minister is referred to as 'John Doe'. The woman is described as Jane Doe. Here is a section that contradicts Christian Porter's press conference comments. 

The pair first met in 1986 and again in 1987 in Adelaide when Jane was 15 at a national school competition. The group of students travelling together became close friends, socialising, dancing and studying together.

While the group was close, one friend told Crikey that John Doe had an “arrogant” side to him and as competitions intensified he would become mean.

“[Jane] talked about how she was shocked because she’d imagine that everyone was friendly, and yet the way that [John] was behaving towards it was not as a friend would behave,” she said.

“I think that was the first inkling she had that he was not what she had thought that he was.”

John would make callous remarks at women, Jane wrote. She recalled him saying she didn’t “have the tits” to wear a bikini, and joking that the alfalfa sprouts on her salad made it look like she was “eating sperm”.

But later he would flatter Jane, complimenting her — and himself. According to Jane’s statement, he asked her to iron a shirt he wanted to wear.

“You would make a wonderful wife one day,” he said. He called her “so smart and so pretty”, capable of doing “all the good housewife things”.

At the press conference, Porter made it out that he only met the woman once at the debating competition. He explained that the line comes from the fact that this 'Jane Doe' knew how to iron a shirt and he didn't. It's interesting how he used his own inept male chauvinism at 17 as his defence there, - but it contradicted greatly by what is being described. He knew her, he liked her more than just friends. He knew her enough that he wanted to marry her, - which is to say he wanted to have sexual relations with her - at least that's what is being related. Chalk that one up to motive. 

After dancing in Kings Cross, Jane — who said she was in a dissociative state — agreed to a non-penetrative sex act propositioned by John. Jane wrote that she agreed to the act because she had been hurt by John’s comments about her body. 

He then allegedly violently forced Jane into performing oral sex on him despite her saying no. Jane said he kicked her to the ground and wrapped his hands around her neck.
Later, she said he bathed her thoroughly, dressed her and comforted her as she fell asleep telling her it was “all a bad dream”. 

She said she woke to John anally raping her. He allegedly raped her twice without a condom.
“The only thing that I remember [John] saying to me was that was ‘I don’t want to get you pregnant’,” Jane wrote. 

The next day, Jane said John joked about how the night “might have been different” if he had a condom before referring to his “good Catholic girlfriend” back home.

Great. So he had access to this woman, and therefore the means. This allegation also completely contradicts Porter's own press conference statement where he denied he knew her any more than the realm of the debating competition.   

The description in this allegation is is like something out of 'American Psycho'. It's completely alien to most people with common sense and judgment. 17 year olds with common sense and judgment don't go around getting women drunk and anally raping them. Porter essentially made an appeal to the empathy of most people to imagine themselves at 17, not even remotely likely to rape, and then asked them to take their good judgment and common sense as his own. It's so sickening that he would run that manipulation on the people of this country. 

You can't be asking for presumption of innocence at the same time running a gaslighting operation. We're not taking about what we would have done. We're talking about what he most likely did. 

The crux of it comes down to the believability of the allegation. 

Jane lived with the allegation for 30 years. Feelings of shame and guilt are common in survivors; 57% of victims experience anxiety and fear in the year after the assault.

One male friend, who met her around six months after the alleged assault said Jane spoke about experiencing a “serious and traumatic event” which he assumed to be a form of sexual assault.

“For many years, we’ve had many discussions around many aspects of her being assaulted and the damage that it did without her identifying who it was,” he said.

“At no occasion did she ever contradict herself or was she ever inconsistent.”

Jane had been a high achiever. School captain. Dux. She was incredibly smart, being accepted to school teams earlier than most students and was the “brightest star” out of the school team, friends said.

But Jane struggled, suffering from mental illness and substance abuse which intensified as she went into university. In one study, 45% of survivors of sexual assault reported having a drinking problem in the year before the survey.

“She did go on to experience real challenges with her mental health,” one friend said. They added that Jane believed her mental health issues were linked to her alleged assault. While Jane still worked and studied, friends say she never had a career of longevity or finished her PhD.

After seeking counselling from both a psychologist and a psychiatrist in 2019, Jane decided to make her allegations public. She reached out to friends who were around her in 1988. These messages, sent between 2018 and 2019, have been seen by Crikey. The three friends Crikey spoke to reject the idea that the memory could be false.

“The level of ancillary detail … the sidebars and the interpersonal things that she commented on, some of them I know to be true and some of them ring very true,” one friend said.

The three friends Crikey spoke to said Jane was determined and resolved in telling her story. Her parents reportedly only found out about the allegation in 2019 and they do not believe that it is true.

For what it is worth, I believe her. I completely believe this account. If it's Christian Porter's words against the words of this woman, I take the latter. And I do not take kindly to Porter's intimation that her account was not right because somehow she suffered a mental health issue (all while himself begged off work for a couple of weeks to regain his mental health ... p'uh-lease!). That was a cheap shot. 

I think Porter's press conference was good enough to buy a few days' worth of grace while we processed what was being discussed. What has come out contradicts Porter's own statements so greatly, one has to wonder if there's any truth to the denial itself. I kind of think he perjured himself in the court of public opinion by feigning that he hardly knew the woman. This was simply not true by the account of not just the woman, but the people who knew them back then. One can't lie about this fact and then make one's denial stand. 

My opinions here don't really matter. It doesn't affect anything. I just blog to keep track of my own thinking on things. All the same if you're asking me what I think, I think he did it. 

What Now?

As I said in my last entry, ministers have lost their jobs for less. If one is in the Prime Minster's shoes l- hate him or loathe him - he has no choice but to jettison this toxic mess. This is doubly so when there is the other business of Brittany Higgins going on, ensnaring Linda Reynolds with her 'Lying Cow' remark. When you think about it, Reynolds is not the rapist, merely the boss of the victim, who tried to minimise the allegation for political reasons - and she is in as deep trouble as she is. Porter's position is worse in that he is the accused perpetrator of a crime who cannot come close to proving his innocence; worse still, the more we learn of the allegations, the more we're convinced he likely did rape the woman when he was 17. Can Scott Morrison really countenance having this man as his top law official? 

The problem of course is the Morrison is sitting on a one seat majority, with the departure of climate-change-denying-Anti-vax-Anti-mask-Trumpist-nutjob Craig Kelly from the Liberal Party. The election that brought this sorry government back was May 2019, so we're looking at latest May 2021 as the election date. Presumably Morrison's play is to make it to later this year and use the COVID-19 vaccine and management of the pandemic in Australia as his ticket for reelection but you have to wonder if he's going to make it that far. So like it or not we're marching into an election year with a lot to process. A lot of it is exactly the women problem the Liberal Party has.

If you conducted a vox pop on any street in Australia today, how many people would be able to tell you the name of Australia’s Minister for Women? Just about nobody. Because Marise Payne has done just about nothing. Move on. Zap. Forget.

Even after these torrid and shocking weeks with accusations of rape against a Liberal staff member and a Liberal cabinet minister, senior Liberal men do not think their grip on power is under threat. These controversies might increase the Labor Party’s winning margins in seats they already hold, but are not powerful enough to cost the Coalition any of their seats, they assert.

This has the whiff of hubris. It’s true that Scott Morrison’s approval rating is strong, in the 60s. This is a result of his handling of the pandemic and the recession. But it’s also true that nothing has budged the critical measure – voting intentions.

The voting intentions have not moved. The electorate is split roughly 50-50. So maybe Morrison intends to just ride it all out, pretend nothing's happened. Except right now, Morrison seems to be presiding over a Land of Rape. Things are absolutely, decidedly totally not fine - the house is on fire when it comes to topic of women's safety, and right now the fire is burning down the authority in the House of Representatives. If he doesn't do anything, Morrison may as well be anointing himself rapist-in-chief. 

The thing is, as of now, Christian Porter can just fuck off. There's no upside to the man in terms of policy, politics or legislature. There's no coming back from this allegation. He can't have moral authority as the top law official of Australia while the allegation remains - and it will remain by dint of the woman's suicide. Luckily for Porter he won't see the inside of Prison. 

So he's done. The only questions are how soon will Scomo wake up to this dire reality and how far will he be punting Porter. 

News That's Fit To Punt - 01/Aug/2016

The Rudd Rejection

It's already a fiasco, but this business of the Coalition Government not nominating Kevin Rudd to run for Ban-Ki Moon's office of Secretary General of the UN is already spinning wayward.

Kevin Rudd says he was told he had Malcolm Turnbull's strong support for his bid for the top job at the United Nations before the Prime Minister suddenly reneged on that commitment, according to private letters from Mr Rudd to Mr Turnbull, obtained by Fairfax Media.

In an explosive new development in the aftermath of the Turnbull government's official rejection of Mr Rudd's request for endorsement to run for the post of secretary-general of the United Nations, Mr Rudd has released letters, which, while only showing one side, suggest that agreements had been reached to support the Rudd bid, but that this support was suddenly withdrawn on May 1, just days before the election was called.

This is quite awkward.
Over the weekend, Peter Garrett was heard this first concert since returning to being a vocalist, that the world dodged a bullet when Malcolm Turnbull refused to back Kevin Rudd as a candidate. It's a bit cruel but I guess there's no love lost between Rudd and Garrett*.

It's not exactly a great move by Turnbull. Now he'll have a vindictive Rudd on his case and god only knows how that will play out. After all Kevin Rudd can be a spectacular media tart and if he signs up for something like Sunrise again to prefer his political opinions on a regular basis, it mightn't be long before he will actively say things to sway public opinion against the government. Rudd was always going to be better for everybody concerned, outside of Australia.

Anyway, Pleiades tells me this won't be the end of it because Rudd doesn't know how to quit. Not only that he has significant recourse with his international friends. Dr. Geoff Raby has an article in the AFR today that illustrates possible path back for Kevin Rudd. If the election/selection for the UN Secretary General does not conclude before the US election and if Hillary Clinton should win,therein every chance that a President Hillary Clinton might back Kevin Rudd for the job. At which point it's going to be an uneasy phone call for Malcolm Turnbull.

In a matrix of fifty-fifty coil flips, there's a 25% chance Turnbull doesn't have to revisit this issue, 50% chance that the issue remains irrelevant, but a 25% chance that he's going to have to eat crow.   That 25% however is looming larger when you think through the fact that the next Secretary General is being selected in sync with the next US President. The US will moe than likely delay the selection until after the election, and that Donald Trump is (for al his blather) unelectable. That means there is a great probability Malcolm Turnbull will be asked to revise this topic.


* - As a side note, I've been pondering for long time why as a fellow leftist Peter Garrett's stance on things have bothered me over the years. My old working theory was that he was a prat, but that seemed too simplistic. The most accurate representation of his position might be that he is a regressive leftist. Once you understand that about Peter Garrett, the rest of it is rather easy to decode. 

One Seat Majority

The last seat in the Lower House fell to the ALP, which means the Coalition have only a seat majority. One would surmise then that Malcolm Turnbull has no margin for error.

No Coalition MP will be able to cross the floor. Even an abstention would force the Speaker to cast a tie-break vote, creating the appearance of party weakness. Coalition discipline will need to be watertight. 

2212`1`12Coalition figures have been fond of saying that a narrow majority will enforce its own discipline. That's true in the sense that it forces the party to stick together like glue. But on whose terms will it stick together? 

Mr Turnbull's challenge of managing his right flank becomes that bit harder because the handful of lower house MPs who might actually take the rare step of defying party discipline at the point of voting in Parliament will need to be placated down to the last man or woman. 

Those passionate outliers within the party will be empowered by knowing Mr Turnbull cannot afford to lose a single vote.

Well... one would imagine that's a two way street. If the fringy-crazy want to threaten to cross the floor, it would be over a policy that the ALP may actually want, and would a fringy-crazy rightwing nut job MP want to cross the floor just to spite their moderate PM? There can't be that many bills that satisfy both the ALP and the Greens and the fringy-crazy right wing of the Coalition. Not even Bob Katter would cross the floor to do that. It's hard to image that fringy-crazy rightwing MP of the Coalition would be going that far as well, no matter how unhappy they are with Malcolm Turnbull.  

Of course Bob Katter's not happy Malcolm Turnbull hobbled Katter's friend Kevin Rudd's aspirations so maybe therein a scenario where Bob Katter crosses the floor (Katter's already signalled he's not going with the ABCC legislation).

Didn't Last The Week

In the last post I pointed out how untenable the Royal Commission that was announced was, having Brian Martin heading up the Royal Commission, and surely enough he's resigned.

Former Supreme Court judge Brian Martin has resigned as the head of the royal commission into the NT juvenile detention just days after being appointed. 

His replacements have been announced as former Queensland Supreme Court judge Margaret White and, following calls for an Indigenous co-commissioner, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda.

Citing the need for public and stakeholder confidence in the joint Commonwealth-NT inquiry, Mr Martin said that criticisms of him had been "disingenuous" and ill-informed.
"However, notwithstanding the nature of the commentary, it has become apparent that, rightly or wrongly, in this role I would not have the full confidence of sections of the Indigenous community which has a vital interest in this inquiry," he told media in Canberra.

As teens like to say, "sure, whatevs". You have to love people putting up defences of their positions that fly in the face of reality. If it were exactly as he said it was, he wouldn't be quoting, would he? Both things cannot stand and one thing we know for sure is he's not doing this Royal Commission any more. You can't put a man in charge to investigate himself.

The Downside Of Identity Politics

Here's something about a statue going up in Ashfield.

It's the peace statue that is dividing Korean and Japanese community groups, with legal threats issued to a church minister and complaints escalated as high as the Minister for Multicultural Affairs. 

At the centre of the dispute is a statue commemorating the "comfort women" of World War II - the women and girls who were forced into sexual servitude for Japanese troops - which has been imported from Korea by a local Korean community group.

The group - called the Peace Statue Establishing Committee - plans to unveil the statue, which they describe as a "peace monument", at a traditional welcoming ceremony to be held at the Korean Community Hall in Croydon Park on Saturday. 

The statue, which cost $35,000 and was donated by a Korean benefactor, is about 1.5 metres high and depicts a Korean comfort woman sitting beside an empty chair, as a symbol of the victims who have since died.

And so it is that we come to the Comfort Women issue, exploding on the streets of Sydney. Really, we ought to ask, should this issue be played out in Australia? Should it be played out in Sydney?

Now, this statue was meant for Strathfield but was soundly beaten back by a presentation by the Japanese community. The main plank of the rebuttal, so to speak, was that there actually is no mythical girl who was forcibly taken away by the Japanese Army to be a sex slave prostitute. Except this is accepted as fact thanks to the Yoshida Testimony of 1982, as published in Asahi Shimbun. Since then there has been much research on this area to corroborate the Yoshida Testimony, and nobody has been able to corroborate any of it. There has even been a US Senate enquiry into it and the the US Senate recognised that there was no truth to the Yoshida Testimony. Seiji Yoshida himself made statements before his death to the effect that he had made it all up.

Last August Asahi Shimbun finally retracted the Testimony as false, which has led to a class action against Asahi Shimbun for insisting on its provenance for 34 years, providing ammunition for the claims that the comfort women were forcibly taken away by the Japanese government orders. It's been such effective bullshit that people in the west are refusing to give up that talking point, now that Asahi Shimbun has retracted the claim. The new of its retraction and what it means has been very slow in getting around the globe.

So yes, the statue is inflammatory. That's the whole point. It's primarily being put there to offend while proclaiming peace and remembrance or whatever. The people who want to put it up want to do so to stick it to Japan over stuff that happened in World War II. The people who don't want it put up are fed up with South Korea trying to stick it to Japan for an apology and an extra pay out.

Except as of 28th December 2015, there has been a new apology and an agreement to pay the claimants. The terms of the agreement stipulate several things including, this is the last discussion to be had on the topic of comfort women, their recompense, their status and as a bargaining point between South Korea and Japan. Part of the agreement was for the government of South Korea to work with the activist group to remove the original statue placed in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul.

Now, it should be noted that it is against international convention to stick a protest statue in front of another country's embassy, regardless of the cause. We don't do it, the Americans don't do it, nobody in Europe or Africa or the Subcontinent does it, Japan certainly does not do it in retaliation, not even Israel does it to the German embassy.

If the agreement of 28th December 2015 is to stand, the South Korean government has to remove the original of the statue. That's what they agreed and signed upon, and eight months later they're yet to do it. It is therefore in incredibly bad faith (and bad taste) to be sticking a replica of that very same statue in the streets of Sydney proclaiming it to be an act of peace. It's extremely disingenuous of this Reverend Bill Crews to be talking about apologies an peace.

Be that as it may, it should be asked of the Korean community if an equivalent statue ought to be erected in tribute to the Vietnamese comfort women the South Korean Army procured for itself during the Vietnam War.

During the Vietnam War (late 1960’s – early 1970’s) South Korea sent troops to Vietnam in an attempt to keep South Vietnam free from communism. It was reported later that many South Korean troops raped Vietnamese women and committed atrocities such as massacring farmers and aged people, and many others were forced into working as prostitutes for the South Korean soldiers. Many of these women would then later become pregnant and after these mixed Korean-Vietnamese children were born they were shunned by Vietnamese society and their soldier fathers returned to South Korea never to be seen or heard from again. The plight of these women was lost to history and not discussed until the late 1990’s when many of the victims began to speak out against the Vietnam and South Korean governments and demand recognition and compensation. To date the South Korean government has done little to acknowledge the issue but has continued to pursue further financial compensation from Japan for their own comfort women survivors and some say that their actions have become hypocritical and they are using the issue as their own political tool. In fact, South Korea orchestrated with Korean-American’s politically-driven campaign in the U.S. continent against Japan.

Yes, that's right.

I'd be okay with the statue going up in Ashfield if the Korean Community acknowledge what their troops did in Vietnam and build a plaque next to it, mentioning it. I doubt they would - it's all about bullshit nationalist fervour. So unfortunately for the Reverend Bill Crews, there's not much moral high ground going around there.

It's kind of pathetic people are still fighting over this terrain, seventy-one years after the conclusion of World War II, but that's what happens when identity politics is given full rein. 

Even More Reflections On Brexit

Day 3 After Brexit

It's certainly strange that I have so much to write about the Brexit referendum vote even three days after the event. Part of the difficulty in getting my head around it has been just how unexpected the outcome was, given the advantages EU membership conferred upon the UK.

Extraordinary also is the immense buyer's remorse being expressed by those who voted 'Leave' as a protest vote, only to find out they won. This dovetails with the strange report where Google searches for the EU went up after the vote closed, as people sought to find out what they have left. In other news related, Cornwall has sought confirmation that indeed the money they used to get from the EU would be replaced by the British government. This would be a fair cop if you had voted to stay and then against your wish been made to leave. What's particularly rich about this one is that Cornwall overwhelmingly voted to leave.

Northern Ireland is one of those issues that could turn into a disaster. The Good Friday Agreement that brought an end to long hostilities was underpinned by the EU laws and agreements whereby one side got just enough to be Ireland and the other side got be just enough to still be the UK, but there would have to be no border because they were all in the EU. That's now gone. It could very well slip-slide back into the chaos that was the Troubles with checkpoints guns and the lot (would you like some fries with your bombs?).  The horrors long thought to have been left behind in history just might come back - all thanks to this vote.

Nicola Sturgeon has already signalled a second referendum to keep Scotland in the EU which means secession from the UK. It's funny how the last Scotish referendum was argued as a session from the UK, and defeated because of the possibility of being kicked out of the EU. The Flow of ironies never cease.  This may all go to show how referenda in general are  more destructive to the polity than previously thought.

And so the news trickles in.
There was an observation made that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove didn't exactly look too excited by the outcome - more surprised and perhaps like deer in the headlights as history comes charging towards them. After all the unbelievable scuttlebutt is that Johnson might be the successor to Cameron. And Johnson being Johnson he would be aware of how difficult and mountainous the tags would be to actually managed the messy divorce with the EU, and that he would be charged with all the social costs. He would be stepping in to captain the Titanic having steered it in to the iceberg, having assured everybody on board that the iceberg represented no threat, and that the Titanic was unsinkable.
Maybe.

I'm not there; I'm not a citizen; and I sure don't have the vote in the matter, but had I been asked I would have offered remain was a better option. I've been searching my own feelings on this as it has been so unexpected that the Leave vote would win. The more I turn over the morsels of information I can find, the more I'm inclined to think the case for leaving was not made, and perhaps overstated its alleged advantages. Some people might even describe it as being built on outright lies. Let's face it, Nigel Farage was quick to rescind the £350m he was supposedly going to hand the NHS.

Farage might think he is steering the country into his vision of the future, but it's really a nostalgia trip. That being the case, the ultimate bit of the nostalgia trip might object to losing a chunk of her wealth and her realm...

Her Majesty's Role To Play

One thing I had not thought about is what the hell Her Majesty thinks of all this. Yes, as a constitutional monarch, she doesn't get a say in it, but let's face it - she is the Queen. Will she sit idly by and rubber stamp the referendum result into law? It's hypothetical but what if Her Majesty simply does not approve of the measures and refuses to sign off?  This is actually a curious question from a historic point of view.

The Brexit vote has the likely outcome of splitting apart the United Kingdom. And as per speculation during the Scotland referendum last time, Her Majesty would remain constitutional monarch to these countries, some of which will want to stay in the EU, and England which has opted out. The question then is does Her Majesty want to be the Monarch who presided over the breaking up of the United Kingdom? And if not, just how far would she be willing to go to stop it?

Writing as an Australian, I am reflecting on the rather vast 'reserve powers' of the Crown that removed Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister - and while nobody can quite claim Her Majesty had an active role in it (we know she was a sounding board as was Prince Charles), her crown certainly had the authority to make that political action stick. So what happens if the next Prime Minister puts through the bill to ratify the referendum and turns up at Buckingham Palace to have it signed off and the Queen refuses to sign? Or she actively vetoes the bill using her reserve powers? It would be utterly in-democratic, but it would preserve the status quo.

It might be inconceivable but again, from an Australian point of view, this is not a stretch. She likely has the power and authority to (pardon the pun) scotch this whole deal. If she null-and-voids the referendum result, thus keeping the UK in the EU, it would take the sharp edge off Scotland's desire to leave and solve the problem of Northern Ireland and the eventual break up of the realm. It would be a move that would hark back to Charles I or King John with its unilateral authoritarianism, but if Queen Elizabeth II wants to preserve the realm, the she might just have to bring out the bazooka. It may even start a civil war - after all, that was what happened with King John and Charles I - but the Queen as an institution is not the Queen for nothing.

It's hard to say if there is such resolve in a 90year old monarch in the Twentyfirst Century. Her reign has been successful exactly because her thoughts on politics are opaque. We simply do not know what she makes of all this business. I'm not much of a Royal-Watcher. I don't really care about the Royal family at all except as a curious historic artefact, but I do wonder what their household has been like in the last 72hours. I'm sure they would be cussing the name of David Cameron that brought about these terrible circumstances, and then turning to advice on just how much power they still have to stop this thing. Just remember, if her authority can dislodge a Prime Minister in the Commonwealth, it sure can whack some bill that emerges from popular referendum.

Let's just say, if I were a Conservative MP that didn't want Brexit to happen, you may well think that I would be talking to the Palace about such options, "but I couldn't possibly say". The ultimate 1%-er is Her Majesty the Queen, Elizabeth II. In turn, if Boris Johnson is indeed the next Prime Minister, and he really wants this Brexit as advertised, he might well need to have the resolve of Oliver Cromwell rather than the nationalist Ra-Ra of Winston Churchill. We'll certainly see.

The Circus In Canberra

The Political Caste Is Forming

I've written a couple of times here that student politics from the early 80s has been casting a long shadow over real adult politics. Turns out this is a view that's being shared by journalists who watch these people a lot closer than mere mug punters like we can do. Mrs. Pleiades sent in this link by an article by Guy Rundle.

With the appointment of Smith – who was Melbourne University Liberal Club president in the 1980s, before being hired as press secretary and eerie doppelganger to Peter Costello – we have reached the point where all the key roles in both chambers are occupied by former student politicians. These are people who have had almost no job but politics, who went from university scuffles into back offices and then onto government or opposition benches.

Tony Abbott cut his teeth and punched near women’s heads in the cockpit of Sydney University’s late Cold War politics in the 1970s. Bill Shorten rose through the ranks of the Melbourne student Labor Right in the 1980s. Christopher Pyne and opposition leader in the senate Penny Wong tangled at Adelaide University in the same period, and George Brandis floated round Liberal student politics in Queensland. One could find another half-dozen figures in the front ranks who took the same path: a fee-free degree leaving plenty of time for student politics, all-involving clashes for the spoils of office, culminating in the annual National Union of Students conference where enmities and alliances, now of decades’ standing, were put in place.

Among the journalists reporting on them, analysing them, are more than a few who edited or wrote for student newspapers, including this correspondent. Political, personal and ideological battles fought in the confines of cramped student union buildings, fluoro lights and beige floor tiles, the chemical reek of the paper’s bromide camera, meetings run by 20-year-olds with their own copy of Robert’s Rules of Order. It never occurred to me at the time that it was the adult world in miniature, as prologue, but so it is. 

Parliament House, that great disaster, exacerbates this, a student union writ large, self-contained and too far from anything else to make leaving during the day worthwhile. For two decades, this new political situation has been under construction. Now it is here. We have been ruled by political professionals for decades, of course, but even those who started early, such as Paul Keating, went through an entirely different process, in a wider world that was also more testing. What we have now is the bonsai version. And it shows in our politics. 

So it is always amusing to see journalists from this milieu talk about “the political class” as if they weren’t part of it. Or as if there were a class at all. “Class” suggests a social category, a group too broad to know one another. The people we are now ruled by constitute a political caste, quite a different thing – a group small enough for all the principals to know one another, have associations, obligation and affinities stretching back decades, and hidden from wider view.

And that, in a nutshell is the origin story of how our politics got to be so - how to put this politely - fucked up. The worst irony (as I've written before) is that these very people got up on the back from free education offered up by Whitlam, and now that they've found the trough into which they've firmly affixed their snouts, they're busy pulling up the ladders by making university education prohibitively expensive. Think about that for a moment. These people reaped the benefits of a decision, got into a career in politics on the back of this decision, profited by it greatly, and are now busily removing the road that gothic there so there will be no competition.

As Guy Rundle properly points out, this is a caste; these people all know each other from a long way back. And what will become of this caste is that it will create whole families of people who will now run for office in the future, benefited by the ancestral decision to go into politics on tieback of a free education in the small window it existed in time. We will be seeing the beneficiaries of a hereditary political caste, and they will be running our democracy in ever diminishing effectiveness. Which is what we've seen in older countries like England and France but also in Japan and Taiwan.

The recent airing of 'the Killing Season' illustrated how Tony Burke had no particular policy agenda but was willing to throw his lot behind Julia Gillard in order to unseat Kevin Rudd. There was no political principle involved, it was a nudge and a wink and time to round up the backbenchers. The cabinet knew less of what was going on until the coup was fait accompli. Did they oust Rudd because he was genuinely some kind of party outsider? Then who are the insiders? The insiders, as it turns out are these apparatchiks borne of student politics, the career politicos who fined being policy wonks but headed to Canberra for their big payday. It only made sense to machinate against Rudd if it meant a higher pay under Gillard and so they did. Tony Burke didn't spell it out, but it was always a nudge-and-a-wink with these people; and even in being interviewed, he didn't deny it.

They're not in to it for the power anymore. They're into it for the money that comes with power. They might not even care about the impact of the power they throw about in the process of grabbing the money. It's simply not about the policy or ideas. Just look at Sophie Mirabella who is desperately trying to get back in. It's not like she has any policy ideas; she's never had any worth a camel's spit. She just wants to get back in for the money and the perks. In some ways being a Parliamentarian might be the next gold rush, which explains the recent Senate vote which ushered in a candidate from allied (read, preference-swapping) micro-parties.

How does this thing play out in the short to mid-term? An interesting observation made by some pundits in the property sector some months back was that negative gearing because most of these politicians were themselves property investors and so were net beneficiaries. You can bet your bottom dollar that when most of them have paid off their mortgages on there properties, they will magically come to the conclusion that it is time to wind back negative gearing. This would be just one area where the interests of the politicians will speed right ahead of the interest of the economy or for that matter, this nation. And we wouldn't be able to accuse them of corruption because it's not corruption if everybody accepts the practice - an attitude we're discovering is prevalent and entrenched when it comes to perks.

In the mid-term, we will find that the policy wreck created by their collective indifference - and let's not mistake the mock outrage your see in question time as some kind of passionate display of ideas - which will ultimately drive this nation into a ditch. It's not that far off, especially given how quickly Andrew Robb is trying to sell us out to other nations with all these unfavourable 'Free Trade Agreements' that abdicate the sovereignty of our state.

In the long term, they will sell us out so much there won't be any decisions future Parliaments will be able to make. At that point it will become glaringly obvious, un-contestable and fact, that politics is indeed the entertainment branch of whatever rent-seeking-lobby du jour is running this country. And so, this kind of crony capitalist idiocy isn't going to stop even if the Liberals get rid of Tony Abbott as Prime Minister or if the people vote out the Coalition. The ALP will get right back in and it will just continue being a circus. We're really going to have to all get more involved politics (not less) if we're going to stem this tide.