View From The Couch - 27/Mar/2016

Propaganda And Nothing But Propaganda

Some days you just don't know what to make of the government's views on the arts and entertainment industry. Other days, it's pretty damn clear what they want from its workers. And so today we find that the immigration department dropped $6million to make a Telemovie about what a bad idea it is to be an asylum seeker from Afghanistan or Pakistan, hoping to trek to Australia by water.

Government tender documents reveal the Department of Immigration and Border protection paid the Sydney-based Put It Out There Pictures $4.34 million to produce the movie. It paid a company called Lapis Communications a further $1.63 million for to promote and advertise it, bringing the total to $5.97 million. 

By contrast, Priscilla cost less than $2 million, Wolf Creek about $1 million and The Castle just $750,000. Even adjusted for inflation, the total budget of all three films works out at about $5.8 million in today's terms. 

Filmed across three countries, the ninety-minute drama tells the story of a small group of Afghan asylum seekers trying to get to Australia by boat. A trailer available on YouTube – which has about 1000 views – shows scenes of asylum seekers talking, arguing and crying in Afghanistan, Malaysia and Indonesia.

I guess the obvious thing about this is that this government views propaganda films as being more important than any film that gets made with government assistance through Screen Australia. When the government has a point to put across through film, it actually has a bit of financial wherewithal to make its point forcefully. 

I know it wasn't intended but there probably isn't a bigger insult to the film makers of this country than a production where the budget provided by the government is bigger than anything it would normally hand out to a local production; where the content is purely political; the funding came out of a department that has zero involvement with the arts and entertainment sector, and the production money went out to a foreign production entity. 

One would think - rather cheekily - that the department of Immigration should have been forced to go through the process every other producer has to go through to secure government funding, and tried to set up its own distribution deals overseas. 

The production also brings up some interesting issue like, who in Australia might have undertaken such a project. I'd imagine the vast majority of film makers are pinkos. Some are even heavily Regressive Left types. There would be a lot of people who would object to this project for being propaganda and for such nefarious intent. All you have to remind people is 'Leni Riefenstahl', and they would've run screaming. As such, the government would have had immense trouble getting any kind of creatives going on in Australia. It kind of illustrates just why it was made out in Afghanistan:

Put It Out There company director Trudi-Ann Tierney declined to be interviewed. However she has in the past had some interesting things to say about her own work, describing her films as "propaganda". 

The former Australian TV executive and actress moved to Kabul to manage a bar but fell into the local TV industry and found herself producing a highly popular soapie, which she wrote about in her book Making Soapies in Kabul. 

In the book she said she was ostensibly head of drama "but in truth I was nothing more than a propaganda merchant". She also says her work was part of the "psychological operations" NATO and its allies used to influence the values and behaviour of its Afghan audience in a way that supported the war effort.

It's all about the war effort boys and girls! There's always more money for that. 

Rejoice, It's Joyce Season

The interesting news is that the "vengeful micro parties" are going after Barnaby Joyce. 

The Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce is to be targeted by "far right wing" micro parties directing preferences against him in the seat of New England, according to the preference expert Glenn Druery. 

Mr Joyce holds the seat by 19.6 per cent but the micro parties revenge for being bundled out of the Senate is expected to greatly enhance independent Tony Windsor's campaign to retake New England. 

Mr Druery said on Friday the right wing micro party candidates would also direct preference against sitting Coalition members in at least 10 marginal seats.

The fun part of the news is that these are "far right wing" micro parties. These micro-parties are presumably for people to whom the current Coalition is not right wing enough. That's right, more right wing than the climate-change-denying', Coal-seam-gassin', asylum-seeker-hatin', gay-marriage-equality-resistin', Johnny-Depp-baitin', cockamamie Barnaby Joyce.

You wonder what the world has come to when a right ole rightwing nut like Barnaby can't rely on the far right wing nut vote.

A House For This Sinodinos

It's truly strange how political operators go about doing things and how money seems to swirl around the things they do.

Key Liberal fundraisers sounded out major donors to the party about chipping in to buy a house for Senator Arthur Sinodinos after the collapse of a potentially lucrative money-making venture. 

The audacious plan originated in early 2013 after Senator Sinodinos relinquished a 5 per cent stake in Australian Water Holdings, a company that later became the focus of a landmark corruption inquiry. 

Fairfax Media had earlier revealed Senator Sinodinos' shareholding in a company that employed Eddie Obeid jnr, the son of controversial Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid.
At the time Senator Sinodonis said that although his shareholding was recorded on his parliamentary pecuniary interest declaration it was not publicly registered with the corporate regulator "because it was on a gentleman's agreement".

How does that even work? Could, say, Terri Butler the current ALP shadow cabinet secretary go to the unions and ask for them to find money to buy her a house? Wouldn't Malcolm Turnbull and his ABCC bill jump up and down and point to such shenanigans as exactly how the unions and the ALP were corrupt? Isn't that what Sinodinos is being accused at this moment? This is some really weird stuff - especially because you see names like Obeid thrown in there, and we know "Obeid" can only mean "corruption" in this part of the English speaking world.

At some point they have to just 'fess up and admit that corruption is corruption is corruption.
And then there's this:

How Deep Does This Rabbit Hole Go?

Here's a doozy. The same ICAC inquiry that dug up the dirt on Sinodinos has also dug up the name of Peta Credlin. Yes, they tried to suppress that name, but it's out in the open now.

The documents were suppressed last week by the head of the Independent Commission Against Corruption after lawyers acting for Liberal Senator Arthur Sinodinos raised concerns they could be subject to parliamentary privilege. 

But the suppression order was lifted on Monday after the speaker of the House of Representatives, Bronwyn Bishop, advised the commission that no claim for privilege would be made. 

The emails reveal that, in March 2011, while the Coalition was in opposition, Ms Credlin used a major donor to the Liberal Party, Brickworks, as part of Tony Abbott's campaign against the carbon tax.

Oh doesn't that look like a bucket of writhing corrupt worms right there? Turns out Lindsay Partridge of Brickworks - who classifies as a Developer - was donating "illicit money" (The Sydney Morning Herald's words not mine BTW) to the NSW Liberals and Federal Liberal Party through back channels. The emails leave a trail of totally awful illustration of how money buys you so much access you get to put words into the mouth of a Prime Minister. 

Frankly, it's ugly and despicable that this is politics in this country, and how we in the electorate simply have to take it. All we do get is to vote for some person who may or may not get into Parliament, and may or may not represent our interests in that Parliament.It's really vague what the vote gets the ordinary citizen. 

The rich on the other hand, clearly get to dictate terms on a daily basis. 

News That's Fit To Punt - 30/Nov/2015

The Limits Of Malcolm

Malcolm Turnbull has been getting some nice pieces written about him. They're easy to write, partly because Tony Abbott was singularly awful in his stint as Prime Minister, but also because Bill Shorten looks a little light weight next to Malcolm Turnbull. This has made Malcolm Turnbull look a lot better than he is capable of being given the precarious nature of his backbench support. When it gets down to it, politics remains the art of the possible, and when your backbench is lobbied heavily by the Minerals Council of Australia - yes, those very same bloody-minded cunts who went after Kevin Rudd - then there really isn't much possible.

And so Malcolm Turnbull backed right off the pledge to stop subsidising fossil fuels. When it got right down the nitty-gritty, too many of his constituents weren't ready to face the future. So much for the tremendous courage and all that. At this point in history, you do wonder whether they really believe there is no climate change or whether they just dig their heels in to keep dying industries alive - and if so, why didn't they dig in harder for the automotive industry?  It's a veritable mystery.

What's more poignant is that as with Kevin Rudd at Copenhagen, Malcolm Turnbull's limit is demarcated by the very limitations imposed by his own side politics. He might believe that Global Warming is a terrible challenge we must face, as with all the other beggar-thy-neighbour moves that the Coalition seems to love, Turnbull is committing us to "me-last" as Australia's mantra. The surrounding rhetoric sounds nice I'm sure, but this is the same dog's breakfast government when it comes down to the crucial aspects of emissions control.

Conservatives Like To Control You Through Your Meal Ticket

I just want to point to this interesting thing in Peter Hatcher's series on the execrable Abbott Government and how it failed most dismally.

In another incident, Credlin was angered and distressed by a column in The Australian by Niki Savva that appeared on October 30 last year. The particular sore point? Savva reported that Credlin had organised a dinner launch for a group to mentor Liberal women staff in Parliament House. The guest speaker at the dinner was Abbott. 

Savva thought it odd that Credlin had not invited the only woman in the cabinet and the deputy leader of the party, Julie Bishop, to the dinner. Relations between the two women had been increasingly difficult. Credlin was unhappy that the Savva column could contribute to the impression that she was trying to freeze Bishop out. 

Credlin sent a text message to the newspaper's editor in chief, Chris Mitchell. He tells Fairfax Media: "For several months she'd been complaining about Niki and the text said 'I've had enough, you have to sack her'." 

Mitchell replied that in 24 years as an editor no political staffer had ever made such a request and that he was shocked that she would ask. 

"Then Abbott got on the blower," says Mitchell. "He rang me about 10 minutes after my response to Credlin. 

"He asked me why I'd object to Peta's request to sack Niki when I had sacked Glenn Milne [an earlier columnist at The Australian] at Julia Gillard's request. I explained to him that that wasn't what had happened." 

Abbott denies asking for Savva's sacking, but Mitchell says that was exactly the interpretation he'd put on the prime minister's call.

Let them eat cake, seems to be the going motto there. It's staggering that the Prime Minister's chief of staff rings up a newspaper and demands somebody get sacked of writing an article that had negative implications. And when she couldn't get her way, the Prime Minister calls and demands somebody lose their job for actually doing their job. Worse still, this was a Prime Minister who presided over more jobs lost than jobs gained, and essentially, he wanted specific people to lose their jobs for being politically unfavourable.

What's particularly nefarious about this is that, not only are they lobbying for somebody to lose a job, they're doing so using the weight of public office, and doing it in a covert manner so that the columnist has no rebuttal - and then they deny it. It's a flagrant abuse of power, to even try this crap. The fact that they expected results, and then covered their tracks by denying it took place tells you well enough that not only are they sneaky and evil, they know they're being sneaky and evil, and are further enlisting sneakiness and evilness to get their little way.

Amazingly, this is the government Australia elected.

No Age Pension For You

Australia's federal budget is in a spot of bother. Something like $50billion will be missing, thanks to the Chinese economy 'tanking'. It's bit of a worry going forwards because that kind of demolishes the old Coalition platform to reduce the deficit to zero by the end o this decade. Given the Federal Budget is roughly $400billion all told, that 50 is 12.5%. Whatever you call that, it's not chump change.

Naturally, this leads to Scott Morrison enthusiastically saying that we can't count on the age pension in our old age any more. I don't know that getting the age pension is a great thing to begin with, but let's face it nobody's going to employ the elderly - that's why you retire. On top of which it doesn't pay great anyway; some of the stories are downright harrowing. So you kind of hope you can kind of shore up some sort of position going into old age, but what Scott Morrison's doing here is stealing from the future to pay for today, and in the process, ripping up old social contracts. It seems like these kinds of announcements are going to abound. They're ding badly, and they need the money.

The bottom line is, the future is going to suck even more than the present, precisely because it's the only place from where this government can steal. In that way, it's somewhat like a bad Terminator sequel.

News That's Fit To Punt - 29/Jan/2015

Everybody Has Advice For The PM

If you screw things up as knottily as Tony Abbott has done in his short tenure as Prime Minister, it becomes something of a sport to offer up advice. The best one for laughs I have seen to date is from Rupert Murdoch tweeting that Abbott should sacrificially sack Peta Credlin as his chief of staff. In other words, in a partnership of a brain and the mouthpiece, the mouthpiece should sack the brain. I guess if Abbott just took calls directly from Rupert all the time, it would save having to talk through Credlin, presumably.

Oddly enough Bill Shorten defended Peta Credlin. Then again, I would too if the opponent is about to sack its worst tactical liability.

Andrew Bolt thought the 'Knightmare' was so bad, it was possibly fatal for Abbott's prime ministership. Of course, on a long enough timeline, all prime Minsters fail and leave office in one way or another, so something will remove Tony Abbott eventually. Perhaps ridicule is more powerful than the sycophantic support of rightwing nut job radio broadcasters. If so, hooray for ridicule!

Tony Abbott's standing is so low, he's been asked not to go up to Queensland for the state election,  by the incumbent LNP Premier himself; I might add it is a premier who is in danger of losing his own seat, and he still doesn't want any 'help' from the Federal branch of his own party. It's so bad NSW ALP strategists think Tony Abbott alone is worth 3-4 seats coming off Mike Baird's Liberal Party majority. The Liberal Party strategists think it's more like 6 seats.

And so, the latest scuttlebutt is that yes-maybe-probably the Liberals are considering alternatives and this is rounding on the usual suspects of Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull. It's so transparent that bookies are taking bets. The problem with all this is of course the Right wing (of a largely right wing party, which is like saying the "glans of the dickhead") won't tolerate Malcolm Turnbull and well, Julie Bishop is - Margaret Thatcher's fine fascist career notwithstanding - a woman, and such a stunt as to installing a woman as a Liberal Party Prime Minister and one not by election at that, is just too Gillard-ian for their own tastes. Let's face it, Malcolm Turnbull probably still hasn't developed any judgment and is liable to run the party into the ground in his own way, the way he did with Ute-gate; and Julie Bishop's best attributes are still the death-stare-denial-of-reality and the moral nihilism that allowed her to defend James Hardie and Big Tobacco together with the strategically acquired Claire Underwood hairdo.

Be that as it may, the cat is surely out of the bag and working the phones, canvasing for votes. Do I bet on equities, bonds, derivatives, horses or do I bet on who will replace Tony Abbott? It's a tough choice. Here's my advice to the PM: If I were Tony Abbott, I would march in to the party room before any spill and announce a Double Dissolution and go to the polls.

News That's Fit To Punt - 08/Sep/2014

ICAC Is Still The Gift That Keeps Giving

This is good. Turns out the tentacles of developers and other business interests trying to directly influence the outcomes of policies through donations and bribes, goes right through the office of Pete Credlin, Tony Abbott's chief of staff. A few days ago, I blithely wrote that we've come to the point where vested interests just walk right in and tell the Government what they want, and the Government just writes up policy the way the political donors want it. It wasn't an ambit claim; it's pretty much borne out in the emails as revealed at ICAC.

The ICAC has heard that Brickworks used the Free Enterprise Foundation, a shadowy Canberra-based organisation, to channel $125,000 in illicit donations to the NSW Liberals for the March 2011 state election.

Since 2009, property developers have been banned from donating to NSW political parties, but it is legal for such donations to go to federal parties.
One of the previously suppressed emails reveals that, on March 1, 2011, Mr Nicolaou sent Ms Credlin an email titled

"Re Carbon Tax" advising that Brickworks was "a very good supporter of the Party."
Mr Nicolaou attached an earlier message from the company's managing director, Lindsay Partridge, which read:

"Paul, Tell Tony to stick to his guns on no carbon tax.
I am running an internal fight with the BCA [Business Council of Australia] who seem to be driven by a few companies who will make bundles out of the tax."

Ms Credlin replied enthusiastically to Mr Nicolaou's request.

"Lindsay provided a great line for Question Time. Do you have a number that I might be able to contact him on and see if he was happy for us to use it … " she said.

I wasn't kidding. The joke is that people keep turning a blind eye to this stuff and saying "we're just good friends." or whatever plausible deniability they can issue. That's the problem with plausible deniability: it breeds contempt faster than familiarity. It's like anything else.

If That Wasn't Skullduggery Enough, There's Always Christopher Pyne

The hung parliament that Julia Gillard presided over was a terribly difficult thing. power hung so close and yet so elusively far from the opposition of the time. Naturally, people would push hard to get things to happen, and perhaps change the very government.

Such intrigue would have been irresistable to the like of Chris Pyne, and so today we find that Chris Pyne offered James Ashby a  job and a lawyer to go after Pete Sipper, the Speak of the House at the time. What a guy!

It's grubby, it's scandalous, and it probably won't bring down this wretched government. Oh well, such is life in the antipodes.

Scotland Might Actually Go Independent
The latest shock poll suggests the Yes vote is getting ahead of the no vote. It's so strange to contemplate what this could mean in practical, financial terms. Can an independent Scotland issue a currency of its own? If so, how does it stop it becoming a basket case currency overnight? How will the independent Scottish Parliament stop Scotland from becoming a kind of economic basket case over night? Wouldn't the wealthy south benefit greatly i it didn't have to financially support the North? Doesn't this suggest that the road of independence might be fraught with terrible risks and pitfalls? Will they be able to negotiate with the EU fast enough to join seamlessly? Can it even be done? What would England say? What happens at the border? Will England set up a customs gate near Hadrian's Wall? All these questions make things incredibly interesting.

Of course, the monarch of the United Kingdom HM Queen Elizabeth II couldn't possibly be countenancing all this with great majestic joy. one imagines she would be fuming hat things are going to be close, let alone, go towards Scottish independence. It's so strange how this is coming about in the way that it is.

Unrepresentative Swill

While I'm On A Roll Ranting About The Coalition Government...

Here's something interesting.

She's offered it only within the confines of the government, but word is Peta Credlin has some world-weary advice for rookie Labor leader Bill Shorten: if you're serious about making Labor competitive again in 2016, you best swallow hard, take a deep breath, and turn your back on carbon pricing. And you best do it now.

It's that simple. Or is it?

That Credlin is Tony Abbott's chief of staff, is enough to provoke suspicion. Indeed, coming from the respected but highly partisan Credlin, such unsolicited advice is just as likely to make the ALP cling ever more determinedly to its carbon pricing commitments like the proverbial … to a blanket.
But some in Labor are beginning to question the longer-term implications of an automatic assumption of staying the course. Ever so quietly, they are whispering ''hold on, let's just think about this''.

One of those is thought to be Shorten himself - the man Abbott described this week as ''nothing if not pragmatic''.

Abbott's super-focused Environment Minister, Greg Hunt, agrees the term ''pragmatic'' was a coded appeal to Shorten's personal exceptionalism - his sense that, more so than his colleagues, he is a realist and will do the political maths pretty dispassionately when needed.

Credlin, of course, knows first hand about the wilderness Shorten has just entered.
As an adviser in the Howard government and then as chief of staff to a succession of leaders - Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull, and finally Abbott - she has seen her share of political failure.

Just for the record, Peta Credlin isn't anywhere near being an elected representative of Australia's constituency. Yet there she is offering unsolicited advice to the new Opposition Leader in the most patronising of ways. But basically she's saying, roll over and play dead or you won't have any shot at winning government. And she says this from her authority of having been chief of staff to Nelson, Turnbull, and Abbott - but hey is that a position you get voted in. Uh, didn't think so.

It says she thinks the Coalition won government on its policy platform when in all likelihood the electorate rejected the riven and fractured ALP government. What's worse is that the ALP allowed it self to be so riven and fractured just by having Tony Abbott saying a bunch of ridiculous things over and over again. But the main point is, if Peta Credlin thinks they won on the back of policies, she is so wrong it's not funny. But this is a good thing because it means they're willing to go to a Double Dissolution, because they really believe in their own bullshit. This is going to be really interesting if it gets to that point.

The Honorable Clive Palmer, Mouthbreather Patrician

It's really difficult to watch Clive Palmer giving speeches because he's such a mouth breather. He sounds like his nose is perpetually blocked, and you start to feel like you're running out of breath, just listening to him.

Anyway, Clive is saying he won't pass anything until he and his ragtag bunch of Climate Change Deniers gets treated like a major party. I guess he doesn't have a problem being described as 'entitled'. He's playing brinkmanship with Tony Abbott knowing full well Tony Abbott needs the balancing block to repeal the "Carbon tax". What's even stranger is that he wants to be reimbursed the Carbon tax already paid by his company. Otherwise, Abbott won't get to repeal the Carbon Tax after his Senators take up their positions in the Senate after June next year.

Now, I don't know about you but this strikes me as a massive conflict of interest. You never saw the Australian democrats make this kind of demand when they had the balance of power - not in the most fey and feckless moments of Cheryl Kernot, or the closet-Liberal moments of Meg Lees, or for that matter the petulant and idiotic moments of Natasha the Stoat-Destrpoyer. Not even Bob Brown made demands like that. Cheryl or Meg or Natasha or Bob never said "I won't pass this legislation unless I get a tax refund on a previously-legitimate tax that I paid."

How is this not a massive conflict of interest? Forget for the moment Clive is saying he's effectively going to block Tony Abbot from governing unless he gets what he wants which is Tea-bagging enough. Forget all those weird-ass expenses MPs have been racking up at the tax payers expense. Clive won't say yes to anything unless he gets a refund for the Carbon Tax.  He wants a freaking ransom!

Paul Keating was sure right about the Senate being unrepresentative swill. I sure as hell can't believe how Australia saddled itself with such a crazy Senate.