From Paul Kelly:
The Turnbull government has moved into a more decisive and bolder mindset and has scored a critical victory this week on a new childcare policy — yet the hostile obstructionism from Labor has intensified with the government now facing challenges that could destroy it.
In many ways the feature of the week is Labor’s arrogance dressed as compassion. It voted against the government’s $1.6 billion childcare package, heavily geared to equity and productivity and delivering benefits to more than one million families. Labor’s willingness to oppose this package as a worthwhile reform reveals not just the depth of animosity in our politics but the growing mantra that no losers can be tolerated outside the better-off.
At the same time Labor signalled its determination to vote down Malcolm Turnbull’s announced changes to section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, warning that Turnbull will license an outbreak of racism in this country. This includes repudiation of the government’s decision to alter the statute so the test becomes Australian community standards or, explicitly, what a “reasonable member of the Australian community” would think.
It is, frankly, hard to imagine a more arrogant and contemptible attitude towards the public than a determination to reject having Australian community standards in the law as the test for section 18C. Why would Labor oppose this and what does it reveal?
…The only conclusion is that Labor is fully committed to the project of identity politics with separate laws, protections and privileges according to the identity of minorities. Labor seems utterly locked into this position. Anyone who thinks this is not a fundamental issue in its own right with the capacity to change Australia — far greater than the mere specifics of section 18C as its symptom — is fooling themselves.
We live in a time when policy principles are being broken down. Self-interested expediency is the only law. Deals and more deals are the only currency. And Turnbull, it seems, has decided he will fight on his feet, not die on his knees.
The real question is how did Paul Kelly, formerly the nation’s leading political economy commentator, develop such poor policy and political judgement?
It’s obvious why Labor is resisting the “reform”. It exposes the government for what it is, completely incoherent, via Phil Coorey:
Turnbull, mustering all the flourish of his barrister past, sold the change as a win-win.
“We are toughening the law by making it clearer,” he said. “This will strengthen the protection of Australians from racial vilification and strengthen the protection of free speech.”
Yet, an edict has gone around to stop talking about it. The issue was the elephant in the room at Wednesday night’s Migration Council annual awards but Turnbull did not mention it it in his keynote speech, let alone use his line about it strengthening protections.
The government enlisted the support of the Senate crossbench to effectively shut down any meaningful scrutiny of the change by limiting a Senate inquiry to just one day – Friday.
The bill will be introduced into the Senate next week with the plan, nay hope, that it will be knocked off by Labor, the Greens and the Nick Xenophon Team.
This ensures the bill will never make it to the lower house where Coalition MPs with real constituents would have to vote for it. The government’s one-seat majority means no one would be able to abstain or cross the floor.
The trouble with the whole cunning plan is once the Senate knocks off the planned wording changes to 18C it will remain Coalition policy that, presumably, it must support all the way until the next election.
This is all the more problematic when the reform’s loudest supporters have familial links to high ranking historical Nazis.
18c reform is not emblematic of Labor or senate intransigence, it’s symbolic of a government that can’t coordinate national interest policy to save itself. To wit, last week it went from “reform” in defense of the “right to be a bigot” on Wednesday, said Do-nothing Malcolm:
“Free speech is a value at the very core of our party,” he said. “It should be at the core of every party.”
To the first bigot that sticks her head up on Thursday, said Pauline Hanson:
“Let me put it in this analogy – we have a disease, we vaccinate ourselves against it,” she said on Friday.
“Islam is a disease; we need to vaccinate ourselves against that.”
To condemnation of said bigot as a terrorist on Friday, said Do-nothing Malcolm:
“If the problem is terrorism, policies like that would only make it worse,” he told 3AW radio. “The object of the terrorist, the Islamist terrorist, is to get the broader society to turn on Muslims at large.
“Their recruiting message to Muslims and Australian Muslims is to say ‘this country doesn’t really want you, you’re not really Australian, they all hate you’.
“Inciting hatred against any part of the Australian community is always dangerous. It undermines the mutual respect that we have in our community.
“If you seek to attribute to all Australian Muslims or all Muslims responsibility for the crimes of ISIL [Islamic State in the Levant], then you are doing what ISIL wants. That is the classic strategy of the terrorist and it has been forever.”
So what is “reforming” 18c which helps authorise just such outbursts? Not to mention courting political alliances with the same bigot and ‘tacit ISIS sympathiser’? How can any misbehaviour be held to account against this hypocrisy?
More to the point, even as it is drawn to race politics like a moth to the flame, the government’s immigration flood is getting ever more out of control:
In lieu of productive economic reform, the Do-nothing Government is stuffing the major capitals with foreign peoples so fast that no macro manager nor city planner has a hope in Hades of coping. This is breeding resentment and building rage across the polity as:
- first home buyers are thrown to the wolves;
- infrastructure groans and breaks;
- the ethnic mix in the big cities transforms at radical speed;
- wages stall and fall as ‘coolies’ flood the labour market, and
- generally, standards of living erode.
It is absolutely no surprise that populist Right parties are springing out of the woodwork. Given the scale of pressures being piled upon the multicultural consensus, the real wonder is how well it has held together under this assault, and that we haven’t yet seen open revolt of some kind. But that does not mean that it will not come. You cannot compulsively stab the social fabric of the country like this and expect it to not tear.
I put it to you that this is not only a government that does not know what it is doing but one that is so personally and institutionally vacuous that it does not have the slightest care.
