After yesterday’s brilliant speeches by Brittany Higgins snd Grace Tame, today brings a return to the brain-dead political economy that has reached ground zero under the Morrison Government. The searing allegations of intimidation, malpractice, and ethical collapse have been greeted with the usual cover-ups, faux processes and obfuscation.
As a veteran radical centrist, let me assure you that this is exactly what you can expect to continue. The Morrison Government is no better than Donald Trump when it comes to the truth. Anything it doesn’t like is ignored as fake and is snowed with Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
This is now the challenge before the Australian people. A range of legends have spoken truth to Morrison’s power. Even the mind-numbing MSM has been forced to listen. But do not have faith in it. It will move on faster than a rat up a drainpipe when some “influencer” gets their gear off.
The task of cleaning up Morrison’s mess falls to the fringe media and the Australian people.
What needs to be done? Without putting too fine a point on it, first and foremost we need to restore decency to the political economy.
The evil Morrison Government must be voted out. Enabling rape and pillage to run the national parliament is monstrous. This goes way beyond the usual violations of neo-liberalism which systematically encroaches upon the due process of government. It is now personal. The Morrison Government is a criminal conspiracy of greedy carpetbaggers, tribal political nihilists and religious nutcases. A sectarian sleaze cult, full of passionate intensity. Its psychopathic tendencies violate everybody in its orbit, sunders the national consciousness and tears gaping holes in the economic and social fabric.
It has got to go. Anthony Albanese and his Labor Party are very far from perfect but they are capable of restoring decency to Canberra. That’s all we need right now.
In turn, that must take three forms for Albo’s first term.
First, Grace Tame should be made a special minister of state in the incoming government with instructions to deploy her plan for a uniform national regime against child abuse and rape. Such a federal campaign can help bring healing to both state and people post-COVID. Whether Brittany Higgins wants to join in this undertaking is not so clear but she should also be offered a senior role in overseeing the execution of the Jenkins Review in its entirety. If not her, then the Albanese Government should still make this its top priority.
Second, the Albanese Government must install the most powerful independent commission against corruption in the country. As a part of this, it should also undertake donations reform that closes the absurd loopholes and make plain who is buying our pollies. Even better, scrap the donations system entirely and come up with something better and more independent.
Third, Australia needs a national plan. We need to go back to first principles and establish where we want to be not in three years but in 10-20 years after the COVID experience. What national independence do we need from immigration, for the economic structure including manufacturing, resources and energy, and for critical supply chains? It need not be implemented. We simply need an open and honest discussion about it and to determine national priorities. Deployment can come later.
These are only the most basic tenets of delivering government. So that Australians can feel safe in their parliament, they know who is pulling the strings of their representatives, and they understand where we are going as a nation post-COVID.
If an incoming Albanese Government can do these three things with a modicum of integrity, then it will have cleaned up the Morrison mess and have delivered a successful first term of office.
If not, then the Australian people should take matters into their own hands and raze Canberra to the ground.
