November 22, 2024 • 50 mins
We explore the proposed reforms to Australia’s donation laws and ask: who really benefits from these changes? The climate wars rage on, with the latest battle centred on the government’s delayed 2035 emissions reduction targets. Meanwhile, the Albanese government attempts to outflank the Liberal Party with increasingly hardline policies on immigration and asylum seekers. And, the Senate equates a political protest against the King with acts of homophobia, racism, and bigotry, raising critical questions about fairness and media bias in Australia’s political landscape. #auspol
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode of New Politics was released on the twenty
third of November twenty twenty four and produced on the
lands of the Wongle and Wadjuck people.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Welcome to New Politics. In this episode. Donation laws to
be reformed, but who does it actually benefit? The climate
wars are still continuing. This time is over the twenty
thirty five emission reductions targets. The Government tries to outdo
the Liberal Party on immigration and asylum seekers, and the
Senate decide that a political protest against the king is
(00:39):
just as bad as homophobia, racism and bigotry. I'm Di Djokovic,
editor of New Politics.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
I'm David Lewis. An enigma wrapped in a riddle.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Just a reminder. We don't have the billionaire owners or
even the millionaire owners to support us, and that's the
way that we'd like to keep it. But if you
would like to support New Politics, you can do that
Throughreon or substack, or you can make a donation at
newpolitics dot com dot a and all of this is
a good way to support independent journalism direct year, the
(01:22):
federal government is proposing changes to donation laws, and while
any changes to the current system should be welcome, these
ones just do not go far enough. The key change
is to reduce the amount of money that can be
donated by an individual or a single entergy, and that's
to a limit of twenty thousand dollars per candidate each
year and an overall donation cap of six hundred thousand
(01:43):
dollars per year. Candidates will have a spending limit of
eight hundred thousand dollars, and a political party can have
a spending limit of ninety million dollars all across the nation.
The disclosure of funding will be at the end of
each month rather than at the end of the financial year,
and anything above one thousand dollars will need to be
declared down from the sixteen thousand and nine one hundred dollars.
(02:05):
And there's also an increase of public funding from three
dollars thirty per primary vote up to five dollars per
primary vote. Now, some of this might look good on paper,
but it's pretty much tinkering at the edges rather than
wholesale reform. But the bigger problem for me is that
the government just wants to rush this legislation through Parliament,
and it's two hundred and twenty one pages of legislation,
(02:27):
and because the coalition has said it's likely to support
the legislation, it's pretty obvious that these changes favor the
major political parties and not smaller parties in Independence, and
it's also likely to deter newcomers into the political system,
just at a time when we should be encouraging more.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
I'm not even sure we need to encourage more. I
think the movement is such that more are coming in
and this isn't a bad thing, and the bigger party
should realize this. If they're being held to account in
a fair and re way, it makes them better, whether
that's liberal labor, Nationals, Green one Nation, Catter, legalized cannabis,
(03:08):
or the rest of it. Being held to fair and
reasonable account is actually good for everybody. Some of these
reforms seem very good. Having the cap drop from sixteen
nine hundred dollars to one thousand dollars is good, and
you might think are one thousand still high, But you
get all these ten and twenty dollars donations that becomes
a nightmare to administer in a declarative thing. So I
(03:30):
suppose a thousand is fine. Five hundred would be better. Again.
Having shorter reporting time is an improvement. It should be
in real time. Western Kingston Soccer Club donates one thousand
dollars to the local candidate. We should know that straight away.
It might change your opinion on the club. But it
(03:51):
knows too who the candidate is being supported by and
who they're likely to support in Parliament, and will find
that there'll be a surge of donations week before and
a fortnight before the election, so that you won't get
backlash from Oh, Gena Reinhart gave Matt Canavan one thousand dollars,
I wish i'd known that, I would have not voted
(04:12):
for him.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Well, I've got a feeling that it might be more
than one thousand dollars for Matt Canavan coming in from
Gena Reinhart.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
I've kept it low too, you know again, I'm just
pulling at examples here rather than trying to make factual
accusations of impropriety. I'm not doing that at all in
this case. Or if the on the other side, if
the Young Socialists gave one thousand dollars to Anthony Alberanzi's campaign,
which is less likely I think, but still not out
of the question. And hello to all our young socialist listeners. Again,
(04:41):
I'm just using you as an example. The independents are
claiming that they're being shut out of the system and
there's a sense in which they can't know this, and
this is their other complaint, which from the outside makes
a lot of sense. That it's hundreds of pages of
legislation and they've only had two days to read it,
which suggests that there's stuff in there that a lot
(05:03):
of legislators won't like. And Peter Dutton has not said
no to it. It's the first thing he's not said
no to since he became leader of the Opposition. So
if Peter Dutton's not saying no something stinking, I think.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Well that's probably right. And if Peter Dutton is supporting
it will it probably goes to the heart of what
this issue is, and it's about pure politics. It's about
money and it's about power, and this process tries to
accumulate more finances to the major political parties at the
expense of the smaller parties and independent players, and then
the hope would be that more money will result in
(05:41):
more power or more representation for the major parties and
then stop that leakage to the non major parties, and
I think that would be the idea of theory and
in practice, but just based on all the trends that
we've seen over the past few decades where the electorate
is looking for something different in politics and just not
getting it from the major political parties, I'm not sure
(06:03):
that these changes will make that much difference to bucking
that trend away from the major political parties as far
as the primary vote support is concerned. And it's obvious
that these changes are primarily being implemented to deter the
big donors like Clive Palmer, who has donated over two
hundred million dollars over the past couple of elections to
(06:24):
the United Australian Party, which of course he's a part of.
But it's also human nature to try and get around
these changes, and where there is a will, there will
be a way. But I think that while most of
the focus has been on people like Clive Palmer on
the right, it will also affect enterities such as the
Climate two hundred group or donations such as the one
(06:46):
made by Graham Wood back in twenty ten when he
donated one point six million dollars to the Australian Greens.
But this whole process has to be applied consistently, so
there can't be a problem with that. And some of
the independent MPs have said that they just haven't got
enough time to assess the quality of the legislation and
that's a serious problem. Here's the Independent Member for Waringa,
(07:08):
Zalie Stegel.
Speaker 4 (07:10):
We've had months of asking the Minister to show us
an exposure draft, come clean with where the government's going,
what it wants to do, Negotiate with a crossbench on
genuine reform to our electoral process that makes a fair competition,
fair access to elections to everyone, not just the major parties.
(07:32):
But what we have instead is, as I understand it,
that government will introduce the bill on Monday. We are
just getting an opportunity to see it and will force
a vote by Thursday next week in the House of Representative.
That is unacceptable.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
It's actually a large piece of legislation and the main
reason why it's essential for MPs and senator scrutinize legislation
is so that they can weed out any un tended
consequences and then find out ways of improving that legislation.
That's actually part of their job and there's quite a
few loopholes that I've noticed. One is that the funding
limits will reset after each election, which essentially means that
(08:13):
every third year you can reach that donation limit twice
in that one year. And another one is that because
political parties have got state branches, donations that reach the
limit can be made to each of those branches and
then be considered separate donations. So you could make nine
donations at the maximum level to essentially the one political party,
(08:34):
but that would be treated as though you made a
donation to nine different political entities. And the other point
is that these laws won't come in until twenty twenty six,
and they first of all have to be approved by Parliament.
But they're not going to be effect or in effect
until twenty twenty six and will affect the twenty twenty
eight federal election onwards. So there's no real rush for this,
(08:56):
and the legislation should be carefully considered.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Yeah, one wonders why the rush and why the obscur antism.
I don't think they're deliberately hiding it, because they distributed it,
but they're certainly making it hard. Of course, the solution
is fully funded public elections, in which you pay your
I think it's one thousand dollars now used to be
five hundred as a deposit to essentially guarantee that you
(09:22):
can get four percent of the primary vote. If you
get that, you get your money refunded, and then if
you have a certain amount of members you can apply
for funding, and then that funding is capped so that
you don't have the Clive Palmer taking over YouTube, not
that it did him any good. You got one senator
in and that senator was Ralph Babbott, of whom more later.
(09:44):
And it stops that American style influence. And it means
that things like the IPA stop being a fundraising organization
and actually have to come up with ideas to run
better campaigns, which I think might not work out so
well for them, because when they do come up with ideas,
they're uniformly terrible. But it means that on the labor side,
(10:05):
the Fabian Society and the Whitlam Society and those types
of things can actually be more prominent in their ideas,
I mean publicly prominent, and we might start getting better
election campaign because really we haven't had a great election
campaign since maybe Kevin O seven. Everything else has just
scraped over the line and.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
You referred briefly to the disclosure requirements, and generally they
are better within these new proposals, but they're still inadequate.
It really is essential to know that if private money
is going into politics, we need to know where it
comes from, and we need to know that very quickly.
And in that case where legislation is being prepared in
(10:46):
Parliament and being voted on, and there's a lot of
donations being made in the lead up to that legislation
being voted on and passed, we need to know where
those donations are coming from before the legislation has passed,
not afterwards. And the new proposal is for donations to
be disclosed twenty one days after the end of the month,
and that's certainly better than having to wait until the
(11:06):
end of the financial year, but it's still not good enough.
The technology does exist to have real time disclosure or
some kind of centralized online clearing house. Many other democracies
around the world are doing this. In Australia should be
doing this as well. And I think the other factor
is that the government has almost had three years to
prepare this legislation. This should have been released in November
(11:28):
twenty twenty two, so it could have been scrutinized and
put in players for the twenty twenty five election. But
it's been released in the shadows of this parliamentary term,
and obviously that I don't want too much scrutiny of
this legislation. Otherwise they would have released it much earlier.
But generally we should always welcome reforms to the political system.
But this is about one percent of the change that's required,
(11:49):
and it's being released at the last minute. I just
don't think that that's good enough.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
I mean, I suppose points for effort, but it's still
a seamy at the bottom of a report card, isn't
it pretty much When they presented it to Peter Dutton
and he said yes, it was time to take it
away and rethink it. And I know that both sides
are trying to protect their own long held hege of
money over the system, and both sides are being threatened,
(12:16):
I guess by the rise of independence. Suddenly the independence
in the liberal seats are a big threat. Whether that
will translate to labor seats remains to be seen. I
don't see why it can't, but it hasn't happened. Yet
the Greens remain a strange kind of threat in that
they can win seats. But the last lots of election
I have seen their vote rise but spread over several seats,
(12:39):
meaning that they didn't win anything or didn't win very much.
So again, the Greens are worried on this legislation, and
they should be. They require donations like all parties, and
the Labor has the unions, of course, and I don't
want to go through the whole historical reason why Labor
Party has the unions. The Liberal Party has a course,
(13:00):
big business on its side, and the Nationals have the
mining industry on their side, so the Greens don't have
anything like that. And of course, as if the Greens
influence grows, they'll start to get bigger donations as people
realize we can hopefully get some influence here. I think
that if Labor was smart, they'd slow it down a
(13:21):
little bit and bring through the heck's repayments before the
election and leave the legislation for this till after the
next election, when one they'll see who they're dealing with,
and two give everyone a chance to go through and
read it and absorb it and get the chance to
make meaningful and constructive change rather than blast it through
(13:41):
and then in two years time realize that it hasn't
helped anybody.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
This is New Politics with Eddie Jokovic and David lewis
the best podcast on Australian politics and news commentary. You
can support us through Patreon and substance and also find
us at Newpolitics dot com dot au.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
The government has announced that it will reveal emission targets
for twenty thirty five at some point in twenty twenty five,
but it's unlikely that that will be revealed before the
federal election due in May next year, and the Environment
Minister Channel Pilibasik has suggested that there will be delays
because the Australian Greens insisted on a law that requires
(14:44):
future targets to be based on advice from the Climate
Change Authority, and the Climate Change Authority has suggested that
it needs more time to do some modeling based on
the impact of the election of Donald Trump in the
United States. But as far as I'm concerned, this is
the government stone mauling on climate change targets. The Labor
government did pass legislation in twenty twenty two to achieve
(15:05):
a forty three percent reduction of twenty h five levels
of emissions by twenty thirty, and there is also an
overall commitment to achieving net zero by twenty fifty. But
this action, to me, it just seems like it's more
about trying to avoid a climate change war with the
coalition in the lead up to the next federal election.
(15:26):
And it's not like the Trump election victory was a surprise,
you know, not that we would have wanted it, but
in a two horse race in US politics, there's always
a good chance of either side winning, and Trump's attitude
to climate change would have been well known from his
time in office between twenty sixteen to twenty twenty, as
well as what he's been saying over the past year
(15:48):
about dismantling a lot of green policies implemented by the
Biden administration. So the Climate Change Authority should have been
able to do some modeling on either the Democrats or
the Republican being in office in the United States from
next year onwards. But irrespective of that, this just seems
to be continuing the behavior of this labor government. It's
(16:09):
reactive rather than proactive, and it always just seems to
be on the back foot, and of course you do
need to be wary of changing circumstances, whether that's here
or internationally. But it seems that the Labor government is
more worried about being attacked by the Coalition, or they're
more worried about what Peter Dunton might say about climate change,
rather than leading from the front and letting the electorate
(16:32):
know where they stand on climate change. It was a
big issue for the twenty twenty two federal election and
I think it's likely to be a big issue at
the twenty twenty five federal election.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
What the Liberal Party has failed to understand because they
keep pre selecting the wrong candidates, although I will be
fair they've started to put in candidates who have a
better chance of winning, is that the climate is I
think the thing that is most prominent in people's concerns.
(17:04):
We're watching the climate change. I know that there are
those out there who thinks it's a hoax and that
we're misreading the data. I had a guy say, oh,
Cobbin's only zero point six percent of the atmosphere, and
I put it probably too gently to him that if
you have point six percent of alcohol in your bloodstream,
you're not able to drive, and so these minuscule amounts
(17:26):
can make a massive difference.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Well, it's almost like saying, the sea levels are only
going to rise by one or two millimeters over the
next ten years, so let's not worry about that. That's
not much.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
Yeah, no, over whatever. The area of the Pacific is what,
that's hundreds and thousands of milli meters, which.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Yeah, but it's the same sort of thing. A couple
of millimeters rise in the sea levels. Well, that's a
catastrophic effect.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
Oh, absolutely it is. And a lot of people are
noticing this, particularly in the more university educated areas, hence
the safe liberal seats, hence the turnaround of save liberal
seats into independent seats. I know that there's a lot
of interest in some safe labor seats to run strong
independent candidates. It would be interesting to see if that happens.
(18:12):
The point is that the vast majority of the voting
public in Australia is very worried about climate change. We
can see with the how many once in a hundred
years storms have we had over the last five years,
at least three, how many colder winters that don't last
as long, but also hot as summers. Every year we've
(18:32):
broken the record for hottest summer ever since nineteen ninety
or something, but the last too many years have broken
the record for the hottest year on record and the
record has been the year before.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
And that's all correct, of course, but it just makes
you wonder why is the Labor government just so worried
about what the coalition will say about climate change and
what Peter Dutton will have to say about climate change
as well. And in politics, David, you know that you
should never reveal your hand too early, but you do
need to let the public know what you're doing, because
(19:06):
the public, the electorate, they're the ones who actually decide
whether you stay in office or not. And who knows.
The government might actually have her twenty thirty five target
in mind, and the CSIRO they've actually suggested that the
twenty thirty five target should be around a sixty five
percent reduction, and that's according to a combination of environmental issues, economics,
political factors, and also based on the fact that a
(19:29):
twenty thirty target of forty three percent reduction has already
been legislated and that overall that there is a net
zero by twenty fifty is the target goal, and my
feeling is that rather than having a compact with the
public and the electorate, the government just seems to be
having a compact with the coalition. They're more concerned about
(19:51):
what Peter Dutton will say, or what he will think,
or how the Coalition will react to her twenty thirty
five target if it is announced before the next federal election.
This gets back to a point that we have consistently raised, David,
that the Labor government just doesn't seem to have that
confidence in what it wants to achieve in certain areas
and it just gives the opposition and a leader like
(20:13):
Peter Dn't too much respect. Or maybe they don't believe
too much in climate change issues themselves. And you'd probably
have to say that after most of their actions on
the environment over the past two and a half years,
when they've approved so many new coal mines and gas fields,
and greenhouse emissions have actually risen over the past eighteen months,
So who knows that might actually be the case, And
(20:34):
certainly the coalition doesn't believe in climate change issues very much.
All roads for the Coalition, they all lead to nuclear power,
that their answer to climate change is nuclear power. Their
answer to renewables is nuclear power. The answer to local
electricity bills, the answer is always nuclear power. Or build
more minds, or just keep on digging. So it might
(20:55):
be a case where the government is just trying to
avoid an election based on the client it changed wars.
But I just don't think that the Liberal Party is
going to let that happen.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
No, and again I don't understand. I do understand in
a way, but I really don't understand why they're just
not ignoring the Liberal Party and letting it tear itself
apart and rebuild itself instead of seeming to pander to it.
I know that there's still fiery clashes in Parliament and stuff,
but how much of that is theater and how much
(21:25):
of that is a genuine clash of conflicting ideas. But
treating people with more gravity than they deserve doesn't end well.
If Peter Dutton was a substantial intellectual figure of leadership, okay,
that's fine, yes, but he's a laughing stock outside of Parliament.
Despite what the polls say, very few people think he's
(21:47):
going to become Prime minister.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
I guess the other point is that the rest of
the world is moving on in perspective of what the
Labor government does, or Peter Dutton says, or whatever. But
there is a massive energy transition that is taking place
globally and it has been led by China and the
United States, and I think it might be too far
down the track for a Trump administration to pull back
(22:12):
on this, because they too will be left behind and
damaged economically in America. But here we have a little
Australia still arguing about climate change and renewable energy while
the rest of the world moves on. And I think
that's because we have a government that just doesn't want
to be bold on climate change and that's given people
like Peter Dunton a leg up in this debate, and
(22:32):
because he sees a political opportunity to inflict damage on
the Labor government by waging round fifty of the climate
change wars, which seems to have been running longer than
the one hundred Year War. And because of this, the
public interest in Australia just gets left behind. And this
is also in the context of the COP twenty nine
(22:53):
in Azerbaian, which is the annual United Nations Climate Change
Conference talk fest, which seems to be moving ahead at
the pace of a glacier if not slower. And sure
it is better to have a conference on climate change
than not having a conference, and Australia is now jostling
to host COP thirty one in twenty twenty six. But
(23:15):
a lot of it just seems to be window dressing.
We've been following these conferences for some time now. It
just mainly seems to be world leaders saying, yes, we
must do something about climate change, otherwise the world is
going to blow up, and then they just repeat the
same message the following year, and that message is eventually
going to become true that the world is going to
(23:35):
blow up if we don't do anything about climate change.
But that might end up happening a lot sooner than
we think it might.
Speaker 3 (23:42):
In Monty Python's Life of Brian, the People's Front of Judea,
whose worst enemies are the Judean People's Front, continually have
meetings and past resolutions and argue over what the resolution
should say, but they don't actually do anything. And this
feels like a lot of governments response to climate change.
And they can come back from Azerbaijan or wherever, you know,
(24:05):
if it's held in Australia next time, and at the
rate we're going, they'll probably need to hold it at
some waterfront like Burke or Alice Springs and the new
beach that's been formed. There's a lack of political will
because they think there's not a lot of votes in it.
And to be fair, what the Trump election has showed
(24:25):
us as people like the idea of simple solutions. Prices
are too high. Will put tariffs up to China. That'll
show the China he's not realizing that it's going to
put prices up another twenty five percent at least education expensive,
will scrap the Department of Education rather than look at
why it's expensive and what you can get out of
it and are there more efficient ways or different ways
(24:47):
of running a department of education. I guess the thing
is is that climate change requires tough and hard solutions.
It means a change in how we do things. It
means a change to our comfort levels. It means a
change to what a lot of us are used to.
But if we don't do it, there'll be nothing. We're
(25:09):
losing islands in the Pacific, the Indonesian islands that have
gone underwater. There are South Pacific islands that have gone underwater.
We've got to change it before it's too late, and
it may be too late.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
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Substack and at our website New politics dot com dot au.
Speaker 5 (25:43):
Can you see where you come from?
Speaker 6 (25:47):
But unknowmal just watching Flodia stop.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Immigration issues have also been prominent during the week, and
the first issue relates to the cap on international students
and once again this is outright politics and got nothing
to do with the issue at hand. It's more about
the battleground of immigration and zinophobia, which the Coalition is
only too happy to play along with and the Labor
government is happy to sign up and join along with
(26:27):
as well. Generally, international students are good for Australia. It's
good to have a diverse mixture of people within the
university sector. They also become part of the overall community
and it is a good way of providing education as
an export to overseas countries that need it. But the
problem here is that the higher education sector sees international
(26:48):
students as a cash cow and success of federal governments
have decreased domestic funding for higher education. As the funds
from international students has increased, and if there was ever
going to be a cap on international students, well they
should have happened years ago and done on educational grounds
and economic grounds and not having universities dependent on money
(27:12):
coming from overseas. And that was really highlighted when COVID
hit in early twenty twenty. And these are the reasons
why the government should be looking at student caps. It
should have been done a long time ago as well,
not the reasons that we are being given now, which
is essentially to plant the right wing immigration debate, which
somehow leads into housing affordability and other issues that have
(27:34):
got absolutely nothing to do with international students. Now, the
Coalition has said that it won't support this legislation. The
Australian Greens have also said that they won't support it,
but for different reasons. But the genesis of this whole
process is that the Labor government wants to be seen
as anti immigrations, so it prepared legislation that it thought
(27:56):
would get the support of the coalition. But the Coalition
has rejected the legislation so it can continue to blame
the government for not doing anything about immigration levels, and
then continuing to make that link between immigration levels and
housing affordability, which it doesn't actually have a strong correlation with.
And will the alban EASi government ever learned, David, you know,
(28:19):
stopped trying to play politics in an area that the
coalition owns. Just try and do the right thing. That's
the basic rule of governing that they should follow. The
government just keeps being outplaid on these issues. Politically. The
Coalition is never going to support whatever the Labor government
proposes anywhere, and especially on an issue such as immigration,
even when it's according to Liberal Party policy. They should
(28:41):
have just navigated these changes with the Crossbench and get
them passed as soon as possible, but they didn't do that,
and now they've got a big problem on their hands.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
Yeah. I mean, I'll make the point that they will
support the government on things that directly affect them in
a positive material way, such as the electoral reform laws,
but in this case here, there's no way they're going to.
I think the best way is just to ignore them
and to work with the cross Bench, to work with
the Greens, to work with everybody else, and make the
(29:12):
Liberal Party irrelevant to the discussion because they're clearly not
up to having the discussion yet. And while that's the case,
there's no point in discussing it with them. They've got
nothing of value to say, they've got no practical solutions,
and they've got no way of making things right from
the position that they're in, or that the position that
they hold now.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
I think this is also starting to lead into a
bit of policy chaos.
Speaker 5 (29:35):
Now.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
One strategy that governments have is that they wait until
the final few months of the political term, and that's
the stays that we're at the moment and guillotine everything
and then just ran it through Parliament and the opposition
cross bench look at the legislation and I think, oh, well,
that's not worth expending too much energy on, and then
they just wave it through. But for something like this,
(29:56):
which does have major ramifications for the higher education sector, well,
I think there just needs to be more time to
assess the legislation. You know, is the legislation any good,
what's its purpose, what is it trying to achieve? And
just like the donations reform legislation, if it's so important,
why wasn't it introduced earlier? And I think it's also
(30:19):
the government just being outflanked by a terrible Liberal Party
leader and one of the worst Liberal Party runs that
we've ever seen, and that to me takes a special
level of skill to allow that happens. So government has
proposed a cap of two hundred and seventy thousand international students,
which is fifty three thousand places lower than last year,
(30:40):
but it's only around seven thousand students less than the
pre pandemic levels in twenty nineteen, and Dunton has said, no,
that's too high. I'll put it down to one hundred
and sixty thousand. And I can guarantee you that if
the government had suggested a cap of one hundred and
sixty thousand students in the first place, Peter Dunton would
have just said, no, that's too high. I'll put it
(31:00):
down to fifty thousand students. And it'd also repeat what
he said last month about international students.
Speaker 5 (31:07):
When you look at the detail, this is the modern
version of the vote arrival.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
And we've pointed this out before. Labor tries and we've
pointed out this so many times today Labor tries to
negotiate with Peter Dunton, who was always going to say
no unless it's to rework the donation laws so that
the Liberal Party gets more funding from the tax boy.
He is always going to say no, and then they
get surprised when he says no. And there's a perfectly
good cross bench available, you know, which does consist of
(31:37):
the Green's political party if they want to call it that,
and negotiate with them, implement your agenda, get things done,
and not try and negotiate with an idiot who is
always going to say no. And maybe we're the idiots
in all of this, David, that we're just thinking that
this is the better way for the government to negotiate.
But it just seems pretty obvious.
Speaker 6 (31:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
The other thing I think I should point out is
having worked in the higher education system, I was always
a pall at how international students were treated. They were
treated back then, this is before I stopped, just before
the pandemic. They were treated like ATMs with unlimited funds.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
Oh, that that's right. The money was just taken. There
was no additional support offer to international students, no additional
English classes or any sort of academic support provided to them.
Speaker 3 (32:26):
They passed the basic English test, which is great, but
if you were in a humanity subject, the level of
English was just that little bit higher for a lot
of them, and it was up to the lecturers and
tutors to give that extra support to explain things a
lot of them got. Some of them were done for
plagiarism because they'd have to get someone else to write
(32:49):
the essay for them, which of course counts technically as plagiarism,
which would have been avoided had proper support systems been in.
And I'll be fair to the universities the level that
this type of stuff is expensive and there wasn't always
the money to be able to do that. And then
when COVID hit, of course they treated international students appallingly too,
(33:12):
and then wondered why there was this massive drop off
that hasn't quite come back after COVID. China at one point,
not that long ago, was building a new university a week,
meaning that there was less incentive to go overseas to study.
You could study in China and then do your travel
if you so wished. And the bigger universities in particular
(33:34):
were losing millions of dollars a week because you can
only exploit people for so long, and smart people too,
before they realize hold on there are better options and
to blame foreign students on land prices is just insane.
There might be a bit of a bump, and I
don't think there is in suburbs that are accessible to
(33:55):
a university, but you're hideously expensive Lower north Shore or
townhouse is expensive, not because of four kids sharing a
unit in Burward for example. Both again, both parties have
to really sit down and look at things in a
mature way, not in a way that wins them the
political debate on the day.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
There's also another piece of legislation that the government is
trying to force through that's also on the political terrain
dominated by the Coalition, and that's on asylum seeker policy,
where the Government has proposed one of the most draconian
anti refugee bills ever seen. It's known as the Deportation
Powers Bill, and it was introduced by the Immigration Minister
(34:48):
Tony Burke several weeks ago and it has been debated
in Parliament now and essentially Australia can decide that any
country in the world can be an offshore detention center.
It strips away legal rights for refugees, gives the government
the right to overturn permanent protection visas and send people
to countries where they can be persecuted or killed, and
pays those countries for the privilege of doing this. Now
(35:11):
it also contravenes the Refugee Convention that Australia is a
signatory to, and once again the government is trying to
outdo the Coalition on immigration and asylum seeker issues, and
once again it's the race of the bottom.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
Bob Hawk. I have issues with some of Bob Hawk's policies,
particularly the move towards neoliberal economics, but one area which
he was fairly exemplary was refugees. When your prime minister
is tolerant, the rest of the country tends to be
a bit more tolerant. Now, we're not going to stamp
(35:47):
out racism overnight in Australia, but we go close every
seems twenty or thirty years or so, we get in
a government that says, hold on, let's treat refugees like
human beings and as it supposed to be treated. Seeking
refuge is not illegal. In fact, it's the encouragement is
to look after refugees who come to your country. Now,
(36:08):
I know that in the Middle East and in parts
of Asia, it's a numbers crisis. There are so many
refugees and smaller countries as struggling to look after them.
In Australia, we don't have that problem. I know that
at a senior level there's this belief if we open
the border's too wide, that we're going to get millions
of people flogging in. But one, I don't know that
millions of people are going to make it across the
(36:29):
Pacific or the Indian Ocean, and two there's plenty of
other places to stop before then. Most people are just
looking for safe landfall. And even if millions of people come,
then that's part of Australia's burden as a first world
leading G twenty country to look after the poor and
desperate of the world, but to treat people appallingly in
(36:50):
a country that prides itself on the fair go, in
a country that prides itself on its egalitarian nature, and
looking at government policy the last ten or so years
nineteen ninety six, really with maybe a small break with Rudd,
government is not promoting an egalitarian country of the fair
go in any ways. And this is where I think,
(37:14):
speaking more broadly, this is where most people are disappointed
in the labor Party, the population was ready for that
egalitarian that we would treat asylum seated because better, That
we would bring in an amendment to the Constitution that
acknowledged and honored Indigenous people. That we would look after
(37:34):
our poor, that we would look after those who've come
to Australia to try and better themselves, that we would
look after those who had risked everything to show injustice.
And we have signally failed at this because the cruel solutions,
the nasty solutions, the ignorant solutions, are easy, and we've
(37:56):
had governments who have promoted the easy way rather than
led and gone for the hard way. And I think
this will cost governments.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Oh after a while. I think all governments tend to
look the same on certain issues. And obviously the Labor
Government has done some very good things earlier on in
the term, or at least it's try to do some
good things. But I think that it's gotten into the
same trap that most other governments get into. The roles
and actions of government are hard, and eventually it all
(38:25):
just gets a little bit too hard. So to stay
an office, they start to play the political games. They
do various tricks with smoke and mirrors and on this
occasion or on this issue, the Labor government has decided
that it doesn't want to be accused of being soft
on a silence seekers and refugee so it proposes even
more draconian legislation that even the Liberal Party would even
(38:48):
dream of. And then whenever the Liberal Party gets back
into office, which will happen at some point in the future,
they'll make it even more extreme. And where probably just
one or two steps from executing refugee by firing squad.
You know, surely that's the next step. And we've had
twenty six years of rubbish policy on refugees and asylum
seekers because the Liberal Party can easily ramp up this
(39:10):
sort of rubbish and can easily find a very receptive
audience over it to gb and also in cahoots with
the mainstream media that's never going to do any sort
of sensible reporting on asylum seecre issues.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
And that's the big elephant in the corner. We have
a press who prefers simple cruelty to complex humanitarianism.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Oh that's We had one refugee turning up in a
little dinghy a couple of months ago, and there was
a national outrage about one person in this little dingy
arriving on the shores.
Speaker 3 (39:41):
And can you imagine how much of an ordeal that
must have been to get here from wherever they came from.
If you're coming from puppy in New Guinea, it's still horrendous.
Apart from that, everywhere is almost impossible. Coming from Pakistan
or Syria or Jordan is incredibly difficult, and we should
(40:02):
be helping rather than hindering. But we've decided that it's
easier to be cruel, it's easier to be inhumane, it's
easier to be racist. Peter Dutton famously was happy to
welcome South African white farmers when they were in trouble,
all the while stopping Middle Eastern. Now, if we were
accepting Middle Eastern people, fantastic, and we should accept white
(40:25):
South Africans in similar circumstances. You can't choose based on race,
or background or attitude. We've got to find a government
who is prepared to make the harder decisions that improve
all of us, rather than the easy ones that just
improve some of us.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
This is New Politics. Available through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, Audible,
and YouTube, and also available to support it Patreon, Substack
and at our website New politics dot com dot au.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
And just finally there was another issue that arose from
the Senate and there was a censure motion against two senators,
Senators Lydia Thorpe and Ralph Babbitt. But there was only
the one senator who received all the attention. The Senate
censured Senator Lydia Thorpe for her actions against King Charles
last month when she said this and more than just
(41:39):
saying that she was deeply concerned. Senator Penny Wong moved
the censure motion in the Senate and here's what she
had to say.
Speaker 5 (41:46):
Can I say the government moves these motions reluctantly. We
all know both senators are engaging in these behaviors, but
precisely in order to get attention, engaging in actions and
stunts designed to create storms and social media but offering
nothing of substance to improve anyone's life. These are actions
which seek to incite outrage and grievance, actually to boost
(42:09):
their own profiles.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
And this was supported by Senator Simon Birmingham.
Speaker 7 (42:15):
This motion is not about what she said. It is
not about her right to say it or her views
those we defend, but it is about the conduct and
that was undertaken, the disruptive, disorderly, and disrespectful approach that
reflected so poorly upon all Senators and this Chamber and
(42:37):
brought us in to disrepute. That is why it is
worthy and warranted of censure.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
And in response, here is what Lydia Thorpe had to say.
Speaker 6 (42:47):
The colonizing king were to come to my country again,
our country, then I'll do it again and i will
keep doing it. I will resist colonization in this country.
I swear my allegiance to the real sovereigns of these lands.
First peoples are the real sovereigns. You don't have some
(43:10):
random king rock up and say that he's sovereign. Well
not on my watch. White supremacy exists in this country. Now.
To call it out doesn't mean you're a bad person.
It's just truth telling. I'll use the privilege of what
a senator has to infiltrate and bring down the colony.
(43:34):
That's what I'm here for. I'm not here for friends
or votes. I'm here to bring down the colony.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
And the problem here is that it was the one
motion that censured both senators. Rolph Babbitt posted violent and
offensive racist slurs and posted some highly offensive, homophobic and
anti transgender commentary. So the Senate has equated a political
process against the King and match that with the Senator
who we racist, homophobic, anti trans and promotes violence. And
(44:04):
the other issue is that even though Babbitt's behavior was
totally unacceptable and consisted of hate speech, the media focus
on the actions of an Indigenous woman who challenged the
status quo and questioned the role of white Australia and
the British in wholesale land theft, rather than focus on
the racist homophobe. But there's no surprises, really, It's what
(44:26):
we've come to expect from the media.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
At no point did Lydia Thorpe threaten physical harm against
the King. She doesn't want the king as part of
the constitution. She feels that the monarchy has let Australia down,
particularly Indigenous people. She feels very strongly about these and
put it in very strong words. But she didn't say
eat the rich. She didn't say let's set up firing squad.
(44:51):
She didn't call the King any names that might have
suggested to her followers that the King's life had less
value anybody else's. In a democracy, and I know that
there's a lot of people who said I wouldn't have
done it that way, and that's yeah, I probably wouldn't
have either. But I'm not an Indigenous woman. I haven't
walked in Lydia Thorpe's shoes. I can only imagine the
(45:14):
frustration she feels, and to get the opportunity to actually
express that may have been very cathartic for her, and
then she's got to sit through a senate censure from
people who historically would have fairly similar ideas and beliefs
to her. I'm speaking of Penny Wong. We can't expect
much from Simon Birmingham. He's a liberal with particular views.
(45:36):
And again, I haven't walked in his shoes. I haven't
walked in Penny wong shoes, but I've seen their journey
a little bit more, and I struggle to understand why
Penny Wong has I'd have understood if she'd been silent
had she not, but to actually lead that I don't understand.
Speaker 6 (45:54):
Well.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
I guess I do have to go through the formalities
of child in the censure motion, but still equating Senator
Lydia Thorpe with Senator Ralph Babbitt, that to me seems
quite bizarre.
Speaker 3 (46:06):
He was deliberately provocative to a broad section of the
Australian populace. He said in our house, well you live alone, Ralph,
so there's that we use the words, and I won't
repeat the words. I won't dignify them with repeating them,
and then said he's never going to apologize, ended up
(46:27):
deleting the tweet and apologizing. Typical beata male cuck soyboy
NPC behavior if you ask me. But again, I haven't
walked in his shoes. But clearly Ralph Babbitt, who I
think they expected, to remain defiant and make sure he
used those words back right down. Lydia Thorpe has said
(46:50):
she'd do it again if she had the opportunity. Now
she's not standing for Parliament again, so she may never
get the opportunity as a senator again to do it.
But nonetheless, there were two different things that required two
different censere motions if you were going to give a
cent motion. The Lydia Thorpe one was not the same
(47:10):
as the Ralph Babbitt one, and they should have been
done as even on the same day because that made sense.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
And I also think that it's the reaction of the
media where I just totally focused on Lydia Thorpe and
had pretty much nothing to say about Ralph Babbitt. And
that might be because they didn't actually want to highlight
his profile anymore, because that's what he's obviously after. But
I don't think the media would be that moral about it.
It's obvious that it was because Ralph Babbitt is from
(47:39):
the right and the media pretty much agrees with his views.
They're obviously not going to say that, but they pretty
much agree with his views. But someone like Lydia Thorpe
or she's of the left and they've always harassed her
when it comes to issues related to indigenous affairs, and
the behavior of Ralph Babbitt would have been more newsworthy
to highlight how offensive this guy really is, so at
(48:00):
least people could be worn about him, but the media
just totally ignored him.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
Yeah, he's very ignorable, but these things need to be
highlighted to show that. One there's flaws in the Senate
voting system that allows a guy who gets in on
he didn't get his deposit back, or Clive Palmer didn't
get his deposit back, and he's not really fit to
be a senator. He's a nobody who spends more time
(48:26):
talking about how Trump's a great president. And I'm pretty
sure he thinks that there's a fifth Amendment to our
Constitution to stop him incriminating himself, and the second Amendment
for guns. I'd almost bet that that's the case with him.
There's not For those of you who haven't read the Constitution,
we don't have amendments like that in Australia. We just
(48:47):
amend the Constitution. We need less babbitts, and we need
better candidates for the Senate and for the House of Reps.
But that's a whole other issue.
Speaker 2 (49:01):
That's it for this episode of New Politics. Thanks for
listening in, and if you'd like to support our style
of journalism and commentary, please make a donation of our
website at newpolitics dot com dot au. We don't beg plead,
beseech or gaslight you about journalism coming to an end.
We just keep it very simple. If you like what
we do, please send some support our way. It keeps
(49:21):
our commitment to independent journalism ticking along. I'm Edie Jokovic.
Thanks for listening in and it's goodbye to our listeners.
Speaker 3 (49:29):
I'm David Lewis.
Speaker 2 (49:30):
We'll see you next time.
This episode of New Politics was released on the twenty
third of November twenty twenty four and produced on the
lands of the Wongle and Wadjuck people.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Welcome to New Politics. In this episode. Donation laws to
be reformed, but who does it actually benefit? The climate
wars are still continuing. This time is over the twenty
thirty five emission reductions targets. The Government tries to outdo
the Liberal Party on immigration and asylum seekers, and the
Senate decide that a political protest against the king is
(00:39):
just as bad as homophobia, racism and bigotry. I'm Di Djokovic,
editor of New Politics.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
I'm David Lewis. An enigma wrapped in a riddle.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Just a reminder. We don't have the billionaire owners or
even the millionaire owners to support us, and that's the
way that we'd like to keep it. But if you
would like to support New Politics, you can do that
Throughreon or substack, or you can make a donation at
newpolitics dot com dot a and all of this is
a good way to support independent journalism direct year, the
(01:22):
federal government is proposing changes to donation laws, and while
any changes to the current system should be welcome, these
ones just do not go far enough. The key change
is to reduce the amount of money that can be
donated by an individual or a single entergy, and that's
to a limit of twenty thousand dollars per candidate each
year and an overall donation cap of six hundred thousand
(01:43):
dollars per year. Candidates will have a spending limit of
eight hundred thousand dollars, and a political party can have
a spending limit of ninety million dollars all across the nation.
The disclosure of funding will be at the end of
each month rather than at the end of the financial year,
and anything above one thousand dollars will need to be
declared down from the sixteen thousand and nine one hundred dollars.
(02:05):
And there's also an increase of public funding from three
dollars thirty per primary vote up to five dollars per
primary vote. Now, some of this might look good on paper,
but it's pretty much tinkering at the edges rather than
wholesale reform. But the bigger problem for me is that
the government just wants to rush this legislation through Parliament,
and it's two hundred and twenty one pages of legislation,
(02:27):
and because the coalition has said it's likely to support
the legislation, it's pretty obvious that these changes favor the
major political parties and not smaller parties in Independence, and
it's also likely to deter newcomers into the political system,
just at a time when we should be encouraging more.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
I'm not even sure we need to encourage more. I
think the movement is such that more are coming in
and this isn't a bad thing, and the bigger party
should realize this. If they're being held to account in
a fair and re way, it makes them better, whether
that's liberal labor, Nationals, Green one Nation, Catter, legalized cannabis,
(03:08):
or the rest of it. Being held to fair and
reasonable account is actually good for everybody. Some of these
reforms seem very good. Having the cap drop from sixteen
nine hundred dollars to one thousand dollars is good, and
you might think are one thousand still high, But you
get all these ten and twenty dollars donations that becomes
a nightmare to administer in a declarative thing. So I
(03:30):
suppose a thousand is fine. Five hundred would be better. Again.
Having shorter reporting time is an improvement. It should be
in real time. Western Kingston Soccer Club donates one thousand
dollars to the local candidate. We should know that straight away.
It might change your opinion on the club. But it
(03:51):
knows too who the candidate is being supported by and
who they're likely to support in Parliament, and will find
that there'll be a surge of donations week before and
a fortnight before the election, so that you won't get
backlash from Oh, Gena Reinhart gave Matt Canavan one thousand dollars,
I wish i'd known that, I would have not voted
(04:12):
for him.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Well, I've got a feeling that it might be more
than one thousand dollars for Matt Canavan coming in from
Gena Reinhart.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
I've kept it low too, you know again, I'm just
pulling at examples here rather than trying to make factual
accusations of impropriety. I'm not doing that at all in
this case. Or if the on the other side, if
the Young Socialists gave one thousand dollars to Anthony Alberanzi's campaign,
which is less likely I think, but still not out
of the question. And hello to all our young socialist listeners. Again,
(04:41):
I'm just using you as an example. The independents are
claiming that they're being shut out of the system and
there's a sense in which they can't know this, and
this is their other complaint, which from the outside makes
a lot of sense. That it's hundreds of pages of
legislation and they've only had two days to read it,
which suggests that there's stuff in there that a lot
(05:03):
of legislators won't like. And Peter Dutton has not said
no to it. It's the first thing he's not said
no to since he became leader of the Opposition. So
if Peter Dutton's not saying no something stinking, I think.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Well that's probably right. And if Peter Dutton is supporting
it will it probably goes to the heart of what
this issue is, and it's about pure politics. It's about
money and it's about power, and this process tries to
accumulate more finances to the major political parties at the
expense of the smaller parties and independent players, and then
the hope would be that more money will result in
(05:41):
more power or more representation for the major parties and
then stop that leakage to the non major parties, and
I think that would be the idea of theory and
in practice, but just based on all the trends that
we've seen over the past few decades where the electorate
is looking for something different in politics and just not
getting it from the major political parties, I'm not sure
(06:03):
that these changes will make that much difference to bucking
that trend away from the major political parties as far
as the primary vote support is concerned. And it's obvious
that these changes are primarily being implemented to deter the
big donors like Clive Palmer, who has donated over two
hundred million dollars over the past couple of elections to
(06:24):
the United Australian Party, which of course he's a part of.
But it's also human nature to try and get around
these changes, and where there is a will, there will
be a way. But I think that while most of
the focus has been on people like Clive Palmer on
the right, it will also affect enterities such as the
Climate two hundred group or donations such as the one
(06:46):
made by Graham Wood back in twenty ten when he
donated one point six million dollars to the Australian Greens.
But this whole process has to be applied consistently, so
there can't be a problem with that. And some of
the independent MPs have said that they just haven't got
enough time to assess the quality of the legislation and
that's a serious problem. Here's the Independent Member for Waringa,
(07:08):
Zalie Stegel.
Speaker 4 (07:10):
We've had months of asking the Minister to show us
an exposure draft, come clean with where the government's going,
what it wants to do, Negotiate with a crossbench on
genuine reform to our electoral process that makes a fair competition,
fair access to elections to everyone, not just the major parties.
(07:32):
But what we have instead is, as I understand it,
that government will introduce the bill on Monday. We are
just getting an opportunity to see it and will force
a vote by Thursday next week in the House of Representative.
That is unacceptable.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
It's actually a large piece of legislation and the main
reason why it's essential for MPs and senator scrutinize legislation
is so that they can weed out any un tended
consequences and then find out ways of improving that legislation.
That's actually part of their job and there's quite a
few loopholes that I've noticed. One is that the funding
limits will reset after each election, which essentially means that
(08:13):
every third year you can reach that donation limit twice
in that one year. And another one is that because
political parties have got state branches, donations that reach the
limit can be made to each of those branches and
then be considered separate donations. So you could make nine
donations at the maximum level to essentially the one political party,
(08:34):
but that would be treated as though you made a
donation to nine different political entities. And the other point
is that these laws won't come in until twenty twenty six,
and they first of all have to be approved by Parliament.
But they're not going to be effect or in effect
until twenty twenty six and will affect the twenty twenty
eight federal election onwards. So there's no real rush for this,
(08:56):
and the legislation should be carefully considered.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Yeah, one wonders why the rush and why the obscur antism.
I don't think they're deliberately hiding it, because they distributed it,
but they're certainly making it hard. Of course, the solution
is fully funded public elections, in which you pay your
I think it's one thousand dollars now used to be
five hundred as a deposit to essentially guarantee that you
(09:22):
can get four percent of the primary vote. If you
get that, you get your money refunded, and then if
you have a certain amount of members you can apply
for funding, and then that funding is capped so that
you don't have the Clive Palmer taking over YouTube, not
that it did him any good. You got one senator
in and that senator was Ralph Babbott, of whom more later.
(09:44):
And it stops that American style influence. And it means
that things like the IPA stop being a fundraising organization
and actually have to come up with ideas to run
better campaigns, which I think might not work out so
well for them, because when they do come up with ideas,
they're uniformly terrible. But it means that on the labor side,
(10:05):
the Fabian Society and the Whitlam Society and those types
of things can actually be more prominent in their ideas,
I mean publicly prominent, and we might start getting better
election campaign because really we haven't had a great election
campaign since maybe Kevin O seven. Everything else has just
scraped over the line and.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
You referred briefly to the disclosure requirements, and generally they
are better within these new proposals, but they're still inadequate.
It really is essential to know that if private money
is going into politics, we need to know where it
comes from, and we need to know that very quickly.
And in that case where legislation is being prepared in
(10:46):
Parliament and being voted on, and there's a lot of
donations being made in the lead up to that legislation
being voted on and passed, we need to know where
those donations are coming from before the legislation has passed,
not afterwards. And the new proposal is for donations to
be disclosed twenty one days after the end of the month,
and that's certainly better than having to wait until the
(11:06):
end of the financial year, but it's still not good enough.
The technology does exist to have real time disclosure or
some kind of centralized online clearing house. Many other democracies
around the world are doing this. In Australia should be
doing this as well. And I think the other factor
is that the government has almost had three years to
prepare this legislation. This should have been released in November
(11:28):
twenty twenty two, so it could have been scrutinized and
put in players for the twenty twenty five election. But
it's been released in the shadows of this parliamentary term,
and obviously that I don't want too much scrutiny of
this legislation. Otherwise they would have released it much earlier.
But generally we should always welcome reforms to the political system.
But this is about one percent of the change that's required,
(11:49):
and it's being released at the last minute. I just
don't think that that's good enough.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
I mean, I suppose points for effort, but it's still
a seamy at the bottom of a report card, isn't
it pretty much When they presented it to Peter Dutton
and he said yes, it was time to take it
away and rethink it. And I know that both sides
are trying to protect their own long held hege of
money over the system, and both sides are being threatened,
(12:16):
I guess by the rise of independence. Suddenly the independence
in the liberal seats are a big threat. Whether that
will translate to labor seats remains to be seen. I
don't see why it can't, but it hasn't happened. Yet
the Greens remain a strange kind of threat in that
they can win seats. But the last lots of election
I have seen their vote rise but spread over several seats,
(12:39):
meaning that they didn't win anything or didn't win very much.
So again, the Greens are worried on this legislation, and
they should be. They require donations like all parties, and
the Labor has the unions, of course, and I don't
want to go through the whole historical reason why Labor
Party has the unions. The Liberal Party has a course,
(13:00):
big business on its side, and the Nationals have the
mining industry on their side, so the Greens don't have
anything like that. And of course, as if the Greens
influence grows, they'll start to get bigger donations as people
realize we can hopefully get some influence here. I think
that if Labor was smart, they'd slow it down a
(13:21):
little bit and bring through the heck's repayments before the
election and leave the legislation for this till after the
next election, when one they'll see who they're dealing with,
and two give everyone a chance to go through and
read it and absorb it and get the chance to
make meaningful and constructive change rather than blast it through
(13:41):
and then in two years time realize that it hasn't
helped anybody.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
This is New Politics with Eddie Jokovic and David lewis
the best podcast on Australian politics and news commentary. You
can support us through Patreon and substance and also find
us at Newpolitics dot com dot au.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
The government has announced that it will reveal emission targets
for twenty thirty five at some point in twenty twenty five,
but it's unlikely that that will be revealed before the
federal election due in May next year, and the Environment
Minister Channel Pilibasik has suggested that there will be delays
because the Australian Greens insisted on a law that requires
(14:44):
future targets to be based on advice from the Climate
Change Authority, and the Climate Change Authority has suggested that
it needs more time to do some modeling based on
the impact of the election of Donald Trump in the
United States. But as far as I'm concerned, this is
the government stone mauling on climate change targets. The Labor
government did pass legislation in twenty twenty two to achieve
(15:05):
a forty three percent reduction of twenty h five levels
of emissions by twenty thirty, and there is also an
overall commitment to achieving net zero by twenty fifty. But
this action, to me, it just seems like it's more
about trying to avoid a climate change war with the
coalition in the lead up to the next federal election.
(15:26):
And it's not like the Trump election victory was a surprise,
you know, not that we would have wanted it, but
in a two horse race in US politics, there's always
a good chance of either side winning, and Trump's attitude
to climate change would have been well known from his
time in office between twenty sixteen to twenty twenty, as
well as what he's been saying over the past year
(15:48):
about dismantling a lot of green policies implemented by the
Biden administration. So the Climate Change Authority should have been
able to do some modeling on either the Democrats or
the Republican being in office in the United States from
next year onwards. But irrespective of that, this just seems
to be continuing the behavior of this labor government. It's
(16:09):
reactive rather than proactive, and it always just seems to
be on the back foot, and of course you do
need to be wary of changing circumstances, whether that's here
or internationally. But it seems that the Labor government is
more worried about being attacked by the Coalition, or they're
more worried about what Peter Dunton might say about climate change,
rather than leading from the front and letting the electorate
(16:32):
know where they stand on climate change. It was a
big issue for the twenty twenty two federal election and
I think it's likely to be a big issue at
the twenty twenty five federal election.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
What the Liberal Party has failed to understand because they
keep pre selecting the wrong candidates, although I will be
fair they've started to put in candidates who have a
better chance of winning, is that the climate is I
think the thing that is most prominent in people's concerns.
(17:04):
We're watching the climate change. I know that there are
those out there who thinks it's a hoax and that
we're misreading the data. I had a guy say, oh,
Cobbin's only zero point six percent of the atmosphere, and
I put it probably too gently to him that if
you have point six percent of alcohol in your bloodstream,
you're not able to drive, and so these minuscule amounts
(17:26):
can make a massive difference.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Well, it's almost like saying, the sea levels are only
going to rise by one or two millimeters over the
next ten years, so let's not worry about that. That's
not much.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
Yeah, no, over whatever. The area of the Pacific is what,
that's hundreds and thousands of milli meters, which.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Yeah, but it's the same sort of thing. A couple
of millimeters rise in the sea levels. Well, that's a
catastrophic effect.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
Oh, absolutely it is. And a lot of people are
noticing this, particularly in the more university educated areas, hence
the safe liberal seats, hence the turnaround of save liberal
seats into independent seats. I know that there's a lot
of interest in some safe labor seats to run strong
independent candidates. It would be interesting to see if that happens.
(18:12):
The point is that the vast majority of the voting
public in Australia is very worried about climate change. We
can see with the how many once in a hundred
years storms have we had over the last five years,
at least three, how many colder winters that don't last
as long, but also hot as summers. Every year we've
(18:32):
broken the record for hottest summer ever since nineteen ninety
or something, but the last too many years have broken
the record for the hottest year on record and the
record has been the year before.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
And that's all correct, of course, but it just makes
you wonder why is the Labor government just so worried
about what the coalition will say about climate change and
what Peter Dutton will have to say about climate change
as well. And in politics, David, you know that you
should never reveal your hand too early, but you do
need to let the public know what you're doing, because
(19:06):
the public, the electorate, they're the ones who actually decide
whether you stay in office or not. And who knows.
The government might actually have her twenty thirty five target
in mind, and the CSIRO they've actually suggested that the
twenty thirty five target should be around a sixty five
percent reduction, and that's according to a combination of environmental issues, economics,
political factors, and also based on the fact that a
(19:29):
twenty thirty target of forty three percent reduction has already
been legislated and that overall that there is a net
zero by twenty fifty is the target goal, and my
feeling is that rather than having a compact with the
public and the electorate, the government just seems to be
having a compact with the coalition. They're more concerned about
(19:51):
what Peter Dutton will say, or what he will think,
or how the Coalition will react to her twenty thirty
five target if it is announced before the next federal election.
This gets back to a point that we have consistently raised, David,
that the Labor government just doesn't seem to have that
confidence in what it wants to achieve in certain areas
and it just gives the opposition and a leader like
(20:13):
Peter Dn't too much respect. Or maybe they don't believe
too much in climate change issues themselves. And you'd probably
have to say that after most of their actions on
the environment over the past two and a half years,
when they've approved so many new coal mines and gas fields,
and greenhouse emissions have actually risen over the past eighteen months,
So who knows that might actually be the case, And
(20:34):
certainly the coalition doesn't believe in climate change issues very much.
All roads for the Coalition, they all lead to nuclear power,
that their answer to climate change is nuclear power. Their
answer to renewables is nuclear power. The answer to local
electricity bills, the answer is always nuclear power. Or build
more minds, or just keep on digging. So it might
(20:55):
be a case where the government is just trying to
avoid an election based on the client it changed wars.
But I just don't think that the Liberal Party is
going to let that happen.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
No, and again I don't understand. I do understand in
a way, but I really don't understand why they're just
not ignoring the Liberal Party and letting it tear itself
apart and rebuild itself instead of seeming to pander to it.
I know that there's still fiery clashes in Parliament and stuff,
but how much of that is theater and how much
(21:25):
of that is a genuine clash of conflicting ideas. But
treating people with more gravity than they deserve doesn't end well.
If Peter Dutton was a substantial intellectual figure of leadership, okay,
that's fine, yes, but he's a laughing stock outside of Parliament.
Despite what the polls say, very few people think he's
(21:47):
going to become Prime minister.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
I guess the other point is that the rest of
the world is moving on in perspective of what the
Labor government does, or Peter Dutton says, or whatever. But
there is a massive energy transition that is taking place
globally and it has been led by China and the
United States, and I think it might be too far
down the track for a Trump administration to pull back
(22:12):
on this, because they too will be left behind and
damaged economically in America. But here we have a little
Australia still arguing about climate change and renewable energy while
the rest of the world moves on. And I think
that's because we have a government that just doesn't want
to be bold on climate change and that's given people
like Peter Dunton a leg up in this debate, and
(22:32):
because he sees a political opportunity to inflict damage on
the Labor government by waging round fifty of the climate
change wars, which seems to have been running longer than
the one hundred Year War. And because of this, the
public interest in Australia just gets left behind. And this
is also in the context of the COP twenty nine
(22:53):
in Azerbaian, which is the annual United Nations Climate Change
Conference talk fest, which seems to be moving ahead at
the pace of a glacier if not slower. And sure
it is better to have a conference on climate change
than not having a conference, and Australia is now jostling
to host COP thirty one in twenty twenty six. But
(23:15):
a lot of it just seems to be window dressing.
We've been following these conferences for some time now. It
just mainly seems to be world leaders saying, yes, we
must do something about climate change, otherwise the world is
going to blow up, and then they just repeat the
same message the following year, and that message is eventually
going to become true that the world is going to
(23:35):
blow up if we don't do anything about climate change.
But that might end up happening a lot sooner than
we think it might.
Speaker 3 (23:42):
In Monty Python's Life of Brian, the People's Front of Judea,
whose worst enemies are the Judean People's Front, continually have
meetings and past resolutions and argue over what the resolution
should say, but they don't actually do anything. And this
feels like a lot of governments response to climate change.
And they can come back from Azerbaijan or wherever, you know,
(24:05):
if it's held in Australia next time, and at the
rate we're going, they'll probably need to hold it at
some waterfront like Burke or Alice Springs and the new
beach that's been formed. There's a lack of political will
because they think there's not a lot of votes in it.
And to be fair, what the Trump election has showed
(24:25):
us as people like the idea of simple solutions. Prices
are too high. Will put tariffs up to China. That'll
show the China he's not realizing that it's going to
put prices up another twenty five percent at least education expensive,
will scrap the Department of Education rather than look at
why it's expensive and what you can get out of
it and are there more efficient ways or different ways
(24:47):
of running a department of education. I guess the thing
is is that climate change requires tough and hard solutions.
It means a change in how we do things. It
means a change to our comfort levels. It means a
change to what a lot of us are used to.
But if we don't do it, there'll be nothing. We're
(25:09):
losing islands in the Pacific, the Indonesian islands that have
gone underwater. There are South Pacific islands that have gone underwater.
We've got to change it before it's too late, and
it may be too late.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
This is New Politics, available through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon,
Audible and YouTube, and also available to support it Patreon,
Substack and at our website New politics dot com dot au.
Speaker 5 (25:43):
Can you see where you come from?
Speaker 6 (25:47):
But unknowmal just watching Flodia stop.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Immigration issues have also been prominent during the week, and
the first issue relates to the cap on international students
and once again this is outright politics and got nothing
to do with the issue at hand. It's more about
the battleground of immigration and zinophobia, which the Coalition is
only too happy to play along with and the Labor
government is happy to sign up and join along with
(26:27):
as well. Generally, international students are good for Australia. It's
good to have a diverse mixture of people within the
university sector. They also become part of the overall community
and it is a good way of providing education as
an export to overseas countries that need it. But the
problem here is that the higher education sector sees international
(26:48):
students as a cash cow and success of federal governments
have decreased domestic funding for higher education. As the funds
from international students has increased, and if there was ever
going to be a cap on international students, well they
should have happened years ago and done on educational grounds
and economic grounds and not having universities dependent on money
(27:12):
coming from overseas. And that was really highlighted when COVID
hit in early twenty twenty. And these are the reasons
why the government should be looking at student caps. It
should have been done a long time ago as well,
not the reasons that we are being given now, which
is essentially to plant the right wing immigration debate, which
somehow leads into housing affordability and other issues that have
(27:34):
got absolutely nothing to do with international students. Now, the
Coalition has said that it won't support this legislation. The
Australian Greens have also said that they won't support it,
but for different reasons. But the genesis of this whole
process is that the Labor government wants to be seen
as anti immigrations, so it prepared legislation that it thought
(27:56):
would get the support of the coalition. But the Coalition
has rejected the legislation so it can continue to blame
the government for not doing anything about immigration levels, and
then continuing to make that link between immigration levels and
housing affordability, which it doesn't actually have a strong correlation with.
And will the alban EASi government ever learned, David, you know,
(28:19):
stopped trying to play politics in an area that the
coalition owns. Just try and do the right thing. That's
the basic rule of governing that they should follow. The
government just keeps being outplaid on these issues. Politically. The
Coalition is never going to support whatever the Labor government
proposes anywhere, and especially on an issue such as immigration,
even when it's according to Liberal Party policy. They should
(28:41):
have just navigated these changes with the Crossbench and get
them passed as soon as possible, but they didn't do that,
and now they've got a big problem on their hands.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
Yeah. I mean, I'll make the point that they will
support the government on things that directly affect them in
a positive material way, such as the electoral reform laws,
but in this case here, there's no way they're going to.
I think the best way is just to ignore them
and to work with the cross Bench, to work with
the Greens, to work with everybody else, and make the
(29:12):
Liberal Party irrelevant to the discussion because they're clearly not
up to having the discussion yet. And while that's the case,
there's no point in discussing it with them. They've got
nothing of value to say, they've got no practical solutions,
and they've got no way of making things right from
the position that they're in, or that the position that
they hold now.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
I think this is also starting to lead into a
bit of policy chaos.
Speaker 5 (29:35):
Now.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
One strategy that governments have is that they wait until
the final few months of the political term, and that's
the stays that we're at the moment and guillotine everything
and then just ran it through Parliament and the opposition
cross bench look at the legislation and I think, oh, well,
that's not worth expending too much energy on, and then
they just wave it through. But for something like this,
(29:56):
which does have major ramifications for the higher education sector, well,
I think there just needs to be more time to
assess the legislation. You know, is the legislation any good,
what's its purpose, what is it trying to achieve? And
just like the donations reform legislation, if it's so important,
why wasn't it introduced earlier? And I think it's also
(30:19):
the government just being outflanked by a terrible Liberal Party
leader and one of the worst Liberal Party runs that
we've ever seen, and that to me takes a special
level of skill to allow that happens. So government has
proposed a cap of two hundred and seventy thousand international students,
which is fifty three thousand places lower than last year,
(30:40):
but it's only around seven thousand students less than the
pre pandemic levels in twenty nineteen, and Dunton has said, no,
that's too high. I'll put it down to one hundred
and sixty thousand. And I can guarantee you that if
the government had suggested a cap of one hundred and
sixty thousand students in the first place, Peter Dunton would
have just said, no, that's too high. I'll put it
(31:00):
down to fifty thousand students. And it'd also repeat what
he said last month about international students.
Speaker 5 (31:07):
When you look at the detail, this is the modern
version of the vote arrival.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
And we've pointed this out before. Labor tries and we've
pointed out this so many times today Labor tries to
negotiate with Peter Dunton, who was always going to say
no unless it's to rework the donation laws so that
the Liberal Party gets more funding from the tax boy.
He is always going to say no, and then they
get surprised when he says no. And there's a perfectly
good cross bench available, you know, which does consist of
(31:37):
the Green's political party if they want to call it that,
and negotiate with them, implement your agenda, get things done,
and not try and negotiate with an idiot who is
always going to say no. And maybe we're the idiots
in all of this, David, that we're just thinking that
this is the better way for the government to negotiate.
But it just seems pretty obvious.
Speaker 6 (31:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
The other thing I think I should point out is
having worked in the higher education system, I was always
a pall at how international students were treated. They were
treated back then, this is before I stopped, just before
the pandemic. They were treated like ATMs with unlimited funds.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
Oh, that that's right. The money was just taken. There
was no additional support offer to international students, no additional
English classes or any sort of academic support provided to them.
Speaker 3 (32:26):
They passed the basic English test, which is great, but
if you were in a humanity subject, the level of
English was just that little bit higher for a lot
of them, and it was up to the lecturers and
tutors to give that extra support to explain things a
lot of them got. Some of them were done for
plagiarism because they'd have to get someone else to write
(32:49):
the essay for them, which of course counts technically as plagiarism,
which would have been avoided had proper support systems been in.
And I'll be fair to the universities the level that
this type of stuff is expensive and there wasn't always
the money to be able to do that. And then
when COVID hit, of course they treated international students appallingly too,
(33:12):
and then wondered why there was this massive drop off
that hasn't quite come back after COVID. China at one point,
not that long ago, was building a new university a week,
meaning that there was less incentive to go overseas to study.
You could study in China and then do your travel
if you so wished. And the bigger universities in particular
(33:34):
were losing millions of dollars a week because you can
only exploit people for so long, and smart people too,
before they realize hold on there are better options and
to blame foreign students on land prices is just insane.
There might be a bit of a bump, and I
don't think there is in suburbs that are accessible to
(33:55):
a university, but you're hideously expensive Lower north Shore or
townhouse is expensive, not because of four kids sharing a
unit in Burward for example. Both again, both parties have
to really sit down and look at things in a
mature way, not in a way that wins them the
political debate on the day.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
There's also another piece of legislation that the government is
trying to force through that's also on the political terrain
dominated by the Coalition, and that's on asylum seeker policy,
where the Government has proposed one of the most draconian
anti refugee bills ever seen. It's known as the Deportation
Powers Bill, and it was introduced by the Immigration Minister
(34:48):
Tony Burke several weeks ago and it has been debated
in Parliament now and essentially Australia can decide that any
country in the world can be an offshore detention center.
It strips away legal rights for refugees, gives the government
the right to overturn permanent protection visas and send people
to countries where they can be persecuted or killed, and
pays those countries for the privilege of doing this. Now
(35:11):
it also contravenes the Refugee Convention that Australia is a
signatory to, and once again the government is trying to
outdo the Coalition on immigration and asylum seeker issues, and
once again it's the race of the bottom.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
Bob Hawk. I have issues with some of Bob Hawk's policies,
particularly the move towards neoliberal economics, but one area which
he was fairly exemplary was refugees. When your prime minister
is tolerant, the rest of the country tends to be
a bit more tolerant. Now, we're not going to stamp
(35:47):
out racism overnight in Australia, but we go close every
seems twenty or thirty years or so, we get in
a government that says, hold on, let's treat refugees like
human beings and as it supposed to be treated. Seeking
refuge is not illegal. In fact, it's the encouragement is
to look after refugees who come to your country. Now,
(36:08):
I know that in the Middle East and in parts
of Asia, it's a numbers crisis. There are so many
refugees and smaller countries as struggling to look after them.
In Australia, we don't have that problem. I know that
at a senior level there's this belief if we open
the border's too wide, that we're going to get millions
of people flogging in. But one, I don't know that
millions of people are going to make it across the
(36:29):
Pacific or the Indian Ocean, and two there's plenty of
other places to stop before then. Most people are just
looking for safe landfall. And even if millions of people come,
then that's part of Australia's burden as a first world
leading G twenty country to look after the poor and
desperate of the world, but to treat people appallingly in
(36:50):
a country that prides itself on the fair go, in
a country that prides itself on its egalitarian nature, and
looking at government policy the last ten or so years
nineteen ninety six, really with maybe a small break with Rudd,
government is not promoting an egalitarian country of the fair
go in any ways. And this is where I think,
(37:14):
speaking more broadly, this is where most people are disappointed
in the labor Party, the population was ready for that
egalitarian that we would treat asylum seated because better, That
we would bring in an amendment to the Constitution that
acknowledged and honored Indigenous people. That we would look after
(37:34):
our poor, that we would look after those who've come
to Australia to try and better themselves, that we would
look after those who had risked everything to show injustice.
And we have signally failed at this because the cruel solutions,
the nasty solutions, the ignorant solutions, are easy, and we've
(37:56):
had governments who have promoted the easy way rather than
led and gone for the hard way. And I think
this will cost governments.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Oh after a while. I think all governments tend to
look the same on certain issues. And obviously the Labor
Government has done some very good things earlier on in
the term, or at least it's try to do some
good things. But I think that it's gotten into the
same trap that most other governments get into. The roles
and actions of government are hard, and eventually it all
(38:25):
just gets a little bit too hard. So to stay
an office, they start to play the political games. They
do various tricks with smoke and mirrors and on this
occasion or on this issue, the Labor government has decided
that it doesn't want to be accused of being soft
on a silence seekers and refugee so it proposes even
more draconian legislation that even the Liberal Party would even
(38:48):
dream of. And then whenever the Liberal Party gets back
into office, which will happen at some point in the future,
they'll make it even more extreme. And where probably just
one or two steps from executing refugee by firing squad.
You know, surely that's the next step. And we've had
twenty six years of rubbish policy on refugees and asylum
seekers because the Liberal Party can easily ramp up this
(39:10):
sort of rubbish and can easily find a very receptive
audience over it to gb and also in cahoots with
the mainstream media that's never going to do any sort
of sensible reporting on asylum seecre issues.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
And that's the big elephant in the corner. We have
a press who prefers simple cruelty to complex humanitarianism.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Oh that's We had one refugee turning up in a
little dinghy a couple of months ago, and there was
a national outrage about one person in this little dingy
arriving on the shores.
Speaker 3 (39:41):
And can you imagine how much of an ordeal that
must have been to get here from wherever they came from.
If you're coming from puppy in New Guinea, it's still horrendous.
Apart from that, everywhere is almost impossible. Coming from Pakistan
or Syria or Jordan is incredibly difficult, and we should
(40:02):
be helping rather than hindering. But we've decided that it's
easier to be cruel, it's easier to be inhumane, it's
easier to be racist. Peter Dutton famously was happy to
welcome South African white farmers when they were in trouble,
all the while stopping Middle Eastern. Now, if we were
accepting Middle Eastern people, fantastic, and we should accept white
(40:25):
South Africans in similar circumstances. You can't choose based on race,
or background or attitude. We've got to find a government
who is prepared to make the harder decisions that improve
all of us, rather than the easy ones that just
improve some of us.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
This is New Politics. Available through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, Audible,
and YouTube, and also available to support it Patreon, Substack
and at our website New politics dot com dot au.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
And just finally there was another issue that arose from
the Senate and there was a censure motion against two senators,
Senators Lydia Thorpe and Ralph Babbitt. But there was only
the one senator who received all the attention. The Senate
censured Senator Lydia Thorpe for her actions against King Charles
last month when she said this and more than just
(41:39):
saying that she was deeply concerned. Senator Penny Wong moved
the censure motion in the Senate and here's what she
had to say.
Speaker 5 (41:46):
Can I say the government moves these motions reluctantly. We
all know both senators are engaging in these behaviors, but
precisely in order to get attention, engaging in actions and
stunts designed to create storms and social media but offering
nothing of substance to improve anyone's life. These are actions
which seek to incite outrage and grievance, actually to boost
(42:09):
their own profiles.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
And this was supported by Senator Simon Birmingham.
Speaker 7 (42:15):
This motion is not about what she said. It is
not about her right to say it or her views
those we defend, but it is about the conduct and
that was undertaken, the disruptive, disorderly, and disrespectful approach that
reflected so poorly upon all Senators and this Chamber and
(42:37):
brought us in to disrepute. That is why it is
worthy and warranted of censure.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
And in response, here is what Lydia Thorpe had to say.
Speaker 6 (42:47):
The colonizing king were to come to my country again,
our country, then I'll do it again and i will
keep doing it. I will resist colonization in this country.
I swear my allegiance to the real sovereigns of these lands.
First peoples are the real sovereigns. You don't have some
(43:10):
random king rock up and say that he's sovereign. Well
not on my watch. White supremacy exists in this country. Now.
To call it out doesn't mean you're a bad person.
It's just truth telling. I'll use the privilege of what
a senator has to infiltrate and bring down the colony.
(43:34):
That's what I'm here for. I'm not here for friends
or votes. I'm here to bring down the colony.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
And the problem here is that it was the one
motion that censured both senators. Rolph Babbitt posted violent and
offensive racist slurs and posted some highly offensive, homophobic and
anti transgender commentary. So the Senate has equated a political
process against the King and match that with the Senator
who we racist, homophobic, anti trans and promotes violence. And
(44:04):
the other issue is that even though Babbitt's behavior was
totally unacceptable and consisted of hate speech, the media focus
on the actions of an Indigenous woman who challenged the
status quo and questioned the role of white Australia and
the British in wholesale land theft, rather than focus on
the racist homophobe. But there's no surprises, really, It's what
(44:26):
we've come to expect from the media.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
At no point did Lydia Thorpe threaten physical harm against
the King. She doesn't want the king as part of
the constitution. She feels that the monarchy has let Australia down,
particularly Indigenous people. She feels very strongly about these and
put it in very strong words. But she didn't say
eat the rich. She didn't say let's set up firing squad.
(44:51):
She didn't call the King any names that might have
suggested to her followers that the King's life had less
value anybody else's. In a democracy, and I know that
there's a lot of people who said I wouldn't have
done it that way, and that's yeah, I probably wouldn't
have either. But I'm not an Indigenous woman. I haven't
walked in Lydia Thorpe's shoes. I can only imagine the
(45:14):
frustration she feels, and to get the opportunity to actually
express that may have been very cathartic for her, and
then she's got to sit through a senate censure from
people who historically would have fairly similar ideas and beliefs
to her. I'm speaking of Penny Wong. We can't expect
much from Simon Birmingham. He's a liberal with particular views.
(45:36):
And again, I haven't walked in his shoes. I haven't
walked in Penny wong shoes, but I've seen their journey
a little bit more, and I struggle to understand why
Penny Wong has I'd have understood if she'd been silent
had she not, but to actually lead that I don't understand.
Speaker 6 (45:54):
Well.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
I guess I do have to go through the formalities
of child in the censure motion, but still equating Senator
Lydia Thorpe with Senator Ralph Babbitt, that to me seems
quite bizarre.
Speaker 3 (46:06):
He was deliberately provocative to a broad section of the
Australian populace. He said in our house, well you live alone, Ralph,
so there's that we use the words, and I won't
repeat the words. I won't dignify them with repeating them,
and then said he's never going to apologize, ended up
(46:27):
deleting the tweet and apologizing. Typical beata male cuck soyboy
NPC behavior if you ask me. But again, I haven't
walked in his shoes. But clearly Ralph Babbitt, who I
think they expected, to remain defiant and make sure he
used those words back right down. Lydia Thorpe has said
(46:50):
she'd do it again if she had the opportunity. Now
she's not standing for Parliament again, so she may never
get the opportunity as a senator again to do it.
But nonetheless, there were two different things that required two
different censere motions if you were going to give a
cent motion. The Lydia Thorpe one was not the same
(47:10):
as the Ralph Babbitt one, and they should have been
done as even on the same day because that made sense.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
And I also think that it's the reaction of the
media where I just totally focused on Lydia Thorpe and
had pretty much nothing to say about Ralph Babbitt. And
that might be because they didn't actually want to highlight
his profile anymore, because that's what he's obviously after. But
I don't think the media would be that moral about it.
It's obvious that it was because Ralph Babbitt is from
(47:39):
the right and the media pretty much agrees with his views.
They're obviously not going to say that, but they pretty
much agree with his views. But someone like Lydia Thorpe
or she's of the left and they've always harassed her
when it comes to issues related to indigenous affairs, and
the behavior of Ralph Babbitt would have been more newsworthy
to highlight how offensive this guy really is, so at
(48:00):
least people could be worn about him, but the media
just totally ignored him.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
Yeah, he's very ignorable, but these things need to be
highlighted to show that. One there's flaws in the Senate
voting system that allows a guy who gets in on
he didn't get his deposit back, or Clive Palmer didn't
get his deposit back, and he's not really fit to
be a senator. He's a nobody who spends more time
(48:26):
talking about how Trump's a great president. And I'm pretty
sure he thinks that there's a fifth Amendment to our
Constitution to stop him incriminating himself, and the second Amendment
for guns. I'd almost bet that that's the case with him.
There's not For those of you who haven't read the Constitution,
we don't have amendments like that in Australia. We just
(48:47):
amend the Constitution. We need less babbitts, and we need
better candidates for the Senate and for the House of Reps.
But that's a whole other issue.
Speaker 2 (49:01):
That's it for this episode of New Politics. Thanks for
listening in, and if you'd like to support our style
of journalism and commentary, please make a donation of our
website at newpolitics dot com dot au. We don't beg plead,
beseech or gaslight you about journalism coming to an end.
We just keep it very simple. If you like what
we do, please send some support our way. It keeps
(49:21):
our commitment to independent journalism ticking along. I'm Edie Jokovic.
Thanks for listening in and it's goodbye to our listeners.
Speaker 3 (49:29):
I'm David Lewis.
Speaker 2 (49:30):
We'll see you next time.
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