The Australian Politics Thread

[Carter's Choice]

Interesting day in NSW state politics. The Nationals have effectively disbanded the governing coalition over environmental legislation being presented by the Liberal Party. I'm sure NSW voters will be happy that during a national and global emergency their government is prepared to split over legislation designed to save endangered Koalas.

Coalition crisis over koala war: Premier gives Nationals ultimatum
By Alexandra Smith and Lucy Cormack
Updated September 10, 2020 — 4.48pmfirst published at 11.44am


NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has given the NSW Nationals an ultimatum to withdraw their threats to sit on the crossbench by first thing on Friday morning or she will swear in a new ministry.

In an escalation of the Coalition crisis, Ms Berejiklian said she would not tolerate the Nationals remaining in her cabinet while refusing to support the government.

"It is not possible to be the Deputy Premier or a Minister of the Crown and sit on the crossbench," Ms Berejiklian said in a statement on Thursday afternoon.

"I have just made it clear to the Deputy Premier that he and his Nationals colleagues who are members of the NSW Cabinet have until 9am Friday September 11 to indicate to me whether they wish to remain in my Cabinet or else sit on the crossbench.

"They cannot do both."

John Barilaro, Deputy Premier and leader of the NSW Nationals, was called to a meeting with the Premier on Thursday afternoon after he confirmed that his party would not support government legislation in a row over the protection of koala habitat.

He did not tell Ms Berejiklian of his party's position before announcing it publicly.

After a lengthy party room meeting on Thursday morning, the Nationals also vowed not to attend the Coalition joint party room or leadership meetings. But he said ministers would go to cabinet.

The MPs also agreed to introduce a bill to the lower house to repeal the State Environmental Planning Policy relating to koala habitat protection.

"By not supporting government legislation effectively means all members [are] united in the National Party and will sit on crossbench," Mr Barilaro said

But Mr Barilaro confirmed that Port Macquarie Nationals MP Leslie Williams, who called on the Deputy Premier to stand aside after his ill-fated tilt at federal politics, would not sit on the crossbench.

The Coalition crisis was sparked by the policy designed to protect koala habitat, but the Nationals say it would severely limit the way property owners could manage their land.

Mr Barilaro said he had taken Planning Minister Rob Stokes on his word that a raft of changes to the policy would be made, but despite six months of negotiations, there had been no concessions.

"In the end, it felt like our concerns were not heard and the member for Clarence [Chris Gulaptis], in frustration, decided to go public to the point and offered to sit on the crossbench," Mr Barilaro said.

NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro says the National Party will no longer guarantee support of government legislation.

He said the Nationals felt "betrayed" by the Liberals' refusal to change the guidelines of the policy.

"This issue alone is now starting to divide our communities. This issue alone takes away hope and prosperity for the future of the regions," Mr Barilaro said.

Opposition Leader Jodi McKay said Ms Berejiklian did not have the confidence of the Labor Party, calling on her to address the crisis within two hours.

Ms McKay said she was struggling to understand whether Mr Barilaro was still the Deputy Premier or just the leader of the Nationals.

"This morning we’ve seen the Deputy Premier effectively blow up the government and blow up the Coalition," Ms McKay said.

"I don't understand how you can walk into cabinet, be bound by cabinet solidarity, yet walk into Parliament and not support government legislation.

"I don't know how you can be part of a coalition, yet still sit on the crossbench."

The policy became law on December 18 after being signed by the Governor on the advice of the executive council, which was made up of two Nationals ministers: Bronnie Taylor, representing Mr Barilaro who was in London at the time, and Kevin Anderson.

On Wednesday, one of the Berejiklian government's longest-serving Liberal MPs, Catherine Cusack, said Mr Barilaro had shown "unprecedented disloyalty" to the Coalition.

In a extraordinary attack on the NSW Nationals leader, Ms Cusack said: "In 30 years I have never seen such behaviour by any leader in politics."

Ms Cusack said Mr Barilaro should resign as leader of the junior Coalition partner if he refused to follow cabinet processes and "continues to embolden government MPs to move to the crossbench".

[mat the expat]

Barilaro is just in it for himself

[Carter's Choice]

Barilaro is just in it for himself

It will be very interesting to see how this plays out. Berejiklian has called his bluff, and threatened to sack any Nationals from the Ministry by Friday morning if they don't back down. I expect them to back down, is Barilaro prepared to lose the Deputy Premiership on this issue?

[mat the expat]

He is desperate for relevance.....the Nationals in NSW are haemorrhaging voted to the Shooters and Fishers.

He fluffed his jump to Federal politics - that multi-million dollar luxury farm he has won't pay for itself

[Carter's Choice]

[MungoMan]

It would indeed have been short, viz. Gladys B handing Barilaro the press release announcing her ultimatum and uttering three words.

Stitch. This. Cunt.

[Carter's Choice]

Wrong tactic at wrong time may be end of the line for Barilaro
Alexandra Smith
By Alexandra Smith
September 10, 2020 — 6.12pm

John Barilaro's latest, but most extreme, round of brinkmanship may well win him friends in the bush but it will be at the expense of a stable functioning government.

The NSW Nationals' leader, with the overwhelming support of his party room, has taken the unprecedented step of leading his troops to the edge of the cliff and they are ready to follow him over.

When NSW Parliament resumes next week, 18 of 19 Nationals MPs (with the exception of Port Macquarie's Leslie Williams) plan to sit on the crossbench and hold the Liberals to ransom.

But Premier Gladys Berejiklian has shown she will not be railroaded. In the past, Barilaro has managed to tease concessions out of Berejiklian and to keep the regions happy.

But Berejiklian has chosen her moment – and this time she will not back down. She has made a calculated political decision that this is not the right time or the right issue to jeopardise a functioning government.

She will not tolerate the threats to her government and has given an ultimatum to the junior coalition partner.

Barilaro and his team must withdraw their threats by first thing Friday, or they are out of her cabinet. She is prepared to go to Government House on Friday and swear in a new (all-Liberal) ministry.

NSW Government in crisis as Nationals move to crossbench over koala policy
Thursday September 10: The NSW Government is in crisis after the Nationals announced they would not support government legislation.

It is an extraordinary development for a government that is the envy of the country for its competent handling of a global pandemic.

On the surface, the issue that appears to have sparked the crisis in the Coalition is a little known planning policy relating to the protection of koala habitat.

It became law just before last Christmas, but has been the source of simmering tension between the Nationals and Liberals ever since. The Nationals argue the policy will lock up land for farmers. The Liberals insist it does nothing more than provide mechanisms for koalas to be protected.

For the Coalition to face a nasty split over the issue of koalas seems unfathomable. But the cracks in the relationship – routinely described as an unhappy marriage of convenience – have been widening.

The underlying issue is not about koalas. The National Party feels betrayed by the Liberals. They believe the people in the bush are treated like second-class citizens and they have had enough.

This time Barilaro had no choice but to follow through. He has a long history of empty threats, whether it be threatening to quit as leader, or threatening to give up his title of deputy premier.

He has become known as the boy who cried wolf. But he has also been effective.

There is no doubt that while Berejiklian, along with her chief health officer Kerry Chant, have been lauded for the NSW's response to the pandemic, Barilaro has also been integral in NSW's success.

He championed the issues of communities on the Victorian border and was instrumental in reinstating a desperately wanted bubble zone. Barilaro has also helped keep the NSW economy open.

But in a global pandemic, with a recession not seen since the 1990s, what is needed is a strong stable government and united leadership.

The Nationals have chosen their moment to strike, but so has Berejiklian. Barilaro's strategy to demand better treatment for the bush may well have been right, but his tactic was wrong.

This may well be the issue that ends his leadership.

[Jimmy Smallsteps]

Good on her.

She has put up with some shit from her spineless PM ScoMo. (Jesus, what an initial typo to suggest he was 'spinless').

She will not put up with this scurrilous cunt.

I'm no Lib, but I do have some admiration for Gladys.

[mat the expat]

Predictably, he caved immediately.

Expect his resignation as leader soon, the smug POS:

[Carter's Choice]

QLD's CMO has been the target of death threats.

Meanwhile, PVO wrote an interesting article in today's Australian. Basically he says that regardless of what happens with the pandemic or the economy, PM Scott Morrison will come out ahead because he is better at playing politics than anyone else in Australia.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commen ... 6064dfe38d

Coronavirus Australia: Partisan squabbles with premiers suit PM Scott Morrison
PETER VAN ONSELEN


The Prime Minister is losing his authority, not that doing so will lose him the next election. He’s squabbling with state premiers and not even doing that consistently. I don’t expect this descent into partisan madness to ultimately hurt Scott Morrison at the ballot box because he’s always been a political operator, and the times now suit him.

The coronavirus crisis has left Labor at the federal level in a Catch-22: if the economy suffers as it surely will, Morrison campaigns against switching to Labor and risking things getting even worse. If it miraculously improves, he takes credit for the sound economic stewardship that facilitated it.

Actually causal links between these realities is neither here nor there, its about political spin and positioning. The political campaign will work precisely because voters regard the Coalition as the better economic managers. Whether that is the truth of the matter doesn’t ultimately matter. Not if voters are set in their ways.

And while partisan jousting with state premiers might be deeply unbecoming for a PM to partake in, Morrison knows how to use it to his political advantage, and doesn’t mind how it outwardly looks.

Morrison can’t lose

If the economy is dragged further south, he’ll blame Dan Andrews: that autocratic Victorian lefty getting in the road of the national recovery. In other words, Morrison can’t lose politically in the wake of the coronavirus crisis. Not in the short and medium term anyway. The next election is his for the taking, and it is Labor that should be worried about losing seats rather than the government.

READ MORE:Your mess, Dan, you can pay for it|Dan’s made a mess, but PM needs Victoria to work|Spare us partisan attacks: McGowan|Politics and hubris weaken the nation
It is a remarkable thing that the Coalition is in this position after seven years in government and on the back of three prime ministers during that time.

Unlike the Howard government which had achieved so much (under one stable leader) in seven years, this Coalition government has achieved very little. Beyond the traditional conservative goal of keeping Labor out of office.

That is a goal usually driven by ideological and fiscal concerns about Labor. Yet this Coalition government doesn’t ideologically stand for much, and fiscally doubled the national debt before plunging the budget into its most perilous state for a generation (albeit the latter because of the COVID crisis).

The Coalition is an election winning machine, as Christopher Pyne once described them.

But electoral victory doesn’t always equate with good governance, or consistent conduct. Why is it that Morrison is so loud and proud condemning the Labor Queensland Premier but not the Liberal Premiers in Tasmania and South Australia? There have been just as many ridiculously heartless refusals for exemptions on medical and compassionate grounds into those states as there have been into Queensland. Yet Morrison reserves his criticism for Annastacia Palaszczuk.

I guess inconsistency doesn’t matter in politics.

Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.

PETER VAN ONSELENCONTRIBUTING EDIT

[Carter's Choice]

Scott Morrison's much hyped energy announcement today is based around the Federal Govt funding a gas powered power plant in NSW.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-14/ ... oFN9QRSFwE

[MungoMan]

Scott Morrison's much hyped energy announcement today is based around the Federal Govt funding a gas powered power plant in NSW.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-14/ ... oFN9QRSFwE

Building a new gas-fired power station, either open cycle or closed cycle, is a thoroughly well-understood exercise. The direct and indirect costs are well-understood and there are well-understood ways to model the likely revenue stream. Nevertheless, private sector proponents are showing sod-all interest in investing in new large-scale gas-fired generation in NSW.

There just might be a readily-grasped reason for that.

Private sector energy companies and equity firms willing to invest in generation projects aren't, generally speaking, big stakes gamblers comfortable with lots of risk. And there's risk aplenty in taking a punt on a large gasburner when the price of gas is staying stubbornly high (despite the Cwth Government trying and failing lower it), when electricity spot price is falling, and when a future Cwth Government might just pluck up the courage to put a price on greenhouse gas emissions.

[Carter's Choice]

The Federal govt are going to scrap responsible lending rules in Australia, to increase and hasten access to credit. It's almost like the Banking Royal Commission never happened.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n ... rt-economy

Watching Frydenberg's press conference this morning, he says that the onus of responsibility will move from the lender to the borrower. What could go wrong?

[Guy Smiley]

What they lack in ability, they make up in sheer corruption.

[Carter's Choice]

What they lack in ability, they make up in sheer corruption.

I just cannot understand how loosening lending rules will improve our economy, especially given we already have some of the highest personal debt level in the world.

In other news, it is interesting to see that the Federal govt have declared that they won't be considering govt debt until unemployment is well below 6%. And reading across the various news sites this attitude seems to have been well received by the media. As an ALP member I find this hard to accept given that Labor has been smashed about govt debt for the best part of two decades. Even at the last election Bill Shorten was savaged by all sections of the media because of the alleged cost of some of his policies to the budget bottom line. And Scot Morrison was allowed to run on a platform of being 'back in black' and bringing the economy back into surplus 'next year'. Yet now the Coalition govt have been given a free pass to dismiss any questions about debt until unemployment reaches a level that they have arbitrarily picked. Suddenly because a Coalition govt is in power, debt and deficit doesn't matter. Don't get me wrong, I think its important that our Federal govt spends our way out of this recession. I'm just enraged about the double standard.

[Guy Smiley]

Slightly contextual... I made this comment in a conversation elsewhere regarding the hilarious twist NewsCorp are trying to put on the job Dan Andrews is doing...

You’d like to think this year’s coverage of the COVID crisis would be some sort of watershed in the downfall of Murdoch’s influence... Fox is struggling financially. Sky news is like some grotesque muppet show with various figures scrabbling for the Statler and Waldorf roles while The Australian has become a rattling wheeze where once it really was a journalistic voice. I hate everything Murdoch’s empire stands for and hope to see it collapse within itself. The worrying aspect is the steady shift of ex News employees into the ranks of the ABC suggesting a stealthy takeover coupled with a dilution of standards and talent. Behind all of this is the icy proctologist’s finger of the IPA and the Liberal party working steadily away at the stealing of democracy. Fuck em for turning everything they touch into a shitshow of corruption and stench.

[mat the expat]

What they lack in ability, they make up in sheer corruption.

I just cannot understand how loosening lending rules will improve our economy, especially given we already have some of the highest personal debt level in the world.

In other news, it is interesting to see that the Federal govt have declared that they won't be considering govt debt until unemployment is well below 6%. And reading across the various news sites this attitude seems to have been well received by the media. As an ALP member I find this hard to accept given that Labor has been smashed about govt debt for the best part of two decades. Even at the last election Bill Shorten was savaged by all sections of the media because of the alleged cost of some of his policies to the budget bottom line. And Scot Morrison was allowed to run on a platform of being 'back in black' and bringing the economy back into surplus 'next year'. Yet now the Coalition govt have been given a free pass to dismiss any questions about debt until unemployment reaches a level that they have arbitrarily picked. Suddenly because a Coalition govt is in power, debt and deficit doesn't matter. Don't get me wrong, I think its important that our Federal govt spends our way out of this recession. I'm just enraged about the double standard.

When you control the media (or it controls you), it's easy to get a free pass

[Carter's Choice]

When you control the media (or it controls you), it's easy to get a free pass

That's exactly what has happened. Today during a press conference with Mathias Corman, Josh Frydenberg said he and his government were not going to answer any questions on debt because that wasn't their focus until unemployment reach 6%. And the room full of journalists just accepted that and moved on.

[mat the expat]

An absolute disgrace.

[Carter's Choice]

Slightly contextual... I made this comment in a conversation elsewhere regarding the hilarious twist NewsCorp are trying to put on the job Dan Andrews is doing...

You’d like to think this year’s coverage of the COVID crisis would be some sort of watershed in the downfall of Murdoch’s influence... Fox is struggling financially. Sky news is like some grotesque muppet show with various figures scrabbling for the Statler and Waldorf roles while The Australian has become a rattling wheeze where once it really was a journalistic voice. I hate everything Murdoch’s empire stands for and hope to see it collapse within itself. The worrying aspect is the steady shift of ex News employees into the ranks of the ABC suggesting a stealthy takeover coupled with a dilution of standards and talent. Behind all of this is the icy proctologist’s finger of the IPA and the Liberal party working steadily away at the stealing of democracy. Fuck em for turning everything they touch into a shitshow of corruption and stench.

The worst part is that we are at the stage where we know that Rupert Murdoch directly controls election results at state and federal level, but there is nothing we can do about it. News Ltd newspapers run at a loss but Murdoch keeps publishing because influence is much more valuable than any profit they may have once gleaned. Cue Sluggy arguing that The Australian wrote one positive article about Kevin Rudd back in 2007 so that balances things out.