Politics

The Morrison government was brought to the brink of collapse this week in a confrontation between the prime minister and reinstalled Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce. And while Scott Morrison emerged the undisputed winner after bruising negotiations over the shape of the ministry and direction of the government, the damage is far from repaired.

The Ben Roberts-Smith case may be the greatest show in town, yet the consequences for the media defendants cannot be overstated. The future of investigative reporting is held in the balance.

Before the voters got a chance to pass judgement on the Morrison–McCormack Coalition, the Nationals’ party room did. And its judgement was that the deputy prime minister was failing to deliver for his core constituencies. Dispatched was mild-mannered Michael McCormack. According to an insider, the Nationals wanted a leader who could stand up to Scott Morrison and look after miners and farmers better. This narrative, at least at face value, is what motivated a majority of the 21 Nationals to re-elect the previously shamed Barnaby Joyce as leader.

It is most disturbing how genuine compassion has been lost from our national government. Even worse, they seem so shameless about it. Concepts of government responsibility, integrity and accountability are increasingly downplayed, even ignored. A sense of shame is essential to an effective moral compass. Shamelessness is a real threat to our democracy and to the rule of law.

The relationship between the Australian prime minister and the country’s highest-profile devotee of the QAnon conspiracy cult became even more problematic this week for the absent Scott Morrison. The Labor opposition seized on revelations in the much anticipated Four Corners program about Tim Stewart to claim serious questions of national security are involved. The Louise Milligan report showed a number of text messages where Stewart boasted of his access to the prime minister and his ability to influence him.

The decision to transfer one of the daughters of the Murugappan family to Perth Children’s Hospital sent shock waves across Australia and abroad. Growing public pressure forced the Australian government to release the whole family into Perth community detention.

This weekend, Scott Morrison would be hoping pictures of him rubbing shoulders with United States President Joe Biden and the world’s major democratic leaders at the G7 summit in Britain would speak volumes about his importance and worth to Australian voters. But he will be vying for screen time with the heart-wrenching pictures of two distressed children kissing before they are separated so that the younger of them might be evacuated to mainland Australia, an emergency caused by a failure of medical treatment.

In Franz Kafka’s book The Trial the accused, Josef K, manages to arouse the court’s anger by loudly complaining about the absurdity of the proceedings and the accusation itself, if he could only understand it. The book is alternatively macabre and comical – much like the Commonwealth’s case against our own K, Witness K, and his former lawyer, Bernard Collaery.

The latest outbreak shows only one person needs to catch the bug in hotel quarantine in Adelaide, bring it unwittingly into Melbourne and carry on with a very active life in the community across several suburbs.

It’s been almost 20 years since I wrote “Bell’s Theorem”, an essay about Aboriginal art and the Western systems that make it a white business. The essay finished with a simple observation: ‘There is no hope.’