Politics

It took a carefully orchestrated sting lasting 12 months to rid the Australian Labor Party of a strongman few could tolerate any longer. But the fall of factional warlord Adem Somyurek has ramifications well beyond the borders of his Victorian fiefdom. Somyurek made sure of that himself when he boasted in secret recordings that his influence went to the top of the Labor Party in Canberra.

The morphing of a campaign focused on policing, justice and structural disadvantage into a culture war over statues, movies and TV isn’t an accident. It’s a deliberate attempt by conservatives to shift this debate onto terrain where they are more comfortable fighting. None of the demands raised by organisers of the Black Lives Matter rallies related to renaming federal electorates, felling statues or cleansing Netflix’s library of blackface material.

There’s nothing like the prospect of voters about to mark their ballot papers to focus the minds of politicians. And as parliament resumed this week, the spectre of the Eden-Monaro byelection hung over the place, jolting it out of its brief coronavirus togetherness. Make no mistake: even though the byelection in three weeks’ time will not weaken the government’s numbers on the floor of the house if it loses, there is a strong view that a Liberal win will reinforce Scott Morrison’s druthers to go to a general election early. And you don’t have to look very far to find the reasons why.

As Black, Brown, Indigenous people and allies in the United States and across the world collectively rise up to end systemic racism and violent police practices, it was necessary for us here in Australia to also rise.

As if Scott Morrison hasn’t got enough on his plate, now he has been dragged into the quagmire of Donald Trump’s increasingly ugly campaign to cling to office. The invitation to attend the September summit of G7 world leaders in the United States would normally be a feather in the cap for an Australian prime minister. Now it only complicates Australia’s interests at home and abroad.

It’s easy to avoid a hard question by simply saying the government ‘should’ provide more money to the universities. But there’s a long list of things the Morrison government should do: extend the JobKeeper payment to casuals and temporary residents; permanently boost unemployment benefits; provide support to the arts and entertainment industry; introduce a carbon price. And avoiding hard questions, by focusing on what ‘should’ happen, isn’t going to spare the academics in the vice-chancellors’ firing lines. So, what can be done?

At the National Press Club on Tuesday, Scott Morrison went all medical as he framed his prescription for economic recovery. Key ministers in the room smiled their nodding approval when he said: ‘At some point you’ve got to get your economy out of ICU. You’ve got to get it off the medication before it becomes too accustomed to it.’

It was only three months ago that the prime minister stood up in parliament to make his latest report on the progress of Closing the Gap. Just two of seven targets, he revealed, are on track to be met by 2025. The gap itself is a difficult concept. By its very nature, improvements do not always mean it is narrowed. For instance, while Indigenous mortality rates and child mortality rates have improved slightly, so have those for non-Indigenous Australians, meaning the gap remains – and Indigenous children still face a mortality rate twice that of their non-Indigenous peers.

Just at the moment the government claimed vindication for a big win on the world stage, China ridiculed its grandstanding. A terse, one-paragraph statement from its Canberra embassy called Australia’s response ‘a joke’. If anything encapsulates how fraught relations are with our biggest trading partner, this was it.

If anybody needed reminding, the Australian economy is in deep trouble, much deeper than either the treasurer or the prime minister realised at the beginning of last month. Then, the talk was of a ‘snapback’ from the damage of the coronavirus pandemic; now it is of a ‘sobering’ economic impact in ‘very difficult’ and ‘uncertain times’. Making these times even more uncertain is our biggest trading partner, China, none too subtly firing the first shots in a trade war.