Politics

The cruel irony in this standoff for the protection of our cultural heritage is that it occurs against a backdrop of the Andrews Labor government’s current process to negotiate a treaty with Victoria’s First Nations. The way our concerns, elders and cultural values are being dismissed gives us no confidence they will undertake the current treaty negotiations with Traditional Owners in good faith.

The Trump presidency has been a wild ride for its ally Australia, and is becoming dangerously more bizarre by the day. Canberra is being railroaded into a confrontation with Beijing, which is clearly not in its economic or strategic interests. The Morrison government knows as much and is struggling to deal with America’s ambition in a way that assures Australia’s prosperity and security. The degree of difficulty became apparent at last weekend’s Australia–United States Ministerial Consultations in Sydney.

War is readily characterised as a failure of reason. But that’s not quite true. It is, in fact, a failure to hear reason. The recent loss of Graham Freudenberg – Australia’s greatest speechwriter – compels us once again to listen. We owe him that. With rising geopolitical instability, the value of reason – of the ilk Freudenberg championed – couldn’t be higher.

Tasmanian independent Jacqui Lambie has returned to the senate convinced that people don’t trust politicians. That’s the message she received anywhere she went in the island state during her enforced exile from parliament over citizenship eligibility, she says. And that’s why she and other crossbenchers in both the house of representatives and the senate are calling for the urgent establishment of a national integrity commission.

Scott Morrison, who famously shrank the Liberal Party to near-invisibility to win the May election, was this week confronted by his party’s reappearance, and he doesn’t much like it. In just the second government party room meeting since polling day, Morrison read the riot act to backbenchers for unhelpfully freelancing in the media. In parliament, he sat frustrated as Labor mostly ignored him in question time.

Remember this quiet week. It is the origin moment of the biggest test of national character Australia has faced in 50 years. Some may have sensed it, others deduced it. But before 2020 arrives, anyone with contemporary historical perspective will know, understand and have had to take a position on the United States and its president. The choices are appeasement or action, with little scope to hover in between.

Rapturous applause welcomed Scott Morrison to the annual Hillsong conference. Twenty-one thousand delegates bowed their heads as the prime minister led them in prayer for our nation – for veterans doing it tough, young people considering suicide, those facing the challenges of middle age, remote Indigenous communities, people with disability, and drought-breaking rain.

Despite claiming that his ‘faith is not a political agenda’, the prime minister’s religious values are evident in his speeches and policies. Scott Morrison talks about his Christianity all the time. Listeners might not be faulted for absorbing his analogies and colloquialisms as metaphors. For Morrison, however, they are facts. The Pentecostal faith does not describe itself in the abstract: a miracle is literally a miracle. His language is full of references to evangelical fundamentalism and the supernatural.

In politics, so the wisdom goes, ‘perception is reality’. And this week, with the opening of the 46th parliament, the perception and the reality of the federal election hit home, particularly for the vanquished Labor Party. But for the victors, not everything is as it seems.

What if money didn’t matter much in Australian politics? Clive Palmer just spent $53 million on ads for his United Australia Party and had zero candidates elected. And Jacqui Lambie won a senate seat having gone through a lot of shoe leather but spent only $50,000.