Comment

The maxim holds that arts work shouldn’t feel like work if you love it enough. We don’t have to treat your work as work if we can treat it as your passion. If there is funding, it should go to the art, and paying workers is optional. We would if we could, the organisation says. This divestment of responsibility does more than harm arts workers; it actively reproduces prevalent and exclusionary power structures within the arts. The explicit currency on which arts organisations are run is passion, but the implicit currency is personal privilege.

The fact is Labor senator Katy Gallagher referred herself to the High Court as a test case for “reasonable steps”. Turnbull’s attack on Shorten for gaming the system is very rich given he argued that Barnaby Joyce was eligible until the court declared otherwise. Joyce remained deputy prime minister and sat in the parliament for 74 days even though he was under a cloud. There is no real substance to the demands that the members now facing the voters again should apologise for the inconvenience and expense the byelections will cost. In all their cases, their good faith is established by their genuine efforts to comply with section 44, according to serious legal advice, which was clearly not the case with the politicians who were bundled out of the parliament last year.

The massive expansion of the tertiary sector during the Dawkins era, and the elision of tech institutes and universities, set us off on the wild ride we are still on. Resistance by the humanities was greeted with exemplary punishment – the cheapest courses to teach, they were crowded with tens of thousands of new students and deprived of the funding to cater for them. The problem is worse in Australia than almost anywhere else. Had we a real respect for universities and what they do, the successive depredation of them would have given us a May ’68 redux by now. Instead, the machine hums on.

Voters are being asked to buy a pig in a poke. Morrison wants them to take him on trust. This is despite the fact he is a treasurer whose budget last year did not foresee the massive revenue increase that materialised over the past four months, a revenue lift that Treasury has baked into its forecasts for the forward estimates and projections out to 2025. In all budgets, assumptions are contestable, but some of the key ones in this budget are close to unbelievable.

The LNP have been brazen about their commitment to what they call ‘independent’ schools, including those that charge high and ever-mounting fees. They have claimed their partiality towards these palaces of privilege is ‘part of their DNA’. Under Turnbull’s mutated (and mutilated) Gonski, 87 per cent of public schools will still not be funded to the agreed minimum school resource standard by 2023. Sixty-five per cent of fee-charging schools, however, will be funded above it.

If Shorten is having nightmares over the thought of Morrison demolishing his politically toxic corporate tax cuts, the Business Council of Australia has signalled it is putting together a war chest estimated at $26 million to campaign for them. Here, the Liberals should be careful what they wish for.

The colliding of opinions will only lead to the emergence of truth if the force behind both is equal, if the playing field is level, if there is a commitment to truth rather than to an agenda that is self-serving. Herein lies the rub: those who claim to be the biggest proponents of free speech seem uninterested in the pursuit of truth, unable and unwilling to accept any version of truth that is not their own.

Dutton, who spends billions of dollars to keep innocent people in misery for years, spends more taxpayer dollars to resist attempts to get appropriate medical care for the children the minister has harmed. He also criticises lawyers who try to help the people he is harming. In August 2017, Dutton declared that lawyers helping asylum seekers were “unAustralian”. Speaking for myself, his comment made being “unAustralian” a badge of honour.

The government attacks the unions, particularly the CFMMEU, for seeing fines as the cost of doing unlawful business. It has now been exposed as being far more tolerant of its corporate mates doing the same thing. No wonder Labor can throw back at the Liberals the charge of running a protection racket for the banks. The stench coming from the royal commission is souring the government’s attempts to have the Senate pass the final $35 billion stage of its corporate tax cuts. The big banks stand to be major beneficiaries, to the tune of $13.2 billion in tax savings over the next decade.

Credlin is no run-of-the-mill commentator. One veteran Liberal says there’s no doubt she’s one of the key campaign strategists for the Abbott camp. ‘She’s a player,’ he says. Just how big a player is hard to determine. But so deep are the suspicions within the party that another backbencher says he wouldn’t be surprised if she had a hand in a sensational story, in the News Corp tabloids, saying Turnbull has personal investments worth a million dollars in a fund that profits when Australian companies lose.