Comment

Julia Gillard (Unley High School) was at The Sydney Institute when she said the words that would help destroy the Australian education system: “no school will lose a dollar of funding”. More than a decade on, funding to schools has never been so unequal.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was desperate to claim a ‘win’ in the Fadden byelection. This was evident in a number of ways – most conspicuously, the negativity of his behaviour in the days leading up to the vote, his focus on trying to blame the government for the cost of living and housing crises, and his anti-Voice strategies.

If you can believe the opinion polls, regional Australia has gone very cold on the idea of a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Rebel Liberal ‘Yes’ campaigner Julian Leeser certainly found a warmer reception in the New South Wales city of Wagga Wagga on Monday, where he attended a number of events promoting the referendum.

When Donald Trump was elected United States president in 2016, one of the many entrenched right-wing Liberal members in Victoria posted on social media a photo of himself proudly wearing a red baseball cap emblazoned with the words ‘Make Victoria Great Again’. I immediately suggested to several people in the party that this would not bode well, given Trump’s overt racism and sexism, and that they should ‘lose the caps’.

“Those who failed to ensure that Australia’s participation in this war was legitimate should not escape their share of culpability for the atrocities in Afghanistan.”

At the end, robo-debt was about two things: a government totally unable to imagine the experiences of the poor and a politics that sees votes in their exploitation. Robo-debt would never have existed were it not for the contempt with which the political class views those living in poverty.

The Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme has identified appalling dishonesty and lapses in government processes that had serious consequences for the innocent, and their families, who were hounded for non-payment of fictitious ‘debts’.

No one was happier in the federal opposition than Peter Dutton when the embattled Stuart Robert quit the parliament a couple of months ago. Sure it triggered today’s byelection in Robert’s Gold Coast seat of Fadden, but it made clearing out the Liberal stable that much easier.

It is quite clear opponents of the Voice have decided the best way to defeat the referendum, and to bloody the prime minister’s nose as a bonus, is to sow doubt and confusion.

Linda Burney’s voice is stretched and a little unsteady. When she speaks, her face opens, as if waiting to see she has been understood. She calls in the people at the back of the room. Before all this, she was a schoolteacher.