Comment

It was a star-encrusted night on Tuesday as the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties held its annual knees-up at Sky Phoenix in Sydney. This was not just a few lefties munching on dim sum around a lazy Susan in a Chinese restaurant. Rather, it was a grand affair bursting with judges, lawyers, politicians, scientists, captains of industry, academics, public administrators, journalists and other worthies.

The Morrison government is running away from a national integrity commission at breakneck speed. Its reluctance is made all the starker by its unrestrained willingness to seize on the embarrassment caused to its Labor opponents by Australia’s toughest anti-corruption body, the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption.

As the government of Papua New Guinea has vowed to remove all refugees from Manus Island, most of us who have been detained there for almost seven years are being transported to Port Moresby. It is a big change for us: disturbing and disruptive in many ways. I am in the Granville Motel. It has been fully booked for the Manus refugees. We have to use our boat ID numbers here too for all our needs. Our identity continues to be stripped away from us in PNG.

Giovanni (Pork) Barilaro, deputy premier and king of Cockies Corner in the New South Wales parliament, has been busy puffing hot air and positioning himself for a move to Canberra. But he has other pressing concerns: unfortunately for Giovanni, the Australian Taxation Office has applied for a winding-up order for Ryleho Group Pty Ltd, the Queanbeyan timber doors-and-windows operation he owns with his brother Tony.

There’s no doubt the populist backlash over attempts to deport a Tamil family from Queensland has caught the government by surprise. All of a sudden the perceived advantage for the Coalition in the areas of national and border security was slipping from its grasp. This was all the more of a shock to the minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, who has been assiduously attacking Labor on the issues since the election.

According to our prime minister, ‘If you have a go, you get a go.’ As it turns out, this maxim doesn’t apply to everyone. This truth became catastrophically apparent after Priya’s visa expired on March 4, 2018. Since that day, the members of her family have been denied their basic human rights.

Little wonder Nick “Goosebumps” Cater very quickly lost the plot on Monday’s Q&A. The poor fellow from the Menzies “Research” Centre had just stepped off his Pollie Pedal bicycle, after he and a bunch of other ageing, angry, white reactionaries in Lycra and dyed hair roared into towns in northern New South Wales and southern Queensland, sweatily inspecting war memorials and other remnants of past glories.

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.

This year, seven Australian universities made it into the top 100 in the QS World University Rankings. Their vice-chancellors cheered. But on staff-student ratio Australian universities scored dismally. Of those top seven Australian universities, the Australian National University had the highest score for teaching. It was ranked 417th in the world. Three of Australia’s ‘top’ universities were ranked outside the world’s top 600 for their student-staff ratios.

Fantastic Angus has been so busy with explanations about the poisoning of endangered grasslands on a family spread that he’s taken his eye off the ball. Both carbon emissions and power prices have gone in the opposite direction to that promised by Schmo Morrison’s junta. Emissions are up, up, up, and so too are power prices. Fantastic. Great move. Well done, Angus.