Comment

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.

Senior members of the Commonwealth’s cop squad have been working overtime on coming up with fresh meanings for the phrase “national security”. To paraphrase Humpty Dumpty, it really means just what the government chooses it to mean, neither more nor less. Certainly it covers things such as bugging the Timor-Leste ministerial offices, or soldiers shooting the wrong people in Afghanistan, or plans by spooky public servants to spy on the entire population. All of that comes under the Humpty Dumpty definition, which really has nothing to do with national security at all, but more to do with government embarrassment.

Scott Morrison is assiduously doing nothing much of consequence. In fact, this week he appeared to have taken a leaf out of the opposition leader’s book and, like Anthony Albanese, is doing a lot of listening. He has apparently decided this is the safest way of dealing with the press freedom brouhaha that has engulfed his government since its unexpected return to power.

The Australian Federal Police raids on the offices of the ABC and the home of a News Corp journalist keep being described as ‘unprecedented’. They are certainly a degeneration, though these goonish interventions have always been there. Only their targets and locations have changed. An unbroken chain of raids, prosecutions, bannings, destructions, libel suits, intimidation and blacklistings drags its way through our history, all the way to the early colony.

Poor Gaven Morris, the man in charge of “news, analysis and investigations” at Your Aunty. No sooner was he having to bat away allegations he closed down a radio current affairs story about the loss-leading economics of Adani’s Carmichael coalmine than he had Constable Plod of the Australian Federal Police at his door, saying, “Ullo, ullo, ullo, wot’s going on here, then?” With a breathtakingly broad warrant, Plod was hunting for the sources connected to ABC stories published in 2017 about Australia’s clandestine special forces operations in Afghanistan.

Scott Morrison and his treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, don’t intend to repeat the Keating government’s mistake of crab-walking away from their key pre-election promises, not that they made many. Frydenberg still trumpets the $100 billion promise over 10 years for infrastructure, but is just as adamant he won’t be bringing any of it forward. He says half of it will be spent during the next four years. The RBA governor is looking for more stimulus now.

The Coalition won the recent federal election at least in part on its reputation as the better economic manager. It claimed it could be trusted to take care of taxpayer dollars. But does this stand up to scrutiny? Frankly, not when it comes to the way the government funds our schools.

Already, the race is on for the next election. Both a jubilant Scott Morrison and a perky Anthony Albanese are off and running. Morrison has set himself the task of winning a fourth term for the Coalition, while Albanese is determined to learn from the wreckage of the unloseable election and keep the focus as much as possible on the government.

Some time between 8.58am and 10.43am on June 29, 2016, after Borce and Karen Ristevski’s daughter, Sarah, left for work, Borce killed Karen, his wife of 27 years, in a manner known only to himself. He then moved her body from their home, placed it in the boot of her car, drove to Mount Macedon Regional Park, north-west of Melbourne, and concealed it before proceeding to lie about his actions to their family, the police and the public for years. By the time investigators found Karen’s body in the isolated bushland where it had been hidden by Ristevski, it was no longer possible to determine a cause of death.