Selective memory: The Voice and Anzac Day

The 2019 Anzac Day service in Cloncurry. Photo: Author’s collection

During my time as a journalist across Queensland (2009-22), I attended dozens of Anzac Day services, on and before the day. Whether they were held at cenotaphs, schools, aged homes, churches or cemeteries, they all commemorated Australia’s many war contributions and all followed a similar format: military-style marching, speeches, hymns, prayers, anthems, the ode, a minute of silence, reveille, and the laying of wreaths. I respected and enjoyed the solemnity of these occasions and I’m proud of the service my eldest daughter gives as a member of the Australian Defence Force. But the part of Anzac Day I enjoyed most was the camaraderie after the event, the chatting and catching up with old and new friends. As a journalist I took great delight in finding out news that was often unrelated to the day itself. I’m not alone in enjoying the aftermath of Anzac ceremonies, as packed pubs on the day prove.

In recent years, there has often been a pleasing inclusion of a Welcome to Country at Anzac Day ceremonies. Welcome to Country is performed by a local Indigenous person to acknowledge and give consent to events taking place on their traditional lands and has become a staple of many public gatherings. Like Anzac Day itself, Welcome to Country serves as a polite but important reminder of how our past continues to influence the present, a “lest we forget” that wars were things that did not just happen overseas.

But that development is now in peril. Last year Australia held a referendum to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the first people of Australia and to create a new body subject to parliamentary laws called the ATSI Voice to make representations to parliament on related matters. At the time I outlined my reasons why I was voting “yes”. However there was politicial division and the referendum failed with a 60 percent “no” vote. Only the ACT was in favour and my state of Queensland recorded the highest no vote of 68%. I was disappointed, but it was the will of the people. As someone who has long supported some form of treaty between black and white Australia, I believe we could still achieve Indigenous justice in other ways.

What I failed to foresee was a sullen triumphalism from many in the “no” camp, and demands for more action. Not content with winning the referendum, many now want to shut down any form of Indigenous identity, including the Aboriginal flag, Welcome to Country and smoking ceremonies. I was reminded of this on the first Anzac Day since the referendum. Someone in my social network shared a popular blog post called Welcome to Country violates principles of commemoration by a man named Charlie Lynn. I’d never heard of the 79-year-old Lynn but he has an impressive CV as a Vietnam veteran and a Liberal Party member of the New South Wales Legislative Council between 1995 and 2015. He has received honours in Australia and PNG, chaired many community and business groups, founded the Kokoda Youth Leadership Challenge and was a talented ultra marathon runner.

His opinion on Anzac Day was therefore worth reading and more troubling because of it. Lynn begins uncontroversially by saying that for the previous 32 years he had attended the Anzac Day service at Bomana Cemetery. Situated outside Port Moresby, Bomana is where many Australians were buried from the New Guinea campaign of the Second World War. The cemetery, he said, reflected “principles of equality, uniformity and commemoration in perpetuity.” I imagine it is a beautiful, poignant and highly relevant place to conduct an Anzac Day service.

This year Lynn was in Australia and attended Anzac Day services in his home town of Camden, New South Wales. He said he was proud of its conduct, that was, however, “UNTIL . . . it was hijacked by an aboriginal activist who was not satisfied with the privilege she had been granted to give a brief ‘welcome to country’.” Lynn said the microphone was “captured” by a woman named Aunty Glenda, “who apparently works for Centrelink (and was apparently paid $300) for the occasion, then went into a black-armband rant reminding us that their fathers were ‘invaders’ who had ‘massacred aborigines’, and that we now living on stolen land which ‘always was and always will be’ aboriginal land‘.”

Lynn said “Glenda from Centrelink” was unaware of those who sacrificed their lives to “save her people from the fate suffered by the Chinese population when they were invaded by the Japanese in 1937.” Lynn also claimed she was unaware that thousands of Australians died in the Papuan campaign and many relatives were sitting in the audience “she was berating.” He said that if she had served in the military she “would have learned that the only colour that counts to servicemen and women is the colour of their uniform” and her “intervention” was an insult to her RSL hosts and a proud Camden community. Lynn said he walked out on the speaker. “I did not wait to hear the full extent of her disgraceful rant. I removed my medals from my jacket and adjourned to the Crown Hotel for a quiet beer to settle down.” It’s not clear whether or when he returned to the Anzac Day service.

Lynn now wants to RSL to ban all “‘Welcome to Country’ speeches, ceremonies, and similar tirades from all Anzac Day services as they represent a violation of the principles of commemorations.” He outlined those principles as uniformity, equality, and “commemoration in perpetuity”. Uniformity covered the design of war cemeteries and of Anzac Day ceremonies, roughly the format I mentioned earlier: “prayers for the fallen, hymns, guest speakers, laying of wreaths, Last Post, a Minutes Silence, and Reveille”. Equality meant “no precedence in acknowledging one race above all others.” Lynn did not define what commemoration in perpetuity meant but said that if “aboriginal activists are permitted to infiltrate Anzac services by establishing ‘Welcome to Country’ as a bridgehead to become a norm, our sacred day will surely suffer the fate of Australia Day in years to come.”

There’s a lot to unpack in Lynn’s passionate piece, which I’ll get to in a moment. But almost crowding it out, was the pile-on response I saw on Facebook. A handful of commenters disagreed but they were drowned out. Mostly, there was a torrent of anti-Indigenous sentiment, none of it very new. “Yes they whinge and moan, but are happy to take the coin,” said one. “Scrap this welcome to country crap,” said another. “Im totally over these minority Indigenous who claim to represent the Indigenous Aussies from all over this country who used to regularly massacre each other while stealing the women!” said a third. “They don’t respect our heritage so why should we care about theirs,” said a fourth. “Wake up to fuking reality, every country on the planet has been invaded and colonised in some way. Get over it,” a fifth said.

On it went, a litany of complaints that could have been lifted from Pauline Hanson’s 1996 playbook with a very 21st century addition about “wokery”, the current shibboleth du jour for those detesting any measures towards inclusion. One revealing comment was “This Bullshit was supposed to stop with the NO vote…Aunty Marcia said,” accompanied by a picture of pro-Voice Indigenous academic Marcia Langton with text underneath “vote no and you won’t get a welcome to country again”. What Langton meant was if the Voice failed, non-Indigenous Australians would feel too ashamed to ask traditional owners to do a Welcome to Country. However, opponents treated it as a personal promise and demanded she never conduct another welcome to country again.

I am not blaming Charlie Lynn for the racist nature of these comments. Nevertheless there are several problems with his blog post and I will pay him the respect of addressing them. Firstly the event was not “hijacked” by an Aboriginal activist. As Lynn said, Camden RSL invited Aunty Glenda to speak and possibly paid her for the privilege (I can’t confirm this). It’s also possible her speech was not brief. I have attended many Anzac Day ceremonies where speakers gave long, boring and waffling speeches. Attendees might yawn, look at their watches, and wonder when will this end, but I’ve never seen anyone walk out. Imagine Lynn’s anger if an Aboriginal person had walked out of an Anzac Day service – to the pub, no less – if they were bored or confronted by a white speaker’s remarks. Lynn also queried Glenda’s title of respect, Aunty, by enclosing it in quotes and allowed readers to assume she was a dole-bludger with his repeated “Glenda from Centrelink” association.

As for the Japanese massacres of Chinese people in the Nanking campaign, these did happen. But there is no evidence to suggest that the Japanese would have treated Indigenous people worse than non-Indigenous had they invaded Australia. I don’t know if Aunty Glenda was aware of Nanking, but she would likely aware that more than 1000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples served Australia in the First World War, more than 4000 in the Second World War, and 300 more served alongside Lynn in the Vietnam War. They were not passive observers dependent on white saviours nor are they now “infiltrators” at Anzac Day services. Indigenous Australians helped protect their country from the fate of Nanking.

Lynn is correct to say Indigenous people in the military would have learned “that the only colour that counts to servicemen and women is the colour of their uniform.” However he neglects to note that they would have been reminded of other things that count as soon as they returned to mufti. Lynn, meanwhile, fails his own three principles of commemorations tests. Far from uniformity, Anzac Day is the classic “invented tradition” which has undergone constant change. In early years it was a purely religious ceremony. No cinemas, racecourse, hotels or sporting venues could open on the day so there was no sulking in the pub if you didn’t like what you heard. As for equality, it did not exist for black people under the law until long past the war that Lynn invokes. The government actively enforced the White Australia Policy in the 1940s. Aboriginal people remained non-citizens, subject to drastic restrictions on their lives and movements, hidden away in poverty-stricken reserves, missions and shantytowns, suffering ill health, and treated with lack of respect and racist condescension whenever they mixed with the white population, with the exception of the sports field. In places near the warfront like Burketown, Indigenous people were forcibly removed from their homelands without consent. Lynn’s undefined third principle “commemoration in perpetuity” is less preservation of a “sacred day” than an attempt to prevent the future from learning from the past as his lament about “the fate” of Australia Day (another contested invented tradition) shows.

Yet the past is where the hurt lies, something Lynn acknowledges when he described Aunty Glenda’s welcome as a “black armband rant”. The custom of wearing black armbands to denote mourning, grief, and loss comes from the Egyptian era and was passed down through the Romans. Oddly, while this seems an obvious fit for a solemn occasion like Anzac Day, I can’t remember ever seeing them worn on that day. Aboriginal people wore them on the 150th anniversary of colonisation in 1938 and presented a petition to King George VI to “mourn the death of the many thousands of Aborigines who were brutally murdered (and) mourn the loss of our land and the rape of our women by the white invaders.” But its Australian meaning was forever changed 30 years ago, just as Bill Stanner, Lyndell Ryan, Noel Loos, Henry Reynolds and other Australian historians joined a worldwide movement to document the dispossession, exclusion and marginalisation of colonised peoples. Not everyone was happy with this revisionism. Professor Geoffrey Blainey wrote that his generation grew up on the “Three Cheers” view of history which saw Australia largely as a success. He said in 1988 Australia moved “from a position that had been too favourable to an opposite extreme that is decidedly jaundiced’ and ‘gloomy’.” Blainey’s interpretation was a big influence on the Howard government’s approach from 1996 and the culture and history wars that followed.

It is fitting and proper that history should be contested. It is, after all, a matter of perspectives and there is no single right answer. Anzac Day’s “Lest we forget” invites us to remember all perspectives, including that of Aunty Glenda, rant or not. Her full name is Glenda Chalker, a Camden-born Dharawal woman of the Cubbitch Barta Clan. In her speech she probably spoke about the Appin massacre of April 1816 where at least 14 Aboriginal men, women, and children were murdered by British soldiers and the Camden Park area where her ancestors were forcibly removed to. Chalker wants to see a plaque at the site, which she helped preserve from developers. However she acknowledged to the ABC in 2022 that not everyone was “happy with what we have achieved”. Presumably these are the same people that would now demand Chalker and her mob “wake up to fuking reality”. The tragedy of the 2023 Voice Referendum is the stridency of those now who feel emboldened to roll back even those small achievements. Never mind Black Armband, Three Cheers is becoming Three Jeers. I hope the RSL matches the referendum result and treats Lynn’s suggestions with a polite but emphatic “no”.

Why I’ll be voting Yes in the Voice Referendum

On October 14, Australians will vote in a referendum to change the federal constitution. The change, if passed, would recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (ATSI) as the first people of Australia and would also create a new body subject to parliamentary laws called the ATSI Voice to make representations to parliament on matters related to ATSI. According to the government’s Referendum booklet, the “yes” case recognises and listens to Indigenous advice to improve their lives while the “no” case says the change is too big, too risky and divisive. If you are not sure, no-campaigners say, then you should vote no. However if that is true, then so is the corollary: If you are sure, then vote yes, which is what I’ll be doing.

I grew up in Ireland and moved to Australia in November 1988. I had no idea then it would be a permanent move but I quickly loved Australia as a vivacious country, brash and confident in its future. In time, I married an Australian woman and had two Australian daughters. Prime minister Paul Keating made it easy for me to become an Australian citizen when he removed the Queen from the oath of allegiance to Australia and I happily swore fealty to my new country in 1994.

I just had one nagging doubt. I knew little or nothing about Australia’s Indigenous people and despite the significance of the bicentennial year, Australia’s past seemed a touchy subject. If Australians remembered the past at all it was reverence for military adventures on foreign fields or for hardy country pioneers who fought only against the land. Indigenous people didn’t fit neatly into the accepted histories though they were being dealt with by a process called “reconciliation”. What was being reconciled? And with whom? It was never made clear. What actually happened in 1788? What happened in the years before? The years after? How did the land change hands from black to white? These were questions that bothered me.

The answers first took me into deep time. A study of Indigenous Australian DNA has shown they are the most ancient continuous civilisation in the world, pre-dating Australia itself, which was then part of the supercontinent of Sahul connecting New Guinea to Tasmania. Genetic data showed humans travelled along the south Asian coastline before reaching Sahul across low sea levels and quickly fanned out across the continent. Stone tools at Malakunanja and Nauwalabila rock shelters in Kakadu National Park are 50,000 years old. Astonishingly, the oldest human remains outside Africa are from western New South Wales at Lake Mungo (Willandra Lakes). Humans arrived there between 50-46 thousand years ago (kya) while the skeleton dated to 45-42 kya. Were Malakunanja and Lake Mungo part of any other country’s history, they would be celebrated and Lake Mungo would be a site of pilgrimage. But here in Australia, they remain unknown.

Writers like Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe pointed out the millennia of achievements of the people that followed, such as fire management, trade routes, townships, and dams. Indigenous societies were intimately and inextricably linked to the land. Stories and knowledge about the land were highly valued and storytellers and songsters were highly-valued members of the community. But there was no writing and their dreaming tracks and songlines were indecipherable to white eyes and ears. It suited too many people to claim Indigenous people were “nomads” with no concept of land ownership. A subtle racism still exists in Australia predicated on the notion there was no civilisation or agriculture on the continent before Europeans arrived and the land was “there for the taking.”

So Australian history begins not with Lake Mungo, but with the First Fleet in 1788 and Australia Day marks the day the British flag was first hoisted at Sydney Cove. The British penal colonists did not engage in treaty talks and never sought to negotiate with the land owners. Instead, they claimed the land belonged to no one and took it for themselves. French navigator Louis de Freycinet was an early visitor to Sydney and recognised the problem at the heart of the young colony. “The very fact that Europeans landed and established themselves at Port Jackson, was as far as the Aborigines were concerned, and according to the laws under which they lived, a hostile action.” Arthur Phillip tried to keep the peace but those that followed him saw the natives as “savages” and began a land grab that fanned out from Sydney, eventually spreading across the continent.

The Black War convulsed Tasmania in the 1820s while across the mainland Native Police forces under white commanders pacified unruly tribes at the barrel of a gun. Queensland’s Native Police survived 60 years as the frontier rolled north and west, with massacres disguised as “collisions” and “dispersals”. They continued into the 20th century with the six week killing spree at Coniston in the Tanami Desert in 1928 killing at least 100 people, a crime for which no-one was ever charged.

White Australia never acknowledged Indigenous resistance nor the heroes of that resistance. America is far from perfect dealing with its settler history but at least Cochise, Crazy Horse, Geronimo and Sitting Bull have made it into popular consciousness. Australian equivalents who fought to save their way of life, such as Pemulwuy, Yagan, Jandamarra, Windradyne, and Bussamarai, remain steadfastly unknown. Survivors of the massacres had their rights restricted in New South Wales and Queensland or were herded into gulags like Palm Island and Cherbourg, which survive today as desperately poor townships out of sight and out of mind.

There remains a tendency in Australia to deny any of this ever happened. In 1963 Anthropologist Bill Stanner called it “the Great Australian Silence”. This silence wasn’t absent-mindedness, Stanner said, but rather “a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape.” Stanner was speaking in 1963, just after ATSI people got the vote. That decision began to bring Indigenous people into the Australian story, a process accelerated by the 1967 referendum that they were counted in the census and that the Commonwealth would have a role to play in what was previously a state issue. In the 1980s and 90s, there was progress on land rights, historians began to investigate the past, an Aboriginal representative body (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission) was established and the 1992 Mabo decision ended the fiction of “terra nullius” and enforced native title.

But a backlash began around 1996 led by the election of far right extremist Pauline Hanson. Hanson found many sympathetic listeners when she promoted the “usurper’s complex” that the government was being too generous to Indigenous people. Within a few years, Liberal Prime Minister John Howard had made Hanson’s views mainstream. ATSIC was abolished, research into the past was derided as “black armband” history, and there was a move to limit native title.

Yet Indigenous people remained at the bottom of Australia’s ladder as every “Closing the Gap” indicator showed. The gap was a stark reminder of a great divide in Australia across education, income, housing, mental health, chronic disease, child and maternal health, access to health services, incarceration, and more. According to the Close the Gap campaign steering committee, the gap led to an immense and unnecessary burden of suffering and grief for ATSI people. For the rest of us, it was a “scar on an unhealed past” and a “stain on the reputation of the nation”.

The Voice is an attempt to heal that past. My only criticism of the yes case is that the change does not go far enough. What is really needed is a Treaty, to formally acknowledge and provide recompense for the 150-year long war that saw the entire continent of Australia change hands. A Treaty to settle “fundamental grievances, and establish binding frameworks of future engagement and dispute resolution” was the centrepiece of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, which acknowledged ATSI tribes as the first sovereign nations of Australia co-existing with “the sovereignty of the Crown”. But white Australia has long resisted the truth of that sovereignty and the war to defeat it, and although Indigenous no-campaigner Lydia Thorpe has called for one, there appears little appetite for discussion of it during the campaign. Treaties, if they happen at all, will be driven by the states and territories, such as Queensland’s Path to Treaty, Treaty in Victoria, and the Northern Territory Treaty Commission.

Instead the referendum focuses on another aspect of the Uluru Statement. The Statement noted that in the 1967 Referendum, Indigenous people were counted but now they need to be heard. For Indigenous people to “take their rightful place” in this country, the statement asked for a “First Nations Voice” in the Constitution. South Australia has taken a similar approach with its First Nations Voice to Parliament.

Sadly, the National Party decided to oppose the federal voice from the outset. They said the Voice will not advance the primary aim of Closing the Gap, though they offered no alternative solutions other than a “focus on local and regional voice bodies and traditional owners” which is exactly what the Voice is designed to do. The Nationals’ opposition is no real surprise as they represent the biggest beneficiaries of the stolen land; the farmers who protested the shrillest against the Mabo and Wik decisions and whose leader in the 1990s infamously promised to pour “bucket-loads of extinguishment” on the native title rights of Indigenous peoples.

Nevertheless like the earlier referendum, the Voice should still have gained bipartisan support of the two major parties. After all, the 1967 referendum happened under a Liberal government and Robert Menzies founded the party in 1945 to represent the “forgotten people”. None have been more forgotten in Australia than its indigenous people. But the Liberals have moved steadily rightward in recent years and Peter Dutton is using the referendum to shore up his base. Dutton has claimed members of the Voice would be “a group of city-based academics” but confusingly has pledged to hold a second referendum on the matter in the unlikely event he wins government at the next election. While Dutton has been quick to back false claims that the likes of Marcia Langton and Ray Martin are rubbishing no-voters not the no-campaign, Dutton has left most of the running to NT Indigenous Senator Jacinta Price who calls the referendum divisive and says it seeks to create different levels of citizenship.

But fellow Indigenous woman and constitutional lawyer Dr Megan Davis disagrees. She says a First Nations Voice in the Constitution would shift Indigenous affairs “out of the realm of ideological party politics, where our issues are ruthlessly measured against utilitarian rule.” While Davis ultimately wants a Treaty, and a Truth and Reconciliation Commission similar to post-apartheid South Africa, she said the Voice must come first. “The bulk of our people require enormous amounts of support and resources to get to the threshold” of entering treaties. Davis says Australia has never grappled with that original grievance; the dispossession. “It needs to be resolved in order for us to flourish, for our health and wellbeing to get better and for us not to be so dislocated from the Australian people and Australian state,” she said.

Let’s vote yes and make it happen.

Dark Victory: remembering the Tampa

Rescued asylum seekers aboard the Norwegian cargo ship MV Tampa on August 27, 2001 off Christmas Island. Photograph: Wallenius Wilhelmsen

In November 2001, Australian prime minister John Howard won a spectacular third federal election victory. Barely two months after 9/11 Howard had the advantage of incumbency, but it was still a come from behind win. Kim Beazley’s Labor Party comfortably outpolled the Liberal/National coalition for much of 2001. The defining moment in the campaign came three months earlier when the Norwegian vessel Tampa rescued boatpeople from the high seas.

The events are documented in detail in a book by David Marr and Marian Wilkinson. Dark Victory forensically takes the reader on a journey through choppy waters where no one in Australia comes out well. But while the Norwegians picked up boatpeople, Howard picked up electoral traction. His government launched a damage control operation that moved at breathtaking speed leaving the media and the opposition trailing. It closed the hearts and minds of Australians to refugees and led to Howard’s stunning victory with the infamous campaign statement: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”.

In 2001 refugees seeking asylum in Australia were mostly from Afghanistan and Iraq and were either fleeing the tyranny of the Taliban or ten years of suffocating sanctions against Saddam’s regime. Those aboard a small Indonesian fishing vessel called the Palapa were mainly Afghan with a few Pakistanis. They paid thousands of US dollars to intermediaries to take a dangerous journey on an over-loaded and leaky boat. They sailed from Pantau, a south-west Java port near the surfing town of Pelabuhan Ratu and headed for the Australian Indian Ocean territory of Christmas Island, two days away to the south. But after one day the engine went dead. The boat drifted aimlessly.

The crew reassured nervous passengers they were in Australian waters and would be rescued. Australian Air Force members of Surveillance Australia were aware of the boat. They made several overflies of what was designated as a SIEV – Suspect Illegal Entry Vessel. The crew told Coastwatch that the ship was in difficulties. But instead of issuing a distress signal, Australia attempted to palm the problem off on Indonesia.

The spot where the ship sank was in the high seas. But it was in the zone that was the responsibility of the Indonesia rescue authority BASARNAS. The Australians faxed BASARNAS with details of the SIEV. There was no reply. Canberra had no idea what BASARNAS was doing and took another flyover the following morning. They saw passengers wearing orange rags and holding up flags that read “SOS”. But instead of launching a search and rescue mission, Australia tried again to reach BASARNAS by telephone without success and issued a message to shipping, asking vessels within 10 hours to help.

The 44,000 tonne Tampa, named for the city in Florida, was owned by the Norwegian-Swedish Wilhelmson line which traded with Australia since the 19th century. When the Tampa got the message, it was sailing for home in Norway via Asian ports and was four hours away. Ship’s master Arne Rinnan immediately reset course for the Palapa. The Tampa rescued 438 people from the dilapidated boat. They were 369 men, 26 women (two pregnant) and 43 children, the youngest one year old. Rinnan asked the Coastguard where he should land his new cargo. He told the refugees the boat was bound for Singapore. They pleaded to be taken to Christmas Island.

Finally BASARNAS roused and told Rinnan to take the boat to the nearest Indonesian port of Merak. When the refugees heard this, they became aggravated and threatened Rinnan if he didn’t take them to Christmas Island. Rinnan did not have any firearms. By chance the Australian coastguard rang during this tense exchange. Rinnan told them about the ultimatum. The coastguard said it was the captain’s responsibility to decide the best action. Rinnan set sail for Christmas. The Department of Immigration contacted the boat and told them they could not enter Australian territorial waters. It backed up the command with a threat of their own – Rinnan would be arrested for people smuggling if he tried to take them ashore.

The decision to stop the Tampa came from the top. John Howard’s chief public servant Max Moore-Wilton was the architect of the plan and Howard approved it. Rinnen had no choice. The Tampa turned around and set sail for Merak. But the boatpeople became restless again. Rinnan could not guarantee the continued safety of his ship. He turned for Christmas Island once more.

Australia was not compelled to land these people. Under international law no nation is responsible for rescues on the high seas. Shipping owners, bound by the maritime convention to rescue, were lobbying to change the law. Rinnan arrived outside the harbour at Christmas but was not allowed to land. The refugees could see the lights on the island. They were happy.

But Howard was about to make an issue over the Tampa. Australia was getting uncomfortable reminders how close it was to Asia. Boatpeople had been part of the vocabulary since a Vietnamese boat anchored uninvited off Darwin Harbour in 1976. As former diplomat Bruce Grant said “for Australia, history and geography had merged”. But Australia doesn’t like refugees to arrive this way. It prefers to pick its quota out of overseas camps.

The flow of boats trickled through the 1990s but was increasing. The detention centres of so-called “illegals” in Port Hedland and Baxter were overflowing. Pauline Hanson was making political capital out of the “danger” of Asian immigration. Howard, anxious to win back supporters, gave Moore-Wilton the job of staunching the flow. Australia tightened security and increased intelligence on the ground. ASIS operatives sabotaged boats in ports in Indonesia to prevent them from sailing.

But they were still coming in numbers. Tampa gave Howard an opportunity. To keep the refugees out of Australia Howard had to keep them out of the courts. They could only access the Australian courts if they could make landfall. The Government would eventually excise Christmas Island, Ashmore Reef and other islands from the legal definition of Australia. But that was in future, now, they needed to keep the Tampa out of Australian waters. Christmas Island’s only port, Flying Fish Cove, was closed indefinitely. Where Rinnan would land was now a matter to be resolved between the governments of Norway and Indonesia. Rinnan, and the Norwegian government were appalled. They had answered an Australian distress signal.

The Australian government called on favours to find someone else to take on the responsibility. The Pacific Solution was born. New Zealand took some. The impoverished island of Nauru was persuaded to house others. Canberra engaged its client state Papua New Guinea to build a detention centre on Manus Island. They asked the UN to approve a transfer to newly independent Timor Leste. To Howard’s disgust, Kofi Annan refused.

The passengers on the Tampa went on hunger strike. The army landed an elite SAS team including a doctor to examine them. They reported the people were in good health. It remained Rinnan’s problem. He decided to ignore Australian warnings and make an emergency landing at Flying Fish Cove. Under directions from federal cabinet, Australia ignored his MAYDAY. The boat entered the harbour where it was detained by the SAS.

HMAS Arunta was dispatched to the scene. Ostensibly its job would be to tow the Tampa out to sea. Howard tried to pass an emergency bill to make this a legal activity. Kim Beazley refused to support it. Labor was now trapped. Howard accused Labor of compromising Australian border integrity. Although the bill was defeated in the Senate without bi-partisan support, Howard had struck gold; an opinion poll showed 95 percent support for his “strong action” on border policy. Howard went on talk radio with Alan Jones. Jones fully supported Howard and urged him to take stronger action.

Australia paid Nauru $16.5 million to build a camp. A legal team in Melbourne tried to fight the case onshore. But they needed a client and access to the refugees was prohibited. While they tried in vain to mount a case, SAS soldiers forced the passengers to move to the HMAS Manoora. The Tampa was free to go. Arne Rinnan went home to a hero’s reception and government medals in Oslo. The passengers were eventually unloaded in Nauru; the first of many. Operation Relex had begun and would last until November 2001. By then Howard had won his election. As a 2021 Guardian article on the 20th anniversary noted, some things have not change in two decades. “The Taliban is brutally ascendant across Afghanistan, wreaking violence and terror and sending thousands fleeing from the country. And the offshore processing network Australia set up in the wake of the Tampa is still operational.” The Australian military-style response to a humanitarian crisis has been widely copied by other jurisdictions. But numbers of refugees across the world have doubled in the last decade and there are over 100 million forcible displaced people globally. It is a diabolically wicked problem with no easy solutions. But no matter how electorally popular, “dark victories” like Australia’s Tampa response serve only to sweep it under the carpet.

2021 media person of the year: Grace Tame

In May Grace Tame was the first non-celebrity on the cover of Marie Claire’s Australian edition in its 25 year history. She returned to the cover later in the year with Brittany Higgins.

Grace Tame started the year with an important accolade as Australian of the Year and now ends it with a less prestigious one – this site’s 13th annual media person of the year. I started the award in 2009 with an Australian focus when I gave the first one to the then ABC boss Mark Scott for taking up the fight to Murdoch. Though it went to an Australian a year later for Julian Assange’s Wikileaks exploits (and though he has spent much of the last decade in detention he was a good candidate for a second award this year), Assange’s global focus encouraged me to look beyond our shores for recipients. Looking back on the 13 winners, they were mostly people I respected (Trump the obvious exception) but the common denominator was they used their voice to great effect. Last year I gave it to World Health Organisation boss Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus for dealing with the unimaginable global challenge of COVID and his unheeded warning of the need for equity in vaccine distribution. COVID remains the dominant theme of 2021 though no one individual stands out in response.

Looking elsewhere it was another watershed year in the fight for genuine equality between the sexes. The UN says gender equality is a fundamental human right and a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world. But despite many advances in recent decades, the UN says discriminatory laws and social norms remain pervasive, women continue to be underrepresented at all levels of political leadership, and one in five women and girls between 15 and 49 experience physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner within a 12-month period.

Grace Tame is one of those women. She is an Australian activist and advocate for survivors of sexual assault. She is a yoga teacher, visual artist, and champion long-distance runner, having won the 2020 Ross Marathon in a female course record time of just under three hours. She turns 27 in late December though the highlight of her 2021 was back in January when she was named Australian of the Year. That award is conferred by the National Australia Day Council a not-for-profit Australian Government–owned social enterprise. The award given since 1960 has evolved over the years though scientists and sports stars have always done well (three Australian cricket captains feature). There has been an increasing number of female and Indigenous winners and two of them, Adam Goodes (2014) and Rosie Batty (2015) have used the award to campaign hard on issues of importance, risking great unpopularity for speaking out.

When Tame was named Australian of the Year, Batty wrote her an open letter, warning of the pressures and demands ahead and pleading with the National Australia Day Council to better support recipients. “If there was one thing I would ask NADC to consider,” Batty wrote, “it is to prepare the honourees more thoroughly. Give an indication of the avalanche about to hit.” That avalanche certainly hit but Tame was ready for it, living up not to her surname but to her first name, the epitome of grace under fire. In 2021 Tame took her activism to the next level, directly attacking the government and its leaders, inviting political displeasure in a year when the ruling Coalition has been beset by “women problems” which are really “men problems”.

Tame knows a lot about men problems. Born in Hobart she was a gifted, outgoing child with a loving but disrupted childhood. Her parents separated when she was two and she spent 13 years moving between two homes. She was a dual-scholarship holder at St Michael’s Collegiate girls’ school and was diagnosed with anorexia in Year 10. She was groomed aged 15 and then repeatedly sexually abused by 58-year-old teacher Nicolaas Bester. The school knew about the predator but did nothing to stop the abuse until Tame reported her attacker. Bester was arrested and convicted of “maintaining a sexual relationship with someone under the age of 17”. In sentencing, Justice Helen Wood said Tame, who had undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder, was “particularly vulnerable given her mental state” and that her abuser “knew her psychological condition was precarious” and had “betrayed the trust of the child’s parents and the school’s trust in an utterly blatant fashion.” Tame argued the offence needed to be renamed as in other jurisdictions due to its misleading use of the word “relationship” when what was really meant was “abuse”.

Her attacker showed no remorse. After release from prison in 2015, Bester boasted about his crime on an internet forum. “The majority of men in Australia envy me,” Bester wrote. “I was 59, she was 15 going on 25 … It was awesome.” He was convicted a second time as a result, and for sharing further child exploitation material. In 2017, Bettina Arndt interviewed Bester for her YouTube channel in a segment she called “Feminists persecute disgraced teacher”. Arndt claimed there was “sexually provocative behaviour from female students” and said young women needed to “behave sensibly and not exploit their seductive power to ruin the lives of men”.

Arndt made no attempt to understand the power differential between Bester and Tame or the way he tried to ruin her life. She had not contacted Tame for the story and published her name without consent. Tame criticised Arndt for falsehoods and supporting her abuser and “trivialising” and “laughing off” his crime. “Ms Arndt never reached out to me in the pursuit of balanced journalism; never heard my side of the story; was not present at any stage of the abuse; did not attend any of the court hearings; yet confidently labelled me a ‘provocative’ teenager who used her ‘seductive powers’ to ruin a man’s life,” Tame said.

Though Bester had spoken publicly about the case many times, Tame could not as she was gagged by a Tasmanian law supposedly designed to protect victims. Since 2001 the Evidence Act prohibited publication of information identifying survivors of sexual assault. Journalist and sexual assault survivor advocate Nina Funnell worked with Tame on a campaign called #LetHerSpeak, with Marque Lawyers and End Rape on Campus Australia seeking to overturn this law and a similar law in the Northern Territory. The campaign attracted global support from Alyssa Milano, Tara Moss and John Cleese and from the MeToo movement.

Grace fought her own private battle to speak publicly in the Supreme Court of Tasmania. After two years and a $10,000 legal bill, she was given special leave in August 2019 to tell her story, the first woman in Tasmania granted the exemption. Then in October Tasmanian Attorney-General Elise Archer announced legislation would be amended to allow sexual assault survivors to publicly speak out with changes to the wording of the crime noting that “the word relationship has connotations of consent.” That law came into force in 2020.

As a result Tame became an international advocate including work with the Los Angeles Human Trafficking Squad helping people understand grooming and psychological manipulation. Her focus is on education as prevention rather than looking for cures which can “fuel the unconscious belief that child sexual abuse is just a fact of life that we have to accept in our society”. LA Human Trafficking Squad task force leader Detective Ray Bercini said Tame’s insights were invaluable. “It’s a mind manipulation, it’s a way that these guys are able to control and manipulate victims who are just looking for someone to love them or give them some direction,” he said. “They don’t want to disrespect them if they’re older, and so a lot of the process that happens in the grooming, that’s what draws that bond, and that bond becomes very, very difficult to break through. And if I can understand that, then I can have a little more patience and compassion in knowing that that’s what’s happening.”

Grace Tame was named Tasmanian of the Year in October 2020 and three months later became the first Tasmanian winner in the 61 years of the national award. The award panel cited her “extraordinary courage, using her voice to push for legal reform and raise public awareness about the impacts of sexual violence.” In her acceptance speech she spoke of her assault: “I remember him saying, ‘Don’t make a sound.’ Well, hear me now, using my voice amongst a chorus of voices that will not be silenced.” Tame said child sexual abuse and cultures that enable still existed and the lasting impacts of grooming were not widely understood. “Predators manipulate all of us — family, friends, colleagues, strangers in every class, culture and community. They thrive when we fight amongst ourselves and weaponise all of our vulnerabilities.” Her powerful speech “brought the house down” and marked Tame as an important new voice.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison introduced her that night but probably winced at the speech, with several members of his own government accused of inappropriate conduct, a Coalition staffer on trial for rape of Britanny Higgins and allegations of bullying made by former Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate. Tame later said his measly response was “Well, gee, I bet it felt good to get that out”. With plausible deniability Morrison said he’d called her Australia Day speech “very brave”: “That is exactly what I meant when I said that to her on that occasion”.

Morrison may have wanted to sweep it under the Canberra carpet but Tame was just getting started. At a March 4 Justice rally she said evil thrived in silence. “Unspoken behaviour ignored is behaviour endorsed,” she said to huge applause. She acknowledged while having a voice in these conversations was “terrifying”, women needed to know they had the power. “The fear of doing nothing should outweigh your fear of doing something.” Tame stood shoulder to shoulder with Higgins and both made the cover of Marie Claire’s “Women of the Year” issue, with the magazine recognising them for their “bravery, honesty and smarts”.

Morrison’s “well, gee” reaction suggests he had no grasp of the problem but the evidence was mounting. In April Queensland introduced a Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce to examine coercive control and review the need for a specific offence of domestic violence. Morrison responded with his own Cabinet Taskforce on women’s security and economic security the same month, though he remained opposed to quotas for women in his own party.

Tame made enemies, criticising the appointment of Amanda Stoker as the new assistant minister for women, saying the Queensland senator had supported a “fake rape crisis tour” that inflicted great suffering on survivors. Stoker said Tame’s claims were “utter nonsense” and said different points of view should be spoken and heard even if they had the potential to offend. She probably had Arndt’s Bester story in mind. Stoker had previously supported Arndt who got an Australia Day award a year before Tame, ironically, for her contribution “to gender equity.” In the real world of gender inequity a report by sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins found one in three people working in federal parliament had experienced some kind of sexual harassment. Tame said “until every recommendation has been implemented and real changes follows, sadly all this will amount to is another theatrical announcement. I’m loathe to have to criticise once again, but this is the reality.”

Tame did not back off. Speaking on Twitter after the report was released she said the Prime Minister led a coalition “whose behaviour evidences a distinctly corrupt standard’. Tame said “it rots from the top. “Parliament’s ecosystem of abuse has been revealed. 15 minutes after the 500-page Review launched today, Scott was already claiming it’s a safer workplace than when Brittany was there. This, days after he coercively orchestrated the ambush of Bridget Archer.” Archer was the female MP dragged into the PM’s office for a dressing down after crossing the floor, a fate not shared by male Senator Gerald Rennick when he did the same thing.

Just as the Murdoch press hammered Australian of Year Adam Goodes for being an “uppity black” after he spoke out about Indigenous issues, their army of conservative columnists pressed into action again against Tame. A sure sign she was hitting home came from Janet Albrechtsen who accused Grace of dividing the country. “By antagonising many Australians with her increasingly political interventions, many people will stop listening even when she has something non-partisan to say,” Albrechtsen wrote “More and more, she is surrendering her unique presence as a sexual abuse survivor to dirty partisan politics.” Albrechtsen was lamenting the fact Tame was unafraid to speak her mind. She was using that voice she promised.

A further sign Tame was on the right track came when Pauline Hanson’s New South Wales muppet Mark Latham (who has spent the last 17 years reminding Australians they dodged a bullet when he lost the 2004 election) claimed she had “disgraced” the role of Australian of the Year. Latham’s sole evidence was that Tame was a “one-person political attack machine” on the prime minister and had betrayed the traditional role of the Australian of the Year staying out of partisan political attacks and trying to unite Australians. In Latham’s view, “uniting Australians” is only a good thing if it is uncontroversial, while dirty partisan politics was best left to dirty partisan politicians like him. If my award was for drongo of the year, Latham would be a strong contender, but his words show the truth in reverse. Tame has thrown great honour and meaning on the award, and is an shining exemplar for having the courage of her convictions. After emerging from a difficult dark past, Tame is using her voice to achieve effective change on an international level and a deserving winner of my 2021 media award.

“Child sexual abuse is permanently damaging but it doesn’t have to stop you from doing anything, In fact, it can be the very thing that drives you to achieve great things.” – Grace Tame

Woolly Days media person of the year winners:

2009 Mark Scott

2010 Julian Assange

2011 Alan Rusbridger and Nick Davies

2012 Brian Leveson

2013 Edward Snowden

2014 Peter Greste, Mohamed Fadel Fahmy and Basher Mohamed

2015 Clementine Ford

2016 David Bowie

2017 Daphne Caruana Galizia

2018 Donald Trump

2019 Greta Thunberg

2020 Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

When Malcolm Turnbull stopped at nothing

A photo of Malcolm Turnbull eating a camel pie in Birdsville in 2015 noting he became prime minister a few weeks later.

Annabel Crabb’s short biography of Malcolm Turnbull “Stop at Nothing” was published around the 2016 election but before the result was announced. There was an assumption that Turnbull would win that election in reasonable comfort and rule another 10 years or so in John Howard-style. But like Howard in his second election in 1998, Turnbull stumbled over the line. Unlike Howard who had a clear run in his own party-room, Turnbull remained hostage to the climate wars that dogged the Liberals since his first sacking in 2009. Another journalist, Nikki Sava told the story of how Morrison eventually unseated Turnbull in 2018. Turnbull’s resignation made Crabb’s book less relevant to day-to-day politics but she has an enjoyable wry style and Turnbull has led a wildly interesting life so it was enjoyable read.

Crabb starts with the shocking moment Turnbull lost his father Bruce, which also featured in the SBS Who Do You Think You Are episode about Turnbull’s ancestors. Bruce Turnbull raised Malcolm alone since his mother Coral Landsbury walked out on the family. In the SBS show Turnbull said her absence “crept up on me like a slow chill of the heart”. Bruce died aged 56 in a single-engine New South Wales air crash in 1982. Malcolm was 28 and had just become a father himself. It “smashed him up” as Crabb said. The book and SBS show recount the story when Malcolm was a boy and Bruce saved his life when he got in trouble in the Bondi surf. Bruce taught Malcolm to forgive his mother for leaving them when he was just eight, something Turnbull noted with approval in Who Do You Think You Are when a similar story of forgiveness for a mother’s infidelity was unearthed about his bygone relatives.

Crabb says Turnbull’s life was driven by ambition which changed abruptly when he finally became prime minister in 2015. It has been a colourful life, full of “hinterland” as George Brandis called it. Turnbull loved being prime minister, unlike his predecessor Tony Abbott who was a better opposition leader. Turnbull’s “crowning misadventure” as opposition leader was the grand bargain he wanted on a carbon price with the Rudd government in 2009. But Turnbull was driven on by extraordinary expectations and his determination to meet them. After considering retiring, he stayed on to become Australia’s 29th prime minister six years later.

Turnbull was famous long before he entered politics. He first came to public attention in the 1970s as a University of Sydney student working for the Nation Review, radio station 2SM and Channel Nine. He flogged jingles to ad man John Singleton who introduced him to Kerry Packer. He became Packer’s “Boy Friday”, then spectacularly won the Spycatcher case, before leading the Republic campaign to defeat in 1999.

Crabb tells the strange story of “The Cat”. In 1977 Turnbull was dating Fiona Watson, stepdaughter of Labor senator “Diamond” Jim McClelland. It was a turbulent relationship which Watson decided to end. Turnbull wrote letters to Watson’s cat, exhorting its owner to take him back. One day Watson found the cat dead outside her home. There is no evidence Turnbull killed the cat, but rumours spread. Those rumours which spread into print were quickly met with Turnbull writs. “No cat died at my hands,” Turnbull told Crabb, but the story remains Sydney folklore.

Turnbull joined Packer’s organisation after Bruce’s death in 1982. Shortly after starting at Consolidated Press he became embroiled in the Costigan Royal Commission investigating dodgy union dealings. The Commission heard secret evidence that a well-known Australian businessman was involved in drug-running, pornography and murder. The National Times published extracts from the hearings calling the businessman “The Goanna”. Sydney graffiti identified Packer as the Goanna. Turnbull persuaded Packer to counter-attack, believing the Commission was leaking the information. Packer publicly identified himself as the Goanna, refuted the allegations and blasted the Commission. Turnbull went on the air defending his boss, raising the ire of fellow barristers for his unorthodox behaviour.

In private practice in 1986 he received a brief from barrister Geoffrey Robertson to fight for former British Intelligence Officer Peter Wright to publish his memoir Spycatcher in Australia, which the British government wanted to ban. Turnbull was told the case was unwinnable and he was probably bugged but chose to continue. He indulged in fake conversations and hoax faxes to put the opposition off. He even contacted British Labour opposition leader Neil Kinnock to get him to (reluctantly) attack Attorney-General Michael Havers for lying about secret letters that incriminated aristocrat Victor Rothschild in leaking Wright’s intelligence secrets. Kinnock was criticised for accepting the call with one MP saying it was if he had spoken to General Galtieri for a chat about tactics during the Falklands War. Turnbull won the case making Spycatcher a best seller, and him a household name on two continents.

As a lawyer Turnbull later worked against Packer, acting for American junk bond holders owed money by Fairfax in 1991. Turnbull litigated against Fairfax and its bankers for misleading conduct saying the company had overly optimistic projections when touting for loan funds. He called off the threat when Fairfax finally took the holders as serious a creditor as its banks. It got them a seat at the bargaining table when a group called Tourang including Packer and Conrad Black looked to take over the company. When leaked papers showed Packer’s intentions to be more interventionist than he publicly stated, some wondered if Packer’s ex-lawyer was doing the leaking. Turnbull denied it but admitted he was feuding with Packer. When the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal threatened an investigation, Packer withdrew from the syndicate, leaving the Fairfax empire in Black’s hands.

While Turnbull had no overarching political philosophy, Crabb said he was driven into politics in 2004 by a mixture of aptitude and ambition, a sense of public service, and the “gravitational pull of fate”. A sleight of hand involving branch stacking also helped to unseat MP Peter King in Wentworth, the wealthiest electorate in Australia. Turnbull thought he was the obvious choice to replace John Howard as leader in 2007 when Peter Costello stood aside but an ABC interview where he slammed WorkChoices cost him the vote against Brendan Nelson. Nelson was hapless and quickly replaced by Turnbull. Paul Keating told a worried Kevin Rudd that Turnbull was brilliant and utterly fearless but had an Achilles Heel: he lacked judgement. That cost him dear in 2009 when he went too hard on the Godwin Grech affair.

Grech was Turnbull’s Treasury mole, keeping him one step ahead of the government’s response to the GFC. When Grech supplied details of a car financial assistance scheme with a supposed email from a Queensland dealer wanting special treatment, Turnbull demanded the resignations of PM Rudd and his treasurer Wayne Swan. It was revealed Grech had faked the email and Turnbull crashed, eventually falling on his sword over the carbon pricing deal when Andrew Robb reneged his support. After a “bleak period” of introspection, Turnbull stayed on as a “loyal” Abbott frontbencher and then government minister from 2013.

Crabb pinpoints the time when Turnbull realised his boss was not suitable for the job. In May 2015 under advice from Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, Abbott wanted to strip suspected terrorists of Australian citizenship, which would have breached Australia’s UN obligation to prevent statelessness. Turnbull railed against Abbott’s pointless war on “death cults” and delivered a powerful speech to the Sydney Institute on the rule of law and civil liberties. When he was finally elevated to the top job, he wanted to be more consultative than Abbott who relied exclusively on his chief-of-staff Peta Credlin (Abbott cabinet meetings without her in the room were much shorter because ministers knew they needed her approval for their ideas).

Turnbull was done in by the same numbers that did in Abbott. Treasurer Scott Morrison thought Turnbull supported him on his idea to raise the GST and use the funds for tax cuts. Backbenchers were furious at having to sell the hike for only moderate economic gain and Turnbull backed off leaving Morrison high and dry. After 30 successive Newspolls Turnbull’s numbers were still behind Labor, and his time was up by his own method of indication. When conservatives led by Peter Dutton eventually came for him, Morrison squeaked in the back door and won the 2019 election Turnbull believed was his for the taking.

Now Turnbull has time for kayaking on his beloved Sydney Harbour and seeing resemblances to his own life in his family tree. Crabb, speaking to Turnbull before his fall, gets one final quote. “I’m either ahead of my time or behind it. I don’t know which.” Turnbull is an extraordinary and brilliant man, but the times have moved on without him. Turnbull points to Same Sex Marriage as an important legacy but that was poisoned by the long-winded way it had to be done. The tragedy of Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministerial reign was his failure to reshape Australia in his own forward-looking image.

A journey into the inscrutable Scott Morrison

Baby Prague Dudy gets up close and personal with PM Scott Morrison in Cloncurry. Photo: Derek Barry

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece for Australian Community Media’s network called “Prime Minister Scott Morrison on a COVID wing and a prayer”. The article was based on my first-hand experience of the PM in his visits to North West Queensland and recent readings of Niki Savva’s Plots and Prayers and Katharine Murphy’s Quarterly Essay: The End of Certainty. It was a brief attempt to chart Morrison’s current problems, looking back on how he won the “miracle election” of 2019 and looking forward at how he might try to repeat the dose next time round. I talked about his visit to Cloncurry three days after the 2019 election when I saw a busload of pentecostalists come down from Mount Isa who mobbed the PM and treated him like a hero. In her book Sava noted how Morrison had put his faith at the heart of the campaign when he invited the cameras into his church in the Easter before the election. Labor mistakenly wrote him off as a “bible basher” but the pictures of him in prayer made conservative believers feel safe and welcome in the Liberal fold. I saw first hand his affability and he used his personal positive opinion poll rating to good effect. I wondered if he would run a similar track to win again next time. I finished with a note of caution he was “hoping the vaccine rollout doesn’t suffer from too many more snafus”. Those snafus arrived within days of my piece.

Nonetheless Morrison cannot be written off and I want to expand on the arguments of Sava and Murphy. Sava’s book is a blow by blow account of the dramatic circumstances of Morrison’s ascension to PM in August 2018. Using voluminous testimony of senior Liberal Party insiders Sava looks at the challenge to then PM Malcolm Turnbull in a spill precipitated by frontbencher Peter Dutton (though it was Turnbill who actually called the spill). Dutton lost the vote 48-35 but the 30+ votes was seen as a deathknell for Turnbull. In a second vote a few days later, Turnbull stood aside and treasurer Scott Morrison defeated Dutton 45-40. In his final press conference as Prime Minister, Turnbull denounced Dutton and Tony Abbott as “wreckers”. Sava does not deny the point but she also casts an eye on Morrison’s behaviour despite his plausible deniability he was not behind the spill.

Abbott had been a thorn in side in Turnbull’s side since Turnbull overthrew him in 2015. Abbott’s long term game was to undermine the government and then resume the leadership (of the opposition) when Labor, as seemed likely, would win the 2019 election. But Abbott was a spent force and a backbencher with little party room support. Senior front-bencher Dutton was a different matter. He knew Turnbull was an electoral liability in Queensland and several MPs there feared they would lose their seats. As Turnbull was about to face his 40th straight Newspoll loss to Labour in September 2017 (though still competitive at 51-49), Dutton decided it was time to strike. Turnbull beat him to it bringing on a leadership vote in August forcing Dutton to scramble for numbers. The key to his challenge was his best friend finance minister Matthias Cormann, who initially stayed quiet though he did vote for Dutton in that first vote. Cormann’s hand grenade came later in the week.

The role of Morrison and his supporters, says Sava, was “clever, controversial and deadly”. As treasurer he stayed loyal to Turnbull but his numbers men were paying close attention and as the wind changed in the second half of the week they were ready to strike. On Wednesday in a press conference with Turnbull and Cormann, a reporter asked Morrison if he had leadership ambitions. Morrison put his arm around Turnbull and said “I’m ambitious for him”. Within hours Morrison and Cormann were changing their tune. Morrison’s fellow prayer group members Stuart Robert and Alex Hawke were his numbers men and knew Dutton was on the move. The trick was for enough of their supporters to vote for Dutton in the first ballot to leave Turnbull terminally wounded and then pounce in the second ballot once Turnbull was gone. Morrison claims he did all in his power to save Turnbull including warning him not to bring on the first vote and then urging him to send everyone home to avoid the second one. But his henchmen had done the courting and the counting and Morrison was ready once Cormann had come out publicly against Turnbull. With the writing on the wall Turnbull stepped aside and supported Morrison to ensure Dutton would not become PM.

Despite being the seventh PM in nine years, Morrison kept the reputation of a being a clean-skin. He was not helped by the woes of Coalition partners Nationals with leader Barnaby Joyce imploding as his marriage fell apart in public. As parliament resumed in February Morrison was expecting a torrid time but Labor erred in voting for the cross-bench Medevac bill. The fact the bill was morally correct was of little consequence in the murky swamp of Australia’s immigration debate and it allowed Morrison to play national strongman in parliament. He ran a highly disciplined and blokey campaign to defeat Labor in the election winning key seats in Queensland and Tasmania and holding the line in New South Wales, Victoria and WA. The electorate may not have known who Morrison but it decided it didn’t want to know what a government under Bill Shorten would look like.

Murphy’s Quarterly Essay takes the story forward 12 months as the COVID-19 pandemic takes hold. Murphy frames the prime minister as a project manager. She said people close to him said he still maintains the mindset of a party director and problem fixer. He is a populist not an ideologue. As Treasurer he defined the two problems of Australian society as do you get it and are you on my side. “It is no longer about convincing Australians to be on our side, but to convince Australians we are on theirs.” Although Morrrison did not rise to the occasion during the bushfires in his first major crisis but his failure there informed his response to the pandemic. Murphy said Morrison reminded her of Julia Gillard in that they were both watchful politicians, vigilant, and with the ability to read a room.

Turnbull said Morrison showed no interest in policy and his tendencies are shown in a Nick Xenophon story at a time when the then-South Australian senator’s vote was often crucial. Xenophon bumped into Morrison in Canberra and suggested they meet for a coffee to discuss policy. Morrison said “what for?” and Xenophon replied “I just want to catch up and chat about issues.” “No mate,” Morrison replied, “I’m purely transactional.” Murphy said Morrison was not well liked in politics, something that came out in Sava’s book too, “He plays to win and people who play to win tend to accumulate enemies,” Murphy said. What, she asked, are Morrison’s abiding objectives in public life? What hill will he die on? After two and half years of his leadership we seem none the wiser.

Morrison still leads the preferred prime minister stakes but his numbers are falling and his problem with women is especially apparent. Michelle Grattan recently wrote that Morrison is inclined to underestimate tough women. He’s done this in the past, to his detriment, she said. In 2006, when he was managing director of Tourism Australia, Morrison was sacked after falling out with the board and federal Liberal tourism minister, Fran Bailey. His recent handling of issues involving Grace Tame and Christine Holgate have been poor and new Essential polling is finding women are turning off Morrison at a “giddying rate”.

Sava sees the problem as inherent in the party rather than a Morrison issue. The Liberals are desperately short of women in parliament, a problem that will remain as long as they resist quotas. There is plenty of bullying. Many good women including Julia Bishop, Kelly O’Dwyer and Julia Banks have been forced out, though all before Morrison became PM. Murphy did not address the issue in her essay, though to be fair it really only exploded in the six months since it was written. Murphy did address the issue in an article this month where she references the Essential polling but also notes that Morrison’s support among men has not dropped off. She says Morrison believes he can plot a way through this crisis.
“The prime minister has very clear objectives every time he talks to voters, objectives that are generally well informed by research, and he doesn’t mind traversing a narrow pathway as long as there’s a victory at the end of it.” Expect plenty more “Scotty from Marketing” ploys like morning hi vis exercises with Twiggy Forrest to Working Class Man. Working class men may provide Morrison his narrow pathway to a second election win.

The tragedy of Afghanistan’s war lurching toward defeat

It is hard to believe people are now adults that weren’t born when the September 11 tragedy struck,  claiming 3000 lives in 2001. Memories of the day are so fresh in everyone’s minds old enough to remember, and it seems hard to believe 18 years has passed.

While the four terrorist incidents happened in the United States it was a tragedy of global consequence not least because more than 90 countries lost citizens in the attacks. It also led to the war in Afghanistan, a conflict that remains unresolved to this day, with Australian forces still in the country as they have been since 2001.

Chris Masters has written one of the few books that looks deeply into that involvement. No Front Line is a massive 600 page book (a story that resists abbreviation, as Masters notes) that looks into the role played by Australian Special Forces from 2001 to the book’s publication in 2017.

It is a story he says, Australians have been largely disconnected from despite the glorification of the Anzac legend through all the 100 year anniversaries of the First World War.

Australian governments have always justified involvement in Afghanistan by stressing that national security is greatly enhanced by denying al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups a haven, and that this is best done by helping to build a more secure and democratic Afghanistan.

That future seems as far away as ever, with the Afghan government – although elected – maintaining only a tenuous grip on the capital Kabul and outlying area while the Taliban forces, displaced in 2001, remain de facto rulers of much of the country. It is wild ancient country but the Toyota Hilux, cellular phones and the internet connect it with the 21st century.

The first Australian contingent in 2001 was 1 Squadron Special Air Service Regiment who arrived via Perth, Diego Garcia and Kuwait three months after 9/11 to find the Taliban rule had collapsed. While the Americans controlled the air, the Australians were “ground truthers” getting to know the lay of the land. Their role was to long-range patrols to “disrupt and degrade” remaining Taliban and Al Qaeda elements but there was an immediate sense the enemy was not routed but merely regrouping.

The Allies bombed the Tora Bora Caves into submission but Osama Bin Laden escaped into Pakistan and so did many of his and the Taliban’s fighters. Australia’s first casualty was a corporal who stood on a land mine in January 2002 blowing off his foot though he survived the blast.  Australia’s first battle death since Vietnam soon followed – Sgt Andy Russell killed when his Land Rover also hit a mine.

While the focus moved toward nation building with peacekeepers arriving from 18 countries, the Australians moved to Bagram in the North-east to help remove the large remaining stronghold. Here a force of Arab, Uzbek, Chechen and Taliban fighters offered the stiffest resistance yet before being pushed by superior firepower and survivors again slipped away to Pakistan.

Attention was moving to Iraq and Australia already stretched with peacekeeping missions in Timor Leste and the Solomons the end of the 2002 Afghan mission seemed like a natural end. In 2003 SASR was assigned to Iraq while major combat operations ended in Afghanistan and a stream of refugees returned. NATO took over the military role in Kabul but could not establish a force further than 60km from the capital.

Meanwhile Taliban leaders like Mullah Omar were regrouping in Pakistan and a training facility in Quetta prepared new soldiers for the war against the infidel. Inside Afghanistan the main tactic was intimidation against cooperation with the new government. It was effective enough to send all NGOs out of Kandahar by end 2003. The Taliban also began a bombing campaign in Kabul targeting foreign military.  NATO estimated they needed 80,000 troops to secure the south but due to Iraq they only had a fraction of that number.

Violence escalated in 2005 with 19 US Navy Seals killed in an ambush in Kunar province. America pressurised Australia to return and agreed to support the Dutch contingent in Tarin Kowt, capital of the dangerous Uruzgan province in the south. Their mission was to transition “the war off terror to nation building” but new president Hamid Karzai told Denense Minister Robert Hill Uruzgan was challenging.

Special Forces arrived ahead of the 2005 parliamentary elections, which the Taliban was determined to intimidate into failure. The Australians were to conduct long-range patrols as a show of force. While the election passed without incident but the patrols were subject to ambush. 2 Squadron was involved in a six-hour battle in the Khod Valley and they returned to base to find Minister Hill there who realised the nation-building project was “not far advanced”.

The political rhetoric was to characterise the mission as counter-terrorism though no Al Qaeda fighters had been encountered since 2002. The enemy was more nebulous, sometimes called Taliban, sometimes the Mujahideen and others anti-coalition militants.

On patrol the biggest danger was Improvised Explosive Devices which could be placed in culverts under the road and detonated from a distance. In towns suicide bombers and “green on blue” attacks were also dangers. The Special Forces based was named Camp Russell in honour of the soldier who died in 2002 and there they had to mostly sit out the bitterly cold winter.  The danger was increasing with the UN and NGOs departing in 2006 and only two of Uruzgan’s six districts considered safe.

Contact became more frequent. Australia suffered two deaths in quick succession, Pvt Luke Worsley to a rocket-propelled grenade and Sgt Darren through a round in the stomach. One American officer considered the cost of the war. “Considering the (Australian Javelin shoulder-fired weapon) each cost up to $100,000, I used to think we could go down there instead and buy every fighting age male”.

In 2006 the Coalition launched Operation Mountain Thrust, the biggest set-piece since 2001. The third rotation of Australian Special Forces landed in Tarin Kowt and were almost immediately in the fight in the nearby Chora Valley menaced by Taliban forces. In three months they cleared the valley only to be withdrawn and the area was quickly overrun again. This pattern would be repeated over again. Despite its firepower, the Australians were not a holding force so it was easy for the Taliban to take over the battle space aided by the local Ghilzai population who either supported the insurgency by choice or by intimidation.

A new rotation in 2007 was also sent to help the Dutch patrol the Chora Valley and ran into heavy Taliban firepower including mortars, rockets, heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. IEDs made using palm oil containers, fertiliser and battery packs were increasingly used to trip vehicles whose movements were tracked on the bush telegraph. Battles lasted days on end, though very little of this was reported in media.

Although over 60,000 international troops were in Afghanistan in 2007, they all responded to their own leaders meaning there was no coherent plan across all campaigns. Or as Masters put it, the same war was being fought again and again. That year the second Australian soldier died. Trooper David Pearce killed when an IED took out his light armoured vehicle. A third, Matt Locke when a patrol was ambushed in a field.

The death toll rose rapidly in the years that followed as the Taliban confidence – and firepower – increased. Back at home the prime minister of the day and the opposition leader would solemnly attend the funerals as the bipartisan support for involvement continued. The battles that caused the deaths remains mostly outside the public eye.

Afghans were dying in greater numbers still. As one analyst put it “we can kill 20,000 and there are 300,000 in the madrassas in Pakistan being prepared”. The foreigners were increasingly seen as the occupiers rather than allies. In 2009 the new Obama administration called for a “stronger, smarter” strategy in Afghanistan. There was a troop surge and a counter insurgency strategy of “clear, hold and build” but it was undermined by Obama’s parallel announcement of a drawdown in 2011. The Taliban were elated, they could simply wait the enemy out. It was expressed in their saying “they have the watches, we have the time”.

The war dragged on into the 2010s with little or no change in the overall dynamic. The Australians pulled out of Uruzgan in 2013 leaving the field to the Taliban. When surge didn’t work it was followed by drawdown and when that didn’t work either there was another surge. No wonder Trump’s election promise in 2016 to pull America out of the middle east (including Afghanistan) was so electorally popular at home. The war was bewildering.

America is now negotiating directly with the Taliban in an effort to extricate itself from the conflict. American magazine Foreign Policy says after 18 years of war, thousands of lives lost, and hundreds of billions of dollars squandered, the United States has accomplished precisely nothing.

It says the Kabul government is irredeemably corrupt, the Taliban had sanctuary and support in Pakistan and the claim that it was necessary to deny al Qaeda a “safe haven” was increasingly dubious, especially once Osama bin Laden was dead and that terrorist group had spread to many other countries.

“Trying to turn Afghanistan into a modern, Western-style democracy was an act of extraordinary hubris, and all the more so when U.S. leaders told themselves they could do it quickly,” Foreign Policy said.

If the US does finally withdraw so most likely will the 300 ADF personnel deployed there. It is sad news especially for Afghan women who face a return to second class citizens under a renewed Taliban government. But maybe it will give a country tortured by 40 years of war a chance to live and breathe.

My interview with Bob Katter

Last week I posted a live Facebook feed of my sometimes heated interview with Bob Katter. We sat down on the steps outside the steps of the Mount Isa pre-poll centre and chatted for 25 minutes. Thanks to issues with my technical skills and a dodgy selfie stick, the feed came out in Facebook on its wrong side, first 90 degrees to the screen and then in portrait mode instead of landscape. Nonetheless there was a lot of interesting material in the interview and 4000 words spoken, mostly by Bob, so here it is for posterity.

DB: Hi I’m talking with Bob Katter. Bob thanks for talking to the North West Star. Bob, we’re here live outside the Mount Isa pre-poll centre. Bob, we’re about a week out from the election, what’s your take on it so far.

BK: Well you said, it’s the first time we’ve seen you in Mount Isa for the election campaign and that is right. In traditional electioneering you leave the biggest centres till last and you do the smaller centres first and that’s exactly what we’ve done in this election –

DB: Bob I –

BK – so that’s two days I’m here now in what is still the biggest voting area in the electorate. The biggest booths are in Cairns, very sadly, you know their population, but it’s still the biggest voting area so you leave that till last so here I am.

DB: Fair enough and I understand it is a big electorate, I guess what prompted my question before we started taping about was this your first visit was I accused you of snubbing the north west and you hit back at me saying that wasn’t true, and as far as I know you haven’t done a campaign launch in this part of the world.

BK In actual fact I haven’t done a campaign launch at all, and I have to say that’s just incompetence on our part, but then again we’ve been so busy attacking and fighting to try and get the leverage we need. When you say, I must perform and I must deliver or you should boot me out. That’s the way it should be always. Now, I could spend my time, I love electioneering, a big elongated pub crawl. And no one can criticise me because I’m electioneering. Sometimes in the Overlander (Hotel in Mount Isa) where I was last night in the bloody bar. It’s the one time I can justify it and I enjoy myself. But you must deliver. Now the Prime Minister Scott Morrison would not come out to North West Queensland with the disastrous suffering that we had and endured with the death of all these cattle –

DB Hang on surely he would have come out –

BK Stop, stop,

DB Anyway –

BK Stop, Stop Stop. He had the floods on in Townsville. And these weren’t cattle dying these were people dying from disease caused by the flooding. And one of the people related to our staff was in very serious trouble. I know a number of people in Townsville that got these desperate diseases. He also had two other situations with the fires down south so we had people hit by this, a very small number of people, might be 400 or 500 people, you know, the floods and fires, there’s 200,000 people living in Townsville. But when I went down and spoke to him, I pulled some heartstrings, and I suppose said some things that would not have been entirely proper, and I convinced him to come out here. Now the difference between him coming out here and not coming out here, if he doesn’t come out here we get two hundred million, if he does come out here –

DB – So you said Bob,

BK: Stop, stop

DB – No I think I am going to interrupt you at this point.

BK – Right

DB – You said you were instrumental in getting $2 billion, surely that’s not (true), How –

BK – I’m explaining that to you. I’m explaining it. I’m saying 200 –

DB – All you are saying is you met him.

BK No, please let me complete what I’m saying. What I said is that if I could get him to come out, it was my belief we’d get a thousand million, and if I couldn’t get him to come out here we’d get two hundred million and I reminded him his family, the Gilmores part came from out here, Dame Mary Gilmore is the great-aunt and he worked out here as a young bloke . But he sees these people with their suffering and the massive numbers of cattle dead. It will be of enormous benefit. That’s what we want from our Prime Minister-

DB Nobody’s arguing –

BK – That they care about people –

DB – The Mayors of the area have done as much as you have

BK Absolute rubbish. Absolute rubbish. They had absolutely nothing to do with it. I walked in to see him, demanding to see him, because I was in a position I could demand and he said no he couldn’t go. And he didn’t have to explain to me. He’s got mobs of Liberals trying to stab him in the back, he is trying to pull the party together to go into an election, he’s got the ALP savaging him from across there, he’s got the fires down there where hundreds of thousands live, up in Townsville there’s 200,000 people with this dreadful flooding and people dying in the aftermath. Half a million cattle compared to those things, probably not so serious. So I pulled the heartstrings and in 25 minutes I convinced him to go there. The mayors had absolutely nothing to do with it. Two of them hate me with a pathological hatred, they’re entitled to, because my figures shamed their figures.and they’re entitled to hate me and they hate me.

DB Bob –

BK They had nothing to do with him going up there.

DB You say there was no-one else involved. Nonetheless this was the cattle industry which was extremely important to North West Queensland which was on its last legs because we had half a million cattle dead, he understood, and everyone understood, that you had to do something, and something large and whether you were there or not he was going to do that.

BK Derek, you know nothing about politics and the way that it works, absolutely nothing, my friend. And you can rave on to your heart’s content and be the mouthpiece for a couple of mayors, and we’ll judge them upon their performance. We had a flood in which we lost half a million cattle. The southern two-thirds of Queensland have had a drought in which they have lost almost similar figures. They have got nothing and my area has got two thousand million. Now what is the difference, they’ve got a dozen mayors down there  who make two mayors up here look like idiots. Complete non-performing monkeys compared with what you’ve got down there. Well not many of them are monkeys but compared to them they do not rate. Now, there were 12-15 mayors fighting the battle down there, they got nothing so how come we got it? I’ll tell you how we got it because my personal friendship and support and good rapport I have with the Prime Minister and because, infinitely more importantly I had the leverage.I had the power. I had the balance of power.

DB Well –

BK And I used it ruthlessly. I expected to get two hundred million. The minute I knew he was going, Derek, I thought I’d get a thousand million and we got two thousand million. And if I wasn’t there, you wouldn’t have got it. And you can say what you bloody well like but I’ve got 50 years of experience standing behind my statements you’ve got no experience at all standing behind yours.

DB – Okay…

BK Except as a journalist.

DB Okay well we’ll move on. I’m not on the ballot paper, Bob, but, you know, the locals mayors, I’m talking about the six north west mayors (Editors note 1: nine actually) who put one a six point plan that (shows) we’ve been shamefully neglected now you’ve been the MP in this area for over 20 years, haven’t you been asleep at the wheel if that’s the problem? The fact we’ve got no services, bad infrastructure, poor transport, poor telecommunications –

BK – Does this area include Hughenden?

DB It doesn’t (editor’s note 2, it does, and I later apologised for my mistake to Mr Katter)

BK It doesn’t include Hughenden alright, The Hann hwy got the first federal government special allocation for a special road to my knowledge in Australian history. I did not believe I had a tinker’s chance in hell of getting that highway but we got it. Now, I got two thousand million in assistance, I’m the member of parliament for the area, even if I had nothing to do with it but I’m the MP when it came so my good luck. But it was not good luck. My chief of staff was at the meeting and she’ll give you a statutory declaration that when we went to the PM, he said he couldn’t do that and I knew he’d say that because I knew his situation and I didn’t think it was unreasonable and we sat down and discussed what would convince him.

Derek – Bob,with all due respect the Hann Hwy is not part of this area (editor’s note 3, it is. See note 2).

BK The Hann Hwy is Georgetown –

DB – I’m talking about Mount Isa, about Cloncurry, I am talking about Normanton, Burketown, Julia Creek.

BK – Right-o, let’s go further west. You of all people Derek know the delicate situation that we had here concerning one of the mines and I have to choose my words very carefully. CopperString is worth $45m benefit to just one mining operation in this area.

DB – That’s if it comes off Bob

BK – And

DB – It hasn’t been delivered yet

BK And

DB I’m talking about what you you done in 26 –

BK and. And –

DB – years you’ve been an MP?

BK Will you shut up and listen to me for a minute

DB I have been listening to you all along

BK I’m losing my cool here, right? I’m not allowed to complete a sentence. You cut me short when I was talking about Scott Morrison and getting two thousand million

DB Bob –

BK And that’s nothing for the area

DB Bob, that’s one of the issues that people have with you, you go on –

BK It’s a very simple proposition. You said to me, what had I done for the area?

DB Okay

BK Well I got the Prime Minister to come out here and he gave us two thousand million

DB He didn’t come out to Mount Isa.

BK Aw, well. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. He didn’t come out to Mount Isa? Well, I didn’t know Mount Isa had any dead cattle

DB Mount Isa is the heart of this area. With 20,000 people. It’s gone from 30,000 to 20,000 in the last 20 years under your watch, Bob.

BK Who’s fault is that? No, no I’m asking you whose fault? I’m asking you the question you can answer it or say no I’m not going to answer it. Who’s fault is it?

DB – I guess its, I’m not on the ballot paper Bob, you know, it doesn’t matter what I think whose fault it is. I’m asking you whose fault it is.

BK I can tell you exactly whose fault it is.

DB Tell me then

BK It was Tony McGrady, the Mines Minister

DB – So you are blaming the state –

BK Who abolished, stop interrupting, who abolished the ban on fly in mining.I was the minister in 1990 (Editor’s note 4 Katter was mines minister until December 1989 when Labor won the state election). The town has 32,000 people then, the minute we lost the battle – there were huge meetings held there – 300 and 400 people at the meetings. We lost the battle, the state government had the power to allow fly in mining and the state government allowed fly in mining. It’s very simple. Now have we been able to get it back? No we haven’t and I feel and I think the criticism is valid that I as the federal member should have found some way to beat McGrady but his popularity here was twice mine so I have little chance of beating him here in Mount Isa. So he won, I lost, And this town lost. We lost (to) fly in mining. You are well aware of the letter I wrote to the paper when McGrady, one of his spokesmen, attacked Robbie Katter for removing one job in Cloncurry and I’d pointed out the jobs that he’d lost here. Well I’m sorry he won, I lost. But it wasn’t for the want of fighting. But you think you should vote for the bloke that took all the jobs away, or you should vote for the bloke that wants all the jobs here, that’s your choice.

DB Can we move on to another issue. People would say –

BK I want to answer your question. You asked me a question what have I done for this area. I don’t know because there is no specifics in the budget yet on how much money we have got in the greater Mount Isa Cloncurry area for the highway coming out from the coast, onto Tennant Creek, a couple of hundred million, I don’t know but I don’t know where they intend to spend it and I can’t get it out of them. I’ve had a number of meetings with Scott Buchholz the minister to plead the cause for all of these roads but I’ll be honest and said to you Chillagoe two three thousand people along that road, it’s still a dirt road, in our area they get 40-50 inch rainfall. That’s an appalling reflection upon me so I’ve got to fight for that and also the Flinders Hwy in my opinion is not bad between here and Cloncurry but the rest of it is falling to pieces and I’ve got to try and get some money in it but then I’ve got a one lane highway going to Normanton. You say the North West, well Normanton is the north west. And people are getting killed, one of my closest friends the mayor of Georgetown, not Georgetown the neighbouring shire got killed on it. (Editor’s note 5 he meant former Croydon mayor Jack Pickering) I was with him two weeks before he was killed. Obviously it is a very high priority for me. And I’ve got to go where I can get things to happen. But remember this, Hughenden irrigation is the prototype. It is the template. I would have never got Hughenden except in the context of getting Cloncurry, Normanton and Julia Creek. And Richmond has done a lot of good hard work. And getting all of those projects going which had to start somewhere. But Hughenden irrigation is as much about Cloncurry and Richmond as it is about Hughenden. It is a program for the development of the water resources of North West Queensland, if you like, I like to say the Far West, the Mid West and the Gulf.

DB One of the issues raised and it came really up at the top of the list when it came to election issues of our readers was the high cost of flights. You don’t seem to have done anything in that regard, Bob?

BK: I have had seven meetings called with the AWU in Townsville. Now, he wouldn’t give me the meeting.

DB Who wouldn’t?

BK, the AWU boss. I cannot do this without the power of the unions behind me and the AWU is the major union whether I like it or not, and I’m a member of the CFMEU so they are not particularly friendly towards me but I have to work with them, he comes from Mount Isa the senior boss. But I eventually got a meeting the sixth meeting that we called but he wouldn’t go to the meetings. The sixth one we agreed to go to the attend and he didnt attend so I went around twice to AWU HQ and they said he wasn’t there. So there was a seventh attempt. Now Robbie Katter believes he’s got a way of doing things differently – that is not the way I want to do it – he believes we can get another operator in here at a reasonable price. I believe we have to call for tenders and it cannot be done without the cooperation, and I had some initial discussion with the mayor (of Mount Isa) a fair while ago now but I don’t want to be going to her every 10 minutes about it because principally it’s my headache, I agree with you on that and I can tell you it’s not for the want of doing work on it. I have met with recently, and they did not disagree they could do the job for $400, there and back $500 to Townsville and also Robbie leans a bit more heavily on flights to Brisbane. But last time I spoke to him he said, ‘I’m beginning to think we are going to have to look at your approach’, so all I can say to you is that I agree with your criticism of myself, it hasn’t been done. It’s my fault and I accept that responsibility but I’ve got to say it is my belief, and I want to say this bluntly that I cannot do this unless I get the state government agreement, because most flights in and out are state government, unless I can get agreement of the major mining operations there because we’ve got to guarantee 72 percent uplift so you’ve got to be able to say that every flight on average has 72 percent of seats taken. I can’t do that without getting the mines and the state government to come in. It is my belief that that at the state election at the end of next year Robbie Katter and his team, the KAP will get the balance of power and he will be able to deliver the state government and if he’s able to deliver the state government I’m certain – not certain – I’m guardedly confident the mining companies will come in on it and I’m guardedly confident that we can get in under $600 return to Townsville. Now, I hope I don’t have to eat my words this time next year if I’m reelected but your criticism in this case is quite valid and I take it. You don’t get paid in my game for trying, you get paid for accomplishments. I’ve not accomplished it and I want to say bluntly unless I get the cooperation of the unions I will not be able to fulfill this. I do not have sufficient leverage to do that.

DB Bob, you’ve made a big deal out of your relationship with the prime minister Scott Morrison but all the polls seem to suggest Labor are going to win this election, you may lose that leverage?

BK I enjoy very good relationships with a number of senior ministers in the current government. I have a very good relationship, he’s still a very good friend of mine, with Kevin Rudd and also John Howard. I helped these people at various times. A person like myself in the position I’m in can be very helpful indeed.They can’t do things within their own party but I can do things for them from outside. Now I want to say I probably don’t enjoy good relationships with Bill Shorten comparable with my relationships with previous Labor PMs but I’ve got a lot of friends in the Labor party, a lot of friends, remember I’ve got a very close relationship with the CFMEU as I should have, I represent miners, people that work in the mines, and I should be, every MP should be close to their unions, they are good unions that represent their people and represent them properly, so I have a good relationship them and they are very powerful within the Labor Party so I’m not without teeth in the Labor party, so it’s a good question and a good criticism as well.

DB: Bob you don’t think you are too old for the job?

BK:: You know I’ve got the press ringing me saying you are the most energetic person running for parliament, where do you get the energy from. I don’t want –

DB Where do you get the energy from?

BK I dont want to put Robbie Katter down but he didnt get the best player for North Queensland and signed for the Cowboys and I 40 years older than him beat him over 25m a few weeks ago and he reckons I cheated so we had a rerun and I beat him again so I’m not doing too bad for 74 (Editors note 6, Bob turns 74 May 22 six days after the election) and an 80 hour week and a sinus condition and a breakdown of health, three days (indistinguishable) but obviously I’ve done it. But if you’ve worked an 80 hour week on average since Christmas you are going alright. And if you want to know where I am I am in Mount Isa today, I’m in Mareeba tomorrow and you know it gives me no joy to say this but Mareeba is now over 24,000 people and we are down below 20,000 here and this is my homeland and I take full responsibility but if the people of Australia vote for people that want to destroy us all I can do is fight like a tiger and threaten and my threats are not idle, not idle at all. I don’t want to tell you how I brought down a deputy prime minister or a premier or the most powerful person in the Labor Party or a prime minister, I’m not going to dwell on that but people know that is what I have done and fear is a very powerful weapon that I have, but that doesn’t mean I win all the time. My task has been to keep the mines open here and you might make very small beer of Copper String and you might say it’s never going to happen, well, people said that about Burdekin Falls Dam, people saying that even after Bjelke-Petersen announced it and they started work. All I can tell you the money has been budgeted in the budget for the amount of money that the planners and initiators and owners of the project have advised is all they need to move forward with the project. The project stands on its own merits. They just need the five million to complete the engineering work. That’s all they need. They get that, the project is going ahead.Now the mining companies involved have also informed that the project is going ahead. That’s the best I can do for you but I can tell you in this case I had to have I think four meetings with the Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who I enjoy a very good relationship, but you know I like to think Tony Burke, I enjoy a very good relationship, Albanese I enjoy a very good relationship, there’s half a dozen on the Labor side. We don’t all like each other down there but you know there are people that like me on that side and on the other side and there are people that hate on both sides. Yeah all right.

DB: Bob, thank you very much for talking to the North West Star.

BK: Good call on your part

Warren Mundine: a life in black and white

Warren Mundine has lived an adventurous and complicated life. The former ALP president is now a Liberal candidate in the next election for the seat of Gilmore on the New South Wales south coast, parachuted in by prime minister Scott Morrison over local objections. A Bundjalung-Gumbaynggirr man from Grafton, Mundine has never been afraid of controversy. His autobiography Warren Mundine: in Black and White was written in 2017 before he stood for election as Liberal but after his departure from Labor and charts his political journey and his Aboriginal heritage. The book is also painfully honest about his personal life and his relationship with three wives and wider family.

Mundine was born in 1956 in a separate wing of Grafton Hospital for Aboriginal mothers and babies. Segregation was commonplace in regional Australia before 1967 and Mundine tells how his ancestors went from being masters of their country to slaves in a century. Survivors were removed to reservations and missions, and their lives were controlled by police and Protection and Welfare Boards who removed children to institutions and white families.

Mundine carried Irish heritage on his mother’s side through Corkman William Donovan who married Yuin woman Catherine Marshall. They moved to Kempsey in 1870. The Mundines called the Donovans the Black Irish as they also lost their land to the British. Warren’s mother Dolly inherited the Donovans’ religion and married Roy Mundine in Bowraville Catholic Church. Roy laboured at Naryugil near an asbestos mine where Warren’s uncles worked and later died from mesothelioma.

With union help Roy got equal wages with whites and the family bought a house in Grafton where they raised 11 children. Roy had the infamous “dog tag”, a certificate of exemption which allowed him assimilate in white society, but Dolly scratched out the photo, believing her husband shouldn’t need the tag to do what others took for granted. The couple passed on this determination not to be treated like second-class citizens to their children though Warren darkly remembers when two policemen strip-searched his father beside his car for no apparent reason. “You might own a house, but to us you’re still an abo,” they told Roy.

When older siblings got scholarships the family moved to Sydney in 1963. Warren was seven. They lived in Auburn which he called “an exemplar of multiculturalism – long before any politician dreamed up the name”. Racism was rife against all minorities but they were no longer under the stultifying control of the welfare boards. Warren was introduced to football and players would not believe he came from Grafton until he told them of his Bundjalung heritage. “Ah! So you’re a real Aussie, an original!” they replied.

Through older sisters, Warren became politically aware and watched the 1967 referendum on television, cheering the result. Warren was proud of his siblings working in the campaign. However Warren’s grades were poor and he ended up in a trade not in university like his sisters. He became an apprentice fitter and turner and studied at TAFE. When cycling home one day he was hit by a truck and suffered a spinal injury which laid him off work for a year. Warren moved into a rental house and discovered drugs and women.

Aged 19 he met Jenny Ross, 17, and she fell pregnant after a couple of months. They married, Jenny gave birth to “Little Warren” and Nicole was born three years later. Warren was a labourer with the Water Board, focused on his future as a dad. He completed his HSC, sat the public service exams and got a job at the tax office. The couple bought a house in St Mary’s and Warren took a second job bartending at Bankstown town hall. He returned to Baryulgil on weekends with his sisters and joined a board that managed Aboriginal land rights in the region.

The tax office offered Warren a university scholarship in Adelaide. His parents offered to look after the children, but he left alone and the marriage disintegrated. At SAIT in 1982 Warren became politically active, describing himself as “radical and left wing”. He was also exposed to the free market ideas of Milton Friedman, though he believed solutions should be driven by communities and governments not individuals. He was helped by Don Dunstan’s programs to train Aboriginal students and studied everything from leadership to negotiation. In 1982 he was part of the Aboriginal protests against the Brisbane Commonwealth Games and met other emerging Aboriginal leaders including Marcia Langton, Gary Foley, Charlie Perkins and Michael Mansell.

He also met Kevin Cook who headed up Tranby Aboriginal College in Sydney. Cook taught him that business and enterprise in a cooperative model was the key to moving people out of poverty. Mundine learned about the worldwide indigenous and black activism and worked with Cook on land rights. He was influenced by New Caledonian Kanak independence leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou who wanted to embrace the best of the modern world. Modernisation was not a threat to independence and culture but essential to its survival.

Mundine’s second wife Lynette Riley was a friend of his sister Olive who was working on an Aboriginal teachers’ program with NSW Education. They met at an education conference and it developed into a relationship. They worked together at Tranby and travelled the state promoting land rights and the Aboriginal Land Rights Act passed by NSW’s Labor government in 1983. They got married, had children and moved to Armidale where she worked for the university and he worked for the land council. His political vision crystallised about the need for commerce, private ownership, jobs and education to improve the lot of poor people. “I realised government could only do so much,” he said.

He saw segregation was gone from regional NSW but Aboriginal kids were not going to school and people were surviving on handouts. Welfare dependency and “sit down money” replaced low-wage jobs and land rights alone would not solve the problem. Inexperienced land councillors were not up to running businesses and managing land as an economic resource. Mundine felt activists were no help blaming problems on the past and looking to governments for assistance.

In Canberra, Hawke and Keating were enacting economic and structural reforms which resonated with Mundine. He ran unsuccessfully as an independent for Armidale City Council in 1991 and was elected in 1995. He called council a “hothouse learning in the art of politics” and learned the importance of authenticity and “speaking with the right people through the media”.

He ran for the 1998 state election in Dubbo, a safe Nationals seat. Mundine polled well for Labor, and independent mayor Tony McGrane won the seat by 14 votes in a three-way split. Mundine’s strong performance attracted the attention of party bosses Karl Bitar and Mark Arbib. Mundine was named number three on the Labor Senate ticket for New South Wales for the 2001 federal election.

Labor usually won three seats in a NSW half-Senate election but this was not a normal election. After the Tampa crisis and the events of 9/11 Prime Minister Howard increased his majority, the Labor vote collapsed in NSW and they only won two Senate seats. Mundine returned to Aboriginal roots.

For him, “Mabo changed everything”. The High Court judgement handed down in 1992 eventually led to PM Paul Keating’s native title legislation a year later. In 2003 Mundine moved to Sydney to take a job as NSW Native Title Services Ltd’s CEO representing holders and claimants across the state. He was selected as the Labor right candidate for national president and finished third. He served two years as vice president and became national president in 2006.

His term as president brought a national profile, notably with his interview with ABC’s Kerry O’Brien where he spoke out against party disunity memorably peppered with several uses of the word “bloody”. By this time the tide was finally turning against Howard and Labor looked likely to win in 2007.

Mundine’s career took a new turn under the influence of Bob Carr’s advisor Walt Secord. Secord grew up on a Canadian reservation and believed Aboriginal land should become economic assets. Mundine wanted to move away from communal land ownership and non-profit community businesses and take up home ownership, economic land development and profiting businesses. It was an incendiary idea and it made him “one of the most loathed people in Indigenous Affairs, a puppet of white establishment and a conservative government, wanting to stop land rights”.

Mundine said he didn’t believe land rights or native title should be abandoned but could be leased out with the head title staying with traditional owners. He saw this as a way of removing dependency on handouts and becoming “full participants in all that Australian society had to offer.” That was not music to the ears of the National Native Title Conference in 2005 where he was heckled and booed. But the Howard government was interested in his ideas of individual rights and home ownership.

Around this time he had an affair and his marriage to Lynette broke up. Professionally, things also  went awry as his hopes of being preselected for the Sydney seat of Fowler for the 2007 election fell apart without explanation leading to a falling out with Labor. Howard appointed him to the National Indigenous Council and while Mundine was critical of Howard’s handling of the Apology he supported his policies to remove disadvantage and poverty. Mundine said that for true reconciliation Aboriginal people also needed to forgive, draw a line in history and “feel a part of Australia as a nation, in addition to their own first nations”.

Mundine supported Howard’s Northern Territory Intervention believing it would enable people to own homes and Aboriginal communities could operate like towns with small businesses and commercial activities. He also supported the needs of Aboriginal victims of violence and the objective of getting Aboriginal children back to school. The reason the intervention failed, Mundine said, was an “invasion of bureaucrats”.

Mundine was initially excited about Kevin Rudd coming to power in 2007 and worked well with Indigenous Affairs minister Jenny Macklin. He supported the 2008 Closing The Gap initiative as a scorecard to show if programs were working though he believed the way to close the gap was through economic participation and “governments don’t create jobs”.

He supported the Rudd-Gillard plan to shift Indigenous mindsets from welfare dependency to jobs and education. But on other matters he was disappointed. He said the carbon tax, the mining tax and increased workplace regulation stifled growth and productivity. He made one final attempt to secure a Labor seat in 2012 when Mark Arbib left the Senate but the casual vacancy went to Bob Carr instead despite numerous denials, further damaging his trust in the Labor machine. He resigned his Labor membership that year.

Mundine’s drift to the right continued when he met Elizabeth Henderson at an event organised by the Sydney Institute, run by Elizabeth’s parents, Gerard and Anne Henderson. He and Elizabeth developed a relationship. Mundine also developed a professional relationship with opposition leader Tony Abbott and his chief of staff Peta Credlin accompanying them on a three-day working bee to renovate Aurukun’s library. Aurukun was a tough community with 120 times more murders than the Queensland average. Mundine saw a communal-run town with no commerce, agriculture or tourism and a community “locked in some kind of social and cultural museum”.

In 2012 Mundine had major heart surgery, a “brush with death” which led to his departure from Labor. Mundine used his new platform of CEO of Generation One, an Indigenous jobs finding organisation funded by Twiggy Forrest, to frame arguments on home ownership and Aboriginal land. When Abbott was elected in 2013 Mundine chaired a new Indigenous advisory group and said special governance was only needed for use of traditional lands, native title rights. community assets and heritage but not for regular municipal services.

Mundine spoke weekly with Abbott. They were both focused on practical outcomes in schooling, jobs, business and community safety. An early initiative was Remote School Attendance Strategy which employed attendance officers to work with families to reach the crucial 90% attendance threshold for effective education. Mundine was frustrated state governments would not provide the information. Mundine also supported cashless welfare. He said encouraging people via welfare payments into long-term poverty was “cruel” and authorities needed to stop payments if people refused to participate in job programs.

Abbott went the way of the two previous prime ministers and Mundine found it harder to connect with his replacement Malcolm Turnbull who was uninterested in Indigenous affairs. Turnbull called a Royal Commission into the Don Dale detention centre following an ABC report but did nothing over the 75,000 cases of domestic violence in the NT in three years. Mundine said “whichever dickhead came up with the idea was wasting taxpayers money”. Turnbull warned him to back off. Mundine offered his resignation from the Indigenous Advisory Committee, which Turnbull accepted.

Mundine’s book came out before Turnbull was deposed like Abbott, Gillard and Rudd. But Mundine’s ideas were increasingly in tune with the Liberals despite his lack of rapport with Turnbull. Scott Morrison did not merit a mention in the book but it is not hard to believe they saw eye to eye on economic development. It’s also not hard to believe Morrison liked the cut of Mundine’s jib. “I like to talk in a way people understand, say sensible things and inject common sense into a political debate that has become too focused on vested interests and not focused enough on regular people,” Mundine wrote. The people of Gilmore will now have a chance to judge for themselves.

Big Coal: promoting Australia’s dirtiest habit

Australia is beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists. Coal remains the nation’s second largest energy source. According to the Energy Update 2017, in 2015-16 coal was the source of 32 per cent of Australia’s energy, just behind oil at 37 per cent but well ahead of natural gas (25 per cent) and streets clear of renewables (6 per cent). Coal consumption grew by 3 per cent in 2015–16, although consumption was still 17 per cent below the peak in 2008–09. All the growth in 2015–16 was black coal, with brown coal consumption falling by 4 per cent. Over 60 per cent of Australia’s electricity generation remains coal-fired.

There has been conflicting news for Australia’s troubled but still profitable coal industry this week. China announced it was banning all coal imports until at least next year backing up a ban imposed earlier this year due to over-supply and it is not expected to be lifted until early 2019. Despite this, demand from other Asian markets – especially South East Asia is pushing up prices for both thermal and coking coal and there are huge queues in Australian coal harbours with Australia’s total thermal coal export level expected to triple between 2017 and 2030.

The latter news is music to the ears of Australia’s Resource Minister Matt Canavan whose Rockhampton office is Queensland coal production heartland. In an op ed for the Australian Financial Review Canavan said coal has once again become Australia’s biggest export and he welcomed last week’s International Energy Agency forecast that coal demand is set to grow by 492 million tonnes in the Asia Pacific region by 2040. “The biggest opportunity lies in India,” Canavan said. “With coal demand there set to grow by over 600 million tonnes by 2040. Last year, India imported 160 million tonnes of thermal coal but Australia accounted for just 3 million tonnes of that.”

Canavan is pushing for the approval of the Adani Carmichael project in his region which is still awaiting financial approval. In its latest media release Adani pushed the project’s job creation “In the initial ramp up and construction phase there will be more than 1500 direct jobs on the mine and rail project,” they said. “Economic modelling, such as that used by the Queensland Resources Council in its annual resources industry economic impact report, shows that each direct job in the industry in Queensland supports another four and a half jobs in related industries and businesses, therefore we can expect to see more than 7000 jobs created by the initial ramp up of the Carmichael Project.”

But as Guy Pearse, David McKnight and Bob Burton, the authors of Big Coal (2013) point out, the question needs to be asked: is our increasing dependence on coal a road to prosperity for Australia or a dead end? They acknowledge coal is a $48 billion export industry employing 46,000 people however with 80 per cent foreign ownership most of the profits go overseas. Any investment that stays in Australia does not go on employment as the industry is increasingly automated but instead on equipment, mining camps, railways and ports which are used exclusively by the industry.

Then there is climate change which Canavan and Adani studiously ignore. As the IPCC latest report Global Warming of 1.5 °C makes clear 1.5°C is a best case estimate and under that scenario coral reefs, for example, are projected to decline by a further 70–90% with larger losses (>99%) at 2ºC. These are the same coral reefs that lie off Matt Canavan’s shoreline and employ thousands of locals in tourism-related industries but there is no hue and cry from him (or the daily papers that dot the Reef) about a best case losing 70 per cent of one of the world’s greatest natural wonders.

The IPCC has little to say about coal other than “a steep reduction in all (coal) pathways” is needed to even make 1.5°C. It takes it as read that coal is not part of the planet’s energy mix of the future. Studies by the Post Carbon Institute and others identify coal as the greatest threat to civilisation and its continued unfettered use will lead to catastrophic climate change. Yet the pace of change is ineffectual. The global coal industry represented by lobby groups like the World Coal Association trumpet the growing demand for its product despite also claiming they are “about obtaining those strategic benefits of coal while addressing the environmental challenges that come with it.”

Despite many magic pudding statements about “clean coal” there has been almost zero attempt to sequester any of the vast amount of carbon generated by the industry. Attempts such as Australia’s to impose the costs of these have met fierce and politically well-connected resistance. When the Rudd government tried to impose an emission trading scheme in 2009 the coal industry fought the provision to tax fugitive emissions from methane released by mining and launched an alarmist ad campaign claiming thousands of jobs would be lost. They did the same when the Gillard government brought in the carbon tax supported by an opportunistic political opposition.

The Abbott government did not take long to remove the carbon tax, a short-sighted decision which Australia will repent at leisure. Now even supporters of the axing, such as BHP, Rio Tinto and Woodside, the country’s largest oil and gas producer are calling for market mechanisms. Woodside CEO Peter Coleman said a carbon price was needed to “ensure that the most effective energy gets into the system”.  Disappointingly but unsurprisingly, the federal government has dismissed the call as Woodside “wanting to sell more gas”.

Woodside would prefer more investment in oil and gas rather than coal, but coal is by far the biggest contributor of emissions. As the Big Coal authors say, we need to view coal as the new tobacco or asbestos, “a dangerous product whose use is strongly discouraged by the government and ultimately abandoned.” That will be incredibly difficult for the world’s second largest exporter that was for many decades a cheap source of energy that powered Australia’s manufacturing industry. As in the UK, the coal industry was a constant battle between employers and employees over safety, pay and conditions and today’s international corporates are just as ruthless in fighting off any attempts to price carbon, tax their profits or regulate their actions.

They are assisted in their greed for Australian resources by state governments dependent on mining royalties. Big projects are routinely fast-tracked past environmental impact assessments due to “state significance”. Prime agricultural land is regarded as “overburden” by the industry, workforces are fly in fly out contributing little to local towns, the valuable water table is something to be drawn down, while massive profits accrue to mostly overseas mining barons.

It is unlikely the current federal government will see much problem in this. Last year then-Treasurer Scott Morrison infamously brought a lump of coal into parliament saying “don’t be afraid, don’t be scared”. The now-prime minister last month proposed government subsidy for the industry in discounted loans for new baseload power generation — ­including for new plants fed by “clean coal” (unviable nonsense that should be labelled for what it is – “slightly cleaner coal“).

Sadly it is not just Morrison. Labor has been ambiguous about coal. Bill Shorten said their decision on Adani would be made on the “best science available“.  It is not clear what that science is if it not the IPCC unambiguously saying coal was cooking the planet. The best outcome Big Coal‘s authors can see is the shift “will have to come from citizens making it clear that Big Coal’s time is up.” Over four in five of Australians now believe that, but it will be easier to prosecute this case in Melbourne than Mackay.  The mercury is rising, but does the Mercury care?