Senator Joyce writes for the Canberra Times:
Recipe for political distaste
The framed flyer enticed me to partake in the splendour of ”new season lamb with brioche parsley crumb, buttered peas and mash” and all for $34. I must say as a venue for an advertisement it had a captive audience as there being no graffiti on the back of the toilet cubicle door. It was unerringly incongruous though. The two products linked by a rather circuitous form that required a lot of forgiving latitude from the observer to entice purchase. Like the lavatory door advertisement for dinner, when I see Julia Gillard unveiling a statue of Curtin and Chifley, a rendition of Sesame Street’s ”One of these things is not like the others” starts ringing in my ears.
Curtin and Chifley gathered the reins in the darkest hour and saw Australia through its greatest crisis, the impending Japanese invasion during World War II. They were loyal to one another and their stature also carried the respect of their colleagues on the other side of the political fence. If they had failed then Australia was finished.
Now we have this shambolic Australian war against the temperature orchestrated by a person who was supposed to be the former prime minister’s most loyal lieutenant, prior to her walking to his office and informing him, in the most brutal form, of something else. Gillard’s actions have bedevilled all attempts to breathe authenticity into any belief that she could guide us through watering the roses let alone running the country.
Election Julia ”ruled out” sending asylum-seekers to a country that had not signed the UN Refugee Convention. Gillard, however, accuses the Opposition of ”bleating today about human rights issues” because they do not want to send refugees to a country where striking people with the rattan is on the statute books for illegal immigration.
The unerringly termed ”Malaysian solution” was bizarre. Why do we have to accept anything that Labor suggests by reason of the Executive says so, so there? If the next step of lunacy is the ”Antarctic solution”, is it plausible just because Labor says so? The return of Labor as the new age form of complicit convict flogger was for so many the final straw.
The Government now complains that the Parliament is not giving the Executive the powers it demands, but the Parliament has never been the writer of blank cheques. There is a time-honoured way for the Executive to resolve disputes between it and the Parliament. A very good mechanism to achieve consensus is the mechanism called an election.
The Malaysian solution is an alternate manifestation that closer observation is seen in the financial management of this country. Federal and state governments have gathered massive debts in a resource boom. In a world out of money and Australia relying on credit and an imported standard of living for a workforce employed predominantly in services, is a very dire mix.
We hope that Europe sorts its problems out but if does not, then I have concerns about Wayne Swan’s authority to handle a global liquidity meltdown. We stayed out of the last recession because of Asian demand for our resources not manic programs such as $900 cheques. He should not claim authority for geography and Asian economic growth.
Surely Labor has someone vaguely competent that could show some sense of consistency. Do we have to trudge like lemmings into two further years of abyss because we cannot rely on the honourable pulling of the pin by someone who does know that we cannot go on like this?
So, do not sell dinner at your restaurant on the back of a public lavatory door, it is the dilemma of the nation’s political incongruence. Minority government and authoritative government, Swan and financial management, Labor and policy, fish and bicycles and if statues could walk then I would have seen two remarkable men of metal politically walking assiduously away from a struggling lady and her incompetent sidekick.
Barnaby Is Right 
I think that is an excellent summing up. I think you have the majority of Australians agreeing with this. Did anyone notice the color of the suit the lady wore at the unveiling.
Gun metal shiny fabric that melded in with the bronze of the statues. No Julia you are and never will be in their league if you were trying to compare yourself with these men.
Off topic but check this out TBI, from Bloomberg;
“Asian currencies slumped, even as traders said Indonesia and South Korean authorities intervened to slow declines, after the U.S. Federal Reserve said there are “significant downside risks” to the world’s biggest economy.”
“The Bloomberg-JPMorgan Asia Dollar Index fell to the lowest level this year and the MSCI Asia-Pacific Index of shares tumbled the most in six months. Data today showed Thai export growth slowed in August and indicated China’s manufacturing will shrink for a third month in September. Bank Indonesia, which said it intervened when the currency slumped on Sept. 14, will remain in the market to boost confidence, Hendar, the central bank’s director of monetary policy, said in Jakarta today.”
“The won fell to a one-year low as overseas investors pulled money from Korean stocks, adding to net sales of $918 million this month through yesterday. The potential outflow of foreign capital from South Korea is a major concern, Financial Services Commission Chairman Kim Seok Dong said today in a CBS radio interview. The current global economic difficulties will likely drag on for “quite a long” period, Kim said.”
This seems all very Asian financial crisis-esque & all because the Fed, BoE & BoJ have promised the speculators profits on their bonds (didn’t I say!?). Government bond prices are soaring as stocks, oil, the AUD, CAD, Asian curriencies (except the Yen) & even gold are being sold down.
Yup, you were on to it alright. Did you read Zero Hedge recently on how there’s unprecedented put options on equities for October? Could be yet another Black October, perhaps.
With the stockmarket already so battered I doubt we’ll see a horrendous crash but it could well keep moving lower, at least until central banks promise to start buying corporate debt (stocks are a form of corporate debt) as well government debt a la 2008.
Another from Bloomberg;
“The real’s biggest five-day plunge since 1999 is fueling speculation Brazil will sell dollars to shore up the currency, reversing a 28-month-old strategy aimed at stemming gains.
Brazil’s currency tumbled 4 percent against the dollar today, bringing its losses this week to 12.6 percent, the most since January 1999 when the government dropped a peg to the dollar.”
Crikey, we’re even back to the ’90’s!
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-22/real-s-world-worst-plunge-may-trigger-intervention-reversal-brazil-credit.htm
I can feel a rate cut… coming on
I read on the wire, that the World Bank has warned of any impending global crash. There goes the carbon trading market perhaps. I don’t really understand global markets, but I know we are linked with them unfortunately, and I reckon that since the EU have gone into the crazy carbon credits, this has undermined their economies, especially investments in
clean energy, solar and wind mills. One big solar panel firm in the USA has gone bust and the FBI are investing. Our solar industry is not doing too well, and windmills they are one great hole in the pocket. Can’t this government note what is going on overseas or do they think we are immune as we are so far away?
Once again Barnaby Joyce appears to be guilty of the twin virtues of reading from my mind, and then speaking my thoughts louder and better than my own voice:
“.. we have this shambolic Australian war against the temperature orchestrated by a person who was supposed to be the former prime minister’s most loyal lieutenant .. ”
” .. if statues could walk then I would have seen two remarkable men of metal politically walking assiduously away from a struggling lady and her incompetent sidekick.”
I share Barnaby Joyce’s fiscal conservative views – especially his anti-Keynesian, Jeffersonian balanced budget, small government low taxes and constitutional libertarian ideas. As Thomas Jefferson (and many others, including Ronald Reagan after him) said, “government, at the best of times, makes for a poor servant and an even more dangerous master.”
But within a fiscally conservative budgetary framework, my social policies are progressive. My core values are the true labor values of family and community, reflecting my modest working class roots.
What an irony that unlike Julia Gillard (my direct political opponent at the next Federal Election), the ALP’s political party apparatchik implanted into the Federal Electorate of Lalor when former Quiz-Show King Barry Jones retired from labor service in 1998, I am more “true labor” than “faux labor” Julia Gillard and her incompetent side-kicks have ever been.
And I am a man of the people, an independent political candidate who abhors what extra-constitutional (and in my lawyers and economists opinions, anti-competitive, anti-democratic and even illegal as in criminal) political parties have done to derail Australia from ever getting anywhere close to departing our Imperial (Rule Britannia) prison society shackles robes and become a nation of truly and genuinely democratic equals.
Most of my political heroes are from different times and from different nations – The English heroes of the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest of 1215, the heroes of the short-live English Constitutional Republic of the 1640s and the England and the English and Scottish Bills of Rights of 1688 and 1689, the heroes of the 1776 American war of independence and Constitutional Republic, the heroes of America’s Civil Rights Movements of the 1860s (anti-slavery) the 1950s (anti-McCarthyism) and the 1960s (anti-segregation), the heroes of the Irish constitutional republic of the 1920s, the heroes of the Indian Independence and constitutional republic of the 1940s, the heroes of South Africa’s movement for freedom from apartheid and the constitutional republic of the 1980s, and the heroes of East Timor’s independence movement and constitutional republic of the 2000s.
Maybe Australia will one day have heroes and patriots of those statures too. Too much political spin and omission has been used to hide the true history of some of our greatest Australian patriots, complicated and politically demonised men from complicated times, like Mathew Brady, Peter Lalor, Ned Kelly, Andrew Inglis Clark, Donald Mackay, Marcus Einfeld, Michael Kirby and Julian Assange.)
My (few) Australian political heroes are the likes of the Australian Labor Party’s JB Chifley, JJ Curtin, HV Evatt, EG Whitlam and PJ Keating. And never our first Prime Minister, the white-supremacist favorite of the ancient Queen Victoria, Sir Edmund “Toby” Barton (he who wanted a purely white Australia – “Australian for the White Man and China for the Chink” and, within 2 years of being appointed first Prime Minister by Queen Victoria, 6 months ahead of the first Australian federal election, appointed himself to a job for life as one of the first judges of the new High Court of Australia. And never the first Liberal Party Prime Minister of Australia, RG Menzies, for the reasons the late Emeritus Prof Donald Horne articulates better than I could hope to in his “The Lucky Country” (1964) and “Death of the Lucky Country” (1976) and “How I Came to Write the Lucky Country (2006) (published posthumously).
A prize-winning photograph, “Gough and Kerr”, taken at an 80s book launch of a biography on three times Archibald Prize winning painter Clifton Pugh, hangs in pride of place in my Chambers (on show over my right shoulder in my avatar).
I seethe for the constitutional crimes of the 1975 Whitlam dismissal – crimes (plural) that have been well recorded by the late Emeritus Prof Donald Horne in his 1976 sequel “Death of the Lucky Country” (and retold by me recently via my WordPress blog). And I seethe over the 2010 Rudd dismissal for the same reasons – another obscene affront committed by unconstitutional political parties against the natural and constitutional democratic human rights of 22 million ordinary Australians, laboring under the shackles of a 1901 “lawyers constitution” (“The Great Constitutional Swindle” of Federation, as Professor Peter Botsman called it in his 2000 constitutional history of Australia of the same name.
I agree with Barnaby Joyce and the chorus of the majority of Australians who say that this incompetent Gillard administration and parliament have to go, sooner rather than later. And as a constitutional lawyer of some note, I see no reason that our Governor-General cannot follow her Latvian (Presidential) peer and call for an election (or, as the ex-Latvian President did, via a two-step started by a referendum on whether to have an election) without breaking the constitution by committing the obscenity of herself appointing a Prime Minister (as Kerr appointed Fraser) and sacking a Prime Minister and Ministry (Whitlam and his Cabinet). After all, once an election is called, the administration and its parliament, by convention go into a caretaker mode anyway until the new administration is elected (and new cabinet and Prime Minister appointed).
The other alternative is for the independent members of the parliament (the few, true parliamentarians, since they are not under the dictation of political parties or ministries) to cross the floor and vote with the opposition parties to force an election as the “independents” did to the first RG Menzies administration in 1940 (shortly after the outbreak of World War 2. Today, there is no reason the independent MPs would have to “sack” Prime Minister Gillard and appoint a new Prime Minister (wouldn’t Barnaby Joyce be a brilliant option for care-taker Prime Minister – an even better option than a Tony Abbott care-taker Prime Minister). They could offer Julia Gillard the middle ground of allowing her to go to the polls as “care-taker PM” (as for the 2010 election), and leave it to the people to decide – just like former Governor-General John Kerr should have done, if only he had done only his duty on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1975.
It is only a matter of time before PM Julia Gillard is (1) dumped by her political party; or (2) dumped by “her” (actually, the Rudd administration’s appointee) Governor-General Her Excellency Quentin Bryce; or (3) is dumped by a simple majority of parliamentarians (including most of the non-political party aligned independent members of the House of Representatives. Unless she takes the 4th option and resigns recognising her continuing tenure as PM is untenable.
Whatever way the curtain falls on Gillard’s reign as Prime Minister, my only hope is that it happens in the way that causes less grief to the Australian people and our tentative baby steps towards a democratic political system, than the damage caused by the vile, unconstitutional and illegal Whitlam dismissal of 1975 and Rudd dismissal of 2010.
James Johnson
Independent Federal Candidate for Lalor
Constitutional Human Rights Advocate
Solicitor and Barrister of the High Court of Australia
(Celebrating 20 Years of Legal Practice 1990 – 2010)
http://jamesjohnsonchr.wordpress.com