Media madness, a Voice to Parliament, Climate Change politics and factional trouble in the Liberal Party

New Politics: Australian Politics

There’s a madness in the media and hard to see when it will stop. The Prime Minister has returned from the recent NATO meeting – which included a visit to Ukraine – and the media wanted to create a false equivalence and criticised Anthony Albanese for spending too much time overseas. Why? Because they criticised former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, when he made his secret family holiday trip to Hawaii while half of Australia was burning away in 2019. So, it’s time to criticise Albanese too, even though the circumstances are completely different.
Which, of course, lead to other media outlets outlining how Albanese was now having to defend these criticisms. It’s a circular referral system that helps create the news, assorted click-bait, and continues that tradition of legacy media holding a Labor government to account in ways they never apply to conservative governments. And this style of reporting is becoming as irrelevant as the mainstream media, who seem to be enjoying their descent into a sea of insignificance.
And the factional problems within the Liberal are slowing being exposed and it’s becoming clearer that these interplays between the moderates, centre right and conservatives, was one of the key causes of the defeat of the Liberal–National Coalition: Not the only reason; there was still a great amount of room for the other factors – inaction on climate change, incompetence, mismanagement, corruption.
It’s also the end of NAIDOC week and how close are we to achieving a Voice to Parliament? While the conditions are possibly the most propitious they have been for many years, there is still a long way to go. The biggest problem is that to achieve constitutional legal change where land rights or legal rights given back to the original owners of this land, it has to be agreed to by the people that took it away in the first place. That’s not right.
And who has the mandate on climate change? Labor – which wants to implement a 43% reduction target by 2030; or the Australian Greens, who want to implement a 75% reduction target? They can both claim legitimacy, but the issue here is that Labor is the government and holds 77 seats, to the Greens total of four seats; but to balance this out, the Greens hold the balance of power in the Senate and Labor needs their Senate support to pass legislation. How this will be resolved is anyone’s guess, but surely the greater incentive is to act in the interest of the public and end the climate change wars?