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An idea that’s gaining traction, in a pandemic where international travel has stopped and many Australians are losing their jobs, is this notion that the unemployed (aka: everyone on JobSeeker payments) should go out into the regions and help the farmers pick fruit.
Serendipity is defined as the gift of finding valuable things in unexpected places by sheer luck. It is a good description of Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie in Australian politics. But there is a sting in the tail. A system which depends on serendipity potentially also has a big downside.
Entering an election year is like coming home for the holiday season. It's full of hope and hijinks but also promises and pain. And like every family, each party has its quirks. Hopefully a post-election Parliament will green light some meaningful reform to improve people's lives rather than always culture warring. But don't hold your breath.
In light of the evidence, a national energy policy prioritising renewables should be uncontroversial. But is seems ideology is impermeable to evidence. Instead, we have the government continuing to try to pressure AGL into keeping the Liddell coal-fired power plant open despite clear-cut economic and environmental reasons for its closure.
The contrast between success and failure shows that successful independents and minor parties cannot just be based on major party disillusionment, creative election campaigns, or attractive candidates, but also on deep listening to and engaging with their communities which enable a positive and grounded alternative to be offered to voters.
It sounded like the ultimate election sweetener. Six weeks out from polling day, SA Premier Jay Weatherill announced a plan to install free solar and Tesla batteries on 50,000 homes. Except it's not quite that simple. Seduced by the chance to publish more clickbait about Elon Musk, the media misrepresented the details.
The decision by Nick Xenophon to leave the leadership of his Senate team to return to South Australian politics has rattled the political elites in his state and stirred the pot nationally. Xenophon's gamble raises two immediate implications and suggests one bigger and more tantalising question for Australian politics.
The big media players eventually get what they want by wearing down the government of the day and latching on to whatever opportunity comes their way. This month the government handed them the reform they've long craved while Xenophon attempted to win some concessions. We can assume Australia's media market will now become more concentrated. What we don't know is whether Xenophon's trade offs will do enough to protect public interest journalism and media diversity.
Same-sex marriage, the government tells us, is not a first-order issue. And yet it has grown to become a controversy so monumental it has overshadowed even the prospect of nuclear war with North Korea.
In an age of 'budget repair', social policy risks becoming just a sidebar to economic policy which is a contest of ideas about how best to grow the size of the pie thereby providing a slice for 'the deserving poor' without having to redistribute too much of the pie, while 'the undeserving poor' drop off the edge as they would have anyway. For those of us schooled in Catholic social teaching, the so-called 'undeserving poor' are the litmus test of our commitment to the human dignity of all persons.
To say the Senate cross bench is a mixed bag is an understatement. All that is really lacking is an extreme left senator unrestrained by Labor/Green discipline. Amid all the controversy I've grown comfortable with their place in the Senate and appreciative of their collective presence in an otherwise party dominated chamber. They each have their flaws, but they make a generally positive contribution to public discussion and to ultimate legislative outcomes. We are better off for their presence.
If the plebiscite bill is defeated in parliament Labor, the Greens and Nick Xenophon will bear responsibility for not taking the opportunity offered even if it is in their view a second-best option. The government is already labelling them as same sex marriage wreckers. Yet if before too long a parliamentary alternative, such as a free vote, is found to advance the cause of same sex marriage then the rejection of the plebiscite option will come to be applauded as a master stroke.
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