The Gravy Train Express

When this happened a couple of days ago, I had to quadruple-check it was real. But yes - as though he were a powerless cash-strapped individual citizen, this nation's potato-headed defence minister really did start a Go Fund Me calling on the public to donate their own flood relief. Peter Dutton's department has wasted literally hundreds of billions of public dollars on military junk, and the Morrison administration has yet to spend a single cent of its dodgy $4 billion Emergency Response Fund. (The ERF was built from money syphoned out of education infrastructure, and buried in the legislative fine-print - unmentioned at its loud 2019 launch - was the proviso that it only be touched when all other emergency funds were exhausted. It was a classic PR "announceable", cobbled together on the run, and never truly intended to be used for anything but press releases.) The record $16 billion of "decisions taken but not yet announced" in last December's MYEFO u...

Just to recap, i n 2013 Joe Hockey pretended outrage at domestic car-industry subsidies (while having no issue with the multibillion dollar public assistance lavished on mining) and expended a lot of energy in parliament mocking GM Holden and daring them to leave. A few months later, the car industry packed up and left. For the next 5 years, the Coalition did everything they could to suppress clean energy and keep Australia dependent on the dirty fossil-products of the party's biggest donors. Then in the leadup to the 2019 election, Scott Morrison undertook a smirking scare campaign attacking electric vehicles, ludicrously asserting that their introduction would "end the weekend". ("Tell ya what, it's not gonna tow ya trailer, it's not gonna tow ya boat, it's not gonna get you out to your favourite camping spot with your family", he lied, merrily.) By the end of that year half the country was burning in the Black Summer megafires, and while nature, p...

Extract from The Saturday Paper article by Rick Morton: "The centrepiece of the federal government’s “Living with Covid” program is a call centre outsourced to former robo-debt collectors and staffed by workers on casual contracts with no medical experience. A cache of documents and testimony obtained by The Saturday Paper reveals the inner workings of the National Coronavirus Helpline, which is being run by private-equity owned Probe Group and its subsidiaries, on contracts worth more than $270 million." Morton's article discloses that the national helpline - listed as the first point of contact by multiple government departments - has been staffed by Probe with a small, badly-paid band of random recruits, who're tasked with triaging, despite often having only 2 hours training and no background in health care. Morton reports that the highly-stressed workers are overwhelmed by the volume, complexity and variety of calls - and that when problems arise they're tol...