Extract from ABC News
Analysis
Australia was dubbed the "new Hermit Kingdom" earlier this year by Washington-based Australian journalist Amelia Lester in Foreign Policy magazine, and it's a term that's been used a fair bit ever since as Australia's international borders have remained firmly closed as the rest of the world opened up.
We had the official photo opportunity early on Friday morning to celebrate the opening of the borders: the Prime Minister and NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet beaming in an airport hangar in front of a Boeing 787 as Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce announced the opening of international flights from November 1.
Thousands of stranded Australians will hopefully be able to come home, and others leave, ahead of a broader opening return of international students, skilled migrants and other travellers.
It was an event to cap a generally celebratory day as Melbourne came out of lockdown and there were more and more announcements that domestic travel restrictions would be ending.
While the borders may be opening, though, it feels like Australia remains stubbornly and dangerously closed off from the world in many other ways, like its Hermit Kingdom namesake — a country where declarations made by our political leaders about their policy successes and ambitions bear little resemblance to reality, where saying something is true is somehow expected to make it so, where democracy feels ill-served, to say the least.
In Canberra this week, a struggle for relevance continued within the Coalition on climate change. Nationals MPs continued to make dark predictions about what would happen if they did not get their way with the Prime Minister on emissions reductions policies.
We ended the week waiting to find out whether Australia could make a commitment to net zero emissions by 2050, but knowing there would be no increase in the current commitment to reduce emissions between now and 2030.
Climate policy accounting tricks
The mechanics of covering these day-to-day manoeuvrings can mean losing sight of what is actually going on here.
For example, has there ever been any real suggestion that Scott Morrison and energy minister Angus Taylor actually want to have a much more ambitious emissions reduction policy? No, this is a transactional story, driven purely by the need to have a climate policy alibi, however weak, that squeezes between the Nationals and international contempt.
The Prime Minister and Taylor regularly tell us that Australia is one of the few countries actually doing what it says on climate.
For example, they say, we are "meeting and beating" the target set for emissions reductions at the Paris climate talks in 2015. What they don't say is that what we are meeting and beating is our commitment to cut 26 to 38 per cent of emissions, compared with 2005, when most wealthy nations have committed to cuts by more than 50 per cent.
They don't say that the discussion at the Glasgow climate talks will be about this 2030 target — that the net zero by 2050 figure is almost irrelevant.
They insist that we have cut our emissions since 1990, when in fact they have actually risen. A report by the Climate Council this week was the latest to point this out: that electricity emissions have increased by around a third while transport emissions have grown by more than a half.
It is only when you add in the impact of declining emissions from land clearing that the figure starts to look any good. And this, of course, was the accounting trick Australia pulled off back at the Kyoto talks in 1997. And everything we seem to do now on climate seems to contain accounting tricks, or dubious slogans like the "gas-led recovery" and the "technology roadmap", and little real policy effort.
Not even businesses and banks back any of this stuff anymore, nor are they content to simply leave it to the government. A group of business leaders representing companies from BHP to Coles, Ikea to Qantas published its own roadmap to 2030 this week.
This followed the Business Council of Australia's move a couple of weeks ago to push the government to cut emissions by between 46 per cent and 50 per cent by 2030 (after describing Labor's 45 per cent target three years ago as "economy wrecking"). Many of the states have adopted more aggressive targets.
In such an environment where so many others are calling out the need for action, having the confidence to make such statements, and misrepresent the facts, is the hallmark of politicians not feeling under any great challenge to tell the truth, for which there are a host of reasons.
Stopping MPs casting a vote
But it is a mindset also reflected in the way the government conducted itself in the House of Representatives this week, declining to send to the Privileges Committee the question of whether the blind trust that helped fund up to $1 million of Christian Porter's legal fees was in breach of the terms of the register of members interests — which is supposed to reveal to the public where MPs' obligations might lie, not simply condone the donors of such funds remaining a secret.
The justification for this was, according to the Leader of the House, Peter Dutton, that the question of how members could fund the defence of their reputations was a broader one than just applied to Mr Porter.
The only example the government appears to have offered in support of this argument is a GoFundMe campaign by Sarah Hanson Young, which was mostly made of donations of less than $300 and were therefore not so much secret as just not detailed (and which could be traced anyway, if necessary, because of the way such sites work).
Such matters might be resolved if we had a federal integrity commission, of course.
But the Prime Minister told independent MP Helen Haines this week that the government would not facilitate a debate in the House on her proposed national integrity bill.
That was before the astonishing revelation emerged that the reason the government was able to defeat the vote to send the Porter matter to the Privileges Committee was because the government will not allow independent crossbenchers to vote remotely.
Haines says Dutton had told her it would be "impractical" for the government to include the votes of remote crossbenchers in divisions, despite the government doing so in the Senate since September 2020.
"The fact that MPs want to exercise their right to vote in parliament is not 'impractical'. It is a fundamental tenant of our democracy and parliament, and it is offensive to the constituents of the electorates represented on the crossbench," Haines said on Thursday.
"If the Leader of the House had not blocked the two crossbenchers participating in parliament remotely from casting their votes yesterday, the deciding vote yesterday may well have been with the Speaker."
Of course, the Speaker, Tony Smith, had told the House that he believed there was a prima facie case to be answered over the Porter donations and had urged the House to give precedence to referring the matter to the Committee.
So it would have been hard for him to have voted against the move.
Stopping MPs casting a vote.
Democracy: Hermit Kingdom style.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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