John,

It was looking for a while like we could go a full two weeks without Angus Taylor being embroiled in a new scandal. But no. You can’t. Fantastic. Great move. Well done Angus…

Here’s this week’s #5and5:

BEST

1. Infrastructure ineptitude
2. Drought doldrums
3. Porter’s James Hardie gaffe
4. The PBS
5. Big Stick
   

WORST

1. Angus Taylor. Again.
2. Estimates secrecy
3. Peter Dutton. Again.
4. Peter Dutton. Yet again.
5. Stick to the facts

BEST

1. Catherine King has been compiling an avalanche of examples of the Government talking up infrastructure projects that won’t even start for years. During the election the Government made all sorts of roads and infrastructure promises but when you read the fine print most of them don’t even start this term. There are even examples where children in kindergarten now will have started high school before work even starts. Meanwhile the economists – and people like Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers – keep saying the economy needs infrastructure projects to be brought forward right now. On Monday and Tuesday the government had to confront example after example with questions from Anthony, Catherine and Jim as well as Kate Thwaites, Milton Dick, Alicia Payne, Anne Aly, Luke Gosling and Shayne Neumann.

2. Every day this week Anthony Albanese and Joel Fitzgibbon pursued the Government over its failure to have a plan to respond to the drought. As the week went on the responses from the Government kept changing, with the National Farmers Federation releasing one plan, the National Party releasing another and the PM and the Deputy PM racing each other in competing media interviews to make the same inadequate announcements. Anthony and Joel zeroed in on the chaos asking if the reason they weren’t willing to have a bipartisan approach with Labor was because the Liberals couldn’t even reach a bipartisan approach with the National Party.

3. The so-called “Ensuring Integrity” Bill is getting closer to coming to a vote in the Senate. It’s all about attacking unions as part of this Government’s deliberate strategy to keep wages low. Christian Porter was again asked to admit the law he is proposing would have meant unions like the AMWU that pursued James Hardie on behalf of the victims of asbestos would have been liable for deregistration. At first Porter said this was clearly not true and the actions taken in that dispute would not have been caught by his new legislation. Then the next question came: Did he even know what actions the unions had taken in the James Hardie dispute? He clearly didn’t.

This is how much attention the Government paid to the workplace relations debate this week. PHOTO: Lyndal Curtis

4. Labor’s Member for Dobell, Emma McBride, used to work as a hospital pharmacist and this week she used the full authority of her experience to debunk claims from Greg Hunt about the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. Hunt has tried to claim that he is listing new drugs on the PBS in a way that Labor didn’t. Chris Bowen has been steadily explaining the exact opposite is true. Hunt is delaying the announcement of new drugs for months and then using the announcement as a media opportunity rather than making sure people get access to the medicines they need as soon as possible. Emma McBride said: “It is my view that a PBS listing—that is, the subsidising of a medicine—should not be turned into a political stunt or self-promotion event. Listings are in the interest of public health and they matter. They should not be reduced to a photo opportunity for a political agenda. It is worth noting that the minister's public 'announcements' don't deliver a single clinical outcome.”

5. There were important amendments that went through the House this week on the Government’s so called “Big Stick” legislation that deals with energy companies. Labor is insisting the legislation can’t be used to privatise energy companies that are state owned and is also demanding workers’ entitlements are carried over if part of a business is divested through the legislation. The first of these was fixed this week in the Reps and the second issue will be dealt with in the Senate.

WORST

1.  Angus Taylor again. His office provided documents to the Daily Telegraph claiming extraordinary expenditure on flights from City of Sydney Council. The problem for Angus this time (it seems there’s always a problem for Angus) is the document he claimed was part of the council’s Annual Report had wildly inflated numbers compared to the actual Annual Report. He told parliament the document with the fake figures had been downloaded from the Council’s webpage but the Council provided metadata evidence that seems to show this was impossible. Forging a document to influence a public official is a serious crime in NSW. Mark Butler pursued the issue for most of Question Time on Thursday and I moved to suspend standing orders to deal with the issue. And you can reasonably expect that by the time you’re reading this, the matter will be with the NSW Police.

Angus Taylor was embroiled in yet another scandal this week. PHOTO: Mick Tsikas/AAP

2. It wasn’t only the media running a campaign on the right to know this week. In Estimates, the Senate team led by Penny Wong found the government was refusing to answer questions at a rate never seen before. Question after question was simply taken on notice, in an attempt to undermine one of the key institutions for government accountability.  Check out this little mash-up that makes the point quite nicely.

This Government has taken secrecy and evasion to a whole new level. PHOTO: Alex Ellinghausen/Nine

3. Peter Dutton often makes the worst list. We don’t expect much from him. But if you want to know how appalling he was this week, the interjection of one caucus member says it all: “You’re better than this.” Which is saying something given how low our expectations of him are. For two days running he tried to politicise child abuse. Anthony Albanese raised points of order. He kept going. Eventually I moved that he be no further heard.

4. Still on Peter Dutton, on Tuesday he based an entire answer to a Dorothy Dixer by referring to legislation he claimed we opposed in 2014. But there was a small problem for him,  as Richard Marles explained at the end of Question Time. Labor hadn’t opposed the legislation he was referring to. So the entire answer was based on a lie and we called him on it.

5. It’s always been the case in Parliament that politicians will take the same set of facts and spin them to suit their political argument. That’s simply the nature of political debate. But under this Government, there’s a shift going on: to dispute and deny the facts themselves. That’s what Dutton did in the previous point. It’s what Scott Morrison increasingly does when presented with facts he doesn’t like. And this matters. Because outside of Parliament, in the real world, the facts don’t change simply because a Government is denying them. Wages still aren’t moving, the climate is still warming, living standards are still going backwards. On Wednesday night, as the House of Reps was shutting down for the night I made a short speech about the dangers of where political debate is heading in Australia.  If you get a chance I’d be grateful if you had a quick look.

The Reps isn’t back until late November but the Senate will be sitting during that time. This will lead to endless claims from Senators that they work harder than us. I’d better stop typing now...

I’ll be in touch in a month.

‘til then 

Tony

PS. Song of the week was a bit tough this week. I searched around for songs to match the PBS story. There are plenty of songs referring to medication of different sorts, but, well, they tend to have a different theme. So instead I just want to recommend a song that was released a couple of months ago that was really powerful and you might not have heard. All the proceeds from this song go to 1800 RESPECT, which helps women affected by family violence. Have a listen to Alex the Astronaut with “I Like to Dance”.