Vikki Campion: Albanese’s gift of transparency wrapped in double standards
Anthony Albanese came to power promising transparency in government. What we’ve got instead is gagged debate, financial control, murky non-disclosures and confidentiality clauses, writes Vikki Campion.
Opinion
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On Monday, we learned we need more coal while having policies to phase it out.
On Tuesday, Brittany Higgins, who quit her Parliament House job, was awarded an undisclosed taxpayer payout for her mental health after seeking $3 million — while Labor halved Medicare rebates for psychology for everyone else from 20 sessions to 10.
On Wednesday, the Greens did a deal with Labor to replace home gas stoves, hot water, and wood heaters with electric appliances, even though our grid’s capacity is dropping, with three 500MW coal-fired generators to be blown up in April.
On Thursday, teal “independents”, who won inner-city seats on a transparency campaign, gagged debate on the energy bill after taxpayers paid about $1 million for politicians to jet back to Canberra from around the world for a half day of work to consider the most seismic change to economic policy in adopting Soviet-era price controls. Their concern for global warming goes as fast as the closest VIP aircraft.
This is the sad, sorry advent calendar Australians are opening in the lead-up to Christmas.
Tuesday’s depressing offering shows government compensation can be a fast measure when the only person who could contest Higgins’ allegations, her former boss Linda Reynolds, was gagged from doing so.
Ask any nurse, teacher, paramedic, police officer, firefighter, or veteran how long it took for them to get government compensation for being abused, assaulted, shot at, bastardised and blown up.
A day of mediation is a dream compared to what first responders face: the arduous process over years, requiring doctors, psychologists, PTSD rigmarole, interviews with superiors, diary entries — and often ending in workers’ compensation paid piecemeal into retirement.
The test now for Albanese is whether this is about compensating all parliament staff who allege they were sexually abused, or just those whose circumstances guided an election-winning narrative.
James Ashby, as a staffer allegedly subjected to sexual harassment from his boss, former Labor-appointed Speaker Peter Slipper (who always denied the allegations), never had the sympathy Zeitgeist of women’s marches driven by multi-millionaire television hosts.
There was no hashtag about believing James, no glossy front covers, no book deals.
Instead, he has spent years trying to get help paying his legal bills after now-PM Anthony Albanese, then the Leader of the House, gave his Speaker a taxpayer-funded lawyer to fight Ashby’s allegations.
For all its rainbow flag-waving, Labor did no review, issued no apology and introduced no sexual harassment training.
When the then-opposition called Slipper out, selectively oblivious to allegations around her Speaker, PM Julia Gillard defended him in her misogyny speech which has now been appropriated to advertise glossy women’s mags online.
Finance Minister Katy Gallagher asked questions on behalf of Higgins six times in the 46th parliament — her concern for staff welfare did not extend to Ashby even once.
Nowhere in Ashby’s court documents will you find a figure for a pay-off. He wanted an apology. He wanted parliament to deal with MPs who felt laws didn’t apply to them.
In the same way Albo silenced Linda Reynolds against giving evidence — using financial levers to gag in the most threatening way — he did the opposite to Slipper, who received an Act of Grace by the special minister of state, with lawyers paid for by the parliament.
Ashby got a $4.4 million legal bill and then went back to work.
Not 48 hours after learning of Higgins’ payout, we entered the era of Albanomics as the advent calendar revealed a surprising return to Soviet-style centralised intervention where supply and demand are ignored for price caps.
The government that vowed transparency rushed through the bill capping the price of coal and gas — not power — hours after gagging debate.
If there was ever a case for a federal ICAC, Labor’s performance over the past week could be the gift that keeps on giving.
In Queensland, the biggest profiteer from electricity is the state government, which owns 70 per cent of the coal-fired generators, most of the coal mines and sets the price.
In NSW, the bill caps coal prices in a state that on the current trajectory will have less and less until it shuts down entirely by 2040.
If this insane market intervention is about the cost of power, then why not apply the same logic to renewables? Or won’t they survive without taxpayers propping them up?
Keith Pitt, a former federal resources minister and industrial electrician and electrical engineer with both trade and degree, with the rare ability to explain how electricity works, fears MPs have no idea what it costs to retrofit homes from gas to electric — where paying for new appliances is only a fraction of the $10,000-plus bill to rewire a premises.
We are now driving further need on a dwindling grid set to brown out under Labor’s Tesla obsession which forecasts a potential 60 per cent increase in electricity demand, incentivising people to go electric when our grid isn’t up to the task, misleading them into thinking power will be cheaper by Christmas when any impact won’t be felt until six months from next Christmas and will end up crippling supply.
We’re in this mess because of market intervention — providing massive subsidies to intermittent renewables, causing them to flood the market and make reliable baseload generators uneconomic.
When you tear off the Green bows, and rip away the glossy teal wrapping, Albanese’s promised gift of transparency is a box full of gagged debate, financial control and shushing over murky non-disclosures, confidentiality clauses and committee rooms gathering dust.
All this inconsistency, injustice, ignorance of the tried, proven and obvious comes wrapped in emotion and presented to us as ‘progress’.
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