Daily Archives: October 14, 2020

"It's pleasing the judgment has come down the way it has, because of course it's an unintended consequence of Labor's legislation that created this situation," said Sam McQuestin, Liberal Party state director.

The Coalition had taken the VEC to the Supreme Court in late February, asking for transfers from the Liberal Party to the Nationals not to be treated as political donations, and for payments between the two parties to be exempt from the cap on donations.

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Under the Coalition funding arrangement, first announced in 2008, the two parties operate joint tickets in the upper house and split the proceeds of the VEC reimbursement, with the Nationals receiving one-third and the Liberals receiving two-thirds of the money.

Following the last state election, the VEC indicated it would not pay the one-third share to the Nationals because Liberal Party candidates had occupied the bulk of the first-preference votes.

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Liberals, Nationals win court challenge on election funding - The Age

Four things happened at the October 12 Central Coast Council meeting, but leadership with open and honest transparency, wasnt one of them.

The meeting went from 6.30pm until 12.46am more than six hours of politics basically.

The Coast has a Council with six Labor councillors (Vincent, Hogan, Matthews, MacGregor, Mehrtens, Sundstrom) holding the balance of power, versus an Opposition of two Independents (Best, McLachlan) and the four Liberals (Pilon, Burke, Marquart, Gale).

Of the three other Independents (Greenaway, Holstein, Smith), two often side with Labor (Greenaway, Smith); although Cr Greenaway did vote with the Opposition at this meeting on the confidential item.

The lengthy October 12 meeting showed that no matter the extent of the crisis, the ability for the members of the two opposing groups to put aside their political point scoring and concentrate on working together is nil.

The problem for the community is that we have a Labor group in power saying one thing, the Liberal-dominated Opposition saying another, and the community doesnt have enough information yet to know who is telling the truth.

What we do know is that Council is facing a huge financial deficit, the size of which is hotly debated, but the publicly acknowledged figure is $89M for last financial year.

It also has an immediate cash flow problem and it has found an issue with its processes and accounting practices.

The Labor group is saying this cost blow-out is new information.

Independent Chris Holstein says he can no longer trust the staff to give the councillors correct information.

The Opposition is saying Council has been spending like drunken sailors from the beginning and havent listened to their warnings about this for three years and that this new information only adds to the problem.

The public has no detail yet of hinted new information, but it is bad, whatever it is.

A Mayoral Minute was given to councillors during the first few minutes of the meeting and it contained explosive information that the Mayor wanted dealt with, there and then, in camera, behind closed doors.

The councillors said that they had spent two hours together in briefings before the meeting and it wasnt fair that this information had not been given to them at that time.

The Mayor said that she had kept it secret because she didnt want it leaked to the media.

However, her move backfired, because the majority of councillors agreed with Cr Greg Best to defer the item and to deal with it next Monday night, October 19, when an extraordinary meeting will be held to deal with the backlog of items that were deferred from the October 12 meeting.

So, now, that information is with the 15 councillors for one week before they debate it.

We dont know what that information is about, but councillors said enough in open forum for us to believe that it will have a significant impact on the business.

The mind boggles with the possibilities of what this could be, but the councillors were well aware of legal restraints in talking about it in open debate, so Im not going to speculate.

The matter will come out eventually, whatever it is.

Adding to the speculation was the fact that the CEO Gary Murphy was not at the meeting.

No explanation was given on the night as to why he wasnt there, but the agenda included a Notice of Motion calling on councillors for a vote of no confidence in him. (See separate article)

Was he sick, as one councillor said?

The official press release issued said that he was on leave.

That left the Director of Water and Sewerage, Jamie Loader, in the role of acting CEO and acting chief financial officer (CFO) at the meeting.

The council is currently recruiting for a new CFO.

The Motion of no confidence failed.

Then, finally; some decisions.

Council made some decisions aimed at addressing the financial situation.

Those decisions are outlined in a press release from Council (see separate article).

The major new decision was to either borrow money from internal restricted funds or to get a $100M loan, or maybe both.

The Opposition did not agree with more spending, but they did not put forward alternate solutions.

The list of decisions is really about planning to make decisions to rein in the costs.

Councillors were invited to be part of the committees making the plans.

Cr Troy Marquart said Council couldnt plan to spend money that they didnt have.

The Minister for Local Government, Shelley Hancock, who will have to give permission for the internal borrowing, is also the Minister to call Council into Administration if she thought that was a better way forward.

Going on last nights performance, surely Administration is a tantalising option for a Liberal State Government which finds its Liberal councillors at Central Coast Council in Opposition and without the numbers to have any real power?

Merilyn Vale

Read this article:

Administration is a tantalising option for a Liberal State Government - Central Coast Community News

The reports sparked a political storm into whether Mr Sukkar used his taxpayer-funded electorate budget to pay staff who designed smear files to take down opponents, in a potential breach of parliamentary rules.

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One person familiar with the affair emailed the Department of Finance on September 3 and again on September 9 but was not asked any questions about the matter and was not told how to give testimony to the inquiry.

The department told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald it had engaged law firm Ashurst to conduct two reviews, one into each office, but did not say whether electorate staff were asked any questions.

"Mr Sukkar and Mr Andrews participated voluntarily and provided written responses and other relevant documentation when requested by Ashurst," the department said.

"The independent reviewer determined that there was not a sufficient basis to form a view that there was serious misuse of Commonwealth resources under the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act 1984 or the Parliamentary Business Resources Act 2017."

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Asked if the inquiry interviewed current and former staff of Mr Andrews and Mr Sukkar, the department said it "would not be appropriate" to comment.

Asked if the inquiry had access to correspondence between the MPs and their staff, the department did not answer.

Mr Sukkar and Mr Andrews referred themselves to the department the day after the allegations were raised. Mr Sukkar's office said the inquiry was independent and any questions about its conduct was a matter for the department.

"I've always maintained that I've done nothing wrong and whilst I was obviously pleased with the outcome of the review, I wasn't surprised by it," Mr Sukkar told radio station 2GB on Wednesday.

"So we draw a line through that. My focus is on Australians, getting them back to work and doing everything we need to do to ensure that we can get back to a prosperous society that we had pre-pandemic."

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg welcomed the outcome on Wednesday after The Australian reported the department had cleared the two senior Liberals.

"I've obviously read those reports, that's all that I have seen, and of course that is an important statement from the Finance Department," Mr Frydenberg said.

"They won't be making further references on those matters and that, for me and no doubt for those involved, is the end of that."

It is a breach of federal and state law for an electorate officer to work for the benefit of other MPs or engage in party political activity, but Mr Bastiaan dismissed that restraint in secretly taped conversations.

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"Who gives a shit," he responded to one electorate officer in a call to discuss allegations taxpayer funds were being misused. "We are trying to win a f---ing seat mate."

Mr Bastiaan resigned from the party in the wake of the reports.

One document revealed in the August reports was a memo created by Mr Bastiaan that set out ways to build power with Mr Sukkar by giving taxpayer-funded jobs to Bastiaan's operatives to undertake political work.

Labor shadow special minister of state, Don Farrell, expressed concern the inquiry had ended without trying to interview all the key people or see the memo.

"Only by conducting rigorous interviews of all those involved, and this key document, is it possible to get to the truth of this matter," he said.

Senator Farrell wrote to the Secretary of the Department of Finance, Rosemary Huxtable, on September 18 to ask her to make sure the inquiry interviewed all current and former staff relevant to the allegations.

Ms Huxtable responded without any mention of staff being asked questions about any political work at taxpayer expense.

"Each review is examining internal records submitted to and held within Finance, as well as additional information," she wrote on September 22.

David Crowe is chief political correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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Inquiry that cleared Liberal MPs did not hear from key witnesses - The Age

The Texas County Republican Party invites you to be a part of a patriotic event in support of President Donald Trumps re-election with an event scheduled for Saturday, October 17. Those wishing to participate will meet up on Gladyas Street in Hooker OK, for a Trump Train drag at 4:00. The Trump Train will lead everyone to the Hooker City Park to have a Trump Rally with elected officials, local personalities and people with a story to tell. Tim and Diane Ekkel will have their electric Trump Train for rides at the park in Hooker.

Prior to the event a 5 axle Trump/Pence wrapped semi will make appearances in Guymon on Thursday at 10:00am and in Liberal at 12:00 noon. On Friday, the semi will drive down Kansas Avenue before making its way to Hooker. Everyone is invited everyone to participate and show their support by decorating your vehicles and wearing patriotic apparels/ costumes.

For more information call:Linda Ridley 580-523-1058Dallas Mayer 580-651-9089

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Red Giant Trump Semi Coming to Guymon, Liberal, and Hooker - KSCB News.net

9News understands momentum is growing among party members for a challenge to Ms Harvey's leadership ahead of the planned caucus meeting tomorrow.

Nine's Political Editor Gary Adshead was told by a Liberal Party insider that at least 13 of 22 party MPs would support a change to the leadership, with some refusing to rule out that the spill could happen tomorrow.

Others, however, have suggested that if any challenge was to happen, it would be later in the year with November 10 tipped as another possible spill date.

The talk of a possible change has come amid MPs fearing the loss of their seats at the upcoming state election in March, and a significant shift in voter support away from the WA Liberal Party.

A spill motion would still need to be raised and supported by a challenger to Ms Harvey's leadership, with insiders suggesting that Shadow Treasurer and Bateman MP Dean Nalder could be that person.

9News was told by Ms Harvey's office today that there is no truth in any talk of a spill motion.

See the original post here:

WA Liberal Party's Liza Harvey could face leadership spill from MPs fearful of losing seats at election - 9News

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I place you on notice that I will not accept the publication of further false imputations about me.

The McArthur email, as well as other information gathered by an investigation by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald potentially gives Victorias anti-corruption watchdog, the Independent Broad-based Anti-Corruption Commission (IBAC) jurisdiction to examine the alleged misuse of taxpayer resources in the Liberal Party, expanding a similar investigation already underway into the Adem Somyurek branch-stacking operation in the ALP.

IBAC has been unable to probe allegations aired in August of taxpayer rorting involving Commonwealth public servants in the offices of Mr Sukkar and federal MP Kevin Andrews because it can only investigate state officials and the misuse of state government resources. Both Mr Sukkar and Mr Andrews have denied knowing about the alleged misuse of staffers.

The allegations about Mr Sukkars office and Mr Andrews office were examined by the federal finance department, which, unlike IBAC, cannot compel interviews with witnesses or issue warrants to obtain evidence. The department on Tuesday found there is not a sufficient basis to form a view that there was serious misuse of Commonwealth resources. But the department also revealed it had interviewed no witnesses outside of Mr Sukkar and Mr Andrews.

In the email, which Ms McArthur sent in 2017 to then Victorian Liberal president Michael Kroger and recently disgraced powerbroker Marcus Bastiaan, she asked: Exactly what has [Mr Dalla-Riva] & his taxpayer office been doing since the last state election [in 2014] that would differ from the Labor office rorts we are campaigning on ...?

Ms McArthur is a close ally of Mr Bastiaan and a key member of the conservative faction led by Mr Sukkar and until he quit the party in August Mr Bastiaan.

Richard Dalla-Riva when he was in Victorian State Parliament.Credit:Jason South

The scheme referred to in Ms McArthurs email involves the conduct of Mr Dalla-Riva and his former electorate officers, including Tom Ma and Beau Dreux. The allegations have not been investigated or proven. In the 2017 email, Ms McArthur also urged the Liberal Party to avoid using Mr Dalla-Riva, who stepped down from State Parliament at the 2018 election, as a campaign manager.

Michael we do not need the services of this fellow, she wrote.

In his maiden speech to Parliament, Mr Sukkar thanked Mr Dalla-Riva for acting as his campaign manager during the 2013 election. Mr Dalla-Riva was a state MP from 2002-2018.

The email was leaked to The Age and Herald by a Liberal insider and the concerns it raises have been corroborated by four Liberal party sources with direct knowledge of the campaigns operations and his office staff when they helped Mr Sukkar retain his federal seat of Deakin in 2016.

Liberal MP Bev McArthur.

The sources said that in 2016, Mr Dalla-Riva and his electorate officers Mr Dreux and Mr Ma, worked on Mr Sukkars successful bid to hold his marginal eastern suburbs seat of Deakin.

While a serving MP, Mr Dalla-Riva worked as Mr Sukkars campaign manager, running a sophisticated 12-month field campaign out of a campaign office in Maroondah Highway, Ringwood, opposite the sprawling Eastland shopping centre. The Liberal sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mr Dalla-Rivas electorate office was often closed as he and his staff worked in the Deakin campaign office.

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The Sukkar campaign focused on winning votes by using digital town hall meetings and the Chinese social media platform WeChat, but the key mission was direct voter calls. The Deakin campaign office made more than 10,000 calls in the final three weeks of the campaign.

Mr Dalla-Riva is now the chair of Mr Sukkars local Deakin party branch. Mr Dalla-Riva hung up the phone when called by The Age and did not respond to text messages and follow up calls. Mr Dreux said to the best of his recollection, he worked as a full time electorate officer for Mr Dalla-Riva in the electorate office and that his work on the Sukkar campaign was as a volunteer.

[There is] nothing to my recollection where I was working on the Sukkar campaign during work hours, he said.

Asked if Mr Dalla-Riva was working during office hours on the Sukkar campaign, Mr Dreux said, It is not my job to answer these questions, because I was only a junior staffer.

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Mr Ma said he only worked 10 hours a week for Mr Dalla-Riva and that his work for Mr Sukkar was as a volunteer.

The allegations that Mr Sukkars faction was involved in branch stacking and misusing office staff were aired in August by The Age, the Herald and 60 Minutes. The evidence included a secret recording in which disgraced factional operative Marcus Bastiaan rubbished the rules disallowing taxpayer-funded staff doing party campaign work.

"Who gives a shit we are trying to win a f---ing seat mate, he said. It sparked an ongoing branch stacking investigation by the Liberal Party and the resignations from the party of Mr Bastiaan and other factional operatives.

Nick McKenzie is an investigative reporter for The Age. He's won nine Walkley awards and covers politics, business, foreign affairs and defence, human rights issues, the criminal justice system and social affairs.

Paul is a reporter for The Age.

Original post:

Victorian Liberal Party involved in 'rorts' like red shirts says conservative MP - The Age

Its what the public demands. Thats always been the governments alibi for tough immigration rules. Polls, though, have suggested that the public is more nuanced and liberal than given credit for. The latest British Social Attitudes report, on post-Brexit policy, confirms this.

Most headlines about the report have focused on the fact that two-thirds of Britons oppose freedom of movement for EU nationals. What the survey asked, however, was whether EU nationals should be treated the same as everyone else. Most people agreed they should. Two-thirds also thought that EU countries should not favour Britons over other non-EU migrants. This is, in other words, as much a demand for equal treatment as for ending freedom of movement.

When asked how difficult it should be for immigrants to come to Britain, just 13% thought it should be relatively difficult for French people to migrate. For Poles and Australians, the figures were 18% and 12%, respectively. Inevitably, people were less welcoming of Pakistani immigrants, yet, just 29% thought it should be relatively difficult for Pakistanis to enter Britain.

The government has made much of its desire to welcome high-skilled workers and to restrict low-skilled ones. While the vast majority of the public want priority given to doctors, they also favour prioritising care workers, deemed low skilled by the government. Fewer than one in five want more high-skilled bankers. There is much opposition, too, to salary thresholds for prospective immigrants.

Public opinion is not as liberal as I would like. But its certainly far more so than youd imagine from much of the debate about immigration. Or from government policy.

Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist

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On immigration, the public is far more liberal than UK government - The Guardian

Register-Guard

This is a strange moment for racial politics in America. Many liberals regard the Trump era as a turning point akin to Reconstruction or the civil rights era, in which the country is choosing between the entrenchment of white privilege and the possibility of a truly anti-racist future.

Donald Trump himself often seems intent on confirming that analysis. He began his rise to the presidency stoking racial paranoia via birtherism, and hes trying to hold the presidency by stoking racial paranoia about voting, portraying votes cast in Democratic cities as fraudulent and illegitimate, and litigating against the franchise in ways that would hurt minority voters more than most.

But at the very same time, the pandemic-era policies of many progressive jurisdictions are sabotaging basic civic goods, with anti-Trump zeal as an accelerant and with effects on minority communities that are likely to far outlast the Trump era. This means that for many African Americans and Hispanics, a key legacy of 2020 may be a well-intentioned liberal betrayal of their interests, a hollowing-out of the institutions that protect and serve them, and the deepening of Americas racial inequalities even if Trumpism goes down to defeat.

The most important part of this sabotage, which is the subject of an essential Alec MacGillis article for The New Yorker and ProPublica, is the failure to reopen public schools in many liberal cities, which is consigning a heavily minority and low-income school-age population to a far-inferior virtual experience or (for many kids) no real education at all.

This failure has many causes including, yes, the Trump administrations inability to develop a national strategy for school safety. But in MacGillis account its clear that anti-Trumpism, and particularly a partisan impulse to resist the White Houses push for reopening, created a permission structure for teachers unions that already opposed in-person school to force a continued shutdown.

Without minimizing the real uncertainties around reopening and student health, he suggests that advocates of closure ended up cherry-picking studies to exaggerate the dangers and ignoring the evidence that a reasonably safe reopening was possible including not only European case studies but more local examples like Baltimore, where MacGillis lives and where in-person summer schooling produced zero new known cases.

The result of this urban shutdown is an autumn in which schools have successfully reopened for much more of white America than minority America: Approximately half of white kids have access to in-person school, compared with just about a quarter of African American and Hispanic students, according to a recent survey MacGillis cites.

This is definitely bad news for the students themselves: MacGillis notes that losing time in school tends to negatively affect subsequent educational attainment, literacy rates and employment. At the same time, the shutdown threatens to undermine public education more generally, by undercutting parental faith and commitment to the public system and pushing more families into private education (including the varied pods and home-school startups the coronavirus has encouraged).

In interviews, MacGillis quotes union officials expressing a confidence that after the pandemic, families and their kids will simply come back to public schools. No doubt most will; most parents, after all, dont have the resources to go elsewhere. But the entire challenge of education and integration in America turns on the challenge of keeping a subset of affluent, engaged parents involved in public education and not just involved but also willing to send their kids to racially diverse schools that arent set up as incubators of privilege.

If this is a big challenge in the best of times you can listen to a recent New York Times podcast, Nice White Parents, for a specific portrait of that challenge then its hard to imagine a policy more likely to permanently break these parents ties with public education than a mass closure of urban schools.

One striking detail in the MacGillis piece is that even though school closures plainly have a disparate impact on minority students, the case for closures is often phrased in the language of anti-racism, with the frequent suggestion that reopeners dont care about putting minorities at risk. This makes the schools issue the most conspicuous example of a larger pattern, in which the invocation of anti-racism and the reality of racial impacts can sharply diverge.

Part of this pattern reflects the impulse among Trump-era liberals to have no enemies to the left, lest they vindicate the presidents flailing attacks in any way. This is politically understandable, but the consequence has been that various forms of navet, utopianism and outright idiocy have hijacked liberal politics, marching under the banner of anti-racism while leading progressive policy astray.

This happened with the push for police reform, which was often diverted from reasonable proposals into unreasonable abolish-the-police fantasies, creating public paralysis in cities like Minneapolis even as public order deteriorated.

It happened with some of the George Floyd protests, which were redirected toward futile insurrectionary violence by a network of mostly white anarchists, whose very existence was hard for liberals to acknowledge even as their depredations did particular damage to minority and immigrant neighborhoods.

And its happening within the educational bureaucracy, where theres a Trump-era vogue for attacks on whiteness that often seem to double as attacks on standards, discipline and rigor with urban schools as the most likely laboratory for whatever educational alternatives the new progressivism dreams up.

How far any of this goes will depend on what happens after after (as seems quite likely this year) Joe Biden defeats Donald Trump, after we reach the post-pandemic era, after the current sense of wild abnormalcy recedes. But right now, the same anti-Trump progressivism thats crusading against presidential racism is also presiding over a mix of policy choices and abdications thats worsening life for racial minorities across multiple dimensions, making their school systems less stable, their streets less safe, their kids less likely to succeed.

I have written previously about the possibility of a center-right politics that appeals successfully to African Americans and Hispanics, and that might answer some of these liberal failures with a conservative alternative. But that kind of hypothetical feels very far away this week, and its mostly irrelevant to the immediate fate of public safety in Minneapolis or Chicago or public education in Baltimore or New York.

What matters there is what happens within liberalism itself. And if 2020 is to be remembered as a turning point for the better in our racial history, liberals need to rediscover the reality that the material interests of racial minorities can indeed have enemies, however well-intentioned, on the left.

Ross Douthat writes for The New York Times.

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Douthat: Sabotage in the liberal city - The Register-Guard

An array of liberal Jewish groups signeda letterwith other faith-based organizations appealing to senators not to confirm President Donald Trumps Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, citing her past opposition to the Affordable Care Act.

The letter, signed by 41 groups in all and spearheaded by the National Council of Jewish Women notes a case upcomingon the Supreme Court docketthat could dismantle the act, also known as Obamacare.

President Donald Trump, who wants the legislation dismantled, has said he will replace some of its provisions, including guaranteeing coverage to people with preexisting conditions, but he has not yet advanced legislation that would do so.

Should the ACA be struck down, tens of millions of Americans will immediately lose access to coverage as an unprecedented health crisis rages on, plunging our entire health care system into confusion and chaos, said the letter sent Friday to all 100 senators. People of faith refuse to remain idle while the health, safety, and lives of countless individuals are on the line and believe that our next Supreme Court justice must commit to upholding precedent affirming the constitutionality of the ACA.

The letter concludes by saying that Barrett would run counter to the example set by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Jewish justice who died last month and whom Barrett would replace.

In addition to NCJW, the17 Jewish groupssigning the letter include a number of Reform and Reconstructionist movement bodies, in addition to Jewish human rights advocacy groups.

In a separate statement this week, the Reform movement said it opposed Barretts nomination because of what it described as her stated opposition to the ACA, the right to an abortion and LGBTQ rights. The Reform movement has rarely opposed Supreme Court nominees in the past.

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Liberal Jewish groups sign letter with other religious orgs opposing Amy Coney Barretts nomination - Haaretz.com