Category Archives: Liberal

Liberal Leader David Honey is standing by his decision to hire a man who quit Richard Courts government in disgrace.

Jack Gilleece resigned in 1999 after a conflict of interest was uncovered where he was conducting media work for a number of corporate firms in Perth.

An inquiry found he earned $46,000 while moonlighting as a freelance media advisor, on top of earning $144,000 a year as executive director of the Department of Premier and Cabinet.

Mr Gilleece has now been employed as a media consultant for the WA Liberals, and David Honey said he has full faith in his abilities.

Jack Gilleece is a highly respected corporate media advisor, he told Liam Bartlett.

22 years has gone by since that time, and my understanding of that time is that Jack actually believed he was entitled to do that.

He is someone who I think has a very keen political mind, and someone who will give me good advice on a range of political issues.

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Why the WA Liberal Leader has hired a former disgraced government advisor - 6PR

Christine Holgate's $20,000 spend is pretty tame when you consider the Liberals squander $450,000 a year on Australia Post directors.

Christine Holgate not only lost her job but took a severe reputation hit for trying to reward staff for hard work. Her only actual error was buying Cartier watches rather than sending her executive team and partners to a Bledisloe Cup game. She should have known better we do sports in Australia, not luxury items.

Her $20,000 expenditure for four watches looks trivial compared with the $450,000 retirement scheme the Liberal Party extracts from Australia Post annually. What you say? Thats the equivalent of 90 Cartier watches a year.

The Liberal Party appears to use board positions as a thank you for loyal dedication. If you were concerned that government or party officials were poorly paid and not keeping up with the private sector, take some comfort that their post-retirement fun is looked after.

The good old Australia Post with its dedicated posties is not immune to government board stacking. Four of the eight board members are highly linked to the Liberals.

Heres who they are and what they got:

I am not an expert on Holgate-gate, but I know one thing: people in glass houses should not offer up cushy board postings.

Get Crikey for just $1 a week and support our journalists important work of uncovering the hypocrisies that infest our corridors of power.

If you havent joined us yet, subscribe today to get your first 12 weeks for $12 and get the journalism you need to navigate the spin.

Peter FrayEditor-in-chief of Crikey

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Four Cartier watches? Bah! Libs hand out the equivalent of 90 a year to party hacks - Crikey

Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero/The Daily Beast/Getty

When four liberal lawmakers came to the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday to roll out legislation to add seats to the high court, they may have had the base of the Democratic Party strongly behind them, but their party leaders across the street in the Capitoland many of their colleaguesmight as well have been residing in a different political universe.

Just before Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), the lead Senate sponsor of the bill to pack the court, took the microphone outside the Supreme Court, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told reporters at her weekly press conference that it was going nowhere fast.

I have no intention to bring it to the floor, she said.

Later that afternoon, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the chair of the House Democratic Caucus and a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, said the partys leadership team hadnt discussed the legislationat all.

I haven't heard too much about it one way or the other, Jeffries, who has not taken a position on adding seats, told The Daily Beast. No one within the Democratic caucus has said anything to me about it yet... We just had a leadership meeting, and this didnt come up.

Top Democrats surely know, however, that among many of their voters, this issue is hardly an afterthought. In four years, Donald Trump shifted the high court to the right with three successful confirmations. And with every addition, Democratic support grew for adding seats to the bench.

Now that Democrats have control over the White House, House and Senate, liberals say its time to act. The leaders of the pushJudiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Sen. Markey, Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY), and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA)acknowledged this was just the first step in a potentially long but existentially important campaign. But the imprimatur of Nadler made Thursdays first step more forceful.

I wish we did not have to stand here today, said Jones, a freshman progressive, at the press conference. I wish we didn't have a far-right Supreme Court majority that is hostile to democracy itself. But here we are. And the fact is, if we want to save our democracy, we must act before it is too late by restoring balance to the Supreme Court.

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Among a broad swath of Democrats, though, this push is seen as politically toxicespecially for the swing-district lawmakers who will determine whether the party retains its House majority in 2022.

Up until now, those frontline Democrats could keep their distance from the court debates, which were historically the purview of the Senate. But the introduction of this bill on court-packing now puts them on the spot on this touchy issueand Republicans are all too happy to exploit that development.

Conservative politicians and media buzzed with Thursdays press conference. Fox News aired it live. And House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) made special note of the press conference during his weekly press conference, saying the idea should scare every American.

They didnt have to make it this big push, a senior House Republican aide told The Daily Beast. The outrage is justifiable, especially after the last four years, after they said we were trampling on normsnow theyre trying to add seats to the Supreme Court. Its something were going to make every one of their members own.

President Joe Biden, who has avoided taking a clear position on court expansion, moved to create a commission to study the issue further. Republicans intend to use this to put pressure on him, too.

Nothing symbolizes liberal overreach more than packing the court, said a senior Senate GOP aide. The American people recoil at the idea. It was too radical during Franklin Delano Roosevelts presidency, and if Joe Biden wants to maintain any claim of being a moderate he ought to shoot this down immediately.

In the early days of Bidens presidency, Democrats have confronted a challenge of taking control of Washingtons levers of power: reconciling the pent-up demands of their party base with what is politically possible. Biden and congressional leaders have satisfied progressives so far with a sweeping COVID relief plan and its dramatic expansion of the social safety net, and the infrastructure plans early designs on climate policy are promising to them as well.

Proponents of court expansion know that, in order to pass the bill, they would need to eliminate the Senates 60-vote threshold for making laws. There is increased Democratic support for that, but whats pushing them there isnt necessarily a desire to expand the court; its a fresh urgency to expand voting rights.

The issues place on the liberal back burner is notable, given how much space it has taken up in Democrats recent debates. During the 2020 presidential primary, Democratic hopefuls faced pressure to back the ideaor at least not reject it outright. That bar was cleared by several top candidates, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and now-Vice President Kamala Harris. A New York Times poll from October, when Trump and Senate Republicans rushed to confirm Amy Coney Barrett before the 2020 election, found that 57 percent of Democrats nationwide backed court expansion.

But Jones, who was elected the 2020 freshman class representative to House leadership, said that its safe to presume we begin this process with the vast majority of Democratic members of the House being supportive of reforms to the Supreme Court.

Now, Jones said, we've got to get them to a place where they would agree to co-sponsor this legislation and vote for it, and that needs to take place before we even have discussions about whether there will be a floor vote on Supreme Court expansion.

Other Democrats do favor some court reforms, like term limits for justices, and most believe that Republicans dealt the most lethal blow to court norms by eliminating the 60-vote threshold to confirm high court nominees. Still, most are far from ready to support adding seats to the bench. A senior House Democrat, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), backed the legislation in a Thursday tweet, but there was hardly a rush to get on the bandwagon.

One of the partys most outspoken moderates, Rep. Conor Lamb (D-PA), plainly said he was going to ignore the legislation.

There's just a lot of things we're working on right now that actually have a chance of getting done now that Biden is president, and I don't think that's one of them, Lamb told The Daily Beast. So I really mean it when I say I'm just not going to devote thought to it.

Jones dismissed the idea that Democrats would face real political ramifications for the push, arguing it would be key to ensuring their popular policies withstand a legal assault from conservatives.

People are not going to be losing elections over an effort to make sure that everyone has the right to vote in this country, said Jones, to make sure that we can continue to have the Affordable Care Act, which is deeply popular with the American people, and which the Supreme Court has been dismantling and a series of decisions over the past decade.

But the bills proponents acknowledge they have some selling to do, too, and they believe that politics will do some of that work for them. Asked about Pelosis opposition to bringing the bill to the floor, Nadler emphasized that the speaker didnt rule out the idea altogether.

Speaker Pelosi is a very good judge of events, and of history, said Nadler. And I believe that as events unfold and the court comes down with decisions obstructive of a womans right to choose, as they come down with decisions obstructive to the climate, as they come down with decisions obstructive to civil liberties, I believe that Speaker Pelosi and others will come along.

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Dem Leaders Quick to Kill Liberal Dream of Packing the Court - Yahoo News

The Supreme Court has yet to issue a ruling in its biggest religion case this term, but a new report makes a victory for the Catholic foster care agency involved feel like a foregone conclusion.

The study, conducted by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Chicago, shows that advocates of religious rights have logged an 81% success rate before the Supreme Court in the 16 years since Chief Justice John Roberts took the helm.

Plainly, the Roberts court has ruled in favor of religious organizations, including mainstream Christian organizations, more frequently than its predecessors, the study explains, noting that religions win rate used to hover around 50%.

According to the researchers, religions current hot streak primarily stems from changes in the makeup of the court rather than other factors, like growing cultural hostility toward faith.

In the Roberts era, its become almost unthinkable for conservative justices to rule against people of faith, they said.

The justices who are largely responsible for this shift are Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, the study argues. They are all clearly the most pro-religion justices on the Supreme Court going back at least until World War II.

Critics of the Roberts courts approach to religious freedom have seized on this finding to call for an overhaul of the legal system. They want the Biden administration to move quickly to add liberal jurists to the bench.

Its time for court reform and expansion! tweeted the Freedom From Religion Foundation on April 6.

What nearly all these calls for reform failed to note is that conservatives rarely acted alone when handing down victories for faith groups.

In 9 of the 13 cases counted as Roberts-era wins for religious freedom in the study, liberals joined with conservatives in either a 7-2 or unanimous decision, according to a Deseret News analysis.

The new conservative majority is essential to the high-profile cases, but not to all the others, said Douglas Laycock, a professor of law and religious studies at the University of Virginia, in an email.

For the most part, liberal justices only peel away en masse from their conservative colleagues when religious freedom is in tension with another important human right, he said.

Most of the hot-button cases present conflicting interests that the liberals care about more, like gay rights, contraception or public health, Laycock said.

Even that assessment slightly overstates the gap between liberals and conservatives, said Richard Garnett, director of the program on church, state and society at the University of Notre Dame. As recently as last year, two liberal justices, Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer, joined with conservatives to rule in favor of two Catholic schools wanting to sidestep employment nondiscrimination law.

That decision was 7-2 even though the governments interest in these cases is limiting employment discrimination, he said.

The court also ruled 7-2 last year in favor of the Trump administration and a group of Catholic nuns in upholding a policy enabling moral and religious objectors to birth control to avoid covering it in employee health plans.

Citing these and other recent decisions, Garnett argued that the Roberts court as a whole not just its conservative members should be seen as supportive of religion.

At the very least, Kagan and Breyer have earned that designation, since both fall in the top half of the studys list of the most pro-religion justices to serve since 1953. Kagan is just a few spots behind her conservative colleagues.

I think its a mistake to frame the religious liberty question in terms of present-day left and right labels, Garnett said.

However, Steven K. Green, director of the Center for Religion, Law and Democracy at Willamette University, believes there is a difference in intensity of conservative and liberal support for religious freedom that justifies concerns about a pro-religion bias.

Looking at the data, its clear that the courts conservative justices are putting their thumbs on the scale in favor of faith groups, he said.

Breyer and Kagan have been more willing to sometimes decide against religious claimants. They take it on a case-by-case basis, Green said. Conservatives are just kind of going in lockstep about this.

In some cases, conservative justices have actually presented themselves as defenders of faith, he added.

Justices Alito and Thomas in their opinions have used language that mirrors the culture wars, like the state is out to get religious believers, Green said.

For example, in a scathing dissent criticizing the courts July decision to allowing the state of Nevadas COVID-19 related restrictions on churches to stand, Alito wrote, The Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion. It says nothing about the freedom to play craps or blackjack, to feed tokens into a slot machine or to engage in any other game of chance. But the governor of Nevada apparently has differently priorities.

When you add opinions like that to the significant winning rate that religion has had, it does seem to suggest that some of these cases are being decided on the basis of justices ideology and not so much on the facts, Green said.

Such an approach to decision-making would always be controversial, but its especially so right now since Christians, rather than members of other faiths, are the primary benefactors. Many observers question why the court needs to repeatedly intervene on behalf of a religion that has historically had plenty of political and cultural power.

Theres been a shift in the character of the religious liberty claims that make it to the Supreme Court, Green said.

Critics of the court sometimes imply that this shift stems from Christian favoritism. But others argue that it makes sense for Christian groups to need more help these days.

The courts critics say it is now protecting the religious majority, but thats not true, Laycock said. By definition, no one comes to the court seeking legal protection until after it has lost in the political process.

The Catholic agency involved in the current Supreme Court case, for example, was unable to convince the city of Philadelphia to exempt it from anti-discrimination rules governing the foster care system. The agency lost its government contracts when the city learned it was not willing, for religious reasons, to asses whether same-sex couples were fit to be parents. Catholic officials say the citys decision to freeze it out of contracting work violates the Constitutions free exercise clause.

There is no religious majority in the U.S. anymore, Laycock said. We are all minorities now.

The idea that American Christianity is vulnerable may be a difficult development to grasp, but that doesnt make it false, Laycock added. People who claim otherwise may be motivated by animosity toward conservative Christian beliefs.

Conservative Christians are one of the least popular minorities because their public spokespeople so often sound hostile or even hateful to so many others (and) because they would deny fundamental rights they disapprove of to so many people who desperately need the protection, he said, noting that their support for former President Donald Trump further damaged their reputation.

Whats often forgotten is that Christian victories at the Supreme Court benefit more than just Christians, Garnett said. In the context of free exercise cases in particular, precedents set by the Roberts court make it easier for members of any faith group to live out their beliefs.

Its not a zero-sum game. Its hardly the case that its Christians versus others, he said.

And, despite the publicity that surrounds their lawsuits, Christians are still less likely than people of other faiths to be involved in religious freedom battles if you look at the legal system as a whole, Garnett said.

The vast majority of religious liberty claims involve members of minority religious groups, not evangelical Christians, he said.

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Is the Supreme Court biased in favor of conservative Christianity? - Deseret News

A key element of the Liberal government's reconciliation agenda is facing resistance from Conservatives in the House of Commons and some First Nations critics on the outside.

Bill C-15, An Act respecting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), is at the second reading stageand is being discussed this week by members ofthestanding committee on Indigenous and northern affairs.

The proposed legislation aims to implement the UN declaration by ensuring federal laws respect Indigenous rights.

Some First Nation critics say the bill doesn't go far enoughand may end up restrictingthoserights.

"It doesn't seem like Canada has really learned its lesson from Oka to Wet'suwet'en to the Mi'kmaq fishermen," said Grand Chief Joel Abram of the Association of Iroquois and Allied Indians.

"Our first choice is to have it go back to the drawing board."

UNDRIPaffirms the rights of Indigenous peoples to their language, culture, self-determination and traditional lands.

It was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2007. Canada's Conservative government voted against itat the time, citingconcerns about natural resources and land use but then endorsed it in 2010.

In 2019, an NDP private member's bill to implement UNDRIPdied on the order paper after Conservative senators warning it could have unintended legal and economic consequences slowed its progress. Last December, the Liberal government introduced a new form of the legislation.

Conservatives again are raising concerns mainlyover UNDRIP'srequirement that governmentsseek"free, prior and informed consent" from Indigenous communities before pursuing any project that affectstheir rights andterritory.

"When a First Nation says no to a project, does that mean it's dead?" asked Jamie Schmale, Conservative Crown-Indigenous relations critic, at Tuesday's standing committee hearingon Bill C-15.

"It leaves a lot of unanswered questions and potentially the courts to decide that definition."

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, legal counsel to the Assembly of First Nations, said those fears are misplaced.

"Consent is not a veto over resource development," Turpel-Lafond said.

"What this is doing is saying we want to end the process of this very colonial approach to taking Indigenous peoples' lands, supporting projects and developments on those lands without their consent, engagement and involvement."

Turpel-Lafondsaidthe language in the bill should be made clearer by, for example, replacing the word "discrimination" with "racism".

She also said the bill has promise and aims to closeagap by reinforcingexisting rights that haven't been respected.

"The most important thing it does is it puts an obligation on Canada to conduct its policies and conduct its interactions with Indigenous peoples on the basis of recognizing Indigenous people have rights," Turpel-Lafond said.

"Since as long as there's been a Canada, it's been doing it the opposite way, which is denying that Indigenous peoples have rights and ... a very high-conflict relationship. The bill is meant to shift that."

In a statement to CBC News, Justice Minister David Lametti's office said the government remains open to any proposed improvements to the bill.

"Our government has been clear in recognizing the realities of discrimination and racism that Indigenous peoples face in Canada, and we continue to work in partnership with Indigenous peoples to find and implement concrete solutions to address them," said the statement.

WATCH: Inuit leader says government bill is a test of Indigenous rights

Natan Obed ispresidentof the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, which co-developed the bill with the federal government. He told CBC News the legislation creates a new avenuefor Indigenous people to seek justice in the courts.

"This legislation really is a test on whether or not specific political parties or specific jurisdictions accept that Indigenous peoples have human rights," Obed said.

"If governments are still in the place where they're fighting against Indigenous peoples rights, what they're really saying is that human rights apply to some of their constituency, but not all. I hope that political parties can understand that this is actually what is at stake here."

Russ Diabo, a member of the Mohawks of Kahnawake and apolicy analyst, went to Geneva in the 1980s and 1990s to develop the declaration with the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations.

He said Canada's interpretation of UNDRIPdoesn't advance the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples and allows the government to keep the upper hand under the law.

"Bill C-15 is going to entrench all of that, the colonial status quo," Diabo said.

Diabo said the bill reinforces Canada's existing policies on modern treaties and self-government, which he believes are in breach of the UN declaration's standards.

That, he said, will make it harder for Indigenous communities to blockresource projects they don't want.

"(UNDRIP)will be used domestically against land defenders and water protectors to say that they're acting outside of the law when they go and stop projects or activities that they feel are infringing or affecting their aboriginal treaty rights," Diabo said.

"You're going to see more conflict."

The provinces alsocould play spoilerand undermine the federal bill if they decline to pass their own laws on UNDRIP, since natural resources fallunder their jurisdiction, Diabo said.

"It doesn't deal with provincial jurisdiction and that's going to be the big problem."

Half a dozen provinces already have asked the government to delay the bill over worries it could compromise natural resource projects.

NDP Premier John Horgan's government in B.C. is the only one so far that has passed a provincial law implementing the declaration.

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Liberals' bill on Indigenous rights getting pushback from Conservatives, First Nations critics - CBC.ca

If prime minister Scott Morrison wants a circuit-breaker for the gendered political turmoil besetting his precarious Coalition government, unilaterally declaring gender quotas for federal Coalition MPs would be a masterstroke.

Even Coalition voters on balance now support quotas for women (48% supporting and 43% against) according to the latest Essential poll, with net support among voters overall doubling from +6% in 2019 to +12% in this weeks poll.

Note, Im suggesting he should bring in gender quotas, not quotas for women. Benefits flow from diversity, not women. If three-quarters of Coalition MPs in Canberra were women instead of men as is the case today, gender quotas would rebalance things in the direction of men.

Changing the rhetoric from quotas for women to gender quotas makes it harder for troglodytes to block this sensible extension of the quota approach the Coalition routinely uses elsewhere for example, the longstanding quota ensuring the Nationals get a fair share of ministers on the frontbench.

Quota opponents could be further disarmed if the policy applied only to winnable seats as they open up in the future, making sitting members safe from change.

Morrison could also take up the shift evident internationally from 50/50 quotas to the more flexible 40/40/20 approach adopted, for example, by global law firms Baker MacKenzie in 2019 and Norton Rose Fulbright in 2020.

This 40% women, 40% men, with 20% open approach to leadership appointments not only gives organisations a bit of elbow room in achieving gender diversity but makes room for other kinds of diversity too.

The Male Champions of Change group of Australian business leaders advocated this in its 40:40:20 For Gender Balance report in 2019, aimed to help organisations reap the diversity dividend now clear in management research.

The report provides hard numbers on the superior results achieved by organisations not dominated by one gender. It shows how to overcome the problem of merit being defined by, and reinforcing, the status quo.

Crucially, this is a report endorsed by 255 leading Australian directors and chief executives, including Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn, Wesfarmers managing director Rob Scott and Golf Australia CEO James Sutherland to name a few.

There would be a fair degree of overlap between the Male Champions of Change group and the Coalitions donor list come election time. If gender quotas are good enough for them and their organisations, why not for the federal Coalition?

Finally, this is a change which can be picked up and announced right away. Morrison has an action deficit. Declaring the beginning of the gender quota era in the Coalition, using the Male Champions of Change report as his template, would show him actually doing something, not just dodging, delaying and announcing another process.

Stubbornness stands in the way of Morrison making this necessary and politically sensible move.

Guardian Australia political editor Katharine Murphy last week noted the prime ministers practice of almost exclusively addressing men at risk of voting Labor in his public rhetoric. It is reminiscent of former US president Donald Trumps 2020 presidential election tactic. Trump lost.

As with Trump, its unlikely to be enough for Morrison to hold on to men at risk of voting Labor when he is at risk, because of his one-sided handling of the last few weeks, of losing an equal or bigger number of women who voted Liberal at the 2019 federal election.

Nor is it as though this is a new problem. The broad church Liberal party of which John Howard used to boast even as he worked to narrow it, is no more.

Instead of being Liberals, small l liberal moderates now sit as independents between government and opposition MPs on parliaments crossbench: Helen Haines (Indi), Zali Steggall (Warringah) and Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo) so far. Similar moderates are eyeing Wentworth, Hughes, Calare and Groom.

A contemporary Robert Menzies would do a strategic appreciation of the situation and realise he had to bring the small l liberals back into the tent before the cumulative seat loss became fatal.

Looking back on the formation of the Liberals in 1944, Menzies singled out two people for special praise. One was May Couchman, Victorian president of the Australian Womens National League whose members Menzies said did far more electoral work than most men. Over a six-month period, Couchman folded the League into the Liberal Partys Womens Section, significantly strengthening Menzies fledgeling political creation.

Morrison may be no Menzies but, as a former state party secretary and in 2019 victor in an apparently unwinnable federal election, he is not without some political smarts.

Putting his prime ministerial prestige on the line to get the Liberal partys state branches to adopt 40/40/20 gender quotas, and to urge the Nationals to do the same, is not just the right thing to do. It would be very smart politics too.

Chris Wallace is an associate professor at the 50/50 Foundation, Faculty of Business Government and Law, University of Canberra. She tweets at @c_s_wallace

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Bringing in gender quotas in the Liberal party is not just right it's smart politics too - The Guardian

Starting Wednesday, March 31, Port, who is widely known for his conservative views on North Dakota and national politics, will be hosting weekly shows on InForum that will feature rotating guest hosts with more liberal takes on the issues. The Plain Talk segments will be live every Wednesday at 2 p.m. and include a live blog where readers and listeners can "join the conversation" by submitting questions and comments in real time.

"My goal is to leave the audience feeling like the issues covered are better illuminated for them, however they might feel about the views I or my guests express," Port said. "Maybe they'll feel persuaded. Maybe they'll feel more committed to what they already believed. Either way, that's a win in my book."

Port's first rotating guest host will be Jonah Lantos, a Minot-based talk show host with the podcast "The Good Talk Network." The idea is to provide a platform on InForum where civil dialogue can happen between two people with opposing views on some of the most hotly debated topics, all while allowing InForum readers to join the conversation.

"I don't want it to be another political cage match," Port said. "We have so much of that these days. Cable news might as well be professional wrestling. I want thoughtful, passionate conversations about news, culture and policy among people who can smile at each other at the end and agree to disagree.

Port, who was a guest on a livestreamed event with OneFargo activist Wess Philome to talk about race, said these kinds of conversations require a willingness to acknowledge that nobody is going to "win."

"In nearly two decades of covering politics, the most concrete thing I've learned is that nobody ever really 'wins' a debate," said Port. "One side may be ascendant for a while, but there are no permanent victories in politics. Time marches on. Attitudes evolve. There's always another election looming. All we can really do is listen and try to understand."

Parts of these livestream shows will be available on Plain Talk with Rob Port, which can be found on InForum or on a variety of podcasting services.

In addition to the Wednesday livestream shows, Port will also begin adding "newsmaker" video interviews with some of his columns, where he'll speak with state leaders and various newsmakers throughout North Dakota. His first is being published this Friday, April 2, with Lt. Gov. Brent Sanford as they talk about the potential sale of the Coal Creek Station.

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Conservative opinion columnist Rob Port to begin new livestream show with liberals - Grand Forks Herald

FILE PHOTO: Leader of the German Free Democratic Party (FDP) Christian Lindner speaks during a session of the Bundestag, the country's parliament, ahead of the EU summit, in Berlin, Germany, March 25, 2021. REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

BERLIN (Reuters) - The leader of Germanys pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) poured cold water on the prospect of a national alliance with the ecologist Greens and the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) on Sunday, saying he saw little common ground.

A slide in support for Chancellor Angela Merkels conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian CSU sister party - together known as the Union - ahead of a Septembers parliamentary election has focused attention on various coalition scenarios.

An opinion poll published on Sunday put support for the conservatives at just 25%, with the Greens closing in, on 23%. The FDP, which has been emboldened by gains in a regional vote this month, could be a kingmaker.

One scenario that is becoming more likely, at least mathematically, is a Greens-led alliance with the SPD and FDP, dubbed a traffic light coalition after the parties colours.

The three parties already govern together in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate. But FDP leader Christian Lindner seemed sceptical about whether the alliance would work at federal level.

Where is the common ground in terms of economic policy? he told ZDF television. They want more debt and higher taxes, we want to get out of debt and tax less.

Although the FDP has criticised the ruling conservative-SPD alliance for its handling of the pandemic and what it says is a violation of civil liberties from lockdown measures, the conservatives are the most natural fit for the FDPs pro-business policies.

Lindner said he saw a lot of common ground with new CDU party chairman Armin Laschet, particularly on questions of economics and financial policy. Laschet and CSU leader Markus Soeder want to settle the issue of who will be the conservatives candidate for chancellor by May 23.

Reporting by Caroline Copley; Editing by Kevin Liffey

Continued here:

Germany's liberal FDP cool on three-way tie-up with Greens and SPD - Reuters

The meeting of senior female NSW Liberal Party officials was held on the afternoon of Friday, February 26, just hours before the NSW divisions state executive convened.

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The executive voted later that evening to adopt a new code of conduct that makes clear the party has zero tolerance for bullying, sexual harassment, vilification, physical violence and discrimination.

Nine people attended the meeting Ms McQueen, NSW state director Chris Stone, country representative Michelle Bishop, urban vice-president Penny George, womens council president Mary-Lou Jarvis, country representative Jemma Tribe, urban representative Michelle Byrnes, a junior party official and country vice-president Aileen MacDonald, who organised the meeting.

Several formal complaints about Ms McQueens comments were made after the meeting to Mr Stone and these have been discussed with Liberal Party federal director Andrew Hirst.

When Ms McQueens specific alleged comments were put to Mr Stone, he did not deny she had made them.

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Instead, a spokesman speaking on behalf of the federal and NSW Liberal parties said the matters youve raised are internal matters for the party and we are unable to comment.

Ms MacDonald had requested the meeting of women in the NSW branchs executive in the days after Ms Higgins came forward to come up with the beginnings of a cultural shift action plan, according to an email sent by Ms MacDonald to the group on February 20 and seen by the Herald and The Age.

But according to several people who attended the meeting, Ms McQueen seemed determined to shut down the discussion about the proposed code of conduct.

We were all left in shock, it was terrible, deplorable, one of those participants, who asked not to be named, said.

When we were talking about another aspect of the code she said cant we move on? and then she said, Lets talk about women not getting drunk at work. A few of us have made complaints.

Liberal Party federal director Andrew Hirst.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

A second participant said other people in the meeting were absolutely shocked, horrified, there arent enough words to describe how we felt.

I had gone in hoping it would be constructive but it was rail-roaded by those comments. Her views didnt represent those of the other people in the room.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the issue was a matter for the party.

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The Sun-Herald and The Age reported the Liberal Party had issued a gag order on officials speaking publicly about party affairs, with only federal president John Olsen and federal director Andrew Hirst authorised to make statements about federal party matters in the lead up to the next federal election.

The order is widely understood to have Ms McQueen, an outspoken conservative member of the party, as its target.

But Ms McQueen is refusing to stay silent, continuing to appear on television and saying: Do you think anyone could gag me?

Nick Bonyhady is industrial relations reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based between Sydney and Parliament House in Canberra.

James Massola is political correspondent for the Sun-Herald andSunday Age. He was previously south-east Asia correspondent in Jakarta and chief political correspondent. Before that he was political correspondent for the Australian Financial Review.

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I would kill to be sexually harassed at the moment: Liberal Teena McQueen stuns colleagues in closed door meeting - Sydney Morning Herald

On Jan. 6, the president of the United States, arguing with zero evidence that his reelection was stolen, incited a violent mob to storm the Capitol, where the bravery and wits of outnumbered security officers staved off catastrophe. The same man is still the undisputed leader of one of the United States two main political parties.

The United States convulsions are dramatic but not unique. Liberalisms crises predated Donald Trump and will outlast him in America and around the world. Hungarys Prime Minister Viktor Orban has successfully swapped out independent press, judiciary, civil society, and parliamentary representatives with pliable functionaries of his own. In India, long a marvel of democracy, the Hindu nationalism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has wreaked violence on the countrys Muslims and taken legislative steps toward undermining their citizenship, while cracking down on journalists and nongovernmental organizations. In all, according to Freedom House, democracy has deteriorated in countries where three-quarters of all humans live this past year.

Many countries hold elections, for surebut without the guarantees of speech, assembly, or religion; the respect of individual dignity in government and law that is the hallmark of liberalism; and its promise of freedom. Liberalisms global recession is real and is not going away.

Like so many people, Ive spent the last years reeling from the illiberalism sweeping the world. Yet the term illiberal is helpful only in a very limited way. It has no positive, affirmative content and is hardly something any group would call itself. It assumes anything non-liberal is a deviation from the norm.

The end of the Cold War made it easy to see things that way. But victory can blind you too, and the Wests seemingly miraculous victory over Soviet communism was as blinding as Israels own victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. Both seemed to settle not only geopolitical disputes but also ideological arguments once and for all. Western-style liberalism was to be the wave of the future, and Israels existence as both a Jewish and democratic state seemed at long last secured.

In Israel, the worlds only Jewish state, one-fifth of the citizens are Arabmostly, though not all, Muslim. It is a vibrant, raucous democracy in a largely undemocratic region; a military and technological power punching well above its weight, wracked by profound economic and social inequalities and burdened by generations of trauma; a state built by settlers who largely saw themselves not as colonizers but as stateless refugees coming home; a Western-style polity engaged in a decades-long occupation.

It has also been moving steadily in the direction of religious nationalism and authoritarian populism. The March 23 election propelled into parliament politicians belonging to the once-fringe Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) partya far-right group with roots in the late Rabbi Meir Kahanes violent anti-Arab Kach movement that was once described by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as racist and reprehensible.

The half of the body politic opposed to Netanyahus combative right-wing populism has so far failed to dislodge him. Liberalisms recession in Israel can offer some lessons about liberalisms crises elsewhereand show liberals in different countries that they are in this together and need urgently to learn from one another in order to preserve the ideals and institutions they hold dear.

In his deeply researched and ambitious book Liberalism in Israel: Its History, Problems, and Futures, Tel Aviv Universitys Menachem Mautnera leading Israeli constitutional scholarsensitively and searchingly critiques his own, liberal camp, hoping to rescue it from oblivion. Doing so, he says, means rethinking liberal assumptions not only about law, but also about nationalism, economics, ethnicity, religion, and culture.

In a previous, illuminating work on Israels judiciary, Mautner demonstrated that Israels Supreme Court, under the presidency of Chief Justice Aharon Barak, developed a doctrine of liberal judicial activism going further than his avowed American role model. This was all the more remarkable given that Israel has no written constitution.

It does have a series of awkwardly named Basic Laws, mostly governing basic government structures. But 1992 saw a new one, passed jointly by the Labor and Likud parties: the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. This meta-statute incorporated international human rights principles into Israeli law and defined Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Barak, in over a decade of remarkable and controversial judicial opinions, used this Basic Law to launch a constitutional revolution. By the time of his retirement, the Supreme Court had final say over vast swaths of parliamentary legislation and governmental policyand it had hordes of new critics.

Mautner views this judicial revolution as the crusade of a once-dominant Labor Party establishment, based on socialist ideals and holding liberal views, to retain some of its steadily vanishing power. Failing to win votes, as new religious and nationalist groups became ascendant and core liberal values declined, the former Labor hegemons as he calls them looked to the courts to save what to them were the foundations of Israeli democracy, and to their critics and rivals symbolized elitist cosmopolitanism. Backlash was not long in coming, culminating in 2018s Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, in which the word democracy tellingly does not appear.

The vitriol heaped on Israels court is excessive, but the former Labor hegemons religious and nationalist foes were not entirely wrong. Barak and his allies were indeed fighting a culture war against themone with deep, complicated roots.

Israels secular elites had quite deliberately estranged themselves from, and weaned their children off, their own Jewish cultural resources, succumbing to the fate of revolutionaries who give their children an education as different as they can get from their own.

Israels first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and his peers, for all their secularist, socialist rebellion, were deeply tied to Jewish tradition, texts, and history. After independence, they had no trouble making the argument to Religious Zionists and to the non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox both that the Labor Zionist ethos was not only the better defense of Jewish interests but also the better interpretation of its values. The successors of Ben-Gurions generation, however, could not make that argument, if for no other reason than that they no longer shared with their religious interlocutors the same language or the same basic understanding of who they are and what they are doing in their own state.

To the ultra-Orthodox, the enterprise of secular Jewish statehood was a deep assault on tradition, necessitating retreat to an enclave paid for by the state. To the Religious Zionists, the secularists had lost their way, failing to grasp the true meaning of Jewish statehood as the occasion for a new, muscular Judaism, and the fulfillment of Messianic longing. For Sephardic Jews, arguments over secular Jewish nationalism were all very foreign.

The reengagement that Mautner urges, then, isnt a call for Israeli liberals to stop being themselves but to dig more deeply into the histories that made them who they are, see what they can learn, and interpret anew.

Deep, informed dialogue with the best of American political and legal thought is on every page. Yet, Mautner argues, seeking to imitate U.S. democracy isnt the answer. After all, the United States is full of problems: structural economic inequalities, a deeply dysfunctional health care system, high levels of imprisonment, and unending racial injusticeall of which made possible the rise of Trump.

Mautner calls on his comrades on the Israeli left to lay aside American liberalisms brand of rugged individualism in favor of what he calls the liberalism of human flourishing. From this perspective, politics still aims to help individuals flourish independently, but also through meaningful belonging to ethnic, religious, and cultural communities.

Concretely, such a project would mean parting with a form of liberalism modeled on untrammeled American capitalism and looking instead to social democratic models found in Europe. This could mean letting different localities arrange their own religious affairs, resurrecting ideas of civic nationalism as an alternative to ethnic nationalism, working toward a humbler and thus more legitimate judiciary, and finding ways to engage in good faith with religious thinkers and their ideas while still holding fast to fundamental freedoms.

Where in all this, one might ask, is Israels painful conflict with the Palestinians? To Mautner, the absence of robust liberal nationalism is both a cause and effect. In bringing out all of nationalisms evils, the occupation discredits nationalism as a whole, making it that much harder for Israeli liberals to assert the shared national commitments would make Israels broadly nationalist center take them seriously. In other words, if you want to end the occupation, Mautner argues, dont throw out nationalism but make it more liberal (as many early Zionists, including Theodor Herzl, hoped to do).

Mautners argument has lessons for other countries: We live in a world of nation-states that isnt going away anytime soon, not least because the kind of meaningful belonging nationhood provides speaks to deep human needs. By refusing to engage with the worlds of meaning that many people of good will draw from ethnicity, shared history, culture, and religious life, liberals are not helping their cause.

The point isnt to capitulate to the bristling animosities of sectarian or identity politics but to speak clearly about how liberal values are needed if people want to live together, seeking their varied paths of communal, cultural, and religious fulfillment and flourishing, without tearing each other to pieces. This is also true of the state whose own brand of nationhood, it likes to think, is the great exception: the United States of America.

There is a deep paradox at the heart of Americas claim to leadership of the democratic world, and it is tied to American exceptionalism. Its geography as a continent secure from invasion, its multidimensional religious history, and its being a nation of immigrants make its own senses of religion, ethnicity, and nationalism different from those of most every other country. The identities of African Americans, the descendants of people brought in chains, are inextricably intertwined with their having been the victims of the countrys original sin. (That the earlier American original sin, the slaughter and displacement of Native Americans, is not an acute source of discomfort to much of the body politic is because it was so murderously successful.)

The stunning Trumpist resurgence of racist politics in response to, among other things, the presidency of Barack Obama was on display in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, where Confederate flags were flying and Camp Auschwitz T-shirts were on display.

American liberals need to understand where the United States is exceptional and where it is not. The reckoning with race every American must make is at once very public and very personal. Public, because anti-Black racism that indelibly shaped American democracy for so long. And personal, because every American, no matter when or how their ancestors arrived, has inherited that past and must grapple with its legacies today.

The illiberalism of the right is more obviously violent; the illiberalism of the left is most pronounced in academia and to some extent in journalism. But both share the insidious assumption that we cannot think or feel as humans outside our bloodstreams and that all politics is a zero-sum struggle for power and privilege.

How then can the United States hope to serve as an example to other liberal democracies? The answer is that America can lead only if it is willing to learn.

Something embattled liberals need to understand is that while they may see their opponents as nothing but destructive, that it not at all how they see themselves. Yes, authoritarian populists, hyper-nationalists, and radical religionists are regularly on the attack, but they win adherents not only because they express peoples anger, but also because they offer them a vision of something good. Those visions, deceptive though they can be, speak to profound human needs for connection, community, and commitment that the U.S.-led post-Cold War order of globalized economics and culture simply fails to provide.

That failure is compounded by the very American faith that those who differ from Americas vision of what is good are bound sooner or later to come around. The excesses of Trumpism on the one hand and the Great Awokening on the other show us where those frustrations can lead when liberalism fails to respond.

The end of American exceptionalism, saddening though it may be, is also liberating. Crafting American policies rooted in liberalism at home and abroadwith lucid views of its genuine shortcomings and failures, of how far it reaches and how far it doesntis crucial. Self-professed liberals must also examine what kind of philosophical or theological justification liberalism needs to maintain its own conception of what it means to lead a good life.

Such an effort not only makes good sense but also seeks to reap the rich harvest of differing ideas of how to protect life and libertyfrom the violence of the state, the ravages of the market, the authoritarianism of the clergy, or the monolithic conformism of the tribe. This is liberalisms deepest, abiding good.

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In Israel, Liberals Lost. The American Left Should Heed Their Lessons. - Foreign Policy