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The air is thin on the high moral ground. So thin, some who try to ascend the summit will say and do silly things and find themselves back down where they started, in the lowlands of political chicanery.
The oxygen must have run low for the Labor Member for Gilmore, Fiona Phillips, yesterday, a day when the government held the high moral ground, launching a censure motion against the former prime minister and secret minister for everything Scott Morrison.
In a back-slapping speech about the Albanese government's achievements in its first six months in the big chair, she repeated a couple of falsehoods.
The first was that the government delivered a pay rise for aged care workers. It didn't. The Fair Work Commission, independent of government, granted the sector a long overdue 15 per cent pay rise.
The second fib was that pensioners were benefiting from the biggest allowance increase in three decades. The implication was the government somehow made that happen. It didn't.
That increase was courtesy of automatic indexation, again independent of government. It was delivered because the cost of living is spiralling out of control.
As porkies go, they're small. Little fudges of the truth designed to make the government look shinier. And Fiona Phillips is a lowly backbencher so chances are few people were listening.
But Phillips is crucial to the government's majority. She held the seat by just a couple of hundred votes, becoming the government's 77th member. Seats like hers are also probably a reason the government voted down an amendment to its national anti-corruption commission legislation seeking to bring the time-honoured practice of pork barrelling into the commission's remit.
Ever since the seat went ultra-marginal three elections ago, Gilmore's been wallowing in federal promises and pledges.
Highway upgrades, town bypasses, emergency management centres, job-creating expansions to the local defence establishment; they're trotted out frequently and loudly in this once blue-ribbon, set-and-forget Liberal seat.
But is it pork?
In August, the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption defined pork barrelling as "the allocation of public funds and resources to targeted electors for partisan political purposes".
The most spectacular examples of pork barrelling involve the distribution of grants by ministerial discretion. The sports rorts scandal that temporarily derailed the political career of Bridget McKenzie in the previous government was emblematic.
And who can forget the former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian admitting to ICAC last year that she saw nothing wrong with pork-barrelling.
"I don't think it would be a surprise to anybody that we throw money at seats to keep them," she told the hearing.
Far more subtle is the showering of pledges on marginal seats for political gain.
Gilmore was once a seat where voters were happy to see the local MP at the village fair, club bingo night or the opening of an envelope and nothing much else happened. Now, the electorate sees federal elections as a three-yearly bonanza. It's grown fond of pork and will expect more.
The barrels will be rolled out again. No major party will be prepared to end the practice when their political fortunes rest on it.
Great for the marginal seats but the whole country is poorer for the practice.
HAVE YOUR SAY: Will pork barrelling ever be stopped? Do you live in a marginal seat where the promises come thick and fast at election time? Or do you live in a safe seat where you sometimes feel taken for granted? Email us: echidna@theechidna.com.au
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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:
- Nationals leader David Littleproud has declared the party will not back a proposal to enshrine an Indigenous voice to parliament. The government has been calling for a referendum during this term of Parliament to set up an Indigenous voice - one of the recommendations from the Uluru Statement from the Heart. However, Mr Littleproud said the junior coalition party would oppose the plan. "We've got to a position where we don't believe that this will genuinely close the gap," he told reporters.
- Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe has apologised to people who listened to the RBA guidance that said the cash rate would not be raised until 2024 and took out mortgages. Dr Lowe appeared at Senate Estimates where he was questioned about the RBA's pandemic guidance issued in February 2021 and which stated the central bank would not raise rates until actual inflation was within the 2 to 3 per cent target. The board said it did not expect these conditions to be met until 2024 at the earliest, however later backtracked on this advice, and has been increasing the cash rate since May.
- A former soldier says he and fellow Australian Defence Force Academy recruits were so traumatised by their extreme training regime they began hallucinating and some became suicidal. James Geercke joined the academy in 2008 as an 18-year-old and told a Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide that recruits were routinely pushed to their limits. He recounted witnessing "some of the youngest, brightest, most driven, intelligent, promising people in the country" take their own lives. "We started seeing a lot of self-harm,' Mr Geercke told the inquiry on its first day of public hearings in Wagga Wagga.
THEY SAID IT: "The duty of youth is to challenge corruption." - Kurt Cobain
YOU SAID IT: From backyard to not in my backyard, the return of the incinerator as a means to deal with waste.
Gary says: "Why have a problem and then turn it into another or greater problem? Yeah, right. Not in my backyard."
Phil says the incinerator is a much better solution than landfill: "The one thing you fail to mention in your discussion about the pyrolysis products of waste combustion is that all those compounds, the furans, the dioxins, the polyaromatic compounds, are all organic compounds and flammable. Once the temperature is high enough and the residence time in the combustion zone is long enough then those compounds are oxidised. The waste gas stream can then be successfully neutralised using wet scrubbers and the CO2 produced can also be used as a feedstock to manufacture methanol. This is being successfully done in a cement manufacturing facility in China. Having been involved in the commissioning of the liquid waste treatment plant in Lidcombe some decades ago, the technology to combust undesirable compounds is robust and achievable. The desire to stick it in the ground to gradually decay and contaminate the surrounding area is reprehensible."
Sue wants waste addressed at the source: "Almost everything I buy comes with waste material, and some comes with stacks of it. Much of this is plastic or polystyrene. I accept that many of these can be recycled, and are, but there does come a point where they can't be - what then? What I don't get is why they are still being made in the first place? Sure, re-use, re-purpose, re-cycle the existing plastics, but knowing there is an end point where this can't be continued and we still have the plastics to dispose of in some way, why are we still making them? Let's see if governments, which are spending a lot of time telling us about how we need to work towards sustainable futures, are prepared to say, 'OK. That's it. No more of this! We end plastics now.' "
Maggie's heard it all before: "Déjà vu. Thirty years ago the NSW Waste Management Authority planned a high-temperature incinerator to dispose of intractable waste, most of which was, and as far as I know may still be, stored at Botany in Sydney. The WMA proposed seven or so possible sites, near small towns scattered around the state. Like the Goulburn-Mulwaree Council now, people around the proposed sites were unconvinced that scrubbers in the outlets would eliminate the nasties, and after two years of intense protests, lobbying, and an independent panel inquiry, the idea was scrapped. A key argument was that, if the incinerator was so safe, why not build it in Botany? A similar argument applies here. If a power-generating incinerator is safe, put it at the source of the fuel. If it's not safe, don't do it."
Monica says: "I lived up the hill from a well-known incinerator on the Lower North Shore. Until I read this article, it never occurred to me that it could have contributed to my entire family acquiring COPD in our later years. At 84, I am the last of my family but we didn't know any better. That being said, everyone burned off in those days and most smoked. We also stretched out in the boiling hot sun 'getting a tan', and drink driving. Makes me wonder how we survived! These days, with the knowledge we have, why are we thinking of reverting to this dangerous idea of rubbish disposal?"
Gerry adds: "Thanks for the anti-incineration article. You are 100 per cent correct. Incinerators don't make money from generating electricity - they make money from gate fees. It is also worth noting that the only things which burn in incinerators are organic in origin. All of them are either recyclable or compostable. All plastic is recyclable given the correct process. There is no reason why a plastics recycling facility cannot be built in every major centre in Australia. The remaining organic materials from food waste to roadkill can be turned into compost or hydrolysate (an effective foliar fertiliser and replacement for chemical nitrogen)."
Peter says: "A definite and resounding NO to incinerators, commercial or backyard. Giving companies a licence to burn waste under the pretext of generating electricity is unconscionable given the potential health risks, but sends the wrong message about minimising our use of plastics as well. My family also had a backyard incinerator when I was a kid, so I can relate to your piece about the fascination with burning plastics. The biggest kick came from throwing bits of broken fibro into the fire when it was really hot - they exploded like a cracker, sending showers of sparks high in the air. Great fun at the time, but 40 years later I nearly died of oesophageal cancer. You live and learn. Keep up the good work with The Echidna - I really enjoy my daily read and Fiona's brilliant cartoons."