Even Pauline Hanson’s Critics Say Attorney-General Went Too Far

Penny’s pay bump wouldn’t fly in corporate Australia 

After stepping in to defend Anthony Albanese during the much-discussed melon controversy, Penny Wong has now landed a more lucrative stand-in role: earning the Prime Minister’s pay rate whenever he is out of the country.

Wong is serving as acting prime minister while Albanese attends the Pacific Islands Forum in Palau, with Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles also abroad on visits to the United States and Britain.

Under a recently adjusted Remuneration Tribunal arrangement, Wong is entitled to be paid at Albanese’s annual salary rate of $622,102 for the period she is temporarily carrying out the top job.

The political twist is hard to miss: Wong, as Foreign Minister, is receiving the extra pay while staying in Australia, as Albanese handles overseas diplomacy that would typically sit close to her own ministerial brief.

And Albanese does not pause his prime ministerial salary while Wong fills in. Instead, taxpayers are effectively funding two senior politicians at the Prime Minister’s pay rate at the same time.

Try that arrangement in the real world. If the chief executive of a private company travels overseas on company business, the board doesn’t start paying another executive the CEO’s full rate while continuing to pay the actual CEO every cent of theirs. Responsibilities are delegated, and that’s it.

Only in Canberra does the temporary delegation of duties require the creation of a second prime-ministerial pay packet. Aren’t we lucky this lot is looking after the nation’s finances.

The tribunal insists the change wasn’t requested by the government. That merely highlights that it’s a system-wide absurdity rather than a specially designed favour for Penny.

The acting PM position is itself largely ceremonial these days anyway. Albo remains contactable aboard an RAAF jet equipped with internet access and secure communications. He continues making decisions in every meaningful sense.

Well, to the extent Albo makes any meaningful decisions, that is.

Ooshie economics from a landlord minister 

Communications minister Anika Wells has found a novel way to explain Labor’s housing tax changes to Australians: talk to them as though they are toddlers.

Wells posted a video surrounded by dozens of Woolworths Ooshies, solemnly explaining that ‘both the Ooshie market and the Australian housing market are dictated by supply and demand’.

Under Labor’s reforms, Wells said, investors can ‘keep using the tax system to buy Ooshies, but only new ones’.

It was housing policy by Play School. All that was missing was Big Ted negatively gearing Jemima’s dollhouse.

And she’s the communications minister. Are we living through a real-world political satire?

But Wells left one particularly relevant Ooshie out of the display: her own investment property.

The minister’s latest register of interests declares a rental property in Chermside, as well as the Wavell Heights home she owns jointly with her husband. The Chermside property predates Labor’s reforms, meaning it’s protected by the government’s grandfathering arrangements.

Perhaps some Ooshies are more equal than others.

To be clear, the register doesn’t disclose whether Wells negatively gears the property and I am not suggesting that she does.

But if she does, she can keep doing so under the new rules. The restrictions she was explaining with plastic figurines apply to investors who came along after her.

In other words, Wells already owns the rare existing property Ooshie, and Labor has made sure no other kids can take it from her.

Aspiring first home buyers locked out of the housing market are apparently meant to be reassured by a ministerial landlord shuffling children’s toys around a desk.

Perhaps Wells’s next video can demonstrate how many Ooshies a young Australian needs to trade for a deposit?

Political safety comes with conditions

Attorney-General Michelle Rowland has managed to turn victim-blaming into government policy, at least when the victim is Pauline Hanson.

Hanson says escalating threats against her now require federal police protection.

Whether anyone agrees with Hanson’s claim that Albo’s rhetoric has contributed to the threats is neither here nor there.

Either way, the response from the nation’s first law officer should have been simple: political threats are unacceptable, full stop.

Instead, Rowland acknowledged that life was becoming increasingly dangerous for high-profile female politicians before immediately adding a qualification.

Hanson, she suggested, needed to ‘look at oneself and one’s behaviour’ and consider the standards accepted within her own party and ideology.

Come again?

It was the political equivalent of telling the victim to consider what she had done to bring the trouble upon herself.

Even some of Hanson’s fiercest critics on the other side are quietly shocked.

Imagine just for a moment if a male Coalition attorney general told a female Labor or Greens MP receiving physical threats to examine her own conduct and political beliefs as the cause.

Labor would demand his resignation within the hour. There would be sombre speeches about misogyny, safety and the dangerous consequences of blaming women for abuse directed at them.

But because the target in this real-life case was Hanson, Rowland apparently decided the usual rules don’t apply.

Her comments came after Albo labelled One Nation ‘dangerous, divisive and downright dishonest’ and told the Labor faithful: ‘We simply must defeat them. We owe it to history.’

The PM says politicians need to lower the temperature, then turns up at a Labor conference carrying a rhetorical blowtorch. When the target complains about threats, his AG tells Hanson to reflect on her own behaviour.

Apparently threats against women are always unacceptable, unless the woman’s name is Pauline Hanson.

Canberra discovers a new definition of ‘consistent’ 

Labor managed to have two refugee policies in a single working day last week, and by the following morning ministers were insisting there was no backflip.

Look over there, it’s a dog that’s really a cat!

On Thursday morning, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke’s office confirmed the government planned to cut Australia’s annual humanitarian intake from 20,000 places to 13,750 next financial year.

That wasn’t media speculation, it was confirmed from the responsible minister’s office.

Labor backbenchers promptly revolted. By late afternoon, Albo had intervened and declared that the intake would remain at 20,000.

The PM communicated his government’s final position by sending a text to an ABC journalist. Good government at its finest! Cabinet government is clearly overrated.

The following morning Health Minister Mark Butler insisted it was ‘not a backflip’, while Industry Minister Tim Ayres declared that the government’s approach had been ‘consistent all the way through’.

That is an impressive abuse of the English language even by Canberra’s standards.

Either Burke’s office announced a major migration policy without the approval of the PM, exposing extraordinary dysfunction at the centre of government, or Albo dumped the policy after his backbench revolted, which is the very definition of a backflip.

Both explanations are embarrassing to say the least. Neither resembles consistency.

Only one month earlier, Labor’s national conference had unanimously committed the party to maintaining the 20,000 intake in the short term, while continuing to aspire to 27,000. Apparently nobody thought to send the minutes of that meeting to the Home Affairs Minister who’s responsible for the policy.

Under Labor’s new policymaking model, cabinet is optional, a caucus rebellion counts as consultation and a reporter receiving a text message substitutes for a formal announcement.

Taxpayers can only hope Albo remembered to text Tony Burke as well.

Why Scarr should stop giving advice 

Former shadow immigration minister Paul Scarr has found a new vocation since Angus Taylor dumped him from the frontbench: advising Albo on who should be in cabinet.

His nominee? Labor senator Deborah O’Neill.

‘Deb should be a cabinet minister,’ Scarr gushed last week. ‘She’s got a very strong moral compass.’ He even volunteered to convey this brilliant recommendation directly to the PM.

Prime Ministers don’t generally take cabinet advice from backbenchers whose own leader has decided they aren’t fit for the shadow ministry.

Scarr’s record hardly qualifies him as a political talent scout.

As Sussan Ley’s shadow immigration minister, his instinct was to soften the Coalition’s position, reject talk of ‘mass migration’ and lecture colleagues not to ‘inflame emotion’ – precisely as voters furious about immigration were stampeding towards Hanson’s One Nation.

Hanson’s rise, neatly and accidentally accommodated by Scarr’s stupidity, is now threatening to destroy the very party the Queensland senator represents.

Taylor took one look at that political masterclass and returned him to the backbench. Quite right, too.

Scarr’s judgment of O’Neill is no sharper, and his timing couldn’t be worse.

Before delivering his sycophantic tribute, O’Neill had accepted flights and accommodation from defence lobbying firm Pyne & Partners to attend its nearly $5,000-a-head AUKUS conference in Washington. This was the subject of my column last Sunday.

At the time of the trip, O’Neill chaired parliament’s Defence Subcommittee and was just weeks away from becoming chair of the powerful new Parliamentary Joint Committee on Defence.

In other words, a defence lobbyist paid to fly a parliamentary defence watchdog to America to mingle with arms dealers chasing a slice of the $368billion AUKUS spend.

Everything was declared and within the rules, O’Neill’s office opined. Which is precisely the sort of threadbare defence she would’ve filleted had it come from one of the consultancy giants paraded before her corporations committee.

Yet Scarr sees a ‘very strong moral compass’ in the way Deb operates. Interesting.

It’s worth noting Scarr is a Liberal moderate, which makes him a factional ally of the former Liberal minister Christopher Pyne, whose lobbying firm took advantage of Deb’s penchant for a junket.

So Scarr couldn’t read the electorate on immigration and now he can’t recognise a glaring conflict of interest when it’s sitting right beside him.

If this is Scarr’s best judgment, Taylor performed a public service by consigning him to the backbench.