The Case Against Four Bin System

The Andrews Government's announced statewide move to four colour-coded rubbish bins is a waste of time, money and space.

Environment Minister Lily D'Ambrosio is conscripting every citizen to become an unpaid rubbish sorter.

Many Victorians just don't have the room to store yet another bin.

Those Victorians with small townhouses and one-car garages hardly have enough space to store their existing bins.

Adding an extra one will increase costs to ratepayers by an extra 25 per cent, which means higher rates.

If the aim of this policy is environmental, then that's an additional diesel garbage truck polluting the neighbourhood every week.

The median value of a square metre of land in Melbourne is more than $1100.  The cost of storing an extra bin will waste $253 worth of land per household, on average — even more in the inner city.

Ms D'Ambrosio said the government was making waste collection an essential service.

But with council rates soaring to record highs, all it is doing is foisting this "essential" responsibility on ratepayers.

A new Dynata poll released last week found 66 per cent of Australians think local councils should stick to roads, rates and rubbish.

Only 10 per cent disagree.  Yet apparently councils can't even do rubbish properly.

Why The Aboriginal Citizenship Ruling Is Alien To All Ideas Of Law

The utter failure of the federal Coalition, after almost seven years in government, to do anything to arrest the left-wing political activism of Australia's institutions of government and administration was on full display last week.  It's one thing (as bad as it might be) for the ABC, or the Canberra public service, or the country's taxpayer-funded universities to indulge themselves in the progressive cause of identity politics.  But it is altogether more serious when a majority of the High Court does it.

In last week's decision of Love and Thoms v the Commonwealth, four of seven High Court judges ruled that whether Australia's citizenship laws apply to a person depends on their racial background and identity.  In the case of two individuals, Daniel Love and Brendan Thoms, the majority decided that although they were not born in Australia, and were not Australian citizens, they could not be deported following their criminal convictions because as people of Indigenous descent they were not "aliens" under the terms of the constitution.

Two of the majority, Justices Geoffrey Nettle and Michelle Gordon, were appointed by the Abbott government, and a third, Justice James Edelman, was appointed by the Turnbull government.  The fourth member of the majority, Justice Virginia Bell, was appointed by the Rudd government.

If future High Court decisions endorse the majority view that the law should permanently divide Australians according to their race, Love and Thoms could prove to be the most significant and controversial case in the history of the court.

The majority decision in Love and Thoms is so deeply flawed at so many levels, and so at odds with the basic notions of the rule of law, it is difficult to know where to begin.

First, it overturns the notion of equality before the law.

Second, the majority decision means the Parliament no longer has the capacity to decide who can and can't reside in the country, because there is now a class of people beyond the realm of Commonwealth law.

Third, the reasons the majority provides for their extraordinary decision are confused and incoherent, and are grounded in politics and philosophy, not in law.  And the most confused and incoherent judgment is that of Justice James Edelman.  At the age of 46, Justice Edelman could be on the High Court for another quarter of a century.

DANGEROUS TERRITORY

According to Edelman:  "The identity of of Aboriginal people, whether citizens or non-citizens, is shaped by a fundamental spiritual and cultural sense of belonging to Australia" and "[Aboriginal people] have been inseparably tied to the land of Australia generally, and thus to the political community of Australia, with metaphysical bonds".  Once a judge starts talking about "metaphysical bonds" they've transcended the realm of the law into something else entirely.

A more fundamental problem rests with Edelman's argument that regards Love and Thoms, not as individuals, but as members of a group he describes as the "Aboriginal people".  Certainly, many individuals of Indigenous descent might regards themselves as "inseparably tied to the land of Australia" — but some might not.

To describe people as members of a group first, and as individuals second, is both dangerous and tragic.  Whether Edelman is engaging in any sort of racial and ethnic stereotyping is for him to answer, but there is certainly the question of whether he would apply the sort of profile of belief he ascribes to Indigenous Australians to any other group of people who were not Indigenous.

Using "metaphysical bonds" to determine whether a person can be deported from Australia the country is highly problematic.  There's of course any other number of "metaphysical bonds" that could connect individuals to Australia.  A great-grandfather in one of the 1200 Australian graves at the VC Corner Cemetery at Fromelles in France is just one such metaphysical bond.

The success of Australia as a multicultural society rests on a core, and up until now, widely accepted principle — namely that all Australians are equal under our political system and in the eyes of the law — regardless of whether their forebears arrived in Australia a generation past or 60,000 years ago.  Last week, either deliberately or not, the majority of the High Court began to gnaw away at that principle.

A Path Forward On Constitutional Recognition

This week's decision in the High Court to invent a new category of personhood for people on the basis of their race is a devastating blow to the movement for the constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians.

On Tuesday the High Court handed down a decision in relation to how non-citizens who identified as Aboriginal would be treated under the Constitution, and in particular if they were subject to the commonwealth's migration laws.

By a narrow majority of 4-3, the justices decided that non-citizens who were descended from and claimed membership of indigenous Australians could not fall within the scope of the commonwealth's power to make laws with regards to "aliens" under section 51 (xix) of the Australian Constitution.

This is the most radical decision in the history of the Australian High Court.  The court has effectively created a new class of person on the basis of racial identity.

It is a fundamental challenge to the idea of racial equality as well as the sovereignty of parliament to decide who can be members of our shared political community.

This extraordinary decision has significant implications for proposed constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians.

This week the High Court demonstrated that it was prepared to make out of whole cloth a race-based exception to migration laws and the commonwealth's constitutional power to decide who aliens are.

It demolishes the idea from supposed constitutional conservatives that there is a form of minimalist constitutional change that would have minimal consequences in the law and the Constitution.

Proponents of constitutional recognition — in the form of either a symbolic preamble or the establishment of an indigenous body to advise the parliament — referred to as the Voice — have been insistent that these ideas are simply about recognising the place and history of indigenous Australians and would be treated with restraint by the courts.

In light of the High Court's decision this week such an assertion is no longer credible.  Having now created a new category of people beyond the scope of Australia's migration laws, what would it be prepared to do with a preamble?  Or how would it interpret the role and functions of a Voice body?

However, there is a path forward for achieving constitutional recognition that properly recognises the equal dignity of indigenous Australians and which would not give the High Court another opportunity for unbridled activism.

Credible recognition would mean amending the Australian Constitution to remove the remaining references to race, not adding more references to race.

The first of the two references to race in the Australian Constitution is section 25, which pretends to penalise a state if its parliament restricts an entire race from voting.  The provision is now defunct and should be deleted.

The second is the race power, which gives the commonwealth parliament the ability to pass laws with respect to the people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws.

There is no legal or moral justification for retaining the race power.  The basic needs of all Australians are not culturally contingent.  A power to legislate for specific races can never be a beneficial power because it rests on the flawed presumption that different groups need to be treated differently under the law.  The policies that promote a successful life and human flourishing are the same regardless of one's race or colour.

Few pieces of legislation rely on the race power.  The legislation regulating native title is frequently cited as being at risk of invalidation if the race power were to be removed.  This would be extremely unlikely.

Native title is the settled law of the land and has been recognised since 1992 by the High Court as existing as part of the common law.  If tested in a court, the Native Title Act would not rely solely on the races power for validation.

To retain the law, the commonwealth could rely on the external affairs power which gives the federal government the power to implement international agree­ments, such as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Additionally, the commonwealth could rely on the nationhood power or ask the states to refer the power to regulate native title to the federal sphere.

A new poll conducted by Dynata found that more Australians agreed (45 per cent) than disagreed (16 per cent) with the idea that all references to race should be removed from the Australian Constitution.

Moreover, this was consistent across all age groups surveyed.

Indigenous recognition means recognising that indigenous Australians are the moral and legal equals to all other Australians.  And equal recognition of human dignity between races demands the removal of divisive reference to race in Australia's constitution.

Roaring Into The Twenties

When Ricky Gervais came roaring onto the stage at the recent Golden Globe awards, he cemented his place as the first anti-woke hero of the 2020s.

"If you do win an award tonight, don't use it as a platform to give a political speech," Gervais said.  "You're in no position to lecture the public about anything.  You know nothing about the real world — most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.  So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your god, and f— off."

And, pre-empting the inevitable fallout, Gervais reminded the audience:  "Remember, they're just jokes!"

Gervais knew what he was doing.  He was daring the Hollywood wokeocracy to reach for the outrage button in an era when every second joke triggers a garbage fire on Twitter, or at the very least a string of interminable online think pieces about how "problematic" it is.

And that's the rub.  That is the whole dynamic that made the 2010s such a dreary and frankly depressing era.  Like the celebrities lampooned by Gervais, everyone and everything, it seems, is serious and pompous and exhausting.  Nobody has any fun anymore.

It's not just that we're no longer able to tell a few bawdy jokes.  It's not even political correctness itself.  It's the deeper mentality that has engulfed society at large, a pathological tendency to see the worst in everything.

These days, it seems like no aspect of daily life — from how we carry our groceries back from the shops to how we get to work in the morning — is safe from overbearing guilt, or worse still oppressive regulation.  Meanwhile, advertisements abound telling us we drink too much, we eat too much, that we're sending our family to the poorhouse with every harmless punt and that — despite ample evidence to the contrary — a great many of us are unknowing bigots.

It's a mindset that casts Australia and everyone who's in it with original sin.  Everywhere you look, there are naysayers peddling the myth that Australia is a Dickensian hotbed of inequality, on stolen land, spreading poison around the world in the form of our number one export, the demon coal.  Black armband history is nothing new, but over the last decade the grievance industry has boomed, with an army of moral guardians waxing lyrical about how every Australian institution — from our constitution to the local footy club — is seeped in racism, sexism and "toxic masculinity".

To be fair to Australia, it is a disease that's afflicted the Western world in general.  Look at Prince Harry (or whatever he goes by these days), wincing at the thought of commercial aviation — the modern miracle that allows millions to see the world — saying that "We all have to do better".  Or Nike, which marketed itself a couple of years back by celebrating the cause of an elite athlete who refused to stand for the national anthem.  Not to be outdone, Gillette released an ad the following year suggesting that its customers were latent misogynists.

And, appropriately, Time's Person of the Year at the tail-end of the last miserable decade was a sour-faced teen whose most famous public utterance is a finger-wagging "How dare you?"

Say what you like about Scott Morrison, but when he says "How good is Australia", it resonates.  Because more than ever before, there is a deep thirst in the community for a bit of good news, a reprieve from the drudgery of whatever the chattering classes happen to be banging on about.  We want to feel good about ourselves again.

It's not as if there aren't public policy problems in Australia — there are.  Too many people are out of work, red tape is choking our chance at prosperity, taxes are obscenely high and decades of overregulation have transformed electricity — in one of the most energy-rich countries on the planet — from a basic utility to a luxury good for too many.

But none of those things make Australia — let alone Australians — inherently bad.  All it means is that Australia has untapped potential, and lots of it.

And ironically, in global terms things have never been better.  Extreme poverty has more than halved since 2010 and, as of 2018, more than half the world's population has been in the middle class for the first time in human history.  Every available indicator — from literacy to infant mortality — continues to improve.

Meanwhile, freedom is making a comeback in the West, as patriots around the world elect governments that promise to dismantle the worst excesses of the bureaucratic-managerialist state.  Donald Trump's seismic cuts to tax and red tape have created the most free and prosperous economy America has seen in generations.  Boris Johnson's thumping victory last year obliterated the hitherto-insurmountable resistance of the "Remoaner" elite.

And while Scott Morrison's policies — to the limited extent he has any — are somewhat hit-and-miss, we can credit him for heading off the most wantonly destructive policy platform in living memory, a horrible reality we were all but guaranteed to suffer through had the Liberal party continued on the trajectory set by Morrison's deeply unpopular and woefully inept predecessor.

And of course, as the popularity of Ricky Gervais's diatribe shows, the world is increasingly seeing through the dead end of identity politics.  Ordinary people are no longer allowing themselves to be intimidated into silence.  The emperor's clothes are falling off.

By speaking up, by revolting at the ballot box, by opening their wallets for the Peter Ridds and Israel Folaus of the world, mainstream Australians are casting off the yoke of windbag politicians, joyless bureaucrats, condescending "experts", preachy celebrities and every other noxious strain of self-important know-it-all who gets off on micro-managing almost every conceivable facet of the human condition, while making us pay through the nose for the privilege.

So, Australians all let us rejoice.  Let's draw a line under that wretched decade of self-flagellation and start living large again.  It's time to ditch the acrimony and nihilism of the 2010s, and embrace the feel-good twenties.

Intellectual freedom? Only if your values are ''aligned''

The university year began with a rumbling noise that all is not well with intellectual freedom in this country.  What started as a small story at a Queensland campus has become a very big one that demands attention if we care about the future of the current generation of young Australians, the next generation, and the trajectory of freedom in this country.

Generation Liberty is home to a group of young Australians, who are committed to understanding and promoting the way in which freedom has enriched people across the history of civilisation.  I have come to know many members.

They are an eclectic bunch mostly under 25.  So good luck to those creepy fiends of identity politics who try to filter these young people by sex, sexual orientation, racial and religious traits.  This futile search will throw up these common threads only:  they are curious contrarians.  They engage in furious debates, don't take themselves too seriously and are willing to listen to others.  They want to learn things they haven't always been taught at school or at university, the history of Western civilisation, warts and all, the ebbs and flows of freedoms and its impact on people.

Last month, Gen Lib, as we call it, applied to have a stall at Market Week, an extended part of O Week at Queensland University of Technology, which runs in late February.  By email in late January, Alisha Pritchard from QUT's student guild declined Gen Lib's application, telling it the committee had "decided that your brand does not align with our values".

In the days that followed, Drew Pavlou, a student who sits on the University of Queensland's senate, started a petition to ban Gen Lib from UQ's market day activities too.  Pavlou describes himself as a human rights campaigner.  He has tweeted a video of himself supporting Hong Kong protesters at UQ.  Alas, his lack of support for intellectual freedom at home creates a serious credibility problem for him.  In other social media posts Pavlou has called for crushing dissent, burning books and said Gen Lib members "need to be bullied into submission".

What on earth are they afraid of?  This year, Gen Lib intends to run a book club for students that will include Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, Albert Camus's The Stranger, Mark Twain's The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, and Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell.  Gen Lib also will chat about what we call Big Fat Books, including The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Atlas Shrug­ged by Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.

Which book frightens QUT's student guild or the student representative on the UQ senate's peak governing body so much that they don't want students knowing about Gen Lib?

When news broke of this censorship of Gen Lib, QUT's student guild ran for the hills, claiming a litany of other reasons for Gen Lib's exclusion.  But remember its first response to Gen Lib:  "Your brand does not align with our values".

At one level, this is a story about a group of students who have not been taught about the empowering forces of intellectual freedom, let alone the history of freedom across a few thousand years of Western civilisation.

But it is part of a much bigger story that includes a vice-chancellor, too.  Following questions from this newspaper to the Education Minister, QUT vice-chancellor Margaret Sheil released a statement last week saying that O Week gives priority to guild-affiliated clubs, and Gen Lib could affiliate and apply next year.  In any case, "the available area for stalls during O Week is currently at capacity", she said.

Then came some pure puffery.  "QUT does not operate on the basis of left or right-wing bias:  the effectiveness of all we do here relies upon remaining open to a variety of contesting viewpoints and to the merits of evidence," Sheil said.

Was Sheil misinformed about the facts or was she being disingenuous?  Either way, the university's leader failed to address the fact that the student guild at QUT rejected Gen Lib's application for Market Week, not O Week, and on the basis that its brand did not align with their values.

On Wednesday afternoon, QUT backed away from its first statement.  Peter Gatbonton, QUT's manager of student engagement, emailed an invitation to Gen Lib's Theodora Pantelich, inviting them to be part of O Week.

What happened to no space?  Maybe like a late guest pulling out from a wedding reception the chaps from the Socialist Alternative couldn't make it after all.

Seriously, are we meant to be grateful that QUT administrators caved in to pressure and managed, after all, to find space for the ideas of freedom at QUT's O Week?

Perhaps, in her private moments, the vice-chancellor of QUT wonders how the heck it reached this dismal state of affairs among her students.  In truth, the responsibility rests with university administrators like her.  Rarely from the goodness of their hearts or the brilliance of their minds do VCs defend intellectual freedom.  They tend to do it once forced, when exposed, and shamed.  Like here.

Vice-chancellors love talking about deliberately ambiguous concepts such as "diversity" and "inclusion" rather than a bedrock principle called intellectual freedom.  Worse, they have overseen the cementing of these woolly words on campus to shut down div­erse views and students who challenge the orthodoxy feel excluded.

We know this from a survey of students conducted last year.  Rather than listening to the public exhortations of VCs, we asked students about their experience at universities.  Forty-one per cent of them said they felt unable to express their opinions at university.  This is what transforms a small story about a student guild at QUT into a very big story about the strangulation of intellectual freedom.  The story gets bigger still.  It includes a set of laws that are lame and a regulator that has had no discernible impact on improving intellectual freedom at Australian universities.

Start with the Higher Education Support Act 2003.  As a condition of receiving federal money from taxpayers, it provides that "a higher education provider ... must have a policy that upholds free intellectual inquiry in relation to learning, teaching, and research".  Then there is the HES Framework 2015 that says:  "The higher education provider has a clearly articulated higher education purpose that includes a commitment to and support for free intellectual inquiry in its academic endeavours".  This framework requires a university "governing body ... to develop and maintain an institutional environment in which freedom of intellectual inquiry is upheld and protected".

Now for the regulator.  The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency is empowered to enforce the HES Act and the HEC Framework so taxpayers and students know publicly funded universities are carrying out their core mission to educate their students.

TEQSA's own report card is woeful.  Like VCs around the country, TEQSA's chief commissioner, Nick Saunders, has mentioned intellectual freedom, including when asked at a Senate estimates inquiry, but there is scant evidence of a regulator genuinely committed to holding universities to their core mission of intellectual freedom.  If this is yet another rogue bureaucracy ignoring its remit from government, the government has a chance to appoint a new kind of bureaucrat.  TEQSA chief executive Anthony McClaran is leaving his role at the end of next month.  The search for a new boss may be the chance to boost the heft of this body.

But, then again, maybe the law needs reforming.  After all, requiring a policy on paper about intellectual freedom is meaningless;  what matters is enforcement.  This story, then, is also about the federal government.  A series of them, in fact.  Intellectual freedom has been on the slide for decades, going back to the atrocious treatment of Geoffrey Blainey at the University of Melbourne in 1984 when he aired his view that the Hawke government's 40 per cent intake of poor immigrants from Asia could threaten the country's social cohesion unless managed properly.  He was hounded off campus as a racist.  Blainey is not a racist;  he is one of Australia's finest historians.

There has sometimes been a bit of talk from politicians, prime ministers too, and a bit of legislative tinkering such as Julia Gillard's changes to the HES Act in 2011.  But still, today, too many university campuses are not known as places of learning where intellectual freedom thrives.  If they were, a student guild running stalls for new students wouldn't dream of banning a Gen Lib stall on the basis that its brand did not align with the guild's values.  If intellectual freedom were taken seriously, a vice-chancellor would not put up with this baloney on their campus.  And neither would the regulator or our government.

The Education Minister has the authority to direct TEQSA in the exercise and performance of its powers.  Isn't it time then for a ministerial kick up the regulator's backside?  If not now, when?  What will it take for that to happen?

Remember, too, that thousands of Australians are still waiting for the Morrison government to support intellectual freedom by supporting Peter Ridd, who was sacked by James Cook University for challenging the quality of climate science.

Instead, Education Minister Dan Tehan has plans to tweak this, and tinker with that, tightening up the government's "compact" with each publicly funded university to include universities reporting on their approaches to supporting freedom of intellectual inquiry on campus.  That'll fix things, then.

Another more difficult, but not impossible, route to intellectual freedom is to remove sources of public funding from universities that fail at that core mission.

A baker's mission is to bake.  A lawyer gives legal advice.  A plumber will fix your plumbing.  Yet we need laws, regulators, compacts and codes to convince university administrators their core job is to offer intellectual freedom on campus.

No wonder Generation Liberty is thriving, attracting curious young people hungry for what publicly funded universities fail to offer them.  It is a safe bet that, far away from student guilds and VC offices, our values about freedom align very closely with millions of Australians.

Activist Judges Misrepresent Mabo To Create Privileged Class

The High Court's decision on Tuesday to exempt an entire group of people based on their racial identity from the operation of national migration laws is the most radical instance of judicial activism in Australian judicial history.

The High Court's decision concerned two individuals who were not born in Australia and were not Australian citizens but who claim biological descent from Abor­igines and Torres Strait Islanders.

After the two non-citizen individuals were sentenced for separate and unrelated offences against the Queensland criminal code, the Home Affairs Minister cancelled their visas and they were detained under the provisions of the Migration Act 1958 on the suspicion of being unlawful non-citizens and were liable to deportation.

This law relies on the commonwealth's power under section 51 (xix) of the Constitution to make laws with regards to "aliens" — a phrase that established High Court precedent understands as referring to non-citizens.

The High Court, by a narrow majority, has arbitrarily written into this aliens power a new exemption.

The majority decided that it was not open to the parliament to treat an individual who can prove sufficient descent from an Aboriginal Australian as an alien.  The majority claims that because the common law recognises indigenous native title to the land as surviving the reception of the common law and the sovereignty of the Australian crown, it follows that indigenous Australians also have an inextinguishable right to enjoy their traditional lands and maintain their cultural and spiritual connection to them.

The result is the legal fairytale of a unique class of individuals who are non-citizens as well as non-aliens.

The decision to limit the commonwealth's power to decide who is and is not an alien is a direct attack on the sovereignty of the crown.

Justice Michelle Gordon introduced her decision by stating that "the fundamental premise" of the High Court's 1992 Mabo decision "is that the indigenous peoples of Australia are the first peoples of this country", and the connection between the indigenous peoples of Australia and the land and water that now make up the territory of Australia was not severed or extinguished by European "settlement".

This is a misrepresentation of the Mabo case.  The basis of the court's decision to recognise native title in Mabo was that it existed within the common law system and that this was an institution derived from the sovereignty of the crown.

Yet the decision this week is founded on the opposite premise that, in at least respect of alienage, the racial identity of a person supersedes the sovereignty of the crown.

The majority decision is a total repudiation of racial equality.

By carving out an exception in the Australian Constitution for people on the basis of their immutable biological characteristics, the High Court has created a new class of person "consigned to inhabit a constitutional netherworld in which they are neither citizens ... nor aliens", as Justice Stephen Gageler noted in his dissenting judgment.

This fact alone should put to rest the idea that recognising historical facts in the Constitution would not lead to unintended consequences.  The credibility of the minimalist case advanced by some "conservatives" for constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians has been swept away.

Any proposal that would insert a new provision into the Australian Constitution that would mark out some kind of recognition of indigenous Australians would inevitably come before the High Court.

The question now will be:  if the High Court is willing to create a separate and privileged class of person that is beyond the scope of Australia's migration laws, then what would it be prepared to do with a preamble or declaration written into the Constitution?

Each of the seven High Court judges offered their reasons for their decisions.  This means that the judges responsible for this mess cannot hide behind the judgment written by another judge.  It also means that a divided majority judgment will be easier to knock down by a future court.

But to do this would require judges who are more willing to hew to the basic legal principles that formed this commonwealth.  In this respect this decision should be a wake-up call for Coalition governments.

Three of the four judges forming the radical majority were nominated by the Abbott and Turnbull Coalition governments.  The supposedly conservative Coali­tion has failed in its basic task:  preserving our country's Constitution by appointing judges willing to play the proper role of saying what the Constitution means, rather than what judges would like it to mean.

During the next 13 months two of four judges in the majority — justices Geoffrey Nettle and Virginia Bell — will reach the mandatory retirement age.  The two replacements must both be explicitly capital-C conservatives.

Anything else will be a further betrayal of the Constitution and of Australians.

McKenzie's Removal Was A Bad Day For Democracy

In the Battle of Bridget, the unelected bureaucrats have triumphed over the will of the Victorian people with the effect of diminishing the value of our democracy.

Senator Bridget McKenzie has paid a steep price for the sports rorts scandal, being forced to resign as Minister for Agriculture and leave Cabinet.

The usual narrative around McKenzie's dismissal was that it was inevitable;  that she had abused her position when she was Minister for Sport by handing out grants to clubs in marginal Liberal and National seats.

But there is another way of looking at this, one where three groups of unelected bureaucrats, under the direction of the shadow attorney-general, used their positions to unfairly target a high performing and popular conservative female senator for Victoria.

Group of unelected bureaucrats #1, the Australian National Audit Office, undertook an audit of the Community Sport Infrastructure Program.  As Minister for Sport, McKenzie had responsibility for allocating funds to sports clubs around Australia.  This audit was undertaken at the request of the shadow attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus.

Dreyfus specifically asked the ANAO to investigate the circumstances surrounding the $127,000 check that went to the Yankalilla bowls club in the lead up to the 2018 by-election in the of Adelaide electorate of Mayo.

But the ANAO, of its own volition, went beyond that remit of investigating the $127,000 cheque to looking into the entire $100 million multi-year grants program.

The finding by the ANAO was apparently that some successful grant applications were "not those that had been assessed as the most meritorious in terms of the published program guidelines".  But assessed as meritorious by who?

That would be group of unelected bureaucrats #2, Sports Australia, which is the government agency responsible for advising on and administering the sports grants program.

Sport Australia invented a rating system out of 100 to assess grant applications, with the expectation that those with a higher score would receive the funding.  McKenzie's office developed its own methodology which, naturally, led to do different assessments.

There is the broader public policy question of why the Commonwealth government even has the authority to hand over significant taxpayer dollars to local sporting clubs.  Surely that would be better managed at the state, local, and community levels.

But given the Commonwealth does have that power, someone must decide where the grants are allocated.  And in a parliamentary democracy like Australia, it is the bureaucrats who advise and ministers who decide.

Even the ANAO report concluded that "program guidelines identified that the Minister for Sport would approve Community Sport Infrastructure Grant Program funding".

Certainly, some of McKenzie's grant allocations were questionable.  Her $36,000 grant to a shooting club in Wangaratta that she was a member of was a clear conflict of interest.  McKenzie should have declared the conflict and recused herself from providing grants to firearms clubs.

Ultimately, it was an investigation carried out by group of unelected bureaucrats #3 at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet that uncovered that and a second conflict of interest that led to McKenzie's resignation.

But, even there, it is worth remembering that shooting is an Olympic sport that Australia has won five gold medals in.  And some of the other grants which have been questioned in the media don't seem so dodgy on reflection.  Sport Australia advised the minister that the Gippsland Lakes Roller Derby would be a worthy recipient of a $500,000, grant having received a rating of 98 out of 100.

McKenzie formed a different view and decided to allocate $500,000 to the Pakenham footy club to build changing rooms for female footy and netball players.  The Sport Australia bureaucrats rated the footy club as only 50 out of 100.

That tells you everything you need to know about this issue.  Unelected bureaucrats wanted grants to go to roller derby.  But an elected member of parliament thought the footy club was more deserving.  Which is more consistent with community expectations?

The sports grants program was far from a pure and clean process.  But there is a much bigger principle at stake, which is that ministers must hold the ultimate responsibility for how taxpayer dollars are allocated.  They — and not the unelected Canberra-based bureaucrats — are the ones who face voters every three or six years.

Like it or not, that is how democracy works.

Climate Wars Are The Aussie Brexit

Climate change is to Australia what Brexit is to Britain.  That's because, just like on Brexit, perspectives on climate policy are as much about one's views on the future of the economy and society as they are on with the merits of the issue itself.

Because most of the inhabitants of the Canberra press gallery bubble can't see past the froth on their cappuccino, Tuesday's vote for the parliamentary leadership of the federal National Party has been presented as basically the product of Barnaby Joyce's ego and personality.  Maybe.  But something much bigger was at stake.

Under one leadership candidate, the Nationals would continue to follow the Liberals' climate change policies, which place a priority on adherence to the Paris Accord.  Pursuant to the accord, Australia has agreed to impose the deepest per capita cuts to CO2 emissions in the developed world.

Under the other candidate, the Nationals' position on climate change would instead have prioritised cheaper energy and industrial development.  A majority of the National Party MPs and senators voted for the first candidate.

These two positions reflect vastly different assessments of the politics of climate change and vastly different worldviews.  It seems that to several Liberal MPs (and presumably a few National MPs, too), if the Coalition somehow did more on climate change, many of the political challenges posed by climate change would go away.  This might be true, but history has demonstrated that more action on climate change never seems to be enough to satisfy those demanding further reductions in emissions.

Furthermore, the evidence that the public is demanding action on climate change is more nuanced than commonly assumed.

The evidence for this is not only the outcome of last year's federal poll, which was presented by many as the climate change election.  There's also data from surveys such as that by JWS Research reported in this newspaper in November:  when respondents were prompted on what they thought were the three most important issues the government should focus on, the environment and climate change was ranked fourth, behind cost of living, hospital, healthcare and ageing, and employment and wages.

INCREDIBLY REVEALING

When respondents were unprompted, 34 per cent nominated the environment and climate change, 28 per cent named healthcare and 22 per cent said employment and wages.  It is incredibly revealing that despite all of the attention devoted to climate change in nearly every single walk of life in this country, only about one-third of people rank it as one of the top three issues on which the government should focus.

When for example, former United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change executive secretary Christiana Figueres said climate change policies provided "the chance to re-create the economy, to re-create the world", it's not unreasonable for those who believe the world could be better but who don't think it should be re-created, to take people like Figueres at their word and push back.

"THE PARTY FOR WORKERS"

This is the point that Nationals senator and former resources minister Matt Canavan made this week when he talked about the future of the Nationals as "the party for workers ... workers in coalmines, workers in shipyards and workers in factories".

Canavan was one of the four people most responsible for the Coalition's federal election victory in May — the others being first and foremost Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and the Liberals' federal director Andrew Hirst.  Canavan's work went largely unnoticed in Sydney and Melbourne but he was the one who turned the debate about the future of Australia's coal mines into a vote for or against economic development in regional Australia.  A large part of the reason the Coalition won 23 seats in Queensland to Labor's six is because of Canavan.  One outcome of the Nationals' leadership vote this week is that he is now on the backbench.

A re-created zero-emissions economy consistent with the vision of someone like Figueres has little place for workers in factories and definitely doesn't have room for coalminers.

At least for the British, as of Friday last week when Britain officially left the European Union, Brexit for the moment is settled.  In Australia though, there's no end in sight to the so-called climate wars.

Defang Bureaucrats So They Can't Be Used As Political Pawns

The revelations about how former prime minister Tony Abbott and other conservative activists were pursued by the federal Attorney-General's Department at the behest of Labor legal affairs spokesman Mark Dreyfus represents a failure of our democracy and the rule of law.

My Freedom of Information request­ uncovered further details about how the organiser of the Conservative Political Action Conference, Andrew Cooper, and conservative speakers at that conferenc­e, including Abbott, were required to register as agents of foreign influence by the Attorney­-General's Department.

Last July 22, Dreyfus attended a briefing with senior represent­atives of the Integrity and Security Division, the bureaucrats from the Attorney-General's Department who were responsible for enforcing the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme.  This occurred just days before Kristina Keneally's speech to the Senate which sparked a media frenzy about the CPAC conference.

The FITS scheme was introduced into federal parliament in December 2017 and came into force a year later.  The purpose of the Dreyfus briefing was to inform him about the implementation of the scheme.

In notes recorded by an A-G's departmental official, Dreyfus "specifically raised the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference to be held in Sydney 9-11 August 2019, as an example of an event that may trigger registration obligations under the scheme and asked what the Department planned to do about it".

It is clear the bureaucrats went straight to work following up Dreyfus's request, and by August 2 last year they had sent letters to Abbott, inviting him to register as an agent of foreign influence, as well as Andrew Cooper, who as president of conservative advocates LibertyWorks was the co-­organiser of CPAC.

What is also clear from the FOI request is that the departmental bureaucrats busily monitored the speaker list of the CPAC Australia website each day so that they could also invite others to register as agents of foreign influence.

On October 22, the department sent Cooper a letter demand­ing he turn over all documents regarding the CPAC conference within 14 days, with the threat of being imprisoned for six months if he failed to comply.

It was clear from reporting in The Australian at that time that Attorney-General Christian Porter­ was unaware of the actions of bureaucrats in his department.  He said he had made it "clear to my department that I expect it to demonstrate a focus on the most serious instances of non-­compliance".

He then added what might be seen as an understatement:  "I'm not persuaded this focus has been perfectly demonstrated to date."

The bluntness of this legislation was foreseeable.  My Legal Rights Audit 2018 warned that the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act 2018 remove­d procedural fairness, the right to silence and the privilege against self-incrimination.

The very people responsible for protecting our democracy from political interference have been actively undermining it.  Using the power of the state to target political opponents is behavio­ur you expect only in authorit­arian regimes.  Yet this is what Dreyfus apparently sought to do.

Australians understand that foreign interference in our politics is a serious issue and one that our laws should seek to prevent.  It was shameful of Dreyfus to seemingly try to ­harass his political opponents by using a law designed to address the genuine issue of political interference by communist China.  If it was found that a Coalition MP had tipped off bureaucrats under the guise of national security legislation to investigate the links between an Australian prog­ressive activist organisation co-hosting a conference with a US organisation there would be wall-to-wall outrage at the ABC and The Guardian.  Rightly so.

Yet some mainstream media outlets have been all but silent when it comes to reporting revel­ations of the misuse of national ­security apparatus to hound their ideological opponents.

In any other liberal democracy, to require a person to hand over any information where the consequence of refusing is jail time would require these bureaucrats to stand before a judge and secure a warrant.  Not here.

A recent poll by Dynata found 64 per cent of Australians believed unelected bureaucrats had too much control over our lives.  The Dreyfus revelations show Australians are right to be worried.

The FITS legislation needs to be recast to defang the bureaucrats as well as opportunistic politicians such as Dreyfus who apparently use it target enemies.

Unelected Bureaucrats Engaged In ''Political Hit Job'' At Labor's Request

The real scandal in the grants administered by Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie is that unelected bureaucrats at the Australian National Audit Office engaged in political hit job against a conservative politician at the request of Shadow Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus.

The ANAO undertook its Award of Funding under the Community Sport Infrastructure Program audit at the request of Mr Dreyfus.

The shadow attorney-general requested an audit into the circumstances surrounding then-Liberal candidate for Mayo's funding of a local bowls club in the lead up to the 2018 by-election.

It is curious that no one in the media has questioned why in a liberal parliamentary democracy like Australia a member of the opposition can direct unelected bureaucrats to investigate a minister of the Crown.

Going beyond its original remit of investing the provision of a $127,273 cheque to the Yankalilla bowls club, the ANAO engaged in a far-reaching audit of all grants administered under the Community Sport Infrastructure Grant Program.  Grants under the program could be provided under the discretion of then-minister for sport, Ms McKenzie.

Ms McKenzie's apparent failure was that several projects which received grants did not meet the criteria established by Sport Australia, which is an unelected statutory agency.

But this is an egregious misunderstanding of how democracy works.  Bureaucrats advise.  Ministers decide.  If public servants want to decide how taxpayer funds are allocated, they should run for parliament.

Mainstream Australians would much prefer an elected member of parliament to decide how their money is spent, not faceless, unelected members of the Canberra swamp.

A recent poll by Dynata found that 64 per cent of Australians believe unelected bureaucrats have too much control over our lives.

In reporting on the issue on Tuesday, the ABC thought they had found two fatal smoking guns.

The first was the apparent revelation that the minister's office was running a parallel process to Sport Australia for where the grants should be allocated, as evidenced by a spreadsheet leaked to and reported by the ABC.

Far from a smoking gun, this spreadsheet appears to exonerate Ms McKenzie of any wrongdoing.

The spreadsheet shows that the majority of the 223 projects marked as "successful" in the first round of grants went to Labor-held seats.  As McKenzie said, this is "reverse pork-barreling".

Some 94 projects were in Labor-held seats, with 87 in Liberal, 35 National, and seven in seats held by independents.

The second would-be smoking gun is the $500,000 grant provided to the Pakenham Football Club, which received a rating of 50 out of 100 by Sports Australia but received the highest possible grant.  The Pakenham Football Club is in the marginal Liberal seat of La Trobe.

According to Sport Australia, that $500,000 would have been better provided to the Gippsland Lakes Roller Derby in the safe Nationals seat of Gippsland, which received a rating of 98 out of 100.  Only an unelected and out-of-touch public servant could think it is a better idea to fund the roller derby than the footy in Victoria.

Besides, the ratings out of 100 are mere inventions of the bureaucracy designed to give the process fake scientific credentials.

More to the point, the funding to the Pakenham footy club was to build change rooms for female footballers and netballers, something the woke ABC would usually celebrate.  Instead, the ABC would rather play political football for the Labor Party even if it means female footy players lose out on much-needed facilities.

To be sure, the potential misuse of taxpayer funds is a big policy issue and must be investigated.

In October last year, this government gifted $1 billion of taxpayer funds to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to underwrite more intermittent, expensive, and unreliable renewable energy.  No one lost their job.

In 2018, this government gave $444 million to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation which at the time had an annual revenue of around $10 million.  No one lost their job.

For a decade both Coalition and Labor governments gave more than $88 million to the scandal-plagued Clinton Foundation.

Yet Ms McKenzie could lose her role as deputy leader of the Nationals for faithfully discharging her duties as a minister and an elected member of parliament.

Ms McKenzie has been engulfed by a scandal.  Just not the one spun in the media.

A member of the Opposition directed the ANAO to investigate a political opponent, the ANAO then went beyond the remit of this original request, and the taxpayer-funded ABC conspired with a leaker to obtain and report on confidential information with the potential effect of ending the political career of an elected member of parliament.

Investigate that.