Climate Change Action, Do We Need Religion In Politics, Vaccination Envy

New Politics: Australian Politics

The world is slowly moving towards climate change solutions and, once again, Australia is the laggard on the world stage but trying to tell everyone how well it's performing, even though no other world leader believes it. And this is the modus operandi of the Morrison government: lie, mispresent the data, gaslight, or divert the attention somewhere else. The US President, Joe Biden, might be an old man but he’s not a fool and knows a fool when he sees one. It’s obvious Morrison wants to lead a government that acts as the world’s double-exhaust pipes, and accede to the wishes of the many vested interests in the mining and oil sectors. But he’ll be in for a huge shock when he sees the size of the tariffs imposed on Australian goods and services exports.
A milkshake video was released through a government-managed website – The Good Society – and if a casual viewer wasn't told about what the video was about, they'd be scratching their head trying to work out how smearing a milkshake in a man’s face relates to sexual consent and the serious issues of sexual harassment, rape and assault. But the content of these videos provides an insight into the mentality of the government that commissioned the videos in the first place: a government that wishes to impose its narrow-minded conservatism upon the community and searching for a teenage community that doesn't seem to exist anywhere in Australia. And its a conservatism based on the Pentecostal beliefs of the Prime Minister.
Prime Ministers have the complete right to believe – or not believe – in any religion they choose, as long as it's a private matter. There is a church-state separation in modern democracies – for very good reasons – but Morrison wants the church to creep over in the political sphere. And it shouldn't be there.
And the vaccination rollout keeps creating political problems for the federal government and they keep looking to apportion blame to everyone – except for themselves. Why did they take on the program in the first place? They provided massive amounts of stimulus funding to the state and territory governments and the states and territories ending up getting all the political credit, much to the chagrin of Morrison and Josh Frydenberg. They weren't going to allow that to happen again. So, they took on the implementation of the vaccination program, something the federal government has never done before, hoping to get all the political benefit, and a clear pathway to victory at the next federal election. And the pear-shaped result is exactly the result the federal government deserves.