It’s great fun being a staffer in an incoming government. You can look forward to a decent salary and a well-staffed office after years of slogging your guts out for a pittance in opposition. And if you’ve got a communications role, journalists have to suck up to you, at least for as long as the honeymoon period lasts.

Labor is officially on the hunt, publicly and privately, for a whole new battalion of ministerial staffers and we’re confident there will be plenty of eager recruits.

So we were intrigued to learn that long-term Albanese spinner Alex Cramb had decided to lay down his weapons and withdraw from the political fray, swapping combative Canberra for a peaceful Victorian farm. The former Herald cadet first met Albo more than 20 years ago as an ALP ‘‘branchie’’ in Marrickville and worked on the Kevin 07 campaign with former national secretary Tim Gartrell, who is staying on to work as the PM’s chief-of-staff.

Cramb’s lyrical farewell to friends and colleagues put us in mind of Russell Crowe’s Gladiatorcharacter General Maximus Decimus Meridius, who dreamed of giving up his warlike ways and retiring to his farm and growing ‘‘grapes on the south slope, olives on the north’’.

‘‘It’s goodbye Canberra and hello Gippsland,’’ Cramb wrote on Instagram, about the farm he bought online over a year ago. ‘‘The years are moving fast but I have a few good harvests in me yet. Nothing like letting go of all you know and jumping feet first into a new adventure. A life of mud and mire in the green hills of Woorarra West. Some sheep and goats, some cows and chooks, bees and a stone fruit orchard, a tractor and a good paddock dog. A life on the land with Amazing Ally. So a fond farewell to my comrades. It was a wild ride. Much love to you all and good luck in your own adventures ahead.”

Cramb, who spent six weeks on the campaign trail wrangling hacks on the ALP bus, was one of the unfortunates who caught COVID-19 at the Canterbury-Hurlstone RSL Albo election night party. ‘‘That gave me some time to think,’’ Cramb told CBD. We wish him better luck than Maximus had on the farm.

PERFORMANCE TIPS

All those politicians licking their wounds after electoral loss would do well to pick up a copy of a new book out today, The Performance Mindset (published by Wiley).

Written by the former performance psychologist with Carlton, Hawthorn and Melbourne AFL clubs Anthony Klarica, it lays out seven strategies on how to perform, using tips from elite Australian athletes.

He has insights from the likes of Belgian-born Victorian Brigitte Muir, who became the first Australian to climb Mount Everest after four failed attempts, AFLW player Tayla Harris and how she endured the social media storm for the photo of her kicking in full flight and Sam Mitchell as he makes the transition from AFL player to Carlton coach.

‘‘Resilience is all about learning how to be a better loser,’’ Klarica told CBD. It will no doubt be a hot item in Canberra bookshops this week as many ‘‘former’’ pollies pack their bags and head home.

HOWARD AND JACOBY

The Union Club was the venue for a lunch yesterday hosted by the founder of Chief Executive Women Barbara Cail, where television producer Anita Jacoby spoke about the book she has written about her businessman father Phillip. As an early importer of radios and electronics, her father’s stock exchange listed company Jacoby Mitchell, enlisted the help of law firm Truman, Nelson and Howard and a young commercial lawyer called John Howard, who would go on to become our 25th prime minister. He was in the Bent Street audience yesterday, along with many female CEOs, while Jacoby was in conversation with current CEW President Sam Mostyn about her memoir, Secrets Beyond the Screen.

Jacoby senior also mentored fellow emigre Carla Zampatti in the early days of her fashion empire and gave entrepreneur Dick Smith his first job. ‘‘Dad thought Dick would make a great salesman,’’ Jacoby told CBD.

When she started researching the business background of her father – once chairman of Sony Australia – she contacted ex-PM Howard to interview him. ‘‘He got back to me within days, I never expected such an enthusiastic response,’’ she told us.

Others at the CEW event included NSW Governor Margaret Beazley and her husband Dennis Wilson, ABC chair Ita Buttrose and managing director David Anderson, former News Limited director Geraldine Paton and former federal member for MacKellar, Bronwyn Bishop.

THAT’S DR SOLLY TO YOU

Melbourne’s Palladium at Crown was buzzing yesterday with the Australian-Israel Chamber of Commerce’s business lunch with ANZ chief executive Shayne Elliot as the star guest. Rag trade billionaire Solomon Lew, sporting his new honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University, shared a table with cardboard king Anthony Pratt (dressed in suit and sneakers), entrepreneur Harold Mitchell (looking a tad deflated from weight loss and the Liberal loss) and tax lawyer Mark Leibler.

SMH CBD 01/06/2022

By Lucy Hamilton

The mainstream media in Australia is currently whitewashing fascist politics. It is not just sycophantic, or lazy, journalism. It is dangerous.

When Peter Dutton was named the leader of the LNP opposition last week, a number of poor pieces emerged about giving the “hard man a go” to prove who he is. One of the most supine was from Jacqueline Maley at Fairfax.

These soft columns mention some of the ugly acts of Dutton’s past, such as walking out of the apology to the Stolen Generation. He has apologised for that, blaming his background, presumably as a Queensland cop. Dutton has also apologised this week for joking about the existential threat that climate change poses to our island neighbours. He described this bigoted quip as “in poor taste.”

What these articles have not detailed is Dutton’s appalling record as head of Immigration. In 2017, the government paid out $70 million to refugees and asylum seekers to avoid having the lawyers’ meticulously documented trail of abuse of innocent people laid out in court. The solicitors described it as the largest human rights class action settlement in Australian history.

The life of refugees on Manus and Nauru is indeed well documented in its horror. Women coerced by guards to provide sexual favours to have enough water to wash out their shampoo or clean their children in the overwhelming heat. Women forced to queue for each issue of a sanitary item. People abused for taking a piece of fruit for later from the nursery-hour dinner. Tents smeared in black mould found to be “highly toxic,” with only a small fan to make the heat less intolerable. Utterly inadequate medical care.

The point of this treatment, under Morrison as well as Dutton, was to make the Taliban or the genocidal Sri Lankan army or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard less horrific than Australia. During Labor’s last term, detention was a process. Under the nine years of LNP government, it became an intolerable dead end. Guards travelled with Hoffman knives as standard issue to cut down suicide attempts. People lay through the stifling days, depression-drugged, in dank tents without home to return to or hope for the future.

Eventually the children on Nauru declined into resignation syndrome. They were literally dying of despair, but Dutton wasted taxpayer money in the courts to avoid evacuating them from Nauru.

When he was eventually forced by Medevac legislation to bring the most ill adults to Australia, their treatment can only be described as vengeful. Those closest to death received medical care; the rest continued barely helped. They were imprisoned in Alternative Places of Detention, robbed of the ability to walk the streets or choose a meal. After they communicated with people outside their windows, or for fear of more suicides, some were even robbed of fresh air. These men with damaged health were made more anxious by utterly inadequate pandemic provisions. It was only the spotlight shone on their treatment by Novak Djokovic being locked in one of the hotel prisons that provoked outrage and eventual freedom. This extraordinary waste of money took place while their families and friends in the community could have housed them at minimal cost to the country.

The Murugappan family illustrated the treatment of the refugees and asylum seekers in Australia, not much better than the abuse offshore. Fleeing a genocidal army must have made being dragged from their house by uniformed men at dawn even more terrifying. (Dogs often accompanied this kind of night raid perpetrated on vulnerable people as they were moved around at the whim of the department.) YouTube still holds the video of the sound of the girls’ screams as armed guards kept them from their mother. The children have long slept with their parents, scared of what might happen next, or the procession of guards inspecting them at night, torches glaring over their beds. They had teeth pulled because of rot from a lack of vitamin D. In Melbourne, these little girls did not have time in the sun to produce the vitamin.

These stories are not isolated and they happened in our suburbs and small towns to so many other people Australians don’t know about. This was possible because the victims, ordinary people fleeing our nightmares, were dehumanised and hidden from our sight.

Dutton repeatedly misled the public about the conditions under which people lived, the quality of healthcare to which they had access, or suggested that the people living in harsh conditions were of criminal character and deserved it. And none of this was necessary. Labor’s boat turnbacks had made the extortionate price of this last-resort path unviable. Daily cruelties to make Australia intolerable were not truly perpetrated to “send a message” that people smugglers must stop. They were attempts to make Australia’s reputation cruel and ugly, so that nobody would ever want to come here that Peter Dutton didn’t invite. White African farmers, white Ukrainians or au pairs might receive mercy. No mercy is granted the non-white or the Muslim outside our pitifully small humanitarian visa program.

Fascist is a term thrown around loosely; fascist politics is a more useful concept. Yale philosopher Jason Stanley defines it as identifying enemies and appealing to “an in-group (usually the majority), and smashing the truth and replacing it with power.” Dutton and his party defined people who arrived by boat as our enemies, as likely to be radicalised and to harm us. More recently, Scott Morrison seemed keen to echo our AUKUS allies in adding the tiny cohort of trans youth to the list of enemy threats. These culture war battles are divorced from fact but aim to deploy rage to distract a resentful voter base. These trumped-up panics are accompanied in Australia, Britain and the USA by a rapid decline in our democratic standing.

Dutton has signalled that his leadership is to be about culture war battles and division. After Albanese included the three Australian flags in his press briefings, Dutton made the ostentatious step of appearing in front of the Blue Ensign alone. First Nations Australians are to be invisible. After 9 years in government, Dutton has discovered the “forgotten people” of the suburbs. This dogwhistle is to announce the fact that Morrison’s “quiet Australians” remain the target of culture war divisiveness.

Biden defeated Trump in the US. Boris Johnson’s career remains precarious, but his party’s hold is not. Our May election gave the Liberal Party the thumping it had earned. None of these countries is safe. It has taken decades for the radical right in America to suppress the votes of those not caught up in its culture war campaigns. It may be that there are not enough to fight back against the Republican’s authoritarian trajectory in 2022 and 2024.

Without a strong news media, Australia faces a clouded future. Albanese’s government may be able to repair our Rule of Law protections adequately to protect us into the future from the international right’s authoritarian games. The radical right might lose their hold on the Liberal and National parties. We have seen in America, however, that this form of the right is prepared to play the long game. Journalists that help them whitewash their cruelest actions aid them in this plan.

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/dutton-and-trump-politics/

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