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good morning
happy Sunday! Today on #Insiders are Karen Middleton from The Saturday Paper, ABC everyman Stan Grant and murdoch veteran late of the Guardian Malcolm Farr. The interview is with acting junior immigration minister (Dutton administers the Migration Act) Alan Tudge.
happy Sunday! Today on #Insiders are Karen Middleton from The Saturday Paper, ABC everyman Stan Grant and murdoch veteran late of the Guardian Malcolm Farr. The interview is with acting junior immigration minister (Dutton administers the Migration Act) Alan Tudge.
this thread is not fact-checked. Also I have been out of range much of the week so may be missing some context! #Insiders
do we really know how to live with this virus? asks the bloke who spent an entire #Insiders episode on 12 April advocating for easing restrictions, for the benefit of capital.
the montage has the now settled frame of treating Victorian outbreaks as a Victorian problem. Except when the prime minister feels like turning up to work and blathering some creepy emotive nonsense for political purposes. #Insiders
#WhatThePapersSay halving the number of incoming flights returning international travellers home. Ninefax are reporting “what a recession looks like”, says Speers, on the ratio of job vacancies to unemployed people, which has risen but was already very high. #Insiders
Briggs is back with #TheCurve. The Vic graphs are pretty scarey. The NSW curve is also inching upwards. “Hmmm. Frightening stuff Casey” says Speers, sounding exactly like Mike Moore. #Insiders
we go first to Farr. He describes the contact tracing and containment public health management approach that has been the accepted practice all along. No word on overhyped digital tracing that we paid huge sums to produce and promote #Insiders
pride before a fall, says Middleton. We all became smug and complacent, she says. Does she mean Morrison? Why universalise the faulty attitude of Morrison and his people? Many sectors of the population are neither smug nor complacent and never were #Insiders
turning lastly to Grant. Is it time to re-assess whether the overall strategy is the right one? Grant says we are increasingly isolated. Globally, the highest numbers ever were recorded yesterday. He wonders aloud about the future of globalism and rising nationalism #Insiders
it would seem Grant is critiquing global capitalism, however obliquely. Speers says we will get to that - lmao I doubt it - and cuts to a clip of the prime minister and asks what Farr thinks of hotel quarantine instead. #Insiders
wow $65 million in NSW alone spent on putting up people in hotels? Now to be charged $5K. Speers pops up a pic of Morrison “cheering on the Sharkies” with a chuckle. The Sharkies didn’t have much joy there, smiles Speers fondly. #Insiders
Middleton says the footy decisions were not a good look in March and it is not a good look now [paraohrase]. Farr runs thru the school holiday dad drivel before drawing attention to the fact that Morrison is not wearing a mask and not distancing. #Insiders
after indulgently promoting the phoney footy persona the prime minister has pushed so aggressively, and inviting the white journos to do the same - they mostly declined - Speers moves on to the interview. Grant recently produced a footy doco btw #Insiders
some interview audio problems then we get to the Hong King visa issues. Tudge opens with the usual Liberal Party comms “those in genuine need of protection”. What is the “pathway to permanent residency”?
A: An opportunity to apply for PR in five years time.
Big deal. #Insiders
A: An opportunity to apply for PR in five years time.
Big deal. #Insiders
aside from his irritating interruptive technique, Speers is doing a reasonable job of trying to pin the distinction between existing policy settings and the government’s announcement on HK citizens currently here. Anything? Just the five year visa extension, basically #Insiders
there seems to be a large knowledge gap here. Neither Tudge nor Speers understand the character test provisions - which Dutton has power over anyway - and deportation of offenders power, also administered by Dutton, sufficiently to inform viewers #Insiders
fruitpickers and other seasonal workers. We have already made provisions, says Tudge, again with no apparent grasp of policy detail #Insiders
refugees in hotels? Tudge says “they have the option to return to Nauru or PNG” or their home countries. Forced deportation to the place of persecution is a breach of the Refugee Convention, so the government lets refugees rot and hopes they will return “voluntarily”. #Insiders
what about the 1,000 refugees who came to mainland Australia via #medevac? Speers asks. Tudge is across this one. Labor and the Greens he says. The legislation says they can return to offshore camps. He pretends the government didn’t horsetrade ferociously on that bill. #Insiders
a third clip of what Speers seems to think is the prime minister looking prime ministerial (it isn’t). He goes to Grant to lend gravity to the issue, which god knows Morrison needs. Grant contextualises Chinese nationalism/imperialism if I could put it that way #Insiders
the Liberal Party backbench opinion on foreign affairs is apparently to offer safe haven to HK democracy protestors. This narrative - Australia as champion of democracy - was a shocking lie and failure in Iraq. #Insiders
something we often overlook is the increasingly strong Sino-Russian alliance says Grant. He points to Russian influence in Libya and Syria as well as Europe ie the Crimea. Russia is redrawing the map, says Grant. I want to move on to income support says Speers. #Insiders
yet another clip of the prime minister, yet another leading question from Speers accepting every word Morrison says at face value, which shows appalling judgement given the available evidence. Victoria is home to more than 1 in 5 businesses, says Farr. #Insiders
“they have decided to not make this Victoria specific” says Middleton of an unannounced policy setting. She discusses the sector-by-sector approach to business “support” without any ideological frame eg when Morrison pulled jobkeeper from the childcare sector. #Insiders
Speers repeats gallery fantasies about Morrison government income support policy that I won’t bother disseminating on their behalf. We have to pay for it in the future, Grant says, which is basically the tedious line that falsely compares government to household budgets #Insiders
#TalkingPictures is with Mark Humphries who furrows his brow and wonders aloud where Angus Taylor gets his numbers from. Or perhaps Stuart Robert. Or the $60 billion that was lost down the back of the couch. Economic management indeed #Insiders
#FinalObservations 1 is Stan Grant on the #UluruStatement being contested ground. Speers says he is looking forward to Grant’s #4Corners tomorrow night. #Insiders
#FinalObservations 3 (I missed Farr) was Karen Middleton saying there is a parliamentary committee scrutinising the eye-watering half-billion dollars for upgrades that Morrison gave the Australian War Memorial. #Insiders
to clarify, we are spending $499 million on a very expensively funded world class institution of memory which is almost exclusively focused on dead men and refuses to acknowledge the Frontier Wars. Sacked Liberal Party PM Tony Abbott washed up on its Board, too. #Insiders
we go out with more fond smiles and gentle chuckles from Speers, this time directed to another washed up Liberal Party wealthy white male, the weapons manufacturer consultant Christopher Pyne. Nice of us to provide time on the public broadcaster for his book promotion #Insiders
btw on #medivac, which passed as a series of amendments to a government bill in February 2019 after the Liberals shafted Turnbull and lost the seat of Wentworth to Dr Phelps. I live-tweeted the six votes the government lost in the House of Reps here: https://twitter.com/imusing/status/1095204360261255169?s=21
