A: No. Why ask such a ridiculous question?

When it eventually dawned on the Australian government that a global pandemic requires governments to spend money, the prime minister was devastated. As treasurer, Morrison handed down the 2016-17, 2017-18 and 2018-19 federal budgets. All were in deficit. Morrison and the Canberra press gallery called these deficits ‘bringing the budget back into surplus’, a typical tory time machine lie.

In 2019, prime minister Scott Morrison, as ousted prime minister Malcolm Turnbull did before him, leveraged his artificially inflated budget bottom line to launch the Liberal Party election campaign. He also shut parliament for most business other than passing supply bills to avoid losing more votes on the floor of the house. The other prongs of his campaign strategy were: preference deals with Clive Palmer, who has been charged with fraud; giving billions of public dollars to Liberal and marginal seats; a stunt a day for the nightly news; and constant lies about his political opponents.

All of this was faithfully covered by the press gallery in ways that consistently served the interests of the Liberal Party campaign, whether ignored (the handouts), minimised (the Palmer deal), amplified (the stunts), or legitimised (the lies about Labor policy).

[Bear in mind that the richest areas tend to vote Liberal, so higher amounts of needs-based public funding should land in Labor electorates. Yet when the national press (as opposed to regional newspapers giving free publicity to people like Georgina Downer) did, eventually, start reporting on handouts of public money based on Liberal Party campaign priorities, their comparisons to Labor government funding models are false equivalence at best. Anyone comparing a Mt Druitt football field to Mosman rowing club knows nothing about Mt Druitt, needs based funding, or the role of government.]

Fast forward to March 2020. There is a global pandemic. Evacuees from Wuhan have been sent to the Christmas Island detention centre, 1500 kms from the Australian mainland. Cruise ship passengers are allowed to embark in February and then disembark in March to spread out across the country. Various levels of isolation restrictions are implemented by the Premiers and Chief Ministers. Scott Morrison maintains he will go to the footy and then walks it back.

Various ‘stimulus’ polices are announced, staged and piecemeal. He starts by announcing, in early March, that there will be one-off $750 payments to unemployed people in May and people on other income support in July, aimed at propping up the quarterly figures. At this point, Morrison still thinks he can manipulate the numbers sufficiently to avoid the appearance of recession.

This is despite the fact that the economy is already in recession in all but name, papered over only by federal government defence spending and the migration intake. The economy has been tanking since the first Abbott-Hockey government budget. Economic management under Liberal Party leaders Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison is so dire that the Reserve Bank governor has been calling for stimulus for years, including lifting the rate of unemployment benefit.

Also in early March is the announcement of more public subsidies for business owners who employ apprentices. This is aimed at corporations in unionised male-dominated industries and blue collar male business owners in swinging seats. They receive an eye-watering expansion of instant tax write-downs, from $30,000 to $150,000 for ‘tradies’ with turnover of up to $500 million (previously up to $50 million).

The big one.

In late March, the prime minister calls his third press conference in three days. Wringing his hands, hoping and praying, he announces ‘jobkeeper’, a wages subsidy to businesses for paying employees rather than standing them down. The announcement is aimed at stemming a steep rise in unemployment figures. A huge headline figure, later cut by $60 billion, is splashed all over the press. Also later, the subsidy is expanded to wealthy corporate religion, so the catholic church for example is collecting public cash; several rule changes are made to be absolutely certain public universities are excluded; and it is withdrawn completely from the childcare sector.

There is also a ‘corona virus supplement’ to top up the ‘jobseeker payment’. This is aimed at stopping footage of long unemployment queues – and heavy handed policing of destitute people in the queues – appearing on the nightly news. Still to come are almost a billion dollars for wealthy home renovators via builders aka tradies; and $650 million in announcements for the arts, of which about a third is for local industry and two thirds for Hollywood. These are framed by Scott Morrison as directed not only at performing arts creatives but also… tradies.

Each of these deeply ideological measures are reported as heroic. The accompanying slogans, carefully designed to confuse and mislead, are faithfully broadcast and published, with the desired result.

Barely two months after wage subsidy and income support supplements start rolling in May, the Morrison government starts leaking its plans for the future of the payments after its September deadline, to favoured journalists. This fuels endless press gallery speculation about a political statement slated for Thursday 23 July. The Juy statement was offered up by the government to replace the federal budget, which they cancelled.

Morrison then brings the income support component of the political speech that is supposed to replace the budget forward by two days. Why? Hard to say. Incredibly*, this political communications strategy generates blanket coverage that income support is to be ‘extended’. The narrative is aimed at well-off people who vote Liberal and like comforting pabulum to obscure the fact that the rest of us fund their investment properties, private health insurance, and elite school fees.

Some detail, and some context

Firstly, as the government fiddled around with eligibility for the wages subsidy based on its political priorities (like misogyny and religiosity), the ‘jobkeeper’ budget was cut by a whopping $60 billion inside the same month payments commenced. Now we are told it will be cut by $300 per fortnight per full time employee after September and by $750 per fortnight per part time or casual (under 20 hours) employee.

In addition, the corona virus supplement will be cut by $285, to less than half the original $550. The supplement is paid to people on ‘jobseeker’, and is aimed at deflecting from the huge realisation about to sweep through the population that our social security system, far from providing a safety net, is onerously punitive and pointlessly cruel. It creates and exacerbates mental health conditions. It drives people to despair up to and including to suicide. It also costs squillions in public money given ‘job agency’ proprietors like Liberal Party donor Sarina Russo.

The cuts are reported as ‘extending’ income support because he is announcing in July what the lower rate will be after the September deadline which the government announced in March. Clear as mud, I know.

Missing from media reports is the fact that the base unemployment rate had already been rebranded, from newstart to jobseeker (JSP), before any fiscal response to a global pandemic. At the time, it was routine Morrison government activity, cosmetic fiddling while Rome burns. Social security since the Howard government has been text book neoliberalism, designed to construe people on income support as latent jobs. The rest of society is invited to see poor people as responsible for what is caused by capitalists, as nothing more than the potential value of their labour to bosses. A degrading and punitive compliance regime, which forcibly transactionalises human relations and commodifies members of the working and underclasses to benefit rentseekers like Sarina Russo, has been called a digital workhouse.

Dickensian, but online.

Meanwhile, the news cycle is dominated by announcements and misinformation. Arguably worse is what top Australian psephologist and fellow blogger Noely Neate describes as scottysplaining. This is the fantasist editorialising on what Morrison could do (be a decent person, act in an intelligent and timely way, implement policy in the public interest) rather than who and what he really is (a heartless stentorian, a monstrous and profligate liar).

Morrison has long shown us who he is and we ought to believe him. This is a man who lies about charity workers and refugees in detention, costing us billions; who unlawfully extorts money from the lowest income workers to fabricate a budget bottom line, costing us billions; and cancels the parliament but will solicit corporate clients at the football, costing us billions. This is but a sample of what passes for Liberal Party ‘economic management’.

The political economy of the Liberal Party

The most critical element of the Liberal Party comms strategy is press gallery journalists invariably reporting, above the fold, on the home page, at the top of the bulletin, what Scott Morrison said. No matter what its relationship to reality, anything said by Morrison (or his ministers) is ascribed priority, and what Scott Morrison (or his ministers) say is what the Australian people, the audiences and readership out in the electorate, see and hear first. It is extraordinarily difficult to get cut-through for the purpose of refuting their lies.

This gift is not a function of who is in government. Only Liberal-led governments enjoy the vast benefit of this reporting model. Liberal opposition leaders have no difficulty in getting their deranged and false claims about Labor governments onto the front pages of  murdoch mastheads. The key is aligned corporate interests. The Liberal Party are the party of business, of awarding huge contracts, billions of public dollars, to the corporate sector – usually to see it wasted on greed and incompetence, as capital will.

A strange thing happened today.

The inspiration for this post is that something odd followed Morrison’s announcement about cutting the rate of jobkeeper wage subsidy and jobseeker corona virus supplement today. The press gallery departed from their devoted practice of unquestioningly reporting Morrison setpieces as policy facts and instead told us that the base jobseeker rate will not stay at its present low rate. Bewildering stuff.

To conclude, a brief overview of unemployment payment at the time of writing:

• • ‘Jobseeker’ is a pre-covid rebranding of newstart, sickness benefit and other income support payments. It is not a virus response or stimulus policy. It is the base rate of unemployment benefit that has not increased in real terms for over 25 years.
  • reporting that Scott Morrison has decided ‘to extend jobseeker’ is meaningless and not ‘news’, unless you think Scott Morrison could or should or would abolish unemployment benefits.
  • The corona virus supplement was announced in March 2020. Actual payments commenced in May and it was legislated to expire in September. The prime minister has now announced the supplement will be cut rather than expire at that date.
  • When asked if the base JSP rate is too low, the prime minister said his government is not considering the matter.
  • When asked if the base JSP rate is too low, the prime minister said his government is not considering the matter.
  • WHEN ASKED IF THE BASE JSP RATE IS TOO LOW, THE PRIME MINISTER SAID HE IS NOT CONSIDERING THE MATTER.

Recall that the first sector to lose access to ‘jobkeeper’ wage subsidies was childcare. Almost all the workers are low-paid women; and almost all working mothers depend on childcare to participate in the paid workforce. While today we are inundated with breathless reports of future cuts to the rate of jobkeeper as an ‘extension’, it has already been ‘extended’ to the catholic church and company directors; withheld from public universities, migrant workers, and the arts; and withdrawn from the child care sector.

Oooh he’s a little blondie like I was, says my niece, who has a little blondie of her own now. He’s not the little blondie running around anymore says his great-great auntie, who recently saw my boy, her 15-year-old nephew, for the first time since he was a toddler.

Like my youngest son, Elijah Doughty is a blondie and unmistakably Aboriginal. His beaming smile is heartbreaking today. I do not know Elijah or his family and I offer love and condolences to everyone who does. I only mention his looks because that picture of Elijah reminds me of my boy every time.

Is this personal connection what it takes to humanise Aboriginal people – even Aboriginal children – in the collective mind of white Australia? In my kids’ extended family, blondie expresses loving-belonging. I do not know if other families do this, but I know that words and gestures of loving and belonging matter, to reassure our kids, who daily face ignorant and harmful remarks, like whether they ‘look’ Aboriginal.

White Australia demands to be competent in determining who is Aboriginal, but it does not know. It may never know. Aboriginality is ontological , it is independent of white classificatory systems. Still, White Australia always knows who it can kill and incarcerate and criminalise and oppress and forcibly remove from family with impunity.

I am writing this because a white man killed a Black child, which – apparently this needs to be spelt out – is an objective moral wrong. The man was not charged with murder, and he was found not guilty of manslaughter. I am writing this because there are white people out there defending the killer, defending the legal system that let him kill with impunity. I am writing because our society is awash with racist violence and awash with normalisation of racist violence and still we let this go on and on and on.

Fact and law

The identity of the 56-year-old killer is suppressed by the court. He pleaded guilty to causing the death of Elijah ‘by dangerous driving’. The law categorises killings into lawful (eg self-defence) and unlawful (eg murder requires intent). The unlawful killings are further categorised into murder and manslaughter, and involuntary manslaughter. The accused can be charged with murder and come out with a manslaughter verdict, which is sui generis, a category (genus) of one (single). You can not be charged with armed robbery and get a lesser verdict like break-and-enter. This is because, as with all human societies, we say that the taking of the life of a fellow human is extremely serious.

So referring to the anonymous killer as a murderer (eg on social media) is not a good idea. It is wrong at law, and the law likes to punish those who are wrong at law. In the system we have, which was imposed by the English at gunpoint, only a court – whether a judge-only trial or trial by jury – can determine guilt on the offence. In contrast, calling the killer the killer is not wrong at law, because the killer pleaded guilty to causing the death of Elijah. What he did killed Elijah, and he conceded that by pleading guilty to occasioning death by dangerous driving.

What happened and coverage of what happened

There is no doubt, in law or in fact, that the anonymous killer got in a ute and chased down Elijah and killed him. On the evidence, the killer was told by a police officer where motorbikes are often “dumped” and went to that place. He then saw Elijah on a motorbike and chose, of his own free will, to drive in a manner that killed Elijah. This much is on the public record.

What happened next was absolutely typical of Australian law and society. To say that the not guilty verdict for manslaughter – the killer was not even charged with murder – or the sentence of three years are astonishing or incredible is to perpetuate the lie that racist violence is normally punished.

It is not. Killing Aboriginal people with impunity is the norm. If the anonymous killer had been adequately held to account… that would be astonishing. Reporter after reporter put on their grave face to ‘report’ that tensions were seething in Kalgoorlie-Boulder. That ‘there was anger’ in the Aboriginal community, as though this was some kind of abstract or independent thing. Aboriginal people are just angry, you see. Random as.

Put it this way. If my son steals a thing, it is okay to kill him. Sounds harsh? That is exactly what is being said about Elijah right now. Put it another way. The property rights of the white man are of greater value, to the white man and to white society, than the human right to life of the Black child. There is no moral universe in which this is a defensible ethical position. Yet there they are, all over the newsfeed, taking exactly this position.

Our political leaders, of course, have taken no position at all. They are all over the shooting of a white woman in America; but not a peep on the vicious vigilante killing back home. I wonder why.

News story after news story reported on what a great job the WA police did in keeping the peace. Such heroes. With their guns and their riot gear in the face of people in mourning. Since when have Aboriginal people done anything but negotiate? And been slimed for their trouble? When Aboriginal people express anger, sadness, despair… it is not just the state but white society that pushes back in the most inhumane ways.

We do this because we know our presence is illegitimate. We know we are on Aboriginal land. We do not want to admit it. So we frame perfectly reasonable Black responses, the same response any one of us would have if Elijah was OUR child, as an existential threat.

The existential bit is true. But not the threat. Fuck Camus. Forget the threat. All any Aboriginal person has asked of me is to listen, learn, and be yourself.

With 26 January looming, it is that time of year in Australia when the gatekeepers of the national narrative go into overdrive.

Where I live, in western Sydney, it is easy enough to look around the train carriage or campus or shopping centre and celebrate diversity. It is equally easy to forget, unless venturing into the large and poorly-conceived social housing estates, that western Sydney has the largest Aboriginal population in the country.

And on 26 January, it is impossible to ignore the social fact that white Australia relentlessly, aggressively promotes the dominant agenda: whites are nation-builders, we ‘let’ the migrants in, we obscure the violence of our own ‘entry’, we are the arbiters of what is, and of what is not, Australian.

An early salvo from DIBP

One example of the dominant narrative is how junior minister for Immigration and Border Protection Alex Hawke stopped Freemantle Council holding a citizenship ceremony on Saturday 28 January. His is the department which the Australian National Audit Office reported has spent $2.2 billion on off-shore detention without authorisation.

This shambolic, cruel, militarised, and eye-wateringly profligate branch of executive government is designed to manufacture and disseminate xenophobic hate. And its 2IC (from the wealthy white northern suburbs of Sydney) confidently told a local government in Western Australia that its citizenship ceremony ‘has got to be apolitical, non-commercial, bipartisan and secular’.

Given the rabid politics in which white Australia engages around 26 January, these criteria would be met by changing the date of the first Freemantle citizenship ceremony for 2017.

At no point did Hawke articulate what exactly is ‘political’ (or commercial, or partisan, or religious) about 28 January. Unlike 26 January, which is obnoxiously white and hideously commercial, 28 January is just another day on the calendar. There was no mention that 28 January is the saints day of Thomas Aquinas, although Hawke is a former Opus Dei adherent and, given his position, likely to be as unapologetic an Islamophobe as his boss. Such mention would have been quite fitting: Aquinas christianised the philosophy of Aristotle while developing retrospective justifications for the christian west to invade Islamic countries and slaughter Muslim people. His just war theory (!) is embedded in the contemporary law of war (which, typically, is called humanitarian law) and invoked to this day.

But Hawke did not have to win his manufactured controversy on the merits or in the marketplace of ideas

He just threatened Freemantle Council with the power of the Commonwealth to revoke authority to hold citizenship ceremonies. Hawke backed this threat with an insupportable interpretation of the Australian Citizenship Ceremonies Code. The code does not stipulate that citizenship ceremonies be held on 26 January. In fact, such a directive would breach the code:

In keeping with government policy that ceremonies be held at regular intervals, local government councils should hold ceremonies at least every two to three months, regardless of the number of candidates available to attend and more frequently if necessary (ACCC 2011: 6).

It is par for the neoliberal course to label a decision to make a public ceremony more inclusive as divisive. Freemantle Council put up a decent fight, but was ultimately forced to move its scheduled 28 January citizenship ceremony.

A junior minister threatening to unilaterally operationalise federal power to bully a local government was widely reported, but without analysis of why Hawke got so worked up about a local council events calendar.

Why intervene? The strength and longevity of Aboriginal Australia

There is more to the wrongs of 26 January than whining hypocrisy and dishonesty from the likes of Alex Hawke. He is a mere microcosm of how incumbent conservative power is abused to retain dominance. Hawke was successful on his own terms: he got his mug in the press, playing to a racist constituency. Other councils will now resist change which could mitigate some of the harm caused by ‘celebrating’ 26 January.

And the nation is the poorer for it. Every time new Australians are sworn in on 26 January, they are co-opted into the colonial project. To become an Australian on 26 January is to become part of ongoing dispossession, of the goals and narratives of the colonial settler state, and to participate in the endless whitewashing of a violent history.

Surely new Australians do not want to erase the 50,000+ years of over 300 sovereign nations, their populations, their societies, their law and languages and traditions, which are the oldest continuing cultures in the world? Traditions that, as journalist Amy McQuire writes, include a slew of firsts from astronomy to bread baking to burial rituals to art to the most sophisticated and sustainable agricultural practices ever devised.

If we are seeking to redress dispossession, as we say in another dishonest narrative, we would not frame 26 January as a day of national pride. But in its current form, the Recognise campaign is as likely as every other white Australian agenda to further erase Aboriginal people and their sovereign rights.

At best, Aboriginal people are expected to show gratitude for crumbs from the white table, when an entire continent and her islands were taken by force. At worst, constitutional change will be interpreted by future governments and the courts as Aboriginal people collectively ceding sovereignty to the colonial settler state; something no Aboriginal nation has ever done nor stated any intention to do.

People like Hawke are deeply threatened by the fact that Aboriginal people have survived and maintained so much of their culture and traditions. During his crusade against Freemantle Council, Hawke did not once mention the meaning of 26 January to Aboriginal people. Instead, he relied on the inherent racism of the non-Aboriginal population to fill in the gaps around his false claim that  28 January is somehow a political/divisive date for a citizenship ceremony.

Inclusion and collusion

Speaking of crumbs from the table, this phrase was used more than once to describe a commitment by a crowd funding campaign which raised over $120,000 to donate leftover money to Indigenous organisations.

The money was raised to reinstate billboards and publish print ads depicting two girls wearing hijabs and waving Australian flags. The original digital billboard, funded by the Victorian government and developed by QMS media, showed a rotating series of images. It was taken down following threats of violence by tiny but well-known (because well-covered by legacy media) white supremacist groups.

A #PutThemBackUp campaign quickly gained traction. New billboards have since appeared with the same image of the girls, and the words ‘Happy Australia Day’.

That many Australians put their money where their mouth is for the purpose of addressing racist violence against Muslims is not an incontestable social good, although it did prompt some nuanced conversations about the implications of the billboards, the day itself, and another campaign: #ChangeTheDate. Conversations, I should add, that have been had many times over many years.

This generous post by Nakkiah Lui was widely shared and applauded. I say ‘generous’ because while racist threats by white supremacists are easy to spot, many Aboriginal people are still taking the time and effort to explain the ways in which self-identified political ‘progressives’ erase Aboriginal people, history and culture.

My own reaction was to cringe at the fact that the campaigners failed to consider Aboriginal perspectives until prompted.

Does it matter that the campaign was instigated by a director of Creative Edge, the advertising company that is reinstating the billboards? Or that the alliance offered ‘leftover money’ to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre before CEO Kon Karapanagiotidis turned their minds to Aboriginal perspectives – well after the initial target was reached?

Does it matter that many Aboriginal people were once again compelled to expend valuable time and emotional resources on educating white and multicultural Australia on what is wrong with celebrating 26 January? Or that a commitment to ‘deliberately not mention 26 January’ morphed into billboards saying Happy Australia Day?

HAPPY AUSTRALIA DAY? Would you say happy Israel independence day to Palestinian locals on the anniversary of the catastrophe? Would you, in the month of May, donate to fund billboards of Aboriginal children wearing ochre to ‘celebrate’ Al-Nakba? In Bethlehem? Naqab? In Ramallah?

Moral relativism and the national character

Commentary on such issues tends to draw on specific philosophical traditions, whether proponents are aware or not. For instance, concepts from classical economic theory, such as cost-benefit analysis and utility, are often applied to moral questions. This is a legacy of the enlightenment: Jeremy Bentham applying (half) of Adam Smith’s ‘free market’ theory to the (im)morality of the carceral state; Herbert Spencer butchering Darwinian evolution to justify the racist violence of imperialism.

Where an event or series of events produces feel-good benefits to one section of the population and tangible harm to another, it is justified by utilitarianism, the short hand for which is ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’. The problem is that we can reliably predict to whom the harm will be done and to whom the benefits will flow.

In Australia, with just about any political or social movement, the harm will disproportionately impact on the Aboriginal population.

So the claim is that the campaign did more good than harm, or produced a net social good. This is to succumb to JS Mill’s tyranny of the majority, which in turn relies on hyper-individualism for coherence. The thing to remember here is that for Bentham (and Kant and Rousseau and the rest) only property-owning white men were fully human.

This is the real root of identity politics. The corrupted version is used by opponents who have a vested interest in continuing to obscure the role of demographic privilege in life outcomes. We know who will benefit and who will not from any top-down policy or action. The evidence speaks for itself.

For example, the rate at which the state imprisons Aboriginal people has increased since desegregation freed people from mission managers and dog tags and town-limits curfews; since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. The rate at which Aboriginal children are forcibly removed from their families has increased since the Bringing Them Home report, increased since the Apology to the Stolen Generations.

And these are policies which were said to be redressing past crimes against Aboriginal people. More commonly, Aboriginal peoples, and their sovereign rights as First Nation peoples, are not taken into account at all.

Inevitably, the response to critics is: what have you done? Is doing nothing better? At least we are doing something.

Implicit in this response is the utilitarian calculus: this action is better than the actions of white supremacists (and armchair activists). But also embedded is the value of change for its own sake. Like other nonsensical values such as extending government control over the citizenry for its own sake (data retention is an expensive hotch potch of IT amateurism; cashless welfare, at huge public cost, has no discernible benefits to people on welfare) this unquestioned assumption is dangerous.

Its economic manifestation is growth for the sake of growth, a capitalist value which has brought us to the brink of extinction. Its social manifestation is progress for the sake of progress, where a dominant minority defines progress: bigger houses? Smaller telephones? Greater connectivity? Labour market ‘flexibility’, rising inequality and income insecurity? Incessant, endless, unwinnable wars?

The not-dominant narratives

There are various reactions to the billboard campaign. Members of the many Aboriginal and Muslim communities have spoken out against a campaign which celebrates a day marking the start of colonisation, and their voices should be amplified: the links above to Amy McQuire and Megan Davis and Nakkiah Lui, the IndigenousX platform created by Luke Pearson for unmediated Indigenous perspectives; Aamer Rahman saying the billboard campaign is an ‘expensive way to throw Aboriginal people under the bus’.

It is also important to note commentary which emphasises the well-meaning motivations of the well-intentioned. This trope is a sop to whiteness. It is routinely trotted out to obscure the genocidal policies which caused monumental harm to the Stolen Generations and their descendants. When supposedly good intentions are so profoundly damaging, the crime should be treated as one of strict liability: absolute legal responsibility for which mens rea (the intention) does not have to be proven in order to convict the guilty.

From my point of view – and I speak only for myself, a white Australian and feminist (and graduate economist) – the billboard campaign is a misallocation of resources. It is exhausting for Aboriginal people to keep explaining how Happy and Australia Day do not go together. It re-traumatises, it marginalises, it causes fatigue, it takes up valuable time and effort, it drains energy from the struggle to see Australia recognise and redress its ongoing colonial crimes.

Where could these resources have gone instead? To Aboriginal women’s refuges, to Aboriginal legal and health services, to Indigenous literacy, to a trust fund pending consultation.

But there is also a missed marketing opportunity. The billboard could have featured the words Change the Date. And the billboards could have had a message which foregrounds the fact that white and multicultural Australia share something profound: we are all on stolen Aboriginal land.

It is in you, he said, gesturing to his heart. It never goes away.

Last Thursday a mate and I had a few quiet drinks and a post-festive season debrief on my back veranda. He grew up in poverty, in cars and refuges and low-income neighbourhoods, his education disrupted, his parents often absent – to shift work, to incapacity. He holds a university degree, a steady job, and a mortgage with his partner.

Inevitably we got talking about the federal government policy of sending 20,000 letters per week to past or current welfare recipients demanding repayment of past or current or – with an error rate of at least 20% – non-existent debts.

It is difficult to remember when I started earning enough to stop reporting my income to Centrelink, as a sole parent raising three children in western Sydney while working part time and studying law. But I will never forget the process. The dehumanisation, the penalties incurred on utilities bills due to Centrelink errors, the time, the ‘voice recognition’ which could never identify my employer correctly, the stress, the humiliation, the look on my children’s faces as I yelled at the phone, their avoidance behaviours around excursions and other expenses, the cost, the cost, the financial and emotional and personal and family cost.

Being poor is hugely and unnecessarily expensive, and it does not have to be like this.

Our government has gone out of its way to make what is already a horrible and inefficient and expensive process much worse than when I reported fortnightly, first on paper and in person and later by telephone to a machine. It is horrendous for income support recipients, for Centrelink staff, and for the budget bottom line.

According to Appendix E – Data matching of the 2015-16 Annual Report, the Department of Human Services spent $19.5 million in 2013-14, $25.5 million in 2014-15 and $8.3 million last financial year on its data matching program. That is, our government has allocated over $50 million in the last three years to produce the outcomes reported in the first week of 2017: outcomes so appalling that a government agency is making blanket referrals to the suicide prevention service Lifeline for hardships caused by its own actions.

Let that sink in: Centrelink is using social media platform Twitter to refer income support recipients to Lifeline, because some ‘customers’ are suicidal after receiving letters sent by the agency demanding repayment of debts that people have not, in fact, incurred. This is the return on a $50 million investment of public moneys.

Many were letters stamped with the Australian Federal Police logo demanding information under the code name Operation Integrity.

It will surprise no one who has observed the Turnbull government that the operation has no integrity. The link above does not provide a breakdown of Operation Integrity costs. But it offers this:

“From 1 July 2016, $45.1 million will be invested in the myGov digital service over 4 years, to ensure people can continue to interact with the Australian Government online, ensuring access by all tiers of government. … the next phase of improvements to myGov. $5.4 million will be invested over 2 years to modernise this service and ensure it continues to deliver on the government’s commitment to make services simpler, clearer and faster.”

From what I can tell, and I may not be reading it correctly (the reporting methods are oblique at best), this amounts to an additional $50 million for a total of $100 million for the years 2013-20. Again, to use the government-preferred econospeak, this ‘investment’ has a return. In the first week of 2017, the dividend included driving some low-income Australians to suicidal despair. And causing incalculable hardship to other welfare recipients across the country.

To put that figure in perspective, the politician expenditure for the first half of 2015 – this is above and beyond their $200-500K+ salaries, and does not include the cost of their staffers – was $48 million. That is for six months, so a reasonable guesstimate is that yearly expenditure would be around $100 million. More recent figures do not include total costs.

Welfare recipients have 21 days to respond to a threatening letter, but political expenditure disclosure is delayed by at least six months, as are political donations reporting requirements. For example, next month we apparently find out whether Turnbull threw in around $2 million to his own re-election campaign, the one where he lost 14 seats and claimed a mandate, including for these kinds of nasty policies.

Remember, Scott Morrison told us in the dying days of that dreary campaign that a re-elected Coalition government would continue to hate n the poor while cutting company tax rates (although a tax cut for entities which pay zero tax still generates zero revenue).

So from a government preaching fiscal restraint and sound economic management, we have seen a) $50 million spent over four years (2013-16), with another $50 million slated for the next four, to persecute the poor; and b) $100 million spent in one year (2015) to ship Barnaby Joyce and Julie Bishop and their ilk around the country and the globe. The return on that ‘investment’ by the Australian public – over which we had no say – is a) harm to welfare recipients up to and including contemplation of suicide; and b) Who knows? Presumably contracts to client donors, but if there is a discernible benefit to the nation I have yet to see it reported.

Independently wealthy politicians, people who have never missed a meal in their lives, are an enormous drain on the public purse. They are born into families that can afford to choose expensive educations which set the kids up for life. They grow up to be blind to their own privilege, yet make decisions which further marginalise and oppress identifiable groups in society, groups to which they have never belonged, and for whom they are utterly unqualified to make decisions.

Turnbull and Porter and Joyce do not understand that the entire point of fiscal policy, of a civil society, of collecting taxes and allocating resources to essential services, is to provide for those who – due to age, disability, parenting responsibilities, labour market conditions, whatever – can not always meet basic human needs such as food, housing and utilities.

And this is in a wealthy society whose shape and values are determined by people such as themselves, by the beneficiaries of inherited wealth. A society which in the 21^st century means that ICT and metropolitan transport are necessities – for job-seeking – on top of food and shelter. A dominant culture which refuses to value reciprocity, mutuality, sharing, love. A government which co-opts these values to spout nasty and abusive rhetoric on mutual obligation and correct entitlement.

A government which pretends that a system which data-matches welfare recipients to Australian Tax Office (ATO) records is somehow acting on behalf of some special category of taxpayer, by persecuting some other category of taxpayer. People who paid taxes and received income support in the same year are the people receiving these letters: they are, by definition, taxpayers. As is anyone who has bought anything other than fresh food since 2001.

But that would be putting facts in the way of this government’s favourite pastime, which is to demonise welfare recipients (when it is not persecuting people fleeing persecution, or trolling women, and migrants, or ignoring Aboriginal rights).

This is a government entirely composed of people whose luxurious taxpayer-funded lifestyle falls outside of welfare categories. Its support base is also made up of people who enjoy private school fee subsidies, the medical advances borne of public teaching hospitals, immediate $20K write-downs on small business costs… but these are not classified as welfare either.

Under this value system, those who want for nothing are worthy of hundreds of millions in public moneys. Yet receiving and spending public moneys on food and shelter (rather than, say, mining truck diesel fuel) is somehow unworthy.

What a way to run a country which has been skilfully and beautifully managed for upwards of 50,000 years. A place of pristine rivers and verdant soils, of generosity and beauty and bounty, if only those who seized it for themselves could see.

The senior Minister, Christian Porter, insists that the system is working incredibly well, that it is a gold star system, that no better system could be designed. The junior minister, Alan Tudge, is nowhere to be seen or heard. The agency mouthpiece Hank Jongen consistently reiterates that he has complete confidence in the system. To date, the Prime Minister has not commented on the fact that a government agency is systematically driving low-income Australians to despair.

The evidence shows that the system is causing enormous harm to the poor. The minister and the mouthpiece say the system is working as it is supposed to work, operating as it is designed to operate, producing the outputs it is programmed to produce.

I believe them.

Bearing witness to the horrors that human beings inflict on each other prompts many responses. One is silence. Another is to express shock. A third is gesture politics, as Prof Megan Davis writes here and Luke Pearson here.

One of the loudest public responses to terrible acts of violence in Australia is to call for an inquiry. When a politician responds by apparently deciding overnight to hold a Royal Commission, it is very likely to be an act of gesture politics.

This week, Malcolm Turnbull responded to mass media exposure of a problem – an endemic problem with a history as long as colonial Australia – by announcing a Royal Commission into Northern Territory juvenile detention centres.

As pointed out by Michelle Grattan and Brian Stout among others, the ‘evidence of NT detention centre abuse was there for all to see’. The Prime Minister knew or ought to have known. The Chief Minister did know. We know they knew because the NT Children’s Commissioner published its report in August 2015.

But there seems to be some confusion as to what is a Royal Commission, as well as to what a Royal Commission can achieve. A Royal Commission is a process, not an end in itself – although announcing a Royal Commission can be a political end in itself.

The nature of Royal Commissions

Royal Commissions are a serious business: the act enabling their establishment is only a year younger than the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution. The penalty for intentionally insulting a Royal Commission is imprisonment for three months. If the Commissioner is a judge, no trial is required – the Commissioner acts as police, judge and jury.

Royal Commissions bear witness, and are reported in detail. So the citizenry can bear witness too.

Referrals may be made for prosecution, and may produce convictions, which might be followed by custodial sentences – or not – as the law takes it laborious course.

Recommendations are always included in the final reports. This is the systemic aspect, the central purpose of an RC, that which goes beyond individuals to the whole of the society.

Governments may accept some or all of the recommendations. Governments might then legislate for the implementation of the recommendations. Or not.

Executive government – the minister and public servants whose job it is to implement cabinet decisions – may do as directed, in part or in full. Employees who ignore or resist government directives may face consequences for this form of misconduct. Or not.

So the pathway from announcing a Royal Commission to a positive change in the way we are governed – whether a harm done is compensated, whether the wrong-doer is punished, whether future harm is prevented by systemic reform – is very long.

The longer the path, the more likely there are twists and barriers and traps and saboteurs between the RC and its stated goal.

Meanwhile, vested interests deliberately deny and derail and delay around RC proceedings: to avoid accountability for their wrongs and those of their mates or staff or institution. Witnesses tell the Commissioner they can not recall. It was all so long ago.

Then there are the false binaries as to whether Royal Commissions are political or impartial, effective or ineffective. Some Royal Commissions are party-political from day one, others are established after careful consideration of its nature and the terms of reference.

These binaries emerge because white western traditions and systems – of knowledge, of government, of society – are designed this way. Our adversarial system of law, the two-party model of government, rigid male-female genders and stereotypes: these are examples of how we organise and teach and understand the world in ‘the west’.

The model is neither accurate nor nuanced, but it is the one we have. And its beneficiaries are very aggressive in maintaining the status quo.

A Royal Commission may be relatively non-politicised; but all concern specific vested interests (such as organised religion or the nuclear industry) and RCs always concern the interests of governments. Different Royal Commissions have played different roles. But no RC in living memory has prompted “strong decisive” government action to implement all recommendations and thereby produce lasting, effective social change for the better.

EG

The Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption was an unmitigated and expensive, deeply politicised failure. That a finding of corruption was pre-emptively written into its title is the first sign. The referrals for prosecution have not stood up to scrutiny by the relevant prosecutors. The Commissioner was compromised by perceptions of bias if not actual bias – where perception of bias was a decision reserved to the Commissioner himself.

In contrast, Black Rainbow founder Dameyon Bonson has been calling for a Royal Commission into Indigenous suicide. Rates of suicide among Indigenous people are the highest in the country. Young people and people from Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Intersex (LGBTQI) community are over-represented again. There has been no national approach to understanding, let alone acting on, these known facts. No representation of Indigenous people on the various peak bodies. We see mass coverage of government homophobes attacking an education program designed to save young LGBTQI lives, but not of the intergenerational trauma carried in Indigenous communities since colonisation.

In this context, a national, co-ordinated response in the form of a properly funded Royal Commission that gathers evidence, tested by lawyers, has every chance of being the most effective next step to the work done by Black Rainbow and Joe Williams and others’ efforts to save the lives of their people from suicide.

The Royal Commission into Northern Territory Juvenile Detention Centres

I am against. These are my reasons.

1 As mentioned, the claims made about the efficacy of Royal Commissions, that RCs have the capacity to effect social change for the better, are misplaced. It is governments which must legislate and implement the recommendations.

2 There are thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from hundreds of Indigenous nations around the country who have already analysed the evidence. Who have been stymied at every turn from bringing up their young people. Who have the knowledge, skills, understandings, love and care and motivation – but not necessarily enough resources or authority, which the colonial state has systematically stripped away – to care for young people.

3 The notion that another evidence-gathering and analysis process is required before government can act on systemic racist violence in its own ranks is entirely unfounded because the evidence is in. It is uncontested. It has been in for decades, at least since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987-91) and National Inquiry into Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (1997).

Only the most Jurassic racists openly pretend that this state-sanctioned violence is to deal with kids who ‘cause trouble’.  Like the NT Chief Minister. When (slightly less overtly racist) politicians gravely intone that this RC will ensure the terrible wrong will never happen again, they are demonstrating wilful ignorance of the system of government to which they have been elected. They are grandstanding. Posturing. Knowingly misleading the public. Lying.

Not only is implementing recommendations the role of government, but no RC recommendation has ever ensured Indigenous people are not harmed by the state. In fact, the state removes more Aboriginal children now than during the Stolen Generations eras. The state locks up Aboriginal people at a higher rate than when the RCADIC recommendations were handed down. A key finding of that RC was that the rate we lock up Aboriginal people is a direct cause of the rate that Aboriginal people die in custody.

4 Which raises the spectre of an RC doing more harm than good. Whenever Aboriginal people make steps towards equality and justice, the dominant majority – the white patriarchal state, citizens with structural social privilege (collectively and individually), corporate interests, conservative media, all these push back aggressively against Aboriginal people, Aboriginal people’s rights and interests.

This is how the official end of segregation and assimilation as government policy saw the beginning of a much harsher form of segregation: more children removed, and more locked up  – often the same kids.

5 Cost-benefit, or better use of resources: RCs are very expensive. Lawyers cost a lot of money, as do researchers and scribes and security and sittings and per diem if the RC sits in multiple locations. There is an allowance for witnesses, whether abuser or victim.

The estimated cost of the Trade Unions RC was $80 million. This new one looks to have a similarly narrow scope (unlike the RC into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, with its much wider jurisdiction).

What is the opportunity cost? Could $80 million cover a compensation scheme, be invested in remote communities, in health and education, in transport and recreation facilities? Who has the greater need for state funding: Aboriginal children, or lawyers?

6 Some recommendations on how to stop police and prison guards violently assaulting and even torturing children would be useful.

But this is not how the terms of reference will be framed. We know this, because the Prime Minister and Attorney General have committed to working with NT Chief Minister Adam Giles; and Giles has framed the problem as unloving parents and children who ’cause trouble’.

This problem – the subject of this RC – is about Giles’ racist government and its very violent employees.

The Northern Territory government signed off on the procurement of these ‘restraint’ chairs, as is clear from the linked story dated 22 April 2015, which reported: “Cable ties and restraint chairs are set to be approved for use on children in custody as young as 10 if new laws pass the NT Parliament next month.”

As young as 10.

Yet the Chief Minister watched footage of staff strapping a child to a chair with cable ties, men hooding a boy, men teargassing children, turning a fire hose on them, stripping a child naked in the most abhorrent way … and concluded:

“The best form of youth program there is the love of a parent. … In the Northern Territory, there are too many children who are unloved.”

This is coded. The translation? Black parents are the problem.

If 60,000 years continuous survival is not evidence that Aboriginal and Islander people can bring up their children, what is?

There is simply no way an RC with terms framed by a man who thinks like Giles can effect positive change. The way he thinks and the stated objective of the RC process are incompatible, irreconcilable, do not inhabit the same discursive universe.

7 – 100: No Australian government has the courage or the know-how to stop police and prison guards from violently abusing Aboriginal people, especially children.

The people who are presenting this Royal Commission as a solution are part of the problem. The people who will write the terms of reference, who will tell us this process is to ensure it never happens again, can not, and will not, ensure any such thing.

Racist violence directed by successive white governors and governments has led us here. Attorney General Brandis limited the RC scope to the Northern Territory on the basis that the NT was “the particular problem that has been exposed” – exposed by a television program. This minimisation and isolation of a systemic problem is part of the problem.

Our governments pass laws to (re)dispossess and otherwise oppress Aboriginal people, like the NT ‘Emergency’ Intervention, or the NT paperless arrest laws, or the closure of remote Aboriginal communities in Western Australia.

The events shown on Four Corners are terrible, but they are on a spectrum rather than being a one-off, an aberration. All Australian governments employ men who violently abuse children in their care (as do churches, charities, boarding schools, armed forces and so on and on, ad infinitum, back to the culture of the C18 imperial power).

Yet these same men imply an RC comes with a magic Royal wand to safeguard against future governments passing laws that are designed to dispossess and otherwise oppress Aboriginal people. If Giles thinks black lives matter, he will repeal the paperless arrest laws and focus on the violence committed by government employees. He has not and will not do these things.

The timing, the politics, the narratives, and the role of RCs

The fact that the Turnbull government chose its announcement for maximum impact to capitalise on the Four Corners program; the feigned outrage and faux sincerity of every government member when asked about the footage (like Child Abuse RC witnesses, these people are only concerned with their own position, not those kids); the narrative of claiming shock when faced with the long established fact that government employees (and churches etc) grossly abuse young people; that Giles has been invited to give input …

These observations of how this thing is playing out in the public domain (and politicians treat the public domain as their private playground: double dissolution elections, plebiscites, Brexit), strongly indicates that the Commonwealth is using an RC announcement to appease the public; and that it will not be designed to stop government employees committing state-sanctioned racist violence.

Bearing witness is important, and has been done: by Aboriginal children and their families and communities; by the NT Children’s Commissioner and legal and other organisations; by governments and now by the viewing public. It is time for action.

Shut them down.