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Tophat exits, crazies take full control
Volume 33 #12
August 29, 2018
Byron’s fair share Council needs shorter meetings or complimentary stimulants. Or put another way, torture has many forms, and one is B-grade political banter to a mostly empty room. Last Thursday’s council meeting in the Mullum chambers kicked off at 4pm with two hours of public access (which was full), but by around 8pm it was clear that hapless staff and two journos left in the room were going to have endure a late night. It finished around 11pm. So what happened? Heaps! Yet with some small preparation and less yaddah yaddah and humbug it could been over much earlier. The Railway Park rotunda location was sorted (see page 2), a major urban development for Saddle Road (between Mullum and Brunswick) was thrashed out (see page 1) and a further report was requested around the ongoing issues at the very popular and disintegrating Broken Head Reserve and Seven Mile Beach Roads. The mayor’s motion was supported, which will look at a ticketing system at the entrance to Seven Mile Beach Road and sealing the roads. Another issue where Council has limited funds and no real powers (hint: the state government controls everything) is Byron High School traffic safety at Arakwal Court. Concerns about safety were explained to councillors by principal Janine Marcus in afternoon access. Cr Paul Spooner’s motion passed, which keeps staff moving along and also asks them to ‘Identify the most viable option between traffic lights or a roundabout at the intersection.’ It was around this point that the Greens mayor suggested that as local Nationals MLC Ben Franklin is challenging sitting MP Greens Tamara Smith for the upcoming state election (though yet to be a candidate), it was an excellent opportunity to lobby him for all sorts of improvements for the Shire. The Echo agrees. So here’s a short list. Don’t waste everyone’s time with a post mortem of the approved holiday industry after the government’s undercooked holiday laws have been in place for a year – instead, push for Council to be paid a bed tax via Airbnb and other platforms like they are in progressive larger economies in the US and Europe. Instigate an immediate inquiry into the effectiveness or otherwise of unelected planning panels (such as the JRPP) that determine questionable large developments. And regardless of that outcome, push for decision making to be returned to an elected body – councils. Lobby RMS to widen the one-lane roundabout outside the Byron Central Hospital and spank the bureaucrat behind that silly decision. Lobby for a light rail service to connect all the Shire’s towns to invigorate economic activity and community. Those are just a few, so let’s all get cracking on it! Ben’s contact is Parliament House, Macquarie Street, Sydney NSW 2000, phone is (02) 9230 3793 and email ben.franklin@ parliament.nsw.gov.au. Hans Lovejoy, editor
The Byron Shire Echo Established 1986
Nicholas Shand 1948–1996 Founding Editor
General Manager Simon Haslam Editor Hans Lovejoy Photographer Jeff Dawson Advertising Manager Angela Cornell Production Manager Ziggi Browning ‘The job of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’ – Finley Peter Dunne 1867–1936 © 2018 Echo Publications Pty Ltd – ABN 86 004 000 239 Mullumbimby: Village Way, Stuart St. Ph 02 6684 1777 Fax 02 6684 1719 Printer: Fairfax Media Brisbane Reg. by Aust. Post Pub. No. NBF9237
12 August 29, 2018 The Byron Shire Echo
I
n the end Malcolm Bligh Turnbull left the office just as he managed it – in appeasement, denial, dithering, procrastination, bluster, bravado, resentment and eventual capitulation – albeit with a characteristic burst of petulance. In the process he dumped almost all the more important policies he had demanded as vital for the country and went so far as to close down parliament in an attempt to avoid the consequences of his backflips, cowardice and his incompetence. It started a long time ago, and the Longman by-election became an important catalyst, but the final collapse was triggered by the abandonment of the NEG, which was supposed to be essential in providing both stability and popularity. It had achieved neither within the dysfunctional Liberal Party room, but there were signs that Labor was preparing to provide the bipartisan support Turnbull said he had always wanted. This would have given Turnbull the result, the outcome, that just about everyone was pleading for; but this was not about policy, it was about politics. Turnbull could never bear the humiliation of watching Labor vote with him while a handful of coalition rats crossed the floor. So no deal, no NEG – and now no Turnbull. Not that there was much left of him anyway. Various members of what Turnbull calls the insurgency claim that they had to act because Turnbull’s policies were drifting too far to the left. But they found it hard to name any of them, which is hardly a surprise because Turnbull gave them everything they wanted and more, even anticipating their demands. Tony Abbott once told Tony Windsor he would do anything to gain the top job except sell his arse; it is not clear that Turnbull
CHESS by Ian Rogers The poor state of governance nationally became clear this week when the Australian Chess Federation anointed a small Melbourne tournament as the official Australian Open. The Canterbury Summer Swiss, held during the gap between Christmas and New Year, is well established as a pleasant warmup tournament before the national championship. However, the organisers probably never expected to be rescuing the ACF from their own ineptitude by renaming the event the Australian Open. Consequently the 2019 Open, established in the calendar for decades as an early January event, will be played in the wrong year, over five days instead of eleven, and with a prize fund half that of Canberra’s Doeberl Cup. The Melbourne organisers have a fine pedigree but in trying to help out the ACF have been dealt an impossible hand, with players given only four months’ notice to change their holiday plans. The Open fiasco caps off a disastrous year for an increasingly shambolic ACF, which has shown itself to be unprepared for the takeover of junior chess adminis-
would even resist that fundamental reservation. From the start of his miserable regime, the progressive liberalism Turnbull promised in his life before parliament and in the initial period within it was wiped out in order to secure his ambition – his birthright as he saw it. His government began as skewed to the right and kept going. The break was not about the policies Turnbull was pursuing, but about the fear and loathing that he just might revert to the ones he long ago espoused. That, and of course his overthrow of the right’s hero, Tony Abbott.
boats’ policy. He would have no difficulty about incorporating Dutton and even Abbott in his cabinet and encouraging them to pursue the culture wars they so enjoy – if they can be trusted to behave themselves. So much for the new generation. There will be, Morrison said, echoing Turnbull’s own ascension, continuity and change; but a lot more of the former. Which of course brings us to the question: What madness enveloped the party to rip itself to bits so publicly and so bloodily for what has been a pretty uninspiring result?
The damage has been immense, and not only to the Liberal Party – or what remains of it. by Mungo MacCallum And quite apart from anything else, they just didn’t like the man. They were prepared to strap on the suicide-bomber belts if necessary to get rid of him. And they have, although only up to a point; Turnbull, if he sticks to his word, will shortly be gone but neither Abbott nor his protégé Peter Dutton has succeeded, and both are there to fight on. Turnbull, in one of the very few wins of his lamentable time as leader, has finagled Scott Morrison through what is being described as the middle. Well, this depends on where you are standing, but Morrison is no namby-pamby centrist. He is, and has always been, a creature of the right, both economically and socially. He is a dedicated union basher and an evangelical Pentacostalist, a worshipper of the free market and a fringe religion. And never forget he was the original architect of the ‘stop the tration at the start of the year. Top juniors expecting to compete internationally have been frustrated by the absence of calls for applications for major events. When juniors took the initiative and applied for events they were starved of information by the ACF, which also failed to appoint selectors. The Australian Junior Championships, the best attended classical tournament in Australia, would have gone the same way as the Australian Open but was saved late in the day by a former official of the Australian Junior Chess League, an organisation which the ACF had starved into extinction at the end of 2017. In only two areas does the ACF now show a level of professionalism: the running of a domestic rating system and coordination with the world body FIDE. Yet even here the ACF has made missteps, almost sabotaging one of the two Grandmaster tournaments in Australia in 2017 by initially voting not to rate the event. Such maladministration would in a normal organisation have caused those officials responsible for the failures to resign. Yet with no-one putting their hand up for a leadership challenge, the poor governance is likely to continue.
The damage has been immense, and not only to the Liberal Party – or what remains of it. The sight of the nation’s parliament degenerating into utter chaos before being shut down altogether has done as much to repel those who are already cynical about the democratic structure as the worst excesses of Donald Trump – more, probably, because they are closer to home. And the last week cannot be dismissed as a deranged aberration; Morrison might talk of leaving the past behind, a fresh government united in its high purpose to serve the people, but as soon as Question Time resurfaces, as soon as Abbott reappears on television (not that he has ever vanished) the punters will remember how very unloveable they all are, and by extension the system that produces them. And while the loathing will be universal, the Libs will cop the brunt of it – and so they should – the likelihood is that
the public will be as much bemused as repulsed, because what has really changed? A Band-Aid has been administered to the schism between moderates and rightists but the war will go on unabated. Malcolm Turnbull was responsible for his own demise – the combination of personal arrogance and political timorousness was always going to be fatal. But having said that, he is entitled to believe that it was not entirely about him – it was about that bloody divided party. Abbott was the great disrupter, but he had a zealous, if small, band of followers who were determined to remake the Liberal Party in their own image or blow it to smithereens. John Howard had shown them it could be pushed to the right; Abbott confirmed the trend. Turnbull and the mainstream resisted, but it only takes one side to start a war. As the ex-prime minister watched his ministers walk out the door until he was almost the last man standing he might have mused on the words with which the great Bruce Petty summed up, many years ago, another failing Liberal prime minister: The boy stood on the burning deck Whence all but he had fled And a staggering piece of insight Kept running around in his head. When the flame of truth hits the ship of state And the tides of time are turning They tend to bucket the captain – But the ship is what is burning. That prime minister was Billy McMahon. Will Malcolm Turnbull be remembered with similar derision? And if not, why not?
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