Politics

Junk Explained: Peter Dutton And Scott Morrison Are About To Have A Real Bad Week

Parliament's been back for half a day and there's so much to catch up on.

by Sam Langford  10 September 2018
Scott Morrison Greenpeace

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Good morning, and welcome to another sure-to-be-wild week in politics. Parliament’s sitting for the first time since we swapped Prime Ministers, and there’s plenty of drama to discuss, bicker about and vote on.

Already, the tension is making people behave in odd ways — Labor MP Julian Hill opted to welcome everyone back to Canberra with a bizarre spoken-word rendition of The Muppet Show theme song adapted to comment on Australian politics, a foray into comedy that went about as well as you’d expect.

Now that we’ve set the mood, here’s the lowdown on all the drama you can expect out of Canberra this week:

Peter Dutton’s About To Have The Real Bad Week He Deserves

Peter Dutton has a lot to answer for this week, and he’s about to face two votes that might just end his career.

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Junk Explained: The Au Pair Scandal Is Heating Up And It Could Be Peter Dutton's Downfall

One of those votes is about the ongoing au pair drama Dutton’s mixed up in (we’ve got an update on that here, if you need it). Basically, since Parliament last sat, we’ve found out much more about Dutton’s past decisions as Minister for Immigration, in particular the ones where he appears to have intervened to approve au pairs’ visas after relatively famous people asked him to. New information revealing that Dutton appears to have a personal connection to some of these cases was a huge deal last week, because Dutton previously said in Parliament that he had absolutely no personal connection to the cases.

That sounds an awful lot like Dutton misleading the Parliament, and the Greens and Labor have been threatening to move a motion of no confidence in Dutton as a result. They’ve almost got the numbers for the motion to pass, too — it’ll likely depend on a couple of crossbenchers who said they wanted to hear Dutton’s attempts to explain himself first.

Dutton made a speech to Parliament this morning where he tried to make that explanation, and it was basically just him repeating that he doesn’t have a personal connection to any of the people involved. In fact, Dutton doesn’t look to have many personal connections in Parliament at all today…

Anyway, we’ll have to wait and see what happens with the no confidence motion, but fear not: that’s not the only way Dutton could get toppled this week. Labor is also threatening to refer him to the High Court over the question of whether he’s even eligible to sit in Parliament at all (more on that one here). It’ll be tougher for them to get the numbers on that one, but hey, anything’s possible.

Scott Morrison’s Week Is Also Off To A (Flag) Flying Start

Around the same time Julian Hill was experimenting with Muppet-themed slam poetry, two Greenpeace activists climbed the flagpoles outside Parliament to unfurl a giant banner showing Scott Morrison holding a lump of coal alongside the text “get your hand off it”. It’s a reference to the time Morrison walked into Question Time to wave a lump of coal around and pledge his undying allegiance to fossil fuels in spite of all available evidence that they’re killing us. Today, climate activists are making it known that they’re still mad about it.

They’re not alone, either — a pretty sizeable group of farmers also gathered outside Parliament House this morning to protest the government’s inaction on the drought that’s currently plaguing rural Australia, which is only going to get worse if the government doesn’t take decisive action on climate change.

“What it clearly says to Scott Morrison is that the future of this country is in renewable energy, and stop doing the bidding of the coal industry,” Greens leader Richard Di Natale said of the banner protest. “When Scott Morrison walked into Parliament with a lump of coal, what he said to Australians was ‘I govern for my corporate donors, the coal, oil and gas industry, I don’t govern for you.'”

“What these two brave people have done today is made it very clear that they are speaking on behalf of millions of Australians right across the country, who want this climate-denying government to get on with making the transition to renewable energy. I mean, that image is an image that will define Scott Morrison’s term as Prime Minister.”

That’s not the only thing that could ruin Morrison’s week, though. There’s also the fact that a number of women in the Liberal Party have been threatening to name the members of the party who allegedly bullied MPs into voting for the leadership spill that made him Prime Minister two and a half weeks ago. If they decide to do that, then on top of all the drama already happening there’s going to be more Liberal Party infighting.

In fact, the only thing that might not happen in Parliament this week is any actual work. Any work done by the Government, that is — while all this drama has been kicking on, the Greens have already managed to get a bill banning live sheep exports through the Senate. Greens Senator Rachel Siewert is also planning to introduce a bill that would raise the Newstart allowance by $75 a week.

In short, Parliament’s been back for half a day and it’s already been a massive week in Australian politics. Strap in, we’re in for a wild ride.