Tips and rumours

From the Crikey grapevine, the latest tips and rumours …

Just how bad is voter fraud in Australia? Conservative politicians in Australia are also obsessed (like their US counterparts) with potential electoral fraud and are keen to introduce voter ID, but Australian Electoral Commission data recently provided to Parliament suggests it is much less of an issue than the scare campaign indicates.

While the AEC does recommend a Queensland-style voter ID requirement and an electronic database to mark voters off as they go, the stats provided by the AEC to the joint standing committee revealed that, excluding the 42 cases in Herbert, there were only 76 cases of multiple voting referred to the AFP for further investigation, following 18,000 instances of people having their name marked off the roll more than once.

This is fine. After a summer of intensely negative reaction from the public over Centrelink’s disastrous automated debt notices scheme, two government backbenchers bizarrely decided this week it would be time to congratulate the government on its digital agenda and for “fixing” Centrelink. MP for Fisher Andrew Wallace moved a motion on Monday in the Federation Chamber congratulating the government’s technology reform agenda and actions the government was taking to renew ageing Centrelink IT.

Then new MP for Mackellar Jason Falinski got up to congratulate the Digital Transformation Agency, an agency that has not much to show for its two years in operation, and whose former CEO left under a cloud and now strongly criticises the government on its digital policy. Labor’s spokesman on the digital economy Ed Husic was having none of it:

“My question to the Deputy Speaker is, is there a provision in the standing orders for either irony or grand self-delusion? Because that is the only way this resolution can be debated here now. You cannot be serious! It is such a bizarre resolution.”

Husic said that DTA had essentially become a think tank in government, and due to its own internal warfare, it was not actually doing any of the digital transforming it was designed to do. Husic dared the two Coalition MPs to post their speeches on their Facebook pages to see what reaction they got from the public. Perhaps unsurprisingly, both MPs — who often upload their speeches to Facebook — have not done so yet.

If you’ll pardon the French. Former chief justice of the High Court Robert French took aim at US President Donald Trump in a speech on the rule of law, given on Friday night. French’s lecture at an event hosted by the Victoria Law Foundation included French taking apart Trump’s tweet responding to a decision upholding the legal stay on his travel ban on seven predominantly Muslim countries. On Febraury 4, Trump tweeted: “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!”

“The President’s statement could not be dignified as ‘criticism’ of a judicial decision. It was rather a content-free coupling of epithets calculated to mitigate the political embarrassment caused by the ruling by suggesting that it and the ‘so-called judge’ somehow lacked legitimacy,” Lawyers Weekly reports French said.

“Such remarks may be seen as calculated to undermine respect for the rule of law,” French told those present. He said it had never been more important for society to understand how the rule of law framework had been developed.

“The spaces left by lack of awareness and misunderstanding are all too readily filled by snake oil salesmen coming in from the hinterland of our civil and political discourses.”

Trump has been called many things by many people, but a snake oil salesman from someone as eminent as French is new.

What happened to Paula Broadwell? With the “resignation” of Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for his secret liaisons with the Russian government and subsequent lies about it, an old name has resurfaced as a potential replacement: David Petraeus. The criminal Petraeus — convicted of passing on secret information to his girlfriend Paula Broadwell when he was head of the CIA under Obama — met with Trump after the election to discuss the position of Secretary of State.

Clearly, despite his breach of the most important security laws (and attempt to cover it up by lying the the FBI about it), Petraeus’ rehabilitation is almost complete — indeed, the foreign policy establishment, which relentlessly demonised Ed Snowden, WikiLeaks and Chelsea Manning for revealing a vast array of crimes, including war crimes, has been happy to overlook Petraeus leaking information to impress a young lover. But what about the woman so often described in the media as his “mistress”, Broadwell?

She kept a low profile throughout the scandal, but had both her military and academic career wrecked. No rehabilitation for her — just the usual double standard that means adulterous men are to be admired while adulterous women are sluts, predators and home wreckers. Broadwell gave an interview to Vanity Fair in December about the impact on her, with surprisingly little vindictiveness toward Petraeus, who threw her under a bus when the scandal emerged. Her current work? She heads an NGO she established looking at bias against women in the media. Who can blame her?

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