Cheap IPA (not the good kind), more Morrisonian shrugs and another defection at Fox

Value CPAC CPAC Australia, the annual convention for culture warrior conservatives ranging from the merely right wing to the right out of their damn minds, has been brightly announcing its 2023 line-up for weeks.

It includes choices both obvious (One Nation leader Senator Pauline Hanson, former prime minister Tony Abbott, former deputy PM Barnaby Joyce) and inevitable (newly independent Victorian MP Moira Deeming) as well as just plain questionable, such as long-time US conservative political activist Matt Schlapp, trailing as he is a series of scandals.

And if all that somehow isn’t enough, CPAC is offering a near-50% discount to attendees to snap up a membership with the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA).

It will cost you $55 bucks to help support the only think tank willing to do what really matters: total up every time the ABC used the word “Murdoch” to make some kind of point, and help take a bit of pressure off Gina Rinehart (Crikey understands the institute runs on what she finds down the back of her couch). Money well spent, no doubt.

The history of Australia in 10 Scott Morrison abrogations “I played no role and had no responsibility in the operation nor administration of the robodebt scheme,” former prime minister Scott Morrison has insisted, talking about a disaster of which he seems to consider himself the primary victim. It occurred to us that you could write a fairly detailed history of our times via disasters that Morrison insists were not his fault and jobs he insisted were not his to do.

On top of the former social services minister’s shrug over robodebt, Morrison’s denials cover off on the following:

• Australia’s tendency to knife its leaders midterm between 2007-18: “I was not the one who sought to change [the party leadership].”
• Australia’s hardline policy towards refugees: “It’s not my job to be an ethical theologian or any of these things. It’s my job to do a job, and my job was to stop the boats and that’s what we did.”
• Australia’s inaction on climate change: “I don’t hold a hose, mate.”
• On rape and sexual harassment: “Well, that is a matter for the police. See, I’m not the commissioner of police.”
• On COVID-19, part 1 — Australia’s insufficient vaccine supply: “The simple explanation is that … 3.1 million vaccines never came to Australia“; the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisations “had been very cautious and that had a massive impact on the rollout of the vaccine program, it really did. It slowed it considerably and put us behind — and we wish that wasn’t the result, but it was”; “It’s the pandemic, that’s the reason why these things are happening, and happening not just in Australia but in all places around the world.”
• On the crisis in aged care: “We regulate aged care, but when there is a public health pandemic … then they are things that are managed from Victoria.”
• On COVID-19, part 2 — secretly appointing himself to several ministries: “Had I been asked about these matters at the time at the numerous press conferences I held, I would have responded truthfully about the arrangements I had put in place.”

Have we missed a major policy area for which Scott Morrison has abrogated his responsibility? Let us know.

A walk on the Woodside Woodside Energy boss Meg O’Neill’s beachside mansion in Perth has allegedly been “invaded” by at least three protesters The Australian reports. Two men and a woman have been charged. Protest group Disrupt Burrup Hub put out a statement insisting the protest was “peaceful” at the time that counterterrorism police — who it says had been “lying in wait” — intercepted them.

O’Neill disagreed: “This was not a ‘harmless protest’. It was designed to threaten me, my partner and our daughter in our home. Such acts by extremists should be condemned by anyone who respects the law and believes people should be safe to go about their business at home and at work.” Which is fair enough, but if O’Neill is worried about lawless greenies outside her house, just wait until she gets wind of what rising sea levels are going to do to it.

Kristol clear Just as there is no greater apologist for Fox News than someone who works there, there is no more scathing critic than someone who used to. Bill Kristol, the neocon who spent a decade at Fox News after serving as chief of staff to then-VP Dan Quayle, has written to US watchdog the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), calling on it to reject the broadcast licence renewal application for Fox Corp-owned television station FOX 29 Philadelphia (WTXF-TV).

Proving what a bipartisan affair hating on Fox has become, Kristol’s is a joint informal objection with former PBS president Ervin Duggan. This is in support of advocacy group Media and Democracy’s formal petition earlier this month, which argued Dominion Voting System’s defamation lawsuit against Fox proved the company breached the FCC’s policy on licensee character qualifications:

The adjudication of the Dominion case unequivocally established that Fox News channel repeatedly disseminated false news, and the Fox cable channels and its broadcast ones are clearly intimately linked, as Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch hold the authority for decision-making over both. The commission should follow the well-established legal framework and conduct a hearing to fully consider the fitness of FOX and the Murdochs to continue as licensees of the public air waves.

It must be a particularly bitter blow for Rupert to hear Kristol talk this way — he helped finance Kristol’s conservative publication The Weekly Standard in the early ’90s and gave him regular air time on Fox for a decade to spruik basically any war the US might care to involve itself.