This week was Scott Morrison’s first week as Prime Minister and he rather quickly announced his cabinet. Mathias Cormann and Peter Dutton, have kept their roles – although Immigration is now no longer part of the Home Affairs portfolio. A number of cabinet members have also stayed in cabinet or kept their roles, regardless of who they supported during the drama of last week. However, there has been a bit of a reshuffle and two backbenchers have been pulled out of relative obscurity into the ministry, with Melissa Price becoming Environment Minister and Karen Andrews becoming Minister for Industry and Science. Michaelia Cash has been moved sideways to become the Minister for Small Business and Skills, and Kelly O’Dwyer is now Minister for Jobs and Industrial Relations. Steve Ciobo seems to have lost his Trade portfolio to Simon Birmingham, and Dan Tehan is now Education Minister.
Julie Bishop has left the front bench, and will be replaced by Marise Payne as Foreign Minister, so Christopher Pyne is now Defence Minister. The big thing here though is that Bishop has left the ministry and the deputy leadership of the Liberal party after eleven years. One of the most senior and experienced women in the Liberal party is no longer in the ministry, and that’s a heck of a lot of expertise no longer on the front bench. Part of this seems to be because of a group text conversation on WhatsApp between some moderate Liberal MPs and Senators calling themselves “Friends of Stability”. It appears one of them uncovered an alleged plan from the Dutton camp to stick some WA votes behind Bishop in the first round of voting during the spill, in order to knock out Morrison so Dutton would win. Poor Christopher Pyne was left to very respectfully warn Julie Bishop of this plan to use her to get Dutton as PM.
Julie Bishop has said that she will contest her seat of Curtin at the next election, and there are whispers that she could be the next Governor-General as she is respected on both sides of the political divide.
This is not the only issue involving women in the Liberal Party and the spill of last week. Julia Banks, the Member for Chisholm, has announced she will not contest the next election in her marginal Melbourne seat. She cites bullying and sexist behaviour from parliamentary Liberal Party, especially during the week of the spill, where she alleges three MPs and Senators (who are thought to be some of Dutton’s numbers men) engaged in intimidation tactics to try to get her to vote their way.
https://twitter.com/juliabanksmp/status/1034597677017718784
Two other members of parliament, Sarah Henderson MP and Senator Linda Reynolds have also alleged poor behaviour on the part of these “numbers men”, with Henderson apparently being promised a ministry or some other worldly goods, and Reynolds feeling intimidated by the actions of her party – something she spoke about in the Senate to get it into Hansard.
Prime Minister Morrison spent a lot of his first full week as PM not in Canberra. He toured drought affected Queensland at the start of the week and learned more about the effects the drought is having on families. At the end of the week he travelled to Jakarta and met with Indonesian President Joko Widodo. Originally the trip was for Malcolm Turnbull, and many expected it to be postponed after the spill, however, Morrison went over and spent time with Widodo, and they seemed to get on well, and Morrison did represent us well on his first international trip as Prime Minister. Australia is about to sign a Free Trade Agreement with Indonesia, eight years in the making, so the relationship is now more important than ever.
Meanwhile, Peter Dutton is facing criticism over what is being dubbed the “Au Pair Affair”. It’s understood that a couple of years ago, Peter Dutton allowed a 27-year-old French national into the country on a tourist visa, despite the fact that she had admitted to Border Force officials that she would engage in work as an au pair for the McLachlan family. The McLachlan family are well-known South Australian pastoralists and are related to AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan – who knows Dutton from when he was Sports Minister. It appears Gillon McLachlan linked his relatives to Dutton’s office so they could plead the young woman’s case. It’s also understood that he has helped a former cop colleague in the same situation whose potential au pair was detained at Brisbane airport, along with one other au pair – but that last one hasn’t been talked about much.
The Catholic Church has responded to the recommendations from the Child Abuse Royal Commission, saying it will take all but a few of the recommendations on board. They have stated that they won’t be breaking the seal of confession to report child abuse, but they will apply to the Vatican to consider making celibacy a voluntary aspect of being a member of the clergy. Meanwhile, South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory are continuing in their push to make it illegal to not report child abuse revealed to priests in the confessional, against the wishes of the Catholic Church.
Finally this week, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Barnaby Joyce will be a Special Envoy for the Drought, and Tony Abbott will be Special Envoy for Indigenous Affairs (which is going down really well amongst the Indigenous community); Chelsea Manning, the US Army intelligence officer who leaked thousands of documents to WikiLeaks, was banned from entering Australia, but she will be allowed to enter New Zealand; the NAPLAN results came out and while Primary school results are improving, the high school results aren’t as positive; and Australia probably won’t get visited by US President Donald Trump, instead we’ll get a visit from Vice-President Mike Pence.
Tweets of the Week
https://twitter.com/BevanShields/status/1034259584221736960
Things I’ve Been Looking at Online
Annabel Crabb on Julie Bishop’s savage one-liners – ABC Online
Mark Latham’s defamation defence dismissed (it’s awesome) – Federal Court of Australia
Kara L 