It is a few months more than 179 years since 4,500 British and ‘Native’ troops and 12,000 camp followers were forced to leave Kabul.
The Afghan rebel Akbar Khan had struck a pistol in the mouth of the British political advisor, Sir William Hay Macnaughten, and shot him dead. Shortly after the British Commander-in-Chief Sir William Elphinstone surrendered Kabul and begun the retreat to Jalalabad.
It is commonly believed if you are going to consistently tell lies you need either a good memory or a hide like a rhinoceros. These days neither seems to be necessary.
Scott Morrison fails the first qualification, comfortably fits into the second while, fittingly for a fundamentalist God-botherer simply believes what he says or thinks it serves a higher purpose.
It is now known that one person in the Prime Minister’s office drew up the spreadsheets for both the sports and car park rorts.
While this is unsurprising, given the nature and standard operating practice of the Morrison Government, it raises questions about the way the role of advisors has developed.
Two recent surveys and a critique of an international ‘Trust Barometer’ give vastly different views of who and what Australians trust.
One is relentlessly upbeat, one is highly critical and one gives an interesting sidelight on the issue.
In 2020 an Australian communications company, Senate SHJ, surveyed what communication elements contribute to social cohesion in the community and the degree to which the public trusts communication from various sources – measuring whether Australians listen to and trust information from the sources and then combining the elements in a Togetherness Index.
The Australian Government is very, very slow to address veterans’ problems – witness the tardiness on the veterans’ suicide problem – but it’s always quick off the mark to dream up some new commemoration.
The latest is to be a commemoration of our participation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ostensibly it is to acknowledge the service and sacrifice of Australians but between the Defence Department and Peter Dutton one can expect an awful lot of forgetting, not much remembrance and lots of glorification of things military.
It may be surprising but a lot of people in the world are happier in the midst of COVID and lockdowns than they were – although Australia is a slight exception.
The World Happiness Report 2021, published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, compares happiness in various countries and its latest report tracks changes from 2017-2019 and compares them with 2020.
There is one thing almost everybody commenting about Australia’s poor vaccine roll out agrees with – the need for an advertising campaign.
There is less agreement on what sort of ad and how it fits into any broader social marketing campaign. Ads without the benefit of being part of a wider campaign combining best practice social marketing principles, behavioural disciplines and government initiatives just make ad agencies, research companies and media proprietors richer.
There is no doubt about the City of Port Phillip – just when you think they are incapable of doing anything as inept or laugh out loud ridiculous as they have in the past they come up with a new effort.
The latest relates to a proposed policy on what organisations getting grants from the Council can do and say.
Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away there was a concept called the Westminster principle of Ministerial responsibility – if you failed in your responsibility you resigned or got sacked.
It no longer applies much in Westminster and almost never ever applies in Scott Morrison’s Australia.
While Whitlam, Fraser and Howard all sacked Ministers (Howard regretted it after an initial deluge) Morrison is a different sort of creature.
While fundamentalist Christians are busy infiltrating the Liberal Party the Rationalist Society of Australia (RSA) and other groups have launched a campaign – the Census 21 Campaign – to encourage people to tick the no religion box in the August 10 2021 Australian Census.
The ABS says that: “The 2016 Census of Population and Housing found that three-fifths of the Australian population (61 per cent, or 14 million people) are affiliated with a religion or spiritual belief. Christianity is once again the dominant religion in Australia, with 12 million people, and 86 per cent of religious Australians, identifying as Christians.”