Three times a year, the ordinary sittings of the Senate are suspended for the obscure but essential business of budget estimates hearings. For the next fortnight, the bleak theatre in the House of Representatives will continue as expected, but the Senate chamber will lie empty; the action on our side of the building playing out elsewhere.
Tonight I rise to invite Prime Minister Tony Abbott to visit the beautiful state of Western Australia.
If the Abbott government succeeds in deregulating media ownership – using the web as cover – stand by for local news services to be cut and vested interests unexposed
11 February 2014: around the globe more than 6000 websites, with user groups ranging from sub-niche to hundreds of millions, are blacked out today. The cause is serious: government surveillance overkill that compromises privacy, the rule of law, journalism and democracy itself.
“We don’t discuss intelligence matters,” Australia’s bewildered Prime Minister told the media again this morning, making him the only person left on earth not discussing intelligence matters. Finally, seven months after the fuse was lit, the scandal of the US National Security Agency surveillance state has finally detonated in Australia.
So we’re seven days into the search for #14votes, and there are probably another seven days to go.
I’ve now lost count of the number of candidate forums I’ve spoken at with an empty chair reserved for a no-show Coalition candidate.
Senate Estimates committees are my favourite parliamentary obscurity, a thrice-yearly ritual of tense cross-examination and hideous boredom that runs a ragged cross-section through the state of the Australian Government in all its banal and ominous glory. Nearly every part of these hearings can be of interest, but for a number of reasons I have always got the most out of exploring the poorly mapped intersection of communications, surveillance, censorship and national security policy.
It’s the end of an era for the Greens (WA), and also a harsh reminder that talent and hard work alone are no guarantee of a seat in Parliament when the conservative tide turns.