Paul Keating famously railed that senators, and he surely had his eye on the Tasmanian lot among others, were ‘unrepresentative swill’.
The beef lies in the fact that the Senate was created as a states’ house, yet has evolved to be a generalist chamber of ideological hardheads that are often more interested in their own personal ideological barrows than representing their state.
This would describe Tasmanian Liberal Senator Eric Abetz quite aptly.
Are you aware of any major issues in Tasmania in recent months? Perhaps COVID-19?
Of about 90 Facebook posts since the start of March, Senator Abetz mentioned COVID-19 in Tasmania twice. He had more posts on each of the following topics: the queen, funding stunts with Liberal councillors, Black Lives Matter, military matters, Victorian Labor, the Greens, climate change (denial), his ‘cosy chats’ with Sky reptiles, the World Health Organization and his pet topic, China.
None of this related to Tasmania at all, apart from the pork-barrelling. Apparently when federal money arrives in Hobart for things such as City Deal infrastructure, only Liberal councillors such as Simon Behrakis (see image above) get invited to the photo opportunities. Never mind that most of the Deal was negotiated by council staff and the Mayor, before Behrakis was even elected to the council. The implication that Behrakis ‘delivered’ the money is as preposterous as Georgina Downer’s giant cheques, although Senator Abetz is enough of miser that he only bothers to print them out on A4.
Following the death of his wife last year, some had suggested that the Senator might fade away into the distance. If anything he seems to be doing the opposite. He appears to be doing everything he can to solidify his legacy as a culture warrior with effectively no interest in Tasmania other than that as a convenient bully pulpit.
He’s doubled down in recent weeks on BLM, accusing the Melbourne march of sparking the outbreaks that have recently occurred in Victoria. It’s rubbish of course, and the statistics show that.
On the day of the march, 6 June, Victorian coronavirus cases stood at 1681 cases. In the six weeks since, the total has risen to 5165. Of the 3484 new cases, just six attended the BLM march. None are thought to have contracted COVID-19 at the event according to contact tracing done by the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services.
Meanwhile there are at least 14 clusters of over ten cases that are centred around schools, aged care homes, butchers, restaurants, meat processing plants, hospitals, hotels and individual families. Senator Abetz has not spoken out about any of those. Families who eat meat and send their kids to private schools would appear to be particularly at risk, so we eagerly await his denunciation. As all Victorians are now being urged to wear masks, perhaps they might hope that Senator Abetz would wear a gag that prevents him pontificating on issues he clearly knows nothing about.
(For this information I have used Victorian Department of Health and Human Services data).
The Senator egregiously misquoted, by omission, the position of BLM in order to prop up his argument. The quote he cited was this: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” What BLM actually said was: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’.” Again, later in the piece he commits the same (intentional?) misrepresentation: “We believe that prisons, police and all other institutions … must be abolished.” The words he chose to admit are “institutions that inflict violence on Black people.” The original sentence concludes “and replaced by institutions that value and affirm the flourishing of Black lives.” Senator Abetz therefore has no base to label BLM as ‘toxic’ when he either doesn’t understand or chooses not to understand what they are struggling for.
Senator Abetz also sprang out of the blocks this week to declare that the release of the letters between Sir John Kerr and the Buckingham Palace during the 1975 constitutional crisis “has taken every bit of wind out of the flagging republican campaign.” His claim was that the correspondence confirms the Palace did not get involved nor was the queen made aware of the decision before it was taken and implemented.
Historian Claire Corbold, a Harvard Professor, noted that absence of evidence is not absence of event/fact/idea. “Do you put everything you really think on your work email? Of course not,” she said. “Sound historical research takes time. This cache of letters will be checked and cross-referenced with other materials, including some that will mention this correspondence. Doing so will among other things go to deciding whether this archive is complete. When reading correspondence, it’s best to consider any one letter in the context of the whole. What’s the relationship between the letter-writers? When do they reveal things and when do they keep quiet? What are the trends in their correspondence, in other words? And finally, with reference to this case, the 1970s was not a time in which use of the telephone was unheard of.”
So how long did Senator Abetz take to read and study the letters before making his judgement? Less than 24 hours. And what are his qualifications in historical research and analysis? None. In other words, as he has made a career of doing, he has cherry-picked slender bits of ‘evidence’ that suit him and used them as a basis for a tirade based simply on his existing prejudices. He is, after all, a member of the steam-powered Australian Monarchist League.
Evidence and this Senator have never sat well together. We may recall the largest plebiscite in recent history, the Australian marriage law postal vote in 2017. The Tasmanian vote returned 63.6% in favour on over 300,000 valid votes, sweeping a majority in each of the 5 federal electorates too. On anybody’s evaluation, this was a significant demonstration of the will of the total state electorate that Senator Abetz is supposed to represent. The Tasmanian Yes vote was even higher than the national figure of 61.6%. So how did Senator Abetz vote then on the resulting Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Bill 2017? Against.
Recently Senator Abetz has been hawking an opinion column about the Huon Valley Council’s Code of Conduct processes. Surprise surprise, he is against local government politicians being held to account, and in favour of muddy-booted boofheads abusing their constituents.
A TT report on the issue was published as It’s Moments Like These We Need Truth to Matter. Let me say I do not know Geoffrey Swan, and he seems able to defend himself, despite the buckets of abuse being tipped. The TT Editor has forwarded me some clarifications by Swan about the Abetz comment piece, and they are interesting reading.
What has generally not been reported is that Mick Newell is the second only Tasmanian Councillor since 2015 to be required to undertake individual counselling. In their determination report the Panel wrote: “Cr Newell demonstrates limited insight into his behaviour. By repeatedly stating that he does not regret statements previously found to have been a breach of the Code of Conduct, he shows little regard for either the Code or the Panel.”
And not only that, Newell’s most recent breaches of the Local Government Act 1993 were so severe that the Panel sanctioned him with a 6 week suspension from office; this is the most severe sanction available to the panel. “It is the Panel’s decision that Cr Newell be suspended for a period of six weeks from the date this determination is tabled at the Council meeting.” This followed a previous caution to Newell, and his continued lack of remorse, and ongoing poor behaviour.
The Code of Conduct process – introduced under a state Liberal government – has been in place five years, and now Newell is the first ever person to be suspended from the office of Councillor. It’s clearly not a process that is out of control, nor Newell being an ingenue caught up in the machinery. It’s a process being implemented as it was designed, and in this case has filtered out a serial offender against standards of decent conduct. It’s funny how for all Senator Abetz’s hokey Christian moralising, when he has the chance to stand up for decency he chooses not to.
What does he stand up for? Remember that Senator Abetz’s was a loud supporter of Tony Abbott, who galloped in to the Prime Ministership in 2013 by claiming that a net national debt of about $270 billion was a ‘Labor’s debt and deficit disaster’. Currently the Australian federal government is not only staring down the abyss of more budget deficits, but deficits in the realm of over $100 billion dollars in the coming years. With his Liberals set to take us to a whopping $1,000 billion dollars of national debt in less than ten years, the best Senator Abetz can suggest is cutting tobacco taxes. Yes, you heard that right.
Back to Newell for a moment, one of Senator Abetz’s other defences of the wayward one was that he garnered 5000 votes in the last local government elections. That’s interesting, coming from a politician who lost the only time he ever stood in actual contest, in 1993. Eric Abetz entered the Senate as a party nomination to fill the casual vacancy left by Brian Archer in 1994. Since then he has only ever stood in Senate elections from high up on the Liberal Party list, and never from a position where his seat was in the balance and would require his personal appeal to win it. Compare, for example, Senator Lisa Singh’s victory from the ‘unwinnable’ sixth position on the Labor Party ticket in 2016.
My insinuation above is that the popularity of Senator Abetz’s views has never really been put to the test.
He has been allowed free reign to lobby, campaign and use his parliamentary presence to promote views that are often neither explicitly those of his Party nor of his electorate. He was also happy to repeat under parliamentary privilege the Godwin Grech lie in the OzCar affair. He is often closer to the One Nation position than to Liberal one on many issues.
Psephologist Kevin Bonham noted in 2016: “Although Senator Abetz polarises opinion and was the candidate most frequently placed last on Senate ballots, no conclusions about his popularity can be drawn directly from this result. Historically, there is evidence that the Liberal Party performs worse in Tasmania (relative to the nation) when Senator Abetz is on top of the Senate ballot, but the difference is not quite statistically significant and could be caused by other factors. There is no evidence in historic results that having Abetz on top of the ticket is an asset to the party’s fortunes.”
There is a feeling around that the Liberal Party dynamic might be changing a little with Peter Gutwein in charge. Firstly he made himself Minister for Climate Change, then he adopted a very socially progressive response to coronavirus as the crisis deepened. His ministers Rockliff and Shelton stared down some noisy opposition by the booze lobby to better labelling of alcohol packaging just this week. For the most part he’s looked like a leader trying to genuinely find the zeitgeist of a state, like everywhere else, now grappling with serious issues on many fronts.
Perhaps its time for Gutwein to take the garbage out and declutter the Liberal Party’s remnant Abetz faction. The Party’s future at both state and federal elections in Tasmania can surely benefit from a fresh approach, rather than the long shadow of a unaccountable ideologue who is divisive, spiteful, and consistently wrong. As Tasmania looks to recovery, there is enormous reputational damage from a key figure who makes the state look closed-minded and backward with his every utterance and manoeuvre.
On his letterhead, you’ll find the words Liberal Senator for Tasmania. This is also wrong. Senator Abetz has only ever been a senator for himself, never for Tasmania.
Juliette Rosenthal is a Tasmanian-born former federal public servant who worked in the area of policy development and analysis. She returned to Tasmania after retiring and is patiently learning how to grow olives.
JOHN HAWKINS: Abetz and Channel Highway Land Deals.
