"Hardly contrived - what country have you been in for the last 10 years."
I could ask you the same question. Have you not noticed the fabricated scare campaigns from Morrison, Dutton and others directed at the ALP and Albanese in particular in the absence of any credible policies to take to the election? The disingenuous behaviour has been condemned by the current and former spy chiefs, Mike Burgess and Dennis Richardson.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/feb/17/morrison-and-dutton-are-imperilling-australias-national-security-to-hang-on-to-power" ... Given there is no concrete evidence of significant policy differences between Labor and the Coalition on China – at least none that I’m currently aware of – Morrison and Dutton puffing themselves up like mini-me McCarthyists imperils the national interest.
By turning question time into a treason tribunal – staging a daily Judge Judy session to unmask the sleeper agent in our midst – Morrison and Dutton are actively stoking societal anxiety.
Given the current climate, that behaviour creates material risk.
You don’t have to take my word for it. In fact, please don’t take my word for it. Let me hand you over to Australia’s domestic spy chief, Mike Burgess.
He’s rebuked the partisan grubbiness twice, publicly and politely, in the space of a week. That level of public intervention from the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation is highly unusual.
After Morrison and Dutton ignored the first rebuke by Burgess (what would he know after all?), a former spy chief, Dennis Richardson – one of the most respected former public servants in the country – entered the fray. Now retired, he can be more direct than Burgess.
Richardson told the ABC on Thursday morning: “What is unusual in this case is that the government is seeking to create the perception of a difference between it and the opposition on a critical national security issue, that is China – seeking to create the perception of a difference when none in practise exists”.
“That’s not in the national interest.
“That only serves the interests of one country, and that is China.”
Let Richardson’s latter point settle in your mind for a moment.
I’ll repeat it again, because politics is so noisy at the moment it can be hard to sort signal from noise.
Richardson said the current political debate is serving China’s interests, not Australia’s.
As excoriations go, that one was pretty succinct.
I'll reiterate in part what I said in the previous post because it is very relevant and seem to have missed by you : ... it is a contrived narrative by the LNP, repeated often by the ill informed, deceived and ignorant devotees that place Australia's interests behind their self interested and self serving political protaganists.
