Tea Party For One

Bernard Gaynor will go down in history as having one of the shortest, stupidest political careers in Australia’s history, and history is where he should stay.

At 11:53am on Tuesday 22nd January, Bernard Gaynor announced via social media that he would be running for a seat in the Senate, as a member of Bob Katter’s Australia Party. Not long after, the deluge of bizarre tweets had begun:

2:42pm 22 Jan @BernardGaynor: As a KAP senator I’ll have the courage to close borders to those who do not accept Aussie values – burkas are not a sign of tolerance. #auspol

I’m quite certain that not accepting the women who wear burkas is a far stronger sign of intolerance, particularly from a man who has spent considerable slabs of his life in Iraq, and a flying visit to Afghanistan.

By 7:38pm, the Sunshine Coast Daily was reporting that Mr Gaynor has said that “Climate Change is crap”. Despite the overwhelming weight of science, in this country the debate on climate change continues, so Mr Gaynor’s position is not rare. It’s just dumb. Mr Gaynor is a proud climate science denier though, and tweeted a link to the story.

The tweeting continued, on topics as diverse as denial of climate change to defence of his Catholicism to the boganisation of Australia Day and the use of the Aussie flag in Australia Day celebrations. Controversial, conservative, and largely unsurprisingly.

Wednesday 23rd January was to be the retired army major’s own chapter of revelations.

8:11pm 23 Jan @BernardGaynor As a KAP senate nominee in Qld and former Party National General Secretary, I fully support Tess Corbett.

Tess Corbett is another now-former KAP candidate whose claim to infamy is her statement that she considers gays and lesbians to be in the same category as paedophiles. Its Ms Corbett’s dicey version of the slippery slope: if we accept homosexuality as normal, we’ll eventually accept paedophilia too. That’s a slippery slide that is usually occupied by Liberal Cory Bernardi, who thinks acceptance of homosexuality will lead to acceptance of polygamy and bestiality. Isn’t it just possible that acceptance of homosexuality will lead to a decrease in depression and suicide within the gay community?

But I digress.

Less than a minute after his tweet supporting Tess Corbett, he tweeted again.

8:11pm 23 Jan @BernardGaynor I wouldn’t let a gay person teach my children and I am not afraid to say it. #auspol

And there endeth a political career.

8:12pm 23 Jan @BernardGaynor If we value free speech and democracy then we would respect the right of Christians to hold their views about right and wrong.

Fair enough, too. I sincerely agree with this point, at least. What Mr Gaynor doesn’t mention is that in every state and territory in this country, it is illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of a lawful sexual preference.

Mr Gaynor was less than 36 hours into the role of candidate, so perhaps we should forgive him for being so naïve in the ways of Twitter:

8:47pm 23 Jan @BernardGaynor Woah! Just said prayers & put kids 2 bed. Came back to find many ppl tweeting against discretion over teachers. #goodluckwiththat

8:49pm 23 Jan @BernardGaynor Parents should have discretion over who teachers their children. #auspol

  Around about this time, one of two things happened: Either Bob Katter phoned Mr Gaynor and told him to get off Twitter before he does any more damage, or Bernard himself realised that he was facing a whole world of twitter-related pain, and decided to pray about it. Mr Gaynor’s increasingly popular twitter account went dark. There were no new tweets until the following day when he tweeted a link to a press release containing “clarifying comments”.

It’s always a concern when a politician needs to issue clarifying comments – surely politicians should be able to communicate at a professional level, with honesty and precision, and not need to elucidate their comments later. But no – serial clarifiers include Andrew Laming and Barnaby Joyce. Australians are lucky though – at least none of our politicians have tweeted their Anthony Weiners at us yet. I wonder what a clarifiying statement on that one would look like!


The shortlist (so far) of things Bernard Gaynor doesn't like

 Back to Mr Gaynor’s illustrative comments, which are available on his blog: his argument does not soften his stance against gay teachers, but it elaborates on his position that parents should be able to choose who teaches their children. He even makes a few assumptions about how he believes the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition would act as regards the rights of parents to choose who teaches their children. Hell, I support that right too, which is handy because it already exists. If you don’t like the value set at a certain school, you are most welcome to remove your child from that school and send it somewhere else.

Of course, if you can’t afford a private school that reflects your values, you can enjoy the widely varied range of qualified teachers available in the public school system, and stop making sexual orientation an issue. Alternately, give up your day job and home-school the children.

Mr Gaynor has received a swag of hate-tweets and death-wishes since making his homophobic comments on twitter, and that makes both of us sad. It’s a shock when it happens. I’ve received twitter death-threats from a political candidate because I (politely) challenged his views. Twitter can be a trial because of a handful of people with strongly held extremist perspectives and no idea how to conduct themselves in public.

And that’s it. He has been suspended from Katter’s Australia Party, and which means he won’t be standing for the senate as a member of the KAP. That should have been the end of the shortest, saddest political career since Mal Meninga tried to run as an independent in the ACT. Big Mal lasted a mere 28 seconds; Bernard Gaynor still hasn’t accepted that his race with the Katter stable is over. He’s still tweeting.

25th Jan @BernardGaynor I agree with KAP candidate Jamie Cavanough. I don’t want to buy meat that has been faced towards Mecca and blessed.

The rationale provided by Mr Cavanough is that if he buys Halal meat, some of the money from his purchase might find its way to the Muslim Community. It’s nice to have his position on Muslims confirmed; it wasn’t quite clear after his comment about burkas.

Meanwhile, just after 2pm today, Mr Gaynor released a statement confirming that he would be fighting his suspension from the KAP. It’s worth reading.

And that’s one helluva hate list to have put out there in just a few tweets: Bernard Gaynor’s 35 tweets have indicated that he does not tolerate gays, Muslims, climate scientists, Bogans and even Bob Katter. It’s fortunate that he has his faith and his family; it appears that he doesn’t have much else right now.

BTW, there is no mention of Mr Gaynor on the official Katter's Australia Party website.

Newmania: Living the Dream

King Campbell is living the dream: he has a lovely wife and daughters, good friends, an important and well paid job with all the perks. Now, less than nine months after being elected to lead Queensland out of the financial quagmire, the dream has faded like Queen Lisa's curtains during Daylight Saving.

If only...

King Campbell may have led the LNP back to government, but nothing is the way it should’ve been, and very few people on the Conservative side of politics are happy. There was a plan. The LNP won in a landslide. So what went wrong?

King Campbell's dramatic ascent to the top is virtually being mirrored on the slide back down. So dramatic has been King Campbell’s political descent that LNP members are walking away from their leader. Those who have stayed are finding the journey less satisfying than they had expected. Bruce Flegg has retreated to the back benches, Ros Bates is mired in controversy with her son, and everyone else is taking a beating over the violent cuts to jobs and services that their government has forced through.

The Newman Effect is undoubtedly having an impact on the electability of the federal Coalition, so Canberra isn't’t happy either.

And now, Ray Hopper is telling tales. Mr Hopper is a former LNP Member who defected to Bob Katter’s Australia Party last week, and he tells not of living the LNP dream, but of surviving a nightmare in the party room. Mr Hopper has revealed that Campbell Newman’s own leadership team of Treasurer Tim Nicholls and Deputy Premier Jeff Seeney chose Newman to lead the LNP to victory in the election, a role Newman performed admirably.


The thing is, the Nicholls-Seeney plan did not factor in any possibility that King Campbell would win the seat of Ashgrove. Had Kate Jones held Ashgrove for the Labor Party, Newman would’ve been out of a job because while you can lead the party in Opposition from outside the Parliament, you cannot be Premier without a seat. Had Newman lost Ashgrove, Tim Nicholls and Jeff Seeney – and possibly Bruce Flegg, Lawrence Springborg, Fiona Simpson and/or John Paul Langbroek – would have fought for leadership of the party, and Premiership of Queensland.

What would that have looked like? We’ll never know. Mr Hopper says there was no opportunity for dissent, no opportunity to vote for a leader. Newman was installed, and that was it...but he was installed to win, not to lead.

Of course, King Campbell’s People are ducking and weaving like the administrative mavens they are. Their response is that we should not believe the bitter rant of a man who left the party. Frankly, I’m more inclined to believe Mr Hopper than I am to believe the LNP spin team trying to protect the reputation of a leader who is rapidly losing all support. Ray Hopper has nothing to lose.

So far, the other two MPs who parted company with the LNP last week haven’t spoken out…but both of them - Dr Alex Douglas and Carl Judge - have shown interest in teaming up with Clive Palmer, should Mr Palmer form a new political party.

And then there’s Bob Katter, who has been in contact with Clive during the past few weeks, around the time that Clive removed himself from the LNP. Perhaps Mr Katter is after financial support from Clive, although they do have some areas of policy in common. Ray Hopper is now running the three man parliamentary arm of Katter’s Australia Party. If Clive’s latest plan goes ahead, and he picks up Douglas and Judge plus only two more, the two minor parties would have between them as many MPs as Labor. I wouldn’t rule anything out.

And while all of this to manoeuvring is going on, King Campbell continues to his slide to oblivion, which is exactly where Jeff Seeney and Tim Nicholls expected him to be. Unfortunately, he’s still Premier, although there is some doubt as to whether he is calling the shots.

Ray Hopper has suggested that our worst fears are being realised; that the thousands of jobs the Newman Government cut didn’t need to be cut; that the same result could have been achieved with a gentler approach. Gentleness was rejected. It would take too long, and the point was to get the nasty stuff out of the way quickly so that we could all forget about before the next election.

I guess they've forgotten that Anna Bligh pretty much sunk herself by announcing the infamous assets sale just weeks after being elected. Newmanians have long memories and carry grudges.

Nightmares can be nasty, particularly the recurring kind. Newmania is living the LNP nightmare right now, and we’re stuck in it for another two years, at least. The question of who is pulling the strings is largely irrelevant. Everyone is suffering and it appears that within the LNP senior ranks, there is no alternative.

At least Ray Hopper, Alex Douglas and Carl Judge can sleep easier.

What Does It Mean To Be Australian

In the midst of all the Budget palaver, the rumours of Peter Costello wanting to return to politics, the Craig Thomson/HSU fiasco, and Barack Obama’s public support for same-sex marriage, it would be easy to lose track of a story in this week’s news media.

Here’s one that almost got away:

Bob Katter says in ten years, Aussies will be a vanishing race as baby boomers die off. To ensure this doesn’t happen, he wants the Government to pay $7000 for every child for every year they’re legally children. Apparently it’s important to ensure that Australian babies are really Australians, and not migrants.

If you’re talking purity of race, you probably mean the Aboriginals – but only the pure ones, with none of that dirty whitefella influence.

No, then perhaps you’re of the view that the ‘real’ Australians – all 859 of them -  that arrived on the First Fleet, and those that came later, from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales; convicts and free settlers who left the Mother Country to make a new life on the other side of the world. Some of my ancestors would be amongst the free settlers who arrived in the middle of the 19^th century.

That’s the ‘real’ Australian, the way it was taught in schools in for most of the twentieth century. Australians were of Anglo-Saxon descent, Christian, with a government based on the Westminster System. We adopted and continued their language, their values, their sports.

The fact that a population of First Nations with a rich cultural heritage blanketed the continent for 40 thousand years before the ‘real’ Australians arrived was barely mentioned.

That doesn’t seem likely though, as Katter himself is of mixed Irish and Lebanese descent. Either he is denying his own Lebanese heritage, or he includes some migrants in his definition of “Australian.”

On the other hand, if he is including Lebanese in his version of what makes an authentic Australian, it would be logical to include the rest of the nationalities that come from the Middle East as well.

So far, we have Anglo Saxon, and Middle Eastern in the mix. Left out: the rest of Europe, most of Africa, all of the Americas, both North and South, South East Asians, North Asians, Indians, Pacific Islanders Inuit, Scandinavian.

Perhaps Mr Katter thinks we should just exclude everyone who was born overseas. The most recent Census statistics available, from 2006, indicate that 24% of the population was born outside Australia. What does Mr Katter suggest we do with them to protect the ”Australian race”? Deport them? Lock them up in mandatory detention centres in the middle of the Great Sandy Desert? Sterilise them?

This isn’t funny. This is about as unfunny as you can be, in the midst of such multiculturalism. From my perspective*, it’s divisive and ignorant, and I invite Mr Katter to sit down with me and have a coffee and talk about what makes an Australian.

He may not like our multicultural Australia, but it’s here, and we couldn’t stop it now, even if the majority wanted to. Even a return to our murky past via the White Australia Policy is impossible, and thank for your deity of choice for that!

Luckily for us, Mr Katter has a solution.  Throw money at it: $7000 per child per year to encourage parents (racially acceptable parents, that is) to have more kids, and lower the rates of suicide and homelessness.

In today’s money, that’s $98,000 in handouts to raise a child from newborn to fourteen years old. Obviously the payments would be indexed. On the basis of the 2006 Census figures, we can project a population of about 4.42milliom in that age bracket (0-14) in 2012. If we were to roll out this proposal right now, for the approximately 4.5 million kids between newborn and fourteen, we’d need about $31 billion dollars for one year. Our budget surplus of $1.5b would over about 5% of this payment. Mr Katter has suggested $2.1b, which would barely cover the newborns for a calendar year. Financially, we could not consider such a payment, even if it was sane.

Finally, let’s just take a look at the Australian population as it stands. It is multicultural, with almost one in four Aussies being born overseas. While we tend of think in terms of stereotypical ethnic ghettos, that model isn’t absolute. Even if there was an Australian racial identity 200 years ago, and a completely different one prior to that, there isn’t now. The racial makeup of Australian society is so magnificently inclusive, there is simply no single racial signature that captures what we are.

Multiculturalism, by it’s very nature, places Katter’s call for a financial solution to what he sees as a ‘racial’ problem in the basket marked Crazy-Talk. I’m sure I’m not the only Australian who is both affronted by this overt xenophobia, and amused by the impractical solution he’s proposed.

*My perspective: My maternal family roots are deep in English and Scottish soil, and my paternal family is Pakistani (see photo above). I was born in Australia, but is that enough for Bob Katter? My partner is of Scottish descent, but his first wife is 5^th generation Australian of Thai descent. His children are beautiful Eurasian girls who were born here. Are they Australian?

Mr Katter, in terms of race, how do you define “Australian”?

Bob's Kattastrophe

Try to remember your response to the announcement that outspoken independent Bob Katter was starting his own political party. I can recall having at least three responses simultaneously: cautious optimism, mocking laughter and a barely suppressed groan. All at once - quite a feat! I'm guessing I wasn't alone. A brand new political party had been announced, and it was being founded and headed by a "colourful" independent from outback Queensland.  

Originally he wanted his new party to be called The Australian Party, but was denied the right to register that name. So he added his own surname, recruited a Queensland independent from state politics, and announced to the waiting world that Australian politics now had a legitimate third banana.

With a bizarre mix of policies ranging from Tea Party-esque right wing religious conservatism through to agrarian socialism, Katter boasted of his plan to run a candidate in each of the 89 electorates in the upcoming Queensland election, and to shake up the latte belt socialists with his down to earth policies and fearless campaigning.

Now, with just a week left to run before the election, Katter’s Queensland campaign isn’t living up to the hype. Rather than being a third force, Katter’s Australian Party is polling in most electorates with the also-rans, the “others”. Perhaps those who laughed and mocked were right.

Remember that while this formidable force in Queensland and Australian politics was forming his new party, he was still a member of the Australian parliament too. That suggests the kind of determined effort that would floor men half his age.


Katter’s first challenge was with candidates. He failed to find suitable candidates to contest all 89 seats in Queensland’s parliament. High profile state independent Rob Messenger considered joining the party, but backed away when the party’s views on Sharia Law different from his own. On the other hand, Shane Knuth, the sitting member for Dalrymple, jumped ship to KAP after becoming disillusioned with the LNP.


Everything seemed to be running fairly well to plan, although quieter than I'd anticipated, until we saw the appalling television advertisement that ran under his party’s name last weekend.

It wasn’t news that Katter disapproved of same sex civil unions. Last year, he dumped a candidate who was in favour of conscience votes for members, on values issues issues like gay marriage. So that would be a 'no' then: everyone in the Katter party is expected to honour the party line, regardless of their personal beliefs. This was not a loose grouping of independents, leveraging each other's reach and buying in bulk. This was a values-based political party.


That’s not that unusual in political parties. Look at poor Campbell Newman: if elected, he’ll be leading the push to rescind the existing civil partnerships laws, despite having close friends who are lesbians and who want to be married, and despite his support of gay marriage, a stance emphasised in Katter’s advertisement. Why? Because that's the policy of the party to which he belongs and which he expects to lead.


Speaking of Newman, the ad was clearly designed to highlight Newman’s personal views and differentiate the KAP as the only truly morally conservative party. It's been almost universally criticised. In fact, it’s awfulness was the only point of agreement between Anna Bligh and Campbell Newman at last night’s Queensland Forum. Despite the condemnation from across the country, he won’t back down.

He also doesn’t admit that the ad that carries his name is homophobic.


Homophobic by intent or not is barely relevant any more. It was perceived as homophobic…in the cities, at least. Out in Katter Kountry, it was probably received with far more equanimity.


Will it win any votes though? In the city, very few; it's more likely to lose votes. In the bush, it may, although as a policy, opposition to gay marriage can’t be taken in isolation as a vote winner, particularly as the LNP shares that policy. It’s not a point of difference, and unless you are directly impacted by gay rights, it's probably of little interest.


Look at Coal Seam Gas mining activities though, and there’s more votes in it. Questions around the issue of Coal Seam Gas Exploration were asked of both leaders last night; both leaders were openly in favour of continued CSG and mining activities, because without the revenue from the industry, Queensland could be in financial difficulty.


One of the KAP’s key policy planks is a one year moratorium on CSR Mining activities to allow time to reassess and study the industry. That will play well with farmers whose properties are in the sites of the mining companies. More importantly, it’s in opposition to the LNP’s support for CSG. That’s the point of difference so many conservatives are looking for. In this instance, Katter has given conservative voters a choice.
 So amongst all the side issues, the mud-slinging, the distractions and the hoopla, and the policy-talk about cost of living and Queensland Health waiting lists and roads and schools, two issues have emerged as the ones we're all talking about: Civil Unions and Coal Seam Gas. Here's how they break down.

Katter’s Australia Party may do better than expected this election. There’s a good chance that the KAP will hold the two seats they already have: Beaudesert and Dalrymple. They have a better than average shot in Nanango, which has been held by conservative independent Dolly Pratt for over a decade. Dolly’s retiring, and the KAP’s candidate in Kingaroy is Carl Rackemann, former Aussie faster bowler. Combine name-recognition with the conservative bias of the seat, and it’s doable. Meanwhile, up in Katter Kountry, Bob’s son Robbie Katter will be running for the seat of Mount Isa. They love Bob up there. It’s another possibility. I’m even willing to concede that they might pick up a couple of random seats that no-one is really talking about.


At best, that would give the KAP 6 seats in the new Parliament. It's unlikely that the KAP will take votes from the ALP, but the conservative votes are in play. Six seats to Katter's mob is six less seats the LNP can win.


What about the rest? My best guess is three independents…so that’s nine candidates from outside the two major parties, leaving just 80 seats for the ALP and LNP to fight over.


Notice that I haven’t mentioned the Greens at all? Know why? Because they’ve been so low profile this election it’s almost like they aren’t here at all.


I think both Bobs (Katter and Brown) will be disappointed with this election campaign.


Question: Earlier this week, while federal parliament was in session in Canberra, Bob Katter wasn’t there. Does anyone know where Bob was, or why he wasn’t in Canberra, representing the people who elected him?