China’s meme-plomacy … Morrison’s ‘political amnesia’ … the gig is up

Meme-plomacy Look, we in Australia are not strangers to China’s fondness for “shitpost diplomacy” — back in 2020, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian posted a dodged-up image of an Australian cutting an Afghan child’s throat, a gleeful and ghoulish reference to the recently released Brereton report. It had the desired effect: we got mad and China won the troll war.

Still, it catches the breath, even knowing it’s the same guy, to see the spokesman for a major country’s government deploy a 10-year-old meme format to mount the argument that 9/11 was an inside job.

Perhaps it’s the fact that vast swaths of the internet are unavailable to the average Chinese citizen that gives memes a much longer half-life there. Regardless, we look forward to Lijian’s next missive, which will presumably be the “I can has cheezburger?” cat brightly announcing that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself.

Memory loss During a rambling press conference yesterday, Scott Morrison gave a detailed rundown of events that he had insisted, the day before, he had no recollection of. Of course, when he had mentioned this fogginess on assuming extra ministries — aside from those already revealed — it was mere minutes before it was revealed that, yes, of course he had indeed appointed himself additional portfolios. It was a first-class example of the “I can’t recall” defence, and it put us in mind of other classics, such as Bill Clinton’s 267 derivations of the phrase when being questioned about his alleged sexual harassment of Paula Jones.

It’s a particularly common complaint in Western Australia — as Rick Feeney sketched, former premiers Carmen Lawrence and Brian Burke were struck with persistent memory loss during inquiries into disasters their governments oversaw.

It was also a recurring theme of the final year of Gladys Berejiklian’s reign as New South Wales premier. She couldn’t remember exactly why she ignored treasury advice and supported a grant proposal in her secret boyfriend Daryl Maguire’s electorate. She couldn’t call to mind whether she had been at an “intimate fundraising dinner” at Club Taree where an allegedly illegal donation was made. And best of all, she had “no recollection” of sending a text that called then PM Scott Morrison a “horrible, horrible” person … more concerned with politics than people”.

What are your favourite examples of political amnesia? Let us know.

It’s the gig Yesterday’s Fair Work Commission (FWC) decision regarding Diego Franco, a former Deliveroo driver who filed for unfair dismissal against the company, is significant in two ways: first, it reveals the disastrous impacts of the High Court’s personnel contracting decision on worker’s rights in this country; second, it is nakedly scathing of that decision.

A quick primer: the gig economy brought to this country, most aggressively by Uber and credulously lapped by big chunks of the political and media class, wiped out a century of employment law and the protections that came with it for a whole class of workers. It did this by classifying workers — who fulfilled pretty much every common law definition of employees — as contractors. In an instant, there goes your minimum wage, paid leave, unfair dismissal protections and any responsibility the employer has for your safety. We have seen countless examples of how that has impacted workers, in sometimes tragic ways.

So when Franco, nominally a contractor with Deliveroo, took them to court for unfair dismissal and won, it seemed like a crack in the edifice, an acknowledgement that for legal purposes gig economy workers are employees. Then in February, the High Court, hearing a different case, said actually fuck all that, it is only the written contract that determines if a person is an employee or contractor. Hence, when Deliveroo appealed the decision, the FWC was obliged to overturn the original ruling. It dealt with this under the subheading “Realities we are obliged to ignore”. You can practically hear the tone:

We conclude that the Commissioner erred in finding that Mr Franco had been an employee of Deliveroo immediately prior to the termination of his engagement. When we say that the Commissioner “erred”, we of course only mean that in a formal sense since, on the common understanding of the law at the time the Commissioner made his decision, his finding was correct. It is the High Court’s subsequent statement of the law in Personnel Contracting which has rendered the finding erroneous.