For all the truly god-awful, inhumane, staggeringly brutal policies the Australian Government has in place regarding asylum seekers and off-shore processing, the one minor glimmer of hope was that, in cases of extreme medical or psychological distress, those desperate people being held indefinitely in Australian-run detention centres could be evacuated to Australia to receive the medical care and treatment they need. The Medevac Bill, which passed despite the Morrison Government’s best efforts to kill it dead at the time. Now though, Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison and everyone else who could not give two shits about the plight of refugees have gotten their wish. The Medevac Bill has been killed off on the floor of the Senate, and it’s all thanks to independent senator Jacqui Lambie and some sort of unspoken secret deal that the Government feebly tried to deny existed.
[jwplayer KI9ANAzh]
The Government found the numbers to repeal the Medevac Bill in the Senate this morning, with One Nation and Lambie joining the Government in voting to pass new amendments that effectively nullify the old bill.
What’s got the entire political bubble in uproar, though, is that it would appear Lambie and the Coalition struck some sort of deal that neither party are divulging, done in exchange for Lambie’s vote on the issue.
This morning, the Government hastily called a vote on the amendments, heavily implying that they had *something* to go on, given the bill had otherwise stalled in the Upper House.
In farcical scenes, Liberal Senator Mathias Cormann stood up in the senate this morning and robustly denied that a deal had been struck. Less than 20 minutes later, however, Lambie addressed the senate and said there was, in fact, a deal. But that she couldn’t speak of what it was due to “national security.”
A teary Lambie told the Senate “I’m not being coy or silly when I say I genuinely can’t say what I proposed. I know that’s frustrating to people. And I get that. I don’t like holding things back like this. But when I say I can’t discuss it publicly due to national security concerns, I am being 100 per cent honest to you,” and that she voted with the Government on the issue because she “can’t let the boats stack up.”
Taking an already fucked scene to even more ridiculous depths, Greens leader Richard Di Natale then asserted he’d overheard Cormann asking Lambie if it was ok if he told the Senate floor there was no deal, a point which Lambie responded to by confirming there really was a deal.
So the Government wins. Asylum seekers will no longer be allowed to be evacuated to Australia for medical treatment. And they petulantly got their way by striking some sort of clandestine deal with a loose unit moron sitting on the crossbench, the details of which aren’t even being made available to opposition politicians, let alone the Australian public.
Fuck this for a joke, I tell you what.
