Dr. Guarav Sharma is now an independent MP. We probably won’t have to wait much longer before we hear he’d be willing to work with a centre-right government in future, should the good people of Hamilton West re-elect him next year. His constituents deserve a lot better. Despite several invitations to share the evidence (a) of bullying and (b) how many of his staff have quit, Sharma has repeatedly failed to front up.

So far, he has produced no credible evidence beyond his say so to support his claims that the Labour leadership has engaged in lies, bullying, gaslighting and cover-ups. There is nothing to justify holding an independent investigation into whether Sharma has been the victim of injustice. To date, Sharma appears to have regarded the attempts by the Parliamentary Service to mediate the staffing issues in his own office as a “bullying” intrusion on his “right” to treat staff as he deems fit. The Francis report into parliamentary work conditions said otherwise.

Sharma’s colleagues have allegedly been guilty of the following catalogue of horrors. They held a meeting (without him being present) to discuss his unilateral decision to publicly release their private emails without their permission. Then they held another meeting (to which he was invited) to decide what could/should be done about it, if he refused to desist from violating their trust and privacy. In other words, his colleagues abided by the party’s formal process for handling such conflicts. Finally, a Minister reportedly made Sharma wait out in the office while they watched the conclusion of a sporting event on television. Heinous crimes no doubt, but reason enough for trying to blow up your own party, and for publicly calling your leader a liar? Hardly.

All along, this column has been inclined to think Sharma’s rebellion has been a strategic ploy staged for his own benefit. Labour won quite a few electorates in 2020 that it will struggle to hold next year. Sharma may have concluded that he has a better chance of survival if he stands next year as an independent MP able to pitch for votes from the right, the left, and from the uncommitted middle. A victim willing to take a stand. on principle.

Yet plainly, Sharma is not a principled but misguided Labour rebel in the mould of John A. Lee, some 80 years ago. Instead, he seems more like a Peter Dunne, a politician whose values proved to be elastic enough to serve the agenda of either the left or the right. In his wilder dreams, Sharma may even imagine himself being a king maker if nationally, a razor-thin outcome eventuates next year.

To that possible end, what Sharma’s expulsion from the Labour Party has done is to give him more than a year to concentrate on promoting a favourite project – himself – without having to do anything at all on behalf of the Labour Party that gave him the platform for his political career.

Sharma’s constituents need to ask themselves a basic question. They elected Sharma on the Labour ticket, in the belief he would work constructively with his colleagues to help them negotiate the bureaucracy of government, and thereby enable the people of Hamilton West to access the public services they need and deserve. Instead, their local MP has turned himself into a pariah figure, with no ability to work jointly with fellow MPs and Cabinet Ministers on their behalf. It didn’t have to turn out this way.

At the end of the day, Sharma has chosen to put his own perceived best interests ahead of those of his constituents. As a rookie MP, there is simply no way that Sharma can serve his constituents better as a lone wolf than by being a team player within the ruling party. If his constituents really were Sharma’s top priority, you’d have to think he would have tried harder to ensure he didn’t damage his ability to achieve the best outcomes for the people who voted for him. Yet at every step along the way to his expulsion, this sorry exercise of pique has always been about what Sharma feels to be his due. The people of Hamilton West should keep that in mind, if and when Sharma professes to be their selfless servant in future.

ScoMo and the Governor-General

It's hard to think that Australians could manage to find a whole new set of reasons to hate Scott Morrison. It is even harder to believe that Australians have also found a new set of reasons to distrust the ways that the Governor-General can help subvert the conventions of the country’s social democracy. After all, it was the Governor-General (Sir John Kerr) who turfed out the elected Whitlam government in 1975.

Now, it transpires that the current Governor General (David Hurley) chose to secretly swear in Scott Morrison as a co-minister in several key ministries: Treasury, Home Affairs, Finance, Health and Resources. The evidence of him doing so was omitted from the official diaries of the G-G’s activities. Weird how these oversights and transgressions by the Queen’s representative so routinely serve the interests of conservative politicians.

Normally, the G-G’s diary reports on everything that the G-G has been doing. The Australian public were recently told, for example, that the G-G had just bestowed the Duke of Gloucester Sash on the top sheepdog at the National Sheepdog Trials. But as the ABC recently reported, the evidence of Hurley swearing in Scott Morrison as the head of five separate ministries (and without a term limitation) was not deemed worthy of inclusion in the daily diaries.

Morrison has claimed that he appointed himself to all those ministries as a back-up move during the pandemic. But that doesn’t explain why he told only one of his colleagues (Geoff Hunt) and not the general public, that he’d done so. His Cabinet colleagues were kept in the dark that their leader had cloned their jobs, and given himself the power to set aside their decisions. So much for the conventions around collective Cabinet responsibility. It is pretty hard to be responsible for decisions of which you were unaware, and which the boss has made behind your back.

On at least one known occasion, Morrison did use those secret powers to override a decision that the alleged Resources Minister had made. (So much for the rule that the buck stops with the Minister.) Whatever you call a system where one person appoints themselves as the ultimate arbiter of all major decisions, a “democracy” is not the first term that comes to mind. Apparently, a subsequent report to PM Anthony Albanese has found that Morrison did not act illegally by giving himself all those ministerial powers. The damage was done to the conventions that underpin the whole edifice.

And it was the Governor-General who quietly rubber stamped this exercise in prime ministerial over-reach. Hurley has claimed in a press release that it is not his job to tell the Australian public about such arrangements.

"It is not the responsibility of the Governor-General to advise the broader ministry or parliament (or public) of administrative changes of this nature," the statement said. "The Governor-General had no reason to believe that appointments would not be communicated."

That doesn’t wash with some observers:

The role of Hurley here is critical; he claims it was not his responsibility to publicise these arrangements. But it has now emerged that since December 2019 his office stopped reporting to the Senate an indexed list of files chronicling all his official activities. This requirement was legislated back in 1994. Greens senator David Shoebridge says “it is a pretty stark coincidence that this refusal to provide transparency happens just six months after David Hurley takes on the role of Governor-General.” A job given to him by Scott Morrison.

According to The Australian Financial Review the Office of the Official Secretary to the Governor-General, acting on its own authority says, “there needs to be a better system of notifying the public when ministers are appointed”.

You bet. And while we’re at it, there also needs to be a better system for choosing the Governor-General, or their republican equivalent. Surely, it shouldn’t be left to the government of the day to pick someone from a shortlist of their own devising. Somehow, Kerr’s actions in 1975 didn’t bring to an end this odd willingness that Australians have to surrender crucial constitutional powers to the representative of a foreign monarch. Hurley’s apparent collusion with Morrison now bids to do even further damage to the credibility of the office of Governor-General.

Clearly, the path to a republic will not be taken in Australia – or in New Zealand – until Queen Elizabeth II has finally departed the scene. But this sorry episode with ScoMo as the Minister of Everything underlines just why New Zealand should have also - long ago - cut its own final constitutional ties to Mother England, and to the monarch’s local representative.

Sweet Sounds of Sierra Leone

After a week of Dr. Sharma’s shenanigans, and after Brian Tamaki’s march on Parliament as the avowed champion of freedom, maybe we all need a bit of soothing palm wine music from the Sierra Leone master musician, S.E. Rogie. Here’s “Koneh Pelawoe ( Pleaee Open Your Heart”) from Rogie’s final album Dead Men Don’t Smoke Marijuana…

And from an earlier album, here’s his lament for “My Lovely Elisabeth…”

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