It’s been a shocker of a holiday for a Turnbull government which slunk off to lick its wounds after being routed by its own ludicrous 2016 energy policy debacle – only to be rocked by MPs’ travel scandals and the debacle of the Centrelink Robo-debt-clawback debt extortion scheme which may, it seems clear this week, have a ninety per cent error rate.

It doesn’t help when The Australian National Audit Office reports that the Department of Immigration and Border Protection spent $2.2 billion without permission. Nor when Scott Morrison trumpets he’s, “putting Australia first”, but has to go to London to announce he’s helped us grow a $500 billion gross public debt; outspending Labor two to one.

But, look over here, Scomo’s got a beaut new trade deal up his sleeve, says The Herald Sun. Just as soon as the Brexit dust settles, he’ll be laying the foundations for a new trade agreement. Perhaps there will be stuff for backpackers who can also take in the washing in a transitioning economy based on services more than digging up coal and iron ore.

Much clearer, is the proposed mid-year export of George Brandis to London to get him out of harm’s way and to become Australian High Commissioner. It is being treated as an “open secret” at DFAT. Lord Alexander Downer who expected, at least, another term on the grounds that he is born to rule and that Daddy was Commissioner before me will have to be dragged kicking and scheming from the Australia House mansion by the usurper. At least with Crown backing, the Colossus of toads’ deposing of Downer should be less fraught than his demotion of a previous solicitor general.

Demotion is something the Coalition knows intimately, after its shock election result and its decline in opinion polls. As the Chinese Year of the Rooster dawns, Malcolm Turnbull and his government are already feather dusters.

Rude shocks continue.  The Coalition of capons pulls its head out of the sand, only to be eye-gouged by newly proclaimed US Vandal-king, Donald the Red, a power-drunk, politically illiterate knuckle-headed tyrant eager to show he’s king of the playground at home and top dog on the world stage by abuse of his presidential executive powers.

Trump, the campaign blowhard, was meant to morph into a Republican pussy-cat. That was the Coalition plan; its reality-denying rationale for inaction and inertia secured by yet another Julie Bishop charm offensive- now exposed as woefully inadequate.

Instead, Trump is rushing to honour his threats including tearing up the TPP, banning Syrian refugees, closing the border to all Muslims and leaving Australia no “great and powerful friend” to cosy up to at the arse-licking end of the world.

The deal to re-settle, in the US, refugees from Manus and Nauru, struck under Obama, is also dead in the water, Labor argues, but, world leaders in Direct Action, trickle-down, the NBN, scrapping a carbon tax and other modes of reality denial, the government remains confident, the PM announces Saturday, deep within the Coalition’s virtual sinkhole, it has found a loophole “deep within” the President’s anti-Muslim executive order.

The loop-hole, said to have been inserted by a cutting edge PMC allows a case-by-case exemption to allow the US to “conform to pre-existing agreements” provided Trump understands any of it or has read his own executive order.

Heroically, Turnbull phones Trump Sunday, on the number he got from Greg Norman, to probe the inner incoherence of the nuanced and profound understanding that has characterised The Donald’s diktats so far.

Doing a typically magnificent job as back-up, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce adds his own natty touch of policy incoherence and disunity. He tells 2GB listeners – the radio station that governs Australia – that it would not be the end of the world if the deal did not go ahead.

Finding his own loophole meanwhile, Loghman Sawari flies from Manus to Fiji, to seek asylum on the grounds of his certain persecution should he return to PNG. The 21 year old Iranian is the first to seek protection from Australia’s punitive offshore detention regime which has meant years of suffering beatings, bullying, imprisonment, illness, suicide attempts and being threatened by a PNG official.  He fears that Trump will tear up the resettlement in the US plan.

Border Supremo, Generalissimo Peter Dutton has yet to comment – and won’t because operational secrecy trumps open and transparent government. Just imagine how the people-smugglers’ business model would benefit once people realised they could smuggle themselves DIY-style. Expect refugee advocates to be blamed for what is yet another indictment of offshore detention and evidence that Turnbull’s US resettlement plan is a cruel and dangerous hoax.

The ANZUS hoax is still intact. Trump hasn’t torn up the ANZUS Treaty yet, but given its nebulous wording only “to consult” he doesn’t have to. Turnbull’s wait and see tactics mean his government is flat-footed; floundering. Blind Freddy can see he’d be mad to expect any favours from a US President whose anti-Muslim ban is creating chaos around the world. He books a call for 9:00 am Sunday (5:00 pm Saturday in Washington) anyway.

Australia does receive from the US State Department a culturally sensitive Happy Australia Day message which claims that the US has “no better friend than Australia”.

If only the reverse were true. The message coincides with Invasion Day rallies involving hundreds of thousands of Australians in major centres throughout Australia which are generally reduced in the media to reports of “clashes” rather than for any statement they seek to make.

Barnaby Joyce helpfully adds “protesters should crawl under a rock and hide a little bit”, as he does his best to promote ignorance and intolerance from the top – doing his own bit, as always, to disgrace and dishonour the Coalition in the eyes of increasing numbers of Australians who would vote this mob out tomorrow if they could.

His government in free-fall in opinion polls – 46% to Labor’s 54% in Essential’s poll this week, Mal the Vaccillator, the PM of convenience, whose total surrender to the right has neither quelled rebellion, nor inspired followers, is in deep trouble. Adding to his fix, an outbreak of Trumpophilia – with some MPs already Trump-struck.

Scott Morrison vows to “put Australia first” while right wing nut jobs get out their dog-whistles and Barnyard Barnaby descends to rocks and stones. Never to be outdone in delusions of grandeur, Pauline Hanson is reported to believe she has a serious chance of winning government in the Queensland state election.   Or hold the balance of power.

Or something very big, important, something just “yuge” whenever her Svengali, micromanager and political aspirant himself, James Ashby, gets around to providing that talking point.

Beastie-Boy Cory Bernardi and George Christensen, geed up by Trump’s public humping of democracy and all decorum threaten to come out publicly as anti-Halal 10 February at anti-Islamic Q Society’s fund raiser while sniper Abbott’s latest gibe is that the PM ought to stop talking about agility and show some. Somehow, Abbott’s taunt gets a result.

Rocked by rorting revelations, so serious Pythagorean numerologist Sussan Ley’s inquiry must be kept secret, and with no policy agenda for 2017’s parliamentary year, the Coalition digs deep within its existential absurdity to find its own, inner, dead parrot.

Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch is reworked as a live TPP no-one else can see – an invisible friend with benefits. Frantic for distraction, the PM pretends that Trump has not killed off the TPP. Behold! It is reborn; our Free Trade saviour. Bill Shorten must die for his “cowardly” and “gutless” lack of faith and his heresy in refusing the communion of holy free trade – and his allegiance to populist, protectionist, powers of darkness.

Novel? It is politics as usual in the asylum; a mad theatre of the absurd run by the inmates, largely for their own benefit with a few indulgent words of praise from captains of industry bankers and the odd media mogul.

A couple of Liberal shills are called in to attest to the TPP resurrection. There was still “a lot to be gained” from the TPP and “we intend to pursue that”, Mad Dog Scott Morrison, our Federal Treasurer and revenue problem denialist says mid-week from a UK where he has discovered the secret to housing affordability – as you do –  is to stay in bed with property developers, an amazing breakthrough he and his PM call “increasing supply”.

Trade Minister Steve Ciobo, who recently revealed that he can’t tell a trade deal from a Grand Final, chimes in with a catchy “12 minus one” arrangement, a sort of reverse baker’s dozen, rather like leaving the US out of its own stag night.

Japan, on the other hand, still raw after being dudded over Abbott’s submarine building deal, sneers. The TPP is “meaningless without the US”. Pursuing the TPP is a “pointless waste of time” agrees Shorten.

But Labor becomes the whipping boy. For days Shorten is howled down, publicly flogged for being a “cowardly” wimp and a free trade heretic and not upholding a TPP that has expired – a TPP that never was. An alternative factual TPP. What’s going on?

Turnbull’s farcical TPP diversion is a desperate bid to wedge Bill Shorten as anti-trade or for being weak- and in yet another echo of Tony Abbott’s character assassination – just for being Bill Shorten – a slur in itself now, thanks to Murdoch media and Abbott’s Royal Commission show trial which have both helped demonise the Labor leader.

This week, Turnbull taunts Bill Shorten over the dead parrot of the TPP which anyone but gutless Bill, weak Bill – can tell is not dead but just resting, shagged out after a long squawk. Labor’s honesty is heresy, treason and no cojones combined, in the PM’s hysterical denunciation.

OK, it might be clinically dead – but it will prove a phoenix rising from the ashes of Trump’s trade treaty bonfire. Or Trump could change his mind. Or a re-jigged TPP will lead us to a fair bit of eternal prosperity for the time being.

In a post-truth Trump universe of alternative facts, no-one dare mention the truth. The TPP, like all other so-called “free trade agreements” is about trade protection. It is chock-a-block with lists of free trade exempt items such as digital goods and medicines. It seeks to increase copyright protection over these goods. Extend trademarks.

Australians would continue to pay more for these under the TPP. Leaked documents from the largely secret treaty, a lawyers’ picnic that was seven years in the making reveal that the TPP would extend US copyright laws over Australian businesses, hindering innovation and adding compliance costs, according to intellectual property experts.

In brief, one big lie inhabits another. Shorten is demonised for not valuing a dead TPP. It’s a bizarre contortionist performance from a frantic PM who is scaling new heights of absurdity in his will to convince us, against all evidence, that the dead parrot sings.  How can he keep a straight face? Yet his resurrection dream is even sillier.

Not only is the TPP alive and well, with a quick re-jig and a few shanghaied new crew members from China, Indonesia, or wherever, we’ll be in easy street, rich beyond belief by rivers of free trade wealth trickling down from fat cat exporters. Pity no-one apart from Turnbull seems to see his point. Or would ever believe a Coalition promises.

Unlike Turnbull, however, Donald Trump seems to be keeping his pledges. Or his threats to tear up everything Obama achieved, everything progressive or enlightened or wise. So much to undo. So little time.

Certainly he is backing out of the TPP as promised as soon as he takes office. Most see this as the kiss of death. The US is a whopping 40% of the TPP which is less about trade than enabling big pharma, big tobacco and other US corporate interests to dictate to Australia and other nations how local politics best protects US investments. With a TPP, for example, plain packaging of cigarettes would fail. The investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) clause gives corporations power over its signatories; all sovereign states.

The other aim of the late, lamented TPP was strategic. It would balance China’s growing regional political and economic power. Act as a bulwark against the rise of the (not-so) Pacific Panda with its military installations in disputed territories and its muscular global diplomacy. Yet that TPP is not the make-believe TPP which our government wants resurrected.

To hear Turnbull or Ciobo spruik it, the TPP’s not about strategy or investment it’s all about trade, and not just trade but free trade, Amen.  Look at all the deals that will go West if we walk away from the TPP at this stage. It’s bunkum.

In 2010, our own Productivity Commission found the benefits of the TPP to be negligible. No-one in government admits that TPP nations are already our trading partners. As for economic benefits, we didn’t need a TPP to have a resources boom from our trade with China.

Shorten ought to get real, Turnbull jeers. Any fool can see that the TPP is still alive. A quick ring around the neighbours and we’ll top up the numbers. Give the TPP skeleton the kiss of life. Put Humpty Dumpty together again. Get the gang show back on the road.

Of course, he’s got a lot to deal with – there’s a rift between the nervous nellies of the back bench who fear electoral annihilation through sheer incompetence and own goals of a cabinet you could drive a panzer tank division through. Or drag a Trump tower. Sideways. But his latest outrageous display is insane. Of course, there’s a lot on his disordered mind.

Factor in a damaging rorting crisis with the recycling of World’s best Greg Hunt, a fan of the US Health system, as Health Minister and a perfect, scrap-Medicare patsy. Blend in a complete absence of any plan or policy to speak of beyond tax cuts for the rich. Add a dash of Narcissus Trump who doesn’t give a toss for all our diplomatic grovelling, fawning and our mindless US-Alliance fetishising.

All he cares about is the size of his inauguration crowd and throwing his weight around.

Presto! Desperation is bound to break out. You might almost feel sorry for a PM who once had to say that he and The Donald were peas in a pod with their business backgrounds and their late entry politics – even if neither of these is true. Alternative facts, rule, OK?

We have come to expect the unexpected from a government with no real plan and less demonstrated competence – beyond a genius for turning crisis into catastrophe. Yet, as the year of the Rooster dawns, everywhere is chaos and cock-up. Trump-mania afflicts his crew, the new US president turns out to be mad, bad and dangerous to know, a monster intent on proving he’s boss at all costs. No wonder Captain Mal is showing a bit of strain.

But who would have thought he’d reprise the Monty Python dead parrot sketch in his madness- his manic quest to wedge Bill Shorten on the TPP; an ex-treaty, an agreement which even Shinzo Abe, never the sharpest knife in the sushi kitchen, can tell you is deceased.

Or could it be that the dead parrot represents the Turnbull government itself that is deceased, DOA at the beginning of 2017 parliamentary year; all over bar the squawking?

 

 

“Watching Donald Trump take the oath of office is like seeing Bobo the Clown Photoshopped into the Last Supper,” writes the ABC’s Simon Royal. Many Americans are equally shocked. A narcissist with no concern beyond himself and his wealth, a political simpleton, with no experience in public life and little understanding of public issues, an egoist who poses as a populist reformer, a redneck who made his contempt for tradition, protocol and taboo his byword, the 45th President of the United States is a shocker.

Could Americans have chosen a more divisive, more unfit figure? The inauguration, 20 January of the seventy-year-old, reality TV star, real-estate hustler, former beauty pageant entrepreneur, six-times bankrupt and one time professional wrestler installs a president with a 40% approval in opinion polls, the lowest on record.

Trump gained 3 million popular votes less than his rival, Hilary Clinton. It shows. Washington public transport figures reveal fifty per cent fewer locals turn out for Trump than Obama. Protesters take to the streets.

Trump already has half the population offside – and not just in the USA. Eclipsing the inauguration crowd, half a million women in pink knit “pussy hats” march on Washington, the following day in the largest protest demonstration in US history while around the world 1.5 million more march in support in 161 cities across all seven continents. “You can’t comb over misogyny reads one sign.” “Make America compassionate again” reads another.

“It’s been a heart-rending time to be both a woman and an immigrant in this country, says activist America Ferrera. “Our dignity, our character, our rights have all been under attack and a platform of hate and division assumed power yesterday.”

“You are really special, amazing people” Trump tells the CIA the next day, ignoring the Women’s March. He makes a beeline for the CIA HQ in Langley Va; after the National Prayer Service. He’s going to need to build some bridges, at least, with the CIA, having trashed their reputation in dismissing evidence Russia intervened in his election.

The “amazing special people” will require more persuasion than empty flattery, however. Sadly, it’s all Trump knows – along with contesting the truth of anything unflattering to himself.

The newly inaugurated president has already gone to work on his attendance figures, attacking reports of poor attendance. The media’s lying, he says of estimates of 250 thousand. He’s sure it was over a million people. His media people are working on it. Give them a few weeks and it will be at least a million and a half.

White House press secretary, whining Sean Spicer uses his first White House briefing to lecture the press on its “deliberate false reporting” for ten minutes before walking out without taking questions. This administration will be holding the media to account, he says.

It’s an alarmingly adversarial start to the Trump Presidency’s relationship with the press, yet it continues the Trump campaign theme that bad news is fake news and the tactic of disputing all reporting which may be critical or hold Trump presidency to account.

Trump can, however, count on a Mexican wave of support down under. Luckily for the new president and for the “ordinary Strines” she claims to represent, (while consistently voting with the government), Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party has sent its envoy Brian Burston to give the 45th president its own special blessing.

Burston’s already in the press with his endorsement of the new type of One Nation candidate and how they are heaps better than the 1998 train wreck, QLD PHON party. For starters, this time the party is way smarter. Any fool can see that unlike today’s breed,

“They ran dopes, unemployed, inexperienced, not all that intellectual …

Hanson’s too busy, herself, she says with state election matters involving travel which she books up to her federal government account, unable or unwilling to see when challenged that this is a rort. Burston pays his own way to the US Trump mother ship.

Busy indeed. Hanson assembles her WA candidates but refuses to speak about them, in a Trump-style attack on right of the press to scrutinise public life. “I’m not going to have trial by media here, with all of my candidates. If this interview is going to be all about the candidates that represent me, I’m sorry, but this interview is finished,” Hanson says.

Piquing interest, is One Nation’s candidate for Dawesville, Pastor Lawrence Shave, whose Bikini Baristas business plan will enable consumers to ogle women in swimwear while they satisfy their caffeine fix. Pastor Shave also professes divine, healing powers but Hanson stops the presser.

Hanson’s new WA breed of candidate is a step up from the old guard including former PHON Senator, stand up comedian Rod Culleton whose latest routine is to refuse to accept the Federal Court and Senate ruling that he should be removed from his seat because he is bankrupt. He says he is solvent and will not leave his office. He could now face prosecution for impersonating a government official. It’s a sobering prospect. Yet Pauline’s distracted.

A Trump-struck Hanson shuns the former sheep farmer to put tickets on herself.

So keen is PHON to be invited to Trump’s big bash, empiricist Malcolm Roberts badgers DFAT to find them some spare tickets. Later, these are flourished as evidence of One Nation’s hotline to The Donald and of PHON’s clout in US-Australian relations. Now all Strines can see how big PHON is. Earlier Hanson, or James Ashby on her account, tweets:

“Would you believe it? I have been gifted tickets to the Presidential Inauguration Ceremony of Donald Trump – What an honour!” Of course it’s not. Reports quickly emerge of masses of discarded tickets at the under-subscribed ceremony. “Gifted”, also, is a big stretch.

SBS journalist, Lee Lin Chin is quick to attack Hanson’s grandstanding: “Who hasn’t got tickets? No actual Americans want to go so they’re just inviting everyone. I’ve got a +8 for my man harem,” the pint-sized presenter replies.

The Donald’s Oz cheer squad extends beyond One Nation, or Lee’s man harem, however. It’s a mile wide and an inch deep before you even consider Corey Bernardi.

Never to be upstaged, former Labor PM and UN leadership hopeful, Kevin Rudd calls for a fair go for Trump. Patronises him. Like a child with a tantrum, Trump, should “calm down” his dangerous talk on China and Taiwan, seize our help with nuclear disarming North Korea and bring back the TPP, suggests “One Kevin” Rudd ever bubbling with practical ideas.

Always at arms’ length from practicality, PM Turnbull is upbeat about the TPP. Why, he’s been on the blower to The Donald, jumping the Trump shark, thanks to Greg Norman. Bill Shorten says it’s “a waste of time” and “a distraction” from a PM who has no plans for jobs.

Shorten is proved correct on the time-wasting when an unusually coherent White House statement that is not a lecture or a tirade confirms Trump’s promise to withdraw from the TPP is one of the Administration’s first acts. So much to undo, so little time.

Oz-media’s made itself look silly smoothing the way for Trump, the vulgarian at the gate. The ABC’s inauguration commentary is saccharine with mindless Coalition optimism, which is quickly revealed as so much wishful thinking from a government caught on the nod.

The official ABC spin seems to be that now he’s thrown his rattle out of his playpen and he’s got what he wanted, The Donald will morph into a sensible and moderate monster who only wants our constant undivided attention and who has the nuclear codes to do it with.

Nothing in the Donald’s inauguration speech, not even an echo of Batman, The Dark Knight Rises “…and we give it back to you, the people,” suggests that Trump will soften his campaign rhetoric in favour of more statesman-like role once in power. Everything he says about isolationist foreign policy, in his “dark and inward-looking” fourteen minute speech, his “America first, only America first” is an alarming departure from US interdependence.

So much for the Turnbull’s government’s agility. Its foreign policy, like its domestic planning is rooted in inertia; do nothing, or as little as possible, repeat mindless Abbott era slogans, bag Bill Shorten and see what evolves.

Now it’s caught flat-footed. Foreign Affairs light-weight Julie Bishop says she’s been on the job, briefing Trump’s team on Australia’s requirements but that could mean anything and besides, there’s no evidence whatsoever anyone’s listening. Or ever will. Even the national broadcaster struggles to spin that.

To be fair, Aunty is distracted by the shock resignation Friday of Director of TV’s Richard Finlayson which comes at a time of deep unrest within the ABC, under former Murdoch executive, Managing Director Michelle Guthrie, a Turnbull appointee, whose reign is mired in job losses, cost cutting and ringing accusations of “piss poor management”.

Guthrie is critical of Four Corners-type programs and seems not to understand the role of investigative reporting at all; wants to do “more about successful businessmen”. It’s a work in progress. Already ABC news is lurid with tabloid stories; sensation displaces information.

Expect a puff piece soon on Mr Donald Trump, the people’s president and the inspiring business types who comprise his cabinet. When it’s properly run down and ready to be privatised as the IPA wishes, the ABC could be flogged off to an American. Rupert Murdoch is reported to be currently enjoying Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull’s harbour-side hospitality.

Other media outlets are also complacent; Donald-conciliatory. The least predictable presidency, the least qualified and most divisive figure on the world stage ever is spun as more of the same. Nothing to see here. Business as usual.

“The fair-minded thing is to give the guy a go,” a folksy Rudd tells Seven’s Sunrise on Friday, aglow with sanctimonious hypocrisy given his undermining of Julia Gillard. Rudd’s voice upstages Turnbull as intended – briefly- but fails to quell what is reported to be hundreds of Americans who try to block the entrances to the Inauguration. Dump-Trump demonstrations take place in other cities in America and throughout the world.

“Illegitimate, bastard” shouts Code Pink women’s rights organiser, Madea Benjamin, who makes it into the section reserved for honoured guests and journalists and Joe Hockey before she is thrown out by police. A protestor gets dangerously close to the new president, if not quite in The Donald’s orange face, at least not far below it.

“Trump is not going to be stopped at the top, he’s going to be stopped from the bottom, from people rising up,” says Ben Allen, a thoughtful 69-year-old retired teacher from San Francisco.

“We support the right of everybody in this country, no matter what nationality, what religion, the colour of their skin, to be respected as a human being, and this guy doesn’t respect anybody.”

As he speaks, removed from the web is the Department of Labor’s report on the rights of lesbians, bisexuals, gays and transgender people. The White House’s exposition on climate change and efforts to combat it are also excised. Police hurl flash bang grenades to banish protestors from the inauguration parade route. The smell of tear gas wafts over K street, the heart of Washington’s lobbying district. So much to undo. So little time.

To borrow a Trumpism, its 45th president is bigly disliked already – before he’s even had time to” bomb the shit out of ISIS” or leave NATO or reverse Obama’s sanctions against Russia for hacking the election. He’s yet to slash corporate taxes, bring back water boarding, dismantle Obamacare or lift a brick to wall out waves of Mexicans.

Civil Rights leader, veteran Democrat Congressman John Lewis boycotts the inauguration also because Mr Trump is an “illegitimate” President, he says. Thin-skinned Trump takes this personally, as he does all criticism- even working into his speech an “all talk no action” gibe at “politicians” to echo his earlier tweet that “Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results.”

“All talk, talk, talk — no action or results. Sad!” Trump dismisses Lewis’ role in the protest movement which led to the landmark voting rights act of 1965 and the end of racial discrimination in voting in the US. Lewis has already achieved more for his people and for human rights than Trump ever will.

Malcolm Turnbull may not have been certain Tuesday just who would represent Australia at Trump’s swearing in but Ambassador Joe, Big Noter, Hockey clears that up with tweets that he, along with “all the chiefs of mission”, would attend all the events. We don’t hear that much from Joe: it’s good to know he’s still alive and tweeting. Doubtless he’s been busy saving the TPP and working on that people-trafficking asylum-seeker swap deal.

A messianic figure, in his own eyes, at least, Trump vows to be the greatest job producer that God ever created, a feat he will achieve by cutting taxes for corporations, a trickle-down con trick familiar to Australian voters deceived by similar promises. It’s a key detail in a fact free speech which is stuffed over-full of dreaming big and winning.

“We must think big and dream even bigger,” he says. “America will start winning again, winning like never before.” There’s no explanation of how this will be achieved or even what it means, just echoes of a former casino operator philosophy overlaid, perhaps, with the mindless Neoliberal cruelty which divides all human endeavour into winning and losing.

“We will bring back our jobs, we will bring back our borders, we will bring back our wealth and we will bring back our dreams.” Trump fist pumps. But expect delays. His transition team has only two of its fifteen cabinet members approved and has made only 29 of 660 executive appointments. Trump Inc. is nowhere near ready for government.

Big business is investing heavily in bringing back its wealth. Trump’s inauguration is awash with corporate donations. Chevron ($660,000) and Boeing ($1.3 million) are some of the big business donors who help the Trump team raise more than $131 million for their inauguration hoe-down — double any previous President’s send-on. A big donation secures an intimate dinner with the President and First Lady.

Doubtless, Trump aims to invest heavily in himself, (as did Turnbull with his $2 million donation to his own campaign.) Of course, he claims he won’t. Yet delegating his business affairs to his sons is no substitute for a blind trust. One expert on corporate governance warns that Donald Trump will be a “hopelessly conflicted president” whose unprecedented swag of commercial conflicts of interest will undermine his presidency.

“Parliament is set to return in just over a fortnight but why are they even bothering?”, asks Fairfax’s Adam Gartrell, who points out that MPs have little or nothing on their plates. The government’s legislative list is minimal. The new travel allowance and expenses bill shouldn’t take up more than six months.

As luck would have it, a new president of a newly Disunited States and a new world disorder will afford plenty of distraction, even if it’s only reading The Donald’s tweets. And being terrified.

 

 

Former Howard Liberal government Minister for Social Services and other portfolios, Amanda Vanstone with  pup, Gus, a Weimaraner, who went on to bite the Pakistani ambassador.

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Australia is way ahead of the game in terms of using government policies and processes to punish and isolate our most disadvantaged citizens so the Government can reduce its welfare spending a few million. We now allow our Government to implement the work of sociopaths and threaten poor citizens with imprisonment on the basis of half-cocked ‘automatic computer-matching’ algorithms that are allegedly tracking welfare fraud.

Bill Mitchell Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia.

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“Bill Shorten’s skin is so thick it puts a rhinoceros to shame”, snipes Liberal hit-squad reservist, retired SA senator Amanda Vanstone who is rostered on this week to kick off the government’s perpetual rubbishing of the Labor leader.

She would know. Her own political style was brutal: “Let me put my dancing shoes on, ” she said on learning of the death, from stomach cancer, of fugitive Christopher Skase in 2001. At the time, she was the minister responsible for pursuing the fugitive. More recently, on Nine ‘s election eve commentary, she thrust her hand in Maxine McKew’s face.

“Talk to the hand, the face doesn’t want to listen.” The hand was almost as controversial as Turnbull’s victory speech.

She’s got her hand up again this week. Handy Mandy’s attack is a bid to help a government in crisis over its Centrelink debt collection disaster  while continuing the line that its policy failures are always Labor’s fault. Shorten and Tanya Plibersek invented the scheme, Vanstone writes, so they have no grounds, whatsoever, to criticise it.

Centrelink “does an outstanding job,” she dashes off, in pursuit of a red herring, because it is so big and complex and deals with 4.5 million (sic) “mindboggling permutations”. She reckons she knows. She once “had the welfare portfolio.”

Someone else can tell her it’s now more like 7 million. If they can get past the hand.

Vanstone and Welfare? Now there’s an winning double. It must be Liberal policy to choose the worst possible fit, like Greg Hunt, the Minister for killing the environment, for Health. Dutton for refugees. Who would have thought, Alan Tudge, another MP, like Ms Vanstone, with an empathy bypass, whose robotic delivery so perfectly suits an automated debt recovery system, would be Human Services Minister today?

Who would have thought a government could be so utterly out of touch that it would follow its debacle, this week, by extending Robo-debt to age and disability pensioners?

Vanstone’s bull-dozing joins Alan Tudge’s verbal sludge. The system is working perfectly, he crows. It’s meant to have a twenty per cent failure. That’s how it works. Fear and surprise worked for the Spanish Inquisition, too. Who knows how much more harm is yet to be done when the scheme is unleashed on age pensioners and the disabled?

Apart from its gratuitous cruelty, Centrelink’s “outstanding job” has public servants pitted against each other by managers, competing for the highest daily quota of debt notices, according to Tasmanian Independent Andrew Wilkie.

There’s a lot of “talk to the hand”, moreover, as thousands of Centrelink clients report, as their attempts to seek help or appeal mistakes and miscalculations are brusquely pushed aside. Fobbed off. Threats to seize or garnish bank savings have been reported. The “outstanding job” clearly includes extortion and obtaining advantage by deception.

“If the government was a private company it would go out of business or be shut down by regulators for fraud over the Centrelink debacle,” says former Digital Transformation Office head Paul Shetler. Talk to the hand, says Vanstone.

Vanstone is an expert in the straw man.

“What is it about us”, she writes, “what kind of bongo juice are we on when we fall for some schmaltzy rubbish suggesting that everyone should be allowed to keep overpayments?”

But no-one is making that suggestion. Liberal MPs caught in travel rorts defend rorting, it is true. Look at Steve Ciobo’s absurd claim that a Grand Final is a business meeting if you are an MP . Sussan Ley says she’s broken no rules. But that doesn’t mean everyone tries to cheat.

Keep overpayments? It’s a tactic to blur the issue, divert criticism. It’s a low ploy that can only increase suffering; further harden the dehumanising nurtured openly by Joe Hockey. the prejudice that the poor are leaners. Take away their humanity: take away their human rights. Scapegoat. Its demonisation of the poor is a domestic version of a cruel government’s denial that asylum-seekers are “legal” – have human rights, are entitled to care and compassion. Vanstone’s mob  helped start that with babies overboard in 2003.

Scapegoating helps bury the hoax of broken promises. When authoritarian structures or figures can’t keep their promises to their constituency, they scapegoat, Noam Chomsky warns. “Let’s blame it on people who are even more vulnerable and who are suffering even more than you are. Let’s make it their fault.”

At issue is an employment data matching system between ATO and Centrelink which crudely calculates client’s fortnightly earnings by assuming annual income is earned regularly over a year and generates letters demanding repayment of debt when it discovers or it miscalculates a discrepancy between the two agencies’ records.

Twenty per cent of demands from Centrelink are wrong. Yet many recipients are bluffed or frightened into paying up. 200, 000 letters have been sent since September. The pain and suffering is unprecedented.

In a reversal of natural justice, you are deemed guilty until you prove yourself innocent. Proof may be hard because the Robo-debt claw-back system can search back six years. Workers may not keep their records that long; ATO rules do not require it. Most don’t and the government is counting on it. Yet in contempt of reciprocity, fairness and good faith, if Centrelink owes you money, however, you have only two years to claim it.

Being bullied is the first approach many report. A threatening letter demands debt repayment with a ten per cent processing fee. Alan Tudge, appears elsewhere, to make it clear that defaulters could go to gaol. Attempts to clarify or rectify mistakes are often met with delays. In brief, Robo-debt claw-back is a flawed system, a wrong system, an illegal system before we even begin to consider the social or economic effects.

Bill Mitchell warns that the letters violate recipients’ human rights. Ben Eltham sums up.

“Like the government’s last data debacle, the 2016 Census, it’s clear that there are massive IT failures here. This is not just a few glitches and bugs. A government department is sending out tens of thousands of erroneous communications accusing welfare recipients of over-payment. The government is falsely accusing some of the most vulnerable members of our community.”

Cruelly and irresponsibly, Vanstone misrepresents the issue, smears welfare recipients as cheats, parodying Shorten’s case for an inquiry as “We don’t give a hoot if you get overpaid, by accident or design; it doesn’t matter. Keep the lot. You’ve figured out how to get more than your neighbour? Good on you. There’s plenty more where that came from.”

How to get more than your neighbour? The pernicious lie of widespread deliberate welfare fraud is lightly tossed into the mix. It’s an assumption which underlies the whole clawback policy yet it is egregiously, wilfully wrong. Your prejudices are showing Ms Vanstone. DHS reports show a decline over the years in cases brought for fraud. In 2008-9, it recovered $113.4 million out of $87 billion in payments – 0.13 per cent.

There is no evidence to support $4.5 billion is available to claw back. That pot of gold your government is chasing just doesn’t exist, Ms Vanstone. But you can frighten people into paying anyway. Nowhere is there evidence of widespread rorting – for that you would have to look at politicians and their travel allowances.

Familiar also is her emotive plea that welfare is a burden on the taxpayer, yet Vanstone can add a loopy twist. “Take a $3000 Centrelink debt, she says. A person who pays about $26,000 a year in tax has to work for about six weeks to give the taxman that $3000 to dish out in the first place and certainly wants it paid out according to the rules.”

Yet only half of government revenue comes from PAYE tax. The rules? A tax system is part of a fair society it is not about resenting responsibility – “giving the tax man” but a way those who can work are able to help those who can’t. A real drain on the system, on the other hand, is the third of big businesses who pay tax. Yet Vanstone’s mob will give companies a $50 billion tax break.

Putting in the boot comes naturally to Vanstone who holds her own in a Coalition stable which boasts such feral attack dogs as Tony Junkyard Abbott or Senator Ian Macdonald or Peter “Nutso” Dutton. Indeed, her prowess in sinking the slipper once caused a mild-mannered Wayne Swan to call her “a political hyena who takes delight in attacking society’s most vulnerable”.[4] Swannie’s too much of gentleman to tell us what he really thinks. Nor does he need to remind us that hyenas hunt in packs.

While she is unlikely to get under his skin, Amanda knows full well that Kill Bill is the only strategy the Coalition has going for it. OK it may well be derivative, out of date and increasingly ineffectual – like the Turnbull government itself but, hey, it’s fun and why debate the issue when you can play the man? Or all that you know.

Vanstone’s attack on Shorten, is a crude bid to redeem Clawback; to rehabilitate the Coalition’s automated debt-collecting process, a process which is part of its war on the poor and allied to its demonisation of welfare recipients – a process which is so wrong on so many levels that it has already done incalculable harm to thousands of Australians .

Vanstone’s chief tactic is to pretend that the only alternative to clawback is to leave overpayments alone entirely. You don’t pay the money back at all. Showing she’s all class – ruling class, the former Howard government minister charmingly manages to combine this misrepresentation with a dishonest slur of dishonesty on all Centrelink beneficiaries.

Yet Amanda is a welfare recipient herself. After retiring from the senate in 2007, she spent three years on the nation’s tit as Australia’s Ambassador to Rome. The job comes with a few perks such as subsidised accommodation, utilities and travel. Taxpayers lavish on the incumbent a multi-storey Italian mansion perched in the hills above Rome’s Piazza del Popolo.

This is not about Amanda, primarily, but the thick-skinned, wrong-headed, morally bankrupt government she represents. Never in Australia’s history has there been such utter heartlessness by the government department cruelly, ironically entitled, Human Services. Never has it been clearer to the Australian public that their government, unwilling and unable to chase revenue from company tax defaulters is prepared to go to war on the poor.

Most victims of Centrelink’s abuse in its Robo-debt-scam-the-poor-the-weak-and-helpless scheme have nowhere to go to get legal help. The basic legal help available from Centrelink will be axed in July. is Last year 150,000 of those who asked for help though community legal centres were turned away. Centres have had their funding cut.

Spare us the barracking, Ms Vanstone. Spare us the lie that the poor are worthless, lazy, dishonest and underserving. Save us your talk-to-the-hand endorsement. No need to put your own boot in. Your government is doing enough of that already. If you are worried about overpayment, how about refunding your government pension for the three years you were Ambassador to Rome. Remove the grounds for accusations of double-dipping.

The money could fund a legal aid centre for poor people falsely accused of fraud because Centrelink has made a mistake and that they are guilty until they prove themselves innocent. Call that an outstanding job all you like Amanda but it’s illegal, it’s immoral and it’s dangerous. Best of all you could back off with your attacks on the poor and turn your journalistic pen to ending rorts in your own political party. Reform is so badly overdue, they are about to undo themselves entirely.

 

 

Pleonexia … originating from the Greek πλεονεξία, is a philosophical concept which roughly corresponds to greed, covetousness, or avarice, and is strictly defined as “the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others”, suggesting a … “ruthless self-seeking and an arrogant assumption that others and things exist for one’s own benefit”.[1]

“We are dealing with other peoples’ money,” intones Malcolm Turnbull, taking the high moral ground as he fronts a thin press conference on the afternoon of Friday 13th. Other people’s money. Who would have thought? Tell Centrelink.

The conference room is almost empty. The Canberra Press Gallery is either on holiday or heading for happy hour. A bored government staffer stands to one side; a stage-manager, ready to call time on any questions after the Prime Minister’s hammy but low-energy performance. The atmosphere is let’s get this show off the road.

Turnbull grips the edges of the moulded podium with both hands: he could be a Border Force Control officer on the bridge of an intercepted vessel. He’ll turn this thing around. The kitsch set is so stagey that it shrieks defensive artifice while underlining his government’s monumental disconnect from its people. The national flags add to the travesty.

It’s time to put out the trash; bury bad news in a time slot where it will attract least media scrutiny. Two weeks into a new year, the Turnbull government is already mired in crisis. Dirty Captain Turnbull must spin scandal as good news.

He is here, he declares, drum roll – to announce a new system. Trust him. MPs are helpless as a kitten when it comes to moral choices. He can fix all that. Operation High Moral Ground will flush out the rorters. Besides, we are soon to discover, he has probity’s poster boy, Arthur Sinodinos, up his sleeve.

Sussan Ley has made a “personal decision” to resign, Turnbull mumbles, to a reporter’s inaudible question. It’s almost an aside. Ley’s personal decision includes a statement that she doesn’t believe she’s broken any rules.

Yep, it’s the damn rules that have broken her; that stupid system which supposes you know right from wrong. Ken Goodger, Acting Anglican Bishop of Wangaratta, holds a garden party at his church in Albury in support of the high flying Health Minister, pilot and Pythagorean numerologist whose wings are now clipped. Grounded. Dumped from the ministry.

A deafening silence ensues from Ley’s own party where one might expect calls of support, yet the news is full of reports of MPs jostling for what the Herald Sun calls her “plum job”. Former Health Minister Tony Abbott puts in job application in Friday’s The Australian, in the guise of an article in which he shirtfronts Turnbull for being all mouth and no trousers.

Turnbull’s call, cunningly packaged as Ley’s decision, he hopes, will soothe a nation inflamed by a week of revelations of pleonectic MPs, snouts in troughs, rorting travel allowances. We will cheer his decisive leadership. Ra. Ra. Fat chance.

A deep anger now dwells within Australians, a sense of betrayal and of loss. So profound now is the gap between rich and poor; between those who have work and those who have no work; between home owners and those who will never own homes. Between men and women’s career options and pay.

Years of neoliberal cuts to services, to wages and conditions; years of corporatisation, deregulation and privatisation and the voracious love of competition and profit above all else have cheated us and divided us. There is nothing any leader of the party of the IPA, the mining lobby’s puppet, the hand maiden of big business and banking can ever say or do which will assuage the people’s anger.

Abroad, vulgarian and fellow professional narcissist, Donald Trump also deals in lies; manufactures facts; abuses those who would dispute his version of events.

“We are not living in a post truth universe”, writes Robert Fisk, “we are living the lies of others”.

Just when he’d hoped to get by without any cabinet reshuffle, a badly wounded Turnbull, who must himself live the lies of his hard right captors, is caught up in another silly season turkey shoot. But he’s ready with the traditional trimmings. Dab hand with the corny theatrics. He falls back on a tried and true script.

A sacrificial resignation is followed by a (patently hollow) promise to fix the system. Cue massive spin from a servile media. By Sunday the ABC features teenage reporters explaining how huge is the grey area between right and wrong. The system’s rotten. Politicians can’t be blamed for any bad moral choice, really.

It’s what you’d expect of Turnbull. God forbid he’d assent to growing demands for a national ICAC. Or agree to a cease-fire in the automated debt recovery phase of his government’s war on the poor currently harassing 20,000 Australians per week.

We haven’t heard it yet but expect the term “welfare security” to be applied soon as the government seeks another phrase in its mission to demonise welfare recipients; its determination to behave with the same indifference and inhumanity towards the poor as it does toward asylum seekers.

Working “incredibly well”, says Christian Porter about Centrelink’s Robo-call debt extortion system which hounds victims of its own mistakes within an inch of their lives; those it alleges it overpaid, demanding repayment plus a ten per cent debt collection fee.

Porter boasts $300 million dollar has been found down the back of the couch or in Grandma’s funeral bond; $300 million which is clearly not money received but debts alleged. There’s $4 billion out there to collect. But only if you believe the figure is anything more than a wild conjecture.

Robot Alan Tudge, a perfect choice as Human Services Minister in an inhuman government, is equally immune to the grief, the fear, the anger, the human suffering his automated debt recovery blunderbuss is inflicting. The system is working well, he says on ABC, Wednesday -“and we will continue with that system”. You bet you are. You bet I am.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, also is utterly unrepentant, blind to anything but the dollars. He makes a virtue of being remote and unyielding. “We make no apology for the fact that we are trying to make sure we are more efficient, have a wider grasp of those who might have received payments in error.” Or those frightened into paying money they don’t owe. Those driven by despair into dark thoughts of self-harm.

Darren O’Connell, whose PhD is in economics, a teacher who has lectured at Curtin University, has tried eight times since November to get his inaccurate debt removed from the system, but the letters keep coming.

“The process and logic used by Centrelink is both flawed, dangerous and opaque,” he tells news.com.au. “This process assumes people are guilty and it is up to us to prove our innocence.”

A competent, compassionate, responsible PM – even an agile PM would have called the dogs off on well before now. Sacked Tudge. Scrapped a monumental failure. Made time for age pensioners. Raised welfare payments to make amends. Instead he’s helping create for himself and his government a mother of a perfect storm.

Changes reducing the allowable value of pensioners’ assets help magnify the anger and resentment from those in the debt-collector’s gun towards those living high on the hog; having fun in the sun.

World’s best minister, Greg Hunt books up $20,000 of summer holidays in Queensland at the taxpayers’ expense. It’s a similar story with Matthias Cormann. Many other examples follow, each one pointing up the gap between the ruling elite and the rest of the nation; the rapidly widening social divide. A Cabinet Minister buys an apartment on impulse when most ordinary Australians are priced out of the market. Any protest is dismissed as the politics of envy.

Sir Michael Marmot, President of the World Medical Association says the opposite to poverty is not wealth. It is justice. Closing the gap on health inequality would mean tackling the disproportionate distribution of global wealth, the epidemiologist argues in his latest Boyer Lecture and it’s exactly the same within nations.

“We have the knowledge and the means to improve people’s lives and reduce health inequality,” he reminds us, “The question is: what do we have in our hearts? Do we have the will to close the gap in a generation?”

Abbott has a go at his PM in his vanity publisher, The Australian, for being unready to deal with a protectionist world under Trump. Be agile; don’t just say the words. Make no mistake, the former PM is on the warpath. Here, he scores a technical point – yet neither PM nor his nemesis equates agility with the real need to seek a fairer, more just society.

The Coalition merely flicks the switch to damage control. When all else fails book in a review or an inquiry. Or a distraction. The perpetually befuddled Japanese PM Shinzo Abe, another politician with a charisma bypass, beholden to capital, is wheeled in front of cameras to signal that trade will boom and security will be strengthened thanks to Turnbull’s deftly steering around the 330 Minke whales Japan is about to kill and avoiding any questions about conservation or the ethics of slaughtering sentient beings for human consumption under the guise of scientific research.

After Tony Abbott’s silly, made to be broken, submarine deal promise, Turnbull’s government is reluctant to make waves. It will not send a patrol vessel to Antarctic waters to monitor the Japanese whaling fleet unlike in previous years.

On the other hand, the free trade agreement with Japan is achieving amazing things, says Steve Ciobo noting

“Exports of beef have climbed about 30 per cent as tariffs of up to 38.5 per cent are lowered as part of the deal and are now worth $793 million.” Wild cheers all round. No-one questions the place of tariffs in a free trade deal.

Sadly, the incredible Japan trade boost news fails to distract the media circus from its pursuit of politicians’ travel rorts.

Professional wave maker, Nick “Get-your-head-on” Xenophon pops up on the box again. He’s sure the system is at fault on ABC 7:30. Up bobs Michael Gordon in The Age. It’s another part of the blame the system ruse. MSM scribes agree to call their hounds off; turn their ire from MPs who cheat, to the rotten system whose main fault seems to be that it presupposes politicians can make autonomous moral decisions. Steve Ciobo argues, on cue, that he can’t tell a Grand Final from a trade deal. Jules Bishop pulls out of the Portsea Polo just in case. Shinzo Abe needs me more is her excuse.

She wasn’t going anyway. Reports of a Hugo Boss outfit suggest otherwise, according to Fairfax’s Julie Singer.

Smoothie Stan Grant is also recruited into grey-washing what to most of us appears very black and white. C’mon, Stan. Imagine you are Sussan Ley. You get to Brisbane, bore a few chemists witless with your talk on scripts which could have been an email or a letter and then you fly on to the Gold Coast to buy your apartment. If you can’t tell which part of the journey to book to your boss, you shouldn’t be a minister.

If you can’t tell you don’t need to charter a jet at $12 000 to do the trip, you shouldn’t be in government. Nor do you need anyone to tell you that flying your own plane along the same route used by commercial services is not only hugely more expensive but it looks as if you are trying to get your flying hours up to keep your pilot’s licence. What Grant doesn’t go into is the fudging that is done to dress up holidays as business.

There is a lot still, though, potential grey area, isn’t there? If you look at the entitlements, it’s full of that, and it’s left to a lot of discretion and self-regulation.

We heard from Steve Ciobo, the Trade Minister, saying that he thinks it’s appropriate that the taxpayer pays if you attend a sporting function. He would be there being questioned, potentially doing work, as well as enjoying the sporting event. Does he have a point?

In a word, Stan, no. Imagine you are Greg Hunt. From 2004 to 2006 you travel with your family to Noosa in late November, each time staying there between three and seven nights and for five nights in 2008. You talk up the political things you do during your holiday. The meetings, the electoral visits. Dress it up. Then you blur the issue by reference to the beaut job you do at other times addressing the Davos mob on Hayman Island as a Global Leader for Tomorrow’ by the World Economic Forum. Yet none of this justifies booking your holidays up to the government.

The rule is clear. If your trip was primarily a family holiday, that should really be the end of the matter. While it is true that there may be some complex areas, the cases reported are not that difficult to call. But Stan and others don’t think so. The government gets a big boost on the ABC’s 7:30 Report and on all other mainstream media. Mission accomplished. Focus can now shift from rorters to the system. Why, it’s even led the Finance Minister astray.

Belgian Borzoi, Mathias Cormann, who barks and growls incessantly about keeping government spending under control, is clearly at a loss when it comes to who should pay for what. He billed taxpayers over $23,000 for weekend trips to the beach resort town of Broome with his wife over five years. A spokesperson for Cormann points out that the Minister would have had a range of mission critical commitments in the beach resort town. A very junior reporter on ABC 24 reads out a list of all the top level negotiations and vital political stuff Cormann would have to do in Broome.

Never overburdened by an original thought, Turnbull looks to the UK for a solution, as he did when he wanted Alexander Downer to retire in favour of pin-striped megalomaniac George Brandis, whose boundless faith in his own infallibility has not advanced either his own career or his Prime Minister’s.

In the meantime, press hacks flock to admire Turnbull’s new baby- his you-beaut triple decker anti-rorting authority. Turnbull’s system fix gets a massive spin, happily diverting us from any thought of adding up the rorts or forming the view that, in Sussan Ley’s case, here dies a scapegoat or taking interest in how few will actually pay anything back.

A sacking, spun as a mutually agreed resignation means there’s no need to publish PMC secretary Martin Parkinson’s review. It’s the very least that the embattled thin-lipped PM can do – apart from wearing the black spectacle frame of gravitas and sobriety who daily appears capable of less and less. The incredible shrinking PM blinks. A shrewd bit of deflection. Then bugger all the preceding reviews, he’ll set up one of his own.

Why, he’ll copy the Poms; import the British system of transparency, its Parliamentary Standards Act 2009 – as befits a staunch republican. He’s even going to set up an Inquisitor or a panel of three of them called an Independent Authority. That’ll help cut red tape and boost the mission of smaller government. But there’s more.

The independent authority will be staffed by a member experienced in auditing, a member experienced in remuneration matters, the president of the Remuneration Tribunal, a former judge and a former MP. Jobs for the boys and growth!

This is a very strong board, the PM patronises us. It will have significant independence from the Government. (Whatever that means.) MPs and senators will be able to get advice and rulings from the independent agency if they are unsure about a claim. Genius. Outsource ethnical decision making. What could possibly go wrong?

“Transparency is the key”, Turnbull says opaquely – the PM who refuses to confirm how much of his own money he spent on the election campaign – a PM who vowed never to sloganeer. We won’t get to see Martin Parkinson’s review of Ley’s rorts. His government refuses permission to professionals working on Manus or Nauru to testify to their experiences. Transparency? The Turnbull government has yet to share with the nation its legal advice it said it needed before joining the US in its illegal interference in Syria.

A 2016 independent review into parliamentary entitlements, led by retired senior public servant David Tune, found a “focus of concern is travel ‘inside entitlement’ but outside reasonable expectations and standards”, The Age reminds us. Turnbull ignores it.

Bugger Tony Abbott’s review which has been lying around the Liberal Party lunchroom, yellowing, fading, curling at the edges along with Turnbull’s own clean-up vows, now a mouldering year old. Mal must make a stand. But it won’t staunch the Turnbull government’s bleeding. And it’s got Buckley’s chance of fixing the problem.

Ms Ley who added an extra S to her name to liven up her life will be remembered more for her travel and her numerology than her service to the nation’s health or the body politic. In May 2016, her wish to lift the Medicare freeze was blocked by departmental red tape helped pave the way for Labor’s Mediscare.

She’s also become a standing joke on social media and an emblem of government excess during its automated debt recovery extortion, part of a war on the poor which has at its heart a mean-spirited denial of welfare beneficiaries right to payments which will at least keep them above the poverty line. A Melbourne Cup field of other rorters soon join Ms Ley. Each one is a nail in the political class’s coffin.

The vivid contrast between the entitlement of the ruling elite and the deprivation of the poor highlights the expanding inequality and redistribution of wealth from labour to capital; worker to boss that began with Hawke’s accord and continued as the neoliberal Keating Rudd and Gillard Labor governments traded away workers’ wages and conditions.

Ley’s final touchdown is a welcome distraction from news that Trump’s team is hustling Congress to approve its members without adequate vetting rushing through the process in a way which shows contempt for the American voter. It brought relief from chortling and guffawing over news from America of a Shower-gate scandal in which Russian agents, it is said, compiled a dossier of compromising dealings on the president-elect including The Donald’s alleged dalliance with Russian prostitutes and deviant sexual preferences

But now Turnbull must rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, as former Health Minister Tony Abbott loiters with intent in the public eye. Abbott backers are active. Turnbull drops National Party Deputy Fiona Nash’s name. As Assistant Health minister, Ms Nash took down a healthy food rating website on the advice of her Chief of Staff Alistair Furnivall.

Mr Furnivall is married to junk food lobbyist Tracey Cain, sole director and secretary of Australian Public Affairs which represents the Australian Beverages Council and Mondelez Australia, which owns Kraft, Cadbury and Oreo brands, among others.

By Sunday, he’s giving the impression that the impeccable Arthur “see no donors” Sinodinos will get the nod. Sinodinos was questioned by NSW ICAC in 2014 but couldn’t recall, despite being a director of Australian Water Holdings, an Eddie Obeid company, on a salary of $200,000 a year for three years, what he did beyond the odd meeting and checking his bank account.

Sussan Ley is all done and dusted now that her resignation is in. Yet her trip to the Gold Coast, after a meeting selling prescriptions in Brisbane, to snap up a $795 000 apartment on the spur of the moment is not all it seems.

In fact, her bargain buy turns out to be a carefully planned purchase in which the Main Street apartment owner, Martin Henry Corkery proprietor of Children First, a child care business and a big donor who gave the Queensland Liberal Party $50,000 in 2011, sold the property at a loss to the MP. Doubtless he took pity on the impoverished Cabinet Minister.

Corkery, who disavows all knowledge of who was buying what, received a $109,977 grant for his day care business when Ley was assistant Education Minister.

Furthermore, a retired couple on the Gold Coast Hinterland helpfully come forward to claim Ms Ley made an unsuccessful bid on their house nine months before she purchased the apartment.

Ley should stand aside until the two inquiries , one by Finance and one by Martin Parkinson of the PMC under way are completed. All overpayments should be paid back with ten per cent recovery fee under the same terms and conditions as apply to Centrelink beneficiaries. The media should be encouraged to drop its spin that Arthur Sindodinos has been cleared. The report, released September last year does not exonerate Mr Sinodinos.

Operation Credo is yet to deliver its report. Happily, NSW’s Baird government made amendments to ICAC last November which are widely tipped to help Mr Sinodinos while a current review of laws banning property and other specified investors to make donations could clear things up nicely.

Despite his sacrifice of Sussan Ley, Malcolm Turnbull begins 2017 badly wounded by revelations not only of endemic rorting but of a political caste made up of ministers such as Steve Ciobo who don’t see a problem with pretending that their holidays or Grand Final tickets are for business and their own and their families’ recreation. Nor will it help him with the perfect storm brewing as a result of the Centrelink clawback debacle and the rising discontent spread amongst pensioners by changes to the assets test.

Most damaging of all, however, and irreparable is the disconnect revealed between his ministers and the Australian people in comments from the likes of Alan Tudge and Barnaby Joyce which indicate a damning lack of empathy if not a contempt for the welfare of ordinary people in a society which wealth is increasingly in the hands of the elite.

Above all, a government which promised openness, transparency and consultation has opted instead for secrecy, lies and diktat. No staged press conference, fake news, spin, arranged resignation or any other diversion can alter one jot the right of the people to a fair and just society; to the truth, Mr Turnbull.

 

 

It’s been a bad week for Turnbull government. Even for a mob with a gift for self-inflicted crisis and a record for monumental mismanagement and sheer ineptitude, it’s been a shocker.

Health Minister Sussan Ley’s gift for snipping up the odd bargain $795,000 apartment while travelling on official business and her spectacular thrashing of her parliamentary travel allowance – $10,000 per day in the USA – has aroused the nation’s indignation at a time when Centrelink’s claw back fiasco takes its popular demonisation of the unemployed, the poor, the frail and the elderly into extortion.

Always with an eye for the main chance, veteran trouble-maker and attention-seeker Tony Abbott swoops to ridicule his PM’s lack of authority and trash our mid-East foreign policy.

Ever willing, Greg Huff n Puff Hunt is sent on an Alcoa rescue mission with a side-serve of Greens-bashing in a desperate, attempt at distraction. “The Turnbull government will stand up for workers, their families and regional communities”, he says in callow self-parody. Does he mean Adelaide and Geelong with closure of car manufacture? Or in ship-building in Adelaide, Melbourne or The Hunter where 1600 workers have lost jobs since the Coalition came to power?

ABS statistics show 44,000 fewer manufacturing jobs and 49,000 fewer mining jobs exist now than when the Coalition took power in 2013. Yet Hunt, champion of the workers, is eclipsed instantly when Indonesia tries to pick a fight over an insult in some training materials and later over a demonstrator waving a West Papuan flag at its Melbourne Embassy. Foreign Minister, show pony Julie Bishop will be tested by the challenge.

Some may call him lily-livered but can Turnbull be blamed for hiding under his goose feather doona? Deputy dog Barnaby Joyce is sooled on to Abbott. The  bovver-boy-yobbo rides taller in the saddle on his comeback trail with every Turnbull government crisis. Yet, even Joyce knows the jig is up. He settles for telling Abbott he is “unhelpful”.

Yet something seems to be working. The budgie smuggler is probably miffed that his policies do better under Turnbull than they ever did under his own good captaincy; when his “fierce political warrior” and micromanager Peta Credlin had the whip hand. But he’s not going to ditch the hair product just yet. Turnbull’s true gift is for self-destruction.

History repeats itself, wrote Karl Marx, first as tragedy second as farce. Turnbull, Abbott with a better post code looks set to repeat his 2009 defeat as he once again shows his the vast, yawning deficit in his authority and his lack of political nous.

Junkyard dog Abbott scents blood. Geed up by Malcolm’s endless misfortune, he is free-lancing in foreign policy; urging Australia to drop its foreign aid to Palestine, move its embassy to Jerusalem; second guess Trump.

Domestically, Abbott talks up division, helpfully telling 2GB, recently, there are ‘cross-currents’ within the party, urging colleagues to think twice, not “make a bad situation worse”. The human wrecking ball wags his finger at Cory Bernardi, George Christensen; warns against wrecking and division. How does he keep a straight face?

Abbott knows full well that when things start to go wrong for a government, they rarely go right.

Making a bad situation hopeless, Industry and Science Minister Greg Hunt fails to reach any kind of deal at all with Alcoa after a last minute dash to New York with his Victorian counterpart Wade Noonan in tow.

The rebuff coincides with news of another dud. Its record-breaking 2016 Census data gathering mother of all disasters is about to be eclipsed. Unaccountably, defective data infects its new, computerised, “claw-back” program which is set to shake down shifty welfare beneficiaries and other bludgers who have been wrongly claiming age, Newstart and other pensions. Yet, unfathomably, Bludge-buster Alan Tudge is on leave; unavailable for comment. Who would have thought?

Christian Porter eventually turns up to defend claw-back. It’s “working incredibly well” and “he doesn’t think it’s an unfair system” even though it might “upset” some people. Only twenty per cent of letters are sent in error. Besides, it’s already netted $300 million, a figure disputed by Hank Jongan, Department of Human Services GM who says that this number represents the identified debts.” Porter’s bland blithe indifference will help make this into a PR disaster.

Despite Porter’s spin, MPs and others report countless stories of computer error and human suffering. The system is a lemon. The Not My Debt website records disturbing examples. Jayde Harvey, 24, is shocked when she gets a letter from Centrelink just before Christmas, asking her to clarify how much she earned when she worked part-time while in high school. A casual teacher, morbidly distressed over a demand for a $3200 debt from six years ago, is told to call Lifeline.

Errors are inherent given the way the program calculates fortnightly earnings, for example, or interprets employer’s names. Yet the government will continue with its weapon of math destruction in the absence of any effective, responsible political leadership – adding callous indifference, if not sheer cruelty, to its reputation for incompetence.

Labor’s Human Services spokesperson Linda Burney tells Fairfax Media: “A program that’s working well doesn’t send 4000 false debt letters a week. She’s written to the Australian national audit office asking for an investigation. Labor’s call is echoed by The Disabled Peoples’ Organisation which wants a stop put to the Centrelink “fiasco” stressing that it is particularly unfair on people with a disability. Half of all people with a disability live in poverty.

Peter Martin in The Age calls the program “a litany of inhuman errors”. He predicts that the debacle will cost more than the bungled census debacle for which the PM said heads must roll. A look overseas, at the US or New Zealand would have been sufficient warning that data matching programmes cause more trouble than they are worth. Again, what could have reasonably been foreseen appears to come as a complete surprise to the Turnbull government whose gesture toward planning is a two word slogan. Even the demise of Alcoa, a business long in terminal decline, is treated with feigned surprise.

Who could have predicted that Alcoa would be in trouble? A global decline in aluminium prices has closed eight smelters in the US, reducing that country to its lowest output since 1945. Known for years, also, was the expiry of the unsustainable deal for Alcoa’s electricity struck by the Cain government in the late 1980s, eager to boost employment even if it meant over burdening a creaky state power grid and imposing billions in costs tax payers.

The subsidies began in 1962, when the Liberal Bolte government offered Alcoa discount electricity at 0.4 pence per kilowatt hour, when the market rate of 1.5 pence. The arrangement was possible because the state owned the power network and generators. With privatisation, which politicians promise brings competition and lower prices to consumers came exactly the opposite. Later the Bracks government levied $100 million a year land tax to help it meet its power liability, a cost passed on to all consumers. No-one can tell how many billions it has cost tax-payers in total.

Cain agreed to subsidise the multinational company’s profits by $100 million a year, while the plant consumed ten per cent of the state’s electricity. And a succession of political white knights have come forward as Alcoa has struggled to make a go of things. Although the unprofitable plant was forced to close its Point Henry smelter, an opportunistic Tony Abbott was quick to offer the kiss of life. “Scrapping the carbon tax will give industries like aluminium a fighting chance, not just to survive, but to flourish,” he said in February 2014, a patently absurd prediction.

In reality, despite Abbott’s ranting, rather than being crippled by the carbon price, the company benefited from a system which left it with excess, lucrative carbon units. Now the chips are down, work experience boy, Greg Hunt, is sent on a fool’s errand.

Hunt has been running a few ideas up the flagpole. See who salutes. Some may say it’s late in the day but nevertheless Hunt has big-noted himself with a plan to funnel clean energy loans into building a dirty power station for the troubled smelter. It sounds so good on paper. But it’s not legal. Any clean energy project has to be at least part clean: renewable energy. Shocking bit of red tape. Must be a complete surprise to the unlucky Industry Minister.

Happily the Turnbull government has an economic plan. Its tax cuts to corporations plan is guaranteed to restore jobs and growth. Grow the economy. Alcoa of Australia Ltd, CITIC and Marubeni -three of four entities with ownership interests in the Portland smelter paid zero corporate tax in Australia in the latest year for which information is available. According to the Tax Justice Network Australia, over the last decade, Alumina Ltd, owner of 40% of Alcoa Australia has paid a global average effective tax rate of zero per cent. But it’s all about the jobs, as Hunt keeps reminding us.

Alcoa is a model employer. In early January last year it abruptly replaced the Australian crew of MV Portland, a crew with 27 years’ service and no industrial disputes. Security guards hauled crew members off ship in the middle of the night. The company replaced the workers with a crew from India on a rate of $2.00 per day. The ship was sailed to Singapore and sold. The operation was carried out with the full knowledge of the federal government which was told it was the ship or the smelter.

WA Labor Senator Sue Lines noted in a speech March that,

“The government stood up for a multinational company over the jobs of Australians—men and women, mums and dads, taxpayers, homeowners, voters.”

Astonishingly Greg Hunt can still claim in The Herald Sun just before Christmas that the Turnbull government was “working closely with the Victorian government and unions to help secure jobs in Portland”, after a recent power outage damaged the smelter which appears to have no back up supply.

The Centrelink claw back debacle and the battle to save Alcoa the workers’ friend forms a fetching backdrop to news that little Aussie battler Health Minister Sussan Ley may have rorted her travel claim when she dashed away May 9 2015 from a meeting with key stakeholders to snap up an $795,000 Gold Coast apartment, a spur of the moment purchase.

Other revelations follow including a trip to the USA to “study its health system” a vital exercise in learning what to avoid which could have just as easily been done online – in which expenses ran to $10,000 per day. Expect more to follow.

Late on Sunday Ley admits to an error of judgement in The Australian but she cannot produce evidence of the meeting of stakeholders which she says drew her from Brisbane to the Gold Coast after her official business which was a policy announcement on the “availability of new medicines” which could have easily and rather more cheaply and effectively been made on a piece of paper. She says she will pay the money back.

In any decent, functioning government, Ley’s resignation would have been expected long ago. Its mismanagement is as much of an indictment of Turnbull’s government as the light it sheds on its true nature. Illuminated is the context of indulgence and entitlement. It makes a telling, damaging, contrast to the stories of the wretched victims of Centrelink’s mismatched computerised debt-recovery or the plight of the thousands about to be thrown out of work.

2017 has barely begun yet everywhere is seen the suffering of innocent victims of a government totally unable to plan beyond its next gibe at Shorten or its latest diversion from its own failure. Blinkered by its Neoliberal ideology, possessed by its war on the poor and needy, the Coalition begins 2017 destined to repeat its disastrous performance of last year.

Light on for talent in Cabinet, its ineffectual leader a captive of the hard right, its crew fighting among themselves or mutinous, the Turnbull government enters a world where the inauguration of anti-politician Donald Trump, an unstable professional narcissist and Russian puppet, means all the old certainties will be cast into doubt. It will be sorely tested.

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“Taking  out the trash” is Canberra-speak for burying bad news in a quiet time-slot. Confronted, 10 September, by the inconvenient truth that Australia’s carbon emissions are rising, Federal government decides to sit on the data until just before Christmas, as it does with its MYEFO, a report so poor it would be taken as a rebuke by any other government.

Delays and evasions are the Turnbull government’s stock in trade. As 2016 ends, it has little to show for itself, however much the PM may boost his ABCC, a law, Adam Bandt notes, which won’t come in for two years and which, even then, could be disallowed by the Senate. Carbon emissions are less equivocal; an indictment of Coalition climate policy.

The Environment Department Greenhouse Account report confirms Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions rose 0.8% in the year to June, mainly due to fossil-fuelled electricity generation. Current policy cannot bring us near our 2030 targets; not that the government that scrapped the carbon tax will admit to a rise in emissions, let alone own its responsibility.

In November, Energy and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg stalls four times when David Speers on Sky asks him about the rise. Then he thinks up a lie; attempts to blame Labor “they’ve gone down significantly from where they were then we inherited it from the Labor party.” It’s a whopper but few will challenge him. He’s counting on it.

The Government’s own data shows that, when Labor left office national annual emissions were 523Mt CO2 (year ending December 2013) while the latest annual result from shows they are 529Mt CO2 (year ending December 2015).

A Freedom of Information request is needed before the Australian Conservation Foundation can confirm the delay, a move, it says, which shows the Turnbull government’s determination to hide its policy failure. Evasion is becoming its trademark. Last year, figures showing a rise in emissions were released on Christmas Eve. Nowhere is the government of secrets and lies better revealed than in its propaganda war on renewable energy; its failure to deal with climate change.

The Coalition’s war on wind and solar is a diversionary tactic. With the help of ABC’s, Chris Uhlmann, the anti-solar power Grattan Institute crusader and a mainstream media eager to protect coal against the consumer, the nation has been repeatedly told that the SA blackout, in which a storm blew down 22 transmission towers, was caused by “too much renewable energy in the mix” a ludicrous assertion contradicted by every industry body in the market.

Expect to hear endless replays in 2017 until it becomes accepted as true. Just as budget repair, another absurdity – as if you could break a budget – and originally a gibe at Gillard – has now become part of mainstream discourse.

Solar and wind energy are now cheaper than any other mode of power generation creating a dynamic Chief Scientist  Alan Finkel calls “an unstoppable energy transition away from centralised polluting fossil fuel plants.”  Yet, like Donald Trump, a post-truth Coalition gets its propaganda from the coal lobby. Expect to hear it repeat the fossil fuel industry myth that renewables boost prices to the consumer. How they are unreliable. Not suited to the grid. Bad for birds and bats. Or that we must take our time.

Expect to hear more from red-neck MPs such as Matt Canavan, Resources and Northern Australia Minister and other science illiterates who pretend to accept climate change but dispute how much of it is man-made. (Stop wasting our time. Read the research. It’s pretty much all of it, Canavan!)

Expect more fake, fake news fibs. Matt King Coal Canavan, a climate change denier who believes the effect of carbon emissions is “overhyped by certain interest groups”, bizarrely attacks the ABC for broadcasting “fake news” when it reveals that the Adani company is the subject of multiple corruption investigations by the Indian government for trade based money laundering, allegedly siphoning funds offshore and inflating electricity prices. Fake? It’s impeccable.

ABC sources not only include India’s Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, the Indian government itself, they comprise University of Sydney’s Professor David Chaikin, a leading Australian authority on money-laundering. Worrying, as Bernard Keane notes, is Canavan’s ironic reversal of the use of “fake news” to mean news without foundation, false or fictitious such as the wilful misinformation and lurid fabrications published on social media by Donald Trump’s associates.

Yet it’s not without precedent. Canavan’s tactic echoes Malcolm Turnbull’s recent misappropriation of “post-truth” to dismiss information he doesn’t like. Expect more pernicious nonsense. Trump’s inauguration and the swearing in of his cabinet of climate science denialists will vastly encourage the Coalition’s rabid right wing to pull even tighter on the strings of their puppet Malcolm Turnbull. Yet nothing will help a coal industry past its use by date. Or ease its desperate propaganda.

Jargon helps the coal lobby case. Wind energy, we are told, can’t supply “synchronous energy” despite a recent assurance by GE, the world’s largest supplier of energy equipment that “The days of relying solely on synchronous generation for everything are over.” Nick Miller, senior technical director for GE Energy Consulting, adds that alternatives such as inverter-linked solar can perform many of the same functions, and much more efficiently.

Yet, in a nation where mainstream media is hostile to wind and solar, Australians are lied to; manipulated into accepting the worst possible choices for their future and the future of the planet. Almost as deplorable is the extent to which Turnbull, a former advocate and the putative leader of his party, has capitulated; embraced Abbott’s denialism. In the meantime, Abbott has stepped up his sniping at Turnbull while Eric Abetz, Kevin Andrews and other clapped out party hacks barrack for Abbott to be given a place in Cabinet, doubtless hoping for a rise in their own fortunes.

Abbott gal pal, Catherine McGregor, makes the laughable suggestion that cabinet discipline would keep Tony focused. It never has before. A certainty is that Turnbull can expect more sniping in the New Year. Above all, it’s a beaut diversion from the colossal ineptitude, the vacuity of his own leadership and his government’s plummeting popularity in the opinion polls. Everybody knows Abbott doesn’t have the numbers to challenge but it’s fun watching him heckle from the peanut gallery; extracting every ounce of revenge by cutting his PM and his pretensions down to size. On with the show!

You can’t tell the silver budgie from the budgie smuggler, when it comes to policy -apart from the onion breath.  Turnbull’s New Year message and terror alert is straight out of the Abbott playbook. Yet not all of us can give him our attention. Many decent Australians are distracted by menacing debt collection text messages; pay up or go to prison, Merry Xmas, Happy New Year, Ho, Ho, Ho: Centrelink, Santa Clawback department. PS add our 10% “recovery fee”.

Recipients have 21 days to comply, calculated from when they were sent the original letter or electronic message. Many do not receive the first notice. Letters are sent to invalid addresses. Some electronic messages are simply not received.

“We’ll find you, we’ll track you down and you will have to repay those debts and you may end up in prison,” Federal Human Services Minister, Alan Tudge is a model of enlightened humanity on A Current Affair, Monday 5th December.

Most vulnerable, according to current Legal Aid statistics, will be those with disabilities or in financial hardship. There is no evidence, moreover, that threats of prison will significantly change behaviour. Or reduce any kind of crime rate. Nor with a 20% increase in our imprisonment rate over the last ten years, are our prisons likely to have room for more pensioners and poor. Yet the threat does sit well with the government’s get tough on dole bludger narrative.

Not that people matter. Bludger-buster Tudge is chuffed: productivity is up. Centrelink used to send 20,000 queries a year. Now it’s 20,000 a week. A gung-ho Tudge boasts the system will send over 1.7 million compliance notices by 2020. At the current rate, however, it would send 3.12 million notices over the same period, but this assumes accurate data in the first place. It also flies in the face of other evidence which suggests that the $2 billion the government believes it is chasing or the $4 billion nudge upward from Tudge is a delusion; one of Morrison’s unicorns.

Referral of fraud cases to the Director of Public Prosecutions fell by 80%  since Centrelink introduced an early contact system between 2009-13. The recent rapid upsurge is due to automation and a huge number of incorrect letters of demand being generated by erroneous calculations or deductions made by the new software system. The software searches back six years, while welfare recipients entitled to claim a benefit in arrears may go back only one year.

Data-matching is the government’s latest buzz-word in its “welfare crackdown”. However, the process is only as good as the data it matches; the algorithms used. Horrific injustices reported include a young single mother being hit with a bill for $24,215 days before Christmas. A minor error in her reporting an employer’s name in two separate documents led the computer to deduce she had two employers. Errors are common when the ATO’s recording of a company’s business name differs from the name the employee knows it by. The computer treats the discrepancy as an extra job.

An automated debt recovery system is the grand title given this crude database matching with agencies such as the ATO.  Thousands of complaints that low-income earners have been wrongly served with repayment demands for thousands have led to calls from ACOSS and some Labor MPs for its abandonment.  Calls for the abolition of the new compliance system, are unlikely to be heeded. The government is on to a winning formula. The burden of proof is on the accused. If you can’t find your receipts, which you have no ATO legal requirement to keep, or your employer has gone out of business, you have to pay anyway.

Searching back six years is guaranteed to increase the probability that clients won’t be able to find receipts. These will have to pay up regardless.  It’s enough to put you off the political circus entirely, if you stop to think about it.

Not that we do over think our politics. We love to hate our political clowns and villains; see ourselves as spectators rather than participants. And each other as us rather than them. Those on welfare, moreover, are daily demeaned in our media; trashed in The Herald-Sun, The Daily Telegraph and in the Australian as worthless, undeserving, bludgers.

The Daily Telegraph alone has published fifteen dole bludger bashing articles in 2016 alone. Three quarters of these, Owen Bennett points out in New Matilda, rely on government information; statistics and interviews with ministers. Only government supplied data or opinion is used to support its argument for example that a quarter of dole recipients are refusing to turn up to work in Dole Shirkers Shun Work in 7 April which cites 276,000 payment suspensions job agencies imposed on unemployed workers between 1 July and 30 September 2015 as evidence.

Yet these figures refer to a different penalty. The relevant eight week suspension was applied only 1046 times in the same period. As Bennett notes, the Daily Telegraph got it wrong by 1,102,954. Fake news or news which falsifies key information or wilfully misleads to support the government’s case is increasingly put at the service of the Turnbull regime.

A Current Affair, last year, found an “Aussie Kim Kardashian” rorting her single parent payments, which it doubled to $600 per week, despite supplying no hard evidence as to the woman’s alleged extra income from her home beauty salon business. To delight Peter Dutton, and other Coalition racist dog-whistlers, ACA helpfully led readers to believe that not only was un-Australian Kim in need of some repair work, she was – Lebanese.

“It’s reported she recently returned to her home of Lebanon for cosmetic surgery.” Hopefully not via Syria.

No-one expects a Turnbull government to chase the top end of town. Or to give fig about its role in growing social inequality. Australian Taxation Office figures released 17 December show over a third of Australia’s top 1500 corporations did not pay any tax at all in the 2013-14 financial year. Then there’s deductions and dividend imputation. While companies press for their promised $50 billion’s worth of tax cuts, many already effectively pay around ten per cent tax. The government misses out on $8.4 billion in revenue per year estimates United Voice in its 2014 report.

Then there’s $380 billion in tax breaks, capital gains and super concessions for rich retirees over the next two years.  It’s the nation’s biggest cost to the economy but would involve breaking the Coalition’s election commitment to looking after the wealthy. Scott Morrison, moreover, refuses to admit any revenue problem. Pretends it’s a welfare problem. But there’s only so long that he and his government can go on pretending.

In September, one year into office, Turnbull’s government had underwhelmed Jeff Kennett. He couldn’t recall a single achievement. “Well, by the skin of his teeth, he didn’t lose to Bill Shorten”, sniffed a visibly unexcited Peta Credlin.

“It takes Malcolm Turnbull a year to do nothing, ” huffs the Herald-Sun, a rag which loves Tony Abbott like catnip.

Nowhere is this more of an indictment of his leadership than in Turnbull’s defection to the side of climate change denial.

Apart from demonising the other and pandering to xenophobia – both unifying pursuits which still play well in the Victorian anti-terror witch-hunt in the lead-up to Christmas – and featuring the war on terror in the PM’s New year message, delay is one of the few tactics still available to a Coalition saddled with a neoliberal ideologue as treasurer, a poseur too dry to even utter the words “stimulus spending” on ABC 7:30.

No good telling Morrison, the Malcolm Roberts of economics, that government debt would zero if we had Howard-era tax rates. Nor any other kind of empirical truth, such as from best performing economy in the world in 2013, in three years we’ve fallen to fifteenth.

There’s a lot not to like and bad news to bury at the end 2016. Carbon emissions and unemployment are up; tax receipts are down, down, down. Under-employment is steadily rising. Wages are flat-lining. Real wage growth will stay below 1% until 2019-20. Prices remain static. Business investment will fall by 6% next year. Forecasts for jobs and growth are also “revised downward” in a phrase which lies at the heart of Malcolm, Fizza Turnbull’s brief but endlessly disappointing career as Prime Minister even in a post-truth era.

A hapless captive who traded his independence for a crack at the top job. Turnbull faces new threats to defect from the likes of Beastie-Boy Corey Bernardi and Gorgeous George Christensen. He should call their bluff. If only he had the guts.

Instead, the year ends with Turnbull burying the trash of his economic and climate policies when he hopes it won’t be noticed, whilst Morrison, an economic mountebank, expects a round of applause because we have not lost our AAA credit rating. Yet.

No-one in government will concede that there its welfare crackdown is flawed in conception and in execution, a cynical attack on a fair and compassionate society, by a government too weak or too beholden to review $50 billion company tax cut; a government which has sponsored a war on the poor and fostered social division through mainstream media.

And no-one in government has the human decency to respond appropriately to the death of 27 year old Faysal Ishak Ahmed, a Sudanese refugee yet another in our care on Manus Island whose quest for asylum has cost him his life.

In the end how the Turnbull government treats the poor, the suffering and the dispossessed diminishes us all,  to say nothing of its cavalier disregard for future generations in its climate policy, its failure to make sound economic plans. Australia has seldom been so ill-served by any government. May 2017 be a time it is brought to account.