I don’t know what I’m doing, but my incompetence has never stopped my enthusiasm. Woody Allen 

The nation is spellbound this week as a Turnbull government, long-acclaimed as a leader in mismanagement and dud judgement, breaks all former records in a crop of epic, self-inflicted disasters which begin with a bungled police raid on the Australian Workers Union and ends with an inept government in catastrophic trouble.

First, the government woos us with a shaggy dog story. David De Garis, Employment Minister Michaelia Cash’s bat-eared Man Friday, hears the Australian Federal Police are about to raid the Sydney and Melbourne AWU offices. The AFP have been tipped off: The AWU is about to destroy some ten year old receipts for donations to GetUP!

Instantly, a squad of 30 AFP wallopers swings into emergency receipt rescue formation. No-one gets between an AFP and paperwork in danger. Danger? Incredibly, it turns out the AWU is diabolical Bill Shorten’s old union.

David phones journos. Happily, he gets everyone in time to make the evening news. SKY and ABC have cameras rolling at 4:30 pm just as the AFP arrive. As with all classic comedy routines, timing is everything.

Employment Minister, Michaelia Cash who has a lot on her plate managing her property portfolio as well as growing all those jobs every month, says she took Dave to lunch with Mal, Wednesday.

As the PM’s red teapot is her witness, Dave didn’t say a word about the AWU stunt, much less fess up to having orchestrated the whole damn catastrophe. It beggars belief but Cash won’t budge from her story.

Cash returns to the Senate Estimates Committee where she lies five times that no-one from her office called the cops or got the media on to the AWU witch hunt raid stunt. No-one believes her – clearly the tip-offs have got to senators, too although, by Sunday, Phil Coorey a big Cash man on ABC Insiders, will charge to her defence.

“I can also assure you that my office did not find out about the raids until after they were conducted. It is a very serious allegation that you are making and I refute it completely,” she tells a Senate estimates hearing.

Liberals do moral indignation so well. On the other hand, they do get a lot of practice. Butter wouldn’t melt.  Cash’s shocked denial is a haunting performance.

By tea-time, Cash changes tune. De Garis did it, she says. He’s gone off and done it all off his own bat. Not told a soul. Not me. Not the PM. Not even the Daily Tele. Turnbull, in it up to his neck, says Shorten, clinches his complicity by faking moral indignation. It was, he finger-wags,  “a very, very wrong, improper act of indiscretion”.

Keeping a straight face, Cash suggests the AFP look into it. Brilliant. The AFP should investigate the AFP. She deploys what Mark Kenny sees as the Sharon Strzelecki defence from Kath and Kim, “I didn’t know”

More credible is the pithy, down to earth Labor Senator Doug Cameron who tells the hearing: “She’s thrown her staffer under the bus”. In the process she has misled parliament, her department has clearly busted the ROC as a political witch hunt, she’s blown the Coalition’s latest Kill Bill strategy and a staffer’s career is ruined.

It may even be the end of the ROC, experts tip. Apart from that, the AWU raid’s a stroke of genius.

What better than an Australian Federal Police raid on AWU offices in Sydney and Melbourne, Tuesday, to blood the ROC (Registered Organisation Commission) the new union-bashing lynch mob on the block, smear Shorten, puts the wind up GetUp! and help disguise Turnbull’s “game-changing” brain fart as an energy policy.

Nothing shrieks “gotcha” like a shot of a burly cop lugging a bulging plastic bag of receipts. Wonderful optics.  Get the photographers from the Jihadi mincer plot on to it. They have a wonderful eye for guilty before charged.

Years of images of terror busts have, doubtless, helped soften us up to accept random AFP raids. Yet AFP powers are limited to investigating crimes which fall under Commonwealth laws. Most crime is a state law matter.

In May last year, The AFP raided the home of then shadow communications minister, Jason Clare, and senior Labor Senator, Stephen Conroy in connection with what were claimed to be leaked government documents. Don’t ask what became of the inquiry. The AFP bust like all performance art won’t be rushed liked that.

Then, as now, the Prime Minister rejected any suggestion of Government interference, claiming the AFP operates “entirely independently of the Government”. His assurances ring as hollow as his energy or NBN guarantees – or indeed the heavy-handed, ham theatricality of his patently insincere censure of the dynamic David De Garis.

In a travesty of due process, the ROC says it ordered this week’s raid solely “on the basis of an anonymous call”.

No lawful reason exists for the raid. The documents the government seeks are not required to be held beyond seven years. They were documents, however, which the union was making available to the ROC.

“We were cooperating before we ended up in this remarkable situation yesterday. For our 131 years, there has not been one occasion that the AWU has not cooperated with any investigation and we don’t have any ideas of changing that,” National Secretary, Daniel Walton tells ABC’s AM.

Nor has any law been broken: this is not a criminal matter but just a routine ROC-AFP bust to see that the AWU is following its own rules. No wonder the coppers on camera are scowling.

Attorney-General George Brandis, who is still wiping the egg off his ample face over his disastrous advice to his government over its dual citizenship debacle, adds his own hint that the ROC is a kangaroo court.

“Its job is to enforce the law and if it finds the law has been breached, then its obligation is to pursue that,” Brandis, our legal Mr Magoo, tells Sky News. No law has been breached? The government does not care.

So what if the AWU says it’s happy to share the documents? It has already made them available to Dyson Heydon’s Trade Union Royal Commission, an $80 million witch hunt into Bill Shorten which spawned the ROC concept?

Nobody in a post-truth, Trumpian world is bothered by evidence any more. As the Productivity Commission’s rules this week, on its yen to change GST distribution, “An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.

It is an alarming trend – even if the phrase is a gift to the t-shirt slogan industry. The title of the Commission’s report – ‘Shifting the Dial’ is a clue to our brave new government’s desire to march to the beat-up of a different drum; its rush to tune out empiricism in favour of a more pliant metaphysics; the vibe, the smear and the spin.

Equally alarming, as Mark Kenny notes,  is the tally of Turnbull government ministers who have entered the plea of ignorance as their defence and who have freely admitted, as coal puppet Matt Canavan does, after blaming his mother and updating his story several times, that they were prepared to stand for election and to bank the 300-400,000 salary but that they weren’t fussed checking whether they were eligible for the job.

“For … institutional conservatives, the trashing of basic parliamentary and ministerial standards through these events is even more depressing. Having lawmakers deploy the ignorance defence fundamentally erodes the power of law, and materially weakens the very project of parliamentary representation.

At the ministerial level, it renders the sanction of executive resignation hollow, by allowing a minister to simply stand with everyone else, among the great unknowing. This lack of knowledge and basic curiosity makes a mockery of the accountability mechanism central to the Westminster tradition.” He writes.  And then there’s the lie of spin.

Spin? Anti-worker Employment Minister, Michaelia Cash, insists the ROC will just subject Unions to the same rules as company directors. Sure. Every day we see directors of banks, mining companies, casino operators and betting agencies being raided by AFP officers and sundry men in suits just to help accountancy teams with their filing.

Like extreme vetting, an AFP raid on your archives is positively therapeutic; a type of clerical, colonic irrigation or a form of shock treatment. Or both.

In fact, the ROC has markedly more extensive investigative powers than Fair Work, the power to lay criminal charges and impose financial penalties harsher than those applicable to businesses under the Corporations Act.

Slater and Gordon caution that ROC and supporting laws represent a significant attack on the rights of unions to self-govern. Imposing a dedicated regulator focussed squarely on Unions is an attempt to ensure that Unions are focussed on compliance with costly, unwieldy regulation at the expense of organising and representing members.

ROC aids and abets union bashing. Former shonky jobs figures shill, Senator Eric Abetz, a veteran GetUp! foe takes time out from fighting safe schools, same sex marriage and encouraging gays to come out as straight, Sunday, to explain that if the (perfectly legal) GetUp! funding “was proved inappropriate”, it raises serious questions.

” … finally issues relating to potential trade union corruption are being taken seriously and thoroughly investigated,” he says “Honest union members have the right to know that their money is being spent correctly.”

Proved inappropriate? Since 2010, Eric, who is convinced the organisation is a Greens/Labor front run by George Soros, has reported GetUp! unsuccessfully to the AEC and the ACCC. It is disingenuous to continue the smear given the publication of clear refutation by both bodies. But Eric has a record of being fast and loose with facts.

On a local radio station last year he argued that GetUP! should have its charity status revoked.

“If an organisation becomes involved in the political debates, they shouldn’t be allowed to get charitable donations — which means tax-deductibility — in circumstances where the political party against which they are campaigning cannot get that sort of tax-deductibility and charity status for their donation.”

Sadly, for the senator’s rapidly dwindling credibility, GetUP! Is not a charity.

Issues relating? While they’re after the GetUp! paper work, the police seek evidence of a $25,000 payment made by the AWU to Mr Shorten’s election campaign in the Melbourne seat of Maribyrnong in 2007, and another two payments to campaigns in the seats of Petrie (Queensland) and Stirling (WA).

Unions legitimately support Labor candidates but the raid helps create suspicion of criminal misconduct.

No-one will worry it’s a stunt. All that matters is that Shorten be smeared, somehow, because the AWU openly and legitimately donated $100,000 to GetUp! when the Opposition leader led the union over 10 years ago.

The law is now on side, too, thanks to nifty Nick Xenophon and dreadful Derryn Hinch’s vote in May. The ROC, a double dissolution trigger last election, is nothing less than a state attack on workers.

AWU national secretary Daniel Walton calls the raids “an extraordinary abuse of police resources”. “It is clear the Registered Organisations Commission has been established, not to promote good governance, but to use taxpayer and police resources to muckrake through historic documents in an attempt to find anything that might smear a future Labor prime minister,” Walton tells AAP. 

Wages stagnate, work becomes increasingly deskilled, part-time and casual while inequality becomes more deeply entrenched, yet the Coalition responds by attacking working people, their representatives and the many volunteers who give their time to be delegates and to generally support unions in their work.

Unions are already covered, moreover, by the Corporations Act, and lately by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Now the Coalition has imposed a third tier of union oversight. While it claims to be after union corruption, the government is interested in union governance; donations and superannuation funds.

For a divided Coalition at odds on energy, education, environment and marriage equality to name a few, policy debate yields readily to dirty pool. It’s week of defamatory personal attacks on Sponge-Bob Bill Shorten whom the PM jeers, is “Melbourne’s greatest sycophant, one of the union movement’s great sucker-uppers.”

Worse, in that perverse projection Turnbull favours, Shorten is one of Labor’s “hereditary union princelings”. “Not everybody has a privileged ride to power through a union job,” he sneers, baring bottom teeth.

The politics of sledging is a legacy of junkyard dog, Tony Abbott, whose grasp on any policy is, still, at best tenuous and whose sole, intelligible claim to remain leader, was that he could “beat Bill Shorten”.

If only politics could be reduced to a boxing match between the two leaders. If only we could sucker punch the entire Labor mob. Kill Bill with one knock-out punch. The team is working on it. Sadly, Rupert Murdoch’s rags have far less influence now.

Gutter politics are almost eclipsed, however, by the Coalition’s secret strategy to deal with Friday’s High Court verdict: complacency and entitlement. Ayatollah Turnbull, as he is known to his former fellow merchant bankers, has let his ego do the talking. You can tell he’s still personally outraged at the court’s lese majeste.

This was not the plan. Now he dithers for two days about whether he can trust Julie Bishop to act PM.

A High Court wowed by the PM’s parliamentary chutzpah ,”… the High Court will so hold…” was meant to clear Kiwi Barnaby and as many of the remaining six dual nationals as it cares, leaving himself and Lucy free to jet to Israel where he could pose as an international statesman and explain how the charge of the Fourth Light Horse Brigade at Beersheba in 1917 allows Australia to lay claim to founding Israel.

“The capture of Beersheba allowed British empire forces to break the Ottoman line near Gaza and then advance into Palestine, a chain of events which eventually culminated in the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948,” Australia Post said in 2013  It’s a popular new reimagining of the past to give Israel another link with Australia.

Clayton’s Deputy PM Julie Bishop will now hold the fort. She can deal with the backlash over Turnbull’s decision, announced Wednesday, to reject any plea for a constitutionally recognised voice to parliament.  Cabinet rejects The Uluru Proposal  five months on from the historic constitutional summit in Central Australia.

The Uluru statement is a rejection of symbolic constitutional reform in favour of a constitutionally enshrined voice to parliament, which would sit outside the parliamentary structure but provide advice and consultation on issues and legislation affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Establishing a Makarrata commission with a view to establishing a treaty, or treaties, between Indigenous people and Australian governments is a second, vital component of the Uluru statement.

As Paul Daley notes, the rebuff is a slap in the face to “all the linguistically and culturally diverse urban, regional and remote communities that comprise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia”, a breach of trust and a rejection more pointed  by making the announcement, from on high, in cabinet on the cusp of the PM’s departure and at a time when parliament is in recess.

Above all it sends a clear signal that the Turnbull government lacks humanity and common decency as much as it lacks vision and leadership. It is by far the biggest failing of his utterly disappointing prime ministership and will be cost him dearly.

Indigenous leaders rightly feel betrayed if not duped. The Coalition has let indigenous Australia, indeed all Australians down first by having no plan for constitutional recognition of its own when it came to power  – then by asking leaders to consult with communities to come up with a model – only to reject that model when so much hard work is done. At the very least, it is a consultation in name only, an act of gross bad faith and betrayal.

The PM rejects embedding an indigenous voice in the constitution as “too ambitious”. While The Referendum Council’s proposal for an Indigenous representative assembly, or Voice, is a new concept constitutional change, the PM must acknowledge the extensive and valuable work of the past decade – largely with bipartisan support.

It is a poor thing to say “too ambitious” or that the model lacked detail. A good government, committed to equality and partnership, committed to community works with people to find that detail. It is mutually demeaning, moreover, for Turnbull to retreat to a symbolic recognition.

Turnbull himself is now also disgraced by his poor form in prompting the High Court in parliament to find in favour of his deputy PM in an extraordinary moment of poor judgement when he took it upon himself in Question Time in the House in August to predict – if not lead -the High Court in its judgement.  The High Court will so hold what the High Court decides and not what any jumped up Prime Minister may try to dictate.

Similarly, the AFP raid on the AWU reeks of the same poor judgement that indulged Godwin Grech in Utegate in 2009. Instead of blowing up Bill, the PM has effectively blown up his own government.  By Friday, gone is his parliamentary majority, two cabinet ministers and any sign of an acting deputy PM.

No-one knows what challenges will be mounted to decisions taken by ministers who were allowed to continue while their eligibility to be in parliament remained in doubt.

Worse, Michaelia Cash has disappeared into WA for a good lie down gifting politics with an open season on backstabbing, bitching and petty vendetta, especially given she’s widely tipped to be next Attorney General.

The week ends with a government in crisis, its credibility in tatters, its majority shot and with serious questions hanging over the legitimacy of its decisions after The High Court rules comprehensively against its brilliant case that for MPs caught in the trap of dual-citizenship, ignorance is somehow an excuse, an argument which is itself indicative a deeper, postmodern malaise in which truthiness displaces truth and all is spin.

Super Mal, our super-antihero PM, the down-under “wonder-gunner” blitzes Canberra’s political firmament this week, lighting up the sky with yet another dazzling flash of super-power in “Keeping The Lights on” – a love duet with the BCA and for history buffs an homage to the Liberal Party’s naff 1975 election slogan, “Turn On the Lights.”

In a week where our role in world affairs includes the shameful abandonment of our gulag on Manus Island to our ignominious failure to censure Myanmar over Rohingya genocide and where our embarrassments extend to our Foreign Minister having to eat her words about never being able to trust a Kiwi Labour government, the PM’s energy fix and Michaelia Cash’s jobs windfall are played for all they are worth. And then some.

First, to Turnbull who talks up his NEG, a National Energy Guarantee – a type of energy policy on steroids to judge by its promotion – which promises cheaper, reliable, cleaner electricity. Cheaper? NEG has a way with words:

“It is expected that following the guarantee could lead to a reduction in residential bills in the order of $100-115 per annum over the 2020-2030 period.”

NEG gets generators to clean up their act. No blackouts; keep costs and emissions down. Generators must meet two guarantees; one on reliability and one on emissions.

After that, the proposal gets hazy. Reliability is tricky because coal is “in the mix” along with other ready-to-use sources such as coal, gas, pumped hydro and batteries”. Yet coal is less and less reliable, given the age of Australia’s ageing power plants. Unless it’s running all the time, moreover, a coal-fired plant is inflexible.

Coal fired stations can’t rapidly ramp supply up and down and they are costly to start. Furthermore, high capital costs mean that the less often they operate, the higher the electricity price they need to obtain when they do.

The emissions guarantee, we are told, “will be set to contribute to Australia’s international commitments. The level of the guarantee will be determined by the Commonwealth and enforced by the AER.”

If, as seems likely, the new scheme allows for trading of credits liked to coal generation, the result will be a market in subsidies for dirty energy: “dirty energy credits”.

How it all works is anybody’s guess: no details are available. It’s a Turnbull big picture thing. But for an eight-page thought bubble, a document whipped up in two weeks by a government desperate for a plan B for a flagging Finkel Report, the NEG vibe is just incredible. Huge.

More than a few greenie nay-sayers may be throwing mung bean sandals or waving their Dakota dream-catchers, if we are to heed barking Barnaby Joyce whose tenuous grip on decorum and reality slackens every Question Time.

Won’t the NEG just protect the fossil fuel industry and slow the uptake of renewables? Experts such as Giles Parkinson have not been slow to voice their reservations. Giles mildly ventures that the proposal is:

” … the most ill-considered, poorly detailed and potentially useless policy that anyone can remember – the work of Australia’s so-called ‘energy mafia’ hungry to defend the power of the incumbent oligopoly, commercial interests and their ideology.”

Let yourself go, Parkinson. Tell us what you really think. The Opposition also has some major misgivings.

Labor’s Mark Butler worries: “For Turnbull’s plan to work there would be no new large-scale renewable energy projects and a cut of at least two-thirds to current rates of rooftop solar installation.”

The ESB  proposes a piddling 28 per cent to 36 per cent renewable share by 2030 a means to pacify a Coalition right wing, which already has the scent of victory in its nostrils.

Isn’t the NEG just another back-down? Hasn’t the right wing forced the government to junk the carbon price, reduce the renewable energy target, reject an emissions trading scheme, and dump a clean energy target?

Our PM quickly calls out any such heresy as “ideological”. Reckless unbelief such as this caused the SA blackout, remember? Besides NEG’s been designed by experts. Turnbull savages ABC RN’s Sabra Lane, Wednesday. How dare she (or anyone else) “attack” the “distinguished and expert” Energy Security Board?

Ayatollah Turnbull’s always been a bit iffy about impertinent questions but COAG’s set up a flash new ESB to hide behind. The ESB amounts to five independent experts who know everything. Gold-plated poles ‘n wires R US.

Dr Kerry Schott, former head of NSW and ACT network operator Transgrid fronts the gig, helped by deputy Claire Savage of the Business Council of Australia, a rent-seeking body dedicated to looking after the needs of some of our biggest polluters, a body which, in 2008, warned Rudd that a carbon price was “a company killer”.

Savage is highly regarded but has for the last decade worked as an advocate for big utility companies such as the industry association ESAA, then with EnergyAustralia before her work with the BCA.

Making up the rest of the impartial, independent, business brains trust are the heads of the Australian Energy Market Commission, the Australian Energy Regulator and Australian Energy Market Operator, or, as Sabra Lane puts it:  “… bodies that oversaw the last ten years of disastrous energy policy in Australia”.

Lane’s thoughts are echoed by Parkinson:

The scheme will, ostensibly, be monitored by the same useless regulators that allowed the networks – and latterly the generators and retailers – to gouge consumers over the last 10 years, and enabled them, more recently, to ‘play’ the market for certificates in the renewable energy target.

Our PM’s a gunner from way back. In June, for example, he was still “gonna” introduce a Clean Energy Target. Until it became a test of his leadership. Still going to get water to run up hill in his Snowy Hydro 2.0 pipe dream, though.

Amazingly his Snowy Hydro 2.0, a feasibility study on a massively expensive project at least ten years away is spun as somehow coming on stream tomorrow. A mad, manic delusional optimism seizes the entire front bench.

Turnbull, the disruptor, promises an energy game changer. It’s a masterly performance with report of an Abbott Party Room slap-down.  Josh Frydenberg intercedes. Abbott is a “conscientious objector”. The press gallery drools.

But Mal’s light on for detail. What is the plan? Is “coal in the mix” a sign that this is just another NBN-type hoax? Will coal play the role of copper in the PM’s disaster of an NBN project, devised solely to take down Labor’s?

Dave Donovan argues coal is to Turnbull’s new National Energy Guarantee what copper was to Turnbull’s major debacle; his  underpowered, oversold, over-budget version of the National Broadband Network.

Yet, judging by the saturation press, the PM lays his NEG, a “national energy guarantee” upon a grateful nation. It will, he promises, speaking quickly, cut electricity bills, lower carbon emissions and boost reliability. And look. There’s no modelling. And … that’s not all. The new NEG comes with its own, in-built political point-scorer.

The PM vows without hint of a twitch of upper lip that he will take the politicking out of the energy debate.  Born to silence the right wing and designed to wedge Labor, the NEG is as political as it gets. The rest is hypocrisy.

“How do we break out of these climate wars, of this dreadful cycle of ideological argument — and frankly idiocy or stupidity. There is no other way to describe it,” Turnbull pretends, invoking a thoroughly well-thrashed scapegoat for his own party’s paralysis on energy policy.

The lie that political squabbling is to blame for the Liberals’ own policy inertia, a result of its complete capture by the coal lobby, is repeated so often it is now gospel according to ABC Q&A, The Drum and others in MSM.

Yet, as Naomi Klein says, “It’s hard to tell where the Australian Government ends and the coal industry begins.” Increasingly we are fed the lie that somehow the Liberals’ purity of motive is thwarted by its political opponents’ treachery, especially Labor’s fetish for cheap, reliable, affordable clean energy that won’t destroy the planet.

Equally specious is the lament that squabbles deny our great god industry the certainty it is due; the certainty that is fundamental to investment. As Richard Denniss points out between 2009 and 2015, Santos and its international partners spent $10,000 a minute on a $25bn mistake when they hoped a massive gas export plant at Curtis Island, near Gladstone in Queensland would be profitable. So, too, did two other consortia, boosting cost to $80bn.

Denniss notes: “Australians have been told for decades that “businesses need certainty”, and that uncertainty is a barrier to investing in renewable energy. Unfortunately the gas industry’s inability to predict the future with any certainty didn’t prevent its managers from taking a massive risk with their own shareholders’ money.”

Turnbull’s on the same tram. “We’ve got to stop this ideological, theological nonsense about energy,” he preaches to IAG business leaders in Canberra Thursday. This is a time for clear-eyed, hard-headed, businesslike leadership.”

It’s an alarmingly delusional affectation and a well-worn cliché of conservative government rhetoric that only businesses know how to make sound decisions in energy when the evidence from our own gas industry catastrophe alone, a major cause of our own disastrous energy bubble should give pause for thought.

Turnbull must take us for fools if he believes we will mistake his government’s impulsive decision-making (or as he flatters it a “plan”) a proposal whipped up in two weeks without any proper modelling for a clear-eyed or hard-headed policy. It’s another in a long line of capitulations dictated by the government’s industry sponsors.

Yet it is his trademark wild-eyed evasion, Turnbull models in his leadership when he appears on ABC RN.

“Will you guarantee those price reductions?” asks AM host Sabra Lane.

“Well, what I can guarantee” replies PM Turnbull, “is that we’ve got those price figures, those cost figures ‒ in fact, which is based on their estimate of a 20 to 25 per cent reduction in wholesale generation costs ‒ we’ve got that. I can guarantee that the people that are giving those figures are the best informed and the most knowledgeable in the industry.”

No modelling? Instantly, the Opposition pounces in Question Time. Happily, Speaker Tony Smith interprets relevance so broadly as to allow Coalition MPs free rein to indulge in yet another round of Labor-bashing.

The plan is to paint Labor as the party of higher prices in a reprise of Tony Abbott’s pernicious great big new tax on everything 2013 attack on a price of carbon, a stunt which minder, Peta Credlin, now freely concedes, was a hoax.

It’s a work of consummate con-artistry which will continue the “energy wars” on the Labor Party whose reckless pursuit of renewable energy targets, as everyone knows, got us into this mess. Yet Labor fires back.

“In just the last 12 months, the Prime Minister was for an emissions intensity scheme until the Member for Warringah came out against it and he supported a clean energy target until the Member for Warringah came out against that,” Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Mark Butler, says.

“Given reports that the Member for Warringah spoke against the Prime Minister’s latest energy policy in the party room today, when will the Prime Minister announce that he’s against this one too?”

Not only is the NEG a runaway success, the week ends on a high – at least for employment minister, Michaelia Cash and her groupies who swoon over the government’s latest fresh-baked batch of employment figures.

These confirm how hugely successfully it always is in “creating jobs”, the corollary of “growing the economy” provided no-one looks at population growth, hours worked, wages or any other meaningful measure.

“Employment has increased by 371,500 over the last year – more than four times the jobs growth in Labor’s last year in government …” claims Cash, shrewdly manipulating the time period. Over the Coalition’s four years,  only an average of 206,400 jobs have been added per year.

Given, our adult population growth of  293,700 per year over the last four years, jobs have failed to keep up.

Jobs? ABS records reveal that Turnbull and Abbott are the worst economic managers since Menzies. Wages have languished for four years. Conditions decline steadily. A quarter of Australian workers now have no leave entitlements whatsoever.

A year ago, 716,600 Australians had no work at all but unemployment is no longer something the government mentions in public. Nor is it big on admitting a relentless decline in the quality of our working lives. The Coalition presides over record unemployment, underemployment, underpayment and the systematic casualisation of work.

But it’s on with the Cash Show. It’s all vital part of the pantomime theatre of work in which a neoliberal government can worship in the church of the free market, yet take credit for its own benign intervention.

12 months’ consecutive jobs growth – employment at a record high runs this month’s media massage.

Oh, my! 19,800 – in just four weeks! Just look how many JOBS our Magic Pudding policies have cooked up since our last sensational gingerbread bake-off. MSM reporters fall over themselves to toast another Coalition triumph.

An “extraordinary achievement” gurgles Malcolm Turnbull. Best run of monthly gains for nearly twenty-five years. A chum on The Drum obligingly beats up the myth of infrastructure spending the government keeps spinning and spinning as the cause of our workforce suddenly awash with well-paid, secure employment.

Getting in early, Judith Sloan posts a puff piece about how unassailable government employment statistics are. The former director of Santos a firm which deceived the nation about how much domestic gas it would sell off-shore, howls down “ABC talk-back hosts” for spreading doubt about official figures. It’s a dead giveaway.

Of course there are more people in work. There are more of us. What the minister’s orgy of self-congratulation never acknowledges is how jobs are increasingly part-time, casual and insecure.

But you’ll never hear Cash stop to factor in population growth – or any other fact that would help us to contextualise her meaningless statistics. She breathlessly reels off her talking points oblivious to their nonsense. The population increases; the economy expands. Yet, as Alan Austin, notes, MSM is taken in by her spin.

JOBS announcements are what Ms Cash endlessly, dramatically, provides in her role as Employment Minister, a cameo role she effortlessly fits in with her day-job of growing her own property investment portfolio.

As with most Turnbull government roles, her duties are now chiefly theatrical.  Cash applies her prodigious energy to being our national cheer-leader for all hardworking Australians in her indefatigable, virtue-signalling war on job-snobs, welfare-bludgers and other shirkers. It’s a ritual drawing of the battle lines between lifter and leaner.

For those viewers who don’t speak gush, ABC News 24 obligingly runs a synoptic ticker bearing the whopper: “jobs bonanza”, part of its lip-service to statutory fairness and balance.

As with so much else released by the government and especially with economics, the Employment Minister’s press release includes a Newspeak-style mission statement concocted entirely of false or misleading information.

“We are focussed on our plan to secure a stronger economy with more jobs, including lower taxes for small businesses, a record investment in infrastructure, reliable and affordable energy, new export agreements and an ongoing focus on ideas and innovation”.

More jobs? Alan Austin notes there were 711,500 people out of work in September, the eleventh consecutive month the total has been above 710,000, a figure not seen before the Coalition’s victory in 2013, since 1997.

Hours worked per month, the most reliable employment indicator, were 86.17. It has been below 86.5 for 48 consecutive month since the Coalition was elected. Under Labor it rarely fell below 87 even during the GFC.

Cash also delivers the obligatory attack on Labor. Yet under Labor, Australia ranked sixth in the developed world on the provision of jobs. We now rank 16th.

The Minister for Misleading Employment Statistics has an alarmingly over-expressive delivery easily mistaken for liar’s hype.  While Cash is doubtless a boon to even visually impaired lip-readers everywhere – especially those who yearn for misleading disinformation, her performance demands closer critical scrutiny.

Turnbull’s all-singing, all dancing brand new energy policy, is an insult to the intelligence of the electorate. It lacks detail and any semblance of integrity. Beyond its function as a kowtow to the coal lobby which pulls the party’s strings, it is a desperate, flimsy attempt to wedge Labor whilst appeasing the party’s right wing.

Jobs and energy, the two big-ticket items of the week reveal a Turnbull government hooked on hype and spin, an embattled, incompetent and hopelessly corrupted regime whose sole response to its self-inflicted energy and employment crises is to turn up the loudspeaker on the propaganda machine.

It’s a frantic, futile bid for reassurance; as each Newspoll shows, fewer and fewer amongst us are taken in.

“It is hardly necessary to say that the court is aware of the need to give its answers to these references with or without reasons as soon as possible,” declares High Court Chief Justice Susan Kiefel, Friday.

Kiefel is slapping down brash Matt Canavan’s barrister, David Bennett QC, whose client has changed his story several times after first blaming his mother for making him an Italian. Now expert esoteric Italian legal depositions are tendered.

Bennett, a former Solicitor-General has the chutzpah to remind the court of “the importance of an urgent decision”.

Snapping your fingers for service does not go well in The High Court. The lady’s not for churning,Susan Kiefel makes it clear. Nor is her court.

Ultimately, however, Kiefel succeeds only in bidding up the nation’s impatience in a political week filled with trepidation, the sick joke of Greg Hunt’s health policy “shake-up”, a capitulation to health insurance industry and the prospect of a national, Nationals New England by-election circus starring the incomparable, incomprehensible, Murray-Darling cotton-farmers’ darling Barnaby Joyce.

Politics could be put on hold for weeks, whenever The High Court gets around to delivering its verdict on seven little (alien) Australian MPs’ dual citizenship, should the PM finally decide to prorogue parliament while Barnaby Joyce is re-elected, a safe bet despite a Melbourne Cup field of candidates preparing to stand against him.

Centrelink clients, on the other hand, will be put through promptly, now that the government has outsourced its telephone calls to Serco, helping the international company rebuild trust after its 2013 scandal when it was discovered to have overcharged the UK government for electronically tagging criminals who were back in gaol, overseas or dead.

The government, meanwhile, brushes aside criticism of its Robo-call fiasco. It dismisses complaints made against the system as “third parties … aimed solely at scoring political points”. It’s a line it likes to apply widely to any call for accountability and thinking which informs a lot of its spin excusing its own lamentable failure in energy policy.

Quickly it scotches any suggestion it suspend its error-ridden data-matching Tuesday, while engaging an outside contractor with a dodgy reputation in the UK and in New Zealand. Chin up pensioners: what could possibly go wrong?

Left right, you know the drill. Look over there! Don’t you know there’s a war on? Or one about to go on in North Korea. What could break the Turnbull government’s log-jam of indecision and ineptitude better than a military adventure?

Abroad, in a scene worthy of Apocalypse Now, Julie Bishop jogs the DMZ dividing North from South Korea while urging an increasingly potty POTUS to declare war on North Korea as she dodges questions about Myanmar’s genocide.

Elected unopposed, Australia waits to play its part on the UN Human Rights Council which is waiting for us to condemn the human rights atrocities in Myanmar which Foreign Minister Julie Bishop insists arise from a “security operation”.

The Rohingya are to blame. Look where their insurgency has led them. What bother they’re causing Bangladesh.

Refugees? Rohingya refugees? No here. Not us. 11,000 flee in one day? We “need independent, verifiable accounts”.

Bishop’s outright refusal to acknowledge the existence of the humanitarian crisis posed by the Myanmar persecution of the Rohingya is a shameful demonstration of the Coalition’s complete disregard for human rights.

The Turnbull government’s compassion bypass, its cruelty and its wilful abdication of responsibility under international refugee agreements are an indictment of its lack of moral compass and inhumanity. Instead, its foreign minister falls back on the best hollow clichés her staffers can provide for her.

“Australia will bring a pragmatic and principled approach to working with other nations to find real solutions to complex global challenges,” she says. Elsewhere she is fond of talking of rules-based global order, a catch-phrase of our 2016 Defence White Paper but one which is wretchedly vague and subjective. What if China has its own rules-based order?

In a revealing lapse into Newspeak, on SBS TV Sunday, Julie Bishop claims her government will offer “principled and pragmatic leadership” in the UN Human Rights Council, as if principled and pragmatic are not mutual contradictions. Easy to say. Is she unaware that our pragmatism is on open display in how we treat others such as Rohingya refugees?

“What will it take for our government to draw a line in the sand with the Myanmar military so as not be to complicit in crimes against humanity in our region?,” asks Diana Sayed, Amnesty’s crisis campaigner in Australia.

Bishop may commend her government’s new UNHCR role but nothing can hide our shame on boat turn-backs or atone for the inhumanity of our offshore detention; our neglect of Indigenous health, education and incarceration issues.

Worse, neither she nor Peter Dutton will comment on reports that Border Force is offering to pay Rohingya men on Manus to return to Myanmar and certain persecution. Yet one Rohingya detainee has already reported that he was offered $25,000.  Luckily, threat of war provides distraction. North Korea is not happy with Bishop or Australia.

Pyongyang’s news agency, which our ABC must remind us is “state-run” personally criticises Bishop; accuses Australia of joining the “frenzied political and military provocations of the US” against Pyongyang. It warns that Australia would not be able to avoid disaster if it continues to support the US stance on Pyongyang. Yet does she even know what that is?

Julie Bishop puts on her runners. She warns reporters “little rocket man” may launch a missile next week. Nuclear war could follow, she purrs, or worse, unless we drag Kim-chi Kimbo kicking and screaming to the negotiating table.

Negotiating? Donald Trump, the star of The Art of the Deal or “Fucking moron”, as secretary of state Rex Tillerson, tenderly refers to him, is sulking in his room. The President hates everyone. Another day. Another tantrum.

“We’re totally prepared for numerous things,” Trump baffles media, Friday, in a briefing that is pure Samuel Beckett.

“If something can happen where we negotiate, I’m always open to that. But if it’s going to be something other than negotiation, believe me we are ready, more so than we have ever been.” 

Apart from that, Trump won’t tell. Won’t give his game away. Especially as there is no game – a deception our government, Julie Bishop take a bow, enables. Jim Schoff, former senior Pentagon adviser for East Asia policy, tells The Washington Post that there are no signs that “U.S. policymakers think we’re on the brink of all-out war.”

Nor are there any signs of evacuation of the 28,000 US troops stationed in Seoul or any other civilians in South Korea while, over the border, Kim’s latest speech bags the US but is mainly about economics. North Korean soldiers are getting in the autumn harvest. Civilians are not mobilising. Only Trump and his Australian fan-club are talking up any war.

Long past the brink, mad-dog Abbott makes war on his boss from London. Experts detect another Newspoll in the field. Beyond barking, (Tel-Aviv) Dr Tony attacks his PM and all post-Christian, goat-sacrificing climate change god appeasers from The Old Dart. Climate change is crap. But, hey, if it really is real – and I’m not saying it is – it’s good for you.

Abbott makes a crap speech littered with falsehoods, a rant riven by tortured logic and inconsistencies to a bogus think-tank of coal industry puppets who clap politely in relief at the end. Bernard Keane carefully lists seventeen changes in the former PM’s position on climate change. Julie Bishop says he backed Paris; now he should explain his flip-flop.

Not a whisper from her of her former leader’s flip-flops on health, education or cuts to the ABC at the time.

The budgie-smuggler’s lunacy boosts an uneasy expectancy which falls upon us all, a wary national pessimism born of disappointment and exhaustion; boosted by the dance marathon of the postal survey on marriage equality and Josh Frydenberg’s super-elephantine four year-energy, bugger-the- climate to please Tony policy pregnancy.

In a world gone troppo, an uneasy, existential foreboding bedevils political life; the nation is waiting for Godot.

But no-one’s saying Chief Justice Susan Kiefel won’t put on a good High Court show. The odd cuckoo may even be thrown out of its parliamentary nest, or, indeed, all seven – after hearing One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts at length.

It would be un-Australian, the senator with the epistemological bent pleads, to discriminate between natural-born Aussies and “natural-born Indians” like himself.  It’s a welcome break from his party’s campaign slogans.

Oddly, the High Court expresses frustration with Roberts’ SC, Robert Newlinds, Justice Bell interjects testily: “It is unclear to me where this argument is taking you.”

If you were a betting man – and Malcolm Turnbull certainly is to have let his Deputy PM stay in parliament while disqualified – risking appeals on every decision he is party to, you would have to offer long odds on Roberts.

If Kiwi, Barnaby Joyce, were also deemed ineligible, he’d be a by-election shoo-in for his north-western NSW electorate of New England given his 58% of the primary vote last year. His anti-greenie electorate loves a water-rorting frack-champion, too.  Joyce is a huge SANTOS supporter. He hits the airwaves to plug coal seam gas extraction at Narrabri.

Joyce contradicts a federal government-appointed recent independent expert scientific committee which finds significant “knowledge gaps” in SANTOS’ local environmental impact study. And he does so with impunity. Why?

Is it self-interest? Narrabri is near Joyce’s property at Gwabegar. The Nationals’ leader forked out $572, 000 for two blocks of 1000 hectares in “mongrel country” , fit for goats, the odd migrant flightless bird and not much else, in 2006 and 2008. He had no idea that there was gas just begging to be fracked right under his property.  Amazing.

There’s no chance, he adds, any gas is going to come off his blocks. No chance his pal, John Anderson, gave him the nod – either. Anderson, a former Nationals leader, left politics, as you do, to become chairman of Eastern Gas in 2007, a firm which co-owned exploration rights to the block next door to Barnaby’s. Petroleum licences? You’ve got to be joking.

No chance of the pals’ gas-bagging about fracking. Nah. Goats and bloat mostly. Farm yarns. Land’s up for sale anyway. A  check with the agent reveals not a single enquiry. Joyce tells reporters he’s not going to make a “windfall” on the land.

Local activists say petroleum licences for the whole region depend on progress at Narrabri. Even with Barnaby’s spin, however, or with Fran Kelly’s “model corporate citizen” puff on ABC RN Breakfast, Santos has a poor record in the Pilliga. 20 toxic waste water spills at least have destroyed forest, one aquifer has been contaminated with uranium and other toxic heavy metals. Yet few gas wells have been sunk, so far; it’s the exploration phase of the project.

Mercurius Goldstein, a euphoniously named local high school teacher and The Greens’ anti-SANTOS candidate received 2.9% of the primary vote last election.  His party explains it is in it for the long haul and will contest any by-election.

Barnaby’s prospects will be boosted, also, by the fast-tracking of road projects which were funded by Labor in 2013. These languished under the Coalition which is now only too happy to discover some Opposition pork in the barrel.

A close relation to the pork barrel is the $6.25 billion taxpayers provide to subsidise private health insurance, an industry boondoggle introduced by the Howard government in 1999. Pivotal was Howard’s Health Minister, Michael Wooldridge, an entrepreneurial company director after politics, who in 2014 was subsequently fined $20,000 and banned from being a director of any company when a retirement company collapsed in 2011, owing investors $500 million.

Wooldridge was one of five former directors and did not benefit financially from the collapse. In 2016, the full court of the federal court overturned the ban, ruling that much vaunted corporate watchdog ASIC took too long to bring its case.

Preserving links with the top end of town, public health gets a soft spotlight Friday near the putting out the garbage end of this week as St George Hunt capitulates to the dragon; the government subsidised private health insurance industry.

Billed breathlessly as a “major shakeup” of healthcare policy – the biggest changes for fifteen years, the Turnbull government’s “sweeping changes”, offer a huge cut of 70 cents a week to the less than half of us who pay an average $1800 a year for private health insurance – on top of our Medicare levy.

Underwhelmed? Wait. There’s more. Policy holders may now also trade off a higher excess of $750-$1500, individual or family for lower premiums which will still rise by at least four per cent per year. Of course other savings are promised.

Instead of paying on average 119% more for having your cardiac device, for example, fitted in a private hospital, the cost of prosthetic devices to private patients will come down. That’s a promise.

Not only would private health insurers save $1 billion over four years on cheaper prostheses, Hunt claims, the saving would be passed on to customers.  It’s a trickle-down benefit, he’d like to pretend you get in the operating theatre. There’s no evidence of this ever happening. Every year, private health insurance premiums inexorably rise.

Clearly, the Coalition’s better health slogan applies only for the industry.  It continues to wage war on the planet and on public health in its four year failure to come up with an energy policy which even remotely considers public health.

Expect the next week in politics to be brimming with promises of affordable, reliable energy which is what the spin doctors hope will confuse punters who may want to know what we are really doing to meet our Paris targets, weak as they are or to curb the pollution that each year takes lives in towns that host coal-burning power stations .

Research estimates that 24 people die for every terawatt hours (TWh) of coal burnt.

Expect to hear nothing about health risks, or environmental costs or the fact that 95% of LaTrobe valley pollution is caused by coal. Expect to hear about the cheap cost of coal power and nothing about the health costs.

A 2009 Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering report put the health costs of coal-fired power stations at A$13 per MWh of electricity generated from coal (about $2.6 billion a year). Climate change and other environmental costs were not included.

Of course when the going gets tough, there’s always the diversion of North Korea’s threats to nuke us all now that Kim has displaced Bashar Al Assad as international evil monster du jour. Expect great celebration and self-congratulation now that we’ve been elected unopposed to a UN Human Rights Council, even though we’re not worthy of belonging.

Just don’t expect leadership. Or honesty or accountability. The week shows just how far this government will kowtow to vested interests; its great and powerful friends and their lobby groups.

Whatever the rhetoric, in the end, its “principled and pragmatic leadership” translates into the ruthless pursuit of power by any means; by the powerful for the powerful.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull speaks to State and Territory leaders during a special meeting on counter-terrorism of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) at Parliament House in Canberra, Thursday, October 5, 2017. (AAP Image/Lukas Coch) NO ARCHIVING

Never get between a premier and a bucket of money, Paul Keating warned. Or a Premier and an anti-terror photo-opportunity, he might add, after Thursday’s huge COAG performance. Human rights and civil liberties alike are trampled in the rush by all premiers to be the PM’s dancing partner in a show-stealing anti-terror two step.

It’s all about “keeping us safe,” Turnbull says, announcing what MSM echo is “a suite of measures” in “a further toughening” of national security laws including the extension of detention without charge to 14 days.

It’s a big thing. No  longer will Australians have to lie awake at night worrying lest the AFP runs out of time to interrogate terror suspects, including ten year olds. Police now have a good two weeks to come up with some charge or other. It’s a huge leap forward in public safety. So thoughtful of the community-minded AFP, too.

Imagine how much safer longer detention would have kept us last July with the Lakemba Muslim meat grinder plot terror crisis where an entire nation went into lockdown while AFP and a swag of other special forces clearly rushed against the clock to uncover a plot to use a kitchen mincer to blow up a plane and/or gas everyone on board with fart gas. No H2S gas was ever found, nor any gas dispersion device. Nor were explosives discovered.

Police can report, however, that the mincer was 7 kg too heavy to be allowed on the plane and that two of the four men arrested following an overseas tip-off have now been released.

In a sensational late update, AFP reveal that Lebanese authorities also allege a Barbie doll may also have been part of a plot to smuggle concealed explosives on-board an aircraft, not that any explosives had been found.  Did the doll also fail the weigh-in check? The Barbie doll plot is not part of any AFP allegations before the Sydney court.

Effortlessly working the Lakemba Four (now two) into his terror shtick, PM Turnbull prepares for his 21st successive NewsPoll with yet another keep us safe routine at the special COAG. Lakemba shows how our security forces can disrupt a plot to bring down a plane, he says. You wouldn’t believe how many plots have been foiled.

What can possibly go wrong? David Marr, on ABC Insiders Sunday, cites the 2007 case of Dr Mohammed Haneef who was held 11 days in the Brisbane watch-house by the AFP under brand new powers that allowed terrorism suspects to be imprisoned without charge virtually indefinitely. Information was then leaked against Dr Haneef.

News Ltd newspapers reported police found “images of a Gold Coast building” and its foundations in a raid on Haneef’s apartment. Investigators were said to be looking at documents referring to the “destruction of structures”. Haneef was one of a group of doctors who had been learning to fly in Queensland, they said.

A year passed before The AFP dropped its case against Dr Haneef, saying there was insufficient evidence to charge Haneef with any criminal offence. In December 2010, Haneef receives “a substantial” compensation settlement in a defamation and wrongful detention case he brought against then Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews.

Precedent counts for little in an era of the anti-terror cult, a time where politics runs in the continuous present. In June 2015, then PM Tony Abbott told the nation Islamic state group is coming after us.

Since Abbott, however, the threat of terror is hyped so successfully that according to an ANU poll, nearly half of us believe we or our families are in danger of a future terrorist attack and over half of us would like government to do so much more.

In reality, male partners and police constitute a far more serious danger.

“More Australians have died at the hands of police (lawfully or unlawfully) in 10 years (50 at least from 2006 to 2015) or from domestic violence in just two years (more than 318 in 2014 and 2015) than from terrorist attacks in Australia in the last 20 years,” observed Greg Austin, an international security expert at the University of NSW, last October.

The PM makes no case for the need to extend detention without charge nor does he defend the detention of ten year olds. Instead, he claims on Sky News Sunday, that it’s just business as usual .

‘It is very important to remember that (with) children there is actually no change here. Under our criminal law, children can be charged with committing crimes,’ he tells reporters in Sydney.

But there’s more. The innovative PM unveils Panopticon 2.0, a saucy, if not wanton, invasion of our privacy.

A 21st century digital re-imagining of the eternal surveillance of our convict heritage, Panopticon 2.0 blends an homage to the omnipresent eye of God, with a type of electronic Peeping Tom as it merges images from drivers’ licences with facial recognition software to invade our privacy at all times.

Governments already have massive databases of ID photos from licences and passports. What is new is the sharing and the matching of the data in real-time in what is broadly described as the interests of national security.

The new database will permit real-time access to passport, visa, citizenship and driver’s licence images. Details are vague, however, on the public and private spaces in which mass surveillance will be carried out. The project is a revamp of “The Capability”, a new, improved version of a $18.5 million system, proposed in 2015.

Premiers who just can’t wait to dance on the grave of a just and democratic society are just one scene from a week in our bizarre, hyper-surreal post-truth Trumpian politics, sees our great nation state grow ever larger.

Small government with its red-tape bonfires are now so yesterday. The hairy-chested Stalinist Coalition of today promises to fund coal-mines and even sort out gas companies. It can even roll up its sleeves and shovel coal to keep a dirty old power station like Liddell open. It can certainly keep us all under surveillance 24/7.

Turnbull waves away any suggestion that we’re already suffering toughen-up fatigue, so thick and fast have come the suite of security measures the Abbott-Turnbull government has unleashed on an alert but not alarmed nation.

” … there’s no place for set and forget in any area of national security, but the laws are already very strict”.

Spontaneous applause breaks out  Panopticon 2.0 wins Turnbull instant, slavering adulation while the concerns of the chattering classes are summarily trashed by all those with their feet up on the commonwealth table.

Desperate Dan Andrews, leads a team of premiers in quickly dismissing those who raise the issue of rights. What would such time-wasters know of the real world of Mal the Sun King Canberra’s bubble or his lunar satellites?

“They’re going to talk about the thin end of the wedge and all this sort of stuff. Well, frankly, that talk is a luxury that may be available to them but it’s not available to political leaders in this country,” he says. 

“Notional considerations of civil liberties do not trump the very real threat, the very real threat of terror in our country today. We are going to have to curtail the rights and freedoms of a small number of people in order to keep the vast majority of Australians safe.”

It’s not just talk, either. Last month his government announced plans for new laws that would give police the power to declare special areas where they can search people, cars and houses without a warrant.

From dead-pan Dan there is no inkling that civil liberties belong to us all; affect us all.  And laws aimed at “bad guys” often impact far more widely. The NSW Ombudsman found the 2012 revival of consorting laws to deal with crime gangs actually impacted most harshly on Indigenous Australians and homeless people.

” The criminal face database will affect all Australians, even the most conscientious and law-abiding. Given the extremely low level of terrorism in Australia, it’s likely to merely generate massive ‘false positive’ lists and flood our very effective police and security services with useless distraction,” says Privacy Foundation’s David Vaile.

There is nothing remotely “notional”, moreover, about the database nor about changes to law which will extend to two weeks the time anyone, including ten year olds can be detained without charge. Possessing terror instructions and even terror hoaxes are to be criminalised in Turnbull’s toughening up.

Yet Dan’s slogan goes viral. Co-luminary, WA Premier, Mark McGowan almost eclipses Andrews with his rapid study of the finer philosophical bits of premiership by leaving the lot of them to the lynch-mob.

“We are dealing with the civil liberties of terrorists and I don’t particularly care about the civil liberties of terrorists or potential terrorists.”

Yet we are dealing, in the end, with everyone’s civil liberties and whilst much is unspecified about Panopticon 2.0, what is certain is that its mission will creep. Dissenters of all kinds, including those whom this government may define as “eco-warriors”, in reality environmentalists, are in danger.

Already, an eager Cory Bernardi urges the database be used to enhance the Coalition’s war on the poor.

“If we’re going to start gathering data on particular people, I’d like to see that actually happen more in the welfare space as well,” he says, “because I think there’s a lot of people that are ripping us off on welfare and it might be an opportunity to tie in a coordinated approach to identifying individuals who are accessing the welfare system.”

The database may even be corporatised; flogged off to the highest, private bidder. Privatisation has worked so well not only in energy. Think Medibank private, TAFE and the privatisation of IT support for government agencies.

Labor is anxious not to be wedged. Bill Shorten makes no fuss despite the opposition leader’s recent study tour of the Korean Peninsula where supreme leader Kim Jong Un has got the mass surveillance thingy down to a fine art.

Instead, Shorten calls for the Coalition gun amnesty stunt to be extended. He wants life sentences for gun-runners.  Exempted, doubtless is our big brother government, which is doing so well out of its secret supply of arms to Saudi Arabia, which has killed 10,000 civilians in its brutal war with Yemen- that it can’t say a word.

The Turnbull government refuses to supply details of its military sales, citing commercial-in-confidence rules, themselves a function of the increasing despotism of a state which pretends its gun-running is a trade secret.

Turnbull tries to wedge Shorten, nevertheless, for not backing mandatory sentencing for gun-runners as if mandatory sentencing were some kind of panacea and not a knee-jerk to shock jocks on Sydney radio.

NSW Bar Association president Phillip Boulten SC says: “There’s no evidence at all that mandatory sentencing ever decreases the amount of crime that’s committed and it has the ability to act unfairly on vulnerable and disadvantaged groups.”

Big Fear certainly works on the states – and on the federal opposition, as Labor’s evasion shows.

With no opposition in the field, legal experts are left to explain the reality. Party-pooper Deakin University criminology lecturer Adrian Molnar warns Fairfax the database of driver licence photos, amounts to “mass undifferentiated surveillance that can be used regardless of innocence and no participation in a criminal activity”, warning that such a measure “runs dangerously close” to breaching the legal principle of probable cause.

“It’s just quite simply unnecessary,” adds Nicola McGarrity, UNSW terrorism law expert. Dr McGarrity argues existing laws already allow people to be held pre-charge for up to eight days.

There are no instances she is aware of where an “extra six days would have made a significant difference in making a prosecution or preventing a terrorist attack”, she says

But the states love it. They fall over each other to eagerly leap aboard any public safety bandwagon.

The PM is love-bombed Thursday, at the COAG show, where a tumult of “furious agreement” and “violent agreement” ensues, sighs NSW Liberal Premier, Gladys Berejiklian even if she refuses to let Turnbull have his way later with her state over fracking. She tells him what he can do with his non-ideological energy pragmatism.

If the COAG meeting is intended to lead to agreement on fracking via solidarity on law and order, it fails.

Apart from the onset of another Newspoll, why all the fuss? The day before, in a letter to Liberal supporters, the PM effortlessly counterfeits a false connection between the mass shooting in Las Vegas and Australia.

“The tragedy in Las Vegas is a reminder that we must be relentless in our efforts to protect Australians in crowded places so that we can go about our lives safe from harm” 

To Guy Rundle, what is remarkable is the absence of concerted pushback. The new laws were announced after almost no consultation and at the prompting of the AFP and ASIO.  Big brother has made himself a lot bigger and there has been very little backlash, despite some concern over ten-year-olds in fourteen weeks’ detention.

For Bernard Keane, however, there is a palpable contrast with the ” deathly silence that accompanied the government’s introduction of mass surveillance of our phone and internet use”. Keane believes there are signs of a “welcome stirring of media and community opposition”.

Certainly the government needs to be challenged on what problem its new Panopticon 2.0 is intended to solve; how its latest “suite of security measures” are anything more than a tub-thumping exercise timed to coincide with News Poll data-gathering to artificially boost the stakes of one our least popular leaders in our nation’s history. It appears to be hastily contrived with few if any real safeguards to the nation’s right to privacy or civil liberties.

There is some hope. As Katharine Murphy notes, The ACT has a Human Rights Act enabling it to impose additional controls on the sharing of facial recognition data with Canberra.

Consequently the ACT has an intergovernmental agreement stipulating the ACT “will allow access to its data via the face identification service for the purposes of national security and community safety only”.

Whilst “national security” and “community safety” are broad, the agreement also acknowledges “the importance of human rights, specifically the right to privacy”.

It’s a small step, but without it, the agreement to share surveillance data reached between federal and at the special national security meeting on Thursday represents a serious threat to a free, democratic and open Australian society.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” … “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”  

Through The Looking Glass

Thunderous applause reverberates up and down the nation this week as the High Court releases its reasons for allowing the Turnbull government to do as it wishes with the $295 million slush fund it has put by for postal surveys and other unforeseen national emergencies and crafty evasions of parliamentary democracy.

What constitutes an emergency, the High Court reasons, is essentially the government’s call.

The decision puts a bit more muscle in the increasingly powerful executive arm of government. The court rules the Coalition may spend its contingency fund on almost anything it sets its tiny heart on, provided the Finance Minister can claim it’s an emergency, unforeseen at the time the budget was put to bed.

Unforeseen? Matthias Cormann has sworn an affidavit that in May the idea of a postal survey, the nation’s Clayton’s plebiscite was not even a glint in aspiring Prime Minister Peter Humpty Dutton’s eye.

But does any government’s lack of awareness or planning constitute an emergency?  It does now.

According to the court’s gloss on section 10 of the Appropriation Act No 1 2017-2018 (Cth) it’s the Finance Minister’s call. An emergency happens whenever, like Humpty Dumpty, the minister is “satisfied” there’s an emergency. In other words, it’s an utterly subjective test or, as lawyer Michael Bradley says, a legal fiction.

While the urgency of the postal survey is patently bullshit in the literal sense of the term, in the legal sense it’s entirely defensible. The minister being satisfied that it’s about to rain, and having good political reasons for saying so, permits him or her to spend our money on umbrellas — notwithstanding the clear blueness of the sky. 

It’s a huge win for government by spin, the messaging that now upstages, if not entirely usurps our political leaders while shrinking our national discourse to fit the front bar of some western Sydney pub.

“Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery,” Marshall McLuhan predicted in 1972. He foresaw the rise of “propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but the impact of the whole technology of the times”.

“The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favour of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.”

Turnbull may have some way to go on his own project but it’s a work in progress.

McLuhan may also have oversimplified the transfer of power but spin is certainly king this week.  Whether the ABS is the right body to carry out the government’s survey, as Coalition blowhards insist, still seems highly contentious.

For many it’s a bit of stretch to contend that a postal survey of people’s views involves the collection of statistical data. Yet The High Court rules that the survey data has a sufficiently close relationship to topics such as marriages, law and the social characteristics of the population on which it already collects data.

The precedent is set for a government to spend as much of its slush fund as is expedient while the court signals a flexible approach to how far it will permit government to interpret what its agencies can do – and as Michael Bradley suggests, opens the door any number of issues being decided by postal survey.

Perhaps the Finkel Clean Energy Target that is proving such a headache for Malcolm and the Monkey Pod, his merry band of sniping, climate change deniers, could also be decided by voluntary, non-binding plebiscite.

Monday sees the PM call another of his fearless tough talks with gas company CEOs where he’s able to parlay to a grateful nation the terrifying news that the shortage will be far more dire than predicted given the companies’ fondness for selling our gas offshore. The same scare campaign was run in 2014. No-one calls deja vu.

No-one mentions the twentieth straight News Poll disaster in a row. Labor extends its two-party lead over the Coalition to 54-46%. The Turnbull government would lose 20 seats if an election were held tomorrow. But Turnbull’s a black belt in gas-baggery. Shock, horror, Victoria could run out gas tomorrow. If you’re gullible.

BHP Petroleum chief Mike Yeager told journalists in 2014 that there was plenty of gas available in the Bass Strait, and it could supply Victoria, NSW, and even Queensland, “indefinitely”. The Australia Institute’s Richard Denniss notes that gas production on the east coast is up 20%, largely because farmers have been unable to prevent fracking for Coal Seam Gas in Queensland. There is no shortage. The problem lies in the marketing.

Rather than admit that it’s the Coalition’s beloved free trade that sees our gas being sold off-shore to the highest bidder, or admit that the solution lies with renewables, Turnbull must find scapegoats, namely the states and environmentalists. And Labor.

There’s no show without Punch. Turnbull fills his performance with name-calling his nemesis. “Blackout Bill” is to blame for everything in the power game.  “Brownout Butler” is also a villain. It’s testament to the PM’s ear of tin and the show biz principle that no-one ever went broke underestimating popular taste. And to his desperation.

By Wednesday, he’s got Kiwi Barnaby in tow to let us know it’s all sorted. Super-Mal saves the day. Of course he puts it more poetically, given his tough negotiations have wrung concessions, or so he claims, out of the hard-nosed captains of the gas industry.

Turnbull seems to have a deputy who’s running dead. Some cynics suggest that, with Kiwi’s dual nationality threatening his eligibility to even be an MP, that he’s been sidelined from negotiations. Companies could hardly be bound to an agreement signed by a resources minister who shouldn’t be in parliament. Turnbull talks it all up.

“They have given us a guarantee that they will offer to the domestic market the gas that was identified as the expected demand shortfall, by AEMO, in 2018,” he says – in his Turnbullian way of not saying very much at all.

At least he’s leading by example with the recycling. Bernard Keane notes in Another Day another Gas Conference, it’s an almost verbatim repeat of his message of “gas in our time” which the plucky little PM delivered 15 March.  No-one at the presser calls him on it.

AFR’s Angela Macdonald Smith shows the PM’s boast is hollow. There’s still the same gas volume available as there was yesterday but it’s at prices industry says it can’t afford. Triple the tariff. The electricity forward price in the eastern states edges up $2 a megawatt hour on Wednesday afternoon after Turnbull announces his gas deal.

Insiders, clearly, expect gas prices to rise under the government’s Domestic Gas Security Mechanism, not to fall.

Turnbull promises another meeting next Tuesday which involves executives signing something. It’s all about his not having to “pull the trigger” of curbing gas exports.

Luckily, Turnbull can fall back on Labor-bashing. It’s all the fault of the states which ban fracking. Especially the LABOR state of Victoria, (can anyone labour the word Labor quite like Malcolm Turnbull?) which sits on “enormous stores” of conventional gas, a palpable lie which the PM is keen to make true by Goebbels-like repetition.

Turnbull’s assertion that the state is awash with gas just waiting to be tapped is at odds with the facts. Energy market experts and the Victorian state government point to a 2015 parliamentary inquiry which shows that whilst the state has large reserves, they are in Bass Strait.  Victoria currently exports Bass Strait gas to Queensland.

No proved or probable onshore gas reserves exist in Victoria despite the issuing of many exploration licences.

At best, there may be up to six months’ supply, says The Geological Survey of Victoria, which estimates that up to 110 petajoules of conventional gas could be accessible, subject to a comprehensive geoscientific investigation.

Party-pooper and Victorian State Treasurer, Tim Pallas, offers to put the PM’s DIY gas crisis in proper perspective.

“Malcolm Turnbull might want to pretend that this has got something to do with an unknown and undeclared gas resource in the state of Victoria,” he says. “I think it has a lot more to do with an enormous resource that is being shipped offshore.

Not so fast, Tim. The PM insists that it was Luh-hay-buh that began the folly of permitting our finest multinational companies have carte blanche to exploit our resources to export gas. Yet it was, in fact, honest John Howard.  Export controls on gas were lifted in 1997 by a PM eager to win a long-term Chinese contract. It worked? Too well.

With typical, self-effacing modesty, the great power-walker was so chuffed with his 2002 $25 billion LNG deal with China, he called it “a gold medal performance”. Yet it locked in prices based on 2002 lows, a feature of the deal which would mean that by 2015, Chinese customers would pay a third of the price Australians were paying.

Somehow, a contract clause which allowed the price to rise in line with world pricing eluded a consortium of hard-headed, hard-hatted North West shelf oil business types which saw two “local” companies, Woodside and BHP Billiton join BP, Shell, Chevron and a combination of Mitsui and Mitsubishi.

In 2007, Howard crab-walked away from all responsibility for his dud deal – because of his daft neoliberal ideological mindset that such matters are best left up to the market.

“I would never encourage the idea that governments should negotiate LNG prices,” he said. “At no stage was the Australian government directly involved in pricing issues in relation to the $25 billion contract.”

The lie of the week is that old chestnut that the more gas that is drilled, the lower the domestic price. The reality is that any new gas supplies will be sold on a market which links all of Eastern Australia and which is driven by international prices.

A related lie given much airplay recently is that the “energy crisis” is the result of too much politicking which radio and TV sages nod, interferes with business’ sacred need for certainty. Uncertainty is a barrier to investment.

Seriously? As Richard Denniss details, between 2009 and 2015 Santos and its international partners blew $10,000 a minute on a $25 billion mistake, building a gas export plant at Curtis Island off Gladstone, a plant which today is worth billions less than it cost them. Two other consortia did their dough on building similar plants alongside.

Add in WA and NT and the total gamble amounts to $200 billion of the gas companies’ shareholders’ money. No wonder they are keen to gouge consumers today.

A bipartisan approach will fix everything, surely, commentators cry. In the meantime, the government is doing everything it can to use its manufactured crisis to wedge Labor; paint Labor somehow as the party of higher electricity costs. It’s all going to come to grief when consumers get their next bills. But at least it buys a little breathing space.

It’s sleeves rolled up and on with the job from a PM who oozes practicality from every presser, a leader whose pledge to “get on with the job of governing” inspires Peter Dutton’s team to pay $25,000 to a Rohingya refugee on Manus to return to certain persecution in Myanmar.  Dutton refuses to confirm the man’s testimony on ABC 7:30.

The Immigration Minister is keen to deal himself back into the national conversation. And a gas diversion would be handy.  He puts the boot into refugees bound for the US.

His pal, Sydney radio host Ray Hadley feeds Dutton the line on his regular Thursday that a photograph of the group published by News Corp this week “looked like a fashion show on a catwalk in Paris or New York”.

“They’re economic refugees; they got on a boat, paid a people smuggler a lot of money, and somebody once said to me that we’ve got the world’s biggest collection of Armani jeans and handbags up on Nauru waiting for people to collect it when they depart,” Dutton dog-whistles in reply.

‘Somebody once said to me the world’s biggest collection of Armani jeans and handbags was up on Nauru waiting for people to collect it when they depart,’ he adds with the shabby “somebody once said” hearsay tactic or utterly unsubstantiated assertion.

Was that someone Pauline Hanson? Doesn’t the Minister have a responsibility to find out the facts? Stick to facts? Dutton’s favourite line is interviews is that he deals in fact; leaves the commentary to others. Nothing could be further from the truth, however, as is evident in his comments about refugees taking our jobs and our welfare.

Dutton’s monstrous lie is as despicable and as damaging in its own way as Turnbull’s lies about gas. Firstly, the refugees have been subjected to Australia officials’ degrading, invasive and protracted harassment fondly known as “processing” with additional “extreme vetting” by US authorities.

Extreme Vetting is a mysterious process yet to be fully explained but it is likely to be highly invasive and have scant regard for human rights. The Wall Street Journal warned in April that it could involve tourists from Britain and other countries visiting the US being asked to reveal mobile phone contacts, social media passwords and financial data.

That Turnbull’s government acts the ever obedient servant to the Trump administration and religiously repeats its rebuking of “rogue state” North Korea won’t help.

Some commentators even fear The Donald will hear the Immigration Minister’s comments and the refugee swap deal will fall through. Not to be misheard or misunderstood, Dutton repeats himself in London, adding a thank you to the President.

‘We have been taken for a ride, I believe, by a lot of the advocates and people within Labor and the Greens who want you to believe this is a terrible existence,’ Dutton says.

‘These photos demonstrate otherwise. People have seen other photos in recent weeks of those up on Manus out enjoying themselves outside this centre, by the beach and all the rest of it.’

Erick Jensen, The Saturday Paper’s editor takes up the “all the rest of it” wondering what Dutton means. All the rest of the rapes, the suicides, the deaths, the days without sanitation?

Perhaps it’s the makeshift tents in which children have lost their childhoods. Perhaps it’s the women denied abortions or the pregnancies produced by rapes.

Perhaps he means the self-immolation or the murder by paid guards. Perhaps he means the mental anguish, the loss of hope, the calculated destruction of a few thousand lives for the sake of political gain.

The UN has condemned our offshore detention camps. Experts have testified that indefinite detention in dangerous and unhealthy conditions amounts to torture. The biggest condemnation and contradiction of Dutton’s glib slur, however, comes from his own government’s admission of culpability last June when the Australian government agreed to the largest human rights payout in our nation’s history.

A class action in the Supreme Court of Victoria on behalf of 1,905 asylum seekers and refugees held at the Manus Island detention centre from November 2012 to December 2014 was resolved on the eve of the hearing, for a reported $70 million.

A payment of nearly $37,000 dollars, on average, for each detainee is to compensate detainees for physical and mental injury caused to them by the government’s failure to provide clean and safe water and food, shelter to protect them from heat, rain and insects, essential personal items such as clothing, shoes and toiletries, adequate and hygienic medical and dental facilities, hygienic bathing and toilet facilities and protection from violence and assault.

The slur of “economic refugees” is part of the vocabulary of hate speech of those who seek to demonise refugees and deny their claims on our compassion. A decent Immigration Minister would have stopped Ray Hadley in his tracks. Instead, Dutton colludes with him; lying on air to demonise those whom he is supposed to protect; even trying to play cheap wedge politics. His comments will cause irreparable harm.

Similarly, Julie Bishop has been evasive on every occasion where she’s been asked when Australia will take Rohingya refugees who are suffering extreme persecution in Myanmar where security forces are engaged in a campaign of genocide ill-served by the 1990s euphemism ethnic cleansing. Bishop calls it “a security operation”.

Bishop has said that “independently verifiable sources” are required as if the facts are in any doubt. Worse, her government continues to provide military training and support to the Myanmar government.

“This engagement allows Australia to promote the role of a professional defence force and highlight the importance of adhering to international humanitarian laws and norms” a spokesperson says. Pious piffle. No evidence of reality, Ms Bishop, whatsoever.

Appearing on ABC Insiders, Bishop even chooses to portray events as “a security operation” between a Rohingya army and the Myanmar army. Does she mean The Rohingya National Army, last heard of in 2001?

Or does she have some other insurgent group in mind? Whatever, her aim the effect is a distortion of reality as cruel as Peter Dutton’s.

Dutton and Bishop, of course, follow Tony Abbott who simply declared it was safe to return Sri Lankan nationals, claiming the civil war in their homeland had ended and their country was “at peace”.

In 2014, a boat carrying 153 Tamil asylum seekers was intercepted at sea by Australian customs vessels and returned to Sri Lanka. Another boatload of 28 Sri Lankan nationals was handed over to Sri Lankan authorities. Reports of torture followed.

In 2014, the Abbott government deployed 11 ninety seat Chinese made orange fibreglass lifeboats, which cost $46,000 each in asylum-seeker turn-backs to Indonesia.

Then Head of Operation Sovereign Borders Lieutenant General Angus Campbell confirmed in January 2015 that 15 boats carrying 429 asylum seekers were forcibly returned to Indonesia and Sri Lanka since the operation began.

Later, a “multi-million dollar deal” to have 10 custom-made wooden-hulled “alternative transportation vessels”, resembling Asian fishing boats were built in Vietnam.

Abbott was in breach of international law and the UN Refugee Convention to which Australia is a signatory.

Julie Bishop echoes Tony’s “Nope, nope, nope” – Abbott’s 2015 response when some 7000 Rohingya people and Bangladeshi migrants were stranded at sea after Thai authorities closed a popular trafficking route out of Burma and the people smugglers jumped ship, leaving their human cargo to starve.

Questioned on ABC Insiders, Bishop says she thinks Peter Dutton meant “those found not to be refugees” – implying that there are “Armani refugee” bludgers cluttering our luxurious detention centres. Those who have not been afforded refugee status, she hints, are somehow fair game.

It’s an appalling gaffe from a Foreign Minister who must know that asylum seekers rarely have documentary evidence that strongly supports their claim for protection.

Tough on borders as always and following rave reviews for its gas company bargain, this week, a re-run by popular demand of its popular farce, the Coalition turns from disguising its lack of energy policy to bullying states into coal seam gas mining.

It’s process that could only be improved by sending in the army according to Liberal Party elder statesman Dr Tony Abbott who urges Turnbull to invoke “defence powers” to deal with a gas crisis totally of the Coalition’s own making.

What could possibly go wrong? On current form, the High Court may even accede, especially if the government were to work the word “emergency” into its scare tactics.