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.

“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.

“You won’t find an economist anywhere that will tell you anything other than that the most efficient and effective way to cut emissions is by putting a price on carbon.”

Malcolm Turnbull Q&A 5 July 2010

Dark clouds descend over Malcolm Turnbull’s future and over any vestige of hope his government will do anything real to reduce carbon pollution as the worst week of the PM’s disappointing political career exposes the disturbing truth of his utter captivity by the right-wing of his party. His bad week ends not with a bang but a whimper.

“Say it ain’t so Bro,” he tweets his pal John Key, on hearing of the Kiwi PM’s decision to abandon his very neoliberal ship. It’s a message his bestie could easily have sent him on report of his week’s epic failure.

Forced to choose between his Chief Scientist’s advice and an ETS which could help save Australia and the planet from global warming, or appeasing Cory Bernardi and the lunatic right, the PM plumps for keeping the nut jobs on side. It’s not so much political pragmatism as total capitulation. And political suicide.

Turnbull’s monumental failure of ticker triggers a chorus of scorn and disbelief. There is just too much on public record of Turnbull’s earlier passionate advocacy of carbon pricing to leave him a skerrick of credibility. He is too quick, moreover, to throw Josh Frydenberg under a bus.

Turnbull is “the most ineffective conservative prime minister since Billy McMahon” says Kevin Rudd whose record is obligingly besmirched this week by a fake report purporting to come from Treasury which challenges his stewardship of the economy in the GFC. Even Michelle Grattan reckons he’s run up a credibility deficit. Katherine Murphy drops the torch she holds for her PM to tell him he’s “gutless” and “talking crap”.

An expired Liberal leader, resurrected as leader with fanfare, primarily because he was not Tony Abbott, his stocks boosted by the willing suspension of disbelief and the wilful suppression of any memory of his original failure, Turnbull’s prime ministership is beginning to look a bit like the dead parrot in the Monty Python sketch.

“… (the) only reason that it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been NAILED there…”

Nailing the lid on the environmental and economic management coffin, is news that Adani is to proceed with its Carmichael mine, thanks to a generous government coal lobby love-in subsidy, in the form of a $1 billion rail loan from the slush fund created by the grandly titled pie in the sky  North Australia Infrastructure Facility. Who could now heed a coalition which cries poor to make its case to cut funds to health, welfare and education and slash its public service workforce?

And how doubly untrue Sunday, is its claim funding two weeks’ domestic violence leave will damage the great god the economy? As Labor’s family violence spokeswoman, Terri Butler, point outs “It’s domestic violence, not domestic violence leave, that costs our economy and harms our international competitiveness, citing KPMG research that estimated domestic violence cost Australia $13b a year.

In one stroke, the Turnbull government proves it does not give a fig for the environment, global warming or its responsibilities as a world citizen and that it is prepared to tear up any social contract, renounce any commitment to a fair and just society. Let it regurgitate the propaganda of the mining and business lobbies. The Adani approval is a fatal error.

Federal Northern Australia Minister, Matt Canavan, tellingly says it is the “biggest news for North Queensland since the Beatles came to Australia”. Sadly, his government’s view of the environment is also stuck in 1964.

Mainstream media spins outrageous fictions, long disproved, about the mine creating masses of jobs despite Adani’s own testimony in the Queensland Land Court last year of 1464 full-time jobs. “Bring millions of Indians out of poverty” recites Adani Australia chief executive officer Jeyakumar Janakaraj in a bare-faced lie straight from Peabody Energy’s website, a wilful piece of coal industry propaganda which flies entirely in the face of the facts. 84% of India’s poor live in rural areas beyond the reach of the grid. Those who don’t, can’t afford the prices.

Coal is a slayer not a saviour of the poor. One Indian study found that in 2011-12 exposure to pollution from coal-fired power plants killed at least 80,000 Indians and inflicted health problems on tens of millions more. In Queensland, last year, black lung was reported to have returned to the industry, causing the deaths of four miners and potentially putting thousands more at risk. The monitoring system appears to have failed.

Failing us too are our leaders. Nowhere in the national energy conversation is there room for truth. Along with Resources Minister Matt Canavan, Labor Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk ought to be charged with wilful deception. She keenly recycles the mining lobby’s lies of ten thousand jobs. Nowhere is there mention of the adverse effects on the Great Barrier Reef due to the mine’s use.

Nor are miners good tax payers. Energy and resources sectors have the highest level of non-payment. Fossil fuel companies such as Exxon Mobil Australia, Chevron Australia, Peabody Australia, and Whitehaven are among those that paid no tax for 2013-14.

If they can’t be good corporate citizens, bugger the planet. Last year, in a brilliant bit of sophistry, Greg Hunt argued that the global warming achieved by burning the coal exported from Carmichael was not significant when calculating environmental effects.

Nowhere is there any admission that no Australian bank is prepared to fund the world’s largest new mine. The railway subsidy offer is received with great ceremony but Adani is in no state to begin digging. A sense of national leadership in abdication, a commonwealth in disarray is heightened as Australia is torn between appeasing the demands of the declining mining states of Queensland and Western Australia and the needs of the rest of the Commonwealth. Above all is the stench of appeasement at any price.

Crushed by the burden of a nation’s unmet expectations and led on a leash by the rabid right, the weary PM picks his way out of COAG alone, Friday, cursing his self-inflicted, self-funded fate and his overweening ambition for leading him to believe he could be PM at any price. Any price except a carbon price.

Monday begins well, for the planet and common sense. Josh Frydenberg is a model of reasoned moderation on ABC radio, “We know that there’s been a large number of bodies that have recommended an emissions intensity scheme, which is effectively a baseline and credit scheme. We’ll look at that.”

Frydenberg is merely faintly reflecting his own party’s former policy. The record is clear. “The Liberal Party has a policy of both protecting the planet and protecting Australia. We support, in principle, an Emissions Trading Scheme” trills Julie Bishop in an electorate newsletter, September 2008.

Greg Hunt, best minister in Dubai’s view of world 2015, ever generous with superlative, gushes with praise for St John Howard, Liberator of Iraq, spinning his crafty bet-hedging on carbon tax in May 2008 as visionary , “Perhaps the most important domestic policy was the decision of the Howard government that Australia will implement a national carbon trading system. … We hope that the new government will take up this proposal.”

Federal Treasurer Scott “pothole” Morrison was all for embracing an ETS in June 2009. “There are a suite of tools we need to embrace to reduce emissions. I believe an emissions trading scheme, in one form or another, is one of those tools. Placing a price on carbon … is inevitable.”

Even captain turn-back himself was on board with an ETS. “You cannot have a climate change policy without supporting this ETS at this time,” Tony Abbott babbled in 2009, support the suppository of wisdom now says he never gave. Onya, Tone. Play your cards right and you’ll be back on the PM perch in no time. Dead set.

In the same year, Steve Ciobo, who has since moved on to lead the free trade happy clappers church, was all prophetic vision and pious intent “We want to work constructively because we recognise that in the future around the world in most developed economies if not all there will be an ETS of some sort.”

“We went to the last election with an ETS policy—many have forgotten that fact,” Sussan Ley lectures in 2009. Little did she know then how completely her party would renounce its vision. Malcolm Turnbull has not forgotten. Although his defeat was largely because then, as now, he was unable to unite and lead his team, he still needs to blame his defeat on his support of an ETS. It couldn’t have been his leadership.

Hansard records many other Coalition politicians who were to deny their faith; becoming hypocrites and converts to the Direct Action boondoggle as the price of their loyalty to Abbott; pinning their hopes to their party’s dazzling, rising star in lycra Tony Abbott who won his ascendancy over Turnbull by one vote and sealed it with a crusade against what he falsely called a carbon tax and its supporters in the 2013 election.

With all of its previous advocacy on board, the Coalition’s modern allergy to anything to do with an ETS is even more shocking – and yet another toxic legacy of the hyper-partisan Abbott era where carbon emissions were a stick to beat Labor.

Barely has Frydenberg shut his mouth before the air is filled with shrieks of heresy and the grinding of pitchforks. By Wednesday, after cabinet meets to force him to recant, the early worm is given the bird; Fry-in-hell Frydenberg is forced to retract, rescind and disavow in a Hobart news conference. He ships out to Antarctica, as you do. An ETS, his PM thunders, rising to cleanse the broad church of the Liberal Party from the sulphuric stench of climate apostasy, is dead buried and cremated. Wash your mouth out with coal tar soap.

Craig Kelly, coal fire in his belly, goes on ABC to reprise a Tony Abbott standard about power bills, lamb roasts and a Bee Gees’ inspired song about the lights all going out in old Whyalla. Barnaby Joyce echoes his former master’s voice. Even Turnbull lapdog, mincing poodle Christopher Pyne, yaps in time to the music, nipping the hand that feeds him along with a small army of defence contractors who are laughing all the way to the bank.

It’s all too much for South Australian PM, jolting Jay Weatherill, who publicly rebukes the PM for heading a government “clearly bought and sold by the coal club”. He invokes Turnbull’s commitment to “mature evidence-based policy” communicated “through sophisticated explanation rather than infantile slogans”. He says “that’s all we are asking for here”. Turnbull looks as if he’s made to look a complete fraud and a fool. He has.

Weatherill accuses the PM of ignoring his own Chief Scientist, Alan Finkel, and for “mischievous” lying about an ETS pushing prices up. Finkel and others have the figures to show it won’t. Weatherill won’t let up. “Many Australians were optimistic that Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership would provide us with sensible policy debate and action in the national interest. After this week’s events, any remaining optimism has now evaporated.”

The truth clearly hurts. Yet repeating the myths and clichés of coal lobby propaganda will cost more. Weatherill warns Turnbull his job is at stake. “The Prime Minister lost his job in relation to a decision back a few years ago. It would be a great irony if he was to lose his job for a second time being on the opposite side of the debate.” Ouch.

Turnbull’s coal-powered government has been attacking Weatherill for months, assisted by the ABC and led by News Corp’s The Australian, falsely accusing him of setting “reckless” and “ideologically-driven” targets for renewable energy generation which have compounded the state’s massive power outage and threatened the state’s “energy security.” In reality, electricity prices soared when power was privatised and were helpfully boosted by Tony Abbott’s 2013 ten per cent bonus to power companies for investment in poles and wires which has raised costs to consumers by fifty per cent.

Now Turnbull backs into the blades of a spinning wind turbine. Or several. He, again, shows his utter contempt for the electorate. As Bernard Keane points out, “he has ratified an international agreement to reduce our emissions by 26-28% of 2005 levels by 2030 and has nothing that will achieve even that unambitious target.”

Less popular now than his predecessor Tony Abbott, when he deposed him, his political credit long spent, a weak, forsaken leader of a bitterly divided Coalition, he further shrinks to a bad Abbott caricature over carbon. His humiliating back-down on just a hint of a discussion paper on an emissions trading scheme, provokes a storm of media criticism and bad publicity. SA talks of going it alone on carbon pricing and Victoria pleads for real leadership. Has ever a Prime Minister been so comprehensively routed?

Monday’s announcement of his government’s long scheduled review of Direct Action which would include a system of baseline and credit carbon permits for electricity generators only is rescinded, even denied by Josh Frydenberg but 36 hours later, an ignoble retreat in panic at the prospect of a party room revolt.

Cory Bernardi, his courage up after three months in New York observing the UN and the rise of Donald Trump, spearheads the attack calling his government’s plans to consider some form of ETS, “one of the dumbest things he had ever heard”. From Beastie Boy Cory Bernardi, that is saying something.

Sunday, Cory’s all over the media protesting that Centrelink is authorising polygamy, by making payments to Muslims with several wives. Miranda Devine and Peta Credlin quickly leap on the Muslim-PC-welfare bashing bandwagon. “Just completely ridiculous” barks Belgian Shepherd Mathias Cormann, the alternative is a single parent payment which is more expensive than a partner payment. But it’s about the Islamophobic dog-whistle not the cost to the budget. Imagine what these gurus could do if 18C were repealed.

Environmental warrior Bernardi echoes Trump in calling for Australia to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, “for the good of the country”. He also falsely claims the move would drive down power prices, a line coalition members are queuing up to repeat in the most recent set of government post-truth talking points.

“Hardworking Australians”, as Turnbull likes to divide us, are left to wonder who is running the country, a puzzle which is not eased by the release of figures showing a quarter of negative growth, a contraction in GDP of 0.5%. By cutting public spending and failing to invest in infrastructure, Scott Morrison is depressing the economy; sloganeering about jobs and growth yet delivering neither. He pretends the news is a surprise.

In an admission, surely, that his government has been asleep at the wheel for the past four years, he candidly calls the bad figures as a “wake-up call”. What he means is that Labor should get behind the corporate tax cuts, an imperative which is somewhat undermined by the release this week by the ATO of figures which show that a third of companies paid no tax last financial year with QANTAS heading the list.

Who is in charge? It’s “The Cory Bernardi government” runs a popular tweet as Turnbull’s right wing masters, yank him ignominiously into line with their climate-change denying, coal-industry serving and anti-Labor stance. We won’t meet our Paris climate change targets, Chief Scientist Alan Finkel warns COAG, and avoiding an ETS will add $15 billion to the cost of electricity, over a decade, but our government plans to do nothing about it.

Instead, in another capitulation to the Nationals, COAG agrees to import the Adler shotgun. A press release Friday, stresses “heavy restrictions” in an indictment of the Federal government’s evasion of real leadership and effective decision-making unrivalled since its backpacker tax fiasco last week.

The seven-shot model Adler A110 is restricted to professional shooters prompting howls of outrage from the shooters, fishers and farmers party yet the five-shot model is re-classified B, from A where it sat alongside air rifles, yet still putting a semi-automatic shotgun within the reach of a wide sector of the population. Experts attest to the ease with which this model can be modified to an eleven-shot without reloading weapon. Somehow, Turnbull tries to spin the result as a good thing.

‘This is the first time the national firearms agreement has been strengthened in this way in 20 years,’ he tells reporters.

Turnbull is not alone in his humiliating carbon back down. Energy and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg is forced to deny from Antarctica that he ever suggested emission trading schemes, despite clearly announcing this Monday in foreshadowing his government’s proposed review of energy policy scheduled for 2017.

It’s “an extraordinary, gutless capitulation” writes Turnbull admirer Katharine Murphy. Frydenberg’s lie is quickly exposed by ABC TV and radio news which replays recording of the Minister’s Monday media release.

Help is on its way. Pauline Hanson’s recent flying visit to Launceston confirms reports that One Nation plans to expand into Tasmania. Although her party invariably votes for the government it is nice to offer the people of Tasmania the illusion of choice. Interviewed in her bathers, as she subjects the Great Barrier Reef to her empirical testing, only 1300 km south of where the coral is bleaching, she is a model of lucidity:

“We are being controlled by the UN and these agreements that have been done for people’s self-interest and where they are driving our nation as a sovereignty and the economics of the whole lot,” Hanson tells an adoring media in her best, incoherent, manner. Please explain? You can’t. But it makes as much sense as current flip-flop, appease-the-right-at-all-costs, post-truth coal-lobby Coalition policy.

“A bunch of bong-sniffing, dole-bludging, moss-munching, glue-guzzling, K-Mart Castros are again vandalising Parliament. And stopping other opinions being heard.” Queensland LNP senator and PM’s Assistant Minister, James McGrath, sneers at twenty members of the Whistleblowers, Activists and Citizens Alliance who disrupt Question Time mid-week with a plea to end the punitive detention of the 1300 innocent men women and children held on Manus and Nauru. “Close the bloody camps now,” they urge. Even worse, WACA is back next day abseiling down the building with a banner; putting red dye in the water feature.

For a moment, the government is flummoxed; shocked to hear the people they represent speak up, out of turn in parliament. Yet no-one heeds the message. MSM turns not to the protesters’ concerns but how best to keep the people out the people’s house. Democracy is under attack, squawk Shorten and Turnbull in unison. Only The Greens applaud the protesters. But nothing happens. To those suffering the torture of indefinite detention in the open air rape camp on Nauru and on Manus, the government’s Christmas present is the cruel hoax of false expectation of resettlement in the US, a prospect which recedes daily in the wake of news of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team opposition.

Turnbull is typically conflicted. Earlier, he seemed cautious about a proposed $60 million security upgrade to parliament house which includes 2.5 metre high barriers. “We have always got to make sure the people’s house… is as open and accessible as it can be and we try to get the right balance there,” says the leader of a government whose secrets and lies over Manus and Nauru include making government operations off-limits to journalists and criminalising whistle-blowers.

Turnbull’s Australian people are free to marvel at the architecture, listen to Question Time, even take a selfie, provided they don’t get fancy ideas about inspecting policy, expecting accountability or, God forbid, voicing their outrage about our government’s human rights abuses on Nauru. The new, you-beaut, security measures are voted in on Thursday in what constitutes the government’s biggest victory all week; part of its drive to curtail, if not outlaw, the impertinence of political dissent. Oddly, no-one from the repeal 18C brigade leaps forward to defend the protesters’ freedom of speech.

The right to protest has long offended the Coalition, especially should it impede oil rigs and coal mines. Australia’s offshore oil regulator is censoring documents about BP’s plans to drill in the Great Australian Bight because environmental campaigners could use the information to “oppose all drilling activities” there. If they could understand them. The plans, it tells Greenpeace, who requested details under FOI, are too “technical” for the public to understand. Yet the FOI Act states that government agencies cannot consider whether releasing information “could result in confusion or unnecessary debate”.

Accountable to Energy and Resources Minister Josh Freydenberg, The National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority told a senate inquiry in November that BP’s application “was still in play” and the company could sell its right to drill to another company if its application was successful. NOPSEMA, which is said to be reviewing its transparency is our gatekeeper for information which in all other OECD countries is a public document.

Similarly, Attorney General George Brandis aims to change the Environment and Biodiversity Act to restrict green groups from challenging major developments under federal law after Adani’s Carmichael Mine was challenged on environmental grounds in what Brandis attacks as “green lawfare.” Labor opposes any such change.

Its gang-bashing of Bill Shorten, rudely interrupted, a rattled government scurries out of the House by the nearest exit, leaving only its supercilious sneer behind, a dysfunctional, discombobulated Cheshire cat, its lily-livered leader cowed in yet another humiliating retreat. Later, safely behind an ABC microphone, Turnbull urges reprisals. The protests, he thunders, are an appalling “denial of democracy” … an affront to the Australian people. Unlike Coalition asylum seeker policy or an ABCC which makes it harder for construction unions to protect workers who risk their lives to earn a living.

Construction sector fatalities rose between 2005- 2012 during the last ABCC. On historical data, Turnbull’s reintroduction of the ABCC will cost another ten deaths a year, calculates Bernard Keane. As it stands, big companies can “get away with murder”, says CFMEU Queensland District President Stephen Smyth. Mining giant Anglo American pleads guilty this week to disregarding safety obligations, causing the death of worker Paul McGuire at its Grasstree mine, North-West of Rockhampton. The company settles with a paltry fine of $137,000.

While concessions to cross-benchers by a government desperate for any kind of victory mean that the heavily amended ABBC bill amounts to a re-badged Fair Work Building and Construction according to Andrew Stewart, University of Adelaide employment law expert, it still empowers Michaelia Cash to impose on Commonwealth contractors, a new building industry code of practice. This will spread to other major construction firms. The code will strike down Enterprise Bargaining and prevent “virtually everything” unions would seek to negotiate.

Labor sticks to its post in Parliament at least when the government clears out fearing the protesters. It’s a brief respite in the LNP’s war on Bill Shorten. A succession of MPs are howling down the Opposition Leader, rubbishing his union history and accusing him of post truth politics and lying before trumpeting its own fiction that passing its bastardised ABCC bill and resolving its backpacker tax fiasco are somehow victories; vital to running the country and not just desperate political expediency, critical only to saving Turnbull’s bacon. Parliament is given over to hysterical denunciation and personal attacks. Like a bad rash, the madness of “Good Captain” Abbott’s regime flares up again.

Even Laurie Oakes is disgusted. The government’s conduct is “grubby, unedifying, unpleasant. A week of brinkmanship, horse trading, and undisguised cynicism.” The Coalition’s unrelenting kill Bill invective is primitive, shrill and eerily reminiscent of March 2011 when Tony Abbott stood next to a sign urging “ditch the witch”, near another sign reading “JuLiar Bob Brown’s bitch”.

An ugly undertone of misogyny enters as Liberals itch to ditch Kimberly Kitching, Labor’s recent appointment to a casual senate vacancy by repeating unsubstantiated allegation made in Tony Abbott’s $46 million Heydon Royal Commission into Trade Union Corruption 2014. The smear was made during the long witch hunt into unions which led to only one criminal conviction but provided many a handy stick to beat Labor with all this week.

“The Leader of the Opposition deliberately parachuted into the Senate Kimberley Kitching to become Senator Kitching, who is alleged to have fraudulently filled out the safety tests for six union leaders in the Health Services Union,” Pyne crows, labelling the new senator a “Captain’s Pick”. Pyne, the mouth that roars, hyperventilates with confected outrage.

Parachuted into a portfolio he might not stuff up, Pyne is currently fighting a turf war with Marise Payne who refuses to tell Senator Labor’s Kim Carr who is the senior Defence Minister in a partnership which has yet to be clarified, Labor Senator Don Farrell points out, more than three months after Turnbull’s government was sworn in, despite ABC reports of duplication and confusion from Defence and industry.

In July, Turnbull promised something better. “I believe they want our Parliament to offload the ideology, to end the juvenile theatrics and gotcha moments, to drop the personality politics.” Instead, he has presided over more of the same, subtly undermined by his patent insincerity, his own, inner lack of conviction, achieving a hollow, stagey theatricality; a bad, toothless, flea-bitten, parody of Abbott’s junkyard dog.

The government line is that Labor is not the Labor Party of old; the party of Hawke and Keating but one ruled by militant unions and bosses who exploit their members. It’s a high-risk strategy which invokes invidious comparison between Fizza Turnbull and two real Prime Ministers. Further, “hard-working Australians” may not be wooed by Liberal nostalgia for a time when neoliberal Labor PMs traded off workers’ wages and conditions for companies to increase their profits; increasing inequality, vastly shrinking union membership and eroding Labor’s traditional support-base.

The semi-slavery of an itinerant and readily exploited expanding migrant rural workforce is the sordid reality behind the backpacker tax which is tricked up in parliament as a favour to rich white tourists. Instead, it is the result of an unregulated underpaid and increasingly illegal cut-throat labour market exploited by farmers and fruit growers to meet the ever lower prices offered them by our dog eat dog supermarket duopoly plus upstart Aldi. The real crisis lies not in the government’s utter incompetence in levying an effective backpacker tax rate, but in our economy’s growing dependence on ever cheaper part time or contract and piece rate labour, a legacy of the neo-liberal Hawke and Keating regimes.

Labor’s Accord with the ACTU removed union opposition to Labor’s neo-liberal “reform” agenda, helping governments to strip away hard-won rights and drive down living standards. Risky or not, however, the Shorten-is-no-Keating nor-is-he- Hawke tactic diverts attention from Attorney-General George Brandis, whose crisis-ridden tenure must surely end soon. Brandis awaits a Senate inquiry into how he directed Solicitor-General Justin Gleeson to argue in the Bell Group High Court case or his role in an alleged deal to dud the ATO of $300 million in 2015. Brandis’ retirement is imminent judging by Turnbull’s perfunctory support. “Of course I do,” he says when Labor asks if he still supports his AG.

Labor knows union-bashing failed the PM miserably last election. And as for harping on about how unfit your opponent is to be the nation’s leader, look how well that worked recently for Hillary’s campaign against Donald Trump. Labor’s most powerful indictment comes from the protesters’ banner outside. It reads “Labor: No opposition to cruelty”

Yet there are some extraordinary if not recklessly indulgent union-bashing performances. Turnbull repeatedly trumps up his rhetoric insisting absurdly that the Labor Party “is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CFMEU”. Barnaby barnyard Joyce goes barking mad and attempts to throw the dictionary at the Opposition leader’s character. Shorten is “swarmy and lubricious.” He reads a scabrous, unsubstantiated TURC allegation until stopped mid-blow job reference by the speaker. Joyce has no problem, however, parroting his PM’s outrageous lie that the ABCC will reduce housing costs, a lie which has drawn censure from The Australia Institute’s senior economist, Dr Jim Stanford.

Stamford, has recently published a report rebutting what he says is the Prime Minister’s “appalling” ideological claim that a tougher construction union watchdog would make houses more affordable. There is no link between construction costs and rising house prices. The property bubble is not the fault of unions.

Morrison and Malcolm Turnbull repeatedly mock Wayne Swan for being the author of Joe Hockey’s backpacker tax. It’s a transparent lie which reveals more about the speaker than the object of ridicule. Turnbull could be talking about himself and his ABCC or his capitulation to his right wing or his Faustian deal with the Nationals to become Prime Minister.

“The hypocrisy of this Leader of the Opposition knows no bounds. He has no regard for consistency. He has no regard for accuracy. He is concerned only with seizing one political opportunity after another—no principles, no integrity, no consistency, no accuracy and no regard for the truth. Except there is one truth we all know about this Leader of the Opposition: he will stop at nothing to pursue his own political self-interest.”

The parliamentary year ends with Turnbull having managed to tidy his sock drawer, says Lenore Taylor. The Backpacker tax which was Hockey’s solution to the debt and deficit disaster so urgent a year or so ago will raise less than a spit in the bucket over four years. Expect instead an expansion in the cash in hand work force. Expect more overworked, underpaid, scammed Pacific Islanders and Malaysian pickers in orchards, vineyards and packing sheds. Getting big companies to pay their tax or getting a fair return from our gas exports which should be worth $400 billion over the next ten years, according to the Tax Justice Network are far more productive tasks which the government has squibbed.

Despite the government “getting on with the job” or “ending the year with a win” spin on a pliant media; despite all the lies that houses will become cheaper in a “win for the economy”, its last week is a tour de force of chaos and crisis beneath the smokescreen of its war on Bill Shorten, its attack on unions and hence the wages and conditions of the average worker. $50 billion’s worth of tax cuts to companies, promised this year as a first priority, can only further increase inequality and divide a society which is increasingly polarised between those few at the top and the rest.

Best SNAFU comes on Thursday. The government could pass a backpackers tax rate of 13% in the senate Thursday. It has the numbers. Instead, it waits to be rescued by The Greens, an inexplicable move which costs it $100 million which will go to Landcare. Pressed (lightly) for an explanation, the PM says he loves Landcare and wouldn’t hear a word against it.

The ABCC, which has never been another cop on the beat, or a tough watch dog, is gutted of its ugly STASI-like powers and is all trussed up like a Christmas turkey with local preference rules, economic benefit strings and such trimmings as Doug Cameron’s hire Australian unless there is “no Australian suitable” for the job clause which has nothing to do with the spirit of the act but which will bugger the 457 Visa and impose more red tape and expense on a body in a bill which was supposed to streamline construction and lower building costs.

In the end the self-styled Fixer, a self-satisfied Christopher Pyne preens. “We’ll do a deal with anybody to get things done,” he says on Friday, making a virtue out of the sheer, unbridled, horse-trading of the government of the turning bull in its last week of the year where doing something, anything, is preferable to searching for the right thing, the democratic thing, the just thing. Not a word about principle, ideal or dedication to the common good.

All tip and no iceberg, to quote Paul Keating, Turnbull’s government for the elite by the elite ends the year spruiking success but all it has to show is a big new security fence.

 “… dun-coloured shawls will tone beautifully with local scenery as leaders return home to rust-belts left by the close of local manufacturing caused by free trade … “

APEC 2016 ends not with a bang but a whimper from Stockholm syndrome victim Malcolm Turnbull who begs our US corporate captors to keep flogging us with a TPP; expanding multinational power over us and favouring the USA in trade. Turnbull, a National Party hostage, has already astonished Australia with his devotion to his captors. His protestations of TPP love on a world stage allow him to indulge his perverse illness in a forum stacked with fellow-sufferers.

Flagellation deprivation aside, after decades of fawning and grovelling, Australia’s need to be independent of the US must come as a shock. Painful. When the road is long even slippers feel tight, as they say in Peru. Turnbull’s plaintive plea for Donald Trump to keep APEC’s trade accord, the infant TPP is, naturally quickly rebuffed. The US president-elect reiterates his threats. He will drop the new-born TPP on its head from the top of Trump Tower.

“From day one of my presidency”, he vows to withdraw in a YouTube video. “TPP is a potential disaster for our country.”

Trump alone will not kill the DOA TPP, despite his triumphal boasts. His adversary, Hillary Clinton who now leads him by over two million popular votes was not sold on the deal. Above all, the TPP attracted six years’ concerted popular opposition in prospective member countries. Australian critics compared it with the US-Australia Free Trade agreement, a trade deal debacle, ABC’s Ian Verrender points out, that buggered Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, limited the Commonwealth’s power to price medicines cheaply, and contributed to the soaring costs of our health system.

When in 1940, Australia set up its PBS, the Australian government used a “reference pricing” scheme to keep medicines affordable to ordinary Australians. Signing up to AUSTFA a decade ago made that illegal. Instead, medicines were linked to patents. In 2007 the PBS was split into two different formularies, boosting the cost of medicines to consumers by effectively delaying access to cheaper, generic drugs by an average of three years. Patent holders could, however, use “ever greening” to extend the length of the patent’s life from 20 to 25 to 40 to 50 years.

Top marks for chutzpah and Trump chump of the week award, nevertheless, must go to Foreign Minister Julie Bishop who rushes to her ABC to reassure the nation that we will still cop a flogging even if the TPP is history. The Donald will not do away with AUSTFA, the Australia US Free Trade Agreement. Relax. It’s a dud deal.   “We run a trade deficit with the United States. The US has a considerable surplus so it’s unlikely to change.” She means YUGE, OK, Donald.

In 2015, the US was our second-largest two-way trading partner in goods and services, worth $70.2 billion. Australia’s goods exports to the United States were $14.2 billion. Australia’s total imports from the United States were $33.0 billion in 2015. Our bilateral services exports to the US were worth $7.9 billion and imports $15.1 billion in 2015.

Bishop skips the best bit. In ten years, ANU’s Shiro Armstrong calculates, the preferential trade agreement has diverted Australia’s trade away from the lowest-cost sources. AUSTFA has led to Australia and the United States reducing their trade with the rest of the world by US$53 billion making them worse off than they would have been without the agreement. Imports to Australia and the United States from the rest of the world fell by $37.5 billion.

Then there’s the bondage. Exports to the rest of the world from the two countries fell by $15.6 billion over eight years to 2012. Australia is forced away from competitive suppliers to those dependent on the agreement . Yet trade between the two nations has not increased while the growth of trade with East Asian nations has been held back.

AUSTFA, like all free trade agreements, is neither about free trade nor even about trade, it is about realpolitik. US sycophant and man of well-oiled steel, John Howard, eager for a deal with George W Bush, after the second US invasion of Iraq, rushed the agreement through in one year. Similarly, the TPP advances US corporate interests and counters China’s expanding influence. Consequently, Washington’s current administration is loath to let it go. Blocking the TPP is “handing the keys of the castle over to China”, Obama’s trade negotiator, Michael Froman, worries.

At least the Chinese are cheered. Trump’s threat is a green light to China’s campaign to reign supreme in the region. Their Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership or RECP as they call their new empire involves the 10 members of ASEAN, plus their regional trading partners China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and India. The RECP is a TPP knock off with just as much free trade hymn-singing but with fewer, lower regulatory standards. Red-devil developers who don’t mind a bit of asbestos in their cheap as chips roof-panels or who like to take a bit of a gamble on their bargain structural steel holding up will be delighted at the prospect of less red tape in the way of profiteering.

China is tucking into the Asia-Pacific noodle-bowl with gusto; last month it signed up Malaysia, Cambodia and The Philippines in a blitz of cheque-book diplomacy, billion dollar trade, aid and investment deals. It’s picking off pro-US ASEAN nations opposed to its territorial claims on The South China Sea, through which flows $A6.7 trillion worth of cargo; half the world’s trade. For Kim Beazley, the Obama administration’s insertion of the US into Asia is about to come undone under Trump, yet Australia’s response is just wait and see: let Turnbull twang on his banjo about the TPP.

Mercifully Turnbull is quickly eclipsed by the APEC leaders’ silly shirts photo, a big part of its annual free trade gab-fest . But there’s a twist. The dominant paradigm is subverted their year by host Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, President of Peru. Crafty Kuczynski, in the only surprise move in APEC’s entire history, kits out his twenty-one visiting dignitaries in natty Peruvian vicuna wool shawls. The dun-coloured shawls will tone beautifully with local scenery as leaders return home to rust-belts left by the close of local manufacturing in nations where wages stubbornly remain over a dollar a day.

Factory closures, the ruin of local manufacturing and the destruction of entire communities are only part of the tithe demanded by the free trade agreement god. Free trade agreement worship also requires that leaders gather at APEC to make their ritual oath of solidarity before returning home to undermine each other’s prosperity and make war on the planet. Lima’s air is the most polluted of any Latin America city. Copper, silver, gold, mercury, and zinc mining, unchecked by generations of corrupt governments, has poisoned the local water supply and hastened deforestation.

Luckily, the versatile vicuna shawl doubles as an air filter, shade sail or towel. In the APEC family photo the shawls could almost be soiled beach towels thrown over one shoulder as if heads of state are returning from a dip in a toxic local waterhole. Or, perhaps, a dip in the ocean has led to their entanglement with the Pacific trash vortex, that gyre of marine debris which is yet another environmental blessing industrialisation confers upon the planet which is boosted by free trade. The pollution is augmented by marine debris liberated by container ships, over-fishing trawlers and other vessels busily extending the tentacles of grasping free-traders; choking the globe’s waterways.

Turnbull wants Trump to agree to parts of the TPP which he says will benefit Australia, as if any part of it is non-toxic. In June, even our Productivity Commission slammed the TPP and other recent free trade deals because “they grant legal rights to foreign investors not available to Australians, expose the government to potentially large unfunded liabilities and add extra costs on businesses attempting to comply with them.” But no-one in the Coalition listens.

The TPP, driven by big business including big tobacco, and big pharma was invented to benefit huge multi-nationals and to help the USA counter China’s growing regional rivalry. Thanks largely to former Trade Minister, Andrew Robb, the man who unfroze Labor’s glacial negotiations by agreeing with everything the USA demanded, the TPP is an article of faith in Liberal ideology. Yet no Liberal can ever spell out its benefits. On the other hand, its ISDS provisions would allow foreign companies to sue Australian governments over public health policy and environmental protection laws. Prices for medicine, would rise while our internet usage would incur greater surveillance.

Australians may be spared the TPP thanks to the Donald’s popular isolationism but should he carry out his threat to impose tariffs on Chinese imports, or enact any of his promised protectionist trade measures, Australia could be in for a bumpy ride. Luckily our crack team at DFAT, headed by show pony Julie Bishop and with jolting Joe Hockey strategically deployed Trump-side, has come up with a brilliant game plan. Denial. So far the government’s position is that The Donald is just bluffing about his trade and foreign policy. Never happen. Yet the evidence, from his transition team appointments, his recent attacks on the media, to his release of a video denouncing the TPP attest otherwise.

Luckily there is a big win for the government this week as Mike Baird nobbles ICAC by passing a law which replaces the current commissioner with not one head but three and makes a few running alterations which mean that property developers can be a lot more relaxed and comfortable if not brazen exhibitionists about getting back into bed with the Liberal Party. Profiteering out of buying and selling property now reclaims its rightful place as the moral mainstay of an agile and innovative nation. Real estate speculation can now come out from under the doona and mount the victors’ podium atop resource extraction and labour exploitation as number one engine of our 21st Century economy.

A knackered ICAC will restore the party’s fortunes in many ways. Perhaps Arthur Sinodinos may even recover his memory. A frighteningly re-energised screaming Scott Morrison is out of the blocks already; his sights fixed on filling developers’ pockets. He talks all over a fawning Lee Sales on 7:30. Gotta increase supply. Relax zoning. Release land on the edge of town. No jobs, no transport but by God it will sell well. He’s all worked up to distract us from party-poopers Deloitte Access Economics whose forecast this week joins other experts who warn that as treasurer Morrison is a hopeless joke. His binge-spending coupled with his denial of his revenue problem is rapidly increasing the deficit.

When the government finally “puts out the garbage” by releasing its budget update at the last possible minute if not the night before Christmas, the blowout will be about $24 billion over four years, a total of $108 billion. Despite the deficit being comparatively low by international comparison, our externally sourced private debt – much of it invested in housing via the banking system – is among the highest in the world.

Lowest on record is PM Turnbull’s approval even according to Newspoll which has the PM on -20. It’s four troughs down and twenty-six to go, by the formula Turnbull used to topple Abbott. Confidence in Turnbull to manage the economy has dropped below 50% for the first time. Essential and Newspoll have Labor ahead 53-47%. Given this and the economic bad news, what can any hopelessly divided, incompetent Coalition do but get into the gutter with Trump?

Peter “dog-whistle” Dutton plays the race card again. Ignorance and bigotry are his strongest suit. Last week’s shameful attack on Lebanese migrants is extended in parliament in a bid to wedge Labor on immigration or paint them as soft on border protection.

“The advice I have,” he tells the parliament, “is that out of the last 33 people who have been charged with terrorist-related offences in this country, 22 of those people are from second- and third-generation Lebanese Muslim background. The hyped up figure is repeated even by those who protest his bigotry despite its flaky nature. Teenagers posting on Facebook boost the dodgy statistic. Yet if Dutton has his way, even challenging his figures will become a terrorism-related offence.

The paragon of border control who spends $400,000 a year on every refugee locked up, the genius who chooses to further torture refugees on Manus and Nauru with false hope by airing a deal with the US which is clearly dead in the water is not shy of attacking Malcolm Fraser. “Mistakes were made” in his refugee program. Labor challenges him to be specific. He can’t.

“The reality,” he says, “is Malcolm Fraser did make mistakes in bringing some people in the 1970s and we’re seeing that today.” Fraser should have been able to eyeball refugees then and pick which ones would bear terrorist-related offending grandchildren. In a payback to a dead man who dared criticise his punitive detention and off-shore torture policy, the classy Dutton argues in effect that Australia should be admitting only the right kind of refugee, the immigrant who fits in and eagerly assimilates. It’s a preposterous rationing of human compassion and a wilful denial of the government’s own non-selective policy and the UN Refugee Convention. It explains the delay in Syrian refugee arrivals.

Posturing as a moderate against a “tricky Bill Shorten”, Dutton ends up wedging Turnbull who is daily revealed to be a weak leader, our weakest Prime Minister ever, who must appease his right wing captors at all costs even if it means indulging overt racist hate-speak in parliament. Each time Dutton gets into the gutter he drags his captive Prime Minister down with him.

Worse. For WA Labor MP Anne Aly, Dutton’s dog-whistling evokes several immediate threats of bodily harm. A Facebook post next day reads ” I would love to kill you and poison your family. ” Another reads “Peter Dutton was right,” referring to “Leb thugs”. “Pack your bags and piss off back to where you came from and take all of your terrorist faith with you.”

Turnbull’s failure to censure his Minister makes him complicit in these attacks. The closest he comes is to send Deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop out to ride shotgun in damage control. Bishop claims absurdly that the Immigration Minister was misquoted. He meant that 1970s support systems for refugees were not up to today’s world class standard.

Compromising himself utterly in truth or leadership stakes, Turnbull plunges to new depths of cringing servitude to his right wing in praising Dutton for “doing an outstanding job” when, under any other PM, his minister’s record in breach duty of care alone would be grounds for dismissal.

A Senate committee hearing last year, was told by Immigration that it had received 14 reports of sexual assault, 213 of physical assault and 798 of abusive behaviour in the offshore processing centre on Manus Island. The Guardian published files of 2000 incident reports of injury from self-harm, sexual assaults, child abuse, hunger strikes, assaults and injuries written by guards, caseworkers and teachers between 2013-15. Dutton disputed, dismissed or diminished the reports and has so far done nothing to demonstrate his ministerial responsibility for those in his care.

Dutton’s “outstanding” record suggests callous indifference if not cruelty as well as neglect. He called Samantha Maiden “a mad fucking witch”. A month elapsed before he would even acknowledge the plight of Abyan, a 23 year old Somali woman, pregnant after she was raped on Nauru. Later, awaiting an abortion, Abyan was deported from a hospital bed.

Dutton’s typical response to news of his torture regime is to attack the messenger. He has repeatedly attacked the ABC as being on a Jihad against him, or having a left-wing bias. He has falsely accused refugee advocates of causing or coaching asylum seekers to self-harm. He has even claimed that refugees and asylum-seekers in his care “self-immolate” in order to be deported to mainland Australia. His outbursts are irrational, unreasonable, even paranoid.

Shock therapy is called for if Turnbull is to resuscitate his government. He must dismiss Dutton immediately. He must also dump Trump and tear up the US-Australia so-called Free Trade agreement; liberate our trade with our closest neighbours. DFAT should be planning now for an independent strategic and trade policy in which China is in ascendancy and the USA is in retreat.

The PM needs to meet the rise of Trump not by getting into the gutter with him, not by attacking Fraser but by following Fraser’s late example of tolerance and humanity. He must counter Baird’s attack on honesty and integrity in politics with a federal ICAC. Above all he needs to assert himself over his rabidly right wing captors. Tear up his Faustian pact with the Nationals. He has nothing to lose but his whips and his chains.

“We were robbed.” Labor’s lies about Medicare blinded voters to the allure of tax cuts for the rich and funding cuts to hospitals and schools. In Tasmania, the Prime Minister tells the three amigos, Eric Hutchinson, Andrew Nikolic and Brett Whiteley what they want to hear. He’s good at that – and he’s not bad at finger-pointing either. Everything is Labor’s fault again this week from Hazelwood’s closure to South Australia’s aggressive 40% renewable energy target by 2020 which he is hoping we forget was set by the Howard government.

It’s just what the reality evaders and Tony Abbott supporters need to hear. It’s not that they were bad advocates for those who elected them. It’s not that their policies were few and fanciful. It’s that someone else is to blame. It’s a Turnbull government mantra; a futile bid to evade accountability. Don’t expect Nikolic to ask the PM to help him honour his tertiary education funding campaign promise of $150 million to UTAS for a new campus at Inveresk.

Turnbull has been stood up by Joko Widodo whose immense personal popularity has led more than one reporter to ponder whether our PM has something to learn from him. They have much in common. For starters, Joko Widodo is just another puppet of predatory oligarchic elites. Naturally, fluffy puff pieces are being rushed to our screens now in which Jokowi, as he is known, explains his amazing strategy of talking to the people.

Yet suddenly, unfathomably, the man of the people has a riot to attend to; a popular protest where some in the mob seem out for his blood. Some days, as One Nation bush poet Rod Culleton says, dog-shit just sticks to your boot.

Is there an Indonesian solution in the pipeline? Certainly, the problem of what to do with asylum-seekers on Manus and Nauru won’t go away just because we can’t talk about it. Whatever was in the wind, Joko’s choking has meant Turnbull is robbed by fate once again of a chance to pose as a statesman. Now, as Liberal shill Nikki Savva puts it on ABC Insiders Sunday he must go (once again) into “a new week of parliament with nothing”.

Fate also snatches away any chance to chat about the Ubud Writers’ festival where a year ago Jokowi made news for censoring three panel discussions set up to explore the Indonesian genocide of 1965; the brutal repression of the will of the people in which it is estimated up to a million people were executed for being suspected of opposing the government; communists, left-wingers, critics, independent thinkers and suchlike.

Secrecy makes it impossible to know how many died, but our PM will surely want to chat with Widodo about the international panel of judges which concluded this July that Indonesia’s mass killings of 1965 were crimes against humanity, and that the United States, United Kingdom and Australia were all complicit in the crimes.

Luckily for all concerned, an epic extravaganza bursts upon the national stage this week sweeping all before it. Holy smoke! Hazelwood mania is taking the country by storm.

The arresting tale of an elderly coal-fired power station in intensive care battling to come to terms with its mortality seizes the imagination of the nation, Hazelwood Mon Amor is an extraordinary production in which virtuous denim-clad artisan turbine tenders in moccasins and tats heroically contend with impending disaster caused when perfidious socialists collude with greenies to close the noble smoke stacks of a poor community’s life support system.

Hazelwood, we are told, will lose up to a 1000 jobs  – all because of a state Labor government’s avarice in tripling its brown coal royalty and its demonic pursuit of a 40% renewable energy target for green-washed ideological reasons. And it gets worse. Hazelwood’s closure will cripple a vibrant LaTrobe Valley economy. Without Hazelwood, the state will go from a net energy exporter to a net importer. Next thing you know, Victoria will be forced to suck on the withered tit of Bass-link. It’s the last blow for coal, we are told, as if that’s a bad thing.

Hazelwood is a post-truth drama. The Andrews government’s new royalty merely brings Victoria into line with NSW; its 40% renewables by 2025 target sees it join ACT, Queensland and South Australia, states with more ambitious targets than the federal government which has cut its target causing a three year drought in investment.   And Victoria’s target will create employment. Victoria’s Minister for Energy and Climate, Lily D’Ambrosio says her state’s scheme is expected to generate 3,000 jobs by 2020, before any costs were imposed, and then another 4,000 additional jobs by 2023/24.

Yet the government of the turning bull never lets fact spoil its story. The loss of 1000 jobs is tiny compared with an SEC workforce slashed from 11,000 in the late 1980s to 2600 in Jeff Kennett’s newly privatised state power grid which left one third of families in Moe and Morwell without bread-winners. Nor are the workers merely cast aside penniless. The CFMEU, demonised by the Coalition, has negotiated $300,000 plus redundancy packages for workers. The confected outrage has nothing to do with compassion for the workers or their families.

The Hazelwood saga is scripted by Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal-mining company in which the closure of mines and power stations is reduced to a choice between jobs or coal. The environment can fend for itself; what really matters is “energy security” another Peabody concept, that only coal or gas-fired generation can bestow and something archly referred to as base-load power which cannot possibly be achieved without base-load generators burning coal or perhaps powered by nuclear reactors.

Yet north German states Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Schleswig-Holstein already operate on 100% net renewable energy, mostly wind; trading with each other and neighbours and without baseload power stations.

As Christine Milne put it ‘We are now in the midst of a fight between the past and the future.’ The refutation of the baseload fairy tale and other myths falsely denigrating renewable energy are a key part of that struggle.”

Once again a tamed ABC and a bought mainstream commercial media do big mining’s dirty work for it on behalf of a crisis-ridden, coal-powered Coalition desperately in need of a tactical diversion if not aerial support in its jihad against renewables, refugees, reporters or anyone who might tell truth to power.

Our ABC blitzes the airwaves, sensationalising the long overdue closure of brown coal-burning Hazelwood, the dirtiest power station in the developed world, a dinosaur of energy generation. Josh Frydenberg lies that the Andrews government has driven the operator out of town while French owner Engie repeatedly explains that its decision to close the fifty year old plant is economic; nothing to do with state government policies.

Aunty’s obsession almost eclipses the chaos in the Senate as Liberal stooge Bob Day, who even managed to vote to cut family allowances, resigns as the High Court prepares to get the last laugh on One Nation’s Rob Culleton, an amateur stand-up comedian who claims “four glasses of wine” may have caused him to incorrectly declare he was eligible to stand for the Senate.

Culleton also believes that the High Court has been acting illegally in not issuing writs in the name of the Queen but that will not prevent it sitting in judgement on his eligibility to be a senator given that he was a convicted felon at the time he stood for office, a conviction that was subsequently quashed. What may not help Culleton defend his false declaration is his apparent insolvency, broadly defined as owing more money than you can pay back.

The One Nation funster appears to have a liquidity crisis, owing around $5 million to Wesfarmers and a bank. But there’s no justice, as Rod himself is fond of pointing out. Don’t get him started on the Family Court.

Being insolvent did not preclude Bob Day from voting nine out of ten times with the government when technically his financial interest in his own North Adelaide electoral office building may also have made him ineligible to stand for the senate. The High Court will do its job on Bob and it is likely to find a recount is required in SA’s ballot for the senate, an event which pollsters predict could produce another Labor senator.

If Culleton abstains from voting as promised, Labor need only two cross-bench votes to defeat government legislation. Whilst Turnbull maintains that the cross-bench may yet prove biddable, news that the government was aware of Day’s financial interest in his Adelaide office at least since before the election will make it hard to dispel the suspicion that his government was keener on Day’s vote than its legality. Even harder to evade is the impression that its high-handed arrogance and has caused the born to rule party to become unstuck.

The government went to some expense, it seems, to buy Day’s vote. The revelation that in November 2015 the Coalition donated two million dollars to Adelaide’s North East Vocational College knowing that Day was a director and a former chairman of ten years’ standing has been met with strenuous denial from government despite the existence of photographs showing Simon Birmingham visiting the college with Day six months earlier.

When the going gets tough the tough become ludicrous, at least according to Bill Shorten who has dismissed as very silly indeed Peter “Nutso” Dutton’s desperate attempt to up his government’s cruelty to asylum-seekers to divert attention from its self-inflicted chaos.

Is it legal? Immigration Minister Peter Dutton talks all over Fran Kelly Monday when she dares to question the government’s proposal to banish forever those being tortured on Nauru and Manus Island. It’s his latest ploy in a plan to wedge Labor on immigration and paint it as soft on border protection. Thomas Albrecht, the United Nations refugee agency’s regional representative says the bill appears to breach Article 31 of the Refugee Convention, which prohibits refugees being penalised for seeking protection in an irregular manner.

The Attorney-General’s department has given its assurance that the proposed bill is constitutional and it meets our international obligations, splutters Dutton. Enough said. He brushes the ABC aside lightly as befits a minister whose beef is that the public broadcaster is packed with lefties and has a jihad against Immigration. The paranoid border protector explains to mate Ray Hadley, the ABC is part of a conspiracy. “Sometimes, particularly through some of the left wing media outlets, Border Force gets a pretty rough time.”

Imagine all the good news stories Aunty could be reporting that Immigration has to tell about indefinite detention, self-harm on Nauru or the physical and sexual abuse of those in its care. No wonder Dutton is forced to set up Border Force podcasts to get out the positive accounts, insights and reflections about feeling trapped forever on an island hell-hole.

Article 31 of the United Nations’ 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees states that signatories “shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees”.

Dutton is on thin ice. His claim that due diligence has been done by the Attorney-General is unfortunate after Brandis’ false claim about his government’s citizen-stripping bill having been vetted or his recent misleading of parliament that the solicitor general had consented to becoming a dog on the Attorney-General’s leash.

The act of calculated cruelty is the latest in a series of desperate attempts by a faction-ridden Turnbull government to divert attention from its bungling incompetence and its delusion that is above the law. Is it so desperate to appease its xenophobic right wing and to arrest its plummeting popularity that it will stoop to persecute the weakest and most wounded?

It is unconscionably inhumane to further crush the spirits of those already suffering the cruelty of indefinite detention, deprivation and brutality. It seems a bizarre response to the UN’s report on Manus and the endemic suffering and institutionalised abuse exposed by the reports leaked by the Guardian Australia earlier this year.

Some call it folly. Bernard Keane and others point out that the attempted wedging of Labor will not work. The Australian electorate no longer trusts the government much more than the opposition on asylum-seekers. Polls now indicate at best a two point advantage over Labor.

What is clear is that the proposed bill reflects the moral bankruptcy of a Coalition conflicted internally; irreparably divided if not crippled by its capture by its conservative rump, a government of bungling incompetence fit only to turn crisis into catastrophe. Its backers call the tune on energy and the environment, a coherent if shameless capitulation to big mining, big business, big banking. Yet its latest move reveals a heart of darkness.

In the administration or systematised wilful neglect of asylum seekers and refugees on Nauru and Manus, torture has become our government’s policy.  Is it now so desperate to boost its stakes that it is prepared to resort to sadism?