“In just two years, Tim Wilson has single-handedly reshaped the human rights debate in Australia. He has restored balance to a debate which had previously been dominated by the priorities and prejudices of the Left.” George Brandis

Wow. Our Tim of the IPA was really a super hero, all along? And we only ever saw him as a Liberal Party stooge? No application. No ad. No interview. Just a tap on the shoulder from AG George Brandis. And a word in his little pink ear.

“We’ve a top job for you Tim: “Freedom Commissioner”. Hang about a bit. Make the odd speech to the press club about Magna Carta. Do a Tony Abbott with indigenous peoples. Prance around. Get your photo taken a lot. Get your top off. Go on The Drum. Play your cards right and you could be our next President of the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Who knows what the future may hold? Gillian Triggs can’t go on for ever with her Leftist agenda, holding the government to account over human rights abuses, child imprisonment and off-shore detention. My secretary, Chris Moraitis may just pop around. Offer her a job in another government department. Tell her she’s lost my confidence.”

The above dialogue is fiction and conjecture, of course, just like Brandis’ rave reference for his protégé. Tess Lawrence writes well about how he really got his job. Unlike the rest of us, Tim was lucky to have been one of a favoured few as the political playing field was tilted back towards the wealthy at the expense of the deserving; at the expense of everyone.

The wider realities of the Abbott/Turnbull government’s sustained attack on the vulnerable; its programme of disempowerment and neglect of the poor and disadvantaged; it eagerness to heed the needs of the privileged are a continuing story. Scott Morrison used a Press Club talk this week to bash welfare recipients for being a burden to those out earning money and a drain on productivity.

How productive was Wilson? What did he ever do for anyone but himself? Brandis is skimpy on evidence of Tim’s super powers after what reads like a hazy, lazy rehash of his appointment release. Let’s face it there is no evidence. Just a damning, resounding silence.

Lawrence makes a good case that the best thing Tim’s done for human rights in Australia, is to resign. The Commission will be a happier workplace without him.

Sadly, however, the damage is not easily repaired. Wilson’s appointment came at the cost of a disability discrimination commissioner. Graeme Innes’ term expired in July 2014 and was not, given the cost of Wilson’s appointment, renewed.

Graeme Innes said at the time, given 45 per cent of people with disability lived in poverty, and rates of employment for disabled Australians were 30 per cent lower than those for their counterparts with disability, ”I could mount an argument that people with disabilities are a threatened species.”

The fate of the discrimination commissioner is paralleled by other cuts to the vulnerable in our society. Under the Abbott/Turnbull government, Community Legal Centres suffered funding cuts of $50 million, helping silence the voices of the disempowered; excluding the poor and disadvantaged from decision-making.

You might expect a Human Rights Commission to act as an advocate for those who can’t look out for themselves. Not Tim.

He’s certainly a quiet worker. You don’t hear a peep out of Tim on human rights abuses. He does speak, however, at Liberal functions; cheques payable to Liberal Party of Australia. Brandis defended him in the senate.

In WA, dissent is being outlawed in a bill which seems certain to be enacted into law. Three UN Special Rapporteurs – David Kaye, on freedom of expression; Maina Kiai, on freedom of peaceful assembly and association; and Michel Forst, on human rights defenders – slam the whole bill.

The Criminal Code Amendment (Prevention of lawful activity) Bill 2015 creates vague new offences of “physically preventing a lawful activity” and “possessing a thing for the purpose of preventing a lawful activity”. Both offences carry serious penalties of prison of up to 1 year and a fine of up to $12,000. In certain circumstances, the penalty for preventing a lawful activity can rise to 2 years and $24,000.

Did Wilson, our human rights Martin Luther, also add his protest. Get real. Freedom Boy, as Richard Ackland calls Tim, has a much more urgent and personal agenda. He sees a future for himself within the Liberal Party, an invisible political bias which Brandis, doubtless, easily overlooked when the AG appointed him Freedom Commissioner. Bias would damage the commission’s reputation for independence.

Wilson is going into politics. It won’t be a long journey. The safe Liberal seat of Goldstein has wealth and privilege written all over its tickets on itself. Just the ticket for Tim, he reckons. Yet if our left-busting, debate reshaping, Freedom Boy, (as Richard Ackland dubs him) Tim is to win preselection he needs all the help he can get. And then some.

The blue-ribbon electorate of Goldstein includes the well-heeled suburbs of Brighton, Bentleigh, Elsternwick and Sandringham, suburbs not noted primarily for their human rights activism despite being named after feminist and suffragist Vida Goldstein.

One of the biggest Liberal branches in the state, Goldstein does expect a high-profile and influential member. Retiring member, Free Trade maven Andrew Robb raves about Georgina Downer, whom he notes, is a woman. Tim, he says, carefully, would “also” be an excellent candidate.

Tim, himself, sees his chances differently. A young man with a taste for lavish expenditure, he has never lacked in either ambition or over-self-promotion. Besides, he needs a job. He’s quit his $300,000 plus job as Human Rights Commissioner after only two years in the five year appointment. Perhaps he thinks he’s a shoo-in. The way he sees it, he would be employed and the people of Goldstein would have him. It looks like a win-win. Or does it?

Georgina Downer, a former Minter Ellison lawyer and diplomat, unsurprisingly sees the Goldstein preselection as hers to win while the electorate expects a cabinet minister at least or a well-connected candidate. Switching her attention from the Menzies electorate, where Kevin Andrews has elected not to retire, Georgina is a bit of a late entry and is described by some as an outsider and lightweight. Still she has been lucky in the past.

Ten years ago, when her father Alexander Downer was foreign Minister, Georgina, then a 25 year old with a third class Melbourne Uni honours degree beat 300 other candidates to win the prestigious A$100,000 PA Chevening postgraduate scholarship to study in Britain, despite failing to attain the ‘upper second class degree’ stipulated on the award’s application form.

No-one of course is suggesting that Georgina was not selected fairly, or that the process was anything less than rigorous. It does, however, strangely recall how Tim got his job as Freedom Boy, a curious story in itself yet one which deserves to be better known so clearly does it illustrate the Abbott/Turnbull government’s contempt for human rights. Wilson began by bagging the outfit he was later to be appointed to.

Wilson criticised the commission, and called for it to be abolished. A month later, he alleged it was “missing in action” for not lobbying louder for freedom of speech, in the wake of a court decision against Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt and his claims about several high-profile “light skinned” indigenous people. Who could be more perfectly suited to get a call offering him a job as Freedom Commissioner?

Wilson’s story illustrates a government prepared to turn away from those in most need of help. It is happy to fund its ideology of entitlement and to protect privilege at the expense of its fundamental obligation to provide for every Australian regardless of wealth, status or background.

Wilson also reflects a political elite which rules with callous disregard for the disadvantaged. It heralds a new era of cruelty and injustice where government can splash funds on a so-called “freedom commissioner” to serve its own narrow political ends, while it denies others the necessities of life. Wilson’s silence on WA’s new anti-demonstration laws suggests it, too, would silence those who speak truth to power.

Tim Wilson’s tilt at politics and his career so far, shows a government redefining and debasing human rights to condone its subsidy of the greedy and the powerful at the expense of the poor, the needy and the weak.

In the end such a cynical redefinition will cause it to forfeit popular respect and trust as well as any claims to legitimacy as a government of the people by the people.

“Australia is rapidly becoming a nation divided between those who pay taxes and those who have taxes spent upon them,” Federal Treasurer, Scott Morrison says late in what he assures us will be a ‘candid’ and ‘upfront’ Press Club address in Canberra, Wednesday. Instead we get the same tired old evasion and sloganeering that is his trademark.

“A nation divided…” is one of ScoMo’s clearer statements in an hour in which he will, he says, share the ‘economic and fiscal context’ of his thinking. This is not the budget. Instead we get a series of clichés about China, some hollow boasts about job growth and his barren old hokey standby of “transitioning” the economy.  WOTF?

Transitioning is not a transitive verb. There is no argument that the economy is in transition. Yet, somehow the government wishes to claim leadership for looking on idly as the bottom falls out of commodity exports, for example, as if this were somehow the natural scheme of things. Revenue is down, down, down. Yet no revenue problem exists, Morrison bizarrely insists.

Forget “transitioning”. What is his government is actually doing to foster new enterprises, apart from impeding a renewable energy sector its fossil fuel sponsors wont’ let it help? Farewelling a car industry its ideology won’t protect?

The TPP, will, of course solve everything by setting up “generations of prosperity”. A late question as to why the productivity commission has been denied evaluation of the TPP is dismissed in another ScoMo smart remark that his government does not go in for “rear view analysis”.

The truth is that the benefits of the TPP are likely to be either miniscule or negative. Our USA FTA, for example, diverted trade from lower-cost countries, cutting our trade with the rest of the world, it is estimated, by $53 billion.

What the treasurer does manage to make clear is that he wants to cut income tax for a lucky group of wage earners he is “backing” while cutting back on government spending for everyone. Pensioners, welfare recipients and other bludgers are especially in the gun. The best bits are left until last and only then divulged under questioning.

Despite all the innovative hype surrounding his government, Morrison is flogging some very old ideas.  Joe Hockey’s “lifters and leaners” are clearly still part of the Liberal mental furniture as Morrison drags out the old austerity line that the government has to spend less on everything but especially on welfare.

“Buckets of money” are not available he says repeatedly as if the states, for example, were being scandalously reckless in requesting enough funds to pay for hospitals and schools after being cut $80 billion from forward projections in the Abbott government’s first budget.

Morrison evades Lenore Taylor’s question on how states obtain the funds to avert a looming crisis in health and education by saying we are all sovereign governments. In other words, states can raise taxes if they must, but the federal government “is not about taxing and spending”. It is a shameful capitulation to cheap politicking.

“I don’t run the other governments” he says betraying an immodest but never deeply concealed view of his power in the federal government. It’s his “upfront and candid” way of saying states need to raise their taxes. He bullshits that he is a “federalist”.

Is this petty trick his best shot? His government will cut its spending in order to get its budget back into surplus. States have to fend for themselves any way they can. No-one asked him if this were wise in the face of a looming global slowdown, if not a recession. No-one challenges the politics or the economics of austerity.

Discrimination and the politics of resentment are ugly ideas from anyone at the best of times but when times are tough, it behoves national political leaders not to be seen to foster division. ScoMo’s backing himself in. Bugger anyone else.

Equally unattractive is the tea party bias against taxation. Yet Morrison continues to claim against all evidence that rising tax rates are ‘job-destroying’ simply to justify cutting taxes for the wealthy while welfare recipients must expect to have benefits even further reduced.

Morrison’s this-is-not-the-budget speech is cagey and evasive on policy but generous to a fault when it comes to meaningless sloganeering such as “how can I back you in today”‘ which, by way of a clumsy personal anecdote, is his message for the nation.

Australians who are “out there earning” would win his government’s backing. Those millions of decent and worthy non wage-earning saving and investing Australians deserve less support.

Backing winners and bagging losers emerges as central to Morrison’s vision, a vision which he calls:  “backing Australians and our transitioning economy”. Who writes his stuff? His talk promises to ease taxes on worthy wage-earners who are “transforming and transitioning” our economy while the $11 billion he says goes on housing assistance is very clearly a drain in a less than upfront aside to his reply to 2CCC’s question about housing supply.

Otherwise the treasurer is ideologically bound to repeat the tired old myth that housing affordability is merely a matter of supply and demand despite the work of ratings agencies such as Fitch or the ABS suggesting otherwise.

Despite giving himself a boost as a ‘plain speaker’ Morrison is dull, opaque and cloaked in generalities. His pet analogy of how a government should handle a nation’s economy is embarrassingly hokey and wilfully misleading. It brings back memories of other conservatives in the position like Peter Costello who would offer the spurious analogy that the nation’s economy is like a household budget and must not spend more than its income.

When all else fails, Morrison badmouths Labor, a little too eagerly

Devoid of any announcement on GST, Morrison has no real material to offer. Instead he fumbles an austerity budget plan that depends on a couple of meaningless slogans.  ABC’s Chris Uhlmann gives him a boost in introducing him as the kind of guy who did what had to be done. “Stop the boats, they said and he did”.

Many watching recall today is the anniversary of 23 year old Iranian Reza Berati who was bashed to death on Manus Island in circumstances which Morrison has never given a candid or upfront account of, despite being the minister responsible at the time. Perhaps Morrison could be given leave to attend to unfinished business before he is not responsible for even further unspeakable suffering in his name.

“Ministers and assistant ministers are entrusted with the conduct of public business and must act in a manner that is consistent with the highest standards of integrity and propriety.”

Malcolm Turnbull Statement of Ministerial standards 20 November 2015.

There’s never been a more exciting time to be my Cabinet-Valentine, coos Malcolm Turnbull, a ministerial speed-dating app flashing late into the night on his golden iPhone.

It’s the one time in his career he can get people to say yes without reservation, although some old hands beg to differ. Everybody knows everyone finds the PM’s pitch irresistible, ABC Insiders’ guest The Guardian’s Katharine Murphy “hack-splains” on Sunday. He could “sell ice to Eskimos”.

Notwithstanding, Murphy’s “hacks-planation”, Turnbull’s spin is wearing thin. The week attests to the PM’s failure to persuade, discern or negotiate. His cabinet has not lasted six months. He can’t sell a bigger GST and he can barely control Scott Morrison, his treasurer, a bull at a bigger tax gate, with his eyes on the main prize. Now he is in damage control, plugging gaps, plying the snake-oil and repairing the façade of unity by extolling the virtue of growth.

‘An organism that stops growing dies’, he says in a spray of facile spin and grin, “growth is good”; ignoring cancer.

Oddly, despite being freshly ordained World’s Best Minister by the Emir of Dubai, at the behest of an appreciative petrochemical industry, Environmental Pollution Minister, Greg Hunt, who has put in a cheeky bid for Trade, does not receive even a text. Nor does the agile Erich Abetz, Former Employment minister who just knows his country needs him. Somehow The Mercury is moved to protest that “no Tasmanian is included in the new cabinet”.

It’s not true and it unfairly raises expectations about representation when the PM must meet other needs such as rewarding supporters and appeasing an angry and destabilising right wing.

Incumbent Tasmanian Cabinet member, Senator Richard Colbeck of Devonport, Minister for Tourism and International Education and assistant Minister for Trade and Investment since 2015 is somehow missed in the tally by the once-proud Tassie paper. He is from Devonport. Perhaps a trade visit to China to raise his profile is in order. Once he’s fixed the rogue colleges fleecing foreign students with bogus degrees.

“orderly, respectful government”

The PM could use a fixer. Having seen fifteen changes since promising “orderly, respectful government” in September, Turnbull must be hoping for better luck now as he woos a few hapless over-ambitious, under-qualified younger men and several token women into accepting cabinet positions they have no hope of mastering in the six months before the election. Some have form.

Then Assistant Minister for Health, Senator Fiona, “Let them eat junk”, Nash was censured 5 March 2014 by the Senate for pulling a health energy rating website on the prompting of her adviser, Kraft-Cadbury spokesman, Alastair Furnival, who co-owns with his wife a confectionery and soft drink lobbying firm.

Since then Nash has made a healthy comeback. Trust the Nationals, the voice of the farmer, the mining industry and the tobacco lobby to overlook a mere Senate censure. Would either of the major parties been so keen to allow her to enter a leadership ballot?

Would her past actions pass the Turnbull test? MSM ignores the discrepancy between Stuart Robert’s treatment and the judgement meted out to Nash, to say nothing of her remarkably forgiving return to high office.

The Minister is in rude good health. So much so that she promised last week on ABC Q&A to forgo her private medical cover. Concern for the public good has since, sadly, forced her to renege on her pledge because, she claims, her stunt would displace a more deserving member of the public from obtaining a hospital bed. Nash has no problem, moreover, it would seem, with the $6bn taxpayers must pay each year to subsidise private health insurance.

New Trade Minister Steve Ciobo, dobbed into his new job by Robb, however, is no stranger to bed disputes or dog-whistle politics. Labor back-bencher Nick Champion would “slit Julia Gillard’s throat if he could”, Ciobo helpfully added to the public debate on political leadership in 2013, a phrase Peter Reith repeated, albeit with a twist. It is an ugly, violent and disparaging image which cannot help but fuel those predisposed towards violence against women.

Entitlement has raised its ugly head…

Then Minister for Women, Tony Abbott, brushed aside complaints about Ciobo as “merely metaphor”, a dismissal as short-sighted and partisan as his espousal of the right to vilify in seeking to remove section 18C of the racial Discrimination Act 1975. Turnbull’s new trade minister will doubtless expect he is entitled to the same level of support from his new PM. Entitlement has raised its ugly head before.

Four years ago, while on exchange to the US, Ciobo booked into a hotel when DFAT was slow to honour his request for a two bedroom flat for his wife and child incurring a bill of $8000 which he refused to pay. Was his dummy-spit a display of entitlement or the need to “disrupt”? Turnbull has clearly given him also the benefit of the doubt.

Disruptive, suddenly seems a less attractive buzz-word, however, to the PM, now that it is his government suffering the disruption. His promised orderly, respectful, government proves no different to Abbott’s “good government”.

“The government is now so deeply split between so-called moderates and the RW nutters that it can’t decide the time of day”, veteran Mike Carlton chortles. His restraint is admirable given the yawning ocean trench now threatening to swallow up PM Turnbull’s love boat on its extra-virgin, maiden voyage. No need to frighten the horses.

Stuart Robert is thrown splashily overboard but the boat fails to rise. Utterly rudderless, it leaks and lists to starboard. The tax reform table with everything on it must also go. If only someone could lift it! All hands look over the side. Robert’s nob, bobs idly amidst a wet, black crush of ministerial hats afloat a rising sea which laps hungrily along the gunwales of the PM’s ship of Theseus. Like Theseus’ ship, Turnbull’s cabinet has had so much of itself replaced that experts will debate forever whether it is the same ship.

…the PM can hide effortlessly in its shadow…

Stuart Robert has had to go. A bull in a China trade show, Robert is attacked in parliament by matador Shorten and picador Dreyfus . Pass after pass is made. Shorten fans go wild. Finally, he is gored beyond redemption. Nothing can be done, however. The PM has done all he can by referring the matter to its proper place, the desk of Dr Martin Parkinson which looms so big all week that the PM can hide effortlessly in its shadow. Turnbull just looks weak and crafty.

In the end, Robert is given no estocada (final, fatal sword thrust) in a Parkinson’s report which finds him in breach of the code but recommends no dismissal leaving Turnbull with no choice, he claims, but to remove him from the ministry.

Not only has Robert breached the ministerial code of conduct, the Minister for Being in China only on Personal Business has made a farce of question time by eagerly leaping to his feet to rush the despatch box only to decline to answer. All he’s done is helped his mate Marks get a good deal. OK, the Chinese thought he was there as a minister. OK his presence may have helped seal a deal. OK he does have shares in Marks’ company. But how was he to know? It was a trust.

Robert, of course, chooses to say nothing in the house. Endlessly he refers questioners to his previous response, itself a referral to a previous response, in a recursive series of diminishing returns. Surely the tactic will become known as the Robert-Droste stone-wall. His example, however, will prove a difficult legacy for Turnbull to manage. Sadly, clearly, he has been persuaded that the PM would spare him. Keep his word. Yet there is no shortage of help to be rid of him.

Liberal party leaks help Labor. Bill Shorten gives one of his best ex tempore speeches yet, which shows what he can do when he’s given the right material.

Turnbull’s indulgent, patronising smile turns into a fixed, rueful, rictus under the onslaught . Abbott’s faction has all the ammunition necessary to Roberts political overkill. And more. Who can doubt that the MP’s register of pecuniary interests will get another workout soon? Who will be the next hapless accidental tourist?

Perhaps the PM regrets that he has, last week, allowed Abbott a senior advisor for twelve months and an assistant ‘in keeping with the duties of a former Prime Minister’. Such as not sniping. The leaks can only continue.

Old hands sniff an early election. Some think it will be later, especially if the electoral office is to have time to publish the new senate voting rules, if they got through the current senate .

…the first fortnight of the phoney war…

Others hear all the flatulent garrulity of a lower house barely into its second wind in the first fortnight of the phoney war that is the prelude to the campaign proper. Warren Truss is oblivious, having at last handed the National’s tiller to Mr Barnaby.

Many are unsettled by the prospect of Barnaby Joyce being a heartbeat away from being Prime Minister, to say nothing of the yoking together in the show-ring of an agrarian socialist, Sinophobe, climate denier and a multi-millionaire, free- trade-is-my-religion merchant banker. The hayseed and the spiv may not be an election-winning image, it is feared. Christopher Pyne dubs them Yin and Yang, in a novel take on Taoist complementarity.

Wokka Truss, a National Murray Grey, for years forced to sleep uncomfortably on a front bench, is finally, mercifully led out to pasture. Or such pasture as remains after CSG frackers and coal-miners have taken their whack of the family farm.

Veteran blue heeler, Joyce is left as uncontested champion of the paddock and confirms his leadership as Nationals and Deputy PM by yapping a defence of Robert on the very morning of the day Turnbull announced that despite veterinary advice from Dr Martin Parkinson, Robert was to be put down.

The Abbott faction has been after Stuart Robert’s scalp to avenge his betrayal of his former leader, turning at the last minute, it seems, to follow Morrison into the Turnbull camp. Now Morrison is in the gun with Turnbull and with the Abbott factions over being far too bullish over a GST hike that he hopes to ride to victory over his critics. Turnbull is forced to bring forward the issue Treasury analysis which confirms that a 50% GST rise would be an economic downer in case Morrison declares it policy on Monday at the National Press Club lunch.

…cabinet rejects, failures and other has-beens…

Sweet Custard Bun as he is known in China, Malcolm Turnbull is on full-charm, grin and spin alert all week as party unity is well-nigh destroyed under the continuing assault of aggrieved right wingers, cabinet rejects, failures and other has-beens who cluster around the former Prime Minister in the Monkey Pod Room. Stuart Robert is paid back for his perfidy in defecting from the Abbott to the Turnbull camp in last September

It is a fantastical week in politics. Greg Hunt’s gong for Best Minister in the World is rivalled only by Philip Ruddock’s appointment as Australia’s special envoy on human rights to the UN. Both are upstaged, however, by Barnaby Joyce’s ascension to become deputy PM of Australia while in the background the Abbott faction continues to surprise a beleaguered PM with all manner of sniping, leaking and sundry other forms of creative disaffection and disruption. Saddled with a tax reform agenda it has lost control of and riddled with tensions and rivalries, the Turnbull ship is making very heavy weather of its maiden voyage.

It’s official, Barnaby Joyce will soon be only a heart-beat away from being Prime Minister.

What is going on? What went wrong with the rumoured Liberal plan to keep Wokka on the payroll until after Turnbull got back in? Will Barnaby even be re-elected, given Tony Windsor’s threat to nominate as an independent who would at least represent his electorate and not sell out local farmers’ by giving their water to Shenhua mining? Is Barnaby the best man to arrest the National’s slow but inexorable shuffle into extinction?

As news of Joyce’s anointment as Nationals Leader filtered out Thursday, a mob of LNP loyalists in the ABC rushed to put a positive spin on the member for New England’s elevation, occasioned neither by merit nor popularity but by old bull Warren Truss’s retirement. Rumours of a challenge proved unfounded and no-one outside the Nationals could explain the process of acclamation or herd instinct which gave Barn the nod in the end. One thing is certain. A Barnaby explanation is unlikely to help.

ABC TV news showed an image of Joyce and Turnbull in profile in the Canberra afternoon sun, hayseed and spiv picking their way across press cables in the grounds of parliament house. It was not a reassuring image; not an election-winning look. The pair are at best an odd couple but many in MSM were keen to give the marriage of convenience a boost. Few bothered to note the different religions of the pro-foreign investment PM and his new keep the bastards out agrarian socialist deputy. It can’t last and it won’t work.

A few, such as Bernard Keane foresee disaster. With Robb’s resignation, Turnbull will lack capable and experienced hands on deck. An embattled PM will have to contend, moreover, with a deputy who is a maverick on fiscal policy and foreign investment. Tony Abbott had to drop him after four months as shadow finance minister. Joyce seemed set on playing the role of fiscal village idiot. Debt was so huge, he once alleged that Australia  would soon default on its foreign debt. Just what you need, really in an aspiring deputy PM.

Someone on ABC’s The Drum gushed that Joyce would certainly get the Nat’s brand ‘out there’, whatever that may be, in an echo of the Liberal mantra. Bugger policy, just get the message out. No-one, however, would quibble with the ‘out there’. Another thought Barnaby said what he thought, unwittingly identifying his Achilles heel. Joyce’s cringe-worthy grandstand over Johnny Depp’s dogs has clearly worked well for him in some quarters. ‘Bugger off back to America’ certainly has a ring about it.

Who knows ‘We decide whose dogs come into this country’ could be an election winner in the way that a similar slogan worked for John Howard after the Tampa crisis. The country’s been barking mad on migration since.

Dubious claims and dog-whistling aside, what seems clear is that the Nationals are now packaged on MSM as a kind of circus who merit a cheer for giving us Joyce, a favourite clown, an outspoken but amiable and benign buffoon who will entertain us as a celebrity in the razzle-dazzle Luna Park of our national politics.  Soft focus; no hard stuff. Jokey blokey.

Little space is made so far in the popular imagination for the real Barnaby whose unabashed populism, his loose grasp of fiscal policy and his capacity to shoot from the lip could well and truly cruel the coalition’s chances in the next election. Now he’s got the job, let’s not over-think the selection process.

Can Barnaby handle his responsibilities? So far most of these would appear to be well beyond him. Veteran cat herder as he may be in the national’s cupboard of a party room, with big Wokka as backup, he may now have to muster a whole coalition or front the despatch box while his PM is overseas innovating, posing for photographs with soldiers or selling off more of the farm, as befits any hot-eyed zealot of the cargo cult of free trade deals, the Liberals’ new evangelical religion.

With Wokka out to pasture, the new bull will need to do the mysterious things that Nats do in the name of leading the party. His critics say he has neither the discipline nor the character. Voting, it seems is rare, but somehow consensus is forged. Perhaps it’s a young-bull old-bull tussle. Even here, while Barnaby has the seniority and the scars to prove it, he may struggle a bit to exert authority given his unpopularity and his volatility. At least there’s only ten of them in parliament to contend with.

While Barnaby’s struggle to be boss of his party mirrors something of the same in Toff’s Corner between Malcolm and the many Liberals who can’t stand the man, his need for approval may also gee up his populist anti-foreign investment and debt rhetoric, heedless of its effect on the economy. Some of these are as well-presented and enlightened as his views on the climate.

“Look … I just – I’m always sceptical of the idea that the way that anybody’s going to change the climate – and I’m driving in this morning and we’re driving through a frost – is with bureaucrats and taxes. All that does is … it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. I make you feel guilty so I can get your money and put it in my pocket and send reports backwards and forth to one another.”

Dear old Barnaby, the sheep-wrangling syntax mangler, has some funny old views on a whole range of issues. He’s a cheerful climate change denialist who opposes same sex marriage because a diamond is not like a square. He warned us in 2010 of approaching economic Armageddon. Carbon tax, he notoriously claimed would kill sheep farming.

“It’ll be the end of our sheep industry. I don’t think your working mothers are going to be very happy when they’re paying over $100 for a roast.”

Joyce is also capable of picking a fight in court as when in October last year he accused Tony Windsor of profiteering out of selling property to Shenhua. Windsor threatened to sue.

But let’s not laugh at Barnaby. It’s too easy to rubbish the Nationals as an historical atavism, a party which has long since lost its relevance, party which is in terminal decline. Small in numbers it may be, but those numbers matter to the Liberals. Let’s remember that in 2010 without his leadership of the revolt against the carbon tax, Tony Abbott would never have seized the leadership from Malcolm Turnbull.  Chances are, the way things are lining up, Barnaby could well be the Bill-Shorten-for-PM camp’s best ally.

You’ve got to hand it to Malcolm Turnbull, he’s never short of a word. Tragically, it is seldom the right word, the apt word, the word that crystallises meaning. Instead, a fog of words billows forth obscuring or forsaking simple clarity.

On ABC Insiders, Sunday 7 February, for example, Turnbull cosies up to Cuddly Barrie ‘Big Ted’ Cassidy, one of the most forgiving political interviewers in the land. Arm Chair PM Turnbull gushes buckets of gratuitous information, a tepid bath of benign assertions.

Cassidy has cued a voter who has drawn the PM aside in public to tell him not to ‘stuff up’ over increasing the GST. Implied is that he’s got the next election on a plate but for his own, inherent, poor judgement.

Turnbull turns instantly into a justification of his flip-flop by misrepresenting failure of nerve as a concern for fairness and efficacy.

…the issue with any changes to the tax system, particularly a really big one like increasing the GST is that you have to be satisfied that it is actually going to deliver an improvement in GDP growth. In other words, it’s got to drive jobs and growth. And unless you can be satisfied that it’s going to do that, and that it’s going to be fair, of course, which is equally important, then you wouldn’t do it.

How can a GST, a regressive tax be fair? How can it have taken four months to discover that a 50% GST hike would be a slug to productivity as measured, grossly, by GDP? Any fool could tell you higher taxes dampen demand. Why is the PM now recycling ScoMo’s banal slogan, ‘drive jobs and growth’?

He knows Barrie won’t interrupt his flow but he’s prepared to talk over the top of him anyway.  His inner bore prompts him to labour every little point. Bully his listener with trivial details. It’s excruciating to listen to, let alone watch. What he doesn’t ever seem to know is how to answer the question. Or care. His mission is to confer legitimacy by misrepresentation and by resorting to generality. He eases up only to labour the bleeding obvious.

So, what we have been doing … what we have been doing, as you can see is looking at this and a number of other tax reform changes or tax changes very, very carefully. They’re very complex and they deserve careful discussion and it’s good that, by not shutting it down, as previous governments have done, in a panic, we’ve allowed a debate to continue.

This is a marvellously fictive rationalisation of indecision and ineffectual leadership and his claim of close scrutiny is outrageous unless he is referring to Liberal Party polling on the GST hike. Yet Barrie looks on like some bemused St Bernard rescue dog as a hapless downhill skier disappears under an avalanche of his own blathering.

Unless his master’s voice admits he’s tried and failed to sell the electorate a pup, how can nod-along Cassidy ever save him? From himself.

Neither a leader born nor made, but a hugely ambitious man with a reputation for wanting his own way at all times, Turnbull pretends that his failed sales pitch has been a process of consultation. Barrie could ask why the Green paper lies abandoned, along with the people’s submissions; why the white paper has been pulled. But he can’t -or won’t- get a word in edgewise.

There’ve been a lot of contributions – there’s been differences of opinion in the Liberal Party, differences of opinion in the Labor Party, differences of opinion in the economic commentariat – and all of that has enabled us to make a very careful and considered analysis of it. Obviously with Treasury doing the analysis with some outside assistance and we are coming to a conclusion. But it will be evidence based. It’s not going to be a political decision. Whatever policies we take as part of our tax reform package, Barrie, will be ones that we are satisfied will deliver the growth and jobs outcome that we want.

Turnbull has no need of any opposition hatchet-job here. He’s damaged his leadership aspirations enough with his own prevarication. There has been no attempt to truly canvass and then discuss options beyond telling us ad nauseum that everything remained ‘on the table’. Nor does he seem to understand that his language betrays his true motivation. Economic sense, it may not make, democratic it may not be but a political decision is guaranteed. His lofty intellectual pose is damaged here by his inability to choose quite the right words.

Not that he is grossly off-key. Bum notes are uncommon. A suppository of wisdom would not pass his lips. But, rather, all his words are a barricade. He can lecture but he can’t talk. Or if he talks, he is not really listening. When he looks as if he’s listening, he’s rehearsing his next wind-bagging evasion and mind-numbing dumbed-down explanation.

Turnbull can pitch any amount of lofty speeches but you can’t dwell in windy generalities forever. You have to be able to come down out of the clouds and answer a question sometime. Time wounds all heels. His ‘I’m not Abbott the barbarian’ silken parachute will not soften his landing.

Turnbull loves to show off what he knows, often alas without knowing enough to bring significant insights to any given issue or situation. And it’s not just his bloviator reading glasses which are irritating. He’s a poseur pretending to be Prime Minister.

After four months’ suffering, it is clear, to any who care to listen that as a speaker, Turnbull has an ear of tin. Even as a show, a divertissement between Abbott and the next Liberal election victory, Malcolm the waffling toff has just about passed his use by date.

In appointing the deeply compromised, former Attorney General, counter-terror warrior, Philip Ruddock as his government’s special envoy for human rights to the UN, Malcolm Turnbull has achieved a gesture worthy of Tony Abbott’s appointment of himself as Minister for Women. It is a calculated slight.

Unless, of course, the PM wishes to give the Saudis, the Chinese and the Vietnamese representatives currently disgracing the UN Human Rights Council another rogue they can relate to.

Whatever Ruddock’s appointment may do to boost Turnbull’s stakes in the monkey pod room, the PM’s snub to international standards can only damage his own reputation for sound judgement and leadership.

Was this the only way he could be rid of the ‘father of the house’ as the time-server was so often ironically misnamed? Is this the move to bring an innovative, agile Australia to the world’s attention?  Can he do any more to trash our image abroad?

Australia’s reputation will sink even further under Ruddock’s dead weight. Not that much more is needed with our immigration laws, Operation Sovereign Borders, the continued existence of a regime of indefinite detention in unsafe camps on Manus and Nauru Island and the recent high court green light to repatriate babies and children to these places of danger.  It will, however, assist us attain new depths of world disapproval.

Ruddock is a rebuff to the court of international opinion if not to the notion of accountability itself. Turnbull is dismissing UN censure over our mistreatment of refugees and asylum-seekers by appointing the one Australian in political life whose career commends him least to the position.

Philip Ruddock helped Howard politicise the maltreatment of asylum seekers in 2001, when he helped perpetrate the myth that boat people were throwing babies overboard and whose career as Attorney General saw a series of assaults on the human rights of ordinary Australians including re-introducing the law of sedition, against expert advice, along with preventative detention and control orders.  He pioneered the culture of secrecy which continues to vitiate the people’s right to know what Immigration and Border Control get up to in our name.

Ruddock’s war on terror resulted in travesties of justice and human rights in the cases of Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks whom he insisted, madly, with no evidence, were high-ranking al Qaeda operatives. Habib, whose rendition to Egypt and subsequent torture was witnessed by an Australian official, later successfully sued the Gillard government.

On the domestic front Turnbull is lining himself up with Tony Abbott’s populist, pragmatic chauvinism. Perhaps he thinks by thumbing his nose at Geneva and all other piss-weak libertarians he demonstrates how he’s secretly a tough guy who doesn’t give a stuff what others think of him. It’s a calculated, if not opportunistic, statement of independence, made in the context of the proposed return of vulnerable infants to Manus and Nauru.

Sending Ruddock to the UN is partly a crudely macho swagger. No-one tells Australians what to do. Unless of course, they are American presidents based in Washington who must do the bidding of the pentagon and its powerful patrons and pressure groups and take us into unwinnable battles over oil.

But that’s war. Ruddock helps Turnbull re-position himself as a hard bastard who doesn’t give a fig for the finer nuances of international relations or human rights. It’s another sharp right turn from the image of refinement he presented as the alternative Prime Minister in exile during Abbott’s excesses.

Nothing new here, the PM has done the same on climate change and on social issues such as gay marriage. He has even retreated from his leadership of the republican movement in order to launder his political character to remove all traces of his former, left-leaning libertarian tendencies. Or previous self-inventions.

Abbott was given to railing against a world who dared to ‘lecture us’ on human rights, or which simply seeks to hold us to account for our barbaric, selfish cruelty. Turnbull’s anointing of Ruddock as human rights warrior does much the same. In the process, the PM is capitulating to the very forces in September he pretended to oppose.

For a man who came to power promising to respect the intelligence of the electorate it is an alarming flip-flop; rapid reversal and retreat into the mindless slogans of being ‘tough on border protection’, as if we were threatened with invasion or at war on some battle-field, where our enemies are not ourselves but instead some baroque, fictive, demon people-smugglers that have such enormous power of perception we can utter no word about how we treat even one tiny baby lest this result in a tidal wave of rusty, clapped out fishing trawlers on the horizon.

It’s preposterous but it’s only part of his message. Turnbull’s calculated gesture of contempt for the principles and processes of decent, responsible global citizenship is intended for a wider audience. Geneva will not mistake it for what it is, a two fingered salute to those who criticise our primitive immigration and ‘border protection’ policies.

The UN, for all its challenges and limitations is staffed by intelligent, often learned people, who will have no trouble recalling that Ruddock then attorney-general was the Australian politician who, in 2002, helped then PM John Howard perpetrate the lie that asylum-seekers had thrown babies overboard. It was the first, irrevocable step towards the demonising of the dispossessed and their travel agents, ‘the people smugglers’, a pit into which the PM and his foreign minister have lately taken delight in dragging us all back into.

‘We’ll decide who comes to this country’ ran the headlines in the Murdoch press, featuring an heroic John Winston Howard pretending to take a stand against refugees who had somehow forfeited all right to our compassion and humanity. By means of a lie.

Ruddock helped Howard make political capital out of cruel indifference and wilful deception. He ushered in an era in the nation’s political life in which our cruel inhuman indifference to the worlds’ most unfortunate peoples could be presented not only as right but as necessary. Our national security was at stake. We must maintain our sovereign borders. The hollow, meaningless rhetoric that accompanies the theatre of cruelty reverberates in the nation’s parliament today.

Demonising asylum-seekers began with a lie exploited for political gain, with Mr Ruddock’s agile help and John Howard’s avid encouragement. We were persuaded to surrender our humanity for his political gain. We are, today, ourselves, all of us, diminished, our better instincts all locked down by a perverse determination to keep others out that began with Howard’s desperate bid to win an election, thanks to Ruddock’s help.

No more calculated snub to the UN could be found than to announce the appointment of this man as Australia’s special envoy for human rights. What it ultimately does to the nation is anyone’s guess. But what it does for Turnbull’s leadership and reputation for judgement will, ultimately, be little short of disastrous.

Friday afternoon, Malcolm Turnbull drops a bombshell. He intends to ignore the will of the people over tax reform. Speaking on ABC Adelaide he says:

“I think given we’re so close to the budget, the budget will be, for all practical purposes, the white paper.”

It’s no big announcement; he couldn’t be more low-key about it. More polite. Or less brutal. Forget the people’s input. There’s just not enough time. Imagine this as an election campaign slogan: ‘We really want to be democratic and consult and converse about tax but we just don’t have the time’.

After taking power because,

“It is clear enough that the government is not successful in providing the economic leadership that we need,”

Turnbull has aborted his national conversation on tax. He’s scrapped the time-honoured process of consultation whereby a discussion paper allows the people to identify and commit to a problem which leads to a green paper which airs possible solutions and seeks feedback, a paper which in turn provides the basis for the white paper, which sets out what the government proposes to do. ‘Economic leadership’ does not entail scrapping the consultation process.

At first glance Turnbull appears to be just following Treasurer, Scott Morrison, who will not be deterred, he says, from tax reform just because a hike of 50% in the GST might be unpopular. So claims ScoMo, for whom increasing tax and stopping boats are all the same thing. He’s done unpopular before.

Morrison makes it seem so simple. So easy. If only people would just shut up and let those born to rule get on with the job of government.

Then the champion of unpopular causes gets carried away with his own heroic virtue. Nervous backbenchers are just bed-wetters, ScoMo jeers. This alienates them further. But what, then, does this now make Malcolm Turnbull?

Late Friday, Turnbull tells an Adelaide ABC reporter, in passing, that his government’s White Paper will be dropped.  It’s a sign that, after 140 days of Liberal floating a GST increase he’s now trying to torpedo the idea. Frantically.

Four months into his Prime Ministership and eight months out from an election as Lenore Taylor reminds us, Turnbull may not have a clue who he is or what he stands for but he knows what he doesn’t like. Opposition. The PM may have a pathological need for approval but that aside he’s shrewd enough not to sign his own political death-warrant. If only it were so easy.

The PM’s change of policy on consultation will come as a shock to those hundreds of Australians who made submissions in good faith that they might be listened to; that their voices might influence policy – especially on taxation, by a politician who came to power promising a consensus model which ‘respected the intelligence’ of the electorate. Now at least it’s clear. The people’s voice doesn’t matter.

Cheer squads are acceptable. Some, like Kate Carnell, veteran barracker for all businesses great and small are a shrewd investment; independent opinion is a disposable extra. Surely he can’t expect voters to be happy with their dismissal?

Unhappy also are Turnbull’s own backbenchers who are caught flat-footed, wedged between a tax conversation few of us can join in and the growing pressure of electorates which hate the idea of a 50% GST rise, an idea which has not been explained let alone argued. As Russell Broadbent tells the media,

“I am yet to hear a coherent argument as to why we are doing this, an argument I could use to convince the people of my electorate,” Broadbent says.

Instead Malcolm Turnbull proposes to ride rough-shod over any process of democratic decision-making. Clearly rattled by growing back-bench dismay over a 50% rise in GST, our unelected PM plunges headlong into another flip-flop. It’s a disturbing trend. Does he have a clue what he’s doing? What is the point of brand Turnbull if it is as weak and vacillating in government as the PM he overthrew? What price democracy under a Turnbull government?

Daily, Turnbull behaves more like his predecessor Cap’n Tony Abbott, an equally inept decision-maker with no clear agenda whose fondness for rash unilateral ‘Captain’s calls’ helped pave the way for Turnbull take his job.

Autocratic decisions are the order of the day, for the Abbott-Turnbull government while its main business of managing the affairs of the nation, or its policy, or itself remains confused and at worst inept. Kate Carnell has just been anointed Ombudsman for a GST hike and tax cuts for high income earners and business, a $6 million dollar move which does a public servant out of a job. Mark Brennan, current commissioner for small business, a former Labor appointee must make way for a political appointee. No fuss was made; no consultation was deemed necessary.

No warning or consultation preceded Turnbull’s words on Friday, either. He surprised those who heard earlier in the week his Treasurer promise that the White Paper would be ‘released before the next election’. Yep. The same white paper that was promised to be released before Christmas. The same white paper that Tony Abbott put on hold.

Democracy is on indefinite hold in this Liberal Party government. Turnbull, himself, is a PM in search of what he stands for, a PM whose chief distinguishing feature so far is his phobia of committing to any one policy. So far he is Tony Abbott in a better suit and a more coherent sound-bite.

Abbot came to be paralysed on policy by his fear of getting anyone off-side. Turnbull is every bit as fearful. Yet there is plenty of bold reflex action: business lobbyists such as Ms Carnell are welcomed on-board.

The White Paper on tax reform was supposed to reflect the nations diverse views. As it still says grandly, hollowly on its better tax website, the government tells us ‘

‘The Treasurer opened the conversation on tax by releasing the tax discussion paper on 30 March 2015. The formal submissions process has now closed’.

They got that last bit right. Closed. The government has taken our views into consideration and rejected all of them.

This was to have been a process of consultation, a national conversation, a way of government seeking out and recording the diversity of opinion amongst the Australian people on an issue of fundamental importance. Tax.

Hundreds of submissions were received. Typically a green paper would inform a white paper which would guide policy. Now, all is to be tossed into the garbage can.

Bugger the people. Bugger the fact that for months Treasurer Morrison has regaled us with his oily promise of a national conversation on tax reform. What we got instead was: ‘Let us pretend to value your opinion. Let us delay our white paper. Then, early in February, let us totally scrap the whole pretence.

Thanks for nothing, Mr Turnbull. Thanks for wasting our time. Thanks for the arrogance and contempt for what the people might think. Encourage us to give our opinions and then just trash the results. Clearly the people don’t matter to your style of government whatever that may turn out to be. You have made it clear we are irrelevant to you.

Just don’t be surprised when we return the favour in September. Dropping your 50% GST rise is your business but don’t expect Australians to take kindly to your trashing what’s left of our democracy in the process.

People smugglers are no threat to our sovereignty postures Malcolm Turnbull in Question Time, Tuesday, as a beleaguered PM, beset by internal division and a continuing decline in global economic news, resorts to the old Liberal line that cruelty to asylum seekers is an effective and worthy deterrent of demon people smugglers. It is an unworthy and unwelcome decline in his leadership.

Of course it helps when heading into an election year if you can engender a sense of national crisis and pose as your nation’s saviour, but when babies and children must suffer as a result of your need to appear ‘tough on people smuggling’ you tread thin ice.

What does this do to ‘brand Turnbull’? What damage will this cause to his carefully cultivated illusion of a superior moral tone? What price his slogan-less government now?

Does the PM really need to appease his party’s disaffected right wingers by channelling Tony Abbott’s apparent cavalier disregard for humanity; his apparent contempt for our international obligations to refugees and asylum seekers?

The new parliamentary term has not begun well. Economic indicators are all heading south. AGL has pulled out of coal-seam gas. There is back-biting from the backbench about the GST hike, despite Douglas Robb’s denial.

Worse, the government’s game plan, which featured killing Bill Shorten with union smears is all over the media. A rat in the ranks has leaked the very first Cabinet meeting’s talking points.

The gauntlet is down. By Wednesday the PM seems all out to win at all costs in a race to the bottom. He uses parliament’s Question Time to pose as guardian of our national security, apparently happy to grandstand on the High Court 6:1 verdict in favour of the legality of Manus and Nauru.

Some MSM reporters, doubtless, will praise Turnbull’s ersatz patriotism. His cheap rhetoric will be hailed as making him ‘strong on border protection’. His posturing will blend in well with Scott Morrison’s ‘tough but fair’ stance on raising the GST for everyone so that a privileged few get income tax cuts. And it may help get the Monkey Pod room off his back for a moment.

Turnbull is under pressure to prove he’s no bleeding heart liberal. Abbott’s speech in the US helps wedge him on gay marriage and Kevin Andrews urges troop deployment in Syria in what seems to be a continuing bid to paint the new leader soft on terror. Or just soft.

A flying visit to the frontline does not quite do the trick. Images of Turnbull in a bomber jacket for an awkward photo session reveal few of our boys in Iraq with smiles on their faces. The ABC, does, however, seem to step up its anti-ISIS news items.

Knocking back a US invitation to boost our troop deployment may not have won any hearts and minds amongst our military personnel already deployed in Iraq, but it was a wise decision. Turnbull’s decision to dive into the people smuggling bag of tricks with all its attendant assumptions lies and misconceptions, on the other hand, is less well-considered.

“The people smugglers will not prevail over our sovereignty. Our borders are secure. The line has to be drawn somewhere and it is drawn at our border”.

Our borders never were threatened by people smugglers. In the meantime, however, as a result of the High Court’s ruling against a challenge, babies are able to be sent back to Nauru and Manus Island. Despite the PM’s real intentions and despite Peter Dutton’s desperate backpedalling, the news from the High Court is nothing to crow about.

It’s not something that merits a public pat on the back in parliament, Mr Turnbull. It doesn’t vindicate our policy towards asylum seekers. It doesn’t do anything for our international reputation or our claims to be a humane and compassionate society.

All it is an expected legal outcome. The High Court has ruled against a challenge to the legality of offshore detention. It says nothing about the morality of indefinite off shore detention in life endangering conditions on Manus or Nauru.

Ninety-one children, thirty-seven of them babies are among the 267 asylum seekers including female victims of sexual assault now threatened with deportation to places so notoriously unsafe and badly run that they’ve attracted protests from the UNHCR and human rights groups around the world.

Children suffer especially acutely, from bed wetting, nightmares, ongoing effects of trauma and torture in previous countries, as well as “situational crisis” from their current detention, IHMS reports. Those attending school on Nauru are threatened with knives and are subject to sexual harassment. Often beaten and abused by community members, they live in fear.

To send the babies back would be child abuse, says Greens senator Sarah Hansen-Young whose heroic efforts to expose conditions in the off-shore detention centres have been subject to ridicule by Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton. Even Dutton is now, however, saying he would not send a child back into danger.

Border protection is at best a confected nonsense, one of the worst legacies of the Abbott Prime Ministership debacle. Our national sovereignty was never in question. Punishing asylum seekers and refugees by putting them on Manus and Nauru has never been a deterrent to any people smuggler.

Instead of pretending to be tough on people smugglers Malcolm Turnbull could prove he is tough by exercising moral leadership. Close down the detention centres. Let the men, women and children live amongst us. Let us look to their healing. Surely they have suffered enough.

Don’t tell  waste your breath telling the Federal Treasurer his tax plans are unpopular.  Being unpopular  will only serve to flatter his colossal ego.  Don’t ask how he can ignore the will of the people. Or delay the hundreds of submissions to his green paper on tax reform options. ScoMo knows what’s good for us. He’s about to launch a 15 % GST hike upon us.

Ready or not-so-ready, Scott Morrison is already lumbering down the runaway. His rent-seekers’ pre-election special, the deceptively misnamed ‘tax reform package’ is set for a barn-storming national tour. Pity none of it adds up.

Morrison proposes to tax all of us more despite telling us there’s no revenue problem.   We are meant to swallow whole his government’s line that this will ‘grow’ the nation’s economy. As a sweetener, expect tax cuts for those earning over $80,000 PA which will net you $100, 000 a year if you are a millionaire or about seven dollars a week if you are not.

The ScoMo-tax will hit hardest those who can least afford to pay, the poor and the elderly. It will also discriminate against women who already pay higher prices for identical products in a so-called ‘pink-tax‘ and do nothing for those it pretends to help, women with children in part-time work who would increase their hours but for the extra income tax. Compensation is spoken of, true. But what this will amount to is anyone’s guess. Best keep your hopes low.

And who are we to quibble? What would we know? Never does respecting the people’s will enter into ScoMo’s vocabulary. Nowhere does he deign to explain how a regressive tax will do anything at all to promote economic growth. Or do anything but increase social division. Doing unpopular means not doing explaining or being too fussed over fairness. Morrison will just mow you down if you say it can’t fly. Experts scatter for their safety.

Bizarrely, even for ScoMo, riskily, he resorts to mythologising his past. He harangues his talkback mate Ray, I-can’t-find-the-Bible, on Hadley’s 2GB radio show about how in 2013 he knew best . He parades his track record of trashing the people’s will as a badge of honour even if it means he has to re-write some well-known history.

‘I remember before the 2013 election turn-backs actually had lower levels of support in the Australian community. It’s important that when you believe that something’s right for the country, that you remain focused on that’, he tells Ray and Ray’s listeners.

‘Turn back the boats’ as an unpopular slogan? Seriously? Morrison will do or say anything. His national conversation on tax is also a complete con. His government never had any intention of truly consulting anyone. What it sought were smoke and mirrors, a subterfuge where, after all options having been ‘on the table’ for months, suddenly all we are all shoe-horned into one: a GST rise.

Cue Mr Clean Mike Baird to take some of the heat with his so-called ‘compromise plan’ which equally bizarrely gives the money raised by the new GST rise, a state tax, largely back to the Commonwealth. A pittance only of $7 billion would go towards health and education, both of which are bleeding after the Abbott government’s cuts of $70 billion.  If this is a compromise, it highlights how far off the tracks the ‘national tax conversation’ has been derailed. Or hi-jacked.

Not only are ScoMo’s ‘unpopular’ turn-backs a false analogy, however, his words are a disturbing abrogation of his responsibility to the people. Morrison  is happy to override popular opinion in order to give us not what we want but what he thinks we need. Or what he’s been told to tell us we need. Tax cuts for the top end of town.

His package won’t fly. Can’t fly. He’s even getting ahead of the PM as Michelle Grattan observes ; his equivocal but needier fellow social isolate flight ‘Captain Flash’, Turnbull. A rough patch looms ahead, surely. Turnbull may flake off just when Morrison discovers he, himself, is irrevocably welded to a GST that we all hate. It wouldn’t be the worst outcome. Not for Turnbull, anyway.

Morrison’s got few of us on board. His past lies don’t help. His ‘national conversation about tax’ performance piece failed to be a conversation. It solicited hundreds of submissions from all of us. Now it is totally ignoring them.

The promised green paper reflecting our views on tax reform has been postponed, the Treasurer says until ‘before the election’. Besides, who needs consultation when you have ‘Malcolm and I’?

‘Malcolm and I … have advanced the debate a lot more effectively over the past four or five months than a green paper ever would‘.

One modest government: two colossal egos.

February’s version of ScoMo is running the old ‘tough but necessary’ operating system. We’ve seen it before, right down to the presumptuous arrogance. Ad nauseam. It saves admitting that his sales pitch is a failure. Or that his reform package is no such thing but just a ruse to get us all to subsidise his government’s tax cuts for the rich.

You can tell Morrison senses defeat by his uncompromising demeanour. Soft and cuddly ScoMo locks up and has to reset himself to Rottweiler mode. It’s disturbing transformation as Gillian Triggs discovered when she dared venture that the indefinite detention of children was a human rights abuse if not a crime against humanity. Morrison pounced on her definition of detention as if a bit of categorical nit-picking ever did anything for imprisoned children.

Perhaps looking for the word, ‘resolute’, SBS  helpfully misreports that the treasurer is resilient. No. After pretending to be tractable, democratic, even, he is back to his old I-know-what’- good-for-you-damn-you contempt for any views but his own. He has no shortage of other stellar performers, either, to cheer him on.

Kate Carnell, tireless advocate for the abolition of penalty rates and the promotion of lower wages, who plays the role of Liberal blue heeler, nips at dissenters’ heels. Kate has strategically morphed into an ombudsman to supply a bit more puff on behalf of wealthy business interests who feel out in the cold in Canberra.

Ms Carnell will supplement the more than one thousand business lobbyists already hard at work in the nation’s capital, to say nothing of her own ACCI,  the Australia Chamber of Commerce and Industry and an alphabet of similar groups who must daily badger our political elite. When it comes to advocates for business, too much is barely enough.

The public will pay a bargain $6 million dollars for Kate and a small team to support her to act as a cheerleader for increasing the GST. Yet ordinary folk are not allowed the luxury of having any new advocates or even our disability or sex discrimination commissioners reinstated.

Kate helpfully waves aside popular opinion.  Earlier this year, fearing an unpopular GST increase would be discarded too quickly, she got up nine different business groups to join in lobbying against ‘short-termism’ in political decision-making. Her view is that no-one likes to pay extra tax. Or even their fair share.

A reporter raises recent Newspoll results suggesting that a GST increase is not what we want. A rise appeals to at best just under half of voters. The people are wrong again, however, it seems. Mal and Scott will sort them out. Tell them what’s good for them. Good for Mal and Scott that is.

A democratic government respects the will of the people. It does not trash popular opinion to follow its own agenda of protecting privilege by offering tax cuts to its mates. It  cannot merely be the servant of entrenched division and inequality. It cannot seek tax reform submissions and just sit on them. It cannot offer slogans instead of explanation of its aims. If it seeks more tax revenue it must make its case for increased prosperity for the common good.

So far the Abbott/Turnbull regime has flouted every requirement of a decent, democratic government in its campaign to increase taxes without consultation. It is time for all Australians to speak out.

In the 1990s, when Malcolm was still a merchant banker, the Turnbull family commissioned one of my father’s artists, Lewis Miller, to paint a portrait of Malcolm. Unhappy with the work, Turnbull confronted my father at a function and exclaimed: “That artist of yours is no good; he’s made me look like a big, fat, greedy cunt”, to which my father replied, “He is a realist painter, you know”. 

Malcolm Turnbull’s pillow-talk may be less public these days, but Evan Hughes’ recollection of his father Ray’s heart to heart with the younger Mal’s taste in art is a rare and precious jewel in a week of schlock from the publicists, hacks and spin-doctors who must toil heroically to put lipstick on pigs.

News that our own accomplished turd-polisher, political strategist, former tobacco lobbyist, Lynton Crosby has been knighted by grateful UK Tories, almost takes the gloss off the Turnbull anecdote.  Crosby pockets £ 2.4 million for his election-winning package after an election which was largely decided by non-conservative voters failing to vote.

So complete now is the average Brit’s exclusion from participation in politics and society, so bleak is their future, that the overwhelming response to both party campaigns was ‘why bother’?

Crosby has, nevertheless, helped the Tories set some sort of record. Not since universal suffrage in 1918 (for women over 30 but ten years later equally for both sexes) has any party with less than 37% of the popular vote gained an absolute majority in the UK parliament.

Least he be underwhelmed by his knighthood and fee, Crosby is hailed as ‘an inspirational role model’ by the Australia Day foundation who make him UK Australian of the Year. Perhaps his campaign against plain wrapping for tobacco products tipped the distinction in his favour.

Plain packaging discourage children from buying cigarettes, thereby denying an important market to tobacco companies whose products cause six million people to die each year. But bleeding heart liberals can butt out; spin-meisters rule the world OK?

Role models work best unfettered by scruples or ethics as the work of our own popular heroes in Border Protection, for example, or our Monkey Pod hoons, the Abbott government in exile, attests. Its suppository of wisdom is tapped by an anti-gay group in the US and fellow marriage guru, Kevin Andrews has taken leave of parliament to supply a similarly right-wing mob’s desire to have another Australian political failure on its speakers’ list. Abbott drops in on Rupert Murdoch and Jerry to offer some pre-nuptial counselling. It all spells trouble-making for Malcolm at home.

Tony Abbott, for whom ‘no’ is the new ‘yes’, is spurred to honour his pledge not to snipe or undermine Turnbull by doing precisely both. Is the portrait story a bit of monkey business? Imagine the outcry.

By Sir Lynton’s gong, no! By that new gold standard of ethics in public life, Sir Lynton’s knighthood, the reappearance of Turnbull the unhappy portrait subject an elderly story today, has nothing to do with Monkey Pod plotters.

Countless other scoundrels abound who would eagerly revive any story depicting his narcissism and foul mouth just to take him down a peg. Abbott’s anti-gay marriage speech and Kev’s mischief will help to wedge Mal if he doesn’t watch himself.

Just don’t expect him to revoke his exciting times marriage licence any time soon. Or counsel Tony Abbott with the pithy phrase used by Reserve Bank members on NPA’s Brian Hood tried to blow the whistle on corruption in 2007-8.

The director of Note Printing Australia who exposed alleged bribery in two Reserve Bank subsidiaries was told ‘you don’t fit in, f— off’. Similar advice may be invited by the antics of the Monkey Pod God.

The language may be a bit less blue when the RBA meets next Tuesday, to decide our futures as the tabloids would have it. Directors will prognosticate the unknowable, as distinguished economist Richard Denniss reminds us with his refreshing candour. Or just make stuff up. Expect fluffy coverage in MSM about interest rates, now a largely ineffectual lever being ‘on hold’.

The economy will be described as if it were a toddler taking its first steps. One thing is certain. On present trends, no-one will be high-fiving or punching the air. No-one will ask about the RBA’s reserves.

Equally certain is that no-one will vote to return to Treasury the $8.8 billion that Joe Hockey flicked its way, casually boosting the 2013 federal budget deficit to $40 billion, after years of screaming about deficits at Labor. It could be a deposit on repairing the $80 billion hole Joe made in health and education funding to the states.

Hockey’s expensive political statement, a way of dramatising Labor’s reckless debt and deficit disaster will continue to be paid for by cuts to health and welfare budgets. Ordinary Australians are stung for Hockey’s political stunt. Onya Joe! Is there an award for US Australian of the Year?

Australia’s growth in 2016 will be minimal, perhaps two per cent. Export earnings continue downward while domestic demand remains weak. Yet our PM just oozes excitement and wild optimism. He can’t think of any better time to be alive. It’s a disturbing take on leadership.

Dissent is unacceptable in the Turnbull Liberal government, as Glyn Davis of Melbourne University found early last November. Turnbull dismissed the Vice Chancellor’s real objections to his thought bubble tying university researchers with industry as ‘… running against the vibe.’

‘You haven’t got the new zeitgeist. The new zeitgeist, Glyn is to believe in yourself, is to have a go’. Davis simply told Turnbull that unlike Britain, for example, we don’t have industries big enough to fund university research.

A new zeitgeist, or a new despotism? Is his government so deluded it believes it can force us to agree against all evidence that we live in the best of all possible times? Of course it can. It works in North Korea, a totalitarian state, but it is ‘a hard ask’ as they say in sports journalism in Australia.

Far from offering hope, Turnbull is peddling denialism in a different package. And it’s the last thing worried investors and a cash-strapped general public want to hear. Record household debt suggests average Australians worry more about paying their bills; meeting their current financial commitments, than shopping the nation back into economic recovery. The true picture is sobering.

Sterling has collapsed 7% in two months, partly on rumours of an impending ‘Brexit’ from the EU, Australia’s third largest trading partner and its low interest rate forecast for 2016. Weak demand and overproduction continue to drive down commodity prices. Warren Hogan, ANZ Bank’s chief economist, foresees depression in China’s heavy industry. Will he, too, get a lecture from Turnbull on his need to get the new vibe?

Australian MSM, on the other hand, is rushing to fall in with our Dear Leader. His ABC new broom, Michelle Guthrie, is abuzz with the new zeitgeist. Sabra Lane recently gushed over Malcolm Turnbull’s interest in art and his love of Winston Churchill for seven minutes, as if nothing else in the world was more important. If only she could have asked him to recall his verdict on the Lewis portrait. Or what his government’s up to with the ABC?

Technology editor, Nick Ross quit the ABC because he has not been allowed to report on the NBN fiasco. His reports have the wrong vibe. Evidence that Turnbull has sabotaged the NBN is just not part of the new optimism.

Other commentators play down any sense of impending crisis by softening their language. TV news is of ‘stocks tumbling’, ‘investors jittery’ and the old chestnut ‘market volatility’ diminish a stark economic reality. The new vibe involves the old cultivation of diversion as well as evasion and denial.

Admiral Morrison continues to turns a blind eye to anything that’s not in his script of expenditure and income tax cuts.   And dumping on Labor. Will he also sling a few billion into the reserve bank’s reserves?

‘It will be a tight budget’ says the PM and his treasurer while busily waving fistfuls of dollars under the Adani Brothers’ noses.  Turnbull’s game plan is to entice the billionaires into fantasy coal mining, a type of reality TV show in which the contestants don’t have to do anything to get the money.  It parodies the ABC where it can do nothing under the current government to keep its funding.

The tight budget also tightens a noose. Investors are divesting from coal-mining shares as the world’s carbon budget tightens in the fight against climate change, and as renewable energy technologies fall in cost. Opinion polls, moreover, show Australian voters are less and less sold on industry subsidies.

Morrison spent much of his week pitching his leaner, fairer, smaller tax system. A GST rise will fund planned tax breaks.

Average families out of pocket $6000 a year as a result of a GST hike will welcome their chance of being a part of Turnbull’s campaign ‘to do something about the bottom line’.

Yet we are awash with buckets of money for the rich. A millionaire will get an extra $100, 000 a year under ScMo’s planned cuts. The rest of us get an extra $7.00 per week.  Employers can expect continued support in their bid to keep wages low. Working conditions must stay as they are for everyone’s good.

Turnbull warns his is not going to be a ‘fistful of dollars’ budget, unless of course, you exploit natural resources, endanger the environment or head up a wealthy corporation. High rollers, like Shenhua mining win the whole trifecta.

Sneering at Labor who promise this week to restore some of the education funding needed to address inequality of opportunity promised under Gonski and then some, Turnbull said this would not be a cash-splashing budget. ‘We all know, the PM said airily that it’s not just a matter of spending more money on the problem.’

Indeed, much would continue to be taken from the lives of ordinary folk who are said to be excited by the Turnbull government’s innovative ways of getting them to toughen up. Cuts to education, health and social services help us all develop resilience and independence.

Australians with disabilities are said to be liberated by the loss of their disability commissioner and those who are denied a fair go because of gender are raving about Turnbull’s decision to delay appointing a sex discrimination commissioner.

A ‘fistful of dollars’ would be the last thing anyone would wish upon poor innocent victims of misfortune. Government ministers, this week, extol a range of new numbers you can call to raise your awareness of your own poverty or your partner’s violence.

Kent, a homeless man, appears in Saturday’s The Age thanking Malcolm for his innovative government decision to put some of the money cut from refuge services into creating a website which offers the destitute something to click on.

Although Kent has no internet connection, our hearts swell with pride and hope in this ground-breaking step towards an inclusive compassionate society which will soon offer a website for everything.

Click on me will become the new national anthem in an innovative agile and high-tech savvy Australia. Lean on me will provide the melody.

Click on me when you’re not strong

And I’ll be your friend, I’ll help you carry on

For it won’t be long

‘Til I’m gonna need somebody to click on

Kent and others like him are happy to kip down in his local shopping centre. Spend $600 million on a wind commissioner. As long as David Leyonhjelm is happy.

David’s supporters were all over the news this week pointing up the oft-ignored link between Port Arthur massacre and domestic violence. The logic is now crystal-clear, thanks to the independent senator. Since women have struggled after Howard’s gun buy-back to get a good weapon, their menfolk have got away with murder.

Hitting women was being made out to be worse than it really is, anyway, by the feminists and those whose political correctness had gone berserk, said Mark Latham, whose Mr Punch role after politics gets him attention if nothing else in his splenetic outbursts.

Violence is just ‘a coping mechanism’ for men, he said on his debut on Triple M’s Lathamland a show tailored to the incorrigible attention-seeker’s need to be needlessly offensive.

‘How is the tax system actually stopping people who are actually out there backing themselves, achieving the goals they want to achieve?’ Scott Morrison, Sky News Monday 25 January.

‘Stopping people’ has an irresistible ring to Scott Morrison who put a stopper in Tony Abbott’s career by ‘running dead’ to ensure Malcolm Turnbull won the leadership spill four months ago.

Before that he was Abbott’s boat-stopper and Abbott’s ‘fixer,’ before fixing Abbott’s wagon in the spill. Now he’s on to a plan that will help ensure that the more you earn, the more you can keep. It’s part of his quest for a fairer system. And a smokescreen for a higher GST.

Morrison did not stop the boats, they stopped under Rudd, yet by dint of repetition he has most of us believing him. This week he’s hard at work inventing another bizarre fantasy. This time it’s about our tax system stopping us from working or achieving our goals. ‘Backing ourselves’ whatever that means. He just can’t just stop the whoppers.

Morrison pretends that a dollar or two more in tax incurred via bracket creep will cause workers not to go to work or cease to need schools, roads or hospitals. Yet he knows he’s got to pay for essentials such as our latest $400 million a year foreign adventure in Iraq. Border protection cost $2.9 billion and got a top up of $450 million in the MYEFO.

Then there’s parliamentary entitlements. Where are the cuts to pollies’ expenses? Barnaby cost the nation $ 1 million over six months last year in helicopter Joyce rides.

ScoMo’s happy to peddle the Tea Party lie that paying tax prevents us achieving our goals. Encourage wilful blindness as to the social benefits of an income tax system. He’s playing with fire.

A tax break would tie up more capital in Australia’s cash-strapped economy where private debt is at record levels while cuts to government spending could plunge us into a recession we need not have.

Predicted low commodity prices will in 2016 will mean our earnings will continue to decline, yet, at home, the forty per cent of companies who owe us billions in taxes they evade, are not, in Morrison’s view worth chasing. A fantasy, he says.  He would know.