Australia’s unsuspecting body politic was about to be plunged into the chill and murky depths of revoking citizenship last week as Captain Abbott beat out a mean anti-terror snare on the old tin drum he keeps by for when fortune flags, boredom yawns or he gets stuck in the muck of good government. Strip their citizenship. Make ’em stateless. Fetch the gang-plank!

It was all rousing, hairy-chested, tough-guy, stuff. Bugger the judiciary. Nobody separates our powers, Abbott winked as he instructed Credlin to tell the ‘Tele’ the result of the cabinet decision before they’d had the discussion. No agenda necessary, Peta, he winked again. Peter Dutton fetched a length of timber from somewhere, checking carefully beforehand to see it wasn’t a sleeping Warren Truss. Tar and feathers appeared in another wink..

Things were shaping well towards our declaring undesirables stateless; their fate resting entirely on a Minister’s suspicion; requiring no burden of proof. Being made stateless would show them we were tough on terror. Teach them to nick off to the Middle East when you can get good falafel in all major cities. But was it too tough?

Revocation would be used only sparingly, ‘Gung Ho’ Dutton rushed to explain, managing only to sound like a bent head-master justifying his use of the cane. Dan Tehan reported that the backbench loved it. But their finer-pointing was drowned out by an outbreak of ‘robust debate,’ all reported verbatim in the Fairfax press the next day.

Robust debate scuppered Abbott. Senior Ministers Bishop, Turnbull, Brandis, Pyne and Andrews all opposed summarily revoking citizenship. Brandis claimed, po-faced, that as AG, it was ‘his job to uphold the rule of law.’ Tell that, Mr Brandis to the Australia Council whose funds you have just raided to create a personal slush fund, to be known as the ‘National Programme for Excellence in the Arts,’ without the merest hint of irony.

Dutton then broke everyone up by explaining no evidence was necessary. ‘That’s the beauty of it’ he said before being howled down. It was left to Barnaby Joyce, perhaps seeking to make up for his disgraceful email to Gina, to stop the show with ‘ Isn’t that what the courts are for?’.

Forced to back off revocation the PM then had to suffer being outmanoeuvred by a nimble Bill Shorten who upstaged him by proposing his own marriage equality bill to be debated Monday. Rolled by his own cabinet, a subdued Abbott walked out only to suffer a painful political wedgie from Shorten. It was too late to cancel the Telegraph’s report of a unanimous Cabinet in favour of revocation of citizenship for those whom we suspect may be un-Australian or who grow their beards, cover their wives, watch the Friday movie on SBS or eat that Halal stuff or something.

What should have been a week of simple pleasure drumming out death cult drongos or kids who fly to Syria to join ISIS; and drumming out any other enemies and fifth columnists within our embryonic police state, thus suddenly morphed into a long drop on to the dung heap for the hapless PM. Thank God for the backbench and their red-necked supporters. Thank Rupert for the Tele which continues to portray a version of the government which bears no resemblance to the real chaos, entropy and reality denial which engulfs the incumbent ruling political party.

LNP denial extends to the facts of life, embarrassing even to a grown man like Joe Hockey who appeared ambushed on ABC’s Q&A by a young woman campaigning to have the GST removed from tampons and other sanitary products. Put on the spot, Joe appeared to concede she had a case, a stance which the PM, wearing a silly grin which betrayed his discomfort on the topic, appeared to oppose the following day. The split between treasurer and prime minister revealed a PM who cannot command consistency of policy nor as it turns out loyalty in cabinet, although it must be said he had betrayed democratic process by his leak to the Tele of the result before cabinet had even met. A good captain leads from the front.

Upstaged by Joe’s going soft on tampon tax on Q&A; betrayed by Bishop and rolled by his senior colleagues in the best-leaked cabinet room revolt in Australian conservative political history, Abbott is suddenly looking very vulnerable. Cabinet has lost confidence in his judgement. Now he was to suffer mutiny along with mutterings of unfairness in his second budget – especially over his pledge to ‘never ever’ change tax on Super, a promise ensuring the wealthy continue to be subsidised in their retirement to the tune of 18 billion.

To make matters worse, Barnaby’s email advising Gina Rinehart’s ungrateful brats to suck it up was all over the news, as if Abbott had set it up, an outrageous slur. It was the Peter Slipper witch hunt all over again. To say nothing of the witch hunt now underway to prove Bishop and Turnbull collaborated on leaking chapter and verse of cabinet to Fairfax reporters.

Better late than never, Cabin boy Hunt fetched good news from the crow’s nest he is forced to occupy now that cabinet has excluded him and his ministry because it can’t stand either of them. He spied fair landing on The Great Barrier Reef, he shouted.

‘At the end of the day, this is the strongest possible endorsement of what Australia and Queensland are doing,’ the Minister for breathless Hyperbole, puffed. In reality, someone had just emailed him a UNESCO draft decision which was highly qualified, cautious and untrusting.

The committee recorded its concerns about the poor outlook for the reef and recommended that the World Heritage Committee review any lack of progress in 2017.

UNESCO’s concerns would cause any self-respecting environment minister to reef in his sails but Hunt’s faux triumphalism capped another week of chaotic instability, duplicity and bad decision-making that our PM assures us is ‘good government ‘.

Not content with pretending that UNESCO had given us a big tick of approval for our reef management, Hunt huffed that our environmental policy now earns us unreserved applause from a grateful world, not to mention a few clapped out reef tourist operators who are keen to flog the half of Great Barrier that survives its wholesale abuse since the 1980s.

At least Hunt’s false joy makes a change from our PM’s tendency to sneer at the UN and to lecture it on daring to lecture us on what is fit and proper to do in our own sovereign dystopia. Don’t try to lecture us on human rights or anything now. We lead the world on the environment.

Granted there was our wee fracas with the US only a year ago when a senior Democrat accused Australia of “behind-the-scenes lagging” on global efforts to tackle the challenges of climate change. But ever since then, Hunt pretends, Australia has been so quick to clean up its act that the rest of the world must now sing our praises for, as Hunt puts it, ‘what we are doing.’

Doubtless Hunt’s ‘what we are doing’ includes the abortive Bjorn Lomborg Consensus Centre, a proposal which caused such dissension UWA had to abandon it. Fossil fuels continue to rule in Oz. We pander to the coal industry and we continue to subsidise big mining. Perhaps that is or rather was the plan. With Bjorn in a professorial chair we could have been world leaders in climate-sceptical self-interest and mutual self-destruction. Let false prophets bless our fat profits. To hell with reason, science, responsibility and all the rest of that leftist bullshit.

What are we doing? We are busily licensing the Adani mega-mine in the Galilee Basin while expanding coal ports up and down the Great Barrier Reef coast. Let Germany get into bed with renewable energy. We love it under the doona with dirty old coal.

If ‘coal is good for civilisation,’ as Abbott claims, it has failed to promote civilised or rational behaviour amongst its advocates and producers who would elbow each other under the next monster mining truck in their rush to exploit a fuel which has ravaged the planet and which threatens us all with extinction as coal fires boost global warming and pollution.

Selling more coal to other countries is like shouting a drink for an alcoholic on the grounds that someone else is only going to do it if we don’t. And it gets us off the hook. Greenhouse gas emitted by coal-fired plants in other countries doesn’t count. We only sold them the coal.

‘Direct Actor’ Hunt’s hollow assurance highlights, a remarkable week in the Coalition’s forlorn and at times sordid, quest for legitimacy as it continues its desperate search for credibility and respect by looking for love in all the wrong places. And in all the wrong ways as Barnaby Joyce’s email to Gina Rinehart’s children illustrates.

How and why Joyce would take it upon himself to persuade the children to drop their case against their mother’s control of their inheritance is just another extraordinary episode in the chapter of accidents that was the week that was.

The government has been strangely buoyed by a phantom ‘bounce’ in opinion polls, which all others see as showing a continuing preference for Labor. It is crowing with fiscal pride because no-one is throwing up over its second budget. Yet the budget continues unfairness, especially in pensions and superannuation which are set to preserve the perks of the wealthy while diminishing the returns of the deserving, the middle to lower income retiree who now have to make do with less, despite all of Morrison’s enjoyment of phrases such as taper rates and other attractive jargon used to cloak taking from the poor and elderly to subsidise the rich.

What is most evident, finally over much of the week’s politics is the tribalism of the Abbott government, a mentality which experts tell us is part of a widespread cultural trend toward fragmentation and a retreat from civil discourse. Stripping any citizen of his or her right to have rights, their citizenship, is part of a drift towards partisanship and cultural isolationism – as Abbott’s book title warns us battle-lines are being drawn. As the people we are not included in the process of government but increasingly marginalised, frightened we are expected to simply choose sides.

Accountability is the cornerstone of good government. It ensures answerability, a readiness to explain itself; to provide sufficient information and justification to the people for its actions. We, the people, feel secure in being listened to, understood and provided for by our elected representatives who may be relied upon to provide wise leadership at home and to justly uphold our rights and discharge our responsibilities as members of an international community of nations abroad.

And so it was last week that Australians of all walks of life rejoiced in a wealth of edifying and illuminating explanations ranging from Australian dogs’ best friend, Barnaby Joyce, whose Yorkshire terrier turn-back was a triumph of diplomacy and statesmanship to our barking mad Prime Minister’s gnomic repudiation of all notion of social contract ‘Nope, nope, nope.’

Non-answerability came thick and fast after their leader’s lead, as coalition politicians ‘fanned out’ to ‘sell the budget,’ as the PM termed his team’s approach, a process avidly embraced by Bruce Billson in interview with ABC Insiders’ Barrie Cassidy.

So mad keen on fanning out was our Minister for Small Business on Sunday morning TV that he resembled nothing so much as a lap dog himself, whimpering and wetting himself with pleasure; beside himself with excitement on being given a bone, in the form of instant tax write-offs for some small businesses.  If he could, he would have licked his master’s salty face. News shots showed him in the corner of each frame adoring his leader with dog-like devotion.

Never to be outdone, Julie Bishop elbowed our recycled former health watchdog Peter Dutton out of the spotlight with her forensic rationalisation of our nation’s cruel indifference towards several hundred wretched men, women and children found starving, destitute and begging for help in a wooden fishing boat turned back by Malaysia to fend for itself in the Andaman sea. How do we know they are real refugees? Bishop asked.

Minister for Ineffectuality, Peter Dutton was left to wring his hands. ‘We do so much already, he despaired. We can’t help everyone. ‘There are about 20 million people who are displaced around the world. We can help some but we can’t help everybody,’ he told Channel Nine, as if, somehow, this explains why we must do nothing.

Yet Dutton manned up when it came to Pistol and Boo, Johnny Depp’s un-quarantined Yorkshire terriers. He blew the whistle long and loud, even, somehow teaming with Barnaby Joyce who issued an Aussie ultimatum ‘Bugger off home.’ The phrase resonated with the international crisis and encapsulated LNP refugee policy whilst guaranteeing the enmity of all fair-minded Australians, dog-lovers and Depp fans world-wide.

But it’s OK to chuck ’em out, added Labor, in reference to expelling ‘illegals’. In a disturbing display of race to the bottom bipartisanship, Labor immigration spokesman, former senior legal consultant, Matt Thistlethwaite, ditched empathy and ethical responsibility in favour of a narrow, legal view.

‘Countries have the right,’ he observed feebly, ‘to remove people who are not found to be refugees under UN convention,’ a perspective which would greatly comfort the countless dispossessed of the world who are forced to return to their country of origin and certain persecution and or a life of destitution.

Australia must throw its hands in the air. It is the only logical solution chimes in our de facto Federal Treasurer, Scott Morrison, our self-appointed Federal fixer before Christopher Pyne abrogated the title.

‘It’s dumb to even suggest that we might help, argued Rottweiler Morrison, a former border protector himself, whose practices have contributed to the current crisis, before proceeding to rebuke us and set things straight with one of his ‘people who’ explanations.

‘People who suggest countries in the region can resettle persecuted Rohingya misunderstand the scale of the problem.’ There are a million persecuted Rohingya in Myanmar.’ Clearly Morrison thinks that tolerance begins at home – and should stay there. Australia, perhaps, should just tell Myanmar to back off the Rohingya, just as we told Putin to back off in Ukraine. That seems to have worked a treat.

Too many to count, too insignificant to matter, too wretched to care, none of this wisdom reached the ears of the desperate people in a wooden fishing boat, condemned to a death at sea. Two hundred people died during their three month ordeal which culminated in their being abandoned to the elements by a crew made desperate at news of a crackdown on people smuggling. Their bodies were thrown overboard. Survivors were vainly trying to shelter from the fierce Andaman sun under flimsy plastic tarpaulins. No-one was game to take them in.

Cries of “Please help us! I have no water!” rose from the boat as a vessel carrying journalists approached. “Please give me water!”

Help? ‘Nope, nope, nope.’ Our nation’s leader, Good Samaritan Abbott made a captain’s call to negate our collective humanity. Sensing somehow that her leader was not even prepared to enter into discussion of the matter, his foreign minister leapt in with both feet, as she is wont to do, almost to his rescue, by explaining to a disgusted world that the Bangladeshi boat-people would not get any help from Australia because they were not genuine refugees.

In fact, Bishop hissed, during a break from her mobile emoji-sending, they were ‘illegal labourers’ according to her sources in Indonesia, fellow turn-backers and buck-passers whose self-interested perspective is doubtless utterly credible. Many aboard are reported be carrying readily available false National ID and counterfeit passports. ‘Illegal’ labourers are less than human it seems and forfeit all right to humane consideration.

The boat’s plight highlights the migration crisis confronting the region. 6,000 to 20,000 migrants are believed to be at sea, fleeing ethnic persecution in Myanmar and poverty in Bangladesh, while countries such as Australia pass the buck or point the finger.

It is also, tragically a litmus test of legitimacy for a coalition government which has abdicated all responsibility, accountability and answerability in favour of spin. If we cannot swallow our slogans and practise our humanity and common decency, there is nothing our government can do from now in to salvage any last vestige of credibility or moral integrity at home or abroad.

Joe Hockey’s second Budget set a new backflip benchmark even for the Abbott government which has elevated flip flops into a key political strategy. For stop-go Joe and for his do-whatever- might-work party, Budget number two was either a dramatic reinvention or a breathtaking political quick change from neo-constrictor to big stimulus spender.

Forget debt and deficit disaster. Expect nothing but blue skies from now on. We are on ‘a credible path to surplus’ sometime in the next decade or two provided the good times keep on rolling. Provided we keep the telescope up to the blind eye.

Iron ore , for example, can’t possibly drop below its current price  despite Citigroup predicting it will drop below $40 a tonne as miners boost supply and markets contract.

Whatever they thought of the  motive, the reversal was so remarkable as to leave most observers wondering who Joe Hockey is -and what his party stands for. Is he now just Scott Morrison’s sock puppet?

The wealthy, however, were not to be left in doubt. Superannuation tax breaks for those on high incomes would continue, Hockey reassured us, although he neglected to say our support of the privileged costs the nation the same as the entire Medicare scheme.

Just to keep faith with those who expect more mean and nasty, however, the Coalition was able to put the boot into breast-feeding mothers and any others who dared to double- dip, rort and defraud the virtuous tax-payer by claiming two periods of paid parental leave, albeit in total less than Abbott’s original unfunded proposal – and still inadequate.

Morrison was all moral outrage on radio:

Channeling a Catherine Tate character, Morrison was all moral outrage on radio: ‘how very dare they!’ Later, he offered another version of his comment in case we were confused as to what he really said which he said was not a criticism of women at all but a flaw in the scheme. Of course.

Strangely Hockey has also claimed that his comments were also mis-reported although his PM is still keen to voice his new-found opposition to women taking two periods of leave, despite this being intended in the legislation. It can only be assumed that Credlin has yet to catch up with him.  Expect to hear another version of what he really meant soon.

Similarly, the old Joe could be detected in funds to help women. Yet only after the budget did Michaelia Cash announced breathlessly that another 4 million would be spent on an 1800RESPECT help line to tackle the epidemic of domestic violence. She did not explain why the afterthought or why this was less than one percent of the ‘the spend’ on increased anti-terror measures also announced in the second budget.

So far, initiatives in the government’s response to the nation’s domestic violence crisis have been underwhelming. If two women each week were killed by terrorists, it would be a different story. So are it has funded an awareness programme and a helpline. Although it says 25 million is allocated for shelter for the homeless, this is a paltry investment when contrasted with the funds pouring into our war on terror.

…child dental care rise by $75…

Saving women’s lives is clearly far less of an Abbott government priority than say organising an armoured vehicle to patrol north Melbourne or pouring millions into welfare police. The budget will see child dental care rise by $75 as a result of its freeze on Medicare rebates. We already have the GP copayment by stealth.

The party’s small-business heartland will do OK out of this budget. Experts believe it will do no harm either in key tradie-infested Victorian marginals, as have-a-go-Joe happily forgoes revenue in tax breaks to small businesses in the hope of buying votes before they call a double dissolution.

No-one expected the Joe show to be so startling. ‘Dull’ was the PM”s  promise but he did not put it in writing. ‘Do or die’ was easily the most popular guess by those in the know and even those with no clue at all, mostly because it sounds dramatic. Double-dissolution got more than a whisper from some highly placed sources.

In the end, however, no-one tipped that the Treasurer would publicly turn himself inside out and his party back to front to unleash a big spending big taxing budget on an unsuspecting nation.

Joe came out as a wet.

‘Have-a go-Joe shocked even his closest followers. We expected dullness before he opened his cake-hole. And we were not disappointed. Only the random, ragged applause of clapped out party hacks served to remind us that this was not just another political soliloquy; another raving nutter talking to himself in public. But then, amidst the happy-clappers came the bombshell. Joe came out as a wet.

No-one warned us to expect Joe to go wet on us. His act upstaged his message. Upstaged his entire party’s platform. Was this the secret, inner Joe? Or was it some new Joe? Who could tell? Certainly not his leader.

Tony Abbott, no stranger to dullness himself, as G20 leaders know, had worded us up to expect his dull Treasurer to give a dull, ‘nothing to see here and move along please’ budget that his dull party could ‘tick off’ before it ‘moved on’ with its next round of public spending cuts or its brazen pandering to privilege and wealth and persecution of the poor that constitutes its idea of good government. Joe must have missed this hint. For Budget Night was all about his miraculous turnaround. Before our very eyes, the economic dry became a very wet one.

Hockey’s budget speech was as boring as bat-shit. Clichéd, commonplace and as corny as all get out, it was just the sort of twaddle the dutiful neo-con radical-conservative feels he ought to say on public occasions such as budgets.

…dreary, lazy, superficial generalities and unexamined assumptions:

As nimble as big men often are , Hockey adeptly sidestepped depth, originality or insight. Instead he ladled out the LNP stew of dreary, lazy, superficial generalities and unexamined assumptions: ‘every big business started small’ and ‘small business is the backbone of the nation.’

Were it not for the incredible spectacle he made of himself with his almost total capitulation to expediency, it would have been a dull night’s entertainment. Yet, here, before his peers, stood last year’s economic dry who could not do enough to cut spending and to preach economic doom and disaster. Now we were to accept his spectacular reincarnation as an economic wet who would spend us out of the impending recession even if it mean repudiating everything his first budget stood for.

Hockey’s own party clapped loud and over long for his support of the monied. They loved him for his public homage to those popular have-a-go myths with which they liked to console themselves and rationalise their naked self-interest. Genius, Joe. Buy ’em off! Joe the deliverer and redeemer might even get them re-elected if he kept this up.

Jobs would doubtless flow; wealth would trickle down as the burden of tax would be eased on the small business folk of Australia, the backbone of the nation. Amen. Not one of them would take the money and run. No-one seemed to bother to with the fact that even if you have an immediate tax write-off, you still have to have the capital in the first place. Nor was time wasted on the two-tier tax system created when experts already warn of unfairness in favour of small versus medium enterprises.

…Hockey’s last chance…

It was, let’s be frank, Hockey’s last chance to show us why Scott Morrison should not have his job. Why, Joe could rustle up a party narrative with the best of them. he would not let himself or the PM or the party down by letting truth get in the way of a good story.

Porky pies followed thick and fast.  The world economy, he lied is on the up and up. And as for Australia? Why, Australia is set to rocket off into prosperity along a ‘trajectory’ hitherto undreamt of because of all his party’s heavy lifting.- Look at our raft, he said, of Free Trade agreements with China India and other places where labour is cheap and life is even cheaper.

Best of all, he paused, as you do when you are free-wheeling, we have no carbon tax to ruin business or a mining tax to ruin Gina Rinehart and other such entrepreneurs whom he poppy-cocked repeatedly were once small businesspeople. Every business was once a small business.  Like Gina’s. Like IBM. Or when Mark Zuckerberg knocked back his parents’ financial support.

Huge savings from turning back boats, people-processing savings and not building new detention centres have left us with buckets of funds, he continued. In fact, he crowed, ‘our party doesn’t do tax. That’s the other mob.’

Hockey then plunged into a froth and lather detailing his party’s highest taxing, biggest spending budget of all time. This included billions in foregone tax revenue so that saintly small business folk such as tradies, the backbone of the nation, can get new utes to hoon around Noosa and doubtless down to Centrelink the following day to hire a swag of long-term unemployed.

…Newscorp’s divine right to a monopoly…

Hockey just the previous day was forced to hold a press conference to show Rupert that despite being upstaged mercilessly by Scott Morrison, he could still make himself useful in putting GST weights up on Netflix and any other rival to Newscorp’s divine right to a monopoly in Australia, while continuing to lead the pack in paying tax elsewhere.

Resourcefully the ABC pants on fire brigade, dropped their yoga mats and braved the chill Canberra evening outside while they dissected the corpse of the DOA budget and its fire-breathing Minister.  Perhaps they were making a symbolic statement of independence. Or were they just dramatising their exclusion by a government which favours fawning sycophants over reporters.  At least we got to see the trendy coats ABC reporters can still afford.

The untold story is that the bad old cuts will continue to bite deep – Sussan Ley, the bunny in the headlights of the Health ministry still has to cut 1.6 billion out of the health budget – ‘savings’ as they are cynically re-branded. They are not savings they are cuts which will have a negative effect on both health – not to mention the flow-on effect to other sectors of the economy. Perhaps we are going to all buck up after hearing the good news of the budget and have no further need of doctors and hospitals.

Hockey’s second budget may have come as a surprise but don’t be surprised when after failing to deal with the  senate  and while small business folk everywhere are maxing out credit cards in the rush to cash in on their tax breaks, the government calls a double dissolution in the more than faint hope of re-election through its cynical courting of self-interest and the pursuit of power for its own sake.

Tension is high across Australia in anticipation of the Abbott government’s budget extravaganza, B2, a vaudeville-cum-variety show which opens in Canberra next Tuesday as the existential angst of aid workers attests:

“The whole of the aid sector is hanging on the edge, waiting nervously for the May budget when it will be revealed exactly which parts of the aid budget will be cut – a bit like a doomsday clock,” ActionAid Australia’s Holly Miller says.

Tellingly, the ABC’s attempts to seek details were evaded. “The Treasurer isn’t engaging in budget speculation.” So much for ‘consultative government.’

Time is not only ticking down for aid workers, however, the clock is also running for our PM and his mate. Hockey is on notice that he will be replaced, if he fluffs this budget, Niki Savva says sagely, whilst others believe a dud budget will also terminate Abbott’s flagging career.

Will B2 be a hit?  Even if he has to fudge it, Abbott will do anything to save his neck; even contriving to appear fair.  He’s dropped his ‘debt and deficit disaster’ scare-mongering. He’s flip-flopped on debt from Labor’s “disaster” of 13 per cent of GDP to now call projected debt of 50 to 60 per cent of GDP as “a pretty good result.”

Abbott, the eternal pragmatist, now favours restraint, while Hockey wants to cut further. Little wonder relations appear strained in recent images taken to show a matey, blokey collaboration; a budget chumming up. Or do they reveal a duo who will go down together?

Bringing down a budget is a sideshow compared with the ‘running the economy’ yet, unless our leaders can step up, Australia will continue its economic slide. Abbott’s evasion will only further damage his credibility and weaken his capacity for reform.

Leadership is what we expect from government, leadership which has a real plan as distinct from rhetoric; a slogan about a plan. 94 per cent of Textor’s recent research sample, for example, agreed the nation “needs a better plan for its long-term future”.

But what to do? Property is booming while our terms of trade unravel, as commodity prices drop back to normality after a boom which governments chose to see as endless. Now the Coalition can choose between allowing deficits to balloon and a credit rating downgrade in return. Or it can rein in spending and slow the economy even further.

Satyajit Das, financial market veteran, argues federal budgets matter little in an increasingly globalised financial system; a global economy. Yet others contend that our economic structure has been crippled by years of policy failure. Leaders lack political will to reform. Governments do nothing beyond simply looking to the RBA to lower interest rates in the hope that this will boost economic activity.

The truth lies somewhere between these two extremes, our government’s power is proscribed but within its limitations, there is a power of good it can do. Or as in the current case, a power of damage to be done by choosing do nothing.

Lowering interest rates doesn’t always work magic as Glenn Stevens pointedly observed recently, cueing a reluctant Abbott government to take monetary action. There are limits to what can be achieved by fiscal policy alone. If anything. The most recent interest rate cut led to a rise in the Aussie dollar as speculators punted on it being the final cut.

Our prosperity is ultimately shaped by forces beyond control of governments, or nations. B2 will be a strategic diversion whilst real power over the nation’s fortunes lies in the hands of international capitalists in a global financial system. And our current local neo-con politicians are happy to surrender even their limited authority to the TPP, for example, such is their deference to international capital, free trade and ‘market forces.’

Yet, Bringing down the Budget will be a fantastic show. It’s traditional, for starters, for the country’s federal treasurer and his government to pretend to be in charge of the nation’s finances, to have plans and the means to carry them out. Fantastic. And it’s revealing. Hockey will, yet again, claim he knows what is best for us without ever having to ask.

Strong performances are expected from Tony the ten pound Pom, as the widow Twankey and Joe Hockey as a bungling but loveable, comic Ali Baba who runs around swearing revenge on a mob of merchant bankers, tax- evading multinational thieves, only to disclose in the final moments of the show, that he is married to one of them.

Highlights include ‘It’s everybody else’s fault but mine…’ in which a hapless Joe Hockey must convince a sceptical audience that that he has learned anything from Budget Mark 1 despite his continued need to blame others and his deluded claim that he ‘tried to do too much in the way of reform.’ If only we had all set out to do so much less and had no-one to contend with. The world would be close to perfect.

‘It is the senate. It was the Greens. It is Labor,’ Hockey explains to the AFR. Au contraire Joe, let’s not forget the matter of your poor communication and consultation. Your budgets won’t work because they are not built on consensus. For consensus you have to talk to people; share with them. You have to heed and respect what people say.

The essence of theatre is illusion. The Federal Budget perpetuates the illusion that our leaders have the power to shape our future when they clearly struggle to cope with the present. Expect more rhetoric about ‘heavy lifting;’ the ‘bulk of the hard work’ being done. Expect blather from Scott Morrison about pension ‘taper points’ as he wilfully confuses the technical element of budgeting with its real locus in political priorities.

The hard work of raising revenue has not even begun, whether it be via chasing tax evaders, reforming superannuation tax, a scheme which is obscenely skewed in favour of the rich and costs us as much as Medicare. Investing in renewable energy industries would make more sense than continuing to pour money into a hole in the ground to benefit multinational mining companies. Or into the pockets of the coal barons.

B2, is a cleverly marketed surrealist life-size puppet theatre show sequel to B1, Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey’s debut. The show was widely panned as unfair. B2 is billed to be a ‘bring home the bacon budget’ although some observers add: ‘only for those already riding high on the hog’ or a ‘pigs might fly’ rider.

The (Second) Greatest Show on Earth gets its nation-wide release on May 7. A small fortune has been spent in its promotion. Punters await in frenzied expectation. Will Hockey get it right this time? What has he learned from his earlier flop? Will this be curtains for the dynamic neo-con duo?

Given our Treasurer’s abysmal first budget show, what hope is there for his second? All that is certain is that there is a lot riding on this production. No wonder he and Abbott look nervous, especially in each other’s company. No wonder Abbott is so toey.

Unwittingly using negative psychology, Abbott is promising a budget that will be ‘very dull, very routine.’  Or perhaps he’s slipped into his promised ‘under-promise, over-deliver’ mode.

Meanwhile Laurie Oakes is leaking. We are in for a double dissolution, he puffs, doubtless while we are still distracted by Charlotte Elizabeth Diana’s blessed arrival, the sensational success of direct action and the funds given over to WA to reward Premier Colin Barnett for being unable to see past his own greed far enough to forecast a return to normality in iron ore prices; banking on boom times lasting forever.

And a ‘fair budget.’ The fairness tick of approval will earned by a fudged budget that does nothing to address the nation’s declining fortunes or any other type of leadership but which will do everything possible to shore up Abbott and Hockey’s survival with perhaps even hope fantastical of boosting chances of an Abbott government return.

Say what you like about Tony Abbott but he’s a bugger to follow. Harder than eating red beans with a pitchfork. He’s always been a lair but now he hoons, fishtails and careers all over the tarmac in his own death-wish demolition derby. Has he finally crashed and burnt on his mission to save ‘The Bali Nine Pair’ Chan and Sukumaran from Indonesian justice?

Shopped by Federal Police who have yet to explain why, the youngsters fell victim to operational ‘information sharing.’ Conflicted from the outset, clumsy, confused, the Abbott government had little chance of intercession later, despite our hope and media hype.

Abbott’s threat to cancel aid, however, served only to harden Indonesia’s intransigence. Now the PM could help himself by answering a few basic questions. Why did we set up a drug bust with a nation with a death penalty? Did we need a favour in return? Is he happy with his negotiation style?

The PM can be abrasive. European leaders should turn back refugee boats; follow his lead, he lectures, leaving Julie Bishop to suggest lamely that her boss was merely offering his experiences for others to consider, adding injury to insult. She went on to contradict him, further shredding his credibility as a strong leader.

Sent in to the rescue no doubt, Katie Hopkins of Murdoch’s Sun, who has called refugees ‘cockroaches’ rose to the occasion if somewhat lowering the Tone.

“Australians are like British people but with balls of steel, can-do brains, tiny hearts and whacking great gunships.”

European leaders are bemused. Yet they can’t help but laugh at the presumption and self-delusion of our Walter Mitty would-be strong man. They see him flip-flop. One minute, we are all washed up; down the debt and deficit gurgler, he wags his finger. Next he’s spending up big like a drunken sailor out on the town but with someone else’s money. Ours.

Funds are so low we must scrap Federal literacy support for school kids; but suddenly Abbott stumps up $100 million we don’t have, to build a memorial to John Monash, which, frankly, neither of us needs – in France. Gallic gratitude to ‘our boys’ aside, the French hardly need another war museum, even, as promised, one just pulsing with interactive, hands-on stuff to help the mindless to reflect.

Let homeless war veterans sleep on the streets. Let battered wives be forced to stay at home with their tormentors. We can’t spare funds for more refuges. Forget John Monash, the Villers-Bretonneux museum is effectively a monument to an inept Australian PM, desperate to boost his image; hitch his wagon to a star. If his wagon were not a sky rocket without a stick.

One moment Abbott’s toe to toe with Widodo next he’s wimped out, settling for a lame, ambassadorial recall for two weeks – a ‘go stand in the naughty corner’ which Indonesia is already laughing off. Being a hypocrite doesn’t help. The PM can go off like a frog in a sock about Indonesian injustice all he likes but he’s connived with Dutton to achieve a Vietnamese refugee turn-back behind our backs.

The Abbott government has allowed asylum seekers of all ages to be raped and one even to be murdered. He’s also earned the censure of both the UN for indefinite detention and children in detention. Censure, too from the rest of the world for announcing we are not to be lectured on human rights. Small wonder Widodo thinks he’s a joke-O. With thousands of Australian-bound UNHCR registered asylum seekers marooned in Indonesia at a stroke of the pen by Australia’s 2014 Sovereign Borders law, moreover, Joko Widodo may well have the last laugh.

No wonder Credlin went missing in action. Or was just run off the road. His formerly inseparable Amazonian chief of staff just vanished after Rupert Murdoch told Abbott to drop her. Silence prevails. Secrecy is in this government’s DNA, intertwined with dirty tricks, slipperiness and its fondness for lies.

Pity. Peta Credlin is a lot easier to look at than her boss. Smarter, too. You can tell she’s been sidelined, sadly, by the PM’s increasingly ill-advised stunts since Rupert’s call; the erratic trajectory of Captain Chaos’ ship snaking this way and that before burning out on re-entry and falling back to earth with a thud. Come back, Peta, your boss is the loaded dog without your leash; your house-training.

Stop squandering money on such luxuries as running the country, employing people, and looking after us, advise the Abbott government’s tanks of neo-con artists. Let them buy their own bloody aspirin and paracetamol! Labor will take the blame for all of this for at least the next millennium while professional shakedown merchants scab the rest from the poor and needy.

Well, not quite all. The elderly need to be helped to empty their pockets; fork over their savings and anything else of value. Otherwise it’s intergenerational theft. Time for another tank of thinkers to rattle the can it carries for our Neo-con LNP.

Pensioners who can’t be put to work at Mitre 10 are to be hit up for their spare change and any coin that may have fallen down the back of the sofa before being forced to give their homes to finance companies. The ‘Australia Institute,’ an oxymoron which bills itself as ‘a progressive think tank,’ will then talk up reverse mortgages, (perverse?) until the elderly cave in completely and hock the family home in terror because they have been conned into thinking they must fund their own meagre pensions.

Yet now, suddenly, miraculously, Abbott can afford more troops for his war-gasm in Iraq; funds to give to arborists and others quick enough to stick their hands out for Greg Hunt’s phony ‘carbon abatement’ scheme handout; a quarter of a billion on nannies; a special fence to keep himself safe in Canberra. The list goes on. The man’s a virtual magic pudding mix-master; a genius when it comes to putting the con in Neo-con or looking after his own ends.

Yet tragically, there seems to have been little cash splashed where it mattered in his latest, dreadful debacle with the Indonesians where events prove the Abbott government has truly run up its own moral debt and deficit disaster, having burned all diplomatic and political capital pursuing moronic three word slogans, enacting laws repudiating all international obligations.

No. Having inflicted calculated cruelty on those to whom we should extend compassion, there has quickly come the point, when the rest of the world will cheerfully tell us to go to hell – however much, we beg their mercy.

A week is a long climb in politics but last week lasted a hundred years. Or so it seemed to most Australians as time warped into an ANZAC wormhole, stopping the nation in its tracks with a heavy bombardment of all things old Digger in a frenzied bout of military nostalgia, myth peddling, sentimentality and falsehood. No expense was spared by a government which had to underfund advocacy groups for poor and needy citizens do desperate was it to find ‘savings.’

Australia’s half billion dollar effort to commemorate World War One will cost more than three times as much as those of the UK helping to cement Australia’s place amongst nations as ‘without doubt the most aggressive of the centenary commentators,’ in the words of one international scholar as reported by UNSW Canberra military historian Professor Jeffrey Grey. We are even outspending the French whose cause to remember is rather more substantial than a nation never at threat of invasion.

Grey’s calculation does not include Abbott’s latest cash splurge, his newly announced captain’s call of a $100 million Monash interactive war museum in France marketed to the nation as a means ‘to immortalise the stories of Anzacs fighting on the Western Front.’ Monash, an engineer in civilian life who specialised in reinforced concrete construction, and who was a consummate tactician, would appreciate the irony in his being honoured yet again in what is another desperate attempt by an Abbott government, under fire from all quarters, to fortify its beleaguered position.

Abbott’s own fetish for militarism aside, his move is the latest in a series by Australia’s conservatives, and Neo-cons to shrewdly promote an ersatz Aussie nationalism to replace an older, truer sense of community or identity, both casualties of selfish neoliberal ideology and the god of the free market. Boosting ANZAC observance and myth-making into an orgy of maudlin sentimentality, is seen in part in the popular phenomenon of the ritual trip to Gallipoli by the young, a travesty of historical remembrance verging on sacrilege and utterly alien to the reflections and the hard won wisdom of those who returned.

‘Let silent contemplation be your offering’, is inscribed on the War Memorial at Sydney’s Hyde Park. Instead we are set to indulge in ‘a discordant, lengthy and exorbitant four-year festival for the dead,’ writes military scholar James Brown in Anzac’s Long Shadow. It is already taking its toll in the lounge-rooms of the nation.

Our plucky young nation’s heroic re-baptism by fire and noble sacrifice proved the feature event of the week. Starring a mythic Gallipoli-born national identity and other false or foreign imports, the performances were gruelling on all sides. Surviving only through mateship, pluck and much wearing of rosemary, Australians at home weathered wave after wave of lounge-room carpet bombing and other assaults by sustained TV ANZAC ‘wraparounds’ led by scoundrels such as ex-Kiwi and former gladiator actor Russell Crowe, whose lack of military understanding and otherwise complete unsuitability is redeemed by his history of throwing telephones and other improvised ballistic devices.

Assisting Crowe was an army of other unlikely recruits, incorrigible grandstanders and up-stagers. There is some good news, however. Despite sustaining massive casualties to truth and despite its post-operative trauma from amateur open-heart and DIY identity reconstruction surgery, the nation is said to be currently in a stable condition, although future prospects are a concern, especially when the nation’s full-scale commemoration kicks in 28 July. Our death cult PM will however doubtless have the odd free trade announcement and terror alert up his sleeve to see us through. This week he set off at a blistering pace.

Abbott exuded Turkish delight as he simultaneously scaled the twin peaks of trade and terror in Ankara, staging a virtual love-in with Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu who agreed to talk tough on terror. Abbott, in another captain’s call, then damned Turkey with very faint praise claiming windily, ‘it is prosperous, it’s pluralist, it’s peaceful and it’s a stark contrast to the kind of things we see happening in Syria and Iraq right now.’ The facts suggest otherwise, especially to Turkish minority groups but Abbott appears to have been poorly briefed on the truth.

Persecuted Alevi or Kurdish members of Abbott’s ‘pluralist’ Turkey could play the Australian PM a clip from President Erdogan’s last election campaign where racial vilification of his opponent proved a crowd-pleaser if not also a vote-winner.

“You know, he is an Alevi,” Erdogan told crowds in a cynical way while thousands booed “the Alevi Kilicdaroglu.”

Doubtless some fine-tuning of our own racial discrimination act could yet permit similarly ‘robust debate’ here.

Our thirty-third trading partner, Turkey’s economy was also no doubt vastly boosted by Abbott. And the help did not stop there. He promised expert advice, based on his own triumph, to help guarantee Turkey the G20 success Australia enjoyed for when Turkey hosts the next G20 meeting. His host just promised further talks -not to talk turkey.

Abbott thanked Professor Davutoglu for ‘helping deliver’ annual counter-terrorism talks between the two nations, the placement of Australian officials with Turkish police and for advancing discussions on the return of foreign fighters. If this doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, it will certainly amount to a whole lot of falafel. Whatever the case, it will be less worrying than Julie Bishop’s coup of the week, her arrangement to swap intelligence with Iran, a nation which Wilkie warns will only feed us lies and generally stitch us up to its own advantage. But Bishop had other matters on her mind.

Julie Bishop won best in show in Teheran by a short half head with her deconstructed burqa mantilla head un-covering. Preferring as she says to be ‘judged by what I do’ not by any feminist label, her deeds judged her a supporter of the oppression of women. In one half-veiled fashion statement, she antagonised both her host and those who work tirelessly for women’s rights around the world.

Bishop then capped this with a slap-down for her PM in her gloss on his sensitive advice to Europe to turn back the boats following one of the worst maritime disasters in Europe’s history. What the PM was doing was ‘offering up his experiences for everyone else to consider,’ she lied. His pitch was intended for domestic audiences to boost his standing with those ever willing to applaud a stoking of their xenophobic hatred of refugees.

Abbott talked up trade and terror and turn back the boats on his way to grace the centennial Gallipoli landing commemoration with the best oration his turd-polishing unit could pen.

Glossing over the fact that 1915 marks the beginnings of Turkey’s policy of genocide which resulted in the massacre of one and a half million of its population of two million Armenians, Abbott preferred the simpler myth that Australia and New Zealand were forged at Gallipoli which he represented as a crusade for freedom undertaken by ordinary men doing their duty and their best. He lavished a fair bit of praise on our veterans but words are cheap. His government cannot count the number of homeless veterans sleeping rough in Australia today, let alone make some move to provide for living diggers.

Forged also in another sense was former failed Health Minister, Peter Dutton’s brutal return of forty-five hapless Vietnamese refugees who were last heard of in police custody in Vietnam. Claiming that Australia cannot possibly be responsible for what happens after repatriation, Dutton took a leaf straight out Scott Morrison’s book.

The worst ex-Health Minister of all time also channelled his guru Morrison in producing a duplicitous tourist video promoting a ‘fast-paced and vibrant’ Cambodia as offering ‘a wealth of opportunities’ to unwary and unwilling refugees who would rather be detained indefinitely on Manus Island where they can be sure of being fed. One third of Cambodia’s population must try to survive on 45 cents a day. Fortunately for the hapless minister, another promotional video upstaged Dutton’s.

Australian paediatrician and former party animal Dr Tareq Kamleh has appeared in an Islamic State video urging other medical professionals to travel to Syria and join the holy war against the West. His transformation into Jihadi despite the billions squandered on security and anti-terrorist intelligence gathering exposes flaws in the Abbott government’s beefed up security regime supposedly dedicated to preventing Australians travelling to Syria or Iraq to join ISIS. Kamleh’s case also opens another perspective on an ‘evil death cult’ world which our government insists on representing only in propagandist terms.

Credibility gaps also yawned in Work Experience student Gregory Hunt’s ‘Stunning outcome’ as he called it of awarding $660.4m in emissions reduction contracts. Hunt has had a huge success giving our money away. His announcement of what is a government grant of taxpayer money to groups who promise to put it towards carbon abatement schemes such as planting trees raises more questions than it answers, especially how the scheme will work when industrial emitters want to throw their hat into the Direct Action ring but the funds are all gone. For the Climate Institute, the first ‘auction’ merely confirms Hunt’s policy will fall short of stated goals.

Environment Minister Hunt who has now already given away much of his funding, pledges that ‘we will meet our targets easily.’ Experts point out that carbon emissions are abating as a result of other more significant global factors such as China’s slow-down and its policy of deploying new power generating technologies. Yet a sure sign young Greg is in trouble is that ‘Greg Sheridan hails Hunt’s success as an election-winner.

Finally, Joe Hockey has differed with his PM over eighty billion dollars he says the states won’t be getting. Abbott has promised a cosy retreat where the state premiers can hold a free-flowing discussion about bailing out Western Australia a state which is now caught short by the mining industry downturn because of its own planning failure. Principle aside, if Abbott could ever get men such as Victoria’s Daniel Andrews to support a bailout, it seems pointless holding a retreat if the Treasurer has taken the money ‘off the table.’

Other hits of an action-packed week include Sussan Ley’s ‘industrial-strength’ review of Medicare to give it ‘better efficiency’ a process started two years ago by Labor but not, Ley claims about finding savings. Instead, as turd polishers have spun it, she is ‘modernising for the future’ and ‘maintaining its integrity’ yet all of us know that she has been told to cut her budget and the only real question is by how much. The last word must go to a writer who saw active duty in the Great War and whose inbuilt ‘crap-detector’ helped him see through the rhetoric of war and sacrifice and all the other weasel words that governments use to get us to part with our money and our lives.

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
—Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

The meaning of ANZAC is everywhere this autumn morning in a small, Western District soldier-settlement as a few old-timers rugged up against the cold, huddle outside their dark and draughty hall, its 1960s facade a wall of blank, red brick over the original, 1920s wooden building, once the heart of town.

A chill wind moans and whistles in the stays of the flagpole, slapping the lanyard noisily against the cold steel of the pole. It reddens the noses of a straggle of elderly folk mustered for the ANZAC service, their hats and shoulders dashed with the rain a gusty southerly brings in gusts from up the coast. Pleurisy plains they call it.

‘Dirty weather.’

‘Just as it should be, says Helen McPhee, relieved the gods are scowling. Her eyes are so damaged now she wears huge dark glasses everywhere that give her a basilisk’s stare. At 83, her face is ravaged by a lifetime of punishing physical exertion, outdoors in all seasons, raising stock, crops and children; fighting fires, frosts, droughts and floods.

But her mind is still whip-smart and she gives no quarter. She’s worked as hard as any man all her life, if not harder. Last year she was still breaking horses. Easier than training a husband she says. Her late husband was a hard man even before he went to war. Impossible when he got back even before the whisky bottle got him.

…defying all odds to the bitter end.

A rich American company bought up their farm. An offer too good to refuse, her son told me, before he pocketed the proceeds and skipped out of town to head north into warmth and sunshine. Helen alone stays on, a fighter all her life, defying all odds to the bitter end.

‘It’s not a celebration. When I think of those poor boys who went away never to come back. It’s meant to be miserable.’

‘Gets smaller every year, says Wesley. Numbers are down at the school they say, too. Soon it will disappear altogether.  When the school goes, the town goes.’

A few nod but none feels the need for words. Besides, what is left to be said when everyone has known everybody else forever? They continue their vigil in dutiful silence, as the whole town mourns its fallen, its past and its future.

Forty years ago, things looked up. Flush with funds from a long wool boom and buoyed with all kinds of hopes, local farmers updated their hall with a face-lift. Cannily they built a new façade in a measured flirtation with progress, a prudent, shrewdly frugal each-way bet on the two-faced god of modernity, a tribute to their civic pride and Presbyterian thrift. Nothing was too much trouble.

They carted the old hall across the road, wrenching it suddenly away from its partner of forty years, the old bluestone hotel next door. Progress left conviviality and hospitality behind; divided forever by the highway. The hall now brick-faced with funereal austerity, thrift and civic sobriety stands stiff and aloof across the road a respectable distance from its former neighbour’s joyful debauchery.

…strangers on what is now nobody’s land.

Now new money is set to close the town. International capitalists have mechanised the farms. Old holdings are joined up into one new vastness by faceless men from other places chasing profits around the globe. Foreign investors put managers and other strangers on what is now nobody’s land.

The town, like countless others has dwindled to a few hundred mostly elderly folk and a few lucky elder sons whose inheritances are still viable provided a man is rich enough to pay for laser-guided machinery and fit enough to farm at night by GPS.

Some, like Helen’s son have sold up and moved out leaving an elderly mother behind for the term of her natural life, a condition written into the contract of sale. You will only get me out of her in a box, says Helen. Kiwi contractors do the shearing now.

Down the road, the march assembles on the little rise outside old Jock’s hardware store. Numbers are down but it’s always like that nowadays. Head boy and girl of the local school and the primary school captains are joined by a handful of reserves, a widow and an old digger for the hundred metre march to lay the wreaths.

Jock gave up the ghost when his wife persuaded him into a retirement home in Ballarat. He was at a social game of bowls just before he left when his partner, Johnny W upset him with a display of high spirits. Stop larkin’ aboot, this is fookin’ serious, laddie!’ Jock’s reproach echoes in the voiced of the dour, determined townsfolk who must daily battle to survive.

Someone has to volunteer …

RSL Tom was never in the services. A former teacher, he says he put his hand up to lead the branch when the diggers died out.  He’s on every town committee. ‘I’m a joiner,’ he says. Someone has to volunteer, especially these days. He does his best but still it seems like filling in.

The toy army lays its wreath, salutes, a bugler plays the last post and Tom recites Binyon’s ode. We file inside to hymns from the 1950s. ‘Melita’ to begin. Jesse McNab tickles the ivories, her powerful forearms flexing, hands rough but still sensitive after a lifetime of chopping wood, mending fences, driving the tractor. Like most of her generation Jesse could do anything from delivering a baby to fixing the brickwork in the chimney. That piano wouldn’t dare not to respond to her touch.

At times, in the old music and the fast-emptying halls you imagine ghosts returning to homes left long ago, now overgrown and empty all over the district. Some are still filled with abandoned furniture and belongings. Uncles, brothers, fathers, mates are recalled into being by the gathering of kin and the singing.

The old melodies test most of us save for a few staunch women elders whose alto voices soar high and pure and still beyond all hardship, hurt and wrong. Purified by suffering and by selfless devotion, their voices fill the vault above us, touching all of us with a true, unyielding testament, a sacrament of song.

How small towns were hit hardest …

Tom speaks. He speaks well of the privations of his boyhood during wartime. He talks of the change in the men who returned. How small towns were hit hardest. He says he places hope in the young people of today. A visiting retired army officer, a professional speaker, gives his views on the meaning of ANZAC, about duty and sacrifice and the folly of war. The captains read the ANZAC ode, stumbling fittingly over foreign place names; as their forbears before them stumbled upon the same unfamiliar places.

None of this talk is as moving or as wise and profound as the women and their song. And none can find words to address a far greater foe, the nemesis of capital investment which reaches effortlessly across continents and oceans, past all borders and boundaries, tipping villages and nations out of their old ways, turning inside out their lives of self-sufficiency, identity and community and a life on the land into the maws of a machine age and the certain uncertainty of an international, invisible market capitalism, a death in life, from whose bourn no traveller ever returns.

Everything they say the ANZACs fought to protect us from, or all they were told or believed they must fight to preserve: our sovereignty, our security, our values, our ways of life are all at stake as a global tidal wave of money threatens to wash old farms with national borders into oblivion. Unless, against the odds, our spirit rallies; unless, somehow we choose not to surrender; unless on this one day in this small place we rediscover what it is we truly stand for.

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JOE HOCKEY: We never put a date on returning to surplus. We just need to show we have a quality trajectory, a quality trajectory back to surplus and that we are getting the budget under control. Now, you will see that in the budget…

ABC Insiders 19 April 2015 

‘No way’ will the Coalition be ‘putting a date on the surplus’ Joe Hockey roundly declares on ABC Insiders. It is no backflip, the Federal Treasurer suggests. He never set such a date. Yet it’s not what the record reflects.

Last election, Joe Hockey promised a ‘guaranteed return to surplus within one term,’ a promise that voters certainly heard as ‘putting a date’ on the surplus. It was upbeat, it was encouraging and it was ongoing.

Before the 2013 federal election, Hockey not only pledged a surplus in his party’s first year in office but “every year after that.” Voters would have heard him ‘put a date on’ a surplus at that time, too, even if he was quick to step back from his commitment at the last minute.

On the eve of the election Hockey downgraded his pledge of a guaranteed surplus in one term and forever to ‘an ambition’ to be ‘on-track’ for a surplus at the end of Coalition’s first term.

Retreating even further, now Hockey is scuttling away like the white rabbit leaving nothing behind but his ‘trajectory,’ meaning he’ll get Treasury to give us some beautiful figures showing expenditure going down and income rising over the forward estimates. It will look good but Nostradamus would be about as credible a guide to how the economy will perform and what future budgets will be like. Experts consistently got it wrong in the past.

Fiscal consolidation has been abandoned. Why all the stuff and nonsense about a return to surplus when he clearly doesn’t mean it and he certainly can’t achieve it? Is it an ‘in joke?’ Have we missed a punchline somewhere?

Hockey and Abbott are morbid jokesters as far as taxation promises go according to Peter Costello, who should know given the fun he had at our expense with not taxing super and squandering the profits of a minerals boom on tax cuts to buy votes.

Perhaps Joe expects us to realise that he was only making a prank call back then. Perhaps he also, not unreasonably, supposes only a fool to expect his party to keep any of its election promises. Or even remember them?

Perhaps Joe considers that his promise was automatically redacted or cancelled once ‘the coals’ won office and the myth of Labor’s delinquent financial mess, its debt and deficit disaster was trumped up and down the land. After all, this is the government where rhetoric fixes everything.

Perhaps, again, we just didn’t read the fine print as we failed to see the strings attached to Abbott’s ‘no new taxes.’ Huckster Hockey’s phrase this time is beguiling. Could he be invoking the rise of ‘quality:’ the rich and the privileged as ‘trickle-down’ economics ensures their ascendancy over everyone else’s decline, in a ‘quality trajectory?’ Or has he gone completely ballistic?

Certainly the Hockster’s trajectory conflicts with the PM’s. Only last month Tony Abbott said it would ‘take five years to achieve a budget surplus.’  One of them has to be telling porkies. Could Joe’s ‘quality trajectory’ refers to all the dodging and weaving he’s been doing to dodge his own Prime Ministers as well as all his own promises of a return to surplus?

‘We just need to show we have a quality trajectory back to surplus.’ If only it were that simple, Mr Hockey, you would be dancing in the street and blowing kisses to Wayne Swan across the chamber. Swannie certainly had extra virgin quality in a winsome budget trajectory. So, too, did the now failing South Australian economy have some fine figures in its budget forecasts. But a beautiful set of figures cannot stop the ever changing game of a real economy making you look like a mug.

Time to fess up, Joe. Your party made impossible promises which ignored all reasonable probability, all reality. Ignored trends in terms of trade and export earnings: boom commodity prices were always going to return to normal. An ageing population? People were always going to grow older. Local manufacturing has never looked flash. Then you had to drive the car makers out of the country. How could this help anyone put the brakes on the deficit?

Come off it, Mr Hockey, any fool can forecast smaller deficits with surpluses around the corner or over the horizon of the forward estimates. But the economy always has a mind of its own. Like Sam Goldwyn’s verbal contract, a quality trajectory isn’t worth the paper it is written on.

‘Putting a date on the surplus’ sounds increasingly like the parlour game of pin the tail on the donkey. There are other similarities. It is a game, for starters and participants must wear blindfolds. You play it at kids’ parties. No wonder you are begging off now that the ‘grown ups’ are in charge, Joe.   

Tragically, for all parties, the more party-pooper Joe Hockey opens his mouth the less we pay attention. We tune out, turn off, leave the room, do the dishes or weed the garden; anything to escape his empty bluff and bluster; his punishing injured, self-righteousness tone; his petty, political point-scoring.

Bluffing that you are curbing corporate tax evasion by setting up talks with Britain, ‘a plan to have a plan,’ to take mutual action doesn’t cut it, Joe. Even Sam Dastyari has achieved more than that. Blustering that Labor buggered the budget by not playing ball won’t shake off the sense of unfairness your government created all by itself. By contrast, squaring off to snatch tax-deduction status from environmental groups looks politically motivated and only serves to underline how soft you are by contrast on the big end of town.  

What’s that? You tried to do too much too quickly? Spare us. Show us what you’ve done about tax instead of peevishly correcting claiming to beat Costello to voice bracket creep concern. None of your petty excuses will help you rebuild your authority; your program of ‘reform’ is just a joke, Joe.

Of course, a lot more would have to change before we could take the morbid jokester Hockey seriously. It’s not impossible, but it’s a big call now. Something to say and the means to say it would be a good start. So would telling the truth. And having a real plan.

Instead, however, the treasurer continues to serve up a swill of half-baked Neo-con rhetoric, porky pies and baloney boosted by the odd piquant dash of jargon be it ‘disintermediation’ or ‘quality trajectory.’ In the coalition’s far-right fantasy, wages must come down so that opportunities may be created and wealth can trickle down. No matter that wages are at a record low. No matter that inequality is growing. The party’s wealthy backers in business must be appeased.

The coalition’s record of economic management since it misled voters into electing it is in tatters.  His ‘quality trajectory’ is but the latest whimper of retreat as Hockey backs away from commitments he should never have made; promises he could never deliver as he discovers to his cost, he must deal with the real challenges of an economy in downturn; his own credibility in tatters; his government’s political capital all now well and truly spent.

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“It is an absolute principle of democracy that governments should not and must not say one thing before an election and do the opposite afterwards.” Tony Abbott 2011

‘A morbid joke,’ Peter Costello’s considered view of the Coalition’s failure to match its ‘lower, fairer, more effective taxes’ promise, is a term with wider application. It fits its entire period of office. Despite Tony Abbott’s pledge to mend his ways in February, to be more consultative, his government continues to make a fool of itself and the mug punters who elected it. Witness how Peter Dutton’s illegal secret mission to repatriate Vietnamese asylum-seekers has become our latest national fiasco now that word has got out, confirming to the world that Australia’s immigration and border protection policy to be run by cowboys and morbid jokesters.

Breaking its word, retracting and redacting willy-nilly, it flip-flop-flouts even Abbott’s own ‘absolute principle of democracy,’ trashing every promise which helped it gain office.  Opinion polls show an increasingly alienated electorate as the PM and his government seem daily defeated by the challenges of day to day government, stuffing up even a simple COAG meeting, let alone winning any hearts abroad, making its pre-election pretensions to integrity and unbroken promises a morbid joke indeed.

Rattled by his near-spill early in February, Great Helmsman Abbott, spirits buoyed to find himself still in the boat, any boat, let himself get carried away with profuse displays of contrition. Contrition comes readily, too readily, to the politician and failed trainee Catholic priest who is on record for preferring to act first and apologise afterward. Weak and irresolute at heart, stubborn and vindictive by nature, as in his withholding 3 billion of infrastructure funding from Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews who has sinned by opting to develop public transport, he is a goat in sheep’s clothing.

The new, reformed, consultative, Abbott is still running off at the mouth. It gets him into trouble. His remark to Angela Merkel that ‘fear and greed’ were driving our China Policy, a pithy off the cuff quip in another context has come back to bite him on the bum. Similarly, his rash promise of good government escaped his lips before his brain was fully engaged, but it has set him an impossible target.

‘Good government’ may have been a parting ventriloquist’s trick by chief of staff Peta Credlin, or a captain’s call. Whatever the explanation, it amounts to a desperate and costly move to buy time. Ultimately, moreover, the gesture only raises some further tricky questions about his leadership. Would he know good government if he fell over it?  Would his track record encourage anything but disbelief?  What did it mean for all that had gone before?

Abbott’s promised ‘good government’ is still nowhere to be seen. Dog-whistling racists in Reclaim Australia, fear-mongering over terrorist threats, ice epidemics and debt, repatriating Iranians to face almost certain persecution or secretly permitting corporations to explore our marine national parks for oil, his government continues to alienate the electorate with its poor decisions, its dismal performance.  Good Captain Abbott may have narrowly avoided capsize in February but his government has plumbed new depths rather than change course. Chaos, chicanery and ineptitude proceed apace on his watch.

Peter Dutton today praises new laws before the Senate which would enable asylum seekers in detention centres to be bashed to death. Costello mocks Hockey openly on the treasurer’s failure to achieve its slogan of fairer, lower, more effective taxes. Our ‘national conversation’ on taxes is pre-empted by a PM appearing on national TV to overrule any calls for increased taxes. As leader of a government that is ‘not ruling anything in or anything out’, the ‘good captain’ Abbott appears destined to forever cause more chaos and confusion.

To cap it all, the piece de resistance of its reform, the fruit of its herculean heavy-lifting, is to be ‘a dull budget.’ This is possible, Abbott and others claim, because of the heavy lifting that was done earlier in its wildly successful first budget, ignoring entirely the seventy billion extra in debt its actions have cost us so far.

Perhaps a dull budget is all that may be expected from a dullard government so decisively defeated by the challenges of government that it appears completely out of its depth just past the half-way mark; not waving but drowning. Dullness may be all the Abbott government can manage but dullness will not help it survive.

Business groups have gone ballistic. ‘The last thing we need as a community, and as a business community, is another year of paralysis and doubt about what the Government can do,’ bellows the Australian Industry Group’s Innes Willox, another disappointed by the PM’s apparent lack of budgie in his smugglers.

The times require a bold budget! Business leaders urge, wanting a government to hold their line, repay their support. But audacity is a function of mendacity alone in Team Abbott. It could rain a sky of Kate Carnells to rival Magritte’s Golconda, before any boldness will be seen or as long as Captain Abbott must fight desperately to cling on to the helm.

Let Kevin Andrews pretend that his failure to name the leader of ISIS, our enemy and Anti-Christ, western civilisation’s nemesis is inspired by anything other than a senior moment or the product of a cultivated ignorance and blind obedience according to the dictates of a devotional faith.  Explain it away as ‘operational matters’ all you like, Mr Andrews.  To anyone else it is manifest incompetence.

‘Know thine enemy’ is a first principle in Lao Tzu’s treatise on the art of war but our Minister of Defence prefers a different strategy. Ignorance is bliss. Military intelligence is after all long held to be a contradiction in terms. Let our PM and his ministerial Kevin-in-chief continue to box outside the thinker.

Andrews’ ignorance symbolises our blind terror-alert state in which urgers tell us Armageddon is expected tomorrow at the hands of our vast invisible, unnamed enemies of state who hunch over Facebook, Twitter and other anti-social media in Lakemba and other suburbs near you being groomed by IS recruiters for investment as Jihadi suicide bombers.

When reality seized him by the scruff of the neck, as it has so regularly in his chequered career, it suited the PM to strike a penitent pose. Yet so far,  we witness nothing but more of the same bad practices from a battle-shy team led by the same bad, ‘Good Captain’ Blatherskite, Tony Abbott, the narcissist’s narcissist obsessing endlessly over his own survival, compelled, as ever, to put everything else last. Camouflage survival politics all you want with fear, Mr Abbott, we see what you are up to.

The Abbott government resorts more and more to panic button politics in a futile attempt to bolster its waning authority and legitimacy. We endure determined attempts to put the frighteners on us at every opportunity. Look over there! Look out behind you! Look anywhere but long and hard at us, it begs in a dreary procession of alarmist reports, data retentions and militaristic impulsivity.

Insecurity is contagious, crippling. Faced by a desperate existential crisis, largely of its own making, the Coalition has resorted to a hastily compiled survivalist’s grab-bag of old political tricks including fear-mongering, sabre-rattling, and appeals for the electorate to tell it what to do, please. Its backflips, concessions and its elevation of indecision to polity as seen in Hockey’s mantra: ‘we are not ruling anything in or anything out’ combine to reveal a ‘good government’ which is so bad that it is embarrassing; alarming.

It is also alarming, even to itself, as can be seen in its repeated calls for ideas or ‘conversations’ which mask an indecisive, conflicted government which lacks the will, the skill and the political fibre to do anything beyond struggle to survive. Wedged by its business ‘supporters’, such as the amazingly ubiquitous Kate Carnell, apparently oblivious to falling iron ore export prices and other economic challenges who demand self-interested ‘reforms’ of wages and conditions under the pretext of greater productivity and an increasingly alienated nation, the government is caught between a pile of rapidly depreciating rocks and a hard place

Despite the obsequious Murdoch press and its biased Newspoll, there has been no dead cat bounce in the opinion polls. The only modest rally came when those polled believed a leadership shuffle was on the cards. Clearly, the key to halting the Abbott government’s spectacular popular decline is to get rid of Abbott. Yet it has no-one in the party with the bottle or the ticker or the foolhardiness to challenge the leader. Who would, or could, seize the wheel of the LNP juggernaut?  Overladen with lost wolves in sheep’s clothing it veers alarmingly all over the road in its own demolition derby, before rushing downhill, irrevocably toward oblivion. A dull budget could be the Abbott government’s ultimate morbid joke, should it lead to a double dissolution.

Fancy a ‘double Irish sandwich with Dutch associations?’ Or is it all double-Dutch to you? You’d be in good company if it is. Apparently some of the biggest corporate heads in Australia are mystified too. Or so they claim. Yet on the menu in Canberra on Wednesday are combinations straight off the menu of a New York deli. Chaired by the dashing Sam Dastyari, our plucky little senate committee is attempting an impossible and dangerous, if not death-dying manoevre as it sets about tackling the top end of town over corporate tax avoidance. That’s where the double Irish scheme gets airplay.

The corporations send their big boys and girls. Sam’s eight member team sensibly brings some back up. Morrison is nowhere to be seen despite his offshoring credentials. Fifty-seven senators are participating, even if we are yet to hear from more than one or two. Yet the senators who do have speaking roles are good value. Christine Milne, for example, picks up a corporate suit and tie on Freudian slip on Thursday. The CEO waffles about making the law.

‘That’s what you meant to say,’ ‘make the law,’ she crows. It is a rare epiphany. Any moment now, the tax caper will spring open under pressure like a jemmied safe or as Milne guesses the correct combination. She throws Bermuda black hole in after the Double Irish with Dutch associations for good measure. Sam jokes about her use of language and talks it up but in reality Milne’s spray is a pea-shooter against a charging elephant.

Sam is a flash dresser. With his blue ties and his suits and hair-cut like a hairdresser’s model, you could easily pick him for a Liberal. It won’t stop him being on the predators’ dinner menu himself, however, if he doesn’t watch himself. The senate team begins by flicking their towels at the IBM, News Corp, Google and other corporate bullies as they climb out of the fast lane at the reserved part of the public pool.

This is just for openers. Sam and his team have crafted a fiendishly cunning plan to get the suits sitting opposite to ‘fess up to how they avoid so much tax and other loaded questions. The tension is electric.  Spectators crane their necks but they may just be getting in touch with their stockbrokers.

Is this a stunt?  The quixotic Dasher and his crack team now dive headlong into the murky waters of off shore havens.  They swim willy-nilly like minnows amongst sharks. Their fate is frightening to contemplate. In the process, however, Sam utterly shows up Joe Hockey who often says things about chasing big tax avoiders, his party’s mates, but is yet to do anything except to protect them from being named.

Joe is such a blowhard the wind he creates would fair blow the milk out of your cup of tea but nobody’s bluffed. Anyone can see which side his bagel is buttered on.  Now he’s wedged. The public expect him to go after multinational tax avoiders despite all his waffle about disintermediation and how the modern world of finance has all gone global.  The committee’s crafty subtext is to do him down, shut Hockey up forever but you won’t find that in the official title.

Dasher’s committee is refreshingly entitled, ‘An inquiry into tax avoidance and aggressive minimisation by corporations registered in Australia and multinational corporations operating in Australia.’ Milne reckons the Double Irish sandwich is the key to it all.

Essentially, the sandwich reduces corporations’ tax bills by channelling profits to Ireland, then on to the Netherlands and thence back to Ireland. The scheme is allegedly used by Apple, Google and other multinationals operating in Australia to reduce tax. It saves them a fortune. Off-shore tax havens include Singapore with its tax rate for big corporations of 5 – 10%.

Google’s local tax bill, for example, amounted to a mere 15 percent of its $46 million Australian profit in 2013, half the Australian going rate of 30 per cent.  Factor in $2 billion in local advertising generated online which is ‘booked’ in other countries. Bear in mind that local earnings are likely to be talked up by corporates to advantage as tax deductions in the haven. Top this up with the  $4.5 million Google happily pockets in R&D tax breaks and it is fair to say that the corporation does very well out of Australia. As do so many multinationals.

If it sounds unfair, that’s because it is, but the gutsy senators can bang on all they like about corporations avoiding their fair share of tax. Their opponents’ refrain is that everything multinationals do with tax is legal, ‘hey, no-one is breaking any law.’ Yet they have tax lawyers so sharp they can calculate how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. Legal? Everyone including the ATO knows that what is legal is a matter of fine interpretation.

No-one raises the bigger issue of the alarming percentage of our income we happily put into the multinationals’ pockets. Money spent on tech is money taken out of other sectors of the economy. Our fetishising of communications technology also has huge social and emotional costs and consequences. One of these is the off-shoring of our consciousness and our identity. They suck our brains out. Policy-makers would do well to heed all dimensions of the beast, but for now the senate confines itself to a rather naïve and simple question about the use of tax minimisation schemes.

Sam’s team hits a rough patch when it has to furiously tread water, clearly struggling to stay afloat in the deep end with so much testimony from corporate suits that is meaningless. Unsurprisingly, not one corporate boss runs to help the senators or throws in a life preserver. The multinationals’ explanations are way too hard for anyone except a tax lawyer to follow. The News Corp. executive sneers, saying their tax is legal and far too complex for you to understand. You begin to worry about Sam’s strategy. Nuanced it ain’t.

Loaded questions merely invite denial and worse. Imagine you are a CEO of a company like Apple, known for using the scheme, you will profess complete ignorance of the term. You will also throw in some bullying for good measure because you don’t get to be a narcissistic corporate psychopath without throwing your weight around and making others feel stupid, insignificant and at fault.

The big knobs hate pollies. Politicians are contemptible because the bloodsuckers and leeches are not out in the real world, the sacred workplace, nobly and virtuously growing businesses and creating opportunities for wealth to trickle down. They are on the tit of the government payroll. Just ask Sarah Palin. What would they know?

The Double Irish proves a high point of the senate inquiry as Sam gives his first day’s summing up. It’s not exactly a David and Goliath contest, but the corporate advantage is staggering. The big fish give fishy answers to some fairly dud questioning. Straight man, Tony King, head of Apple Australia, responds to Christine Milne’s half-cocked loaded question by claiming not to know what a Double Irish is despite it being recognised world-wide as Apple’s main tax structure. What a crack-up. Yet the local representatives are not what they once were. They are now more like agencies of the main firm, protecting intellectual property, and other dodges than the snarling man-eaters of Packer’s era

King does let on that his company buys iPads and iPhones from overseas operations, and resells them locally to be, then taxed on its local profit. Why he thinks this worth mentioning is anyone’s guess but it does contribute to the corporate team’s signature ploy of showing the senate team up as a bunch of ignorant, impertinent, time-wasting dimwits.

God alone knows what game Dastyari’s is playing is but already his team is outclassed; outmanoeuvred, out of its depth. Our Senate Economics References Committee minnows are after some very big sharks. Represented Wednesday were Microsoft, Google and Apple, the holy trinity of the modern technological age. Bringing the big boys in for questioning, however, seems to be the extent of the team strategy. Yet he’s exploiting LNP vulnerability – wedging Hockey neatly.

The plucky senators’ game plan seems on the face of it to depend on lobbing a few random cunning questions such as how much it costs to make an iPhone. You probably need a bit more than this, Sam, before you cause executives to break down and beg us to allow them to pay more taxes as in the current feel-good story about Starbucks being held to account in Britain.

None of the assembled executives seemed to know what it cost to make an iPad. This disappointingly predictable response could have easily been surmounted by a better question about profits. Senators could have used Google to google IHS research that 38 percent is Apple’s total gross reported profit over all its iPads.

On the surface the inquiry seems an elaborate hoax, a futile exercise in mutual duplicity. Our senate wants us to believe that it is going to get big corporations in to fess up to making obscene profits just because they can pocket the money off shore via a thicket of company and corporate structures. Yet no-one on the senate team appears to have done any homework. No-one representing any of the multinationals is going to do them any favours and it is a sheer waste of time asking for information which is already in the public domain. It is like some bizarre new reality TV show, Big boys don’t pay tax. Or Technology just rules, OK? Yet futile show trial or not the political gains will be all to Dastyari for attempting what Hockey is not. In the meantime it is a great show.

Smug omnipotence is pitted against plausible humbug as corporate psychopaths on one side snarl and smirk their contempt for the fumbling, woefully under-prepared, outsmarted senators on the other. It’s a bit like asking the school bully for your marbles back. It is of course a type of public theatre, in which those with an interest in being seen to do so go through the motions of bringing tax evading corporations to account. As if you ever could.