Category: Political Comment

The boy who cried wolf, the tale of Joe Hockey and his own and his government’s credibility deficit.

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hockey with abbott staring at him

Joe Hockey has been criticised lately, but I tell you what, I think Joe is going to be one of the great treasurers because he’s someone who bounces back and that’s what he’s doing now.

Tony Abbott ‘telling Leigh Sales, what’ …  ABC, 7:30 4/12/2014

Joe Hockey is the little boy who cried wolf. He cried wolf about Labor’s economic management on the hustings. He cried wolf when he had just been sworn in: ‘Labor’s debt and deficit disaster’ big, bad, wolf had devoured the goodies in the nation’s picnic basket of prosperity. He cried wolf when confecting his budget crisis and emergency.

Now, Hockey wants us to believe there really is a big, bad, wolf out there, this time. Really, truly. Wednesday’s lupine national account figures prove it – with big teeth. It could be the end of the good times for quite some time he is saying today along with some other blinding insights about complacency and doing nothing, both apparently, in the Treasurer’s mind legitimate options by implication.

“These national accounts confirm that when it comes to the future of Australian economy, complacency is our enemy,” he said.

“Doing nothing on economic reform is not an option for our country.”

Disposable income has dropped for two quarters in a row.

Asked whether parts of the economy now appeared to be in recession, Mr Hockey said: “No.”

“Fundamentally we are endeavouring to stabilise the rise in unemployment,” he said.

“Importantly, we are seeing strong export growth.” What he didn’t bore us with is what we already know. Export growth is nothing to brag about when commodity prices are in free fall.

Mr Hockey said he was taking advice from Treasury on the benefits of the three free trade agreements signed with China, Japan and Korea, indicating a refreshing willingness to seek expert advice but puzzling his listeners as to why it had taken so long. Does Hockeynomics mean you get the free trade deal first, fingers-crossed and then ask around Treasury later if it is any good for anything?

“I have no doubt 2015 will be better and beyond will be better than that,” he said, sounding as if he were channelling a fortune cookie.

The downturn in mining-related construction highlighted the importance of the government’s infrastructure plans, Mr Hockey said with a straight face knowing in his heart that he really had nothing on the go in terms of infrastructure and would have to suck up to Daniel Andrews after all.

Of course none of it is his fault. No-one expects the treasurer to admit any responsibility for the state of the economy when things are going south, but the consensus is that Mr Hockey won’t be dancing to Best Day of My Life in his office any time in the near future.

His PM was on ABC 7:30 tonight damning him with faint praise. Abbott said that Hockey will still turn out to be a great treasurer. Great to hear on national television that your boss clearly needs to tell us that he knows you still have your P plates on. Time perhaps Hockey cut his own quick remix, Best Day of the Rest of My Life. There are going to be a lot of bad days from here on in for the beleaguered boy who cried wolf too often. David Johnston and Christopher Pyne could join in the chorus. But the evasion is wearing painfully thin with the electorate who are suffering Federal Treasurer excuse and evasion fatigue and in pensioner’s cases about to see it in their reduced income courtesy of an indexation ‘saving’ which was due to be put through at the last possible moment today.

Yesterday afternoon in parliament, accomplished and highly-credentialed Treasury spokesman Chris Bowen linked the budget and the national accounts data. He asked Joe Hockey when he might “acknowledge that the budget has hurt the economy”.

Bowen was, typically, right on the money. It was too close for comfort for the Treasurer. Tellingly, all Hockey could do was rubbish Bowen’s intellectual capacity and tell him off for drawing attention to the truth. It was a fine evasion of ministerial responsibility.

The Treasurer told Mr Bowen that he “just doesn’t understand”.

“It’s so irresponsible for the member for McMahon to talk like that.”

Mr Hockey, get a grip. If it’s not your fault, it’s hard to see who else is responsible. You need to face the music.  You and your budget have buggered business and consumer confidence. The economy is flat-lining. Even Santa’s got the jitters: retail spending is down in the lead up to Christmas.

When you make cuts and when you kill confidence, you don’t take so much tax, Mr Hockey. So you have another round of revenue write downs on income tax and company tax. Then there is the cost of humanitarian aid and training in Iraq and the national terror wind-up. You spent up big on national security and military action. Then there’s those Senate deals you negotiated to secure support for the government’s legislative agenda. They cost a bundle. Admit it, your poor decisions and your lack of any intelligent economic strategy has been a national calamity. Couldn’t you just fess up?

Of course, it’s clear that you have been minded, recently, Mr Hockey. You did promise that there will be no more big cuts. Did some little red riding hood in PM&C whisper in your ear that cuts could take us into a real recession? It’s true. And you have got the message about the need for infrastructure spending. That’s why it’s encouraging to see you talking sense about letting Andrews have the East West Link money for public transport in Victoria. Bugger your boss. The economy needs that investment spent, despite the PM’s threats during the election as he tried to hold Victorians to ransom by threatening to take the money back unless the East West link went ahead.

So a word of advice about this line you’re running about the Senate, Mr Hockey. Give it away. You want it to approve more cuts? Seriously? You are going to repeat the same mistakes but expect different results? It is too late, there is already a whisper from Julie Bishop, aka Princess Mesothelioma that foreign aid will be cut again. She’s cut because she just found out Abbott doesn’t trust her at Lima alone, so he is sending party animal and most reluctant chaperone Andrew Robb to keep an eye on her in case she does something rash like commit Australia to some real emissions targets.

This time, Bishop is threatening to ‘hang it around Tanya Plibersek’s neck. Every day.’ That’s what she said yesterday, at least, in vindictive fury. You wouldn’t want to cross her. Hell hath no fury like a princess upstaged. You can see why she’s a natural when it comes to diplomatic relations. Only it will be your neck, Mr Hockey and your government’s neck that the albatross of another failed measure will be swinging from. That is if there’s room. There’s a fair bit of dead albatross already there, what with the GP co-payment, the fuel excise, cuts to higher education and so on.

If only those bastards in the Senate would support your economic plan? Mr Hockey, Labor has already supported ‘savings’ of $20 billion. So let’s get this straight about the cuts. You really want to inflict even more of the same damage that’s helped the Australian economy tank towards recession? Bag the opposition; blame it all on them.  It’s the only script you know. How’s that working for you, Mr Hockey It’s Labor’s fault for opposing your bad policy, your bad legislative proposals. It’s Labor’s fault for not coming up with alternatives. It’s Labor’s fault.

Mr Hockey, you should be grateful that someone in Canberra has some sense. Make that sense, experience, qualifications, international esteem and a record of success handling the GFC. Stop bagging them, get your head out of volume two of your biography and try to learn something about economics, especially macroeconomics. A nation’s budget is not like a household budget, Mr Hockey. And for God’s sake, Mr Flip-flop, decide on a message and stick to it.

Your inconsistency does not help your credibility problem.  Mr Hockey, I heard you on ABC RN Breakfast just two days ago telling listeners it was all quiet on the wolf front. It was all lambs, sunshine and green meadows. You wanted us to believe that the economy was powering along.

In fact, you even had a bit of sook when Fran Kelly queried your lie that business and consumer confidence were up. It’s not what the latest NAB report says, Joe and your listeners knew it. You waffled about solid achievement and read out some of your talking points which pretend that you have got 75% of your legislation through the parliament.

The fact is that the only bits you have got through have been the ones undoing Labor legislation, the carbon tax, the mining tax and so on. There is no record of achievement whatsoever, and you know it, Mr Hockey however hard you choose to spin it. You have no credibility. Your government is stuffed. You and Abbott are lower than a snake’s belly in the polls.

And you need that albatross off your neck for the New Year. Cut loose your own real debt and deficit disaster.

One sure way to fix all this, Mr Hockey. You and Tony get together with Peta and Michael and call the GG over the holiday break. Forget debt and deficit disaster. Go for a double dissolution. It’s not only richly alliterative. It’s your only option.

Pyne’s Tertiary Education ‘Reforms’, a desperate gamble with our children’s futures.

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The most important thing is not that you have the best university in the world but the best university system in the world. You don’t want to have one Rolls-Royce and 12 clapped-out Commodores.

Greg Craven, ACU and personal friend of Tony Abbott

Education Minister ‘mincing poodle’ Christopher Pyne was yapping all over the airwaves this morning over the failure of his so-called higher education ‘refahhrms’ as he somehow manages to pronounce the word reforms. He sounded fractious, almost shaping to hit Chris Uhlmann with his man-bag this morning on RN AM. And he was downright bitchy later, twitting Uhlmann when pressed on his illogicality in insisting that the Senate were obstructive whilst congratulating his party on getting 75% of its legislation passed.

“I thought you were referring to my higher education bill. In fact you said that most of it hadn’t gotten through by the end of the year and I was correcting you.”

To hear Pyne, this morning, he was the only one making any sense. He was a great hard-working minister, even if he said so himself. Everyone else including the slackers tuning in had merely been twiddling their thumbs in wilful idleness. Why he had been feverishly working his little fingers to the bone to make sure even Lazarus was fully texted.

The universities were all on board, the diligent minister pointed out, neglecting to mention the 20% funding cut and the hints of more to come he had applied along with the lure of being able to charge what they liked when the Bill got through, to bring them into line. But everyone else was out of line, especially those obstructionists and vandals in the senate. It was enough to make a man weep into his Rolodex.

But he was not a quitter, he reassured himself and anyone else listening before misquoting Churchill in the hope of building an image of heroic, nation-saving resolve. Instead he sounded as if he couldn’t even get a famous quote right, let alone any reform. What he meant to say was:

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

It is the ending of Pyne. But he’s only got himself to blame. He didn’t do his homework and he didn’t prepare his case. He hasn’t really put a coherent case. There isn’t one. But that didn’t stop him plunging ahead with his scheme to scrap what was working well and fairly for massive, unregulated fee hikes that would make a lot of money for banks and other money lenders, price ordinary people out of the market and put the others into debt for much of their working lives.

Not making a case while making cuts, has been another blunder, another shot in the Gucci leather boot. Now, thanks to his ineptitude, instead of being converted to any cause, the public is totally off-side and confused. To the public it looks as if the government is arguing that deregulation is needed because the Abbott government is committed to taking 20% of funding out of the tertiary education sector. That’s what happens when governments present us with a solution to a non-existent problem. Yet there was a token attempt to consult.

To be fair to Pyne, although the facts do him absolutely no credit, he did go through the motions. There was very limited, unconvincing attempt at a “Clayton’s consultation” before deregulation of tertiary education was dropped on an unsuspecting public in the May budget. When it landed, it looked like a turkey; it looked ideological rather than sensible, workable or necessary. It still looks that way.

Of course, Pyne had cobbled together a Mickey Mouse ‘review’ comprising two right wing yesterday’s men and nobody else. Former Howard Education Minister David Kemp and his adviser Andrew Norton were paid well to barrack for complete deregulation, the solution which, amazingly, like the commission of audit’s “solutions”, was the very answer the government wanted (even though it has never been able to say why.) It was also the same answer that they had come up with in Howard’s time and one that voters had rejected in 1993 in the “unlosable election.”  Pyne appears to have not bothered with any homework. He was in too much of a hurry to impress. It was rush, rush, rush.

The public was given four weeks to respond.  Only two of the eighty responses were from student organisations. The Abbott government produced no evidence that the changes would produce any of the results claimed. No tangible outcomes. Nothing. And it had no model to show what a deregulated system would look like in future. That’s because no-one knows what will happen when you throw caution (and the system) to the winds of an unregulated market.

Pyne made a big deal of university support:

But they asked the Senate to pass the bill. They asked the crossbenchers to pass the bill. Every single university representative organisation did. So you’d have to say on balance they must be pretty supportive of the Government.

In fact, Mr Pyne all your listeners would say on balance is that Universities were happy to be allowed to set their own fees. They were agreeing to a scheme which would allow them to charge what the market would bear. Your 20% cuts may also have helped them in their thinking. Nothing like a loaded gun to the head to induce clear reason.

The proposed changes will make it harder for the average person to obtain tertiary education but will assist greatly with its restriction to a better class of person. If you hate the idea of an open, equal society and if you will do everything you can to further the interests of wealth and privilege in an age where all measures show that inequality is steadily increasing in all western economies, then you will back Christopher Pyne as he takes a punt with our children’s futures. He’s got nothing to lose.

Pyne’s ‘reforms’ are nothing but an ideologically-driven gamble, that will lock up educational opportunity, whilst introducing a climate of competition that will see the wealthy and prestigious universities doing very well while all the rest suffer badly.

The Abbott government’s higher education reforms are toxic. They were not popular the first time they were tried. Pyne’s pickle is no surprise to anyone, really, except the coalition, and a few rusted-on neo-cons, because the ‘reforms are a solution in search of a problem. They won’t work. They will benefit no-one, apart from banks and other money lenders and University bursars. And, of course Christopher Pyne. Perhaps we should leave the last word to him. This morning in true Abbott-government fashion, the current failure of this ill-conceived, ill-prepared, badly managed dog of a policy, was a temporary setback to the Minister, and, verified by the highest authority in the land, the Murdoch press, all the fault of that nasty Senate:

No. The Senate is what it is. We have to negotiate with the crossbenchers. There was a Telegraph poll about two weeks ago which said that 66 per cent of the Australian public believe that the Senate was being obstructionist, not constructive. That makes it very difficult for the Government.

Diddums. Feel sorry for yourself, Mr Pyne, we don’t feel sorry for you. You mean, you have to deal with an Opposition? You mean it’s hard work being democratic? Difficult? Go drown in your self-pity. The rest of Australia is saying thank God for the Opposition.

Time to come clean, Joe Hockey, your budget, your government and your political self are all dead in the water.

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joe looking under siege

Mr Hockey, you need to come clean. Come clean with the Australian people. You can start with being honest with yourself. Take a deep breath. Deep down, you know you stuffed up the Budget. Now you are stuffed. Your government’s pretty stuffed, too, largely thanks to you. Next to your Prime Minister, you are the chief architect of its disaster. And you know it.

It wasn’t a little stuff-up. You stuffed your first budget comprehensively, from design to delivery. First let’s take the delivery. You couldn’t put a foot right. The ‘poor people don’t drive cars’ thing, the cigar thing, the dancing in your office on Budget Night to name but three of your many debacles; none of that helped, even though there is probably a Darwin Award nomination for life-endangering stupidity in it. We won’t even go into your appearance on the BBC in October when you were caught out on greenhouse emissions. Your party denies climate change. And you deny that there is any link between economic activity and global warming. But it would not have mattered how badly you had carried on, Joe your Budget Disaster is more deeply-rooted than that. Generally, a government can ride its first budget home without too much trouble but your government’s first budget fell at the first hurdle, the hurdle of macroeconomics.

Macroeconomics is something your shock troops, the Commission of Audit failed to understand; something no reasonable person would expect them to understand. They are just wealthy businessmen after all, business-card carrying bovver boys, sent out to work us over and soften us up so that you could budget-cut the bejesus out of our standard of living. But they got it wrong. As you would expect from a mob from business backgrounds, they didn’t know better because their experience is almost solely in microeconomics. And it showed in their absurd first premise.

The Commission adopted the assumption – as the underlying basis for its recommended budget cuts – that overall unemployment would stay close to 6 percent whether any, some, or even all of its suggestions were implemented. It was, and remains, an absurd over-simplification. You can’t make billion dollar cuts without increasing unemployment.

You increase unemployment: you decrease your government’s income tax revenue.  And it has all come back to bite you on your rump. If it were a horse, you would take your budget out the back and shoot it, Joe.  But in politics, you know it won’t be the horse that will be sent to the knackery.

Talk it up all you may, the economy is not responding the way you said it would. And you just sound daily less competent, less credible, less believable.

No good shouting in parliament, either, Mr Hockey. You look and sound desperate. And no wonder. Unemployment is up according to the ABS. Business and consumer confidence are down, according the NAB. That’s what you would have expected had you troubled to look at the bigger picture. Had you known to look at the macroeconomics.

Adding even further, now, to your desperation is the way your party has shot its credibility to pieces by promising no cuts as one your election ‘promises’. You lied about what you aimed to do to get elected. And you have lied about that lie ever since. You can’t get your cuts and new taxes (let’s not call them savings) past the Senate yet you have no other strategy. As the PM admitted yesterday, there is no Plan B. All your desperate, hypocritical bipartisan appeals have fallen on deaf ears.

So now, the best you can do is rubbish Labor for behaving well, like an opposition.  This horse is well and truly dead, Joe. Stop flogging it. Besides, you make yourselves appear as if you are still behaving like an opposition. And there’s a double jeopardy with that: do you really believe the people won’t remember your own opposition antics? Or maybe triple jeopardy in that it is always a bad idea to blame someone else every time you make a mistake. You don’t even have to be in politics to know that.

Of course it’s not all your own fault: falling commodity prices have painted you further into a corner. In addition to your own bad medicine, your own incompetence, there’s been a big drop in overseas earnings, despite a modest increase in exports. And we stand on the threshold of another GFC if oil prices continue to plummet. But don’t expect sympathy and understanding.

Remember when terms of trade turned crook when you were in Opposition and you still blamed Swannie? Remember the ways you rubbished Labor for a budget deficit blowout caused largely by falling commodity prices? Now it’s happening to you. The only difference is that Wayne Swan had a few clues. In fact, he was internationally recognised for his smarts as a treasurer.  And he understood macroeconomics.

Stupidity is repeating the same mistake and expecting a different result, Joe. When you don’t know what you are doing, you fall back on repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results. Against all advice, against all evidence you reckon that a few more cuts will get the budget on track. Unbelievable! And you reckon you can hector Labor into dropping their opposition to your fundamentally flawed and unfair budget and pass the cuts in the senate. Incredible!

Let’s just get this straight. You rubbish Labor. You accuse them of being wreckers and incompetents and then you appeal for their bipartisan support for a budget that is fundamentally flawed, a budget that just won’t work. You lie about their record of success in government. You spin the old debt and deficit disaster slogan every time you open your mouth. And you expect Labor support? How’s that working for you?

Time to man up and take stock even if the truth hurts, Joe. The truth is that you are being sidelined because your PM and your party have lost all confidence in you. Just admit it. OK, we know that type of thing is hard for you. Honesty is not something we have come to experience recently from the Liberal brand. Denial is your stronger suit. We heard you havering on ABC Radio National this morning. Fran Kelly asked if you were being sidelined now that Michael Thawley has been appointed secretary of PMC. She clearly touched your thaw spot. Your response was to try to shoot the messenger; rubbish things you see published. Abbott and Thawley, themselves, you claim, couldn’t believe ‘that article’. Shall we take that as a yes, then?  No more hocking, Mr Sooky. Let’s look how your PMC has worded it:

“Mr Thawley is expected to advise on how budget strategy should be recalibrated, and then co-ordinate all arms of economic policy including industry policy, labour market policy, education, transport, infrastructure and tax reform.”

Sounds a lot like he’ll be doing your job, Joe. Best you fess up. Throw yourself on his mercy. Start with telling the truth about the way you hung Napthine out to dry in the Victorian election.

The truth is you chose to hang on to news about your government’s decision to soften on privatising university fees and on GP co-payments when earlier signals would have thrown Nappers a lifeline. OK you are still pretending about the GP co-payment because you want to fiddle the books at MYEFO. You want to leave in the receipts from a co-payment you will never collect just to adjust the bottom line a bit as Labor said in the house yesterday. It won’t work, Joe. The electorate is smarter than you think. And tell your boss to back off with his bullshit about withholding the 3 billion for the East-West link project. You pledged those funds last year for public transport.

Now Peta Credlin let the GP co-payment genie out of the bottle without telling you and you tried to stuff it back in.  Your own MPs were forced to ask reporters what their own party’s policy was. It wasn’t a good look, Joe. No good whinging about her authority getting above her pay grade; better get used to it. You are well and truly second fiddle. There only be a lot more of the same from Thawley.

Time to stop blaming Labor for everything, Joe. It won’t wash unless, of course, you really want to sound like an opposition. We’re all heartily sick of it although some of us are sure your lot could blame Labor for the Ebola crisis and the loss of MH17. Time to stop pretending you have the foggiest idea of how to be a treasurer. Do the decent thing. Come clean; make a clean breast of it. Apologise for your stuff ups. Admit your own ignorance and your mistakes. Step aside before you are pushed. It’s for your own good and it’s best for everyone in the end. It will be a lot less messy and much less painful all round. Drop out now and avoid the rush at the end of your government’s first term. You will only get one term. You never know, you could start a trend.

Abbott government denies reality and lessons in Victorian Election; a one term federal government is now certain.

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abbott tired and angry

Tony Abbott, one of the best things that you could do right now is pick up the phone and congratulate Victorian State Premier-elect Daniel Andrews. No good going on telly and pretending you have spoken with him. You look knackered. And no-one believes a word you say anymore. No good repeating the falsehoods about what he’ll have to pay to get out of the East West link contract. Or that CFMEU slogan. Not sure why you would even try. Your pants are on fire so often the CFA has a truck permanently parked outside your office.

And it was really dumb to ask Dan Andrews to start breaking his promise. The man’s not even sworn in yet. Did you think about the message it would send about you? The PM who is pathologically incapable of making any promise he intends to honour. The PM who sees promises as made to be broken. Do you really need to make that signal any clearer?

We understand if you feel a bit shook up right now. Get Peta to dial the number. She’s good at that type of thing. So is your new head of PMC, that blast from the Howard past, former adviser to the man of steel himself, Michael Thawley, but this can’t wait until he’s on deck. He only started today. Besides, he will be busy doing Joe’s job. Very busy. That’s why you hired him. And your obsession with the Howard era, a time when conservatives where lucky rather than successful. (You sure know where to get them, Mr Abbott.)

Hope he gets on with Peta. Joe won’t like him. Or the way you have by-passed him. OK, there is the small thing of his political ineptitude and almost total lack of any basic numeracy. But he’s a mate, isn’t he?

Well, no. Expect Joe to throw a tantrum and sook for weeks. Odds on it will be hate at first sight. You will have to choose between them. That means, somehow, you will have to be decisive. Like now. Or you will be further up shit creek than dead man walking David Johnston.

It’s better late than never even if it won’t look terribly sincere. Not that looking insincere has ever troubled you in the past. Sincerity is the most important thing in politics. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made. Look at it this way. The nation will see it is the right thing to do. Even if you have a bit of trouble with that type of thing.

Congratulate Dan. He will thank you for it. But he won’t work for you, Tony. With you, not for you. He hates everything you stand for. Especially the lying. And the insincerity. And the way you take cheap shots at unions. OK, your callous indifference to the rest of humanity grates with him, too. And your lack of decency is opposed to everything he stands for.

Unlike you, Dan means what he says. He will walk away from the East West link project which was never going to relieve congestion anyway, despite its dividends for your financial backers. Public transport is the go. The 3 billion you gave Victoria for that purpose can go back to its original hypothecation. Love that word, don’t you. Don’t pretend you can take it back. You don’t want to add “Indian-giver” to your long list of demerit points. Victorians need public transport. There are 65,000 more out of work than when the conservatives came into power down here. They are living proof your policies don’t work and that the cuts you’ve made and the bad decisions you have taken have had a massive impact. But they need to be able to get around. You don’t want to make them any unhappier. They hate you as it is.

Look at Dan as a mate, not as the enemy. After all, in a way, you are his benefactor, a sort of fairy godfather if you will forgive the image. Your unfair Budget, your sneaky fuel excise and your whopping lies about ABC cuts helped Dan to defeat the Napthine government. That and the fact that he had the people behind him. Ordinary people. People who have to work for a living. If they can find work.

Ordinary people are dead-set hostile about the GP co-payment. 46% of those surveyed in an exit poll on Saturday instanced their dislike of your government as influencing their vote. So you won’t be intruding. You are already in the frame, so to speak. So why the delay?  Is it an ego thing? You see yourself as the big cheese and Dan just a little Babybel? You are having a sook because you were told you were not wanted during the campaign? You were told you were toxic many times by many people? Get used to it. It is only going to get a lot worse before the end of your government in two years.

And get over it. You don’t have a minute to waste. The truth, Mr Abbott, is that you are in denial. It is well known that you are a climate change denier. What is less well broadcast is that you and your parliamentary party are all reality deniers. It’s what you stand for. That’s what conservatives do, isn’t it? You deny the reality of countless challenges to our survival in favour of a complacent expectation that things will always be the same. You’ve had it easy all your life. You want to keep it easy. No nasty jolts from reality. Slippers by the fire, dinner in the oven, wife in the kitchen, children in bed, investment dividends in the bank and superannuation millions piling up by the minute. That’s your comfort zone. You have already got a comfortable life and you want to keep it, don’t you? Hang on to what you have; bugger the have-nots, they don’t deserve wasting time over. It’s their fault if they’ve stuffed up their lives. Handouts only weaken their resilience and initiative.

Don’t waste time whinging about being misunderstood – about the need to get your message out. You have got your message out.  It’s in your unfair budget. It’s in the fact that you can spend billions on the things of war and nothing on the people; spend billions on war craft but you can’t give a pay rise to the armed forces; the people who staff your war games. It’s in your promotion of coal and your services to miners. It’s in your ignorance and stupidity on climate change and renewable energy. The more you get your message out, the more you it nails you down. You are yesterday. Your defeat is inevitable. Yet you still cling to the delusion that you can explain yourself; explain everything away. So rather than face the music you send out your explain it away troops, your reality-denialists Andrew Robb, and, spare us, Julie Bishop.

Andrew Robb waffled about inevitability on Insiders on ABC Sunday TV. Watch that one. Claimed that if your popularity is shithouse from the start, there’s not much you can do about it. Is he trying to send you a message? He’s wrong of course. But you are in trouble if he’s right. Two more years of negative popularity and declining support and you are history, one term or not. His denial is worth noting because it condenses much of the denialism intrinsic to your terminal condition.

“I don’t accept that we had a big influence, of course we’ll be realistic, we’ll have a look at the implications but clearly from my experience and my observations, this was a state election overwhelmingly fought on state issues,” he said.

“I spent a lot of time yesterday going around the booths … there wasn’t a word of Abbott, not a word,” Mr Robb said.

All this means is that Victorians were too polite to tell you, Mr Robb, not that you are much of a listener anyway. And when he says he will have a look at the implications he already shows he has a closed mind. Other MPs had a different experience. One federal Labor MP Anthony Byrne relayed this message to Abbott from a voter who had voted for the Coalition in 2013.

“God I wish today was the federal election, when is it? I am counting the days until I can get rid of the f—ing bastard”.

Julie Bishop was despatched to do what you couldn’t, Mr Abbott. But she didn’t do a lot of good. OK you have all got talking points about the achievements of your government but it’s not playing that well in Victoria. Or any other state, really. Bishop then got confused with the attention she was getting and started spruiking nuclear energy. Hose her down, Tony. No votes in nuclear. Renewables are cheaper. Better for you, too. And the environment.

No. Call your dogs home. Call off everything. Gather your troops around you. Explain to them that you have wasted too much of the nation’s time and money, cruelled too many futures to count. Call Dan and be the first to tell him that you admire him for his win and his integrity and that as soon as you can you will be calling a double dissolution. The writing is on the wall.

Asylum seekers need our compassion and our help, Scott Morrison, not “enhanced processing” or expanded powers.

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A trawler carrying 38 Sri Lankan Tamil asylum seekers was intercepted by an Australian border protection vessel off Cocos Island two weeks ago and handed over to the Sri Lankan Navy. There were six children aboard. The Sri Lankans are the first to be turned back in five months as Australia’s highest court hears a test case challenging the government’s right to intercept asylum seekers’ boats outside its territorial waters.

At the same time, the Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment Bill which is currently before the Australian Senate represents an unparalleled aggrandisement of the Immigration Minister’s authority and an all-out assault on refugee law.

The recent dilatory disclosure of the latest interception, well after the event, is disturbing in many ways. First, there is once again that toxic smoke-cloud of secrecy which enshrouds so much of our immigration policies. It cloaks all dealings of the tirelessly self-promoting Immigration Minister, Scott Morrison and the increasingly arbitrary actions of his own paramilitary Sturmabteilung, the Australian Border Force.

It is added to by a layer of befogging sophistry and specious argument often blended with a testy belligerence such as Morrison’s infamously disingenuous justification of his policy of deterrence as proceeding from a desire to prevent accidental drownings. It is present whenever he is publicly questioned such as his offensively belligerent and shamefully disrespectful hectoring of Gillian Triggs at the Australian Human Rights Commission recent inquiry into the detention of asylum-seeker children.

Morrison’s latest act of piracy or ‘interception’ was not reported immediately but hidden, it seems, for as long as possible. This has become a pattern, although on this occasion the fact that the action was illegal and that the ‘enhanced questioning’ was both wrong and against international law might have also contributed to its suppression. Whatever his precise motive, he was, however, just following the LNP coalition party line of being lean or mean with the truth.

For a party that promised the high road of open and transparent government, the LNP Coalition has done its best to crawl in the opposite direction. Delaying, suppressing, concealing, disputing and denying have now become its typical response to challenges. The Abbott government increasingly stands revealed as a government of broken promises and lies whose behaviour has cost it both credibility and legitimacy. Its governance lacks principle, its day to day conduct is dictated by a desperate necessity to pick a winner.

Nowhere is all of this better seen than in Morrison’s regime. Ruthless expediency and duplicity combine in what it grandly and falsely represents as border security and control. It’s touted as a runaway success. Yet Morrison’s operation, in fact, represent a callous indifference or calculated cruelty to others and a wilful determination to dishonour or evade Australia’s international obligations. It is illegal. It is wrong. It is dangerous. Shame on you, Abbott; shame on all of us.

The Abbott government has rightfully earned Australia United Nations’ censure for its indefinite detention, its detention of children. Its ABF shames us before the rest of the world. Yet, with characteristic hubris, Scott Morrison has recently blithely dismissed all such criticism with the line that that Australia’s immigration policies ‘will always be made in Australia’ as if we can walk away from the law or our international obligations any time it suits us.

His department’s secrecy has been defended by the Minister in several unsatisfactory ways, including his infamous ‘on-water matters’ excuse which is predicated on the fiction that ‘border protection’ would be somehow jeopardised if made public. ‘Loose lips sink ships’ was a British propaganda poster slogan of the last world war. Morrison is clearly either in some time-warp or he is labouring under the misapprehension that Australia is at war with asylum seekers. Nothing is further from the truth. They are part of our human family. We owe them the duty of care we owe to our brothers and sisters, daughters and sons. Most of us know this instinctively. Yet for Morrison and Abbott, they are the enemy. Horrifying as it is, it is not Morrison’s or his party’s only delusion.

Morrison likes to hark back to his party’s campaign slogan, stop the boats, as if successful government were merely a checklist of promises to be kept to the electorate by any means. He is also a little too interested in his own image, paying staff to google his name and to monitor his press. Little concern is spared for reflecting on the ways turning back the boats represent a scandalous abandonment of all civilised behaviour and a wilful flouting of all relevant international agreements and expectations.

If Morrison’s habitual secrecy is a continuing concern, what it covers on this occasion is even more alarming, the introduction by stealth of so-called ‘enhanced screening’. Were it not tight-lipped about its covert operations, the ABF might divulge the nature of its new, improved, streamlined fast-track ‘enhanced’ screening process, a self-parodying ‘process’ which in Orwellian Newspeak manner grotesquely distorts the meaning of the word enhancement to mean impoverishment and debasement.

Flouting accepted international practices, asylum seekers face a set of simple questions on the spot from an ABF operative with translator. It is brutally swift and unsatisfactory. There are enormous flaws in this impromptu, unsupervised, unscrutinised ‘process.’ Not the least of these faults is the likelihood that the subject of interrogation does not understand the seriousness of his entrapment.

Enhanced screening’s worst feature is, of course, that it is a cruel and cynical hoax, an instrument of coercion and duplicity contrived to return asylum-seekers hastily back where they came from – and further persecution. It is a shameful deception.

In the recent case, moreover, all but one aboard the trawler were returned to jail in Sri Lanka where they have been jailed while awaiting court cases set for May 2015 for illegally leaving the country. The all-but-one returned statistics reveal that the ‘process’ is a monstrous lie, a shameful sham and a travesty of due process. The world knows that on past evidence most, if not all, of these asylum seekers are likely to be genuine refugees. It is also widely understood that returning these people is to endanger their well-being. Experts attest that returning these Sri Lankans amounts to refoulement, or delivering them into the hands of their persecutors and oppressors.

The Tamil Refugee Council has said that the return almost certainly condemned them to persecution, including torture by returning them to their homeland. Furthermore, the screening system used by authorities is an illegal and insufficient test, the council said.

“The idea that you can properly test a person’s claim for refugee status at sea has been condemned by well-respected legal and human rights groups many times, yet this government cares nothing for its legal, moral or ethical obligations,” stated the council’s Trevor Grant.

For Australia, however, an arrogant ‘made in Australia’ evasion is all that Morrison bothers to offer to defend his proposed changes to the law. Then he repeats the lie that Australia has discharged its international obligations to refugees. He knows, like all tyrants, that to repeat a monstrous lie is to give it life. His latest moves serve to bring into sharper focus the cruelty and calculated inhumanity we now choose to inflict on asylum seekers; the bad faith with which we persecute those who in good faith seek asylum.

In itself, turning back the boats is a government’s disgraceful capitulation to the politics of petty ignorance, fear and chauvinism. Most of us can see it is wrong. Most of us know it is wrong. It is persecution and torture. It is a wilful denial of what makes us human.

What makes it even more disturbing is the perverse joy, and evident self-satisfaction, animating the Minister, his government and his key staff. Most Australians would blush with shame at the latest UN condemnation of our policy of indefinite detention as torture, but for Morrison and his government it is just another ‘on water matter’, an inconsequential irritation that will not deter him, nor cause him to reflect on the essential cruelty and betrayal of humanity that are the core of our immigration policy. The act does not need extending by legislation. It needs to be thrown out, along with its authors and supporters. Our humanity, our innate sense of justice and our compassion demand no less of us.

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Clowns in politics, the Victorian state election and its coverage.

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Victorian State Election, yawn! That’s how TV, our medium of choice, packages the campaign. It’s how it packages our participation in our future. ‘Journalists’ jostle with each other to deplore the lack of anything interesting in the Victorian election. That’s how most see their role. It’s a derivative, generic and seductive interpretation. But does it do any of us a real service? Or is it self-fulfilling?

“Media commentators” mimic the judges’ panel on reality TV singing, dancing or cooking shows. Must be a whole cross-over thing going on. They scold candidates, obsess over performance and appearance, skim over substance then bag the whole shebang for not entertaining us. ‘Lighten up’ is the ever present subtext. Sex it up is another. Depth, detail, or even accuracy are for party-poopers. In an era of contracting worldwide attention spans, the trivial is king.

Sheesh! Listen up candidates. WOTF? What is wrong with you? Don’t you know you are in show business? Show business for ugly people? Like the commentariat, itself, only less powerful, less prolific and harder to photograph? Get your act together! Entertain us. For God’s sake don’t challenge us, make us think or expect us to do or know anything.

It’s a disturbing trend. And it is widespread. Is this how we kid ourselves our apathy is OK? Is this how we assuage our guilt for our lack of attention, interest or involvement? Are we really so ignorant or so confused that we believe that politics, our chance to have some say in our increasingly more powerful and intrusive government, is really only a form of show business?

Whatever the case, the results are bad news for democracy. It’s the kiss of death to reporting and it’s the kiss of death to effective representation. Yet we must not over-simplify causality. In the end, we get the politicians we deserve. That’s how it works. Almost. We get by with a little help from our friends. Participation in politics is mediated and massaged by an ever expanding, ever-present digital media. And, for a decreasing few, by an endangered popular press.

Print media is in extremis, an increasingly unprofitable atavism in an era where consumers have been colonised by the Digital Empire. Our major papers have, perhaps, two years’ life before they, too are forced to fold, driven into extinction by their digital competitors. Internet killed the video star and then went on to massacre print media. The first step was to rip its heart out.

A beleaguered media, is increasingly side-tracked into distraction and diversion instead of investigating and reporting facts. Murdoch media goes a stage further towards complete surrender. It combines diversion and distraction with dutiful distortion; abandoning objective investigation or reporting for brazen partisan support; a cheer squad for the interests of the Murdoch empire. Or something more sinister.

In the 2013 election of the Abbott government, the Murdoch Press became a death squad for its opponents, the Labor Government(s) of Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd. Given its dwindling circulation and rising unprofitability, it was probably its last gasp effort. But you don’t have to be openly partisan or in print to offer another kiss of death, the kiss of irrelevancy.

Josie Taylor, last night on local ABC 7:30 report, a show which will be axed as part of Abbott’s ‘efficiency dividend’, asked a random grab of light-weights for some superficial election eve fluff. They obliged with a consensus that the campaign had been dull and boring. Josie commiserated: “I thought that’s what you would say.”

The subtext was motivational in a way. Well, we have to vote. These clowns are forcing us to do something we resent. So let’s save face by dismissing them. We know diddly-squat about the campaign because we haven’t been paying attention. But, hey, that’s all their fault for being boring. Their fault for being politicians.

The morphing of information into infotainment with a fair dollop of ridicule is aided by choosing crossover commentators. Waleed Aly is an intelligent, scholarly, thoughtful and perceptive person. His choice of stand-up comedian, Claire Hooper on his election eve ABC radio show may have been to redress listeners’ boredom. His station’s attempt to lighten up may also be enlightened. Commentators can come from any walk of life. But the exercise is fraught with peril when it panders to our prejudices and reinforces our rejection of politics in the guise of light entertainment.

A night ago, called to give her views on the state election, Ms Hooper replied with an anecdote to the effect that a mate of hers didn’t even know the Labor candidate’s name. Came up, she said, with “Dennis Andrews”, an amalgam of both Dennis Napthine and Andrew Daniels. On one level this says a lot about what’s in the popular mind about State Politics. Boring! Like a Maths lesson. On the other hand its relentless negativity reinforces and legitimises our own abdication of responsibility.

Deploring dullness in politics may be an excuse for opting out of something we vaguely sense we ought to take an interest in. Ceding the field of participation in politics to entertainment; to show business is, however, no solution. Unless, of course we relish having clowns in politics. 

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Abbott government runs aground on its own duplicity; Prime Minister faces existential crisis.

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Tony Abbott, catapulted by fate into an unexpected and totally undeserved captaincy, continues to confound critics and supporters alike by leading his government from crisis to catastrophe. Confirming all initial fears about his total unsuitability as Prime Minister, in the space of just one year, Abbott jerks and twitches frenetically across the political stage like some manic over-charged Energiser Bunny, a battery operated suicide bomber.

Feverishly, assiduously, the little manikin continues to wreck his own career, Australia’s international reputation and any prospects of a Liberal re-election.  A loose-lipped, loose cannon who is ever fast and loose with the truth, Abbott is an accomplished one-man wrecking machine who has cleared the decks of HMS Team Australia of any last vestige of optimism.

Newspoll’s latest result has Labor leading 55% to Coalition 45%. If an election were to be held now the Coalition would be wiped out.  On balance it would be a good outcome. Both at home and overseas, the Abbott government has lost all credibility and the capacity to act like a government let alone a world citizen. His G20 debacle made Abbott look like an international pariah on climate change and a narrow, inward-looking self-serving politician with nothing to offer on an international or intellectual plane, further lowering his stocks both at home and abroad. So on the nose, is Abbott that his own party have called it electoral suicide to be seen out with him in public in Victoria. “Eyebrows”, John Howard, seventy-five and not out, is a former Liberal Prime Minister and respected authority on Australian cricket, whose appearance and stagey, manic manufactured bonhomie resemble a demented garden gnome, has been wheeled out to press the startled flesh in the Victorian State Election on behalf of lost-cause Liberal party pretender Denis Napthine. Napthine, whose ineffectual efforts so far and his cronyism towards powerful local supporters suggest that we would all be safer and better off when he goes back to Warrnambool to resume his career as a well-connected country vet with a naturally long reach. The nearest “Nappers”, or “Kermit” as he is sometimes known, will get to help from Abbott’s Cabinet will be this evening when Julie schmoozes the Mount Macedon landed gentry, rubbing along at sunset in the light of the Rock, sipping bubbly and swapping stories about pony ownership, the cost of good domestic service and the importance of choosing the right investment broker.

As the parliamentary year shudders to a halt, with less than nothing significant or praise-worthy accomplished, the government’s paltry achievements amount to an unparalleled deficit in every dimension, be it moral, intellectual, political, diplomatic or fiscal.   Joe Hockey has blown out the budget deficit by over 50 billion dollars; Julie Bishop’s grandstanding, demanding and attention seeking at the cost of any useful diplomacy has blown off just about every world leader who matters; Hunt, Minister for Environmental denial, Ever Begging to Differ and Direct Action Fairies at the bottom of the garden, has blown all credibility while raising serious questions as to his sanity with his rabid, irrational babbling.

Exhausting all reason in promoting an untried, unproven, unbelievable, direct action scam which pays polluters out of the public purse, Hunt is also a future-wrecker whose breathtaking arrogance and intransigence in interviews is made of the very stuff which has brought his leader down.

Lies about ABC cuts have been the latest to bring Abbott’s credibility lower. Lies are this government’s lingua franca, yet when Defence Minister David Johnston chose to tell the truth about the ASC, very publicly not trusting it to build a canoe, he was immediately put in the naughty corner and made to apologise. It won’t help any future sale of the ASC but then, neither has the government’s clear predilection for favouring Japanese tenders in any future submarine building contracts.

HMS Team Australia, the ill-fated, unseaworthy, ship of shame which plies its wretched human trade under a range of foreign flags, has been on a disaster course since its commission. It is now holed up on liar’s reef, leaking badly and under attack from all former backers including Murdoch’s phone-tapping hacks, and other sundry, craven, self-promoters who daily deal death and misery in international business and finance as they seek to increase their capacity to run the world purely and simply for their own profit. Even Abbott hagiographers have gone on the offensive. The Daily Telegraph recently observed of Tony Abbott:

He is fast proving to be the least conservative leader the conservative side of politics has ever seen.

Now the weather is turning increasingly foul and a cruel sea is rising. The scurvy crew is either drunk or off its face on other substances. And there’s been frigging in the rigging. Narcissists, Morrison and Bishop, totally power-besotted, drunk on self-importance, vainglorious omnipotence and the sadistic excitement of deciding whose chances they can cruel next, have been caught paying a fortune on special Google-me staff whose sole job is to search all media to find mention of themselves.

HMS Team Australia, a ship of shame, has been further disgraced by its captain’s blatant attempt to re-write United Nations Conventions on Refugees so that Australia can perfect its translation of foreign policy into an instrument of torture, locking up the world’s most vulnerable and needy, including the indefinite detention of children.

Throwing cabin boy Hunt out of their double bunk, Abbott kicks ship’s cat, Christopher Pyne. Pyne dashes caterwauling up the rigging. Abbott hears him promising to the winds that he will door-knock every door in his electorate. He will personally let voters know how being indebted for life is in fact a liberating form of servitude for all those who aspire to a university education. Voters will be dancing in the streets with joy, when I get the message out there, he howls into a mounting storm. Yet even that dead albatross around Hockey’s neck could tell any one of them that it’s not about getting the message out. This government has made bad decisions, bad policies, bad choices. More spin won’t help a bit. HMS Team Australia is too badly damaged to put about or limp back to port.

“Lash me to the wheel, Hunt”, Abbott rasps desperately, knowing no other course.

Bugger the barnacles! Abandon Ship now, Mr Abbott, before it’s too late for all of us.

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So you just told the crew that you might knock the barnacles off, Mr Prime Minister? Or should that be Cap’n Pugwash? Brilliant! We don’t know who writes your material, even though we taxpayers are paying a fortune in salaries and bonuses, but the latest metaphor takes the (ship’s) biscuit for black comedy. Barnacles!

It wasn’t them? OK, it was that Truth Parrott that so regularly but unpredictably shits all over your outfit. Just won’t shut up, will it? Annabel Crabb first noticed it. Your parrot squawks out the truth at the worst moments, Cap’n Pugwash. Knock off the barnacles, indeed. Best you listen this time.

Where would you begin? Your Ship of Fools, SS Team Australia, worm eaten, listing badly to starboard, almost rudderless, is now aground on Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire Reef and she’s leaking badly while that scurvy backbench crew becomes daily ever more mutinous. Mutinous? Not just the back bench. There’s friggin in the riggin, Cap’n while you’ve been down below.

Hell, even Pyne the ship’s cat, deserted his watch, to write submissions about the ABC. That’s right, a submission to his own government! The ship’s cat attempted to jump ship. Or perhaps he believes he’s already on another one.  Or he’s dived in after all the other rats. Cabin boy Hockey is already bobbing around in the drink, furiously treading water, like some kind of human buoyancy marker.

Signaleer Malcolm Rotary Nuts goes on ABC to lie about your lie about not cutting funding. Now, a few days later he spills his guts and calls it a cut. Lies about his lie about your lie about a lie. He’s trying to send you a message, Cap’n.

Ditzy Ms Bishop, your recruit from SS Princess Mesothelioma, just won’t stick to her knitting. At first you liked her style. Tough customer. Hard as nails and as smart and flash as a rat with a gold tooth, she made an early forward showing, when she broke all the rules to toss Steve Bracks out of his NY consular berth to repay a favour for Nick Minchin. Then she yanked Mike Rann home from London eighteen months early in favour of Alexander Downer because Downer was owed a big favour, too.

Downer, you recall, bugged Timor Leste leaders during delicate negotiations on the Timor Sea resources treaty in 2004. Woodside Petroleum did well out of it and returned the favour by finding a position for Alexander afterwards.Through his consulting firm Bespoke Approach, Downer became a paid consultant to Woodside Australia’s largest hydrocarbon company, which stands to make billions of dollars. No doubt you have something similar lined up for yourself with the coal industry.

But once on deck, Bishop has been a shocker. Not only has she insulted every world leader you would want on your side, including China and the entire UN Security Council, she set you up for an Obama Broadside. Stitched you right up. Ruined your G20.

Watch your back Captain Abbott. Forget the so-called death stare. Bishop has her eyes on the main prize. You never even questioned why she was so below decks at the time. Now you know. And she’s up in the ratings. All sorts of favourable mentions including Woman of the year for Harpers and even a push from the Fairfax press is whispering sweet nothings in our ear.

Risky recruit, Cap’n. Can’t say you weren’t warned, though. Wrong team. Not your team. Not only is she one of the Adelaide ‘born to rulers,’ she breaks your own rules about putting women in charge. They are not physiologically suited to the decision making required of leaders, as you have said. And furthermore, fess up, Cap’n: you always knew it was bad luck to have a woman on board, let alone a Twitterbox, even openly on her iPhone during Question Time. It’s not a good look, Cap’n. Sheeesh! You sure can pick ’em.

Barnacles! It’s your Christmas message to the crew Captain Abbott. You are rubbish in the polls. Your unfair, stuck budget festers in the public craw. You send in pin-stripe suited Cormann, your party’s own Heimlich manoeuvre but he just ends up looking like some expensive foreign mercenary or mafia hit man.  But, hey, we will knock one or two barnacles off the ship before Christmas.

If you mean what you say, and that’s a bit controversial at the moment, we assume you have some plan for steering back into port. And someone on board who knows how to navigate. What’s that? Coal-powered? You have hitched the ship to a coal-burning tug. Brilliant!  But you will need a dry-dock, Cap’n. And where will you find one of those, now, Cap’n? You’ve just about exhausted or alienated all your known stocks and supplies. Even Captain Rupert’s hacks are backing off or openly backing another rat.

Forget the barnacles. Abandon ship. Call a double dissolution. Put your money where your mouth is. It’s your only chance to get out while you can salvage any shred of credibility. So you lose the election. That’s the plan. Get a cosy berth ashore in coals, or even oil. Dick Warburton will even set you up with a few names of firms who would love to have you on board. And you wouldn’t have to do a thing. That’s the best Christmas gift of all – to all parties.

Violence against women, Mr Abbott. Your number one priority.

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Mr Abbott, you appointed yourself Minister for Women. Why? You have never given a satisfactory account of your self-promotion. Was it to cover your ineptitude, your potential to insult and demean women any time you open your mouth? Or with your mouth shut, just giving a crafty wink? Perhaps you need a memory jog. There are many telling examples but let’s just recall a few beauties.

Remember when you praised a Liberal candidate for her  “sex appeal”; or when you told those women netball players that “a bit of body contact never hurt anyone” or your pitch for the votes of Big Brother contestants “as I’m the guy with the not bad looking daughters”?

Remember when you suggested ironing was exclusively done by “the housewives of Australia” Remember when you let slip your own view of male superiority as leaders: “What if men are by physiology or temperament more adapted to exercise authority or to issue command?”

Remember when you channelled 1950s moral bigotry with your taunt that Julia Gillard should “make an honest woman of herself”? Remember letting others in your party get away with calling Gillard ‘deliberately barren’? Women have not forgotten. What’s barren is your effort to be any kind of Prime Minister for women. You call yourself a feminist?

You say you are a feminist because you have daughters. Mr Abbott, that’s not how it works. A feminist upholds the cause of equality for women. Of course equality involves change and we know you don’t like change. You have even less of a clue about reform.

So let’s make it even more basic. A feminist stands up for women’s rights. You have done less than nothing. In fact, you have effectively set back women’s rights. Human rights. And your self-appointment as Minister for Women has been a further obstruction.

Let’s take the most basic right, the right to feel safe. We’ll put it in economic terms first to keep it in your comfort zone. You are willing to spend billions on an anti-terror campaign which makes no-one, really any safer. Most of it is for show. Yet you won’t spare a cent on our real terror threat- the terror so many Australian women face daily at home.

Violence against women is endemic in Australian society. The very fabric of our society is infected by it. Apart from the immeasurable, unimaginably hideous suffering, it costs billions in lost opportunities; lost productivity. Women daily must contend with a rampant, devastating disease of epidemic proportions. Yet you won’t lift a finger to address the issue.

Why? Is it less glamorous? Less of a vote-winner? Too hard to get men to change their behaviour? Too long to wait to get a return on your investment? You need to get matters into perspective, Mr Abbott, it is not a matter of thrift. You need to look at the facts.

One woman a week is killed at home. Killed by a partner or former partner.  In the past decade, domestic violence has killed between seven hundred to a thousand women and children. Almost half a million Australian women experience physical or sexual violence or sexual assault in the past 12 months according to ABS data. That’s half a million since you were elected. More than a million have been assaulted physically or sexually by male partners or ex-partners since they were fifteen.

Can you see the size of the problem, Mr Abbott? Can you see how it might dwarf any so-called Jihadist terror threat? Is it any clearer how your own focus on anti-terror measures is an indictment of your priorities?

You are wasting vast resources on presenting yourself as the nation’s macho protector, a make-believe role against an almost totally imaginary foe, while you ignore the real crisis of violence against women at home. Talk about pure evil, Mr Abbott, if you must, but the home-grown terror of domestic violence eclipses any death cult spawned by ISIS.

How many Australians are killed by terrorists? 113 since 1978. That includes Australians killed overseas and non-Australian men and women killed in Australia. You don’t need an accountant to see that you have wasted a fortune on invisibles. What is worse, is that some of this has come at the expense of women’s well-being; at the cost of their safety as a result of cuts in you budget. You have put women in even greater danger whilst splurging billions on what is largely an invented and inflated threat.

Women are often trapped in abusive relationships. Your budget makes it even harder for victims of domestic violence to escape. You cut the single parent tax benefit.  You cut the National Rental Affordability Scheme. Your GP co-payment, too would effectively represent a cut in some women’s capacity to access medical help.

Violence against women is not a simple matter, Mr Abbott, even you must acknowledge that. Its causes are complex and deeply-rooted in the construction of the Australian male psyche, itself a product of powerful societal currents and forces. And there is a lot of work to do here. Yet without asking you to go too deep, you have to start looking at your own behaviour. You have to look at the way your leadership fosters a blokey, matey culture in which violence is condoned if not promoted. You may have got some attention when you made your shirtfront threat to Putin but it’s time for a Prime Minister who doesn’t foster a climate of expectations which says that problems are solved by violence, a climate in which challenges are not a macho contest of wills. Or force. Or power. We need a Prime Minister who is able to contribute to an inclusive and civilised national conversation, a zeitgeist that is not cripplingly narrowed to puerile, gladiatorial contests.

Sometimes, sadly, the job is just too big for the person, Mr Abbott, but a Prime Minister needs to be able to transcend primitive power plays; turn aside from petty competition, self-aggrandisement and vilification of the other. A Prime Minster needs to seek instead to redress injustice and heal division in his own patch; in his own party; in his own heart. And a Prime Minister who is also the Minister for Women needs to turn all this nation’s resources without delay towards the real terror that lurks within. The violence of Australian men against women must stop. Even if you achieve no other, this should be your first priority.

Julie Bishop dives on world stage with attack on Obama.

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The foreign minister said she had met the US secretary of the interior, Sally Jewell, in Sydney before the G20 and outlined “in considerable detail Australia’s commitment and capacity to preserve the Great Barrier Reef”.

“And I pointed out that we were working with the heritage committee and with UNESCO to ensure that the barrier reef remains as healthy and protected as is humanly possible,” Bishop told the ABC.

“I pointed out that mining and drilling and gas exploration are banned by law from the Great Barrier Reef region and that we had acted to prevent the dumping of capital dredge waste in the marine park. Indeed, [environment] Minister Greg Hunt announced that during the World Parks Congress, that we will ban that by law.”

Julie Bishop, Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, has lashed out at US President Barrack Obama, reproaching his churlish ignorance, insubordination and bad form. His offence? He voiced fair and reasonable public concern for the survival of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Weak on fact, strong on indignation, Bishop’s objection contributes more dark comedy than any light of reason. Indeed, the more she protests, the more she resembles a Catherine Tate character: ‘How dare he, how very dare he!’

Bishop’s self-parodying protest speaks volumes about herself and her government. Diving into desperate damage control as her government’s domestic standing declines and her own standing takes a hit, her intervention is only likely to make matters worse for both.

Bishop’s nose is out of joint. How dare Obama speak out? Show us up? How dare the US President ambush the Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott on his home turf? Then there’s the lapse of decorum: it is such poor form for a mere guest to abuse his host. Poor form, also it would seem to ignore the Australian Foreign Minister’s briefing, even if it did contradict all of the science. He did not know what he was talking about. The US President “overlooked” Australian actions in preserving the reef, she claims, as if correcting a small boy’s homework.

A spirited self-defence is evidently hard at work, at least. The Minister for Foreign Affairs cannot be faulted, at least in her own version of events. Yes and No Minister. Self-justification after the fact serves only to reveal a significant chink in your Armani. The test of performance lies in what is or what is not achieved, not who or what you might claim afterwards is really to blame. Your job is to make it work, not to point the finger when you fail.

Bishop’s over-retaliation has raised eyebrows whilst lowering her own and her country’s international standing. First, it is stretching things to accept that the President acted wrongly or badly. What else was he expected to do? Abbott, as G20 chairperson insulted world leaders as he attempted to limit the agenda, substitute his own agenda and hijack international events for domestic gain, a manipulation which conveyed at best indifference and at worst contempt for the real challenges faced by the world and its leaders. Any leader worth his salt would take a stand. Any true world leader would want to turn attention back to where it belonged.

In Brisbane, Abbott proposed, in effect, a G20 public housekeeping party; a global gathering where he would speak openly of struggling to put his own house in order whilst attempting to sweep climate change under the carpet. It was easy to appear out of order in this parochial context. Even compulsory. Virtuous. All you had to do was show a true commitment to international affairs.  Or behave like a statesman.

Obama’s timely reminder that the reef was in danger of extinction because of climate change contributed, it is true, to his upstaging the G20. Yet it was upstaging by default, simply because he cared enough to speak out on the major issue confronting the world. For this he is to be commended rather than condemned. And there are already clear signs that his words helped refocus the attention of the leaders present. He is to be admired for heeding the call of duty.

Julie Bishop, however, has a more limited perspective. How dare Obama have the temerity to exercise genuine world leadership! Shame Australia’s leaders out of their self-absorption and parochial self-interest. She wants to cut Obama down to size. Her agitation is palpable. What would he know? Whom did he talk to? Who does he think he is? Like Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth the lady doth protest too much. It will be her undoing. She is already hoist with her own petard.

Not only was Obama out of order, Bishop alleges he did not know what he was talking about. Worse, he bypassed her.

It is true Obama did not consult Bishop before he made his speech drawing world attention to the dangers faced by this part of our world heritage. Nor should he have. No-one else, it seems, could do it. Least of all his host. This part of her reasoning is also comically self-important.

She tried to tell him. But would he listen? Bishop complains she briefed US Interior Secretary Sally Jewell prior to the address, just to see Obama got his facts right. This, it seems, would have ensured that he left the reef bit out. No doubt she has explained this to her own boss who might have also raised the odd question over Julie’s less than stellar G20 contribution.

Bishop has been forced to quickly sent Obama a bromide in the form of a briefing paper pointing out the error of his ways, reefing him in for his untrammelled arrogance and stupidity. Talk to me first, next time, meathead!

Proving once again that there is less to Bishop than meets the eye, her rebuke is typically insubstantial. In fact it is pretty fact free, embarrassingly flawed. Like many of her government’s recent attempts to explain situations, it bothers little with science or logic. But it makes revealing reading. Compelling, too, not only if your taste runs to a farrago of lies, disingenuous assertion and misplaced indignation at being upstaged by someone with a real concern for the future of the world and the means to make a difference.

Bishop’s case is countered by leading scientists who point to rising temperatures and increasing carbon dioxide in the oceans. Massive bleaching and destruction of fragile ecosystems will result.     Mr Obama was “right on the money”, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute, said. “He was stating a fact.

“We have one of the jewels of the planet in our possession and we should care a lot about climate and he wasn’t getting that from our leader [Prime Minister Tony Abbott],” Dr Hoegh-Guldberg said.

Seldom stooping to let facts get in the way of her argument, Bishop’s petulant remonstration sets out clearly once again for all the world the wilful ignorance of her own party, the limitless arrogance of her own personal position and the status of both as terminally endangered species.

The current Minister of Foreign Affairs, who is also deputy leader of the Liberal Party, and the only woman permitted in the Abbott government Cabinet, has greatly disappointed with her failure to acknowledge the best efforts of those who are committed to dealing with climate change as a world priority. Her recent efforts have hindered more than helped anybody.

Her performance is all the more deplorable for its wilful distraction; amounting to an almost criminal neglect of other pressing international issues such as the unequal status of women, violence against women and any practical plan towards redressing the world-wide trend away from inclusivity and towards further marginalisation and discrimination.

Starting to clean up our own backyard would be perhaps too parochial for our globe-trotting Foreign Minister but it is a sound first step for implementing wider reform.  Immigration is a bridge too far, no doubt, but the latest bill before the senate will make us the pariah of the international community. Alternatively, she could try closer to home. A ‘robust discussion’ with Colin Barnett, her home state premier, about his decision to close around 150 Aboriginal communities would be a useful place to start.

Of course, this would involve rethinking her own approval of the scheme. It’s another Federal cutback which the nation never got to vote on last election. WA has chosen to make Aboriginal people refugees in their own country because the Abbott government decided to cease funding for essential services in remote communities. As part of the cabinet discussion around that decision, she could explain how this is leadership rather than something we should all be deeply ashamed of.

Julie Bishop, you had the chutzpah to rebuke Barack Obama over the Barrier Reef when he was clearly in the right. Surely, then you have the wherewithal to stand up to your Prime Minister when he is clearly in the wrong. Begin to assert your independence where it may do some good. Tackle Abbott over all those areas of policy in which Australia is reneging on its responsibility to its own people to say nothing of its international obligations. Tell him he is wrong about climate change and that you need to conserve your energies to fight injustice, inequality and ignorance at home before you can take another single step on the world stage without making yourself and your government an even greater international laughing stock.