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

Malcolm Turnbull Q&A 5 July 2010

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Attorney General and pocket Napoleon George Brandis QC, a liability to the rule of law even in a Turnbull government, alienates the entire legal fraternity this week by relentlessly bullying Justin Gleeson, his solicitor-general, into resignation. It’s a turn of events unseen in a hundred years, a departure which robs the office of one of its finest legal minds and strikes a blow at the heart of the solicitor general’s office itself – but our PM’s on to it. “These things happen”, blathers Malcolm Turnbull before dashing  offstage into witness protection.

 Each week brings fresh opportunities for the Prime Minister to go missing in action. The latest Newspoll says PM Fizza is even less popular now than former big cheese Tony Abbott, a Trump admirer, who found time to squeeze amongst some young netballers for a publicity shot, quipping and winking , “a bit of body contact never hurt anyone.” His louche let-down of a successor favours a more hands-off leadership style which is easily if not frequently mistaken by ministers for licence.

Minister for talking about women, Michaelia Cash is able to skip a planned meeting with states with the excuse that there’s “nothing requiring ministerial decision”, apart that is from a summit on curbing domestic violence and announcements that women are to be protected from idleness and double-dipping by cutting parental leave.

 Cash is allowed to pass up a chance to confer with states’ IR ministers about family violence leave or parental leave or to unpack her government’s August 2015 finding that female friendly workplaces may put men off as it was broadly reported –  although the truth is that it found that female friendly policy and practice was OK apart from “male-dominated” workplaces in science, mining and engineering where it may “cause problems”. From this alone it would seem that there’s a fair bit of work to do, Minister.

 The Minister could start with reviewing progress in key areas. In November 2014, The Workplace Equality Agency found 48 per cent of employers had policies on flexible work yet only about 13 per cent have a strategy for ensuring these policies are used by employees who want to access them. While half had a standalone gender equality policy, only 7.1 per cent had a gender equality strategy.

 Instead Michaelia Cash is talking up a storm in all the ways cutting funding will help women  and how domestic violence is a cycle which “must be broken” a process which currently involves a lot of talking and the spending of very modest amounts of funds while $34 million is still slated to be cut from community legal centres over the next three years. No hint officially that causes of men’s violence to women include entrenched gender roles and patterns of male privilege and the sanctioning of violence which current government policies help perpetuate.

 Instead the COAG domestic violence summit in Brisbane Thursday and Friday is geed up by a PM who boasts that the country has “undergone a cultural shift with regards to domestic violence and the momentum cannot be denied”.  It’s not reflected in the rising statistics of violence inflicted by men upon women nor is it reflected in the behaviour of so many of the men who wield power on his government’s behalf: witness George Brandis’ bullying of Gillian Triggs in a senate committee last year or Ian Macdonald’s bullying of Triggs and more recently of Solicitor-General Justin Gleeson.

 Whilst bully-boy Brandis misled parliament twice in claiming that he had the SG’s approval for his citizenship and his marriage equality bills and while he set himself above the law in issuing an illegal directive curtailing the SG’s independence, shit happens. There’s nothing to see here, according to Malcolm Turnbull. “It’s always regrettable when people don’t get on in the workplace.”

 Being replaced before your time is up is also ever to be deplored. Alexander Downer, Australia’s High Commissioner in London, a doyen of diplomatic discretion and good taste, in 1994 stunned a meeting of party faithful by suggesting they change the slogan “things that matter” to “things that batter” to better reflect Liberal domestic violence policy – an area still ill-defined despite this week’s gabfest -but then as now, only encouraged by such humour – is reported in The Weekend Australian to be furious. He’s heard his job is being “sounded out” in a bit of Liberal Party thinking aloud on how best to move Brandis out of harm’s way. But it’s just a tiff between two bigwigs, according to the Coalition. Nothing to see here. Besides, Downer has eighteen months’ sinecure left to serve.

 Clear to everyone is that Brandis must go. His actions represent an unacceptable and gross infringement on the independence of the Solicitor-General and he has “crossed a key line of integrity”. He should follow the Solicitor-General’s resignation with his own, says Australian Lawyers Alliance National President Tony Kenyon. Alternatively, he can continue to wreak havoc in a Cabinet which has more than its fair share of mavericks, especially on the vexed issue of energy.

 Nuclear fusion is the energy of the future. And it always will be until we can harness the heat and power of a fusion reaction. Greg Hunt, Minister for Innovation and Science, is, however, unfussed by mere practicality. Former Direct-Action carbon con-man, “my job is done” Hunt spruiks nuclear fusion as if it’s just around the corner, on Fran Kelly’s ABC Radio show Monday in his weekly own-trumpet-blowing solo. It’s how the world’s greatest minister keeps himself relevant.

 After its hatchet job on renewables after SA’s blackout, the Coalition’s mantra is that we need practical, reliable, secure energy. Greg’s listening. What better than the fantasy of nuclear fusion?

 Creating an abundance of safe, clean energy by fusing two hydrogen isotopes was first envisaged by English physicist Arthur Eddington in the 1920s. The concept excited Australia’s Mark Oliphant in 1933 but until we can find a way to harness a reaction as hot and fierce as the sun’s, we will always be thirty years away. Nuclear fusion is an area where we don’t even know what we don’t even know making it the perfect choice for an Abbott-in-drag government where wilful ignorance is a badge of honour. Nowhere is this better seen than in policies affecting women.

 Turnbull says he backs family leave “as a father and husband” before declaring it all a mystery to blokes. “In so far as men can understand these matters, we are absolutely understanding and sympathetic,” he says, misrepresenting key principles of equality and basic workplace entitlements as areas for male approval rather than simple human rights while his government slashes funding. The arcane mysteries of justice are just something to puzzle over as men decide what’s best for working mothers.

 Cutting parental leave, we hear this week, will combine with an absence of affordable child-care, to help grateful mothers back into the workforce to resume bonding with colleagues; properly leaving baby to frantic grandparents. Although the government enjoys confusing what is a workplace entitlement with welfare, one thing is clear. Shameful double-dipping will cease forthwith – or in nine months’ time as an indulgent Prime Minister exercises his seigneurial discretion. Australian women will be overjoyed that the Coalition’s eagerness to get them back into the workforce is almost second to none. On OECD statistics, our government’s paid parental leave is now lowest in the developed world outside the USA.

 Cuts will also fix our scandalously lavish Newstart handouts which sap initiative and prevent unemployed Australians from breaking out of their “inter-generational welfare dependency”. Five job-seekers already contest every single vacancy which is typically a part-time, casual, poorly paid job. Women are increasingly over-represented in part time, casual work.

 Yet clearly job-seekers are not trying hard enough and must be blamed or shamed into work. Federal Treasurer screaming Scott Morrison is on to something Friday when he says “it’s a crying shame” that thousands of welfare recipients would “have to take a pay cut” if they were to get a job –  but no-one mistakes his call for his bidding up the minimum wage.

 Morrison is mad keen to boost the myth of indulged welfare bludgers. He reckons 43,000 parents were high on the hog enjoying at least $45,000 in benefits last financial year.  The Australian Council of Social Services is left to counter that the true figure is fewer than 1900 households. Morrison says nothing about trimming the $1.8 billion welfare a year we pay to subsidise a dependent coal industry. Yet he is heard screeching that Green “lawfare” must stop. Protestors cost jobs.  Otherwise lies ruin, warn Black Hole Morrison and the increasingly shrill Minster for Resources, mining industry shill, Matt Canavan.

 Julie Bishop who is keeping herself nice before it’s her turn to knife her leader appears on Insiders to defend Joe Hockey’s $25,000 claim for five months’ baby-sitting expenses. Poor Joe struggles to get by on $360,000 in salary as US ambassador while he double-dips into his $90,000-a-year pension. Yet he must be feeling a bit sensitive about being part of the new age of entitlement because he’s changed his expenses from baby -sitting to extra staff after Fairfax made enquiry under Freedom of Information.

 Bishop who is the Liberal Party’s human Talking Point gives the standard defence that it’s a regular thing for an ambassador or a member of DFAT with an overseas post to have expenses paid glossing over the reality that Joe’s appointment itself is part of the Liberal Party’s special plan for Joe’s welfare, a handout and a handy way to pack the dumped failed former federal Treasurer off out of harm’s way. Hockey, despite what Bishop would have us believe, is not the equivalent of his predecessor, Kim Beazley a political academic with a lifetime of US contacts and a passion for American history.

 While Hockey win best political bludger and Morrison is easily best welfare-basher, Huckleberry Hunt, the huckster’s huckster deserves some sort of award for reminding us that when it’s not putting the boot into the poor or discriminating against women, the Turnbull government has its feet planted firmly in the clouds. Best of all – Hunt’s nuclear fusion diversion is a free lunch. There’s no radioactivity, no carbon emissions and we get into the rarefied atmosphere of the fusion Spiegel-tent free – almost. Hunt gushes over his deal which trades our scientists’ “incredible expertise in plasma and imaging” for free admission to the fusion hucksters’ club.

 Ripping off scientists’ intellectual property to get into a wank-fest is just one way the Liberal-National helps our scientists feel valued. Since 2014, the Coalition has cut $3 billion from science and research helping Australia’s research and development investment to plummet to a 30 year low. Above all Education Minister Simon Birmingham is clear that pure research plays little part in his vision: Universities have to be driven by “what is in the best interests of the student and the need of the national economy” he maintains outlining a narrow vocational perspective for less investment in higher education. Luckily Hunt is budget-minded.

 According to Coalition propaganda-sheet The Australian, Hunt is once (or twice) again a pioneer “it is the first time in 35 years a nation outside the founding nine members has been admitted to the global collaboration to produce energy from fusion … the first time a member has been admitted without paying at least $346m as an entry fee to finance the research and development of a fusion ­reactor. Also a first is his  self-promotion mania. Just how many more feathers can Hunt’s cap bear?

 Equally eager to promote his relevance at any price is Barnaby (horse-feathers) Joyce, Deputy Prime Minister and federal celebrity dog-catcher who is keen to hose down another Coalition fuss over nothing erupting over his attempts to move Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines, an entire government department from Canberra to Armidale NSW to boost his electoral prospects. It has cost the Coalition tens of thousands to keep secret a letter written by Dr. Grimes, which is released by the Department of Agriculture Monday in which he warns Joyce he “no longer had confidence in his own capacity “to resolve matters relating to integrity with you”. 

 Joyce denies causing the head of the department to resign and blames an uppity “rogue staffer” for changing Hansard. He says, less than reassuringly, he’s changed it back again. Launching a desperate diversion Joyce  lambasts Labor for their communist policies such as vegetation management in an address to the National Farmers Federation. The audience which includes the Chinese Ambassador laps up the spectacular entertainment which is surely the prelude to a little more land-clearing.

 We need a bit more farm land. Queensland has seen 296 000 hectares cleared in 2015 while in NSW 23,000ha of vegetation has been cleared for cropping and pasture since 2010 and 59% of this is “unexplained”.

 Barnaby is barking mad again, ScoMo foams at the mouth but the show must go on in a week which also sees some solid ensemble work from a Turnbull troupe dedicated to entertaining its dwindling admirers and performing its heart out to please its mining business and financial industry backers. Bugger the people. Forget rights for women. Right wing bosses must be kept happy with buffoonery in energy, welfare and justice in a Melbourne Cup eve Turnbull Stakes that sees ignorance and folly racing neck and neck with crass stupidity.

 

“I said to them, how on Earth could it have been that in the period coming up to the 4th of May, you must’ve known about this direction, you were helping draft it, the Parliamentary Counsel knew about it, the attorney knew about it, his staff knew about it. “How on Earth could it have been that the one person who needed to know wasn’t told?”

Former Solicitor General Justin Gleeson

Break out the brandy and cigars. There’ll be chest-beating and drinks all round at the exclusive, all-male Savage Club a refuge where member George Brandis can kick back and forget his responsibility as Attorney-General to uphold anti-discrimination laws. Megalomaniac Brandis, a cane-toad in pin-stripes from the deep North, a legal giant who got his QC only after arriving in Canberra, has got his way at last. Forget the constitution. Forget justice. What matter is that Brandis rules thanks to his cunning plan to remove the Solicitor General, Justin Gleeson, a highly regarded, constitutional expert and independent legal advisor. All that remains, now, is to get a Liberal lickspittle to replace him.

Gleeson’s dismissal has not been achieved directly, of course, the Solicitor-General is a tenured public servant. Or was. Nor has his stitching up been easy. It has taken effort to make it impossible for the Solicitor General to continue to offer independent, expert legal advice that looked to the law rather than flattering the government and its power-mad, accident-prone, incompetent Attorney General. In the end, boys-club Brandis simply over-reached his authority in May. Imperiously, he directed that all requests for Gleeson’s legal expertise to come through his office first — a matter Gleeson was not consulted on beyond the idea being “raised” in a November meeting.

All that remained, then was to pretend Gleeson was consulted and when an inquiry arose Coalition bovver boys, Senators Ian Macdonald and Barry O’Sullivan could take the SG out the back and give him a good working over. They, too, must be so proud of themselves, now. It’s a win for the bullies. The dismissal has been achieved the Brandis way, using the sort of bastardry applied to Gillian Triggs to remove her dissenting, independent self from the head of the Human Rights Commission last year.

Gleeson, like Triggs, is accused of being political. How dare either of them offer criticism or expert, independent advice to a born to rule government’s right to ride roughshod over human rights or the nation’s constitution?

Spin doctors in damage control now have MPs bucketing Justin Gleeson for talking to Mark Dreyfus during an election campaign – as if this is an act of treason or a betrayal of office. Put this behind us and move on is the line heard on ABC Radio from MPs spruiking today’s Coalition talking points – after they trivialise and put the boot in. Nothing to see here. Nobody will believe the Attorney General who overreached himself and misled parliament.

Dreyfus rang Gleeson to ask him if he thought he had been consulted and if he was happy to be sidelined, he explains. Gleeson gives an honest no. For this, Macdonald tells him he ought to enter politics directly. Gleeson says he also gave Malcolm Turnbull legal confidential advice in January but this seems to attract no comment. What is needed now is for the former SG to be demonised for his outrageous political intervention.

Anyone who saw the treatment meted out to Triggs in February 2015 when the President of the Commission was also falsely accused of being politically partisan would recognise the shameless, relentless and misogynistic bullying.

“I thought you might like to hear a man’s voice” boomed Queensland Senator Barry O’Sullivan last year, randomly interrupting the senate estimates hearing for no other purpose than to make a sexist tool of himself. At other times, he and Ian MacDonald barked at women senators. Undismayed by such boorish bully-boy antics – and giving them his tacit approval, Brandis said he had no confidence in Triggs. He wanted rid of any critic of his government’s glorious policy of locking up children indefinitely in offshore hell-holes to punish them for not drowning at sea.

Gleeson also gets the Macdonald – O’Sullivan treatment in a senate committee just over a week ago – a hearing which was delayed as Macdonald sought to have the hearing held in camera – or behind closed doors, aka “out the back”. Scrupulously impartial and fastidious with regard to procedure, Macdonald declares at the outset that the senate inquiry is an “absolute waste of time”.

Despite the hazing, Gleeson demonstrates calmly and capably that Brandis misled the Australian Parliament. Macdonald does his best to treat the SC with utter contempt – as he did when he told Gillian Triggs he had not even bothered to read her magisterial Forgotten Children report. Why would he? He knew it was biased. Way to go Macca. Don’t let the facts get in the way of a reputation-trashing. Macdonald cuts off Gleeson three times and when cautioned by the chair says he always gives witnesses “the respect they deserve”.

Disrespect is modelled by Brandis. Not only has the Solicitor-General’s office been side-lined by Brandis’ naked power grab, he has also had his advice ignored and misrepresented as when Brandis lied to the house that the Solicitor-General had backed the legal land mine that resulted from the Brandis’ decision to rush up a law to appease his then PM, Tony Abbott, another Liberal who likes to play fast and loose with the rule of law, who wanted to score political points by threatening to strip dual nationals of their citizenship.

Brandis’ first attempt was an unworkable mess. It was reviewed by the circus known as The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, which is currently chaired by deadly Dan Tehan who daily, it would seem finds new evidence of fiendish terror plots against us to report. The second draft attracted no fewer than 27 recommendations for change.

As it is the law contains the legal fiction in section 33AA revocation of your citizenship just happens if you do something which might roughly be some sort of breach of the criminal code – unless you happen to be in Australia at the time of your offence to vaguely defined provisions in the criminal code, subject to one exception. Worse, it appears that it could be construed as a punishment and beyond the authority of the executive arm of government. No wonder the AG is a bit sensitive to criticism.

Brandis has acted illegally in demanding that all those who seek the solicitor general’s advice must come via the Attorney-General. In the words of a former solicitor General and Howard legal advisor, Gavan Griffith, the direction is not only unlawful, it would reduce the SG’s independence to that of a dog on a leash. Brandis has also lied about having consulted Gleeson as to his intentions, despite much unedifying quibbling from the Pettifogger General over the definition of consultation, a matter he is prepared to settle, like a schoolboy debater, with a dictionary definition.

In fact he is wrong at law about consultation, just as he over-stepped his authority in demanding control over the solicitor general’s office. There are grounds to accept that the term is used legally to mean something more than just “raising an issue” telling another party what you intend to do – after you have done it.

Brandis has an issue with consultation. As Arts Minister for an Abbott government which did not have an arts policy, much less have much time for such matters, he simply made up his own, not deigning to consult with the arts community before reducing arts grants to create his own award for excellence, which quickly became known as the George Brandis slush fund. His unwillingness to release his electronic diary to corroborate his claim that he met with representative has now cost taxpayers $50, 000 under FOI challenges and appeals.

Brandis’ power grab has been simplified by a media dedicated to preserving us from complexity to a personal spat between the two men, ignoring the constitutional issues involved and reducing the Attorney-General’s high-handed arrogance to a clash of personalities – or even more disingenuously – a fight between two leading lawyers. Gleeson may be a top silk. Brandis is not. A pettifogging legal piss-ant with monumental delusions of grandeur, his officious bungling and over-reach of his authority will continue to create crises for himself and his government. He is almost certain to be censured when the senate committee concludes its inquiry in a few weeks.

In the meantime the saga of Brandis’ war on his Solicitor General reveals a Coalition of petty despotism, convinced of its own infallibility, immune to criticism and contemptuous of due process, happy to misrepresent itself in its determination to impose its will at all costs; its desperate desire to silence its critics whatever it takes.

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

A muffled thumping disturbs the chamber this Thursday as our PM and his predecessor, in turn, throw each other under a bus, to use Omnibus Bill Shorten’s colourful phrase.  Guardian Australia’s Katharine Murphy, who continues to hold a torch for the PM, has never seen anything like it in twenty years of parliamentary reporting. The Coalition is openly at war with itself.

 After a two week niggling campaign, Tony (Gospel Truth) Abbott brands Malcolm Turnbull a liar for suggesting the Abbott regime struck a deal last year with Senator David (happiness is a warm Adler A-110 lever action shot-gun) Leyonhjelm. Turnbull counters that the Prime Minister’s Office knew of the deal. It has documents. Pyne, Dutton and Keenan back their PM. Abbott says he’s been “grievously” misrepresented but it’s his flat denial against the word of two ministers involved plus an entertainingly self-parodying denial from Turnbull camp clown Christopher Pyne.

 The Abbott-Leyonhjelm deal involved lifting import restrictions on the weapon in return for the Senator’s vote on stripping home-grown terrorists of their dual citizenship but at stake now is Turnbull’s authority; his capacity to maintain what remains of his Liberal leadership. Rightist Michael Sukkar, Member for Deakin, supports Abbott, feebly, saying there is “no strong evidence” for a deal. Turnbull nurtures his inner political death-wish by dithering; he allows two days to pass in which it seems as if a deal is still on the table.

 Astonishingly, ABC listeners are immediately treated to National Party’s Troy Grant passionate case that every farmer needs to be able to shoot eight rounds in eight seconds or be overrun by feral pigs. An Adler 110 lever-action rapid fire shotgun is vital to the survival of the entire NSW rural sector if not the national economy. To dare suggest that shotgun might fall into the wrong hands is to cast a hurtful slur upon responsible gun-owners everywhere despite the fact that the  Adler is precisely the sort of weapon most commonly stolen according to Gun Control Australia.

 Deadly David Leyonhjelm, whose 2014 maiden speech was peppered with references to philosophers such as John Locke, John Stuart Mill and David Hume who helped convince him that no government – indeed, no-one tells him what to do (although he does seem to expect others to fall in line with his views) is a gun nut. A down-under NRA Charlton Heston, to quote Mike Seccombe, Leyonhjelm is full of dangerous nonsense about our right to bear arms and the right of the citizenry to rise up against “over-governing, over-taxing and over-riding ways”.

 Leyonhjelm moonlights for the NRA in a video released last year slamming Australia as a “nation of victims”. His view is we’d be safer if we were all armed. “We love the NRA here in Australia amongst us gun owners and in fact we rely on you guys to also help us hold the line in Australia,” he riffs in the clip. In his libertarian view, it is the government which has to make a case for banning rapid-fire weapons – not the farmer or sporting shooter who wants to buy one.

 Bikies have the same right. At a rally outside Queensland’s Parliament in late 2013, the Senator decried new laws potentially denying gun licences to affiliates of outlaw motorcycle gangs.

 The 2015 deal traded guns for votes, Labor helpfully points out, attacking Abbott’s honesty and exploding the Member for Warringah’s pose of being tough on gun control, which, along with his tough on borders posturing, helped the former PM convince his right wing he could make Australia safe again – or as he likes to put it – protect our national security. Stopping the guns, like stopping the boats, or his puerile threat to shirt-front Putin, however, is pure Abbottry, that specious, empty rhetoric he substitutes for real communication or conviction.

 Abbott has no right to claim a legacy of public safety. He made Australia less safe by re-entering conflicts in Iraq and Syria, in a calculated political strategy that had nothing to do with Australia’s national security that would further radicalise some within Australia’s Muslim minority and increase the domestic terror threat. “They are coming after us” he said of ISIS inflaming paranoia increasing anxiety and adding his own note of hysteria to public alarm.

 Abbott indulged in dangerous and divisive dog whistling about terrorists on boats.  While he sloganeered on protecting our freedom, he restricted our civil liberties and shackled our watchdogs with laws which retain people’s metadata for two years and laws which could make it offence for journalists to report on spying. And he was useless in the Lindt café crisis in December 2014; too busy to speak to Man Haron Monis as the Inquest heard this April.

 What is at stake, Bernard Keane points out is Abbott’s ego. The facts don’t fit his macho image. “It doesn’t fit the hard man image, the image of the prime minister who trashed civil rights and threw money at security agencies to fight terrorism, the man who attacked Muslims for failing to talk about the peaceful nature of Islam, to be seen as having connived at a deal to allow high-capacity shotguns into the country.”

 Is Abbott lying about the Adler? We’d be foolish to expect truth. In 2010, Abbott explained that unless you had it in writing, you’d be unwise to believe him. As it turns out, Abbott is contradicted by the evidence: an email from his office, sent 15 August 2015, published by Paul Bongiorno in this week’s The Saturday Paper supports Turnbull and Leyonhjelm’s version of events.

 “We confirm that ministers Dutton [Immigration] and Keenan [Justice] have agreed that the government will amend the Customs (Prohibited Imports) Regulations 1956 to insert a sunset clause of 12 months into the recently amended provisions which ban the importation of lever action shotguns with a magazine capacity of more than five rounds.”

 Leyonhjelm, nevertheless, carried out his side of the deal which was to “vote against the Labor amendments to the Migration Amendment (Strengthening Biometrics Integrity) Bill”. It was a straightforward trade of a gun for a vote. Now, the former Liberal, who resigned from the party in 1998, in protest over John Howard’s gun control laws, is threatening to pull the pin on his support for the union-bashing ABCC legislation despite his reservation that the bill infringes civil liberties.

 The PM’s public slap-down of his predecessor may cost Turnbull his ABCC legislation. Even those few Australians yet unpersuaded by the patronising arrogance of a Coalition who reign over us by birthright and by force and such other means as are from time to time necessary must applaud the Turnbull government’s wondrous capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

 Not that applause is necessary. Those who dissent from its plans are dismissed as too stupid to know what’s good for them such as the Coalition’s dream of a deregulated, causualised, de-unionised part-time workplace, already on its way, glimpsed, for example, when backpackers and their tax appear up for discussion in another fiasco or when Seven-Eleven is revealed by Fair Work Australia to have worked its employees twice as long for half the going pay rate.

 Fair Work Australia’s fresh investigation 27 August follows an ABC and Fairfax lead but a frenzy of union-bashing erupts this week to assist with the passage of the ABCC in another orchestrated attack on organised labour and the rights of Australians to a fair wage and decent conditions. Although barely 15 per cent of workers are union members, the ILO reported in October last year, 60 per cent of Australian workers are employed under conditions that were collectively bargained for, far above the rate of many countries with higher union densities.

 The week begins so promisingly too. A faction-riven Coalition rabble is somehow marshalled by comical cat-herder Christopher Pyne. The government lines up the crooked CFMEU and nasty Bill Shorten in its sights. It guillotines debate to get its ABCC bill rail-roaded through the lower house. Labor is allowed to speak once. You don’t need democratic debate when you have an election mandate. Pyne gags that everyone’s views have been heard before in the two previous failures to pass the legislation, despite the presence of new MPs who have never spoken on it. Malcolm Turnbull accuses Bill Shorten of being in debt to the CFMEU and shows a video.  

But it all goes bad by Wednesday and ends in catastrophe with the Prime Minister shooting himself in the foot, destroying any vestige of doubt as to his political ineptitude by helping get Tony Abbott back on to the ABC’s 7:30 Report (bumping unhappy deputy Liberal leader, Julie Bishop) on Wednesday night. Tony clearly believes he is once again a contender for the top job even if he forgets to say he stopped the boats.

 The week should have featured a virtuoso performance by immigration intellectual Peter Dutton doing a number on the ABC; rebutting the Four Corners expose of cruelty and child abuse on Nauru by shooting the messenger: calling the whole programme an orchestrated litany of lies and accusing the ABC of being “on a crusade against government policy”.

Why? Dutton’s raving: “because they hate the fact that we’ve stopped boats and they believe we should have open borders and they’ve turned themselves into political operatives,” – adding for good measure, in some alarming former drug squad code all his own, “drinking the Kool-Aid”.

 Who knows what Dutton’s been drinking but Thursday, The Border Enforcer is inspired to a piece of performance art which links bikies, The CFMEU, Bill Shorten and Labor with the high price of apartments and the fact that decent young Australians can’t afford to buy a home.

 Meanwhile, in a senate committee, veteran plot-spotter Eric Abetz tells Michelle Guthrie she’s been captured by the leftist conspiracy which runs Radio National and infects the rest of the ABC. Tenderfoot Liberal Senator Jane Hume dismisses the Four Corners Report as selective. Where are the refugees who were happy with their lives on Nauru? She wonders if “all we heard on this program were the representatives of Save the Children and Amnesty (International) and the stories they wanted to tell, and selected stories from the young people on Nauru?”

Eric Abetz wonders if ABC reporters are not siding with activitsts.

 Way to go Senators. Show us all the fun side of indefinite open detention, ABC, on 21 square kilometres of abandoned guano mines, a ravaged moonscape of an island the size of an international airport. Report on the joys of living with the daily fear of assault in a failed state run by a corrupt oligarchy with a corrupt police force, where 90% of the population of 9,000 are jobless and suffer extreme levels of diabetes, heart disease and obesity.

 Have the senators read The Moss Review (2015), the Senate Select Committee Inquiry into the Nauru Detention Centre (2015) or the Report by Australian Women in Support of Women on Nauru (2016)? These reports document endemic gender-based violence systematic abuse carried out on Nauru against asylum seekers and refugees, abuse condoned by the Nauruan and Australian governments. Rape, assaults and indecent assaults are an inescapable part of life on Nauru and the government knows it.    

 Central to Dutton’s regime is the precept that refugees are to be punished for not drowning by being locked up in a hell-hole on Manus or Nauru, as Julian Burnside notes. The UN has recently confirmed that Nauru is one of the world’s worst in a report presented by doctors and officials from the United Nations’ refugee agency, to senior immigration department staff 11 October.

 Dutton and his 82 communications staff provide no response to the UN’s investigation. He has successfully prevented or discouraged anyone but The Saturday Paper from reporting even on the leaked report. Instead he deploys the Coalition’s favourite ploy: attack the messenger, as it did when in August The Guardian leaked case notes of 2100 actual investigations.

 In a masterpiece of spin, the Minister then accused The ABC and Guardian Australia of ‘trivialising’ grave issues ‘by trying to promote the 2,100 reports as somehow all being serious when they’re not.’ Dutton also falsely accused Save The Children of leaking the reports. It’s a quality response as might be expected from a Minister with 82 communications staff, 22 of whom are dedicated to its “24/7 media operations”, including social media.

 Immigration also had eight non-permanent communications staff earlier in the year. It paid Talkforce Media more than $225,000 for training after its Operation Fortitude fiasco in Melbourne last August – on top of $1 million on external media monitoring staff and another $7 million on public relations and internal communications staff.

 Will the PM survive his showdown with Tony Abbott? Will the party now break down into two armed camps, the right wing troglodytes affiliated with Abbott versus the Trotskyites who lean towards Malcolm Turnbull, a PM in the words of Kate McGregor on The Drum recently more of a progressive Labor leader than a conservative? Will Leyonhjelm be wooed by another deal?

 What is certain is that Fizza Turnbull will continue to face challenges to his authority as his incapacity to lead, his instinct for poor judgement, his capacity to turn crisis into catastrophe is daily revealed to be a liability to the interests of his party’s big business backers; an impediment to the Neocon agenda of the IPA and other powerful lobby groups. Julie Bishop is staying out of things, appearing on an ABC story about sportswomen as befits her feminist inclinations – you can bet she won’t be backing equal pay -and keeping herself nice for when Turnbull needs to be knifed.

 Meanwhile the ABC will continue to be derided and defunded and accused of bias whenever it dare report the truth instead of doing its job as the government’s cheer squad. Whether the over-hyped ABCC bill passes or not, the government will not ease up on its war on workers while the gulags on Nauru and Manus will not go away, however much the government invests in their denial. Like the rotting prison hulks of yesteryear they are a reminder of how badly a nation can go wrong when it prefers the politics of cheap populist hysteria over humanity; tries to hide from its own conscience; its moral responsibility.

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Creepy Clown hysteria sweeps the nation, this week. Almost trumping The Donald, CC’s upstage AFL trades and eclipse politics. Is it a cult? Is it a craze? No-one thinks it will end well. Police beg copy-cats to end “this dangerous and stupid trend.”  While reported sightings may distract us from assessing clown-prince Turnbull’s government’s performance, however, the Creepy Clowns illuminate far more than they obscure.

Take LNP Senator Ian MacDonald for example. He’s a standout as Pozzo, Samuel Becket’s bullying clown modelled on the Keystone Cops character, in the Senate Inquiry side-show into megalomaniac George Brandis’ misleading of parliament over his subjugation of the solicitor-general in his government’s push to politicise our public service. And the Great Grimaldi, himself, would be delighted to own as his protégé the hapless, petulant, incompetent Mal Turnbull pathetically playing someone he can never be: anyone but himself – let alone another clown.

Turnbull’s first hundred days are a bungling reprise of the shtick of Coalition “Auguste” clown, Tony Abbott: union-bashing, poor-trashing, pro-coal, anti-welfare, education and environment in a government paralysed by division, its PM led “like a dog on a lead” by the right.  Playing politics on marriage equality, its plebiscite hoax which would promote homophobic attacks while postponing legalisation is finally exploded this week in a type of anniversary gift, by Labor, The Greens, three Xenophons and Derryn Hinch. Turnbull’s regime sinks to Abbott-era depths in NewsPolls. Luckily, Eric Abetz has an innovative solution.

Come out of the closet, urges perennial unicorn chaser the agile Abetz, who blames media bias for not celebrating or honouring people who “come out” and switch from a homosexual to a heterosexual lifestyle. Abetz, one of four remaining Tasmanian Liberal Senators fighting for attention in Federal Parliament, is banking on a grateful media, free at last to give heterosexual Australians who have come out straight the attention they merit.

Abetz is also keen to share with reporters his completely rational, objective and measured conspiracy theory that there has been a campaign under way since the 1970s to deconstruct marriage and rob it of its meaning. He is there to  launch a book with the most innocuous title Stealing from the Child: The Injustice of “Marriage Equality” by Australian Marriage Forum president David van Gend, a book that promises to lay bare the “breathtakingly subversive redefinition of marriage” and expose the “genderless agenda” that comes with genderless “marriage”.

“His call to celebrate people turning from gay to straight is just the latest line of attack against gays in long political career that bears all the hallmarks of a religiously-fuelled, personal moral crusade,” writes James Norman in the SMH. Yet overall the media has framed its reporting of the plebiscite along government lines. It is Labor which is said to have “scuttled the coalition’s plan” for a plebiscite

Reading Abetz ‘s views, is to be confronted with direct evidence which contradicts his PM’s comments in parliament this week that waive aside the reality of entrenched and active bigotry which is well-funded and politically powerful, with an airy “trust” in the Australian people to be nice or the specious argument that it is “only a minority” which is likely to suffer homophobic abuse.

Whatever his personal beliefs, Turnbull himself is beholden to a powerful and intolerant minority whose prejudicial influence upon a community he says he supports he cannot blithely wish away any more than he can will himself into any real control over the disparate, divisive and defiant elements that have ruined his own authority and legitimacy.

A hundred days in office, certainly, have not seen the Coalition develop its parliamentary skill. “There has never been a more chaotic government, there has never been a more chaotic parliament and there has never been a leader of the house that has had to endure humiliation from his colleagues on such a regular basis,” Manager of Opposition Business Tony Burke tells Parliament after Financial Services Minister Kelly O’Dwyer votes against her own government, endorsing a bill amended by Labor, which calls upon the Government to close tax loop-holes and increase transparency.

Labor’s Jim Chalmers attacks O’Dwyer’s history of lapses: “Given the Minister for Revenue can’t answer basic questions about her legislation, contradicts the Prime Minister on house prices and negative gearing and was the original architect of the Census disaster, can the Minister please a very interested House about what other spectacular policy achievements lie ahead, or is this the high point of your brilliant career?” he says. O’Dwyer can only head upward from here.

Not all is flagging; Petti-fogger General Brandis rogers the Solicitor-General while Turnbull gets into bed with One Nation. Pauline Hanson is helped on to the  Joint Standing Committee on the National Broadband Network which exists in order to “inquire into and report on the rollout of the national broadband network”. Numbers have been boosted from 7 to 17 members this year but doubtless it will be vital to have Pauline and her vast technical expertise on board.

These are top-quality performances. Either professional clown is up to Trump or any other international pick-up artist in sophisticated seduction or the vital matter of consent.

But look over there! Crippled by crushing welfare debt? Embarrassed by your nation’s quick whip round to give big business a bit of a handout? Fear no more. Worry yourselves sick, instead, over cyber-attacks. The nation is treated to a frenetic tap dance from Dan – “close the doors they’re coming in the (MS) Windows ™- Tehan.” The Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Cyber Security,  executes a frenzied buck and wing in tribute to his government’s need to spy on us, keep our data and lie about it, hyping “cyber” terror, xenophobia and paranoia in this week’s coalition circus Oz.

Deadpan Dan, enhances his tap-dance by unfurling something called The 2016 Threat Report, the work of professional fear-mongers, The Australian Cybersecurity centre and revealing chilling news: the intelligence service of an unnamed country hacked into our Bureau of Meteorology last year. No! Next we know, our weather will be on Wiki-Leaks.

But wait; there’s more. Tweaking things a little, Dan says the ACC warns public servants of cyber-devastation in three years – (He must mean government departments still in operation after Coalition savings and efficiency dividends.) – 

The report, however, clearly  states: “…it is unlikely terrorists will be able to compromise a secure network and generate a significant disruptive or destructive effect for at least the next two to three years”.

It don’t mean a thing if it aint got that spin. Desperate Dan milks further applause with a coy revelation. Reassuring us all that he will not sit idly by while we become victims of international cyber-crime, he reveals that Australia has (gasp!) cyber offensive capacity. Pressed for details of this creepy secret weapon, Dan tells Kim Landers on ABC Radio he can’t say because it wouldn’t be secret. Be alert, not informed. Mum’s the word. He also refuses to name any names about our cyber attackers although his vacuous drivel next day in party propaganda organ The Australian calls them ISIS.

“When it comes to, when it comes to intelligence matters there’s a long history of us not publicly broadcasting what we’re doing in this area,” says the little Aussie bottler. Indeed. Add that history to Border Security’s selective catatonia, targeting of whistle-blowers or mad King George Brandis’ two year, $50,000 tantrum over refusing Labor his diary least it confirm he cut arts funding without consultation – a word very much in the air Friday in a senate committee set up to help O’Sullivan and MacDonald bully Justin Gleeson the Solicitor General. The duo give him the Gillian Triggs treatment for daring to challenge King George’s megalomania or his lie to parliament that Gleeson was happy to be shafted.

Mad King George claims, like a schoolboy debater, that the whole sorry business is a matter of definition. He waves his dictionary, a pocket Napoleon brandishing his pocket Oxford. He misses the mark. The net effect is more of a sulky Humpty Dumpty. He’s decreed that all who seek the Solicitor General’s advice must have the Attorney General’s permission first and he’s told Gleeson afterwards, a process he claims is consultation.

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

By Friday, the latest chapter in megalomaniacal George Brandis’ self-aggrandisement, his misleading of parliament, his attempt to sideline the Solicitor General in a radical and unprecedented diminution of the second law officer’s authority had been trivialised into a “breakdown.” It is as if the two are naughty boys who ought to have their heads knocked together – a view favoured in the ABC’s framing of the conflict in its news bulletins and on The Drum which gets its name from the wrong part of a washing machine. It’s the filter that collects all the fluff and lint.

 Barry O’Sullivan and Ian McDonald abuse Solicitor General Justin Gleeson SC because he took a phone call from Mark Dreyfus during the election, surely a communication entirely legal and within his role. Was he consulted about being demoted to Brandis’ subordinate? Was he happy about it? No and no. Expect Brandis high-handed abrogation of power to be overruled by the senate in due course. The Attorney General’s original instructions tabled in the senate are  a “disallowable instrument” and can be overturned by a Senate vote.

Until then, Gleeson will disregard what he believes is an unlawful instruction. Expect the framing to continue, however. The media prefers us to see a brawl, a face-off, a feud, a tiff that distorts and distracts from Brandis’ naked power grab.

A Newspoll published Monday shows the Coalition once again trailing Labor 52-48 two party preferred as Turnbull’s lame duck government clocks up an underwhelming one hundred days in office.  Its vaunted omnibus bill merely  enables it to pass savings slated in Abbott’s first dud budget but it has achieved some dangerous union-bashing as the senate passes its amendment to the Fair Work Act to ban the inclusion of certain “objectionable terms” in enterprise agreements covering workers employed by a “designated emergency management body” (such as the CFA). Clauses requiring management to consult with the relevant union are considered “objectionable”.

In November last year, CFA management was rebuked by a senate committee for refusing to supply vital information into the operation of its training college at Fiskville, where trainees were sent after the site was found to be contaminated with carcinogenic chemicals.  Fiskville was finally shut in 2015 after a cancer cluster was discovered among those who lived and worked there since the 1970s.

A Victorian government inquiry has found that “The CFA withheld test documents that confirmed the site was unsafe, yet insisted publicly that everything was OK” according to United Firefighters Union head Mick Tisbury and has criticised WorkSafe and the Environmental Protection Authority for their poor oversight of Fiskville. Yet, workers, paid and unpaid will continue to be at risk as a result of a massive union-bashing campaign driven by Volunteer Fire Brigades Victoria (VFBV), the Murdoch press and the Liberal Party. The issue has been successfully framed in the media as one of noble volunteers being at risk of thuggish union control. Our lawmakers even seem to have heeded the rhetoric.

One Nation’s vote was vital in getting the CFA Volunteers Bill through the senate Tuesday even if they don’t seem to have a clue what it’s about. Party empiricist, Malcolm Roberts calls the matter an issue of freedom versus control:  “The control mechanism proposed is an EA [enterprise agreement] that gives union bosses the right to dictate the daily operations of the community-based rural fire brigades,” he says; talking through his tin-foil hat.

Doug Cameron points out it’s the opposite: “Career fire-fighters who place their lives in danger to protect the community are entitled to documented, enforceable health and safety conditions in their enterprise agreements,” Senator Cameron told the chamber. “The volunteer fire-fighters union, basically, want power and control. There is no doubt about that.”

Nor is there any doubt about Donald Trump. Australia heaves a sigh of relief this week as Tony Abbott rates Donald Trump’s policies as “reasonable enough,” while he concedes that the Republican candidate’s views on women are “gross.” Abbott cherry picks for praise Trump’s “cutting tax” and “boosting foreign policy”, neither of which are more than banner headlines in The Donald’s policy-free platform.

Elder statesman Abbott, Bronwyn Bishop and John Howard’s political love-child and suppository of all knowledge, icon of the Liberal Party’s hard-right rump, former PM and Minister for Women, is keen to open another split between himself and Turnbull by defending Trump against the unfair bad press the Republican presidential candidate has been receiving lately largely over his pickup artist tips and lies spread by women claiming he abused them.

Allegations of misconduct against Trump are false, Campaign spokesperson Hope Hicks explains. They are all part of a “political attack designed to tear down Mr. Trump,” and nothing to do with his policies which include building a wall across the United States to keep would-be immigrants back where they belong, an eerie echo of Abbott’s own Sovereign Borders fantasy and with as much feasibility.

While Abbott may be merely attempting to dog-whistle conservatives and to provoke Turnbull, he is displaying a Trumpish lack of judgement in parading his own glass house of boorish ignorance, social incompetence and political ineptitude. Rat cunning is no substitute; nor will it fund a comeback. Turnbull loses the judgement challenge, however, responding by asking if Abbott has read Trump’s views against Free Trade. Abbott by then doesn’t need to.

Keen to make rating The Donald a proxy war between right and moderate Liberals, NSW’s Parliament’s Upper House passes a motion which censures Trump for being a revolting slug.

Doing its bit for the Turnbull government’s desire to re-heat Abbott’s terror hysteria to distract, divert and divide us, home-grown terrorists are being bred in Goulburn’s Supermax prison, “Australia’s toughest jail,” investigative journalist Chris Masters sensationally reports on Four Corners. Two sixteen year olds, it reports later are arrested for planning a terrorist attack.  Not content with promoting fear of renewable energy, the national broadcaster is further able to boost its usefulness to government by adding xenophobia and Islamophobia as it claims our best prisons are breeding “the worst kind of terrorist”. Be alert and alarmed.

Ignorance, superstition and partisan political spin appear increasingly part of the mix as our ABC re-interprets its “innovative and comprehensive services” to include many feel-good stories during the week about how coal-mining really has a future in the country now that the coal price is up. Interviews with community business people celebrating news that the Collinsville mine in Queensland’s Bowen Basin help put the case that coal-mining is really about local jobs.

Similarly, Resources Minister Matt Canavan is heard deploring BHP’s decision to pull the pin on oil drilling in the Great Australian Bight muttering about the ugly edge of green activism. Green activists, it seems, have been “swilling champagne” while people lost their jobs.

The ABC’s coverage of the SA blackout which scapegoated renewable energy reliance as the cause is a good example of how a dominant frame, once established, can exert a long-lasting influence over media coverage of a particular event, writes Ben Eltham in New Matilda. So, too with the simplistic framing of the week’s reports on coal into a choice between coal-mining or jobs.

Has it really taken only ten months for the Turnbull government to morph completely into the Abbott government on the environment and on energy? Are we really prepared to abandon everything we have gained in environmental education and awareness, everything we have learned about fossil fuels and climate change or the effects of mining on the environment, everything we have learned to accept as our international responsibility to curb carbon emissions that we can allow our state broadcaster to ally itself to a political party which is captive to the resource industry and oblivious to any real concern about the nation’s future.