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Opposition leader, Bill Shorten’s return to Hobart Friday, a record second lightning visit in as many weeks, puts the cat amongst the Tory pigeons.

Not only is Bill back in town again campaigning, when The Australian, Fairfax’s Mark Kenny and the ABC’s Chris Uhlmann have already given the election to the government, the Labor leader whose party “lags in all key marginals” is bearing further promises of jobs and money including a bright new extension lead for Basslink.

Campaign crews report that Labor is picking up votes but only in safe Labor or safe Liberal seats on issues like health and education which won’t win it the election. What is going on?

The latest Fairfax-Ipsos polls which in Victoria and NSW state elections understate the Labor vote put the opposition ahead of the government 51-49 with Shorten maintaining his improved personal approval ratings while the latest NewsPoll, whose new methodology does not confine it just to landlines and is yet untested in an election, has the two main parties at 50-50.

Yet no-one important rates Labor’s chances, although the independents, especially the Xenophon Party in South Australia, get a massive talking up causing Malcolm Turnbull to warn that chaos will result from voting for minor parties – as opposed to the halcyon tranquillity and stability of his own party which has had two prime ministers and fifteen cabinet changes in three years together with an approach to economic policy and tax reform which involves keeping everyone guessing.

It’s the prospect of chaos, “an unstable, chaotic, minority Labour-Greens Independent government as we had before, he maintains, which prompts the PM to put the Greens after Labor on preferences, despite the Gillard minority government (which was more widely based than a Labor-Greens alliance) being highly successful in executing legislation and stable between 2010 and 2013.

The Australia Institute’s latest report shows that the Abbott Turnbull government has performed the worst since the Menzies government on a range of 12 economic indicators including GDP per capita, the unemployment rate, employment growth and the growth of real business investment and intellectual property investment.

Peter Reith, former Howard Minister for babies overboard, balaclava labour on the waterfront, compulsive union-buster and now tragic Liberal Party hack helpfully spells it out on Sky News.

“…what we don’t want is a bunch of wackos out to the left or out to the right …” “Don’t give them an inch. Don’t give them any support.”

Undaunted by any fear of chaos, wackos or a conservative press that is not going to do him any favours, Shorten pledges $150 million to help the University of Tasmania to move its Newnham campus to the heart of Launceston and closer to its students, with a similar proposal for Burnie.

$15 million of new funds is ear-marked for Cradle Mountain – an amount which Labor will double if the Coalition will match it – and other plans for Tasmania including $5 million towards a feasibility study for a second Basslink cable and $500 million should one be required.

The Opposition Leader is “peddling positive policies” sneers News Corp. The put-down highlights an inversion in this campaign. The Opposition proposes policy for a small target government to tear down.

Jacqui Lambie is also critical if cryptic. She says “there are other priorities” which she leaves unspecified while former employment minister, Eric Abetz is put in mind of a wedding.

Labor is “throwing money around like confetti,” Abetz, self-appointed leader of Federal Liberal conservatism, chides, on cue. It does not matter that his government has just promised, in April, a billion dollars of Clean Energy finance to reboot Basslink to “future proof” Tasmania’s energy needs.

The plan is reinforce the myth of Labor as big spenders. No matter that the LNP is outspending Labor two to one on election advertising. Nor that it is spending more than Gillard or Rudd, despite warning of a “spending problem” and urging Australia to “live within its means.”

Government spending as a percentage of Australia’s economic activity is higher now than when Labor governments steered us through international economic turmoil. But confetti?

Is it a Freudian slip? Abetz may soon be back in cabinet if, as some suggest, the LNP is returned with a small majority. Turnbull’s authority over the right would further decline.

Always vigilant on fiscal prudence, due diligence and a close ally of Tony Abbott, Abetz is no stranger to dispute. He claims Turnbull’s coup cost the party hundreds of resignations in Tasmania, a view disputed by Party President Geoff Page.  Page clearly wasn’t looking hard enough.

With Abetz on board, no wonder Reith cautions against supporting any further wackos. The phlegmatic Abetz once dismissed environmental concerns over acid rain, ozone depletion, pesticide use and climate change as “Chicken Little-type hysteria.”

A “toughen-up buttercup” kind of a bloke as employment minister, Eric deplores those who lack his own resolve, as in his address to the Sydney Institute when he shared his distaste for “weak-kneed employers caving in to unreasonable union demands” who then expected him to be a fixer.

More than 17,000 public servants jobs were cut under Abetz’s regime. His bargaining framework banned back-pay and sign-on bonuses. Agency bosses could not use savings and cuts already imposed after years of “efficiency dividends” to justify pay rises.

With this CV and his professional skills, Abetz’s demotion was a loss to the nation, or so he told Fairfax’s Jane Cadzow in March.  Today he gleefully peddles party line hysteria over Labor’s fiscal profligacy. But it’s small beer when compared with a couple of years back when he thundered.

“We are borrowing one thousand million dollars per month just to pay the interest bills on the existing borrowings.”

Shorten’s training programme will not cost a dollar. It will supersede the Coalition’s Youth Jobs PaTH programme, a plan to supply cheap interns whose conditions of work and tenure will be at employers’ discretion. Only their $4 per hour pay will be guaranteed to be below subsistence level.

Yet back-bench Abetz is kept more than busy lately. He complains in The Spectator that he is being silenced by the left-wing commentariat as he tries to denounce Islam and Muslim radicalisation, despite his Prime Minister having no problem.

Turnbull does not hesitate to declare last Sunday’s anti-gay massacre at Orlando, Florida the work of a terrorist conspiracy which only his government can protect us all from.

Someone quickly gets on to the PM. After channelling Tony Abbott, Turnbull subsequently recognises the suffering of the gay community in what evidence suggests was the act of an unstable homophobic individual and not a planned attack by any international terrorist organisation despite the gunman’s pledge of allegiance to ISIS and that group’s subsequent claiming responsibility.

Ever vigilant, protective and resourceful, our Federal government is working around the clock to protect us, Turnbull bangs on. He doesn’t mention metadata retention or the recent NBN raid on Labor offices in Victoria or your plight if you happen to be a professional whistle-blower in a detention centre and bound to remain silent or face imprisonment under the Border Force Act 2015.

Nor does he mention the deadly debacle of the Lindt café siege. Nor oddly, does he dwell on the failure of the AFP to protect the nation from another deranged gunman, Man Haron Monis, about whom it knew more than enough to take protective action.

For Peta Credlin, our intelligence systems are hopeless. Credlin, too uses this week to make common cause with Pauline Hanson and former Bob Katter staffer turned Australian Liberty Alliance Senate candidate Bernard Gaynor and sundry other self-appointed Islamophobes across the nation.

“Fair enough, have a Ramadan Iftar dinner at Kirribilli House but if the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Australian Federal Police, the ceremonial branch and the Prime Minister’s own office can’t recognise a hate preacher and exclude him, we have a massive problem.”

Abetz is quick to pick up the dog whistle. “So, why this silence and denial on Muslim radicalism?” He persists, Trump-ishly and continuing the politics of division which underpin Turnbull’s initial ABC News 24 appearance.

What silence? Crikey uses data from media monitoring and analysis company iSentia, to show that the words Muslim or Islam have appeared over twelve thousand times in media in the last fortnight.

A leader in the Abbott government’s failed Royal Commission into Union Corruption, Abetz is as big a fan of leftist conspiracies as he is of the work of discredited waterfront historian, failed state Liberal politician Dr Hal G.P. Colebatch and commends his partisan union bashing account to others as fact.

According to Colebatch, the chaps wearing balaclavas on the wharves in 1998 in one of the most scurrilous union-busting episodes in our history were workers fearing reprisals from the MUA and not scab labour brought in by Patrick Corrigan and Peter Reith after all. Their attack dogs were probably just family pets. What’s certain is that their headgear kept their handlers warm.

Shorten should take his chilly Hobart reception as a compliment. At least the Tories care enough to give him lip. Not so for Liberal Bass MP, Andrew Nikolic, who shuns a local Bass candidates’ country club debate with a Greens candidate on the grounds that the “Liberal Party is not interested in debating other candidates who have no chance of winning.”

Luckily, for Nikolic fans, the Green pulled out. His no-truck-with-losers approach, however, is certain to catch on in other electorates and would be a salutary reform for question time in parliament.

Despite a handy 10.8% swing last election, Nikolic does have a bit of a battle in Bass with some demanding constituents who refuse to see the benefit of tax cuts for companies in an electorate where two thirds earn less than $37,000 a year, unemployment is high and healthcare is a big issue.

When a cut to the pathology rebate was proposed, Tasmania’s head of pathology could not get an appointment to raise his concerns with the retired Brigadier. Nor could local Baptist Church pastor Jeff McKinnon who reckons Nikolic doesn’t listen to people who hold opposing views. Perhaps he’s been mentored by Greg Hunt.

Renowned for his rapier-like riposte and always up for the cut and thrust of debate our Direct Actor himself, Environment Minister Greg Hunt slips out of witness protection to jeer at Shorten for being in Bass under false pretence. Why no mention, Hunt splutters, of the government’s earlier promise of a Basslink feasibility study?  Why indeed?

Hunt is in hiding somewhere on Melbourne’s Mornington Peninsula since the “clean bill of health” he proclaimed on The Great Barrier Reef has become an electoral liability. He has, however, managed the timely excision of sections on the reef and sections dealing with Kakadu and Tasmanian forests from “World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate” a recent UNESCO climate change report which now has no mention of Australia.

Once an occasion for group hugs in the house, Hunt’s reef verdict now rings hollow given warnings from real scientists confirming that 93% of the reef’s coral is bleaching as rising sea temperatures, a product of global warming continue, helped along by our own greenhouse gas emissions which have increased steadily since the government scrapped Labor’s carbon pricing scheme.

Carbon consultancy firm RepuTex, says that Australia’s carbon pollution rose in the 2014-15 financial year for the first time in almost a decade when compared to the previous year.  Australia’s national greenhouse gas emissions are set to keep rising well beyond 2020 on current trends, with the projected growth rate one of the worst in the developed world. No wonder Hunt is in hiding.

Now that climate change is settled, CSIRO’s Larry Marshall, who works closely with the Prime Minister and his government, is able to dismiss 350 scientists most of whom work in climate science, a move which is devastating to Tasmania’s scientific community.

Sagely, Shorten is not buying into that – or any other links, confining himself to the power switch.

“If anyone thinks that there’s a continuous, reliable supply of power between the mainland and Tasmania, I don’t think that is happening,” the opposition leader says.

Labor will stump up half the cost of a proposed $1 billion Bass Strait electricity cable, with leader Bill Shorten confident the project will go ahead. Yet for Erich Abetz, for whom government expenditure is always a cost and never an investment, Labor is making promises the nation cannot afford.

Everyone in government must avoid the elephant in the room of its climate change denial and how its support of coal-fired power generation contributes to changing weather patterns behind Tasmania’s recent crippling lack of rain and the running down of storage dams to record lows.

All Tassie needs is another power cord. Former Liberal MP from Bass, Mr Warwick Smith has already been tapped to head up a feasibility study for an undisclosed fee to be paid out of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the government’s latest milch-cow since foreign aid has been cleaned out.

Spinners, including the PM, support another Basslink connection on the grounds that Tasmania will thrive on the export of its renewable energy. But will it have any to spare? It’s OK now. Hydro dams are overflowing but what if the spring rains fail to come again? If only state and federal governments could stimulate investment in wind and solar energy. Defy the coal lobby.

In Tasmania, in microcosm, are writ the deficiencies of our national energy policy over successive governments. Solar and wind energy resources abound and yet we cannot break away from the fossil fuel capture of the energy market and build up our solar and wind capacity. Last budget, the Turnbull government, cut one billion from Australia’s Renewable Energy Agency.

Whilst Turnbull has distanced himself from Abbott’s war on renewables, in retaining the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, it is only a tiny step back.

Placating the right and its climate deniers at all costs to retain some sort of personal power, Turnbull is involved in a disastrously expensive and ultimately impossible operation.  Who knows how long he will survive? Whatever the outcome on 2 July, however, one thing is certain. We will still be playing politics on climate change; playing politics with our very survival.

 

 

 

 

“This is a vile attack on freedom … an attack on all of us.”

“There are people outside our country and some within it who hate the freedoms that we enjoy and would seek to threaten them and undermine them with violence.” Malcolm Turnbull ABC 24

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Just before “last call,” around 2:00am last Sunday Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old US-born citizen of Afghan ancestry turned his legally obtained AR-15 type assault rifle and his hand gun on patrons of Pulse a gay bar in Orlando, a place he himself had frequented for three years.

Forty-nine young people in their twenties and thirties, were killed while another fifty were injured in an horrific scene of unimaginable carnage.

Gun violence kills or injures 112 Americans per day and the Orlando shootings were one of 43 in the USA on Sunday yet the event has deeply shocked Americans, and caused many to search for answers, or, sadly, to air pet conspiracy theroies or inflict their dark Islamophobic ranting while similar outpourings and anguish from around the world including of course Australia.

Mateen was known to the FBI but Director, James B. Comey Jr., says that there had not been any indication that the massacre was part of a foreign-directed plot. Undeterred by reason or empiricism, mainstream media outlets are quick to make the same link New York Post which ran a headline “ISIS vs the US.”

In Australia, conservative media pet commentator and Senate candidate Pauline Hanson appears on Sky News as a terrorism expert, despite not knowing the difference in meaning between Islam and Muslims. And dogs as it turns out.

Although Mateen claimed allegiance to ISIS, evidence suggests that the shooting was a hate crime; the action of a disturbed and homophobic young security guard who was deranged and abusive according to his former wife, who had alarmed his colleagues with his past talk of violence and his homophobic hatred.

Leaders’ comments feed Islamophobic sentiment. For President Obama the massacre is “an example of the kind of homegrown extremism that all of us have been concerned about,” with a gunman who was inspired by radical material he found online.

No mention of course of Mateen Snr who believes homosexuals will be punished by God and who reports that his son was sickened by the sight of gay men kissing in public. Mateen Snr’s a regular sort of guy who likes to dress up in army uniform and post videos on social media campaigning for Afghanistan’s presidency although the poll closed a year ago.

Also campaigning rather less than successfully is Australian caretaker Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull. Like Pauline Hanson and Donald Trump, Turnbull is eager to exploit the tragic event as an opportunity to electioneer.

Rather than reach out to the victims in their suffering or acknowledge some of the tragic event’s deeper complexities, the PM is quick to resort to the over-played anti-terror card he has picked up from his predecessor, Tony Abbott.

“We stand in solidarity with the people of the US as they stand up to this terrorist, violent, hate-filled attack,” he says despite clear evidence that the tragedy is already causing deep divisions to appear in the US such as those between Democrats arguing for gun control and Republicans who focus on ISIS.

It is, Turnbull says, “a vile attack on our freedom” In this he aligns himself with Donald Trump who is proposing to ban immigration from nations with known terrorist connections. Turnbull may have come out as a feminist recently, but he wants us all to know he’s not soft on terror. He knows what’s going on in Orlando.

His sentiments are echoed by racist populist and celebrity politician Pauline “Please Explain” Hanson who may win election to the Australian Senate on 2 July. Hanson has released a video in which she uses “the latest terrorist attack,” as she calls it, to her political advantage.

“We have to take a strong stand against Muslims,” she says. A little further into her mind excursion, she compares the 1.6 billion adherents of Islam to dogs. Muslims, like pit bull terriers are dangerous. Neither ought to be allowed.

Malcolm Turnbull is no demagogue but he does manage to deliver a plausible Lynton Crosby, tough on terror, dog-whistling scaremongering script on how the senseless slaughter of at least fifty people in Orlando means that terrorists are after us because “they hate our freedom,” a meaningless but inflammatory phrase favoured on several public occasions by his predecessor.

The PM’s freedom-protecting performance plumbs new depths. Worse, his eagerness to identify yet another offensive by the forces of evil – to whip up xenophobia and Islamophobia is a disturbingly inappropriate and inept response to a tragedy which calls for empathy and compassion.

On his first attempt at a statesman-like response, he has no solidarity, no common cause with a suffering community. He cannot even bring himself to acknowledge that the killings took place at a gay night club, a lapse quickly brought to his attention, yet one which it is impossible now for him to rectify.

Nor is his public record on gay rights anything but disappointing. While the PM is happy to be photographed in his best causual pink shirt with participants in Sydney’s iconic Gay Mardi Gras, he is not prepared, despite his earlier pose as a progressive, to advocate for gay marriage.

He cannot even protect Safe Schools, a voluntary resource to support the teaching of tolerance of gender difference and diversity of sexual orientation which is now all but shut down by his right wing colleagues. Nor is he prepared now to call the violent and extreme homophobia inflicted upon the innocent victims of gay bar in Orlando for the hate crime that it is.

The PM’s narrowness is disturbing. Alarming. But then, it’s meant to be. “Our way of life,” that homogenous, monolithic entity of football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars is at stake.

Our way of life? In reality, of course, we are a diverse nation with a myriad of affiliations, allegiances and cultural backgrounds, a million and one ways. But there’s nothing like a quick pogrom against the outsider to unify us; help us rally around the flag in an ersatz, sentimental mindless nationalism.

Some of us now drape ourselves in Australian flags, cover our faces and proceed out into the street to jeer, punch and kick to Reclaim Australia.

Turnbull’s comments are calculated to inflame the sources of the type of violence seen in Coburg, Melbourne between anti-racist and anti-immigration demonstrations recently where men kicked grappled and punched each other before being separated by police in riot gear.

Investing in division pays political dividends for conservative parties. Whilst George Brandis’ amendments to 18C of the Racial Vilification Act 197, may have failed, hate speech still has more than its fair share of supporters in this government. It’s a handy tool for petty demagogues, provided you don’t mind the damage it causes.

So far the PM’s actions have been a shamefully cynical attempt to exploit the suffering of those who were injured or killed or their friends and families for his own narrow political gain. He can boost anti-Muslim sentiment along with all manner of other bigotry and appear tough on border protection in one.

He did this earlier this year, to much international censure, when he publicy warned Europe that the Syrian refugee crisis may be exploited by terrorists. Perhaps this explains why we have accepted only a handful of the Syrian 12000 refugees Tony Abbott promised to accept last September but which now turn out to be only those 1-3 % of Syrians who are members of Christian minorities.

It takes time, as the head of the Refugee Council has pointed out in disgust to cherry-pick the right type of refugee.

Turnbull must appear a strong leader at all costs. Those Australians who must daily endure prejudice, ignorance and hostility, whom he has a duty to protect can expect to suffer increased intolerance and Islamophobia, state-sanctioned by dog whistle.

Clearly the aspiring Prime Minister cares more for his own campaign than for the victims or for all those who now in this lucky country must pay the price of his incitement of racial hatred and irrational fear of the other.

Like Tony Abbott before him, he never stops to consider the damage his senseless inflammatory remarks may have on individuals and communities in Australia, especially in migrant communities and in all the other many places our social fabric is already stretched to breaking point.

Campaing experts, such as Lynton Crosby recommend fear. A bit of hysteria about the imminent invasion of ISIS, as in Tony Abbott’s disgraceful “they are coming for us” makes us lean towards voting for a conservative candidate in the polling booth. But it also runs the risk of backfiring.

Doubtless Turnbull was just following orders in his Orlando nonsense. If Malleable Mal is putty in the hands of his homophobic right wing, Lynton Crosby will be irresistable. Yet Turnbull does himself and his campaign cause no favour to allow his campaign director’s penchant for cynical fear-mongering to sway his own reason and judgement.

But, then as we saw with Godwin Grech, and as we saw recently with his social media video homage to his father Bruce, an embarrassing and demeaning special pleading that we would look more favourably upon him because of the poverty and maternal deprivation he suffered as a child.

Despite it being a pre-requisite for any kind of leadership, Judgement is not Malcolm Turbull’s strongest suit. Nor it seems is assertiveness.

While you won’t hear Pauline Hanson complaining nor any of the other Islamophobes standing for the senate, helped by the double dissolution Turnbull had to have many other more reasonable Australians are daily disappointed in Turnbull.

Voters had hoped for a more enlightened statesmanship from Tony Abbott’s successor, a man who promised reasoned dialogue and consultation only to be fobbed off with business as usual from his government which, as his cynical and wretchedly inadequate response to the atrocity of Orlando shows, is all too keen to continue his predecessor’s politics of intolerance, fear and division.

 

Wading around deep water in Launceston last Thursday, were Tasmanian Premier Will Hodgman and federal Liberal MPs Andrew Nikolic, Brett Whiteley and Eric Hutchinson, who turned up to ensure that the PM did not spoil his visit to the Onion Isle by getting out his depth on climate change and rashly linking global warming with the devastating floods.

Turnbull rebuffed Bill Shorten’s shrewd offer of a bipartisan visit. Launceston was thus blessed with two successive media circuses, although they visited different flood-struck areas. Yet, despite the mud and the wheel-churning, it was spared the impression that Shorten was Turnbull’s equal. Or an alternative Prime Minister.

The PM was resolute. Bugger the pre-election caretaker convention of equal access to information and consultation on important decisions. It was only day 34. There was an election dance marathon to be won. Policy to be got out.

As both major parties waltzed around the elephant in the room of the coalition’s bogus climate policy, the PM spoke up to stop anyone joining any dots between the disaster and climate change, before anyone brought up the clear global trend of increased Intensity of rainfall with climate change.

They were too late. In response to one journalist’s question that we would see more storms of this nature with climate change, Turnbull generalised and obscured the link. “Larger and more frequent storms are one of the consequences that the climate models and climate scientists predict from global warming.”

If only we could get rid of those models and those scientists, we’d be OK. (The Coalition’s working on it.)

“…you cannot attribute any particular storm to global warming,” the PM continued arrestingly, obscuring the point the reporter was making, “so let’s be quite clear about that. And the same scientists would agree with that.”

Encouraged by his PM’s form of words, but picking up on only some of them, embattled member for Bass, Andrew Nikolic, a highly vocal climate sceptic in parliament who enjoyed a key role in the slashing of our Renewable Energy Target (RET) went further. No-one would be “silly enough to try and link a single event to climate change.”

No-one is arguing for simple causation

Of course they are linked. No-one is arguing for simple causation. Climate Change Council scientists warn that global warming and rising sea levels are major contributing factors to the kinds of storms that recently caused so much damage to the East coast of Australia.

All extreme weather events have a climate component. A warming atmosphere has a greater capacity for carrying more moisture resulting in more intense rainfall and floods. Accelerating sea level rise also increases the impact of storms in coastal areas as witnessed recently at Collaroy.

Professor Lesley Hughes explains the heavier rainfall. “These east coast lows, while they’ve also been around for some time and often deliver intense rainfall, are occurring in an atmosphere that has about 7% more water vapour than it did fifty years ago. This increases the risk of more intense rainfall.”

What should be bipartisan is an understanding that our only choice is to stop burning coal and embrace renewable energy. This election is the last chance we have to get serious about our climate change policy. Yet there is nothing to see here from either major party in this Clayton’s election campaign, despite some urging from the sidelines.

Some ratbags will got to any lengths to spoil a disaster zone media opportunity even with our beefed up national security and metadata retention laws, including the Border Protection Act 2015 which makes it illegal for professionals to speak out about conditions in detention centres, a law which some doctors have chosen to defy.

And so it proved in Sydney later that day. A British television crew ambushed the PM as he left the American and Australian US Studies Centre tenth annual benefit dinner, a black-tie function in Sydney where Turnbull had been insulting the intelligence of his audience by repeating the lie that he had to call the election because of vital ABCC legislation blocked by the senate which his government needs to restore the rule of law.

“Australia’s actions were illegal..”

Jonathan Miller, Channel Four Foreign Correspondent, wanted to know if the PM was alarmed by the recent spate of self-immolations by asylum-seekers on Nauru and whether he agreed with observers that Australia’s actions were illegal under international law. The PM is reported to have stone-walled the BBC reporter.

He would have been just as forthcoming had he been asked about the government’s position on PNG, a failed state whose PM enjoys our loyal support despite evidence of considerable popular unrest and unconfirmed reports of police shooting protestors. The ugly spectacle of our support for a corrupt regime because our government needs desperately for Manus Island detention centre to at least remain open is one which with bipartisan agreement seems to be swept to one side. Just as with the gulag on Nauru.

Nothing to see here. As in the days of the Tampa crisis, when John Howard refused point blank at a press conference to reveal the source of his categorical assurances to the Australian people that SIEV-X sank in Indonesian waters and that the drowning of 353 people was somehow someone else’s responsibility.

Turnbull had just come from praising John Howard as the gold standard in his own cabinet government and singled out Arthur (Amnesiac) Sinodinos for his architectural virtues in two governments. A pillar of the Howard government, Sinodinos, he said is “a flying buttress in mine.”

Perhaps this curiously phrased praise will cause a restorative flow of blood to Arthur’s head and enable him to recall the answers he was unable to provide the ICAC concerning his role in setting up The Free Enterprise Foundation which was established to permit property developers to make illegal donations to NSW Liberal Party funds.

The NSW Electoral Commission continues to withhold $4.4 million in public funding from the NSW Liberals until it formally discloses who donated $693,000 to the party via the Free Enterprise Foundation before the 2011 election. If Sinodinis is Turnbull’s flying buttress, however, in foreign policy the US is Australia’s anchor, the caretaker PM declared dipping into maritime analogies on Thursday, despite Malcolm Fraser’s view that it was a ball and chain.

…a strategic captive of the US…

John Howard, set up the US Studies Centre, according to Turnbull on Thursday because he ‘…understood that the United States is the irreplaceable anchor to the global rules-based order, an order built upon shared political values and common economic and security interests.’ Yet for Malcolm Fraser in his book Dangerous Allies, ours is more of Stockholm syndrome relationship. Australia is “a compliant partner, a strategic captive of the US,” in Fraser’s view.

To those perverse few who still see Malcolm Turnbull as a type of enlightened and progressive rationalist, a “small l” Liberal, his sycophantic embrace of Howard and the US Alliance in Sydney this week may be a rude shock. On the other hand, the latest Reach-Tel suggests a 2 point increase in Turnbull’s popularity which will, no doubt, be taken as a vindication for his release last Sunday of a brief Facebook video which asks us to accept him, perhaps even to let him lead us, because of his poor, deprived childhood.

“How poor was my childhood” could be the start of some competitive bidding from other political hopefuls and millionaires although it could be argued that Gina Rinehart, a major backer of the IPA which is enjoys an extraordinary influence over Liberal politicians both in and out of parliament, has already set the gold standard.

Her ABC Australian Story documentary appearance in 2015 reinvents her father, Lang Hancock, as a noble and heroic Aussie battler and devoted father. His stoic and selfless determination to fly out on endless self-punishing mineral prospecting odysseys over the Pilbara enabled him to reap obscenely large profits from the sale of minerals extracted from lands far below which did not belong to him, as if this were somehow his just reward. It was an astonishing piece of hagiography even from a loving daughter.

Similarly, the Turnbull video is ostensibly a tribute to Bruce, a father to whom he owes everything. Yet below and even on top (- a part of the surface gloss) is a calculated bid for our sympathy from a politician whose ruthless ambition is well documented.

… see the mythic reinvention as a quest…

The spin is defended by Karen Middleton and others who see the mythic reinvention as a quest to present a more authentic Malcolm to his adoring fans. Besides, her argument goes, Bill is doing the same type of thing.

True, there are images of Shorten’s mother, a former teacher, in some publicity material canvassing us to vote Labor because education matters but it is a long way from the PM’s recent desperate pitch in which he reinvents himself as some sort of ordinary battler. It’s an ill-judged bid for sympathy and the women’s vote which Turnbull’s been advised he will need.

Some offer a blunter appraisal; if you have to make a video like that, you are admitting you are in serious trouble. The feminist bid just smacks of desperation and will backfire when it is measured against the poverty of the PM’s achievement on behalf of women.

Coming out as a feminist is not a new thing in recent Liberal prime ministers, but it still has some novelty value. Turnbull the feminist was unleased on an unwary electorate this week, raising some very awkward questions about a Liberal Party leadership which as Annabel Crabb notes, only the men are feminists, because the women don’t want any label which might get some of the unreconstructed males still left on front and back bench offside.

…where there is a war on women…

The nation now awaits Turnbull to respond to the promptings of his feminist sensibility and release all those women imprisoned on Nauru where there is a war on women. If he really wants to be a leader, he will bring home all the asylum seekers and refugees immediately. At home, he will pushing for equality in workplaces. The gender pay gap of $277 per week between women and men’s average weekly earnings will vanish at one stroke.

What is increasingly apparent, however, at least to some in the Labor camp, is that the caretaker PM is content to “run down the clock” to the election. He is just playing a dead bat, happy to sacrifice ten marginal seats if it brings him the office of elected Prime Minister that he covets. Or that Bruce would have wanted for him. Certainly his failure to turn up at a Sky News Peoples’ Forum debate on Wednesday, a “long-standing invitation” made him look flaky. Or scared. Or both. Or perhaps, he just couldn’t be bothered.

Sky News showed its displeasure sending presenters Paul Murray and Andrew Bolt out to condemn Turnbull for his snub. Sky is, however, getting great value out of the Liberals and ought not to be so churlish, especially when recent recruit, Tony Abbott’s former boss Peta Credlin’s stellar performance is taken into account.

Voters don’t like Bill Shorten and don’t trust Malcolm Turnbull according to Credlin’s piece in The Herald Sun on Saturday. Abbott’s former chief of staff has let the nation know that Turnbull is not doing enough to win over uncommitted voters and that the result could be chaos in the senate.

Credlin has a way with words and her freely dispensed advice is doubtless as powerfully motivating to the PM as any desire to prove worthy of the memory of his father’s sacrifice. She has homed in on an arrogance which is perhaps a key part of the caretaker PM’s campaign strategy so far. In her view, Turnbull’s “superannuation changes still tell the Liberal base you don’t really matter because you have nowhere else to go.”

In the campaign so far, the PM has avoided anything of substance while challenges that clamour for real leadership, such as climate change, closing the gulags that are our offshore detention centres, or providing a fair and just society for all Australians, issues which might truly define a worthy political leader lie well beyond his grasp.

His opponent, for all his affinity with the workers and all his rhetoric appears just as imprisoned by the corporate state a compliant partner as Fraser would have it in an abusive and mutually demeaning relationship.

Eighty per cent of success,  says Woody Allen, is showing up, a point lost on hapless caretaker PM Malcom Turnbull who fails to appear at the second Sky leader’s debate last Wednesday, leaving Bill Shorten to engage with the audience and an empty chair. Hosts Paul Murray and News Corp’s moral philosopher Andrew Bolt are furious.

Murray has email proof that Turnbull promised to be there. The brilliant Bolt wonders if Turnbull was “punishing Sky for hiring Peta Credlin.” (Imagine the ruckus if it had been Bill Shorten who had simply failed to turn up. Or had gate-crashed Leigh Sales 7:30 Report soirée instead.)

As it is, Shorten improvises a forum where he answers questions with some success. Sky News reckons 57% of audience members say they are more likely to vote Labor after hearing from Bill; 16% are less likely. 27% are still undecided. The science isn’t settled on Labor yet.

In the meantime on ABC, 7:30 Turnbull is evading Sales’ questions; sloganeering about jobs and growth.

Is it just another bad call? Turnbull’s dud judgement is legendary. His credibility is yet to recover from his 2009 backing of dodgy Treasury mole Godwin Grech who forged a bogus email about a ute in an attempt to discredit the Labor government. More recently, Turnbull’s home video, a special plea to be taken seriously as a leader because of his childhood deprivation is another execrable lapse of judgement.

Perhaps, the PM’s minders tell him that he is in such dire straits in the popularity poll stakes now that a no-show is better than another poor show.  Or does his nerve simply fail him? He has access to special party polling. Whatever the cause, it is not a good look even if it continues his downward trajectory.

Malcolm “Soufflé Turnbull, is Australian politics’ incredible shrinking man.  After six months of letting down the nation’s expectations, he cannot even show up at Sky to debate Bill Shorten, the least threatening, most neoliberal, bipartisan Labor leader he could hope to encounter.  Bipartisan? There’s never been a time when the two parties have agreed not to disagree about more matters of substance.

Just look at defence, one of the Coalition’s costlier vote-buying stunts, part of its politicisation of the military.

Labor, under Shorten, is happy for the Abbott/Turnbull government to squander $12 billion on F-35 jet fighters. It could have at least queried their reliability. Grounded by the Pentagon because of defects 13 times since 2007, the F35 is a plane which Rand analysts say  “can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run.” No wonder they want to sell them to us.

But Shorten’s Labor does not want to look soft on national security. It is the same with our new giant submarines, which are an absolute steal at $50 billion, and rising, to buy votes for a couple of Liberal seats in South Australia.

Labor’s quite OK for Turnbull and co to blow $50 billion on twelve Shortfin Barracuda Block submarines from DCNS which are concepts; little more than a sketch on the back of a Gauloise cigarette packet. And $50 billion is just the purchase price. You can probably triple that over the life of the vessel, to maintain the fleet. No matter that  we can’t even crew the six crack Collins class subs we have currently.

The navy has problems crewing its submarines. It’s lucky to be able to put just one in the water in recent times. Consequently, it must pay high wages. A spud-basher on a submarine can command $200,000 per year.

Other personnel are paid more in order to compensate for the drawbacks of a life under the ocean wave. Blokes get to risk their lives buried in a big steel coffin-like tube under thousands of tonnes of water for 80 days with mostly only other fellow-isolates for company, although some crews today may include a few women. In February, RAN submariners were paid a $50,000 bonus just for being on board.

Yet, given poor Liberal polling in a key seat or two in South Australia there’s never been a more exciting time to be a submariner.  With a bit of innovative recruiting, or a bit of trickle-down morale boosting, our current three seagoing submarine workforces will magically expand to twelve. An agile, innovative, government could always approach Serco to press-gang a crew or two. Just don’t expect any questions during the election campaign about it.

Perhaps someone in a forum where the PM does show up will ask how many jobs are really likely to flow from our huge investment in the Silent Service. Despite the “Aussie jobs, Aussie steel” rhetoric, about half of a modern submarine’s rig is likely to be built by multinational war profiteers such as Rayethon and Lockheed Martin who will install US weapons systems, to the great benefit of their international shareholders.

Or perhaps someone in government will even make a case for submarines to the electorate.  What do they add to our fleet of surface vessels?  Why not invest the $50 billion in education and health?

There’s still time, too, for a “prudent and responsible” PM who has told us he is “not going to hand out a fistful of dollars” to go over how the $50 billion contract was won.

French company DCNS  is currently under investigation by a French court for bribing Malaysian officials to win their submarine contract in 2002. Here, DCNS employed former Liberal staffer Sean Costello as its CEO for the bid. Mr Costello was chief-of-staff for former Defence Minister David Johnston who was sacked from his position in 2014.

Nothing to see here. Or, at least, Turnbull has nothing to fear from Labor here. Shorten doesn’t want to be an underwater, nanny state wuss. Or soft on massive arms spending binges we can’t afford. No way.

Then there’s Labor’s neoliberal mindset. Shorten’s been sucked in to the local job-destroying vortex of Free Trade. When did you hear him last challenge the Great God Growth? Amen. Bill’s often on about how small government is good and how small business leads the economy. Neither is true but you hear the same spin from the government. No wonder debates descend into quibbling over costings, a black-holier-than-thou finger-pointing.

Turnbull need not fear Labor on asylum seeker issues. Shorten even voted for the Border Force Act 2015 which makes it illegal for doctors and other professionals working in the gulags we call detention centres to report abuse.

Yet there has been a late change. Perhaps Turnbull wimped out on Wednesday because he is afraid to talk border protection now that he has outed himself as a feminist. Questions arise. Just don’t expect Shorten to ask them.

A feminist Malcolm Turnbull has to know that there is a war on women on Nauru. Yet his feminism fails to lead him to act upon this knowledge. Even as a superior economic manager, Turnbull could bring those women home immediately. Close Nauru. Finally, acknowledge that PNG has closed Manus, too. Reduce costs vastly. Help him get us all to live within our means as he so confusingly puts it.

According to last July’s Senate committee hearing it cost $645,726 per asylum seeker during an 11-month period, or almost $2000 a day. Far cheaper to give each asylum seeker free housing, enrol each one in public school. Give each asylum seeker free accommodation on the mainland and save $400. There’d be votes in that – but not from Coalition supporters.

Bill’s even in the race to cut the deficit, or balance the budget, rather than call this stunt for what it is, a ruse invented by Peter Costello, the world’s most profligate treasurer so he could brag about his fiscal prowess, taking all the credit of a mining boom but failing to invest any of it.

Defence, border protection, balancing the books, the two leaders agree on so much it’s not funny. But somehow, Shorten’s got Turnbull running scared.

Granted, Leigh Sale’s 7:30 Report last Wednesday, is no place to hide. His audience is bigger and the questions are tougher –  but the net effect is to appear flaky and evasive. Far too much of the hokey personalising; the you and me Lee first name business so much abused by Hawke. It’s overly familiar and just another transgression the PM’s minders would do well to talk him out of – if he ever listens.

What are we to make of this weasel? A man who wants us to elect him PM who simply walks away from a commitment to debate his opponent only to seek out the masochistic pleasure of a public doing over from his favourite ABC interviewer?  His performance does nothing to reassure his rapidly dwindling supporters. Or to win any swinging voters.

Unable to explain what his government’s National Economic Plan would mean in real terms to an average family with a policeman and a teacher, our caretaker PM falls back on slogans. It’s an uncanny evocation of the interview with Sales and Abbott where the budgie smuggler who also had nothing to declare, repeated as if he were on some cognitive loop: “We’ve stopped the boats…boats…boats.”

But in Malco’s case it is jobs and growth. What jobs? What growth? Sales allows the PM to blow hard about 300,000 jobs created, as if the government directly creates employment. His dominatrix avoids pointing out that under this government employment has been in steady, steep decline since it took office, measured by hours worked.

Alan Austin notes that hours worked per month for the last six months under Labor averaged 88.55. For the last six months of 2014, the average was 86.91. For the last six months on record, up to January 2016, it was down to 85.56. A shocking result.

Turnbull and co love to claim they are creating employment. It is simply not true. Similarly, someone in a leader’s debate could challenge Turnbull on small business. His slogan is that small business is the engine room of the economy. It is driving employment growth.

Except that it’s not. It’s true that a lot of Australians work for small business employing up to 20 workers. It’s 45% of the private sector workforce. And those voters must be courted at all costs. But in the last six years these small businesses have provided only 5% of the growth in private sector employment.

A real leader’s debate is impossible given that Labour and LNP have agreed on so much already. The important stuff. Of course, you would also need a couple of real leaders. It’s too late now to undo the damage Turnbull has done himself by running away from the second Sky debate; jilting Bolt in favour of a speed date with Leigh Sales.

But it’s never too late to stop the nonsense about jobs and growth in favour of some real answers to some real questions such as how soon can we close our gulags on Nauru and Manus?

How about we cut the reckless spending on supporting multinational arms suppliers and submarine builders and invest the funds where they’ll do some good. Health and education would be a good place to start.

If only we could be assured our PM wouldn’t just cut and run. Again.

 

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Signs of desperation are appearing as the Coalition passes the halfway mark in its double or nothing two month campaign gamble which so far is failing to pay off. Labor is level-pegging in the polls while Shorten is ever more popular however much they rubbish him. And no one is buying its great big national economic plan of tax cuts that will fix everything.

Saddled with a superannuation policy it can’t explain and an unfunded $50 billion business handout it can’t sell; an economic plan which simply will not work, its popularity tumbling, the Coalition is resorting to cheap tricks and stunts.

Treasurer, Scott Morrison, has trumped his recent falling into his own black hole trick with an even more embarrassing performance exposing “Shorten’s war on business” and his use of “tax as bullets,” a puerile pantomime scaremongering replete with daft charts on a day reserved for the repatriation of remains of soldiers who had died in Vietnam.

Not to be outdone, Nationals Deputy, Fiona Nash, who last campaign was photographed with “Ditch the Witch” anti-Gillard posters, has attacked a “prehistoric” Bill Shorten for claiming that women do most of the work when it comes to organising childcare.

Yet all this appears reasonable compared to the PM’s crying poor. Millionaire Malcolm Turnbull, whose father was a hotel broker, the boy who was a scholarship student at elite Sydney Grammar, is now posing as a battler from a broken home, a pitch MSM suggest, is a bid for the women’s vote, although they may be confusing his emotive plea with his recent claim to be a feminist.

Or are we being asked to accept that his wretched childhood will cause women to rush to mother him? Never mind that he’s a weak and indecisive political Walter Mitty whose pipe dreams of innovation and agility are no substitute for policy or leadership, we must all take pity on poor little Malco for his dreadful suffering. Whatever the aim, it’s emotional baloney.

Turnbull’s a mug if he thinks we are that gullible. He may well have been unhappy when his mother left and who knows the suffering he went through? The feelings of abandonment? The rejection. No-one would dispute his real loss. Or the pain that may well continue to this day, to say nothing of the damage caused to his self-esteem, his sense of well-being. But just how does wearing his hurt on his sleeve make him any more electable?

In ways he may not understand or welcome, Turnbull is doing voters a favour by tearing up on camera and posting videos of his days with Bruce, his father and his best mate. His behaviour is far more eloquent, more revealing than four weeks of tedious campaign rhetoric of jobs, growth and innovation. His special pleading sounds the alarm in even the most sympathetic voter. This is no way to get elected Prime Minister.

What are we to make of a man prepared to trade his unhappy childhood in a last-ditch plea for sympathy or anything that might bring him victory? The manipulative distortion of the facts is hardly endearing. The poor little Malco story is the latest offering from a very rich and powerful, ruthless man who needs always to get his own way. He will do anything to get it.

Turnbull’s manipulative man-child featured in his last leader’s debate when he posed as a political cleanskin, a tycoon who turned fifty before his idealism, honed by years of deal making, job creating and growing led him reluctantly to public life.

“I did not come into this role as a political activist. I did not come in here as a political staffer.

I came into this role as an adult, at 50, after a lifetime of working, building businesses in many, many areas, creating jobs.”

All of which is a plausible lie. Or if you live in our media bubble of the eternal present which knows no history, admits no past, a place where all claims are true, devoid of any means of disproof. Turnbull has, in fact, been in politics all his life.

From Sydney University’s Liberal Club to his bid for Liberal preselection in 1981, he’s been a ruthless political animal.

In a preselection battle for Wentworth in 2004, for example, he told sitting member Peter King, to “Fuck off and get out of my way.”

Desperate times call for desperate measures, perhaps. Although bookies still favour the coalition to win, Turnbull is fading badly at the half-way mark. Recent Reach-Tel polling shows that even in Wentworth there is a ten per cent swing against him. Half of his electorate say they fancy him less now that when he toppled Abbott.

Even worse, he now has the IPA offside. His own party’s policy engine-room, the IPA, has taken issue with his government’s tinkering with super law. Framed as “transitioning to retirement,” in reality, these Costello era rules help rich people to evade tax.

Despite commandeering Liberal policy under both Abbott and Turnbull and having members actually in the senate and in the house of reps, the hugely powerful IPA is clearly prepared to do everything it can to ensure that its backers are getting value for money.

The IPA is the Liberal Party of Australia’s major policy architect, a conduit from corporate will to political decision. Helping investors take the risk out of democracy, the IPA is coy about its backers such as Gina Rinehart or other backers in big mining, big tobacco, big oil, big arms manufacturing Exxon, Shell, Caltex and BHP Billiton.

The IPA’s contribution to Liberal policy is massive, all pervasive and unprecedented.  A powerhouse of Neoliberal ideology and mythology, it helps Liberal governments to privatise and deregulate. It urges war on unions and NGOs.  The science of environmental and climate change is to be debunked and defunded. It advocates cutting business tax and so much more but it is clearly not satisfied with Turnbull.

Determined to squeeze the Liberal lemon until its pips squeak, IPA Director and former Howard government staffer John Roskam tells ABC radio, LNP super changes are clearly retrospective. People write him emails. They are “disappointed, devastated, white hot with anger.” “Hundreds of thousands of Australians have had their plans thrown into turmoil.”

Windy back-benchers quickly pitch in but amidst all the hysteria PM “May-I-Just-Say” Turnbull, “makes it perfectly clear” that the policy stays – at least until they’ve won the election. Will the IPA get its way? If you listen to party amnesiac Arthur Sinodinos or inspect Julie Bishop’s language, “unintended consequences” the backflip is already booked in.

Turnbull’s modest super reform was about all he had got going for him in the way of real policy. Now that has been kicked away from under him he must fall back on his personal following, the central plank of the Liberals’ 2016 campaign strategy.

As he desperately, forlornly tries to reinvent himself in his own image, his popularity in free fall and with a hostile IPA gunning him down, the shadow of the man he deposed, Tony Abbott, the IPA’s favourite son must fall darkly upon his dreams of ever being elected PM.

 

 

 

 

 

With a month of whistle-stops, walkthroughs and the dark pit of at least one more dud leaders’ debate yawning ahead, the coalition campaign show is careering back and forth across stage like a pantomime horse, back legs alarmingly out of step with its front.

Meanwhile, backstage, John Roskam, IPA ring-master, inveterate defender of privilege, vested interest and sundry secret backers including Gina Reinhart is whipping up such a frenzy of opposition to super policy fit to bring the house down, assisted naturally by some sensitive back-benchers.

While some voters may be enjoying the comic debacle, the thoroughbred Coalition favourite continues to ease in the betting ring as its poor form fails to inspire confidence. Show pony Julie Bishop baulks at talking to her own party’s super policy, causing Turnbull to opine that super is a notoriously complex thing. Clearly JB should not be bothering her pretty little head with figures.

Kooyong Colt and union-super-buster Josh Frydenberg, who in February shifted his own work super into a union super fund, is equally foggy on the details of his party’s policy on super but when it comes to self-interest he clearly knows which horse to back. Unlike his party leader, however, it’s just a guy thing; nobody is suggesting he takes a Bex and has a good lie down.

But who cares about figures? Mad dog Morrison and fall guy Matthias Cormann just make the figures up. On Thursday, ScoMo goes into a barking frenzy about Labor being at war with growth on a day set aside to bring home remains of 33 soldiers from Vietnam. Is this another excruciatingly bad dead cat tactic?

None of Morrison’s embarrassingly inappropriate and juvenile rhetoric of war and bullets cuts any ice with an electorate which has seen better stunts before. He shoots himself in both feet.

Across the nation weary punters remain sceptical that the Coalition’s economic plan; welfare for the wealthy $15 billion tax cut over ten years to businesses with big cuts to education and health is any kind of leadership at all, let alone a pathway to jobs and growth. ScoMo’s stunts shriek desperation.

The Fairfax Ipsos Poll has Labor in front 51-49 led by a spectacular collapse in support for wannabe elected PM and hapless tool of his party’s right wing, “May I Just Say” Malcolm Turnbull who has cut his 53% popularity before Christmas to 3% this week by continuing to alienate and disappoint. Turnbull makes some desperate attempts at Abbott style ranting about Shorten’s war on everything and is on track to overhaul the Opposition leader’s minus six rating.

Where is the leader who promised advocacy not slogans? Missing in action. What became of the leader who “would respect people’s intelligence,” or who would “explain these complex issues and set out the course of action we believe we should take?”

Apart from his unusual nostrum of jobs and growth, a bit of tame pork-barrelling and a promise to stick to his super plan and lies about negative gearing pushing rents up and destroying house values, all Turnbull can offer the nation all week is Shorten’s war.

Little wonder that Turnbull’s approval rating, on which was built so much of the government’s strategy, along with his promise to do things with the economy that his economically illiterate predecessor could not, has dropped 3 per cent in the last fortnight.

Alarmingly for Coalition campaign central and fancy hired guns Crosby-Textor, Shorten’s approval continues to climb. Word is put about that the Coalition is really very strong in its marginals but there is little room for complacency despite years of training.

Seven’s Reach Tel poll on Friday has young colt Wyatt Roy, whose sandpit portfolio of Assistant Minister for Innovation is even younger than he is, down to 50% of the two party preferred vote, a 6.9% drop on his last election result. Doubtless there will a crowd-funded app for that.

In Tasmania, Getup! polling suggests a bold swing to Labor in Bass. Brigadier Andrew Nikolic, Delcon (delusional conservative expecting Abbott’s return) and chair of the national insecurity committee and anti-safe schools crusader may have to carefully return his leadership baton to his backpack come early July.

There is always time, however, for a national security crisis involving another Sydney teenager who wants to travel to Syria or a turn back the tinnies campaign to take us all utterly by surprise and cause us to come to our senses and return to the fold. Or vote for the Jacqui Lambie network which seems to specialise in armed services veterans in touch with their feminine side.

Kitchen Cabinet-maker Lambie’s footwork has been fancy lately even letting us into her closet of ball gowns whilst bawling out a ballsy dismissal of Cory Bernardi’s pretensions, “… born with a silver spoon up (his) rear end,” a suppository of privilege which puts “silver-tail” in a whole new light but, as Annabel generously offers, may make things painful for a sitting member.

Doubtless feeling that Bernardi, who is always on the brink of starting his own party, too, needs a show of public support after being lambasted by Lambie, our silver-tail PM Malcolm Turnbull turns up to hold hands with the Senator on Thursday at Cory Bernardi’s Conservative Leadership Foundation fund-raiser for the South Australian senate campaign.

Perhaps Malcolm is keen to protect Cory from those critics who objected to his recent tweet to an advocate of rape on private property or perhaps it was to go over old times. Bernardi’s CLF spawned CANdo, which Sally Neighbour writing in the Monthly five years ago, reminded us “rallied dozens of like-minded groups and thousands of individuals to join an orchestrated ‘grassroots’ campaign – also known as ‘astroturfing’ – against the ETS. Their efforts persuaded Liberal MPs to revolt against Turnbull, killing the ETS and propelling Abbott into leadership.”

On the front foot last Tuesday, capering away crazily are Scott Morrison and Matthias Cormann whose lunatic scaremongering about Labor’s black hole last week may startle the Canberra Press Gallery but does nothing to inspire credibility or respect.

“I’m not saying $67 billion, I am saying up to $67 billion ..,” the Treasurer honks as party-pooping, nit-picking reporters find black holes in his black hole. His lame attack quickly falls apart under questioning during its own press conference and is soon trashed by everyone but The Daily Telegraph. The treasurer had made an utter goose of himself, it is agreed, or a chook. But then a skittish Labor rears up in fright.

Labor has been “flushed out,” Morrison crows as the workers’ party bins its pension asset tests and its school kids’ bonus, before the second four week leg of the campaign has even begun. Whilst Labor will enter the second leg of the journey a good few billion dollars in promises lighter, only Morrison could claim the loss of these two policies as any kind of victory.

Disappointed, especially, would be Senator Sam Dastyari an ALP apparatchik who is all misty-eyed idealism and moral high ground with Annabel Crabb on Thursday’s ABC Kitchen Cabinet but who is right on the money about winning.

“It’s not about winning for its own sake,” Sam throws into the mix as he blends chilli and extra virgin olive oil. Former NSW Labor power broker, Dastyari is no stranger to hard politics even if he is a campaign virgin. Piloted into the senate three years ago, he replaced former Labor senator MJ (Matt) Thistlethwaite who left to contest the lower house seat of Kingsford.

Sam drizzles oil over the salad as he dazzles Annabel with all the honest to goodness folksy political idealism he can fit into thirty minutes of lapel-grabbing intensity.

Dastyari, who sits next to Bill Shorten on the Bill bus is a PM in the making. On the up. Turnbull is caught somewhere in the reverse cycle. Yet both recall Groucho on principle.

“Those are my principles and if you don’t like them I have others.”

In a similarly strategic re-invention to Sam’s soft soap on Crabb’s show, Malcolm Turnbull presents himself in last Sunday’s leaders’ debate as a political ingénue, who was an old man of fifty before his idealism finely honed by years of deal making and business starting, jobbing and growing pushed him reluctantly towards a role as the voice of reason and principle in politics.

All of which is true if you ignore the reality. Turnbull has been involved in politics all his life. From Sydney University Liberal Club right through to a bid for Liberal preselection in 1981, he’s been an eager, if not aggressive participant. In his preselection battle for Wentworth in 2004, he told Peter King, his Liberal opponent, “Fuck off and get out of my way.”

Turnbull is commonly held to be short of fuse, remote and very rude which is why his handlers have instructed him to keep smiling. Morrison surely tested his fixed rictus. By Thursday ScoMo had a puerile new routine, Labor’s war on business with “tax their bullets” which also came complete with silly charts and absolutely no new information or argument. A lunatic logic prevailed. The “war on business” refers, for example, to Labor’s qualified tax cut for-small-business-only support.

Was the Morrison Cormann show the arrogance of entitlement? Or was modelling incompetence a Crosby Textor new team plan? After the ScoMo show, leadership stakes show pony Julie Bishop and Josh Frydenberg fell at the first jump when neither could explain their government’s superannuation policy. Or were their catatonic responses some type of Freudian slip? Are they running dead so as to be fresh for the next bold new change of plan? Or leader.

Backbenchers already have the wind up as the IPA orchestrates a full scale attack on a policy that is calculated to upset the very wealthy and as such would always be a bit of a stretch for any Liberal.

A Turnbullian attempt to steal a march on Labor, its proposed tinkering with super concessions has taken the Coalition out of its comfort zone. Now even amnesiac Arthur Sinodinos has remembered his cue, wandering down stage making placating noises. Booking a back flip, he says he wants super looked into after they win the election, a bizarre approach to a policy reform and an election pledge that was clearly announced in the ScoMo budget. Turnbull gets his back up.

The IPA continues to kick up a stink about super on principle. It’s unfair to the rich, a cause shock jocks everywhere rush to take up. And it’s unfair to the poor, the IPA add for good measure. This line attracts the likes of Fran Kelly who gets Kelly O’Dwyer on her show.

Perhaps O’Dwyer feels she cannot compete, so high have Morrison and Cormann raised the bar?

Let’s Make Stuff Up in Public, ScoMo and Co’s riotous rubbery figures show in Canberra last week was ground-breaking. It elevated the humble press conference into surreal, Dadaist performance art in which two clowns pretended to discredit Labor’s costings in a reality-defying routine which ended with the MPs making utter fools of themselves.

Morrison has a number of stabs at how much over budget Labor’s policies might be. Is it $32 billion or is it $67 billion? In the end it was way too much. But whatever he and Cormann alleges is true, he maintains, blazing a bold new path in lunatic logic – it is all true until those Labor bastards could come back and disprove any of it. All true unless disproved.

Say what you like about ScoMo and Co, they get noticed. No wonder others find it hard to keep up.

Shadow finance minister, Tony Burke protests. The Treasurer and Finance minister are out to treat Australians “like fools” who “… know the information they are giving the Australian people is wrong. And they intend to give it anyway.”

Burke is so yesterday. The Coalition is a more highly evolved party, a mob which has economic management in its DNA. Former PM of this government, IPA tool Tony Abbott reassured us all after he was on the skids over his incompetent handling of the economy.

To be fair his government effectively pushed through an IPA agenda of tax cuts for companies, “efficiency dividend” austerity budgeting, privatisation, punishing the poor and the low wage earner and so much more so that wealth may continue to trickle upwards. Or rush.

Now Tony’s team may have another PM as the back legs of the panto horse, but it still clearly acts as if it has licence to make it all up as it goes along. Or not even bother as in the case of Julie Bishop and Josh Frydenberg flubbing their party lines on Super.

Doubtless, too, an abundance of innate fiscal DNA explains Peta Credlin’s vicious attack on Kelly O’Dwyer and her own team. Credlin fires off a critique of her former underlings.

“…the government can’t be in a position where it’s incapable of explaining its own policies.” 

Nit-pickers may point out that under Credlin, explaining policies was not a feature of the Abbott government. Who can forget or forgive the excruciating inadequacy of Tony Abbott’s “we stopped the boats’ policy performance with Leigh Sales?

In the real world, of course, many are horrified when neither deputy leader Julie Bishop nor Minister for Resources, Energy and Northern Australia and building a railway for Adani if it needs one, Josh Frydenberg could explain the government’s proposed changes to superannuation.

The failure of two senior Liberals to explain policy raises questions about the gap between hype and reality from a party still trading on its false boast of better economic management, one of Howard and Costello’s legacies to the nation along with a squandered mining boom.

For Credlin, O’Dwyer has been MIA. The coalition needs to defend it or fix it, she says of the super changes, warning that the issue threatens to become a sleeper. (With a bit of help from Sky News.)

Even ABC’s Fran Kelly wants a please explain. She asks Kelly O’Dwyer if ignorance of policy is good enough Kelly’s question on RN breakfast Wednesday morning.

O’Dwyer evades Kelly’s question. She “won’t commentate on commentary” she says in what is now a stock Liberal response.

She’s asked if the government has understated how many of us the changes to superannuation rules will affect. It’s as if O’Dwyer can’t hear Fran. It’s the tactic du jour of the 2016 campaign, which itself is founded on the lie that the government could not function without its ABCC legislation.

Whilst the strategy is not new, it seems that the coalition has truly made it their own; elevated the non-sequitur to an art form. With all that economic DNA sloshing around in its veins, a Liberal politician doesn’t need to answer questions.  Or tell the truth.

And we should be very wary of those who seek to beguile us with professions of principle or protestations of innocence and naiveté whatever their pedigree or political stable.

 

 

 

 

 

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The PM’s “Turnbullian” master stroke, as his early election gambit was hailed by Annabel Crabb, of Canberra’s press claque, barely a month ago, looks more like an Abbott’s captain’s call each week. Media polls, with all their flaws, point to an ebbing of popular support for the LNP and its hapless leader. Around the nation posters depicting Turnbull’s face are appearing with but one word, Fizza.

Fizza is the work of Sydney graphic artist Michael Agzarian who says he is inspired by Paul Keating’s 2007 description of Malcolm Turnbull as a “big red bunger on cracker night … the one you light and then there’s a bit of a fizz but then nothing, nothing.”

Government strategy has advanced beyond dead cats on tables, or tactical diversion and is now officially out of control as flagged by Turnbull’s public rebuke of his deputy, Barnaby Joyce, for provoking the Indonesians.

Joyce may just have been taking his cue from Scott Morrison or Peter Dutton who were encouraged by captain Abbott to thumb their noses at Indonesian sovereignty as they turned back twenty boat-loads of asylum-seekers into Indonesian waters since 2013 without telling anybody, according to Amnesty International.

Joyce should model his gaffes on Scott Morrison’s black holes. The Treasurer has a black hole in his black hole in his presser Tuesday. He starts out with $67 billion and ends the conference with $35 billion by using some creative accounting based on commitments he thinks Labor might be about to make in Foreign Aid. Until they prove otherwise. His Finance Minister has trouble remembering his PM’s name. Yet, somehow, Morrison claims a type of victory.

The entertainment value of the stunt proves a runaway success and quickly earns a twitter cult following. The Cormann Morrison routine takes the award for the most bizarre election side show of the week for its preposterous logic.

It elects to publicly improvise Labor costings which Labor must then disprove using the dodgy ploy, as Gareth Hutchens writes in The Guardian, that any proposition is true until proved otherwise or Argumentum ad Ignoratiam. Labor takes the bait, dropping its $4.5 billion School Kids Bonus and its Pension Assets test.

Carnival barker, ScoMo revels in Labor’s back down and crows over flushing Labor out. What is at stake, however, apart from his own credibility and authority, is costing. The government will not debate what it is vital for the country to invest in. There is no room in this campaign for what we might truly need.

Yet the Coalition knows it can get mileage out of twitting the opposition’s arithmetic. Bill Shorten gets a makeover as Willy Wonka in The Daily Telegraph, the Liberal Party’s free propaganda organ. No-one presses Morrison on the flimsy guesswork behind his budget’s projected revenue which relies on fantasising about the price of iron ore and the amount the government will get out of multi-nationals – let alone the $1.2 billion it says it will “ claw back” from Centrelink beneficiaries and other welfare fraudsters.

The Black Hole tack is effective. Media focus shifts to Coalition territory and away from health where Labor continues to outpoint the government. AMA doctors help. They are mounting a media campaign to end the Medicare rebate freeze. They argue it amounts to a co-payment by stealth. Health Minister Ley admits that she would end the freeze but has been overruled because she can’t find more cuts to Health.

Barnstorming Barnaby Joyce, the Hannibal Lector of LNP’s PSYOP division, (psychological operations) he reckons, is messing with Johnny Depp’s mind. Or so he says. Joyce takes fool’s cap and bells from Peter Dutton this week for his linking of the live cattle trade with asylum seekers. Turnbull quickly issues a denial. If sending in the clowns is the answer, the government is asking the wrong question.

Week three has Seven’s Reach-Tel poll putting Labor ahead 52-48, two-party preferred nationally with respondent-allocated preferences to Labor while others have the two major parties neck and neck or with Labor slightly ahead. The impression, nevertheless, given by the trend of the polls is that the LNP may run out steam given the length of the campaign.

The TV nightly news image of a happy Malcolm Turnbull on the obligatory pollies’ Puffing Billy ride cements his party’s love affair with coal and the age of steam, whence its funding cuts for education and CSIRO, its privatisation of Medicare, its subsidies for miners and its deregulated labour market goal seek to return us with just a hint of a steep uphill track ahead. He seems to like not having to steer, too.

Turnbull’s punt on an early poll before his earlier appeal fades entirely may prove as much of an error of judgement as his backing of a dodgy email from Godwin Grech in 2009 or his indulgence of Peter Dutton’s views that illiterate migrants take Aussie jobs and bludge off our luxurious welfare system, or, more recently, his failure to deliver a high speed national broadband on time.

Unlike the NBN fiasco – and unlike the brave Dr Peter Young, who sought the truth on Hamid Khazaei’s shameful death from neglect on Manus Island, however, there is no national security gag handy.

A random midnight police raid on dissenters, with media accidentally happening upon the scene although it was out of their way and way past their bed times, can help to shut off the oxygen and smear your opponents. But even that’s not guaranteed in this campaign.

Sadly, for the PM and Commissioner Andrew Colvin’s crack team of plumbers, reports of the raid serve only to validate the copious leaks. Further confirmation was given on Saturday in some incredible spin from the Dr Ziggy Switkowski, whose migrant background has not prevented him making Telstra and Kodak what they are today.

Continuing the coalition’s one-bust-and-you’re-guilty approach to justice and doing his bit to brand leakers as thieves, Ziggy broke all protocols to become judge and jury in Saturday’s SMH.

“They cannot give voice to their preferred ideology by passing on stolen documents.”

It was, moreover, according to Dr Switkowski, rumourtrage, or the practice of leaking damaging rumours to cause a drop in stock price for commercial advantage. He also portrayed NBN staff as demoralised, something which never happened it seems when Telstra jobs were outsourced to cheaper offshore labour contractors.

Switkowski did not say how he knew that “stolen” documents were seized. Seizures are supposed to be in secure policy custody and held under parliamentary privilege. Unless the AFP-appointed NBN deputy sheriff took photographs.

Switkowski’s extraordinary pitch rivals last Wednesday’s Canberra Press Club debate when Environment Minister Greg Hunt swore on a stack of censored UN environment bibles that Direct Action would never ever lead to any form of carbon trading. Or that we lead the world with our carbon abatement programme. Or that we can afford to pay polluters indefinitely.

Telstra’s stocks are up but it is not due to Ziggy’s broadside or his assurances that everything about the NBN is going according to plan. Telstra’s boost comes from news that the government will outsource Medicare patient details and other sensitive personal data to a vast, impersonal corporation guaranteed to outsource the work to underpaid over-worked operatives in an offshore politically volatile nation with even fewer labour and security safeguards than in Australia.

The NBN’s cost blow-out, its slow speed and its failure to meet its schedule were all spectacularly confirmed in the Keystone Copper to the home raid on Senator Conroy and a staffer’s premises. Abbott appointee, Commissioner Andrew Colvin, who two years ago, appeared on ABC Radio National AM spruiking for the government’s proposed metadata retention and Internet spying laws, refused to rule out the AFP’s abuse of new security laws to trawl through journalists’ metadata

Turnbull of course invented metadata. Now he finds himself spurned, scorned, a hapless caretaker PM whose style is so far distinguished solely by his alarming capitulation to the breath-taking ignorance of his party’s arch conservatives who yet again upstage their leader as a barnstorming Deputy dog Joyce claims that Indonesia re-paid Australia for our ban on live cattle exports by exporting more asylum-seekers.

While even Turnbull has to publicly decry the remark, his belated assertiveness does nothing to halt his slide in opinion polls. Should the downward trend continue, he is on track to overtake Abbott’s capacity to alienate an entire nation well before 2 July. As it stands his net negative approval rating of 12 per cent makes the great white hope now as equally unpopular as Bill Shorten.

Nothing is working. No-one appears unduly fazed by Crosby-Textor’s confected hysteria that Labor is soft on border protection or national security, weasel-words to conceal our calculated cruelty in inflicting punishment on those already driven mad by the trauma of dispossession, enforced exile and despair.

Yet the campaign plan is to publicly parade our lack of empathy; harden our hearts yet again against unfortunate victims of conflict and upheaval. Men, women and children, just like us, no matter how much we try to demonise them, who have risked everything, lost everything, now throw themselves on our mercy in their desperate search for asylum.

Instead of compassion, our leaders have succumbed to a vile sickness; a puffed up triumphalism that we “stand strong on borders,” a stance which demeans and discredits all of us.

If anything is a race to the bottom it is this campaign’s competitive denial of humanity as the LNP seeks out Labor’s Achilles heel, a bizarre state of affairs where to have MPs express compassion for refugees and asylum seekers is deemed a kind of dangerous weakness.

Expect to hear much more from the LNP about Labor’s fatal disunity on punishing refugees and asylum-seekers by means of indefinite, offshore detention in poorly run, unsafe camps. Expect to hear offshore processing, the weasel words for a gulag.

As well as being traitors on border protection, Labor of course, we are told, are economic vandals for tinkering with negative gearing or wanting funds for education and health. While the Shadow Treasurer gives a good account of himself in some dull electioneering masquerading as a debate, the real question of what will sustain us is lost in a flurry of competitive predictions and claims about costs.

No-one on either side really talks about the Australian economy. The ongoing petty dispute which takes the place of debate is wittering on about costing and twitting about black holes. To rephrase Oscar Wilde, it is about demanding to know the price of everything yet knowing the value of nothing.

The debate is won comprehensively by the IPA and the hordes of other lobby groups that preach austerity and while holding that investing in our future education and health is a scandalous waste of public funds.

Deflecting any real inspection of its record, especially its spending, the Coalition has plumped for the cunning plan of getting its more colourful characters to make outrageously ill-judged, ill-informed and provocative assertions to derail Shorten’s increasingly successful campaign about caring about ordinary people.      

Coalition HQ repeatedly sends in the clowns, a Dutton here, a Joyce there who not only offer catharsis, they can get away with all manner of outrageous bigotry, prejudice and racist nonsense such as Dutton’s claim, supported by his leader, later, that refugees are illiterate and innumerate. 

 Sending in the clowns also diverts attention away from vulnerable topics such as education and health but it is not without certain risks to both sides.

 One risk is that the campaign is stuck somewhere in Australian waters off the Ashmole reef. Discourse degenerates into how we must crush the cruel people-smugglers’ business model. Avert catastrophic deaths at sea by submitting those who beg our asylum to torture. Or we lock them up indefinitely in conditions which cause them to take their own lives.        

 Q&A audience member, Rhys Whitelock, tells Innovation and Science minister, Christopher Pyne, that he was missing the “old Malcolm”. The Turnbull with moral convictions, who believed in climate change and gay marriage without a plebiscite, he says.  

 “I want the old Malcolm back,” he protests. “The old Malcolm who was more socially progressive, the Malcolm who crossed the floor on the emissions trading scheme, the Malcolm who was for marriage equality.” 

 No-one is rude enough to point out that he is dreaming. The old Malcolm is a form of wishful thinking assisted by some shrewd posturing from a man in a leather jacket who would never stoop to mindless slogans about boats.  

Well, hardly ever. When asked during Rudd’s government, by a Liberal back-bencher why he was forgoing bipartisanship on asylum-seekers, Turnbull replied, “it’s all we’ve got.”

Perhaps this time, Australians will show him how much his reply disqualifies him from any kind of political leadership at all, let alone becoming an elected Prime Minister.

 

For all the hullabaloo of the hustings, the black hole ballyhoo, the hoopla and the bloopers, plus a stunning late-night AFP raid on Labor’s Senator Conroy and a staffer who may have been leaked embarrassing proof that his NBN is slow, hugely over budget and way behind schedule, Malcolm Turnbull’s double dissolution election campaign circus is not a total embarrassment.

Unlike his deputy PM, Barnaby Joyce, a one man three ring circus, who links our pause in live cattle trading to an increase in refugees and asylum-seekers via Indonesia.

At least sanity has prevailed on the NBN leaks; now legitimised by an AFP raid. No-one would go to all that trouble if the information were not true. At least, also, our national security laws come in damn handy when it comes to clamping down on any political embarrassment. Or getting back at whistle-blowers.

Had the AFP used journalists’ metadata in its bust? Commissioner Andrew Colvin’s reply evoked the case of Dr. Peter Young who spoke out about Hamid Khazaei’s death on Manus in September 2014 only to have the AFP access his phone records. It was a covert if not undercover “yes.”

“I’m not going to answer what operational tactics or strategies we have employed”.

Ironically, despite the LNP’s best intentions, or the operational tactics of wizard consultants, Crosby-Textor, the protracted virtual selfie that is the PM’s electioneering campaign occasionally permits something else to intrude into the frame.

Before the first flush of his popular appeal disappears entirely, something profound, abiding and true appears amidst the campaign trail litter of high-vis vests, sound-bites and talking points; the real features of a nation in distress. Daily, Turnbull is confronted by first hand evidence that puts the lie to his smug victim-blaming slogan that, for Australia, “there has never been a more exciting time to be alive.”

Australia is hurting and it shows. Visiting the marginal south-western Victorian electorate of Corangamite this week, the PM is shocked to discover that local people are driven by despair to take their own lives. No-one interrupts to pursue the elephant in the room of the NBN which in sucking up 56 billion, leaves less for local hospitals.

NBN is Turnbull’s baby and a federal priority which is yet to improve communications or boost employment in Corangamite, although talk does turn to black spots.

Luckily, residents are spared Turnbull’s view that Corangamite will soon be booming courtesy of a “productivity dividend” as his government cuts taxes to businesses and wealth trickles all the way down to the Western District of Victoria. So, too with his abiding conviction that changes to negative gearing as proposed by Labor will cause local businesses to close their doors.

Oddly he chooses to say nothing about how his government’s cutting of Gonski education funding to a quarter of the original commitment, pledged by Tony Abbott last election will mean that it will be even harder for local youngsters to get the level of education they need and deserve. Over-represented in the statistics of suicides are those who have failed to proceed past Year 10 at school.

Instead, the PM promises to “leave no stone unturned.” Rural Health Minister Fiona Nash chimes in with an equally vacuous pledge to do “everything we can as a government” to address the issue.

Of course, like every snake oil salesman, Turnbull’s has a patent remedy to hand. An app or a phone number or some counselling, although, to be fair, the technological fix is proposed not by the PM but by Ian Hickie, co-director of Sydney University’s Brain and Mind Centre.

Hickie holds that if you are a suicidal young man at 3:30 am in a rural Western District town in Victoria, you need at least to be able to phone a specialist. He is right. Left out of his equation, however, is a $73 million cut faced by Victorian hospitals, this year, which makes it unlikely any doctor will be available, assuming the young man is not in a telecommunications black spot.

What Turnbull can’t fix, because he is part of the problem, is the truth; his party’s neoliberal and “financialisation” policies are largely to blame for the distress faced daily by ordinary Australians.

Tragically, the Labor Party is equally smitten by the ideology of free trade, small government and leaving it to the market, a laissez-faire abdication of fiscal responsibility which has destroyed car manufacturing at the local Ford factory in favour of a free trade god who exchanges the economic and social security of skilled employment in local manufacturing for cheap Chinese imports.

Men and women who have no jobs, no prospects and who can’t pay their bills are increasingly at risk of suicide because of their poor economic circumstances.

Centrelink’s New Start is a cruel hoax. It provides a series of demeaning experiences in return for a life below the poverty line. Mental health issues are not routinely dismissed, beneficiaries report. All job-seekers must endure the dehumanising jobs merry go round in which they are pawns in Australia’s privatised unemployment services sector.

Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at the University of Newcastle, Bill Mitchell points out: there’s been a whole industry of punishment and coercion and monitoring of the unemployed when there’s not enough jobs anyway.”

Add to this a new industry of surveillance, the institutionalised expectation that each claimant is a fraud. Stuart Robert’s recent Task Force Integrity, increases surveillance to “claw back” welfare fraud.

Corangamite and Casey in Victoria have the highest rates of suicide, suffering 184 and 111 suicides in the period 2009 to 2012, while Longman and Brisbane in Queensland, have had 162 and 105 suicides respectively. John Mendoza, director of consultancy ConNetica announces grim statistics he has compiled from Australian Bureau of Statistics and Public Health Information Development Unit data. It’s a cue for campaigners and others to deplore the figures.

But no-one in government, or the Business Council of Australia, or the IPA, or the armies of other lobby groups for lower wages, penalty rates and “more flexible work options” is listening when Mendoza proceeds to explain that the causes of suicide are embedded in the neoliberal ideology which encourages an increasingly casualised, contract and part time work force.

“It’s what the literature refers to as precarious employment conditions – less certainty,” Mendoza explains. “If you want to give people a mental health problem, if you want to raise their psychological distress, what do you do? Dose them up on uncertainty, dose them up on fear.

“That’s what causes mental illness, that’s what gets them to the point they see no other option but to take their own life.”

Quickly the media focus shifts to dairy farmers who have just suffered retrospective indebtedness, surely one of the most outrageous forms of extortion in farming history. Not only has the price of milk halved, dairy farmers are told by email, it is retrospective. The average Goulburn Murray farm supplier now faces a debt demand for $120,000. Some farmers walk off their farms.

A package is announced. Farmers will be able to borrow half of what they owe – if they can qualify for a loan. Up their burden of debt. No-one in government or opposition has the guts to call big business on its “step-downs,” the industry jargon for abruptly dropping its price.

Somehow, with a bit of media skimming, the consumer is to blame for buying on price alone. Not that Coles and Woolworths and the big dairy providers have extorted primary producers by colluding to get prices so low they are sending some farmers broke. Somehow it escapes the free market antenna of a neoliberal government.

Suddenly it’s all about connections as media attention deficit disorder moves to the next big thing. Improving connections would help small businesses and ordinary people, Regional Communications Minister Fiona Nash pipes up with a pledge to give $60 billion to fix mobile phone black spots, a matter of life and death, which it has taken the coalition three years to notice.

Ms Nash appears oblivious to the fact that before he toppled Tony Abbott as an act of civic duty because he owed it to the nation to bestow upon us his superior skills as an economic manager, Malcolm Turnbull was an under-performing communications minister who has failed to deliver on his NBN promise to build a better, cheaper faster network sooner than Labor.

NBN costs have blown out to $56 billion. His NBN has taken twice as long and double the cost to deliver half the speed promised. Yet, as the AFP raid last week makes clear, or its inspection of Peter Young’s phone records, the Turnbull government is quick to invoke national security law to deal with the political embarrassment of being held accountable.

If the neoliberal Liberal Prime Minister’s visit to Corangamite will do little to assuage voters’ real concerns, let alone ease their suffering, his NBN and his government’s approach to whistle-blowers will do even less for their peace of mind.

 

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NBN Bust! A brief, grainy, almost noir, news item, with not much action and an eerily silent soundtrack screening repeatedly on national TV Thursday night wins feature of the week, Le chat mort or the dead cat award, in the Federal Election campaign, the latest episode of the long-running Canberra political soap opera, Days of our Knives, (M for mature audiences only.)

Despite – or, perhaps because of its murky production values and its publicity shy team, NBN Bust! goes viral. Like the NBN itself, it is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Welcome to week two of election 2016, a no-holds-barred contest between the best campaign consultants dodgy “Free Enterprise” fundraising institutes’ money can buy – and all the rest. Winning is everything. Stakeholders in commerce, industry and media are major players. The public, if it’s lucky, gets a bit part. Unless, like Duncan Storrer, it dares speak truth to power.

Cue no mood music. The flickering images on your screen could be a drug bust, a crackdown on 457 visa over-stayers or just another of the regular round-ups of “the 501s”.  These are the Kiwi citizens we routinely repatriate to New Zealand via Christmas Island under section 501 of the Migration Act, a courtesy extended to “non-citizens” who hold a “substantial criminal record,” entirely at anti-Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s discretion. Lucky he’s an “outstanding Minister.”

One thing is clear. Along with indefinite detention and blowing the whistle on aid workers who word up asylum-seekers to self-harm, Kiwi repatriation is all part of the “outstanding job” Dutton is doing to keep us all safe in our beds, our places uncontested in employment and dole queues.

Clipping Kiwi’s wings – aka operation flightless bird–  is but one of the reasons the Border Supremo is singled out for praise by a political leader pledged to consensus and dialogue, a PM who promised to be a reasoned alternative to Tony Abbott’s obsession with shock-jock politics.

After successfully seizing the leadership last August, Turnbull stepped all over Tony Abbott to step up to the plate. He was determined, he suggested. Determined to rid us of the cheap, demeaning, dehumanising illiterate political sludge of boat-stopping slogans, to say nothing of unbridled pragmatism and messianic delusion. Or such was his promise.

Yet before even a second week is over – and with forty days and nights of campaigning still before him, the caretaker PM is morphing before our eyes into Chief Border Enforcer, PM Malcolm Abbott. Expect a made to measure bomber jacket any day. Tony’s won’t fit and besides, he’s keeping his.

Turnbull says the raid is news to him, he’s just the PM and the NBN was his baby for nearly three years before that. No. It’s not a government stunt. How dare anyone impugn the AFP! He can’t explain how so many members of the media were up out of their beds past midnight and just miraculously appeared upon the scenes of the busts. Not that anyone asks him. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence.

Whatever it is, NBN Bust! needs to eclipse the black hole of entropy that is the coalition election campaign. A slew of opinion polls point to a steady rise in the PM’s unpopularity. For the first time now as many respondents don’t approve of him as do, while the Coalition’s overall political appeal continues to slide as voters tire of jobs and growth sloganeering.

A ReachTel poll, published Saturday in The Herald Sun, suggests Labor could clinch the seat of MacArthur held by Liberal Russell Matheson 51-49 per cent on a two-party preferred basis. Roy Morgan echoes this trend on a national scale.

A dead cat on the table is required. Coalition campaign consultants Crosby Textor use this curious term for a big distraction. “Drop the dead donkey, let’s heave a dead cat on the table.” (Abandon news no-one wants or needs to hear; create a massive distraction.)

Highly skilled, even if it says so regularly itself, the Crosby Textor consultancy has helped Boris Johnson to victory twice. Its team includes at least one former Liberal party bigwig and a pollster who rose to meddle in campaigns in the UK and NZ.

In a controversial decision to award a knighthood for political services in 2015, David Cameron made Lynton Crosby a knight. “Arise, Sir Dogwhistle,” critics wrote.

Doubtless his partner, Campaign strategist Mark Textor, was up for a downunder knighthood had not Tony Abbott cooked his royal goose with Sir Phil of Australia’s knighthood. Mark Textor does boast of putting the following in Abbott’s mouth:

“We will stop the boats, stop the big new taxes, end the waste, and pay back the debt.”

What could possibly go wrong? Taking full credit for Tony Abbott’s amazing success in 2013, Mark Textor wants more satisfied customers. He calls quickly for a big distraction, or two. Wrench voters’ attention away from the Coalition’s flop of a trickle-down economic plan based on cutting taxes for the rich.

Upstage wily Bill Shorten’s successes with health, education, unfreezing Medicare rebates and a full frontal shopping mall snogging from an over-enthusiastic admirer.

A skillfully televised Federal Police raid on the Melbourne office of shadow Communication Minister Stephen Conroy and a Labor staffer suddenly interrupts normal transmission across the nation. Whodunnit? Why? What are they looking for? (Apart from any leakable notes Conroy may have nicked from the NBN committee.)

The show is an absolute mystery to a great many members of the government, most of whom seek out every available network TV camera to exclaim over how they know nothing. Federal Police Commissioner, Andrew Colvin kindly calls a press conference to assist with all enquiries. He tells media the government had been told nothing by the AFP. You can tell he’s not lying because he’s a policeman in uniform.

It is all utterly unbelievable. A human sacrifice is required. Uncommunicative Communications Minister and Minister for cutting funding to the Arts, Liberal Party chief philistine Mitch Fifield, puts his hand up after a few days.

Fifield ‘fesses up. He knew all along but chose to keep it all to himself, a disclosure which his PM, who is pledged to open, consultative cabinet government and team play in general, swiftly publicly endorses. But will the nation recover?

Images of nocturnal AFP operatives entering premises are disturbing. The cinema noir shabbiness of one busted property positively shrieks for a spot of negatively-geared landlord attention, or a boost in overnight expense allowances, serves above all to confirm in the public mind that the ALP are a shifty mob who inhabit a squalid, run-down set from Underbelly.

It does not matter that the raid sought to recover documents already widely and enthusiastically leaked to the media. Finance Minister Mathias Cormann, an out of the loop NBN campaign spokesman calls it intellectual property theft, a theft which, somehow, he hints broadly, imperils, (if it were not already a public laughing stock) the entire NBN project.  Or imperils every journalist who has received a tip off. Or anyone who exposes the mountebank in Turnbull.

Nor does it spoil the plot to know that Senator Conroy had sought to table in parliament NBN leaked documents, which reveal that the NBN is lagging well behind schedule, has a massive cost blowout to $56 billion, nearly double its original projected cost – and is facing technical difficulties.

What is a bit messy is that the whole business reveals Malcolm Turnbull’s utter failure as communications minister and the man who invented the Internet to do what he said he would do – create a better, faster, more reliable and cheaper alternative to Labor’s NBN.

The NBN bust upstages an otherwise thoroughly eventful political campaign in a week in which Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton makes inflammatory and irrational anti-immigration claims that refugees are illiterate, innumerate and about to take Australian jobs while they also languish on welfare and are a burden on Medicare. Thousands rise up overnight in remonstration – from all walks of life. But not in the government.

Dutton’s comments are endorsed immediately by the Prime Minister who publishes a wheedling justification in The Age next day in which he makes the absurd argument that our multicultural society depends on secure borders. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop also rushes to defend a minister whom the PM declares to be an outstanding Minister of Immigration on the grounds that we’ve had 600 weeks of unsuccessful people-smuggling operations.

It is just the type of distraction – almost-  Crosby Textor recommends – a Textor-book tactic. Or it may even be a little too refined. Textor seems to adhere to the Phineas T Barnum adage that no-one ever went broke underestimating public taste. Or xenophobia.

Meanwhile, the reputedly outstanding Immigration Minister has little or nothing to commend him in the running of his portfolio. Uneasy with inquiry or the Westminster system of ministerial responsibility he either refuses to answer questions, on operational grounds or because they will encourage the demon people smugglers to refine their business model – or he gives misleading answers.

Last week the Federal Court of Australia found that Dutton, exposed Abyan, an asylum seeker, to serious medical and legal risk by flying the woman from Nauru to PNG to terminate her pregnancy, despite this procedure being illegal in PNG. The asylum seeker became pregnant after being raped while in detention. Dutton is now legally required to fly Abyan to a country with the necessary medical expertise and equipment to safely perform an abortion.

The Federal Court also found that Australia owed a duty of care to the asylum seeker, a finding that may have broad ramifications for offshore detention.

One bright spot. Dutton seems big on military drill. He certainly has been happy to continue Scott Morrison’s militarisation of a government department which should be an extension of our humanity, our duty to provide help to refugees and other displaced persons.

Instead Dutton administers a militarised Border Force where families live in fear of a knock on the door in the middle of the night.  Uniformed Border Force guards are there with vans and dogs. In Darwin and in Melbourne in the middle of the night, guards in riot gear invade rooms and drag people out to waiting vans for transfer to planes to Nauru.

Women and children are forced to strip in front of guards and to shower without doors. They are given special clothes for the plane journey back to Nauru and escorted up the stairs with guards on either side.

In an open letter to Mr Turnbull and Mr Dutton in New Matilda, Liam O’Loughlin writes

Omid Masoumali spent three years imprisoned on Nauru for fleeing persecution in Iran. Last week he was told by UNHCR officials he would remain on Nauru for another decade. Soon after, he doused himself in accelerant, yelled “This how tired we are; this action will prove how exhausted we are. I cannot take it anymore”, and set himself on fire. Waiting in agony two hours for a doctor’s care, eight hours for morphine, and 22 hours for medical evacuation, Omid suffered cardiac arrest and was dead upon arrival in Brisbane. He was 23.

And what was your response? Charge Omid’s family $17,000 to return the body to Iran. Sedate his wife, deny her a lawyer and refuse calls to family. Then try to persuade her to return to the country from which she’s fled.

Much could be said about Dutton’s signal failure to respond humanely to the tragic self-immolation of those in his care on Nauru but his assertion that detainees were being coached in self-harm by refugee advocates is surely sufficient evidence alone that far from being outstanding, the Minister should be relieved of his portfolio. Or accept the verdict of Tim Costello that offshore detention is not only punitive as an intended deterrent, it is torture.

Those who remain in Australia are made to suffer. For two years Dutton denied 24,500 asylum seekers detained in Australia the right to work or volunteer. Even those who may be released into the community continue to suffer as is attested in the tragic last words of Khodayar Amini, who, fearing a return to detention, burned himself to death in bushland around Dandenong.

Khodayar Amini, left these parting words:

“My crime was that I was a refugee. They tortured me for 37 months…Red Cross, Immigration and the Police killed me with their slogans of humanity and cruel treatments.”

Many eminent Australians have taken issue with Dutton’s diatribe against refugees since last Thursday. On balance it appears he spoke off his own bat and not as a dog-whistler, orchestrated by the Crosby-Textor campaign of a coalition government determined to win at any cost and realising as Malcolm Turnbull said of the asylum seeker issue in 2008 “it’s the only thing we’ve got.”1

With its flash campaign strategists at the coalition campaign helm, bipartisan support on the cruelty of offshore detention and with little else resonating with the electorate, expect more of the same desperation; the primitive tribal beating of the anti-immigration drum.

Unless of course, the vast majority of ordinary Australians who are decent and humane at heart get their politicians to stop the nonsense and bring those suffering in offshore camps immediately to asylum in Australia.

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1. Back in 2008, while he was still opposition leader, Malcolm Turnbull was tackled in his party room over his ramping up of the boat people issue. His predecessor, Brendan Nelson, had agreed with the Rudd government’s dismantling of the Howard-era Pacific Solution. Nauru was closed. But as the boats began to trickle back, Turnbull was asked by a backbench Liberal why he was passing up the chance to restore the bipartisanship that existed on refugees before Howard torpedoed it in 2001. In the face of a still dominant Labor government, Turnbull responded: “It’s all we’ve got.”
   

Paul Bongiorno The Saturday Paper 21 May 2016

 

Man overboard or not, the government’s election campaign is all going to plan. Perhaps that’s the problem.

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Every top conservative political campaign, these days, embraces expensive, designer-consultants. Accordingly, the Coalition reaches for top shelf Crosby-Textor ready-made, off-the-peg, four-point election campaign template with dead cat on table. It’s world’s best practice with a dinkum Aussie link: Abbott’s victory in 2013 hugely increased demand for their consultancy services. They made their name with a boat-stopper.

Yet his campaign plan may prove Turnbull’s undoing – and the nation’s – unless of course, the electorate welcomes another term of Tony Abbott whose grandiose delusions saw him invite all national TV networks to his local campaign launch last Sunday just to let us all know that he is clearly preparing for a comeback. Mr Abbott is assisted in this endeavour, as in many others by recently appointed Sky Pilot, his former Chief of Staff Peta Credlin.

Unless the PM’s leadership gear-change gets results, he knows he’ll be back in opposition under leader Tony Abbott.  The sober truth dawns on Turnbull and his minders this week. Suddenly the suave, urbane Q&A leader takes off his leather jacketand puts on the twisted snarl, the feral hysteria of the xenophobe.

The caretaker PM reverts to an Abbott-style appeal to primal fear. Anything to cling to power. This week, Malcolm Turn-back-the-boats’ joins his Immigration Minister to play the fear and hate card of “stop the boats and repel all sponging money-sucking terrorist and in bed with unions refugees. But he is yet to win a trick.

Crosby-Textor offer a simple, four point plan. Five if you count the cat. But it’s not working – so far. Hammering economic competence, national security, immigrant-bashing and hounding Labor, may have worked for David Cameron, Boris Johnson or even Kiwi John Key but the formula is yet to lift the fortunes of a maladroit Malcolm Turnbull.

Labor has successfully painted his Economic Plan as a tax cut for rich people. Morrison’s budget, only yesterday, it seems being touted as a key to election victory, is an abject failure. On current trends the government appears set to hand Labor a victory on a plate if the party’s nose-dive in popularity as suggested by Essential and by Gary Morgan’s latest poll continues.

Support for the Coalition in the latest Fairfax poll remains at 51-49, yet when the 1497 respondents were asked who will receive their second preference at the ballot box in July, the difference between the Coalition and Labor drops to 50-50.

Yet, as Thursday’s AFP raid on Senator Stephen Conroy’s Melbourne office and the shabby chic home of a Labor staffer reveals, there is always the trusty Crosby-Textor dead cat on the table strategy to distract the punters from all your other stuff-ups. Look over here!

Yet even the trusty deceased feline routine appears to have backfired on Turnbull. It risks raising the ghost of Godwin Grech when events conspired to compromise Malcolm Turnbull’s judgment. Then, too Turnbull acted precipitately in rushing to proceed with the damaging nonsense of utegate.

The timing of the AFP-NBN plumbing expedition, a last desperate turn of the wrench to stop endless NBN leaks, in particular, is just too convenient. It fits the Turnbull camp’s cunning plan to paint Labor as being soft on national security, in bed with CFMEU and high taxing high spending (if you overlook the existing government’s record blowout.) But it does raise some tricky questions.

Why did a complaint which NBN laid last December take until week two of a train-wreck of a Liberal campaign to manifest itself into a raid? And how could it not know about it? As Bill Shorten put it, how could the NBN, a government firm, not notify its boss that the raid was imminent?

Suddenly it was back to a Coalition of sealed lips and secrecy. Finance Minister Mathias Cormann evaded the question three times when asked if the government pressured the NBN into referring matters to the AFP for investigation.

Yet mud sticks. Mainstream media have had a field day with the presumption of guilt, while the IPA’s comment in Crikey sees the raid as a body blow for Labor.

Police raids to smear our opponents. Secrecy. Denial. Is this the nation we have become?

Leigh Sales took the biscuit for dead cat impartiality and death stare when she challenged Tony Burke to repeat his outrageous suggestion that the AFP had been tipped off by the Liberals.

Offstage slightly a Melbourne Cup field of Liberal politicians rushed all available open microphones to clap hand to heart and swear denial of all knowledge of any AFP raid, thereby confirming that someone said something to someone but now, hey, the cat was in the bag.

AFP Commissioner, the boyish Andrew Colvin, an Abbott appointee who battles to get by on $700, 000 a year and who even looks a bit like a real policeman if you don’t listen to what he says, admitted that the AFP would have got their hands on some confidential Labor campaign stuff, too, but not to worry, his boys were born professionals and besides, like Turnbull’s fate, the seized documents were sealed until after the election.

With the drop of the dead moggy, however, comes the risk that the stench of Turnbull’s dud NBN is now dead centre of the campaign, thanks to the AFP’s spectacular – but alarmingly short on specifics on the warrant – intervention.

Whilst Commissioner Colvin mouths reassurances, the AFP can hardly be seen as a safe pair of hands. In 2013 AFP operatives left plastic explosives were left in a bag at Sydney Airport at the end of a rigorous dog training session. Last year, AFP lost thirty controlled items as they term them including munitions, body armour, bullet-proof vests, Tasers, batons, handcuffs and night-vision goggles. A similarly deficient audit in 2009 points to an ongoing problem.

Above all, the NBN raid or fishing expedition smacks of desperation. Gone is the sophisticated PM who would reason and explain. Back is the Abbott style leader who operates in secret who will do anything it takes to gain political advantage.

Busted by an unsaleable dud budget predicated on the economic witchcraft of trickle-down economics and the willful over-estimation of iron ore futures and lumbered with a mob of mad right wingers who can demand failed former employment minister, Erich Abetz gets a post in the next cabinet, or which allows a Peter Dutton to spill his guts, Malcolm Bligh Turnbull has resorted to the dead cat stunt so early, it is clear that he even he knows he’s in trouble.

Turnbull can bleat “jobs and growth”, “keeping Australia safe” and other mutually demeaning, slogans to an ever more sceptical public until the Murray-Goulburn cows come home but no-one is fooled. Let him publicly delude himself that cutting taxes for the Liberal Party’s rich backers will magically grow the economy or that Australians feel that their government is keeping them safe – especially now that some Border Force officers are now under investigation for allegedly working with crime gangs and drug and tobacco smugglers. Throughout looms that issue of his judgment.

Who persuaded Turnbull that negative gearing is a good stick to beat Labor? Or that Peter Dutton needed to be publicly commended on his record as Border Supremo MKII? Dutton was recycled from a poor performance in the Health portfolio after his predecessor, Scott Morrison went barking mad up river like Colonel Kurz in Apocalypse Now and had to be made treasurer.

Our innovative PM has dropped his bundle. He’s ditched his pious piffle about jobs and growth and opportunity, a pitch which as they say is “failing to resonate” with the electorate in favour of a primitive hysteria, a back to the future fear of invasion by refugees, a Tampa MKII or 2013 (stop-the-boats).

Evading comment on his Immigration Minister’s recent performance on Sky where clearly a pumped Dutton threw away the dog-whistle and barked himself, Turnbull would have us believe that “Nutso” Dutton is an outstanding minister. Outstanding. Why, we have not had a successful people smuggling operation for 600 days. (Surely a success would have evaded detection?)

Naturally, a world beset by refugees is now beating a path to our door in envy of our regime of offshore detention where asylum seekers are assessed promptly and dealt with humanely.

Of course, our off-shore detention policy has had its moments. PNG has recently told us to leave Manus Island and take our asylum seekers with us. True, we have nowhere to take them because no other nation will take them off our hands and we have promised not to bring them to the mainland. But that’s a mere operational detail. Dutton will nut something out.

Is Turnbull being pushed around by the rabid right wing of the party? It would explain his accommodation of his Immigration Minister. Head of the monkey pod faction, or self-styled Abbott government in exile, the Delcons, Peter Dutton is indulged, even praised for his illiterate, incoherent and utterly baseless assertions that most migrants can’t read or write in their own languages or are innumerate but somehow steal Aussie jobs. Or sponge off Medicare.

Or did Turnbull put Dutton up to it? Is this a classic dog-whistle to those in marginal seats who share similar prejudices? Or is it simply, as Mick Young put it when faced with choice between a conspiracy and a stuff up we should go with the stuff up?

The timing suggests the latter. One moment Turnbull was in Darwin being photographed attractively against the deep blue of background of a freshly painted Border Patrol boat posing as our sovereign nation’s macho protector and the next day butch Dutton was all over the airwaves after a Sky interview with Paul Murray 18 May that took issue with the Green’s proposal to take in 50,000 refugees and also managed to work in Labor and the CFMEU.

“There would be a huge cost and there’s no sense in sugar-coating that …”

Turnbull has a piece in The Age the next day in which he tries to sanitise junkyard Dutton’s latest offering, defending an utterly indefeasible rabble rousing performance with a piece of pure sophistry and wilful denial of the facts which contends that we have such great multi-culturalism because we have strong borders.

Putting the political chimera of multi-culturalism aside, the PM is asking us to pretend we don’t have very porous borders where most of our asylum-seekers arrive by plane. He repeats the same false imagery that Australia is somehow under threat of being swamped by an invasion of refugees, saved only by the brave boys and girls in Border Patrol.

It’s all part of the Crosby-Textor approved narrative of external threat. Not spelled out is the elephant in the room – the supposed deterrence effect of an offshore regime of punishment and the barbaric cruelty of indefinite detention. The PM preserves Dutton’s subtext of irrational fear and intolerance with a specious “just stating the facts” slant on the Immigration Minister’s remarks. Perhaps he hopes to get a tick of approval from his party’s Delcons.

Fat chance. Abbott-faction cheer-leader, Peta Credlin mocks Turnbull nightly on Sky, critiquing his performance. Her ritual humiliation of the PM has so far reminded us that a proper politician, a proper campaign leader would never have cancelled the Westfield walkabout with Fiona Scott no matter how insulting her public lack of loyalty.

A leader with bottle would never have campaigned on his own in WA just because he got the huff over the local candidate’s faking his CV or his repeating Erich Abetz’ line that gay marriage leads to polygamy.

Less than two weeks into his marathon selfie of an extended election campaign, Turnbull’s campaign is a train-wreck. The Delcons are laughing at him. The voters are bored with him, impatient with his grandstanding ineffectuality, resentful of his allegiances to the top one per cent, critical of his capture by the right. No wonder he’s dropped his bundle. Desperate to impress voters on some score, he resorts to the Tony Abbott card of hate and fear.