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When the going gets tough on the campaign trail, Australians discovered last Wednesday, the tough may just get up and leave. Golden dummy spit award this week goes to caretaker PM Malcolm Turnbull, former Siberian gold prospector, barrister, property investor and sometime man about western Sydney who left town hell-bent on rescuing a nation from reckless spending on health and education, lower house prices, a bogus Labor tax on carbon and other dark forces of unreason including misty-eyed sentimentality for asylum-seekers.

It was a hell of a call but he would rise to it. On week one of his union-busting, work interning, corporate tax-cutting election campaign proper, the PM was out to convince an increasingly sceptical electorate – and anyone else who might show up to his show down – that he has the ticker to win.

Turnbull positively thrives on high stakes conflicts. Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer and he once threatened to kill each other over the takeover of Fairfax in 1991, according, at least, to Annabel Crabb’s 2009 Quarterly Essay.

Yet sometimes the plan is too big for the man. When media took more interest in whether the local candidate, Liberal MP Fiona Scott, supported his deposing of Tony Abbott and voters wanted to talk about his cuts to education and his plan to cut taxes for the rich, he asserted decisive, unequivocal leadership. And pulled the pin.

When the chips are down, the PM showed the nation, he can turn things around. Or, himself. At least, he may be counted upon to wimp out and catch the next train back to his minders and his mansion in Sydney.

It began not so badly. “This seat (of Lindsay) is absolutely critical for the future of Australia”, he declared, his tone aloft with a touch of overstatement if not big-noting, self-importance. Clearly, there was a tad riding on his pin-striped shoulders as they rubbed up against ordinary working class commuters so taken by his common touch that some had no idea who he was.   It was to prove a political train-wreck of a whistle-stop.

Carrying a designer hold-all referencing a bookie’s shoulder bag, a smartphone and bearing a fixed grin which rivalled the rictus of a Patagonian tooth fish, Malcolm Bligh Turnbull, as ever, more mouth than trousers, rapidly collapsed into bathos when called on to explain exactly how why Lindsay was a bellwether seat.

“It’s critical because if we hold this seat, then we will be returned to government, and then we will be able to carry out our national economic plan,” he claimed, baring his bottom teeth in a gesture common to seasoned politicians, merchant bankers, carpet-bagging insurance touts and other roles he has played effortlessly in his past lives.

Most of Turnbull’s electioneering follows this pattern. Not that he’s underprepared. Turnbull’s man bag is big enough to house a whole library of classic texts including his well-thumbed Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War and a huge vat of his feed-the-rich trickle-down magic pudding tax mix .

Turnbull’s Tardis of a carry-bag must also contain a vast National Economic Plan, another historical borrowing, lifted from the political genius of George W Bush and supply-side economics whence comes the classic Jobs and Growth, a timeless slogan which accompanied the destruction of the economy of the richest nation in the world.

Hapless cabinet secretary and PM’s confidante, “Amnesiac” Arthur Sinodinos may also have been in the bag; an accidental stowaway given his urge to crawl cat-like into confined spaces, a natural and understandable behaviour, given ICAC – and now a senate committee – still demand he explain what he’s forgotten about illegal donations to the NSW Liberal Party.

Yet none of this was visible to the untrained eye. A model of cultivated charm and passable insincerity, Mr Turnbull blended awkwardly into the built environment, whose needs he no longer tends so assiduously since Jamie Briggs fall from grace has seen the Cities etc. portfolio dumped with him. He slumped over a smartphone, his thumbs blazing to scotch unwarranted media interest in his fondness for offshore companies. If only a start-up would develop an app to deal with nosy journos.

Re-assuring those Australians who were alarmed to discover that their nation’s PM was once again associated with Star Mining, another offshore company set up to solely to evade tax, Mr Turnbull said that there was, again, nothing to see here. Happened way back in the 1990s. Never made a profit and if it did it would pay tax in Australia. No-one asked why it was not set up in Sydney, then.

Star Mining, later Star Technology, generated an eighty per cent return for Turnbull and his partner Alan Doyle and the venture may be placed alongside his play in Solomon Islands logging concessions. Neither of these entrepreneurial ventures merit a moment’s reflection according to the PM in a report to the AFR because there was “no suggestion of any impropriety whatsoever.”

Nor should there be. Yet there is always the matter of principle in the embrace of means to evade tax and elude questions, especially from a PM who leads a party preaching transparency and accountability. And there is the matter of the public good. Shareholders keen to learn what became of Star Technology’s major asset of $100 million, would be stopped by one phrase “Controlled entity not required to be audited under British Virgin lsland requirements.” Its major asset was never audited.

Awaiting Mr Turnbull were the legendary charms of member for western Sydney seat of Lindsay, Fiona Scott, whose sex-appeal is on public record thanks to previous PM and chick magnet Tony Abbott. Scott, who has an MBA, has done things as a marketing manager for Westfield that doubtless have changed the face of Penrith.

Scott also left her mark when she suggested in 2013 that asylum seekers were causing road congestion and hospital delays in western Sydney, a call which Tony Burke awarded silliest comment of the election campaign.

All of this was ignored by reporters who were keen to air the matter of Scott’s treatment at the hands of the Abbott faction, or the Delcons, who have branded her a traitor for her support of Turnbull in the leadership ballot.

Irritated by questions seeming to require the candidate to revisit not only his knifing of Tony Abbott but the vexed matter of cabinet leaking, Turnbull turned on his heel and abruptly cancelled the rest of the walkabout. A planned visit to Westfield Penrith was abandoned. Turnbull’s act upstaged any campaign rhetoric. He sent a vital message about his own need to engage with the people only on his own terms to all keen democrats on the trail.

Peta Credlin, enjoying her new post as agent provocateuse or chief Delcon rear gunner on airship Sky swung into action. She deplored his walking away from his planned walkabout. Very helpfully, she highlighted Turnbull’s chief credibility gap: the great wall of wealth which insulates the PM from the people.  To Credlin, walking away from the walkabout was unthinkable.

“If it’s known that you were going to do a street walk in Penrith, the last thing you want to do, Mr Harbour-side Mansion, is look like you don’t know and you’re not welcome in western Sydney.”

In her opinion, Turnbull was not up to snuff. If Scott wasn’t pump-primed, they should have moved the visit. Logistics expert, campaign veteran and HR talent, Ms Credlin was very clear what she would have done in the same position, even more stage management, which may shed some light on why Tony Abbott was elected with less policy detail than you could jot on the back of a QANTAS ticket for two to the south of France.

Itching to make a bid for silliest 2016 campaign comment, Dawson’s George Christensen used social media to throw his weight around about the millions of Syrians who would flood into his electorate and take Aussie jobs.

“I’ve advised the Assistant Minister [for Multiculturalism] that the Mackay region won’t be able to handle an influx of refugees given the state of the regional economy,” Christensen wrote in a Facebook post on Tuesday. He seems to have accepted as true an urban myth about a workers’ camp in the town of Sarina. Sarina is in the neighbouring seat of Capricornia, about 37 kilometres south of Mackay.

The myth that refugees are a burden also fails to match the reality. Nhill’s economy, for example, is booming since 2010 when 200 Karen refugees from Burma settled in the Wimmera, a small agricultural town in Victoria which is located half-way between Melbourne and Adelaide. Other sources such as ABS figures indicate that migrants are more likely to be in work and less likely to be on welfare than Australian residents.

Yet gorgeous George did get something right. Christensen confirmed the power of certain right wingers over the PM. Turnbull did not pause to tell the National MP to check his facts but instead took time out from his lunch at The Athenaeum, a club for wealthy white blokes. He indulged George’s Scott-like delusion about being overrun with refugees while glossing over the MP’s lack of respect for process or his leader’s authority, claiming the MP’s:

.“… concerns lie in the lack of jobs in the area due to the downturn in the mining construction boom.

What he’s saying is because there aren’t a lot of jobs around, it’s better for refugees who come in the humanitarian program to be located in places where there are more opportunities for work.”

Amazingly asylum-seekers became Labor’s problem when on Tuesday North Queensland’s Cathy O’Toole, Labor candidate for Herbert was reported to have attended protests about her party’s immigration policies three months ago.

The Australian was delighted to report that O’Toole had “derailed Shorten’s campaign” and published a comment from Peter Dutton on how this indicated that Labor would be a hopeless government when it came to border protection.

This is in stark contrast with his own government’s brilliant record, roundly criticised by international humanitarian agencies and the UN which now includes an urgent need to find somewhere for those in ‘open detention’ on Manus Island, a centre PNG wants closed.

Recent reports of asylum seekers’ suicides in response to their punishment by indefinite captivity abuse and neglect in poorly-run off-shore “processing centres” which form a type of gulag for which neither party will accept responsibility.

After fifteen years of the politicisation of our humanitarian responsibility to refugees it is bizarrely, according to a range of mainstream media, Labor which must get its act together in the first week of an election campaign which is all about Turnbull’s need to get himself re-elected before his dwindling popularity vanishes completely like the Cheshire cat leaving nothing but a toothsome smile behind him.

Asylum seekers were not an issue for the 100 swinging voters who declared to Galaxy that they were undecided at the leaders debate staged by Sky at the Windsor RSL Friday. The event plays to the myth that voting is compulsory and that Australian elections are decided by voters exercising a rational choice between sets of policy offerings from parties they remain open-minded about.

Given that we are far more likely to vote for a party we have an allegiance to surely we could dispense with much of the theatre of the election show in favour of having our candidates face more open and direct questions from voters. The current media product appears calculated to alienate, especially younger voters.

In fact, if last election figures are a guide, many Australians have already voted by opting out of the system as Michael Taylor points out.  1.22 million which includes 400,000 young people, nearly half of all eighteen and nineteen year olds who did not bother to register to vote last election.

Young people are the most unrepresented. Half of all 18-year-olds and a quarter of 19-year-old Australians are not yet enrolled to vote in this election a total of 350,000 votes that will not be cast by young people in 2016. About 608,000 Australians 25 years and older are also not enrolled. Already there are a million marginalised, missing voters or almost six per cent of eligible voters who won’t be going to the polls.

Although it doesn’t fit the plot of mainstream media’s Election Show, most Australians are doing it hard. While powerful business lobbyists press for tax cuts for businesses and the abolition of penalty rates, average Australians are increasingly excluded from participation in a free and just society; enjoying the fruits of their labours.

ACTU president Ged Kearney sees a:

“deliberate shift away from a full-time, secure employed workforce to one that is precarious and underemployed. It’s part of the process of financialisation: moving all the cost and responsibility for employment away from the employer and the state and onto the individual.

So eventually you have a workforce that has no paid leave, no sick leave, quite possibly no workers’ compensation. Workers are insuring their own equipment, which they’ve bought. And many of these people are precariously employed, so they don’t have the benefit of knowing that they’re going to get an income week to week. It builds a very shaky house of cards.”

In the meantime, Turnbull’s long campaign off a short runway continues leaving him to cling to powerful backers and vested interests while treading carefully around the reptilian brain stem offerings of the party’s right wing. Shorten’s Labor Party which has not completely turned its back on its origins in the trade union movements of the 1890s is presenting itself as a people’s party which is pledged to invest in health and education.

The most eloquent and most profound voice of the week, however, is that of Melinda who approached the PM with an economic plan for all Australians  as he left a business in Moorabbin to tell him:

“The cost of school is going up and up and up and yet we’re not getting any more money and now you’re going to take the family tax benefits away. It’s not just single mums you’re hurting,” she said.

“Give them [our children] an opportunity to make something of themselves, please.”

 

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The government has lost the plot with its election agenda. After conning the Governor General into granting assent for a double dissolution with the fiction that its blocked ABCC legislation was mission critical, the PM has since dropped the issue in a bid to sell his economically innumerate and unsaleable budget, another work of fiction, in a change of tack which is engaging the community in ways that can only further hurt his fast-receding election prospects.

Turnbull’s first tack, however, is to normalise the use of off-shore companies to reduce tax. Defending his role as a company director in an offshore company set up by Mossack Fonseca on the dubious grounds that “it certainly would have paid tax in Australia if it had paid any tax at all”, he unerringly puts his finger on the problem that such companies are set up to minimise tax.

Now that Turnbull has given the green light, Ordinary Australians across the nation are now promising that when they, too, set up their next Siberian gold prospecting company, they, too, will choose an offshore company to help them pay tax in Australia.

If his offshore argument prevails, Turnbull will have no trouble peddling the preposterous lie that cutting company taxes and income taxes for the less than a quarter of Australians who earn over $80,000 does not amount to simply rewarding his party’s wealthy backers.

He may even convince us that the cuts are funded by the $4 billion to be gained from tax evasion clampdowns. An ATO already down 4,700 in staff since the coalition came to office will retrieve billions from wealthy and well-resourced multi-national company tax evaders. 1300 extra ATO workers will be recruited or rehired leaving a workforce depleted by only 3,400 and a tad demoralised, to say nothing of the loss of specialised knowledge.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, the PM holds that lowering business and personal income taxes is not only an act of economic genius, it’s an inspired form of social service whereby everybody gets richer in the end. Malcolm’s magic pudding mixture, moreover is freely available.

Amazing similarities link Scott Morrison’s economic plan with an almost identical failure in the United Sates. Jobs and growth even recycles a George W. Bush campaign slogan. It’s either reality-defying chutzpah or a perverse determination to copy abject failure. In other words, it’s standard LNP political leadership.

In 2003, Bush’s 10-year ‘economic plan’ was for “jobs and growth.” He cut taxes. His “Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act” followed his 2001 cuts, the effects of which were disastrous. Between 2001 and 2010, US national debt grew from $5.8 trillion to $13.5 trillion.
US Federal revenue fell, from 20% of GDP in 2000 to 14.6% in 2009 while unemployment doubled; from 4% to 8%.

The US economy is not our economy. America doesn’t have Australia’s dividend imputation scheme which allows many of our companies to pay no tax, a fact missed in the coalition’s spin. Yet Morrison and Bush share the fundamentals: grow the pie. Cut taxes and create wealth.

Of course this is all a ruse to hide the fact that the election’s timing is all about Turnbull. The PM must rush to the polls before his cosmetic popular appeal wears off completely like fake tan in the pool. He has no economic plan. Nor has he ever demonstrated the means to negotiate one. All his attempts to forge budgetary consensus fell off the table because he failed to accommodate key stakeholders. Or made outrageous offers to state premiers. Now he’s simply going through the motions equipped with some second-hand slogans.

Yet he’s done us all a favour. Turnbull’s long and slow election campaign is extraordinary for the way reality has so quickly broken through the spin and the stage-management. What was predicted to be a dull, hard slog has quickly become an engrossing spectacle.

Pundits primed us to be bored; to quickly tune out of a long, dreary election campaign. “Nothing to see here”, said our fourth estate mavens and media magnate mouthpieces who eagerly pre-package our perceptions, provide take-away conclusions and pre-digest our thinking for us.

How wrong they all were. A week into its long-running schedule, the election campaign’s Truman Show with its scripted informality and over-directed spontaneity has been upstaged by reality. The budget’s economic plan is a resounding belly-flop. In a long, slow campaign, ordinary punters keep getting into the frame, arguing with “Mr Sydney Harbourside mansion”, as Peta Credlin dubs the PM, on screen. Social justice threatens to re-claim the field.

Our attention has been attracted to real people and their lives. “Nothing to see here,” the Coalition’s favourite all singing – all dancing chorus of denial and deception is upstaged by a real world of people demanding to be heard.

The terrible spectacle of manifest inequality, the reality of a wealthy nation riven by a selfish elite, driven by greed and declining commodity prices to ever greater exploitation of the powerless has its vast, cruel indifference every day exposed by authentic personal stories of real suffering. The mind-numbing, reality-denying, thought bubbles of election trail windbaggery are punctured by a succession of real life cameo appearances from real people.

Instead of the treasurer’s message of mindless optimism in ever sharper relief appears the rapidly widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. The true enemy of productivity is upstaging the slogans, the scare-tactics and the stigmatising of the poor. What’s happening?

Duncan Storrer sticks his head up. The part-time driver from Geelong says he has a disability and left school early yet he has a pearler of a question for Ms Kelly O’Dwyer. For all of us.

For a while it looks like a bit of a Zaky Mallah moment. All three hundred thousand dollars per annum of Walkley Award winner Tony Jones’ salary, hovers in the balance as Chairman Jones appears unsteady, unsure which way Duncan is heading.

Few on the panel speak the language of the poor, it is clear. Apart from Cassandra Goldie, CEO of ACOSS, few seem aware of the poor, their plight or their rights. Few seem to care.

Assistant Finance Minister O’Dwyer, elite Presbyterian Ladies’ College alumna and member for the ultra-blue-ribbon electorate of Higgins, Jones knows full well, does not, normally, have much truck with the likes of Duncan. He need not have worried. O’Dwyer utterly misses the point of his inquiry, anyway, in a long-winded response about business.

“I’ve got a disability and a low education, that means I’ve spent my whole life working for minimum wage. You’re gonna lift the tax-free threshold for rich people,” Duncan says. There are at least 800,000 Australians on a disability pension, despite tightened eligibility – and about one third of the nation’s workforce is part-time.

O’Dwyer, who appears unprepared to encounter a low-paid disabled part-time worker, let alone one challenging the coalition’s tax policy, sounds almost Prime Ministerial as she wobbles off topic in a long-winded bit of Mal-splaining, clearing up less and less as she goes on.

“It’s about balance,” she ends hopefully, like a junior debater who has a phrase or two put by for emergencies.

Duncan Storrer shakes his head. It is about fairness, decency and humanity and the whole audience knows it. And it quickly turns to being about democracy.

Storrer refuses to be slapped down on Q&A, because of his low income. Business big-wig Innes Willcox sneers at him for daring to speak out when he pays next to no income tax. Duncan puts him right about being a GST paying tax-payer. He has every right to be heard.

Others are upsetting the campaign apple-cart. Melinda, a single mother confronts Malcolm Turnbull about education costs in the Labor-held Melbourne seat of Hotham. He fobs her off with empty campaign rhetorical reassurance when the only Coalition’s only plan for schools is to scrap Gonski funding after 2017, much of which is targeted to disadvantaged schools.

“Our expenditure per student in state schools, like your boys’ schools, has been rising rapidly, far faster, than the state governments’.”

“That’s not what the schools are saying”, Melinda replies.

“Give the kids a chance, give them a fighting chance please,” she says.

Of course such incursions of reality into campaigning are rare and heavily guarded against. Reprisals are common. And vicious. Already the Murdoch press has done a number on Duncan, sending Caroline Overington of The Australian to interview Duncan’s son over what a dead-beat druggie dad Duncan really was. His story is not so easily trashed.

Over 73 days the appeal of a second-hand failed economic plan, a record of three years of failure won’t add up to match. The squalid spectacle of a desperate struggle for self-preservation by a party of privilege well past its use by date will be no match for the competing discourses of real Australians whose daily struggles to survive eclipse in eloquence and depth the mindless slogans, the deception and the lies of The Turnbull Show and its stage-managers.

Giving a new spin to Ambrose Bierce’s view that politics is the conduct of public affairs for private advantage, Tony Abbott surges above a pack of hopeful contenders to set the seeking of advantage as a key theme of the week in politics on Wednesday night as other MPs past their use-by-date are farewelled.

The former PM gives retiring Ian McFarlane a helping hand send-off by calling for someone with an ear close to the ground, say in mining or anything to do with good old-fashioned non-renewable resources to give a former non-renewable resources minister an honest job.

McFarlane’s scrapping of the mining tax was a “magnificent achievement” he says of a move which cost his budget bottom line $3.3 billion despite collapsing commodity prices and mining companies’ massive use of tax deduction.

“I hope this sector will acknowledge and demonstrate their gratitude to him in his years of retirement from this place.”

Yet it is not mutual back-scratching or jobs-for-the-no-longer boys, so much as Abbott’s untimely off the cuff story about donations that furrows Liberal brows.

Abbott’s extraordinary anecdote stars NSW senator Bill Heffernan as his moral guardian, in an uplifting fable guaranteed to sour Turnbull’s rapidly declining election prospects. The sly junk-yard dog makes his sabotage seem almost accidental. No sniping or undermining to see here.

The “climate change is crap” and “coal is good for humanity” heroically independent former PM shares a past moral dilemma of his own when as a young MP “a well-known millionaire” gives him $5000 in cash. Happily all ends well when Abbott has the presence of mind to call “The Heff” who tells him to give the money back.  At least Abbott knew better than to bother his confessor George Pell.

At 72, Heffernan, a farmer-charmer from Junee has won shed-loads of fans with his timely, nurturing and freely dispensed advice. Heff’s gems include telling Senator Nash to “blow it out her backside” and, infamously, accusing Julia Gillard of being “deliberately barren.”

Heffernan’s gem-encrusted parliamentary speeches and asides mean we are spoilt for choice when it comes to selecting any single winner. Yet his spontaneous “Fuck that’s risky shit” comment to a committee about planes making cross-landings should serve as warning to his former leader’s foray into political donations so close to an election campaign.

How long Abbott agonised, or why he agonised at all, are questions now firmly in the public mind, as are further speculations once believed to be thoroughly hosed down about banned donations to the Liberal Party in NSW. The Electoral Commission is still withholding $4.4 million in public funding until the party formally discloses the details of some big donors.

Last week, wily Arthur Sinodinos attacked a senate fund-raising inquiry committee for not consulting him first before demanding that the important figure appear to answer questions.

Last month, the NSW Electoral Commission stated that the Liberals used the Free Enterprise Foundation to “channel and disguise” donations, including from banned donors, before the 2011 NSW election.

“No attempt was made to contact my office to determine my availability before the committee scheduled the hearing on those dates.”

Senator Sinodinos may well have had important stuff such as fund-raising or mentoring Mr Turnbull to do on those days.

Showing that his memory has improved markedly since his last appearance before ICAC, Sinodinos, the Turnbull government’s Cabinet Secretary gives Mark Arbib’s 2010 refusal as his precedent for not appearing. Perhaps he could not recall that Labor’s Arbib was summonsed by a committee, not, as in his case, the whole Senate.  It may not end well for him or his party.

Sinodinos, one of Turnbull’s few close confidantes, did not propose any alternative dates he would be available leaving  Greens senator Lee Rhiannon to comment that,

“What the committee now needs to explore is whether Senator Sinodinos is in contempt of the Senate, considering there was a clear direction passed by a majority of Senators directing him to appear.”

Also not appearing, at least on Tony Abbott’s list of tributes, is Bronwyn Bishop, his ideological “love-mother,” who seems choppered out of her former PM’s love-fest of farewells. Not that she’s about to ask for her money back.

Abbott singles out Ian Macfarlane, Bruce Billson, Bill Heffernan, Bob Baldwin and even Victorian Liberal Senator Michael Ronaldson but he fails to pay tribute to Bronnie, his captain’s pick for speaker. It is kerosene baths at fifty paces as Bishop vows revenge.

Turnbull must be rapt to have another Bronwyn vs Tony spat to take the focus off his harmonious and disciplined campaign. Yet an impending Abbott family feud is the least of his problems. Bronnie may even clip her love child’s wings with a timely, well-worded revelation or two.

Without “The Heff” to keep them on the right path and without Ms Bishop’s shining path to guide them, how will our benighted politicians even find their way to the car park?

Happily, PM Turnbull has an app for that – and of course a Comm car and driver for when he tootles over to Yarralumla Sunday with a heart as pure as the driven snow. The ego has landed, scribes report.

Turnbull plans to get the Governor General to collude with him over the transparently fraudulent claim that an early election with double dissolution cream and cherries on top is required to enable the coalition to pass ABCC legislation.

Sir Pete, the Queen’s representative will probably salute the former republican agitator and fall about signing everything in sight. Thank God for the pair of them. Malcolm Turncoat, as they call him in the ARM, needs a break.

After a nightmare week slaving over his government’s Goldilocks Budget MKIII (2016) with its central monstrous lie that tax cuts for the rich will stimulate any growth at all beyond about business owners’ bank accounts, an embattled Turnbull is rattled by a perfect storm of mishaps, cock-ups and the squawking of pigeons coming home to roost.

Bronwyn Bishop’s retirement speech hand grenade doesn’t help the tone.

“It’s not the end,” Bronnie says, a wild-eyed zealot on a vendetta, a little like Scott Morrison who talks all over Barrie Cassidy with outrageous claims about what Labor is doing. Morrison is like a runaway pacer all harnessed up but out of control on ABC Insiders Sunday.

“Labor is playing around with the value of a family home.” Morrison claims that Labor’s proposed reduction of negative gearing will wreck the economy. He shies away from Dutton’s extreme claim of an ASX crash. Yet he has trouble justifying how more affordable homes could cause such damage.

Morrison contests Cassidy’s reading of a transcript of his comments on his removal of aid workers he claimed were political activists who were causing children to self-harm on Nauru.

The Save the Children workers, it is announced this week, are cleared by an inquiry by former integrity commissioner Philip Moss and a review commissioned by the federal government by lawyer and immigration expert Christopher Doogan.

The former immigration minister repeatedly denies the ABC transcript containing his claims which include the following.

The orchestration of protest activity and the facilitation of that protest activity on Nauru, including tactical use of children in those protests to frustrate the ability of those who work at the centre and to deal effectively and safely with those issues.

 Their coaching and encouragement of self-harm for people to be evacuated off the island.

 And fabrication of allegations as part of a campaign to seek to undermine operations and support for the offshore processing policy of the government.”.

Morrison directed 10 Save the Children staff members to leave Nauru in October 2014 after he received “an intelligence report” accusing the group of “encouraging and coaching” self-harm to “achieve evacuations to Australia”. The Daily Telegraph promoted his false allegations.

Morrison’s denial of an ABC transcript is preposterous as is his claim that ordering the workers off Nauru was the action of a minister with an open mind:

“I set up the inquiry that led to these outcomes, and that’s why I set it up, so that we could get to the bottom of what was happening there. I drew no conclusions on the material presented to me at the time.”

All of this is triggered by Cassidy suggesting an apology was in order. Paying compensation would be a concession of guilt to most of us but not in Scott Morrison’s moral universe. Already there is much for Turnbull to sort out if he is to get a clear run at this election thingy.

Turnbull could seek out Cosgrove on the Save the Children issue, given that her Majesty the Queen is president of the Save the Children fund. She ought to hear about any alleged political activism Morrison needed to call out publicly but cannot, will not apologise for. Perhaps a royal commission would be in order.

It’s all looking a bit costly to the PM. Bill Shorten has given a respectable budget reply speech. The campaign to demonise him because of his union background and his corrupt commie mates in the CFMEU hasn’t come to much. Not yet, anyway. Cue the Cossack dancing, carbon taxing home ownership destroying fear campaign.

Yet it is Turnbull who is the pursued. People want figures. Costings -answers – not fudge, flapdoodle and fol de rol. AMA doctors are going after him over his Medicare co-payments by stealth; his tyro Treasurer Scott-Backing-in-Morrison has cost the nation – to say nothing of his own party or his own career, far more than the undisclosed compensation.

Turnbull makes a note to stop Peter Dutton doing the same. It’s too, late of course, even if he could get the former drug squad policeman’s full attention. Or find the time.

On Tuesday, Dutton blames refugee advocates for the suicide attempts on Nauru and Manus, for “encouraging detainees to self-harm” in the hope of getting to Australia.

His comments, which uncannily echo Morrison’s, come after a second refugee, Hodan Yasin, who set fire to herself on Nauru overnight remains in a Brisbane hospital in a critical condition.

Dutton, too, now has his hands full of homing pigeon droppings with his recent not-so-secret repatriation and refoulement of an unstopped boatload of twelve asylum seekers who have miraculously reached Cocos Island on 2 May only to be forcibly repatriated to Sri Lanka where they are promptly arrested at Colombo airport and certain future persecution.

Then there’s the exciting opportunity of Manus. It is reported by Guardian Australia that Manus detainees be sent to Norfolk Island, former “Hell in the Pacific” now that Peter O’Neill PNG PM has made it clear the Manus detention centre must close. Norfolk could be a goer. It worked so well for all parties last time.

To be fair, a key proponent of the use of Norfolk for detention, Natasha Blucher, would prefer Australia to process asylum seekers on the mainland.

“if that’s not going to happen, as it seems from [Immigration Minister Peter] Dutton’s ongoing statements and Labor’s support, I guess this is the second best”.

It’s a week when bad news threatens to wreck all Coalition’s plans. Costs of corporate welfare in the Ten Year Enterprise plan just can’t be concealed any longer when former UBS banker and Abbott appointee to the Treasury, Secretary John Fraser ‘fesses up at Friday’s Senate Estimates Committee hearing, although he refuses to answer more than two questions.

With all this – and the skids of rapidly declining opinion polls well and truly under him – Malcolm Turnbull’s Mothering Sunday drive to Yarralumla to get Abbott knight, Sir Pete Cosgrove is an ever more desperate attempt to get him to collude in a double dissolution and an early election.

Both men know that it’s not about any blocked legislation. It’s sheer expediency. Turnbull’s agile, innovative plan boils down to crash or crash through.

The former merchant banker’s dithering, stumble-bum, utterly bankrupt approach to policy and government is costing the Liberals so much popular support that every week brings compelling evidence they need to hold the election yesterday.

None of this political subterfuge, however, merits a moment’s attention in their breathless commentary as ABC’s Greg Jennett and Chris Uhlmann pipe the GG aboard his Yarralumla bivouac gushing that Cossie ‘always carries his own bags.’

Don’t contact ABC’s Fact Check unit. Turnbull appointee Michelle Guthrie is about to wind up the troublesome unit. Besides she’s got five million of “savings” to achieve. And who needs analysis or critical commentary?

As the week amply demonstrates, the Turnbull government prefers a fact-free following, nowhere better represented than in  Jennett and Uhlmann’s gushing deference to authority and obsession with superficial observation as we go to Turnbull’s visit to the GG live and in real time.

Greg ventures that Sir Pete has probably rehearsed for the big day. Anthony Green goes on to comment on the political and constitutional context. Nobody follows him. So many hours of reporting. Such little sense.

So much more warrants our attention, such as the Climate Change Authority’s report recommending a price on carbon – but that’s been delayed by the government which now controls the majority of members on the authority until after the election.

In a week where a cabinet minister can publicly disavow an ABC transcript of his own words, when a former PM can publicly lobby for a job for a retiring politician or talk about his need to phone a friend over a bribe and where a PM can pretend to have a case for an early election, it is very much a matter of never mind the questions and on with the show.

 

 

 

 

 

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Scott Morrison and Malcolm Turnbull’s cunning plan not to provide costings for their ten year tax giveaway has blown up in their faces. Whatever they may claim about not wishing to “do Shorten’s homework for him”, their decision to leave costings out of the budget paper is a gross tactical error, a blunder which may well just have handed Labor the election.

Of course, there other possible explanations. Morrison’s excuse that he was merely being mean and tricky may just be a cover up. The junk-yard dog ate his homework. Or he may simply been left out of the loop again by a PM who has every reason not to trust a ruthlessly ambitious cabinet member widely believed to have been the Abbott government’s best leaker.

Yet the PM must have known. And the fiasco has highlighted the Coalition’s predilection for deception. This is a budget of dodgy assumptions and double-dealing.

Take the deceptive way this is billed as Morrison’s first budget. It is no such thing. It is the Coalition’s third attempt and it is vital to read it in the context of all its prior decisions $13 billion of Family tax, maternity leave and PBS cuts which still remain on the books to boost the budget’s bottom line even though they have not been passed by parliament’s upper house.

This is the third in a series of failed tests where the self-styled “better economic managers” have already lost the public’s confidence and are wasting the nation’s time.

Yet Morrison’s inattention to detail or his ploy to get Bill may not be such a bad thing.

On the contrary, the Treasurer may have done voters a service in arousing suspicion. The public will come to see that the budget centrepiece of a ten year tax handout for business is based on the entirely erroneous assumption that cutting tax for business owners and the top quarter of wage and salary earners will stimulate the economy. It’s a budget based on a lie.

The appearance of John Fraser, Abbott’s pick for Secretary to the Treasury at the Senate Estimates Committee on Friday dramatically underscores the element of deception.

Although the Prime Minister had denied that treasury had done any costings of the ten year tax cut to companies, Fraser admits, with excruciating indirection and languid delay, that these amounted to “dollars 46 billion”, a bizarrely jargonised admission that, yes, now that you mention it, Senator Wong, Treasury has done the costings and the cost would blow a $50 billion dollar fleet of submarines out of the water, even if they were still at the conceptual stage.

Fraser hangs Turnbull out to dry on the previous day’s line that the Treasury had not costed the tax cuts. For all his talk about innovation and agility, the PM is hoist by his own petard. Before voters even get an election date officially declared, we are left dwelling on the government’s duplicity; its maladroit strategy of conniving to trick the Labor leader into making a bad guess.

Yet there is an even bigger deception at hand. The budget centrepiece is founded on the fiction that cutting taxes for companies and for the quarter of the workforce who earn more than $80,000 will stimulate economic growth. It won’t. Nor will it do to lie about how many of us earn $80,000.

(Astonishingly the top 25% become ‘average wage-earners’ in the PM’s radio interviews or “middle income earners”. The Australia Institute calculates, however that counting all wage-earners, it may be as few as 18%.) The electorate that will do best out of this budget’s income tax cuts is the PM’s own of Wentworth or net worth as it is has so aptly dubbed. Ordinary Australians are left out in the cold.

Central to the budget’s calculations is that notion that making the rich richer makes all Australians prosper. To this false assumption it adds investment and jobs. Given its record so far, however, these are the last claims this government should be making.

Tax attack dog Morrison whose false accusations that Save the Children workers were coaching refugees to self-harm on Nauru two years ago have resurfaced in a compensation settlement this week has another equally implausible slogan that can only once again draw attention to his government’s lack of achievement.

Morrison chooses to campaign on jobs, investment and growth. Yet after nearly three years, growth is forecast to be well below par at 2.5% for the next two years rising then to a minimal 3%. Unemployment is at least 5.5%. Business investment will be flat-lining at zero growth in 2017-2018.

Job figures, of course, can be fudged in many ways, including absorbing punters into internships, but the growth boast beggars belief at a time when the Reserve Bank is cutting interest rates because growth is feebly declining and inflation is plummeting. As with climate change, marriage equality or safe schools the Coalition is well and truly in denial.

Denial is the bedrock of the Coalition’s latest budget attempt. At massive expense to ordinary tax payers, the Abbott-Turnbull government’s main budget strategy is based entirely on the superstition that wealth will trickle down, or that cutting company tax will boost productivity, a notion which is now so well-disproved that even economist Arthur Laffer, its guru, no longer believes his own theory.

A big taxing, big spending government, the Coalition has produced in it its third budget an Enterprise centrepiece – an ill-judged, expensive and unnecessary handout to those who run businesses or who earn over $80,000 on the pretext that this will kick-start a halting economy. Turnbull’s “innovative” prime ministership has a plan which relies on nothing more than the old, discredited disgraced trickle-down theory and a bit of dodgy supply-side economics,

Putting aside its need to please the self-interested urgings of the Business Council of Australia, the IPA and others for a moment, company tax cuts are completely counterproductive, illogical and damaging to economic recovery.

Company tax cuts do not cause economic growth. Even Treasury can tell the government this. Cutting company tax has never stimulated any economy – not in Australia or anywhere else. Nor will cuts cause prosperity for all in the future.

When Treasury modelled a one per cent cut in 2014, the benefits flowed in the short to medium term solely to the business or company.

Companies simply pocket the difference in higher profits. Some of these profits do ultimately return to the economy as dividends. Multinational corporations, however, including the Coalition’s newest chum, submarine builder DCNS can just take the money off shore.

In the long run, cutting company income tax leads to a tiny increase to GDP of 0.15-0.2% – if and when an increased influx of foreign capital rushes to fund projects that wouldn’t be viable under the higher tax rate.

Treasury finds no case for company tax cuts. Yet not only is the Coalition prepared to risk an estimated $60 billion to defy its own Treasury modelling and ignore the lessons of history it is prepared to defy the laws of economics while cutting government spending to “live within our means”.

Turnbull is prepared to throw public money away in a bizarre gamble against the odds. Renowned economists. Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, have argued repeatedly that cutting spending while the economy is slowing results in increased unemployment. Yet they are mere Nobel laureates. What would they know?

Both argue that reducing inequality not to increasing it will boost productivity. And both point to the key role of education.

What these experts would tell the government is that education is the key. Economists the world over hold that the best way to increase productivity, labour-force participation and GDP growth is to invest in education. Yet the Coalition’s 2016 budget cuts Gonski funding by a quarter. New strings are attached.

Morrison’s budget does not replace the cuts made by Abbott Joe Hockey to schools and in tertiary education. It even adds a big new cut. Despite backing down on university fee deregulation, the Turnbull government wants to cut university funding by $1.5 billion. Vice Chancellors will have every reason to feel betrayed.

So, too will teachers feel betrayed to discover that only $1.2 million or a quarter of full Gonski funding for schools survives in this budget. Hollow if not hypocritical is Morrison’s boast in the budget preamble of making provision for future generations.

In brief, the government is prepared to defy all evidence, abandon all pretence at fairness, even do a bit of cheating with its figures in order to satisfy its appetite for the trickle-down theory.

Another explanation is that the Coalition is hell-bent on appeasing its powerful business backers and the majority of Australians can just go hang. 2 July will see what ordinary Australians make of that assumption.

 

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Jobs and growth. Scott Morrison may not be the smartest treasurer we’ve seen but, my, how he loves to parrot a slogan. He’s not referring to the more than 1000 jobs which will be axed from the community services sector following federal budget cuts to homelessness services, mental health programs and community legal centres.

Nor is he talking about the efficiency dividend of $1.2 billion which will see another swag of public service jobs disappear despite his government’s promise not to make any further public service cuts.

“This is a continuation of a policy that meant one in three phone calls to the Medicare, Centrelink and child support agencies went unanswered last financial year, 22 million calls missed in total,” says CPSU leader Nadine Flood.

Jobs and growth. He has to do something. Budget MK III is utterly bankrupt; devoid of ideas, initiative or integrity. Even the title: Come in spinner.  What a way to end the series!

Jobs and growth. No-one can follow ScoMo’s budget story, helpfully subtitled in the budget slideshow “sticking to our economic plan.” Everyone knows what happened to the architects of that plan. Yet so much in the Budget Mk III could be titled Not the Hockey Horror Show. Clearly Morrison’s just stringing us along until the election, hoping we’ll forget the cuts to health and welfare Abbott left on the books.

Yet who could forget the $600 million from planned cuts to access to Family Tax Benefits, $258 million from the outlawing of “double-dipping” of maternity leave schemes and the $139 million from increasing co-payments and changing the safety net for the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

Things do look crook. After three years in government, unemployment is still just under 6%, inflation is diving through the Axminister and the economy is tanking. Turnbull’s economic management credentials may have been talked up for the coup. His tax reform charade was another triumph of spin over substance. So, too, is his budget.

Come budget night, all his government can do is to turn its back on the average Australian, ignore the realities of climate change, health and education, cease to provide for the needs of an increasingly ageing population and give away $9 billion in individual tax cuts to those who really don’t need the money and to small business in corporate welfare.

Of course it’s not all handouts to companies. Pre budget spin has told us that women will love the tax cuts for those earning over $80,000 or is that the 16% of women who enjoy this salary. Spin all you like, the cuts are for the rich blokes. In fact, it’s a bit of a rich white bloke’s budget but you can’t say that on the ABC.

Blokes are less likely to use the women’s refuges and youth shelters which will be hit hard by the axing of a $115 million program to meet the needs of the rising numbers of homeless Australians.

Of course there’s more to it than this. Superannuation claims are trimmed especially for millionaires and there’s a lovely fairy story about how multinationals will be made to pay their fair share of tax by an ATO which has lost 4000 workers but will now get about a quarter of its staff back just for this purpose. Perhaps they’ll call them the unicorn branch.

International aid is cut by a further $224 million, after a one billion dollar hit last year to a record low of 23 cents in every $100 of gross national income. Unprecedented numbers of people caught in global humanitarian crises and people displaced by conflict have led 22 wealthy nations to increase their aid contribution.  Only Australia joins Portugal in making cuts. Yet  Australia can still find $1 billion to fund indefinite offshore detention of men, women and children.

A thousand young people, we discover, are to be rescued from unemployment by internships which will see them working for $6.00 an hour and not dismissed when the boss runs through his government subsidy.

Jobs and growth! It’s not that there are no jobs for young people after all, it seems. All our “vulnerable youngsters” need is a bit of work experience and a bit of benign neglect or worse. The system has no safeguards, no way of protecting those whom the treasurer calls our vulnerable young from being exploited by unscrupulous bosses. But then, what you expect from tokenism?

We learn also that in Morrison’s universe small businesses are now the leading employers in the land whereas in the real world big companies provide the most jobs.

Jobs and growth? The only jobs this mob cares about are its own; the only growth the cancer of false assumptions, canards, furphies and lies which choke the national conversation or worse become accepted as fact. News Corp is already on to it, but even they are having trouble finding a story.

Where’s the narrative? Amongst the commentariat and past- their use by date politicians it’s trendy to talk about the need to establish a narrative. It’s how you sell ideas, reforms, budgets. No coherent narrative exists in Morrison’s check-list of super, bracket creep, vulnerable young people, women, company tax, cities, multinationals, infrastructure . . .”

Nor is there a story in his prescription of discredited economic nostrums, such as the whopping lie of trickle-down theory upon which much of his gifts to businesses and high income earners, if not his entire world view are based.

One day, a reporter will challenge Morrison to provide evidence for his belief that making businessmen rich causes them to create jobs; his fantasy that making the ruling elite wealthier benefits anyone but themselves.

An economically literate treasurer would be boosting pensions and welfare payments and lifting the earnings of the lowest paid. Even the IMF knows that this is the way to promote economic growth.

Instead there is a host of porkie pies and wanton story-telling. Mercifully, however, nothing about his pal in New Zealand this time, however, the man inspired ScoMo last harangue with “how can I help you win today?”

Working out winners and losers, says the Treasurer, was “the old way. The Australian people have moved on from all that.”

Morrison convinces nobody. The main point of his budget is to pick winners and reward them. He has already said too much pre-budget about his mission to reward the heavy lifters – those earning over $80,000.

The Murdoch press is doing its best to help, even creating a post-budget Daily Telegraph wraparound featuring ScoMo as Superman. Yet is too late to save the job of the Treasurer, whose innate elitism and indifference to others colours his superficial, jargon-laden business hand-out of a budget on Tuesday as it does his abject failure of an address the following day at the National Press Club. Both performances serve only to confirm his colleagues’ opinion that the job is too big for the man.

Either that or the man and his party are on another planet, (which could be why there was no mention of a GFC we haven’t really got out of or climate change or the imperative to develop renewable energy anywhere in ScoMo’s spray).  Planet unicorn, perhaps?

The 2016 budget is presented as Scott Morrison’s first economic plan, a shonky re-badging in case anyone twigs that although this government has been in power for nearly three years, only now do they come up with a plan. Or that the best they can offer us is ScoMo, the man with a plan, like his $5.5 resettlement plan for Cambodia to take our refugees.

Although once there was a mob of five now only one remains to attest to his plan’s success. But then, ScoMo’s take on reality has always been a little different, as on budget night when he says disarmingly things are not what they seem.

“This isn’t a budget,” he explains. “It’s a plan.”

But no-one is surprised. Nor are they really listening. Even on budget day, (is nothing sacred?), the Reserve Bank further assails whatever remains of Morrison’s credibility by lowering interest rates.

But, then, what would they know about the economy? ScoMo is here to tell us everything is going gangbusters. Why, the Federal Treasurer will even use meaningless statistics to further insult our intelligence.

Our economy last year grew by almost $40 billion and added almost 300,000 jobs.

The ABS, on the other hand, found that in the first three months of 2016,  prices fell by 0.2% (the first such fall since December 2008) and annual inflation dropped all the way down to 1.3%: But what would they know?

Non-tradable items are showing record weak growth. In the past year, prices of non-tradeable items (such as takeaway food, rents, utilities, house prices, health and education expenses) increased by just 1.7% – the lowest this century

If, as Morrison repeatedly claims, the coalition is the only party which knows how to grow the economy, perhaps it should take a long hard look at the fertiliser it’s using.

‘This budget will not be about a fist full of dollars, it will be about prudence, fairness and responsibility to our future generations,’ Morrison tells the Victorian Liberal Party conference in Melbourne on Saturday although his budget gives away $4 billion in order to protect us from bracket creep, but only if you happen to be in the $80,000 PA bracket, an income group the treasurer is staunchly pretending is average.

In this delusion ScoMo is supported by his PM who doesn’t know anyone who doesn’t have a rental property, an income above $80,000, and who doesn’t own a cracker of a small business.  Neither cares that we lead the world in inequality.

In a world of widespread worsening inequality, Australia is in the lead. Compared to the average for OECD countries, income inequality is growing significantly faster in Australia. The Productivity Commission’s study of economic gains from 1988 to 2010, found that they disproportionately accrued to higher-paid workers.

Buoyed by his spaghetti western credibility, egged on by his PM, doubtless, our cowboy treasurer rustles up a posse of false assumptions including his belief that falling off a resources boom cliff is really “a  glide path to jobs and growth”.

Australians know that our future depends on how well we continue to grow and shape our economy as we transition from the unprecedented mining investment boom to a stronger, more diverse, new economy.

Transitioning! Like Good Captain Abbott, Morrison is a dog with a bone when it comes to the t word. Yet there is little evidence of transitioning to a stronger economy; of any sector taking up the lead once enjoyed by mining. Experts have been looking for it for years. A year ago the ABS forecast investment in the non-mining sector, excluding manufacturing, would fall by 8.1 per cent in the 2015-16 financial year.

What is keeping Australia from recession is the tail of the boom and the property and construction market in Sydney and Melbourne while the health care social assistance sector remain strong because of our ageing population. Construction is predicted to slow by next 2017.

The Australian economy is expected to grow at 2.5 per cent in both 2015-16 and 2016-17 before strengthening to 3.0 per cent growth in 2017-18 as the detraction from falling mining investment eases.

No mention from ScoMo on what precisely will drive this growth or ease this detraction. (You have to love the language)As Australia Institute economist Richard Denniss warns predictions are what economists can never agree on. Or get right. Anything after six months is generally flim-flam and flapdoodle.

Yet the facts don’t matter to the coalition’s divinely ordained mission to better economically manage us and Morrison is relaying a gem from the party’s suppository of wisdom. “Our objective is to transition people from one good job to another good job”, Tony Abbott said happily in 2013 – spookily predicting Joe Hockey’s good fortune.

Talk about “de-risking unemployment”, to use ScoMo’s cute new buzz words.  If only it were so simple. Nowhere in his speech does he acknowledge that there are at least 700,000 Australians unemployed and about the same number underemployed. The best he can boast is that submarine building will create jobs in something he calls

 A defence plan for local hi-tech manufacturing and technology

Yet this is not how defence contracts work with overseas-made specialist equipment netting profits to multinationals and small workforces. For example, despite the cost of the project, the most reliable forecast suggests that only 2800 jobs will be created in South Australia, when DCNS the French based multi-national whose colourful past includes corruption scandals, starts to build submarines that despite the $50 billion price tag are just a concept at this stage.

Curiously we are building 12 submarines despite being able to crew only 6 and despite the Navy’s problems finding crews for its Collins class subs because fewer sailors are keen to spend three months at time underwater. As with any part of the smoke and mirror budget, it doesn’t pay to look at any of it closely.

Jobs and growth? If the government were serious about growth, why does the budget entail a 13% cut to industry programs when compared with last year? Why a 9% cut to the Australian Research Council?

The government has made a big ballyhoo of its National Innovation and Science Agenda which is to boost entrepreneurship and collaboration between business and universities. But it hasn’t put its money where its mouth is. The Abbott government cut $3  billion in research and innovation spending. Only 1 billion has been put back.

Much of the rest of Budget III is forgettable or a field of unicorns or fairy-floss and that’s the aim. It needs to be out of the public mind by the time the election proper begins. Also needing to be forgotten, dead buried and cremated is the underlying mythology of trickle-down economics and business tax cuts causing bosses to hire more workers or of young workers only needing a bit of work experience to get into the workforce. For these he may well be laughed out of office.

The craven vote-buying, the economic illiteracy or wilful blindness, moral blindness and the ignoring the needs of the average Australian in order to pander to the needs of the elite are less easy to deal with. These are never to be forgotten. Or forgiven.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scott Morrison does not enjoy the trust of his leader or his nation. Malcolm Turnbull put his finger on his distrust of his Treasurer when he said Morrison “knew of the plan to bring the budget forward by a week to May 3, but that he was not part of the inner circle.”

A successful treasurer cannot be excluded; a wallflower in his own party’s dance to the music of time. If your boss won’t even trust you with the budget’s date, why should the nation trust you with any other budget details?

Then there are Morrison’s performance issues. When the Abbott cabinet leaked like a sieve, Morrison was the prime suspect. Morrison as Treasurer has underwhelmed with his  tenuous grasp of economic essentials. He has flip-flopped over championing individual tax cuts to the need to cut middle income earners’ taxes to defray bracket creep. One moment it has been GST, the next the imperative to cut company tax.

Morrison does not exude mastery. He talks of tax cuts for business as creating a growth dividend, a new phrase for the long-discredited myth that wealth will trickle-down.  He appears out of sync with his Prime Minister. He refuses to admit that the government has a revenue problem when the evidence points to declining tax receipts. There is good reason to suppose that he owes his position as Treasurer more to Turnbull’s need to keep an eye on him than his abilities.

Then there’s credibility. Morrison’s previous two portfolios did not build his reputation for integrity or accountability.

When twenty-three year old Reza Barati was bashed to death on Manus Island on 17 February 2014 a week elapsed before Morrison would concede that his story that Barati was outside the fences was wrong. It later transpired that he had known the truth from the outset.  But Morrison has ventured no apology.

Two of Barati’s assailants will receive five years in prison for his murder but there has been no move by Morrison in apology or for compensation to the young man’s family. Julian Burnside has described Morrison’s regime as callous.

Morrison sought to depersonalise and criminalise asylum seekers by instituting the phrase illegal maritime arrivals.

Not only is asylum seeking entirely legal according to the UN, Morrison’s language was calculated to further dehumanise and desensitise us to the barbaric cruelty of indefinite detention, a trend he extended by adding Border Protection to the Immigration Department’s name.

Protection implies threat. Australia has never been at threat from asylum seekers or refugees but it suited Morrison’s career to represent it thus. Mr Morrison also developed the punitive culture of detention which would torture and break men and women so that some would take their own lives, a calculated cruelty that he upheld as a deterrent.

Recently a twenty-three year old Iranian man, Omid Masoumali, committed suicide when he was told he could expect to be on Manus at least another ten years.  A Somali woman has recently set fire to herself, an action condemned by the government of Nauru as a ‘dreadful act.’

Despite its claims, the Abbott government didn’t stop the boats. It was Kevin Rudd in July 2013 who introduced offshore detention as a stop gap in a regional solution which has never eventuated, in a cynical ploy to get Abbott’s opposition off his back. Yet Morrison made no real move towards a more permanent regional solution. After nearly three years one refugee is left In Cambodia, a sole witness to his ludicrously expensive $55 million ‘solution.’

Morrison showed a ruthless pragmatism as border supremo and an arrogance and an almost fanatical refusal to answer questions in the absurd assumption that any information would encourage people smugglers. Later he used the phrase operational matters which implied we were at war with asylum seekers. In none of this did he betray a hint of the stability of character, the balance and breadth of perspective that might be expected of a future treasurer.

Besides putting immigration on a military footing. Morrison spent millions on orange fibreglass sea-craft into which he decanted refugees from Sri Lanka returning them with enough fuel to get them back to certain persecution, a move Tony Abbott boasted about in a recent Quadrant essay as boldly unconstrained by human rights considerations.

Morrison remains a pragmatist and a populist, at least in rhetoric. Despite Turnbull’s aversion to slogans, his treasurer is addicted to them, making his grasp of key issues appear two dimensional, simplistic. Like his previous prime minister, Morrison is keen to avoid nuance and complexity. He talks of backing in the tax payer who’s having a go or even a red hot go.

Being Federal Treasurer is not about picking winners. His talk of backing those who are out there earning or his disparaging comments about the numbers of Australians who receive welfare exposes him to the suspicion that he is divisive; determined simply to make it easier for those with money to hang on to it.

To Morrison, the Tea Party tax populist, welfare payments are a burden. He relays a Tea Party delusion that taxes are a burden rather than a social responsibility.

Now he wants to lower taxes for those on incomes over $80, 000, despite his earlier claim that he had no ‘fiscal headroom.’ Or that the budget couldn’t afford it. This is a wilful distortion of reality as is his comment that spending on education is unsustainable. Given Australia’s relative wealth as a nation we can afford whatever standard we aspire to. What he means when he says unsustainable, says economist Richard Dennis, is jargon for he doesn’t want to.

Morrison is even willing to pretend that $80,000 an average salary in Australia when the ATO can tell you it’s way too high, especially for female workers. Peter Martin points out that the average wage is $60,000 and that most Australians don’t get close to $80, 000. Only a quarter earn over that amount. Quickly his pre-budget comments show an ignorance or a wilful deceit on what the average wage in Australia is, whatever they imply about his lack of fairness.

Morrison’s budget income tax cuts will be unavailable to eighty per cent of workers in Tasmania. But his aim is not to support the average Australian, despite the rhetoric. He wants to lower company taxes, claiming this will boost productivity yet there is not a reputable economist in the land who will support the belief that making the rich richer somehow creates jobs or trickles down into increased prosperity for all.

In fact that increased wealth just trickles up. He may call it a productivity dividend until the Kidman cows come home. Spare us the jargon. He is simply looking after the rich.

With dividend imputation most Australian companies pay far less than 28% in tax. Morrison must know this. You only have to read a little history to see that when John Howard reduced company tax, there was no boost in productivity. Yet his Budget will set out a table of how company tax will be cut and continue to decrease in stages in future years.

His backers may be happy but the nation as a whole won’t thank him for widening the gap between rich and poor. Clearly, along with Joe Hockey he sees Australians as lifters and leaners; winners and losers. Already Labor is calling it an unfair budget, a charge which has every chance of creating considerable electoral damage.

Morrison is keen to portray his government as not a tax and spend government but his own MYEFO puts the lie to his mantra. Bernard Keane offers a neat summary of the real facts:

 As a proportion of GDP, the tax burden on the economy has risen from 21.5% of GDP in the last full year of Labor to 22.3% this year and is planned to be over 23% in 2018-19 — putting the Commonwealth tax take at $113 billion more than the final year of Labor. Morrison plans to be the highest-taxing treasurer since Peter Costello sucked 24% of GDP out in taxes before the financial crisis.

Morrison’s government is a reckless spender. This year, spending will be 25.9% of GDP, higher than it was in 2014-15 (25.6%) while Labor’s last full year was significantly lower at  24.1%.

If his words on taxing and spending are false, Morrison is also keen to create an illusion of economic transition. The economy is transitioning is his mantra. You couldn’t trust Labor to minister to a transitioning economy. Yet it is all bogus. He can’t produce a skerrick of evidence that any sector of the Australian economy is remotely ready to take over mining’s lead. It’s all windy wishful thinking and endless, desperate repetition.

Morrison repeats his hollow claim as if  there’s some soft landing after the collapse of the mining boom instead of a rude shock. He pretends to be nurturing an economic recovery when in fact his government’s  ideological NeoCon decisions are helping us towards recession.

The Abbott Turnbull government has sacked 16, 500 public servants, closed the car industry, buggered investment in renewable energy industries, left industries such as Ardmona to be rescued by the Victorian government state. Steelmaker Arrium is about to collapse, threatening 7000 jobs nationally, 1000 in Whyalla S.A. alone, but it has offered nothing to save workers’ jobs. Instead, it has allowed the banks to put in their own administrator.

Now the news is that Turnbull has broken his government’s promise to halt public service cuts or productivity dividends. A further $1.2 billion, will be announced in the Budget, will be ripped out of the APS to fund the cuts it will offer to those earning over $80,000 a year to offset bracket creep already marginal in times of low inflation and record lows in wage growth.

Morrison may show charts and graphs about his Budget but he will never convey the effect of those public service job losses in terms of lives wrecked, careers destroyed and the flow-on effects on local communities of moving families from salaries to Newstart allowances.

Not all of them can hope to find employment in the contract positions which will pop up to do the work which under-staffed demoralised and depleted government departments can no longer manage. He will not produce a chart which shows the cost of hiring contract staff to do the work of those who have been sacked in the name of savings. Private contractors will continue to do well out of a Liberal government.

But it’s not really about savings. The Liberal government continues to pay $5 billion a year to subsidise multinational mining companies. Dividend imputation which was modified by Peter Costello in 2000 to allow refunds to shareholders with no taxable income, profits rich investors from the top 2 % and costs the tax payer $5 billion a year according to the Australia Institute’s most recent report.  Here’s two savings we won’t see in Morrison’s budget. Yet he is obsessed with the mantra that he has an expenditure and not a revenue problem.

One trillion dollars is to go on Defence spending over the next twenty years, money that despite his rhetoric will go largely into the pockets of overseas corporations supplying specialist equipment. Yet even one trillion will not buy security. No-one in Defence or elsewhere in government or society believes we are likely to be attacked; none believe we could ever defend ourselves if we were. It’s all about the politics of looking strong on security while saving Liberal seats.

Subsidies and protectionism are OK when it comes to building submarines in South Australia; when it hopes they’ll win you votes but $50 billion looks like reckless spending when at best it is likely to net the government two seats and one of these is Jamie Briggs’ seat of Mayo.

The fact is that we are not transitioning. The only reason we are not in recession is because there’s still a flicker left in mining and because the property market in Sydney and Melbourne still chugs along thanks to foreign investment and the speculative activity of those who take advantage of the negative gearing and capital gains discounts the party introduced in Howard’s era.

Morrison is not averse to using bogus authorities. No-one believes BIS Shrapnel’s dire predictions about negative gearing, not even BIS Shrapnel who refuse to say who did the modelling behind that but who admit it was done before Labor’s policy was released. The Grattan Institute calls the report ‘manifestly ridiculous.’ Yet Morrison made great play of it in parliament and in radio interviews subsequently.   It has done his credibility no good.

The same goes with his talking up your budget for months. Everything was on the table so long, it looked like neither Treasurer nor his Prime Minister could make a decision. Until others made it for them.

A rabid union-basher, Morrison has shown the nation that he can’t keep anything on the table without permission from your IPA, BCA and other top end of town backers. Whatever he  put up, vested mining, business and banking interests made him remove from the menu. He has ended up looking weak; beholden to his powerful, ruthless mates.

Morrison runs off at the mouth. Australians know that the more technical terms you use, the less you really understand. Budgets are about communicating with ordinary people. They are not an excuse for you to name-drop economic terms such as ‘over the forward estimates’ when their treasurer could simply say “over the next four years.” Yet Morrison it seems craves the power of jargon.

Despite what he may think, jargon doesn’t help him shore up his claims to authority or expertise. Rather it exposes his flimsy purchase on his portfolio, as well as his credibility.

Let’s cut the slogans and the mind-numbing Treasury-speak. Let’s stop all the pretending. Drop the lies, the half-truths, the myths and the empty generalisations. Let’s drop phrases like growing the economy, too. The economy is not a wheat crop. Nor is it growing. The government’s austerity measures have not promoted growth.

So what will be in Morrison’s unfair budget? Five key elements are guaranteed.

Tax: Liberal backers won’t let Morrison make any real tax reforms but he needs to pay them back with company tax cuts they don’t need and income tax cuts for high earners which come at the cost of an effective public service.

He refuses to admit that he has a revenue problem so he’ll make some more cuts to expenditure that will ultimately dampen economic activity. His IPA pals will be distressed that he hasn’t gone far enough.

Roads to nowhere: He’ll pretend to be hugely investing in infrastructure – any infrastructure. No-one will be too clear that it’s the infrastructure we really need or how you intend to pay for it. How much will be new funding or recycled from a year ago is anyone’s guess. Of course he won’t be actually be spending any money but he will be guaranteeing loans. If you can attract investment.

Education and Health: will get less than either needs with much empty rhetoric about money not being the key to quality and hollow promises about keeping teachers up to the mark. He will break his government’s election promise to match Gonski dollar for dollar. Well, Gonski was about redressing inequality anyway.

With a great hoo-ha he will recycle the announcement of an extra $2.9 billion for the states to fund hospitals over the years to 2020. States accepted the money during the Council of Australian Governments meeting in Canberra a month ago. He will hope nobody notices that this only partly makes up for Tony Abbott’s cutting $7 billion from hospitals.

Banks: ASIC which he reckons is better than a Royal Commission and which has let the banks do exactly as they please will get $127 million which is almost as much as Abbott and Hockey stripped out of its budget. This money will equip them to go after the banks.

Verdict: Rather than be an election winner, or some type of manifesto, the budget’s manifest unfairness could help accelerate its growing unpopularity.  The consensus will be that Morrison has generally wasted everybody’s time, upset the left who, bless them, still value fairness and justice, while disappointing the right who want more austerity just as long as it is not applied to them.

If his government is re-elected by a small majority, Morrison, hated by the Abbott faction and mistrusted by the Turnbull may find himself out of the hunt for a portfolio in the next Liberal government. Still it’s better than being called before The Hague.

 

 

It takes a special breed of PM to admit that he has no idea where he’s going, let alone when there’s an election or a war on. Malcolm Bligh Turnbull, however, rises to the occasion Wednesday this week when he claims, incredibly, to have no idea that Australia’s indefinite detention of refugees and asylum-seekers on Manus Island is wrong.

The full bench of PNG’s Supreme Court unanimously rules that Australia’s mandatory indefinite detention of asylum-seekers is illegal and unconstitutional, leaving our government exposed to potential claims of more than $1 billion and prompting PM Peter O’Neill to close our Manus prison camp.

Last month, at the National Press Club, O’Neill, who is fighting for political survival in a PNG where the issue of keeping Manus Island open is no vote-winner, implied more Australian money might help.  Currently PNG receives 557 million per year in aid which is not targeted to help PNG fight corruption.  PNG is likely to go bankrupt in June.

“We have issues about cost of the resettlement, who is going to pay for it? Certainly [the] Papua New Guinea government does not have the resources to resettle the refugees as required.”

AID/WATCH Director Thulsi Narayanasamy adds “Australia presents the relationship with PNG as one of an equal partnership when the reality is that the cornerstone of the relationship is unequal power. So long as Australia can dump refugees on Manus Island, engage in an unfair free trade agreement, and facilitate its companies to have access in PNG – corruption is not a threat to Australia’s national interest, in fact, it appears to benefit from it.”

Australia dismisses O’Neill’s appeals with predictable results. Its arrogance and its policy of War on the Unfortunate and The Other at home and abroad prompts a welter of speculation.

Will Manus inmates be mixed in with the Kiwis of Christmas Island, whose past criminal convictions allow us, we claim, to hold them without charge prior to deportation? This would blend two policy catastrophes.

Will Manus’ 850 inmates now bunk down on Nauru, a place where detainees swallow razor-blades and washing powder, a hell-hole where even teenagers and children are so depressed they contemplate suicide?

On Wednesday, Omid, a twenty-three year old Iranian man burns himself to death in front of his wife and a UN inspector. After three years on Nauru, he is heard to say he “cannot endure any more.”

24 hours elapse before Omid is flown to Brisbane hospital, a delay which Refugee Action Coalition spokesman Ian Rintoul describes as “criminal, arguing that the “lack of experienced staff, medical supplies and “shocking conditions in the Nauru hospital” cost the young Iranian his life.

Will Manus detention centre be flung open in a cruel parody of liberation? This will allow asylum-seekers who can make the long trek from the prison to Manus proper free to bond with Manus society and people including former guards who have tried or vowed to kill them. PNG says no. The Immigration Minister pretends this is an option.

Enter Peter Dutton stage right. Immigration Minister and Monkey Pod Supremo, Dutton, leader of the Liberal Party’s Delcons, the right-wing rump, quasi cargo cult whose mutual delusion is to daily prepare for the return of Tony Abbott, volunteers another view. Everything is under control.

Dutton mutters that a bad Manus “outcome” was expected all along. Doing nothing about it, whilst doing everything to appear caught on the hop by it, must be equal parts of his cunning plan. He picked up the legal vibe from PNG a year ago, he reckons. He just did nothing. His PM is left to plead ignorance.

Whether Turnbull’s disclaimer represents peak cynicism, peak snake-oil or just what he is told to say by his right wing, it is undeniably summit of the week in political chicanery. The very next day the PM’s innovation drive malfunctions. Our Guru of Agility does not know what to do next. Or so he maintains.

Statesmanlike leadership is off the leash and running in all directions in week two of his snap election campaign.

Staffers toil to spin Turnbull’s bewilderment into a strength only to have him appear like a Big Bwana waiting patronisingly above the fray for poor benighted, basket-case PNG to come to its senses. Accept our “help.” Obey our wishes.

PNG’s Supreme Court rules that Australia’s practice of detaining 850 asylum seekers on Manus Island is illegal;  unconstitutional. Only Turnbull is surprised. Manus was always illegal – ever since Kevin Rudd dreamed up the crafty dodge of sweeping our maritime refugee problem under someone else’s woven organic floor covering.

When Australian legislation had to be urgently revised to fend off a challenge to our own High Court to permit the tragic farce of off shore detention to continue, it was inevitable, surely, that other judiciaries would follow suit.

Rudd’s 2013 deal with PNG was never about what was right. It was a political strategy devised on the eve of a federal election aimed at blocking a key Coalition line of attack. In this, and only in this, did it succeed. It was wrong, then and everyone knew it. It was unconstitutional, illegal and immoral. Both parties knew it. And it was never intended to be a “processing facility,” a euphemism for indefinite detention.

Manus Island was set up to be a hell-hole. As former migration agent, Liz Thompson, explained to SBS in 2014,

“It’s not designed as a processing facility. It’s designed as an experiment in the active creation of horror to secure the deterrence.”

Nevertheless, our PM now claims PNG’s High Court ruling is unexpected. He has no idea what to do next. Luckily, he quickly adds, it is a PNG issue. Yet even Blind Freddy can see that it is our problem.

Nor is there a flicker of recognition from the PM that because PNG has ruled our camps unlawful that Australia might be doing something wrong; that the lives of those detained count for more than his own political advantage.

We made Manus Island Detention Centre; we own it. It has not been cheap. Australia spent $1.2 billion plus $400 million in PNG aid at the last renewal of Broadspectrum, formerly Transfield’s contract in 2014. It costs $400, 000 per person per year to maintain refugees on Manus or Nauru as opposed to a little over half that on the mainland.

Only a Turnbull or an Abbott could persevere with the myth that Manus is anyone else’s problem. Yet our PM claims the “matter is for PNG initially, but the ruling was under consideration at home and Australia would support PNG in figuring out a solution.”  It is code for offering PNG a better-directed bribe. No innovation here.

The PM fails to mention that in 2014, PNG already unsuccessfully tried to change its constitution to make Australia’s Manus Island prison camp legal. Nor does he begin acknowledge that money won’t fix this issue. Yes, he’s lost, he admits reassuringly, as if we are to be comforted by his ownership of his own moral and legal abyss.

“I can’t provide a definitive road map from here, but today … we’re getting briefed on it,” Turnbull tells reporters in Brisbane on Wednesday, only to be contradicted by Dutton who says he had “anticipated” the ruling.

Dutton can, of course, offer no evidence, whatsoever, of anticipation or plan, despite asserting that his department has been burning the midnight oil for a year in anticipation of “an adverse legal outcome”. His protestation as always sits oddly with the government’s shocked reaction and its lack of any plan.

Redefining the meaning of the phrase “going on the offensive,” a hairy-chested Turnbull quickly advises the nation that it is rash to “become misty-eyed” over immigration policy or any other gross breaches of human rights necessary in its implementation. Those suffering the brutality we inflict on them simply don’t count.

Nothing matters except the Liberals’ political expediency; how this plays out at home. PNG may be a basket case. Manus may be closing down. But asylum seekers must suffer. Turnbull’s cruel phrase betrays his calculated inhumanity.

Turnbull vows to continue to play politics with the lives of 850 men currently indefinitely detained in a prison, condemned by human rights organisations and the UN, a prison which Peter O’Neill, the PNG PM wants to close.

“They will not come to Australia — that is absolutely clear and the PNG Government knows that,” Turnbull says.

The Liberals mistook Labor’s off-shore plan. The Houston-Aristotle-L’Estrange 2012 report on asylum seekers to PM Gillard, recommended offshore processing only as a first step towards setting up a broader, permanent regional solution to refugees and asylum-seekers. Bernard Keane notes, after nearly three years in power, the Liberals still don’t get it. The Cambodian solution, a $55 million, unworkable parody is all they have to show.

Not to be outdone, Shadow Immigration Minister Richard Marles is on the box to declare that “offshore processing has been the single most important policy that any Australian government has made”.

Marles’ claim is an outrageously false and yet unctuous display of bipartisan victimisation yet heard in the asylum-seeker debate which is not a debate but an agreement to treat the suffering of the alienated, the dispossessed, the wretched of victims of ever-widening political persecution and instability with cruel contempt.

What place does Marles affords to policies such as votes for women or the eight hour day? Hogs are publicly washed as the slow bicycle race of bipartisan immigration policy totters toward its inevitable forced dismount.

Still urging the Liberals’ domestic war on the poor, the less fortunate and the different in our society, George Brandis, Liberal Party pocket philosopher on the Neocon version of human rights which includes the right to defame and hate speech, attacks Labor for its plan to leave Tim Wilson’s role of Freedom Commissioner unfilled. Outrageously Labor plans to restore the Disability Commissioner to a full time gig.

“It shows how little Labor cares about our fundamental political freedoms, including freedom of speech, opinion, religion, association and freedom of the press, that it is once again proposing to abandon this role.”

Not abandoned, however, are all those many Australians who live in cities. The PM makes the astonishingly platitudinous observation that no Australian citizen should live within thirty minutes of his or her job. Who writes his stuff? No practical suggestion or plan is provided as to how we rebuild our cities to resemble his ideal or who will pay. Clearly we are expected to live inside his thought bubble.

The jargon du jour of “value capture” and private-public partnerships are airily presented as solutions to funding, if indeed, any further funds are needed, given that the government is prepared to commit a whopping $50 million to the wankfest. This is a tenth of the amount it is estimated it is prepared to waste on its marriage equality plebiscite, an extravagant stunt to avoid the party’s responsibility to make a political commitment.

“Smart Cities” allows Turnbull to talk to himself in public again.  Because his real area of expertise is airy generalisation and speculation, Turnbull is in his element. He may waffle on so much that  someone, somewhere, will think he’s come up with a real policy. Even if it is only George Brandis.

Yet the government’s investment in the Smart Cities thought bubble is piffling in contrast to the week’s economic master-stroke which rather startles the Japanese to whom Tony Abbott had made captain’s call assurances. French submarines, built it South Australia by DCNS, a firm which has had bad luck with the odd corruption scandal in its chequered past will be our saviour. In February France opened a probe into  the alleged bribery of Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak by the firm to win a contract for two submarines.

At least the new boats will save a couple of marginal seats in the rust-belt of South Australia. Brian Toohey in the AFR estimates that it will cost $20 billion extra to build the subs in Australia.

Factor in the $35 billion already committed for nine new frigates and it is clear that the coalition is committing to spend over a hundred billion on war toys without once deigning to explain where the money is coming from. All up it is calculated that the government has committed to spending an astronomical $1 trillion dollars on defence over the next twenty years. You would have to spend 10 million dollars every day for 273 years to spend $1 trillion. In this context, splashing $50 billion submarines is a bargain buy.

$50 billion is a lot to pay for a couple of seats, in the real world, however, even if one is Christopher Pyne’s. It also betrays some poor priorities. With bipartisan support, Turnbull is committing bulk public funding to defence while dodging investment in real infrastructure such schools or hospitals, or other investments such as renewable energy of vastly greater and enduring benefit to society and economy.

Why subsidise submarines and not cars? All it would have taken is for GMH to stay in Australia would have been a paltry $150 million a year, according to Mike Devereux, former GM Australia managing director.

The logic of lavish defence spending contradicts the government’s principled neo-con decision to cut off the auto industry from all subsidy or support. Why not fund an industry which employs vastly more Australians? Whilst the political bleeding may be staunched in a few seats for the Liberals in South Australia, moreover, unemployed car industry workers will be far more numerous.

Victoria also faces high unemployment as the effects are felt of Abbott and Hockey’s decision to deprive car-makers of any form of subsidy. Thousands more workers will be out of jobs in car making and ship building in Victoria than in South Australia as a result of this government’s selective free-market ideology. The submarine deal is poor value for money before you even go into the logistical and practical drawbacks of our location at the arse end of the world, to use Keating’s famous phrase.

Scott Morrison will blow hard on his expenditure on defence in his Budget speech next week. He will rave on about keeping us safe and all the other cheap rhetorical tricks governments use to induce compliance and conformity. Millions will be spend on advertising to show that we must spend every waking moment in fear of invasion or terror attack. He will not show us the real equation.

The Treasurer will not list all the of opportunities Australia will have to forgo, including the capacity to behave like a mature global citizen that can offer real foreign aid to neighbours like Indonesia, the Pacific Islands or PNG, nations which are in desperate need of support and whose plight it ill-becomes us to treat with contempt, whose plight it is not in our national interest to ignore.

Above all he will remain silent on the fate of the poor, the elderly, those marginalised by misfortune at home, the nurses the teachers, the doctors whose welfare and capacity to do their jobs will continue to be presented as a welfare burden while a trillion dollars is splurged on military hardware we really don’t need and can’t afford.

“Not all bankers are greedy, profiteering, heartless bastards” says the PM, airing his fabled diplomatic charm and finely nuanced business skills after the cheese and port at the Westpac Bank 199th birthday bash, 6 April, “but those who aren’t should blow the whistle on those who are.”

As with many of the PM’s recent homilies, it is a bizarre tack to take. Not that it is all up to the banks themselves to clean up their acts. ASIC MKII with extra funds will help keep our banking industry’s usurers and loan-sharks on the straight and narrow.

Even if it has been a complete failure in the past – and despite being designed to go after corporations and not banks. And under-staffed.

Despite a senate inquiry which found on 26 June 2014 it was not up to snuff and suggested a Royal Commission, a bigger, better ASIC is sold as the answer.

Bankers, under Liberal governments especially, whom they fund most generously, are in a class of their own. Despite doing very little of anything productive, except to make profits out of other people’s industry and trust, banks bask like sharks in the status of an industry. And for the Liberals it is a protected industry.

Turnbull has factored both natural sloth and potected species status into his cunning reforming plan. It won’t all be one great orgy of self-reporting fraudulence. A newly rebooted ASIC will be the tough new (recycled) cop on the block. Or so he says.

ASIC will even get some of its $120 million dollar 2013-14 Budget cut back courtesy of the same government. Overnight, the regulator will be transformed from paper tiger to a bigger, fatter, slower, pussy cat.

The PM, himself, is busier  than a cat watching two rat-holes. His government now, due to its own ineptitude and tactical blundering, has a feral Senate on its hands with two weeks to kill after its “let’s bring back the ABCC” bill was thrown out in a day.

Cross-bench senators may have been turkeys voting for Christmas over their dismissal of the ABCC legislation, but they were focused turkeys. The focus is back on corruption. And anti-Turnbull government with a vengeance.

The Liberals’ cunning plan envisaged weeks of wrangling and nifty anti-senate maverick cross bench bad press for the propaganda mill.

Now the government is forced into a politically embarrassing and potentially disastrous end-game. Labor’s Penny Wong has successfully summonsed Arthur Sinodinos to explain his role in dodgy NSW Liberal fund-raising. This was not part of Turnbull’s “brilliant and audacious” scheme.

Yet the PM is no slouch when it comes to jawboning and droning on about banking reform.

Turnbull will restore $57 million – almost half of the funding cut by Abbott and Hockey in 2013. Half of the several hundred staff it sacked may be re-engaged or replaced. But the PM’s main game plan remains DIY anti-corruption by insider whistle-blowing and a bit of finger-wagging from himself as coach. It’s wet, it’s weak and it’s won’t work.

Unsurprisingly, the PM’s speech does not go over well.  Some of his audience go off like a frog in a sock. The gruntled wunch of bankers at the birthday bash suddenly turns ugly when after dinner speaker, Turnbull appears to acause them of malfeasance and roguery, in the best banking tradition, betraying former colleagues, scandalising them with an unexpectedly blunt, broadside.

Some are outraged at the jumped up former merchant banker. Mortified. Who farted in church? Others voice the proposition  that the PM’s public embrace of banking reform will only confirm to the public that there is a banking problem. Now that is a conundrum.

Doubtless the conundrum of the government’s love of banking problem, a tough love that dare not speak its name,  will be aired repeatedly on the hustings once Turnbull gets the bottle to formally declare his 2 July election date and begin the longest, dunless, least-advised and coyest (so far)  in Australian political history.

The PM does, however, avoid the word ‘scandal’. It can’t be easy. He invokes higher principles – risking  losing or further confusing every banker present. Reciprocity, for example, is surely in order, he thunders given taxpayers once rallied to carry the banks though the GFC:

“… many Australians, as you know, ask today: ‘Have our bankers done enough in return for this support? Have they lived up to the standards we expect, not just the laws we enact?’ Wise bankers, such as your leaders, recognise these questions are legitimate – dismissing them as bank bashing misses the point.” 

The bankers glare back at him with pursed lips. Most must, surely, know by now that the PM is just an ineffectual windbag and hopeless hog-washer but their faces register disgust, nevertheless, at his insolence, his lese majeste. Most note, nevertheless, in the margin of the ledger of their discontent that he proposes no action.

Turnbull’s serve, of course, is all for show. It is aimed less at righting wrongdoing, such as ANZ and Westpac’s current prosecution for illegal home loan rate fixing, than the need to be seen to be doing something about the industry as it is designated today, where the term industry is widely and loosely applied to any form of commercial intercourse including prostitution.

Yet he does cut through, judging by the bankers’ anger. No-one in the industry mistakes the PM’s studied indirection. He does not have to spell out how our Big Four dodge tax or give conflicted investment advice or deny insurance payouts and sundry other ways the industry can make its customers suffer, including, as Mike Seccombe nearly summarises in The Saturday Paper:

“the pursuit of small investors who lost their savings through bank-financed fraudulent investment schemes, to foreclosing on drought-stricken farmers who have fallen behind on their covertly restructured loans by minuscule amounts, to colluding to manipulate interest rates.”

There is of course much more but it’s enough to have anyone reaching for his antacid. Labor has helpfully provided Seccombe’s newspaper with four closely typed pages detailing seventy separate acts of financial malfeasance, supporting its case for a Royal Commission.

Yet for the last ten days, the government’s case is that bankers must never be brought to any Royal Commission lest it cause a loss of confidence in the industry. Things are really crook in banking, we know, runs its logic, but let’s not do anything to frighten the horses. Lose confidence in the system. As if there were any confidence left.

The Turnbull lecture is quite a show. The PM calls upon on his sure grasp of banking history and tradition, to say nothing of occasion and convention, to lecture his former colleagues about their fixation with profit and personal gain,.

Yet he  makes it perfectly clear that all he is prepared to do about it is half of sweet Bugger all or this  ritual public flogging with a limp salad green.

Meanwhile, Turnbull and his hugely underperforming treasurer, Scott Morrison, endlessly tell the nation that ASIC is doing a simply marvellous job of holding our Big Four to account in spite of all the evidence now tabled.

Assistant Treasurer and former banking employee, puppet Kelly O’Dwyer maintains there’s nothing wrong in her being sponsored by banks at precisely the time when there is every reason for detachment and objectivity. It’s world’s best practice, surely.

Morrison repeatedly claims in his unique manner, like a racehorse at the gallop, that the regulator has more powers than a Royal Commission, ignoring its manifest failure so far to bring any banker to book, a failure rooted deeply in Westpac’s origins.

Westpac was founded in NSW as the Bank of New South Wales in 1817 by Governor Lachlan Macquarie but it was almost ruined when, in 1821, Edward Smith Hall, its Chief Cashier, made off with half its subscribed capital, none of which was ever recovered. Yet it has never looked back since.

The transfer of funds seems to have done Hall less harm than his reformist political views aired in his newspaper, The Monitor, which put him to jail on charges of sedition until a change of monarch caused Governor Darling to pardon him. Even then, the bank was too big to fail.

And so today, our banks must be protected, at all costs, from themselves and from that low-life Shorten’s plans to call a Royal Commission, plans which would utterly destroy consumer confidence in an untrustworthy bunch of mongrels who are interested, as the PM so aptly puts it, only in profit and personal gain.

Not only would a Commission undermine the reputation and credibility of our banking sector, Shorten’s promise is just another “distraction, a thought bubble”, a sentiment echoed by the Treasurer in a rare display of consensus, his head weaving, his lips flecked with foam .

Shorten replies that the banks have already done a good job on their reputations themselves.

ASIC, both Turnbull and Morrison claim, is already perfectly equipped to do the job although the Senate inquiry in 2014 found exactly the opposite to be the case.

According to Morrison, ASIC has the same powers as a Royal Commission, yet it is set up to look into corporations, not banks and it has a lamentable record of failure.

ASIC has failed to stop banks’ overcharging on credit cards, colluding to fix interest rates for home mortgages or prevent financial planners providing conflicted advice. CommInsure, the Commonwealth Bank’s insurance arm has refused to pay out on insurance claims even pressuring doctors to change diagnoses. ASIC, the corporate watchdog, has merely looked on.

Even the Liberals are divided. Almost immediately, Turnbull is publicly contradicted by eight Liberal MPs. Mackay MP George Christensen, a prominent Delcon, (delusional conservative working towards Tony Abbott’s return) wants a Royal Commission as do a handful of Nats including Warren Entsch and the champion of reform, senator John Williams whose comment echoes the PM’s moral tone.

“We get dog products, dog advice in a culture of profit, profit, profit and to hell; with everyone’s security”

Propping up ASIC is the government’s lame answer to those now on both sides who call for a Royal Commission into banking because of a series of big bank scandals which have led to a crisis of consumer confidence. These critics won’t be fobbed off.

Pretending ASIC is up to the job is preposterous – as preposterous as calling on Australian banking to clean up its act via whustle-blowing. Or that a bit of Prime Minsterial finger-wagging is anothing better than a pea-shooter against a rhinoceros.

ASIC is a failed regulator, already discredited by the 2014 senate inquiry as too “timid”, “inept” and too “gullible” to do its job in an industry, the committee noted, in which whistle-blowers fared badly – before ASIC had its staff and funding cut.

Spare us the moral posturing, Mr Turnbull, you have no intention of getting banks to clean up their act, even if you had the means to achieve it. There is a list, a long list of banking malfeasance to attend to but your latest efforts are as laughably inept as your audacious early election gambit, already seriously unstuck in the senate.

And if a Royal Commission costing $80 million running for two years but achieving nothing was good enough for Labor’s union backers, a Royal Commission into the banking industry, is the very least you could offer the nation – despite your party’s indebtedness to banks for its funding; despite the love that dare not speak its name.

Dear readers

Blogging has been suspended recently while I have been in Auckland supporting youngest sister, Linda who has just undergone a major operation.

Linda has now been discharged from hospital and appears to be recuperating well.

Will resume blogging as soon as practicable.

kind regards

 

Urban Wronski

This budget will not be about a fistful of dollars, it will be about prudence, fairness and responsibility to our future generations,”

So the PM told the Victorian Liberal Party conference in Melbourne this week a gathering to honour John Winston Howard who blew the mining bonanza buying votes while generally ignoring prudence, fairness and responsibility to anyone’s future but his own.

Newspoll has Labor 51 ahead of LNP 49 two party-preferred for the first time this week and is unlikely to respond to Turnbull’s budget hints, while his popularity plummets each week. If only they had a category for best prevaricator, bloviator or most patronising toff.

Publicly humiliated last Friday when a scurvy crew of state and territory leaders angrily trashed his latest tax plan, the PM was affronted by the premiers’ outrageous demands that the government repay the $80 billion over ten years Health and Education funding Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey cut in the 2014 Budget, perhaps with a GST hike in mind, PM Turnbull was quick, this week to claim the high moral ground at the top of the COAG compost heap.

Ignoring entirely his government’s part in creating the funding crisis which is already causing some Victorian hospitals to close emergency wards and ordinary folk to suffer, the PM dismissed the $80 billion as “a fantasy”, although it appears in his own government’s 2014 budget overview:

“In this Budget the Government is adopting sensible indexation arrangements for schools from 2018, and hospitals from 2017-18, and removing funding guarantees for public hospitals. These measures will achieve cumulative savings of over $80 billion by 2024-25.”

Later he led his team to repeat this falsehood and misrepresent the Premiers’ behaviour.

“The reality is … if they’re not prepared to make the case to their citizens through their parliament for higher taxes, they cannot seriously or credibly ask us to raise taxes to give money for them to spend.”

Yet it was the PM himself who seemed less than serious, especially to Tasmania, South Australia and The Northern Territory whose smaller populations would mean they would have to raiser higher taxes. The NT calculates it would have to raise taxes by over 8% to make up for the loss of the tied health and education grants.

Turnbull didn’t care as long as he could paint the states as churlish, uncooperative and immature. He bared his bottom teeth like an anglerfish attracting prey.

“Live within your means,” Turnbull lectured the premiers. A paragon of frugal living himself, his personal commitment to frugal domestic economy includes a Spartan $52 million Sydney hacienda, a lakeside Canberra penthouse, art deco New York apartments, Hunter Valley land holdings and a few lazy million perfectly legally invested in a Cayman Island Trust.

Legal to his back teeth, the PM is not accused of anything but hypocrisy. OK – being hopelessly removed from everyday reality also cuts it. (Just one of his ties would cost you your entire Newstart allowance.)

“Trustafarian” Turnbull’s Cayman Island investments yield income which, he assures us, he pays tax on in Australia, although the whole point of the exercise is to reduce his taxable income. Apart from safety and privacy. One per cent of the world’s population owns half the wealth and they need somewhere special to stash it.

Tax havens are not perfect, however. This week’s leak of 2.6 terabytes of data exposing 11.5 million documents made Mossack Fonseca look a bit ordinary. The world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm, it runs 214, 000 shell companies for those, who, through no fault of their own, are born impossibly rich and a few other innocents abroad in the serendipitously named British Virgin Islands. Some of this clientele is now acutely embarrassed.

Plummy, UK PM, David Cameron, has hammed up a series of excuses, beginning with how his shares in his late father’s Blairmore offshore Trust, were just a family matter while the laconic Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, Iceland’s PM simply swiftly hung up his ice-pick.

The ATO will go through the records of 800 Australians exposed by the leak, although down in staff numbers and facing further government cuts which will see numbers reduced by a total of 5000 so far. The Turnbull government is unwilling to put its money where its mouth is on catching tax cheats.

Some big company names have surfaced already: Wilson Security, which runs Australia’s offshore detention facilities with extreme prejudice towards those within, is shown to be still linked to Thomas and Raymond Kwok who were implicated in a Hong Kong corruption scandal. Thomas Kwok was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for bribery.

The Greens have the temerity to call on the government to terminate Wilson Security’s contracts, a case which was strengthened by reports that the firms’ guards had beaten children, a fact which Peter Dutton told ABC’s Mark Colvin was just peddling unsubstantiated rumour and was part of a conspiracy of advocates: “I think these people are being used as pawns, frankly, by some advocates in Australia.” A day later the report was verified.

The odd big corporate name has already popped up in the Panama Papers. BHP Billiton is revealed to have been warned by Mossack Fonseca’s compliance division to get its act together or get out. Its governance controversies meant that it was high risk and needed to produce extensive documentation.

BHP left the firm instead, doubtless to seek another off-shore firm with a lower doc approach which will enable it to continue to pursue those frugal, thrifty practices which so inspire our Prime Minister.

Turnbull’s preaching of thrift sits oddly with his government’s own extravagance. From $153 billion when Abbott assumed office, net debt is now $279 billion a rise from 10 per cent to nearly 17 per cent of GDP. Axing the carbon tax, its hobby horse, has cost over $7 billion per year. Direct Action will cost $1.5 billion over three years.  Its White Paper promises to “increase the defence budget to reach $42.4 billion, which is two per cent of GDP, in 2020-21.”

Happily there is another IPA plan. Education Minister Simon Birmingham confirmed this week he will continue to deregulate tertiary education, thus helping those who can afford it to go to university, further entrench educational inequality and ensure more young people will be living beyond their means. Look forward to $100,000 degrees.

The burden of unpaid HECS has been positioned in the news this week as a way of making us feel sorry not for the students who can’t get jobs to pay back their loans but for the government which holds all of this debt.

No wonder it proposes to get students to repay loans faster and lower the income threshold whilst it may remove HECS access for TAFE students, entirely. Despite its lip-service to its innovation agenda, it talks of raising University entrance standards. It is axing 350 CSIRO scientists, gutting the climate science unit and backing out of funding schools.

Fittingly, debt-ridden Victorian student protesters interrupted yet another Liberal dinner in honour of the architect of much of our current social, political and fiscal mess, St John Howard, who came to power twenty years ago with the slogan “for all of us” a form of words whose meaning his government spent years refining.

Howard changed the basis of federal funding for private schools to enable well-established, well-endowed schools for the privileged to attract millions more from government funding, accelerating the drift away from state schools and helping create, “for the rest of us”  a residualised system, less and less equipped to provide equality of educational outcome with its favoured, private neighbour. The trend will accelerate under Turnbull’s school funding proposal.

Howard’s welfare-to-work policy pushed single parents and Australians with a disability down to the lower Newstart allowance, a saving which benefited older, upper middle class punters.

Howard’s introduction of The Job Network, alone, stripped one billion out of funding to help long term unemployed. His Work for the Dole scheme echoes the Turnbull government’s view that it is only your attitude that holds you back, whether you are a dole bludger who refuses to look for work or a state premier who wants to fritter the kitty away on indulgences like health and education but who won’t get out there and raise your own bloody taxes.

“Live within your means,” is music to lot of public ears.  Even Ombudsperson for Small Business, Kate Carnell, is heard gurgling sweet nothings over her boss’s hard line with the states, although it did not stop her urging the PM to cut company taxes, despite The Panama Papers confirming that the biggest struggle faced by many companies is how to sock away its profits. Expect company tax cuts in the budget.

Continuing the moralising, BHP’s spin off, Whyalla steel-maker Arrium which began with a 1.2 billion debt from its parent was roundly condemned by many for its “poor investment decisions” namely its decision to mine iron ore as well as make steel, which in reality like those of the government itself consisted of misreading the end of the mining boom.

“Fiscal vandals” and “not adults” sneered Tony Abbott’s pet pen-pusher Greg Sheridan who is also Australian Foreign Editor, appearing on Q&A Monday, helping the government promote its superior tone.

Greg might have been talking about the banks who have moved swiftly on Arrium to recoup what is likely to be 65 cents in the dollar on the $4 billion plus the little South Australian miner and steel-maker owed the Big Four. After flogging the bankers with a limp lettuce leaf, the PM backed off, helping Bill Shorten steal a march by announcing a Royal Commission into banking should Labor come to power and labelling Turnbull’s tax plan double taxation.

To be fair to the PM, his cunning plan was not his own but an IPA leftover. Yet even Tony Abbott had seen fit to leave it well alone leaving Malcolm Turnbull with the need to pay back his tormentors and to lead an increasingly skittish government once more into the breach this week by claiming to have won a strategic victory.

Less was said of his cunning plan to back out of funding state schools while vowing to continue to fund the privileged private sector. The PM himself hammed it up on TV pretending to have discovered something he archly called “clarity”. By this he meant he had tricked the state premiers all into revealing their true positions. He knew where they stood.

Turnbull’s rout had become a magnificent victory by Monday, according to Turnbull himself who presented his defeat as a “moment of clarity” that revealed the states “lacked the stomach for reform” and must “live within their means”.

It was a line which Joe Hockey, looking on fondly from his comfortably refurbished, palatial ambassadorial residence in Washington wished he’d had the guts to use.

Industry Minister Christopher Pyne was everywhere Thursday boasting an $80 million contract to buy Arrium steel to build roads would save Whyalla from being wiped off the map, although it needs $4 billion. Only exports can keep it afloat. The SA steel-maker was forced into voluntary administration by banks who are sensitive even to their modest exposure to mining suddenly want their $4 billion back and their own administrators installed.

Arrium, previously OneSteel and a former BHP subsidiary, set up with a 1.2 billion debt, is a casualty of falling commodity prices, cheap Chinese imports and an LNP industry policy confined to closing down car makers and Ardmona while finding billions for submarines it won’t build locally. It last traded at 2.2c and is worth $65 million.

As he jetted off to China where he could offer a few pointers of his own on the Chinese Premier’s cultivation of a Maoist cult of the leader’s personality Turnbull would spearhead another massive invasion of 1200 SME business types dwarfing the record 350 who invaded Indonesia last November when Douglas Robb was in the top Trade job.

Once again our army of business types is intent on landing a deal with a nation which requires little from us but which must be allowed to sell us ruinously cheap steel and which is staring down the barrel of an imminent recession it will inevitably share with all the rest of us.

However well it may airbrush its official statistics, China’s economic growth is faltering. Luckily our former Trade Minister and special envoy Douglas Robb has a cunning plan to cash in by servicing the political elite’s well-being.

“First it’s their diets, then it’s their health care, and then it’s ensuring their kids’ education. These are our strengths.”

Let’s hope the Chinese don’t look too hard at our government’s domestic health provision. Let’s hope the Chinese don’t look too hard at our government’s domestic health provision. Or its contempt for education. Or what we know of Chinese medicine.

 

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