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Cabinet maker, nation builder, architect of our future, seer, Malcolm Bligh Turnbull squints into Monday’s winter sunshine in the courtyard where Tony Abbott used to park his bicycle and proclaims a mandate. A depleted Coalition stares back at him in disbelief.

Eric Abetz is scowling.

The bruising eight week ordeal on the hustings is a solid victory, he says. He has a vision, he insists. MPs will ask him in three years about KPIs, (key performance indicators), because “we have set out our plan”. Even Howard would struggle to be this dull. Not even Abbott would be this transparent.

“This is all about delivery,” he continues, as if addressing Eagle Boys Pizza, a PM who surely holds the record for the most over-promised and under-delivered election performance in history. His authority in tatters, his credibility shot, many MPs doubt Fizza will make it to Christmas.

“He’s a sitting duck and he knows it” one Liberal tells Paul Bongiorno adding that the Coalition’s plan will be to sit parliament as little as possible, planning only seven weeks’ sitting before December. Turnbull’s small target campaign will evolve into a small target parliamentary strategy.

The plan will be to say they have a plan that fixes everything and a mandate.Tactical evasion comes naturally to a leader whose approach to tax reform showed a genius for equivocation and indecision.

“We were fucked by February,” campaign guru Mark Textor confides after the party room meeting to one of the few female MPs to survive. Doubtless there will be no discount to his fee for services to the lost cause.

By Wednesday despite colossal media spin about mandates and plans even ducking and weaving looks risky. Chairman Mal’s heroic victory over the “outrageous lies” of scumbag Labor’s Mediscare dims with news that his government’s “solid majority” of 77 in the House of Reps of the 45th Parliament now amounts to only one seat. Eric Abetz did say, Monday, his campaign was crap.

In a flash of old Malcolm, the PM snaps back. How many members are in the Tasmanian branch? 1200? The senator claims Turnbull is 800 shy of the mark but the point is made. The party ran dead not only because its leader ran dead but also because its grassroots support is dying. Like all true leaders, Malcolm is quick to blame someone else, even if Abetz has a lot to answer for.

It ran out of money. Its policies did not connect with electors. And shockingly to all of us who hold that democracy is not for buying or selling, late in the day, Turnbull dipped into his own pocket.

Just how much Turnbull’s own contribution affected the election result will remain a matter of conjecture. How much proprietary authority it buys him in terms of his own leadership is impossible to reckon. The amount, however, may not be one million as reported in The Australian but two. When ABC’s Leigh Sales presses the PM on his donation he, typically, brushes her aside.

“All of the donations I’ve made in the past to the Liberal Party and any donations that will be made or have been made will all be disclosed in accordance with the Electoral Act.”

The future looks grim. Unlike Labor, the Liberals cannot count on unions or idealistic young people with notions of social justice and community service to build support. And in a glimpse of things to come, in Tasmania recently, some power mad young Liberals seem to have lost the plot.

Eric Abetz had to abandon his address to a hundred bright young things attending the Australian Liberal Students’ Federation dinner in Hobart when students, dressed as security guards blocked delegates, claiming that they had not registered in time to vote for the new executive.

For Turnbull it is the opposite tactic. Rather than make hard decisions in allocating or re-allocating portfolios, or kick up a stink by replacing Liberals with Nationals, he has simply had a bit of a tinker with Environment and Defence and then let everyone in. His cabinet is the biggest since Whitlam. What he gains in patronage, he must surely lose in unworkability.

Gone is any faint hope of authority over his bitterly divided party. Helpfully ABC’s 7:30 Report Friday beats up Bill Shorten’s “factional war” but the Labor leader has just consolidated his leadership while Turnbull has open insurrection and belly-aching back-stabbers to contend with.

Munificent Mal must stare down the likes of gutsy George Christensen who threatens to waddle across the floor over super, in a social media spray two days after Monday’s party room meeting. Gorgeous George sees the proposed changes as Labor-style policies in a Tea-Party worthy swipe.

“It’s not the government’s money, it’s YOUR money. We in government need to remember that.” 

Union supporter, maverick Bob Katter has warned that he will not support an ABCC and is quick to tell the PM through the media that he will not stand for any union bashing. ACTU Head Dave Oliver applauds. Katter could be a handful on marriage equality too since he once said he’d walk backwards to Burke if there was a single gay in his electorate.

Simmering on the backbench is a potent brew of confused, imported populism, racism, climate denial, wilful ignorance and confected Trump-style resentment which finds expression in scapegoating all manner of outsiders from Muslims to marriage equality advocates. Some like Cory Bernardi interpret the election fiasco as evidence of a need to shift the party further to the right.

Into this mix, with his double dissolution Turnbull has delivered Pauline Hanson, former 1996 Queensland Liberal Party candidate, populist politician and celebrity bigot who claims clairvoyantly that she “just says what everyone is thinking,” such as – No more Muslims for Australia. Muslims should be prohibited because “like pit bull terriers they are a danger to our society.”

The gift of sensing “what everyone else is thinking” brings with it the delusion that her crackpot notions are mainstream views, an attitude also struck by Cory Bernardi and George Christensen and others whose sexual phobias are nurtured by the propaganda of the Australian Christian Lobby. Claiming to channel the mainstream is a specious bid for legitimacy and Turnbull will need to call her on it, although it is far from certain that One Nation senators will oppose the ABCC.

Turnbull’s capitulation to his party’s lunatic right wing’s witch hunt against Safe Schools suggests that he lacks the means or the will to cut through the toxic miasma of irrationality he has stirred up. Nor does he have much in the way of Liberal party political precedent to enable such a stand.

Despite her disclaimer, Hanson in fact channels prejudices popular amongst small sectors of the Australian community for generations, her incoherent, irrational, wittering discontent is much more closely linked with Liberal Party demagoguery than Turnbull and others voicing public disapproval would care to admit. It is to be heard, for example, in the nonsense expressed by Peter Dutton that migrants take our jobs while simultaneously being a drain on welfare.

It resonates with John Howard’s claim of babies being thrown overboard, an election winning gambit to demonise asylum-seekers as subhuman and unnatural. Hanson also taps the vein of fear nurtured by Tony Abbott who proclaimed that ISIS was “coming after each and everyone of us. She draws sustenance from the militarisation of our duty to refugees in Morrison’s Border Force and the pernicious myth that our borders are somehow under threat those who seek our asylum.

The myth of the dangerous Muslim is reflected in the Abbott government’s decision to offer haven to only those Syrian refugees who are Christian, a stipulation which has led to UN censure and to unnecessary and inhumane delay in our accepting our fair share of the world’s displaced peoples.

A lame duck leader mortally wounded by his deal with the Nats and despised by all for his arrogance; his imperious mien, his fatal combination of overpowering entitlement and poor judgement, the Chairman is now at the mercy of every desperate party renegade with an axe to grind. Reluctantly Liberal MPs gave support to a coup leader they didn’t like or trust in the hope that he would deliver them from certain political oblivion under Abbott.

Now he has doubly failed them. He will seek to appease the rebels over the proposed $500,000 lifetime cap on non-concessional superannuation contributions. Yet the price of peace will be an even less egalitarian society. Morrison is said to be working on it already.

Expect exemptions for when your Dad dies and leaves you a few mill and a farm in the Upper Hunter or for when you make a mozza out of a divorce settlement, as you do, especially women.

“Life events”, these windfalls will be called as if inherited wealth can never be taxable or as if granting tax exemption under duress is not the perpetuation of privilege, inequality and the power of vested interests.

But Turnbull doesn’t let it show; even if he could afford to. Long live Chairman Tang Bao, sweet custard bun! It’s not a backdown on an election commitment, just a bit of fine tuning because that’s what good government is about.

Mad Dog Morrison is fit to kill. On a mission to restore Australia’s AAA rating when experts reckon the ratings agency Standard and Poor’s is not worth taking seriously given its flawed record in the GFC, Morrison wants us to believe that he’ll have us return to balance by 2020-2021.

Moody’s told him in April that budget cuts alone would not return us to surplus. None of the ratings agencies believe his projected iron ore prices nor do they approve of his counting in zombie measures yet to pass the senate. In other words his budget calculations don’t add up.

Morrison’s furious to learn secondhand of Turnbull’s turnaround on Medicare from AMA’s Dr Michael Gannon who’s got the nod from Health Minister Sussan Ley. A $2.4 billlion dollar nod over four years according to Labor’s Parliamentary Budget Office costings.

“I would be gobsmacked if the government took an ongoing freeze to the next election. They got the scare of their life on health, and that was probably the policy which hurt them the most,” says Dr Gannon leaving a smiling Ley who also says “consultative and collaborative” for the camera.

“Loose lips” Morrison is left out of the loop again, as he was on the date of his first budget. The Great Helmsman clings to the tiller of the ship of state, his knuckles whitening.

Bad news from the Sombrero Belt midweek threatens to throw Chairman Mal off course. Herbert’s electors may fail in their duty to return sitting member, LNP’s Ewen Jones.

Voters do not embrace a tax cut for the rich – key to the great Economic Plan for jobs and growth on which our nation’s prosperity depends. One in five young people in Townsville is unemployed.

Worse, Labor’s Cathy O’Toole may be elected instead. Hawk-eyed Attorney-General George Brandis is urgently dispatched to scrutineer in frantic over-kill, doubtless, an early example of a good, stable government in action.

Herbert is instantly downplayed by national media outlets and the ABC, whose news packaging assumes that Herbert will come to its senses following a recount of all of its 104, 181 ballots.

Should Labor win the seat, leaving the Coalition with a majority of one, Ayatollah Turnbull will be utterly at the mercy of his back bench. Unable to muster numbers on a no confidence vote on same sex marriage, for example, could see his term of office over by Christmas.

Earning the nickname “The Ayatollah” for his autocratic management style in merchant banking, the PM is no natural negotiator. He is going to have to learn more than the hand chopping body language he has recently picked up if he is to master the requisite consensus forging skills to survive. Luckily he is able to play Father Christmas and buy some support as he hands out a record number of ministries.

Turnbull is a model of largesse and jobs and growth in action as he creates the biggest cabinet in forty years, with jobs nearly half the party. Only Eric, Kevin and Tony The Incredible Sulk Abbott are left to cool their heels in the corridor and plot mischief.

Promoting conservatives Matt Canavan and Zed Seselja and putting Christopher Pyne in a new role as defence means a hard right turn in policy with a left back twist in protectionist submarine building in the Turnbull government’s new ministry, officially Australia’s 71st as the million dollar PM boosts the Nationals and rewards his own backers over Abbott faction members.

An anti-abortion campaigner, Canavan doubts climate science is settled while Seselja will abstain from voting should the marriage plebiscite go ahead while the appointment of the conservative Josh Freydenberg to a combined energy and environment portfolio is the kiss of death to those who have been hoping for a progressive approach to either.

But like the jobs and growth slogan itself, this cabinet is no new era in policy or government or anything else much beyond an attempt at appeasement; a calculated buying of time and support so that the man who would be Prime Minister can achieve his dream.

Even if the rest of the country goes to hell in a handbasket, if the economy nose dives and the social contract is torn up while rabid right wing nut jobs argue the toss, Turnbull will be able to claim that he was an elected Prime Minister. Even if he has Buckley’s chance of lasting until Christmas.

Historians will take the view that like his predecessor, Turnbull never had what it took to be a Prime Minister but that his tenure represents the last desperate gamble of a Liberal party which came to have no effective popular support base and no clear idea of what it stood for above servicing the requests of business, a party which spent its political capital as freely and unwisely as it did the proceeds of the mining boom leaving no-one fit to mind the shop and the barbarians an open gate.

Father of the house, Kevin Andrews conceived crackdown on pensioners.

Tasmanian senator Eric Abetz fearlessly leads the charge of the right brigade this week into a stoush between his beloved team Abbott and the Pollyanna faction led by tub-thumping, sub-stumping $50 billion dollar man Christopher Pyne. Eric is out to keep the bastards honest

Abetz takes a pot-shot at the Turnbull’s government’s legitimacy, the issue of the political week if not the forty-fifth parliament’s lifetime, after sub-Marathon Mal’s hamstrung election performance, which saw the PM forced to fund his party’s manifest destiny to the tune of a million dollars.

Can he just do that? Millionaire Mal’s DIY fund-raising does not raise an eyebrow on ABC Insiders Sunday. Fran Kelly, Nikki Sava, Karen Middleton, all senior journos, see no problem posed to our democratic processes by a rich man buying a prime ministership. If Laura Tingle has reservations she keeps them to herself. “Do I look bothered?” Catherine

Tate would say.

“He’s done it before,” Karen Middleton sighs, “and he’ll do it again.” Perhaps she recalls Turnbull’s desperate battle for Liberal preselection for the blue-ribbon seat of Wentworth thirteen years ago, when his opponent, Peter King, says Turnbull told him to “fuck off and get out of my way.”

Money talks – and often in the Turnbull story. In 2003, Turnbull paid Alan Jones $5000 a plug to support him on radio and won. Perhaps this time, too, his million dollar investment may help to stem rising Liberal Party disquiet. The election’s cost him too much personal authority to do it any other way.

…wept on camera…

Some say millionaire MPs do this sort of thing. Queensland Nickel donated $288,516 to PUP last December, a fortnight before sacking staff at the Yabulu refinery near Townsville. Nothing was left in the kitty to pay wages. Ewen Jones, then member for Herbert, wept on camera.

Pity us poor Liberals, Julie Bishop pleads on ABC’s Insiders, “we don’t have the rivers of gold that come from the union movement.” AEC ALP records do not match the Foreign Minister’s fantasy, showing instead a broad set of donors. In 2015, the CFMEU donated $50,000 yet WestPac gave $1.5 million. No-one challenges Bishop.

Most likely, however, Turnbull’s party was just caught short as its uber-rich supporters; fearing penury if super rules were to change, withheld donations.

A $500,000 lifetime limit on how much of one’s after-tax contributions one can make to one’s super is at issue. Currently the limit is $180,000 a year.

The IPA opposes the “diabolical” changes along with Coalition plans to impose 15% tax on income generated by balances above $1.6m. Director, John Roskam, says the changes are also clearly retrospective. So central is the IPA to controlling Liberal policy, this means the government is at war with its own brain stem.

Its civil war with the IPA aside, most of the Liberals’ pain is self-inflicted.

…Arthur is unable to recall.

In March the NSW Electoral Commission denied the party $4.389m in public funding because it accepted illegal developer donations for the 2011 NSW election via its “Free Enterprise Foundation”, a matter the ICAC needs expert help to sort out, hence its request to then Liberal Party Treasurer and President, now Coalition Cabinet Secretary Arthur Sinodinos. As yet Arthur is unable to recall.

No big fan of Arthur, who was numbers man in Turnbull’s coup, an ear to the ground Abetz reckons the super changes were never properly ventilated and massively cost Liberal votes in Tasmania, an insight he has gained by door-knocking and national report.

“From right around Australia I got very strong feedback that that was not the way to go forth and I trust that we will revisit aspects of that policy.”

Can a party change its policy after the campaign? Abetz seems to think so. He’s not alone. Mad dog Morrison, our reverse Robin Hood Treasurer, is on standby with a solution which may see the super changes watered down. Protect the rich.

In the real world over 31,000 people have lost their disability support pension in the past year, the biggest annual drop on record as several years worth of government crackdowns begin to bite. 90,000 may expect to undergo a medical review in the next three years. More “savings” are promised as Mad Dog Morrison has promised to find another $3.5 billion.

Don’t expect schools or hospitals…

It costs money to keep negative gearing for speculators and then there’s the cost involved in “fine-tuning” its super changes to protect the wealthy. Don’t expect schools or hospitals from this mob.

All of this challenges the notion of a mandate on policy his party took to the election; the current Liberal Party mandate mantra. “What mandate?” says Eric.

Unhappy Abbott camper Eric is bucking his party’s line on its campaign, a failed gamble on an early election double dissolution which has left its PM’s authority in tatters; its future on a knife edge.

“A lot of our colleagues see the election result as the barest of victories, if we can a call it a victory having declared victory two weeks out,’ he growls.

For Turnbull toy dog Christopher Gertrude Stein Pyne, however, “a win is a win, is a win” and the whole election thing is just a game of footie, really. Bugger what the people actually wanted or what they thought they were voting for.

Mincing poodle, as Julia Gillard so aptly dubbed Pyne for his performances as Abbott’s yap dog in three years of relentless negativity in opposition, has done well out of our defence policy.

Pyne’s SA seat of Sturt is now secure thanks to the government’s astonishing flip-flop on protectionism to the tune of a $50 billion industry subsidy. The ASC will assemble a dozen frog submarines in the SA rust belt state, when it would be so much cheaper to have them made in France.

For half the price we could have had them made in Japan and Germany quoted $20 billion and the subs to be delivered six years earlier.

…$490,000 for every vote…

Winning has not come cheaply. The $50 billion amounts to to $468,000 per potential vote in Hindmarsh, $490,000 for every vote in Pyne’s Sturt and $480,000 for each potential Boothby vote.

It may sound expensive but it’s an investment in not just Pyne’s seat but in the democratic pork barrel itself so vital to mandate creation. And it’s not a subsidy to car-makers, a prospect former Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey, amen, hated.

For one per cent of the sub investment, car manufacturing would still be able to employ 200,000 Australian workers, directly and indirectly.

To be fair it wasn’t all about boats. Pyne does admit,along with dog-catcher Barnaby Joyce and other National Party campaigners that they threw campaign talking points away – departed from the official script. Yet although success came from not plugging policy, he does not hesitate to claim a mandate.

Also leading the charge in the battle of the mandate is lynx-eyed Attorney-General George Brandis, a chap who may have failed to explain metadata and who was unable to open a spreadsheet warning of a terrorist threat but who has got a safe pair of hands on everyone’s metadata, nevertheless.

…signed letter of permission…

Just in case, four days before the election, Brandis elevated the attorney general’s status. Anyone, including the PM, who needs to see Justin Gleeson, the Solicitor-General now has to get signed letter of permission from himself, a move which has legal experts legal experts describe as an “unnecessary impediment” to expert advice.

Members of the legal community point to a growing tension between the nation’s first and second law officers over matters, including the 2013 same-sex marriage High Court case, the 2015 advice Mr Gleeson provided over changes to citizenship laws and over the drafting of same-sex marriage plebiscite legislation, a matter which Brandis is overdue to report back to government on.

One of the new Cabinet’s first tasks after Governor General returns from France to swear them in after arranging armed transport and a special security detail for Mitch Fifield’s massive family Bible will be the wording of the plebiscite so that it is unlikely to succeed.

Of course, it may be that we never see the plebsicite at all just as we will never see the secret agreement between the Liberal Party and the Nationals. It may request the government not to budge on same sex marriage, given that it can lead to polyamory, as Eric Abetz attests, or to bestiality, one of Cory Bernardi’s big bugbears. There is no mandate for a secret coalition agreement.

What the secret agreement is also likely to reflect is a Nationals push to nudge the Coalition even further towards Hansonism, given that One Nation’s support base comprises an fair muster of alienated single fathers who blame their marriage and relationship breakdowns on the Family Court.

…a kangaroo court…

One Nation, which apart from its familiar figurehead, is now a blokes’ party, attracts such voters with its policy of abolishing the Family Court and replacing it with a kangaroo court which it calls a community panel.

A mandate man, Brandis is under the illusion on Monday’s Q&A that this is Turnbull’s second term as elected PM. His memory lapses are eclipsed, however in the company of Cabinet secretary Sir Arthur Sinodinos, who is appearing all over the media to talk up his government’s mandate while awaiting a call back from ICAC on Australian Water Holdings and the Free Enterprise foundation.

Now that the Turnbull government may attain a whopping seventy-seven seats in the House of Representatives of the forty-fifth parliament as the vote count continues in the Townsville-based seat of Herbert, shows Labor’s candidate Cathy O’Toole behind the LNP’s Ewen Jones, by only a dozen votes, Liberals have been vigorously pumping the handle of the mandate organ.

Soon hagiographers rewriting the history of Australia Pty Ltd will be telling us this is Chairman Mal’s finest hour. Expect ballet and epic theatre to be commissioned in the great helmsman’s favour.

Mandate? Michaelia Cash is dashing into TV studios to madly impress us with her claim that the government has 700,000 more votes than Labor. Yet it is only true as a Coalition. Labor’s 4.3 million first preferences put it ahead while if you total all minority parties, the government is outstripped.

As Guy Rundle points out, the mandate issue becomes even more vexed if you consider the fundamentally flawed nature of our democratic voting process where The Nationals with one million votes get 23 seats while The Greens get one seat after receiving 1.2 million.

…almost another million dollar man…

Amazingly making the same claim to a mandate is a pin-striped Malcolm Turnbull who is careful to be photographed with Martin Parkinson, Head of Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and on $860,000 PA almost another million dollar man proving to all Australians that because they are both using Ipads, this whole 21st Century innovation thing will be just a doddle.

What they are doing is not revealed because like the Coalition agreement it is secret and like our imports of asbestos in portables from China none of our business. What is likely to be on the iPad, however, will include the promotion of Zed Seselja whose opposition to same sex marriage is but a small element of his valuable contribution to good government in the forty-fifth parliament.

Team player and good captain, Tony Abbott will not be attending The Lodge for pre-blood-letting drinks Sunday night says Julie Bishop. Nor will he find himself back in the cabinet, in a welcome sign that some sanity at least has prevailed in Mr Harbourside Mansion’s Point Piper decision making processes. Expect press releases to tell us he has a contribution to make in other areas.

Expect to hear a lot about the Coalition’s mandate to provide stable government; how we must knuckle under; pull together; go without to get us all on a “credible path back to surplus” and other unreal stuff. Watch out when Eric, Tony and Kevin find themselves surplus to requirements.

What is real is that the first shot in the Turnbull government’s war with itself has just been fired.

 

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“… a win is a win is a win…” Christopher Pyne

Before the Electoral Commission’s glacial vote count even ends in finely divided electorates, Christopher Pyne sticks his head out of the Coalition campaign train-wreck window to crow victory. Even Eric Abetz can see he’s wrong; the government has won nothing but “a kick up the pants”.

Welcome to the 45^th parliament of Australia whose foundations are already being laid firmly in the realms of fantasy, delusion, denial and secrecy, not to mention confusion and division, where an election result, is just like the outcome of a football game.

The false analogy is as bad as Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce’s comparison on Thursday RN. He sees the National’s secret agreement with Liberals to be the same as a journalist protecting her sources. It’s as spurious as the PM’s claim, Thursday, that a win is a mandate.

No mandate results from any small-target campaign. The Coalition bypassed real issues such as climate change, or how to pay for health and education, provide equal pay for women, invest in renewables or what to do with the gulags on Nauru and Manus Island.

It ignored the yawning abyss of social and economic inequality that even Bill Shorten could tell it is one of the lessons of the Brexit revolt. Instead it ran a reality-denying campaign show of magic words. Hey Presto! Endlessly repeating jobs and growth and stability would make them appear.

Now, Mathias Cormann is claiming that the government’s empty sloganeering amounted to an agenda and that it can now get on with “implementing the plan we took to the election”.

In reality, the government has just enough of a majority to get itself into trouble. An existential nightmare of negotiation and infighting lies ahead of it. Eric Abetz and Kevin Andrews are already demanding Abbott returns to cabinet. The IPA won’t rest until Turnbull drops his super changes.

The real game is only beginning. And the captain’s in trouble already whatever his game plan.

Turnbull is a lame duck. A weak leader who campaigned poorly, his approval as PM rating, taken over the last two weeks, dropped three points to 37% in Tuesday’s Essential Poll which now has Labor 51 to the Coalition’s 49 two party preferred. At its current rate of decline it will not be long before Turnbull overtakes Tony Abbott’s record unpopularity.

Popularity is not everything – as Tony Abbott always said – but repelling the electorate will not improve Turnbull’s position with angry back-benchers whose seats are more precarious than ever as a result of his early election gambit failing. His natural arrogance and impatience do not help.

Even MPs in safe seats will be emboldened. A slim majority means every one is a king maker who may make demands of a PM whose lip-service to cabinet government and his need for the company of the like-minded makes him vulnerable.

Turnbull is guided by Pyne, aka “The Fixer” self-deluded master tactician and reality denialist in an inner circle of advisors that includes foundation member Lucy Turnbull, Arthur, party amnesiac, yet to hear back from ICAC, cabinet secretary, Sinodinos and show pony Julie Bishop, a wimpy Foreign Minister so desperate to avoid a spat with China over The Spratleys or anything else, she can’t do her job. No danger Turnbull’s inner sanctum will tell him anything he doesn’t want to hear.

Nor will Turnbull’s poor poll showing give him the authority to break free of his Faustian compact with the Nationals. He turned hard right to win support to depose Abbott. Now he cannot turn back.

Barnaby Joyce has succeeded in keeping the Nationals’ agreement with the Liberals secret. While a pro-government ABC boosts the Nats’ success, claiming their bold showing bestows greater negotiating power, the reality is the Nats won a 0.4% swing. The real question is what is in the hidden detail of their hold over Turnbull?

On Sky, Joyce quips “The first aspiration is the agreement remains confidential. That’s aspiration one, two, three, four, five and six.” His flippant disregard for democratic process makes a mockery of the Coalition’s promises of open, transparent government.

On R N Breakfast Thursday morning, Joyce tells Patricia Karvelas that Coalition secrecy is the same as reporters protecting their sources. Then he’s off blaming Labor for lying about Medicare; causing all our economic problems. We could lose the ABC, he reckons, unless we push ahead with tax cuts which will do nothing for budget repair.

Coalition agreements have not been public in the past, but why the secrecy? Whatever Joyce is hiding is bound to be a matter of public interest. Crikey’s Bernard Keane makes a compelling case for Barnaby’s chasing the Hanson vote, building on the AFR’s Phil Coorey’s report that the Nationals are keen to take some One Nation turf including her proposal to abolish the Family Court.

http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2016/federal-election-2016-hansons-former-right-hand-man-says-barnaby-joyce-the-key-to-working-with-pauline-20160714-gq5epo.htmlIn a move which would further disempower women and increase suffering, One Nation would replace the Family Court with a panel of “mainstream” community members, dump current child support arrangements, change legal aid to require losing parties to pay costs, and make joint custody the “option of choice” for the family law system in an echo of the Australian Christian Lobby.

Australian Institute of Family Studies research shows that two thirds of separations involve partnership violence with one third of women reporting serious violence. One in five parents has concern for the safety of their children as a result of contact with the other parent. Yet violence against women is hugely under-reported.

Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS) research shows less than eight per cent of media stories about violence against women includes comments from survivors but there is a body of embittered males amongst One Nation supporters convinced the system is loaded against men and the only solution is to do away with the Family Court entirely.

The Nationals may wish to increase their political relevance but why indulge the misogynistic, irrational mythology of men’s groups who feel discriminated against despite all the evidence?

Lurching to the right with a secret agreement will not help a Coalition which couldn’t govern even with a solid majority in its last incarnation.

We will be “getting on with good government”, Turnbull tells us, borrowing Abbott’s phrase. We are to overlook its thin majority and pretend it will all be plain sailing with a senate cross bench which includes Pauline Hanson, Derryn Hinch and other incoherent, opinionated populists.

Finally, the double dissolution early election was supposed to be the making of Turnbull; a cunning plan whereby he could snatch the victory he needed to establish his authority over his party; a master stroke to rid his government of an uncooperative senate cross bench.

Instead, Turnbull’s gamble has turned out to be an unmitigated disaster; another stunning example of his poor political judgement and the single most compelling reason why his win is no win at all.

With the likely result to yield 77 seats, Turnbull will need to give up one to the speaker, leaving a majority of one. Liberal Party funding via boutique foundations to allow property developers to break the law in NSW will continue to trouble it.

Cabinet Secretary, former NSW fund-raiser, party amnesiac and Turnbull confidante, Senator Arthur Sinodinos is banging on tonelessly about a mandate, having managed to resist with Malcolm Turnbull’s assistance calls for his resignation. Tanya Plibersek has said it beggers belief that as treasurer and finance director of the Liberal Party he did not know about hundreds of thousands of dollars of illegal donations to the Liberal Party.

Although News Corp’s Sharri Markson wrote an impressive scoop 21 January this year reporting that charges had been dropped, the next day ICAC said its inquiry into a company linked to Labor and Liberal figures including Arthur Sinodinos has not yet been completed. Sinodinos failed to have retracted a NSW Electoral Commission’s report in March that he knowingly disguised donations.

Humpty Dumpty Sinodinos stunned ICAC in October 2014 with his prodigious feats of memory failure. ICAC reasonably wanted to know what Arthur did as a Director to earn $600,000 for an estimated 25.5 hours to 45 hours a year in three years at Australian Water Holdings, one third owned by the Obeid family. Arthur could not recall. He said so 68 times.

Nor could he recall an AWH donation of $74,000 to the Liberal Party, although he was deputy director and had drawn up a list of donors to be approached which included AWH.

Shortly before drawing up the donor list, Sinodinos had been lobbying Barry O’Farrell to support granting AWH a lucrative government contract. Sinodinos did not inform soon-to-be premier O’Farrell that he stood to make as much as $20 million if the deal went through.

AWH billed the state government’s water utility Sydney Water for “administrative” costs that in fact included fat salaries and political donations. ICAC has yet to report its findings on Sinodinos.

ICAC is yet to report on another matter. As Treasurer and Chairman of the Fiance Committee of the NSW Liberals the senator accepted donations through the Free Enterprise Foundation from property developers, a group prohibited from making political donations.

Expect a lot of pressure from Labor to be applied to the curious case of Arthur Mandate Sinodinos, whose byzantine financial dealings and unfortunate memory failure have the makings of something by the late Oliver Sachs.

As always it is not easy to grasp readily what Arthur means. A mandate for what? Jobs and growth? The retention of negative gearing for the rich speculator? The Liberals’ campaign was cobbled together out of the scraps that had fallen off the table of Turnbull and Morrison’s farce of a tax reform review which ultimately collapsed under its own inertia and its leader’s indecision vanishing like the Cheshire Cat leaving nothing behind but the smile of its good intentions.

True, there were tax cuts on offer if you were in above average earnings territory or you ran a business. Yet even these appealed only if you believed in fairies at the bottom of the garden economics or the Laffer Curve, the discredited promise of trickle down economics.

Tax cuts for business and wealthier Australians were flogged ad nauseam but no-one, not even Liberal voters could tell you how they would restore the nation’s prosperity and productivity.

The winning theme is also embraced by the Coalition’s own Justinian, Attorney General George Brandis, the man who when faced with advice of terrorist threat could not open the second tab on a spreadsheet.

Brandis appears on ABC’s Q&A, Monday to speak up for the golden years of John Howard’s era, stopping a whisker short of praising the lies of babies overboard, his boosting of funding to private schools or his Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, a lie occasioned by his raging US sycophancy as much as a vote winning scare tactic.

Brandis expects everyone to forget also how the man of steel let Peter Costello blow the proceeds of the mining boom and how he is one of the leading architects of our current economic and social mess. He glosses over how the Howard 2006 reform, acceding to the pressure of mens’ rights groups, to the family law act brought misery to countless women.

Brandis’ mission is to promote Abbott the junkyard dog, the textbook failure of an effective hound of an opposition leader who should never have tried to be a prime minister. With a straight face Brandis calls Abbott an elder statesman.

Kevin Andrews has also hopped aboard the bring back Tony pony express and perhaps Turnbull will be looking to create a special cabinet post for the union basher. Abbott could be the Minister for the ABCC. Although it was mentioned briefly twice only in the eight weeks’ campaign the ABCC, hated by unions and the Law Council because it strips away workers’ civil rights is due to be brought back into the limelight.

Will it pass the cross bench of the senate? Derry Hinch has already said he’d have a talk to both sides, despite his votes not being all counted yet. There’s no question that the human headline, who has been to jail for contempt of court over releasing information prejudicial to the fair trial of sex offenders will rule out something just because it does away with workers’ rights.

Pauline Hanson whose been busy with Today show appearances and Dancing with the Stars or like Bob Katter too bushed to read newspapers or watch TV news is expecting to be briefed.

The ABCC, a Howard era throwback with no solid evidence to suggest it ever worked is an attempt to end “corrupt union practices” which remain no more than assertions despite the mammoth and hugely expensive Dyson Royal Commission. The ABCC reverses the onus of proof, removes the right to silence, and allows officials of the ABCC to enter premises without a warrant and demand to know names and addresses.

With dodgy legislation to oversee as a priority and with pressing claims from every MP in a government whose numbers mean that it is poised on a knife edge and with the right wing Delcons already resuming their crusade to restore Abbott their leader, helmsman and meal ticket Turnbull, the Great Capitulator will find that a win is neither win and nor is it a mandate but merely a ticket to ride the meanest bucking bronco in the rodeo, the 45^th parliament, already pawing and snorting as he approaches the mounting yard.

 

It was Getup; it was Labor’s lies about Medicare. It was the super changes. It was the electorate getting it wrong. It was a week of finding someone else to blame.

Liberal Party power broker, Tasmanian senator Eric Abetz is almost quick enough off the blocks to lead of the Coalition’s nation-wide chorus of denial, its political feature of the week, with his bizarre defence of his party over its election rout.

For Andrew Nikolic, the 10.6 % swing which lost him the marginal Bass to Labor’s Ross Hart resulted from a “dishonest, nasty, personal campaign.” That nicely clears up any confusion about the role of his refusal to talk with any but pro-Liberal voters.

Nikolic, former chair of the nation’s joint parliamentary committee on intelligence, accuses unions and Labor of deception “built around the core lie of Medicare privatisation.” He attacks GetUp! for peddling lies and frightening pensioners.

Yet GetUp! National director, Paul Oosting, says volunteers had communicated “clear facts about cuts to health education and renewable energy supported by Nikolic, whilst a funding crisis at Launceston General Hospital was of great concern to locals – as was the GP Medicare freeze which will price some families out seeing a doctor.

The government’s nothing-to-see-here case was not helped, moreover, when Sussan Ley was put in witness protection for volunteering in May that she would lift the Medicare freeze but she was blocked by departmental red tape.

Rumours abound that Ley will be relieved of her post with some suggesting that world’s best minister Greg Hunt, who has also been in witness protection during the campaign, will be an ideal Health minister given his outstanding success in environmental protection and his clean bill of health for the Great Barrier Reef.

One in twenty Australians already can’t afford to see a doctor. Yet the government’s extension of the Medicare freeze until 2020, means patients could face a $25 fee per consultation according to the AMA. No mention of a red tape problem.

Dotty Scott Morrison is also quick to claim that the government was robbed. “Beam me up Scotty” loves antics and theatrics and corny mock shock horror shows but he has failed at the main game. He has not got a handle on the Treasury portfolio.

There’s the trust issue for starters. His PM would not even trust him with the date of his own budget. Surely he will be relieved of the post after his shocking campaign in which he sacrificed any shred of credibiity remaining to him with his war on business, his childish charts and his own black hole in Labor’s hole and other loopy stunts.

The reason, voters were dumb enough to be bluffed by Labor’s lies, he blusters Wednesday, was that the Coalition had run such a positive campaign.

Has he forgotten his own scaremongering; the Labor’s war on business scare, the certainty that Bill Shorten would run Australia like a union scare; the collapse of the housing and even the stock market negative gearing scare, the soft on border security leading to chaos on our borders scare or Peter Dutton’s refugees taking Aussie jobs while simultaneously sponging up all our Centrelink scare?

Even his PM the day before is wearing what Barrie Cassidy calls his “shit-eating grin” and conceding that there was “fertile ground” for voters Medicare fears to grow. What he could say is that voters are intelligent enough to recognise the Coalition’s moves amount to establishing a two-tier privatised health system.

Part of the “fertile ground” for this campaign is that Australians have heard this promise before. Many recall John Howard’s undermining of Medicare by failing to allow funding to keep up with costs and population growth.

Many others would also remember Tony Abbott’s disastrous 2014 Budget promise of “no cuts to health” and how the Liberals tried to introduce a $7 GP tax and hike the price of prescriptions while ripping billions out of public hospitals.

And surely all would recall how Turnbull took the opportunity of his very first economic statement, the 2015 MYEFO, to cut even further than Abbott, slashing $650m from Medicare rebates for pathology and diagnostic imaging, cuts which Pathology Australia, the Diagnostic Imaging Association and others said would increase the price of vital tests and scans beyond affordable for some Australians.

Yet it is still a stretch to claim that Labor tricked electors into voting for it. Scruitneers and electoral officals reveal Medicare may have cost the Coalition votes, it seems from this stage of the vote count, but did not boost Labor’s vote, as it might if people had been conned into believing they needed to vote to “save Medicare”.

In the meantime, as vote counting continues its glacial pace in marginal lower house seats as well as the senate, Tasmanians’ votes below the line on the ballot ticket for Labor’s popular Lisa Singh appear to be pushing her towards a senate seat.

Not only is Lisa popular, she, like Liberal Richard Colbeck, campaigned for a vote below the line, a trend which is likely to result in Eric Abetz, who easily accessed number one spot, receiving fewer votes than Colbeck, thereby signalling the end of party control over senate voting and some attenuation of Ubergruppenfuhrer Abetz’s authority over the Tasmanian Liberals.

The gobsmacked senator elect is on to something, however with his suggestion that someone form a right wing Get Up, a theme also embraced by conservative party luminary Senator Cory Bernardi, who is once again said to be starting a group of right-thinking red-blooded Australians who aren’t already voting One Nation.

Cory’s new conservatives will nudge politics a little further to the right in response to the Liberals’ thrashing in the polls and the miraculous resurgence of One Nation’s Pauline Hanson, former guest of Her Majesty and latterly celebrity demagogue on the Today Show, clear signs to Eric Abetz and others that what voters are craving is another dollop of right wing nut-jobbery. A right wing GetUp would help, he reckons.

Yet there are a few hurdles ahead of Bernardi and Abetz starting with the support the conservative cause already enjoys from the odd powerful press baron, almost all mainstream media including the ABC and all our captains of industry and commerce, their supporters, the well-funded lobbyists, think tanks, foundations and institutes.

Also on the lucky Liberal list now are Chinese language voters who get all their news from WeChat, which hosted a non-scare campaign information service which explained for the non English reader Labor’s plans for boys to use girls’ toilets.

Voters in the Victorian seat of Chisholm in Melbourne’s East were also told by WeChat how Labor was going to open the gate to refugees who would take jobs. Labor was going to increase the refugee quota at the expense of Chinese migrants.

Chisholm records a first-preference swing of 4.2% to the Liberal candidate, Julie Banks, and 5.6% away from Labor which is so low as to use scare tactics.

The volunteer-run WeChat social media campaign was organised by Gladys Liu, the Liberal party communities engagement committee chairwoman for Victoria.

Apart from being superfluous, Eric and Cory’s concept of popular activists telephoning voters, for example, and canvassing votes on the basis that big business really needed a tax break or that pensioners needed further hurdles to jump to get their paltry allowances may need a little re-thinking.

Voters are more likely to paint their bodies blue and lie about naked in the street to be photgraphed, an event entirely of our time in the recent “Sea of Hull installation”, another of Spencer Tunick’s, true-blue artworks.

Yet Abetz is no lone wolf. His whingeing echoes his hapless Prime Minister’s petulant victory speech at the Wentworth hotel, such an ugly dummy spit that it even causes seasoned sourpuss Laurie Oakes’ some grief.

“It is the first time that I have seen a bloke that has won the election give a speech that saying we was robbed,” Oakes says on a Channel Nine chat show that also doubles as an election night special.

The “we was robbed” theme is continued at the end of the week by the dynamic Arthur Sinodinos who appears on ABC Insiders to demonstrate in person that his party has learned nothing, claiming the results as a mandate for tax reform.

Oddly, none of the journos present asks Arthur whether his memory has recovered enough for him to be able to assist ICAC in what he did in the 25 and 45 hours a year he spent working as a director for AWH 2008-11 to justify his $200,000 salary.

We were robbed. Not that the candidates were out of touch or that their policies were duds. All voters were offered the usual hollow slogan of jobs and growth with the promise of a tax cut for the top four per cent – surely an irresistable package. Plus extra stability.

Denial is capably assisted by scapegoating and blaming. Already recriminations are flowing thick and fast while Tony Abbott is getting fan mail on ABC from the likes of Andrew Probyn. Is a bit of factional sand-bagging already taking place?

The consensus on Sunday’s Insiders is that Abbott played a blinder of a campaign even helping out others such as poor George Christensen, one of the Liberals’ Lost Boys and deserves a Brownlow for best non-sniper on the field and that he cannot possibly be linked to the salvoes of criticism which underminded his nemesis Turnbull from Sky media celebrity Peta Credlin. Nor will he in any way benefit.

Abbott does have a little jab at Malcolm on 2GB in yet another on-air rub down with Cronulla riot demi-urge Alan Jones. The big issues like budget repair, national security and border security, were underplayed in his opinion, aired for everyone’s benefit, along with a lot of Rugby playing analogies that leave no doubt that after a spell on the bench, Abbott is waiting to be picked again for the firsts.

Stop the press. Tosser Turnbull has claimed victory, Bill Shorten has conceded defeat.

it’s an odd speech about good government a phrase which recalls “good captain” Abbott who promised the same, not long before, he, too, got thrown out.

Tosser waffles about “building on the strength of our economy,” with a bit about how we get him wrong and how he is not an unduly sentimental fellow and how he was holding his grand-daughter when Bill Shorten rang him and sod the present it’s all about the future and our grandchildren. We are trustees for our future generations.

Has he been on the single malt again?

Perhaps Turnbull’s had a Damascene conversion. Perhaps he’s about to ring Birmingham and Sussan Ley. Tell them he’ll put back the $70 billion that his government ripped out of health and education.

Could someone get Greg Hunt on the phone? It is too late to ring Howard about getting the profits of the minerals boom back? A word with Keating about QANTAS and the Commonwealth bank, the infrastructre he sold off for a song?

There’s a bit about democracy too, just to keep the Mineral Council of Australia happy, not to mention the long list of lobbyists and powerful backers to appease.

Many of us remember what the Minerals Council of Australia did to subvert public discussion on the Mining Super Profits Tax. Or what Clubs Australia did to stymie gambling reform, or what Big Coal did to Emissions Trading Scheme; the Carbon Tax.

Now it’s all over bar the shouting. The blood-letting. The blaming. Will Turnbull be able to manage a slim majority and a cross bench of nine? He had the odd spot of bother with the last mob. And they had no Pauline Hanson. No Derryn Hinch.

How will he go with a leaner Liberal Party but a fatter right wing, a “broad church” with a rabble of conservatives pointing the finger at the Sinodinos faction of wets, circling cabinet positions and back-benchers bitching, ranting about their betrayal, now every one of them a king maker?

Whatever the outcome there’ll be someone else to blame.

A party room meeting is scheduled for Monday.

Cory Bernardi’s true blue conservative flash mob?
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The poor election showing of the Coalition should come as no surprise. Despite the growth fantasies of Federal Treasurer Scott Morrison who is out of his magic faraway tree, the economy is in an income recession while wages growth, as the ABS notes, “is now the lowest on record since the series was first published in September quarter 1998.” People are doing it hard.

Few Australians not among the top four percent promised a tax break would share Malcolm Turnbull’s view that there has never been a more exciting time to be Australian. Even fewer would see his mindless optimism as anything more than another sign he is out of touch.

No-one below the poverty line on an age pension or other Centrelink payment would welcome Morrison’s $2.3 billion welfare crackdown increasing already stressful delays and challenges in a toxic atmosphere of mutual mistrust. No-one is mad keen to vote for more war on the poor.

Nor are the times exciting to anyone in the job market. For all the ballyhoo, the hollow boast of 300,000 jobs created last year, the trend continues to part time poorly paid casual work where franchise workers are slave labour and women are underpaid just because they are women.

Job ads have been falling. Employment growth has stalled. More workers worry about losing their jobs than at any time since Turnbull became PM. And now, Turnbull’s double dissolution election fiasco, on top of his government’s dodgy budget estimates has earned a Standard and Poors credit downgrade – adding insecurity and instability to an anaemic economic climate.

His vacuous campaign slogan of jobs and growth was a con, a phrase to make palatable handouts to the wealthy. There never were any jobs on offer. Yet, to be fair, Turnbull’s Prime Ministership is itself only part of larger Liberal Party crisis of identity, policy and leadership.

Desperate to ditch Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull’s backers gambled on a rank outsider with a patchy track record; an acclaimed orator who could also be a dithering windbag and a bore with a gift for talking himself up matched only by his capacity to talk down to or over others. His massive over confidence, his capacity to trust his own poor judgement has proved his undoing.

A self-alienating, weak leader, Turnbull’s surrender to the right to win power left him nothing to offer the electorate but an economic plan which consisted entirely of tax cuts for the rich. No wonder he ran dead, despite – or perhaps because of being shepherded by a media cheer squad which awarded him victory before the race had been run and whose campaign reporting reflected optimistic party insider briefing far more than reality. Perhaps he was never really in the race.

Desperate to be rid of the Abbott catastrophe, Liberals took a long punt on Turnbull’s electoral popularity. A natural despot with a rampaging ego who suffered fools badly, he had failed as a leader to gain support of his party or party room six years ago and he led the Australian Republican movement nowhere in 1999 but there was still the hope that his patrician image, connections and the myth of his self-made success would elevate him beyond politics into the unassailable ranks of celebrity and total immunity from accountability. A bit like our Pauline.

Enter Pauline Hanson, celebrity demagogue, another proven political failure, whose latest rise to power owes much to the Turnbull double dissolution fiasco and The Today Show. Hanson’s press agent, James Ashby, has let Fairfax know Pauline is currently unavailable for interview. Like Turnbull, Hanson is happy with the idea of the media as fan club.

Now the myth of Turnbull’s business success and the popular superstition that it will ensure political success or at least make him saleable, gets another trot around the ring from deputy show pony Julie Bishop who tells Turnbull fan 7:30 Report’s Leigh Sales on pro government ABC TV later in the week, “he knows how to negotiate” when the record of his dealings show only that he will do anything to get his own way.

Yet, on 2 July, PM Malcolm Bligh Turnbull’s brief dream run ends in a rude awakening. The party’s bet on the former merchant banker running an IPA agenda has not paid off. Turnbull has gambled on a double dissolution early election and lost. He has only himself to blame.

Now he must face the loss of his government’s authority in what looks like a slender majority in parliament – and the huge loss to his personal authority in a party riven by faction, divided over same sex marriage and with types like Cory Bernardi and the Delcons yearning for Abbott’s return misreading the election result as a call to turn even further to the right.

Turnbull is not the man to handle complex and delicate negotiations. He has never disguised his enormous ambition nor his king-size ego. Former business partner, Trevor Kennedy, Australian Consolidate Press managing director and former Bulletin editor said in 1984,

“Malcolm probably wouldn’t even be satisfied with being prime minister of Australia. He’d probably rather be prime minister of the world.”

Banking colleagues dubbed him “The Ayatollah” while Brendan Nelson who defeated Turnbull for Liberal Party leadership in 20017 believes Turnbull,

“has a narcissistic personality disorder. He says the most appalling things and can’t understand why people get upset.”

Come election night, he’s lost the plot. He’s late to his own wake; or rather the “victory party” staged in a hotel which like the PM’s blue-ribbon electorate is named after William Wentworth, son of a convicted highwayman, a “currency lad” who re-invented himself as a patriot.

Turnbull, like Jay Gatsby, springs from his own immaculate conception of himself. The man who would be Prime Minister must now look out over the bedraggled remnants of his depleted cheer squad, many of whom, like the PM himself, are tired and emotional and offer some solace. He is confronted: taunted by the tawdry reminders of his failure to deliver and it shows.

The private schoolboy has a public tantrum. No-one is thanked for their campaign, no commiseration is offered to the many who have lost seats. Victory has been stolen from him. Once again, it is all about Malcolm. Quickly the Delcons, the deluded conservative Abbott supporters will claim the result would have been better under the junkyard dog. Once again, they are wrong.

Turnbull is no overnight failure. Years of Liberal government misrule, party division and dysfunction, not to mention the monumental ineptitude of his predecessor, who spent recklessly on defence, fetishised the national flag and fantasised about invading Syria or Ukraine, not to mention shirt-fronting Putin, have led up to this moment.

To see Turnbull as solely the architect of his own misfortune is to miss the Liberal Party’s decline over the last decades a process which as Guy Rundle puts it “so successfully undermined the platform on which it once stood, that it has fallen through the hole.”

Today’s Liberal Party draws upon an eclectic mix of ideologies from neoliberal, classical liberal and conservative schools of thought, blending tea party jargon about small government with neoliberal and small “l” liberal ideas and even in submarine building, industry protectionism. The confused brew makes the task of leadership even more daunting for Turnbull.

Will he fall on his sword? The honourable way out would be to make a resignation speech. Now, just when once again he seems to have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, a mortally wounded Malcolm Bligh Turnbull reaches deep within himself and orates.

We can still form majority government, he thunders. Why is he shouting? Echoes here of the schoolboy debater, a natural third speaker who chooses bluster over substance.

Then there’s the scapegoating. It is as if the public have spoilt the party by not voting for him.

Labor’s mendacity, including “an extraordinary act of dishonesty” in text messaging purporting to come from Medicare has scared voters off the privatisation of Medicare which is otherwise proceeding apace with the government’s freezing of the Medicare rebate to GPs, and cutting bulk billing payments for pathology and diagnostic imaging and cuts to the Medicare Safety Net.

Yet no cuts are proposed to the $11 billion government subsidy of private health insurance.

No privatisation? Turnbull’s technically correct. Former PMC secretary John Menadue points out, current Coalition policy won’t privatise Medicare, it will destroy it.

By Tuesday, Turnbull concedes that the scare campaign against Medicare succeeded because his government had provided fertile ground for Labor’s “outrageous lie,” but the wounded Turnbull lashing out at a Labor scapegoat, Saturday, is the one voters will recognize as more authentic.

Ira fraudulosa esse non potest. Anger cannot be dishonest.

Turnbull lies that “party officials,” whose myopia has contributed to the campaign disaster, confirm the Coalition could form a government in its own right. Claw back seats from Labor.

“We’ve been here before,” he adds, another palpable lie, rallying the faithful whose bitter disappointment in his leadership is fast turning to anger. He offers another spurious historical parallel and the implicit hope that he’d lead them through this crisis instead of deeper into it.

“I give you Bob Katter,” he will be able to say by Friday, enriching his government’s prospects of success in the same sex marriage plebiscite con by signing up an independent who will walk backwards to Burke if there’s a gay in his electorate.

Katter’s list of demands include federal funding for the Galilee Basin railway, a strong moral case according to Resources Minister Josh Frydenberg in October last year who is keen to divert funds from the Northern Australia infrastructure facility to build a stranded investment that will never pay its way servicing the proposed Adani coal mine that could only proceed if the world reversed its investment in renewable the Indian government changed its policy of discouraging coal imports.

Before he even begins his election night dummy spit, Fizza Turnbull has been abandoned by a good third of the victory party to say nothing of a parliamentary party white-hot with rage and seething with self-righteous resentment. The smart set has withdrawn to its comfortable eastern suburbs barricades. Au pairs and nannies are put to bed leaving Alan Jones to put the boot in.

Smelling blood, Channel 7s team, fittingly, leads the nation in a bit of victim-bashing speculating that poor little Malco has wimped out. He’s staying home with his head under the doona. Shortly after this is broadcast, the PM appears, family in tow.

He has a plan, he says. He will turn this disaster of a defeat thing around. Like any blue-blooded scorpion, he lashes out at Labor’s Medicare lies. The police will be involved.

A simian John Howard, the architect of so much of the modern Liberal Party’s existential crisis, whom party and media amnesiacs alike have grotesquely elevated to party patron saint looks on approvingly, perhaps remembering his own undermining of Medicare not by open cuts but by failing to increase funding to keep up with increases in prices and population and his use of the “babies overboard” lie to win an election he deserved to lose.

Perhaps his heroic Iraqi war effort is on his mind. So hard to get good intelligence before battle.

It can’t be easy being Malcolm. Failure has dogged so many of his grand ventures now, including his failure to lead the Australian Republic Movement in 1999, his botched, white elephant of an NBN, his disastrous attempt to lead his own party in 2009 which ruptured on his despotic temperament and his failure to negotiate a PM role which left him any credibility or authority, all which his media cheer squad has been keen to overlook.

No one to blame but himself.

Turnbull’s dismal performance on election night earns the scorn of Laurie Oakes, self-appointed national moral guardian whose own virtuous behaviour includes the practical misogyny of his persecution of Julia Gillard who wrote the book on successful minority government.

Laurie Oakes was also instrumental in preparing the electorate for Tony Abbott, contributing to the myth that the Gillard years were chaotic and dysfunctional or that the junkyard toad would somehow, overnight become a prince, a leader and an effective Prime Minister.

Beyond the theatrics of a lost election lie the profound issues of the people’s voice ignored, a voice which now it is so easy to disparage or dispute or discourage competing as it must in a mediated society where elections are about what we believe to be our choices based on what we are told by radio, TV, website and all other form of mass medium.

Perhaps the greatest irony in the Coalition’s election debacle is that a servile, pro-government media created a bubble which insulated the government from the feedback it needed to run an effective campaign. Instead of the strategic feedback the Coalition needed, it received an echo of its own spin.

The government was “tracking well in the marginals,” we were all told. Insiders were quietly confident. Insiders predict a comfortable victory. No wonder Turnbull in his naiveté thought he really didn’t have to try. Perhaps this is the key to his anger election night, he and his party were undone by their own spin; betrayed by their own narcissism.

Surely, also, on some level he must know he is utterly undone and once again, parliamentary party playmate of the month that he may once have been and however much seduced by the Liberal party’s born to rule complacency, he is ultimately the architect of his downfall.

Without the victory that would have conferred authority and without the judgement and personal skills required to negotiate a minority government or one with a slender majority, his best course of action is to resign.

 

 

Tasmania leads the nation, Saturday, in a clean sweep of Liberal-held lower house seats, which sees its three amigos, Eric Hutchinson, Andrew Nikolic and Brett Whiteley, sent packing. In the contest for Tasmania’s twelve senate seats, the fates of sixth listed Labor senator Lisa Singh and non-Abbott man listed fifth, Liberal senator Richard Colbeck may take weeks to be finalised.

Why the clean sweep? Some say the three Abbott loyalists brought it all on themselves by not representing Tasmania’s interests. Others report that Andrew Nikolic was not easy to engage or debate, especially if requests contravened local Liberal Party policy of strictly only two party debates. None of this, however, can detract from Tasmanian voters’ achievement on Saturday.

Where did we go wrong in Tassie? The Coalition is said to be puzzling- as if it got the rest of the nation right. Hint: beware of believing your own talking points. Most polls put the two parties neck and neck over the eight weeks but Turnbull and his team campaigned as if they had it in the bag. Labor was left to engage with the people; put out real policies.

Was it a Mark Textor tactic to create a bandwagon effect? Exude confidence. Claim the government is ahead in the polls and you can help to put the government ahead in the polls?

“We are polling well in the marginals.” You could tell it was a line just by listening to Julie Bishop – the walking talking point. The Coalition was doing much better in the marginals according to its own polling. Never mind anybody else’s poll.

Once you succumb to self-deception, all manner of delusion becomes possible; it becomes less a question of what went wrong and more how could anything go right? Next thing you know someone will suggest that Tony Abbott would have run a better campaign.

Tassie voters sensibly reject a Coalition campaign which ignores the rights of ordinary people to better healthcare, education, penalty rates and employment, offering, instead, lower taxes for corporations and to those on higher incomes, which ordinary people would subsidise in a not so innovative and astonishingly ill-judged new plan announced by the Federal Treasurer in the last few days of the campaign. Tax cuts for the rich would be funded by doing over the poor.

Not working? Australians on retirement or sickness pensions will not miss out. Their Centrelink claims will be scrutinised by a uniformed Human Services officer in a supportive “better targeting and integrity strengthening process.”

By this means, the Treasurer expects to claw back a lazy $2.3 billion that may have fallen down the back of the sofa, or is sloshing around in Grandma’s handbag making it too heavy to carry or too hard for her to find her betting tickets or her daily half bottle of brandy.

…the $5 billion clamp down on welfare fraud…

Of course, the new clawback is not that new. It’s identical to the $5 billion clamp down on welfare fraud announced a couple of months ago in last May’s Budget. “Sometimes people are overpaid and they don’t even know it,” explains Scott Morrison. His eyes light up at the prospect of privatising debt recovery from pensioners. But not until the election’s settled.

Morrison’s got the Productivity Commission to review all human services “delivered” by government: community services, social housing, prisons, disability services and Medicare.

It goes without saying it’s not a scare campaign, or a threat, this war on the poor to pay the rich. It’s just another treat from the smorgasbord of “efficiency-dividend” and “savings” or “greater flexibility” and choice that Sussan Ley talks about when she means to cut funds or social services or terrorise the elderly by stopping pension payments without notice at all should an overpayment accidentally appear. You’d be mad not to vote for more of it.

Liberal plans to privatise Medicare have taken a bit of stick from the Liberal campaign war machine recently. It’s all a beat up. A critical semantic distinction is commonly overlooked. The PM can deny with an air of wounded innocence that his government has any plans to privatise Medicare because it is already doing it. And Tasmanians know it.

Semantics aside, the government makes a last minute pitch of strident denials that it has any plans to privatise Medicare. These are augmented with attacks on Labor’s lies and its cruel strategy of ringing old people, who cannot be expected to know what is going, on especially about their own health. The old folk are then terrified to hear the truth second hand.

Medicare is tricky, too, because there’s been a late change of plan. No longer will the $50 billion fee collecting business be flogged off to eager private models of integrity such as Telstra – or at least not for the time being. The Prime Minister has promised to keep back-office operations in house, for the time being. But the real issue is the freeze on the GP Medicare rebate .

The biggest privatisation of health ever is already under way in Australia – the co-payment, which our government is forcing on all of us by freezing the GP Medicare rebate. Some practices are already adding this to their fees.

Privatisation involves increasing the proportion of private payment in the health system. We are forced by the freeze to pay, so our GPs can continue to treat us.

…fails to resonate with ordinary Australians …

If privatisation denial is no vote winner, the promise of stability, oddly, also fails to resonate with ordinary Australians, despite coming from a Coalition which knows first hand its worth. It’s had two Prime Ministers, three different tax policies and seventeen changes in its cabinet in the last three years, not to mention its internal rifts such as between its conservative rump and the rest.

Not even a Brexit reference makes Turnbull’s pitch to the nation to behave like good children, sit still, stop wriggling, shut up and vote for him any more compelling. Tasmanians see right through it – despite his finger-wagging and scare tactics.

“The upheaval reminds us there are many things in the global economy over which we have no control … At a time of uncertainty, the last thing we need is a parliament in disarray,” he lectures the party faithful gathered in Sydney. Tony Abbott, before him had worried us all about the ISIS monsters who were coming to get us – but, not to worry, only Labor runs scare campaigns.

The great big new tax on everything scare, the $100 lamb roast, the wiping of Whyalla off the map and Bronywn Bishop’s tale of the pensioners who had to stay in bed because they couldn’t afford their electric heating bills were all OK when they were part of Tony Abbott’s campaign.

Brexit is a vexed issue for the Liberals. Britain has tried Neoliberalism and rejected it. Brexit is a warning to leaders who believe we are merely consumers bonded by economic ties, born to compete; not communal creatures with misty-eyed notions of nurturing and helping one another.

Brexit may be a warning to our increasingly remote power elite of the alienation, marginalisation and exclusion experienced by those who make up the mass of the modern corporate state. For Turnbull it is a stick to beat us with. So, too the false memory of disarray, the Liberal myth that our last minority government was anything but an astonishing success. Now, disarray is just what the Liberal National government has delivered. It could last for years.

Of course, others may see it differently, local Liberal power broker Eric Abetz is blaming national issues which “swamped the state campaign,” or so he claims in The Mercury Sunday. Abetz believes that the local Liberals ran an exemplary campaign only to be gazumped by “dishonourable and deceptive statements” made about Medicare.

…a highly welfare-dependant state…

“They are genuinely concerned about their well-being and we in Tasmania are a highly welfare-dependant state, and if you are welfare dependant then Medicare, and those sort of support facilities, are vitally important to you,” he says. Best not mention Medicare, then in case, like democratic choice, it spoils people’s voting intentions.

To Abetz credit he reveals that the party of stability is already baying for its leaders blood. Asked if he has ‘full confidence in Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister’ the senator says: “I always have confidence in the elected Parliamentary leader.”

While vote counting will continue Tuesday in a Federal Election result which may remain unknown for weeks, some things are certain. Malcolm Turnbull, whose errors of judgement include the leasing of the Port of Darwin to a Chinese firm, the Godwin Grech affair, where he was the victim of an outrageous sting, and the appointment of Mal Brough to his cabinet, may have made his final, fatal error.

Perhaps he is a victim here, too, a plausible stand in, bound to fail, a politician whose untested claims to electoral popularity were oversold by backers desperate to replace a politically toxic Tony Abbott.

Certainly his gambit has proved an expensive mistake. Despite high praise from Press Gallery backers, (one gurgled, that his double dissolution plan meant “he ha(d) seized the initiative by the scruff of its neck,”) Turnbull’s punt will cost him and his government dearly. Lenore Taylor calls it “an unmitigated disaster.”

The PM who promised strong, stable stand-alone government, spends Sunday morning canvassing support from Lower House Independents including Andrew Wilkie who returns to Denison, and Cathy McGowan who returns to Indi.

There was never going to be any deal, says Wilkie, a sentiment echoed by McGowan.

…a bizarre speech of recrimination…

His appeals sit oddly with his public assurances to those of the party faithful who remained to hear him make a bizarre speech of recrimination made after midnight at The Wentworth Hotel.

On election night, the PM is sure a majority is in the bag. He is just as sure that the Labor campaign has been a farrago of lies. He is calling the police on the opposition’s fraudulent scare-mongering. Had the AFP not had its hands full with NBN whistleblowers and the mystery of who had access to Peter Slipper’s diary, it might leap at another non-political investigation.

The PM has lost his double dissolution early election gamble, along with many of the marginal seats his leadership was set up to protect. He has failed, comprehensively, in his bid to achieve a more congenial senate despite reforming the election process to eliminate micro parties.

His government will struggle to find support from a new senate cross bench which includes at least one Pauline Hanson and Fred Nile. It is certain to be at least as challenging as its predecessor while the PM who has failed to deliver stability or security to his own party has lost even more authority and credibility as party leader

Bolshie senate to one side and leaving the witch hunt over illegal scare-mongering alone, Labor’s Brian Mitchell expresses something which, sadly is too easy for the complete, modern corporate statesman or party hack to overlook. It goes to the heart of Labor’s Tasmanian victory and may be one key to the post Brexit Labor success across the nation.

For Mitchell the result is,

“Just an amazing feeling. I’m the son of a school cleaner, my mum cleaned schools, my dad was a factory hand, to think that their son is now in Federal Parliament, that’s the Labor story.”

Of course, there is more to the story than that, especially in a modern Labor Party which post-Hawke is as neoliberal as its opposite number, a party with more than its fair share of lawyers and party apparatchiks, its consultants, publicists and lobbyists but Mitchell is on to something nonetheless.

For himself, for the nation, for everyone’s sake, he certainly deserves to.

 

“ They are a bunch of opportunistic Trots hiding behind a gum tree trying to pretend they’re the Labor Party,” claims Paul Keating getting stuck into the Greens in his pal Albo’s inner western Sydney seat of Grayndler which the Labor MP has a chance of losing to the Greens. It’s splendid invective, vintage Keating and a marked contrast with most of the language of this dull, passionless, pedestrian campaign.

Independent MP Andrew Wilkie, it is true, has not held back, denouncing Barnaby Joyce as a sadist and the people who control live export as monsters but his is a rare flash of brilliant conviction amidst the dross of the week’s official campaign speechifying.

Similarly empassioned, addressing 2000 in Double Bay, but minutes away from Turnbull’s harbourside mansion and in the PM’s electorate of Wentworth, former Liberal leader John Hewson accuses the Coalition of being a national disgrace over its failure to put climate change at the heart of its campaign.

Short term politicking from both sides left targets that were inadequate and policies that weren’t going to meet those targets, said Hewson as good a definition as any of the government’s Direct Action bogus climate change policy. Climate should be bipartisan, Hewson thunders to much applause. Only the politicians would disagree. The sitting member headed for Launceston instead.

Launceston, nevertheless, is chuffed Friday when caretaker PM Malcolm Turnbull, turns up to honour a promised prior visit postponed because of the floods. The PM tops Labor’s promises by pledging $7.5 million to the $18.1 million City Heart project, launched in 2014, to “revitalise” the city. It is a fair effort from a PM who risks his own seat feeling left high and dry.

The man who would be Prime Minister is happy just to tick the boxes.
Stick to the plan he says. It is his take on stability, the word he offers as his campaign signature, at the bizarrely late Liberal campaign launch on Sunday where he also comes up with “power-sharing fiasco”, a term he repeats three times and which might also apply to his own Faustian compact with the right.

Turnbull is trusting to inertia and popular aversion to three PMs in as many years, an aversion carefully cultivated with the help of mainstream media, to get him across the line.

…rhetoric of jobs and growth.

The PM is out doing the dull stuff; covering Labor pledges in Bass, an electorate which his party polling tells him is marginal with a history of unseating sitting Liberals, an electorate which has more than its fair share of battlers who see through his government’s rhetoric of jobs and growth.

The median individual income in Bass Coast Shire is $489 per week. In the 2016 March quarter, the unemployment rate was 7.40% and rising.Yet Turnbull’s speech seems to suggest everyone will either get a new job building the new campus or become a university student.

Not much to woo the average punter here but it’s typical of a campaign in which the ordinary Australian is lucky (or not as Duncan Storrar discovered) to get a question out on Q&A or like Melinda the single Mum, who bravely buttonholed the PM in Moorabbin in May by interrupting his small business mutual love fest.

Melinda had real questions about the cost of living and her children having a chance in life but she turned away when she spotted Turnbull’s vast personal indifference to her or any other battler behind that energiser battery smile.

Turnbull’s stump speech in Bass is a fizza, too. And is it wise to take time out from electors closer to home? Shouldn’t he be at least back-chatting Hewson? As a campaigner, Turnbull doesn’t seem to do savvy. His sloganeering is wooden; his fulmination against the dire evil of Labor’s negative gearing and softness on borders is as unconvincing as his fixed grin.

Another $150 million will help UTAS move to a more central Inveresk campus, with a similar move for the Burnie campus. As the PM explains, coaxed into life by the allure of a Latinate abstraction, it means “ensuring Tasmanian cities realise their enormous potential as international hubs for both education and tourism.” You can’t say his speech has a ring to it. More an ear of tin.

…preach the gospel of uncertainty…

Nothing excites the PM more than spruiking potential unless it’s to preach the gospel of uncertainty as he does later that night like some latter day antipodean Heraclitus waxing philosophical in response to a question on Brexit from Leigh Sales on her ABC 7:30 Report.

“(Brexit)’s a reminder, Leigh, of a point I often make: that we are living in a period of rapid economic change, we’re living in a period of volatility and we have to embrace that.”

Only Turnbull can pitch 21st century technobabble while posing as the strong leader of a “rock-solid” stable government able to withstand anything Brexit could throw at it. Only his government has the adhesive: an economic plan which cuts taxes for companies and those on higher incomes.

Sales deigns to challenge him on the reality of his government’s internecine division and self-eviscerating instability, its 17 cabinet ministers, its 3 resignations, its fund-raising fiasco. Not to mention the divisions and indecision revealed in its failure to cobble together a tax reform policy. Perhaps he’s bored her into submission, too. But wait, there’s more.

Turnbull’s even throwing in a set of free trade deals. Post Brexit that is some call. Yet no-one feels secure or loved at home. There’s a week to go but the writing is on the wall.

The PM could lose his own seat; so deep runs discontent in Wentworth especially among its sizeable gay community. Turnbull’s electorate feels abandoned and rejected if not betrayed by their local member’s latest revelation that government MP’s may not be bound by any plebiscite on same-sex marriage. Some commentators suggest the issue may even cost him the election.

Then there’s the wretched environmentalists, all stirred up with Di Natale visiting the Tarkine and Hewson’s rabble rousing greenmail. God knows how they’ll vote.

…yearn for more personal attention…

Gone is Turnbull’s erstwhile popular standing. His local electors now see their MP as merely another politician says Roy Morgan, whose poll of The Greens’ 20 best seats this week puts the Coalition on 41.5%, down twenty points on 2013. Could they yearn for more personal attention than more of the same old stale jobs and growth slogan Turnbull serves up on every occasion?

Or do we get the slogans we deserve? No-one in Launceston or in the PM’s large media entourage presses the PM to defend his government’s proposed policy on higher education in which degrees and diplomas could become prohibitively expensive as a result of tertiary fee deregulation. No point in moving the campus if students can’t afford to enrol.

While technically only a “reform discussion paper” subject to consultation, its tertiary education policy is due to be announced straight after the election. In an attempt to reassure those who accuse it of secrecy, Education Minister Simon Birmingham has earlier claimed that his government has released more details than Labor.

“…there will not be full fee deregulation and … we can guarantee that for at least 80 per cent of students they will operate under a fixed price regime and nobody will pay a dollar upfront…”

Birmingham explains that universities will be allowed to set their own fees for 20% of their “flagship courses” from 2018. Universities won’t get funding from the government for these “opt-in” courses. To prevent degrees costing $100,000, course fees would be monitored by a group like the ACCC. No-one is reassured by any of this. We’ve seen how well the ACCC controls the banks.

Entitled Responsibly Investing in Higher Education, lest anyone mistake access to higher education as a basic human right and to further the neoliberal view that everything is always about investment the (draft) policy is set to delight the privileged and to further entrench privilege.

Not only are student fees likely to rise, the cut-off for fee recovery has been lowered, a sensible and practical step to ensure that no-one is ever free of their HECS debt, even if their income is subsistence level or below as in the case of the Newstart allowance or the age pension.

…staring down a giant mask of himself…

Not everyone in Bass is happy to see the PM and the local Liberal candidate. Embattled Bass MHR Andrew Nikolic proves his own military training useful choosing to fuss over his leader, filling in admirably as Kaiser Mal’s batman while staring down a giant mask of himself, part of a small group of demonstrators protesting about school funding, penalty rates and other real issues.

There are members of the United Voice union, Gonski backers and a papier mâché bobble head lampooning Nikolic, an MP who is no stranger to controversy. He caused a stir recently by refusing to debate a local Greens candidate, preferring candidates who have a chance of winning.

The Liberal campaign has seen the Nikolic gambit developed and refined by justice minister Michael Keenan who has repeatedly refused to debate his Labor counterpart, anti-terror expert Dr Anne Aly, whom he accuses of being soft on national security because once in the course of her job she recommended a terror suspect be given access to an anti-radicalising programme.

The accusation has been taken up by Julie Bishop who was also once a lawyer but who is keen to pitch in with a denunciation to boost the climate of hysteria so vital to keeping our borders secure.

Assisting with the same mission, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton holds a surreal off water press conference to announce that his government has just turned back boat number twenty eight, a statistic no-one has any way of checking because requests for information are routinely denied on the grounds they are operational matters or details which must be kept secret because their publication would only help demon people smugglers revise their business models.

Psychologist Paul Stevenson who has been an outspoken critic of conditions on Manus Island has been dismissed by email, a better outcome than the Border Force Act 2015’s prescribed imprisonment but still an indication that there is no change to the regime of secrecy which has been part of the militarisation of our duty to show compassion and care for those who seek our asylum, a regime so capably initiated by Scott Morrison under this government.

Morrison has recently made a fool of himself in claiming that he too a rich white male member of the power elite knows what Penny Wong means when she warns of the unleashing of bigotry should the coalition’s plan to hold its same sex marriage plebiscite go ahead. He, too he claims feels her pain.

Whilst his claim is ludicrous, offensive and insultingly insensitive, it is characteristic of the strategy increasingly favoured by members of the ACL and its key exponents such as Cory Bernardi who present themselves as somehow champions of mainstream opinion who are persecuted for their views. Donald Trump takes a similar position with his nonsense on radical Islam.

…a heavily reduced majority..

If Turnbull is indeed to succeed in the July 2 election, it will be with a heavily reduced majority. And slim also seem his chances of dealing with a right wing which embraces climate deniers and fundamentalist Christians implacably opposed to gay marriage.

The shock news of Brexit this week has been claimed by both sides as an argument to win votes. Labor points justifiably to its record of success in shielding Australia from the GFC of 2007-8 while Turnbull invents a stability and record of success at economic management which relies totally on John Howard’s and Peter Costello’s myth-making which has passed into popular perception, with the help of mainstream media as fact.

It is early days to reckon the effect of Brexit although its economic effects both direct and indirect are likely to be deep and enduring, despite Scott Morrison’s best strategic efforts at PR damage control. As always he proves hopelessly out of his depth..

Brexit, moreover, may be read in part as a protest against the disempowerment and exclusion of the poor; a result of the overplaying of their hand by the wealthy elite. It points to some serious flaws in the glass of neoliberal policies including free trade which has caused industry closure, fostered policy which has increased social inequality and led to marginalisation and alienation. It carries real warnings for our power elite in Australia, too. Win or lose 2 July, Turnbull and his government may be in for a rude surprise.

---

 

Want to know what Brexit means for Australia? Looking for a bit of leadership from the Prime Minister in response to Britain’s latest financial and economic crisis? Worried Britain will drag us all into a global recession? Don’t ask Malcolm Turnbull. He’s just the Prime Minister.

Tony Jones made the leadership mistake on Q&A when he asked Turnbull why he was soft on same-sex marriage. Why was he pushing ahead with a plebiscite even though he personally favoured a conscience vote?

Turnbull said he was “sticking by the decision the Coalition party room made under Tony Abbott.”

The PM neglected to mention that the party room was augmented with a rump of National Party members herded in at the last minute. His capitulation endorses a flaky evasion. Abbott’s move was nothing more than a cynical stalling tactic.

No update either for viewers that neogitations are currently under way to ensure that members of Turnbull’s government, should it be returned, will be able to vote against their electorates on marriage equality. Senators Eric Abetz and Cory Bernardi have already said they will do this.

As Penny Wong puts it “Malcolm Turnbull didn’t give supporters of marriage equality a free vote before the election, but will give opponents of marriage equality a free vote after the election.

What came next is the most amazing concession of the campaign so far. Turnbull is the type of leader to lead from behind. He’s only the boss. “I am the PM but I’m not the dictator,” he said.

“Some people like the idea of prime ministers that ignore their colleagues. I don’t agree with that. I’m a strong believer in traditional cabinet government and that means compromise.”

Now it’s Leigh Sales turn to make the same mistake on Friday’s 7:30 Report. Not that she’s really interested. It is, after all, another opportunity for the PM to campaign. And in the end it’s all about the show. She asks him what it means. Means? He fetches up one fence-sitting word, “uncertainty.”

The U-word has bolted before he realises, to his horror, he mustn’t frighten the horses. Quickly he claims uncertainty as a virtue – and the high moral ground. Who knows where he’s headed? Give him a minute or thirty and he’ll give you the full Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

“ Uncertainty …” he begins, lifting an unequivocal bottom jaw.

Sales looks worried.

It is a vintage Turnbull display. Patronise. Preach. Change gear. Hasn’t he told us to “embrace uncertainty?” he chides, smugly, channelling entrepreneur-Mal, his inner shill, hopelessly addicted to start-up technobabble and all manner of other 21^st Century con-artist jargon?

We are being told off for not being quite with it. He’s gazumped us. Everyone can see how embracing his inner uncertainty has worked for Malcolm, the ditherer. Not that he is letting Ms Sales speak. She does try to get to the heart of the nonsense about embracing change by spelling out some of the changes in terms of jobs lost to technology, EU migrant workers and open markets.

I just wonder if that message that you’re making perhaps scares and alienates people?

Turnbull seizes the opportunity to riff on the word immigration in what Sales is saying.

The EU Schengen agreement permitting passport free travel is in his sights. It reminds him to sound like a toddler potty training manual,

“…how really important it is for the Government to be seen to control its borders.”

Borders secure, he’s straight off up the garden path of how his government offers stability, a brilliant economic plan of bribing rich people with tax cuts and its Liberal psychic powers.

“I think we could be looking at a period of some uncertainty. And it’s a reminder, Leigh, of a point I often make: that we are living in a period of rapid economic change, we’re living in a period of volatility and we have to embrace that. We have to recognise that we’ve got to make sure that we have stable leadership, an economic plan, stable government, so that we are able to deal with the unforeseen.

Luckily Leigh is not up to challenging him. Turnbull’s government is one big factional in-fight. And it shows. In three years our economy has gone from best performing in the world to about fifteenth place now as a result of internal conflict and utter confusion over ideology and economic policy.

Abbott outsourced most Liberal policy to the IPA leaving himself an incoherent bag of Trump-style US clichés about small government being good for you, a dash of flag-waving rabid nationalism, authoritarianism and the dog-whistling politics of division. Malcolm Turnbull has done his best to pick up all of these but hasn’t quite got them all in the bag. Nor will he ever while Abbott survives.

If Fizza Turnbull were to win the election, on current predictions, his is unlikely to be a big enough victory to give him the authority to command the stability which he claims to offer. Abbott’s already got his dibs on a return to cabinet as Minister of Defence. But wait, there’s more – of course.

Turnbull bangs on about his economic plan. His government’s economic plan is neither economic nor a plan but rather a magic pudding mix that serves up a rich and tasty tax cut for wealthy supporters which somehow trickles down to feed the rest of the nation by boosting productivity and prosperity in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The evidence for stability is just as weak. Since John Howard’s shrewd brew of nationalism, neoliberalism – once called economic rationalism and social liberalism was spoilt by WorkChoices, the Liberal Party at both state and federal level is beset by an existential crisis. Tony Abbott’s false promises to keep Labor’s social program added untrustworthy into whatever the Liberals stand for.

In federal politics, the Liberal Party has given the nation two prime ministers in three years, fifteen changes in the cabinet and a smorgasbord of funding scandals. Right now the word is that the party is struggling to find the cash to fund its last furious final volley of TV attack ads. They could save their money. People will be watching the Brexit fall-out news.

None of this is followed up. Mr Stability Turnbull is left to dip into his usual grab bag of vapid platitudes, Mal-splaining and some special name-dropping for the occasion.

OK, he says, he did contact David Cameron to “console” the British PM ahead of his resignation. But he’s not prepared to share with viewers anything that might have been said. This is a pity. Both have a fair bit in common in terms of their capture by the right wing of their divided parties.

The PM’s message is “nothing to see here,” just as his deputy, Julie Bishop has earlier advised Australians to “keep calm and carry on.” Whistle a happy tune. Don’t mention the class war.

To be fair Sales does not exactly press the Prime Minister for answers. That’s not her job. Her show’s more of a foot-rub and back-scratch than a quest for information. Hold her guest to account for his promises, his evasions and lies? She can and does ask the odd good question but these tend to be batted away and never followed up. Or Turnbull bloviates and then answers his own question.

Friday he gets away with murder. Turnbull crows that her show had revealed Shorten to be a liar about Coalition moves to privatise Medicare. It is a ScoMo moment, a cheap and demeaning gotcha that does nothing but lower the tone and the PM’s credibity – and insult the intelligence of her audience. Does he imagine we don’t know that he set up a 20-member, $5 million privatisation taskforce which he was forced to cancel at the 11th hour.

And despite his strenuous denials, the outsourcing of Medicare payments went to federal Cabinet.

Turnbull bags Shorten for not putting his hand on his heart, a stunt Sales dredged up in the previous night’s programme and straight out of the Ray Hadley 2GB playbook. It proves nothing but the depths to which political debate has fallen. Sales doesn’t seem to mind to be used in this way. It’s as if she’s happy to be an accomplice in Turnbull’s long-practised evasion of leadership and truth.

Now interviews don’t have to be combative. To help the ABC here are a few of the many questions remaining unasked which could help Turnbull to lead; act like a Prime Minister.

How could the pundits get it so wrong? Is Brexit part of some more deep-seated popular protest against conservative politics; a rebellion against the politics of division, exclusion and increasing social and economic inequality? To Rafael Behr, Brexit sounds,

“…more like a howl of rage and frustration by one half of the country against the system of power, wealth and privilege perceived to be controlled by an elite residing, well, elsewhere.”

Are there parallels in Australia? Brexit is the repudiation of its ruling political and economic elite, by half the British nation. Similarly marginalised by a rapidly diminishing share of the nation’s prosperity and excluded or alienated from real political decision-making, manipulated by a conservative mass media could Australian voters be about to make a similar protest?

In the post-truth era style of political interview we will even phrase the questions to help our PM.

Surely we don’t have workers who have lost their jobs, their futures, their feeling of self-worth because of our politicians’ relentless, mindless march towards globalisation and free trade?

Surely we don’t live inside a housing bubble so inflated by our banks that it is impossible for average voters to own their own homes?

Surely we don’t have politicians who are so addicted to neoliberal dogma that the concept of the people has become replaced by that of the consumer?

Surely no politician would claim that the politics of economic austerity will solve everything, while tax cuts for the wealthy and the business classes will ensure that prosperity trickles upward?

Surely none of these are true, Malcolm Turnbull wants us to reassure us. He’s calling Brexit a message of “optimism.”

“In this age of technological change, in this age of the internet, in this age of globalism, why would we remain part of Europe for no reason other than geographic proximity at a time when technology has abolished geography?”

Whatever desperate, far-fetched spin our PM may choose to employ to fend off reality, there is an inescapable sense that the writing is on the wall for neoliberal governments everywhere. What is clear is that the free trade agreements and treaties which underpin the now diminished European Community have been tried and found wanting in Britain and that other nations may well follow.

What is certain, despite everything that our PM has left unsaid, is that Brexit puts the skids under the global financial system. Expect instability, it is true but don’t expect leadership from him. There is no point in his evading responsibility and everything to be gained by taking us into his confidence. But that would require a capacity to take command and an as yet unseen capacity to communicate.

Brexit will prove the measure of Turnbull, the would-be elected Prime Minister.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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