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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear readers

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

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

Will resume blogging as soon as practicable.

kind regards

 

Urban Wronski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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The week in politics was rocked by the disclosure that the NSW Liberal Party was, once more, in a spot of bother. Public-spirited to a fault, the Prime Minster then leapt nobly into the breach, diverting the nation’s attention from the Liberals’ deepening crisis and taking us all back to 1942, with a bizarre last-minute proposal that states levy their own income tax because they are clearly wasting federal funds on health and education.  Luckily, it was one IPA proposal that Tony Abbott had overlooked.

Lobbed like a grenade into an already hostile COAG meeting of state premiers who, Colin Barnett aside, want him to return the $80 billion his predecessor cut from hospital and school funding, the proposal either blew up in his face or it was a cunning tactical move to paint the premiers as ingrates and nay-sayers – depending on your choice of spin doctor.

By Saturday Shorten had him on the back foot calling COAG a “humiliating farce” forcing Turnbull to snarl that state premiers could never ask federal government for any funds ever again. Having rejected his best offer, (made without a scrap of documentation), they are to stop snivelling about going broke and take whatever further cold cuts and other stale leftovers from the IPA menu are fed them in the May Budget.

Now it has his number on cut-throat competitive federalism, Labor has been quick to exploit both the mean spirit of the PM’s less than innovative proposal and the hasty manner in which it was made, an urgency, Mr Turnbull has explained which was brought on by the draft cabinet document being leaked the previous day.

Not only is his COAG leadership looking uninspiring, however, the PM’s anti-corruption-in-construction election plank is flimsy in the light of the evidence of corruption surfacing in the NSW ICAC into Liberal funding which suggests most of his party’s funds in that state came from prohibited donors.

Funding is big in the NSW Liberal Party HQ ending the careers of many state politicians including wine buff, former Premier Barry O’Farrell. The outfit not only runs our most populous, most powerful state, it is an incubator for those born to rule federal politics, such as Bronwyn Bishop, whose every waking moment is dedicated to keeping the streets of McKellar safe from ISIS.

Bronnie’s former mentor, local hero and darling of the NSW right wing, IPA apostle Tony Abbott soldiers on bravely juggling his valuable advisory work in Ukraine with his many international speaking engagements because of his need to “make a contribution”.

Tony’s contribution in Ukraine is a paid position on President Poroshenko’s International Advisory Council. Poroshenko assured him that all his council members are “an author of economic or democratic miracle in your countries.”  Tony’s noble ideals surely would have commended him, too, had Poroshenko been pressed further.

Renowned for its pursuit of the noblest ideals of community service, public discourse and intellectual inquiry, the NSW Liberal party, suddenly, is struggling to account for $690, 000 of its own funds. Or access any of their $4.4 million war chest, until they can tell the NSW Electoral Commission who gave them the money.

The NSW Liberals seem to have overlooked or misunderstood the disclosure rules in the exchange of money for influence popularly known as fund-raising. As a result, its funds have been frozen by the Electoral Commission headed by Justice Keith Mason, a former president of the NSW Court of Appeal who is not all fazed by Arthur Sinodinos’ threats of legal action over its “flawed” report that has led to media outlets labelling him corrupt.

“A cherry on top of a compost heap” in Paul Keating’s recent assessment, whose “greatest risk is that turns into a sultana,” Malcolm Turnbull has rushed to his cabinet secretary’s defence with a form of words which Arthur must find vastly comforting.

 “My understanding is that Arthur Sinodinos has said he was not aware [of the banned donations] and he has done so at the Icac hearings, which were some time ago.”

While $4.3 million may not be much personally to Turnbull or many other party members and small change to some of its bigger sponsors, it would be nice to have these funds on hand especially with a bit of an election coming up. Turnbull is peeved because the process is damaging to his rapidly weakening election prospects.

Not only does the banned donors scandal besmirch the pristine Liberal brand, along with the Mantach scandal, it casts a shadow over Arthur, “I don’t recall” Sinodinos who has made it clear, many times, that he knew nothing of his party’s arrangement to collect illegal donations. An aide will be employed to find his car in the carpark and to remember where he lives. He is unlikely, on the other hand, take Simon McInnes’ lead.

Simon McInnes, NSW Liberal Party financial director admitted to the ICAC that his party hid the identity of property developer donors and companies who “sought privacy”, by means of “The Free Enterprise Foundation,” a trust set up to receive such donations, but says he “thought it was legal”. McInnes has since resigned.

The ICAC has also been told by senior party fund raiser, Nick Nicolaou, that Arthur Sinodinos was present when the Free Enterprise Foundation was proposed as a way of accepting funds from banned donors.  Natasha Maclaren-Jones, party state president, has testified to Icac that she asked Mark Neeham, party secretary, for a list of donors on November 9, 2010.

Neeham responded that, “Arthur went through the list today with key ­members of the finance committee”. The initials “AS” appear beside 36 potential leads which he was to follow up. Maclaren-Jones herself told ICAC, “I left the detail of fundraising and the contacting of donors to Arthur Sinodinos and Paul Nicolaou and others.”

Sadly for Arthur, his seven page letter to the Commission requesting his name be retracted has been spurned. Justice Mason refuses to retract reference to Sinodinos, even adding that the “arrangements” Sinodinos was involved in “provided the factual and legal matrix upon which non-requisite disclosure was made by the party”.

Also unaware of financial irregularities, albeit in his fiefdom the Tasmanian Liberal Party, former Workplace Relations minister, real estate zoning expert, Eric Abetz, knew nothing when it was revealed that its treasurer Damian Mantach had been fiddling the books. Abetz, was, however, on the ball when it came to Godwin Grech.

The arch conservative Tasmanian senator, a paragon of modesty and commitment to public good who regularly reminds his PM publicly of the folly of trying to rule without himself or Tony Abbott back in cabinet, took time out from his gruelling crusade for reinstatement. In a recent Fairfax interview, Abetz bucketed his current Prime Minister with another timely reference to his poor judgement in the Godwin Grech affair. Ever the noble and loyal servant, Abetz claims to have taken the rap for Turnbull.

Luckily, the equally public-spirited Tony Abbott is busting a gut to get Mal re-elected, he says, or something similar, announcing his brilliant scheme to bus himself around the marginals, gifting his services to Liberal victory.  The failed PM is clearly in it for the long haul, despite the Australia Institute’s polling that shows a majority of Australians want him to quit politics.

A gift that keeps on giving, Abbott  has so far received a series of firm but polite refusals from the likes of Scott Morrison and Christopher Pyne who say they would prefer to do their own campaigning, especially on education funding which will be a key issue.

If you cut funding, you get better results according to the Education Minister pointing to recent data from Tasmanian schools. On this logic, the nation eagerly looks forward to the day when federal government will cut all funds to all schools entirely including private schools enabling all to lift their standards.

“We are not wedded to the full Gonski” claimed the PM tossing off another arresting phrase highlighting his unswerving commitment to equality of educational opportunity. He reassured private schools that they would continue to get their money as part of his government’s unswerving commitment to the needs of the elite.

“I suspect no federal government would retreat from funding and continuing to support the non-government school sector because there would be a concern that they would not get a fair go from state governments,” the Sydney Grammar School alumnus explained, clearing the matter up nicely.

Also clearer by the day is Turnbull’s sensible decision not to discuss too much with Scott Morrison who was out contradicting his PM by claiming states’ taxation power would not cause any overall increase in the tax base, because states would not be allowed to increase their income tax surcharge to meet higher health and education costs. Turnbull announced the opposite view, concluding that in the end, such discretion, goes to the central logic of the change which is to make states responsible politically for funding their own schools etc.

“I’m a cautious sort of fellow,” said Morrison in response to Leigh Sales’ question to him over the alarming rift between the two but stopping short of asking him who leaked the cabinet tax proposals to COAG on Thursday.  Morrison’s caution is, of course, legendary as refugees on Manus and Nauru whose incarceration is officially part of a glacial paced processing already under way when he was Immigration Minister.

Rash acts of humanity and compassion could easily backfired on all us, according to Peter Dutton this week when he confirmed that Australia would not be rushing to process Syrian refugees in case they may in fact turn out to be terrorists.

Speaking at an international refugee meeting in Geneva, whose organisers were hoping might evoke offers from nations such as our own to open their doors and take more refugees, Dutton dashed hopes by declaring that governments need to tighten their borders and quickly send home migrants not in need of protection.

Whilst milking its act of compassion as evidence of its achievements, the Abbott Turnbull government is clearly dragging its feet when it comes to honouring its commitment to alleviate the suffering of those dispossessed by Assad’s regime. Only 29 refugees out of the much heralded intake of 12000 have been re-settled in Australia.

All of this means that Julie Bishop is exceptionally well placed at the moment to make a case for nations to open their doors and their hearts to the biggest humanitarian crisis currently facing our world. We expect to hear any moment of a compassion breakthrough despite all evidence to the contrary.

Ms Bishop is attending a meeting of fellow attention-seeking busybodies and a few others in Washington DC for the Nuclear Security Summit, where, in an attempt to divert us all from our real duty and responsibility to humanity, world leaders are discussing how to protect uranium and plutonium from falling into the hands of terrorists. There are fifty countries and four international organisations attending the summit who have managed to get the phrase dirty nuclear bomb into the news by raising the prospect that terrorists might make one.

Ms Bishop’s solution to both the challenge of our international responsibility and our contribution to security and its time and place is a stroke of genius. We will be selling plutonium to Ukraine. Making her announcement on April Fool’s Day, the month of the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl meltdown Bishop also has the chutzpah to be attending what is supposed to be a nuclear security summit.

President of the nation which gave the world Chernobyl, Petro Poroshenko can’t stop laughing. Ignoring the Espoo Convention, an international framework agreement around what is termed “transboundary environmental impact assessment”, he is just a hands on kind of guy. Call it cutting corners if you like, he’s just doing what it takes to keep his reactors running and is clearly poster boy for our yellowcake cheer squad, the Minerals Council of Australia.

Of Ukraine’s 15 nuclear reactors, four are already past their use by date with six more to follow by 2020.  Australia has suspended uranium sales to Russia but now sees fit to deal with Ukraine where two thirds of the nation’s nuclear reactors will be dangerously obsolete within five years.

None of this was mentioned by Ms Bishop who is also keeping quiet about her government’s ignoring of the UN Secretary-General’s call for Australia to have a dedicated risk analysis of the impacts of the uranium sector. Ignored also is our own Joint Standing Committee on Treaties which last year cautioned against the Turnbull government’s controversial deal to sell our uranium to India. Both deals reflect the extent to which the government is prepared to put it’s the interests of the Australian mining above all other considerations, including international stability and safety.

Finance Minister, Mathias Cormann speaking on ABC Insiders Sunday has blamed the Gillard government for the economic mess his government finds itself after 927 days in power.

A star jaw-boner, Cormann dazzled audiences with his references to policy levers, trajectories, fiscal gaps but no-one thought to ask him how a government flash as a rat with a gold tooth when it comes to economics jargon could have taken so long to put together a coherent policy package or fail so spectacularly to come to agreement over its taxation plans. Or be so short-sighted on matters of legality be it raising funds at home or its international obligations to refugees and nuclear safeguards.

 

 

 

The “courageous” Yes Minister idea of getting the states to raise their own income tax to cover state schooling and health has exploded in Malcolm Turnbull’s face. Not only was the proposal canned by the Premiers at today’s COAG meeting, it has wounded the lame-duck PM in his waddle-up to an election for which he is daily looking less prepared.

The meeting was not a total waste of time, however, with a PM throwing states a few crumbs from his federal budget table, a table once cluttered with options but now almost completely bare. $2.9b will be provided to keep public hospitals operating over the next three years. Tony Abbott had scheduled a $7b cut which builds to $57b over eight years.

Yet this demeaning act of noblesse oblige will not repair any of the damage done by the defeat of his bizarre plan to turn back the clock on taxation. Nor will it fix the state’s problem.

Voters are now rightly fearful that Turnbull’s crazy DIY income tax plan is still at the back of his mind. They will wonder what’s up between him and his treasurer. Above all, has once again, blown hot and cold on a proposal in a matter of days.

Not only does Turnbull walk away from his COAG Captain’s call looking unrealistic, impulsive, in brief a bit like Mr Abbott, he’s got egg on his face. It’s not just that Scott Morrison was left out of the loop again, although that’s a bad look in itself.

We wonder about the poor timing of a major tax reform which properly belongs in a second term in office after everyone has had a lot of time to think about it. And we continue to wonder about Morrison, too.

Not only do we wonder at the relationship between PM and his Treasurer; wonder who is doing the Treasurer’s job, Turnbull’s made it clear that his government thinks the states are wasteful with funds and that they regard federal government as a big ATM machine. It’s a cheap shot that will further damage his image as a capable national leader. And it shrieks of lack of trust.

Few were surprised at today’s failure. Banging on about efficiency and how you would be much more careful with money you had to raise yourself all sounds a bit patronising really. More than a bit far-fetched. Stoking competitive federalism by getting states to pay for their own hospitals and schools may appeal to the IPA but, for the rest of us, the proposal is unfair, unworkable and a bit unreal; in Daniel Andrews’ words a ‘thought bubble.’

Andrews was also quick to point out the government was not offering any extra money. If he were really committed to this brainwave, surely Turnbull would have put back the entire $80 billion which Abbott took away from the states’ education and health grants. Then the PM would have had some basis on which to negotiate.

But, in the event even Mike Baird who loves the concept of greater state autonomy, was prepared to tell the PM that his proposal was a dud. No-one except Barnett was in favour.

There was never any additional money in it. Nor was it fair. Less populous states such as Tasmania and South Australia lack the necessary revenue base to pay for the amenities they deserve and are entitled to as members of the Commonwealth.

But there was also a rush of smoke and mirrors from the political fog machines. Health Minister Sussan Ley came out on cue to read her autocue and bang on about efficiency and better targeted health care. It was left to Daniel Andrews to call it for what it was: a diversion from the savage cuts of the Abbott 2014 budget.

WA Premier Colin Barnett was the only one who looked forward to being able to raise his own income taxes but even he spoiled the illusion with wild assertions about wastage.

Airing the old canard that the Abbott government did not really cut $80 billion at all, he suggested the figure was a contrivance of Bolshevik premiers. Like any useful stooge, he had a colourful personal anecdote ready but it proved nothing, apart from his capacity to smear the COAG process.

“There were little private meetings in different rooms as the then Prime Minister and state premiers scurried from room to room and the $80 billion figure appeared. I didn’t at the time ever believe that was a realistic number or that that could be properly funded.”

Barnett added a bit of jargon dropping which didn’t help. Vertical fiscal imbalance is probably best left to the experts. All it did was make him look superior, as if smart people like himself knew that there was a funding crisis all along. All it means is states spend more funds on services they are responsible for than they can ever raise themselves and they have to get the rest from Canberra. If you can’t say it in plain English voters will only deduce you are hiding something.

Where is this mythic wastage? Where it the evidence that any state was on a spending spree before the Abbott/ Turnbull government came to power just to bring them to our senses. Those who shriek “waste” have clearly never stepped inside a public hospital or a state school recently. The casualty department of Warrnambool Hospital is about to close because of lack of funds. Others are in a similar position.

Was the PM really keen on this radical proposal or was he pushed? Bernard Keane believes that Turnbull is telling the truth when he says the leaking of the idea on Wednesday forced him to put it on the agenda. Once more he’s been caught out by an act of insurrection.

Could it be a tactical move? Wedge the premiers so that when, as they inevitably must, appeal for more funds he can reply he offered a solution but they turned him away? It’s a high risk gambit. Certainly, if nothing else, today’s fiasco has blown the whistle on Scott Morrison’s continued assertion that there is no revenue problem but just an expenditure problem.

For Turnbull, today’s failed proposal is a serious stumble which will cost him credibility in the leadership stakes and which will provide Labor with a wealth of ammunition on his government’s pretensions at management let alone economic reform.

 

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Donald Trump is in the news again this morning. He’s thrown another toy out of his playpen. Not Megyn Kelly. This time he’s calling for women who have abortions to be punished. Or something.

In an interview with someone called Chris Matthews on MSNBC, the Donald uttered a construction about punishment and abortion that even he had to go back on. What he meant, he said some time later, is that doctors performing abortions should be punished.

Well, that’s cleared that up, then. Donald Trump wasn’t just airing his stupidity or desperately bidding for our attention. He wasn’t just pandering to the basest prejudices of the ignorant and benighted. Or acting (badly) the high school class clown role that is part of his shtick. Except that class clowns are usually smart.

It’s great to have closure. Everybody says so. Got to have closure. If only we could market closure. But just one nagging question. What does Donald Trump mean?

The Donald himself is an enigma- not only to himself, but to all the rest of us. How else to account for the millions of words analysing, diagnosing The Trump Phenomenon? It’s become a growth industry; the only game in town. Therapists, especially, love him for his pathology.

Clinical psychologist Ben Michaelis raves about Trump. To him, the Donald is a walking textbook definition of narcissistic personality disorder. “He’s like a dream come true.” Or a nightmare.

“He’s so classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example of his characteristics,” he says. The Donald is going to save doctors a lot of money in resource materials. Other politicians just talk about making a contribution to public life.

It is fascinating just reading about one more thing that makes Trump newsworthy if not noteworthy – or even a little bit epic: Trump the living pathology specimen. Oliver Sacks fans eat your heart out. There’s a musical or a mini-series or both just in the title.

But in Australia NPD is so yesterday. In our political arena, narcissistic personality disorder just qualifies a person for office. Or to run the Prime Minister’s office.

Michaelis would have a field day in Australia. Our last Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, vowed to shirtfront Vladimir Putin. He ate a raw brown onion on camera while his Chief of Staff, Peta Credlin ran his office for him largely by telling his colleagues how insignificant and unworthy they were and humiliating them in public. How she always had to get the job done.

Now Abbott jets around the world taking selfies with world leaders and eating the real Prime Minister’s foreign policy lunch by making a string of macho announcements. How we need to get tough with the Chinese. Terrorists. How the next election will really be all about his agenda. How other governments should deal with refugees.

No-one knows why but all signs point to NPD and an excess of available testosterone. Or relevance deprivation syndrome. None of which our current PM Malcolm Turnbull suffers from but he’s a classic NPD for sure. No idea of policy or platform but a series of whistle stops and thought bubbles offered up for the rest of us to gratefully admire or he gets testy. Or retracts.

Some unkind idle onlookers call the Donald stupid. The same has been said about our NPD. But being  dumb does not disqualify you from high office. Look at Ronald Reagan. He looked the part. Ron was the talent the conservatives wanted in the role. He signed everything the neo-neo cons put before him. And Nancy did everything for him in the latter years of his second term. Almost went to the bathroom for him. And look how well that turned out.

In the course of two terms the US went from leading global creditor nation to leading debtor nation. Reagan helped create vast armies of poor and dispossessed; an embittered alienated underclass that just love Trump. We have one forming nicely here, too. But we blame the poor for being a drain on government expenditure. Say one thing about the Donald. He loves the poor. They love him back.

They love it when the Donald gets tough with the world. How he’s going to war with China. How he’ll make America great again. In Australia our PM simply pours billions into submarines and fighter planes with the same insane objective. Such a vote winner.

Critics of the Donald say he is a bit slow and strange but don’t they remember Gerald Ford? Lyndon Baines Johnson said that Ford was so dumb he couldn’t walk and fart at the same time. Johnson could and took pleasure in forcing his guests no matter how important to continue conversations with him while he relieved himself. That’s not strange that’s colourful.

Don’t be so harsh on the Donald. He is an asset to public life. He reminds us of the intersection of politics and show business that is our modern age. Or should that be a car wreck? He is a living reminder of how the media circus long ago became the centre of everything as a wise Canadian named Marshal McLuhan once or twice pointed out.

If the media is the massage, however, spectacle is the new substance. The Donald is a beacon to alert us to that. He’s also a type of prophylactic. If you don’t vote, look what can happen to your public life. He’s doing wonders to bust the bejesus out of political apathy. And my how he’s working wonders with the art of political debate.

One debate on news unfortunately around meal time had the Donald making reassuring noise about the size of his member. From its TV presentation, US presidential political debate is a warning to all of us. It resembles a bad segment from a Big Brother reality TV show in which none of the contestants can come up with anything interesting and witty or relevant to anything but each one desperately wants to win the prize by staying in the house the longest even if it comes down to a gross-out.

Some say the Donald shows how the art of the debate has been debased into mudslinging and the exchange of preposterous, unfounded assertions. Most of what Trump trumpets is like this. How he’s going to build a wall to stop illegals coming up from Mexico. How he’s going to slap tariffs on manufacturers who move north of the border to avoid US tax. None of this he can do. No president can do. Bear with the theatre of the absurd.

A few fusspots fear that the Donald simply doesn’t make sense but to his listeners he does. Like all populist demagogues he says what people want to hear or what they think he says they want to hear. His utterances are a new benchmark in incoherence – one academic dignified them by comparing them to the stream of consciousness in literature but for Trump it really is closer to a stream of unconsciousness  – a key semiotic marker of the decline of public discourse.

Others say the Donald is a fake. He pretends to be an amazing self-made business tycoon but the fact is he’s had a barrel of financial disasters and a history of sharp practice after he had the bad luck to inherit wealth. You’ll narrow the field too much if you apply this standard to your leading public figures. Here we’d have to disqualify our own Prime Minister.

Scholars argue that the Donald is a creation of the Republican party. Others  claim he and Sanders are creatures of the times. One thing is certain, Trump cannot be simply explained away. As in Australia, and in other western societies suffering even more the economic consequences of the GFC and the neo-con fantasies of wealth from toxic sub-prime loans which contributed to it, the Trump phenomenon, the Donald’s populist insurgency is one to be heeded most carefully. In the end he holds a mirror up to ourselves and our political times.

 

The $60 million Cole royal commission, which consisted of 23 volumes, referred 31 individuals for prosecution. But it resulted in how many prosecutions and how many convictions? There was not one single criminal prosecution, let alone any finding of guilt.                                 Brendan O’Connor

 

Family First senator Bob Day bobs up all over the media these days. He makes himself endlessly available to tell anyone who’ll listen that corruption is rife in the construction industry. Corruption! He repeats his mantra with righteous fervour. No matter that tax-payers have just spent $80 million on a two year Royal Commission into Union Corruption with very few prosecutions coming out of its witch-hunt. He has a much better plan!

We must all go back a decade or so to the Howard era and restore the Australian Building and Construction Commission. No matter that we already have a Fair Work Building Commission effectively on the job.  No matter that Day as head of his own highly profitable building and construction empire can hardly claim to be a disinterested bystander. He’s an urger with an anti-union agenda who has proposed that young workers “put themselves out of the system,” trading away their entitlements, holiday and sick leave just to get a job. But the government can’t get enough of him.

PM Turnbull and Workplace Minister Michaelia Cash and others are happy to gee Day up in their mission to wilfully mislead voters and the Governor General, that an ABCC is urgently required for the Turnbull government to continue its policy programme when the bill was first introduced in November 2013. They misrepresent its nature.

The ABCC will be a “tough new cop on the block” or “a watchdog,” when Blind Freddy can see it’s an excuse for an early election via double dissolution for a Turnbull government plummeting in popularity as voters lose patience with its division, indecision and policy vacuum. And voters have memories of the fiasco of the ABCC first time around.

Introduced in 2003 by the Howard government, after the Cole Royal Commission into the Building and Construction Industry and in operation until repealed by the Gillard government in February 2012, the ABCC made workplaces more dangerous and workers and decreased productivity. It was a perfect storm of bad industrial relations and bad law.

Unions were not allowed meeting time to discuss health and safety. Deaths on construction sites resulted. Workers were harassed, subject to secret interrogations. They lost their common law right to remain silent. Reversed was the onus of proof. Officials could enter premises without a warrant; demanding names and addresses. You could go to jail if you didn’t cooperate.

Bob Day doesn’t tell us these less attractive facts. Like Tony Abbott, whose union baiting Day is channelling, the senator is a mine of misinformation and deception.  He won’t let the truth get in the way of his crusade against organised labour.

For Day, corruption is an established fact rather than an unproven, prejudicial allegation, an unconscionable slur which Tony Abbott shrewdly enshrined in the title of Dyson Heydon’s Royal Commission. Corruption, moreover, is a word which needs to be repeated as often as possible.

As for the ABCC,’s STASI like powers, Day is as silent on its extraordinary powers, as he is on its limitations to civil and not criminal law. Yet he is vocal about its advocacy even suggesting that an ABCC type outfit could be part of everybody’s workplace.

“Given the government has established an anti-corruption measure in the ABCC to (the construction) sector then I can’t see any reason why … if it were to emerge that there were corruption that my colleagues identified in other sectors why wouldn’t they establish a similar anti-corruption measure for those sectors,” he tells the ABC.

Day puts himself forward as a spokesman, a service which other cross bench senators forcefully decline. Despite this, Malcolm Turnbull says Day is “showing real leadership” in acting as a broker. For the ABC and other mainstream media, this makes Day an important source, a de facto leader of the independent senators when in fact he is more of a Liberal Party stooge, a means for the LNP to “outsource its negotiations with the senate,” as Brendan O’Connor puts it.

Michaelia Cash threatens that the government will only negotiate with the crossbench on the Australian Building and Construction Commission bill as a bloc of at least six, and will not accept any amendments that will “compromise the integrity” of the ABCC, as if she were in a position to dictate terms. Or that ABCC and integrity are even words that you can put together.

Day is now Malcolm Turnbull’s pet senator; his preferred point of contact and even lead negotiator with the cross bench. But just who is this man?

A former Liberal candidate in 2007, Day resigned from the Liberal Party to contest the senate in 2013. Owner and director of a large and prosperous construction empire, he is head honcho of Homestead Homes and Home Australia, which owns large building companies in Western Australia, Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales. You wonder how Bob the builder fits in any political work at all. Then there’s all the breathless media work.

Day bobs up regularly all over Auntie and other tame media outlets assuring anyone who will listen that the construction industry is run by a bunch of crooks. It’s defamatory, it’s damaging and it’s wrong.

Day’s sweeping assertions are not only calculated to smear those who work in the construction industry, they use loopy logic.  “What goes on” he says, on some building sites is hurting people and driving up the price of homes”. No chance that speculative investment and the work of property developers like himself drives up the price of homes.

Bob doesn’t have to provide real evidence. He just knows, because, in real life, he is in the construction industry. Not that he’s corrupt, of course, despite his cosy chats with the PM or the fact that he is pushing the Abbott/Turnbull agenda as hard as he can.

Bob can’t even point to the  PM’s shonky Independent Economics report. It was commissioned by the Master Builders Association and is discredited by the Productivity Commission. And even the Master Builders know that you’re barking up the wrong tree.

Wilhelm Harnisch, CEO of Master Builders Australia tells the ABC “those people who are saying this is about dealing with criminality and corruption are missing the point about the ABCC bills.  The matter of criminality and fraud are totally separate from the Australian Building and Construction Commission.”

Talking to ABC’s Greg Jennett, who is typically indulgent, Day explains that the ABCC

“ … should never have been abolished. It was like taking customs officers out of airports and criminal activity skyrocketed. We need to bring them back.”

Except that it didn’t, Bob. Except that it is a totally false analogy. Except that the ABCC reduced productivity and increased workplace accidents and fatalities.

But Bob the builder keeps on bobbing up like a turd in the surf at Bondi. No-one calls him for being a Liberal stooge; a seasoned, self-interested union basher whose toxic scare campaign  and smearing of the construction sector is the last thing any of us need let alone an industry interested in improving its productivity.
 

 

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Since losing the Prime Ministership, Tony Abbott, an MP since 1994, would like to continue to “make a contribution to our public life”. Or so he says. Do we have it in writing?

A born team player, Tony’s organising Tony Abbott Unplugged, The Tour, his own mobile “protect my legacy” election campaign in marginal seats, because no-one officially invited him to take part. Would any sane Liberal apparatchik want him near a voter?  Stop the votes!

Someone should tell Tony that if you can’t make a contribution in twenty-two years, you are wasting your time. And other people’s. But let’s be fair, it’s not as if he contributed nothing.

By most people’s reckoning, Abbott made a negative contribution; a leadership deficit his party is still paying for. The country has yet to recover. Tell him he will go down as a footnote of political history, a human wrecking-ball.

But nobody ever could tell Tony Abbott anything he doesn’t want to hear. And just because he walks on two legs, it doesn’t make him human. Ask Erich Abetz. The android Liberal spear-carrier’s mission is to flatter Abbott by incessantly demanding his hero return to cabinet. Reinforce his delusion of a return to power.

This week, Abetz is detailed to help Abbott “make a contribution” by bagging Turnbull. He dredges up Godwin Grech to remind Fairfax readers that unlike his hero, Turnbull is not just Machiavellian, he lacks both judgement and character.

Voters will make up their own minds. A Reach Tel poll last December found that most of voters in Abbott’s safe Liberal seat of Warringah want him to retire. Abbott’s response was a counter claim, on Sky:

“I’ve had literally thousands and thousands of messages of support and encouragement since mid-September,” 

He’s not mentioning the hate mail. The death stares. Those folk, Bob Ellis says who “vomit at the sight of him”. The list is growing. Abbott’s incessant war of words on his nemesis, the oleaginous poison toad Turnbull have not endeared him to former supporters Former Liberal leaders, advisers and political experts insist Abbott call it quits.

Liberals want to protect a conflicted, divided, party in trouble with ICAC in NSW for concealing the identity of donors, a shifty move which could cost it $4 million in campaign funds unless it dobs in its sponsors.  Luck with that. They fail to see Abbott’s prime ministership as a symptom of their mess. What they do see, however, is that Abbott’s hanging around only to white-ant the current leader and whinge that he should take his place.

Liberals know the damage Tony did last time he tried to be leader. Niki Savva records in The Road to Ruin how Abbott retreated into the PM’s Office, giving extraordinary power to his assistant Peta Credlin, overwhelming her. Credlin coped by obsessing over small details when she could not manage the large.

Part of Abbott’s legacy, his “contribution” is his unconditional support for a woman who enjoyed abusing her power and her staff next to poring over renovations for The Lodge whose budget blew out to $11.61 million dollars, five times the initial estimate causing Malcolm Turnbull to call in the auditors.

Despite the mud-slinging from pro-Abbott quarters and Peta Credlin, Savva’s account is not invention or unsubstantiated rumour or Turnbull’s revenge but testimony from credible sources who suffered the Credlin captivity of the PMO.

Not only did Abbott and Credlin collude to strangle vital communications with MPs, they helped cause policy and management paralysis with their obsession for centralised control and their total lack of trust. They also conspired to wreck people’s lives. Savva records many who were bullied off the job.

Jane MacMillan, a former director of Abbott’s press office, says that

“the dysfunction was hidden in the early days, spoken about in whispers, intimated. But it didn’t take long for the initial courtesies to be done away with and for the dysfunction to surface.”

“The office was regularly held hostage to Peta’s moods. She would disappear, be uncontactable — or, worse — be present to single people out in group settings, and bully them.’’

Staffers, Shane Evans and Fiona Telford also attest to Credlin’s volatility and lack of respect. Tony Abbott aided and abetted such abuses of power by endlessly appeasing Credlin; expecting her to do his job for him.  The Prime Ministership was another job he couldn’t do.

Abbott got into politics after being not that good at anything else. Even a nation largely indifferent to politics could see he wasn’t cut out for PM after his first budget, where he broke all his promises. Someone needs to tell him to go.

But what good what that do?  Clearly Abbott believes he has made a contribution and not just his gifts to our language such as the three word slogan; his suppository of all wisdom or his two kinds of promises, those you hear from his lips and those which are true because he’s put them in writing. It’s casuistry worthy of a Jesuit if only it were worth anything at all. Most of Tony’s words are like that. But that’s not how he sees himself.

You only have to read the narcissist’s latest Quadrant essay modestly entitled Why I was Right about National Security to see that in his mind he was an enormously successful Prime Minister at home and on the international stage with a government whose every action was calculated not for show but to make a difference.

In other words Abbott is a seriously, irredeemably, dangerously self-deluded egomaniac. Or simply full of it. Or both.

Does Australia need further public displays of brown onion-eating? Do Australian Muslims need another dog whistling politician out to whip up a bit of hatred to serve his own ends? Do we need another protector of privilege who will subsidise big business but wage war on the poor? Do we need the architect of disadvantage to crow over how he defunded hospitals and schools to the tune of 80 billion?

Perhaps we do. Perhaps Abbott’s “contribution” is the best thing that could happen to a Turnbull government. After all,  it still follows most of Abbott’s wretchedly ill-devised “reforms.” It continues his hostility to climate or any other science. It reeks of his homophobic mistrust of social progress over marriage equality and his wholesale embrace of an IPA agenda because neither he nor his successor have any worthwhile ideas of their own.

If you need any help with fuel for you campaign bus, Tony, I am sure we could organise a quick whip-round. Abbott stopping the votes on the hustings in the marginals? Abbott reminding everyone that Turnbull’s government is the same python with a different head? Abbott helping the Liberals to a thoroughly well-earned break from power? Bring it on!

 

 

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After six months of mind-numbing indecision and ineptitude, Australia’s incredible shrinking PM is suddenly judged “bold”, “canny” a “man who can transform his prime ministership in one fell swoop.”

Veteran Turnbull groupie, Mark Kenny has a crush on the new Power-Mal which produces a purple patch which owes a bit to the Scottish play and a bit to King Canute with a nod to the valour of the old time Bondi surfer south of the Ocean Outfall Sewer.

“In one fell swoop, the Prime Minister has taken control of a sea of floating imponderables.”

Canberra’s press claque are all over themselves Monday to flatter Captain Malcolm Bligh Turnbull. Malcolm (wedged) in the middle is at last acting like a leader, they rave, yearning for a strong leader to bound through the surf like a bronzed Adonis with a life belt to save us from ourselves and monsters of the deep like Cory Bernardi, who, flushed with terminally endangering Safe Schools is up for more of the same against equal marriage.

Clearly, the Press Gallery forgives the PM for his dodgy right wing speech about our place in our region at the Lowy Institute Wednesday where he forgets to include the Pacific and leaves out all mention of “our dear friend New Guinea” as Julie Bishop refers to the island paradise to our north which minds Manus for us.

Most alarmingly, he insists, in a bit of an Abbott-like rant that Syrian refugees may be ISIS terrorists:

“Recent intelligence indicates ISIL is using the refugee crisis to send operatives into Europe.”

However many points he thinks he is winning from Abbott and the monkey pod room at home, the rest of the world is underwhelmed. Belgian ambassador to Australia, Jean-Luc Bodson, rebukes Turnbull for playing into ISIS propagandists’ hands, ” making a confusion between terrorism and migrants and between terrorism and Islam.”

Abbott, on the other hand, is still looking at himself in the mirror. The former PM has just published a well-timed reminder of his genius as a world statesman in an essay in in Quadrant Sunday celebrating his boat stopping, his disdain for wimpy human rights groups and congratulating himself on the achievements of his two year crack at the top job.

Modestly entitled I was right on national security, Abbott’s essay will be an absolute godsend to any Australian conservative Prime Minister seeking re-election who is in need of a reminder of how his predecessor was so much more than he could ever be.

Turnbull will learn how Abbott “put aside the moral posturing” and got on with the job of “making a difference”, a motive which lay at the heart of everything his government did.

Turnbull, on the other hand, can’t resist a good moral posturing even if he fails to do his homework first. In January, in Washington in his first foreign policy speech, he called for the UN convention on the Law of the Sea to be upheld. The PM was trying to persuade China to behave itself in the South Pacific but the ploy backfired when it was pointed out that the Law of the Sea is one which Australia has flouted over Timor Leste.

This week, 10,000 people demonstrate at the Australian Embassy in Dili Timor-Leste, calling upon Australia to adopt fair and permanent borders in the Timor Sea. Protesters claim East Timor had lost $6.6 billion in oil and gas revenues to Australia under provisional arrangements for resource sharing between the two countries.

John Howard a former Liberal leader, recently canonised St John of the double-cross at a Sydney Liberal anniversary back-slapping back-stabbing dinner featuring an Abbott cheer squad floor show, pulled a swiftie on East Timor according to UN officials and local politicians who accuse Australia of taking advantage of East Timor’s economic and strategic vulnerability in pressing for an early signing of the treaty in 2002.

Since Australia bugged their cabinet rooms in 2004 to take the guess-work out of our diplomacy, East Timorese feel we ripped them off in our oil and gas treaty and demand justice in The Hague. We are, however, under Bishop and Turnbull both agile and innovative in our support of our regional neighbours. We won’t be letting our spy who set up the bugs leave the country.

Currently, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop denies a passport to former ASIS agent, known as Witness K, preventing his giving evidence at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague about an operation to bug East Timor’s cabinet rooms during negotiations with Australia over an oil and gas treaty in 2004.

“It will prejudice Australia’s national security to allow him out of the country” to tell the truth, her office says, – not mentioning it would lead to the repudiation of our 2004 oil and gas treaty.

Turnbull will doubtless have an agile solution handy. After all, he justified his knifing of Abbott as just taking care of business, something he had to do as the servant of the god of better economic management.

A movie could do the trick. The Immigration Department has just completed its $6 million anti-refugee blockbuster, The Journey, which explains why you should not dream of leaving your troubled country for Australia. Film apart, who would want to risk a returned Abbott-style Turnbull government?

This week the PM’s scheming with his new chum the Governor General is all over the media. Turnbull will get rid of the senate cross bench, organise an early election and wedge his rivals, a cunning plan which has the press gallery gobsmacked. The truth is more prosaic.

After six months’ dithering Turnbull is panicked into a high-stakes gamble. After half a year of capitulation to a rabid Liberal right wing our PM is frightened he is being found out to be an imposter.

A new, dramatic role is called for with bold new lines.  Somehow, despite paying a fortune to keep a small army of advisors fed and watered, he embraces “continuity and change” which is ” the most meaningless political slogan we could think of” according to a VEEP writer. Julia Louis-Dreyfus says she is dumbstruck and laughs hysterically at him from the other side of the world.

With continuity and change on his side, Turnbull won’t be letting Abbott kick sand in his face any more. Or suffer George Christensen’s homophobic hi-jacking of the party room. Or stand by while opinion polls confirm what his opponents got right in 2009, he is rubbish at being Liberal leader; a disaster as a Communications Minister let alone a Prime Minister. Above all, don’t let him open his mouth overseas.

Turnbull announces a cunning plan. Recall parliament early. Push for a double dissolution election 3 July. He neglects to tall Scott Morrison, insisting, later, that he was “in the loop”. On Lisa Wilkinson’s Nine Networks’ breakfast television show, it seems that “the loop” is effectively a cabinet by-pass. “A small circle of people” were told, he tells Lisa. Those he trusts.

Perhaps, as with Abbott who also concentrated power narrowly, replacing cabinet with “a small circle” is why we are seeing even more dud decisions recently.

Turnbull rules through a DIY coterie which includes his wife, Lucy, the colourful bean counter Arthur Sinodinos, his assistant and- anyone- but- Pyne Education Minister, Simon Birmingham and of course the Attorney General George Brandy who refused to allow Dreyfus to see his diary because of the unreasonable burden it would place on him and his staff .

In December a tribunal ruled that Brandis was not only not complying with the aim of the Freedom of Information Act, his behaviour was “thwarting the intentions of parliament”, thereby making him uniquely valuable to any cabal dispensing with cabinet government.

It is not known if household pets are permitted to contribute to the proceedings at Salon Turnbull but Arthur Sinodinos, the PM’s numbers man in his coup is threatened with a rolled-up newspaper if he tramps any more ICAC droppings into the house. Labor is asking for Sinodinos to resign over his involvement in the Liberal Free Enterprise Foundation which effectively laundered the identity of donors to the NSW Liberal Party.

Former Abbott political pet, Scott Morrison the boat stopper cum champion Abbott cabinet leaker who is now said to be Treasurer, despite all budget work now being done in Turnbull’s PM&C Office was not only excluded, he was slapped down in two radio interviews which Turnbull subsequently gave.

“I believe that government should look at these issues very carefully, take all of the matters into account, confer confidentially in the cabinet and then, when we make a decision, announce it, rather than providing hints and leaks, and briefs and front running,”

Turnbull says in a clear demonstration that he’s secretly a very tough dude who’s prepared to duke it out with bare knuckles if necessary. He will make foreign policy announcements and not Tony Abbott, who just happens to be in the UK visiting his old pal David Cameron, as former great world leaders do.

World statesman Abbott is able to get on TV with London images of bridges over the Thames and buses behind him claiming that Turnbull is only running an Abbott agenda anyway; a fellow-traveller.

It’s tough but Turnbull goes back on radio to do a Tony slap-down, insisting feebly that the innovation vibe, the amazing deals with media ownership laws — which may well not be passed this year anyway — and his cities policy make this election clearly all about him.

New, improved, with added aggro, Tough-guy Turnbull ‘s warned us and Tone recently that he’ll publicly correct the record when necessary. The electorate readies itself for a campaign with policy by slap-down, an innovative approach to an election nobody wants over an issue few can be bothered by with.  Peta Credlin helpfully comments that it is war between the Abbott and Turnbull camps.

Turnbull’s cunning plans include a few tough patches. He’s had to drop by Abbott knight, Sir Pete Cosgrove’s joint. It does mean swallowing his republicanism, but, heck, a man has to make a stand. Play that ace up his sleeve. Despite a six-month losing streak, he’s really been secretly, political poker-playing, a move or two ahead of the game. If only the same could be said for his new script.

‘The Time for game-playing is ah-over’, declares the great prevaricator, dazzling many by deploying a House of Cards reference to announce his own game plan. The House of Cards Twitter account tweets him back in a digitally disruptive duet between fiction and PM in an ominous pre-election flash of narcissism.

After six months of kow-towing to his troublesome right wing and being pushed around by the homophobes and climate deniers in his own party, the PM will take on a recalcitrant senate cross bench whom he says are obstructing his mission to clean up the construction industry.  He has no economic policy; he has squibbed the much tabled tax reform. Eighty per cent of his policies are Abbott’s.

It is a gusty effort. Now the chips are down, the PM is putting everything on the (new black) of an industrial hammer to crack a walnut. Turnbull’s stagey, “dramatic” decision to con Sir Peter Cosgrove into recalling parliament three weeks early allows the government time to call a double dissolution if the cross bench block his reinstating the ABCC.

Do we need to go back to a John Howard Australian Building and Construction Commission? It’s a bad law which we don’t need that he misrepresents as “a tough new cop on the block.”

The ABCC grants STASI-like powers that deny the right to silence or a lawyer of choice to anyone it chooses to investigate. Despite the coalition’s lies, it is not a cop at all; it has no powers of criminal investigation but it does have the ability to act in the civil jurisdiction to impose massive fines for behaviour it deems unacceptable.

We already have a watchdog on the job that as Paul Bongiorno says “works without denying legal rights we are supposed to value as a free country.”

No real policy. No real motive other than self-preservation for calling an early election over some legislation we don’t want or need. Sounds like one of Abbott’s captain’s calls.”At war” with Abbott, his right wing and with Morrison fit to kill, Turnbull sets up an interminably long election campaign everyone will resent, which he can’t even launch honestly or without dissent.

With apologies to Mark Kenny, the PM is diving head first into a sea of ugly imponderables. What could possibly go wrong?

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The incredible shrinking PM has finally dropped his bundle; lost his nerve. In desperation, after six months of dithering, Malcolm Turnbull has gambled on an early election in July. He claims, with a straight face, that he must resuscitate a Howard-era relic, long dead, buried but not cremated, the ABCC, whose seven years of partisan attacks on unions cost taxpayers $135 million, last time it was inflicted on the construction workforce. He talks over Leigh Sales when she presents government evidence that the ABCC did not result in improved productivity. But there’s more.

Apparently a Registered Organisations Commission is also vital given a fifth of our workforce still in a union workplace.

Only with an industrial relations zombie and union bashing as its centrepiece can his government function as it should. Secretly Mal’s hoping that the senate will be rid of its unrepresentative swill, even though LNP control of the upper house via a double dissolution is far from guaranteed. Malcom game-player declares the ” time for games is over”. He is referring to the senate and also to Abbott and his Monkey Pod opposition.

Turnbull hopes to put a spoke in Abbott’s wheel. The rabid right currently setting his government’s homophobic, fundamentalist agenda can all back off; tighten up and fall in behind. Yet on the day of his big call Abbott is madly claiming it will be an election fought on an Abbott agenda he quickly reinvents to feature refugee turn-backs and free trade agreements but no cuts to health or welfare. He does put in a plug for the ABCC and the ROC.

Turnbull is forced to fire his first big shot at his own side. In the AFR Tuesday, he tweaks his budgie-smuggler’s beak. Abbott is wrong. Look at Turnbull’s fantastic achievements: media law reform, Senate voting reforms, changes to section 46 of the Competition and Consumer Act and last year’s innovation statement. No-one could take this rebuttal seriously.

It’s a wild punt from a man who knows he stands to lose everything; a man whose opinion polls already have him on the skids and whose party red-necks are laughing at his lack of authority over them.

Certainly, he may have seemed to do well out of high risk ventures in the past, as Tony McGrath, the liquidator of HIH alleged in 2004, when naming Turnbull in his inquiry into how FAI came to be so overvalued just before HIH paid $300 million too much for the business.  Then as now Turnbull fought tooth and nail when disaster seemed o be looming, as its seems now.

Let’s just drop the pretence. Malcolm Turnbull doesn’t give a toss about the building industry watchdog but he’ll do anything to be top dog. Desperate to assert his authority over a divided party, damaged by his predecessor’s destabilisation campaign and unable to put together a coherent narrative on tax reform or budget repair, Turnbull needs an early election before his pose as a progressive and effective Liberal leader is revealed to all as a cruel hoax.

After six months Turnbull’s disappointed many Australians’ hopes that he’d be something different, a better PM than the embarrassing incompetent he knifed. Not being Abbott made him popular for a while, but he has failed to manage any greater expectations. His policies are Abbot MKII and his pretensions to be an expert economic leader have been flatly contradicted by his indecision, inertia and death of ideas. A one man leadership debt and deficit on his own, Turnbull has created a policy vacuum his opponents have eagerly filled.

The Turnbull policy vacuum has enabled Labor to defeat the government’s GST plans, at least this time around. Labor has also been able to set out it own policy ideas. It’s a curious form of leadership. Under Turnbull the Liberal Party seems as if it’s in opposition again, chasing Labor initiatives rather than making the running itself. And fobbing us off with promises.

It’s too late to defend inertia by claiming all will be revealed in The Budget. The treasurer’s promises, thought bubbles and retreats so far, inspire no confidence in his grasp of economic policy. Yet Morrison is Turnbull’s appointee.

Making Scott Morrison treasurer may have neutralised a political rival but it’s provided the nation with an incoherent, gibbering economic basket case in return.  Too many of Turnbull’s cabinet choices have been similarly poor decisions. And, now, the relationship between treasurer and PM appears to have broken down irretrievably. Monday, Morrison learns from the media that his budget will be a week earlier; that his PM has decided to go for a double dissolution.

Turnbull’s a captive of his right wing on policy. Now he’s making a bad case out of a bad policy to prove them wrong. The ABCC bill is bad law which under John Howard was a failure which delivered much higher rates of injured workers; higher numbers of fatalities. When Labor gutted the ABCC, productivity soared.

Let’s be clear. The claims being made for the ABCC are a shonky pretext for union bashing. Turnbull is consumed instead by a desperate need to control his own party dissidents. At the core of his campaign is a gamble to win over the right. The right of his party mistrusts Turnbull. It sees him as too soft and too pink to be trusted with the hard right heel of the Liberal Party, the dryer, meaner party of John Howard.

The case for the ABCC is based on lies and hyperbole. Leigh Sales could have reminded the PM of his massive government misinformation campaign in which Nigel Hadgkiss, its Liberal appointed Director of Fair Work Building and Construction (FWBC) falsely claimed there have been 1000 crimes and 948 workplace breaches on building sites.

Under questioning in the senate estimates committee 22 October 2015, Hadgkiss backed off the crimes claim. There were 1000 complaints. Many were trivial. The Director admitted to the senate, complaints could include a drainpipe over someone’s back fence.

They were not crimes nor were there 948 workplace breaches.  All up there were only 36 proceedings brought in 2014/15, of which only 12 were successful. Despite all of this being in the public domain, it still suits the Liberal leaders to repeat this tosh in parliament and the whole stitch-up was faithfully reported as fact in The Australian.

If Turnbull wants to run an election campaign on the ABCC, he could make a start by cleaning up the lies. To reassure us that it’s needed he must justify why the ABCC needs its extraordinary, security agency powers.

Or he could come clean about his motives. This will not be an election about cleaning up the union movement or fixing a hamstrung construction industry and Turnbull knows this. His double dissolution bluff is all about besting Tony Abbott.

So far, on day two of the phoney campaign, Turnbull’s early election gambit, which is based around a pretext based upon a lie, is looking like the rattle of a desperate man.

Australians are being forced to go to the polls early because after six months of indecision, capitulation to conservative forces and a failure to meet any of the hopes placed in him. Turnbull has left himself with no other option. He may say it’s about the ABCC and the need to set his country’s workplaces free, but for Turnbull, as always, it’s all about me.

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