A credibility gap continues to consume politics this week as the chasm between the official and real is stretched ever wider with gob-smacking lies about carbon emissions, an unbelievable tribute to Abbott’s charismatic leadership and the danger of safe schools while Turnbull capitulates to his tin foil hatters thus kissing goodbye all future claim to authority or respect while being forced to concede publicly Tuesday that his Innovation Policy is boring.

The senate continues to behave in free-booting, freewheeling freedom loving ways which confirm why it is an upper house and not a tightly disciplined major party like the Liberals whose divisions threaten to lose it government. Turnbull says he wants to end the circus in the senate with a law which extinguishes minor parties. He is excited by experts which predict that this will give the LNP a much better chance of controlling the senate.

Thanks to a deal between the government and the greens and Nick Xenophon it passes a law which will make it harder for those like Ricky Muir to be elected on only 0.51% of the vote, a law which experts suggest is likely to give the government more chance of controlling both the upper and lower houses.

The legislation passes parliament after a marathon Senate sitting on Friday. Turnbull watchers suggest that the move could pave the way for the federal government to call a July double-dissolution election, clearing out both chambers. Many Greens supporters are displeased with their leader Richard Di Natale whose recent fashion photographic session depicting him in a black top may add to his being re-named The Dark Wiggle.

It is “a great day for democracy”, according to the PM but will it also be a great day for Bob Day who mounts a legal challenge on the somewhat tenuous grounds that 3 million voters will be disenfranchised by the laws because their votes will no longer result in electing political candidates?

Day is also seeking an injunction from the High Court to intervene before the election to decide whether the electoral changes are constitutionally valid.

Family First senator Bob (The builder) Day recruits Liberal Democrats senator David Leyonhjelm who believes that universal gun ownership guarantees public safety as seen in the US. What could possibly go wrong?

Senate drama to one side, at the heart of the week, the national agenda and reflecting some of the deepest issues which beset a beleaguered Turnbull government’s tenuous hold on reality and legitimacy is his government’s Innovation Policy, a failure to inspire or convince which the PM decided to re-present to an underwhelmed Canberra Press Gallery on Tuesday. No-one knows why. Bravely the PM goes to the heart of the problem with a forlorn, final petition to the vast yawning indifference of the assembled Canberra hacks.

“Christopher and I failed to inspire one question about innovation. Is there a question – one more question – if it is on innovation?”  A journalist put up his hand to ask a question about cigarettes. The room breaks up laughing. Turnbull gives up and leaves.

His innovation policy a load of old cobblers, his indecision and uncertainty over election dates, tax policy, senate voting reform or budget plans all equally risible, the briefing’s sole achievement is to confirm the government’s determination to give tax cuts to fat cats.

“This week we’ll be introducing legislation to provide the tax incentives and CGT exemptions, Capital Gains Tax exemptions for investments in early stage start-ups,” Turnbull says. Sadly, no-one can give a toss, except wealthy, experienced investors who stand to gain hundreds of millions of dollars.

On the other hand, the Environment Minister never fails to inspire questions about his innovative take on most things.

February is reported to be hotter than ever; a shocking 1.35 per cent above average but Australia’s World’s Best Minister, Greg Hunt, is not having an isobar of any suggestion that Australia is any part of the problem.  Instead, Hunt claims that Australia’s emissions peaked 10 years ago.

It must just be a 21st century climate vibe thing, the Environment Minister is picking up because Hunt’s view, like his Direct Action policy has no foundation in reality whatsoever. Hugh Grossman, Executive Director of Reputex, says his company’s analysis of the government’s own data shows Australia’s emissions will continue to grow with “no peak in sight”.  Australia’s growth rate will be among the highest of all developed countries.

“Extraordinary comments” says  Climate Institute CEO, John Connor, who also points to “the enormous credibility gap in the government’s current policies.”  Equally extraordinary is Billson’s fulsome tribute to his leader.

“The wisdom, the insight, the personal feng shui, (literally wind and water)” Billson fawns this week in a valedictory surely a golden grovel benchmark even for him. But just who is his personal guru, his Great Harmoniser?

Billson’s high praise is for his former PM Tony Abbott, now Monkey Pod faction Captain and leader of the Abbott government in exile, a gang of four whose latest move to destabilise Malcolm Turnbull sees him sign a petition against Safe Schools, an initiative of his own brief, unsafe government. Now Abbott bitterly opposes Safe Schools because “new material has come to light” and it gives him a chance for revenge on Turnbull. He signs Christensen’s petition to reject the Safe Schools’ review.

Gorgeous George Christensen, Australian Christian Lobby stooge continues his homophobic attack on Safe Schools with allegations of paedophilia. Urged on by Abbott, Christensen dismisses the government’s inquiry as a joke. Gorgeous is happy to do the bidding of the ACL, which requires children to be bullied at school because of their gender identity or uncertainty or just because they are children.

By Friday, Turnbull’s government announces it will gut the Safe Schools programme and impose restrictions which are likely to scupper the whole programme. These including limiting it to secondary students and only those who have their parents’ permission, the parent body’s permission. A delighted Christensen is the voice of adult, reasonable, fundamentalist, homophobic government saying:

“We’re not going to have students exposed to websites that take them off to adult shops or to groups that are running sex toy workshops for youth and that sort of thing. That’s got no place in this program.”

In other words, whatever it may reveal of his own preoccupations, Christensen’s objection has nothing to do with the programme. It is an open challenge to Turnbull’s authority. Obligingly, the PM caves in; something Abbott managed to avoid on this very same but not quite same-sex issue.

When a few right wing tossers last got hot and flustered about Safe Schools in the Abbott government party room, their ranting was hosed down by Christopher Pyne who said the government “did not, as a rule, defund programmes which were already running.”  This time, however, the homophobic, fundamentalist push has Tony’s signature on their petition. The non-sniper’s moniker makes all the difference.

Out to wedge his PM as a closet Marxist, Abbott has now succeeded in making Turnbull even further beholden to the right wing. Turnbull’s government will continue to be fearlessly innovative and agile in education or any other policy area it may have unless any right wing nut job or pal of Tony Abbott’s objects and organises a petition. Then it will be even more benighted than its predecessor. Nowhere is this better seen than on the issue of marriage equality where it is about to do nothing.

Unable to agree on public funding or granting exemptions from anti-discrimination laws, a deeply divided Turnbull  government is about to renege on its promise to reveal the fine print in its planned marriage equality plebiscite before the next election.

Being unable to keep Abbott’s dodgy plebiscite promise may even amount to a bizarre keeping of faith with the great communicator. The former PM stacked caucus with conservative Nationals and called for a plebiscite as a cunning diversion. Doing nothing was always where his  duck-shoving of responsibility was headed anyway.

Ducking for cover, Deputy dog, Barnaby Joyce, is baying at the moon and chasing parked tractors over the prospect of a dog-fight with Independent Tony Windsor for his seat of New England. He may be the first sitting deputy PM in Australian political history to lose his seat. Newspoll suggests a two-dog swing against the Nationals leader of 16 percentage points.

A recent Newspoll, for The Australian, suggests Joyce is neck-and-neck with Windsor on the primary vote but the independent former MP would win back the seat by 52 per cent to 48 per cent based on preference flows.

A close contest at home may prevent Joyce from dogging his pal Mal on the campaign trail. Whilst some may say this may be a good thing, a solo tour of duty may not flatter Turnbull, especially if his campaign is a repeat of the dog’s breakfast he is making of tax reform, budget strategy or even leading his party.  What is certain is that junkyard dog Abbott will be up on his hind legs to assist his PM in deputy dog’s absence with his non-sniping, non-wrecking, non- undermining vendetta against Turnbull for deposing him.

Far from chastened by his recent rebuke from his master, over when submarines could and should be built, Tony Abbott recently made mention of Malcolm Turnbull’s name at a Balgowlah RSL in the Warringah electorate Sunday only to draw jeers. Almost straight-faced, Abbott was explaining how important it was for his audience to do all they could, as he himself is, to see that Malcolm Turnbull wins the election.

Endorse the Turnbull government. This is doubtless what Abbot was doing when he attacked Labor over what he termed the workers’ tax for increased excise on tobacco. It looks as if LNP budget will have an increase in tax on tobacco.

Labor’s Anthony Albanese believes the Liberal Party is like Sharknado, a film in which a freak hurricane swamps Los Angeles, and nature’s deadliest killer rules sea, land, and air as thousands of sharks terrorise a sodden populace.

Turnbull would be helped if he actually had an election platform according to one senior Liberal Party figure. Or is he were not a failure as a Prime Minister. “This talk about an early election,” Jeff Kennett tells 2UE, “is an indication sadly that the government does not have a plan for the future of the country, and they are trying, I think, to use this talk of a double dissolution, an early election, simply to cover up their own failings.”

One of these failings is Scott Morrison whose grasp of his own party’s policy appears tenuous at best.

“What this government is doing through changes to the tax system is backing in Australians who we know will innovate and create the growth and therefore the jobs…”

He shouts as if volume will compensate for his deficit of understanding, a Blimp-like caricature shouting at foreigners to improve their understanding of his language.

“The plan on this side of the house is to reduce the tax burden on investment. That is the key ingredient to support the transition in our economy.” If only it were that simple. If only there were signs of transition and not the opposite.

Despite the empty rhetoric, despite all the scandal, division, discontent and negative publicity, the Government’s two-party preferred lead is extending to 53-47 it is announced Monday in a Fairfax-Ipsos Poll. Bob Ellis and others dispute the methodology and the timing of any poll on a long weekend but what is clear is the rapid rate of decline in Malcolm Turnbull’s popularity which is down 15 percentage points to 55% net since its high of 69 last November.

Yet NSW pre-selection news bears little to reassure nervous LNP punters as the party without factions, in Turnbull’s eyes, declares factional war on itself.

Tony Abbott’s ideological love mother Bronwyn Bishop is not feeling the love from Tony as pre-selection turns ugly in her NSW seat of McKellar. Niki Savva claims the PMO made Bronwyn Bishop delay apologising for her helicopter ride.

Monday, Bishop issues a statement that she has nothing further to add, effectively endorsing Savva’s version of events. Abbott is said to be enraged. He has endorsed a candidate to run against Bishop in McKellar. His campaign manager Walter Villatora was the first to nominate against Bronnie.

Onions are placed in protective custody across the nation, Monday 14 March but the anniversary of Tony Abbott’s terror attack on an innocent unarmed onion in Tasmania goes without incident.

When asked to nominate his achievements after two years in government, the naturally reticent former Rhodes Scholar modestly leaves out onion eating in favour of stopping the boats and the TPP. Sadly, the boats stopped under Rudd’s announcement in 2013 and the TPP is probably worth half of bugger all.

World Bank, staff recently produces a study finding the Trans-Pacific Partnership would boost Australia’s economy by a whopping 0.7 per cent by 2030. On the other hand, it will give multinational companies a lawful excuse to contest any environmental laws, for example, or other national legislation which might come between them and their capacity to make a profit.

Little profit seems to have been gained by Labor’s leader however. Tuesday Bill Shorten gives a competent and convincing speech to the Press Club in which he largely wasted his breath outlining Labor’s policies and answering a few half-arsed questions from Leigh Sales about Labor accepting fees from criminal unionists on ABC’s 7:30 Report. Shorten’s speech is largely ignored by much of the media afterwards yet

“I thought when Malcolm – or Mr Turnbull – took over, while it would be harder for me, we’d take politics to a better place,” Shorten says. “He just hasn’t. But we have. We think that we’re talking about ideas which are relevant to the social and economic future of Australia.” This does not include the effects test.

Section 46 should prohibit conduct by firms with substantial market power that has the purpose, effect or likely effect of substantially lessening competition, consistent with other prohibitions in the competition law.

Aimed at preventing big firms from misusing their market power, such a test has been popular with National politicians for decades and is a flip flop for Turnbull who opposed it six months ago. Its adoption as policy splits the coalition and is opposed by Labor which describes the effects test as a lawyer’s picnic. Amazingly, Labor proposes alternative legislation making it easier to bring litigation.

In the meantime, the battle for market share should not obscure the battle of ordinary Australian working families to afford leave to have a baby.  New parents in low-paid jobs stand to be $10,500 worse off under a Turnbull government paid parental leave plan intended as a compromise on cuts proposed by Tony Abbott, according to new university research.

The research, commissioned by women’s group Fair Agenda and conducted by the University of Sydney’s Women and Work Research Group, shows mothers who work in healthcare, teaching and retail could lose between $3942 and $10,512 under the compromise policy.  It is revealing indication of the government’s priorities even if its plans, its policies and its leader’s authority look increasingly conflicted and compromised.

 

 

 

 

 

Double D is all the buzz in Canberra this week as a Malcolm Turnbull shrewdly deflect a bit of media attention away from Niki Savva, The Trump Show or Rupert and Gerry’s nuptials. The PM looks exhausted, uneasy. Is he well? Has he been reading something which disagrees with him? “Government poll plunge, says a headline: voters drift away in disappointment”. Surely not?

The Pell show, whose brilliant superstar never knew what was going on either, or could not recall; a natural leader who asked no questions and who took neither initiative nor responsibility to protect anyone but himself was always going to be a hard act to follow.

Big Mal doubles down.  He coyly hints at early July, using the words “working towards”. It is a week of such nebulous certainties from a government of definite maybes. Turnbull’s drawn, weary face increasingly betrays his hesitance, his indecision and timidity. As PM he is our most brilliant ditherer. When reporters bravely question the uncertainty, the unwillingness to rule out idle speculation, the indecision he just says bafflingly:

“It’s a great story.”

No indecision, whatsoever, is shown by Victorian Liberal President Michael Kroger, however, who leaps straight into bed with the Greens. Liberals could enter a “loose arrangement” with the Greens ahead of the forthcoming federal election, he says adding the Greens are “not the nutters they used to be”. Say what you like about his bedside manner, at least he’s not shilly-shallying when picking his date.

31 different election dates have now been offered by a government which came to power promising clarity, economic leadership and adult government. Russell Broadbent calls a 2 July election date “the longest suicide note since the Roman Empire”. He’s lost his marginal Victorian seat twice and sees “only negatives from a campaign that long”. But the hares are already away.

An adult Peter Dutton jumps the gun to tell ABC radio listeners Labor will raise rents, lower prices, “bring the economy to a shuddering halt. The stock market will crash”.  Dutton is immediately accused of channelling Tony Abbott leader of the Monkey Pod faction who continues to swear he is doing everything he can to see that a Turnbull government is re-elected despite all evidence to the contrary.

Could it be, as Niki Savva warns, Abbott is back to what he does best: wrecking governments? Or is he, as Peter Reith contends, hell-bent on bringing down Turnbull at any cost?  Both of these notions have a grain of truth in them but the blame game is always a trap if only because of its false assumptions. Let us not forget that Abbott’s bad policies ultimately brought him down.

Turnbull has inherited most of his predecessor’s bad policy baggage and he’s captive to the hard right. Even without Abbott’s destabilisation campaign, Turnbull is batting on a sticky wicket. Even if he had the world’s best cabinet or party room, he would still be lumbered by unpopular and unworkable policies on climate, marriage equality and defence binge-spending. Adding or perhaps multiplying these vulnerabilities are his lack of any economic plan, Budget plan or taxation policy. Now factor in his poor decision-making.

Turnbull’s self-sabotage tops any list of threats. If Abbott’s monkey pod yahoos are aiming to wreck the joint, the PM is already doing some useful self-demolition on his own. What’s the story? Where is his narrative or his strategy? Turnbull the great communicator remains mute; so conflicted on what he stands for that trivial speculation about the date of the election eclipses all else. He is shaping to take the record as Prime Minster who spent longest as a man in search of a plan – any plan.

Turnbull is putting undue pressure on Unicorn Morrison and his rookie team with a 3 July election. Chances of embarrassing errors increase as the tight budget deadline is brought forward even a week.

His slogan about the need to bust union corruption and power is a weak case for the ABCC and an unlikely election winner in the context of news of ANZ rate rigging or revelations that the Commonwealth Bank’s government-subsidised health insurance arm has scammed policy holders including forcing some doctors to alter their diagnoses to avoid payouts to the sick and vulnerable.

CFMEU secretary Dave Noonan even cites Dyson Heydon against bringing back the ABCC. “Even the Heydon Commission Final Report points to the conclusions of the 2014 Productivity Commission Report which says there is no credible evidence that the ABCC regime created a resurgence in construction productivity and that its removal has had a negative effect.”

Although he talks as if we can all bank on bucket loads of improved productivity because the economy is “transitioning”, Scott Morrison shows he still has no clue what he is doing or how the economy works, while Turnbull appears to be “doing him slowly” as Keating put it.

Will the PM beat the Abbott and Hockey Budget Show ratings by bribing our higher earners with tax refunds in an economically unwise move which none of us can afford? Will he tinker with super? Will he fudge the budget with income from legislation yet to pass the senate? Nobody is talking.

At least it gives reporters another chance to get their mouths around the words double dissolution, a delicious attention-getting confection which few could ever explain. Experts differ on whether it will confer the government control over a new senate. What is certain is that haste increases the risk of error.

Rushed decisions are statistically guaranteed to succeed better on average than no decisions, Turnbull must be thinking. Bugger tip-toeing around business and investor confidence. Optimism. Positivity. Taking risks, he drones on. No-one asks him why Tony’s Tradies” magic bullet in the last Abbott budget, set to “turbo-charge the economy,” or so we were assured, was a flop according to a recent report. Was it simply another quick-fix?

The small business package, a mere $5.5 billion over four years, was to be a centrepiece of the Abbott government’s re-election plans. Boost the economy and create jobs, Hockey boosted in a slogan that his successor Unicorn Morrison now applies to everything including breathing and passing wind.

There is no boost. Economist Saul Eslake says that car and retail sales may have risen slightly over a couple of months but nothing was sustained. Less clear is why anyone ever expected it to. No reason was ever given. Perhaps it was part of the magical thinking or wilful self-delusion of the trickle-down theory. Tradies with new utes would immediately burn rubber down to the Centrelink to hire new workers.

In the real world, IMF economists argue that the same investment in pensions, in improving the bottom ten per cent of income-earners’ spending power would be a real boost; stimulate economic activity and dampen galloping inequality. Yet as our Iranian overture this week clearly shows, reality and the Turnbull government are often estranged.

One of the week’s most unreal achievements in political boosterism is news from Julie Bishop that Australia could be on the verge of an Iran asylum-seeker deal, a wondrous tribute to our Foreign Minister’s diplomacy and tact and a great help to a PM dithering over an election date.

All 9000 of our Iranian prisoners are to be forcibly repatriated. Iran is on the verge of becoming really safe for dissidents and minorities, it is thought, although DFAT retains its website warning:

“The Australian Government remains deeply concerned about the human rights situation in Iran, including the use of capital punishment, in particular for juvenile offenders; violations of political and media freedoms; and discrimination against religious and ethnic minorities.”

DFAT cites people smuggling, terrorism, regional issues and human rights as issues of importance to Australia’s relationship with Iran. Clearly nothing to see here.

Champagne corks are on the verge of popping when the Iranian Ambassador pulls the rug. Luckily Peter Dutton is able to confirm that we still have two former detainees in Cambodia. At $55 million he adds, the plan is working, a prudent investment of $27.5 million per person which the remaining 2000 people now in their third year of indefinite detention on Manus and Nauru look forward to at least the same amount being spent on them. Those resettled on Manus receive $50 per week allowance and must pay for their own medicine.

Is it a flip flop or just another Turnbull government flop? Just how did The West Australian come to print such a piece? It claimed talks on repatriation, a long-running point of contention between the two countries were well-advanced and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop was hopeful of a deal next week. Was it a pressure tactic gone horribly wrong? Surely Peta Credlin is not still leaking against Bishop?

Some governments would believe they owed someone at least an explanation but Turnbull regime is just as preoccupied with keeping things secret as its predecessor. Nothing to see here.

Australians are quietly, firmly, pushed away from better security and intelligence oversight. Senator David Johnson tells Labor that John Faulkner’s private member’s bill to improve oversight of the joint committee on security and intelligence will be refused because the situation does not require fixing. It is the first Labor hears of the change of plan.

For new JCIS chair, Andrew Nikolic, since we are at war with ISIS, the public has no right to know anyway. Under its new chair the committee will become a rubber stamp. Turnbull’s government is rejecting improved oversight out of hand. Any supervision now relies on a government appointed overseer and a monitor it tried to do away with in 2014. it could have been worse. They could have called in the IPA. The agile IPA is called in to help the ABC decide its exciting new future.

Those who value what independence is left in the ABC will be alarmed that under its new head, Michelle Guthrie, a Turnbull appointee, the ABC invites the right wing IPA which holds that the broadcaster should be privatised. At least their views are on public record.

“Only privatising the ABC will resolve the public policy failure that sees more than $1bn of taxpayers’ money annually spent campaigning for left wing causes.”

Public policy is not about to fail if Alan Tudge can do anything about it. The newly sworn in Social Services Minister who replaces an unfortunate but enterprising and pro-Chinese Stuart Robert is keen to ensure saving money on welfare while splurging on contractors who scan social media as Centrelink changes its role from support to surveillance agency.

When Australians get to see a budget it will be interesting, once again to note how many billions the government is keen to recover from welfare fraud. Last budget listed over a billion dollars. Less conspicuous will be the cost incurred hiring contractors to catch the unwary fraudsters who may unwittingly divulge income or a change in marital status they have not reported to Centrelink.

Finally, showing that its heart is in the right place, politicians entitlements have been reviewed by the  Expenditure Review Committee which recommends no changes. In 2015-2016 our politicians are spending $506m just on entitlements. At $2.2m per MP, this may sound generous to the layman but just imagine where we’d all be without the review. Now we know we are getting a quality product, we can sit back and enjoy the show. After all, we are all paying for it in the end, anyway.

 

Former Peter Costello staffer, political commentator, veteran Canberra journalist Nikki Savva’s book The Road to Ruin, How Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin destroyed their own government is a  carefully substantiated examination of the disastrous consequences of Tony Abbott’s surrender of his Prime Ministerial authority to his political dominatrix, his high-handed Chief of Staff, Peta Credlin.

By patiently interviewing an abundance of MPs, former staff, friends and other key players who were keen to place themselves on record, Savva documents Abbott’s abdication. He was a Prime Minister who gave up power the moment he won office. Failing to set up the right structures, personnel or processes to run a government he left it all to Peta.

Lacking any real qualification or personal attribute to be a Prime Minister, Abbott allowed his power-hungry, megalomaniacal adviser to do his job for him. It was an arrangement that suited both of them nearly two years.

After his first leadership spill where 39 MPs preferred an empty chair to their current PM; the his ‘near-death experience’ Simpkins and Randall, told Abbott MPs hated Credlin. She had to go. “Ah, mate, I can’t go there”, he replied.

Abbott indulged Credlin’s power tripping, tantrums, abuse of staff and due process at the expense of everything else, party, people and ultimately his own prime ministership. He ignored all warnings. He sided with her.

Victims of a Credlin tongue-lashing who complained ended up apologising to Peta who had to be appeased at all cost. Or simply left like Fiona Telford, after learning she was a ‘fucking useless bitch .. You don’t fucking know anything.’

Aided and abetted by a weak, inept boss whose co-dependency she nurtured, Credlin’s abuse of her position proved boundless. She even came to announce policy positions off her own bat, having bypassed such non-entities as press secretaries or prime ministers. She had the power of life and death, over staffers’ careers and aspired to the same with government ministers. Credlin ‘s Prime Minister’s Office became her court. You kept favour to keep your job.

Of course political disasters are never so simple. Savva is too much a creature of the right herself to allow that bad policies played a role in Abbott’s downfall, too. Savva may be brilliantly attuned to individuals within the Liberal machine but she is tone deaf to is slavish adherence to IPA inspired neo-con policy which sought to punish the poor that the wealthy might enjoy further tax cuts or the policy dictated by big business, especially mining and coal-powered energy. None of these helped Abbott’s record unpopularity with voters.

Nor did Abbott’s ministry exactly distinguish itself by its capability, but, apart from agreeing that Joe had to go, Savva is too blinkered by her Liberal affiliations to allow that other underperforming Liberal politicians such as Christopher Pyne and his botched Higher Education reforms helped Abbott undo his government.

Pro-Liberal bias aside, however, Savva makes a major contribution to Liberal political history at a time when no-one else is prepared to tell the truth. Is the rest of the Canberra press gallery too busy serving the interests of its media proprietors? Savva has the courage and the sources to create a powerful and damning critique of Abbott and his Chief of staff which helps explain the disastrous aberration in national politics that was the Abbott petticoat government.

For her pains, Savva has copped a lot of flak from those whose interests she attacks even if much of the attack is cheap, or wilfully misreads and misrepresents her work. One such howl from the affronted or hurt by the truth on the right is that the book is unsourced, salacious scuttlebutt. It is not.

On the contrary, Savva’s capacity to include first hand testimony, often of the lowly staffers, is one of her book’s strengths. When “megalomania kicked in”, we hear that impression first-hand. When Abbott canvasses Warren Entsch’s support we hear him tell his PM that he was “as opposition leader, he was a bloody disaster.”

Liberal MP Alex Somlyay tells Abbott that “goal kickers not head kickers” win games. “Yeah, mate, but I love kicking heads,” Abbott replies. Therein, Savva notes, lay the problem.

Protecting her sources meant that Savva could not consult Abbott or Credlin. Both complain loudly now. It is a disingenuous slur on her objectivity. What they mean is clear. Heads could have been kicked. Moreover, neither the former PM nor his former chief of staff lack access to the media. Credlin cultivated reporters.

Abbott ignored his colleagues, his party and its representative processes while abrogating power to his own office. Yet Credlin’s power trip went further. Within the PM’s office there was no division of responsibilities, there was a takeover.

Political advisers, policy advisers, administrative staff, decorators, even menu-planners saw Credlin take over. Then she took over the press secretaries’ jobs, too. Cabinet ministers had no access; their calls or emails to the PM’s office were ignored. Not only did it cause MPs’ resentment, it crippled government.

Credlin’s megalomania was as self-destructive as it was limitless. Abuse of a representative system to one side, her centralised chokehold on everything created an impossible workload; a command and control centre where nothing got done. Workflow slowed to glacial. Policy papers languished weeks in her in tray while she pored over plans for decorating The Lodge or seating plans at a dinner function.

Abbott and Credlin appear as a co-dependent pair of pathological liars and bullies trapped in a “Beelzebub’s bubble” of delusions of grandeur and lies. Their bubble remains un-pricked. Far from disgraced by Savva’s revelations, the pair today maintain they were betrayed by Bishop and Morrison. They were on the right path. Their record stands.  Their colleagues’ report, however, attests to a deep-seated corruption.

Along with Abbott’s wilful self-deception and fatal isolation from reality a rottenness was at his government’s core; a repudiation of its contract to act in good faith on behalf of the Australian people. Lies were its currency du jour while relationships degenerated into petty power plays based often on little more than petty jealousy or raging paranoia.

A rampant, mutual mistrust led to further double dealing and deceit to disempower rivals and to neutralise all threats. Credlin’s PMO would cynically and wilfully mislead outsiders. Julie Bishop was leaked against as were others perceived as rivals. Turnbull was set up to appear weak on defence. Canberra veteran, Laurie Oakes supports Savva who reports:

“I would check things with Abbott’s office and be misled. One press officer even boasted openly about fooling members of the press gallery.”

Telling truth to power is never easy. The forces supporting conservative politics in Australia are legion. Savva has been howled down by many on the right as peddling unsourced hearsay, idle gossip or muck-raking or sexist. Abbott’s publisher Louise Adler calls it a “self-serving revenge tale”.

The Road to Ruin is none of these things. For those who would simply read it, Savva is attempting to put the record straight. Her use of reputable primary sources sustains a compelling narrative and analysis albeit from a conservative perspective.

Abbott’s Liberal Party coalition came to power quite unprepared and unfit for the job. Elected less on policy than because they were not Labor, but with the noose of Abbott’s rash promise of “no cuts” like a noose over them, the Liberals in government were headed by a PM unable to move much beyond his sloganeering of opposition. He and Credlin retreated into their bubble determined to divide and conquer. In eighteen months it all fell apart. 39 MPs voted against him. Abbott promised changes he could never make. Good government, he said. Six months later, he was gone.

Good government required a leader who was informed, responsive to events, a PM who had a clear policy agenda and who took and sought advice from his colleagues. Instead, Abbott withdrew into his Chief of staff’s cocoon, engaged by little beyond flag-festooned national security scare campaigns, publicity stunts and stitching up his enemies. Prince Phillip’s knighthood and his other disastrous “captain’s calls” showed a costly bad judgement for which Savva suggests, he may not be solely to blame.

MPs quickly came to see they were not heeded and resented it. Above all Abbott’s other limitations, his lack of interest in economics, his impatience with detail, his tendency to shoot from the lip, his inept bungling of even minor issues as same sex marriage policy was his failure to heed good advice.

The Road to Ruin shows Abbott’s utter dependence on his adviser. Credlin encouraged him to believe she was indispensable. She exploited her position to control him. She openly declared he could not function without her. He seems to have believed her. The delusion betrayed them both.

Savva details how Peta Credlin’s abrasive, controlling personality and her domination of Abbott led her to assert a stranglehold over communications and vital decision-making in the PMO. Rather than protect him, as she claims, however, his Chief of Staff’s intervention exposed Tony Abbott to criticism, complaint even ridicule.

The command and control centralisation rankled. Some called the PM’s office The Kremlin. Even the Foreign Minister’s travel plans had to wait on his office’s approval, approval often delayed. Credlin also alienated Abbott’s colleagues, by treating them to displays of withering contempt.

Credlin summoned MPs after a bad day in parliament to rebuke them “why am I the only fucking person who can get things done around here?” It was a favourite Credlin theme. Savva details a dysfunctional PMO, which Credlin made into a toxic workplace in which staff were not only subject to unreasonable demands but who suffered terrible bullying.

Credlin sweated the small stuff because she was overwhelmed by the big. Yet she could monster others for their perceived failings. She was keen to eliminate female rivals including Abbott’s wife, Margie. “If you get any requests for briefings for Margie’s ladies’ lunches, it’s not going to happen,” she told a staffer, furious that Margie had been briefed on the entitlements and expectations of a PM’s wife. Credlin expressly forbade this. Why?

And where was Margie’s husband, Tony, when Credlin created this purdah for his wife? Complicit? Overruled? It seems he abdicated early as a PM and as a husband and father. His Jesuitical justification of his passivity only digs him in deeper. Policy-makers, such as himself were a breed apart, whose family duties were, he said: “Less to be role models as spouses and parents than to build the best possible conditions for families to flourish.”

When he needed to stand up for himself against Credlin, Abbott capitulated. But he had excuses. As the father of three daughters, he explained to staffer James Boyce, a bloke is wise to back off from an irrational female.

“He always found it was best not to fight back … better to accept what they were saying, apologise, then deal with the issue when things were calmer.”

Margie Abbott was regularly excluded from her own show; events which were her prerogative, as the Prime Minister’s wife, to attend. MPs out of favour were undermined; leaked against and manipulated.  So detailed were the leaks of her profligate expenses that Bronwyn Bishop says she knows they could only have come from one place.

Bishop continued believing that she had Tony Abbott’s support up until one hour before he announced her resignation. Media were briefed that once again, Abbott had ignored Credlin’s advice. Savva notes ironically that it is “funny that at the scene of every disaster it was made known that the chief of staff had nothing to do with it”.

MPs such as Greg Hunt who contested her will were subject to screaming matches. Hunt prevented her effective veto of the Climate Change Authority by standing his ground and citing the Westminster system to claim his authority as a government minister superior to any chief of staff.  Many, however, like adviser Jane Macmillan, were forced to leave, their careers in ruins, their confidence in tatters. The Credlin who boasted openly that Abbott could not do his job without her, helped drive a lot of female staffers to resign.

Much has been made of Credlin’s Svengali-like skill at moulding minding Abbott into an election winner and not all of it by Credlin herself. In a reverse take on Pygmalion, Abbott became a statue in a successful if robotic policy-free, scare-mongering election campaign. Abbott was OK if he could be made to stick to his script, a step he forgot in his SBS interview on the eve of electoral victory in which he wildly declared no cuts to anything.

Abbott’s SBS declaration undid his credibility and ruined any later chances of success as he struggled ineptly to cut government expenditure in line with his dry, IPA economic agenda.  Savva provides a clear case that most of the fatal errors in his government were committed in the first few weeks of office.

A loose cannon took charge of another loose cannon, in an erratic petty tyranny which exalted the power of the Prime Minister’s Office at the expense of effective, representative, policy-based government. Along with countless accounts of Credlin bullying MPs, Savva’s story records shocking examples of the PM’s capitulation to his advisor while she consistently over-reached her authority. Who was running the country?

By 27 November 2014, Credlin is able to inform the media that the GP co-payment is dead before even telling Abbott let alone any of his policy advisors. Abbott’s code for this was ‘an unauthorised briefing’ which was “code for a complete cock-up” by his office beginning with his chief of staff.  The PMO tail was wagging the junkyard dog.

In abrogating power to her office, moreover, Abbott and Credlin created a type of paralysis in which decisions were delayed or made without due consideration. It was a recipe for disaster which still haunts Liberal proceedings. Old habits die hard.

The Road to Ruin is a complex and alarming story of a Prime Minister who surrenders his authority to his erratic chief advisor while defending her from all criticism and appeasing her will on key decisions, a perverse loyalty and protectiveness which confounds and alienates his colleagues. It raises profound questions about Abbott’s capacity to assert his personal authority let alone exercise any effective Prime Ministerial leadership.

MPs found access to their PM blocked by his controlling Chief of Staff. Even writing Abbott a note was forbidden. All “paper”, an early Credlin directive states, must come to the PMO and not to the PM himself.

The more the flow was channelled into her office, however, the less she could deal with. MPs found their submissions ignored, delayed or summarily rejected.

Credlin’s obsession with petty detail at the expense of policy or any bigger picture, her temperamental outbursts are attested to by a series of political figures who witnessed or who suffered her tongue-lashing and cruel power plays.

The Road to Ruin is a compelling but disturbing portrait of a Prime Minister’s Office which usurped its advisory role.  Abbott encouraged his office to assume executive responsibilities and powers well beyond its proper role or its administrative capacity. It was a fatal over-reach, just as Abbott himself on being elected by accident and against all expectations Prime Minister quickly found himself imprisoned in a role vastly beyond his capabilities.

Beyond Savva’s portrait of a pathological PM’s Office, however, lies a Liberal Party in crisis. It has its rich and powerful friends in business and in the media who give it every advantage in gaining office. When it gains power, however, it is overwhelmed by its opportunities.

Abbott’s way of coping with a job well beyond him was to retreat into a type of centralised autocratic command centre and try to bluff his way through which did nothing to resolve any of the complexities of negotiating the competing demands and managing the conflicting interests that lie at the heart of any successful representative government.

His evasion of responsible leadership has not helped the Liberals develop adequate responses to challenging circumstances, including an economy which is stalling in a world which appears headed for recession.   Yet he, alone is not to blame. To read Road to Ruin as a scapegoating of Abbott and Credlin to boost the glorious triumph of Turnbull is to mistake symptom and cause.

The ill-fated two years of the Credlin captivity are but one symptom of a greater malaise in Liberal politics which finds itself now seeking re-election with neither policy nor past success to commend it. Pinning hopes on a presidential Turnbull, a PM who has yet to show he can organise a cup of tea would be to merely repeat and compound the Abbott error.

 

 

The week starts badly for evidence-based, people respecting government. Essential publishes a 50 50 poll result. Newspoll can no longer be so easily dismissed. Labor is up to 38% of the primary vote. Gone is the Coalition’s lead.

Health overtakes economic management as biggest single issue on voters’ minds just as ScoMo tells states to find the $80 billion his government cut from schools and hospitals, a view which his PM undercuts with covert patching up .

Leadership and coherent policy have collapsed in camp Turnbull . It is an irresistible opportunity for Abbott to hijack his PM’s agenda. The world is his onion.

“Banzai” screams Tony Abbott, adding a Nippon vibe to an otherwise tricky Liberal party room, Tuesday. Members snigger at him over Nikki Savva’s recently published expose of his “consuming obsession” with Peta Credlin and his politically suicidal decision to set up a Credlin shogunate above his prime ministership.

Twitter is all lit up with the sharing of favourite excerpts. The situation begs for a distraction and Abbott is up for a Kamikaze moment.

Freshly returned from Japan where he shirt-fronts China for bullying its neighbours, our self-appointed Foreign Minister claims our nation’s values are identical to Japanese, especially when buying their submarines via competitive evaluation or not getting stuck with a dud; a locally built barbed-wire canoe.

As ever Abbott-san is a true son of Nippon; a model of refined, studied, evasive understatement, right up to his final act of ritual political disembowelment.

“Banzai”, he shouts, lobbing policy Molotov cocktails into the Liberal Party’s campaign gunpowder barrel. Publicly, he rams his 2014 budget down his leader’s silver gullet, screaming it is time “for the leadership to take on the savings challenge again”. Four MPs pipe up in support of Abbott-san.

Explosions reverberate throughout the week, helping bring government to peak excitement. There has never been a better time to be an Australian Abbott biographer.  Abbott finds time to condemn Safe Schools for “social engineering”, although it was his own government’s initiative. Yet he has no time for Nikki Savva’s new book which holds that his own compact with Peta Credlin destroyed his government.

“I’m not going to rake over old coals, I’m not going to dwell on the past,” he says. Yet his actions prove he is incapable of anything else. He has been doing little else since Turnbull’s coup against him. Now nothing else is left him but resentment, revenge and massive self-destruction.

Abbott’s explosive devices may destroy his party’s chances in the next election but he’s “hell-bent on revenge and vindication”, sources say. He openly declares war on Malcolm who poses in the middle.

Cheering on the budgie smuggler is a right wing Risorgimento of assorted Monkey Pod nut-jobs, tea-potters, rent-seekers, climate change deniers and other sundry sore losers of the Abbott faction including Kevin Andrews, one of the few lucky enough to have had access to classified draft white papers on defence.

Abbott wants tax cuts AND spending cuts and a defence policy, like he and former Defence Minister Kevin Andrews  cooked up, which features new submarines before they can be built. He is, he says flabbergasted at hint of a more realistic timeline in Marise Payne’s White Paper.

Abbott repeats the word “flabbergasted” Rex Mossop-style in an interview with pal Greg Sheridan, The Australian’s foreign editor. Someone, not Tony, leaks Greg a page a defence white paper. It’s a bi-partisan issue and no-one is rude enough to rock the underwater boat or remember that delivery dates don’t matter. Defence contracts typically incur huge cost blow-outs and long delays.

Our F35s or the “flying turds” as they are known to their US pilots were going to cost $8 billion and would be delivered six years ago. Now, the best cost guess is between $19 billion and $24 billion, while full deployment is not expected before 2020. But Abbott doesn’t mean to get real. He is wedging his PM on tax and defence. No room here to ask why such lavish funds for defence and not health or education.

All eyes turn to Turnbull. Even Kevin Rudd did not inspire such insurrection. It cannot end well. Sighing, singing you are made me do it, I didn’t want to do it …Turnbull flogs Abbott with a limp lettuce leaf.

Turnbull publicly defends the former PM’s right to publicly contradict his own PM on policy which will be taken as an invitation to a further stoush and a recipe for further confusion, destabilisation and electoral damage. His Defence Secretary and other nobs put Abbott straight. There is no delay. Turnbull is no national security wimp. Onlookers are underwhelmed.  They are mesmerised by Abbott’s licence.

Why did no-one laugh in the big taxing, big spending Tony Abbott’s face? Under Abbott, taxes rose from 21.5% of GDP under Labor to 22.3% when he was ousted. Spending rose 1.8 percentage points of GDP to 25.9% of GDP. It reached 26.2% of GDP in the early months of this financial year. The onions which Abbott is dishing out are ones he could never eat himself.

Facts, however, count for little when mythologies clash. Nor are they helpful to what is essentially a destabilisation campaign. On the right is a former PM whose erratic leadership and poor decision making brought him undone after 23 months. Clueless about policy generally, let alone economics, Abbott squibbed the same austerity budgeting he now claims he wears “like a badge of honour”.

In the other corner, also on the right or in the pocket of the right despite the small l Liberal badge, cowering, an abject captive of the right since his coup, is our current incumbent, a PM whose indecision and timidity have left a policy and leadership vacuum for Abbott to exploit. And not just Abbott, Scott Morrison shows utter contempt for parliamentary proceedings with a very dodgy document.

Morrison torpedoes the government’s case against negative gearing by confusing some highly dubious privately commissioned BIS Shrapnel rat-poison propaganda for Labor’s negative gearing policy. Shrapnel is cited to prove that Labor policy would destroy every family across the nation.

Who commissioned such a shocker? The Grattan Institute’s CEO John Daley says it is “manifestly ridiculous.” Shrapnel won’t say. Would any other PM have allowed his treasurer to proceed with it?

Daley says Shrapnel “doesn’t pass the giggle test”. It dramatically over-estimates the effect of tax on land prices, to begin with. Its embrace confirms Morrison’s contempt for rational debate, the parliament and the people of Australia. Moreover, it contradicts Turnbull’s own 2005 tax policy paper.

In 2005  Turnbull described negative gearing and the CGT discount as a “sheltering tax haven” that is “skewing national investment away from wealth-creating pursuits, towards housing”, and has caused a “property bubble”. Bernie Fraser, former Reserve Bank Governor, is on record as holding the same view.

Shot to buggery, Scott Morrison still maintains with Turnbull’s support that his bogus report predicts the end of the known world under Labor. Health Minister Sussan Ley similarly hypes her huge victory over private health insurance firms who, after a stiff letter from the minister, will now raise fees a bit less. Pensioners unable to afford the 5.59% hike are overjoyed not to have to pay 6.1%.

Private health premiums rose six per cent per year over the last five years. Increases and policies will also be explained better, she claims. On the other side of the ledger, taxpayer subsidy for private health insurance is predicted to grow 7% over the period 2015-16 to 2018-19, up to $7.3 billion in 2018-19.

Did Ley use government subsidy as a bargaining lever? Does anyone ask why any government should subsidy health insurance companies’ vast profits? Is any one of us is any healthier or better off as a result? OK. Industry executives have done well: Ramsay Healthcare’s CEO was paid $31 m in 2014.

Ever more expensive health services and problems even accessing what average voters need and a co-payment by stealth are shaping to be key election issues but the government does little beyond duck and weave and bluff and confuse.

Is the Medicare co-payment was dead? Alan Tudge, Turnbull’s parliamentary secretary, was adamant twice on Monday the co-payment “has been dropped”, only to be contradicted in Tuesday’s party room. It’s in because it was part of Hockey’s calculations.

ScoMo’s wilful deception by dodgy report is exposed by Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen. With no economic plan, a one-slogan campaign strategy and a lame duck rookie treasurer who hates him, the PM can neither impose his authority or unify his party as he attempts to steer the coalition through an election. Even the act of calling an election date seems beyond him.

Malcolm “everything is on the table” Turnbull retreats Hamlet-like into his vast inner indecisiveness. Nikki Savva tells him to go to the polls as early as he can before mad dog Abbott brings the whole show down. Go now, she urges, it can only get worse. Her book has clear warning in its title, The Road to Ruin: How Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin Destroyed Their Own Government.

Laurie Oakes calls it “the weirder-than-weird story of a duo who couldn’t govern to save themselves”

Yet Turnbull dithers and delays despite all due warning.

As the days pass, Turnbull lets double dissolution options slide. He pushes his senate voting reform through but creates such hostility in the process that micro-parties and other mavericks will no longer cooperate on any legislation this government ever proposes again.

Dropped is one double dissolution excuse, the innovative re-introduction of Howard’s ABCC, the Building and Construction Commission a bit of ritual union-bashing as bizarre in a time of record lows in wages growth and relative industrial harmony as Morrison’s obsession with bracket creep. Not that the ACCC saw anything but labour costs increase. Gone is the GST excuse along with everything else from the smorgasbord of tax reform. Gone is the PM’s authority of novelty and hope.

“Tony Abbott is shirtfronting his Prime Minister on tax policy”, is one of Bill Shorten’s better zingers.

The ex-PM’s non-sniping, wrecking or undermining total party policy takeover bid paints Malcolm Turnbull as an economic and national security girly-man. The leak of part of a draft white paper may undermine the PM’s sub-building cred but his comment and his attack on the capability of the Collins class subs we are currently lumbered with is an unprecedented breach of decorum and security.

Only someone of Abbott’s genius could jeopardise national security in order to portray his PM as soft on defence and a risk to national security.

The PM pretends Abbott’s attack is proof everyone is listened to in the Liberal Party. Continuing his best comic-opera form, he next calls in the AFP, our national Keystone Cops whose advice in December 2014 that Mans Haron Monis held a gun licence was later withdrawn, after being challenged by NSW Police, with the explanation that it was from a “non-definitive AFP database”. Monis had never held a licence.

The AFP will still have its hands full with the Christopher-Pyne-James Ashby investigation and the nature of Wyatt Roy’s role in the illegal access to Peter Slipper’s diary. The AFP Slipper case probe was only requested in December 2012. No-one wants a rush job.  And, as with all top outfits, there’s a massive backlog.

Yet unsolved is the AFP’s first case, the 1979 Hilton bombing which led Malcolm Fraser to create the AFP in an extensive expansion of the powers and resources of the police and security apparatus. Many contend that it is likely that the bombing was conducted by the security forces themselves.

The leak to Greg Sheridan, foreign editor at The Australian could yet scuttle both Abbott and Turnbull.

The “not waving but drowning” PM is thrown Abbott’s failed economic policy; his unfair 2014 budget with its cuts to health, education and welfare, none of which is calculated to keep him politically afloat.

Abbott’s IPA-dictated budget preserved subsidies to miners, tax concessions for wealthy superannuants and Defence’s divine right to unfettered expenditure in the national interest. Yet his Molotov cocktail explodes the myth that Turnbull really has a tax policy or shows any economic leadership or policy platform fit for an election.

Above all, Abbott’s outburst exposes the PM’s failure as a leader to assert his authority over his rival, a man now bold and (Yes Minister) courageous enough to bring his house down. And with the collected testimony of his colleagues in Nikki Savva’s book against him, Abbott has absolutely nothing to lose.

 

 

 

 

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As parliament resumes Monday, spectators discover an oddly familiar negativity and intellectual vacuity, not to say a little madness, perhaps even a re-run of that Abbott-era day time TV classic “good government”.

Is it just because Newspoll puts the parties each on 50 per cent, two party preferred? Peter Dutton warns the press: “The prospect of Bill Shorten leading the country is now in play.” Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce calls it a “wake-up call”.  Has Turnbull’s mob dropped its bundle on its first dud poll result? Surely not.

Could it be policy? Never. “Modest, incremental reform” as a killer of a Liberal platform. It just reeks of passion and excitement.

Yet something is seriously awry for Scott Morrison to stand up his pal Ray Hadley at 2GB on Monday.  Ray understands. Being PM or treasurer is harder than it looks; wanting the job and being able to do the job are not the same thing, he says. Thanks, Ray.

Is it Gorgeous George Christensen reading members a text on “penis tucking”? No, that happens at Tuesday’s party room meeting. Morally aroused George claims he clicked on a Safe Schools link to a link to a link on another website which linked to an “adult services” site and that this proves that safe schools grooms young people for paedophiles.

The Queensland MP’s homophobic shock tactic gets the PM to promise to review the program. Assisting Gorgeous George are Senator Cory Bernardi, Tasmanian Senator Eric Abetz, Tasmanian MP Andrew Nikolic, Western Australian MP Andrew Hastie and Queensland Senator Jo Lindgren who worry, they say, it could be disguised funding for “minorities”.

Bernardi is moved to decry a Marxist agenda of cultural relativism behind the program but not even George can explain what he means. He’s shocked to hear such language from Cory. The ANZACs didn’t die for rainbow posters in class rooms.

Is the Monkey Pod collective holding a wok-around-the-clock policy stir-fry? No. But there is a hint of monkey madness afoot amidst the cherry blossoms abroad. Veteran cultural warrior, elder statesman and US pet “Tamagotchi” Abbott waits until Saturday to sumo-wrestle China out of our Pacific hot tub. We may trade with China, but Japan is our one true love, he sighs.

Speaking in Tokyo, after a banquet of scientifically killed whale, in his own typically resonant but opaque tribute to Kabuki, Abbott praises Japan and Australia’s “special relationship because it’s not based simply on shared interests, but also on shared values”.

A Kabuki touch also informs Abbott’s view that Turnbull’s “biggest challenge will be to retain popularity” “once he has a credible narrative of his own”. He could have said everybody hates you even when you stand for nothing but he did promise no sniping. The non-sniping, supportive analysis will be published by News Corp soon.

None of these rich pickings from a week in a Turnbull government at work are the cause, however. A fish rots from the head down. Monday’s whiff of the past is our PM aping his predecessor. It is unbecoming and wholly unconvincing but the PM is going the full Tony.

Even his flatulent speech slows as he wanders aimlessly through a week, his only plan to bag Labor’s plot to destroy us by changing negative gearing rules. Is he rattled or has he been rolled? Whatever the cause it’s contagious.

Before week’s end, many MPs race to follow him downmarket. Optimism is swapped for shock and horror. Evidence-based government is nowhere in evidence as the government’s right wing tail wags its mascot junkyard dog. A fear vibe goes viral.

By Wednesday, Cory Bernardi is heckling Bill Shorten during the opposition leader’s conference on Safe Schools, “at least I’m honest, Bill”. And you are a fraud”. The program seeks to encourage acceptance of difference; protect children from homophobic bullies.

Bernardi wants Tony Abbott back as Prime Minister. Badly.  So too do the twenty MPs whose dinner with Abbott this week helps keep talk of a fantasy comeback alive and doubtless nurtures the latent lair in Bernardi.

“At least I’m not a homophobe”, Shorten fires back, lowering further the tone or “raising the Tony”, in a week of ridicule, name-calling and a massive government vote-buying defence spending spree masquerading as national security and patriotic duty.

“I don’t see it as a choice,” Defence Minister Marise Payne tells Leigh Sales, on Thursday’s 7:30 Report when asked why her government is borrowing to spend up to $150 billion to acquire and run twelve new submarines at $12.5 billion a pop over thirty years while denying schools and hospitals the $80 billion they need to keep open today.

Payne does not explain why the cost is now three times the estimate of the government when Tony Abbott was PM. The new vibe helps Payne assert a moral relativism that sweeps defence spending out of scrutiny.

Payne isn’t asked to explain why there is no case for this number. It is just a target from the 2009 White Paper which has just been repeated. We can’t crew twelve subs and Defence probably could only deploy six. Nor is she asked about the consequences of a likely winning Japanese bid tying our defence policy to that nation at the expense of any independence in the Pacific.

Five state of the art $2.5 billion hospitals could be built for the cost of just one sub subsidy. But it’s not just a troubling priority, it’s a huge blind spot in government industry policy.  Submarine building, like all defence spending, involves massively expensive industry subsidies however many Australian flags you cloak it in.

Having closed down Australia’s car industry the government scrambles to tip buckets of money into an industry just because it is marked “defence”.  Few Australians will benefit.

With $31.8 already allocated to be spent this year, defence costs taxpayers dearly for little direct return . Much of the money spent goes into overseas companies’ coffers. The extra $29.9 billion defence spending over the next ten years, just announced, will mostly benefit US multinationals, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon.

Happily, national security enthusiast and Victorian wool-grower, glad-handed Dan Tehan is to be Minister for defence materiel. Multinational reps high five each other. He’ll look after them. So, too will extreme right winger, Tasmanian Andy Nikolic who cruises into Tehan’s old job as chair of the joint intelligence and security parliamentary sub-committee.

Nikolic caused a stir last year when he claimed that civil liberties should be suspended given the national terrorist emergency Australia faced.

Not all observers are enthused. Electric Frontiers Australia is concerned that the former brigadier’s “hard-line” views on national security issues and his “apparent disdain” for civil liberties suggest that he is unlikely to bring a balanced and objective perspective to the work of the committee. Perhaps such critics wilfully miss the politics of the appointment.

Butch does not sit easily with the PM’s original image. Turnbull MKII is an alarming, if not dangerous, departure from his previous hit role as Mr Slick, an urbane inner Sydney sophisticate, equally at ease with an international finance deal or a bloodless knifing. This week, the Member for Wentworth is a hard act to swallow. He achieves a bad parody of a PM who frequently parodied himself.

“Vote Labor and be poorer” one of Turnbull’s turgid slogans of the week appears to be, sadly, a bad Abbott.

Tax reform has collapsed under its own inertia. A skittish backbench has jumped on the table with everything on it causing its collapse . Little remains of any economic policy let alone a tax reform program. Much as Turnbull loves to point out how his love of rail differentiates him from Abbott, states who expect infrastructure funding for railways must give up money for something else.

There is no new money. No new plan. Even the PM’s wimpy negative re-gearing is under attack from the same MPs who put the kybosh on the GST. They shrewdly outsource the people’s voice. Private consultants are engaged to make a case to the PM.

Liberal and Labor swap routines. The Government acts the role of a beleaguered, badgering opposition reduced to beating up the threat of Labor’s tax plans. Labor, it screams, would send the economy into “free-fall” in a time of dire national emergency.

Gone now is his pose of enlightened rationality and vision. The member for Wentworth speaks slower, reaches lower as he unleashes his inner junkyard dog. It is not working. Turnbull cannot hope to reproduce all the slavering, captious, capricious negativity of his predecessor, a politician who in 2012 blocked Rudd’s Malaysian solution in order to create a build-up of boat people to enhance his own campaign.

Turnbull could never proclaim himself minister for women to show his macho contempt for the principle of gender equality and to symbolically re-enact the injustice and the exclusion the portfolio seeks to redress.

Nor should he try. The PM is ill-advised to continue his bad copy of a dodgy Abbott original. Why rebuff those who were captivated by his earlier cameo roles? Articulate, sophisticated Super-Mal wowed us all with his urbanity and vision; his difference from Abbott. According to the polls. Yet in parliament this week he mimics Abbott as if his life depends on it. King Canute spots a rapidly rising red tide.

“Labor will ruin us all”, he rants. If we don’t ruin ourselves. Like all bad actors, he is oblivious of how close he is to ludicrous incongruity; self caricature and travesty. His credibility, legitimacy and authority suddenly look very flaky.

It is a bid to bolster the PM’s rapidly diminishing authority over a deeply-divided party, a last-ditch attempt to boost his prospects in an election he knows he must call before 11 November, an election which he is being pressured to hold as early as he can, even risking a double dissolution. Not that all his strays come to heel. Indeed, some seem encouraged.

Gone, all gone, is the PM’s positivity. His airy promises of innovation evaporate. It is out with reason and in with the politics of fear. Evidence based government and respect for the electorate’s intelligence are abandoned in favour of a scare campaign around Labor’s proposal to reduce tax concessions for property investors. Yet the campaign soon falters.

He said they would fall. She said they would rise. Assistant Treasurer Kelly O’Dwyer pops up on the Seven Network’s Sunrise show mid-week only to contradict her PM’s claim that Labor’s proposed changes to negative gearing would “smash” house prices “like a wrecking ball”.

The government’s new fear-mongering is clearly a work still in progress. Capital gains tax is now also only a definite maybe. Turnbull tells the house Monday there are “no changes planned” before being forced to admit the next day that his government was looking at getting superannuation funds to pay more CGT.

We will all be ruined. Labor’s proposed changes to negative gearing rules will cause prices to rise. No. Our houses will become worthless overnight. OK. It will be bad, anyway.

Whatever else is going working for the Turnbull government, its own cabinet is confused about the PM’s new attacking vibe. The Turnbull who promised evidence based policy and decision-making is now swinging from the same branch as the monkey-pod messiah, Tony Abbott whose absurdly alarmist warnings that Whyalla would be wiped off the map and that a lamb roast would cost $100 under Labor’s carbon tax brought him well-earned ridicule but his campaign helped trash Labor’s hopes .

So far Turnbull’s lowering of his act has only encouraged Bernardi and Christensen and others of the right wing whose participation looks more like upstaging than sharing. Channelling Tony Abbott has won Turnbull no new supporters, brought no greater unity. Their own bizarre preoccupations can only expand to fill his policy vacuum and have damaging consequences. No amount of defence White Paper and reference to external threats can distract us from his lack of effective leadership.

Who needs an opposition? Turnbull is trashing himself and his brand as he flails about wildly at a small target. Experts suggest that Labor’s negative gearing changes might reduce house prices one or two per cent. It is a poor base upon which to build an entire campaign or even part of a campaign.

As he loses control over the right and as he is seen to propose fewer and fewer real policies, the PM’s strategy could deal a serious blow to his re-electability. But it does offer a great invitation to the Monkey Pod nutters to get in on the act.   Expect a carnival of chaos as a PM who can’t even lead his party tries to lead an election campaign.

 

 

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A Newspoll result suggests that Super-Mal is tanking. It’s panic stations in the LNP camp. Ministers duck for cover. Back-benchers bolt. Like a rat up a drain pipe, our survivalist PM drops policy and shifts his tack to fear-mongering.

Gone is The Better Economic Manager; his treasurer wrecked that role for him by failing to produce any kind of economic plan last week. No new idea after five months makes the innovator claim wear thin, too. Fading badly also is the allure of Mal the closet progressive. What is left? Mal the reactionary who will do and say whatever it takes keep power.

Reactive, embattled, Turnbull returns to the cheap politics of fear and division of the Liberals’ 2012 campaign. It fits him as badly as a pair of Tony’s cast-off speedos but it’s all he has left.

Turnbull MKII channels his inner junkyard dog, howling down Labor for “smashing” the housing market. Peter Dutton follows with a volley of populist xenophobia by defending the illegal, indefinite off-shore imprisonment of men, women and children as the only way to stop evil people smugglers and to prevent drownings. Persecute the victims.

Mal becomes a yapping kelpie cross on the tucker box of the nation’s real estate. Labor’s proposed change to negative gearing rules will drive ‘all house prices down’ he barks. It’s an alarmingly deficient view of housing as solely profitable investment, as it stands, but his clueless treasurer warns that house prices will go up.

Not content to publicly contradict his leader, Morrison also offers an absurd analogy comparing housing with car sales. By Tuesday, he’s on to what he’ll do on credit card interest rates.

The government’s attack exposes its disunity and poor team work, its shallow economic understanding and opportunism. Its attack so far has merely served to highlight its vulnerabilities.

Even Bill Shorten scores a direct hit when he says the treasurer is lost “chasing pixies and unicorns in his top paddock”. It would be funny if Morrison were not about to plunge us into an austerity budget recession. No-one would buy a used car from this man.

We are back to the same nonsense of the Abbott scare campaigns where Whyalla was going to be wiped off the map and a Sunday roast would cost $100 as a result of “a great big new tax on everything”.

We are returned to our heroic war against the “ruthless, organised, criminals” who inspect every utterance on air or in parliament for a sign of weakness to exploit. Compassion to an infant burns victim is out of the question, Dutton blusters. Out also is PM John Key’s kind offer.

Key’s “New Zealand solution” of 150 refugees a year would invite floods of illegals violating our borders via a back door. No chance. Baby Asha must be returned to a camp which medical experts condemn as harmful or akin to child abuse; a camp which breaches international law and earns Australia UN censure for human rights abuses. For only this will halt the vile people-smuggling trade. Only this will give us an enemy.

According to “Intelligence”, which only a Dutton cannot see is an oxymoron, there are forty thousand asylum seekers queued up waiting in Indonesia, he warns on Fran Kelly’s RN Breakfast.

Ms Kelly can’t ask him how he knows or if his intelligence is anything like the intelligence which permitted Mans Monis access to the streets of Sydney. It is an “operational matter” or some other top secret matter. Dutton is, forever, absolved from all ministerial responsibility and accountability. His job is to present badges to the Border Force militia, his heroic private army:

“…since Operation Sovereign Borders has been implemented by this government, we have been able to stare down the threat from people smugglers. Not one death at sea has been reported over that period. We have the ability to turn back boats where it is safe to do so, and it is the policy of both government and opposition in this country to continue regional processing, because we know that it works in stopping the boats,” Dutton responds to Adam Bandt’s question in parliament Monday.

Outside the Dutton universe of assertion, we know no such thing. UNHCR figures indicate that boats increased in 2014. What changed was the honest reporting of them. Nor are we permitted to know, such is the secrecy of Immigration. What we do know is that we are being sold some very old, very bad lies. Worse follow.

Dutton will not be “blackmailed” by a year-old child, he thunders in parliament Monday. Asylum-seekers would self-harm if that route led to Australia, he tells MPs. Supporters of Asha are moved to make public hospital records to disprove his scurrilous claim that her mother burned her in a bid to be taken to Australia.

Dutton’s despicable dog-whistling evokes Howard’s lie about babies being thrown overboard, a lie that helped him win an election assisted, as he was then, by our nation’s newly anointed UN human rights envoy, Philip Ruddock.  Not only has the coalition lost its composure, it must jettison all vestige of credibility and respect, as did Kevin Rudd.

Rudd dusted off Howard’s people-smuggling target. In 2009, he declared that people smugglers were the “absolute scum of the earth”. Tony Abbott saw it as an “evil trade”.

Demonising people smugglers helps us look the other way; pretend that when they embark on their perilous journey, our refugees’ focus is solely on the logistics of resettlement, and not their desperation to leave behind persecution, torture or threat of death. It is a cruel, cynical manipulation of the truth.

Dutton keeps the old lies coming. Those who assist refugees are ruthless organised criminals, he says. Blog writers and others online use Baby Asha to raise their media profiles, he claims.

Fran Kelly asks his response to AMA Brian Owler’s view that to return babies to Nauru is child abuse. Continuing off shore processing is his answer, dignifying his government’s inaction with officialese ‘processing’. What he means is we continue to be cruel to refugees, vulnerable victims of traumatic dispossession and alienation who have a legal right to seek our help and protection.

We set out to teach them, instead, to expect persecution and neglect at our hands. They can expect mental and physical danger; violence and deprivation. All this and more is necessary to send a message to a non-existent enemy, the demon people smugglers. We even lie about who runs Nauru, too.

The Nauruan government does that “process”, Dutton lies. Nauru simply rubber-stamps whatever Australia wishes as our fact-finding senators and others have discovered in their attempts to visit these prisons in their search for the truth.

There is a big risk to the government in its reactive defence. The case of Baby Asha has gained the nation’s attention. She has become a cause in which the government’s threadbare authority, its lack of good faith has been exposed like a raw nerve.

Dutton’s defence, moreover, may have worked in the past. Now, it serves only to illuminate his government’s moral and political bankruptcy. For Malcolm Turnbull whose reason for being was to represent something better than Abbott; a man who presented himself as the embodiment of reason and reform, the case of Baby Asha may conspire with other events to deal him a serious blow.

Asha’s suffering coincides with Scott Morrison’s public failure to present a plan for anyone’s well-being or continued prosperity. It is a massive double deficit for a Liberal leader leading into an election in which he must ask people to trust him and his team. The tactics of fear and division may not work as well this time around. In the meantime, forget the boats Mr Turnbull, just stop the lies and the prevarication. If you’re not up to it, there’s always an early election option to retirement.

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“How can I help you win today?” Clay Nelson, US salesman and Morrison’s mentor.

Journos sulk balefully as Federal Treasurer Morrison wastes everyone’s time at Wednesday’s Press Club lunch. No-one’s up for yet another game of pin the tail on the donkey as Liberal government policy briefings have become.

Scott Morrison’s fended off the press before. His career is built on non-responses. As Sovereign Border Enforcer, Supreme Commander Brush-Off Morrison ruled any useful question out of order by militarising immigration, a tradition capably founded by Liberal PM John Winston Howard who in the Tampa crisis started the pernicious myth that refugees are our enemy. We have been at war with asylum seekers and ourselves ever since.

Happily for our PM it’s open season on demon people-smugglers, many of whom are refugees themselves. The vile, evil scum cop yet another salvo from a Turnbull determined to show he’s not soft on border protection – whatever that is.

PM John Key, who seems to be in the country for some Mal-pal pyjama party says NZ will take 150 Manus and Nauru detainees every year but he’s over-ruled. “There’s an enormous case-load”, says Julie Bishop, adding a nifty bit of jargon on Sunday’s ABC Insiders where affable Barrie Cassidy’s soft questioning helps her get her enormous lie out. As Foreign Minister she must know what a whopper it is. Europeans facing millions of refugees, shake their heads in utter disbelief.

Bishop repeats the equally preposterous government claim that decisions can only be made on a case by case basis despite UN rulings that our entire indefinite off-shore detention scheme itself is illegal.

Not that we are making any decisions. Unspoken, but always implied, the official myth of “processing” hides our practice of punishing refugees simply for fleeing persecution. So far, Turnbull is in lock-step with Abbott over the political necessity of the wilful denial of our own humanity. His Prime Ministership not only disappoints, it diminishes us all.

People smugglers must be discouraged, the PM honks, his silver tongue now a jarring klaxon of fear-mongering. Negative gearing also cops a blast because it would ‘smash housing values’. Unlike the fall in values which will occur as a result of the recession his neo-liberal treasurer wishes upon us with his economic illiteracy and his austerity mindset.

Immigration staggers under its “caseload”. In the meantime, any one of the babies and children in Australia may be extradited back to Nauru without notice, thanks to a nifty “reform” to our “processing”. Baby Asha is surrounded in a Queensland hospital by a group of protestors keeping vigil. A baby needs physical protection from an immigration bureaucracy that we somehow turned into a power-drunk, unaccountable quasi-police force.

Doctors’ organisations, even state premiers offer refuge to the babies and children but Turnbull is not about to go soft on border protection, even if it is a nonsense founded on unlawful policy, a capitulation to hysterical xenophobia and the politics of gutter nationalism.

Morrison’s a total non-event. The Abbott/Turnbull government is under the spotlight and it looks unprepared for anything. No policy after two and a half years of hints and teases and everything on the table. Of course everything is on the table if you are unable to make a decision. Until you have to take GST off the menu. ScoMo’s giving no-one any copy. No hook, no headline. Only the cartoonists and photographers, as usual, have any fun.

The Treasurer infuriates some journos. He will cop heck from AFR’s Laura Tingle, you can tell, well before she gets to her feet. She rebukes him for saving $80 billion and spending $70 billion and or being silly enough to boast publicly about it. Alan Jones tells him the next day “he said nothing”. What was that all about?

“Backing Australians in our transitioning economy” is its clumsy title yet ScoMo’s speech aims to divide us just as surely as if he’d called us lifters and leaners. “Picking winners” is what he’s really up to.

“Australia is rapidly becoming a nation divided between those who pay taxes and those who have taxes spent upon them,” he says in what he calls his ‘candid’ and ‘upfront’ meaning covert, divisive dog whistle style.

He means we’d be so much better off without the bludgers. We’ll make the losers pay. He boasts about the $80 billion cut from health and education as evidence of economic governance instead of what it is, social vandalism. He mutters about $100 billion wasted so far on housing assistance for the needy. If only the nation would grow up, get out of bed and get a job.

No-one, not even Liberal cheerleader Chris Uhlmann would expect candour from this man but why must we always be wrong to expect fairness? Innovation is patently just this government’s latest hoax. We get the same tired old evasion and clapped-out sloganeering that is Morrison’s trademark animated only by the odd hint of his pleasure at increasing social division like a crafty bowler picking at a seam.

“A nation divided…” is one of ScoMo’s clearer statements in a miasma of spin in which he will, he says, share the ‘economic and fiscal context’ of his thinking. This is not the budget, he notes helpfully. Instead we get a series of clichés about China, nothing at all about the fiscal collapse of much of the EC our next biggest trading partner, some hollow boasts about job growth and his barren old hokey standby of “transitioning” the economy.  Even China our biggest trading partner is “transitioning” its economy and it’s looking good for tourism. WOTF?

China is frantically trying to manage an inevitable economic slowdown while at the same time it must wrestle with a credit bubble that somehow just happened. No-one trusts official statistics. Yet while experts disagree on details, all agree that China’s capacity to manage its economy is doubtful. Instead, it looks increasingly ham-fisted and desperate. George Soros even thinks this looks like the GFC of 2008. But reality does not intrude into the eternal sunlight of Turnbull’s mindless optimism. We are in the best of all possible worlds – provided he can squelch any electoral backlash.

ScoMo is clearly unable to announce a 50% rise in the GST, because Turnbull’s got cold feet. His trepid PM has just pulled the pin on any tax increases. Liberal backbench “bed-wetters”, as ScoMo calls those worried by the prospect of rapid political oblivion, are up in arms. Turnbull rushes out treasury figures about productivity. A GST rise does not do much for productivity. Nor does the tax mix switch, which sounds almost kinky amidst Morrison’s limited pitch.

The tyro treasurer is really struggling.  For Bob Ellis it’s the worst presentation from any treasurer anywhere in five hundred years. Apart from the graphs, his fulsome praise for his team – “it’s always a thrill to work with Matt Cormann”- his rugby forward drop of the shoulder and the thing he does with his jacket button, Morrison has nothing to offer. Zilch. Nada. Zip. Zero. Another dry patch in the five month policy drought of the Turnbull ascendancy itself not a new government as Leigh Sales reminds ScoMo but a government two and half years old with no economic plan.

ScoMo knows a story is a public speaker’s best friend. He’s no public speaker. He praises Clay Nelson, an American salesman in an aside which sums up “what he and his government are all about”, he says. Then he gives us another slogan.

Clay’s tale has alligators in hunting cabins, a practical joke simply begging public endorsement, but it pays tribute to something for every Macca’s drive-through and Centrelink customer service cubicle  ” How can I help you win today.” Even Chris Uhlmann looks bored. Later, newspapers background the man in the anecdote. Seriously. Perhaps they, too, sense they missed something.

Scott Morrison’s hokey story does say a lot about himself and his budget. He’s right about that. It’s about winners and losers. The winners are those who are out working every day. Scott is trying to help them by reducing their taxes. This will make us all richer as a nation because of something he calls a productivity dividend. A what?

Richard Dennis who shows how politicians use jargon to exclude us from understanding economics has warned us. Productivity dividend is our old friend, Mr Trickle-down.  Trickle down is a discredited theory that holds that a nation’s prosperity may be increased by increasing the fortunes of the wealthy. It’s Morrison’s tax plan in a nutshell. It’s helped foster inequality and injustice all over the world as well as in Australia.

As a speaker, Morrison can’t bat. Can’t bowl. But like many a con artist he can’t resist a cricket analogy. This budgeting business is, he says, is more of a test match rather than a big bash. Perhaps he’s stalling for even more time. His government, certainly appears utterly unprepared for either type of match or anything else involving preparation and a plan.

Whatever he intends by this the treasurer needs to be reminded he can forget cricket when lives are at stake. Voters don’t need yet another sporting analogy. Or a folksy story. They want and deserve a treasurer and a government which can govern fairly and honestly in the interests of all Australians.

It’s not about winners and losers, Mr Morrison, your job is about nurturing a genuinely democratic society that has mutual respect and equality at its core an Australia with the desire, the political will and the capacity to take care of everybody.

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“In just two years, Tim Wilson has single-handedly reshaped the human rights debate in Australia. He has restored balance to a debate which had previously been dominated by the priorities and prejudices of the Left.” George Brandis

Wow. Our Tim of the IPA was really a super hero, all along? And we only ever saw him as a Liberal Party stooge? No application. No ad. No interview. Just a tap on the shoulder from AG George Brandis. And a word in his little pink ear.

“We’ve a top job for you Tim: “Freedom Commissioner”. Hang about a bit. Make the odd speech to the press club about Magna Carta. Do a Tony Abbott with indigenous peoples. Prance around. Get your photo taken a lot. Get your top off. Go on The Drum. Play your cards right and you could be our next President of the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Who knows what the future may hold? Gillian Triggs can’t go on for ever with her Leftist agenda, holding the government to account over human rights abuses, child imprisonment and off-shore detention. My secretary, Chris Moraitis may just pop around. Offer her a job in another government department. Tell her she’s lost my confidence.”

The above dialogue is fiction and conjecture, of course, just like Brandis’ rave reference for his protégé. Tess Lawrence writes well about how he really got his job. Unlike the rest of us, Tim was lucky to have been one of a favoured few as the political playing field was tilted back towards the wealthy at the expense of the deserving; at the expense of everyone.

The wider realities of the Abbott/Turnbull government’s sustained attack on the vulnerable; its programme of disempowerment and neglect of the poor and disadvantaged; it eagerness to heed the needs of the privileged are a continuing story. Scott Morrison used a Press Club talk this week to bash welfare recipients for being a burden to those out earning money and a drain on productivity.

How productive was Wilson? What did he ever do for anyone but himself? Brandis is skimpy on evidence of Tim’s super powers after what reads like a hazy, lazy rehash of his appointment release. Let’s face it there is no evidence. Just a damning, resounding silence.

Lawrence makes a good case that the best thing Tim’s done for human rights in Australia, is to resign. The Commission will be a happier workplace without him.

Sadly, however, the damage is not easily repaired. Wilson’s appointment came at the cost of a disability discrimination commissioner. Graeme Innes’ term expired in July 2014 and was not, given the cost of Wilson’s appointment, renewed.

Graeme Innes said at the time, given 45 per cent of people with disability lived in poverty, and rates of employment for disabled Australians were 30 per cent lower than those for their counterparts with disability, ”I could mount an argument that people with disabilities are a threatened species.”

The fate of the discrimination commissioner is paralleled by other cuts to the vulnerable in our society. Under the Abbott/Turnbull government, Community Legal Centres suffered funding cuts of $50 million, helping silence the voices of the disempowered; excluding the poor and disadvantaged from decision-making.

You might expect a Human Rights Commission to act as an advocate for those who can’t look out for themselves. Not Tim.

He’s certainly a quiet worker. You don’t hear a peep out of Tim on human rights abuses. He does speak, however, at Liberal functions; cheques payable to Liberal Party of Australia. Brandis defended him in the senate.

In WA, dissent is being outlawed in a bill which seems certain to be enacted into law. Three UN Special Rapporteurs – David Kaye, on freedom of expression; Maina Kiai, on freedom of peaceful assembly and association; and Michel Forst, on human rights defenders – slam the whole bill.

The Criminal Code Amendment (Prevention of lawful activity) Bill 2015 creates vague new offences of “physically preventing a lawful activity” and “possessing a thing for the purpose of preventing a lawful activity”. Both offences carry serious penalties of prison of up to 1 year and a fine of up to $12,000. In certain circumstances, the penalty for preventing a lawful activity can rise to 2 years and $24,000.

Did Wilson, our human rights Martin Luther, also add his protest. Get real. Freedom Boy, as Richard Ackland calls Tim, has a much more urgent and personal agenda. He sees a future for himself within the Liberal Party, an invisible political bias which Brandis, doubtless, easily overlooked when the AG appointed him Freedom Commissioner. Bias would damage the commission’s reputation for independence.

Wilson is going into politics. It won’t be a long journey. The safe Liberal seat of Goldstein has wealth and privilege written all over its tickets on itself. Just the ticket for Tim, he reckons. Yet if our left-busting, debate reshaping, Freedom Boy, (as Richard Ackland dubs him) Tim is to win preselection he needs all the help he can get. And then some.

The blue-ribbon electorate of Goldstein includes the well-heeled suburbs of Brighton, Bentleigh, Elsternwick and Sandringham, suburbs not noted primarily for their human rights activism despite being named after feminist and suffragist Vida Goldstein.

One of the biggest Liberal branches in the state, Goldstein does expect a high-profile and influential member. Retiring member, Free Trade maven Andrew Robb raves about Georgina Downer, whom he notes, is a woman. Tim, he says, carefully, would “also” be an excellent candidate.

Tim, himself, sees his chances differently. A young man with a taste for lavish expenditure, he has never lacked in either ambition or over-self-promotion. Besides, he needs a job. He’s quit his $300,000 plus job as Human Rights Commissioner after only two years in the five year appointment. Perhaps he thinks he’s a shoo-in. The way he sees it, he would be employed and the people of Goldstein would have him. It looks like a win-win. Or does it?

Georgina Downer, a former Minter Ellison lawyer and diplomat, unsurprisingly sees the Goldstein preselection as hers to win while the electorate expects a cabinet minister at least or a well-connected candidate. Switching her attention from the Menzies electorate, where Kevin Andrews has elected not to retire, Georgina is a bit of a late entry and is described by some as an outsider and lightweight. Still she has been lucky in the past.

Ten years ago, when her father Alexander Downer was foreign Minister, Georgina, then a 25 year old with a third class Melbourne Uni honours degree beat 300 other candidates to win the prestigious A$100,000 PA Chevening postgraduate scholarship to study in Britain, despite failing to attain the ‘upper second class degree’ stipulated on the award’s application form.

No-one of course is suggesting that Georgina was not selected fairly, or that the process was anything less than rigorous. It does, however, strangely recall how Tim got his job as Freedom Boy, a curious story in itself yet one which deserves to be better known so clearly does it illustrate the Abbott/Turnbull government’s contempt for human rights. Wilson began by bagging the outfit he was later to be appointed to.

Wilson criticised the commission, and called for it to be abolished. A month later, he alleged it was “missing in action” for not lobbying louder for freedom of speech, in the wake of a court decision against Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt and his claims about several high-profile “light skinned” indigenous people. Who could be more perfectly suited to get a call offering him a job as Freedom Commissioner?

Wilson’s story illustrates a government prepared to turn away from those in most need of help. It is happy to fund its ideology of entitlement and to protect privilege at the expense of its fundamental obligation to provide for every Australian regardless of wealth, status or background.

Wilson also reflects a political elite which rules with callous disregard for the disadvantaged. It heralds a new era of cruelty and injustice where government can splash funds on a so-called “freedom commissioner” to serve its own narrow political ends, while it denies others the necessities of life. Wilson’s silence on WA’s new anti-demonstration laws suggests it, too, would silence those who speak truth to power.

Tim Wilson’s tilt at politics and his career so far, shows a government redefining and debasing human rights to condone its subsidy of the greedy and the powerful at the expense of the poor, the needy and the weak.

In the end such a cynical redefinition will cause it to forfeit popular respect and trust as well as any claims to legitimacy as a government of the people by the people.

 

 

 

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“Australia is rapidly becoming a nation divided between those who pay taxes and those who have taxes spent upon them,” Federal Treasurer, Scott Morrison says late in what he assures us will be a ‘candid’ and ‘upfront’ Press Club address in Canberra, Wednesday. Instead we get the same tired old evasion and sloganeering that is his trademark.

“A nation divided…” is one of ScoMo’s clearer statements in an hour in which he will, he says, share the ‘economic and fiscal context’ of his thinking. This is not the budget. Instead we get a series of clichés about China, some hollow boasts about job growth and his barren old hokey standby of “transitioning” the economy.  WOTF?

Transitioning is not a transitive verb. There is no argument that the economy is in transition. Yet, somehow the government wishes to claim leadership for looking on idly as the bottom falls out of commodity exports, for example, as if this were somehow the natural scheme of things. Revenue is down, down, down. Yet no revenue problem exists, Morrison bizarrely insists.

Forget “transitioning”. What is his government is actually doing to foster new enterprises, apart from impeding a renewable energy sector its fossil fuel sponsors wont’ let it help? Farewelling a car industry its ideology won’t protect?

The TPP, will, of course solve everything by setting up “generations of prosperity”. A late question as to why the productivity commission has been denied evaluation of the TPP is dismissed in another ScoMo smart remark that his government does not go in for “rear view analysis”.

The truth is that the benefits of the TPP are likely to be either miniscule or negative. Our USA FTA, for example, diverted trade from lower-cost countries, cutting our trade with the rest of the world, it is estimated, by $53 billion.

What the treasurer does manage to make clear is that he wants to cut income tax for a lucky group of wage earners he is “backing” while cutting back on government spending for everyone. Pensioners, welfare recipients and other bludgers are especially in the gun. The best bits are left until last and only then divulged under questioning.

Despite all the innovative hype surrounding his government, Morrison is flogging some very old ideas.  Joe Hockey’s “lifters and leaners” are clearly still part of the Liberal mental furniture as Morrison drags out the old austerity line that the government has to spend less on everything but especially on welfare.

“Buckets of money” are not available he says repeatedly as if the states, for example, were being scandalously reckless in requesting enough funds to pay for hospitals and schools after being cut $80 billion from forward projections in the Abbott government’s first budget.

Morrison evades Lenore Taylor’s question on how states obtain the funds to avert a looming crisis in health and education by saying we are all sovereign governments. In other words, states can raise taxes if they must, but the federal government “is not about taxing and spending”. It is a shameful capitulation to cheap politicking.

“I don’t run the other governments” he says betraying an immodest but never deeply concealed view of his power in the federal government. It’s his “upfront and candid” way of saying states need to raise their taxes. He bullshits that he is a “federalist”.

Is this petty trick his best shot? His government will cut its spending in order to get its budget back into surplus. States have to fend for themselves any way they can. No-one asked him if this were wise in the face of a looming global slowdown, if not a recession. No-one challenges the politics or the economics of austerity.

Discrimination and the politics of resentment are ugly ideas from anyone at the best of times but when times are tough, it behoves national political leaders not to be seen to foster division. ScoMo’s backing himself in. Bugger anyone else.

Equally unattractive is the tea party bias against taxation. Yet Morrison continues to claim against all evidence that rising tax rates are ‘job-destroying’ simply to justify cutting taxes for the wealthy while welfare recipients must expect to have benefits even further reduced.

Morrison’s this-is-not-the-budget speech is cagey and evasive on policy but generous to a fault when it comes to meaningless sloganeering such as “how can I back you in today”‘ which, by way of a clumsy personal anecdote, is his message for the nation.

Australians who are “out there earning” would win his government’s backing. Those millions of decent and worthy non wage-earning saving and investing Australians deserve less support.

Backing winners and bagging losers emerges as central to Morrison’s vision, a vision which he calls:  “backing Australians and our transitioning economy”. Who writes his stuff? His talk promises to ease taxes on worthy wage-earners who are “transforming and transitioning” our economy while the $11 billion he says goes on housing assistance is very clearly a drain in a less than upfront aside to his reply to 2CCC’s question about housing supply.

Otherwise the treasurer is ideologically bound to repeat the tired old myth that housing affordability is merely a matter of supply and demand despite the work of ratings agencies such as Fitch or the ABS suggesting otherwise.

Despite giving himself a boost as a ‘plain speaker’ Morrison is dull, opaque and cloaked in generalities. His pet analogy of how a government should handle a nation’s economy is embarrassingly hokey and wilfully misleading. It brings back memories of other conservatives in the position like Peter Costello who would offer the spurious analogy that the nation’s economy is like a household budget and must not spend more than its income.

When all else fails, Morrison badmouths Labor, a little too eagerly

Devoid of any announcement on GST, Morrison has no real material to offer. Instead he fumbles an austerity budget plan that depends on a couple of meaningless slogans.  ABC’s Chris Uhlmann gives him a boost in introducing him as the kind of guy who did what had to be done. “Stop the boats, they said and he did”.

Many watching recall today is the anniversary of 23 year old Iranian Reza Berati who was bashed to death on Manus Island in circumstances which Morrison has never given a candid or upfront account of, despite being the minister responsible at the time. Perhaps Morrison could be given leave to attend to unfinished business before he is not responsible for even further unspeakable suffering in his name.

 

“Ministers and assistant ministers are entrusted with the conduct of public business and must act in a manner that is consistent with the highest standards of integrity and propriety.”

Malcolm Turnbull Statement of Ministerial standards 20 November 2015.

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There’s never been a more exciting time to be my Cabinet-Valentine, coos Malcolm Turnbull, a ministerial speed-dating app flashing late into the night on his golden iPhone.

It’s the one time in his career he can get people to say yes without reservation, although some old hands beg to differ. Everybody knows everyone finds the PM’s pitch irresistible, ABC Insiders’ guest The Guardian’s Katharine Murphy “hack-splains” on Sunday. He could “sell ice to Eskimos”.

Notwithstanding, Murphy’s “hacks-planation”, Turnbull’s spin is wearing thin. The week attests to the PM’s failure to persuade, discern or negotiate. His cabinet has not lasted six months. He can’t sell a bigger GST and he can barely control Scott Morrison, his treasurer, a bull at a bigger tax gate, with his eyes on the main prize. Now he is in damage control, plugging gaps, plying the snake-oil and repairing the façade of unity by extolling the virtue of growth.

‘An organism that stops growing dies’, he says in a spray of facile spin and grin, “growth is good”; ignoring cancer.

Oddly, despite being freshly ordained World’s Best Minister by the Emir of Dubai, at the behest of an appreciative petrochemical industry, Environmental Pollution Minister, Greg Hunt, who has put in a cheeky bid for Trade, does not receive even a text. Nor does the agile Erich Abetz, Former Employment minister who just knows his country needs him. Somehow The Mercury is moved to protest that “no Tasmanian is included in the new cabinet”.

It’s not true and it unfairly raises expectations about representation when the PM must meet other needs such as rewarding supporters and appeasing an angry and destabilising right wing.

Incumbent Tasmanian Cabinet member, Senator Richard Colbeck of Devonport, Minister for Tourism and International Education and assistant Minister for Trade and Investment since 2015 is somehow missed in the tally by the once-proud Tassie paper. He is from Devonport. Perhaps a trade visit to China to raise his profile is in order. Once he’s fixed the rogue colleges fleecing foreign students with bogus degrees.

“orderly, respectful government”

The PM could use a fixer. Having seen fifteen changes since promising “orderly, respectful government” in September, Turnbull must be hoping for better luck now as he woos a few hapless over-ambitious, under-qualified younger men and several token women into accepting cabinet positions they have no hope of mastering in the six months before the election. Some have form.

Then Assistant Minister for Health, Senator Fiona, “Let them eat junk”, Nash was censured 5 March 2014 by the Senate for pulling a health energy rating website on the prompting of her adviser, Kraft-Cadbury spokesman, Alastair Furnival, who co-owns with his wife a confectionery and soft drink lobbying firm.

Since then Nash has made a healthy comeback. Trust the Nationals, the voice of the farmer, the mining industry and the tobacco lobby to overlook a mere Senate censure. Would either of the major parties been so keen to allow her to enter a leadership ballot?

Would her past actions pass the Turnbull test? MSM ignores the discrepancy between Stuart Robert’s treatment and the judgement meted out to Nash, to say nothing of her remarkably forgiving return to high office.

The Minister is in rude good health. So much so that she promised last week on ABC Q&A to forgo her private medical cover. Concern for the public good has since, sadly, forced her to renege on her pledge because, she claims, her stunt would displace a more deserving member of the public from obtaining a hospital bed. Nash has no problem, moreover, it would seem, with the $6bn taxpayers must pay each year to subsidise private health insurance.

New Trade Minister Steve Ciobo, dobbed into his new job by Robb, however, is no stranger to bed disputes or dog-whistle politics. Labor back-bencher Nick Champion would “slit Julia Gillard’s throat if he could”, Ciobo helpfully added to the public debate on political leadership in 2013, a phrase Peter Reith repeated, albeit with a twist. It is an ugly, violent and disparaging image which cannot help but fuel those predisposed towards violence against women.

Entitlement has raised its ugly head…

Then Minister for Women, Tony Abbott, brushed aside complaints about Ciobo as “merely metaphor”, a dismissal as short-sighted and partisan as his espousal of the right to vilify in seeking to remove section 18C of the racial Discrimination Act 1975. Turnbull’s new trade minister will doubtless expect he is entitled to the same level of support from his new PM. Entitlement has raised its ugly head before.

Four years ago, while on exchange to the US, Ciobo booked into a hotel when DFAT was slow to honour his request for a two bedroom flat for his wife and child incurring a bill of $8000 which he refused to pay. Was his dummy-spit a display of entitlement or the need to “disrupt”? Turnbull has clearly given him also the benefit of the doubt.

Disruptive, suddenly seems a less attractive buzz-word, however, to the PM, now that it is his government suffering the disruption. His promised orderly, respectful, government proves no different to Abbott’s “good government”.

“The government is now so deeply split between so-called moderates and the RW nutters that it can’t decide the time of day”, veteran Mike Carlton chortles. His restraint is admirable given the yawning ocean trench now threatening to swallow up PM Turnbull’s love boat on its extra-virgin, maiden voyage. No need to frighten the horses.

Stuart Robert is thrown splashily overboard but the boat fails to rise. Utterly rudderless, it leaks and lists to starboard. The tax reform table with everything on it must also go. If only someone could lift it! All hands look over the side. Robert’s nob, bobs idly amidst a wet, black crush of ministerial hats afloat a rising sea which laps hungrily along the gunwales of the PM’s ship of Theseus. Like Theseus’ ship, Turnbull’s cabinet has had so much of itself replaced that experts will debate forever whether it is the same ship.

…the PM can hide effortlessly in its shadow…

Stuart Robert has had to go. A bull in a China trade show, Robert is attacked in parliament by matador Shorten and picador Dreyfus . Pass after pass is made. Shorten fans go wild. Finally, he is gored beyond redemption. Nothing can be done, however. The PM has done all he can by referring the matter to its proper place, the desk of Dr Martin Parkinson which looms so big all week that the PM can hide effortlessly in its shadow. Turnbull just looks weak and crafty.

In the end, Robert is given no estocada (final, fatal sword thrust) in a Parkinson’s report which finds him in breach of the code but recommends no dismissal leaving Turnbull with no choice, he claims, but to remove him from the ministry.

Not only has Robert breached the ministerial code of conduct, the Minister for Being in China only on Personal Business has made a farce of question time by eagerly leaping to his feet to rush the despatch box only to decline to answer. All he’s done is helped his mate Marks get a good deal. OK, the Chinese thought he was there as a minister. OK his presence may have helped seal a deal. OK he does have shares in Marks’ company. But how was he to know? It was a trust.

Robert, of course, chooses to say nothing in the house. Endlessly he refers questioners to his previous response, itself a referral to a previous response, in a recursive series of diminishing returns. Surely the tactic will become known as the Robert-Droste stone-wall. His example, however, will prove a difficult legacy for Turnbull to manage. Sadly, clearly, he has been persuaded that the PM would spare him. Keep his word. Yet there is no shortage of help to be rid of him.

Liberal party leaks help Labor. Bill Shorten gives one of his best ex tempore speeches yet, which shows what he can do when he’s given the right material.

Turnbull’s indulgent, patronising smile turns into a fixed, rueful, rictus under the onslaught . Abbott’s faction has all the ammunition necessary to Roberts political overkill. And more. Who can doubt that the MP’s register of pecuniary interests will get another workout soon? Who will be the next hapless accidental tourist?

Perhaps the PM regrets that he has, last week, allowed Abbott a senior advisor for twelve months and an assistant ‘in keeping with the duties of a former Prime Minister’. Such as not sniping. The leaks can only continue.

Old hands sniff an early election. Some think it will be later, especially if the electoral office is to have time to publish the new senate voting rules, if they got through the current senate .

…the first fortnight of the phoney war…

Others hear all the flatulent garrulity of a lower house barely into its second wind in the first fortnight of the phoney war that is the prelude to the campaign proper. Warren Truss is oblivious, having at last handed the National’s tiller to Mr Barnaby.

Many are unsettled by the prospect of Barnaby Joyce being a heartbeat away from being Prime Minister, to say nothing of the yoking together in the show-ring of an agrarian socialist, Sinophobe, climate denier and a multi-millionaire, free- trade-is-my-religion merchant banker. The hayseed and the spiv may not be an election-winning image, it is feared. Christopher Pyne dubs them Yin and Yang, in a novel take on Taoist complementarity.

Wokka Truss, a National Murray Grey, for years forced to sleep uncomfortably on a front bench, is finally, mercifully led out to pasture. Or such pasture as remains after CSG frackers and coal-miners have taken their whack of the family farm.

Veteran blue heeler, Joyce is left as uncontested champion of the paddock and confirms his leadership as Nationals and Deputy PM by yapping a defence of Robert on the very morning of the day Turnbull announced that despite veterinary advice from Dr Martin Parkinson, Robert was to be put down.

The Abbott faction has been after Stuart Robert’s scalp to avenge his betrayal of his former leader, turning at the last minute, it seems, to follow Morrison into the Turnbull camp. Now Morrison is in the gun with Turnbull and with the Abbott factions over being far too bullish over a GST hike that he hopes to ride to victory over his critics. Turnbull is forced to bring forward the issue Treasury analysis which confirms that a 50% GST rise would be an economic downer in case Morrison declares it policy on Monday at the National Press Club lunch.

…cabinet rejects, failures and other has-beens…

Sweet Custard Bun as he is known in China, Malcolm Turnbull is on full-charm, grin and spin alert all week as party unity is well-nigh destroyed under the continuing assault of aggrieved right wingers, cabinet rejects, failures and other has-beens who cluster around the former Prime Minister in the Monkey Pod Room. Stuart Robert is paid back for his perfidy in defecting from the Abbott to the Turnbull camp in last September

It is a fantastical week in politics. Greg Hunt’s gong for Best Minister in the World is rivalled only by Philip Ruddock’s appointment as Australia’s special envoy on human rights to the UN. Both are upstaged, however, by Barnaby Joyce’s ascension to become deputy PM of Australia while in the background the Abbott faction continues to surprise a beleaguered PM with all manner of sniping, leaking and sundry other forms of creative disaffection and disruption. Saddled with a tax reform agenda it has lost control of and riddled with tensions and rivalries, the Turnbull ship is making very heavy weather of its maiden voyage.