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It’s official, Barnaby Joyce will soon be only a heart-beat away from being Prime Minister.

What is going on? What went wrong with the rumoured Liberal plan to keep Wokka on the payroll until after Turnbull got back in? Will Barnaby even be re-elected, given Tony Windsor’s threat to nominate as an independent who would at least represent his electorate and not sell out local farmers’ by giving their water to Shenhua mining? Is Barnaby the best man to arrest the National’s slow but inexorable shuffle into extinction?

As news of Joyce’s anointment as Nationals Leader filtered out Thursday, a mob of LNP loyalists in the ABC rushed to put a positive spin on the member for New England’s elevation, occasioned neither by merit nor popularity but by old bull Warren Truss’s retirement. Rumours of a challenge proved unfounded and no-one outside the Nationals could explain the process of acclamation or herd instinct which gave Barn the nod in the end. One thing is certain. A Barnaby explanation is unlikely to help.

ABC TV news showed an image of Joyce and Turnbull in profile in the Canberra afternoon sun, hayseed and spiv picking their way across press cables in the grounds of parliament house. It was not a reassuring image; not an election-winning look. The pair are at best an odd couple but many in MSM were keen to give the marriage of convenience a boost. Few bothered to note the different religions of the pro-foreign investment PM and his new keep the bastards out agrarian socialist deputy. It can’t last and it won’t work.

A few, such as Bernard Keane foresee disaster. With Robb’s resignation, Turnbull will lack capable and experienced hands on deck. An embattled PM will have to contend, moreover, with a deputy who is a maverick on fiscal policy and foreign investment. Tony Abbott had to drop him after four months as shadow finance minister. Joyce seemed set on playing the role of fiscal village idiot. Debt was so huge, he once alleged that Australia  would soon default on its foreign debt. Just what you need, really in an aspiring deputy PM.

Someone on ABC’s The Drum gushed that Joyce would certainly get the Nat’s brand ‘out there’, whatever that may be, in an echo of the Liberal mantra. Bugger policy, just get the message out. No-one, however, would quibble with the ‘out there’. Another thought Barnaby said what he thought, unwittingly identifying his Achilles heel. Joyce’s cringe-worthy grandstand over Johnny Depp’s dogs has clearly worked well for him in some quarters. ‘Bugger off back to America’ certainly has a ring about it.

Who knows ‘We decide whose dogs come into this country’ could be an election winner in the way that a similar slogan worked for John Howard after the Tampa crisis. The country’s been barking mad on migration since.

Dubious claims and dog-whistling aside, what seems clear is that the Nationals are now packaged on MSM as a kind of circus who merit a cheer for giving us Joyce, a favourite clown, an outspoken but amiable and benign buffoon who will entertain us as a celebrity in the razzle-dazzle Luna Park of our national politics.  Soft focus; no hard stuff. Jokey blokey.

Little space is made so far in the popular imagination for the real Barnaby whose unabashed populism, his loose grasp of fiscal policy and his capacity to shoot from the lip could well and truly cruel the coalition’s chances in the next election. Now he’s got the job, let’s not over-think the selection process.

Can Barnaby handle his responsibilities? So far most of these would appear to be well beyond him. Veteran cat herder as he may be in the national’s cupboard of a party room, with big Wokka as backup, he may now have to muster a whole coalition or front the despatch box while his PM is overseas innovating, posing for photographs with soldiers or selling off more of the farm, as befits any hot-eyed zealot of the cargo cult of free trade deals, the Liberals’ new evangelical religion.

With Wokka out to pasture, the new bull will need to do the mysterious things that Nats do in the name of leading the party. His critics say he has neither the discipline nor the character. Voting, it seems is rare, but somehow consensus is forged. Perhaps it’s a young-bull old-bull tussle. Even here, while Barnaby has the seniority and the scars to prove it, he may struggle a bit to exert authority given his unpopularity and his volatility. At least there’s only ten of them in parliament to contend with.

While Barnaby’s struggle to be boss of his party mirrors something of the same in Toff’s Corner between Malcolm and the many Liberals who can’t stand the man, his need for approval may also gee up his populist anti-foreign investment and debt rhetoric, heedless of its effect on the economy. Some of these are as well-presented and enlightened as his views on the climate.

“Look … I just – I’m always sceptical of the idea that the way that anybody’s going to change the climate – and I’m driving in this morning and we’re driving through a frost – is with bureaucrats and taxes. All that does is … it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. I make you feel guilty so I can get your money and put it in my pocket and send reports backwards and forth to one another.”

Dear old Barnaby, the sheep-wrangling syntax mangler, has some funny old views on a whole range of issues. He’s a cheerful climate change denialist who opposes same sex marriage because a diamond is not like a square. He warned us in 2010 of approaching economic Armageddon. Carbon tax, he notoriously claimed would kill sheep farming.

“It’ll be the end of our sheep industry. I don’t think your working mothers are going to be very happy when they’re paying over $100 for a roast.”

Joyce is also capable of picking a fight in court as when in October last year he accused Tony Windsor of profiteering out of selling property to Shenhua. Windsor threatened to sue.

But let’s not laugh at Barnaby. It’s too easy to rubbish the Nationals as an historical atavism, a party which has long since lost its relevance, party which is in terminal decline. Small in numbers it may be, but those numbers matter to the Liberals. Let’s remember that in 2010 without his leadership of the revolt against the carbon tax, Tony Abbott would never have seized the leadership from Malcolm Turnbull.  Chances are, the way things are lining up, Barnaby could well be the Bill-Shorten-for-PM camp’s best ally.

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You’ve got to hand it to Malcolm Turnbull, he’s never short of a word. Tragically, it is seldom the right word, the apt word, the word that crystallises meaning. Instead, a fog of words billows forth obscuring or forsaking simple clarity.

On ABC Insiders, Sunday 7 February, for example, Turnbull cosies up to Cuddly Barrie ‘Big Ted’ Cassidy, one of the most forgiving political interviewers in the land. Arm Chair PM Turnbull gushes buckets of gratuitous information, a tepid bath of benign assertions.

Cassidy has cued a voter who has drawn the PM aside in public to tell him not to ‘stuff up’ over increasing the GST. Implied is that he’s got the next election on a plate but for his own, inherent, poor judgement.

Turnbull turns instantly into a justification of his flip-flop by misrepresenting failure of nerve as a concern for fairness and efficacy.

…the issue with any changes to the tax system, particularly a really big one like increasing the GST is that you have to be satisfied that it is actually going to deliver an improvement in GDP growth. In other words, it’s got to drive jobs and growth. And unless you can be satisfied that it’s going to do that, and that it’s going to be fair, of course, which is equally important, then you wouldn’t do it.

How can a GST, a regressive tax be fair? How can it have taken four months to discover that a 50% GST hike would be a slug to productivity as measured, grossly, by GDP? Any fool could tell you higher taxes dampen demand. Why is the PM now recycling ScoMo’s banal slogan, ‘drive jobs and growth’?

He knows Barrie won’t interrupt his flow but he’s prepared to talk over the top of him anyway.  His inner bore prompts him to labour every little point. Bully his listener with trivial details. It’s excruciating to listen to, let alone watch. What he doesn’t ever seem to know is how to answer the question. Or care. His mission is to confer legitimacy by misrepresentation and by resorting to generality. He eases up only to labour the bleeding obvious.

So, what we have been doing … what we have been doing, as you can see is looking at this and a number of other tax reform changes or tax changes very, very carefully. They’re very complex and they deserve careful discussion and it’s good that, by not shutting it down, as previous governments have done, in a panic, we’ve allowed a debate to continue.

This is a marvellously fictive rationalisation of indecision and ineffectual leadership and his claim of close scrutiny is outrageous unless he is referring to Liberal Party polling on the GST hike. Yet Barrie looks on like some bemused St Bernard rescue dog as a hapless downhill skier disappears under an avalanche of his own blathering.

Unless his master’s voice admits he’s tried and failed to sell the electorate a pup, how can nod-along Cassidy ever save him? From himself.

Neither a leader born nor made, but a hugely ambitious man with a reputation for wanting his own way at all times, Turnbull pretends that his failed sales pitch has been a process of consultation. Barrie could ask why the Green paper lies abandoned, along with the people’s submissions; why the white paper has been pulled. But he can’t -or won’t- get a word in edgewise.

There’ve been a lot of contributions – there’s been differences of opinion in the Liberal Party, differences of opinion in the Labor Party, differences of opinion in the economic commentariat – and all of that has enabled us to make a very careful and considered analysis of it. Obviously with Treasury doing the analysis with some outside assistance and we are coming to a conclusion. But it will be evidence based. It’s not going to be a political decision. Whatever policies we take as part of our tax reform package, Barrie, will be ones that we are satisfied will deliver the growth and jobs outcome that we want.

Turnbull has no need of any opposition hatchet-job here. He’s damaged his leadership aspirations enough with his own prevarication. There has been no attempt to truly canvass and then discuss options beyond telling us ad nauseum that everything remained ‘on the table’. Nor does he seem to understand that his language betrays his true motivation. Economic sense, it may not make, democratic it may not be but a political decision is guaranteed. His lofty intellectual pose is damaged here by his inability to choose quite the right words.

Not that he is grossly off-key. Bum notes are uncommon. A suppository of wisdom would not pass his lips. But, rather, all his words are a barricade. He can lecture but he can’t talk. Or if he talks, he is not really listening. When he looks as if he’s listening, he’s rehearsing his next wind-bagging evasion and mind-numbing dumbed-down explanation.

Turnbull can pitch any amount of lofty speeches but you can’t dwell in windy generalities forever. You have to be able to come down out of the clouds and answer a question sometime. Time wounds all heels. His ‘I’m not Abbott the barbarian’ silken parachute will not soften his landing.

Turnbull loves to show off what he knows, often alas without knowing enough to bring significant insights to any given issue or situation. And it’s not just his bloviator reading glasses which are irritating. He’s a poseur pretending to be Prime Minister.

After four months’ suffering, it is clear, to any who care to listen that as a speaker, Turnbull has an ear of tin. Even as a show, a divertissement between Abbott and the next Liberal election victory, Malcolm the waffling toff has just about passed his use by date.

 

 

 

In appointing the deeply compromised, former Attorney General, counter-terror warrior, Philip Ruddock as his government’s special envoy for human rights to the UN, Malcolm Turnbull has achieved a gesture worthy of Tony Abbott’s appointment of himself as Minister for Women. It is a calculated slight.

Unless, of course, the PM wishes to give the Saudis, the Chinese and the Vietnamese representatives currently disgracing the UN Human Rights Council another rogue they can relate to.

Whatever Ruddock’s appointment may do to boost Turnbull’s stakes in the monkey pod room, the PM’s snub to international standards can only damage his own reputation for sound judgement and leadership.

Was this the only way he could be rid of the ‘father of the house’ as the time-server was so often ironically misnamed? Is this the move to bring an innovative, agile Australia to the world’s attention?  Can he do any more to trash our image abroad?

Australia’s reputation will sink even further under Ruddock’s dead weight. Not that much more is needed with our immigration laws, Operation Sovereign Borders, the continued existence of a regime of indefinite detention in unsafe camps on Manus and Nauru Island and the recent high court green light to repatriate babies and children to these places of danger.  It will, however, assist us attain new depths of world disapproval.

Ruddock is a rebuff to the court of international opinion if not to the notion of accountability itself. Turnbull is dismissing UN censure over our mistreatment of refugees and asylum-seekers by appointing the one Australian in political life whose career commends him least to the position.

Philip Ruddock helped Howard politicise the maltreatment of asylum seekers in 2001, when he helped perpetrate the myth that boat people were throwing babies overboard and whose career as Attorney General saw a series of assaults on the human rights of ordinary Australians including re-introducing the law of sedition, against expert advice, along with preventative detention and control orders.  He pioneered the culture of secrecy which continues to vitiate the people’s right to know what Immigration and Border Control get up to in our name.

Ruddock’s war on terror resulted in travesties of justice and human rights in the cases of Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks whom he insisted, madly, with no evidence, were high-ranking al Qaeda operatives. Habib, whose rendition to Egypt and subsequent torture was witnessed by an Australian official, later successfully sued the Gillard government.

On the domestic front Turnbull is lining himself up with Tony Abbott’s populist, pragmatic chauvinism. Perhaps he thinks by thumbing his nose at Geneva and all other piss-weak libertarians he demonstrates how he’s secretly a tough guy who doesn’t give a stuff what others think of him. It’s a calculated, if not opportunistic, statement of independence, made in the context of the proposed return of vulnerable infants to Manus and Nauru.

Sending Ruddock to the UN is partly a crudely macho swagger. No-one tells Australians what to do. Unless of course, they are American presidents based in Washington who must do the bidding of the pentagon and its powerful patrons and pressure groups and take us into unwinnable battles over oil.

But that’s war. Ruddock helps Turnbull re-position himself as a hard bastard who doesn’t give a fig for the finer nuances of international relations or human rights. It’s another sharp right turn from the image of refinement he presented as the alternative Prime Minister in exile during Abbott’s excesses.

Nothing new here, the PM has done the same on climate change and on social issues such as gay marriage. He has even retreated from his leadership of the republican movement in order to launder his political character to remove all traces of his former, left-leaning libertarian tendencies. Or previous self-inventions.

Abbott was given to railing against a world who dared to ‘lecture us’ on human rights, or which simply seeks to hold us to account for our barbaric, selfish cruelty. Turnbull’s anointing of Ruddock as human rights warrior does much the same. In the process, the PM is capitulating to the very forces in September he pretended to oppose.

For a man who came to power promising to respect the intelligence of the electorate it is an alarming flip-flop; rapid reversal and retreat into the mindless slogans of being ‘tough on border protection’, as if we were threatened with invasion or at war on some battle-field, where our enemies are not ourselves but instead some baroque, fictive, demon people-smugglers that have such enormous power of perception we can utter no word about how we treat even one tiny baby lest this result in a tidal wave of rusty, clapped out fishing trawlers on the horizon.

It’s preposterous but it’s only part of his message. Turnbull’s calculated gesture of contempt for the principles and processes of decent, responsible global citizenship is intended for a wider audience. Geneva will not mistake it for what it is, a two fingered salute to those who criticise our primitive immigration and ‘border protection’ policies.

The UN, for all its challenges and limitations is staffed by intelligent, often learned people, who will have no trouble recalling that Ruddock then attorney-general was the Australian politician who, in 2002, helped then PM John Howard perpetrate the lie that asylum-seekers had thrown babies overboard. It was the first, irrevocable step towards the demonising of the dispossessed and their travel agents, ‘the people smugglers’, a pit into which the PM and his foreign minister have lately taken delight in dragging us all back into.

‘We’ll decide who comes to this country’ ran the headlines in the Murdoch press, featuring an heroic John Winston Howard pretending to take a stand against refugees who had somehow forfeited all right to our compassion and humanity. By means of a lie.

Ruddock helped Howard make political capital out of cruel indifference and wilful deception. He ushered in an era in the nation’s political life in which our cruel inhuman indifference to the worlds’ most unfortunate peoples could be presented not only as right but as necessary. Our national security was at stake. We must maintain our sovereign borders. The hollow, meaningless rhetoric that accompanies the theatre of cruelty reverberates in the nation’s parliament today.

Demonising asylum-seekers began with a lie exploited for political gain, with Mr Ruddock’s agile help and John Howard’s avid encouragement. We were persuaded to surrender our humanity for his political gain. We are, today, ourselves, all of us, diminished, our better instincts all locked down by a perverse determination to keep others out that began with Howard’s desperate bid to win an election, thanks to Ruddock’s help.

No more calculated snub to the UN could be found than to announce the appointment of this man as Australia’s special envoy for human rights. What it ultimately does to the nation is anyone’s guess. But what it does for Turnbull’s leadership and reputation for judgement will, ultimately, be little short of disastrous.

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Friday afternoon, Malcolm Turnbull drops a bombshell. He intends to ignore the will of the people over tax reform. Speaking on ABC Adelaide he says:

“I think given we’re so close to the budget, the budget will be, for all practical purposes, the white paper.”

It’s no big announcement; he couldn’t be more low-key about it. More polite. Or less brutal. Forget the people’s input. There’s just not enough time. Imagine this as an election campaign slogan: ‘We really want to be democratic and consult and converse about tax but we just don’t have the time’.

After taking power because,

“It is clear enough that the government is not successful in providing the economic leadership that we need,”

Turnbull has aborted his national conversation on tax. He’s scrapped the time-honoured process of consultation whereby a discussion paper allows the people to identify and commit to a problem which leads to a green paper which airs possible solutions and seeks feedback, a paper which in turn provides the basis for the white paper, which sets out what the government proposes to do. ‘Economic leadership’ does not entail scrapping the consultation process.

At first glance Turnbull appears to be just following Treasurer, Scott Morrison, who will not be deterred, he says, from tax reform just because a hike of 50% in the GST might be unpopular. So claims ScoMo, for whom increasing tax and stopping boats are all the same thing. He’s done unpopular before.

Morrison makes it seem so simple. So easy. If only people would just shut up and let those born to rule get on with the job of government.

Then the champion of unpopular causes gets carried away with his own heroic virtue. Nervous backbenchers are just bed-wetters, ScoMo jeers. This alienates them further. But what, then, does this now make Malcolm Turnbull?

Late Friday, Turnbull tells an Adelaide ABC reporter, in passing, that his government’s White Paper will be dropped.  It’s a sign that, after 140 days of Liberal floating a GST increase he’s now trying to torpedo the idea. Frantically.

Four months into his Prime Ministership and eight months out from an election as Lenore Taylor reminds us, Turnbull may not have a clue who he is or what he stands for but he knows what he doesn’t like. Opposition. The PM may have a pathological need for approval but that aside he’s shrewd enough not to sign his own political death-warrant. If only it were so easy.

The PM’s change of policy on consultation will come as a shock to those hundreds of Australians who made submissions in good faith that they might be listened to; that their voices might influence policy – especially on taxation, by a politician who came to power promising a consensus model which ‘respected the intelligence’ of the electorate. Now at least it’s clear. The people’s voice doesn’t matter.

Cheer squads are acceptable. Some, like Kate Carnell, veteran barracker for all businesses great and small are a shrewd investment; independent opinion is a disposable extra. Surely he can’t expect voters to be happy with their dismissal?

Unhappy also are Turnbull’s own backbenchers who are caught flat-footed, wedged between a tax conversation few of us can join in and the growing pressure of electorates which hate the idea of a 50% GST rise, an idea which has not been explained let alone argued. As Russell Broadbent tells the media,

“I am yet to hear a coherent argument as to why we are doing this, an argument I could use to convince the people of my electorate,” Broadbent says.

Instead Malcolm Turnbull proposes to ride rough-shod over any process of democratic decision-making. Clearly rattled by growing back-bench dismay over a 50% rise in GST, our unelected PM plunges headlong into another flip-flop. It’s a disturbing trend. Does he have a clue what he’s doing? What is the point of brand Turnbull if it is as weak and vacillating in government as the PM he overthrew? What price democracy under a Turnbull government?

Daily, Turnbull behaves more like his predecessor Cap’n Tony Abbott, an equally inept decision-maker with no clear agenda whose fondness for rash unilateral ‘Captain’s calls’ helped pave the way for Turnbull take his job.

Autocratic decisions are the order of the day, for the Abbott-Turnbull government while its main business of managing the affairs of the nation, or its policy, or itself remains confused and at worst inept. Kate Carnell has just been anointed Ombudsman for a GST hike and tax cuts for high income earners and business, a $6 million dollar move which does a public servant out of a job. Mark Brennan, current commissioner for small business, a former Labor appointee must make way for a political appointee. No fuss was made; no consultation was deemed necessary.

No warning or consultation preceded Turnbull’s words on Friday, either. He surprised those who heard earlier in the week his Treasurer promise that the White Paper would be ‘released before the next election’. Yep. The same white paper that was promised to be released before Christmas. The same white paper that Tony Abbott put on hold.

Democracy is on indefinite hold in this Liberal Party government. Turnbull, himself, is a PM in search of what he stands for, a PM whose chief distinguishing feature so far is his phobia of committing to any one policy. So far he is Tony Abbott in a better suit and a more coherent sound-bite.

Abbot came to be paralysed on policy by his fear of getting anyone off-side. Turnbull is every bit as fearful. Yet there is plenty of bold reflex action: business lobbyists such as Ms Carnell are welcomed on-board.

The White Paper on tax reform was supposed to reflect the nations diverse views. As it still says grandly, hollowly on its better tax website, the government tells us ‘

‘The Treasurer opened the conversation on tax by releasing the tax discussion paper on 30 March 2015. The formal submissions process has now closed’.

They got that last bit right. Closed. The government has taken our views into consideration and rejected all of them.

This was to have been a process of consultation, a national conversation, a way of government seeking out and recording the diversity of opinion amongst the Australian people on an issue of fundamental importance. Tax.

Hundreds of submissions were received. Typically a green paper would inform a white paper which would guide policy. Now, all is to be tossed into the garbage can.

Bugger the people. Bugger the fact that for months Treasurer Morrison has regaled us with his oily promise of a national conversation on tax reform. What we got instead was: ‘Let us pretend to value your opinion. Let us delay our white paper. Then, early in February, let us totally scrap the whole pretence.

Thanks for nothing, Mr Turnbull. Thanks for wasting our time. Thanks for the arrogance and contempt for what the people might think. Encourage us to give our opinions and then just trash the results. Clearly the people don’t matter to your style of government whatever that may turn out to be. You have made it clear we are irrelevant to you.

Just don’t be surprised when we return the favour in September. Dropping your 50% GST rise is your business but don’t expect Australians to take kindly to your trashing what’s left of our democracy in the process.

 

People smugglers are no threat to our sovereignty postures Malcolm Turnbull in Question Time, Tuesday, as a beleaguered PM, beset by internal division and a continuing decline in global economic news, resorts to the old Liberal line that cruelty to asylum seekers is an effective and worthy deterrent of demon people smugglers. It is an unworthy and unwelcome decline in his leadership.

Of course it helps when heading into an election year if you can engender a sense of national crisis and pose as your nation’s saviour, but when babies and children must suffer as a result of your need to appear ‘tough on people smuggling’ you tread thin ice.

What does this do to ‘brand Turnbull’? What damage will this cause to his carefully cultivated illusion of a superior moral tone? What price his slogan-less government now?

Does the PM really need to appease his party’s disaffected right wingers by channelling Tony Abbott’s apparent cavalier disregard for humanity; his apparent contempt for our international obligations to refugees and asylum seekers?

The new parliamentary term has not begun well. Economic indicators are all heading south. AGL has pulled out of coal-seam gas. There is back-biting from the backbench about the GST hike, despite Douglas Robb’s denial.

Worse, the government’s game plan, which featured killing Bill Shorten with union smears is all over the media. A rat in the ranks has leaked the very first Cabinet meeting’s talking points.

The gauntlet is down. By Wednesday the PM seems all out to win at all costs in a race to the bottom. He uses parliament’s Question Time to pose as guardian of our national security, apparently happy to grandstand on the High Court 6:1 verdict in favour of the legality of Manus and Nauru.

Some MSM reporters, doubtless, will praise Turnbull’s ersatz patriotism. His cheap rhetoric will be hailed as making him ‘strong on border protection’. His posturing will blend in well with Scott Morrison’s ‘tough but fair’ stance on raising the GST for everyone so that a privileged few get income tax cuts. And it may help get the Monkey Pod room off his back for a moment.

 

Turnbull is under pressure to prove he’s no bleeding heart liberal. Abbott’s speech in the US helps wedge him on gay marriage and Kevin Andrews urges troop deployment in Syria in what seems to be a continuing bid to paint the new leader soft on terror. Or just soft.

 

A flying visit to the frontline does not quite do the trick. Images of Turnbull in a bomber jacket for an awkward photo session reveal few of our boys in Iraq with smiles on their faces. The ABC, does, however, seem to step up its anti-ISIS news items.

 

Knocking back a US invitation to boost our troop deployment may not have won any hearts and minds amongst our military personnel already deployed in Iraq, but it was a wise decision. Turnbull’s decision to dive into the people smuggling bag of tricks with all its attendant assumptions lies and misconceptions, on the other hand, is less well-considered.

“The people smugglers will not prevail over our sovereignty. Our borders are secure. The line has to be drawn somewhere and it is drawn at our border”.

Our borders never were threatened by people smugglers. In the meantime, however, as a result of the High Court’s ruling against a challenge, babies are able to be sent back to Nauru and Manus Island. Despite the PM’s real intentions and despite Peter Dutton’s desperate backpedalling, the news from the High Court is nothing to crow about.

It’s not something that merits a public pat on the back in parliament, Mr Turnbull. It doesn’t vindicate our policy towards asylum seekers. It doesn’t do anything for our international reputation or our claims to be a humane and compassionate society.

All it is an expected legal outcome. The High Court has ruled against a challenge to the legality of offshore detention. It says nothing about the morality of indefinite off shore detention in life endangering conditions on Manus or Nauru.

Ninety-one children, thirty-seven of them babies are among the 267 asylum seekers including female victims of sexual assault now threatened with deportation to places so notoriously unsafe and badly run that they’ve attracted protests from the UNHCR and human rights groups around the world.

Children suffer especially acutely, from bed wetting, nightmares, ongoing effects of trauma and torture in previous countries, as well as “situational crisis” from their current detention, IHMS reports. Those attending school on Nauru are threatened with knives and are subject to sexual harassment. Often beaten and abused by community members, they live in fear.

To send the babies back would be child abuse, says Greens senator Sarah Hansen-Young whose heroic efforts to expose conditions in the off-shore detention centres have been subject to ridicule by Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton. Even Dutton is now, however, saying he would not send a child back into danger.

Border protection is at best a confected nonsense, one of the worst legacies of the Abbott Prime Ministership debacle. Our national sovereignty was never in question. Punishing asylum seekers and refugees by putting them on Manus and Nauru has never been a deterrent to any people smuggler.

Instead of pretending to be tough on people smugglers Malcolm Turnbull could prove he is tough by exercising moral leadership. Close down the detention centres. Let the men, women and children live amongst us. Let us look to their healing. Surely they have suffered enough.

 

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Don’t tell  waste your breath telling the Federal Treasurer his tax plans are unpopular.  Being unpopular  will only serve to flatter his colossal ego.  Don’t ask how he can ignore the will of the people. Or delay the hundreds of submissions to his green paper on tax reform options. ScoMo knows what’s good for us. He’s about to launch a 15 % GST hike upon us.

Ready or not-so-ready, Scott Morrison is already lumbering down the runaway. His rent-seekers’ pre-election special, the deceptively misnamed ‘tax reform package’ is set for a barn-storming national tour. Pity none of it adds up.

Morrison proposes to tax all of us more despite telling us there’s no revenue problem.   We are meant to swallow whole his government’s line that this will ‘grow’ the nation’s economy. As a sweetener, expect tax cuts for those earning over $80,000 PA which will net you $100, 000 a year if you are a millionaire or about seven dollars a week if you are not.

The ScoMo-tax will hit hardest those who can least afford to pay, the poor and the elderly. It will also discriminate against women who already pay higher prices for identical products in a so-called ‘pink-tax‘ and do nothing for those it pretends to help, women with children in part-time work who would increase their hours but for the extra income tax. Compensation is spoken of, true. But what this will amount to is anyone’s guess. Best keep your hopes low.

And who are we to quibble? What would we know? Never does respecting the people’s will enter into ScoMo’s vocabulary. Nowhere does he deign to explain how a regressive tax will do anything at all to promote economic growth. Or do anything but increase social division. Doing unpopular means not doing explaining or being too fussed over fairness. Morrison will just mow you down if you say it can’t fly. Experts scatter for their safety.

Bizarrely, even for ScoMo, riskily, he resorts to mythologising his past. He harangues his talkback mate Ray, I-can’t-find-the-Bible, on Hadley’s 2GB radio show about how in 2013 he knew best . He parades his track record of trashing the people’s will as a badge of honour even if it means he has to re-write some well-known history.

‘I remember before the 2013 election turn-backs actually had lower levels of support in the Australian community. It’s important that when you believe that something’s right for the country, that you remain focused on that’, he tells Ray and Ray’s listeners.

‘Turn back the boats’ as an unpopular slogan? Seriously? Morrison will do or say anything. His national conversation on tax is also a complete con. His government never had any intention of truly consulting anyone. What it sought were smoke and mirrors, a subterfuge where, after all options having been ‘on the table’ for months, suddenly all we are all shoe-horned into one: a GST rise.

Cue Mr Clean Mike Baird to take some of the heat with his so-called ‘compromise plan’ which equally bizarrely gives the money raised by the new GST rise, a state tax, largely back to the Commonwealth. A pittance only of $7 billion would go towards health and education, both of which are bleeding after the Abbott government’s cuts of $70 billion.  If this is a compromise, it highlights how far off the tracks the ‘national tax conversation’ has been derailed. Or hi-jacked.

Not only are ScoMo’s ‘unpopular’ turn-backs a false analogy, however, his words are a disturbing abrogation of his responsibility to the people. Morrison  is happy to override popular opinion in order to give us not what we want but what he thinks we need. Or what he’s been told to tell us we need. Tax cuts for the top end of town.

His package won’t fly. Can’t fly. He’s even getting ahead of the PM as Michelle Grattan observes ; his equivocal but needier fellow social isolate flight ‘Captain Flash’, Turnbull. A rough patch looms ahead, surely. Turnbull may flake off just when Morrison discovers he, himself, is irrevocably welded to a GST that we all hate. It wouldn’t be the worst outcome. Not for Turnbull, anyway.

Morrison’s got few of us on board. His past lies don’t help. His ‘national conversation about tax’ performance piece failed to be a conversation. It solicited hundreds of submissions from all of us. Now it is totally ignoring them.

The promised green paper reflecting our views on tax reform has been postponed, the Treasurer says until ‘before the election’. Besides, who needs consultation when you have ‘Malcolm and I’?

‘Malcolm and I … have advanced the debate a lot more effectively over the past four or five months than a green paper ever would‘.

One modest government: two colossal egos.

February’s version of ScoMo is running the old ‘tough but necessary’ operating system. We’ve seen it before, right down to the presumptuous arrogance. Ad nauseam. It saves admitting that his sales pitch is a failure. Or that his reform package is no such thing but just a ruse to get us all to subsidise his government’s tax cuts for the rich.

You can tell Morrison senses defeat by his uncompromising demeanour. Soft and cuddly ScoMo locks up and has to reset himself to Rottweiler mode. It’s disturbing transformation as Gillian Triggs discovered when she dared venture that the indefinite detention of children was a human rights abuse if not a crime against humanity. Morrison pounced on her definition of detention as if a bit of categorical nit-picking ever did anything for imprisoned children.

Perhaps looking for the word, ‘resolute’, SBS  helpfully misreports that the treasurer is resilient. No. After pretending to be tractable, democratic, even, he is back to his old I-know-what’- good-for-you-damn-you contempt for any views but his own. He has no shortage of other stellar performers, either, to cheer him on.

Kate Carnell, tireless advocate for the abolition of penalty rates and the promotion of lower wages, who plays the role of Liberal blue heeler, nips at dissenters’ heels. Kate has strategically morphed into an ombudsman to supply a bit more puff on behalf of wealthy business interests who feel out in the cold in Canberra.

Ms Carnell will supplement the more than one thousand business lobbyists already hard at work in the nation’s capital, to say nothing of her own ACCI,  the Australia Chamber of Commerce and Industry and an alphabet of similar groups who must daily badger our political elite. When it comes to advocates for business, too much is barely enough.

The public will pay a bargain $6 million dollars for Kate and a small team to support her to act as a cheerleader for increasing the GST. Yet ordinary folk are not allowed the luxury of having any new advocates or even our disability or sex discrimination commissioners reinstated.

Kate helpfully waves aside popular opinion.  Earlier this year, fearing an unpopular GST increase would be discarded too quickly, she got up nine different business groups to join in lobbying against ‘short-termism’ in political decision-making. Her view is that no-one likes to pay extra tax. Or even their fair share.

A reporter raises recent Newspoll results suggesting that a GST increase is not what we want. A rise appeals to at best just under half of voters. The people are wrong again, however, it seems. Mal and Scott will sort them out. Tell them what’s good for them. Good for Mal and Scott that is.

A democratic government respects the will of the people. It does not trash popular opinion to follow its own agenda of protecting privilege by offering tax cuts to its mates. It  cannot merely be the servant of entrenched division and inequality. It cannot seek tax reform submissions and just sit on them. It cannot offer slogans instead of explanation of its aims. If it seeks more tax revenue it must make its case for increased prosperity for the common good.

So far the Abbott/Turnbull regime has flouted every requirement of a decent, democratic government in its campaign to increase taxes without consultation. It is time for all Australians to speak out.

In the 1990s, when Malcolm was still a merchant banker, the Turnbull family commissioned one of my father’s artists, Lewis Miller, to paint a portrait of Malcolm. Unhappy with the work, Turnbull confronted my father at a function and exclaimed: “That artist of yours is no good; he’s made me look like a big, fat, greedy cunt”, to which my father replied, “He is a realist painter, you know”. 

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Malcolm Turnbull’s pillow-talk may be less public these days, but Evan Hughes’ recollection of his father Ray’s heart to heart with the younger Mal’s taste in art is a rare and precious jewel in a week of schlock from the publicists, hacks and spin-doctors who must toil heroically to put lipstick on pigs.

News that our own accomplished turd-polisher, political strategist, former tobacco lobbyist, Lynton Crosby has been knighted by grateful UK Tories, almost takes the gloss off the Turnbull anecdote.  Crosby pockets £ 2.4 million for his election-winning package after an election which was largely decided by non-conservative voters failing to vote.

So complete now is the average Brit’s exclusion from participation in politics and society, so bleak is their future, that the overwhelming response to both party campaigns was ‘why bother’?

Crosby has, nevertheless, helped the Tories set some sort of record. Not since universal suffrage in 1918 (for women over 30 but ten years later equally for both sexes) has any party with less than 37% of the popular vote gained an absolute majority in the UK parliament.

Least he be underwhelmed by his knighthood and fee, Crosby is hailed as ‘an inspirational role model’ by the Australia Day foundation who make him UK Australian of the Year. Perhaps his campaign against plain wrapping for tobacco products tipped the distinction in his favour.

Plain packaging discourage children from buying cigarettes, thereby denying an important market to tobacco companies whose products cause six million people to die each year. But bleeding heart liberals can butt out; spin-meisters rule the world OK?

Role models work best unfettered by scruples or ethics as the work of our own popular heroes in Border Protection, for example, or our Monkey Pod hoons, the Abbott government in exile, attests. Its suppository of wisdom is tapped by an anti-gay group in the US and fellow marriage guru, Kevin Andrews has taken leave of parliament to supply a similarly right-wing mob’s desire to have another Australian political failure on its speakers’ list. Abbott drops in on Rupert Murdoch and Jerry to offer some pre-nuptial counselling. It all spells trouble-making for Malcolm at home.

Tony Abbott, for whom ‘no’ is the new ‘yes’, is spurred to honour his pledge not to snipe or undermine Turnbull by doing precisely both. Is the portrait story a bit of monkey business? Imagine the outcry.

By Sir Lynton’s gong, no! By that new gold standard of ethics in public life, Sir Lynton’s knighthood, the reappearance of Turnbull the unhappy portrait subject an elderly story today, has nothing to do with Monkey Pod plotters.

Countless other scoundrels abound who would eagerly revive any story depicting his narcissism and foul mouth just to take him down a peg. Abbott’s anti-gay marriage speech and Kev’s mischief will help to wedge Mal if he doesn’t watch himself.

Just don’t expect him to revoke his exciting times marriage licence any time soon. Or counsel Tony Abbott with the pithy phrase used by Reserve Bank members on NPA’s Brian Hood tried to blow the whistle on corruption in 2007-8.

The director of Note Printing Australia who exposed alleged bribery in two Reserve Bank subsidiaries was told ‘you don’t fit in, f— off’. Similar advice may be invited by the antics of the Monkey Pod God.

The language may be a bit less blue when the RBA meets next Tuesday, to decide our futures as the tabloids would have it. Directors will prognosticate the unknowable, as distinguished economist Richard Denniss reminds us with his refreshing candour. Or just make stuff up. Expect fluffy coverage in MSM about interest rates, now a largely ineffectual lever being ‘on hold’.

The economy will be described as if it were a toddler taking its first steps. One thing is certain. On present trends, no-one will be high-fiving or punching the air. No-one will ask about the RBA’s reserves.

Equally certain is that no-one will vote to return to Treasury the $8.8 billion that Joe Hockey flicked its way, casually boosting the 2013 federal budget deficit to $40 billion, after years of screaming about deficits at Labor. It could be a deposit on repairing the $80 billion hole Joe made in health and education funding to the states.

Hockey’s expensive political statement, a way of dramatising Labor’s reckless debt and deficit disaster will continue to be paid for by cuts to health and welfare budgets. Ordinary Australians are stung for Hockey’s political stunt. Onya Joe! Is there an award for US Australian of the Year?

Australia’s growth in 2016 will be minimal, perhaps two per cent. Export earnings continue downward while domestic demand remains weak. Yet our PM just oozes excitement and wild optimism. He can’t think of any better time to be alive. It’s a disturbing take on leadership.

Dissent is unacceptable in the Turnbull Liberal government, as Glyn Davis of Melbourne University found early last November. Turnbull dismissed the Vice Chancellor’s real objections to his thought bubble tying university researchers with industry as ‘… running against the vibe.’

‘You haven’t got the new zeitgeist. The new zeitgeist, Glyn is to believe in yourself, is to have a go’. Davis simply told Turnbull that unlike Britain, for example, we don’t have industries big enough to fund university research.

A new zeitgeist, or a new despotism? Is his government so deluded it believes it can force us to agree against all evidence that we live in the best of all possible times? Of course it can. It works in North Korea, a totalitarian state, but it is ‘a hard ask’ as they say in sports journalism in Australia.

Far from offering hope, Turnbull is peddling denialism in a different package. And it’s the last thing worried investors and a cash-strapped general public want to hear. Record household debt suggests average Australians worry more about paying their bills; meeting their current financial commitments, than shopping the nation back into economic recovery. The true picture is sobering.

Sterling has collapsed 7% in two months, partly on rumours of an impending ‘Brexit’ from the EU, Australia’s third largest trading partner and its low interest rate forecast for 2016. Weak demand and overproduction continue to drive down commodity prices. Warren Hogan, ANZ Bank’s chief economist, foresees depression in China’s heavy industry. Will he, too, get a lecture from Turnbull on his need to get the new vibe?

Australian MSM, on the other hand, is rushing to fall in with our Dear Leader. His ABC new broom, Michelle Guthrie, is abuzz with the new zeitgeist. Sabra Lane recently gushed over Malcolm Turnbull’s interest in art and his love of Winston Churchill for seven minutes, as if nothing else in the world was more important. If only she could have asked him to recall his verdict on the Lewis portrait. Or what his government’s up to with the ABC?

Technology editor, Nick Ross quit the ABC because he has not been allowed to report on the NBN fiasco. His reports have the wrong vibe. Evidence that Turnbull has sabotaged the NBN is just not part of the new optimism.

Other commentators play down any sense of impending crisis by softening their language. TV news is of ‘stocks tumbling’, ‘investors jittery’ and the old chestnut ‘market volatility’ diminish a stark economic reality. The new vibe involves the old cultivation of diversion as well as evasion and denial.

Admiral Morrison continues to turns a blind eye to anything that’s not in his script of expenditure and income tax cuts.   And dumping on Labor. Will he also sling a few billion into the reserve bank’s reserves?

‘It will be a tight budget’ says the PM and his treasurer while busily waving fistfuls of dollars under the Adani Brothers’ noses.  Turnbull’s game plan is to entice the billionaires into fantasy coal mining, a type of reality TV show in which the contestants don’t have to do anything to get the money.  It parodies the ABC where it can do nothing under the current government to keep its funding.

The tight budget also tightens a noose. Investors are divesting from coal-mining shares as the world’s carbon budget tightens in the fight against climate change, and as renewable energy technologies fall in cost. Opinion polls, moreover, show Australian voters are less and less sold on industry subsidies.

Morrison spent much of his week pitching his leaner, fairer, smaller tax system. A GST rise will fund planned tax breaks.

Average families out of pocket $6000 a year as a result of a GST hike will welcome their chance of being a part of Turnbull’s campaign ‘to do something about the bottom line’.

Yet we are awash with buckets of money for the rich. A millionaire will get an extra $100, 000 a year under ScMo’s planned cuts. The rest of us get an extra $7.00 per week.  Employers can expect continued support in their bid to keep wages low. Working conditions must stay as they are for everyone’s good.

Turnbull warns his is not going to be a ‘fistful of dollars’ budget, unless of course, you exploit natural resources, endanger the environment or head up a wealthy corporation. High rollers, like Shenhua mining win the whole trifecta.

Sneering at Labor who promise this week to restore some of the education funding needed to address inequality of opportunity promised under Gonski and then some, Turnbull said this would not be a cash-splashing budget. ‘We all know, the PM said airily that it’s not just a matter of spending more money on the problem.’

Indeed, much would continue to be taken from the lives of ordinary folk who are said to be excited by the Turnbull government’s innovative ways of getting them to toughen up. Cuts to education, health and social services help us all develop resilience and independence.

Australians with disabilities are said to be liberated by the loss of their disability commissioner and those who are denied a fair go because of gender are raving about Turnbull’s decision to delay appointing a sex discrimination commissioner.

A ‘fistful of dollars’ would be the last thing anyone would wish upon poor innocent victims of misfortune. Government ministers, this week, extol a range of new numbers you can call to raise your awareness of your own poverty or your partner’s violence.

Kent, a homeless man, appears in Saturday’s The Age thanking Malcolm for his innovative government decision to put some of the money cut from refuge services into creating a website which offers the destitute something to click on.

Although Kent has no internet connection, our hearts swell with pride and hope in this ground-breaking step towards an inclusive compassionate society which will soon offer a website for everything.

Click on me will become the new national anthem in an innovative agile and high-tech savvy Australia. Lean on me will provide the melody.

Click on me when you’re not strong

And I’ll be your friend, I’ll help you carry on

For it won’t be long

‘Til I’m gonna need somebody to click on

Kent and others like him are happy to kip down in his local shopping centre. Spend $600 million on a wind commissioner. As long as David Leyonhjelm is happy.

David’s supporters were all over the news this week pointing up the oft-ignored link between Port Arthur massacre and domestic violence. The logic is now crystal-clear, thanks to the independent senator. Since women have struggled after Howard’s gun buy-back to get a good weapon, their menfolk have got away with murder.

Hitting women was being made out to be worse than it really is, anyway, by the feminists and those whose political correctness had gone berserk, said Mark Latham, whose Mr Punch role after politics gets him attention if nothing else in his splenetic outbursts.

Violence is just ‘a coping mechanism’ for men, he said on his debut on Triple M’s Lathamland a show tailored to the incorrigible attention-seeker’s need to be needlessly offensive.

‘How is the tax system actually stopping people who are actually out there backing themselves, achieving the goals they want to achieve?’ Scott Morrison, Sky News Monday 25 January.

‘Stopping people’ has an irresistible ring to Scott Morrison who put a stopper in Tony Abbott’s career by ‘running dead’ to ensure Malcolm Turnbull won the leadership spill four months ago.

Before that he was Abbott’s boat-stopper and Abbott’s ‘fixer,’ before fixing Abbott’s wagon in the spill. Now he’s on to a plan that will help ensure that the more you earn, the more you can keep. It’s part of his quest for a fairer system. And a smokescreen for a higher GST.

Morrison did not stop the boats, they stopped under Rudd, yet by dint of repetition he has most of us believing him. This week he’s hard at work inventing another bizarre fantasy. This time it’s about our tax system stopping us from working or achieving our goals. ‘Backing ourselves’ whatever that means. He just can’t just stop the whoppers.

Morrison pretends that a dollar or two more in tax incurred via bracket creep will cause workers not to go to work or cease to need schools, roads or hospitals. Yet he knows he’s got to pay for essentials such as our latest $400 million a year foreign adventure in Iraq. Border protection cost $2.9 billion and got a top up of $450 million in the MYEFO.

Then there’s parliamentary entitlements. Where are the cuts to pollies’ expenses? Barnaby cost the nation $ 1 million over six months last year in helicopter Joyce rides.

ScoMo’s happy to peddle the Tea Party lie that paying tax prevents us achieving our goals. Encourage wilful blindness as to the social benefits of an income tax system. He’s playing with fire.

A tax break would tie up more capital in Australia’s cash-strapped economy where private debt is at record levels while cuts to government spending could plunge us into a recession we need not have.

Predicted low commodity prices will in 2016 will mean our earnings will continue to decline, yet, at home, the forty per cent of companies who owe us billions in taxes they evade, are not, in Morrison’s view worth chasing. A fantasy, he says.  He would know.

 

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The Abbott-Turnbull government’s new, improved, ScoMo the soft and fluffy laundry product with added stain remover is attractively packaged, thank you ABC, and Annabel Crabb but, somehow, no-one is buying.

Could it be the price? Can he ever put Operation Sovereign Borders behind him? So far ScoMo’s even more of a liability than Joe Hockey.

Having buggered his credibility on Manus and Nauru Scott’s pitch is: ‘trust me, I’m not bringing in any changes to the GST’. But we need to find a way to get our tax rates lower’. He spouts word-perfect IPA drivel about how our tax system with its bracket creep is crippling our productivity. The crafty bastard needs a GST to pay for tax cuts.

ScoMo changes job as often as he changes his pitch. Yet one thing stands like stone. Morrison, former Tourism Oz professional bag-blower loves to withhold information. It’s part of his stand-up routine where he calls for a national conversation on taxation in which he says nothing and nothing we say matters.

Of course in saying nothing, Morrison says a lot. To paraphrase, ScoMo takes the line: ‘Bugger the Westminster doctrine of ministerial responsibility. Let me satisfy my pathological need to withhold from you what I owe you.’ Like the truth.

‘Things are not as they appear, they are as I tell you’. Commodity prices are crashing, export earnings are at an all-time low, many of our bigger businesses do not pay any tax and holler to pay even less, but we do not have a revenue problem; we have an expenditure problem. Because of Labor.

You don’t have to be a Freudian to sense the man’s not well. Just as well he’s not in charge of anything important.

Morrison, a flop in his previous jobs has been booted upstairs. Now he poses as our latest cute and fluffy Treasure- bunny, a stuffed toy in the window of Business As Usual the department store run by Adani, the IPA and Co.

Treasury does all the work. The minister takes all the credit and dodges all responsibility while focusing on the main task ahead. Sell a new version of himself.

Cue Annabel Crabb’s soft-soapie touchy-feely recent episode of Kitchen Cabinet. This is a ScoMo mark III commercial, a vehicle for reminiscing fondly how he and Jules were given the bum’s rush in Sri Lanka but how he just loves its curries. Annabel can’t shut the man up, he’s so pumped with his own promo. Put a V in the programme guide for Vomit bag warning alert.

‘Crabbers’ helps all she can but in the end KC is a tacky failure.  We are meant to see a wholesome, home loving, sweet and decent human being. But  behind the rimless glasses  lurks the monster of Manus Island, the man who had a go at Gillian Triggs for daring to question the detention of children. All we get is the feeling of being conned. And worse. Morrison will do anything to present the right image but the ScoMo promo demeans us all.

In 2010, Morrison took pains to condemn Labor when relatives of asylum seekers killed in a boat tragedy off Christmas Island were flown to attend their loved ones’ funerals in Sydney. Tax-payers should not be paying for this, he thundered. Later he would spend millions on turn-back boats.

As Minister of Immigration, Morrison ordered officers to intercepted terrified refugees, confiscate and destroy their boats before decanting men, women and children into dinky custom-built orange fibreglass craft with just enough fuel to get back into the hands of their tormentors and then consigned them to the high seas. Stop them drowning.

Morrison washed his hands of his ministerial responsibility to protect those seeking refuge and not wilfully endanger them. To say nothing of refoulement, another clause of the Geneva convention on refugees his government contests. As our Lord High Monkey Pod God and Suppository of Wisdom and fellow anal retentive Tony Abbott puts it :”Look, I think Australians are pretty sick of being lectured to,’ about what we do in our own prison camps.

It doesn’t have to. Anyone can see it’s wrong. The family of Reza Barati, the 23 year old Iranian bashed to death February 18 2014 on Manus by guards want answers. Others attempt suicide by ingesting laundry products and anything else toxic they can get their hands on. Every second day someone attempts self-harm.

Hamid Kehazaei, 24, dies of septicaemia from a cut three weeks because there’s so much paper work in the way of getting him to a Brisbane hospital. A 23 year old Somali refugee who is pregnant after being raped on Nauru suffers monumental obstructionism instead of timely access to a termination procedure and other relevant medical help.

Like Dutton, the Minister says he can’t comment on individual cases. Criticisms, Morrison tells us are ‘not based on any primary knowledge of the event or the circumstances’.  Dutton follows this dismissive line in his response to the preventable death of Fazel Chegeni in October 2015 or the Christmas Island riot which was direct result of his policy of mixing violent criminals, minor offenders and asylum seekers. Withholding is a gift which keeps on giving.

Nothing to see here. Australia is not responsible. Direct enquiries to PNG and Nauru whose sovereign territories we have built our detention centres in. But don’t go there and whinge about having a right to know what’s going on in Australia’s name. Don’t give us stories of death threats and being followed or any of that weird stuff. Or we’ll get Dutton to make fun of you. Give praise instead they are not drowning at sea. Penned up, desperate to end their lives instead. Hallelujah!

Oddly, none of this bubbles up through the KC froth. But Morrison is not to be held to account for his past portfolios, he’s been granted immunity by dint of his elevation to Treasurer-Poo Bah and Lord High Everything Else. He stopped the boats. Amen. Rudd just halted them. Besides Liberal treasurers don’t do questions. They rant about Labor’s wasteful failure while blithely creating a debt and deficit mess  of their own.

To be fair to the treasurer, even if he did reinvent himself again there are just too many questions to answer, not even counting those from previous jobs he’s walked away from. Here’s a few for starters.

• Where’s the eighty billion of school and hospital funding your government took from the states?
• What is your government doing about the forty per cent of companies in Australia who were revealed recently to be paying no income tax at all?
• Can you really expect to sell a GST rise that will hit poor and needy people hardest when nearly half of the top end of town get away – ahem – Scott free?
• And how is a 15 per cent GST, which takes money out of circulation and your promise to cut spending such a wise idea when heading into recession?
• Why is the government ignoring record private debt?

As John Kelly points out average Australians are strapped for cash. Currently private debt, comprising business borrowings, home mortgages, other loans and credit cards accounts for $2.5 trillion (AUD), or 156% ratio to GDP.

Unlike public debt, private sector debt could bring everything to a grinding halt. Why is our treasurer pretending it doesn’t exist; doesn’t matter?

Why is it OK to take money from women’s refuges? In an innovative calculation Malcolm Malaprop’s outrageous explanation, reported on his ABC Sunday night, is that costs are down because we are ‘having a deeper conversation’ about domestic violence now? We are? Tell that to the women desperate to find shelter. 423 people are turned away from homeless shelters every night. And you cut funding.

Domestic violence? Try men’s violence towards women. So much for all the awareness raising, Mr Turnbull we’ve been hearing about from you. Just repay the money. $38 million would be a start. It’s a pittance when you put it alongside your tax evaders. Take Shell, for example, which you’ve allowed to pay no company tax although it has pumped $60 billion from us over the past three years.

Clearly the Treasurer is withholding a wool sack filled to bursting of information. Either that or he hasn’t got the foggiest idea of what he’s doing and is desperately trying to stall until he can run the budget the IPA prepared in their kitchen at home earlier. He can hope that a tax cut bribe for some of us will fool us into buying a GST hike for everyone which will have double the real cost on lower income earners than on the well-heeled.  ScoMo’s saying nothing.

Instead he offers a replay of his calming mantra: We don’t have a revenue problem, we have an expenditure problem.

Don’t rule out something colourful; some more high camp performance art.  Tax accountants may be decorated for their courage in collecting more from the poor while the rich get rewarded for evasion?

Will ScoMo match the sheer Dadaist brilliance of his ‘on water’ denial of ministerial responsibility? Will we suddenly be at war with the demonised, desperate poor who like our asylum seekers have done everything to deserve our compassion and absolutely nothing to incur our bizarrely inappropriate show of brute force and hostility?

Suddenly? Aren’t we there already?

 

 

Turnbull gives an unconditional definite maybe to put more boots on the ground in Iraq.

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A man in love with himself may have no rival, but it doesn’t stop him seeking approval. Our emotionally needy political parvenu PM’s own self-promotion and arrogance has cost him undying enmity in his own party. Yet he’s conned the public. Revered simply for not being Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull is a people’s messiah. So far. Perhaps that’s why he is a  wanton in Washington. It’s his endless quest for love. He cannot trust the public crush on him.

A stage-struck Turnbull is so taken with his US reception that he goes Monkey Pod himself- insanely reckless in praise of brute force and ignorance. His US foreign policy salute is so embarrassingly overboard that listeners wonder what’s next. A rap for Vlad Putin’s gift to world peace?

To be fair, someone important is listening to Mal, the Centre for Strategic and International studies, a leading think tank whose Facebook page asks: ‘This Sunday marks 25 years of America bombing Iraq. What has it achieved?’

Has Turnbull researched his audience? A CSIS do is no ordinary wank fest. He appears unsure. Like Jay Gatsby, he has to flash a pedigree to win acceptance. He reaches for the classics, like every futurologist.

Our love-hungry stray from down under is desperate to impress overseas. He hefts his Thucydides. He shares a bit about how when nations see a new head; they rush to kick it. He winces. Abbott ‘s Monkey Pod does him over regularly.

MT’s message is ‘lay off China’. For Thucydides, self-control is key to self-respect; self-respect is vital to courage. Our PM may struggle with some of this. But too much of the little Aussie China plate, will upset Washington. Turners quickly goes red, white and blue in the face in rapturous praise of US boots on the ground. Who needs Bolivian marching powder?

Skipping his party’s creed in which the US, an empire ordained by God for all eternity won all major modern wars for Hollywood and today is beloved unconditionally; revered by peoples worldwide for dispensing peace and democracy, often from the same troop-carrier, Mr Turnbull pulls out Pax Americana!

‘the greatest period of prosperity and peace on earth – including China’s rise – was due to post World War II stability that had been forged by the United States.‘

Mal follows John Howard’s nauseating fawning. Fraser’s sweet surrender: All the way with LBJ? Yet hapless blatherskite Mal has gone beyond the traditional, full Aussie grovel. Mal confuses brave with foolhardy. Someone needs to brief the PM that even Americans know bullshit when they hear it. As do Australians.

Onan The Barbarian does not need any bull from vassals seeking to excuse themselves their military duty of committing more troops to Iraq. Let the US do its own smoke-blowing. Chomsky neatly notes:

‘Powerful states have quite typically considered themselves to be exceptionally magnificent and the United States is no exception to that. The basis for it is not very substantial, to put it politely.’

Turnbull has to refuse Washington’s request but a clear no is too negative. He searches out words to make his weasel into a war horse. A public liberty fondle? That’d do it. No groping – even between mutually consenting freedom lovers.

Mal of the Never-never praises America the land of the free, white rich male. He flaps his Yankee doodle. Pays tribute but drops a clanger. Despite his protestations of love for liberty, his government is hell-bent on taking it away at home.

His government’s victory over freedom in its wholesale meta-data retention is disturbing. State surveillance powers have massively increased. Being stripped of your nationality if you are a suspected terrorist or mischief-maker is a bit of side-show but it reveals the complexion of the beast. Cuts to education and childcare help perpetuate an elite. Turnbull’s Australia entails a systematic disenfranchisement of minorities and disadvantaged groups.

Intolerance and mutual suspicion are ratcheted upwards in the cause of anti-terrorism. Make our nation safe!  Australian Muslims feel far less than free or respected. Human rights advocacy has been steadily dismantled.

For four months, Australia has had no commissioner for sex discrimination. The Chris Gayle or the Briggs-Dutton fiasco alone, are evidence we can’t afford to do without one.

Disabled Australians lost their commissioner, Graeme Innes, a fearless advocate and a giant in compassion and courage. Frightened that our human rights commissioner, Gillian Triggs might indict it for putting asylum-seekers and refugee children into indefinite off-shore detention, or for covering up abuse including medical neglect and beating to death, the Abbott government appointed IPA toy boy Tim Wilson to negate any malign influence of the UN and to ride Triggs until she resigned and right-wing Tim got the job. The plot misfired when Triggs stuck to her guns.

But we do have a wind-farm commissioner, an absolute bargain at $600,000 when you consider the absurdity of his role; the impossibility his commission. Newly appointed Andrew Dyer will have his work cut out for him according to the Liberal Party’s environmental intellectual and protector of fauna he doesn’t forget, Greg Hunt who puts it:

‘His role will be to facilitate resolution of complaints from concerned community residents about, and to provide greater transparency on the operations of, wind farms.’  Transparency? What are they hiding in those rotating blades? Dervish technology?

‘The right boots on the right ground’ is a cute slogan for Malcolm Turnbull to offer in his fearless recent posturing as the good friend who turns you down But what exactly does it mean?

Like a Point Piper Pavlova, Turnbull is soft and light inside a crisp crust. He  says what he thinks we want to hear. ‘The right boots’ is a sop to his party’s right-wing bullies who have him muzzled after his written guarantee to seize power nicely. No policy change. For their love, he poses as a hawk, or discerning buzzard, ready to put the boots in only if and when he absolutely has to. You can walk a mile in another man’s boots, if you want to, but his own will fit him better.

It sounds profound and lofty, ‘the right boots’ is an echo of the right stuff. Mal is the sort of world statesman who can elevate platitude into profundity by just adjusting the settings. The discerning use of force never hurt anybody. It beats the dangerous ranting of his bellicose predecessor; the hairy-chested empty shirt-front threat. (Yet how he must wish he could manage a swift judicious kick to get the junk-yard dog from under his heels and out of the house).

Make-believe is the life-blood of all political scoundrels. Let’s pretend-along-with-Mal of the Never-Never. Our boys in Iraq are really training brave Iraqis to fight better. Understand their own local situation.

We all learn how to fight better when it’s all explained by a complete outsider. Especially  one who wants your oil supply. Or comes looking for your approval. Or who just trashed your place the last time he came looking to restore freedom.

The right boots on the right ground is boxing clever when what is needed is some plain old fashioned simple honesty. We failed in Iraq last time. Badly. Turnbull’s faking a perhaps maybe case for war does nothing to comfort his own or his nation’s insecurity. Faking a concern for freedom and democracy into the bargain does nothing for the PM’s credibility.

 

Turnbull is happy to pose with the few women he’s put in his cabinet; resolutely opposed to making the changes which will enable all women greater access to power.

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Widely dismissed or derided as some sort of wacky, tacky political wasteland, The Silly Season is a series of brilliantly improvised theatre events enacted during our pollies’ summer holidays – full of surprises and novel events but packed with all kinds of significance about the direction of politics when parliament resumes in February.

Putting Out the Garbage performed on 29 December, for example, saw the unbeloved Mal Brough and the equally creepy, a-kissing and a-hugging, Jamie Briggs relegated to the back bench recycling centre, via a wheelie bin dump. Little Jimmy had gone bonkers in Honkers before Christmas but a delay was required for him to ‘inform his family’. If you require a little more honesty in government than this, expect to be disappointed in 2016.

Labor saw the Briggs-Brough dump as a West Wing style ‘take out the trash day’ a tactical dumping of several bad news items at once in order to blur the information and soften its impact ahead of a possible early election in March.

Garbage deserves to become a classic in transparency and government efficiency, a human resource meets waste management fusion routine with a dash of victim bashing thrown in to help gender inequality. Briggs’ apologists in the Murdoch papers described him as ‘decent’ and ‘a good man’ thereby invalidating both complaint and complainant.

If the anonymous female victim, a woman in her twenties, copped a bashing from News Corp reporters, Briggs, on the other hand, The Australian assured readers, would have the support of his colleagues who had pledged to use the Christmas break to reach out to their mate and try to find out where it had all gone wrong.’

Innovative paradigm shifters, it seems will have to sit this one out. As will the optimists. Women voters, on the other hand, continue to fall out of love with Turnbull and his government as its boys’ club rules are revealed to be entrenched.

A Liberal Party report to the federal executive, leaked on 27 December warns Liberals will lose relevance if the party doesn’t include more women. Yet if finds many barriers to women within Liberal ranks such as a ‘boys’ club’ culture; occasional chauvinistic behaviour from men; and exclusivity. Party processes are designed to ‘keep outsiders out’ and ‘perpetuate the power of those who hold political positions’. In brief, the Liberal Party works to keep men on top.

Nowhere is gender inequality more entrenched, than in the Turnbull government’s policy decision to make childcare more expensive by instituting 4.8 billion of cuts to family payments. Not only will this be devastating to single income and low income families, it perpetuates further inequalities. Unequal access to high quality, affordable childcare is a recipe for further income, gender, and social inequalities. Why would any intelligent woman vote for this mob?

In place of information, the PM offers glossy cameos showing ‘average families earning $115,000 and with two kids in childcare will be nearly $4000-a-year better off under a new Robin Hood childcare policy that will slash rebates for the rich to 20 per cent’, says Daily Telegraph national political editor and Liberal spin maven Samantha Maiden.

Withheld, however, as Cassandra Goldie, CEO of ACOSS points out, is separate modelling of the impacts of family payments and childcare packages and cohort analysis of impacts on single parent and couple families with children of different ages. ACOSS analysis presented to a recent Senate Committee Inquiry shows that a low income single parent family with two children would lose more than $60 per week or $3000 per year once their youngest child turns 13.

Meanwhile the Prime Minister’s radical new policy direction of doing whatever will work is a big hit. Rave reviews are rolling in from the meeja, that is to say the PM’s vast personal army of hacks, backers and craven Press Corp lackeys and Sam Maiden. Minister Christian Porter is moved to announce a thought bubble about innovative ways to reduce housing inequality which are sure to come about if he commissions a report. Two years in government and a report is the best he can come up with? It’s a ruse of course – a commitment to nothing but to be seen to be busy.

Turnbull’s veneer of optimism belies a hardened conservative intent on preserving privilege. He is breeding a dilettante government which wants to play like Christian Porter at making trendy, innovative changes urged on by a claque of supporters. Otherwise they’re pretty happy with the way things are.

Not all observers are overwhelmed. Some are rude enough to tell the emperor he’s wearing no clothes. Glyn Davis, Chancellor of Monash refuted Turnbull’s thought bubble that universities could be funded by business by observing that we lack the businesses to do that. Turnbull told him he was lacking in optimism and thereby letting his students down! (Working) class act Dave Oliver won’t have a bar of the new soap either. What about the workers?

Noting the employers’ views were more than adequately represented, the ACTU head noted that employees didn’t get a look in. ‘The workers pivotal to these new industries were barely mentioned’.

The current glut of business advocacy groups clogging our airwaves is less upbeat about innovation than they might be but as Dame-in-waiting Kate Carnell, herself, has noted massive support will flow once businessmen and some women hear their favourite buzz words tax reform and flexibility, code for cutting workers’ wages while lowering their own tax rates.

A possible snag here is that the forty per cent who paid no tax last financial year can hardly pay less but surely the spin-meisters come up with something else to ‘boost productivity’.

Nevertheless, we are in a new era. ‘Turners’ is seeking to ‘change the old politics’, he says. ‘No longer will politicians feel they have to guarantee that every policy will work’. Instead we’ll just suck it and see in a revolutionary trial and error process which is just so totally innovative and Facebooky and Googly it may well please even Ms Julie.

‘Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. Just like start-ups’, he adds helpfully, not adding that ninety per cent of these fail. ‘We are to be driven by an ideas boom’ he said optimistically casting around for new policies, although he still can’t get the old ones to work. Who would have thought our biggest businesses pay so little tax.

Yet more is to follow. The show, which features a Where’s Wally segment for keen-eyed kiddies to search out a well-concealed Prime Minister, has two whole weeks left to run. No time at all for the air to be clear of the stench of rotting fish. And the smell of fear in the face of danger. Questions are as thick and fast as flies to an outback dunny door.

Who leaked Brigg’s victim’s photo? Who quietly released data revealing 40% of Australian companies pay no tax? Who delayed publication of the failure of Tony Abbott’s lavish $40 million dollar witch-hunt to get Bill Shorten? Who thought it good value to spend $100 million on consultants to show the Department of Defence how to save money?

Is Tony Abbott really pleading Mr Peta Credlin, Brian Loughnane’s case to replace Tim Fischer in the Holy See or is he just testing the water? Will Malcolm Turnbull ever show his face in public again or will he retreat like Howard Hughes to obsess over other people’s uncleanliness whilst he is consumed by counting his vast wealth in private?

Such are but some of the torrent of pre-season teasers, that fans of our national political virtual reality series remain glued to their screens. Audiences can barely make tea or put out the cat least they miss something. Will Malcolm Turnbull come out of hiding with his hands up?

On Monday, local shares may shed a further 1.8 per cent. The Australian dollar has plunged 1.7 per cent.  Oil is down 6.2 per cent while global equities from China to Europe to Wall Street are falling. If he knows anything, he’s not saying. For a PM who boosted his coup prospects by boasting that he was a better economic leader than Abbott, he is certainly not choosing to lead from the front. Or is he reluctant to baffle us with his expertise? Scared he’ll frighten the horses?

Perhaps it has all got to him. Not only is the world economy on the skids he can do nothing to halt the slide at home. There are no interest rates worth cutting or any other levers to pull to help us weather an ever more likely recession. All you can really do at such times is create distractions and diversions.

Abbott camp-followers from the First Reich the veteran war horse Kevin Andrews and his World Family Congress pal Erich Abetz, a pair of dreadful old stagers are briefly hawking themselves around in a naughty naked self-interest duet. Boots on the ground , a call for universal military conscription to Iraq, is a toe tapper, to be sure, but unlikely to stop the show. Urging war can work to glue us together, true but their tacky performances are so clearly, shamelessly calculated to salvage their own miserable careers that even the Monkey Pod God Tony Abbott must surely be blushing.

With each surreal and fantastical twist, our national political drama fires our imagination. Is blinky Bill Shorten finished? Or is he merely winged by the rusty blunderbuss of the Royal Commission? Or will it take more than flat-lining in public opinion polls to kill him?

It’s hard to land a punch on Cap’n Catspaw, Shorten’s invisible adversary in The Lodge. An oily phantasm and hero of greed, the toast of coal-miners and global capital investment houses with addresses in the Bahamas, our current PM may be little more than a figment of our vain imaginations.

Or no less. Is the light on the hill the bonfire of all our vanities? A riddle wrapped in a mystery, swallowed whole by a mob desperate to unseat Abbott is hard to see as any sort of enduring national leader. Adani may love him as their mascot, yet do we want or need a PM more like Jay Gatsby than someone just a little more real? A lonely, frightened figurehead of a Government by a ruling class of unctuous superiority and privileged rapacity?

Will the finale feature a ‘gross-out’, an attack of projectile vomiting in a cheeky reference to Another Bucket for Monsieur in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life? Just don’t ask Peter Dutton. Or anyone else in a government machine whose sole achievement is to become so well-drilled in obstruction and evasion that it will only do Dorothy Dixers.

To be fair, any question with Abbott in it is bound to be a doozy. One thing, however, is certain. Expect further dirty tricks and the rattle of some very loose cannons as a zealous Monkey Pod room crew pursue their cargo cult aim of restoring their Dear Leader, top banana and suppository of all wisdom.  For thereby lies their own redemption and even better superannuation.

The Monkey Pod Bruvvas hunker down every Thursday parliament is in to chew over their fate and ingest Chinese takeaway. The malcontents share little else beyond their hatred for Turnbull for overlooking them in his new cabinet.

Currently the group is said to be led by the untouchable Peter Dutton but the conch gets passed to others with axes to grind, including bottle black, red-blooded alpha silverback Berlusconi, World Family Congress, Mr Natural Family Man 2014, Kev Andrews who is currently that we’re all up shit creek in the Middle East unless we get into a real man’s fight.

Despite being dumped after a brief tour of duty in 2014-15, as Defence Minister, Andrews has lost no time in publicly putting his successor Marise Payne right. Fearlessly outspoken, his capacity for loyalty and self-sacrifice have doubtless assisted his parliamentary career. Five teams in the last fifteen years have been blessed with Andrews as Minister.

Clearly, noble Kev is keen to rescue Payne and her PM from accusations of incompetence or being soft on terror only hours after the government said it had ‘formally declined’ a US invitation ‘increase its contribution’ in Iraq.

‘It’s quite clear from the advice I received, and I was aware of what the American military personnel and defence leaders were suggesting, and that was for months they were suggesting that we needed forces on the ground in order to defeat ISIL.’

Andrews, further wished to make it clear that what was misreported as a jeer of ‘Ya ‘big girl’s blouse’ heard in the vicinity of the Monkey Pod Room was one of the boys letting off steam after a bit of ironing. Nothing to do with anyone’s view of the PM.

Andrews’ fearless and heroic call to give malingerers a boot up the date in Iraq will strike fear into the heart of evil-doers everywhere – except that part of Syria which is the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. There our own Dirty Digger Rupert Murdoch is on Dick Cheney’s team to prospect for oil.

Our boys must take the fight up to the evil death-worshipping, public-decapitating ISIS, thunders Kev. Tony Abbott’s clique has gone completely bananas with relevance deprivation disorder amongst other serious pathological conditions including putting Peter Dutton in charge.

Multinationals are up in arms over paying any tax at all as our national political theatre, pretends to be closed over the holidays. Sadly the true picture of tax evasion is unable to be revealed because we’ve just discovered that Indonesia is about to become an ISIS caliphate. If only they had got themselves good anti-terror laws like ours. Expect a lot more of this sort of diversion.

The fiction, that nothing is happening and that the nation needs to move along sonny, nothing to see here will be rivalled in the Turnbull government’s epic theatre of absurdity only when early in February its closed shop puts on a show of being open for business.