“The MYEFO confirms that tax revenue will rise to 23.1 per cent of GDP in 2018-19…Not Whitlam, nor Keating, nor Rudd, nor Gillard ever taxed this high. The only government to have a higher tax-to-GDP ratio was John Howard, who exceeded this rate in eight of his years in office.” 

Stephen Koukoulas, former adviser to Julia Gillard.

It’s in and what a shocker it is! P-plate treasurer, Scott Morrison’s morally bankrupt, fiscally inept MYEFO statement, shows our national income shot to buggery while expenditure goes through the roof.

Our deficit rockets to $37.4 billion. The net debt savings the Coalition had earlier claimed by slashing Australia’s foreign aid in half and shifting $80 billion of hospital and school bills to the states is now pretty well all gone.

Morrison, naturally, quietly leaves in all of Joe’s earlier cuts to Education and Health, while slashing $200 million more from agencies such as Health and the Attorney-General’s Department. Tassie also loses funds for inessential stuff like protecting forests. Bugger the environment. But, then, Hunt’s doing a good job of that already.

However, everything is OK with most of the MSM. The rest of us kids are all being taken for a ride. Everybody loves a summer holiday. Dad Morrison always drives without any sort of map. Never checks the gas gauge. He’s running on empty.

Mum jokes we are from the Fockawi tribe, always driving around in circles and off cliffs shouting, ‘We’re the Fockawi!’

Mismanagement and duplicity masquerade as budgeting yet again. Too be fair, Morrison can’t see past those bulging tax cuts for corporations up his sleeve, or as he loves to say ‘on the table’ despite the fact that according to the ATO, 40% of our ‘good corporate’ citizens are having a free ride. They pay no tax.

Corporate tax evaders are not in ScoMo’s sights. Nor are the wealthy who enjoy $25 billions of tax breaks per year via Super. Nope. Nope. Nope. it is the poor, the elderly and the vulnerable who must bear the brunt of  $10.6 billion worth of spending cuts, including reductions in bulk-billing incentives for pathology, funding for aged care providers and tougher means-testing of childcare benefits.

Morrison’s con job, his innumeracy and incompetence, raise barely a murmur from the ‘Chuck this mob out’ squad, of course. News Corp hounds would be baying for blood if his, high-taxing, high-spending, deficit-blowing-out, living beyond its means government were not Liberal, not an branch of its head office; an arm of its own franchise.

Shock and horror, the iron ore price is going through the floor. Well, who would believe? Lordy, lordy, lawks a mercy. We are told all about the dreadful fall in commodity prices as if it just took us all by surprise. Shocking! No-one could see it coming.

Of course the budget’s buggered. This mining boom was going to be everlasting, unique and unlike any other this country has experienced. Unprecedented? What is unprecedented is what we are expected to swallow. His analogy is so bad it’s good.

‘There are no short cuts; there may be some delays on the way with road works and the like,’ Morrison muses. “There will be plenty of people in the back seat – which often happens when I’m driving the family – saying, ‘Are we there yet? Are we there yet?’

No, ScoMo, they are saying that you are all over the road. You have no clue where you are going. No good just saying ‘follow that car!’ Chasing falling revenue by cutting government spending is going to get you nowhere apart from back into recession. What’s that? Move it?

Of course! Brilliant!  You can always push out your ‘back in the black’ fantasy estimates. You can’t do it forever, however and Peter Martin notes another teensy problem with the are we there yet going on holiday analogy. We never get to come back. That date for return to surplus keeps on getting postponed. Still, you always get a few smartarses.

Some are asking the right questions. How did we put all our revenue eggs in one basket? How could we have been so dumb? How could we accept such wilful blindness, greed, short-term political myopia and a cheer-squad of vested interests only too happy to take over the driver’s seat. Voting Liberal because we thought Labor was worse. It’s cost us. And it will continue to cost us.

But we don’t have a revenue problem claims Blind Freddy Morrison who is happy that forty per cent of corporations pay no tax at all. Nothing to see here. Just as we never had anything to explain in our offshore processing centres. Nothing to see in the collapse of commodity prices.

Look over there! Export volumes went up in the last quarter. We are on track. Morrison is rabid with spin; barking mad. Reasoned discourse is impossible, Leigh Sales discovers – yet again. Don’t even try to reason with the mongrel. Your job is to nod agreement and offer the odd Dorothy Dixer he’s thoughtfully supplied.

The laughable ‘credible path to surplus’ slogan gets a rest and the ‘target’ is shifted forward into infinity. Instead transitioning gets a workout. Exports show we are transitioning, a buzz-word for our times that covers changes we don’t understand that we have Buckley’s of controlling. Exports? Our miners’ last-ditch attempt to turn a profit is responsible for the increase in exports, not a sign of any diversification or restructure. A last gasp transition?

Transitioning works so well for the Turnbull government, however, it just can’t leave the buzz word alone. You’d swear they had invented it. So perfect to claim things are going your way when the truth is that you don’t have a clue where you’re going. Scott ‘Are we there yet’ Morrison’s dumb analogy of the federal budget as family car trip

Today’s favourite buzz-word was, however, around well before a few right wingers and a mob of failed farmers and agrarian socialists, the Nationals threw in their lot with a few right wing odds and sods, including the politically conflicted mutual self-delusion that is the ‘broad church’ Liberal Party to transition into a coalition early last century. They are still back there.

Transitioning into a coalition made political sense, numbers-wise, even if some hayseeds later turned out to be diabolical liabilities and fair-weather friends. Populist nut-job Bob Katter, for example, sensibly became an Independent in 2001 and the often less than sensible Barnaby Joyce, goes barking mad with pistol envy from time to time as he did at Johnny Depp. Barnaby will come right. He is set to transition into Deputy PM when Wokka Truss retires.

Since a conservative rabble transitioned into a Coalition they have never looked back. Or ceased to look backwards. And sidewise, under the bed and behind the wardrobe. In place of a coherent ideology, the coalition is fuelled by a mutual mistrust bordering on paranoia. But it works. Australia is safe from Boo and Pistol. A transition can do that. And more.

The arse falls out of mining. You’ve spent all the proceeds of the boom years on buying votes with tax breaks and benefits. You’re skint. Forty per cent of your companies pay no tax at all. No problem. Tell the punters the economy is transitioning. Approve massive coal mines like Adani’s Carmichael mine while you bugger the renewable energy business but, hey, your energy policy is transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables. Transitioning even works with your human resources.

You recycle your rejects. There’s Joe Hockey, transitioning effortlessly from dud treasurer to top show pony. He also gets free rent and utilities in Washington as Australia’s Ambassador to the US and he gets to pool his $90,000 PA parliamentary pension with his new diplomatic salary of $360,000. A few bargain-priced running repairs costing a mere couple of hundred million should tide him over, as Australia transitions towards a new, more appropriately upmarket mansion.

Joe has never shown a shred of diplomatic potential but his grasp of the economy wasn’t that flash either. You have to bury your corpses somewhere. And opportunities abound in these exciting times. There has never been a better time to be Joe Hockey.

Joe may even team up with Donald Trump. They are made for each other.  Joe could put his foot in Don’s mouth and vice versa. Transition into stand-up comedy. Anything. Just not politics.

Malcolm Turnbull, too, was once a lowly Communications Minister who couldn’t, well, communicate. OK he landed a hard gig. In Opposition, he spruiked a bogus NBN but after the election when the opposition transitioned into the government things were looking crook even for the man who could talk his way out of an HIH collapse.

Once his mob was in power, no-one understood Mal any better, but now people expected him to make his NBN fraudband work. Walk the talk. Was the NBN Tony’s (or Peta’s) hand-brake on the over-ambitious, underperforming silver-tongued silver-tail? Not even Tone thought it could work.  But in the bigger picture it was just a stop-gap until Mal transitioned to Prime Minister when it could be someone else’s problem; someone else’s fault.

Because Abbott was so widely and well hated, Turnbull as PM has had a dream run although hazards are ahead.  One is his fat head.  Consistently being overrated in politically useless popularity polls can do that even to a narcissist.

Popularity as ‘measured’ in public opinion polls has stuff-all to do with actually being a PM, although it cranks up expectations. Can Malcolm transition from pop-star to real politician? Will Abbott and the lunatic right’s monkey pod push let him? All bets are off.

Being PM involves practicalities like showing backbone and getting projects finished. Anyone can waffle about innovation but if all you can show for it is a buggered NBN and a lot of hot air about innovation, then the honeymoon will eventually be over. And while the not-being-Tony-Abbott halo effect elevates Mal above his station, it will also more powerfully illuminate his deficiencies. Mal’s popularity is in inverse to his capacity to achieve anything. Or his bottle.

Scott Morrison is in the same sort of fix. He’s clearly hopeless as treasurer. He got the job because he was ambitious and Mal wanted to keep him busy and out of trouble. ‘The Fixer’ was fixed up.

OK Morrison was hopeless at his first cabinet post but he could make it up as he went along. Best of all he could refuse to answer any questions about his stuff ups. Or anything really. Then there was the ‘on water’ and the ‘operational matters’ analogy, as if we were at war with our own humanity and compassion. Genghis Khan was more accountable.  And he had a real budget.

Fear not. Fee, Fie, MYEFO Fum Scott ‘Are We There Yet’ Morrison is merely in transition from head of Tourism Australia, an unhappy appointment which was terminated by mutual agreement.  His transition into politics was set with a bit of help from his friends in the form of a job as NSW Liberal Treasurer. Scott, Where the bloody hell are we? Morrison of Tourism Australia has transitioned into ‘Are we there yet?’

So that’s it, then, kids. MYEFO is really just a children’s story about a family trip in the car. Just don’t expect it to have anything to do with real Federal budgeting. Or a happy ending.

Australia’s climate delegation returns to a media blitz of self-generated glory. Hunt’s Heroes lead the world only briefly, however, before being upstaged by Scott Morrison’s MYEFO war on the poor. Although ScoMo continues to show no reason whatsoever to suppose he is any better than the treasurer he replaced, he is a great deal meaner and he is a past master in refusing point blank to be accountable.

Morrison brings new obduracy and condescension to the treasury portfolio as befits Joe’s successor and baton-carrier. He’s also booked savings which have yet to pass the senate and are most unlikely to. But that’s OK. We’ve had treasurers before like that. Costello was seen as mean and sneaky. But he had revenue. Morrison’s tank is empty.

ScoMo’s lame analogy that budget repair is like a trip in the family car demeans both his audience and himself. Treasurers love to talk down to us and labour false analogies but Morrison’s car trip is a lemon. Are we there yet? it presumes we are heading somewhere. Voters and investors can tell he’s only a P-plate driver.

Reductive, simplistic stories and slogans may work in Immigration but the economy is more complex and demanding. No-one is expecting a more nuanced approach, given Morrison’s performance in Immigration and Social Services. But when your own figures show you have a revenue problem, you need to admit it. Or you seem out of your depth. Or over-eager to support the wealthy in their tax breaks and other entitlements. And you can’t keep cutting the public sector s, however much your right wing-nuts love that stuff.

Our public sector is already leaner than most other comparable nations while an emaciated education, environment, foreign aid and transport infrastructure have been so under-funded as to impair their capacity to meet our needs, expectations and obligations. Hunt’s hideously extravagant Direct Action con, on the other hand, or the billions wasted on Border Force or the war on terror are expensive political sacred cows which weaken any case for cuts to real public services, even for governments with proven competence or political capital.

ScoMo’s fixation with expenditure causes him to turn a blind eye to the nation’s revenue problems and to completely misrepresent our economic situation. His party fought to prevent the wealthy from having their tax affairs scrutinised.  Even the compromise, published today is a damning reminder of a whopping revenue problem. But he’s not interested in ‘political questions’, he says, talking down to Leigh Sales recently, just as he did to Gillian Triggs, as he dismisses Sales’ attempts to get him to explain his party’s inconsistency.

Morrison is interested only in ‘sensible, rational conversation’, meaning he will dictate the terms, such as in Health cuts where it he acts first and dismisses criticism later. In a surprise move to scrap bulk-billing incentives to pathology companies Morrison is gazumping a review still in process and picking a fight he can’t win with patients, the AMA and the pathology companies. The hapless, arrogant Hockey-like streak in Morrison’s makeup becomes more apparent by the hour.

Another hapless, neoliberal fantasist, Sussan Ley is demolished by the AMA when she defends what amount to Morrison’s pathology test co-payments by stealth in the name of competition. Companies will undercut each other to extract your blood or scope your bowel.  Trust the market. Our supermarket duopoly reminds us that markets are not inherently trustworthy. Sick people will end up paying more for their tests.

The Coalition ‘hits those who can least afford it hardest’ says an independent senator who is right on the money. So, too is the opposition leader with the charisma bypass, Plain Vanilla Bill Shorten. But, with apologies to Hockey, pathology tests are another waste of money on bludgers without private health insurance. Poor people don’t thrive.

Also looking unwell is Australia’s wilful climate change denial. Hunt declares a target of 2% is ‘deeply personal’, yet he needs to meet a 1.5 % rise. Less about Greg. More about real targets. Yet selfies are his team’s standout achievement in Paris, apart from our rapidly increasing carbon dioxide emissions and our world-beating reputation as climate change cowboys and con-men.

OK there is also Greg Hunt’s stand-up routine at the screening of a documentary on the dangers facing the Great Barrier Reef, an echo of his earlier claim that the UN had given it a ‘clean bill of health’ . We approve massive coal mines because who are we to tell India to keep the world’s coal in the ground? Neo-colonialism is so yesterday.

Hunt’s account of how he spent his time includes a big white bwana style mediation between vulnerable countries and the powerful which seems a disingenuous posturing. Tony de Brum, for example, made it clear that vulnerable nations speak most effectively in their own right. Australia’s intercession on small islands’ behalf, moreover, is difficult to square with its setting carbon reductions targets which will surely drown them.

Yet we love to lead, even if it is only to lead astray. Malcolm Turnbull pledges Australia to a lead role in climate change policy, a boast echoed by Julie Bishop. Bishop goes further and asserts that we are leading already with our innovation. We will sit back, do nothing and hope something high-tech will turn up to save us all from our selfies.

You can’t rush hackathons. At the current rate of carbon emissions, the world will reach 450 ppm in 2040. Then it will be too late. In fifteen years, says the International Renewable Energy Agency, we take our chances on catastrophic climate change. Australia, however, lucky country to the last, prefers to gamble on human ingenuity galloping to our rescue.

Turnbull commits us publicly to a global ‘Mission Innovation’ in Paris, giving green, clean tech $200 million a year only to continue Abbott’s war on alternatives at home. A pledge to scale back government subsidies of fossil fuels is best left to other countries because our Liberal Party sponsors need handouts and handicapped alternatives to remain competitive.

Julie Bishop reprises Turnbull’s stale, empty rhetoric. You can bet she is planning another hackathon soon, the paperless passport for Kiwis, her latest innovation breakthrough, a real boon to DFAT as it is to our trans-Tasman relations, those whom we are not deporting via Christmas Island for at some time having served criminal sentences.

‘… innovation and technological breakthroughs … will ultimately be the game changer in our climate change response,’ Bishop claims in Australia’s ‘National Statement’ to the UN conference. Yet we will provide no help with organising finance. There’s a world of difference between a start-up and an upstart like wind or solar. Last week told parliament that her government would abolish the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and Australian Renewable Energy Agency.

Shamelessly Bishop also spun Australia’s renewable energy target as ambitious, despite it requiring only 20 per cent of the nation’s energy to come from clean sources by 2020. ‘Ambitious’ also, according to the Foreign Minister, are our 2030 emission reduction targets which ‘will see us double the rate at which we reduce our emissions,’  she said as if our rate of reduction were anything but inadequate. Australia’s gutless 2030 target of 26 to 28 per cent on 2005 levels places the country behind all developed nations.

After Paris, other nations confirm their opinion of Australia as who just don’t get the gravity of the climate crisis. Our soft targets join our other notorious underarm delivery in the hall of infamy and brazen, shameless bending of the rules. Our big polluters are let off the hook. We are the only country ever to have abolished a price on carbon – and the first to have a net increase in carbon emissions to show for it. We are world leaders after all. We have crippled the uptake of clean alternative power sources such as wind and solar.

Abbott’s scrapped carbon tax boosted coal industry profits, but cost Treasury billions in lost revenue. Now ordinary Australians must make up the deficit with cuts to health and welfare. Fixer Scott Morrison’s MYEFO shakes down the poor, the sick and the elderly. And he has cheats in his sights again as a way to cut welfare spending.

Social Services Minister Christian Porter is eyeing off another billion and a half he reckons he can find from Centrelink recipients alone since last May’s treasure hunt of welfare bludgers.  It’s not about cuts to welfare; it’s all about ‘better targeting’, he says to ABC listeners. Poor people vote Labor, anyway.

It’s business as usual for the LNP. Massive new coal mines will be approved, our carbon reduction targets will be fiddled and the disadvantaged will be squeezed to pay polluters. Direct Action won’t work and we can’t afford it.  But Hunt has a solution. We will be able to buy international carbon credits. Way to go, Greg! Saves any fuss and bother about cutting pollution at home. The planet won’t even notice.

In a parallel universe of honest intentions and just desserts Hunt and our other brazen coal industry toadies would be ashamed to come home. They were disgraced in Paris. Australia is third last in action to curb climate change according to the Climate Tracker think tank.

Labor’s spokesperson for the environment and climate change Mark Butler sums up our commitment. ‘We have no five-yearly target whatsoever, no target for 2025 and instead of a commitment to net zero emissions by the middle of this century we have a target from this government of net zero emissions by the end of the century.’

Turnbull and his government will be undone by its Turnbull-shit and with the assistance of mainstream media. On ABC breakfast Monday an upbeat, on script Hunt assured listeners Australia would ‘meet and beat its targets’. He was not asked how.

What he has in mind is a hoax which involves first an accountancy trick which lowers the figure of our true responsibility in curbing emission and second the dodge which involves paying polluters to plant trees and better manage their land-filling which he calls Direct Action. Even if we could afford to go on paying polluters, Direct Action does not solve our increasing carbon emission problem.

Nor was Hunt asked why our target is so low as to be a doddle; so low, moreover, as to be lethal. Experts calculate that our 26-28 per cent limit would see the globe warm 3-4 degrees with disastrous results. Current emissions reductions targets in Australia would mean we would be the highest per-capita polluter in the G20 by 2030.

Hunt was permitted to announce that we would buy credits from overseas as if that were relevant to a discussion about curbing our own emissions – not how cleverly the books could be fiddled while we avoided real action of our own.

Nor was the Environment Minister required to explain why Australia is persisting with the accounting trick of carrying forward credits from Kyoto. Other countries with Kyoto credits abandoned them as a gesture of commitment to real carbon emission reduction. The reality is that despite meeting notional ‘targets’ Australia has been rapidly increasing its emissions since the repeal of the ‘carbon tax’.

When asked about coal, Hunt dipped into his cache of buzzwords and came up with ‘transitioning’. We are ‘transitioning’ from fossil fuel to renewables. Transitioning is a go to verb for coalition politicians caught having to defend bad policy. In this case coal-fired power generating. Hunt was permitted to use the buzz word to give the impression that Australia had policies to lead it away from coal. Or a plan. Or the intention. Does it? Nope. Nope. Nope.

ScoMo says our economy is transitioning when all he has evidence for is a rise in the volume of exports last quarter. Mining has upped its output despite falling prices in a last ditch attempt to survive. It is not a sign of other sectors taking up the slack unless we factor in Turnbull-shit. Spin is our real growth industry.

In the MYEFO and in the parading one more around the ring of our shonky climate policy, our one trick pony of a government  continues to pursue bad policy with the practised ease of the entitled, a pathological indifference to others and all the ugly wrong-headed zeal and ultimately self-destructive arrogance of those who wilfully put ideology before any attempt at empiricism.

At the UN climate Jamboree at Le Bourget, near Paris, the Climate Concord 2015 finally rattles into the station complete with buffet car and sleeping carriages and the last word in anti-macassars. A straining boiler creaks and hisses superheated steam. Hastily applied stove polish sizzles over rusty bits. Rivets pop. Pressure valves blow. Global warming must be kept below 1.5 degrees, all at last agree. Hurrah! It is a breakthrough and a catastrophe. All aboard!

Bleary-eyed delegates totter wearily aboard, thankful any train has arrived at all, knowing full well, that while the Paris 2015 agreement is the best we can do, it is nowhere near good enough to get us home safely. It is not a treaty. For all the talk of it being legally binding, it is only an aspirational goal of 1.5 degrees. We have no agreed route to get there.

Father of climate change awareness NASA scientist James Hansen thinks we are all being taken for a ride.

‘It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, …just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.’

The final ‘aspirational target’ of 1.5 degrees is better than Hansen expected but there is a big gap between this and the woefully inadequate targets nations have set themselves which might, perhaps, limit global warning to 3 degrees at most. A carbon price placed on major emitters, which Hansen and others advocate as the only real way to get pollution down to 1.5 above pre-industrial levels, is still a bridge too far for most governments.

CICERO, Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research – Oslo predicts that at our current rate of emissions the world will have produced enough carbon dioxide by 2020 to lock in 1.5 degrees warming. But, hey, there will be regular inspections every 5 years to confirm we are on our way to certain extinction. Yet no-one can make a profit out of a dead planet. Business and finance have been eagerly hopping aboard recently.

In the last year, investors have rushed into a low carbon economy.  John Kerry, US Secretary of State is upbeat. ‘While we’ve been debating, … the clean energy sector has been growing at an incredible rate.’  Clive Hamilton of Charles Sturt University calls it an amazing shift among investors and ‘non-state actors’ that ‘signals a sea-change in climate action that now seems unstoppable’.

Self-interest is worth backing because it is a horse which will always run on its merits. In one year, The Montreal Carbon Pledge under which large investors commit to measuring and reporting on the carbon footprint of their portfolios, has been signed by investors controlling more than US$10 trillion in assets.

A ‘Science Based Targets’ initiative, has seen 114 large corporations pledge to reduce their emissions in a way consistent with a 2℃ objective. Big corporations including Ikea, Coca-Cola, Dell, General Mills, Kellogg, NRG Energy, Procter & Gamble, Sony and Wal-Mart have already signed up and are implementing plans.

Curbing climate change has long been presented as a choice between development or environment, thanks largely to the propaganda units of fossil fuel interests such as Peabody Energy.  Recent developments seem set to challenge this logic. A bloc of vulnerable countries has now formed. Combine these voices with the development of renewable energy capacity. Add a commitment by rich nations to fund poor nations’ climate mitigation and adaptation and the old equation is set to be disproved.

Agreement has been a slow train coming. In 1995 in Berlin, the first UN Conference would have been able to achieve a 1.5 degree warming target but the train was derailed by fossil fuel lobbyists who were able to take advantage of politicians only too willing to trade short term gain for long term disaster.

50,000 delegates, media, rent-seekers and hangers-on from 193 nations skitter all over the talking shop in a last minute flurry of pledges, alliance building, mutual suspicion, misunderstanding and folie à foule.  Only two things are certain. This moment has been over twenty years in the making yet no-one can predict exactly what it all means. It will never happen again.

Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Tony de Brum is photographed being tightly embraced by a dazzling Julie Bishop, who channels her inner Pirelli calendar girl to glamorise Australia’s Leyland P76 lemon of a climate change policy. She also covers for Hunt who puts in a pretty ordinary performance, even for him.

Jules is all over her ‘good friend’ Tone like a rash but even her full frontal frottage fails to gate-crash his ‘coalition of ambition’, a melange of 80 developed and developing countries including the US, EU, Canada and Brazil – aimed at offsetting a push by China, India and Saudi Arabia to water down the wording as negotiators go at it hammer and tongs well after the final siren.

De Brum says he is happy to take down Bishop’s particulars but Australia will have to make its case. ‘We are delighted to learn of Australia’s interest and look forward to hearing what more they may be able to do to join our coalition of high ambition here in Paris.’

Kiribati’s President Anote Tong who voted for Australia to be on the UN security council because of its pledge to put climate change on the agenda says his country now feels betrayed by Coalition policy on global warming. He is far less diplomatic in his assessment of Australia’s commitment. ‘They don’t feel it, they don’t know it, [and]they don’t care: They care about the next election.’

Clearly, a window of opportunity opens for Australia’s Minister for a coal-powered future, George Brandis’ ‘climate intellectual’ Greg Hunt who whispers that curbing global warming to less than 20′ is ‘a deeply personal goal’ of his whilst eagerly, hastily, approving vast new coal mines.   If anyone can wangle us a seat on the coalition of high ambition, Hunt the agile, nimble-witted, back-flipper Hunt. If only someone could find him.

Conflicted and compromised publicly by his flawed performance as protector of the Great barrier Reef Hunt’s profile in Paris is lower than a Yakka skink by Thursday. He may just have nodded off. Luckily, crowd-pleaser Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, always makes herself freely available. And hits a bum note.

Bishop attracts attention and unkind parodies. Marie Antoinette caricatures of her appear as if by witchcraft for advocating coal as a solution to world hunger.  ‘Let them eat coal.’

Bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived negotiators hold all-night indaba, a Zulu word for discussions around huge tables of 80 officials from as many countries in which everyone present must speak and be heard.  Agreement on a common but differentiated responsibility’, a Nicene Creed of climate change ownership in its complexity, is reached by attrition through an exhausting series of redrafts and revisions. Specifics are edited into hazy generalities until real commitment to curb global warming threatens to disappear completely like the Cheshire Cat leaving nothing behind but its smile  – of good intentions.

Delegates of rich nations seek to erase their oversize carbon footprints; their historic responsibility for polluting the planet’s atmosphere. Poor countries lobby to lock in emissions exemptions in the name of development.  Convention mastermind, Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary General, says the talks are ‘the most complicated and difficult negotiations’ of his career.

The fate of the planet hangs by a thread, a frayed, well-chewed-over form of words, a universal agreement on climate change achieved by a ‘consensus model’ in which every official of every nation has to agree to every word in six languages in a marathon of talking. It is a miracle there is any consensus at all.

Inexplicably out of range of ABC microphones, veteran talkfest-meister Greg Hunt is last seen publicly in a failed attempt to put his case at a screening of naturalist David Attenborough’s documentary on the Great Barrier Reef. Australians are forced instead to endure rational, informed and objective commentary on proceedings from bodies such as The Climate Institute, although, as always Julie Bishop gets a good look in to shore up optimism and positivity. Minister for Are We There Yet?,  she stays relevant by reporting agreement is imminent and that it’s all been a lot of hard work.

Is Hunt sulking? Or just skulking? In the panel discussion after the Attenborough screening, Thursday, Aussie biologist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg who has made a lifetime study of the reef says Australia must choose to either proceed with its $16 billion Adani coal mine or protect the Great Barrier Reef.  Hunt, mistakenly believing Australia has funded some of the BBC documentary in yet another of his hilarious crossed wires, forcefully requests to speak at the end of the film only to riff about Australia’s innovative neo-neo-colonialism.

Rather than choose to address the disconnect between promoting coal mining and protecting the reef, Hunt, instead, boosts Australia’s piddling $140m ‘reef trust’ aimed to combat soil erosion, crown of thorns starfish and other threats. Earlier he explains that Australia approved Adani because we are not a ‘neo-colonialist’ power that tries to tell poor countries what to do. For Hunt, that clears up the issue. For Tong, it lacks moral justification. Above all it is a specious argument that ignores Australia’s history.

Australia’s neighbours may beg to differ with Hunt, especially those fielding boatloads of Border Force refugee turn-backs. Or Pacific Islanders, long colonised by Aussie multinationals. In Profits of Doom, Antony Loewenstein explains how PNG has been made dependent on Australian aid, about $500 million a year. About 60% of this will end up with Australian corporations. Bishop’s ‘New Aid Paradigm’ with its slogan of poverty reduction through economic growth continues to boost the fortunes of our neo-colonial investors.

Julie Bishop, mistress of the universe of diplomatic discourse does, however raise Australia’s profile with her lecture to delegates in which she upholds coal as the solution to world poverty. ‘Let them eat coal’ plays to bemused delegates who check their programmes in case they’ve accidentally wandered into the Climate Change Circus which runs concurrently with COP21. Consensus is rapidly reached. The Australian Foreign Minister has been at the Peabody Energy drinks cabinet again.

‘It will be innovation and technological breakthroughs that will ultimately be the game changer in our climate change response,’ Bishop waffles in what is billed as our ‘National Statement’, an embarrassing excuse for not being able to admit you have no ideas whatsoever. Or no intention of curbing emissions.  And less concern.

Bishop’s statement reiterates Hunt’s misleading statistical nonsense about our target of a 26% reduction on 2005 levels being ‘ambitious’ and the falsehood that we are per capita leading the world in our emission cutting. Climate Change Authority analysis and projection, however, shows Australia continuing to lead the world right out to 2030 and beyond it in its pollution per capita.

Surely now, Greg Hunt will reveal Australia’s secret admirers’, those direct action fans or groupies, he alludes to so often. The minister for the environment has kept everyone in suspense with his repeated claims his nation’s Direct Action had attracted much favourable attention. Yet it all seems a case of misreporting. All Hunt is claiming is OECD and IEA approval of his reverse auctions.

During an OECD panel discussion, Hunt claims ‘Both the International Energy Agency and the OECD have said reverse auctions could be the most effective means of price discovery.’ Whatever the truth of his claim, it relates only to a small sub-component of his scheme and not Direct Action itself.

As Lenore Taylor notes, a deluded Hunt has wasted his time in Paris pretending that his ERF is a price on carbon and the peddling the preposterous lie that the world is remotely interested in his Direct Action.

At home, consumed by paranoid delusions of betrayal, Ayatollah Abbott is still barking mad.  Still shrewd enough, however, to spot a strike-back opportunity, he rubbishes Islam. Helpfully, he further poisons the turbid well of the nation’s international relations and foments Islamophobia at home by attacking Islam for its backwardness. Pauline Hanson is interviewed on ABC shortly afterwards on the coattails of Abbott’s disingenuous mischief-making, rabble-rousing.

Unlike his own faith with its history of crusades, Inquisitions and conquistadors, Islam is a menace in Abbott’s eyes because it lacks the seasoning of reformation. ‘Cultures are not all equal. We should be ready to proclaim the clear superiority of our culture to one that justifies killing people in the name of God.’

God only knows what the coal lobby will find for Abbott to say next or how Hunt will claim that the UN decision is a victory for Direct Action and that we are already so far ahead of our targets we don’t’ need to do a tap until 2020. Add in Ian McFarlane’s defection to the National Party as a means to getting back in cabinet and it will take real leadership to steer government away from the fossil fuel obsessed towards something renewable.

Today’s report that Hunt was sidelined while Turnbull removed Abbott’s restrictions on Clean Energy Finance for wind farms is an encouraging sign that the PM is prepared to encourage green energy, yet he still owes favours to the Nationals’ agenda of retaining Direct Action.

‘There’s never been a more exciting time to be an Australian,’ PM  Turnbull repeats, playing the straight man before a non-sequitur worthy of Hunt, ‘We need to embrace new ideas in innovation and science, and harness new sources of growth to deliver the next age of economic prosperity in Australia.’ What Turnbull will have to do soon, however, is stop talking and put his money where his mouth is.

We don’t need no innovation, with apologies to Pink Floyd. Keep coal in the ground and invest in clean, renewable energy without further ado. It’s our last chance to act to match the aspirations of Paris with deeds that may earn us some respite if not reprieve from the inexorable changes we have caused by allowing carbon in our atmosphere to reach 400 parts per million.

Cancel all coal mine projects at once. Get out of coal-fired power generation. Boost investment in solar and wind. Abandon the Peabody propaganda. We have nothing to lose by getting out of fossil fuels. And a whole world to re-gain.

Former failed Education Minister, Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science Christopher Pyne and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull address the media after the announcement of the National Innovation and Science Agenda at the CSIRO Discovery Centre in Canberra on Monday 7 December 2015. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

Malcolm Turnbull’s, ‘Innovation! Package’, turns out to be another boost to small business and nothing to do with innovation at all. It is another conjuring trick from a government pledged to avoid commitment or accountability under the guise of ‘encouraging the free flow of ideas and entrepreneurs’. It is based on a seriously defective business model, the tech start-up. As a strategy toward economic restructure, it is a poor choice; an inexcusable error of judgement.

Above all, Innovation! is an opportunity missed. Instead of investing in renewables, boosting employment and kicking its fossil fuel dependency, the coalition has chosen the trendy but flaky tech start-up business enterprise, a choice which will distract from tackling its rising carbon emissions while further trashing Australia’s former reputation as a good global citizen.

For all Greg Hunt’s absurd claims that we lead the world in climate policy, expert report, based on a range of measures, from the UN climate talks in Paris yesterday reveal us to be third last. Although Julie Bishop may fluff around on the world stage promising to fix climate with ‘innovation’ the truth is that we are substituting urban myth for science or economics.

The start-up myth itself is enchanting and beguiling. Rich young San Francisco Bay Area, California dudes meet somewhere on the autism spectrum and hunker down to a year or two of nerdy anti-social existence. They live off their wealthy parents while they code software 24/7. Overnight they become billionaire misfits and eccentric publicity-loving celebrities proving all along to the world that smarts matter. The PM, especially, loves this tale.

The dudes attract a few other couch surfers along the way together with a rash of venture capital: rich folk who gamble by lending the dudes money in the hope of a huge return on their investment. Or not. Stop the press.

The start-up success story is an urban myth. Surely no-one in their right mind would recommend we adopt this model to fix our own tanking economy? If he is serious about the Innovation! hoo-ha, Mal’s judgement is once again is up the Silicon Valley creek.

…over 90% of start-ups self-destruct.

Start-ups are expensive failures as a rule. Current UC Stanford and Berkeley research shows that over 90% of start-ups self-destruct. Typically, software dudes borrow to build a product for which there is no customer, a product for which they also have to manufacture a demand. Nothing like putting on the wings when your craft is taxiing along the runway. When the product is ready to market, the dudes have no buyers, no income and no funds to continue and they crash. The dudes fall back on couch-surfing until they inherit.

Not all give up. There are serial starters-up who make failure a lifestyle choice. Our PM warms to these. He will see to it that failure is elevated in our own society to the status it deserves by taking the sting out of bankruptcy. No stranger to failure himself, politically, he will ignore the difference between political and business failure. Taxpayers will pick up the tab.

Even the few start-ups who succeed, employ few workers and minimise their taxes. Outfits like Google or Apple or Facebook are adept in creative tax accountancy. What start-ups are good at is making profits for investors.

Making a few rich dudes richer is no way to rebuild a nation’s prosperity. Start-ups offer no key to economic revival. They do, however, offer an attractive package to business classes, a package which is trendy enough to deceive the mug punter who will pay the bill through higher taxes. And coal is spared by default.

Strip away the packaging and Innovation! looks like plain old crony capitalism; a rebranding of the same old pocketful of promises to the big end of town that is the Liberal Party’s reason for being. A bit of tinkering around the edges is added to confirm Innovation!. Some refunds are touted as reinvesting in science as if government has suddenly come to its senses after destroying the CSIRO’s morale and much else with it. Turnbull supporters seize on the refunds as proof that Mal is progressive after all. The facts attest otherwise.

So much knowledge …lost.

Some ‘efficiency dividend’ cuts from CSIRO, made when ‘good government’ had no need of science, will be returned. But it is nowhere near enough funding to do a ‘reset’ even if CSIRO wanted to. Or it were possible. So much knowledge has already been irrevocably lost. But business and science will be able to hold hands in the cosy, innovative Turnbull era instead of being at arm’s length or independent as empirical impartiality dictates.

Academics are to be enticed out of ivory towers to team up with business types in an alarming re-run of the wishful thinking that ignores our economy’s small size. We do not have the money. Venture capital is just not available here to the degree that it is to UK or US researchers. The priceless value of pure research in non-commercial fields is also ignored, although vital to innovation and the foundation of all science.

So what are we left with? Another tax break for investors? A newer, softer neo-liberal bankruptcy-lite to allow ‘entrepreneurs’ to quit more easily; bail out of financial obligations such as wages to redundant workers more readily? An incubator for shonky con-men and dud business ideas? Strip away Innovation! Package wrapping and most of what is left amounts to a scheme in which privileged venture capitalists are subsidised by everyone else.

Attracting venture capital, we are told by our po-faced ring master Turnbull will enable the best business brains to invent new businesses which in turn will G-R-O-W the economy. We are to forget in all the hoopla and excitement that venture capital has no interest in progress or innovation as such. But it loves huge profits.

Turnbull expects us to fall in love with a scheme to encourage those whose business model includes the very best the Cayman Islands has to offer. It will not build a 21st Century economy or a nation but it will accelerate our already disturbingly rapid divergence into two distinct nations, a nation of haves and have-nots.

Yet is anyone really surprised by Turnbull and Pyne’s surprise package? Turnbull gave us our NBN, popularly known as ‘fraudband’. A political stunt, NBN is now woefully behind schedule, over-budget, slow and over-priced. It is increasingly evident to consumers that the NBN project, like Direct Action is fundamentally flawed.

…an accountancy trick…

Substituting copper wire for fibre allowed the LNP to undercut Labor’s real NBN, but it is a bit like carrying forward Kyoto credits instead of reducing our carbon emissions, an accountancy trick which does nothing to make it all work. A sale of Turnbull’s NBN lemon is rumoured. In softening bankruptcy rules, Monday’s message is that it’s OK to fail. You learn from it. Turnbull would know. Or is it OK to fail, provided someone else picks up the tab?

A Humpty Dumpty for our times, Turnbull can make Innovation! TM mean whatever he chooses as he peddles a scheme to boost his wealthy backers’ fortunes at the expense of all the rest of us; a type of subsidy for the investing classes. Treasurer Morrison is on standby to announce further cuts in government spending; cuts to our services and quality of life as a nation, all in the name of Innovation! Innovation! is already morphing into a new, secular religion, at least in Liberal Party circles. Or is it a tax-deductible church and charity to business? What is certain is that it will cost us all dearly.

Innovation promises, programmes are old hat in Australia. Innovation policy expert Roy Green notes that Australia has had 60 reports at Commonwealth level on innovation since 2000. $9.7billion of government funds is spent annually on ‘research and innovation’ across 13 portfolios and 150 budget line items.

Making Innovation! into a faith means that it is immune from criticism. You can’t be against the future can you? Only a heretic would be sceptical. Challenging the creed is almost un-Australian, as Malcolm Turnbull clearly implied when he chided Leigh Sales on Monday’s 7:30 Report. ‘Aunty is not interested in Innovation!?’ he gibed. Nor was she excited. ‘Exciting’ infects all government policy announcements it seems. It is becoming a test of faith. Forget reason. If you are not excited, you are beyond the pale; an unbeliever and a luddite.

Turnbull’s ‘exciting’ announcement on his nation’s future is pure theatre. Spruiking his package around lunch time Monday, the PM is flanked by our agile new Innovation! Minister, Christopher Pyne, the consummate political organ grinder’s monkey who is reinventing – repositioning himself – ‘in this space’ – before our very eyes. Pyne is flattered, he says, to reveal that his name was called second when Turnbull announced his new cabinet, but to others the PM’s choice of Christopher Pyne for the new portfolio signals an each-way bet at least on its success.

…the modern filth of relevance…

A spectacular flop as a ‘back to the future’ Education Minister, whose advisors included back to basics gurus, Kevin Donnelly and other advocates for corporal punishment and that old nostrum ‘the Judaeo-Christian tradition’ to purge the modern filth of relevance from children’s learning, Pyne peddled his ideologically blinkered, backward vision of education as a private market-driven commodity and the rightful prerogative of the rich.

Although the odd, ambitious, Vice Chancellor could see promotion in embracing Pyne’s elitist neo-liberal plan to privatise learning, there were few other takers. It was widely believed that Pyne was forced to write a book, about himself for his children lest they read for themselves, one day, unaided the truth about their father’s failures. Yet he is a survivor. A sequel, Christopher Pyne, A Man for All Seasons, must surely follow.

Disappointingly missing from the launch of the new era of mindless optimism, Australia’s own techno-Micawberism was a song and dance routine. Surely Kylie could be persuaded to reprise Locomotion with just one or two judicious edits?

‘Everyone is doing it … the Innovation!…c’mon…c’mon… do the Innovation! with me’

Another Prime Minister, another Christopher Pyne is doubtless already working on the choreography. ‘Industry, Innovation! and science’ are conjoined uneasily in a threesome of convenience in the tyro minister’s full title but we all know it’s a meaningless title for a made up job to keep a recycled Pyne, a numbers man, in Turnbull’s pocket in case another coup is brewing.

Abbott will stay in politics by popular demand, he says, between snipes at his PM and his PM”s policies. Yet Mr Popularity brushes aside his need to discipline rogues. Even with the recent eight point downturn, he’s still up in the ego polls of preferred PM, as if it matters.

…ubiquitous lobby groups for the rich…

Turnbull is mobbed by his own cheer squad. Kate Carnell just loves him. Andrew Carnegie has a man crush. Orchestrated squeals of approval are heard from the hordes of ‘institutes’ and other ubiquitous lobby groups for the rich which will successfully block any real progress or innovation. Indeed, Australians have stagnation rather than innovation to look forward to in the words of the clear-eyed economist Satyajit Das.

‘What I’m seeing now in Australia is the same that I see in many Western democracies. Powerful lobby groups form and then they basically push their own agendas and, because they countervail each other, the whole system basically gets completely and totally stagnant and nothing happens.’

Turnbull’s Innovation! stimulus package unleashes a Pavlovian stampede as business classes clamour and elbow each other aside to snout the public trough, breaking only to preach small government or plead with government to cut funds from the poor and disadvantaged. An intoxicating scent of vast profits to be made wafts towards the feral animal spirits of the entrepreneurial classes like catnip from Canberra. This way if you want to make money!

Anyone who has any can lend their money at favourable rates and with less risk to ‘start-ups’ or new businesses. Rich white men step up. They are not slow to catch on to Malcolm’s spiel. Business, especially ‘small business’ as the motely, multifarious mob likes to style itself, can see that Innovation! is all about encouraging ‘start-ups’ or small business ventures. About them. And that’s all it is. Innovation! is not about new or original ideas. The country can’t afford any of that expensive, non-productive nonsense.

Kill-joy Opposition Leader, Bill Shorten, is duty-bound to remind anyone still listening to him that, ‘Since the 2013 election, the Abbott-Turnbull Government has cut $3 billion from innovation, science and research initiatives.’ Let Malcolm Turnbull insist at every turn that we are an agile and clever country, the evidence is otherwise.

Australia ranks below Azerbaijan…

Australia may rank number one in the world for how many years kids typically spend at school, but it is 77th when it comes to how many graduate with science and engineering degrees. Here Australia ranks below Azerbaijan, Mongolia and Guatemala and will continue to do so provided our innovation is confined to creating business incubators for the wealthy at the expense of expanded, improved access for all to education.

Let Turnbull make his announcement with the assistance of a funky horn-rimmed Pyne now reborn as guru of the Innovation! vibe. Well may they redeem bankruptcy and failure as yet another stage in learning. Pyne is destined to fail at his latest project just as surely as he flopped as Minister for Education. Unless, of course, he incurs collateral damage as Mal Brough digs himself out of the Ashby go-fetch-Slipper’s-diary scandal.

Australians are not deceived. They know that Prime Ministers and governments do not create innovative nations or economies by decree. They know that however attractive the tax breaks, a rash of investment in companies based on the software start-up model is no more a step towards greater national prosperity than it is a way to restructure our stalled economy.

Designed to reward his small business backers, presented as something it is clearly not, infected by the mania of the Silicon Valley start-up cult and heeding none of its limitations, Turnbull’s Innovation! Package is a breach of faith with the Australian people as much as a signal failure of his government’s political imagination and will to explore real reform. Still, with Kylie behind it, The Innovation! could really catch on.

‘Everyone is doing it … the Innovation!…c’mon…c’mon… do the Innovation! with me’

Grasping the lectern as if delivering an over-wrapped , over-packaged pizza.

‘It is not simply that we are optimistic about an agreement, we are optimistic because we believe we have, as a global community, as humanity, the ability to innovate and imagine the technologies to enable to make these big cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.’ Malcolm Turnbull at the United Nations Convention on Climate Change 1 December 2015.

‘From Australia we come from confidence and optimism’, barks PM Turnbull, our very own super-woofer. Now he’s top dog, he won’t stop yapping and nipping at everyone’s heels about how success is just a matter of how you hold your mouth; your positive mind-set, your attitude; how imagining things brings them into being.  And it’s free.

Turnbull’s full up to pussy’s bow with rampant corpo-silicon valley technobabble and thinking outside of boxes. You won’t hear a peep, however, about Faustian compromises he’s had to make along the way. These rapidly reveal themselves this week when his promises to the Nationals to keep Abbott’s climate policies, or to repay Mal Brough’s loyalty to his coup help invite an insubordination that could scuttle Captain Smirk along with his starship enterprise.

In Paris he’s as flash as a rat with a gold tooth. An habitual power dresser, he wears the Canali that won him the leadership spill, a suit that could run the country by itself. And possibly still is. Like all top brands, the electricity consumed in its manufacture, marketing and counterfeiting could power a Pacific nation for a year. Or drown it forever.

No-one calculates carbon tax or suggests ‘savings’ or applying an ‘efficiency dividend’ on Mal’s wardrobe. We like his rig; the cut of his jib. For Joe Aston, of the AFR, it is because ‘we are happy to have someone who can dress himself as a PM rather than a theatre usher’. Or an ‘Ansett purser’. Yet ‘Turners’ Turnbull’s climate policy is pure Abbott in its capitulation to the Minerals Council of Australia and the powerful mining industries and interests it represents.

For many Paris is just another form of up-market tag team wrestling match where the theatre of cruelty still matters. Looking the part, too, is almost as important as the size of your backers’ bank accounts. Turnbull, however, knows it pays to play nice to those in the cheap seats; the developing nations. You never know they could get into bed with the Chinese, like all those nations who have rocketed from developing to Chinese satellite status in Africa.

Julie Bishop is tasked with water damage control after Dutton’s sea-water-lapping-at-your-back- door gaffe. She commits a gaffe and a half of her own in the house when she fluffs her rebuttal of Tanya Plibersek by confusing Eneko with Anebok, an island in the Marshalls which has long succumbed to rising water levels. Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Tony de Brum is said to be keen to straighten her out.

Bishop will fix things with the Pacific Islanders when she replaces our Direct Action Man Greg Hunt, Australia’s anti-environment minister in the second week of talks. She is to bring her own mop and bucket. Mal won’t let either of them spend a red cent more. Hunt and Bishop’s air fares alone this year could buy a decent size island in the Marshall group.

Bishop’s foreign aid piggy bank is raided yet again. Australia commits $1 billion over five years to help Pacific nations and other developing countries ‘prepare’ to fight climate change – out of money it is already giving. Canada, by contrast, has pledged a genuine $2.5 billion.

In another piece of shonky accountancy Australia will carve its $1 billion out of the pittance of our aid budget. Also included is the paltry $200 million over four years the government has already stumped up for the UN’s Green Climate Fund. Yet all this giving by taking away and fiddling the figures amounts to a policy masterpiece, according to Hunt.

‘Julie Bishop is a master in this space of delivery of Australian aid in a way which meets our global objectives, our regional objectives, but their national needs,’ he said, yet Bishop has allowed her budget to be plundered twice so that we can spend $3.7 billion more on security and defence over four years. Australian aid will fall to 0.22% of Gross National Income in 2017-18, the lowest level in Australia’s history and against a world trend of increasing commitment. The UK has passed a law to see it meets its increased target of 0.7% of GDP.

As for meeting our regional objectives,  most Australians (75%) say ‘helping reduce poverty in poor countries’ is the most important objective. Only 20% of Australians, surveyed by the Lowy Institute, identify ‘promoting Australia’s foreign policy objectives’ as the most important objective of the program.

None of this matters to Turnbull – yet. Things have never looked so rosy to our PM, our own lonely little petunia in an onion patch, posing as the incorrigible optimist on stage. A wayward wisp of comb-over like a fraying silver thread unwinds in the spotlight, hinted at the veteran con-man in Turnbull, a chap more at home dealing in derivatives or finance than clean energy or climate.

Spectacles slightly askew, the former merchant banker could be a superannuated Clark Kent, condemned by age and nature to be cut off forever from any transformative phone-booth. The glad-handed elder salesman you see before you is what you get. Or less. Australia seeks concessions as it did in Kyoto in 1997 to weasel out of any real commitment.

His spiel all down pat, Turnbull moves to the boxy lectern, grasping its sides with both hands, to steady himself, like an up-market delivery boy bearing some over-priced, over-packaged Christmas gift from Macy’s.

Turnbull under-delivers. His spray merely reprises his now far from new innovation evangelist shtick in the Loire room at the Paris Convention on Climate Change, while in the Seine room in a simultaneous but sincere and well-received speech, Canadian PM Trudeau, is pledging his nation to real action, ‘Canada can do more and will.’ Turnbull, on the other hand, might be giving us a heads-up on the first line of some dull new national anthem or corporate-state team song he has just devised. ‘From Australia, we come …’

‘We are not daunted by our challenge’, he postures, while Hunt negotiates to get us off the hook. Australia need do nothing until 2020 about curbing its carbon emissions after it persuades St Lucia and South Africa to allow it the accountancy dodge of carrying over Kyoto credits. In return Hunt won’t commit to a 1.5% rise but instead settles to ‘reference 1.5% in the text’

It inspires us, it energises us’, he says despite mounting evidence of his evading challenges on the domestic front. He is unable to control a growing chorus of dissidents sapping his authority within his own party. His domestic audience will never forgive his indulgent support of Mal Brough, nor his failure to bring a hostile and increasingly insubordinate Tony Abbott to heel.  Increasingly, he appears unable and unwilling to put his money where his mouth is.

Mal’s contortionism and his Silicon Valley vocabulary make him a ready crowd-pleaser, a popularity boosted at home and abroad by not being Tony Abbott. For his star turn at the international climate circus, he springs another surprise. Turnbull emerges from the change room in a Leghorn rooster costume. Where is the superman outfit everyone expected? What of Greg’ Hunt’s adenoidal, preppy promises that further climate change pledges would be revealed? World audiences, are, however, not entirely disappointed. Turnbull is to perform his signature routine.

The PM executes a virtuoso performance of his innovative trick unicycle act, wobbling atop a fraying tightrope while pursued by a crazy clown in budgie smugglers bearing a feather duster and a rolled up copy of The Daily Telegraph. Pedalling desperately to stay upright, Mal must negotiate a barrage of inflated Cory Bernardi and Ian McFarlane balloons while side-stepping a deflating, saggy Mal Brough doll which threatens to fall on him from a great height.

Turnbull does not fall. He tips a scuttle of coal all over a New Zealand-led pledge to phase out fossil fuel subsidies. In a great show of tidying up, he tears up the unsigned document from the land of the long white cloud before pulling a ‘Kyoto 2020’ a cute Hello Kitty kawaii type toy rabbit out his hat which overflows with Kyoto carbon credits carried over.

L’Équipe Australie (Team Australia) exits stage right, borne off by a team of Gina Rinehart lookalikes in hard hats singing It’s been a hard day’s night. I’ve been working like a dog to earn my 2 million dollars an hour.‘ Silence. The curtain goes down to a smattering of polite applause, Gallic shrugs and other gesticulations of multicultural bewilderment.

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, NAB chief economist and killjoy Alan Oster, reports an unwinding of business confidence with the resolution of the LNP’s leadership jitters while confidence in mining, construction and finance continues to fall because the nation has avoided reality, trusting instead in the hope that resources boom will last forever, a myopia encouraged by our political masters who squandered the proceeds buying votes with tax cuts.

Despite the odd blemish, however, in areas such as export receipts and an economy that needs rebuilding, Oster was all for looking at the bright side of things. We were not a basket case yet. Things may be looking up. Especially if you are in banking – or baskets.

While our big-talking PM is clearly making no ‘big cuts’ to his rhetoric to leaders in Paris, at home all bets on change are off as party deputy Julie Bishop executes the Liberal leadership’s ‘good cop bad cop routine’. For all Environment Minister Hunt’s prior hints that in Paris we might at last get real about our carbon reduction targets, Foreign Minister Bishop abruptly drops her emoji transmission to rise in the lower house on Monday to scotch all rumour of change.

Ethiopia and Rwanda are now doing more for climate change than Australia.  Australia is bludging on the efforts of others, Kofi Annan complains. Or sabotaging them.

Bishop publicly reassures the restive right in her own party and its fossil fuel backers, that LNP dinosaurs will still rule. Using Parliamentary privilege, she spells out coalition intentions. Her coal-fired government will not be changing its soft target of 5% reduction, a target too feeble to begin to abate a jot of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions will continue to increase in fact, since Direct Action without a carbon price mechanism provides no means of controlling carbon emitters. It will also continue to Hunt down and crush any upstart renewable energy start-ups.

Innovation is fine as a buzzword it seems, just as long as coal and oil keep their duopoly over Australia’s energy options. Any brash new solar or wind Johnny- come-lately that challenges the dominance of the privileged, government sponsored fossil fuel industry in Australia can expect open opposition from the Abbott/Turnbull coalition. The government will continue to give $7 billion-a-year in fuel tax credits alone to mining and agriculture.

A triumphant Bishop boasts that her government will stick to Tony Abbott’s pledge to abolish the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation. After all these will only encourage emerging clean energy technology, Let Turnbull blow his bags abroad about Australia ‘meeting the climate challenge’ through ‘innovation’.  It can’t and won’t.

Bishop leaves out the best bit. Given the workload in soothing party throwbacks, hacks and backers, not to mention the psychic energy required to stare down Tony Abbott’s after his recent accusations of deceit and treachery, it is, perhaps, understandable that Ms Bishop neglected to publicly salute her government’s heroic commitment to global warming over the next four years. That’s right. Australia will turn up the thermostat while expecting other countries to dial down their carbon emissions.

Australia will spend money it can’t afford creating future problems no-one needs. $47 billion of government hand-outs is ear-marked for the production and use of fossil fuels such as the Fuel Tax Credit scheme ($27.9 billion over four years), the concessional rate of excise on aviation fuel ($5.5 billion), accelerated depreciation rules ($1.5 billion) and the removal of the carbon price ($12.5 billion).

Turnbull came to power promising better economic leadership. Not only has he failed to show any climate change leadership whatsoever in Paris, a leadership which is now widely seen as fundamental to economic growth and sustainability, he has failed to show he has the bottle to lead his own LNP.

Cracks are appearing in the PM’s charismatic but largely cosmetic authority, a gloss which makes him popular in the nonsense of opinion polls but which does not carry over into day to day political leadership or management. Ian McFarlane is jumping into a Truss-warmed bed with the Nationals in order to get back into Cabinet out of a sense of his own entitlement rather than any notion of service to his nation or party.

Mal Brough’s tawdry involvement in the Slipper affair was sufficiently well-known prior to Turnbull’s rise to power to pre-empt his selection as a supporter by any prudent leader in the making. Once again, Turnbull’s lack of judgement is out in the open.

Tony Abbott just won’t shut up. Whether he opens division and threatens party unity on defence and security doesn’t matter, he is openly defying the authority of his PM.  He needs to be brought into line. Then there is the nightmare that is Greg Hunt, a minister who has committed the Turnbull government to an exorbitantly over-priced, unproven and ultimately unworkable emission reduction scheme.

Hunt will return from Paris boasting of illusory victories and the admiration of all nations. Yet he has nothing but bad news for Turnbull. Hunt’s specious arguments and spurious, outrageously far-fetched claims merely serve to highlight the government’s mendacity and its contempt for the electorate’s intelligence. Both of these brought Abbott undone.

Despite the superior cut of his suit and the fluency of his Pollyanna techno-optimism, Turnbull has some serious thinking to do over Christmas if he wants to remain PM after the election that is coming as certainly as the New Year. The ability to bloviate or to ‘imagine and to innovate’ even if it were more than a figment of the PM’s advertising puffery imagination is no substitute for good government.

The UN Climate Change Summit circus in Paris will have to start without Tony Abbott – not that he was going anyway. Not that it needs another clown. He got one Captain’s call right. His successor would also stay at home if he could. He should.

Malcolm Turnbull is impossibly conflicted on climate. He recognised that Direct Action is ‘bullshit’ and called it a ‘policy which does not exist’ in 2009. Now he has to sell something he never believed to a mob who will never forgive him for going soft on saving the world.

Worse still, the PM will look stupid and shonky, something he normally leaves to his predecessor. Perhaps he should take a sickie; he has been looking exhausted lately. Backflips can do that to man.

Turnbull won’t be missed amongst the 45,000 delegates from 193 countries converging on Paris, some of whom are serious. His government has nothing to contribute. Or even less. Indifferent if not hostile to the science, the Abbott/Turnbull government is contrarian on climate. It pays polluters to plant trees and if they don’t promise to clean up their act a bit, pretty please, they face a flogging with a wilted lettuce leaf.

The coalition is soft on targets. Its 2020 emissions reduction target of 5%, if no-one else did anything and 25% if they did, is soft and its 2030 target is a dangerously low 26-28 per cent below 2005 levels, a goal which will do nothing to prevent global warming reaching 2 degrees – which is what Paris is supposed to forge consensus over.

On the other hand, the Abbott/Turnbull government is doing its bit to warm the globe. The LNP has enabled power companies to increase pollution by scrapping Labor’s carbon price mechanism. Its commitment to a greener planet has no better indictment than in its willingness to pay a ‘windfarm commissioner’ $600,000 to indulge complaints about a safe, alternative power source.

Direct action means taxpayers have forked out $660 million already to get farmers to plant trees but Environment Minister Hunt happily let Campbell Newman clear enough of Queensland in 2014 alone to fit the entire ACT inside, a move which cost the federal government 80% of the 45.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gas abatement it purchased recently at a cost of $557 million.

But the show must go on. Malcolm Turnbull, Julie Bishop and Greg Hunt are in Paris to keep up appearances; pretend that Australia is doing its bit by meeting a soft target that required no effort whatsoever to slow emissions. Not that it could slow them now if it wanted to.

Much as the Abbott/Turnbull government promotes its Direct Action scam, it will not reduce emissions with its current policies or its current mindset.  Although Hunt crows about having ‘reached our target’, our carbon emissions have been on the increase since 2013.

Other countries know the truth.  Since its scare campaign on what it wrongly called ‘a carbon tax’, helped win it power the Abbott/Turnbull government has done everything it can to stymie any initiatives to curb global warming.

It attacks renewable energy. It is in bed with coal. It supports the Queensland’s Coordinator-general’s plans to extinguish native title, against the wishes of traditional owners, over a leasehold property held by Adani, to allow the international mining company to build infrastructure for its $16 billion Carmichael coal mine.

Vast coal mines such as Adani’s have been approved; climate change agencies have been defunded or rigged. The LNP government subsidises coal miners $4 billion a year and proposes laws restricting green groups’ legal standing to challenge mining approvals and other developments. It has so successfully spread lies about global warming and our role in fixing it that it has lulled much of its population, into complacency.

Secure within the deep pockets of the coal industry, Environment Minister, Greg Hunt, has led the charge. The coal lobby’s gift to climate politics, Hunt has the hide of a hippopotamus. And its plan of attack.  Even for a politician, he is oblivious to criticism and inured to any vestigial promptings of conscience. He is above all that, he lets us know. His delusions of grandeur rival Turnbull’s.

Only Hunt could boast of meeting our 1979 Kyoto agreement, famously described by Labor’s Duncan Kerr, then environment spokesman, as ‘a three inch putt’. Australia was allowed to increase its pollution by 8% while requiring everyone else but Russia to reduce pollution by 8%.

On top of this ‘The Australia Clause’, allowed us to include carbon emissions from land clearing.  Only Hunt, moreover, could overlook the fact that Australia’s tactics, and the “victory” they delivered, generated resentment around the world.

We are one of the few countries in the world to have met and beaten our first round of Kyoto targets and to be on track to meet and beat our second round of Kyoto targets.

When not claiming credit where none is due, Hunt is coy about how his Direct Action safeguard mechanisms will work. He refuses to explain. Almost as arrogant and patronising as his boss, Hunt’s style is to simply dismiss all criticism. Who better to negotiate climate change agreements and safeguard our future – in the same way that Abbott was perfect as Minister for Women?

The Incredible Hunt will say whatever he likes; do whatever it takes. Asked about funding his Emissions Reduction Fund beyond the forward estimates, Hunt claimed incredibly that its cost per tonne of emissions saved was about a hundredth that of the carbon tax, absurdly inflating the figure; neglecting to factor in the revenue obtained from a carbon price’s levy on pollution.

Hunt’s boasts include claiming that the world is beating a path to our door to copy Direct Action, an experimental, expensive, government subsidy to businesses and farmers to voluntarily clean up their act. He knows no-one asks him to name one. The UN, on the other hand, can name 36 who think it’s a con. 36 nations tabled some ‘please explains’ recently, including Direct Action’s huge cost.

The Coalition’s policy would see Australia’s emissions rise about 9 per cent by 2020. To achieve their promised range of 2020 carbon cuts of 5 to 25 per cent below 2000 levels, the Coalition would need to spend at least an extra $4 billion to $15 billion by 2020.” – John Connor, The Climate Institute.

Unaffordable, Direct Action is fluffy; unworkable. Big polluters can stay outside the scheme and agree to soft ‘safeguards’, targets based on their greatest releases of GHGs into the atmosphere. ‘It’s like setting a limbo bar at two metres’, says Mike Seccombe in The Saturday Paper.  It’s also how we set our national target. Reducing our carbon emissions? We are there already with the help of a neat accounting trick.

‘We’ll be able to say that we’ve already met our target,’ boasts Hunt as if curbing CO² were some kind of game it’s smart to cheat at. As if his audience is stupid. Australia may well be 28m tonnes of greenhouse abatement ahead of what it needs to reach the target of a 5% reduction by 2020 based on 2000 levels but it has absolutely no cause for self-congratulation. On the contrary, it has a lot of explaining to do. Why so low? How does it propose to achieve any target?

Since election, the LNP has dismantled climate initiatives; attacked emission reduction mechanisms. It has returned entitlements to big polluters to pollute for free, while taxpayers must now pay the cost of reducing emissions. It has cut climate and clean energy programs and independent agencies.

Given his party’s hostility and his own compromised position, what can Turnbull offer to any UN conference to foster collective action on global climate change? His party aims to obstruct, discredit, disband, defund or wind up all whose work might help to reduce Australia’s contribution to global warming.  Unable to axe the Climate Change Authority, for example, it is now stacking its membership with LNP supporters and climate change opponents.

These include Kate Carnell who has accused clean energy investments of ‘destroying jobs’ rather than creating new ones, a key plank in the coal industry’s hugely successful propaganda platform which has manipulated the national debate into a choice between clean energy and prosperity.

Now the government must flaunt its duplicity in Paris. Nick Feik, editor of The Monthly says, it will set a 2030 greenhouse gas emission reduction target at the UN convention despite having ‘undermined every possible mechanism for reaching it.’

Australia will brag about reaching its reductions target while it is actually increasing its greenhouse gas emissions. It will also, according to Hunt, seek permission to use the same accountancy trick; to ‘carry forward’ the bonus obtained in Kyoto, a credit which has helped it to fake its current achievement.

Coalition policy on climate change has been a catastrophic cop-out and a colossal cock up. By scrapping Labor’s price on carbon and its low emissions target, the Abbott/Turnbull government has actually helped Australia to increase its output of greenhouse gases 6% over the next five years based on today’s figures.  Does it believe other nations at the Paris Convention will not notice?

Pitt & Sherry’s CEDEX analysis, shows emissions from Australia’s coal power stations have risen steadily since the end of the carbon tax in June 2014 and are now at their highest level since early 2013. Last year, emissions in the power sector grew by more than they have in a decade, wiping out all gains made by deploying the carbon tax.

Yet Hunt has no interest in the bigger picture; he is there to crow about meeting a target set so low it virtually met itself when it was set in 1979. A slowing economy and other factors independent of government policy have also helped. So, too the figure we had to beat kept shrinking. Total pollution estimates got progressively lower as calculations improved. None of this, however, prevents Hunt from taking credit for all carbon emission reductions. For him it is all about winning the game.

Not, for Hunt, or the new Turnbull, does it matter that our target is too low to contribute to other nations’ efforts to restrict global warming to 2 degrees. Not that we have met our target only by using an accounting trick to carry over credit for curbing emissions we haven’t earnt.  Not that we owe it to humanity to do our full share if not more, in trying to halt global warming.

None of this enters the calculations of the Environment Minister or his government. The LNP game plan is to do as little as it can get away with while trumpeting that it’s meeting targets. Its behaviour is a hideous travesty of commitment to international cooperation. The overweening man-child Hunt’s sense of self, his world, consists of winning cheap debating points based on statistical manipulation at the expense of any larger responsibility or respect for his audience.  He will disgrace us again in Paris. 36 questions already lodged by UN members in April, show many suspect a hoax.

‘1990 is an internationally common choice for base year of 2020 targets, but Australia choose 2000 instead,’ said a question from China. ‘Australia further indicated that the 15 per cent and 25 per cent conditional targets are based on the level of international action, especially from advanced economies … This ambition level is far below the requirement that Australia set out for advanced economies. Please clarify the fairness of such requirements.’

Apart from it not playing fair, scientists warn that Australia’s target is a Clayton’s target. It is too low to enable Australia to make any ‘credible’ contribution to reducing global warming, says the Climate Change Authority, a body the coalition would have abolished had it not been blocked by the Senate. It is a hoax. Australia’s carbon emissions are once again increasing. Energy and emissions analyst, Reputex, forecasts Australia’s actual emissions to increase by 6 per cent by 2020 on today’s figures.

Today, however, the Environment Minister relishes the prospect of wasting everyone’s time at the UN Climate Change Convention. His form of words will allow him to pretend that Australia is doing its bit for humanity despite the reality that under his government, emissions have increased after it scrapped Labor’s ‘great big new tax on everything’.

Yet taxpayers will have to pay the 2.2 billion allocated to his Direct Action a scheme to subsidise landowners and landfill managers. Taxpayers will also have to find the 6 billion foregone as a result of scrapping carbon pricing.  The world will have to bear the impact of Australia once more increasing its carbon emissions as power generators pollute freely and targets are contemptibly low.

Meet our targets? Unfortunately for all of us, his Paris audience will see Hunt’s claim for what it is: a cheap confidence trick from a shonky salesman for the coal industry.  Whatever feeble emissions target the incredible Hunt may have confected and ‘met’, it will not disguise how the LNP government continues to turn its back on the environment and its responsibilities as a global citizen to keep its backers happy and for short term, political gain.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No but look out below!  It’s Super Mal, the man of tomorrow. Faster than a speeding spill ballot, more powerful than a runaway train of thought, the supersonic ‘small l Liberal’ super hero and man of Chinese steel rockets into the stratosphere, unlike the plummeting spot price for iron ore and other commodities we, poor sods, have yoked our futures to, courtesy of the myopia of his post-modern political class and its minders.

The lofty, big-noting Mal is in his element. From on high this week he eagerly anticipates captive audiences everywhere while he mediates god-like between heaven and earth. And the twitterverse. Back and forth he flies, much like his government’s yes-but-no policy on Chinese investment in Australian real estate, or its stop- start-stop on renewable energy or its two faced environmentalism or its hypocrisy over calling corporate tax evaders to heel.

Federal environmental policy is not so much conflicted but exposed as a sham when it comes to protecting Great Barrier Reef. Legislation enacted November 12 restricts sea dumping and port expansion in the Reef heritage area. Yet days later, the government welcomes the expansion of the coal seam gas (CSG) and liquefied natural gas (LNG) industries.

It is as if these operations will have no long-term adverse impact on climate change and on the reef’s survival. Equally, Environment Minister Hunt fails to factor the impact of burning its coal into his granting permission for Adani’s Carmichael mine. We have to go on using fossil fuels, the PM reminds us, ‘they are part of energy mix’ as he tries to jawbone the myth of clean coal into reality.

Similarly we must go on helping our billionaires to keep their tax affairs secret. Their pockets are so deep that both sides of politics fit snugly inside them. So keen is our ‘tax reform conversation’ government on helping billionaires and multinationals hide their true worth and any other information that would help ensure Morrison’s ‘fairer tax system’ that it kills its own bill which would have required multinationals to file financial statements and made more transparent their dealings.

Exposing their true worth would bring real danger of kidnapping, it was said, not that it would enable them to pay their fair share or as Turnbull puts it ‘give back’. Of course the bill went.

Safe from kidnapping, billionaire Mal trips the light fantastical modern world political stage, flexing his ego, wearing his need to be liked like an emoji love heart on his sleeve. Terrorists disrupt and displace the neo-connerie on the agenda at the G20 in Antalya Turkey, replacing it with windy rhetoric about security, a sudden change which adds to his lack of ease. It doesn’t matter that 30,000 have been employed just to make sure the venue is secure.

Turnbull observes other new boys manage their first-day nerves. Trudeau the hot new Canadian PM, enters every room with a wave of acknowledgement, never checking for fans first.

Yet Mal gets a good trot at home. Reporters fawn, complains Gerard Henderson on ABC Insiders who must have his customary dry right whine about our lazy, biased press and their cohorts of left-leaning luvvies. He calls Peter Dutton to get the latest on the ABC-Fairfax jihad, the immigration minister warns us about. The truth is a leftie conspiracy.

Fawning doesn’t last, of course. Like Julie Bishop, Wyatt Roy and the rest of the PM’s future fawning claque, it is based in fakery and fashion-mongering. Endlessly looking for true love is a tiring, bruising and ultimately fruitless quest but no-one has ever told Mal you can’t win them all over. Nor has anyone told him to go play with his Lego and be quiet, either.

Mal’s love affair with the sound of his own voice comes to the fore on tour. Mal needs to blow his bags, harangue or ear-bash even more than the average politician. Quite a bit more. Buttoned down DFAT staff look edgily at one another at touchdowns. Who knows what he will say or do?

The terrorist attacks in Paris and subsequently in Mali effectively hijack much of his planned talking points yet provide an opportunity for Turnbull to differentiate himself from his ‘destroy the evil death cult approach of his warmongering predecessor.

“Plainly, when you look at Daesh or ISIL, its base is a Sunni population that has felt disenfranchised or oppressed in Syria, and with very good reason, and also has felt left out of the new government in Iraq,” he says, preferring a political solution, a stance which mirrors Obama’s thinking at the time which is to say the President will soon give way to those urging armed invasion.

So far, despite all opportunities and expectations, ‘Zelig’ the human chameleon, Turnbull has not revised his position on what is widely called ‘the war on terror.’ We are in dangerous times for subtle, nuanced or profound understanding. Armies of knee-jerks approach on all quarters. And a Turnbull talk-about could happen at any moment.

The PM is notorious for his urge to improvise a public speech out of the blue, anywhere, any time. Bugger the  DFAT itinerary, he can spot an open microphone from ten thousand feet. His eye in the sky, his minder, the lynx-eyed Lucy wills Mal to just shut up.  He won’t, of course. It’s who he is.

‘It’s never been a more exciting time to be alive.’ Big Mal bravely embraces a risky theme in a world awash with news of terror strikes, suicide bombings and the profound and abiding horror of the slaughter of innocents. ‘Never a more exciting time to do anything’, gushes our 21st Century Candide, in a monomaniacal rapture over how we live in the best of all possible worlds. He bores audiences into submission with another stump speech replay.

The words ‘excitement’, ‘agility’ and ‘disruption’, the jargon of the merchants of change tumble from his lips wherever he goes, remarkably from a man who professes to abominate slogans.  Apart from talking sense on Syria, each stop of his journey further confirms Turnbull’s status as master of the breathless yet meaningless platitude, the cliché rhapsody.

‘The Asia Pacific region is the most dynamic in the world,’ he flatters wary Asian business and political types and travelling cliché weary hacks and other hangers-on. They look back, eyes as bright as bicycle lamps and with every dynamo whirring. It makes a change at least from his predecessor’s habit of conferring instant bestie status on every national leader he met.

‘Turners’ is clearly sleep-deprived. He may even be hallucinating. He denies that Darwin is used by our navy, a picayune mistake which causes friction between the PM and Obama, a complication he or his staff ought to have noticed before selling the port to the Chinese. DFAT was probably too busy with its innovation hackathon to notice or care. Gossip about Port Melville being prepared for US military use grows.

Lucy Turnbull endures, without indulging her husband, in her constant monitoring of his public persona. Her guard is always up lest a darker, deeper part of Mal surface to bite off his hosts’ and all their minions heads. She has met the enemy and it is not ISIS. She frets when the PM works for 36 hours straight. What is he thinking? When Mal gets tired he gets testy.

Madly impressing John Key, Mark Kenny and ‘Barry’ (only to his mates) Obama, Mal the Mouth from the South Pacific puts himself about shamelessly. Obama flirts back with a joke, about how no-one speaks to the Kiwis but after the Christmas Island riots and with a boom mike on, Turnbull, is clearly stumped for a funny comeback. Perhaps it’s the jet lag and the lack of sleep. Key is a role model, he says. Dead pan. Obama aides crack up. It becomes the lead story on New Zealand news.

The land of the long white shroud is ecstatic. New Zealand has been noticed for being ignored. It’s one up from being rubbished by Australia. John Key, naturally, laps up all compliments and milks this for all it’s worth in a big-noting comment in which knocks news of a tourist helicopter fatality and high winds in the North Island off the top two spots in The New Zealand Herald’s ‘Most Popular’ column.

Taking time out from accusing the opposition of supporting murderers and rapists for suggesting deported Kiwis have rights, a line which Dutton also runs up the flagpole, Key is a happy little satellite of love.

‘I’ve been around President Obama for a long period of time and I think he is a really good genuine guy, and I think the friendship we have got is genuine so it would be disappointing if he didn’t say that but it’s very nice that he has.’

Just like Key, the power junkie in Turnbull also gets a buzz out of just being around the most powerful man in the world but Mal’s magical mystery tour involves more than this. Woody Allen says 90% of success is just showing up. Turnbull must put in a show; keep up appearances, even if he must spruik his earnestly unoriginal, preppy 21st century carpe diem vibe.

Turnbull, a Mal-come-lately, is yet an arriviste, a parvenu atop the Down Under political dunghill and he well knows it. His purchase is still precarious despite the fawning opinion polls which ask the wrong people the wrong questions and perpetuate the myth that he’s some kind of popularly elected president. He must answer to his party’s mongrel expectations.

As assiduously as he greased the slippery pole to the top with promises to run backwards on climate change and other 21st century hot-button realities to woo the wary red-neck rump of his party, Turnbull’s whirlwind tour is ultimately a shameless self-promotion. He will caress, cuddle and kiss as many world leaders as he decently can, before they all give him the cold shoulder over coal at the COP21 Climate change talks in Paris.

Mal’s speed-dating barn-storming charm offensive is partly a pre-emptive strike at critics both at home and abroad. He must continue to swat away domestic bot-flies such as Tony Abbott who has reverted to typeface in the one thing he is half-way good at, tabloid, gonzo, boots on the ground anti-terror, fear-mongering journalism. He contradicts his PM’s foreign policy from the Daily Telegraph, a sniping at his leader only Gerard Henderson can defend. It is also a challenge to Turnbull’s power that will not be solved with another bull session on team work.

In what is widely reported as a ‘slap-down’, the PM reminds the incredible budgie smuggling Hulk and the rest of the nation that a political settlement in Syria is better to aim towards than another abortive invasion no-one can afford and which will help ISIS recruiting propaganda.  Let the US go hard on invasion, our inveterate ‘future embracing’ evangelist urges audiences worldwide to ‘seize the day’ not choke the living daylights out of anyone ungrateful for colonisation or western multi-national exploitation.  In the meantime he is content to help Greg Hunt to bugger our tomorrow.

Hunt and Brandis continue their ‘lawfare’ jihad by defunding environmental groups while Coalition senators vote against continuing the legal rights of environmentalists to challenge the minister’s development approvals. Siding with the minority of submissions, the Environment and Communications Committee votes to go ahead with the repeal of laws which allow environmental groups to mount legal challenges to government-approved development projects.

Some countries, he knows, will howl us down for this. They already hate our Direct Action scam which pays people to plant trees and manage landfill but does nothing to curb big polluters even if it does keep the LNP’s mining industry backers on side. Let them remain benighted in their ‘ruling in, ruling out’ ways of yesterday. They just haven’t got the vibe.

There are many ways of dealing with climate change, he says smugly, it’s just that ours happens to be totally untried and unworkable, a complete con. We continue to do everything we can to appease the coal industry. It’s who we are.  OK we may worship the top end of town a teensy bit but our idolatry of those who push us around just makes us and our inane twaddle about our freedoms and the free market so fashionably retro.

Knowing that he may well be told to shut his coal hole, especially over the need for clean coal to ‘be in the energy mix’, our agile PM is buddying up with every pal available before Environment Minister Hunt’s bullshit hits the fan. Wisely, he backs out of a climate change stand-off with the US and Japan, agreeing to cut funding for dirty coal-fired electricity by billions of dollars a year.

Turnbull’s charm offensive seems to be working. He scores a return invitation to visit the Obamas early next year and a bromance blossoms with Fairfax’s Mark Kenny who observes with mounting excitement how the PM embraces change. Even the Kiwi leader has his socks knocked off.

‘He’s a bolter’, beams a nimble John Key, New Zealand PM and fellow multi-millionaire whose own Olympic agility in the back flip has kept him in power for three consecutive terms.  No slouch himself, Key gets straight to the heart of the matter. ‘I reckon he’s there for a long time.’

Key rushes his ‘Unwelcome Home Bro’ law through the Beehive, New Zealand’s humdinger unicameral parliament. The legislation has civil libertarians and human rights activists up in arms.  It mirrors Donald Trump’s call for a database of all US Muslims to be set up to track their movements.

Key’s new law follows his failure to sweet-talk Australia out of repatriating Kiwi troublemakers. Instead, Dutton’s deportees will be met at the airport by a team of NZ police, corrections officers and social welfare agency workers to have their fingerprints and DNA samples taken. The deportees, many of whom have grown up in Australia, and all of whom have served their sentences, will effectively all be put on parole; punished twice for the one offence; made to carry the stigma of being second-rate citizens all their lives.

Deportees are reject Kiwi migrants. Some are former jail birds who fail Peter Dutton’s ‘character test’, but many are not his stereotypical murderers or rapists and have achieved his beloved ‘convicted criminal’ status for minor offences. Yet all are levelled by the democratic deportation process. A knock on the door in the night leads to their finding themselves on a plane bound for Auckland via Christmas Island as if in the CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition’ of political prisoners.

Asylum seekers are not on the agenda of Turnbull’s meeting with Joko Widodo, an arrangement which spares both parties the tedious repetition of LNP policy on how important it is to be tough on asylum seekers because it prevents drowning, an absurd, indefeasible and palpably false position. It is also falsely held that the cruelty of offshore detention has stopped the boats. What has stopped is the reporting. Yet this was not the case on Christmas Island this week when one boat was a hundred metres off shore. Locals could see it and wanted to help.

Official reports of the arrival focus on the vessel and not its cargo of lives with their hopes, their fears, their human frailties. ‘A boat carrying asylum seekers was intercepted close to Christmas Island on Friday, the first to reach Australian waters since June 2014.’

‘The boat made it within 200m of Flying Fish Cove before it was boarded by Australian officials’, according to Island sources. Then it was towed back out to sea, allowing no test of sea-worthiness, in an act of callous inhumanity which shocks locals and puts the lie to all the rhetoric about saving lives. Yet no-one expects Turnbull to do more than follow his predecessor’s course.

The pole Turnbull climbed to become PM is greased with resentment for environmental regulation and prejudice against refugees and asylum-seekers. Turnbull is only too well aware he’d quickly slip down again if he halted the government’s war on green groups or the nation’s war on asylum seekers. Or is seen to go soft on anything the hard right want him to leave alone.

As his over-long oversharing whistle-stop self-promotion tour journey on the world stage continues, our PM looks increasingly trapped. He is caught between his own facile infatuation with the fashionably fluffy rhetoric of the futurists and the demands of the hard right to keep everything the same as under Tony.

He is caught between his need to cut a dash on the world stage and the need to settle his authority at home. No longer will success on the world stage automatically win him points at home. Or strengthen his authority. He needs at the very least to remind his predecessor that he is bound by the party like any other member.

Annabel Crabb’s Kitchen Cabinet is a voyeur’s delight which starts with a saucy two course proposition. I’ll show you my dessert if you show me your ‘mains’. The intimate exchange of menus, the home swum yabbie and the odd bottle of Chateau Plonker is the entrée to a behind the scenes expose of rich white men (mostly) of our political class who have built careers on manufacturing and maintaining their public images; men who have had their off duty switches surgically removed at birth. Camera or no camera they are constantly, forever starring in their own shows, while we are kept in our places.

Most MPs are born performance artists and many overachieve assiduously in creating and presenting selves spun entirely from their own bullshit. Some like Pyne are all gong and no dinner; all mouth and no trousers. But modern politics became just another branch of show business long ago.

Still Crabb’s little show sticks to its shtick; its promise that something, if not anything profound or noteworthy, will be revealed in the mix as MPs do a twirl with a wooden spoon or whisk a bit of froth about.  Cue earnest, direct questions from Annabel. She catches a new Nova as the hard mother slaps down her daughter’s malingering as she paddles the damper.

Of course some MPs are just not up to it. Albo and Pyne faff around like men who have just discovered the existence of the apron until someone competent takes the work off them.

Crabb says the show aims to humanise politicians. Now that would be an achievement. Instead it is more PR for pollies, an attention seeking species for whom too much exposure is never enough. Especially when there’s image rehabilitation to do. Morrison the monster of Manus Island, the most loathed minister ever is quick to seize the day even if the best he can manage is to faff about with lies about needing to act tough to deter people smugglers. Crabb should play him a clip of his bullying of Gillian Triggs.

While it takes the lid off to reveal what’s cooking in the pollie’s pot, Kitchen Cabinet embraces gender stereotypes and supports the patriarchy of the rich white narcissist, born to reign over us, while the rest of us in the under classes drool and dream on, our voices unheard, our needs ignored, our noses pressed to the sweetshop kitchen  window.

Penny Wong’s appearance, it is true, broke the unadulterated run of blokes while former Hockeyroo Nova Peris added a piquant dash of her own dream time nightmare as she related acts of her own and her mother’s tough motherly love with a good Magpie Goose plucking thrown in to level any of her ABC hostess’s vegetarian pretensions.

Crabb expresses amazement at hearing that Peris experiences more racism at home than anywhere abroad. Cue the quick cut to the bush baklava with rosella jam. The script is under strict instruction to keep it fluffy.

A privileged sneaky peek into the knives of the rich and famous for the nosy parker and the name-dropping social climber in all of us, the show, nevertheless crosses all sorts of boundaries. And it’s such an easy meal, all pre-packaged, no-fuss, instant mutual appreciation. Just sprinkle with wittering superficial pleasantries and banalities.

‘Soo interesting, Scott’, whether it is chopping, stirring or chewing and talking at the same time, Annabel models that faux politeness where one simply must not give offence.  Or expect one’s guests to feel anything but comfortable. Some of us would like the former Border Patrol heavy to report to The Hague to answer for his abuse of human rights. Crabb is happy to keep it down to a story of no soap, no towel in the hotel room on the Island of Serendip.

So you were in Sri Lanka and they gave you less than full room service? So convenient. No mention is made of the turned around asylum seekers washing up, delivered back to their persecutors in bright orange fibreglass Australian return to sender capsules on Sri Lankan shores. Don’t bring a thing. No mess. No-one even has to do any washing up.

Of course it’s far more. For starters, it’s an enchanted beanfeast. Effortlessly, instantly, we cross an impossible threshold; trespassing freely, swapping any guilt or sense of intrusion for the vicarious pleasures of watching. A magic window swallows us up, devours us whole with an illusion of intimacy and belonging in a world just like our own but with a better class of condiment and brand of cutlery.

KC enables us to imagine, fondly, for twenty-nine minutes that we have every right to be where we don’t belong. We make believe we have a standing invitation, always welcome to join Annabel’s kitchen table of powerful friends. Except that we are not and never will be welcome. Kitchen cabinet peddles the preposterous and transparent lie that we are welcome at our masters’ table.

In reality, Kitchen Cabinet re-enacts our exclusion from power and privilege. For all our vicarious enjoyment of the faux intimacy, we are being given the bum’s rush. The Brits have perfected this in their marketing of their royal family as somehow essential to the social picnic despite the royal ‘firm’s’ vast wealth, its parasitic entitlement and its history of predation and dispossession.

We are conned into believing we have every right to be in Annabel’s kitchen. After all, the camera persuades us, Annabel is on intimate terms with all the high and mighty. Of course they act human. They let her rub in the lard a bit about their poor scone skills or their kitchen gaucherie and fess up about some part of their own innate human silliness.

Does one tie an apron at the back or around one’s embonpoint? Albo wonders, a boofhead when it comes to apron strings but engaging us all with his disarming lack of kitchen smarts; his crafty lack of guile.

We are permitted to indulge our fantasies about being powerful or interesting or famous or even on a level peg with the famous pollie for thirty minutes. The illusionist sets out with a clean napkin over her granny basket and leads us up the garden path in another episode of the same fantastical fairy tale, the greet and eat.

KC co-opts its viewers into the rarefied world of the political class pretending to be normal; posing as perfectly ordinary people. It is not too far down the kitchen passage way to imagine they are one of us. And vice versa. We recall the mansion we inherited along with Mal as he shows us what his father left him. Of course he does it in that well-bred off-hand way favoured by the filthy rich indicates.

A mistress-piece of illusion, Ms Crabbette’s feast purveys the outrageous lie that behind the bastard in front of the camera is a loveable and harmless one of us. It is as preposterous a lie as the proffered image of a cute and fluffy Morrison or a wise and witty Pyne.

Along with the twaddle of the fat-free low carb lo-cal dialogue KC serves up a recipe that does vastly more to sustain our political classes’ privileged places at the table than it does to appease the hunger of the rest of us for a fairer share of the national pie. This is not to have a go at Annabel who does what she does well. Just let’s not be confused about what it is she’s serving us along with her self-saucing pudding.

In January an army of Islamic extremists razed the northern Nigerian village of Baga, killing as many as 2,000 people – mostly women and children who were unable to flee the attacks. The incident was not reported widely in the popular western press. No collective international outrage was confected. Instead news of the atrocity quietly, quickly, disappeared into the obscenity of our indifference. The media’s failure to even bear witness to the tragedy in Nigeria casts into sharp relief its hysterical obsession with the recent Paris terror attacks.

News of the attacks is quickly swamped by a tsunami of interviews with survivors, experts, authorities and other talking heads. Vengeance upstages understanding; eclipsed is the light of reason, our human need to make best sense of events. Of course it is all too much to take in. Our point of view is hotly contested. Scapegoats block the view-finder. As does the grand dame herself. Paris, the city of light is a formidable celebrity in her own right.

For Francois Hollande, it is self-evident that the attacks were ‘committed by a terrorist army, the Islamic State group, a jihadist army, against France, against the values that we defend everywhere in the world, against what we are: a free country that means something to the whole planet.’ No evidence is required but, remarkably a Syrian passport turns up. It is a fake.

The forged Syrian passport found near a terrorist’s body gulls the Daily Telegraph into saluting Tony Abbott for his prophetic warning as the Murdoch newspaper continues its own campaign against refugees and asylum seekers.

‘Former PM Tony Abbott warned IS terrorists are hiding in a flood of refugees.’ The Tele knows how keen its readers are to find evidence to suit their prejudices. It can’t stop to see if the evidence is real; it has a duty to its readers to be speedy. Besides it’s a free kick for Tony from the newspaper’s endless supply of Abbott-idolatry in its mission to serve even a dud conservative leader at the expense of the truth.

Political types fall over each other with chest-beating promises to ‘bring the culprits to justice’. Francois Hollande makes threats of ‘pitiless’ reprisal. Or ‘Merciless’, depending on your journal du jour. Military types urge leaders to put ‘boots on the ground’. An agile Malcolm Turnbull channels his godly inner crusader, decrying the attacks as ‘the work of the devil’ undertaken by ‘enemies of freedom’, his features display a public, pious outrage.

‘The home of freedom has been assaulted by terrorists determined to attack and suppress freedom not just in France but throughout the world,’ the Prime Minister says grandly, adroitly demonstrating that not only does he have the US narrative off pat, as a loyal, freedom-loving Francophile, the heart on his sleeve is bleeding.

‘This is an attack, as President Obama has said, on all humanity.’ Clearly no local factors must cloud his focus. Or his portrait of an ungodly global jihad that can only be met by force of arms and the upliftingly resolute public singing of La Marseillaise.

Before anyone knows who exactly is responsible, France has bombed a Syrian city. A massive ‘airstrike’ by French jets on an ISIS bastion in Raqqa is played up, feeding some primal, populist narrative of retaliation. Satisfying it is, indeed, it seems, to show the world that you can just go out and kick a few heads. All of which is exactly what ISIS wants to hear. It feeds their myth of persecution by a hostile, infidel, unjust West and boosts recruitment.

For Western allies and lackeys of the US, such as PM Turnbull, the nature of existence is to be engaged in a crusade, a religious war in the name of the freedom god, against an infernal foe.

‘Protecting Australians, protecting freedom, is a global struggle for freedom against those who seek to suppress it and seek to assert some form of religious tyranny. A threat in the name of God, that is truthfully the work of the devil.’

Nonsense is spouted about democracy itself being under attack; the city of Paris showing valour, resilience because that’s what democracies do. Ignored is the reality that the Parisian poor are a permanent underclass, who share a life of grinding deprivation and hopeless misery. The poor people of Paris are, moreover, part of the wretched 8.5 million French citizens who must eke out a bleak existence in grim poverty excluded by class, race and religion from any of the delights of the city of light or the grand promises of the revolution.  Marginalised, alienated, dispossessed, by a neocon corporate state they are a fertile recruiting ground for extremists offering some kind of hope.

Suffering and resentment are the birthright of fourteen percent of France’s population. Despite their President’s assertions, Liberty, equality and fraternity are an ironic, cruel joke to those who lack the resources to provide for their daily needs and who daily must battle prejudice and persecution just to survive.

In a recent survey into prejudices against the poor, seven out of 10 surveyed believed that it is easy to receive benefits, the survey found, yet the truth, as ATD Quart Monde points out, is that officials demand up to 100 documents for an application. 68 per cent of those eligible for the basic unemployment benefit do not receive it.

For all the posturing, however, for all the grandstanding and the indulgent backgrounders featuring ‘Paris on edge’, or citizens ‘being strong’, by bravely going out drinking together in spite of everything, we are no closer to knowing what is going on. Further still from understanding it. Everyone is happy this way. Easier to point the finger at outside agencies than to acknowledge that terror begins at home.

The  media will keep this choke-hold on us before serving up the ready-made facile interpretation and shallow analysis which best fits our prejudices, our brief attention spans, our impatience with complexity and depth. We won’t have to think too hard and we can pack up our critical faculties right away. They won’t be needed. They won’t be appropriate.

Questions abound. Why did seven men open fire on completely innocent civilians? Who were they acting for? Did French intelligence know but fail to act? Were they independent locals, as seems most likely or were they instructed by ISIS HQ as the popular press has already decided – with a little help from its friends? Yet what is modelled, what is packaged is a case for war that it is unpatriotic to inspect.

A former NATO Supreme allied commander admiral James Stavridis says ‘there will have to be boots on the ground in Syria to destroy ISIS.’ Just as there had to be boots on the ground to get Saddam Hussein out of the way so that Iraqis could ‘transition to democracy’. And what if our crusade succeeds in destroying ISIS? Whose boots will hit the ground to deal with the group that pops up in its place?

France’s swift reprisal on Raqqa is scripted by Western media eager to exploit our preference for simple narratives. It looks remarkably like the type of bombing it has been carrying out for a month now but you won’t hear ‘More of the same pointless, ineffectual bombing’ as the headline on the news. Despite 2500 sorties in the last month, our air attacks seem to be making very little impact on ISIS in Syria. Yet it’s cost the Pentagon $5 billion so far and counting.

The G20, it is reported, will be a rallying call for world leaders to denounce terrorism, another reassuring solution in search of a problem. ABC’s Barbara Miller gives us ‘a city on edge’ while another host chats with witnesses, bystanders and onlookers. An avalanche of ‘feel-bad’ popular media provides the moral outrage to suppress our critical faculties; to recruit us in the campaign against a radical group itself the by-product of our own rush to judgement in Iraq 2003.

Calling ISIS the ‘work of the devil’ downplays our own hand in its creation. When the West was on its last crusade in the Middle East Twelve years ago, we were easily manipulated into falling in with a US foreign policy itself serving the needs of big oil rather better than any other deity.   Crying havoc and letting loose the dogs of the media war urgers serves us ill as a civilised people who have as much right to the truth as to our own humanity.

Spare us the saturation bombardment of media stories, interviews and other products and packages. Just focus on reporting exactly what happened. All we need is the evidence. Let us make up our own minds about the all the rest. Or we are simply fighting one form of barbarism with another.

­

After playing to rave reviews from local audiences, our innovative, one man show, ‘A Malcolm For All Seasons’, is touring Germany, Turkey, the Philippines and Malaysia via Jakarta where it is an overnight sensation.

No-one flings small change at Turnbull while shouting ‘here’s your Tsunami aid’; he appears neither to offend nor insult no-one although there is a tense moment when he and Jokowi remove their ties. The last time a local politician and his pal were reported getting their kit off in public, both he and his driver ended up in prison.

In February, Malaysia’s highest court upheld a five-year prison sentence for opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim on a sodomy charge thereby crushing any viable political opposition to its Barisan Nasional coalition that has ruled Malaysia since 1957.

Power still resides with the party’s chairperson, Megawati Soekarnoputri, as she reminded Jokowi publicly, in April, at his party’s congress. He owed his presidency to her support, she said, ignoring her own links with the military and neglecting Washington’s active support including helping discover unflattering things about his opponent during the election campaign. These matters aside, it’s a fair call.

‘It goes without saying that the president and vice president must toe the party line,’ says former president Megawati, daughter of Indonesia’s late founding president, Soekarno, publicly demonstrating once more her power over Widodo whose pre-election reputation for probity had earned him Mr Clean.

One of a tarnished Widodo’s first acts of office was to mount an assault on Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission, the KPK, dashing his supporters’ hopes. Mr Clean became Mr Weak. Praising the efforts of successive Indonesian governments to clean up corruption, Andrew Robb reckons they are now on top of it. Yet the police chief Widodo installed was one of those listed by the KPK for investigation.

DFAT secretary, Peter Varghese, goes one better, bravely claiming one of the ‘seminal developments of the past two decades is the success of Indonesia’s democracy’. Too many hackathons can destroy a man’s perception and judgement.

Protectionism is the current Indonesian line to toe in trade. Jokowi has been busily raising tariffs on more than a thousand items and looks around anxiously to see if Turnbull has brought Free Trade power ranger Andrew Robb with him. Next week? He laughs politely at Turnbull’s invitation to join the TPP. English cannot convey the subtlety of his refusal. In Bahasa Indonesia there are at least 12 ways to say ‘No’ and many ways to say ‘Yes, but I mean no’.

Indonesian has raised its import tariff on meat from 5 to 30% to protect local business. Turnbull wants a clear commitment on the live cattle trade which Indonesia is not prepared to give. Populist, protectionist Jokowi, who is riding a wave of disappointment in opinion polls, is hoping, at least, to absorb some of Turnbull’s fabled charisma. An official trails the profusely perspiring PM through the market with a roll of paper towels.

Trade Minister Robb will follow with a mob of around 400 hopefuls and hangers-on next week. Our largest trade delegation to Indonesia ever is not a Turnbull ‘innovation’ nor the result of any Wyatt Roy/Julie Bishop hackathon, but an onslaught originally scheduled for March. A postponement was thought prudent while Widodo had an Australian or two to execute. Whether these state-sanctioned killings improved the image of the president or his leadership, as he hoped, or not, imports continued to fall, despite his signal that a tough guy was in charge.

Indonesia’s imports last month totalled US$12.96 billion (S$17.7 billion), 17.4 per cent lower than the same month a year ago. Two-way trade between Indonesia and Australia was just $11.8 billion in 2014. New Zealand with a population of four million is our bigger trading partner. Even Andrew Robb admits that Australia has 360 businesses in Dubai yet only 200 in the whole of Indonesia. The ASEAN region has a population of 620 million and an economic output of US$2.5 trillion, yet it accounts for less than 5 per cent of Australia’s total outward foreign investment. Perhaps Turnbull can trade on his novelty. It’s a tactic which is still working at home.

Indonesians marvel at this suave ‘bule’ (white person) who favours Canali and Salvatore Ferragamo. How different he is to the closet yobbo and notoriously eager trouble-seeker Tony Abbott.  How couth, how handsome, how very agile. Unhappiness with Australia, however, still festers over Abbott’s high handed dismissal of phone bugging of former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Indonesian diplomats see Turnbull as just a new head on the Abbott python.

Aggravating the strained relationship is Abbot’s asylum-seeker policy with its turn backs and its secrecy. It was a  bad idea of his to link tsunami relief aid to a plea for clemency for two Australian drug dealers. Turnbull’s new image may be refreshing but there remains a lot for the new Australian PM to put right.

Naturally, the Malco Jokowi show, subtitled ‘resetting the relationship’ is a huge success with the two craven self-publicists and attention-seekers who quickly establish a common bond based on both being businessmen and both being weak leaders doing the bidding of powerful right wing vested interests. Both know a bit about the local plantation timber industry. Both leaders have domestic economies heading for recession. Both have a lot of catching up to do. It is the first bilateral meeting of leaders of the two nations since the April executions of the Bali Nine duo Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.

Turnbull has a rich history of relationship building to draw upon in ‘re-setting Australia’s relationship with Indonesia’. ‘He’s a prick,’ says Nick Whitlam. His partnership with Whitlam ended badly as did his relationship with ‘Diamond Jim’ McClelland who sees Turnbull as a bowel motion. Deploying his more restrained bedside manner, Dr Brendan Nelson diagnosed a narcissistic personality disorder.

‘He says the most appalling things and can’t understand why people get upset. He has no empathy.’

He’s a turd,’ said former Labor senator Jim McClelland. ‘He’s easy to loathe, he’s a shit, he’d devour anyone for breakfast, he’s on the make, he’s cynical, he’s offensively smug …’

With such testimony on the public record backing him to the hilt, what could possibly go wrong for Turnbull? His wealth? Quickly the talk turns to how furniture tycoon millionaire Joko maintains his image as a humble man of the people, a theme to which an openly perspiring Turnbull warms immediately only to discover himself on his feet as his host sweeps him up in a ‘spontaneous blusukan’ which turns out to be a walkabout to a batik factory where adoring crowds go wild for a touch of  his outstretched hand. Blusukan is from the Javanese for getting into something messy.

‘Blusukan’ is the secret of my common touch, Mal, beams Jokowi. They are in the Tanah Abang Market, once a notorious hangout for criminals, not too far from the National Palace. A man is on hand to dab the Turnbull face with a paper towel made from pulped virgin rain forest.

Turnbull reprises his party piece, warbling about ‘exciting’ times prompted by innovation and technical disruption while a batik worker’s recent evidence in an enquiry into worker exploitation eloquently supplies some of the real context of doing business in Indonesia.

‘It takes four days to nglawong (wax) a piece of batik cloth,’ said Sukemi, a traditional artisan, adding that she received Rp 50,000 (US$3.50) a day as a seasoned worker in the industry. An established batik company, can sell the same piece of cloth for up to Rp 2 million.

As Sukemi’s evidence suggests, doing business with Indonesia will never be the plain sailing favoured by ‘big picture’ Prime Minister Turnbull or his Trade Minister Robb but will involve a lot of nitty gritty hard graft and local partnerships. Hobart boat builder Incat would like to supply ferries and patrol boats to help Widodo achieve his goal of building maritime infrastructure. It sees $500 million of opportunity. Yet the Indonesians are interested in the skill transfer which may be obtained from a joint production in Indonesia.

University of Indonesia (UI) International relations head, Makmur Keliat responds neatly to Turnbull’s agenda of economic ties, terrorism and undocumented migrants, by expressing his country’s main hope that together, the governments can come up with an international and ‘innovative’ mechanism for handling the heavy flow of asylum seekers.

‘No country can handle this issue alone. Australia should be willing to cooperate with Indonesia in this case, instead of letting it burden Indonesia alone.’

With a trade relationship bigger than the Indonesian, New Zealand is also bothered by our Border Protection and off-shoring practices. The riots on Christmas Island, Peter Dutton seeks to reassure us, are caused by ‘hardened criminals, murderers and rapists’. What the challenged Immigration Minister fails to add are that these ‘criminals’ have served their sentences but have refused to be deported to New Zealand. As Bronwyn Bishop says of ambassador Joe Hockey, Dutton does say some funny old things. Or so seems to be the view of his indulgent party.

The rest of Australia would like to know why it is such a good idea to lock those Kiwis refusing to be deported up with refugees. Dutton, naturally is not going to explain and ruin the business model of the deportee. Doubtless it is also an ‘On Christmas’ and an operational matter. Yet unless we are at war with New Zealand and we have forgotten to tell the Kiwis, our government ought to quickly deal with what threatens to be more than a blip in our trans-Tasman relationship. Already Dutton has helped to create a major diplomatic furore.

Peter Dutton and Eric Abetz join forces late in the week when it is clear that loyal Liberal Party deputy Julie Bishop was exchanging little more than emoji messages to Malcom Turnbull, a situation which leads to an effective question in the house from Tanya Plibersek.

‘It’s not just Labor saying Julie Bishop has questions to answer about her involvement in the stalking and bringing down of a prime minister,” she tells reporters. ‘Her own party are saying she has questions to answer, that it’s plain that she was up to her neck in the bringing down of Tony Abbott.’

In a touching show of bipartisan support for her historical record, the Labor Party obligingly reproduces evidence which has been deleted from the Foreign Minister’s website. Ms Bishop is forced to confirm her top adviser was at what she coyly calls a ‘drinks’ evening where the decision was made for Malcolm Turnbull to challenge for the leadership. While the public appears to have little appetite for this disclosure, it does reveal something of the tensions still part of the fabric of that fabled ‘broad church’ the Liberal Party, a term reserved to cover the inherent contradiction at its base between those who fight tooth and nail to keep things as they are if they can’t turn the clock back to the 1950s and those who are up for a bit of a change. Even if they are not prepared to commit themselves publicly to the nature of that change.

The week begins with reform monger, taxation ethicist and reformed former on-water terminator the totally revamped and made-over Annabel Crabb approved soft and cuddly Scott Morrison lecturing reporters on how important it is to get past ‘what has been for the last eight years, the time of gotcha politics and rule in and rule out’.

What this means precisely is anyone’s guess but let’s call it for now, at least, Turnbull’s 21st century agile, innovative, creative evasiveness. While Paris for good reason, may not prove the venue for the next round of climate change talks, the Australian delegation will be well-equipped by combining, as it does surely in its Treasurer, its Environment Minister and his Prime Minister, the new evasiveness with the old flip-flop. Commitment is so yesterday. Next thing you know, you are all tied up in accountability. Eternally keeping all our options on the table makes us a resilient and agile nation. Just don’t pin us down to anything. This is the message of the Turnbull Show on its world debut.