‘This government will deliver Australia’s economic future because only a Coalition government can. As Liberals and Nationals, sound economic management is in our DNA. We’ve done it before and we are doing it again.’

Tony Abbott National Press Club address 2 February 2015.

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Every LNP government and its wealth-struck PM loves to brag endlessly that it is a ‘better economic manager’ which will always keep taxes lower than any Labor mob. Conservatives are born with an auditor’s pen in their mouths. They brag shamelessly about their mythic fiscal genius, or their capacity to make the nation’s fortune as they have single-handedly made their own. They venerate the wealthy and love to boast about ‘truly understanding business and finance’ and how it is in politics and life you take your chances and you talk them up.

Now with two legs of its race over and a late change of rider the Coalition is talking up its prospects of victory over the full distance, hinting at a ‘full term’ election, meaning one as late as possible next year. Suited by the longer journey, but with a novice jockey in the saddle the coalition is, nevertheless, daily, positively ‘Turnbullish’ about its prospects of victory.

The innovative and agile Mr Turnbull used the B word on Thursday to suck up to the Indonesian President, Joko Widodo. As former businessmen, they understand business. The economy, meanwhile, goes to the dogs. It doesn’t help that both Joko and Malcolm are essentially weak men, beholden to more powerful invisible, conservative factions. Even less helpful is our practice of dumping refugees on Indonesia in terms of providing a good foundation for renewing mutual trust and goodwill.

Foreign Minister Marsudi has been blunt, saying only that ‘Australia knows what its obligations are under the Refugee Convention’. She means that she doesn’t like the way we break them. Each party is determined, nevertheless, to get on famously with a trade relationship that is really quite insignificant in the wider scheme of the economies of either nation.

It pays to advertise, of course. You can’t fault self-promotion either. Like self-interest, at least you know it’s real. Yet increasingly, it seems, the nation is less accepting of LNP neo-conmen. A recent Essential Research polls, for example, shows that Australians are at last starting to challenge the myth after generations of torpid acceptance of deception. Disillusionment seems to be the one big legacy of Abbott and Hockey’s economic cocking-up.

Australians are not alone in their history of blind faith and misplaced confidence in conservatives, however. A naïve trust in the Tories to look after the money extends across the western world, despite all evidence showing that what Tories do best is look after their own money. Assiduously. Self-promotion and Tory self-congratulation come second equal.

The Coalition’s hoax was going to be exposed sooner or later. Reality can do that. Let it continue to claim ‘a mandate’ for ‘tax reform’ or ‘budget repair’ just because it won the last election. Everyone knows Labor made itself unelectable, with a bit of help from Rupert and the boys at the IPA. Coalition claims reflect no more than its own superiority complex and its fetishising of the economy. OK, also throw in for good measure, the LNP’s s compulsion for confecting history and its addiction to bluff and bluster or simply making stuff up.

Smirking is in LNP’s genes. Despite their assertions, which feature Peter Costello’s conceit that handling the economy is like driving a finely calibrated race car, the LNP in government has a cruder track record of high taxing and high spending with some very poor performances. As Costello himself told his former PM’s biographers, ‘the Howard treasurership was not a success in terms of interest rates and inflation’. Interest rates, in fact, reached a peak of 21% while inflation peaked at 12.5%. Yet you won’t find these achievements venerated by the Liberal National Party spin machine.

Propaganda, aside, the LNP’s actual historical record is dismal. When the times were good, it spent like a drunken sailor letting the good times roll with no thought of tomorrow.  PM John Howard had the good fortune to come to office at the same time as the resources boom yet he lacked the good sense to plan for its inevitable decline. Now the Abbott/Turnbull government faces terms of trade which are down 30%; reflecting revenue from resources which is down 50% from its peak in 2011.

John Howard was also spoilt by much lower household debt. Today high real estate prices have helped to push Australia’s household indebtedness to a whopping 134% of GDP; the highest in the world. Let LNP dries and diehards prattle all they like about cuts to services or as they call it ‘Budget repair’. Let them busy themselves preparing to levy higher taxes on every householder or as they call it ‘tax reform’.  Today there is a lot less to squeeze out of the old tea bag.

Howard and Costello sold off the farm to pay off debt. It was not cutting spending and raising taxes which enabled them to achieve a surplus, they sold government assets. Between 1996 and 2007, these sales brought in $72 billion which not only ‘paid down the debt’ as Costello liked to gloat, it wiped it out entirely with $16 billion left over.

Flooded by corporate tax income from the mining boom and the proceeds of government asset sales, Costello risked being awash with money. In the end the treasurer set up his Future Fund which absorbed some of the nation’s embarrassing excess liquidity. Ultimately it would fund public servants’ superannuation and of course provide Costello with ongoing employment post retirement from politics. Further bragging rights were guaranteed in taking credit for the performance of the blue chip fund, although New Zealand’s has done better. How the world has changed.

So far, however, the changed realities have not produced any adaptive behaviour even from the new, ‘agile and innovative 21st century’ Turnbull government. Blind panic and denial seize LNP politicians and advisers. Unable to make any adaptive changes to a new set of external realities, they retreat into their rhetoric. What better to crawl into than the old, now internationally discredited, basket trap of austerity measures?

Cut, cut, cut. Tax, tax, tax.  Does it work? Look at Greece. The key demonstrable effects of austerity measures are to depress economic activity and to help induce recession, yet this is where the Liberal brain is hard-wired. Cutting is an automatic reflex.  Like raising taxes.

Nowhere is this better seen than in Credlin, Abbott and Hockey’s autocratic decision to ‘defund’ schools and hospitals $80 billion over ten years in the May 2014 budget without notice or any pretence at consultation even within cabinet. Hardest hit will be pensioners, concession card holders and disability support pension recipients, who will be expected to pay more to access health care.

Every government job cut, moreover, cuts off the flow on. While 11000 public servants found themselves unemployed last year in the biggest annual reduction since the 1990s, their spending power was also taken out of the economy, spreading the suffering even wider.

Bugger the need to define the problem, it is time, Abbott and Hockey said, for ‘a national conversation about tax reform’, although what they had set their sights on was simply raising the GST. With the GST, it can be pretended that it is really the states who are adding thousands to the average Australian’s expenses in running a household. The Liberals love collecting any tax but my, how they love to collect from the poor!

John Howard presided over the highest taxing government in Australia’s history. In 2004-05 and 2005-06, the tax to GDP ratio reached a record high 24.2 per cent. Howard is the only PM ever to take the tax to GDP ratio over 23.5 per cent. He achieved this on seven different occasions.  Conversely, the only government to keep the ratio under 22% has been Labor, an achievement it repeated no fewer than ten times.

The record shows that the Coalition has been a high-taxing big spending government, especially under Tony Abbott’s mentor and predecessor, Howard, the ‘man of steel’ who duped us while he squandered three billion over eight years in a war to destroy Iraq’s fictional WMD; the PM whose ‘WorkChoices’ aimed to lower wages by individualising employment relations and thereby marginalise trade unions and industrial tribunals.

Howard’s mean and tricky regime was as fast and loose with the truth as his protégé, Abbott. He created the ‘babies over-board’ crisis to manipulate popular sentiment against asylum seekers. He set back race relations and the pursuit of an egalitarian society with his inability to apologise to indigenous people, claiming there ‘was nothing to say sorry for’. Costly as these failings have proved, however, they should not distract us from his profligacy. Howard was the last of the big spenders, whose public purse-strings were, indeed, ‘relaxed and comfortable’.

In 2008, an Australian Treasury study found that real government spending grew faster in the final four years of the Howard government than in any four-year period since the 1990s recession. In 2013 The IMF found that the most profligate government in Australia in a hundred years was the Howard Government.

Financial prudence is also missing from the historical ledger. John Howard squandered the proceeds of the mining boom buying votes for his singularly underwhelming, underperforming government, a government that languished for eleven years and nine months without creating one major economic initiative. Rather than quarantine the economy from the mining bubble, Howard used the proceeds to deliver personal income tax cuts.

Continuing its run of outs, in 2013 the coalition government with ‘economic management in its DNA’, elected Tony Abbott as PM, a politician who professed no real interest in economics and who showed even less understanding. Nevertheless all hands on deck stood by and watched as he arbitrarily cut funds to the states for health and education in his first Budget. His ‘captain’s call’ ensured funds were abruptly cut with no consultation and with no plan for alternative funding.

Now, while bad captain Abbott has been ditched overboard and the LNP is trialling the Great Gatsby as PM, it has done nothing to fix the economic mess it has created in its first two years. Huge stresses placed on the health system are resulting in major hospitals in Victoria for example unable to pay their bills. They must rely instead on Health department letters of guarantee to continue to operate on credit.

Internationally also, the coalition’s claims to economic wizardry are wearing embarrassingly thin. Joe Hockey’s Brisbane action plan was going to get world leaders to achieve growth of 2.1% just by pledging to do so.  It is not happening. The ‘global infrastructure hub’ he promoted as a peer pressure type of solution to low growth is also looking like a con job. After one year it is no more than a website and a business plan.

Conservatives love to lecture us on how the national economy is like a household budget, a comparison, akin to saying that an ATM is like a slot machine because you can put money into both.  Yet even according to their own set of precepts, they seem to have forgotten the duty of government to pay its bills.

What could have caused this public health oversight? Apart from hating Medicare and apart from wanting to push state premiers into agreeing to a hike in the GST, the LNP has been preoccupied with its main mission, the need to ensure that those with money are given every possible advantage to make more.

Now the Abbott government made the right noises at election time. It promised a return to budget surplus, cutting government debt and having a pro-business strategy in its economic policy management. None of these have been kept but there is still a slim chance that it may under Turnbull at least pass a law to allow big business to hide. Surely that counts.

Hiding your balance sheet helps you avoid tax and even the ATO has been keen for big businesses to reveal their financial dealings. It would boost tax revenue. In 2013, the ATO claimed that disclosure by companies with revenue of more than $100 million would ‘discourage large corporate tax entities from engaging in aggressive tax avoidance practices’.

The coalition, however, does not want to embarrass its wealthy mates, whatever it says about its love of tax reform, a phrase which is code for getting low income earners to pay more tax. Hence its beaut new law which it calls ‘Better Targeting the Income Tax Transparency Laws’.

Even as bills go it’s not much of a title but it beats ‘A law to help the rich pay less tax’. For this is what it is. It would come to the aid of up to 1000 of Australia’s biggest privately owned companies, including charity cases, James Packer, Gina Rinehart, Lindsay Fox and 7-Eleven owner Russ Withers, all of whom are in dire need of special extra help from Treasury just to buy their next cup of instant noodles. 

Lobby groups can take the uncertainty and the democracy out of Australian politics and the rich can be very resourceful when it comes to keeping what they have. Enter The Family Office Institute Australia. This lobby group impressed the socks off the Senate Committee.

The Family Office’s submission was quoted all over a Senate report which, incredibly, recommended the government shield privately owned companies with income over $100 million from increased transparency. You never know, you could be kidnapped if people knew how rich you were, explained former apprentice Treasurer Josh Frydenberg to the party room. Yet the Family Office institute has no members. Still it represents what the LNP wants to hear.

Joe always said he had a plan and it was working but he could never tell us what it was. Turnbull also has a plan even if his treasurer Scott Morrison can do nothing but rule nothing in or out. Make no mistake, he will cut taxes and impose a GST if he possibly can. You don’t need to explain your plan if you are an LNP government. Nor do you need a new one, despite your crafty posing and your pseudo concern for fairness. In the end it’s always the same plan.

For all its fetishising on increasing GST, and its obsession with ‘tax reform’ the Coalition will continue the LNP tradition of being a big taxing, big spending government which will do whatever it can to protect the top end of town at the expense of the average worker, the elderly, the poor and all other vulnerable members of society. It’s in their DNA.

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We will aim to do more’, a glad-handed Greg Hunt promises the world, having just begun the week by breaking his promise to Tiwi Islanders over Port Melville. ‘Port Oversight’ mysteriously popped up while no-one was looking with not even a nod or a wink at any environmental impact, let alone Environment Ministry permission. The facility will refuel up to 40 ships per week and endanger marine creatures in hitherto pristine waters but it’s all been sorted, thank you. Nothing to see here. Move along. The adults are in charge.

In May, ‘Bluster’ Hunt was up on his high horse, all set to track down the outlaws responsible : ‘if further action needs to be taken, we will take it without fear or favour, no matter where the blame lies’. This week, however, our Federal Environment Minister settles for just giving Port Melville a good rubber stamping. Then he’s off to China to set the rest of the world straight on energy and environmental management. Another week, another mask.

Another mission faces Hunt in global finance hub Shanghai, Tuesday. Our agile Lone Ranger turns keynote speaker at a ‘Future of Energy’ Summit. He spins his government’s ‘positive agenda’ to ‘harness energy innovation, support renewable energy and cut greenhouse gas emissions’, leaving his audience gobsmacked, wondering which Australia he represents. Who is that masked man? Me Tonto.

‘A clean and healthy environment and a strong economy are not mutually exclusive,’ Hunt continues, calling an end to ‘lawfare’ and the demonising of environmental activists. Jaws drop. For two years his government had a coal-fired PM who ceaselessly argued precisely the opposite. At home, his party’s large right climate change denying rump shudders. The dries wet themselves. Brandis has to pour himself another brandy.

Turnbull is full of blandishments about coal being very much in the ‘energy mix’. Expect to learn that we will buy Adani a railway to the newly expanded port at Abbot Point out of the $5 billion northern Australia fund. Queensland has put billions into redeveloping the port despite having its ports only 65% utilised.

Adani coal mate, Hunt, promises the world we’ll cut our carbon emissions even further. Blind Freddy, however, can see we are not really reducing any at present, despite all of Hunt’s statistical nonsense. In his sales pitch for Direct Action, Hunt parades a breathtaking duplicity and an ignorance of simple mathematics. Our reality-defying, back-flipping Environment Minister, brags about Australia’s brilliance in carbon reduction; the genius of his plan.

And what a plan it is. Turnbull himself could not have put it better. ‘We will aim to do more’. Cue Bryan Brown as Hunt of the outback, who has now morphed into rugged bush poet in battered Akubra mustering brumbies in the rain. When the vision thing goes blurry, when your helmsman drops his oar, when your team won’t pull together, thank God someone knows the score. We will aim to do more, boys, we will aim to do more!

The nation looks to Hunt to save the day with his fearless future-embracing yet nuanced 21st century manifesto and universal, all-weather platform on everything. ‘We will aim to do more’. Adam Bandt and Richard Di Natale retort in Hunt’s case, less is more. In particular, reinstating a ‘carbon tax’ would add as much to the ‘budget bottom line’ as increasing or broadening the GST, while costing households less.

‘Do more?’ All triumphalism aside, ‘Chutzpah’ Hunt could hardly be doing less about carbon reduction. Doubtless this is why he has been let loose on the world stage to spruik Direct Action, a dodge in which government pays agile entrepreneurs to nimbly plant trees or manage landfill but does nothing to curb coal-fired power generators nor any other big polluter.

At least this government has a clear narrative, even if the main character is a worry and the plot has got whiskers on it. The Australian Industry Group calculates that to meet its target of a five per cent reduction on 2000 carbon emissions by 2020 through Direct Action will cost the government between $100 and $250 billion.

Even less credible are Hunt’s ‘safeguards’ which are riddles with loopholes such as allowing polluters to set their own very generous baseline on their highest levels over the last five years or higher if they make special application. In any event fines are only a last resort and are not envisaged as bringing in any revenue. But that’s not his narrative which has more of a western flavour.

Carbon baddies quake in their boots as Hunt rides tall in the saddle. He’ll bring rogue polluters to heel with ‘safeguards’, he says, but no-one, except Hunt, believes him. Those not persuaded include The Australian Industry Group, investment bank Citigroup and the Grattan Institute think tank. Perhaps they’ve seen the Tiwis.

Yet no persuasion may be needed. A lucky Hunt has been helped greatly by downward revisions in the target. Energy and carbon market analysts, RepuTex, now calculate that actual greenhouse gas reductions that have to be achieved by government policy could be just 50m tonnes. In a special deal with landfill operators, the government has been able to receive a free gift of 16 million tonnes of greenhouse emissions reductions.

What is beyond dispute is that $660 million of Hunt’s $2.5 billion budget has been gratefully pocketed so far by energy carpet-baggers and other new age entrepreneurs ‘seize very big opportunities’ as the new PM promised in his September coup. Many of those on the take, it is true, began their schemes under Labor; schemes that would have continued without Direct Action double-dipping. Or without our tax subsidies.

Equally as certain, moreover, is that the uptake of solar and wind energy, together with the slowing of the economy were masking an increase in carbon emissions since the removal of the carbon tax, a trend which has now reversed according to energy consultants Pitt and Sherry. But Hunt is up to paint a rosy picture and then take all credit. And some. He flaunts his innovative agility with an incredible back somersault on a high wire before 400 hard-nosed global investors, rent-seeking analysts at a Bloomberg New Energy Finance conference, in Shanghai.

It’s some back flip. Old Hunt did everything he could to abolish the national renewable energy agency and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation when Abbott was PM. New Hunt, the agile 21st century appropriator, now wants to show them off. He preens and parades them before his Shanghai audience like any proud foster parent. These bodies prove Australia ‘excels’ at climate change. ‘Seize the day’, the PM so rightly says – and anything else not nailed down.

Hunt, an environmental intellectual, according to George Brandis, is one of the poster boys and girls of a Turnbull revolution that is seizing the day all over the show. ‘Freedom Boy’, Tim Wilson, our commissioner of human rights holds a conference about religious freedom but fails to invite Aboriginal or Muslim representatives.  Julie Bishop spends $ 140 million on her trendy InnovationXchange which ticks all the boxes for agility and bean-bags. Beneath the PM’s borrowed robes, his posturing, his lofty rhetoric and his rounded vowels, is the hide of an old goanna. Compared with many of his ministers, however, he is but a babe in arms.

Penny Wong challenges Julie Bishop’s financial priorities. Having cut $11.3 billion from Foreign Aid, how can the emoji-speaking Foreign Minister blow $140 million on an InnovationXchange which has nothing to do with helping people in need overseas? Wong does not ask if Bjorn Lomborg, whom Bishop has shrewdly installed as one of the directors of her trendy exchange also commands a fee. Or Michael Bloomberg. ‘Weather vane’ Hunt strangely makes no mention in his keynote address of the climate change sceptic being on ‘team Turnbull’ but he’s keeping all his options on the table.

Not ruling anything in or ruling anything, a key strategy in Malcom Turnbull’s revolutionary, 21st century approach to agile government by keeping everything on the table is looking more and more like an avoidance of commitment.  The week is notable for its crush of hopeful rent-seekers such as BCA’s Catherine Livingstone who are all over the new PM in the hope he would lower company tax rates. ‘Nothing will stimulate innovation and growth more’, she claims, despite not a shred of evidence. Nothing would be gained, however, if every interest group got its wishes, should the government decide to lift the GST to 15% or expand its base.

What the government wants to do is to lift the GST and offer tax breaks but as Scott Morrison wastes our time repeating, he’s not saying that. Not when you can get others to do it for. National’s David Gillespie says he’s won over by New Zealand which has licked all its economic problems with 97% of goods incurring a GST at 15%. ‘They seem to be going from strength to strength in their economy’ he warbles wistfully again without a scrap of evidence. It’s Turnbull-shit, but that does not deter experts such as Livingstone from repeating the claim .

New Zealand is staring down the barrel of a recession after dairy export receipts from trade with China have fallen and given that, courtesy of El Nino it faces the worst summer drought for twenty years. The elephant in the room, however, is not so much the deluge of misinformation that pours forth from coalition MPs and their media minions and business backers. The elephant is a former captain’s call to cut billions in health and education.

States have been corralled into contemplating a GST hike because Tony Abbott made massive cuts to health and education. It was a captain’s call, done without consulting the states and without any thought given as to how the states would find the $57bn for hospitals and $28bn for schools slashed in his 2014 budget. This fact should at the very least be the table’s centrepiece if everything is truly on the table, a table which is about to collapse under the weight of the spread it carries and the dead weight of an ever-increasing deficit.

On Friday, the RBA downgrades its growth estimate to 2.25% for the current fiscal year.  This could blow out the deficit by a further $11 billion. Scott Morrison clings to his claim that we have an expenditure problem and not a revenue problem. He continues to maintain that any increase in the GST would not be used to boost the overall tax intake. The truth is that the coalition budget is based on some unreal expectations of economic growth and although it has abandoned its ‘credible path to surplus slogan’, its calculations are clearly seriously awry. And it shows.

Of course, a slowing economy with serious structural flaws should not worry us unduly when we have a PM such as Malcolm Turnbull for whom boxes were invented to think outside of. The secret, as he told Melbourne University Vice-Chancellor, Glynn Davies, whom he labelled ‘defeatist’ for not being Turnbullish about commercialising university research. Davies, who rightly observed that our economy does not include the big corporations to invest in R&D. For the PM, this was missing ‘the vibe. You haven’t got the new ­zeitgeist — that is to believe in yourself, have a go’. To the rest of us Davies was simply being realistic; practical.

Turnbull’s own cabinet may be missing the vibe, also. Or just getting it hopelessly wrong as does our treasurer who is out dog whistling for a GST hike to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.  ‘I say, we have got a tax system that is penalising people who are out there making a contribution in the economy. We want to back them and we want a tax system that backs them’ Scott Morrison said as he blitzed the airwaves on Monday in his monologue which he insists is a conversation about tax.

It’s not that we are a long way from everyone else and that have too small a population to sustain manufacturing causing an overreliance on primary produce and extractive industries which puts us at the mercy of falling commodity prices as the world boom in iron ore prices declines.  No. It’s our unfair tax system.

Morrison has clearly not been in conversation with Greens MP Scott Ludlam who challenges the fairness of the 50% capital gains tax exemption. ‘Work for a living, get taxed at the full rate. Play the stock market or load up with investment properties, and half your earnings are tax-free.’ But then, Morrison is simply conveying neoliberal ideology which favours small government and lower taxes for the wealthy. ‘Reform’ in this context, means making the poor pay more in regressive taxation such a GST.

The week sees an incredible change in Karma Chameleon Hunt, our agile environment minister who goes all green and renewable in public in Shanghai but who is still in bed with coal back at home. No change at all, on the other hand, appears in our NeoCon treasurer whose overladen table makes him as much of a commitment-phobe as the PM who having seduced the nation in a whirlwind romance by not being Tony Abbott will not reveal his real intentions.

Let Julie Bishop hold hackathons to her heart’s content. Let Hunt be loud in praise of renewables.  Beneath the din, the clamour of the claque, it is difficult to see or feel the new ‘vibe’ as Turnbull puts it as adding up to more than another conga-line of suck holes frantically currying favour, each determined to deny that in reality their new emperor wears no clothes.

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• Read Crikey: Turnbull still has a major problem on climate:

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‘I say, we have got a tax system that is penalising people who are out there making a contribution in the economy. We want to back them and we want a tax system that backs them.’

Scott Morrison ABC Radio National Breakfast 2 November 2015.

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Why is our nation’s annual economic growth down to 2% and weakening? Falling world demand for commodities such as coal and iron ore? Our small population and remote location rule us out of manufacturing? Export prices down but volume up?

Nope. Nope. Nope. Amazingly, Scott Morrison has looked into the matter and come up with an answer nobody expected. It’s the tax system, stupid! Our tax system is just so unfair to the rich. The speculative capitalist just can’t get ahead without the backing of the system. The same system which protects the top end of town to the tune of 5 billion a year with its tax breaks for high earners’ superannuation is in clear need of reform.

Eureka! Who would have thought we could have had it so wrong for so long? The tyro treasurer breaks into a song and dance routine in his office. Sounds like a Beatles tune, ‘All you need are cuts, cuts, cuts. Cuts are all you need’.   Cuts plus a great big new 15% tax on everything. Not that you will hear anything so clear from his lips. Morrison is the archetypal fast-talking huckster with a con-man for a boss.

Nothing is being ruled in or out. Everything is on the table. It’s all about creating a fairer system; rewarding the people who want to have a go. That’s the spin. Motor mouth Morrison has three media monologues on Monday morning in which he is all over David Gillespie for having a go but the NZ example is not his case.

The treasurer is all for ‘having a conversation with the nation’ applying the Morrison model of dialogue, which means he will do all the talking. His talk is not talk at all but a type of promo, chock-full of ‘come-on’ but offering nothing more substantial. He eagerly confirms that his government is ‘working on tax reform’ a mystical process which includes the nature and the scale of the GST. But despite his blizzard of words, his eagerness to correct his hosts as to what he is not saying, his frenetic delivery, snake-oil Morrison gives away nothing of his real intent.

Make no mistake. Morrison will cut taxes for businesses and the rich. These are his party’s fabled lifters, the winners that any respectable neoliberal government, addicted to trickle-down wealth creation mythology loves to pick. These are the people who must be looked after; the people Morrison has in mind when he says ‘ people out there …making a contribution to the economy’.  The people who matter.

The Treasurer doesn’t mean people like you and me or all of us as in ‘the people’. We don’t count. But he does want us to pay the cost of tax cuts and super benefits for the wealthy. That’s why he’s set up David Gillespie, who turns out to be a National MP to run off at the mouth about New Zealand’s beaut 15% GST on 97% of everything not our namby-pamby 47.

New Zealand’s economy is not comparable to Australia’s. For starters, it’s about half the size of Queensland’s – or one-tenth of Australia’s. Dave will still run it up the flag-pole. See who salutes. Morrison can then give 7:30’s Leigh Sales the run-around by denying he’s advocating any GST increase.

The Kiwis were lucky but will their luck hold? Their economy was pumping while their dairy products could still fetch a good price in China. Before the arse fell out of international commodity prices, Australia’s economy was well in front, too. Now dairy prices are falling; the Chinese are setting up their own milk production, such as their recently purchases of large operations in Victoria’s South-west.  And if the fall in milk prices is not enough, the worst El Nino effect in eighteen years threatens to bring a summer drought which could lead New Zealand into recession.

GST rates have nothing to do with it. We could double our GST tomorrow and impose it on everything and still we’d be beaten by the land of the wrong white crowd. But the instantly forgettable and obscure Dave’s not known to have any special handle on economics. He’s just been sent out to do some spruiking to soften us up.

Upping the GST will do bugger all by itself, of course, especially for employers. Employ-ERS as they say on ABC Radio are the people in the workplace who matter; the ones Kate Carnell goes on everything to whinge on behalf of. Wages are too high. Our penalty rates are crippling.  We’ll never be competitive.

Or so the employ-ERS claim. Statistics tell a different story. Currently, businesses paying penalty rates are booming. The café and restaurant sector is doing so well, for example, that it will soon overtake manufacturing.

Business Council of Australia’s Catherine Livingstone says a cut in corporate tax is the only way to stimulate the economy but her case is based on modelling which supposes complete competitive and open capital and goods and services markets. As Ross Garnaut observes, however, ‘It is hard to see how it can be reasonably applied to an economy in which a majority of corporate profits are in sectors in which monopoly, regulatory and resource rents represent a pretty high proportion of the profits.’

Morrison hears employERS pain. His empathy is legendary since his spell as Border Supremo Major-domo, a time when, he says to Annabel Crabb, he had to ‘act tough to send a message to people smugglers’. Too bad about the cruelty and inhumanity; the deaths, the children in custody, the utter disregard, the trampling of Australia’s human rights obligations under international charter. Suddenly Morrison can’t do enough to ease the suffering of the top end of town. He doesn’t want employers to be burdened by paying weekend penalty rates.

Employers are important people who grow the economy. But not by paying tax. The ATO reports that one in five private companies with a turnover of $100 million plus pay no income tax. No-one in politics has the bottle to go after these tax avoiders and evaders. Luckily for the government, however, workers have no such option.

If the boss is dodging his share, his workers can pay more tax to make up for the shortfall by means of the all-new, Kiwi-inspired 15% GST. It will cost at least $4000 per year to a worker’s household budget according to Curtin University research but wage slaves can be rewarded, instead, with ‘tax credits’, an idea Morrison has called innovative, one of his government’s Turnbull-shit weasel-words.  Compensation has a habit of being devoured by bracket creep in a few years. Details are of course, never available but one thing is certain. The low-paid and the poor will pay the most.

Of course, we are all ‘out there’ and making our own ‘contribution in the economy’ but the only people who matter to the treasurer are his party’s big business mates who are demanding that he cut their taxes. To pay for these tax cuts for the wealthy, Morrison wants to increase the GST and expand the base, effectively getting poorer Australians to pay the most towards giving the wealthy further tax-breaks. He claims that this is making it a fairer system.

A 15 per cent GST would cost householders $4,000 before Morrison expands the number of things you have to pay GST on but Morrison says this won’t happen. Fran Kelly had the cheek to raise this key question on Monday. Morrison brushed the facts aside. ACOSS reports that the bottom 20% of income earners pay 7% of their income in GST while the top 20% pay 3%.

By now we know that anyone who voices another point of view to Morrison’s, however, well based, however solid the evidence is always wrong. ACOS, the following day, publishes its highly respected NATSEM modelling which, of course, comes to the same conclusion but ScoMo has a monopoly on the truth.

‘No, it is not true, Fran. If you put the appropriate compensation measures in place and if you have a package which deals with all the other issues that are relevant, Australians can be better off and that is the only reason why you do it, Fran’

What, pray, tell are these ‘appropriate compensation measures’? What is this ‘package which deals with all the other issues that are relevant? Which Australians can be better off? ScoMo can offer a five percent tax cut but this does nothing to help ease the burden falling on low income earners and pensioners. Mike Baird’s proposal to protect households under $100,000 means collecting GST from 60 per cent of income earners only to embark on the wasteful process of paying it back to them as compensation. But that’s Baird’s proposal.

The truth is that the treasurer and his PM are artfully avoiding all specific commitment but every chance they get they repeat the mantra compensation hoping that just by repeating it, the GST will somehow become something other in the public mind than the great big new tax on the poor that it is.

The factual content is in the subtext; the medium is the massage: Morrison reveals himself and his party’s true position when he talks down to his host; talks over his host, spewing an endless, breathless thicket of words. It’s the same mad arrogance we suffered under Abbott. Hide the facts. Deny the facts. Talk endlessly about the virtues of the process without ever once disclosing the product. Don’t for God’s sake consult. Tell the people you know what’s good for them. But above all, just keep talking.

Julie Bishop takes selfie in eagerness to get aboard Turnbull’s tech-savvy bandwagon while the real business of government is put on hold.

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‘Get your snout out of the trough, Hockey, you double-dipping hypocrite!’ Nick Xenophon begins the week by tipping a bucket of iced water over the Joe-love-making, speechifying and re-writing of the history of the two long years of the Abbott government.

The new history thrives. Everything that Abbott and Hockey did was on the right track; they just had trouble selling their message and their reforms were blocked by those crossbench bastards in the senate. The deluge of obsequies that marks the dismissal of the failed treasurer barely pauses.

Xenophon uses other words but his voice is a refreshing corrective to Joe’s over-heated fawning, fulsome farewell tributes. It’s also a fair call; uttered with conviction if not sincerity. No wonder, the man has to start his own party.

Naturally, the quixotic SA Senator whose corny stunts incorporate giraffes, mules, goats, dogs and a toy car is accused of grandstanding. He may well be. But underestimating public taste or its attention span never deters this conviction political performance artist.

Nor has it held back the popularity of the rising political star, Czar of the senate cross bench and, most recently, founder of his own political party, TXN. Xenophon is up for a challenge.  He will introduce a law of his own, he promises, if stymied by the Joe-Hocracy.

Word quickly comes back from on high that Joe’s pension sacrifice would, of course, have to be approved by learned arbitration silks and Fair Work wallahs. It would take time. Michael Lawler clearly already has a fair bit on his plate from his bizarre appearance on Four Corners recently. Great call, Nick, but our trotters are tied at the moment, seems to be the message.

Of course, it’s not personal; it’s the principle. Nick Xenophon is anxious lest Joe’s post as Ambassador to the US with its $360,000 annual salary, plus free rent and utilities somehow be seen to endorse double-dipping, ‘leaning’ or otherwise betray unseemly greed, privilege and undeserved reward. The millionaire might compromise himself or his party or what is touchingly referred to as ‘the system’. Oddly no-one else in politics seems to spot the problem.

The SA senator has a sense of humour. ‘I just want to help Joe Hockey fulfil his dream of ending the age of entitlement by Joe Hockey setting an example for the rest of us,” he says, drily. Joe’s ambassadorial golden handcuffs, however, are designed to keep Hockey overseas and out of Malcolm’s face while the PM works out what to do with Abbott, the hydrophobic junkyard dog who appears increasingly deranged. Telling Europe what to do with its refugees is his latest stunt.

Coming out as an antipodean Maggie Thatcher but without the hair and elocution lessons, or the handbag, a rabid Abbott harangues an after-dinner stupor of Tories and other squiffy, port-befuddled conservative ratbags who pay four hundred pounds each to suffer his diatribe. They are shocked by the gibbering madman’s lunatic proposals and his presumption. It quite puts one off one’s port and stilton. They leave muttering that the poor fellow had better see a good doctor.

Seeking a back door into the headlines and, on a quick double-dip of his own, Washington Speakers’ Bureau recruit, Tony Abbott is in London to mouth off about refugees and to urge his PM to commit ground troops in Iraq. Dr Nope whose website ad offers his services for $40,000 and upwards per oration, is honoured, he says, to be invited to deliver the second ever Margaret Thatcher Lecture at a Tory banquet in London. Who better than he to wise up the poms on how to stop the boats? Clearly they needed to toughen up or it would be the end of Europe as we know it.

Referencing Enoch Powell amidst other dog-whistles, Abbott the ten pound pom, himself an economic migrant, warns his audiences against going soft. ‘Misguided altruism” is ‘…leading much of Europe into catastrophic error’. Tough love is called for. Boat people should be pushed back to sea to drown or else forced to return to their persecutors to face the persecution they so richly deserve. The comprehensive failure of a PM proudly claims that Australia has solved the problem thanks to his own true Thatcher-like grit and compassion.

Nowhere in Abbott’s ranting does he cover intercepting vessels bound for New Zealand or other countries and paying the crew to turn back to islands in Indonesia, a tactic which is, however, highlighted by Amnesty International in a move which Peter Dutton said was disgraceful. What he does embrace is the principle of decisive force.

‘As Margaret Thatcher so clearly understood over the Falklands: those that won’t use decisive force, where needed, end up being dictated to by those who will’.  He is not only Thatcher’s soul mate he is psychic. Mr Abbott treats his audience to his own parapsychological intuition of what Margaret Thatcher would have done today.

Did Europe which receives more refugees in a week than Australia has ever experienced in one year have anything to learn from Abbott? Abbott is happy to lie about Australia’s experience and his part in it. He exaggerates the numbers and claims falsely that it was his policies and not Kevin Rudd’s which were a turning point. An abject failure as PM, he is terrified by his rapid descent into irrelevance. History must be re-written to save him from infamy and ignominious obscurity.

‘The second wave of illegal boat people was running at the rate of 50,000 a year – and rising fast – by July 2013, when the Rudd government belatedly reversed its opposition to offshore processing; and then my government started turning boats around, even using orange lifeboats when people smugglers deliberately scuttled their vessels.’

In fact boat people arrivals peaked at 20,587 in 2013 when Kevin Rudd was PM. They then fell quite dramatically after his ‘Malaysian Solution’. Yet the Abbott myths prevail, nourished by many who should and do know better.

ABC journos such as Fran Kelly continue to help Malcolm Turnbull out by fostering the spurious, and utterly discredited ‘counter argument ‘ of tough border protection being a deterrent. Annabel Crabb happily indulges Morrison’s downplaying of his own cruel indifference if not hostility to refugees by glibly claiming it was just something that had to be done. Turnbull, himself pretends to be open-minded about Abbott’s embarrassing display of stupidity and his insubordination.

‘Tony has given great service to the nation’, he declares, smiling indulgently. That entitles him to say anything he likes, anywhere he chooses, even if it does rather trash our reputation overseas and reveal my total lack of authority.

A claque of Liberals brandishing selfie-sticks claims Turnbull’s attention. Liberal hopefuls are all a twitter for innovation now that technology is back in place of religion. Selfie-obsessed Julie Bishop is hell-bent on upstaging Wyatt Roy and all other 21st century cognoscenti in the Turnbull twitter-verse. The growing back-log of real work is postponed or added to as our leaders take photos of themselves in a rash of hackathons and other technological idolatry.

Bishop’s ostentatious innovation testifies to the emoji-princess’ agility in embracing Turnbull’s New Age 21st century government which, it is said, only ‘digital natives’ like Roy can ever truly understand. For the rest of us, the promise of more technology in our lives is a distractor from a PM who has done little so far to justify his ‘disruption’ but rule nothing in or out. His ministers communicate no clear plans but must tell us that everything is on the table.

The Turnbull government is still-born. Overwhelmed by opportunities, it is also paralysed with fear it may offend any of the ‘Loony Tunes right’, as Keating terms the coalition’s conservative rump. He is seen to shape his pitch to his audience so readily that his own position is impossible to discern.

A hostage to the deals that helped him seize the leadership, Turnbull, the elusive human chameleon, drops hints of plans or simply tells each party what he thinks they want to hear. In reality he is going nowhere. At worst, as in his energy policy, he is going backwards.

The week sees the former renewable energy advocate now out shamelessly flogging coal. He even dips into Abbott’s Peabody press kit, a mine of misinformation and arrant nonsense, with its ‘clean coal’ fraud and its missionary position promises to lift India out of energy poverty.

The PM is a blend of blandishment and lofty superiority. All conflict can be resolved if we approach things rationally and not from an ideological perspective is his patronising mantra. All we need is to be agile, flexible, and ‘disrupt’ old ways using all this beaut new 21st century thinking that helped create silicon valley; in other words behave like software engineers, become a silicon society. Only Julie Bishop and Wyatt Roy take him seriously.

In Julie Bishop’s 21st century hackathon thought bubbles become policy, a process Tony Abbott frequently favoured, often with disastrous consequences. Upstaging Roy, her innovation policy ‘hackathon’ will, the wannabe wonkette claims, ‘generate new policy ideas to help develop Australia’s economy into an innovation powerhouse’.

So far she and her InnovationXchange has hacked or hatched the passport in the cloud, a paperless 21st century concept for DFAT which will be such a blessing to Rohingya boat people, Syrian refugees and all other impoverished, dispossessed souls forced to flee their homes at short notice.

Paperless passports make sense only to the state. Unless you have faith in the state not to lose or confuse your records or to have trouble retrieving your data or just plain refuse to know you if you are trouble-maker.  In this case you are delusional and probably should stay at home and lie down in a darkened room.

Unlike Julie Bishop’s DFAT mob, some of us are not so upbeat about trusting the state to always act fairly; on its citizens’ behalf and with their best interests at heart. Fortunately, our nation’s technical capacity to do all this innovation does not exist, but don’t blame the previous communications minister. Turnbull sooks whenever anyone finds fault with the NBN. This week, however, the NBN went public with its latest stuff-up.

The NBN company has just divulged that it had to buy in 1800km of brand new copper cable. The extra $14 million, must not be seen as a cost blowout or an oversight. It will be money well invested to ensure that the Fibre to the Node technology model preferred by Malcolm Turnbull’s agile, 21st century Coalition Government will actually work.

Xenophon’s gibe will be as lost on Hockey as metadata is to Brandis, just as speed will be lost to the weakest link in a network that seeks to marry ageing copper with optic fibre. Turnbull is stuck with Abbott’s legacy in many policy areas; its NBN was more of a debating point than a workable concept. FTTN owes its existence to merely to being the Coalition’s cheaper – and slower -alternative to Labor’s national broadband network proposal. Regarded as a ‘nonsense’ by experts, who argue it will put Australia behind the rest of the world, the NBN claims it can marry fibre with copper to produce a high speed network. Politicians’ appeals to tax the top end of town fairly have more chance of success.

Not to be left out of the ‘national conversation’ Immigration Minister ‘Nutso’ Dutton attacks Amnesty International for ‘an ideological attack’ which is ‘beyond the pale’. How dare the do-gooders question Australia’s forays into people-smuggling!

What Dutton doesn’t do, is deny the payments were made. Nor does Julie Bishop, despite the government’s denials in June. Amnesty’s report of refugees being kicked, threatened with being shot and being put to sea again with just enough fuel to get into trouble expose the lie that our ‘tough border protection ‘is all about saving drowning.

News that Australian charities are forced to pay a multimillion dollar bond to prevent employees speaking out about conditions on Nauru broke after Dutton’s angry response to Amnesty. Doubtless the news will help convince Amnesty and other do-gooders that the Australian government has nothing to hide in its Border Protection practices.

Despite being found wanting on every level, Dutton provides a rich veneer of make-believe to the alternative reality TV show that is our national political life, a mission capably continued Tuesday by member for woolly Wannon, dynamic Dan Tehan who was on the Frank Kelly show on ABC radio defending the indefinite detention of children.

What Tehan’s case was or if he had one was never clear but what could be made out was some bleating about John Howard’s policies, how hard it is to get things right and the need to make best and fairest example of all hapless victims of misfortune who stoop to enter Australia through ‘the back door’.

Tehan was flogging some new ‘tough on terror’ tactics. The Federal Government, he says, is considering a raft of tough new counter-terrorism laws, including legislation to slap control orders on teenage terror suspects. Whilst this has nothing to do with refugees, he likes to mention the two ideas together because it helps the popular myth that asylum seekers and refugees are likely to be terrorists until proved otherwise, a principle of our recent anti-terrorist laws.

Members of Australia’s parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security, chaired by Mr Tehan travelled to the UK, France and the US to inspect other nations’ back and front door locks, a task which could not possibly be performed by 21st century communications technology but which required all-expenses paid extensive overseas travel.

What impressed them most, according to Dan is the way secret courts in the UK could really get to grips with terror suspects, behind closed doors, undisturbed by the rule of law and because they were free not to disclose their sources. While human rights advocates complain that secret courts deprive defendants of their fundamental right to see and challenge all the evidence being brought against them, Australia would not find this so much of a problem, now that we’ve ‘reformed’ our anti-terror legislation and given our refugee policy has made it clear to the world that human rights policy wonks in Zurich are not going to tell us what to do.

Our government continues to expand its vigilance over human rights, according to George metadata Brandis, addressing a DFAT event, this week. He was spoilt for choice for examples but luckily settled on simple Tim Wilson’s appointment which he said had helped “enlarge the scope and focus” of the Australian Human Rights Commission. And its payroll. Wilson’s 300,000 a year position was created by Abbott as a political tactic, intended as a bulwark against the left-wing Gillian Triggs whom he wanted to shame and bully into resignation, with all due respect, of course, for her human rights.

The week saw federal politics awash with a toxic nostalgia for a past that never was from politicians who never really were who they claimed to be, some of whom continue to do great damage to Australia’s reputation and future prospects by public displays of such inane stupidity as our former PM recently got away with.

Abbott and his key ministers, moreover, found themselves dwarfed by the challenges of government let alone the complex but urgent issues of climate change and economic management in a time of declining prices for our commodities and global economic downturn and great uncertainty.

Turnbull cannot afford to stall much longer. He cannot sustain, forever, the momentum of the novelty of his not being Abbott and his capacity to speak whole sentences. The naïve trust placed in him will rapidly turn into a crushing burden of disappointment.

The PM’s authority is being tested. His credibility rests entirely on his capacity to govern, not his personal popularity or his intelligence. The latter were never in doubt. The former requires much more than indulging the darlings of the right while trading in yesterday’s political currencies such as coal and tough border protection while pretending endlessly to the fiction that nothing is being ruled in or out.  The table with everything on it will collapse under its own weight.

 

 

Love is in the Canberra air this week as a sort of truce breaks out for Joe Hockey’s farewell. Magically, the bear pit of parliament becomes a back-patting, ego-fondling, air-kissing mutual admiration society. All verbal jousting, crowing, carping, double-crossing and character assassinating is suspended. Stilettos are sheathed. Even Dorothy Dix is jilted for Big Joe’s farewell love-fest.

MPs normally consumed by enmity and mutual hatred, stop up their venom and gall. Suddenly the House is a love-in of unctuous fawning and praising, group hugging and the blowing of wet, sugary, good-bye kisses as one of their number is shown the non-revolving door.

Part of the performance art is simply unemployment insurance. An MP’s life is precarious; it is Joe we farewell today but who will it be tomorrow? Yet a valedictory is a many-faceted gem, shining even into the abyss between what is said and what is meant in the Kabuki theatre of parliamentary relationships.

Joe’s leave-taking is a ritual in which the lamb is lionised; the sparrow hawks at the eagle; the porcupine is smothered in lotus petals. Praise is piled so high as to completely bury the recipient. MPs project their own strengths and deficiencies. Or show off some fancy footwork to disguise their animus for the loved one.

‘It is a big day in the life of a big man’, the silver-tongued Turnbull, Hockey’s own Prime Remover uncontestably attests, ‘One of the giants of the Parliament is taking his leave.’ Turnbull, talks up Big Joe, the man he helped throw himself out of a window a month ago with a speech to national television skewering the hapless Treasurer for not knowing his onions; ‘not giving the country the economic leadership we need’.

In the hallowed tradition of the parliamentary farewell, the lowly are exalted, the ordinary become extraordinary and good words are found for the biggest plonker – even if they are words like ‘big’ and ‘giant’. On Wednesday, the apotheosis of Joe is not without the odd, delicious, irony.

…Joe’s wealth and life of privilege…

‘You are no ordinary Joe,’ fawns Shorten who repeatedly rubbished Joe’s elitism, who claimed Joe’s wealth and life of privilege robbed him of compassion and blinded him to the trials of ordinary Australians. One of a kind, Joe nods, as only Joe can nod, agreeably, however fulsome the florid praise, however patently undeserved. He’ll take what he can get at this stage.

MPs fall over each other to sing extraordinary Joe’s praises. Sweet, kind, big-hearted and generous to a fault, Hockey is said to be the biggest and best Joe we’ve ever had. Yet all deftly skirt the elephant in the room of his massive job underperformance. Clerks scurry to check the parliamentary Kool-Aid and sniff the breeze outside the smoker’s courtyard. It is revealed that all the special wine reserved for the PM’s guests is missing, yet this seems to have been drunk at Tony’s table-top dance send-off. Both sides, however, are as high as a kite in Kabul.

Only Deputy Liberal Leader, Julie Bishop, her Foreign Aid budget slashed to ribbons is absent from the Hockey love-in, having had to ‘Daesh’ out on important business with a visiting delegation of petty non-entities from what is left of Syria, Iraq and Kurdistan, a pathetic mob compelled to do the rounds of their Australian coalition allies and other opportunists as they seek to add to a worm-infested veneer of legitimacy to US bombing in Syria and Iraq.

Doubtless, Bishop renders her Joe-bituary, fittingly, in emoji, although three Liberal MPs are sufficiently outraged by her poor form as Deputy, to contact Fairfax’s James Massola, protesting at the calculated slight, despite Peter Dutton’s warning last month that Fairfax was colluding with the ABC in a conspiracy to destroy the Coalition.

If the earth doesn’t move for all of us, Joe-love, nevertheless, goes off the Richter scale in Parliament. Of course, Big Joe gets his canoe paddle in, too, topping the obsequies with a heart-felt paean or three of self-praise. After all, greatness is something Joe has not only always aspired to; it is something he believes he is more than entitled to. Always has. That’s one of the reasons he’s being farewelled.

…His party is gob-smacked…

Hockey’s valedictory provides further clues as to how he orchestrated his own demise through timidity and inertia. Big Joe rattles off a list of changes he would have liked to have made – if only he had been given a chance. Big of him to let them know. His party is gob-smacked by all the things Joe opposed that on his last day he must tell us he secretly stood for.

Joe says he would have changed negative gearing, brought in means testing of private health insurance, cut tax concessions on superannuation funds and reshaped the GST. He even now has a good word for Labor’s NBN unless it’s a dig at Malcolm’s ugly, over budget, overdue fibre to the node baby.

‘Tax concessions on superannuation should be carefully pared back,’ Hockey finally gets up the courage to say. Negative gearing ‘should be skewed towards new housing’. Gunner Joe is shocking his colleagues with stuff he never brought up when he could have done something about it.

For the rest of us Joe will be an historical footnote; the best treasurer, the Abbott government never had. Of course he gave it his all but all we got was his big, boofy, blokey, folksy Joe-persona masking the painful reality that his job was a size or two too large for him. Sometimes, the job is just too big for the man.

From the moment he took up office, Hockey let the PMO walk all over him, beginning with Abbott’s unprecedented recruitment from merchant banking of John Fraser. The Secretary to The Treasury nipped in the bud Hockey’s flirtations with Keynesian stimulus spending in favour of a dull budget repair mantra. Some say it was all over then for the no-mojo Joe, bar the pipe-dreams.

Too big, also, alas, were his aspirations: Joe got the jitters instead of nominating for leader in 2009, an indecisiveness which may have cost him the top job. Now, the going is getting tough he is getting out. And landing on his feet. Even a dud treasurer is entitled to a soft landing when the jig is up.

…a celebrity politician…

But Joe cannot go without a blow of his own trumpet: it’s what he does best. He’s the best politician to have ever appeared regularly with Rudd on Sunrise and in his own way, he’s a sultan of spin. Left to his own devices he could have become a celebrity politician, famous for just being famous if it were not for his stupendous talent with spin.

Right to the end, Joe can still tell it like it never was; spin statistics like no other. He loves his story of his massive $68 billion increase in GDP and his 300,000 new jobs since his government came to power.

All those new jobs run parallel to a rising total of unemployed and a growing population. Among the 630,000 new people in Australia over that period, 83,000 were jobless, an unemployment rate for ‘new Australians of 27%. Under Hockey,
Unemployment rose from 5.6% to 6.2%, while those discouraged from looking for work and those who want more hours of work, the ‘underutilisation rate’ grew from 13.5% to 14.3%.

His GDP boasts sound good until we know that net wealth per person has in fact declined by $283 per person per annum under his helm.

As befits ‘no ordinary Joe’, the great man and distinguished statesman takes advantage of his farewell to remind an adoring parliament and a grateful nation about his own outstanding contribution to Australia and the world. Not only did he fix Australia’s debt and deficit disaster, not only did he split the lifters from the leaners in our midst above all, he crowed, his ‘death of entitlement’ thesis reverberated all around the world. ‘Unprecedented impact’ are his words.

‘Entitlement is dead’, Joe maintains: the age of personal responsibility has begun. In his case, fortunately, entitlement was merely napping until he could be fixed up with a plum job in Washington, a perk of high office and no less than his due. He may have even proposed the post himself as price of his going. To use one of the few bits of jargon he is notorious for, that’s real disintermediation.

…lower-paid working Australians…

Did Joe by-pass the middleman in bargaining his ambassadorship? Could it be that Joe’s cushy new job is the exception that proves the rule? One thing alone is certain. The age of entitlement was only ever over for the ungrateful non-coalition voting, lower-paid working Australians whose destiny is to pay for the pretensions of the political class.

Our charity began at his home. Taxes from ordinary Australians subsidised the Hockey household more in one tax-deductible night’s rent of his wife’s home in Forrest, Canberra than a New Start job seeker gets in a week.

The Forrest house purchase illuminates ‘Hockey’s mercantile genius’ to Liberal Party’s Ross Cameron because he bought for a song. After Joe spotted the property in 1997, he sent his father, Dick, in to have a beer with the elderly owner who insisted he did not want estate agents or lawyers to handle the sale.

In his negotiations, Mr Hockey snr did not divulge that he was a real estate agent or that his son was a lawyer. He wangled a sale for land value only. For many non-Liberals, Cameron’s heroic tale of Joe’s business acumen sounds grubbily close to obtaining advantage by deception.

Like all of the hoo-ha and flim-flam with which we dress up our pretensions, moreover, the story speaks volumes about the values of those involved. A party that would praise such a deal could sell its own grandmother. Any treasurer that could connive at such deception will never command the people’s trust. Nor did his habit of socking the poor and failing to deliver on promises.

… a much softer budget than he wanted…

Hockey’s 2014-15 Budget broke promises, raised taxes and brought massive cuts to state school and hospital funding; deferred cuts which are conveniently scheduled to take effect beginning in 2017-18, less than a year into the next Parliament. Yet it was a much softer budget than he wanted, his recent biography reveals. He could have done the tough stuff if only he’d been able, he suggests, a claim which sits oddly with his record of big expenditure.

Hockey was a big spender. He managed to boost the accumulated budget deficit across the four years to 2017-18. It exploded from $60.2 billion in his first budget to $116.5bn in his second, and final, budget. He liked to talk about ‘growing the economy’ as if it were some farmer’s crop. Yet his real growth area was debt and deficit.

For all his finger-wagging, shouting, anti-Labor theatricality, Hockey proved a dab hand at splashing the cash himself. Joe got us more heavily into hock and much faster than any of his predecessors. This would be fine if it were invested in assets which paid real dividends such as fostering renewables. But seldom has so much been spent so soon with so little to show for it.

Joe’s valedictory allows him to show more of the same blowhard self-deceiving wind-baggery that cost him his job. It also allows him to be honest about his inability to stand up to his PM who caused policy to be cast aside in the constant search for conflict. Hockey was prepared, he says to consider increasing taxes for wealthy superannuants but was vetoed by his boss who wanted to pursue the political scare-tactic of sloganeering on the ‘theft on people’s savings’.

In the end, however, the party that gave us Joe Hockey is still in power. His windy departure should give us pause to reflect on the outfit which gave him a job he couldn’t do and saw to it that he failed comprehensively. The same precious recession encouraging nonsense about needing to cut expenditure to fix the budget deficit is continued by Scott Morrison whose credentials to be treasurer appear at least as challenged by reality as Joe Hockey’s ever were.

We are daily bathed in the same warm, soapy bubble-bath of expectations that budget repair can only be achieved by lowering welfare for the poor and needy while being softened up for some increase in a GST which will most hurt precisely those whose welfare assistance is being reduced.

…a reality denying, climate change denying government…

Above all, moreover, the extravagant hyperbole; the over-praising of one of the weakest performers of all time in the Federal Treasurer’s role reveals a Coalition with its feet firmly planted in the clouds, a reality denying, climate change denying government which far from being an agile 21st century government is over-burdened with conservative interest groups and threatened by change.

The coalition prefers the fiction of fiscal austerity, despite its manifest failure overseas. Let it parade its cargo cult mentality of free trade as the solution to everything. Let it mutter about penalty rates as the solution to productivity. Let it collude to raise the cost and lower the standard of living for all ordinary Australians.

As seen on Wednesday, it is a government whose ideology and practice are so shallow, so unworkable, so morally and intellectually bankrupt that even a Joe Hockey may be put on a pedestal. As Paul Keating said recently to Kerry O’Brien, ‘the bar is not raised real high.’

In the end the fulsome flattery of Hockey reveals only the defective vision of those who would praise him and their mutual fear that in time, they too, will be found out by events just too big for their pretensions. Above all, they will discover to their cost the price of their arrogance. It never pays to underestimate the intelligence of the Australian public.

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Newly appointed Minister for Energy Resources and Northern Australia, Josh Frydenberg is Tony Abbott MK2 when it comes to preaching the gospel of coal. He is reading from the same Peabody bible. Ranting to Barrie Cassidy on ABC Insiders Sunday, Frydenberg recycles the absurd nonsense Abbott was full of. Frydenberg claims that Australia has a mission to export coal to lift Indians out of poverty. This is something the environmentalists don’t understand, he says smugly.

Even the Adani bastards can’t buy that. They donate solar street-lights to poor Indian villages which are never going to be connected to any national grid. They know that coal is the cause not the solution to energy poverty. India suffers 40 per cent transmission and distribution losses across its grid. Its mining and electricity generation industries are heavily nationalised. Consumer tariffs are on the rise as they are in Australia. Coal is not the answer but in fact the cause of 300 million Indians having no domestic electric power supply.

The Adani brothers know that coal-fired electricity can do nothing to lift villagers’ living standards. They know that the poor bear the brunt of our coal-fired nightmare. They know that the coal industry in places such as coal-dominated West Virginia, has created the lowest standard of living in the most depressed state in the USA. Coal aggravates poverty; it alleviates none of it.

As shameless or as delusional as his predecessor, ‘The New Mr Coal’ to use Andrew Bolt’s title for the Kooyong colt, sees ‘a strong moral case’ for coal. Doubtless this is because coal helps cause the dirty air which kills one in eight of us world-wide.  The moral case for coal is to leave it buried underground. Fossil fuel divestment is the only cause with any moral authority. Fossil fuels like coal are killing us.

Frydenberg is eager to help coal do its job, even if it means fudging statistics. On Sunday he said two billion people in the world were still burning wood and dung for cooking and that 4.3 million people died early as a direct result. What he left out of his statement was coal. The statistics he misreported should read burning coal, wood and dung.

In 2012, WHO calculates,  7 million died just from breathing in muck. One million of these deaths, WHO estimates, are linked to coal. Four thousand Chinese die every day from air pollution. Mr Coal must believe we can’t know this. He can’t believe it doesn’t matter.

Coal is the enemy of humanity. It causes climate change which destroys global health. Climate change hurts our economy and our environment. Poor people are hurt disproportionately more, entrenching poverty. Poisoning us aside, the harm coal does humanity in climate change alone now; let alone in any future it may leave us, outweighs any benefit.

Frydenberg must be hoping we won’t know that four out of five poor people in India live in areas away from an electricity supply which it is uneconomic to extend according to Indian research. India’s former secretary of the Ministry of Power, EAS Sarma writes ‘Studies have shown that when a village is more than 5 km from the grid, the cost of supplying electricity from solar and other off-grid solutions is far below the costs of supplying from conventional sources such as coal … take it from us in India: the world needs renewables, not more Australian exported coal.’

Others more fortunate enjoy subsidised coal which is priced well below anything Adani mine could ever produce. But he’s full of all sorts of other facts and figures – the sort you get from coal industry propaganda, a pack of lies boosted by experts from tobacco advertising. Coal is singing from Big Tobacco’s hymn-sheet; following the same tactics.

Jessica Craven, media adviser to the Australian Climate Council and a former public health advocate, points to the way cigarette companies responded to early health concerns about their product by promoting filtered cigarettes.

“Now we have fossil-fuel companies talking about ‘clean coal,’ ” she says. “It’s very similar. And the whole coal/poverty argument that we now see being used a lot by the Minerals Council – that was developed by ex-tobacco people.”

The truth is that coal is a killer. And the Indian government and its coal-fired generators know this as well as anybody.

The Indian government has ordered state utility giant NTPC to sell more expensive solar generated electricity with cheaper coal power as a single unit in an effort to increase solar uptake. China’s GCL Group has announced a strategic partnership with Adani Enterprises that will focus on delivering complete solar PV operations in India, in addition to further collaborative efforts in wind and LNG energy. Unlike Australia, India is cutting back on its coal subsidies and boosting its growing renewable energy sector.

This year the Federal government will give the poor old coal industry a $4 billion subsidy. This tops up the miserable $3 billion each year given on average by state governments. And out comes Frydenberg, popping up on Insiders, blithely repeating the same brazen lies which got Tony Abbott into trouble. Given its record of as coal industry apologists, no-one could possibly take Frydenberg or the Abbott-Turnbull government seriously. Nor does any one of us have time to indulge his wilful and calculated deception. It is too late in the day to be enduring a re-run of his government’s coal-industry propaganda. A government in bed with coal is not an agile government, not a 21st century government remotely, Mr Turnbull, it is a criminally corrupt outfit which is content to sell out the nation to the highest bidder – the coal industry which will destroy us and our planet; an industry which is, the enemy of humanity.

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National Anti-poverty week sees the richest PM in Australian history explaining his investments while his predecessor is stressing now that his salary has been cruelly slashed from $539,338 to just $200k. How will he ever meet the mortgage payments on his Forestville home? Retirement is out of the question; it would only bring him $307, 542 for life. Perhaps his mate Malcolm, lustily singing his praises as our deliverer to NSW Liberals and to the House only recently, could help out. PM number 29, aka that smartarse millionaire bastard, Turnbull, certainly has all the answers.

Turnbull defends his own use of Cayman Islands’ Ugland House, a five storeyed office building in George Town, Great Cayman, the registered address of several of his family investment trusts. Others do it, he says, even Shorten’s unions. 18,856 other businesses and funds, in fact, use the address. That’s enough to confuse any postie. Or, as Barack Obama said in 2008, ‘that must be one big building. Or one big scam’.

Of course, The Toff huffs loftily, it’s all legitimate. An honest to goodness, true-blue, Caymans fund, the PM assures the House, helps the Turnbulls to pay tax in Australia. He keeps a straight face while skewering Labor. It is sophistry they won’t hear from any other PM. Or want to. A civilised society works only if members who enjoy its benefits are also prepared to pay their share of the costs. It may help if you keep a few lawyers out of politics, too. Lower the bunkum level.

Rather than being a way of paying no or very little tax, their raison d’être and their irresistible appeal to vulture fund operators, the PM’s Cayman accounts help him pay tax. He says. A sceptical ATO, on the one hand, has previously pointed to US investors keeping money offshore indefinitely. Australian investors may do the same.

Turnbull does not divulge his rate of tax, be it zero, five, ten or twenty percent. Nor do we have any means of finding out, a situation which fuels speculation, perhaps none so bizarrely figurative as touring comedian Russell Brand who protests,

‘having your money in the Cayman Islands is like putting your dick into custard. We all want to do it, but there’s no rational reason to do it. If your dick’s in a bowl of custard you’re doing it for a reason.’

Caymans’ laws prevent even the ATO from finding out what tax whack Mal, who is also known as Tang Bao in China or ‘sweet custard bun’, is paying.’ Our own secrecy laws prohibit ATO officers divulging clients’ tax details. Quixotic Sam Dastyari and other ‘class envy party’ members risk looking impertinent, personal or just plain naff as they challenge Turnbull’s use of managed funds domiciled in a place called home by tax evaders, rock iguanas and red-footed boobies.

Dastyari knows that Cayman Island tax havens are legal but this does not prevent the PM or members of his media claque from repeating this irrelevance. Sam wants to know if their use is appropriate for a PM whose government promises to pursue companies ‘off-shoring’ or using tax havens to reduce their tax liabilities. Dastyari, alleges a conflict of interest at least if not the abuse of privilege and that by resorting to such elite services, Turnbull fails to lead by example.

Exclusive funds in the Turnbull portfolio such as the Zebedee Growth Fund, the Bowery Opportunity Fund and the 3G Natural Resources Offshore Fund are only for the well-heeled. Mum and Dad investors, don’t try this at home. They require a one million minimum investment from clients but can return them 20 per cent per annum.

Bowery, which targets distressed and bankrupt companies, boasts 21 per cent since 2009. The PM could invest $539,338 or just a year of his salary at this rate today and ten years later he would have roughly 3.5 million.

Turnbull personally has as much right as any other Australian to seek high returns, but as PM he should be leading the charge to unwind ‘off-shoring’. The PM is no ordinary investor. The Caymans are not ‘bog-standard’ investment houses, despite his protestations that even Aussie Super uses them. His deflects the Labor attack, however, like the barrister he was.

Turnbull accuses Labor of a personal smear campaign inspired by the politics of envy. On this front, he declares, wearily that his wealth is no secret. Nor is his ‘success’. Luck and virtuous hard work have made him a fortune. He bears it well.

‘The fact is that Lucy and I have been very fortunate in our lives. We have more wealth than most Australians, that is true. We’ve worked hard, we’ve paid our taxes, we’ve given back.’ The model taxpayer then dismisses out of hand all suggestion that he might disclose further tax details.

It is inconceivable, he implies, that his riches could ever cloud his judgement, impair his perspective or that his path to a Caymans account or three have been anything but virtuous even if those thousands of ordinary Australians who lost their savings in the collapse of HIH after it paid too much in its takeover of FAI might tell a different story. Of course he knows how ordinary Australians live. He uses public transport. Why, his friends include some … quite ordinary people.

In 1998,Turnbull, then chairman of Goldman Sachs Australia advised FAI Insurance on a $300 million takeover bid by HIH. The bank’s role and the advice it gave to FAI were key themes in a 2002 Royal Commission which failed to nail any wrong-doing although this did not prevent the HIH liquidator Tony McGrath, of McGrath Nicol & Partners from bringing his own legal action. In 2009, a confidential settlement by his former employer, spared Turnbull from appearing in court as a defendant in a private $450+ million lawsuit.

Nothing to see here, Turnbull reminds the House, he has no say in investment decisions made by his funds. Putting your wealth into blind trusts, where it may be invested in anything, anywhere, he makes appear responsible, ethical, the only proper course of action.

Turnbull’s example will doubtless inspire the 1 million to 1.5 million ordinary Australians who live in poverty, based on their access to necessary goods and services and social exclusion measures. The figure may be higher. The Australian Council of Social Service estimates that 2.55 million Australians live below the poverty line. These include 55 per cent of Newstart recipients.  Even the Business Council of Australia wants to raise Newstart. But not a peep from Bun’s government, however, just a steely resolve to serve the interests of the rich.

The Turnbull government marks anti-poverty week by repealing a Labor measure that required private firms with revenue over $100 million a year to disclose their tax details. ‘The changes will restore the long-held general principle of fundamental rights of taxpayers’ privacy, including for Australian-owned private companies,’ inquiry chair and Liberal senator Sean Edwards says in his report, while Josh Frydenberg sees it as protective, claiming business owners fear publication could increase the risk of them being kidnapped and held for ransom. Doubtless Ugland House fund operators applaud his logic and would use his case themselves if they could get away with it.

The euphonious Ugland House is also financial home to another endangered species, a tiny mob of investors, pure as the driven snow, who, like our PM, are ‘lucky’ enough to rank amongst the one per cent of the world which now owns fifty percent of its wealth as Credit Suisse reports recently.  And that one per cent may be declining. Surely, we must do all we can to protect this tiny minority. Certainly Greg Hunt, aka Hunt Greg for his recent backflip over renewables to suit his new boss, is helping us all to do our best.

Environment Minister Hunt is seen to press his lips to a violet-scented Turnbull ear-lobe before slipping out of question time under cover of Thursday’s fat-cat-calling. His government’s steamy, coal-seamy affair with Adani demands his personal attention. Minutes later, Hunt’s office announces Carmichael mine may go ahead.

It’s good news for cash-strapped international entrepreneurs, the Adani brothers, one of whom, at last count was down to his last 7 billion and whose shares are trading lower than the belly of an ornamental snake. Now, if only a bank will lend them some money, they will be able to go ahead with Australia’s biggest coal mine, and the coalition’s biggest economic and environmental disaster. If only one of the 14 major banks which have turned them down would ignore the inconvenient truth.

Our ‘agile’ 21st century government, naturally, prefers a different view. The Adani Carmichael mine, we are told, will produce only artisanal, hand-crafted ‘clean coal’, carried by reef-friendly, accident-proof ships with highly-paid, well-trained local Australian crews with the navigation system of a Mars landing. Nothing bad could possibly happen to the water table or the ecosystem of any living creature. Adani will bust a gut to pay loads of tax, as only a multi-national corporation can.

Unlike any other open-cut mine in history, Adani will be a big employer. Huge. Created will be at least one 21st century job for every Australian for life. All we need to do is help fund a proposed 16 billion coal-dedicated railway between Galilee Basin and Abbott Point’s expanded port facility, which is set to become the biggest coal terminal in the world, a nifty bit of engineering which Aussie battler Gina Rinehart and other ‘lifters’ diligently ‘growing the economy’ may also be able to use in a serendipitous stroke of pure good fortune on top of the billions of government subsidy we foist upon her.

But let’s not get too far down the track. Boyish Josh Frydenberg, Minister for resources, energy and Northern Australia and protecting corporate bosses from kidnap, is busting to take his new portfolio out for a spin, is a bit too quick off the blocks. Giving the rail an OK before Mal’s OK leads to a carpeting from his boss. Now Josh says – ‘just joshing – ‘it’s not a priority’, meaning we will pay for the rail when the fuss has died down a bit or the next Federal election is closer.

Dipping into the Northern Australia Infrastructure fund to turn may allow coalition fiscal wizards to misappropriate enough to enable the Adanis to build an unusable, ecologically irresponsible coal mine which no-one wants or needs and that neither the current market nor any future can bear in an industry which Goldman Sachs and others say is in structural decline.  At worst it will be moth-balled immediately.

‘Hunt’s hole’, as it will be known, will however, serve as his government’s most fitting monument.   A vast, useless pit, measuring 247,000 square kilometres and visible from space, it will warn even extra-terrestrials of the suicidal madness which seized the Neo-Cons of Oz, a maniacal abdication of reason more akin to nineteenth century Polynesian cargo cults than to any 21st century government with the very best available science and technology. If only our Easter Island leaders had taken heed. For those future politicians with macro-economic perspectives this is what a stranded asset looks like. For the rest of us a caution. Money talks. Unfortunately.  But when money is doing all the talking, woe betide the rest of us.

‘Focusing only on border control and deterrence will not solve the problem. It is the duty of any government to ensure security and to manage immigration but these policies must be designed in a way that human lives do not end up becoming collateral damage … an exclusive focus on security and targeting criminal activity only risks making these journeys even more dangerous.’ Antonio Guterres UNHCR

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‘We need advocacy, not slogans. We need to respect the intelligence of the Australian people.’ Malcolm Turnbull

Australia’s ‘tough’ border protection policy never ‘stopped the boats’, as Tony Abbott never tired of boasting or brazenly taking credit for. Arrivals did decline steeply, it is true, after 19 July 2013  when Kevin Rudd announced that under his PNG resettlement scheme, asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat would never be settled in Australia, a trend which has continued to the present day.

Yet that decline is nothing to be proud of. If fewer boats were to arrive in Australia, there has been no decline in numbers desperately putting to sea, even if we have become very practised in concealing the truth; putting the suffering and torment of others out of sight and out of mind.

The myth of stopping the boats entails a wilful denial of the facts as well as a collective self-deception. The pernicious fiction also involves us in shabby behaviour. The boat narrative entails the conscious abrogation of our moral and legal responsibility as a civilised nation to provide refuge to others in distress. It is a perverse suppression of what makes us human; a denial of our better instincts that is as harmful to ourselves as it is to others.

We shun our humanity and thumb our nose at international refugee conventions. We perpetrate the cruel hoax of intercepting boatloads of needy and suffering fellow human beings only to return them to almost certain persecution. Some we send back with limited fuel in a vessel which is barely sea-worthy. Others we decant into orange, fibreglass, purpose-built ‘boomerang lifeboats’, consigning crew and cargo to the mercy of the open sea. Who knows how many ‘turn-backs’ have ended in disaster? What can be certain is that we never better the lives of those we turn away. Nor we do anything but diminish ourselves.

We incarcerate men, women and children in poorly-run gulags called detention centres which it suits us to pretend are run by nations we have paid to do our dirty work, nations, in the case of Nauru which struggle with the rule of law or the administration of justice. Sexual favours are traded for hot showers. Women are raped.

Iranian Reza Barati, who at 23 should have had his whole adult life ahead of him, was bashed to death by a guard who has not yet been brought to justice. 24 year old Hamid Khazaei, died because medical aid was delayed because our bureaucratic hell-hole decreed that a visa application be completed before he could be taken to hospital in Brisbane. Children become chronically depressed to the point where RCH staff in Melbourne refuse to return them to further torment. It is not a record that anyone in his right mind would want to claim credit for. Yet Abbott and his crew have bragged about stopping boats and saving lives at sea so often that these two lies have entered folklore; become accepted as fact.

If Abbott is to be credited for his true contribution it should be for raising the number of boat arrivals. His opposition to the Malaysian arrangement in 2011 led to thousands of new arrivals in the following two years.

Yet facts have never stopped boasts. The Coalition, under Turnbull, is pleased to continue with its bragging, repeating the same slogans with better elocution. It is even prepared to repeat the lie that our policies have saved lives.

Our heartless yet enthusiastic prejudice, (let’s not dignify it with the word policy) towards men, women and children who are driven by desperate necessity to flee their homes and to put to sea in unsafe vessels has done nothing but cause harm to refugees and to Australia’s reputation for fairness and humanity.  It is to our national shame and regret that we turn away from the poor, the needy, the wretched of the earth, who reach out to us for help in their time of crisis. Instead, from those who have already lost everything, we take their freedom, their dignity, their future happiness.

Regardless of what Malcolm Turnbull wants to pretend in public, our ‘tough border protection’ has not prevented refugees from drowning or perishing in other dreadful ways. There is no evidence whatsoever for claiming that news of Australia’s ‘tough policies’ are any form of deterrent. Growing numbers of displaced persons are desperately putting to sea in our region to seek refuge. According to the UNHCR, more people boarded boats after former PM Abbott introduced punitive ‘deterrence’ policies, not fewer.

At least 54,000 people boarded boats in South East Asia, our region according to the Foreign Minister, in Jan-Nov 2014, an increase of 15%  over the same period a year earlier. Around 540 people died trying to get here in 2014.

They starved to death. They perished from a lack of drinking water. Some were beaten to a death by crew members and thrown overboard. Many drowned when their unseaworthy vessel sank. Hundreds more died in camps in Thailand.

Yet our government is in complete denial. Despite promising respect on seizing power Malcolm Turnbull insults our intelligence less than a month later in parliament by defending coalition immigration policy. It is a despicable act of duplicity from a politician who is more interested in courting support from his right wing ‘boat-stopping’ party bigots than in facing the truth.

So much for his promise of being a Prime Minister who respects truth or who respects the nation. Instead, Turnbull contemptuously recycles Tony Abbott’s tired old lies; repeats the same disgraceful untruths rationalising our capture and imprisonment of asylum seekers. The cruel hoax perpetrated on Australian people is that our shameful behaviour is some sort of necessary evil which deters others driven to flee their homeland from attempting to reach safety by sea.

The deterrence argument is an outrageous, guilt-assuaging rationalisation of the government’s cruelly, inhumane behaviour towards some of the most desperate and needy people in the world. Not only is it totally spurious, it is condemned by the UNHCR and by other bodies that monitor international human rights abuses. Yet the coalition has made it their mantra for two years.  It is a shocking breach of good faith by a PM who promised advocacy and respect.

Yesterday, Greens MP Adam Bandt asks when the government will stop holding children and babies in ‘mental illness factories’. Turnbull is unable to make any coherent, sensible reply except to sloganeer. Nor does he give any sense he knows a proper response is needed. He repeats the shamefully false claim that immigration policies such as the Greens’ lead to people dying at sea in the attempt to reach Australia.

Ignored is the logical conclusion of his argument. If we do save people from drowning, it is only to send them to the hell of indefinite detention, a perpetual torment of deprivation and uncertainty, a nightmare which more have escaped through dying than through successful resettlement.

Adding insult to injury, the PM chooses words which draw attention to his flagrant lie. He describes his utterly unfounded assertion as ‘the melancholy truth’. ‘That’s not a question of theory,’ Turnbull continues as he proceeds to dig himself in further, pointing to changes tried by Labor.

A new sitting of parliament presents a chance for Turnbull to show that he is any more trustworthy than the promise-breaking, prevaricating dishonest junkyard dog who was his predecessor. He is on his second and final chance to prove himself after his failure to last more than a year as Liberal leader in 2009 when having alienated his colleagues by his imperious and superior personal style, he split the party over his support for a carbon reduction scheme.

Tellingly, Turnbull fails to rise to the occasion. Disappointed as many hopeful voters may be by the new PM’s failure to rise to our expectations, we should, perhaps not be surprised. A soufflé cannot rise twice, as Keating said of Andrew Peacock’s second attempt to become Liberal leader in 1994 .

Far from achieving any form of elevation Turnbull lowers himself by using an old propaganda technique: repeat a lie often enough and people will believe it. It is a base form of deception which history will not forgive. It is an abdication of real leadership at a time when the nation is crying out for a humane and enlightened politics.

In offering more of the same denial and dereliction of duty towards others that is our immigration policy, Turnbull does a lot of harm. Rather than deliver much needed, much overdue real reform, Turnbull has betrayed his promise; dashed the hopes of those who supported his coup.

Above all he has betrayed a nation who dared to hope for better; a leader who would not encourage us to further turn our backs but one brave and principled enough to help us to change our course; to do our best to reach out and help others in distress. It is the only way we will rediscover our own humanity; reclaim our self-respect.

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‘There’s never been a more exciting time to be an Australian’, a hot and bothered

Malcolm Turnbull confides. Whatever he means to tell us, at least he reveals how he’s feeling. He’s picking up the good vibrations. We’re giving him the excitations. The PM is enjoying the longest political honeymoon since our love-fest with Kevin07. Malcolmania sweeps the nation.

Opinion polls rank him the most popular PM in more than five years. But can he do the job?

Besotted by our good-looking, sweet-talking new PM, nothing else seems to matter to us. Assad’s ally Russia fires 26 medium-range cruise missiles into Syria from ships nearly 1,000 miles away attacking anti-Assad insurgents and allowing ISIS to advance to 2km outside Aleppo. Twenty-two staff and patients, including women and children are killed in a US attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz while the West’s strategy in Afghanistan if not across central Asia is revealed to be a failure.

Nauru liberates all asylum seekers into ‘open detention’ with life-guards, saying it plans to process the lot in a week, a week in which the High Court hears legal challenges to offshore detention itself, only to withdraw its promise later. Doctors at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne refuse to release child patients back into detention. 400 sign a petition demanding the release of all children detained on Nauru and Manus Island, a stand backed by state Health Minister, Jill Hennessy, a move to which Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has no sensible response, although it is possible to make out the word ‘drowning’.

Australia is drowning by numbers. The IMF produces growth projections contradicting Hockey’s gonzo optimism and indicating steep economic challenges await us. A fifteen-year old shoots police employee Curtis Cheng, at Parramatta Police Station. None of this, however, puts comeback king Turnbull off his toe-tapping, show-stopping razzle-dazzle.

Oozing charisma and class, Turnbull is a born entertainer; an accomplished showman. He raps. He dances. He speaks in sentences. Can there be no end to his talents? The nation goes wild.

Mark Kenny is smitten. Oldies fall back in love with the coalition, swelling its primary vote by 7% mainly at the expense of The Greens in a series of recent opinion polls. Things look crook for Labor which announces a ‘concrete bank’, which is a new plan to finance public works such as Tasmania’s Midland Highway.  It is clever and is modelled on the CEFC but it is an ugly baby. It will be concrete boots for Shorten if the PM’s stocks continue to turn bullish.

Turnbull has a vision. He has seen the future and he is in it; ‘The Australia of the future has to be a nation that is agile … innovative … and … creative’, he raps. His all-female backing group, the Show Ponies led by Marise Payne and Kelly O’Dwyer, share his microphone: Innovation- e-Nation.-Job creation! E-lation!

There is no Coalition plan, however, to raise female pay rates, set quotas or targets to improve women’s participation in the workforce. Funding of measures to address a national epidemic of violence against women receives one hundred million back of a three million cut. It is a creative accountancy trick which fools no-one. The Turnbull cabinet may have a few more women in it but his government is as far away from gender equality as its predecessor.

In the crush of the national mosh-pit, moreover, Turnbull’s future clichés are mistaken for a type of benediction or prophecy rather than a warning based on our historical flat-footedness in responding to change.  Ever suggestible, unused to criticism, we readily mistake reproach for flattery. Most of us miss the irony in Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country. If we were an agile, creative, innovative nation, we would not still be beholden to dying extractive industries for our income.  We would understand that inequality is both morally wrong and economically counterproductive and address it. We would invest massively in renewables.

Luckily, our new PM has a silver tongue. Sweet Custard Bun, as our dragon-bone divinating PM is known in China, is delighted to woo us with his platitudes and beatitudes. He is happier than ever with himself. Betraying less small l Liberal than messiah complex, his mission is to reset the Australian zeitgeist from Nope to Hope, reinventing himself as a model of consensus and bearer of glad tidings. Bun is the one chosen to lead his people into a new dreamtime. He will save us from ourselves. Best of all, Bun is not Abbott.

We feel better already. ‘Relief’ is felt by twenty five thousand readers currently polled by The Age on their ‘reactions to Malcolm Turnbull becoming Prime Minister’. Relief is four times more powerful than ‘Hope’ which earns a respectable second ranking. There has never been a more exciting time not to be Tony Abbott. The possibilities are positively intoxicating.  Even the dinosaur of the Liberal party room appears eager to seize the day.

Mark Kenny detects an Oz-Glasnost as MPs rattle off new ideas and ‘think outside the box’, freed from the iron hand of Peta Kremlin’s PMO.   Fortress Abbott is under demolition. An invisible Liberal MP, David Coleman, has an idea. Business ‘start-ups’ could be encouraged by exempting their initial costs from capital gains tax liabilities they might otherwise incur. On Tuesday, moreover, Liberal backbenchers chorus for a review of weekend penalty rates.

This is heady stuff. Perestroika must surely follow. Yet a few bum notes mar the orchestration of the Turnbull New World Symphony.

Toadying to the NSW Liberal Party State Council in Sydney on Saturday, Turnbull is clearly rattled when his audience laughs at his claim that the Liberal party is not run by factions. Nor are we run by big business, he says with a straight face. Liberal circles continue to be in denial about their very real factions and Abbott’s dismissal still rankles, especially with the Liberal hard right. Turnbull ends up looking like a tosser. Despite his threats, however, Cory Bernardi has yet to found his own party.

Bernardi cannot find a new party which would have him as its founder. He bounces back like a dud cheque with ‘colourful’ international Islamophobe Geert Wilders in tow. Scott Morrison proposes to privatise hospitals and schools, a bad old idea whose time has come and gone.

Unclean! Unclean! The ubiquitous Kate Carnell rings another cracked bell with her delusion that leprous penalty rates will destroy all private enterprise as we know it.  Brian Loughnane, husband of Peta Credlin, the man the Liberals call Federal Director resigns with a parting shot at the PM’s crowd-pulling, crowd pleasing shtick.

‘We see Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and I don’t think Australia should think we’re immune to these trends,’ he says in a predictably petty swipe at Turnbull’s popularity.

All this is water off a toad’s back to the all-singing, all-dancing PM who belts out the retro Minder theme song. ‘I could be so good for you’ when rabid fellow admirer Victorian Liberal Director, ‘Dollar Sweetie’, Michael Kroger meets him Thursday. You could win us five Victorian seats, just by not being Tony Abbott, blowhard Kroger sucks up to his new idol.

‘I know what Tony is going through, Michael,’ grins Turnbull, revealing dentition the envy of a Patagonian tooth-fish. He savours the budgie-smuggler’s suffering. PM Bun is engorged with a transcendent optimism. He is buoyed by the omnipotence and superiority known to every narcissist when a plum job falls at last into his lap.

Turnbull’s leadership plum is all the sweeter for having been so painfully surrendered by his detested nemesis, Tony Abbott darling of all right-wing nut-jobs everywhere and Rupert Murdoch’s stooge, the  man who beat him for leader five years ago by one vote. Even more satisfying, Abbott is a sore loser, suggesting he was taken by surprise. The Manly skeghead continues to give interviews which reveal his bewilderment, vitriol and a bit of surfer’s rash. He is suffering.  There has never been a better time to be Malcolm Turnbull.

A gifted orator and former Communications Minister, Sweet Custard Bun tells 3AW’s Neil Mitchell Tuesday that he has not spoken to Abbott since deposing him. Will he and Abbott ever make up? The Godfather Turnbull replies, ‘There’s nothing personal, just business.’ At a NSW Liberal function on Saturday, however, he gushes such patently insincere, fulsome praise of Abbott that not even Abbott could take him at face value.  It is their first public meeting together since the coup and from the body language argues against any rapprochement.

‘Tony Abbott has held firm to those Liberal values throughout his career and public life. He held true to them as an opposition leader, he held true to them as prime minister…He took us out of the wilderness of opposition and took us back into government and achieved great things, great reforms, great commitments.’

‘Seize the day’, is the best Liberal value our opportunistic PM cum National Cheer-leader can muster. He busts his promise not to sloganeer. Pundits puzzle the conundrum. A slogan is kosher when it is a Latin tag, or when it popularises privilege, elitism and fascism, as in Dead Poets Society? When it is his captain’s call? Keating’s young acolytes might have marched to the beat of a different drum in Dead Poet’s Society but it was Keating’s drum.

‘We need advocacy, not slogans. We need to respect the intelligence of the Australian people.’

 

‘Seize the day’ suggests we should not expect Bun to take too far the need to respect his audience’s intelligence. Or respect its interests. ‘Always back self-interest in the race of life’, Jack Lang said- ‘at least with self-interest, you know it is trying’.

Enthused by the excitement of his own ascendancy, Bun is happy to resort to spin to win over others. He embraces the newly signed TPP, describing it as a ‘giant foundation stone of our future prosperity’ when it is a mill-stone. The secret treaty cedes our sovereignty to US-based multinational corporations, allowing foreign firms to use ISDS to sue our government if we change our laws and diminish their profits.

Not only will the TPP undermine our environmental protection, it will restrict how we address climate change. Above all, for a nation which has to be agile and creative, the treaty crushes innovation by transforming intellectual property into a way of protecting big corporations’ investment in culture, advertising and medicine. There has never been a more exciting time to be a US-based multinational in Australia.

In essence the TPP is less about free trade than US power. Confronted by the rise of China the US has created a twelve-nation trading bloc to boost its waning international authority and to provide access for US-based multi-national corporations to raw materials at the lowest possible cost.

Given that even bilateral trade has seldom if ever been a success to both parties, the chances of a workable twelve-nation agreement are not high. Even if it were to sail through the US Congress, it is likely to prove an expensive source of frustration to its smaller members than any instant passport to prosperity. Our own Productivity Commission reports

‘The increase in national income from preferential agreements is likely to be modest. The Commission has received little evidence from business to indicate that bilateral agreements to date have provided substantial commercial benefits.’

A TPP which truly aimed at improving its members’ prosperity instead of US security would include China. Indeed, the exclusion of China puts the lie to the snake-oil salesmen who are promoting the deal as a way to promote growth, improve living standards or any other economic benefit. So far, however, Sweet Custard Bun has failed to live up to his promise to respect the nation’s intelligence.

If there is any advocacy being exercised by our PM in the TPP fiasco it is all on behalf of the multi-nationals and our great and powerful friend the US. Although the TPP was a good eight years in the making, a done deal when he came to power, Turnbull will be remembered as the PM who sold Australia into multi-national corporate servitude. Unless, of course, the US Congress fails to ratify the TPP. Or our Senate remembers that it is never a good plan to buy anything, not even a recycled, replacement, remade PM, sight unseen. Nor embrace one in too much of a hurry. Caveat Emptor not Carpe Diem, works better for our nation, regardless of what’s best for you, Mr Turnbull.

Malcolm Turnbull struck a positive note when he contacted Muslim leaders after the shooting in Parramatta. There is every reason to believe he understands complexity and respects other cultural perspectives. In style, he is a totally different performer to his abrasive, fear-mongering sloganeering predecessor. Yet beyond his superior performance values there is very little yet to suggest that the Sweet Custard Bun is any more nourishing or sustaining to a nation hungry for real leadership in a time of unprecedented international and domestic challenges than the budgie smuggler junkyard dog.

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The economy will grow gangbusters, trade will rocket ahead and immense benefits will be ours according to Australia’s Trade Minister, Andrew Robb this morning. Keen to promote a secret document even he cannot confirm a detailed knowledge of he was absurdly bullish about a treaty which cannot be revealed until it is all signed and sealed. If it all sounds too good to be true, that is because it is.   It does nothing to boost his own or his government’s stocks, however much the miracle deal is hyped and oversold.

Robb has been conned. His claims for the Trans-Pacific Partnership are spurious at best and confined to pollywaffle about increased trade. Less than one fifth of the treaty, in fact, deals with trade. Robb cannot point to one clear-cut advantage. Nor should we be buying a pig in a poke. No-one should accept his explanation that the secrecy is to ‘protect negotiations’. That’s nonsense.

The Australian people have a democratic right to know what you have just signed on our behalf, Mr Robb. Why is it that

600 plus corporate advisers have access to the treaty’s text? Are we suddenly trust giant firms such as Halliburton, Monsanto, Walmart, and Chevron? Unlike you and your government, many of us just don’t accept that an elite corporation knows what’s best for all of us.

At worst, Robb’s promises are outright lies.  As with all so-called ‘free trade agreements’, the TPP is not free. Nor it is not primarily about trade. As Joseph Stiglitz warns, the TPP is about the protection of corporate monopolies at the expense of everyone else. What suits corporations will cost ordinary people their rights.

 I’ve talked to the health negotiators around the world. I’ve talked to people who’ve been involved in the arbitration process as part of the investment agreements. Even people who are arbitrators say the whole system is corrupt, that it’s a very expensive system, that therefore creates an un-even playing field with big corporations with big, deep pockets can get access to have recourse, whereas smaller firms can’t… It’s not just a trade agreement, it’s a really major change in a legal structure.

The TPP is firstly a US political strategy to boost its international authority. The waning superpower is attempting to counter the influence of a rising China. The TPP involves twelve countries whose trade and commerce add up to an impressive 40% of the world’s GDP even if it is it constructed to benefit the wealthy elite in the US and US-based and other global multinationals – whatever it may cost the rest of us.

Beyond this, the TPP permits hugely powerful multinational corporations to become more powerful.  For Australia, TPP weakens our intellectual property rights and attacks our sovereign law. Its ISDS clauses allow investors to sue us if our law conflicts with that investor’s capacity to make a profit, as is the case currently with Phillip Morris’ case against the Australian government over plain packaging for cigarettes.

The Philip Morris tobacco company is currently suing the Australian government using an obscure 1993 Hong Kong- Australia investment treaty. A US-based company, it could not sue under the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement: public opposition kept this clause out of the agreement. In order to sue, the company simply rearranged its assets to become a Hong Kong investor.

Philip Morris lobbied hard as did other Big tobacco and other powerful global corporations to include the right of foreign investors to sue governments in TPP negotiations among the US, Australia, New Zealand and six Asia-Pacific countries. And it’s not just tobacco packaging, the agreement contains provisions which limit the government’s ability to label food, even though this is in both consumers’ and government’s best interests to look after public health.

Medical costs will rise as the TPP will displace ‘generic’ medicines to protect the rights of Big pharma to make bigger profits. Other TPP proposals attack our PBS, the Australian government’s ability to keep drug prices affordable. Wholesale prices of the same medicines in the US are three to ten times higher than in Australia and retail is even higher. If you are a pensioner in Australia, your bill is no greater than $6.10. the TPP contains provisions which threaten to raise prices to governments which would then have to pass the increases on to consumers.

Internet service in Australia has never been cheap when contrasted with other countries. Expect to have to pay more under the TPPA. Last year, an international coalition representing over 100 web companies and Internet user groups protested that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would force ISPs and web providers to police the Internet. This would be passed on to the consumer.

Australians deserve to hear less spin about benefits to trade and have a right to know about loss of our sovereign rights and our rights as consumers. Skip the Turn-bullshit and tell the nation the truth about the TPP, Mr Prime Minister. We had a gutful of secrecy, evasion and deception from your predecessor. Act now to avoid joining him.