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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.

This article is written by Adjunct Associate Professor Hazel Moir, ANU and was originally published in The Conversation. It is reproduced here by Creative Commons licence agreement.

How trade agreements are locking in a broken patent system

Hazel Moir, Australian National University

Ten years on from the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, Australia is entering another round of negotiations towards the new and controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership. In this Free Trade Scorecard series, we review Australian trade policy over the years and where we stand today on the brink of a number of significant new trade deals.

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Australia has long had low requirements for obtaining patents. Some of these low standards were “locked in” in the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement. This made reform to the system difficult but not impossible.

The same cannot be said of the proposals in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA). If implemented, they will ensure no future Australian government can improve the patent system without violating the TPPA obligations. They also reinforce the current problems within Australia’s patent system.

It is so easy to get a patent

Patents are no longer just for scientists and engineers doing leading-edge research. They are not limited to technology or science. They don’t even have to be inventive – at least in the ordinary meaning of the word.

Australia’s patent standards are incredibly low. In 2003, we even granted a patent for a method of teaching children about finance by having them work for their pocket money. The “invention” had lots of different parts such as learning about credit cards by getting next week’s pocket money early. This is actually the best way to get a patent in Australia – combine two known things or processes and as long as no one has written them down together, you can get a patent on it. If it has been written down, all that is needed is a third known process!

The gradual watering down of patent standards over recent decades has led to an explosion in the number of patents being granted in Australia. In 1984 the number awarded was 7,044, in 2013 this had grown to 17,112.

This has significant implications for pharmaceuticals and it has led to higher costs for consumers and taxpayers. For example, if a known medicinal compound is combined with a known method of release (such as extended release) then an extra patent is granted. A patent for extended release venlafaxine (brand name Efexor®) kept generic competition off the market for two and a half years, costing taxpayers over A$200m.

The TPPA also reinforces the current flawed approach to granting patents. Hidden in footnote 54 to draft article QQ.E.1, it says patents should be granted when “the claimed invention would have been obvious to a person skilled or having ordinary skill in the art having regard to the prior art”. This means that it is inventive enough for a patent unless it is obvious to an unimaginative person working in a very narrowly circumscribed field.

However there is a big difference between being inventive and not being obvious – just like there is a big difference between being beautiful and not being ugly.

What else does the TPPA do to our patent system?

As well as cementing this extraordinarily low standard for granting patents, the TPPA plans to broaden the extensive privileges already granted to patent owners.

Existing privileges prevent Australian-based companies from making and exporting a drug to a country where it is out-of-patent if the patent is still valid in Australia. This is silly and costs Australia significant export earnings.

The TPPA plans to go further by limiting the grounds on which patents can be revoked or cancelled. Pharmaceutical patents will be longer in some countries. Data exclusivity provisions will be wider and stronger, and may reinforce the market exclusivity of some drugs.

What are the penalties for getting the patent system wrong?

There are very few for patent owners. If your patent is challenged and revoked, then only the profits made since the legal challenge need to be repaid.

Yet those who infringe a patent may be fined and may have to exit a particular line of business or develop less efficient means of production.

The TPPA will make it more difficult to challenge a patent. It proposes a presumption of patent validity (Article QQ.H.2.3), which directly contradicts Australia’s current laws. Many scholars in the United States consider this presumption as one of the worst features of the increasingly broken US patent system.

Why should we care about the TPPA?

First, it is undemocratic for one government to tie the hands of all future elected governments. The IP chapter of the TPPA is heavy-handed regulation. It specifies in detail many aspects of patent policy which are currently subject only to parliamentary control. It will make domestic reform hard if not impossible.

Second, cementing low standards for patent requirements will mean we can do little to control the cost of health care. Australian taxpayers will continue to pay a lot more for pharmaceuticals.

Third, there is some – albeit tenuous – link between patents and innovation. All court cases on patent infringement involve an innovating company being sued. So only our innovating companies pay for our broken patent system. As only 25% of Australian innovating firms take out patents, it is the other 75% who pay the price of a bad system. Innovation is too important for our future to get it wrong.

And for what? Just how much extra milk or beef exports will we get in the TPPA? Adopting the TPPA is rather short-sighted when we consider the future economic strength of Australia lies in the knowledge industries.

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This article draws on research prepared for the 2014 Workshop “Ten Years since the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement: Where to for Australia’s Trade Policy?” Sponsored by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UNSW Australia.

Hazel Moir, Adjunct Associate Professor; economics of patents, copyright and other “IP”, Australian National University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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The Australia of the future has to be a nation that is agile, that is innovative, that is creative. We can’t be defensive, we can’t future-proof ourselves. “We have to recognise that the disruption that we see driven by technology, the volatility in change is our friend if we are agile and smart enough to take advantage of it.’ Malcolm Turnbull

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It is a lightbulb moment. Right now, a mini summit on Big Ideas is just what our nation needs, decrees our dear leader in his captain’s call of the week. Guests are agog at Prime Minister Sweet Custard bun’s incredible acumen; intellectual audacity and his Apple watch. The ACTU is invited along with welfare and other civil society groups. The IPA is not. This is new. Bun even runs it all by himself not via some IPA stooge or superannuated old biz-pal. It is to be a week of surprises; not all of them pleasant.

To be fair, Custard Bun is only responding to ACOS, ACTU, and BCA who all wrote to him to announce their common ground on some issues since their first gab-fest in August. Bun jumps at the chance to ask them all to Canberra for Thursday’s mini-thingy.

Turnbull’s will be ‘an agile government’ yet slogans are verboten. Bun drops the phrase ‘agile economy’, a reworking of an IT concept as he ear-bashes Fran Kelly on Thursday’s AM. Fran is not happy but lets him talk over her because that’s what blokes and PMs do. Besides Bun government is in its honeymoon period, a state of grace which appears to set to extend well beyond its shelf-life. Commercial stations need not adjust their reception.

P-plate Treasurer ScoMo, Art Sinodinis and other MP reformist bean-counters bear fixed smiles, from the other side of the cabinet table. Just one proviso. No-one must expect any decisions. Nothing is to be ruled in or out, a significant ruling in itself. Everything Tony Abbott swept off or under the table is now back on.

Eight spokes-folk from industry, commerce and labour shoot the breeze with Turnbull’s MP windbags. Talk? They could talk the leg off an iron pot, now trading at roughly half its 2014 price on world markets. And they do. It is a borrow my watch and tell me the time type of confab; a Turn-bull-session. But it seems to do everyone a power of good. Gone is the squelch button Abbott government which did away with consultation, a government which spent itself closing down discussion and debate. Optimism bubbles. The mood is positive. The two-week old infant Turnbull government is smiling. Or could that be wind?

Delegates swap dogma. Mantras are chanted. ‘Work, save, invest’ or ‘grow the economy’ get a good threshing. The scene recalls Swift’s Laputans being beaten around the head with inflated pig-bladders. Only then would they change opinion. But no-one attacks anyone. It’s not that real. Everyone is upbeat, no-one beaten up, at the end. Beyond a gush of motherhood statements, however, none can point to any specific achievement. It’s just the vibe.

‘It isn’t about taking stuff off the table and narrowing the options,’ Jennifer Westacott CEO of the club of one hundred businesses, a lobby group which calls itself ‘The Business Council of Australia’ tells reporters. Somehow we are to find it reassuring that ‘everything is still on the table’ and ‘no decisions have been taken’.

For ACTU secretary Dave Oliver, key differences divide us but ‘We all have one thing in common and that is it is all about growth,’ he claims, happy to recycle a warm and fuzzy fib which politicians use to justify business as usual. Growth of itself does nothing to resolve inequality. Yet Oliver sensibly dissents from cuts or ‘austerity measures’ so keenly advocated by business busybodies in difficult times. ‘Productivity dividends’ are so last government. For now.

‘Unions want to engage on the ‘high road of reform’ and not the low road of reducing wages, stripping conditions or cost shifting on to working families’, Dave warns. In Greece, cuts are called ‘fiscal waterboarding’ by a recent Greek Finance Minister. Dave is a fair way back from there, but a good leg up on the summit – or at least the moral high ground.  Perhaps he’s heading off the wage-cutters amongst the gathering with their mythologies of more jobs and increased productivity, both of which lack any empirical foundation.  Does he have the BCA in his sights?

Six months ago, Kate Carnell’s BCA released an ad with an Easter Message to attack penalty rates; peddling the lie that penalty rates cost jobs:

‘This Easter long weekend, we’re sorry that we will be closed. We’d like to be open to serve you. We’d like to give local people jobs. But the penalty rates are too high. Tell Canberra something has to change.’

Sweet Custard Bun will have nothing so naff. Yet he cannot stop Josh Frydenberg who leaps aboard the bandwagon with some timely old misinformation for our budding ‘touchy-feely’ new age national conversation.

‘In the resources sector it costs 50 per cent more in Australia to have an energy project than if you were to have one on the US Gulf Coast … Malcolm Turnbull is absolutely right to point to industrial relations as one area where it does cost business and ultimately it does cost jobs.’

His assertion is untrue and recycles a dodgy 2012 Business Council claim which ignores our exchange rate; the size of the US industry and its vast supply of cheap illegal Mexican labour.  True or not Frydenberg helps to up the ante in the arse about face process of the mini-summit. The pow-wow assumes problems to exist, rather than diagnose what they are and come to consensus about priorities. This is dangerous; already there is talk of issues which exist only in the minds of fat cats who think they’re starving. Yet the mini-summit seems more New Age than practical.

The gabfest raises national reform consciousness by picking up a former government’s toddlers’ toys and putting them back in the crib. All that’s missing is a round of happy clapping and a verse or two of Kumbaya. Leaders spruik sometimes crackpot ideas unfettered by the ‘negative energy’ of real-world constraints. These are to filter up through government in a process of consultation and review – at least that’s Turnbull’s promise. In reality, it is a soft sell before a GST rise is ‘agreed’, tax rates are tizzied up and government spending is cut further.

After three hours of warm inner glowing, the meeting closes happily. Woes, however, still outnumber ideas for the new PM. Sugar-Daddy, Sweet Custard Bun, as he is known in China, is cursed to rule ‘in interesting times’.

Russia piques international interest by suddenly fighting Assad’s civil war for him; China goes abacus-up dragging world finances down with it; Julie Bishop bags us a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, for 2018-2020 or later, on the grounds, presumably, that Manus and Nauru boost human rights because they stop deaths from drowning. She creates a stir by inviting pal, David Panton, along. Panton usurps an official seat, Labor protests. Worse, he appears to nod off. If it’s not a calculated insult, it is certainly not a gesture of respect from Ms Bishop.

Meanwhile deposed PM Abbott bobs up like a Bondi cigar in the surf on 2GB and 3AW keen to reinvent his glorious past with an eye to his future. Of course, Ray, he’s keen to help his mates out. His visit to Ray Hadley and Neil Mitchell will help pick up audiences. Ratings are off a bit lately. Turnbull sees the tabloids and shock-jocks as a waste of time. You are either preaching to the converted or being nailed to an ultra-right albatross of a populist position. Or a stunt like a shirt-front. There is a chill in the wind; Hadley and co know they are losing their pull.

Abbott, however, grandly, styles himself a man of principle. The supreme opportunist, whose need to oppose Labor at every turn, saw him adopt a whole Kamasutra of positions, he now sees himself as a conviction politician, a man who took a stand. He can’t resist the chance, while he’s at it, to white-ant Turnbull’s talkfest.

‘All the way through I’ve stood for things and back in 2009 the Coalition was in diabolical difficulty, absolutely diabolical difficulty, because we were making weak compromises with a bad government,’ he says.

‘We were ‘too gutsy in that first budget’, Ray. But it was brave, Ray. Brave. Negotiation is for sissies, Ray. Real men lay down the law. Unlike our two-timing, double- dealing-weasel-compromiser Turnbull. I’ve stood for things, Ray.’

Voters are urged to support the coalition through gritted teeth, orders the failed captain, advice which demoted leader of the senate Erich Abetz renders in a Liberal newsletter. The former Minister of employment reports mass resignations from party members protesting weasel Turnbull’s doing down of Abbott.  Ego naturally unscathed, Abetz, nevertheless, feels Liberal voters’ pain.

‘It is understandable that with the removal of Tony Abbott, Kevin Andrews and myself from the ministry that our core constituency feels disenfranchised’, a line which Abbott takes up on Thursday talkback.

While weasels Turnbull and Scott Morrison embrace Kate (penalty rates) Carnell and other business class sloganeers to the ‘National Reform Summit’, Anthony John Abbott books precisely the same timeslot for a full service with Neil Mitchell to crank out his own bitter antiphony over 2GBs airwaves. In his reinvention, he is a blameless victim of circumstances.

David Cameron won against poor opinion polls, he says, overlooking Cameron’s progressive views on renewable energy and social issues such as gay marriage and quite forgetting that voting is not compulsory in the UK and many working class people are too burnt out to bother. Polling data suggested 12.2million people would vote Labour, but only 9.3million turned out on polling day, while 12.5million people who said they would vote Tory, and 11.3million actually voted.

Abbott has nothing to answer for, he contends. Nothing went wrong. Colleagues betrayed him. Lost their nerve. Panic over polls.

The mature-age Manly surfer says he’s too young to retire, meaning young and immature enough to make trouble. Too old to be a beach bum, he has an adult-no-longer-in charge sook about his betrayal, sniping at the Antichrist Turnbull for being a snake out to dud all of us. Same python, different head. Even as he makes this claim, his new PM breaks new ground with his mini-summit, promising continual revision and change under his government.

Canberra is the city of talkfests but few are so feted as Malcom’s mini-summit. It gets top billing on most networks. Everything is said to be ‘on the table’. And David Oliver is there. It has been two years since anyone has invited the ACTU to any policy discussion; it’s all been the big end of town talking. Talk is cheap, however, pundits agree; the real question is how many lightbulbs does it take to change a prime minister.

Turnbull channels Abbott when Rosie Batty asks him to close down Manus and Nauru. A refugee who reluctantly agreed to be removed from Manus Island to rescue his wife and infant daughter from war in Syria has begged the Australian government to be included among the 12,000 Syrians it will accept for resettlement. Sweet custard bun is happy to recycle the old lies.

“The one thing we know is these policies, tough though they are, harsh though they are in many respects, actually do work, they save lives,” the PM lies. Yet the evidence contradicts this popular yet pernicious myth.

UNHCR data shows that more people boarded boats after Abbott introduced punitive ‘deterrence’ policies, not fewer. Over 54,000 people boarded boats in our region in Jan-Nov 2014, an increase of 15%  over the same period a year earlier. 540 people died trying to get here in 2014. Hundreds more died in smuggling camps in Thailand. Sweet Custard Bun needs to upgrade his act and abandon this old canard if he is to maintain credibility and inspire any kind of trust.

Shrewdly not ruling in; not ruling out leaves so much on the table it may collapse under its own inertia. Yet for all its broad and fuzzy focus, the PM’s conference signals a desire to explore options on tax and on environment where his predecessor ruled them out. Supported as he may be by disgruntled members of the hard right, such as Abetz or Andrews, it will take more than Abbott’s dismissal of Turnbull’s significant points of difference to sabotage Sweet Custard Bun’s choosing of a broader path to reform and policy-making.

The proof of any pudding be it custard or jam, is of course in the eating. Sweet Custard Bun’s new era of the lavish banquet with everything on the table cannot be left to stand too long or it will collapse under the weight of its own inertia. Our new ruler of everything in will have to rule some things out. Soon. Expect a bunfight.

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They have not met people who seek protection and shared their food; they have not known of the gifts they bring and could share for our benefit; they have not seen shoulders straight and eyes bright shortly after completing the most momentous and dangerous journeys, and the same eyes opaque and body slack with depression after years in detention; they have never held photographs of the women and children in ruined villages and camps, whom their husband and father may never hold or help again; they have never sat with young men in community detention in fear of their 18th birthday when they are liable to be sent back into detention centres; they have not tasted the terrors of Manus Island.

If we saw, heard and tasted these things in the lives of our families and friends, they would surely keep us awake at night. Documented and transmuted into art by a Solzhenitsyn these things might tell a cautionary tale of a society gone awry. That as a nation we simply move on is a marker, not of our wickedness or of our necessities, but of a failure of our imagination.

Andrew Hamilton Eureka Street

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Now that the Liberals in a fit of damage control have at last removed Tony Abbott from office, let’s get rid of some of the toxic verbal garbage from his era or the damage will continue. Let’s start with the often repeated, overused weasel words, Border Protection. Abbott did not coin the phrase but he and his government have given it such a flogging that it has now entered common usage and the Macquarie Dictionary. No it is not a cricketer’ deodorant.

Does it really matter?

This is not just a semantic quibble. The words are a matter of life and death. How we choose to talk about something determines how we see it; how we think about it and ultimately our world-view. At present we have been mentally conditioned to accept locking up men women and children in indefinite detention centres on Nauru, Manus and Christmas Island as well as on the mainland.

These poor, unfortunate people have committed no crimes yet we must punish them for the misfortune of being persecuted in their own countries. Our conditioning has moved into a phase where many Australians now proclaim tough border protection as something to be proud of – a good thing. It is in fact our national shame.

Some pioneers have even been sent to Cambodia at great expense to Australian tax-payers to prove a political point. The only certain way out of detention is to die. Of course you may return to persecution and in many cases almost certain death.

Words can kill. Nowhere is this more tragically the case than with Border Protection, a disgusting pair of buzz-words which cover a multitude of crimes against humanity. Use of the phrase by our politicians has shielded us from the truth; enabled us to accept that we must punish asylum seekers for their own good. Border Protection enables us, by proxy, to neglect our responsibility to other human beings in need; exercise instead a most callous indifference.

Use of the term by politicians allows them to pander to the lowest common denominator, fear. Promoting fear of asylum seekers can win votes from some sections of our community.

Border protection is a nonsense.

Australia has already the best natural border protection in the world. We are not at war. We are not being invaded. Our borders are not threatened – unlike many countries around the world. Use of the term, moreover  has also enabled Scott Morrison to create his own ‘on-water army’, our ‘Border Force’, a powerful paramilitary force with its own ideology, training and rank structure. Border Force seems to be above the law. It answers only to an immigration minister who will keep what takes place secret. No legal or constitutional checks and balances appear to exist outside itself.

Border Protection Case study

A recent Radio National AM morning panel includes a couple of fellow conservatives, Tom Switzer Amanda Vanstone who comfort themselves and their listeners that we are retaining our ‘tough border protection’. Malcolm Turnbull has clearly rattled Switzer and co by making a statement of compassion for inmates of detention centres. Next day he has made it clear these people will never settle in Australia. The panel breathes a sigh of relief that the new top banana was not going to go all soft and mushy on our war against refugees.

‘Tough on Border Protection…’

It’s said in a way that you might hear a parent tell a child to eat her vegies. You may not like them but they are sooo good for you. Yet there is nothing that is good about this phrase. It enables our collective inhumanity by blinding us to the sordid reality of our inhumane and utterly unjustified detention policies.

Why are we even using this term?

The euphemism allows us to condone brutality. Border protection is a glib phrase which covers putting women and children into prisons on the hell holes of Manus and Nauru Islands where rape and violence are added to the cruelty of endless deprivation. Death is a real and present danger.

Two men, Reza Berati and Hamid Kehazaei, lost their lives in these facilities. One was bashed to death. The other young man died because of delays in his paper work – delays in obtaining a visa to permit him to get off the Island.

In Australia, comes a knock on the door before dawn.

Others who have already arrived in Australia have been deported to Nauru or Manus Island. Our officials knock at the door before dawn. Terrified asylum seeker and their families get five minutes to gather up a few belongings. We are helped to do this by de-classifying human beings into UMAs.

What are UMAs?

On 19 July 2013, Rudd’s government changed immigration law to classify anybody who comes to Australia by boat after this time as an ‘unauthorised maritime arrival’. UMAs cannot apply for protection in Australia under the United Nations refugee convention . Regardless of whether they are found to be refugees, they cannot be settled in Australia. They must be taken to a regional processing centre – currently either in Nauru or on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea; possibly soon Cambodia.

There is no historical evidence that tough policies and laws have any effect on the flow of boat people to our shores. In years of tough policies under Howard and under the reintroduction of the pacific solution under Gillard numbers doubled.

Stopping boats arriving in Australia of course is not the same as stopping them setting out for our shores. If you listen to politicians from both major parties, however, you would be forgiven for this misunderstanding. In fact, the lie that tough border protection prevents drowning has been repeated so often that it has become accepted as fact. Worse, it is parroted regularly by influential leaders and public figures such as Warren Mundine on the Drum and countless others.

According to the UNHCR, more people boarded boats after Abbott introduced punitive ‘deterrence’ policies, not fewer. Over 54,000 people boarded boats in our region 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. Hundreds more have died in smuggling camps in Thailand.

Let us reject Border Protection and everything it stands for, everything it means in its highly secretive practices. Challenge the term Border Protection whenever it is used. Challenge the assumptions behind it. Our common humanity demands no less of us. Repeal those Abbott immigration law amendments which have made us a cruel and merciless people.

We could start by liberating those incarcerated on our island hell-holes. Declare an amnesty. Show compassion to the suffering. Welcome to our shores those whom we currently punish for being victims of misfortune beyond anyone’s control. Have mercy upon the wretched and the poor of this troubled earth. Or we may never be able to forgive ourselves; live with ourselves as truly autonomous, sentient, compassionate, moral human beings.

Notes.

1. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that the structure of a language affects the perceptions of reality of its speakers and thus influences their thought patterns and worldviews.
2. John Menadue, Stopping the boats, a graph for lazy journalists.
3. The Facts about boat people The media and politicians are lying.

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‘You have got to get all of the systems lining up. Your welfare system, tax system, your industrial relations – workplace relations system – they have all got to be lining up to achieve growth.’ Scott Morrison

For all his media appearances our ambitious new treasurer Scott Morrison is a dark horse with a patchy track record. Head of Tourism Australia, a $350,000 PA job arranged for him by mate Joe Hockey after the 2004 election which ended with an agreed separation. Fran Bailey, his successor said ‘his ego went too far.’ Morrison did get a $300,000 payout.

Entering federal parliament in 2005 Morrison the ‘supreme opportunist’, in one senior Liberal eyes, has come a long way in a short time. His rapid rise and his changing roles don’t make it easy to follow him; know what he stands for at any one time. In two years he is on to his third makeover; his third ministry, a steep step up from Immigration and Social Services, a step which he could well trip over. More likely he will follow the boss’s orders. For as long as it suits him.

Morrison is good at reinventing and promoting himself. The human chameleon began as a moderate who was elevated to the shadow cabinet because he supported Turnbull five years ago. Yet he quickly became a rabid Abbott political conservative to follow his new leader.

Expect further changes in Morrison Ver3 to suit the political climate again. Expect his ruthless pragmatism, his unbridled ego, his ambition to remain the same. Morrison excels at selling himself and quick to change to take advantage of any situation. Beyond these limited political skills does the man really know what he’s doing? His record is thin when you get beneath the spin.

ScoMo, the border enforcer, bills himself as the tough guy who stopped the boats. In fact the boats were pretty well stopped by PM Kevin Rudd’s announcement on July 19, 2013, that any persons arriving irregularly by boat would not be settled in Australia. Boat arrivals fell quickly and dramatically.  Yet ScoMo, like his then boss Abbott, never let the facts get in the way of a good fiction. And like Abbott, he loves to whip up hysteria.

Morrison made news with his attack on the Labor government for meeting costs of flying 21 survivors of the shipwreck of an asylum-seeker boat on Christmas Island to Sydney for the funerals of family members who had died. How dare they, he raged, determined make political capital out a simple act of compassion and basic human decency.

Some say this marked him as a ‘tough man’. Most see it as a sign of a grub, a politician who would have no compunction in cynically whipping up our worst prejudices; our basest instincts. Morrison ranted on 2GB about the wasting of taxpayers’ money. Listeners on the right of politics would be easy to arouse, he calculated shrewdly. He was right.

78,000 of readers of The Australian who voted on the issue in an online poll, were 97 per cent behind Morrison. In a similar poll of 18,000 Sydney Morning Herald readers, however, only 31 per cent agreed with him. Clearly Morrison has a talent for tapping into right wing prejudices, inflaming the passions of those who resent and would punish asylum seekers. It’s ugly and despicable stuff.

Morrison and Abbott lied that being ‘tough on border protection’, to use their jargon for punishing asylum seekers for their misfortune, saved lives at sea. It was a specious claim at the time but it was repeated so often that it became accepted as true. Morrison’s brutality was completely exposed, however, in the scandalous way he whipped up hate over the funeral expenses. Lives had already been lost. His cruelty could no longer be explained away so readily.

Former Liberal leader, John Hewson, called his remarks “insensitive, lacking appropriate compassion, even inhumane”. Nick Xenophon described him at the time as “the greatest grub in the federal parliament”.

Morrison moved on to see himself as the ‘tough cop on the welfare beat’ when he became Minister for social services. ScoMo soon got attention for all the wrong reasons. Women who claimed maternity leave from their work and from the government were ‘rorters’ who were ‘double dipping’. Of course, he did not mean any offence, he quickly added. His gesture of retraction was to blame the system. Not that he is letting go of his crusade against the rorters.

He will, he says, this week, continue his mission as treasurer. Women will be stripped of the ability to claim the 18-week government-funded PPL along with any employer-paid benefits. Not only will this save buckets of money to give to multinational corporations setting up coal mines and the like, it will signal his toughness. It is a message he is fond of. Or no messages at all.

Everything is secret with Morrison. Kate Ellis, Labor Early Childhood shadow minister, says he’s obsessed with secrecy and control in whatever ministry he heads. In six months as social services minister, only two media inquiries were responded to. In six months his media team of fifty received 390 inquiries. It chose to respond to two.

Now having cut his reputation as a hard man headed for the top, Morrison sounds, in his second week in office as if he’s gone all mystical with a mission to ‘line all of the systems up’. Lord knows what he means.

Is he raising Kundalini? Aligning his chakras? Getting his ducks in a row? Just what the country needs right now is another Liberal treasurer who doesn’t know his job to patronise the electorate with more nonsense. It’s not like in Peter Costello’s day when you could do little, know little and rack up a lot of credit because you had Ken Henry as secretary of Treasury. Morrison will get little spoon-feeding from Abbott appointee, former investment banker John Fraser who doesn’t sound like he knows what he’s doing either, for all his self-awareness. ‘I am a prick’, he volunteers. ‘I really am.’

Perhaps Morrison is ‘lining up systems’ to avoid lifting and leaning. It worked for Joe. Hockey went back to 1942 to Menzies’ lie about lifters and leaners, dangerous, divisive nonsense then as it is now. Hockey, you recall also said that the age of entitlement is over. Except for him.

Joe’s being sent to Washington as Ambassador, as a consolation prize for failing to measure up after two years as treasurer. God knows what Washington will make of our human deficit but they won’t feel indebted to us.

Kim Beazley won’t be too flash on it either. Abbott renewed his term until the end of 2016. Being recalled early so that Hockey can be looked after would make anyone feel undervalued, despite being rated highly his peers. Yet the point of getting rid of Hockey – surely – is to start afresh. That’s another reason Morrison makes no sense at all. He’s either gone barking mad or he’s reading Hockey’s notes.

The debut performances from our tyro Treasurer are uninspiring. His interview with Leigh Sales a few days after he got the gig was a shocker. Morrison has a closed mind on ‘fixing the budget’. As far as he is concerned we have an expenditure problem.  We have a spending problem not a revenue problem, he repeats in the maddening sloganeering which was one reason Abbott dudded out. Morrison just doesn’t get it.

No need to raise revenue? No. No need to be in step with a wealth of credible experts including Ken Henry, former Head of Treasury who points to a revenue AND an expenditure problem? Having made a belly-flop of a dive into his portfolio, the newborn treasurer appears to be threshing around not waving but drowning in the baptismal font of his new ministry. Another MP says, of our new treasurer’s lack of expertise, ‘Morrison would drown in the shower’.

When Abbott was challenged, which was not infrequently, he would retreat into three word slogans. Morrison is already doing the same. Is he deaf to his new Prime Minister’s plan that government MPs talk sense? Or could it be that he is not the messiah but just a naughty boy? By being wilfully disobedient to this leader he can diminish Turnbull’s authority in the party room.

Turnbull called for: ‘a style of leadership that respects the people’s intelligence, that explains these complex issues and then sets out the course of action we believe we should take, and makes a case for it’. ‘Advocacy, not slogans’, would be the style of his new government. Except when it comes to his appointment of one he knows who can’t do the job of Treasurer. Someone he can control by giving him the job. Someone who has no option but to follow the PM’s instructions.

Barely a day later, cuckoo in the nest, Morrison is sloganeering like there’s no tomorrow-‘work, save, invest.’

We will all have to put up with the noise, for a while, I guess. Especially Turnbull who has taken a calculated risk in an appointment where the job is clearly too big for the man. Let Morrison waffle on about lining up his systems. We all know who and what he wants to line up if we will never quite know what he means. We all know he will never step out of the wretched cruelty of his past avatars.

If Morrison as Treasurer is Turnbull’s answer, already the 29th PM is asking the wrong question.

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A small, figure struggles up the steps of the Vice Regal mansion in Canberra. It is Assistant Cabinet Secretary, Senator Scott Ryan a king-maker in Malcolm Turnbull’s rise to power. Ryan is carrying a bible bigger than Kelly O’Dwyer’s baby as he helps create the beginning of a new week in national politics. He ushers in a new era.

The scene is being set for another swearing in at Government House, or Yarralumla, meaning ‘echo’ well before it was later brought into play to provide visiting kings and queens with somewhere to stay as well as providing shelter to our Governors General and prevented their having to doss down in the rough. No better place could there be to launch a Ministry for the 21st century.

Born or as it was rebirthed ninety odd years later to reign over us and extended many times over the years, Yarralumla is a symbol of our inner Brit, our glorious colonial past and our divinely ordained royal task masters.

Largely vacant most of the time the mansion would accommodate a lot of Syrian refugees or shelter women fleeing domestic violence, had our leaders chosen the path of the Good Samaritan and not that of the passer-by like the priest and the Levi in Ryan’s bible, on the opposite side of the road.

Worthy as they may be these reflections are the least of the ironies which staunch republican Malcolm Turnbull must savour as he acts genial host and enlightened cabinet-maker while Tony Abbott’s knight, Sir Peter Cosgrove prepares to make himself useful, as best he can, on a salary of $425,000 and only a very limited personal staff.

While Ryan lumps his word of God up the steps, other godly folk amongst the new and newly-recycled ministry do a quick check of product labels in the kitchen to ensure for the sake of Cory Bernardi’s senate committee at least that no halal certified products may be sponsoring terrorism amongst the catering.

A quick sweep of the shrubbery has the AFP and ASIO, who are both in attendance, ensure that there are no eco-Green warriors lurking under leaves amidst the skinks and snakes all posed to leap forward with copies of section 487.2 of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 to commit an act of what George Brandis calls ‘lawfare.’

Dewy eyed with hope and hay fever, others stand around dazedly blinking in the spring sunshine, yet to grow into their shiny new ministries. Kelly O’Dwyer’s baby Olivia breaks the ice.  An avuncular Turnbull smiles sweetly, showing a perfect set of milk-white bottom teeth. His surname Tang Bao, in China is a sweet custard-filled bun.

Monday is a big day for Turnbull and for the nation. Born today is the ‘Sugar bomb’ or ‘Sweet dumpling’ dynasty as Chinese scribes translate Turnbull’s name.  Oozing charm, patrician manners and a dab of Clive Christian No. 1 Pure Perfume for Men, the ebullient Turnbull mingles grinning amongst his team, a shark marshalling a school of minnows.

Eschewing anything as crass as ‘Team Australia,’ Turnbull reaches for his advertising copy book. His team will provide ‘strong, confident, imaginative and innovative leadership for the country’s future in a rapidly changing global economy.’

It is as if he is launching a new corporation. Certainly he breathes not a word about compassion, empathy, social justice or any of the qualities which build community; make us human. Ominously he includes the phrase ‘welfare net’ for those of us who can’t quite manage on the high wire of independent living and who must fall upon the cold, stinting charity of the cost accountant.

If all is not pitch perfect on Monday, Sugar bomb has other sour notes in his history. Associates, former employees and many in his own party eagerly volunteer some saltier alternative epithets for Malcolm Turnbull, whose conduct of his career path to becoming Australia’s 29th Prime Minister has attracted more than a few critics.

In 2009, Dr Brendan Nelson diagnosed Turnbull with narcissistic personality disorder because as he puts it, ‘he says the most appalling things and can’t understand why people get upset. He has no empathy.’

To Annabel Crabb, who once harvested yabbies and prepared pomegranates with the old silvertail, the Turnbull of old is a chest-beating Tarzan ‘more comfortable with grand gestures’ than the realities of political compromise.

Fifteen years ago Turnbull’s spin doctor Mark Wesfield noted both the sugar and the bomb in the complex mix that is the man, the corporate lawyer cum merchant banker cum Prime Minister.

‘Perhaps more than any person in Australian corporate circles, Malcolm Turnbull’s name inevitably provokes reaction. He can be courteous, charming and flattering one minute, and bursting with dark volcanic rage the next, depending on whether or not he is getting his way in negotiations.’

For one glorious morning all discord is briefly forgotten, however, as Sir Peter Cosgrove swears in Sugar Bomb’s ‘Ministry for the 21st Century’, a forward looking Mad-men type name for his brand which Turnbull has spun to excite our expectations for change and innovation while hinting at his hopes for its longevity and to disguise its conservatism.

His new crew is only as new as it can be, given the circumstances of the recent palace revolution that has enthroned him and the constraints of available talent. But anything after Abbott looks appealing.

There is also, inevitably, a bit of blood on the carpet. A wounded Kevin Andrews takes his sacking from Defence personally, even announcing his dumping before sweet dumpling could announce it himself in an extraordinary breach of decorum and political judgement. Bruce Billson also whinges and refuses to be demoted to Cities. Billson ends up licking his wounds in his North Frankston office and wondering what he’ll do for a Christmas drink this year. At, least, Frank Madafferi will still send him a case of grappa.

Malcolm’s picks are ‘a new broom’; ‘a talented bunch’ or that is the spin. In reality, Turnbull’s decisions are political. He owes the National Party for its support during his coup. He must also stitch up his foes and reward his cronies. Apart from these minor concerns the new PM has a finger or two in the ministry pie.

He proclaims that every minister is selected on merit, shaming and perhaps putting on notice the proven duds Hunt and Dutton. He hits back at his internal detractors daring them to put up or shut up,

‘No-one could suggest that this Cabinet, this ministry has been assembled on any basis other than merit,’ he tells the AM program Monday morning. Unlike the deposed Joe Hockey, Turnbull has a record of success in litigation.

Critics call Turnbull’s government ‘Abbott-lite.’ Viewed in one light, some see the PM as Malcolm Abbott, from the other, he appears as Tony Turnbull. Unfairly, unwisely they ignore the silver tail and silver tongue. Yet in policy they have a point. While he has some new faces amongst his galley slaves and while Eric Abetz, Kevin Andrews, Joe Hockey have been jettisoned overboard, the ditching of the hard right will cause no change of course.

Hockey it is said to offered Ambassador to Washington, a reward for failure and proof that the age of entitlement is not over yet for the failed treasurer.  Hockey will be ‘up in class’ as they say in horse racing, in a competitive field of foreign policy thoroughbreds.

But you can take sympathy for the underdog too far. Some see Joe’s affability as all he needs to make him a hit on the diplomatic scene. Yet some, like Bill Shorten, are stumped by the logic of the appointment and fear it may be read as a calculated insult.

‘You can’t sort of buy peace within your divided party by treating the post to Washington — one of our key foreign policy relationships — some sort of consolation prize for a treasurer who has taken Australia nowhere for two years.’

Some new ministers, such as the special minister for state are not unblemished. Mal Brough, no stranger to controversy has already antagonised the senate cross bench by attacking micro parties. Arthur Sinodinis still has questions to answer at ICAC. Most of the ministers who created problems in the Abbott government, moreover, retain their jobs. Dutton and Hunt ‘the great climate change intellectual of the cabinet’ according to Brandis, on Sunday are duds.

More moderate though it may appear, yet younger and with added women, the all-new ministry is cobbled together from some shop-worn components and may quickly fall short of the sort of performance in the sales pitch Turnbull is giving it. Tony Abbott, of course, sees no difference in the political complexion of the new line up.

In his first interview since his Manly surfside snipe at Scott Morrison, Tony Abbott’s promise of ‘no wrecking, no undermining and no sniping’ is elastic enough to permit him to tell News Corp on Sunday that Turnbull’s palace revolution had led to no change in policy direction. It was an Abbott promise after all. The sclerotic heart foundation of a failed Abbott government in exile gives Turnbull its tick of approval. Or its kiss of death.

‘Border protection policy the same, national security policy the same, economic policy the same, even same-sex marriage policy the same, and climate change policy the same. In fact, the rhetoric is the same.’ Tone intones.

Abbott has a point. The Merchant Prince of Point Piper’s golden galleon ‘The pragmatist’ will continue to steer hard right even on the republic. Let small l Liberals cry into their kale smoothies, if they join the Greens, we’ll get their preferences, says Good Prince Mal who is snug in his neocon life preserver.

Mal’s ministry are not all newbies. Also being re-sworn old hands Pyne and Morrison are rewarded for their loyalty by being fitted up with new ministries to keep them under control. Morrison immediately goes troppo opposing Turnbull’s pause of the tax reform white paper. Morrison will be white papering his way to cutting more spending, against all expert advice and in the face of warnings that such a tack will hasten an approaching recession.

‘Cuts’ Morrison could be picking a fight, undermining Turnbull in the party room with an Abbott era approach to the economy. He is already showing more than a tad of his maniacal defiance of reason that saw him king of our nation’s shame, the offshore detention centres. Who may forget his rabid, foam-flecked attack on the Human Rights Commissioner, Gillian Triggs, for daring to pursue the legality of having children in custody.

Other makeovers include former apprentice Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg and Simon Birmingham who inherits Pyne’s abortive higher education reforms, an Augean stable of steaming ordure. Communications is hived off to Mitch Fifield who inherits a mare’s nest of Fraudband sleight of hand in the rollout of an NBN which is 18 billion over budget, four years behind schedule and already obsolete thanks to Turnbull’s turn at the helm.

Some of the newly anointed are toey. Frydenberg promptly spills the worst kept secret in the coalition’s disastrous, ecocidal, uneconomic, mine construction saga a day later by talking of plans to spend five billion, euphemistically ear-marked ‘Northern Project’ on the railway that will help Adani and Gina Rinehart get their newly mined coal to port. It is another step backwards.

Australia will subsidise coal, petroleum and gas consumption by $41 billion in 2015, the International Monetary Fund said last month, the equivalent of 2 per cent of our annual economic output. A recent opinion poll clearly reveals that most Australians would prefer the money to be spent on Education and Health.

P-plate Treasurer ‘Lead-foot’ Morrison will be left to explain how a $5 billion splurge on a railway for your mates is in the nation’s best interests if it’s not embargoed as commercial in confidence, operational, or given its terminus, an on water matter. His weak argument will be that the sum is an item of already committed expenditure.

Turnbull has created a new Minister for Cities and the Built Environment in Jamie Briggs, who will not be in cabinet but who will work with Environment Minister Greg Hunt, sharing his stash of magic mushrooms, hashish and the other natural hallucinogens which inspired his Direct Action stoner scam.

The drugs seem potent. By Friday, high as a kite, Hunt has bobbed up in a presser claiming we have the ‘best and cheapest carbon emission reduction scheme in the world.’ He boasts also of having vetoed Abbott’s plan to hold an inquiry into the BOM. If only he’d done the same with Direct Action. On Friday, China announced the starting date to its national emissions trading scheme

We have a minister for cities but no minister for disabilities, mental health or housing. Perhaps these will manage themselves in the 21st century, or perhaps the cabinet is too big already without adding extra bleeding hearts. Yet a new analysis of the government’s ‘welfare-to-work reforms’ under Labor and Liberals alike has found that they failed to increase single parent employment in Australia. Instead up to 150,000 disadvantaged single parent families and their children are pushed into poverty.

One Nat is cheesed off. His party’s one cabinet position short, he reckons. David Gillespie, member for Lyne tells ABC Rural his party should technically have gained an extra seat in the Cabinet. Just add water … Turnbull would counsel him. He has added water to Agriculture to stitch up a deal with the Nats. The deal draws David Marr’s criticism. ‘He wanted to be Prime Minister, but was it worth the Murray-Darling basin?’

A large part of the price of Turnbull’s seizure of the Liberal Party leadership will be worn by the nation as it suffers another pragmatist at the helm, a silver-tongued, silver tail who may promise optimism and government to take us into the future. It is early days yet but already it seems as if there is more than a touch of the Dr Caligari than Dr Pangloss in Turnbull’s cabinet. In the end it  doesn’t really matter how big the bible that you take to the swearing in if your ministry is as mean and as unfair and as unreal as that of the  last heartless bastard.

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New PM Malcolm Bligh Turnbull has announced measures against domestic violence will be number one priority in his newly rebadged ultra-conservative LNP government. After its makeover, that government is still mainly blokes with a few token sheilas added to cabinet on sufferance, but Prince Mal is promising a feminist twist. He will need to do a lot of repair work, however, if he is to convince us that his latest cheesecake sale is not the same old LNP stall with new window dressing.

Combating domestic violence, he says, will be the first priority for his patriarchal, fossil-fuelled, marriage equality squibbing government as it gears up for what experts tip will be an early election to take advantage of Mal’s honeymoon approval ratings. A hundred million dollars will be spent.

Pin money! The man’s personal bank account contains more than that. He could drop that on the Dapto Dogs and not miss it. But it is at least a different gesture from the nose-thumbing at women of his party’s former PM.

Tony Abbott, Turnbull’s misogynist predecessor, appointed himself Minister for Women as his own pointed snub towards any movement towards gender equality or taking women’s issues seriously.   After two years, there is nothing to point to by the way of his achievements for women.

Worse, his inaction held back any real advances in the causes of gender equality or justice for women. A refusal to get real about dealing with the epidemic of family violence compounded the problem sending the wrong messages and betraying a cavalier disregard or at best an incapacity to understand the issues.

Abbott and the boys, with some help from some women, too, most notably the two Bishop politicians, showed their true colours in Opposition during their vile persecution of a woman who dared to be a PM, a woman who was able to negotiate a minority government among other achievements he could only dream of. By their deeds shall ye know them.

Abbott proceeded to cut funding for legal aid and women’s refuges. His real priorities lay with the boys and their toys.

In April 2014 Abbott announced Australia would acquire another 58 Joint Strike Fighters at a cost of around $90 million per plane, budgeting $24 billion to purchase and operate the aircraft until 2024.  It was another of his infamous captain’s calls. Our paternalistic democracy is not the sort of democracy where the people have any say big ticket items like spending on new aircraft. It’s a pity because half of the population for starters might have a different set of priorities.

No-one is suggesting we disarm. Australia urgently needs to get involved in another costly drawn out US war in the Middle East, a war that is guaranteed to end badly. Again it’s something the people don’t have any say in.  But just half of that $24 million would go a long way towards combating a real and present danger, the war on women, provided we don’t spend it all on awareness campaigns and further lining the pockets of well-heeled media and PR companies with links to the ruling patriarchy.

There are many other areas in which the federal government’s spending reveals its priorities. It is more important to subsidise a dying coal industry than it is to prevent women from being murdered by their partners. The Australian Conservation Foundation reminded us just how much Australians pay for fossil fuel subsidies.  In December 2014 it estimated $47 billion would be allocated by the federal government to the production and use of fossil fuels over the following four years.

Turnbull’s announcement sounds impressive, even newsworthy at first, and that’s where he hopes most listeners will leave it. When you look a little more closely at Turnbull government’s cash splash, however, it is only a drop in the bucket. This is not to dismiss its value.

A range of services, will receive funding including $21 million to help Aboriginal women and women in remote communities. $5 million to the 1800-RESPECT line and funding to help improve training for frontline services. But the crisis calls for far more.

Real money needs to be spent on the front line. Every week three women are hospitalised with brain injuries as a result of family violence. Six women die each month. Last year more than 12000 men in NSW assaulted partners or former partners. Yet after a state review of services women’s refuges in NSW were told they couldn’t just reapply for their own service – if they wanted to retain their refuges, they would have to show they could provide multiple services to all homeless people in their area. Services can no longer be exclusively for victims of domestic violence – they now have to cater to all types of homelessness.

In Victoria, last year, police have had to attend 70,000 incidents of domestic violence, a figure double that of 2013.

It is ‘a national emergency,’ says Michaelia Cash our new Minister for Women. She has got that right but there is no word to describe the damage her government has done with its cuts to peak programmes. The Abbott government took out 300 million last year. Now the same python with a different head wants applause for putting one third of that back in nine months later?

The announcement of more funding is misleading. A con. The coalition government cut funding from domestic violence services last year. The then Minister for social services, Kevin Andrews slashed funding to affordable housing and crisis housing services a week before Christmas, defunding peak bodies such as Homelessness Australia and National Shelter.

Experts identify two urgent priorities, ‘the provision of safe, secure and affordable housing; and provision of a continuum of individualised and open-ended support, including outreach services, that wraps around women and their children in a range of areas (therapy, health, life skills, housing assistance et cetera) for as long as they need it.’

The least Malcolm Turnbull could do is to put back what his predecessor took away from women. Next he could follow up by explaining that today’s announcement is just a tiny down payment, on a real investment in a coordinated campaign. Now that he’s got our attention, he needs talk in specifics and to put his latest funding in context.

His government will spend $100 million dollar to tackle family violence, on measures to keep women safe in their homes and by providing mobile phones that can’t be tracked by abusers.  In his announcement, however, Turnbull chooses to use the word ‘package’ with the connotation of a carefully thought out comprehensive wrap-around solution. Spare us the spin, Mr Turnbull. There is no ‘package’ from your government. At worst it is a cheap easy pre-election commitment, a token approach to women’s issues which rationalises neglect and effectively condones abuse.

Funding not only needs to be restored, massively increased and restructured into dedicated family violence funding, it needs to be integrated and guaranteed. We can do this when we are budgeting for military hardware or subsidising a coal mine but we cannot yet do it for the war on women that domestic violence represents. At present funding is piecemeal and fragmented across a range of agencies. It is less likely to be ongoing and it also serves to hide the real size of the emergency.

Finally, Turnbull could look to his language. As Clementine Ford points out today, the line that real men don’t abuse women is false. They do. Expecting men to somehow shame other men into being non-violent with their partners hasn’t worked.

Expecting men to improve their behaviour by dividing them into the good guys and the bad guys is wishful thinking – and counter-productive. An abuser is unlikely to give a toss if his PM calls his behaviour or even him ‘un-Australian.’ No amount of nagging appeals to masculinity however well intended are like to have any effect. For apart from the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, ‘raft of measures’ and the ‘packages’ we hear the PM bang on about to protect women against their violent menfolk, there is a curious reluctance to address the real cause of the problem. The behaviour of men.

It is not the other bloke who is un-Australian who is to blame Mr Turnbull, it is ourselves. Men are violent. Unless we men are prepared to acknowledge our individual and collective responsibility to change our violent behaviour, our toxic relationships, women will continue to suffer our brutality. You have made a positive announcement about funding. Now take the lead in the owning and sharing of the man problem and you will have taken a significant step in the long, difficult and expensive journey to solutions. Now that would be a vote-winner.