Scott Morrison bobs up on Wednesday’s ABC 7:30 Report for his debut as treasurer, his third role in a Federal Government only two years old. His performance is a shocker. Many viewers switch off or change channels so deeply disturbed are they by even a chance sighting of the member for Cook. Morrison’s 5% rating in the polls as preferred PM suggests a deep public aversion yet his poor public opinion ratings has not put a dint in his ambition.

Not one bit. It’s something Morrison can’t ignore, however, should he genuinely aspire to be a successful Treasurer. It helps if people approve of you. Trust you. Believe you. Respect you. The former minister for immigration and border protection has forfeited all of these, despite his reincarnation as Social Services minister, a role he describes as the ‘tough cop on the welfare beat,’ albeit a softer role than his act as Border Force Supremo.

The Monster of Manus Island lurks not far below the surface of this newly reinvented Morrison. He bull-dozes and blusters his way around a set of fair and reasonable questions designed to permit him to give an account of himself. Nothing new worthy of note emerges but the rest of his performance is scary; a flashback to the bad old days of Abbott. At the end we are left thinking that appointing Morrison is Turnbull’s biggest mistake so far. Unless he means him to fail. The pair have a history of bad blood. Morrison was one of a few who defected from the Turnbull camp to support Tony Abbott, an arrangement sponsored by the NSW Liberal Right.

Promoting the boat-stopper to Treasurer may be Turnbull’s crafty way of controlling his ambitious young rival. Give Morrison a job he can’t do. Cut him down to size. Keep him busy. Then, when he fails, send him packing -along with his neocon austerity nonsense. Then a change of course to more enlightened economic policy.

Of course the reverse may be true. Morrison could be running his own Abbott-era economic austerity agenda to win enough points from the Howard throwbacks and others who form the sclerotic hard right wing Liberal rump to wedge Turnbull in the party room. Thirty Liberals voted for Kevin Andrews, it must be remembered, in the deputy leadership spill.

But that’s idle speculation. What we see on Wednesday is alarming enough without second-guesswork. Morrison spews a fog of words, a noxious, billowing miasma of aggression, evasion and untruth. He bullies. He hectors. He bluffs. It rapidly becomes impossible to recognise the creature advancing under his own cloud of mustard gas.

Is it a venomous toad? Sales certainly isn’t going to kiss him to see if he turns into a prince. In fact after a failure to pin him down on what he knows and is never going to tell, she opens the formal part of the interview by telling him he is wrong to claim the government has an expenditure problem. Sales chides Morrison that we have a revenue problem as well.

Two things became immediately clear. Firstly, Morrison is economically illiterate, despite having taken economics in his degree. He shows little grasp of his new job. Second, what he does know, he won’t be telling. How he helped kick Abbott downstairs, for example, is a story he will never tell. To cap it all Morrison has a vacuous new slogan: ‘work, save and invest,’ courtesy of some think tank somewhere in the dismal Liberal Kiss Army of spin.

Sales gives the new Treasurer a platform to explain himself and his policies to the nation. In particular, he could reveal why cutting government expenditure is now his sole priority despite expert advice that cuts alone are never the answer. Cuts, moreover, would hasten the onset of recession. Morrison fails.

He also gets an opportunity to defend himself against recent Abbott’s recent criticism. Morrison evades the question.

Sales presses Morrison about the part he had played in the Liberal leadership coup. She offers him a chance to respond to Tony Abbott’s surfside allegation that he had ‘badly misled people’ with his claim after the coup that he had warned the PM that the Liberal Party room was about to depose its leader. Even Abbott haters believe the former PM’s claim.

Morrison is evasive, fobbing us off with the lie that this has all been cleared up last week on his friend Ray Hadley’s show. Ray implied he was lying, in fact, even requesting that he put his hand on a Bible which could not be found. Sales counters that Abbott had made his allegation this week, after the Hadley show. Morrison stonewalls, a favourite tactic. Stonewall Morrison has dealt with this question, he alleges and he refuses to discuss it further.

‘I don’t think there’s any profit in going over them again here tonight or any other night.’

In a past life this would have been an ‘on water matter’ or ‘an operational matter.’ Now it can be seen even more clearly for what it is –  sheer, bloody-minded intransigence. Morrison, it seems,  is in no hurry to take up his new PM’s call for a new consultative ministry. Last week Prince Mal promised a new style of leadership that ‘respects people’s intelligence, that explains complex issues and then sets out a course of action.’

This is not what we see from our new back-to-the-future Treasurer. He is in full Abbott minister mode as he evades, denies, dictates terms. Prevaricates. Lies. A persistent Sales eventually get an answer – of sorts. Morrison failed to warn his boss, he says, lamely because it wasn’t his job.

‘I was never the opposition whip and if the prime minister at the time wanted to discuss those matters with me that had been raised, well that was a matter for him.’

It’s nonsense. Raising matters would be a bit difficult if the PM had no idea what matters were coming to a head. Clearly, Morrison has just implicated himself in the coup. Is this the best defence he can come up with? Does he not realise that trust plays a key role in being a successful treasurer? Or does he simply not care?

Having admitted that he did not warn Abbott as he should establishes Morrison’s complicity. He begins to tank early in the interview. His admission costs him credibility. The answers that he is prepared to give Sales, the tedious explanations that are long on rhetoric, short on details fail to explain how he intends to do his job as Treasurer.

Everything he says is dimmed in Morrison-speak, a fog of dissimulation, secret power plays and overweening ambition. Is he axing government spending because this will cost Malcolm Turnbull his authority in the party room? The theory is gaining favour, he is so determined to stick to his austerity course.  Bugger the experts.

For the rest of the interview, viewers are treated to a performance which confirms how and why the Abbott government managed to alienate the people of Australia so quickly; how it clung to neocon ideology at the expense of any reasoned dialogue on social or economic policy; how ideology displaced any mandate, any responsible contract with the Australian people.

Out goes any hope of mutual respect or policy proceeding from a sense of justice and fairness. It was if someone has flicked a switch and we are back in the badlands of Nope, Nope, Nope.

Leigh Sales puts a fair case. Morrison’s government has failed to improve the economy. Things have got worse since Labor was in power. She gives a few reasons. Unemployment is up, GDP is falling while debt and deficit are climbing. Morrison is dismissive. He sweeps away her list of facts, dismissing her evidence as merely Sales’ opinion. He is not remotely interested in any case she may bring; he is on the show to broadcast his own preposterous spin. An arrogant self-righteous superiority is his major contribution to the conversation.

We are plunged back into deepest, darkest Abbott-land, a land of evasion and intractable confrontation in which Ministers do what the IPA or big business tells them. Morrison, the bull-master ignores experts such as former Head of Treasury Ken Henry.  The new treasurer discards the best economic advice available to pursue the same narrow, ideological agenda which has cost his party one Prime Minister already. His mantra is about cuts.

Further cuts to government expenditure must be made- cuts which will punish the poor and needy. GST may rise to increase revenue so that upper and middle income earners may be wooed with income tax cuts as a sweetener at the heart of next election campaign.  The Abbott crusade against the underprivileged continues unabated, despite the loss of the man at the helm. The Liberal party’s addiction to neocon economic theory is as strong as it ever was. The party’s wealthy sponsors in industry commerce and finance are eager to keep it that way.

I think the ABC, like most media organisations, is determined to hold the Government, any government, up to account, and speaking of politicians, of course, always feel that the media is too critical… I would say, as somebody who used to interview people for a living, both as a journalist and then as a barrister, and then, of course, as a politician, I would say that a more effective interviewing style is one that is less aggressive and more forensic. Malcolm Turnbull on The Bolt Report

http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/media/transcript-bolt-report-the-abc-climate-change-and-racial-discrimination-act

The ABC 7:30 Report last Monday treated viewers to Lee Sales’ boldly experimental interpretation of the art of the interview as a non-aggression pact. It was less of an interview than an assisted monologue, a radical departure from Kerry O’Brien’s savaging of former PM leadership coup winner, Julia Gillard. Or indeed, Sales’ own recent Abbott interview where she rightly challenged his empty rhetoric; his sloganeering.

Is this an attempt to meet the Turnbull government’s hope for a more ‘forensic’ ABC, as the PM put it on The Bolt Report when he criticised Sales and Lateline’s Emma Alberici as ‘aggressive’?

Or is the host too scared of her guest to ask hard questions? Or is it OK to attack Labor but another, softer, set of rules apply to Liberal leadership coup winners? Certainly, Sales was soft on Monday.

Cue soft lights and mood music, Leigh Sales all but curtseys to new Liberal Party ruler, Malcolm Turnbull, The Bonnie Black Prince of Point Piper as he enters the 7.30 Report studio, lord of all he surveys.  Her greeting celebrates, cements Prince Mal’s political ascension,

‘Prime Minister, congratulations on your elevation to the position.’

Having put our newest Dear Leader up there, and ourselves down lower, the next bit is tricky. How should a commoner put questions to a king – especially one with Black Prince Mal’s fearsome reputation? Even Kerry Packer feared him. So, too does ‘our ABC.’ Mal, as Minister of Communications under Abbott presided over deep cuts to ABC funding.

Many Liberals would go even further; privatise Aunty out of obligation to the commercial masters of the airwaves such as Rupert Murdoch who see the public broadcaster as unfair competition. A waste of public money.

Two years ago a Murdoch Adelaide paper released the salaries of the ABC to help Rupert’s case. Leigh Sales’ salary was then $280,400, a bargain compared with Tony Jones on $355,789, yet each is one third of their counterparts on commercial flagships Seven, Nine or Ten.

Some say the publication of ABC salaries was aimed at recruiting talent but it has left most ordinary punters hoping for value for money. And so it was on Monday night.

Opting for a post- modern deconstruction of the traditional question and answer format, Sales co-opts her host into interview as assisted monologue. Her questions serve as Turnbull talking points not as opportunities to challenge what are often false or very flimsy generalities. Turnbull is relieved and perplexed at this lowering of expectations.

Prince Mal need not actually answer any or all of her questions, Sales makes clear, nor need he remain relevant in his responses. Making sense is entirely up to him. She will ask what seem to be questions but he can answer any way he likes. She will not interrupt. Follow ups are verboten lest Dear Leader be held to account for contradicting himself, for example as he does in his specious case for his party’s Direct Action confidence trick as an effective emissions control.

Sales opens by playfully making a pact with Mal to respect the sanctity of the opinion poll, ensuring that he knew she would be calling the shots on her show. He readily agrees that he does take polls seriously. More than most, he smiles.

Our postmodern interviewer Sales says she will remember this amazing insight. His assent will help her with her future scripts. It will also help keep future reports fluffy and focused on what the polls say this week. Or playing gotcha. It beats doing more detailed research.

Uncritical acceptance of opinion polls helps trivialise political conversations and overvalues impressions. Snapshots of our feelings are elevated and inflated out of all proportion to their true worth or beyond the means of most interpreters to adequately contextualize and responsibly explain. Every set of poll statistics deserves at least three basic questions.

Where do they come from? What are they actually measuring? And what have the pollsters done to the data?

Mal says none of this and Leigh is not about to prompt him for us. He does warn that a poll is only a snapshot but his big statement is that he takes them very seriously – more seriously than most. Some viewers are intrigued by the PM’s candid reply but Prince Mal is keen to avoid even a friendly gotcha moment.

But wait, there’s more. Prince Mal is disarmingly, charmingly frank about what lies beyond the looking glass. He is about to give Sales another exclusive. Politicians tell fibs!  They pretend opinion polls don’t interest them. Now that’s an exclusive. You heard it first on the Leigh and Mal show.

He waffles on. Whatever Mal may have said about polls not meaning anything, he never meant it, it is just part of his political shtick. You say stuff when you are politics.

The PM makes it clear that he takes polls very seriously, before worrying that this may sound foolish. He adds that polls are just a snapshot in time in case we think that he will be amazingly popular for all eternity, although it would be fitting.

A green light on polls allows Sales to lower the boom. She talks dirty; goes for the fundamentals. Prince Mal is asked about his government’s core values and beliefs. He nearly drops his dagger, dripping with Abbott’s blood in shock. Hard core so early! He is thrown.

The soft approach is a disaster. With no adversary to rise against, Turnbull flops badly. He bores on regardless, however, a good twenty minutes of piffle. He lacks focus, detail and structure. He expresses tepid generalities in long, over-qualified badly finished sentences. The freedom word comes out – ‘it’s all about freedom.’ As we all saw in the Liberal party’s attempts to stop its own members holding a conscience vote on gay marriage. Or in the Royal Commission into Bill Shorten.

Freedom of speech has been outlawed by this government if you are a doctor, nurse or any other government employee on Nauru or Manus Island and you happen to report any breach of the law or violation of our international rights obligations. Leigh Sales could take up these or a host of other incursions into our civil liberties under the coalition but she is not following up. Her role is to plump up the cushions on Mal’s day bed and hold his hand while he rambles on, not to hold her guest to account for his arrant nonsense or ask him to explain himself out of respect for his viewers.

Securing any specific commitments is off limits in this version of 7:30 Report. Take tax for example, Sales prompts him to reveal that he is going to change taxes but that’s it. Turnbull is allowed to get away with the ‘not ruling anything in not ruling anything out’ evasion on tax reform. Yet up to now everything has been ruled out in favour of coercing the states to propose a GST increase that the Federal government is too wimpy to impose itself. The savings then can be squandered on tax cuts to boost re-election.

Superannuation concessions for the rich, the capital gains tax discount, negative gearing, closing loopholes for the top 1% were all off the table for the coalition. An indulgent Sales helps to keep it that way by not following up or challenging Turnbull’s windy waffling.

Sales fawns over her royal guest, even apologising for interrupting him when he was rambling so badly he had become completely incoherent.

Sales: “I’m sorry I’m laughing, but you’re not at the dispatch box and you’re not at the bar, so I’ve got to squeeze in one more question before we run out of time.”

Turnbull: “One more question. Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

Sales: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry to be rude like that too.”

Turnbull: “You’re not being rude at all. It’s quite understandable.”

Sales: “The – no, no, I did cut you directly off.”

Turnbull: “That’s fine.”

Sales’ mission, clearly is to put Prince Mal at ease. Handmaiden to her latest star, she gently massages his regal ego, plying him with soft-serve questions and permitting him to blather on happily free from any hint of scrutiny or obligation to even make sense. Turnbull-shit.

Yet even a soft interview gives Turnbull enough rope to hang himself. Left unchallenged, he has nothing to say, no concrete proposals, no insights, no ideas, no plan but a snake oil salesman’s determination to talk things up. His assertions are include alarmingly vacuous claims.

‘So everything I can say to inspire confidence is going to help the economy.’

Sadly, it is on environment that Turnbull is most compromised having been a trenchant critic of direct action in the past. Tonight, however, everything is rosy. Besides, he knows each time he repeats a lie, it gains acceptance; displaces the truth.

… what’s good about the Emissions Reduction Fund and the other mechanisms the Government has in place? What’s good about them is they’re working. .. the Government’s policies will achieve the reductions that have been – that we’re taking to the Paris conference of the parties.

The last word may go to Sales whose light-hearted tweet trivialises viewer responses; she is above criticism or at least she will laugh off her responsibility to at least help her guests make sense.

“Leigh Sales went too hard/too soft in her interview last night and she is a left-wing stooge/right-wing fascist. Her outfit was gross/awesome/reminiscent of a bag lady. Bring back Kerry O’Brien​/Chris Uhlmann​/the guy who plays the piano with the puppet,” she posts.

Not so fast, Leigh. Parodying audience responses does not diminish our right to have expectations nor does it relieve you of your responsibility to hold your guests to account; keep the bastards honest. Don’t go soft on us. There’s more than enough fluffy stuff on the commercial channels. We are drowning in a tide of spin. Giving Turnbull or his ilk a free ride will cost every one of us dearly in the end.

Malcolm Turnbull is all mouth and no trousers. His ’21st-century government and a ministry for the future’ is anything but. Nowhere is this clearer than with the environment. In 2010 he had the right words.

‘We as a human species have a deep and abiding obligation to this planet and to the generations that will come after us.’

Now he clearly doesn’t give a toss. In his first week as PM in parliament he ridicules Labor and its renewable energy aspirations using plenty of invective and rhetoric but a damning lack of argument.

Fancy proposing, without any idea of the cost of the abatement, the cost of proposing that 50% of energy had to come from renewables! What if that reduction in emissions you needed could come more cost-effectively from carbon storage, by planting trees, by soil carbon, by using gas, by using clean coal, by energy efficiency?

What if this is an entirely specious and irresponsible speculation posing as an argument, Mr Turnbull? Or are you prepared to ignore the experts; the science in favour of the sound of your own voice? What if such schemes will take far longer to achieve their objectives than originally planned; achieve much less than expected; cost far more than was budgeted. The Australia Institute pointed out in research paper four years ago.

Direct Action is unlikely to achieve more than 18 per cent of your party’s target of reducing emissions by five per cent on 2000 levels by 2020. Emissions falling by five per cent on 2000 levels? In 2020, they would instead rise by 18.4 per cent? Facts not empty rhetoric, Mr Turnbull. We had more than enough hot air from your predecessor.

We know hot air when we hear it, Mr Turnbull. So do you. You once described Direct Action climate change policy as “fiscal recklessness on a grand scale” but now you would have us believe the policy is a “resounding success”.

Clean coal? Really? More Turnbullshit. Clean coal doesn’t exist Mr Turnbull and you know it. As you put it in 2010,

“Despite all of the money and all of the hope that has been put into carbon capture and storage there is still, as of today, not one industrial scale coal fired power station using carbon capture and storage”.

If you were at all serious about the future, your past speeches would be a good start. Next you would set up an inquiry into work experience boy Greg Hunt mishandling of his brief as Environment Minister. A PM who is really making plans for the future as you so eloquently put it, a PM who is making a case for agility and being on our toes cannot afford to have a Hunt anywhere near environmental policy.

Hunt is an embarrassing liability in the Environment Ministry with his farcical Direct Action plan and his record of having his eyes wide shut whether it be approving dirty big international coal mines but forgetting about the local water supply or the endangered fauna; holes in the ground to bury our future or risking our heritage in the Great Barrier Reef to ships bearing coal with unskilled underpaid crews to make profits for overseas merchants.

Hunt closed his eyes to the building of a refuelling port on Melville Island in the Tiwis. The excuse was that his ministry is so overworked that it failed to notice the construction of a round the clock commercial refuelling port in a pristine part of Australia without any environmental study.

A $130m deep-sea port project was allowed to go ahead without environmental assessment or approval, despite being in an area of ecological national significance, home to nesting turtles and dugongs. Storage tanks that can store up to 30 million litres of diesel have been installed within the area. Already there has been diesel spill of 3,500 litres.

The latest report on the Port Melville construction without approval fiasco is that the government will not be taking any further action. The Federal Department of Environment has dropped its investigation into the Tiwi Land Council and its Singaporean development partners.

Hunt cannot be allowed to get away this gross negligence of his portfolio and allow Australia’s heritage and future to degenerate into a free-for-all for international speculators keen to exploit our nation’s lack of vigilance, due diligence.

The man was overseen Australia’s carbon emissions rise since the coalition gained office thanks to the abolition of the carbon tax which was never a tax but an emissions trading scheme which even Tony Abbott used to support before he flip-flopped because it was such a good strategy to beat Labor with. Hunt has gone along with this, including the nonsense that families gained $500 per household. Few gained at all – and in the long term all lost. Labor’s scheme was both sensible and workable.

Renewables are the key to our future energy needs yet while you were announcing your new cabinet, the quarterly Ernst & Young ranking of the attractiveness of global markets for renewable energy investment has demoted Australia further to now be out of the top 10, citing ‘an all-out attack on the Country’s wind sector’ by the government.

As a new Prime Minister who wants to offer a credible message of hope Mr Turnbull, you need to do more than mention the word ‘renewal’ frequently and the need to ’embrace the future’ or the nation will see your rhetoric as merely political, a way of drawing a contrast with the coal-fired climate change denying, back to the 1950s, Abbott gang.

Start by holding Greg Hunt to account. Stand him down. Get a Minister for the Environment who can look after the environment.

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Another week, another Prime Minister struts and frets the poop deck of Federal Politics as the Liberals throw mad Captain Abbott overboard and bring back Malcolm Turnstile from the brig in a desperate attempt to calm rising seas, distract circling sharks and other monsters of the deep and to keep their leaky vessel off the rocks.

Captain Ayatollah as he is known to former crews, appears delighted to be at the centre of the political universe and in his rightful appointed place at last. He can’t get seem to get that thin grin off his face. Malcolm Bligh Turnbull flashes his barracuda bottom teeth as he contemplates his new cabinet demotions and the settling of old scores. Ever gracious in victory, he congratulates Fortune on finally coming to her senses, even if it did take five long years for her to get it right.

Nothing becomes Tony Abbott, so much in his Prime Ministership as the leaving of it. Not that he makes a good end. Like all bad hams, he drags it out too long. Not until mid-day Tuesday, does he share with the nation his parting pearls on losing Monday’s leadership spill against him by a margin of ten votes. Where is he hiding? Has his stint in the Top End convinced him to copy Adam Giles and refuse to step down? Like a shark can he only swim forward?

A SkyNews helicopter quarries him out at lunchtime Tuesday outside Parliament House, a hunched figure walking awkwardly as he were a farmer with a pig under each arm. It circles above, upstaging the former PM who rants and rattles the mental leg-irons of his slogans, clichés and lies, in subdued but nevertheless classic Abbott fashion.

Beelzebub, God of lies, Lord of the Flies why hast thou forsaken me? Am I to be destroyed by my own hubris?

He lies that he sees it as an honour to be asked to go. The rest of his farewell is shredded by the noisy blades of the hovering media chopper. Right to the end he has trouble getting his message out. Or does he? Luckily half his audience is deafened or they might be upset; take issue with his attack on them. Unbelievably, he promises to stop his sniping, hoping doubtless for some kind of truce.

Abbott whimpers. Snipes. Curse Turnbull, this isn’t the twenty-one flag ‘Presser’ of the week he had planned; his glorious war on Syria’s ‘first bombs away’ of his recovery is planned for Wednesday. Abbott blames everyone and everything but himself for his fate, a true anti-hero to the bitter end. The ‘Meeja’ cop a broadside. But a bad end cannot detract from his accomplishment. Going. It is the most seemly and fitting thing he could ever do as PM. Or have others do to him.

Colleagues choke back tears of grief and pity. Oh, that it took so long to get rid of him. Tributes flow from the lips of those who lopped him; cursed him when he held power. Morrison’s Father Confessor, His eminence raving Ray Hadley, Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt go ballistic. They have lost the best ratings milch-cow in the history of shock-jock demagoguery.  They know they won’t be telling Malcolm what to think. Besides his head is too big.

The consensus among these opinionated egotists of the shock-jockracy is that Turnbull thinks too much of himself. Australia be warned. He who falls in love with himself shall have no rivals. Turnbull take note.

A staffer working overtime shredding documents in Abbott’s office Monday night, however, shows remarkable understatement and restraint. He calls out to Turnbull, who is taking a nocturnal stroll around his palace, noting who’s still at work, congratulating himself on taking possession.

‘Malcolm. Malcolm.’

‘Yes, what is it, my loyal and dutiful subject?’

‘You are a Greg Hunt.’

Consumed by recrimination and regret, Abbott cannot bring himself to attend his rival’s swearing in, the formal handing over of his wonderland of power. Flushed out of hiding, all he can do is play the victim. He flails about him; lashes out.

‘We have more polls and more commentary than ever before — mostly sour, bitter, character assassination. Poll-driven panic has produced a revolving-door prime ministership, which can’t be good for our country, and a febrile media culture has developed that rewards treachery.’

For all his macho swagger; for all his fearless shirt-fronting, onion-eating, public courage Tony Abbott wimps out. In the end he cannot face even his own knight, Sir Peter Cosgrove.

Abbott, the avowed monarchist, resigns by fax in one last gaffe. He breaches protocol, committing Lèse majesté against the Australian Governor General representative of her majesty the queen.

The deposed PM is absent without leave from parliament all week. An ABC camera lingers on a vacant back bench seat now allocated to him, unwarmed by his nether regions all week, the unfilled place, a metaphor for his time at the top. A hot-shot opposition leader, the job of Prime Minister proved just too big for the man. Not that it stopped him having a go.

Abbott was always prepared to punch above his weight. Foolishly at times. Yet it was his pugnacity, his conviction that he could beat Bill Shorten and that beating Shorten and hammering Labor was all that being PM entailed, more than any other flaw which made Abbott the architect of his own downfall.

Scribes are quick to list his many other failings. His war against the Left, caused him to flip-flop on the economy, on the emissions trading tax he had previously supported; on anything in which he needed in order to oppose Labor.

His captain’s calls were the signature notes of his capacity for monumental ineptitude. Last Friday’s leak to the Daily Telegraph purporting to be his cabinet reshuffle plans was taken as a leak from his office, whatever its true origin, such is the well-established pattern. It creates a swell of disaffection and discontent to boost Turnbull’s recruiting drive.

His grandiose delusions, his mendacity, his broken promises helped make Abbott the most unpopular and least successful prime minister in Australian history and contributed inevitably to his spill. And more than a touch of madness. Turnbull tells anyone who will listen that the increasingly erratic PM is burning the house down.

A liability to his party and an ever-increasing threat to the seats of growing numbers of his colleagues, Abbott is deposed by his nemesis, the man he, himself, did down five years earlier. It is karma with more than a whiff of betrayal. Of course when pressed, Scott Morrison has his hands clean despite his Holiness Ray Hadley wanting him to swear his innocence on a bible. Similarly Julie Bishop has played no part at all, she assures us in her PM’s downfall.

Scott Morrison does not contend the deputy leadership spill despite the PM summonsing him the day before, promising him the posts of Treasurer and party deputy leader, provided he stand for deputy. Morrison cops it from Ray Hadley but denies he colluded with Turnbull. This is the most amazing ‘hands-free’ leadership coup in history it would appear but give it a week and the dirt will start to come out.

Already there are leaks about Turnbull’s claim to favour women. He has the worst record as Communications Minister for employing female staff members. Of course, the figures are misleading as he happily explains to Labor questions, when they can get their questions right.

Having got its worst actor ever off stage, the Liberal party has no choice but to fall back on another old ham, Malcolm Bligh Turnbull, who seizes his chance to finally knife his rival. He promises less shouting in parliament. He always prepared to argue clearly and equably why he is always right.

Turnbull, a long-winded narcissistic know-all proceeds at length to talk himself and his party up and to put everyone else down through a week of parliament in which Labor appears under some sort of hypnagogic spell. In the meantime several Abbott Cabinet Ministers, Andrews, Hockey, Dutton keep nicking out to appear on TV auditioning for their former jobs. A disgusted Liberal MP calls their performances ‘craven.’

It is not an edifying performance from either side. Some see Turnbull as a Rumpole reprising his best barratry. Most are distressed to hear him embrace the right. Labor accuses him of being an Abbott with elocution; an Abbott in a better suit. Burke notes that the new PM has locked himself in to every one of the Abbott government policies.

Turnbull hectors, lectures and patronises even Tanya Plibersek on Foreign Aid who responds with a request for a little less mansplaining. Leave the bloviating to Brandis, she could have added –  for everybody’s sake. There is a palpable sense, however, of the new PM having got what he wants, just going through the motions of being engaged by parliamentary debate.

The key task at hand for Turnbull is to choose a cabinet that will tide him over until an early election delivers him another three years of power at least. Malcolm Blowhard Turnbull may be fond of the sound of his own voice but he is even fonder of getting his own way. Coalition godfather, Rupert Murdoch freely dispenses his well-intentioned advice.

‘Sad to see such a decent man as Abbott toppled,’ Murdoch writes in a tweet. ‘Now Turnbull needs a November election before Labor sacks Shorten.’

Not so fast, Rupert. Malcolm has to pick the right team. He’s had plenty of prompting, thank you. The Liberal parliamentary party is not shy of self-promoters. Happily, such types are also like their former leader undone by their own hubris. Look at Morrison, for example.

Scott Morrison, it is widely held will be Treasurer because Joe was hopeless. Morrison, the people smuggler, the arrogant bully of Gillian Triggs is held up in contrast as a ‘good performer.’ Reza Berati’s family won’t be writing any character references. Barati was bashed to death in February by a Manus Island guard and an accomplice. Those sexually abused in the Nauru camp won’t be writing any testimonials for either Morrison or Dutton who recently swept aside the findings of the Senate Committee as being politically motivated.

‘Good performer’ is a self-referential, self-serving term, as if it matters not a jot what it is that is being performed, be it cruelty, secrecy and utter contempt for accountability and due process. No-one who presided over the indefinite detention of men, women and children in conditions of punitive neglect in the Abbott government’s mission to stop the boats is fit to be in government let alone hold a ministry.

Malcolm Turnbull will not be guided by such concerns, however. He will be interested only in balancing power within his cabinet, of keeping a political lid on things until he can get re-elected. But don’t think that after this the ‘true Malcolm’ will return to his small l Liberal, progressive ways. Politics is all about power and Turnbull has to appease and control a right wing party where power is wielded by throwbacks to the Howard era whose attitudes and values are woefully out of step with modern society.

Turnbull may be our new Prime Minister but he inherits a parliamentary party of refugees from reality; he is bound to their hide-bound conservatism for his very existence, let alone his continued survival.

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The Liberal Party has blown a million dollars on the Canning by-election. $1.2 million so far, to be precise – not that anyone’s counting. Not that we will ever know.

A fortune has been wasted in a final, futile attempt to save Tony Abbott’s career as PM.  Now Malcolm Turnbull has deposed Abbott, what sort of a return will the Liberals get on their investment? Or the nation? Not to mention the eternal bridesmaids, the electorate of Canning, the people of Australia?

Turnbull will not rush to embrace the Abbott vice-captain’s pick. He has enough ultra-conservatives frustrating his control of the parliamentary party as it is. Another Cory Bernardi with all the extra baggage of an ex-serviceman is no help to him.

Especially an Andrew Hastie who clearly has not had time to work out who he is or exactly what he stands for. If he ever can.

Not that the Canning Liberal candidate wants to share too much; give very much away. Bonding with the electorate is best done at arm’s length. Hastie sees his fundamentalist views as off limits, as if somehow they are not integral to his decisions as a politician. Besides, ‘voters are sick of this crap,’ he tells a reporter.

Andrew Hastie was still telling ABC listeners this week that he wasn’t a politician. One host corrected him on air. Yet you can understand his confusion. The youngster was an SAS captain until Julie Bishop coaxed him out of his uniform and into politics a few weeks ago.

Why was the junior army officer recruited? Bishop liked the cut of his jib. Tony Abbott’s conservative journo mate Greg Sheridan was also attracted to the young man years earlier using him in a piece on the war in Afghanistan. The local selection committee were also all over him like a rash.

What exactly it is about a soldier that makes conservatives drool is a complex issue but it appears to include a fondness for authority and a nostalgic hankering for simple certainties, black and white thinking, a backward looking affection for security by the imposition of force.

These very same qualities may be found in spades amongst the hard right core of the modern moribund Liberal party if not liberally dispersed throughout.

If looking backwards is a worry, so too is assuming that a military background is an asset in modern politics. Whatever it is that suggests Hastie or anyone like him will become a ‘good politician’ is never spelled out but it is equally disturbing. The new young candidate is more likely to turn into another right-winger like Tony Abbott with all his rigidity, his inability to empathise; communicate; represent ordinary, decent Australians.

Military types are seldom democratic or flexible in their thinking.

“I know what I believe and I believe what I believe is right,”

George W Bush, once endearingly said about his own closed mind; his opinionated dogmatism. Bush could have been channelling Tony Abbott. Similarly, Hastie refuses to even discuss his fundamental religious beliefs, state his grounds, especially on his creationism. Does Australia need more of this mindset in Canberra?

Soldiers are well-trained in taking orders.  Bullying and bastardisation also remain part of their rites of passage, their culture despite many well-meaning promises of reform. Andy’s professional obedience would have been handy to the former PM.

A weak leader, independently minded subordinates bothered Abbott. Toadies did a lot better. How else to explain the rise and rise of Bruce Billson? Or Abbott’s indulgence of the misrule of Joe Hockey as treasurer. But the choice goes beyond the PM’s need for tame followers or any other personal weakness.

Putting to one side ‘Two year Tony’s Abbott’s fetish for the military, his eagerness to bond with another macho man of action, the Hastie runs deeper than any one actor; any individual’s agency.  Choosing a man with a military background helps to perpetuate the old guard, the male oligarchy, the boys’ club if you will. The old guard, an endangered species, is fighting a rear-guard action in the real world but it will spare no expense to turn back the clock in politics. It remains convinced it is born to rule. Witness Tony’s abject blaming of others right to the end.

Tony Abbott was deposed on Monday but to hear him talk, it was nothing he had done, no reflection on his decision-making, his dud prime ministership. Narcissist old guard politicians are like that. As he bleated on TV, it was all someone else’s fault. The media did him down by publishing malicious leaks and false rumours. So unfair.

Unfair? Nothing like the leaks his office fed the Daily Telegraph, daily? Nothing like the way Murdoch’s papers boosted this political nonentity  into power?  Left to his own devices, he would always find his job too big for the man. As it was at the end.

The uniform was no consolation to the former PM when the chips were down. He broke with protocol. The representative of his beloved monarch was sent a fax. Abbott did not have the ticker to concede defeat to his own knight, Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove. A military fetish did not help his personal bravery.

Besides a personal appearance would have meant shaking that bastard arch rival Turnbull’s hand. No. As he said on each of the three brief occasions he visited, the Canning by-election was not about him. Nope. Nope. Nope. So what is it about?

Canning is about Liberal values. Forget the rhetoric about individualism in action, self-help, keeping our great nation safe and how the coalition government has a PLAN. Despite there being all sorts of talk about choosing a woman candidate, or a local candidate, the Liberal plan is all about the man. Hastie, the young reactionary was head-hunted. He was approached by Julie Bishop, agreed to stand and then resigned from the Army. Then the money was tipped in.

Who needs hospitals, schools, women’s refuges? Helping Andrew Hastie buy a safe Liberal seat is a real priority. Canning show-cases the independence, the freedoms, the respect for the individual and other slogans Liberals like George Brandis are so fond of repeating over a reflective single malt in his all-male Savage club. A lad from a privileged background can’t possibly be abandoned, left to his own devices or be trusted to win a safe seat on his own merit. What he needs is a massive subsidy.

But it’s a hand up not a hand out. Tomorrow Hastie should have a job for life with all the other ‘lifters’ in parliament who have succeeded by their own hard work unhindered by their wealthy, powerful and privileged families. Now the ex-soldier has taken an opportunity to make something of himself, despite his opportunity being pre-made, offered to him on a plate. Of course he must behave himself; follow party room directions; read the daily talking points.

In Canning, our taxes are hard at work, the Liberal poster boy for rugged self-reliance and initiative, Andrew Hastie must pretend he has something to offer voters. Not that he was selected to suit the party’s needs. The Liberal machine picked Hastie because they liked his kerb appeal. In the post-modern era, politics has moved on – transitioned – from ideals of public service and commitment to principles to whatever looks good. Exalting image over substance, matches the party’s elevation of pragmatism over any kind of principle.

For most of us Hastie represents a bridge too far; a travesty of the whole process of candidate selection. In Canning, however, an advertising campaign is enabled to usurp a political campaign. The selection of the new recruit has nothing to do with seeking a people’s representative or grass-roots or any other form of democracy. It’s about making the Liberal Party look better than it really is. That is hard enough, especially in its current crisis. By choosing Hastie, however, the Liberals have made a hard task impossible.

Malcolm Turnbull, by nature a more moderate Liberal, has just won a leadership coup more by default than by personal popularity with his party.  He already has his hands full attempting to assert his authority over a bitterly divided party. The new PM does not want to have another rabid right wing pup to call to heel.

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Wish I could say something good about Malcolm Turnbull. OK. He’s not Tony Abbott.

There. Feel better now? What’s that? He got rid of Abbott? Well, no, Abbott did a pretty good job of that himself. Before he was rejected by those whose interests he threatened to stuff up; those whose futures he was about to ruin. But not Malcolm’s, at least not right away.

Malcom’s a former tycoon and a lawyer, a wordsmith with business smarts as well as a former Merchant banker, you say? Please. A rhyming slang, is how his peers see him.

Already he is waffling on about being consultative leader who runs a traditional collaborative cabinet government. Last time the tosser was full of it. He meant it, too, before talking everyone else under the table.

On the good side: Turnbull has command of complex issues and is keen to articulate his mastery. On the bad side: Turnbull has command of complex issues and is keen to articulate his mastery, Peter Lewis and Jackie Woods

No-one could fault Turnbull’s understanding or his principles. He was just a dud when it came to leading the team. Sound familiar?

At least the new Liberal leader is recycled, a hand-spun home makeover, you say, a homely re-purposed hand me down kaftan cum security blanket knitted out of some of grandpa’s old woolly work socks that will keep the party snug and warm, until the next election? It doesn’t sound that way from all the bleating and whinging so far.

Cory Bernardi is already bleating he’s left out in the cold again, but a Turnbull-led Liberal Party is not that broad a kaftan. Expect a fuss from other hard right nutters such as Nikolic, Abetz, Andrews, Christensen and too many others to name left outside the tent pissing in. Abbott had them inside the tent pissing out. Or so they thought.

OK, at least the Liberals are recycling at last. But isn’t that putting a bit too much spin on an act of desperation. Not cosying up together, just a mob of sheep rushing to huddle up miserably frightened by a bad storm. Most Liberal MPs can’t stand the arrogant bastard who failed last time he held the reins, the smart-arse they just re-elected leader, in a panic to be free of the last mad bastard.

Two cheers are in order. Liberals are free at last of Abbott’s oligarchy, aka the Credlinator and rule by PMO and the sidelining of cabinet. Yet why recycle a leader who didn’t fit last time? Could it be that Malcolm was the only option? An out of date default back up programme?

Still some points at least for recycling even if it means another sort of bully is back in charge for a while.

Will voters see through the makeover? Or will they see it as another expensive Direct Action con, which the coal-fired party desperately hopes we won’t understand but which Hunt can somehow claim is a world first. Perhaps it is in a way.

I’m with First Dog on this. If Malcolm Turnbull is the answer, you are asking the wrong question. As Malcolm Turnbull, takes his turn carrying the coal scuttle that is the Liberal Party leadership, don’t expect too much in the way of a change of course, least of all in those fabulous national conversations we’ve all been having about the need to pay more tax and have less freedom of speech.

All of our national nattering, getting stuff off our community chests has been obligingly helped along with lashings of data retention, provided by our communications minister and former OzEmail director Malcolm Turnbull who practically invented all that Internet stuff, as his technologically illiterate former PM was fond of boasting when it suited him.

Turnbull returned the vote of confidence by enabling the state full and free access to every citizen’s private cyber life. Say what you like about Turnbull, he gets things done.

Communications Minister, Turnbull was the head-kicker who got on to the ABC over Q&A having Zaky Mallah, the man who dared to travel to Syria to film the Syrian civil war in its show.

‘Heads must roll’ said Abbott, channelling his death cult nemesis while doing the nation a favour by forbidding his ministers from appearing on the show, adding with his finely nuanced understanding of the role of public broadcasting, ‘Which side is the ABC on?’

In case this threat to its independence was dismissed another Abbott bit of hairy chest-beating or shirtfronting, Minister Turnbull quickly put the boot into Q&A, confirming the Liberal party line that the ABC is infested with lefties, greenies and fellow travellers on an anti-government jihad.

At least you could say Turnbull actually did something in bullying Mark Scott. Something in addition to the massive cut in funding, the ‘efficiency dividend’ to stifle independence of Joe Hockey’s IPA Budget he seemed happy with earlier.

Now Q&A must share a studio with Peppa Pig and co. Its tweets are vetted, too.

Welcome to Malcolm in the Middle, Episode Two. Or is it just another repeat?

“It takes a good captain to help all the players of a team to excel.” Tony Abbott 31 January 2015

Tony Abbott’s ABC 7:30 Report interview with Leigh Sales, easily the worst in living memory for any serving Prime Minister, sets the high-water mark in a week in politics in which it becomes ‘crystal clear’ in PM-speak, that he and his government are not waving but drowning.

The government is awash all week; overwhelmed by opportunities. It is a week, flagged – as the glorious launch of our righteous crusade against evil in Syria yet it is a week in which a flat-footed PM loses his purchase, is swept up in a wave of refugee compassion and almost drowns when the refugee crisis throws the old boat-stopper a life preserver.

Abbott finds himself compelled by a rapidly rising international tide to seek some of the moral high ground it promises. He declares 12,000 Syrian refugees will be permanently resettled in Australia. Under pressure he rescinds his earlier decision to cut refugees from other countries and makes this an extra 12,000, unleashing an orgy of self-congratulation and false statistics from ministers keen to perpetrate the government lie that we are per capita the most generous refugee takers in the world.

UNHCR boffins will work out which batch of Syrians best suit his requirements. Syrian refugees on Nauru, Manus or on the mainland, however, will continue to rot in hell where they belong because of their deals with evil people smugglers. No word is spoken of forced repatriations to Syria ceasing.

Yet not even his conflicted, conditional ‘yes’ to more refugees, ‘ nor his stylish new combatant Andrew Hastie’s war on crystal meth in Canning can provide a lifeline to an Abbott government now totally out of its depth. Like the opposition leader, it is just treading water.

Sales offers Abbott a hand up. Calls on him to give an account of his leadership; his government’s achievements. A curiously flat as a tack Abbott is not up to it. Only his tin ear is working. He falls back on reprising old campaign slogans.  A narcoleptic trance overtakes him. He talks in his sleep about boats and carbon taxes; maunders about jobs and growth. Then Sales raises the PM’s record ever lower poll results; his ever rising unpopularity with voters.

Abbott awakes. His temper is bad. He peevishly attacks the ABC. Our national broadcaster ignores all his government’s good news. Sales is out of line. Abbott channels Dutton and Hockey from last week’s ABC-Fairfax jihadist bash.  The PM is so shockingly bad that Tony Windsor wonders aloud if Abbott has just given up.

The next day his old, superior, self is back only to have his toast fall butter side down. Abbott angers not only Pacific leaders but all indigenous peoples by laughing at their fate and their cultural view of time in response to Peter Dutton’s stupid quip about climate change.

Noting that Friday’s meeting on Syrian refugees is late to start, Dutton remarks snidely that it is running to ‘Cape York time,’ prompting our PM and man of the indigenous world Abbott to reply, ‘We had a bit of that up in Port Moresby’.

Add safari suits, pith helmets, monocles and behold! A club meeting of colonial masters laments the natives’ poor work ethic, commiserates over the thankless task of getting blacks to behave more like white men.  Abbott and co are the colonists’ white man’s burden writ large all over again.

Despite the millions spent on their pay, the PM’s minders let him down. They clearly fail to brief him that not every culture views the concept of time in the same way. Not that this would interest a politician with no ideas, nor time for any.  Perhaps he was looking at his watch. As he does. Not paying attention; needing to be somewhere else; on borrowed time.

Inspired, encouraged, Dutton adds, ‘time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to … have water lapping at your door’. Abbott laughs like a drain.

Social Services Minister, Scott Morrison then notices the open microphone bobbing over their heads. At least one of the time-wasters has his wits about him. Trust Morrison to keep a weather eye open.

Too late. The remark is widely condemned. It is another rebuff after Australia and New Zealand have just refused the islanders’ appeals to push for a 1.5 degree rise in global temperatures at the Pacific Islands Forum. It doesn’t help that Australian aid to the region has been cut to a 40 year low under Julie Bishop’s term as Foreign Minister, nor that after Budget cuts she was forced to break her promise of aid for Pacific women.

‘We thought there was some resistance to the science of climate change amongst our friends to the south, but we didn’t expect there would be that indifference to a matter of life and death for their neighbours,’ Marshall Islands Foreign Minister, Tony de Brum tells RTCC, a climate advocacy website.

Later Abbott, in full damage control, intervenes to praise his Immigration Minister repackaging Dutton’s humour as a ‘lame’ joke and diverting us by calling attention – look over here – to Dutton’s Syrian refugee miracle. Peter Dutton is now a mastermind of compassion.

It is quite a spin. Dutton is fresh from the forced repatriation of Syrians from detention on Manus Island back into a bloody civil war. On Sunday comes the news that the ‘mastermind’ has flexed his new muscle given him by the revised Migration Act to fly an asylum seeker charged with criminal offences straight to Christmas Island before his trial. But by then the tide of opinion has rapidly, irrevocably risen against the pair, their intolerance, and the ‘insidious soft racism of low expectations.’

An angry Cape York traditional owner Gerhardt Pearson says the reference to ‘Cape York time’ aims to portray Aboriginal people as ‘lazy good-for-nothings.’ ‘We are constantly burdened with the view espoused by the likes of Dutton; a … soft bigotry (which) continues to dominate policy responses.’

Captain Abbott’s bravura SNAFU performance is a master class in political public self-destruction which makes a fitting finale to a week in which the PM seeks points in tactical compassion by agreeing to accept 12,000 extra refugees from Syria only to lose by imposing terms and by wasting time.

The PM adds an expensive tension-building prologue by sending Dutton off to UNHCR HQ to find out if this Syrian refugee thing is real.  Perhaps it’s a shrewd investment. It gets one loose cannon off the poop deck for a few days.

The PM has a proviso. He chooses his words carefully. He speaks of ‘women, children, families, persecuted minorities.’ This means our soon-to-be-new-Australians must be neither male nor Muslim and must have never been in a boat. His tide of support sweeps out like a torrent races around a rock. Perhaps Biggles bombs Syria an Abbott new release will attract favourable review.

Bombs away could be a life saver. Abbott’s government believes it is on to a winner in ‘turning left out of Iraq’ as Air Chief Marshall Binskin puts our violation of Syrian air space, to bomb the evil death cult ISIS, a motley crew who will immediately abandon their practice of embedding themselves amidst innocent civilians and expose themselves in the open so our six vintage Hornets can bombard them with surgical precision leaving unscathed those homes, hospitals and schools as yet untouched by Assad’s barrel bombs or the Iraqi-captured weapons of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, self-styled Caliph of Islamic state.

Bombing will solve everything – especially Syria’s refugee crisis. We know from Vietnam how successful aerial bombardment is in a theatre of guerrilla war. Nothing, moreover, may halt the exodus of millions of terrified civilians, traumatised by years of civil war, better than a fresh new wave after wave of Aussie bombs exploding over their heads.

Logic plays little part in Abbott’s crusade against the infidel; his own war against evil. The real truth of our involvement must be kept from us. We are in Syria at the PM’s instigation, our first irrevocable step into a quagmire that will only require us to send more and more troops, a conflict which will be long, protracted and punishing.

Instead we are fed the official US line, a cut and paste of a Centrecom press release.

RAAF bombings will help us help ‘the Iraqi government’ degrade and destroy ISIS. Yet there is no Iraqi state left and not much in the way of a functioning government or military. The fall of Ramadi in March shows an ISIS which can quickly gain the upper hand in many a strategic battle.

In Ramadi, capital of the Anbar province and one of the biggest cities in Iraq, 150 ISIS troops were able to dispel 1500 Iraqi troops who fled on May 17 this year. US air support was unable to be of assistance to the Iraqis because it could not distinguish between Iraqi and ISIS forces intermingled in heavy combat.

It was not an isolated incident. Desertion is a logical consequence of an engagement by an army whose morale is low, whose function is imperilled by corruption and whose loyalties in a region beset with sectarian conflict are divided. Tens of thousands of desertions have the Iraqi military have created what one U.S. official describes as “psychological collapse” in the face of ISIS offensives.

We have gone to war as allies of an Iraqi army which runs away, a demoralised army at the service of a defeated rump of a corrupt and malfunctioning government, propped up by the US for strategic purposes. Yet we will not hear this from Tony Abbott’s or Kevin Andrews’ lips. Nowhere does our government acknowledge the realities of the recent rapid increase in Russian military assistance in all forms, from boots on the ground to air and naval support.

Nor is there any mention of Syria’s other long-term ally Iran which has recently also despatched soldiers to serve the cause of Bashar al Assad. Saudi armed forces are also a threat to be left out of the equation by a PM anxious to spin his own child-like mythology of the hunt for the evil Daesh.

Against this in a bizarre counterpoint, the language of the military normalizes and disguises barbaric cruelty and random acts of violence as in Air Commodore Bellingham’s report of our first sortie into Syria.  ‘The Hornets were also prepared for any short notice high priority tasking which could include surveillance and weapons release.’

The Australian Air Task Group will continue to plan and conduct strikes against Daesh in Iraq and Syria as part of coalition strike operations aimed at disrupting and degrading Daesh strongholds, Bellingham says.

The PM parrots the US administration’s spin that ‘the coalition’ is winning the battle against ISIS and al Nusra, al Qaeda’s branch in Syria. We are kept at arms’ length from real news of what is truly happening. Instead we are entertained by images of an RAAF Super Hornet on its first bombing raid into Syria.  Make that ‘weapons release,’ it sounds almost desirable.

Bombing will, of course, give Abbott something to brag about when he visits Canning on the weekend as well as a chance for the Canning Liberal candidate, former SAS Captain Andrew Hastie, to take a breather from his war of words on ice and his war with reporters wanting to know more about his creationist and anti-gay marriage beliefs. Once again, Hastie will remind voters that he is a former soldier. He knows what war is all about.

Being photographed with Hastie will boost the PM’s stocks, he reasons and divert questions about his leaked cabinet reshuffle, an IED of sorts, militarily speaking which he disavows utterly.

Just when things can’t get any worse, they become disastrous. The Daily Telegraph, an annexe of the Abbott government’s media office in Antony Albanese’s quip, claims that six ministers would go in a cabinet reshuffle planned by the PM to keep his government fresh and appealing to voters.

Is it a leak from the PMO designed to flush out leadership contenders? Joe Hockey’s name is not among the six to get the sack. Is it a leak by a contender?

Whoever leaks it, the report creates havoc. ‘It is like a hand grenade has gone off,’ a minister, clearly well into the military swing of a khaki election, tells ABC news. MPs see the leak as coming from the PMO. Coalition MPs regard The Daily Telegraph as their government gazette. Those tipped to be on the up are agitating; those tipped for the chop are – well, agitated or, as Tory Shepherd put it on ABC’s Insiders on Sunday, ‘pissed off.’ It is a disaster in anyone’s estimation. Even the government seems to know it.

A spill is on next week. Paul Bongiorno, who has good sources, claims the numbers are there for a spill. A spill will have to come before the Canning by-election because afterwards will smack of desperation. But not everyone is convinced of this. What is agreed is that Abbott is ‘a dead man walking’ as one of his ministers put it – off the record of course.

We are all waiting for Canning. A curious unreality settles over the political scene by the end of the week. We are at a Becket play, in a Becket play, a menacing world of pointless circularity in which:

‘Nothing happens. Nobody comes. Nobody goes. It’s awful.’

Throughout Waiting for Canning, time and who controls it plays a major role, as in climate change, cabinet reshuffle or the invasion of Syria. As Becket knew well, ‘the waiting is the hardest part …Not only is the waiting difficult, but working out what to do while waiting is difficult.’

In the meantime, our compassionate government provides an entertaining series of short film clips of our magnificent men in their flying machines dropping bombs on the evil Daesh death cult while innocent men, women and children scream in pain and in terror just off camera, out of frame.

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“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it wrongly and applying unsuitable remedies.” Groucho Marx

He may not be able to take a trick when it comes to winning trust or building confidence but Tony Abbott certainly knows how to look for trouble. After threatening to shirt-front Russian President, Vladimir Putin, at the G20 last year, an embarrassingly  inappropriate blustering that did nothing to improve his standing as a statesman and everything to make himself look foolish, our bizarrely behaving PM, is like a rat up a drainpipe when it comes to the next big misadventure. You can’t hold him back.

This week he’s sending us into Syria, a nation torn apart by civil war; buying into trouble without explaining why; without bothering to make a case. Does he have even have a case? Or is his move just a cynical ploy to divert us from his failed domestic policies; his disastrous rating in opinion polls?  As usual, his government likes to keep us in the dark.

For a man who publicly loves to disparage speculation, the PM does everything to encourage it. Abbott offers no strategy. No analysis. Just more bullshit. We get more empty rhetoric about stopping the ‘evil death cult’ Daesh as if our six thirty year old Hornets are somehow going to make all the difference. The US has failed to halt ISIS so far, despite 6,500 air strikes.

Abbott’s Syrian adventure is presented as a ‘logical extension’ of bombing ISIS in Iraq. Not a word is uttered about its effect on Syria. If we do ‘degrade and destroy’ ISIS, we help Assad the butcher stay in power. Whatever the outcome we have bought into a conflict where we are unwelcome. We have already got up the nose of Syria’s powerful ally, Russia. Iran is likely to be hostile also.

Australia will not increase its troop numbers despite their wider deployment. Australia has 400 personnel supporting aerial missions over Iraq and 200 SAS soldiers training Iraqi counter-terrorism units. Another 300 soldiers are training Iraqi forces at the Taji training base north of Baghdad.

This refutes Abbott’s claim that the US urgently needs us in Syria. If we can manage with our current small troop numbers; with our six planes, there is no operational urgency to enter Syrian air space. Unless we are there symbolically to send a message to Russia and Iran.

In announcing that the RAAF will invade Syrian air space to bomb ISIS military targets, Abbott must now face down both Russia and Iran, nations who are now stepping up their support for Syrian President Bashar al Assad’s genocidal regime.

Just how Australia’s new bombing role will be achieved or at what cost is not mentioned. ISIS is embedded amidst the Syrian people. Bombing raids ignore the hard-learned lessons of Vietnam. A guerrilla army cannot be defeated from the air. So Australia is to provoke other nations by embarking on a futile and dangerous mission. Now there’s a captain’s call.

Russia has already condemned Australia’s involvement. A spokesman for Russian Ambassador Vladimir Morozov told the ABC today that US-led airstrikes on IS targets have not achieved much and that what was required was a broad, international coalition.

In the meantime, the Russians are expanding their presence in Iran, a presence which dates back to the soviet era with military arrivals by air reported and two tank carriers arriving by sea. Lebanese sources say that the Russians are establishing two bases, one inland and one on the coast.

In the last few days, Iran has committed soldiers ‘on the ground’ to help Syria. The troops are there ‘in cooperation with’ Vladimir Putin who is also using the presence of ISIS as an excuse to maintain a Russian presence in Syria. There are strategic concerns, a gas pipeline; access to it naval facility at the port of Tartus.

Australia is not alone in deciding to enter Syria. French President Francois Hollande and British Prime Minister David Cameron, have both announced bombing campaigns in Syria. Like Abbott, they have been quick to make claims which justify intervention in Syria as somehow addressing the needs of the mass exodus of Syrian refugees.

Abbott’s solution to the refugee crisis borrows the same crazy logic that the more bombings we conduct over their villages, their homes, their heads, the more likely Syrians will be to decide to stay home.

The Prime Minister has failed to take us into his confidence; failed to explain his real reasons for entering Syria. He cannot say what victory would look like when questioned by journalists. He has moreover, let us know that our presence has no clear end date.

Without aims, without strategy, without explanation, without real political leadership, Australia is being dragged into another foreign conflict which can only end badly for us. Whatever his hopes of improving his party’s chances in Canning, whatever dreams he has of reversing his massive unpopularity, Tony Abbott is looking for trouble in Syria.

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Liberal Canning candidate, Andrew Hastie, looks like a younger Cory Bernardi, but unlike Bernardi, the would-be representative stubbornly refuses to concede that his own Christian views are any business of the electorate. How could they possibly influence his politics? If only the media would stop asking about his beliefs. He would rather talk about ice.

Hastie, who refuses to be drawn on the topic of creationism, his theologian father’s speciality, today suggested that the WA state government double its current mandatory penalties for ice dealers who serve underage clients; endanger children. It is an unworkable, ill-informed, irresponsibly punitive proposal but it may get him known for being tough on drugs. Above all, it resonates with a government which punishes asylum seekers for arriving by boat; punishes the poor and disadvantaged, the unemployed for being a drain on the Budget bottom line when there are billionaire miners it needs to subsidise.

The Liberal candidate, of course, revealed his hand. In his clumsy bid to divert questions about his father’s creationism and his stunt to gain the attention of an electorate underwhelmed by blow-ins, let alone geeks bearing ice-war gifts, the former SAS captain unwittingly drew national attention to his own limited political, intellectual and moral horizons.

Naturally Hastie needed to change the subject back to fit his image; something manly, some alpha male posturing; an SAS unarmed combat assault on ice rather than admit he is a creationist like his Dad.  The people of Canning are no doubt suitably impressed by this facile substitution. Give us the rhetoric of war and toughness, they plead. Who cares if it is a load of bunkum? Who cares if it after years of it from Barnett, the drug problem is booming?

Andrew Hastie told assembled reporters that he would ignore their questions about his beliefs, his father’s creationism, his wife’s homophobia.

‘People are sick of this crap,’ he said. How does he know? How dare he presume to know? Perhaps they are just keen to know who their new fly-in candidate really is. Perhaps they are rapidly finding out. His last underwhelming stunt was to hire a plane to fly a banner across the skies of Canning towing a banner which read VOTE 1 HASTIE. Doubtless the presumption and the crass sloganeering would endear him to his new-found bestie, the PM.

Class act, Andrew Hastie, as the Liberals have packaged him, was parachuted into the electorate Canning on the death of man of the people Don Randall at the behest of Julie Bishop who says she was greatly impressed with the politically and socially conservative young SAS Captain Hastie when she sat down with him for a chat over morning tea in Afghanistan.

As you do. Of course Hastie was not on his anti-drug crusade at that stage. But he was wearing a uniform.

Drug abuse amongst serving troops would not have entered the conversation. Australia’s military code of denial has helped keep it off the national agenda, too. There is no reason, however, to doubt Hastie’s recent comments that he has had personal experience with friends who had been affected by illegal drugs and was passionate about finding a solution. It is more than likely that some of these may have been soldiers.

Whatever the case, he owes those who suffer ice addiction more than the tired old cliché of a war on ice. He would do well to abandon any macho tough on drugs posturing and explore ways of understanding and treating the needs of those suffering addiction.

Ice is popular with returned soldiers. It is a local substitute for the heroin which is so cheaply and readily available in the narco-state of Afghanistan today, largely as a by-product of western intervention. Whilst the Department of Defence denies that Australian soldiers using heroin or opiates in Afghanistan is a problem, therapists who work with returned servicemen tell a different story.

27,500 Australian soldiers served in Afghanistan since 2001. There have been 40 fatalities. The conflict has been Australia’s most intensive commitment since Vietnam. Yet after Vietnam, those in command knew that many recruits, even those physically unhurt, would not return home unscathed. PTSD rates amongst returning soldiers are about twice the rate of the civilian population. Drug and alcohol abuse is a problem.

A war on drugs is the last thing these returned soldiers need. They have been through enough horror; enough punishment. Surely there is something more useful the aspiring candidate, with all his military insights could be offering. And as for the parliament, the people of Australia already have one Cory Bernardi. Two is one too many.

Time to get real, Mr Hastie. Get some real policy. We have more than enough sloganeering, alpha male shirt-fronters with their meaningless, simplistic ‘solutions’ wasting our time and money in national politics already.