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Announcing in a Canberra Press Conference today what he calls ‘a logical extension’ of Australia’s campaign in Iraq, Prime Minister Tony Abbott has committed his nation to joining the US in bombing ‘ISIS military targets’ inside the Syrian border in an illegal incursion into another sovereign nation’s air space, a nation embroiled in a brutal civil war, a nation of strategic significance in the Middle East which currently enjoys the support of Iran and Russia.

It is a captain’s call, which Ayatollah Abbott makes once again, an authoritarian, arbitrary decision-making style he prefers to consulting his people or going through parliament, but one which he presents as consultative on the grounds that it has been discussed by his government’s national security committee, a rubber stamp of the executive. Abbott fools no-one.

Proving that he will do anything to revive his political fortune, the most unpopular, least successful Prime Minister in Australian political history confirms also that he is happy to fly by the seat of his pants. Abbott could articulate no specific objectives, in question today, yet he is keen to persuade the electorate, especially the people of Canning, that his commitment of Australia’s token strike force of six elderly Super Hornets is both a significant contribution to the war on ISIS and an insignificant extension to his party’s unswerving pro-US foreign policy. It is neither.

The notion that Australia’s decision adds anything to the largely unsuccessful US bombing strategy is laughable. Even if Australia added another two of its antique aircraft in response to the US ‘tasking cycle’ as it was obscurely described by Head of Armed Force today it would be risible. The nation’s military deployment against ISIS, would remain that of a using pea shooter to halt a mad, charging water buffalo.

Similarly, to present the PM’s decision as a logical extension of Australia’s current military commitment in Iraq is an attempt to hoodwink the nation; an evasion of its illegality and a down-playing of its significance in international law. It is a violation of national sovereignty. Yet is something which it suits the Abbott government to trivialise. Up until now the PM and the Foreign Minister has argued speciously that going into Syria is OK because ISIS disregards the border with Iraq.

What does bombing achieve? Utterly underplayed is the point of bombing and its risks. The 6,500 strikes which the US coalition has completed so far have not halted the advance of ISIS.  Most military experts concur that ISIS will not be stopped by this strategy, however, appealing it may be to a US which does not want to become embroiled in ‘boots on the ground’ warfare .

What is clear is that innocent civilians will be killed. An Australian raid on a suspected IS weapons factory, on December 21 last year appears to have led to the deaths of a woman and a child according to a US Central Command report obtained by the ABC. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop responds that the government is aware of the incident but that the deaths have not been confirmed, whatever that may mean in a war zone. The report compiled by coalition pilots and ground forces lists dozens of other possible civilian deaths which are downgraded in military jargon to ‘casualty incidents.’

In the Vietnam war the term collateral damage enjoyed currency as the deaths of ordinary innocent civilians, the destruction of normal everyday life was presented as an unfortunate by product of virtuous military campaigns. Today, the killing and maiming of innocent people should  be seen for what it is an inevitable part of war, especially the preferred war in the air, the massive series of bombings which US has co-opted us into. Australia won’t make a bit of difference to the outcome. But today’s commitment may add a few points to the Abbott government’s polls at home.

The bigger picture is no less distressing. Whatever short term bounce in the polls Abbott may enjoy, if indeed there is any bounce at all, the PM has helped commit Australia to a taxing and unwinnable conflict; taken another step towards becoming a part of another US military ‘solution’ to a complex, intractable uprising that will not yield to air force power.

ISIS will not be stopped by bombing in Syria. The next step could well be a call for boots on the ground. Yet even if it is not drawn into another Afghanistan, Australia has aligned itself with the US against Iran and Russia in a conflict which it has no hope of either winning; no hope of easy retreat.   Yet if ISIS needs confirmation of its propaganda that the US and the west is conspiring or colluding against it, for reasons of their own, Abbott’s announcement today is right on script.

And if the voters in the rapidly approaching Canning by-election need any more evidence that the Liberals campaign is not ‘all about the people of Canning’ but is rather the last desperate act of a failed Prime Minister and an incompetent government, his declaration of war on ISIS in Syria, today indelibly fits the bill.

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Australians, per capita, have nothing to boast about with regard to helping refugees.  On the contrary, UNHCR statistics show that we are an embarrassing 27th place in the world or 46^th if you consider our relative wealth in GDP. And it is a concerning long term trend as is our asylum seeker policy of pretending that those who seek asylum by boat are somehow not real refugees, a strategy which allows us to put them into prison camps on Nauru and Manus Island where they must endure the punishment of indefinite detention and brutality at the hands of guards to teach others a lesson.

In 2013, moreover, Australia took a giant step backwards when our incoming ultra-right Abbott government made a politically expedient cut to our total intake of refugees of 30%. It was one of the first acts of the new government. Yet to hear our politicians on our ABC currently and to hear journalists such as James Carleton on RN Breakfast this morning, you would think we were a nation of over-achieving humanitarians, doing so much heavy lifting in refugee resettlement that we are all in danger of developing compassion fatigue. Nothing could be further from the truth.

And while we are far from the truth, let’s start with our PM and his ministers Robb, Dutton who are so morally irresponsible, so blinkered or indoctrinated by their own propaganda that they can repeat the claim that Australia ‘takes more refugee and humanitarian entrants,’ than any other country, as Tony Abbott put it on radio 5 September.

It is grossly irresponsible not to add that this claim is true only if you ignore 96.9% of refugees in the world and confine comparisons to the miniscule 3.1% resettled by the UN.

If you redefine who is a refugee, in other words, if you exclude roughly 97% of all other refugees, you can brag. Most Australians would be ashamed if they knew the truth. Instead, a shameful lie is perpetrated upon the unwary.

It is more than shameful, moreover, that this pernicious lie is repeated on our ABC Monday and Tuesday. Australians trust their ABC. But, then, that’s the tactic. Repeat the lie until it is believed; accepted as truth; received wisdom. No-one will bother to check the facts – even if all they have to do is visit the UNHCR website.

In 2014 UNHCR data shows the 14,350 refugees recognised or resettled in Australia during 2014 made up 0.43% of the global total. Australia ranks 22nd overall, 27th on a per capita basis and 46th relative to total national GDP.

It has been much the same for the previous ten years. 141,047 refugees were recognised or resettled by Australia.  This was 1.16% of the global total of 12,107,623 which earns Australia 23rd rank overall, 27th per capita and 46th relative to national GDP.

Australia’s PM has earned international censure for his party’s stance towards refugees, most recently in an editorial in The New York Times 5 September.

‘Prime Minister Tony Abbott has overseen a ruthlessly effective effort to stop boats packed with migrants, many of them refugees, from reaching Australia’s shores. His policies have been inhumane, of dubious legality and strikingly at odds with the country’s tradition of welcoming people fleeing persecution and war.’

The editor notes that European officials have travelled to Australia recently and quotes an International Organisation for Migration spokesman who explains that while politicians may love fences, the fences such as those built by our asylum seeker policies in fact create further suffering, adding to, rather than alleviating the world’s growing refugee and humanitarian crisis. It is inexcusable that people fleeing emergencies should end up finding themselves in conditions more desperate, more hopeless and degrading than those which forced them to flee their homes.

Australians deserve better than to be fed lies which cruelly distort the truth about its policies towards refugees. Now we are experiencing a wave of compassion for refugees from Syria, a compassion triggered by images of a three year old boy washed ashore on a Turkish beach.

Compassion is to be encouraged, however, belated its discovery, provided it is not confused with sentimentality. Now that we have glimpsed the truth, perhaps, been helped to understand the truth about what it means to be one of the 19.5 million refugees in the world today, more of us will demand an end to indefinite detention and the daily brutalities of our camps on Nauru, Manus Island. But only if we demand the truth from our politicians, expect the truth from our national broadcaster.

Shame on the ABC for lamely accepting the lies of its politicians for in repeating those lies it allows itself to become an instrument of propaganda. Shame on our political leaders who in seeking power through manipulation and deception demean all Australians.

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Averting its eyes from a stock market bear rampaging in the China shop, turning its back on the Syrian refugee crisis but effectively planning  to help Assad in his genocide by bombing his ISIS enemies for him, a narcissistic Abbott Government of secrets and lies turned inward to embrace its own feral inner Panda, spin its ChAFTA Free Trade Deal and claim the June Quarter ABS statistics vindicate its economic plan whereas to most other observers they reveal an economy standing still, living standards in decline and a nation increasingly out of work.

In Canning, however, it was all about the people of Canning as Andrew Hastie, the Liberal candidate, a former SAS soldier promised to meet voters’ needs with a war on ice which he would fight with his bare hands and totally without funding.

A bromance broke out instantly between Hastie and his PM and the candidate was able to turn away questions about his creationist theologian father, Peter Hastie and any other personal questions which might give the electorate some glimpse of his real identity and beliefs.

It was all about being on message and on course for the incoherent and directionless government. ‘A bugger’s muddle,’ Trade Minister Robb, bravely reprising 1950s slang, told ABC Insiders on Sunday, would result if government were duped into providing protection for Australian workers from cheaper Chinese workers on 457 Visas which Labor had invented anyway.

Robb’s case was seldom clear enough to persuade let alone inform but he left viewers with the perfect collective noun for the bugger’s muddle that is his party’s policies.

A buggered Abbott Government was on task, policy or not, pursuing its core business of displaying unity to the party room through infighting, finger-pointing, fear-mongering and self-delusion as MPs bickered, back-stabbed and passed the buck all week. Labor, a jihadist ABC and Fairfax came in for a serve for failing to act like News Corp, the party’s propaganda arm.

Yet not even News Corp could explain away the miraculous dirty, big re-fuelling port which has miraculously popped up on pristine Melville Island without so much as a Yakka Skink of an environmental study, acquired, it seems, like the British Empire in a fit of absence of mind.

Absent also was the PM’s mind. Tony Abbott who himself sets the bar high in displaying moral leadership, enriched the national conversation, in his captain’s gaffe of the week by effortlessly offending the Jewish community and many others with his gratuitous nonsense about the Nazis being a class act in evil-doing because their shame dictated they kept their wicked deeds hidden.

‘I mean, the Nazis did terrible evil but they had a sufficient sense of shame to try to hide it,” he said relaxing in the weekly hot tub and rub down offered him by his pal Alan Jones’, another popular historian and ethicist, thereby giving top ranking to the pure evil ISIS mob who flaunt their atrocities and also amply confirming that his grasp of history does not extend beyond yesterday.

Abbott’s idiotic comment played into the hands of the ISIS propaganda unit; guaranteeing more local recruits. At least the PM gave Alan Jones’ listeners plenty to talk about. He showed he could still insult, alienate and divide with the best of them, even if he was a dead man walking awaiting the outcome in Canning.

Just to make this message crystal clear, however, our pocket moral philosopher PM explained that our nation should heed the plight of Syrian refugees because we have stopped the boats and prevented drownings. So far Abbott has dismissed suggestions that Australia make any provision to take any extra refugees saying that we already take more refugees than other countries, noting that last year we agreed to take 4,400 refugees from Northern Iraq and Eastern Syria areas where the death cult is active, glossing over the civil war which Assad wages on his own people, in favour of demonising ISIS.

Achieving its KPI of at least one major stuff up per day meant the Abbott oxymoron kept pace with its target In a star-studded, hotly contested field, Joe Hockey and Peter Dutton easily won a dead heat for best whinger because the Fairfax media and the ABC are always out to get them but best all round performance was Greg Hunt’s Tiwi Islands magical mystery port.

Hunt narrowly defeated the PM and his Treasurer who called a midweek press conference to axe Labor’s bank deposit guarantee levy; to axe a tax which wasn’t a tax and which didn’t exist.

Every other MP sought someone else to blame or frame for the mess they had, by and large, got themselves into, apart from our work experience boy the Environment Minister who discovered that a massive $130 million port has been built on Melville Island with no environmental oversight.

Even Hunt will have trouble blaming ‘vigilante lawfare,’ for his latest cockup but he’s sure to come up with something. Perhaps it will be Labor’s fault for getting into bed with the Greens to sabotage investment, development and progress. Or those Top End, bottom-feeding bastards who go crazy over a barrel of pork. Or diesel.

A 2007 cyclone demolished a wharf intended to support a proposed forestry scheme on Melville, the biggest island in the Tiwis. Reconstruction started last year but mysteriously, magically, the project morphed into a major port designed to handle ships up to 200 metres, making fifty visits a month in a 24 hour re-fuelling operation.

Port Melville will store 30 million litres of diesel or 15% of the entire NT fuel storage capacity according to NT Labor MP, Senator Nova Peris. Of course, no-one knows anything; no-one is talking, least of all, curiously, the mouth from the south, the wind-eating Gregory Hunt, MP.

Using documents obtained under FOI, New Matilda reports that ‘… in partnership with the local Tiwi Land Council, the original developers of the expansion – a Singapore-based company called Ezion Holdings – hoped to use the port to service the growing Timor Strait oil and gas industry.’

Hunt seems to have either fallen asleep at the wheel or been too busy looking up Wikipedia to notice while a major offshore oil and gas supply base was constructed, a port which now stands poised to pollute a pristine Top End waterway, to say nothing of the thirty-eight endangered species in the area which its construction and operation threaten.

In May, the NT Environment Minister, Gary Higgins and former planning Minister, channelling Clark and Dawe in a script worthy of Utopia appeared to have a lend of Greg when they told the ABC that a loophole in environmental legislation had rendered them powerless to stop the development. Besides, proper processes were followed.

Mr Higgins said developers were supposed to submit to him environmental impact statements if required by the NT Environmental Protection Agency (NTEPA), and Mr Higgins would then pass on those statements to the responsible minister. His explanation deserves a place in history alongside the Nuremberg as the Melville Defence.

‘The responsible minister for port development is a loophole in the legislation,’ Mr Higgins told reporters.

‘There is no responsible minister for signing off on a port development.’

Mr Chandler said it was the responsibility of the EPA and the Federal Government to step in if they believed a development was not fit for approval.

So how and why did the Federal government fail to act? The Department of the Environment blames overworked staff, and claims they had been conned. Potentially ‘false and misleading information’ has been provided to investigators. A bit like the Minister’s emissions targets he plans to take to Paris at the end of the year.

Hunt seems to have shut up about Port Melville in the hope that it will all go away. Mainstream media have been helpfully silent. Expect federal government spin doctors to have a (well-fertilised) field day. They certainly got into gear on economic news this week.

While ABS figures for the June quarter showed Australia’s economic growth stalling with falls in construction, mining and living standards, our own Dr Pangloss, Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey was typically upbeat, claiming his ‘plan’ is working and that something he calls ‘our over-arching goals’ will be met.

The fact that he doesn’t seem to have much of a plan did not deter his optimism although he did concede that he ‘wouldn’t get too complacent,’ carefully choosing words associated with a positive set of figures.

If Hockey’s promise not to break out the champagne just yet did not pass the sniff test for most ordinary punters, it certainly inflamed his fiercest critics, most of whom are in his own party.  Julie Bishop did not deny she had barrelled the PM about Joe’s vote-losing manifest incompetence six months ago but of course she would not be drawn into any speculation over the identity of the phantom cabinet leaker. Besides, she had enough on her hands supporting her vice captain’s pick, former SAS Captain Andrew Hastie, as they patrolled the malls of Canning, while those Labor traitors ran dead.

Or so she claimed, implying that Labor would rather keep the incumbent incompetent whom they could easily beat next election. Some took this as a swipe at her PM.

The noise was deafening, even for the Liberals. Already razor-sharpened knives were honed for the scapegoating of the hapless Hockey schlockmeister, who despite outperforming all others bar his boss and cabin boy Hunt in the bullshit stakes, is far and away Australia’s worst treasurer. Hockey who has helped bring the Australian economy to a full stop and who has boosted real unemployment towards ten per cent did not miss a beat.

The Treasurer immediately accused the media, once again, of undermining government, while bagging ‘fringe whingers’ in Federal Cabinet for telling the press, the PM should sack him.

One of the Tony Abbotts claiming to be the PM told reporters ‘no one had raised it with him,’ possibly because he is part of the plan. Arthur Sinodinis, the unimpeachable, called for Abbott to sack the rats; especially the leakers. Peter ‘Chucky’ Dutton saw a Jihadist anti-government conspiracy being plotted by the ABC in cahoots with Fairfax. Yet all was not lost, papyrus-faced Dyson Dinosaur Heydon applied his best solipsistic black letter vision to adjudge himself fit to proceed in a legalistic clean bill of health which will satisfy neither the community nor the trade unions but which did his own ego a power of good.

In a ruling which is guaranteed to create further trouble for the government, Heydon diced definitions of perceived bias in his own case wafer thin and on Monday at 2:02pm, served up his meagre but adequate offering with a judicious sprinkling of precedent, as you might expect from a learned black letter jurist. Should they not boycott the commission, expect unionists to plead in their defence that they ‘overlooked’ key details and that they don’t even plan to own a computer.

Abbott’s expansion of his humanitarian bombing into Syria will be announced soon in timing which has nothing to do with the Canning by-election but which reflects the need for careful consideration by the government’s intelligence and security committee which will have to factor in how long it takes to procure the necessary extra bunting for what is sure to be a twelve flag announcement.

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China’s uniquely regulated stock market crash may not prove to be the great fall of China so widely predicted nor is the Bling Dynasty, China’s obscenely wealthy elite, finished yet, but it what is certain is that the slowing economy of Australia’s largest trading partner has bust our mining boom and that our politics will never be the same. Liberal governments, in particular, who banked on the good times lasting forever have been caught with their pants down.

Suddenly, as Paul Krugman puts it, Australia, like Canada has the wrong exports and ‘is kind of in the wrong place in the world right now but has other strengths.’ The best, however, the Abbott government could grasp last week was the fig leaf of its Free Trade Deal with China to cover its nakedness; its failure to plan; its lack of initiative; its poverty of policy.

Liberals hope to sell us the China deal as an achievement which atones for decades of failure to plan. Above all, Tony Abbott plans to wedge Labor. Labor is not opposed to the deal, Blinky Bill Shorten makes clear, but he is not going to commit to a deal which permits Chinese firms to import their own cheap labour and do Aussies out of a job. Shorten says nothing about the FTA empowering China to sue the Australian government should one of our laws impede any of its projects. He ignores the ways in which the deal opens up Australia to some significant labour market deregulation.

A Chinese firm bringing in workers under 457 Visas on a construction project, for example, get to negotiate the wages with the department of Immigration and Border Protection. Details will be kept secret. In this and in other ways, the deal with China could represent a major assault on Australia’s construction industry, but perhaps this its real attraction to the Abbott government. Perhaps this is why it is strangely reluctant to offer any details.

The coalition unable to instance one concrete benefit has its bid trumped by Labor’s specific objection. Shorten’s challenge, moreover, resonates with the people of Canning according to ReachTEL opinion polls in the electorate this week.  Yet pressure is put on Shorten when state Labor leaders go all the way with the FTA. Abbott seizes on this to demand an end to Labor’s intransigence.

The PM references the weight of opinion, hoping we have forgotten his contempt for the weight of opinion on marriage equality. The weight of opinion, he says or on even within Labor ranks, is for the agreement to pass by November for the sake of the economy.

‘Quite frankly, Bill Shorten is playing fast and loose with our future – this free trade agreement sets Australia up for decades to come,’ he said whilst offering no detail as to how or why. Although the argument is one which is couched in terms of the national interest, this is windy rhetoric. The proposed Australia-China deal, like the Trans Pacific Partnership, is mostly about entrenching the power of monopolies, about preserving the power of a ruling elite. It promise bugger all for the nation and less than nothing for the average punter.

At present, however, what matters is the politics. The deal is a useful blunt weapon for the coalition to wedge the traitor Bill Shorten, the union bastard for daring to ask questions about workers’ or any other kind of protection before hopping into bed with a complete stranger whose details have been kept low key.

Even the Productivity Commission reports that bilateral trade deals ‘lack transparency and tend to oversell the likely benefits.’ Yet we are being rushed into something which appears to offer huge political benefits to the Abbott government in terms of labour deregulation but less than nothing, including unemployment and poorer working conditions to our workers in return. Australians deserve better than this.

Joe Hockey is upbeat. He has to be. Disingenuous frauds have no other choice. For a government that prides itself on having economic management ‘in its DNA,’ a government forever banging on like the proverbial empty vessel about jobs and growth, the truth hurts.

Unemployment is up 0.5% from July and a year ago while growth is almost at a standstill according to the ABS June 2015 quarter National Accounts. A slow-down in mining and construction and a 3% decline in exports have reduced the economy’s growth to 0.2% or half the predicted rate.

Unemployment is up 0.5% since July bringing the real unemployment to 9.2% and rising says Roy Morgan.

There are new jobs, of course. Yet the 3000,000 new jobs Coalition MPs boast that the federal government has ‘created,’ are not enough to meet an expanding workforce. Nor did they create many of them. Apart from the recently hiring of a mob of ABF recruits or in the case of creating a wind farm commissioner, or paying the crew of people-smuggling boat to turn back to Indonesia the ultra-right Abbott government does not create jobs.

It’s just the opposite. As CPSU National Secretary points out the coalition has been quick to save on its wages bill by sacking masses of public servants and by chiselling away at the quality of work available to those who retain a job .

“The Abbott Government has slashed 17,300 public sector jobs since taking office and now it’s going after the conditions, rights and take-home wages of 160,000 Australians who work in the public sector.”

Infected by tea party rhetoric about ‘small government’ and keen to cut expenditure where they can, the coalition has slashed public service jobs and clamped down on even modest wage increases. The flow-on effects as workers and their families must suddenly make do with a loss of income, not to mention the incalculable costs to well-being add significantly to the slowing of the economy.

Public service cuts are sold by the treasurer and ‘economies’, ‘savings’ and even productivity dividends. Beneath the bullshit, workers struggle to complete projects with fewer colleagues to assist; morale plummets; efficiency declines.

Perhaps the false economy of cutbacks explains the recent catastrophic failures of the Department of the Environment to perform due diligence in the required environmental studies for the Carmichael Mine or their failing to do any study at all in the scandalous Tiwi Port project which has been built without any environmental consideration whatsoever. Certainly, a reality-denying, ideologically-driven culture in cabinet does not help. Hockey is a major repeat offender.

Nominal GDP grew at 1.8% for the year, according to the ABS, its weakest growth rate since 1961-2, a comment which the Treasurer seems unwilling to accept., arguing that it is in line with ‘over-arching expectations’ and a target of 2.5%. Hockey bluffs that the figures ‘bounce around’ a bit when what he has in front of him is not bouncing but steadily declining. The government likes to apply the same spin to its consistent and continuing record decline in 27 straight opinion polls. No-one is deceived.

It’s about as bad as it gets without turning into a recession, an event defined by two successive quarters of negative growth. We are not there yet. But everything is going to plan, according to our Treasurer. Plan? Recession-led community security? We can hardly wait.

Hockey shrugs off suggestions that the high points of the National Accounts data, are part of his plan. Government spending on three new warships has helped tipped growth into a marginally positive territory. Total government spending increased by 3.4% also contributed to delivering growth of 0.2%.

Yet for Hockey this one positive is to be explained away. ‘It wasn’t planned that way,’ he says of the three warships. Sadly he and his government are wedded to government cuts – austerity. It is against his religion, his neo-con ideology to concede any evidence that state investment in the right projects could be part of any plan to support economic activity in challenging times.

The same windmills which Hockey finds ugly on his drive past Lake George are a solution staring him and his Prime Minister in the kisser. A government lead in boosting Australia’s renewable energy industry would be a prudent investment in job creation and in longer term benefits to the economy and environment. Its attacks on the renewable energy industry, sadly expose its lack of vision.

The coal-powered coalition needs to get over its ideological block towards Keynsian economic investment; its mindless opposition to alternative energy and go cold turkey on coal. It cannot afford to continue its servile protection of a fossil-fuel industry not only heading for history’s dustbin itself, but likely to take us with it.

In the end the current account figures reveal some concerning trends which call for more than head-shaking. Hockey needs to abandon his pretence that we are still ‘on trend’. His government needs to get its blinkers off, wake up to itself and take the lead. Intervene. Subsidise solar and wind. Instead of wasting money we don’t have to prop up a dying coal industry, we don’t need and can’t afford.

Put some money into industries with a future. Create jobs and export opportunities. Harness Aussie ingenuity. Build a clean future. If that’s all too hard, then get out of the way. Make way for someone who can. But stop pretending, please.

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“Out of respect for the Australians I led overseas I took a position going into this election that I was not going to talk about operational matters … As I have said previously, not everything goes to plan in any aspect of life, let alone in a high-pressure war zone where people are trying to kill you.’ Andrew Hastie, Liberal candidate for Canning

Who is Andrew Hastie? What is he trying to hide? Why is there still no campaign biography of him?

Could it be, as military sources have it that Hastie is still under investigation by the Army for his role in an incident 28 April last year in Zabul, Afghanistan in which an Australian SAS corporal severed the hands of three dead Taliban fighters, claiming that the mutilation was ‘out of military necessity’?  SAS troops were instructed to collect fingerprints.

The official version is that the corporal, who is still under investigation, was acting on advice given by an officer from the Australian Defence Force Investigative Service (ADFIS), who lectured a group of SAS soldiers on April 19 during a training session at the Australian base at Tarin Kowt.

The ADFIS officer told them it did not matter how the fingerprints were taken and that it would be acceptable to chop off the hands of the dead and bring them back to base for identification purposes. Although this account appears to be widely and uncritically repeated, it has raises more questions than it answers.

One problem with this version is that such behaviour violates ADF regulations ‘the remains of the dead be respected’ and international law. Article 15 of the Geneva Convention states:

“At all times, and particularly after an engagement, Parties to the conflict shall, without delay, take all possible measures to search for and collect the wounded and sick, to protect them against pillage and ill-treatment, to ensure their adequate care, and to search for the dead and prevent their being despoiled.”

What we do know is that former reactionary PM, military fetishist and US sycophant John Howard joined Tony Abbott to hold Andy’s hand as they tried to con voters that the people of Canning are what matters in the campaign today. Just how successful their help would be is open to question.

Abbott is the greatest promise-breaker Liberal PM in history. Howard is an ultra-conservative who turned back the clock on a raft of social and political issues and who lied about Iraq and invented Tampa to win an election over Keating. Would you buy a used captain from this duo?

What happened to ‘open and transparent government?’ The amazing case of former senior Victorian Liberal Damien Mantach who it seems was helped to allegedly embezzle over a million dollars because he could hide his past should warn the Liberals about the dangers of running a dark horse.  Yet with the Canning by election, they seem to be at it again.

Mr Mantach was forced to resign as the Tasmanian Liberal party’s state director in 2008 because he ran up personal expenses of $48,000 on a party credit card. The money was repaid but not disclosed on the party’s annual return.

Mantach not only embezzled money in his role in Tasmania, however, he proceeded to do far more damage to the Liberal brand and their reputation as money managers when he became state director for the Victorian Liberals. Up to 1.5 million is missing. This was not because his past was unknown but because somehow vital information about his past was not communicated.  Information, Liberals tell us increasingly is something they have a right to withhold.

From his arrogant comments to The Guardian yesterday the tight-lipped Hastie is the very model of an uncommunicative modern Abbott government Liberal. He refuses to answer the questions that matter in a manner which tells us that he believes he has every right to withhold the truth.

Rather than respond to a fair and reasonable question about his past, the former SAS captain cites operational matters forbid his divulging details of his past.

Hastily parachuted into the electorate in a desperate captain’s pick by a Tony Abbott whose future rides on the result it seems that due diligence has been discarded in the rush to pick a candidate who fits the PM’s fetish for the military. Voters, it is implied, have no right to ask who Hastie is. The young man is a soldier, a superior being, a man of courage and action, for God’s sake. Isn’t that enough?

Michelle Grattan delineates Abbott’s secrecy and quasi-military drill:

‘The Coalition, just because it can, withholds information on the most spurious grounds, excuses the inexcusable, tolerates what it would have vociferously condemned in Labor’s day. Moreover, learning only selectively from the Howard experience, it has compromised the military, using it not just to execute policy but as a political shield.’

Hastie’s introduction to the electorate is profoundly disturbing. He is pulling down the blind of operational secrecy. And he gets his party leader’s backing. It is not good enough for any accountable politician and it is certainly not good enough from a candidate who should be making it clear who he is and why he should be elected. ‘Operational matters’ do not apply. They never have.

The phrase which Scott Morrison lifted from military, is applied to anything that the government does not want to reveal about its inhumane, punitive immigration and detention policy; its preparedness to do whatever it takes including paying of people smugglers or paying 40 million to Cambodia to take four refugees off Nauru, in an abortive scheme which was originally based around resettling a thousand asylum-seekers.

Andrew Hastie needs to explain who he is and why he is a suitable candidate for the Canning of electorate and the parliament of Australia. The government and the people do not need another dud captain’s pick chosen impulsively because his background and his deeply conservative values make him of use to a failing PM desperate to exploit every opportunity he can to survive in power.

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‘the reality is there is a bit of a jihad being conducted against the government by Fairfax at the moment …

they’re being helped by the ABC as well, there’s no question about that …’ Peter Dutton on Skynews and on ABC Radio 1 September

In his quixotic crusade to keep the nation safe, a mission which is fraught with grave risks for himself and for a largely unsuspecting nation our Immigration Minister, Chucky lookalike, Peter Dutton took the morning out from policing our streets and borders to win our hearts and minds, take us into his confidence after yesterday dismissing out of hand as a ‘political witch hunt,’ the senate select committee’s report into alleged sexual abuse and its recommendations for reforms on Nauru.

It proved a disturbing experience. Dutton buttonholed a series of media hosts only to make some wild accusations; a series of crackpot rantings suggesting that all is not well with the Minister or his government.

Dutton accused Fairfax and the ABC of conspiring to bring the government down. It was a rude shock to most listeners who foolishly expected some form of ministerial responsibility. He had bobbed up, we reasonable assumed, to take questions about Operation Fortitude; deal with the fallout over his Friday Border Force fiasco in Melbourne and with anything else that needed clearing up. Instead he went on the attack.

On ABC Radio National’s AM programme Peter Dutton was asked a fluffy question about how the coalition could get back on course; communicate its message to voters. Dutton immediately leapt into the media. It was not that his government has little coherent to communicate, but that media organisations were conspiring to sabotage everything his government tries to do. Aside from the fact that the government has been doing a fine job of self-sabotage, the attack on the media was as ill-judged as it was alarming. The man is not travelling well.

Nor is the government travelling well as it lurches from crisis to catastrophe. The recent debacle in Flinders street being but the latest in a sequence of bizarre stunts and stuff ups. Even more alarming, apart from hopping into public enemies  number one the ABC and Fairfax, the PM and his Immigration Minister have assured media that Operation Fortitude was perfectly normal. Or SNAFU, to use military slang.

‘What was happening as part of this Victorian police operation to, I gather, crack down on anti-social and unlawful activity at transport hubs, was that anyone who the Victorian police suspected might have a visa issue would then be referred to Australian Border Force in the normal way,’ the Prime Minister told reporters in western Sydney Friday.

So what went wrong? If it was normal, why was it announced beforehand? The government has yet to reconcile an array of conflicting explanations and eye-witness accounts. Some of these are not reassuring.

Friday was ‘our first hit out in community safety operations,’ a senior official explained, using an unfortunate metaphor.

But not only is the media to blame, it’s the media AND Labor. This all started when reporters went ape after Labor, in the final stages of the last government and we’ve just been dropped into their mess, Dutton volunteered. He could have added that the officers were entirely within the law in their plans to ask for papers.

The newly amended Migration and Maritime Powers legislation Act permits  an authorised officer to ask for information from someone the officer “knows or reasonably suspects is a non-citizen”.

Border Force officials have a range of powers to enforce migration laws, including the power to compel a person to produce such documents as visas and tax file numbers to check whether they are an unlawful non-citizen.

Until Friday’s disaster the ABF has been going from strength to strength since its creation by the Abbott government in July. Recruiting is proceeding apace to meet plans for some five to six thousand officers. Most are to be trained in the use of force.

A government which must cut welfare, hospitals and schools can afford 10 million so far, on signage and quasi-military uniforms for their new border enforcers. Officers taught racial profiling to help target their community protection. It is an alarming assault on our democratic society by a government which is increasingly secretive and autocratic.

Now the force is being road tested as we saw in Melbourne last Friday. Other recent trial manoeuvres include ‘Operation Brothel Creep’, an assault last Wednesday on Top End massage parlours which saw 19 NT ‘establishments’ raided in a joint operation with police. None of this is adequately explained. Instead we are treated to an attack on the messenger, the media for challenging or holding to account a government increasingly out of control.

We don’t want to hear that the operation was normal. Spare us your nut-bag conspiracy distractions Mr Dutton. The Australian people need to know why we need an armed paramilitary force at all.

After Friday’s sneak preview, it is clear that the minister must apologise, resign and that his ‘border force’ goon squad be disbanded immediately. The uniforms could be donated to the next gay Mardis Gras.

… the mere fact that  a person agrees to deliver a speech at a forum does not rationally establish that the person is sympathetic to, or endorses the views of, the organiser of the forum’. Dyson Heydon Reasons …

In the end it is no great surprise that the former ‘High Court’s great loner,’ or ‘Great Dissenter’ Justice Dyson Heydon QC AC, has dismissed an application that he recuse himself from the Royal Commission into Trade Union Corruption. He is not unused to taking an independent or an unpopular position. Nor is he at all averse to a legal contest.

In fact, Dyson Heydon’s career is built on winning legal contests, arguments and disputations, a fact which also makes it unlikely that he would ever recuse himself on the grounds that he might appear biased or in any other way unfit to judge. Especially when he has to judge himself.

But can the great legal mind see the wood for the trees? Might he not consider his position independently of the case brought in the unions’ application?  No chance.

Today Heydon continues to walk to the beat of his own legal drum: the letter of the law. Justice Heydon has made it clear that in his considered and detailed opinion, there is no legal case to answer in the ACTU and other unions’ application to cause him to continue.

In his sixty-seven pages of reasons published at 2:00pm today on the Royal Commission’s website Heydon dissects the case against him and dismisses it, authoritatively, convincingly and resoundingly. That should be the end of it.

But it’s not the end; more like the end of the beginning. What Heydon has left out of consideration, as he must, is the larger, more important issue of how the public perception; how the average person may see his Commission.

The Royal Commission is tarnished. Whatever findings he makes by its December close, will forever be tainted by his belated discovery that he ‘overlooked’ his role as a Royal Commissioner and accepted an invitation to speak at a Liberal function.

Despite arguing convincingly in his reasons today that his speaking at the function does not necessarily make him a biased Royal Commissioner or one whose judgement would necessarily be impaired by his acceptance. The bigger picture is not reassuring to the public. Nor is the image of a judge who ‘overlooks’ details, favourable to fostering public confidence.

That loss of confidence may be accelerated by Heydon awarding himself a TKO.  Heydon argues, that the unions’ application fails to establish evidence from which a reasonable lay observer may deduce or infer his bias.

‘… the applicants’ submissions depend on isolating conduct which reveals a particular characteristic – affinity with, partiality for, lending of support to, persuasion, allegiance or alignment to the Liberal Party, or a political prejudice against the Australian Labor Party.’

Yet the integrity of the Royal Commission in its wider sense, has already suffered a crippling blow.

In order to consider the application from the ACTU and other unions that he recuse himself He had to put himself in the position of ‘a fair-minded lay observer.’

Yet given the circumstances surrounding his Commission are less rarefied. His impartiality has been challenged; his cooperation with requests for relevant documents has appeared less than perfect. In his words this may have been an ‘innocent’ oversight but it does not build confidence.

To complicate matters, Heydon has revealed his impatience with key witness, Bill Shorten, in a way that appears prejudicial to his full and fair hearing, rebuking the former head of the AWU lest he appear an ‘unreliable witness.’

Rebuking Shorten, was an extraordinary departure from protocol, but hardly the only indication that Heydon will do things his own way. He provides transcripts of charges against those called before the commission. These are given to reporters as those summonsed to appear get to see for the first time what it is they are charged with.

It may help the media but it does not help the perception of integrity. Moreover it provides easy ammunition for coalition politicians to use in parliamentary debate and to apply in arguments to persuade cross benchers.

He could not continue without significantly weakening the commission’s authority. At a cost of 61 million dollars so far and counting, the public deserves better value for its money. Heydon may have defended himself capably against the case of apprehended bias against him but even in doing so he has lost the bigger argument of why his commission should continue at all.

‘It never happened. Nothing ever happened… It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.’  Harold Pinter

“Nothing happened here except the issue of a poorly worded press release,” an open-necked, dressed-down for credibility, Prime Minister says, squinting in the Torres Strait sun as he covers up a cover up; capping a magical week of reality and illusion, which culminates in pure farce; an abortive Border Force crackdown on Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station, the city’s sordid underbelly of visa fraudsters, fare-evaders, bail absconders, buskers and other anti-social types.

A crack-up of a crackdown, Operation Fortitude is all over before it has begun; ridiculed into submission; laughed out of town. Bizarrely, the organisers have seen fit to post advance warnings of their surprise raid on social media. That does it. Melbourne’s twitterati drop everything but their smartphones and storm the station.

Dutton’s Fuzz, hopelessly outnumbered, are in trouble. Operation Fortitude is abruptly cancelled; redacted; consigned to the memory hole by the Ministry of Truth.

If Melbourne is odds-on to win best in show, it faces stiff competition from little Thursday Island where Tony Abbott, a veteran land-rights opponent, is reborn as Mabo Man.

Mabo Man leads a conga line of clowns, contortionists and illusionists that is our nation’s political elite.  Performers amaze onlookers and participants alike, all week, with a breath-taking display of Canning stunts, death-defying acrobatics, sideshows and some very funny stand up from the PM.

In a routine straight from Abbott (no relation) and Costello’s Who’s on first base, the PM kicks off the week’s fun and games by giving the nation the ring around on who rang whom in the race to be invited to invade Syria, an event most nations in the region have wisely stayed away from.

‘President Obama called me,’ he says with a poker face, to beg us to help the US, because our six ageing Hornets from 1984 are all he needs to turn Syria around; win it for him. OK, so it might improve my standing in the opinion polls. You can’t help bad luck.

Everyone knows it is Abbott’s call. All that is missing is a theme tune from the 1913 Broadway hit Honeymoon Express: ‘you made me love you, I didn’t want to do it; I didn’t want to do it …’

The week’s treats range from Abbott’s confected invitation to bomb all the IS it can find in Syria, a duty call to play our part in the ruinous potlatch ceremony that is our historic alliance with the US, our great and powerful friend who cost us $9 billion in Afghanistan alone, to ‘Visas, Please!’ a Dadaist production of Flinders Street theatre parodying our fetishising of totalitarianism, xenophobia and the narcissism of social media activists, artisan-crafted for a discerning Melbourne audience.

Code-named Operation Fortitude, Dutton’s Army, resplendent in six million dollar uniforms, – until now all dressed up with nowhere to go, team up with Victoria Police, Metro Trains, Yarra Trams, the Sheriff’s Office and the

Taxi Services Commission, to bail up random unwary pedestrians, who look a bit, well, temporary, fail to make eye contact or who fail the brown paper bag test. At least, that is the game plan.

The official plan is a caring, state protectiveness, such as a military dictator provides or the citizens of Johannesburg experienced when the Pass Laws kept them safe.  Armed and uniformed Border Force agents build ‘a secure and cohesive society,’ using tactics of fear and surprise. If you can prove your innocence, why, then you would have nothing to fear. Carry papers at all times.

It is a mission to ‘support the best interests of Melbournians, targeting everything from anti-social behaviour to outstanding warrants,’ explains ABF Victorian and Tasmanian supremo Commander Don Smith, ‘speaking with any individual we cross paths with … if you commit visa fraud you should know it’s only a matter of time before you’re caught out.’

Right on, Don! Yet it is Smitty himself who is caught out. ABF and co will stop ‘only those referred to us by police,’ he backtracks, too late. A flash mob public demonstration of anger against the government’s latest way of ‘keeping the public safe’ erupts forcing the performance to be called off ultimately in a teasing series of on-again, off-again announcements earning the ABF comedy hall of fame status as gold standard Keystone Coppers, in the national security division.

Tony Abbott, you can tell, back on Thursday Island, is searching desperately for another onion to bite into; a war to declare; a terrorist cell to bust, all week, but the closest he gets is Dutton’s utter cock-up.   Naturally the PM and his Minister for Border Protection have no explaining to do whatsoever, no responsibility for what was planned because it didn’t happen. ‘Operational matters’ secrecy will keep the monumental stuff-up under wraps.

Helpfully, a spokesperson for Peter Dutton’s office reminds the nation that ministers do not direct operational matters. Just in case you think he or his boss were behind something that had their fingerprints all over it. Abbott does come out on Saturday against random searches but has nothing to apologise for. It is all a miscommunication; a ‘very poorly worded’ press release.

The good captain blames his crew. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary happened,’ he repeats. ‘Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.’ Nothing to see here. Unlike the spectacle that Joe Hockey made of himself earlier in the week when he took advantage of the bagless power vacuum at the top that is Abbott’s post-Dyson Heydon leadership to do his own thing.

Bruised after a rubbishing from the bean counters for his vacuous platitudes on taxation, at a Tax Institute and Chartered Accountants of Australia and New Zealand conference in Sydney, Joe Hockey comes out as a republican again in a hopeful bid for Turnbull’s approval, Christopher Pyne outs himself as a libertarian and a Republican, trumping Hockey in a cheeky bid of Me-tooism for the love of Malcolm in the middle, the PM-in-waiting’s attention while the top cat is away.

King for a week of Thursday Island, Uncle Tony honours his promise to go bush one week every year instead of doing anything practical to help indigenous peoples whom he continues to patronise while underfunding them. $534 million was cut last year from indigenous programs administered by the Prime Minister and Cabinet and Health portfolios.

Abbott needs time out. It will give him time to work out the best angle on the tax cuts he will dangle before the people of Canning, tax cuts which even Hockey can see they have no way of funding. It is time to work out a replacement for Dyson Heydon to rev up the war on Bill Shorten.

Thought bubbling, brain farting, gaze firmly on a middle distance framed in palm tree leaves and the prospect of defeat in Canning, the PM is in top visionary form. Re-energised, re-born, he holds two radio interviews and one full press conference, satisfying the nation’s hunger for a few inane slogans about jobs and growth. Somehow, he finds time after decorating some local war heroes, to float a proposal that their Northern Dreaming pay for a railway for poor Adani.

Joe Hockey says, on Monday, government is ‘working away’ to see if Adani can have some, if not all, of a $5 billion Northern Australia Infrastructure Scheme announced in this year’s budget.

Adani is unlikely to secure the money to proceed with the mine, despite this latest carrot from our coal-fired Federal Government. Even if it went ahead tomorrow, there would be few jobs created.

ABS figures show that far more Australians work in solar power than coal; a total of 13,300 in July last year, compared with 9,500 in fossil-fuelled power stations.  Coal employs fewer workers than McDonalds.

Despite its mission to destroy what is left of our renewable energy industry, the government cannot hide the fact that its support of the coal industry is a costly economic and environmental mistake.

In a bid to divert us from the half billion his government cut from Aboriginal funding, the same amount as its direct subsidy of coal, the PM proclaims himself to be the first federal politician to visit Eddie Mabo’s grave; first to rule Australia from Thursday Island for a week.

Bragging rights secure, Abbott then professes his own undying respect for Eddie Mabo, a radical conversion, direct to camera, in a road to Damascus moment, the like of which has not been seen since his last major public backflip. This is not the same Tony Abbott who told The ABC in February 1992, that Eddie Mabo was dividing the nation.

Tony ‘Mabo’ Abbott is a powerhouse of good government in the field. He even gets George Brandis under canvas, he winks, while issuing regular pieces to his own film unit assuring the nation that the vital Royal Commission into Bill Shorten must go on, whatever Heydon decides.

Jeremy Stoljar QC, counsel assisting, is weakening as captain’s pick. Stoljar overlooked the odd email making a fool of his boss over his claim to have given all correspondence to the ACTU as requested.

Dyson Heydon must recuse himself on grounds of apprehended conflict of interest but his announcements are delayed while the PM’s office finds a suitable replacement former High Court Judge without Liberal Party affiliations who is mug enough to sully his name in Abbott’s witch hunt.

It could be a long delay. Luckily the PM can dazzle voters in Canning with promises of tax cuts but his best plan is to keep well away apart from a fleeting appearance on a quiet Saturday afternoon.

Abbott’s crafty choice of a 19 September date for the by-election allows him to back out.  Parliament can’t run without me will be his first lame excuse. Should it go badly, it will be due to local factors, why, that the PM was barely there.

Reporters rash enough to raise with the PM trivial, real world matters such as signs of recession in China, or even signs of a global recession, are told to run along; nothing to see here. Look to the future. Follow me, he says, winking darkly.

He of the never-never gives his ‘guarantee.’ Aboriginal peoples, he says, will best be recognised in the Australian constitution if we are all prepared to have a go; if we could all do a bit more talking in our segregated assemblies, until next June. Suddenly, we will discover we are there.

A form of words will spring fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus, to magically forge consensus, silence all naysayers and wow every voter in the land in 2017, most likely in the form of a referendum or plebiscite or something such as Uncle Tony or the next big white bwana may, in future, impose to get the result he’s after. No rush here or with marriage equality. Unlike war.

War is urgent. War boosted Howard’s approval in 2003. Abbott’s career is far more on the skids than Howard’s ever was. Desperate times …

It’s a simple plan of attack. Our nest of six Hornets is all set to buzz into Syria in an illegal extension of their ‘humanitarian’ mission that is guaranteed to win Syrian hearts and minds. No one will say what the terms of engagement are. No end point is envisaged. Like the Royal Commission into Union Corruption, it could run forever. Or until it sends us destitute.

Invading a sovereign state’s airspace is fraught with all manner of risks. But once again, questions are met with ‘nothing to see here.’ Foreign minister Julie Bishop who keeps up with all that type of thing assures us borders no longer matter because the enemy ignores them.

With sophistry like this guiding our foreign policy, the party with the focus on national security appears vulnerable on many fronts. Soo, too is the new candidate, Captain Andrew Hastie. Ms Bishop swoops on the 32 year old former SAS member. Takes him by the hand. She swans around shopping centres, flashing her new pal, Liberal candidate Andrew Hastie, like an engagement ring. Just whose campaign is Bishop, a contender for the PM’s job really helping?

Hastie, a veteran of unwinnable wars overseas, is boosted as a hero, a man of the military world. He knows what it is, he says to fight for his country’s way of life, whatever that means. The reality may be less grand. He may find himself yet again another pawn in someone else’s unwinnable endgame.

A shy, callow young man with little life experience outside of barracks and the combat zone, who is yet to produce a biography, he seems the perfect captain’s pick. Tongue-tied, nervous, used to taking orders, but good in a fight, he seems the ideal recruit to a tribal political party in which attacking opponents is the order of the day, dissent is discouraged, a party above all in which sideshows and diversions have become core business as real power lies in the hands of its puppeteers, the vested interests of commerce and industry and the ultra-right.

All eyes turn to the diverse Federal electorate of Canning where the death of sitting member Don Randall has caused a by election whose result could determine who leads the nation. Tony Abbott’s career rides on the result, according to a variety of sources in Canberra. Captain Andrew Hastie has been his captain’s pick to stop the rot, a man’s man to send on a man’s errand.

Former SAS Captain Andrew Hastie turns out to be a shy, gangly, young string-bean, awkward around people and ill at ease in public. Just the fella to parachute into the once safe Liberal seat formerly held by the late Don Randall whose local popularity Hastie cannot hope to match. We are treated to images of him at a local shopping centre in the infotainment that passes for TV news.

Hastie mumbles and fumbles. Looks down a lot. The tall young sandgroper is camera shy. Just as well he’s brought his Mum along. Mums come in handy if you ever have to explain yourself. As you do when you are still under investigation for serious misconduct on the battlefield. It doesn’t help that you are pretending otherwise.

Only it’s not his Mum at his side, it’s Julie Bishop. The diminutive Foreign Minister and deputy leader of her ultra-right party, takes the fledgling Liberal candidate firmly in hand. She flashes him around like a new engagement ring.

Bishop brags about Hastie being ‘an outstanding candidate’ as he clings to her arm like a new toy boy or even man bag an accessory after the fact of her own political ambition as much as his mentor. Bishop is not ruling out throwing her hat into the ring should Abbott step down as PM.

Hastie is promising. He has to be. There is little in his record which commends him for the job. He hopes his soldiering will fill the gap in his CV, a delusion encouraged by his military fetishising PM.

Widely seen as a ‘litmus test,’ a do or die by-election for the Prime Minister, Canning is just a bit of routine maintenance, a spark plug or oil change, according to Ms Bishop. She laughs off all suggestions of it being Tony Abbott’s last chance. This only confirms our suspicions.

‘The Canning by-election is all about the people of Canning. It’s all about finding a replacement for a very popular member in the late Don Randall,’ she lies.

If this were true, what is she doing there? Why are some of Abbott’s mates, Andrew Nikolic and two other Tasmanian Liberals, each chipping in $2000 for the campaign?

Hastie says he ‘knows what it means to fight for the Australian way of life,’ but he doesn’t explain what on earth he means; what this means in a multicultural society not at risk of invasion. He talks of how his tours of duty have been formative in his candidacy,

In a place where …’power and violence regularly intersect I’ve come to appreciate the unique conditions of liberty that has led to the flourishing of Australian society and our system of government.’

It’s another long stretch, which only draws attention to the truth. Everybody knows the ‘young fella’ was just another Aussie tag-along in another mad American adventure that has ended badly for all except the international heroin trade. A question mark hovers in the minds of some citizens at least as to why exactly any sane young man would volunteer to go there. Three times. Or what anyone would learn that could help them in Canning from the Narco State of Afghanistan where the fruits of war were chiefly a massive rise in opium production.

By 2014, a record 224,000 hectares of opium was under cultivation, double the amount grown before the American war. Afghanistan produces an estimated 6,400 tons of opium, 90 percent of the world’s supply. The drug is twenty five per cent of the nation’s economy and its tentacles stretch into the highest levels of the Afghan government. The opium trade brings in 3 billion per year and is the largest legacy of the war with America. Australia did its little bit for its great and powerful friend, the US and by extension, the drug lords.

Afghanistan, was a thirteen-year military failure; a futile incursion for which Australian leaders eagerly volunteered our young men. One thousand US soldiers were killed. Untold numbers went mad from their suffering.

Although the war was declared over last December, the ceremony in Kabul honouring the mostly-American and British troops who fought and died there had to be held in secret. The war went so badly that even Kabul itself is no longer safe from the Taliban.

His three tours of Afghanistan notwithstanding, it is probably prudent, therefore, not to hail Hastie as the returning conquering hero. It would be wise, moreover, to question what another soldier could possibly add to our testosteronic posturing, our tribal shirt-fronting leader’s style. The Liberals do not need another junkyard dog. Nor do they need another Audie Murphy loose cannon.

Hastie shoots himself in the foot by firing off a line about Labor being weak on supporting our boys in Afghanistan. He rails against renewable energy.

‘I never felt Labor had our backs when I was serving.’

Captain Hastie was in a helicopter when in 2013 a corporal under his command cut off the right hands of three slain Taliban fighters. Hastie’s claim that the investigation is over is not true. It was normal practice, he claims, a line he contradicts by his assertion that he was first to report the incident up the chain of command. If it were routine, he would not immediately inform his superiors.

Bishop’s defence of him is spirited but unhelpful. What happened was OK, by the Army, she effectively says and besides Andrew was in a different part of the battlefield. Please.

Does it matter where the captain was on the field when the atrocity was committed? Are we to believe that such a violation of the Army’s rules of engagement and of the Geneva Convention on war could ever be considered OK? The spin machine is suddenly under pressure to clean up the candidate’s past before he’s even begun campaigning.

A rapidly flaky Hastie is moved on. Nothing to see here. It’s the same out and about. There is an underwhelming reception for Hastie on the streets of Canning.

Bewildered strangers seem a under-awed. Perhaps it’s the instant familiarity Bishop rains upon them. She is like the Chinese war lord who baptised his troops with a hose. Candidate in tow she barges on; brazenly, fearlessly butting in uninvited; intruding into the private lives of the people of Canning and their business in the town.

Hastie is the goods and she is out touting him about. The people of Canning baulk at the hard sell of a less than glossy Liberal candidate whose paint is already badly chipped and fading as details of his past leak out.

Bishop takes charge of her young man, as Mums do, grasping his hand tightly as if taking a grandson to the zoo. Yet this outing is far scarier; more dangerous. Captain Hastie must fill a dead man’s shoes, he must take a crash course in meet n greet. He must learn what fights to pick and how.

Bishop offers the uneasy former SAS man a career-change jumpstart; an intensive immersive professional development experience, an induction into the show business for ugly people that is modern politics.

Julie is ten megatons of tactical cheesecake and power come hither. Andrew puts his head down and mumbles into his boots. The pair are so totally unalike each is diminished by the other’s proximity. And Hastie needs to learn to keep his mouth shut and not lead with the odd cheap shot.

Being gauche is not the kiss of death in today’s modern Liberal Party. Nor is being fast and loose with the truth. It may even confer a modest advantage but Andrew needs to woo the camera as much as the electorate. Sadly he is terminally upstaged by the supercharged Julie Bishop who is channels her own inner Tina Sparkle, so intense is her razzle-dazzle charm offensive. She gushes bonhomie and repartee, the perfect Perth hostess offering Andrew about as if he were the last canapé on the plate at a society do.

Andrew will be a hit with some Liberal voters judging by the guy in the Dick Smith shop who squeals and wets himself on sight of the new candidate for Canning. Loves a man in uniform. Hastie gives out his card. You can call me. Or email me at any time. Sure. We’ll get back to you after the 19th on that, Andrew.