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… It is expected that, on appointment, a judge will sever all ties with political parties. An appearance of continuing ties, such as might occur by attendance at political gatherings, political fund raising events or through contributions to a political party, should be avoided.” National Guide to Chief Court Officers 2^nd Edition

An eerie darkness descended upon Canberra last Tuesday as a vast cloud, a loft, a shit-load of Prime Ministerial pigeons came home to roost in such a mass that day became night and the edifices and institutions of our great national capital, its officials and its leaders were rendered ghost-like in a pallid gouache of guano.

A fall of snow dusted everything off, completing the illusion, making white the black heart of the nation and sending apocalyptic shivers up and down the national spine, especially amidst the Canberra Press Gallery.

‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.’

To Annabel Crabb, whose upcoming series Snouts in the Trough, the political class at table, is an eagerly awaited sequel to her popular Kitchen Cabinet, the snowfall in Canberra was an image of hell freezing over, the appointed time when our PM would permit same sex marriage. Abbott finds homosexuality personally threatening, he repeatedly, bafflingly offers by way of explanation as if this is some type of exemption from having to exercise sound leadership. Or tolerance and humanity.

The PM needs to maintain his opposition, forever, however, for it keeps alive his courtship of the right despite wedging him between his party’s social troglodytes and the nation, and at a cost of alienating liberal Liberals and the odd Nat in the coalition. Divorced from social reality, cut off from realists and progressives in his own party, and lacking any real accomplishments to bolster his leadership Abbott is looking increasingly vulnerable. Marriage equality in the meantime has become a hand-reared monster fed by his failure to take the lead.

For the incoherent Eric Abetz, however, perpetually conflicted, confused, muddling through as Abetz only can, gay marriage is both a little thing and a very big thing. Just as July’s rise in unemployment to 6.3 %, its highest for thirteen years with an extra 41,000 officially out of work is ‘positive’ news to him because 38,500 new jobs are being created. The dollar fell in response to the news, possibly because it lacks Abetz powers of perspicacity and discernment.

The Employment Minister did not proceed to say that two thirds of these new jobs are part time. Or that wages are stagnant. All Abetz are off, it seems, if you are out of work. Or looking for a fair and just society where equality, especially marriage equality is not just a hollow promise. Unless, of course, like Dolce and Gabbana, as Mr Abetz observes, marriage is not part of your business plan.

On ABC radio last month, gay marriage was ‘not a high order issue’ the Employment Minister soothed and assured his listeners, in his mellifluous way; yet later it was ‘Look out!’ A human rights disaster is upon us.

Abetz may be granted his ‘disaster.’ Marriage equality has been dealt with so badly by the PM and his government, which leaves the agenda on this issue to its opponents, that it tied up an incredible six hours on Tuesday at the end of which nothing positive was resolved and uncertainty and cabinet division fomented.

Two themes emerge clearly. One is the PM’s power to inflict his will on his party despite there being every good reason for allowing a conscience vote, if only as a sop to those party heretics who hold that he be reasonable or accountable.

Equally clear is that the PM has no intention of law reform in this area. A referendum would allow the issue to be shelved and even defeated if worded as a change to the marriage act rather than approval of same sex marriage.  Plebiscite talk is a useful division and diversion while he gets on with ignoring it all and hoping it will go away and allow him to get out the good news on jobs and growth, a two word quinella on a couple of lightly-raced stayers.

Marriage equality was not the only pigeon returning home to roost and catch the PM and his government napping, asleep at the wheel. Abbott’s stuff up was displaced only by another. It is every politician’s nightmare. Were they men trapped in a nightmare they were politicians? Or were they politicians trapped in a nightmare that they were merely men? Would they wake up and find themselves no longer in Canberra and forced to deal with a real world?

The Bronwyn Bishop scandal hung around like a bad smell over the installation of the new speaker, someone called Tony Smith who looks like and at times acts like a discarded early prototype for a Thunderbird puppet. Abbott more or less said Smith was ideal as Speaker of the House because Smith had failed to amount to anything so far in his parliamentary career.

Pyne further polluted the Speaker’s baptismal waters by claiming insanely that Bronwyn Bishop had been ‘felled in most unfair circumstances’ a bizarre but fresh perspective on the theme of innocent victimhood the PM had preferred to anything more factual. Pecking Bronnie on her cheek with a casual familiarity and an unexpected intimacy as he came out of the party room Tony Abbott offered the image of his Judas kiss to the nation’s photographers. He also signalled to the right where his loyalties lay.

Smith doubtless was vastly encouraged by the news that he was there because he was a failure so far and because the previous incumbent had met with bad luck. Never for him, as Scott Morrison’s party room elected man, the captain’s kiss. On the positive side, almost anything Smith does will be better than his predecessor.

It was a week of self-inflicted – if not permanent injury and disfigurement for life. Abbott’s long-running witch hunt of his opponents lost its gloss after beak of the week Dyson Heydon was found to be booked to entertain a Sydney Liberal Party do, while the PM’s crafty equivocation over gay marriage and his ambush of his own party and the resulting fiasco over plebiscite or referendum revealed a kamikaze PM abdicating all pretence at leadership in the face of his own insecurities, prejudices and the loss of support of the right wing.

Dan Tehan’s call for us to go to war with Syria reflects a similar problem. He was on the ABC about it before he’d even asked his boss. Or so he said. Abbott has a habit of unleashing Tehan in times of political crisis.

Greg Hunt similarly is let off the leash, foaming at the mouth without his muzzle. He snaps at Leigh Sales on camera. ‘With respect,’ he snarls, interjecting dismissively, hectoring and contriving in the end only to bully her. Bullying aside, leadership in this government is not just MIA, it is AWOL. Having no plan, no clear direction, and the government circles aimlessly in some kind of holding pattern until it runs out of fuel. Hot air exponents and manic blatherskites such as Hunt are sent out, meanwhile, to huff and puff hot air enough to keep an Airbus aloft.

The long-awaited release of the government’s targets for emissions reductions served to only confirm its rock-solid commitment and capitulation to the coal industry but the occasion contributed a surreal moment of unreality as gushing snake oil salesman and media bulldozer, Greg ‘let me finish, Leigh, Hunt’ talked over the top of everyone in case we noticed that he is comparing apples with bananas. He is clearly bananas.

‘We’ve moved from a minus five per cent target to a minus 26 to 28 per cent. We’re able to do this because of the success of the Emissions Reduction Fund and do this without driving up electricity prices, which is the alternative policy.’

It’s bull’s wool. OK there may be a bit of guano mixed in for binding but the government is banking on its being all too confusing for voters to follow. In parliament this week, Tony Abbott denied ever saying that climate change is absolute crap. Perhaps he was misreported. What he really said was the coalition’s climate change policy is ‘absolute crap.’

Most Australians know when they are being taken for a ride. They remember not getting any axed carbon tax refund on their power bills despite the government’s promises. Or if they did get some paltry refund it in no way matched the rhetoric. Nothing has changed. The nation can see that Direction Action is a big new tax. After all, they are paying for it. So far taxpayers have given $660,297,303 – that is more than a quarter of the $2.55 billion available to the government to achieve less than twenty percent of its emissions reductions target and some five years too late.

Hunt’s ERF ‘success’ is measured solely by the amount of cash handouts doled out by a government silly enough to pay $2.55 billion to those who volunteer to reduce emissions through carbon abatement programmes. These are not new schemes, moreover. Most are pre-existing forestry or land sector, landfill schemes and there is nothing to say that their results would have been recorded without the ERF and under Labor. The big culprits, moreover, such as coal fired power stations go on polluting freely because they are not in the scheme.

There is no cap where it matters; on the emissions of heavy emitters in energy and resource sectors who remain outside the ERF; no guarantee above all that any gains made in voluntary carbon abatement will not be eaten up by an increase in emissions by those industries outside the scheme. It is a con.

But wait there’s more. There are ‘other measures’ and an unexplained ‘safeguard mechanism’ which Hunt will not detail which will supplement direct action’s handouts. This government has no intention of meeting its international obligations; no commitment to reducing carbon emissions. But it is wedded to coal, a marriage less of equality than of convenience.

It was a week in which the federal government inexplicably was badly in need of leadership and a plan. The terror drum had been beaten to death. Industrial relations is a no go zone despite the report of the Productivity Commission heretics that basically our workplaces were in pretty good shape. Refuting business calls for a comprehensive reform of a failing system, the Commission found Australia’s labour market was performing relatively well against global standards. Sunday overtime rates and enterprise contracts were raised but the government does not have the ticker to raise them. Where was Alan Jones when you needed him?

Even the Kill Bill show, that long-running standby with the extended season and an expandable budget was in trouble. Another pigeon, another pile of bird poop. The ‘Prime Minister of the Opposition’s’ negativity and skulduggery backfired spectacularly.

It had seemed a good idea at the time. Setting up a Royal Commission to bully the union movement and to kill Bill Shorten’s political career had, however, as experts warned it would, come back to bite Tony Abbott on his bony but priceless rump. Another captain’s pick had become an own goal.

Dyson Heydon QC, a national hero of jurisprudence according to the PM and worth every cent of his top secret fee estimated to be at least $4 million and who is a sure thing for another captain’s pick knighthood, a veteran advocate of work choices and reactionary polemics in industrial relations found himself unaccountably booked as guest speaker at a Liberal Party fund-raiser in Sydney later this month, thereby jeopardising whatever shred of impartiality was left him after his outrageous attack on Bill Shorten’s reliability as a witness last month.

Heydon seems in no hurry to resign, yet but the unions appearing before the commission are threatening legal action to remove him. In Heydon’s own 2011 opinion, the union case has merit. The Liberal Party fund raiser speaking engagement was not a good look, however much Abbott and co may pretend it was not political.  In Heydon’s own words;

“The appearance of departure from neutrality is a ground of disqualification” for a judge. “It is fundamental to the administration of justice that the judge be neutral.”

King Billy, as National Secretary Shorten was known to AWU rank and file members at the time, took a bit of a dip in the opinion polls as a result of the rubbishing the top silk dished out to him but no lasting damage seems to have been done to the ‘Labor-lite’ leader. Dyson Heydon may have even done him a bit of a favour by highlighting the former union leader’s deal-making skills.

Indeed, Shorten’s dull pragmatic conservatism may enhance his career in our troubled, tricky times. A candidate with a charisma bypass just might get a crack at the PM’s job if he can return the favour of not being Tony Abbott to an electorate which voted in the coalition only because it wasn’t Labor. Voters won’t be fussed too much about his politics or his promises as long as he’s not the current mongrel.

We get the politicians we deserve in the end, however and perhaps the biggest pigeon of all coming home to roost was the increasing number of Australians who do not vote. It is estimated that you could fill four federal electorates with unregistered potential voters. Australian Electoral Commission statistics reveal 20 per cent of eligible voters did not cast their ballot in the last federal election. Labor had its lowest voter turnout ever.

If ever Australians needed a graphic reminder of what happens if you can’t be bothered to vote, they should look at the current circus of recycled Howard era rejects and throwbacks in Canberra. Apathy and inertia help in no small way to guarantee any conservatives, however, dysfunctional, their continued existence.

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It is the title fight of the century. Skink and Snake, two obscure creatures are thrust suddenly under a national spotlight at Queensland’s Galilee Basin, last week, when the little Aussie battlers square off against a pair of slick out of towners who have cut up ugly and are about to destroy the joint. What’s this? The referee is stopping the bout? The crowd goes wild; it is on for young and old.

Backers and seconds pitch into the fray. Punches are thrown. In the ensuing melee which rages up and down the country it is impossible to predict the final result. Most punters, however, back the coal to stay in the hole.   One of the many men that are Tony Abbott on the political scene bucks the trend and wagers coal will clean up. Everyone in the world wants our coal. Because our coal is like no other coal; such clean, green coal, he winks.

Only Blinky Bill Shorten, who seems to have coal dust in his eyes, takes an each-way bet. Maybe he’s saving himself for his next appearance before the Royal Commission into Bill Shorten where he will once again be found guilty of being a unionist.

Counsel assisting the commission Mr Jeremy Stoljar QC has new documents; new evidence he says quietly and slowly, softening Shorten up, softening us all up, playing on the dramatic irony that no evidence is needed for the commission to do its dirty work. Only the coalition puts on such quality show trials. But Adani is a class act also. Money to burn. And all other peoples’.

After four years of digging in, Adani had looked unbackable. The miner bought the port; it owns Abbot Point in Bowen, a port it puffs which has been going for thirty years. Transport is in the bag. It has MOUs from other miners pledging funds. Even Gina and Clive have said they will chip in to pay for Adani’s railway. But there has been the odd setback along the way.

Adani failed comprehensively to make its financial case in response to a Queensland Land Court challenge earlier this year.  It was hammered. While it may be a year before judgement is found, it does have the PM and his sock puppet Environment Minister Hunt in its pocket. Surely they’ll come up with something. But no-one expected a skink and snake to do them down.

In a hiding to nothing, dinkum-Aussie-backs-to-the-wall stoush, the quiet yakka skink and his flash looking bushie mate, the ornamental snake outfox not only the wily Adani giants but also one entire Queensland government and a Federal government. Snake and skink backers, the MacKay Conservation Group backers, take a bow.

Not that Abbott’s team has its eye on the ball. Last week, MPs abandoned any pretence at governing in favour of bagging Labor over travel and quietly paying back their own misspent entitlements. It was not until late in the week that a story was got up about a greenie, socialist conspiracy abusing the courts to wilfully sabotage progress. Most Australians saw it differently.

Halting the Carmichael mine is a victory for grass roots democracy, a win for the little people everywhere, according to social media, but the Adani mob and their political backers beg to differ.

Sailing close to contempt for the judiciary, Tony Abbott, the number one Adani fan club ticket-holder confects outrage: ‘the courts are being used to sabotage projects.’  He may see himself as Bronwyn Bishop and John Howard’s ideological love child but he ought to have a paternity test done.

Abbott is, or his latest avatar is, sounding more and more like a son of Joh Bjelke Peterson’s with his secrecy, his craven crony capitalism, his over legislation and his bashing of the bench. Not to mention the sensational rorting of his political intimates. President of the NSW Bar Association, Jane Needham SC, spots a link with Joh in Abbot’s weak grasp of the separation of powers.

“The comments demonstrate a lack of understanding of the independent role of the courts in our democracy,” …”the courts are not the servant of the Executive.”

Anyone else would realise he’s way out of line. Behind all Abbott’s blather, however, he is all for changing the rules, over legislating again, to make it impossible to challenge mining on environmental grounds. There’s more than a touch of megalomania.

Shrewdly sidelining Christopher Pyne, whom even Howard wisely refused to give a portfolio, Abbott has dipped into Bronnie’s pin money and outsourced Pyne’s day job, engaging Robert Griew, a $155,000 professional negotiator.

It is an interesting form of perk for Pyne. Doubtless many workers would be happy for the boss to pay someone else to do their job. It begs the question, however, what are we paying Pyne for?

Griew is making inroads with the likes of Ricky Muir, wind energy saboteur David Leyonhjelm and other nut cases of the senate cross bench.  Leyonhjelm has been heard in interview boasting that wind farms are done for thanks to the combined power of the cross bench. The mouse has roared. Expect a change of heart on the cost of tertiary education. The environment could be next.

Minerals Council of Australia blowhards accuse opponents of the Carmichael Mine of being ‘politically motivated.’  A Royal Commission into environmentalists won’t, however, be needed this time thanks.  With a professional negotiator on the job, the government may sugar coat and sweet-talk an ‘obstructionist’ senate into agreeing with its proposed Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 2013 Amendment. With deadpan irony, The Department of the Environment promises the Senate that the new law will have only a ‘minor impacts.’

Greg Hunt would be given complete legal immunity from all future legal challenges to his mining approvals. The law, moreover, would be retrospective even if Hunt’s approval was not compliant with the EPBC law. The Environment Minister would be above the law, a situation which he sees as offering certainty to mining companies which are faced with environmental challenges. Sure will.

Despite his own rule changing, the PM can still keep a straight face as he tells others to play by the rules in his pose as the arbiter of a fair go. He knows what to say. Playing by the rules is virtuous.

“If a vital national project can be endlessly delayed, if the courts can be turned into a means of sabotaging projects which are striving to meet the highest environmental standards, then we have a real problem as a nation,” he said. “We can’t become a nation of naysayers; we have to remain a nation that gives people a fair go if they play by the rules.”

Hypocrisy to one side, every premise in the PM’s case is false. Far from being ‘a vital national project,’ for example, the mine is shunned by financial backers and mothballed by Adani because on current coal prices in an increasingly green market for energy it is a dud. With other markets contracting it will never make money. India is pledged to become self-sufficient in coal in a few years. China, also, will import less. Both, unlike Australia are investing heavily in renewable energy. How could anyone say Adani is playing by the rules?

Adani has grossly exaggerated the benefits of the Carmichael mine even according to its own experts.  It promises 10,000 jobs and 22 billion in tax but the facts attest otherwise. Jerome Fahrer, Adani’s economics consultant concedes only 1494 jobs will be created, and there is no guarantee that 457 visas will not be used to help Adani import workers.

The outlook for coal is bleak, even for the superior Galilee Basin, artisanal, hand-crafted, organic thermal coal which Abbott spruiks constantly; assuring us is better than any available elsewhere in the world. Adani needs a price of $80 to 100 US dollars a tonne to be profitable. Currently the price is around $60 per tonne in what is a deflating bubble. It may well be that coal reverts to its average of around $30 to $40. A mine that runs at a loss will not pay taxes.  Should it make a profit there is every reason to expect Adani to follow its current practice and ‘offshore’ its profits.

Yet our government in Canberra has no stomach for facts. Blind faith and obedience to vested interests and an IPA agenda eclipse any empirical research. The federal government is a sheltered workshop for Howard-era throwbacks, rejects and other, sundry, flat-earthers who seek to take Australia back to a glorious past when all you needed to succeed was a long handled shovel and a miner’s licence. Lang Hancock, recently canonised in a July Australian story hagiography is their patron saint. Strangely it chose to steer around his attitude towards Aboriginal Australians and their land; their mother.

Less circumspect in her own cause is Dame in waiting Gina Rinehart, a partner in another licence to mine in the Galilee Basin. A mate of Tony Abbott, Gina tells the PM what she would like done with mining and minerals policy. Someone has to. With no real energy or environment policy and a reverse Midas-touch in business and finance, the government is desperate to have any mine go ahead, especially Carmichael which carries bragging rights of being the biggest coal mine in the known universe. Abbott can’t wait to blow his bags.

Tony Abbott, named for St Anthony, the patron saint of lost things, clings precariously to his leadership and all week has been manically seeking to deflect damage by rashly committing to root and branch reform of entitlements. It will come back to bite him in the bum.

In 2012, his day trip to a Country Music Festival in Tamworth saw him claiming $9347 in work expenses despite not even staying in the city overnight. From 2010 to 2014, as Opposition Leader, Abbott claimed a total of six million dollars, outspending the then Prime Minister, Julia Gillard.

Seriously wounded by his loyal support of Bronwyn Bishop, Abbott, the six million dollar man, is bad-mouthing anyone who dares raise an eyebrow over his equally mad plan to back Adani, one of the most unattractive partners you could choose with its record of bonded labour, child labour, illegal work practices, environmental vandalism and financial shenanigans.

Three Adani-owned companies are alleged by Indian government authorities to have siphoned a billion dollars from Indian shareholders and transferred them into a Mauritius Island account, an allegation the company dismisses as ‘politically motivated.’

Tony Abbott is spruiking the benefits of Adani prosperity but none of the wealth appears to trickle down. One 12-year-old boy from the state of Bihar, is paid 150 rupees a day, about $2.60, to carry drinking water to the workers. He said he worked 12 hours a day, and had only Sundays off. But he does get to work on Shantigram a luxury apartment Adani is building on the outskirts of Gujurat. Bet he can’t wait to pay for Adani coal-fired electricity Abbott says will lift him out of poverty.

According to the Prayas Centre for Labor Research and Action in Ahmedabad, Adani gets around paying fair wages by outsourcing labour to many contractors. It is not unknown here.

“Almost one fourth workers are getting less than 230 rupees per day [$4], the minimum wage for unskilled construction workers in Gujarat,” the report said. “Another 29 per cent of workers are getting between 231 and 300 rupees per day [$5.30] … the lowest wage rate reported was 130 rupees per day [$2.30].”

Notorious in India for their exploitative work practices and disdain for local ecology and environment, Adani is the darling of the deluded right wing rump which calls the shots in the coal-fired Abbott government, a government with a cargo cult attitude to prosperity. We will all be rich when multinational companies can freely dig up our minerals, destroy the environment, and rip off our taxation system by transferring their profits offshore.  Coal is good for civilisation.

Australians with other ideas are stooges of conspiracies, saboteurs, wreckers, as prime paranoiac and craven panic merchant, Abbott rants:

“Let’s be under no illusions the carbon tax was socialism masquerading as environmentalism”.

‘Not my stuff up,’ work experience boy Greg Hunt huffs from the brig, ‘and Captain Abbott makes all the decisions. And it is really only a tiny, weenie, hitch.

Adani will be back in the saddle as soon as Hunt can change the rules and obtain 16 billion dollars of new financial backing.  The pokies industry takes 15 billion a year. It owes them a favour.

Skink and snake had been left out of environmental minister Greg Hunt’s plan, causing the Federal Court to decree progress on the Carmichael dam must cease forthwith, a verdict which also cut off its money supply. Hunt had failed his obligation to properly consider all endangered species.

A mere technical detail, said Minister Hunt, downplaying the project’s mortal wounds, in a trademark Monty Python Black Knight dismissal which he also applied to news the Commonwealth Bank would no longer sponsor Adani Mining, leaving the firm Buckley’s chance of stumping up the 16 billion required to fund not only the mine but the rail and everything else to make it all work, or to use another government- buggered buzz word, its ‘infrastructure.’

Adani has responded by sacking or redeploying most of its 50 Brisbane staff. Of course, the firm is big enough, wealthy enough to redeploy these employees any time they need. At present, however, regardless of skink and snake’s last stand, the Carmichael Mine will not go ahead until it can convince sceptical financiers that it can make a profit. Nor will any other mine in the area get the green light.

All depends on Adani. And unless the Indian miner can make a convincing financial case, all other blandishments and exhortations from Prime Ministers and governments state and federal will be to no avail. And if Blinky Bill Shorten could get off the fence; shake the coal dust out of his eyes. Even Bill would agree, it is not about the environment or the ecology, in the end it is whether the other mob can make a quid out of us.

But that won’t stop the finger-pointing, the name-calling and the witch-hunting. It’s one of the laws of political survival: ‘When something goes wrong find someone to blame.’ Makes a wonderful diversion, too. Expect a lot of it in the next few weeks.

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Did she go or was she pushed? Why did it take so long? The resignation of celebrity politician, Bronwyn ‘Barnstormer’ Bishop on Sunday afternoon raises more questions than you can poke a joy stick at but one thing is certain, as she hands in her robes and locks up her speaker’s luxury apartment, before parliament resumes next week, she gave her ticket to ride a legendary workout. A place of sorts for her in the history books is guaranteed.

“I have not taken this decision lightly, however it is because of my love and respect for the institution of Parliament and the Australian people that I have resigned as Speaker.”

In the end, however, Bronnie had to be grounded; dragged out of her speaker’s high chair she so eagerly approached feigning resistance as ever for the gallery. Her flights of fancy ended badly. Her spectacular junkets drew attention to herself in ways that neither her notorious bias as a speaker nor her patchy travel documents could bear. And people were talking about little else but Bronwyn’s travel scandal. She even made news by staying put.

Bishop made headlines late last week when she had to cancel a planned dash to NYC, a turn of events typical of a bizarre week in politics in which a series of wretched ‘errors of judgement,’ it seems, had contrived to throw the speaker off her true course into luxury limousines, charter flights and other wantonly extravagant transports of delight.

Forced to take a back seat, other worthy public agenda items include marriage equality, an issue which threatens to wedge Abbott while revealing his party is out of touch; a debate on racist Australia after Adam Goodes’ racial vilification; the vexed question of how best to boost the number of women in politics and the failure of the TPP to get every member to cede its sovereignty and to sacrifice its local industries in homage to Free Trade and US; while under ISDS, multinational corporations get the right to sue governments over not acting in a corporation’s ‘best interests,’ as in the current legal case of Phillip Morris Asia vs the Australian government where the cigarette-maker claims that plain packaging violates its intellectual property rights.

The TPP push will now subside into a death in life like the WTO Doha Round which has disappeared like the Cheshire cat leaving only its smile behind. Expect much self-congratulation and spin, nevertheless. Break out the cigars; we’re almost pregnant. Besides failing and failing to get in the news are very different matters. Just ask Sophie Mirabella.

Such was the crush on Bronnie that Sophie Mirabella was almost pushed out of the news, an unthinkable turn of events. Such are the times, such is politics today and such is Sophie Mirabella’s chutzpah that she has done nothing newsworthy, noteworthy or remotely interesting other than promise to be a proper candidate, telling the good people of Indi she will show up around the electorate now that she has been preselected. This is deemed news.

Mirabella whose strengths so far appear to most observers unfathomable, could continue as an Australian Submarine Corporation director right up until the election. Tony Abbott made a director of the Australian Submarine Corporation last December after Mirabella lost her seat to Independent Cathy McGowan. Her $73,000 fee comes in handy, while, should it win the election, the government would be blessed with an MP who has some handy inside knowledge, provided submarine building is not all done and dusted by then.

Jack Waterford of The Canberra Times sees in Mirabella a gift for uniting people in their sadly, all too often personalised dislike of her, a gift she shares with her pal, Bronwyn Bishop. Both women of course enjoy Tony Abbott’s undying support, a loyalty which prompted Bronwyn to confess to the error of her ways on a comfy radio station. She convinced no-one and did her sponsor’s cause nothing but harm by offering too little, too late.  She continued to pretend that paying back the money absolved her initial fraud.

Of course, Bishop would pay back the money she claimed to travel to Sophie Mirabella’s nuptials and a few other similar pressing political duties, not because it was wrong but because it doesn’t look good. You can’t dance at two weddings with one behind.

All eyes, however, remained fixed all week on Bronnie’s front, her chutzpah, her outrageous sense of entitlement; the ways she could turn an otherwise mundane travel rort into a spectacular tour de force. A wild-eyed, wayward prima donna, she threatened to upstage everything; bring the house down.

It all made for a week when the speaker’s decision not to travel, or one made for her by the PMO, was as newsworthy as the steady discovery of further excesses proving Bishop has always tucked into her travel entitlements with gusto. She always has. She hired a helicopter at public expense shortly after first entering parliament in 1987, according to her biographer. It was an emergency. She needed to get from a fete to a dog show.

Bishop’s record suggests an exalted sense of entitlement if not pathological delusions of grandeur; an imperious disdain for the hoi-polloi and the petty rules lesser mortals are bound by.  No wonder that for so long her pal Abbott saw her as a poster girl for the Liberal party. And yet she’s a practical gal, even if her feet are seldom on the ground. Chauffeured BMWs are quicker than Comcars; in a chauffeured Beemer, one is allowed to use bus lanes.

Bishop’s scandal is an irresistible spectacle, especially for a government pledged to eliminate waste, a government whose every plan is predicated on the ‘ending of the age of entitlement.’ At least that was Joe Hockey’s promise. Now Bronwyn’s travel diary tells a different story, a tantalising expose of wanton wanderlust and unrepentant fraudulence. And her comeuppance. There’s a mini-series in it, surely if not a whole soap opera.

The nation has enjoyed the ride, too. Everyone is captivated by the colour and movement of a rorting, cavorting and high-flying party animal who suddenly plummets back down to earth. Hubris and Nemesis are back at work, along with more than a little schadenfreude. Bishop is long on enemies yet not without friends. Her exit was artfully staged with their help.

Lest the nation think there was something wrong or that she lacked remorse, the veteran thespian and former TV actor, crept, as Abbott had decreed, when the two mates met Wednesday, on to Alan Jones’ 2GB radio show to cop the copter; apologising for whirly-birding it to Clifton Springs. ‘There is no excuse for what I did with the helicopter.’ It was, indeed, over the top but only the latest act in a whole political career over the top.

Time was not on Bishop’s side. That it took her until Thursday to make her stage-managed apology did not help her credibility but at least she had complied with her boss’s instructions. Alan made soothing noises and damaging accusations about Julia Gillard’s use of charter flights which might have been relevant had they been accurate and had Bishop been PM.

Bishop’s public act of penance if not exactly contrition earned the approval of her otherwise silent bestie PM, ‘Chastened,’ very ‘chastened’ was the non-committal word Tony Abbott chose to describe Mrs Bishop’s new state, as he crept out of hiding on Friday to publicly confirm his support of her as long he could string it out. She was worth a handful of right wing votes in the next leadership spill. And pure gold in the shit-fight that is question time.

Scotching whispers she may resign, Mrs Bishop charged ahead as she had pledged, ‘working hard’ on visits to a school and to Gatsby-parties, gracing in a chastened, low-key fashion the recent reunion of her pal Jamie Packer with Jodhi Meares, while continuing to upstage all else in federal politics for a third week as fresh revelations showed that last year she had chartered a $6000 flight to travel the 160km from Sydney to Nowra using her chief of staff, Damien Jones bestie Andrew Gibbs’ aviation company. The same link led to her now notorious chopper ride to Geelong as certainly as it seems to have led her from ‘error of judgement’ to ill-judged corruption.

Government was not so much sidelined as derailed as Joe Hockey found to his cost when he attempted to engage the press after his midweek news conference on the economy. Reporters had questions only about Bronwyn. Some sensed fraud not just poor judgement, others were even less generous, a development which ‘takes the saga to a whole new level’ said Labor. Hockey looked happy to be relieved of the burden of his usual hollow rhetoric and nonsense about a credible path to surplus, grinned and walked briskly out of harm’s way.

Without evidence of official committee work, it seems Bishop made false claims about the real purpose of her travel to her pals’ weddings. More than once or twice. The government at first was paralysed with inertia. Or fear. At last, when all other options were exhausted, the PM showed his decisiveness in securing Bishop’s resignation after a sneak preview in opinion polls showed the coalition hopelessly down the gurgler. ‘Bronnie, darl, you either resign or the Liberal party plunges into electoral oblivion, taking you and me with it.’

Bronnie is not just a big spender who needed cutting down to size; she is Abbott’s nemesis, publicly puncturing his leadership pretension, foregrounding the born to rule party on the wing, its addiction to luxury, its worship of privilege and its culture of evasion and denial. He had to ‘let her go’ cut the dead albatross from around his party’s neck.

The Coalition’s abject failure to deal with Mrs Bishop’s refusal to even step aside, let alone heed her duty to resign; her pathological obduracy in the face of mounting evidence of irregular travel claims; her excessive travel; her histrionic apology, extracted too late, constitutes an inescapable indictment of the PM whose knowing captain’s call put her in the speaker’s chair in the first place.

It is almost as damaging to a Coalition party so out to lunch it could let it all happen. It will dog Abbott and his party. Who would make such a creature speaker? Who could show such cruelty and such contempt for parliament?

Tony Abbott’s cynical over-promotion of Mrs Bishop is another gesture of contempt for due process from the same political joker who made himself Minister for Women.

Blinded by Bishop’s potential usefulness Abbott, the ruthless pragmatist, was prepared to overlook her lack of any other quality or skill that might commend her selection.

A true friend would never have set Bronwyn Bishop up for a fall; just for his political advantage and enjoyment. Abbott has directed and produced a parliamentary theatre of cruelty which sees his challenged Madam Speaker stitch up an enraged and frustrated opposition. Such drama not only demeans himself his party and politics, it demeans all of us.

Bishop appeared confused at times, mistaking names and other details. Her rulings could defy logic. At other times she appeared Pyne’s puppet, heeding overt signals to stem applause for Bill Shorten. Abbott’s creature she may be, but Bishop was bested by the expectations and responsibilities of the Westminster tradition. It is not so much the speaker’s travel bills which have proved expensive; her cost to our democracy is incalculable.

Successful Speakers enjoy their peers’ respect. They demonstrate a capacity to make quick, informed, impartial judgements based on their extensive knowledge of procedure. The appointment of Bronwyn Bishop was an alarming departure from this tradition.

Regardless of how clever it seemed at the time, Abbott’s choice of speaker has ultimately proved another catastrophic error of judgement from a Prime Minister whose fondness for a captain’s call is not matched by any capacity to make the right call.

Even at the end, it seems shadow figures did the PM’s dirty work for him. Nowhere in his Sunday night media statement did he take responsibility for his speaker’s resignation. A lack of leadership was also damagingly apparent in the maverick attempts of his colleagues to do his job for him through the week.

‘Go Bronnie, go,’ front bench Liberals whispered; Bishop and Hockey even telegraphed her marching orders via the press.  Turnbull took a train to Geelong in a cheeky stunt to signal that for Bishop it was the end of the line for her. Her colleagues, with the exception of Christopher Pine and one other wanton toady and the affable but utterly marginalised National Party duffer Barnaby Joyce, want to clip her ticket; her free ride to stop now.

Government has ground to a halt, they claim; worse, they are upstaged by the scandal; she is ‘sucking up oxygen.’  Other matters, they claim archly, merit attention. Or not.

Kevin Andrews’ election campaign funding scandal is eclipsed by the saga of the free-loading unrepentant rorter in the speaker’s chair. Greg Hunt uses the alarming newspeak ‘credible’ for his yet to be released 2020 climate change targets. No-one follows up.

Even Murdoch hacks attack the coalition’s failure of nerve and sinew.  The government is paralysed; locked in a crisis of its own confection. Its indecision feeds an all-consuming scandal until it has become a monster eager to devour them all.

The fish rots from the head down. The Bishop travel-scandal was nurtured into a full-blown crisis by a prime minister who was MIA. Tony Abbott went underground most of last week, emerging only when her decision had been made.

Did another captain’s pick fiasco, prove too much for Abbott? Possibly. What is certain is that a prime minister who goes into witness protection or who is simply MIA in the heat of battle is as much of a liability as PM who runs away from a dud captain’s call. It can only go downhill from here. Abbott’s call for a review of the entitlement system an ominously evasive tactic.

In the end, the PM said, it is all the system’s fault for being inside the rules but outside community expectations. “What has become apparent, particularly over the last few days, is that the problem is not any particular individual; the problem is the entitlement system more generally,” he said. This is why Bishop said she was doing committee work when she was going to a wedding. A greatly relieved nation could dismiss all thought of fraud, corruption or rorty wastrels and sleep soundly in their beds.

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‘Sod off Tony! Bronwyn Bishop sends Tony Abbott packing, rebuking her pocket PM for his cheek, if not his hypocrisy in broaching the issue of her travel claims. The hypothetical scenario is surely the most likely outcome of the spat of the week based on what we know of each party and given the veil of secrecy our virtual-burqa-wearing government prefers.

Whatever Tone did say to Bron, or he said she said, the outcome is plain.  Their conversation frames another amazing week in federal politics, a week which saw the PM’s leadership and that of his team tested if not bested by the need to walk the talk while the opposition followed suit.

Not content with adopting LNP policy on turn-backs, Labor also borrows the government’s specious rhetoric that it is a life-preserver.  Never mind that it is a lie. Never mind that Liberal spin doctors dreamt it up to disguise their real motive of vote-buying as preventing drowning.

Never mind that it is a grotesquely preposterous pose,, Bill Shorten, but you do need, now it is Labor policy, to explain to the nation how life in indefinite detention in, say, Nauru is a life saved.

Explain to us, Bill, how it saves lives when thousands of Rohingya from Burma and Bangladeshi migrants are stranded at sea when Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand turn back their flimsy boats.

Apologise, Bill, above all, to asylum seekers for the slogan ‘turn back the boats.’ They are not boats that you turn back but people.

Bill Shorten also needs to apologise to Tony Abbott for implying that ‘boats have stopped’ when it is clear we have paid at least one crew of people smugglers to turn back and just last week there was a boat off Dampier. The boats are still coming but we are not told about them. Keeping the people in the dark is part of the government’s art of national conversation, its current talking point obsession.

Despite a Canberra gab-fest of talking points about the need to talk; about how good it is that we are having this conversation, real communication hit new lows. Every MP and her leader was so busy paying lip-service to the conversation buzzword, that trust and respect couldn’t get a word in. Tony Abbott made a captain’s call for something which, by definition, you just can’t call to order.

“We want to have a well-informed and civil national conversation about all these things and, frankly, if we can have a conversation rather than a scare campaign, our country will be so much better off,”

Mr ‘Communications Skills,’ as he is known around parliament, Abbott intoned, achieving all the statesmanlike sobriety and gravitas of a cheap tourist souvenir, a plastic mascot of a man whose pale, taut face and patent insincerity were given unflattering emphasis by a backdrop of garish bunting; another set of spanking new Australian flags.

The Prime Minister’s gift to the conversation was to restrict it. Changes to the tax on super or any review of tax rates for the wealthy were ruled out, leaving leaders only one option to discuss: GST.

Abbott was croaking from the leaders’ retreat at Victoria police barracks in Canberra, a venue which doubtless saved him a travel claim whilst conferring the militaristic touch he favours in his ongoing ‘national security conversation’ a scare campaign he maintains constantly with ill-informed warnings and lurid fear-mongering about death cults coming for every one of us.

To be frank we’ve given up expecting anything real, Mr Abbott. So far, your ‘honest national conversations’ are a blend of crying wolf, fetishising the military and bonkers paranoia. Your so-called White Papers are marketing tools for your agenda. Take away your IPA wish-list and you have nothing to say. You may think you can fool us but you can’t con Bronnie.

Abbott is Bishop’s political bestie and party warhorse but even a PM who puts the con in conversation, gets a charge out her when he waves the red flag of travel entitlements. Bishop does not respond well. Her nostrils flare. Such presumption amounts to lèse majesté. He may as well tell her to take a kerosene bath.

‘Where would you be without Bronnie?’ She cackles. Her support of Abbott enabled his one-vote 2009 leadership victory over Turnbull. It was close. One informal vote was simply marked ‘No.’

Would you still be my PM today without my people? Bishop is queen of the Liberals’ ultra-right wing and, in her own mind, the entire Liberal Party if not the nation. And her aspirations don’t end there.

Unaccountably, in her eyes, she has just been passed over as next Head of the Inter-parliamentary Union. Insiders cite her campaigns against Islamic dress as doing her case no good at all. Still, they could probably do with a queen on Pluto.

A more rational estimate of Bronwyn’s bishopric is that she rules Mackellar and the PM’s neighbouring seat of Warringah; it’s her turf but she’s done him all sorts of political favours even if Douglas Robb had to veto her plan to bank donations into her own political account in the early days. Abbott is indebted to her. She knows it. Some say she’s done quite well out of her mate, too.

Do you realise whom you are talking to? She barks. Her bedside manner wins her few admirers. Gareth Evans says it is easy to hate Bishop at first sight. It saves time later. Many in her own party are similarly underwhelmed by her naked ambition, self-interest and delusions of grandeur.

Rampant egos burnished bright, Bishop and her PM are political birds of a feather; in for the kill – the spoils and little else. Forget policy or the art of governance, it is the thrill of politics as blood sport which binds them, as much as Narcissus within permits. And nests exist to be feathered.

Abbott’s ‘ground control to Major Bron,’ damage containment mission has led him to describe his speaker as ‘a loyal servant of her country,’ choosing words which clearly presage a dame elect, an ultra-monarchist lady in waiting for whom the PM’s controversially revived Order of Australia is tailor-made, most others see her in a different light.

It is Bronwyn Bishop’s loyal service to herself which is her outstanding feature. And being above the rules. No holds are barred for this veteran cage fighter who fights tooth and claw to put her own interests first, second and third. Never one to fight shy, her chutzpah is industrial-strength.

As Downer’s shadow health minister Bishop issued a statement approving tobacco advertising prompting an outcry from the AMA. It was her first day in office.  Her tantrums over not getting her favourite seat can keep commercial flights grounded for twenty minutes.

Despite all of her boss’s begging, pleading, blandishments, promises and unctuous entreaties, Bronnie remains steadfast; unrepentant, utterly unashamed and incapable of conceding she has ever done anything wrong be it her $5227 dollar helicopter ride to a Clifton Springs fund-raiser, her $88,204, two week European trip in her failed bid to be head of the Inter-parliamentary Union, or her billing the taxpayer $600 to wing it to Wang to attend Sophie Mirabella’s wedding in 2006.

All of these decisions were right in her eyes, even the $3300 she has spent in transport to the opera in the last three years, because she sees her public appearances as part of her function. Besides we should pay for the privilege of her blessed presence amongst us.  It is only right and proper.

She will never step down, she is emphatic. Her spurned spiritual love child Abbott, handling his rejection manfully, later reports to the media that he has had ‘two long conversations with her.’

Punishment enough, many would say. For either party. Evidently neither gets Abbott anywhere, forcing him to claim victory just in the jaw-boning, a theme he extends also to his failed COAG meeting and leaders’ retreat. Isn’t it just great to be having the conversation?

Nothing you can say that can’t be sung … All you need is talk. Talk, talk, talk. Talk is all you need …

Abbott, po-faced, in his best bodgie impression of gravitas, selects reverse gear on the spin machine. Bronwyn is, uh, contrite and has, uh, apologised for her, uh, ‘serious lapse of judgement’ merely ‘by paying back the money.’ Bronwyn, he claims, with best bestie insight, has learnt, uh, ‘a very salutary lesson.’ She is on probation; a set of gold-embossed luxury limo P-plates is in the mail.

Once again the PM must put lipstick on a pig. Cover up his drubbing. Not even the promised damehood which Abbott dangles before her will cause ‘the Lady Gaga of the seniors set,’ as he dubs her, to budge; her position is as rigid as her incredible chignon.

Bronwyn Bishop, Abbott’s pocket speaker, singing partner and craven crony to whom he owes his leadership and more simply tells him to go bite his bum. Go shave your legs, Tony, she laughs.

I’m sure you have another pollie pedal the public will pay your travel on. Some Iron-ing man event?

Don’t you have some people-smuggling expenses to declare? Time to fix the record about your $9,400 Battlelines book-signing travel expenses you denied then were forced to pay four years ago?

Bishop may not remember to read things before she signs them; she has trouble with MP’s names; trouble articulating due cause to use 94A to eject from the house 394 Labor MPs to six from the government but she understands all about power and mutual self-interest.

The doughty warrior is not over-fussed about appearing impartial or too afraid to rule out Opposition laughter. All is fair in love and war. She knows which side of her crust the butter goes on.

‘Besides, Tone, she purrs into a golden iPhone, I know where all the bodies are buried.’

Will Tony be hurt by protecting Bronnie? Does she ever pay for anything? Thus runs the week’s whopper BBQ stopper in a fascinating seven days of ‘national conversations in which Captain Tosser, Tony Abbott’s congress with the electorate and with the high-flyers in his own party is a complete waste of time, serving only to confirm that without trust, mutual respect, the will to listen, – and a little thing called truth, any call for conversation is just a con.

Abbott’s midweek COAG wankfest con is billed as some kind of summit on tax ‘reform’ meaning state and territory leaders have been set up to fall in line with the coalition’s need to offer the electorate tax cuts next election and grant a rise in the GST but it rapidly comes unstuck when Labor leaders reject the ploy.

COAG then simply wastes time and money viewing presentations on ice and terror before being reduced to blathering on, ‘because it would be remiss of me not to’ about the Northern Territory’s fantasy of achieving statehood before releasing a form of words on terror that is truly frightening.

Why terrorism? The media release peddles a myth to suit the Abbott government’s own jihadist mind set.

“The common element in radicalisation is exposure to violent extremist ideology … Other drivers, such as social isolation, a longing for a sense of purpose or belonging, long-term unemployment, criminality, or perceived political grievances, may also contribute.”

The analysis is skewed, incomplete, false. As Bernard Keane notes, drug use and mental illness are omitted and none of the list above is a key factor save grievances. The last begrudging concession to political grievances must not be properly acknowledged lest these be legitimised. Into this category fit the radicalising consequences of western intervention in Iraq and the effects of Assad’s genocide as in its recent barrel bomb attacks on civilians in Aleppo.

In its national conversation on terror, the government puts up a straw man to enable ludicrous arguments such as Julie Bishop’s Arab Spring thesis to succeed. Western intervention played no part according to the government’s foreign minister, IS sprang up from the Arab Spring. It is ‘a risk greater than rise of communism or the cold war.’ This may provide the means to crank up the terror threat machine but it is dishonest neoconservative propaganda.

COAG does its bit for the myth, too, by issuing a new terror threat scale, in effect, implying that things must surely be getting alarmingly bad to warrant a whole new measure but the real message is that this is a government of mass manipulation not national conversation.

COAG’s true function is to illuminate Mike Baird’s initiative.  His leadership eclipses the PM who has absolutely no idea or interest in any discussion regarding taxation matters beyond scare tactics and three word slogans. A spotty sort of limelight falls on the NSW premier, for showing up the PM, according to Herald but this is hardly any mark of distinction.

Baird is who the politician who made election promises to Watermark farmers he would be taking a personal interest in the Shenhua mine fiasco, a mine we don’t need, don’t want and which should never have been approved. The NSW premier hasn’t been seen in the area since.

Former New England Independent MP, Tony Windsor, sees the Shenhua mine approval as being as big a stoush as the blockade of the Franklin river. On Saturday, he predicts that it may end Barnaby Joyce’s career and sour our relationship with China.

The mine will proceed with the help of our Environmental Minister who continues to act as the obedient servant of a government which is, itself, beholden to Chinese mining interests.

‘The valley-wide bioregional assessment process that was initiated by former federal minister Tony Burke has been butchered by Coalition minister Greg Hunt and replaced with a box-ticking exercise of little more than a localised environmental impact statement.’

Trust is something Tony Abbott says we can’t put in Bill Shorten or Labor yet all of his abortive attempts this week to ‘hold a conversation with the nation,’ point to his own government having forfeited trust along with mutual respect. Talk to the people? His government can’t even get its speaker to listen to reason.

Abbott’s failure to rein in even his high-flying speaker friend this week is a fitting emblem of his incapacity as Prime Minister to lead his party in a government which has forfeited all credibility in its fondness for the spoils of office, its arrogance, remoteness and for its dizzy spin.

It has failed to use COAG to corral the states into raising the GST to permit it to offer tax cuts at the next election but it has successfully bumped up its use of the conversation buzz word, removed any environmental brake on foreign coal-mining in the best agricultural region in the nation and bumped out another instalment of its anti-terror gang-show, effortlessly refreshing its anti-jihadist terror death cult threat ideology to buttress its rule by fear, division and truth-suppression.

‘The world’s gone mad,’ barks Barnaby, Federal biosecurity watchdog and Boo and Pistol impounder, Minister for Agriculture, Member for New England. Or could it be Barnaby has been driven over the edge of reason?

Joyce fails to see Greg Hunt’s outstretched leg.  He trips awkwardly, drops his portfolio and plunges to the bottom of a virtual mine-shaft. It’s all part of Operation Lose Barnaby before the next election which could be any time Abbott gambles on a double-dissolution trigger.

On the nose with the electorate, terror scares not making a difference, the economy going south, gay marriage opening a wedge, a punt looks more and more attractive to a desperate Tony Abbott. An Abbott-Joyce LNP ticket, however, would scare off voters. One loose cannon is too many.

Abbott, Hockey, Hunt quickly tip barrow-loads of bullshit on top of Joyce in the traditional Liberal burying of the politically dead. Barnaby, says Hockey, is an “outstanding” deputy leader of the National Party. He talks shit, sometimes, but it is always patriotic shit.

“Sometimes I don’t agree with him, often I do agree with him, [but] you know what I love about him? He puts Australia first,” he says, returning to complete the section of the TPP which cedes the nation’s sovereign rights to multinational corporations should projects unaccountably be vetoed.

Shifty Hunt gushes brotherly love over Barnaby, whom he believes exists to be patronised, overruled and betrayed. He is a National after all. This is how the coalition forges consensus. ‘We are still buddies,’ he says after his mine approval double-cross.

“I really like him. Like, I really like him,” Judas Hunt damns Joyce with faint praise.

“He is an incredibly decent guy and passionate, and people should be proud to have a representative such as that.” In other words Hunt sees him as a likeable but ineffectual buffoon. Abbott can’t stand the man. And he’s increasingly unpopular with his electorate.

Barnaby Joyce is a sell-out, Watermark farmers swear.  Local Aboriginal people are so furious at their virtual exclusion from the decision they plan to take their case overseas. Hunt, however, claims the mine is proceeding solely because of community consultation. And because state Labor started it. Word is that locals were warned not to get too political. ‘Barnaby would handle that.’ He hasn’t.

A Namoi Valley Independent poll has garnered 4,300 votes. 4,132 (96 per cent) oppose the mine. A social media campaign aims to mount a blockade of more than 40,000 people to stop work. The Shenhua mine decision is shaping to be a major flashpoint.

Tony Windsor wants his old seat back. He would get it too, so well has Joyce alienated his electorate. Farmers are maddened by the LNP’s lunatic economics as much as its lack of support. As Greens Senator Larissa Waters puts it;

‘With the coal price in structural decline, it’s economically insane to be sacrificing valuable farming land for the dying coal industry, especially when we have viable renewable energy alternatives.’

So begins another surreal week of coal-powered politics in the Land Down Under in which Barnaby Joyce publicly attacks a major coalition decision but remains in cabinet; Bronwyn Bishop gets away with not only claiming expenses on a fund-raiser but blowing $5,227 on an 80 km chopper ride, opting for the most expensive copter on offer to patronise her adviser’s mate’s aviation firm. Unrepentant, she has a swipe at Joe Hockey for saying poor people don’t drive. Fairfax publishes details of her overseas travel which portray the speaker as profligate with public money.

Cracks are appearing all over the coalition’s crazy pavement. Yawning gaps appear which have the PM on the hop. Labor says his leadership has failed the test of reining Mrs Bishop in. Or the consistency test.

Unlike Peter Slipper, Bishop is simply permitted to pay back the money.  The former speaker’s $900 Cabcharge conviction, later overturned, looks even flimsier and falsely trumped-up in contrast.

Worse, Abbott’s attack on Slipper in 2012 deeply compromises his protection of Bishop. Back then the then Opposition Leader was full of lofty principle in a judgement now expunged from Liberal Party official websites.

‘The Prime Minister, to uphold the integrity of the Parliament, needs now to require the Speaker to step down until these matters are resolved.  It’s also incumbent upon the Australian Federal Police to swiftly investigate the potentially criminal allegations that have been made against the Speaker.’

Protecting Bronwyn Bishop at all costs but leaving Barnaby in the dark, Abbott backs away from the Shenhua deal to let Hunt ‘stand up for coal’ on his own. Hunt bypasses cabinet and deals Joyce out of the decision to allow the Watermark coalmine deal to proceed.

Prudently, Abbott revokes Joyce’s right to freedom of speech on Q&A and the PM announces his White Paper on Agriculture in Grafton in his minister’s absence. Never know what the man will come out with. Abbott would know.

An unhappy Barnaby yelps that he’s been shafted by the Shenhua mine approval. Hunt allows the biggest coal mining company in the world to sink a thirty-five kilometre square black hole into the heart of Australia’s agriculture.

But it’s not his fault. Barnaby’s done his bit. He appears, however, to protest too much and produce too little evidence of his labours.

“I’ve never supported the Shenhua mine. I think it is ridiculous that you would have a major mine in the midst of Australia’s best agricultural land,” posts Joyce on Facebook, the one communication medium left him by Wednesday. He blames NSW Labor for approving the project originally. The pass the parcel blame game catches on.

In a dazzling tour de force of virtuoso buck-passing, Environment Minister Hunt, his PM and others duck shove responsibility back on to the state, the law, anywhere but themselves. This leaves Hunt ‘approving’ and imposing conditions on a project which he says he is powerless to stop.

In a cop-out which stretches Westminster responsibility beyond breaking point, Hunt claims he had no other choice, he says, but to agree to the mine based on the advice he was given.

“No federal environment minister could have reached a different decision,” he squeaks before second-guessing the law in a trend which echoes his mentor Abbot’s disturbing contempt for legal process in revoking citizenship.

“With six scientific reports, with legal advice, with departmental advice, any decision other than the one we made would have been challenged and — on all advice that I have — rejected by the courts.”

Joyce is also keen to let everyone know he’s not to blame.

“I’ve done everything in my power to try and stop the mine … I think the world has gone mad when apparently you cannot build a house at Moore Creek because of White Box grassy woodlands but you can build a super mine in the middle of the Breeza plains.”

Joyce is keen to place on record his opposition. But later he swings around to accept his government’s decision because of the safeguards built in over water use. It is a flip-flop which recalls that which he performed when he first opposed, then accepted, Indonesian interests buying Northern Territory cattle stations in 2010. Barnaby, it seems, is a man for all seasons. Sadly, however, the water safeguards argument appear less than watertight.

Former environmental lawyer, Larissa Waters argues that Hunt has no legal option of stopping the mine on the basis of a legally ‘blurry’ water plan without incurring a vast compensation claim. Hunt is using the plan merely to wimp out of admitting that he gave his approval.

Water plan safeguard or not, the Shenhua company has moreover a blemished record in Mongolia where it converts coal to oil. In 2013, Greenpeace East Asia revealed that the Shenhua plant was overexploiting groundwater in the Haolebaoji basin in Ordos, an area of fragile ecology. The organisation also exposed Shenhua’s illegal dumping of toxic industrial wastewater.  But Hunt was us to trust their assurances. And Barnaby appears simply out of his depth.

Former New England Independent, Tony Windsor alleges that the federal Agriculture Minister, has “essentially done nothing” to prevent the mine from getting Commonwealth approval. He threatens to re-enter politics because Joyce has failed his New England electorate on coal. He has a case.

“Part of the process initiated back in the previous parliament, and funded, was a valley-wide Bioregional Assessment process,” Windsor says. ‘It hasn’t been done.’ A Green’s senator unkindly tweets the widely held view on many local farms that Joyce is f***ing useless.

Windsor’s legacy is impressive His ‘water trigger’ legal constraint on mining developments allows the Federal government to pause projects to assess their impact on water use, legislation exploited by Hunt to halt progress on the mine to aid Liberal prospects before the NSW state election.

Joyce did, however, have a point about the giant coal-hole’s approval. Do we really need another coal mine in Australia? Do we want one? Existing mines are losing money after coal’s steep drop in value on international markets. Some face closure. Can Shenhua even pay its way? Chinese economic growth is slowing and prices are the lowest since the GFC and declining.

Even on current prices, big losses appear likely. Whitehaven’s Narrabri and Maules Creek mines nearby suggest that Shenhua Watermark will produce 1.78 million tonnes a year of semi-soft coking coal at a loss of US$20 a tonne, while producing 8.22 million tonnes of thermal coal at a loss of $9 a tonne. The new mine can expect to lose over 100 million in its first year. And it has cost a bundle before any digging has started.

Seven years in the pipeline, the projected open face monster, 4000 football fields in area, has cost its backers dearly. “After eight years, Shenhua has spent $700 million and has little tangible progress to show for this investment in NSW,” the firm’s Australian chief, a frustrated Liu Xiang,​ observed in February before reflecting that his company had not experienced the ease of investment on which our ‘open for business’ government promotes itself.

The mine has not been the straightforward project Shenhua had envisaged with local indigenous groups to appease, hostile farmers to placate and complex legal restraints to negotiate. Success in all of these areas has so far eluded the Chinese firm and more problems are brewing. Environmentalists have begun to take it up the cause against it.

The ten million tonnes annual output expected from Shenhua Watermark is scheduled to continue for 30 years. This represents an environmental threat in terms of its emissions and its impact upon local ecology. Destroyed will be 789 hectares of an endangered ecological community, mostly box-gum woodland, and 148 hectares of other woods.  But it’s Hunt’s captain’s call. Bugger Barnaby or consulting the rest of cabinet. He tries a Bromantic touch.
Greg he tells us he loves Barnaby. Bugger off Hunt. He loves Joyce so much in fact he’s let the Chinese mine coal in the middle of prime agricultural land in his electorate for the next thirty years.

In a Shenhua-Coal-mines-meets-Brokeback-Mountain moment, Hunt claims that a little thing like a massive coal mine could never come between himself and Barnaby yet the furious Agriculture Minister is appears not to be feeling the love.

Theirs was an “incredibly positive, civil relationship”, Hunt insists, leaving his captain to talk up the passion. Barnaby who can’t bear to look at either of them shoots through to Bunbury WA.  Is he done for? Has Joyce been stitched up in this deal? Don’t write him off too soon. Parachuted into the electorate the former Queensland senate scene Barnaby has a lot of skin in the game. Yet his boss would cheerfully tan his hide.

Captain Abbott loves his ‘passionate’ and ‘committed’ loose cannon so much, it seems, he wants Warren Truss to stay on. At least that’s the whisper from some Liberal MPs. If Wokka gives it another term, another nematode resistant replacement National leader has time to be bred up out the back of the tractor shed or behind a silo.

In the meantime, Abbott’s banned Joyce from appearing on Q&A. He’s launched the White Paper on beefing up Top End agriculture without him. Joyce is on a flight to WA when Abbott visits NSW to spruik ‘beef roads’ and other top end infrastructure spending to boost our live cattle trade, a trade which has just slumped with Indonesia’s 80% cut from 200,000 to only 50,000 in its imports.

The PM insists on radio that the cut is a ‘one-off’ despite Indonesia’s government plans for self-sufficiency whereas to our Agriculture Minister it is a trend which could see our Indonesian live trade cease quite soon. As an ABC report would say, its future is ‘unclear. ’What is clear is that the government needs to make up its mind what is going on before Barnaby heads to Jakarta to sort it all out. Even clearer is the question mark that is hanging over Joyce’s handling of his portfolio. And over Greg Hunt’s career after his capitulation to Alan Jones.

“I will do something today that I have never done before, that I am not required to do by law. I will make a public commitment,” Hunt ventures to salvage some credibility after his savaging on Jones’ radio show.
Hunt is bullied into this promise by Jones who shouts at him that he is wrong about where the Shenhua coal mine would be located and everything else on his Thursday’s breakfast show.

Yet Hunt’s crafty commitment is no concession at all. He is just going to palm Jones off with a water report. And hasn’t he said he was powerless to stop the mine going ahead? Hunt turns his attention to a shirtfront he can win and attacks the CEFC. All is fair in love and war after all.

Hunt claims his government’s attack on the Clean Energy Finance Corporation is fair. His directive to the CFEC to drop ‘proven’ technologies like wind and solar is just a little house-keeping to realign the green bank with its original charter, he lies.  All Labor’s fault. Labor set it up to fail.

Hunt says he wonders what all the fuss is about. According to him, the CEFC is charter bound to invest in untried technologies that would send them broke and save the Abbott Government the democratic hassle of negotiating with a hostile senate to abolish it.

At the end of the week the coal-powered Abbott government is in a spot of bother with a mine nobody really wants, the greenies hate and which no-one can make pay. Joyce has been shafted along with New England’s farmers who foolishly trusted their MP to represent them. Renewable energy industry investors are left in uncertainty as the government flicks the off switch on the CEFC. Hunt has stitched up Joyce and anyone else who trusted him to act like an Environment minister, independent of the pressures of fossil fuel interest groups.

At day’s end Bronwyn Bishop, appears, in her mind, a Valkyrie hovering over the fray, transcending petty politics and mere mortal rules with lofty impunity, secure in her master’s protection and her power to decide who lives and who dies in battle. Including if only accidentally a collaterally damaged Tony Abbott.

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The Bill Shorten show trial, an ‘eagerly anticipated’ or hugely oversold piece of legal theatre played to packed houses in Sydney midweek thrilling sell-out audiences with its stunning production values and its convincing performances – especially from Shorten who stoically underplayed himself in the role of a man on trial for his political life.

Shorten’s trial was a timely treat for a nation which could relax in an old-fashioned lynching, boo the union villain and take time out from the pressure of the daily threat of an ISIS attack, ‘coming after us,’ asylum seekers invading our sovereign borders and Gina Rinehart’s new Roy Hill Pilbara mine never making a profit.

Iron ore dropped to $44 a tonne on Thursday and investment bank Citi predicts an average of 38 for the last quarter ten dollars down from the price Joe Hockey locked in to his last Budget calculations. But in Sydney it was on with the show. And what a show it was!

Commissioner Dyson Heydon exceeded everything you could ever hope for as the sinister but charismatic Grand Inquisitor and the show held its packed house spell-bound as a pale Bill Shorten gulped enough glasses of water to flood a Beaconsfield mine while top Sydney silk, Inquisitor Jeremy Stoljar justified his 3.3 million dollar fee by cutting his ‘unreliable witness’ down to size by craftily avoiding any allegation in favour of inviting Shorten to assent to it in principle. Shorten, of course, could not agree but the trap had been sprung.

‘Do you agree with this proposition: it would profoundly weaken the bargaining position of the AWU if in negotiating with the company about an EBA, that company is at the same time making a donation to the then national secretary’s political campaign? Do you agree with that?’ Jeremy Stoljar had Shorten on the ropes.

And not before time. ABC News-readers, not to be bested by other media vigilantes, were breathily speculating on a yet to be discovered ‘smoking gun,’ a Sherlock Holmes clue. That Holmes solved crimes by logical deduction is something quite overlooked in our rush to judgement of a man who has committed no crime, except, perhaps that of being Bill Shorten and just not seeming up to much – rather than up to too much. As, Robert Conquest observes: ‘Every organization appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents’.” 

Commentators lead us to assume, as we all must, that Old Bill is guilty simply by virtue of his appearing before Mr Heydon. If they don’t find that gun this time, they will call him back until they do. Guilt is easily presumed if you are called before a Royal Commission, especially such a lavish production as the TURC, the Royal Commission into Trade Union Corruption.

Commissioned by waving an open cheque in front of lawyers, in this case from George Brandis’ former employer Minter Ellison, the Coalition has helped legal eagles feather their nests to the tune of 17 million. The Bill killers will make a right royal killing of their own. The TURC could blow $80 million by 31 December when it reports.

TURC’s season is certain to be continued. Funds flow freely in the Coalition’s class war. No fee is too high in the war on Labor and the vast underclass of poor needy and vulnerable the party still pretends to represent. No price is too high to buy eternal coalition rule. It is certain that the commission will run longer rather than shorter. Abbott, no doubt would relish a commission in perpetual session. Yet it damages the Inquisitor also.

Happily forking out nearly four times the sum it begrudges its campaign against family violence, the Abbott government’s priorities and values were also very much on show in the commission. It did not disappoint. A nine hundred question duet between Stoljar and Shorten was followed by a Busby Barkly orchestrated chorus of cabinet ministers who came on just to kick Bill. Yet each paraded a brazen hypocrisy and risked drawing attention to their own malfeasances along the way.

Julie Bishop quickly sank her slipper into Shorten calling on him to fess up over ‘secret side deals’ that were ‘not to union members’ benefit.’ Her smear would do more damage were it not for her own ‘secret side deal’ to keep three days’ silence, misleading parliament over Man Haris Monis’ letter not making the inquiry into the Martin Place tragedy.

But forget merely conspiring to mislead parliament. Shorten’s deals were just too horrible to specify and so utterly unlike the deal Bishop struck to protract proceedings defending CSR Ltd against claims by miners and workers who had contracted asbestosis.

As she explains, “rhetorically asking the court why workers should be entitled to jump court queues just because they were dying” could be construed as ‘legal theatre’, not truly reflecting on herself as a person. Theatre? Theatre of cruelty, perhaps, Ms Bishop.

Shorten’s use of union support to help himself win the safe Labor seat of Maribyrnong or deals he did with some big firms to make the workplace work for all parties, or in implementing enterprise bargaining, on the other hand, are true horror stories, according to the coalition which hints that there is so much more to come out.

Eric Abetz, does horror well. Snatching himself away from Pandora’s Box and the nightmare of polyamory rampaging through once respectable suburbs or Tassie’s Channel Highway life-style blocks should gay marriage be legalised, our Minister for unemployment and government Senate smear-leader, delighted loyal fans with his scariest Dalek-speak as he put the boot into Bill.

‘Most people would be horrified by some of the evidence exposed through the royal commission,’ monotoned Abetz, vastly helping national conversations about Bill’s guilt by saving the average punter the bother of finding out the real details and preserving energy for kicking.

Eric can’t wait for the commission to drill down to Bill’s unpaid public library fines and what he lets into his recycling bin. Elaborate? No. Persecute! Exterminate! ‘Most people want him gone.’

Spokesperson for most people, ebullient under-thinker and glad-handed tax conceding Pollyanna, Bruce Billson was keen also to spike the national conversation with a Bill-killer pub test analogy about a car salesman’s commission.

“I think what people are really interested in — imagine if you had a trusted mate buying a car for you, trying to get you a good deal, then you find out your mate is getting a sling from the man who is selling the car, that’s just dodgy,” he told his party’s Channel Nine mates.

Dodgy deportation deals? Billson counted shrewdly on viewers forgetting yesterday’s weather let alone being able to remember last week’s story about his successfully lobbying Immigration Minister Vanstone to overturn the deportation of a Calabrian underworld figure, Joe Madafferi.  Besides it never happened, he explained. The AEC is happy. Go away.

Flouting police advice that Madafferi posed a danger to the community, Billson and a couple of his Liberal mates put in a word with Amanda. Nothing dodgy here, just a trail of big donations to the Liberal Party leading to the successful reversal of Madafferi’s deportation. Vanstone has recently said she was led to believe that Madafferi had gone straight.

Much Bill-kicking of this nature followed, lessened only by the absence of those many party members on holiday during the winter break. Many others subbed for them. Anne Henderson on The Drum linked Bill with the ‘really bad’ CFMEU. Give it time and he will be just another Kathy Jackson in the popular mind. Her case has cropped up helpfully in the same news bulletins. No longer is she the darling of the right, the ‘lion’ lauded for her work in dishing dirt on Craig Thompson when the Abbott government needed her.

High and low kicking notwithstanding,TURC’s current season is sure to be extended yet again into 2016 to permit the commissioner to drop his Shorten-ordure from a great height all over Labor’s election campaign which Bill is now by no means certain to lead. Mud sticks.

Of course, not all of us welcome the diversion. Most are still coming to terms with our taxes being used to pay people-smugglers. And the silence that has ensued.

It is alarming just how quickly this ‘creative’ bit of border enforcement, as Abbott describes it, has been redacted from the national agenda.  What could be next? From the same heart of darkness comes the TURC witch hunt.

The Royal Commission into unions is a disturbing show trial, not merely because, as it is luridly billed, its mission is to ‘shine a light into the dark and dirty underbelly of unionism,’ its adverse findings on organised labour predetermined. It is also a cynical attempt to distract and divide. This is not to pretend that there are not questions to ask of some elements of the union movement but we already have established democratic means to achieve this. It is also less about Bill Shorten than what Abbott’s series of commissions represent, a pox on our democracy.

TURC destroys reputations, demonises unionists and distracts from the coalition’s utter failure to function as a government. Out of touch with Australian society and out of its depth in the world, the coalition is as unprepared to countenance gay marriage as it is to heed warnings that China’s stock-market bubble would one day collapse. Attack is all that matters.

‘Cut to the chase,’ Chief Witch-finder Heydon interjects, unhappy with his witness having so much to say for himself. If this ‘unprecedented intervention’ as Labor describes it, shines any kind of light it is on Heydon himself and his skill in timing his cut perfectly for the evening tabloid media for a ready-made headline that Bill was an unreliable witness.

Bill Shorten discovered, to his cost, that Commissioner Heydon is not to be mucked around on day two of his testimony; his second long day in the witness box. It was a low point in a long week of misrule in which the Coalition tried again to dim the lights of scrutiny and accountability in its quest to remake the ABC into a government propaganda arm while it underplayed its responsibility for maintaining an orderly functioning democratic society, promoting hysteria and blind fear of terror instead in order to disguise its manifest failure.

Ultimately, the retired Chief Justice will never shine any kind of light into anything that matters to the people at all so powerful and entrenched are the ‘dark and dirty dealings’ of the coalition’s black spot approach to ‘good government.’ Let minors suffer sexual abuse on Nauru a state which has degenerated into a one party dictatorship which has abandoned the rule of law. Let women be forced to trade sexual favours for hot showers. Our government just makes it illegal to tell.

Yet, perhaps, after all a light of sorts is indeed cast by the commissioner on the government’s willingness to abuse its power. Even to Cory Bernardi this is wrong or ‘power creep,’ as he calls it, meaning not his bully of a PM but a process whereby government executive power steadily usurps the rule of law.

Has Bill been killed or merely grilled? His reputation has been seriously damaged and his career may never recover. The bigger question is what is also being done to the rest of us.

Parliament rose for a six week winter break last Thursday amidst whispers of an early election and a delegation on the wing to Singapore, led by a PM in search of Asian investors, clutching his northern Australia white paper that is his government’s vision for an economic powerhouse and ever keen to boost free trade and other links with Australia’s fifth largest trading partner.

By the week’s end, however, the PM’s junket was over as his party split over gay marriage; Greece was set to split the EU and Chinese share-markets continued a three trillion dollar nose dive, a decline unseen since 1992.

A senate inquiry documented an orchestrated coalition conspiracy to mislead parliament over Sydney siege gunman Man Haron Monis, suggesting that Abbott and his cabinet misled Parliament and then attempted a cover-up, actions which warrant calls for the conspirators to resign.

End of entitlement rhetoric was further exposed when it was revealed that Tim Wilson, George Brandis’ hand-picked Human Rights Commissioner, racked up $70,000 in expenses in his first year in office, making a total tax-payer bill with salary and allowances of over $400,000 for the Abbott government’s appointment, made, as Brandis put it, to shake up the status quo. The money put into this walking political gesture would be far better spent invested in reinstating former disability Commissioner Graeme Innes whose commitment is such that he continues his advocacy work unpaid.

Overall, it was another impossible week for a PM who vowed once that he would like to keep politics out of the newspapers.

The PM’s week had begun promisingly enough but it quickly went bad. Relaxed and comfortable in a like-minded regime with wondrous public order, clean streets and cheap as chips all you can eat Yum Cha, Mr Abbott fearlessly led the Australian delegation to an island nation fabled for its hard bargaining in the midst of global uncertainty and impending crisis. But they saw him coming.

‘Put your money into our top end,’ said Tony Abbott. Incredible development opportunities abound.

Savvy, cashed-up Asian speculators kept their hands in their pockets. Abbott offered a pipe dream not a project you could commit to. A library of studies over the years by respectable scholars exists to support their caution. Undeterred, flanked by WA and Queensland premiers, Abbott touted the Top End as a huge investment opportunity.

Granted the PM was short on details but it made little difference to his audience. Abbott was politely ignored by local investors who prefer to buy real estate in our capital cities. Rural stations appeal also. Currently Singaporeans are our third biggest overseas buyers of Aussie real estate.

Presentation made, the PM’s went for the common touch. A good sport who enjoys making a spectacle of himself, he delivered in a carefully managed people-meeting event. A public ‘Aussie BBQ’ staged in his honour, saw him in an apron holding tongs and wearing a silly headpiece of red and yellow balloons.

However much the air-head gear suited him, the BBQ backfired when angry, hungry Singaporeans discovered that being ‘open to the public’ meant open only to those with tickets. A compromise was achieved whereby a few ticketless souls were let in to enjoy the remnants, after the ticketed had eaten their fill, in a rare display of trickle-down economics at work in broad daylight.

Detoxing and reforming terrorists was next to get a hammering as the PM jawed his way through a tour of Khadija mosque, an outfit which claims to de-radicalise jihadists and other hotheads who look as if they need straightening out.  Abbott admired Khadija but said it wouldn’t work at home.

Very little of the virtual police-state that is Lee’s Singapore would work at home but at least the PM was able to get the terrorist theme into reports before, in a heady moment of over-sharing his pathological fear of the abyss overcame him.

Revealing more of his own inner being than he realised, as he spoke straight from the heart,

“I was very pleased to see their confidence that it was possible to turn people back from this dreadful, dreadful abyss,” he said. “Because the more people succumb to that, the worse the abyss that all of us could face in the years and decades to come.” He should know.

Patronising his hosts for their conviction, Tony Abyss relaxed, happily in the embrace of an autocratic state run on dynastic lines, a haven and a place of respite where he could shake another strong leader by the hand while taking a breather from domestic politics and the taxing business of running a bodgie government, something no foreign despot can help him with and where his past sins of omission and commission will inevitably undo him.

No-one could pester Abbott for a few days to account for his actions or his government’s mistakes while economic recession edged closer and Australia’s forgotten people expected leadership if not an honouring of commitments in matters ranging from constitutional recognition of indigenous people to a commitment to a carbon emissions target.

His spin-doctors came up with vital goodwill and trade benefits but the PM was thankful to find a nation which wouldn’t laugh in his face or question him about paying people smugglers, violating human rights or his evasion of responsibility on climate change and gay marriage.

Happily for Abbott, homosexuality is illegal in Singapore. No-one popped up to quiz him over the lethal split on gay marriage in coalition ranks or how he has wedged himself against popular opinion by his own stubbornly held prejudices. As David Marr says, it could be his undoing, akin to Howard’s obdurate refusal to make an apology to indigenous peoples for the stolen generations.

And there were other breaks. The PM did not have to follow up Employment and Pandora’s Box Minister Eric Abetz’s comments about same-sex marriage, the Asian century or his slippery slope scenario. Abetz contends that gay marriage would lead to matrimony with animals or union with root vegetables. Not only was he getting out of this; the PM was getting on with the business of government. Achieving things.

Abbott’s achievements included a unique photo-session of his head festooned with red and yellow sausage balloons fashioned into a silly hat. Politics, economics and cultural exchange blended with clowning for the cameras giving the PM at least one thing he does well. It was his crowning achievement.

Bonding with Lee Hsien Loong, Lee Kuan Yew’s elder son, who looked only slightly less silly, our PM revealed a soft spot for Singapore’s racist, autocratic patriarchy which he admires for its take on freedom, equality and the rule of law. Trade deals aside, calculated or not, his visit to the island state managed to send just the right message home about his prime ministership

Singapore commends itself to the Abbott regime. A totalitarian state with a corrupt judiciary, it has the highest rate of executions in the world, no free press, no freedom of association, unlimited detention without trial and it ranks below Russia in the 2014 World Press Freedom Index.

Homosexuality is a criminal offence. You can be arrested and gaoled on suspicion of being a druggie or an undesirable, just in the first draft of his legislation the Immigration Minister would be able to act on his suspicion that you needed your citizenship stripped if you were a dodgy jihadi dual national such as lurk in our midst the real and present danger of the enemy within.

Enemies of state have no right to speak in the Abbott government’s ideal state and Tiny Tim Wilson our LNP’s Freedom Commissioner was despatched to vent his majesty’s displeasure on Monday’s episode of the ‘leftie lynch-mob’ that is Q&A. The ABC had gone too far and if heads have been slow to roll so far, by the end of the show, Wilson had cause a fair bit of eye-rolling disbelief.

Wilson made a fool of himself and his government by claiming that Zaky Mallah’s freedom of speech was in no way constrained by Steve Ciobo’s threatening to deport him. ‘He did but that does not silence or censor him,’ Wilson volunteered hopefully fumbling for support of his thesis that freedom of speech was not at stake but that Q&A should be ashamed of giving a ratbag a platform.

The audience laughed. Tim had an on-air tantrum and chided his host for twisting his words.

Perhaps Wilson was wrestling to accommodate the ratbaggery of Steve Ciobo, the politician whom the PM and Minister for Women defended in 2012 over his call to ‘slit Julia Gillard’s throat.’ For Abbott, then, it was just a figure of speech.

Similarly, Alan Jones who may have boosted a racist Cronulla riot with his on-air comments and who has said Julia Gillard should be put into a bag and drowned at sea is a guest whom the LNP has no problem with. Highlighted on Monday was just how much the Zaky Mallah incident has become an excuse to bash and intimidate the ABC for doing its job by holding the government to account.

Kevin Andrews, another opponent of gay marriage and the building of Australian naval submarines in Australia and one Alan Tudge who claims to be an Abbott government MP did their bit for free speech by vowing not appear on Q&A. Both aired reservations about the ABC’s impartiality which do not prevent their appearing on shock jock radio which owes its existence to the daily massage of audience prejudices.

Chief amongst these is the myth that the LNP is the better at managing the economy while all evidence so far inspires little or no confidence in its manifest capacity to do more than follow an IPA agenda or the hands-free dictates of neo-con free market ideology, applying nineteenth century laissez-faire economics to a twenty-first century world.   And a lot of hokum.

Bruce Billson, Minister for bovine optimism and the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, is Acting Treasurer for another week while Joe Hockey and his well-travelled colleagues dash abroad on ‘study tours’ and other subsidised holidays while the Greek economic crisis looms and the Shanghai composite index continues to dive at a rate unseen since 1992.

Only a party with economic management in its DNA could put its feet up at such a troubled time. Perhaps the LNP is simply dead on its feet; exhausted by the hard graft of good government, shagger’s back and other bad workplace management practice afflictions and disorders.

All Australians, especially small business-folk in market gardening communities will applaud the elevation of ‘Pastor Bruce,’ as the PM has dubbed him for his evangelical fervour, if not his ministry to family-man and convicted felon Frank Madafferi’s plea for help.

News emerged this week that Billson was one of a trio of MPs who in 2003 or 2004 lobbied then Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone to provide a visa for alleged Mafioso Madafferi whom Vanstone’s predecessor in Immigration Philip Ruddock wanted deported because of the Calabrian’s ‘serious criminal past’ and because he posed a danger to the community.

The ease with which generous party donations help secure the ear of the powerful raises serious questions about how Liberal Party fund-raising permits donors access to power as much as it suggests a lapse in the small business minister’s capacity for independence and sound judgement.

Billson’s handling of the effects of the Greek crisis will, of course, be at least equal to the absent incumbent’s manifest incompetence. Joe Hockey’s management of his portfolio suggests that any idiot can manage the free market shop just by leaving the till open and the door unlocked.

The ‘hands-free’ Treasurer paused on his way to the departure lounge early this week to hose down panic with the view that, “Australia’s exposure to Greece is very limited and quarantined”.  RBA’s Glen Stevens said much the same but as Mandy Rice Davies famously put it, ‘he would say that wouldn’t he?

The chance of Greece upsetting the EC apple-cart and world financial markets is not so easily dismissed, however. Nor is it possible to pretend that we are immune from panic in Chinese share markets.

In the end we are left with a government which has abdicated its responsibility for honest and open management in favour of tactics to scare us into submission. Facts are not to be kept from us nor false account tendered. The people have a right to know.

The PM may warn us that ISIS is coming for us all but the greatest danger to the nation’s security is in his government’s willingness to keep us in ignorance; its failure to provide real leadership and economic management. White papers promoting pipe schemes, or stubborn opposition to popular opinion apparent on matters such as marriage equality are no way to govern.

The Abbott government’s scaremongering and tough on terror bluster has cost it the trust, the credibility and legitimacy it desperately needs to survive precisely when the cry of wolf is real.

‘Full steam astern,’ Captain Hook-or-by-Crook Abbott, ducking volleys of brickbats, derision and sheer disbelief from home and abroad, cowers on the poop deck, manfully commanding the start of another week of good government and doing whatever craven acts it takes to follow the almighty IPA’s wish-list, amen, annihilate all opponents and preserve his arse, a commodity he must remind us, that is not for sale.

Monday sees him suddenly reversing course to avoid a leaked green-paper proposal for wealthy parents to pay fees for their children’s public schooling bobbing up like a turd in the surf at Bondi.

‘Not policy now or ever’ Abbott lies, trusting someone will pick it up and run with it. It’s a win-win. The fuss will distract the nation from the legality of Australia’s offshore detention being challenged in the High Court or PWC’s report that a third of Australia is effectively in recession. So much to evade, deny, silence or lie about, he sighs, so little time. But at least, he can do Bill slowly. The Royal Commission into destroying Shorten forever promises to be worth every penny, he winks as he is told the Information Commissioner has given up after being forced by government cuts to pay all costs, even work from his own home. The Abbott government’s war on transparency is all going to plan.

A hell’s kitchen of housing prices continue to bubble but nothing to see here, says Abbott and Hockey rubbishing the RBA’s view. Who cares as long as decent, Liberal voters owning property in Sydney and Melbourne make a fortune? Does it matter where investment comes from? Some foreign buyers, it seems, are all cashed up with the proceeds of crime or are buying under shonky schemes to hide their identity. Yet the matter is well in hand as the government’s new fee for overseas buyers is guaranteed to ease the pressure. Sort things out. Guaranteed. Enough with the negative. Listen to Billson if you want proof that economic management is in our DNA.

Tax breaks for some small businesses are restoring our nation’s flagging prosperity. Why just the other day, a small business in my electorate bought a new coffee machine. A new coffee machine, Madam Speaker, by taking advantage of the new tax write-offs. LNP turd polishers instruct MPs to stud their talk with homespun folksy anecdotes about having a go in the new millennium of the Hockey economic miracle of pandering to where the votes are rather than where investment or even an economic plan is needed.

…this polyester-wool blend Pollyanna…

Minister for Positive (Delusional) Thinking and mindless optimism Bruce Bilge water gurgles joyfully, winsomely to the house, possessed by a permanent raptus, a true believer whose evangelism embodies all that is wrong with the Abbott’s ‘open for business’ slogan. No-one ever tells this polyester-wool blend Pollyanna to shut up on a point of order. Everyone is struck dumb in awe of the holy simpleton. Not so dumb, however, is the rest of the world which is taking less kindly to our wool-pulling in climate change and our entry into the people-smuggling trade.

World leaders are increasingly short with Hunt’s walnut shell and pea solution to global warming while it looks as if none of the coal in the Galilee Basin is worth mining let alone ruining a world heritage reef over. Scrapping the carbon tax continues to shred our credibility. The notion that Australia is too small to make any difference to world is challenged by the view that only if the world can get nations such as Australia to reduce emissions will measures to counteract climate change have a chance of success.

We are keeping the world guessing over if our PM will even attend the Paris climate talks or send ministers with a cut lunch. And our new emissions target is still a secret. Abbott will only repeat his empty rhetoric that any new target for Australia will ‘safeguard economic growth while taking action on climate change.’

Kill Bill, our PM’s real contribution to statecraft, runs dead midweek in a late night call, we are told, to chateau Shorten. The PM, no, Australia needs the opposition leader to agree to change the law on Thursday to make offshore detention legal. Shorten chortles at the thought of Manus and Nauru suddenly expelling their main income source but agrees with his shifty counterpart that bipartisan support is needed if you really want to make a go of trashing human rights.

Cabinet leaks continue. Abbott continues to tank in all reliable opinion polls and it is increasingly harder for Julie Bishop to disguise her looks of withering scorn; her utter contempt for her PM, a ten-pound pom who never renounced his British citizenship still blocking her glittering career path to the top at any cost.

..a flogging with a limp lettuce leaf… 

Yet none of this cramps Abbott’s style in a week which sees him flanked by ten national flags, avidly eying off some openly displayed colour-coded maps of pure evil secret intelligence on camera. There is an image of the Middle East projected on a screen behind him which experts recognise as a year old souvenir from a Fox news broadcast. Labor give him a flogging with a limp lettuce leaf in parliament about going public with those maps but Abbott has by then enjoyed exploiting his unique photo-opportunity.

Eager as Priapus to protect Australia and to keep us all safe from death cults other than Catholicism he tells the nation that ISIS is coming for each and every one of us. His jihad on the ABC is helped immensely by the appearance of Zaky Mallah on Q&A. Heads must roll he says. Say what you will about his taste in imagery, our PM wastes no time on over thinking his strategy. Witness his crafty hand pass of the privatising state school political football.

‘I think it’s good that some of the states and territories at least are thinking creatively about how they can responsibly fund their operations.’ Abbott winks as he puts away his dog whistle.

By the week’s end the PM has backed away from ‘a whole raft of measures including his love for the ABC.’ Ever the stand-up comedian, Abbott was happy to waste parliament’s time with his ironic public vote of thanks to the ABC for shafting Shorten in The Killing Season but a day later he was calling the national broadcaster to account for ‘betraying Australia,’ and getting Malcolm to send the boys around for a please explain.

‘Whose side are they on?’ The question will play out well on talkback. Tony Abbott morphs into Oskar Matzerath, the hero of Gunther Grass’s Tin drum who chooses to remain a child forever, as he gives a blast on his whistle and beats his anti-terror drum.

It is a big back down…

It is business as usual. PM Flip-Flop suddenly drops his mission to give Immigration Minister Dutton the power to banish undesirables in favour of something constitutional after all. Dutton would no longer revoke citizenship all by himself but an existing law would be amended. It is a big back down that goes unacknowledged. But the tough on terror dog whistle has done its job.

A 1948 law that automatically cancels the citizenship – subject to judicial review – of dual nationals who fight with foreign militaries against Australia was approved by Cabinet on Tuesday, making Opposition leader Bill Shorten’s lack of opposition to anything on national security appear even feebler but sparing him a political wedgie.

Abbott fails to wedge an infuriatingly bi-partisan Bill Shorten as soft on bad terror legislation. Even worse, ultimately for both parties although neither can see it, Shorten unctuously supports Abbott in the hasty last-minute change to the law to fix the human rights smart-arses appealing to the High Court on the legality of Australia’s concentration camps on Nauru and Manus Islands.

So unseemly is the government’s haste to close what it calls ‘a loophole that it is clearly unsure as to ‘whether it had the authority to lock asylum seekers up indefinitely in the territories of other sovereign nations or to effectively procure that detention’ says Daniel Webb, The Human Rights Law Centre’s Director of Legal Advocacy.

The bigger loophole is in allowing access to education to the hoi-polloi. Here, the coalition’s strategy is a work in progress. The PM’s high speed flip-flop on fees causes a bit of a pile up in the conga line of suck holes of his ministry. Pyne and Turnbull even break step for a moment to dissent but their leader masterfully out-manoeuvres them.

Abbott, stoically shrugging off a possible light bruising, quickly gets in first telling the House that it is not policy. The day’s morning news flash is a non-starter by question time. The PM leaves us guessing why it had been run up the flagpole in the first place.

“If the states and territories want to charge wealthy parents fees for public schools – that is a matter for them…Charging wealthy parents for their children to attend public schools is not this Government’s policy. It is not now, it won’t ever be,” he said.

Christopher Pyne is all a-Twitter…

By question time Monday afternoon, Minister for Social Media, wealthy parent Christopher Pyne is all a-Twitter with his opposition to the idea, causing wonderment if not utter disbelief amongst those of the commentariat not under threat of decapitation.

Those permitted to keep their heads were encouraged to avoid all controversy and to stick to publishing lists of the coalition’s record achievements, photographs of Bruce Billson beaming and photographs linking Bill Shorten with colourful union identities and would-be foreign mercenaries.

Some voters are old enough to recall governments refining proposals after discussion, debate and due consultation. Last week the Abbott government set a world record in responsive government. No-one can recall a government ever floating and sinking its own proposal on the same day. It is as unprecedented as paying people smugglers bound for New Zealand to turn back to Indonesia.

Clearly, creative problem-solving is all the go whether it be our PAYG border protection racket or keeping ordinary people in ignorance by privatising state schooling. A little fancy footwork is only to be expected when it comes to keeping the nation safe from bad ideas.

The fee for public school reversal, the last minute dash to change the law to make our offshore prisons legal are like beacons of what Mathias Cormann made it his mid-week mission to tell us is the orderly and methodical approach to government favoured by the Coalition. It was all just a means to ‘a mature and sensible discussion’ about how best to steal our children’s birthright and ensure that inequality of opportunity is entrenched in education.

Abbott’s sights remained firmly set on the main chance of his continuing in politics by hook or by crook in a full week of the skulduggery and thuggery that was our good government before parliament rose, perhaps for the last time.

Kill Bill was going gangbusters. Even little Katie Carnell was out smearing Shorten with the CFMEU’s criminality on Monday’s The Drum. Citizen-stripping got the tough on terror message out coverage and Monday’s Q&A gave him a perfect opportunity to have another bash at the ABC and the silencing of all objective reporting and – God forbid, dissent.

 

Whilst they professed their undying loyalty, fealty and overwhelming devotion to the great charter in public, our MPs trampled Magna Carta in the mire last week as they resumed the tribal blood-sport that now dominates national politics at the expense of the national interest and the common good.

A boat bound for New Zealand had been turned around with a wad of cash. Questions about it dominated the first day of parliament. Time to batten down the hatches, boys, says Captain Abbott.

Forget policy. What matters is whose side are you are on and what can you get away with. Federal government, rattled to discover it fosters the people smuggling trade it demonizes, reverts to its opposition strategy of attacking the man. Abbott is back in his element; doing the one thing he knows. Kill Bill. Get Gill. Who gives a fig for the common good, or justice and the rule of law?

Bribe back the boats. Lie about it. Let our border force boys be creative. We will do whatever it takes. They are keeping us safe. We won’t say how. We don’t comment on operational matters. What matters are results. We are at war with people who ask questions.

By Tuesday, Labor had dropped the ball. Suggestions that it, too, had bribed sea-farers in the people trade, were enough to cause an abrupt cessation of an attack which should have been continued. Julia Gillard came out to deny ever paying people smugglers but by then the opposition had dropped its demands for an explanation. And the people’s right to know.

A plucky Tanya Plibersek picked up the ball late in the week. But she may call all she likes for a full explanation. Tony Abbott will continue to refuse as long as he knows he holds the trump card of cheap, xenophobic, populism. As long as we let him.

Paul Sheehan reminds us, most of us closed our hearts and minds to refugees long ago. Now the PM wants us to close our eyes and stop our ears. We will do whatever it takes, he soothes, to keep you safe.   Transparency? You really don’t need to know. And you can keep your criticism to yourself.

It was an ugly week in politics. An increasingly despotic LNP government turns viciously on its critics. It scorns and mocks and undermines those who seek to hold it to account. Even if it is their job. Labor is said to be ‘rolling out the red carpet’ for terrorists because Mark Dreyfus reminds a reporter our courts cannot try a person in his absences. Labor is about to steal our super.

Even uglier was the disgraceful attack on Monday on Gillian Triggs whose job it is to hold the government to account. The context of Magna Carta made it seem even more an indictment of our representatives’ capacity to pay lip service to ideals they daily scorn or flout.

The 800^th anniversary of the great charter occasioned such a gush of public speaking that the forked tongue seemed fit to gain a place on our flag. The paying of homage in counterfeit coin was enough to make a baron blush while the deeds of those entrusted to govern us were once again a travesty of Magna Carta’s guiding principles in protecting us from abuse of power by upholding the rule of law.

How low can you go? Certainly, Captain ‘Hook or by Crook’ Abbott and his limbo-dancing government appeared to violate the rule of law at every turn, from Bronwyn Bishop’s public bullying of Gillian Triggs on ABC’s Q&A, another shameful act in the Coalition’s orchestrated campaign to undermine the Human Rights Commissioner, whose independence is intended to act as a check on executive power, to the PM’s mission to set up a kangaroo court in the Immigration Minister’s office for those whom he suspects should have their citizenship revoked.

Monday night it fell to Speaker of the House and Minister for ejecting Labor MPs, Bronwyn Bishop to take up the cudgels; belabouring Triggs with the LNP bully baton. Repeating the lie that the report on children in detention was politically motivated, Bishop urged Triggs to shape up or ship out.

There is a time, and I think Gillian recognises it, that as a statutory officer you have to decide whether you’re a statutory officer, fulfilling that role with security of tenure, or whether you wish to say, ‘I want to be part of the political debate’ and stand for office and run to become part of that political process.’

Clearly the only free speech this government values is its own and its mates’.  It has a tame commissioner, Tim Wilson, formerly of the IPA waiting in the wings. It seeks Gillian Triggs’ scalp for the Human Rights Commission’s report on children in custody.

The Human Rights Commission, along with the judicial system, has its own job to do under international convention and Australian law.  The Abbott government’s campaign to discredit it undermines the rule of law. It tramples the principle that independent actors are given specific roles as checks and balances to the government’s political power.

At least a small handful of LNP cabinet members who still believe in the rule of law but they are to be denied access to the final draft of the citizen-stripping bill which is calculated to win more political kudos than the alternative. The alternative would be to simply modify the existing law dating from 1948 under which dual citizens forfeit their Australian citizenship if they take up arms in the service of a foreign army against Australia.

The bill also dispenses with the courts, giving the Immigration Minister the authority, because, as the PM blurted out on radio last week, involving the courts is always perilous. Abbott, clearly has no faith in the legal system and is backing a single minister to get him a better result.

Abbott was keen to tell parliament he had support. He even verballed former national security laws monitor and head Brett Walker, a distinguished leader of the legal fraternity. A furious Walker was quick to issue a press statement pointing out that the courts should be an essential part of any such bill. Yet the PM continued unapologetic, unscathed, almost unchecked.

In parliament last week, Abbott did divulge that the final draft of the controversial bill would be seen by the AG and the Immigration Minister. The Foreign Minister is sidelined, as are all others who may dissent. The PM is more concerned with the roar of approval he anticipates from the mob.

Mates like anti-wind-farmer Alan Jones are vital to the Abbott government’s access to the mob. And the argument cannot be pitched too low just as long as it floats the shock jock boat. I know what the people are thinking Abbott says during the week. For ‘the people’ read Alan Jones’ listeners. It’s called talkback radio but anyone who disagrees is rubbished on air.

Bugger global warming: renewable energy is so ugly. Abbott uses Sydney radio to tell us that he hates windmills. Like Hockey he needs to say so. They look bad. Bound to be bad for you. ‘Visually awful,’ he says to his pal – unlike, it would seem, a nice clean coal-burning smoke belching power station.

Reasoned discourse, dissent and difference continued to be pushed to the wall. Mud-slinging and dog-whistling remain our PM’s own special way of fostering a ‘national conversation’ on energy. On our responsibilities as global citizens. On the process of accountability itself.

As modelled by Bronwyn Bishop on Monday’s ABC Q@A, the much-touted national conversation that the LNP urges upon us is all one way. Shut up and listen to our platitudes, prejudices and lies. Hector your critics. Threaten them when you can.

Royal commissions come in handy, here. They sound so legitimate. Even ABC sound-bites help carry forward the impression that the latest commission is anything more than a political witch hunt. Abbott gets the boot in early.

In Cairns on Friday to flog a White Paper on Developing Northern Australia, Abbott accuses Bill Shorten of ‘identity theft’ in the former AWU head’s workplace negotiations. ‘Verging on identity theft’ are his weasel words.

Ironically his white paper on the deep north is a tissue of lies, based on rent seeking, opportunism, romanticism which flouts the expert advice of countless studies attesting to its national economic, social and environmental madness. But this is not mob to fuss over serving self-interest or ignoring science.

‘Verging on identity theft. ‘How or why is best left unsaid. The PM’s smear is a mere appetiser to the meal he is certain to make of Shorten’s appearance next week at the costly political witch-hunt that is his government’s Royal Commission into Trade Unions. Nothing like giving your independent judiciary a helping hand. What’s that about the separation of powers? Don’t you worry about that. Just look at that crook Shorten.

Senator David Leyonhjelm, at times, such as on gun control, a cup short of the full tea-party is all over commercial news with skeletons of this magnitude which Shorten must explain. Shorten is ‘haunted by his days as a union boss’ according to another. In fact when he appears on ABC’s Insiders on Sunday, he is proud of being a modern bloke and an accomplished negotiator who has moved beyond class warfare. Much good may it do him.

Bill Shorten is already convicted in the Murdoch media over alleged union support of his campaign to the tune of $300,000. The smear campaign has already found him guilty of something unspeakably shifty despite union support being perfectly legal. What is not reported is that it is only about half of Roslyn Packer’s 2013 gift to the LNP of $580,000 in 2012-13. In the commission also Shorten is guilty until he proves himself innocent. In the court of popular opinion he is another Craig Thomson already. Reports have it that his former wife has been interviewed. Must be dodgy.

The LNP receives twice as much money from all donations than Labor but this week we were being worked up over Shorten’s ethics in accepting unnecessary support. Joe Hockey should know. Is it as unnecessary as an allowance paid to a wealthy treasurer who rents a house his wife owns in Canberra?

Worse, Shorten was diddling the workers he was representing. In reality, he helped negotiated a series of rostered days off into flexible RDO’s. But the media pack is baying for blood. On Murdoch TV we learn that Shorten’s personal life is under scrutiny from the Royal commission. Guilty. Guilty Guilty.

Criticism is a type of treason it seems according to the Abbott government’s rules of engagement. So blind is its anti-terror frenzy; so virulent is the anti-other intolerance and hysteria it whips up to cripple the national psyche.

Luckily for us simple folk, head coach, Captain Hook-or-by-Crook-Abbott pledges to keep us safe from harm by doing whatever it takes, whenever he feels like it, to make us all feel endangered, whilst he busily stirs up further insecurity, enmity and division. The biggest danger to our well-being as a nation is himself and his government of crazed neo-cons. The only leadership he knows is how to put the boot in.

Our elected representatives were spoilt for choice as heads to kick popped up everywhere last week. Let’s kill Bill,’ the government’s contribution to bipartisanship, played to packed houses in and out of parliament while the week began with yet another round of ‘let’s get Gill.’ She’s just a political mouthpiece for telling us that children should not be in indefinite detention. Any kind of detention.

Mothers got some tough love too, as support for perinatal depression was axed in another round of ‘independence-building’ in the needy and the vulnerable. Australia wants mothers who lift not lean. The $85 million National Perinatal Depression Initiative expired in 2013 leaving state health ministers to negotiate its future but Health Minister Sussan Ley told them this week that the Commonwealth would stop contributing by the end of the month. You have to be cruel to be kind.

Victorian Health Minister Martin Foley called a press conference to object to a cut which does not just hurt the mother but her whole family:

“To cut the programs that fund perinatal programs that support mothers and children is just one of the cruellest cuts [the Federal Government] could deliver to the most vulnerable families,” he said.

Yet it was not all negative. After his on-air rub-down with Alan Jones, Abbott had an innovative proposal. We are to be blessed with a new wind commissioner we never knew we needed, after the PM declared his hate for the sail on his mate Alan Jones’ hate-for-the- other radio.

It was a kick in the teeth for sacked disability commissioner Graham Innes who protested that he must continue his advocacy unpaid after the government pulled the rug out from under him. We can’t afford someone to look after twenty per cent of the population who have a disability yet we need to fork out a million dollars on a commission into wind-farms that any number of previous commissions and reports have shown to be completely safe to public health.

In the meantime, the barbed wire canoe that is our ship of state sails ever further up shit creek without a paddle. But the coast is clear and nothing but fair seas await on the starboard bow. No-one in government knows anything they need to explain to the people or seek their opinion on while our Good Captain Abbott already knows, he says, with a wink, what the people think.

 

 

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Good Captain Abbott led Team Australia to a record-breaking tally of red cards, penalty shoot-outs and own goals last week in an incredible seven days of good government which began with an angry Mandy Vanstone caning the Minister for Women in her Monday Fairfax Liberal Party tub-thumper and which ended with the PM deploying the silver-tongued Mathias Cormann to defend his not denying that Australia may have paid thousands to people smugglers to turn back their boat.
The government’s week began badly when the PM copped a broadside from former colleague, Liberal hagiographer and one woman cheer-squad Amanda Vanstone. Vanstone typically goes out of her way to whisper sweet nothings about the LNP but there was nothing mellifluous about her excoriating attack on the PM. It made it all the more remarkable, readable and unanswerable. Mandy did not mince her words.

Abbott was ‘lazy, sneaky or both’ according to the former senator for his contempt of due process in Dutton-gate. He had ‘thrown the whole Westminster system of cabinet government out the window.’ Professing a ‘belief in the individual,’ whatever that means, Vanstone went on to express her:

‘…profound disappointment, bordering on despair, when I see some on ‘my team’ thinking it is OK for a minister alone to take away a citizen’s rights – indeed, take away citizenship – in the blink of an eye. No appeal, no judicial process, just a ministerial decision. What were they thinking?

Some see Vanstone’s attack as the beginning of the end for Tony Abbott’s career in politics. Yet Abbott himself, ever ready to obscure the real issue is quoted in Sunday’s media as being ‘certain the law will stand up.’ No mention of the cabinet hi-jack. No reply to Mandy. There is no reply. She has called it like it is. Not one of her former colleagues has been able to step up and reply to her broadside.

Bill Shorten should be making some political capital out of Abbott’s autocratic arrogance if he were not Bill Shorten and not about to appear in the LNP’s witch hunt of a Royal Commission into unions. Shorten featured wimpily in the news this week bleating that he had always done the right thing by the worker. This seems to have involved condoning having the employer pay employees’ union dues.

Expect a bucketing of Bill from Tony Abbott and his crew next week. Abbott needs the distraction and it serves his real interest in politics as blood-sport. He boasts that he can beat Bill Shorten but beating Bill Shorten is about all he can do. The week showed he does not have what it takes to be an effective Prime Minister. And it revealed a back to the future controlling PMO was very much to the fore again.

Dutton-gate reveals a PM’s Office leaking untruths to The Daily Telegraph. First was a lie that cabinet had been consulted. Second, was the falsehood that cabinet had reached consensus before it had even met. Third is the implicit lie that the concentration of power in the hands of the PMO has been reformed or is any less of a handicap to this government than in February when backbenchers complained of being controlled and shut out.

Stung to be so used and abused two senior colleagues struck back at Abbott. ‘Operation leak-back’ was sprung by two cabinet members, according to Julie Bishop’s friend Peter Hartcher who received the leak. Hartcher was able to publish such a detailed account of cabinet proceedings that the PM’s double deceit is rendered transparent. But this was only the end of the beginning. And the leaking continues.

In the end, the PMO had whip up a posse of backbench support just to shut the buggers up while George Christensen, National Party Whip has offered Abbott his help.

Gorgeous George is the only member of the current Liberal mob to have attended the racist Geert Wilders’ 2013 DIY workshop on bigotry, intolerance and citizen-stripping. He is also the only member of the current government to have boycotted National Sorry Day. What role he plays in whipping up support is an operational matter. Currently he is crusading against gay marriage and is in the PM’s ear.

The wisdom of getting your backbench to trump your front bench has to be conundrum of the week in good captaincy. Surely it is up there with paying people smugglers or trusting Peter Dutton with anything. The public, doubtless, will understand and forgive any PM who is prepared to be ‘creative’ in implementing his vision of a tough on terrorism government.

By ‘hook or by crook’ Tony Abbott assures us he has the national interest at heart even if he cannot deny paying people smugglers to turn back their boats. We can be creative. Who cares what we do if it gets results?

By Friday, the PM made paying people smugglers sound like smart practice. Extolling the imagination and flexibility which our border enforcers brought Under repeated questioning on Friday, Mr Abbott refused to deny the reports, instead saying authorities had been “incredibly creative” in coming up with ways to stop asylum seeker boats making it to Australia.

Regardless of Abbott’s admiration for his authorities’ ingenuity, Indonesia is now demanding an official explanation from an Australian government which seems to have followed trying to ‘buy back the boats’ with a will to ‘bribe back the boats.’ It will not end well for us, or for Abbott. Yet the best Dutton and Abbott can offer so far is denial.

The week drew to a bizarre close on Sunday with Mathias Hubert Paul Cormann, Joe Hockey’s straight guy, interrupting Sunday lunch on ABC radio to explain to the nation that knowing nothing was the same as admitting nothing and the same as doing nothing when it came to his government’s knowing anything about paying people smugglers to turn their boat around and head back to Indonesia.

For information, Cormann implied, Australians must look not to their own government but to another nation. Don’t ask us. We are just running the country. Besides we do not comment on operational matters.

The fact that most of us, along with the rest of the world, have already heard report from an Indonesian police chief and other seemingly reputable sources just puts an extra gloss on this government’s veneer of transparency. Our vessels in the area have just become floating ATMs for those in the asylum seeker transport trade.

A little light relief for the nation came when Joe Hockey, the government’s funny money man observed that the best way to get a house was to get a well-paid job. It certainly worked for him. What also helped Joe were wealthy parents and marriage to a merchant banker. Aspiring home owners take note. The sun may be setting on sunrise Joe’s political career.

Speculation that Joe will really have to go over this gaffe is growing despite his PM’s defence and lame attempt, given his salary, to hose down the issue by posing as one of the ordinary folk of Australia who suffer to pay their mortgage. His attempt to rescue his feckless Treasurer is part of a side show in which the LNP pretends that we are all able to become as rich as they are if we work hard enough. Adherence to this pernicious myth increases the Abbott government’s irrelevance to average Australian lives.

What is also growing is the anxiety of those paying inflated prices for houses in Sydney and Melbourne where policies have helped foster a housing bubble. Despite some solid comment from the RBA’s Glenn Stevens and others who should know, the government seeks to deny that the bubble is happening, let alone take any steps to deal with it such as ending negative gearing or the provision of cheap accommodation.

There was much for Tony Abbott to account for last week but his contribution to responsible government may be summed up in his tilt at windmills on professional windbag and blatherskite Allan Jones’ talkback radio show. Abbott massaged his pal’s prejudices and those of their listeners by finding wind power generation ugly and something the government would be cutting back on were it not for that damned obstructionist senate.

With his recent cabinet coup, his carte blanche to do whatever floats your boat in international waters and his love of being a tough guy on terrorism, it led to an intimate rapport as Tony and Allan and the listeners could tell just how much better for us all it would be if we had a one party state and we just let Tony get on with it. All those greenies, progressives and human rights bicycle riders could just get out of the road.