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Remember that young Joe Hockey, from Sunrise TV?  Full of jovial bonhomie and matey ocker banter, the man exuded likeability. A likely lad, he was rated highly by TV couch potatoes across the land. All for grinning and acting the fool.

Back then Joseph Benedict Hockey was a rising star, a young Turk, although of Palestinian Arabic extraction, a future PM and harbinger of a matey, multicultural, new era of brotherly tolerance; effortless accomplishment and noblesse oblige.

Nine years ago, now, at least, Hockey’s political fairy tale had us in its powerful spell. The rock of the world is fastened securely to a fairy’s wing, says Francis Scott Fitzgerald about the unreality of reality in The Great Gatsby.

Affable Jesuit educated north shore Sydney migrant boy, turns politician, renouncing a world he’s barely had time to taste let along experience. Or suffer much to inherit. Runs for SRC president at Sydney Uni in 1987 on a free beer ticket.

No yobbo, though, not our Joe. Neat. Nicely turned out. Pin stripes, tie and clean shaven, even in the ungodly hours of the sunrise time slot. Mums love him. Best of all he seems solid, dependable, bankable.

Not everything goes his way. Those studio lights are hot. And it’s hard work being funny, let alone consistently nice. Yet nothing ever seems to worry Joe. Nothing dents his relentless cheerfulness. Upbeat. Glass half full kind of fella. Happy as a clam at high tide. Always cracking silly. Full of beans and bus-tickets.

Everyone knew Joe then. Or reckoned they did. He was a part of their lounge rooms; grinning, guffawing, hanging shit on Rudd; talking shit, letting everyone know underneath the expensive suit he was a regular, normal Joe even if he did come from a rich family, his missus was a merchant banker and everything.

Joe wanted us to know it was OK to like him. So too did his Skippy bookend, K Rudd. Kevin 07 and Joe were always stirring each other, joshing, mugging for the camera. Joe won best guffaw. Rudd won cutest comebacks.

They should have kept it going. The Kev and Joe show could have come next, a Seinfeld with politics, a show about nothing that made you feel OK about knowing nothing, doing nothing, that there was nothing to worry about a show which was just good fun. Make you laugh. It was OK to suck at politics. But Rudd pulled the plug once he got into office.

Well, guess what. Turns out Joe’s still around. Looks the part, too but he’s a lot less jovial. Still a big joker, though.  Good that he’s been able to keep that up. The other day he reckoned he was the federal treasurer. What a crack-up.

Monday, he told a ledger of accountants at the ACCI Business Leaders’ Summit that we ought to cut income tax rates to arrest bracket creep and to ‘incentivise workers.’ Reduce the ‘burden’ of their taxes.  Especially for his mates, the 300,000, the top three per cent who will creep into the second top tax bracket. Or politicians nudging into the top.

‘He got us all here to tell us that we need lower tax rates’ fumed a bean counter head of the CPA of Australia, a mob which blows hard about rich people needing to pay less tax but for workers’ rates to be slashed because everybody knows that business is crippled because wages are too high. Penalty rates are prohibitive. Cafes and restaurants are their favourite examples. It’s bullshit.

Latte servers and mocha sellers are not struggling. ABS figures show a hospitality sector in rude good health. As for their boss saying ‘hell I just won’t go in to work today because I am paying a few cents in the dollar more,’ that is an even bigger stretch of reality.

But how would Joe know? His advice to anyone who wants to buy an overpriced home courtesy of the housing bubble that he and his banker mates helped create is to get a better paid job. Get wealthy parents. Marry a merchant banker. It worked for him.

Hockey sees our taxes as ‘a burden’ we should try to get out of instead of our social responsibility, a way of paying our way; helping support others. Funny man. Look where it’s got the Americans. His latest cuts will cost 25 billion over four years. To get that he will cut government spending on hospitals, schools, social service.

But he won’t stop there. He’s all for upping the country’s GST rate. Needs to be 15% and include education, health and fresh food. GST is a regressive tax, hitting low income families hardest.

Hockey’s still a neocon comedian. Wealth, he insists despite all the evidence, trickles down from the rich; workers just can’t be stuffed working hard because their wages have gone up only to take them into a higher ‘tax bracket.’  Another couple of crack ups.

Wealth does not ‘trickle down, Joe; top income earners are surprisingly adept at hanging on to extra income. They are the nation’s best savers for example. Wages are not rising, in the real world even if politicians did give themselves a 31% pay rise in March 2012. OK they did get another 3% on top of that three months later. The base for a backbencher became $190,550. only 2.7% of the workforce gets over $180,000.

You always were protected from the real world, Joe. Privileged. It’s your shtick. As Treasurer to the wealthy, you are a gem. Keep looking after the elite. Great to hear you are keeping the free beer flowing.

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So the PM is going to govern Australia for a week from a ‘defence facility’ on Thursday Island? What’s that? Govern? There’s always time for the great Bwana to try something new.

We thought he was up North for a photo shoot. Doing stuff he loves. Going bush with military blokes, living in barracks, wearing fancy dress. Having locals make a fuss of him. Beef up his sorry status in opinion polls. Give him a few days’ quality time amidst people he can ignore for the rest of the year. Or longer.

Not that we would ever knock his visit. Not only does it get him out of Canberra and a long way from Canning, it’s a great opportunity. Give him time to explain the $534 million his government cut last year from indigenous programs administered by the Prime Minister and Cabinet and Health portfolios. It’s not far north enough to be an operational matter so he can unzip a bit.

It’s not institutionalised racism, the Minister for Aboriginal Australia will explain, it’s savings. We’ve got to find the money for the subsidies we give to mining companies from somewhere. Federal government subsidies to the mining sector have increased by half a billion dollars over the past year, according to the Australia Institute.

But in case you are thinking it’s a simple swap, direct subsidies are only part of our mining welfare payments. Mining companies effectively get a $5 billion handout when you factor in the tax concessions they get from the government according to the institute’s Matt Grudnoff. Yet you can make a case for the true cost to Australian society of the handout being far higher than that in the long run when you see where it is being taken from.

What the government is doing is taking more than $160 million from Aboriginal health and putting it into its own fabulous medical research slush fund. It must be helpful to have the PM on the team, so to speak.

The cuts are being made, a frugal Joe Hockey beams, ‘to eliminate waste.’ He should know more than most politicians what it is to have to stretch every dollar and cent. You start by stopping wastage.

No more frittering of millions on indigenous language support. No squandering funds on redressing disadvantage or looking after the little ones. Without extra funding it is likely that 38 Indigenous childhood development centres across the country will close.

Cutting the luxury of infant health and well-being helps create expensive problems and misery further down the track. These include alienation and contempt for the white man’s law. But, relax. A local copper always puts the stopper back in the bottle. The government did find $54 million for new police stations to be built in seven remote Indigenous communities in Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia over the next four years.

But there is not the faintest hint of apartheid about the coalition’s policies. Abbott will explain how he is ‘sweating blood’ to have indigenous Australians recognised in the constitution. True, he’s done a bit of back flip or two recently but basically it’s all OK now for indigenous people to meet to discuss the issue.

Of course non-indigenous people will be holding their simultaneous series of meetings. What will happen next? We’ll hold a referendum as we have promised, sort of with gay marriage and as history tells us is the ‘go to’ option when you really don’t want any change at all.

All of this and more will be playing softly in the background as the PM shakes hands, lays wreaths and kisses babies.

“Probity may be affected by conscious bias for or against a particular litigant or class of litigants. The law compels judges who have such a bias or may reasonably be thought to have such a bias to disqualify themselves, and in the practice it may be assumed that very few judges are consciously biased.” Dyson Heydon, Quadrant Dinner speech 2004

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‘Man overboard! Cabin boy Hunt squeals from the crow’s nest where he’s been sent to practise spotting endangered species. A waterlogged periwig bobs uselessly, oddly, among the sodden crusts, fag ends, and potato peelings of cook’s galley slop in a dirty scum off the stern.

Losing Dyson Heydon is a cruel but not unfamiliar blow. Abbott’s captain’s picks seldom stick. The ship of state, now utterly rudderless, idle, all projects stalled or shelved, drifts helplessly in foul seas listing further to starboard by the minute and leaking like a lobster pot. Now even a show trial seems beyond it.

Abbott’s ship has lost its figurehead and its fig leaf of decency. Justice Dyson Heydon, AC QC, former High Court Judge, is a respected academic and ultra conservative thinker, ‘a paragon of integrity’ to hear the PM speak, drafted because of his reputation. Now he has been dragged into the depths of Abbott’s sordid world. Nothing good can come of it for either party.

Heydon’s predicament makes him star performer in a surreal week in the theatre of the absurd that is Australian federal politics, a week which began with the leaking, to two media outlets, of an empty Cabinet agenda and a PM pep talk on unity, loyalty and not leaking.

The agenda proved cabinet had no agenda and no way of hiding it. Later in the house, with no hint of irony and less of hypocrisy the PM jeered at Labor for being non-substantive under Rudd.

Abbott got the word from a speech of Heywood’s in 2013. It was an indication of partiality best left alone but the PM was all junkyard dog. Had he been into the rozzer’s ‘roid’ supply at police barracks where he chooses to doss down? Certainly, the ex-pugilist came out fighting Monday.

There would be ‘serious consequences,’ for gutless rats,’ ranted the Good Captain Abbott, now barking mad and unlikely to survive past the Canning by-election in September, despite Andrew Hastie, his ex-military candidate’s refusal to be tainted by his unit’s investigation for severing Taliban enemy hands two years ago, which he says is standard finger printing practice, and was judged appropriate at a military inquiry. All but one of his troops was cleared.

Abbott could swap leadership stories with Captain Hastie on how best to deal with subordinates. Only last week he had ambushed the lot of them over gay marriage by suddenly opening a farm gate to let in a mob of Nationals, even if it did include pink redneck Wokka Entsch, with his private member’s bill on gay marriage.

Abbott had deployed a form of ‘branch stacking’ to avoid a conscience vote, said Pyne, clearly angling for the bovine rather than the team player vote. Others in the Coalition have been off side ever since.

It was the night of the long horns; the act of a leader so desperate to save his hide he would appease the right at all costs. A rancorous, mutinous discontent with ‘the prick’ his crew’s term for him, now seethes above and below Team Australia’s decks. And will not be quelled.

Immediately leaked also by a ‘high-ranking cabinet member’ who had remained awake during the PM’s serve were the ironically entitled ‘talking points’ MPs must parrot each week.

Cabinet ministers were sent out with the line that ‘our cabinet is functioning exceptionally well,’ a satirical crack-up too ludicrous even for the Abbott government, a government in deep trouble; such dysfunctional division that catastrophe has become the new normal.

‘A few rough patches,’ Abbott and Hockey say, that’s all, just the ‘tough decisions of governing’ overlooking the reality that all tough decisions on tax, super, energy, environment are being evaded. Hockey’s broken promise to lift GST from tampons does not even come close.

Mike Baird, Abbott’s sock puppet proxy vetoed to its removal at the state premiers’ COAG GST party on Friday while Joe ‘look, no hands ma,’ Hockey, leaned in, beaming approval, squibbing any unpopular heavy lifting himself, such as raising the GST rate, but fooling no-one. Punters have not forgotten his 2014-15 Budget’s massive cuts to state school and hospital funding.

The patches were more than rough. The government was rebuked by the Federal Court for misrepresenting a court decision to fit its paranoid vigilante litigation myth. Four cabinet leaks occurred. Victorian Liberal leader Damien Mantach is said to have embezzled millions, a scandalous charge which assails the Liberal ‘better economic managers’ myth and exposes Liberal leadership selection processes. But it was a better week than last week; funnier, too.

Cabinet crack-up, straight man, comic Eric Abetz, fearlessly attacked ‘gutless’ leakers from safely behind a microphone on ABC radio. It was Eric’s take on courage, unity and loyalty. Perhaps he should turn professional. In his day job Tuesday he failed to get two IR ‘reform’ bills through the senate. So much for the crackdown on unions. In the lower house, the riot actors were in form.

Fearless MPs took turns to jeer and smear Labor, Monday, toning up their abuse after the captain’s motivational speech. The PM led by denouncing the ‘smirking phony’ Shorten for criticising the star of Abbott’s $80 million witch hunt set up expressly to destroy the Labor leader.

Labor was racist, too, for making a fuss about Chinese workers on 457 visas taking Aussie jobs under the Free Trade deals which would now have to be amended to allow Australia to slap a GST on all online vendors.

Despite clearly enjoying themselves trashing Shorten and his party, the Labor-baiting was abruptly trumped mid-week by Brandis, Peter Pan Hunt, Abbott and the other lost boys of the Liberal leadership gang into declaring war on vigilante litigators, ‘elements within the greens,’ Labor racists and any other traitors taking the piss out of progress, jobs and growth.

‘Progress jobs and growth’ means allowing dirty unprofitable multinational coal mines which, in reality, could guarantee none of these things even if they were viable. Renewable energy was ugly and would add five thousand dollars to household electricity bills.

Wind power was backed by the same ‘well-funded’ conspiracy against King Coal, a paranoid Brandis muttered darkly into his brandy, scattering other, saner, Bohemian Club brothers who feared he’d spill their drinks.

It was ‘lawfare’ by vigilantes, Brandis ranted, amidst other bizarre lies about Adani’s coal mine being stopped by ‘extreme greens’ instead of admitting that Hunt had made a mistake.

Ultimately, a desperate Abbott was forced to put on a straight face on Friday and claim the US needed Australia to drop bombs on ISIS in Syria, a group which would immediately abandon its tactic of being embedded with civilians and rush out of hiding into the desert and other wide open spaces to present itself as an Australian air raid target.

Having Aussie top guns kill the evil death cult would do Assad a favour and allow him to continue to barrel bomb his own population without distraction.

In trooping into Syria, Abbott had drummed up a diversion from his government’s ineptitude and chaos; his poor leadership and bad judgement. Yet all of this and more was on more permanent display in Humpty Dumpty Dyson Heydon’s fall from grace and in the conundrums it poses.

Can a judge we perceive to be biased be trusted to judge his own perceived impartiality – as he must – as if he were an average punter? Is a black-letter conservative, an intellectual jurist, a notorious dissenter, up to the task? Will he exercise insight or oversight? Does it matter?

Heydon’s joy in ‘beautifully clear black letter propositions,’ betrays his reverence for an idealised past of certainty and true virtue, a world ill-attuned to the squalid compromises of modernity. It also indicates a mind opposed to those who elevate contemporary values or modern concepts such as human rights above the letter of the law. Yet even Heydon cannot bestow upon Abbott’s Royal Commission the integrity it lacks from its inception. Nor is he the right judge for the job.

A complex and divisive figure, Heydon is a cultured scholar and ‘national treasure,’ a revered Solon to his admirers. To others he appears pompous, pedantic and overbearing, a fossil who has no time for ‘judicial activism’ or changing laws to suit the times. He was never a trial judge. Listening to evidence and weighing it all up as he must in the TURC must be a trial to him.

Heydon is out of his depth in this commission. An academic with no experience of unions let alone the workaday world of building construction, he is more at ease with reading and writing academic dissertation than listening to unionists’ testimony.  In almost every way, he is the perfect Abbott Captain’s pick who must now judge himself from the perspective of the fair-minded observer, an everyman legal construct as impossibly far from his real self as could be imagined.

The Witch-Finder Royal has been forced down from Olympus by his own fallibility, his ‘oversight’ of a series of emails over his agreeing to speak at a Liberal Party fund raiser. Now he must plead his own case; argue that he is fit to proceed. Already the evidence suggests he is not.

Star of his own Star Chamber, Justice Heydon is Abbott captain’s pick in his Machiavellian plan to shore up the coalition’s re-electability; trash the unions, damage Labor and kill Bill Shorten. Now he may have discovered the hard way the truth of Sir Owen Dixon’s dictum that High Court Judges decline the offer of any Royal Commission.

To accept is to become a creature of the government with no constitutional protections for independence. It is also to blot the escutcheon of the High Court. Certainly this commission is bound to end badly for all parties.

Heydon will respond to a submission lodged on behalf of the ACTU, Unions NSW and four unions that he should recuse himself and resign his commission “on the grounds that he is unable to afford any union or any person associated with any union procedural fairness as a result of his apprehended bias”.

Forced to sit in judgement on himself, an awkward, uncomfortable, if unique, privilege at the best of times, Heydon has already taken a massive step down. He will, he advises, take some time to consider his case and will hand down his verdict next Tuesday.

Whatever Heydon’s finding, the Royal Commission is irrevocably tainted. Should he choose to remain, moreover, the ACTU and the Unions could take its case to the Federal or the High Court.

Heydon’s credibility and that of his commission is now as bad as his memory. Sadly for a party, that has a crush on bigwigs, another Liberal idol is seen to have feet of clay.

To most ‘fair-minded observers,’ Heydon’s case surely beggars belief. A top silk, whose reputation includes his capacity to summon even the smallest detail and who clearly expects the same powers of recall from those who appear before him, a judge who is perfectly capable of applying seventeenth century precedent to acquit a husband of the rape of his wife – can ‘overlook’ things? Or not realise things?

Heydon is resisting calls for his resignation on the grounds he was not aware the Garfield Barwick address, was a Liberal fundraiser – despite the emails and despite Barwick being a Liberal legend for his 1975 role in advising Kerr in Whitlam’s dismissal.

Is he foxing? Surely Heydon must recuse himself. The damage is done. Yet the former Howard appointee to the High Court is acting like a politician, denying, pleading ignorance, making excuses, ‘ so many speaking invitations,’ denying, demurring and prevaricating.

The top silk is dancing in step almost with Bronwyn, the dance of the umpteen veils of departure until the booing is loud enough for the PM to haul him off. Yet you can understand his reluctance.

The performance was going so well. Abbott’s show trial into Gillard and Shorten and the criminals, thugs and bikie gangs that run the union movement was providing more than just dark comedy, light relief and welcome theatricality; it offered rich pickings for press and pollie alike, providing a flailing coalition with enough mud to sling at Bill to fill a coal mine.

Heydon himself had got into the swing of his extended season, following up his mind-reading of Julia Gillard whose ‘demeanour’ he judged to contain ‘an element of acting’ by striking another blow at impartiality with his gibe at Shorten who was in danger, he said, of ‘becoming an unreliable witness.’ Bugger protocol. Heydon sets his own rules.

Senator Conroy reminded the senate, Heydon’s Royal Commission departs from precedent. It accepts hearsay but refuses objections and cross-examinations. Double standards for different witnesses appear depending which side of the pay desk they are on.

Detailed media briefings are provided to reporters minutes ahead of witnesses who may read the charges against them for the first time when they enter the box.

The PM tried hard and loud to defend his pocket colossus in parliament. Heydon, AC QC, Abbott repeatedly hectored MPs, the QC AC sounding faintly like some band, is a Justinian of Australian jurisprudence, Sydney Solon, a certainty to pick up a knighthood for services rendered.

Not only is this paragon ‘absolutely beyond reproach’ it is a criminal act to attack a serving Royal Commissioner, the PM bellowed getting up a riff: Labor must stop running a protection racket on a protection racket, stop smearing a former High Court judge.’

Abbott doth protest too much. Hoist with his own petard, his explosive Royal Commission device has spectacularly backfired disabling his mate Dyso and himself leaving Shorten smirking.

His crew in mutiny if not open revolt, his vow to beat Shorten looking increasingly like all his other broken promises, his government ‘chaotic as a Tupperware cupboard’ and utterly without an agenda, Captain Abbott appears to be up shit creek without a paddle.

All the military adventures and other diversions he can wangle, all the QCs he can commission cannot put him back together again. Not as leader, anyway. A leader would have given Heydon the heave-ho long ago. Or not appointed him in the first place.

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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.