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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…this polyester-wool blend Pollyanna…

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

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

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

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

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

..a flogging with a limp lettuce leaf… 

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

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

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

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

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

It is a big back down…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher Pyne is all a-Twitter…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Captain Abbott, an Odysseus in speedos, found himself once again staring down mutiny on Monday as HMS Team Australia limped into port, divided over national security. The vessel was leaking badly. Team Australia had weathered some punishing offshore squalls and was coming apart at the seams, it seemed. Yet somehow disaster was averted by a government which went on the attack.

A quick fix suddenly presented itself: Peter Dutton would just have to have another go at Gillian Triggs. Dutton called for the Human Rights Commission chair to resign over her comments on the consequences of our turning back asylum seekers. His call summed up a key theme of government business of the week, the persecution of dissenters.

Dutton alleged on Sunday’s Andrew Bolt show that Triggs linked her criticism to a recent Indonesian execution of two Australians but the evidence shows otherwise.

Last week, at a forum in Adelaide, Triggs simply asked: “Have we thought about what the consequences are of pushing people back to our neighbour Indonesia? Is it any wonder that Indonesia will not engage with us on other issues that we care about, like the death penalty?”

If Dutton is to be given the power of deciding citizenship, as seems likely under the government’s proposed new anti-terrorism law, he has so far displayed little of the discernment or discretion that would inspire trust. But trust went out the window for the government all over the shop last week.

A FIFA scoundrel had pocketed 45 million of our hard-earned bribe, it was discovered, as Sepp Blatter’s incredible empire began to fall apart under allegations of systematic bribery and corruption. Perhaps the money could be forwarded to the Indonesians. Julie Bishop had to explain to Indonesia why a massive cut in our aid to our neighbour was not payback for their executing two of our finest and most famous young drug-runners.

The terms of trade continued to run away from us and although the world iron ore price was up to $60 per tonne from its low of $50, it was still a third of its price in the boom we banked on lasting forever. The root cause of the downturn is the slowing urban migration of Chinese country folk into cities, which in turn dampens the market for construction steel. Labor, doubtless, will be blamed.

The UN was disgusted by Australia’s slacking off on climate change while our cavalier dereliction of duty over the Rohingya crisis remains an international scandal. But no-one will preach to us, thunders Abbott.

Wagging its finger at Australia for wasting its time with direct action proposals that did not stack up, the UN found our carbon abatement targets too low to be real or fair. The US was underwhelmed by our support for its latest oil war given that Iraqi soldiers had just deserted their posts and run screaming from the enemy, a tactic not in any training manual.

A commitment to Australian boots on Iraqi sand was expected all this week. It seemed ever more likely as the government repeatedly denied having any such plan. Few are taken in.  Denial is typically this government’s prelude to action.

As for having no plan, chaotic adhocracy is the Abbott government’s modus operandi. Julie Bishop’s news that fiendish death cult ISIS plans to recruit experts to help with gas warfare is, moreover, surely evidence we are being prepared to fight pure evil on the ground, despite our letting Assad get away with it for years. Expect more on this score soon. Who knows? Someone in the Pentagon may even dust off the old WMD tactic again.

The PM stuck his finger up in response to all critics. He was a fighter! Rats in the ranks and Bill Shorten’s overtures of cooperation over small business tax breaks alike found themselves rebuffed, if not repulsed, by a macho PM in full flight. Abbott treated the nation if not the world to a brazenly unreconstructed, tough-guy, hairy chest-beating, vote-winning simian display of authority. The junkyard dog was back on attack.

In a stark reminder of its real commitment to bipartisanship and its increasing contempt for the role of parliament, the government voted against itself rather than allow Bill Shorten to expedite the passage of a small business tax-relief bill by tabling his party’s assent.

Abbott capped this bizarre act with another rough rebuff. Having secured Labor’s assent in principle to new laws stripping citizenship from ISIS supporters and anyone else Peter Dutton suspects, the PM refused to give Labor a briefing on the new bill. And his odd-ball hardball act was, it seems contagious.

Australia was grilled over its carbon emission targets. Environment Minister Greg Hunt, on Bondi Beach for the launch of the ‘One Tree Per Child’ initiative was in top form. Approached for comment over international concern as to whether Australia’s target of five per cent reduction by 2020 is fair, Hunt obliged with ‘No with respect, your statement carries a presumption that is false, untrue, incredible and inaccurate.’ Just what you would hope really from a consultative government committed to transparency, about to enter world negotiations on 30 November to save the planet’s future.

At home, trade winds threatened to blow us back on to the rocks of recession. A housing bubble would help it along. Even John Fraser the Liberals’ hand-picked, head-hunted Secretary to the Treasury discerned, he said, a bubble in the Sydney housing market, a housing bubble which apprentice treasurer, Josh Frydenberg mistook to mean higher prices on ABC Insiders Sunday. The member for Kooyong’s apparent confusion did not stop him denying any bubble exists. What would the Head of Treasury know about it anyway?

Similarly David Murray’s caution that the present exemptions for rich retirees made our super unsustainable were dismissed by Frydenberg, despite Murray’s expertise. Super was something the PM had promised would remain untouched, he said as if this were a real option.

Nor did it phase the assistant treasurer that the ERC was leaking as badly as cabinet. ‘What matters, he said, sagely, reciting his talking points, is that we are getting on with the business of government.’

That leaks imperil effective government is evidently not part of Frydenberg’s reasoning. ‘Why, there are green shoots all across the economy,’ he volunteered, remembering another part of his script. In fact the only green to be seen shooting in the non-mining sector is in housing construction and that could be a whole bubble of trouble rather than cause for more mindless applause.

Frydenberg also put on record this week his government’s meaning of the phrase ‘well-received’ as in Hockey’s ‘well-received’ second budget. Expect to hear more of this phrase. The truth is that there has been no rush of support to the government or ‘budget bounce’ as had been hoped by the Coalition.

‘Well-received’ translates into ‘has not been howled down’ except by families and low income earners, a large number of Australians who will be 15 billion dollars out of pocket as a result of cuts that remain from 2014 and new ‘savings’ read cuts in the 2015 budget according to Dr Cassandra Goldie of ACOSS. $6 billion has been slashed from family payments and 1 billion has been cut from health.

Happily for Abbott and his crew, however, a complete coalition capsize was averted, if only in the end, by a solid ballast of lies, denials, Tea-Party clap-trap, neo-con con-artistry, homophobia, xenophobia, sundry finger-pointing, blaming of Labor, witch-hunting and rabid scare-mongering. Not only are ISIS-groomed seventeen year olds about to kill us all in our beds, ISIS is planning to make war by chlorine gas. Bishop would have us believe ISIS needs to recruit experts to achieve this. Some of us, however, have not forgotten the use of chlorine in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. Doubtless there would be some local experts already available.

Keeping to his cunningly reversed course, Crusader Abbott sought salvation for himself and the nation by fighting terror, fighting Shorten and fighting rats in his cabinet. He would even enlist the back bench in the fight. Pit front against back bench. Teach a lesson to those dogs who’d dare find fault with his decision to grant Peter Dutton supreme power over citizen-stripping.

Within his party, in parliament and on international commitments, Abbott continued to do his best to boost his fortunes by promoting a mindless tribalism. Ask not what you can do for your nation, but whose side are you on? This tribalism usurps and infects politics with self-interest, self-absorption and indifference if not hostility to others. It is a primitive herd-like mentality set to diminish us all; further weaken our over-stretched social fabric; destroy our democratic birthright.

Team Australia, never a tight ship at the best of times, continued to list to starboard and to take on water as a result of ‘operation leak-back,’ where the crew had leaked against the captain in retaliation for his leaking against them a decision they had yet to take.

Abbott had to take a stand. ‘Personal and political consequences,’ he thundered, will rain upon the head of each and every rat found leaking. Except when I, myself leak, or when Wonder Woman Credlin leaks to our Daily Telegraph.

It was, he crowed, a ‘come to Jesus moment’ for his crew. Christ-like he promised to walk on leaked water; turn back all leaks for all time. Yet, so badly holed was his omnipotence that barely a messianic moment had elapsed before the next leak occurred. Yes. His very sermon against leaks was leaked to the press. It was a telling sign of his decline since February’s leadership spill.

Luckily, Hockey was still full of bullshit. He bounced back like a celluloid doll but with less credibility. On Wednesday, he was cracking hearty over a ‘terrific set of figures,’ fresh from the ABS. He was elated to discover that he had something he could spin.

In truth the ABS figures contained no measure of any substantive economic gain. But you couldn’t shut Hockey up on the miracles he had wrought in Australia’s economy. He assured a sceptical nation once again that we were on a credible path to recovery or a surplus or whatever it is you want to hear before we pull the double dissolution lever.

Hockey sallied forth to babble all over breakfast television, claiming a blip in forecasts was iron-clad evidence of a credible path to economic recovery. Besides, hadn’t he just made tampons cheaper and cheap utes tax deductible for tradies?  The economy was set to take off.

Australian shares suffered their worst week in three years. Long term unemployment rose 18 per cent over the past year to 188,000 a peak not seen since late 1990, according to the ABS who report also that GDP grew only 2.3 per cent, well below the 3 per cent trend required to maintain employment.

The sixteen year high in long-term unemployment is a measure of real suffering. It is also expensive. It comes with a wellbeing cost of a record $3.9 billion in the March quarter. Workers who have been granted the smallest basic pay rise ever would not be so quick to congratulate Hockey over his GDP. Factor in population growth, moreover and real domestic product grew by only 0.8 per person. GDP itself is a poor measure of economic health for a treasurer to be flaunting. It is not, as it is presented, a simple tick of approval.

Nor do we get to keep it. In mining, eighty per cent of GDP flows out of Australia into the bank accounts of the international mine owners.  Success in stimulating investment outside the mining sector remains largely elusive.

Bilge-water rising, Abbott battened down the hatches on climate change and human rights, stopping his ears to a blast of international criticism on human rights and energy policy while his leaky craft continued to ship water in the wash-up to ‘Strip-gate’ and the lead-up to the Paris climate summit at the year’s end.

‘Strip-gate’ was not so much the kangaroo court invited by the summary revocation of citizenship at the Minister’s whim as much as Abbott’s attempt to bypass cabinet with this alarming assault on the rule of law.

‘Here we go again,’ Gatsby Turnbull complained, according to usually reliable leaks. Cabinet, angered at another dud captain’s call from Abbott the self-styled son of God, took issue with his megalomaniacal decision to revoke all semblance of democratic process from the cabinet’s decision-making.

‘The extraordinary privilege of Australian citizenship’ must not be taken lightly, gushed Dan Tehan, member for the blue-blood seat of Wannon where a sheep could get elected if it wore a Liberal ribbon. He was bleating anti-citizenship in an excruciating online interview with Fairfax.

Those suspected by the Minister to be in bed with terrorist agents would be stripped of Aussie citizenship, if they had a spare citizenship up their sleeves, or something like that.

‘Beam me up Scotty’ Morrison acted the big softie as ever and had his five bob’s worth by suggesting that suspension would be just as good. Or else it was what the government really had in mind or something like that. Why, he could do the same with rorting pensioners and other welfare fraudsters. No wonder Dan was not across the detail.

‘All hands to the pump’ commanded Captain Kangaroo. It thus fell to the hapless Andrew Laming to make a complete fool of himself by claiming that the leak from last week’s cabinet meeting was good. It had, in fact, he fancied, had the perverse effect of reinforcing the government’s resolve within the electorate’s mind. Laming’s own resolve is the stuff of Liberal legend.

Who could forget Dr Laming’s resolute embrace of tolerance and compassion; or his just, fair-minded perspective on civic unrest? In response to a skirmish between Pacific Islander and indigenous residents of Logan, he tweeted: ‘Mobs tearing up Logan tonight. Did any of them do a day’s work today, or was it business as usual and welfare on tap?’

Laming would do well to read Tehan’s website. Dan spells out clearly what we expect of all citizens clearly for the benefit of newer citizens.

‘For those who enjoy our citizenship there must be an acceptance of our core values; tolerance, pluralism and peace.’ Perhaps those who are already Australian citizens are exempt. Perhaps when he revokes his British citizenship, and applies to become an Australian, our PM will be able to practise some of these.

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Australia’s unsuspecting body politic was about to be plunged into the chill and murky depths of revoking citizenship last week as Captain Abbott beat out a mean anti-terror snare on the old tin drum he keeps by for when fortune flags, boredom yawns or he gets stuck in the muck of good government. Strip their citizenship. Make ’em stateless. Fetch the gang-plank!

It was all rousing, hairy-chested, tough-guy, stuff. Bugger the judiciary. Nobody separates our powers, Abbott winked as he instructed Credlin to tell the ‘Tele’ the result of the cabinet decision before they’d had the discussion. No agenda necessary, Peta, he winked again. Peter Dutton fetched a length of timber from somewhere, checking carefully beforehand to see it wasn’t a sleeping Warren Truss. Tar and feathers appeared in another wink..

Things were shaping well towards our declaring undesirables stateless; their fate resting entirely on a Minister’s suspicion; requiring no burden of proof. Being made stateless would show them we were tough on terror. Teach them to nick off to the Middle East when you can get good falafel in all major cities. But was it too tough?

Revocation would be used only sparingly, ‘Gung Ho’ Dutton rushed to explain, managing only to sound like a bent head-master justifying his use of the cane. Dan Tehan reported that the backbench loved it. But their finer-pointing was drowned out by an outbreak of ‘robust debate,’ all reported verbatim in the Fairfax press the next day.

Robust debate scuppered Abbott. Senior Ministers Bishop, Turnbull, Brandis, Pyne and Andrews all opposed summarily revoking citizenship. Brandis claimed, po-faced, that as AG, it was ‘his job to uphold the rule of law.’ Tell that, Mr Brandis to the Australia Council whose funds you have just raided to create a personal slush fund, to be known as the ‘National Programme for Excellence in the Arts,’ without the merest hint of irony.

Dutton then broke everyone up by explaining no evidence was necessary. ‘That’s the beauty of it’ he said before being howled down. It was left to Barnaby Joyce, perhaps seeking to make up for his disgraceful email to Gina, to stop the show with ‘ Isn’t that what the courts are for?’.

Forced to back off revocation the PM then had to suffer being outmanoeuvred by a nimble Bill Shorten who upstaged him by proposing his own marriage equality bill to be debated Monday. Rolled by his own cabinet, a subdued Abbott walked out only to suffer a painful political wedgie from Shorten. It was too late to cancel the Telegraph’s report of a unanimous Cabinet in favour of revocation of citizenship for those whom we suspect may be un-Australian or who grow their beards, cover their wives, watch the Friday movie on SBS or eat that Halal stuff or something.

What should have been a week of simple pleasure drumming out death cult drongos or kids who fly to Syria to join ISIS; and drumming out any other enemies and fifth columnists within our embryonic police state, thus suddenly morphed into a long drop on to the dung heap for the hapless PM. Thank God for the backbench and their red-necked supporters. Thank Rupert for the Tele which continues to portray a version of the government which bears no resemblance to the real chaos, entropy and reality denial which engulfs the incumbent ruling political party.

LNP denial extends to the facts of life, embarrassing even to a grown man like Joe Hockey who appeared ambushed on ABC’s Q&A by a young woman campaigning to have the GST removed from tampons and other sanitary products. Put on the spot, Joe appeared to concede she had a case, a stance which the PM, wearing a silly grin which betrayed his discomfort on the topic, appeared to oppose the following day. The split between treasurer and prime minister revealed a PM who cannot command consistency of policy nor as it turns out loyalty in cabinet, although it must be said he had betrayed democratic process by his leak to the Tele of the result before cabinet had even met. A good captain leads from the front.

Upstaged by Joe’s going soft on tampon tax on Q&A; betrayed by Bishop and rolled by his senior colleagues in the best-leaked cabinet room revolt in Australian conservative political history, Abbott is suddenly looking very vulnerable. Cabinet has lost confidence in his judgement. Now he was to suffer mutiny along with mutterings of unfairness in his second budget – especially over his pledge to ‘never ever’ change tax on Super, a promise ensuring the wealthy continue to be subsidised in their retirement to the tune of 18 billion.

To make matters worse, Barnaby’s email advising Gina Rinehart’s ungrateful brats to suck it up was all over the news, as if Abbott had set it up, an outrageous slur. It was the Peter Slipper witch hunt all over again. To say nothing of the witch hunt now underway to prove Bishop and Turnbull collaborated on leaking chapter and verse of cabinet to Fairfax reporters.

Better late than never, Cabin boy Hunt fetched good news from the crow’s nest he is forced to occupy now that cabinet has excluded him and his ministry because it can’t stand either of them. He spied fair landing on The Great Barrier Reef, he shouted.

‘At the end of the day, this is the strongest possible endorsement of what Australia and Queensland are doing,’ the Minister for breathless Hyperbole, puffed. In reality, someone had just emailed him a UNESCO draft decision which was highly qualified, cautious and untrusting.

The committee recorded its concerns about the poor outlook for the reef and recommended that the World Heritage Committee review any lack of progress in 2017.

UNESCO’s concerns would cause any self-respecting environment minister to reef in his sails but Hunt’s faux triumphalism capped another week of chaotic instability, duplicity and bad decision-making that our PM assures us is ‘good government ‘.

Not content with pretending that UNESCO had given us a big tick of approval for our reef management, Hunt huffed that our environmental policy now earns us unreserved applause from a grateful world, not to mention a few clapped out reef tourist operators who are keen to flog the half of Great Barrier that survives its wholesale abuse since the 1980s.

At least Hunt’s false joy makes a change from our PM’s tendency to sneer at the UN and to lecture it on daring to lecture us on what is fit and proper to do in our own sovereign dystopia. Don’t try to lecture us on human rights or anything now. We lead the world on the environment.

Granted there was our wee fracas with the US only a year ago when a senior Democrat accused Australia of “behind-the-scenes lagging” on global efforts to tackle the challenges of climate change. But ever since then, Hunt pretends, Australia has been so quick to clean up its act that the rest of the world must now sing our praises for, as Hunt puts it, ‘what we are doing.’

Doubtless Hunt’s ‘what we are doing’ includes the abortive Bjorn Lomborg Consensus Centre, a proposal which caused such dissension UWA had to abandon it. Fossil fuels continue to rule in Oz. We pander to the coal industry and we continue to subsidise big mining. Perhaps that is or rather was the plan. With Bjorn in a professorial chair we could have been world leaders in climate-sceptical self-interest and mutual self-destruction. Let false prophets bless our fat profits. To hell with reason, science, responsibility and all the rest of that leftist bullshit.

What are we doing? We are busily licensing the Adani mega-mine in the Galilee Basin while expanding coal ports up and down the Great Barrier Reef coast. Let Germany get into bed with renewable energy. We love it under the doona with dirty old coal.

If ‘coal is good for civilisation,’ as Abbott claims, it has failed to promote civilised or rational behaviour amongst its advocates and producers who would elbow each other under the next monster mining truck in their rush to exploit a fuel which has ravaged the planet and which threatens us all with extinction as coal fires boost global warming and pollution.

Selling more coal to other countries is like shouting a drink for an alcoholic on the grounds that someone else is only going to do it if we don’t. And it gets us off the hook. Greenhouse gas emitted by coal-fired plants in other countries doesn’t count. We only sold them the coal.

‘Direct Actor’ Hunt’s hollow assurance highlights, a remarkable week in the Coalition’s forlorn and at times sordid, quest for legitimacy as it continues its desperate search for credibility and respect by looking for love in all the wrong places. And in all the wrong ways as Barnaby Joyce’s email to Gina Rinehart’s children illustrates.

How and why Joyce would take it upon himself to persuade the children to drop their case against their mother’s control of their inheritance is just another extraordinary episode in the chapter of accidents that was the week that was.

The government has been strangely buoyed by a phantom ‘bounce’ in opinion polls, which all others see as showing a continuing preference for Labor. It is crowing with fiscal pride because no-one is throwing up over its second budget. Yet the budget continues unfairness, especially in pensions and superannuation which are set to preserve the perks of the wealthy while diminishing the returns of the deserving, the middle to lower income retiree who now have to make do with less, despite all of Morrison’s enjoyment of phrases such as taper rates and other attractive jargon used to cloak taking from the poor and elderly to subsidise the rich.

What is most evident, finally over much of the week’s politics is the tribalism of the Abbott government, a mentality which experts tell us is part of a widespread cultural trend toward fragmentation and a retreat from civil discourse. Stripping any citizen of his or her right to have rights, their citizenship, is part of a drift towards partisanship and cultural isolationism – as Abbott’s book title warns us battle-lines are being drawn. As the people we are not included in the process of government but increasingly marginalised, frightened we are expected to simply choose sides.

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Accountability is the cornerstone of good government. It ensures answerability, a readiness to explain itself; to provide sufficient information and justification to the people for its actions. We, the people, feel secure in being listened to, understood and provided for by our elected representatives who may be relied upon to provide wise leadership at home and to justly uphold our rights and discharge our responsibilities as members of an international community of nations abroad.

And so it was last week that Australians of all walks of life rejoiced in a wealth of edifying and illuminating explanations ranging from Australian dogs’ best friend, Barnaby Joyce, whose Yorkshire terrier turn-back was a triumph of diplomacy and statesmanship to our barking mad Prime Minister’s gnomic repudiation of all notion of social contract ‘Nope, nope, nope.’

Non-answerability came thick and fast after their leader’s lead, as coalition politicians ‘fanned out’ to ‘sell the budget,’ as the PM termed his team’s approach, a process avidly embraced by Bruce Billson in interview with ABC Insiders’ Barrie Cassidy.

So mad keen on fanning out was our Minister for Small Business on Sunday morning TV that he resembled nothing so much as a lap dog himself, whimpering and wetting himself with pleasure; beside himself with excitement on being given a bone, in the form of instant tax write-offs for some small businesses.  If he could, he would have licked his master’s salty face. News shots showed him in the corner of each frame adoring his leader with dog-like devotion.

Never to be outdone, Julie Bishop elbowed our recycled former health watchdog Peter Dutton out of the spotlight with her forensic rationalisation of our nation’s cruel indifference towards several hundred wretched men, women and children found starving, destitute and begging for help in a wooden fishing boat turned back by Malaysia to fend for itself in the Andaman sea. How do we know they are real refugees? Bishop asked.

Minister for Ineffectuality, Peter Dutton was left to wring his hands. ‘We do so much already, he despaired. We can’t help everyone. ‘There are about 20 million people who are displaced around the world. We can help some but we can’t help everybody,’ he told Channel Nine, as if, somehow, this explains why we must do nothing.

Yet Dutton manned up when it came to Pistol and Boo, Johnny Depp’s un-quarantined Yorkshire terriers. He blew the whistle long and loud, even, somehow teaming with Barnaby Joyce who issued an Aussie ultimatum ‘Bugger off home.’ The phrase resonated with the international crisis and encapsulated LNP refugee policy whilst guaranteeing the enmity of all fair-minded Australians, dog-lovers and Depp fans world-wide.

But it’s OK to chuck ’em out, added Labor, in reference to expelling ‘illegals’. In a disturbing display of race to the bottom bipartisanship, Labor immigration spokesman, former senior legal consultant, Matt Thistlethwaite, ditched empathy and ethical responsibility in favour of a narrow, legal view.

‘Countries have the right,’ he observed feebly, ‘to remove people who are not found to be refugees under UN convention,’ a perspective which would greatly comfort the countless dispossessed of the world who are forced to return to their country of origin and certain persecution and or a life of destitution.

Australia must throw its hands in the air. It is the only logical solution chimes in our de facto Federal Treasurer, Scott Morrison, our self-appointed Federal fixer before Christopher Pyne abrogated the title.

‘It’s dumb to even suggest that we might help, argued Rottweiler Morrison, a former border protector himself, whose practices have contributed to the current crisis, before proceeding to rebuke us and set things straight with one of his ‘people who’ explanations.

‘People who suggest countries in the region can resettle persecuted Rohingya misunderstand the scale of the problem.’ There are a million persecuted Rohingya in Myanmar.’ Clearly Morrison thinks that tolerance begins at home – and should stay there. Australia, perhaps, should just tell Myanmar to back off the Rohingya, just as we told Putin to back off in Ukraine. That seems to have worked a treat.

Too many to count, too insignificant to matter, too wretched to care, none of this wisdom reached the ears of the desperate people in a wooden fishing boat, condemned to a death at sea. Two hundred people died during their three month ordeal which culminated in their being abandoned to the elements by a crew made desperate at news of a crackdown on people smuggling. Their bodies were thrown overboard. Survivors were vainly trying to shelter from the fierce Andaman sun under flimsy plastic tarpaulins. No-one was game to take them in.

Cries of “Please help us! I have no water!” rose from the boat as a vessel carrying journalists approached. “Please give me water!”

Help? ‘Nope, nope, nope.’ Our nation’s leader, Good Samaritan Abbott made a captain’s call to negate our collective humanity. Sensing somehow that her leader was not even prepared to enter into discussion of the matter, his foreign minister leapt in with both feet, as she is wont to do, almost to his rescue, by explaining to a disgusted world that the Bangladeshi boat-people would not get any help from Australia because they were not genuine refugees.

In fact, Bishop hissed, during a break from her mobile emoji-sending, they were ‘illegal labourers’ according to her sources in Indonesia, fellow turn-backers and buck-passers whose self-interested perspective is doubtless utterly credible. Many aboard are reported be carrying readily available false National ID and counterfeit passports. ‘Illegal’ labourers are less than human it seems and forfeit all right to humane consideration.

The boat’s plight highlights the migration crisis confronting the region. 6,000 to 20,000 migrants are believed to be at sea, fleeing ethnic persecution in Myanmar and poverty in Bangladesh, while countries such as Australia pass the buck or point the finger.

It is also, tragically a litmus test of legitimacy for a coalition government which has abdicated all responsibility, accountability and answerability in favour of spin. If we cannot swallow our slogans and practise our humanity and common decency, there is nothing our government can do from now in to salvage any last vestige of credibility or moral integrity at home or abroad.

Joe Hockey’s second Budget set a new backflip benchmark even for the Abbott government which has elevated flip flops into a key political strategy. For stop-go Joe and for his do-whatever- might-work party, Budget number two was either a dramatic reinvention or a breathtaking political quick change from neo-constrictor to big stimulus spender.

Forget debt and deficit disaster. Expect nothing but blue skies from now on. We are on ‘a credible path to surplus’ sometime in the next decade or two provided the good times keep on rolling. Provided we keep the telescope up to the blind eye.

Iron ore , for example, can’t possibly drop below its current price  despite Citigroup predicting it will drop below $40 a tonne as miners boost supply and markets contract.

Whatever they thought of the  motive, the reversal was so remarkable as to leave most observers wondering who Joe Hockey is -and what his party stands for. Is he now just Scott Morrison’s sock puppet?

The wealthy, however, were not to be left in doubt. Superannuation tax breaks for those on high incomes would continue, Hockey reassured us, although he neglected to say our support of the privileged costs the nation the same as the entire Medicare scheme.

Just to keep faith with those who expect more mean and nasty, however, the Coalition was able to put the boot into breast-feeding mothers and any others who dared to double- dip, rort and defraud the virtuous tax-payer by claiming two periods of paid parental leave, albeit in total less than Abbott’s original unfunded proposal – and still inadequate.

Morrison was all moral outrage on radio:

Channeling a Catherine Tate character, Morrison was all moral outrage on radio: ‘how very dare they!’ Later, he offered another version of his comment in case we were confused as to what he really said which he said was not a criticism of women at all but a flaw in the scheme. Of course.

Strangely Hockey has also claimed that his comments were also mis-reported although his PM is still keen to voice his new-found opposition to women taking two periods of leave, despite this being intended in the legislation. It can only be assumed that Credlin has yet to catch up with him.  Expect to hear another version of what he really meant soon.

Similarly, the old Joe could be detected in funds to help women. Yet only after the budget did Michaelia Cash announced breathlessly that another 4 million would be spent on an 1800RESPECT help line to tackle the epidemic of domestic violence. She did not explain why the afterthought or why this was less than one percent of the ‘the spend’ on increased anti-terror measures also announced in the second budget.

So far, initiatives in the government’s response to the nation’s domestic violence crisis have been underwhelming. If two women each week were killed by terrorists, it would be a different story. So are it has funded an awareness programme and a helpline. Although it says 25 million is allocated for shelter for the homeless, this is a paltry investment when contrasted with the funds pouring into our war on terror.

…child dental care rise by $75…

Saving women’s lives is clearly far less of an Abbott government priority than say organising an armoured vehicle to patrol north Melbourne or pouring millions into welfare police. The budget will see child dental care rise by $75 as a result of its freeze on Medicare rebates. We already have the GP copayment by stealth.

The party’s small-business heartland will do OK out of this budget. Experts believe it will do no harm either in key tradie-infested Victorian marginals, as have-a-go-Joe happily forgoes revenue in tax breaks to small businesses in the hope of buying votes before they call a double dissolution.

No-one expected the Joe show to be so startling. ‘Dull’ was the PM”s  promise but he did not put it in writing. ‘Do or die’ was easily the most popular guess by those in the know and even those with no clue at all, mostly because it sounds dramatic. Double-dissolution got more than a whisper from some highly placed sources.

In the end, however, no-one tipped that the Treasurer would publicly turn himself inside out and his party back to front to unleash a big spending big taxing budget on an unsuspecting nation.

Joe came out as a wet.

‘Have-a go-Joe shocked even his closest followers. We expected dullness before he opened his cake-hole. And we were not disappointed. Only the random, ragged applause of clapped out party hacks served to remind us that this was not just another political soliloquy; another raving nutter talking to himself in public. But then, amidst the happy-clappers came the bombshell. Joe came out as a wet.

No-one warned us to expect Joe to go wet on us. His act upstaged his message. Upstaged his entire party’s platform. Was this the secret, inner Joe? Or was it some new Joe? Who could tell? Certainly not his leader.

Tony Abbott, no stranger to dullness himself, as G20 leaders know, had worded us up to expect his dull Treasurer to give a dull, ‘nothing to see here and move along please’ budget that his dull party could ‘tick off’ before it ‘moved on’ with its next round of public spending cuts or its brazen pandering to privilege and wealth and persecution of the poor that constitutes its idea of good government. Joe must have missed this hint. For Budget Night was all about his miraculous turnaround. Before our very eyes, the economic dry became a very wet one.

Hockey’s budget speech was as boring as bat-shit. Clichéd, commonplace and as corny as all get out, it was just the sort of twaddle the dutiful neo-con radical-conservative feels he ought to say on public occasions such as budgets.

…dreary, lazy, superficial generalities and unexamined assumptions:

As nimble as big men often are , Hockey adeptly sidestepped depth, originality or insight. Instead he ladled out the LNP stew of dreary, lazy, superficial generalities and unexamined assumptions: ‘every big business started small’ and ‘small business is the backbone of the nation.’

Were it not for the incredible spectacle he made of himself with his almost total capitulation to expediency, it would have been a dull night’s entertainment. Yet, here, before his peers, stood last year’s economic dry who could not do enough to cut spending and to preach economic doom and disaster. Now we were to accept his spectacular reincarnation as an economic wet who would spend us out of the impending recession even if it mean repudiating everything his first budget stood for.

Hockey’s own party clapped loud and over long for his support of the monied. They loved him for his public homage to those popular have-a-go myths with which they liked to console themselves and rationalise their naked self-interest. Genius, Joe. Buy ’em off! Joe the deliverer and redeemer might even get them re-elected if he kept this up.

Jobs would doubtless flow; wealth would trickle down as the burden of tax would be eased on the small business folk of Australia, the backbone of the nation. Amen. Not one of them would take the money and run. No-one seemed to bother to with the fact that even if you have an immediate tax write-off, you still have to have the capital in the first place. Nor was time wasted on the two-tier tax system created when experts already warn of unfairness in favour of small versus medium enterprises.

…Hockey’s last chance…

It was, let’s be frank, Hockey’s last chance to show us why Scott Morrison should not have his job. Why, Joe could rustle up a party narrative with the best of them. he would not let himself or the PM or the party down by letting truth get in the way of a good story.

Porky pies followed thick and fast.  The world economy, he lied is on the up and up. And as for Australia? Why, Australia is set to rocket off into prosperity along a ‘trajectory’ hitherto undreamt of because of all his party’s heavy lifting.- Look at our raft, he said, of Free Trade agreements with China India and other places where labour is cheap and life is even cheaper.

Best of all, he paused, as you do when you are free-wheeling, we have no carbon tax to ruin business or a mining tax to ruin Gina Rinehart and other such entrepreneurs whom he poppy-cocked repeatedly were once small businesspeople. Every business was once a small business.  Like Gina’s. Like IBM. Or when Mark Zuckerberg knocked back his parents’ financial support.

Huge savings from turning back boats, people-processing savings and not building new detention centres have left us with buckets of funds, he continued. In fact, he crowed, ‘our party doesn’t do tax. That’s the other mob.’

Hockey then plunged into a froth and lather detailing his party’s highest taxing, biggest spending budget of all time. This included billions in foregone tax revenue so that saintly small business folk such as tradies, the backbone of the nation, can get new utes to hoon around Noosa and doubtless down to Centrelink the following day to hire a swag of long-term unemployed.

…Newscorp’s divine right to a monopoly…

Hockey just the previous day was forced to hold a press conference to show Rupert that despite being upstaged mercilessly by Scott Morrison, he could still make himself useful in putting GST weights up on Netflix and any other rival to Newscorp’s divine right to a monopoly in Australia, while continuing to lead the pack in paying tax elsewhere.

Resourcefully the ABC pants on fire brigade, dropped their yoga mats and braved the chill Canberra evening outside while they dissected the corpse of the DOA budget and its fire-breathing Minister.  Perhaps they were making a symbolic statement of independence. Or were they just dramatising their exclusion by a government which favours fawning sycophants over reporters.  At least we got to see the trendy coats ABC reporters can still afford.

The untold story is that the bad old cuts will continue to bite deep – Sussan Ley, the bunny in the headlights of the Health ministry still has to cut 1.6 billion out of the health budget – ‘savings’ as they are cynically re-branded. They are not savings they are cuts which will have a negative effect on both health – not to mention the flow-on effect to other sectors of the economy. Perhaps we are going to all buck up after hearing the good news of the budget and have no further need of doctors and hospitals.

Hockey’s second budget may have come as a surprise but don’t be surprised when after failing to deal with the  senate  and while small business folk everywhere are maxing out credit cards in the rush to cash in on their tax breaks, the government calls a double dissolution in the more than faint hope of re-election through its cynical courting of self-interest and the pursuit of power for its own sake.

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Tension is high across Australia in anticipation of the Abbott government’s budget extravaganza, B2, a vaudeville-cum-variety show which opens in Canberra next Tuesday as the existential angst of aid workers attests:

“The whole of the aid sector is hanging on the edge, waiting nervously for the May budget when it will be revealed exactly which parts of the aid budget will be cut – a bit like a doomsday clock,” ActionAid Australia’s Holly Miller says.

Tellingly, the ABC’s attempts to seek details were evaded. “The Treasurer isn’t engaging in budget speculation.” So much for ‘consultative government.’

Time is not only ticking down for aid workers, however, the clock is also running for our PM and his mate. Hockey is on notice that he will be replaced, if he fluffs this budget, Niki Savva says sagely, whilst others believe a dud budget will also terminate Abbott’s flagging career.

Will B2 be a hit?  Even if he has to fudge it, Abbott will do anything to save his neck; even contriving to appear fair.  He’s dropped his ‘debt and deficit disaster’ scare-mongering. He’s flip-flopped on debt from Labor’s “disaster” of 13 per cent of GDP to now call projected debt of 50 to 60 per cent of GDP as “a pretty good result.”

Abbott, the eternal pragmatist, now favours restraint, while Hockey wants to cut further. Little wonder relations appear strained in recent images taken to show a matey, blokey collaboration; a budget chumming up. Or do they reveal a duo who will go down together?

Bringing down a budget is a sideshow compared with the ‘running the economy’ yet, unless our leaders can step up, Australia will continue its economic slide. Abbott’s evasion will only further damage his credibility and weaken his capacity for reform.

Leadership is what we expect from government, leadership which has a real plan as distinct from rhetoric; a slogan about a plan. 94 per cent of Textor’s recent research sample, for example, agreed the nation “needs a better plan for its long-term future”.

But what to do? Property is booming while our terms of trade unravel, as commodity prices drop back to normality after a boom which governments chose to see as endless. Now the Coalition can choose between allowing deficits to balloon and a credit rating downgrade in return. Or it can rein in spending and slow the economy even further.

Satyajit Das, financial market veteran, argues federal budgets matter little in an increasingly globalised financial system; a global economy. Yet others contend that our economic structure has been crippled by years of policy failure. Leaders lack political will to reform. Governments do nothing beyond simply looking to the RBA to lower interest rates in the hope that this will boost economic activity.

The truth lies somewhere between these two extremes, our government’s power is proscribed but within its limitations, there is a power of good it can do. Or as in the current case, a power of damage to be done by choosing do nothing.

Lowering interest rates doesn’t always work magic as Glenn Stevens pointedly observed recently, cueing a reluctant Abbott government to take monetary action. There are limits to what can be achieved by fiscal policy alone. If anything. The most recent interest rate cut led to a rise in the Aussie dollar as speculators punted on it being the final cut.

Our prosperity is ultimately shaped by forces beyond control of governments, or nations. B2 will be a strategic diversion whilst real power over the nation’s fortunes lies in the hands of international capitalists in a global financial system. And our current local neo-con politicians are happy to surrender even their limited authority to the TPP, for example, such is their deference to international capital, free trade and ‘market forces.’

Yet, Bringing down the Budget will be a fantastic show. It’s traditional, for starters, for the country’s federal treasurer and his government to pretend to be in charge of the nation’s finances, to have plans and the means to carry them out. Fantastic. And it’s revealing. Hockey will, yet again, claim he knows what is best for us without ever having to ask.

Strong performances are expected from Tony the ten pound Pom, as the widow Twankey and Joe Hockey as a bungling but loveable, comic Ali Baba who runs around swearing revenge on a mob of merchant bankers, tax- evading multinational thieves, only to disclose in the final moments of the show, that he is married to one of them.

Highlights include ‘It’s everybody else’s fault but mine…’ in which a hapless Joe Hockey must convince a sceptical audience that that he has learned anything from Budget Mark 1 despite his continued need to blame others and his deluded claim that he ‘tried to do too much in the way of reform.’ If only we had all set out to do so much less and had no-one to contend with. The world would be close to perfect.

‘It is the senate. It was the Greens. It is Labor,’ Hockey explains to the AFR. Au contraire Joe, let’s not forget the matter of your poor communication and consultation. Your budgets won’t work because they are not built on consensus. For consensus you have to talk to people; share with them. You have to heed and respect what people say.

The essence of theatre is illusion. The Federal Budget perpetuates the illusion that our leaders have the power to shape our future when they clearly struggle to cope with the present. Expect more rhetoric about ‘heavy lifting;’ the ‘bulk of the hard work’ being done. Expect blather from Scott Morrison about pension ‘taper points’ as he wilfully confuses the technical element of budgeting with its real locus in political priorities.

The hard work of raising revenue has not even begun, whether it be via chasing tax evaders, reforming superannuation tax, a scheme which is obscenely skewed in favour of the rich and costs us as much as Medicare. Investing in renewable energy industries would make more sense than continuing to pour money into a hole in the ground to benefit multinational mining companies. Or into the pockets of the coal barons.

B2, is a cleverly marketed surrealist life-size puppet theatre show sequel to B1, Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey’s debut. The show was widely panned as unfair. B2 is billed to be a ‘bring home the bacon budget’ although some observers add: ‘only for those already riding high on the hog’ or a ‘pigs might fly’ rider.

The (Second) Greatest Show on Earth gets its nation-wide release on May 7. A small fortune has been spent in its promotion. Punters await in frenzied expectation. Will Hockey get it right this time? What has he learned from his earlier flop? Will this be curtains for the dynamic neo-con duo?

Given our Treasurer’s abysmal first budget show, what hope is there for his second? All that is certain is that there is a lot riding on this production. No wonder he and Abbott look nervous, especially in each other’s company. No wonder Abbott is so toey.

Unwittingly using negative psychology, Abbott is promising a budget that will be ‘very dull, very routine.’  Or perhaps he’s slipped into his promised ‘under-promise, over-deliver’ mode.

Meanwhile Laurie Oakes is leaking. We are in for a double dissolution, he puffs, doubtless while we are still distracted by Charlotte Elizabeth Diana’s blessed arrival, the sensational success of direct action and the funds given over to WA to reward Premier Colin Barnett for being unable to see past his own greed far enough to forecast a return to normality in iron ore prices; banking on boom times lasting forever.

And a ‘fair budget.’ The fairness tick of approval will earned by a fudged budget that does nothing to address the nation’s declining fortunes or any other type of leadership but which will do everything possible to shore up Abbott and Hockey’s survival with perhaps even hope fantastical of boosting chances of an Abbott government return.

 

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Say what you like about Tony Abbott but he’s a bugger to follow. Harder than eating red beans with a pitchfork. He’s always been a lair but now he hoons, fishtails and careers all over the tarmac in his own death-wish demolition derby. Has he finally crashed and burnt on his mission to save ‘The Bali Nine Pair’ Chan and Sukumaran from Indonesian justice?

Shopped by Federal Police who have yet to explain why, the youngsters fell victim to operational ‘information sharing.’ Conflicted from the outset, clumsy, confused, the Abbott government had little chance of intercession later, despite our hope and media hype.

Abbott’s threat to cancel aid, however, served only to harden Indonesia’s intransigence. Now the PM could help himself by answering a few basic questions. Why did we set up a drug bust with a nation with a death penalty? Did we need a favour in return? Is he happy with his negotiation style?

The PM can be abrasive. European leaders should turn back refugee boats; follow his lead, he lectures, leaving Julie Bishop to suggest lamely that her boss was merely offering his experiences for others to consider, adding injury to insult. She went on to contradict him, further shredding his credibility as a strong leader.

Sent in to the rescue no doubt, Katie Hopkins of Murdoch’s Sun, who has called refugees ‘cockroaches’ rose to the occasion if somewhat lowering the Tone.

“Australians are like British people but with balls of steel, can-do brains, tiny hearts and whacking great gunships.”

European leaders are bemused. Yet they can’t help but laugh at the presumption and self-delusion of our Walter Mitty would-be strong man. They see him flip-flop. One minute, we are all washed up; down the debt and deficit gurgler, he wags his finger. Next he’s spending up big like a drunken sailor out on the town but with someone else’s money. Ours.

Funds are so low we must scrap Federal literacy support for school kids; but suddenly Abbott stumps up $100 million we don’t have, to build a memorial to John Monash, which, frankly, neither of us needs – in France. Gallic gratitude to ‘our boys’ aside, the French hardly need another war museum, even, as promised, one just pulsing with interactive, hands-on stuff to help the mindless to reflect.

Let homeless war veterans sleep on the streets. Let battered wives be forced to stay at home with their tormentors. We can’t spare funds for more refuges. Forget John Monash, the Villers-Bretonneux museum is effectively a monument to an inept Australian PM, desperate to boost his image; hitch his wagon to a star. If his wagon were not a sky rocket without a stick.

One moment Abbott’s toe to toe with Widodo next he’s wimped out, settling for a lame, ambassadorial recall for two weeks – a ‘go stand in the naughty corner’ which Indonesia is already laughing off. Being a hypocrite doesn’t help. The PM can go off like a frog in a sock about Indonesian injustice all he likes but he’s connived with Dutton to achieve a Vietnamese refugee turn-back behind our backs.

The Abbott government has allowed asylum seekers of all ages to be raped and one even to be murdered. He’s also earned the censure of both the UN for indefinite detention and children in detention. Censure, too from the rest of the world for announcing we are not to be lectured on human rights. Small wonder Widodo thinks he’s a joke-O. With thousands of Australian-bound UNHCR registered asylum seekers marooned in Indonesia at a stroke of the pen by Australia’s 2014 Sovereign Borders law, moreover, Joko Widodo may well have the last laugh.

No wonder Credlin went missing in action. Or was just run off the road. His formerly inseparable Amazonian chief of staff just vanished after Rupert Murdoch told Abbott to drop her. Silence prevails. Secrecy is in this government’s DNA, intertwined with dirty tricks, slipperiness and its fondness for lies.

Pity. Peta Credlin is a lot easier to look at than her boss. Smarter, too. You can tell she’s been sidelined, sadly, by the PM’s increasingly ill-advised stunts since Rupert’s call; the erratic trajectory of Captain Chaos’ ship snaking this way and that before burning out on re-entry and falling back to earth with a thud. Come back, Peta, your boss is the loaded dog without your leash; your house-training.

Stop squandering money on such luxuries as running the country, employing people, and looking after us, advise the Abbott government’s tanks of neo-con artists. Let them buy their own bloody aspirin and paracetamol! Labor will take the blame for all of this for at least the next millennium while professional shakedown merchants scab the rest from the poor and needy.

Well, not quite all. The elderly need to be helped to empty their pockets; fork over their savings and anything else of value. Otherwise it’s intergenerational theft. Time for another tank of thinkers to rattle the can it carries for our Neo-con LNP.

Pensioners who can’t be put to work at Mitre 10 are to be hit up for their spare change and any coin that may have fallen down the back of the sofa before being forced to give their homes to finance companies. The ‘Australia Institute,’ an oxymoron which bills itself as ‘a progressive think tank,’ will then talk up reverse mortgages, (perverse?) until the elderly cave in completely and hock the family home in terror because they have been conned into thinking they must fund their own meagre pensions.

Yet now, suddenly, miraculously, Abbott can afford more troops for his war-gasm in Iraq; funds to give to arborists and others quick enough to stick their hands out for Greg Hunt’s phony ‘carbon abatement’ scheme handout; a quarter of a billion on nannies; a special fence to keep himself safe in Canberra. The list goes on. The man’s a virtual magic pudding mix-master; a genius when it comes to putting the con in Neo-con or looking after his own ends.

Yet tragically, there seems to have been little cash splashed where it mattered in his latest, dreadful debacle with the Indonesians where events prove the Abbott government has truly run up its own moral debt and deficit disaster, having burned all diplomatic and political capital pursuing moronic three word slogans, enacting laws repudiating all international obligations.

No. Having inflicted calculated cruelty on those to whom we should extend compassion, there has quickly come the point, when the rest of the world will cheerfully tell us to go to hell – however much, we beg their mercy.