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Fancy a ‘double Irish sandwich with Dutch associations?’ Or is it all double-Dutch to you? You’d be in good company if it is. Apparently some of the biggest corporate heads in Australia are mystified too. Or so they claim. Yet on the menu in Canberra on Wednesday are combinations straight off the menu of a New York deli. Chaired by the dashing Sam Dastyari, our plucky little senate committee is attempting an impossible and dangerous, if not death-dying manoevre as it sets about tackling the top end of town over corporate tax avoidance. That’s where the double Irish scheme gets airplay.

The corporations send their big boys and girls. Sam’s eight member team sensibly brings some back up. Morrison is nowhere to be seen despite his offshoring credentials. Fifty-seven senators are participating, even if we are yet to hear from more than one or two. Yet the senators who do have speaking roles are good value. Christine Milne, for example, picks up a corporate suit and tie on Freudian slip on Thursday. The CEO waffles about making the law.

‘That’s what you meant to say,’ ‘make the law,’ she crows. It is a rare epiphany. Any moment now, the tax caper will spring open under pressure like a jemmied safe or as Milne guesses the correct combination. She throws Bermuda black hole in after the Double Irish with Dutch associations for good measure. Sam jokes about her use of language and talks it up but in reality Milne’s spray is a pea-shooter against a charging elephant.

Sam is a flash dresser. With his blue ties and his suits and hair-cut like a hairdresser’s model, you could easily pick him for a Liberal. It won’t stop him being on the predators’ dinner menu himself, however, if he doesn’t watch himself. The senate team begins by flicking their towels at the IBM, News Corp, Google and other corporate bullies as they climb out of the fast lane at the reserved part of the public pool.

This is just for openers. Sam and his team have crafted a fiendishly cunning plan to get the suits sitting opposite to ‘fess up to how they avoid so much tax and other loaded questions. The tension is electric.  Spectators crane their necks but they may just be getting in touch with their stockbrokers.

Is this a stunt?  The quixotic Dasher and his crack team now dive headlong into the murky waters of off shore havens.  They swim willy-nilly like minnows amongst sharks. Their fate is frightening to contemplate. In the process, however, Sam utterly shows up Joe Hockey who often says things about chasing big tax avoiders, his party’s mates, but is yet to do anything except to protect them from being named.

Joe is such a blowhard the wind he creates would fair blow the milk out of your cup of tea but nobody’s bluffed. Anyone can see which side his bagel is buttered on.  Now he’s wedged. The public expect him to go after multinational tax avoiders despite all his waffle about disintermediation and how the modern world of finance has all gone global.  The committee’s crafty subtext is to do him down, shut Hockey up forever but you won’t find that in the official title.

Dasher’s committee is refreshingly entitled, ‘An inquiry into tax avoidance and aggressive minimisation by corporations registered in Australia and multinational corporations operating in Australia.’ Milne reckons the Double Irish sandwich is the key to it all.

Essentially, the sandwich reduces corporations’ tax bills by channelling profits to Ireland, then on to the Netherlands and thence back to Ireland. The scheme is allegedly used by Apple, Google and other multinationals operating in Australia to reduce tax. It saves them a fortune. Off-shore tax havens include Singapore with its tax rate for big corporations of 5 – 10%.

Google’s local tax bill, for example, amounted to a mere 15 percent of its $46 million Australian profit in 2013, half the Australian going rate of 30 per cent.  Factor in $2 billion in local advertising generated online which is ‘booked’ in other countries. Bear in mind that local earnings are likely to be talked up by corporates to advantage as tax deductions in the haven. Top this up with the  $4.5 million Google happily pockets in R&D tax breaks and it is fair to say that the corporation does very well out of Australia. As do so many multinationals.

If it sounds unfair, that’s because it is, but the gutsy senators can bang on all they like about corporations avoiding their fair share of tax. Their opponents’ refrain is that everything multinationals do with tax is legal, ‘hey, no-one is breaking any law.’ Yet they have tax lawyers so sharp they can calculate how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. Legal? Everyone including the ATO knows that what is legal is a matter of fine interpretation.

No-one raises the bigger issue of the alarming percentage of our income we happily put into the multinationals’ pockets. Money spent on tech is money taken out of other sectors of the economy. Our fetishising of communications technology also has huge social and emotional costs and consequences. One of these is the off-shoring of our consciousness and our identity. They suck our brains out. Policy-makers would do well to heed all dimensions of the beast, but for now the senate confines itself to a rather naïve and simple question about the use of tax minimisation schemes.

Sam’s team hits a rough patch when it has to furiously tread water, clearly struggling to stay afloat in the deep end with so much testimony from corporate suits that is meaningless. Unsurprisingly, not one corporate boss runs to help the senators or throws in a life preserver. The multinationals’ explanations are way too hard for anyone except a tax lawyer to follow. The News Corp. executive sneers, saying their tax is legal and far too complex for you to understand. You begin to worry about Sam’s strategy. Nuanced it ain’t.

Loaded questions merely invite denial and worse. Imagine you are a CEO of a company like Apple, known for using the scheme, you will profess complete ignorance of the term. You will also throw in some bullying for good measure because you don’t get to be a narcissistic corporate psychopath without throwing your weight around and making others feel stupid, insignificant and at fault.

The big knobs hate pollies. Politicians are contemptible because the bloodsuckers and leeches are not out in the real world, the sacred workplace, nobly and virtuously growing businesses and creating opportunities for wealth to trickle down. They are on the tit of the government payroll. Just ask Sarah Palin. What would they know?

The Double Irish proves a high point of the senate inquiry as Sam gives his first day’s summing up. It’s not exactly a David and Goliath contest, but the corporate advantage is staggering. The big fish give fishy answers to some fairly dud questioning. Straight man, Tony King, head of Apple Australia, responds to Christine Milne’s half-cocked loaded question by claiming not to know what a Double Irish is despite it being recognised world-wide as Apple’s main tax structure. What a crack-up. Yet the local representatives are not what they once were. They are now more like agencies of the main firm, protecting intellectual property, and other dodges than the snarling man-eaters of Packer’s era

King does let on that his company buys iPads and iPhones from overseas operations, and resells them locally to be, then taxed on its local profit. Why he thinks this worth mentioning is anyone’s guess but it does contribute to the corporate team’s signature ploy of showing the senate team up as a bunch of ignorant, impertinent, time-wasting dimwits.

God alone knows what game Dastyari’s is playing is but already his team is outclassed; outmanoeuvred, out of its depth. Our Senate Economics References Committee minnows are after some very big sharks. Represented Wednesday were Microsoft, Google and Apple, the holy trinity of the modern technological age. Bringing the big boys in for questioning, however, seems to be the extent of the team strategy. Yet he’s exploiting LNP vulnerability – wedging Hockey neatly.

The plucky senators’ game plan seems on the face of it to depend on lobbing a few random cunning questions such as how much it costs to make an iPhone. You probably need a bit more than this, Sam, before you cause executives to break down and beg us to allow them to pay more taxes as in the current feel-good story about Starbucks being held to account in Britain.

None of the assembled executives seemed to know what it cost to make an iPad. This disappointingly predictable response could have easily been surmounted by a better question about profits. Senators could have used Google to google IHS research that 38 percent is Apple’s total gross reported profit over all its iPads.

On the surface the inquiry seems an elaborate hoax, a futile exercise in mutual duplicity. Our senate wants us to believe that it is going to get big corporations in to fess up to making obscene profits just because they can pocket the money off shore via a thicket of company and corporate structures. Yet no-one on the senate team appears to have done any homework. No-one representing any of the multinationals is going to do them any favours and it is a sheer waste of time asking for information which is already in the public domain. It is like some bizarre new reality TV show, Big boys don’t pay tax. Or Technology just rules, OK? Yet futile show trial or not the political gains will be all to Dastyari for attempting what Hockey is not. In the meantime it is a great show.

Smug omnipotence is pitted against plausible humbug as corporate psychopaths on one side snarl and smirk their contempt for the fumbling, woefully under-prepared, outsmarted senators on the other. It’s a bit like asking the school bully for your marbles back. It is of course a type of public theatre, in which those with an interest in being seen to do so go through the motions of bringing tax evading corporations to account. As if you ever could.

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‘In his capacity as Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Morrison was at best complicit, and at worst the chief protagonist, in advocating offshore immigration detention policies that violate the United Nations Convention against Torture,” … “further, the Australian Human Rights Commission found that policy championed by Morrison and other Ministers of Immigration have caused asylum seeker children significant mental and physical illness and developmental delays.” Statement from Sydney Boys’ High School old boys objecting to Scott Morrison’s proposed visit.’

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Shortly after dancing with children like a Wombat for TV, in a bid to promote ScoMo Ver. 2 as a cuddly bundle of fun, Wombat Morrison calls for a coalition of ideas on pension savings. It is a double back-flip; his own and his government’s. It is a big flip flop even for a government of flips and flops, as if Morrison has just flipped out; gone completely barking mad.

It looks bad. Wombat Morrison suddenly shows interest in what someone else thinks. Call an ambulance! Alert the triage unit. Mood swings we can handle but this is total personality meltdown. Obergruppenführer Morrison, as he is to those who serve him, ran Immigration and Border and Protection as if a military coup was his next goosestep.  ‘Protection’ in his Ministry meant the reckless endangerment of almost everything, including asylum seekers’ lives, Australia’s international reputation, the rule of law and the Westminster system.

Abbott buoyed Morrison, even telling the UN to stop lecturing us when it ruled against Australia’s ‘cruel and degrading’ practice of locking up refugees indefinitely. His government had already rejected the more substantive ruling of the 18-member UN Human Rights Committee on indefinite detention. We showed the world what it could do with its superior moral tone.

Time to get real. Neither Morrison nor Abbott ever gave any signal they were willing or able to heed anyone or anything in their political lives, despite their subsequent cynical calls for ‘a national conversation’ about everything the electorate has rejected, doesn’t want or which can’t be managed quietly by statute like the Medicare rebate.

Never been interested in what others have to say before, Wombat, have you? Not remotely. Or since. Your old school chums want to ban you, from speaking at SBHS’ 15 April Fund-raiser.  You just brush them aside. Your response is to tell them that they can stay away. Just send a cheque, you laugh.  You claim your right to freedom of speech but you miss the point. Their protest is about you and your contempt for human rights.

‘This is not a question of restricting freedom of speech, but instead reflects the desire not to tacitly endorse the actions of a man who has demonstrated callous disregard for human rights. It is cruel and insensitive for the Union to laud this man’s connection to the school, its graduates, and their families,’ said an SBHS spokesperson for ex-students opposed to Morrison’s visit.

You did not buy your eleven bright orange fibreglass boats, ‘survival capsules’ from Singapore at half a million dollars each to carry out fifteen ‘turn-backs’ because somebody else told you to or made you do it. Nor did you tell us what you were up to. You simply intercepted refugees, asked them a few questions and then forced them to sail back to their persecutors. ‘Enhanced processing’ you called it. Your ears were deaf to all but redneck urgers and shock jocks who exist to fawn all over you. No calls were made by you for any coalition of ideas on this project. Yet the culture of secrecy has been hugely costly even in economic terms. Operation sovereign borders will cost 2.1 billion at least over four years, 2 billion more than treating refugees decently, fairly in Australia. The damage to our international reputation is incalculable. So too is the human cost of brutal incarceration.

You would not have a bar of anyone’s opinion, moreover, when you let Reza Berati get battered to death and then tried to cover it up. You said we were all wrong despite evidence that it happened inside the camp and at the hands of guards.

Reza Berati was 23 when he was murdered on February 18 2014 on Manus Island. 77 other asylum seekers were also attacked and wounded in front of many witnesses. Yet no one has been charged with his murder. Another man died of infection and medical neglect. Others go mad in captivity. Perhaps this coalition of ideas was too much for you.

Did you call for suggestions before you chose to bully the Human Rights Commissioner, Gillian Triggs, for daring to seek your evidence about children in custody, children in your care? Certainly it was not what we saw when you falsely claimed that Save the Children put up refugees to self-harm, sew their lips together; falsely claim torture and abuse.

Professor Triggs was full of ideas worth heeding. But your government went on the attack to remove her in favour of LNP lapdog, Tim Wilson, formerly of the IPA, when her Commission echoed the UN in finding that as Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Morrison you were at best complicit, and at worst the chief protagonist, in advocating offshore immigration detention policies that violate the United Nations Convention against Torture.

Morrison’s call for ideas is risky. His Coalition risks further signalling it has no clue; no ideas of its own.  Floating the idea that what the people think matters or will be heeded is also a dangerous step. Then there’s the hazard of transparency: conning the electorate into asking for ideas to help achieve its own agenda by calling it consultation or conversation will convince no-one.

Morrison’s pension ‘reform’ means finding ways to cut back on funding those with a right to retire; cutting the pittance it currently ear-marks for elders who may be no longer able or prepared to work yet who deserve respect. Let’s scale back the assets test and the taper rate. Anything to dodge our responsibility to support our seniors or acknowledge how they have supported us.

Perhaps, after all, Morrison’s call is not a massive back flip after all but just another sales job: a cynical attempt to market consultation itself. Talk up consultation and people may be hoodwinked into thinking it is on offer. Morrison talks up his own intransigence and commitment to cut costs.

‘My commitment is the same that I have given since coming into the portfolio, something only comes off if something goes on.’ In other words only give me an idea if it saves money.

OK, we see what you are up to, Wombat. Just you go right ahead. Pick our brains and send us the bill for doing your government’s job for it. Add insult to injury by pretending it is consultation – or a coalition of ideas.

Coalition of ideas. Far canal! Which turd-polisher or spin doctor came up with such nonsense? Coalition of ideas? Sounds like the campaign slogan unit has been on the Red Bull again. Still, it beats coalition of the willing; but then again, didn’t that coalition just beat themselves? Aren’t we back in Iraq?

OK, it beats coalition of imbeciles, lunatics and the newly besotted Ruby Wax’s other-worldly toy boy on Q&A Christopher Pyne whom she instantly had down for an alien on a mission from another planet. It’s geronticide in all but name.  And, of course, Abbott will love it. We rest our case.

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As soon as NSW’s election result is clear, TV is invaded by Libs who crow; get their heads on to talk down to us; explain to us, we, the poor, mentally defective, dumbclucks, the public, with our gnat-like attention spans and goldfish-like memories, what it all means. Things are dumbed down for us slowcoaches. God forbid we should make up our own minds or prove able to deal with complexity.

This is the ‘news’ cycle of modern politics, a ‘news’ which assumes that the past is a total mystery to all of us and that none of us can make sense of the present, on our own. Experts jostle each other aside in their rush to rescue us; bring us back on track; back into the fold; now they are back on top. They rope us in like novice climbers or kindergarten kids on a walk lest we stray away from the one true path of understanding and into danger. They know the way. Know the ropes.

Bishop is first, narrowly beating professional commentator Kate Carnell who makes so many TV appearances each week that she deserves her own channel. Scott Morrison Mark II is not far behind her, his reformed nature oozing from his every pore. A few days ago he was filmed hopping alarmingly around the room, imitating a kangaroo at a kindergarten photo opp. Big Scott was doubtless getting in touch with his wholesome, loveable and daffy inner cuteness whilst terrifying the children and disturbing adult onlookers. The teacher is now on stress leave.

Morrison seizes the chance to show off a clever word play. Baird is “popular but he’s not a populist”. But then, like a rat up a drainpipe he’s hopped aboard the success-through-explaining wagon, if only briefly before invoking the charmless, dour insouciance that is the average pollie’s handicap.

“What Mike Baird did, he didn’t just sell a change; he sold the benefits of change. Mike Baird has that winning smile and that incredible natural charm, which only a few people are blessed with.” Morrison drops out. It is really Bishop’s go and he’s run out of clever stuff.

‘Mike Baird’s re-election …,’ Bishop wags her finger, back stiff, head and hair up, her nose this way and that like a meerkat sniffing for danger, ‘Mike Baird’s election shows that people are ready for reform if it’s explained to them.’

Bishop’s pitch is nonsense. Baird’s party is flogging an asset in a thinly disguised cash grab. He is set to repeat Victoria’s mistakes where consumers pay vastly more today after Kennett’s privatisation than when the state was the sole power supplier. Baird’s move is a not ‘reform’ but a regression, a mistake, ill-advised act of desperation by a mob who mistake a budget surplus, the cash float in the till, for evidence of sound economic management. Bugger the people. We must balance our books.

It is an act of wilful blindness. Selling state-owned utilities services the big end of town and ministers to its need, its greed for profit at the expense of everyone else’s well-being. The people know this but in NSW they are between a crock and a hard place. A poll of swinging voters records their view that privatisation is short-term thinking, because government assets return money to pay for government services.

One respondent fears: ‘It will come a day when Australia is owned by Asia Pacific – China.’

Voters suffer Baird’s poles and wires sell-out not because they want privatisation but because somehow Baird fills their hope for a squeaky-clean telegenic celebrity-leader who is not Labor. Polls indicate half of NSW voters have doubts about his push to privatise. They show voters confused about whether the privatisation is a sale or lease, and little awareness that the Baird Government had proposed a 49 per cent lease. Baird the explainer is a mythic invention of the desperate Feds.

Power privatisation has not been well explained, moreover, because it is a rip-off. The deal will realise about one sixth of the long-term real value to the people of its poles and wires. Putting the paltry 20 billion into roads is an Abbott-level blunder. Public transport is a sound investment. More roads only induce commuters off public transport and into their cars. More congestion results.

This is what intergenerational theft truly amounts to. Forget the Liberals’ nonsense about cost blow-outs and their scapegoating of the old and the vulnerable, forget their resentment of our needs for pensions, education and welfare. When you privatise power you make life harder for future generations. Just like when you privatise tertiary education.

Bishop leads a small posse of LNP sock-puppets including Morrison and Joyce on her win spin patrol mission. She is out to kill rumours of any Abbott factor in NSW voting apart from her ceaseless self-promotion. The aspiring PM times her appearance for that TV sweet spot between knowing the result and when people stop watching and allows herself time to gate-crash Baird’s after-party to a rock star welcome.

Her victory script does not include mention of Sky’s exit poll of voters where 44 per cent of voters agreed that Abbott’s performance had hurt the Baird campaign. Whatever else she may be, Bishop is no party-pooper. But later we see she’s processed the information alright.

First on her agenda is praise for Mike the explainer of reform: the Foreign Minister thus revealing she can preach consultation even if no-one in her party can ever practise it. While she’s got our attention, however, a pointed bit of political point-scoring is a powerful second.

While setting us all straight about the reform story, Bishop, sinks her slipper into Abbott. She admires Baird’s ‘very strong narrative about what he wants to achieve,’ adding, ‘he’s authentic, he’s real, people trust him, they like him, people feel they know him.’ Baird, now boosted almost into orbit, a virtual Nelson Mandela of political leadership overnight, succeeds, in other words, by being everything Abbott is not.

Bishop’s pseudo-analysis cum megaphone diplomacy to Tone about his leadership deficit disaster, ought not to be taken too literally whilst Bishop is auditioning for his job. She is, after all, putting herself in his place, rather than doing any real explaining. Facts don’t matter much on such occasions. What matters is Baird won because he is not Tony. The rest of what she offers, especially on consensus, amounts to fibs, fairy-floss and fantasy, yet it is toxic nonetheless.

Consensus does not come merely by explaining or ‘getting the message out’ despite our leaders’ fixation with this lie. People have to understand and like your ideas and accept your policy proposals. They are not stupid and they don’t like duds.  Unable to deal with the electorate’s rejection of their bad policies, the LNP can only fall back on the explaining thing, the narrative thing rather than face than its own failure to create workable plans.

Federal Liberal failure to get real is cemented by its neocon market fetish, its attraction for ‘small government’ slogans; its poor planning and its indulgence of the big end of town. From its first budget, it would seem, it had no place in its thinking for a government’s duty to support and protect the vulnerable; to put ordinary people first. It got that message out so well any other is superfluous.

What Liberal victory in NSW means is that the other candidate with his party legacy of ne’er do wells and Eddie Obeids, held less appeal than Mike, Prince Charming Baird. It is not a mandate for reform. It is not the victory of an explainer. Electors are still confused by the whole poles and wires deal. They do not want privatisation as such but they see it as a fair price to pay not to have the other guy and to feel they are free of graft at last and can hope for the fresh start he represents to continue.

The message for Abbott couldn’t be clearer despite all the hard work of the damage control troops on Saturday night. Not everyone has forgotten the time when Abbott claimed a mandate; a time when his party got voted in not for any other reason than the fact that it wasn’t the Labor mob. Mike Baird ought to ignore his Federal well-wishers and look not his victor’s laurels but to the hard graft of building an inclusive government based around the needs of the people, not what can be bought and sold to profit the top end of town.

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In another fabulous action-packed week of fantastical spinning, bewildering back-flipping, delusion, parliamentary hullabaloo and other outward manifestations of ‘good,’ ‘adults-in-charge,’ open for business, government, its multi-million dollar turd-polishing media unit was in overdrive. Abbott’s avid fascination with Goebbels lingers on like a fart in a sleeping bag, a noxious emanation impossible to disown or disavow.

Every flip and flop of the Abbott government’s flip-flops and total flops of unworkable, unpopular or utter nonsense policies were presented with fanfare and at great expense to an increasingly alienated nation as ‘positive new’ and ‘exciting new’ policy initiatives to be drooled over by sycophants such as Piers Ackerman, Miranda Devine and the craven conservative apologist, Greg Jennett on ABC TV whom we hate for replacing the insightful, wise and independent Lyndal Curtis who was always good value.

‘On the cards,’ we are told, is the despatch of Tony Nutt, a ‘political fixer’ who looks a bit like his former boss John Howard might if he had impacted wisdom teeth, to Abbott HQ to redress the Credlin captivity in line with Rupert’s orders and as a sop to foolish backbenchers, many of whom have whinged about her and who consequently now have no career prospects whatsoever. Doubtless he will pool ideas with Christopher Pyne, the other, fixer, albeit self-proclaimed, in the ranks.

Work experience boy, Environment Minister Greg Hunt added more utter nonsense as he presented his Direct Action assignment creatively rendered in noxious clouds of choking coal smoke signals. Hunt’s Direct Action means that government not only pays our taxes to polluters to reduce pollution, it now promises no real guidelines to measure that reduction. This is world’s best practice we are assured.

Direct Action, based on Hunt’s ‘fairies at the bottom of the garden’ vision promises to be a real hoot. It sets no baseline at all for electricity generators who are free to burn coal forever with impunity. The Abbott government is very happy with young Greg, consequently, and points to its consistency in always capitulating to the needs of fossil fuel electricity generators, amen, who play ‘a vital role in our economy.’

Any other industry gets a ‘guideline’ based on its peak pollution level over its last five years’ operation. The Climate Institute’s Erwin Jackson sees the policy as a ‘Claytons’, a ‘climate policy you have when you don’t want to reduce emissions.’ Safeguard provisions amount to a Newspeak term for no safeguards at all. How the Direct Action fairies will reduce pollution is anyone’s guess but we all recall Greg telling us he ‘just knows’ it will work. We hope he is not relying simply on our reducing electricity usage to meet his targets. At least he didn’t have to change the law as Brandis just has.

Hunt’s love of coal-fired power is in marked contrast to his declaration of war on solar power companies whom he threatens to investigate, pink batts style, claiming 15 per cent of the 1.3 million rooftop systems in Australia are substandard and potentially unsafe. Yet Australian Solar Council head, John Grimes says that under the Abbott government a safety advisory committee of the regulator has not sat once. Mr Hunt had not shown any concern about safety despite being handed three reports in his time as minister, he observes.

Brandis sighed happily as he helped Australia towards becoming a police state when his new metadata retention legislation was passed by the senate. It will become ever harder to hold government to account, criticise or even scrutinise as the state gained the right to access our metadata whenever it feels like it, for whatever reason, unless you are a journalist in which case a summons is required, although this will most likely be swiftly and readily provided by an obligingly sympathetic judge without unseemly delay in 2017 when the new law comes into effect.  Ordinary citizens stand to discover for themselves the ways this data can be used by a range of agencies to follow up even minor misdemeanours such as unpaid parking tickets.

The government was assisted by a feeble Labor government which needs to trade up its leader and a bewildered, incompetent senate which meekly fell into line with Big Brother.  A recent guest on The Drum, a much better website than a current events show, said his mates were not worried about it round the BBQ as if apathy and wilful ignorance were somehow some immunity to tyranny.

Contenders for star performer for the government faced stiff competition but must include Health Minister Sussan Ley who proclaimed that reversing the decision to cut funding to domestic violence victims is a policy triumph. How a backflip represents a wise decision, or a government at the cutting edge as she unfortunately put it, is beyond comprehension. All funds are needed and this reversal must be followed by scrapping the $30 million awareness programme and giving the money to outfits which provided women with urgently needed shelter, protection and support. Further funds may found in an efficiency dividend applied to Abbott’s ministry for women.

Given that Tony Abbott made himself Minister for Women only as a calculated snub to those who advocate justice, sexual equality and equal rights for women, Ms Cash’s assistant role remains problematic. If she continues to be subservient to Abbott whose dim and crazy view is that we have shattered all available glass ceilings, women would be better served by putting Ms Cash’s allowance into support for needy families suffering all over the nation from our epidemic of domestic violence, a violence experienced by one third of all women by the age of 15. Every week two Australian women die by from male abuse. Yet we pay more attention to two lives, albeit tragically, lost in a plane crash in an apparent pilot suicide.

Savings to fund programmes to address our domestic violence crisis could be made in our defence budget by scrapping a submarine or two. Even smarter would be to save at least $5 billion a year by bringing our advisers home from Iraq. Three Iraqi militia units who support the US- Iraqi assault on Tikrit have just withdrawn and refuse to fight saying they do not trust the United States.

Doubtless our advisers, with Kevin Andrews’ counselling skills could correct this little rough patch in an otherwise healthy relationship rooted in mutual distrust, hatred and competitive self-advantage. Failing that Andrews could kick a goal for common-sense and humanity by calling our troops home before they are irretrievably enmeshed in another military fiasco. Put the money into combating a real evil at home.

Chip in the $2.5 billion ear-marked for Direct Action, a total waste of money and you’ve got a sum which can be put to good use immediately. Of course millions in small change can be found instantly simply by dismissing all those spin doctors and media gurus who are even more redundant judging by the way the government’s message has continued daily to be totally incoherent. Then there’s the carbon tax which did have a chance of regulating carbon emissions and providing a handy source of revenue. None of this is pie in the sky given the extent of government back-flips and reboots so far. Yet any of it would be a victory for humanity and justice and a brighter future for all of us.

Now that Labor has achieved a good result in NSW and is revitalised, the Liberals who are poised to dump their increasingly crazy leader could make their move and make these much needed changes – if only they could read the writing on the wall. Yet instead, Abbott is likely, bizarrely, to claim some sort of vindication and crow and boast and make even more lunatic captain’s calls as his party, riven by leadership rivalry, drifts with him inexorably into the arid social wasteland of neoliberal neglect for the people in its pursuit of tea party small government and its mindless veneration of its cruel, false, free market god.

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An astonishing event in Canberra has seized the nation. Reeling from a record-breaking run of defeats, self-sabotage, own goals and sundry other debacles, a terminal Abbott government has defied the odds and at last notched up a win – of sorts. It has got its message out.

The victory is all the more remarkable given the Liberals’ record of deceit, evasion, broken promises, budget of injustice and studied disdain for any notion of governing for all Australians.

Abbott’s increasingly erratic captain’s calls have madness in them and there are alarming signs of contagion in Pyne and Hockey’s disturbed behaviour. The fish rots from the head down and David Cameron warns of the insanity of office and its unpredictability:

‘I’m not saying all prime ministers necessarily definitely go mad or even go mad at the same rates …’

Yet, rampaging madness aside, one run for Team Lazarus appears on the board at last. A few more skewed polls, News Corp propaganda and even a modest Baird victory in NSW on Saturday will have the party high fiving and twerking in the streets; crowing with righteous vindication and as out of control as a mob of schoolies on the Gold coast in December.

Its coaches and supporters confused, worn out, worn down or just plain stood down like Credlin on Murdoch’s orders, Team Abbott’s forces appear in total disarray. Now out of control in Credlin’s absence, his government has a future only in the history textbook, to be studied avidly by students of political dysfunction, with an interest in a government misled by its own rhetoric; routed by its own incompetence.

‘We need to get the message out’ its leaders continue chanting at the half-time huddle; ‘get the message out,’ but suddenly the message is confused, scrambled by Captain Qeeg Abbott declaring the scoreless first innings over. He knows his onions, Tony Abbott, he claims, waving papers and making strange facial movements as he does before he speaks or eats random, unusual root vegetables.

Suddenly skipper Abbott, is happy with the economic picture after all. He flourishes graphs which he says show we are ‘on trend’ to a miraculous near-recovery in five or so years. The line plummets into disaster ever after but, hey, he’s a glass half-full type of skipper and besides, his team must rest their heavy lifting muscles. Why, ‘we get very close to balance’ he grins, waving his own copy of ‘The Intergenerational Report,’ another lame work of propaganda he’s spent a fortune flogging. Another Goebbels line pops into his head but he controls his impulse this time. Yet the image says everything.

Flapping his pages, like a Tibetan prayer wheel Abbott explains, Qeeg-like why after rejection of the budget by the Senate and the people of Australia, he has brought HMS Team Abbott to a full stop.

‘The document shows that we have halved Labor’s debt and deficit going forward. Debt as a percentage of GDP which would have been 120 per cent under the policies of the former government is about 60 per cent under the policies of this government.’

The ‘good captain’ lets the crew know that they have done more than enough already, compared to Labor, if Labor were elected, ignoring data showing bigger deficits than anything his government had inherited; and continuing insanely to claim a better result than Labor would have achieved had it been re-elected and ignored the deficit.

God knows what he will do when the prohibited substances or the beer goggles of Murdoch’s Newspoll predictions or sycophant Ackerman’s helpless, hopeless, lovelorn ranting wears off.

The scoreboard, however, records its own clear message, the team is always getting out. Or so it went until only yesterday when the plucky little vice-captain, working a stray ball from the edge of Hockey’s bat off her left leg, played a blinder with her eyeballs.

Julie Bishop gets her message out, a message which shows clearly that she is not happy to have been excluded from the decision. Also signalled is that she is not a team player.

Bishop has never been a team player, but in a Liberal team of every woman for herself this itself should not be held against her. She lets the team know, however, by mugging for the television camera, rolling her eyes at Joe and shaking her head.

Her human-emoji message is picked up by everyone instantly, a laser-beam of real feeling and disunity piercing the fog of faux party unity and ritual public grieving in its indulgent public fawning over Fraser

Amidst its elephantine, public lamenting of the death of the dead wet Liberal Malcolm Fraser, a prolonged, outpouring of dutiful affection and ritual laceration, to rival Whitlam’s wake, a cocky Joe Hockey overshares by airing his own disturbing, dirty little secret.

Cutting budgets is fun, he crows like a lunatic, emboldened, swaggering as he speaks, excited to be holding court again instead of appearing before the judge in one all last week, and having to give an honest account of himself. His behaviour gives credence to speculation that the whole cabinet should be swabbed for drug use

Bishop purses her lips, fit to kill and stabs exquisitely manicured and lacquered fingers savagely at her Blackberry. If only she had done the same when, in opposition, she looked on fondly while Abbott used every dishonest and misogynist trick under the sun to attack Julia Gillard.

If only she had rolled her eyes and shaken her head when her legal boss had instructed her to make mesothelioma victims struggle every inch of the way in their rightful claim for damages against CSR, a delay which cost lives and caused incalculable misery

Hockey extols his love of razor gangs and the power it gives him to deny others, erupting, mid-eulogy, a mourner transported by grief, political opportunism, and vanity, a mad ham actor amidst the obsequies, arms outstretched theatrically like Moses stopping battle, forlornly, re-enacting his inner need for authority, acknowledgement, approval. Someone once must have said, ‘Jeez you’re a dag, Joe,’ so full of it, you should be in parliament.’ And Joe believed them.

The Treasurer lards his speech with fulsome praise for Fraser, Liberals’ iconic hero of Labor-bastardisation, anti-Medicare, anti-union, Viet Nam drafter, a conflicted, dyed in the wool stalwart of Western District squattocracy, a conflicted tragic hero who also held a torch for multiculturalism and human rights along with a steadfast and undying interest in his own cause

Hockey bores on inexorably on the virtues of the departed when, suddenly, he changes his narrative and gains everyone’s attention. Pollies pause their yawning, texting and checking of email. Emojis are abandoned for a moment.

To a hushed house, Hockey professes his yet unsated appetite for cutting up the plans and hopes of others and all such other urges as may be served in wielding the razor in Fraser’s ERC

Waxing to his theme, he announces his government has again pilfered the small change now left in the Foreign Aid budget, funding so subject to depredation it is now a pittance, a tiny, useless, token amount, such as Apple, BHP or multinational may pay in tax under Liberal governments in Australia.

Australia’s foreign aid budget, which has already suffered $11 billion in cuts since the Coalition was elected is like a magic pudding be cut again in May in its second budget carve up.

The ERC or expenditure review committee is extolled as another of Saint Malcolm’s ever expanding list of achievements. Razor gang founder; architect of world peace, multicultural harmony, trouser loss and depositor of pickled onions in guests’ pockets at parties, Frazer is a veritable Mother Theresa, Gandhi and Martin Luther King whose ruthless ambition caused him to bring down a lawfully elected government in a Machiavellian conspiracy of squalid, ruthlessness, class hatred and petty advantage.

Joe, doubtless, has his mind fixed on such higher pragmatism as he rises Zorba-like to wheel, arms outstretched as if in some mystic dance routine to invoke the neoliberal gods of Hayek and Friedman

While Hockey performs his lumbering parody of a conviction politician, Bishop, another parody in waiting, upstages him by revealing her displeasure. Joe would eat his words; do her bidding, grovel and beg on his knees before her but it is Turnbull who pulls off the master stoke with his deadpan line to camera on morning television.

Joe wanted us to respond like that, he grins archly, it was that sort of speech. Joe wanted us to roll our eyes and shake our heads.

In less than twenty four hours, the Liberals have broken their run scoring drought. Bishop has communicated with the nation through the eye of god without Credlin or her husband’s prior permission. With head and eyes alone, Bishop has spoken volumes about Liberal disunity, division and selfish ambition. In a gesture she has shown us all the worth of her captain’s reassurances about consultation and communication.

It is a victory of honest communication for a government of deceit and utter dysfunction, which despite its message wants to keep its true message in not risk it getting out, but after last Monday’s non-verbal stoush, no-one need be in any further doubt. Fraser’s spirit was alive and well, its legacy inescapable even in Abbott’s reborn, revised, revamped, consultative neo-Liberal party.

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When Christopher Pyne called himself ‘The Fixer,’ on Sky TV, recently, audiences guffawed and fell about helplessly, hooting with derision as another of the Abbott government’s star performers seemed to attain new heights of comic absurdity and grandiose self-delusion.

Pyne’s performance eclipsed even Scott Morrison’s claims that indefinite detention of children was an act of mercy and that on Nauru, Save the Children staff had ‘coached’ detainees to stich their lips and falsely claim sexual assault, both now shown to be false in Philip Moss’s report.  He almost outshone his master, Tony Abbott who has just said things happen and shrugged aside the report’s finding.

Pyne, more than any other clown in cabinet, has helped his Prime Minister elevate governing to a new level of absurdity. The surreal humour in David Speers’ interview on Sky lies partly in Pyne’s past failure to fix anything, let alone counselling cross-bench senators, such as Glenn Lazarus who appears about to take out a restraining order on him. But there is more to it than comic incongruity or the minister’s industrial-strength chutzpah.

Pyne’s inane grin signals some deep inner peace, if not pleasure, in challenging our expectations. Moreover, it tells Speers and his audiences exactly what he thinks of them; it is a gesture of contempt. And if his back-flip was bewildering; Pyne has learned well from Abbott his master.

Pyne’s gun-at-their-heads terrorist negotiation tactic had been dropped overnight. 177 researchers could continue to receive wages and feed their families. Universities would no longer be threatened with massive cuts to research funding unless enough cross-bench senators approved to pass the bill; another ideologically driven delusion of a tertiary sector where fees would rise and take standards and everything else up with them.

Everything was fixed. Pyne just was not going to say how. Like his boss, everything bad was behind him, we were moving forward, he promised, grinning like a Cheshire cat.

When Speers asked Pyne for details of his new-found funding fix, the Minister simply refused to tell. It was a watershed moment in his government’s history. It redefined and refined the doctrine of Westminster responsibility to a tissue of invisibility.

Pyne has taken government to a higher metaphysical plane. His non-interview with Speers was either pure Dadaist non-politics or a type of Zen mysticism. Commentators flocked in hordes to applaud the ensuing, absurdly surrealistic exchange, acclaiming it as worthy of comedic giants John Clarke and Brian Dawe.

‘I want it to be a surprise for you,” he told Speers. Asked again where the money was coming from he said, “That’s not really your concern.”

Laughter, of course, must not distract us from the hard facts. Pyne is a major contemporary political figure. Whilst he may entertain and divert us, he also busily refines the essential absurdity of his fantasy government, a surreal government which came to power in a puff of smoke, not by virtue of any real platform but by dint of simply not being Labor, a Dada government which took office with its feet permanently planted in the clouds, its head turned firmly away from Labor and the sordid, fallen world of the ordinary voter.

Pyne is chief custodian of the Abbott regime’s anti-government castle in the air. He embodies in word and deed an unreal government which bought office with a blizzard of false promises; a government which from inception created a trust deficit, which, together with its contempt for explaining itself, or being held to account, has ensured its future impotence and unpopularity. With the manifest arrogance of God’s anointed or the born to rule, it saw no real need to communicate, let alone negotiate, preferring instead to dictate the pace; act first and apologise afterwards; announce first and attack critics later enacting metadata retention laws to further frighten off dissent.

It is tempting to dismiss Pyne as a privileged Peter Pan whose plummy voice and arrested adolescence appeals to the old ladies of Sturt who receive signed birthday cards from him and who vote for him in droves. Yet that would be to overlook the consummate performance artist in him. Pyne’s stock in trade, his ‘shtick’ is serious self-parody. He is a kamikaze politician, like his gaffe-prone leader, Tony Abbott whose efforts more often get him into trouble than out. Yet like his master, he can grin and say sorry. Or just grin, turn around and dish up another serve of complete codswallop.

Thus Pyne continues at the wheel of the LNP vehicle, spinning the tyres, doing burnouts and sliding all over the track with boyish delight. That he gets nowhere is beside the point. It is Pyne’s deathless derring-do, his manic energy and single-minded determination to stay in the game – almost any game – at any price that is his vocation, his unique contribution. His plummy words are but puffery. Even he doesn’t expect us to really believe them.

By all conventional accounting, Pyne has a record of resounding defeat and underachievement in the Education portfolio and his latest nobbling of the government’s darkest horse in its privatisation stakes, Higher Education, fell at the first hurdle because he had not bothered to first make a case for change. Other Education Ministers would have negotiated or sought advice from experts such as Peter Dawkins, David Phillips or Bruce Chapman. Instead, it was easier for Pyne just to follow the same path that had led to power and make things up.

Lies are no substitute for building a case for reform, however liberally sprinkled, and Pyne’s two fundamental lies are whoppers. It is a lie to claim that there is a financial crisis in education funding and it is false to pretend that there is anything wrong with higher education. The government commits similar amounts of funding to private schools as it does to tertiary education yet never once has it proclaimed any crisis in funding parents’ right to choose their children’s (private) schooling. That would not be risky; it would be foolhardy.

Pyne will take risks to be Abbott’s fixer. Witness his role in the ‘fixing’ of Peter Slipper, a dangerous liaison which he cultivated for as long as it took to achieve a result. Although he maintains he promised Ashby no position or any other form of inducement to press charges against Slipper, it would be wise for him to hush this over as best he can.

As tempting as it may appear, however, it would be unwise to dismiss ‘The fixer’, as simply delusional. Pyne’s role in shaping the Abbott government’s style and direction is significant.  In his voice is money, privilege and droit de seigneur; in his antic disposition appears his party’s flight from reason into blind faith in neocon ideology.

Pyne shares with Abbott the same sense of vocation. Each is a type of priest in the ritual adoration of the sacred free market life force and other assorted Tea Party received truths. Both worship the gods of small government, small business and the much-lauded, miracle-working capitalist entrepreneur who makes all things possible to all men whilst praying for lower wages, fewer conditions and other ‘flexibility,’ to be granted by a good and faithful servant government, amen. Yet Pyne is the acolyte; Abbott his adored master.

Pyne is the quintessential Abbott courtier who has given his all to his government’s abortive radical neoliberal ‘reform’ programme. As Leader of the House, he has also, moreover, made his mark on parliament, snubbing democracy as befits the truly anointed member of the elect, deploying tactics such as privileging the ‘Dorothy Dix’ in question time, elevating time-wasting to an art, presiding over a parliamentary theatre of ridicule and simultaneously prosecuting his party’s contempt for reasoned discourse, decorum and common sense.

Historically, every monarch’s court had its jester or fool but few have been gifted with a Christopher Pyne. Just his unstoppability and his commitment alone command our notice if not our admiration. Energiser-bunny Pyne has tirelessly, selflessly, devoted his phenomenal energy to being a clown. Time, then, we gave him due credit for his sensational performances, especially his gift for self-deprecating absurdity, and considered him in his own right.

So popular has Pyne become as a laughing stock that he almost upstages his Prime Minister whose back flips, onion eating and zany captain’s calls have the nation in stitches. Abbott’s one-liners are head and shoulders above any of Shorten’s zingers. Only last week he boasted that he ignored metadata when he was a journalist. Yet his brief abortive career as a scribbler was over well before the Internet was in use in Australia.

Abbott, like any good captain, sets the lunacy bar high. Yet Christopher Pyne is not about to give up. Undeterred, undaunted, the Pythonesque Black Knight is heroically resolved to fight on with his teeth if need be in the service of the surreal, fantastical, castle in the air that is the Abbott government.

Whilst some pragmatists see clowns merely as useful distractions, the role of the Education Minister is more complex, fashioned from the very essence of the fantastical yet fanatical neo-con theocracy that Abbott and his backers have installed to rule over us. Rather than dismiss him as some hopeless eccentric we should consider Pyne more thoughtfully for what he reveals of the workings of the Abbott government as a whole, a government which leans more towards performance art than politics, a government informed by an ideological fantasy of a neoliberal ‘hands-free’ approach to the very hands-on challenges of being a successful government.

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‘All About Women,’ the ABC’s grandly titled maiden International Women’s Day all-women panel episode on Q&A screened 9 March was a disappointing disservice to women even if it did provoke the chauvinist ire of Minister for Women, Tony Abbott into rebuking women of the panel for not taking the plight of the Bali Nine seriously. Abbott later attacked Greer’s levity in challenging Julie Bishop over whether she would flash for the Bali duo’s freedom. The rest of the show, however, was a fizzer.

Greer’s bare breast jest did make a serious point.  A Minister for Women who is a bloke is bad enough. But when the man who appointed himself Minister for Women rebukes you for being a silly woman, things are crook indeed.

Granted Greer was flippant with her dare to bare, ‘free the nipple’ theme. Her disparagement of the activists posited an inverse relationship between size of breast and revolutionary ardour but she was having fun at their and our expense. Her anecdote about inviting her pursuer home was definitely not something she was seriously advocating. Perhaps suitable cautionary, ‘Don’t try this at home’ or ‘caution, satire’  tweets could run in the twit line for future episodes.

Ultimately Germaine Greer is a notorious provocateur whose penchant for the outrageous should not distract us from the seriousness of her cause nor cause us to deny her right to poke fun at our self-seriousness and national irony bypass. Certainly, her strategy flushed out the chauvinists.

Abbott predictably rose to the bait like a trout leaping to an angler’s cast. So powerful was the allure, to him, of a chance to put a woman in her place, he was caught hook, line and sinker.  Sadly, however, the abortive episode did little to advance the cause of women’s rights and much to set it back. It has ended, moreover, being ‘more about men’ after all.

Television can engage with some complex issues when it tries, but this time, it typically chose to shy away into the outstretched arms of light entertainment and patriarchy. ‘All About Women’ cheated its audience of substance, side-stepping equality and justice to endorse resurgent sexism by indulging Julie Bishop, our token female foreign minister and blokes’ rules apologist to confuse real issues of serving the cause of equality with a form of words.

Our hopes were high, at least, with regard to the top of the bill. Top marks to the producer for securing Germaine Greer; and wonderfully literate and wise Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay, but few if any marks for selecting the other, minor guests who included Best & Less fashion store chief executive Holly Kramer, and engineer and youth advocate Yassmin Abdel-Magied. Bishop was along to get her head on. Greer would have been much better served by a panel of equals. And therein lies a big problem.

So minor was the calibre of these three other panellists, Greer and her audience could be forgiven for concluding that we don’t take her or her cause seriously. Consequently she resorted to being wickedly irreverent and flippant to salvage some integrity from the mundane banality of much of the earnest, competing discourses.  It was painful and it was embarrassing. The least Australia could have provided Greer was a panel of her peers.  As it was, the mismatch got in the way of the show’s progress and appeared to be another calculated insult to Greer and to all women.

Before anyone spoke, this Q&A episode was a slap in the face to those millions watching who understand and know personally the injustices women must suffer; the countless women who every day are relegated to a second-class existence; the millions who know that feminism is not some token label.  Women’s issues are not well-served by some hasty assemblage of talking heads whose chairperson appears to have a brief to keep it light; keep it funny.

It was not the right time or place for lengthy personal anecdotes about working in a male-dominated industry from the representative of Youth without Borders. Name me one that doesn’t have men in control. Perhaps a kind person could take such earnest young speakers aside and counsel them not to generalise from their own limited experience; explain to them that their experiences as qualified professionals working with other professionals who happen to be male does not match the workplace or life experience of the vast majority of women who must contend with being so much less than equal in more ways than a highly educated young female engineer could ever dream of.

Nor was it the right forum for the wittering ignorance of Julie Bishop, who represented not just herself again but the product of repression, the smart woman who will not even use the f-word for fear she frighten the boys and cruel her chances in a male-dominated, patriarchal power structure. She is not self-aware enough to own that status but it shows.

Bishop seized her opportunity once again to peddle the pernicious lie that feminism is an optional extra. She has puzzled and dismayed observers with her ‘self-describe’ disclaimer. She approves of gender equality in theory and even does a bit for women overseas but she is not going to apply the same rules to herself or expect them of others in her life or her workplace. Goodness no. Bishop’s got where she wants only by the historic achievements of past feminists and of course by the advantages conferred by her privileged upbringing but to hear her tell the story it is just about being determined. Bishop’s message was a cue for supporters of the minister for women to prick their cauliflower ears up and another slap in the face for all other women and those who support the cause of equality.

Where was Tony Jones when you needed him? Bishop claimed that she did not self-describe as a feminist. We have heard this before and worry how long it will take before it is accepted that being a feminist is not about what you choose to call yourself, it’s about what you do to further the cause of justice and equality for women. In Bishop’s case this is less than nothing, considering her role in her party’s unconscionable attack on Julia Gillard, but on Monday, she was allowed to get away with the impression that as Foreign Minister she was flying a banner for women’s emancipation or that she was some type of liberationist.  Equally so with her claim that she makes her voice heard in Cabinet.

Bishop has allowed her foreign aid budget to be raided by the boys to such an extent that her budget to do anything useful is pretty well nothing. So much for her voice counting in cabinet. She may well make claims on television about helping the women of the world achieve justice and equality but where was she when the Pacific Islands Forum women needed her support? After giving her word  that Australia would provide funds, Bishop was unable to even face the women after she was forced to renege on her promise when the boys took a hammer to her piggy bank. In the end, her own need to boost her public profile in the leadership stakes came before any other priority. As it did with her participation in the Abbott opposition’s hounding of Gillard and her collusion in the smear campaigns about her probity as a lawyer and about her credibility as a woman whose lifestyle choice included being ‘deliberately barren.’

Perhaps it was a reminder that with an ABC hating government holding the purse strings we must expect to see more and more of the lunatic right. Women’s rights are dangerously left wing territory by definition to the ruling conservative patriarchy even with the help of such grovelling apologists as Julie Bishop whose ‘I do not self-describe as a feminist’ comment put back women’s rights and trivialised feminism whilst signalling her own alarmingly limited grasp of reality.

Annabel Crabb, an accomplished performer in other contexts valiantly struggled to assert her authority as chair permitting Germaine Greer to be talked over, Youth Without Borders founder Yasmin Abdel-Magied to talk too long and Julie Bishop to campaign for Liberal leader whilst a fawning Crabb looked on fondly . The articulate Roxane Guy made a series of stimulating observations and shared shocking details of her own life, such as her rape at the age of twelve, but these appeared to be too much for the rest of the panel to deal with. Guy is worth a show on her own but there was sense that the chair needed to keep it light and sunny. Reality can be so confronting.

In the end, the special International Women’s Day episode may prove useful as a type of warning. It serves as a timely reminder that we live in an age of an ill-informed phobia of feminism, eagerly supported by the vested interests of a patriarchal ruling class, when the gap between male and female equality is increasing and that we are currently governed by a party which takes every opportunity to keep it that way. The question Ms Bishop is not whether you choose to self-describe yourself as a feminist but rather how could you not be?

How in the face of the institutionalised injustice, inequality and suffering in the world today could anyone choose not to be a feminist. How can you maintain you have a choice? To deny the need is to be part of the problem.

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Canberra is notorious for its gas-baggers, blatherskites, hum-buggers, cods wallopers, and hog-washers but lately it has been in the grip of an obsession with national conversation. The phrase is on everyone’s lips. It monopolises the media. Every pollie, panjandrum, business busybody, wannabe and has-been it seems, is suddenly up for a chinwag.

It’s hard to keep up with the new zeitgeist. Just yesterday, everyone was busting a gut to ‘get the message out.’ Now ‘having a conversation’ is all the rage in a puzzling turn of events laced with comic incongruity if not profound irony. And there are so many competing calls for our attention a deafening static has turned us inward.

Everyone’s talking at me.

Can’t hear a word they’re saying.

Only the echoes of my mind.

Even for Canberra, those appealing loudest ironically often lack the most rudimentary conversation skills, such as Tony Abbott’s wilful incapacity to listen, a fatal flaw he shares with most members of government and his opposition, public servants, public figures and a deafness of do-gooders, preachers and other eminent notables.

Indeed, as a rule, those least equipped to communicate are most likely to order us to listen. Often after they have forfeited all respect. Abbott, with his own, unique empathy, attention and respect deficit disorders epitomises this flaw in his recent dealings with Joko Widodo, the United Nations, our entire Aboriginal population and all Australian women. Making himself Minister for Women was a two fingered captain’s salute which rubbished fundamental notions of equality and mutual respect. Now belatedly he has spent $300 million on an awareness campaign which will only help to further line the pockets of media companies while refuges languish for lack of adequate funding. Prior conversation might have steered this decision away from guff towards practical assistance for those desperately in need of shelter. No victim of domestic violence needs a TV campaign to help her identify their abuse or abuser.

Now Abbott is charging off to Victoria amidst a ‘war of words,’ in the ABC’s lexicon, with Daniel Andrews, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind that young buck Daniel’s role is to agree with the old buck. It’s another classic conversation which essentially consists of ‘Tell you what I’ll do, and what you need to do, it runs, now let’s have a conversation to help you to agree with me. Sooky, Joe Hockey, the glassiest jaw on the front bench, currently provides a sublime example.

‘Ad hoc Joe’, privilege’s poster-boy, pocket neoliberal philosopher and stoutly loyal father, husband and son, is notorious for freely sharing his thought bubbles with an ungrateful world. Yet, $22,000 a year, will get you his undivided attention if you join his North Sydney forum. Hockey’s granting of privileged access at a price is a selfless gesture, he says, and a public good, part, perhaps of the largesse and noblesse oblige of entitlement.

It’s a party fundraiser, he says. If it were not for such public-spirited generosity, the taxpayer would have to foot the bill. Others take a different view. The Age reported the fee for access practice in its brief to act as a public forum under a ‘treasurer for sale’ headline. Hockey sprang into defensive action, getting staff to ring the editor at 2:00am to demand an apology and to threaten defamation. As you do, when you would lead the national conversation.

Now in court, Hockey wants compensation for his buggered reputation, caused, he claims, by the vile media report, inspired by ‘petty spite,’ malice and revenge, a conspiracy theory which quite baffles Fairfax. Walking and talking wounded Hockey and his entire family have been ‘devastated’ by The Age. Now his wisdom in seeking his own revenge only to expose what already seems to many as an oddly exclusive type of word in his ear is equally on trial.

A poor witness, who needs reminding whose role it is to ask the questions, Joe, has confused the witness box with the dock such is his stress, Nonetheless, he must take every opportunity to remind the court that he is federal treasurer, part grandstanding but also voicing a deeper anxiety over his tenure. Joe claims he was not hocking himself to businessmen and lobbyists by flogging twenty-two thousand dollar a year subscriptions entitling business types to have a cup of Joe with the Treasurer in VIP meetings in private boardrooms via his North Sydney forum, a Liberal party entity. It’s all a storm in a tea cup. Why he can’t even remember names without Fairfax’s counsel prompting him.

Who paid for an audience with Joe we shall never know because the list is confidential, the Treasurer reminds journalists, underscoring his own and his party’s notion that a good conversation was one where he controlled access to all the information and could readily withhold the bits he wanted hidden. A courtroom, however, is not a North Sydney Forum, what Hockey can only recall under probing questioning calls attention to another of his vulnerabilities in his job; a poor memory for names ill-becomes a man entrusted with the nation’s finances.

The Age’s case rests on a reasonable assumption that those paying for Joe’s attention expect something special from him in return. Whatever the legal outcome of his NSF debacle it will cost Hockey dearly in credibility in his call for an open national forum. The idea of exclusive access to the treasurer can only add to suspicions of unfair influence.

Bitter stoush with mortal enemy Fairfax, notwithstanding, Joe can’t resist another punt. When he should be comforting his family, preparing his testimony or preparing the next budget Joe, tears himself away to float his latest loopy idea of raiding our super to buy a first home. An attack on the basic role of super which would also push house prices even further out of reach of average wage-earners Hockey’s latest thought bubble threatens to bring the house down. But a pollie who hollers for a conversation is seldom bound by common-sense. Least of all, Joe.

A paternal Paul Keating has kindly bought into the conversation to straighten out the wayward younger treasurer. Boofhead Joe’s latest idea is a dangerous dud, he makes clear. Hell-bent on calling for conversations, however, allows Joe no time to listen or respond. Or converse. Into the breach springs the loaded dog, aka PM Abbott who lately displays all the survival instincts of a Jihadist suicide bomber.

Madly supporting everyone not moving against him, Abbott has rushed to back Hockers up before he tears himself away to put out a few spot fires he’s lit recently. It is difficult to converse when your foot is in your mouth. Yet shoot first, apologise later, is second nature to the captain. It does mean, however, Abbott has to mop up after one or two of his latest crap captain’s calls. Denial is his first tactic. The car industry call, he claims he took to the ERC, none of whom would ever disagree. Rapidly revising is also a favourite move. It wasn’t that much money. It was normal and proper.

Further funding for auto and parts manufactures turns out to be a type of reverse magic pudding promise which begins as 900 million but which self-deflates in a day to one tenth of that if you are lucky.  The wealthy multinationals who are the Australian car industry puzzle all the way to the bank. Hockey choked them to death last year yet now flings them some loose change he just found lying in his pocket.  Pay for the drinks at their wake. The intergenerational report, already an entrant in the Miles Franklin award for fiction, also deals with loose change in the nation’s pocket, however much it is boosted in Hockey’s jawboning.

“It is a very genuine attempt by the Treasury, in an unprecedented way, to launch a conversation about Australia’s future,” Hockey told the NSW Business Chamber.“ It will be a genuine community conversation about actions that not only protect our current way of life, but protect it for the next generation, and the next, and the next.”

Joe Hockey oozes protectiveness, then proposes we raid our super to buy our first houses, a move that could wreck countless young futures and push up house prices. What our leaders mean by ‘Let’s have a conversation’ is less than it sounds. And more sinister. This government has shown no capacity to consult; no ability to listen to mere mortals, so bound up is it in its worship of the holy free market, captains of industry and its duty of care to vested interests.

Rupert Murdoch can cause Peta Credlin to be moved off stage but the recent United Nations’ censure over our mistreatment of refugees is dismissed by Abbott as wrong in substance and an unwanted lecture to boot. Express a dissenting view or even broadcast one and you will be overruled, attacked or ridiculed or all three as happened to Gillian Triggs. The record shows little sign of any government conversation skills or any other wherewithal for genuine dialogue whatsoever.

Let me talk you round to my point of view; talk you into submission; talk over the top of you. Not, let me listen to your opinion with an open mind and heart. Not let me pay you the courtesy of consulting with you first and respecting your point of view. Such is the case with Morrison’s latest offer to compromise on lowering the pension.

The proper time and place for a national conversation about the pension was at the last election. Instead the proposal to change the indexation method from being wage based to CPI, was simply proclaimed. The proposal aims to save the government billions over time but it cheats pensioners who struggle now to exist on the pittance provided by a resentful government by lowering the amount of their entitlement at a time when essentials such as utilities are set to rise steeply. But who knows, perhaps the boys can find another carbon tax to axe.

Sponsoring the privatisation of utilities and cossetting energy producers has guaranteed price rises which will put utilities soon beyond the means of the average pensioner. We are, however, invited to a conversation after the government has declared its intention. Why, Scott Morrison MKII, the biddable, loveable saviour of drowning children and newly minted model of ingratiating affability is open to compromise, he says.

The Abbott government simply does not communicate. Half-way through its term in office, it says, it is waking up to the need to listen to itself. If it’s true, it’s been a long and dangerous sleep. Wokka Entsch warbles contentedly now about how his party now listens to its own back bench. Perhaps he thinks we will hail its belated discovery of common-sense a virtue. Perhaps also he confuses listening with hearing. His optimism deludes him into believing that his leader will do anything more than grant him permission to speak.

The Abbott government which has shown no capacity for dialogue whatsoever even with its own. For a conversation to succeed, you need to be able to listen. You need to be able to seek advice, then take advice, not brush it aside with a rubbishing of the messenger. Lenore Taylor in the Guardian lists several compelling cases where the Federal Treasurer has brushed aside significant and worthy contributions to the national debate, often with a sneer or ad-hominem attack, such as his gibe at the Greens.

Calls for conversations have some unlikely politicians singing from the same crowded song sheet. But in a government which has no record of consultation and even less of a commitment to dialogue, or mutual respect, there is little more to it than a parroting of a new buzz word in a cacophony of double-speak spin as each clamours for our attention, each presuming our assent.  Meanwhile, its leaders continue to draw attention to their own, singular unwillingness and lack of skill in listening or sharing. As they will until the next election gives the people their turn to speak.

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Side-stepping convention, tiptoeing around the climate elephant in the room, Joe Hockey shrugs off precedent and other reasonable expectations to promote his narrow, political and partisan Intergenerational Report, a propaganda piece which is less an honest estimate of future trends than a final, desperate dose of shock therapy to the LNP’s own black dog of despair, its own budget mess.

The report is a dog’s breakfast of lies, half-truths and half-baked statistics all rehashed in a neoliberal ideology blender. Sloppy Joe Hockey wants his IGR to begin a national conversation about our future, yet surely even Hockey cannot expect any real dialogue when he and his government are unwilling to act in good faith. The report needs to speak the truth. It fails the test of credibility.

Some of its lies could just be sloppiness: early in the piece’s executive summary, current Australian life expectancies for men and women ‘are 91.5 and 93.6 today.’ Yet the ABS figure is ten years lower than that. There is a bit of a push on from the Abbott government to abandon the frippery of census taking and other hard empirical data gathering but until that happens, the ABS figure has the ring of truth. The error rings alarm bells. This IGR is light on for accuracy.

Similarly, the IGR plays fast and loose with the truth about projected government income, population growth and even boosts its own performance figures by factoring phantom income such as its abandoned GP co-payment and other measures which have been blocked by the senate.

Its pretence at prognostication, to one side as a bit of window dressing, this IGR sets its sights on the here and now. The report is a big gun in a campaign to strike terror into our heats and stampede us into accepting austerity budgeting. But it is deluded if it thinks it has kept its powder dry and that its scare tactics have not lost their shock value. Can it not see it has cried wolf too often?

Forecasting is a risky business at the best of times and never more so than with the imperfect science of economics. None of the previous IGRs have come within a bull’s roar of getting their budget estimates right. You need clear aims, rigorous methodology and quality data.  As Richard Denniss notes the garbage in, garbage out principle of computation applies to this IGR in spades.

Even if you just want to scare people, you need credibility. Joe Hockey fails to meet any of these requirements and instead must fall back on blind neoliberal faith and ignorance if not stupidity. Stupidity is repeating the same mistake and expecting different results. Change the record, Joe.

Fools enjoy a natural immunity from self-awareness and the Great Helmsman Abbott is happy to sail into the wind taking his bearings from false soundings. Anything but change course to accommodate science and reason.  Undeterred by the prospect of his leadership’s imminent ship-wreck, the fool-hardy Hockey fudges numbers to fake impending economic disaster. We are all doomed: only he and his government’s fiscal austerity medicine can save us.

The Abbott government’s IGR paints an incredible future scenario in which everything governments do remains the same for forty years. Governments continue to lower income tax rates each year while deficits rise, an unimaginable if not absurd prospect. What the states’ economic lives contribute to the changing picture is never contemplated. Nor is the reality of the cost of changes in our weather. Joe is making his own arbitrary decisions for his own reasons: his own captain’s call.

Climate change doesn’t matter a damn and Labor never gets back into power or brings back a carbon tax. True intergenerational theft is the province of the climate change denier whose influence is at work in this one-eyed squint at the future.

Technology never evolves nor could it ever make work more possible, more profitable. There is no thought given to the potential of a healthy renewable energy industry nor the boom it could bring not just to lower power costs but also to exports.

The inter-relationship of new technology with a brighter future may be illustrated with Tony Windsor’s comment:

“If the package of technologies enabled by high-speed broadband can keep 5% of elderly people in their homes for just one extra year, Australia could save $60 billion over ten years on aged care facilities ($4 billion a year in bed operating costs and $20 billion in capital costs). These savings alone would more than pay for the NBN.”

The scenario shows how small changes can make a huge difference, and highlights fruitful future areas of investment if we are truly concerned to address the costs of our aging society. Rather than concern itself with solutions, however, the report takes a different tack. The IGR scapegoats an ageing population for raising health costs. Pressure on the system, in fact, comes from the wealthy wanting to be healthy. They then purchase ever more expensive government health services.

The elephant in the room of climate change is invisible to this government. The biggest threat we face in 2055 will be a budget deficit, according to the report’s authors who appear trapped by a tunnel vision and happy to ignore the facts and all previous warnings. Or is it that they suppose that Greg Hunt’s direct action has climate change safely under control?

It seems more like avoidance: turn your back on it and it will go away, an unbecoming if not downright dangerous attitude in any would-be forecaster. Either way it’s an act of wilful negligence that further undermines its flawed economic forecasting. Or has the lesson of the IGR become only that we can safely ignore the last one?

The last IGR warned us ‘the largest and most significant challenge to Australia’s environment. If climate change is not addressed, the consequences for the economy, water availability and Australia’s unique environment will be severe”.

Australians deserve better than to be played for fools over their future.

Hockey has transformed the Intergenerational Report from its use of data to model future scenarios to prompt informed debate beginnings as it began in 2002 into something which is not about the future at all. It’s all about Joe. And Labor is to blame.

Everything the Abbott government ever set out to do was right on track and all that needs to be done is for those Labor bastards to drop their opposition, that mongrel senate to fall into line and the budget will be passed at last and we’ll be back in surplus tomorrow and forever after. The report has the graphs to prove it. It’s only because of Labor that things aren’t perfect already. Cuts must be made to balance the budget. Nothing else matters.

Hockey’s report will go in the waste bin along with its Commission of Audit and other failed attempts to soften us up for more cuts to government expenditure. Expect to be blitzed, nevertheless with an advertising campaign telling us we are living beyond our means.

No expense has been spared. Funding of advocacy groups is threatened; emergency accommodation for women seeking refuge from domestic violence has been slashed yet Joe can blow $380 million on an ad campaign to frighten us into submission.

Hockey’s IGR is propaganda masquerading as prediction. If Hockey is serious about ‘having a conversation’ with Australians about our future then he needs to put up some honest data. He’s missed the boat with this report. But has he ever been remotely interested in any conversation which doesn’t tell him what he wants to hear?

The Treasurer is so desperate to claw back lost opportunities that he will even politicise an IGR if he has to. Even if it means, as is highly likely, he kills it off. Hockey has abandoned all pretence at a forecast based on best available information as a responsible public service or even duty. Instead he has concocted a fiction to serve his party’s narrow political ends in the hope it might rescue his political career. It is unlikely to make his political future any less uncertain.

What is certain is that whatever shape is taken by our budget and the economy forty years hence it will bear no remote resemblance to any scenario presented in this so-called ‘report.’ Certain also is that the Australian people will see through this tissue of lies and see through the ensuing campaign assault on their common-sense and intelligence as a desperate government abandons any remaining good faith and turns to fear-mongering about the future to save its own self interest because it can make no larger plan.