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Tony Abbott was on ABC radio yesterday claiming that he will still be PM of Australia next Tuesday 10 February. It was the same message on TV. Today, on Macquarie Radio, he updated us: there would be no challenge for the leadership when cabinet met next Tuesday. “I have the full and unanimous support of the cabinet”. He was continuing the line of his Press Club speech on Monday when he proclaimed that voters have the right to ‘hire and fire’ their leaders, not party rooms.

Andrew Robb begged to differ. Robb’s accomplished chaperoning skills can only have been strengthened by his stint at the coal face with Julie Bishop in UN climate talks in Lima last December, when Bishop announced to a dumbfounded world that: Australia has a strong track record of playing a constructive role in the global response to global climate change.

His guardian instincts finely-honed by Lima, LNP duenna Robb promptly publicly put his leader back on track by flatly contradicting the PM’s call: ‘Abbott knows that his leadership depends on his performance, he said with a wink to the plotters. Robb either overlooked or contradicted the PM’s newly self-proclaimed gift for captaincy in so openly refuting his captain’s call. He also demonstrated a bit of a hiccup in Abbott’s roll-out of his new consultative government style, also proclaimed, along with so little else amidst so much more of the same on Monday.

These were big calls even for Abbott but not out of character. The PM has established a reputation for himself as a denialist and a contrarian, a type of antipodean Canute eagerly countermanding the popular tide at almost every opportunity: climate change, coal, equity in budget repair, hyping a debt and deficit disaster, the monarchy, renewable energy, gay marriage, the gift of virginity, the public wearing of speedos, George Pell and royal knighthoods to name but a few.

Abandoned by his boss Rupert Murdoch and his backers including party blowhards and gas-baggers, such as Andrew Bolt and Jeff Kennett and facing toxic levels of party dissatisfaction and disillusionment, Abbott stuck to his crease. He took his typical captain’s stance. He assured an incredulous electorate that regardless of what they had heard, or what they might believe, nothing was happening. Nothing.  And nothing would come of nothing.

Productivity was being lost while we were gripped in the paralysis of a leadership crisis. Introspection and analysis, had to stop at once, he ordered, addressing his backbench. It was time, he urged, to stop ‘navel gazing;’ time to get on with the ‘business of government.’ It was as if somehow he were no longer the people’s elected representative in a troubled political party but a small business person running a nut and bolt factory in Fisherman’s Bend, in the days before his government had closed down car-making and allied auto industries putting a quarter of a million Australians out of work.

Abbott’s advice was largely wasted on his own team, a chaotic, dysfunctional and woefully inept government which has never shown any useful reflective capacity and which has destroyed itself attempting the mundane practicalities of formulating a sound budget, health or education policy.  Several sycophants whose jobs depended on the PM were, nevertheless, quick to get into high-vis vests. Joe Hockey was a picture in buttercup yellow hard hat and high-vis everything doing the hard graft of government by having a photo taken in a pizza shop, the epitome of national productivity and model of enlightened workplace wages and conditions.

Abbott’s ‘business of government’ did not include honest communication with the people. It did not come within a bull’s roar of his giving a frank account of whatever was going wrong with his leadership; what he was doing about it and ignored the nation’s right to know these matters. No doubt this is a refinement of the much-vaunted ‘transparency’ he and his team pledged to bring to government at the last election. We will be transparent about restricting what we tell you.

Doubtless there was also another good shake of the sauce bottle of consultation Abbott announced in the Canberra headland speech. The fully consultative Captain Abbott had listened. He had heard his back bench crew all telling him the LNP bus was heading for a cliff edge and here he was on TV telling us he wanted no wimpy introspection about changes of leader or direction but having listened and he was back in the driver’s seat gunning the engine. Full speed ahead.

Abbott took other giant strides as a reborn consultative leader in responding to sooks who whinged about Peta Credlin being too bossy. As he promised the Press Club, he would listen to criticism and he would change. He quickly forgot this the next day in cabinet by confirming that Peta Credlin would continue as his chief of staff. He would continue to outsource his prime ministership.

Tipsy with the heady new consultative spirit, he outsourced the task of counting rats by getting Ian McFarlane to ask Julie Bishop where she stood. Bishop spat the dummy and flounced out. She was furious, she said, that her loyalty could be questioned. Why, her loyalty was severely tested in this attack on her integrity. 0f course, she declared later she would make herself available should the leader declare a Prime Ministerial vacancy.

Other cabinet members gave the new consultative regime a workout on the airwaves with Christopher Pyne telling other radio listeners that Malcolm Turnbull was not mounting a challenge. Why, Pyne had asked him and Turnbull had said he wasn’t. Proof indelible. Turnbull subsequently cleared up the matter of his challenging the PM completely by explaining that he was not canvassing but rather ‘merely having conversations.’

Joe Hockey invoked divine assistance, crying out aloud that, by ‘God his government had a mandate to ‘fix this country.’ But because he was wearing a silly yellow hard hat he looked like Bob the Builder and nobody took issue with his blasphemy. Hockey was, however, admirably kitted out for leasing out to shopping malls in a while-you-wait budget repair stall and is rumoured to have received a number of calls from the adult entertainment sector proposing post-political career possibilities.

Abbott’s ‘it’s not happening’ call is a gutsy captain’s call and if he were in an Iron Man, someone would have to swab him for banned substances. Nothing could further heighten the atmosphere of surreal LNP soap opera cum carnival of the animals that grips the capital, an extravaganza which has usurped all normal processes of elected government.

Abbott’s strenuous, wilful, denial is ritual reassurance, bravado and machismo all rolled into one sweaty tee shirt. It is also on a par with his finest climate change work, patently, palpably, dangerously untrue. And there are a number of known unknowns, as Rumsfeld put it, or shreds of the wreckage for him to cling to.

The spill set for next Tuesday may not eventuate, despite media notices that it is now official, Turnbull may lack sufficient support and Abbott may survive technically but at huge cost to his already plummeting legitimacy. Arthur Sinodinis has scored a body blow by declaring his less than total support for the PM. On Wednesday Sinodinis voiced conditional support only for Tony Abbott, adding, helpfully, digging his leader in as deeply as he could, that the furore around Mr Abbott ‘is not just media hype.’

Sinodinis, who agreed to down tools as assistant treasurer in order to assist with their inquiries the Sydney ICAC inquiry into corruption, is a highly respected senior Liberal who once gave John Howard advice. A former Director of Australian Water Holdings, a role which required 25 to 40 hours of work per year or not even one hour per week plus travelling netted him $200,000 PA, a reimbursement he has defended as not unreasonable. His testimony is that he was unaware of any illegality.

Sinodinis dealt a mortal blow to the Prime Minister’s career. Abbott’s political future is down the drain. He is rapidly becoming politically insolvent. And he knows it. Whilst we can expect further public reassurances to add the sense of unreality which this government has made their trademark, we can also expect dirt to be dug on such potential contenders as Malcolm Turnbull, Malcom Brough, a stalking-horse rather than a real contender and the highly ambitious, over-achieving Julie Bishop. But it will not prevent Abbott’s inevitable, ultimate defeat.

So much is stacked against the beleaguered PM that he is irreparably damaged and diminished even if he survives the mounting backbench discontent currently coalescing around Malcolm Turnbull. Millionaire Turnbull, the Croesus of LNP politics, who is far more popular to voters than to his own party, is phoning party conservatives to reassure those who are dry and those who hate him that if made leader he would stand for everything that he’d never stood for before. No carbon tax. No gay marriage. Let’s give direct action a go, no-one else has tried it. The fools he never suffered gladly may, however, remain beyond the reach of his charm offensive.

In the end, support for Abbott has taken an odd twist. His defenders chief call is that we must not look like Labor. This begs the question of whether their own chaotic, inept disunity under an out of his depth PM is a better option. Policies not personalities matter, the LNP talking points tell us conveniently overlooking the fact that it is its unfair, unworkable policies the electorate is focussed on.

Keeping Abbott would mean that the LNP should persevere with a lame duck PM who will inevitably further lose support over the remaining year and a half of his term. Do those who want to appear unlike Labor believe that a contrived unity is going to be more effective, more convincing than a change?

‘We must get on with the job of government’ is the other official LNP rallying cry. But this begs the question of whether, despite all its spin, the government’s record of achievement is anything but abysmal in its failed budget, in its climate change denial and its advocacy of coal, its cold shoulder to renewable energy, its proposal to deregulate higher education and thereby restrict to an elite those who may access their birthright, their attack on Medicare and their apparent contempt for the rights of the elderly, the sick and the poor.

No, the LNP leadership impasse has come about not because the government has failed to get the message out but because the electorate has heard and rejected the message of a government it doesn’t like. Abbott is Prime Minister of an inept government formed from an LNP set up to serve the wealthy and the privileged. His government exists to meet the needs and serve the vested interests of the power elite but it has failed to deliver. The biggest strike against Abbott is that he now puts all of this at risk. He can promise all he likes to change into someone else but in 500 days he has yet to remotely demonstrate that he is the right man for the job of Prime Minister or the right man to lead a successful government.  Those who helped put him in power must now get someone else to do his job. Turnbull is moving against him and Bishop will be on his ticket. Should they fail to get enough votes to succeed in the spill scheduled for next Tuesday, Abbott’s opponents have already dealt him out of the game.

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Australia’s Prime Minister for the time being, the feckless and friendless, ‘Toxic’ Tony Abbott who almost single-handedly has achieved the rare distinction of making himself both universally loathed and totally dispensable with astonishing and record-breaking rapidity, is in for a nervous twenty-four hours as voters in Queensland vent their anger by punishing Campbell Newman for being Campbell Newman; threatening to sell off state assets and for having something to do with the detested Federal LNP government and its hateful PM.

If Newman loses, or if the spin doctors are stumped by the size of his government’s losses, it will be curtains for maverick monarchist and general-purpose sycophant Abbott, as much as it will be Queensland’s own one-fingered salute at austerity politics with its formulaic sacking of public servants and its fervid urge to privatise ports, power plants, power lines and other ancillary public utilities, a move its hard right ideologues claim will reduce the state deficit. Normal, ordinary Queenslanders are not so struck on the plan because it will guarantee steep rises in the cost of luxury items such as household electricity. Not to mention a drop in the quality of regional power services in the far-flung state.

Damaged-brand Newman, of course, is tipped by pollsters to lose his own seat because his electorate still has voters who work for a living; voters for whom the prospect of higher utility bills is a real turn-off rather than a smart move that will boost the state’s financial bottom line whilst lining the pockets of Campbell’s pals in commerce and construction. The loss will rival Abbott’s rout-seeking self-destruction given that only three years ago his party swept to power winning 67 out of 89 seats. Newman has also made history for the number of public kisses he can bestow at any one gathering and for carrying his sports jacket on his finger to all public appearances.

Boffins are baffled by the sudden outbreak of osculation in the Queensland premier’s repertoire of stunts but, with a nod and perhaps a pucker up to Newman’s military background have dubbed such gatherings the Kiss Army. Local pharmacists are said to have stockpiled anti-viral ointment to cope with any contingent eruptions of herpes simplex amongst party faithful, although these professionals prefer the term The Smackeroos when describing Newman’s fan club. A puckering of smackeroos is said to enter the vernacular as a collective description of any meet’ n greeting of LNP party members.

Similarly, Newman’s coat-carrying is held to be an inspiring demonstration of flexibility: that the Premier has other uses for his versatile forefinger beyond pointing into the middle distance whenever a photo-opportunity presents itself.  Or perhaps he deludes himself it makes him look taller. But that’s not all. ‘Fingers’ Newman has certainly been giving his middle digit a workout in dealing with the mob in Canberra.

The banana bender’s otherwise mind-numbingly dull election campaign has been fascinating for the message sent to the PM from the Premier of the Deep North, whose state motto must now be beautiful one day, rejected the next. Keep out or we call the bikies in. Show your face and we break it. Invoking their own unique form of border protectionism and in a one fingered salute to federalism, the Queensland government, an oxymoron heading for annihilation at the hands of outraged punters, has hoped to contain some of the damage by refusing to have a bar of Abbott or any of his mob. In this they have showed a rare common-sense but it is likely to prove too little too late. The electorate is not stupid nor does it forget that Abbott was all over his best-buddy Newman like a rash not so long ago. Besides, the damage has been done or, perhaps over-done: and the last thing Newman needs is an extra hand at the barbie to cook his own goose.

Border protectionism has only barely acted to contain the southern menace, however and today a mouth from the south has opened today spruiking the Liberal brand as the only party to make you rich. Joe Hockey, Australia’s worst treasurer, who can’t handle rejection of any kind typically pointed up the Liberals’ affiliation with materialism, greed and self-interest lest it be said after the rout, that he hadn’t done anything. His embarrassing barracking for the rich and the wannabe rich from the sidelines is unlikely to do either politician any good although Hockey is so unpopular that any further decline in his ratings is meaningless.

Apart from Joe’s blowing his bags, other harm was inflicted on Newman from the southern end of the Liberal grandstand. Opposition leader Annastacia Palaszczuk whose evocative name which evokes ballet rather than any rougher body-contact sport, will appear on spelling tests in all Queensland schools henceforth, has appeared naked in caricature astride a wrecking ball on a federal politician’s Facebook page. Apologies to Miley Cyrus is written in the corner.

The image has “nothing to do with me” according to Campbell Newman in a disclaimer which evokes Christopher Pyne’s denial that he had promised Ashby a job if he helped the Libs in opposition sink the slipper into power-balance holder and former Speaker Peter Slipper. The Facebook contribution was made by Dawson Coalition MP George Christensen, whose special talent lies in the new economy growth area of creating social media outrage, made his own helpful contribution to the Queensland election campaign on Tuesday, but inexplicably the cartoon was quickly taken down.

‘All my own work’ Christensen posted a cartoon of Ms Palaszczuk naked on a wrecking ball, crashing into a wall representing jobs at the controversial Abbot Point Coal Terminal, with Greens leader Christine Milne cheering in the background. Anxious Queenslanders and spelling bee buffs are at pains to point out the one t in the name of the coal terminal.

As for Ms Palaszczuk, herself, she appears to be a thoroughly decent person with a concern for others who has showed no tendency whatsoever to suck up to Rupert Murdoch nor flirt with anyone and everything with money in its pockets in a refreshing contrast to the current incumbent and in marked contrast to the nation’s PM whose obsequious fawning and sheer determination to play the royal toad had him dub Queen Elizabeth’s consort, Abbott’s soul-mate and kindred spirit, the unreconstructed autocrat, the Duke of Edinburgh, ‘Philip- who brought him?’, the man with a gaffe for all occasions with an Australian knighthood.

‘I say to the people of Queensland don’t abandon good government tomorrow’ was the abandoned Tony Abbott’s Captain’s call today in yet another puzzling phrase, a lexicographer’s study in gratuitous fatuity, a conundrum which is nevertheless likely to enter the national lexicon for its unintentional irony, ambivalence and its capacity to make history under the heading fatal last words.

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Il y a une femme dans toutes les affaires ; aussitôt qu’on me fait un rapport, je dis : « Cherchez la femme ! Dumas

(There is a woman in every case; as soon as they bring me a report, I say, “Look for the woman!”)

His knighting of the Duke in the Australia Day honours list provided final proof to an astonished world that Australia’s beleaguered Prime Minister Anthony John Abbott, had finally gone barking mad. Now the signs all added up: his erratic, flip-flop, decision-making, his disordered habit of speaking only in moronic slogans and superficial sound bites, his mangled syntax, his bizarre parochialism in the G20, his utterly inappropriate shirt-front taunt to Putin, the G20 playground psychopath, the oddly uncoordinated way he walked like a man holding a pig under each arm all suddenly made sense. The man was crazy. How could voters have missed this? He was stark raving mad. Completely bonkers. Mad as a cut snake. You bet you are, you bet I am.

Some say that now Abbott has completely lost his marbles he must be rolled before he causes further grief; others unkindly venture that he had very few marbles in the first place; whilst those who see no change argue that he’s not about to be deposed because his party harbours no credible heir-apparent.  They point to Malcolm Turnbull, a republican moderate who is widely hated by the conservatives and Julie Bishop, who gets some points by just not being Malcolm. Some others fancy tough guy Morrison with that special love conservatives harbour for closet fascism.

Bishop is an ambitious, self-promoter but she is a less than convincing Prime Ministerial candidate who will never live down her fluffy performance as shadow treasurer in 2008. She will also forever be dogged by her Princess Mesothelioma former legal career advocacy for those who opposed the claims of asbestosis victims and rest their cases. Morrison is such a mongrel that he is always appealing to those who hanker after the chimera of ‘strong leadership’ but is monstrously unpopular precisely because of his abrasive bed-side manner and his complete and utter egomania. Yet others point to Abbott’s outstanding lack of credentials in the leadership contest he won unconvincingly by one vote in 2009. How much lower could the bar be set?

All agree, however, the Prime Minister’s behaviour has been exceeding strange of late. Even for Tony Abbott. The focus in the national press has shifted from valiantly attempting to boost his government’s meagre achievements to: ‘Now look what he’s gone and done.’ Even Miranda Devine has turned against her erstwhile champion. Now her News Corp boss, ex-Australian Rupert Murdoch, the king maker of Australian politics, has invited Julie to his bachelor pad in New York for a candlelit supper, after which he has hopped on to his Blackberry.

Rupert has come out thumbs blazing. Peta Credlin is the root of all evil, it would seem to him. Fuelled, no doubt by Bishop’s bitch session, punctuated by mutual toasts of a vintage Piper-Heidsieck, nearly as ancient as Rupert and topped up with his own abundant and free-flowing misogyny, Murdoch has clearly formulated a plan to get rid of Credlin. It can’t be all Tony’s fault. After all, he boasted, I created him. And Julie has told me herself what a cow Credlin is. Cherchez la femme!

Those cheese eating surrender monkeys, the French, have a phrase for it: ‘Cherchez la femme.’ Look for the woman whenever a bloke appears to be off his game. ‘Le Bloke’ may be trying to impress a mistress or simply cover up an affair with one. Murdoch knows all about this. Doubtless still humbled for the rest of his life by the News of the World phone-tapping scandal, he is happy enough with himself, his relationship with Rebekah Brooks that he can now muster enough chutzpah to sink the slipper into Peta Credlin. It can’t be Tony, his own show pony. It can’t be a man. Cherchez la femme! Peta Credlin is to blame, the old twat tweeted.

Amazingly, Rupe Le Pew’s tweets were identical with a column published by his very own Miranda Devine, one of countless hordes of News Corp hacks who fall over themselves to put the boot in when the boss goes off someone. In a pair of tweets yesterday, Murdoch channelled News Corp columnist Miranda Devine, who yesterday said it was time to get rid of Ms Credlin. Or vice versa.

“Tough to write, but if he won’t replace top aide Peta Credlin she must do her patriotic duty and resign,” Mr Murdoch tweeted, thumbing down Abbott’s Chief of Staff in cold blood. Many commentators will argue, of course, that the buck stops with Abbott and that the entire scapegoating of Credlin is a nasty, messy gendered business. Rupert has missed his mark. But this view underestimates the crafty old buzzard’s capacity for strategy. Whilst it pleases him to have Credlin in his sights, he knows, surely, that Abbott will never agree to stand her down and that he will not accept a Credlin resignation under such duress. Instead he must fall on his sword. Murdoch is effectively calling for Abbott’s resignation.

Thumb still smouldering, Rupe Le Pew tweeted, apparently after reflection and a single malt whisky. “Forget fairness. This change only way to recover team work and achieve so much possible for Australia. Leading involves cruel choices”.

Murdoch could be hoping cynically that Abbott, a former Rhodes Scholar would forsake his Rhodesian principles for an act of cruelty. Cecil Rhodes’ criteria, however, cover a fair bit of territory: literary and scholastic attainments; energy to use one’s talents to the fullest, as exemplified by fondness for and success in sports; truth, courage, devotion to duty, sympathy for and protection of the weak, kindliness, unselfishness and fellowship; moral force of character and instincts to lead and to take an interest in one’s fellow beings.

Some of these principles governing behavior will take observers by surprise because they have been well-concealed so far by the PM but doubtless they have been internalized. Doubtless, also they point up by contrast what commended Abbott to Murdoch; what prompted him to back the then aspiring PM in the first place. Beneath the cachet of the Rhodes Scholar, Murdoch saw an unbridled pragmatism and a ruthless, if not fanatical determination and self-belief. Above all, he saw another radical conservative and a politician who would cheerfully do his bidding.

Rupert’s tweets have done all Australians an immense favour. They have shown where the power lies when it comes to Liberal governments. Such public tweaking of the strings of his puppet politician Abbott is really an enormous act of public service. Abbott must take the heat; do what Rupert wants or get out of the kitchen. Similarly the use of identical phrases in his tweets to the words used by Miranda Devine, the doyenne of his Australian tabloid press helps clarify the power relationship. Rupert rules the Liberal Party by force and very little if any finesse and is completely unafraid to put his instructions on Twitter for all to see.

We can forget all the rabid chattering about freedom and liberty in Abbott’s treatise Battlelines. We can ignore the waffle that accompanies the LNP’s latest draconian cut to social services, well-being or employment in the public service or in manufacturing. Liberal party philosophy never amounted to a hill of beans anyway. Now we can focus even more clearly on Abbott’s veneration of the power elite and the way he is programmed to do its bidding; his unalloyed loyalty to tycoonery above almost anything else.

That almost anything else includes Peta Credlin, however, and it is impossible at this stage to see Abbott, ‘letting her go’. To do so would invite another bucketing for his treatment of women. Moreover, it would further expose his own vulnerability as an antipodean Chauncey Gardiner. Besides Abbott would be lost without Peta Credlin by his side; someone to do his makeup, write his script, answer his questions in cabinet and even tell him what to wear, such as that flash bomber jacket he wore on his lightning visit to Iraq. And in the end he must accept full responsibility for making the Duke a knight. To do otherwise would reveal a damaging insight into who is really Prime Minister.

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“Hey, my name is David Hicks,” he shouted, as Senator Brandis wrapped up his address at a Human Rights Awards function.

“I was tortured for five-and-a-half years in Guantanamo Bay in the full knowledge of your party. What do you have to say?”

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Attorney-General George Brandis plumped himself expectantly before an ABC News 24 camera in Canberra late last week.  Brandis, a former trade practices lawyer, as pallid as an undead vampire, appeared like some portly nocturnal creature who had strayed somehow uncomfortably into daylight.

Brandis frowned, blinked myopically and peered about. The afternoon sun fell mercilessly on his pale bald pate. Was he expecting someone or just looking for the camera?  Was David Hicks’ challenge ringing in his small but perfectly formed ears? Or was it tinnitus? Off camera someone was giving instructions which Brandis was having trouble following.  Where to stand, perhaps.

The United States had just agreed David Hicks’ innocence after years of wrongful imprisonment in Guantanomo Bay. Viewers naturally expected Brandis had called the conference to apologise to Hicks. His conscience, we just assumed, had got the better of him. Obama had surely had a word. Now Brandis would step up to the plate and deliver a public apology. Others had been calling for one.

Hicks’ lawyer Stephen Kenny said his client David Hicks was looking forward to having his name cleared and deserved an apology from the Australian government.

“He understands that we’re really on the last straight to having his conviction cleared. So of course he is very excited about it and he would be very pleased to have his name cleared.”

Mr Kenny hoped the Australian Government would apologise for its part in Mr Hicks’s treatment.

“I think their support of holding David in Guantanamo Bay in those conditions for so long is a severe embarrassment and he at least deserves an apology from those who were involved,” he said.

“The current Government could issue an apology to David on behalf of the Howard Government and recognise that the Australian Government and in particular the Howard Government’s support of Guantanamo Bay was a serious error.”

Anticipation was mounting. Brandis would announce that he was sorry and then, we guessed, announce that his government had set up a compensation package for Hicks to make up for the suffering it had caused an innocent man. Surely, given its liability, the government would make a belated attempt at restitution and reparation for the damage and suffering caused to Hicks and his family.

A package must surely be in the offing. This would include a substantial consideration for damage caused to their reputations as a result of the Australian government’s support of his five and a half years of wrongful imprisonment and torture in Guantanomo Bay by the United States of America. There could even be specific reference to an out of court settlement for damage and loss caused by the George Brandis’ own libellous comments. Gerard Henderson would then surely follow.

But, no, our hopes and expectations were dashed. Brandis opened his mouth only to waste everyone’s time with another dull diatribe against home-grown Jihadists who went to fight for ISIS.  Perhaps we expected too much. Perhaps it was unreasonable to expect accountability or moral propriety from this man in pin stripes blinking in the Canberra sun or his government on their maltreatment and abandonment of Hicks. Perhaps it was a bridge too far, on a par with expecting Brandis to renounce his membership of the elitist, Bohemian, male-only Melbourne Savage Club with its guttural noises, chest-beating and other male bonding rituals.

Logically, this is not too much to expect. The Savage Club’s pledge to free-love, frugality and voluntary poverty, required of all members is a poor fit for Brandis, a fine dining voluptuary keenly working his way through a hefty smorgasbord of entitlement, assisted by Australian taxpayers who have invested heavily extra thousands in the senator’s hospitality, wine bill, custom-made bookshelves, his library and his many other perks of office. Why, a modest dining out, a meal with a special guest or two could cost over a thousand dollars. Then was the drinks bill after.

Brandis bumbled through a script about how the whole Australian nation must quake in its beds over the real risks of foreign fighters and how many there were and a lot of other scare-mongering of a similar nature, all without any evidence whatsoever.  The Attorney-General aired yet again the absurd Abbott government argument that legions of Australian foreign fighters are in fact a real and present danger to anyone at home. You can hear the same scenario from David Cameron and other self-styled defenders of freedom who sing from the same song book.

Brandis, who resembles Mr Magoo more than any lynx eyed legal beagle or even any Attorney General, appeared discombobulated, asking which way he should be facing whilst making odd shuffling and turning movements like a male emperor penguin who has been given an egg to incubate. It didn’t put him off his autocue, however. He was getting the message out. He even waved to someone off camera in that disconcertingly matey way favoured by so many deluded self-alienating others of his political persuasion. No-one was observed waving back.

Attorney-General Brandis claimed grandly ‘the total number of Australians thought to be involved in the conflict was now around 90, up from roughly 75 late last year,’ No evidence was given. Nor would evidence ever be forthcoming. National security legislation made such matters off limits to mere citizens.

‘Let us be fearful,’ was Brandis’ message, ‘for we harbour enemies in our midst.’ Or enemies who go and fight with ISIS and return all primed and battle-hardened to wreak terror at home. Such official warnings, such secrecy of operations and denunciations of public enemies have been favoured historically by totalitarian governments and by the United States in its war on terror. Show trials of apprehended enemies are part of totalitarian states repertoire of repression techniques. Captured public enemies such as David Hicks fits the bill perfectly. In leading Melbourne barrister Robert Richter QC’s words:

The charade that took place at Guantanamo Bay would have done Stalin’s show trials’ proud. First there was indefinite detention without charge. Then there was the torture; however the Bush lawyers, including his Attorney-General, might choose to describe it. Then there was the extorted confession of guilt.

Whatever Hicks may have done, the theatre of a voluntary plea of guilty when the choice is “rot in hell or say it’s true so you can go home” is worthy of The Grand Inquisitor. In Stalin’s as well as the German show trials of the 1930s, the essence of the display was the public confession, followed by the sentence. Details of the offence, of course, were crafted carefully by authorities to fit the current climate of fear-mongering and witch-hunting. And last week, Brandis was cranking the propaganda handle of the state’s fear machine.

Warming to his theme, Senator Brandis claimed intelligence agencies had noticed the “disturbing” demographic shift in the last six months. No-one present appeared remotely disturbed but our intelligence agencies are well-placed and well-paid to be disturbed on the nation’s behalf and we can expect George Brandis and the entire Abbott cabinet to bring this disturbance to our notice.

“More and more very young people are … being enticed and ensnared here in Australia with the false glamour of participating in the civil war on behalf of ISIL, or DAESH,” Brandis said hoping no-one would notice the parallel with members of the Australian armed forces whose numbers were soon to be increased by a Prime Minister seeking false glamour to boost his standing in the polls, a Prime Minister who is happy to pretend to the nation that we are supporting an Iraqi government at its request instead of following the US and in the process causing further grief and mischief by propping up a corrupt dictatorship with its own terror squads which inflict barbaric and brutal summary executions on innocent Iraqi civilians who happen to belong to be Sunni rather than Shia.

Fondly savouring his use of DAESH, because ISIS finds the term derogatory, Brandis’ acronym invokes ad-Dawlah al-Islāmīyah fil ‘Irāq wa ash-Shām a phrase which means The Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria.

Brandis was merely following his leader, Tony Abbott, who prefers a similar disdain for any nuanced appreciation of the conflict in Iraq.  Neither man appears to give a fig for the consequences despite both being keen to impress upon us the dangers we face from ISIS followers and would-be followers in our midst.

“DAESH hates being referred to by this term, and what they don’t like has an instinctive ­appeal to me,” Abbott said with relish in name-calling and a typical eagerness to give offence despite a situation urging caution.

ISIS supporters take offence because DAESH crucially omits the Islamic portion of the name. According to The Guardian’s Ian Black, DAESH “entered the ever-adaptive Arabic language big time: in the plural form — ‘daw’aish’ — it means bigots who impose their views on others.” ISIS leaders have threatened “to cut out the tongues” of anyone caught using the term DAESH.

Our own champion of 18C bigotry, Brandis’ appearance was also a classic in its own right, a highlight of the ABC News 24 chook-feeding news release. This ‘news’ looks increasingly like a propaganda session. Typically a government politician appears before a gathering of cameras to read his spiel and then pretends to answer inaudible questions. Sometimes we can faintly hear ‘reporters’ asking their questions. This gives the whole media release circus an additional absurdist twist as if the politician is talking to himself or herself in public (again). It also adds an extra level of incoherence to Brandis’ natural, halting delivery.

What is not absurd is how suppressing any comment or question or any real context favours propaganda and deviates from any responsibility to inform objectively. Of course, the trend towards a lack of audible questions in press releases and media briefings could simply be due to technical bungling or even ABC cutbacks but it needs to stop. The public has a right to know the truth.

Brandis blinking in the sun, an Attorney General briefing Australians on matters thought to be rather than known to be; assertions without evidence or explanation represents a government intent on feeding our fears whilst side-stepping its duty to inform; evading questions, shrugging aside responsibility, rationality and moral accountability. Denying David Hicks an apology or putting an apology on hold helps maintain the myth of the enemy of the state, a convenient construct to permit new laws, increased security and secrecy which effectively take all of us prisoner.

 

Hunger strike continues and expands on Manus: the Minister’s intemperate statements that asylum seekers are making “exaggerated and unfounded claims” are driving more people to join the protest. Ninety-five percent of Mike Compound – over 300 people – is now on hunger strike.

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‘Manus Island is an experiment in the ultimate logic of deterrence, designed to frustrate the hell out of people and terrify them so that they go home. Your two options are indefinite detention or to return to the country where you fear persecution.’ Liz Thompson, refugee advocate on SBS Dateline.

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No words could ever describe life in Manus Island Detention Centre, but imagine a makeshift, overcrowded, run-down camp of peeling weatherboard cabins, tents and shipping containers sweltering and festering in the jungle on a hot, humid, far-flung island amidst some of the poorest and most disadvantaged people in the world.

Your only company is that of other wretched unfortunates like yourself. Should you be ‘processed’ and found to be a genuine refugee, you may be freed but only to be settled locally. The local people, however, resent your presence. Your sense of entrapment is suffocating. Blend in the isolation, disease, and heat and you have Manus Island’s mission to deter.

The only hope of getting out of Manus is to return home to certain persecution or, if ‘processing’ establishes your bona fide refugee status, you will be set down amongst hostile locals to wait for re-settlement in another part of PNG that a reluctant, corrupt and inefficient government has not yet set up.  You could be there for years, if you survive. You fear for your life. Not that you are safe inside Manus, especially should you protest (and almost everyone must).

Four days ago, asylum seekers reported that guards threatened to rape and beat those of them who did not stop their protest. Fatal force was used a year ago when a mob of guards, staff, police and residents stormed the detention centre. They beat Iranian Reza Barati to death. Dozens of other asylum seekers were injured. The trauma of that beating and the violence of the mob are nightmares which still haunt the asylum seekers, many of whom are also suffering the trauma of war.

Fifty men have been told that on 22 January they will be forcibly resettled, a prospect which has precipitated the asylum seekers’ latest desperate bid to be listened to, a protest in which 700 people are still on hunger strike. Men have stitched together their lips in hunger strikes whilst one has attempted to commit suicide by swallowing razor blades and two have been stopped from hanging themselves.

Force is integral to Manus’ brutal regime. Whilst Immigration Minister Peter Dutton may deplore the demonstrations, he appears as wilfully oblivious as his predecessor, Morrison, to the institutionalised violence of the prison camp itself, to say nothing of the coercion involved in the parent policy of offshore detention itself.  When pressed on the issue, Dutton also follows Morrison’s lead in taking refuge in denial and hair-splitting semantics.

A “degree of force” Dutton concedes, was used on protestors but claims that the situation hasn’t turned violent. Asylum seekers beg to differ. They claim that detainees were “beaten like dogs” by guards. Dutton will, no doubt, claim they are making this up, just as he dismissed the claims that protestors had been refused drinking water, despite video evidence to the contrary. Sadly, such discrepancies have become a major theme in the reporting of Immigration and Border protection matters and make a mockery of promises of ‘transparency,’ a buzz-word on every government minister’s lips. The denial of reality is another powerful tool, moreover, in Manus’ campaign of psychological warfare against refugees and is helped by a context of privation.

Cruel privations include a lack of drinking water, low personal safety, poor hygiene and no first aid or adequate emergency medication. Reza Barati was beaten to death. Hamid Khazaei died of an infected cut caused by chromobacterium violaceum, a bacteria which can aggressively attack internal organs after entering the bloodstream.  In both cases, the authorities’ slow responses may well have contributed to their tragic deaths.

The worst cruelty, however, is the attack on the human spirit. Beyond words is the unrelenting, daily dashing of hope, the relentless, inexorable sense of abandonment, loss, failure, worthlessness and being forever cut off from family and friends and hope.

‘Life’ on Manus is not life as anyone of us outside would know it but more a type of death-in-life, a living nightmare. Only those who are locked up in here can truly know what it is to set out on a desperate quest for safety; a dangerous all or nothing bid for freedom only to end up in a stifling over-crowded badly-run prison that should never have been a prison in the first place.

Manus is not a place you would wish on your worst enemy. Yet for the thousand and thirty men who must suffer incarceration in its badly equipped, overcrowded and poorly designed facilities it is hell on earth. And that is its purpose: Manus is a prison designed to cripple the human spirit. Forget the euphemisms, ‘detention centre’ and ‘processing centre’ for these are part of the nightmare; part of the equivocating language of state cruelty in which terms are formulated to hide unpleasant truths; part of an impossible burden of uncertainty, a web of unknowing, a prison which crushes a man’s spirit or sends him mad with despair. ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here for we have abandoned you, is Manus real motto.’ That abandonment is evident at every waking moment to all prisoners. It is reinforced by the facilities themselves.

Manus is a crowded, hot and dirty existential hell where men are consigned indefinitely for the crime of being forced to flee from persecution. It is hidden away, off the map, because it is a shameful abuse of our human obligations to others in need; an unconscionable abuse of their human rights. And it is blanketed in secrecy by a government which has no other solution than to resort to coercion, secrecy and lies.

In one darkened sleeping centre in Foxtrot compound, 122 men must share a room. It has no air-conditioning. In Delta compound, AAP media, visiting in March saw filthy toilets with no running water. There were broken showers in another compound. In the largest compound, Oscar, Amnesty reports, 500 men receive only a dozen bottles of water per day to share between themselves, a ration of less than 500ml of water per person per day which is extremely insufficient, especially given the heat and humidity.

Tightly packed shipping containers arrayed in rows, in another compound, each sleep four or five men. Deprivation and hardship are found at every turn, although the supervision is not without foresight. The guards in Manus Island’s prison are instructed to carry hooked knives to cut the ropes asylum seekers use to try to hang themselves.

Manus is meant as a deterrent, a place, to use former Immigration Minister Morrison’s phrase where the sugar is off the table.’ But as the latest protests attest, deterrence is not working, nor is the system that bequeathed it working. Manus is set to implode in violence.

The prison at Manus Island, keystone of our deeply flawed immigration policy’s ironically entitled PNG solution, is no solution at all. It is a squalid, unworkable compromise between the politically confected ‘asylum seeker problem’ with its rhetoric of stop the boats and the bare necessities of custodial care.

While our government pats itself on the back for a job well done, the evidence attests otherwise. Their asylum-seeker problem is far from solved. Nothing has been well done.  Costing $632 million or half a million dollars per detainee last year alone to administer, Manus attests to our failure to develop any other policy beyond containment, an expensive holding pen where asylum seekers are at risk of death or injury and serious psychological damage.

Manus is less an answer than a series of serious questions about how we see ourselves and how we treat others in need, questions that go to the heart of what it is to be human; questions which puncture the machismo of our national identity; questions which prompt a growing source of acute national shame and self-reproach to all decent Australian citizens in whose name endless, incalculable cruelties are inflicted daily. Why and how can we allow it to go on? It is time we stepped up to the plate and owned our own part in what is done on our behalf; done in our name; time we stood up and were counted.

For it is in the name of the Australian people that 1030 men have been locked up against their will; consigned to oblivion in an existential hell for daring to seek our help; locked down in a gulag in the midst of one of the most disadvantaged communities in the world. We have put them in a gulag.

Powes Parkop, a human rights lawyer and governor of Port Moresby and the National Capital District, who grew up on Manus Island, coins the term Pacific gulag to describe the hell into which we have confined asylum seekers. ‘The Manus detention centre offends both PNG law and local culture,’ he says. The PNG mobile squad police do not help the situation.

Squads of PNG’s notorious mobile squad police have been brought in as hired muscle. Ostensibly there to guard the ‘detention centre’ enterprise, the mobile squad has made a violent impact on the local community causing the deaths to date of two locals, one beaten to death in full view for a critical remark, another a promising schoolboy knocked down by a drunk driver, a mobile squad policeman who veered on to the wrong side of the road. The policeman had been observed drinking heavily during that day.

The mobile squad enforces compliance with the enterprise, menacing villagers who may object to any detention centre activities. It was supporting the prison staff when Reza Berati was beaten to death.

Australians are not by nature cruel, vindictive or lacking in compassion. How can we live with ourselves while Manus continues to exist? How can we remain unmoved when those we have locked up protest or are forced to resort to self-harm because it is their only remaining avenue of redress? It is a dangerous place. One person per day is put in isolation for their own safety. According to leaked medical records there have been at least forty-eight medical evacuations to date.

Manus exists to inflict barbaric treatment and utterly undeserved punishment on the dispossessed; to maltreat those vulnerable, innocent, long suffering peoples whose only mistake has been to seek our help, our compassion and our understanding in their desperate need to take refuge from persecution at home, a refuge which they have every right to seek.

It is not illegal to seek refuge. The 1951 United Nations convention offers protection to those fleeing their country as a result of “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion”. What is illegal and immoral is our denial of our obligations and responsibilities to our fellow human beings who through no fault of their own, people who have done no wrong except to be in the wrong place at the wrong time just happen to be refugees. Manus is our disgrace, our national shame: its existence does not reflect creditably on any of us.

Along with the other hell-holes such as Nauru, Christmas Island, and the yet to be commissioned Cambodian detention centre, our political newspeak blunts the truth of, preferring terms such as detention centres or processing centres, the legal framework under which asylum seekers are transferred to and held at Manus Island has been heavily criticised by leading international human rights organisations such as the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) and Amnesty International and by the Australian Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights and the Australian Human Rights Commission. The UN speaks out against the flagrant violations of human rights such as indefinite detention and the incarceration of children. Surely Manus is an abomination. How did it come about?

Manus has been an ‘out of sight out of mind’ instrument of Australian immigration policy since 2001 when John Howard conceived his Pacific Solution in response to what it called the ‘Tampa crisis,’ a manufactured crisis with lies about babies overboard and other forms of deceit all cynically calculated to win political advantage and obscure the reality of the cruel and violent interception of an asylum seeker boat. Howard’s Pacific Solution set in train the process of offshore detention, a type of forcible deportation which has cost all of us dearly both in our international reputation and in our sense of ourselves, to say nothing of the utter ruination of the lives of the asylum-seekers. The damage is incalculable. The Pacific Solution, a phrase uncomfortably close to the NAZI Final Solution, was neither ‘pacific’ nor was it any ‘solution.’

Off shore detention has stripped all decent Australians of their natural capacity, their instinct to practice tolerance, compassion and humanity. It has violated that sense of ourselves we call mateship, our spontaneous instinct to support, help and deal fairly with others and it has vitiated our natural impulse towards acceptance, understanding and compassion. It is time we called a stop to the practice. It is time we tended the needs of the all those who desperately turn to us for help. Far more than a blot on the body politic, Manus is an atrocity in the name of us all, an inhumanity which diminishes us all.

Far from the public eye, its isolation originally commended Manus Island, which lies about 800km north of Port Moresby, to Howard’s government because it provided an extra dimension of deprivation and suffering to asylum seekers, whom it was resolved to deal with as harshly as possible to ‘send a message to people smugglers.’ Yet what is that message?

No better, surely, than terrorists who attack a few targets to send a message to a whole society, argues Nick Reimer, of the Refugee Action Collective, Sydney.

How best to deal with the monster of Manus? We should begin by rejecting the cloak of secrecy that was invoked by Morrison with his quasi-military regime and his refusal to speak of ‘on-water’ matters. It is inappropriate and it is undemocratic. We are not at war. Elected governments have a clear and abiding responsibility to inform all citizens of their operations. We need to demand up to date, objective information as our right. The right to visit Manus which was denied our Human Rights Commissioner, Gillian Triggs and denied to our media should be re-instated immediately.

We must reject entirely the language of manipulation. Manus is a prison; its prisoners are being dealt with in a way calculated to cause hardship and suffering beyond the privations of incarceration. Let us use plain words to tell plain truths. We are punishing the innocent because it suits us to blame others rather than confront ourselves and our own failings at the heart of the problem. We have allowed ourselves to believe absurd lies and myths about asylum seekers when we should be listening to each asylum seeker and opening our hearts.

Above all we must call a stop to blaming the victim. Riots occur when people have no other means of being noticed, being heard. End the foolish nonsense of pretending that the demonstrations at Manus are somehow not genuine. Challenge official explanations.

Rookie Immigration Minister Dutton, whose first act in his new job was to arm customs officers, has so far has shown all the feelings of a crash test dummy and something of the same demeanour. He should not be allowed to get away with allegations which he refuses to substantiate.

On ABC recently Dutton refused to give detail to support his allegation that prisoners were armed. He did, however, tender the ludicrously implausible explanation that Manus Island asylum seekers had been coached in self-harm by refugee advocates for political motives.

Imagine this bizarre claim in reality. The ‘advocate’ sews up his or her own lips or swallows razor blades outside the wire and the asylum seeker copies his or her coach.

Even more ludicrous is Dutton’s implication that everyone is happy but a few trouble-makers have stirred the others up. Only a few? Informal reports suggest we are talking about 700 out of 1030 men who are demonstrating. Dutton’s paranoid logic, moreover, boggles the imagination.  Who would travel to Manus just to foment a demonstration for political purposes? He needs to be required to supply evidence.

The only suspect political motives to be deplored in Manus Island are entirely this government’s own. Instead of blaming advocates who seek to ease suffering, the government should admit it has failed, close the prison, close down the offshore detention system and relocate the asylum seekers to the mainland where they can be released into the community until such time as their claims are proved.

We need to press all our politicians to act responsibly in Immigration especially, sharing all information essential to accountability. Reject their spin and their jargon and ask clear questions which probe the heart of the matter. Assert our right to see for ourselves. The offshore detention centre system is a prison set up to punish those hapless souls we have caught fleeing from persecution. They have thrown themselves on our mercy. Let us not throw them in prison on Manus Island or any other island but rather take them in and minister to them for in this we affirm our humanity. There is no other possible course of action.