---

‘I think the nation is ready for a conversation about our future.’ Joe Hockey, Australia’s hapless treasurer, fingered the ‘conversation’ trope reverently as if it were a worn rosary bead. Hockey exuded paternalistic concern and affable superiority. As ever, he knew what was best for us. It was as if Dad had noticed one of the kids needed a haircut or a clip over the ear for wasting grocery money on sweets. His actions, however, show rather less concern for future generations. By December the Abbott government will have doubled Labor’s debt.

Regrettably the Treasurer could not provide any real rationale for our nation being ready to talk about our futures. The dog ate his homework. He had been hoping to lean heavily on the government’s intergenerational report but its release has been held up by the political chaos rife in the party. Now his case was missing but, typically, that wasn’t holding him back. He was pressing on with the business of good government. He explained this to 3AW’s Neil Mitchell.

“I am doing the heavy lifting for my country,” Hockey said. “I am going to keep going because that’s what people say to me on the streets, ‘keep going, Joe’, and I am keeping going.”

However flatteringly he may choose to portray himself as the virtuous laborer in the vineyard of ‘reform’ for the media, the results paint a different picture of the Treasurer. He’s a gunner. Last year, for example, Hockey had promised the IGR (Intergenerational Report) by the end of December 2014. Its postponement means he has broken the Charter of Budget Honesty Act. The tax reform white paper is also overdue.  These will form the basis for the “deeper conversation with the Australian people” that ‘gunner’ Hockey proposes to have with us.

Before bowling us over with the logic of IGR’s statistical trends, the Treasurer and his government would do well to ensure ‘the fundamentals are in place’ for a genuine dialogue. There is a lot of ground to make up. A first step would be for the government to demonstrate that it is genuinely interested in dialogue with the electorate. So far it has been simply driven by neo-liberal ‘dry’ economic ideology, an ideology that is imposed with the help of scare tactics and fear campaigns. Ideology not dialogue is what keeps Hockey and his government going.

Delaying the release of the report will also effectively curtail discussion as business interest and lobby groups have pointed out. Other commentators have suggested that the delay is in part due to the need to rewrite the tax paper to meet Abbott’s change of heart over any extension of the GST. Regardless of the cause, the result is to guillotine debate. Good faith has not been kept.

Conversations are founded on honesty, trust and mutual respect, Mr Hockey. Your surplus promise was not a good start. You promised: ‘we will achieve a surplus in our first year in office and we will achieve a surplus for every year of our first term. ’Broken election promises, meltdowns at the top, your government’s flip-flop policy changes mean that you have some huge repairs to make to your credibility before you can begin to engage in real dialogue.

Real dialogue is possible only when each party knows where the other stands. Right now it seems that you and your PM are not on the same page. Tony Abbott’s all for easing back from the ‘tough measures’ as you call them. But you are on the other track. You are not budging from austerity, despite its dismal record overseas. So which is the correct government policy?  Is it ideologically dry or a little bit wet as a sop to the voters? A man cannot dance at two weddings with one behind, Joseph. If you want a national conversation you need to tell us where your party stands. And you need to tell the truth.

Honesty went out the window with your next act of duplicity, your debt and deficit drama. You wanted to scare us into accepting your ideologically driven budget agenda, an agenda which would have resulted in higher unemployment and a slowdown in the economy. This flea-bitten, threadbare pantomime warhorse needs retiring, Mr Hockey. It’s an embarrassing fake. Debt is not an issue in itself. What counts is the ratio of debt to GDP. On that we are in rude good health.

Last week you claimed that Australia will owe a trillion dollars by 2037, a figure based on our ‘current debt trajectory.’ Top marks for doing your best to crank up a scary big number, but it’s not this figure that matters. It never has. What matters is the ratio of debt to GDP.

Government debt is now about 20 per cent of GDP, a ratio it has maintained historically. Since GDP grows nominally at around 5 per cent a year, the debt to GDP ratio stays unchanged if debt also grows by 5 per cent. In brief, the budget is near enough to being in balance that it is not worth worrying about. Yet you happily terrify the population with the spectre of ruin. Is that good government? Responsible economic management?

Years ago, Joe Hockey enjoyed real celebrity credibility with a regular spot on the Sunrise Show. Hockey played the genial buffoon to his frenemy Kevin the nerd in a show full of blokey, jokey bonhomie and other televisual small change. There was a lot of stirring and kidding along between the chummy pair with the odd low calorie political point thrown in. For a moment they both looked like fixtures but John Howard wasn’t happy at Joe’s fraternising with the enemy and in the end Kevin got caught up in an issue of honesty and integrity.

The sun set on the ‘Joe and Kevin Sunrise show’ nearly eight years ago when Rudd’s false dawn created a stir. Rudd rang the producer to pull the pin. The public was kicking up a fuss over his involvement in a plan by the show to stage a false dawn service broadcast from Vietnam on Anzac Day. Rudd saw it as threatening his credibility and honesty.

It was to be all downhill from Rudd’s false dawn. After some brilliant work from his team protecting us from the GFC, micro-managing control freak Rudd went on to stuff up government, set back the Labor cause and ‘fair shake of the sauce bottle,’ mangle the vernacular.

Hockey began ranting about the ugliness of wind farms.  Once in power he was banging the drum for big ticket ‘reforms’ which would penalise the poor but help wealthy interest groups towards amassing even greater wealth.

Better for the nation had they both stayed on Sunrise. Kevin grinned his heart out, dumbed down his act and pulled his punches. Joe carved out a role as the nation’s boofhead goodwill ambassador. He was going places then. He was a shoo-in for a big part in a children’s show had he put the hours in. Whatever made him put his hand up for a job he could never do.  A job he for which he lacks both qualifications and experience? As federal treasurer he makes a great former TV bit-player. He could have had a real career.

Hockey could have got a gig as host on the Price is Right or some other minor celebrity game or virtual reality show which left the contestants to do the maths and count the money. He was a natural for the role of unassuming ordinary bloke with less to him than met the eye.

Now his job has bested him; now he has revealed his allegiance with the big end of town; now he has shown he is an ideologue whose policies favour the elite, Hockey’s popular appeal has vanished. His party will dump him along with his leader when Abbott’s next major stuff-up forces it to finally come to its senses and turn to politicians who have more than cosmetic appeal.

Hockey can call for a conversation all he likes but he has forfeited his part in any real national dialogue with his duplicity, his scaremongering and his ideologically driven campaign for austerity measures that preserve the privilege of an elite at the expense of the rest of society.

Above all, conversations require trust and mutual respect. Honesty is vital. This government and its treasurer have destroyed the very foundations on which to build any real dialogue with the people. It is no use promising to patch things up or to restart let alone invite us to a chat about our future, Joe, when your government’s fundamental underpinnings are rotten at the core.

---

Like a fart in a pickle barrel the Federal Coalition reverberated from crisis to catastrophe in a woeful week in which everything went wrong again, perhaps its worst week yet, a week which began with the PM’s rude April Fool’s-Valentine card Monday’s ballot on his leadership where he made history by narrowly beating off a challenge from an empty chair to his Friday last minute sacking of Father of the House Ruddock while proclaiming profusely his undying friendship and esteem for his mate.

Hate mail from former supporters continued unabated. The Daily Telegraph’s Samantha Maiden, dubbed Peta Credlin ‘the nation’s first female Liberal Prime Minister — unelected, mind you — that we never knew we had.’ Credlin, was, however, Abbott’s ‘one unmoveable chess piece,’ he said, besides, she was far too powerful to be a PM, although he was keeping her out of Cabinet and the advisors’ bench in the House while the fuss all blew over. Bugger Ruddock. Credlin was loyal.

‘Not the right move,’ Julie Bishop bristled and archly briefed the media that Credlin was ‘a powerful figure’ who was ‘full of opinions’ and her boss was ‘a smart man’ who could join the dots. Flattery will not get you everywhere, however and Bishop accordingly threw in, for good measure, her character assessment of her boss, made to his face in a full and frank screaming match earlier.

‘You are you own worst enemy, Tony’. In Tuesday’s joint party room meeting, those present had Credlin in their sights when they brought a motion to sack any staffer who ‘backgrounded’ against a minister. Nothing was said about a briefing backstab, Bishop had noted on her legal notepad.

Dumping Ruddock was all about fostering stronger bonds with the backbench. It was renewal, Abbott explained, thankfully avoiding using the reset button image but fooling no-one. He had knifed Ruddock last thing Friday, as he and Peta put out the trash and tidied up the office. Ruddock had not whipped up enough support for his leader in the spill.

It was a novel, perhaps, dangerous interpretation of the role of Chief Party Whip and risked conflating party with leader but at least the new boy Scott Buchholz would have a real whip to crack even if many saw him as a National Party hick in origin and for sundry other reasons would have no real dealings with him.

Rabid Abbott flatterer Tasmanian MP Andrew Nikolic has also been elevated to government Whip. Nikolic, an effusive supporter of the Prime Minister since entering Parliament in 2013 would be guaranteed to nurture the views of all fellow sycophants as he skilfully forges consensus between backbench and leader. His promotion should also clear up some of the delay in news of dissent reaching the ears of the PM, a problem which appears to have bedevilled his administration lately.

The PM’s use of ‘renewal’ really meant reverting to a ‘command and control regime’ with bullying as required, for example in his hysterical attack on Gillian Triggs for daring to publish a report critical of his government. She was a shameless political partisan, he bellowed and he later got Brandis to send round a message boy telling her she should resign, another alarming precedent in ‘good government,’ as it was a complete breach of etiquette.  Malcolm Fraser stuck up for Triggs and deplored Abbott’s bullying in the press. ‘Stronger bonds’ meant more bullying: he would put those backbench bastards on a tighter leash. The old junkyard dog was back and bigger than ever.

Whilst the shafting of Ruddock caused uproar, it was not enough, in itself, to be the ‘next big mistake’ a cabinet member had predicted would terminate Abbott’s leadership and the message to move on was put out by Rupert’s new friend Julie Bishop who proclaimed on the Tuesday: ‘Leadership challenges are so yesterday.’ Or tomorrow. Some insiders claim that 47 votes for Turnbull could be counted now with others accruing as the PM’s latest captain’s call alienated the party.

Popularity plummeting, party unity unravelling, policies in tatters, the Abbott government proceeded to struggle to govern itself, let alone govern the country.  Its messages were a flip-flop flapdoodle of contradiction, inconsistency and lunatic denial. Its cabinet members were confused and dazed; its backbench bolshie.

‘Must cut government spending,’ Hockey spluttered but Abbott had tax cuts, jobs and undisclosed family-friendly bribes in mind for the budget. Higher education costs or some of them would be discounted in a predicted ‘softening’ of unpopular policies.

Pyne turned his considerable energy to kicking the standards can and would also kick a few heads to see that beginning teachers were literate and numerate or he would personally confiscate their chalk. The government’s only plan was to keep repeating inanely that it had a plan. Where was it? Where was party discipline? Sack the whip?

Some see The Whip’s dismissal as scapegoating. Incapable of responding to its leadership crisis the LNP opted for an easier target and shot the messenger. Cadaverous, slow moving Party Whip and longest serving Liberal MP, Philip Ruddock, is clearly pacing himself for the record books. Only ‘The Little Digger’ with a 51 year stint, stands between Ruddock and the record books. Hughes was also not very tall attesting perhaps to the longevity of smaller targets.

Many cannot forget nor forgive the bloodless Ruddock’s stint as John Howard’s Minister for Immigration where babies were said to be thrown overboard among other whopping lies to demonise asylum seekers arriving in leaky boats. ‘Turn back the unworthy illegal queue-jumping bastards’ became a popular talkback line and has since cemented into a bipartisan policy, excluded only by Section 18C from official documents.

Yet this ritual bloodletting has only weakened the patient. Outrage is mounting amongst emotional party members who equate Ruddock’s despatch with the slaughter of the water buffalo in Apocalypse Now as an unforgiveable act of gratuitous cruelty. Abbott, doubtless, would be Kurtz in this scenario. Regardless of his ‘tough on boats’ history as a Howard heavy and for many, because of it the worthy time-serving Nestorian Ruddock enjoys some standing as a type of counsellor and mentor. Feelings are running high. Abbott’s latest poorly judged captain’s flick may prove his final undoing as he struggles to do anything at all successful in the dog days of his Prime Ministership.

Cabinet members bicker. Parliamentary debate degenerates into denouncing Labor in a desperate last-ditch bid to win back credibility by its rattled leader. ‘I can beat Bill Shorten,’ boasted the PM on Monday. The nation’s naysayer’s naysayer is incapable of interpreting the results of his leadership spill motion beyond a signal to go back on attack. Yet a week earlier, at the Press Club, the leader was promising a new era of consultation, collegiality and candlelit suppers. No wonder the LNP eyes its crazily erratic leader warily, wondering if it is now is the right time to put its slathering junkyard dog out its misery before it sinks its fangs into another postman or woman.

‘Good government begins this week,’ promised the Prime Minister revealing intact his gift of the gaffe despite his ‘near death experience.’ Abbott’s face wore a rictus more rueful than repentant. The spill had diminished his authority. ‘He would last only as long as his next big mistake,’ as one of his ministers put it. Abbott had bet shrewdly on his party’s reluctance to make any leadership change. The other options were just too hard. Prudently, however, he also bought more votes with a promise to build submarines in South Australia.  The promise of a tender later evaporated into a competitive evaluation, a form of words that puzzled everyone.

It was always all about power with Abbott. He’d never been popular, even pretending to make a virtue out of this but his new record low of a net minus 38 was straining his relationship with his colleagues who now, overwhelmingly, see him as a liability even if they fail to agree on what to do about it.

‘The wood is on me to change,’ said the PM, favouring a sporting metaphor as he promised to change at the National Press Club last week. To have the wood on someone is to know their weaknesses, and use them to your own advantage. Typically, he gave no detail of his changes, beyond promising to be more ‘collegiate’ and ‘consultative.’ It could have been a parody. Abbott has never shown any practical understanding of either word in his political life.

Nor did they sit well with party culture of a conga line of suck-holes to recall Latham’s vivid phrase. Any LNP politician favouring a consultative style may have to change more than himself. What Abbott means is that he will abandon or water down some unpopular policies including higher education, the Medicare co-payment plan and further changes to media. Abbott the politician is incapable of change.

Abbott Mark II has proved no more than Abbott Mark I recycled. His reinvented political self was a con. His ‘near death experience’ simply forced his retreat into a primitive aggression and denial. ‘Good government’ is simply and wholly about his own survival.

Flanked by sundry subdued party members over whom his authority and standing was irreparably depleted, Abbott strode from the party room, determined to ‘put the spill behind’ him. He was ‘getting on with the business of government.’  Besides, he couldn’t stand to look at the traitors. Two thirds of his backbench wanted rid of him. Others voted ‘No’ to stay his execution only because they believed it might seem fairer to the electorate. None rushed to congratulate him.

Howard, the Liberals’ Lazarus, the fabled party comeback king and increasingly nostalgic hero of ‘good government,’ pleaded for his protégé to be given another go. Howard was not, however, the best authority here. He took the same poor advice himself in 2007 when ceding leadership to Costello may well have prevented his party’s loss in that election. Turnbull may be widely disliked but Abbott has few friends left and has exhausted his political capital both within and without the party. It was evident this Monday after the party debouched out of the party room.

Only the pink-cheeked Bruce Billson appeared struck on his leader. He tripped alongside Abbott trying to catch up. Rapidly stepping backwards and sideways, the Minister for Small Business bobbed and weaved as if trying to fall in with his leader’s manly steps in some exotic high speed tango. His features flushed, Billson twisted his neck and lunged alarmingly at Abbott’s face as if he were seeking some type of ‘Kiss me, Hardy,’ opportunity. ‘Good government,’ it seemed, could be built on such encounters.

His deputy, phantom challenger, Julie Bishop flashed a dark look across at her leader. Harsh words had been exchanged the day before and Abbott had verballed her about her lack of support. She hated him for ever and it showed. Her kiss of death could wait. In the meantime, she was turning over a media briefing she would make on the need for Abbott to review Peta Credlin’s tenure.

The PM’s jaw was set; his face drawn like a man digesting news of a terminal illness.  If Billson were seeking to console the PM, he clearly had a lot more work to do. The spill had gone too close for Abbott’s comfort, despite his crafty trimming of dissidents’ sails in bringing the spill meeting a whole day forward and his shrewd locking in of cabinet votes in a type of coercion he claimed was tradition. Abbott was done for. His reptilian brain kicked in immediately ordering him to attack. The key to good government lay in the attack dog doing more of what he did best.

Abbott’s earlier triumphal phalanx of support was gone like the wax from Icarus’ wings in the heat of the spill moment. Before the ballot, a rowdy push had swept him along in a swell of approbation, bearing him on into the cabinet room like a gang of kids in a playground. Now he was all on his own, striding purposefully, briskly, weaving to shake off Billson’s idiot yapping. Abbott looked as if he wanted to push his Minister out of his path. Or punch him. The new consultative collegiality was already wearing thin.  Abbott was coming out fighting. His new good government would be taking no prisoners.

Some distance behind, Malcolm Turnbull sauntered, chin down and focused inward, alone with his thoughts. He affected a studied nonchalance and ironic detachment, his gait measured as befits reflection, one hand dangling wire-framed reading glasses speculatively from the hinge as if he held the scales of justice denied; or a model of an empty gallows.

All his life Turnbull had, like Jay Gatsby, craved acceptance and affirmation. Reason and experience instructed him not to take rejection personally. His heart, however, knew no other way. All he need do now, however, he thought, was wait. The spill result would prove Abbott’s death sentence. He was in like Flynn. It would take three months, tops, surely for his next big stuff up.

Joe Hockey also appeared thoughtful. He was praying that he’d last the week as Treasurer. For good measure, he also mumbled the LNP catechism: Fix the mess that Labor left us in. The government has a plan to cut spending. Australia’s economy is in great shape fundamentally. Recovery involved applying his party’s neoliberal faith-based platform. Harsh measures were required. But now, two competing versions of the liturgy were emerging. Hockey would cut spending. His leader was promising tax breaks. He hadn’t been consulted. Then Abbott had cut him loose in public, refusing to back him twice in a press conference recently. He felt like Abbott’s fall guy.

Overseas, events were making a mockery of the Australian neoliberals’ pretence to understand markets. Commodity prices had plunged. Storm clouds were brewing for the US and the world in a falling oil price. China’s economy was slowing.  Russian faced economic collapse over lost oil revenue and its annexation of Ukraine could wreck things. Yet it was clearly ‘good government’ to ignore all this.

Abbott shouted and mocked Labor in parliament, channelling his inner junkyard dog. Out came the coarse rhetoric, the lies and the gaffes. He stonewalled, he thought-bubbled; he turned Question Time into a time-wasting farce of Dorothy Dixers, denial and rubbishing Labor. He bagged Gillian Triggs for being partisan over locking up children of asylum-seekers even suggesting she give Scott Morrison an award for humanity. He said his government had increased jobs by a factor of three, a cruel lie. He presided over some MPs walking out when Bill Shorten dared challenge his cutting the very funds which may have helped Aboriginal communities to close the gap. He sacked Ruddock, his Chief Whip for not supporting him sufficiently during the spill. Abbott Mark II looked like a testosteronic adolescent parody of Abbott Mark 1.

‘Good government starts every day,’ Abbott ventured in the House, attempting belatedly to retract his earlier gaffe; reset the record. The recovery was clumsy and unconvincing, as with the rest of his makeover. The PM’s promised new, ‘good government’ was nothing more than government by reset button. Its leader would continue to mouth off; shoot from the lip; act first and apologise later, and although neither tendency would help him consult, build collegiality nor recover any popular standing, it would always be someone else’s fault. He would fight tooth and nail for his own survival. Everyone else was expendable. Right now, Joe Hockey was in the gun. Yet, in the end, both were all washed up.

Fighting off a mob of forty colleagues baying for his blood at Monday’s party room meeting Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott snatched a victory of sorts from the jaws of defeat. The meeting, to vote on a motion for a leadership spill, moved by two West Australian MPs had to be brought forward one day as the PM desperately sought to hose down a blazing conflagration of party rebellion incited by anonymous malcontents and an alienated backbench. No challenger stepped forward at the last minute, lending a surreal effect to what some termed ‘a phantom challenge’ but this made the spill even more of a referendum on the PM alone.

In effect, Monday’s party room spill motion proved to be a vote of limited and conditional confidence in the PM.  Even party hacks and spinners put it about that Abbott was now on probation. He had not won, he had merely bought time to lift his game, a conditional and precarious tenure on the position he famously said he would do everything but sell his arse to obtain. He came close with a promise to build submarines in Australia which was enough to get votes against the spill from SA MPs but in a novel form of words not clear enough to be any kind of real commitment. At the end of the day it all hinged on a competitive evaluation process, whatever that mean. It clearly did not mean an open tender but it could well have served to describe the party room process.

Monday’s party meeting may have failed to dump Abbott but it did succeed in mortally wounding the troubled leader. Stealing not so much victory but the poisoned chalice of his party’s qualified approval, Abbott was relieved, shamed and frightened at the same time. It did not last into question time. Before parliament began, however, Abbott quickly seized the microphone to beg forgiveness; beg his colleagues’ mercy. Good government starts today, he pledged leaving many to wonder, as Bill Shorten has quipped about the preceding 521 days.

Abbott would lift his game, he said; he would change his act; he would consult; he would scrap everything unpopular. He would go no more a-knighting; he would clip Peta’s wings; he would stop walking funny; he would fudge the next budget to give tax breaks to business although we were still in the valley of the shadow of our ‘debt and deficit disaster.’ He would, he promised, become a Prime Minister. In question time that followed, however, once the obsequies to departed greats such as Tom Uren and Colleen McCullough were done, Abbott reverted to type, a political rat, or junkyard dog, all teeth bared and claws scrabbling to keep himself at the top of the pack.

Thirty-nine LNP party members had wanted a leadership spill, their confidence in Abbott completely shot. The one informal vote bore the word ‘pass’ and can hardly be seen as an endorsement of their fearless leader. Nor can we count all the votes of the PM’s cabinet, bound, we are told, ‘by convention’ to vote for the leader. Yet even by the official count, it was a pyrrhic victory. Abbott was done for and they knew it. Many enjoyed it. It gave Julie Bishop licence to publicly repeat Rupert Murdoch’s order with regard to the execution of Peta Credlin, her thin lips curling as she savours her revenge on almost being denied a passage to Lima and a thousand other petty checks and slights.

Abbott was dealt a lethal backhander on Monday. The only question for the party was how long he would be made to suffer before being put out of his misery by Jay Gatsby Turnbull, a man with real connections, real Sydney real estate and a demonstrable entrepreneurial capability matched only by his peerless capacity to suffer fools badly and to alienate the entire National Country Party. But for Abbott on Monday, whose self-awareness is, at best, under-developed, it was easier to slip into his old bad habit of denial. It was, a rough patch, he admitted in a line which Hockey and others repeated as if it were not all self-inflicted but it could all be turned around with words.

The PM was shaken. Like Moses in the desert he was hearing and seeing things. One vision was clear. It was them, not us, as he pointed out, after experiencing his Cecil B DeMille epiphany, an epiphany which he eagerly shared with the media later:

 “I was given a very strong message yesterday. If we focus on Labor we can win the next election. If not, we will lose.”

God, it seems, had not spoken of Abbott’s reaping the whirlwind of his own poor leadership, poor policies nor of his pathological behaviour and unsound judgement. Nor did he suggest Abbott’s mob might need to focus on government for the rest of its term. It was, as always, the fight that mattered most. No matter that he might be hallucinating in pain and enunciating last election’s mantra. Déjà vu or Groundhog Day, he ploughed ahead.

Abbott gripped his lectern for dear life, shoulders forward, legs braced, comb over strapped down for action and toes turned wide like a frogman balancing on deck in a choppy sea or a bantam rooster in a scrap. He should be spared, he crowed, because he had won the last election. Single-handedly.  Look backwards, he was saying. It works for me. All the rest is speculation. And negative thinking. Why, there are some who would say I have virtually single-handedly guaranteed our future defeat and our party’s utter annihilation. He paused for applause. He waited. Nothing but an embarrassed silence and Peta’s mobile ringing greeted his ears.

He was, moreover, a fighter, he crowed. He just wasn’t good at fighting the Liberal party, he pretended. He offered his neck in awkward gambit of appeasement and faux contrition making another fresh claim about his past that, if allowed, would rewrite history. The revised Abbott was LNP leader by universal acclaim, not one vote, in his new vision; it was Abbott the valiant, moreover, alone, bare-handed who had brought his party to the Promised Land. Super-Abbott the new mythic hero would now replace the historic Tony Abbott, the dangerously trigger-happy scrapper and in-fighter who had in fact only emerged victorious by default when Labor did themselves in.

Abbott was sorry but couldn’t say the word. He was sorry to have stuffed up everything. Sorry to have been asleep at the wheel and to have run the ship of state aground on the treacherous reefs of political reality. All those captain’s calls. He was sorry that some backbenchers thought he was ignoring them. He was sorry that he’d probably attempted to do too much in the first term of his captaincy. But he was a good captain. He was good at apologies. He was good at acting first and saying sorry afterwards and other modes of manly decisiveness. He was good at saying the words that he thought they wanted to hear. Why, he could knock off a barnacle with the best of them. He was sorry, above all, like any narcissist, for everything, meaning everything that hadn’t gone his way.

Abbott was ‘chastened,’ he said by his ‘near death experience,’ although he had never been chastened in his life. Good government would begin today. A muffled titter broke out. Did this mean that the previous half-term had been play-acting or bad government – or both? Although, typically, the PM later claimed that he meant that good government began every day, irreparable damage had been done to the reputation of his government’s previous half-term and to himself if he had only the wit to realise it. Better take up Kevin Andrews’ offer of counselling. Remorse, the WD40 of his re-start would dispel all oncoming disaster and keep the party motor running sweetly on to victory.

Tony Abbott was trying out some steps in his latest dance of contrition. It was a command performance and stakes could not be higher but it looked awkward, unrehearsed and unconvincing.  Most of it was familiar as if the PM could only reprise his old fancy footwork.  He pledged to reform; to mend his ways again as he attempted to take in the confronting evidence of a real and present danger.  He had no idea. A more self-aware, astute leader would have resigned, if not in his own, in his party’s best interests.

The LNP’s contrived ‘Clayton’s’ leadership spill was squibbed by a party room terrified of any alternative. It was intended as a shot across his bows, as if Team Abbott were capable of changing course. Tony Abbott has weathered his latest crisis only to buy time. He has no plan. He has said nothing about what his changed Prime Ministerial role will look like, feel like, and be like. He has fallen back on his standard defence that he is not the messiah but merely a naughty boy and he is sorry and he will mend his ways. There is nonsense about consultation and collegiality thrown into the mix for good measure and a vague undertaking to tone down his outsourcing of his job to Peta Credlin with the mumble that we have all got to lift our performances.

It is telling that Abbott thinks all he has to do is mouth the right words. Yet the right words hold no meaning for him. How can they? They are alien to his political lexicon. He is the consummate enfant terrible of politics, a man who got to be Prime Minister as Opposition junkyard dog whom many including himself, hoped could grow into the job only, inevitably, to be disappointed. Nor is there any real evidence to support this supposition. The PM’s entire political trajectory is based on the crash through or crash principle. It is revealing that since his rebuff in the party room, he has come out with the line that he is a fighter. At the same time he would have us believe he can be a sensitive, pliant, nurturing and open-minded listener extending limitless tolerance, acceptance and respect. The transformation would be incredible if it were enacted anywhere by anyone let alone by Tony Abbott, the fractious pugilist who prefers a three word slogan rather than any real political discourse or genuine dialogue with his electorate which involves real listening and genuine mutual respect.

It is evident today in the televised part of federal parliament that is question time, that the new Abbott is channelling the old. He is incapable of being or doing anything else. Words are cheap to this man. He will buy votes with promises he never intends to keep or promises of submarine tenders he thinks can get out of. He will tell you what he thinks you want to hear. He may promise endlessly to mend his ways but he will revert to type the moment he is under any pressure.

Old habits of attack and bluff and dumbing down issues to asinine slogans, however, have cost the PM dearly in trust and credibility, together with the cynical chicanery of his ‘promises’ that are only promises if they are written down. There is much like this on the debit side of Abbott’s ledger, the latest is his resort to weasel words such as ‘competitive evaluation’ to evade the commitment of an open tender for new submarines. Above all, however, in Canberra last Monday was the tawdry spectacle of the liar found out. Spare us all the unctuous grovelling apologies and promises of reform, Mr Abbott, just get on with the job or if you can’t, stop pretending. We know how you love approval. The nation will not regard any more highly if you mistakenly attempt to tough it out in a Prime Ministerial role you are manifestly so ill-equipped to fulfil.

---

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.

---

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.