Jargon devours our body politic, degrades our national identity and destroys our duty of care.

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aaa child and doctor

Australians are a plain-speaking people who prefer simple, direct speech in their everyday dealings. We also, however, have a fondness for the vernacular, our unique, colourful, colloquial language.  Our national conversation is enriched by vivid images and vital figures of speech and it is often underscored by a capacity for ironic understatement which keeps us from having tickets on ourselves and which can also act as a reality check on others’ pretensions.

The Australian tradition is under attack today, however, from all sides, from spinners who could sell their own grandmothers to experts who wilfully pepper their conversation with jargon, happily losing whole audiences in the quest to bolster their own status and to have the last word. No wonder disillusionment with politics appears rampant. We have forsaken substance for smoke and mirrors. We are hungry for information but we are served up regurgitated often ill-digested remnants of someone else’s haute cuisine. We are talked at endlessly; jawboned by asses with diplomas in communications and public relations and wannabe economists who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The worst of these merchants may convince themselves of their own importance but they end up talking to themselves in public. Best we not dwell any further on the failures; far better we turn to our successes.

Our finest political discourse is typically vigorous, succinct and to the point. When Paul Keating sought the leadership from a resistant Bob Hawke, his words were. ‘I was after his job. He didn’t want to give it to me.’ Keating was a master of memorable speech, he could effortlessly change register to mine rich colloquial idioms or even invent some:

Well, the thing about poor old Costello, he’s all tip and no iceberg, you know. You know, he can throw a punch across the parliament, but the bloke he should be throwing the punch to is Howard. Of course, he doesn’t have the ticker for it.

Neither man nor politician was ever lost for words and their best left no-one in any doubt as to where he or she might stand. At the same time there is a robust, sentient vitality: as Sydney Baker, who published several works on slang: the Australian’s ‘greatest talent is for idiomatic invention. It is a manifestation of our vitality and restless imagination’.

Keating’s masterful debating style was acerbic and theatrical but informed by living Australian language and culture; drawing strength and power from the vital oral traditions of the nation at work and at play, at home and in the street. His entertaining but deadly debating style has gifted a number of acidulous one-liners to our lexicon. These can still be relished today:

The Leader of the Opposition is more to be pitied than despised, the poor old thing. The Liberal Party of Australia ought to put him down like a faithful old dog because he is of no use to it and of no use to the nation.

The image is engaging, outwardly familiar and couched kindly, almost sympathetically, but there is a stiletto twist within the bouquet and the deadly main message is spelt out with unhurried, unmistakeable, declarative clarity. Keating was inventive in the best Australian tradition, with a surrealistic twist as and when required: Decrying John Hewson’s debating he said:

‘It was the limpest performance I have ever seen … it was like being flogged with a warm lettuce. It was like being mauled by a dead sheep.’

Our public speech, however, has been increasingly undermined as exotic linguistic forces have done their colonising. Flash as a rat with a gold tooth, the expert undermines the field if not the high ground of our national conversation.

Experts, of course, come in many guises from the hired pun, the lone ‘communication consultant’ to entire agencies dedicated to helping you get your message out. The PM spends millions on his stable of spin doctors and speech writers and cannot leave the office without his talking points, a list of empty phrases every parliamentary party member parrots but never owns. Could he do without them? We have his words for it. ‘You bet I am! You bet I will.’

The government pays experts with our money to exclude us from dialogue in the aim of ‘selling its message’ or ‘touching base with the electorate.’ The professional explainer pops up amongst us at every turn. He or she may take many forms, from the tax expert with his ‘bracket creep’ to the weather person with her ‘rain event.’ Jargon has colonised our discourse, laying waste plain speech, promoting indirection, evasion and enhancing mightily the prospects of those who would baffle in order to pull rank, exert power or dodge responsibility.

Like a rat up a drain-pipe, jargon has raced onto the stage of our national consciousness. It has infested mass media and it hovers over popular discussion ready to strike. It squats, today, upon our nation’s public discourse like a cane toad, an ugly and noxious foreign invader, dulling our senses, poisoning our hearts often crushing our spirits with its bulk. Nowhere is the poison better exemplified in than in Health. Our new minister, Sussan Ley, has wasted no time in announcing that the principle of the co-payment is to send a price signal. She wants to raise doctors’ fees but dare not put it plainly. She may be new to the job but she is already confounding us with jargon creep, Wronski’s new term for the invasion of technical language and the exodus of real communication.

Jargon creep, gets its name from bracket creep, a term first heard from the lips of Peter Costello a former Federal LNP Treasurer who frittered away the profits from the mining boom on tax breaks to sweeten his party’s electoral appeal and thus keep John Howard’s government in power well beyond its use by date. Jargon creep is all pervasive. Everywhere around us, in our newspapers, social media, advertising copywriting, on our radio and TV, even in online newspapers our senses are assaulted from breakfast to bed time by the steady, insidious infiltration of jargon into our everyday lives, especially, but by no means exclusively, the misuse of economic jargon to explain, regulate or justify human activity.

No longer do we expect to ‘see results’; ask ‘what happens,’ we must instead, increasingly be prepared to see how this plays out. Within this gem is the idea that we are spectators at some game. We are not responsible agents ourselves but instead we are bemused onlookers who must hang around to see some random result. See how this plays out is heard everywhere and unless we can resist the implicit sidelining or abdication of our own agency, it will be all over red rover.

Jargon makes us passive onlookers. It excludes us and it transfers our right to be in charge to other agents. Just in case you thought you are just reading this, for example, let me put you straight: you are in fact an electronic text consumer, consuming a product. I am not writing to you, I am engaged in content delivery. Meaning is of course, in the best postmodern fashion relegated to a secondary and optional extra. The black cat is white if that’s your take on it. What do I mean? It is whatever you care to take from this, a ludicrous overstatement of subjectivity in understanding. Next thing you know we will that have one man moved to tears by looking at our asylum seekers’ deaths in custody whilst another may applaud our toughness, a brave stand to protect of our borders.

One of the lowest, most disgraceful points ever reached in our national history occurred last year when the Federal Immigration Minister, Scott Morrison, typically anguished in his expressions of regret to parliament at having to keep asylum seekers in detention centres when they could have otherwise been working for a pittance in Australian fields and factories. ‘I don’t have a product!’ was his protest. Of course his ‘lack of product’ was all the fault of the senate and the Labor Party but then jargon is handy that way. It helps shift the blame for our own reprehensible actions on to others. And it obscures the truth, which in this case was that the minister could have issued temporary visas if he had really wanted to. There are still, it grieves me to note children in detention men and women languish in indefinite detention while the government unaccountably pats itself on the back for honouring an empty slogan: stopping the boats.

Jargon is the language of experts in a particular field of endeavour, which has jumped the fence. For example, a challenged Federal Treasurer may explain his government’s decision to increase doctor’s fees by claiming that we need to send a price signal.

What he means is that he wants to put the fees up. He just wants it to sound less arbitrary and somehow fairer and more reasonable. He is deluded enough to believe that the jargon will sweeten the bitter pill of deception. The jargon is always a lie and an obfuscation. Only in our present political regimes it will be parroted by the entire mob of galahs with their talking points and their people in the background doing meaningful nodding; as if repetition and mindless endorsement somehow strengthened rather than undermined meaning. Politicians talk of the team being ‘on message’ but what they mean is they are happy to have everyone ‘singing from the same song sheet’ or endlessly duplicating slogans that never bore inspection in the first place. Take Mr Abbott’s government’s real solutions pledge:

The Coalition’s Real Solutions Plan will build a diverse 5-pillar economy to build on our strengths, including in manufacturing. I will spare you the detail because there is none. The package is a set of glib slogans that nonetheless have been endless recycled by the sections of the tame media as if they were ever a meaningful commitment to anything. And so it is with price signal an asinine compound noun which has been dragged from the neo-con economics textbooks out into the wider world of Health where it sticks out like a shag on a rock. Not only does it not belong in public health it should be expunged from all political discourse instantly.

Price signal has become a familiar term recently because of our government’s plans to increase GP charges by decreasing the Medicare rebate.  Economists invented ‘ price signal’ to explain their theory that higher prices send a signal to buyers to reduce their consumption. Now without wading into economic theory and competing notions of price setting, the analogy is outrageous. It’s not only nonsense, it’s the worst kind of nonsense and completely injurious to your health. Moreover, it’s dangerous nonsense. How can a visit to a doctor be compared with buying a loaf of bread or any other commodity? How can health be compared to the supply and demand of commodities of any kind?

“Health and health care,” Greek Physician Dr Benos said in 2012, “are not commodities that exist to drive the economy. They are among the social goals which we have an economy to achieve.” Yet we are being driven mad with meaningless jargon about the Market, about the need to pinch our pennies, to tighten our belts; the ‘virtue of austerity, when what we need to ask is “Why?’ Why is there an economy? What is the goal of production? Surely it is to provide a society equipped to care for every one of its members. Let’s reject the price signal jargon and everything it stands for including the cruel myth propagated in the United States of America that when we support the core needs of the most vulnerable, we weaken the economy. Let’s not be hoodwinked by experts and jargon into getting it arse about face. Taking care of people comes first. It’s not the economy, stupid.

Wronski’s rule of thumb states that: Very little in human affairs can be explained in market terms; the best things are inexplicable, especially in market terms; the more we resist market jargon, the more things will make sense and the happier we will be. Above all health is our society’s lifeblood and an inalienable right for each member not a commodity that needs its price signalled.

Je ne suis pas Charlie Hebdo. Tragedy and Truth in Paris.

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Paris-Demonstration

Freedom of speech has burst back into the national arena following the shocking, cold-blooded murder of twelve workers at Charlie Hebdo, a Parisian satirical magazine which rose to notoriety for its provocative cartoons, caricatures and its gleeful parody of powerful institutions. Fearlessly, if not recklessly, venturing beyond reason and decorum to attack religious extremism of all persuasions, Charlie Hedbo won a certain ill-repute and, until recently, a loyal, if declining, following whilst simultaneously attracting many sworn enemies.

No stranger to controversy including death threats, the magazine’s offices were fire-bombed in 2011 over a special issue featuring a cartoon impression of the Islamic Prophet Mohammed as its editor-in-chief, Charlie Hebdo. To outsiders bereft of key critical French cultural contexts and constructs, much of the humour is lost in translation but its irrepressible iconoclasm and confronting irreverence are unmistakeable and doubtless not unattractive to readers who might already struggle with authority, convention and political correctness.  It set out to shock and shock it did, often crudely. Yet a publication must do more than be confronting to earn its audience.

A recent issue depicts clearly pregnant kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls screaming in unison. Their plea? Don’t touch our ‘allocs’ (allowances.)  It’s funny only to those who can desensitise feelings of repulsion towards Boko Haram and to the abduction and rape of 300 young women. And even then it runs the risk of simply cementing the prejudices of readers seeking confirmation of their animus towards migrant welfare bludgers and women.

Unfettered by good taste or common decency, the magazine did not hold itself back. Doubtless, even our own George Brandis would have felt a warm inner glow at Charlie Hebdo’s liberal propagation of blasphemous images, racial stereotypes and insults bordering on hate speech, (a crime which is rigorously prosecuted in France, despite much recent misreporting), as a vision of what he could achieve in Australia with the repeal of section 18c.  Even Brandis, however, could not pretend that such views were in demand: Charlie Hebdo was a basket case financially despite its government subsidy, (subsidies help explain why there are 1500 newspapers in Paris.) Now, ironically, sales are booming worldwide with the latest edition offered for auction on eBay and attracting thousand pound bids. Yet none of it persuades me that Je suis Charlie.

Rude good health of sorts has been restored to the mortally wounded Charlie Hebdo after the tragic loss of life of its creative midwives, rekindling gallows humourists and satirists’ interest in the phrases ‘over my dead body’ and the Gallic protestation to love something or someone Je t’aime à la folie, jusqu’à la mort. (I love you madly until death.) Whilst an issue has been published in a quixotic gesture of defiance, it remains to be seen, however, what direction the revitalised paper will take from now on.

Equally unknowable is the future of the Charlie Hebdo movement although its longevity looks already in doubt. Although many would like to assume that there is a cause at stake, it is difficult to state precisely what that cause may be unless we imagine a society that is better for having a freedom to be crudely, cruelly insensitive and calculatedly offensive, a freedom to hold all things up to merciless ridicule. Yet the Charlie Hedbo phenomenon is nothing without its quixotic followers.

The brutal unforgivable summary execution, of a dozen Charlie Hedbo workers led to a collective outburst of anger and grief in a massive popular demonstration in Parisian streets of a nature not seen since VE Day. More than a rally, however, the terrorists’ attack prompted a type of raptus, exciting and inflaming passions whilst capturing the public imagination.

Now the whole world, it seems, has become if not French, at least keenly interested in paying homage to Charlie. Golden Globes Award, commentators elevated it to The Je suis Charlie movement whilst photographers thoughtfully provided stars with signs, buttons and placards, prêt à porter, as it were. And whilst alert entrepreneurs around the world flock to this latest cause celebre, there is no knowing where it will end. It is reported that the phrase Je suis Charlie has been the subject of patent applications by several enterprising international citizens. But what is Je suis Charlie? What does it mean? Is it anything more than a fleeting folie a foule, an ephemeral group madness?

What is happening in Paris and in the spiritual, imaginary or completely fictive Paris of the hearts and minds of the international community and what it means is a complex, multilayered phenomenon best interpreted cautiously, yet this has not deterred mass media and other commercial interests from providing ready to wear labels, in the quest for making meaning or a host of other related quests such as to foster, adopt or take it over.

In the process, as is to be expected, a blurring of focus and some wilful distortion have taken place. Widespread, for example, is an urge to characterise, explain and identify, a dynamic that is not confined to the professional myth-makers in the international scrimmage over the chance to say what Je suis Charlie represents.

‘It’s about self-expression,’ a protestor volunteered yesterday whilst George Clooney expressed his own take from the Golden Globes stage with:

‘There were millions people that marched . . . in support of the idea that we will not walk in fear. We won’t do it. So, je suis Charlie.’

Support for progressive causes is not unfashionable in modern Hollywood but some in the audience would have recalled Ronald Reagan and his shopping of fellow actors and competitors to the House Committee for Un-American activities which began its witch hunt in 1945 and faded only in the early 1950s or the double lives led by actors afraid to declare their sexuality and who walked in fear lest the truth would ruin their careers. In this context, however, Clooney’s support for the ‘Charlie thing…’ however vaguely defined is refreshing.

Support should never be overanalysed. Much current interest in Je suis Charlie initially seems to have been a simple, instinctive and undifferentiated sympathy; a public identification, manifested in the rally; at best a spontaneous and uncomplicated expression of compassion for the victims and their families. Immediately, however, commentators have packaged and promoted this feeling into a statement of solidarity by supporters of free speech, freedom of expression and even self-expression. In the circumstances it is useful to carefully establish our own perspective.

People took to the streets to defend their right to say what they like and to protest at the brutal, barbaric outrage that cost the lives of twelve staff at Charlie Hebdo and the wounding of many others. What motivated them is a more complex and profound matter but at heart the rally was a massive and unprecedented public display of camaraderie not seen for decades in Parisian streets. Naturally this first reading of events only touches the surface of what is ultimately a complex, multi-layered phenomenon in its own right but it is important it not to lose sight of what it was before we draw long bows as to why and how.

On the surface, the Je suis Charlie demonstration remains a remarkable phenomenon which drew record crowds in an arresting, collective outpouring of outrage, anger and sorrow. Few could be unmoved by such a spontaneous popular demonstration of feeling. This is not to forget, of course, that many complex cross currents were at work beneath the surface but rather to observe the significance of an instinctive, naive accord, a simple, collective call to action in a complex and conflicted modern world.

At best, the march seemed a rallying cry for Europe’s leaders, even if solidarity was more elusive: the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel was later airbrushed out of the report published in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish newspaper which edited her out of a picture of world leaders at the Paris march against terror. Similarly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who shoved others out of the way to get there, tweeted an edited image of himself in the front row of world leaders while cropping the shot to exclude Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Liberty, equality and fraternity, it seems, cannot be taken too far but for a moment it looked as if all were well.

According to New York-based newspaper The Jewish Daily Forward cameras for a local media outlet caught Netanyahu elbowing aside a woman French minister as he tried to jump the queue for the bus that would transport the group to the starting point of the (Je suis Charlie) march. Finding himself relegated to the second row at the march, he shoved aside the president of Mali and inserted himself in the front row.

Other statements, however, particularly our Prime Minister’s exhortation to Australia’s cartoonists to ‘keep on drawing’ and the recent resurgence of calls for our defamation laws to be relaxed are more problematic suggesting that we are conflicted as a nation and as individuals in what we see as reasonable limits on our freedom of speech.

Whilst we rise as one to protest our outrage at the hideous atrocity carried out in the name of Islam in Paris by two French citizens with an Algerian background who chose murder with AK47s as their own barbaric form of remonstration and redress we are less united when it comes to our defence of basic freedoms at home. And just how far are we prepared to take our vicarious indulgence?

Let us consider one hypothetical parallel. Imagine the fuss if a cartoon were published which depicted our Prime Minister and George Pell in a French kiss, perhaps with the caption, Je suis Georgie’s boy. Or the former Immigration Minister Scott Morrison’s image is drawn above one of his previous portfolio’s slogans: where the bloody hell are you? Cambodia, Nauru, Manus, as long it’s not Australia, we don’t care.

Such speculation has already led to a local war of words. Tim Wilson who must be the most fortunate government appointee ever, a man who was given the Federal government’s Human Rights Commissioner’s job via a phone call from George Brandis without so much as a job interview and who has obediently spruiked government lines on matters ranging from challenging the science of global warming to arguing for changes to the racial discrimination act to promote ‘real’ freedom of speech on TV and radio has come out with the claim that Charlie Hebdo would not be published in Australia. Expect a rush as other LNP supporters ride in his coat-tails. We will be told we need to ‘revisit’ a law which at present protects those who might otherwise be cruelly attacked for their origins. Worthies such as Andrew Bolt may well weigh into the debate. Expect more nonsense in the name of freedom of speech. Just don’t expect enlightenment.

As 2015 begins, Australians are curiously positioned between the PM’s incongruous and gratuitous piece of advice to cartoonists not to self-censor and his government, a government which has made much of the need to forgo certain freedoms in the interest of national security, a government which has already enacted legislation restricting its citizens’ freedom of speech in the name of anti-terrorism, a government which has our metadata and the right to use it against us without challenge. Charlie Hebdo, it is true, has become an international cause celebre with followers and advocates in the most unlikely places but let’s just keep things in perspective. It is less about freedom and freedom of expression or any other warm and fuzzy vibe than about realpolitik and a means to an end for governments who would put the freedom genie firmly back in the bottle as they seek to mobilise us against the evils of death cults and terror, prosecuting the politics of division while constraining individual liberty and strengthening state control.

Australia dismantles its Healthcare system to suit its government’s ideolgy and not its peoples’ needs.

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111 A paul bongiorno on health

Seeing the doctor is about to become greatly more expensive for all Australians in a government move which will alienate both doctors and patients across the nation whilst it adds to the suffering of those most at need. Next week GP’s fees will rise suddenly by around $20 or more per visit because the Federal government has cut Medicare rebates and made other changes to GP’s consultation schedule by regulation.

Applying its “10 minute” rule will increase GP waiting times while from January 19, Medicare will pay $20.10 less for consultations lasting six to 10 minutes, consultations it has long paid $37.05 towards. Such “Level B” visits are required by millions each year for prescription renewals, blood pressure and other vital but routine check-ups. It will now pay $16.95, a reduction the medical profession fears will “destroy” free universal healthcare.

There has been no community consultation and no negotiation with the AMA, the professional body representing our doctors, a body which is now understandably angry at its exclusion by a government which has failed to negotiate with key stakeholders before making its decision. The decision constrains a vital part of the doctor-patient relationship, the time a doctor has with a patient, limits appointment-making by extending consultation times and will restrict access to medicine amongst the elderly, poor and needy. It is ill-advised, unnecessary and high-handed. It has not been well-received by the medical profession.

AMA President Associate Professor Brian Owler says the Government’s unilateral move to slash the rebate for GP consultations lasting less than 10 minutes, cut Medicare rebates by $5, and extend the indexation freeze on the Medicare Benefits Schedule through to mid-2018, has provoked the angriest response seen from the profession in many years.

Thwarted by being unable to get its GP co-payment legislation through the Senate, the LNP has chosen regulation to achieve its aim of ‘sending a price’ signal’. Whatever this piece of jargon may mean in plain English, the government is certainly ‘signalling’ not only a contempt for democratic processes but an alarming willingness to govern by any means possible, including if necessary, by decree. Democracy, for all its constraints, is infinitely preferable to the desperate ‘ad-hoc-racy’ of the current Federal government as it panics to implement its radical rightist agenda at any cost.

Sending a price signal is jargon for making a visit to your doctor cost you more in order to cause you to see your doctor less often. Around Budget time, we were treated to Joe Hockey’s assumption that some, if not many, visits we make to the doctor are not necessary. Hockey’s scenario is ludicrous, yet it has powerful adherents in the government: the price signal will bring us to our senses and eradicate malingering at a stroke of the regulator’s pen. Where he gets his information is never divulged because it proceeds from ideology rather than empirical fact.  At worst, it is a palpable lie for the purpose of withdrawing funding from those who need it most: the elderly, the needy, those on low incomes. Discriminatory against key groups in society, given the structure of our economy and society it will punish women most, in what seems like a calculated act of callous indifference if not cruelty – all to meet a commitment to its grab bag of neo-con, radical hard right ideology.

Peter Dutton, until recently our self-effacing, under-achieving, Federal Health Minister, threatened late in November that the LNP government would introduce changes by regulation if necessary to send its coveted price signal.  He sounded desperate if not petulant in his newly resolute tone, an understandable shift given his own failure to consult or negotiate his ill-fated GP co-payment before it appeared in Joe Hockey’s dud Budget.

If there were a crisis, it would be a crisis born of incompetence, a crisis of his and his government’s making, by its distaste for adequate public discussion prior to any policy formulation.  A responsible political party might even have taken such a controversial idea to the people in the election campaign, but complete silence or misleading lies formed the course chosen by our current Federal politicians in the last election as they promised anything to get elected, whatever their subsequent commitment might prove but who carefully left out any detail of their real intentions. Soon after his bullying comment, Dutton was shoved sideways into Immigration’s contingent vacancy, a vortex of incalculable dimensions created by Scott Morrison’s move into Social Services and has not been heard of much again apart from his announcement that he would arm Customs Officials, a move which no doubt will suit arms suppliers but which is unlikely to increase safety, efficiency or public confidence.

‘It shows we are serious about border protection,’ is his line and he’s welcome to it.

Dutton’s successor, Sussan Ley, a Health Minister whose ministry is combined with Sport describes herself as a “recovering punk rocker from a time when it really mattered,” doubtless brings other strengths to her new portfolio such as an interest in regional and rural health and a commercial pilot’s licence, both of which commend her to our flying doctor service.

Too little is known of Ley’s post-punk and piloting credentials although much has been made of the fact that she is a woman. A former accountant with the tax office in Albury, it remains to be seen how she will position herself politically in her new job. Her performance, to date, however, as Assistant Minister for Education suggest strongly Ley is an economic dry who will happily follow a hard right agenda as articulated by fellow new blood, Assistant Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg.

People need to realise health care isn’t free and must be prepared to make ‘modest’ contributions to it, he said whilst new assistant treasurer, Kooyong colt, barrister, writer and tennis player Josh Frydenberg, was on message trotting out the ‘tough but necessary medicine’ line:  ‘Hard reforms are sometimes unpopular,’ he continued, furthering his party’s abuse of the word reform when it means change or simply, cutbacks. Making a virtue of necessity, perhaps, as his government faces continuing decline in all opinion polls, he opted for a self-reassuring but utterly unconvincing lie: ‘We don’t seek to win a popularity contest.’

Frydenberg, appointed in December whilst his predecessor Arthur Sindodinis stands aside to better assist ICAC, has been a senior adviser to Downer, Howard and was Abbott’s parliamentary secretary in charge of the government’s deregulation agenda.  His perspective fits the Abbott government’s hard right policy of dismantling our current system in favour of one in which the patient or ‘consumer’ will face prohibitive costs. The price signal is a key part of the myth. As Professor Jeff Richardson, director of Monash University Centre for Health Economics argues: ‘The unsustainability of government health expenditure in Australia is a myth that has been carefully nurtured to justify policies to transfer costs from government to the public.’ ­Sustainability panic argues Steven Duckett, Director of Health at the Grattan Institute, is often used to justify shifting the burden of controlling health spending from the wider society to a vulnerable few – people with poor health who frequently go to doctors and hospitals, for example, or those with high needs and potentially shortened life expectancy.

People need to realise health care isn’t free and must be prepared to make ‘modest’ contributions to … Frydenberg asserts disingenuously. He fails to acknowledge that we know all too well that our health care is not free, we have been paying taxes for it all our lives. Public understanding or support is ill-served by patronising and derisory comments implying the opposite. A little listening to the people is recommended before you tell us what’s best for us, Mr Frydenberg.

Australians are not mugs. Although it will be challenging, given the inertia and indifference dictating your government’s consultation by-pass, an operation made necessary by its sclerotic heart, you need to heed the message: the public is not fooled into being falsely reproached for its delusions: taking Healthcare something for nothing.  It never did. Give the people some credit. They pay taxes, read newspapers and they also vote.

Setting up a straw man, a misconception which can only be destroyed by a price signal is irresponsible. Just give us the facts, Minister Ley. You are about to make Healthcare more expensive and elitist still as you dismantle a system which we pay taxes for so that it may look after all of us, not just the wealthy. Why? It is simply because it fits your mumbo-jumbo Hayek meets tea party ideology of letting the market rule, your slogan of ‘user-pays’. It is the price of your infatuation with ‘small government’, self-reliance and similar meaningless slogans and unworkable assumptions. The new fee rises are a travesty of any respectable health policy, and a betrayal if not outright abnegation of community, compassion and conscience.

Carry on, cartoonists, urges Tony Abbott after Charlie Hebdo attack.

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abbott and microphones

Australia’s PM with his supportive media.

Australia’s army of parodists, satirists and professional piss-takers, the nation’s cartoonists, have been told to carry on. Terrified and shocked by events overseas, on the point of drawing the line at any more funny business and laying down their pencils, en masse, the nation’s lampooning doodlers have bucked up to hear words of encouragement from the top. And in such a good cause or two: our way of life is at stake. We are as nothing without corrective irony, parody or self-ridicule. Freedom of speech, moreover, is something we hold dear; central to the way we carry on. Or so we are told, from most unexpected quarter, or cartouche.

Oddly, the satirists’ rallying cry is being made by Australia’s PM, Tony, Abbott, a caricaturist’s dream, a political figure easily mistaken for a parody of a PM, or a parody of himself, or both. Not renowned for enjoying or appreciating criticism and fronting a LNP government which is at best economical with freedom of expression and truth, to say nothing of justice, tolerance and compassion, qualities informing every satirist’s bite, the PM has leapt into the fray.

Yesterday, the PM, a talented contortionist and ever-obliging target himself, the butt of a thousand gibes was urging us to give ’em hell with bells on. Loony Toons Abbott morphed into the mouse that roared: a mouse exhorting all the neighbourhood cats to sharpen their claws.

In yet another unexpected twist to his contorted career, the PM burst on to Channel 9 to the amazement of jaded, hung-over morning television viewers and cracked up the nation with a message straight to camera. Cartoonists carry on! The terrorists will win if you stop. And there was more. With the injunction came insight; he knew, he confided, all too well, what it is like to be a member of a persecuted minority, the object of satire: people are always making fun of Catholics in Australia.

Abbott’s babblings were prompted by the tragic events at Charlie Hebdo, the satirical Paris newspaper in which two gunmen brutally executed ten staff members and injured eleven others, some of them critically on Thursday morning in apparent retaliation for the paper’s pungently satirical comments on Islam. Curiously, they echoed David Cameron’s despite their religious differences, differences on climate change and other matters. Doubtless, similar sentiments could be traced in the addresses of a group of national leaders whose talking points are lovingly hand-prepared in Washington.

Whatever his intention, or the true origin of his inspiration, Tony Abbott captured every satirist’s imagination with his latest hypocritical posturing, beginning with his TV appearance itself.

Others in his cabinet may wait weeks, or even longer, to talk to the media but the PM gets his head on the box any time he feels like it. One of his first initiatives in government and, yes, the word is to be used cautiously, was to control communications. His own ministers and hapless members of his government have to line up like the scene in Oliver to get permission to exercise any freedom of expression that might involve talking to the people. All media requests must be approved by a member of the Prime Minister’s staff, aka Peta Credlin.

Yet the same PM can air his thought bubbles and spray his talking points at us with barely a moment’s notice, as he did on national television yesterday. Indeed, he is able to over-share, as his wont; the reason he needs a minder on every occasion and doubtless the reason the party dominatrix Peta Credlin must accompany him everywhere.

Other ironies abound. Whilst the office of the prime minister has divided the media into friends and enemies and whilst Abbott himself is openly critical of criticism of the government by the ABC, an outfit he would love to privatise, he rushed to pose as a defender of free speech stating:

‘…it’s important there be no self-censorship by Australian media in the wake of yesterday’s terrorist attack in Paris.’ No doubt this thought vastly relieved Australian cartoonists who are by nature an unctuous and dependent breed, constantly seeking approval and instruction from the top. Whom did the PM think he was trying to kid?  He may be able to tie himself in knots but cartoonists, satirists are not about to follow.

Losing no time either in gleefully cranking up popular fear and anxiety, Abbott warned that ‘the world should be braced for more terrorist attacks.’

Just what form this bracing should take was not specified, although the term is used frequently in press releases and talking points constructed by his office. Nor would the PM elaborate on the reasons for our national bracing and whether he meant he expected more terrorist attacks in Australia. Yet even as the lion of truth he was forthcoming in constructing falsehood. He proceeded to link Paris and Martin Place:

The attack in Paris was relatively sophisticated. The attacks in Australia have been relatively unsophisticated. But whether these are, if you like, grass roots terrorism or whether they’re organisational terrorism, the fact is it is still a terrorist attack on us, on our way of life.

The PM began to sound like a veteran commentator and we, his people, veterans of terrorist attacks who would all the more clearly see that our way of life was threatened, conveniently feeding the pernicious myth of conformity and clouding our sense of our rich and vital diversity. This is a consistent line of Abbott’s which, it seems, he shares with other western leaders who, television ‘world news’ clearly showed, subscribed to the same script service and were taking similar liberties with their own peoples amounts to a dangerous myth-making which helps to divide our society and to promote the ignorance, the intolerance, hysteria and fear which enable terrorism in the first place.  It is also, of course, a most useful proposition in the construction of Abbott as our public defender and a generic nostrum for conservative leaders the world over. It times of crisis, moreover, it is hoped we will unite behind the strong leader.

Of course, the intolerance and ignorance is just a fact of modern life, according to the PM but with a twist. There may well be a contortionist’s prize for holding a view in which we are seen to welcome all sorts of minorities and the roots of our current immigration policy, for example. Or the cognitive dissonance in the hardened certainty of the phrase ‘absolutely hate’ and the cosy inner self-deluded glow of undifferentiated multicultural acceptance; our pluralism.

And the sad truth of the modern era is that there are people who hate us, not because of anything that we’ve done but because of who we are and the way we live. They hate our tolerance, our pluralism, the welcome that we provide to all sorts of minorities. It’s an essential part of Western civilisation and it’s the thing about us that these people absolutely hate.

Interrupting if not arresting the PM’s drift towards a hard-edged soft focused generality, a servile Channel 9 interviewer offered his neck, begging correction, asking the already contorted Abbott how much freedom the press should give up to make us all safer:

TIM MCMILLAN: how far should Australian media outlets go when satirising religions or minority groups?

Abbott invoked his own experiences as a member of a persecuted minority, perhaps knowing of the value of bogus identification in propaganda:

Australian media organisations don’t normally hold back when for argument’s sake they’re criticising Christianity. Catholicism comes in for a particular dose of scorn.

We will take that as encouragement that we are not to hold back. Wittering scorn, however, was invited on this occasion, if not earned by his concluding paradoxical homily:

It’s very important, two things here: first of all that we don’t engage in self-censorship as a result of this kind of attack. Second and even more important, we should not stop being ourselves because of this kind of attack.

If we do engage in self-censorship, if we do change the way we live and the way we think, that gives terrorists a victory and the last thing that we should do is give these evil fanatics any kind of victory.

Abbott has once again used the news to inflict his own agenda upon us. He peddles his own bigoted post-modern mythos of Manichean struggle between good and evil. He would have us in a straitjacket of fear and beholden to the leader as protector, yielding freely up our metadata, our privacy, our right to know the truth and other democratic rights, yet carrying on as normal as his far right government strengthens the role of the state in a desperate attempt to shore up its shaky foundations. Endless conflicted and compromised, he cranks the hurdy-gurdy of the rhetoric of freedom and freedom of speech while his government systematically goes about undermining its very foundations.

Abbott’s moonlight flit to Iraq, leaves home fires burning.

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abbott talks to military in Iraq

A spokesman for Mr Abbott blamed security for keeping the media off the trip. “Due to security measures, there was very limited capacity to facilitate any movements of Australian media in Baghdad and the international zone during the Prime Minister’s visit yesterday,” he said.

“The PM’s office did attempt to obtain the necessary approvals for media but it wasn’t possible for this visit to Baghdad.

“Any suggestion the Prime Minister’s office ‘excluded media’ is patently untrue.”

Australian politics took an intriguingly mysterious turn recently when Tony Abbott slipped out of Australia on his own top secret mission to Iraq without telling anybody. It was all very hush-hush, so cloak and dagger that he could brief no-one, not even Tony’s Turd Polishers, his own media unit. Peta Credlin remained under the radar. Australians had to learn from Iraq what their PM was up to.

Masterfully, the PM also excluded the Australian media crew on standby in Dubai, permitting no independent footage to be garnered and ensuring no Australian journalists popped up with awkward questions. This also, however, guaranteed him a hostile domestic reception on his return and damaging questions about censorship and the breaking of promises he had previously made to the reporters stationed in Dubai.

Abbott’s mission was a minefield of awkward questions he typically thought best to side-step.

Questions thronged thickly around Abbott’s mutual morale-boosting joint appearance with Iraqi counterpart, US puppet Haider al-Abadi, another impotent ‘Prime Minister’ who recently announced the discovery of 50,000 ‘ghost soldiers’ on the Iraqi payroll. Although no one knows how many Iraqi soldiers are being paid but not turning up to duty, this was a reality shock for Albadi, matched only by his discovery after his dodgy election that no Iraqi has the slightest interest in taking him seriously and that his power is proscribed by Shiite militias and their political counterparts embedded in his corrupt and failing government. He was there to pocket US dollars and follow instructions.

Other pressing questions avoided for the meantime included: what on earth is Australia doing propping up an American stooge, a prime minister in name only who is presiding over a hopelessly corrupt regime which condones death squads and other acts of terror against Sunni civilians? What purpose is served in propping up an illegitimate puppet who has little real authority over an Iraq which exists now in name only?

Why are we now talking of increasing our troop deployment? The PM announced that he doesn’t rule out committing more troops to Iraq yet he said he had no intention of committing ground troops two months ago? Why has Abbott come out and criticised the US for the hash it made of rebuilding Iraq?

Questions out of the way, Wing (nut) Commander Abbott made his dash. His political career in freefall, Abbott, kitted out in a bomber jacket, activated Plan B for Baghdad, scrambling himself, his eternally brunette Ken Doll, Defence Minister, Kevin Andrews, who was to pretend for the first time in his life to have any remote interest in the military, and a News Corp camera crew and the odd photographer. The chief of defence, Air Chief Marshall, Mark Binskin was also on board to add credibility to official Australian propaganda photographs.  It was also thought it might be handy to have someone who could shoot back should the mission come under fire at any point.

Pausing only as long as it took to tuck $5 million dollars into one flying boot and to flash a two-fingered victory sign at a flabbergasted but grounded Bishop from the cockpit, Abbott stole away at the crack of dawn.

Abruptly, unkindly left behind to keep the home fires burning and to front the nation’s TV cameras entirely un-briefed, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop flapped about like a stranded guppy. The Princess Mesothelioma was forced to fall back on her native wit and intuition, an excruciating situation for both herself and the nation. She was asked what PM thought he was up to.

Vamping whilst running one hand through her own exquisitely gamin styled coiffure, Bishop raised an eyebrow whilst she inspected the immaculate nails of her other hand. She supposed, she said airily, the PM knew what he was doing but it was not for her to second-guess Mr Abbott on yet another vital mission (abortive PR stunt) but if she’d known they were going to be keeping up appearances, she’d have let them borrow her spare hair-dryer and a bit of eye-liner and some lippy. (Julie and Kev often swapped beauty routine tips, like keeping on top of your grey roots and how it was vital not to let oneself go.)

After she had downed the odd glass of bubbly, Foreign Minister Bishop seized her opportunity and issued statements contradicting the PM’s lie that he was invited by the Iraqi government. Abbott said we would fight in Iraq to stop ISIL coming to Australia. Bishop said she didn’t know what he was talking about; ‘no request has been received,’ she said implying that he didn’t know either.

Abbott knew exactly what he was doing. Like a rat deserting a sinking ship of state, he fled Australia, prudently choosing not to help out local fire fighters in Victoria or South Australia lest his presence provoke spontaneous outbreaks of bomb-throwing, shirt-fronting, booing or other hostile popular reactions such as might compromise his personal safety. He would visit when all danger was safely past. Besides, he reasoned to no-one in particular, the National Interest didn’t look after itself and was known to take unkindly to neglect. And fires are dangerous.

Whilst being burnt alive is not always a negative career move, Abbott’s handlers discouraged the martyrdom option, richly attractive as it may now appear to the condemned PM and advised him to shun public places, for as long as possible, at least on the domestic front. The PM’s popularity is now lower than a snake’s prolapsed belly, so low, indeed, that these days that his diary is full of people, dates and places to avoid, such as the recently announced Queensland state election, the entire studio complex at 2GB and everyone at the ABC except for Lee Sales and any others Mark Simkin says is OK.

Abbott’s clandestine, ‘Black Ops’, top secret sortie was a fully-fledged ripping yarn fit for the pages of a Biggles’ story, The White Fokker, perhaps. His staff, such as remained after his latest PMO ‘reforms’, sworn to secrecy, remained tight-lipped and would only allude to ‘pressing security reasons’ for keeping the trip top secret. Just as it was a matter of national security preventing any explanation why the media were excluded. The National Interest was not invoked but it stood close by expecting a salute.

Secrecy, of course feeds speculation and rumour. Imagine the vital productivity lost to the nation were it to be known in advance that the PM had left to visit another dangerous world trouble-spot. Millions would take the week off work to celebrate. Eric Abetz, George Brandis and the IPA would instantly draft legislation prohibiting time off except on statutory holidays and Clive Palmer would be talked around to supporting it because it would further cheapen the cost of his own large labour force. Joe Hockey could weigh in with a sensitive ‘poor people don’t take holidays because they don’t own cars.’ Hunt could claim that the windfall of the repeal of the carbon tax ensured that all families could afford expensive luxury cruises. And so it would continue.

Imagine, Warren Entsch would wag his finger, the explosion in violence from home-grown and imported mental defectives and other ‘Jihadist terrorists’, who might exploit the Great Helmsman Abbott’s absence from Australia and run amok, following the spin-doctors’ thoughtfully provided script.

Others may argue that the PM was on hand in Sydney at our last ‘brush with terror’, for all the good it did. All that could be said was the lame argument that Abbott had strapped his buckler on to deal with the main threat at its source and that mouthing platitudes about ISIS being evil in Iraq would eliminate entirely any further domestic terror brushes.

The truth is both complex and prosaic. Abbott needed a boost, and Haider Al-Abdadi, our man in Baghdad, needed at least one other friend in the world. Baghdad is on hand to offer Abbott peer support from other like-minded cronies, other similarly scurrilous, self-interested, discredited merchants of mendacity who will happily laugh long at your jokes until your money runs out.

Abbott, moreover, has much in common with the Iraqi PM, including an embarrassing British citizenship, a capacity for self-delusion, political impotence and a disturbing lack of popular support.

Baghdad, home of the Arabian Nights, is a post-modern fabulist’s paradise, and may take out top honours this year as bullshit capital of the world, although the title is always keenly contested. Canberra, itself, of course, boasts some cred in this area. What richer setting then to repeat the nonsense that Australia is in Iraq at the request of the Iraqi government? What more fertile site to reiterate the Abbott crusade against evil? Against the ‘death-cult ISIS? Where better to wear one’s new bomber jacket?

Modern Baghdad, a collective delusion, in the same way that the entire state of Iraq is a convenient fiction, exists almost solely in the minds of those vested interests whom it suits to support its existence. The perfect home away from home for any compulsive liar with quasi-military aspirations and in bed with Big Oil, Halliburton and multinational capitalists, Baghdad appeals greatly to Abbott, but this alone does not explain his trip. Nor does mingling with kindred spirits.

Whilst Abbott has, indeed, been bonding with his peers, a select group comprising other hopelessly ineffectual leaders of another morally bankrupt regime on the brink of extinction, the flying visit was wholly for domestic consumption. The PM is hoping to show his own nation, if not himself, that he is still a vital force. It pays to have as few observers as possible in case anyone starts laughing.

Abbott is counting on a visit to Iraq injecting a little special something into his flaccid career. He is desperate to stem his rocketing disapproval. He wants to give the old action PM routine another spin, this time, as before repeating the palpable lie that Australians are much safer at home if we attack Iraqis overseas. All we need do is ‘knock off’ ISIS in Iraq and we will all be so much safer in our beds in Sydney. And we are morally obliged to help Iraqis take up arms in the fight against evil ISIS.

So far the visit has been an incredible runaway success: Abbott has also been able to slip A$5 million in ready cash into an eager Iraqi palm. Such a piddling amount is likely to be punted away in a night at a Baghdad casino but it proves that Abbott is right on the money when it comes to making the right sorts of gestures.

Abbott’s junket also got him away from having to answer embarrassing questions about why he lied about renouncing his British citizenship. A document search obtained under FOI indicates that there was no renunciation from Tony aka ‘The Great Prevaricator’ Abbott. It looks serious. The Australian Constitution will not allow any Australian who holds dual citizenship to be Prime Minister, but a quick dash to Iraq buys Abbott a distractor if not a bit of thinking time as well as offering priceless photo-opportunities with the boys (and girls) and other opportunities to pose as a world statesman, even if he can’t give our troops a decent pay rise any more than he can be honest with the Australian people about his intention to increase our troop numbers in Iraq or the fact that he is still a British citizen and constitutionally prohibited from being Australia’s Prime Minister.

Julie Bishop eyes off Tony Abbott’s job as he drags government down even further.

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Abbott's bad look at Julie Bishop

Anthony John Abbott, Australia’s kamikaze pilot Prime Minister continues to drag the LNP coalition deeper into disaster and defeat, plumbing new depths of disappointment, unpopularity and disapproval. Those who have vested interests in the longevity of an LNP government are increasingly talking of alternatives such as Julie Bishop, most recently air-brushed in the Murdoch press as heiress apparent in the faint hope of restoring at least enough support for the ‘safe seats’, such as Pyne’s seat of Sturt not to change hands in 2016.

By December the Coalition’s primary vote had slipped to 38 per cent while Labor’s had risen to 39 per cent, indicating a two-party preferred result of 54-46. Analyst, Andrew Catsaras identifies a 7.5 per cent primary vote swing against the Abbott government since the election. Three-quarters of it has gone to Labor; one-quarter to the Greens

Switching the figurehead, however, is not going to help; not going to change the course of the SS Team Abbott. Not only is the electorate underwhelmed overall, it is clear that in vital quarters, such as women voters, for example, Abbott and his team have inspired an intense, implacable hostility.

That hostility continues to expand with each adverse move the government takes towards caring, towards compassion, towards responsible government for all. Switching ‘Mad-Dog’ Scott Morrison to Social Services was, in itself, a massive rebuff to all who value caring in our society.

News items such as Morrison’s recent threat to the Moreland Council’s authority to bestow citizenship because they left his immigration slogans out of the ceremony serve only as further nails in his coffin. Morrison could not leave Immigration without a swift kick to the belly of those who oppose cruelty, torture and indefinite detention in the name of the Australian people.

Abbott does not know how to lead a government. The consensus across the nation, even amongst supporters is that ‘Tony-one-note’ may have been an impressive wrecking machine in opposition but he is dangerously out of his depth in the deeper waters of leadership; now that he make must meet more complex demands such as making policy, exercising authority and showing real leadership. And unlike his past, where others have always got him out of trouble, Abbott must now wear the responsibility which comes with the highest office. It is not an easy fit. He is clearly, by temperament, most suited to inflicting damage but now he needs to be in damage control mode, he can’t find the switch.

Abbott, the unlikely rising contender distinguished himself rather more for his manic ambition, his dogmatic negativity, his chauvinism, his bottom-feeding misogyny and his chutzpah, his outrageous often ludicrous audacity, than any particular skill or commanding intellectual depth or breadth.

No, Abbott gained attention by other means, by stooping low, easily our lowest stooping Prime Ministerial candidate in Australian political history. He Limbo-danced, (how low can you go?) his way into the short-attention-span, shallow end of the pool of popular consciousness.

Yet pandering to popular prejudice and other forms of stooping to seek approval has proved a two-edged sword for Abbott and his government. His notorious support from toxic quarters set up a reciprocal axis which has infected his personal approval and his government’s legitimacy. The damage has been done by his alliance with Piers Akerman, Andrew Bolt and other tabloid hacks in Murdoch’s press and his mateship with far right Sydney shock jocks such as Alan Jones, who indulged his own personal hatred of women with a public ‘ditch the witch and Juliar‘ persecution. The pigeons have come home, if not to roost, at least to defecate all over his reputation.

Now Tony One Note has been catapulted into power by the decline of the Labor government, and by a series of whopping lies and simple slogans and big backers, Abbott’s Team Australia most notable achievement is the consistency with which it malfunctions and underperforms, disappointing its wealthy supporters by behaving more like an opposition than a government. Swinging a wrecking-ball at anything environmental, for example, may well appeal to his vengeful side, and brownie points from the sclerotic, climate-denying rump of his parliamentary party, but it wins him no new political capital.

A competitive over-achiever, fuelled by an almost paranoid anxiety, Brown-coal Abbott has now reached the point where he is glancing nervously over his shoulder as he poll after poll delineates his accelerating political decline.

Waiting in the wings, according to Rupert Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph is the heiress apparent, Julie Bishop, aka Princess Mesothelioma an ambitious Adelaide blueblood from the same set which gave us Alexander Downer, a woman with strong connections to old money whose political star is rising in a murky, if not downright stygian firmament.  The elevation is interesting for its pitch. Deciding wisely not to put an intellectual or outstanding record first, the Telegraph has opted for a glamorising the woman in Julie rather than the person or the politician.

111 Bishop photo shoot

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has appeared in her most glamorous photograph yet, posing in a Giorgio Armani dress and heels.

The justification offered by Ms Bishop is that she used the shoot to deliver a serious message about the gender divide in Canberra: “I wish there were more women in Cabinet. I think women make a great contribution to discussions; they offer a different perspective.” Especially if they twerk like Miley Cyrus, the feral Telegraph reader adds reading between the lines.

Women in power, Bishop assumes we all accept, regularly use photo-shoots to offer insightful observations of grave and profound nature as she has chosen to offer. Bishop’s world-view and her presumption usefully free her from deigning to expand on what her ‘different perspective’ amounts to. Or if it’s heeded.

That’s because Bishop’s different perspective amounts to nothing or less than nothing when you look at her record. Bishop, of course, has used this line before. Her claim has been that despite being the only woman in cabinet, up until the recent reshuffle, she spoke out; she made her opinion known. Perhaps that’s why the government has used her portfolio like a piggy bank, raiding it whenever they need to honour other commitments such as the insultingly paltry $200 million to the UN Green Climate Fund 9 December. We now have the lowest spending on overseas aid on record. On top of 7.6 billion cuts already announced, Abbott will now cut a further 3.7 billion over 4 years. Bishop has no funds to do anything and countless former aid recipients who feel betrayed, hurt and abandoned by the Foreign Minister and her government.

Bishop has now just broken her commitment to the women of the Pacific, a cause she has claimed is dear to her heart, a commitment which she had assured all parties was rock-solid. Why? It’s because her patriarchal party’s cabinet has raided her fund. You may tell us you have the ear of the cabinet, Ms Bishop, but the evidence is so damningly  to the contrary, that all you do is injure your credibility further. Unless of course, you bank on exclusive brands and your glamour, a commodity which the Telegraph suggests continues to increase:

What other qualifications does this daughter of the Adelaide toffocracy, have on Abbott’s job? The Daily Telegraph is keen to explain that Bishop is a woman who has not bartered her femininity to achieve success. The photo shoot could have fooled many of us. But in the sense that the Telegraph readers love, they can be assured that Julie has kept up her appearance and looks a treat. Of course, as Victoria Rollinson notes, in 2007 Bishop confirmed her abhorrence of just being a fashion-plate.

“I don’t think it’s necessary to get dressed up in designer clothing and borrow clothing and make-up to grace the cover of magazines… You’re not a celebrity, you’re an elected representative, you’re a member of parliament. You’re not Hollywood and I think that when people overstep that line they miss the whole point of that public role.”

So it’s just a line between Hollywood and democratic public life, Ms Bishop? It seems the lady doth protest too much. The Courier Mail has the last word on this element of Bishop’s designs.

‘Dignified yet determined, Ms Bishop has succeeded where Julia Gillard failed, by showing that women can perform at the highest levels of political office without either hiding behind their gender or sacrificing their femininity. A passionate advocate of women, Ms Bishop believes in merit-based promotion, and her own hard work is now reaping rewards, both on the international stage and in domestic polls. And the damage done by Ms Gillard to the public perception of women in leadership roles is slowly being healed as voters regain confidence that a female politician can deliver’.

Bishop then has made clear that she is not a feminist. She chooses to look at the world through another lens, she claims. She doesn’t self-identify as a feminist, as she puts it, her backhanded vacuity trivializing feminism as a matter of image or an adjective one might employ in one’s PR material. Yet Bishop happily accepts all of feminism’s gains, whilst being so airily dismissive.  She does not, it seems understand that a career in politics for women owes much to historical feminists’ struggles. Oblivious also to her privileged career, she asserts that she has never had any trouble getting what she wants. Clearly, in her eyes, feminism is an optional extra for other women; women of lesser ability than herself.

Waiting in the wings, pursued by a rabidly partisan press, supported by backers anxious they may have done their dough on a dud in Tony Abbott, Julie Bishop has little or no other claim on the leadership. But that didn’t stop Tony Abbott. Bishop’s over-hyped record of success as Foreign Minister is patchy but she enjoys good press. The undertakings to Obama about the astonishing health of the Barrier Reef and the amazing record of the Abbott government in protecting it were probably brushed aside but the Bishop-backers would count this another stellar moment where the little woman stood up for herself against the big bully of the world. Bishop’s talking up of her tough talk with Putin was a great spin on what amounted to a flogging with a wet lettuce. it was another entirely ineffectual encounter: Putin continued ‘putin’ on Bishop either not computin’ or spinning like a dervish.

Spin, or rather hyper-spin, if we may be permitted to spin spin itself, of course is a tactic not confined to Bishop alone in the beleaguered Abbott government; indeed, its slogan could well be ‘It don’t mean a thing if ain’t got that spin …’ with apologies to Duke Ellington and it is a terminal addiction not merely because it is so transparently far-fetched, but because the spinners appear to be taken in by their own spin.

Make no mistake, Julie Bishop is very ambitious. But, so too, was Tony Abbott. Bishop may come into the top job by default, as he more or less did with Labor’s collapse, an event he had more than a hand in. But that doesn’t make the Princess Mesothelioma qualified to lead. Indeed, all the evidence so far, suggests that she is only just treading water in Foreign Affairs. Jumping, however glamorously, into the top job would be getting her into very much deeper water.

Tony Abbott’s New Year Resolutions

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abbott's resolutions

Dear Mr Abbott,

Commiserations. Wish we could wish you a happy new year. We can’t. it won’t wash. Everything’s against it. Rupert’s rubbished you. Bolt’s become a blistering barnacle. Even lame, tame, Piers ‘party parrot’ Akerman is on the attack. The economy is nose-diving. Unemployment soars. Export receipts are plummeting. A plunging oil price threatens international capital and world financial stability. Balancing the budget? Even Joe Sooky concedes that you will break that promise too.

It’s not as if you’ve been doing nothing, as you say. You’re busier than a cat watching two rat-holes: with your neo-liberal tea party attacks on welfare, your trashing of the environment, your scorning of climate science, (and most other science), and your persecuting of refugees; your assaults on the elderly, the frail and the needy.

Meanwhile cyborg Employment Minister Eric Abetz, another 1950s throwback, readies Work-Choices off-stage and there will be hell to pay when that cat is debagged. But nothing much has come to anything; really achieved anything you wanted, or like yourself, will ever amount to much. So much on; so little to show.

So here’s a New Year’s resolution or two, just in case you don’t get time to do your own. Like talking points, really. You’ll get the hang of it. But first, a word in your ear.

Prime Minister, there is no nice way of putting this. You are beyond saving. Beyond redemption. No resolution will help you hang on to power, get re-elected or ever be trusted but it might tide you over until the end. The end is certain, whether you are wiped out in the next election, or you are impaled on Peta Credlin’s size 11 stiletto heel, you skewer yourself on a sharpened bicycle spoke, or you are lost in the surf at Portsea. You are going nowhere, and it shows.

In the meantime, here are a few tips. It’s not all positive, Mr Abbott, but it can’t be helped. There’s so much you must cut out.  Let’s start with ‘getting the message out.’

Stop parroting ‘ we must get the message out’. The message is out. Australians get you loud and clear: we just don’t like what we see and hear. Messaging, moreover, cuts both ways and you can’t speak out, reach out without first listening in. Your empty ‘messages’ are nothing but hollow reminders of your lack of credibility. Moreover, they waste time and energy. Beyond your spin cycle, your real messages are your words and deeds. Time to stop spinning, tune in and listen.

You are reactionary, backward-looking, ill-prepared and unfit to govern. That’s the message you convey. You can’t get away from it. The bad news, for you, is that voters get this message loud and clear. The good news is this leaves you a fair bit to work on.  Start by stepping out of the past.

Revering the past, continually referencing the past, just confirms you as yesterday’s man. Stop reminding us Howard faced adversity, too.

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Your love affair with a mythical past signals an incapacity to deal with the present. Mention Menzies or hark back to Howard and you only earn yourself further derision for your presumption.  False analogies and parallels are dangerous. They make you look fat-headed and trapped in the past. Snap out of it. If you can’t face the future, at least look as if you know you need to focus on the present. Above all you need vision. Step up, stand out from your backward-looking, reactionary and regressive ministry. None of them can do anything but pull you down further like the undertow in the Portsea pier to pub in January.

Nostalgia saps your mindset, your weltanschauung, your shtick. ‘Turn back the clock’ might as well be your party slogan. You yearn for a 1950s Camelot ruled by Ming and Santamaria. You dream of a stable, comfortable, Australia of order and propriety. It never existed. It’s a wife in the kitchen, children in bed, slippers by the fire and pipe-dream, a fabrication based on myth and falsehood. More to the point, it is a dangerous delusion and a retreat from reality. Let’s get real about the 50s.

In the 1950s an intolerant, hypocritical, narrow society stifled individuality and oppressed difference. It was a racist, xenophobic, White Australia of privilege and entitlement ruled by Anglophile white males. No time to be a woman, or an ethnic minority, it was also an era of defensive nationalism in the face of new contact with outsiders; a time of acute cultural cringing and low national self-esteem. For many if not most, it was to be endured, suffered rather than celebrated or venerated. You want to put a bit of distance between yourself and the 50s.

Unfairness has hurt you most. The Australian people have long lost tolerance for you and your government. Your behaviour is unfair, reactionary, autocratic, anachronistic, backward-looking, untrustworthy and dishonest. You are gaffe-prone. You conspicuously lack what it takes to govern modern Australia, a diverse multicultural modern nation.  You lack independence, initiative and vision. You are putty in the hands of big business and big capital but you oppose anything which helps ordinary people.

You were quick to repeal the mining tax for your mate Gina Reinhart. But you are happy to raise the petrol excise and the cost of doctor’s visits for ordinary Australians. You have let Hockey go soft on his promise to chase multinationals who evade tax. It was too good to be true anyway. Hockey took the opposite position when in opposition. But you step up your spending on chasing dole frauds. You cut funds for the homeless. You oppose anything progressive like renewable energy or public transport on principle whilst you indulge reactionary movements like the world family congress and vested interests in your fantasy that you can turn back the clock. Take your sneaky back door re-introduction of Work Choices, for example.  Last week Eric Abetz crowed that he had “neutralised” Work Choices. He means it is far enough in the past for it to have faded in the public’s consciousness. And even despite your witch hunting Royal Commission into the unions, Work Choices will prove a dead parrot. Work Choices didn’t work under Howard and won’t work now. Economists will tell you low wages do not build GDP. And even if it’s a hit with your mates, your wealthy backers, it signals ‘mean and out of touch’.

Both of your two main achievements have been negative and both have helped us to hate you. You repealed a tax on carbon, a backward step which not only shrank budget revenue, it left us with no climate change policy and out of step with the rest of the world. You lied about its benefits to families. Despite your desperate spin, the carbon tax repeal has not lowered prices. But you continue to pretend that we are all $500 better off. Stop it.

Persecuting asylum seekers might stop some boats but it undoes a lot of good. And there are fewer votes in stopping the boats under Morrison than you count on. Time to stop. OK, you inherited the shameful off-shore detention camps but your boat turn-backs, your enhanced processing and all the cruelty revealed signals that you have taken persecution to extremes. It is cruel, covert and wrong. It flouts all decent principles of behaviour and thumbs its nose at the law. It screams inhumanity. It ignores our international commitments. There is a strange, disturbing zeal to it all, moreover, of loss of reason, sanity and plain good nature. Back up. Scrap the policy. Embrace humanity and honour our global responsibilities.

Granny- bashing, handbag-snatching is your real forte. It is, own up. You target defenceless groups, which are too weak and disorganised, unlike the miners, to fight back. You destroy their advocacy groups, silencing those who keep guard over a fair and decent society, groups who might challenge you or voice protest. You rob children of their futures by snatching environmental groups’ funding. You put a stranglehold on social, educational, health, research and advisory bodies. Any government which behaves in this way signals its own demise. People will reject you to protect themselves and the vulnerable. Any so-called savings in the area of welfare spending will cost you dearly.

Porting Australia into the past is future-proofing in reverse. It creates anxiety and a massive lack of confidence. You have declared open season on anything environmental, from laws to organisations. Your achievement amounts to wrecking anything enlightened or progressive whilst you venerate yesterday’s mistakes with your championing of coal. You lie about damage to the Barrier Reef.

Ask yourself: what have you really achieved? This question comes before claiming victory in fields, such as the economy being on the right track, when it is self-evidently a rout. So much of your media releases, your claims of victory contradict the population’s own perceptions. Much of what your ministers and spin doctors utter has the same theme: but you’re wrong you know. Putting a false spin on your ‘achievements’ just makes you sound more dishonest, for example, the talking point about a strong economy. You talked it down. Your spending weakened it. Cut the spin. You can’t polish a turd without getting smeared in ordure yourself.

Cut the talking points. Your ministers are hard enough to listen to without having to endure endless repeats of empty, meaningless slogans every day. Your communications unit is no better than a galah if all it can do is get you to parrot clichés, slogans and banal talking points. First up it would be listening. Communication is a two way process, Mr Abbott. It is as much about taking messages on board as getting messages out. And you can’t simply relay the interests of other lobby groups such as the IPA, the Sydney Institute and others in the pay of vested interests.

Kick the IPA out of bed. It is funded by yesterday’s interests, mining and fossil fuels. And you let it keep details secret. How about requiring advisory boards, institutes, groups and agencies to provide clear details of their sponsors?

Mr Abbott, these New Year’s resolutions are tough medicine but you have so often told us you are up for it.  Your choice is clear. Either continue on your current disastrous course and steam straight into the iceberg of ignorance. (There won’t be many to rescue from the wreck.) Or you can take stock. Stop what isn’t working. Start listening. It’s too late to save your own career but it’s just possible that you may lessen the wreckage and destruction you inflict on the nation.

Resignation: Abbott’s most significant achievement for women.

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tony looking creepy

(The Prime Minister) told Channel Nine’s Lisa Wilkinson that when it comes to women, it’s very important his government does the right thing by families.

“Women are particularly focused on the household budget and the repeal of the carbon tax means a $550 benefit for the average family,” he said.

Abbott also pushed the paid parental leave scheme he said he’s still committed to in 2015 – a policy that will now be managed by incoming Minister for Social Services Scott Morrison, along with childcare and our welfare system.

Women of Australia are overwhelmed with gratitude. They are singing and dancing in the streets. Tears of joy are shed amidst the laughter. A great clapping of hands, shouting of ‘bravo’, ‘jolly good show’ and other expressions of joyous approbation sweep the nation in a spontaneous, tumultuous outpouring of thanks for the achievements of Prime Minister Tony Abbott in his repeal of the carbon tax. The repeal of the carbon tax, was his main achievement, as he put it, modestly, on breakfast television last week, in his role as Minister for Women.

Women embrace ecstatically.  Gone forever are the dark clouds of doubt and despair over inequality, injustice and oppression. Glass ceilings lie in shards all over boardroom tables throughout the land. Employers, unchained from carbon taxing, rush to pay women equally. Banished is the dreadful spectre of the throwbacks back in charge; the re-emergence of the arrogant, indifferent and cruel boys’ club of the patriarchy that ruled Australia in the 1950s.  There is hope in every woman’s heart. All this and a PPL, too! For there is no carbon tax to pay.

And the PPL, of course, the PM repeated, stalling, hearing no prompt on his ear-piece to Peta. He stared down the camera, looking vainly for an auto-cue, insulting and overlooking every woman who was not, nor was ever to become a mother. Of, course, naturally, there is our Paid Parental Leave; even if it doesn’t quite exist as yet; even if it is unlikely to ever be enacted. Even if the experts say it won’t work. That hasn’t prevented us from counting it in. Just the opposite. He grinned.

Just look at MYEFO. Just look at how we rigged the bottom line by including the GP co-payment and other payments we had yet to get through the Senate. But it wasn’t easy! The so-called experts were against me again, of course.

Here the Prime Minister laughed as if ‘expert’ were a dirty word along with ‘scientist’ and ‘feminist’ in his government and he were naturally averse to any advice save his own and the sound of others agreeing with it. It didn’t pay to dwell on issues. In a post-modern world everyone was his own expert. Truth, in the end, always boiled down to a simple, black and white formulation you could fit on a bumper sticker.

Take the Productivity Commission 2009 Report on Paid Maternity, Paternity and Parental Leave. What would they know? Pack of experts! Pack of eggheads, couldn’t even park a bicycle straight. They argued for flat rate payments, rather than the income replacement we are offering. They claimed ”the labour supply effects would be greatest for lower-income, less-skilled women, those most responsive to wage subsidies and least likely to have privately negotiated paid parental leave”.  He shuddered.

But, you know, these theorists. He winked. Hippy-trippy, tree-hugging, beardy-weirdy, love-everyone do-gooders. ABC listening lefties the lot of them. What would they know with their fair-trade, gluten-free café frappuccinos, their vegan free range risottos and their mung-bean sandals? Fixated on their social engineering and economic vandalism! Redressing disadvantage? For goodness sake. Next thing it will all be about counteracting hegemonic masculinity.

No. We need to help the right women first. Help the right class of woman to have babies. Look how they did it in Singapore. You know I have always been a big fan of old Lee Kuan Yew. He was in power for thirty years. Knew a thing or two, too, the old Lee.

Open a nation for business and the benefits will trickle down. You bet you are, I am, you bet it will. That’s why we’ve had Eric Abetz slaving away to cut red tape; red tape like keeping tabs on women’s participation in the workforce. We have a mandate to cut this ‘red tape’ by relaxing the gender reporting requirements of big bosses that have only just come into force and which were intended to track women’s workforce participation and remuneration. Frees up employers to create jobs. We are the party of little government, freedom and opportunity.

Experts even said my PPL wouldn’t boost the workforce. Said highly educated, well-paid women already are highly attached to the labour force; already enjoy a high level of private provision. Said that, because of this full income replacement ”would have few incremental labour supply benefits”. They banged on about its expense and how other countries have social insurance to pay for it. But that’s not what my staff tell me. I listen to them. And some of them are women. He winked again.

Minister for Women is a vital job, of course it is, a huge responsibility. Huge. One I take very seriously, he said. Very seriously. I am a feminist. At home they call me Mr Betty Friedman. I have three daughters and a wife who is a woman.  My own mother was a woman. And we have two women in cabinet! But my daughters made me a feminist. In fact if you got them the wool, they could make you a feminist, too.

And here’s a fact for you. Since the carbon tax was abolished, the number of women in cabinet has doubled. And that’s not all. Nearly twenty per cent of my entire ministry is female, he boasted. I stand on my record. Of course, we want to include all women but, let’s be perfectly clear, that doesn’t mean men and women are equal. As I said a few years back:

“I think it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons.”

But we’ve come a long way. As I said at IWD in March. Today you can be female and a high flyer. Look at a hundred years ago. ”It wasn’t so long ago as a Sydney-sider that there was a female lord mayor, a female premier, a female prime minister, a female head of state in our governor general, a female monarch, obviously, and indeed the richest person in our country was female.” And now, of course, we have a feminist male as a PM and Minister for Women.

Of course, I copped a bit of stick about it. Eyebrows went up everywhere when I put up my hand for this vital role. We need Tony like a fish needs a bicycle was the consensus. That’s what they said. And worse.

Was it not a calculated snub? Was my abrogation of the role of Minister for Women yet another gesture of contempt towards progressives in general and women in particular? And what of the implications? Some said it was a calculated insult to all women.

Well I knew it was going to be hard. But we are prepared to do the hard yards. Take the tough measures to get Australia back on its feet again. But it’s not like an Iron Man event or anything.

But there were a few hurdles, his staffers conceded privately; a few tricky patches he needed help with; needed to be eased through. First there was his almost total ignorance. Did he know who women were or what they did? On this and many similar fundamentals, but most especially his prejudices, his misinformation, his instinctive mystification his staff found it simpler, more expedient to adjust their own expectations than to expect to change his.

Julie Bishop rushed in to iron out the wrinkles and added a few more of her own. What the PM means is that benefits to women help everybody, she said.

“Women’s policy is everyone’s policy”. Did she mean Minister for Women was, therefore, a redundant anomaly?

“There are numerous issues that could be mentioned in the context of what we do for women,” she said. Yet she was not able to articulate a single one.

“I think the Prime Minister was focusing on the policy change that will have the largest impact on families and households and getting rid of the carbon tax is certainly that.” Yet out of Canberra’s spin cycle, the nation’s riddance of the carbon tax has been almost impossible to spot in the real world, in real things like power bills. Despite all of the coalition’s propaganda, very few of us are any better off and all of us face bigger utility bills in the near future.

In the end, of course, the PM was damned with faint praise. Bishop merely opened the door for Abbott to announce his decision to get out of the job to make way for someone who has the necessary qualifications and the experience. A woman would be a good idea. And as the PM has assured us, there are countless numbers knocking on the cabinet door.

Stitched up by Abbott, Scott Morrison falls on his sword.

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“He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals.” Benjamin Franklin

THE man who stopped the boats yesterday declared he will now stop the bludgers. In a sweeping cabinet reshuffle, Immigration Minister Scott Morrison will now be tasked with putting rorters back to work and creating a new families package. Dubbing himself the “Minister for Economic Participation” the new Social Services minister has the task of clearing up the billions taxpayers fork out on people who would rather claim welfare then work. The Daily Telegraph 22 December 2014

The final nail in the coffin of the Abbott government was not the whiff of scandal emanating from the Pyle-Ashby nexus; the malodorous political corpse of scandal-in-waiting Mal Brough; the Credlin-Abbott power nexus; the stench wafting down from ICAC in Sydney.

Nor was it any number of other things such as the crushing unpopularity of a government that couldn’t take a trick without a dirty trick or two involving phone calls from asylum seeker children to cross-bench senators or the desperate plundering of Foreign Affairs’ money-box to pay for guns and gunships, sovereign borders, Federal Police, the Reserve Bank, Direct Action and sundry other lapses of impulse-control.

Nor was it the failure of all the PM’s snipers, ASIO operatives, terror squads and secret intelligence to protect Sydney from a notorious and threat-listed madman who somehow dropped off the list, resulting in the tragic deaths of two innocent civilians.

No. None of these. It was to prove Abbott’s last act of bastardry that did him in. The ‘promotion’ of Scott Morrison. How this came about is a curious tale of a most curious individual, in curious circumstances, for Morrison is a man conflicted in so many ways: by his beliefs and his actions; by his words and meanings; by his ambition and his embarrassing public displays of servile devotion and unquestioned obedience to his leader, whoever he or she may be.

Flushed with his self-proclaimed triumph of stopping the boats, First Sea Lord Morrison, reportedly repeatedly, relentlessly badgered his leader, the beleaguered, self-deluded Tony Abbott for promotion. ‘I am your stand-out star performer, he is believed to have said on every occasion and many would-be, could be, not-quite and not at all occasions. I stopped the boats…’

It was a poor career tactic. Morrison’s persistent attention-seeking self-promotion not only provoked displeasure in many of his naturally unpleasant or jealous cabinet colleagues, it prompted his boss or his boss’s boss, Peta Credlin, or both, to have him moved sideways.

Yet it was Morrison’s unctuous protestations of unhesitating loyalty to his boss that were the last straw. He would, he lied, with nauseating eagerness and frequency, do whatever his Prime Minister, said he should do. Someone give him a suicide vest and a one-way ticket to Iraq, please, Credlin murmured under her breath. Aloud she said to Tony, why don’t we give him Kevin’s job? It made sense. Couldn’t be any worse than Andrews, they agreed. And Kevin’s already cut all the agencies. Saved us a quarter of a billion. Glad we could help him out with getting the credentials for his counselling outfit.

Morrison’s conduct has been overweeningly, dangerously ambitious, even for a party built out of overweeners. He has put Julie Bishop to shame, but without the jewellery, couture or the jogging; Murdoch’s press loved him and his amour propre, affectionately describing him as a tough guy who got things done. That hurt. So, in the end, Abbott was persuaded by Credlin, he had to be taken care of.

Liberal Party Chairman Brian Loughnane, Peta’s husband, a dab hand at such matters, was in attendance, to ensure proceedings served the party’s interests, its heritage and its principles of unbridled pragmatism, expediency and leaving all the rest up to the market.

And so it goes that Mad-Dog Morrison, once and forever garlanded with the reeking albatross of Immigration and Border protection – the  moral, economic and policy failure of Immigration, tracked his execrable political corpse for the last time into the boudoir of power, Abbott’s own throne and star chamber, newly-renovated and replete with bar fridge, overnighter and bicycle by the wall, the Prime Minister’s office. He knelt at Peta Credlin’s size 11 stilettoes. He talked about himself, pleading his case.

Naturally, Morrison, explained, he had effected a little career enhancement of his own, as it were, on the job. His genius constrained by the plain title ‘Immigration’ he had cleverly expanded his importance by announcing that he was adding Border Protection but stopping short of explaining this was in order to imitate his mentor Howard in creating and maintaining an Australian phobia of asylum-seekers as a threat to the nation. The new title went with trimmings including an exalted four star general, Angus Houston, and lots of staff in uniforms. He sighed happily.

Morrison militarised his department, he went on. He gave regular briefings where he couldn’t answer any questions or else simply failed to turn up. He changed the law, putting himself, if not exactly above it, at least in the next best available position.

But every dog has its day and so it was on this day, a few days before Christmas. Arise Sir Scott, John, Morrison, said Abbott, only half in jest for a knighthood had been dangled over him.  Arise Sir Scott, Knight of the boats, the olds and the bludgers.

It was, he knew it, Morrison’s day to be shunted out of contention as a leadership rival.  Social Services was snatched from the safe hands of Kevin Andrews and thrust upon the newly dubbed has-been with some extras tacked on for show.

Time to take stock. Granted, the amalgamation of childcare, welfare and family leave create the appearance of a super ministry but it was hardly a reward. For starters, Morrison has no budget and beyond that he is singularly ill-prepared by his experiences in Immigration to begin to cope with Social Services, albeit the new, enhanced, expanded model with extra child-minding.

In brief, Morrison is clueless. He has no idea of how to go about his very different new job. In a stroke of either genius, pure malice or instinctive vindictiveness, Tony Abbott has checked the career of his ambitious over-reacher, Morrison with a poisoned chalice.

What can we expect? From the past, we can expect silence. Already Morrison has declined to be interviewed on ABC on the subject of the ‘defunding’ of disability advocates, homelessness and all other groups representing the poor and needy. Certainly, they had no idea that funds would be cut by a quarter of a billion dollars.

Naturally there will be a change of name to fit the neo-con mould of veneration of economics. Expect the Ministry of Economic Participation, caring for at least half a million who through no fault of their own are excluded from participation.

We can expect more manipulation. This will follow the trail blazed by the way he got children to phone cross bench senators such as Ricky Muir but just in case they may have got bamboozled: there are still hundreds of children in detention in Australia. Plus over 150 on Nauru. Peter Dutton could well attend to this in his first act as Minister.

Above all we can expect propaganda and lies about the NDIS being too expensive to run without swingeing cuts to other welfare spending. Here it will be imperative to remind Morrison of the facts. The NDIS was funded by a 0.5% increase in the Medicare Levy in July. The increase – from 1.5 to 2% – took effect in July 2014 and is expected to raise $20.4 billion by 2018-19. The NDIS is estimated to cost just over $22 billion a year when fully operational in 2019-20.

The cost per taxpayer is minimal. Average Australian taxpayers, in full time work the ABS calculates enjoy incomes of $74,724, before tax, it means around $350 per annum or $7 per week. Those on $110,000 will pay $500 or $10 per week.

There was bipartisan support for this Labor initiative but now it suits Scott Morrison to claim that welfare cuts are needed to pay for the NDIS.

In the end, however, we can expect the same crass ineptitude that is the Abbott government’s signature. Only this time, it will be visible and not enveloped by a pseudo-military operations secrecy. And Social Services won’t be militarised so readily although don’t discount the formation of a dole-bludger-busting squad trawling through Brandis’ metadata and even out on the street, lifting blankets, inspecting limbs, checking the real mobility of those in mobility scooters.

Morrison can’t refuse to speak because it is an ‘in-bed matter’ or an ‘in wheel chair matter. He won’t be able to ship oldies and other recalcitrant pensioners off shore, as much as he would like to. He may of course, resort to proposing military training for dole bludgers but it’s unlikely to be a runaway success, especially given poor morale in the forces because of low wages, poor conditions and so on.

In short, it will be a total disaster. Morrison will rush into savage cuts to pensions, allowances, and anything else he can get his hands on. The economy will change down another cog as a result. The public and the public servants will jack up.

Morrison will plead the need to fund the NDIS. He will bang on about safety nets and sustainability. But the Australian public will see him coming this time. They will resist. They will contest his every move, his every word and deed.

Not so fast, ‘mad dog,’ Australians will say, we’ve got your number. Get back in the Ute – and cut out that barking. We are taking you to the vet. Only it won’t be a vet, it will be a court of law requiring Morrison to answer charges relating to his time as Minister for death camps and detention centres. The long list will include charges of manslaughter, child abuse, obtaining benefit by deception and violation of human rights. Morrison will be advised to plead nolo contendere.  He will, by special arrangement, be incarcerated on Manus Island for the rest of his (un)natural life.