First published July 25
“We must hit the ground doing,” the PM declares, talking up a storm of “good government” although parliament will not sit for a month and no-one’s got any real plans. Even if it had an agenda, the 45th government only needs to get two independent senators offside and any proposed legislation is all over.
MPs look uneasy.
Eric Abetz is spitting chips.
After months of agonising indecision and inaction followed by an ill-judged election gambit, an eight-week ordeal which almost cost them government, Turnbull is keen to get things moving, but he needs to be careful not to jump the shark nor lose any of the 75 MPs left.
Some, like Cabinet Secretary and confidante Arthur Sinodinos, who has yet to hear back from the ICAC on accusations of illegal fund-raising will already be in Labor’s sights.
The week in politics begins with the PM gesticulating manfully in some type of air karate performance in the hope that his words will be mistaken for decisiveness, his exhortation for leadership. Someone’s told him to beef up his body language.
What will they be doing? asks David Marr on ABC’s Insiders. The PM has no game plan.
The bruising eight-week ordeal that has almost destroyed them is “a solid victory”, he chops. A solid victory. Chop, chop. He has a vision. We see his palms. MPs will ask him in three years about KPIs, (key performance indicators), because “we have set out our plan”.
Even John Howard would struggle to be this dull, this dishonest, hand gestures aside.
“This is all about delivery…”
“This is all about delivery,” ventures the PM who surely holds the record for the most over-promised and under-delivered election performance in history. He could be addressing Eagle Boys Pizza. His authority in tatters, he may not make it to Christmas.
“He’s a sitting duck and he knows it” one Liberal tells Paul Bongiorno adding that the coalition’s plan will be to sit parliament as little as possible, planning only seven weeks’ of sitting before December. Turnbull’s small-target campaign morphs into a small target parliamentary strategy. To hell with accountability, or representative government.
The Coalition plan is to say they have a plan. Yet they also have a leader whose tax reform antics showed a genius for equivocation and indecision, a passive aggressive government given to erratic outbursts and bullying of state premiers who unreasonably expect the government to stick to its word over Gonski and health funding. Turnbull did himself in.
“We were fucked by February,” campaign guru Mark Textor confides to one of the female MPs to survive, in a rare concession to reality that will not spoil his enjoyment of his fee.
By Wednesday, despite colossal media spin about mandates and plans even ducking and weaving looks risky. Chairman Mal’s heroic victory over the “outrageous lies” of scumbag Labor’s Mediscare dims with news that his government’s “solid majority” of 77 in the House of Reps of the 45th Parliament now amounts to only one seat.
Eric Abetz did say, Monday, his campaign was crap; the electioneering failed to connect.
In a flash of old Malcolm, the PM snaps back. How many members has the Tasmanian branch? 1200? The senator claims Turnbull is 800 shy but the point is made. The party ran dead not only because its leader ran dead but also because its support base is dying.
Like his predecessor, Turnbull must blame someone else, even if Abetz has a lot to answer for in a local campaign that was out of touch; out of time.
Turnbull dipped into his own pocket…
The Liberals ran out of money. Their policies did not connect with electors. Then, shockingly to all who know that our democracy is not for buying, late in the day, Turnbull dipped into his own pocket.
Just how much Turnbull’s own contribution affected the election result will remain a matter of conjecture. How much proprietary authority it buys him in terms of his own leadership is impossible to reckon.
The amount, however, may not be one million as reported in The Australian but two. When ABC’s Leigh Sales presses an evasive PM on his donation he, typically, brushes her aside.
“All of the donations I’ve made in the past to the Liberal Party and any donations that will be made or have been made will all be disclosed in accordance with the Electoral Act.”
The future looks grim. Unlike Labor, the Liberals cannot count on unions or idealistic young people with notions of social justice and community service to build support. And in a glimpse of things to come, or a groundhog moment, in Tasmania recently, some power mad young Liberals seem to have lost the political plot – if they ever found it.
Abetz abandons his address to a hundred bright young things attending the Australian Liberal Students’ Federation dinner in Hobart when students, dressed as security guards blocked delegates, claiming that they registered too late to vote for the new executive.
For Turnbull it is the opposite tactic. Rather than make hard decisions in allocating or re-allocating portfolios, or kick up a stink by replacing Liberals with Nationals, he simply tinkers a bit with Environment and Defence and then lets everyone in.
A wag on Insiders asks if anyone is left on the Coalition backbench. Turnbull’s Cabinet is the biggest since Whitlam. What he gains in patronage, however, he must surely lose in unworkability. Or does this not matter since it seems his government is all for show now?
…both open insurrection and belly-aching back-stabbers…
Gone is the wounded PM’s faintest hope of authority over his bitterly divided party. Helpfully ABC’s 7:30 Report Friday beats up Bill Shorten’s “factional war” but the Labor leader has just consolidated his leadership while Turnbull has both open insurrection and belly-aching back-stabbers to contend with.
Munificent Mal must stare down the likes of gutsy George Christensen who threatens to cross the floor over super, in a social media spray two days after Monday’s party room meeting. He’s had eight weeks of electioneering to make his protest but Gorgeous George now labels the proposed changes as Labor-style policies in a Tea-Party towelling.
“It’s not the government’s money, it’s YOUR money. We in government need to remember that.” Christensen is not only seeking attention he is exposing a power vacuum at the top.
Union supporter, maverick Bob Katter has warned that he will not support an ABCC and is quick to tell the PM through the media that he will not stand for any union bashing.
ACTU Head Dave Oliver heartily applauds. Katter could be a handful on marriage equality too since he once said he’d walk backwards to Burke if there was gay in his electorate.
Simmering on the backbench is a potent brew of confused, imported populism, racism, climate denial, wilful ignorance and confected resentment à la Trump which is expressed in scapegoating all manner of outsiders from Muslims to marriage equality advocates. Some, like Cory Bernardi, misinterpret the election fiasco as evidence of a need to shift the party further to the right.
Into this mix, with his double dissolution Turnbull has delivered Pauline Hanson, former 1996 Queensland Liberal Party candidate, populist politician and celebrity bigot who claims that she “just says what everyone is thinking,” or “No more Muslims for Australia.” Muslims should be prohibited because “like pit bull terriers they are a danger to our society.”
The gift of sensing “what everyone else is thinking” brings with it the delusion that her crackpot notions are mainstream views, an attitude shared by Bernardi and Christensen and others whose phobias and prejudices are nurtured by the propaganda of the Australian Christian Lobby.
…a specious bid for legitimacy.
Claiming to channel the mainstream is a specious bid for legitimacy. Turnbull will need to call her on it, although it is far from certain that One Nation senators will oppose the ABCC.
Turnbull’s capitulation to his party’s lunatic right wing’s witch-hunt against Safe Schools suggests that he has neither means nor will to cut through the toxic miasma of irrationality he has stirred up. Nor does Liberal party precedent help him access moral high ground.
Despite her disclaimer, Hanson channels prejudices popular amongst small sectors of the Australian community for generations, her incoherent, irrational, wittering discontent is much more closely linked with Liberal Party demagoguery than Turnbull and others voicing public disapproval would care to admit.
It is to be heard, for example, in the nonsense expressed by Peter Dutton that migrants take our jobs while simultaneously being a drain on welfare.
It resonates with John Howard’s claim of babies being thrown overboard, an election winning gambit to demonise asylum-seekers as subhuman and unnatural. Hanson also taps the vein of fear nurtured by Tony Abbott who proclaimed that ISIS was “coming after each and everyone of us. She draws sustenance from the militarisation of our duty to refugees in Morrison’s Border Force and the pernicious myth that our borders are somehow under threat those who seek our asylum.
The myth of the dangerous Muslim is reflected in the Abbott government’s decision to offer haven to only those Syrian refugees who are Christian, a stipulation which has led to UN censure and to unnecessary and inhumane delay in our accepting our fair share of the world’s displaced peoples.
A lame duck leader mortally wounded by his deal with the Nats and despised by all for his arrogance; his imperious mien, his fatal combination of overpowering entitlement and poor judgement, the Chairman is now at the mercy of every desperate party renegade with an axe to grind. Reluctantly Liberal MPs gave support to a coup leader they didn’t like or trust in the hope that he would deliver them from certain political oblivion under Abbott.
…an even less egalitarian society.
Now he has doubly failed them. He will seek to appease the rebels over the proposed $500,000 lifetime cap on non-concessional superannuation contributions. Yet the price of peace will be an even less egalitarian society. Morrison is said to be working on it already.
Expect exemptions for when your Dad dies and leaves you a few mill and a farm in the Upper Hunter or for when you make a mozza out of a divorce settlement, as you do, especially women.
“Life events”, these windfalls will be called as if inherited wealth can never be taxable or as if granting tax exemption under duress is not the perpetuation of privilege, inequality and the power of vested interests.
But Turnbull doesn’t let it show; even if he could afford to. Long live Chairman Tang Bao, sweet custard bun! It’s not a back-down on an election commitment, just a bit of fine tuning because that’s what good government is about.
Mad Dog Morrison is fit to kill. On a mission to restore Australia’s AAA rating when experts reckon the ratings agency Standard and Poor’s is not worth taking seriously given its flawed record in the GFC, Morrison wants us to believe that he’ll have us return to balance by 2020-2021.
Moody’s told him in April that budget cuts alone would not return us to surplus. None of the ratings agencies believe his projected iron ore prices nor do they approve of his counting in zombie measures yet to pass the Senate. In other words his budget calculations don’t add up.
Morrison’s furious to learn secondhand of Turnbull’s turnaround on Medicare from AMA’s Dr Michael Gannon who’s got the nod from Health Minister Sussan Ley. A $2.4 billion dollar nod over four years according to Labor’s Parliamentary Budget Office costings.
“I would be gobsmacked if the government took an ongoing freeze to the next election. They got the scare of their life on health, and that was probably the policy which hurt them the most,” says Dr Gannon leaving a smiling Ley who also says “consultative and collaborative” for the camera.
“Loose lips” Morrison is left out of the loop again, as he was on the date of his first Budget. The Great Helmsman clings to the tiller of the ship of state, his knuckles whitening.
Herbert’s electors may fail in their duty…
News from the Sombrero Belt midweek threatens to throw Chairman Mal off course. Herbert’s electors may fail in their duty to return sitting member, LNP’s Ewen Jones.
Voters do not embrace a tax cut for the rich – key to the great Economic Plan for jobs and growth on which our nation’s prosperity depends. One in five young people in Townsville is unemployed.
Worse, Labor’s Cathy O’Toole may be elected instead. Hawk-eyed Attorney-General George Brandis is urgently dispatched to scrutineer in frantic over-kill, doubtless, an early example of a good, stable government in action.
Herbert is instantly downplayed by national media outlets and the ABC, whose news packaging assumes that Herbert will come to its senses following a recount of all of its 104,181 electors’ ballot papers.
Barring a recount reversal, the Coalition’s majority of one puts it at the mercy of a mad, bad backbench or any maverick prepared to cross the floor. Unable to muster numbers on a no-confidence vote on same-sex marriage, for example, or in strife over zombie “savings” measures his government looks as vulnerable as it could possibly be.
Little wonder that its leader has already taken refuge in the fantasy of a mandate or the group delusion that it has a plan and that’s before the backlash when the electorate wakes up to the fact that Turnbull’s 21st Century Cabinet reshuffle, especially in environment and energy is all about his own survival and satisfying his party’s backers and vested interests than meeting the needs of contemporary Australia.
• Fairfax: Liberal Richard Colbeck back on track to defy the factional fix and get re-elected in Tasmania Another Lazarus-like return from the political dead is under way in Tasmania. Days after it became clear Labor’s Lisa Singh had defied her relegation by factional bosses to survive as a senator, powered by below-the-line votes of supporters, Liberal Richard Colbeck appears to be on track to do the same …
• ABC: Evidence of ‘torture’ of children held in Don Dale detention centre uncovered by Four Corners
• Lynne Newington in Comments on the 4-Corners story: Credit where credit is due … never before has a prime minister run with a royal commission so speedily on such a controversial issue … If Tony Abbott was still sitting in the captain’s chair with his history of protecting the status quo and cover-ups …
• Bob Brown: Don Dale Juvenile Centre’s horrific history Darwin’s Don Dale Juvenile Detention Centre was where a 15-years-old boy committed suicide in the middle of a federal parliamentary controversy over mandatory sentencing of Aboriginal children in 2000, former Greens leader Bob Brown said today. The boy was found hanged at the centre on day 23 of his 28 day sentence for stealing biscuits, apparently not knowing he was due for release within 5 days …
• Bob Hawkins in Comments: Pots and Kettles Department: It’s a cruel irony that a royal commission is to be called into child abuse in the Northern Territory by a PM who, along with all PMs and Immigration Ministers for the better part of two decades, has been indulging in child abuse and human-rights violations, including stealing the childhoods of asylum-seeker kids. I hope this time we are not listening to more MT rhetoric …
