If Malcolm Turnbull did not know it before, he certainly should now: before you stomp your way into Aboriginal politics, it is wise to first don the emu-feather sandals of a trained Kadaitcha man.
The area is fraught with uncertainty and sensitivities which are not always apparent to the outsider; whitefella politics are relatively straightforward compared to the Indigenous version. (more…)
The term was always a bit suss – indeed, when Tony Abbott coined it to claim solidarity against the war against terror, it quickly became obvious that membership of his side was to be strictly limited. Team Australia meant, in effect, Team Abbott: its participants were to be Captain’s picks, loyal not to the country but to the right wing causes he himself would select.
And it was perhaps prescient that one of his immediate s decisions was to barrack for team New Zealand – he enthusiastically endorsed the former Kiwi prime minister Helen Clark as his choice for secretary-general of the United Nations over the former Oz prime minister Kevin Rudd. The precedent was set: the national interest would be disposable where party politics were concerned. (more…)
In a singularly petulant and graceless speech in the early hours after election night, Malcolm Turnbull said he thought he would be returned to government.
His surly but defiant supporters – those of them who had not already gone home – snarled agreement. And for what it is worth, I concur: my fearless prediction is that the coalition will end up with between 76 to 78 seats in the House of Representatives, a thin but decisive majority.
But this is not the way it was meant to be, and it is definitely not as the commentators, the editorialists and the bookmakers confidently forecast. Although the national polls were always close, we were repeatedly reassured that the marginals were holding for the coalition. (more…)
So at long last, next weekend, the voters get to choose, not that it’s much of a choice: which putative prime minister do they least distrust?
The least few days of the campaign of degenerated into a screaming match between dodgy scare stories, a barrage of negativity which can only erode what little faith the punters have retained in the political process. (more…)
The idea of a country negotiating a treaty with its indigenous inhabitants is hardly novel.
Three of our closest friends and allies (New Zealand, Canada and the United States) have all done so successfully, and none of their nations fallen into terminal division and chaos.
And of course even in Australia, a treaty has been under discussion for nearly a century. Aboriginal elders have talked about it since at least the sesquicentenary of settlement in 1938, and it was seriously mooted a generation later when the great public servant, Dr H C (Nugget) Coombs proposed what he called a makharrata – a settlement. (more…)
Malcolm Turnbull’s supporters have been praising him for keeping on his message, which at least has the virtue of simplicity: my government has a national economic plan for jobs and growth.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, and this is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know, as John Keats more elegantly put it. (more…)
Malcolm Turnbull is all very holy about the independence of the Federal Police following last week’s raid on ALP offices and homes over embarrassing (to him) NBN leaks.
Why, the government had absolutely nothing to do with the cops, the Prime Minister asserted virtuously. Bill Shorten should be ashamed of even thinking such a thing.
Well, perhaps, in 2016. But there was a time when Turnbull knows very well that the government of which he was a minister leant on the AFP, and leant very hard indeed. (more…)
So we have at last reached a marker along the long trek to the election.
The Pre-election economic and fiscal outlook (PEFO) was announced at the end of the second week, which is supposed to mean just where we and our political masters see the state of the nation.
PEFO was, like all its predecessors, determinedly optimistic: there are problems, sure, but we can expect things to get better. Nothing to see, folks. But for once there is a serious caveat: it just might not work out exactly as the Treasury and Finance Department hope. And if it doesn’t, we are up shit creek in a barbed wire canoe without a paddle. (more…)
The dementors of Newscorps couldn’t believe their luck.
When the hapless Duncan Storrer rose to ask why rich people were to receive tax cuts while the poor, like himself, did not, the man ticked all the boxes.
He was obviously a victim, and presumably a whinger. And he was not only an invited guest of the one-eyed leftist ABC, but of its most unholy program of all – Q and A. And unsurprisingly, its gullible audience proclaimed him a hero. The man was born to be destroyed. (more…)
Our economic plan for jobs and growth … jobs and growth…jobs and growth… jobs and growth … sobs of mirth … Hobson’s Choice … blobs and froth .. …
The trouble with endlessly repeating slogans is that they become meaningless babble. Just what the Turnbull/Morrison mantra will sound like in another eight weeks beggars the imagination.
And while we’re at it, the transition away from the mining boom is bad enough, but its ugly and illiterate derivative, transitioning the economy, is downright horrible, guaranteed to drive the sensitive listener mad within a fortnight.
But the irritating terminology is not the real problem with the budget. Turnbull and Morrison insist that it is not an ordinary budget – not a budget at all. It is a PLAN, and a plan not for a mere budget, but for an election campaign – perhaps for a decade.
But the immediate reaction was not to admire and analyse this solemn document, but to ask one simple question: can the government sell this manifesto, at least for long enough to win the forthcoming election? And, fortunately for the government, the answer seems to be a qualified yes – if only because there isn’t much to sell.
It hasn’t produced a lot of winners, but it hasn’t produced a lot of losers either. And that, in the somewhat parlous circumstances in which Malcolm Turnbull finds himself, is just about the best that can be hoped for.
They will also hope that the electorate will fail to see the inherent contradiction in the stitch up. Even as Morrison was taking his first, tentative steps into the budget lock-up, to recite another of his depressing slogans – living within our means — the Reserve Bank was cutting interest rates to an all time low in a completely opposite signal.
What Glenn Stevens and his fellow governors were telling the nation was that the economy is sluggish to the point of deflation and what is needed is not restraint but stimulus: borrow, invest, spend! Just what the voters will make of all that is best forgotten, and it undoubtedly will be in the days – no, weeks – ahead.
When it was already clear just 24 hours after the budget was brought down that it had become something of an anti climax, the government’s spin doctors tried to bring it together into six succinct dot points. But if anything, these only revealed the piecemeal nature of the document.
Point one: The great innovation strategy. But that was last year, and in any case, it never really explained just what, if anything, was actually proposed.
Point two: The colossal defence announcement, setting to high-tech spending throughout Australia. But that too was old news – last month, and widely regarded as an a electoral fix for South Australia with the rest way over the horizon.
Point three: The various free trade deals. But, yet again, not new, and in any case Turnbull and Morrison had very little to do with them. It is likely that the unilateral deals with South Korea, Japan, China and perhaps India will eventually prove fruitful, and just last week Singapore was brought into the mix. But the Trans Pacific Partnership Turnbull boosts so extravagantly is much more dubious: it appears to favour American corporations rather than Australian consumers.
So on to point four: tax. Attacking the dreaded multinational avoiders while reducing Australian corporate rates. The government argues that this is in sharp contrast to Labor’s schedule for tax increases: but hang on. Labor has no plans for major tax increases – it is just intending to withhold the tax cuts the government proposes. This is not an increase – it is in fact a saving from revenue; it is government that plans to spend them. But not, alas, on Turnbull’s plan – on its own.
And Labor would maintain the Temporary Deficit Levy, on the obvious ground that the deficit has not been reduced – it has multiplied threefold. Surely the need for the levy is greater than ever. Not much joy there.
Point five is superannuation: the retrospective tax you are having when you are not having a retrospective tax. And then point six: the clumsy acronym PATH, to reduce youth unemployment. Well, it might be worth a try – nothing else has worked. But it at least counts as a positive. The rest, unfortunately, appears very wishy washy for an eight week election campaign. Perhaps, just perhaps, Turnbull really does not get politics.
In the meantime, in spite of Morrison’s fervent plea that the voters are now past the stage of finding winners and losers, they, with the help of an enthusiastic media, will get on with doing just that.
Morrison announced, in the tones of one proclaiming the Second Coming, that the class war is over. This, of course, is the constant assertion of the rich and powerful; what they actually mean is that the poor and underprivileged should bloody well shut up and accept their fate.
As the old hymn puts it, The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate: God made them high and lowly, He ordered their estate.
Way back in 1945 the founder of the modern Liberal Party, Robert Menzies, delivered his edict: “We believe that the class war is a false war…” But it wasn’t then and it isn’t now. And Bill Shorten has sought to capitalise on this old and simple truth.
Shorten, it may be said, is trying too hard; but Turnbull risks being positively smug. By asserting his superiority over Shorten and everyone else, he is making what should be a straightforward election campaign a debate whose complexity threatens to unravel.
Let’s just keep it simple: jobs and growth … jobs and growth … jobs and growth … The Grapes of Wrath … Smokers’ Cough … The Glugs of Ghosh …
Mungo MacCallam is a political commentator and former senior correspondent in the Canberra Press Gallery.
We were promised drama and suspense, the start of a massive showdown in the senate over the Building and Construction Commission bill, a clash of egos leaving us wondering how and when it would end.
And we were hoping for some action in the House of Representatives, too – the session might be rudely truncated, but both government and opposition would set the pre-election scene by belting each other with hyperbole over the atrocities of the unions and the banks respectively – and there might also have been some discussion of Arthur Sinodinos and his role in Liberal Party funding.
But in fact the parliament collapsed with barely a whimper. The ABCC bill, so critical that the entire parliament had to be recalled to debate it, was rejected, done and dusted in just nine hours.
The Australian’s indefatigable Editor at Large Paul Kelly, tried to make yet another comparison with the events of 1975: a recalcitrant senate determined to frustrate the government’s agenda. But of course 1975 was much more than that: it was an opposition, bolstered through the replacement of a dead Labor senator by an utterly unscrupulous state premier to secure the numbers to block supply and it succeeded by an unprecedented act of a pliant Governor-General, who dismissed the elected government.
Last week’s anti-climax left the Prime Minister, after some dithering, in Opposition to announce that he had the grounds for a double dissolution. There was no political or constitutional crisis; all parties except perhaps the mindless Senator Steve Conroy whose comparison to the punctilious viceroy, Peter Cosgrove, to John Kerr completely misses the point: Cosgrove acted on the advice of his Prime Minister and Kerr defied it. It is hardly surprising that one of Conroy’s erstwhile colleagues, Simon Crean, once remarked: “Steve’s really not so bad – until you get to know him.”
But on with the story, or rather the non-story. The government, in a panicky reaction to Bill Shorten’s widely welcomed call for a Royal Commission on the banks, replied with what it claimed was a ramping up of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, which it said would allow it to undertake proactive investigations.
It turned out that the money, which was to come from the banks themselves rather than funds that the government would previously cut, was not nearly as much as it looked: more than half of it was for capital grants to replace new equipment and the remainder, spread over three years, was woefully inadequate for what was needed for staff numbers and their foraging.
But even before its money had been cut by the Abbott government, ASIC had proved itself to be a toothless tiger, especially where the banks were concerned; so it was entirely predictable that the banks applauded the decision, and that some of them defied the Treasurer, Scott Morrison, by refusing to rule out passing their additional costs on to the long-suffering customers. Somewhat belatedly, there was also a promise of more money for the Federal Police, who have so far been equally ineffective in the area.
If we are going to have an election about whether the voters hate the unions or the banks worse, there is really no contest. However Malcolm Turnbull soldiered on, and announced that there would be more emphasis on cyber-security because some body had hacked the site of the Bureau of Meteorology – a move which Shorten immediately endorsed and which the public neither knew nor cared about. Then there was the dental scheme, which looked like a hastily contrived fix which the opposition branded a hoax. And the week ended with Turnbull confirming what we already knew: negative gearing is off the table. Turnbull said it would protect the value of the homes of mums and dads; but while there may, perhaps, be some mums and dads eager to sell off overpriced houses in order to purchase new overpriced houses, there are almost certainly more mums and dads who are keen to see prices fall so that their children can get into the market. At best, a dubious ploy at the start of an election.
The impression was that the government, having embarked on the crash or crash through course to take the plunge for an election, was scrabbling for a convincing story for proroguing one parliament with unseemly haste, setting up a new one without an explanation for doing so (after all, it already had a double dissolution trigger – why all the fuss?) and then playing catch up to the opposition while it waits, in desperate hope, for a budget which will make it all plausible.
And there is still a week to go. In the meantime the senate has done its work with the ABCC, but has planted a time bomb or two; an inquiry into electoral funding in NSW and the forced inquisition of Senator Arthur Sinodinos as part of the process – he may have escaped Mark Dreyfus but he will not be able to avoid Sam Dastyari.
And some fairly elementary numerological research makes it clear that after all the angst over the electoral reform process, the new senate is likely to be as least as diverse as the old one, with the consequent bafflement of Malcolm Turnbull in his search for a mandate anyone will acknowledge.
And as for the election itself –it is not looking the picnic it was looking a few months ago. On the current polls, even if the government sneaks back, it may not be able to gather the numbers to pass its cherished ABCC bill through a joint sitting of parliament. There will be independent candidates to deal with – the last thing Turnbull wants is a collection of the disenchanted heckling from a gaggle cross benchers, but he is likely to have to put up with a few of them and even to accommodate some.
Turnbull may still have a master plan, but at the moment it is looking like a confusion turning into a cock-up. The budget just might be the game changer; but given the recent performances of both Turnbull and Morrison, you wouldn’t want to put your overpriced house on it.
Mungo MacCallam is a political commentator and former senior correspondent in the Canberra Press Gallery.