White coal

English food person Jamie Oliver believes that because his country is taxing sugar added into processed foods, Australia should as well. He put out a statement on his Facebook page, and Fairfax superjourno Latika Bourke thought she was doing some journalism by copying it and doing a quick Google search on sugar. Some people regard this as Excellent Journalism That Must Be Preserved but I disagree.

There was the expected backlash from big processed food producers, inevitably to be copied here but with added surprise even from journos with Google access; but that isn't the reason why a sugar tax won't work in Australia.

First of all - Australia is one of the last countries in the developed world that doesn't have a bill of rights, same-sex marriage, or a tax on carbon emissions. What makes anyone think we are ready for a sugar tax? The Treasurer is actively looking for ways to cut taxes rather than raise them, even with a supposedly massive and unsustainable debt.

Second, and more importantly, the reason why we won't have a sugar tax in Australia is because of the sugar seats.

Most famers vote Coalition and get taken for granted. Sugar farmers tend to be different, voting for parties that best represent their interests at a given election (i.e., swinging voters), as Tony Windsor would have all farmers do. Sugar cane is grown not in lush, rich soils, but on marginal lands where margins are thin and a break in government policy can mean the difference between surviving or going under. This has seen major parties offer subsidies and other largesse - sweeteners, if you will - to sugar farmers.

Australia has a significant domestic market for sugar, which arguably has peaked. Australian companies producing sugar (such as CSR, founded as the Colonial Sugar Refinery) have exited the market, beset by low and unpredictable profits and high transport costs. Sugar processors that were set up as farmers' co-operatives, like Tully Sugar or the early distillers of Bundaberg Rum, have sold out to foreign-owned conglomerates. There is a large and growing market in Asia for sugar; except for a heavily-subsidised sugar cane industry in the south-eastern US, most sugar-producing countries are developing countries that undercut Australian producers on price.

The free market is bracing for the sugar farmer. The (increasing) threat of cyclones hits them first and hardest in their communities, and they are among the last producers to recover when the debris is cleared away. Combined with wildly fluctuating profit margins, sugar farmers can find it difficult to get insurance or other support for long-term production - which is where the politicians come in.

Here is a map of where sugar is grown and processed in Australia. The federal electorates covering that area are:

• Page (NSW)
• Richmond (NSW)
• Fairfax (Q)
• Wide Bay (Q)
• Hinkler (Q)
• Capricornia (Q)
• Dawson (Q)
• Leichhardt (Q)

Flynn and Kennedy (Q) would be included were it not for their significant beef and mining hinterlands, which dilute the impact of the sugar-farming vote. You have to draw the line somewhere.

Those electorates have as much in common/are as diverse as the much-vaunted seats of western Sydney.

In that list of electorates above, all bar one (Richmond) was won by the Coalition in 2013. People with short political memories may be tempted to simply regard the rest as Coalition heartland, but all of those seats* had been held by the Labor Political Party when it was in government and it would be crazy not to have some overarching strategy for winning them back.

The Leader of the Nationals Political Party, who is also Minister for Agriculture, almost certainly has feelings for and on the sugar industry too. George Christensen, who holds a sugar seat, has been courting the dormant One Nation vote with his culture-war efforts; he would sooner have people pay zakat than a sugar tax. Any concerted effort for a sugar tax by an unlikely and unsustainable alliance of health policy wonks and small-government fetishists simply has no chance against major political parties backed by processed food industry donors/lobbyists. Besides, the small government fetishists have sold themselves out to the gigantic bludge that is their Northern Australia Dreaming.

This effect is felt at state level too. In 1998 Queenslanders sent 11 One Nation MPs to their state parliament: half were from sugar seats.

Media organisations other than the ABC are cutting back their coverage of regional areas. The 2016 election will see regional electorates play a more decisive role than any election since 1961. This is further proof that major media organisations are run and staffed by idiots. When you have to do your own political background on the events of the day, you realise just how grievously political journalism has failed, and how impertinent is the demand that those who have faile be maintained in the manner to which they've become accustomed.

The very idea that government might levy a tax on the sugar industry is frankly unbelievable. A reduction in their subsidies would have the same fiscal effect as a tax, but that won't happen either.


* Allowing for boundary changes etc over time

The brown word

Before the 1996 election, the Coalition was at a disadvantage on environmental issues. Their environmental credentials (e.g. Fraser Island, ending whaling) were far in the past, while their environmental failures (e.g. the Gordon-below-Franklin dam, the Daintree) were more memorable. The NSW Greiner government's slogan "warm, dry, and green" was little more than that. So, they changed the conversation. Instead of talking about "green" issues (e.g. biodiversity and rainforests), they began to reframe environmental debates in terms of "brown" issues (e.g. soil degradation, water quality).

They made a solid case for the environment as an economic asset, and for elevating big issues like the Murray-Darling basin over threatened species. They made the non-partisan Landcare movement partisan. They also managed to neatly defuse the perceived threat to rural landholdings posed by Indigenous land claims arising from the Mabo and Wik land rights cases using these notions of a combined economic and environmental custodianship that only seemed to include non-Indigenous farmers.

In the 19 years since then, the Coalition has held federal government for 13. The sheer extent of their failure on brown issues is such that rural seats that were once rock-solid for the Coalition - particularly the Nationals - are vulnerable to improvised coalitions of farmer interests, Greens, small-scale community populists, and other groups that could never work together unless presented with a common threat, such as small and scattered outposts of Labor people. Whatever the Nationals gained from not prosecuting clear-fellers on pastoral leases has long since been frittered away.

Cathy McGowan developed her community organising techniques in Landcare and women's farming movements, not in some inner-Melbourne commune, and knocked off a would-be Cabinet minister. She received very little mainstream media coverage and none from the supposedly savvy press gallery, until she actually won Indi in 2013 and Abbott had to do without Sophie Mirabella in his Cabinet.

Every Coalition MP is potentially as vulnerable as Mirabella was then - but you'd never know it. Broadcast media organisations have cut back their regional presence. Big-city news desks look down their noses at the regionals. Regional journalists feel obliged to cultivate relationships with sitting MPs, who look dimly upon coverage of movements that might upset them. Journalists trained to cover politics as a two-horse Labor vs Coalition race find it hard to define or comprehend movements combining conservative landowners, Indigenous organisations and Green activists. They do not keep tabs on or follow up long-simmering issues. If there are any McGowan-style movements afoot in regional federal electorates, the broadcast media wouldn't know until a polling company deigned to turn its gaze beyond the same suburban marginals that have changed governments since 1972, and even then they'd pooh-pooh them like they did in Indi.

One selling proposition for Coalition MPs is that you have more direct influence at the Cabinet table with a Coalition MP than with some independent or other MP kicking against the bricks. The Shenhua mine approval near Gunnedah NSW puts paid to that. Barnaby Joyce is the fourth-highest ranking member of Cabinet, where he sits with Greg Hunt, the minister who approved the mine.

Compare this to the previous parliament: the then MP for New England, Tony Windsor, would have been able to prevail upon Labor Environment ministers not to approve a deal that sacrificed prime farming land to a coal mine. Labor has no love for Liverpool Plains squatters, and nor they for it; both could have avoided dog-whistle concerns about Chinese government interests to kybosh the mine on the basis that threats to groundwater in prime agricultural land were simply too high. Abbott would have made some fatuous statement but the Nationals would have recognised the importance of the issue and been seen to stand up for farmers.

The press gallery was focused on Bill Shorten's appearance before the Trade Union Royal Commission yesterday. There are almost two hundred individuals in the press gallery, yet they are only capable of focusing on one story, despite the ferocious competitive pressures that buffet their industry. They cover it in much the same way - little scope for diversity on whether Shorten did well or badly, and what either outcome might mean for his prospects as Prime Minister.

Whenever the press gallery decide there is only one issue they will cover at any given time, it is easy to surprise them by making an announcement that might otherwise attract more coverage. None of the experienced editors or veteran journalists make contingency for the possibility that an issue other than the agreed one might pop up. And always, those announcements come out, and always they're a surprise. Journalists and editors all do this kabuki routine of shock and then reduce coverage of what they have decided is a secondary issue, and continue to resist the urge to cover them in-depth later - even on slow news days - as though an issue like a giant mine designed to last for decades goes off after a few days like a dairy product.

As Minister for Agriculture and MP for New England, Barnaby Joyce apparently isn't happy with the mine, but so what?

• Is Joyce going to override Hunt? Hardly - coal mining interests are still powerful and alert to any threat to their survival. If that mine were not approved, is any mine safe?
• Is Joyce going to resign from Cabinet? Hardly - the motto of the political class is: never explain, never complain, never resign, leave a good-looking corpse, put your staffer in your seat to replace you, and secure some consultancies into retirement. Joyce would not go that far as a rabble-rouser, not even as far as Bob Katter, and this government would freeze him out even if he just started talking about it.
• Is Joyce going to move against Hunt? Hardly - Hunt has ticked all the boxes and bloodlessly followed instructions to the point where he is regarded as a muppet by everyone outside the Liberal Party. If the Nationals were to demand Hunt's head, and were Abbott to give it, Liberals might start wondering why anyone would tick all the boxes and bloodlessly follow instructions as the PMO would have them do - and that would spell the beginning of the end for Abbott.

Barnaby Joyce will go to the next election facing a furious, motivated, diverse and well-organised opposition in New England, egged-on but not led by Labor, the Greens, and Tony Windsor. It doesn't matter how cheesed-off he is, his name will be mud and his impotence exposed. If the price of coal falls the mine may never go ahead, but this will not be the same as Barnaby saving the day and everyone knows it.

He might have a well-funded campaign, but funding isn't everything - after yesterday, do you reckon Shenhua will fund Barnaby's campaign manager? His ability to campaign for other Nationals will be sharply limited, his public goodwill will evaporate. Whether Tony Windsor runs again, or someone else does, Joyce is on a hiding to nothing.

The CSIRO was founded to examine soil and water quality from a scientific basis: it has been gutted by this government and there is no point lobbying Joyce to restore it. The University of New England, Joyce's alma mater and a major location for agricultural research, is for Joyce a hotbed of political opposition. The Nationals could not run a campaign on brown issues if their lives depended on it.

For years the Nationals, particularly in NSW, overestimated how clever they were in securing support from mining companies while claiming to represent rural communities. That model is pretty much broken now. It leaves them representing the poorest and less well-educated communities - communities whose urban and Indigenous equivalents never vote Coalition - without the fundraising clout that both stops the Liberals from dictating terms, and limits grass-roots insurgents from winning elections.

In addition to New England, look to the Nationals-held seats of Cowper and Lyne on the NSW north coast. Conventional wisdom holds that Lyne MP David Gillespie will cruise to re-election because Everyone Gets Two Terms - Gillespie's sole political asset is that he is Tony Abbott's personal friend, an asset that has been markedly depreciated if not stranded. It's too early to talk about other seats, because we don't have the required information thanks to press gallery limitations.

Not that Greg Hunt can take much comfort from sticking it to Joyce. His electorate of Flinders is conservative heartland, held by former PM Stanley Melbourne Bruce and Cabinet ministers Phillip Lynch and Peter Reith. Hunt entered Parliament at the same election as his contemporary Sophie Mirabella, with the understanding that each was a future Cabinet minister. Regardless of their personal relationship, he would have felt the chill wind from her demise more than most.

Maybe Labor will get some try-hard up for one term in that seat, but if they really wanted to knock Hunt off they would support the kind of grass-roots campaign that Cathy McGowan developed: motivated, diverse locals turning a negative focus (dump the incumbent!) into a positive, community-based one (Mornington Peninsula/Phillip Island locals, you tell me) of the sort described by Jane Gilmore.

This government's whole messaging has been about protecting Aussie soil; you don't despoil the best of it with a coal mine. This government says coal is good for humanity; food is good for humanity, and this lunge for coal above all other considerations reveals an unedifying desperation. This government sticks it to conservative farmers, making voters less rusted-on wonder when the government will sell them out too. Whoever thought this decision was clever stuffed up badly - but to go against due process would also have been bad. It only shows that voting for the majors is no guarantee of effective, consistent, mature government.

Judged on performance

We have a government that doesn't consult with us, which doesn't evolve ideas over time and which regards public input as some sort of failure on their part, to be vigorously resisted. They want to be a longterm government but are behaving like a short-term one; their lack of confidence in their own longevity is soundly based.

We have a media that, for all its close observation of politics generally and the Coalition in particular, can't make head nor tail of what they see in front of them. People they've known for years have become strangers once in office. It isn't only the rookies who are making these errors - the most senior members of the press gallery have no real clue about what's going on in our national politics.

Michael Gordon strikes a pose between Abbott and Shorten. He seems to believe Shorten is under an obligation to spell out detailed policies, a stricture Gordon never imposed upon Abbott in that role (keeping in mind there was a much more realistic prospect of an early election in the last parliament than there is now). Gordon is pessimistic about this parliament:

The result is a war that will be waged on the floor of the existing Senate until the new senators take their seats on July 1, and then become mired in negotiation and brinkmanship with an eclectic crossbench – a war likely to continue the brutality and divisiveness that has defined Australian politics in the past six years.

Negotiation and brinkmanship sounds like standard politics to me. Why not to Gordon, who's been reporting on federal politics for decades? Why this crap about war - at a time when actual armed conflict is literally tearing apart real people and countries, isn't it more than a bit silly to portray a bit of banter between, say, Christine Milne and Eric Abetz as 'war'? Was Australian politics before 2008 really some sort of sylvan glade in which it seemed always afternoon? Gordon is attempting the very sort of empty hype and bullshit which was once thought to 'sell newspapers', but which we now realise (too late!) does the opposite.

While some have given credibility to veiled threats of a double dissolution election ...

Well Michael, Abbott and other Coalition figures seemed pretty definite about it before the election. You're old enough to remember Hawke bringing on the 1984 election. You might have the credibility you seem to assume if you had called Abbott out at the time. This is what I mean about the press gallery losing credibility, and it has nothing to do with partisanship (yours or mine).

Does the national political editor of The Age have anything to say about the vacuous way politics is practiced these days? Reader, he's as bad as the worst of them:

Those [Coalition] strategists flirting with the idea [of a double dissolution election] could do worse than review the calls to talkback radio on Friday.

Talkback radio sentiment is a 1970s metric, skewed toward the very same individuals who were ringing, say, John Laws in the 1970s, but who have now moved into a different demographic. It isn't particularly representative and iSentia - and by extension, Michael Gordon and The Age - does a lousy job of pretending to turn talkback crap into demographic gold.

The early budget battles will be over plans to introduce, without specific mandate, the $7 Medicare co-payment, the return of petrol excise indexation, other measures that will increase the cost of living and a new regime for the young out of work that will save $1.2 billion over four years.

This isn't "without specific mandate", it's directly contrary to any interpretation of 'mandate'. Abbott specifically promised not to increase costs of living, and here he is increasing the cost of living. There is a considerable body of evidence that the "new regime for the young out of work" will cost the economy a hell of a lot more than $1.2 billion, and Gordon should have tapped into that (or at least acknowledged it).

If the Coalition’s central narrative is to address what Abbott calls Labor’s "debt and deficit disaster", the subtext ...

Oh, bugger the subtext. This government will not be judged on its subtext. It is making life harder for people who are already doing it tough.

Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews says exemptions will cover the vulnerable, but does not shy from the punitive aspect:

Andrews is not entitled to be taken at his word, as Gordon does. He's stuffed up bigger challenges than this. What exemptions, how to define 'vulnerable' and 'punitive'? If Michael Gordon was a real journalist these weasel words (from a confirmed weasel) would be ringing alarm bells.

The broader debate, and the one that will frame the 2016 election, concerns the Coalition’s plans for pensioners and the intention to, in Shorten’s words, outsource the burden of its savings task to the states by refusing to continue Labor’s spending on schools and hospitals beyond the forward estimates of Labor’s last budget.

What an awful sentence that is. Never mind outsourcing sub arrangements, that is the sort of sentence I write for free late into the evening of a long day. Seriously, someone of Gordon's experience has no excuse for that. Let's see if it means anything.

It isn't clear why pensions is a 'broader debate' than youth unemployment, or why it's strangely decoupled from debates about education and even health. It isn't clear why the 'savings task' takes precedence over education tasks and health tasks, or why Gordon has failed to unpack that assumption on the part of the government.

It’s hardly a broken promise because nothing will happen before the next election.

It is. Nobody currently relying on the pension was told that the pension indexing arrangements would be reduced in this manner; financial plans have to be adjusted in light of that announcement on top of the normal caprices of the market. Abbott assured pensioners of stability and no journalist called him on it.

On hospital and school funding, the charge is that the Coalition has ripped $80 billion out of funding to the states and given them only one option to recoup the money: support a broader and heavier GST.

How high does the GST have to be raised before it recoups $80 billion? Has that funding really only been withdrawn from "the states", or from all of us who live beyond the ACT? Again, Gordon pays no mind to that.

With reviews of taxation and federal-state relations in train, the Coalition’s plans for future funding in these areas will be clear to voters before they next go to the polls ...

We're talking this year's budget, not 2016. $80 billion has been ripped out of this year's budget for education and health. Victoria (where most readers of The Age live) will go to the polls by the end of this calendar year, and who do you expect them to vote for: the party which takes it up to Abbott or . Even if you did have some arrangement in place two years from now that restored (or even increased) that amount, the disruptions will be far greater than Canberra shinybums (Gordon included) can possibly imagine.

The fact that he hasn't really thought about it is bad enough. If you discount the idea that Gordon is biased in favour of this government, then quite why he feels obliged to assure us that the government has it all in hand (despite evidence so far) is a mystery.

If Shorten opposes broadening or increasing the GST (or both), his challenge will be to spell out another way to fund better schools, hospitals and the National Disability Insurance Scheme he helped bring into being.

If Gordon held Shorten to the same standards that he held the previous opposition leader, then Shorten would simply frustrate the government and offer nothing positive and Gordon would hail him as a political genius. Just like Paula Matthewson has.

No organisation anywhere in the world would accept a sudden $80b shortfall with equanimity. Education and health are matters that affect real people everywhere around the country. It is not merely a matter for federal-state intergovernmental relations, still less some Canberra insider game.

The Budget revealed cuts to health and education funding for the states and territories commencing in four years' time (which is conveniently after the next federal election).

Not everybody plans their lives around federal elections: both my children will be in primary school in 2017, and you can't just turn education systems on and off at the click of some fingers in far-off Canberra. This isn't "amateur theatrics", it's as real as it gets.

You want to know what are the real unbreakable laws of modern politics? Here's one:

Everybody who talks about how something is not what it is but it's actually a pie, see, and then goes on about carving up that pie while also growing it, and then invokes some mad Lewis Carroll imagery of slicing an expanding pie, implying that pies exist for their own sake rather than to be eaten - everyone who does this looks like an idiot. Most people who do it are, in fact, idiots.

There are no exceptions to this rule. It certainly is not invalidated by federal-state memoranda of understanding nor any other legal instrument, and indeed many of those reinforce it.

Truly, nobody who gives a moment's thought to the words they use tosses their credibility into that particular bin.

Matthewson is wrong to claim that the real political game (insofar as it somehow supersedes that of education and health) is one of reorienting the states' tax bases. Chris Pyne says the states have plenty of tax options - as usual, he's wrong and doesn't even care what the truth of the matter is.

The real political game, as it was under Howard, is to force the Coalition out of office at the state level so that the Coalition is not conflicted or diverted politically between federal and state governments. For the Manichean Abbott, the federal-state blame game can be clarified by abandoning state government (and its pernicious moderating influences) to Labor.

• If the Liberals had wanted Steven Marshall to become Premier of SA late last year, they would have kept Tony Abbott well away from there. Marshall isn't where Abbott was in 2010 - he is the punchline in a vast joke he cannot yet understand, but which might crush him once he does;
• Over the next six-and-a-bit months you can expect a number of "harsh but necessary" decisions from Canberra targeted at Victoria that will embarrass, if not devastate, Denis Napthine's re-election campaign. Neither he, nor the national political editor of The Age, will have any idea until after they are announced. True, Napthine has his own problems - but the feds will be quick with "state issues" and press gallery potplants will not challenge them on that either;
• Next up is NSW. O'Farrell was the only politician in Australia who consistently put the wind up Abbott, and it will the the making of Baird if he does so with Abbott. A great deal of money that could be used to shore up nervous federal backbenchers is staying in donors' pockets thanks to ICAC, or being spent on the NSW campaign. Now do you see why Abbott wants state Coalition govts gone?
• Half the seats that are needed to tip this government out are in Queensland, and do you think Abbott wants to be hostage to that stumblebum Newman?
• Look, Matthias runs the show in WA, and who even cares about NT or Tasmania; and last but not least
• Mark Textor will reprise his role of a decade ago with the state parties, where he took their money and gave dud advice to ensure Howard's supremacy went unchallenged. Paula Matthewson and the rest of the press gallery will continue to regard him as a genius.

Mind you, if there is such a thing as "faux hysterics" it follows there must be such a thing as "true hysterics" - and if anyone can make the distinction Matthewson is the very person. The wide boys and girls of the press gallery have no excuse for misreporting as they do, they have seen this movie before. Particularly Peter "single source" Hartcher:

As Joe Hockey set about deciding how to cut welfare payments, he asked for a comprehensive list of all entitlement programs. He couldn’t find one.

The guy had been shadow treasurer for four years. What the hell had he been doing? Had Hockey and his plucky staff not reverse-engineered such a list, and if not why not?

The federal government today collects revenues equivalent to 23 per cent of Australia’s GDP. It spends the equivalent of 26 per cent. The simple reality is that the annual shortfall is 3 per cent of GDP.

If that is allowed to persist, there is only one possible outcome. Corrective action was needed.

The previous government was well aware of that and was not, as Hartcher implies, blithely ignoring it. The previous government delivered six deficit budgets and was widely held to have failed. The incumbents project that this budget and the next five will be in deficit, but that's OK.

Over the coming term of government there will be a return of the El Nino weather patterns to eastern Australia. Receipts from agricultural exports will go down and it is eminently foreseeable that taxpayer cash will be shovelled at improvident yokels, to an extent that makes a mockery of those budget forecasts. Yet, just as the press gallery rose as one to assert that Chris Pyne didn't call someone *else* a cunt, so too will they make excuses and accept government assumptions of ongoing deficits and 'unforeseen events'.

The lesson of history is that the only time that a government will impose real discipline is in its first budget.

Is there 'real discipline' in this budget - not particularly - a bit of trimming, cost-shifting to the states, and class warfare, but that's about it.

These were the declared values, but there were also the grudges and frustrations. The deputy prime minister and leader of the National Party, Warren Truss, said this about age pensioners in a post-budget speech to Brisbane’s Conservative Club: “Increasingly the lifestyle - and the savings for superannuation - are being seen as the opportunity to enjoy a few cruises and the luxuries of life for a few years until it runs out and then people wish to fall back on the aged pension.”

The minister for social services, Kevin Andrews, told a press conference on Monday: “The days of easy welfare for young people is over. We want a fair system, but we don’t think it’s fair that young people can just sit on the couch at home and pick up a welfare cheque.”

Grudges and frustrations my arse - these are people who scorn those they govern. These are the sorts of statements that slip out in the final term of a long-serving government, not the first (unless they are the same?).

And some of the frustration in the Coalition was frustration with their former leader and Liberal hero John Howard. A government strategist told me: “It’s horseshit that a family earning $170,000 with three kids still gets government support.”

Really? Remember when The Daily Telegraph thought anyone earning over $150,000 was doing it tough? Hartcher must have missed that, too. I bet his "government strategist" didn't.

We have now learned, very starkly, that even some of the Liberals who know Abbott closely were quite wrong about his values.

His former cabinet colleague, Peter Costello, wrote a column in this newspaper in 2011 to issue a warning to the Liberals: Abbott didn’t share the core beliefs of the party mainstream, the party of Howard and Costello.

He pointed out that Abbott had “worked closely with the DLP in his student days”, a reference to the old Democratic Labor Party of BA Santamaria.

“The DLP was good on defence and the Cold War but it was not up to much on economic issues,” Costello wrote. He said that the senator recently elected under the resurrected banner of the DLP, John Madigan, should be left to “run the case for protection and regulation”.

“That is not the future for the Coalition. Its leaders are there to promote and implement Liberal policies like freedom in the workplace, open trade, lower tax, and careful spending of taxpayers' money.”
The evidence now before us is exactly the opposite. The Abbott-Hockey government is revealed to be a more ideologically conservative outfit than Howard-Costello.

Rather than relying on Costello's columns from three years ago, it is fair to assume that the political and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald would be in a position to observe and interrogate the Coalition about their approach to government.

The budget conducts a frontal attack on three Howard legacies. One is the family payment system. It will remain as a support, but the government proposes to strip out elements that it considers to be “middle-class welfare.”

Peter, it doesn't; I say this as a recipient of Family Tax Benefit B.

Second is the Howard urge to centralise power in the federal government at the expense of the States. Abbott and Hockey are proposing the exact opposite, to devolve power to the States.

With the pretty important exceptions of health and education, I reckon this holds - and the political skills of both the federal ministers for health and education aren't much chop. Never mind the blithe statements Peter, look into this.

Third is the Howard boondoggle known as the ethanol production subsidy. It’s gone.

Not for long. Do you know how many seats Katter and/or Palmer stand to gain in Queensland if this is mishandled?

The Abbott-Hockey government is also more pro-market and pro-deregulation ... [Howard] never proposed a co-payment to visit a doctor.

This is a non-sequitur. Small businesses are being levied with additional paperwork and compliance.

Abbott’s plan would begin to repair the budget; it would also make Australia a more unequal society. The cuts to welfare are permanent. The 2 per cent tax levy on the rich is temporary.

The first sentence is true, the rest assumes some sort of link between what this government says and what it does. Honestly, there's no helping some people.

Bill Shorten’s budget response is also revealing. He is modelling himself as opposition leader not on Labor leaders Bob Hawke or Kevin Rudd but on Tony Abbott. His budget reply was all snarls, no solutions.

Bob Hawke was opposition leader only for the duration of the 1983 election campaign; he never delivered a reply to any budget John Howard delivered nor even fronted Question Time in that role. Kevin Rudd also offered few concrete solutions, frustrating the then Coalition government no end. Peter Hartcher has no excuse for not knowing this, especially as he's got the ouija board out with Don Chipp.

And Clive Palmer party [sic]? He’s talking mumbo jumbo and shaping as a classic populist opportunist. He’s committed to blocking the Medicare copayment, but he remains a wildcard. Some of Abbott’s most dramatic proposals for Medicare, universities, welfare and health and education depend on him. We have not yet seen how he will conduct his party in Senate negotiations.

Here's an idea: why not make like a journalist and ask Palmer questions. Stop treating him like he doesn't matter and acknowledge that he's part of the landscape now. Find out how he's reacted to similar situations in the past. How different would political history have been if Abbott's performance as opposition leader had been similarly written off by supposedly serious political analysts:

And [Tony Abbott] party? He’s talking mumbo jumbo and shaping as a classic populist opportunist ... he remains a wildcard. Some of [Gillard]’s most dramatic proposals for Medicare, universities, welfare and health and education depend on him. We have not yet seen how he will conduct his party in Senate negotiations.

Anyway, back to it:

And, like Shorten and the Greens, Palmer remains in blithe denial that there is any need to start addressing Australia’s deficit.

Start? When did it ever stop? Will we ever break out of the fetish that the budget deficit is the most important facet of the economy?

After all that it almost seems redundant to give Lyndal Curtis' facile and ignorant piece a going-over. It is of a piece with Katharine Murphy's out-of-office message.

If nothing else is clear from the past few years in federal politics, this is: election promises are often not worth the paper they are printed on.

Maybe it is time to ask for less.

If I had read that on a mobile device I would have thrown it across the room. Neither the quality of major party candidate offerings, nor the limitations of journalists, should cause citizens to ask less of their government. Yes, government is hard and I'm sure that attending press conferences and coffee at Aussie's can be a bit arduous at times, but this is an article by someone with no perspective of what her job is really about.

So many governments have broken promises over the years that we take them with a grain of salt when they are made.

But factoring in a lack of trust as a given does not serve the democracy well. It leads to distrust of politicians and disengagement from the electorate.

Neither credulity nor cynicism are appropriate for people seeking to send representatives to govern them. What people need is information. The idea that the press gallery should observe parliament and parliamentarians so closely, and yet be unable to report on what's going on, means that the press gallery has failed.

So is it just the politicians' problem, or are we all - the media and public alike - to blame for what we ask of politicians particularly during election campaigns?

The assumption that the media is the public, the public the media - is both total nonsense, and totally necessary for press gallery journalists to persist in doing what they do.

Let's be clear about what Lyndal Curtis does - first, politicians make a statement, then give a bit of background. Curtis crafts some questions that will elicit the key lines in the statement, and a bit of background. If there is a response from another party, she will forewarn the interview subject so that they can develop some lines. Then, the interview takes place in which the lines are trotted out in her presence, for a press gallery journalist has succeeded when this occurs.

Challenging questions are batted away and allowed to stay batted. Then, the day's work is pretty much over, but you can pretend that "the 24 hour news cycle" is really a thing if there's a meal allowance in it for you.

Elections have become a game of "rule in, rule out" proposals or changes across the budget.

Why? Who says? Having recognised this, how do you snap out of it?

They are asked for certainty in a world which is fundamentally uncertain. Even governments campaigning for re-election - who are in a better position to know what they will face after the poll - cannot predict every twist and turn of an economy open to global forces.

The urge for specific promises and the fear of a scare campaign moves politicians ever more into the realm of tight messaging and denies the opportunities for a real debate about what is needed or what may be needed.

The media (and I include myself in that) has to bear a large part of the blame.

Who is better placed to change the way interviews are conducted than Lyndal Curtis? Nobody.

So what is she going to do about it? Nothing.

Journalists have sent links to Curtis' piece around Twitter, describing it as "thoughtful" (this is code for 'nothing will change as a result of this'. If it was going to change anything, it would have been described as 'controversial'). It will fade away and be reprised in some other form by somebody else, on and on as the traditional media declines, as mulch for the inevitable pieces 'if only we had listened and acted'.

Years of describing any internal party debates as "dissent" or "splits" mean politicians are more reluctant to have a debate, especially in the open.

Journalists describe debates in that way when they can't and won't understand the issues that need to be debated. Malcolm Turnbull's positions on climate change and the republic are well elucidated and nuanced: but if you're a moron, and the editor who hired you is one as well, LIB SPLIT will do. More recently, the decision to purchase the F-35 fighter is written off as a split, here and elsewhere, because journalists can't be bothered getting across the issues and editor's won't engage those who can. If you won't engage with the public you can pretend it doesn't exist, and doesn't matter I suppose. You can even rope the public into the media's stupidity and laziness:

We should encourage and champion debate. Instead, what the media and to some extent the public does - and what politicians' offices have done for some time - stifles debate.

... debate is discouraged for fear of what the reaction might be.

Measured, considered and detailed responses are a potential outcome from a debate. It is not the debate itself but the outcome that is key as far as government is concerned. John Howard was always "happy to have the debate" after he had made his mind up, not before, and Abbott is the same in that regard. It is the mark of a muppet journalist who seeks to pretend a debate is underway when the fix is already in.

We should ask politicians to tell us what the problems are, to spell out their values in how they would approach them - such as whether they believe in the primacy of public services or whether they believe the private sector should play a greater role.

We should ask if there are specific commitments, tell the public the conditions under which they would be delivered.

Particularly if the "we" includes those of you whose job it is to question politicians, Lyndal, rather than just rattle through a list of questions designed to elicit lines from the press release/conference. You should, but you won't.

We should encourage politicians to engage in some old-fashion policy reform.

It is what Labor did with the National Disability Insurance Scheme - pointing out the problems, getting a report on the options for solutions, then discussing it with the sector and through them the public.

It took an electorate, fearful of increases in cost of living, to the point where it happily accepted an extra tax through an increase in the Medicare levy.

This is one of the more lucid moments in Curtis' piece. But then she scrambles to strike that Michael Gordon pose, the view from nowhere:

Treasurer Joe Hockey too has engaged, singlehandedly, in some old-fashioned policy reform.

He began by describing the problem with what he called the "age of entitlement".

He spoke in broad terms about people doing things for themselves that they could afford without the need of government support.

Yes, but he didn't engage with anyone about this, except the IPA. He just throws ideas out there: it's who he is, it's what he does, and no his thought bubbles are in no way equivalent to the NDIS. Hockey did this as President of the NSW Young Liberals in the early '90s, putting ideas out there and retreating once it got too detailed. He did it in opposition, and journalists thought he was a deeper thinker than he is. He still has Lyndal Curtis bluffed, which invalidates her piece somewhat and shows those moments of lucidity as accidental, sporadic and unreliable - as they are for Katharine Murphy.

But maybe we should also ask them to make fewer promises and judge them on results.

How is that going to get us the information we need to make an informed decision? At least she didn't recommend combing through talkback radio.

Before the last election journalists like Curtis had the whole cynicism/credulity problem something dreadful. Anything the Gillard/Rudd government did was assumed to be bogus, but anything Tony Abbott said - you could take it to the bank. I include Lyndal Curtis in that. And Peter Hartcher. And Paula Matthewson. And Michael Gordon. All of them, directly or indirectly, have admitted that they haven't the faintest clue about Australian politics, despite seeing it up close for many years. God forbid that we should start judging journalists on results.

It isn't like I have gone after some junior woodchucks for spelling mistakes. These people, with the possible exception of Matthewson, are senior journalists. Every journalism school in the country wants its graduates to turn out like these characters, and more's the pity.

If we are to understand how we are governed, and to make informed decisions, we must have better information than press gallery and other political journalists provide us with. This is more important than any other consideration - job tenure or brand positioning or even simple pity at their self-delusion.

You were probably wasting your time reading any articles on the budget other than those by:

• Laura Tingle
• Michael Pascoe
• Alan Kohler

Who's who and what's what

The press gallery reporting of the Abbott government ministry (the very phrase still rankles) has been poor, to say the least, and that bodes ill for the quality of reporting we might expect from it over the years ahead.

First, the generalities. The reason why the make-up of the Coalition ministry does not reflect the glorious diversity of Australia is because the Coalition parties don't. The average age of Liberal Party members is over 65. They remember an Australia run by white men, they tend to preselect white men, and Tony Abbott promised a return to John Howard's Australia. What did you expect? Abbott's frontbench is 80% the same as it was in opposition.

Anyone who is surprised by the gender and ethnic makeup of the Abbott ministry is a fool. Anyone who confects surprise in the hope of making political reporting more exciting than it is really doesn't know anything about politics or journalism, and to persist at both in that state is doubly foolish. When you get to something wilfully stupid like this, you just despair.

Not only is there only one female minister in the Cabinet, but that minister - the Foreign Minister - is the one most likely to miss any given meeting of Cabinet. Annabel Crabb is right when she says Julie Bishop is nobody's token, up to a point. Julie Bishop rose through the ranks of the legal profession, won the safest Liberal seat in Perth and fixed the wreckage of aged care policy left by her hapless namesake Bronwyn. Then she entered Cabinet (coincidentally, the point at which Julie Bishop was dragged out of her depth is also the point when Crabb began her career as a parliamentary theatre reviewer), where it all fell apart in every sense but the titular.

The whole idea of the Gillard government's education reforms was to address the utter failure of Amanda Vanstone, Brendan Nelson, and Julie Bishop in that ministry. They should've made more of that; when Bishop, Pyne and other senior Liberals insisted before the election that the way schools are funded now is perfectly adequate, someone should've asked Bishop to explain the current funding system. The response would have made Jaymes Diaz look like Rudd at his most programmatically specific.

Julie Bishop is, like most of us, a foreign policy moron. This blog has been down on her silly lecturing of Indonesia. While it's true that Greg Sheridan has also pointed this out, the fact that he and she have been on junkets to Sri Lanka and formed similar glowing judgments of that country's government shows that it takes one to know one. The real reason she survives as Deputy Leader is because none of the leaders she served view her as a threat. Press gallery journalists have no excuse not to know this. The Indonesians in particular will leak to them, but will they have the wit to use them against Bishop?

We're poorly served by our new foreign minister and she hasn't even been sworn in yet. That's what's missing from Crabb's piece. That, and the fact that her clumsy segue into Mirabella shows one of her starkest limitations: her imaginative failure. Just because Mirabella isn't in the Cabinet, it doesn't follow that no other woman can be. In Crabb's world it doesn't follow that any woman not even in the Parliament today might make a good and useful cabinet minister. If the options aren't on the table, according to Crabb, they aren't options. Watch Crabb rhapsodise about Bronwyn Bishop as Speaker.

This brings us to another hard truth that the press gallery can't face up to regarding Abbott. Good old Tone the media tart is a thing of the past, and the journos don't believe him when he says he wants a break from having to front them. Mirabella isn't out of Cabinet because she made an announcement - she's not in Cabinet because she lost a safe seat. If you think Twitter is down on her, go and talk to the Liberals in what are now the two or three most marginal Labor seats in Victoria. Press gallery is too lazy to go there and they don't have Twitter accounts, but the anger is both real and valid.

The minister who's next most likely to miss Cabinet meetings is the Trade Minister, Andrew Robb. Abbott's office can't stand Robb because he doesn't back down when they yell at him. He will be one of the better ministers in this government, sifting through the legalistic and ceremonial bullshit to get to the essence of the deal. He will probably help industries you mightn't expect in markets you mightn't expect. Robb is the first Liberal Minister for Trade since 1956 and only the second one ever. The Nats/Country Party have traditionally clung to the portfolio jealously, and stuffed it up; witness the dead hand of Black Jack McEwen (bloody Indi!), or Doug Anthony trying to jam his bloodied toe into the closing door of 1970s Europe, or Mark Vaile simpering before the Americans to land an empty "free trade agreement".

Kelly O'Dwyer is smarter and harder-working than Jamie Briggs, who came from a similar staffer background and entered Parliament before the last election replacing the ministers for whom they worked. She built her profile via the media whereas he worked behind the scenes. She missed out on a frontbench gig whereas Briggs didn't. I knew Dennis Jensen had no hope of anything once he started shooting his mouth off in the media. As with Howard, the worst thing you can do if you care about an issue and want the PM to address it, is to go to the media.

O'Dwyer made one of the cardinal mistakes in politics, a newbie error: never go on telly unless you have something to say (and no, talking points do not count as "something to say"). She was widely disparaged by people who follow politics closely for acting as a relay-station for what are clearly the thoughts of others, and poorly-considered thoughts at that. Keeping up the media availability would be a mistake - the next time she should appear on the media she should have something to say as a result of her own hard work and investigation, and should have cleared it with the relevant minister without merely being an echo of that minister. It is possible that she may not be elevated to a job befitting her talents until the Abbott Government has almost, or completely, run its course; this need not be a bad thing.

Compare O'Dwyer with Josh Frydenberg, who entered Parliament after her and who is again another ex-staffer. The deep humus of this blog has plenty to say about Frydenberg and what a sillyhead he is, yet in Liberal circles he has a reputation as a thinker, while she's just a talking head.

Both O'Dwyer and Briggs - and you, dear reader, for that matter - are smarter and harder-working than Peter Dutton. His contribution to this government's victory is zero. He did no work on policy or campaigning and should not have received so much as a cracker from Abbott. All Coalition arguments about merit and against quotas fail in the slack-jawed face of this utter waste of skin. As Minister for Sport he will spend the coming parliamentary term swanning around next year's One-Day Cricket World Cup here and in NZ, as well as the FIFA World Cup and Olympics in Brazil.

He will do bugger-all about ageing in a nation with a steadily-ageing demographic - one largely responsible for this government being elected at all. He will not even have the wit to fuse sports and health in some way, in a country with such an obesity problem. He is ill-served by having Fiona Nash as Assistant Minister. His successor as Shadow Minister for Health should be able to mess with his head pretty easily, if not claim his scalp.

The one thing Dutton will do is impose boards on hospitals. Studies show local hospital boards do nothing to improve health services, nor to improve the cost per delivery of services, nor tailor health services to local needs. We already know what this government thinks of studies and proof and facts, don't we. Local health boards will be stacked full of busybodies, lurk-merchants and resume-polishers, thanks to Dutton.

Among the many important issues about which Dutton will be doing bugger-all is disability services. One of the central ideas behind DisabilityCare is to deliver the same services for less money. Whether setting it up or abolishing it altogether, this area needs energy and vision - yes I know Dutton is palming this off to Mitch Fifield, I said energy and vision. Fifield is a grey bureaucrat who might keep some obscure corner of government from getting into the slow media, repelling journalists through his sheer dullness, but the wrong person to build anything and reach out to people. The right minister could be so successful that Labor would have trouble convincing future voters that it was their idea - Fifield is not that minister.

Matthias Cormann, like Stephen Conroy, doesn't give a damn what anyone thinks of him. He is the perfect counterfoil to Joe Hockey, who deep down wants people to think he's a good guy. When it came to the Gillard government's regulation of financial planners, Cormann showed both his mastery of detail and the ability to advocate dumb policy with a straight face - two rare and indispensable qualities for this government. It is Cormann who will snarl at aggrieved stakeholders about the need for budget cuts. The whole nation will think he's a prick, and he'll look like one until the entire WA government starts to implode (Cormann is largely to blame for the WA state government being like that), at which point he'll look like a doofus. Hated and smart is OK for a senior politician; hated and clumsy is political death.

Arthur Sinodinos is effectively Minister for Tax and Regulating Big Companies. It's complex and there are no real winners, but this is his chance to develop skills he doesn't have in actual politicking and dealing with the dumber journalists. Nobody doubts Sinodinos can handle the backroom nitty-gritty - hell, Julia Gillard could do that. If Sinodinos really is the complete package let's see him do the grassroots stuff without being able to invoke the authority of the PM's office. Abbott is also feebly trying to signal to Howard that he's his own man; let's see how long that lasts.

Kevin Andrews belongs in the bin with the rest of them, but for one factor: he is the conduit between the Liberal Party and the broad but largely obscure movement of Catholic conservatives. What Andrews lacks as an administrator of the common weal, or as a media performer, he more than makes up for as a tactician while keeping hidden conservative Catholic motivations and support. Next time abortion or euthanasia or gay marriage resurface as issues, it will be Andrews who does the behind-the-scenes work for this government to quietly but unequivocally suppress them. Andrews will do the dirty work to scupper the Royal Commission into Child Abuse, on which a smart opposition would raise hell.

Andrews, through Joe de Bruyn, is the backdoor channel into the ALP; when Liberals bag unionists, you can be sure they do not have de Bruyn in mind. Andrews was such a crap Workplace Relations Minister because he was so conflicted. In his current role he isn't conflicted, but he will be furtive. His shadow minister should be alert to his lack of attention to detail and avoid getting sucked into culture-war themes unless there's gross waste involved.

The reason why there is a Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Centenary of ANZAC is not some tokenistic "Minister for Anzac Day". Next year is the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. 25 April 2015 will be the centenary of the landings at Anzac Cove, and any Australian government would be into that up to its eyeballs; this stuff will not organise itself. In much the same way, there were ministers for the Olympic Games before and during the 1956 Melbourne Games and the 2000 Games in Sydney.

The fact that said minister is the non-entity Michael Ronaldson is not at all comforting. Veterans' affairs is too hard for him. Normally a sinecure, the fact that (for the first time since the 1960s) there are kids at school today whose fathers have been killed at war means that the portfolio needs careful management, if not reinvention. It involves more than patronising old diggers; the push for better mental health and disability services will be driven largely from this portfolio, whether or not the "all in good time" ethos of this government allows it. Young men of working age who got bent out of shape in Afghanistan won't be brushed aside by half-witted Liberals like the Vietnam vets were. Ronaldson should be an easy target for a shadow minister on top of his or her game.

Chris Pyne will persecute the culture war and knows his Adelaide honk annoys people; the correct way to deal with him is not to engage but to simply dismiss him as a know-nothing. He can handle being disliked but not having his bluff called. Sussan Ley will be a cracker of a minister; I pity her shadow, and she will not be able to help showing up Pyne. Michael Keenan is talked up by Liberals but I suspect he is full of shit; a shadow who goes him hard and early might rattle him.

Paul Fletcher was outed today as the genius who foisted an internet filter on Malcolm Turnbull, and the rest of us, on the day before the election. That should have ended his career; it has certainly ended the 'promising' aspect of it. The sillier members of the press gallery tout Fletcher as some sort of ICT policy genius as the basis for doing so gets more and more flimsy. Lumping him as Malcolm Turnbull's parly sec is cruel to both men, unless Turnbull has the sense to lump Fletcher with things like having to erect metal boxes in every street.

Ian Macfarlane thinks he has to be a spruiker for industry. That's what lobbyists are for; maybe he's making an early pitch for such a job. The former spokesperson for farmers has gone full circle in support of the frackers. If he really gets going he will hollow out the Nationals and give rise to dozens of Windsor-McGowan-style independents at the next election, which will finally end the Whitlam-era idea that the outer suburban seats determine government.

It was sensible of Abbott to drop the useless John Cobb from Agriculture. On every bit of public policy affecting agriculture over the past six years - beef to Indonesia, wheat sales, NZ apples - John Cobb managed to stuff it up and had to be rescued by Abbott's office. No press gallery journalist noted Cobb's ineptitude, preferring instead to let Barnaby Joyce complain about foreign-owned farms (Joyce can be quite sanguine about British and US interests owning farms; less so about Chinese and Filipino interests, for reasons no press gallery journalist has thought to explore). Now Joyce is well placed to do something about agriculture policy, but it isn't clear what - like Abbott himself, Joyce is like the dog that's caught the car he chased so ardently, and now he has to drive it.

Why was Warren Entsch dumped as Chief Whip? Along with the dumping of Senator Ian Macdonald from the front bench, you might assume that Abbott has something against far north Queensland. This is going to make it hard for the government to demonstrate that it's big on developing the deep north.

Eric Abetz will be rubbish at negotiating outcomes in the Senate. He's a culture warrior who'll beat up on enfeebled unions (except de Bruyn's, of course), devoting maximum energy to the irrelevant, assuming that everybody works in fulltime jobs within stable organisations with secure employee benefits. The Coalition message on workplace relations is all over the place, thanks to this gimlet-eyed knucklehead who hasn't had a new idea since the 1980s. He is both a liability for this government, and utterly irreplaceable.

Greg Hunt has so hollowed out his credibility that I hope he chokes on his reward. Scott Morrison never had any, and the rest of the Cabinet aren't worth their own weight in bottle-tops. Warren Truss didn't join the Nationals in order to build freeways in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Smart lawyers will run rings around Brandis, who won't have the good grace to admit his own mediocrity and try being affable instead. Brandis fancies himself as a champion of traditional freedoms but he has nothing to say and less to do on the subject; a tough, smart Senate should eviscerate him.

When a new government comes to office the administrative arrangement orders set out which minister is responsible for which legislation, and which departments. It's seriously wonky, but a) the market for that is bigger than you might imagine and b) there is much in that for political journalists to use in assessing ministers' performances. There are thousands of soon-to-be-unemployed public servants who understand these, and a few will be able to explain what they mean. Do you think the press gallery will reach out to such people? Me neither.

Labor's putative front bench are both younger and more experienced than this ministry. Consider two smart, hard-working and effective pols from NSW: Tanya Plibersek and Marise Payne. Plibersek has six years' ministerial experience, including a stint in Cabinet - even if Payne matches that record, and I wouldn't be surprised, she will still be five years older than Plibersek. At some point press gallery journalists will opine that 'the government is tired' and/or 'the opposition is invigorated', because Labor will offer greater relative experience, diversity, and youth.

Whenever a conservative writes a "w(h)ither Labor?" piece, it's almost always an attempt to mask a feared weakness in conservative ranks. This is why halfwits express their amazement that social media treats Abbott with similar contempt to that which the slow media showed Gillard. This is no exception. The internal democracy of the ALP seems very important to those within that organisation, and is neither here nor there to those outside it like Matthewson and me. Rudd was destabilising because he would never accept no for an answer, and neither would his acolytes. It may be that whoever loses the Labor leadership contest white-ants the winner, but it may also be that the loser turns his energy against the Coalition. It's hard to tell from this angle and Matthewson just looks like she's painting Labor in the worst possible light. She should leave that crap to Chris Kenny, or Mark Kenny, or any other member of the Kenny family really.

This government won with less than the thumping majority it had hoped (those pollsters who predicted Rudd and Bowen would lose their seats can just fuck off, and stick your statistical excuse-making). The lack of women and diverse personnel in this government has all but killed the honeymoon effect enjoyed by newly-elected governments (the best commentary on this is Tim Dunlop's article, because it's about Abbott and those who voted for him rather than those who didn't).

At the very point where this government starts the It's Worse Than We Thought pantomime and starts making Hard And Unpopular But Necessary Decisions, along will come the new Labor leader saying that it doesn't have to be this way. That's when the trouble will start for this government. They seriously assume that the opposition, in parliament and out, will let them get on with it with only the kind of quiescent embarrassment that people inside the Coalition who had doubts about Abbott showed toward him.

Labor assumes it will be able to go in hard over its two big strengths, education and health. The loss of government federally, and in four states with two more to come, suggests this would not be a good idea. Because nobody is listening to the opposition anyway at this point, it would be silly to expect them to feint and invite Abbott to engage them on their favourite issues. The opposition should meet this government where they're at, and shirtfront them on the things they care about. The government is all over the place on the economy; it should be possible to get in their faces before they can develop a narrative.

One of the central beliefs animating the Liberal/National base is that Canberra is full of shinybum bureaucrats cooking up plans to raise taxes and generally screw the country. Part of the reason why you so often see Abbott on a bike is to reassure the base - a man riding a bicycle is not trying to break anyone's business model. When Abbott said before the election "I've got a plan", I was waiting for the rejoinder "but he hasn't even got a clue", which never came. A few hard, early blows portraying Coalition figures as having been in Canberra way too long will sting.

The central problem facing this government is that its "all in good time" ethos will start to look complacent. Peter Hartcher has unwittingly admitted that this is a vacuous government, and that it doesn't yet know what aspects of its negative campaign are to be retained or dropped. This makes it enormously vulnerable, but not necessarily in the tu quoque way Hartcher seems to assume. This country has an enormous future provided the Coalition are prevented from applying their bonsai techniques to the mighty potential for social, artistic, and economic outcomes. When polls turn against this government the dopier commentators will assume that they are driving its decay, when in fact they will be reflecting it.

If you don't know why you're in government (other than for its own sake, or for the lurks) you won't be there long. Labor has to learn that lesson, but so too must the Coalition. Guess which is most receptive to learning hard lessons, has nothing to lose that it doesn't value, and has more time and more energy up its sleeve. Guess which is complacent and risk-averse, and confuses debate with dissent. The press gallery literally have a box seat in observing this new government, which isn't new to them; but they just can't tell what's going on.

The student who never learned

Sophie Mirabella, mirabile dictu, has lost her seat on the very cusp of becoming a Cabinet Minister. I've noticed that my previous post about her has received quite a lot of traffic since Cathy McGowan announced her nomination for Indi, but is that the limit of the significance of that event? I think it shows the limits of a model of politics that has passed its peak without a new model to replace it being readily available and replicable.

Mirabella came from student politics, which relies on disengagement from an intelligent electorate. You can get elected to a student representative body with as few as fifty votes - I've done it myself, and so did Sophie Panopoulos (as she was then), especially with a well-known political brand behind you. Basically, if you really want a job that few others want, and work at convincing a small number of others that you're serious, chances are you'll get the votes. Then, you'll find yourself among the small number of others who want to lord it over the refectory, and over grants to clubs and societies.

The main criticism with student politics, particularly among people who have taken other routes into state or national politics, is that it teaches practitioners to fight intensely for issues and baubles that don't really count for much. Worse, it doesn't really teach bridge-building or the necessary skills to marshal broad support for a particular issue, particularly with people who will support you on no other issue. Local government might teach you that, so might NGOs, or perhaps getting involved in a union/professional association - but not student politics. Learning how to distinguish the various flavours of marxist and then fight (for or against) them is both a absorbing pastime on campus and utterly useless beyond it.

Sophie Mirabella embodied all of the worst aspects of student politics and none of the best. She learned nothing about building small-c coalitions, but learned how to build a small, tight-knit and ruthlessly committed knot of supporters who could get her anywhere she wanted to go. This was what she took to the monarchist movement in the '90s: she was always kept away from events where people might need persuading, but where there was a little-watched debate against some diffident republicans putting their case as though it were inevitable, she would all but sink her teeth into their ankles and make sure any undecideds left the debate undecided as the republicans limped away. She'd done her homework but those who could match her there were threatening, personally threatening. She got nasty early and had no game plan for those who could stand the heat. People who backed off when she got personal vindicated her self-image as a strong person.

For Mirabella herself, intensity paid dividends. For those who weren't paying attention it was easy to see her as just another hack on the make.

These were the qualities she brought to Indi. This is an electorate with no dominant centre: a few prominent townships of roughly equal size but no central media market. But for the constitutional prohibition on electorates crossing state boundaries it would be focused on Albury. Someone who's big in Wodonga, say, will be unknown in Mansfield, etc. The region is consistently conservative but, curiously for those accustomed to politics-as-bloodsport, apolitical. Politics is practised subtly, indistinguishable from other business and community transactions. In regional communities you simply have to work with others whether you like them or not, and you're going to lead a miserable life if you don't so get along and go along.

Mirabella was used to living a miserable life. She worked in the family business at Laverton and attended St Catherine's at Toorak. She looked down on those who dropped by the business as much as her meaner, narrower schoolmates looked down on her; she realised that business put her through school but not to the point where she made more of an effort into helping the business grow. She was a high-achieving Melbourne Uni law graduate but none of the big firms or corporates would touch her. She graduated about the time Jeff Kennett led the Coalition to government in Victoria, but couldn't get a staffer job. For five years she had a lover whom she couldn't introduce to her family, and whose family disdained her. A compartmentalised electorate where few people swapped notes suited her down to the ground.

Colin Howard believed that Mirabella would be set for life with such a conservative seat. He overestimated her ability to build large but loose alliances rather than small, tight alliances surrounded by moats of hostility. People were either fiercely loyal to Mirabella or they hated her, and over a dozen years the latter came to outnumber the former; certainly more moved from the former to the latter than vice versa. She had, for better or worse, become part of the community she represented. Those who came to feel Mirabella did not, and ought not, represent local communities faced the dilemma of how they could remove her without rending the very conservative fabric that they blamed her for damaging.

Over time her opponents became united and committed while her inner circle rotated in personnel and became fewer, absolutely and relatively to those whose bridges had been burnt from her end. Having your support base small but tight might be good for your own self-definition but it's a lousy way to operate as one who must smooth over local concerns, or bring focus to them.

The staff in her office turned over regularly. Back when the government ran job ads in the papers, jobs in Mirabella's office were advertised frequently. Country people look to government jobs as sources of continuity in a world beset by fluctuations in seasons and market prices. MPs rely on long-serving staff to provide ongoing service and to become experienced readers of community concerns. Turning over staff is a bad look at the best of times, and unproductive, but Mirabella burnt more than just the individuals who worked for her with her flaky demands and ingratitude.

It must have been galling for local campaigners for mental health services to find Mirabella claiming credit for their work. More significant, however, was that such a movement gained sufficient traction to get a meeting with a federal minister without the imprimatur of the local member. Few would have begrudged Mirabella a photo op or a good-news press release had she been part of the campaign. The then-government helped her opponents by bypassing her - a breach of parliamentary protocol in normal circumstances but one of those things that falls away under conditions of total warfare generally, and where you have a particular disdain for the individual opponent in question.

The fact that she wasn't involved, insisting that other issues were more important, is telling. The fact that she's claiming credit for something in which she played no part is a bit sneaky. The belief, however, that she'd get away with it is extraordinary. That's your real indicator of an absence of emotional connection, an understanding that any group in the community who are committed enough to get top-level meetings in Canberra without help from the local member are going to be pissed off if that member decides she's going to snatch all the credit, thanks very much.

A local member needs to build relationships not only with, but among, a local community; particularly in communities that haven't been as atomised and deracinated as many urban and suburban communities have. I don't care whether you've read enough French philosophy to regard that as bourgeois, and to regard that as a bad thing. Which brings us to this.

It fails on two, eminently Razerian levels. First, 'universal' hatred? Really? Like Bashir al-Assad, or whoever wrote Patrick out of Offspring? Second, it misses the point.

Mirabella was never some kick-arse babe whose default pose was a snarl and a raised middle finger and Razer is wrong to portray her as such. Canberra, like other small towns, relies on people at least making an effort to maintain dialog with others in order to get business done. As Shadow Minister for Industry facing a government with which business relations were strained, she would have been a magnet for lobbyists and would have known how to play that game. Consider three basic facts about politics:

1. Building bridges is a basic skill of politics; and
2. So is holding a safe seat against enemies within and without your party; but
3. Last Saturday, quite a number of politicians who were better at building bridges and other basic political skills than Mirabella lost their seats to candidates who didn't work half as hard as Cathy McGowan did; and
4. At an election where most electorates swung toward the Coalition, those that swung away sure are worth examining; and
5. Politics is tough. Everyone learns on the job to some extent, but basic lessons should have been learned long before your name is called out by a returning officer. Nobody who's been in the game for as long as Mirabella has can claim any excuse, and nobody who's been as pitiless as she has gets a break (unless, like Helen Razer, you haven't been paying attention). Mirabella is like the football player who drops the ball with seconds to go in a tight game - 'universally hated' for a while perhaps, but suck it up because that's how you earn the tall dollars: it's all part of the game.

Naomi Parry is right when she points out that Mirabella was first elected in 2001 with 62% of the vote, and that was whittled down to under 49% by a succession of female candidates like Zuvele Leschen, Jenny O'Connor, Robyn Walsh, and McGowan herself. The history of the Liberal Party is replete with strong, powerful women like Ivy Wedgwood, Margaret Guilfoyle, Rachel Cleland, and Beryl Beaurepaire - Mirabella could have learned from them and built on their achievements, but it's too late for that now. Here we get into questions about whether female candidates are seen to/portray themselves as better bridge-builders and networkers than males, and questions of agency in a patriarchal context, and - look, I don't know why you even come to this site for that because I have to go elsewhere to get across it.

Last year Fenella Souter from Fairfax rang me about my previous post on Mirabella, in preparation for a piece on her in The Good Weekend. She said that she had met Mirabella and found her "perfectly nice", and wondered how anyone could find her otherwise. I gave her some examples, and how she resorts to that early on in an argument (or even an idle chat) rather than as a last resort, when pushed to the edge. I talked about the points listed above, and what I'd hope for from a member of parliament let alone a prospective Cabinet Minister. She paused and reiterated: "Yes but she was perfectly nice, I just don't understand ...", and I thought: she has retained just enough of that St Catherine's polish to put one over you.

Razer says that Mirabella is no worse than Cory Bernardi, and that's probably fair. The difference is that Bernardi made it to State President of the Liberal Party (in South Australia) and retains enough support there to lead the party's Senate ticket in that state. Mirabella has no real clout on the Victorian Liberal executive - again, we go to questions of political skill and competence here.

To divert for a moment, SA also shows the state of the modern Liberal Party. That state elected two Liberal Senators and also gave 1.8 Senate quotas to Nick Xenophon, whose support base consists largely of moderate liberals. Had extremists like Bernardi and Nick Minchin not preferred a small, tightly-controlled Liberal Party over a genuine 'broad church', the Coalition would have a majority in the Senate and be able to pass whatever legislation it could get away with. Show me a tightly-controlled political party and I'll show you one safe for morons. A looser, cat-herding arrangement brings quality to the fore.

There are two personal issues that Liberals try to drag into the debate over Mirabella, and where they succeed they only make her critics look petty. The first, they insist, is that Mirabella is a loving mother. That may be so, or it may not; either way, it has no bearing on whether or not she should represent a community in parliament.

The second is that all this gloating over Mirabella losing her seat is somehow akin to Liberal attacks on Julia Gillard while she was grieving the death of her father. MPs lose their seats as a verdict of the people on their representation in parliament; Julia Gillard's father was not put to death as a result of his daughter's unpopularity, real or imagined. Even if it were true, and that those who felt nothing for Gillard's grief are now pained at Mirabella's, perhaps we might see a change in the way that politics is practised. I doubt it, but I've been wrong before.

The better parallel is with the ALP's drawn-out execution of Belinda Neal, Mirabella's tormentor and sister-from-another-mother in many respects. Even better: the rolling of the then Sophie Panopoulos by the Melbourne University Liberal Club. Many of those who turned on her were people she had known and worked with closely. The same would happen as she walks the streets of Wangaratta or Benalla, watching people who had been loyal supporters averting their gaze. Yeah it probably is painful, but the time has come to stop blaming others for her problems and to stop assuming that it is possible to compensate for them.

What now for Mirabella? How ya gonna keep her down at the Wodonga law practice at now that she's seen the Cabinet table (well, almost)?

• The Napthine government won't touch her with a bargepole. Think of all the problems facing that government and consider which ones Mirabella might make better - and there you have her essential problem in a nutshell. She might get a job writing a report for them or for an employer organisation, but only if she does so from outside the office - you wouldn't want her monstering the admin staff and junior researchers.
• Abbott needs to reward Mirabella, not as some sort of favour but to show his new government that he will not leave them in the cold should they stumble. It's true that I don't think highly of Abbott or Mirabella, but if Abbott starts disparaging her or gives her nothing despite decades of loyal support, then he is a damned swine on top of everything else and his own team will rightly start to disengage from him. It's not at all impossible to envisage Mirabella in Sydney again, doing this or that with and for "Tony" and "Bronwyn"; she owes them so much and they need to be seen to be returning the favour.

Does this mean Mirabella's failure and dysfunction has "broken the business model" of student pols and their disengagement-dependent methodology to national politics? Hardly. In a month or so we could well end up with each of the incumbent and alternative prime ministers being a student politics veteran from Sydney Uni named Anthony. Mirabella has only been 'robbed' of what was 'rightfully' hers if you have no respect for her agency or that of voters in response. She's a clever person in many respects but not in terms of how to deal with people, and what they want from government.

She shares that failing with more people in politics than you might imagine. The tightly-controlled, 'disciplined' model of politics is designed for people slightly less dysfunctional than Mirabella, and slightly less talented in many respects. What lessons will those people learn from the demise of Sophie Mirabella, if any? Sophie who? Wasn't she one of those women from the Gillard era?

Full of promise

Life is great in the Sunshine State
Every Queensland heart sings a song
To its tablelands and its golden sands
We are proud to say we belong

And our faith is great in the Sunshine State
For our Queensland future is grand
From the northern cane to the western plain
It's a full of promise land

All the while every mile, there's a sunlit smile
And a welcome handshake too
For friendship's great in the Sunshine State
May its sunshine keep smiling for you

- Official state song of Queensland

When the Coalition engaged in a development plan for northern Australia, it was a sign of their intellectual bankruptcy. Their policies mainly benefit large landholders and larger mining companies, proposing more infrastructure built from the public treasury while also promising that those who stand to benefit most from their policies should also be given tax breaks. They are vague and frankly untrustworthy about measures to help ordinary people (e.g. encouraging people to move to urban centres like Karratha or Townsville, skills development), measures that might've had more credibility in the 1950s than they do today.

That policy was largely written by the IPA. No longer independent of those who pay them, the IPA have a pseudo-policy development capacity that the Coalition no longer has, generating dull and senseless prose and meaningless picto-stats on demand to plea for government lolly. Any document with a Liberal/National logo on it longer than a press release has been outsourced, and probably not read by the shadow minister nominally responsible for it. It will certainly not be read by candidates, who are all being treated by Liberal Campaign HQ as though they are as stupid as Jaeiuymz Diaz.

At first it was surprising that the ALP would even try to match such policies, but a quick look at the electoral position in that area explains why:

• Coalition-held seats in far north Queensland like Dawson, Herbert, Hinkler, and Cook Leichhardt are up for grabs;
• Durack in northern WA, as with Capricornia in Qld, is open to a credible appeal from a candidate who would champion communities in those area as distinct from FIFO destinations; skyrocketing house prices are useful only if you want to move out of those communities. Labor, Katter, or a reformed conservative (e.g. Windsor, Wilkie, Oakeshott) independent would be well placed to make such a case - Rinehart's LNP or Clive Palmer's outfit, much less so;
• Wide Bay, the nation's poorest electorate (see tables with supporting data linked from here), is represented by the docile, experienced and relatively moderate Warren Truss. Rightwing parties like the CEC are represented all too well in his electorate and, because the right are morons, it is likely they will try to knock Truss off or replace him when he retires. Any LNP candidate who replaced Truss would be weaker, and probably more than flirt with far-right ideas, putting Labor, Katter or a solid independent in a solid position to take the seat by default; and
• Solomon, which takes in metropolitan Darwin, is currently represented by Natasha Griggs. The local Coalition franchise, CLP, holds the Territory government and has blown its goodwill in the sort of credibility-bonfire to be expected from rightwingers unprepared for office. People will be looking to send them a warning - and if that means Tony Abbott finds it harder to win, too bad for him. Griggs needs to learn that the reason why you stop to help people in accidents is because you never know when an accident might befall you.

The above list doesn't take into account expected ALP gains in the Gold/Sunshine Coasts or suburban Brisbane. There are as many, if not more, seats in play in the nation's north as/than there are in WesternSydney™ - and not just in Lab-Lib terms. The people there are subject to the same sort of half-witted stereotypes from those of us who don't live there as in WesternSydney™. They also lack services, with the Queenslanders (being the majority of people in Australia's north) having voted against Anna Bligh for reasons other than her government's service provision, and not having realised that Brisbane would be no better disposed to the region under Newman than it had been under Bligh, or Beattie, or anyone else really.

This makes Labor's half-hearted me-tooism understandable.

For a start, Katter is preferencing Labor on the strength of that 'commitment'. Katter is preferencing Labor because his politics are all about a sentimental attachment to Queensland Labor policy of a century ago: protectionist and mercantilist, welcoming-handshake inclined, not necessarily racist but none of your southern celebrating-difference bullshit either. Katter's conservatism comes from Labor having moved away from that. Rudd can talk from that heritage but he can't necessarily live it; Wayne Swan was part of that generation that excised that legacy from Queensland Labor's brand, whereas someone like Gillard didn't even know where to start with that stuff.

Rudd can also do things like disendorse the Labor candidate for Kennedy so that Katter has a freer run. This is a bit of political sophistry for which the press gallery exists in order to report on, but which in this instance they failed to even detect: lumping Kennedy in with a slice of suburban Melbourne is irrelevant, point-missing journalism.

Labor's northern development policy, such as it is, is not limited to viewing local communities as life-support systems for mining companies. The reference to the NBN holds out more promise to the future of communities like Mackay and Karratha than a few jobs at some increasingly mechanised mines or non-jobs in agriculture. If only a car company would build a factory at Port Hedland. Seriously though, the policy should have gone into greater detail, but to do so would require answers from infrastructure-deficient communities elsewhere in the country.

Part of the infrastructure problem for the north involves protecting it from extremes of weather, which will only get more extreme over time. These can no longer be regarded as freaky occasions that incur acts of charity from the rest of the country, but as part of the costs of living and doing business in that part of the country. There was none of that in Labor's policy, nor the Coalition's: but few political commitments are so bipartisan as those involved in avoiding issues that are real, large, and uncertain in resolution.

The NT has long sought to diversify its agricultural sector beyond beef cattle. Such success as it is starting to have is coming at the expense of northern Queensland, offering a similar climate for produce that requires it but with less risk of the cyclonic wipeouts that afflict that region. Producers in the region can offer Asian markets neither the mass production volumes nor niche specialisations such as pesticide/fertiliser-free certified-organic niches. From a national perspective, depleting established agricultural communities in northern Queensland to boost those in the Territory is a zero-sum game, yet any post-facto justification of a northern development policy will tout NT agriculture as part of the "good news story" to pitch to gullible journalists.

The biggest thing that the Federal government could do to boost communities in northern Australia is to station more ADF personnel there. ADF personnel are skilled and disciplined and get paid a fraction of what equivalent workers get in the mines - and in times of low unemployment the ADF can barely meet recruitment levels while maintaining standards.

The Great Barrier Reef is a greater economic resource than almost any other use to which that area can be put, including oil exploration. Yet, any credible economic (and hence population) plan for northern Queensland will include creating shipping channels to ports such as Gladstone and Mackay, which will end up segmenting the Reef and leaving each segment worse off environmentally. The reefs and other environmentally-sensitive areas of coastal northern WA are under still greater pressure from ports and offshore developments. Again, neither the Coalition nor Labor address those issues (except in the Coalition's fatuous and self-defeating term "green tape"), which reveals the limits on their commitment to making northern development happen. And before you talk about the Greens saying no to dredging and whatever else - it also reveals their lack of commitment to northern development, too.

Labor, the Coalition, and the Greens don't have much to say about engaging Aboriginal communities in the area with regard to economic or community development in the region, or on any other issue really.

Northern development plans have a wider purpose, however, than what's in them and whether or not it adds up. They're about respect for people who are few and marginalised. They're not stupid: they know that decades of northern development plans have been floated and died, and these most recent ones will almost certainly go the same way. In that sense, northern development is a bit like gay marriage - a small minority of the population is even affected, and a fair subset of those are don't appreciate what's on offer, but they seek the gesture nonetheless in the name of equality and respect. As with gay marriage, most Australians are well disposed to the idea of northern development, and only a stingy, nasty few are actively hostile.

In a political environment of programmatic specificity and rigid adherence to talking points, northern Australia provides the impression of blue-sky, limitless vision. You can look at tablelands and golden sands and see anything you want, I suppose. You can see Rudd or Abbott as Prime Minister. Whatever else might happen, in northern Australia as elsewhere, is in the eye of the beholder.

Grist to the mill

By the time wheat makes its way to Sydney it is pretty well processed and refined. It's easy to take it for granted as a commodity and to underestimate the politics involved in making and selling it.

If you want to be Prime Minister, and especially a Coalition Prime Minister, you have to get your head across the politics of wheat. The idea that you should rise to a senior position without having done so is negligent.

Wheat was grown in small and feeble quantities in early Sydney. The Indian strain ruti was grown on a hill to the west of the city that is still known as Rooty Hill, but from which all trace of agriculture has since been lost. When the vast lands to the west of Sydney were exploited by the British it came to be grown in vast quantities; later vast quantities were grown in Western Australia due to subsidies channeled from gold revenue.

Government involvement in wheat-growing took off after the 1930s. It had become one of Australia's key industries and was then labour-intensive. One of the first impacts of the Depression on Australia came with the drying-up of wheat markets, when agents and brokers and other bulk-purchasers went broke and/or slashed their prices, leading to real and immediate impacts on jobs and liquidity generally. Government took over the selling of wheat with the aim of insulating the economy from that degree of shock, offering to pool wheat output and sell it through a "single desk" - with the consequences you'd expect, really, in a neoliberal age.

Firstly, wheat farmers have generally received an even but rarely grand income, as highly regulated as any award employee.

Secondly, the politics of selling wheat has gone way beyond mere hypocrisy and gone into the kind of dissonance that causes mental illness in individuals:

• Coalition MPs who made bloody denunciations of communism were happy to flog Australian wheat to the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China (until Whitlam the communist regime in Beijing was not recognised as the official government of China, the Guomindang government of Taiwan was regarded as "China");
• The Howard government sold Australian wheat to Iraq despite UN sanctions against that country. There was a royal commission into the private sector's role in this, but the role of the then government has not been examined to the same extent. I expected the Rudd government to square that circle, but no;
• When you factor in government involvement in selling Australian innovations such as Synroc and Securency you have to concede that, in certain situations, libertarians have a point.

Basically, wheat farmers in Western Australia want to privatise the profits where prices are high and production is abundant, while wheat farmers toward the east of the country are prepared to stay under government protection to better ride out slumps driven by prices (set by overseas markets and competitors) and production (i.e. droughts, floods etc in Australia). When the government proposed to abolish Wheat Exports Australia (the latest label on the "single desk"), the Coalition found itself wedged:

• Eastern-states Coalition MPs were instructed to vote to keep the "single desk" in some form, and did so;
• Tony Crook, whose presence in Coalition ranks was always tenuous, voted with a calmly united Labor in the expressed interests of his constituents;
• Julie Bishop, the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, was mocked by some old has-been in her attempts to get Coalition MPs to all vote one way on the issue, and in a way that embarrassed the government;
• Mal Washer and Dennis Jensen, two long-serving MPs who had relied on government incomes before entering parliament, decided they would play libertarian in abstaining from voting either with their Coalition colleagues or with the government (if moderates had done this, the Liberal right would have gone apoplectic); and
• For their (non-)efforts, both were denounced by the Coalition spokesperson on agriculture, John Cobb. Cobb showed his genius for agricultural policy over New Zealand apples. He managed to harvest rural anger when the government banned live cattle exports to Indonesia, without a clear idea what he'd do given the breadth and force of opposition within Australia to Indonesian abattoir practices. Cobb pointed out that Jensen and Washer were not part of "the farming community", by which he means the agrarian socialist shakedown that makes people like him possible. 

Cobb's record of political and policy failure remains intact and ripe for rural independents to take advantage of. More broadly, the Coalition looked like a rabble in the lead-up to that vote, during it, and since in taking it to the government in Question Time (in the hope of uniting people deeply divided on matters of principle and what it means to represent the community's best interests).

Julie Bishop was used to brokering deals among fractious Western Australians, but this just proved too hard. Instead of focusing on policy, and taking the initiative away from the government, she instead focused on reacting to whatever the government did and making MPs toe an increasingly silly line.

MPs representing wheat-growing areas tend not to be party hacks with little direct experience in private-sector production, unlike most Coalition MPs. Simply cracking the whip and making these people do what they are bloody well told was never going to work, and nor would once-talismanic but no longer relevant input from Mark Textor jabbering on about elites. The main political tools of people like Bishop, and Abbott, were completely blunted in the face of a political issue that is, as it were, perennial as the grass.

Since his momentum has been slowed by sexism and misogyny, Abbott has been kept above the fray. The Coalition has realised that there is no further advantage for Abbott in his "junkyard dog" role. Bishop has taken over the role but she is no good at it. Pyne has disappeared from view and this is a good thing, nobody wants to or should have to hear from him. Hockey needs to be Mr Policy Substance but somehow he has been drafted into parliamentary theatre. Having abandoned his frontline role, Abbott sits there like his vision of the monarch: to advise, counsel, and warn.

The trouble for Abbott is that role is taken by Howard. His advice and counsel is not that valuable and his warnings have no impact. He sits in Question Time shuffling through papers like Kevin Rudd in 2007 - Rudd was a much more successful Opposition Leader and Abbott could do worse than emulate him more than he did. The difference is that Rudd probably read those papers, they were less likely to be the empty props that they are for Abbott. He will not become more Prime Ministerial by rising above the fray, but irrelevant in comparison with the hands-on Gillard.

The reason why you work on policy in opposition is that you can deal with "sudden" issues like this, complicated by an additional self-imposed requirement to gainsay whatever the government puts up. The Coalition reacts to events rather than demonstrating their capability in managing them. Pissant compromises are all very well for issues that come and go - but wheat is not an issue that disappears from Australian public life for long. The Abbott-led Coalition is not demonstrating that it is ready for government because it is not ready, therefore its criticisms of the incumbents will lose traction, and the Coalition will not be elected to replace them.