The dogs' breakfast

Look, I have a long and winding draft on the US election that I'm still trying to work through, ok? What follows here is a diversion into the politics (and coverage thereof) of my native state of New South Wales, which is ready to go out now. I beg the indulgence of regular readers.

The NSW government committed itself to a significant building program of both public infrastructure and private housing. The departure of Troy Grant as Deputy Premier puts all that in doubt, and the coverage of this misses the point entirely.

In order to pull off an agenda like that, a government needs a nice-guy leader, personable but firm, with an offsider who is a bastard and an enforcer of the steely will the leader never fully shows the public. Everywhere that has successfully pulled off a vast rebuilding program - Haussmann's Paris, Robert Moses' New York, Max Brauer's Hamburg, Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore, Zhu Rongji's Shanghai - saw a charismatic leader with one or more arm-twisting bastard enforcers to get things done.

Grant was Mike Baird's bastard. A police officer for 22 years, he joined the Nationals and won the seat of Dubbo in 2011 from independent Dawn Fardell. He was a backbencher until Barry O'Farrell resigned in April 2014. Nationals leader Andrew Stoner had bought into the development ethos that had consumed the Liberals, insisting that some of the largesse from electricity sales also go to regional NSW; when Stoner stood down six months after O'Farrell, there was no succession plan. Grant had the numbers to become Nationals leader and Deputy Premier.

Being new to politics did not stop Grant taking advantage. He became Minister for Police, leapfrogging his old colleagues who had avoided being posted to Dubbo. He became Minister for Justice as well, breaching the old protocols where the minister for one could not be minister for the other; he outranked the Attorney General, Gabrielle Upton, whose namby-pamby concerns about due process were swept aside by a copper's pragmatism. He combined this with the ministry of Gaming and Racing, putting him in charge of real power with liquor and pokie licencing - as well as Arts, because hey why not and who else in the government wants to do that? Grant aggregated all this power at a time when the Coalition had a vast backbench, full of apparently talented and hard-working potential ministers.

When Baird wanted to curtail liquor trading hours in the inner city, Grant backed him. Police and health workers cheered the move, but the denizens of the city's bars and clubs hated it - and seemed to have no recourse, not to nice-guy Baird, not to the bastard enforcer Grant.

When Baird resolved to ban greyhound racing in 2015, it was to please the same skittish urban base that had embraced Julia Gillard's ban of live cattle exports to Indonesia in 2011. A once working-class past-time had been forced from the inner city to the urban fringes and to rural areas that aren't desert, or pricey prime land, or subject to fracking, or too far from traditional greyhound racing centres in Gosford, Dapto, and Wentworth Park. It was never a big industry and had no champions who were big donors with access to the political class. No migrant group embraced it, it attracted few young people, and with a cut to its subsidies and a bit of compensation it might well have been dispatched into history with its ageing adherents. Grant backed him, and developed the legal and policy mechanisms to make it happen.

As with urban planning or electricity sales, the consultation was broad, but firm; the government isn't backing down on this, but by all means let's talk and money will be available. The legislation passed, and the machinery whirred into action.

If greyhound racing didn't matter, it didn't matter if the ban was overturned. Nobody was asking Baird to go back on something big and important, like WestConnex. By championing greyhound racing, Alan Jones emboldened conservatives who needed votes from lower-income earners and helped them to an easy, low-consequence win over the powers-that-be grinding through the big projects. Jones gives most governments free rein but he expects them to kowtow when he jerks the chain, seemingly at random, whether the issue is large or small. Baird saved his government with the backflip, even if he lost the sky-high ratings a Sydney politician needs to brush off Alan Jones.

Baird didn't want to look like either the bad guy or a backflipper; Grant, who had put the anti-greyhound mechanisms in place, had to undo broad and careful planning and write off the compensation. Labor embraced the greyhound cause for the same cynical reasons Barry O'Farrell used against electricity privatisation in 2008, ending the career of then-Premier Morris Iemma and sending the Labor government into a death spiral. The Orange byelection, brought on when state MP Andrew Gee went to Canberra, came when Grant was exposed and vulnerable.

The trouble with sweeping aside protocols and niceties to make big things happen is that you have to bring people with you. Grant had successively alienated long-standing members of the Nationals such as Katrina Hodgkinson and serial boofhead Andrew Fraser. The Orange byelection is an excuse for getting rid of Grant, not the hill he chose to die on. Grant did not have Baird's residual nice-guy image, nor the depth of experience within the Nationals to smooth ruffled feathers. Hodgkinson and Kevin Humphries had been dumped as ministers, in a party not exactly replete with talent and which needs to have its best members tackling the Liberals, Independents and other forces threatening the party's very existence. Grant's country copper instincts, to start with a chat but end with a boot up the arse if needed, had gone so far but no further.

Grant rose like a rocket and fell like a stick, at which I neither mourn nor revel. I never imagined we'd have a Deputy Premier named Troy; I just assumed it was unconstitutional or otherwise unfeasible. It will be interesting to see what happens now:

• Apparently the new Nationals leader will be John Barilaro, who like Baird comes across as a nice guy and not at all an arse-kicker like Grant.
• As Vocational Education minister, Barilaro had his run-ins with Education Minister Adrian Piccoli; we'll see how things change when the difference in seniority between these two men is reversed.
• Interesting to see who becomes the new Police Minister, a source of real power vastly underestimated in state politics. Will the Liberals bring back Mike Gallacher, or is it too soon? Is he content to join the Liberal Right's factional silly-buggers over preselections, angling for a Federal role?
• Will the Attorney-General be able to reassert due process over the new minister(s) for police and justice?
• What of the regulation of liquor, pokies - or greyhounds, for that matter?
• Will the momentum of big road, rail and other "once in a lifetime" infrastructure projects stall?
• Will arts funding (increasingly important to the sector since federal cuts) stay close to the city's elite, or be dispersed by a new minister from far beyond?
• In Dubbo, Grant had learned to speak Wiradjuri. No other NSW government minister, apart from Linda Burney and some 19th-century Renaissance men, learned an Aboriginal language.
• Imagine Andrew Gee regarding his old seat, in the heart of his federal electorate, that has registered a 30% swing against the Nationals. Gee had entered state parliament in 2011 as Grant had, but never became a minister. He has joined a government less popular than Baird's, with a Nationals leader more cunning but less capable than Grant. No federal MP is safe from a 30% swing.
• Speaking of people considering their future - Grant has been forced out of the Deputy Premiership and faces the undoing of two years of work. Why should he stick around until the next election (in 2019)? His seat of Dubbo adjoins that of Orange, with similar demographics and issues ...

Apart from the prospect of a byelection in Dubbo and a bit of soft-soap work on Barilaro, NSW political journalists haven't started on any of the above issues. NSW politics has been reshaped almost as profoundly as New Zealand's South Island. Grant was significant enough, in less than five years, to leave a vacuum in his wake. State political rounds should be across all of those issues and plenty more, yet they've just clustered around the same set of talking points which make no difference to anyone but the journalists themselves.

Between two stools

Ian Macfarlane knew better to entrust his political career to the Nationals. As head of the Cattlemen's Union in the 1990s, he had shown a real skill at getting seemingly unreconcilable interests to come together and form some sort of agreement; a case of political skill preceding political ambition. When he began expressing an interest in going into politics, but was reluctant to join the Nationals, John Howard persuaded him to join the Liberal Party and to replace Bill Taylor as MP for Groom.

But I doubt he'd suit the office,

Soon after he was elected in 1998 he went on Lateline with then-Nationals MP DeAnne Kelly. Kelly ragged him for being less than a true Queenslander for not having joined the Nationals (I hope the ABC can dig up that episode; it must look pretty funny right now). Howard made him a minister and, like all ministers in the latter part of that government, he built his reputation on shelling public money at those who already had plenty in the name of incentives.

The press gallery regarded Macfarlane as a "straight shooter" because history shows they are suckers for that rustic schtick.

At every point in Australia's political history, in every jurisdiction, there has been at least one MP from the backblocks who turns up to Parliament with grass-seeds in his eyebrows. He is patronised unrelentingly by the urban press because this visage affirms their half-arsed stereotypes about The Bush. That politician proves a master at diverting money earned in the cities to pet projects in his electorate, and those of his growing number of vassals. As that politician rises in the ranks - rarely to the head of government, but close enough to escape scrutiny while getting his demands met - he continues to be patronised by the same media who puzzle at his success in getting things done and in securing largesse for voters in the back-of-beyond. A six-lane sealed highway from Kickatinalong to Wheelabarrowback. An irrigation channel where the water evaporates before it reaches the neighbouring electorate.

Such politicians deliver nothing whatsoever for local indigenous communities, nor for those who claim the local Bishop is too lax in enforcing rules against ... that which must not be spoken; but such absences, silences, and negatives are achievements in themselves for representatives of this type.

In recent times Macfarlane, Barnaby Joyce, Ron Boswell, and Bill Heffernan have pulled this rustic schtick over the press gallery. Labor does it to a lesser extent as they hold fewer rural seats (e.g. Dick Adams and Warren Snowdon; Joel Fitzgibbon looks stupid when he tries). Old hands who can remember Peter Nixon, Ian Sinclair or even 'Black Jack' McEwen have should be awake to it, and in theory an journalist who is fooled greatly for a long period has let down their profession as well as the public. Press gallery journalism is different to other journalism because experienced journalists show themselves over and over to be willingly gulled by pretty much anyone who tries it on.

Pantomime rustics wear press gallery scorn lightly, and relish the relative freedom from scrutiny that urban pollies don't have and can't get. Bill Heffernan can make rampantly sexist and homophobic remarks and even bring a weapon into Parliament: the press gallery just roll their eyes, that's Bill being Bill! If Mal Brough spoke and carried himself like Bob Katter or Doug Anthony, he'd have succeeded in shrugging off the Slipper-Ashby thing and made Mark Dreyfus look like a whinger. Lawrence Springborg gets another shot at state leader of the LNP over some new face (or someone urban like Langbroek) from the southeast, where the party needs to win seats to regain office.

Cut forward to late 2009

... and Malcolm Turnbull was, as the journos say, beleaguered. For all the media coverage at the time showing the frontbench deserting Turnbull en masse, the Liberal Party was evenly divided over keeping Turnbull as leader - certainly if the alternative was Abbott. By then the Nationals had realised their traditional base was no longer capable of keeping them in the manner to which they had become accustomed. There was no conflict between mining an farming interests so long as miners kept their operations well away from farmlands (e.g. the deserts and semi-deserts, and the Barrier Reef), or maintained the sorts of mine-farm balances seen in communities like the Upper Hunter or Gippsland, where rural workers even out the ups and downs of agriculture with steadier incomes from the mines. At the time they thought climate change was an issue that could simply be voted down. The Nationals were showing their donors that they could deliver, and currying favour with the rise of conservative Liberals who promised a closer Coalition than had been seen for decades.

Abbott went to Brisbane to court LNP powerbrokers. Turnbull phoned individuals, who mostly ended up voting as the powerbrokers told them to. Abbott's defeat of Turnbull in 2009 was more like Gillard's defeat of Rudd the following year than either side dares admit; more than the press gallery, who saw it all up close, could comprehend.

The formation of the LNP in Queensland was a takeover of the Coalition in that state by the Nationals, with the purpose of securing the powers of state government to benefit Nationals constituencies. They resented the fact that the federal Coalition got involved in what they saw as internal Queensland matters; they agreed to Howard's demands to maintain a separate Liberal/National presence (including maintaining individuals like Macfarlane, or Brandis) in Canberra in return for letting the merger go ahead at state level. The powerbrokers who formed the LNP, like Bruce McIver, were the successors to Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Bob Sparkes: they arrogantly pushed aside their political opponents, scorned irrelevances in far-off Canberra (and the nerds who wanted to go there) and did pretty much what they wished. In 2009, the Nats who ran the LNP could happily sacrifice one Sydneysider leading the Liberal Party for another if it meant they'd be left alone.

One of the core motivations behind Abbott's leadership of the Liberal Party was the idea that Labor's victory in 2007 was illegitimate and some sort of mistake. They thought they were entitled to take up where they left off. Ian Macfarlane was no more, and no less, entitled than anyone.

Why 2015 is different to 2009

1. Macfarlane has, as Turnbull said in September, had a good go at being a minister. At the time Macfarlane seemed to agree - even in the face of the ignominy at being replaced by Christopher Pyne.
2. The LNP powerbrokers have been knocked on their arses. They fooled some of the people some of the time in southeastern Queensland, but this region proved so hard to govern and chewed up so much state government time that the Nationals' traditional plunder-to-the-regions never took off. That old Bjelke-Sparkes arrogance has been knocked out of them by Labor, and by the realisation that shafting Turnbull again would take them further backwards.
3. The LNP powerbrokers have knocked both their current leader (Warren Truss) and the likely next one (Barnaby Joyce) on their arses. If those guys can't win the LNP executive, what good are they? Their credibility is shot, and not only with Turnbull.
4. Consider this, Nationals voters: the Infrastructure Minister and the Agriculture Minister have buggered their own credibility. This is fine if you think Infrastructure and Agriculture policies don't matter.
5. The Treasurer, who is not out of favour with the PM, is looking to cut subsidies. The government as a whole is under no obligation to make Truss or Joyce look good. While these guys are deciding whether or not they'll retire, Infrastructure and Agriculture bureaucrats will have to start putting budget proposals together, not knowing who the relevant minister will be. Now tell me again what the point of the Nationals is, and why you think their vote will hold up.
6. Shenhua Coal have an approved mining permit to dig up much of the Liverpool Plains and affect the watercourses on the rest of it. The Liverpool Plains includes some of Australia's best farmland, and it's within Joyce's electorate. If Shenhua pulls out of the Liverpool Plains through sustained political pressure, Joyce will be a big winner in the local electorate - if not, he won't. Joyce's bargaining position is weakened rather than strengthened after his part in The Macfarlane Affair/ Maccagate.
7. Joyce tried to rope Scott Buchholz (from the electorate adjacent to Groom) into a Lib-Nat switch. Buchholz used to work for Joyce, but Joyce has made him look like a patsy. Like Macfarlane, Buchholz looks more like a Nat than a Lib anyway.
8. Turnbull's representative on the LNP executive was Peter Dutton. Had Macfarlane joined the Nats and been their candidate to displace a Liberal from Cabinet, Dutton would have been the Liberal displaced. Dutton is the weakest link in Turnbull's Cabinet (with the possible exception of Scott Morrison) and was, in effect, arguing for his own job. Macfarlane would have deserved the administrative clusterfuck and moral swamp that is Immigration.

The value of press gallery experience

Michelle Grattan, Paul Bongiorno and Laurie Oakes have all recounted Macfarlane's tale in traditional horse-race terms, as though it were disconnected from the Nationals-Turnbull relationship in 2009 or the coming Budget. Michael Gordon deserves special mention for a piece that is particularly vapid even by the low standards he sets.

Katharine Murphy has developed a strong reputation for describing game-playing across politics while being coy about the press gallery and its role in political manoeuvrings. Sure, Macfarlane is throwing a tantrum - but consider the role played by Murphy and her colleagues in building Macfarlane up as a "straight shooter", someone with unmatched largesse-shovelling skills, etc. She's been a sucker for the pantomime rustic routine, and now is piling onto the poor hapless bastard ... presumably so she can write another one of her hand-wringing pieces about piling onto poor hapless bastards. Murphy writing about cynicism in politics is like Abbott beating up Islamic extremism: be the problem you denounce, rinse and repeat.

Mark Kenny, the Official Bunny of this blog, proffered two gobbets of analysis on this matter:

Macfarlane's rejection has left his career in the wilderness - with only his credibility for company.

Snappy line, that.

But whatever is done with him, it is pretty clear his party backers are too. Done with him that is ... Now Macfarlane is hinting he might look at something in the resources sector after his stint as Australia's longest-serving minerals energy and resources minister.

The cynicism of such manoeuvring apparently knows no limit. Having failed to secure personal advancement through skulduggery, the risk is he could take the corporate knowledge of national service and deploy it for private corporate gain.

You can't look at something that isn't there. Macfarlane should know that by now.

In challenging times, the mining industry needs all the friends it can get in Canberra - why would they hire someone with no credibility? Former Labor minister Martin Ferguson would probably have better standing with the current minister, Josh Frydenberg, than Macfarlane could ever muster. Do you reckon Clive Palmer would want him involved with Queensland Nickel? You see the problem here, provided you aren't as shortsighted as Mark Kenny.

Nobody in the press gallery is prepared for a post-Joyce environment.

Plenty of journos out there will tell you political journalism doesn't - can't - get any better than those people.

Update 24 December: Tony Windsor's piece on Macfarlane a superior article to the one I had written, so I disavow the above to the extent that it departs from Windsor's analysis. As you can see I placed too much reliance on gallery interpretations (e.g. Macfarlane as turncoat). My post would have been improved with more of the dreary cynicism of which I am so regularly accused.

Commercial media, Pauline Hanson, and radical Islam

In the 1990s Laurie Oakes claimed that the "national broadcaster" was not the ABC but the commercial media outlet he worked for, Channel 9. Since then, commercial television and radio have declined in Australia. Oakes wouldn't make that claim now, or he'd be ridiculed if he did. People have other options for spending their time than watching TV or listening to the radio:

• Well-educated people spend less time on commercial TV/radio than less well-educated people.
• Younger people spend less time on commercial TV/radio than older people, who had grown up in an era where there were fewer alternatives.
• People from non-English-speaking backgrounds spend less time on commercial TV/radio than people from English-speaking backgrounds.

The people now running commercial TV/radio find it more rewarding to hang onto the audiences they have rather than take the risk on a broader, more representative audience that may never embrace those media so ardently as its ageing, Anglo-Celtic, politically inflexible existing audience.

If Muslim Australians were big consumers of Australian commercial TV/radio there would be more Muslim Australians appearing on commercial TV/radio, and running it. Populist presenters making ignorant and hurtful comments about them would be disciplined, and talkback callers offering such content would rarely be put to air.

New migrants tend to work hard and try to fit in, and don't need to be harangued about working hard and fitting in. Rhetoric about 'fitting in' rings hollow from people who regard being both Muslim and Australian as a contradiction in terms, or an exercise in malicious deception. The small numbers of new migrants who don't fit in, who lash out at people and property of a society they don't feel part of, confirm commercial media in their biases.

Those now running commercial TV/radio remember when larger numbers of Australians paid attention to them, back in the 1990s, and one of the personalities who got people to tune in was Pauline Hanson. The assumptions of politics at the time suggested that being disendorsed by the Liberals when they held a strong majority in the House of Representatives should have rendered her irrelevant. Instead, she got millions of dollars worth of free publicity from commercial TV/radio. Political parties have small armies of people raising money in order to buy the sort of exposure Hanson got - and gets - gratis.

In 1998 Hanson's party won a million votes. She lost election after election, she went to prison, and in some cases she paid dearly for free publicity. No longer holding public office, she shunned publicity. Eventually she accepted interview requests from those who promised her an easy time. Pauline Pantsdown's satire of her was as gentle as Billy Birmingham's affectionate, unthreatening impersonations of Richie Benaud. As Jason Wilson points out, her exclusionary immigration attitudes had become mainstream, bipartisan policy (and the broadcast media loves bipartisan policy).

Compare the trajectory of her career to other politicians from the late 1990s: Cheryl Kernot, or Peter Reith, or even David Ettridge. Note how Hanson has survived while Clive Palmer, a smarter operator with more money and votes than Hanson could ever muster, has faded. Many voters in the next federal election will have no clear memory of her as an elected official. Those who have negative memories of her may be outweighed by those who look on her more kindly.

The only interviews on Australian commercial TV/radio with Hanson in recent years have been puff-pieces. Many of her opinions echo lines run by talkback radio, and they have her on to run those lines and reinforce them to a receptive audience. She stayed in the limelight through Dancing With The Stars, an odd definition of stardom. Age had softened some of her rhetoric. A tough interview would arouse sympathy and "controversy" that would go on and on, and work to her benefit. The idea that she is a menace to the unity of Australian society, a belief expressed often in the late '90s, has become harder to maintain.

When there are racist outbursts on content that commercial TV/radio really cares about, such as sport or entertainment, they are slow to act. They are quick to play up a "controversy" that is never resolved, but it isn't in their interest to shut down what they consider a genuine expression from their audience.

Samantha Armytage spent her career in Australian commercial TV, and occupies one of its plum roles as co-host of Sunrise. When she made a "racist gaffe", the resulting conflict arose from a powerful institution being held to standards that it does not set. See also, the treatment of Adam Goodes being Aboriginal in a public place. Commercial broadcast media is run to certain formulas that make racist assumptions and don't challenge them; this helps embed them among those who are watching/listening, and repels those who aren't.

If you can accept that Daesh and al Qaeda aren't representative of Islam, then you can accept that Pauline Hanson's resurgence on Australian commercial television is not a genuine expression of Australia today. She represents a recurrence of some national infection, nasty and untreatable, public but embarrassing.

Scott Atran points out a clear disadvantage for those who would harness the power of commercial TV/radio to promote trust and goodwill:

We have “counter-narratives”, unappealing and unsuccessful. Mostly negative, they rely on mass messaging at youth rather than intimate dialogue. As one former Isis imam told us: “The young who came to us were not to be lectured at like witless children; they are for the most part understanding and compassionate, but misguided.” Again, there is discernible method in the Isis approach.

Eager to recruit, the group may spend hundreds of hours trying to enlist a single individual, to learn how their personal problems and grievances fit into a universal theme of persecution against all Muslims.

Current counter-radicalisation approaches lack the mainly positive, empowering appeal and sweep of Isis’s story of the world; and the personalised and intimate approach to individuals across the world.

So much for harnessing the power of mass-media to counter the Daesh narrative, as we might discourage people from smoking.

It was always a laudable goal to have commercial television reach out to a broader audience, beyond Anglo-Celtic Australia, to include Muslims and other relatively recent migrants. Indeed, there were sound business reasons for them doing so. Now our society needs cohesion and dialogue to maintain safety and security, and it would be nice if the commercial broadcasters could get on board as a community service. It’s too late for that now.

If Hanson and those who run commercial TV/radio could choose to define us/them for who’s with “us” and who’s against, they'd choose the one that resonated with their audience: demonising Muslims and other new arrivals, who were never part of their audience anyway.

There will be politicians who align their interests with those of commercial media. If you thought the Murdoch papers were a bit supportive of the Coalition in 2013, then this country’s commercial media are going to treat Tony Abbott like the king in exile in 2016 (similar to the way they treated Rudd under the Gillard government). He has spent his life aligning with the interests of commercial media. Not only Hanson, but other minor parties who want to crack down on immigration and civil liberties will get much more earned media free airtime than, say, the Greens or other established non-government political entities. Nick Xenophon will have to flirt with anti-Muslims, or walk on his hands down Rundle Mall, to get the free coverage that got him this far.

In their mutually weakened state they'll help one another before they'll help those who ignore them. And what could be more Aussie (pause) than friends helping friends when they're struggling (cut to shot of Australian flag rippling in the breeze, then to shot of a southern-cross tattoo on a comely white female buttock, then to an ad).

A royal commission into the mandatory detention of asylum-seekers

The system of mandatory detention of asylum-seekers began in 1992, when Paul Keating was PM and Labor Left inner-city Melbourne MP Gerry Hand was Immigration Minister. Since then, Labor has been in power for 10 years and the Coalition for 13. Both parties have been implicated in human rights abuses involved with mandatory detention, and with the rorts that have seen foreign governments and multinational companies paid billions of Australian taxpayer dollars to treat people badly and mess with their heads.

These people are kidding themselves. Labor has committed itself to continuing mandatory detention until the next election, and afterwards if it wins. It cannot back down, or even change that policy significantly:

• The Shadow Minister for Immigration, Richard Marles, is a factional ally of the current Opposition Leader. While he might go through the motions of challenging headline-grabbing events like deaths, riots, or cost blowouts, he is not going to challenge the fundamentals of the policy.
• The Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, Tanya Plibersek, has said repeatedly that we should work more closely with countries in our region to build a system where asylum-seekers don't have to take their chances on the Arafura Sea, and are treated humanely within Southeast Asian countries and their asylum applications are processed and, um, whatever happens to refugees at a time where they number in the tens of millions worldwide happens. I had expected Plibersek to travel a lot throughout the region, talking with political leaders at or below the ministerial level, but apart from a content-free trip to Kiribati she hasn't done nearly enough.
• The Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten, is adopting a strategy of differing substantially with the government on a few key issues - and this is not one of them. At Labor's federal conference earlier this year, he twisted arms and worked the system enough that the entire party reaffirmed its historic commitment to mandatory detention. If Labor were to change policy direction before the election it might need a new leader.
• Chris Bowen and Tony Burke are both former Ministers for Immigration. Both are likely to be senior members of the next Labor government. Any measures Labor may direct at Peter Dutton, Scott Morrison, or Philip Ruddock would rebound on them, too.
• State politicians Eddie Obeid and Bernard Finnigan had very little to do with mandatory detention, but they show Labor can't get out of its own way let alone reform vast national policy.

You used to be able to vote for moderate liberals to curb the excesses of a Coalition government. Philip Ruddock helped kill that. Mandatory detention is bipartisan.

Tony Abbott tried to wedge Shorten by making mandatory detention worse than the conditions from which asylum-seekers fled. Abbott is gone from the Prime Ministership but Dutton remains the relevant minister. Shorten and Marles and Plibersek kept their jobs, too. Mandatory detention isn't a wedge when it's a platform.

Labor and the Coalition are locked in to mandatory detention. They're not just "committed", or "sending a signal" that has gone to every corner of the world for more than two decades, a signal received and played back to us by the United Nations. The outsource providers of those centres can and do charge what they like, knowing the Australian government has no choice but to pay. This also applies to the governments hosting them: they breach formally-defined human rights and basic human decencies minute by minute, knowing that the Australian government dares not define standards without tacitly accepting that it breaches them, and that breaching those standards is bad.

Consider those costs in light of current debates about taxes, deficits, and cutting benefits.

Press gallery journalists can't tell whether a policy is good or bad, right or wrong - they can only tell what's controversial. At different times when Labor was in government, under both Rudd and Gillard, they flinched before full support for mandatory detention. The press gallery belted them hard and unanimously for deviating from bipartisanship.

Nobody in the media, nobody in the major political parties, examined asylum-seeker policy from basic principles. The media shut down rather than facilitated public debate, because it values bipartisanship over debates it cannot control. All major-party MPs got a free pass from the press gallery when they wept in Parliament over the boat that hit the rocks on Christmas Island, and they all kept their free pass when they voted to tighten the screws still further.

There's been a bit of discussion on this blog about what is or isn't an informative interview, or a hard-hitting one. It seems that every interview involving Peter Dutton is hard-hitting, regardless of who interviews him or how. He could have the softest interview ever and he would still come off looking like a goose. There is no point "popcorn-scrabblingly" hoping for a tough interview on Dutton, because:

• there have been plenty and they make no difference, in terms of policy outcomes and conditions in the camps; and
• they make Dutton look resolute and tough, with a touch of martyrdom, which feeds his rightwing support base; and
• a Labor government would be no better. At all.

So much for partisanship being the only basis for criticising political coverage (and for brushing off any/ all criticism as though it were).

Intrepid journalists who actually get over to Nauru and Manus Island put the entire press-release-chewing gallery to shame. Their descriptions of what we do to those people is more important than all the journo-fetishising of bipartisanship. The broadcast media are culpable for reinforcing mandatory detention and deserve no credit when the policy changes, as it must. The public debate to develop better policy will have to exclude the major organs of the broadcast media. They can trail along behind the debate in bewilderment, as they do on most issues, or they can step up once they have stood down the long-serving "Canberra insiders" who have clogged their pages/airwaves with bad judgment calls for too long.

A royal commission (or whatever replaces this mechanism under a republic) into Australia's mandatory detention system will be necessary. It will not be pretty, and all the worse for justice denied and injustice compounded. It would only take place when a future Labor/Coalition government is over a barrel and has no choice but to agree to a measure that could damage them and their major opponents. It might be forced on them by Greens or independents; it will have far-reaching effects on this country's established politics.

Sexual abuse against children within those detention centres should be referred to the existing Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Decisions about how those camps operate are made in Australia, with the Australian government as their client. The idea that they are under the effective jurisdiction of foreign states fails under actual examination of how the camps work.

No religious entities have stepped up. The scriptures of the major monotheistic religions in Australia are full of instructions to be generous to unfortunate strangers who turn up at your door. The performance of religious organisations against the scriptural standards they set themselves is patchy at best.

The belief that the current system can't continue cannot usefully flow through to faith and prayer: religious organisations and their leaders are more strongly committed to covering up and avoiding than resolution through exposure.

It can't be resolved through high-quality journalism because Australian political journalism is mostly useless fetishises bipartisanship over all other considerations. The odd telling story will be uncoupled from policy change through set-piece interviews that fool both journalists and politicians into thinking they have done their jobs.

The Navy resisted government instructions to be as harsh as possible, so the government militarised the Australian Federal Police and Customs.

This can't be resolved politically because both major alternatives are stuck in the same policy. Neither has sufficient standing with the community to start a conversation about how things might be different/better. There are alternatives to the major parties but nationally they are piecemeal, community-based and fragmented.

It can't be resolved legally for much the same reason; an injunction here or a judgment there won't invalidate the whole mandatory detention system, and even small wins will almost certainly be reversed by rushed legislation.

Royal commissions aren't as impeccable as they might have been, but they are all we have as tools both to expose systematic malfeasance over decades, and to avoid both the silly press gallery and you-scratch-my-back bipartisanship that will ensure injustices and inefficiencies continue. They only arise under specific political circumstances though, so you have to hope and be alert to things political journalists can't understand, let alone explain.

You can only do what you can with what you have. Some will tell you that what you have is all you'll get, but they're wrong about that too.

Less than expected

One of the things that keeps this blog going is a desire to use its backlog as the raw material for some in-depth studies into how the Australian media misinformed Australians about the way they were governed 2006-15, and the alternatives we might've had (and might yet have). Recent reading suggests it might be hard to draw a line at the fall of Abbott, and that the effects of crap journalism from the press gallery will yet linger like nuclear waste.

That's your interpretation Leigh

Scott Morrison has not taken to the job of Treasurer with the aplomb some had expected. Being Treasurer is a big, tough job. On what basis did anyone expect a new Treasurer to take to it easily? Hockey had been Shadow Treasurer for years and never made the transition. Swan kept as low a profile as was possible initially, until he started getting across his brief. Costello was the last Treasurer who could do the worse-than-expected-cut-the-promises pantomime, and made an early faux pas by disclosing off-the-record discussions with Alan Greenspan that sent global stock markets into conniptions.

Morrison hasn't had years of preparation for Treasury, he couldn't keep a low profile if his life depended on it, and as with John Dawkins his action-man persona means nobody will cut him any slack. Even so, the press gallery was unanimous that he was the only choice for Treasurer, and are a bit confused that he is less a duck-to-water and more like a duck trying to waddle across a freeway.

His big triumph at Tourism Australia wasn't one. Scott Morrison failing to sell Australia to foreign tourists was a bit like Alan Bond and John Elliott having the Australian beer market locked up between them, and going broke anyway - a failure so inexplicable that merely laughing at them or throwing them into prison wouldn't have been enough. Morrison is to blame for Lara Bingle, and it will come back to bite him: I don't know the issue, nor the day nor the hour, but one day the government will do something that antagonises Bingle and activists will rope her into saying "Hey Morrison, where the bloody hell are ya on [issue]?". They will cover that to the exclusion of all else because you know what the press gallery is like.

As NSW Director of the Liberal Party Morrison sucked up and spat down, including on my old Young Liberals branch. He started his frontbench career dumping on people who aren't citizens, don't speak our language, and who are hidden from us; he moved on to people who are dependent minorities, to be typecast and shunned.

As Treasurer, his modus operandi doesn't really work. Nobody is disconnected from the economy. If you start defining a group and then blaming them for everything wrong with the economy (Jewish bankers? Trade unionists?), you just look like a loon. He's said blaming the global situation is a cop-out. Blaming Labor is a cop-out too, particularly when you consider the Coalition has spent 13 of the last 20 years in government.

The press gallery note his early stumbles but can't quite explain them. To be fair to the gallery, and to Morrison, they haven't written Morrison off. To be equally fair, what is the point where you do so? What is the difference between what the Australian Treasurer needs in times like these, and what Morrison (or, insert your alternative here) offers?

Did the press gallery sell us yet another dog when they presented Morrison as the only real choice for Treasurer? Imagine if he'd become leader, as one or two commentators predicted.

The three-word slogans, three-word slogans

Peter Martin doesn't blame the press gallery for the gap between expectations of and performance by Morrison. He blames Turnbull for talking Morrison up. In reality, Morrison was foisted on Turnbull, and nobody in the press gallery demurred.

Morrison is doing the three-word slogans for two reasons: first, he's nervous. He's resorting to what he knows, what got him into the position in the first place.

Second, he thinks so little of us that he genuinely believes simplistic slogans will do. Morrison is on a fast learning curve in terms of economic and budgetary policy, but at heart he is a conservative. Conservatives believe people are greedy and facile and don't know what's good for them. Conservatives believe they know best, don't need to engage in debate and risk their ideas, and that stunts can chew up media space that might otherwise be given to competing ideas. Conservatives want to do what they want with a minimum of opposition, and don't want to do the heavy lifting of bringing millions with you.

Joe Hockey had made the same mistake. He met with actual economists off the record and impressed them with his grasp of the finer points of economics, some of which were different to his public statements (e.g., poo-poohing the idea that there really was an economic crisis. Just between us, behind closed doors, c'mon). On the record he was a performing gimp, with his simplistic nonsense about budget emergencies and what have you. The actual economists told journalists that Hockey had a depth that wasn't obvious in the media persona, and journalists believed it and reported it long after the facts had betrayed everyone involved.

Morrison is trying the same thing Hockey did, but without a decade's experience as a minister or of matching it with people who know about economics. He can't win. He can patronise people, and be dismissive to journalists, but if he was truly across his brief he wouldn't do either of those things. The Prime Minister, no shrinking violet, knows this. Not everybody can engage in abstruse economic jargon, but everybody cares about their job and their friends' jobs and house prices and the sense of well-being that keeps everything and everyone ticking along. Martin is right when he implores Morrison not to patronise us, to engage with the detail, to engage with us as though we too help shape our own destinies.

Perhaps it's too early, even in a hyped-up age, to expect Morrison to be across the detail. What made Keating so effective were not what would now be called "zingers" in Parliament. Keating went to interview after interview, day after day, showing that he was across the detail. People who hated him knew he was across the detail, and couldn't bump him off it. Nobody has confidence Morrison is across the detail, but all this pleading is to encourage him to get across it, and soon.

A sucker, an even break

When Wayne Swan gave way to Chris Bowen as Treasurer - was it really only two years ago? - Hockey as Shadow Treasurer did not hesitate to monster the new boy. Now as Shadow Treasurer, Bowen has refrained from going after Morrison. Is Bowen being restrained, or merely weak? Will Labor regret not defining Morrison, and tripping him up? If we had a proper press gallery, they would be asking those sorts of questions.

All in good time

Michael Pascoe did much the same thing as Martin, but with a bit less patience and a bit better understanding of the politics. Morrison is trying to get the right back on side, by talking about spending rather than taxing. He thinks that by being a conservative Treasurer he will eventually win back the right-wing zombies who think he betrayed Abbott.

Note that neither Pascoe nor Martin are press gallery, but their analysis of Morrison is better than all the press gallery put together.

Abbott thought he'd be safe by cleaving to the right, and built up a Praetorian guard of Queensland right-wingers around him. Plenty of them voted for Turnbull - the idea that such people should demand loyalty from Morrison is just bullshit. Journalists who understand politics would call them on it rather than do anonymous quotes.

Andrew Bolt (no I won't link to his article) was late in running the same sort of slavering get-a-room profiles on Abbott, how brilliant and warm and witty he really was and is, etc., that press gallery journalists have been running for years. All that "best Opposition Leader ever" stuff was garbage. People hate themselves for having believed it and hate the media for dumbing down public debate to the point where people regard it as beneath them. Like the rest of the Liberal right, Bolt dares not admit that Abbott lost because he did pretty much what Bolt hoped he'd do. They keen and wail over Abbott when they are really lamenting their own irrelevance. They aren't the stoic defenders of timeless truths they wish, they assume, they are.

Morrison's refusal to swear a biblical oath before God and Ray Hadley will also impress all but the most butthurt conservative - eventually. Tony Abbott would say whatever he felt needed to be said to get a momentary advantage; Morrison did to Abbott what he did to the country. In taking on Morrison Abbott still overestimates, in his enfeebled state, his ability to take on anyone and beat them.

When John Howard became Liberal leader in 1995 he took the stick to the factional leaders of the Liberal right. He gave the moderates a whack too, but he wanted to make it clear that he owed the right nothing. They needed to get behind him, not the other way around; it was his last chance to become Prime Minister and nobody was getting in his way. They slunk around like whipped dogs for months, but they respected him and were rewarded in government. Morrison knows that you can do over the right and not lose them forever.

This is why [$] what Peter Brent thinks is a conundrum isn't one. Brent makes the most elegant straw men of anyone in Australian political commentary, you almost feel like a vandal knocking them down. With a Liberal loss the right will grow proportionally in importance because the moderates necessary to hold marginal seats won't be there. They will turn to Morrison because he has, and will have, the most net achievements as a conservative. Andrews is relegated to the backroom obscurity from which he should never have emerged. Dutton is a galoot, everyone knows it; he may lose his seat even if Turnbull wins.

Abbott, now older than Rudd, Gillard, Nelson, Costello, or Fraser were when their moment had passed, is hanging on because he has no better options. Nobody is offering him even the table scraps Reith or Costello are getting from the private sector. Turnbull is giving him nothing. Morrison is doing to Abbott what Julia Gillard should have done more - ignoring him, letting him burn himself out.

Liberals in his area are more likely to preselect a more moderate replacement, but only if he goes quietly - nobody is going to chop him down, we've all seen how he behaves when he takes the contest personally.

Work

Direct ministerial responsibility for the Tax Office comes not from Morrison but Kelly O'Dwyer. You would expect O'Dwyer to be announcing this, and a real journalist would have examined why Morrison did.

So Morrison wants to announce a new Tax Office but doesn't want to talk about tax. Morrison would have stood with his back to Fr Rod Bowers' pithy church signs. Instead, he talked unconvincingly about big economic development themes. He owes Canberra nothing and is happy to move public servants away from there. Gosford was the civic centre of the fast-growing Central Coast before big shopping malls shifted the business and the bustle out of town, which goes to some of Turnbull's thinking on cities. The site where Morrison wants to build a Tax Office had been earmarked for open space, reorienting Gosford toward its waterfront as Melbourne and Brisbane and Newcastle have done.

Wicks is a NSW Liberal and a potential voter in future Liberal leadership contests. Oh, and colourful media identity John Singleton has an office in Gosford. Even if O'Dwyer had wanted to make this announcement, Morrison was always going to pull rank.

Save

O'Dwyer worked in Costello's office, she's never hidden her interest in economic policy, and has applied herself to such policy in committees. She's been the loyal soldier in media appearances, to the point where many who observe politics closely can be forgiven for thinking O'Dwyer is dull-witted and unimaginative. She's now in a role where she can dispel that image, and perhaps take a slower but surer road to the Treasurer's office than Morrison has.

Watch for the press gallery to give Morrison credit for O'Dwyer's work, again and again - you know what they're like.

If Andrew Bolt decided that he wanted Kelly O'Dwyer's seat, the Victorian Liberals would give it to him. They are that stupid; they're taking resources that might be profitably used to defend O'Dwyer or Billson and throwing them away in the hills where Sophie Mirabella lurks. Say what you will about whether Labor and the Greens can join forces to outseat O'Dwyer, or how they might go against Bolt, but she has put herself up for public life and actually engaged the public in ways that Mirabella never could. Meanwhile, Bolt, like Victorian Liberal State President Michael Kroger, declined numerous rails-run offers. O'Dwyer is not a sook like Bolt or Abbott, and she runs rings around Mirabella.

Jim Short was a young Treasury official in 1964 when he was sent to work in the Treasurer's office. He saw the great economic and political challenges of the time up close - the transition to decimal currency, the upheavals in Vietnam and Indonesia - and was hooked. It took him 20 years to get into Parliament and another ten to become Assistant Treasurer. Months later Howard dropped him over undisclosed share holdings. O'Dwyer has already come in ahead of Short's long and futile career arc.

Invest

Our country is heading into a period of economic turmoil. Our major media outlets misrepresented the competence of the immediate past Prime Minister and Treasurer. They talked up the incumbent Treasurer too - but at this stage his friends will plead to cut him some slack, while his enemies might be persuaded to give him enough rope. This is the time for some cold-eyed assessments of what our country requires, not to go into bat for good old Scottie.

Our country needs information and recognition of where we are at, and our options on where we go from here. Scott Morrison needs to be across those issues and those options - and he needs to take us with him. Some will agree but those who won't need to respect him and see this or that announcement as part of a coherent whole.

The Prime Minister can't build the coherent whole by himself, and there are no straw men for Morrison to build, let alone knock down. The press gallery will never get the bigger picture by working Morrison like a jukebox of three-word slogans, so they should stop trying. Nobody is impressed by that crap. Nobody needs it. Only they and their equally silly editors confuse it with news.

The right balance

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

- Newton's Third Law of Motion

The Liberal right are convinced they can trash the Turnbull government in the same way that they trashed the Rudd and Gillard governments. They might just be able to do it, but if they do the Liberal Party forfeits its position as a party of government.

Our notoriously obtuse press gallery thinks it detects a "stoush" or a "split", but there's more going on here: a wholesale redefinition of the Liberal Party. The Liberal right like it the way it is - small, ageing, reactionary, and with its liver-spotted hands on the levers of government, jamming the gears and sending things into reverse wherever possible.

I doubt Turnbull's progressive instincts, and his political competence. While it is unlikely he will transform the Liberal Party single-handedly it is possible that he could unleash reforming forces beyond his control, similar to those who made it to the top of eastern European Communist regimes in the late 1980s. No-one else in the Liberal Party is remotely capable of this. This is why Turnbull is the Liberal right's worst nightmare. This is why they're arcing up: they face losing control of the Liberal Party if Turnbull, and people like Mike Baird, succeed.

Working with smart people

What follows here sounds like some sort of paean to the corporate sector of the sort you might see from Ayn Rand or Pamela Williams. That isn't my intention. I'm trying to show how certain people seem to think and follow those thoughtlines to (what seems like) their logical conclusion.

In the late 1990s, when the Chinese mining boom was starting to take off, Malcolm Turnbull was head of Goldman Sachs Australia and Julie Bishop was managing partner of the Perth office of law firm Clayton Utz. These people worked on big deals with tough, clever people, capable of nuanced thought and thinking several steps ahead. These are people who would rather pay a skilled worker $300k to get a mine up and running rather than play silly-buggers with self-defeating nonsense like zero-hours contracts.

Turnbull and Bishop want to work with people of that calibre again. They know those people, they get them to donate and otherwise keep them involved, but capable people like that laugh at the very prospect of going into parliament, playing silly shouty games and having to account to journalists for ever time you breathe in and out. The Liberal Party says that it wants to attract such people, but it has rarely succeeded; it tends to attract those who would never cut it at the top end of town, big-firm droputs, small businesspeople for whom an employee payrise comes from their own pockets, or staffers who can talk fluent corporatese but who don't really get it.

When Turnbull was leader in 2008-09 he wanted to attract clever, capable people into government. Corporate careers became shaky and the importance of effective politics became obvious to all: if ever you were going to get capable people from the corporate sector into politics, that was the time to do it. These are people who understand large-scale, complex thinking and get things done. The Liberal Party foisted Chris Kenny and Peta Credlin into his office to stifle any far-reaching ideas, and they largely succeeded. As Turnbull's star faded in 2009 he was less convincing in attracting capable people from the private sector, at the very time the Liberal Party was starting to open preselections for the 2010 election.

Working with dumb people

When Abbott took over, the Liberal Party responded enthusiastically by preselecting people compatible with Abbott: people who could recite their lines, recite their lines, people who weren't particularly fussed about the big issues or making things happen, but boy could they recite their lines. People like Eric Abetz and Peter Dutton came to campaign for them, and the candidates who won thought people like Abetz, Dutton and Abbott were what the Liberal Party were all about. This was reinforced in 2013, by which time Abbott had set the tempo of national politics. If you couldn't bear all that empty, obnoxious horseshit that lay at the heart of almost everything he did, then you simply didn't join (or stay in) the Liberal Party let alone run for preselection. The Liberal Party was dumbed down to the point where it could be controlled by people like Abbott, Credlin, and Loughnane.

What sort of person looks up to people like Abetz, Dutton and Abbott? The sort of person of such limited capacity they make Jaymes Diaz look like Demosthenes, i.e. many Liberal Party office bearers and candidates.

Big businesses dealt with Abbott and his team before 2013 to discuss what they wanted from government, and what they weren't getting from Gillard-Rudd and their team(s). The deal big business does with politicians is that they provide money to political campaigns and align their messaging, so that the politicians in question appear 'economically responsible' to journalists employed by big businesses. In return, politicians don't explicitly promise to deliver on specific reforms, but they do offer the public relations skills to present pro-business reforms as in the public interest.

Before the 2013 election the Abbott-led Coalition linked the abolition of carbon and mining taxes to voters' household incomes; this was dishonest but nobody in the corporate sector or the media called them out. Insofar as the Abbott government had a reform agenda, it was either not raised or denied before the 2013 election and again business and the media played along. When Labor and some NGOs did call them out they were mostly ignored. By the time they came to light in 2014, they were unattached from any wider reform agenda and from the prevailing economic conditions at the time. No thought had been given to selling policies that disproportionately affected low-income earners, and whose impact on measures like debt, deficits, and business confidence was negligible. The government's political leverage was trashed.

Pro-business reform has no hope when it is presented as benefitting big business only, and having zero to no benefit for employees and the community as a whole. Chifley's bank nationalisation proposals failed in the High Court. This failure was compounded when the banks successfully presented the proposals as detrimental to the community as a whole and synchronised their messaging with the Liberal Party: Chifley's government was replaced, the banks remained as free enterprises, the Liberals won government and held it. Despite decades of 'professionalism' in communications strategy, this remains the gold standard of Liberal-business co-operation to win public support.

Abbott promised to introduce a raft of fairly limited reforms, tax cuts and reduced environmental restrictions and the like. He failed because his politics skills sucked. The media kept saying he had great media skills, but he couldn't really explain why he did things, and they couldn't articulate why he was so great at media. He expected his edicts to have authority in themselves; contemporary CEOs know that they need extensive change management programs to make internal changes, and they assumed the Liberal Party knew what it was doing. The media were wrong about Abbott's media skills, and if Tony Abbott wasn't good at media then what was he good at/for?

Business came through with their side of the bargain (campaign donations, synchronisation of communications between corporate umbrella groups and Liberals), but the Liberals did not (public acceptance of pro-business reforms, enactment of those reforms into law). This is the reverse of the situation with WorkChoices, where business expressed support for the reforms but deserted the Liberals once they enacted them.

The Liberal-business relationship is pretty unproductive in policy terms. It succeeds only as a measure of donations to the Coalition parties. Business hasn't really considered whether it is asking too much of the Coalition (e.g. are penalty rates really inhibiting productivity? Do lax environmental regulations stifle efficiency?). Coalition MPs today lack Menzies' smooth touch in knowing when and how to push back on reforms that cannot succeed.

Representing corporate manoeuvres as being in the public interest is hard. It requires an understanding of intended and unintended consequences of reforms, a deep understanding of government, and being in touch with communities to an extent that polling and focus groups can only hint at. I am starting to believe Abbott did his best to deliver for business; I have always believed that his level best was never good enough. I remain amazed that professional journalists who are paid to observe politics up close for decades couldn't tell political shit from chocolate, but don't get me started ...

Might as well jump

Cory Bernardi has courted money and tactics from the Tea Party in the US for many years, threatening to leave the Liberal Party. The Tea Party's evangelical wing is fading and nothing but racism seems to keep it going in 2015-16. Economic resentments seem to be fading with a recovering economy, less readily translated into racism than in previous eras. US rightwing politicians who had been notorious Kochsuckers (funded by the disclosure-resistant Koch brothers) find their supply of funding drying up.

Bernardi is a former SA State President of the Liberal Party and was preselected at the top of the Liberal Senate ticket at the last election. He knows that a Liberal Senator who leaves the party robs the party of significant funding and other entitlements, earning the enmity of hardworking Liberals who underwrote the privilege he now enjoys. In 2013 he wrote a fatuous book (no I won't link to it) from which he was supposed to launch his political independence, but you have to sell books for that to work. Now he's taken the phrase "Liberal Party" off his social media profile - *yawn*.

If he's going to leave the Liberal Party, like Bob Day did, he may as well join Day's Family First - but it won't be big enough for the two of them. He couldn't join forces with Pauline Hanson or Clive Palmer for the same reason. If he wants to run his own show, why doesn't he just wear the slings and arrows and step off the mothership? People start small businesses every day, and Bernardi likes to think he champions such people - but it is almost painful watching someone talk so tough and yet pussyfoot around when time comes to take a meaningful stand.

Cory, buddy, I left the Liberal Party before there was social media in any meaningful form. I didn't just change my social media profile or hide behind Andrew Bolt, whimpering "this time for sure". I wrote to the State Director and told everyone I knew that I was taking the step. Some tried to get me to stay, which was nice, but nobody can or does claim I was dithering like you are. There was much, much less at stake with my departure from the Liberal Party - where's the leadership you found lacking in Abbott, and now Turnbull? Stop being so gutless and just take the leap. Join the 'ferals' who are more your kind of people anyway - or else, get in behind the Turnbull government. You could have a meaningful role in building bridges between the government and the crossbenches - but to do that you'd have to get over yourself.

Bernardi discredits Seselja and other conservatives so long as he neither fully commits to the Liberal Party nor strikes out on his own. He is the sort of dilettante the rightwing accuse moderates of being. If the Liberal Party is really and truly this conservative redoubt, why is Bernardi heading toward the exits? Can he really do better, and at what? When will be the perfect time for him to take the bold step around which he has minced for so long?

If Malcolm Turnbull can take on a sitting PM after Question Time on Monday, and be the PM at Question Time on Tuesday, you can do it! If that milquetoast Nick Xenophon can start his own party, why can't you? Silent majority got your tongue? You're tougher and smarter than Turnbull or Day or Xenophon. You can take Seselja with you, and John Ruddick (see below). Jump, Cory, jump! You didn't want respect and influence within a major party anyway, did you?

A new people

Turnbull is likely to appoint more women in his ministry today and otherwise represent the government as making a fresh start. This might attract people who had held off joining the Liberal Party at all, let alone run for preselection, had Abbott remained as leader. Turnbull won't be able to shift the party much, but one or two high-profile recruits could change the way Liberal Party sees itself.

John Ruddick is one of those conservatives who likes the Liberal Party just fine the way it is. His piece this week, and again back in February shows another conservative desperate to head off reform, even to the point of appearing as a moderniser clearing out 'archaic' practices - whatever it takes, anything but fresh blood that might reinvigorate the Liberal Party and take it from the hands of high achievers like John Ruddick.

A political party is always different after it has held government. When a party returns to opposition it's wounded and good people give up on it. Those who harbour and foster resentments, like Ruddick and his mentor, former plaintiff lawyer David Clarke, hold the whip hand. Barry O'Farrell had to fight people like that to get the Liberals ready for NSW government in 2011, and Mike Baird fights them still.

In Victoria and Queensland, defeated Liberals have brought back old hands like Michael Kroger and Laurence Springborg rather than take any more risks that might not pay off. These people will turn narrow losses into routs at the next election because risk-aversion and resentment are the very qualities that killed the former Coalition governments in those states. A backbiting, infighting party keeps the incumbents at the top and that's just how they like it. In South Australia, Steven Marshall wants to be a winner but just can't take on the dead weight of a party that doesn't really want to win and wouldn't know what to do with state government if Labor dropped it into their laps. In WA the party has a vicious reputation for infighting despite near unanimity on policy - staunchly conservative, low taxes.

Preselections for the 2016 election are opening soon. Those who control an ageing, stagnant party use preselections as prizes where they can, making "captain's picks" that flatter a candidate without necessarily offering voters a good choice for election. Turnbull has pledged to avoid captain's picks but nor is he someone who suffers fools, despite their abundance atop the party he now leads. He's not as skilled in party fights like O'Farrell, and he doesn't have the time and lack of media scrutiny O'Farrell had in state opposition.

A candidate who was courted by Turnbull and fast-tracked into preselection would edge out some long-serving hack who had built up credit with people like John Ruddick. When they lose, they'll grizzle to people like Ruddick, who will write another piece for The Guardian on how unfair it is that interlopers are taking our jobs, fuelling the very resentment he would claim to relieve.

Once you understand Ruddick's Liberal nativism, you can see how the asylum-seeker debate is both a simple case of projection, and an existential threat to the perpetually resentful. Ruddick was a good mate of Michael Towke; people who think Scott Morrison is from the far right of our politics should take a closer look at this man and those behind him.

A quick response to Anika Gauja

This piece by Anika Gauja on why Australian political parties turn over leaders so often is well considered and worth reading.

Her contention that leadership ballots involving party members slows down leadership churn is negated by the experience of the Australian Democrats in its final decade. It is also negated by the experiences of the Liberal Party under Malcolm Fraser (six years without being challenged for the leadership) and John Howard (twelve), where rules on leadership challenges were scarecely different to those under which Abbott both rose and fell.

Before social media, Australia had a rich history of political activism outside political parties. Political parties followed rather than led campaigns on major social and political issues such as women's suffrage, alcohol licensing, conscription in World War I, counting Indigenous people in the census, euthanasia, and a republic. What social media has done is make organising faster. It is paradoxical that a party-room ballot can be organised in a few hours while a membership-wide ballot takes months, and yet neither relies on social media.

Political leaders today are feeling the strain of outsourcing their needs to engage the community to the broadcast media, which is increasingly inadequate for the purpose, while social media in its current form cannot support the political class (and leaders thereof) in the manner to which they have become accustomed. We see this not in the speed in which leadership contests take place, but in the parties' ability to rationalise leadership changes after the event:

• Labor failed to adequately explain why Kevin Rudd had to be replaced as Prime Minister in June 2010.
• The press gallery claimed that Labor would have more credibility with Rudd as leader than Gillard. When Rudd replaced Gillard in June 2013 his forebodings about an Abbott government were ignored.
• In February 2015 Abbott promised there'd be no more captain's picks, and "good government". The press gallery, again, took him at his word.
• The downfall of Abbott last week was different to Rudd's downfall because the policy dysfunction in Abbott's office was examined more clearly than that of Rudd, where commentary was reduced to a he-said-she-said interpersonal spat (reinforced in The Killing Season).
  
• There is an element of sexism about the roles played by Julia Gillard and Julie Bishop in recent leadership ballots that was not present in examinations of their no-less-implicated male colleagues, which affects the way women engage with traditional political processes.

The zombies that ate Canberra

One or two high-profile candidates could give a defensive, unimaginative party a glimpse of what relevance to an attractive, tangible future for this country might look like. Turnbull might not be capable of that. The rightwing might hem him in to the point where he can present Abbott's policies in a slightly more oily way, in which case he's finished.

There is no civil war in the Liberal Party. Turnbull won fair and square, and decisively. Abbott is no more able to return to the leadership than Harold Holt. What you have is a bunch of political zombies roaming around offering nothing, with that nothing being breathlessly quoted by the press gallery. Nihilistic sooks do not deserve equal time. If we've learned one thing from Abbott's period as leader, we've learned that you can't quote the incoherent howls of the pointlessly outraged and then wonder why public debate has become so debased (well, everybody outside the press gallery seems to have learned that).

Turnbull is the Prime Minister of Australia and should be able to prevail over backroom heroes like Ruddick. The Liberal Party would be stupidly self-indulgent to choose Ruddick or Seselja over Turnbull. Evatt and Calwell failed to tackle the backroom boys, hence failed to become Prime Minister; Whitlam succeeded at both and underlined the importance of both. Howard dealt with the backroomers in 1995-96, which Ruddick witnessed up close (and Turnbull didn't). If Turnbull can't take on the backroom operators he has no business being Prime Minister, and the Liberal Party's key value proposition as one of two major parties providing responsible and representative government is pretty much forfeit.

Handy Andy

The selection of Andrew Hastie as the Liberal candidate for Canning is a nice summary of all that was wrong with the Abbott government (and yes, the choice of past tense is deliberate).

Due process

There was a time when no self-respecting political party would touch a candidate who was still under investigation for serious matters on the field of battle. The report of this investigation may well exonerate Hastie, or it may not; in an era with greater respect for the armed forces and its due processes, Hastie would have been forced to wait until all such investigations were concluded.

It was inappropriate for Hastie to refer to these matters as having been concluded; had he done so before his resignation from the Army, such comments would have been insubordinate.

Under the Abbott government, there has been scant regard for due process. Where the government has been apprehensive about its chances of success in legal proceedings, such as in its treatment of asylum-seekers or granting of mining leases, the government has framed its opponents in alarmist terms ("vigilantes", "terrorists") and changed the law to exclude their right to even bring an action against the government. While one arm of the government (the investigative processes within the ADF) regards Hastie and those under his command as a subject of investigation, another (Abbott's office, and potentially the legislature) ignores the very possibility that he might yet have a case to answer.

If I were a standard Canberra pundit, I might wryly opine that Hastie's candidacy is "brave". I think it's typical of this government to ride roughshod over respect for procedure and legal niceties whenever they feel like it.

Government information-gathering above all other considerations

The ADF investigation, as David Wroe points out, centres on whether or not Australian soldiers breached the rules of war by removing the hands of Taliban fighters for the purposes of identification after the battle.

On the battlefield, mutilating bodies would surely decrease the prospect of civilian co-operation at best, at worst fuel anti-Western hatred and spur more and worse attacks upon Australian troops. Again, though, this is a matter for military and/or scholarly inquiries.

I will not get squeamish or moralistic about what soldiers do in battle. It is fair to say, however, that it is typical of this government to prioritise its information-gathering requirements over any and all other considerations.

The finest minds in the government couldn't define metadata, but they still want to monitor it. It spies on its political opponents, whether you want to talk about Senator Faulkner allegedly receiving leaks or Senator Hanson-Young allegedly being spied upon. This government (and successive major-party governments in recent years - only in the supposedly chaotic parliament of 2010-13 did it abate) has decreased privacy considerations in its information-gathering to the point where any remaining privacy provisions stand like burnt-out, gutted buildings, relics of a past that has not quite gone but which might impede 'progress' from time to time.

Hastie may have acted under orders in gathering such information as he and his troops gathered. Information gathered by such grisly means may well have some value. The idea that such information-gathering drowns out all other considerations is not quite an epitaph for this government, but it's definitely part of its legacy.

Women

... I ask myself: why isn’t our party selecting more women members of parliament?

Why isn’t our party, as relatively advanced on this today as we were 70 years ago?

Why haven’t we remained ahead of our time in promoting women; and is that one of the reasons why we no longer attract the majority of women voters?

... there is consistently low female representation across our party.

There are relatively few women in leadership positions in the lay party [sic]; there are relatively few women in the parliament; and because there are relatively few women in the parliament it’s harder to get more women into the cabinet.

- Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Address to [Liberal Party] Federal Women's Committee Luncheon, Adelaide, 15 August 2015

I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man [Abbott] ... If he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn’t need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror.

- Prime Minister Julia Gillard, address to the House of Representatives, Canberra, 9 October 2012

Abbott could have insisted that the vacancy in Canning be filled by a woman. He could have prevailed upon women of substance like Diane Smith-Gander or Deirdre Willmott, or even Tess Randall, to stand - and prevailed on WA Liberal powerbrokers like Julie Bishop and Matthias Cormann to make it happen. This wouldn't have meant there was a quota - perish the thought! - but a successful political operation would have made it happen under the circumstances, some work of noble note may yet be done, etc etc.

Georgina Dent found Abbott's speech "astonishing":

Not, sadly, due to its astute revelations or bold leadership, rather it is its complete and curious absence of substance, critical analysis and deductive reasoning that makes it shocking.

Pretty much all of Tony Abbott's speeches are like that. A dull-witted survey of the landscape, followed by some cliched remarks that might have passed for considered thought in some bygone century, all summed up in a way that must be what it's like to suffer from incontinence: an awareness that you're in an unpleasant position made worse by the shame at having brought it upon yourself, and the inadequacy of all other options (including blame) to get you out of the predicament.

Dent has probably been lucky in not subjecting herself to regular doses of Abbott's speeches. Press gallery journalists also express surprise at how bad his speeches are; unlike Dent they've endured those speeches for decades, so one can only conclude such people are the worst thing any journalist can be - obtuse.

Hastie cannot be blamed for not being a woman, a shortcoming all too common. I hope it is not grossly sexist of me to observe that Hastie will prove more indicative (if not quite representative) of this government than many women who have been active members of it.

Conservatives and the military

Modern politics calls for major-party candidates who do as they're told, don't speak out of turn, and don't hog the limelight. Members of the ADF have those qualities in spades.

I never felt Labor had our backs when I was serving [in the Army].

- Andrew Hastie, yesterday

Members of the ADF vote for the conservative parties more than any other occupational group - more than lawyers, or farmers, or corporate executives. It comes as no surprise that such people would also join those parties, run for preselection and secure public office.

The defence force serves the nation, regardless of who may be governing it at any given moment. Yet, conservative politics in this country has always claimed to be more supportive of the military than Labor:

• Billy Hughes split the ALP over conscription in World War I;
• Labor had pacifist and anti-Imperialist elements among its membership since the party's inception, which increased after the slaughter of World War I;
• Labor criticised what little the Lyons government did to upgrade Australia's military in the 1930s;
• John Curtin had been a pacifist in World War I, and conservatives used this against him becoming Prime Minister during World War II. The disastrous decision to send Australian troops to Singapore was considered by many historians to be a reaction to conservative criticism, not only from within Australia but from Churchill in the besieged UK;
• Following rhetoric from the Nixon Administration in the US, conservatives conflated protests against the Vietnam war with pacifism and antipathy to troops, and criticised the Whitlam government for withdrawing Australian troops from South Vietnam;
• In 2003, then-Labor leader Simon Crean opposed sending Australian troops to Iraq, but declared his support for the troops nonetheless to the derision of the gung-ho Howard government.

All of the above points (and others like them) have been painstakingly rebutted by historians. I do not aim to lend them credibility they don't have, but rather to show Hastie's remark is not some unprecedented departure from the ADF's non-partisan service to the nation. Hastie draws upon a consistent rhetorical tradition in Australia's conservative politics.

Poor pay and conditions for ADF personnel, and inadequate support for wounded veterans, are yet more of those bipartisan traditions that our press gallery and defence/foreign policy intelligentsia insist upon but which fail us over and over again. You can expect that Andrew Hastie, whether as an MP or an advisor, will achieve no more for serving personnel and veterans than anyone else has in the past fifty years.

The kiss of death

He'll wrap you in his arms,
tell you that you've been a good boy
He'll rekindle all the dreams
it took you a lifetime to destroy
He'll reach deep into the hole,
heal your shrinking soul,
but there won't be a single thing that you can do
He's a god, he's a man,
he's a ghost, he's a guru
They're whispering his name
through this disappearing land ...

- Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds Red right hand

At their press conference in Canning Abbott praised Hastie - but he would, wouldn't he, blunting the news value in witnessing and recording such a statement. Pretty much everyone Abbott has praised effusively has come a-gutser in recent times, and the people of Canning are entitled to take his endorsement with a grain of salt. The Liberal Party can't go on with a leader whose very presence is a kiss of death; we saw in that Abbott-Napthine picture a serpentine Abbott seeming to drain Napthine's very marrow, negating their words or what the prospect of federal and state governments acting within the same party might hope to achieve.

Tony Abbott is a loser. It is entirely likely that Andrew Hastie will not become the next Member for Canning, and that the Liberals will use this as the excuse they need to dump Tony Abbott - but I've said that already. What about Hastie? He can't go back to the ADF, he's shirtfronted his superiors with his dopey comments pre-empting a long-running investigation, and if there's a Labor government he will end up with all the difficult, boring, no-credit jobs until he retires. The Liberals won't look after him - he has no deep roots in the WA Liberals, and being associated with Abbott isn't the golden ticket it might once have been. Who will look out for him?

Even if Hastie wins the byelection, he won't have enough time to cement himself in place before the next election. At the press conference we saw his umbrage at being questioned by journalists. Some random on the street will lead him a merry dance.

If Abbott goes plenty of staff will go with him too, as the Pharaohs were entombed with their most loyal retainers. There may be a vacancy for Hastie, particularly if the next Prime Minister fails to stem perceptions that this government is on the way out. He would be foolish to count too much on their good graces.

Hastie is flying without a net all right, and unemployment in WA is going up enough as it is without him (potentially) adding to it: think about the skills he has, in a market where demand for them won't be what it was.

Balance

But never mind an actual candidate being actually representative of the actual government. Some guy who hogged the obscurity he should have rightfully shared with Tony Abbott, and who has been politically inert for a decade (yet highly regarded by a dying broadcast medium) was rude to literate Melburnians. The incumbents fall to a resurgent opposition. Life goes on.

Losing it 1: The spearhead

Traditionally, an issue has popped up in the media, squadrons of journalists rush out with pre-prepared cliches to smother any public interest, and the issue dies and is replaced by another one. They may be weighty issues, they may not; but you can be sure that the media will churn through them.

In recent years, editors and news directors have lost control of this media churn. The decline in consumption of traditional broadcast media means there's a strong correlation between social media users and the remaining readers/ listeners/ viewers of the broadcasters. The smarter people in the broadcast media realise this, while the less smart ones - disproportionately found in the press gallery, and "media management" roles in the political class - persist with the view that social media are somewhere between annoyances and competitors. They can't dismiss us out of hand (the old saws about cats or breakfast pics have had their day) but they dare not admit we keep them up at night.

Adam Goodes' Indigenous dance celebration at scoring a goal didn't seem so strange to those of us from northeastern Australia, as Preston Towers observes in his masterful account of the controversy. Rugby league player Greg Inglis does a goanna move after he scores tries, which is just Inglis being Inglis; it is not worthy of booing even by fans of teams Inglis pays against, or by those who (for whatever reason) don't like him.

It's true that New Zealand's rugby union team, the All Blacks, do a Maori war dance (haka) before every match, facing their opponents at close range, sometimes including a genuinely menacing throat-slitting move. It's also true that the Australian team, the Wallabies, did a half-hearted Aboriginal-derived response, but that they haven't done it for decades. Because this guy doesn't realise that he isn't quite as Proud Of Our Aussie Heritage as he might imagine.

It also makes this whole debate beside the point. Rugby fans are no more/less Australian than AFL fans, no more/less uncouth or passionate, and no more/less across issues of structural racism.

Goodes is not, as one cranky fan pointed out, the first Aboriginal AFL player; he's not the first prominent Aborigine who uses his public profile to help young people. What makes him different to those who came before, like Nicky Winmar or Graham "Polly" Farmer, is that prominent Aborigines these days can mix it in public debates. Prominent Aborigines like Goodes, Rachael Perkins, Larissa Behrendt, Noel Pearson, or Marcia Langton are central to public debates involving indigenous people unlike previous generations of leaders like Harold Blair, or Bennelong.

The idea that Goodes ought not express pride in his heritage, or that he's being aggressive in doing so, is rubbish. Ron Barassi has spoken of his Italian heritage, including the harassment his father suffered during World War II when Australia was at war with Italy. Dermott Brereton's hardscrabble upbringing is not unlike the disadvantage suffered by many Indigenous people. He has spoken of his Irish heritage and the threats he received as a result.

Did Brereton really never offer any support to the terrorist organisation IRA? Has Goodes ever supported terrorism, openly or otherwise? Brereton's criticism of Goodes is curious. He looks like an old stager who doesn't get it. Mind you, that puts him firmly in line with the gutless all-about-the-money AFL Commission.

When he was called an "ape" showed a deft touch in raising the issue, then defusing the anger that arose from it. He insisted the child be protected from the ravages of tabloid (broadcast, "professional") media, and kept the focus on structural, endemic racism. Accepting his Australian of the Year accolade last year he did much the same thing: raised harsh truths squarely, and then called on everyone to face them together.

I wish we had a Prime Minister who could do that.

The man who has not handled Goodes' comments at all well was racial discrimination offender Andrew Bolt:

People who loathe Bolt will show that image for the rest of his life, and probably beyond it. Bolt has to keep up his persona of the disappointed conservative. Even after his conviction he was "disappointed" and, like Goodes yesterday, took time away from his job. Bolt finds accusations of racism directed at him to be "chilling", as the young people say.

Appearing calm and measured is essential to keeping onside well-meaning conservatives who don't pay close attention to media controversies, but who want a respectable champion of their values in the media when they do dip into it.

If Bolt blows his cool he loses those people. The idea that he's a hate-filled, seething bigot will turn advertisers away, and NewsCorp will drop him. James Packer, a major shareholder of the TV network that broadcasts Bolt, has already shirtfronted him. If there is a "war" over "race hate" between Goodes and Bolt, then Bolt has already lost it.

Spittle-flecked partisans aside, pragmatic and experienced media professionals like Jo Hall expected this to blow over:

I agree with Carol Duncan and Paul Daley: we do need a discussion, one that doesn't end with recriminations and moving-on-to-the-next-story but to somewhere productive, the "brave and fine" conversation we've always been promised but could never quite manage by ourselves.

The AFL had only planned to have one Indigenous Round but has effectively been forced to have a second this past weekend - without Goodes present, and with the possibility that he might retire rather than continue as a lightning-rod for the country's worst instincts. The AFL Commission has not done the leading when it comes to this issue, it has been led. But this goes beyond one sport, which bears more responsibility for the nation than it can reasonably bear.

Again, I wish we had a Prime Minister capable of leading such a discussion. The press gallery promised us that Abbott was both sincere and capable when it came to Indigenous policy issues, and they acted all surprised when neither turned out to be true.

Abbott has gone to ground, which he usually does when the going gets tough. He could have leavened his clearly difficult experience with Bronwyn Bishop by stepping up with even some noble words on this issue - that would have been enough for the mugs in the press gallery. He's not going to talk about on-piste matters. He might not understand AFL or race relations, but he's in that job because he knows how to fool the broadcast media. If he absents himself from the media, the thinking goes, the broadcast media will run out of new angles and the story will die. All that's happened for him and his office is he's been left behind. The broadcast media promised us he was "Prime Ministerial", when he was never anything of the sort.

The broadcast media have now been abandoned at the very point where social media is running rings around them, and they need to borrow Authority from external sources. They're just there to be used and abused by this government, a realisation everyone has come to except them.

They still believe that an endemic issue will just churn through and Good Old Tony will come through for them once more. He'll play them, and they think they play him too, bless them. When they do start focusing on another issue, they might find less public engagement than traditional broadcasters are enjoying now. They become less adept at picking the right issue for their One Daily Story, and their Access Privileges count for less and less with a smaller, more engaged audience.

The worst thing journalists can be is not biased, or even shallow, but obtuse. On Indigenous issues generally, and on Goodes in particular, the media sure have been obtuse. This can't end well for traditional access-oriented broadcast journalism.