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.

The bottle and the damage done

Barry O'Farrell misled ICAC and had to resign. It's still a pity that he's gone from the Premiership, and it's taken me days to work out why.

He made his way up through the Liberal Party with the deft touch of getting along with everyone without being anyone's patsy. He spent time observing all of the players in the NSW Liberals up close, including their weaknesses and how to get around them. It's part of the reason why I both liked him and rated him as a real political operative, not just a player but a stayer, attaining a state to which most political-class dickheads can only aspire.

This slow-baked shrewdness is why O'Farrell could and did outplay Tony Abbott in internal NSW Liberal power games, and why until Wednesday he was a real countervailing force to Abbott. Dopey political journalists insist that Prime Ministers face real challenges from Premiers of the same party; this was true with Askin, Bolte, and Bjelke-Petersen against Gorton, and it was true with O'Farrell and Abbott, but in all other instances it is bullshit.

O'Farrell cut TAFE places and left disabled children without transport to school; he also slapped down Christopher Pyne's vandalism of NSW's school system. He initiated much-needed road and rail projects, but turned Barangaroo into just another third-rate billionaires' folly. His repeated denials a month or so ago that he'd ever met Nick di Girolamo has to be contrasted against the evidence that he seems to have given the man his home address.

You know who else has a mixed record like that? Julia Gillard. Supporters both fiercely defend certain aspects of their still-recent record and face-palm at other aspects, with jeers and even apoplexy from those who never supported them anyway. Each got their start in politics at university, each spent decades working between factions of their party to make it into parliament, and each lasted atop government about the same length of time.

O'Farrell's resignation brings to a head a number of issues that remain unnamed from the Nasty Parliament of 2003-07, issues that have barely been named. NSW politics a number of developments from that parliament which have been slow but inexorable, but which a capable and popular O'Farrell government has managed to hold off in the name of Getting Things Done, until now.

In the NSW Parliament of 1999-2003, Premier Bob Carr did two dumb things which were little noticed at the time, but which have had massive long-term consequences in NSW politics.

First, he made Eddie Obeid a minister, giving him both a taste of power and some experience in how to wield it via the networks that exist in NSW.

Second, he capped the amounts for which one can sue in tort law, not quite smashing the business model of personal injury lawyers (often cruelly called 'ambulance chasers') but limiting it considerably. This sounds fairly arcane, and because it affected the Liberals more than Labor you can imagine Carr congratulating himself for guaranteeing his party two more terms in office.

In the Nasty Parliament of 2003-07, the consequences of both those things started to play out.

First, Obeid ceased to be a minister. For over a century Labor has established protocols for dealing with those of its members who are granted preferment, and who react angrily when that preferment is withdrawn. The foreboding associated with the term 'rat' is usually enough to make most Labor people in that position shut up, thank the party, and depart quietly. Obeid's political genius was to pursue his revenge against the party and the government, and to shore of his post-parliamentary economic position, while co-opting the party to those ends. The NSW ALP didn't rat on Eddie Obeid, and nor did Obeid rat on it; the NSW ALP, including Obeid, ratted on itself. By ratting on itself, NSW Labor ratted on NSW and NSW ratted on it, which (along with O'Farrell, about whom more later) explains Labor's result in the 2011 NSW election.

The corollary of that genius is that the co-opted are widely and fairly regarded as mugs, if not crooks. Labor cannot un-rat on itself or on NSW, not even by expelling Obeid or whomever else - this is like the victim of a practical joke getting angry at the protagonist while the laughter is still ringing. Labor needs the processes set in train by ICAC to play themselves out, and it needs to keep losing elections until after those processes are complete. It cannot fix its own problems. This is an existential threat to its own integrity that nullifies all the well-meant suggestions from John Faulkner, and all the wry witticisms from Carr, and all the earnest insistence from others who persist as members that Labor still stands for something in NSW, put together.

Second, ambulance chaser personal injury lawyer David Clarke did what he swore he would never do: he entered Parliament.

Successful personal injury lawyers need to convince their clients to maintain the grievance for which they are seeking legal redress through expensive, protracted and hard-to-understand legal proceedings. David Clarke was a very successful personal injury lawyer, partly because he was very good at getting people to maintain burning grievances, often in the face of discouragement, over many years. Outside of work he convinced members of fringe Christian cults that they weren't just being ignored but actively persecuted by 'secularists' and moderate members of their own faith. He convinced migrants from eastern Europe that the ALP and moderate Liberals were ready to deport them to face the legal systems of Soviet bloc regimes. He built a substantial power base with little, if any, media coverage.

Moderates do not nurse grievances for years. Moderates start with a position and work toward a compromise. Moderates were flat out building a power base within the Liberal Party, and when it came time to build power bases beyond it they relied entirely upon the media. Moderates regarded David Clarke as a bit weird but basically yet another input to future compromises. David Clarke regarded moderates as foes to be scourged by fair means or foul; he was not interested in compromise, and in about 2002-05 reached his apogee power by securing himself, and a relatively large number of (as it were) fellow-travellers, as Liberal candidates for the 2003 State election and the 2004 Federal election.

Clarke entered Parliament to be led, however nominally, by a moderate young enough to be his son, a man with few economic and political means other than those the party had bestowed on him, a man wedged into the public eye in a way that Clarke could and did eschew. Barry O'Farrell had seen Clarke up close and had known him for years. In Clarke's black-and-white view of the world O'Farrell was as much a moderate as Brogden, but Clarke could never make the charge stick among those who weren't Clarke loyalists; moderates are better at winning people over, however temporarily, by argument. O'Farrell could match Clarke in the party's backrooms, Brogden couldn't. As leader, Brogden was expected to both rise above factional maneuvering and be untouched by it when his side lost, and he couldn't do either. Brogden's impact against his opponents was undermined by internal enemies, led by Clarke, just as Julia Gillard's impact against Abbott was undermined by members of her party nursing long-term grievances that resisted any resolution except destruction.

O'Farrell saw the destruction of John Brogden up close, and enjoyed the freedom to work the party's backrooms and avoid the media where required. He also saw the vacuous Peter Debnam sell his soul to the Liberal Right and get nothing whatsoever for it, which has retarded its recruitment efforts ever since. O'Farrell got off the fence without becoming a moderate. He wedged the Liberal Right into a corner and got most of their candidates out of state and federal parliament (moderates didn't help by alienating people like Chris Hartcher and Marie Ficarra, whose grievances were cultivated by the Right).

Outside the Liberal Party, O'Farrell as leader landed blow after blow on Labor without the internal undermining that Brogden faced, or the self-undermining that Debnam did by indulging the Right. He stopped Labor using the 'Uglies' (seriously, have you seen these people?) as a stick to beat the Coalition with, because Labor's claims that he was a major force in the Liberal Party was evidently false and hurt their waning credibility.

With the diminution of the weirdly religious, non-communicative Clarke as a powerbroker and the rise of O'Farrell as a plausible Premier, business began to take the NSW Liberals seriously again - inversely as Labor began to implode. Moderates took advantage of this situation, and at the same time solved their long-standing problem of creating power bases outside the Liberal Party, and the media - setting up lobbying outfits.

The NSW Liberals did not need all of those panhandlers and spivs who simply switched from Labor. They didn't need to raise that much money, given that Labor was digging its own grave for free. They denounced Obeid, yet they decided (as Thatcher said of Gorbachev) that he was a man with whom they could do business. Waleed Aly is right that the Liberals should have kept themselves nice, but that would have denied the moderates an income, and a way of re-inserting themselves back into the heart of the Liberal Party (what with Howard, Abbott, asylum seekers, and Murdoch, it's been a long time between drinks for the Liberals Formerly Known As Moderates).

The Nasty Parliament of 2003-07 was hardly a moment of Original Sin in NSW politics but from it came problems that are still being played out, and which are barely even being named let alone being classified and addressed in any real way. It showed what happens when the political class not only occupies but cements its hold on the high ground of politics.

Labor and Liberal people had started young in politics, mostly in campus ballots, and had ascended to high office with no incentive or reason to change the way they operate. The worst thing you can say about political-class people in high office is that they Don't Get Business. It's their Achilles heel, their kryptonite. Labor elected Nathan Rees (Premier 2008-09) and Kristina Keneally (2009-11) because of their lack of experience with Obeid and business (because Obeid = business for many NSW Labor people then, and still).

For Liberals, lobbyists offer to help with the lack of business experience - to help their mates in politics navigate the tricky world of business, and vice versa. Nobody helps Labor in that way because pfft, those losers.

Every business person who doesn't get what they want from government complains that government Doesn't Get It, blah blah Red Tape blah Stifling Business. Every political-class politician who is accused of this feels it keenly. Political-class operatives can't distinguish sore-loser spivs from businesses genuinely able to deliver, for them and the state.

The public authorities that used to build major roads and railways have been so stripped of capable managers and skilled professionals that in order to build a major road/railway in Sydney, the NSW government (regardless of who is in office) could not do it with in-house resources. It has no choice but to go to companies that actually employ managers and skilled professionals, and who charge a premium for doing so.

It is not true, however, that to build large-scale water and sewerage infrastructure in northwestern Sydney, that Sydney Water lacks the capacity to do this in a timely and cost-effective way. There is no evidence that Australian Water Holdings has the managers and skilled professionals necessary to do such a job. Yet, to baldly point this out would be one in the eye for Good Old Arthur and Good Old Nick, whose contributions to the Liberal Party's financial position have been redundant but which are not to be discouraged.

In 2003-07, the state parliamentary press gallery did not go much into the above issues. Their conventional wisdom was:

• The 'Terrigals' sub-faction (pro-Obeid Labor Right) were savvy and tough and the futue of Labor and the NSW government: Matt Brown, Reba Meagher, Eric Roozendaal.
• The anti-Obeid Right ('Trogs'), the Labor Left and the Liberals were all clowns - except Brogden who was nice, and then a victim, and then gone.

Kate McClymont of The Sydney Morning Herald used to be an investigative reporter. These days she simply transcribes what ICAC has uncovered, further evidence that investigative skills are atrophying among remaining journalists with fulltime jobs.

O'Farrell could mostly pick the difference between a private enterprise wanting a go from government, and a spiv on the make. Yet, his devotion to people like Reg Kermode and Max Moore-Wilton in the face of evidence that doing them out of their sinecures woould benefit the state enormously, is puzzling and not adequately captured by pecuniary interests or other transparency measures.

How did he get it so wrong, then, over di Girolamo and a bottle of wine? The explanation that works for me is a sport analogy - you can watch a top-level sporting contest and see a skilled and experienced player make the sort of error that a competent child playing that game might not have made, but with the massive consequences that apply in top-level sports which don't apply in schoolyard games. You can still rate that athlete highly while regretting the error, and bear the taunts from those who rate the error above the athlete. If you're not a sport fan, try Greek tragedy. This is why Liberals - and I - insist that O'Farrell is a good bloke who executed his duties honestly and effectively, even though he misled ICAC under oath. I think this is different to someone like Abbott, who will say anything to get himself out of difficulty and whose respect for the truth is considerably less than O'Farrell's.

Barry O'Farrell may resign from Parliament before the next election (due the last Saturday in March 2015). He may not recontest his seat of Kuring-gai at that election, which will be 20 years after he was first elected. He is unlikely to be re-elected in 2015 and serve a full term, as an ex-Premier and unpromotable backbencher: he's not a long-grievance guy. It will be interesting to see what sort of factional log-rolling will take place to elect the new Liberal candidate for Kuring-gai, and what competition that candidate will face from an electorate that has sent two Liberal Premiers and no Labor members to Macquarie Street.

The last preselection I voted in was for the state seat of Manly. Mike Baird was one of the candidates but I didn't vote for him. The candidate who won (and I didn't vote for him either) was a dickhead and deserved his loss at the following election. Funny how things turn out, really.

As Premier, Mike Baird is interesting for two reasons.

Firstly, Liberals talk about free enterprise but they tend to draw MPs from the smaller end of it. O'Farrell was a career political staffer before entering parliament. Debnam was in the navy and puddled around in small businesses before politics. Brogden was also a career staffer with a bit of lobbying. Chikarovski, Collins, and Fahey ran small law firms. Greiner had a Harvard MBA but ran a small family company. Baird had a genuinely successful corporate career, with staff and budgets and everything - and in banking, where throwing cash at spivs is often a career-limiting move, and being able to distinguish going concerns from rubbish gets you to the sorts of heights Baird achieved before entering politics.

Baird entered politics after the Nasty Parliament in 2007, playing no role in the Clarke-Brogden thing.

Secondly, Baird has promised to reform the regulation of political donations. O'Farrell tried that and was defeated in the High Court. It is possible that this will result in another redundant law - had O'Farrell declared that bottle of wine under existing pecuniary interest rules he would still be Premier.

Liam Hogan is right in saying that ICAC should sweat the small stuff, because (and this is what the state governments of Queensland and Victoria, and commentators such as Andrew Norton, overlook) you can't get to the big, seismic investigations into grand mal corruption unless you have dealt with petty and banal instances of the same phenomenon.

Will Baird really take on the lobbyists who comprise much of his party's elite, like Jesus outplacing financiers from the temple? If he does, the only beneficiaries will be these turkeys, Clarkoids who would be flat out running one of those Glenn Druery micro-parties let alone a party of government.

The NSW Liberal Right have bounced back from their low point in 2005 and made no contribution to victory in 2011, but here they are causing trouble:

"We've been ignored for the past three years," a senior right faction source said.

There is no reason why that should change - if it ain't broke, etc. The report is silent as to whether the journalist handed the source a tissue.

"Quite frankly, it's been advancement more based on the relationships with [O'Farrell] than merit selection. We have simply had enough. It's time the party was represented across the board."

The ability to impress someone and form a productive relationship with them is so alien, frightening, and unfathomable to members of the NSW Liberal Right. None of the people named would get preselected on merit, let alone promoted, with the possible exceptions of Elliott and Patterson.

This article says three things that Nicholls missed:

• The NSW Liberal Right can't win elections because they can't read the rules, and by the time they take their socks off to count into double digits the moderates have it all stitched up;
• Gladys Berejiklian is the next NSW Liberal Opposition Leader; and
• Never mind the pundits and the anonymous sources, Charlie Chaplin was right: there is nothing funnier than impotent rage. The NSW Liberal Right are in no position to demand anything from Baird and take comfort only in the fact that he's a church-going Christian.

O'Farrell had the NSW Liberal Right on the ropes. Greg Smith was on the way out and other Uglies were deftly outmaneuvered. Had he co-opted people like David Elliott, who has been attacked from the right himself in internal party battles, he might have squeezed them out altogether. Baird will appoint proselytising Christians into public schools and hospitals and be genuinely puzzled at 'secularists' who protest. You can expect a heated but inconsequential vote on abortion/ stem cells/ homosexuality/ euthanasia/the monarchy before the next election, but probably not to the extent that is happening in Victoria.

It's stupid to assume that what's bad for O'Farrell/Baird must be good for Labor and Robertson. A pox-on-both-houses approach will benefit independents and small parties as a dress rehearsal for the next federal election. This will mean that NSW will continue to see half-baked outcomes, whether stitched-up before they come to light or as the outcomes of horsetrading in public. It will be like the do-nothing excreted from the Nasty Parliament of 2003-07 - or the fast and loose coalition-building that stymied NSW in the late 19th century, and which saw Melbourne with its joined-up government become the biggest and wealthiest city on the continent. This will happen again, unless Baird has qualities that aren't obvious except to his most fervent admirers.

Baird is saying all the right things, and the named and unnamed members of the Liberal Right are saying the wrong things, but the press gallery is not obliged to simply transcribe them and take each at their word.

Cory Bernardi's enduring values

... There were children crying and colors flying
All around the chosen ones
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun
They were flying Mother Nature's silver seed
To a new home in the sun

- Neil Young After the gold rush

There was a time when a substantial proportion of the population was a member of a political party, when local branches actually were a representative sample of the community in a way that focus groups attempt but never quite succeed at recapturing. In such an environment, Cory Bernardi would have been an impossible candidate for office at the branch level, let alone state or federal. The creatures that live and thrive in a free-flowing river are different to those in a series of stagnant, shallow ponds.

Inspired by the Tea Party and its Christianist forebears in US politics, Cory Bernardi is on a death-or-glory mission to do one of two things:

• drag the hollowed-out Liberal Party to the far right and bend it to his will, or
• (more likely) create such friction that he leaves with a name, a follower-base and a war-chest that will survive his ultimately being cast out of a major party, like Brian Harradine and Don Chipp did.

He has been creeping toward this for a while, like a squirrel gathering nuts for when conditions get colder. Within the Liberal Party there is a self-flagellating element happy to encourage a rightward drift, and who confuse obstinacy with conviction, but it is self-defeating. Abbott got where he is today both by courting those people and doing nothing substantial for them. Expecting Abbott or other Liberals to condemn Bernardi is a waste of time and effort.

The Tea Party is not only notable for its ability to draw out idiots. It is notable for its ability to act as cover for large donors seeking to push legislation to advance their interests. This is what Hanson, Katter, and populists other than Palmer lacked: the ability to rabble-rouse and stay in the game.

Idiots tend not to have money and can't keep you going if you stumble; there is no positive narrative for simply doing what you're told by wealthy people. The Tea Party makes up for that, and the fact that it hasn't run out of puff yet inspires Bernardi. The fact that the Tea Party helped lose the Republicans the last two Presidential elections is neither here nor there - Bernardi has never been about advancing the Liberals over Labor. He is ambivalent about who's in government so long as he retains his own bully pulpit by whatever means.

Matthias Cormann visited the US and flirted with the Tea Party, but chose to get with the strength and is now in Cabinet. Over the next year or two Cormann will face a perfect storm politically - architect of unpopular cuts in Canberra, and in his home base in WA he will face the implosion of the Barnett government. Alex Hawke could have fulfilled the role that Bernardi is playing now, having been the heir to David Clarke's Christianist rabble, but by turning his back on Clarke he is playing a longer game even though Abbott doesn't trust him (Abbott's elevation of the equally distrusted Steve Ciobo offers hope to someone like Hawke). Bernardi has the field to himself, and there are political advantages and disadvantages in that.

Bernardi is a clever man who can rouse a rabble but who cannot persuade other equally clever people who take different views to himself. The reason why his travel entitlements claim is so extraordinarily high is because he has to travel far and wide to reach those who constitute his base, and who will sustain him once the Liberals grow weary of him. Let's hope he's not travelling on public expenses to promote a book whose proceeds will not go toward Liberal funds, or even Bernardi's pocket, but toward more rabble-rousing.

This profile usefully captures the embarrassment most Liberals feel toward Bernardi, but so long as he's inside the tent and bringing fringe preferences, he'll be tolerated. The bemusement that comes from Bernardi baiting easily-riled opponents of the government will evaporate once it becomes clear he is shaping perceptions by swinging voters, who were never fully convinced by this government anyway and whose support is desperately needed for it to stay in office.

Conservatives claim that centrist Liberals have a role in securing preferences from centrist parties but that they have an equally important role in securing preferences from Christianists, gunlosers, and racist anti-migrant groups. The election result put the lie to that, and conservatives bellyached that their people lost their places at the top table as a result of being passengers rather than drivers of victory. Less than a quarter of the swing away from Labor last September went to the Coalition - do you even know what Ricky Muir, Clive Palmer or Wayne Dropulich think about abortion?

Right now most conservatives are willing to place their faith on Abbott. The sheer absence of any actual achievements for conservatives will be noted by even the dumber ones at some point, and the hollowness of rhetoric from Maurice Newman and Bernardi. Conservatives were shafted when Abbott was handing out ministerial roles because they contributed nothing to the election result for the Coalition.

When Bernardi says he wants an "exchange of ideas", he means that he wants his opponents to exchange their ideas for his, no questions asked. In an exchange of ideas you take the chance that your own position may have to change in order to secure a result - this is the 'liberal' aspect of 'liberal democracy', and it's what clowns like this don't understand - if give-and-take only ever represents capitulation and loss, you're doing it wrong. His book contains no honest research, unlike other pro-family groups genuinely wrestling with issues like marital breakdown.

It's one thing to say, as Lenore Taylor and Andrew Porter have, that Bernardi is redefining the parameters of debate and making it easier for Abbott to look reasonably centrist when he adopts a right-wing position. This is what Abbott was thinking when he appointed Bernardi as his personal parliamentary secretary when in opposition, a gaambit that failed (here's what I wrote at the time). There are three reasons why this doesn't apply to what is happening now.

Firstly, abortion - Bernardi's chosen gambit - is an open question for very few Australians. Popular opinion has been pretty much fixed since the 1970s: it should be publicly available as and when required. Those who feel otherwise are few and not increasing as a proportion of the population, no matter how fervent they may or may not be or whether their number is adequate to support the Bernardis of this world. Bernardi also overreached when he went after blended families and workplace law reforms - not just because he's offensive, but because he obviously doesn't know what he's talking about.

The most powerful advocates against publicly available abortions are the churches. The churches do not have the power they once had, not only because of an increasingly secular and multicultural Australia but also because of their own failings (about which more in a later post), not the least of which are the sordid cover-ups and evasions arising from clerical and institutional child abuse. Bernardi cannot hope to fill the vacuum of authority in public debate left by incompetent archbishops. He can, however, fill the political vacuum left by Harradine and the Victorian DLP, one which Nile and Katter and Hanson grasp at but can never fully exploit.

Bernardi, a major-party incumbent, can be an ambassador from the Liberal Party to the fringe or the reverse. He is well positioned either way (or to put it slightly differently, he's all right Jack). This is why the SA Liberals were such mugs to hoist him atop their Senate ticket. The quality candidates within that outfit are not taking their chances in the big pond of national politics by taking on Bernardi, instead taking the surer shot on state politics ahead of this year's state election.

Secondly, Abbott's inner circle could not shut Bernardi up if they tried. They have given him no ministerial responsibilities to encourage him to be quiet, or at least to keep him busy. Bernardi is not a distraction from other issues with this government, like, for example, Morrison's increasingly weird humiliations of and petty self-defeating behaviour in the face of asylum-seekers. Modern media has more than enough bandwidth for more than one story at a time: old-timey news organisations, nostalgists who disdain social media, and press secretaries who aren't very good at their jobs, miss this important point.

Thirdly, and most importantly, Bernardi's intervention comes at the wrong time for Abbott. If Abbott was firing on all pistons and fulfilling all his major promises, popular or no, he would be in a strong position to bat away Bernardi's ravings as unrepresentative of the government. We would have a clear idea of who Abbott was and what he's about, and Bernardi would be seen clearly as inconsistent with that. As it stands, people are still wondering what this government is really up to and Bernardi is providing input to that opinion-forming process. The screaming from the attic cannot be unheard and inevitably spoils one's impressions of Mr Rochester and his parlour.

Again, SA Liberals putting him ahead of all other Senate candidates make it hard for the government to distance him from them. Contrast him with SA Labor's number one candidate: the party initially elected Don Farrell, who shared a lot of Bernardi's views. Farrell was replaced by Penny Wong, a politician capable both of principled stands and the give-and-take necessary to persuade those who are not party loyalists.

Abbott will eventually have to destroy Bernardi as he did Hanson. The difference is that Bernardi is smarter than Hanson and more inextricably part of the party organisation than Hanson was. Bernardi is a former state president of the SA Liberals, and though his old mentor Nick Minchin does not back him as strongly as he once did he has an established base within the party that Abbott can't reach. By contrast, Hanson was a member of the Queensland Liberals for less than two years, and was defenceless both from being expelled and from the flies who descended on her when her political career continued regardless. This necessity will not come at a time of Abbott's choosing.

Bernardi is playing a double game with the Liberals and the sooner they wake up to this, the better off they'll be. The fact that he gets away with this is a sign of weakness, not strength and confidence, on the Liberals' part. He imposes himself upon and defines them and not the other way around. When the Abbott government passes into history Bernardi, more than any other backbencher and even most ministers, will have played a role in its downfall. His career may well continue after Abbott has gone, just as Brian Harradine outlasted the Labor split and Whitlam. This is what Bernardi means when he talks about enduring values.

Honour and good sense

Never give in, never give in; never, never, never, never. In nothing - great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.

- Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain, to Harrow School, 1941

Once again, misbehaviour at Sydney University's colleges has hit the news in Sydney, and thus been inflicted on the nation; this time at St John's College. There is, however, something different about the treatment of this issue. The way we look at such antics is different. These places claim to be helping raise the future leaders of our society, and because the society is different then the nature of leadership taught at and by places like St John's has to change.

The ideas behind "initiation ceremonies" at university colleges are as follows:

• Look, we're all corrupt. Just because you're sweet 16 and never been kissed, doesn't mean we all are. We won't be looked down upon by pure little swots when we're in our cups, so when you're covered in vomit and faeces you're no better than us.
• If you see anything wrong, shut up. Just shut up.
• You will exert power over others as a matter of course, and you will be able to pass on the humiliations of this day.
• Conventional morality is something you inflict on others (e.g. calling women 'whores'), not something you have to practice yourself, and if you play along we'll all stick together so that you don't wear any consequences.

None of those notions are relevant to any sort of leadership today. There are consequences from misjudgments and misbehaviour, and they have an importance that goes beyond mere solidarity or the keeping-up of appearances in which nobody believes any more. If you're a pig in the company of your besties then you're easily led astray, and will be no good to anyone as a team member, let alone as a leader.

Peter FitzSimons illustrates the leadership problem, however unwittingly, with this. He starts out by owning his Fellow Senate thing but ends with a particularly feeble bleat:

Not surprisingly, the worst of the excesses over the years have come from the all-male colleges, as the cocktail of undiluted testosterone mixed with too much alcohol and sudden liberation from school discipline has long been a fraught one.

These places are not mere dormitories as is the case on many American campuses, but wonderfully independent institutions with long histories and great traditions that have produced wonderful citizens who have made great contributions.

They have the capacity to change their own cultures, as we have seen with St Andrew's, particularly, and are now seeing with St John's. They will go on. And prosper. Independently.

"Independently" of what, Peter? Independently of whom? If the University can claim credit for colleges' successes it must also accept blame for the failures, and the legalistic duckshoving that allows the University to claim credit but escape blame is to be scorned. The Vice-Chancellor of the University resents the fact that his institution is being tarnished but there's not a damn thing he can do, so don't you make a show of owning the problem and then cheering your "independence" of it.

Why are those who have supposedly made "great contributions" unable to provide positive leadership to people with names like Benedict Aungles, who may not even survive beyond the rigidly hierarchical institutions like those described by Dickens or J. K. Rowling. You can't hush things up and shut down debate in today's world, and nor can you wait for these things to blow over like they might have in the past.

You just can't, and everybody who says otherwise - however eminent they may seem - is misleading you. They need a new operating model and there is nobody leading them toward what such a model might look like - not even Cardinal Pell:

FIVE Catholic priests quit the council of the elite St John's College last night as the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, and the Premier, Barry O'Farrell, voiced their disgust over the initiation ritual scandal ...

Cardinal Pell said he no longer had confidence that the council was able to fix the problems within the elite college at the university.

The mass resignation of the five priests from the 18-person council has left it powerless to continue to govern. Cardinal Pell called on the government to change the laws governing St John's in a move that could mean the church cedes sole control of the 150-year-old institution.

"Unfortunately, I no longer have confidence in the capacity of the council of St John's College to reform life at the college, despite their goodwill and the dedication of the chairman," he said. "I have therefore requested the priest Fellows of the council to resign."

"Unfortunately" is not the word to use here. This predicament isn't one of fortune, but of neglect.

Pell has the power to order the priests to resign, as the article should have made clear. He clearly has no call or suasion over the other members - none of whom were good enough to provide the sort of leadership that might have saved Georgie Carter from the assumption that those within the walls of the College were smarter than those without. Only later in that badly-edited article do we see that the council cannot operate without at least one priest (and a fat lot of good it did with six of them). Once again, for all their wittering about secularism, it falls to government to bail out a church institution.

The clearest MSM assessment of the current controversy, with its antecedents, is Johnsman Richard Ackland. Ackland** talked about the venerable institution he went to and the desire to fit in, and ends his piece with this:

At St John's the main concern of some of the fellows was the reputation of the young men who had conducted the horrible initiation ceremonies. Not the women who were the victims of their actions.

None of the male students have been rusticated because that might damage their reputations. They should be free to go on to higher things where as leaders they can bring their "values" unimpeded into board rooms, the professions and politics.

It isn't only women who are the victims here. As for "values", nobody seriously believes we are going to see a listed board or a Cabinet full of chundering dickheads yelling abuse at passing women. Ackland is right, however, in indicating that such "values" do not facilitate leadership but actually impede it.

All institutions require sound leadership, and even seemingly robust ones will fail without it. Leadership involves knowing when to introduce new ideas and when to rely on the tried-and-true; knowing what parts of Tradition are useful going forward and which have had their day. What the socialisation of somewhere like St John's does is remove the ability to tell the difference.

The people on the St John's College board are eminent people in their own ways, steeped in the symbolism of the Lord and the Queen and the Pope and all they represent. The fact that they are fighting tooth and nail for a set of pranks that are at best silly and repulsive and at worst deadly. They cannot tell what these traditions are upholding. They think that any weakening of any tradition, however redundant or counterproductive, is a victory for the Secularists and Feminists and Socialists and other sub-species of Barbarian.

Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey are both Johnsmen. Some believe that they are the next Prime Minister and Treasurer of this country. Neither is particularly good at identifying problems when they occur and taking action before they become bigger problems. Both have a fixation on hushing things up which they don't want to be made known. This attitude has become so pervasive that a non-Johnsman like Michelle Grattan shares their conviction that the leak is the big story, while the fact that the Coalition lack ability in economic management or policy direction is somehow beside the point.

Hockey can be forgiven for brushing off student pranks. Neither he nor Bill Shorten can, however, be forgiven for brushing off the much broader and more damaging issue of clerical sexual abuse as they do here. Hockey's record of action (rather than impotent if well-meant sympathy) on behalf of victims of clerical child abuse is not strong enough to sustain a claim that he's only trying to protect the victims.

As for Shorten: imagine if Daniel Grollo was harbouring a nest of pedophiles*, and see if your mealy-mouthed bullshit would be any different.

In recent years we have seen apologies for church-government co-operative policies to take children from their mothers. We have acknowledged such policies as misguided and the perpetuation of such policies as failures of leadership (and when I talk about "we" here, I refer you to set-piece speeches on the record by both Hockey and Shorten. Oh, and Abbott too. Our representatives). Clerical child abuse is another example of this phenomenon, yet Hockey and Shorten and others raised to occupy leadership positions take no action to head off such widespread systemic failure and poo-pooh any attempts to do so.

If that's what it takes, then go drink a bucket of off-milk and dog-food boys, get over yourselves, and show us some leadership.

It is telling that there is a very strong push for people to join corporate boards and judicial placements who would never have set foot in an animal house like that - women, people who speak Asian languages, people with an understanding of the arts - anyone but your bog-standard Johnsman-like output who has been raised to assume that positions of leadership are his thing.

The last word goes to, of all people, the well-meaning and much-undermined Rector of St John's College, Mr Michael Bongers:

Mr Bongers plans to keep confronting the old ways at John's. "There is a wonderful learning experience in this for everyone. But it's not just the whole student community. It's beyond that: the old boy network."

He is not intent on banning every tradition. "They must pass the test of commonsense, of decency, of the laws of the land. You've got to show you are respecting people and that you are respecting property and respecting the reputation of this college."

In other words, it's a question of leadership. Knowing which traditions enhance institutions and which disgrace them. It's a paradox that institutions that traditionally provide our leaders have to change fundamentally in order to continue doing so, but hopefully we can get some leaders who can manage the transition. Michael Bongers has shown more leadership than pretty much every living Johnsman, and this lesson in leadership should be recognised as more than just another journo-led kerfuffle bound to blow over eventually.

* This is a hypothetical example, I make no assertion to this effect.

** Update 10/11/12: I apologise to Richard Ackland for the slander of calling him a Johnsman and thank the commenters below for pointing out my error.

The price of power

Tony Abbott can't be Prime Minister because he hasn't made the case that he'd do that job better than Julia Gillard is doing it. In recent weeks we have seen Abbott flick the switch that should have displayed the power he has at his command - the power he would exercise on our behalf, if only we vote in the way that the empty refractions known as polls might indicate.

Let's start with the domestic: electric power, the reliability of its supply and the price thereof.

This has been a major issue in Australian politics for at least twenty years. Only people who know nothing about Australian politics, such as members of the Canberra press gallery, would have failed to miss:

• NSW, where the current Foreign Minister was embarrassed by his party for failing to privatise electricity assets, the largesse from which was apparently going to fund anything but actual renewal of electricity assets (or even, heaven forbid, new ways of generating and distributing and consuming electricity);
• Victoria, where the Kennett government succeeded in privatising electricity assets and failed to get re-elected because there was no discernible impact on the state for this political triumph. The state's schools, hospitals, roads and public transport were no better off, there were fewer jobs in the communities that generated electricity - and as for law-and-order, for much of this period a drug-dealer considered himself "The Premier" because all the rhetoric about cracking down on drugs and crime made no difference to him either;
• South Australia - as in so many things, just like Victoria only much less so;
• Western Australia, where the money flowing into the state might mean they would need a better power generation and distribution system than the jerry-rigged one they patched together during their povvo years, only there isn't as much demand from industry in the south-west as had been imagined (and as politicians had promised). This absence of vision and effective policy is another reason why Collier's "cane toad" statement was so silly. We'd better not even think about other ways of generating electricity because it might damage confidence in key commodities markets;
• Queensland, as above but substitute SE for SW; and
• ACT and Tasmania have the hydro, so once again here is a pressing national debate in which they play pretty much no role.

It is foolish to assume that this stuff, so complex and unresolved for so long, would never make it to the federal arena. When state governments come to Canberra with their begging-bowls, a core part of their problem is stuffed-up electricity policy. It was crazy to assume that such a key aspect of national economic infrastructure would never confront those who deal with Australia's economic policy - the Treasury, the Productivity Commission, Infrastructure Australia, and yes, the government.

Members of major political parties and professional journalists have no excuse for not seeing this issue coming at them. People who have worked closely on the issues arising from the generation and distribution of electricity and who understand it intimately have largely disappeared into the banks, because if your best efforts are going to be ridiculed, scapegoated and/or ignored you may as well be paid well and have a nice office. The federal bureaucracy, the policy advisory ranks of major parties, and the still-bloated ranks of the press gallery sorely need such people; those who make hiring decisions over such people should have taken more interest in such qualifications and background than they have.

The generation, distribution and pricing of electricity was a major political issue when Tony Abbott was writing Battlelines. It isn't exactly a go-to text on that subject. It falls to blogs like evcricket to pick up the slack of actually informing readers what this issue is about and how it affects you. Journalists would grumble if such a person were invited to contribute for their outlet, fancying themselves capable of all that and more besides. The truth is the most senior of them can only produce guff like this. Compare the two links in this paragraph and weep, those who reflexively defend Australian journalism, and let us have no more risible concessions that a good blog is rare while quality journalism is so commonplace and self-evident that it can and must always be defended.

You can use the facts Benson raised to make a number of different, and much better, stories:

• Gillard is finally rising above NSW ALP politics to introduce economic reform of national importance;
• Gillard is, once again, delivering on a policy that Rudd squibbed. This is a pattern that poll-jockeys cannot see, let alone evaluate, and which largely explains why Rudd-fans are kidding themselves about a restoration;
• Chris Hartcher and Barry O'Farrell have long had a difficult relationship - O'Farrell has put Hartcher into a bastard of a portfolio, which neither man is handling with the aplomb that they brought to bear-pit tactics back in Opposition days; and most importantly
• Abbott has nothing useful to say on this issue.

Earlier this week Abbott looked like every other pathetic opposition leader, feebly accusing the incumbent of "gold medal hypocrisy" like some time-server e.g. Eric Ripper or John Robertson. It's too late for that, really it is. First-movers on long-festering issues get accused of hypocrisy for not moving earlier, and eventually they get credit - see Howard and GST, Keating and Aborigines, Hawke and industrial relations reform, or Fraser keeping many of the Whitlam government's reforms. Only partisans think that charge has any sting; it's more than compensated for by the acknowledgment among the disinterested that a long-overdue issue is finally being addressed.

Lenore Taylor is wrong: there is no split within the Coalition because there is no policy over which to split. There is no excuse for this. Shadow Energy Minister Ian Macfarlane could and should have made life hell for his government counterpart (and his successor in the energy portfolio), Martin Ferguson. Rather than allowing Gillard to take the initiative, a bit of effort from Macfarlane might have made it a running sore for the government and proof-positive of Ferguson's intellectual and policy laziness.

Abbott tries to represent the experience of his frontbench as a positive thing. Macfarlane's inertia in taking it up to the government shows that it isn't. There should be a tangible policy direction on electricity reform - with abatement of carbon emissions as part of it - and the fact that there isn't is the reason why Tony Abbott isn't in the race.

Tony Abbott had been pondering how he could get [carbon tax] back on the agenda. Voila.

And in doing so, Simon, he sounded like a plonker, a Johnny one-note who can't change his mind and therefore can't change anyone's nor anything else either. Notice how Abbott disappears from the rest of your article after that, and rightly so. Voila, my arse.

Abbott brings nothing to the table in negotiations on electricity reform. He can't offer the states a stack of cash because, apparently, the economy is stuffed and so is the budget. He can't identify the sticks-and-carrots that he'd use to drove state governments in the direction he wants to go, because he doesn't have a clue what do to and where to go on this issue.

Talking up "the carbon tax" rebounded on him when the sky failed to fall on poor Whyalla and the debate shifted to other factors driving up electricity prices - other factors about which Abbott has nothing to say, nothing to contribute.

The decision to go light on policy development has hurt Abbott. He should be shuttling between state capitals to bring about the solution that Gillard can't deliver and making the case the he should be in the job she occupies today.

Renowned by journalists for his verbal skills, Abbott isn't capable of making the sort of substantial speech Gillard made earlier in the week - not on that issue, nor any other really. Because she's in there trying and he isn't, she's in front on an issue she has neglected and on which her long-serving minister is no help at all. 

Gillard's success in getting bills through parliament and other deals done is negated by a perception that she's a cold technocrat with no vision for the nation. The absence of a policy direction means that Abbott cannot contrast that vacuum with any vision of his own. This, combined with the pervasive and arrogant Coalition attitude that Labor is as good as defeated, means that the next election is shaping up as one of the great tortoise-and-hare contests.

Let us have no nonsense that the Coalition will have a policy all in good time, as and when blah blah. You can get an idea of policy direction without a formal policy document, which is just vapid dot-points these days anyway and hardly telling electorally. It's a year until the election is due: by this point before the 1996 election, Keating government ministers were on the back foot with thoughtful pieces emanating from the opposition which steadily built a perception that it deserved a chance at governing, at dealing with issues that had long been put on the back-burner or junked altogether.

In his second term as Opposition Leader, Howard showed that powder is not always best deployed when simply kept dry. Sometimes you've got to detonate a bit of it from time to time, to blow a minister out of their job and show the government that it might be in office but not necessarily in power. Rudd in 2007 was similar to Howard, but better at running the government ragged and daring people to imagine it as an alternative government. Abbott's popularity falls when people seriously contemplate the prospect that he might be Prime Minister, and that their vote may be implicated in getting him there. All this journo-talk that Abbott is the best-ever Opposition Leader overlooks Rudd's more considerable success, vindicated by an election victory that has eluded Abbott before and which will elude him again.

Abbott's sweep through Washington and Beijing was meant to be a triumph, but it was a fizzer. Conservative foreign policy commentators like Tom Switzer or Greg Sheridan have no case to make that Abbott, or his shadow foreign minister, would be competent at administering this country's foreign policy. The idea that they might be better than the incumbents is demonstrably false, whatever may be said of the government's policies and performance.

Rather than atone for this disaster, he made it worse. The newly elected Queensland government wasted its goodwill and momentum with a series of culture-war spats that have nothing to do with the problems they were elected to address, and which made Queenslanders question whether they were right to elect an LNP government. What does Abbott do but wade into a culture war of his own, winning no support from swinging voters but reinforcing their doubts.

Abbott is proposing to change the law of the land to favour one of his mates: all of Andrew Bolt's avid readers are Coalition voters anyway. Abbott explicitly stood with conservative churchmen at a time when Australians are ambivalent at best about the leadership of churches, and about their relationship to government policy. The conservative base are wrong to seek reassurance at a time when people are not yet won over to what Abbott is offering.

Far more substantial than any policy achievements as Opposition Leader have been Abbott's dirty-tricks campaigns against the admittedly flawed Peter Slipper and Craig Thomson. Bloggers, not MSM journalists, led the campaigns to expose Ashby and Jackson-Lawler, which means that neither the sleaze nor the perception of Coalition distance from them are assets for Abbott.

Now Abbott should be on a winner with electricity, and he isn't. No amount of PR glitter-rolling, no amount of parliamentary theatrics can give him the credibility and the gravitas he has frittered away.

It was understandable that they should give him the benefit of the doubt but now the press gallery embarrass themselves when they simply take him at face value. I talk a lot about the politico-media complex but increasingly, if nobody listens to Abbott on the big issues at the crucial moments, eventually journalists have to stop taking him seriously.

Abbott hasn't paid the price for power, the consideration about what it means to govern this country well and what you might offer toward that end. The humility of the great responsibility of office is being diminished by conceited prats like Chris Pyne who take victory at the next election as given. Oh, yes, Battlelines; more honoured in the breach than the observance in terms of actual Liberal policy directions today. Isn't electricity pricing (and associated issues such as generation and distribution) such a signal issue for Australian families today? Isn't it as important to Abbott as "the greatest moral challenge of our time" was to Rudd (and if not, what is)?

Abbott is committing the worst offence possible against the modern media - providing dull copy - without the gravitas and seriousness of considering the future of the nation and preparing for government. Ironically, any shift by the Liberal Party away from his leadership is made harder, not easier, by the absence of any thought about what a Coalition government might mean (other than winding back anything and everything Rudd and Gillard ever did and pretending the future is 2005). Abbott is to blame for this, and so are those who sold their party out to him so comprehensively, and so cheaply.

The lukewarm attorney

So then, because thou art luke-warm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit thee out of my mouth.

- Revelation 3:16

NSW Attorney General Greg Smith is in grave danger politically. His agenda needs to be clearer than it is, and stronger, if he is to survive. If he goes on as he is he'll become a bigger target for the opposition than Robyn Parker is but without the personal affection and entrenched political support that Parker can command.

Smith came out of the NSW Labor Right and the broader Liberal Party gave him one of their safest seats, Epping, in 2007. Say what you like about the hopelessness of the NSW Liberals, but it is a genuine pity that former Epping MP Andrew Tink had to retire through ill-health and never became a minister while [take your pick from any NSW ALP arseclown who became a state government minister in their spare time] did. Liberals love all that prodigal-son stuff. Smith was spared the indignity of powerlessness that afflicts other fence-jumpers and blow-ins through a Faustian bargain with the Christianist far right faction headed by David Clarke. As with all Faustian bargains it was probably a lot of fun while it lasted.

This article tells us the bargain is off.

The idea of attacking barristers because of their clientele is bullshit. It is both a deliberate misunderstanding and misrepresentation of how the Anglo-Australian legal system works, and a cack-handed attempt to import the worst tactics of US Republicans posing as people of principle when playing partisan silly-buggers. This post by Andrew Tiedt goes into more and better detail on this. Insofar as there was any substance to Phelps' attack it can be brushed aside easily. What's significant here is the politics.

People like Clarke used Phelps to shirtfront Smith because Clarke always looks pathetic when he launches an attack. He has power in close-quarter backroom combat that evaporates utterly under strong light. Phelps is happy to act as Clarke's catspaw in the hope that he might assume a position of substance one day, but it doesn't work like that. If you ever wondered why Liberals disdain PhDs, consider that Phelps is their most immediate example. When they're really desperate the far right wind Phelps up and he goes right over the top, hooting and hollering in a way that can be momentarily confusing for those who aren't used to it, and in that momentary confusion he draws his self-perception of effectiveness. In that sneaky and dishonest ambush the message from Clarke to Smith was clear: you're out of control so you're beyond protection.

Had Smith folded straight away it would have been a significant victory for the far right, whose power has waxed and waned over time but it has not reached the same depths since John Brogden broke down.

While Mr Phelps refused to comment on the altercation, saying his "one rule in politics is not to discuss party room in public", a number of other MPs have confirmed his attack on the Attorney-General.

Phelps didn't get where he is by courting the media or through popular appeal and there is no reason why he would speak to the media, unless he wanted to go the Premier directly. You'll notice that all other MPs quoted are anonymous:

Another MP said that many within the government were concerned with Mr Smith's political leanings, which were often "closer to the Left of the Labor party on issues of prisoner rehabilitation and sentencing".

"The first party he joined was the Labor Party. He doesn't have a Liberal Party bone in his body," one MP said. "He's being called the softest Attorney-General ever.

"This is not a good look for a conservative government. We want to be seen to be tough on crime."

It's hard not to feel some sympathy for Smith for having to deal with gutless shitheads like that. The Liberal Party spent most of its 16 years in opposition trying to outflank Carr from the right on law-and-order - and failing, miserably. "Another MP" has learnt absolutely nothing from that.

Consider that deplorable bleat: "We want to be seen to be tough on crime". No you don't: what you want is for crime to decrease, in incidence, in severity, in recidivism, across the board. That's what you want: to be the government that makes that happen. This is what Smith, apparently, is trying to do:

“The whole hardline approach against crime has been a failure in many places,” [Smith] tells me. “This attempt to make me look softer misrepresents what I am trying to do. I am trying to turn people away from crime. It’s not soft, it’s being more pragmatic.”

The challenge Smith faces in testing his pragmatic approach is daunting. Australia spends $11.5 billion a year on law and order, about $511 a year per person. The dubious honour for the biggest spending goes to New South Wales.

With NSW Labor determined not to be outflanked from the right on law-and-order, and with no "budget black hole" so bad that law-and-order spending will be cut, that level of spending bears out the assertion by Smith and others that the blunt instruments of law-and-order have to be recalibrated in order to be more effective.

Consider that expression, though: "I am trying to turn people away from crime". Smith is not working with community groups who work with the communities where crime is normalised, or who deal with actual prisoners and parolees and know what works and what doesn't. It's top-down, and given the hoo-ha in the party room Smith's willingness and ability to work with such groups toward sound and stable policy is going to be sharply limited.

An idea that's been held and espoused for so long that no-one really questions it is that increased support for troubled families, wayward youth and mental health services will reduce the rates and severity of crime over the long run. The Coalition government in NSW is in an excellent position to prove whether or not this is true. The NSW Coalition's majority and the feebleness of its opposition indicate that the Coalition will be in office for most, if not all, of the coming decade. A child of eight today facing the sort of disadvantage that beset many now in NSW's prison population should take a path that does not lead them to prison in 2022, when they will be 18. That's how you measure success of law-and-order policy; not "Another MP" preening before a funhouse mirror fretting about "be[ing] seen to be tough on crime".

Smith hasn't done the work to give effect to that; neither has the minister that deals with such community groups on a daily basis, Andrew Constance. Constance has no political incentive to save Smith's hide, nor any ability to appreciate the kind of far-reaching change that Smith would like to bring about. Smith seems to think he can do it all himself, and he's wrong. He hasn't done the outreach so he hasn't got the backing that would sustain him in facing the attacks from the far right, as though a bunch of loudmouths who talk tough understand crime better than anyone else.

“I want the community to be a safer place to live in,” he says. Then he turns the argument around by citing laws giving police greater powers that the O’Farrell government introduced in the wake of the drive-by shooting spree. The new laws have tightened the provisions about consorting and criminal gangs in ways that have alarmed civil liberties and prisoners’ rights advocates. The changes went through parliament unamended in March. “These are not soft,” says Smith. “They are tough laws, and I am behind them.”

So, the police have greater powers. What they don't appear to have is greater resources or a critical mass of intelligence. This is why the start of the article is puzzling:

WHEN Sydney’s southwest suburbs suffered a wave of drive-by shootings early this year, the city’s tabloid press and notorious radio shock jocks went into overdrive. Their target was Greg Smith, who is about to complete his first year as attorney-general in Barry O’Farrell’s state government.

Why Smith?

• Why not the Police Minister, Mick Gallacher, or the Police Commissioner, Andrew Scipione, given that the problems in Sydney's southwest are ones of quantity and quality resourcing? Smith has ensured they have the powers they need, the application of those powers is a matter for Gallacher and Scipione.  Gallacher has not stepped up to help his former Clarke-mate Smith, and it would have reflected better on him if he had.
• If smart, effective policing led to people being arrested who were getting off lightly due to legal technicalities or poorly drafted laws, then Smith would be a fair target. 
• When you consider the proportion of crime connected to the illegal drug trade, something like the Australia 21 report into drug laws should have been manna from heaven for Smith: strong support, if not yet vindication for what he's trying to achieve. 
• Shock-jocks have paraded their contrarian credentials by pretending to give drug laws some thought but the moment Smith does, they will bag him and the very social ills to which that report refers will lose all chance of alleviation in NSW - any chance that Smith might work with others to operate the sorts of trials that might support such an outcome, trials more substantial than Labor's relatively small-scale safe injection centre or the Drug Court, will be lost in a storm of bullshit.

Again, it's hard not to have sympathy for Smith in doing the right thing, but it's also hard to sustain the idea that he's the man to bring it about: partly, and ironically, because he wants to be that man who brings it about.

Unlike many people I don't believe Smith tipped off Patrick Power but he did mishandle the whole issue to the point where his competence is in question. This is a man who gets rattled under pressure. He also has a blind spot to the idea that people he admires might be guilty of crimes, a notion that is often cured by many years as a prosecutor. This is another example, and there are yet others I'm sure. That sort of blind spot can kill and has killed political careers more illustrious than Smith's. John F. Kennedy dealt with the conflict of loyalties that Catholics have when holding public office and doctrine conflicts with good policy or even popular will; Smith should be more mindful of that than he is. Smith should have the perspective to realise that his Church is strengthened rather than weakened by the removal of child molesters. Again, these are questions of judgment and character that find Smith wanting the qualities necessary for high office.

Being cast out by the far right is a badge of honour for any Liberal, second only to not having anything to do with those bastards in the first place. Smith needs a support base if he is going to weather the storms from the media and handle the pressure of a difficult job for which his ambitions are both considerable and worthy. He hasn't reached out to the moderates, and nor they to him, and this is a tragedy for both. After a generation of failure and atrophy Liberal moderates desperately need a record of achievement; co-opting Smith on law-and-order and helping him realise his aims is a ready-made solution, achievable and sustainable and eminently in line with the highest and best of liberal policy.

For moderate Liberals to let Smith twist in the wind would be a monstrous waste of opportunity; but like the Palestinians under Yasser Arafat, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The moderates would rally behind Parker and Constance, because they've done the hard yards during dark times for liberal moderates, but not Smith because he's not one of them.

Speaking of support bases, it's usually unfair to go after someone's family - Smith's sons are fair game because they have used their father to get positions within the Liberal Party and exercised power by extension to him. Smith's sons vetted candidates for staffer roles when the O'Farrell government came to office, blocking non-members of the Christianist far right and leaving that government less well staffed than it should have been - whether they would take the same support role today is an open question. The Smiths were a large reason why John Alexander beat Maxine McKew for the federal electorate of Bennelong, simply turning up while McKew went to ground. The young Smiths are like their contemporaries in Kevin Rudd's office who took the ride on the Hubris-Nemesis express, and it will be interesting to see how they juggle a relationship that their father failed to manage.

Greg Smith is plugging away at important work but he would be more effective, and more politically sustainable, were he to join forces with Liberal moderates. Any weakening of Smith's position enhances the anti-democratic and mendacious reach of the Christianist far-right, and that position shows all the signs of weakening simply because lofty ambitions fall short of their desired aims. Maybe Smith's media advisers can switch to the idea that Ray Hadley isn't their mate and that they can refer his requests for timeslot-stuffing to Gallacher's office.

Barry O'Farrell is finished if he lets the Christianists out of the box he put them in to win office, and reinforcing Smith keeps them at bay. On top of his important work Smith has some hard decisions to make about deeply personal issues regarding his Church and his sons, and their place in the agenda he has set for himself. I doubt that he can get over himself in order to get his agenda through, and the smart money would have to be on him failing - but if he did, greatness awaits and the smart money can keep to themselves.

Israel and Palestine

I believe that Israel has a right to exist, and I'm an admirer of the plucky little Israel that beat off the meddling Poms in 1947, which beat the Arabs in 1967 and '73, which held to the Camp David Accord and which bent over backwards to find peace in Oslo.

I wish Palestine had that greatness of spirit. First, it took a generation to articulate any sort of political response to its stateless predicament, and when it did it came in the all-rhetoric-no-responsibility mendacity of Yasser Arafat and Fatah. Now, Palestinian politics is imported from Iran and operates like an organised crime outfit, where squalor is leavened by small mercies on condition of absolute fealty to Hamas and its hierarchy. Where is its Mandela, someone who can stand up for Palestinians without swaggering - or caving in?

The game-breaker can only come from the Palestinians. The Israelis are showing all the fractious brittleness that conservatives call strength, but which the historian knows precedes the end of regimes. Netanyahu is a fool and nobody in that country's elite has the standing to call him out (except the extremists who bray that he hasn't gone far enough).

I've long believed that the flotilla idea, and not an embargo, is what the US should use against Castro in Cuba. Even if the Israelis found weapons or other contraband on that flotilla now, nobody would believe them; the return of Private Shalit is further away than ever.

The two-state solution is now a given; Israel-only is a position that can no longer be sustained, but the Palestine-only push is only made easier if Israel discredits itself. This is the piece that best sums up my attitude toward the recent flotilla - I find it hard to disagree with a single sentence, especially this one:

The threat of delegitimation is not a military problem and it does not have a military solution.

... and this:

It is hard not to conclude from this Israeli action, and also from other Israeli actions in recent years, that the Israeli leadership simply does not care any longer about what anybody thinks ... This is not defiance, it is despair ... This is the very opposite of the measured and empirical attitude, the search for strategic opportunity, the enlistment of imagination in the service of ideals and interests, that is required for statecraft.

That despair has traditionally been the preserve of the Palestinians: Entebbe and Munich, the contemptible murder of Klinghoffer, walking away from Oslo. It is the death-wish of an insurgent opposition, of wreckers and vandals.

Those who support the Palestinians must believe that real leadership exists among the Palestinians, capable of realising a state which serves those people well and would have them live in peace among their neighbours and enjoy prosperity. It doesn't, and so supporting Palestinians is just another expensive and pointless folly, like the various strands of socialism last century, or anarchism before that.

in our time Jewish pride has a disturbingly parasitic relationship with Jewish lachrymosity

No comfort can be taken from the fact that the Palestinians too wallow in victimhood and try to turn that base metal into the gold of righteousness. So too the Serbs and Croats, the Fenians and Ulstermen, Mugabe and Ahmedinejad and North Korea and the Basques. No cause can be right that resorts to this. Only those who can build more than they destroy can have their destruction forgiven and accepted, and allow that which is built in its place to remain standing.

A real “Freedom Flotilla” would have sailed for Gaza to liberate it from its rulers.

Perhaps they thought they were, or that Palestinians would be grateful. The problem is that a reasonable Palestinian leadership has no-one with whom to deal: a Hamas racketeering organisation; an Israeli government that is disingenuous at its best (fleeting) moments; a United States that is not sufficiently engaged to even hear such voices, let alone support them; and Arab neighbours who are afraid of their own moderates, let alone anyone else's.

If there's no latter-day Begin or Palestinian-Sadat to produce a moderate, two-state solution, then to hell with them all: and stop using our passports to prosecute and perpetuate all your bullshit.

Update 10 June: Why have two former News Ltd copy girls gone after some old lady who's been sacked? The media aim to render complex situations simple, but if it is tre that acid tongue sinks veteran scribe, then what's her-name and Caroline Overington are doing us all a disservice by writing the same beef-witted article framing this as a culture war thing. When people write like that about them, they think it's mean; when they dish it out, they are just, um, doing what they do (which is, get ahead of themselves).

Phoney Tony

Tony Abbott has been busy diminishing the Liberal Party's appeal - and now his party has helped him trash the one quality his fans claimed he had in spades, both absolutely and compared to Rudd: his authenticity.

The Liberal Party had a reputation for dour economic management, one that John Howard built assiduously and which Kevin Rudd stole from him. Abbott can't and won't compete with him on that front, it bores him and he thinks he can shrug off those in his party who thinks it is the main game simply because he's Tony Abbott and they're not. His one attempt at shoring up his party's main drawcard yesterday sank without trace.

The revelation that Liberals are getting Abbott some acting lessons is the end of Authentic Abbott, and the whole principle of Let Tony Be Tony. Everyone who shakes his hand from hereon in will be getting the full cheesy experience, like you get with Bronwyn Bishop or Kristina Keneally. Marginal seat voters, captains of industry, anyone he has to impress in order to increase the Liberal vote and engender confidence in a Coalition government, all of those people will ask 'are you for real?', and not be able to answer it either way convincingly. Abbott will project the feeling that he's having a lend of them.

Yeah, I'll bet that Kevin Rudd has had training as well - but a nerd can be expected to get help to take it up a gear, and Rudd doesn't strut around proclaiming how authentic he is.

Liberals complain that Abbott is being criticised for keeping fit, but that's missing the point too. Abbott is being criticised for his hope that projecting his physical fitness might make up for an absence of aptitude for office, a compelling reason why people should vote Liberal rather than default to the incumbents. He thinks all that hard graft about policy and which way to take the country is beside the point, something you can toss off the top of your head while he gets to the real point of his life: a sub-Whitmanesque song of himself with, ah, without the ah, depth of conviction that, tscha, you might expect.

The Liberal Party has no choice but to put up with this self-indulgence because there's nothing more important than letting Tony be Tony (well, there is - but the Turnbull era showed one thing, that if you don't indulge Abbott in his whimsy he melts down). By sending him off to acting school they underestimate how much they have not boosted their leader, but undermined him utterly and irretrievably.

No point in him doing the Captain Catholic thing either - it isn't just patriotism that is the last refuge of people like Abbott. With the perceptions that child abuse is an endemic problem in the Catholic Church, and that its officials are unwilling or unable to act to clean it up (and that they have a bias in favour of perpetrators over victims), it's a huge error to proclaim that you're the guy to solve the nation's ills while shackling yourself to The Brotherhood of Secrets & Lies.

Dennis Ferguson

Perhaps now it may be possible to speak of this person and the issues surrounding him without being part of a lynch mob.

Dennis Ferguson has spent most of his adult life in Queensland prisons, convicted six times of sexually abusing children. He does not participate in rehabilitation programs. He attempted to settle in communities in Queensland which included children, and was hounded out of them. All of a sudden he popped up in a public housing facility in Sydney, where he was hounded out again, and was last heard of at Coogee and in a homeless shelter.

For the first time since 1840, New South Wales has accepted responsibility for a convicted felon from another jurisdiction. Yes, he has to live somewhere and it was clear that the Queensland government found it difficult to locate him in any community within that state without a storm of protest.

He did not have to live in NSW, and was not obliged to be a government responsibility by being accommodated in this state's public housing. He was not entitled, let alone obliged, to vault ahead of others in the long and time-intensive queue for public housing. Those who advocate more low-cost housing in Sydney have a harder time of it because of this stunt.

Ferguson's lack of remorse and his lack of rehabilitation means that children in the community wherever he might live are in danger. This is the pattern he has set and that pattern is unbroken. It is true that he has served his sentence, but this is no reason why he should be given the benefit of the doubt going forward. It is those people living in the community, going forward, who deserve the benefit of the doubt: Ferguson represents a real risk that children in that community might be abused.

There was a time when the rights of a freed convict might have trumped those of others in the community, and no amount of jowl-wobbling outrage from lawyers insisting that procedures known and practicable exclsusively by them vincit omnes will or can change that.

There was a time when sexual abuse of children was tolerated more than it is now. Those times have changed: people are acutely sensitive to the possibility of child sexual abuse to the point where children no longer play in the street or have unstructured play time to the extent that they did. The very prospect of child sexual abuse has caused far-reaching changes in the work practices of those who deal with children, even on a voluntary basis. It erodes people's faith in one another, and even in religious institutions that have not cottoned on to the implications of child sexual abuse as a serious, faith-destroying issue for people today.

Rehabilitating offenders and having them return to the community after their sentence is over is one of those issues that could always be done better. To the extent that it does happen, public housing communities perform an unheralded role in quietly facilitating this. It would be a mistake to assume that all public housing facilities contain all necessary facilities and goodwill required to effect prisoner rehabilitation; more could certainly be done generally, but for an unreconstructed and unrepentant offender there is little to be done. It is cynicism to use the publicity surrounding Ferguson to lobby for more resources: the worst type of cynicism, one where the means won't justify or be justified by the end.

Ferguson can only be accommodated in a community without children. He does not have the right to live where he pleases; the rights of children to grow into communities free of likely harrassment trumps those of this recidivist. Prison is one such; if there are others, then Ferguson must go there. Any community with children in it is a community of which Ferguson is unfit to be part. If there is no such community in NSW, then the NSW government can take no further responsibility for Ferguson and he must be returned to Queensland. If he is harrassed from Coolangatta to the Cape then this is an indictment of Queensland.

It was wrong of the Rees Government to think it was clever helping solve a problem for their neighbours by shunting this serial offender into a Liberal electorate (while I have no proof that this is its motivation, such is the position of the NSW government that nobody should believe any denials).

Fancy taking on a problem that couldn't be solved! What clowns.