The worst kind of political journalism

No political journalism can ever be good if it patronises the people to whom it reports.

Politicians regularly call press conferences for journalists to ask questions. Mostly, their questions are inane - rather than ask better questions, press gallery journalists simply petition the ABC (the network that most often carries live press conferences) to muffle the often silly and ill-considered questions they ask. They usually seek to reinforce a narrative which does not relate to the subject-matter at hand, which is why politicians get a perverse pride in not answering questions or reading slabs from the very press release which initiated the press conferences in the first place.

Politicians almost never convene people for the purposes of asking questions. Some state governments, and the Gillard government, held community Cabinet meetings where they often fielded better and more pertinent questions than the press gallery ever could.

This is patronising garbage. The journalist seriously believes that interrupting a press conference to talk to a politician is some sort of breach of etiquette, and that people should just sit back and consume whatever drivel the media pumps at them.

Here's what happened: the Prime Minister was in Whyalla and someone came up to talk to him. End of.

Any time I have to do my own editing and presentation of a story, the journalist has failed. It's not that the journalist has presented the story in a different-but-equally-valid way, or using some superior journalism imperceptible to those of us who've never lolled about in a newsroom: the wanker who wrote this seriously believes that only journalists may question politicians in public.

Despite the best of preparations and the fullest of precautions, every time a politician appears in public they take an enormous risk: encountering a real voter.

Oh, piss off. A "real risk" involves getting killed. Politicians deal with voters much better than journalists do, which is why the traditional media has no future as a conduit between politicians and voters.

So it was for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Wednesday, who was beset by the dog-walking Raylene Mullins following an announcement in South Australia.

What a dickhead: "beset" and "dog-walking" tell us nothing about this person or what they wanted. They belittle and de-legitimise this person ("where's your press pass?"). What a hopeless lead-in to a story. What a bad attitude this turkey has. Earlier headlines actually referred to Ms Mullins as "errant".

Wait until I find a press gallery journalist who walks their dog. Wait 'til Koziol does: it will rock his empty little world.

Proving that the township of Whyalla was never wiped off the map, Raylene confronted the PM about the government's free trade agenda and its impact on the local steelworks, her husband's employer.

Another silly lead-in: surely the presence of the Prime Minister proved Whyalla's ongoing existence? Why do we have to fight our way past Koziol's silly lead-ins to get at the story? A person spoke to the Prime Minister about his policies and their impact on the local community. You could write a good story about that, having sent a journalist all that way.

"The produce is being ruined and nothing will help Australia if there's another world war because we wouldn't be able to exist," she said.

"Now, why don't all the parliamentarians in the past and in the future think about that, because where are our grandchildren, their children and their children going to work? You can't just have office jobs and health jobs."

The steelworks, which employs about 10 per cent of the town's working population, has been slated for possible closure following financial difficulties. Owner Arrium, previously OneSteel, said the plant posted an operating loss of $43 million in the first half of this financial year due to cheaper Asian steel prices. A decision on its future is due in April.

See? You can so do proper journalism when you have no other choice.

Mr Turnbull was keen to avoid discussing the date of the upcoming budget, but Raylene's ambush proved harder to avoid.

Back to wanky sub-clauses, as though Canberra narrative was more important than actual economic policy. You have an announcement about $600m right here, what makes you think you can address an entire budget?

A non-journalist questioning a politician is not an "ambush", it is democracy in action. When they venture out in public, every Prime Minister gets asked questions by members of the public. It's part of the job. It's always been part of the job. It is not an ambush, and it's not extraordinary.

In response, the PM reiterated his earlier announcement that a major upgrade to 600 kilometres of South Australian rail infrastructure would be brought forward, enabling the steelworks to be more productive.

Not if April's announcement sees the steelworks closed down. We've scrapped the carbon tax, but the steelworks is still losing money: clearly the carbon tax wasn't the problem. Had this journalist dropped the wanky lead-ins they'd have more space to write about what was in front of them, and bring to bear all that knowledge and experience that makes professional journalism so very valuable.

Later, the 64-year-old Raylene told the cameras why she had decided to give the PM a piece of her mind.

Could this guy get any more condescending to "the 64-year-old Raylene"? Did he pat her on the head? She may as well have talked to the cameras - no point talking to the journalists.

"I was walking my dog at the Ada Ryan gardens, didn't know he was going to be here," she said.

Clear failure on the part of Whyalla media. If you don't know the Prime Minister's coming to town, what do you know? How does your market trust you? Is that why Ms Mullins had to ask the Prime Minister about an operational matter, because the local branches of national media are obviously such crap? He actually mentioned the dog-walking thing again, as though it was something people he knows simply don't do.

But the PM defended his government's pursuit of free trade agreements, telling Raylene that future prosperity was dependent upon Australia's access to the large markets of Asia. "We share a passion for Australia ... we have a slightly different view of free trade," he told reporters.

If you're going to splash around $600m to boost one company over others, you sure do have a different view of free trade, and its place in economic and trade policy. Again, instead of proving himself to be a dickhead across state borders, the reporter could have thought about whether that money could not have been better spent elsewhere: $600m on rail in suburban Melbourne would have yielded greater improvements to the economy and broader appeal to voters.

At the risk of appearing cynical, how much tax did Arrium pay last year? How much, if any, did it donate to the Coalition parties? Do you think our hot-shot reporter gave the press release any scrutiny whatsoever?

Whyalla is in the federal electorate of Grey, one of the largest electorates of any parliament in the world, which voted Liberal with a 13.5% margin at the last election. Rowan Ramsey, the local MP, has been there 20 years and (at this stage) is seeking re-election. $600m to shore him up? What does Ms Mullins think of Ramsey - any idea?

As a close and avid reader of political journalism over many years, that piece was utterly worthless.

Fairfax should be culling dickheads like Paul Sheehan and this fool Koziol. Instead, they are getting rid of reporters in regional areas. You can't patronise locals like Raylene Mullins when they're your neighbours and regular readers, but you can if you just jetted in from Sydney/Canberra.

Rowan Ramsey might be safe in two-party terms, but if there's a third party waiting to send Grey the way of New England or Indi our man on the spot wouldn't be able to tell you: he simply can't get past the idea that people walk their dogs in the park.

Sweating the small stuff

Eventually, a section of the political class that has ascended to high office through back-room maneuverings and media stunts comes to the realisation that governing is more about day-to-day grind than maneuverings and stuntwork. This becomes the real test of the government. Some never recover from the shock: this is the point where ministers often come crashing down or quit 'unexpectedly' as some gobbet of Canberra gossip finally makes it into traditional media coverage.

Some rise to the challenge and end up with achievements they never expected earlier in their political careers: they end up having presided over some major reform quite by accident, never having expressed any interest in the issue (or even having scorned it). This is how Martin Ferguson of the ACTU ended up as some sort of expert on mining policy, and how Peter Howson parlayed a few undistinguished months as a paternalist Aboriginal Affairs minister into decades of inane commentary.

The exhaustion of political silly-buggers in the face of day-to-day reality surprised Lenore Taylor, who felt the need to explain the inevitable as though it were novel, even 'commendable':

When leadership speculation was rife in early March and the government was still struggling with the political death throes of savings measures from its previous budget, Abbott spelled out his immediate strategy to his party room with commendable candour. He was changing focus, he said, from policies the government was unable to get through the “feral Senate” to smaller things that didn’t need Senate approval, but would appear “meaningful” and “positive” to the person on the street.

Headlines about policies rejected by voters and defeated in the Senate were duly replaced by scores of announcements about taskforces on the ice epidemic, crackdowns on childhood immunisations, inactive bank accounts, country of origin labelling on food, codes of conduct for supermarkets and sod turnings for new roads.

It was a deliberate plan to ease the sense of crisis engulfing the government, soothe the party room panic and restore some semblance of normal, to use the short attention span of the 24-hour news cycle to the government’s advantage by filling it up with small, positive things while the large unsolved budgetary questions were considered in the background.

Take any government that lost office over the past decade or so: Rudd/Gillard, Bligh and Newman in Queensland, Napthine in Victoria, Giddings in Tasmania, Keneally in NSW. At different stages they stopped poring over polls and focus groups and turned to flurries of new announcements, the way distressed cuttlefish squirt ink: a new road here, something to get you photographed with little children there, a taskforce, something else to get you photographed wearing hi-vis, etc.

If experience counted for anything in political journalism, the press gallery would be awake to that; they are wrong to assume their readers/ viewers/ listeners are not. Large unsolved budgetary questions are very much in the foreground of the commentary I read - though, admittedly, I have to hunt for it rather than just get handed a press release.

Remember how all that activity by the Gillard government was framed:

• "In another desperate attempt to shore up her leadership, the Prime Minister announced ..."
• "The Opposition has criticised the government for its attempts to ..."

For some reason, coverage of the Abbott government is not framed in that way. It is no more popular than the Gillard government was three years ago. Even after the disconnect between what Abbott says and what Abbott does is clear to everyone but journalists, the press gallery still flock to his announcements as though that broken connection was strong enough to support the weight of government, journalism and public expectations combined.

The "24-hour news cycle" did that framing to lift individual issues above the business-as-usual context the (beleaguered) government sought to create. The "24-hour news cycle" and the (beleaguered) government accused one another of spin. Whoever was in opposition at the time just stood there and accrued a credibility they did not deserve, because the "24-hour news cycle" lacked the skills and the inclination to assess how they might govern. People rely on the "24-hour news cycle" to show them who will govern best: ongoing disappointment has diminished the "24-hour news cycle" as a credible source of information, or even as an excuse.

Colin Barnett benefitted from this on the upside in 2008. The WA Labor government couldn't take a trick (despite being led by a former journalist, who doggedly insisted on "getting on with the job") and Barnett was set to retire until a bizarre sequence of events saw him thrust into the Premiership. He presided over a mining boom, and thought he was intensifying and prolonging it by cutting out long-term investment proposals: no to the new train line, no to a new stadium (see this and that on the investment return on stadiums), no to additional school funding. He gave the Treasury to wasteful, destructive oaf Troy Buswell, and then to some numpty from the IPA.

When his luck ran out he couldn't believe it, like this had never happened to any WA Premier before.

He fell back on that mainstay of WA politics: blame Canberra. He thundered into COAG this week as though running out of fuel halfway between Nowhere in Particular and Nowhere Else was someone else's fault, and not something that should ever rebound on him. When he disputed the feel-good message of COAG's commitments on domestic violence and other issues by saying "I must have been at a different meeting", he wasn't seizing the initiative. He just looked like a doddery old man who didn't get it.

Barnett and Nahan have always been starve-the-beast small government men: their squabbling for public coin is unedifying to say the least. Abbott gave him that same smirk that he gave Napthine when he embraced him before the Victorian election - Howard knew that the fewer Liberal Premiers there are, the better it was for him. Abbott always had a keen nose for weakness.

In Australia, the state/territory level is mainly responsible for the delivery of social services on which the nation relies most heavily: health, education, transport, law-and-order. In Canberra, the press gallery regard COAG as a game show in which the PM succeeds only when the states/territories get as little as possible to deliver those services - then, after each COAG, they write disquisitions on how dysfunctional federal-state relations are.

No leader who so recently faced a leadership spill ever got such a free run as Tony Abbott is getting now. Lenore Taylor can describe that free run but not explain it, except by referring to the mass-psychosis of press gallery norms as though they were natural phenomena like the weather, or "24 hour news cycle"; affecting all humans but never itself subject to human agency.

Barnett is showing Abbott, and anyone else who can bear to watch, what happens when a government has run out of options and luck. Barnett had a good go, and a longer go, than Abbott. Barnett faces the prospect that his legacy consists only of cuts - cuts to Aboriginal communities, and no doubt cuts to non-Aboriginal communities coming up in Nahan's next budget, followed by cuts to the number of Liberals in the WA parliament at the next state election.

Nahan has his ideology to take comfort in cuts, and not to care about electoral consequences. He can commission a poll from the Lomborg Institute to show everything will be just fine, eventually. Barnett is part of that WA elite who regard themselves as builders first and foremost. He sees his future, and that of his state, stretched out before him like a patient etherised upon a table at Fiona Stanley Hospital - and, in short, he is afraid, and right to be afraid. He's an old man, he doesn't do "eventually".

Whether WA Labor are ready for government is an open question that probably can't be answered, or even adequately explored, by the state's terrible media.

Tony Abbott has cut his way to a similar predicament to Barnett. He is not the small-government ideologue that Nahan is but nor is he a builder. He, too, will run out of options as unemployment rises and tax revenues fall, and the getting-on-with-it thing will convince fewer and fewer people. The press gallery won't be able to predict that, either; and unlike Taylor they will barely be able to describe it. They will still assume - and insist, despite all evidence - that Abbott has some deeper reserves to call upon not available to other failing leaders.

Spoiled

It is seriously difficult to understand how the government has come to be as bad as it is. Yes, it is hugely tribal, its ministers are convinced they know better than anyone else, and it has a faith in “spin” that has dramatically underestimated the public’s ability to judge for themselves.

- Michelle Grattan, 15 August 2014

And you expected what, Michelle, after 43 years reporting politics at close quarters? After six years of listening to them bellyache about the previous incumbents, did you never wonder whether they might be any better? When you have no idea what's going on every tale must be strange.

Srsly.

Even taking all that into account, Hockey’s Wednesday blunder is hard to explain.

Why – leaving aside such provocative language – did he think he could get away with just talking about ...

It isn't hard to explain at all. Hockey, and those who now comprise the government, have been spoiled.

Ever since Tony Abbott became Liberal leader in December 2009, Joe Hockey has been able to say almost anything and be taken on face value. This is the politicians' dream: autocracies around the world spend billions on secret police, semi-official bands of thugs and vicious prisons to achieve the effect that Tony Abbott had secured effortlessly from opposition over the past half decade.

Hockey has become intellectually lazy as the glorious sunshine of an unquestioning media simply transcribed anything and everything he said, in deliberate contrast with the doubt cast over anything and everything Labor said and did. Swan could say that water was wet and Hockey would pooh-pooh it, and the press gallery presented the pooh-pooh as further evidence of superior competence at government.

Hockey thought he understood poor people, or had sufficient understanding to fob off questioning. It has worked for him time and time again. Before the past week or so he had not been seriously questioned on any knotty question of policy since he was a minister in the Howard government. Nobody told him he wasn't paying attention; he didn't become Treasurer by paying attention. He became Treasurer by glibly fobbing off whatever the then government said.

Abbott constructed the opposition as some sort of second house of review to the then government. This is what John Howard did when he was in opposition - whenever the Hawke government proposed something, he'd say "I'll have a look at it" as though he had the power to override them. He and his shadow treasurer Jim Carlton declared that government to be "the worst in history", "leading this country to disaster", etc. The difference was that the then press gallery thought about what politicians said, and if it was bullshit, they called them on it: people like Paul Lyneham and Laurie Oakes brushed Carlton and Howard off with "he would say that, wouldn't he". The press gallery today lacks that ability to think about what politicians say, but simply transmits what is said because direct quotes chew up wordcount and airtime.

The other important difference was that Wayne Swan was far more gentlemanly than Hawke's treasurer, Paul Keating, who eventually rendered Carlton as a kind of chew toy. This further discouraged herd animals in the press gallery from seeking his input into the big debates of the day. When Keating said to John Hewson that he would do him slowly, it was no idle boast - everyone in Parliament had seen it happen. Swan had been beavering away in Labor backrooms when Coalition governments just fell, federally in 1983 and in Queensland in 1989; Keating knew that internal battles are all very well, but nothing shuts them up like holding aloft the freshly plucked heart of a Liberal. Chris Bowen will never rise above Grocery Watch until he learns this lesson.

It goes against the press gallery narrative to say that Wayne Swan lacked a killer instinct, but Joe Hockey is proof and you know how much regard I have for press gallery narrative.

Joe Hockey has been carried into office on a sedan chair. I read the section of his biography over the period when I knew him (pp. 57-63), from student politics through the Young Liberals and into parliament. Madonna King writes about those steps as though they were foreordained, as a journalist would, rather than with the historian's knowledge that every step is fraught and contingent. His winning personality was put to use in smoothing over ruffled feathers from the backroom deals that brought him into politics; the Liberals have used him in a similar capacity ever since, to smooth over harsh decisions made by awkward backroom people.

Young Liberals would have set-piece debates about endemic global conflicts, but it took Joe to invite people from the ANC and what was then the Palestine Liberation Organisation to address us. That sort of initiative was what the backroom operators lacked. He sang dirty rugby songs with gusto, but could also talk engagingly about the social dislocation behind the rap of Schooly D (yes I'm serious). He liked the idea of ideas without necessarily engaging with them directly. His opponents in student politics feebly attempted to pin him down on specific commitments, and the Mack machine in North Sydney made the same mistake.

If he were in student politics today, he would probably back himself with his ability to win on campus and resist the increasingly discredited major party machines.

In the early 1990s the Liberal Party in North Sydney had been smacked around by Ted Mack's hyper-local machine, but it got its act together and Mack gave it away with minimal involvement from Joe. With the pro-Liberal momentum building across the country in 1995, even a piece of wood like Paul Fletcher could have won that seat.

Howard took a risk appointing him to the ministry in 1996 but it paid off. He was a capable Business minister, pulling together complex and binding corporations law, and bringing Sydney business doyen Ian Burgess down a peg when he sought government insulation from his own ineptitude. He was a safe pair of hands as a minister, and it was understandable that Howard would turn to him to sell WorkChoices. When he whimpers today that the business community isn't helping him sell his budget, this is the experience on which he draws - in recent years people like Tony Shepherd provided the Liberal Party with the ideas and policy-development apparatus the party could no longer provide internally.

The people who were most sceptical that Hockey would make a capable Treasurer were outside the press gallery pack, in business and among business/finance journalists. The press gallery assured everybody that he was a great guy, so good at batting away the convoluted compromises of the previous government's budgets and economic policies. When Hockey becomes unpopular after the budget measures, and gaffes like parking in a disabled spot or whatever, he is falling from a pedestal which the press gallery built and maintained for him.

Wayne Swan delivered six budgets with no surplus, and was regarded by the press gallery as a failure. Joe Hockey delivered one budget with five forecast, none in surplus, and until now was given the benefit of the doubt.

When he delivered the budget Abbott looked smug while Hockey looked nervous. As I said earlier, that budget came from the IPA and big-business cowboys like Tony Shepherd, not from anything intrinsic to Hockey. It's a sign of the meaninglessness of the 'moderate' tag, and of Hockey's ambition, that he embraced that malarkey, and overestimated his ability to get it through parliament and to the public. It was a grievous fault, as Shakespeare might say, and grievously is Hockey answering it.

Soon after the budget Hockey claimed that a young person could survive for six months without benefits because of "severance pay". That was when I knew he'd been cosseted for so long that he could not connect Canberra policy-making apparatuses to people, and vice versa, which is the basic task of the politician. He was always going to make a stupid mistake, one which revealed the sheer absence of thinking before, during, and after the budget, and into the foreseeable future. Peter Costello's comments about childcare in 2007 were reminiscent of Hockey on petrol costs today.

Does he really believe the rest of the world – including (John Howard’s) “battlers” with lived experience of petrol prices, as well as economists who love quintiles and the like – wouldn’t be onto him in a flash?

Yes, because the press gallery and the Coalition cocoon insulated him from that until now.

The central conceit of the Credlin machine is that they develop ideas and that Abbott, Hockey et al just have to go out there and sell them - and that selling is a one-way, transmission-only process. The fact that the press gallery took every word the Coalition said as gospel, and disparaged every word coming from Labor, was an extra layer of insulation that appears to have disappeared overnight - and to which Hockey has to adjust fast, while his adjustments are played out in public.

Some are blaming weakness in Hockey’s office for what happened – he’s a couple down on senior staff – or even saying it’s about time for a ministerial reshuffle.

'Some' might say that. 'None' are giving the press gallery their due for their volte-face on Hockey, it would seem.

As for ministerial reshuffling: well, there would have to be quite a few demotions if performance were the yardstick. A reshuffle after a year and when things are so messy would be a sign of panic, create bad blood and instability, and not necessarily improve the situation. The idea of moving Hockey would be inconceivable, however poorly he’s travelling.

There is no one transforming solution to the muddle across the government. It just has to be worked at, minister by minister, issue by issue, driven by better leadership from the top.

On what basis do you think that leadership will suddenly manifest itself? Is the leadership of this government not at its maximum capacity already? Now that Abbott has a taste for the foreign junket and the oafish blundering into other countries' internal issues, is he seriously going to ask Chris Pyne where the bloody hell is that report from Wilshire and Donnelly, or consult Maurice Newman about anything? Abbott is every bit as popular today as Julia Gillard was eighteen months ago, when everybody (but me) knew that she was finished. That lack of popularity limits his scope for 'leadership'; Grattan should know this better than anyone, if her experience counts for anything.

This weekend Abbott will be on the Pollie Pedal, a familiar and comforting excursion. He gives the impression of a leader for whom the core task of governing and delivering has become very hard.

This is why the Coalition has been so complacent about adverse consequences from its actions. Again, if Michelle Grattan's experience counts for anything, she should know - and convey - that a Prime Minister without a budget is very, very vulnerable. Besides, the Pollie Pedal warrants more scrutiny than it has received. The core task of governing and delivering was never within Tony Abbott's skillset, and Michelle Grattan and her press gallery colleagues were wrong to infer/ claim/ assert that it was.

This brings us to Hockey's apology, or lack thereof. In normal life you apologise for your actions, not for someone else's feelings or any other consequences. This, however, is a political apology; complaining that it isn't "genuine" is beside the point. Read it carefully; it is a classic Howard apology, where the apologiser is being rational and realistic while those apologised to are irrational and unrealistic. The idea of such an apology is not to mollify those who were (or who merely felt) wronged, but rather to kill the story. Having issued an apology (of sorts, however imperfect) you can now say to journalists who would pursue the matter that they should drop it and move on, and that they are being unreasonable should they refuse. The press gallery, being weak and shallow people, will comply - they always do.

One thing the press gallery has failed to notice is that any minister who stumbles will get no support from Abbott. Howard knew that his ministers reflected on him; even Peter Costello got some tepid support in getting the budget through. All ministers are now on notice that you get no help whatsoever from Tony, even if he's known you for thirty years. Abbott and Pyne hung Hockey out to dry. Hockey is perfectly entitled to regard both as pricks. Hockey's friends are right to regard him as a better man than either, or both put together. When Abbott's leadership becomes more vulnerable than it is, this will be remembered.

If this is how Abbott treats someone he knows as well as he knows Joe Hockey, then millions of people he doesn't know at all have no hope. We saw this with all those images of Margie-and-the-girls. He put his arms around them as though he was going to scrum with them. Any woman - even Michelle Grattan - who fancifully extrapolated those images to some general understanding of Australian women on Abbott's part must surely realise their error by now.

It does not mean the government's problems are over once the press gallery has been herded into the next paddock. Hockey is ostensibly visiting minor party Senators in the hope of getting the budget through. After last week, every one of them is in a position to laugh in Hockey's face and give him nothing. Thanks for nothing, Abbott and Pyne.

The trouble with this budget, and pretty much everything else that the government has done, is that it is a product of a government that has never had to understand the country it is governing. The press gallery exists to challenge politicians on this. The $7 GP fee, the Lasseter-like pursuit of a budget surplus, none of those measures relate to Australia today. Whenever Abbott visits the UK he disappears from view for days, and junketeering journalists following him don't follow up.

The Liberals have always had the business community and the IPA hovering in the background but they have had the wit to choose which policies they would take on and when was the best time to champion them. There is an inverse relationship between Liberal political success and IPA success at getting their policies up. Neither Hockey, nor any other member of this government - including often-mentioned backbenchers - has that discretion based on a deeper understanding of the country and the challenges facing it in coming years. Hockey has spoiled his visionary claims with his insistence on the 'budget emergency' and refusal to address revenue.

Hockey has no future in his current role. If he wants a future in politics, his only hope is to retire to the backbench and do a lot of reading, and make a few thoughtful speeches. Otherwise, he will stumble along until Abbott cuts him down and end his career in 2016, 20 years after it began so promisingly, angry and bewildered and misapportioning blame and credit. If he stays he will continue to be a punchline, the cigar-chomping blunderer who doesn't even think about people significantly different to him - let alone the effects his decisions might have on them.

The failure will be his, when it is a failure of the Liberal Party more broadly in not making better use of his considerable skills and talents, and in not effectively complementing (not covering) the sorts of shortcomings that do not prove fatal in far less capable people.

(See? It is possible to write about Hockey without mentioning his weight or his privileged North Shore upbringing.)

The future of financial advice

Maurice Newman is supposedly Chairman of the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Committee. When he aired his opinions on climate change, which ran the full gamut from the half-baked to the half-witted, people marvelled that such an ignorant man should be so trusted an advisor to the country's government.

Since then, you would have expected Newman to have been very busy. Keep in mind that the first term of any government is when its legacy will be most firmly set in place. Yet, Newman had no role in the stunted compromise over Sydney's second airport at Badgery's Creek. When business confidence crashed and the Business Council of Australia joined in trashing the budget, Newman was not having gentle chats with the chaps in Collins Street and Martin Place to persuade them of its merits. Future eructations from Newman should be cast in the dim light of this inaction.

Newman was a stockbroker. You cannot buy or sell shares and other financial products unless you go through a stockbroker: it's a legally-protected retailing job. Sometimes they offer financial advice, but mostly they don't need to - whether clients make money or lose it, the stockbroker does well either way. The private-sector nature of the job, and the fact that you can make out like a bandit without anything like hard work, attracts libertarians and leads them to overlook the essential regulatory underpinnings. Even the most dogmatic libertarian will die in a ditch for "brokerage fees" that add no productive value and cost Australians billions of dollars each year, and will blanch at the very idea of shares traded directly from seller to buyer like Bitcoins or organic vegetables.

Let us leave aside Newman's embarrassing foray into climate science (or even the business opportunities arising from it: no solar panel installer ever bought him lunch), and his ineffectual chairmanship of the ABC. If Newman was going to bring his business and political clout to bear on anything, surely it would be on the amendments and regulations over those who give financial advice to people and sell them financial products, or even the system that generates such products: sadly, no.

Decisions on how financial products are to be sold, and on whom the regulatory burden should fall, have been the subject of considerable debate. The most cogent debates seem to be found here rather than on Hansard, and if there's anywhere less enlightening than parliamentary debate on this issue it must be in the traditional media.

Traditional media outlets used to have a number of journalists who specialised in business matters, who seemed to subsist on sandwiches from corporate AGMs and who could get to the nub of complex issues quickly and engagingly. They tended to be the first ones out the door once traditional media began downsizing, and have not been replaced. Explaining the FoFA debates has been left to Australia's worst journalists, the press gallery, who can only ever explain developments as 'argy-bargy'.

Most traditional media outlets have more than one employee in the press gallery. Nobody in the press gallery follows any one issue for an extended period, as they all move as a herd being equally unenlightening on any issue. This is one of the better press gallery articles on the subject, but it is still presented as win/loss for the government and a series of unqualified quotes rather than what this might mean for consumers long after financial advice regulation is 'off the agenda'.

The traditional media has noted the 'argy-bargy' between Cormann and Palmer over the bill before the Senate. The traditional media has noted the report from David Murray on the regulation of the financial system, including his comments on financial advisor fees and other matters that might cast more light than heat over the FoFA debate. The traditional media has not, however, twigged to the idea that Murray's findings are not apparently shaping the way financial advice is to be regulated into the future. It shows no sign of considering that such a dislocation (along with doubts about the passage of the budget, and the fiscal strategy of the government as a whole) might indicate a lack of joined-up policy planning on the part of the government.

This isn't to advocate for (or against) Murray's findings, nor indeed for the legislation of the previous government which this one is seeking to overturn. It is to question why you'd have an inquiry into regulations that was so utterly disconnected from your regulatory agenda.

Tabloid television shows hire convicted thieves to break into houses and cars to run stories about domestic security. Organisations with large IT systems hire white-hat hackers to probe for electronic security vulnerabilities. Similarly, traditional media should hire some old scammers from Qintex, Westpoint or Storm Financial and present them with the amendments from Cormann and Palmer, and then say to them: looking at these proposed regulations, if you were out to rip off people with more money than sense today, which of these proposals makes it easier for you?

The person chairing the finance system inquiry should have been Don Nguyen, identifying his least favourite options, doing it as a community service obligation rather than for whatever Murray was paid.

Maurice Newman was of no practical assistance in the process of regulating the financial advice industry, one he knows intimately. He might have smoothed things over with Clive Palmer, businessman to businessman, but no. Clearly, being Chairman of the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Committee is a position of no practical political or policy effect, like being Miss Australia or Minister for Health.

The failure of the government in both a policy and a parliamentary sense, and the failure of the traditional media to explain what's going on at any level, leaves consumers exposed and ill-equipped to engage with the debate.

It is standard practice for a government in trouble to create a diversion, and without Newman to do it the task has fallen to Kevin Donnelly.

When the budget was in trouble, Donnelly floated introducing teaching Latin to schools. There is no budget for it, no real advocacy, just a bit of anecdotage that achieved the desired result of attracting press gallery attention away from the train-crash of fiscal policy. The move was designed to appeal to the conservative base, but it didn't work because the budget jangled the hip-pocket nerve too hard.

Before the last election, in what was probably the closest they came to actual policy development, the Coalition proposed an increase in educational exchange between countries in the Asia-Pacific. The idea of increased learning of Asian languages by Australian students is one of those ideas that enjoys great support but fails for lack of a champion. Kevin Rudd proposed it as a Queensland public servant a quarter-century ago, and was still wittering fruitlessly about it after losing the last election. Kevin Donnelly hasn't engaged with the idea at all, but he may yet do so in a future look-over-there moment.

Donnelly's latest maneuver is to talk about corporal punishment. It may appeal to the conservative base, but the threat posed to retirement savings may again displace the effectiveness of culture-war gambits such as these. Journalists should be awake to deliberate feints and distractions like this, but not so for the easily impressed Matthew 'Mark' Knott:

Kevin Donnelly, co-chair of the national curriculum review and a widely published commentator on educational issues ...

Donnelly is not widely but narrowly published, in the Murdoch press; and if you look at the placement of his columns on the page you can see his editors know he is not one of those contributors who attracts readers.

Dr Donnelly continued: "I grew up in Broadmeadows, a housing commission estate in Melbourne, and we had a Scottish phys-ed teacher.

"Whenever there were any discipline problems he would actually take the boy behind the shed and say, 'We can either talk about this or you can throw the first punch'.

"That teacher would probably lose his job now but it was very effective. He only had to do it once and the kids were pretty well behaved for the rest of the year."

Australians are one of the most obese people in the world, an indictment on the effectiveness of phys-ed teachers of whatever background. It is the mark of a mediocre teacher whose ambition and capability extends no further than sullen compliance.

What surprised me about going behind the school sheds was that they did not run into any smokers - Donnelly was hired by tobacco companies to present smoking to school students as a valid lifestyle choice, making a mockery of his other witterings against moral relativism.

The Minister for Education, Chris Pyne, believes he is helping his colleagues by having Donnelly run interference. No journalist will link Donnelly to Pyne in this fashion. No journalist will look at Pyne cutting school funding, and Donnelly cluttering the curriculum with irrelevances, and wonder whether any education minister has so failed his brief as Pyne failed his.

Pyne was responsible for the idea that Peter Costello might challenge for the Liberal leadership, a non-story that sustained the careers of many press gallery veterans. Pyne has been good to the press gallery, and they to him, but whether either is any good at their allotted roles is a question that no longer admits positive possibilities.

In all of his forays into investigative journalism (why meet Deep Throat in an underground carpark at midnight when you can get your scoopy EXCLUSIVEs by transcribing 2UE?), Knott never considered the possibility that he might be in hot pursuit of a non-story, that he might be nothing more than a willing dupe while real actual stories went begging elsewhere, or even that being a dupe is a bad thing. Neither did those who allocate his time and efforts. Note Donnelly's gutless equivocations in Knott's piece, note that Knott does not and cannot call him on them, note the fact that Donnelly's and Wilshire's report is due in a few weeks; and wonder whether it will be worth a pinch of crap, even as a distraction from some emerging crisis for this stumblebum government. A crisis that real journalists should be onto right now.

With the exception of Laura Tingle, none of the Fairfax contingent in the press gallery are worth their own weight in dog food. Their ability to tell you anything meaningful about how we are governed (including the regulation of financial advice services) is non-existent.

We have a government and a media that can't describe how our financial advice system is regulated, and can't suggest how it might be regulated better. We have a media that can't even describe either the status quo or the proposals (and I include social media here - like a 21st century Dionysius I search for the blog that can enlighten in clear strong prose what is actually going on).

Financial advice has a future - until the next catastrophic failure. Maybe then a journalist will then have the temerity to ask Cormann or Palmer about their role in such a failure, whereupon they will simply say "I reject that". The journalist will simply quote them and move on, wondering why people regard traditional media as even less relevant than politicians.

Budgetary assumptions

It never used to be that bad
But neither was it great
Somewhere in the middle then
Content and much too safe
Oh tell me please
Why it takes so long
To realise when there's something wrong

- Crowded House Now we're getting somewhere

The past fortnight or so has seen a fundamental failure of judgment on the part of the politico-media complex. The government, and the press gallery that facilitated it, assumed that the country would sullenly accept the budget-crisis assumption, with only protesting students and bellyaching pensioners offering token resistance before the inevitable capitulation. What happened since the Budget was delivered has taken the entire political class by surprise.

The government thought it had made the case that the budget was in terrible shape, having insisted in opposition that the whole economy was a disaster. The sheer force of the reaction to the budget meant that the case had yet to be made, and having to make the basic case while also selling the details built upon that assumption, any selling job would be doomed. Where the sellers don't even operate on the same assumptions as their market, the seller is doomed and so is the product (in this case, the budget).

Any government always has to trust its Treasurer and Prime Minister to handle not only the economics, but also the politics of the Budget. Tony Abbott has led the Liberal Party to the last two elections, each of which saw the Liberal vote increase dramatically. This government is made up largely of people who wouldn't even be in Canberra without Tony Abbott, and who bought into the whole Labor-bad-Liberal-good message as the ticket to the ride into office. They have no right to be surprised at how badly the selling job was done. Now that it seems clear that Tony and Joe aren't that great at either the politics or the economics, points made by disgruntled smart-alecs like me but safely ignored by the supposedly savvy until now.

Rather than rethink the pretences and flawed assumptions that made this government possible, traditional-media pinheads like this or that can only resort to leadership speculation, as though the incompetence of this government were a new and unexpected development that could not have been foreseen by long-serving and experienced observers. Had they done their homework on policy to the extent that they did on worthless polls, this government may not have made it into office until it had lifted its game.

In this environment, all Bill Shorten had to do was deliver a competent speech that fingered the government, and that's basically what he did. Here is a man playing a long game. Before the election there was a lot of talk about how Abbott was running a marathon rather than a sprint, but contrast his behaviour in opposition with that of Shorten now (or even his behaviour in government now) and know that assertion was always rubbish. Conventional wisdom in the press gallery, shared by pretty much everyone - but rubbish all the same.

Labor's winter of discontent under Rudd and Gillard has not become glorious summer under Shorten. He has not yet begun to address the party's structural difficulties. His party's membership has not taken much initiative, but nor has it rallied to a call that Shorten has barely begun to make. Only when the windows of Jamie Clements' office crash outwards and he hurtles to the pavement Imre NagyJan Masaryk-style - then will I start to be convinced the ALP is serious about internal reform.

Shorten has started to take a strong stance on Medicare but should also be starting to develop clear positions on fracking and the Barrier Reef, on education and yes on the revenue side of the budget - and to do so in a consultative way that contrasts with Abbott's preference for springing surprise announcements as his way of controlling the agenda.

Again, the conventional wisdom is that Shorten can't win the next election and that Abbott can't lose it. We've seen how inept the smarties have been with a mere budget, and at questioning an aspiring government in its fitness for office; they should simply not be heard on what may or may not happen at the 2016 election.

Because the ALP and the Liberals are as hollow as one another, filling their aching voids with spivs and their lolly, each looks set to shrink without disappearing entirely in the foreseeable future. Though there is much focus on Clive Palmer, he does not have what it take to become a third party on par with the other two, overtaking the Greens. He is not credible as the long-lost saviour of moderate liberalism and nor is he the convincing champion of the blue-collar conservative who was never comfortable among the stuck-up white-collar professionals who run the Liberals. He has gotten as far as he has through free advertising: puff-pieces on the ABC and condemnation by the Murdoch press serve the same end.

While Palmer will be a force; the real action in politics is with local independents like Cathy McGowan or Tony Windsor, and it will be necessary for a future government to deal with each one by one, issue by issue.

To those writing Shorten off, I ask you: does Shorten have the negotiation skill to outflank Abbott, like Julia Gillard did in 2010? If so, you can't dismiss Shorten's prospects of becoming Prime Minister, nor lazily assume Abbott will pull something out of his hat. Let's take the backgrounds of personalities of the individual leaders away and the principle still holds: in a hung parliament dominated by independents (imagine one-third each of Labor, Liberal, and independents), would you back Hockey/Turnbull/Morrison or would you back Plibersek/Albanese/Bowen? Labor are historically superior at negotiating minority government, and given the protracted and systemic failure of each major party, minority government will be the only government on offer.

This is the case in other democracies, and it was the case before liberals and conservatives fused to form the two-party system in 1909. This country will be governed by a post-election beauty parade among what now seem to be minor parties.

Journalists accustomed to major-party government, which includes "message discipline" and gotcha games at its absence, will not be able to cope even if their employers remain solvent and retain them in their current roles. Only journalists who can understand what is at stake with each deal will be valuable sources of political information; the stenographers and gotcha-vultures of today's press gallery will hang around and embarrass themselves, or even fade away rather than adapt. They hated Labor and Labor hated them back; they found the Coalition hated them every bit as much, knowing the day would come when their shortcomings came to light and powerless to manage the framing of that.

Liberals were always wrong to believe Abbott could do anything but win the election. As a party of government they had a duty to build an agenda for government, but they shirked it and outsourced it to the BCA and IPA. For a political party to shirk that responsibility is to lose everything, and to realise the sheer vacuity of the money in its 'war chest', or of the number of seats in their majority (for what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, etc.).

Labor was wrong to cower before a budget surplus and 'economic responsibility', and to avoid fighting its own corner. This was a party that slunk into defeat, resurrecting a leader it did not believe in and not fully convinced of "the greatest moral issue of our time" (the environment? Education? NDIS?), while not completely unconvincing on any of those issues.

As to the emerging political forces that are neither Liberal nor Labor, they arise from a susurration that cannot be heard in noisy debates and sometimes you have to go listen to hear them. This is hard and can be hit-and-miss; but it is more profitable than watching those who glossed over Abbott's policy laziness realise now that it is the only game in town.

Given that all media organisations are facing tight budget, they must sooner or later start to look at the considerable bloat encrusting the press gallery and wonder what those people actually do. Anyone could do what the press gallery were doing last year (and the year before, and the year before that): quote what Labor says (boo!) then quote what the Coalition said (yay, and give them the final word).

The assumptions that the press gallery worked under, the idea of what it is to be politically savvy and to report on what's going on - all those have been invalidated, and shown to be invalidated, over the past fortnight. There is no hope that the press gallery will grow a collective brain and start, y;know, engaging in journalism. The press gallery have observed this government closely over many years, and they have no idea what's going on and can't describe the sheer depth of their failure.

The pantomime that the Abbott government has suddenly lost its gloss is getting boring: it never had any, but it played the press gallery like so many trout. The idea that governments come and go but the press gallery stick around is another dead idea that's not helping traditional media in the vital task of getting over themselves. When the time comes to toss this government, the press gallery will have to go too. There is no way around it, no way of turning such journalistic dross into journalistic gold.

A government in trouble might just be tempted to bring these privileges to an end, and in doing so show up the one big lie holding that institution in place: that democracy might continue regardless, that the press gallery is not necessary and definitely not sufficient as a check upon despotism.

We are living in an information age. Traditional media are information providers, and they should be up there with our biggest and fastest-growing companies. As befits a tragedy it is both sad and silly that they can't get over themselves enough both to ensure their corporate futures and to act as bulwarks of democracy.

The Commission of Magical Thinking

Auditors, it is cruelly said, are people who lack the wit and verve to become accountants. They tend to be so focused on what's there that they tend to resist speculation, or be incapable of it. I wondered why there was so much hoo-ha over the Commission of Audit and why it took so long to report, and for once sympathised with the intrepid sleuths of the press gallery in not pushing for its report to be released.

I was surprised when the document appeared to be a veritable festival of speculation - this government's answer to Rudd's 2020 Summit. Perhaps I shouldn't have been: for a start, the Commission contained no taupe-souled auditors, another Abbott Government disconnect between what it says on the box versus what's in it.

Secondly, for a document that would foist so many additional responsibilities upon the states, it contains nobody who had actually run a state government (and who would they pick anyway? Nick Greiner was unwell, Jeff Kennett would have tipped people off to cuts cuts cuts, Ted Baillieu or John Olsen or Rob Borbidge would've just sat there, Richard Court has disappeared comprehensively from public life - John Fahey would have been ideal, and even Gary Humphries could have used the extra work. Oh well).

Press gallery reporting on federal-state relations is stuck in the Keating frame about Premiers and a bucket of money, but in reality the disconnect between those responsible for raising money and those responsible for spending it is one of the key dysfunctions in our political system. The Commission was right to raise the issue but their suggestions are inadequate and so is this government. I live in NSW, the state with the best educational, police, and health services; I'm all right Jack, but I pity those of my compatriots who are far from being my neighbours. Queensland and WA are the fastest-growing states and neither has a AAA rating; if the government of either or both started borrowing to fund infrastructure, Hockey for all his rhetoric would have conniptions. The Commission talked about offering states a parallel income tax, a 1930s idea last heard of under the Fraser government.

Privatising Australia Post is a joke. This government doesn't have the vision to turn it into the logistics behemoth that Deutsche Post has made of DHL, so it busies itself with petty defensive bullshit like this. This government would sell it to a friendly outfit who'd invest no money in it, run it into the ground, and then hire some ex-staffer to lobby for more tax breaks and handouts because they can't make a go of it. This is not a proposal from people who understand government and business, but the opposite.

So too, the proposal to benchmark ABC and SBS against the broken TV networks: fancy having lived in Australia as long as that lot have and confusing national broadcasters with commercials.

The proposal to have university students pay for a greater proportion of their degree isn't well thought out and seems designed to align with the Kemp-Norton review of higher education rather than any sort of honest examination in its own right.

When I left school in the 1980s the smart, diligent kids studied medicine and law. There was serious money to be made for graduates with those qualifications. With the introduction of HECS at the time, paying back education costs as a return on investment seemed fair. Now, graduates in both those fields are in oversupply, and no other field of study has taken their place (with the possible exception of public sporting academies designed to generate high-earning athletes, and even there a small proportion of graduates are covered).

This deflation of education cost-to-earnings has animated debate in the US but Kemp and Norton have largely missed it with magical thinking about the market, and the Commission was wrong to even comment in an area it clearly hadn't examined (concern about duplication, perhaps? Why not just leave it alone?). Countries that invest in education reap economic growth and prosperity; countries that leave those choices to individuals do not enjoy similar benefits. It's a real pity that the commission missed that.

The same applies to the 2% of GDP pledge for Defence, an oft-repeated statistic that has all the hallmarks of being plucked out of the air - especially when couple with calls for a White Paper, which presumably would test this very proposition, and followed by the questionable overinvestment in the F-35. Auditors would have picked up on the idea that investments in diplomacy and soft power would be better investments than this or that hardware.

Means-testing family homes for pensions is very much not a winner. There is a shortage of housing stock, let alone for older people who'd be looking to buy suitable premises once they had been forced to sell their existing homes. Talk about social disruption and ... no, this government simply won't do it. Same with competition for pharmacies, I mean what sort of country do you think we're running here.

The reason why you know this government is not committed to the NDIS/DisabilityCare is because they think it's a charity rather than a economically rational rights-based system, which is why there's all this rhetoric about "trials" and pushing out timelines and "genuine concern", etc. This will go before PPL does.

PPL is bollocks policy, but it is a talisman for whether or not you can trust Tony Abbott. If he junks PPL he will not be believed about anything, if he waters it down he will get no credit for it, and if it goes ahead it will be an albatross around his neck. Remember in 2007 how conventional wisdom held that Howard would be re-elected by people grateful for tax cuts?

There was a genuine conversation to be had about the age at which the pension kicks in. Rudd sprang the age increase to 67 as a surprise, reinforcing his reputation as a credibility-free stuntman. Abbott and Hockey have essentially done the same thing. They could have kicked this issue into the second term, consulting with older people and made the case for gradual increases to pensionable age (and enforced this on the parliamentary pension schemes), as though they planned on a long-term, substantial reform program. If Hockey were the better man and politician than Abbott, he would have taken that initiative, as Keating did with Hawke (who knew a thing or two about consultation). Instead, they've put the wind up people, the opposite of all that no-surprises stuff they promised.

If you're going to deregulate wages so that they go down, and cut benefits to low-income earners, it makes sense that such people would go to areas where housing and other living costs were lower. Yet, you show me a low-cost area of Australia and I'll show you an area of high unemployment. By mandating that low-income people be restricted from high-unemployment areas, Shepherd and his gang simply haven't thought things through and there is scant hope for Abbott in this respect.

These guys who govern us are not the guys to talk about 'sacrifice': not at the Budget, not on Anzac Day, not ever. Someone who claims every 'entitlement' is not the person to end entitlements. Any sharing of sacrifice will not follow through into a sharing of spoils when we come to the sunlit uplands. To share with someone, you'd want to spend time with them; and nobody wants to linger when Abbott's around.

The other place where their imagination genuinely came a-gutser was on the revenue side. It occurred to none of these giants that there was any alternative to taxing either business or incomes, and given that limitation jacking up income taxes was the only option. With miners and financiers making super profits off government guarantees, you'd think they would have been good for a bit of relief on spending cuts and direct taxation - but no, sadly.

This is a government that has outsourced its thinking about what sort of country we would want Australia to be, and how best to realise that - which is the best part of politics. It would have embarrassed itself by appointing the IPA to this Commission, but did the next best thing by lining up a range of exhausted volcanoes. The last government did something similar, but it took a grim pride in Getting Things Done which this government talks about, but doesn't really share. Whitlam and Gillard passed a flurry of legislation, while for Abbott even scrapping regulation was as half-hearted as the passing of it.

This government saw the books before the election - it only "inherited a mess" by realising how the policy vacuum they created for themselves is holding them back. They were careful to frame the Commission's terms of reference in such a way that reflected it back onto the government, and they succeeded: The Commission is a stale joke, and so is this government. Abbott and Hockey seriously believe they will get credit for not going as far as the Commission want them to, while the IPA and BCA will bag them as wimps over the smallest omission. Nobody will believe their protestations that they would never do some unpopular thing spelled out by the Commission; Abbott is nowhere so awkward as in the middle ground.

They will be flat out getting any of their big-ticket items through and it will be fascinating to see which ministers can make the best of the limited scope and time ahead of them. That double-dissolution isn't much of a threat these days, and neither is Tony Abbott.

Missions and omissions of 'Political Animal'

I started out writing a review of Quarterly Essay 47 Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott by David Marr. I think it is the best thing I've read about Abbott, and recommend very strongly that you read it if you haven't already.

The straight-up review is taking ages but the following pretty much wrote itself. It is a rookie mistake for book reviewers to review the book they wish was written and judge the actual book by an inherently unfair standard. Very well: let me separate the review from what I wish Marr had examined (allowing, of course, for the fact that he only had 25,000 words to work with).

The Education of Young Tony

Abbott's education at Riverview is significantly under-examined, and maybe only a full biography can do it justice. Readers from outside Sydney may appreciate the brief summary but Marr's brief description reads like that of a Sydney social-climber: the real estate and the prestige being all you need to know about the place.

St Ignatius' College Riverview (to give its full title) was founded in 1880. The systemic Catholic schools and nascent public system at the time was designed for the self-employed and those who would spend their working lives as employees to undertake valuable, but subordinate work. The elite schools of the time were exclusively Anglican, Methodist or Presbyterian; Riverview was established in order to provide Catholic men with the education that would enable them to participate in the elite of society in New South Wales. Not long after its foundation, Riverview was producing judges, surgeons, members of parliament, captains of industry and other worthies occupying leading roles in Sydney and throughout the nation. No doubt it is possible to trace Christian, and specifically Catholic values, exercised by those men in office as a result of their Riverview education. This aspect of the character of Riverview differentiates Abbott from the education Julia Gillard would have received at Unley High.

Marr makes much of Abbott's ability to write. He also refers to Abbott quoting Shakespeare and other evidence of great reading, and of course there's the adage that you can't write well without having read well. His mother may have read him Ladybird books about the great and good, but did she read him Taming of the Shrew? Somewhere at Riverview a teacher stoked and channelled a high-level of ability and interest in reading and writing: who was that? How many other Ignatians were inspired by that/those teacher(s) with a love of good writing and the ability to practice it?

What is it about the Jesuit education that's special/different? Why did Abbott emerge from Riverview as an, err, energetic Catholic enforcer while others (e.g. Nick Enright, Robert Hughes, Abbott's classmate Ignatius Jones) did not? Three Labor Cabinet ministers were taught by Christian Brothers at St Patrick's College Strathfield: what makes Abbott different to/from them?

Why did others, trained in the same "old-fashioned 1950s Catholicism" abandon it while Abbott stuck by it?

Women

When Abbott was a member of the SRC and Barbara Ramjan was its President, it is possible that she was the first woman apart from his mother in a position to exercise power over him. Wall-punching aside, this aspect of the Ramjan-Abbott relationship is important: Abbott may be among the last of generations of men to have moved up in Australian society without having to deal with women in positions of power.

My guess is that before and during the 1970s, Riverview did not employ female teachers. The Universities of Sydney and Oxford would have employed few female lecturers and tutors, particularly in law and economics. The Catholic Church certainly didn't. The Bulletin and The Australian wouldn't have employed too many women at senior levels. Each of his political mentors/employers John Howard, John Hewson and David Flint were men. Only when he got into the Liberal Party when aged in his thirties would Abbott have encounted women in significant numbers, and at significant levels of power, where he had to deal with them in order to get what he wanted.

So Abbott had a girlfriend who, by the end of his first year at uni, he had abandoned while pregnant. Marr recounts his easy charm and his male friendships at university, and hints at 'women in the background' but fails to examine relationships with his female peers, other than Ramjan. Some of them must have fell for him, however hard, and others who gave him a wide berth. If, say, Greg Sheridan had been Gail Sheridan, would she have been able to form any kind of platonic friendship with the young Tony Abbott? Abbott's relationship with women outside his family, and other than the one he married, are significant.

Prurient detail is unnecessary. These relationships go to the issue of women's attitudes toward him, and to the wider question of whether someone who flouts social norms so flagrantly can truly be considered a conservative.

The University of Sydney

Again, it's significant that Abbott went to the University of Sydney, rather than UNSW or Macquarie (the latter of which is closer to Killara than the city's other universities). Why did he not light out for somewhere like ANU, like his contemporary Kevin Rudd? Why didn't he go straight to the seminary at 18? A Sydney graduate himself, Marr assumes that simply everybody goes to Sydney.

Also: given that Abbott was drinking, rucking, fucking and politicking quite a lot at uni, how on earth did he pass his studies? You don't get a Rhodes Scholarship by barely scraping through. Did any of the subject-matter actually captivate him? Given his love of good writing, and the fact that more female students study those courses, why did he not study Arts?

Sydney's Economics faculty at that time included several prominent marxists, like Ted Wheelwright and Frank Stilwell: how did Abbott bear it? Is the quality of his economics education responsible for the dismissive attitude of Costello and other commentators toward his grasp of economics?

Aside from Joe Hockey, and Marr's erstwhile Fairfax colleagues Peter FitzSimons and Malcolm Knox, many of Abbott's fellow students and rugger-buggers now occupy senior positions in law, finance, medicine and business (Knox writes novels about such people). It's one thing for them to have said "shut up, Abbo" at uni, but how do they feel now that the Prime Ministership is within his reach? Do they cheer him still or does the swot from Unley High not look so bad in comparison? The Liberal Party and the business community are no longer so synonymous nor as in lockstep as they were, even as recently as the 1970s.

Voting in campus elections is voluntary. It is possible to do very well in student politics with very few votes. It relies on apathy to speak and act unchallenged on behalf of students, and this aspect translates into the ennui of wider politics through student politicians carrying their assumptions through to the bigger games. It is a symptom of the failure of campus politics to extrapolate to national politics that Abbott's Sydney University contemporaries have not acted sooner to thwart his ambitions.

One of Abbott's associates at uni was one Steven Lewis. News Ltd employs a political correspondent called Steve Lewis, recently notorious for targeting allegations of homosexual activity as Abbott was at university. Are they the same person?

A junkyard dog in the Liberal Party

In the year following Sir John Kerr's dismissal of the Whitlam government, more Australians joined political parties than at any time before or since. Tony Abbott was not one of them, disdaining the very party he would one day lead. Marr should have made more of that than he did.

I was a member of the Liberal Party at around the same time as Abbott. I was a committed Young Liberal by the late 1980s when he was still flirting with joining the ALP, and I remember when he went to ACM. In the interim he was a "junkyard dog" for the right in internal party machinations.

The most notable of these was the 1989 Senate preselection, for the election the following year. The favourite to win top position on the ballot was a sitting Senator and a Shadow Minister, Chris Puplick. Also running was the immediate past State President of the party, Bronwyn Bishop. Only the top position was guaranteed of election; the second position on the Coalition ticket went to the National Party and the third was vulnerable to the vagaries of preferences.

Conservatives supported Bishop and the moderates Puplick; the moderates were being routed in Victoria and were under pressure across the nation. Abbott was a preselector and tore into Puplick with such ferocity that he became flustered, particularly on Puplick's support for gay issues such as HIV funding. The genteel NSW Liberals had never seen anything like it but they rewarded Bishop with the winnable spot, mainly because the moderates did not respond in kind to Abbott's provocations.

Abbott did the dirty work for Bishop and Howard. The right had no love for the relatively moderate Greiner-Fahey state government and people like Abbott made life difficult for it within its own ranks. It is telling that Howard had the clout to get his man into Warringah in 1994 while Hewson didn't, and couldn't play the internal party game; it's one of the reasons why Hewson never made it to the Lodge and Howard did. Abbott went into his first preselction with a sizeable chunk of votes in his pocket not despite, but because of, all that dirty work. It is genuinely amazing that Marr omitted this.

It is a real weakness of political history - particularly when written by journalists - that one minute someone joins a party and the next the party bestows their most prized offices and emoluments, lending a sense of inevitability to a process subject to duckshoving and luck. Marr was a journalist during this time, he had to be aware of it and it would not be hard to find Liberals who worked more closely with and against Abbott to talk about his role in the party.

After he became an MP Abbott would have watched at close quarters as Howard went through the Liberal Party like a dose of salts in 1995-96. This was the price the party paid for his leadership and the prospect of power. As leader, Abbott hasn't transformed the Liberal Party in his own image to anything like the extent that Howard did. Abbott was a happy spear-carrier for the right but he never led it. People like David Clarke call the shots; never has Abbott disagreed with them and carry the day. This is hugely significant as to Abbott's hold on his party's leadership.

Humanae Vitae

That factional warfare gave rise to this. People thought that was out of character too, because they weren't paying attention. My patience with Abbott's verbal binge-and-purge approach ended there, and so did my ability to regard his supporters as mugs and/or shits. Marr didn't mention this episode at all, and it (along with Foyle's article) complicates Marr's thesis about Abbott being a ratbag at uni who later matured.

Abbott refrained from making similar comments when Labor MPs Nick Sherry and Greg Wilton attempted suicide, but this should be a basic measure of humanity rather than a special concession on his part (Abbott is not entitled to be judged by his own standards). His condolences to the Prime Minister on the death of her father are niggardly to say the least.

When I first found out many years ago that Abbott's father was a dentist, this was the first thing that came to mind. Never mind that nice house at Killara, David, or the various organs of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church; Abbott has simply been badly raised.

Joe de Bruyn and anti-materialism

Latter-day conservatives in the Liberal Party consider that moderates have no place in that party. Any moderate objection to the conservative agenda was met with a chorus of "Why don't you go and join the Labor Party?". Abbott used to do this most enthusiastically to me and other moderates. This simple binary approach belies Liberal conservatives' close relationship with Labor's conservatives.

Marr identifies Joe de Bruyn as having encountered Abbott at school but ignores him thereafter. This is a mistake, particularly for someone who professes to examine the interface between religion and politics in this country.

During the Howard ascendancy of 1995-96, de Bruyn built back-channel relationships with Liberal conservatives; especially Howard, Abbott and Kevin Andrews. Unlike other interest groups the union movement cannot openly work well with both major parties, so any relationships it has with the Coalition must be covert. After he left the portfolio Peter Reith and others have argued that there was much to be done in workplace relations reform, and one major reason why Abbott and Andrews did so little was because de Bruyn made it clear to them that any such initiatives were unacceptable to him.

On other issues, de Bruyn is active in Liberal circles and acts to support Abbott, especially on those issues where the Vatican line is engaged. He intervened with conservatives for Abbott in the debate over RU486 against Labor's then Shadow Health Minister Julia Gillard (those who are amazed that Prime Minister Gillard, a lefty lawyer from Melbourne, won't support gay marriage would be less amazed if they understood de Bruyn better). It is a cop-out for Marr and his entire profession to simply label de Bruyn "shadowy" and/or ignore him altogether.

In this interview (at 13:28 - 14:03) Marr claims the role of conservatives is to keep the price of labour low, and that the DLP don't do this.

De Bruyn works with two of Australia's biggest companies and most significant employers, Coles and Woolworths, to keep labour costs down, down and to limit industrial disputes. The combination of labour cost reduction with Catholic principles is significant in disdaining the materialism on which trade unionism is built. Marr observes Abbott's personal lack of materialism, but fails to mention how this flows through to his regularly expressed scorn for people who band together and carry on for the sake of a few extra bucks. He never supports campaigns for higher wages other than those for MPs. If you're going into Abbott's record and projecting it forward onto what an "Abbott Government" might look like, anti-materialism as an impulse to keeping wages low is a misunderstanding of how what used to be known as Groupers operate today.

You can over-egg the Abbott-de Bruyn relationship, and to be fair de Bruyn operates in a way where he leaves very few traces that journalists can detect. His impact is so significant that Marr tells half a story when he labours the DLP-Santamaria aspect of Abbott but then ignores de Bruyn, who is a latter-day Santamaria in many respects.

Craig Thomson

Craig Thomson was Federal Secretary of the Health Services Union from 2002 to 2007. Tony Abbott was Federal Minister for Health from 2003 to 2007.

Given that Abbott was the sort of minister who'd work with a wide range of stakeholders to get things done, according to Marr, he and Thomson would have worked together at various points over some years - including during the period when HSU member funds were allegedly being misused.

As a political animal, Abbott must have been aware that Thomson was targeting what was then a marginal Liberal seat. He must have been able to pick up indications, however subtle, across the political divide that Thomson had baggage.

For most of this term of Parliament the Coalition have targeted Thomson. It is unlikely that any Coalition MP or camp-follower knows Thomson better than Abbott. Abbott led the attack on Thomson and even, in a simulacrum of magnanimity, suggested that Thomson resign for the sake of his family (which, if Thomson had resigned, may well have made Abbott Prime Minister by now). It is hard to imagine what more the Coalition could have done to ramp up the pressure on Thomson, yet he remains an obstacle to Abbott's ambitions.

This isn't some facile point that Craig and Tony used to work together and now they don't: that's politics, baby. The question here goes to Abbott's judgment. He decided that Thomson was Labor's weak link, he decided that the Coalition's road to government was over Thomson's political body, and this tactic hasn't been as successful as Abbott and others might have hoped.

"the most successful Opposition leader of the last forty years"

Marr said that Abbott is "the most successful Opposition leader of the last forty years". This is one of those mantras of the Canberra press gallery whose adoption is almost a price of admission to that institution, and facilitates the groupthink by which it operates.

Marr doesn't define what success means in that position. Given the high standards and competitiveness of the major parties, you would have to say that a successful Opposition Leader is one who becomes Prime Minister. Here are some Federal Opposition Leaders with a better track record than the incumbent:

• Malcolm Fraser became Opposition Leader in February 1975 and was Prime Minister within ten months. He led the Coalition to the two biggest electoral majorities ever.
• The winner of the third-biggest election victory in our history, John Howard, took 14 months to go from being elected his party's leader to the Lodge (yes, yes, he had another four years or so in the 1980s).
• Kevin Rudd became Opposition Leader in December 2006 and was Prime Minister a year later.
• Bob Hawke achieved the same feat within a month.
• Billy Snedden became a laughing stock for refusing to concede that the Coalition had lost the 1974 election. Even so, he led his party to set the parliamentary conditions that saw a popular and reforming government turfed out. He was a "political animal" at uni and was rude to the incumbent Prime Minister in the House.
• Kim Beazley led Labor to 51% of the two-party-preferred vote in 1998: yet we all agree that Labor lost that election while Abbott's result in 2010 is a "near victory", whatever that means.

Being at best the seventh-best Opposition Leader doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Going back further than forty years, Abbott has a lot in common with his co-religionist Arthur Calwell: a record as a minister that belied a hardline set of beliefs, an authentic representative of an aspect of his party that is no less attractive to the public for that, and a leader who got lucky in his first election from which it was all downhill. Mosman Town Hall is in Abbott's electorate.

In word and deed

You can only accept the claims by Greg Sheridan and Gerard Henderson that criticism by Marr and others of Abbott is "anti-Catholic" if you assume that Abott's every word and deed is done to advance the word of the Lord and the Church. Good luck with that.

The organisation that Abbott leads is looking to increase its numbers in Parliament, while Sheridan's employer is looking to cut staff. Mateship aside, Sheridan's shrieking about Abbott must constitute something of an audition for redundancy. If I were responsible for putting names to job-reduction targets at News Ltd, Sheridan would be top of mind.

Redemption and forgiveness

There was a time when such appalling behaviour would see a chap blackballed from clubs and other institutions of the elite. Clearly this hasn't happened to Abbott, and in this regard too perhaps he should be grateful for living in an age free of the social rigidities he would seek to (re-)impose.

Abbott may insist on a fresh start, but this does not mean he has to be given one. Expecting forgiveness to follow from confession without the drudgery of introspection and atonement may be as Catholic as all get out, and certainly the media seem prepared to cut him plenty of slack. There is, however, real doubt that everyone accepts Abbott's insistence as much as the Catholic church or the Canberra press gallery do. In this disconnect will Abbott's fate be sealed.

In a recent episode of ABC Radio National's Sunday Extra, one of Australia's most professional trolls made the following observations (at 14:33):

... reciprocity, that is ... [almost two minutes of drivel as he marshals his thoughts, then] I turn up to work on time, I do a good job, I expect you [the government and other 'élites', strangely not including him] to do the same.

He used that to imply that Australians were basically conservative and that they would therefore reject the incumbent government. Here's why (in line with his patchy record of success) this guy lacks the ability to make the link and make it stick.

Tony Abbott has gotten away with it all his life. The vandalism and violence as a youngster, the leer and swagger, all show a man who cares not a whit for the opinion of anyone else and is supremely convinced that everything he does is right and good (or if not, that he'll get away with that too). Gillard at least takes people seriously, and the education and NDIS initiatives provide proof of that.

Abbott has done all the learning he is going to do, and if people don't accept the scraps of contrition he tosses out from time to time then to hell with them. Such an unstable man cannot deliver the stability in government that conservatives crave, and that conservatives need to convince voters of if they are to form government. That's why he relies so heavily on Howard Veneer; and he'll thank lefties like David Marr not to probe it too hard and rake over old ground, thanks very much.

Limited abilities

The Joe Hockey I knew twenty years ago would have looked for ways to make the NDIS work, rather than undermining it in the sneaky and gutless way that he did in his address to the NPC.

Hockey's first references to the NDIS makes it clear he regards it as a problem, not a solution:

The four year Budget died just seven days after its delivery as the Minister for Finance flagged new tax increases for the NDIS ...

Julia Gillard has ... allocat[ed] only minimal funding to expensive new programs like the NDIS ...

Of course the NDIS is one item in the Budget, and any criticism of the Budget from a macroeconomic or wider political perspective must include anything on which the Budget does or doesn't spend money. Even so, he might have chosen something else. More than two-thirds of the budget is spent on existing health, welfare and education measures; could he not have used another example of growing expenditure? Anything?

Matthew Franklin shows that modern journalism is all about getting the quotes right but the story wrong:

Mr Hockey yesterday accused Labor of executing "a cruel hoax" on disabled people and their families by announcing an accelerated launch for the scheme without having secured funding ...

And despite the Opposition Leader's enthusiasm for the scheme, Mr Hockey said: "I will not make a commitment to something I can't fund."

He said he supported the NDIS, but "you've got to live within your means and the government is engaged in a cruel hoax in saying that it's getting on with the job of the NDIS and then underfunding it".

"A number of state treasurers have said to me that they haven't got the money the government is claiming they may have for the NDIS."

Since when does a national initiative have to wait for state treasurers to agree? Would Howard or Costello have wrung their hands and delayed anything on the basis of what Kim Wells or Christian Porter might or might not do? Hockey is looking for excuses not to make the NDIS happen.

When he said "I will not make a commitment to something I can't fund", the worst interpretation is that he won't commit to anything initiated by the incumbents. He'd only commit to an NDIS if he or Abbott could cut the ribbons and have their names on the plaques. This is right out of the US Republican playbook and even if it is effective in creating the impression that people will have to vote Coalition to get anything done, it's still absurdly dishonest and unworthy of any politician with even the faintest commitment to public service that comes with their role. Given that people need better disability services now, it's incumbent upon Hockey and other politicians to make this happen, even if it means swallowing his pride and letting Gillard get short-term credit for this measure.

The best interpretation is that he's timid. You can't wait until all the ducks are lined up before you can make reform happen. You can't put it on the never-never, as Abbott initially tried to do with his initial reaction about doing it all in good time, when government could afford it and all the money hadn't been frittered away on anything else.

Playing politics with the NDIS would be understandable if it had come out of the depths of Labor branches, like Medibank/Medicare did. It came out of a recommendation from the Productivity Commission, for goodness sake. The whole idea of the NDIS is that it reduces disability costs going forward while improving outcomes for disabled people and their carers. It makes a nonsense of high-concept declarations from Hockey like this:

Well, enough is enough. The Coalition is going to keep them to their promises.

If that had a scrap of truth behind it, the Coalition would support the NDIS, and acknowledge that the government has reduced the initial outlay by more than a third and is being tentative, evidence-based and risk-averse in its initial steps down this road - as a responsible opposition would have them be in such uncertain times.

Matthew Franklin was being dopey and/or dishonest in adding $8b of future cost projections onto the $7b that government spends today on disability services:

[The NDIS] is expected to cost $8bn a year, on top of the $7bn now spent on disability services.

See what he's done there? Made the NDIS look like a fat slab of icing "on top of" an already rich cake. There's plenty of information available to journos on the NDIS, both at the general level and in detail on how carers, disabled people and government will get better outcomes for less money. Never mind all that, though - here we are all hostage to Matthew Franklin's inadequacy in reading and arithmetic.

The good news for Matthew is that he is capable of getting the story. The bad news is that he buries it and stumbles on as though nothing has happened:

Disability Reform Minister Jenny Macklin said Mr Hockey's comments showed the Liberal Party was divided on disability.

"We don't want to wait while they battle it out," she said. "We think people with disability have waited long enough. We've put $1bn on the table to get on with this work. Our funding is a sign of good faith to all the states and territories that we are serious."

Enough of Franklin: it's Hockey who is the real worry here.

The Coalition are starting to realise that they have trashed Abbott with his perception of negativity. What they think is the smack of firm leadership looks like bloody-mindedness. He just looks disingenuous with a stunt like this:

Mr Abbott, who completed a 1000-kilometre fund-raising bike-ride for Carers Australia last week, spoke about his admiration for carers and the many gaps in the support provided by the Disability Services Commission, in what he termed a "litigation lottery".

He pledged bipartisan support for the NDIS and said he would defy accusations that he always took a negative approach.

"I am sometimes accused of being Dr No ... When it comes to the NDIS, I am Dr Yes," he said.

That was three weeks ago, easily available from a Google search.

First of all, I'd be interested to see how much money Abbott actually raised for Carers Australia, how much they have actually received to date, and what they plan to do with it (compensating for some measure that Abbott plans to kybosh? Any Craig Thomson types running that outfit?).

It would appear that the Coalition are trying to switch Abbott's negative perception, and loading onto Joe Hockey the "Dr No" persona in the name of economic responsibility. The trouble with that is, by undermining the budget with talk about "cooked books", they cast doubt on whether they or anyone can set the budget to right.

A focus on numbers also undermines the idea of what a government budget is for. It's hard to imagine a better use for taxpayer's money than the provision of not only ad-hoc help but long-term security for the disabled and their carers, especially when government can save money by doing so.

Relying on the US Republicans for strategy overlooks the fact that the US government is in decline in terms of what it can deliver to a growing nation; this is not true for this country, our growth prospects and grounds for optimism, and our very different attitude toward government.

By sending mixed messages over the NDIS, and using it as just another political football rather than a real policy that people really need, they send the message that nothing is more important than a commitment to "economic responsibility", always shimmering out of reach, in a land where the budget is always balanced and politicians shake the hands of disabled people whose lives they will make harder rather than easier.

Greens Senator Rachel Siewert said people would be holding their breath on budget night next week to see what the government announced about the NDIS.

"An NDIS is essential. It's not a question of whether we can afford it, it's that we can't afford not to do it," she said.

I've been waiting for a member of the government - Gillard, Macklin, anyone really - to put the NDIS in such a pithy way. And people wonder why the government relies on the Greens.

The business case for the NDIS has been made, and it is strong. Because Hockey will not support it he can no longer bellyache about the NBN, the submarine program, or whatever other big-ticket item of government expenditure apparently lacks analysis. Not only is this an invidious position to be in, it's stupid that Hockey has allowed himself to be boxed into it.

So we have a situation where Hockey submits to being diminished by carrying a leader whose image is more negative and less flexible than that of the Prime Minister. He puts himself in a position where the Coalition depends utterly upon his economic credibility, and that such credibility as he has might make up for the opprobrium that comes from taking on Abbott's persona of no, no, no. On one hand, it's something I can't fund and won't support. On the other it's hard not to have sympathy for Hockey's position - until you realise what it means for other people with fewer options than he has, in which case there is no other hand.