A royal commission into the mandatory detention of asylum-seekers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friends on the other side

Tony Smith became Speaker with the backing of Scott Morrison, according to Abbott cipher Chris Uhlmann. Smith's main opponent in the party room was Russell Broadbent, the last of the small group of backbenchers who spoke out against the Howard government's mandatory detention policies - policies since reinstituted by Scott Morrison as immigration minister, and endorsed by the ALP. Had Broadbent been elected as Speaker it would have been a massive fuck-you to Morrison, and to the Labor leadership that embraced the policy. It would have encouraged people who don't toe the line, people with ideas and the courage of their convictions - people who have all but been stamped out of public life by party machines and a compliant press gallery, relegated to the fringes and called "ferals".

The press gallery were happy to raise Broadbent's donations issues, but not smart enough to tease out the full story like this local-paper journalist, nor even wonder why they were set up to look like tools.

The Liberals most disaffected with Abbott are not the moderates. The idea that moderate centrists stab the Liberal Party in the back is a common right-wing trope, pushed heavily by people like Bronwyn Bishop, but there is no proof of it. The Liberals most disaffected with Abbott are the right-wingers who are watching the reality, the possibility, and the very precepts of their low-tax, high-religion, authoritarian program slip away. Support is slipping away from this government without any of the compensating respect that Howard used to attract, and which Abbott promised people like this gullible, whiny reactionary that he too could command respect when they didn't like him.

The Liberals most disaffected with Abbott are conservatives, who have for years looked up to and been organised and sustained by, Bronwyn Bishop. She kept the faith, both for conservatism and for Abbott, and he and they indulged her expensive foibles. When backbenchers started complaining that she was embarrassing them, she expected Abbott to support her. He was embarrassing them too, and he tended to stick by her. Over the last month or so, he equivocated.

The polls for this government are every bit as dire as they were for the last government, and every bit as stuck, for those who worry about such things. Tony Abbott was never good enough to become Prime Minister in the first place, and never had what it took to turn a difficult position around. All of the savvy journalists, the in-house urgers and party grandees who believed otherwise, have been cruelly exposed. They complain to one another that it's a recent, unexpected development, but it isn't really. It never was. Those people were, and still are, killing themselves.

Scott Morrison has not relied on Bronwyn Bishop to get where he is. She knows he's an opportunist but had been prepared to tolerate him. By standing up to Bishop when Abbott wouldn't, Morrison has displayed leadership credentials that Abbott has clearly lacked. Morrison has knocked off an Abbott loyalist and knocked down someone who made his life difficult in courting the right. Morrison isn't the right's least-worst alternative any more, some sort of speed hump to Turnbull. The prospect that Abbott might stumble is no longer a distant, theoretical prospect, it's the inescapable reality. Morrison is the right's standard-bearer now. He, not Abbott, is the man.

Bishop is furious, but so what? Her fury doesn't count any more. She isn't biding her time, she's out of time. When she refused to applaud Smith she showed that, despite what conservatives claim, she cannot acknowledge anything beyond herself. The contrast with the magnanimous departure of Gillard is striking. Bishop expected to go out on her own terms, not with a thud; the firebrand reduced to just another frail old woman in the departure lounge.

When Abbott and Pyne talked of Bishop in the past tense, they were also talking about themselves in the same way. Abbott will be gone after the Canning byelection. Pyne has passed none of his much-touted reforms and will be gone at the next election. Adelaide will take on the same political complexion as Newcastle or Canberra, while Nick Xenophon will become the moderate liberal champion that Pyne had promised but failed to be.

We're in a political interregnum where the dead lie unburied and where those who now call the shots are under no obligation to stick their heads up. This is a massive change in the power dynamic of the government, and Australian politics generally; to call it "modest" is to have no understanding of politics at all.

Abbott had promised all opposition frontbenchers that they would become ministers after the 2013 election. Tony Smith was one of the few opposition frontbenchers who didn't make it. Peter Costello has said plenty about Abbott being an economic ignoramus, and Abbott has taken this out on Costello's acolytes like Smith and Kelly O'Dwyer. Smith has a similar - eerily similar - physical appearance to Costello, and even copied the former Treasurer's physical and verbal mannerisms. In practical political terms, Victoria is no longer the jewel in the Liberal crown and so the Coalition is not obliged to over-represent that state on its front bench; Robb has the experience, Billson and Ronaldson have put in the hard yards, Fifield got work experience with Costello without drinking too much of his "Prime Ministerial" Kool-Aid, and Hunt has been neutered. With Smith there was nothing to neuter; he and O'Dwyer were out in the cold, with Frydenberg and Tudge on initial probation.

Abbott paid tribute to Smith copping his disappointment in silence without admitting his role in that disappointment. Abbott can claim no credit in helping Smith up after having knocked him down. He was gracious at overlooking Smith's utter absence of policy conviction, as I noted here and there at the time: Smith was responsible for the Coalition going to the 2010 election with no communications policy, and was deputy chair of the committee that came up with no policies for the one after that. He had practiced his non-policy skills on people who keep asking about policy but wouldn't know it if it bit them: the press gallery.

Smith might have been promoted if Robb and Ronaldson pull out before the next election, but in politics you take your chances when they arise. Now he's ascended to a role that's kind of high profile, like a minister but without all that policy stuff. By giving Smith a prize that Abbott had denied him, Morrison creates the sense that the Liberals are moving on from Abbott, freeing themselves from his errors of judgment.

The press gallery wanted to believe Smith's rhetoric about even-handedness and decorum, forgetting that all former Speakers - Bishop, Anna Burke, Slipper, and Jenkins - all said the same thing at this point in their tenures. Slipper and Burke were even-handed in a tightly balanced parliament, but that even-handedness made a boorish, policy-free opposition look more in control of the agenda than a wonkish, rattled government. An even-handed Speaker will expose a government that is not across what little policy brief it has. It's one thing for Abbott to be a dead man walking, but he has enough pride to prefer anything other than the perception that he is a dead man walking - or sitting, waiting for Shorten to rope-a-dope him again and again.

Labor will exploit Smith's desire for even-handedness, making him look like a mug and protesting too much when Smith calls them on it. Smith can be stiff and awkward in the face of raucousness and this will work against him, and the government. The government will also use Smith's basic, non-focus-grouped decency against him, not hesitating to make him and his office look foolish rather than bear any more of the responsibility which they never deserved, nor could even bear with any dignity. The anonymous Liberal sources who help the press gallery pad out their thin offerings will call for Bishop to return. The living will envy the dead in the end times.

If Smith's "friends on the other side" get the opportunity to bounce off him and score a direct hit on Abbott, they will take it. Abbott has ridden Labor for six years (!) and he is wounded now. Smith might not be happy about it but he'll understand: that's politics, baby.

Smith will have moments of decency that will shine all the more brightly for being contrasted against this government. This should not be surprising to supposedly experienced political journalists. At the next election he might lose his seat of Casey, a sprawling outer-urban electorate that resembles a slab of western Sydney, where the profile and folderol of his new office will count for exactly nothing. Then again, he might win, and pootle on in the same middling way he's spent the last decade.

Speaking of crap forecasts, I owe an apology to Independent Australia for setting them up with this - fancy predicting a woman! What was I thinking?

No flies on Scott Morrison

The one sure way to tell that a politician is on the rise is when nothing they do blows back on them. They say clumsy things, they do clumsy things, as we all do - but for those on the ascent, someone else takes the blame. It’s a sweet position to be in, and Scott Morrison is in that position now.

For years, the part of Mr Do-no-wrong was occupied by Tony Abbott. In the Howard government, ministers and backbenchers were castigated for speaking out of turn –Abbott could say what he liked, and did. At the 2007 election, when the Coalition needed all the help it could get, Abbott’s silly pronouncements embarrassed Liberal candidates across the land. When Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull led the Liberal Party they had to put up with Abbott’s often unhelpful interventions; sending him to the backbench either never occurred to them, or did and proved too scary.

Now, the part is played by Scott Morrison.

Morrison had been something of a media tart in opposition, talking big about what he was gunna do. In office as Minister for Immigration, he stopped talking. He refused to comment on “operational matters” of his job that were, actually, central to the very point of his job and notions of democratic accountability.

The Labor opposition missed a big opportunity when they failed to bell him as a secretive creep, giving rise to suspicion that they’d behave the same way if given another crack at government. His behaviour casts doubt on his unverified pledge that he stopped asylum-seekers coming to Australia by boat.

Promising ministerial careers have ended after lesser debacles than the riot on Manus Island last year. Reza Barati, an asylum-seeker inmate, was killed. A Senate committee found the riot “eminently foreseeable” but Morrison, as minister responsible for the detention centre and Barati’s guardian, escaped censure. He escaped censure from Abbott too, of course, but also from the press gallery; it was as though the government could not have been held responsible for conditions in an institution within its purview.

Tony Abbott had whittled down his lavish paid parental leave scheme over time, but he had taken it to two elections and consistently used it as his most tangible shield against charges of misogyny and sexism. Had it been a genuine personal commitment Abbott would have introduced it as soon as possible after being elected. When he finally dumped the policy, Abbott said he was putting more money into childcare.

In 2009 the Productivity Commission recommended that childcare should get the money promised by politicians for PPL. Yet, the credit for averting a policy whose cost far outweighed its benefits went not to the Commission but to Morrison, who stepped up to claim credit for increased childcare resources, promising to work bipartisanly with a startled opposition. The press gallery loves bipartisanship and reported the very promise of better resources for childcare as further proof of Morrison’s effectiveness. Abbott had clung to PPL for too long and Morrison weaned him off it; now we see who’s really running this joint.

When the budget was finally released on Tuesday, the narrative was still alive that the attractive but inappropriate PPL had given way to a simpler, better and fairer childcare system. Hockey and Abbott had the limelight on them. They knew that Shorten would have his go in two days, but nobody counted on Morrison.

It was Morrison who described the situation where women in permanent employment can claim both the basic government paid-parental-leave scheme, and any such scheme their employer might offer, as a “rort”. It's an evocative word, a provocative word, and yet Morrison has largely escaped responsibility for using it.

Abbott used much milder language to describe his shift in policy, but he has worn the full brunt of betrayal and disappointment from those who had been convinced that a man who offered women little might come through for them where they needed it. Mia Freedman does her woman-scorned thing, covering the issues:

• The strong, confident women surrounding Abbott are there to support him, and he in turn supports them. Freedman, like many women, assumed that he could and would extrapolate beyond them to the women of Australia; she was wrong. The only women who will get a break from Tony Abbott are those who had formed a close personal and supportive relationship with him well before September 2013.
• The strong, confident women surrounding Abbott aren't what they were. His daughters are spoiled. His wife takes less interest in her husband's career than anyone in her position since Bettina Gorton. His chief of staff has gone to ground.
• All those points Freedman lists about Abbott acting against women's interests should have shown the inevitable fate of PPL. A government that won't even fund women's refuges but might spend $10.1b on PPL? Dream on.
• People wanted to believe in PPL, and in Abbott, against all the evidence. When Julia Gillard nailed him on misogyny, PPL enabled him to draw attention to her childlessness and her cuts to welfare payments to poorer mothers.

Freedman is disingenuous on why she allowed herself to be played, what she hoped to get from being played in this way, and what she actually got from it. But this isn't about Freedman; it's about the idea that even after he failed to implement the PPL, even after he dropped it altogether, he still got the benefit of the doubt on childcare.

Recently, however, Morrison is steadily accruing more and more credit.

Morrison was praised for his handling of childcare until days ago. Morrison was a member of the Expenditure Review Committee that signed off the budget. Morrison did a lot of the spruiking in the lead-up to the budget, more than Hockey as many commentators noted. Yet strangely, as the PPL/childcare furore rages, the Minister for Social Services is unscathed. He hasn't gone to ground, keeping his profile up throughout; the vigorous questioning of the press gallery hasn't troubled him.

Joe Hockey had hoped a cautious budget might save his political skin. He did himself no favours when Laurie Oakes drew him out on "double dipping", but Morrison could have smoothed the waters had it suited him.

Matthias Cormann and Josh Frydenberg were both accused of "double dipping". The speedy discovery of this by press gallery journalists who are better at catching drops than conducting investigative journalism is suspicious. It was fascinating to watch both men try to deflect the accusation by denying double dipping was even a thing.

Cormann controls a number of party-room votes among WA Liberals and Frydenberg is a player in the Victorian Libs. Both men stood by Abbott in February, both will be key when the leadership is raised again. Watch Morrison praise both men, and their wives (which Abbott hasn't), offering a quid that might yield a quo from these men the next time Abbott goes wobbly.

Malcolm Turnbull earlier refused to back the language his frontbench colleagues Joe Hockey and Scott Morrison have used to criticise the existing paid parental leave arrangements.

So?

Andrew Probyn quotes from Morrison but puts the blame on Abbott and Hockey. Abbott is the head of government, so ultimate responsibility is his - but he is soft on Morrison:

This is policy development by the lowest common denominator - that if the worker in the bakery doesn't get it, nor should anyone else.

This is a lowest-common-denominator government and Scott Morrison is a lowest-common-denominator guy. This should be clear by now, even to press gallery journalists. Some of us were awake to this before September 2013, but never mind that now.

Morrison's charge is that Labor and the unions struck a secret deal to entrench the so-called "double dipping".

Liberal minister takes a swipe at Labor and the unions to rally a base cowed by the public storm over this issue. Almost as obvious as the deal over "double dipping", when you think about it.

Not only is it awful judgment and bad politics at a time the Prime Minister and his Treasurer can least afford it, it may also prove to be a policy of false economy ... This, from the side of politics that spent five years railing against the inadequacy of the existing PPL scheme, proposing instead to give women up to $75,000 (later trimmed to $50,000) for six months leave under Tony Abbott's "fair dinkum" paid parental leave scheme.

My kids are about the same age as Probyn's, but I'm not a press gallery journalist so I was never taken in by Abbott's carry-on. I mean: Abbott. "fair dinkum". Pfft.

Here is the killer:

Tuesday's Budget confirmed the Abbott scheme would have cost $10.1 billion over four years. Its ditching in February amounted to the biggest saving in Hockey's Budget.

The fiscal credit for that saving will be enjoyed by the relevant minister (Morrison) long after the Treasurer who brought that budget down (Hockey) has been forgotten.

Earlier this year, Abbott demonstrated a capacity to lance political boils.

If he truly has changed, he'll be lancing this one early. It's rotten policy and stinking rhetoric.

I must have missed that - did this happen when he was fighting off threats to his leadership? Proof positive of the failure of press gallery journalism is the idea that Tony Abbott has changed. Abbott hasn't changed. The disingenuousness and ineptitude of this government is a given.

Now Hockey, Abbott, and the government, depends utterly upon Morrison as the responsible minister to find a detailed solution to the whole PPL/childcare issue, and negotiate it through the Senate. He is both arsonist and fire brigade, hoping - knowing - that only the latter role will be remembered by a press gallery thirsty for a new hero. There are no flies on Scott Morrison. You can't even see where they've been. His run to the Prime Ministership will not be questioned.

Have a go ya mugs

Coverage of the budget is always dreadful. The entire Australian media relies far too heavily upon the lines the Treasurer's office wants to push, it congeals around a consensus that is almost always wrong, and throws away what little journalism skill it has for the sake of ... for the sake of filling up airtime/adspace that nobody wants to buy.

1. The consensus on this budget

We get it, Joe:

• No bold moves fiscally or policy-wise.
• A bit of help for AussieFamilies™ in 2017 or something.
• Please don't hate us.
• We're doing the best that we can. Really. We're firing on all cylinders.
• You should see the other guys.

You don't need more than 200 press gallery journalists to tell the exact same story with the exact same quotes. Three or four, tops, would do that 'job' more than adequately. Bussing numpties down from Sydney is just redundant, unless it freed up the increasingly sparse office for real journalists to get some work done.

2. Insiders outside

... Standing on the outside lookin' in
Room full of money and the born to win
No amount of work's gonna get me through the door ...

- Cold Chisel Standing on the outside

I watched the ABC's budget coverage, and how strange it was.

There is no point to being an "insider" if you are shunted outside on a cold Canberra night. The ABC have perfectly good studios embedded within Parliament House from which they could have done their talky-head bits, and in which technicians have already done the wiring-up and other preparation. If you reject the idea that the outsider thing was Uhlmann at his most absurd, the only other explanation is the sheer spite toward the national broadcaster by the Speaker.

Leigh Sales gave Chris Bowen too much rope and he was boring. She gave Hockey too much stick and made him look good. Her desk stuck in a corner was basically a pimped-up table from Aussie's.

She made less of a fool of herself, though, than Uhlmann. His reference to the voters and taxpayers of Australia as "the mob" was unfortunate, and revealing, which made it all the more unfortunate. His insistence that politicians must be taken at their word was stupid, and probably revelatory of his whole journalistic approach; even more unfortunate.

3. A year's worth of stories

Why even bother recounting the announceables when you never, ever follow up those stories: just because it was announced on budget night doesn't mean it will happen at all, or in the way the government intended. The budget should contain 90% of the following year's stories for a journalist covering politics and government, insulation against the very possibility of a "slow news day".

All of the points made well here should have been tracked by the press gallery before the budget. That would have been more important - for their own self-worth if nothing else - rather than dropseeking.

Journalists who sit around the budget lock-up interviewing one another should not be allowed out - or they should be cast into the cold darkness where they can hone their inanities with Sabra Lane and Annabel Crabb. They are a bit like motorsport drivers huffing petrol fumes: they might think they are taking in the very essence of their profession, but they're wrong about that too.

4. Ferals in the Senate

The idea that it is appropriate for the press gallery to refer to Senators outside Laborandthecoalition as 'ferals' is clear proof of journalistic failure. Why even bother going on about an $X increase here and a $Y cut there when they are mere offerings to the unknowable Senate, like Quinctilius Varus' legions heading off to the Teutoburg forest.

Start covering the Senate. Press gallery journalists have nothing better to do. It is functioning as the Constitution intended, as a House of Review, and the fact that a control-freak government can't negotiate with those it doesn't control should be a bigger issue than press gallery journalists seem to realise.

5. Re:hash

Joe Hockey's speech to the National Press Club was a waste of time. He stuck to his script. The journos were all hung over and less pertinent than usual. They should all have been strafed.

6. The undead

The idea that the government's nasty policies have been excised from the budget was stupid and wrong. When there is a busy news day - one that doesn't involve the press gallery at all, like a real disaster far from Canberra or a royal something - the government will disinter one of its many nasty proposals. That's how this government works. The easily diverted press gallery will miss this until some kind soul from an interest group points it out to them, and explains why it's bad.

This is what happened with Kevin Andrews' Poor Laws; it fell to ACOSS to point them out and explain why they were bad, while only Kevin Andrews could defend them. The fact that a man whose entire career has involved defending the indefensible - and failing - is now Minister for Defence should be more of a concern than it appears to be.

Being a product of this government, this budget is of course full of half-baked ideas and contradictions which journos have overlooked in their rush for a consensus (see 1. above). They will not keep poring through it, nor follow its fate through the Senate; instead, they will wait until the story is pointed out to them in social media, then run it as EXCLUSIVE. Media execs call this a 'business model'.

7. Savings

When the government cuts money to a thing, it does not announce the cuts as a cuts: it calls them "savings". Journalists who refer to these cuts as "savings" do not understand what they are reporting on (policies that affect people's lives) and have come to identify with the incumbent government to a greater extent than is healthy or wise.

Before the election Tony Abbott said "I don't want to be known as Mr Cut, Cut, Cut", and the press gallery immediately complied. They stopped referring to the very idea that he might cut into services that people need - and can't get other than through the kind of group-buying scheme that Australian government has been since its inception.

8. Our Taxes and Aid to Foreign Kiddies

In between budgets, traditional media run well-researched thinky pieces on how foreign aid is a useful tool of foreign policy, projects our influence abroad (especially when we need stuff from international bodies, like UN Security Council seats or big sporting events) and is generally good to do, reinforcing and magnifying the generosity of this country's private donors.

When the budget rolls around they forget all that: see "Savings" above.

Yesterday the press gallery quoted Julie Bishop as telling the Coalition party room that foreign aid would not be cut. Yet, the budget papers show aid to subsaharan Africa cut by 70%, aid to Indonesia cut by 40%, with no corresponding rises elsewhere to make Bishop's assurances true in any way. Nobody in the press gallery appeared to question this discrepancy, or even notice one existed.

9. Our Taxes and Aid to Australian Kiddies

Unmarried, childless people sometimes grumble that their taxes subsidise other people's children, and resent any increase in resources devoted to their fellow citizens. Their concern is misplaced.

The government has lavished additional funding and legislative powers to security agencies. Apparently those who breach our national security these days are not wily agents of foreign powers but unmarried, childless loners. The Bali Nine were UCLs until they developed a sense of community. So were the Bali bombers of 2002 and '05. You show me someone who's joining Da'esh or an outlaw motorcycle gang and I'll show you someone who doesn't qualify as a "busy mum", or otherwise as AussieFamilies™.

People in sporadic employment need childcare as much as those in more regular employment. Say what you will about the previous government, it would have at least taken seriously a policy response to these people. The people least likely to be securely employed, most likely to be unemployed or sporadically employed, are Indigenous. Their children are not catered for in Smirky Morrison's calculations. They should have been, and if you overlook those in need then you can't really begrudge them.

10. Our Taxes and Aid to Foreign Kiddies Imprisoned by Australia Outside Australia

I still think this is something that should have been discussed at budget time. Remember how Scott Morrison closed down the debate by stonewalling the press gallery? What makes you think he's not going to do that kid of crap in his current or future roles? Wake up press gallery, and stop sucking up to him. He doesn't respect you any more than I do.

11. Hole-heartedly

Joe Hockey has the look of a guy who is giving his current predicament his all, in return for a promise of political survival that Abbott is unable to honour. He reminds me of one of those doomed dancers in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, it hardly matters how much he smiles and poses for selfies.

As Samantha Maiden points out, Hockey gets no credit for this budget but all the blame. To punch through the passive voice for a moment, this happens because people like Samantha Maiden don't and can't give him any credit: it goes against the narrative. Any journalist who notes the "optics" of a situation without being able to push through and question them is no journalist at all.

The press gallery is the hole in the heart of Australian democracy.

12. The opposite of leadership

Re Hockey above (and there are other examples), no greater love hath Tony Abbott than this: that he would lay down his friends for the sake of his life.

The government has no plan to stimulate the economy: they hope Australia's small businesses will light a path they cannot see, let alone build. The government has no generosity toward less fortunate people overseas: they take credit for our private donations, and by being niggardly show themselves as not our true representatives. They cut health funding, but insist we be impressed by a $20b mirage that funds nothing. What's good about this budget can't be trusted; what's bad about this budget (including what's hidden from us) will bite us, hard.

In all its coverage of the budget, the press gallery misses that and gives mendacious bunglers the benefit of a doubt that has almost disappeared.

13. How to tell when a Liberal government has run out of ideas

They spend big but tax less-than-big. If the people take the bribes it confirms the conservative notion of the people as ever more grasping and greedy. If they don't it leaves the incoming government in an economic hole, and the Coalition opposition can attack them for being in a bad situation.

When conservatives do this it shows they're out of ideas, like a cricket team that sends fielders to the boundary to limit a high-scoring batsman they can't get out. This is what Fraser did after 1978, what Howard did after 2000, and what Napthine did as soon as he became Victorian Premier.

When Coalition governments do this they place themselves utterly in the hands of Labor. If Labor haven't got their act together (as in 1980, 2001 and 2004), they are re-elected and hailed as geniuses. If Labor have their act together (as in March 1983, 2007, Victoria and Queensland 2014-15), conservatives not only lose but are bewildered.

Kim Beazley showed that caution is the risky strategy when boldness is required (so did Peter Costello, but anyway). Shorten is certainly very cautious.

14. Early election?

Journalists only run the early election story because they can only report on elections - or think they can. The years that drag on between elections full of complex governing which they can barely describe, let alone analyse. This story has become so discredited it is a joke, particularly when coupled with lavish use of anonymous sources.

15. When the history of this government is written

... this budget will have been its high point.

Scott Morrison should be sacked

... but he won't be, and that's why the Abbott government is pretty much done for.

It is not OK to conduct military incursions into other countries' territories. It has never been OK. Morrison promised never to comment on operational matters, but he had to comment on these 'repeated incursions' before the full details came from Indonesia, or from some source other than his own mouth.

All the PR smarties tell you that if you have bad news, get it out early and get it out yourself. Some news, however, goes beyond mere 'bad news' or even a misunderstanding. Military incursions into other countries' territories is in this category.

The other category error that Morrison made was to blame the Navy, as though it blundered into Indonesian waters:

It was brought to my attention at just after 4.00pm Wednesday that Border Protection Command assets had, in the conduct of maritime operations associated with Operation Sovereign Borders, inadvertently entered Indonesian territorial waters on several occasions, in breach of Australian Government policy.

I should stress that this occurred unintentionally and without knowledge or sanction by the Australian Government.

It strains credibility that the Navy veered off course and did not realise its vessels were in Indonesian waters. The Navy sent its vessels where government told them to go, and did what government told them to do. It is not OK to blame the military for government policy blunders, and ultimately such a tactic will work against the government rather than the military.

From now on people in the military are more likely to leak against this government. People in the military are more likely to have credibility that politicians lack. Any difference of opinion between a politician and the military will be resolved in favour of the military (with the possible exception of bullying allegations). When you consider that military personnel vote Coalition more than any other occupational grouping, this is a political own-goal as well as a governmental one.

Australia needs a long-term relationship with Indonesia more than it needs this or that lot of politicians in government. That relationship will change as Indonesia grows in economic and political power. A big part of Australia's economic growth prospects lie in our increasing engagement with Indonesia. This government has no capacity for improving relations with Indonesia. Even after this government loses office, the silly-buggers of the past four months will be hard to live down.

Almost every Prime Minister in Australia's history has been confronted with the prospect of politicising the military. On almost every occasion, they have flinched and backed down from doing that; indeed, the Coalition went too far in not standing up for service personnel returning from Vietnam and giving them fewer benefits than returnees from World War II got from the cash-strapped Chifley and Menzies governments.

Veterans from Afghanistan will get fewer benefits still, and naval personnel injured at sea while intercepting boats will get less than that. This is worth remembering when watching Abbott and his ministers proclaim themselves strong supporters of the military, and when the press gallery simply pass on words and images to that effect without comment or qualification.

If Howard had been Prime Minister, he would now be in Jakarta apologising, particularly to Mrs Yudhuyono. His smarter advisors would be casting around for someone with the same credentials with Indonesia that Dr Marty Natalegawa (PhD, ANU) and Dewi Fortuna Anwar (MA, Monash) have with this country. He would realise that a strong relationship with Indonesia is important and that anyone who had to go to maintain that would go.

Peter Reith lied about the military to advance the political prospects of the then government, and his own career. He left politics abruptly, suggesting that Howard basically lost confidence in him. Today, in the emerging Fairfax tradition of commissioning jowl-wobbling outrage from grumpy old farts as clickbait, he can make catty remarks about the Liberal Party presidency but he has little to offer (either from his own mouth or as an example) about how an elected government can and should relate to the country's armed forces as part of governing. Always be suspicious when a media tart goes to ground.

Peter Reith was once regarded by inside-Canberra sages as a potential future leader (while Reith has gone, many of said sages are still there). Senator Ian Campbell was pretty highly regarded when Howard sacked him for, um, whatever he sacked him for. David Jull was highly regarded within the Australian tourism industry, as Morrison was. None of the inside-Canberra reasons why Morrison is Too Big To Sack stand up.

The Liberal Party is organised around strong leaders; Labor has institutional checks and balances, but the Liberals are all about the Fuehrerprinzip. The Nationals can get a look-in when they bring quality to the table, as they did in the '70s with Peter Nixon and Ian Sinclair, but mostly they are passengers in a Coalition government.

Abbott is a weak Prime Minister: weak on ideas, weak on execution, weak on resolving conflict, weak on insisting that his team deliver more and better. The fact that he talks slowly is almost beside the point because his words seem to carry no weight. Because the press gallery are mugs, they agreed that his strutting around and declarative statements would make him a strong leader, and they are puzzled that the evidence before them contradicts their convictions. By this point in her Prime Ministership, Julia Gillard was pretty much written off by the press gallery.

What, then, should Abbott do?

Abbott isn't going to get rid of himself, though perhaps he should. When he was in South Africa, the big decisions on Holden and Graincorp were taken in his absence. He can commentate on the cricket, but not apparently on incursions into Indonesian waters. When the big decisions have to be taken, he's not exactly stamping his authority and nor is he conferring to find workable solutions. He's a passenger in his own government, not the pilot or even the navigator.

Getting rid of Bishop would be too hard. She would become a lightning rod for everyone who has their doubts about Abbott. We could end up with an unmarried woman who was a former law-firm partner in the Lodge with her male partner, and my goodness we can't have that.

Getting rid of "three star" General Angus Campbell would be too soft. Campbell was always human window-dressing and nothing would be achieved in scapegoating him, except to antagonise the armed forces still further.

Abbott hasn't thought through the implications of appointing Peter Cosgrove as Governor-General for our relationship with Indonesia. After hyping Cosgrove so much Abbott can't afford not to appoint him, as appointing anyone else would look like a slap in the face to a man widely admired in this country.

Getting rid of Morrison would be just right. The longer Morrison stays in office, the clearer it is that Abbott is not really sorry for the incursions, and that the whole policy of patronising Indonesia like we do Vanuatu or New Zealand will continue. Within the Liberal Party, nobody trusts Morrison: the right hate him because they regard him as a smarmy, self-promoting turd, while their opponents on the lesser right know him to be a smarmy, self-promoting turd. Right now he's doing nothing to turn around dicey polling numbers, but if he backs down altogether and starts weeping for the wretched cast upon the waters he is gone.

Like Kevin Rudd on 'the greatest moral challenge of our time', Morrison is finished no matter what he does. He isn't big enough to reinvent himself and spring clear of this current imbroglio, which is why he can't really 'resign' in any meaningful sense. He's just treading water and getting away with it. If you're the head of this government and you don't want the whole government to be similarly stuck, then you have no choice but to cut him loose and reframe the debate.

Mind you, Tony Abbott isn't one for public debate. He's never seen any good thing arise from public debate. Since he was at university, Tony Abbott aligned himself with powerful people and articulated their interests. The Catholic church and the monarchy are not democratic institutions, and neither is the Liberal Party in any real sense. As long as he's in with the decision-makers, he's happy to let what he regards as idle chit-chat run and run - but when the impressions of this government are so fluid and when simple declarative statements are contradicted by observable facts, he runs the risk that his own statements will be regarded as just more idle chit-chat, rather than the desired effect of Shut Up And Listen This Is Your Prime Minister Speaking.

It would be surprising, but not beyond the realms of possibility, for the Commission of Audit to decide that onshore processing is more cost-effective than Nauru or Manus Island. In the same way that only Richard Nixon could go to "Red China" without being red-baited by Richard Nixon, Tony Abbott could come to welcome boat-borne refugees without any of your "pick up the phone!" nonsense - but then, for the first time in his life, he would have to run a positive campaign and become a bigger person than he is. If you still believe that's possible, read this. Fat chance - not even with the considerable power of the office that he currently occupies.

Nothing if not pragmatic

Two examples why press gallery journalists just don't matter when it comes to covering politics: Clementine Ford and Hugh White ran rings around that sad little drop-seeker who wallows in the title of "chief political correspondent".

Journalists wring their hands and act all conflicted when it comes to the balance of what they report versus maintaining relationships. They are taught to do this by journo-trainers, who consider this to be a Matter of Deep Conflict, when clearly in the press gallery it no longer is. This press gallery isn't even trying to maintain any sort of balance. They have invested all their credibility over years and years in hoping establishing that an Abbott government would be immeasurably better than one led by Gillard or Rudd. Any evidence to the contrary, we now see, will be ignored or even turned into some sort of Orwellian triumph:

Travelling abroad, Tony Abbott has been saying things very different from what we have heard from him in Australia. There are two ways to interpret this. One is to praise him for suddenly becoming a statesman, putting the national interest over petty domestic politics. The other is to see him as weak, unprincipled and insincere. The first interpretation has prevailed among Australia's kind-hearted commentators. But our regional neighbours are not so generous and they will incline to the second interpretation. So Abbott's diplomacy is off to a shaky start.

No sensible person wants to encourage Abbott in any way with his weird and cruel measures against refugees, yet even so it has to be said that his most substantive pre-election policy has pretty much been defeated in the hour of its triumph. It has to be said, but it won't be by journalists. As he does with all powerful people (e.g. Murdoch, Pell, Howard), Abbott prostrated himself before President Yudhuyono and got precisely nothing in return, for himself or for the country. That nothing was also overlooked by the travelling media, whose expense claims eat into resources that could have been devoted to valuable investigative journalism.

He gave a shit-happens to Malaysia and made himself look ridiculous in both Beijing and Tokyo by both insisting on a China free-trade deal but then spiking it. These so-called journalists made up for it not by providing information to Australians seeking validation of their new government, but instead going the suck on the new government in the hope of landing a few drops going forward.

Abbott told the media on 1 October that turning refugee boats around and sending them back to Indonesia was never a part of Coalition policy. A few press gallery journalists noted this with bemusement but none recognised it for the blatant lie, the signal of sheer disrespect, that such a statement most assuredly was. The press gallery simply lacks the self-respect not to throw that back in Abbott's face again and again, like the first half of Gillard's statement about "no carbon tax". The sheer gall of these people in simply transcribing this quote and passing it on, as though we who must have misunderstood.

Journalists profess concern for their colleagues in developing societies who risk arrest and even death in simply doing their jobs. Yet, when presented with the opportunity to stand up for their foreign counterparts in a real way, they declined. They declined to tell us about it too, hoping perhaps that we wouldn't notice, forced as we are to seek our news more broadly than a groupthink-fucked press gallery could ever offer.

Yes, foreign policy can be complex. What's not complex is the politics-as-theatre-review, with its well-stocked pantry of cliches (thanks Annabel!) which enable even the dimmest journalists to assemble prefab stories out of nothing. With no irony at all, Fairfax smart-arse Judith Ireland giggled at a newbie politician:

Keen to mark the moment when she first made it into the House of Representatives as an MP, Ms McGowan tweeted a seemingly harmless picture - of herself sitting on a bench in the chamber, "listening to an address from the Speaker, Anna Burke".

What the member for Indi did not realise was that taking pictures in the House of Representatives is a tightly restricted activity - only accredited press gallery photographers can take still images of parliamentary proceedings.

While Parliament was not officially in session, Ms McGowan's twit pic was still a no no, due to the high degree of sensitivity about images taken in the chamber.

"Media activity" is prohibited in private areas of Parliament, including on the House of Representatives and Senate chamber floors.

In part, this is to ensure "respect for the privacy" of MPs and "non-interference" with the ability of parliamentarians to carry out their duties.

When Julia Gillard was Prime Minister, her chair was shifted a metre or so to the right so that "accredited press gallery photographers" could not take pictures down her cleavage. In no part whatsoever is this a matter of "respect for the privacy" of MPs - parliamentary debates are a matter of public, not private activity. MPs take pictures in their offices all the time, whether or not the picture-taker is 'accredited'.

The process of 'accreditation' is one of those expensive public-sector make-work schemes: in this case one that protects Ireland's colleagues, and enables her employer to retail the fantasy that it offers superior coverage of politics through having employees in the press gallery. Neither Clementine Ford nor Hugh White are members of the press gallery, and we have seen that their insight is superior to that of Kenny or Ireland - with their superior knowledge of bogus 'rules' and what is or isn't (to use the fancy technical term) 'a no no'. There is a real question over whether the (quasi-)legal processes and law-enforcement measures of the state should go toward propping up failing enterprises in this manner, a question the press gallery are both too dim and too conflicted to answer.

Cathy McGowan is an accredited member of parliament, given that accreditation by tens of thousands of Australian voters. Hundreds of thousands of Australian armed service personnel have fought and died to uphold the democratic process; nobody at all has exerted themselves in any way for the accreditation system. The process of accrediting photographers to the press gallery is both far less democratic and less legitimate than the process that propelled McGowan to her new role.

You can see by the angle of the picture of McGowan that she didn't take it herself. She sure as hell didn't shoot her own cleavage, like a 'professional' would given the chance. Too right McGowan won't be reprimanded - superjournalist Judith Ireland could not be any more usefully employed than in finding out who did take that picture of McGowan, and then tattling to Speaker Burke.

But it isn't only journalists who can't see what's in front of them and don't report it. Tony Abbott has committed a huge blunder in his handling of his third Labor leader:

Mr Abbott has previously indicated he would do whatever it takes to abolish the carbon tax – including calling a double dissolution election – but on Tuesday at a press conference at Canberra's Parliament House he retreated from this scenario.

“We are confident that the public pressure on the Labor Party will be such that they will not defy the mandate of the Australian people,” Mr Abbott said.

Mr Shorten, he suggested, would support the legislation because he was “nothing if not a political pragmatist … nothing if not a political survivor.”

Most of the Australian public want a price on carbon. Labor has to show that they stand for something - not making big statements and then backing down, like Rudd used to do (and as Abbott is also starting to do - smart observers of politics will keep an eye on this phenomenon, and on how drop-seekers cover it). If Shorten caves into Abbott he's a dead man - those Labor members who voted for Albanese will have been vindicated.

Too right Bill Shorten's a survivor. The hero of Beaconsfield, the builder of the foundations of DisabilityCare, he has a small but substantial record of achievement. As with Kim Beazley (Labor's only other leader with more experience in government than out), that record dissolves once he starts agreeing with the conservatives to often and too enthusiastically. Shorten doesn't have to go over the top like Abbott did - in fact, if he's calm and firm in his opposition it is the government that will start unhinging, and once again the voters will have to elect a government that can get things done.

The Coalition's lack of negotiating skill is not, as Greg Melleuish would have it, some technicality that can be easily overcome. It is a structural defect that cripples any prospect this government might achieve anything at all, for better or worse. Backing Bill Shorten into a corner where he has no choice but to look like a statesman is incredibly dumb. He really believes Shorten is just like him, but less so. Vain people make lousy strategists because they can't get over themselves, and the idea of anyone Leading Opposition to Abbott is more than he can bear.

Governments come and go, but the press gallery has sunk its credibility into the success of the Abbott government. If that government is manifestly unsuccessful, where does it leave them? Do they report that the emperor has no clothes, or witter about 'context'? What if they complain to the Speaker about a breach of privilege and she tells them where to go? The next government could well come to office over the dead body of the press gallery, bobbing lifelessly in the Arafura Sea after having searched for evidence that Tony Abbott's policies are tracking just fine and that our nation enjoys warm relations across the world as a result of his - and their - fine work.

Abbott wasn't too much of a lightweight to become Prime Minister, but he is too much of a lightweight to stay in the job and do it well. No amount of soft-focus journalism will make up for that, and nor will any but the best sort of journalism recover the reputations of media organisations represented in the press gallery.

National service

Shou'd foreign foe e'er sight our coast,
Or dare a foot to land,
We'll rouse to arms like sires of yore
To guard our native strand;
Britannia then shall surely know,
Beyond wide ocean's roll,
Her sons in fair Australia's land
Still keep a British soul.
In joyful strains then let us sing
"Advance Australia fair!"

- Peter Dodds McCormick Advance Australia Fair (the rarely-sung fifth verse)

In the 1950s and '60s young men in Australia were required to undergo 'national service', which usually involved a cut-down version of army recruit training. There they apparently learned in a few weeks what they had not learned from their families, teachers or other responsible adults:

• how to be both self-reliant and to work in a team;
• how to shut up and do what you're bloody well told, when you're bloody well told to do it; and
• how to polish leather and brass and to make a bed with hospital corners, and to do other pointless but time-consuming tasks appreciated by nobody apart from those who set the tasks in the first place.

The army hated having to do this work. It received precious little extra to take in thousands who did not share their commitment to a military life. Crusty old drill sergeants who had seen off everything that the Wehrmacht and/or the In Min Gun threw at them had their careers ended abruptly at the hands of teenaged compatriots with those fateful words: "Look Sarge, my rifle's stuck ...".

The experience was so traumatic for the Australian Army. When it needed thousands of troops for Vietnam in the 1960s the crusty drill sergeants had faded away, and the 'nashos' had not yet come to look back on their experience so fondly that they would spend the late 1960s leopard-crawling under coils of barbed wire while wearing giggle-hats.

The navy's turn to suffer similar levels of disgrace at the hands of its own citizens came when boatloads of Vietnamese refugees headed to Australia in the 1970s. The then Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, had built up more substantial relationships with regional governments than anyone attaining that office before or since (Fraser had been Army Minister 1966-68 and Defence Minister 1968-71, during the Vietnam War; as Education Minister 1971-72 oversaw the real Colombo Plan). Fraser worked with governments in the region to take on a shared responsibility for refugees, which held until the implosion of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Navy personnel resented having to take civilians on board and ferry them to Darwin or to Asian camps. At the time, refugees who made it to Darwin were hidden from the authorities in private homes - unimaginable today.

The numbers of boat-borne refugees were less because they had fled one conflict - the Vietnam war - that had pretty much ended by the mid-1970s. Today, weak and duplicitous 'governments' give rise to conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and with ethnic targeting in Sri Lanka and eastern Burma, pressures on refugee outflows are enormous. Like many things that were cobbled together in 1951 the UN Refugee Convention has come under considerable strain.

Regional solutions offer the best hope for legitimate, sustainable outcomes for refugees and refuge-providers. Tub-thumping populism within individual countries works for nobody, and looking wistfully to one international agreement while disdaining others is ridiculous.

Crusty old sailors are belittled when their training and equipment is diverted by politicians to beat up hapless asylum-seekers as invading armies, as threats to our border security and our social security more broadly. The Royal Australian Navy is already finding it difficult to crew submarines and other ships. This task will become harder as the perception grows that being in today's Navy basically involves confronting hundreds of wretched people and being able to do very little for them.

Today's sailors - and soldiers, and airmen, and security agencies - face the prospect of a government that has no clue what they should be doing, how they should be doing it, and why they do it at all. This pamphlet basically aims to cleave each of those agencies in twain and give them separate command structures. Does a sailor have a Navy command when on exercises, then report to the separate command structure when engaging with a refugee boat, and then revert to naval command once the encounter is over?

Abbott's reference to some as-yet undefined person as "three star" is an Americanism that won't appeal to the people to whom it was targeted - marginal seat voters in Australia - and will be confused with the classification scheme for tourist accommodation. Unless wacky Jim Molam is the "three star" Abbott and Morrison have in mind, it is difficult to see how a serving officer would be prepared to tread on so many toes across so many agencies in the everyday execution of their duties.

Abbott has said that some aspects of the Rudd government's agreement with PNG will be abandoned while others will be embraced, but that he won't say which is which. His confusion is leavened by the comfort that no journalist will have the effrontery to ask him for policy clarification.

The whole idea behind the Liberal Party appointing Abbott as leader was to create clear distinctions with Labor policy. This shilly-shallying of a-little-bit-of-this and not-quite-all-of-that is the sort of thing that Malcolm Turnbull, the nearest thing the Liberal Party has to a moderate these days, used to do. Abbott gets lost when offering any sort of detail and his base hates it, which is why he does it so rarely. He cannot link it all back to the light-bright-and-trite themes he seeks to project.

This befuddlement was charming when US President Ronald Reagan did it; the old man would retreat from a political battlefield and let his attack dogs take over. In Abbott such befuddlement just looks worrying, and attack-muppets like Scott Morrison just look like they're out of their depth. The "three star" was meant to reinforce Morrison, not make him look like he needs propping up. It makes him look like he has no real clue about how government agencies - especially armed forces - actually work. A high-profile shadow minister who looks like he has no clue about government depresses his colleagues' chances of getting into government.

Operation Sovereign Borders takes one of the greatest prizes in politics - the benefit of the doubt - and denies it to Scott Morrison, to Tony Abbott, and to the Liberal/National/LNP/CLP candidate in your electorate. It gives the benefit of the doubt to Kevin Rudd. His PNG solution agreement thing was as hastily slapped-together as the Howard-Downer Nauru solution shower, and the Gillard-Bowen brainwaves over East Timor and Malaysia. It's appalling in its conception and no doubt ill-considered in its execution. But by comparison with OpSoB (thanks @m0nty!) it stands as a mighty rock before the riven agencies and flaky planning Abbott has dished up.

The whole idea behind the Liberal Party offering itself as an alternative government is that it had a leader who can confront issues that actually beset the nation and resolve them in a coherent manner. John Howard lost the ability to confront new challenges at all, let alone in a way that was coherent and consistent with his record. Julia Gillard could and did confront new challenges - big ones, heaps of them - and unlike Howard eventually achieved a coherence toward the end (people who had bagged Gillard relentlessly came to admit - some while she was still technically PM - that history would be kind to her). Abbott offers no resolutions, only positions.

Abbott is not coming together at the right time. He is coming apart at the wrong time. Those who think well of Abbott must now consider the idea that the four-year joke is approaching its punchline, and that they may feel unable to join in the laughter once the punchline is delivered.

When even 2GB gruntback starts referring to boat-borne asylum seekers as "poor devils", the gig is up. Scott Morrison has been one of Abbott's strongest performers, and he can't help his leader here - they have both stuffed up, big time, and I doubt they aren't done yet. The line that it doesn't matter what Rudd does, he'll stuff it up, is not one these jokers can pull off. Stick a fork in them, they're done.

Members of the armed forces and security services vote conservative more than any other occupational group. Even the amassed forces of the Neil James Institute are on his case. If you can strain the loyalties of your base without convincing the undecideds, then winning elections just isn't for you.

The good news for PNG Prime Minister Peter O'Neill is that he has taken a substantial sum of money from the Australian government that his government would not otherwise have received. There is no other good news. He is about to learn that sometimes additional money, even in the quantities promised by Rudd, can be very expensive. O'Neill has sprung this solution on his country without warning or consultation. He does not have a coherent explanation about how all that extra money coming into the country will be a net gain for the citizenry, given all the extra people coming with it; the reason he has no explanation is because there is no actual strategy from which an explanation might be constructed. O'Neill has been Gillard-like in doing the deal but underestimating the politics that comes with it, and as with Gillard the former PM (Sir Michael Somare) will delight at pointing out these shortcomings: sovereign borders indeed.

Some take comfort in the idea that the expenditure of money from Australia to PNG is to be overseen by AusAID. Who's to say what, or whether, oversight will take place? The hoo-ha over pink batts and school halls shows that even the slightest lapse will get more focus than any successes.

We saw what happened when Rudd abandoned "the greatest moral challenge of our time" and when Gillard gave into a fixed-price carbon tax. Rudd's PNG deal cannot and will not be sustained, even though much appears to depend on it. In that deal is his best hope for re-election but also the seeds of his final political demise.

Like Nixon in 1972, Rudd will easily account for an opponent who's the darling of his base but who can't see or reach beyond it, even when it matters and everything's at stake. Like Nixon in and after 1972, Rudd will be busy over the next two years or so meeting with both triumph and disaster, and treating those impostors just the same. Those who follow Rudd and Abbott as leaders of their respective parties will come to distance themselves from them, but for now the contest between these two awful, complicated and inadequate men remains compelling.

Reasons to be cheerful, part 2013

Dear Alex White,

I disagree with most of your post, and its basic argument. I realise your job is to gee up people on the left and get them mobilised, but you do people a disservice by misleading them in the hope that they'll get fired up and forgive you afterwards. Maybe that's the difference between being "of the left" and just being broadly supportive of the Gillard government over the Abbott alternative.

OK, so the Gillard government has done some good things, some bad things. Sounds like every other government really - including, as you point out, the government of the US.

The government will change if they can be convinced that those who are now in Opposition will do the good things better and the bad things less badly. This is how Howard beat Keating in 1996, it is the same basis on which Rudd beat him in 2007, and it is the same basis on which neither Beazley nor Latham beat Howard.

Abbott cannot convince anyone that any policy area would be better managed by him and his crew than by the incumbents. That's why they can't and won't win. It's in the media's interests to pretend it's a tight race and that there is intense political competition, but there isn't really. The competition isn't there - people who follow politics see it now, and those who don't follow politics closely will see it when they choose to look, which will most likely happen closer to the election.

You can shove your polls up your arse. Really. Without a known polling date polls are pretty useless, and the wider the gap between the polling and the election date the less reliable it is. The statistical busywork applied to polls to convince people of their validity is much the same as that applied to astrological forecasts; the a priori assumptions are bullshit, the output is bullshit, so don't try and impress me with the process.

The fact that there is no real competition between the parties, while journalists engage in increasingly stupid tricks to insist that there is, diminishes mainstream media rather than leads a credulous population buy the nose. You're wrong to take the power of the mainstream media as given.

The potency of the AWU/Gillard thing diminished within the final sitting week of parliament last year. The idea that it will retain the potency it had earlier in that week, or that it will increase, is rubbish. I notice you didn't mention Ashby, which is OK as I'll do it for you.

James Ashby will have to appeal, but in doing so will make it difficult for the Coalition to escape the taint of sleaze. It will also make it difficult for Ashby, a man who has lived his life in pursuit of publicity and is about to learn in the harshest way possible that "there is no such thing as bad publicity" is, in fact, bullshit. The story of Ashby is all wind and no candle, leaving the protagonist without any redeeming legend or other benefits of superstardom - and, indeed, almost no grace.

Any inquiry into Abbott's earlier slush-fund attempts depends entirely upon whether Pauline Hanson will play along, which will require her to give up her dream of a parliamentary pension to carry her into old age.

These issues will negate any lingering benefit to the Coalition from Gillard/AWU and start to eat into core Coalition strengths (e.g. stewardship of the economy). They will work against the Coalition particularly hard in Queensland, where the effect will be like cutting out a melanoma with a broken bottle. Abbott has repeatedly proven powerless to stop the LNPQ from self-harm that spills over federally.

As for asylum-seekers, there is a real bind: yes, there is an active push toward exclusionary policies, but also revulsion at the impacts of those policies (e.g. children self-harming, Australian citizens being deported). Mostly, the media just present these facts; sometimes you'll see a story where someone goes into bat for one side or the other, but you get that.

The question on asylum-seekers is: who do you trust to resolve this impasse? Nobody trusts Abbott to resolve it, you can only trust Abbott to be harsher while playing stupid media games with those exposing cruelty. The Coalition loses credibility when it appears to criticise the government for doing something it would do if it had the chance.

And the bottom line is, it won't get the chance. The link between state and federal politics tends to be weak, but state governments in Queensland and Victoria are acting in such a way that it is possible to say to voters in those states: state Coalition policies are a dress-rehearsal for what an Abbott government would be like.

Labor will win 4-5 seats in each of Queensland and Victoria. Labor will win at least one seat in South Australia; it is not beyond the realms of possibility that it could win both Boothby (knocking off Andrew Southcott) and Sturt (Chris Pyne), which would make Adelaide as much a Labor town as Canberra or Wollongong. This will be offset by winning/losing one seat here or there in NT or WA, but you get that.

Labor is more likely to win Denison than the Libs. The Libs have a chance in Braddon and/or Bass.

God only knows what will happen in NSW. The Labor Right in this state has collapsed as a governing model. The O'Farrell government has had the fresh paint knocked off it, but on one side is a non-Opposition, and on the other it is not as threatening as the Abbott-led federal Opposition.

The Coalition will not win Greenway, Robertson or Page, where Labor has a strong local presence and (except in the case of Greenway) representation independent of the NSW Labor Right. Any Sussex Street stink wafting around Michelle Rowlands will be more than countermanded by the smell of sulphur emanating from the Lib, owing to the branch-stacking in that area by the religious right.

At this stage it is hard to tell what Lindsay, Banks, Reid or Lyne might do, but then Labor could pick up Cowper and/or Hughes. Windsor will win New England if he runs again.

As for Dobell, if Craig Thomson is vindicated as comprehensively as this suggests, Labor would be mad not to run him and the Coalition wouldn't have a chance, given that their candidate's only pitch is how awful Thomson appears to be if you accept everything of which he's been accused.

What Abbott will achieve in NSW is what 1980s-model Howard did - big swings in safe Labor seats (not enough to win them though) while losing close battles in the marginals. MPs like Laurie Ferguson and Chris Bowen will have their arses handed to them, but not their heads.

I don't expect Abbott to be Prime Minister at all, which is why I'm not spooked by your Abbott Government scare campaign.

The spectre of a Royal Commission into the union movement didn't save the Fraser government in the early 1980s, and that was when a majority of working people were also union members. If the unions aren't tightening their administrative practices in the light of HSU and AWU then they deserve what they get. Say what you like about the SDA, but that union's leadership has been vigilant against the kind of abuses and slackness that seem to be prevalent at sister bruvver uvver organisations.

It was the spectre of a return to WorkChoices in 2010 that stopped Abbott's momentum in the first week of that election campaign. Because he's a moron, and because people like Abetz and others on his frontbench are too, he hasn't developed an alternative policy or a strategy for "playing down" those vote-losing concerns. People didn't vote Coalition until they got over their promise to dismantle Medicare, and people won't vote Coalition until they develop a workplace relations policy that is substantially different to WorkChoices.

So Alex White, what does that leave you with? Your no-brainers about the Middle East Western Asia, the global economy and climate change. Big strategic insight right there.

Your idea that people will be like so many turkeys voting for Christmas, as instructed by The Daily Telegraph, is ridiculous. You assume that the Federal Coalition is more substantial than it is, and that the government is the supine outfit Kevin Rudd left it as: enough of these bullshit assumptions. Let us start the new year with Reasons to be Cheerful:

Just doing your job

The Howard Government's policy on deterring and discouraging asylum seekers from coming to Australia by boat was widely regarded as both cruel and effective. The Labor government tried to dismantle it but this was deemed not to have "worked", if you assume that a) deterring asylum-seekers is what we want for the country, and b) every time an asylum-seeker boat arrives, it irritates you personally.

The government set up the Houston commission, framing their terms of reference to assume deterrence and discouragement as policy objectives. The commission reported, with part of its recommendations that the entire report be implemented as a comprehensive package.

The Houston commission recommended that detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island be reopened. This is basically in line with Coalition policy, which is itself an exercise in nostalgia: there was, by coincidence, a decline in the number of refugees worldwide in 2005, and for Coalition supporters that coincidence validates their policy and makes it the benchmark against which all immigration policy is judged.

Coalition policy is expensive: it costs billions of dollars to intercept boats in international waters, and then transfer them to those places and accommodate them there until their refugee status is determined. There was more money available to the government in 2005 than there is now, for two reasons. First, in 2005 every country in the world except Zimbabwe enjoyed economic growth; today many countries are struggling with economic stagnation or decline, which in some cases puts strain on the political system. Second, the Howard government was (believe it or not) a much higher-taxing government than the Gillard government.

The Coalition has won a political battle in having the government basically adopt its policy (all but for TPVs, of which more later). They know it's expensive, they know it's inhumane, and that people will go crazy with the heat and the indefinite waiting; and that the catering company from which Scott Morrison gets his costings will do little to alleviate either.

The government should not tolerate any criticism by the Coalition about asylum-seeker detention. They should point out that this is the policy they wanted, and that deterrence means that good people will continue to suffer while bad people will get away with murder. They should point out that this is the policy that the Coalition will continue if elected, only more so because Morrison will crack down on media visiting those places.

This is what passes for a principle for such people as Scott Morrison; the impact that such people have when they take their place in the real Australian community is less important than their impact on the imaginary and nebulous "24 hour news cycle".

The government should not merely explain, but assert and rebut narratives to the contrary, that they are merely carrying out the Houston committee's report (first step, though, is to actually do so, in full). This is what mandatory detention and deterrence looks like, people. Labor should position itself as the party that is open to new ways of doing things, while the Coalition and the Greens are pretty much stuck.

Bob Carr is right to use foreign policy as a means of securing co-operation over asylum-seekers. He was, however, wrong to start with a jaunt to Sri Lanka. It's not clear that decades of bloody civil war have settled down into a peace of mutual respect and the sort of competition/co-operation on which social and economic prosperity depends. There aren't too many genuine alternatives presented to Sri Lankans who want to migrate here by means other than people-smuggling, and the Australian High Commission in Colombo employs too few Australians and too many locals to do its immigration assessments.

That said, Carr is owning the policy - and given that his opposite number is the nebulous Julie Bishop, he can be forgiven for not taking the fight to opponents who have pretty much vacated his field.

The Coalition knew mandatory detention is absurdly expensive, and that it would blow out the budget. Again, the government should call them on their pretense of suddenly giving a damn about foreign aid, and that the Coalition would cut foreign aid still further because of its budget-surplus fetish.

What's also expensive is forbidding asylum-seekers from working and putting them on welfare. This is a result of lobbying from unions representing poorly-paid, low-skilled workers, many of whom are migrants anyway. It's stupid policy and the Coalition would be right to attack it, were it not for their laziness over Temporary Protection Visas (it was never clear who was being protected, from what or whom). The unexamined government is not worth electing.

The Immigration Minister, Chris Bowen, apparently gets along well with Morrison. What is needed is an Immigration Minister who will take Morrison on for his dishonesty that the Coalition would run asylum-seeker policy differently, better and cheaper. A minister who would rip out Morrison's heart, dump in it, and then have it run against Morrison in his electorate and preference against him is a minister that can make this issue work against the Coalition. Accepting the Howard government's detention and deterrence policy as some ideal of perfection is stupid and unsustainable.

The same goes for the Coalition's criticisms of the government over corruption within Customs. The relevant minister, Jason Clare, is supposedly a rising star in the NSW ALP, but he was a wet fish against the Coalition's Michael Keenan. Firstly, it never occurred to the Howard government to investigate corruption in Customs, and secondly the Coalition have a budget-surplus fetish that militates against more and better resources for that agency. There are the two sticks with which you beat Keenan, and the rest of the Coalition, away from partisan criticism of a story where the government did its job. The government has no excuse for being caught out, the Fairfax-ABC investigations did not precede law-enforcement examinations, they occurred in parallel, with the minister and the AFP Commissioner across the detail.

I wish other areas of policy received as much in-depth coverage in the mainstream media as asylum-seeker policy; even so, it isn't enough. It is not too late to rebuild Fairfax around producers of high-value journalism like Nick McKenzie, and away from the false idols of journalism that are Grattan or Paul Sheehan or Peter Hartcher.

Bowen's record as a minister is dutiful but uninspired, in a key policy area where the price of failure is too politically high. Dumping him would not only encourager les autres (as Napoleon Voltaire said of the British practice of executing admirals) but it would send a clear message to the underperforming NSW ALP to either replace him with Clare, or someone outside NSW and the Labor Right entirely.

In the absence of that - or perhaps as well - the government should acknowledge the fact that it is just doing its job. It should hold up a mirror to the country that supposedly wants to shun people and do it all on the fiscal and moral cheap. Any shifting of the asylum-seeker debate (in any direction other than, say, machine-gunning people at sea or a reintroduction of racial quotas) works to show Labor as the party open to ideas about the country's future. Sensible people do not fret about shifting the debate: only PR dollies, media-relations hysterics and dictators like their debates cliched and contained.

The government should be open to changing its mind after the election but committed to the Houston findings in the short term. It should brook no nonsense from the Coalition over this commitment and beat them with the surplus-fetish stick. That's how you not only deal with a suppurating wound but start a process of healing that is also a key responsibility of government - another responsibility that the Coalition insists it can shirk, and which a lazy mainstream media will let it shirk.

Part of the fallacy behind the politico-media complex is the idea that because the mainstream media isn't doing its job, the government can get away with not doing its. The Coalition has fallen for this and relies entirely on government errors and media sloppiness. A government that steps up and does its job gets re-elected. The government should own both the status quo and the future, on asylum-seekers and customs and the budget surplus and every other issue.

The no-win situation

On the release of the Report of the Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers I am in no position to make legal or practical judgments on what it might mean for asylum seekers, or for Australia. I did, however, laugh at the position in which the Liberals have put themselves. It isn't only asylum seekers who stand to lose no matter what they do.

Contrary to the hopes and opinions of many, there are Liberals who aren't stupid. They know full well that the patterns of refugees heading toward Australia by boat is influenced more by push factors (i.e. the reasons why people abandon the lands of their birth) than pull factors (i.e. gold and soil and wealth for toil). They know that Nauru and TPVs-in-all-but-name and all that were all just security theatre; expensive, but electorally effective while it lasted. They know that the current rise in asylum-seekers has little to do with anything the government might do - but because that government isn't a Liberal one they are happy to create the impression that they have all the answers, and that the messy compromise under which the government operates is some sort of endemic failure on their part.

When Liberal journalists like Chrisses Kenny and Uhlmann paint the background on asylum seeker issues, they ignore the push factors and contrast Coalition firmness with Labor floundering. This helps the Liberals get their message out but it also reinforces that message as though it were true. It has dampened their efforts to think through asylum-seeker policy and consider what might happen if the old ways don't apply to new conditions. This does them a disservice.

The Panel have largely recommended that the Howard government's policy for most of the last decade be reintroduced: Nauru, Manus Island, boat-arrivals being prevented from family reunion, pretty much the whole Ruddock-Vanstone deal. The Gillard government has no alternative but to swallow its pride and bringing the recommendations into being, good and hard. This leaves the Liberals:

• Doing their usual pantomime of appearing to agree with the government, then raising a few quibbles and qualms, then eventually saying no (this strings out a story over days, which journos love); or
• Claiming credit and noisily denouncing Labor for backing down.

Nobody believes the Liberals when they go on about UN conventions and breaches thereof. It's legitimate to attack the government and its policy on those grounds, but Abbott and Morrison have no grounds to do so. In the same way, nobody thinks Tony Abbott building a Potemkin Village in the Top End will make a blind bit of difference to Aborigines. If they take the former path above it will only reinforce Abbott as someone who can point problems out but can't solve them. 

The latter will see Labor demoralised initially, until the Coalition realise what it feels like for a government to steal an opposition's policy. If the policy succeeds, government gets credit and opposition is just me-too. If it won't, how will the Coalition scuttle away to the moral high ground (and where, exactly, might such ground be)?

If? The proposals won't succeed because:

• Facilities in Nauru and Manus Island won't be fully operational by the election this time next year; 
• The key role of Indonesia has been dodged altogether; 
• There will be half-baked G4S-style execution issues; and 
• There will almost certainly be a successful legal challenge because of fundamental sillinesses such as the cruel folly of waiting times.

Labor has room to move - an internationalist approach building on the Malaysia agreement and the re-emergence of Burma into the international community, bringing in the UN, producing a large-scale joined-up policy that the mean reductionism of talkback radio can't beat or even match. The Coalition has no room to move if when the Pacific Solution is discredited.

Gillard's flexibility has counted against her - but having come through on other issues and with room to move on international agreements, she can change policy tack without any loss of standing. Abbott is stuck with the Pacific Solution; if asylum-seeker boats keep coming in the face of such a policy he has no answer, he can't get an answer, he is finished. Gillard will get credit for trying while Abbott becomes just another whinger. Gillard lives to fight another day while Abbott is left with if-onlys an I-couldas.

If Abbott offers anything other than a return to Howard-era policy - in general, and on this issue in particular - he is finished. If he sounds like an echo of the government rather than an alternative, he is finished. This invidious position is another curse of the latter-day Coalition not thinking through policy from basic principles, and using the nostalgicised past as not just a platform but a hammock. It's the difference between creating the impression that you have the answer, and having your bluff called and watching helplessly as "the answer" dissolves before your eyes.

Chris Bowen's credibility is shot with this change in policy. He should go to the backbench and rethink things, but he won't. Scott Morrison will one day attempt to slink away from the position he's held to for years now, and he will fail too. It is the tragedy of the modern political class that they are so identified with their roles that they cannot resign to save themselves.

At a time where options appear inflexibly directed toward Liberal policy, it is Labor that loses less in this no-win situation. It means the election will turn on issues other than this, as voters turn to other issues to make their decision.

After all that, I looked up this picture and it just made me sad.