Brand positioning

Clive Palmer has sold down the carbon tax, the mining tax, and consumers of financial planning for no net benefit - not to anyone, not even himself.

For a while there, he had all the makings of a sustainable niche in Australian politics. The carbon and mining taxes have gone - but household expenses and unemployment will go up, not down. He'll try a bit of product differentiation but it won't be enough any more. Having pretty much caved into the government, if Palmer seeks to amend a government initiative and fails, he will look ineffective; if he seeks to amend a government initiative and succeeds, the government gets the credit.

The best profile on Palmer is this one. Gilmore invokes Palmer as the 'holy fool' who keeps serious matters light but who gets away with telling truths that bring official displeasure upon more earnest courtiers. Shakespeare was big on holy fools. The press gallery would have applauded King Lear for his "message discipline" in dispatching Kent and Cordelia decisively and early, but that was where his problems began rather than ended.

Palmer could have survived if he differentiates himself sufficiently from government, but like the Democrats following the GST Palmer has tarnished his once fresh and irreverent brand.

To read this piece, you'd think Palmer was the first politician to say one thing before an election and do another afterward (I mean, when has that ever happened?). Abbott's inability to dish out this treatment to a government but not be able to handle it once in government is the issue here, with Matthewson too invested in the government to notice. Apparently Palmer is to be condemned because he ran for parliament and voted in his own interests - had he simply funded an ad campaign, as mining companies did in 2010, or had he operated in the shadows with fundraising and lobbyists (like Gina Rinehart and Rio Tinto are doing), this would be better than operating in clear sight of journalists.

Brand differentiation is Palmer's problem (and Matthewson's, from other press gallery hacks). Our problem is that we need information on how we are governed, and to use that information ahead of elections. In this piece, Lenore Taylor pursues the parlous, arse-covering assumption that the parlous state of Coalition climate policy comes as a surprise:

What a complete and catastrophic failure of the political system.

The failure derives from the press gallery refusing to think through Coalition policy pronouncements, presuming instead that anyone who criticised Gillard should get a free pass - which is what Taylor and her press gallery colleagues did throughout Abbott's Liberal leadership. Other aspects of system failure are downstream of this. It's a failure of misinformed voters, which means that all those responsible for misinforming the voters attract - and deserve - resentment from the misgoverned.

After climate policy helped dispatch three prime ministers and two opposition leaders, and dominated three election campaigns and eight years of polarising political debate, it has come to this: we have no national climate policy.

What Taylor is describing is a failure of the political class to act in the nation's best interest. A vote for Abbott was always a vote for no climate policy to speak of. The press gallery knew this, and at the time they pretended it didn't matter. They blamed Gillard and Rudd for "not being able to sell", whatever that meant, too busy listening to Joel Fitzgibbon snickering about polls and not working through what Abbott's pronouncements might mean.

Don't blame voters for making misinformed choices. The press gallery exists for no reason other than to inform voters who want to be informed. If voters are misinformed, this is a professional failure on the part of the press gallery; it is not an excuse for the press gallery to rail at those they have misinformed.

After all that vitriol and hyperbolic attack and all those reports and modelling and studies, and all last week’s drama, we are back to exactly where we were before John Howard reluctantly said he would introduce an emissions trading scheme in 2007. (He later said he did it only because of political pressure, and never really believed in the idea.)

We know more than ever before that global warming requires urgent international action, and we still know that a market mechanism is the most efficient way to respond. But we appear to be politically incapable of doing anything about it, other than watch people yell at each other.

Yes, we do. But we know all that by going around the press gallery, because all they ever covered was "all that vitriol and hyperbolic attack and ... last week’s drama". We got the other stuff by going beyond the press gallery.

John Howard lost in part because his insincerity on this issue was palpable, obvious to everyone outside the press gallery, whose focus was on nothing but quoting his words accurately.

It is, of course, possible to reduce emissions by means other than a carbon price. Tough regulations or carefully targeted and rigorously assessed government incentives can also do the job.

Yes, but any and all debate on those issues was simply reported as 'Labor disunity' rather than as substantive issues that go beyond the antics of Capital Hill, or even the Labor Party. All press gallery journalists including Lenore Taylor reported those issues in that way, pursuing that essentially dishonest objective of selling the sizzle rather than the steak.

But the government’s alternative “Direct Action”, as it stands, is no such viable alternative.

This was obvious well before last September. It's too late to point this out now. If this point had been made before last September, one of two things might have happened:

• The Coalition might have set to work on a better policy; or
• As in 2004, a vigorous but clueless opposition might have cooled its heels a little longer, leaving a flawed government in place until a better option (from either side) presented itself.

Either of those outcomes would have been better for the country than the predicament in which we find ourselves, the predicament the press gallery helped bring about.

The legislation that gives it any rigour may or may not pass the Senate.

That applies to any legislation, really.

And there is evidence Direct Action – which hands out competitive grants to those volunteering to reduce emissions, but imposes no overall limits on greenhouse pollution – will cost far more to achieve far less than the carbon price would have, with the cost being levied on taxpayers rather than on polluting industries.

Should've pointed that out well before last September, and framed your coverage of Coalition claims and counter-claims accordingly.

It is possible the amendments being negotiated with the government by independent senator Nick Xenophon might make the scheme slightly more credible, but not by much.

Should've pointed that out, too. Too late now.

The government did win an election promising to “axe the tax”. But did the voters who backed the slogan really intend that Australia be left with no climate change policy at all?

Did they really think they would be $550 a year better off?

Yes we did, because experienced political journalists like Lenore Taylor simply quoted Abbott's words to that effect, and never really questioned what they might mean - or whether there might be some sort of difference between what Abbott says and what he brings about, as happens with other politicians.

That lamb roast didn’t get any more expensive when the tax was imposed in 2012 and it won’t be getting any cheaper today. So many doorstops, so little substance.

I always thought it was crap, but the press gallery just quoted that clueless yokel without qualification. Where is he now - oh, he's in Cabinet? Still doing those doorstops, are you?

As eight years’ work by thousands of people disappears with the Senate’s vote, many may have cause for regrets.

The press gallery must be full of such people, gnashing their teeth and rending their garments. At long last, from the ashes of political calamity, we can pull press gallery credibility out of the wreckage, yeah?

Labor deliberately ... The Greens must surely ... And those in the Coalition ...

Sadly, no. It's everyone else's fault, including yours - never the press gallery.

... the absence of any credible policy is the big and pressing question for the future.

It has always been the big and pressing question. It has always been much more important than watch Tony gut fish, watch Tony drive a truck, listen to Joel giggle about Newspoll, watch Lenore land a new job despite her professional failure, etc.

Whatever happens, Direct Action will probably only matter for a short time – because even if it manages to reduce Australia’s emissions for a few years, its cost will quickly become prohibitive as Australia is required to reduce its emissions further. That point was made repeatedly by Malcolm Turnbull back when he still talked about these things, and has been repeatedly borne out by modelling (done by third parties because the government hasn’t done any, preferring as prime minister Tony Abbott said during the election campaign, to just “have a crack”).

It need not have mattered at all, if only the traditional media had seriously investigated what an Abbott government might mean in the same way they investigated the prospect of a Latham government.

Which means those concerned about climate change, and the need for Australia to do its fair share of the international task of reducing emissions, need to regroup and re-prosecute the case for some kind of market mechanism or some other effective policy.

Do you seriously think that "those concerned about climate change" had not been doing this? Why would they get any more attention now?

A good place to start would be the widely accepted, but misguided, idea that the point of comparison for our efforts on this issue vis a vis other countries is whether or not they have an ETS. No, the point of comparison is the target by which each country agrees to reduce their emissions.

Honestly, this is what the previous government was saying in response to Abbott - but you simply took Abbott at face value and dismissed the then government as a rabble. It was the press gallery who were the rabble (and, in the face of so little turnover despite this collective failure of judgment and reporting, they remain so).

Clive Palmer’s alternative emissions trading scheme is now delayed and looking increasingly meaningless. It would put the existing architecture into a kind of zero-price “sleeping beauty style” hibernation, with the independent Climate Change Authority getting a last-minute stay of execution so it can advise on when it should be re-awoken. But the conditions for reawakening are becoming so onerous, it is unlikely to matter.

That should have been reported ahead of time rather than afterward.

Those concerned about climate change will have to re-prosecute the case over time, as international action accelerates and Direct Action is found to be wanting.

If the Prime Minister slips back into his hi-vis again, how will you resist the opportunity to re-suspend your judgment? The credibility of climate action advocates is not at issue here, it's the buyer's remorse of the press gallery. Taylor and her colleagues should have known better, done more investigation into Coalition policy, and put a better brief to the public than they did.

Perhaps the last word should go to those well-known job-destroying, economy-hating, green-left anarchists in the federal treasury ...

That would be the entity that is being decapitated because it is offering advice like that, and which lumped all of its long-held wishlist items into the most recent budget to the point where its political masters can't get the Budget through parliament after two months. Experienced press gallery journalists should have identified that, too.

Let's be clear: the press gallery is the problem here. Unlike Lenore Taylor, I'm not being smart after the event or pretending this government's policy and tactical failures weren't foreseeable - go ahead, look at this blog's archives and compare it to the skip-bin of history that is the collective legacy of the Canberra press gallery. Taylor isn't the worst of the press gallery, but as one of its senior members and ever eager to defend the institution she will not escape the scorn that is its due.

The task of holding government to account extends to would-be governments before an election. The press gallery has failed in that task, which meant that voters were misinformed about their choices at the last election. The idea that the press gallery did its job while other aspects of the political system - including the voters - failed at theirs, is ridiculous. It enables the press gallery to persist in its failure and frustrates any hope that better policy and government might even be recognised, let alone come about.

The press gallery in general, and Lenore Taylor in particular, are "still wasting time, and the cost continues to climb".

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I spent last Thursday and Friday not in the press gallery or lurking outside the Senate chamber, but attending this workshop, watching a new academic discipline emerge from the limitations of political science and marketing, with a combination of candour and rigidly framed skiting on the part of practitioners. Next year's conference should be interesting, but to what extent is what they call 'earned media' worth examining in that context? Does this blog have a more academic future, or is its future academic? Comments are welcome on this as ever, but let's make like the press gallery and save any predictions until after the event.

Meanwhile in the Senate

My piece on the 13 marginal seats you won't hear about in the slow media is here, where the mighty King's Tribune look after it so well and place it in such good company.

Back in his paddock

Barnaby Joyce is an increasing threat to the credibility of the Liberal Party without being a threat to anyone outside the Coalition. Tony Abbott needs to rebuke him publicly to shore up the sort of credibility that a Prime Minister needs, but he won't do it because he is weak.

John Howard used to do this sort of thing, but in copying him Abbott is learning the wrong lesson. Howard had his favourites and he would pretty much always defend them - or where he couldn't, would refuse to criticise them publicly. Abbott was a recipient of this level of protection and now Abbott is passing the favour forward to Joyce.

The problem with doing that is: Joyce is a Nat. Nationals do contribute to the Coalition from time to time but they take much more than they give. When a Coalition government collapses it's the Libs who do the heavy lifting and who therefore give out first. Leeches may drop off their hosts when they die but Nationals stay attached at a point close by the juicier organs. Howard in the 1980s was as open and conciliatory to the Nationals as any Liberal leader could be but they just kept spitting in his face. Peacock could deal with the squirearchy elements while small-town whingers like Charles Blunt did themselves in.

By the time Tim Fischer started running rings around Hewson and Downer, Howard had learned how to deal with Nationals: lend a hand in big issues they care about (e.g. snuffing out Aboriginal land rights) and make them feel involved with their simplistic contributions to macroeconomic debates (which always degenerates to a shopping list of special pleading), but otherwise you beat them hard with a big stick if they ever dare to wade into debates that truly matter. The one big issue where Howard lost sight of that was the issue that may yet sink his Prime Ministership in history: AWB-Iraq. Farmers wanted any blood-encrusted coins that Bill Hartley had left behind, and rather than go into bat for the bludgers, Howard and Downer should have dropped them out at sea in a chaff bag.

This is the lesson Abbott has not learnt. The idea of building big dams and super highways where nobody lives or works is stupid. It doesn't make you look like a visionary, it makes you look like you don't get it and that you hate Australians for wanting to squander their hard-earned in this way. It is the prime example of journalistic laziness that they let Joyce go on with pet schemes like this - fools may call it vision - without calling him on the economics.

Phillip Adams called him a latter-day Wilson Tuckey, but all Oppositions need a mongrel and nobody who reveres Eddie Ward or Paul Keating should be indulged in such a complaint. It's probably more accurate to regard Joyce as the Coalition's Paul Howes: obnoxiously self-regarding and not nearly the vote-puller he fancies himself to be, flogging the dead horse of old-school protectionism which only impresses easily-impressed media producers hungry for the ratings cut-through of a colourful quote. Where Joyce seriously overreaches is with stunts like this. His preferred candidate didn't get up and her opponent did, which is going to make life awkward in the Senate (which may well be a sign he's tiring of that joint). All that Queensland crap might gee-up people in NSW, where there is established rivalry over the rugby codes, but Victorians were always going to find his outbursts puzzling, if not disturbing.

Victorian Liberals assume that their people are going to form the core of any Coalition government, and that slap-in-the-face from Joyce only reminds them that the second-biggest source of Coalition MPs in Federal Parliament is not Victoria but Queensland. If someone like that is going to be in Federal Cabinet, riding roughshod over other members, then perhaps it's time to rally around Ted Baillieu and leave Canberra to its own devices. That's how a party can be so strong at one level of government but hopeless at another; it only takes one out-of-control galoot to turn people away from Team Loser and get with the strength. In NSW a decade ago, Charlie Lynn became the face of state politics to the point where any Liberal worth their salt could only focus their efforts on keeping Howard in office. Now Joyce is performing that role for Abbott and driving sensible Liberals toward their comparatively more successful and smarter state governments.

The deselection of Helen Kroger shows that being a whip is the most dangerous job in Liberal politics. Scuttling around Parliament doing their busywork, there was once a time when those who flinched under the Whips' lash had no choice but to cop it sweet. After Patrick Secker and now Kroger losing preselection (and make no mistake, Kroger will not be re-elected to the Senate), opposition whips will have to be a lot more subtle in getting their colleagues to move toward the holding pens of government.

Amid the apathy-inducing prospect of Australia's poorest parliamentary team squabbling amongst themselves came this pearler:

Most of Senator Ryan's cheer squad comprises opinion leaders for competition and the free market. Former Liberal Senate leader Nick Minchin wrote that he was "very grateful to the Victorian Liberal Party for selecting such an outstanding young man".

Let's see: free market - Nick Minchin - nope, I can't see the connection either. Schubert assumes a lot with a statement like that, but as with a Grattan article such facts as there are in the article aren't strong enough to prop up the assumptions.

Anyway, back to Joyce. Whatever he gains from drawing attention to rural issues is undone by the silliness of the issues themselves - big dams and nothing about remote schools or health services, nothing sensible about Aborigines, nor even any tackling of big and serious issues of farms versus mines. If you're going to stick your nose into Gina Rinehart's family affairs and accept her hospitality - even if that involves more curry than you're accustomed to - it's imperative to devote some thought to the big issues facing your constituency. Doubling the baby bonus does not bring all the votes to your yard, it's one of those statements that everyone remembers but nobody believes (like Hawke and no child living in poverty, or Gillard claiming to be against gay marriage). Too much time going into bat for Cubbie Station and Clive Palmer is going to erode this common-man-Barnaby persona that makes him such a media darling real fast.

Speaking of which, how silly were Joyce and Abbott in going after Christine Milne? She's a farmer and will take to farming communities far better than soft-handed townies like Joyce or Abbott might imagine. This isn't to say that a Green tsunami will wash across the bush, but Milne will succeed in lifting her party's votes in the three biggest states to the point where they will not only elect a Green Senator but Green preferences will play a more prominent role in other contests where they haven't been strong. Anti-CSG activists could do worse than study Milne's campaign against the proposed pulp mill at Wesley Vale - much worse, if listening to Joyce's jibber-jabber or soft-cock Max Tomlinson is any guide. Milne will also help to lift the Katter vote in the bush, where he's on he same page regarding farming vs mining; the Nats have nowhere to go but down, led by the man who talked about taking on Tony Windsor but who piked at the crunch.

Bob Brown came from a country background but was never comfortable in rural communities. Shutting down all those Hydro and logging jobs in Tasmania made for a stand-off between Greens and bushies that has become the very sort of political given that goes unquestioned by the politico-media complex, and which therefore is ripe for a kicking. If Milne was cut from the same cloth as Brown, the Greens would never have survived in Tasmanian politics once Brown headed for Canberra. Sometimes a leader who succeeds a popular and distinctive leader has to go their own way; Abbott, in cleaving too closely to Howard, hasn't learned that lesson either.

If Barnaby Joyce is to be any good to the Coalition, let alone the nation, he is going to have to be put in his place. The Coalition leader who does that will be a leader indeed. Truss is not that person and neither is Abbott. Laughing at Joyce, like Labor does, isn't good enough. A quiet word won't do either: only a public rebuke will get Victorian Liberals unified behind such a leader (which will involve them getting the most out of their own bailiwick; sometimes the alchemy of leadership is most notable by its absence). Knocking the Mouth from Maranoa on his backside will make uncommitted voters sit up and listen. A Barnaby Joyce who revels in the sound of broken china crashing and crunching underhoof while customers and shop-staff storm the exits might be enjoying himself hugely, but like Wilson Tuckey he only weakens those he would support. Tony Abbott must take this bull by the horns, but he won't; and the polls don't measure that either, so stuff the polls.

The politics of the ether

Julian Assange said he would run for the Senate, and there was a bit of publicity about that with a lot of very silly extrapolation as to what such a candidacy might mean in terms of future elections. I'm more interested in what constituency he'd appeal to, and how such a flighty man might deal with the drudgery of parliamentary committee work and the bullshit of the politico-media complex.

From this bit of fanboy work, we can see that Assange is pitching directly to the broken heart of Australian politics: moderate liberals, people who have been either chased out from the Liberal Party or who remain as hollowed-out husks, or else those who found themselves trapped beneath the wreckage of the Democrats.

Julian Assange says he wants to bring liberty back to the centre of Australian politics, using his Senate candidacy to defend free speech and the "right of citizens … to live their lives free from state interference".

The WikiLeaks founder also plans to be a "fierce defender of free media" if elected to the Senate, using parliamentary privilege to break court suppression orders and other "excessive constraints" on free access to information ... Mr Assange said he "could be described as a libertarian" and nominated Australian Democrats founder Don Chipp and former prime minister Malcolm Fraser as political figures he admired.

Libertarians and Malcolm Fraser. There's a problem with defining your constituency right there: it certainly poses a challenge of conciliation. The silence from your IPA and CIS in support of Assange has been deafening, but you'd expect that from those who by definition are resistant to organisation let alone mobilisation.

Assange himself has been critical of the Federal government for not supporting him in his travails with at least three other countries' legal systems, so maybe he takes a selective approach to "state interference".

While not charged with any offence in Sweden, [Assange] fears extradition will open the way for his extradition to the United States on possible espionage or conspiracy charges in retaliation for WikiLeaks' publication of thousands of classified military and diplomatic reports.

Australia will co-operate with any US extradition request every bit as much as Sweden, or the UK for that matter; if not more so.

Mr Assange was sharply critical of both the federal government and opposition, saying there is "very little difference between Liberal and Labor - especially once they get into government. Labor suffers more from cronyism, while the Liberals care more for big business."

Big business thinks about as much of Abbott and Hockey as they do of Gillard and Swan. That said, Assange has detected that Australian politics is in a period of deep disillusionment with the major parties (yes, both of them; Liberals relying on the sky-high polling for their side really are kidding themselves).

This parallels the period in the aftermath of the Whitlam Dismissal from which the Democrats sprang. The Democrats maintained a presence in the Senate and in the upper houses of three states for a generation, until it became clear that they were not the answer to the essential question that they put to the Australian political system. After the GST deal in 1999 the had years to establish an alternative vision for their party, and having failed to do so were pried from the political system as soon as electoral cycles permitted.

He is considering "all possibilities" for his Senate bid, including running as an independent, seeking an alliance with another party, or launching a new party devoted to open government. While support for WikiLeaks is strongest among Greens voters, Mr Assange noted recent polling had shown 53 per cent approval across the spectrum.

Assange has no political organisation on the ground here. The way to build a political organisation is not to threaten to build one, or to boast about your potential to build one, but to actually build one. A year from now the election contest will be more intense than it is now, which is why Assange should be much more advanced than he is in building his support base. I don't doubt that the net "hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him", but there should be more substantial evidence of it by now than there is. The idea that he might be ambivalent about joining the Greens, joining some other existing organisation or building his own from scratch is crazy at this late stage.

The Greens would be mad to take him. They have two core constituencies: people who have devoted their lives to environmental campaigns (e.g. Bob Brown, Christine Milne) or who have risen through the ranks of inner-city community organisations (e.g. almost any other Green politician currently serving), and Assange is neither of these. He offers them little that they lack already: the Greens have all the profile they need, thanks anyway. At the next election the Greens are almost guaranteed to win a seat in Victoria, NSW and Queensland, and may well beat the Liberals in the ACT; the candidates to be elected to those seats have almost certainly been active Greens for years and have shored up considerable support already. For Assange to be starting now without so much as a list of numbers or e-mail addresses of Greens members, and expecting to win their votes for zero quid-pro-quo, is simply ignorant of political realities.

The failure to court existing organisations, however loosely organised, that might support him is similar to Malcolm Turnbull's disdain for republican movements that preceded his own. Assange seems to assume a support organisation will appear in Australia, and his background shows that he will split it when he comes to take charge of it. Contrast him with the slow and patient work that Nick Xenophon has put in building his base in South Australia - after the demise of the Democrats.

He emphasised his record as "a fierce defender of press freedom … even though I have known only too well smear by unethical media".

Assange has chosen to make his life an open book. Others who have been dragged into the spotlight and misrepresented, as referred to in the Finkelstein Inquiry, will struggle with Assange through sheer mutual incomprehension. The only organisation in this country with countervailing power to that of the media is the government; Assange has said that he will not use government power against the media. The media organisations themselves, and many libertarians in the community, will simply delegitimise any attempt to do so with the call of the turkey of irresponsible journalism: Goebbels, Goebbels, Goebbels. The media are only a force for good when their capacity for harm to those with limited ability to fight back is limited; when that capacity is unlimited, as it has been for a generation, those who trumpet the importance of a free press are treated with suspicion (and the idea that only an unregulated media stand between where we are now and tyranny is risible and patronising).

Mr Assange nominated Don Chipp as an inspirational figure with whom he shared "many basic ideas", including the importance of "keeping the bastards honest".

The Democrats got and kept considerable power in Australian houses of review through assiduous committee work, reviewing the minutiae of government as it is practiced from the loftiest ministerial statement to the lowliest clerical busywork, comparing documents that appeared to tell different stories about the same thing, and demanding accountability in ways that even the slipperiest politicians could not escape. Assange has demonstrated no ability in this area, no knowledge, no recognition that it even matters. Would he even turn up to sitting day after sitting day? As with building a support base, this capacity can be developed only through exercising it. The Greens recognise this and they live it.

He also singled out Malcolm Fraser for speaking up for civil liberties and humane treatment for asylum seekers.

Again, the lack of reciprocal support (from someone who knows a thing or two about how politics actually works) is telling.

On global issues, he argued that Australia must take into account the likelihood of "serious decline" of the US over the next 15 to 20 years - indeed "collapse of its superpower status". In this case he supports much greater regional engagement and an increased defence and intelligence budget "to reduce our reliance on the US".

He supports what?

It's a poor journalist who would not call Assange on the fundamental contradiction of calling for greater Australian defence and intelligence activity? Will his overarching commitment to freedom of information not undermine it? Which regional politician/diplomat/military official would say anything of substance to an Australian counterpart, if they suspected that it will be all over the internet within minutes? Is the US alliance not a cost-effective strategy toward these ends? Had Dorling been a journalist rather than a stenographer he (or his even more culpable editors) would have picked that and put the conundrum closer to the heart of this story.

He repeatedly emphasised the importance of protecting small business and individuals from the power of government and large corporations.

Small business, eh? One of the best things that government can do for small business is to pay their invoices on time. In his quest for the big issues of infoliberty, I just can't see Senator Assange getting bogged down with stuff like that. He'd be a nightmare to work for too, with Mirabella levels of staff turnover. His declaration o pecuniary interest would be interesting.

In late-night Senate horsetrading who could trust Assange to deliver? To give one example of a real issue with real impact on both Canberra insiders and the populace at large: pokies. Given that the government has kicked pokies reform into the next term of parliament, it is unclear where Senator Assange would stand: for the freedom of gambling venues to conduct their business as they will, or with weakened individuals who need government to develop a policy position and a structure so that they can deal with their addiction. This is an issue that has been all over the media for quite some time and no political aspirant has any excuse not be be across it. What would he trade for his vote?

On controversial social issues including same-sex marriage and euthanasia, he acknowledged "strong arguments on all sides".

Well, yes. That flash of pragmatism is going to turn off the committed support base Assange doesn't even have.

Former Australian Democrats leader Natasha Stott Despoja last week observed: "There will be many Australians who prefer to side with those who reveal, not conceal, so get ready for a fascinating campaign and watch the scrambling for [Assange's] preferences."

That scramble for preferences involves quid pro quo. Assange is happy to take the quid but less so in giving - or indeed being capable of delivering - the quo. The party hard-heads who "shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste" in conducting preference negotiations will understand this, and the 'scramble' might be less watchable than Stott Despoja might imagine.

There are considerable undercurrents of political support that are capable of propelling candidates into parliament, and which do so in other countries. In Australia, the major parties can and do keep these movements divided:

• Christianists are cleft between right-wing Fred Nile/DLP, who preference the Coalition, and other compassion-based movements that preference the Greens or Labor.
• People who support fewer restrictions on guns and access to national parks are split between the right-wing Shooters and the more even-handed Outdoor Recreation Party.
• Libertarians are split between civil libertarians on the left, economic libertarians on the right. Occasionally there is outreach by the latter to the former, as in this article or the Sex Party, but it is too rare to be politically reliable and too weak to force significant and sustained change. Libertarians are skittish in dealing with government at all, and sustained high-quality engagement is essential to bringing policies into being and keeping them going.
• The most significant and interesting example of this is occurring now with the Greens and rural anti-mining movements. People like Barnaby Joyce are frantically attempting to keep rural people within the Coalition fold who had been disenfranchised by mining rights, while the Greens are seeking to co-opt them. A movement that spans inner-city activists and conservative farmers may well be beyond the current generation of politicians - it is certainly beyond Assange - but it has the best potential to break the two-party system (at the very least, it will almost certainly deny office to Tony Abbott in the short term).

If Assange's last address in Australia was in Victoria, then that's the jurisdiction where he'll have to run:

• The good news is that it is also the jurisdiction most receptive to the sort of small-l liberal message Assange appears to be crafting. The other two jurisdictions that have historically been receptive to liberalism are South Australia (Xenophon has that political market sewn up) and NSW (which no longer offers a constituency for it; conservatives in the ALP and Coalition have chewed liberals up and spat them out and voters have ratified those decisions).
• The bad news is that he will have to win more votes there than in any other jurisdiction (other than NSW) to get elected. Brian Harradine built a long Senate career from Tasmania with the sort of vote that would have consigned him to the fringes in Victoria or some other larger jurisdiction.
• Andrew Landeryou's claim that Assange would take a seat from the Greens is mistaken. Their constituency - inner-city activists and those concerned about environmental issues - would hold off any challenge from Assange. The threat he poses is to the last vestiges of the idea that the Liberal Party represents liberals. It is from that party that he would take votes (and even that assumes he'd run a committed and sensible campaign) because it has lost the ability even to talk respectfully to small-l liberals, let alone encourage them to remain within an abusive relationship and support that revolting oik from Sydney. The only Greens votes that would go to Assange would be from small-l liberals who rely upon the kindness of political strangers.

If Assange were elected as a pure independent, and if he were prevented from seeing out his term (either through failing to attend sitting days as required or through some sort of misadventure) it would be fascinating to see who would take in his place, and how the Victorian/other jurisdiction would come to that decision.

Pinning down Julian Assange in the Senate is a whimsical but impractical idea that in many important respects has already failed. Its appeal and its impossibility makes it the early-21st-century equivalent of subjecting Clancy of the Overflow to do clerical work. I can understand why journalists might toy with the idea but I wish they had given it the examination that a strong application for public office warrants. Buried beneath what is already a dead idea are live issues surrounding freedom of information in a digital age, and those ideas will have their day at the centre of public life; but substantial political forces compel their ideas into the public debate in a way that Assange hasn't and can't. That is why - to coin a phrase - "I doubt he'd suit the office".

Why the Queensland election matters

The Queensland election is to be held on 24 March, and it should be of no interest to anyone who doesn't live there. It matters because it is a better indication of the 2013 Federal election than any other election to be held in this country before then:

• Though NSW sets the country's political norms in may respects, last year's election was a freaky, freaky set of circumstances;
• Victoria was and remains a close-run thing, thanks to Baillieu's failure to entrench himself and devastate his opposition;
• Tasmania is freaky too, with its huge Greens presence, and its almost total absence of scope for economic growth in the twenty-first century (which is why they haven't made much of the NBN or those Harradine-era telco reforms that preceded it), not to mention its wacky voting system;
• Western Australia's government has, in contrast to Victoria, both entrenched itself and devastated its opposition;
• The South Australian election will be held after, not before, 2013; and;
• NT, ACT and other local government elections: too small, too freaky, who cares?

In 2007 Queensland voters took nine seats away from the Coalition to make one of their own Prime Minister, and when his party dumped him in 2010 they gave the Coalition nine seats back. What will they do next time?

The conventional wisdom is that:

• Labor will get hosed;
• the LNP will win with a thumping majority; and
• the LNP will govern Queensland for a long long time.

We'll see. 89 seats, one House; first to make it to 45 wins. Currently it's 51 Labor, 4 independents, 34 LNP.

Labor has been in a long time, 20 of the past 22 years. Labor people make much of the "new faces" in the Bligh cabinet, but hacks are always overrated because they assume that popular appeal is just some mysterious part of public office. Dumping the rural fuel subsidy and privatising state assets are long-overdue injections of the sort of things the rest of Australia went through in the 1980s, which only emphasises the indictment of Labor's supposed political smarts in getting them to the position they are in now. They won't be thrashed because they are not the rabble that NSW Labor was (and is).

Every new initiative by Labor is an implicit criticism of their own experience ("Why didn't you do this 20 years ago?"). An example of this is the response to the flood that devastated Bundaberg in 1991: a report was commissioned into that flood and it recommended that a levee be built. The mayor, Robert Schwarten, entered state politics on the Labor side and even became Minister for Public Works. Schwarten retires at this election and the levee still hasn't been built. At some point over the next two months someone is going to promise to build that levee, and the voters of Bundaberg will be entitled to believe it when they see it.

The polls have favoured the LNP but in an election campaign like this, so what? Voters are still baulking at Newman, Seeney, Nicholls, Langbroek et al actually running the government. The parallel here is with the first week of the 2010 federal campaign, where Australia realised that a vote for the Coalition means Tony Abbott becomes PM!, leading to Labor getting a second chance. If Newman starts getting rattled or snappy on the campaign trail, or if the boofheads from the bush or the LNP machine override him, Queensland state politics could turn very quickly.

I've had my say on the LNP. Graham Young said this morning on Radio National that the directionless and unelectable nature of the LNP was "cure[d]" by the appointment of Campbell Newman as leader, but in an election contest like this it is wishful thinking. If you put a glacée cherry on top of a cowpat it does not become an ice-cream sundae, and it doesn't matter if you have polls that say otherwise. If Newman promises something to Brisbane voters that rural MPs such as Jeff Seeney do not like, they will simply contradict him. If the reverse happens, Newman will be expected to suck it up in the name of "loyalty". Newman hasn't solved all this simply by turning up. Newman will not fare well over a marathon eight weeks. He's used to being obeyed and not used to being challenged.

This is not to say that Labor are being smart in wearing Newman down over the long run; they too will get tired and prone to mistakes. Newman has take a leaf out of the Tony Abbott playbook by bagging Bligh's unpopular fuel subsidy, but he hasn't promised to reinstate it himself. If Bligh does a Beattie-style mea-culpa and reinstates it, the LNP will have a real fight on its hands.

Ashgrove will not vote for Newman if the rural LNP or the party machine get ahead of themselves. If Newman doesn't win Ashgrove the LNP won't win government, and vice versa. Swinging voters in regional Queensland or even other parts of Brisbane won't vote LNP if Newman is too worried about his on seat, which will mean the people of Ashgrove won't vote for him, which will reinforce etc etc and this is how you get a downward LNP spiral - now, does somebody still want to preach to me about polling and how important it is to react to it?

In NSW and Victoria the Greens pose an existential threat to Labor's inner-city heartland. They pose no such threat in Queensland's unicameral state parliament (though next year, the third-placed Labor Senate candidate will have a run for their money against a Green). The LNP face a direct threat from Katter candidates, particularly those rural areas threatened by CSG or other mining. The idea that the LNP won't enter into a coalition with Katteroids is stupid if the alternative is 24 years out of power.

Federal parliament will sit for much of the Queensland campaign. Of course the MSM are filtering it through their Rudd-Gillard prism frame obsession: what they haven't focused on is that Abbott will do about as much campaigning as Gillard (but without the protection of her bodyguards). Where is the LNP state candidate whose vote will go up as a result of The Situation waddling down their street? Sure, there'll be a swing to LNP and Abbott will claim credit for it. The Canberra press gallery will give him that credit, because they're stupid. The arrogant machine running the LNP will pay even less heed to Abbott in the run-up to the next Federal election than they have. Labor will gain ground in Queensland at the Federal election because the LNP will be deaf to opportunities to grow or hold votes from 2010, wounded from blowing a huge poll lead.

Prediction for next Qld Parliament: Labor 40, independents/other 7, LNP 42. Newman will demand the bigger party gets independent support, especially as most non-Labor seats will be "normally" LNP seats anyway. In a close fight you'd have to back Bligh because a close fight would mean the LNP had squandered it.

If the LNP win such a fight they will chafe against a minority government and go down at the next poll, like the NSW Coalition did 1991-95 (and, indeed, like the Borbidge government did; consider that Borbidge was a more stable leader than Newman has proven so far).

Whoever loses the Premiership, Bligh or Newman, will probably run against and beat "Stinky" Gambaro for the federal seat of Brisbane. The LNP will give it to Newman as compensation for their stupidity, because he can't go back to City Hall with his tail between his legs. They will ignore Abbott's pleas for his frontbencher. Gillard would want Bligh in Cabinet and, after she licks her wounds, she'd leave state politics to others to take on such a challenge.

For more measured, sensible and informed contributions, I recommend Antony Green as well as Mark Bahnisch and the LP crew. Suggestions for other sites are not only welcome but actively sought.

Bet against Mark Arbib

Mark Arbib could have made sure that the revolt by leading sports administrators over pokies never happened. A politician of his supposed calibre should have foreseen the political danger with Andrew Wilkie's demand, and should have been working on it every day for the past year.

Someone like Arbib would have heard Wilkie's high-minded position on pokies during last year's negotiations on government and known immediately that it was a dagger at the heart of two of Labor's major sources of funding: pubs and clubs. Aside from unions and property developers, NSW Labor's major funding sources are the alcohol industry and the outlets that sell it. NSW Labor have been extraordinarily generous in handing out pokie licenses to pubs and clubs, which have in turn donated millions of dollars to NSW Labor, and so on. The overlap between members of licensed clubs and those who vote Labor is significant, to say the least.

In the absence of a Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Imposing Limits on Poker Machine Gambling, someone like Arbib should have done the groundwork with pubs and clubs and the gambling treatment lobby, proving himself to be the sort of deft politician that he and others imagine him to be. He couldabeen someone who solves problems rather than someone who runs away from them shrieking "it wasn't me!". He couldabeen indispensable, the sort of power-behind-the-throne that Graham Richardson was after the 1990 election. All gone, and too late now.

Who else could have seen this policy through? All the other factional wide boys were busy with actual policy, in communications or financial planning or whatever. Arbib is the Minister for Sport, for goodness sake: what else does he have to do? The Minister for Sport doesn't re-engineer the economy or comfort the stricken. The Minister for Sport doles out cash to popular sports in the hope that the popularity of that sport might rub off onto the Minister and his party. It isn't like he was organising some nationwide effort to curb obesity or get people engaged in mutual community activities or something.

Arbib's political antennae should have been twitching overtime at an issue like this - if he had any.

Because Arbib has botched it - and he has - the government is bogged down yet again, in an issue that shouldn't be such a big deal. Yet again Arbib can project his political failure onto the leader silly enough to accept his backing. Just as he advised Rudd to drop the ETS, then blamed him for dropping the ETS. Now he can blame Gillard for botching the relationship with sporting clubs and take action against her because clubs are so important to NSW Labor, and mate you can't have a leader who goes against NSW Labor, come on.

It is an understatement to say that AFL identities like Eddie McGuire and Jeff Kennett are highly political. It is also true, both in the fact itself and the understatement, to say that of their counterparts in the NRL. Arbib is the first Federal Sports Minister these guys have openly and blatantly shirtfronted. He must be the first minister in that role to be so blatantly disrespected in living memory. He's finished.

Those sports take millions of dollars from the Federal government, and what does the government get for it? Gillard and Swan, as if they don't have enough to do, are going to have to sweet-talk and bribe a bunch of overstuffed sports administrators because Mark bloody Arbib couldn't execute the little responsibility with which he was entrusted.

Nobody blames the clubs administrators for trying it on, but club members know that's what they're doing: trying it on. Club culture, if you can call it that, is strongest in NSW and Queensland, where Eddie McGuire is just that guy on telly who hypes up an otherwise dull quiz show. In Victoria he has a far more all-pervasive presence, but north of the Murray he is seen as a grifter and if the government stands up to him then respect for the government can only increase.

And the man who helped install Julia Gillard as Prime Minister, former national ALP secretary Karl Bitar is now helping to coordinate the campaign in his new job as a Crown Casino lobbyist.

Up to 25 Labor MPs are also threatening to vote against the plan in Caucus.

Every last one of those 25 are morons. The clubs pump their propaganda into people's homes but only the truly gullible members really believe it. You have nothing to lose, you people: if ever you were ever a bit frustrated with Karl and Mark, this is your chance to grow some spine and save both yourselves and a Labor government (with nothing to lose but, well, Karl and Mark).

Club members tend to be older people, claiming a public space in their club after being slowly squeezed out of workplaces (through retirement, forced or otherwise) and shops (low income earners don't have much to spend, retail is geared toward younger people). The club nearest my place is dominated by Anglo-Saxon people in a way that the surrounding suburb was but is no longer. They look the other way when confronted with the idea that their club, and all its works, is subsidised by those with serious problems. If Mr Wilkie and the government step in with their loss-limit devices, these people will respect them for doing so.

While Kennett displayed rare gutlessness in allowing tobacco advertising for the Grand Prix, the politicians who banned tobacco sponsorship of sport ran rings around a lazy arseclown like Mark Arbib.

The fruits of Mark Arbib's career can be seen in Macquarie Street. State Labor Opposition Leader John Robertson has a smaller caucus than William Holman before World War I, and Holman left that. It's doubtful that anyone in State Parliament who was also a member of the ALP would buy Arbib a cup of coffee. Those who would stoop and build up NSW Labor with worn-out tools have nothing to thank Mark Arbib for, nothing. A bit like the thousands of members of the Green Jobs Corps, really.

People complain about NSW Labor, but if the Keating-Richardson era NSW Right were still running things Arbib would already be on his way to some remote embassy, a cold-eyed killer would be slotted into the Sport portfolio to rearrange things and warn anyone that one stray word about a policy not directly related to sport might be very, very costly in all sorts of ways, and a chastened non-entity would humbly assume the role of NSW Senator.

So-called savvy Canberra watchers didn't blame Gillard for inviting so few new names into the ministry after the last election, and there is an assumption that all Labor backbenchers are dills like John Murphy. Here are seven Labor federal backbenchers for whom I have no particular brief, but of whom each would be a better than Mark Arbib:

• Laurie Ferguson (in this list from sheer pity, admittedly, but still a superior candidate)
• Ed Husic
• Kirsten Livermore
• Senator Gavin Marshall
• Deb O'Neill
• Julie Owens
• Senator Glenn Sterle

Each one of those people would be a perfectly capable Minister for Sport (and as for Aboriginal Employment, and the grab-bag of other areas Arbib is mismanaging, don't get me started).

Journalists fail to realise that there is less likely to be a story in a politician who is shooting his mouth off than there is in one who's being very, very quiet. Mark Arbib is being very, very quiet. Journalists are leaving him alone because they are stupid, and they think that when a politician says 'no comment' then all possible avenues for a story are utterly closed, and oh look is that Chris Pyne turning cartwheels in order to draw attention to, um, himself? There was a time when one could simply say 'that's journalism'; but now the sheer slackness of the press gallery is nothing so much as an argument why at least 90% of them should be boiled in their own piss.

Mark Arbib has failed as a minister. He's had four years, longer than Morris Iemma got as Premier. His powers of quiet suasion no longer exist, if they ever did. He is a power vacuum and should be removed before others are sucked in and wedged fast. He should be removed and replaced with ... well, anyone really. The fact that he can't recognise that his own time is up is all the testament you need to the sheer political failure of Mark Arbib.

Lord of misrule

The Right are in the ascendancy in the Liberal Party at the moment. So long as this remains the case, the Liberal Party will be unelectable. The leader who wrests power from them will lead the Liberal Party to victory over the ALP.

Twice this has happened in NSW:

• In the late 1970s, the Liberals fell into a slough of far-right despond - and yes, a far-right response is always an expression of despair rather than hope. Nick Greiner beat off the far-right within the Liberal Party while at the same time sticking it to a seemingly invincible Labor government. When Labor Premier Barrie Unsworth accused Greiner of being an apologist for Nazis, Greiner tore him a new one (not just because of his experience in the Liberal Party - Greiner had Jewish family members). The far right were weeded out of preselections and Greiner led the Liberals to a sizeable victory.
• In the middle of the last decade, the Liberals fell into a slough of far-right despond - and again, a far-right response is always an expression of despair rather than hope. Barry O'Farrell beat off the far-right within the Liberal Party while at the same time sticking it to a seemingly invincible Labor government. When successive Labor Premiers accused O'Farrell of being an apologist for David Clarke et al, again it was out of hope rather than a sober assessment of the state of the Liberal Party. The far right were almost-but-not-quite weeded out of preselections and O'Farrell led the Liberals to the biggest victory over Labor for a century.

It's best to avoid the cancer of the far-right ascendancy, but it's never best to ignore it when it reveals itself.

Paul Sheehan confuses change with progress:

The mood in the room was buoyant, but the guest of honour was subdued.

Quite so. It's like that point in Power Without Glory where John West looks around at the height of his power and realises that he's surrounded by idiots. Eric Abetz has achieved precisely nothing at a time when the wily manipulation of a minor vote could have seen the downfall of a major piece of legislation, a ministerial career, even the government itself. Cory Bernardi would be the truest of true believers left and will be phoning Minchin daily to receive riding orders. Apart from them there would only have been mouth-breathers like Concetta Fierravanti-Wells and Mitch Fifield, empty vessels who would be tailored to fit with whoever was their party's leader.

Minchin, by not deviating from his core beliefs despite enormous pressure to do so, had orchestrated the dramatic events that led to the end of Turnbull as Liberal leader and the shocking emergence of Tony Abbott as his replacement.

Yep - as long as Old Nick stays true to himself, bugger everyone else. The "events" Minchin orchestrated make a mockery of his claims of "treachery" about the party's Vice Presidents. Old Nick knows treachery when he sees it all right, but he squeals like a stuck pig when it's used against him.

[Minchin] also left Liberal Party politics behind, and he did so without a backward glance.

This is a lie. Minchin has nothing better to do - including care for his family - than become embroiled with who's doing what to whom within the Liberal Party.

As for Sheehan, he was the very sort of mindless drone of a reporter who would have been punted three rounds of Fairfax downsizings ago until he discovered his calling as chronicler of the far right. When what Gerard Henderson calls the "lunar right" overreached (Hanson and her lunges for public funding for elections, the CEC in thrall to American kooks LaRouche, racists, gun losers and tobacco-funded smokers' rights outfits) did Sheehan come back to the furthest right that is sustainable in Australian politics: the right-whinge of the Liberal Party.

Sheehan must have missed Heffernan's heckling of Minchin, which would have made him even more subdued. He also missed the statement by Old Nick that it's time for factionalism to come out of the closet:

Minchin had wanted to say something more controversial in his speech but refrained because he feared it would have been used as ammunition in the heated behind-the-scenes battle for the Liberal Party federal presidency, in which Minchin was intimately involved. He was the numbers man for Alan Stockdale, who on Saturday staved off a challenge by Peter Reith.

Fear is a big part of Old Nick's approach to politics. Minchin's first speech has a few digs at Keating's pigs but otherwise spends all its time bagging Hewson for sticking his neck out over actual policies like tax reform. Nick Minchin was not some lion of conservatism, he was frightened and clueless:

• For factional reasons, Minchin directed the Liberals to run dead in South Australia in the 1990 and 1993 federal elections.
• SA Libs only won the state election in 1992 because Labor had absolutely collapsed: Howard hated Liberal state governments because they directed attention and resources away from him. Minchin engineered the Rudd-like removal of a popular first-term Premier and replaced him with a muppet who duly lost office.
• The last refuge of the weak and clueless politician is to call for bipartisanship, as Minchin did over tax reform: Howard brought about the GST in the face of Labor's most committed opposition and over the dead body of the Democrats.
• Minchin's most substantial reform was to privatise Telstra exactly as Labor wanted, leaving it as a bloated monopoly with all the arrogance of a large corporation and all the complacency of a bureaucratic monopolist.
• Minchin was too scared to tell Howard it was time for him to go in 2006.
• Minchin was too scared to tell Howard WorkChoices was a bad idea (Peter Reith wasn't in Parliament then).
• Minchin could not, for all his factional manoeuvering, get the Liberal Party to state openly that it goes in for all that Ayn Rand crap that environmentalism is just a front for socialism; that you can be in favour of capitalism and consume its products, or you can have a concern for the environment, but not both.
• What he did succeed in doing, however, was getting muppets like Mitch Fifield and Tony Smith to quit the frontbench to undermine Turnbull's negotiations for an emissions trading scheme. He succeeded in making like miserable for Senators with more guts than he ever had (e.g. Sue Boyce and Judith Troeth).
• When Tony Abbott knew that he would be asked questions about industrial relations in last year's elections, Minchin told him to faff, and he did. The Liberal campaign stalled and doubts about Abbott calcified, leading not to a victory but the kind of non-result that frustrates the hell out of Liberals and simply confuses the cattle in the press gallery.
• When Abbott wanted to be flexible in negotiating with independents, Minchin held him back. He remains convinced that independent MHRs can be won over in the way that Senators can be bullied and bamboozled, but the result has been that indepedents regard the very idea of supportng Abbott as like turkeys voting for Christmas.

How this timid man got a reputation for toughness is unclear. Coorey continues:

Otherwise, he would have used his valedictory speech to repeat a long-held view that the Liberal Party should follow Labor and formally adopt factions.

While the moderate and conservative wings of the Liberal Party are often referred to as factions, they are more like personality cults. Minchin, who has been the leading conservative for so many years, believes this to be cancerous because of the personal nature of disputes that erupt.

Formalised factional groupings would enable disputes to be based on ideology rather than personality.

"The Liberal Party should recognise that in an organisation like ours, there are going to be groupings of one sort or another," Minchin told this writer. "We should acknowledge the reality of essentially having a conservative wing and a moderate wing."

There has long been resistance in the Liberal Party to the concept because Liberal philosophy places a premium on individualism. But Minchin has allies, especially on the right.

Especially? Don't you mean exclusively?

Things have come a long way since I was a member. Back then it was the moderates who were well organised in NSW and SA, with enough sway in the other states to pull off the occasional win. The right-whinge denied there was any such thing as factions in the Liberal Party - Bronwyn Bishop denied it so often it became a punchline - they cursed the moderates because they were so damn effective at it, and denied they would ever stoop to it. Now, because the moderates have gone (quiet, or left the party altogether - same thing really) he can finally come out and admit to being the factional hack he always was.

Minchin acknowledges factions have a bad name because of the way they have been abused at times within the ALP, but overall they are a beneficial system for settling policy disputes, communicating backbench sentiment to the leader, and even easing pressure on the leader.

When moderate liberals stood up to Howard over refugees, nobody was more critical than Minchin. He didn't respect their opinions, even though they were very careful to keep it in-house (which Minchin never does when the boot's on the other foot).

"Our party has a problem because it was built around Menzies and it's terribly and unduly leader-oriented," he said. "Leaders do not like structures like this; they want all the authority ... [But] factions can be a check on their egos and abuse of power."

In the case of the right-whinge, factionalism is destructive only. It was a check on Turnbull and the ETS all right, and it has been a prophylactic to all substantial policy development in the Liberal Party since. Nothing has come from the right whinge, and nothing can. Even something so wonkishly non-political like alternatives to the NBN or significant investments in defence force hardware is berated by the right as going against the Legacy of Old Nick (such as it is).

''Howard saw everything I did through the prism of factionalism and every action and statement as the produce of my conservative factional base," Minchin said. ''My views were often discounted as a result.''

This frustrated Minchin because, he said, his advice to Howard was motivated always by what he thought was good politically for the government, rather than being factionally driven.

By having formalised factions, such misunderstanding would have been eliminated.

That is so stupid it does not make sense. Howard discounted Minchin because he was a factional hack and if factionalism were formalised, he wouldn't have been discounted? Stuff that. More likely, Minchin pooh-poohed every idea Howard ever had so that when Minchin blubbered that it was all too hard and wanted to slink back to Adelaide and do nothing with his life, Howard chose damn-the-torpedoes-and-full-steam-ahead.

It takes a complete ignorance of politics to classify Peter Reith as a moderate: I'm surprised he hasn't sued the lazier members of the press gallery who've described him thus. It is fair to say, however, that Reith was tough enough to take the rough-and-tumble of political debate and that he did not shut up when Minchin got all jittery about Controversy. Every time Reith opened his mouth you can imagine Minchin wringing his hands and fretting and taking soundings from his buddies in the ALP who told him what his attitude should be. The ructions of this week over the Liberal Presidency go way back: as a conservative leader, Minchin could handle a moribund pensioner like Alan Stockdale, but not the bumptious Reith.

The fact that Tony Abbott felt that he'd "better" vote for Stockdale and wave his vote around like some gutless Paul Howes acolyte shows that he's not the guy to rise above the factionalism that got him where he is. I'm trying to remember the last Opposition Leader who was in thrall to his own chief of staff and her husband. Showing your vote is the sort of thing that happens in nakedly factional organisations: as personal behaviour within the polite circles of the Liberal Party goes, it's about as indecent as dropping your pants. It shows why Minchin's factionalism dream just won't fly, and the idea of a closed inner-party will only repel prospective members. Even Niki Savva made the startling admission that Abbott can't make the transition from stuntman to statesman.

Eventually, the Liberal Party will grow deeply weary of opposition. They will start to come up with concrete alternative ideas to those being put by the Labor government, and will tire of the insistence of happy-little-Minchinites that no policy is good policy. They may even come up with ideas that appeal to those who have voted Liberal in the past and are open to doing so again; people who today are appalled at Tony Abbott and want him well away from the levers of government.

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi, who never voted Liberal in his life

Yeah, but first you've got to get something for which to fight. Then you have to learn how to fight.

Some good people will cop it in the neck during the dark times of the right-whinge ascendancy, but eventually there will be some Liberals will stand up and say enough. That battle is not yet joined, however. Turnbull lacks the organisational nous and the patience to hunt down Minchinites and root them out. Joe Hockey has both those qualities but too few others to win a drawn-out battle and drag the party to government. It won't even begin until the Liberals lose the next election (and I don't care what today's polls say, they will).

Black is white in the red room

The press gallery are usually rubbish at reporting events in the Senate.

Legislation can and does come out of the Senate changed utterly, with far-reaching changes when measures are enacted and it takes months for the journosphere to catch up. This happens parliament after parliament, so let's not have more nonsense about the current configuration. They place too much focus on briefings from the major parties and so-called "parliamentary theatre" in the House, ignoring minor parties or consigning them to the fringes. Then, when the issue (a piece of legislation, or a subject facing committee scrutiny) goes to the Senate, the entire journosphere just throws up its hands as though anything could happen, as though it hadn't actually listened and done its job in studying the tectonics of the Senate. Asking journos to provide some understanding how the Senate might react given a particular set of circumstances is real your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine stuff, a cop-out for so-called insiders. The idea that legislation and the issues that attend them disappear behind some black screen and reappear in changed form is one of the absurd pantomimes that people just have to love put up with, apparently.

The idea that the 2010 election was tantalisingly close for the Liberals is about to be put to the test starkly exposed. During 2005-08 the Coalition had a majority in the Senate. They lost it in 2008-11, having to rely on former Liberal Nick Xenophon and nincompoop Stephen Fielding - but oh wait, they were in opposition by then and they didn't set the legislative agenda any more, nor did they slow down anything that the supposedly vulnerable Gillard government wanted to do.

In less than three weeks, the Coalition will go backwards again. The numbers will stack up as follows:

34 Coalition
31 ALP
9 Green
1 Xenophon
1 DLP

76 TOTAL (minimum number needed for a majority: 39)

Given that Abetz has been utterly useless at tipping a knife-edge parliament to the favour of his party, where is he going to get five votes from?

Only Niki Savva can see this as a positive for a party that had its head handed to it at two elections now. The arguments she puts forward require you to be the most giddy Coalition booster with no sense of history (indispensible for a conservative in normal times), and no sense about Australian politics generally.

[DLP Senator-elect] Madigan is acutely conscious of his party's place in Australian political history. He is equally conscious of the part he could play in shaping events in the future.

It's a pity that Savva isn't. Her article assumes that Madigan is some sort of in-the-bag vote for the Coalition. Madigan beat an actual member of the Coalition, Julian McGauran, to take his seat in the Senate - yes, McGauran was a waste of skin, but if you like that sort of thing he was an actual Coalition vote rather than a maybe.

The Green-Labor alliance - what brings them together, what drives them apart - is the fascinating story of the coming two years. It is the Senate which will determine the configuration of government in the House, and not the other way around. Press gallery journos waiting for independent MHRs to align with Abbott are the same lazy lumps who predicted breathlessly that Costello would definitely challenge Howard, definitely, later this week or early next week, definitely ...

Just because the DLP kept the Liberals in office during the 1950s does not mean they are some sort of lucky charm for the prospects of conservative government today. When Stephen Fielding was elected, it was interpreted by the less cogent members of the press gallery as some sort of vindication of Howard's picket-fences-and-family image imported from the US Republicans. Madigan is replacing Fielding, and rather than being the titan of Savva's dreams he is likely to be every bit the chucklehead Fielding has been and is. On what is arguably the greatest challenge of our time, the Senator-elect upon whom Savva places so much faith is just as wishy-washy as Fielding:

Madigan says he believes in climate change, but does not necessarily believe it is man-made, and is not convinced a tax will fix it.

That sounds very much like he would vote against it, and when I put that to him in a phone interview a few days ago, his reply was: "At this point I am a no."

On that basis, Savva thinks Madigan is some sort of loyal footsoldier of the right. It's almost like she doesn't care what else he thinks. Unlike his co-religionist Tony Abbott, Madigan is more likely to push traditional Catholic preoccupations of abortion, euthanasia etc. His views on drug treatment would be shunned by both major parties.

According to party strategists, if Abbott wins government, and replicates the 2004 Senate result for the Coalition ...

This time - and any "strategist" worth their salt should know this - the boofhead is leading the Liberals. All Labor has to do is remind voters what happened last time the Liberals got control of the Senate: a giddy ride to the peak of hubris, followed by a death-plunge at the hands of the ALP.

I'd love to say that Savva was being silly in pursuit of her rosy scenario, but there is a real prospect that the carbon tax and MRRT won't go through. In that case, Gillard and Labor are finished.

With that number, plus the support of Madigan and Xenophon it could, if it sticks to its pledge, repeal the Gillard tax.

If if if if if if if if.

Xenophon, a climate change believer, is not swept up by the government's carbon pricing proposals, preferring a different model ...

Another case of Xenophon backing himself into a corner - neither major party supports that idea, so he can trade it away in return for - um, what? So that he can vote for an expensive re-realignment of the country's fiscal mechanisms? Over to you, journalists.

As well as touring the farms, [Madigan] talks to old people who while away hours on bitterly cold days in shopping malls because they can't afford to keep the heating on at home, so he is anxious not to sign up to anything that would make life even harder for them.

"I very much deal in facts and tangible things," he says.

"If there is no benefit firstly for people and secondly for the environment ... there has to be a tangible benefit. I want to enhance people's lives."

Madigan could make the DLP relevant again for the first time since Gough Whitlam wiped the party out at the 1974 double-dissolution election, and he knows it.

This is a man who would not know where to start with facts and tangible things. He seriously thinks a carbon tax is "a tax on life", and the practicalities of terminating pregnancies conceived in rape and incest simply pass him by. It's one thing to help the poor and elderly in this country, but that does not mean the country is run for their benefit. Relevance be damned.

Like Bob Katter, Madigan is a candidate for an Australia that has passed but which the poor and old can't and won't accept has gone forever. Savva may think it's smart politics trying to rope such people into the Coalition, heightening the case for the Coalition to turn its back on the future and campaign for a redux of 2006, but it won't serve the interests of the Coalition at all. Madigan will be as much help as hindrance to the Coalition, and they are in for a spell where their impotence gives them the excuse for ineffectiveness they have so far lacked.

... the passing of the balance of power in the Senate to the Greens.

The reason the Liberals look forward to it is because it will, even more than previously, cement the view in the minds of voters that Labor is beholden to the Greens.

The manager of opposition business in the Senate, the ever-alert Mitch Fifield, promises to press home that point at every opportunity.

Mitch Fifield is responsible for nobbling Jason Wood in LaTrobe in what is already the Liberals' worst state on the mainland. Please understand this: there would be a Liberal government were it not for Mitch bloody Fifield.

Keep in mind also that Labor used to "press home" that Menzies was beholden to the DLP. This didn't do either of the latter any harm at all, and many Labor MPs went home rather than to the House as a result. For all the unpopularity of Gillard at the moment, nobody is going to believe Senator Fifield over her.

Yet, even so, press gallery drones will continue quoting Abetz and Fifield as "senior strategists" and treating each new failure as an aberration. The House will be treated as a hotbed of intrigue while the pictures reveal it as a lame set-piece rebounding to the Coalition's discredit. Meanwhile, in the Senate, where the real action is, the press gallery will write it off as wacky and unknowable. We have been poorly served by the press gallery in this parliament and this will not improve any time soon. In 2010 voters voted despite the press gallery and there is every indication that they/we will do so again. If the people vote against the press gallery, sooner or later the press gallery will be out of a job.

In the red room

(This column comes to you after reading too much of The Australian and Paul Sheehan, and listening to more Angry Twerps on Radio than is wise.)

Here at the Politically Homeless Institute, we name the fifth column that is infesting the Liberal Party, a bunch of saboteurs whose every word and deed seems to entrench Labor and the Greens forever!

You know who I'm talking about. That bunch of recalcitrants just seem to drain every skerrick of credibility from the Liberals and Nationals as a potential government.

The Senators.

You may think Senators are harmless enough, beavering away at their committees and so on, but oh no - they clearly have it in for Tony Abbott and are doing all they can to stop him from becoming Prime Minister. Some may say they are doing more than Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan put together to this end.

Consider the evidence:

• Barnaby Joyce. Enough said? Perhaps. You may as well do vox-pops in the street as ask Senator Joyce about matters of high public expenditure. Those smart-alec journalists posing questions about seasonally-adjusted percentages, Barnaby charges through like a bull in a china-shop, and the china-shop owner is made to look stupid for hosting the bull in the first place. The very idea that this man is a byelection from becoming a minister must fill public servants in Canberra with utter dread.


• David Bushby. His catty remark to Penny Wong was flung straight back into his face.


• Mary Jo Fisher. All I can say is, it's astounding ...


• Cory Bernardi. Democracy disgusts him.


• Mitch Fifield. Euthanased a Liberal MP in a marginal seat in a state where Liberals are few and getting fewer, at an election which might have been one for the Liberals had that MP kept his seat. Top effort, Mitch!


• Russell Trood. The only Liberal who knows anything about foreign policy, and they're getting rid of him. By contrast, Ron Boswell has been there since Labor split and he's learnt bugger-all about anything.


• Michael Ronaldson. Failed in the House of Reps.


• No Liberal seats at all in the Reps, not even in a tight election - but my goodness, don't the Tasmanian Libs stack the Senate with some talent!


• Same with the Vics - Costello is gone, so the Senate has become a retirement home for his former staff who couldn't cut it in the House or not nasty enough for The Australian.


• Gary Humphries. Only has to win one of two seats, and barely manages to do that (too early to put him on deathwatch?).


• George Brandis. As smug as Turnbull or Costello but without a single achievement to sustain him in the stratosphere in which his ego cruises.


• Bill Heffernan, Eric Abetz, Matthias Cormann - take your pick.

The Senate is meant to be the House of Review, but these clowns make it a House of Revue. One of them is even called Wacka.

In a tight parliament they have not stopped, or even slowed down, one single piece of legislation. Not one. All they do is look "mean and tricky" at committees where they are rude to public servants (who increasingly give their own back). Eric Abetz must be the most useless Senate Leader of any party since Federation. He has nothing, nothing to show for his efforts but Godwin bloody Grech.

You almost feel sorry for Tony Abbott in dealing with such people, but he has a lucky break: we are into the final month for six of them, and next month they get two newbies! Fresh blood ... well, they are both from South Australia: one of them is from the most famous families in Dusttown or wherever, and the other one is another retread from the Reps who's been unable to get a job since 2007 in a boom economy.

Coalition Senators. Listen to them bleat about Labor spending $11.79 on whatever, and wonder whether any one of them would be worth the price of their food.

Not one of them came to this country on a boat.