Grand or compact

Australians who believe in the union movement believe that if you're worried about losing your job, or working harder for lesser pay and conditions, then you should join your union. If you have to join the union which Paul Howes is operating under the Ludwig franchise, then all he wants is a bit of shoosh from the likes of you and to enjoy the kind of all-care-no-responsibility status union leaders had a generation ago.

This speech makes little sense unless you see it as a precursor for the royal commission into trade union governance and corruption. It signifies little thought on the part of the individual from whose mouth it comes, little sense that he understands the nation into whose politics he thrusts himself, and little sense that he has sought to bring others with him - odd for an avowed unionist.

After a week-and-a-half of front page allegations of corruption in some unions there are things that need to be said - and said in the strongest possible terms.

Any union official proven to be engaged in corrupt or criminal behaviour is a traitor.

The fact that he started his speech with this is puzzling. He opened by talking about vision, and rather than making such a vision rooted in his movement's long history he instead switched to headlines from the preceding two weeks. Union corruption has been going on for more than a week-and-a-half, and the fact that it has hit the media is the least of it. The CFMEU, target of recent allegations, are factional opponents of Howes'. How he expected to rise above the muck with a few factional jabs is unclear.

Howes could have referred to the Health Services Union, whose complicated affairs are playing out in an interesting way. Howes himself referred later to corruption and clean-ups in the AWU, matters which were dealt with by others before he became involved. Making Howes out to be Abbott's patsy doesn't make you a conspiracy theorist: it means you understand how politics works, and how people like Howes operate.

Factional goading, then invoking his own irrelevance: a peculiar model of leadership.

In doing this we should be under no illusion – those who act dishonestly from within the union movement are worse than any crook boss.

I would have been impressed with Paul Howes had he gone to Maules Creek and said to John Maitland, Ian Macdonald and/or Eddie Obeid that, even though their proposals would have employed plenty of AWU members, it was all done dishonestly and he and his union weren't going to be part of it. That didn't happen.

I would have been impressed with Paul Howes had he leant across the luncheon table to Michael Williamson and said: this bullshit has to stop. It has to stop today, and if you dare cry "what do you mean?", I'm going to smack you. That didn't happen, so the idea of Howes as white knight, the guy with the answers has to be seen in that light.

There is no place for you in any corner of our movement.

Clearly though, there has been and there is. Howes, a senior official in both the ALP and ACTU, did very little - too little - to set and enforce standards within the union movement. Why such a person might be considered a great leader in such a movement is unclear. Why he would cheer on a wide-ranging inquiry from a hostile government, and do so a matter of days before a crucial by-election, is unclear - especially if you regard Howes highly as a savvy political operative.

The truth is, today we are facing a real jobs crisis.

This country has shed 130,000 jobs in manufacturing alone since the GFC. Tens of thousands more lie just around the corner.

Indeed, 3000 more lie down the road in Shepparton.

Over my seven years as National Secretary I've travelled to many good factories in deep strife.

People trying to work out a solution at SPC Ardmona would have to look at those words and say: thanks for nothing, Howes. Tooling around the country, casting an eye over closing factories, Howes looks at their labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.

Some will tell you that our industrial relations system is dragging us down.

And I won't be popular amongst my friends in the labour movement for saying this - but I agree.

When so few employees are members of unions, this is absurd.

Productivity decisions are matters for management. Holden, Ford and Toyota built cars that too few wanted to buy at the price. Healthy little human beans got their sustenance from sources other than SPC. Department stores don't engage their staff, staff don't engage customers, customers shun the stores, while Paul Howes hovers above, understanding little of what he sees. Labour market decisions, and big old-school negotiations of the type Howes identifies as his desired model, are irrelevant to the dopey decisions that have seen productivity stagnate and decline.

Labour market policy is a core pillar of the national economy. It's as critical as monetary policy and trade policy ...

Yet can you imagine what would happen if other key pillars of economic policy were being knocked down and rebuilt so often?

Imagine re-regulating the interest rates regime on a three-year election cycle. Can you picture what that would do to business and household confidence?

It would create disastrous instability. We'd all be crying for it to end.

Wait until Howes finds out that the Reserve Bank board actually reviews interest rates every month. Wait until he finds out that the exchange rate for the Australian dollar against other countries goes up and down several times a second. The idea that he should be puzzled at workplace relations being subject to political debate is the sign of someone who doesn't understand politics, or is trying to misrepresent it.

Business senses an opportunity whenever the Coalition takes office to shift all the rules in its favour.

Unions do the same when Labor gets in. And ultimately no one gets anywhere.

No one? Anywhere? This country has enjoyed almost 23 years of continuous economic growth, during which the federal government has changed four times. Unemployment is less than six percent. Most tellingly for Howes and his warmed-over Resolution of Conflict, industrial disputes are fewer and shorter than they have been since the Accord.

It's become very fashionable of late to praise the Accord of thirty years ago.

Even those who railed against it at the time, now acknowledge it as the critical turning point in the nation's economic history.

What was right for a previous time is not necessarily right for today. Crucially, Howes never makes the case, invoking nothing beyond the kind of hippie-style can't-we-all-get-along sentiment that he decries in the Greens.

Given that he wants a system that transcends what's "fashionable", does he think that description commends the Accord to serious consideration?

A Grand Compact in which business, unions and government all work out a deal that we all agree to live with for the long haul.

Which businesses? Why unions, given their failure to appeal to workers (not to mention their governance issues)? Which government?

On top of this, the government's criticisms of workplace relations practices at the car manufacturers and SPC Ardmona - which Howes is reinforcing - fails for two reasons:

• No matter what arrangement employers and workers (union-represented or not) hammer out, some smart-alec from Canberra is going to pick out some detail and make all concerned look like they don't know what they're doing. No agreement, no compact, can survive wise-after-the-event posturings from those who weren't involved and who have no real stake in the success or failure of that workplace.
• This government has a trust issue over the question of jobs. It says it wants high-paying, secure jobs for Australian workers. In practice it seems unconcerned and disinterested when such jobs are abolished. Its members complain that existing jobs pay "too much" when they often fail to sustain their occupants at a level commensurate with this country's social norms and expectations. Howes is stupid to buy into that dilemma while talking about solutions.

Howes is part of the problem.

A Grand Compact that generates certainty and thus confidence.

This would breed the very kind of anti-competitive environment that the Accord existed to resolve, the mutual complacency that mired Australia in the 1970s at the end of another long boom.

That establishes investing in a workforce as a virtue and not a cost.

Where productivity is a shared responsibility not someone else's job.

Where on the job training and development and career planning are the norm.

Now this is a fine sentiment, well articulated but not at all well considered. This is where Howes needed to engage with ideas about the future of work, the very value of human labour in the twenty-first century. Instead, someone like Kate Carruthers can genuinely be said to have thought more carefully and intelligently about such issues than someone who is supposedly a national leader for Australia's working people. It's no surprise that Howes got more publicity than Carruthers, but journalists - people who have faced the very questions of human work and its value that Carruthers raises - have no excuse for giving Howes a free pass for his banalities.

Howes is right to say that these are big and important issues; he is wrong to advance non-ideas that mention but fail to address them. He is wrong to be lauded by journalists as though he had succeeded in grappling with big and important issues, when he has so clearly failed.

We naively believed that everyone being a little bit unhappy with the outcome, delivered the compromise that was sought.

It turns out we were wrong.

So how could things be different with a Grand Compact? Well, obviously, we have a different climate now.

Yes, and the political 'climate' changes all the time, which means that any kind of compact is going to be a product of 'climate' and will inevitably change when the climate changes again. The government has the desire to keep itself in office but does not have what it takes to maintain policy stability. Business does not have what it takes to maintain its market position in a globally competitive market, let alone grow it. Unions represent few workers, and fewer still well or convincingly. All we have is the climate, and the ability to deal with it as best we can.

The idea of a "Grand Compact" is now revealed as a hollow fraud, a gobbet of windbaggery, an admission that it does not and cannot work in any reality beyond the walls of the National Press Club. Did the wait staff and cleaners share a laugh at these contradictory and vapid ideas? Did the journalists not ask them, or fail to consider what such a Grand Compact might mean to what remains of their own industry?

The absence of social capital in our industrial relations system is something of an Australian anomaly – because strong social capital is actually what drives our success in most other areas.

Precisely because unrepresentative swill like Howes seek to abrogate the rights of the system to themselves, I would suggest. A clubby, behind-closed-doors approach of the type Howes would like would diminish social capital rather than raise it.

We need to talk more about 'why Labor', rather than 'how Labor'

This implies that Labor needs to justify its own existence rather than assume a place at the table as of right. It goes against and undermines the rest of the guff about the Grand Compact.

Labor's sole purpose is not to claw back the Lodge in the most expedient way and then jealously guard it for as long as possible.

It wasn't right for the last six years – and it is not right now for an Opposition to death ride the Government of Australia.

Wait, but you said it was. What changed? Are you a weathervane too, like Tony Abbott?

They should understand a lurch back to WorkChoices-style conditions – is nothing but a get-rich-quick scheme.

But a Grand Compact is a golden long-term investment.

Workchoices failed because nobody was making any money from it. As to Howes' proposal for "a golden long-term investment", it is far from clear who (beyond the few participants) would reap the dividends.

But the point is we can't force people into this - we need to take them with us. A Grand Compact can only be driven through the art of persuasion.

Given the inability of Howes and other members of the political class to take people with them, and build political capital, this key phrase is why this proposal is dead in the water. It's why Jonathan Green is wrong to insist on hope that such pie-in-the-sky might afford any kind of sustenance to anyone other than Howes; he may as well ask Tony Abbott to wait at Cheviot Beach until Harold Holt finally emerges from the surf. Green might criticise the form of the criticism against Howes, but the idea that Howes is pulling a stunt in his own interests with indifference to those of others is sound - more soundly based than Green's insistence on good manners to foster what is at best an ill-considered and impracticable proposal, at worst a feeble and much-hyped con.

Howes' political base does not consist of the AWU's membership. It consists of Bill Ludwig and the journalists who report on politics. For instance, Howes well and truly pulled the wool over the eyes of these monkeys:

Union boss Paul Howes has dramatically undermined Bill Shorten's depiction of the Abbott government as anti-worker, proposing unions enter into a new partnership with the Coalition and business to rein in high wages and lift productivity.

Has there ever been an instance where Shorten and Howes disagreed, and Howes prevailed? No. Therefore this lightweight cannot be said to have undermined anyone or anything. When Shorten says:

Mr Shorten on Thursday again declined to directly criticise Mr Howes, but suggested that it was entertaining a "fantasy" if he thought a Bob Hawke-style Accord could be struct between unions and the Abbott government.

"I am not going to engage in some fantasy that Tony Abbott is going to change his spots," Mr Shorten told ABC radio.

Mr Shorten said that he supported consensus on workplace relations.

"It's what I've done for 25 years," the former union leader said. "Do you seriously believe that Tony Abbott is interested in working with trade unions?"

No, but Howes does:

I don't believe for a second that the Abbott Government is un-turnable on industrial relations.

Despite the more cartoonish portrayals, the Prime Minister is far more a politician than he is an ideologue.

I don't believe that the All Blacks are unbeatable in rugby, but I concede that I'm not the guy to beat them. Howes' stated beliefs are one thing, but his confidence in his ability to turn this government is absolutely misplaced. Shorten knows Abbott better than Howes does. Shorten knows workplace relations better than Howes does. Hell, Shorten knows Howes' job and his union better than Howes does. Memo to Kenny and Massola: whenever Shorten disagrees with Howes, Howes is wrong.

It's a standard trick from the US Republicans to attack your opponent on their strongest suit. The Liberals in Australia tend to attack Labor where they feel most insecure. When Pyne accuses Shorten of dancing to the unions' tune, we see that Shorten is a more substantial figure in the union movement than Pyne or Abbott are with business.

Those who keep faith with Howes will be further dismayed once they realise that his statements are not positions of principle, but contrarian look-at-me poses. Howes' speech is Labor's version of Cory Bernardi's book. If Howes is so powerful, why can't he bring other leading unionists with him? Where is the Labor politician who agrees with Howes' promise to the extent that Howes does, who can cultivate the loyalty that Michael O'Brien showed to Don Farrell? At least Bernardi knows how to win a Senate seat.

To talk Howes up is to fail to understand politics, and if you don't understand politics then what are you doing in the press gallery?

To his credit, Mark Skulley isn't a press gallery journalist but here he demonstrates some of the weaknesses of that debased form of journalism. First, the straw man of McTernan was a weak hook for that article. Second, if you're going to talk about "conspiracy theorists", let's look at this:

Howes wrote an inside account of the 2010 election, Confessions of a Faceless Man, which gives an insight into his preparedness to shake things up, even on his own side. As prime minister, Rudd was asked by the Liberal, Christopher Pyne, to comment on criticism of Labor’s asylum seeker policies by Howes.

The book recounts how Howes was affronted that Rudd told parliament that he had not read the comments: “It was a humiliating blow. I hadn’t been expecting him to agree with me, but to dismiss my views out of hand because they didn’t suit his own thinking was typical of Rudd’s attitude to those around him in the wider labour movement.”

Pyne was shadow minister for education. It's entirely possible that Howes put Pyne up to that question - and before you start, see Kerry-Anne Walsh's The Stalking of Julia Gillard for an example of the Opposition asking Rudd, as Foreign Minister, to bag Prime Minister Gillard under the guise of a cross-party Dorothy Dixer. Howes' profession at being shocked, shocked at Rudd's disloyalty ought not be taken at face value.

Saying Howes is the sort of person who'd set up a Liberal to make a Labor PM look bad, and that said PM could see through it and give Howes a taste of his own treatment, doesn't make you a conspiracy theorist; it shows you understand how politics works. If you understand how politics works you are better able to comment on it than someone who gets starry-eyed about a set-piece confection at the National Press Club.

But the boss of Australia’s biggest union, Joe de Bruyn, has rejected Howes’s idea of a grand compact as “fanciful and naïve”.

Such an assessment must surely colour Howes' speech, Howes' judgment, and Howes himself.

But Hawke built consensus, while Howes strikes out on his own in often dramatic ways.

It's a basic political skill to bring others along with you. Any fool can strike out on his own in often dramatic ways. Building consensus and bringing people with you is essential to the realisation of a 'Grand Compact'; striking out on your own less so.

But some of the points Howes made in the speech this week were praised by commentators as varied as Alan Kohler, Jonathan Green and former Liberal strongman Peter Reith, who reckoned he was setting himself up as a potential Labor leader “with backbone”.

None of those people will help Howes win a seat or raise a cent to help any campaign he might run. When he was as old as Howes is now, Bob Hawke was an endorsed Labor candidate for Parliament. Howes is no closer to realising any dreams he might have in that direction, no closer to learning the lessons that Hawke learned at that unsuccessful tilt, and it is unlikely that the Liberals would fear Howes anything like as much as their forebears did Hawke.

[Howes] still evidently enjoys the occasional speech – and has really stirred the possum this time.

He has done nothing of any lasting value. Howes' speech can be dismissed in three words: wanker's gonna wank. A really significant speech would have seen union, business and government leaders consulted beforehand and offer real support, evidence of real heft on Howes' part that is clearly lacking. Plenty of big news (e.g. the Toyota shutdown, the failure of the dire budget predictions last year, this government's palpable fear of regional electorates) went begging because journos got sucked into this bullshit by someone with a big mouth but little actual clout.

Is Australia's future grand or compact? It can't be both because Howes, like his brother-from-another-mother Tony Abbott, hasn't thought through the issues. He can't help us with the policies and the social capital necessary to realise a bright and prosperous future. He can't have a bright and prosperous future at our expense, like Tony Abbott has. When journalist foist a media tart upon the rest of us they foster resentment of not only the tart, but the media. Get your hand off it Howes, wake up to yourselves journalists, tell us what politics is really about and enough with the half-baked sideshows.

The empty mantle

The Liberal Party hasn't started 2013 at all well.

When your mainstream media coverage is stuck on an issue that makes people squirm (Peta Credlin's fertility) within a wider theme that is death for your side of politics (women: Tony Abbott just doesn't get them, but his side of politics wants him to be Prime Minister anyway), you need to change the subject fast. The Liberals chose the wrong guy (Josh Frydenberg) and the wrong subject (workplace relations).

Here's the article by Josh with a warm-up routine by David Crowe. You can read both for free by copying the headlines into Google.

First to Crowe. When Michael Stutchbury left The Australian he took a few acolytes with him, which didn't quite create a vacuum but did result in the backwash that swept Crowe into that organ (whether Fairfax or News benefitted least from that particular exchange is a debate fit only for pubs in Surry Hills or Pyrmont; even blogs have higher standards than that). Paul Kelly used to hold the title that Crowe now occupies, and the very idea of him writing a cloying intro for an Opposition backbencher would have seen him crack the mother of all tantrums.

TONY Abbott is being urged by his allies to commit to major workplace reform and encourage the use of individual agreements, as the Coalition's internal debate on the key election issue escalates despite fears of a political backlash.

It is not escalating. Liberal MPs are in their electorates, spending time with the families for whom they will later leave politics to spend more time. They are being asked can they really win with that man, and have run out of Chrissy comestibles onto which the conversation can be deflected.

Howard government adviser and rising Liberal MP Josh Frydenberg has reignited the industrial relations debate by calling for a crackdown on union power as well as changes to make it easier for employers and their staff to use individual contracts instead of union awards.

He's reignited nothing. As we'll see, Josh is proposing nothing that hasn't been chewed over for much of the past seven or so years. Crowe is wrong to make out that Frydenberg is shifting the debate, or adding anything nearly so substantial to constitute "ignition".

The Opposition Leader has raised hopes for a more assertive Coalition stance on industrial relations by vowing to release detailed policies early in the year, as business leaders seek a clear commitment from the Coalition to dismantle elements of Labor's regime.

Less than a fortnight into the year is pretty early, and to be fair to Abbott he is serving the community to a far greater extent as a volunteer firefighter than he has or even can by applying his talents and experience as a politician. Frydenberg isn't jumping the gun, as Crowe is trying to make out. He is part of the strategy of taking up media space without saying anything.

... Mr Frydenberg is stepping up the case for major reform by citing a "productivity slump" and a spike in workplace disputes as proof that the Fair Work regime has failed to deliver on Labor's promises.

He's not stepping up anything, he's reiterating what has been said before. Crowe is being cute with language here. It's the policy of his paper that Australia's overall productivity has flatlined since WorkChoices was abolished, even though economists find it hard to prove. Can't wait to read the article where Josh clearly establishes that the increase in disputes is directly attributable to the legislation.

Mr Frydenberg marks out three reform targets including scaling back unfair dismissal laws, which currently apply to employers with 15 or more staff. While [he] does not nominate an alternative threshold, some within the Coalition favour an increase to 20 or 25 staff so that more small businesses would gain exemptions from the unfair dismissal laws.

Why does he not nominate an alternative threshold? Why have others done so without putting their names to it? Surely this is part of the broader policy debate? Why can't the Liberals have a debate any more?

Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox assailed the Fair Work regime last year in a speech that singled out IFAs for criticism on the grounds they had "promised so much but delivered so little".

Mr Willox said employers and employees could not rely on IFAs because the current rules meant either side of an agreement could unilaterally terminate the IFA with only 28 days' notice.

The government's review of the Fair Work laws last year suggested the period be extended to 90 days but Mr Willox said companies and their staff needed a more secure arrangement with terms of up to four years.

This is poor criticism: do you want flexibility, or comfort and security? Many commercial contracts have terms of less than 28 days. News Ltd could sack David Crowe and have him off their premises in far less time than that. If you want comfort and security offer permanent employment, or enter into a commercial arrangement beyond the Fair Work Act. Why criticise a piece of legislation for being too flexible, then complaining it isn't flexible enough? Rather than just transcribed Willox's words Crowe should have questioned him on it, like a journalist would.

Mr Ciobo urged Mr Abbott last year to back the restoration of individual employment contracts like the Australian Workplace Agreements used in the Howard government's Work Choices.

Other MPs are wary of doing so as Labor seizes on talk of individual agreements to claim an Abbott government would bring back Work Choices and AWAs, which were widely criticised in the 2007 election campaign for cutting working conditions.

In a sign of the internal differences, opposition Treasury spokesman Joe Hockey declared last November that workplace reform was not a Coalition priority.

Bullshit.

Howard offered Joe Hockey the Faustian bargain whereby he could get into Cabinet only if he put together a piece of workplace relations legislation that was flexible only for employers, but which didn't appear that way and enabled the then-government to fudge electorally unappealling aspects of it. Hockey seized the opportunity and produced a piece of legislation every bit as long and convoluted as the Corporations Act, and which also brought on the biggest labour-movement scare campaign in recent history.

It isn't quite fair to blame Hockey for single-handedly losing the 2007 election for his side of politics. He should, however, have stood up to Howard and demanded some flexibility, and he had a duty to steer the party away from those rocks in debates since that time. The idea that the Coalition would have nothing to say on workplace reform is garbage - particularly as the leader said that there would be a whole new policy early this year, meaning that it is in fact a priority at the very time Hockey claimed it wasn't.

Mr Frydenberg has spoken consistently on the need for workplace reform but insisted last night that he was not proposing a return to the Howard government's IR regime.

Mr Frydenberg said his call for changes to the IFAs did not amount to reinstating a key element of Work Choices.

"It's about tweaking existing provisions in the Fair Work Act to ensure that they work more effectively for both employer and employee, so they're a more attractive option than is currently the case because they're under-utilised," he said.

Ah, so Josh doesn't want to "ignite", he just wants to "tweak". Why didn't you say so, David? LIBERAL MP BASICALLY HAPPY WITH LABOR WORKPLACE LAWS, CALLS FOR TWEAKING would be more accurate than exciting, but accuracy is an under-appreciated and greatly missed feature of newspapers today.

Extending the timeframe of the IFAs, along the lines proposed by Mr Willox from AI Group, was a serious issue that needed to be looked at, Mr Frydenberg said.

What non-committal tosh. Crowe should have called Frydenberg on that.

Mr Frydenberg, who worked as director of global banking at Deutsche Bank and as a lawyer at Mallesons Stephen Jaques before entering parliament, cites the business criticism of the Fair Work Act as a reason for an urgent response from the Coalition.

Again, Crowe is being cute here, puffing up Frydenberg's title at Deutsche and omitting the most substantial part of his pre-parliamentary resume. Frydenberg spent relatively little time in the private sector; there are senior officials in the Chinese Communist Party with more actual private-sector experience than he, including in the important practical areas of dealing with employees and unions. Crowe should have told his readers that Josh is yet another MP who has spent much of his pre-parliamentary career as a party hack (Frydenberg was a staffer to Downer and Howard). Regular readers of The Australian loathe career staffers and wrongly assume hacks are a feature only of the hated Labor government, and would discount Frydenberg's words accordingly if only they knew.

It's understandable that Frydenberg should want to get his name in the paper, but Crowe is meant to be the one with a bit of sense and experience on what news is. Crowe should have looked at Frydenberg's article and declared it as non-meaty as a tofuburger, then gently broken it to Josh that he won't get a run until he can actually contribute to a debate rather than just calling for one. Crowe has tried subtly undercutting Frydenberg but it hasn't worked.

Enough of Crowe and on to Frydenberg directly:

Labor believes there is a trade-off in the workplace between flexibility and fairness, and a contest between a greedy employer and a helpless employee.

This is simply not true.

Employers and employees need each other. Without an effective, workable partnership, there is no enterprise, no profit and no job.

Straw-man knockdown followed by vacuous motherhood statement! If there is such a thing as a stamp of authenticity from Josh Frydenberg, that has to be it.

This workable partnership is under threat from an overregulated workplace, where unions are emboldened, militancy is on the rise and productivity in decline.

These are problems of the government's own making. In return for union financial support at the 2007 election, the Rudd government's Fair Work Act increased union power in more than 120 areas. Greater right of entry, more authority over greenfield sites and an enhanced ability to restrict the use of independent contractors are just some examples ...

This is Australia's new industrial landscape - a throwback to the past, unwinding not only John Howard's reforms (which were responsible for more than two million new jobs and a 20 per cent rise in real wages), but also those of Paul Keating, whose 1993 reforms encouraged enterprise bargaining at the workplace level.

The result has seen productivity slump and costs rise, penalising the very workers Labor purports to represent.

This has all the red-meat indicators of a desire to scrap the Fair Work Act altogether and start again: none of that "tweaking" nonsense that Crowe was quoting. Which is it? Is the current legislative environment completely inadequate or in need of shoring up?

Working days lost through industrial disputes were up 83 per cent in the year to June 2012, levels not seen since 2004, and high-profile stoppages such as the Qantas strike and the blockade at Grocon's Myer Emporium site dominated front pages.

The two examples quoted were employer-initiated lockouts rather than employee- or union-initiated actions: not helpful in making Josh's point. It's telling that 2004 is the nadir Frydenberg uses: while Howard was in office but before WorkChoices, the point where the mining boom started to take off and so did wage demands. He fails to mention low unemployment as a factor in increased disputation.

I'll leave to a qualified economist to deal with productivity and industrial disputations. There's plenty of quant goodness to be had here too, and I'm disappointed it's to be expected that Frydenberg hasn't even engaged with the data.

Greater industrial disputation not only creates higher costs for companies that are inevitably passed on to consumers but can also lead to companies cancelling projects in the pipeline.

In the past 12 months Shell, BHP and Woodside have shelved more than $100 billion of investment as the viability of resource projects is called into question.

And when asked why they shelved those projects, those companies explicitly state that high labour costs aren't a factor. Only cranks like Gina Rinehart, who wants the government to build all her infrastructure and to pay her employees no more than $2/day, bellyache about high labour costs as a factor in investing in this country. The companies Frydenberg cites are all mining companies: mining produces about as many jobs as the arts sector.

In May, BHP chairman Jac Nasser said "restrictive labour regulations have quickly become one of the most problematic factors for doing business in Australia". Using BHP's Queensland coal business as an example, he said in the past year alone that business faced "3200 incidents of industrial action" and "received over 1000 notices of intention to take industrial action and then approximately 500 notices withdrawing that action given on less than 24 hours' notice".

BHP's experience is not a one-off. David Peever, managing director of Rio Tinto Australia, has also spoken out on the issue and Santos chief executive David Knox has said Australian labour costs were double those in competing jurisdictions.

When Nasser was called on his labour regulations remarks, he admitted that they weren't that significant. Commodity prices and the Australian dollar are far more significant in determining the viability of projects in Australia.

This hasn't gone unnoticed by our competitors and global equity investors. Last year Australia fell from 11th to 15th on the World Bank's ease of doing business index ...

And how much of that was down to the Fair Work Act and other workplace legislation? None? Thought so.

and in the World Economic Forum's measure of global competitiveness, Australia fell four places to 20th overall and 123rd out of 144 countries for flexibility in wage determination and 120th in hiring and firing practices.

The latter two indicators are tricky to sell politically. If you are going to make it easier to sack people you run straight back into the Your Rights At Work campaign. Innes Willox was complaining about a mere 28 days notice: imagine the flexibility of giving immediate notice.

If you're going to criticise the current legislation, it is important to be clear about what your criticism is. You might think you're a tactical genius for attacking from both sides at once, but it makes you look flaky.

... Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten remains, in Kathy Jackson's words, "Dracula in charge of the blood bank".

Not a smart move to be quoting Kathy Jackson. Abbott is stuck with her but you may as well go boozing with Peter Slipper for all the good it will do to your cause.

A former secretary of the AWU, Shorten has become "the minister for unions".

Yep, that's what happens to Labor workplace relations ministers. Something similar happens in Coalition governments to Nationals who become Minister for Primary Industry. I learnt that in first-year politics. It's amazing that Josh has only just discovered it; and not necessarily an indictment of teaching at whatever uni Josh went to as one can only do so much.

[Shorten] conducted a Clayton's review of the Fair Work Act ... ignored the Department of Finance's suggestion that the implications for productivity be included ... stacked the Fair Work Commission with former union officials ... government's intervention in a legal case in support of the union movement... crudely "partisan".

So with stock-standard Liberal criticism of a Labor minister, and referring to criticism from employer groups, it is hard to see how Frydenberg is getting out in front of Liberal policy or even contributing much to it. Crowe has sold readers a dog here; everything Frydenberg has said is a rehash of what others have said, with no inkling or enlightenment as to what we might expect from Coalition workplace relations policy (even though, according to a former Liberal Workplace Relations Minister, it isn't a priority at all).

Not to mention his long silence over the Craig Thomson matter, which has raised serious questions about the conduct of senior union officials and the willingness of Fair Work Australia to conduct a proper and timely inquiry.

Michael Lawler has a lot to answer for, eh Josh?

Since union votes continue to dominate Labor conferences and ex-union officials continue to dominate the Labor caucus - even though overall union membership is in freefall - it is clear only the Coalition can make the practical changes necessary to our industrial relations system.

By that logic, only Labor governments can regulate corporate interests.

Tony Abbott has the track record to do this. As a reforming minister he instigated the Cole Royal Commission, which led to the creation of the Australian Building and Construction Commission. In his book Battlelines he identifies the "destructive" elements of Labor's Fair Work legislation while pointing to industrial relations reform as a road to a more productive and fairer society.

Here we are in the fourth-last paragraph of Josh's article. While Frydenberg has name-checked everyone who has ever criticised Shorten and the legislation he administers, he hasn't used it to propel his argument as to what's wrong and what needs to be fixed. All he's done here is name-check the leader, who basically set in place the conditions that led to the breakout of 2004.

Now is the opportunity for the Coalition to go on the front foot and put forward proposals that make unfair dismissal laws less of a burden on small business, lead to individual flexibility arrangements in the Fair Work Act becoming more attractive to employers and employees, and put the brakes on coercive union power beyond reinstating the ABCC and making unions more accountable through reforms to their governance arrangements.

That's it? That's the policy substance we've all been looking for?

That's what The Australian (Financial Review) and the employer organisations has been expounding for years: some sort of alchemy whereby WorkChoices will just pop back onto the statute books without voters noticing. This is more substantial than Frydenberg's effort, and it reads like the blimpish eructations of an armchair general who doesn't bear responsibility for Liberals on the front line. If you asked someone like David Crowe what changes the Coalition would make to workplace relations - shit, if you asked me - off the top of one's head and without reference to Josh Frydenberg, anyone would probably rattle off a list like that. Buy the paper, indeed.

The only attempt Frydenberg has made at dealing with workplace relations policy was this. Scroll down to my name and you'll note my comments on how he and his mate Alan failed to take the issues (which affect broader workplace relations issues) seriously. With this earlier article, his sorry record generally, and now yesterday's effort (even with Crowe's build-up), it's clear that policy is not Josh's thing.

Ironically, the issue that Josh was tasked to change the conversation from - Peta Credlin's reproductive difficulties at work - offers a host of workplace relations issues that are worthy of examination from a policy perspective.

Policy wonkery is not the be-all-and-end-all of politics; there is a place for hard-headed political calculation too. Business got WorkChoices out of the Liberals but when WorkChoices was threatened in the 2007 election, they all but abandoned it and the Coalition. Greg Jericho might think outfits like this are somehow sinister, but from a Liberal perspective they are laughably insufficient. If Innes Willox wants WorkChoices back he can bloody well pay for it: if business won't back workplace relations reform to the extent necessary to beat the labour movement, the Liberals should not stick their necks out for them. If Frydenberg was ever going to bite a bullet in this debate, that was it: he shirked that too.

Never mind seizing the mantle, Frydenberg should just take his coat. There is nothing for his leader or his party in his typically sorry offering. Josh Frydenberg, as was said of Newt Gingrich, is a dumb person's idea of a deep thinker. He drifts into policy debates with nothing to say, no contribution to make, and drifts away having made no impact whatsoever. No Labor ministers need fear any challenge by Josh Frydenberg, and it's doubtful any do. Flattering him as Crowe and others do goes beyond merely gilding the lily: to call Josh Frydenberg an up-and-coming Liberal is to set him, and the Liberal Party, up for failure.

We need more and better consideration of the big issues facing Australia than Josh is capable of offering. We also need the press gallery to stop dragging him out of his depth and insisting that his hapless floundering is so much artful positioning.

Honourable zombies gnawing at Tony Abbott!

The Howard government now looks like it created a golden age of prosperity which is lost ... Our task, to which we are wholly and solely dedicated, is to recreate those great days for our country and we will.

- Tony Abbott, address to the South Australian Division of the Liberal Party, 18 August 2012

Zombies have made a resurgence in popular culture, and economists such as John Quiggin and Jessica Irvine have titled their books to catch the prevailing pop-culture winds. Also interesting are the political zombies that stagger through Australian politics; the Coalition seem more beset with them than Labor.

Liberals believe that John Howard had found the political El Dorado of a political constituency that represents a majority of Australian voters in a majority of electorates that is sustainable over time. The last two elections seem to put the lie to that, but they can be explained away by a) Liberal exhaustion and b) the comforting notion that Rudd was like a rejuvenated Howard (2007), or lies (2010). Nobody blames Abbott's missteps in both campaigns for them being out of office now. I think this interpretation of history is bullshit and that they are kidding themselves, but to be a Liberal is to believe this; or at the very least, to maintain the facade. A loss in 2013 (made all the more bitter by the evaporation of all those if-an-election-was-held-today wallopings, like holding a heap of scrip in a stock that has soared and crashed) would shatter the myth of that the Howard Restoration was possible or even desirable.

Abbott has been all about the restoration of the Howard government as fully as possible. This has required the Liberals to crack down hard on any dissent.

Firstly, this is what Howard did; the habit is so ingrained they could not imagine doing politics any other way. Howard paid lip-service to the idea that Liberals were free to speak their minds, but MPs who did so were ostracised (e.g. Petro Georgiou). It was John Howard who preached "disunity is death", practicing it as fervently as any lifelong rank-and-file trade unionist.

Secondly, it was the price that Liberals paid for not having to rethink what it means to govern Australia from first principles. The Liberals spent more than a decade doing that, squabbling among themselves until the intellectual direction of the party was taken away from the parliamentarians; initially within the organisational ranks, where enforcers like Michael Kroger and Nick Minchin removed Liberal preselection from troublesome free-thinkers. This was then outsourced to wide-boys like Grahame Morris and Mark Textor, who bluffed many into thinking they were better at the thinking-and-perspective business than MPs, whose role was reduced to relaying pre-packaged and simplistic messages, bums-on-seats and fundraising.

The reward for all this self-censorship (and putting up with unelected drill-sergeants like Peta Credlin) is political success. Clearly, the mirage of polling will satisfy many but actual electoral victory trumps all and soothes all. No leader can maintain strict discipline in the face of declining polling, and as polls plunge the leader will demand line-toeing and loyalty all the more, and get it all the less.

John Howard knew this. He went through low polls and high ones, not despairing at the depths nor getting carried away at the heights. He isn't a candidate for the 2013 election, but for many Liberals a non-Howard election is unthinkable. What he wants is vindication, and the Liberal Party wants badly to give it to him. However, it is starting to bristle at the price to be paid for handing its strategic direction over to history.

What John Howard wants from the 2013 election is vindication. If he had gone to the election without having introduced Workchoices, would he have won? Would he have beaten Rudd in 2007 and then outflanked an inexperienced Gillard in 2010, beating Menzies' record and chewing through a generation of Labor leaders? We will never know, but an old man may be forgiven his dreams.

Howard worked hard to overcome both his race-based conception of Australian identity and Queensland-based rural protectionism. Like Peter Costello he was not going to see his legacy trashed by a bunch of yokels dragging the Coalition up a known dead end. If you're going to return to The John Howard Way, then nobody should be surprised that John Howard will tolerate no deviation from it. You cannot have Falstaff and have him thin.

Abbott has no choice but to accept Howard's admonitions and amend Coalition policy accordingly. It is unsustainable for him to claim that there is no going back, that Howard was two PMs and three Liberal leaders ago; Malcolm Turnbull might have swept Howard aside like that, so might Hockey have, but never Abbott. For Abbott to repudiate Howard, however gently, would be a breach of public perceptions about him as great as Rudd squibbing "the greatest moral challenge of our time".

By cleaving to the certainties of the past, Abbott avoids the thorny questions of the future. The absence of such questions makes for the kind of calm assuredness that conservatives, and journalists, crave. By departing from those certainties you open up a whole lot of questions that have no clear, vote-winning answers. You also accept that some of the measures that Rudd and Gillard put in place are irreversible, anathema to people who still can't accept they were ever in government at all (and that they are there at their expense).

If you're going to depart from The John Howard Way on Chinese investment and workplace relations, where does it end? Abbott has saved the Liberals considerable heartache by mandating that any disputes are to be settled in favour of whatever the Howard government did. He has, however, made a rod for his own back; one he had borne proudly until recently.

Tony Abbott was the most moderate of Howard's four Workplace Relations Ministers. I actually believe him when he says he wants to make minimal changes to the relevant legislation. I do not believe, however, that he is strong enough to beat off Abetz and the other gimlet-eyed fanatics who believe that Workchoices didn't go far enough in nailing the unions.

As someone who has worked on contract for the better part of 20 years you can imagine my surprise at Peter Reith's assertion that there is no legal framework for individual employment contracts. Abbott might be fooling the more gullible members of the press gallery about the purity of his heart on this issue, but nobody with an appreciation for red-in-tooth-and-claw power will give his mewlings the time of day. All Abbott's talk about forming a committee or whatever is just buying time; he hasn't given workplace relations any in-depth thought at all and resents being pressed on any matter that isn't his Issue Of The Day.

Howard is not the only political zombie reaching out to Abbott, in order to hold him back rather than help his quest for government. Peter Reith and Amanda Vanstone have each stuck their oar in; each has their beef with Abbott. Abbott promised Reith his support for Federal Presidency of the Liberal Party (a role that would enable him to hobnob once more with the big end of town, which is not available to underemployed consultants) and then went back on him. Abbott was junior minister to Vanstone early in the Howard government; he went over her head to Howard and she was dumped from Cabinet. They don't want to tear Abbott down (or be seen doing so) but they want him to feel the heat that the media have spared him.

What do Reith and Vanstone want? Vindication is part of it. Like all ex-pollies they assumed there would be this raft of board positions and other honoraria following their years in politics, and like all but a handful this hasn't happened for them. They keep seeking publicity even though they have run out of things to say.  Part of their problem is a failure of the model of younger, machine-made politicians, who end up in middle age becalmed and not much use to anyone: look upon these people, Josh Frydenberg and Tony Smith and Laura Smyth and Jason Clare and Sarah Hanson-Young, and see your future.

Nick Minchin rises from is crypt whenever the far right are feeling rattled. Since 2007 there has never bee a time when Minchin and Abbott disagreed on something, and Abbott prevailed. Minchin just wants to be the Australian Cheney, freed from accountability while making the Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party accountable to him.

Grahame Morris (the only one named here not to stumble through life with the prefix "The Honourable ...") was one of the wise heads in Howard's office who tempered the enthusiasms of people like Abbott, now he's a strategist. After calling for the Prime Minister to be kicked to death, and confusing a capable interviewer with a cow, there is serious doubt over the value of this man's strategic advice: you can read equal or better on Twitter, or on the walls of public toilets, for free. He is like Barry Humphries' Les Patterson, and shows that such a character could never be elected today. A man his age should have the feet up, but Morris has teenage children to put through school and no other talents to draw upon. One can understand how flattered he feels when media producers seek his time.

The mistake that Malcolm Turnbull made as leader was to assume that the 2007 election result really was a repudiation of Howard, and to start the process of rethinking what it meant to govern Australia in order to it (us?) to embrace the challenges of the future. At first the Liberals wen along with this, hoping a Turnbull victory would vindicate and ameliorate all and give a corner of public policy that they could shape in their own way. When Turnbull could not credibly promise victory in 2010, they bristled at the repudiation and replaced the man who was Howard in all but name.

Today, Turnbull is not crafting the big visions but stuck selling a zombie policy, crafted in the 1990s with technology that has since been superceded; as though it might be good enough for an ambitious people, as though the NBN was not a superior solution.

Chris Pyne's response to Gonski on schools funding is more zombie policy. It reads like one of his On Dit screeds from the late 1980s, or the stale farts of a shock-jock (even Alan Jones avoids this topic these days, as it only brings up his own teaching career and turns listeners away). It does not even address actual issues like the imminent mass retirements of teachers or the needs to embrace technology, mathematics, personal health and Asian languages within the curriculum at all, let alone show evidence of grappling with solutions.

Abbott will almost certainly survive as leader until the next election, even though his heart is increasingly not in it (Pyne and Julie Bishop have taken on the attack-dog roles in Parliament that seem to bore Abbott these days. For the government, this must be like the experience of encountering a couple of pampered yappy dogs while doorknocking). His leadership would only become untenable under either/both of these circumstances:

• His lack of popularity, as I've said before, is a prophylactic against the election of a Coalition government. Gillard's popularity only has to rise to about 40% and he's in trouble.
• He explodes, and reveals some aspect of his character that just confirms people's worst suspicions about the guy.

In that case, the next leader of the Liberal Party would be Julie Bishop. She'd negate the gender issue and has a hint of steel, but is not deft enough or deep enough to parry with Gillard. She would not go back to first principles and rethink things, as Turnbull would, and she would put up with the clowns that preselectors have foisted upon her better than Turnbull would.

Labor has its old hands but they tend to stay out of the way. Hawke and Keating seem largely content both to let Gillard chart a path they would never have charted (but which builds on their legacies to some degree), and to recognise that the impending passing of Whitlam will overshadow them both for a time. Kristina Keneally is doing her time in community service and Anna Bligh is spending time with her family, and even "Media Mike" Rann is keeping his head down. Peter Walsh and Bill Hayden have retreated to vast acres. Richo is the exception that proves the rule.

It is Coalition figures, with political standing but no political future, who won't return to give Abbott such old-time magic as they have and nor will they shut up and leave him to get on with it. Abbott doesn't have a program and he doesn't have the substance or the temperament to develop one; but the zombies don't have sufficient substance to fill the void, either. Abbott has assumed that everyone enjoyed the Howard government as much as he did, without realising that you can enjoy a memory while also accepting that it's over.

The honourable zombies show that using the Howard government as your platform is not the bed of roses it might have appeared to Abbott and his supporters, and that there isn't really an alternative as far as dealing with our country's future is concerned. The next election is about the following three years, not the last ten, and people will vote accordingly.

Your responsibilities at work

Ideals may tell us something important about what we would like to be, but compromises tell us who we are.

- Avishai Margalit

The tide will turn against you eventually, but when you have a big win you have two choices. You can coast along, collecting and resting on laurels, or you can knuckle down and do some work. When the tide turns, will you have anything to be proud of, anything to show for your efforts, anything to hand on to those who come after (just as those who came before handed over to you)?

It is not only the incumbent Federal government that is in this position. The Australian union movement built and surfed the crest of a wave with its Your Rights At Work campaign. It got rid of legislation it didn't like, and with it the government that proposed it. Union membership even went up a bit back then, but has since declined (and no, unemployment can't be blamed for that). Greg Combet went into Parliament and was replaced by someone who had all the hallmarks of a governance nerd. Jeff Lawrence maintained the status quo rather than put the boom on a sustainable footing (a criticism that can be made of others holding high office) but the answer to their problem is not another swaggering dickhead - an equal-but-opposite of Tony Abbott - but someone who knows that union activity depends upon a well and tightly run administration. It might not be sexy, and it might not get the adrenaline pumping like standing on a picket line yelling at people doing work you've refused to do, but without sound administration no union activity is possible.

The most successful unions today get this. The Shop Distributive & Allied Employees' Union (SDA) is not extravagantly run but its watching-the-pennies administration make its two major functions possible. First, it acts as a consultancy for the two major retailers to manage downward employee expectations of wages, career paths or even any jobs at all. Second, it enables the leadership to proclaim that its tens of thousands of members all share and support their preoccupations with Pellite Catholic teachings (i.e. a focus on abortion and euthanasia and a blind eye to sexual abuse). The Finance Sector Union and the AMWU are also in the business of managing decline, and the AWU is a conveyor belt for ALP machine men. The CFMEU seems like a make-work scheme for the ABCC.

People who get involved in unions from the shop floor up generally have little interest in becoming directors, yet this is what will increasingly be required of those who would take the union movement forward. The language and history of unions has been that workers are passive creatures to be "organised"; that the union exists for the worker ("your union") whether or not the worker chooses to join it, and they may not choose to join a union other than the one designated to "cover" them. This attitude is in stark contrast to the more inclusive rhetoric of other service organisations. One could overlook this as some harmless eccentricity if unions were better able to make their case to workers in industries that did not exist 40 years ago, or to those whose tenure in a job (or even a particular industry) is tenuous and shifting. The people who built the union movement in the decades before the First World War would have been able to work through this dilemma, but the managerial class that the unions built for themselves over the past quarter century are as stumped as the bewildered former blue-collar workers who preceded them.

Unions, like other organisations, require leadership and administration and some degree of stability. Unlike other organisations, unions have to allow for the possibility that members will rise up and demand something different than what the managers/administrators want. This frisson of democracy might be part of the excitement of the idea of unionism but it isn't something that union administrations need worry about on a day-to-day basis, any more than corporate managers do with shareholders. Those who dread the accountability of union members being equal to that of company directors can take comfort from the patchy record of enforcement by corporate regulators.

As ACTU President and Prime Minister, Bob Hawke took on the Builders' Labourers Federation, because the operations of that union only fed every anti-union prejudice. His successor Simon Crean took on the similarly noxious Painters and Dockers. Ged Kearney's Presidency of the ACTU has been one of small wins, with welfare workers; and the whole Help yrSelf Union (HSU) thing certainly clouds, if not overwhelms, that legacy. Kearney does not have to accept whoever her constituent unions throw up, she should take a more active role in shunting out unsuitable people and intervening in unsuitable unions.

That legacy of all-inclusive timidity and inaction leaves you with no defence to this. I stand by the claim that Abbott won't become PM but putting union leaders under the same scrutiny as company directors is the sort of thing that will be introduced by the next Coalition government, whenever and under whomever it comes to office. Thanks to inaction on the part of those who run the union movement, there is no answer nor any alternative to that proposal. Labor will introduce something half-arsed along those lines and the next Coalition government will complete the job.

Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten could do for the professionalism of union leaders what he started to do for financial planners, but he's been sidelined by this. It has derailed his ability to disguise as a concern for unions as a whole what is really a long-running factional spat with Kathy Jackson. Those of us with a relatively long political memory remember Abbott doing the same thing to John Howard, Peter Costello, Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull: he denied hearing the exact words but protested his undying support for the leader. Journos lapped that up, or at best let it pass, but for some reason Shorten has copped all at once the consistent scrutiny that might have done for Tony Abbott before it came to this.

Hockey's entitlement

For some reason this old post has been getting a lot of traffic this week (more rubbish predictions on my part, but I was right about Joe), timely I suppose in light of this.

What Hockey is doing in London is seeing what a successful conservative government looks like. This has become standard practice for Australian political parties, and is separate from the government-to-government relationships of statecraft:

• The Liberals have done this since the early 1950s, when they saw Rosser Reeves' advertising techniques applied to Eisenhower's Republicans.
• Labor did not do this until the late 1960s, when Whitlam encouraged party officials to learn from the US Democrats and UK Labour.
• As Opposition Leader in the 1980s Howard sought and received lectures from Thatcher, but on going to Washington did not receive the same face-time from Reagan; instead, he learned how to make conservative culture-war and creating the appearance of economic rationalism as increased opportunity from the backroom boys who had taken Reagan from a perception as a lightweight and an extremist all the way to the White House. By the time of Bush II these acquaintances had become unbreakable bonds.
• Kim Beazley swapped notes with Tony Blair, to the mutual edification of neither man.

Since 2007 backroom boys have maintained their links with US counterparts but politicians have stayed away from Washington for fear of catching loser-germs. Before then, as a Howard government minister, Abbott visited Washington where he struck a rapport with Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, a high-profile conservative Catholic. Abbott cannot failed to have seen how Santorum did unexpectedly well before losing to the US equivalent of Malcolm Turnbull, who is widely held to be doomed in his contest with Obama this November. The fact that US conservatives are so disconnected from government is the reason why Australian conservatives can do the crocodile-tears routine over Afghanistan.

Abbott went to London in 2010 to attend a Conservative conference, where he famously declined the opportunity to visit Afghanistan. Less well reported here was his encounter with UK conservatives over climate change. There are two propositions with climate change: a) that global temperatures have increased and b) that this has been caused by human activity. US conservatives, from whom Australian Liberals have learned most, accept neither proposition (someone like Monckton is closer to the US than his fellow Poms in that regard). UK conservatives have to accept a), because the case has been made more conclusively by scientists and the non-Murdoch media to the point where denialism is not appropriate for mainstream parties of government; they quibble over b), but they are still well ahead of US conservatives in that regard (and hence of Australians). Abbott looked like a goose when he turned up bagging the very idea of global warming, and was firmly put in his place by leading UK conservatives.

Abbott has learned about as much as he can from conservatives in the US and UK. Hockey, however, has further to go. Like Abbott he is staying away from the madness in the US. Unlike Abbott he does not regard the UK experience as so strange that nothing useful can be learned from it.

The UK Conservatives had the classic problem of an exhausted party: nobody wanted Thatcherite hectoring nor Majorite dithering, but their supporters of whatever degree of commitment never wanted them to completely abandon everything they stood for either. After years of lurching this way and that, David Cameron found a way to represent Conservatives as having kept up with and pulled ahead of Blair while still remaining true to what we might call the essentials of their brand recognition. That eludes the Liberals at the moment, and if I was a senior Liberal I'd want to see it up close too.

Part of what Cameron does in linking back to Thatcher, and further back into the myths of UK history, is that rhetoric about self-reliance, pulling your socks up, getting to work and not complaining, etc. Hockey can and does use the same rhetoric to hark back to Australian conservatives past, too. In Hockey's case, it helps him reach beyond his moderate base and show conservatives that he's not some wet hand-wringer who might go soft under pressure.

From a purely tactical point of view, you can see why one or two Labor people want to interpret Hockey's speech as foreshadowing cuts to health and welfare. It's interesting that any appeal to economic rationalism must mean a reduction in those things: not to incentives given to other industries that can't seem to make a go of all those stated aims of employment and innovation, but which keep getting the largesse anyway. It was a bad look to question welfare so soon after describing his own income as "meagre", and had his relationship with he press gallery not been as good as it is they'd have gone him over it.

As Treasurer for his side Hockey has to be the bastard who says no to politically appealing but economically costly ideas. In doing so he needs a higher framework to appeal to, he just can't say no, no, no like Abbott does. That's why Hockey can stand against donations to the vehicle industry. Another reason why he can do so is his understanding of Australian business, which is probably the best of any current member of Federal Parliament.

Hockey is the man to question the assumption that the car industry is somehow politically vital. The 1981 Lynch Plan did little to save the Fraser government, and the much-vaunted Button car plan of 1985 did little to keep Labor in office. Yet, he did not prevail amongst his colleagues with his views: not with his economic rationality, nor with the accumulated favours and personal goodwill with which he is regarded, nor for having spent a decade in various ministerial roles regulating business in one form or another. His tackling of then-AMP chairman Ian Burgess, a lion of the Sydney business community and close to Howard, showed both his courage and his grasp of his facts to take on someone like Burgess. If there is a way to wean the vehicle industry off the public teat - using many of the same arguments you'd use against welfare to single mums and/or Aborigines - Hockey is the one to find it.

In one sense it is surprising that Hockey has not become the darling of libertarians. His record in this area is stronger than any Australian politician since Bert Kelly, who was never a minister. Hockey's record in cutting red tape and spending is stronger than Howard's; when Howard voted against the Lynch car plan in the Fraser Cabinet in 1981, he was hailed as a saviour and messiah by the economic rationalists and libertarians of the day. They gave him a free pass and continue to do so: despite Labor delivering lower tax-to-GDP ratios and more than matching the Coalition for deregulation and privatisations, the IPA cleaves to the party of Howard over that of Hawke, Keating and Swan. This is partly because Labor has its own quasi-intelligentsia and the IPA would find itself one voice among many in Labor ranks; given the state of the Coalition parties today the IPA is pretty much the nearest thing they have to a brains trust. In the land of the blind the one-eyed men have a singularity of focus that the binocular cannot match.

Like the libertarians though, the fact is that Hockey cannot carry the day among his colleagues. Just because he could cut corporate welfare doesn't mean he will, even if he had the chance. What that means is that when he says something, it can't be interpreted as likely Liberal policy despite his seniority and his supposed responsibility for Coalition economic policy. Soon after Hockey's speech and Lateline appearance, Arthur Sinodinos was hosing it down. Andrew Robb has the same problem, but is more constrained politically than Hockey; Robb might have a clearer macroeconomic perspective but Hockey has a base in the party that Robb lacks. Turnbull also lacks a powerbase but the mix of knowledge, courage and perspective he offers provides a depth that Hockey and Robb both lack, particularly in providing something on which to develop a post-Howard legacy.

The efforts of Turnbull, Hockey and Robb in meeting with people and throwing ideas around (not something other shadow ministers do), and the resulting backlash among "senior Coalition sources" means that the Coalition aren't clear about what ideas they want to take to government, or indeed why they should replace the incumbents. Abbott can't reconcile strong ideas; the pointlessness of favourable media coverage is shown here, where Samantha Maiden tried to make Abbott look like a victim of circumstances but only makes him look like a weak leader. I don't care what the polls say; this will come back to bite them when people are seriously considering who to actually vote for, as opposed to the idle chatter with which they engage pollsters.

That was Michelle Grattan's message in this article I linked to already; she likes it when each party sings from the same songsheet, and frowns upon one member of one party saying one thing while another says something different. Conveying debate and nuance isn't her thing, she wants to tell us that everything in Canberra is in its proper place and don't you worry about a thing; but when people speak out of turn, or do things like issuing press releases after 4pm on Fridays, then dear oh dear it makes life difficult and don't you know how we run things around here? Never mind the implications of those debates for readers and the citizenry at large, provided pro-forma appearances in Canberra are as neat as a pin and all the protocols are observed, then the nation cannot be anything but in tip-top shape.

Hockey protests that his speech was intended for a European audience, but why would they wish to hear from him? He voted against the measures that gave Australia its world-best economy, and in government backed policies that gave away windfall gains so that they would fuel a bubble rather than build infrastructure and social investments. For Australians, his speech is a nostalgia act for a lucky government rather than an action plan for a responsible one. Given recent bipartisan noises over the inadequacy of unemployment benefits, Liberal policies like the Great Big New Paid Parental Leave Tax, and certain political and economic realities pointed out by Peter Brent, you have to be sure that Hockey's tough talk is sheer wind, and given his failure at winning over his current set of colleagues it will not translate into policy any time soon.

There is one aspect of the speech, though, that Hockey probably didn't think about too much before launching into it:

I wish to thank my friends at the Institute of Economic Affairs for the opportunity to discuss an issue that has been the source of much debate in this forum for sometime - that is, the end of an era of popular universal entitlement ... It is ironic that the entitlement system seems to be most obvious and prevalent in some of the most democratic societies. Most undemocratic nations are simply unable to afford the largesse of universal entitlement systems ... Let me put it to you this way: The Age of Entitlement is over.

This echoes Bill Clinton's insistence of fifteen years ago about the end of big government, but doesn't add to it or explain what's gone on in the meantime. Again, more wind on Hockey's part, but in the European context - and specifically the UK context - this statement reveals just another politician hungering for a perception of boldness over good sense.

It's not "ironic" (except, perhaps, in a Morrisettian sense) that entitlements developed in prosperous democracies. This arose as a direct experience from the Second World War. Wars have always been about blood, soil and honour: defending our families and ways of life from the Dreaded Foreigner. Hitler and Mussolini pretty much illustrated where that line of thinking goes. The whole idea of creating entitlements was to provide citizens a stake in the state that did not involve xenophobia, or land ownership (in the mid-twentieth century land was not the guarantor of wealth and status that it had been), or the sort of political power that threatened those who had it antebellum: there isn't much clout in being a mendicant, and people like Orwell and Hayek were clear about how disempowering welfare could be. By declaring an end to entitlements, and to any debate over same, Hockey doesn't offer any sustainable vision of what should take its place as far as a stake in the nation-state is concerned.

Hockey's talk about families taking back responsibility in caring for children and the elderly (and, one might add, the disabled) is galling in an age where costs of care are rising faster than incomes, and people's increasingly insecure work hours do not allow for time to provide that care; there needs to be a way for government to support people in providing that care that doesn't break the economy. He cites Asian countries as models for what he proposes, countries where citizens regard their governments as capricious and disengaged from their interests to an extent that would appall common-law countries like the UK and Australia. If Hockey can't find it - worse, if he isn't looking for it - then he's just another windbag offering non-solutions, not to Australian voters or Institutionalised Poms or anyone else really.

That speech will help Hockey reach out to people within the Liberal Party who wouldn't otherwise support him. It is a shallow and ignorant speech in many regards, the kind that might go over well to a well fed and watered foreign audience but which is of no help to the sober people who'd have to get up the following day and make it work. It might be the sort of thing that Barton or Menzies may have made to appreciative London audiences earlier in their careers, which weren't transcribed but described glowingly nonetheless. It should be regarded as intellectual mulch from which a future Coalition government may yet reap, not any sort of directions statement in itself.

When Abbott goes down the current front bench is going to look pretty stupid for going along with whatever he wanted; only Hockey, Turnbull and Robb have given any indication about what the Liberal Party might do eighteen months from now, win or lose. Hockey has set out his position but not how he will bring people with him, inside the Liberal Party or out, which is why this is so much journosphere nonsense. Complaints that those men do not toe the line only shows how poor is the process of setting that line, and therefore how inadequate is all that Malcolm Tucker bollocks about enforcing a common line, however stupid or misplaced.

Hockey likes the idea of having ideas; see how he basked in the aftermath of his most recent speech and his previous efforts on corporate law reform. There are payoffs in having a perception as an economically rationalist thinker, as Howard showed. However, Hockey should rightly be concerned that his ideas might make life harder for him than it is already - unless he gets a drastically different set of colleagues.

How poor history leads to poor analysis

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

- George Santayana (1863-1952)

This article shows how those who misrepresent the lessons of history will end up without a clue about what's going on.

Abjorensen's spelling and punctuation are sound, but his very first sentence contains the conundrum that engulfs his whole argument. By the time we have waded through his lazy attempt at an overview of Liberal history we can have no confidence in his postulations on that party's present:

After Holt’s untimely death in 1967, his successor, John Gorton, enjoyed markedly less emulation, if only because he was an erratic leader unmindful of such Liberal sacred cows as states’ rights.

Gorton was the last Liberal leader thus afflicted. Menzies had left the states alone; he would never have invoked the corporations power for fear of the private sector getting ahead of themselves public-policy wise, and after failing to ban the Communist Party he was war of constitutional reform. Holt left the states alone too. By the time Gorton made relatively modest calls for national co-ordination in certain areas, premiers like Bolte and Askin had gotten used to acting on their own and lashed out; every successive prime minister had no hesitation in jerking the states' fiscal lead. In 1968 Joh Bjelke-Petersen was beginning his long reign as premier of Queensland - how different would that have been if he had been taught early on that Canberra can and does act as a check on his power, and that if he wasn't that interested in health or education or transport then state politics just wasn't for him.

Was John Gorton really more erratic policy-wise (leaving aside late-night grog sessions) than Fraser or Howard or Abbott? Really?

When Gorton was deposed in 1971, both government and party were tired and seemingly inured to looming defeat, and few took Billy McMahon’s leadership sufficiently seriously to think much about him.

Really? Why didn't McMahon just give up and/or just faff around the edges, like Jay Weatherall is doing in SA or as Kristina Keneally did in NSW? Why was Whitlam elected and re-elected with single-digit majorities, with a Coalition government back in office just three short years after McMahon lost office (and headed by a McMahon government minister)? Yes yes, I realise this is received wisdom/groupthink from the press gallery at the time, but it's equally clear that is inadequate as an explanation of history.

In opposition after 1972, the hapless Billy Snedden mostly failed to inspire ...

Well yes, until you realise that he was the Tony Abbott of his day. This is the man who described organisers of a protest march as "political bikies pack-raping democracy", of a piece with any of Abbott's top-of-the-head offerings. In 1974, he refused to concede that he had lost the election but had merely failed to win it, as Abbott did in 2010 (the difference is that the entire Liberal Party is under the same delusion as the leader, and that the press gallery fail to regard the Liberal leader as a laughing stock).

Fraser ... stamped his seal on the Liberal Party even more forcefully than Menzies ever had and, like its founder, was not only the public face of the party, but its mind, body and soul.

What a fatuous statement that is. Its fatuity is established by Abjorensen's very next paragraph:

Nothing more exemplified Fraser’s dominance than the abrupt and unannounced policy shift after the Liberals’ 1983 election loss. When Fraser quit as leader, his party’s tough stand on the minority white regime in South Africa – an abiding passion of his that chafed against the views of those within the party who supported apartheid – simply vanished from the radar.

It's proof of his lack of dominance, actually. After Fraser lost office in 1983 Liberals distanced themselves from him and much of what his government did; none more so than Fraser's Treasurer, John Howard. It wasn't just foreign policy but pretty much every aspect of Fraser's social and economic policy that came under question, if not derision, throughout the 1980s and '90s.

In terms of Fraser having been the "mind, body and soul" of the Liberal Party during the period 1975-83, I bet Charles Court or Dick Hamer would be fascinated at that idea. I bet John Carrick would have allowed himself a wry grin, considering his control over the party in NSW which was inversely successful electorally to the old man's degree of control over it; similarly John Moore in Queensland. If you're going to go John Gorton over his relations with premiers, then state-level figures during Fraser's time deserve the examination that Abjorensen fails to offer.

... with the arrival of the circuit-breaker, John Hewson, after a fourth successive election defeat in 1990, the party miraculously converted en masse to the new leader’s brand of aggressive liberalism.

Well, not quite. I can still remember John Howard shirtfronting Hewson in the final week of the 1993 election campaign. I can also remember that nobody was across Fightback! but Hewson himself, and that the party was cool with it so long as Hawke floundered in the face of it and was subsequently cut down. Once Keating began to climb all over it - and, by extension, all over Hewson and the Liberal Party - the Liberal Party expected Hewson to change tack and do Keating over as he had done Hawke. That didn't happen; Hewson always said Keating had a glass jaw but it was Hewson who hit the canvas first. Hewson couldn't even do Keating over once the L-A-W tax cuts were abandoned.

Ironically, the same party blamed Hewson and his Fightback! doctrine for the failure to win the 1993 election ...

Yes - the Liberal Party has tended to be good at learning from election defeats, which is the main reason for its electoral success. A manifesto born from one man's head could be vindicated only by electoral victory. Absent victory it was just another manifesto to be used as political mulch for the next government - as it proved.

Howard was very much a creature not just of the Liberal Party, but also of the party’s distinctive NSW division, with its old free trade tradition, in contradistinction to Victoria’s social liberal and protectionist tradition.

The latter tradition had pretty much been stamped out at the federal level by the lead-up to the 1990 election, and by the time Jeff Kennett finished with it the tradition was non-existent.

Having led us through a wasteland of historical crap, Abjorensen stumbles across an oasis of reliable fact:

Howard’s own political fetishes – labour market deregulation and the primacy of the small business ethos – quickly became Liberal orthodoxy. He also tightened his control over the entire party in a way that neither Fraser nor Menzies had, effectively taking personal charge of the once staunchly independent, and nominally autonomous, state divisions through a centripetal shift of resources to the federal secretariat and a de facto veto over appointments of state officials. It was Howard’s party in a far more proprietorial sense than it had ever been Menzies’s: the party was Howard and Howard was the party, in very much the same sense that Louis XIV could say, reputedly, l’état, c’est moi.

OK, so the Louis XIV non-quote is facile and pretentious. Here are three verified quotes from him that are more applicable to Howard:

• He said to his successor: "Do not follow the bad example which I have set you; I have often undertaken war too lightly and have sustained it for vanity. Do not imitate me, but be a peaceful prince, and may you apply yourself principally to the alleviation of the burdens of your subjects".
• Saint-Simon said of Louis XIV: "There was nothing he liked so much as flattery, or, to put it more plainly, adulation; the coarser and clumsier it was, the more he relished it". Nobody who has seen a bunch of mouth-breathing bullet-headed right-wing stack-fodder hail him as saviour of the party and the nation, and seen Howard return the favour by declaring them to be the very essence of what it means to be Australian, will dispute the parallel.
• On his deathbed he said: "Je m'en vais, mais l'État demeurera toujours." ("I depart, but the State shall always remain.")

(These quotes come from from Wikipedia, a far more reliable historical source than Norman Abjorensen.)

We saw the [Liberal Party] ... without Fraser instantly forgetting about apartheid.

That's an exaggeration: Howard muddied the waters but succeeded in downgrading it as an issue for Liberals. It meant that Australian foreign policy was caught unawares when the de Klerk-Mandela rapprochement began to seal the end of apartheid. Even though we are a major migration destination for thousands of South Africa expats, Australia did not keep sufficient tabs on developments in South Africa to play a leading role in that country's political transition, internally or as a global intermediary, mainly because Foreign Ministers Evans and Downer and the entire foreign policy establishment of this country botched it. But anyway, that's for another time.

But losing both office and Howard in 2007, and with Peter Costello declining the proffered crown, the party had an immediate and unexpected identity crisis: it was an orchestra without a conductor.

This is the last bit of valid analysis in the whole article.

The challenge was to protect the Howard legacy – essentially the existential core of the present-day Liberal Party – and start planning a comeback, while at the same time healing the wounds and avoiding the kind of damaging public recriminations that were aired in 1972 and 1983.

The number one priority of the Liberal Party, when it finds itself in opposition, is to get back into government. The airing of recriminations is an inextricable part of "healing the wounds". Those that occurred in 1972 were clearly forgotten within three years, and while those from 1983 lasted longer they were the result of a party that had failed to take the lead in debates about the economic future of the country. Labor's years in the political wilderness during the 1950s resulted from the same political carelessness; in a major party you are at the forefront of economic and social policy debate, or you are nowhere.

The Liberal Party failed to lead debate about how the Australian economy is changing in two important respects. First, with the rise of China and its demand for our mineral resources. It was happy to give away the surpluses but did not trust them enough to engage in infrastructure spending. Second, the Workplace Relations Act needed revision in light of an increasingly casualised workforce (as did notions of family values in light of working arrangements that increasingly could not sustain stable family life); WorkChoices was not the revision it needed. Those failures are why Peter Costello's longevity as Treasurer does not translate to greatness in that role; and no, a bit of tinkering with sales tax does not vault him into the first rank.

The Howard legacy is the default option for the Liberal Party. All Liberals agree that he ran a great government, whatever they might want for policy going forward. Nelson and Turnbull failed to recognise that going back to Howard was always an option for the contemporary Liberal Party; it was the only option that hushed dissent. Abbott knows this and it is why his policy ventures beyond a simple Howard Restoration have been timid. Claiming that a policy that made Howard popular in 2003 is necessarily right for Australia in 2013 is questionable, and Labor should be able to highlight it as proof that the Coalition can't cope with the challenges before us now, let alone plan for the future.

A decisive break with the past was offered by Malcolm Turnbull, but the party preferred the anodyne Brendan Nelson, essentially a stop-gap, with whom the Howard legacy was safe.

Nelson struggled for nine months to make any headway against a popular Kevin Rudd, eventually falling to Turnbull’s challenge.

Rudd had made the case to the Australian people that Howard's capacity to take the country forward had been exhausted. Turnbull took it as a given; the rest of the Liberal Party did not, and Turnbull's leadership then as now depends upon his ability to develop a narrative that moves on from Howard's legacy without either breaking from it or embracing it. For all his intellect, Turnbull hasn't thought deeply about where this country is going and what it needs from government; there are fits and starts of insight into particular issues but these are more like the brilliant essays of a student rather than the parts-of-the-whole musings that come from the reflections of a leader.

By contrast, Abbott carries around the Howard Restoration like a hermit crab carries the shell of another creature that has vacated it to hide his own squishy bits rather than necessarily presenting a strong front to the world.

Howard, it needs to be remembered, grew up in a state that, for the first quarter century of his life, was governed by Labor in an unbroken stretch from 1941 to 1965. The patronage the NSW Labor Party built up over that time extended into every area of civil society; Howard, imbued with the small business and Protestant ethos of his family, always saw Labor and its union base as the collectivist enemy of the dominant values of his self-reliant and individualistic world.

This world view – clannish, suburban and narrow – permeated the Howard era.

Why would a political ethos that had failed for a generation succeed in an era (and in the national context, including but also beyond NSW) that was markedly different to that of 1941-65? Howard's opponents inside the Liberal Party and out simply portrayed him as a man of the 1950s, underestimated him as a result, and fell by the wayside when defeated by someone who was clearly so much more than that. Was Howard really more narrow than Hewson, or Simon Crean?

It was – and conservatives bristle at this – a revival of class war, usually associated with the left, but class war with a difference: while Howard wanted to crush Labor by destroying its union base, he also sought to woo, with some success, traditional Labor voters by means of a cultural offensive.

This is so wrong that it is wrong on multiple levels.

First, conservatives don't bristle at the idea of class war by other means. Starting with William F. Buckley in the United States and Keith Joseph in Britain, conservatives have sought to demonise intellectuals in academia, public broadcasting and government as the most dire threats to our way of life, so that they might be forgiven for ignoring other more pressing threats such as losses of secure jobs, and the managerial skill necessary to create new jobs out of opportunities that are not yet apparent. Conservatives to not bristle at culture war, they perpetrate it, even though they lack the ammunition with which to pursue such a conflict (for example: Miranda Devine is an opponent of, but not an alternative to, Tim Flannery). Every edition of Quadrant contains the phrase trahison des clercs, invoking it enough to give it a currency, a substance and a potency that the notion lacks utterly.

Second, Howard did not destroy Labor's union base with WorkChoices, he energised it. This fact must be taken into consideration when it comes to "protecting the Howard legacy": either Labor's union base isn't that significant and should be left alone, or it must be destroyed by some means other than one which actually drives non-unionised workers into the arms of unions in order to protect them from threats far more real than those featured in the "culture war".

The Liberal Party’s dislike of Labor under Howard went from the political to the visceral; not a single appointment under Howard had the slightest tinge of bipartisanship about it ...

The only contra-example I can think of was when Nelson Mandela visited Australia and was gushed over by John Howard. Mandela received his award with barely contained disgust, from a man who was more than comfortable both with his bogus conviction and with the idea of him rotting on Robben Island for the term of his natural life. Apart from that, Abjorensen's claim holds.

The recent unprecedented interjection in parliament directed at the prime minister from the advisers’ boxes by Abbott’s chief of staff, Peta Credlin, is simply a manifestation of the new Liberal tribalism; it is anger, resentment and frustration all rolled into one, underpinned by an intense loathing, verging on hatred.

Peta Credlin is not an authentic product of the Liberal Party in the way that Howard was. Howard sat through thousands of branch meetings, steadily building support, while Credlin has almost certainly never done so unless she were waiting for one of her bosses. She is a creature of a staffer system that is bipartisan; her skills are absolutely transferable to the offices of Gillard or Swan or any other leading politician. Her outburst should be seen as a lack of confidence in Abbott to get across the message she crafted for him, the control-freak's frustration of "do I have to do it all myself?". She does not have the sort of confidence in Abbott that a facile reading of polling data might suggest the Liberals ought to enjoy.

As one veteran Liberal MP lamented, “We are constantly exhorted now to see Labor not as a political adversary but as a hated enemy. That does not go down well in the electorate.”

You bet it doesn't. Any fool can create more heat than light. If you don't have any solutions - an Abbott doesn't - then it's incumbent upon you to shut your face. Maybe Turnbull is developing solutions, maybe he isn't. Gillard definitely is developing solutions, but how well they're accepted is more of an open question than commentators would expect.

Of course, Australia and the Liberal Party are not alone in bringing a virulent tribalism into the once placid waters of conservative politics. The trials of the contemporary Republican Party in the United States also represent a new-found conservative tribalism that brooks no compromise and sneers at the concept of the middle ground, and for which any hint of bipartisanship is akin to treason.

Abjorensen is confusing correlation with causation. The US Republicans took the lead and the Liberal Party of Australia takes its lead from Republican consultants who have gone further down that road than Australian Liberals have. The different dynamics of US politics, where mobilising a small but virulent base is easier and cheaper than appealing to a majority of adult citizens, is crucially overlooked. It's why Abbott's repulsion to many voters not rusted onto Labor is laughed off by Liberals who are otherwise sensible of and concerned about political risks to their party.

Malcolm Turnbull, it has to be said, does not fit this picture; he is a man out of time, out of place and, barring a political disaster for Abbott, all but out of contention to return to the leadership of what is still essentially Howard’s party.

It is foolish to claim that such a 'disaster' is unforeseeable. Abbott cannot lift above simple gainsaying and nor can he curb his adolescent tendency to the nasty and the snide, qualities that do not help in resolving intractable problems or focusing attention on might yet be.

The 'disaster' Abjorensen refers to is the realisation that the Howard legacy is insufficient in dealing with the problems and opportunities facing Australia, and insufficient to persuading people that they should be governed by the Liberal Party into the future. This will involve a bit of dissent, and will involve situations where many who are now senior Liberals become private citizens. However uncomfortable this might be for individuals - including Abjorensen - it need not be disastrous for the party or the nation. As a hack, Abjorensen can't see that, but it's true nonetheless.

While Turnbull’s style will always ruffle feathers (and there is more than a touch of Rudd in this regard), it was not so much his style that cost him the leadership after just fifteen months as his willingness to trade with the enemy over the doomed emissions trading scheme.

Ruffling feathers is neither here nor there: none of the leaders Abjorensen praises can be claimed to have eschewed this practice. It doesn't even bear mentioning. Turnbull's horsetrading over the ETS was so condemned by Liberals because it succeeded in making Rudd look good. Turnbull should have managed it in such a way that he looked like the winner, not Rudd; the Liberals would have stuck by him had he pulled something out that enhanced his position at Rudd's expense. To do that, Turnbull would have needed more political skill than he has.

Almost as bad was his tacit acceptance of the reality of climate change in the first place, when many, perhaps even most, of his colleagues agreed with former minister Nick Minchin that climate change was nothing but a leftist plot to de­industrialise the Western world.

The Western world is being deindustrialised due to many factors, of which climate change policy is a minor part. Even in Adelaide this is obvious, so much so that Tiberius-with-a-telephone Minchin cannot escape this reality and cannot persuade anyone with a brain that climate change policies can or should be resisted indefinitely.

Turnbull needs to go back to first principles and treat Liberals as though they are as intelligent as he is, all without damaging his credibility any more than he has already; no mean task but not impossible. Australia has a government; the Liberal Party needs to convince the country that it offers better government than the incumbents, and if it can't do that it's the party's problem, not the country's. The Liberal Party has a leader; if Turnbull wants to replace that leader and become Prime Minister he needs to do more of a persuasion job than he has already.

Where Abjorensen and other detractors are wrong is that Turnbull operates from within the Liberal Party, not outside it. He has bent over backwards to demonstrate his loyalty to a party that was almost entirely united against him in the late 1990s. He was a member of Howard's cabinet as much, if not for as long, as Abbott was. Articles like this show that Turnbull's political enemies are those of the Liberal Party. Turnbull hasn't done a great job at persuasion not because he lacks drive or commitment to the Liberal Party, he just hasn't thought things through as well as he might, and just waiting won't be enough. The thinking and the persuasion lies ahead of Turnbull, and it will come within the context of the Liberal Party, which cannot win the next election with a warmed-over Howardism without Howard or Costello.

That loss, every bit as 'unexpected' as 2007, is the 'political disaster' that Abjorensen fears but cannot articulate. He's tried a long run-up through history, but it's such bad hack-history that his conclusions are only right by accident, and not right enough to be reliable. Liberals are better served by preparing for Abbott to go down in accordance with his weaknesses, and to persuade Malcolm Turnbull to get over himself. Lots of hard work in that, far more than being a complacent hack; but fortune favours the brave while the hack can only describe it (or not, in Abjorensen's case).