Does Victoria matter?

Short answer

Yes! Very much. Some of my best friends, etc. I will be Christmassing there. God bless you all.

Yesterday saw one of the few election results where my prediction was the same as what ended up happening, so I'm quite pleased about that.

No, I meant politically. You know, the big picture. Napthine's loss as a harbinger for Abbott

Oh no, of course not. Well, not necessarily.

Menzies said that the Liberal Party was for all Australians, beholden to none. Under Abbott, this is less true than it has ever been. It is getting every bit as rancid as the UAP during World War II (but more on that later). The fact is that the Liberal Party can't handle government across all jurisdictions. Local councils drain cash from and are embarrassingly petty for state governments (territory governments can be counted as 'local government' for the purposes of the preceding statement). State governments set up alternate power bases for the feds.

John Howard hated Liberal state governments. He did nothing to ensure their re-election and actively helped euthanase a few of them. Abbott has learned the lesson but can't execute it.

Correlation is not causation. Napthine's gone and Abbott is stuffed, but as this blog has pointed out for years Abbott would always have been stuffed if Dennis Napthine - or Geoff Shaw - had never been born.

But surely, for committed Liberals like John Howard and Tony Abbott, you can't have too much Liberal government.

You weren't around in the late 1990s, were you?

In January 1995 Howard returned to the federal Liberal leadership. The Coalition had held together a minority government in NSW for four years until March that year, when Bob Carr cobbled together a majority with independents (see my previous blogpost - you'd think the Coalition would be awake to how to do this. Then again, you'd think Labor would, too).

When Howard became Prime Minister, he immediately came over all beleaguered. Carr worked quietly and constructively to shore up funding. This was a sharp contrast to the way his Liberal predecessor, John Fahey, had been wrong-footed by Keating in the COAG doh-si-doh. This made Carr look like a man who could Get Things Done.

By contrast, the Premier of Victoria was Jeff Kennett, a Liberal only in the broadest of broad-church terms. Kennett was not quiet. The extent to which he was constructive can still get you a smack in the mouth in certain Melbourne pubs. He was a man of firm ideas about how Victoria, and the country, should be governed, which pissed Howard off. Victorians with money preferred Kennett over Howard, and donated money to the state Libs rather than the feds, which pissed Howard off even more.

Howard was never a broad-church man, tolerating dissenting views through gritted teeth at the best of times. Once he got a taste of the view from the pulpit it was all over:

• In South Australia, Nick Minchin nobbled one of the state's most popular Premiers, the Liberals' Dean Brown, and replaced him with a piece of furniture from a second-hand shop in Norwood. This is why the SA Libs will probably never govern their state until Minchin dies.
• The Western Australian government proved to be self-nobbling; the current Premier was then its deputy and is applying his self-nobbling skills as we speak.
• Something similar happened in Queensland: Labor seemed to like the health-and-education state government thing, and the Coalition weren't doing much with it, so they handed it over with a shrug that Beattie confused with convulsions of joy.
• In Tasmania, Tony Rundle ran a moderate government in Coalition with the Greens. Eric Abetz helped ensure Rundle was starved of the funding to Get Things Done and was replaced by Labor.
• Abetz also mentored the ACT Liberals, edging out winners like Kate Carnell and Gary Humphries and replacing them with knuckleheads who spray themselves daily with voter repellent.
• The CLP lost the Northern Territory after a generation, replaced by a former ABC journalist who spoke in complete sentences and had probably never even opened a beer bottle with her eye socket.

I worked for the NSW Liberals in the 1999 election campaign and watched Mark Textor smooth the dying pillow over their even-money effort to knock Carr over. Carr won in a landslide. I left the Liberal Party soon after that but remain a Textor sceptic - which puts me at odds with the entire press gallery and other members of the political class, but hey.

With Labor in power at the state level, Howard learned that he could continue to play silly-buggers with the states over its functions and with tax, all care no responsibility because we're Liberals and they're Labor, politicians gotta politic.

High-minded rhetoric about reforming federation was framed as mealy-mouthed nonsense. This continued while Labor held all governments bigger than Brisbane City Council in 2007-08. It continues to this day, because ideas shared by both sides are the epitome of good government and political sophistication, while ideas opposed by both are freaky and flaky and otherwise undesirable. This will continue until the Labor-Coalition duopoly is broken.

But back to Victoria. When Steve Bracks, when Steve Bracks, beat Kennett in '99, beat Kennett in '99, Howard wasn't exactly distraught, wasn't exactly distraught. Bracks was quiet and constructive, quiet and constructive, and repeated his phrases when talking to commercial radio listeners. By contrast, Liberal Opposition Leader Dennis Napthine looked clumsy and shrill when he went after Bracks, and Howard gave him no assistance to speak of. Baillieu only won in 2010 when there was no risk of impeding the feds.

Abbott is in trouble, isn't he.

Yes, for reasons that have nothing to do with Napthine.

Rather than expect Abbott to use some sort of super-powers to save Napthine, then act all surprised when they prove non-existent, journos would be better off asking whether it is reasonable to expect Abbott to do anything. What is the nature of these superpowers that could save Napthine and the Victorian Coalition from itself? Why would Abbott be able to save Napthine's government but not his own? What made you think he'd be any better than Rudd or Gillard?

What is the political benefit for Abbott to save the Napthine government? What does he lose when Napthine loses?

Abbott needs all the help he can get. A re-elected Napthine government would have drained attention and resources away from his outfit.

The best people in the Napthine government (and they weren't all turkeys) are now either unemployed or staring into the foggy gloom of long-term opposition. Those who worked to get Abbott elected took staffer jobs and are looking to get some sweet lobbying roles in before the current government goes terminal. Abbott has the pick of the Napthine government's best brains, which is a nice arrangement for Abbott. And that, as far as he is concerned, is the main thing.

But, but ... Victoria is terribly important!

Oh, please.

From 1949 to 1969, the Victorian representation in the federal government was bigger than that of any state, and provided the leadership. Lightweights like Harold Holt and Peter Howson made it further than they should have through being Collins Street flaneurs, while non-Victorians like Paul Hasluck and Percy Spender were underutilised.

Never mind that during this period, the nation's centre of economic and cultural gravity shifted to Sydney. NSW had a state Labor government and a massive Labor redoubt, and the other states regarded voting Labor with communism.

After the 1969 election the representation from Victoria and NSW were roughly equal. Leadership tension between Gorton and McMahon can be seen in light of that. So too can the tension between Howard and Andrew Peacock.

Malcolm Fraser was Victorian to his bootstraps but he took pains to cultivate the party in NSW, particularly men of substance like Sir John Carrick and Bob Sir Robert Cotton. By the time Howard (mentored by Carrick and Cotton) won in 1996 he had rebuilt the NSW party from the ground up, which has never happened in Victoria.

Today, Victorians aren't the largest delegation to the federal government, nor the second - they are third, slightly ahead of WA. The current federal government, if you hadn't realised already, views things through its own prisms. We had a Prime Minister from Victoria until last year who was underappreciated by the rest of the country. Victorians have never taken to the current Prime Minister (see below). But, cheer up! The alternative Prime Minister is a Victorian - oh, don't be like that.

Look, everyone knows the Liberal Party regards Victoria as the Jewel in the Crown.

It's true that the Coalition held state government in Victoria for a long time, but two things need to be said about that.

First, people like Dick Hamer don't grow on trees (and anyway, with the fate of Leadbeater's possum in the balance, we've seen how Victorians care about trees). The Victorian Liberals of old would have quietly strangled Geoff Shaw rather than have him undermine a Baillieu. And the likes of Peter Reith, I mean I ask you. Costello might have burnished that jewel had he not been such a piker.

Second, the Labor Party in the period 1955-82 deliberately enfeebled itself, much the same as it did federally until last year and as it has in NSW for the past decade or so.

Victoria has 12 Senators. Four of them are Liberals, all numpties. There are local councils with more impressive representations (and more Liberals) than the Victorian Senate team. There is a National Senator too but, for this government, she's the wrong gender (read some of Margaret Fitzherbert's work on formidable Liberal women and wonder what might have been. Wonder what happened to Fitzherbert herself).

There are 37 Members of the House of Representatives from Victoria. Given that the state is such a Liberal jewel, and the Coalition hold federal government, and the party's federal director comes from there, you'd expect more than half - much more than half - would be held by the Coalition.

16 of Victoria's 37 HoR seats (i.e., a minority) are held by members of the Coalition. With the government on the nose, you'd expect the JitC to step up: who will bet me that Victoria's Coalition representation will increase in 2016?

The Liberal Party gives its Victorian branch all the respect and deference due to whiny laggards resting on faded laurels.

You know what the problem is? Tony Abbott needs strong Victorian representation on his front bench.

Andrew Bolt (no I won't link to his article) told his audience of mouth-breathing Victorians that the lack of a strong Victorian in his Cabinet is one of Abbott's major shortcomings.

Four members of Abbott's 20-member Cabinet are Victorians, roughly commensurate with the proportion of Victorians to Australians as a whole. It isn't clear what more Bolt could want.

Even if you accept Bolt's comment (don't worry, dear reader, I won't tell anyone about that time you agreed with Andrew Bolt), the question is: whom? Which Victorian Liberal would you have Abbott slot into his Cabinet to set things right? Napthine? Mary Wooldridge? Bolt himself? What about Sophie Mirabella, a director of the Australian Canoe Corporation? You see the problem here.

Victoria has the country's best infrastructure!

Quite why Kennett, Brumby, and now Napthine had chosen to impale themselves on the altar of the East-West tunnel is unclear.

What do you think of the way the Victorian media covers Victorian politics?

When it is forced to cover actual stuff that state government does, it is quite good. Sophisticated political and policy analysis with a light but not clichéd touch: this is what journalism on how we are governed should be. Only South Australia's InDaily comes close.

When it comes to the coverage of elections, it is as cliché-ridden as any electoral coverage. Before the election, Josh Gordon from The Age insisted that he was "on the fence" about who would win the election, when his coverage was showing clearly that Labor was preparing for office while the Coalition was in a defensive crouch, protecting its vitals.

This phenomenon was identified by US journalist Michael Kinsley in the 1990s. Before the election, journalists insist the race will be tight (against evidence that it often won't be), and that even the lamest campaign cliché is imbued with great significance. After the election, journalists portray the result as the inevitable result of seismic historical factors against which all campaigning was pitifully feeble. Political operatives of similar kidney during the campaign are divided into wise seers and hopeless jokes on the basis of a result the journalist deemed "too close to call". Those considered 'hopeless jokes' can redeem themselves to journalists by dumping on their loser-party colleagues.

This deliberate misinformation is not done to inform the public, but to maintain the journalist's pose of 'balance' above all other considerations. Not one extra newspaper, not one second of airtime, is sold because of this pose. A journalist sitting on a fence is good for nothing but target practice. The position of The Age under a Labor government will be interesting:

• Apparently The Age hacked into a Labor database. According to the journosphere, this was fair play and part of the perils of using job-killing computers.
• Apparently the ALP found a recording device belonging to a journalist from The Age; they listened to it, found and disseminated Ted Baillieu bagging his Liberal colleagues. According to the journosphere, this was fair play an outrage against our very democracy.

The Murdoch press seemed strangely ambivalent as to whether the Napthine government lived or died. Napthine should be congratulated for not appearing in Murdoch ads like NSW's Mike Baird did. In the nature of oligopolies, you can't really expect the Murdoch press to step up:

Hunting for clichés at staged events and finding them is political journalism's equivalent of coprophilia, the sort of misjudgment that is killing their profession from the frontline journalist to the most senior executives. Bloggers who think they have to be fair to the Murdoch press cite Karvelas as proof that not everyone in that organisation is a clown. After her coverage of this state election I'm not so sure.

What will Dennis Napthine do now?

Napthine, a country vet, was for some reason often photographed with, and drawn by cartoonists riding, horses. This could well see the end of the 'man on horseback' metaphor of strong leadership.

His affection for horses is probably genuine and the horseracing industry probably represents his best chance to avoid Stockdale Syndrome, the situation where people are bundled out of politics too early in their working lives and struggle to find something constructive to do.

Napthine has been quoted as saying that Labor's proposed royal commission into domestic violence is a waste of money, but nowhere is he quoted directly: if true, this will go down in history like all those arguments a century ago against women's suffrage, and people will defend Napthine against criticism that he excused the inexcusable.

In the regular quiz at your local pub a little while into the future, one of the questions will be: "Who was Premier of Victoria from 2012 to 2014?". You will rack your brains and groan because you'll know the answer but won't be able to articulate it. When the quizmaster reads out the answer you will growl "Oh, that's right!", and nobody will be impressed because anyone can do that and get zero points for it.

What will happen to the Liberal Party in Victoria?

It will be taken over by conservatives, a process that started already (see the preselection for Kew, and the dithering over Shaw). Churchy obsessives mostly, with one or two IPA types; the sorts of people Malcolm Fraser left the party to get away from, the sorts of people trying it on in NSW. They will shriek for their pet projects, but anything else will be nanny-state bloat. Old-guard figures who are not enjoying retirement as much as they thought will pop back up and tell everyone to keep quiet, to stay away from the Facetweet and what have you, to no avail.

They will preselect voter-repellent candidates for the federal election in 2016 and repeat the dose state-wise after that, selecting people who make Geoff Shaw look like Cicero. The media will describe these people as "feisty" and "controversial" and imply that Andrews has a fight on his hands.

Maybe there will be good and sensible people who turn the party around, but this won't happen anytime soon. The long period of reinvention that I thought was necessary before the Coalition came back to government federally is actually starting now.

The Prime Minister of Australia cares deeply about Victoria. He described Melbourne as a second home.

Yeah, he's said a lot of things. Most of them bullshit.

You seem to be implying that Tony Abbott doesn't care whether the Coalition governs Victoria.

I state it without any risk that it can be refuted. Rebutted perhaps, even dismissed; but not refuted. Do not underestimate the sheer extent to which that man gives no damn.

But if the Prime Minister of Australia doesn't care about Victoria, it must mean we're insignificant.

Oh no. See the first paragraph above. As Australian states go, Victoria is right up there. We've just got the wrong Prime Minister. Easy problem to fix, and you can do your part Victoria.

Just leave those fence-sitting journalists where they are and stop buying their output. Fence-sitting can get boring, and the best press gallery operators know there's more to state politics than some sort of longeur between elections (which they suck at covering anyway). What Daniel Andrews said before the election might not be true afterwards, so keep on looking into what the government is up to.

You'll have to do your own journalism because of the addiction to clichés by those contingently employed to do so; they can't get over it.

Media and politics today

All media organisations fancy themselves as political players. In 2013 the traditional media ganged up on the Rudd-Gillard government and levered it from office. Now, the traditional media don't really understand politics, can't report on it, and can't influence it. The ABC's response to politics takes this to a whole new level.

Stop me if you've heard this before

Traditional media organisations represented in the press gallery came to dislike the previous government. Big reforms that had not been extensively canvassed in the media created the impression that the government didn't need traditional media - an impression reinforced by its flirtation with social media.

Traditional media panicked responded in two ways. First, the sorts of grievances and disgruntlements that occur in all governments was misreported as extraordinary, and magnified in importance.

Second, the Coalition was given a free pass; coverage like no opposition had received before, its often inane and occasionally hypocritical criticisms given credence they didn't warrant. No consideration was given as to what an Abbott government might do in office. Coverage of the government was framed by the criticism from the Opposition.

No Opposition Leader before Abbott or since received such uncritical coverage, or so much of it. He got what all politicians want: to be taken at his word. He got the 'green light', in much the same way that dodgy NSW Police in the 1980s gave the 'green light' to career criminal Arthur 'Neddy' Smith. Abbott even looks a bit like Smith at the same age.

The traditional media were aiming to preserve the two-party system. Detailed and cogent criticism of the previous government from the Greens, or Andrew Wilkie, received much less coverage than white-noise like "Well this is a bad government" from the then Opposition. Minor parties and independents tended to be framed as freaks, an unstable rabble, a framing that extended to the ALP itself.

The two-party model cannot be maintained in reporting politics today. The errors made by the government have largely been unforced, their own inadequacies more important than pressure from the now Opposition.

The government has lost the political initiative. The Opposition does not have it. The political initiative is not coming from the major parties, but from minor parties and independents. Political journalists can pick that it's been a bad week for the government, but their usual frame is that must mean a good week for the opposition. They can't admit how few good weeks this government has had, or is capable of.

Having painted Labor as so hopeless, day after day for years, they cannot credibly claim they now have the answers. Nor can they claim, given the polls, that Labor are so hopeless that the shortcomings of the government should be overlooked. Because they don't understand politics today, they will eventually respond by giving Labor's leader (whether Shorten or someone else) the green light that they gave Abbott. That won't help the public decision-making process either, and nor will it help sell advertising space - depends on what you regard as the main game.

Traditional media is trapped with a set of templates on how to report politics that just don't relate to the reality before us. Regular readers will know I hate this more than I can describe, but describing is necessary as a first step to working out how to break it. A man has to have a hobby. In mid-life this beats the hell out of hair plugs and sports cars. It is cheaper, more engaging, and ultimately more constructive than trying to get a girlfriend half my age. And unlike many other hobbies, collateral damage is not worth worrying about.

Mark Scott, the ABC and 21st century politics

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile - hoping it will eat him last.

- Winston Churchill

Mark Scott is giving 21st century politics a red-hot go, mainly because he's out of options. He's playing a longer game than the government, and even the Murdoch press.

Abbott, Turnbull and the gang thought that instead of letting media organisations play politics, they'd have politics play media. As with pretty much all this government's most cunning plans, it has failed irretrievably within hours of being announced.

Former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser denounced the cuts to the ABC, and to SBS (which his government established). ABC broadcaster Mark Colvin recalled the Bland Report and jeered at what he called Fraser's "double standards". Yet, Colvin and his colleagues at ABC News and Current Affairs thought they were so clever in reporting on the Gillard government in the way the Coalition hoped they might, and for not being 'even-handed' in speculating what an Abbott government might be like. They gladly fed the (contemporary) Coalition crocodile.

Colvin still can't believe he or the ABC would ever be guilty of double standards himself. He can't imagine such an accusation even being made. Such high-handedness and selective blindness makes him the exemplar of not only what's right about the ABC (when he's on song) but also what's worst (when he's not). The extent to which the ABC relies so much upon so few makes the case for cuts stronger, not weaker.

Today, we have a government that disdains to provide journalists with any real information, and to be fair only very few actually bother seeking it out. Today we have a government that can send journalists to prison and spy on their sources. These is what happens when your first priority is maintaining journalists in their pose of balance, to the point where their actual research and story-telling skills wither from disuse. This is why merely reversing the cuts would restore nothing worth having, and increase scrutiny of government not one jot.

Spare us this 'Hunger Games' crap. Honestly. Everyone works in insecure environments these days. Get over yourselves and shut up.

It would be asinine to say that Scott is banking on Labor and the Greens to come through for him, as this shows. It's beyond wrong, it's beside the point. It's just so 20th century.

The two-party system has broken down because communities not considered 'marginal seats' felt neglected, and so are changing their politics to avoid the majors and become politically contestable, getting things done that wouldn't be done if you leave things to the 'professionals'. Denison had been a safe Liberal seat and then a safe Labor one; now it's held by an independent. Indi had been held by 'Black Jack' McEwen and by a putative minister in the current government; now it's held by an independent. Senior Labor MPs Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek face little threat from local Liberals, but are forced to maintain constant vigil against the Greens. Chris Pyne won the safest Liberal seat in South Australia in 1993; now they've stopped listening to him and will chuck him next time.

Community is a thing, keenly missed when it is absent, exulted in when present. Everybody wants their community to be a marginal seat, but it takes hard work and skills that not everyone has.

The ABC builds communities, and maintains them during emergencies. Mark Colvin is a community-builder. So too are Geraldine Doogue and Robin Williams, Tim Cox and Macka. Communities gather around Peppa Pig and The World Game and Australian Story and Q'n'A. Politicians don't represent those communities. They only make their presences felt when they try to knock them over.

Scott has targeted cuts to the ABC in regional Australia. This has flushed out silly Nationals and Liberal MPs in those areas, who have all responded with the much-derided tactic of the Open Letter. They all go something like this:

Dear Mr Scott,

When I voted for swingeing cuts to your organisation, it never occurred to me that you would cut services in my community, or that my constituents would complain so much. It's easy to outmanoeuvre me, and all I can do is squeal like a stuck pig because my persuasive abilities are more limited than you'd expect from someone in my current job. Peta never warned me about this; but to be fair, if she had I probably would have ignored her.

Please, please reverse those cuts, you bastard! You are so not coming to my Christmas drinks.

Yours etc.

In the old way of reporting, where bad news for the Coalition means good news for Labor, this would mean Labor's vote in regional Australia would skyrocket and ... look, it's all too silly. Restoration of ABC funding to rural Australia will not be achieved by the Coalition. It will not be achieved by Labor. It will be achieved by a critical mass of politicians who owe nothing to anyone but those who elect them.

An ABC journalist who has given long and loyal service to a remote community - and who is about to receive a big payout, right in the middle of the parliamentary term - is a potent, direct threat to even the most well-entrenched Coalition MP. The smarter ones know this all too well. ABC presenters are welcomed into homes, vehicles and workplaces far more than even the most affable politician. They cover the gamut of local and national issues, while the Coalition MP is hamstrung by talking points. If they don't run as actual candidates themselves, those people have greater appeal and credibility than those thrown up by parties.

Imagine you're living in a regional area, and you know more about climate change than all the nose-ringed baristas of Fitzroy and Enmore put together. Imagine you're concerned about fracking. Who are you going to vote for?
- a) the incumbent Coalition MP, and Tony Abbott.
- b) Labor, oh yeah.
- c) that ABC journo who did all those 30-minute specials on fracking, teasing out the subtleties of the issue and who stands to win or lose.
- d) a Green who couldn't win preselection for their local city electorate, but who comes with a big recommendation from Senator Lee Rhiannon (whoever the hell he is).

The late Peter Andren, a commercial TV journalist in rural NSW, kept Labor and the Coalition at bay throughout the 1990s. Tony Windsor regards Andren as a role model, and even after his death he has more to offer ambitious regional candidates than, say, Luke Hartsuyker or Joel Fitzgibbon.

The social base on which the major parties were founded is wasting away. The initiative is with community-organising movements, which must necessarily be small-scale. There may come a revival of mass politics later this century, but it is hard to discern from this angle. The smart money is on independents and minor parties, with diminishing majors negotiating terms to enjoy office.

If Scott had wanted to go after the current political class, he would have axed Insiders and smashed the other mirrors in which they regard themselves. But he is playing a longer game.

The majors look silly in their denials that they will (or that they have to) negotiate with minors. They get the legislative composition that the voters set for them, and their challenge is to make the best of that. Labor is better able to get over itself in order to strike a deal than the Coalition. Not only federally in 2010 but in every state over the past 20 years, Labor has won office through a deal with Greens and/or other independents.

This is the future, baby: thumping wins and inviolable mandates will be fewer and further between.

What Scott has done is to mess with the majors, and to ensure that while they might gang up against public broadcasting, they will have to work within a political environment where maintaining and extending the ABC is a given.

Labor underutilised public broadcasting in its pitch for the NBN, and if they do so again (they'd have to resist Murdoch, and the NSW Right in particular could never stay mad at Rupert) they should talk about public broadcasting - not allow the Coalition to witter about hi-def sport and movies. Labor has an advantage in talking public broadcasting, but not much. A future version of the Coalition could peg them back if they really tried, and wanted.

Social conservatives have shown the way, clogging Labor and Coalition parliamentary ranks with churchy freaks implacably opposed to same-sex marriage and to investigating sexual abuse in the churches and the military. This makes minority-held positions look bipartisan - and to be bipartisan is the best politics can be, right?

Issues like political donations, a federal ICAC, euthanasia, gaming reform and biodiversity look scattergun and untidy to those who can only imagine politics as a duopoly. They look like a laundry list of issues which clever manoeuvring and cosy deals can sideline effectively. The recurrence of those issues in public debate looks to such people like a failure of issues management, political reflux; not an authentic expression of democracy.

In the late 20th century, the issues that became crystallised as the Whitlam agenda were like that. Urban planning, no-fault divorce, acquiescence to communist governments in China and Vietnam - I mean, I ask you. Labor only took them up in the vacuum from being squeezed by Moscow and Rome. Labor can't be relied upon to truly embrace a laundry list of issues like that, but they are better prepared to entertain them.

Labor's fading branches, and those of the Coalition parties, aren't discussing those issues - and if they are, the wide boys in those parties ensure they don't get past Conference. The initiative is coming from independents and minors. Mark Scott has pitched the ABC as one of those issues that is always with us - not batted back and forth every time there's a change of government, and neglected in between.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no

Social media sites do listicles, and while this article defends them they are only useful if they are any good.

This listicle on Australian politics is no good at all. It is published in Fairfax, a company whose record with social media is to produce low quality, at great cost, unfashionably late. There are no grounds to be impressed with the form of this listicle, so let's go to the substance.

It suggests ways that the Abbott government might improve its performance. None of them are possible. You may as well write '10 ways the Model T Ford can win Bathurst next year': it's one thing to be cheery, but there's no point being a damn fool about it.

The video at the top of the article is mislabelled. "Liberal Senator Scott Ryan joins Chris Hammer in the studio to discuss the political news of the day" makes it sound spontaneous, even promising. Ryan has been pumped full of Liberal talking points and Hammer is working his way through a prepared list to winkle them out. Standard political reporting I know, but the very kind of formulaic shit that is killing traditional journalism in this country.

Tony Abbott has told nervous Coalition MPs he plans to knock "one or two barnacles off the ship" before Christmas ... some Liberals and Nationals MPs believe changes must be made to clear the decks and start 2015 with a clean slate.

Mixed metaphors are a sign you're not really focused on what you're trying to get across. If you have barnacles on your deck it's too late for the boat anyway. And as for the slate - c'mon.

1) Act on climate change

Nope. Never mind the G20 and next year's targets, this is not a new thing.

Tony Abbott is only leader of the Liberal Party because he found a way of not acting on climate change while also winning over the press gallery. If you thought Julia Gillard lost credibility over carbon pricing, wait until Abbott starts 're-examining' the issue. In the same way that John Howard did not nationalise the means of production, distribution and exchange in the name of the proletariat, so too Tony Abbott won't act in any sort of credible way on climate change. I'm sorry, but people who say things like that should not diminish their battered employers further by opining such ignorant nonsense.

It isn't my fault that you don't understand politics. I'm just pointing it out.

2) Restore renewable energy policy

You can't be serious.

This government got where it is with the support of non-renewables, even gibbering in unguarded moments about nuclear power. It stands against renewable energy sources and cares not at all about the jobs lost in what should be a rapidly growing, labour-intensive sector of the economy. It can't just reverse that. Nobody would believe them.

The government should agree to a sensible compromise on renewable energy, having failed in its efforts to dramatically wind back the target after appointing known climate sceptic Dick Warburton to review it.

If you can deny overwhelming evidence from across the world about climate science, then you can (as this government does) deny the RET is sensible, deny efforts to wind it back have failed, deny that DickWarb is a denialist, etc.

The government could agree to a modest winding back of the target to a figure that is achievable for the industry and does not destroy it.

The RET is achievable. The absence of bipartisan support is the government's fault, and it's up to them to get over themselves. Any 'modest winding back' would be contingent and unsustainable.

3) Have a cabinet reshuffle

This government got where it is through stability. Members of the shadow ministry who didn't make it into government are still moaning about it. Reshuffles make winners quietly pleased while the losers become noisily disgruntled. Abbott knows this.

Promote some high achievers, demote under-performers ...

Easy to say - but who, exactly, are this government's "high achievers"? You see the problem here. You'd basically have to chuck the entire Cabinet and start again, which Labor did twice in 2013 and look where that got them.

... and, above all, address the appalling lack of women on the frontbench ...

It isn't as though half the members of the Coalition party room are female. Who would you promote, Lisa and Fergus? Karen McNamara, just in time to appear at ICAC? Kelly O'Dwyer, whose facility with talking points doesn't necessarily translate into policy depth? Michaelia Cash? The women who happily participated in that Mal Brough fundraiser? If you think the surface of the Liberal Party's problem with women is appalling, wait until you get down into the details.

4) Allow a conscience vote on same-sex marriage

Oh, please. See denialism above. Nobody believed Julia Gillard, a leftie lawyer, when she insisted on the current heterosexual definition of marriage. It is one of the few things you can define Abbott on, and you'll have to force him out in order to get it.

5) Abandon the deregulation of university fees

It's been trying to do that for 20 years, and will hammer away for the next 20 as well. Again, your lack of attention is not my fault. Time for you to catch up. Next.

6) Dump the paid parental leave scheme

Mr Abbott's flagship scheme continues to face an uncertain future.

No it doesn't. If Abbott was going to do it, he would have done it by now. Have a look at what the Whitlam government achieved in its first month in office, then realise Abbott has been in office 14 months now and can't even pass a budget. Public servants face going into Christmas without being paid, and you're worried about women who haven't even conceived yet?

A lack of support in the parliament, among the public and even inside the PM's own party have led to it being watered down and temporarily shelved.

No, it's been defeated. The rhetoric of defeat was splashed around pretty thick about the previous government, but with this government it's all wrung hands and euphemisms. Why is that? Do you reckon a listicle can expose the gutlessness and stupidity of the traditional media's approach to politics? Give it a crack. You have nothing better to do.

7) Revise the government's communications strategy

This government's communications strategy smashed the last government and got a bunch of no-hopers onto the commanding heights of the way this country is run. Again, see the denialism above. This government got where it is because the press gallery confused Coalition bluster with 'straight talk'.

8) Ditch the $7 GP co-payment

Done. Next. If you vote for this lot again you can't be sure that won't return.

9) Review the proposed welfare overhaul

It's not about the bottom line, it's about the culture war, which is all this government has ever been about. The real story here is that the government has reversed almost everything it has proposed in this area, offering a nanny-state solution while also insisting that people should be freer to make their own choices and not consider themselves entitled. Too long for a listicle I admit, but all I ever wanted was a nice bit of journalism on, y'know, public policy and stuff. The kind of thing Katharine Murphy has claimed for years that she'd love to do, but never quite gets around to because oooh, have you seen Julie's shoes today?

10) Reconsider budget cuts to the ABC and SBS

Again: culture wars, denialism, as above.

The way we are governed is important. If you get paid to write, you have an obligation to think about what you write. If it's bullshit, best not to write at all, and your editor can shove both his deadline and his mistaken belief he's doing anything positive by dabbling with listicles.

It's a bit like offering advice to an obtuse government, or to obtuse journalists - what even is the point?

Leadership as distraction

I don't care how many prima donnas there are so long as I am prima donna assoluta.

- Gough Whitlam (1916-2014)

The press gallery bristles at any idea that it is biased for or against either Labor or the Coalition. The bristling becomes positively furious when you back it up with solid examples. Journalists lash out at social media with the same accusations others level at them: lazy, formulaic, ill-informed, stupid, biased etc.

This coming week, you will see the proof of their sheer utter lack of bias. This week, no matter what the government announces - in defence, health, sport, you name it - press gallery journalists will try and frame it through leadership manoeuvring. There will be talk of 'the Bishop camp' here or 'an unnamed Abbott supporter' there. Talk of Bishop looking fresh and energetic will be contrasted against the current Prime Minister being described as 'beleaguered'.

This is not to suggest that a leadership change is afoot.

Oh, poppycock Peter Hartcher, and what would you know anyway?

• Hartcher, like the rest of the press gallery, failed to pick the transition from Kevin Rudd to Julia Gillard in 2010.
• Every week for the following three years, Hartcher predicted that Rudd would return to lead the ALP. The fact that he was proven right eventually should be balanced against the idea that a stopped clock shows the right time once every twelve hours, or thousands of times in a three-year period.
• To be fair to Hartcher, he correctly identified the second change to Labor's leadership in 2013. This was because Rudd vacated the leadership by means beyond an EXCLUSIVE interview with Peter Hartcher, and the ALP openly publicised the fact that Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese were running for the leadership over an extended period.

Imagine the shrieking from the press gallery if Malcolm Turnbull had changed the way he dressed and lined up slavering puff-pieces like Bishop has. Contrast Bishop's free pass with the savaging Joe Hockey received over Madonna King's biography.

Bishop emphatically resists any suggestion she wants the leadership, or even the treasurership.

She would say that, wouldn't she. Full support for Abbott too, no doubt.

She's found her meter [sic], and she's loving it, she says.

Word to Fairfax subs: you left a key letter out of 'metier', and if the word is new to you look it up; assume that every word Hartcher writes contains 'I'.

If you look at Bishop's Twitter feed it is the Twitter feed you see from inoffensive but ubiquitous celebrities, put on for show, but without the gnawing insecurity that comes from someone who puts their heart and soul on the line each day: this is someone secure in the fact that they are never going to be seriously questioned. Prime example:

One wonders by what means the tweet was sent if the iPhone had actually been wrested away from her, if the Foreign Minister does not have some secret stash of device(s) to tweet beyond the control of advisors. This and other recent tweets are both playful and nerdy, like Kevin Rudd's were. She's all about the work - but she doesn't worry too much about looking cool, oh good heavens no.

Solid doses of hoke and disingenuousness form the basis for Bishop's affinity with Rudd. It is hard to see what other basis there is in this for such a comparison:

• Rudd is not some sort of titan in foreign affairs, like Metternich or Kissinger or even Percy Spender;
• In a policy area that is fairly intangible, Rudd has few achievements in foreign policy and many other areas of government, owing to a dithery and chaotic administrative style that careened across other areas of policy. Bourke saw that at close quarters but chose not to mention it;
• No mention is made of any foreign-policy basis on which Rudd or Bishop (or Plibersek, or anyone else) might be judged in the role of Minister for Foreign Affairs;
• Rudd's friendship with Bishop is significant in the context of the last government - Kerry-Anne Walsh calls it out in her book The Stalking of Julia Gillard, but Bourke lets it slide;
• The Labor government of 2007-13 had three Foreign Ministers: Stephen Smith, Kevin Rudd, and Bob Carr. None of those men are in Parliament now. Nobody in the Labor caucus has a strong foreign policy record. This means Labor's foreign affairs spokesperson, whether Plibersek or anyone else, must necessarily be a foreign affairs neophyte. This doesn't occur to Bourke either; so
• It isn't clear what Bishop and Bourke mean when they say Plibersek is no Kevin Rudd; other than in the simple sense that neither of them are Kevin Rudd, I'm definitely not Kevin Rudd and you almost certainly aren't either, dear reader.

An article that obscures understanding rather than facilitating it has failed as journalism. An article on how we are and might be governed that obscures understanding is undemocratic. Journalism is valuable when it seeks to go beyond set-piece events and manipulative one-on-ones, whereas someone like Bourke (and before her, Annabel Crabb) reckon the tinsel and bluster is not a distraction but the essence of government itself.

But Ms Bishop hit back at Ms Plibersek and said her opponent was only interested in playing politics with foreign policy rather than taking a bipartisan approach where appropriate.

"She doesn't seek briefings from me whereas I actually sought them from the foreign minister, both Kevin Rudd and Bob Carr," she said.

"I have invited her to a couple of briefings to hear from me and I've also suggested other briefings, security and intelligence briefings and the like," she said.

A spokesman for Ms Plibersek said she is "regularly briefed by the heads of our intelligence and security agencies directly".

It is understood Labor requests most briefings through the Prime Minister's office not the Foreign Minister's.

Think about that: why would the opposition spokesperson on foreign affairs subject herself to lectures from her political opponent? What exactly did Bishop get out of cosy chats briefings from Rudd and Carr? Rudd didn't seek much from Alexander Downer, and didn't need to. Plibersek would be derelict in not going to agency heads, observing all the protocols etc., rather than accepting morsels doled out by Bishop.

Usually, Latika Bourke is the leading example of a journalist who is fully replaceable with an algorithm:

[start]
[insert]dinkus_lbourke[/insert]

Tony Abbott said today "[insert]*Coalition_press_release*[/insert]".
[end]

She really thinks her job begins and ends at press conferences, never doubting the utility of merely quoting a government that says one thing one day and something contradictory the next. Failure to replace her with an algorithm looks increasingly like negligence on the part of those who employ her. She is not an honest trier having a go, but the world's most expensive microphone stand.

This is typical of Bourke, and it's utter shit:

[Bishop] chats the entire jog and doesn't puff once while updating me about her week's three priorities – foreign fighters, UN peacekeeping and Ebola.

She's not chatting with you for the sake of chatting, she's a public figure communicating through a journalist to the public. The minister's priorities on policy, the three dot points, would be the story for a more capable journalist. Instead, Bourke goes the handbag story, the female equivalent of blokes talking sport as a way of bonding, and a desperate attempt to equate star power with foreign policy gravitas: some random barflies, and a Hollywood reporter who makes Bourke look like Bob Woodward.

Then again, it's a neat trick to brief a journalist under circumstances when she can't function as a microphone stand. That article shows Bishop playing Bourke like a trout. Quite why Fairfax needs to smooth the Liberals' leadership transition in this way, and diminish an expensive employee in the process, is unclear. When you buy the mastheads in which Bourke is printed, you encourage her and her employers in this drivel.

The structural weakness of conservatism is that they can't distinguish between an emerging trend and a passing fad. A party that thinks it is boxing clever on climate change will totally underestimate the growing impact of asbestos, and will overestimate its ability to spin Bishop's defence of Wittenoom against its victims.

Bishop demonstrated the sort of coldness that Liberals tried to foist onto Gillard with her empty fruitbowl and "deliberately barren"; they overestimate their ability to spin Bishop away from that stuff, too. Bishop will drop a clanger that reveals her lack of understanding about raising children and it will come to define her.

As a senior lawyer in Perth, Bishop learned how to schmooze: whom to suck up to, whom to elbow aside, dealing with larger-than-life characters such as Noel Crichton-Browne. She became Minister for Ageing in 2003, injecting a professional approach to the aged care sector missing under her two provider-focused predecessors, Bronwyn Bishop and Kevin Andrews. When Brendan Nelson left the Education portfolio for Defence in 2006 she replaced him, achieving little until losing office the following year.

She became Deputy Leader because she wasn't threatening. The Liberals had an unfortunate habit of putting the leader's most potent threat as deputy, who would use the office to undermine the leader. Costello wasn't strong enough to knock Howard off and win the victory Howard couldn't, but could not play loyal deputy indefinitely. Bishop had no ideas above her station and no clue how to protect the leaders under which she served.

Soon after she became Deputy Leader, Perth-based variety-show host Peter van Onselen asked Bishop to write a book chapter on Liberal philosophy. She got a staffer to write it. Why van Onselen sought her to do a task that was manifestly outside her capabilities is unclear. Van Onselen still keens for Bishop to become Prime Minister, which shows you her ability to put one over people like him and Latika Bourke.

The nearest thing the Coalition got to a coherent policy position when in opposition was the "new Colombo Plan", a hazy but promising scheme where students from Australia would work and study in Asian countries, and vice versa. It is hard to find any particular passion for such a policy in her output before 2007. It isn't as though she's imposing her will on government now to make it happen, like Keating did under the Hawke government.

Her mismanagement of this country's relationship with Indonesia is appalling. An irrelevance like Francois Hollande received better treatment than the newly elected Joko Widodo. Yet again, the distorted prism of refugee policy defines what should be a broad-ranging and increasingly deep relationship. There is no sign Labor are doing much better but it is doubtful they could be worse.

Her mismanagement of this country's relationship with the United States is weird. Truckling to Murdoch is one thing, but Bishop and others in the national and Queensland governments are pathetic. No Australian politician is regarded so highly as Obama is here, and one who declares - as though expecting to be taken seriously - that the Great Barrier Reef is fine only opens up the kind of dissonance that cracks open promising careers in politics.

This piece fails to account for the Coalition's close relationship with the US Democrat administrations of Kennedy and Johnson (and Nixon's dastardly treatment of Gorton and McMahon), but otherwise its point is well made - and it's on Bishop's head. She wouldn't improve much as leader, either.

There are 226 members of federal parliament: name one who could write a more thoughtful and well written critique of trade and foreign policy - including Julie Bishop (and her staff) - than this.

The qualities Bishop offers the Liberal leadership are essentially those Abbott had: physical stamina and a capacity to talk obvious, provable nonsense with a straight face. She brings little to fill the void Tim Dunlop describes; again, like Rudd in that regard. Bishop would be less overbearing and abrasive than Abbott - but really, so what?

The whole idea of leadership is to show us the way forward, to engage with the issues of the day and to have us engage too, to show what our future might look like if only we would trust in something bigger than ourselves.

Journalists describe the major issues of our time but they can't engage with them, because the people they cover don't engage with them. They have no ability to engage with big issues either, which is why their coverage is miniaturised and personalised (e.g. the ill person who can't get hospital treatment, the ADF personnel who are abused but not the culture of abuse, the farmer facing drought yet again) but not rendered powerful enough to compel resolution.

The press gallery brought Senator Lambie under what they thought was intense scrutiny. You'd think such scrutiny would have picked up her role in reversing financial planning regulation - but sadly, no. We're all supposed to gnash our teeth and wail when journalists get sacked, but hey.

People like Latika Bourke and Peter van Onselen regard leadership not as engagement with, but distractions from, the issues of the day - gaffes, handbags, Labor-blaming, pic-facs. Julie Bishop can do that stuff standing on her head. That's why a silly press gallery brings out silly politics, and vice versa, and the cycle can only be broken one way. We will always need politicians but we will not always need a press gallery.

Politicians will go around the press gallery to establish a relationship with the public when they are elected with a connection that does not depend on the press gallery. The utter absence of value in and from the press gallery will then be exposed. We can get distraction from anywhere these days; neither oligopoly politics nor oligopoly media are that appealing. Engagement with the challenges of our time is the thing, and again oligopoly politics and oligopoly media aren't cutting it there, either.

Found out 2: When the Beijing smog clears

The press gallery went to the last election conveying the impression that Coalition policy, even though it existed in scant detail, was immeasurably better than Labor policy on all fronts.

Then, when the Coalition started going back on pre-election commitments, the press gallery just got confused. There was no howl of betrayal, as there was over Julia Gillard's casuistry on carbon pricing, just a kind of befuddlement or cheerily insisting that disappointment must somehow be exciting - or in any case, something we just have to put up with that its words and actions should be so divergent.

As time has gone on the press gallery have engaged in a kind of Dance of the Seven Veils as this government has shed layers of credibility. So its environmental policy is pretty ordinary, and there really is so vision for carbon abatement or even the Reef. All right, so its commitment to civil liberties is non-existent. Yeah, so there is no economic policy to speak of, and the government can't even get its budget through the Senate. It has no ability to negotiate with those outside its command-and-control.

It's interesting to note that former Coalition members Clive Palmer, Nick Xenophon, David Leyonhjelm, and Bob Day are not subject to the same 'traitor' rhetoric that beset former Nationals Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor (Peter Slipper had been elected to Parliament as a Coalition MP, while the others hadn't). Nobody in the press gallery seems to have picked that, practising the goldfish journalism of an eternal present.

Was it only a matter of days ago that the press gallery consensus had congealed around the idea that while the Coalition wasn't great at any sort of policy really but it had some sort of natural gift for foreign policy. Some conceded that Abbott had a few early glitches with the Indonesians and the Chinese (Mark Kenny and the Murdoch outlets refused to acknowledge even that, insisting that such a graceful swan could never be considered an ugly duckling), but they all agreed Abbott was some sort of natural diplomat.

(Note that the more concerted the opposition to an Abbott government policy, the worse Abbott looks. Even with the prospect of opposition, as with paid parental leave, does this tough guy look shaky. Labor gave him unstinting support on foreign policy, and only with that absence of opposition could he even appear capable.)

With all his experience in domestic and foreign politics, Peter Hartcher never picked that the US and China would do a deal on carbon emissions at the APEC meeting in Beijing. [$] Hamish Macdonald in The Saturday Paper didn't pick it. Nobody did. The English-language papers in China and the venerable US news outlets all missed it, too.

It isn't only hippies who think it isn't good enough for this country not to have a carbon abatement policy. It never was. The Canberra consenus that proponents had to wait until Abbott was good and ready to come around to the idea in his own time was wrong, too, but it was consensus and all the press gallery had to do was put quotation marks around it. Our entire political class has been wrongfooted, and the journosphere can't properly report on that because it too has been caught out.

They don't even have the good grace to admit they missed the biggest foreign policy story of the past 20 years. How a mixed metaphor became a dumb story is the sort of thing you get when you fail to clear out dead wood from 20th century journalism.

Only now are the political negatives from Tony Abbott's threat to Vladimir Putin blindingly obvious

It was always stupid. Always.

(This is what shirtfronting looks like)

As soon as it was uttered, all of the images that Abbott sought to shake off - the thoughtless thug - were reinforced. Even if he had literally shirtfronted Putin, it would have made our foreign relations worse rather than better. What use is the press gallery if they cannot anticipate?

The opportunity to rub shoulders with global leaders usually gives the prime minister of the day a boost.

No it doesn't:

• When it was announced that the APEC meeting in 2007 would be held in Sydney, people like Cassidy hailed it as a triumph for Prime Minister Howard. By the time it was held Howard was on his way out.
• In the lead-up to the 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen, the press gallery agreed that it would be a triumph for Prime Minister Rudd. It wasn't, and he too was gone within a few months.
• When Barack Obama addressed federal parliament in 2011 the impact on Prime Minister Gillard was nil. She attended a royal wedding in London and secured a UN Security Council seat and did a CHOGM in Perth; zero political benefit.

It is time for that press gallery cliche to die. I know journos love it, but it has no basis in reality and hence is useless as a prop for reporting.

The opportunity to rub shoulders with global leaders does nothing for the prime minister of the day. Nothing at all.

The reporting, the photographs and especially the cartoons, have reduced serious diplomacy to high farce. For that Abbott has to take a large slice of the blame.

Abbott should take responsibility for his actions, the Murdoch press should take responsibility for theirs.

How Abbott would now like to erase history and start again, allowing himself to present as a mature leader nudging and cajoling the world's most powerful towards important global solutions.

Here Cassidy claims to have some sort of insight into Abbott's mind. He makes a number of assumptions that no member of the press gallery is entitlement to make about Abbott, namely that he has:

• done the work in formulating solutions within a convincing wider vision, and
• anticipated potential challenges to those solutions, and
• that he has the political skill to negotiate with people who owe him nothing. Look at parliament - he can get Peta to bawl out his own backbenchers, but he can't get yokels like Lambie or Madigan even to pass his budget. Other G20 leaders deal with people like them much more convincingly than Abbott.

Cassidy has no right to hold to those assumptions, or to hide journo inadequacy behind them.

There is evidence that the shift from domestic to foreign policy, from the budget to national security, will not be the permanent game changer the government had hoped for.

Well, no shit - what made anyone think people could be deflected from Narwee and Nunawading to focus on Naypidaw? Was there any basis at all to assume that this was even possible, and that those betting the government on it were crazy?

If that won't do it, what will?

30 years in Canberra and you really don't know? So much for being an insider. Give it away.

There would be no greater signal to our political class about the impact of cuts to the public broadcaster if Insiders were to be axed.

The global challenges - and particularly the conflict in Iraq - should be a plus, especially with the opposition offering bipartisan support.

The reason why Labor offered bipartisan support was to maintain their poll lead over the government. Cassidy should realise that politics is a zero-sum game; that the government cannot be said to be doing well if it is polling behind the opposition.

At home, there is a growing realisation that the country does indeed have both a spending and a revenue problem, no matter what Coalition frontbenchers said in opposition.

If only we had experienced journalists at the time to point this out, anticipate what a Hockey budget might look like, and whether it would even pass a fractious Senate.

There are excuses. Commodity prices are falling ...

This was foreseeable before last September.

... and the Senate is preventing the government from reversing some of Labor's spending initiatives.

So was that.

But when a party speaks with such bravado and conviction in opposition, excuses don't offer much shelter in government. Reality is starting to bite.

Reality is not something that was invented this year. Politicians talking with bravado should be called out by journalists, rather than merely quoted.

Before mid next year the Abbott government has to commit to targets out to 2025. According to the Climate Institute, to match what the United States has done, Australia will have to reduce emissions not by 5 per cent, but 30 per cent. Even if that was their inclination, how would they do it? And at what cost? Abbott has already said that even if it becomes clear the 5 per cent target cannot be reached by 2020, he won't be allocating any more money.

Cassidy really can't cope with the idea that a) changing circumstances call for different measures, and b) sometimes often there's a difference between what Abbott says and what comes to pass.

On top of that, because of where China says it's heading, there is now a question mark over coal exports.

That and the fact India has banned them outright, and nowhere else is picking up the slack. This has been coming for a while, Barrie.

The one breakthrough over coming days will be the trade deal with China. But again trade deals are not created equal. There is give and take.

It will definitely be a breakthrough, unless it isn't a breakthrough at all. What a classic piece of insider wank. Sometimes you sit on the fence, sometimes the fence sits on you.

The Chinese have the advantage in this deal. Abbott has said that he's desperate to do a deal of any sort - arse-selling, remember? - and you know how negotiations go when the weaker party is under pressure. Surely that press gallery experience has to be worth something.

Until the details are released and digested, it's impossible to predict how the public will respond.

Oh come on, no it isn't.

In Australia, there is unlikely to be full-scale rioting. Nor is it likely that Coalition MPs will be greeted in their electorates as conquering heroes, with garlands of flowers and kisses from a grateful public just like western forces received in Iraq in 2003. Studied indifference will most likely be the reaction. The media will focus on beef cattle exports, as they always do with trade agreements under this government, and skate over who gets stiffed. A few companies that donate to the Liberals anyway will express delight but will be unable to make good on the promises of the agreement. Long-term impact, economically and politically, can be be anticipated as bugger-all.

Against that challenging background, Tony Abbott could have done with a hassle-free APEC and G20 to build on his status and credibility.

That was never an option. This is a stupid assessment. Hassle-free means no achievements, another empty and expensive talkfest.

The US-China climate deal is a massive achievement, one for which Abbott deserves absolutely no credit.

The journalists who have not scrutinised Abbott and who disparage those who have questioned him cannot protect their boy now. He put all his chips on foreign policy, which journalists don't understand and rely on official announcements to interpret for them. This announcement is clear, and all the spin in the world can't fix things (if you believe the Australian government did know about the US-China deal ahead of time, then you have to believe they couldn't be bothered lobbying on behalf of fossil fuel companies, when this has been its core business to date).

Because the political class has outsourced our foreign policy, and the journosphere accepts this is the way it has to be (with the occasional empty gesture), our country is exposed to initiatives taken elsewhere to a greater extent than would be the case were we to have our own foreign policy.

This government is run by control freaks. They bet the government on things they can't control, developments in Washington and Beijing and the other great capitals of the world. And now events have gotten away from them, and now even the dimmest bulb in the press gallery is obliged to note this.

Political parties can't develop such policies and the media can't critique them. Neither can adapt. Both institutions will have to be gotten around to develop a meaningful foreign policy for this country.

Found out

Two dozen other stupid reasons
Why we should suffer for this
Don't bother trying to explain them
Just hold my hand while I come to a decision on it

Sooner or later your legs give way, you hit the ground
Save it for later don't run away and let me down
Sooner or later you hit the deck, you get found out
Save it for later don't run away and let me down
You run away, run away, run away, run away, run away, run away and let me down

-The Beat Save it for later

One reason to read foreign newspapers online is because you can. I am old enough to remember when foreign newspapers were available only in the State Library, a few days old and often monopolised by some lonely expat who'd surreptitiously rip out a piece, denying you that article and whatever was on the other side of the paper.

Another is to find out how other countries run, what their priorities are. In looking for that you can often get some insight into how this country is run, what its - our? - priorities are.

This article is instructive about Australian politics - but not just for the passing mention of Adelaide's own Lynton Crosby, still junketing away on that Australia-UK Political Relic Exchange Program which gave us John McTernan.

This blog loudly and often bagged the Coalition in opposition for not engaging with policy, and with those affected by various government policies. This blog believed such engagement was essential for the Coalition to regain office, and it was wrong. This blog believed that a few more defeats would be necessary to get some focus, as had been the case in the 1980s and '90s; wrong again.

What I wasn't wrong about was that a policy agenda is necessary to build some respect to replace the inevitable disaffection, and carry a government through the ups and downs.

This government, like that of Gough Whitlam, has an economic policy crafted for another time. It is based on assumptions that no longer apply, such as continued growth in China (weaker than expected), greater engagement with India (might take a while, and looks like going backwards in certain respects, despite all that foreign policy happy-talk at the time). Because nowhere else is picking up the slack, our economy is going backwards, and economic austerity is exactly the wrong remedy for that.

Joe Hockey got more airtime than he deserved in denying the Global Financial Crisis because of a press gallery assumption (reinforced by in-house polls) that economic management was part of the Coalition DNA. In office, Hockey has given scant consideration to the revenue side of the budget, and to changing budgetary settings in the face of changing economic assumptions about growth, iron ore prices, and consumer confidence. He hasn't done the work.

Contrast Hockey with Paul Keating, who had been Shadow Treasurer for a month before taking the substantive role in government. Keating had a far better understanding of the economic landscape and the tools available to him than Hockey does.

The less said about Greg Hunt or Kevin Andrews, the better - but the Vics continue to wonder why they aren't driving the Liberal Party any more.

They thought they were being clever in presenting as little policy as possible to the public before last September. They were reinforced in that belief by a willing media, which must never be indulged in its lazy claim that it was even-handed in its approach to reporting and analysis.

The Coalition wasn't been lean and mean, just skinny and cranky. It wasn't lithe and disciplined, just anorexic and wasting muscles and organs. Its mind was not clear, just vacant.

The press gallery took this bunch of politicians at their word. This goes against the whole idea of journalism and the idea that it is valuable other than as a make-work scheme for journalists. Now that there are laws that would imprison journalists for doing journalism, and now that funding cuts will see journalists sacked and resources cut, this is why nobody rallies to what looks like self-interested pleading from people who've shed their credibility and appeal to get access to people who mislead them.

It isn't true that the Coalition deserves the benefit of the doubt, though that has been the animating principle of the press gallery - it can look like bias and journalists should understand this perspective and resist the urge to brush those accusations away. It isn't true that Labor does, either. Who deserves the benefit of the doubt? Australia. We deserve better, both in terms of government and coverage thereof.

The government hasn't done the work. The press gallery hasn't done the work, and refuses to do so. If the Labor opposition refuses to do the work (and gives up on the idea that the press gallery can even recognise work when it sees it), the task of replacing the political class member by member will be longer and more far-reaching than some might think it needs to be. Those who haven't done the work are being found out by changes to the economy, society and technology that slip away from lazy assumptions of those who govern and inform us.

After the race is run

Horse-race journalism - the conviction that reporting on politics can and should be viewed only through the prism of who's winning, who's losing - is bullshit. It causes journalists to focus on the wrong things and to misinterpret events rather than report what's actually going on in front of them.

It skews all reporting and makes journalists incapable of explaining why and how things change. Given that change is a constant in politics, this is stupid and self-defeating behaviour on their part.


Fairfax failure on poll interpretation

In the past week Fairfax did a poll. There wasn't much in it - a year after a resounding win, nobody cares whether Abbott stays or goes. Nobody regards his as any better than the previous government. Yet, Fairfax's (male) senior political journalists fell onto it like gulls to a flung chip. All political coverage Fairfax does over the next few weeks will be traceable back to these articles, even where the evidence goes against or is irrelevant to this data.

What follows here is not a quibbling with the poll data, which I haven't seen, nor with statistical theories, in which I am no expert. This piece is all about the cod interpretation and the insufficiency of horse-race journalism itself.

Horse-race journalism articles should be viewed as arse-covering on the part of an organisation with no real clue about its role. Whether we're talking declining traditional media organisations, or political parties declining in popular participation and legitimacy, the increasing sophistication of market research should mean their understandings of what people want should be much, much better than they are.

Even the opening sentence of this piece is bullshit:

Prime Minister Tony Abbott's personal approval has surged with voters over the past three months, while the Coalition has also clawed back support but still narrowly trails Labor in the two-party preferred vote.

No, it hasn't. That isn't what the data says at all.

Note also the pictures used in this article: the picture Fairfax chose of Abbott shows him smiling and assertive, while Shorten is protesting and defensive. These pictures are meant to suggest positions that the subject matter can't sustain.

Overall, the poll ... shows the Coalition trails Labor 49 per cent to 51 per cent, meaning the government would probably have narrowly lost an election if one were held over the weekend.

Again, no it doesn't. Polls have a margin of error of about 3%. What this really means is that it's anyone's guess who would win the election. Massola and Aston are pretending certainty exists where it doesn't.

This government won a decisive election a bit over a year ago. What those results show is that people don't care whether it stays or goes.

Contrast this with a bit over a year after the 2010 election. The then government hadn't won decisively. It had introduced unpopular policies, such as carbon pricing. Its position in the polls was about where this government is now - yet everyone agreed the government then was terminal.

But the government will be buoyed by a surge in support since the last Fairfax Nielsen poll was conducted in July.

During that time, Mr Abbott has crafted a an uncompromising reputation on national security, taking a lead role in the outrage over the downing of Malaysian Airways flight MH17 and his now famous threat to "shirt front" Russian President Vladimir Putin.

These writers are looking for excuses to make the current government feel "buoyed".

All those examples are symbolic. He hasn't actually done anything about MH17 (nor MH370, let's not forget). He looked like an oaf over Putin, and it is not beyond the realms of possibility that Abbott will either overreach or back down when confronted with Putin himself, and the possibility of looking like a bad host.

The Coalition's two-party preferred vote has risen from 46 per cent to 49 per cent and its primary vote has risen from 39 per cent to 42 per cent ... Labor's two-party preferred vote has fallen three points, from 54 per cent to 51 per cent, while its primary vote has dropped from 40 per cent to 37 per cent.

These are all within the 3% margin of error; it is entirely possible the polls have gone nowhere at all, cementing impressions about the government while reaffirming the ambivalence in which the alternative is held. This renders the two paragraphs I omitted from the above quote entirely moot, typical of press gallery coverage.

Fairfax Ipsos pollster Jessica Elgood said Mr Abbott appeared to have benefited from, among other things, his government's strong national security focus.

"In terms of the Coalition figures, the increase reflects Mr Abbott's greater international profile and his strong position in deploying troops and taking on Vladimir Putin," Ms Elgood said.

"That has played strongly for him but time will tell if that's a longer-term trend."

It's hollow symbolism, it cannot possibly last. This is the point where simply quoting Ms Elgood becomes insufficient and the journalism should kick in.

In this case, the opposite has happened.

Mr Abbott and Mr Shorten are now tied as preferred Prime Minister on 41 per cent each, with no change recorded for Mr Abbott, and Mr Shorten seeing a 5 per cent drop in support since July as preferred prime minister.

And while Labor has seen its two-party preferred and primary votes fall away, opposition leader Bill Shorten's bipartisan approach to these international events appears to have paid dividends.

His approval rating has risen 2 percentage points since July to 43 per cent, while his disapproval rating has fallen 4 percentage points since July.

Remember what I said about the margin of error?

Right, so Shorten has:

• adopted positions that are close to those of an unpopular government; and
• his ratings and those of the ALP have declined; and
• this is a good result for Shorten, and for the party he leads.

Even though that doesn't make sense, you can expect Fairfax's coverage of Shorten to be stuck in this elliptical reasoning.

The biggest loser in the October poll is the Palmer United Party. Its primary support almost halved to just three per cent as leader Clive Palmer struggled to keep a handle on volatile Senator Jacqui Lambie and sided with the government on a number of issues.

Again, let's see if I understand this:

• Senator Lambie has made a number of inflammatory statements that go beyond, but not against, the government's agenda against asylum-seekers and a nuanced understanding of western Asian politics; and
• Clive Palmer, like Bill Shorten, has voted with an unpopular government; and
• The PUP vote has moved within the margin of error; and
• This is bad news for Palmer, while a similar result for Shorten was good.

Nope, me neither.

Support for the Greens remains stronger than at the 2013 election at 12 per cent.

If you look back at Fairfax coverage of the Greens over the past month or so, they all agree that the Greens risk becoming irrelevant by opposing this government and everything it does. Again, a bit of recent history is instructive: Abbott opposed the previous government and everything it did, and is now Prime Minister. It's funny how things turn out, isn't it.

The government has just two weeks to pass its reforms through the Senate if the new system is to begin in 2016 but Mr Pyne said on Friday that he was willing to delay the start date to get the reforms through.

That means school leavers will be forced to apply for courses without clarity on what the total cost of their degree or diploma will be.

No, that's not what it means at all.

The government's current proposals do not apply to current students, nor to those enrolling next year, but to those commencing their studies after 1 January 2016. If Pyne delays it by a year it will apply to those students who enrol after 1 January 2017.

There's a whole other question about the reliability of a Pyne statement, but we've overloaded the precious poppets with criticism already.

Deregulation of the sector is supposed to fund an expansion of government subsidies for diploma courses and bring student loans for private and TAFE students into line with the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS).

Is that what the polling data says? Is that what the budget papers say? In the context of a polling article, surely the unpopularity should be enough.

And while Tony Abbott may want a "mature debate" about reforming Australia's federation and tax system, just 41 per cent of voters would support an increase in the consumption tax even if their personal income tax was cut as well.

First, over more than two decades in public life, it is clear that Tony Abbott is not capable of a mature debate. He can tear down positive proposals (e.g. the republic), but he cannot advocate for them (e.g. his various proposals for health reform whenhe was Health Minister).

Second, you can't pre-empt a debate by presenting a result like that as a settled result. That's why polls are lagging not leading indicators.

Raising the rate of the GST is also more unpopular outside capital cities, in the National Party's political heartland, too.

Fracking is also unpopular outside capital cities, in the National Party's political heartland. Companies that frack donate to the Nationals. Dead communities pay no GST. The Nationals are embarked on a fascinating historic experiment on the extent to which money compensates for a lack of popular support.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott's signature $5.5 billion paid parental leave scheme enjoys more than two-thirds support from voters under 40, but is still unpopular with voters overall.

We're moving into a gerontocracy, folks, where something resoundingly popular with voters under 40 is not the done deal it might have been in years gone by:

The scheme is due to commence operating from July 1, 2015. With just two more sitting weeks due in the parliamentary year, the expectation among Coalition MPs is that the legislation to establish the scheme will be introduced in early 2015.

Abbott doesn't trust people to discuss and get behind the scheme. He wants to spring it on Parliament at the last minute and wedge it through in a series of backroom deals.

It is politically unpopular in the Coalition party room too, with five of Mr Abbott's own senators flagging they may vote against the scheme when it is presented to the Parliament.

"Flagged", pfft. What even is "flagged"? This would not survive a hot blast of invective from Peta Credlin. Experienced journalists should know this, rather than pulling the drama-queen trick of pretending a non-existent division is somehow real.

Not content to leave this drivel to the backroom boys, two of Fairfax's most senor political reporters chewed over it. Peter Hartcher set up a few straw men:

Abbott's wrestling of the hydra-headed beast of threats to national security has won him a growing, grudging respect.

His activism, firmness and clarity have marked him as something better than the brawling thug that many voters had him pegged as.

Abbott has no experience in national security or diplomacy. Included in those measures are measures that get investigative journalists sent to prison, which will not affect Hartcher or the camp followers who report to him.

Abbott isn't so much an unconstrained thug as a poser. He poses here, he poses there, an achieves very little anywhere. This is what he's done with national security. Hartcher, as his employer's political and international editor, has missed the insubstantial nature of Abbott's record, and his shedding the advantages of incumbency.

His swipe at Shorten in the name of accruing praise to Abbott is also silly, especially when you consider how he gushed over Abbott as opposition leader so recently.

Michael Gordon also piled on, as part of his transition from a political commentator to a poll jockey.

Tony Abbott's national security-led recovery has put the Prime Minister back where he was before the wheels fell off with a first budget that most voters saw as unfair and a breach of trust.

A clumsy sentence is usually a sign of clumsy thinking, and so it is here. Gordon is hungry for an opportunity to recover some of that sunk credibility he, and the rest of the press gallery, poured into Abbott.

... in April, when voters were evenly split on the question of whether they preferred Abbott or Bill Shorten as prime minister.

Never mind the budget. The benchmark here is whether or not voters' faith in Abbott has been vindicated. It hasn't.

Clearly, several domestic policy successes have helped right the Coalition ship – the boats have stopped, the carbon and mining taxes are gone and legislation to implement Abbott's Direct Action policy has passed through the Senate.

Nobody knows whether or not refugee boats have stopped because this government treats them as national security emergencies rather than domestic policy matters. A regime where people die because of cut feet or random thug invasion is not a success in any sense. There is no proof the other issues made a blind bit of difference to the polling. Gordon is imposing his own feelings, biases, and guesses onto the data.

... these results indicate a 4.5 per cent swing against the government since the election of September 2013.

That should be the lede, replacing the clumsy effort he and his superiors ran with. The nine words I cut from that sentence were waffle.

The most immediate, and most sobering, implication is in the state breakdown, revealing the Coalition primary vote in Victoria at 38 per cent just four weeks out from the state election.

Did the poll measure federal voting intention or state? You know they're different, right?

Consider that Abbott has learned the lesson Howard learned: that the fewer state Coalition governments there are, the less compelling the reasons to throw out a federal Coalition government.

No wonder Denis Napthine looked so uncomfortable last week when Abbott offered a hug.

Again with the misinterpretation of what you see before you due to silly preconceptions. Abbott was giving Napthine pre-emptive consolation. He knew he was going to do him over, as he has with spiking the car manufacturing industry, spiking the state's education and healthcare sectors, and now the petrol excise.

Watch Abbott do the same thing to Mike Baird and Campbell Newman next year. Watch Michael Gordon affect surprise then, too, based on his years of experience as a political journalist.


Empty saddles

The best example of the sheer futility of horse-race journalism in explaining anything about how we are governed came fromn Michelle Grattan, when she joined The Conversation:

... I will of course be concerned with the “horse race” aspect of the contest. After all, the “horses” carry the policies – who is first past the post will determine the shape of the future.

Of course. The rationale is entirely wrong when it comes to this government - with half a dozen or so exceptions there is almost no correlation between policies and horse-race positioning.

This is why, less than a year later, the sheer bankruptcy of this position was on show when she surveyed the wreckage of the hopes and dreams invested in the Abbott government:

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

As an analytic tool, as a standpoint for improving understanding, as a basis for a career - horse-race political journalism is totally, utterly useless.


The headache of cognitive dissonance

This brings us to Paula Matthewson, who has not so much lost what little perspective she had as a blogger as wantonly discarded it, buying into insiderdom and the horse race to an extent that can only be described as tragic.

The first thing to be said is that Matthewson does not take criticism well, or at all really. She cannot distinguish between principles and standards about how we are governed and how that is covered, and personal attacks. Had anyone else written this about Matthewson, it would be a swingeing ad-hominem attack rather than fair comment. It's a great illustration of the bankruptcy of insiderdom and the pointlessness of trying to interpret it to the very public it exists to defraud and disenfranchise.

Jacqui Lambie was a non-commissioned officer in the Army. Before joining the PUP and being elected to the Senate, she was politically motivated by a desire for better conditions for serving Defence personnel, and for veterans, and their families.

Neither the ALP nor the Liberal-National-LNP-CLP Coalition offers a strong or proud record in this area. These may not be priorities for you or me but they are perfectly legitimate motivations and focus areas for involvement in politics.

You might quibble with the way Lambie goes about her business, as Matthewson does (strangely calling her both a "problem child" and a "Queen"), but the issues that Senator Lambie raises are worth examining and may explain her position better than Matthewson seems capable.

Matthewson is consistently critical of MPs who speak out against their party, regardless of the reason. People are right to be critical of MPs who vote on legislation they know nothing about, other than the dot-points fed to them from ministers' offices by people not very different from Matthewson.

Most major party MPs have no principles that motivate them one way or another on policy, which is why it is reasonable to expect them to vote and speak as their leadership bids them do. If you assume that a backbencher holding a policy position they have developed themselves is illegitimate, and can only be motivated by self-aggrandisement rather than the position itself, then of course such a position is going to seem self-aggrandising.

This explains why she refers to the prospect of an MP being expelled from a political party - a regular event in our political history - as "ex-communication". One is excommunicated from a religion, not from a political party. She refers to both Lambie and Palmer as "dogs", a term used to denote contempt and disloyalty.

Defence personnel and veterans affairs policies are more than one MP's "pet projects", and deserve to be examined as such by reporters who cover politics. Matthewson and other horse-race aficionados can't do that. People with opinions about policy that are not handed down from official sources are self-indulgent, apparently. If you think about it, such a perspective - a bias - goes against what politics is about in a democracy.

Like it or not, everything is politics, she bleated in the face of earlier criticism which she failed to attribute to anything bigger than herself. That isn't true. Very little is politics, if your idea of 'politics' is limited to the daily sideshow from Canberra. The restriction of decision-making to an unelected, unaccountable cabal of staffers, and the idea of "message discipline" (i.e., that the whole country is no more perceptive than the dumbest member of the press gallery, and information is restricted and fluffed accordingly) means that perishingly little is politics. This is a point well made by Jonathan Green:

Like so many areas of Australian public life, the policy possibilities are well-canvassed, well-elaborated and thoroughly discussed. It's only when issues of substance sink into the pit of politics ... the most obvious current path to action ... that maturity departs and blind partisanship obscures what can often seem like common and consensual truths.

And this will bring a testing time for politics as we know it, for increasingly it is obvious, through the elaborate connectivity of our new age, that the solutions to many of the things that ail, limit or frustrate us are out there, graspable, well-formed and ready.

The gatekeepers of politics, the vested interests of big parties and formal power, no longer have a stranglehold over that information and maybe quite soon over the possible courses to action.

The fundamental disconnect of politics is here: that it substitutes something vindictive and obstinately childish for mature open-minded discussion, discussion most of us are more than capable of having.

It's not as if there were no models out there, versions of public discussion that might simultaneously inspire us and flatter our intelligence.

Matthewson even believes in something called the politics of Ebola. As with any vicious disease, this can be interpreted as follows:

• Polls show that a majority of Australians are against vicious life-threatening illnesses; and
• A minority of Australians have any given vicious life-threatening illnesses at any one time; therefore
• Vote yourself well! The government can cut health funding knowing insiders like Matthewson will praise their savvy.

According to Matthewson, governments don't make political issues. Political issues only arise when people disagree with government. [$]Here and [$]there she articulates opposition to one of the worst budgets in recent times the only way she can: as toddlers' tantrums. She sees the budget only as an agenda item that is not to be seriously challenged, approved, and shunted off the agenda as quickly as possible. Never mind that it rivals New Zealand's 1958 "Black Budget" for sheer political and economic incompetence, or that its effects will be felt far beyond State Circuit for longer than she can imagine.

Apparently there is no reasonable opposition to this budget, or indeed the government; only petulance. Matthewson's idea of connecting with the governed is to sit in Canberra hunched over polling data, projecting her biases and fears and straw-man work like the old lags at Fairfax. Like them, any challenge or questioning can only be emotional and personal.

Before taking articles of faith entering the press gallery, Matthewson was a lobbyist for the motor industry. It is always hard to quantify the impact of a lobbyist, but as Manufacturing Minister Senator Kim Carr had a commitment to the motor industry that came from his political beliefs, with a detailed knowledge of the motor industry and strong support within the ALP from unions in that industry. Was Carr being petulant or childish in his defence of Australian car manufacturing? Was the Abbott government petulant or childish in bringing about its demise?

Why do editors bother commissioning such drivel? The editors who commission Matthewson are steeped in old-media thinking, sharing her assumption the passively observed horse-race is the essence of political reporting. Politics is something that happens in, and to, the nation as a whole. Clinging to the assumption that politics is confined to buildings in Canberra or Macquarie Street is the sort of thinking that has seen traditional media business models destroyed.

The nation sends elected representatives to Canberra. Some journalists take it upon themselves to do the reverse, to posit themselves as representatives of the political class to the rest of the country, explaining what happened and why in such a way that procludes discussion of how decisions might work (instead: how they "play", i.e. what other journalists might think of them), and how things might be different.

This is what Matthewson does, and she's found a circle of editors who will keep her in gin and cat food. What she hasn't done is used the perspective she gained from beyond State Circuit and the traditional media and brought it to bear on insiderdom. Those occasional glimpses were what made her writings valuable, not the did-I-tell-you-I-worked-for-John-Howard stuff. Bringing her in was the last hope the press gallery had to save itself from irrelevance, but by going-along-to-get-along she has reinforced them in their worst habits and stalest assumptions.

By default, Matthewson belongs in the bin of Too Silly To Read, to which many of this blog's press gallery chew-toys have been consigned. Their witterings and prognostications hold up scarcely better than discarded betting-slips. But as Lyndon Johnson once said after an unusually good speech from Nixon, sometimes chicken shit can become chicken salad; and in the same way, it is possible Matthewson will regain some perspective on what government is about, and what politics is for.


They shoot horses, don't they?

Insiders will tolerate set-piece debates only (where participants talk past one another on big ideas, and engage only over trivia), and then with gritted teeth. Wide-ranging debates are ignored or framed as chaos, as we saw under the previous government. They do not understand (let alone present) debates that seriously challenge or even overturn government decisions as democracy in action, but as some sort of political reflux to be resisted at all costs. Polls can measure disaffection but, overlaid with dopey assumptions and cack-witted agendas, they can't identify alternative ways forward. Only politics can do that.

Articulating alternatives falls to outsiders because insiders don't respect outsiders enough to explain, to draw them in, to assess impacts and consider different options. Insiders do horse-race reporting because everyone else does, because they can't snap out of it.

The horse race has held political reporting hostage for long enough.

All those named above could be replaced with one reporter (or even a piece of software), stumbling around Parliament scooping up press releases and gaffes, while greater scrutiny was brought to bear on how we are governed and what our options are.