Sweating the small stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How I voted 2015

I went the polling booth with my young son, who has seen documentaries about the Great Barrier Reef and had the basics of the electoral system explained to him. He is convinced that voting Green will save the Reef, and having taken the how-to-vote from the Green person at the polling booth he waved it at me and said "this one. This one, Dad". It was the first time I had been actively lobbied for my vote since I left the Liberal Party 15 years ago.

The last Liberal preselection I voted in was the one for the state seat of Manly in 1999. The seat was held by an independent - one who had conspired to bring down Nick Greiner - and it was kind of depressing as there was no stand-out candidate. Half of them were outright fools, claiming fealty to Tony Abbott and implying that he was returning the sentiment. I voted for one of my contemporaries who I thought would make a useful MP - not Mike Baird. I had heard Baird would be one of the stars of the preselection, but his speech was a patchwork that he seemed to find unconvincing. When the questions came, rightwing delegates played him like a trout and made him look rattled and defensive. I was tired of voting for losers who got chewed up by sharks in the NSW ALP and picked off by the clowns on the right. As voting went on, my preferred candidate went down and I voted for another guy who seemed nice enough, and worthy, but lacking in the colour, the vision and the mongrel to make a truly effective MP. The winner of that preselection was a boofhead who made Abbott look like a Rhodes Scholar, and who went down screaming against the independent.

That defensive Mike Baird was on display again in a radio interview on Friday. Thankfully for him it was on Radio National so nobody heard it. You will be seeing more of that Mike Baird going forward. He has charmed the press gallery individually such that they do not come after him collectively, and he faced a weakened opposition. The opposition has now been strengthened and the press gallery regards him as less of a novelty. Having no ability to question Baird on policy, and not having put him under much pressure thus far, the press gallery will act all surprise when Baird stumbles. This isn't to say he's a cream-puff - he isn't - but he just won't do that well explaining lots of complex ideas in non-technical terms under sustained pressure.

John Robertson went in hard against Barry O'Farrell and ended up looking like a prick. When O'Farrell fell it had nothing to do with Robertson, who was still a prick, and Baird only made him look worse. Luke Foley was smart not to try and rip away Baird's nice-guy persona, learned from having the blood of three Labor Premiers under his fingernails. If he goes in too hard against Baird then he too will go the way of Robertson; you can do that stuff in Labor backrooms, not in public. Is Foley a nice guy? We don't have enough information where to put him on a scale from Abbott to Baird, much less trust those judgments against policy positions.

Baird even makes Tony Abbott look like more of a prick than he already is. This effect will be enhanced when Abbott plays silly-buggers with COAG, leaving Labor Premiers do the hard yards advocating for state-delivered services. By bringing forward the rollout of NDIS while privatising disability support services, Baird is creating a whole lot of mixed messaging that will come back to bite him over this term.

Anyway, I went to the polling booth and got my two bits of paper. The Legislative Assembly (lower house) paper brought on an immediate bout of hate-voting: no representatives of the various flavours of marxism or blatantly racist parties, but Fred Nile's franchisee (increasingly racist now that homophobia is a non-starter) and No Land Tax immediately took [5] and [4].

The next choice was harder. Jerome Laxale is a young guy who wants to be a MP and he's ticked all the right boxes: joined a major party (Labor), moved into the area and got elected to the local council (a deeply dysfunctional one, which local government reform will almost certainly sweep away). He is still just a political-class muppet and I am doing him a favour by forestalling him becoming Penny Sharpe or Mark Coure.

NSW Labor just aren't ready. Their message of dump-Baird-and-Abbott-goes-too was redundant as Abbott is finished anyway. Their only real objection to the donations that have bedevilled the Libs is that none of it is going to them. Their transport policy was empty, as I said last week, politically and policy-wise. They had no education policy worth the name, they had a real lacuna in law-and-order hysteria to float some new ideas, a bit on health and a few other snippets here and there, but nothing to show for four years in the wilderness. They promised to build a new high school in the area, but they closed the last one and I have no more idea than they do where it might go. I don't believe them on power or disability services or anything else, really; the flirtation with xenophobia regarding Chinese state-owned enterprises was revolting. NSW Labor just isn't like Victorian Labor or SA Labor or Queensland Labor, no good pretending otherwise. Labor [3].

This left the Green and the Liberal. Greens talked a good talk on local issues and have started to think about policy from the ground up. They seem to link bits and pieces from different policy areas into a coherent whole, which it hadn't as a smaller fringe party, yet you can take bits of that agenda and leave others (which wasn't possible as a smaller, more intense outfit). Their third candidate for the Legislative Council was a dux of Duntroon; their other candidates are, increasingly, the sort of impressive, professional, well-educated candidate the majors used to attract.

The old saw that the majors will put together all the governments from now until the end of time is not, as it were, sustainable. They continue attracting impressive candidates who rethink what it is to govern from the ground up (which attracts impressive candidates - an upward spiral opposite to that facing the majors). They deserve the benefit of the doubt, Labor doesn't: Green [2]. My son was disappointed with that but more disappointed that he didn't wish a Green government into being.

The local MP, Victor Dominello, takes his constituency responsibilities seriously and seems to like people, unlike Federal MP John Alexander. He represents a government that has quite good education and transport policies, adequate ones in other areas, and some terrible ones (e.g. disability services, women's refuges) which may be turned around by strategic voting. This isn't the best government can get, but it is the best one on offer at this time, which is why I voted Liberal [1].

In the Legislative Council (the upper house - I wish journos would stop referring to it as the Senate), I voted below the line for a whole lot of candidates who may push to ameliorate the very issues nominated above as weak issues for this government. This is called tactical voting and it beats the hell out of voting the party line and having that line shift without reference or recourse to you. In the Coalition candidate list there are some who will do well at negotiating policy through the Council (but mostly they are just making up the numbers, put to most effective use shutting up and doing as they're told): they can earn their money dealing with a multiplicity of views.

Across safe Liberal seats the Greens came in second. Wealthy areas are described in media cliche as 'leafy', and however much it bemuses Labor die-hards from industrial suburbs it is no surprise that Green activists come from sylvan glades and are well-educated and articulate. It isn't true to describe Greens as the new moderate liberals but it's less of a stretch that it was when the party was dominated by watermelons. Now that you can vote Green without sending the entire economy and social services into perdition, they are the real alternative to Liberals - far easier to imagine a Green as your local MP than Labor.

Only when you understand that can you clarify the hysteria behind this:

Many commentators have seen the Greens' victory in Balmain and Newtown as a sign of the progressive shift to the left in the inner city seats.

But Dr Burgmann says it's actually a sign of a conservative shift away from working class Labor politics that will eventually see those seats held by the Liberals.

"It's a demographic change of the inner city," she said. "It's the very wealthy, well-educated who will never need the services of the state but who can't quite bring themselves to vote Liberal.

"But eventually they will be Liberal seats."

It's worth noting, however, that the Liberal primary vote in Balmain was down by 6.7 per cent at this election, back to roughly what it was in 2007. The Liberal primary vote was also down by 4.4 per cent in Newtown.

Old woman shouts at cloud. A Green voter is someone who "can't quite bring themselves to vote Liberal" in the same way that Dr Burgmann can't. The Greens Political Party offer a starker contrast with the Liberal Political Party policies than the Labor Political Party (all right, I'll stop it now). In inner-city communities Greens are committed users of public transport and education, more so than old-school Labor people who have long since left education (public or private) behind and who accepted ALP blandishments that a dollar spent on public transport should be spent anywhere but in the inner-city. The idea that Dr Burgmann's niece was defeated by a proto-Liberal is bullshit, but if it helps her sleep at night the theory may have some value yet.

Quite why inner-city Sydney turned away from Labor, while inner-city Newcastle and inner-city Wollongong turned toward them, is unclear. Expensive flats may yet create a Liberal constituency that does not exist today, but this would imply the Liberals will develop sophisticated appeal mechanisms that, frankly, does not exist either. We are not yet in speculative fiction territory but you can see it from here.

It seems a shame that the traffic can run only one way: Labor-to-Green-to-Liberal. Why Labor cannot use Green preferences to turn Liberal seats into Labor ones over time, or imagine a Green incumbency that lasts only until Labor can wait it out, is unclear - and probably a failure of imagination on Labor's part.

Why the north coast turned toward the Greens is clearer, and CSG is only part of the answer. Over time the Greens have put themselves in a position to take the advantages that Lismore and Ballina presented them this time.

North coast communities were dominated by rural conservatives who got wealthy selling tract housing to people on lower incomes than they. That new housing became urban communities not very different to sub-urban communities in the cities, but without the infrastructure of those communities. Labor were the first to twig to this demographic shift and what it meant politically; Liberals wrung their hands over invading National turf, leaving it to hayseeds who defined themselves against urban communities to try and represent them.

The Green base thought about government and community and environment from the ground up; people who move to an area are more likely to do this than those who unquestioningly accept it from childhood. Greens started with dessicated old hippies but moved out beyond them as communities changed. Nationals found validation in fossils like Thomas George. Labor's incrementalism worked against them as the Greens offered the more substantial alternative than Labor (without being scary or politically unrealistic).

The Liberals couldn't tell the difference and couldn't afford the aggro with their "Coalition partners". If they are to replace newly-elected Greens in Ballina and Lismore (and, going forward, in Port Macquarie and Coffs Harbour) they will have to start from scratch, today, and somehow persuade their "Coalition partners" that their future lies west of the Dividing Range. Again, this requires Liberals to be bold and innovative and ... you can see the problem here.

I have no idea what Indigenous people want from the NSW government, or what anyone was offering them, if anything.

How do you plan cities in a real estate market like this, and for whom? None of that is clear. The traditional media weren't asking, and the Political Parties can only avoid questions that nobody else asks.

We have in NSW a state government that wants to sell electricity distribution networks at the very time their value is collapsing, and which won't get the political support necessary to do so. It may go into debt to fund big-ticket infrastructure but they won't be around when it comes on line. It will come under pressure on health at the very time that their resident expert, Jillian Skinner, has had her best shot at reform and no-one else steps up to show what the next steps look like (the most likely alternatives being niggardly, self-defeating budget cuts that create more problems than they solve, much like the 'reforms' coming from the federal government). Its mixed messages on disability services, and small-scale donations, will wear it down without a clear way forward.

Foley seems disciplined but will make mistakes. He's already gone further than his Young Labor antagonists Reba Meagher and Joe Tripodi, but that will count for less and less over time. He didn't get where he is by entrusting policy development, electoral tactics or anything else to the wider ALP membership, so forget that. It will be interesting to see the extent to which education and health bureaucracies start leaking to Labor, and of course once the police do so it is all over. I trust Labor to make political capital from prison facilities that are both increasingly decrepit and overcrowded, but not to do much about it.

Still, where else would you be, etc.

The Commission of Magical Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dead, buried, cremated

Tony Abbott has already lost the election. He needed to win a dozen seats to secure the most bare majority on 21 August, but it just can't happen regardless of the debate later on.

During the RSPT fiasco it looked as though Labor would lose all four of its seats in WA, and probably that many again in Queensland. That would have, could have put him more than half way there.

If John Howard had been Liberal leader this year, he would have been all over Perth and mid-north Queensland like a rash, building presence and momentum that would have survived any Labor deal with the major miners. What Howard (or Turnbull for that matter) would not have done is prance around Sydney in sluggos while a political opportunity went begging. The very idea that the Libs stand to lose a seat to a minister from the despised former WA state Labor government is mind-boggling.

Then there was WorkChoices. If he wanted to restore it, or banish it forever, or tinker with it a bit, he needed to have a reason why. A generation of so-called political professionals has dismissed the idea of a rationale - even a principle - behind policy-making. Where that dismissal leads you is where the Libs are now: flying by the seat of their pants, straight into the turf.

John Roskam's piece in Friday's AFR attempted to imply that the business community was seething about the failure of a schoolkid to keep working at a part-time job after school, but at least he's trying. What was really happening there was an act of bastardry by Joe de Bruyn's SDA against the youth of Australia, in which he had nobbled any source of opposition to his wacky scheme to make retail a career for the desperate (who are likely to join the union) rather than a transition phase for young people (who aren't). At least, though, Roskam tried to put it in context, even if he honoured CIS/IPA traditions by getting it wrong.

That arrogant dismissal of an overarching context for policy in NSW gave the Liberal Party four successive losses from 1995 to 2007. It will do the same to Abbott, the anti-intellectual Rhodes Scholar, the minister with a decade's experience who is making every rookie mistake in the book.

Then there was the half-hearted and half-baked speech about the women in his life. It sounded like they were all the women he needed, thanks very much, and Julie Bishop was disingenuous at best in introducing him. It reminded me of all those pictures of Labor women in 2004 lining up to kiss Mark Latham, except there are clearly some things Liberal women won't do. The visuals were all about dirt and trucks. For a game-changer you need persistence and follow-through, and while you can blame it on the news-cycle you can't blame journalists for lacking attention if there's no substance to focus on.

It's not good enough for Abbott to "act decisively" against a pinhead like this. Abbott has spent twenty years puffing up people like that, making them feel like they had a real place in national campaigns and other forms of big-league politics:

"But I don’t know if we want at this stage in Australian politics a Muslim in the parliament and an atheist running the government."

If you don't know, keep your trap shut. It also looks like this is conditional on time, as though there might come a time when there are too few atheists and Muslims in Parliament, and personally I'd be fascinated to know what such conditions might be.

Abbott will go on like this of course. He's come this far and even people like Andrew Robb or Brian Loughnane have not yet summoned up the courage to tell him where he's going wrong. They'll get there eventually and they'll have all these reasons and more, but now is the time to try and pilot the plane away from the ground.

This all depends upon Labor not tracing the same trajectory of failure. Paul Daley is right about Latham's piece in Friday's AFR being a cut-out-n-keep on the modern ALP, but I hope they're both wrong about Gillard. It seems that she's trying to shut down debates on immigration, infrastructure and climate change - debates she can't win within the next four weeks, but which might benefit from clearer political air. You can forgive her for winning dumb if - if - she governs smart.

What is said in the election campaign itself only counts for journalists. Nobody else believes it and no vote turns on it. People are giving Gillard the benefit of the doubt assuming that her governing will be better than her campaigning. Nobody gives Abbott the benefit because everything gets worse if he's vindicated - but he won't be.

Raw deals and burnt offerings

I love it that we live in a country where a joint press conference by two politicians (do not dare call it a debate) gives way to a cooking show. Perhaps they could both share the same theme:

'Cause you're hot then you're cold
You're yes then you're no
You're in then you're out
You're up then you're down
You're wrong when it's right
It's black and it's white
We fight, we break up
We kiss, we make up

(You) You don't really want to stay, no
(You) But you don't really want to go
You're hot then you're cold
You're yes then you're no
You're in and you're out
You're up and you're down

In the comments on the previous post, derrida derider reckons we get the government we deserve. I think this is only true if you believe our democratic processes are more remote than they are. It harks from a time when the class of voters was limited and those who ended up in Parliament could be expected to be reasonably representative of the franchise. I can't be convinced that the people of North Korea deserve the Kim Dynasty, nor that Zimbabweans deserve Mugabe; and that's sticking to our own time and avoiding Godwin's Law assiduously.

That said, Australia deserves better than we are offered:

Julia Gillard enters the campaign carrying the baggage of a Labor government which since 2007 has squandered its political capital on muddled, wasteful spending and a failure to begin the crucial productivity and infrastructure developments needed to lock in the China boom.

Couldn't agree more. However:

Tony Abbott begins his run for the prime ministership trying to lose the image of a Coalition so absorbed by leadership fights since the dying days of the Howard government, that it has failed to do the work on policy needed to renew the conservative agenda.

The Coalition is not absorbed by leadership fights.

There was no leadership fight in 2007: Costello was no further advanced in his 'fight' then than he had been in 1997. Nobody, no-one at all is holding a candle for Brendan Nelson. Malcolm Turnbull is giving Abbott industrial quantities of rope. Greg Hunt is entitled to refuse to serve on Abbott's frontbench, but there he is plugging away like he believes what he's saying. Inflated lightweights like Chris Pyne, Tony Smith and George Brandis have their shoulders to the wheel. Apart from Turnbull all of the leading best foremost Liberals are on Abbott's frontbench: no pretender is skulking away on the back benches, no fifth column of moderates or Illinois Nazis is nibbling away. God help them, the Liberals are giving this election all they have.

That quote is partly right at hinting that conservatism needs renewal. After Bush and the various pipple running the UK Tories, conservatism is seriously in abeyance and there are no green shoots to be seen. The Tea Party and the various brands of British xenophobes offer nothing to the Liberal Party: the vigorous activity of people like Limbaugh, Palin and Griffin is just the sort of twitching you see in a maggoty corpse.

The challenge for both leaders in the next five weeks will be to demonstrate they have thrown off the past three years of missed opportunities, that they have not been rendered frightened and timid by the recent past. They must show us that they appreciate the aspirations of modern Australians and how far voters have moved away from old ideological settings. Above all, both Ms Gillard and Mr Abbott need to understand that a community's yearning for stability does not mean an end to growth or a return to a "little Australia".

Indeed it is. All that is necessary is to ignore pretty much everything that The Australian has ever printed and will ever print. It is only a paper read by the elites; no seat, no election has ever swung on anything that has ever come out of that paper. Yes, it would take a real leader to say, "who gives a damn what's in The Australian?", and after the initial intake of breath from the journosphere the gig would be up.

I particularly loved the fresh breeze of sense eminating far from Canberra in this:

A new Galaxy poll of four marginal Queensland seats has found support for an emissions trading scheme (ETS) continues to grow.

Rudd was going quite well until he backed away from this issue. Under derrida derider's theory there would have been a lot more quiet acceptance of this, despair from those who want action on climate change and quiet vindication from those confused and fearful of any such action. This is further reinforced by this quote from an otherwise self-serving piece:

... the collapse in public support for Rudd was not the result of introducing reform. It was the opposite: appearing to abandon reform and the principles voters believed he stood for. He had promised to be different on asylum seekers and he had made emissions trading his own. The mining tax, announced on the eve of the May poll, played into voter reservations about competence. Net result: Labor voters shifted to the Greens and other minor parties in protest. Coalition voters stayed put.

Anyway, back to the Oz:

As Paul Kelly writes today, "the entire reputation of modern Labor is now on the block".

At every election, the entire reputation of modern Labor is on the block with its skirt hitched up too high and winking at leering passers-by, thus the government-or-opposition stakes at every election that comes around. How poorly served we are, not only by clownish pollies but by the intellectually exhausted journosphere.

Mr Howard was an extraordinary prime minister but he failed in two areas: he did not institute a succession plan around Peter Costello; and he avoided administrative reform, leaving the Liberals trailing the ALP in terms of party organisation and capacity to mount a sophisticated election campaign. Mr Abbott will be a formidable campaigner, having brought the Coalition back to a competitive position. But his lack of adequately developed policy mirrors Labor's shortage of fresh ideas.

That bit about 'administrative reform' got my hopes up - until I realised it was about the Liberal Party, which uses Young Liberals as carrier pigeons and still pays for ads with arrows from Asia stabbing Australia in the backside west. It is Howard who failed on the infrastructure front, and whose policy legacy can be seen with the proposal to jack up the price of school uniforms (now that they are no longer being made by Australians).

Both have leaders of considerable talent who have decided this is not the time to rock the boat with imagination and ambition for the nation.

In sport, we write off players of considerable talent who botch it in the big tournaments. Hand-wringing bullshit like this is designed to pander to an appalling situation where journalists cannot find out what's going on in government unless they maintain good relations with pollies.

The fourth leg of his pitch - to stop the boats - demonstrates how much both parties will seek to build their case for government around controlling our borders. This is a valid concern and the bipartisan acceptance of offshore processing is common sense.

No, it is bullshit and every oxygen-thief who blows their own brand of smoke into it shows their inability to handle real issues of the kind timidly mentioned here: urban infrastructure and environmental issues, in particular the idea that if you can't extract something without wrecking the water table or doing some other great vandalism, you leave it alone.

Labor must formulate a climate change policy that addresses the electorate's demand for action on carbon reduction without frightening business and coal-dependent sectors.

Hard to do in a month: much easier to faff knowing full well that the alternative is much, much worse; and they are.

Our leaders must understand the aspirations of modern Australians and show how they can truly move us forward.

Yes. And if the journosphere don't understand them either, and don't understand the issues they report on, what's the point?

This hand-wringing is all based on the idea that conservatives can no longer have faith in a Liberal victory. Shaun Carney is right: "A damning critique of the government is fine, but it's not enough". Talk of an Abbott Government is, like, so last week.

The Liberal Party really must get past John Howard. People are disappointed in Rudd-Gillard but they are only truly loathed by those they displaced from cushy and impressive-sounding jobs. Start by getting rid of his boy. Tony Abbott helped lose the 1993 election for the Liberal Party, he helped lose the 2007 election ("that's bullshit" - no, really), and now he's going for the trifecta. If anyone's earned a job in Sussex Street, it's Tony Abbott: after the state election he could be their only chance.

Gillard does promise more than is being revealed at this election, and people seem willing to take her on trust. Abbott, on the other hand, is firing on all cylinders and has nothing to declare but his own unfitness for office.

Why the Liberals will collapse in the Federal election campaign

This story misses the point: nobody gives a damn about the gaffe, simply because a) O'Farrell is not some gaffe-prone clown and b) it is an aberration and he will work even harder to make it appear uncharacteristic going forward.


The Liberals are a shambles. They are going into the election campaign with an organisation that is unskilled and lacking commitment. When the heat is on they will panic, lash out and be forced to withdraw; or they will simply loll about listlessly, leak trivia and nonsense to turned into drivel, and wait it out until their glorious summer rolls around at some point into the future.

In NSW they've lost a state president which would be no great loss if the state director wasn't an unimaginative dolt, running around enforcing "discipline" and stamping out any sign of initiative - including the fundamental political need to get candidates on the ground, properly resourced, so that people vote for the Liberals rather than just against Praetorian Labor.

In Victoria, ye olde guarde Melbourne has comprehensively had its fingers prised from decision-making in that state, and the Costello-Kroger generation have not stuck around long enough to cement their role as the new generation in command of the high ground (or at least that end of Collins Street where Parliament House and other institutions of power are). Even though he's no fan of theirs, this vacuum leaves Ted Baillieu exposed and will do unless he can win this year's state election and seize command, Kennett-style, but without the arrogance that made Kennett's time so fleeting. The state party is a joke, committed to the self-preservation of nobodies without any sign of determination in fundraising, campaigning, policy development or anything else. All the qualities of the Victorian Liberals have gone, save the conceit left behind from when they ran party, state and nation.

Victorians will vote against Brumby, just enough to undermine what confidence he has left, without replacing him outright. If he is replaced by Hulls, he will be past his best, as risk-averse as Brumby is now but more complacent, owing to the sort of contempt for his Opposition that Kennett had for his. If Brumby is replaced by someone else, they'll botch it too and make the Libs look good by contrast. That's all next term, though.

In Queensland too, the coming federal election is just a dry run for the next state election which the LNP expect to win. Labor MP Chris Trevor is all but begging the LNP to take his seat from him and many of his colleagues aren't much chop either, but they are facing LNP candidates who are lazy, stupid or both. Speaking of which, Peter Dutton will lose his federal seat and should go into state politics, with the LNP better off at both levels. The sort of people who voted for 19-year-old Wyatt Roy because he was articulate are the same people who voted for Bill O'Chee, and learned nothing from the experience. They know that the action is in state politics and that there Labor have the arrogant complacency that undermines the benefits of incumbency, the very quality Peter Beattie spent his time trying to expunge.

You can't blame the party machine for being encouraged by state politics. In 1987 John Howard might have done better (especially if they - we - had known then what we know now) were it not for the coming of Greiner in NSW and the last gasps of the Victorian squattocracy redoubling their efforts against Cain Labor as the main game and vacillating over Kennett, not realising that a Liberal government in 1987 could have sunk Victorian Labor and headed off its 1989-92 economic vandalism. If Bjelke-Petersen had lost momentum in 1986 Queensland would have concentrated its vote for the Coalition better than it did.

Howard was shunned by the state machines and did not reconcile to them. Like John Gorton, he was an antifederalist conservative and for the same reason: being kicked around by the states will do that to you.

Tony Abbott is getting in Barry O'Farrell's way, he's getting in Ted Baillieu's way (in Melbourne, red sluggos are sooooo 2006) and he's not doing John-Paul Langbroek any favours either. The idea of him getting hold of the federal government and doing what Howard did but less deftly - like Phaeton in the sun-chariot - can only appal anyone keen on good government, let alone one better than the incumbents. Top-notch candidates are staying out of preselection contests: with few exceptions, Liberal candidates are chancers who missed out on a winnable state seat and are racking up brownie points, or old lags who have stayed too long at the fair.

Where the Liberals do get candidates on the ground, they choose the wrong ones. The whole idea (insofar as it can be called that) behind putting John Alexander into Bennelong was "to fight star power with star power". What halfwit thinks that Bennelong hankers for "star power"? Nobody who has been both to Hollywood and Denistone would confuse the two. Bennelong voters want political substance: on the rare occasions that people turn to their federal member to fix a political problem, they want it fixed efficiently. The "Bennelong Funnel" aircraft noise issue in the '90s is the primary example of that. McKew had just enough political substance to push out Howard when the swing against him came. Alexander has no more political substance than any other tennis commentator. Again, all that is necessary for dud candidates to get up is for good candidates to get busy doing something else.

Loughnane and Credlin are duds and will be pole-axed by any Liberal leader with the Lodge in his sights. I thought Abbott was crazy to bring back Tony O'Leary to do his media but clearly he is trying to get another source of advice than Team Stupid. Even below-the-radar advisers like Sue Cato aren't what they were, and Abbott's own creation Simone Holzapfel is a proven loser. Abbott is pushing on and having a go, but it is clear that he is drowning in clear air. He can nibble away at Labor in community events but like the beef-witted Collins Street lawyers of twenty years ago he has no idea how to go head-to-head with Gillard, let alone beat her.

Oh yeah, there are other states I suppose. There might be one seat in play in South Australia (please let it be Boothby: the removal of bunion Southcott can only improve the nation's public life), same with Tasmania and the NT. The politics of Western Australia are so foreign it may as well be New Zealand - and yes, it has a fully-fledged state government that can and does offer real benefit (and punishment) for Liberals that is more real and immediate than those on the never-never emanating from the East. There is only one seat in suburban Perth that will swing either way and I can't tell what it is either. The ACT Liberals, chiefly Minchinite dropkicks, will probably lose their Senate seat to the Greens and be stuck with municipal affairs for at least five years (and will fail to learn any lessons from that).

This idea that polls show Labor and the Coalition as a dead heat is stupid. It reflects poorly on the government that such a weak opposition can be taken seriously. The journosphere should be a bit more humble in reporting back to people what they are already recorded as thinking. There wasn't an election held last weekend so the whole pretense is much less useful than the meeja seem to believe.

The only thing that can forfend a Liberal rout is similar incompetence by the Labor machine:

• The re-emergence of Graham Richardson cannot be good for anyone, least of all himself. He will, however, still be around long after Mark Arbib has crashed and burnt.


• Karl Bitar is overrated and will undersell Gillard, and will be of no use in coping with the tectonic shifts in Labor politics going forward.


• Wayne Swan will to Brisbane and run Queensland's campaign himself because he rightly doesn't trust the dolts who almost sent Anna Bligh the way of Kirner and Lawrence.


• Any gains in NSW (holding Robertson should be regarded as a win after the repellent Neal) will be down to the candidates and/or dumb luck rather than the Sussex Street Stuff-Up Squad. For example, Labor's Long March up the north coast will continue and they'll win Cowper, with no Coalition presence on the NSW coast north of Port Stephens (or if it's really on for Labor - Pittwater).


• In Victoria, Shorten will take control and ride the Gillard wave in that state: Victoria should negate Labor losses in one or two other states (is it too much to hope for Sophie Mirabella to be knocked off?). It will be a real test of Victorian Labor's mettle if they can hold Melbourne from the Greens.


• Labor in Tasmania and South Australia have nowhere to go but down, hopefully taking out that cud-chewing sluggard who sat behind Rudd's left shoulder.


• WA Labor have no right to take anything but what time and fate may give them.

Labor are a long way short of perfect and are beatable - but not by the Coalition this time. The idea that an election campaign is a continuation of recent events but with more picfacs is a journosphere conceit, and shows no real understanding of how pivotal campaigns are (usually in unforced errors rather than any deft strategy).

A vote of no confidence

Nick Minchin has quit the Coalition front bench because he despairs of becoming a minister again any time soon. He got the Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party he wanted, but has come to the realisation that it cannot and will not win government in the foreseeable future.

Minchin saw Howard decay before his very eyes in 2007, and like most Liberals did too little to avert defeat - like most Liberals, any admission of frailty in Howard was also an admission of frailty in himself, and to admit such frailty is to hole your ego below the waterline. In Abbott, he sees a Liberal leader rail against the dying of the light, yet he also sees that the light is dying anyway.

It may be true that the injury to his son has been weighing on Minchin's mind, but it is true that he has, like Abbott, deliberately chosen a role which involves as much time as possible away from the duties of hearth and home. The image of Nick Minchin playing a caring role beggars belief, and can only prompt a seismic shift in the way he looks at people who do this sort of thing for a living - and families who do so with far less means than Minchin has at his disposal.

It isn't as though Minchin is going off to play golf. His interests include politics, politics and politics. He doesn't have marketable skills and business connections like Costello, nor does he have a commitment to service beyond the nation's shores like Downer, nor does he have a sense of social justice and the courage of self-discovery that Malcolm Fraser has. He is going to try and do what Howard is doing, brooding and making phone calls. He is going to watch Cory Bernardi fail, overtaken by Pyne and Birmingham and the state parliamentarians, while jabbering away about watermelons and that human achievement means conflict with the world rather than harmony.

Minchin's comments about greenies de-industrialising the West shows at the very least that he hasn't been paying attention, at worst that he's a nutter. His supposed mastery of policy founders on this rare glimpse into his very core. Look, I've got a copy of The Anti-Industrial Revolution by Ayn Rand too, but I recognise that it has been overtaken by events. Minchin should have seen market-based solutions such as Shi Zhengrong's solar initiatives and disdained science-by-press-release crap like CCS. He should have realised that the game has overtaken him, and that he lacks the ability to position the Liberal Party out in front. Bernardi has no such excuse, he is just a gibberer and the post-Minchin SA Libs should banish him to Monarto.

It will be interesting to watch those few federal Coalition parliamentary staffers who clung to staffer jobs, albeit in reduced numbers at reduced pay with reduced scope of action. With Minchin gone, watch those staffers cosying up to the next bunch of Liberals with a realistic chance of winning government - the NSW state Libs, maybe the Vics, maybe even swallow your pride and schlep to Hobart. For Abbott, this will be particularly galling - this is someone who has dumped all over the very idea of state politics, who defines himself by his contempt for people like state Liberals like John Brogden and Barry O'Farrell. Abbott watched Howard treat state Liberals with contempt too, but the difference was that the feds were winners and the state Libs were obvious losers. Abbott is not ready for the boot to be on the other foot.

Barnaby Joyce is finished. You can shunt him to the regions to get him out of the way, far from big-city media and major business donors/potential clients of a Coalition government. But he is tainted by his failure, the bushies know that he can't come through for them and that he is not the successor to the powerful National/Country Party figures in Coalition governments past. He's not cunning, not details-focused and outcomes-driven like Fischer. He's not the PM's peer like Anthony and Sinclair were under Fraser, and he's not the formidable presence that McEwen was. He's a sideshow, and while rural people appreciate people who take the time to visit they can smell a second-rater. He ain't gonna build Everald Compton's railway from nowhere to nowhere else. Where gas or mineral exploration threatens to corrupt farmland, Joyce can't and won't ensure that farmers and farming communities prevail over the fly-in-fly-outers.

One man who has his pannikin out for an extra helping of hubris is Eric Abetz. For the putative Leader of the Opposition in the Senate and the power behind the would-be Hodgman government in Tasmania, his moment is at hand. Watch him stuff it up. Watch him come out with the sort of wacky nonsense that makes Joyce or Bernardi look as dull calm and measured as Andrew Robb. Watch him do so at a time least convenient to Tony Abbott, and which renders the Liberals as the third wheel in Tasmanian politics for a generation. Watch him urge Abbott to be as wacky as he is, at the very time when Abbott is starting dimly to understand (on issues like gays and parental leave) that the centre really is where government is at, and how far his journey is to that place.

Turnbull is right to stand well clear of this rabble, while appearing to make himself available for the sake of the team. I wonder what he's learned about the country, his party, himself since losing the leadership.

Andrew Robb is the strategist that Lindsay Tanner thinks he is. Tanner will underestimate him and will look foolish for having done so. Won't make a damn bit of difference in electoral terms, but in the next term Tanner will be less than the towering figure he appears now.

The whole rise-of-Gillard thing I commented on a few days ago appears to be a determination by the ALP not to put all their eggs in one basket the way that the Liberals did with Howard. The transition will be fascinating, but it is a sign that Abbott and his supporters are not ready for prime time when they urge their boy to ignore the reality of the Rudd Government and shadow-box an opponent that isn't there.

Even a once-formidable Coalition strategist appears to have lost it. Arthur Sinodinos wanders all over the place and ends with this:

This is a hard time to be an economic reformer.

Maybe so, but this begs the question: who says Abbott wants to be one? Sinodinos sets up a whole bunch of straw men and stumbles over them himself, well before Abbott has the chance to make himself look silly by accepting such 'advice':

The Opposition Leader does not have to agree with every detail of Labor's new health policy. His choices are to smother it in agreement, trump it or punch a big enough hole in the plan that it is not viable, a difficult ask from opposition. While agreement may seem to give Rudd a big win, opposition works only if Abbott is confident he can produce something better. He is best going with his convictions and experience. That is what gives him passion and excites the public. He can do passion better than Rudd.

Compare this with Turnbull's performance on environmental policy. Turnbull agreed with Rudd, and was passionate - but so what? Did he establish that the Liberals would do a better job than the slow-and-steady Rudd? Tony Abbott didn't get where he is by agreeing with Kevin Rudd.

He also should study carefully what the premiers are saying. Health is literally a life and death issue and the states are at the coalface of what can and does go wrong. He can call his own health summit with the states.

If you were advising Barry O'Farrell, Isobel Redmond or John-Paul Langbroek, wouldn't you be counselling your boss that they are doing just fine running their own race and to leave Abbott to his (especially as people are at least open to Rudd, if not convinced that he's winning the debate)?

If Rudd is genuine about co-operation, he should invite Abbott to the Council of Australian Governments meeting in April. As a goodwill gesture, Rudd and Health Minister Nicola Roxon can stop the shadow boxing over Abbott's record as health minister.

Two questions, Arthur: did you have advised Howard to invite Rudd to the 2007 COAG meetings? Would you trust Abbott to maintain the air of kum-by-yah bipartisanship essential to getting an agreement in such forums? What do you mean, no on both counts?

This brings us to the once premier state of NSW. Abbott can make the federal election in NSW a referendum on state Labor. In 1990, Bob Hawke lost seats in Victoria partly off the back of the woeful performance of Victorian Labor.

... and partly off the back of a moderate Liberal leader, Arthur, but let's not go there. Kristina Keneally would love to run against Tony Abbott, as would John Brumby. The Liberal leaders in NSW and Victoria might be happy to use Abbott as a practice run for their state campaigns, once again inverting Abbott's view of things and allowing ambitious staffers to ingratiate themselves with some actual winners.

... the future of the federation [is] also [a] relevant topic ... Nothing is too parochial for high-flying federal politicians these days. Rudd and Abbott have demonstrated centralising tendencies, so everything is fair game. The health network proposal is the harbinger of the federation inexorably dissolving into a quasi regional model along British lines.

Gough Whitlam's original vision was to create strong regional authorities funded directly by Canberra.

And how would you suggest Abbott credibly distinguish his position on federation from Rudd and Whitlam? You couldn't get any differentiation there, and if you could it would hardly matter in electoral terms anyway.

State independence requires fiscal freedom, and what state is willing to argue for a return of income or consumption taxation powers? ... Fraser ... Keating ...

What about if the feds take over 100% of health, Arthur, game over and problems solved for the states? You don't need to hark back to the past when Rudd is setting the agenda today. If you get a strong set of state Coalition governments and a federal leader on the back foot, as Gorton was to Askin, Bolte and Bjelke-Petersen, you never know what might happen. Pity Abbott won't go all out to hand power to the states.

Right now, the Coalition are doing what they do best: keeping up appearances. The idea that Abbott might have a chance is now gone for all but his most shrill fans. The hard men have gone, are treading water, or are lost and befuddled. Soon will come the time to define what a post-Howard Liberal Party will look like, what it will do and how it will work: but finally the Liberals realise that will have to come after the election and not before.

Is Arthur Sinodinos full of shit?

Probably not in general terms, he was a figure of substance within the Howard government and remains influential in business, government and Liberal Party circles. That, however, doesn't explain this. Nobody else is going to shirtfront Arthur but in this case he's making a lot of assertions that don't make sense, so it falls to me to make a citizen's arrest under the Emperor Has No Clothes Act.

So far the polls have not moved but that gives Abbott plenty of runway. It is unlikely that people have made up their minds about him.

If the polls were ever going to move in response to the new leader, they would have done so by now. In NSW, there has been no poll movement following the election of Kristina Keneally; this is proof that she's a dud. Federally, there has been no poll movement for the Libs following the election of Tony Abbott; anyone who "dare[s] to dream of winning the next election" is delusional.

It is absolutely the case that people have made up their minds that Tony Abbott must not become Prime Minister. He can have as much "runway" as Marwoto Komar but he's not going to make it.

The phrase loyal opposition is to him [Abbott] an oxymoron.

The phrase "loyal opposition" refers to the idea that one can oppose the current government of the country without being disloyal to the country itself, its institutions, its head and its people. If he's going to be disloyal to the country as a whole in a quest for power over it, then stuff him.

No quarter will be given and none is expected.

This would be fine if the ALP really was as soft as the Liberals would like to think they are. Again, in NSW the Liberals long assumed that Bob Carr was a cream-puff long after he'd left a trail of blood and devastation behind him through the ranks of the NSW ALP. He beat them four times, five if you count 1991. Abbott has positioned the Liberals within range of Labor's guns; Turnbull's support for the ETS was only ever a gambit and Labor was not prepared for where he'd take the game from there. Abbott has little room to move tactically and strategically. He couldn't even knock Jenny Macklin off her perch when she was practically begging to be relieved of an office for which she has no talent, aptitude or sense.

Next minute he will flick the switch to serious thinker, including on thorny topics such as indigenous disadvantage.

Abbott has no credibility on indigenous disadvantage. As Health Minister he cut $1.5b from indigenous health programs. Like his old boss John Hewson, Abbott can point out the weak points but can't convince people he has the strength to make things better.

He is sustained by strong beliefs and is comfortable in his own skin. He is offering the electorate a contest based on character and not polling or research. Like all guerillas, he has the luxury of picking and choosing when and where to attack. Governments prefer to get their opponents in the open and blast them away. In Abbott's hands, incumbency is a negative as government decisions create new targets for the opposition to attack.

All of that could also have been said for Mark Latham in early 2004. Liberals looked on in amazement when Labor chose Latham to lead them, and couldn't believe their luck; nobody should know this better than Arthur Sinodinos. Fans of Abbott's rootin', tootin', no-quarter approach are starting to understand why Labor turned to Latham, even if they don't see they are bound for the same fate. The trick is to convince people that the Liberals would do a better job, and Abbott can't do that.

Abbott is about avoiding cost increases and reducing costs for families.

No, Arthur, he isn't. He only says that in the hope that it wins votes, but nobody will believe him and the Liberal vote will collapse.

New taxes on wealth or the family home will be dead on arrival.

Rudd will run further faster away from any such proposals, leaving Abbott to mutter about socialism and wish that Labor was in fact out to tax everything that moves. Another example of the Libs hammering the wrong target - like the way they go on about law-and-order and state level with Labor governments happy to see and raise them on that issue, and ignore the whining of civil rights advocates.

Rudd cannot typecast [Abbott] as a "free-market fundamentalist".

No, but he can and will typecast Abetz and other senior members of the Opposition in that way, enough to show that the Opposition must not be returned to government.

Abbott's musings on re-regulation of the banks are opportunistic and principled.

Nobody seriously believes he would deliver on this.

Abbott views industrial relations not through the Left-Right divide but the prism of small business. He will protect it along with farmers, independent contractors and the self-employed. This should also play well in outlying states and industries such as mining.

Yeah, small businesses like mining companies. There are fewer than 15,000 coal mining jobs in Australia, Arthur, and you'd be surprised how many of them vote Labor and are members of the CFMEU. Likewise, playing to disgruntled farmers won't win back many any seats lost in 2007.

It also covers his flanks in the debate on micro-economic reform.

What flanks, and frankly what debate?

What about the manicured grassroots in safe urban Liberal seats? Abbott probably calculates that they will vote for him anyway if he looks competitive, whatever their reservations on specific issues such as climate change.

To "look competitive" he actually has to build an alternative government, which would assume a greater sense of responsibility than which Abbott is capable. If you're going to take power within the Liberal Party on the basis that the grassroots were ignored, you can't then ignore them - especially if you're bent on sacrificing your marginal seat members. Where exactly is the Abbott Constituency, those people who will only vote Liberal with Abbott out front? There was a definite Howard Constituency, as you know Arthur; but there is no more one for the incument as there was, say, a Crean Constituency.

Your job, Arthur, is not to describe the Abbott phenomenon: that's for Abbott himself and for the Grattans, Annabel Crabbs and Malcolm Collesses of this world. Your job is to describe how realistic their positions and assumptions are, which was the value you added to Howard's office.

The same goes for business. The ever-shrinking pool of corporate donations will follow the opinion polls and Abbott will be careful to mend fences.

If money follows the polls then the Liberals are buggered. If you were on a corporate board you'd have Mr Abbott to lunch as a matter of courtesy, and listen to him describe cutlery as namby-pamby and elitist. Then, you'd send a donation to the ALP to keep in sweet with Senator Arbib.

Abbott's best chance to staunch any voter leakage to the Greens is to polarise the electorate by providing a clear alternative to Labor.

No, that will make it worse. The Green vote will increase in Liberal areas, which may not matter in the House but in the Senate it will be the difference between a state electing one or two Green Senators, and the failure of the third candidate on the Liberal Senate ticket.

... early response to the global financial crisis ... kitchen table concerns ... higher living costs ... education ... Hospitals ...

Yep, all Labor shortcomings, all examples where Abbott can't make the case that the Libs would be better and stronger.

In government, Abbott wanted to take over the state public hospitals.

Would that have made them better, or worse? Given the result of the 2007 election we'd have to conclude it's less than the gamebreaker you might hope for, Arthur.

Abbott is not a great proponent of states' rights ... He supported the takeover of Launceston hospital by the feds in 2007

It was the Mersey Hospital in Latrobe, Arthur, and the people who live and worked there chucked out the Liberal MP.

genuinely believes in devolving decision-making to the community on health matters.

There are two issues here. Firstly, a Commonwealth takeover from the States makes this less likely, not more so. Secondly, as Health Minister Abbott listened to the community and made RU486 available, was in no way responsible for the Pan Pharmaceuticals debacle, and did a great job on educating Australian healthcare professionals to meet the skills shortage in health was high-handed and non-consultative with the full backing of the then PM. Where is the evidence of Abbott's acceptance of community consultation on healthcare, except for narrow and compliant stooges like Rosanna Capolingua?

Interestingly, a substantial proportion of women in a recent Newspoll survey indicated they have yet to make up their minds about Abbott. Here lies an opportunity for him. He should do a series of considered speeches through next year.

By "considered" do you mean "a complete departure from the kind of stuff he's been coming out with throughout his career"? Do you take the chance that he'll drop some sexist clanger that causes that suspension of disbelief to fall like a sword of Damocles?

Do not expect an early election; the voters would be cynical and Rudd needs to do Abbott slowly, jump on any evidence of policy flakiness to seed doubts about Abbott's fitness for office.

At last, a piece of sensible commentary! I knew you could do it Arthur.

Abbott has been in parliament for 15 years and served as a minister and leader of the house.

Kim Beazley had done all that and more, so what?

Nor will Joyce be an easy a mark. He is a higher primate who learns from experience. He is already moderating his utterances.

Until next time. He can't "moderate" his position on climate change and other key issues without backing down. A great description of Joyce being rattled and prone to gaffes is described here:

Barnaby Joyce is a fascinating interview subject. He is invariably affable and cheery but as the interviews wear on, he tends to become exasperated. His befuddlement renders the pinkish hue of his complexion into a scarlet, almost vermillion tone, little specks of spit collect around the corners of his mouth and his nose turns cherry red.

These physiological changes are signs that the interview is about to leap into the realms of entertainment and that soon will follow what we political pundits like to refer to as the “money shot”.

Besides, is it too much to expect more from a government minister than to be a "higher primate"?

Rudd has to be the steady hand on the tiller. He must make a virtue of his alleged nerdiness to paint Abbott as lacking substance. He should emphasise his command of issues but engage the public in a way he did not do with the emissions trading scheme.

And Rudd is in Copenhagen gathering tips and tricks from the leading politicians of the world to do just that. Abbott, meanwhile, is lolling around Sydney talking about his chest-hair.

The ascension of Abbott has tilted the odds in favour of more pre-election sweeteners.

It follows the whole narrative of reaping the rewards of saving the country from the GFC, and would have worked had Turnbull stayed in.

Abbott has targeted the economic stimulus package for savings. Expect Labor to pressure him to go further. Rudd needs to take the high ground on the budget and craft a narrative around future challenges, including the ageing population, the looming commodities bonanza and the conservation of resources.

Expect Abbott to be unable to match this combination of fiscal prudence and expenditure on the needful and necessary. That will be the telling difference, Arthur.

... expect to see more of those budgie smugglers.

A triumph of self-indulgence over political prudence. As I said earlier it didn't work for Debnam or Baillieu.

TONY Abbott is the Spartacus of Australian politics.

Yep: caused the Romans a bit of bother for a little while but they killed him eventually, routing his supporters and using their very corpses as proof of the power of the incumbents. Abbott's preference for martyrdom over victory should worry Liberals more than it does: it's another example of his callow lack of responsibility.

Why would Arthur Sinodinos write a piece he must surely know to be false? To keep his hand in and show that he's not a part of some bygone age, and to show that his loyalty is greater than his current capacity for cool judgment. When a party is hell-bent on self-destruction there are no prizes for being smart before the event, at least not publicly. His responsibility is not to churn out twaddle like this but prepare the triage team for the inevitable disaster.

Get it off your chest

The lunatics have taken over the asylum, but they outnumbered the staff anyway and the matron was a bossy old so-and-so.

I should have known that Turnbull was gone as soon as Nathan Rees said otherwise. If I was still a member of the Liberal Party I would have my head in my hands at the idea of Tony Abbott leading my party. I'm not and it isn't, so I don't. I thought that Turnbull would win, and suspected Hockey might; but I never thought the Liberals would be so stupid as to elect Abbott, the Liberals' answer to Rees (if Abbott is the answer then the question, etc.).

There's only one thing for the Liberals to do now: get all the right whinge crap off your chest. Try out all those ideas of which Howard blunted the rough edges, and go for broke. No ETS, no carbon pollution action except in reaction to the US Congress (and even then it will be weak, with plenty of handouts for US-based polluters who will know what buttons to push to get handouts). Announce that you'll cut spending here and there, and that you'll micromanage those areas of government that involve social investment (i.e. everything but defence and big infrastructure projects). Outsource your foreign policy to Washington so that any twit from Adelaide can become foreign minister. Everything that you wanted John Howard to do but never got around to, make that Liberal policy and go your hardest.

If you're going to rely on the base, and champion the base, you're going to have to embrace the idea that the base will be all you're left with. "I can't promise victory", said Abbott at his press conference: electoral victory would be beside the point. He is leading the Liberal Party to the kind of landslide defeat that all first-term State/Territory Labor governments enjoyed in the '90s, and for the same reason: the Libs think their defeat was a technicality and they'll do less than they did last time, except with more umbrage, so they'll get fewer votes than they got last time.

There's no point moderating those policies any more. Like any moderate leader of the Liberal Party, Joe is the Mr Rochester of Australian politics, courting the heroine (the swinging voter) while the right whingers scream from the attic, wreck stuff, and generally make things difficult impossible. Our heroine will only come back once the edifice has been burnt to the ground and the maddie's dead.

I first met Joe Hockey in about 1989, and thought he was a breath of fresh air as a policy thinker and a natural leader, after a damp squib of two years in the NSW Young Liberals run by a control freak. I understood why the right whingers objected to his rails run into Parliament but I couldn't see them offer anyone better (still can't). He's smart and works hard, and anyone who scoffs at this is in for a hard time.

Turnbull has the opportunity to provide the voice of business on prudence and risk management on environmental policy, but anything coming from him will be portrayed as a leadership gambit by the journosphere. I hope he's like Menzies in 1941, under pressure only to rebound stronger than before, but I could be wrong about that too.

I left the Liberal Party before Tampa. I could not cope with a Parliamentary party that consisted of two factions - the compliant and the supine - both worshipping The Leader in their big broad church. I was an ex-Lib long before Howard's self-indulgence drove his government to oblivion: the country made it out in time but the Libs are still trapped in the twisted wreck, face down in the gutter. The road back will be a crawl, with the Mincheviks screaming all the way about "selling out the base".

If I were Kellie O'Dwyer or Paul Fletcher I'd walk into the party room with an iron bar and beat the shit out of Wilson Tuckey; lucky they didn't preselect me, eh.

It's OK for us bloggers to be political dilettantes, less so - no, not so - for party leaders. I think Abbott is weak for being the front man for the Mincheviks, but he wasn't strong enough to do anything else. Being photographed in sluggos, as he was on the weekend, was an exercise in self-sabotage: he doesn't really want the top job, just like Baillieu and Debnam did with their attempts to look like action men. I've seen Abbott look confident and assured, as he was with the republic; but in recent weeks he's looked and sounded less than convinced, less than convincing.

Tony Abbott is a media tart and nothing else, nothing. He was absent from the economic debates of the 1980s and '90s. His entire ministerial career depended on his ability to attract showers of cash from Howard: as Health Minister Kay Patterson was locked in to a narrow range of policy positions but as soon as Abbott got in he could bend over forwards for doctors' lobbies and drug companies. When he got rolled on RU486 it brought the culture wars to an end in this country (the moderates won; it should have showed anyone who was paying attention that he'd never, ever become Prime Minister). He had no opinions on changes to Australian foreign policy, and shadowed Rudd's weakest minister so ineffectively that she's still there.

Tony Abbott is a much less substantial figure than Andrew Peacock.

To the right whingers; you've won, now show the way ahead. You know you want to, and the way ahead for you is clearer than it has ever been. Delight in your base, but if you want the Liberal Party to win government again, you will have to compromise. My guess is that the right whinge won't have the courage of their convictions, and will start moderating furiously once the Liberal Party gets outpolled by the Greens. Labor knows that there's nothing so true to Labor's traditions than selling out Labor's traditions, and so it is with the Liberals: only when the utter bankruptcy of Minchevism becomes apparent can the long road back to government begin.

Moderates are part of your base, you dickheads. Yes, they* are.

Adding value

Peter van Onselen has been emotive and sentimental in overlooking the fact that a structural separation of the Liberal and Nationals would benefit both parties. Using the word "divorce" likens the Coalition to a family, with children and chattels to think of, when it is really more like the kind of corporate demergers that release value for all involved.

It is a distinct possibility that the Liberal and National parties could go their separate ways, just as they did ahead of the ill-fated 1987 election campaign during the ill-conceived "Joh for PM" push.

It's not 1987 any more, Peter. The Liberal Party has been able to represent itself to rural and regional voters as a legitimate representative of their interests. This outreach to regional communities, made possible by changes to transport and communications which make cities and regions less remote from one another, breaks down the sense of implacable divide implicit in the idea that only the Nats can effectively represent rural Australia.

Some Liberals, especially those representing non-metropolitan electorates, are dissatisfied with the Coalition because the Nationals, despite being the junior partner, are heavily represented in the allocation of rural and regional portfolios such as trade, regional development, agriculture and fisheries.

This was probably an issue when the Coalition was in government: not now. Why is trade a "rural and regional portfolio", when most of Australia's exports come overwhelmingly from the major cities? Given that Mark Vaile made such a has of the US Free Trade Agreement, why have they been allowed anywhere near this issue? Why aren't health, education or even Broadband & The Digital Economy "rural and regional portfolios"?

Equally, some Nationals are sick of their party being treated as the poor cousin in the Coalition relationship. They feel they don't get enough respect for what they bring to the table as a party representing the non-metropolitan regions prepared to follow the Coalition line on most issues.

Diddums.

So, the Nats don't get everything they want - does this make them "the poor cousin", or just another bunch of whingers? How about some analysis of how good they've had it, and a link to the degree to which they are obliged to STFU.

If they don't, it will guarantee that the conservatives don't win their way back into government for many years to come, as happened after the 1987 split.

The Coalition split over Joh was history by the following election in 1990. It wasn't drawn-out, like the Labor split over Communism in the 1950s and '60s.

It's true the Nationals benefit - and they know it - from the funds generated by taking a share of the public funding from the joint Senate tickets in NSW and Victoria. But if the Coalition were broken, alternative revenue sources would fast open up if the Nationals pursued a populist policy approach in the bush, which is exactly what they would do. And the electoral benefits would soon follow as well.

The downside for the Nationals breaking from the Coalition is that while they would likely maintain or even increase their representation in parliament, they would do so at the expense of achieving a share of power incumbency brings. The reason the Nationals are a political force able to disproportionately deliver for regional communities is because they are regularly part of a Coalition in government.

If they know that they benefit, why don't they stop whingeing? If they think they can make as much or more after a Coalition split, why bother with the Coalition at all - just grab the new opportunities with both hands. Why this gutless sniping followed by cloying declarations of fealty to the Libs and Turnbull? Never mind the nostalgia act Peter, the better story is to call it as it is.

If the Nats cut themselves off from funding sources in the cities, where exactly might these "fast" funding sources come from? Third parties in Australia have a history of loudly proclaiming their own purity by spurning the corporate coin, whether we're talking about the Greens, the Democrats or even the DLP. It's unlikely that the Nats would follow suit, but even so I think Peter overestimates how much largesse is available from, say, a meat tray raffle at Dubbo RSL.

One example is the proposal to drill for gas on the Liverpool Plains, potentially poisoning the water table in one of Australia's richest farming areas. Now imagine the gas producers wanted to make a friendly donation to the Nationals - to accept, or not accept? That is the question ... the very kind of dilemma that could scupper the Nats, like the GST did for the Democrats.

For a start, Joyce would immediately become Nationals leader. Warren Truss's strength is that he is a bridge between the parties. Without a Coalition the maverick Joyce would easily win a leadership ballot and, as head of a minor party not in the Coalition, being based in the Senate wouldn't be a short-term problem for him. He would move to the lower house at the next election, quite possibly winning a seat at the Liberal Party's expense.

All the other minor parties know the real action is in the Senate. Why would Joyce want to move to the lower House? He doesn't want to and can't become Prime Minister, and if there is a party rule that says that the Senate leader must defer to the House leader, Barnaby can change it.

Let's assume he did - which seat would he go for, Peter? Probably the seat where he lives, Maranoa, currently held by the Nationals. He might go after Ian Macdonald in Groom, but it's not clear that he'd knock him off given that Toowoomba is increasingly an urban settlement in its own right. If the good people of Groom wanted to knock off a once (and future?) Cabinet Minister in favour of a populist loudmouth, van Onselen would need to re-examine all his assumptions about the wonders of being part of government.

Warren Truss's strength is that he is a bridge between the parties.

Yairs. And what a great job he's doing.

Joyce would be free to become even more populist than he already is and not just on the basis of his opposition to emissions trading, about which rural Australia has serious concerns.

He might even embrace policy positions such as giving farmers back their guns, highly selective immigration reforms or a quota for spending in rural communities, similar to the royalties-for-regions policy the WA Nationals successfully took to the previous election.

Let's leave aside the fact that van Onselen is starting to sound shrill here, and doesn't quote any hard data.

Part of the perils of being an honest broker is that you need at least one of the major parties with you. Let's do something that scares Peter van Onselen - let's unpack his assumptions:

• Emissions trading - after the exemption for farming nutted out between Labor and the Libs, the response to this is only too easy - be part of the solution or we'll lift the exemption. That would negate Joyce from the whole debate, and give him nowhere to go on carbon risk mitigation.


• Guns - Labor won't back it, the Liberals might prevaricate but it was John Howard who bought the ban in - and urban MPs of either party want fewer guns rather than more and can be persuaded that the current regime works for farmers, shooting clubs and other legitimate users in the regions.


• Immigration - rural communities know that the only way they can get infusions of either unskilled willing workers or professionals is through immigration. Pauline Hanson lost a rural seat in 1998 (to a Liberal) and Hansonism won't be the powerful tonic in 2010 that it might have been a dozen years ago.


• Royalties for regions - would that be such a big departure from Nationals' standard operating procedure?

At this point you'd hope van Onselen would have a cup of tea and a lie down, but he digs himself in further:

On the back of such populism, Nationals candidates would happily take part in three-cornered contests in rural and regional seats right across Australia. This would threaten the futures of a good number of Liberal MPs and it would certainly make marginal Labor-held seats unwinnable for the Liberals or likelier to be picked up by the Nationals.

To be sure, the Nationals would not limit their push into new electorates to non-metropolitan seats: they would also contest some city-fringe electorates such as Macarthur, McEwen and Paterson in a bid to increase their statewide Senate vote. So the Liberal MPs whose future would be on the line would include those holding marginal seats in or on the outskirts of big cities.

It is sheer crap that the Nationals could win Macarthur or Paterson, or Robertson or any other "urban fringe" seat for that matter. If the Nats can't even win Indi or Corangamite and are not that strong in Gippsland, then they've got Buckley's in McEwen (regardless of whom it's named after).

Let's have a look down the list of Labor's most marginal seats. A CLP member for Solomon NT would more likely side with the Libs than the Nats or independents. The Nationals might have a chance of winning Herbert or Flynn in Queensland, but only with a 1996-style landslide. The Nats are not a strong asset to the Liberals.

By contrast:

• Nationals seats Calare, Cowper, Gippsland and Hinkler are vulnerable either to Labor or the Liberals - and if the Liberals are more likely to deny these seats to Labor then the Nats should stand aside.


• Riverina's standing as a Nats seat owes more to its local member, Kay Hull, than the brilliance of the Nationals machine. The same can probably be said of Bruce Scott in Maranoa, and John Forrest in Mallee. All are aged in their 60s: if Joyce were to run for Maranoa it would not be a bold gambit, but a holding pattern.


• Wide Bay is up for grabs without Truss, it's one of the poorest electorates in the country. There's nothing stopping Truss joining the Liberals.


• This leaves Parkes, and a one-man party is not much of a party at all - a point proven by the craven Fielding insinuating himself with those abused in adoption centres - nice attempt to deflect churches' responsibility for that abuse, eh Senator.

This leaves aside the possibility that, in one or more of those dwindling numbers of seats, there are people amassing war chests and volunteer rosters to run as Independents.

You'd have to consider the Nationals a net liability as a Coalition partner, and not much of a threat to the Liberals (nor, indeed, Labor) as a competitor/enemy. The Nationals are more trouble than they're worth.

There would be no guarantee the Nationals would even preference the Liberals.

An average of 28 per cent of Nationals' preferences flowed Labor's way in three-cornered contests at the previous election, even though in every instance except the seat of O'Connor the Nationals officially directed preferences to the Liberal Party.

Again, van Onselen has shot his own argument. Official direction of preferences are irrelevant, and if the Liberals want to run a gibberer in O'Connor then more fool them. If the Coalition is built on mutual preferencing then it's already done for.

The loss of support for the Liberals if Nationals ran against them in a large number of electorates would be fatal.

No it wouldn't, you've already blown that argument. In those circumstances the Labor vote tends to go down - spend more time as a political scientist and less time doing Glenn Milne impersonations, and this may be clearer than it appears to you now, Peter.

Then there is the difficulty of breaking the newly formed Liberal National Party in Queensland. If the LNP were to disintegrate it would leave what remained of the Queensland division of the Liberal Party more or less bankrupt (a reason the merger was approved by the Liberals in the first place) and shatter the state wing for both parties.

It does not follow that a demerger at the Federal level requires one at the state level. The LNP has the Labor state government on the ropes (if not quite on the canvas, as in NSW), led by a former Liberal. Besides, the Liberal Party's Queensland Division has been blowing huge political opportunities since Gordy Chalk's day - no sympathy for that lot.

In NSW, where the conservatives are considered almost certain to win in March 2011, the Coalition would once again have found a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

This is the nearest van Onselen comes to having a point.

The 1987 Federal split did not prevent the Coalition winning government in NSW the following year. The Nationals realise that all issues are regional issues, which is why their Deputy Leader is also the Shadow Minister for Education. The O'Farrell-Stoner relationship appears strong. The nearest thing to a Joyce-style ratbag, Andrew Fraser, is stepping down and is no threat to anyone (apart from Joe Tripodi, heh heh).

The NSW State Director of the National Party may be forgiven for losing one or two Federal seats next year, but he will fail utterly if all NSW Legislative Assembly seats currently held by the Nationals are not National-held after 2011. He's failed upwards this far, but no further: no Legislative Council seat for someone who doesn't come through.

And where would a federal break-up of the Coalition leave the WA government?

Given that WA Labor is a rabble, it would put them in the box seat for a crushing win at an early election ... but you're the WA-based political scientist, Peter, you tell me.

And Liberals couldn't be happy about the likelihood that the Nationals would try their hand in Tasmania, a state they have always left for the Liberals to contest.

This isn't a courtesy on the Nats' part - they simply can't run an operation on the ground, they can't convince rural communities that they can both reflect their concerns and represent them effectively in Canberra.

Now that the Liberals can operate in the city and the bush, and now that Katter, Oakeshott and Windsor have proven that the only popular Nationals are ex-Nationals, the Nationals themselves are redundant. Unlike 1987, a demerger would benefit both parties - indeed, no other political action in Australia would improve the body politic nearly as much.