The blind spot

When Senator Christine Milne retired yesterday as leader of the Greens and was replaced within hours of the announcement by Senator Richard di Natale, the press gallery was so shocked and so 'unprepared' that it actually reported the news. Those who complained about that lack of preparedness looked so stupid they cast doubt on the very idea of insider political savvy, on which the press gallery depends for its existence.

Next week Christine Milne turns 62. Days before he attained that age, Bob Hawke had been deposed as Prime Minister. When John Howard turned 62 he was still Prime Minister, but press gallery speculation was rife that he might be replaced by a much younger Victorian. Nobody then or since referred to Howard as "a bowser boy from Dulwich Hill" as Milne is just apparently a farm girl from Tasmania.

Senate preselections for the Tasmanian Greens are being held shortly. To win such a contest, and then the election, would commit the winner to a term due to extend from 1 July 2017 to 30 June 2023 - this would have put Milne beyond the constitutional age limit of 70, to say nothing of the personal toll of an already long career in politics.

The press gallery have no excuse for failing to even consider that Milne might choose this time to go. Those who remain in the press gallery from Hawke's and Howard's times look ridiculous in their failure.

When the announcement was made, the fix was already in. This is standard practice when governments make policy announcements. The press gallery never speculate about how an announced policy might be different to the way it is announced, though they may quote somebody who does. If the policy ends up being modified in the parliament, they report it as a personal defeat for the relevant minister or even the government as a whole, regardless of the effect any such change might have on the wider community.

The press gallery concentrates on government. It reports what government does uncritically and only covers opposition to that policy within a wider narrative of political maneuvering, not policy. The formal Opposition often does not quibble with announced policy, which lends it the air of Sensible Bipartisan Reform, to which the press gallery wants all policy to conform (see Jeff Sparrow on this - in his quest for a wider social narrative he lets the press gallery off far too lightly). When it does, the press gallery have to be alert to the possibility that the current Opposition might become the government, and go easy on the narrative that any such opposition exists simply to frustrate government policy.

Because the Greens aren't a party of government, any position they take is only reported by the press gallery through the lens of the major parties. While individual pieces in traditional media sometimes display an understanding of what the Greens are about on a particular issue, and what they hope to achieve, these are almost never written by press gallery journalists. Press gallery journalists don't understand, and don't want to understand, a party they can't imagine ever being in government.

The press gallery don't use favourable coverage to inform readers. They use favourable coverage as currency for the party that is, or might be, in government. A press gallery journalist who gave favourable reporting to the Greens would upset people from the Labor political party as well as the Liberal political party and the Nationals political party, which might make their job just that little bit harder.

In 2010 the press gallery was negotiating positive coverage with Kevin Rudd while his own party, unbeknownst to (and metres away from) them, was tipping him out. For the following three years they held out the threat/promise to the ALP that they would deny Gillard positive coverage, but that if Rudd returned as leader he might have a credibility that she lacked. By the time Rudd returned, people had stopped listening to Labor, and the press gallery wasn't listening to Rudd's warnings that Abbott might go back on his centrist-sounding promises.

The major parties regard their relationship with the press gallery as crucial. The Greens regard it as irrelevant. They maintain a significant vote, and a significant presence in the parliament, without the sort of relationship that the major parties cultivate and maintain at great effort. The very presence of the Greens and other minor parties is an affront to the press gallery, which gives them the desultory coverage that would make major-party players fear for their very jobs, but this does not have the effect of making the Greens die politically among the voting public.

The press gallery have a structural blindness toward the Greens. That's why they tend not to leak to journalists, not this. Nobody will leak to you if what you're offering has no currency at all. Annabel Crabb does favourable coverage so unrelentingly that its absence isn't even noticed, let alone missed.

... although it's obvious there was some pretty serious internal division within the party this year when it decided not to back the Government's planned increase to fuel excise, despite increased fuel taxes being a central part of the Greens policy platform, the exact details of the division are unclear.

Something that's hidden from you can't be "obvious" unless it's hidden badly, which this wasn't.

The effect is clear: the Greens voted against the government's proposal. They have a consistent and easy-to-understand position that they won't raise fuel excise to pay for roads. Crabb and her press gallery compadres would seek to blur with their lazy, cliche-ridden CHAOS SPLIT SHOCK pablum.

If you want to write about the Greens' position on an issue you have to address the issue. Labor and the Coalition now both support increased fuel excise to fund roads, therefore it has become Sensible Bipartisan Reform - and who in the press gallery could stand against that?

On the other hand, it's strange not to know where everyone stands. The abandonment of a central campaign platform item occurs, more or less seamlessly, and the lack of any evident fallout gives the whole thing a slightly eerie, unnerving air - like in Watership Down where the rabbits disappear and no-one says anything.

A better and more pertinent comparison might be when Tony Abbott abandons a central campaign platform item, and only social media call him out.

... there's a whiff of Moscow about it.

Rubbish.

That effect is achieved in Moscow because, (under Putin, and before him under the Soviet Union, and before that under the Czars) killed people who leaked to journalists, and the journalists themselves. Even when the major parties change leader in Australia, nobody dies.

The only exception to that was with Holt in 1967, and you have to work pretty hard to attribute foul play to his disappearance. Gorton's successful campaign for the leadership was the first to engage the press gallery in the way people like Crabb regard as normal, which was a mixed blessing to say the least.

Today, Peta Credlin runs around telling members of the Coalition to shut up, apparently threatening with every dire fate short of death - but oh my goodness no, nothing Muscovite about that.

Crabb's third-last paragraph is a verbal train-wreck, but out of it you can pull what looks like criticism of press gallery consensus. Her swipe at Labor is silly, pointless, and typical (try telling the MPs for Sydney, Adelaide, Perth and Newcastle that they are really representing outer-urban seats, or that they are politically doomed). Her final, major-party-centric paragraph tells you all you need to know about her imaginative failure and that of the press gallery as a whole.

The Greens clearly want something other than 'credibility' or 'openness' with the major parties and the press gallery - or at least this is clear to everyone but Crabb and the press gallery.

It is equally clear they have demonstrated the alternative to such 'credibility' or 'openness' is not impotence and oblivion; but adherence to that belief is crucial to the press gallery, to political-class operatives in the major parties, and everyone who regards themselves as "politically savvy". Either reality, or the press gallery's misperception of it, will have to change.

The major parties have introduced whiff-of-Moscow legislation to stifle journalists and other sources of dissent. A few days beforehand traditional media decided the big story in politics was that the Prime Minister ate a raw onion. After the legislation went through, traditional media and the MEAA half-heartedly tried to engage people on how serious that legislation is - but Crabb used her advocacy to return to the onion thing, and the MEAA represents the press gallery ninnies who've missed the significance of that legislation, so what can you do.

Mark Kenny is always on the lookout for a good-news story for Abbott. He spent February being puzzled how suddenly they dried up. He's found them in what was Julia Gillard's bathroom, he's found it in Christine Milne's old office, and if Malcolm Turnbull steps in dogshit while gladhanding in Rose Bay you can be sure Mark Kenny will declare it good news for Tony Abbott.

Chris Pyne's input to the Greens' leadership transfer is a taunt, not serious political commentary. The press gallery simply can't cover a political issue that didn't involve either Labor or the Coalition, and Pyne has inserted himself into every real and imagined change of leadership for a generation. Pyne was rubbing salt into a wound that seemed to heal quickly, which just left him rubbing salt onto other people - but the press gallery didn't get where they are by making Chris Pyne look/feel awkward.

You could criticise the press gallery, as I have and do, for being gibbering dupes of the major parties. This falls flat when you also accept the gallery's basic premise that political coverage is all about the majors and that minor parties, especially the Greens, have no future, none at all, etc. One constant of the major parties is having commentators predict their demise. There might be as much of a future in death-riding the Greens than being one of its representatives: it's not quite parasitism but not symbiosis either.

The press gallery's best exposition on the Green's change of leadership (despite its lousy headline) came from Lenore Taylor. What follows is unfair to that article and to Taylor's work as a whole, but it shows that even the best press gallery journalism is still limited by press gallery journalism:

Most voters have probably never heard of Richard Di Natale ...

Public ignorance of public matters is a failure of journalism.

He didn't say anything different to existing Greens policy. But more to the point he wasn't saying anything much different to existing Labor policy ...

Green policy can't be understood except by reference to a major party.

And he sounded authentic, like he was speaking in sentences he had made up himself.

This shouldn't be so shocking as it is.

The former GP is also likely to be harder for Abbott to dismiss with the Coalition's usual critique about the Greens being "extreme" and "ideological zealots", and Di Natale maintained he had "small 'l' liberals" in his sights as well. He wanted to convince them that "they can trust us with their vote".

Tony Abbott spent his early political career trumpeting the message that small 'l' liberals had no place in the Liberal Party. Di Natale is reinforcing that. If you look at the recent NSW election you'll see that the second-placed candidate in the seats that make up Abbott's seat, and other safe Liberal seats in Sydney, were almost all Greens. Abbott is likely to be the victim of his own 'success' yet again.

But [di Natale] taking on the leadership just as the government brings down a budget, which to the extent it does anything at all, does things that can't be attacked as unfair. That paves the way for potential deals with the Greens on things such as wealthier pensioners losing payments more quickly.

It remains to be seen whether the budget can't be construed as unfair. The link between what this government says and what it does was never as strong as Taylor seeks to imply (and she will get no quarter when she falls over shocked after the budget is delivered).

Since 2013 the party has been sidelined somewhat by a government agenda it could seldom support and a Coalition happier to do deals with the assorted independents on the crossbench.

On 22 October 1957 The Times of London apparently ran a weather story under the headline "Heavy fog in Channel, Continent cut off". It all depends on your perspective in terms of who is "cut off" or sidelined".

In 2012 the press gallery missed Bob Brown's retirement until it happened. Crabb said then there was a "whiff of Pyongyang" about it (I've never been there, what is that whiff? Stale boiled cabbage?), and the opportunities for press gallery improvement identified by Tad Tietze back then go begging still. Now they missed Christine Milne's, and they will miss di Natale's too. Can't wait for the olfactory journalism on that one.

When leaders of the Australian Democrats stood down the press gallery reacted in much the same way they did with Milne yesterday: one small-party freak replaced with another former teacher from Adelaide. This changed with the rise and fall of Natasha Stott Despoja, who used the press gallery to gain the leadership but was not a more effective or popular leader as a result, and was unable to maintain that well-cultivated relationship when she failed at non-press-gallery-related aspects of her leadership.

Subsequent Democrat leaders were unable to stem the groundswells of dissent that would surge up from the membership and sweep them away. They were like Roman emperors who were happy to dispatch their rivals to far-flung provinces but unprepared when those rivals returned, cashed up and battle-hardened, to knock them off.

If anyone leading the Democrats did have any clues about popular support, they didn't have time to implement them. Unlike the Roman Empire, the Australian Democrats' culture of everyone-gets-a-turn which worked against the strong, decisive (yet bipartisan!) leadership for which the press gallery yearns. That's why the press gallery measures all minor parties against the Democrats and finds them wanting.

After months of treating him like a hoon, a poltroon, and a buffoon, the press gallery couldn't understand why Senator Muir won't confide in them on his legislative votes. They gang up on him when he ventures out of Parliament House, the way court reporters jostle witnesses in high-profile cases to provoke a reaction on the footpaths outside hearings. Perhaps Muir has the whiff of Mt Panorama about him, whatever that might mean.

Taking their lead from the media, major-party negotiators treat Muir the same way. This only reinforces the political gap to which he was elected (however circuitously) to fill.

The press gallery exists to mediate the relationship between those who (would) govern and those who are governed. The idea that there's "nothing wrong" with cosy journo-pollie relationships fails when the public is regularly uninformed and/or misinformed. Whether it's this one on Julia Gillard and "mummy bloggers" or that one on Abbott's in-house photographer, the press gallery's buddies in the major parties are busy trying to get around them.

Music critics don't need to explain Sia in terms of Wagner. But even the best in the press gallery - let alone the other 200 busy making the case for media diversity by pumping out the same story with the same angle - are stuck in the frame of Sensible Bipartisan Reform. The press gallery don't do minor parties because they just can't, while the major parties smooth their dying pillow - the press gallery's, not the minor parties. The more minor parties there are in federal politics, the less the press gallery will be able to meet their brief of reporting to you and I about how we are governed.

Fracking politics

The debate over land use with gas extraction (and other mining) versus farmland is vital for Australia. Do we have to go grubbing for every gobbet of gas that may or may not be out there? Do we have to transport gas vast distances across the continent or is it better to just pipe it from under our feet? If we screw up our continent at a deep, structural level, a few degrees' warming won't matter and we'll all have to take to the boats and find a refuge where people won't laugh at us.

This issue gives rise to moral and legal issues every bit as big as those arising from the Mabo and Wik cases. Politically, it is an existential threat to the Nationals. It is every bit as serious and far-reaching for them, and the Coalition, as Communists and Catholic worker movements fighting over the ALP during the 1950s. Only now are the Nats starting to wake up to it, apparently:

The opposition spokesman for resources and energy, Ian Macfarlane, said prime agricultural land should be exempt from mining altogether. Mr Macfarlane, who lives in the Darling Downs where coal seam gas is heavily concentrated, said "in terms of prime agricultural land, the very best land in Australia, there needs to be a clear exemption for that land from mining". But he, too, rejected the Greens bill, saying it was a ploy to wedge the Coalition.

"It will be a cold day in hell when they are the friends of farmers," he said.

He doesn't just live there, or sleep there. Macfarlane is the elected representative of part of the Darling Downs. The runoff from that land, whether artificial nutrients from fertiliser or mining residue chemicals, contaminates a vast swathe of the country's productive capacity. Nobody with any understanding of politics begrudges Macfarlane for standing up for his patch.

In his shadow ministerial capacity, however, he has a wider responsibility that isn't addressed by that statement (or which reveals more about his thinking than might be wise politically).

There is plenty of farming country around Australia which is not Prime Agricultural Land (good luck to those who'll have to draft the legislation defining that term), but which nonetheless regard themselves as farming communities and Coalition voters. If Macfarlane is only sticking up for squatters on big holdings in black-soil country, the Nats and the Liberals can give up on dozens of rural seats that form the core of their political base.

Macfarlane's snarl at the Greens is not the sort of idle comment you'd expect from his leader: it is more like a defensive measure from a cornered animal, aggression as a transparent mask for mortal fear.

Labor went through something similar with the decline of manufacturing industries and unionised workers, but it has had a generation to adjust while the Coalition faces a collapse at the next election: just as government seemed so tangible, so close.

The main threat to the Libs and Nats is not the Greens in themselves. Your standard urban Greens activists, with their multiple piercings and scent of patchouli, are going to experience a slight increase in the Green vote in rural electorates but can hardly claim authentic leadership of particular local communities and organic representation of their concerns. The main threat posed by the Greens is that they funnel preferences away from the Coalition toward local people who had not been particularly political but who decide to take a stand on this issue, and who get swept up in activism to the point where they start knocking off Libs and Nats from key political positions (and, who have been forced from a livelihood compromised by aggressive miners whose half-baked PR strategy annoys more than it allays).

Tony Windsor built his career by portraying himself as the people's champion against physically and mentally remote public servants - and including the Nationals as part of the problem. This is also the ground that Katter has slapped his brand-name on: Farmers First and Always. Liberals and Nationals have a massive task in finding and implementing a political solution (from which laws and public policy measures flow) that stops Windsor wannabes from pushing the conservatives off the land and into the suburbs).

Canberra commentators go on and on about how freaky the current configuration of the government is, kept in office by rural independents (leaving aside for a moment the Members for Melbourne and Denison). If the Coalition botch the politics of this issue, as they will under their current 'leadership', the current parliament could be the model for future parliaments: city-based brand names parties with city-based leaders jostling for minority government with coalitions of sui generis rural-and-regional independents. Tony Abbott won't be able to make that work for him or his party either, and neither will anyone else accustomed to parties that expect and get tight control over their members.

Senator Joyce said if the Greens were serious about protecting the property rights of farmers, they would broaden the private members' bill to also override state laws that prevent the clearing of native vegetation.

See, there's a time for ambit claims and a time when issues like clearing becomes a distraction from truly vital all-encompassing issues. Joyce is pissing at a bushfire, he's warding off a flood with a mop, he is showing his inadequacy to face the task before him.

Same applies to Abbott:

TONY ABBOTT has said prime arable land should be protected from mining but has rejected supporting a Greens bill that would prevent miners having untrammelled access to farmland.

Mr Abbott said yesterday mining and farming were important but the coal seam gas issue was primarily one for the states.

"We support the mining industry but we don't want to see prime agricultural land destroyed," he said. "We think the rights of farmers should always be respected.

"It's important that we come to a balanced approach which acknowledges the importance of the mining industry to Australia's economic future but which protects prime agricultural land and respects the rights of farmers."

As usual, Abbott is trying to cover all bases. If he faced the sort of light-and-fluffy media coverage he has enjoyed throughout his career, and if "punters" take their media at face value as the journosphere would assume, he would get away with that. On this issue, however, hard choices must be made - and Tony Abbott cannot make them.

Abbott's first task should be to do what the Nationals are doing, and shore up the base first. Unlike the Nationals, this need not mean siding with the farmers against the miners, but in political triage the farmers need public attention first. By going into a flat spin of all-things-to-everyone Abbott shows once again he's not a man for complexity under pressure. Even after many, many examples over many, many years, Canberra commentators who are both highly experienced and half-witted continue to claim seriously that Abbott really has an option to "flick the switch to a more positive agenda". These are the wrong people to help us understand how we are governed.

To put it simply, but hopefully not flippantly, farmers and gas extractors are not in a win-win situation. Use of particular land is often mutually exclusive and a decision one way or the other can be hard to reverse. There's more to it than simply standing up for farmers over miners (Windsor and Katter own that ground and the Nats and Libs have not fully reclaimed it). There's more to it than simply asserting the reverse (foreign gas extractors might have plenty of cash and be willing to donate it to friendly political parties, but in all other respects they offer bugger-all as a political base. You can't eat money and you can't just stuff it into ballot boxes either: nobody wants or needs a gold-plated how-to-vote card).

The whole model by which Tony Abbott and other modern careerist politicians have got to where they are involves being ignorant of issues except for the way they have been framed by others, picking a side and fighting for one interest or another over that issue, ignoring any collateral damage to those with greater knowledge of the issue and whose stake in that issue goes beyond "the media cycle". This has obviously been effective to some extent for the participants but it has meant important issues become lumbered with legal and policy outcomes that don't really address the issues.

As recently as the 1990s we saw Mabo and Wik transform traditional legal understandings of property title. Farmers and miners argued their corners and they developed a solution which balanced their interests against those of traditional owners. The political campaign against this, waged by the Libs and Nats with a support cast of "culture warriors" like Windschuttle and Chris Kenny, had the faint whiff of racism about it. By the late '90s traditional owners faced a harder task in establishing their claims: another one of those Howard government triumphs that left everyone but a small number of participants worse off and cheapened.

Racism won't play in this debate. Gas companies are often but not always foreign-owned, and so are vast tracts of Prime (and sub-prime) Agricultural Land. It wouldn't be politically incorrect so much as fundamentally dumb strategy to inject an element into the debate that has no place there, that increases confusion over what is already fraught and complicated. Bob Katter himself has been careful not to do so, and he has greater standing in dealing with Aborigines than the entire Coalition and the rest of the parliament put together: for all that, he cannot vouch for or rein in some of his more exuberant supporters and the candidates who will be his political franchisees, who are almost certain to play that worthless card in this debate.

Abbott too has not played the race card, one of the few things he can be proud of; but he hasn't achieved much else either in this debate. His verbal discipline under pressure isn't great and the Stockdale re-election shows he always cleaves to the far right when it really counts. That mealy-mouthed bullshit quoted above isn't a policy, and it won't even hold off a media that has magically become less enthralled. People can be "respected" even when the decision goes against them, but when everything goes against them they may not accept either the decision or those who make it.

It isn't good enough to flick this issue to the states. Ever since Bolte, Askin and Bjelke-Petersen ganged up on John Gorton no Federal Coalition leader has been able to use that as the excuse that trumps all others. Abbott is the most anti-states leader the Liberal Party has ever had: for him to claim "states rights" would only show that patriotism isn't the last refuge of people like him. With Coalition governments in three states (and more than likely to win the next elections in the three states Labor governs currently), such a feeble defence would be unsustainably, lose-more-credibility-than-you-gain stupid.

That leaves us with the current federal government. I'd back Gillard to grind out some lawyerly behind-closed-doors agreement that kind-of addresses the interests of miners and farmers as represented behind said doors. The record of this government suggests that any such agreement would please no-one with intense focus on the negatives, fatally fracking any rose-coloured framing slapped on it by so-called issues management professionals within the government. Under the rules of transactional, PR-driven politics such an outcome means you abandon the issue entirely and keep looking for a good headline (until Tony Abbott dumps all over your lovely headline, whereupon you just keep on looking, looking as though your whole way of operating isn't inherently broken).

Some issues are so pressing, so important on so many levels to so many people and so many big corporate interests, that they cannot be abandoned and will not be shunted off the political stage. One of these is the issue of managing land use conflicts between gas extractors (and other miners) and farmers:

• The Nationals can't address the issue, being inseparable as a political force from farmers.
• The Liberals can't address the issue, because they're led by someone whose idea of rising above a fight where he can't just pick a side is to be mealy-mouthed.
• The Greens, Katter and Windsor (and local activists so busy coming to terms with ideas like BTEX that they can barely articulate the predicament that may lead them to where the Greens, Katter and Windsor are today) can't address the issue because their political operations and perspectives do not encompass the wider national interest, of which (yes, Virginia) foreign-based corporate interests do form part. These capacities and perspectives may emerge over time but in 2011 it is more hopeful than true to assert otherwise.
• Then there's Labor (you there, stop laughing). They should be able to do more than gibber about "sovereign risk". They are the political heirs of those who came up with the legal framework around Mabo, the same crowd who were powerless/disinterested to stop it becoming the half-baked legal morass it is today. The farming-mining conflict affects a far greater and more densely populated part of the country than so-called terra nullius ever did.

No Australian who is neither a farmer or a miner (and that's most of us) wants to see the water table fracked and/or the land ravaged with DDT and superphosphate.

I don't have a solution to this issue either. Not being a Liberal any more I do have respect for those who are working to find one. I have no respect for those clogging up the country's political offices and just fighting one corner, confusing themselves with lobbyists; or trying to be all things to everyone, or ignoring the issue while jonesing for the magic headline/TV image that will render us all as forgetful as they.

Protesting too much

Labor strategists in NSW only embarrass themselves when they speak of campaigning, and there is nobody any more with any authority in Labor to impose STFU on these people. One would assume that journalists are giving them one last go-around for old times' sake (because they'd never be lazy; lazy journalism is against MEAA guidelines, so therefore it never happens). There is, however, one topic on which NSW Labor might be heard: how they did over the Greens.

In Marrickville, Labor gave Fiona Byrne plenty of rope by letting the anti-Israel motion go through council. They could not have dreamt that Byrne would be caught out trying to distance herself and embrace the idea at the same time. At an election where parish-pump issues and service delivery was at the forefront, nobody wants to hear any self-indulgent claptrap about East Jerusalem and Gaza. Byrne had a good story to tell the people of Marrickville about public transport and environmental issues generally. She faced an opponent who was neither a dutiful local member nor an especially formidable minister (relative to the jerks in the last government, she was a colossus; but in absolute terms, her policy achievements can be described as, um ...). Byrne blew it for the Greens.

In Balmain, Jamie Parker will probably win but will wear the sort of hounded look that Rob Oakeshott has increasingly borne: jeered at by the Liberals and shunned by Labor. Verity Firth seems to have roared back from the political dead, seemingly by denying her party affiliation and somehow convincing people to overlook her craven gutlessness over unflued gas heaters. The broadminded people of the electorate ignored the tut-tutting of the Murdoch rags over Matthew Chesher's adventures in pharmacology. It could have been worse: he could have been attempting to buy Horny Goat Weed.

Preferences are hard to map where preferencing is optional, yet some common sense can be applied. It's conceivable for people to vote [1] Liberal and [2] Green. It's conceivable for people to vote [1] Labor and [2] Green, or vice versa. It's almost inconceivable that anyone would vote [1] Labor [2] Liberal, or vice versa. The postals will favour the Greens.

Speaking of the ridiculous, here is hopefully one of Imre's last pieces on a subject he doesn't understand:

HAVING snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in one, possibly two, NSW lower house seats, the Greens now face the prospect of four years in the political wilderness without real power.

As opposed to all the power they had in the last term of Parliament? Surely the power to make Labor fight on two fronts counts as "real power"? The Greens are to NSW politics what the Sharkies are to rugby league.

Fronting the media to explain what was widely seen as a disappointing result for the Greens, lead upper house candidate David Shoebridge said the Greens could be proud of their effort.

"They focused their resources on those two seats. We stood up, we're still up, and we'll be in the counting for the rest of this week," he said. "There remains the possibility, in the NSW upper house, to get a majority to do things like call for papers."

This is precisely the sort of thing that the journosphere ignores in the hype of election time, but which is powerful in the actual conduct of Parliament. The Greens went into this election with one Legislative Council seat and came out with three. This puts them ahead already, regardless of what may happen in Balmain. A real journalist would explain what a "call for papers" is and why it matters.

Sydney University political scientist Rodney Smith said the Greens' Marrickville candidate, Fiona Byrne, had suffered from her difficulty getting to grips with the truth over her support for a boycott of Israel.

"It began to look like she was being a bit too clever by half by appealing to people for whom the boycott might be appealing, but at the same time saying, 'Oh no ... I don't support it'," Dr Smith said.

And since when do we at the Murdoch press start quoting pointy-headed academics other than Ian Plimer?

Byrne is not the first politician to talk out both sides of her mouth, but the fact that she was caught and went into a dither shows that she's second rate at best. Had the campaign gone on a bit longer she would have found herself beset by anti-Semites, never a good look for anyone.

He said that Mr Parker had struggled after the late entry of a rival independent candidate and former local mayor, Maire Sheehan, who directed her preferences to Labor.

Politics in that area is basically Labor vs Not-Labor. The Liberals never had a look-in until recently and the Democrats were sneered out of town early on. The various flavours of communist gave up the ghost during the '90s, during the gentrification of suburbs like Rozelle and Balmain with increased numbers of yuppies prepared to vote Liberal. The strongest Not-Labor of that time was a bunch of ex-Labor middle-aged women rebelling at the deals stitched up by Labor men. Maire (not a mis-spelling; pronounced "Moira") Sheehan was one of these, and became Mayor. Since then, she must have made her peace with Labor: at every election where Labor is in trouble, Maire Sheehan comes out and wrings her hands and considers running, and then a couple of media cycles later she nominates. Her effect is to siphon votes off this year's Non-Labor (formerly No Aircraft Noise, now NSW Greens) and funnel them back to Labor. Surely somewhere there's a journalist in Sydney who's awake up to Maire Sheehan.

Former NSW premier Bob Carr hailed Ms Tebbutt and Ms Firth as "heroes" of the election.

So?

Carr has learnt the lesson of military history that disasters are celebrated officially. The two battles at which more Victoria Crosses were awarded by the British than any others were Blood River and Lone Pine, two terrible defeats. Carr seems determined to pull something from the rubble of his legacy and here they are, the bedraggled Tebbutt and barely alive Firth. He doth protest too much.

"It's now clear that the internal politics of the Greens are chaotic," Mr Carr said.

As opposed to the well-oiled machine that is Sussex Street in 2011.

From this it would seem that Bob Brown basically is "the internal politics of the Greens":

Labor has seized on the Greens' failure to win seats on Saturday to demand that Tony Abbott follow the lead of the Liberals in Victoria and NSW by refusing to pass the party preferences ahead of Labor in the next federal election.

"It is difficult to envisage a situation whereby the Greens would win a seat in the House of Representatives without Liberal Party preferences," Labor frontbencher Chris Bowen said yesterday.

Easy, tiger: Bowen forgets that Victoria's Liberals kept Labor on tenterhooks last year before deciding against preferencing the Greens at the last minute. The normally unflappable John Brumby was well and truly flapped with his increasingly strident demands of Liberals to preference Labor. The new Senate, where the Greens have nine Senators whose votes are vital to get Gillard Government legislation through, has not yet been convened. Chris Bowen didn't get where he is today by going out too hard too early (unless he's rattled).

In last year's federal election, the Greens claimed the balance of power in the Senate and won their first House of Representatives seat -- Melbourne.

However, their failure to win seats on Saturday or in last year's Victorian election ...

In both states they have increased their representation. They do seem confined to the upper house, like the Democrats; and like the Democrats they are one big sell-out from a downward spiral of recriminations and oblivion. It's sloppy reporting to suggest that the Greens have gone backwards when they're ahead of where they were,

Yesterday, Mr Bowen said the results showed Mr Abbott had the power to determine the Greens' future in the federal House of Representatives.

"Mr Abbott goes on a lot about the Greens," Mr Bowen told the Ten Network's Meet the Press program.

"Well, it is up to him whether he'd preference the Greens or not ...

There are Liberal voters who preference the Greens: they're called moderates, Chris. All Tony Abbott need do is be true to himself and he will drive moderate Liberals away from the Liberal Party and toward the Greens. Neither Abbott nor Bowen are obliged in any way to give the Greens a two-year head start in building on their considerable progress in inner-city Australia.

Next year's election in Queensland will be fascinating as the state has experienced an array of eco-disasters. You'd expect the state's Greens to step up to a whole new level in seats along the Brisbane River, and in farmland resisting the encroachment of mines and gas wells. Bet they don't though: hacks like the ALP and yee-haw boofheads like Jeff Seeney will squeeze the Greens out of any elected office.

You could argue that the Greens are chokers, and that they'll be bereft after Brown goes. However, they've come a long way in a short time, and NSW Labor of all people ought not be jeering at anyone. They played Fiona Byrne off a break but if anyone is going to learn from this experience it will more likely be the Greens, not Labor.

... Heroes often fail
And you won't read that book again
Because the ending's just to hard to take ...
... But for now, love, let's be real.

I never thought I could act this way
And I've got to say that I just don't get it
I don't know where we went wrong
But the feeling's gone and I just can't get it back ...

- from If you could read my mind by Gordon Lighfoot

The blind leading the naked

Nobody really thinks Tony Abbott would be better off if he embraced beliefs about our future economic growth that he doesn't really support. He's not big on basic economics, so the idea of decoupling economic growth from growth in carbon emissions is clearly too hard.

This piece was originally going to be a tongue-in-cheek rightwing rant about how Tony Abbott should ditch all pretence at moderation, how he should affirm that climate change is crap and that refugee boats should be pushed out to see regardless of the danger to human life involved - mainly because I'd love to see Abbott be honest for a change, and I'd love to see the rightwing bluff well and truly called. Nobody is being fooled by the various evasions, token gestures and outright bullshit that Abbott and other Libs are trailing behind them. This is your big chance, Liberal rightwing - don't let it slide by in a drizzle of well-let-me-say-this.

Instead, there was this. Niki Savva was slightly less nasty this week (not one mention of Julia Gillard's make-up, even though it's probably made from petrochemicals!). She substituted it instead with a less pointed sarcasm against the world generally, but she still brought bucketloads of stupid.

IF Tony Abbott could only embrace the new global religion where belief in climate change is obligatory and in God optional, then he would spare himself the punishment of its spawn, the New Inquisition, and be better off politically if not spiritually.

The whole idea of claiming climate change is a religion rather than a science implies that there is no objective, provable truth about climate change, or that if there is it is obscured by the very institution that would preach it.

I don't know who "the New Inquisition" is and neither does Niki Savva. To rub her nose in her own pseudo-realism: I know that Muammar Gaddafi is killing people who don't support him, but I am not convinced that the Chairman of the IPCC is doing likewise.

The climate change religion purges dissenters.

You can't be purged if you were never really part of the religion.

Listen to the language of these latter-day evangelists: "I believe climate change is real; I have always believed climate change was caused by human activity; I believe Australians agree that climate change is real; the Australian people voted for me knowing I believe climate change is real; the Liberal Party, in the modern age, climate change deniers ..."

That was Julia Gillard, in case you couldn't tell.

Gillard is hardly the only person who recognises both that a) you can have economic growth without emissions growth; and b) if that's what you want for Australia, voting for the Liberal Party will do more harm than good. I still say, drop the pretence and say it loud and proud: vote Liberal if you think climate change is crap.

The Prime Minister does not believe in God, although the muscled-up caucus God Squad, as fellow MPs call the right-wing grouping that staged a mini revolt recently, sustains her.

That's the difference between the Labor God Squad and the Liberal one. Liberals have lost preselection because they're gay, or they are philanderers, or because they don't believe in church intrusion into aspects of social life (such as schools, medical procedures, etc). Plenty of Labor people with the same attributes have slipped through their party's processes unscathed. They then get into Parliament and sneer at the Liberals for being run by religious zealots: SA Labor Senator Linda Kirk is the only exception to that rule I can think of. The men who can make this stick, men like Joe de Bruyn and Senator Don Farrell, are not young men; those who might be expected to take over from them, Tony Burke or Mark Butler, might toe the factional line behind closed doors but they are not going to pole-axe a colleague for personal reasons (e.g. sexual preference), like the Liberals do.

Speaking of Tony Burke and climate change: Burke is the Minister responsible for the Bureau of Meterology. Cardinal George Pell criticised the head of the Bureau, Dr Greg Ayers, calling him "unscientific" and claiming "I spend a lot of time studying this stuff". Burke has a responsibility to stand up for Ayers and repudiate Pell, but I bet he shirks it.

See what happens when you mix climate change and religion? Let's drop that rubbish right now.

Abbott on the other hand, who readily professes his faith in God but was unable to tolerate the strictures of the seminary, finds it hard to be so unswerving in his belief in scientists. They are, after all, only human.

So are voters, Niki. So are you. So are economists, and a good many of those who commission filler for The Australian.

The Coalition was deeply divided on the issue, compared with only mildly divided now. Abbott did not express his unease at that meeting and in fact had been quoted in The Australian the day before effectively urging his colleagues to fall into line. It was only later that day across the border in regional Victoria his inconvenient little truth popped out.

He was guest speaker at a community forum at the home of the Beaufort Crows to help out the newly selected candidate for the seat of Wannon, Liberal up-and-comer Dan Tehan.

An hour late, Abbott walked in while Tehan was addressing the 120-strong crowd.

Most of the questioning was about climate change - not hostile, just your usual laconic country Australians wanting to know why Australia was acting and why it was acting ahead of most of the rest of the world.

Australia isn't acting ahead of the rest of the world, and Abbott had a responsibility to point that out. Which Liberal MP would do anything but laugh when told by Tony Abbott to show some discipline? He also had a responsibility to not get sucked into every rip and downdraft going, to truckle to whatever crowd he is addressing: climate skeptic when talking to Alan Jones, mealy-mouthed climate convert to Tony Jones, and yet he's a conviction politician.

The polls would have to drop a long way before any serious rumblings emerge against Abbott.

Rubbish. The leader should lift the party. Abbott is dragging the Liberal Party down. People want to vote Liberal but under Abbott, they just can't.

There is no threat to his leadership now except the threat Abbott poses to himself.

What about the fact that he is all that stands between Julia Gillard and political oblivion? He is like one of those bad guys in bad movies who ties up the plucky heroine, puts her on the path to certain death (e.g. strapped to a conveyor belt leading to a bandsaw), and then laboriously explains the whole plot, which gives her time to escape, foil the plot and cap it all off with a witty remark. Abbott has to go.

"We should take precautions against risks and threats, potential ones, as well as actual ones, but I don't think we should assume that the highest environmental challenge, let alone the great moral social and political challenge of our time, is to reduce our emissions."

The story here is not that climate change science is not yet settled: the story is that the strutting Hamlet we call our Opposition Leader is a flake. It's time to give up on the guy. What, then, is "the great moral social and political challenge of our time"? The Waratahs' front row?

Liberal MPs were gobsmacked. Two weeks ago Abbott instructed them to stick to the economic arguments against a carbon tax and avoid environmental debates.

There he was doing the exact opposite. "God knows what happened there," a frontbencher said.

Why were they gobsmacked? Do they have no memories at all? Do they not know that nothing is more typical of the man than flaky, don't-do-as-I-do anti-leadership? It might be a breach of "media discipline" but it's not at all untypical of Tony Abbott.

Economic arguments will determine the fate of the carbon tax.

Nah, I reckon it will be politics, quid-pro-quo and a lather of bluster on the side. Only people who spent too long in the eyrie of the Treasurer's office go for this Ökonomie über alles stuff.

Almost 13 years ago, the GST package proposed the abolition of 10 taxes and promised $12bn in tax cuts. In 2007, the Coalition went to the election with $34bn in tax cuts fully paid for, no strings, and still got done.

The former was part of a coherent reform package, the latter was utterly disconnected from any reform at all. Lesson: first reform, then compensation. A government that offers compensation without reform is bribing its executioners. Niki Savva, being a doyenne, missed that lesson and is lecturing people from a position of extraordinary self-delusion.

To quote Amanda Vanstone, $5bn won't even buy families a sandwich and milkshake.

Five billion dollars would do wonders, you idiot - and it's a misquote (the original amount was $5). For a population of 22.3m, it's $224.22 a head - from whence does Madame Savva get her sandwiches and milkshakes?

A halfway decent treasurer could double that without imposing a new tax or raising a sweat.

Are we talking a tax take, or a tax cut? Are Australians overtaxed or undertaxed these days? Is it easier or harder for Treasurers to put taxes through Parliament when they have stonking great Howard-style majorities, as opposed to a minefield of pushme-pullyou arrangements with independents? Can you imagine Peter Costello dealing with Adam Bandt or Tony Windsor without losing his mind, and in such a context would Niki Savva's opinion be worth any damn thing at all?

Abbott has to convince Australians they will be worse off if a carbon tax is enacted, not that climate change is not real ...

But to accept the latter is to be a bit more accommodating about the former. To reject the latter proposition is the only way to get up the head of steam necessary to bury the former. Abbott knows that, surely.

... remember that climate change helped destroy John Howard, Brendan Nelson, Turnbull and Rudd ...

Because they all minced around it, like Abbott is doing now. The story is right there, Niki, slapping you in the face - and if you'd been in journalism as long as I have you'd see that. Abbott is in the departure lounge, all dope and no more rope, and here's you giving him advice on the mot juste.

Maybe both, depending.

See, only doyennes can write shit like that. Anyone else, and it's just empty nonsense.

Any other doubts he should keep to himself.

I doubt Tony Abbott will and should be Prime Minister, and I'd tell anyone. He's a clown and must never govern us again: that's the only political story you need to tell. Nobody who had any genuine respect for religion would compare it to climate change, and the reverse is true too.

Niki Savva has no sense, no nous and no respect. Because she talks nonsense, and her head looks like a fist draped in puff pastry, it is imperative she stays off the telly too.

Update 23 Mar: Tony Abbott is finished.

Why the Liberals should preference the Greens

Australia's two biggest states will go to the polls over the next six months. Labor will want the Liberals to preference them ahead of the Greens, while the Liberals will be tempted to mess with Labor for short-term gain. In both states, the Liberal position is strong: somewhat stronger in NSW but over the next term, even if Brumby scrapes back in you have to fancy the Liberals' chances over Labor's.

There is no reason why the Liberals should engage in a pas-de-deux with the ALP. Labor only do this in moments of weakness, and the Liberals never benefit. It becomes hard for a Liberal opposition to become a Liberal government when they've cut so many deals for quick, little wins; some Lib staffer gets a public sector job while Liberal frontbenchers never become ministers. If the Liberals preference Labor and Labor preferences the Liberals, how do they create a competitive advantage? Brumby's bellowing at the Victorian Liberals, demanding that they preference his government, reminds me of Morris Iemma demanding that Barry O'Farrell back him on electricity privatisation. For Baillieu to accede would be the end of him.

Andrew Norton wrung his hands over his local electorate before eventually deciding to preference Labor on particular Federal issues. What of the longer term, the bigger picture?

The reason why the Liberals should preference the Greens is because it is in its interests to shape the left in such a way that makes left governments structurally weak. A strong Liberal leader, one determined to be in power for a long time, would intone gravely that the Labor Party is in such a dire state that it cannot be supported. The Greens have the kind of political vigour that the ALP lacks, and to recognise this and build bridges over the long term is in the best interests of the Liberal Party. The future of the left in Australia belongs to both Greens and Labor, and it is a pragmatic recognition of this for the Liberals to preference the Greens.

Of course, this would drive Labor crazy. The foundation of the ALP is that it is the only political force on Australia's left capable of holding government. It has guarded this jealously, inventing the notion of the "rat" which has latterly been taken up by post-Howard Liberals. It has seen off international communism, sharply limited the application of Leo XIII Catholicism, and ran rings around the Democrats who threatened to deny Labor centrist votes. The Greens represent a force so substantial and so sharp that it can act as a pincer for Labor, if the wit is there for the Liberals to use it thus. The idea of putting the future of the left in the hands of the non-left is a political advantage for the ages. It threatens to break a generational cycle where Liberals have been equal or inferior to Labor in winning state elections.

In both NSW and Victoria, Labor MPs vulnerable to the Greens in inner-city seats are highly-regarded ministers. If they are beaten by Greens, local Labor branches will not be capable of finding quality candidates to run against them next time; they will be the usual random duffers Labor fields in other marginals. Labor won't be able to replace those people quickly from anywhere else in the short term. The Greens, meanwhile, will have political momentum and will therefore attract quality people not focused on money, continuing to put the lie to the idea that political competence is necessarily expensive. If Labor lose Melbourne or Balmain to the Greens, they will suffer a blow from which they will not recover easily or quickly.

Worse, the future for a proud party thus defeated would be to form a coalition with its tormentors. True, the Libs and Nats have their tensions but they also have a culture of symbiosis that is lacking in both jealous Labor and we-shall-overcome Greens. A future Green-Labor government would be fraught to the point where it will take ten, twenty years for each to learn to live with the other. For the Liberals, ten or twenty years is a long time in government.

Having forsaken the inner-cities, the future of Labor is taking on the Liberals in the suburbs and regions, engaging in law-and-order auctions and urban planning issues: issues that favour the Liberals, especially if they are the incumbent government or challengers to a tired, dispirited and exhausted government.

Five years from now, the baby-boomers will be gone from Labor, and with them the party's electability:

• The NSW Coalition government will be headed for re-election against a gutted ALP;
• If Victoria's Liberals don't win next month, they can't but win next time;
• Anna Bligh, Andrew Fraser and the brothers Dick will have slid into history - regardless of how bad a Langbroek government might be, Labor won't be able to regroup to take advantage of it;
• Colin Barnett is the supreme politician in WA state politics; fawning from his own side, and such opposition as there is can only be described as feeble; John Howard syndrome; and
• The wheels will fall off Rann, again with little prospect of regrowth, to the point where not even the Libs can botch it.

Tassie is anyone's game, though something tells me Hodgman could yet outwit Labor there - and of course the Feds speak for themselves. Gillard can keep Labor together long enough to fob off Abbott, but beyond that a sensible Liberal leader should be able to build a genuine understanding with the Greens that cuts Labor out of the game, leaving them with the sort of union-official zombies they have warned themselves of for a generation. 

I think it is one of the great tragedies that Deakinite liberals were replaced by dull-witted tinsmiths, autodidactic cabinet-makers, Billy Hughes and other randoms under the Labour League banner, many of whom would later desert the ALP anyway (there is nothing so traditional as trouncing Labor traditions). The Greens look set to give Labor the same medicine. All of your Freudenberg flatulence can't help Labor deal with the next few years; fundamental restructuring and accommodation with what now seems impossible is their only hope. The Liberals' only hope is to force these changes on their opponents before they're ready.