Before a fall

This story will probably not lead to the downfall of two Cabinet ministers straight away. It does, however, give an insight into those ministers, and the sorts of inherent weaknesses that might well* lead to their downfall. That article also shows what's wrong with the way politics is reported, particularly by Fairfax.

Barnaby Joyce and George Brandis have been in Canberra a long time. Earlier in their careers it may have occurred to them that seeking taxpayer-funded entitlements to attend a wedding would have been absurd; that regardless of what the rules around entitlements may or may not say, it is a Bad Look to be claiming them to attend a wedding of a friend. Before entering Parliament, Joyce was an accountant and Brandis a lawyer. Neither has any excuse, other than the gradual dulling of common sense that comes from spending far too long in an environment where entitlements are freely available but rarely commented upon.

Joyce's problem from day one in politics has been that he talks in generalities but rarely gets across the detail of whatever he's talking about. Journalists have found this charming, because they don't care about detail either, and rural people who support Joyce share his disdain for details. Now that he has access to a large ministerial staff, he should hire at least one person who is both very much detail-focused when it comes to his personal arrangements, and ferocious in protecting his interests to the point where they can upbraid him to his face and get him to change his ways where necessary. Such people are rare, but vital for an easy-going man to keep up appearances.

If Joyce becomes another grey, defensive politician, it will be because he is at the mercy of pernickety forces he fears but doesn't understand. He is not a reformer, so he will not end up overreaching and caught on the horns of untold dilemmas as happened to the last government, or to Keating, or Whitlam. He seems like an honest man, and will probably not be caught doing something flagrantly wrong. Joyce's career will probably end being shown to have not known something he should have, or not paying attention at a crucial time.

George Brandis is not a lackadaisical bloke, he is tightly wound and puffed up. His weakness is an overestimation of his own cleverness, both in the interpretation of rules and in defusing the scandal by dashing off a cheque once he was caught out. In the execution of his duties he will have to mix it with people who are much cleverer than he, while having the last word because he is the Attorney-General of the Commonwealth of Australia while they (and you) are not, so there.

Again, Brandis does not appear avaricious for anything but prestige, and he will almost certainly overreach in terms of his abilities. Again, his career might not end in disgrace necessarily, but you can see how such a man might get ahead of himself.

All political careers end in failure, said a former British Cabinet Minister not very different from Brandis in many ways. That minister, Enoch Powell, showed that a political career can be over long before the resignation is submitted or the sack is delivered, whether by a leader or by the voters.

It is an old trick to play on journalists: to cut off the supply of official information except through official channels, and then to restrict those official channels to the point where nothing that comes from them is useful to the public at large. For journalists who have no investigative skills beyond the reading of press releases or the cultivation of drops, this is a cruel trick, like hiding the stash of an addict. They might grumble, they might even crack a tantrum, but if they don't expire it could be the best thing that ever happened to them.

It is astonishing that members of the press gallery, seeing Tony Abbott up close for years now, could not have foreseen that an old press secretary would act in this way. The poacher of media attention from the Gillard and Rudd governments has become the gamekeeper of government-press relations. It is ridiculous to see and hear the mewling of journos missing their daily dose of Abbott's blather and antics to fill their gaps. No sympathy is due to them and to their attempt to rope in the rest of us by muttering darkly about democracy is pathetic. They've made their bed, by waving through Abbott into office without the necessary scrutiny. They can lie in it, knowing that they can't just turn on the journalistic scrutiny as they always assumed they could.

Attorney-General George Brandis is one of Parliament's "biggest hypocrites" ... says acting opposition leader Chris Bowen.

Well, he would say that, wouldn't he.

Here it becomes necessary, yet again, to tell qualified and experienced journalists how to do their jobs: it is not a story that there is argy-bargy over the issue. The story is about the claiming of 'entitlements' themselves.

The reason why the story is phrased in this way is to allow the journalist to maintain their self-adopted pose of impartiality: one side says this, another says that. I'm not responsible for helping journalists maintain their deluded pose, and neither are you; I'm interested in finding out what's going on with this matter and what it means more generally. These two journalists aren't helping us do that by concentrating so hard on their appearance of equipoise.

(Note also to the headline writer: a reliance on cliches will cause 'lashes' to lose their sting, which is a bad thing for news providers, for keeping politicians accountable in a democracy, and perhaps even for headline-writers).

Senior Labor figures Chris Bowen and Mark Dreyfus had called for Senator Brandis to be stood down from writing the new ministerial code of conduct, but a spokeswoman for the Attorney-General said he would not be involved in writing the new code.

"It had nothing to do with the story," she told Fairfax Media on Monday.

Fairfax Media understands the new ministerial code of conduct is being drafted within the Prime Minister's office.

Fine, but Brandis is still to be bound by the code, and as a member of Cabinet he will have to endorse it. Here the journalists are being smart-alecks:

• it doesn't matter what Brandis' spokeswoman says, his behaviour and attitude toward public entitlements is directly relevant to the question of a ministerial code of conduct;
• the fact that a spokeswoman would presume to tell journalists what the story is shows how highly their professionalism is regarded (and bugger it, if a spokeswoman can tell journalists what the story is and isn't, this long-suffering consumer of news stories can certainly do so); and
• It doesn't even matter where the Code is being drafted. Maybe Col Allan is drafting it with his other hand while taking a piss; I wouldn't put it past this lot.

Brandis is First Law Officer of the Commonwealth; the execution of his duties is central to the success or failure of any effort to ensure probity in government. That principle is lost in he-said-she-said, voice-from-nowhere, strike-a-pose journalism.

At the weekend, Fairfax Media revealed that Senator Brandis had claimed $1683 in taxpayer-funded entitlements for the wedding of his close friend, radio presenter Michael Smith.

Despite reports the Attorney-General was "tearing up the dance floor", Senator Brandis insisted the wedding was mostly a work-related function.

Firstly, Brandis wasn't Attorney-General when that event took place, and neither is Smith a radio announcer.

Secondly, the Midwinter Ball at Parliament House is a work-related function for politicians and journalists alike; having attended a few of those in his time, Brandis' confusion is understandable.

I know I'm meant to credit Fairfax Media for running this story at all, but - no. The access and privileges accorded to press gallery journalists should see them come out with stories like that every day. No gratitude is owed for an exception that only proves the rule about how sloppy the press gallery are. Like politicians, journalists expect reward and appreciation just for doing their jobs; this is why they are the lowest-regarded professions in Australia.

What I am grateful for is that the superjournos at Fairfax Media's press gallery weren't covering US politics in the early 1970s:

The White House today denied any involvement in the Watergate break-in. "It has nothing to do with the story", said a spokeswoman.

I read this, and frankly I thought it was ungenerous. I wouldn't mind a shelf of books like that (you can keep your CLR though). Then I thought: if I really knuckled down I could buy all those books. Then I'd pay tax on that, and George could buy some more: government as Ponzi scheme. Luckily George isn't a single mother on entitlements benefits, because that would be intolerable sucking on the public teat they don't have time for reading anyway. Would you want to talk to someone on a plane if they were reading So Greek?

Senator Brandis publicly made the case for prosecuting Mr Thomson as well as former speaker Peter Slipper, who was later charged with misusing his taxpayer entitlements.

Given his role as the Coalition's watchdog, Senator Brandis was "clearly one of the Parliament's now biggest hypocrites," Mr Bowen said.

The Attorney-General had "tried to hold other people to a very high standard, a standard he has failed to meet himself", he added.

The journalists are brave enough to point out Brandis' role as Javert to Thomson's Valjean, but in making the link between that and Brandis' behaviour in office going forward, then they scurry around to hide behind the man who built his credibility on Grocery Watch. The journalists present principles about the execution of public office as just another bit of argy-bargy.

This is why people roll their eyes at political conflict and give up on media altogether. When big issues sneak through under cover of the argy-bargy, they get all surprised and disappointed while disdaining politics and media as means to redress those big issues.

For those of you who insist on cheering on random acts of competence in Australian political reporting: this is gutless journalism. By calling it as such I am giving it, and those who practise such journalism for the time being, the respect they deserve.

This story is pretty much dissipated; Brandis and Joyce will continue in office, while the careers of Peter Slipper and others have ended over far lesser breaches of 'entitlements'. Only the cranks who hate this government will even remember this incident, whereas "experienced press gallery veterans" won't remember or learn a thing. Any claims these ministers may have against the misdeeds of others might ring more hollow now than they have, and would hope. But here at least we have the measure of these men, Joyce's carelessness and Brandis' overweening pride. While we haven't seen the chickens come home to roost for each of these men we have seen the chickens, and the roosts, and know it's just a matter of time.

Here too, we see that if there is any investigative journalism to be done into this government, the opposition will have to do it themselves. The journalists need to maintain their fruitless pose more than they need the respect that comes from getting hands dirty and working through complexity and nuance. We see that any government spokesperson can negate a well-grounded, documented attack by simply turning it into he-said-she-said argy-bargy, which repels media consumers and nullifies journalists into the bargain.


* Note the more modest phrasing following this site's TAWNBPM debacle.

Jumping at shadows

Contrasting articles by Lenore Taylor and Ben Eltham aren't about the prospect of a Rudd challenge to the Labor leadership. They are about what the purpose of political journalism is: what it's for, and who's it for.

Is the Labor leadership issue a bizarre beat-up entirely confected by the news media? Certainly not. Is it an unstable and shifting situation, which may lead to a challenge, and which is notoriously difficult to report? Absolutely.

Have I spent too much of my life listening to Kevin Rudd's rhetorical questions, thinking that it's a telling way of making a point? In a word, Lenore, yes.

It might not be confected, and Eltham was mistaken to say that it was. Where Eltham is right, though, was to say that there's plenty more important news and people like Taylor are wrong not to focus on that. Taylor's piece is a solid blast of outrage from a wounded but self-righteous profession: you'll read whatever we bloody well write and stop whinging.

Apparently contradictory things can be simultaneously true. The 103-strong caucus is divided into three camps - those backing Gillard, a growing group who used to back Gillard but who are now unsure what to do, and those backing Rudd. So when Gillard's supporters say Kevin Rudd doesn't have the numbers, that's technically right. And when Kevin Rudd's supporters say support has drifted away from Gillard over the summer, that's true too. Both sides claim more of the undecided camp than they definitely have, meaning when each says the other is inflating their numbers, that's spot-on as well.

As Eltham points out, we've been here before.

In 1990 Peter Costello first entered Parliament and was touted as a future Liberal leader. In 1994 he became Deputy Leader of the Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party, a post he went on to hold for 13 years without challenging for the leadership. In 2007 the leader of the Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party, John Howard, lost his seat; Costello declined the chance to become leader unopposed and declined it twice thereafter before retiring in 2009.

It isn't being smart after the event to point out that many journalists - including Lenore Taylor - wrote many, many articles claiming that Costello was going to challenge Howard and become Prime Minister any day now. The situation about the numbers in the Liberal Party were not very different to the situation Taylor describes above - some supported Howard, some Costello, others in the middle, with numbers shifting from time to time.

These articles tended to be as vague as they were numerous and regular. They relied heavily, if not entirely, on anonymous sources in the way that a drunk relies on a lamppost: for support not illumination. They contained nothing about how a Costello government would be materially different from the Howard government (with the exception of some hazy idea about Aborigines being treated better, the sort of thing that makes Aborigines who work in policy areas laugh bitterly as though they've heard it all before). They were run so often that the machinations about who said what about whom came to seem futile even to hardened politics junkies.

Eltham ends his piece with a quote from Niki Savva, who worked for both Costello and Howard, and appears to have learned nothing from the experience as far as vapid "leadership speculation" is concerned.

At the time, the media seemed to run Howard-Costello challenge stories for the same reason they run stories about the missing Beaumont children, or the Bogle-Chandler mystery: the story you run when you don't have a story. By the time the Howard-Costello story really did come to a head in September 2007, it was too late and nobody cared any more. The story had become the politico-media equivalent of the boy who cried wolf. All the hype and hoopla that the media brought to bear about those late-night meetings in Sydney could not get readers/viewers/listeners back into the story. One reason why Rudd was embraced so enthusiastically at the election a few weeks later is that he brought an end to an intrigue that had long ceased to be intriguing.

As Mr Denmore points out, the Rudd-Gillard story has already reached the point where it is no longer intriguing, despite the insistence of journalists that there is intrigue and it is real. Go read it, see you when you get back.

All of this means it is a difficult situation for journalists, requiring caution, judgment and the testing of what is said by sources who won't be named.

It also requires a sense of perspective, which Taylor clearly lacks.

On Twitter I was challenged to define what a sense of balance might look like. I rejected the challenge because journosphere groupthink says that any attempt to suggest, however humbly, that journalists do their job differently is to hobble freedom of speech in all its forms for all time. One minute there's a suggestion from a guy sitting at the computer in an alcove between his dining room and back deck, and the next thing you know it's Nineteen Eighty-Four or Nanny State is careening through the nation's newsrooms like Aunty Jack, or something. You're not pinning the death of free speech and democracy on me, oh no.

Even Michelle Grattan, who has been in Canberra since McMahon replaced John Gorton, is all breathless and giddy at the prospect Gillard might go. Neither of them has any defence to this summary from Eltham:

The leadership non-story that has developed over the last few days represents one of the worst collective failures of the Canberra press gallery in recent memory. In the pursuit of a juicy potential story with important political implications, most of the Canberra press gallery seem to have completely abandoned sensible standards of perspective, judgment and craft. Stories have been run in which the only quotes that appear which have been sourced from people with real names are statements contradicting the point of the article. Because the very idea of "leadership speculation" is itself so usefully nebulous and hazy, journalists have apparently felt absolutely no compunction about simply stating there is speculation, with no support, and then speculating wildly themselves. At the very least, it's a case of media group-think. At worst, it's all made up. Not to put too fine a point on it, the leadership speculation reporting has been rubbish.

I would love to see The Australian, for example, print a table of MPs who have spoken to journalists off the record since the start of the year. Can't see it happening either, but I'd still like to see it.

Nowhere does Taylor offer any justification of the idea that this is the only story in town, or that her right and standing to make that call trumps all others. Right now, Stephen Smith could* be offering lucrative defence contracts to his mates, Jenny Macklin could* be reintroducing the "dog tag" system for Northern Territory Aborigines, Scott Morrison could be getting his costings from a catering outfit, or some other appalling scandal could be underway - and nobody would know, because all the scoop-hounds are fixated onto a non-story (and because the Opposition are morons who are squibbing a good chance at government, but let's leave that aside for now).

Katharine Murphy acknowledges that the leadership story has been badly reported and then goes on to report it badly, as Bushfire Bill points out. There's no helping some people. It's like hearing a two-pack-a-day smoker preach at people not to smoke: the hypocrisy is almost redundant, it's just pathetic.

The year after Peter Costello entered Parliament, Labor tore itself apart over leadership. The Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister, Paul Keating, resigned and went to the backbench. Merely by doing straight reporting about the government at the time, journalists established that Keating undermined the Hawke government by denying his services to it.

No such straight reporting is taking place now. No area of Gillard government policy is contrasted with what Rudd did/didn't/could've/shouldn't have done, it is all justified by polls; as though polls never soar or plunge over time like a boat full of asylum-seekers in the Arafura Sea, as though press gallery reporters are right to accord polls with the reverence that they do. Straight reporting on the everyday work of government would be more substantial than the blizzard of fluff that we're wading through today. It would illustrate much more clearly the need for change to/support of the current leadership of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party caucus than yet another anonymous quote like "She's a crap/great leader, so weak/gutsy, I'd be disgusted/proud to have her campaign in my electorate".

What Taylor does at the top and tail of her article, and what many journalists do when fickle winds blow their drizzle of piss back at them, is plead that their job is difficult and that they work hard at it. Many people work hard at difficult jobs. This is precisely why it is important to have good journalism to tell us what those who govern us are doing. We don't have time to go into detail ourselves even in an age where press releases, reports and other information sources are as available as a news article. When journalists insist "this story won't go away" when there is no compelling reason why it should take up so much space right now, people can and do turn away from the media knowing they are not missing much.

The real reason why Rudd-Gillard is the story was not articulated either by Taylor or Eltham, but by Heather Ewart on the ABC's 7.30: the press gallery are effectively fighting the last war. Having missed the Prime Ministerial spill of 2010, and the Speaker's of 2011, the press gallery have lost a lot of credibility and can't move on from the story, in the way that a mare will keep nudging a dead foal determined to find some proof of life. This arse-covering is understandable, and it is motivated by the collective self-pity from which Taylor's pleas come - but it doesn't improve my understanding of what is going on with this government and this country. Long after The Future Of Journalism is resolved, these will be abiding concerns for me and many others; please don't expect me or anyone else to suborn those interests to your job insecurity.

When good, straight journalism is crowded out by bullshit like the tendentious Rudd-Gillard "tensions", journalism is devalued because those who consume it are not necessarily better informed by those who don't. That's why Eltham's fanboy approach to journalism is misplaced:

Ordinary citizens can't easily turn up to important events, take notes, recordings and photographs, or travel around the country to a series of specially-organised media jamborees. They can't go to lock-ups, attend medal ceremonies at The Lobby restaurant or travel on the RAAF jet. Ordinary citizens aren't often privy to the idle musings of federal politicians, don't mix regularly with the nation's executive and legislature, and generally can't spend hours hanging around Aussies Cafe in the hope of button-holing a bored parliamentarian with an axe to grind.

Fuck Aussie's Cafe. I've been to some boring meetings and done some dull work at times, but what keeps me going is this thought: at least I'm not a journalist. At least I don't have to loiter around a door in the cold Canberra wind hoping to ask one person one question, only to have that person breeze by with a "no comment". At least I don't have to pretend that I'm doing something important, writing the same story that so-called "competitors" are writing but knowing that my boss will mark my story as "exclusive". If my bosses insist that I should be doing my job in a certain way, I can make a case why what I'm focusing on matters, while a journalist can be stuck on a non-story and have to pump it up.

American philosopher Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit makes the case that something can be true and still be bullshit. On that basis we can call bullshit on Lenore Taylor's article, and pretty much all media content produced this year about the supposed Rudd challenge for the Labor leadership. It may or may not be made up, but its link to what's genuinely important for our country is tenuous. If we have to go around the media to get an understanding of what matters then so be it. Let us have no journosphere groupthink to the effect that declining media consumption is a bad thing for anyone beyond their own employers, a danger to democracy, or that those who don't think as Lenore Taylor and her co-conspirators colleagues think just don't get it.


* I'm sure they're not, but how would I know?

Blank cheques

By the end of the year the government will have dealt with two big issues, refugees and the carbon tax. These aren't the two biggest issues facing people at the moment, regardless of how much they might occupy the MSM or what Robert Manne calls 'The Political Class'. However, they are significant in having the potential to disrupt the Coalition-inspired MSM theme that the Gillard government is a bumbling do-nothing government. The way the government deals with these issues may establish one way or another that if it can act in its own interests it may be able to act in the interests of the nation as a whole; but we'll see.

Quite rightly, there has been a lot of focus on the government during this time, having been humiliated by the High Court and with people wondering whether (rather than when) Gillard is going to turn things around. The incumbent government always deserves the scrutiny that comes with office, and if I had better data and more time I'd add to that scrutiny here.

The Opposition gets a lot of coverage, but not a lot of scrutiny, on the basis that while it isn't in government the polls show it is close to getting there. The Opposition is fairly weak when it comes to policy but with polls the way they are at the moment, so what?

The government doesn't have to beat the better angels of its nature, it just has to beat the alternative. Labor people do get all emotional about what a Labor Government might be and should be, but that's a relic from days when Labor Governments were wouldn't-it-be-luvverly aspirations, or few and far between, and you could hang anything you wanted on them and the idea would just float shimmering in mid-air. The least amount of sentimentality as to what a Labor Government is can be found in NSW, where Labor's been in power for 60 of the past 80 years.

The Coalition deserves more scrutiny. If they're going to become the government we need to know what they're likely to do - not just what they say. We need to know whether they are truly up to the job rather than (as I suspect they are) still screaming after being dragged from the lolly shop. Not many journalists do this, fewer than you'd imagine.

The dilemma facing the Coalition is one that faces all politicians with a lot of political capital. Any step they take in any direction will be a step down, but standing still won't help anyone either. This is a question of courage and leadership, and as such it's a challenge that The Situation cannot and will not rise to meet.

The clearest indicator of The Coalition's failure is here, a pro-Abbott article that damns him where it means to flatter. Gillard needs bipartisan support to get offshore processing up. If she doesn't get it she throws herself into the arms of Labor and the Greens and goes with onshore assessment of refugees. Either way she's a winner, and about time.

Surely by now even the biggest fool in either the Labor strategy team or the press gallery should realise that Abbott would squib a bipartisan solution. As was said of Yasser Arafat when negotiating with the Israelis: he never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Mr Abbott said he wanted to see Labor's amendment's [sic] to the Migration Act before agreeing to support the government.

"I'm not going to pre-empt the government and I'm not going to give them a blank cheque," the Opposition Leader said.

This is hardly news. He does this every time - every time, for years now:

• Day 1: the government extends the hand of bipartisanship to The Situation.
• Day 2: ah, he says, I'll think about it, but no blank cheque.
• Day 3: no, no, no, no - what a surprise!

Every time. It's not even news that he does this. You may as well report that he was wearing a tie.

Just because this is the dull pantomime that politicians dish out, it does not mean that this is the dull pantomime that MSM consumers want or need to be presented with. Massola has no excuse to be unprepared for the sheer absence of anything but bluff in the Coalition response:

As Opposition Leader Tony Abbott refused to say whether the Coalition would back Labor's amendments to the Migration Act, Ms Bishop rejected Immigration Department advice given to the Coalition that Nauru could now be on shaky legal ground.

"I don't believe that we need amendments to the Migration Act for us to reopen the detention centre on Nauru and for it continue to work as it has in the past," she said.

Well, there's the small matter of legal advice, and if you won't accept the good stuff direct from the professionals then no amount of railing from a blogger will do any good.

Because journalists won't do it, let's look more closely at Nauru.

Nauru needs a lot of input from Australia in order to develop the bureaucratic apparatus necessary to sustain the UN Refugee Convention. It is unlikely that a Nauru Solution II would escape scrutiny as it did under Howard.

Kevin Rudd has spent a lot of time schmoozing UN stakeholders recently, and while the Coalition and some journos have sneered at the junket aspect of that they are underestimating Rudd both in policy terms and as a tactician. If Nauru's passage toward UN endorsement were to be held up it would make the Coalition look bad: not to mention the half-baked attempt at fudging a fairly clear direction from the High Court on what's legal and what isn't. One can respect Julie Bishop's legal training and experience while respecting even more those of six High Court judges put together.

The Coalition could have broken with two years of kneejerk reaction and backed the legislation. The question would then be one of how well it was executed: every time there was any sort of shortcoming in the Malaysian solution they could wring their hands and declare that they supported the government in good faith, pearls before swine, you can't trust these people, etc.

Until now, the Coalition got a good run from the MSM on refugee issues for three reasons:

• Their position was clear: it was part of the Rollback pre-2007 thing that is at the core of The Situation's appeal, if not his very political being. Journos love their cliches, especially when those cliches buy them drinks.
• No matter what the government did on refugees it looked like it was on the back foot. This was true when Howard was in government too but the then-Opposition and the press gallery never woke up to that: they still haven't.
• Scott Morrison was always available to bag whatever the government did on asylum-seekers.

Today, the first option has been deep-sixed by the High Court, the second will be much less obvious, and the third will result in uncomfortable questions and thus the access will be cut back. Talk about a no-win situation.

There may still be people in the Coalition who think they can get the same good run by plugging the same line on this issue. All you can do is hope that those engaged on such a doomed mission have a fallback position, and bid them good luck into the future.

Scrape away all that rhetorical bluff and fudge (c'mon, journalists; this is meant to be your job) and it looks like the Coalition is covering up for four years of policy inaction, four years of denying that the voters rejected them for good reasons.

The Government has two perfectly serviceable options ready to go: what they're proposing with their legislation, and onshore if the legislation fails. The Opposition has no policy options on refugees, having forsaken all others to the point where any rethink would involve a humiliating climbdown and a loss of public clarity on what their position is: that sort of thing sees polling leads and donations evaporate, and leaders dumped. At last, this government is learning to play the strategically-limited Coalition off an even break.

Even more enjoyable is watching Niki Savva snookering herself:

... if Labor MPs stick with [Gillard], they are stuck with the carbon tax, which means the government is finished and a Coalition victory is assured.

The scare campaign only works so long as the tax is, like the stuff being taxed, in the ether. Niki Savva saw how quickly the anti-GST campaign collapsed when we actually started paying it, when some things went up and others down and otherwise life went on. I've said it before and like a good former staffer, I'll say it again and again: what value is there in a Niki Savva analysis?

Abbott's second-worst nightmare has to be Gillard striking a workable, humane policy on asylum-seekers which stops the boats, secures the support of Left and Right, and does it without his help. In all our dreams, most likely.

If we do have onshore processing, watch for harrowing tales from applicants followed by pictures of firm but humane processing, followed by happily resettled people warmly embraced by the community. Asylum-seekers will not be an issue at the next election: only the fringe-dwellers will dare go near that issue.

Given his office has (wrongly) taken backbenchers and frontbenchers to task for raising industrial relations reform, and Cory Bernardi had (rightly) been dragged into line for yet another transgression on Islamic issues, because the leadership did not want any distractions from the main game - in this case asylum-seekers - Abbott's threat [to deny Craig Thomson a pair to attend the birth of his child] was plain dumb.

In other words: when Gillard was at her lowest ebb, The Situation not only failed to deliver the killer blow but inflicted damage on himself. What a goose. Has he learned nothing?

The union movement have beaten the Coalition in the last two elections over WorkChoices. Recently the President of the ACTU, Ged Kearney, told the National Press Club that they were going to do the same thing again next time. Labor lost nine elections in a row last century because they couldn't shake the perception that they were too soft on communism. They later won four in a row because the Coalition couldn't shake the perception that they were too hard on Medicare. The Coalition is either too stupid, or too afraid of losing political capital, to rethink workplace relations policy from the ground up: until they do, The Spectre of WorkChoices is the gift that keeps on giving for Labor and the unions. No amount of shrieking from Peta Credlin can or will change that.

Going after Thomson is inextricably linked to Coalition policy on workplace relations. The sort of flexibility Thomson requires (and which Abbott is denying him) is the very sort of give-and-take a modern workplace policy needs (and which doesn't give you confidence in Abbott's ability to come through). As for the other allegations against Thomson, the fact that the police are onto it robs the allegations of any political force and brings to an end the Javert-like role of Senator Brandis. It drags out the timescale (Libs need a quick result, which is not possible when trawling through documents and interviewing different people with competing claims and agendas) and makes a result like this more likely.

Speaking of parasites, Cory Bernardi is undeniably of a piece with today's Liberal Party and its federal leadership. If you're going to attend rabble-rousing rallies in Canberra and receive people like Chris Monckton or David Clarke, on what arbitrary basis do you declare Geert Wilders beyond the pale? This is what happens when you lower standards to the point where The Situation is your choice for Prime Minister. People like Savva are treating Bernardi like he's from another planet, but he was Nick Minchin's protege and was SA President of the Liberal Party. If his roots in the Liberal Party ran less deep, like Pauline Hanson's in 1996, he'd be gone from the Liberal Party by now. The fact that he isn't is more significant than Savva can bear to contemplate.

Savva must feel all righteous in calling for Bernardi to be dumped, but if she's any sort of analyst she must confront the idea that The Situation won't dump him, and what happens then?

Despite Abbott's denial, Bernardi did offer to help divisive Dutch politician Geert Wilders with his proposed visit to Australia. Once again Bernardi embarrassed his leader, and infuriated his colleagues, who believe his behaviour threatens votes in western Sydney. This is not limiting free speech; it's about Bernardi not knowing or not caring that he has crossed a line.

Bernardi thinks that he's shaping debate, within the toxic environment created by the rhetoric around asylum-seekers, and the dog-whistling by his leader, the Shadow Minister for Immigration and other senior members of the Coalition. Bernardi's actions and beliefs are squarely within the Liberal mainstream today. The Liberal Party will indeed lose votes in western Sydney - and Melbourne, and you'd be surprised where else - because Bernardi is not the wacky outlier Savva tries to make him out to be.

That's why Abbott won't sack him - and if he did, like Howard's axing of Ian Campbell, the only effect it would have would be to lower morale (and, perhaps, give rise to Cory's Kampf).

Savva is right about Kevin Andrews but while I can say that, coming from her it's just mean. Is there really anyone left from Costello's office who hasn't yet been looked after? Besides, when ALP Vice President Joe de Bruyn wants the Liberals to do him a favour, who will he turn to once Andrews - the father of WorkChoices - goes?

A failing, defensive party will always indulge insiders rather than sacrifice in the hope of wider appeal from those not yet inside the party room. Howard in 1985 would have stood up for someone like Bernardi, but ten long and hard years later he would have thrown someone like that under a bus and appeared on TV the next day eating Turkish delight.

Abbott also has to take ownership of the economic debate. Rather than release detailed policies, he can talk about themes and propositions. What is his story about where the country should go? Which threads will he use to bind and distinguish his administration?

He won't do it convincingly, he can't do it convincingly. "Themes and propositions" didn't work for Andrew Peacock or Simon Crean and they won't work for The Situation. Niki Savva has no excuse for not knowing this. She has no excuse for not conveying to her readers her sheer inability to come to terms with this particular pig, let alone hold it still long enough to slap some lipstick on it - or why she feels compelled to do so.

The carbon tax - along with the mining tax - is a massive change to the way we fund our government. Once a tax is introduced it never gets abolished, it just means that other taxes are adjusted around it. Because of that it represents a change as to what we can expect from government. At one stage only people with property (i.e. people who paid taxes) were able to vote or be represented in Parliament, and so when the franchise was extended so too the nature of government changed, because those who were served by government underwent change.

The journosphere should look into the carbon tax more than it has: not into the horse-race impact of "who wins the daily media" but into the longterm shift of who pays for what. Savva's assumption that it is an automatic boost for the Coalition is stupid. Is there a competing vision from The Situation, and if so what is it? That's the kind of information we need to make voting decisions, actual value-add, rather than preparing us for a government in which Tony Abbott simply plays cat-and-mouse with every new idea put to him before killing it.

Let's descend from the high plains of Theory and Policy, though, and see that even if you stick to conventional horse-race political reporting, Tony Abbott is not "riding high in the polls". He's in diabolical trouble, and it looks like his whole business model will be on the rocks by Christmas.

Peter Brent makes some good and telling points about where Abbott's support is and isn't coming from but he does himself no favours with this:

People aren’t great at anticipating how they’d vote in a hypothetical situation.

All polling is a hypothetical situation. There will be no election this Saturday, and there wasn't one last Saturday either. There hasn't been a barrage of trite tat which I discard straight away, despite having paid for it with my taxes. There hasn't been the sort of Freudian slips or character-revealing lapses which are worth more than a thousand hours of staged bullshit. I remember polls where Kim Beazley and Mark Latham were "riding high in the polls", yet neither man became Prime Minister. Even if you fully enter the magic wardrobe and accept the premise of polls, they play the same role in modern politics that weighing oneself several times a day plays in the life of someone with an eating disorder.

Depth is what we want from political coverage and you're not going to get it from Niki Savva or James Massola. If that sort of depth is too hard for today's journalists then we need new and different and better journalists.

Swallow it up

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk; the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.

- Hosea 8:7 (The Bible, King James Version)

Destroying opposition leaders is brutal work and it is a relief to see the Prime Minister realise finally that it is an essential part of her job. Some pests can't just be swatted away: there comes a point where you have to get out some strong and smelly chemicals and blast them to kingdom come (starting with some Old Testament can really get the blood moving!). She finally got up on her hind legs in Question Time last week, and she really gave it to Milney and News Ltd and seems to have stunned Andrew Bolt into silence. While welcome, this won't matter if it isn't part of a pattern that shows that she will not tolerate empty stunts from The Situation as somehow balancing substantive achievement.

Niki Savva believes that it's just a "mission" for the Opposition to have a go at the Government, but if the Government dishes it back, horror!

IF the Gillard government could pin the Ibrahim family's gang wars in Sydney and Mick Gatto's successful auction bid for lunch at the Lodge on Tony Abbott, then it would. Throw in the London riots, too. After all, the Opposition Leader visited there around the same time.

That's what passes for wit from Savva; its lowest form, certainly, but standard fare for someone who's spent far too long in Canberra. It's the sort of thing Peter Costello used to come out with when flailing various members of the ALP, the sorts of performances that weaker personalities on his staff like Savva and Tony Smith absorbed into their core perspectives on life. It's the sort of thing that journalists complain about when coming from bloggers or "the twittersphere".

Now that the Liberals aren't in government Savva believes it's somehow illegitimate for Liberals to be on the receiving end of any form of criticism, hype or bluster. Savva's kernel of truth is neutered by her hypocrisy. She has put the Liberals in breach of one of the basic laws of politics: if you're big enough to dish it out, you have to be big enough to cop it.

In the last little while Labor and its acolytes have blamed Abbott's scare campaign on the carbon tax for making it impossible for the government to sell its policy, and further that some of his lines of attack are either xenophobic or racist. His negativity about May's budget made it flop. He has talked down the economy so much he has shaken business and consumer confidence. He created sovereign risk and devalued assets by getting stuck into the coal-seam gas industry. The workers he claims to stand up for will be destroyed by Son of Work Choices.

When you've been around politics for as long as I have, you'll remember Peter Costello or Keating or even Malcolm Fraser's Treasurers getting stuck into every opposition leader and most of their frontbenchers for talking down the economy, creating sovereign risk, shaking business and consumer confidence, doing over the workers, etc. The last budget "flopped" about as much as any of Costello's budgets "flopped". That's politics for ya.

I don't blame Abbott for failing to sell the carbon tax, but then again it would be lazy to assume I'm some sort of Labor acolyte.

[Abbott] has trashed democracy, breached the divide between the justice system and the executive, and infected Australia with down and dirty Tea Party politics.

Let's see how Savva addresses these strong claims with her very next paragraph:

Meanwhile, the Craig Thomson scandal ...

Let's not admit that critics of The Situation have a point: let's just complain that what's sauce for the goose shouldn't be sauce for the gander.

If you want scandal, look at that female Liberal senator charged with shoplifting $92 worth of goods from the supermarket. And Abbott hid it for two months! Shame.

Don't forget the question of assaulting a guard who apprehended Fisher, Niki; a guy doing his job and standing up for his employer gets thumped by some pampered jobsworth from Canberra, without so much as a phone call from George Brandis. Surely your long-standing concern for health sector workers extends to those protecting struggling retail outlets from smash-and-grab raids.

Mary Jo Fisher was charged in South Australia and will be tried there. Policing and courts are run by state governments, and the State Government of South Australia is a Labor government. If a Liberal senator had been charged by the NSW Police when Labor was in State Government here, they would have used it to absolutely negate the next attack by state or federal Liberals. Maybe the SA government really has run its course.

Anyway, back to Savva:

Not only is Abbott culpable for asking questions about this and ignoring massive job losses in manufacturing as if that is suddenly a good news story, which I guess comparatively it is [sic], he is also remiss for not asking them sooner.

Shit happens, eh Niki?

She insists it would have been unremarkable for her adviser to call a public servant to check a fact.

Did Peter Costello never call Ken Henry or any other public servant to check matters of fact? Really?

... when Abbott calls for an explanation, attack puppy Craig Emerson denounces him for maliciously smearing the Prime Minister and calling her a liar.

Never mind they had set the hounds after George Brandis, CSI, for calling the NSW Police Minister and the Police Commissioner to advise he was seeking an investigation into Thomson's activities.

Savva is complaining that the government is giving the opposition as good as it gets.

Let's assume the "CSI" thing is a typo for "SC": maybe a public servant could have helped check that. Besides, it calls to mind George looking into dead things, which one or two actual lawyers might doubt is within George's competence.

Emerson had to spoil it all by being unable to answer questions on travel warnings to the US during Cyclone Irene, forgetting his day job was Acting Foreign Minister.

I thought it was "attack puppy".

And they reckon this issue is not distracting the government.

Since when is the Australian government distracted by Cyclone Irene? What vast numbers of travellers planning a trip to the United States listen in to Question Time for a travel advisory? Or, could it be that a supposedly experienced journalist and staffer (i.e. someone who lives and dies by the way they express themselves) has flung some sloppy wording at the reader in a fit of partisan frustration?

Not a word about The Situation's economic policy failure on manufacturing, and how Emerson skewered him well and truly. Costello was right about Abbott, Niki, as are Emerson and Paul Kelly: the guy really is an economic moron. Why would anyone want an economic moron running this country? So Greek.

In a revealing interview on Friday, Leon Compton, of ABC Statewide in Tasmania, valiantly and repeatedly tried to elicit from Gillard some expression of concern about allegations of gross misuse of union members' hard-earned contributions. All he got were platitudes ...

No, this is a standard thing with journalists who confuse themselves with big-time interviewers Holding To Account. It's dumb, it's boring, but they keep doing this terrible journosphere cliche. It goes like this: an investigation is underway, so the journalist asks the politician about it. The politician says let the investigators investigate, I won't interfere. The journalist keeps on asking anyway: this pantomime is what journalists call "hard-hitting".

The Prime Minister gave a reasonable and responsible response, but Leon sucked up all her time with some sort of insistence that she interfere with an official investigation: so hard-hitting, so valiant.

[Gillard] thinks her only hope is to make [Abbott] appear unacceptably risky, hopelessly negative, internally inconsistent and completely ill-equipped to be prime minister.

Yep. Perhaps not her only hope, but this could be the closest thing you'll get to cogent political analysis from Niki Savva.

He is drawn into every story, every scenario when really, if the government wants people to recognise and focus on its achievements, ministers should talk about them more and him less.

They do, then journalists - harried by imaginary notions of "balance" - chuck in one of his stunts and insist that the government comment on it. They've sunk into the abyss by giving him respect and courtesy, which includes ignoring his more unhinged remarks. What they're doing now is dishing it back to The Situation and his cronies, and they can't handle it at all.

They make [Abbott] seem effective and unstoppable; however, where they have succeeded, with a lot of help from him, is in making him scary.

Destroying prime ministers is brutal work and it is painful to watch Abbott day after day, Terminator-like, fulfilling his mission. It has paid dividends for the Coalition vote, but it has kept his personal standing low. Until now he has been willing to pay that price. He can't afford to do that indefinitely and if he is looking for a role model to avoid, and one that shows how difficult it is to change perceptions once they are set, she stands before him.

It's at this point that a Coalition apologist will blithely insist that The Situation will flick the switch to Prime Ministerial mode, coming out with good and sensible policies, toning down the over-the-top rhetoric, and doing all those things that The Situation can no more do than fly to the moon.

Abbott has time to soften the negatives ...

But not the capacity, Niki, nor the inclination. If you knew Abbott at all, and were being honest with your readers, you'd know that and you'd admit it.

With Arthur Sinodinos entering the Senate, he has an immediate opportunity to re-weight economic debate. Sinodinos could have a new portfolio of productivity, which gets him into the heart of economic policy without having to unseat anyone already there.

If the Coalition doesn't have anyone focused on productivity, as implied by that proposal, then everyone in the opposition's economic policy team deserves to be "unseated", if not dumped at sea in a chaff bag. Productivity has been a vital concern to this country's economy since the latter term of the Howard government; you'd think that after four years, and with WorkChoices having caused more problems than it solved, they would have come up with a few ideas. If not, they are not ready for government and may never be.

If Sinodinos is the answer, then never mind the Senate - why isn't he candidate for Dobell?

Then, unless he has a new prime minister to deal with ...

Or an old one with a new ticker and a sense of perspective, and who already has form in knocking The Situation into a cocked hat ...

... Abbott should take the summer break to modify and refine his approach. He can afford to ease off. She is pretty much dead woman walking.

That has to be the stupidest political advice since Fraser called an early election in 1983 hoping to pin Hayden to the Labor leadership. Firstly, The Situation might get photographed in his sluggos again, and secondly when he spent a week away the press gallery realised what a vacuous dickhead he really is and he's been battling ever since.

The Situation doesn't have an off-switch, he can't be softened and he doesn't have much of a mind to change. The Situation will go on and on while the Gillard government does grown-up governing work, so that at the next election an imperfect government offers itself for re-election against a clownish alternative that can dish it out but can't cop it. Niki Savva knows The Situation isn't good enough, and her painful equivocations show this; yet, she can't admit it when the critics have a point. Savva should be big enough to realise that you have to be able to cop it if you dish it out, but she isn't. That's politics for ya, Niki, swallow it up.

Black is white in the red room

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

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

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

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

34 Coalition
31 ALP
9 Green
1 Xenophon
1 DLP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If if if if if if if if.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It could go either way

We are at a point with Federal politics where, if the carbon tax and the Malaysia deal both end up working, then the Gillard government will deserve and get the benefit of the doubt and probably be re-elected in 2013. If both of these fail, there won't be much point to the Gillard government and it will be pretty much shot.

As you can imagine, Niki Savva is seething. She concedes:

Political parties should argue over policy. It is acceptable, excusable and often necessary, so long as it's really about issues, not ego or ambition.

Then, she seems to indicate that only the ALP are capable of sensible policy debate: members can have impassioned positions on asylum seekers, live cattle exports or whatever, so long as they give the government a boot on the way through; but any Liberal who disagrees with their leader is a stirrer, a splitter an egotist.

I'm glad that Niki Savva approves of democratic debate, however grudgingly. What she may not realise is that the debates and issues are pretty much given, as is the idea that different people have different opinions about those issues. If political parties can't handle policy debate, or if their only way of debating is nasty and destructive, then that only limits the party's ability to participate in democratic government rather than limiting the debate itself.

Also stupid is the failure to produce alternative strategies.

As you know Niki, anyone other than the leader of the Liberal Party who comes up with a coherent strategy is just an egomaniac. Because the current leader is strategically disabled, it is better to cruise toward defeat than propose a alternative which might get screeched at by the sort of people who leak to Niki Savva.

Continuing to pledge to repeal the tax is sustainable, but more problematic is the question of compensation.

Oh come now: surely a scare campaign at the prospect of a new tax, won't be completely deflated by the equally illusory prospect of compensation?

When has any opposition anywhere ever repealed a tax on coming to government? Tinkered with it perhaps, called it a new name with slightly different provisions, but complete root-and-branch removal? Nah, can't happen, and anyone who promises it is a bullshitter - particularly if said promiser a) proposed such a tax as recently as 2009 and b) is one of the few politicians in Australia who is less popular than Julia Gillard.

Nothing during the past two weeks implies the government has steadied, nor that its policies and approach are working, only that there is the potential for it to be saved from itself by the opposition ...

Only journalists think in terms of two weeks. The budget was a month ago, and so was the incompetent self-indulgent response of Tony Abbott (it was a written response, so you know he wasn't making it up as he went along, and the Shadow Minister for Communications wasn't heckling or otherwise rattling him).

The conclusion from watching the government struggle with two issues alone, border protection and the carbon tax, is that its [sic] presentation, formulation and intent are flawed and-or incapable of clear explanation by people fundamentally ill-equipped to deal with them.

Put into context, it illustrates the limits of transactional politics: it's all very well to cut a deal on the fly like lawyer-politicians do; but it's hard to really claim that you believe in that hasty and ill-considered deal with all your heart, and that it really is the solution for every member of every community from Byron to Exmouth.

Savva is still appalled at the idea that those she advised were beaten by lesser people, and even more appalled that there's nothing she can do about it. There's not a lot to be done about, or for, that attitude. From it you can see her inherent nastiness:

... a broken promise at its core, which has infected the debate from the beginning and will carry through to the end ... the PM at her absolute worst, mulish, cruel and bungling.

Just five years ago, the Murdoch press were busy labelling people as HowardHaters™. Pretty much everyone who had ever disagreed with the then Prime Minister, however gently and however careful to focus on facts and principle rather than personality, was labelled a HowardHater™. Could there be such a thing as a GillardHater™, perhaps? I know it's not alliterative, but such creatures may well walk among us and it would be foolish to discount the possibility that they might exist.

For the sake of those 800 people, or 801 if you include Chris Bowen, one of the more talented frontbenchers who is being slowly destroyed in that portfolio, it is long past time for Gillard to abandon her pride, reopen Nauru and reintroduce temporary protection visas, and if she doesn't then her party should tell her to do it.

If they can rise up over the fate of cattle, they can do it for men, women and children who also cannot speak for themselves.

The pain of any backdown will pass if the boats stop, otherwise, the stain on her prime ministership will stay forever.

Niki Savva was born on a war-ravaged island with fewer opportunities than those available here, and came to Australia by boat. Niki Savva is a boat person - yes she is, c'mon Niki phone your lawyer and get a writ, because I'll say it again: Niki Savva is a boat person. This is the first time she has ever evinced any sympathy for her fellow human beings who have done the same as she and her parents did, only more recently, and even then she's qualified it pretty heavily.

This rare act of humanity is immediately eclipsed when she seriously equates difficulties faced by a politician she claims to admire (again, first bout of sympathy for Bowen) with the tribulations faced by people deported to a country unsympathetic to asylum-seekers. She equates people with voiceless cattle - those men, women and children do have voices Niki, however many can't speak English and even where they do, government-funded goons keep them from being heard.

From a policy point of view, however, the Malaysian deal appears to be an attempt to build a regional solution to deal with those forced to travel not just outside their own country's borders to seek asylum, but to travel far beyond it. Such a deal will, almost inevitably, involve a higher scrutiny of human rights than is present now. This policy differs from Nauru detention not because of location, but because of the intent to obviate the clear need to take a risky journey to this country by boat. Abbott's call to "pick up the phone" shows how idle his proposals truly are: there's a lot more to policy like this than picking up a phone, and we need to vote for people who appreciate that.

People who spend their lives pretending to be other people do not change votes unless they are serious political players.

Michael Caton appeared in the same series of ads that Cate Blanchett did. Caton has chosen his roles so well that any politician stupid enough to bag him would suffer more derision than today's delicate poppets could bear - or worse, they'd be ignored.

As to "serious political players", every living ex-PM bar one supports a carbon price - and the exception went to his last election promising one.

For months now the government's case has been both poor and poorly put. It has not answered satisfactorily the fundamental questions of why we need a carbon tax ...

It's easy to say that you can only have missed this if you've been asleep, or listening only to gruntback radio. This is something that modern governments are better at, repeating the same old lines on the same old thing over and over until people cry out for the thing to be passed so that we don't have t listen to it any more.

... why now, especially as we were told less than a year ago it would not happen ...

See, that's just a dig.

When you've been in and around politics as long as I have, Niki, you understand that politicians sometimes say one thing before an election and do another afterwards. Oppositions and journalists that whinge for too long about that look like they don't really understand what's going on.

... why no comparable economy has introduced one, why our main trading partners refuse to have one, or how it will affect climate or behaviour.

See, those are just lies. When you lie, you pollute the pool of information on which public debate depends. When you do that you can't complain that others aren't giving you information or are selling it badly. To use an old American expression, don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.

Compare that with the previous government's mantra when it argued the case for a GST: if you broaden the base of taxation, you can lower the rates, abolish inefficient taxes, cut personal taxes and secure the revenue base to fund schools, hospitals, roads, police.

Yes, let's compare: every word in that paragraph after "taxation" subsequently proved false.

On the other hand, Glenn Milne is blithely ignoring the possibility that the narrative of decline might be derailed by facts.

There is no campaign on foot here, nor any organisation, not even a candidate ...

And yet, there are hundreds of words that follow like a shower of drivel. Milney assumes the carbon tax will fail and that Abbott will stand firm despite having nothing on which to stand, nothing of substance to apply as pressure, and no firm grasp of anything with which he can offer as an alternative. That's a key point missing from the debate here: Gillard doesn't have to beat Pericles or Robert Menzies or even John Howard; as in a sporting contest, she only needs to beat the opposition in front of her.

Focus group research conducted by John Scales of emerging research powerhouse, JWS, reinforces the perception that Gillard is suicidally trying to sell a carbon tax into the headwind of a national obsession about rising costs of living. Scales, who previously worked with Liberal pollster Mark Textor, suggests the headwinds are likely to prevail.

He's a cheap date, isn't he? Ply him with his own weight in shiraz, tell him he's a doyen of the press gallery and tickle his tummy, and you get national media coverage before breakfast.

So, a government that apparently pays too much attention to focus groups is going to be done over by the sort of eighth-rate outfit that would stoop so low as to walk Milney through their confections. Let me guess: they were conducted in the electorate of Lindsay. And, let me guess further: the Liberals are close to preselecting a candidate for that electorate who, as with all elections over the past decade and a half, is a rolled-gold pissant.

I can understand why the ABC let Milney go but I never understood why they picked him up in the first place, or why News Ltd have him back. After the Costello Prime Ministership ran its course, surely his credibility has got to the point where anyone who leaks to Milney has no idea. Milney is genuinely funny when he does that smoke-and-mirrors stuff ("but more on that in a moment ... one senior member confided to me ...", etc), but anyone quoted by name in a Glenn Milne article is a fool shrugging off their credibility: a powerhouse with unsustainable emissions.

It is interesting to see the reaction from the anti-Gillard media, and how appalled they are that recent polls mean so very little. The reality of a hung parliament, with a long-term strategy where media are fed and present issues in a way that actively disengages people, means that sometimes things go your way and sometimes they don't. Recent polls and a consistent strategy from the Opposition have not resulted in the sort of historic inevitability that we saw in 2007 (well, all of us except Dennis Shanahan). It's anyone's game at the moment.

What if the carbon tax, with its associated compensation, is accepted as blithely as the GST was (and which showed all that hue and cry surrounding it to be so much hollow nonsense)? What if the countries of southeast Asia stopped treating asylum-seekers as aberrations and criminals, and work together to build a constructive, longterm method of dealing with such people? The wheels of government grind slowly, too slowly for adrenaline junkies - and on cold Canberra mornings you can wonder what you're doing there, whether something that looks dormant really is, and whether you are really missing much if you decamp from there to the sorts of climes that will support your permanent tan.

Hubris is one word for it

Here Niki Savva goes around like some cattle-dog, yapping and snarling in the hope that Liberals will fall into some sort of line that she doesn't set, but which she considers herself responsible for enforcing. Savva would have you believe that the current Federal situation is unique, but it isn't.

A Labor government with a slim margin that generates little apart from press releases - and a Liberal Party still smarting from being turfed from office, confident that its return is imminent with a bit of pushing. NSW 1995-9 was similar to Canberra today (and I'm not talking about the Territory Legislature). Same Labor government too timid to change much, but with a killer media strategy that the Libs tried to copy but couldn't quite.

In Canberra today the Liberal media strategy is about the same but better than Labor's: Abbott is nothing but a media tart, helped enormously by a Murdoch press that will happily apply more scrutiny to a minority party in the Senate than any of his poorly considered media stunts, which was solidly behind Carr and NSW Labor. We (as "we" were then) were beset by all manner of clowns insisting that we all had to be united behind whatever stupid notion had popped into the leader's head in time for some evanescent media announcement.

Senior Liberals are worried about how to contain an emotion as corrosive as Labor's despair, and driven by the same raw assessment of the political landscape: the government is finished, Julia Gillard has planked and the election, whenever it is held, is essentially a foregone conclusion.

The government would have been finished were it not for a workmanlike budget: not so flash that it would have aroused suspicion, not so dull that it proved Labor could no longer be bothered. It would be finished if the Opposition were not led by one of the few political leaders less popular than Julia Gillard. It would be finished if clowns like Mark Arbib, Paul Howes or those no-marks from Victoria's Labor Right started to raise their profiles.

The smarter operators in the Coalition are acutely aware of the threat hubris poses, first from younger, ambitious MPs who fret that victory will shunt them even further back so they have to try harder to get attention, and second from older MPs (who should know better) who think it's OK to act up, and worry even more than their younger colleagues that time will pass them by.

Seriously, this is bullshit.

Abbott, both Bishops, Kevin Andrews, are all about a Howard Restoration: the idea that they can and will take the country back to 2006 and keep it there. Lose the next election and that dead crust gets scraped off the Liberal Party. As to the "younger ones", some may not know what to do without adult supervision - things may get a bit Lord Of The Flies if Tony Smith, Sophie Mirabella and Mitch Fifield start calling the shots, but they're all from the wrong state. None of them have the stomach for patricide nor the alternative vision that post-Fraser Liberals had.

Maybe the Liberal Party chose the wrong future for itself. They thought they were so clever in bumping up Howard government staffers to the frontline in order to perpetuate the Howard government mindset. Instead, they face the prospect of being represented by a lost generation of drones.

Then of course there are those reprehensible "older MPs" like Mal Washer who stands for greater restrictions on tobacco advertising, which is more than his so-called leader stands for.

Hubris had already manifested in a variety of less troublesome ways, whether it was people jostling for seats or people hanging on to them just so no one else could have them, like Alby Schultz, who boasted to The Canberra Times that his recent heart operation had extended his life span by another 15 to 20 years and that he had no intention of retiring. Take that, evil contenders.

Worse, there is nobody with the leverage to push Schultz out. There is ample scope for a Labor person or an independent to beaver away over the next two to three years and take a very nice seat in Federal Parliament. A Liberal or National could knock him off now, if one could be found with a bit of drive and who could manage the sensitivities of paying due respect to a sick old man with no record other than getting re-elected - good luck in finding someone to fit that bill. Where are you, Bob Cotton?

Meanwhile Cory Bernardi still thinks it's OK to blog whatever pops into his head, including criticising the first bloke Tim Mathieson, in defiance of the usual practice that spouses and partners of other MPs are off limits.

This is fair enough. Liberals squealed like stuck pigs whenever someone had a go at nasty old Hyacinth Bucket Jeanette Howard, and they'd do the same if anyone bothered to go after Margie Abbott (and why would you? She's the only socially useful member of that household). Turnbull and other Liberals looked sleazy and stupid when they went after Therese Rein, and as for Gillard her domestic and reproductive situation is so similar to that of Julie Bishop that you'd think they would lay off.

Then along came Malcolm Turnbull, who is in much the same place - emotionally and figuratively - as Kevin Rudd. Turnbull actually did everybody in the Coalition a favour by reminding them that just a little prick can burst a bubble.

"A little prick can burst a bubble" was a line that Peter Costello used to hiss at anyone who did anything he didn't like. What that misses is the idea that anyone can blow a bubble and create enough hot air to keep it afloat, and that however much blowing bubbles can impress the simple-minded it is not that much of an achievement in itself - you're simply not entitled to carry on when they burst. It's a nasty and meaningless line, befitting all who deploy it because it shows they don't think about what they say.

Having misdiagnosed Turnbull's behaviour, Savva proclaims herself savvy as to his emotional state. It's fair to suspect that her judgment may be off there too.

The weekend leaking ... Initially suspicion fell on Hockey ... Then blame settled on the few remaining Turnbull supporters ...

Oh, please. A senior journalist and a senior adviser reduced to both tittle and tattle. This person is not worth feeding, let alone reading.

If someone held a gun to your head to force you to choose which one of them was likelier to make a comeback, you would have to go for Rudd. Not because he is better than Turnbull but because Labor is in much much worse shape than the Coalition and the alternatives to Rudd-Gillard are weaker.

A silly statement needs some silly assumptions, and the gun-to-the-head thing is an example of the sort of silly Canberra bar talk you'd get from people like Savva and Lachlan Harris. Rudd doesn't have a deal with independent MPs that is holding his party in government: only Gillard has that. The Liberals will do anything to get back into office - if they think they can do so with Tony Abbott as leader he'll stay, but if Turnbull is the man then Turnbull it will be. It's simple as that. If bubbles have to be burst then they'll be burst, Niki.

Even so, feelings about Turnbull are not as visceral or as vicious as they are among Labor MPs towards Rudd.

Given the importance of the emotional in Savva's writings, she's just buggered her own thesis.

A few Liberals speak fondly of Turnbull, even though his dramatic weight loss (13kg thanks to a lemon detox diet) has left him looking a bit hang-dog, or perhaps that's just the internal reflected in the external.

If you can't make a bitchy comment about make-up, make a bitchy comment about weight and diet, rounded off with another pseudo-psychological imputation. Is there no end to this bitch highly respected doyenne of the Parliamentary press gallery?

Turnbull, intelligent and engaging, is a man born out of his time. He belongs in Renaissance Florence, rebuilding cities and states, commissioning great works of art, fostering literary and political talent, all according to his own whims and preferences.

The most common complaint by those who served under him is that Turnbull would not take advice and found it impossible to control his temper.

His arrogance and refusal to suffer fools - a prerequisite for any political leader has cost him dearly.

Which is it - is he intelligent and engaging or can he not suffer fools? Didn't Menzies have the same problem? Would you really bet on Turnbull being unable to modify himself against Abbott lifting his game? Really? They're valid points, but hardly insurmountable.

Plus his frequent need to remind everyone he is a man (probably the last one standing) of principle, as he did again on ABC1's Lateline on Wednesday night, infuriates them.

The fact that he can Turnbull's beliefs on the environment can be defended as a coherent whole more adequately than the Coalition's current policy is what's infuriating. If the current leader had the intellectual heft and coherence that Turnbull has, he'd just be a crank. Turnbull can't be patronised: bared teeth and snarling can betoken fear as much as hostility.

Gillard and the Greens, who if they believed in prayer would beg for Turnbull's resurrection ...

Resurrection is pretty strong power, even Turnbull's most ardent supporters don't think he's capable of that.

Seriously though, the public - outside Canberra and the bars that fill up on sitting weeks - want Rudd and Turnbull leading the major parties. Why would Gillard want the Liberals to be led by someone who's more popular than she is? It doesn't make sense, it's like the tobacco industry warning that consumption of their product going up would be a bad thing. It's why Niki Savva isn't much chop as a political analyst.

Most Labor voters would prefer to see Turnbull in the job, but when you ask them if this would induce them to vote for the Liberals, almost all of them say no.

As one Liberal observed: "Labor voters think if there has to be a Liberal Party and it has to have a leader, then it should be Malcolm."

Most Labor voters don't count - only some do, the ones who only vote Labor sometimes. They're called swinging voters, Niki. Have you met any of them? Swinging voters are the people who turn Labor governments into Liberal ones, or vice versa. Swinging voters would vote Liberal if Malcolm Turnbull were leader, which is why it's in the best interests of the Liberal Party for Turnbull to become leader - once he has learned to take advice, or create the appearance of doing so like Abbott does.

Turnbull cannot renounce his views. Nor should he. But he should have known his wanton disparaging of Abbott's climate-change policy would have repercussions.The fact he later appeared to have no appreciation of the damage he had caused to himself or the Coalition was revealing.

Some issues are more important than the current leader. John Howard used to shirtfront leaders other than himself all the time: his treatment of the leader who gave him his biggest break, Malcolm Fraser, was particularly brutal. As long as Turnbull can dress this up as a cause bigger than himself - just like Costello's bridgewalk for Aboriginal reconciliation - he'll be all right.

Besides, what damage? Abbott's solid, untouchable, the inevitable next PM, right Niki? Right?

He could have maintained the principled position that has won him respect in the community and still not put down his own party's policy.

How? How could he have avoided the thousand questions from journos wanting to write the same Walkley-worthy scoop LIBS SPLIT SHOCK? Come on, Media Strategist Extraordinare, how exactly would that have been possible?

If it was deliberate, it was plain dumb, and if it wasn't deliberate it was even dumber. Either way the poor judgment again exposes a potentially fatal flaw for a man who wants to lead a political party and be prime minister.

In the week before the 1993 election John Howard flatly contradicted his leader, John Hewson, on interest rates. At the next election, Howard was leader and was elected Prime Minister. No election is imminent, and Turnbull is at least as dumb as Howard (if "dumb" is the word to use here).

If Abbott falls before the election, which is unlikely, or if he is defeated at the election, which is always possible, then even those who had stayed loyal to Turnbull to the bitter end, and it was extremely bitter, are unlikely to back a leadership bid by him.

The same could have been said about Howard at any point 1989-95.

In fact the man now most likely to succeed Abbott, assuming the vacancy occurs later rather than sooner, is Turnbull's former very good friend, Scott Morrison.

Oh, piss off. A smarmy turd who wants to run with the racists and climate-deniers while disavowing them - seriously, Alexander Downer or Brendan Nelson or even Gillard are up there with Pericles against such a man as Scott bloody Morrison. Nobody would or should believe he wouldn't screw his best friend, if he had one, for momentary advantage. Canberra scuttlebutt just doesn't translate to the real world, and particularly marginal electorates.

They reckon public hostility to the carbon tax is so embedded it will continue all the way through the election. Even seasoned political operators have been taken aback by the intensity of feelings expressed by voters on the rising cost of living.

Voters believe the government won't help them because it lacks the resources or can't because it is so incompetent.

Niki, Niki, the GST. You were there, remember?

Niki Savva is hopeless as an analyst, but she has her uses in exposing the desperation from eighth-rate hacks who call themselves "strategists",who refuse to face up to real policy issues and tailor their responses to the real electorate/ economy/ society/ country before them. A scare campaign against the carbon tax and refugees is pretty much the entire Liberal offering. To preserve that precious offering, you need to nobble Turnbull before he has the chance to offer something more and leave said "strategists" out in the Canberra cold. Savva fears that Turnbull offers what the country would need at a time - like Florence during the Renaissance, for example - when so much is in flux, where opportunities and pitfalls abound, and where just being a prick is a necessary start to keep on top of it all. Read your Machiavelli, Niki - Turnbull has.

The last chance

And in the master's chambers they gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast

- Eagles Hotel California

Niki Savva should just come out and say that this week is pretty much Abbott's last chance to make an impact as a potential Prime Minister, but apparently she can't. Despite our pitiful record at prognostication, we here at the Politically Homeless Institute contend that:

• The Coalition should be going into this week with an unassailable record on economic management, and it isn't; and


• The Coalition needs to come out of this week with such a record, and won't; and


• Because of the above two points, it is setting itself up for failure at the next election (and thus the impossibility of Tony Abbott as PM).

Let's see how this week pans out, but it's clear that Abbott cannot lift his game. Swan need only stay on his feet and produce a Budget of the kind of dull competence that John Kerin produced in 1991 to keep his reputation as the default economic manager - and hence to give Labor the default choice at the next election, where the Coalition will have the burden of proof placed upon them.

If ever there were a time when the government needed its two most senior people to be at the top of their game, this also is definitely that time, especially as there were suggestions an always alert Kevin Rudd was taking a keen interest in proceedings at the weekend.

Instead, there is little expectation that the budget, tough or soft, will concentrate debate for any extended period, or in any favourable way, on an area usually regarded as a government's strength: that is, the economy.

Nor is there much hope that the Prime Minister and her Treasurer are capable of conducting that debate with authority and conviction.

Take out the reference to the gender of the incumbent Prime Minister, and those three paragraphs could have been written about the first term of Howard as PM and Costello as Treasurer in 1996-98. During that time, Savva was Costello's chief spinner and was frantically burning through her credibility with the press gallery claiming that her L-plated boss was in fact a gold-plated professional when it came to putting together sound budgets, at a time when this wasn't necessarily the case.

The mining boom could encourage increased spending and motivate reform, while consumer reticence could encourage cutbacks and conservatism. Big-picture reforms will make the economy lurch one way or the other (and hence will voters at the next election): this is a time for small-picture tinkering, not sweeping big-picture stuff.

The economy is so contradictory that pretty much any reasonably likely outcome can be spruiked by the government as a win, while any opposition can just be written off as predictable naysaying. A bit extra for mental health funding, a bit of stick for the longterm unemployed (given the fact that we're pushing full employment, surely there would be a fair bit of overlap between the longterm unemployed and those in need of mental health care), a bit of a cut to company taxes, and everyone's satisfied rather than happy.

Swan began his pre-budget sell with warnings of a tough budget, with the government having to fight with every fibre it possessed to get it back into surplus, then finished by showering people with everything ...

Yes but he's been pulling this trick for four years now: warnings that things are going to be tough, combined with handouts, followed by a budget that is neither 'hard' nor 'soft' but good enough for the likes of you.

Surely the whole idea of having someone like Niki Savva is that she can draw on history to some extent, rather than engage in nostalgia about Costello's office that seemingly has no bearing to the situation in which we now find ourselves. People often don't learn from history, but history that can't teach anything even to someone who has lived through it is pretty poor stuff.

Savva goes on about Swan's inability to say the word b-b-billions in 2009: but if he was being advised by someone like Niki Savva, what would he have done differently? Yes, it was ridiculous, but he stuck to the script like a good boy and he's still Treasurer. Savva fails to explore that conundrum: had Swan been more up front would his party have won more seats, fewer or about the same? Would the economy and the budget be in a better position, a worse one, or is the difference so nebulous that only press gallery hacks really give a toss?

Swan's public performances in what is a pivotal role have failed to help lift the government's standing.

Normally the deputy cum Treasurer can be relied on to step in and do the heavy lifting, or help bolster a government under constant fire from every direction. Until she knifed Rudd, Gillard fulfilled that role perfectly. That is not happening now.

Normally, the pre-Budget period is usually a period of silly speculation by the press gallery, where the Treasurer is too busy to respond to every trifle going around, and this is no different. Savva should know that. Julia Gillard was never Treasurer, which Savva should also have known.

The widely-held notion that the BER was an unmitigated disaster disproves Savva's thesis, as neither Rudd nor Gillard made an aggressive defence backing up the 97% success finding from the Orgill Report. You'll know that this government has some life in it when some Opposition frontbencher frames a question relying on that assumption, and Gillard rips them a new one.

Also during the pre-budget sell, prime ministers hold back, mainly because treasurers tend to be extremely proprietorial and have been known to resent the intrusion, especially after they have told everyone how hard and how lonely and how emotional it was pulling it all together, and almost entirely on their own.

Like hell they do. It is a dead-set lie that John Howard respected that convention with regard to Costello, or that he wasn't sticking his oar in right up to the last minute. The incumbents might not be the best government we've ever had but contrasting them unfairly with their predecessors is just risible.

Then in a killer blow on Saturday she all but buried the budget by adding to the bottom line a price tag for her pride: $300 million for the peculiarly Australian form of importing and exporting the world's unfortunates.

Compared to the $1b for the Nauru "solution", it's a bargain.

There is a vacuum at the top crying out to be filled.

It should be by Tony Abbott.

Yeah but it isn't, is it.

John Howard maintained a reputation for economic competence throughout 1983-96 by having the courage to move away from the positions he had held as Fraser's Treasurer. For all the criticism you can heap on Howard for his disloyalty to any leader other than himself, Howard could have easily engaged in whiny self-justification and doggedly refused to admit the economic policy of the Fraser Government was flawed in any way. He nimbly embraced the deregulationary ethos of Hawke-Keating, cementing it as in the national interest (with a few quibbles here and there to keep things interesting). In 1993 he had enough credibility to contradict Hewson a week before election day, and damage not himself but Hewson; three years later he had replaced both Hewson and Keating.

Tony Abbott was an economic lightweight, he is an economic lightweight, and he always will be an economic lightweight. This week won't change that. Joe Hockey has a firm grasp on a few issues but his overall vision is still a work in progress (any attempt to work on that is seen as a threat by people like Niki Savva). Andrew Robb is good for a few dot-points but is more sketchy than Hockey, and scores more against his own side than against Labor. Neither Robb nor Hockey tap into wider debates on the economy, let alone lead them; this is even more true of Abbott.

Abbott has shown during the past few weeks that a mix of positive and negative can deliver results. His poll position has improved not just because he continues to attack but because he has discussed other issues he would like to address, such as mental health, welfare and Aboriginal disadvantage.

Abbott has shown that he can fill a media vacuum with small morsels of fluff. He is not the first Opposition Leader to identify Aboriginal policy as an area where the incumbents are failing, and to offer bugger-all in concrete terms to alleviate it. He was Health Minister for four years and is partly responsible for the predicament of mental health in Australia. Any fool can pick on single mothers and the longterm unemployed: it is not clear why this is considered "tough".

Why are these issues "he [Abbott] would like to address", rather than issues he is addressing, or has addressed? Why aren't those issues ones where voters clearly understand the Coalition position, and firmly believe they are superior to the muddle offered by the incumbents? Abbott has been leader of the Liberal Party for longer than Gillard has led Labor. It is sloppy and lazy for Abbott not to have developed comprehensive responses to these issues, so that he can build on them with a credible policy platform. The picfacs are wearing thin for everyone outside the press gallery. If there is a policy vacuum it's time to counter it with something other than more vacuum.

He should do the same again in his budget reply speech on Thursday night, but put greater weight on the positive and expand a bit on his economic philosophy.

There is no weight. There is no positive. There is no philosophy. There never has been. There never will be. You have no right to expect that any of these would be present. The sheer indulgence required to maintain Tony Abbott at the top level of Australian politics has been one of the most amazing features of contemporary politics.

... but given the Prime Minister and the Treasurer are struggling to shape the economic debate, then the Opposition Leader should at least try to take control of it.

Someone has to.

Yes, someone has to - but Abbott won't, so Labor will end up with economic management capability by default. It won't be a gloaty thing, as you'd have got from Costello or Keating, but before you know it Swan will have shepherded the Budget through the twilight of the Senate and left Abbott standing with nowhere to go, nothing to say, nothing to offer.

Business is anxious for Abbott to show he is interested in and understands the economy.

"Business" may as well leave the porch light on for Harold Holt, for all the good it would do.

One way is to frame his arguments against the carbon tax on the effect it will have in reshaping the economy.

He should continue to hammer the cost of living aspects, but the wider economic impacts have to be canvassed, too, and no one is really doing that.

Yeah, shadow-boxing with the spectre of a carbon tax while Swan attends to the nuts-and-bolts of practical realities: that's the way you cement Labor in place rather than blast them out. Smart advice that! Greg Combet comes out and says that electricity prices will go up by a couple of bucks if you're lucky, and the compensation package completely negates anything Abbott says - like I said, nowhere to go, nothing to say, nothing to offer.

Abbott just can't do the macroeconomic stuff. It's almost cruel to expect that he might. He'd need much more help from third parties with economic credibility than he has got so far, because he is so obviously an economic lightweight that it's not worth their while.

Voters are only too painfully aware of this government's flaws and its many disappointments. They do not need Abbott to labour them. They need him to say what he will do about it and to give them some hope that if he were prime minister he would do better, that government would work better.

In other words, this is the point where the whole Abbott idea becomes unsustainable. The policy discussions involving the whole backbench, and key stakeholders in business, needs to have happened or at least be well advanced - the reason why business is holding a candle for him is that they're waiting to be asked. Abbott won't ask, he can't ask, he doesn't know what to ask.

When business gives up on Tony Abbott the donations to the Liberal Party will dry up. When that happens the Liberal Party will dump Abbott, but not until after the carbon tax is settled:

• Turnbull can only come back once the carbon tax is settled. The ferocious opposition from industry of last year seems to have dissipated, and the carbon tax scare campaign will be seen to have no more substance than the GST scare campaign of 2000 (remember that, Niki?);


• Hockey can only step up if he makes no mistakes, pins Swan to the mat, develops a deft response to the carbon tax, and comprehensively nails any lingering doubts about refugees (he should take on one of the weaker talkback radio blowhards, strike exactly the right balance between toughness and fairness, and leave that 'host' a quivering wreck). I think it's too much to ask, too.


• There is, as Cardinal Fang said, no third thing. Nothing. Not Andrew Robb, not Scott Morrison, not the hollow shell formerly known as Greg Hunt - not while Turnbull and Hockey have breath in their bodies.