Dead fish

Regular readers can take comfort in my poor record of prognostication, but for the longest time I had assumed that the NSW election would have something for everyone: a nail-biter, with the Libs losing a few marginals, the Nats losing one or two seats to the Greens and/or ShooFiFa, but basically the government would be returned for its inevitable final term (because the tensions between Liberal moderates and conservatives, now relatively mild, will only intensify as the spoils of office contract), and new Opposition Leader Michael Daley would need only to hold steady and the 2023 election would be his.

Not so. The Coalition can't win the NSW election, and will probably be the first Australian government to lose office on account of climate change.

And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong

Stories like this followed a couple of guys posting on Facebook about algae and dead fish in the Menindee Lakes. The Menindee Lakes are part of the vast Murray-Darling river system that sustains farming in much of eastern Australia, toward the end of the long meander of the Darling River and its tributaries across NSW. Queensland bears some responsibility for the state of the river, but by this point the state should have more to show for any serious remediation efforts than it does today.

Remember this story when traditional media grizzle about Facebook: it wasn't intrepid journos who hunted down this story, people on social media handed it to them. Facebook can identify the existence of controversy, but not even the ABC (and no other supposedly professional traditional media outlet either) can determine who is responsible for what. The press gallery, so focused on The Big Issues and Liberal-Labor #balance, have missed this issue and its significance entirely. There will be more stories like this. Traditional media is already in symbiosis with social media, and you don't need those strangely ineffable qualities of journalism to re-up something you found on Facebook.

Stories like that stay in the mind far longer than the story-of-the-day hits that media people (both journalists and media strategists within political parties) consider good enough for the likes of us. There is genuinely something wrong with policy, with the government that produced it, that leads to such an outcome. There is something wrong when a whole town relies on charity to receive this life-or-death resource. This mining licence did not have to be renewed before March, or at all really.

The low flow that has led to the algal bloom and deoxygenation of the water across much of the river has disadvantaged not only large but small landholders in NSW, as well as country towns full of people indirectly linked to agriculture. This cannot be smoothed over, or propagandised away. A government that acts, through commission or omission, to bring about this state of affairs is not competent and can make no strong case for re-election.

It should go without saying that water underpins basic life in rural Australia. Government that has let infrastructure deteriorate, that has overestimated the extent normal flows are possible given lax inspection regimes and special deals to thirsty mates, is incompetent in ways that simply defeats any media/electoral strategy. Water is hardly a new issue in the politics of NSW, but this is the first election in a century where the Nationals (including their previous incarnations, Country Party etc.) simply aren't on it.

NSW Water Resources Minister Niall Blair has operated on water flow assumptions that take no account of climate change. He cannot claim to have been badly informed by clumsy bureaucrats, as the Coalition at both state and federal level: firstly, because he should have been (seen to be) across this issue well before now, and secondly because the Coalition at all levels of government has actively pretended climate change is a culture war front only, and not a factor in hands-on operations of government. Whimpering about lack of water simply isn't good enough because the water that was available has been squandered; this would continue even if rains doubled, or halved. His decision not to meet with Menindee locals who had waited to see him was dumb, and I will fight any media strategist who quibbles with that assessment. Blair deserves all the respect due to a man who has painted himself into a corner and who will soon be replaced.

Consider this map. It not only shows the state electorates of non-metropolitan NSW, it shows all the seats currently held by the Nationals. It also shows the state's natural watercourses. None of those seats is safe for the Nationals. None of those seats which they do not hold today (e.g. Orange, Wagga Wagga, Goulburn, even Ballina) is realistically within their grasp on 23 March.

The state director of the Nationals, Ross Cadell, is one of the best campaigners in Australian politics. He is down to earth but also highly sophisticated in all the dark arts of campaigning, and his dedication and skill in excising a Nazi cell from the Young Nationals is commendable. The fate of the NSW Nationals should be regarded as being despite his best efforts rather than because of them. If the Nationals hold half the NSW Legislative Assembly seats in 2019 that they won in 2015, it will be a massive success attributable largely to Cadell.

The Nationals are the weaker link in the NSW Coalition. Usually it's the Liberals who wax and wane with fickle urban seats, who get the big donations and have the more substantial ground game, who lead Coalition strategy overall and who therefore largely determine whether or not the Coalition governs the state, while the Nats simply hold their ground. Not this time, and it's why 2019 is different to your standard pendulum-swing job against the ALP.

The observer effect

The observer effect is a scientific theory that simply observing a situation or phenomenon changes the thing being observed.

In politics, media coverage can change a political situation, and the perceived need to respond to that coverage expands and even alters the political response to that situation. This section applies to both the coming NSW election, and for the coming federal election in regional NSW and beyond.

To be slightly fair to the press gallery (don't worry, I'll pass quickly over this) it is understandable that they should simply focus on overall polls and poo-pooh the idea that the Nationals are in trouble, given their strong vote at the last election. The decline of local journalism means there are no readily available means of judging whether or not a particular seat will not be the standard Nationals-Labor two-party-preferred runoff with the former trouncing the latter. If there is some local insurgency here or there, where's the proof? Show me the data! Give me some names!

When big, urban media companies took over small regional operations there were assurances that local issues would still be covered; those assurances are largely void. The lack of local media now means that national media are largely flying blind on local issues, and relying on their contacts in major parties who have every incentive to draw attention away from unfavourable results. It will mean, once again, that journalists using traditional methods will report on the election in ways that don't prepare voters for what is to happen after the election.

Local communities still have stalwart members involved for many years in local business, sporting, landcare and other community organisations. Those people will have been approached by the major parties because of their high reputations and name recognition, and for those same reasons the stalwarts will knock them back. The Nationals are so on the nose that such people will be under intense pressure to stand as independents, or as candidates for parties other than the Nationals, or even (where they are particularly desperate) by the Nationals themselves. The time is drawing near for such people to make up their minds.

Stalwart members of local communities have much to lose from a tilt at parliament. Being seen to reach beyond your grasp is seen as commendable among seasoned political operatives (our current PM is prominent, but far from the only, proof of this). In regional communities it can lead to loss of reputation: where the business community is intertwined with the Nationals, this can damage people economically and socially. Getting ahead of oneself is poison in regional Australia. While there are those who jeer at the taxpayer-funded sexual incontinence of Barnaby Joyce or Andrew Broad, there are others who feel sorry for them and despise piling-on.

The time is fast approaching for candidates to declare themselves, raise money, and execute a successful election strategy. Political journalists used to dealing with established political machines underestimate how hard it is to build one from scratch. Just as you don't quickly knock up a fully-functioning hospital if you become seriously ill, so too you don't just build a political operation just because you turned the tap one day and nothing came out. Part of the process these people are taking toward making up their mind to run involves not engaging the media until they have a declaration to make. Journalists and pollsters understandably omit those they do not know to be candidates. Both place undue emphasis on the results of the (very different) last election, so when they look for what's different now, they start from a long way behind.

After everything that's happened, there are still hard-working, well-regarded Nationals MPs. The trick for those to oppose them will be to prise their hands off the levers of parliamentary representation firmly, gently, and with sympathy. Note how Cathy McGowan went after Sophie Mirabella in 2013: McGowan could have gone in harder against the widely disliked Mirabella, but it would almost certainly have rebounded on her. Some of the duller journalists assigned to rural seats in the NSW and Federal election will be hunting for argy-bargy, but the smarter candidates won't give it to them and so the journalists concerned will miss the story.

Journalists will absolutely suck at covering the shift away from the Nationals in regional seats. Honourable exception to Gabrielle Chan, but she can't cover every corner of regional NSW or Australia and shouldn't be expected to.

The ingredients of a good message

In the standard narrative of political swings, the Coalition had a massive swing in 2011, then a more modest victory in 2015, and now Gladys Berejiklian should lead the Coalition to a technical win in 2019. I've already said why that won't happen, but I think the people surrounding the Premier aren't doing her - or themselves - any favours.

Labor's Luke Foley showed himself to be a weak leader, long before his sexual incontinence came to light. Berejiklian was entitled to believe she had his measure. By contrast, new Opposition Leader Michael Daley is tough and succinct in putting Labor's case, invoking long-serving former NSW Premier Neville Wran.

In this piece, Deborah Snow and Alexandra Smith cut to the quick:

Berejiklian does have the ingredients of a good message to craft for voters, her closest supporters insist. The state’s budget is in enviable good health, there is $80 billion of infrastructure being built, and NSW has the lowest jobless rate at 4.4 per cent.

But there is a counter narrative building as well: congestion, overdevelopment and the rising cost of living, a perceived tone-deafness on the part of a government too driven by a quest for deals with the private sector, and a lack of coherence around strategy and vision.

The toxic state of the federal party is not helping and Labor’s exploitation of the state government’s commitment to spending $1.5 billion on demolishing and rebuilding Sydney Football Stadium at Moore Park and refurbishing Sydney Olympic Park at Homebush feeds the narrative that Macquarie Street is out of touch with the everyday concerns of ordinary people.

The conventional electoral pendulum for NSW is here. You may as well take the Coalition's most marginal half-dozen seats and give them away, as I said at the top of this post (happy to swap out Monaro for a Liberal bolter higher up the pendulum). Any perception that development policy is driven by developers will endanger Liberal seats like Drummoyne, Ryde, or Parramatta. The Coalition might limit its losses if it can articulate a vision for people involving increased density, but I bet it can't. Nowhere is such a vision in evidence in any particularly high-density community.

This is just poor journalism:

Her latest foray into population policy, suggesting the state should halve its migration intake, is also an “attempt to change gears” a senior Liberal admits. “If there is one person who can say we need less immigration and not look a racist, it has to be Gladys.”

Not just because of the anonymous quote, but this notion deserved more than just transcription and transmission. Gladys Berejiklian could not speak English when she started school. She resisted calls from senior Liberals to change her five-syllable surname. She is the classic immigrant success story, but this policy is an exercise in self-abnegation on her part.

Malcolm Turnbull's public persona was built on two policy areas: climate change mitigation and technology as a force for economic and social good. The Liberal right saddled him with policies that were anti-climate and an NBN policy that impeded technological advancement; they later denied him credit for marriage equality by forcing him through the cumbersome and damaging postal ballot. By abnegating him politically the right made it easier to get rid of Turnbull, and they are doing the same to Berejiklian now. If the Liberals have a leader who vindicates Australia's immigration program, that's an electoral and policy strength rather than something to be traded away for, um, what exactly?

But again, seasoned hands worry about the scatter-gun approach to messaging . “They are focusing on too much,” says one veteran. “Instead of your 20-point plan, just pick five, or six. They do need a game-changer on transport.”

Again with the anonymous quotes. Longterm governments expand their reach across government but often lose sight of the need to constantly justify their own existence against alternatives, particularly when their lived experience of their political opponents and rivals is as partners in compromise.

The way to have changed the game was to have done a ministerial cleanout before Christmas: ministers retiring at this election should have gone, the hapless Andrew Constance should have been punted (and a strong party would have made him justify his future with a suicide mission in Gilmore), replaced by fresh ministers hungry for a fresh go in their own right. This is how longterm governments like Labor in Queensland and South Australia, and the Liberals in WA under Colin Barnett, worked.

But how late it is, too late, for all of that. There are regional Liberals but the Nationals earn their place in the Coalition by keeping across regional issues like water rights. Daryl Maguire failed as MP for Wagga and wasn't replaced by another Liberal because he wasn't focused on anyone in the local area who wasn't a property developer, and now Niall Blair shows that nobody in the Coalition is holding the line on regional issues. The Berejiklian-Barilaro government is exposed in country and city as a government that can't make a case for its re-election, much as happened with the Howard-Vaile government in 2007 and the Fahey-Armstrong state government in 1995.

With the systematic failure of the Nationals though, mere disadvantage and defeat will be manifested as a rout. The Coalition will learn the wrong lessons, and teach them by repetition to the press gallery: never elect moderates, never extol high immigration and multiculturalism, never invest in infrastructure, and jack up the rhetoric on Laura Norder. This will condemn NSW to the political model we see in Queensland, with Labor at the centre and various ratbags (Hanson, Katter et al) orbiting them like space junk. Labor partisans would hope that it returns NSW to Labor's postwar dominance (1941-65), but without the postwar state-building imperative it just seems like some extended you-scratch-my-back exercise.

Mind you, I've been wrong before. The stale pas-de-deux of political campaigning and reporting might throw up something incredible. Maybe it will rain in February such to wash away not only the forecasts of meteorologists but any shortcomings in water management besides.

More likely though is that the NSW government had decided that climate change doesn't affect practical matters like the water supply. When Howard lost in 2007 climate change was still a talking point, and the political system and traditional media of the day allowed for "skepticism" or "agnosticism" on whether it even existed: climate denialism survives in federal politics today, a dozen years after Howard. In 2019 there are consequences for denial, and they include electoral oblivion.


Disclosure: I knew earlier versions of Ross Cadell, Gladys Berejiklian, and Andrew Constance as Young Liberals in the 1990s.

Join the queue

Recent comments by Peter Dutton on Sudanese crime in Melbourne, in support of the Victorian Liberals' attempts to court that old political tart Laura Norder, underline two failures of strategy: in his portfolio, and within the Victoria Liberals in their quest for state government this November.

The end of the line

Immigration policy in Australia was set at the turn of the century by then-Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock, backed by John Howard and his government and only ever tweaked by successive governments since then.

The first thing to say about immigration to Australia overall is that it has increased significantly this century. Where the crackdown has come, and the headlines, is in the refugee and asylum-seeker intakes.

Ruddock developed the idea of a 'queue' for refugees - yes, the world was full of desperate people fleeing war and persecution, but all that was required for such people to enter Australia was to "join the queue", fill out some forms and applications would be processed in due course. People who paid people-smugglers and arrived in Australia by boat without visas were "queue jumpers", denying places on the small (and successively reduced) quota for refugee intake to those who did all the right things and waited patiently.

Here's where Dutton has torpedoed that policy, and made himself look silly: successive Immigration ministers from Ruddock to Morrison told us there were people waiting patiently in refugee camps in Africa unable to enter Australia because bad people from the Middle East tried to jump the queue by coming here on boats. None of the people on Nauru or Manus are from South Sudan. They are people who have come here through the very vetting systems that Dutton now oversees.

If you agree with Dutton that Sudanese gangs are terrifying Melbourne, then it follows that he has failed to vet these people properly. You can't believe that Dutton, with his inflated powers as Home Affairs Minister, is keeping Australia safe if you also accept that he has waved through the very people apparently causing this mayhem. Say what you will about Daniel Andrews, his government simply has no role in immigration vetting. Why detain people at Nauru, Manus, Woodville or anywhere else when you are clearly so careless? Dutton is undermining his own narrative:

"But the short answer is that, if people haven't integrated, if they are not abiding by our laws, if they don't adhere to our culture, then they are not welcome here."

Bit late for that champ.

No journalist has called him on it. Credulous dickheads like this one simply hung a whole story on a radio transcript. He even took to social media to insist - without evidence, like the gun journalist that he is - that somewhere in Yarraside there is so a homebody who uses fear of Sudanese gangs as an excuse to hide quivering within their dank little abode.

In 2018, we know that a quote - even a direct, exclusive one - is no basis for a story. Politicians say things, in the same way that the sun rises in the east or bears shit in the woods; it is not news in itself. The fact that a press gallery exists as a make-work scheme for journalists gathering and disseminating quotes is actually a reason against supporting the Australian media, at least until they realise what a low-value proposition it is.

Hearts and minds

Victoria isn't the place for a Laura Norder campaign, despite the self-defeating willingness of Matthew Guy to give it his very best shot.

The last three Liberal Premiers to win office by beating Labor - Ted Baillieu, Jeff Kennett, and Henry Bolte - all did so without a heavy focus on Laura Norder (the latter two won because Labor had collapsed internally). The last Coalition government of 2010-14 (in which Matthew Guy was a minister, and many of his frontbenchers were also ministers) reduced police numbers and experienced a decrease in crime overall. Guy might call out Sudanese gang activity, but it isn't clear what he proposes to do about it, or whether those proposals might actually decrease criminal activity to warrant a change of government.

Victoria is the state with both the highest proportion of residents born outside Australia. It also records the lowest aggregate vote for One Nation and its anti-immigration ilk. When Pauline Hanson was setting up in the late 1990s, the only senior politician who really called her out was not Kim Beazley, but then-Premier Jeff Kennett. Racial demonisation is not unknown in Victorian politics, but Matthew Guy is going to have to work harder than he thinks to make it work for him.

If you don't believe in Victorian exceptionalism, consider how Laura Norder failed the Coalition in NSW. In the late 1990s, Labor held office under Bob Carr, and the Coalition under successive leaders was unshakeable in its conviction that Laura Norder could force Carr out. Carr simply never let the Coalition get to the right of him on those issues. Whenever a crime hit the front page of the Murdoch papers, Carr would introduce a new bill to parliament to reiterate opposition to, say, murder or sexual assault, and would happily match the Coalition in lengthening sentences or criticising judicial officers based on little more than half-baked reporting of complex legal cases.

In Queensland, the Newman government retreated into Laura Norder once its election promises for an economic bonanza proved elusive. Again, Labor simply matched them on sentencing or whatever, and where Labor wouldn't match (e.g. the appointment of magistrate Tim Carmody as Chief Justice, or the weird pink jumpsuit thing with bikies) Newman had lost more votes than he won. In Western Australia, the economic performance of the government rendered Laura Norder moot. In the Northern Territory, the CLP ended up with the brutality of Don Dale and nowhere else to go. In South Australia, the ACT, and Tasmania, the Liberals shrieked about Laura Norder for the entire time they'd been out of government, and so what?

Laura Norder is a dead loss as a strategy for the Coalition to win government. In Victoria and elsewhere, it has to be part - a small one - of a wider strategy to highlight Labor's internal political collapse. Getting Labor to collapse internally from the outside can be tricky and waiting for it to happen can be boring, but it happens nonetheless from time to time.

The deaf leading the deaf

So, a tone-deaf federal Coalition government is going all in to help a tone-deaf Coalition opposition in Melbourne execute a dud strategy. Peter Dutton impresses nobody who is not already a rusted-on Liberal, and wins no votes in that state which simply do not exist to the right of the Coalition. The federal government's dumping of Gippsland's Darren Chester from Cabinet makes it perfectly clear how it values Victoria and Victorians.

The fact that he lectures Victorians from far beyond the Murray - further even than Canberra or Sydney - is more of an issue than cosmopolitan Melburnians dare admit. Queensland is where Victorians go for sun and recreation, not for advice on how to run their state. With the restaurants of Melbourne doing a roaring trade, Dutton isn't merely wrong but downright foolish. An authoritarian who looks foolish loses everything.

Dutton, and similar comments from Turnbull, aren't helping bring about a Guy government. Given the precarious numbers of their own government, can they be said to buttress their own government's standing in Victoria? A seat won is a seat won, whether in Queensland or Victoria, yeah?

Maybe Laura Norder will help Jason Wood in La Trobe. But then Wood is a former police officer, and every problem is a nail when your only tool is a hammer. The Coalition seemed happy to drop him in 2010, an election in which La Trobe was one of the few seats Labor won from the Coalition. La Trobe aside, it is hard to see where the federal Coalition government will gain votes in Victoria from its contribution to wooing Laura Norder.

Keep in mind that the Victorian state electoral boundaries are due to be redrawn before the next election. When they were redrawn on the state level in 2013* they disadvantaged the Coalition. This is not because of political bias but geography: Melbourne has expanded to the north and west in recent years. It is likely that new seats will be created there, at the expense of rural seats or those in Melbourne's south-eastern suburbs, once the bulwark of the Liberal Party. The Coalition parties have no base or infrastructure to speak of to the north and west of Melbourne.

Polling trends indicate the Coalition is unlikely to win new seats, and that any new seats will almost certainly be beyond their reach. It will struggle to hold marginals like Chisholm, even if its boundaries change relatively little. It did surprisingly well in Melbourne Ports in 2016, but this is unlikely to be repeated given the government's insensitive handling of same-sex marriage, and given a likely state election campaign going hard on Laura Norder and failing. This will intensify pressure on the party's safest seats for party renewal. Of the safest Coalition seats in Victoria, only one (Kevin Andrews in Menzies) is held by someone aged over 60 with more past than future, and the party can't get rid of him: its battles for party renewal will not be expansionary, they will be internalised, and bloody.

Oh, but scare campaigns sell papers

No they don't. They have no effect at all on relentlessly declining sales. And even if this were true, do Matthew Guy and Peter Dutton have some sort of obligation to help Murdoch sell papers at the expense of winning elections?

There is no such thing as great tabloid journalism, it's all patronising shit. Murdoch has withdrawn his rags from official circulation audits because he's so embarrassed, and because he runs them for reasons other than profit-making business. Here's proof that anyone can do it:

African gang attacks Australia shock
(c) www.thesocialite.co.za

* In searching for information to link to in support of this piece, I searched for Antony Green's detailed commentary on the Victorian redistribution, but it would appear that the ABC has dumped that content.

Laws of gravity

The press gallery seems agreed that there were no implications for the Federal Government in the recent WA election, at which Labor won an overwhelming majority. I disagree.

In Warner Bros’ much-loved Road Runner cartoons, there is a trope where Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff and, for a little while, continues moving forward. He stops. He looks down, and suddenly realises that he’s no longer supported. Only then does he begin plunging toward the floor of the canyon. Senator Cormann is similarly paused, seemingly in defiance of known laws of political gravity.

At the grassroots level, the WA Liberals used to be a constellation of local fiefdoms, loosely aligned. Matthias Cormann blew into town and began uniting conservatives with no talent beyond loyalty to him. Part of this loyalty involved preselecting second-rate candidates to state parliament – the sorts of people who looked up to Troy Buswell.

Colin Barnett was a hard-working, clever man who might have made it to the top of any organisation; the organisation he joined was the WA State Parliamentary Liberal Party. Barnett watched in horror as capable local-hero MPs were replaced by mouth-breathing Cormann loyalists. Barnett could only drag such dead weights so far, and Cormann didn’t want to go into state parliament.
From far Canberra, as the tide began turning against Barnett, Cormann had watched his conservative followers ebb away from the Liberal Party and toward One Nation (the same thing is happening to the LNP in Queensland, for much the same reasons). Despite being beyond the pettiness of state politics, and pragmatically recognising Barnett was past it, no politician will sit by and suffer the loss of his power base. Cormann had an incentive to help Barnett, and Barnett had no choice but to accept it.

As Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate, Cormann deals with Hanson regularly. He is used to organising right-wing dummies. By contrast, Queensland’s George Brandis disdains them, after a lifetime fighting and outmanoeuvering them within the LNP (you'd give the job of reforming s18C of the Racial Discrimination Act to Brandis only if you wanted it to fail). Cormann doesn’t patronise Hanson like Brandis does. Hanson’s newfound supporter base in WA were people Cormann knew; despite wanting to extend her influence nationally, Hanson didn’t know or trust them. Cormann cut a deal with Hanson as though it was all upside: keeping conservatives in the Liberal fold through preferences, and currying favour with Hanson’s team (including a new WA Senator to replace Rod Culleton).

You show me a press gallery journalist who insists that WA is a conservative state, and I’ll show you one way too close to WA Liberal MPs. The Liberal Party in WA is more conservative than in other states: moderates usually stay outside the Liberal Party, contesting state elections as independents. Moderate independents help the Liberals win tight elections. When Barnett won government he reached out to long-serving Independent MP Liz Constable as his Education Minister, which surprised no long-time observers of WA politics but which appalled Cormannites working their way through the party.

There is a long history of independents like Constable (and protest groups like Liberals for Forests) aligning with Liberals in WA. The state tends to vote Labor during economic downturns, and who believes Liberal policies will soon pull WA back into the boomtimes? As the McGowan government begins to fade, history suggests moderate independents will come back into WA politics in ways that work against the Labor government. The WA Liberals-One Nation deal assumed those people didn’t exist, or would doggedly stay with the Liberals like the mouth-breathing Cormannites did.

Federal politics in Cormann’s turf: he can’t promise much to his followers, nor threaten them much should they waver. In last year’s federal election Labor ran Anne Aly in Cowan against Liberal MP Luke Simpkins; the Liberals ran a Hanson-like scare campaign against Aly’s Muslim faith, trying to turn her expertise in terrorism against her. For federal Liberal MPs who held on in 2016, like Ken Wyatt, Steve Irons, Ian Goodenough, Melissa Price, or Michael Keenan, nothing has happened to boost their anticipated vote at the next election. There is no sign Aly or other marginal Labor MPs in WA need fear a Liberal resurgence.

Cormann’s people had their go in WA politics, and those who missed out won’t get another go for a while. Many of them have left the Liberal Party, and the failure of WA One Nation left them all looking and feeling stupid. The Cowan experience should have shown that One Nation-style tactics are more trouble than they’re worth.

Charismatic churches have organised and motivated conservatives within the WA Liberals in ways Cormann can’t match, let alone beat.

Cormann himself is in his fourth year as Finance Minister, presiding over ballooning debt in a stagnating economy. It isn’t much of a policy legacy to build upon, and less grounds for pride. That long Perth-Canberra commute wears down even the most committed politicians, creating a sense of entitlement to public junkets which exposure breeds resentment.

I’m not betting Cormann will chuck it in, but all the signs seem there. He had a good run for a long time. A powerbroker whose power fades is broke indeed: Cormann will be keen to avoid that humiliation, a desire strong enough to negate pleas to stay. Having seen Stephen Conroy and other ex-powerbrokers go out on top, he can leave long-term public service to party scions like Christian Porter or Michaelia Cash.

Though his record as Finance Minister is poor, his departure would devastate the political class. It would make tangible the departure of this government, the death of myths like Moderate Malcolm or Liberal Economic Management. The press gallery, for all their close connections and fingers-on-the-pulse, will be taken completely by surprise. How they love his stone-wall interview style. No federal impact from the WA election? Pfft.

Like Wile E. Coyote, Matthias Cormann is not going forward, or down, at this stage. He is preparing for the budget in May. He still has to get legislation through the Senate, dealing with the humiliated Hansonites, as well as the isolated Bernardi, Leyonhjelm, and Hinch. His Mitteleuropa burr has given him the gravitas of Kissinger in 1970s Washington, a quality Christopher Pyne never had and which Turnbull and Morrison are losing fast. He would once have been in the thick of leadership manoeuvres: but whatever happens to Abbott, Dutton, and Turnbull, his own position is safe. That might be a good point to depart.

Trumped part I: America's gimp

Australian foreign policy has changed profoundly in the past few weeks, more so than at any time since 1942 - but with the important difference that the current Commonwealth government seems at a loss for how to deal with it.

Our information about what was important to US voters, and how they might use that information to choose their President and Congress, was poor. The government has sources of information that go beyond the traditional media, such as an Ambassador who was a recent member of the Cabinet, and a golf course designer who has done business with the President-Elect. The rest of us, however, are left with this sinking feeling that we've all been had in assuming US voters would head off Trump, and this will get worse as media both deny any culpability and assert an exclusive and indefinite right to misinform us under the guise of reliable, factual, and relevant information.

First, let's go around the media and work out how Australia's relationship with the US and other countries is likely to be changed. Then, let's aim squarely at those Australian media dipsticks trying to crawl from the wreckage of their credibility, and remind them of the conditions under which they are to go forward, if at all. Finally, I want to explore the media's obsession with this idea of the "alt-right", while at the same time failing to examine the idea in any depth.

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Since US troops were first committed to the battlefields of World War I in 1918, Australians have fought beside them. In World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and other operations besides, Australia has joined US combat aims and suffered losses of blood and treasure. This relationship has shaped the foreign policy behaviour of both countries.

In Australia, it has bred a political monoculture across the governing parties that the US is the guarantor of Australia's political and economic success (and that of other countries, such as Japan or the Philippines) in the Asia-Pacific region. This is supported by a range of institutions, such as the Australia-America Leadership Dialogue or Fulbright Scholarships, which reinforce this relationship. Australians seeking a career in foreign policy, whether partisan (by becoming a member of a political party) or not (by eschewing party politics and following a career in academia or diplomacy), looked to US foreign policy as the star by which all vessels steered.

There is no way of regarding Australia's relationship with the US as anything other than closely intertwined with the broader aims of US foreign policy: outlooks and proposals that might have seen Australia break with the US altogether, or diminished the relationship (e.g. by closing Pine Gap or banning nuclear warship visits) were cast to the fringes of Australian politics and not entertained by serious careerist pragmatic people.

In the US, we have seen a bifurcation between official rhetoric warmly praising our alliance and a sub rosa commentary taking Australian support for granted, verging on contempt. "We think you're an easy lay", recalled Jack Waterford in outlining occasional Australian disagreements within a generally close relationship.

Yesterday we saw the Prime Minister admit that he tried and failed to secure a meeting with Trump, along the lines of Trump's meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Abe. One missed meeting need not have much long-term significance - but it hints at something more foreboding for the relationship, certainly as far as Australia's political monoculture is concerned.

Donald Trump's method of campaigning collapsed the difference between official high-sounding rhetoric and sub rosa contempt in almost every area of policy. While other conservatives were happy to mouth platitudes about freedom and equality while courting bigots through 'dog whistling', Trump was openly racist, sexist, and dismissive of people with disabilities - including veterans. Let's not pretend Trump is different to what he is. Let's have no truck with the fatuous media make-work scheme that is 'the walkback', and apply this pattern - seen throughout this campaign and beforehand - to US-Australian relations into the foreseeable future.

Trump will be openly dismissive of the Turnbull government and of Australia. Trump will openly state that Australia needs the US more than the reverse, and will make demands not even the most craven Washington-phile Australian could support, or even entertain. He and his Administration will be dismissive of the women who are Ministers for Foreign Affairs and Defence in this government, and of their shadows. Political opponents of the current government will titter at this new scope of failure, but the sheer effrontery will transcend partisanship and go to the regard in which our nation is held.

Nothing transforms a relationship (any sort of relationship) like stripping back the honeyed words and seeing it for what it is. It will be a massive break from the norms of the Australia-US alliance.

US Presidents have hung Australian PMs out to dry from time to time, as collateral damage for broader geostrategic reasons. In 1956, President Eisenhower refused PM Menzies' request to intervene in the Suez Canal crisis because of the US's wider interests in western Asia at the time. In 1972, PM McMahon condemned his political opponent Gough Whitlam for visiting and recognising the People's Republic of China - unaware President Nixon was about to do so, again playing a wider game.

Trump will wrongfoot Turnbull. He will do the same to any other putative Australian PM you might name. This is how the man does deals.

The best way to catch Trump out will be to catch him when he's distracted, as we've seen from his hasty and inadequate settlement of Trump University lawsuits. The current government may well be canny enough to do this - or not.

In his address to the Australian parliament in 2011, President Obama said that the US would be less inclined to unilaterally enforce international rules and norms and called upon allies in the region to do more to support shared aims, and expected allies to step up and share more of the burden. Australia is building warships at a rate never seen before because the US has indicated that it's in our best interest to do so.

Some commentators noted Trump's remarks along similar lines of making allies shoulder more of the military burden that had fallen to the US, and compared his approach to mafia shakedowns - but he was, in his crude way, aligning with bipartisan US policy. None of the Republican candidates Trump defeated in the primaries, certainly not Hillary Clinton and still less Bernie Sanders, were arguing for a Pax Americana where a rules-based global system is set up and enforced by the US military commanded by its President.

Criticism of Trump's rhetoric on this issue is just hype, snobbery, and bullshit: the central flaws of all his opponents' unsuccessful campaigns.

This isn't to normalise Trump. It's to do what the Australian media should have done, but failed to do: take his record and project it forward onto how a Trump administration might treat Australia within its view of the world. Australian journalists observing US politics, whether from Australia or on assignment in the US, tend to avoid original sources of information: they read The New York Times and The Washington Post and other established media outlets, not realising the audience in Australia for US politics can and does access those same sites - and more.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation covered the US election by sending reporters to Washington and having them relay banalities from CNN and Politico, which they could have done from Ultimo or Canberra. Shipping those people all that way gave no additional insight at all (except that ABC News thinks their audience are mugs, and should stop gibbering about resource constraints).

Most of the reasons why this deeply weird man was elected have nothing to do with us. The political class in Australia will hunker down and wait for him to pass, assuming the Democrats can and will come up with a candidate in 2020 that can beat Trump. The hunkering down will mean Australia both misses real opportunities in Trump-led US, and underestimates benefits awaiting us after he goes. They will underestimate the extent to which Trump has and will change the landscape, rendering "back to normal" impossible: there is no normal, there is no back.

Our leaders will not, however, do the hard but necessary work of rethinking the Australia-US relationship from first principles. The information isn't available; the very act of doing so is way outside our Overton Window.

Foreign policy wonks have said for a long time that we are moving from a world where the US calls the shots to a multipolar world, where other powers (e.g. Russia, China, India - maybe the EU if they can hold it together) play an important but not final role, along with the US playing a similar, diminished role. The trick, as they saw it, was to manage the transition peacefully. Part of this managerial assumption was that the people of the US would go along peaceably with their country's diminished role, diminished expectations thing. What else are they wrong about?

Australia will have to operate across a much broader front than they have; there will be fewer (expected, positive) options from Washington and more options from Beijing, Jakarta, Delhi, Lima, Nairobi, Berlin, etc. Politicians can't do this. Big corporates can't do this. "Pragmatic people" will blame everyone but themselves. There will be opportunities through sport or other means that are not directly linked to politics or trade, but which will open opportunities in those areas, which Australian politicians and corporates will miss and whinge about when their passing becomes clear. You won't need an app to disrupt foreign policy. Australians are heading into a time of missed opportunities. Coal and hobbled broadband will hold us back. Traditional media will barely notice.

For all its longueurs and ponderousness, foreign policy moves quickly when needs must. In 1910 Britain was indisputably the world's mightiest power: ten years later it was a whimpering basket-case of debt and pain, and Australian foreign policy (such as it was) didn't cope well then either. In 1941 John Curtin reached out to the USSR as the pre-eminent military power of the time; ten years later Australia's postwar consensus had hardened against the Soviets and the government sought to ban the Communist Party. We are again in such a moment of transition.

Nobody has any grounds for believing that our current ministers or their shadows have what it takes to set the nation on a new course in terms of foreign policy, defence, trade, or anything else involving the US; only hacks will pretend, only fools will believe them.

The dogs' breakfast

Look, I have a long and winding draft on the US election that I'm still trying to work through, ok? What follows here is a diversion into the politics (and coverage thereof) of my native state of New South Wales, which is ready to go out now. I beg the indulgence of regular readers.

The NSW government committed itself to a significant building program of both public infrastructure and private housing. The departure of Troy Grant as Deputy Premier puts all that in doubt, and the coverage of this misses the point entirely.

In order to pull off an agenda like that, a government needs a nice-guy leader, personable but firm, with an offsider who is a bastard and an enforcer of the steely will the leader never fully shows the public. Everywhere that has successfully pulled off a vast rebuilding program - Haussmann's Paris, Robert Moses' New York, Max Brauer's Hamburg, Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore, Zhu Rongji's Shanghai - saw a charismatic leader with one or more arm-twisting bastard enforcers to get things done.

Grant was Mike Baird's bastard. A police officer for 22 years, he joined the Nationals and won the seat of Dubbo in 2011 from independent Dawn Fardell. He was a backbencher until Barry O'Farrell resigned in April 2014. Nationals leader Andrew Stoner had bought into the development ethos that had consumed the Liberals, insisting that some of the largesse from electricity sales also go to regional NSW; when Stoner stood down six months after O'Farrell, there was no succession plan. Grant had the numbers to become Nationals leader and Deputy Premier.

Being new to politics did not stop Grant taking advantage. He became Minister for Police, leapfrogging his old colleagues who had avoided being posted to Dubbo. He became Minister for Justice as well, breaching the old protocols where the minister for one could not be minister for the other; he outranked the Attorney General, Gabrielle Upton, whose namby-pamby concerns about due process were swept aside by a copper's pragmatism. He combined this with the ministry of Gaming and Racing, putting him in charge of real power with liquor and pokie licencing - as well as Arts, because hey why not and who else in the government wants to do that? Grant aggregated all this power at a time when the Coalition had a vast backbench, full of apparently talented and hard-working potential ministers.

When Baird wanted to curtail liquor trading hours in the inner city, Grant backed him. Police and health workers cheered the move, but the denizens of the city's bars and clubs hated it - and seemed to have no recourse, not to nice-guy Baird, not to the bastard enforcer Grant.

When Baird resolved to ban greyhound racing in 2015, it was to please the same skittish urban base that had embraced Julia Gillard's ban of live cattle exports to Indonesia in 2011. A once working-class past-time had been forced from the inner city to the urban fringes and to rural areas that aren't desert, or pricey prime land, or subject to fracking, or too far from traditional greyhound racing centres in Gosford, Dapto, and Wentworth Park. It was never a big industry and had no champions who were big donors with access to the political class. No migrant group embraced it, it attracted few young people, and with a cut to its subsidies and a bit of compensation it might well have been dispatched into history with its ageing adherents. Grant backed him, and developed the legal and policy mechanisms to make it happen.

As with urban planning or electricity sales, the consultation was broad, but firm; the government isn't backing down on this, but by all means let's talk and money will be available. The legislation passed, and the machinery whirred into action.

If greyhound racing didn't matter, it didn't matter if the ban was overturned. Nobody was asking Baird to go back on something big and important, like WestConnex. By championing greyhound racing, Alan Jones emboldened conservatives who needed votes from lower-income earners and helped them to an easy, low-consequence win over the powers-that-be grinding through the big projects. Jones gives most governments free rein but he expects them to kowtow when he jerks the chain, seemingly at random, whether the issue is large or small. Baird saved his government with the backflip, even if he lost the sky-high ratings a Sydney politician needs to brush off Alan Jones.

Baird didn't want to look like either the bad guy or a backflipper; Grant, who had put the anti-greyhound mechanisms in place, had to undo broad and careful planning and write off the compensation. Labor embraced the greyhound cause for the same cynical reasons Barry O'Farrell used against electricity privatisation in 2008, ending the career of then-Premier Morris Iemma and sending the Labor government into a death spiral. The Orange byelection, brought on when state MP Andrew Gee went to Canberra, came when Grant was exposed and vulnerable.

The trouble with sweeping aside protocols and niceties to make big things happen is that you have to bring people with you. Grant had successively alienated long-standing members of the Nationals such as Katrina Hodgkinson and serial boofhead Andrew Fraser. The Orange byelection is an excuse for getting rid of Grant, not the hill he chose to die on. Grant did not have Baird's residual nice-guy image, nor the depth of experience within the Nationals to smooth ruffled feathers. Hodgkinson and Kevin Humphries had been dumped as ministers, in a party not exactly replete with talent and which needs to have its best members tackling the Liberals, Independents and other forces threatening the party's very existence. Grant's country copper instincts, to start with a chat but end with a boot up the arse if needed, had gone so far but no further.

Grant rose like a rocket and fell like a stick, at which I neither mourn nor revel. I never imagined we'd have a Deputy Premier named Troy; I just assumed it was unconstitutional or otherwise unfeasible. It will be interesting to see what happens now:

• Apparently the new Nationals leader will be John Barilaro, who like Baird comes across as a nice guy and not at all an arse-kicker like Grant.
• As Vocational Education minister, Barilaro had his run-ins with Education Minister Adrian Piccoli; we'll see how things change when the difference in seniority between these two men is reversed.
• Interesting to see who becomes the new Police Minister, a source of real power vastly underestimated in state politics. Will the Liberals bring back Mike Gallacher, or is it too soon? Is he content to join the Liberal Right's factional silly-buggers over preselections, angling for a Federal role?
• Will the Attorney-General be able to reassert due process over the new minister(s) for police and justice?
• What of the regulation of liquor, pokies - or greyhounds, for that matter?
• Will the momentum of big road, rail and other "once in a lifetime" infrastructure projects stall?
• Will arts funding (increasingly important to the sector since federal cuts) stay close to the city's elite, or be dispersed by a new minister from far beyond?
• In Dubbo, Grant had learned to speak Wiradjuri. No other NSW government minister, apart from Linda Burney and some 19th-century Renaissance men, learned an Aboriginal language.
• Imagine Andrew Gee regarding his old seat, in the heart of his federal electorate, that has registered a 30% swing against the Nationals. Gee had entered state parliament in 2011 as Grant had, but never became a minister. He has joined a government less popular than Baird's, with a Nationals leader more cunning but less capable than Grant. No federal MP is safe from a 30% swing.
• Speaking of people considering their future - Grant has been forced out of the Deputy Premiership and faces the undoing of two years of work. Why should he stick around until the next election (in 2019)? His seat of Dubbo adjoins that of Orange, with similar demographics and issues ...

Apart from the prospect of a byelection in Dubbo and a bit of soft-soap work on Barilaro, NSW political journalists haven't started on any of the above issues. NSW politics has been reshaped almost as profoundly as New Zealand's South Island. Grant was significant enough, in less than five years, to leave a vacuum in his wake. State political rounds should be across all of those issues and plenty more, yet they've just clustered around the same set of talking points which make no difference to anyone but the journalists themselves.

Heave away, haul away

Critics of privatisation and outsourcing often complain you can go too far, that by hiving off "non-essential" functions you end up compromising some part of the organisation that is essential to its survival. Despite what organisational theorists say, there often is no clear line between essential and non-essential functions, and plenty of smart and experienced people have gotten that wrong.

So have the South Australian Liberals. Liberals in that state will follow their Queensland counterparts into history.

The old one-two

Nick Xenophon evolved a constituency that neither the Liberals nor the Democrats fully recognised: people concerned about the increased availability of gambling in a state where it had never been prevalent. He expanded his appeal to cover the spaces left by the dying Democrats, and vacated by the Liberals as they moved right. Now that the Liberals want to move back to the centre, it's too late; Xenophon owns that space now.

Part of the Liberal Party's shift to the right meant that they lost the ability to rein in someone like Cory Bernardi. A precocious young student politician, Bernardi modelled not only his policy outlook but his organisational structure on US brimstone-and-sodomy conservatives. Nobody becomes a Liberal Senator without backing from a substantial portion of the party, having worked the branches and other party structures assiduously (Bernardi was a protege of Nick Minchin, the party's State Director who stacked an overwhelmingly moderate state organisation in favour of conservatives). What made Bernardi different was building networks of fundraising and patronage independent of the Liberal Party, tapping into funds and support that the SA Liberals didn't know about and weren't obliged to declare.

By the time Bernardi took top spot on the Liberal ticket in 2007 the threat was implicit: put me at the top of the ticket or I'll run against you. Nick Minchin retired soon afterwards, knowing Bernardi was building a political superstructure taking him beyond the reach of the party, and beyond the discipline of people like himself. His setting-up of a new conservative party has been a long, long time coming. Finally, he's judged that his hour is at hand, and that he is free to drop off the Liberal Party like a sated tick.

Bernardi hasn't done this before now because the SA Liberals were always a more viable vehicle than anything he might cobble together, alone or with useful idiots like Family First. No longer: the SA Liberals are done. But the relative strength of left and right isn't enough to explain the collapse of the SA Liberals. They assumed they would have a permanent place no matter how little they did, how little they delivered for South Australia.

The franchisee

Labor has become the default party of government in that state. They actually focus on health and education and transport and all those other properly state-based issues. While they don't get every call right and have been in too long, they seem to actually care about congested roads or bad schools or whatever - they aren't diffident about those issues like the Liberals. Labor fights ferociously for every election and the Liberals are diffident about those too; the Liberals win the protest vote but fail to translate that to winning a majority of lower house seats, which underlines their diffidence and lack of the necessary political passion necessary to govern. They talk about economic development but they can't do it, and everyone knows they can't do it.

The leader of the SA Liberals is a nice man - Simon or Stephen or something like that - who acts like the franchisee he has always been, in office but somehow not in charge. If John Martin's department store still existed he would be standing in the window modelling what a suit might look like if a man were wearing it. When the federal government comes to town (rather than flying past Adelaide) they drag along what's-his-name to stand and nod.

He might have disagreements with Jay Weatherill - but Weatherill has imposed himself on his own party so ruthlessly you get the sense if Stewart ever took him on, Weatherill would leap over the Dispatch Box and rip his liver out. Even his "home" electorate is named after Labor's greatest Premier. Weatherill gets bogged down in the intractable difficulties of funding a growing state with a stagnant economy because he doesn't have to play politics with an opposition that is simply no good at that game.

It isn't like he stands before a band of seething rivalries, either; the Franchisee is the best they have. Conservatives spent years hissing at Vickie Chapman until they realised there was nothing for them to worry about. The years of backroom drama with titanic figures like Joan Hall or Nick Minchin having at one another meant that Liberal candidates tended to be no-fuss, inoffensive, even insipid. Minchin realised early, and schooled John Howard in the idea, that the lack of Liberal governments at state level helped ensure a Liberal government at the federal level. He smoothed the dying pillow over the careers of several promising MPs who might get in the way of his wider vision.

Can't be fixed

Christopher Pyne was 26 when first elected to the very safe Liberal seat of Sturt in 1993. When John Hewson was replaced by Alexander Downer as Liberal leader soon afterwards, Pyne said to John Howard "why don't you retire?".

A decade after that, Howard was still Prime Minister and Pyne was still a backbencher. Pyne became chief source for breathless press gallery stories that any day now, any day, Peter Costello would challenge Howard. It was nonsense but it kept both Pyne and the gallery in work, and each was grateful to the other. Eventually, by sheer attrition, Pyne became the guy at the centre of it all, the fixer without whom nothing would get done. The press gallery applauded his childish parliamentary tactics, borrowed from the US Congressional Republicans. In the leadership turmoil following 2007 he switched his vote late, but decisively, ensuring his choice and the winner were the same, and that the winner was grateful to him.

Back in South Australia, the mining boom lulled South Australians into overconfidence about Olympic Dam and defence equipment and other big dreams to transition the economy away from the clearly failing vehicle industry. When the dream died with the mining boom, Labor went back to basics at the state level and lost the plot federally. The Liberals offered criticism but not an alternative. 2013 offered South Australians a change of federal government with one of their own, Christopher Maurice Pyne himself, where he had always wanted to be: at the centre of the action.

Pyne could have had the clout to kick the car industry along for a little while, but he didn't. He could have managed a vast transition from cars to military manufacturing (or something else), but he didn't. Goodness knows he's had time enough and resources to think of something. Unhappy is the land that needs a hero. Those of us who never believed in Pyne were vindicated at such a terrible cost; those who thought he deserved the benefit of the doubt are so far beyond mistaken, it's embarrassing all round.

As Education Minister, he might have found a way to channel more money to the state's creaking institutions - but all he did was propose $100k degrees (increasing the impetus for talented young South Australians to flee their state), and open gimcrack colleges that collapsed before students could complete their courses. South Australia backed Pyne for decades and had hoped for more from him than he could ever deliver. "We will support all Australian students to embrace the digital age" - yeah, right.

When the naval construction contracts went to Spain over Adelaide, the story made the news in Sydney but it did not carry the full anguish from South Australia. It went way beyond Port and the Crows bundled out of the footy finals. It was a realisation that their final hopes were dashed, despite doing everything they could within the system to get some sort of relief. He's blown it. All the consultants who claim they can help him un-blow it are just taking donors' money under questionable pretences.

Pyne has compromised and triangulated so much, like Hillary Clinton in this masterful examination of US politics, that it isn't clear who he is any more. Maybe it isn't even clear to him. He's Minister for Industry from a de-industrialising state, when the BCA and the IPA expect him to sell the unsellable and judge hm accordingly. The new Liberal candidate for Boothby would want to be a cracker because otherwise Adelaide will be an all-Labor city in Federal Parliament, like Canberra or Newcastle.

If there's a double dissolution, the top two Liberal Senate candidates will be Bernardi and David Fawcett, two right-wing goons (if the standard half-Senate election, just Fawcett). Next on their list is Senator Sean Edwards, former real estate agent and transactional pol who put together the painstaking case for frigates and submarines to be built in Adelaide. If Edwards loses (as well he might - your 3-3 half-Senate election results are less likely going forward) it will be another one in the eye for the standard politics of representing your constituency and having your voice heard in Canberra; it will be the government's own fault for failing to respect assiduous grass-roots politics.

The next state election is in 2018 and the Franchisee is unlikely to take things forward. Chris Pyne may well be a private citizen, and we'll see what his extensive experience is worth then. Xenophon's federal focus will see his party play a limited role. Bernardi will trash Safe Schools and abortion, but otherwise have little to offer education or health. People will still vote for those guys, though.

Holdfast

The seismic shift in SA politics places a heavy load on Labor's internal processes to keep the state government honest and vital, and stop them sending monkeys to Canberra. When Sam talks about 2036 he looks forward to a time when the children will indeed be the future but most of his party's current members will be dead. He may well be the last SA Liberal leader, or at least the last where the party is clearly the second-biggest party in the state's politics.

All centrists get accused of being neither one thing nor the other. Most centrists muddle through with a bit of both and something else besides. The SA Liberals have none of that, not any more, and they won't be getting any in. They've abandoned the centre and the dingoes on the right have abandoned them. The state is stagnating economically, so any donor money is going to have to flow in from outside. The Queensland Libs struggled along as the branch office of a national movement for so long, and then gave up on themselves just as conservatives came to realise they needed the suburban south-east more than a shiny new civic centre at Woop Woop.

Whyalla isn't falling back on small business grandees, but on renewable energy - no help from the Libs there. The drought will exacerbate water quality problems in the Murray River, but the Liberal MP who represents that area has spent half a million dollars renovating his office. The SA Libs don't have Nationals but that's the least of their problems. They don't have enough to fall back on, and conservatives need something to be nostalgic about. Playford, Hall, Tonkin, Brown, and Olsen aren't a heritage: they're answers in a pub quiz.

The only future the SA Libs have is to show the rest of their party what structural decline looks like, and that majoritarian arrogance (what US Congressional Republicans call "the nuclear option") is a non-starter. Maybe lack of background will benefit the SA Libs, as it did for Tonkin and Brown, but only briefly - and it's too late for Saul. There may be a reconciliation of left and/or right after Xenophon or Bernardi, but you can't bet on the SA Liberals being led by broad-coalition community-minded people who could pull that off.

Quality control

Australia has a two-party system, where the Labor Party and an established Coalition of parties contend to form government. Each of these parties (the Liberals in particular as the lead party in the Coalition) have a responsibility to choose candidates worthy of the responsibilities of government. It's easy to pick out examples where you don't like an MP and use that as an example of systematic failure, but the Coalition as the incumbent government have work to do in vetting candidates and drawing a line under unacceptable behaviour.

A need for intervention

Mal Brough helped the Coalition get rid of Peter Slipper, thus helping to hasten the end of the last Labor government. After all that effort it might have seemed unfair to exclude him from preselection for Fisher in 2013, but revolutions eat their own and the LNP should have waited until police processes had been exhausted. The reasons why he has chosen not to recontest in 2016 are the same as those for which a functioning party should have vetted him out of contention.

Looking at the LNP cohort in Federal Parliament, none of them are much chop. There are 22 LNP Members of the House of Reps (Queensland has 30 overall) and six Senators (of 12). Only Karen Andrews has a future. Six - Warren Truss, Bruce Scott, Warren Entsch, Teresa Gambaro, Ian Macfarlane, and now Brough — are waiting out their time. Stuart Robert will probably be a shadow minister next time the Coalition go back into Opposition. Brandis and Ciobo are floundering out of their depth. Dutton will probably lose his seat in a swing big enough to carry Labor into office, especially if he devotes too much time on punishing little injured children. Canavan is another culture warrior low on ammunition. Jane Prentice would make a perfectly nice Minister but the dolts will barge ahead of her.

The LNP have done a lousy job in talent selection, but then again they probably don't have much choice. Now that the central premise of the LNP - presenting a united front at state level - has been revealed as a hollow joke, they have an obligation to put their best people forward (Joanna Lindgren? Really?).

The very prospect of Newman’s ninnies slouching toward Canberra should fill everyone, Queenslanders or not, with disgust. It isn’t appalling, it isn’t funny, it’s just a disgrace from a state that is finally getting off its knees: every other party has managed to find some talent (except Clive, and he’s proving my point). Nobody with any other options wants to be a LNP MP, and it’s sad for the LNP that they have worked themselves into that position.

Leaking submarines

Greg Sheridan lied when he denied receiving the leaked National Security Committee papers from Abbott about the submarines. Nobody in any position of authority should have commented on it; Abbott tipped his hand when he did so.

Defence Minister Payne was the real target here: a factional opponent of Abbott’s from NSW, Abbott is trying to perpetuate Kevin Andrews’ laughable claim that removing him from the portfolio was a risk to national security. He hasn’t just missed the target (one does not simply wound Marise Payne and flit away), he’s made himself the issue.

You just can’t go around leaking top secret documents and be a credible government. If you’re a party of government, you can’t put someone who does that into your parliamentary team. There are some issues that are bigger than faction or party: this is one of them.

The Chief of the Defence Force and the Secretary of the Defence Department were right to negate the substance of the issue. Those guys do not mess around and nobody messes with them. The press gallery cannot simply report this as he-said-he-said argy-bargy any more.

J’accuse Tony Abbott of leaking that material, but I recognise that finer minds and keener students of Canberra skullduggery are on this case. If my suspicions are confirmed, the NSW Liberals have no real choice but to disendorse Tony Abbott as a candidate. I don’t care that he doesn’t have another job to go to, or that Curl Curl is full of dickheads who love him. No party of government could tolerate someone who tools around with top secret material.

In the 2007 election it was easy to follow the easy line that Rudd was cruising to victory, but real aficionados of politics were following closely Tony Abbott’s careening efforts in helping marginal-seat Liberals get unemployed. Abbott is doing that again, but instead of Tasmanian hospitals he has crossed the line into national security issues. The Liberals have to get rid of him.

If you thought Trent Zimmerman was tough standing against homophobia, wait until he has to take on the baddest homophobic, sexist, top-secret-leaking, don’t-give-a-damn bully of them all, in his capacity as NSW President of the Liberal Party. And take Abbott on, Zimmerman must - for the sake of party and nation.

Zimmerman and Payne are mates. Any other NSW Liberal who pulled something like that - any of these losers, for example - would already be toast by now. If the Liberal Party is to have any credibility at all, it cannot tolerate someone who leaks national security documents for a cheap headline (and headlines don’t come any cheaper than Sheridan’s).

The legal powers that the AFP and Defence have in investigating Sheridan and related parties are the very ones passed by the Abbott government, which caused an outcry at the time from journalists - real journalists, that is. Actual investigative journalists warned it would be used against journalists and journalism. Press gallery didn’t speak out on this issue in any meaningful way - they tend to be really bad at reporting legislation and debates and actual core business of parliament, and anyone who stood up for journalists and journalism would have their access limited. Now that legislation is demonstrably being deployed against a journalist, they have nothing to say about that either.

Turnbull is convinced he can ladle out another dollop of smarm and calm the waters: this might work on anyone but Abbott. At Goldman Sachs, Turnbull could sic the lawyers onto a recalcitrant employee, but the Liberal Party doesn’t work that way. He needs a combination of toughness and deftness that he probably doesn’t have.

The press gallery think this is about Turnbull vs Abbott, but it isn’t. It’s about the success or failure of the quality control systems that make representative democracy possible. The press gallery and those who employ them are part of those systems, and they’re quite simply fucked. Labor have played this impeccably (imagine if they hadn’t. Imagine some ragged old lefty had spoken out against the very construct of “national security”), but can they be trusted to go on?

Now it is time for the Liberals to wake up to themselves. If you want a reputation for targeting threats to national security, never mind kicking down the door of some young loudmouth in Punchbowl: start closer to home.

Between two stools

Ian Macfarlane knew better to entrust his political career to the Nationals. As head of the Cattlemen's Union in the 1990s, he had shown a real skill at getting seemingly unreconcilable interests to come together and form some sort of agreement; a case of political skill preceding political ambition. When he began expressing an interest in going into politics, but was reluctant to join the Nationals, John Howard persuaded him to join the Liberal Party and to replace Bill Taylor as MP for Groom.

But I doubt he'd suit the office,

Soon after he was elected in 1998 he went on Lateline with then-Nationals MP DeAnne Kelly. Kelly ragged him for being less than a true Queenslander for not having joined the Nationals (I hope the ABC can dig up that episode; it must look pretty funny right now). Howard made him a minister and, like all ministers in the latter part of that government, he built his reputation on shelling public money at those who already had plenty in the name of incentives.

The press gallery regarded Macfarlane as a "straight shooter" because history shows they are suckers for that rustic schtick.

At every point in Australia's political history, in every jurisdiction, there has been at least one MP from the backblocks who turns up to Parliament with grass-seeds in his eyebrows. He is patronised unrelentingly by the urban press because this visage affirms their half-arsed stereotypes about The Bush. That politician proves a master at diverting money earned in the cities to pet projects in his electorate, and those of his growing number of vassals. As that politician rises in the ranks - rarely to the head of government, but close enough to escape scrutiny while getting his demands met - he continues to be patronised by the same media who puzzle at his success in getting things done and in securing largesse for voters in the back-of-beyond. A six-lane sealed highway from Kickatinalong to Wheelabarrowback. An irrigation channel where the water evaporates before it reaches the neighbouring electorate.

Such politicians deliver nothing whatsoever for local indigenous communities, nor for those who claim the local Bishop is too lax in enforcing rules against ... that which must not be spoken; but such absences, silences, and negatives are achievements in themselves for representatives of this type.

In recent times Macfarlane, Barnaby Joyce, Ron Boswell, and Bill Heffernan have pulled this rustic schtick over the press gallery. Labor does it to a lesser extent as they hold fewer rural seats (e.g. Dick Adams and Warren Snowdon; Joel Fitzgibbon looks stupid when he tries). Old hands who can remember Peter Nixon, Ian Sinclair or even 'Black Jack' McEwen have should be awake to it, and in theory an journalist who is fooled greatly for a long period has let down their profession as well as the public. Press gallery journalism is different to other journalism because experienced journalists show themselves over and over to be willingly gulled by pretty much anyone who tries it on.

Pantomime rustics wear press gallery scorn lightly, and relish the relative freedom from scrutiny that urban pollies don't have and can't get. Bill Heffernan can make rampantly sexist and homophobic remarks and even bring a weapon into Parliament: the press gallery just roll their eyes, that's Bill being Bill! If Mal Brough spoke and carried himself like Bob Katter or Doug Anthony, he'd have succeeded in shrugging off the Slipper-Ashby thing and made Mark Dreyfus look like a whinger. Lawrence Springborg gets another shot at state leader of the LNP over some new face (or someone urban like Langbroek) from the southeast, where the party needs to win seats to regain office.

Cut forward to late 2009

... and Malcolm Turnbull was, as the journos say, beleaguered. For all the media coverage at the time showing the frontbench deserting Turnbull en masse, the Liberal Party was evenly divided over keeping Turnbull as leader - certainly if the alternative was Abbott. By then the Nationals had realised their traditional base was no longer capable of keeping them in the manner to which they had become accustomed. There was no conflict between mining an farming interests so long as miners kept their operations well away from farmlands (e.g. the deserts and semi-deserts, and the Barrier Reef), or maintained the sorts of mine-farm balances seen in communities like the Upper Hunter or Gippsland, where rural workers even out the ups and downs of agriculture with steadier incomes from the mines. At the time they thought climate change was an issue that could simply be voted down. The Nationals were showing their donors that they could deliver, and currying favour with the rise of conservative Liberals who promised a closer Coalition than had been seen for decades.

Abbott went to Brisbane to court LNP powerbrokers. Turnbull phoned individuals, who mostly ended up voting as the powerbrokers told them to. Abbott's defeat of Turnbull in 2009 was more like Gillard's defeat of Rudd the following year than either side dares admit; more than the press gallery, who saw it all up close, could comprehend.

The formation of the LNP in Queensland was a takeover of the Coalition in that state by the Nationals, with the purpose of securing the powers of state government to benefit Nationals constituencies. They resented the fact that the federal Coalition got involved in what they saw as internal Queensland matters; they agreed to Howard's demands to maintain a separate Liberal/National presence (including maintaining individuals like Macfarlane, or Brandis) in Canberra in return for letting the merger go ahead at state level. The powerbrokers who formed the LNP, like Bruce McIver, were the successors to Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Bob Sparkes: they arrogantly pushed aside their political opponents, scorned irrelevances in far-off Canberra (and the nerds who wanted to go there) and did pretty much what they wished. In 2009, the Nats who ran the LNP could happily sacrifice one Sydneysider leading the Liberal Party for another if it meant they'd be left alone.

One of the core motivations behind Abbott's leadership of the Liberal Party was the idea that Labor's victory in 2007 was illegitimate and some sort of mistake. They thought they were entitled to take up where they left off. Ian Macfarlane was no more, and no less, entitled than anyone.

Why 2015 is different to 2009

1. Macfarlane has, as Turnbull said in September, had a good go at being a minister. At the time Macfarlane seemed to agree - even in the face of the ignominy at being replaced by Christopher Pyne.
2. The LNP powerbrokers have been knocked on their arses. They fooled some of the people some of the time in southeastern Queensland, but this region proved so hard to govern and chewed up so much state government time that the Nationals' traditional plunder-to-the-regions never took off. That old Bjelke-Sparkes arrogance has been knocked out of them by Labor, and by the realisation that shafting Turnbull again would take them further backwards.
3. The LNP powerbrokers have knocked both their current leader (Warren Truss) and the likely next one (Barnaby Joyce) on their arses. If those guys can't win the LNP executive, what good are they? Their credibility is shot, and not only with Turnbull.
4. Consider this, Nationals voters: the Infrastructure Minister and the Agriculture Minister have buggered their own credibility. This is fine if you think Infrastructure and Agriculture policies don't matter.
5. The Treasurer, who is not out of favour with the PM, is looking to cut subsidies. The government as a whole is under no obligation to make Truss or Joyce look good. While these guys are deciding whether or not they'll retire, Infrastructure and Agriculture bureaucrats will have to start putting budget proposals together, not knowing who the relevant minister will be. Now tell me again what the point of the Nationals is, and why you think their vote will hold up.
6. Shenhua Coal have an approved mining permit to dig up much of the Liverpool Plains and affect the watercourses on the rest of it. The Liverpool Plains includes some of Australia's best farmland, and it's within Joyce's electorate. If Shenhua pulls out of the Liverpool Plains through sustained political pressure, Joyce will be a big winner in the local electorate - if not, he won't. Joyce's bargaining position is weakened rather than strengthened after his part in The Macfarlane Affair/ Maccagate.
7. Joyce tried to rope Scott Buchholz (from the electorate adjacent to Groom) into a Lib-Nat switch. Buchholz used to work for Joyce, but Joyce has made him look like a patsy. Like Macfarlane, Buchholz looks more like a Nat than a Lib anyway.
8. Turnbull's representative on the LNP executive was Peter Dutton. Had Macfarlane joined the Nats and been their candidate to displace a Liberal from Cabinet, Dutton would have been the Liberal displaced. Dutton is the weakest link in Turnbull's Cabinet (with the possible exception of Scott Morrison) and was, in effect, arguing for his own job. Macfarlane would have deserved the administrative clusterfuck and moral swamp that is Immigration.

The value of press gallery experience

Michelle Grattan, Paul Bongiorno and Laurie Oakes have all recounted Macfarlane's tale in traditional horse-race terms, as though it were disconnected from the Nationals-Turnbull relationship in 2009 or the coming Budget. Michael Gordon deserves special mention for a piece that is particularly vapid even by the low standards he sets.

Katharine Murphy has developed a strong reputation for describing game-playing across politics while being coy about the press gallery and its role in political manoeuvrings. Sure, Macfarlane is throwing a tantrum - but consider the role played by Murphy and her colleagues in building Macfarlane up as a "straight shooter", someone with unmatched largesse-shovelling skills, etc. She's been a sucker for the pantomime rustic routine, and now is piling onto the poor hapless bastard ... presumably so she can write another one of her hand-wringing pieces about piling onto poor hapless bastards. Murphy writing about cynicism in politics is like Abbott beating up Islamic extremism: be the problem you denounce, rinse and repeat.

Mark Kenny, the Official Bunny of this blog, proffered two gobbets of analysis on this matter:

Macfarlane's rejection has left his career in the wilderness - with only his credibility for company.

Snappy line, that.

But whatever is done with him, it is pretty clear his party backers are too. Done with him that is ... Now Macfarlane is hinting he might look at something in the resources sector after his stint as Australia's longest-serving minerals energy and resources minister.

The cynicism of such manoeuvring apparently knows no limit. Having failed to secure personal advancement through skulduggery, the risk is he could take the corporate knowledge of national service and deploy it for private corporate gain.

You can't look at something that isn't there. Macfarlane should know that by now.

In challenging times, the mining industry needs all the friends it can get in Canberra - why would they hire someone with no credibility? Former Labor minister Martin Ferguson would probably have better standing with the current minister, Josh Frydenberg, than Macfarlane could ever muster. Do you reckon Clive Palmer would want him involved with Queensland Nickel? You see the problem here, provided you aren't as shortsighted as Mark Kenny.

Nobody in the press gallery is prepared for a post-Joyce environment.

Plenty of journos out there will tell you political journalism doesn't - can't - get any better than those people.

Update 24 December: Tony Windsor's piece on Macfarlane a superior article to the one I had written, so I disavow the above to the extent that it departs from Windsor's analysis. As you can see I placed too much reliance on gallery interpretations (e.g. Macfarlane as turncoat). My post would have been improved with more of the dreary cynicism of which I am so regularly accused.

Brough enough

As we head into the end times for Mal Brough, let's consider how his career represents several things wider than him: machismo, keeping Aborigines "in their place", opportunity costs, and the price of loyalty. Oh, and of course, piss-poor standards of political journalism.

Act I: Taking the crease

Before first entering parliament for the electorate of Longman (now held by Wyatt Roy) in 1996, Brough had been an army officer. The press gallery singled him out for Big Things. When Tony Abbott was promoted to Cabinet in 2001, Brough replaced him as Minister for Employment Services.

Malcolm Farr made a telling anecdote [link broken] about Brough at a cricket match. Because Farr is an old-school journalist in the mendacious world of political reporting, he did not use that anecdote to look into what Brough did and how he did it, questioning his statements and fitness for office generally; instead, the coverage of him (by Farr and others in the press gallery) is pretty much all direct quotes and giving Brough the benefit of the doubt.

Act II: Hubris

In 2004 Brough became Minister for Revenue and Assistant Treasurer to Peter Costello, where he was responsible for hacking into the tax base at the very time the mining boom was taking off. Part of the reason why Wayne Swan, Joe Hockey, and now Scott Morrison, have been unable to do much about the revenue side of the budget is because of Brough's hard work back then. It's notable that those tax breaks did not lead to the private sector picking up the slack in terms of infrastructure; Australian history suggests that where government fails to take the lead, no infrastructure magically appears. Interesting experiment, though.

In 2006 Brough entered Cabinet as Minister for Families and Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. This might sound like he was doing squishy welfare stuff; not a bit of it. Brough came up with the idea of using a report into sexual abuse in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities, Little Children are Sacred, as a pretext to send the Army in to occupy those communities and stamp out anti-social behaviour. He ignored the report and there is no evidence it made much of a difference one way or another, but it made a big splash - this may explain why Labor kept it after 2007. Frances Jones shows how Brough encouraged the Tiwi Islands Land Council to adopt schemes that created no jobs and degraded the environment: a lose-lose situation for people who were doing it tough already.

Despite the demonstrated lack of any link between the Northern Territory Emergency Response and any sort of success metric, the press gallery remained convinced that Brough was an action man and a Liberal star on the rise. He was Hotspur to Tony Abbott's Prince Hal. Consider this table of Sheer Damn Manliness:

Criterion	Abbott	Brough
Relationship to the Queen	Talked a lot of talk about the Queen	Held the Queen’s commission
Occupation before entering politics	Student (well into 30s), journalist	Army officer, sales
Economic credentials under Howard govt	Peter Costello disdained his understanding of economics	Minister for Revenue, helped diminish tax base
Military deployment proposals	To Ukraine, protect plane debris	To Northern Territory, protect Aboriginal children
Military deployment proposals supported by Labor	No	Yes
Re-elected in 2007	Yes	No
Complained publicly about decline in income after having been Cabinet minister	Yes	Yes
Disdained major political development	Climate change	Merger of Liberal and National Parties in Qld
Supported Brough for LNP preselection in Fisher for 2013	Yes	Yes
Supported Brough for Abbott ministry 2013	No	Yes
Supported Abbott as Liberal leader February 2015	Yes	No
Supported Abbott as Liberal leader September 2015	Yes	No

Act III: Nemesis

If Mal Brough had held Longman in 2007 then he, not Tony Abbott, would have been the favoured candidate for leader when Turnbull stumbled in 2009. Brough would have negated Rudd's Queensland appeal and been a bit more presentable than the often uncouth and puerile Abbott. The press gallery would have loved that action-man crap and Labor would hardly have been in a position to criticise his failures in Indigenous policy, having perpetuated them.

But, he didn't. If ever a minister was going to come out of the Howard government and fall into a series of cushy boards and advisory roles, according to the political-class fantasy, he was it. Brough faffed around and ended up as the last Queensland State President of the Liberal Party. He was against the merger with the Queensland Nationals that formed the LNP: he lacked the clout to stop it altogether and the wit to turn it to his advantage. He looked truculent, like a lamb trying to back out of a sheep-dip at the last minute, rather than a political operator contributing to something bigger than himself. It meant he couldn't secure a seat for 2010, which may have seen him back in Cabinet in 2013; more faffing around, this time outside the LNP power structure.

George Brandis also showed his true colours at this time, putting up a token resistance before succumbing. As Attorney-General his role has been to talk about John Stuart Mill, but then assert that civil liberties must be sacrificed to Daesh and that you can exercise a right to bigotry. If your idea of political activism and progress is to offer a token resistance before succumbing, Brandis is your model for involvement in major-party politics.

By 2012 Brough had come around to the idea that politics was his only real career option, and that he had no choice to suck up to people who were once his peers and juniors. Brough was a minister when Peter Dutton was first elected; when Brough went into Cabinet Dutton had taken over his junior portfolio. Dutton had been re-elected in 2007 and was cruising to a Cabinet role without doing anything. As Peter Slipper committed political suicide by all but switching to Labor, Brough could have played the statesman and let the LNP bring Fisher to him - but instead, he got his hands dirty. That sexist menu for his fundraiser in 2012 (no I won't link to it) is a perfect example of officers' mess wit.

As with Kathy Jackson, Independent Australia were onto Brough from the outset. The press gallery resisted the allure of sleaze and illegality because Brough was part of the Restoration narrative. This is why there's no point dipping into broadcast-media summaries, and why ABC reporters look silly when they write off questioning of Brough as 'Labor mischief': the Ashby thing ain't their mischief. IA put out numerous articles and a book on the matter while the broadcast media can offer only potted half-embarrassed recaps.

Act IV: You can't step in the same river twice

When the Abbott government took office in 2013 there were a few changes to the Shadow Ministry becoming Ministers, but basically the Abbott government was all about restoring the Howard government as though nothing had happened between then and 2007. Two Howard-era Cabinet ministers elected in 2013 did not get a portfolio - Philip Ruddock and Mal Brough - and Ruddock had declared he didn't want a portfolio. Brough sucked it up and got on with backbenching, and the press gallery stopped gushing over how great it was to have the old gang back together. Brough didn't have the twinkly-eyed gravitas of veterans like Philip Ruddock or Warren Entsch, and wasn't a fresh face either.

The LNP merger Brough had so opposed was designed to make it easier for the Coalition to win State government in Queensland. Brough had foreseen that it would be a disaster, and the performance of the Newman government 2012-15 proved him right. In politics you can be a drunk, a thief, a sex maniac and/or a terror to work for, and people will cover for you; but get proven right when everyone else is wrong, and that warm inner glow won't save you. The January 2015 Queensland state election proved everything turned out to be just as bad as Mal Brough said it would be.

The first chance he got, in February 2015, he voted against his brother-from-another-mother Abbott. In September he voted against him again. The lack of press gallery coverage about Ashby (mainly protecting favoured source Christopher Pyne) must have lulled Prime Minister Turnbull into thinking Brough was cleared of the matter concerning Slipper's diary and other questionable behaviour. It was always a sad joke to put him in charge of electoral probity, and now it seems like the Prime Minister will have to find someone else.

The longer Brough stays as Special Minister of State, the less likely it is there will be an early election. A quick replacement would have been a clear sign the government was up to something. He is also Minister for Defence Materiel at a time when big procurement projects are up for grabs.

If Turnbull hadn't appointed Brough to the ministry, Brough would have joined the Abbott-Abetz sooks' club, and/or gone bonkers like Senator Macdonald.

Abbott allowed himself a chuckle as Labor finally started questioning him over Ashby-Slipper, at a time when even the press gallery would give them coverage for doing so. Abbott allowed himself a chuckle, as he does when others come under the scrutiny he has always escaped: a could-have-been Liberal leader mocked by a has-been.

The Australian Federal Police had all but dropped their investigation into the events surrounding the Speaker's diary until recently. I note, without making any allegation, that the minister responsible for the AFP is George Brandis. If this investigation damages the political careers of two of Brandis' ministerial colleagues (Brough and Pyne) while leaving his untouched, it could be a masterstroke worthy of House of Cards. If not, it could be the greatest own-goal in Australian politics since the Costigan Royal Commission.

Governments can lose a minister or two without affecting their ability to be re-elected. Turnbull knows this, as does any student of Australian politics. Predicting the demise of Brough or even Pyne will finish Turnbull is to over-egg the situation. Mind you, Mal Brough's whole political career has been empty hype on the part of the press gallery. Now that it is over, it is clear how insubstantial it was.