Sweating blood

Tony Abbott's whole strategy has been based on toying with the government. Whenever Gillard has come to Abbott to cut a deal he has pretended to consider the idea, possibly with an amendment or two, before eventually declining to support. The idea behind this is to portray the incumbents as a do-nothing government so that by the next election it will offer no alternative to an Abbott government.

Last week that strategy failed. It failed publicly, and utterly. It will keep on failing as the government gets up off its hind legs and the measures proposed in the past week come into force, which reinforces the perception that this government is acting like a real government, which gives it more confidence (but hopefully not too much), etc.

Last week we saw three events that made the government look like a real government:

• It consulted widely on tax reform;
• It enacted a budget-sized raft of legislation to institute a carbon pricing mechanism, after years of talk and bluff; and
• It settled, for better or worse, on a policy for dealing with asylum seekers.

In each case, the government broke from its standard practice of going cap-in-hand to the opposition and asking for their support. This had made the Coalition look like the determinant of what was legitimate and what wasn't, feeding the idea that the erratic and flaky Abbott could in fact lead a government committed to stability and security.

This is the lesson that the Liberals learned from the failed ETS deal in 2009. The Liberals engaged in a protracted negotiation process with Rudd, who was at the peak of his powers, and after stringing him along they eventually decided against a deal, which left him (as they say in Canberra) fucked and burnt. Naturally they are seeking to do the same again: all they need is a dumb Labor government that learns nothing.

A press gallery with the memory span of goldfish is also useful to Abbott, as Philip Coorey shows:

TONY ABBOTT has indicated he would have said no to a compromise asylum-seeker policy that included Nauru, vindicating Julia Gillard and others in the cabinet who argued against making such an offer.

Well, no kidding. If the government had proposed restoring the status quo of 2006 Abbott would have squealed that the government had stolen his policy, unfit to govern etc. When you've been involved with press gallery journalism for as long as I have you can pick patterns like that.

The government stopped whinging about Abbott, and got on with it. This is what it always should have done (and those of you who think I'm being wise after the event can go back through this site and see that my hitherto futile calls for same have been a recurring feature of the past two years or so).

Buried way down in this tendentious article is a real gobbet of news, with which your old-school newshound would have led their story:

Mr Abbott's approval fell 2 percentage points to 41 per cent and his disapproval rose 2 points to 54 per cent.

These are his worst ratings since becoming Opposition Leader on December 1, 2009, and are similar to numbers experienced by Mr Turnbull just before he was deposed.

And there you have it. Almost two years into the job, after hundreds of stunts and thousands of pointless words nobody is any more convinced that they ever were that they want this man to be Prime Minister. Why no ABBOTT LOSER CHALLENGE ANY DAY NOW SHOCK headlines?

Now you can see why Abbott went on with all that blood-oath stuff. Not because he's in a position of strength but because he's panicking. Over the weekend he sent out Greg Hunt to destroy what little credibility he had by swearing blind that the carbon mechanism was going to be repealed. It's highly likely that Opposition spokespeople responsible for the budget bottom line and productive relationships with business wouldn't have a bar of it (e.g. Hockey, Robb, Macfarlane) or have other issues on their plates right now (e.g. Mirabella). The Situation himself can only announce this and flit onto something else, trailing credulous journos in his wake.

Hunt is providing the textbook example of why you should resign rather than humilate yourself by selling a position that is so obviously bullshit. He's like the loyal soldier who gets sent by donkey superiors to charge the enemy machine-guns over open ground.

The poll finds 44 per cent of voters back Mr Turnbull as Coalition leader compared with 28 per cent for Mr Abbott and 23 per cent for Mr Hockey.

Mr Turnbull has much stronger support among Greens and Labor voters.

Depends what you mean by "Greens and Labor voters", really. If we're talking rusted-ons, those figures are pretty much irrelevant. If we're talking people who voted Labor in 2007 and '10 but might be persuaded to vote for a Liberal Party not led by Tony Abbott, that's significant.

There are few articles more ridiculous than Labor isn't getting its message out because the press gallery is in thrall to Abbott, and this is Labor's fault, because the herd mentality of the press gallery is never ever wrong.

But in Tony Abbott it is facing the most skilful retail politician in recent memory, a leader with a proven ability to slice up solid arguments with sound bites.

Only if you think a sound bite is sharper than a solid argument, or even real policy with actual results to show for it. This was all very well if you just treat leading politicians as duelling windbags, but in the past week we've seen real policies put in place with real costs and real outcomes. This would be the perfect opportunity for a journalist to ask some searching questions about what a rollback might look like - but then you'd have to ask someone other than Lenore Taylor:

But the Coalition leader has already skipped on ...

And who's more happy to let him skip than Lenore Taylor? She could examine the way that Australian politics has changed and how Abbott is adapting to the new environment we find ourselves in, but she'll just let Abbott skip, skip, skippety-skip.

The factional system, which always provided structure when Labor was in crisis, is broken. "They broke it themselves," says one senior Labor figure. The overthrow of Kevin Rudd, sprung on the caucus by factional bosses at a stage when it was almost a fait accompli, is a process that poisoned its own outcome. The party is now inherently wary of any organised leadership challenge.

That looks like the sort of solid journalism you can usually expect from Lenore Taylor - but then she falls straight off the wagon and spends the rest of her story insisting that something broken is not only functional but powerful enough to knock off a Prime Minister. It's one thing for pollies to contradict one another but when a journalist doubles back on her own story she is only making a spectacle of herself.

Often a "source close to" a politician is the bloke himself.

Thanks for the tip. Shame the journo thinks they're being clever in not just quoting "the bloke himself".

Then there's the thousand words in the Rudd-Gillard kiss last week that the News Ltd papers couldn't write: Rudd saw that Gillard got the carbon mechanism through, in a way that he couldn't. Didn't you see that as an act of contrition, if not capitulation?

Tony Abbott is doing what he's always done and this past week it stopped working. His fanclub just assume he can switch gears to becoming Prime Ministerial, but this just isn't possibler. There is no calm and measured authority, only jumping from one stunt to the next. His only way out is more maxxxtreme stunts that makes Lenore Taylor ooh and aah - and that's what we'll be seeing, until The Situation gets so pathetic that they yank him off stage.

In a week where the government did what it gets paid to do, nobody should expect a grateful populace to cheer from sheer gratitude. We're just doing our jobs, and now the government is too it would be nice if journalists and the Opposition would do theirs.

No refuge II: pressure on

In 1930s Washington DC, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was apparently confronted by a group lobbying for a particular outcome. At length he said, "OK, you've convinced me. Now go out and put pressure on me".

I'm tempted to say that the Prime Minister has done something similar with this. There is scant evidence that she has been so wily in the past. Then again, she's learning on the job, in a job where the previous occupants tear up the manual as they go.

It isn't having it both ways to honour the deal with Malaysia. I still think that the regional dialogue I went on about here is important and it would have been impossible had the Malaysians disgraced themselves by agreeing to drop it. Also impossible would have been articles like this without the focus on refugees in Malaysia. This is the start of something big and important in regional engagement, hopefully not limited to refugees. If nothing else, it's a bit more proactive than sitting back and waiting for the next boat to come over the horizon.

So, we're going to have more people coming here. Where should they go?

Where they should not go is to be dumped into high-unemployment areas of capital cities, where they arouse resentment from bogans and apathy from the rest of the community, and have the apathetic come to confuse the voice of the resentful as the voice of Australia.

They should not go to mining areas because almost all of them are already areas of high unemployment, and because it is a myth that mining companies need vast numbers of proletarian workers who will just labour all day without complaint. No part of the economy that used to need workers in vast numbers - not industry, not construction, not retail or even the defence forces - now has such a need.

The best I could think of was to those rural communities which supposedly let foodstuffs rot because the fleeing or apathetic locals, backpackers and grey nomads who happen to be there at harvest time aren't sufficient in numbers or remuneration to get the job done. It also conflicts with Pacific Islander communities who could do such work on a fly-in-fly-out basis.

Dumping people in communities with few options might not be clever, notwithstanding their potential to prop up infrastructure that might otherwise fall into disuse. You also fall into a trap of positing rural communities as The Real Australia, having people learn English by reading Adam Lindsay Gordon or whatever. Maybe they will just flock to the cities when there's nothing stopping them from doing so. Maybe they will have to in order to exploit training opportunities that are unavailable in the mighty Bush.

I'm trying, and it's heartening that the government too is trying to deal with a complex issue with other policy tools than press releases. One guy who's trying way too hard is The Situation, a man who has painted himself into a corner with his own blood. He's frantic, because he knows he has nothing to show for all that ferocity: it's only worth it if the slow and steady achievements of the past week or so never happened, and weren't seen to have happened. Yes, the government was forced into the position it has now taken - but there is nothing so becoming of a government than the ability to make lemonade when handed lemons. That was John Howard's real skill - his fans call it humility, but even his opponents agree it was a contrast from the approaches of his two Labor predecessors, which was more in the vein of "Oi! Who put these fucking lemons here?".

Abbott could get his photo taken squeezing lemons but you know he hates the taste and nobody wants to drink anything prepared by a smarmy git who despises them. The smarm has gone with all this blood-oath, eating-out-a-carcass stuff, and we're beginning to see them as they are. Abbott is redoubling his efforts, which only moves him from ferocious to frantic. Even his most loyal lags in the press gallery must now accept that Abbott is becoming a figure of ridicule, that the can't-do-anything-right tag that applied to the government a month or so ago now rightfully belongs on him.

What Abbott and his chroniclers can't bear to face is what all the great comics knew: that frantic is funny. Think about Harold Lloyd hanging off that clock, Harpo Marx's charades, John Cleese in "the right room for an argument", or Lucille Ball berating people Mirabella-style while being led into a surprise party. The more calm government we get, steering the nation through the storms and past the shoals, the crazier the Opposition we'll get too; it will get to a point where only journos will give a damn about the fraught but comparatively functional Gillard-Rudd relationship. How quickly things turn: but that's politics for ya.

Back to Washington, and it was Roosevelt's predecessor Abraham Lincoln who said, "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power”. After this week the government realises that it has the power, and that by standing up to Abbott it accrues power rather than losing it. It will be interesting to see how it rises to a challenge that Kevin Rudd has already failed, and which Abbott is watching slip away from him too.

The passion of Sophie Mirabella

I met Sophie Panopoulos at a Liberal students' conference in the late 1980s and at the time, as I've tweeted earlier, thought she was a great sucking hole of need. If she was a bloke she'd have a chip on her shoulder, but let's not be sexist. We all wanted to be MPs at that age, but I underestimated how much sheer need would count toward that end.

Liberals of my generation were convinced of two things, apart from our own special brilliance. Firstly, that the Fraser government had failed so utterly that the Liberal Party could and should be recreated from scratch. People who revere John Howard and regard the Liberal Party as something he invented and shaped in his own image have a bad case of this. I remember one debate supporting pokies as "voluntary taxation", not just focusing on the revenue stream that would enable other taxes to be cut but also the very idea of non-compulsion in the collection thereof.

The second thing of which we were utterly convinced is that being a staffer offered an apprenticeship to modern politics that was quicker and more comprehensive than building a community profile over decades and then eventually convincing that community that you should represent it in the hallowed halls.

Panopolous was briefly a staffer in the NSW government, as was I; she ended up working in a cafe soon after moving from Melbourne to take up the role, as I was told by someone who enjoyed her change of employment more than I did. I went to that cafe and while she refused to take my order, she plonked down the coffee so that it splashed me. "Sorr-ee", she said, and it's the last time I saw her. Yes, it was years ago, but I still don't remember having done anything to her to deserve that. Those who did deserve an apology, members of the Stolen Generation, were denied one from Sophie when she boycotted the House on that memorable day in 2008 on utterly bogus grounds.

I noticed that she missed out on becoming a staffer when Howard came to office, and apparently she had never been a staffer in the Kennett government. It's one thing to admire her, as many conservatives did from a distance, but it's quite another to have her in one's office, berating the receptionist and patronising public servants. Her peers, like Tony Smith and Mitch Fifield, got those jobs. Even people who were freshers in Liberal student politics when she was la grande dame, like Josh Frydenberg and Kelly O'Dwyer, got those jobs.

It never occurred to me that Sophie Panopoulos would make it as a Liberal MP in Victoria. I assumed she would just be preference fodder for vacuous box-ticker candidates like Tony Smith, and then go on to be some sort of backroom player in that state. I should have known better: both Bronwyn Bishop and David Clarke in NSW offered nothing besides the talent to make other people confuse her sheer rage and inadequacy with energy and depth. I expected her to become a spokesperson - like Melinda Tankard Reist, the sort of person who'd start off with a good cause but whose lack of discipline in the face of a media whirlwind would see her branch out into the bat-shit apocalyptic, or even someone who started there like tobacco gobshites.

It's the "should have known better" that explains why moderate and other Liberals at the time let such a person slip through a selection process that should be more rigorous at vetting people. Not only that, but having beaten such a system makes perpetrators scorn it, in the same way that Groucho Marx jokingly didn't want to join a club that would have him as a member.

Anyway, make it she did and out came the attack-dog lines, hoping to give her opinions an intensity that they lacked in integrity: Petro Georgiou and Judi Moylan as "terrorists", Gillard as Gaddafi, blah blah blah.

The only way you could have any sympathy for such a person is for her to be attacked by Belinda Neal, less an opposite than a mirror image on the House benches. The same slightly questionable use of personal relationships to get the mentoring that young men apparently get more readily. The same hatchet faces and repellent personalities, except to those who must be charmed: kiss the hand you cannot bite. As Labor politics might have given Neal a veneer of compassion for the downtrodden, so in conservative politics Panopoulos might have sought some appearance of status and class from defending the monarchy, the Bush Administration, the Howard government, etc.

I have no idea what the truth is in this or that. Those issues are yet to play out in court and other forums and none of what appears here should indicate any opinion one way or another on issues that have nothing to do with me really. I have noted the division between those who can help Sophie and those who can't; I note the arc by which one person started off as powerful and helpful to Sophie and who over time became less powerful and helpful to her.

Like US politician Newt Gingrich, Panopoulos/Mirabella spends so much time with mouth-breathers that she is regarded, and regards herself, as intelligent to the point of genius. I remember seeing the video from which this image was taken:

Never before or since have I seen her look so utterly calm and in control. That was the moment she truly arrived. I have no idea whether or not it was the happiest day of her life, but surely it must be close. Surrounded by nongs and imbeciles, she was beatific: I half-expected her to do that air-scooping wave that the Queen does.

Part of the problem with the intensity over-intellect approach is that you're going to lose it at the wrong moment. That's what happened when she got chucked out of the House at the most crucial juncture of her career. She's a member of shadow cabinet in a hung parliament; had the carbon price votes gone the other way she could well have become a Cabinet Minister with billions of taxpayer dollars at her disposal. Now, she got sent off at a point where her side was miles in front but her opponents were starting to catch up. In sport, players who do that become known as pikers and are spoken ill of for decades.

One of the 20-or-so bills passed as part of the carbon price was to transform the steel industry. The Leader of the Opposition made a point of touring steelworks as part of his campaign to drum up opposition to the whole carbon tax price thing. The person responsible for developing a coherent Coalition position on the steel industry, carbon thing or no, was the Shadow Minister for Innovation, Industry and Science, Sophie Mirabella MP. Oh well.

The whole scope of Australian industry is pretty broad and even a committed person would struggle to identify how exactly the carbon mechanism will affect it. So, Mirabella falls short of lofty expectations - but is it really that lofty to expect the Shadow Minister to produce something more than press releases? You can criticise Abbott for saying no, no, no all the time - I certainly do - but in the absence of solid backup by someone with nothing better to do than provide it, the guy has to say something.

Let's go to a policy issue squarely within her scope and competence. When I knew Sophie Panopoulos she was big on voluntary student unionism (VSU). She was a MP in 2005 when the Higher Education Support Amendment (Abolition of Compulsory Up-front Student Union Fees) Bill 2005 was passed, and spoke glowingly of it. She might not have been a prime mover behind that legislation but she was entitled to be proud of it in a way that pollies do when one of their big causes gets enacted. When that was reversed she was suspended from Parliament - in a hung parliament, where her persuasive skills might have seen this achievement retained.

When she was chucked out Peter Slipper was in the chair. Slipper has never been the Coalition's poster-boy and is much, much less so now. It's one thing to disrespect such a man and to play to your pals who all disdain him too: but in an environment where so much is at stake, where the Liberal Party expects that every man and woman will do his/her duty, a senior frontbencher should have enough discipline to keep the focus on the main game. Note how Jamie Briggs was slapped down for expressing an opinion, and contrast it with Abbott's apparent indulgence of Mirabella dropping the ball on the try line.

Tony Abbott will not get rid of Mirabella. Others tear down wacky right-whingers; he builds them up and defends them no matter what. It is likely that the next leader of the Liberal Party will give her a spell in the back paddocks, but Abbott will stick by her to the death. If he really had to get rid of her, if her public image became so bad that it affected Lib polling and the backroom boys began to lobby him to get rid of her, it would be the sort of thing that would make Abbott wring his hands. This isn't because Mirabella commands some vast number of votes - she'd influence no vote in Canberra beyond her own. On the other hand, he'd have doubts it for the rest of his life - and this is a guy who just doesn't do self-doubt and examination.

Indi (Mirabella's electorate) is within the Murray-Darling basin. If Tony Burke and Craig Knowles aren't all over that electorate they have really lost their touch. This isn't to say that Labor can win Indi, though stranger things have happened. They do have a once-in-a-generation chance to mess with the heads of a political opponent who has given them so much grief, in that opponent's heartland, at a time of hung parliament - and if they pass it up Labor activists will be right to disown them.

The Liberals of Indi took her on the basis that she was a go-getter and someone with a future. Having your local member in Cabinet is no small thing for any rural community. There must be some doubt as to whether they'll get there with the incumbent; I bet Panopoulos/Mirabella has burnt so many bridges with local Libs that she'd now be up for some sort of levy in that legislation passed today. Is there a Liberal preselection candidate in Indi (or moving there soon) who could knock her off? Will there be an exception to the Thou Shalt Not Knock Off A Sitting Member rule made for our Soph - and if so, is there a Wangaratta Windsor or a Benalla Katter who can win an election without having a party behind him/her? Do the Victorian Libs want to put another jewel-in-the-crown in play by hanging onto her?

Mirabella is, however, representative of a generation in the Victorian Libs who have been around long enough to appear on the public stage and make a few errors but not long enough to get the big jobs and make the big decisions: Tony Smith is bored bored bored but has not proven himself successful at anything since he learned how Peter Costello likes his coffee. Greg Hunt has put in so much work defending the indefensible that he will find it hard to rebuild any sort of credibility. Mitch Fifield is going the way of Chris Pyne or Michael Ronaldson, a politician of no achievement besides getting himself re-elected. These people were going to run the entire Liberal Party, and with it the country: now, they are just going to watch the demise of one of their own (oh yes) with a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God helplessness.

The rise and fall of Sophie Panopoulos Mirabella MP involves more than just one person and those who care about her, who have watched her go από την ύβρη προς Νέμεσις in such a short time. It involves the death of several big ideas:

• that you have to be accepted for the front you present to the world;
• that you accrue class and status for yourself by defending those with class and status;
• that you can reshape the Liberal Party and the country any damn way you please, and that anyone who doesn't like it can just piss off;
• that intensity makes up where integrity falls short; and
• that ferocity conquers all.

Like Andrew Bolt, she's still not sorry. She never will be, because she can't be. She'll think that her failure came because she wasn't intense or aggressive enough, and there will be enough of those who support her in that, to the point where the rest of us who point and jeer won't matter one bit.

When you're like her, as many Liberals are, you can't self-examine and apologise without unravelling. If you thought the unhinging was bad, just you wait for the unravelling.

Where journalism fails

The whole idea of journalism is to go to people who have varying kinds of power and influence over our lives and tell us what they're up to, because we don't have the time to be everywhere at once like big news organisations can.

There are plenty of examples where mainstream media organisations execute this magnificently well. As with other fields of human activity, journalism is done very well very rarely, done well-to-average-to-somewhat-below-average most of the time, and done appallingly more often than is acceptable. Even more unacceptable, poor journalism refuses to lie still and be buried as with other types of human waste, but will go and wrap itself around lofty principles like Freedom Of Speech or Excellent Journalism in order that its sheer crapness might not perish from the earth.

Bolt's been done and he doesn't care anyway. Here are two examples from award-winning journalists who should know better, who don't know or care that you can't complain about journos having too little time or resources when you produce imaginary bullshit from real events.

Earlier today ABC journalist Helen Tzarimas used her Twitter account to advertise her role in a non-story:

It was just as bad as it looks. The Foreign Minister was overseas engaging in foreign policy, and instead of being asked what he is doing Helen and the gang report chew up time and resources with what he's not doing.

Kevin Rudd wasn't running for Prime Minister yesterday and he probably won't run tomorrow. You think the media would have learned from Peter Costello - he spent 19 years in parliament not running for Prime Minister. Whole careers in journalism have begun, lived and died in producing the thousands upon thousands of radio and TV and newspaper things about how not Prime Minister Peter Costello was. When Costello quit in 2009 the supposedly serious Australian media couldn't believe it was all over.

The comeback of Kevin Rudd is exactly that kind of non-story. What's worse is that, for all their "insider" pretensions, you can bet that the parliamentary press gallery will be the last to know if Rudd takes his former job back; the guy who weeds the gardens at the US embassy will have a much better idea than all of the doyen(ne)s and other rabbits who make up the Australian media.

When I called Tzarimas on this, she replied:

That's right: an experienced journalist seriously wanted me to believe that I can tell the Foreign Minister what to do from my phone. Was she trying to deflect criticism or did she just not get it? I want to know what the government is doing, not what it isn't doing. You can make up crap all day really:

• Kevin Rudd refused to rule out a tilt at the Bathurst 1000 this weekend;
• Helen Tzarimas refused to rule out something she never really mentioned;
• etc.

When the news is full of bullshit like that you make it harder to defend good journalism and freedom of the press. All sorts of bullshit rumours floats and swirls around in the crevices between journalism and politics; very few of them get an airing so there's no excuse for this crap.

Crap leads us almost inevitably to Annabel Crabb. Ken Henry spends his life in the interface between government and the economy - you have to work hard to belittle such a man but Crabb succeeds. She does her usual trick of starting with a small anecdote in the hope that it might illustrate a wider point; she either chooses the wrong anecdote or draws the wrong conclusion from it, or both as she does here:

"I don't like change," he confided to the patient tillmaster.

At the time, I thought it fascinating that the man responsible for so much Australian money should harbour a personal distaste for having it in his pocket.

Henry's tax reforms are all about increased efficiency: more money collected requiring less work for the revenue-raisers and the effect on economic activity in the economy either unaffected much or enhanced in some way. If you can have a $2 coin in your pocket this is to be preferred to a dozen jangly silver coins - it doesn't mean you have less money, simply fewer coins. Efficiency: Henry lives it. It's a hallmark of genuine leadership that people in exalted positions live their values. Yet again, Crabb has a firm grasp of the wrong end of the stick.

This week, he was back again in Parliament House's Great Hall, once more rehearsing the arguments for the sorts of reforms he advocated in the review of tax that was commissioned at Parliament's last big think-in.

No, he wasn't rehearsing - you don't rehearse for an event that has passed. Henry was reiterating the case for a proposal to a different audience, after events had changed perspective on that proposal.

"It can't be very easy, being Ken Henry", she patronises, then compares a government revenue stream that adapts to the nation's future economic development to a piece of jewellery and a fancy car. She then gives a perfect demonstration of the pearls-before swine nature of journalists being present at important events and misreporting them:

"More important though is the general point that good policy outcomes are more likely where there has been high-quality debate. Good policy outcomes are much more difficult to secure where visionary ideas, big challenges and creative approaches are floated for the first time in the announcement of a policy decision."

Dr Henry's patience demonstrates why he is a hit with Northern hairy-nosed wombats.

If that was a parody nobody would believe it - what should have been a bracing slap in the face for every sorry excuse for a journalist was, for Crabb, just a pretext to talk about wildlife.

She then goes and blames on "politics" what is more properly the fault of the media. The following two paragraphs should have been collapsed into one.

"I mean, let's not forget, the GST in the first place was meant to be applied to food and services," Mr Briggs observed. "I think it has to be discussed ... if you're serious about having a tax forum."

If you're going to have a tax forum of indefinite duration and resources, yes; if you've got two days with a lot to talk about, you have to draw the line somewhere. As it was, the sheer breadth and depth of the debate made the heads of Crabb and Professor Judith Sloan spin. Every single Coalition MP (and Professor Sloan) said exactly the same thing about the Tax Forum, that because the Tax Forum just past covered only 99% of taxes levied in this country, it was some sort of sham - and to say so is "uncontroversial"?

Having authored this - under the circumstances - fairly uncontroversial remark, Mr Briggs spent the rest of the day being kicked about by Wayne Swan and disowned by his leader

No, this was the story of the day: those who dealt with 99% of the nation's taxes were drowned out in the media by part of the 1% that wasn't up for discussion. It was a joke. Briggs' leader has no right to disown any sort of specific proposal given his own vacuity, but once again the journosphere failed to call him on it.

Speaking of vacuity:

The Member for Bennelong, John Alexander, suffered a similar fate a few months ago when he expressed the opinion at an electorate function in August that weekend penalty rates could do with some fiddling ...

The whole idea that penalty rates are some crippling impost on Australian capitalism is an idea that was fairly feeble in the 1970s. You show me a business whose success or failure depends upon penalty rates and I'll show you a badly-run business.

Members of Parliament - even newbies like Alexander and Briggs - have vast resources at their disposal. They've had months to prepare for the Tax Forum. Both men claim they got into politics to make good things happen. And all they can come up with is GST on food and bloody penalty rates, neither of which are within the fairly broad remit of the event. God help us. I wondered why Crabb referred to the Tax Forum as a "think-in", until I realised that thinkers will be abandoning Parliament House to the likes of Briggs and Alexander in a matter of weeks.

Someone like Crabb should be calling out these dummies, as well as the media auction of fatuities that arose from their comments. Is she doing that, though? Is she hell:

When did we stop thinking it was a good idea for backbenchers to have opinions on things?

As Greg Jericho tweeted today, it depends who you mean by 'we'. Backbenchers go all boring and rehearsed so that you don't get Annabel Crabb and Helen Tzarimas making up crap about what you're not doing and ignoring what you are doing.

And as far as the GST goes, it's not as if there aren't reasonable arguments to be had about it - the thing's 10 years old, after all.

Perhaps if the tax summit had been allowed to discuss it, we'd have heard them.

And if those discussions had been "allowed", Annabel, you'd have ignored them, like you ignored and belittled everything else that went on.

Are you suggesting Briggs was "silenced"? Go on, you know you want to. Briggs is a Member of Parliament. He has no shortage of small-f forums* on which to address GST generally or GST on food. The idea that by circumscribing the Tax Forum from 100% to a mere 99% is a dagger at the heart of Jamie Briggs and that his chance even to speak has forever gone, is rubbish.

Mind you, the comment about Alexander and his tennis racket is fair comment. Alexander is more significant as an ex-tennis player than as a contributor to public debate. The man has clearly peaked at the age of [insert Alexander's age when he won that really big tournament].

Journalism fails in the insistence that what isn't there matters more than what is. Genuinely crappy journalism, the kind that props up dictatorships does this all the time. This week we saw a real shift to real news with real things to report and analyse - and two experienced journalists, Helen Tzarimas and Annabel Crabb, couldn't handle it. We look to the ABC for the real news but this week they were appalling. Feed us crap, they insisted, and if we don't get the crap we expect then we'll make some up. We are all impoverished by journalism like this and the editors who make it possible.

Pearls before swine at the Tax Forum

Journalism on the Tax Forum has sucked really, really hard. It shows the limits of the Australian media in their basic job of telling us what's going on, and how we are being governed. It shows their limits for readers/consumers/citizens/taxpayers in showing us how things might be for this aspect of life in our country and what we can do in order to shape that future.

Nobody expected the Tax Forum to be some be-all-and-end-all session where some ideas would triumph and be legislated while others would be kyboshed, never to be heard of again. It isn't the Grand Final of Tax and it's sloppy reporting to express it that way (journos might claim that they're bringing in readers by hyping it, but they'd be wrong about that too). Equally, given both the breadth and depth of experience represented there and the possibilities in a hung parliament, it is not just a "gabfest" either (another journo cliche that fails to either heighten interest or elucidate the issues).

Let's look at the last major attempt at tax reform. The idea of a GST was first raised in the Asprey Report, commissioned by the Whitlam Government in 1975, after value-added taxes had been introduced in European countries and US states for some years. It was raised again in fits and starts over the years, including in a tax summit not dissimilar to this one in 1985, and in Fightback! in 1993. It was still a live issue at the following election, when John Howard denied that he'd introduce one, and at the following one where he said he would.

There was a scare campaign around the GST when it was proposed in the 1990s, which is amazing for something covered so comprehensively. The Democrats amended it at the last minute to exempt food, education and healthcare. After it was enacted there was a high degree of adjustment to and acceptance of the new system (which was accompanied by Business Activity Statements and other compliance issues that were not adequately explained). The degree of acceptance and adjustment is something that the media at the time played a very small part in bringing about, whereas it played a very large part in hyping up the scare campaign.

Not having learned anything from any wide-ranging previous efforts, Peter van Onselen complains that GST and mining tax were left out. You've got to draw a line somewhere, but oh no - it's censorship:

The agenda for the forum deliberately omitted the GST, the mining tax and superannuation reforms. Three of the most important areas for taxation policy debate aren't important enough for this government to open them up to specific sessions.

Oh, fuck off. The GST alone took a quarter century. As for superannuation, rather than the various experts coming to Canberra to get sneered at by ignorant clowns in the press gallery, the relevant minister (Bill Shorten) has been going to them - something similar is apparently happening with the mining tax.

As it is, the gamut of this event is so broad that it is likely that good ideas (such as reforms to funding of local government) will not get the chance to be fully considered. Or as van Onselen puts it:

... general sessions where they will be quickly moved on from very limited discussion. It's a joke.

You can't win with Peter van Onselen, but you have to do what you can.

The Henry Report was treated like a joke way back when it was released, last year. There was a lot of facile media coverage at the time about wombats and such, then that died away. Then the Rudd government said it would implement some things and not others without any sort of debate as to why (and no hope that they might change their minds). The alternative government did not respond to the report itself or the government's reaction in any meaningful way. There it sat, another artefact of public-policy archaeology, until Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor insisted that the Henry Review have the follow-up it deserved.

The Forum should have been part of a wider debate, linked to issues like housing prices and the two-speed economy and the ageing society - you know, irrelevant, dry-as-dust stuff like that. In such a process all of the scare campaigns could have been tried on and fizzled out before they started clogging up Hansard.

It's easy to have sympathy for the states not keeping their end of the bargain when GST revenues started flowing. Ever since the commonwealth assumed full income taxation powers during World War II, the states have struggled to find the funds to operate the many services for which they are responsible: schools, healthcare, roads and transport. But it's time something was done. Glory-seeking politicians gravitate towards the federal arena, but it is at state level the heavy lifting of government really goes on.

Explains why glory-seeking journalists will bypass a number of state capitals to fly across the continent to sneer at amateurs daring to venture considered opinions on matters in federal politics rather than cover complicated issues in healthcare, infrastructure, law-and-order or infrastructure provision.

It's a political decision, not just a tax-wonk decision, that a government that spends taxes should be responsible for raising them. It is perfectly understandable that, with so many participants and so little time, the Tax Forum concentrated on real issues it could address.

Ross Gittins snarled in agreement with van Onselen:

If you're detecting a touch of cynicism in my reaction to all this, you're not wrong. Economists, business people and professional lobbyists would happily meet in Parliament House once a month to preach to each other about the need for tax reform.

But if ever there was a country that runs a mile at the hint of tax reform, we're it. Most of the rest of the developed world introduced a GST in the 1960s and '70s, but we trembled on the brink for 25 years before taking the plunge in 2000.

The way tax reform works in Australia is that whenever governments are persuaded to introduce some major reform, the opposition automatically opposes it and starts a hugely successful scare campaign, urged on by every adversely affected interest group, the shock jocks and any other media outlets looking for cheap cheers ... And the polls say the man with the neanderthal views on tax reform will be swept into office at the first opportunity.

When it comes to tax reform, Australians are utterly lily-livered.

We can only act on the information we're given, Ross, and personally I think someone like the Economics Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald should play a greater role than he has:

• Television and radio are no good for putting forward complex ideas about tax reform in Australia.
• There are foreign news outlets that do this stuff but it's hard to extrapolate foreign experiences, costs and systems to what happens in Australia.
• The Murdoch press aren't going to do it.

Our only hope for solid and well-presented information is the Fairfax press and perhaps the ABC's online offerings, as well as a few specialist econo-wonk blogs.

Instead, we get both kinds of reporting on the Tax Forum of which the Australian media is capable:

• Straight who-said-what reporting, with everything equally valid and no qualification of what was said; and
• OMFG, tax is, like, soooo boring, not at all as cool and exciting as, say, sitting through inane questions in parliamentary committees (and not realising they're inane), watching the Opposition Leader wave around a boning knife or getting bawled out by a DJ.

Both of them are fairly adolescent approaches to a subject that affects all adults, but which is inaccessible to most adults because of its specialist, jargon-ridden nature.

None of the ideas put forward at the Tax Forum were particularly new. Each one of them had been carefully thought out. Some of the proposals are actually in place in other jurisdictions - but whether or not we can see these taxes at work in the real world, the fact is there is an extensive literature about different taxes and their impacts on business investment, poverty, employment and other socio-economic factors. Journos, and their editors, have no excuse for not having done their homework and reporting/analysing the Tax Forum in a way that adds value. There are no boring topics, only boring writers - like Sid Maher:

THE Productivity Commission chairman, Gary Banks, has sounded a warning to the government against using the tax system to change community behaviour in areas such as gambling, road congestion and carbon pollution.

Really? Let's see:

... Mr Banks warned that raising taxes to change behaviour had to be done in "the right way to the right extent".

"That is very hard," Mr Banks told the forum. He argued that much of the detail on how to change behaviour with taxes was "unresolved" and risked authorities' ability to convince the community that the taxes were worthwhile.

On carbon pricing, Mr Banks said "the complexities are unbounded" ...

Sid, he didn't say not to do it - he said, be careful about the way you do it. This is basic journalism failure right there. If I thought I could do anything to avert further failure by reporting Sid Maher to some sort of disciplinary and remediation outfit, I'd do it - but there isn't, so know that if you want to know what's going on then Sid Maher can't help you.

George Megalogenis might, though, provided he's not in journalism-for-journalism-sake mode. Starts off with a high-minded denunciation of "the Australian political system" - all very lofty so far - then this:

As Ken Henry, former Treasury secretary and now special adviser to Julia Gillard, observed: "You could have written the script to this before coming in." Employers want a tax cut; the unions want to deny them.

The Tax Forum isn't a wage negotiation George, it's a discussion about the way the government raises its money, hopefully in such a way that doesn't get too much in the way of business and inequality and other laudable goals. But, in amongst all those people talking past one another you've actually found some people at loggerheads: one person says one thing, another says something else, TAX CONFLICT CLASH SHOCK and hold the front page!

Here, however - and again toward the end of his article (why does News Ltd bury the good stuff?) - Megalogenis is dead right:

Imagine if Swan had held a tax forum last year. The mining tax would be law by now, and a budget surplus locked in for 2012-13.

Anything that does come out of the Tax Forum will not be considered carefully by the media. There will be ignorant statements by people who weren't part of the process and these will be treated equally with the dry and detailed work of the tax experts - for the sake of balance.

I expected better of Megalogenis. I hoped for better from the media generally. I even hoped for better from Joe Hockey:

The Tax Forum reminded me a lot of your own derp-and-CLERP approach to corporate law reform under Howard, Joe. Some issues are too big to just pooh-pooh like that, as you used to know before you got ahead of yourself. You can lose the smuggled-in apostrophes too.

We need to know how we are taxed, and what our options are for being taxed going forward. It's dull stuff and arcane, so we need journalism that can explain it to us. They won't and can't, so we turn away from them - and we're the ones with the problem for not consuming enough "proper" journalism?

Update 7 Oct: Peter Martin's coverage is excellent. Of all people, Jack the Insider does the essential element of all successful change programs - create the burning platform - and in the first half of the article. Who needs journalists?

Wait for the rest of your life

In this article, Amanda Vanstone is pretending to a wisdom she clearly lacks. She has somehow become less knowledgeable about how government works for the country and the economy than she did in Opposition.

Schools, research and health will have to wait till we pay off our debt.

We've been here before. When the debt gets paid off, people like Amanda Vanstone regard education and health as fripperies and call for tax cuts, which means that schools, research and health get cut no matter what.

In 1996, Amanda Vanstone became Education Minister in the newly elected Federal government. She came and spoke to a NSW Young Liberal thing which I attended. Moderate liberals of my generation regarded her as Good Old Mandy, whose Heart was in the Right Place and whose abrasiveness when riled was entertaining; she was one of the few moderates who'd get up on her hind legs and give as good as she got rather than smirk her way to irrelevance. Young Libs five, ten years younger than me who were at uni saw her as the psycho bitch who shredded the education budget and made it impossible for Liberal students to get elected to student organisations. The tension in that room was palpable and something of an ambush for the organisers, who started off sanguine and moved to alarm through the course of the night. It was like those eastern European leaders a few years earlier who had addressed crowds of sullen workers for years only to be suddenly confronted with boos and abuse.

Education and healthcare are major generators of internal demand and of our economic future, you dingbat! They are not optional extras.

When the global financial crisis hit, governments stepped into action to keep their economies turning over. That was a good thing.

It sure was. Strange that the Liberals opposed it though.

But the money did not come out of thin air. Governments went into more debt.

As opposed to what, higher taxes? If you don't support economic stimulus, have the guts to do what Turnbull and Abbott did and say that you oppose it no matter how it comes. The idea that economic stimulus should be "a good thing" but any measure to bring it about is 'bad' is a sorry attempt to box clever.

Many believe that our government spent far more than it needed to and spent it unwisely. We now pay $5 billion a year, or $20 billion in a four-year budget cycle, in interest alone. If we start to climb out of the problem and pay back the same each year in principal, it becomes $10 billion a year and $40 billion over the budget cycle. That's billions our economy is generating that we can't spend on medical research, schools and other things.

I doubt that every cent the Howard government spent could be accused of being carefully targeted, Amanda. The economy wouldn't have the ability to generate debt repayments if it had hit the wall, which it would have if it hadn't been fiscally stimulated in 2008.

But some governments still seem addicted to spending beyond their means ... In Europe, the problem with the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) debt has been understood for some time.

Actually, that acronym is PIIGS - the other "I" stands for Italy, to which Vanstone was Australian Ambassador for some years. If she's going to give us some insight into the European financial crisis you'd think she'd be in a position to do so. Alternatively, if she's going to pull her punches - well, that would be a first for Amanda Vanstone, but basically the idea that she should be so strident about Greece or Portugal being "addicted to spending beyond their means" while skating around Italy - a much bigger economy and a much bigger problem, in both financial and regulatory terms.

The PIIGS countries had levied relatively low taxes. Each of those countries had established tax-avoidance mechanisms for people who had both great capacity to pay and much to be grateful to government for, gratitude for which was expressed not as tax but as political donations or bribes. To say that lower taxes are an answer to our current predicament is less valid than it was four years ago. When Vanstone does turn her attention to Italy, she fails to note that it has a populist conservative government with little in the way of core economic policy. Cheer up Australia, it could be worse.

Note a recurring theme of this article:

The problems facing the world economy are not new. They have just been getting more attention of late ... In Europe, the problem with the ... debt has been understood for some time ... I know firsthand how little Australians care for being told they are no longer getting something for nothing, or as cheaply as they did in the past.

This is designed to create the impression that Vanstone knows what she's talking about, which she doesn't. If they're so well understood, you'd hope that the responses would be smarter than they are. Vanstone might have copped some disappointment from those who'd done well, but what made people really angry was that she cut things that were important and productive. If you're going to make this narrative All About Amanda, however, then one angry person is the same as any other and they could all rack off.

Cuts are easier to take if there's a unifying narrative: from the PIIGS, and the Howard government, we learn that if there are just swingeing cuts then it just builds resentments which play out in all sorts of unexpected and unmanageable ways.

I was part of a government that did the hard yards of finding savings to put our budget back into the black after Labor last had its hand in the till. And then we paid off debt, and set up the Future Fund.

But you didn't restore funding to health or education, did you?

This is an idle exercise. It assumes that nobody who has never been a government minister is allowed to criticise the actions of government, or that any and all such examination of public issues must necessarily be vacuous (a wish list? Really?). I left out the "barbie and a good red" because it reinforces the idleness and indulgence Vanstone is trying to convey, and definitely not because Vanstone herself can pack away the red when she chose to do so.

... in the last budget, Treasurer Wayne Swan was asking to borrow another $50 billion. With that spending record, what will we do if GFC2 breaks out? What if Asia stumbles and we have a few years of lower commodity prices?

Luckily we had the stimulus in 2008 otherwise we'd be stuffed, eh Amanda?

We could all help by avoiding the indulgence shown by Europeans who keep demanding more.

In particular, billion-dollar bludges like this have to be knocked on the head. Education and health aren't bludges or indulgences, they're central to the present and future of the nation - in a way that, say, The Situation isn't.

The government should have the strength to restrict spending and the capacity to stop wasting money ... Swan recognises the need for tweaking.

To that end, the government must not be run by Tony Abbott, Andrew Robb, Barnaby Joyce and Joe Hockey, and must include Swan.

Also, it could get on with helping to boost productivity by recognising its industrial relations overkill.

Part of boosting productivity involves having the clowns who ran Foster's and Bluescope into the ground sent to Christmas Island, or somewhere other than in positions of power over Australian workplaces. If there are industrial relations changes to be made (see my article coming soon elsewhere on this), chances are Swan and his people will make a better fist of it than the clueless and risk-averse Liberals.

Vanstone started the article attempting to create a fug of certainty, and ends it with a shriek of a question. In between she wants to create a narrative of her own wisdom, and that of the Howard government, versus the stumblebum incumbents. It doesn't work and shows the government in a more favourable light than she might have intended. When you consider that there have been more developments in health and education in the past year (despite the budgetary position and the hung parliament) than there was in eleven years with Amanda looking on - it seems that Good Old Mandy's bark and bite are not what they were.

Tattered washing on the line

It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

- H L Mencken

Now that the Coalition are riding so high in the polls, they and their media shills are calling for Rudd to replace Gillard, or claiming some special insight into the Labor mind that means Rudd will replace Gillard any day now ... any day now ... any day ...

I could go on about journalists, how stupid they are to run a story that so obviously has no substance and how easily they can be stampeded. Many of them are the self-same people who believed that Peter Costello would challenge John Howard any day now ... any day ... and who chewed up hours and hectares of media space with non-stories to that effect. How's this for a vacuous piece, by the same journalist who insisted throughout 2007 that bad polls were good news for John Howard: any day now, any day ... Shame on you if you fool me once, etc.

I'm more concerned about the Liberal Party, and why they are jonesing (pardon the pun) for a change of leadership. Why not adopt an attitude of quiet confidence that they can beat whomever Labor puts up? This is what winners do:

• When it became clear in 2009 that NSW Labor Premier Nathan Rees started to reek of stale piss and Joe Tripodi's cigars, Barry O'Farrell was pretty sanguine about whether Rees should stay or be replaced; the NSW Coalition was rightly confident they could beat any figurehead atop NSW Labor;
• In 2007, Kevin Rudd teased Costello about not having the ticker to run and expressed confidence (well-founded as it turned out) at being able to beat Howard, Costello or whomever else the Liberals put up;
• In 1995, John Howard was not calling on Labor to roll Keating or predicting that Kim Beazley would challenge him any day now ... any day ...

Given that Gillard is so on the nose, why bother invoking Rudd? Rudd put Abbott squarely in his place in the National Press Club debate on health and would probably have done so again in the context of an election campaign. On what basis would Rudd be even more of a patsy for the Libs than Gillard? On what basis would Labor vote so as to maximise the Coalition's chances? There are two facets to the answer, neither flattering to the Libs.

First, their central (and seemingly only) criticism of the government is that it is a do-nothing government. On the table between now and Christmas is what Tim Fischer would call "bucketloads of extinguishment" of that notion: carbon price, the disability scheme, broadband, and other issues besides. If Labor change leaders and Rudd reinstates his old way of doing things, the prospect of actual achievements disappear. Instead of a mass bloodletting within Rudd Labor II there would be the slow spread of fear and loathing, like that of East Germany in the 1950s when the populace realised they were trapped and could only sullenly welcome their totalitarian overlords.

Second, there is this notion that Abbott can't handle being beaten by a woman. However overblown it may or may not be in Mitchell's book, there is a kernel of truth to it. Gillard vaulted to being a leadership contender by being Shadow Minister for Health to Abbott as Minister, taking him apart forensically until her good work was undone by having to sell Latham's Medicare Gold.

If Abbott were confident in himself and his masculinity in taking on a woman - as O'Farrell was in taking on Keneally, as Kennett was with Kirner - he'd not bother yearning to have Rudd back. Those men would have been more gracious about their opposite number's birthdays, knowing there was no mileage in being otherwise. He, and proxies like Shanahan and Savva or even dills like Katharine Murphy, protest too much about Gillard. Why?

INCREASINGLY, Julia Gillard's days feel numbered. That's an objective call.

It's subjective because it isn't manifested in any testable reality. Murphy's colleagues have undergone mass hypnosis to this effect and are trying to project a reality so hat they can justify the time they've spent on chasing a story that simply isn't there.

... Gillard has floated past the point of no return, and has washed up in the worst possible leadership zone - the "destabilisation" phase, where every half-baked piece of garbage takes on a resonance it doesn't actually deserve.

And half-baked garbage is a specialty of Murphy and at least 90% of her colleagues, which is why I repeat my call for them to be boiled in their own piss. The Finkelstein Royal Commission should be thus empowered.

Fundamentally, Abbott believes he has Rudd's measure, and the quicker the Labor Party can tear down Gillard and replace her with Rudd, the quicker Abbott can see him off for a second time. Such is Abbott's self-belief (which, in fairness to him, does reflect an objective fact - he did help see Rudd off once before).

It is an objective fact that Rudd was rolled as PM. It is an objective fact that Abbott was Opposition Leader at the time. It is not an objective fact that Abbott inflicted the wound on Labor, or that he has some mesmeric power to force them to switch leaders to suit him.

Julia Gillard is getting on with it, in her own stumbly way, and nothing Abbott does is working. The Coalition pulled out the big guns on Craig Thomson, and all that happened was that they looked mean for threatening to prevent him attending the birth of his child - and their shadow Attorney-General was cruelly exposed, a man at the topmost pinnacle of posh if ever there was one. They are running out of expedient options, which will mean that they will have to re-examine the way they do things - and that won't be pretty, as we saw in the 1980s and '90s.

The Liberals want to beat Rudd because he beat them in 2007, and had he beaten them again they may have learned some lessons about why they lost and adjusted their position accordingly. Instead, the Howard restoration fantasy is left undisturbed within the Libs, and they remain stuck in their abysm of pish. The need to carefully rethink their position can be fended off with the creation of an atmosphere of crisis, buttressed by the fantasy that they are this close to winning back power, that the supposedly flaky independents will succumb to the inevitability of the Howard restoration any day now ... any day now ...

This rhetorical flourish was described by one Labor person ...

Media coverage doesn't get much weaker than that": "one Labor person" indeed. Murphy should have had this flung back in her face and threatened with the sack if she ever turned in crap like this again. Imagine being a journalism graduate who can't get work, reading that and wondering why Murphy and Shanahan can't be cleaned out (or made to report on actual substantial stories). Imagine having a Parliament chock-full of the issues of the day and being able to see nothing more than the monkey-house of Question Time. The real problem with journalism is the editors who not only allow this stuff to get through, but who commission it.

Old-school media management says that once you've convinced journalists to run the story you want them to run, you've got it made because everyone just consumes media unthinkingly. The sheer apathy with which people greet the careful misguided framing of issues requires a rethink of this approach.

I promised that I wouldn't go after the journalistic equivalents of stale bean soup that you get from people like Murphy and Shanahan, but I can't help it. We need better media than they can provide. Bloggers are trying to fill the gap but there's only so much you can do; it's first aid for a deeper problem that the professionals can't and won't address. Tony Abbott presents the sort of brash, utterly baseless confidence that you get from media executives like John Hartigan or David Leckie, and journos are drawn to that like flies to shit. They can't see that Abbott is a fraud because they can't afford to, which weakens their ability to tell us what is going on in Federal politics.

Abbott's stunt-based politics as a means for deflecting attention from real and big issues works for journalists, not for the public at large. Policy-nerd Rudd had sky-high ratings and lost them when he dropped important policies for the sake of expediency. Policy-nerd Gillard was also well regarded and lost them when she too became just another expedient pol. Abbott fans like Paul Kelly can only maintain their position by confusing the Coalition's high poll ratings (which are anti-Labor rather than pro-Coalition) and glossing over the rusted-on dislike of Abbott, who is a prophylactic on the chances of a Coalition government.

Abbott has thrown everything his reptilian, short-term brain can think of at the Gillard government, nothing has worked. The government is still standing and the independents have gone from being disinclined to actively hating the guy. The idea that he's all bark and no bite is cemented in place pretty much everywhere outside State Circle, ACT; his response is to bark louder, which is annoying but impresses the hell out of nongs in the press gallery, they will keep on doing his laundry for him. Even so, Abbott is getting increasingly frantic; if he can't knock over Gillard soon he's going to be left exposed.

The press gallery will then be faced with a choice: report that he's exposed, or continue covering up for his utter absence of policy substance and wilful refusal to address the big issues facing our country. They could turn their backs on his pathetically limited display and report some of the bigger and more immediate issues, but that would require courage and reflective ability on the part of the journosphere which they - like the Coalition - lack. The wider public doesn't lack these qualities, which is why we are so badly served by both the Coalition and the press gallery.