Abbott and the limits of Gerard Henderson's support

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'ld jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips.

- Shakespeare Macbeth Act I Scene VII

In this article tobacco-subsidised Gerard Henderson is getting ahead of himself in not only assuming that Tony Abbott will be PM, but what sort of PM he'll be. The whole article sounds very defensive, a rally-the-troops effort rather than a calm appraisal of the inevitable.

These days, Malcolm Fraser is much beloved by the left ... leftist journalist ... standing ovations from sandal-wearing intelligentsia at taxpayer-subsidised literary festivals.

Standard opening by asbestos-apologist-subsidised Henderson: he wants to filter out any reader who doesn't already support him and won't question him with a sort of verbal barrage.

But it was not always so. As Graham Freudenberg pointed out in his 1977 book A Certain Grandeur: Gough Whitlam in Politics, "Fraser's performance in 1975 was one of the most concentrated, single-minded and effective exercises in political destruction ever undertaken in Australian history".

Fraser took over the Liberal Party leadership from Billy Snedden in March 1975, opposed virtually all Whitlam Labor's legislation in the Senate and finally blocked supply. In the parlance of the day, Fraser was the embodiment of negative politics. A veritable "Dr No". But his tactics worked. In December 1975, Fraser led the Coalition to one of the biggest victories in Australian history.

That's right: Fraser took over in February and was Prime Minister by Christmas that same year. Abbott's experience is so different that pokies-subsidised Henderson's attempt at a parallel cannot really be drawn - at least not in the way he might hope.

Abbott took over the leadership of the Liberal Party in December 2009. By December 2010 he still wasn't Prime Minister, even though there had been a general election in the meantime. He could not persuade rural-based independents to back him, a problem Fraser would have handled with ease. Today, those who backed Gillard as PM have, with the exception of Wilkie, been confirmed in their decision; those upon whom the Coalition relies to force the no-confidence vote that would bring about an Abbott Government before the next election is due have been disparaging of the negative campaign that Henderson praises. Abbott has more in common with unsuccessful Opposition Leaders than with successful ones.

Had Abbott become Prime Minister in August-September 2010, he would have done so 9-10 months after taking the leadership of his party: the same period Fraser took to achieve the feat, and slightly less time than Rudd or Howard did:

Opposition Leader elected PM	Became Leader	Became PM	Duration as LOTO
Whitlam	Feb 1967	Dec 1972	5 yrs 10mths
Fraser	Feb 1975	Nov 1975	9 mths
Hawke	Feb 1983	Mar 1983	1 mth
Howard	Feb 1995	Mar 1996	1 yr 1 mth
Rudd	Dec 2006	Nov 2007	10 mths

The lesson is clear: if you're going to become PM you don't want to spend too long as Opposition Leader. Whitlam's incumbency is the odd one out because of a number of factors unique to his experience: the turnover of Liberal Prime Ministers (losing one was an accident, but three shows carelessness), Labor's extraordinary performance in the 1969 election, and the fact that his competitors within the ALP were either drones (e.g. Frank Crean) or the sort of people who got standing ovations from sandal-wearing intelligentsia at taxpayer-subsidised literary festivals (Jim Cairns).

This lesson is even clearer when you look at those Opposition Leaders who were unsuccessful at becoming Prime Minister:

LOTO who never became PM	Became Leader	Dumped/Quit	Duration as LOTO
Snedden	Dec 1972	Feb 1975	2 yrs 3mths
Hayden	Dec 1977	Feb 1983	5 yrs 3 mths
Peacock (1)	Mar 1983	Sep 1985	2 yrs 3 mths
Howard*	Sep 1985	May 1989	3 yrs 8 mths
Peacock (2)	May 1989	Mar 1990	10 m (total: 3 yrs 1 mth)
Hewson	Mar 1990	May 1994	4 yrs 2 mths
Downer	May 1994	Jan 1995	8 mths
Beazley (1)	Mar 1996	Nov 2001	5 yrs 8 mths
Crean	Nov 2001	Dec 2003	2 yrs 1 mth
Latham	Dec 2003	Jan 2005	1 yr 1 mth
Beazley (2)	Jan 2005	Dec 2006	1 yr 10 mths (total: 7 yrs 6 mths)
Nelson	Nov 2007	Sep 2008	10 mths
Turnbull	Sep 2008	Dec 2009	1 yr 3 mths

* Yes, yes, he later became PM. This period is regarded as some sort of learning experience because he didn’t become PM immediately afterwards and actually dissuaded many Liberals from giving him another go.

As of the date of this post, Abbott has been Opposition Leader for 2 years and 5 months, about average for an unsuccessful Opposition Leader - and by this I mean someone unsuccessful at translating his party leadership to a majority in the House of Representatives. Abbott fans like merchant-bank-sponsored Henderson insist that the position of Opposition Leader must be appreciated on its own merits rather than the way parties of government regard it: as a stepping-stone to the Prime Ministership.

Plenty of Opposition Leaders have limped out of politics insisting that Opposition is a worthy job in and of itself:

• Mark Latham insisted that he "took the fight up to" the Howard government;
• Labor won 51% of the popular vote in 1998 but still lost office;
• John Hewson defended Fightback! for forcing Bob Hawke - one of the most talented politicians of the past century - off his game and out of his job, and keeping Keating on his toes;
• Andrew Peacock out-campaigned Bob Hawke at his first election, despite Hawke having one of the most highly-regarded Cabinets ever and Peacock was stuck with left-overs from the defeated Fraser government;
• Bill Hayden took his party from the second-worst loss in federal election history to the point where "a drover's dog" could have won the election;
• Billy Snedden maintained that he had not really lost the 1974 election.

But really, so what? All Opposition Leaders have experienced a bit of a swing here and a strong performance there, but there is nothing so evanescent as an achievement in Opposition. Henderson should not only know better but stop asserting the contrary case, namely that Abbott is a substantial person in a substantial office doing substantial things.

Today, Tony Abbott is vilified by Julia Gillard and her colleagues, along with quite a few commentators, for his negativity. Yet this is not unusual behaviour for an opposition leader. 

Yes it is.

Since Freudenberg wrote the book upon which Henderson relies so heavily, twelve (very) different men have occupied the position of Leader of the Federal Opposition. None of them has taken the position that Abbott has taken, that the government is so lacking in legitimacy it must be opposed strenuously at every turn, regardless of the merits for the public of what is proposed.

Henderson's use of the word "vilified" is misplaced here; Abbott has received no more or less criticism from the government than anyone in his position might expect. When the Rudd government laid off Brendan Nelson, and when the Howard government went easy on Crean, it was a sign that each man's leadership was terminal - that the incumbents no longer took their so-called leading opponent seriously as an opponent.

The 2010 election result and current opinion polls indicate this tactic is succeeding.

The 2010 election should be regarded as just another election loss. There was a general election, the leader of the Liberal Party did not become Prime Minister and still does not hold that office: as with other competitive endeavours, there are no second prizes in politics.

The Coalition lost the 2010 federal election in the same way they lost the 1995 NSW election, the 1998 Queensland election and the 1999 Victorian election - only just, but those narrow defeats were harbingers of Labor landslides rather than errors soon rectified on the part of the Coalition.

As to the polls, they also indicate that Abbott has not yet failed. Gillard should be much further behind than she is were she to be written off as pollution-subsidised Henderson and others seem to hope.

Jonathan Green, the presenter of ABC RN's Sunday Extra, is one of a bevy of leftists ...

The standard practice of ABC-subsidised Henderson is to aggregate leftists into "brigades" (e.g. "the black armband brigade"). He has set up and knocked down so many brigades, consisting mostly of straw men, that I was surprised that he does not lead the Anzac Day March. Now he has exhausted the very term 'brigade' itself. Are Green's criticisms of the HSU leftist, or are critics of the HSU like critics of the Catholic Church, where expressing even the mildest qualm is proof that you never accepted the very precepts of such an organisation and that you are in league with its enemies? Vital questions of Green's embeviment turn on this.

Green ran the familiar leftist mantra that "Tony Abbott is a total dud that everyone hates but he's going to be prime minister because the other lot are just such an incompetent rabble".

Green, citing Australian Financial Review journalist Geoff Kitney, went on to claim that Abbott's net approval rating is minus 17 and "that compares with the great minus approval ratings of history like Billy Snedden who copped a minus 30 at one point".

But Snedden was not replaced as Liberal leader in 1975 on account of his approval rating. He was dumped because he was a lightweight who did not enjoy the confidence of his parliamentary colleagues. The real comparison is not between Abbott and Snedden ...

Oh yes he was. Oh yes it is.

Snedden lost the confidence of his parliamentary colleagues because of his poor polling. He had his supporters and his detractors; all leaders, even successful ones, have and do. Snedden was no more or less a lightweight than Abbott is; he was Attorney General in the Menzies government. He was Minister for Immigration during the early steps away from the White Australia Policy, and Minister for Labour and National Service during the first attempts to equalise male and female wages. When he was Treasurer both unemployment and inflation were less than three per cent. Snedden's record on fiscal discipline is much stronger than Abbott's, and his record on sound policy well executed as a minister is much, much better than Abbott's. However, Snedden was also prone to the sort of undisciplined and frankly nasty outbursts that Abbott fans and detractors alike have come to accept as an essential part of the man.

How is that defeatist 'mantra' (whether or not it truly belongs to Green) significantly different from the pro-Abbott one that says "Tony Abbott might not be everyone's cup of tea but he's going to be prime minister because the other lot are just such an incompetent rabble"?

... Abbott has been able to get both Liberal and National MPs behind him as he set about the destruction of a first-term government and, since the election, a minority government. Many commentators thought this could not be done.

And a fat lot of good it has done anyone. The "destruction of a first-term government" didn't happen, and "destruction of ... a minority government" hasn't happened either, so it looks like those commentators got it right. Famously, no legislation has actually been blocked under a minority government, which is more than can be said for many majority governments. I can't think of a single policy introduced by the Gillard government which was improved in any way by having been opposed by the Coalition, despite Abbott's vow to hold the government "ferociously to account".

Like all weak Liberal leaders, Abbott has kept the Nationals on side mainly by giving in to them. Nationals stand up for farming rights over mining rights despite the two being in direct conflict in many cases. This conflict is every bit as significant to agricultural interests, and to the nation and its future, as those posed by Aboriginal rights arising from the Mabo and Wik High Court decisions in the 1990s when the Howard government came to power. In that conflict it is not in Australia's interests to give all power to one side to vanquish the other; certainly, the Liberal Party's alignment with mining interests will make for the sort of titanic struggle that makes the sophisticated policy development necessary to balance such important interests harder, rather than easier. This is a structural weakness for a potential Coalition government, and treating 'leadership' as some sort of magic emollient that must not be questioned is weak and poor analysis.

In the 1980s, when the Liberals were fully on board with the economic rationalism debate and the Nationals saw it as their role to block it, Gerard Henderson recognised that the economic future of this country depended on the Nationals being beaten hard and often. Now he looks on benignly and thinks it's nice that the Coalition are playing happy families, when Barnaby Joyce is a latter-day Joh National and poses real difficulties for both Coalition policy-making and peace-making.

Quite a few commentators, who concede that Labor will lose the next election, want Turnbull to lead the Liberals. La Trobe University academic Robert Manne ... Clearly Manne believes Turnbull should be Australia's alternative prime minister.

You can imagine Henderson intoning sonorously: "We meet again, Professor Manne". Manne talked to a girl whom the then-unsubsidised Henderson liked at Melbourne University in the 1960s, or something, and has copped it ever since from Henderson. Woodchip-sponsored Henderson and Manne should get a room and sort it out. As to Manne's opinion on Turnbull, so what? Is this news or something? It might be a red-rag to Henderson but it's both entirely predictable and all part of wider debate.

Henderson is right when he says that Turnbull isn't ready to become Liberal leader again because all of the weaknesses he had as leader the first time around. Henderson is even right when he says that Abbott should continue to lead the Liberal Party to the next election: serves 'em right, I say, and his defeat will show the necessity to move on from Howardism.

Why should Liberal MPs, or indeed Coalition voters, care that a self-confessed Greens voter such as Manne believes Abbott should be dumped as opposition leader?

Why should Henderson care so much? It depends on whether or not you see the role of the Coalition as trying to convince those who did not vote Coalition in 2007 and 2010 to do so. Maybe Manne is playing cute in trailing his coat for a Liberal vote; I haven't read his interview.

Unlike the Gillard/Rudd leadership battles, Abbott prevailed over Turnbull on a matter of policy - namely the emissions trading scheme/carbon tax. If elected, his first priority would be to junk Labor's carbon tax. In other words, Abbott intends to dismantle his predecessor's legacy, something Fraser did not attempt. It is a significant policy challenge, incorrectly classified by some as simple negativity.

Before the 1975 election Fraser talked about dismantling the Whitlam legacy, but did not do so after the election (with the exception of canning Medibank before it could take hold) despite a clear mandate to do so. Abbott can talk about dismantling the carbon pricing mechanism, the NBN, or a host of other aspects of the Rudd-Gillard legacy, but Abbott is not entitled to be believed so credulously as Henderson does, and as he hopes we might. Henderson should have examined the difficulty in reversing that legacy, or indeed the appropriateness and wisdom of doing so, before embarrassing himself with fanboy nonsense like that.

It is fashionable for sneering secularists and sectarians alike to mock Abbott's Catholic faith. In fact, he is a traditional Catholic who believes in human imperfection, forgiveness and eventual redemption. Abbott is no fanatic and is not without personal doubt.

The problem with that is that Abbott's personal feelings, real or imagined, do not translate into public policy. There was a time when Catholicism was regarded with the sort of suspicion that falls upon Islam today; it is the mark of a fanatic to believe that those days have not gone, and even Catholics recognise that Abbott lies outside the mainstream of his co-religionists. Abbott loves his lesbian sister but can't see why her relationship deserves the sort of recognition that accrues to the marriages of his other sisters, or to that of his wife and himself. He recognises that he had a privileged upbringing, but can't see that others need help to give their children similar opportunities. He wants a Jakarta-centred foreign policy, but Jakarta thinks he's a goose. He doesn't trust the lessons learned from his own life.

Abbott is a man who has cut himself off from his public policy positions that we can't be sure that he is strong enough to use his humanity for good. Consider Gillard's idealisation of education in her own life and that of children today, or Keating's passion for the arts proving that he was more than a NSW Labor Right bovver boy or a soulless economist. Consider Malcolm Fraser, the Defence Minister who waged war on Vietnam, bringing in refugees and daring Labor to reopen the door to "Yellow Peril". That was evidence of soul at work in the Prime Minister's office, the idea that atop he political system was a human being for all the maneuvering and hoo-ha. Abbott brings nothing to that, nothing. All sorts of monstrous people reveal some show of humanity to their intimates, and it does not negate or balance or even matter terribly much at all. Against this awful weakness, Abbott's strutting is absurd.

I'm not one of those Henderson hisses at so alliteratively. In any awful but vital job in our community there will be committed Christians: dealing with the mentally ill, prisoners, drug addicts, doing the most wretched work you can imagine with bugger-all resources, day after day. I am in awe of such people and even though Tony Abbott has been raised to respect if not revere such people, he regards them as do-gooders. The people who make him possible regard and treat them with contempt and Tony Abbott is not strong enough to stand up to them. That's why professions of Abbott's true and humble faith are nothing but so much bullshit.

Quite a few Liberals and commentators believed Labor's Bob Hawke did not have the discipline to be a political leader. He became one of Australia's most successful prime ministers.

Hawke gave the grog away. Abbott gives away nothing and gets nothing in return. Hawke surrounded himself with capable people who challenged him while Abbott shuns those who challenge him, surrounding himself with people who titter at his jokes and Peta Credlin. Desperate parallel after desperate parallel just dies on the page for Henderson. All those straw men and nothing to clutch at.

Gerard Henderson is a nostalgia act for editors rather than someone with something to contribute to our understandings of important debates today. Abbott is not Fraser in sluggos but Snedden with a rosary. Henderson's attempts to rally people behind Abbott is undermined by the fact that he hasn't read any books since he started writing them, and that his shock-jock writing style shows his powers of persuasion have deserted him. He repels all but the perishing few who would rally to Abbott regardless. He gives his Fairfax-reading opponents more hope than he might have intended.

The lukewarm attorney

So then, because thou art luke-warm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit thee out of my mouth.

- Revelation 3:16

NSW Attorney General Greg Smith is in grave danger politically. His agenda needs to be clearer than it is, and stronger, if he is to survive. If he goes on as he is he'll become a bigger target for the opposition than Robyn Parker is but without the personal affection and entrenched political support that Parker can command.

Smith came out of the NSW Labor Right and the broader Liberal Party gave him one of their safest seats, Epping, in 2007. Say what you like about the hopelessness of the NSW Liberals, but it is a genuine pity that former Epping MP Andrew Tink had to retire through ill-health and never became a minister while [take your pick from any NSW ALP arseclown who became a state government minister in their spare time] did. Liberals love all that prodigal-son stuff. Smith was spared the indignity of powerlessness that afflicts other fence-jumpers and blow-ins through a Faustian bargain with the Christianist far right faction headed by David Clarke. As with all Faustian bargains it was probably a lot of fun while it lasted.

This article tells us the bargain is off.

The idea of attacking barristers because of their clientele is bullshit. It is both a deliberate misunderstanding and misrepresentation of how the Anglo-Australian legal system works, and a cack-handed attempt to import the worst tactics of US Republicans posing as people of principle when playing partisan silly-buggers. This post by Andrew Tiedt goes into more and better detail on this. Insofar as there was any substance to Phelps' attack it can be brushed aside easily. What's significant here is the politics.

People like Clarke used Phelps to shirtfront Smith because Clarke always looks pathetic when he launches an attack. He has power in close-quarter backroom combat that evaporates utterly under strong light. Phelps is happy to act as Clarke's catspaw in the hope that he might assume a position of substance one day, but it doesn't work like that. If you ever wondered why Liberals disdain PhDs, consider that Phelps is their most immediate example. When they're really desperate the far right wind Phelps up and he goes right over the top, hooting and hollering in a way that can be momentarily confusing for those who aren't used to it, and in that momentary confusion he draws his self-perception of effectiveness. In that sneaky and dishonest ambush the message from Clarke to Smith was clear: you're out of control so you're beyond protection.

Had Smith folded straight away it would have been a significant victory for the far right, whose power has waxed and waned over time but it has not reached the same depths since John Brogden broke down.

While Mr Phelps refused to comment on the altercation, saying his "one rule in politics is not to discuss party room in public", a number of other MPs have confirmed his attack on the Attorney-General.

Phelps didn't get where he is by courting the media or through popular appeal and there is no reason why he would speak to the media, unless he wanted to go the Premier directly. You'll notice that all other MPs quoted are anonymous:

Another MP said that many within the government were concerned with Mr Smith's political leanings, which were often "closer to the Left of the Labor party on issues of prisoner rehabilitation and sentencing".

"The first party he joined was the Labor Party. He doesn't have a Liberal Party bone in his body," one MP said. "He's being called the softest Attorney-General ever.

"This is not a good look for a conservative government. We want to be seen to be tough on crime."

It's hard not to feel some sympathy for Smith for having to deal with gutless shitheads like that. The Liberal Party spent most of its 16 years in opposition trying to outflank Carr from the right on law-and-order - and failing, miserably. "Another MP" has learnt absolutely nothing from that.

Consider that deplorable bleat: "We want to be seen to be tough on crime". No you don't: what you want is for crime to decrease, in incidence, in severity, in recidivism, across the board. That's what you want: to be the government that makes that happen. This is what Smith, apparently, is trying to do:

“The whole hardline approach against crime has been a failure in many places,” [Smith] tells me. “This attempt to make me look softer misrepresents what I am trying to do. I am trying to turn people away from crime. It’s not soft, it’s being more pragmatic.”

The challenge Smith faces in testing his pragmatic approach is daunting. Australia spends $11.5 billion a year on law and order, about $511 a year per person. The dubious honour for the biggest spending goes to New South Wales.

With NSW Labor determined not to be outflanked from the right on law-and-order, and with no "budget black hole" so bad that law-and-order spending will be cut, that level of spending bears out the assertion by Smith and others that the blunt instruments of law-and-order have to be recalibrated in order to be more effective.

Consider that expression, though: "I am trying to turn people away from crime". Smith is not working with community groups who work with the communities where crime is normalised, or who deal with actual prisoners and parolees and know what works and what doesn't. It's top-down, and given the hoo-ha in the party room Smith's willingness and ability to work with such groups toward sound and stable policy is going to be sharply limited.

An idea that's been held and espoused for so long that no-one really questions it is that increased support for troubled families, wayward youth and mental health services will reduce the rates and severity of crime over the long run. The Coalition government in NSW is in an excellent position to prove whether or not this is true. The NSW Coalition's majority and the feebleness of its opposition indicate that the Coalition will be in office for most, if not all, of the coming decade. A child of eight today facing the sort of disadvantage that beset many now in NSW's prison population should take a path that does not lead them to prison in 2022, when they will be 18. That's how you measure success of law-and-order policy; not "Another MP" preening before a funhouse mirror fretting about "be[ing] seen to be tough on crime".

Smith hasn't done the work to give effect to that; neither has the minister that deals with such community groups on a daily basis, Andrew Constance. Constance has no political incentive to save Smith's hide, nor any ability to appreciate the kind of far-reaching change that Smith would like to bring about. Smith seems to think he can do it all himself, and he's wrong. He hasn't done the outreach so he hasn't got the backing that would sustain him in facing the attacks from the far right, as though a bunch of loudmouths who talk tough understand crime better than anyone else.

“I want the community to be a safer place to live in,” he says. Then he turns the argument around by citing laws giving police greater powers that the O’Farrell government introduced in the wake of the drive-by shooting spree. The new laws have tightened the provisions about consorting and criminal gangs in ways that have alarmed civil liberties and prisoners’ rights advocates. The changes went through parliament unamended in March. “These are not soft,” says Smith. “They are tough laws, and I am behind them.”

So, the police have greater powers. What they don't appear to have is greater resources or a critical mass of intelligence. This is why the start of the article is puzzling:

WHEN Sydney’s southwest suburbs suffered a wave of drive-by shootings early this year, the city’s tabloid press and notorious radio shock jocks went into overdrive. Their target was Greg Smith, who is about to complete his first year as attorney-general in Barry O’Farrell’s state government.

Why Smith?

• Why not the Police Minister, Mick Gallacher, or the Police Commissioner, Andrew Scipione, given that the problems in Sydney's southwest are ones of quantity and quality resourcing? Smith has ensured they have the powers they need, the application of those powers is a matter for Gallacher and Scipione.  Gallacher has not stepped up to help his former Clarke-mate Smith, and it would have reflected better on him if he had.
• If smart, effective policing led to people being arrested who were getting off lightly due to legal technicalities or poorly drafted laws, then Smith would be a fair target. 
• When you consider the proportion of crime connected to the illegal drug trade, something like the Australia 21 report into drug laws should have been manna from heaven for Smith: strong support, if not yet vindication for what he's trying to achieve. 
• Shock-jocks have paraded their contrarian credentials by pretending to give drug laws some thought but the moment Smith does, they will bag him and the very social ills to which that report refers will lose all chance of alleviation in NSW - any chance that Smith might work with others to operate the sorts of trials that might support such an outcome, trials more substantial than Labor's relatively small-scale safe injection centre or the Drug Court, will be lost in a storm of bullshit.

Again, it's hard not to have sympathy for Smith in doing the right thing, but it's also hard to sustain the idea that he's the man to bring it about: partly, and ironically, because he wants to be that man who brings it about.

Unlike many people I don't believe Smith tipped off Patrick Power but he did mishandle the whole issue to the point where his competence is in question. This is a man who gets rattled under pressure. He also has a blind spot to the idea that people he admires might be guilty of crimes, a notion that is often cured by many years as a prosecutor. This is another example, and there are yet others I'm sure. That sort of blind spot can kill and has killed political careers more illustrious than Smith's. John F. Kennedy dealt with the conflict of loyalties that Catholics have when holding public office and doctrine conflicts with good policy or even popular will; Smith should be more mindful of that than he is. Smith should have the perspective to realise that his Church is strengthened rather than weakened by the removal of child molesters. Again, these are questions of judgment and character that find Smith wanting the qualities necessary for high office.

Being cast out by the far right is a badge of honour for any Liberal, second only to not having anything to do with those bastards in the first place. Smith needs a support base if he is going to weather the storms from the media and handle the pressure of a difficult job for which his ambitions are both considerable and worthy. He hasn't reached out to the moderates, and nor they to him, and this is a tragedy for both. After a generation of failure and atrophy Liberal moderates desperately need a record of achievement; co-opting Smith on law-and-order and helping him realise his aims is a ready-made solution, achievable and sustainable and eminently in line with the highest and best of liberal policy.

For moderate Liberals to let Smith twist in the wind would be a monstrous waste of opportunity; but like the Palestinians under Yasser Arafat, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The moderates would rally behind Parker and Constance, because they've done the hard yards during dark times for liberal moderates, but not Smith because he's not one of them.

Speaking of support bases, it's usually unfair to go after someone's family - Smith's sons are fair game because they have used their father to get positions within the Liberal Party and exercised power by extension to him. Smith's sons vetted candidates for staffer roles when the O'Farrell government came to office, blocking non-members of the Christianist far right and leaving that government less well staffed than it should have been - whether they would take the same support role today is an open question. The Smiths were a large reason why John Alexander beat Maxine McKew for the federal electorate of Bennelong, simply turning up while McKew went to ground. The young Smiths are like their contemporaries in Kevin Rudd's office who took the ride on the Hubris-Nemesis express, and it will be interesting to see how they juggle a relationship that their father failed to manage.

Greg Smith is plugging away at important work but he would be more effective, and more politically sustainable, were he to join forces with Liberal moderates. Any weakening of Smith's position enhances the anti-democratic and mendacious reach of the Christianist far-right, and that position shows all the signs of weakening simply because lofty ambitions fall short of their desired aims. Maybe Smith's media advisers can switch to the idea that Ray Hadley isn't their mate and that they can refer his requests for timeslot-stuffing to Gallacher's office.

Barry O'Farrell is finished if he lets the Christianists out of the box he put them in to win office, and reinforcing Smith keeps them at bay. On top of his important work Smith has some hard decisions to make about deeply personal issues regarding his Church and his sons, and their place in the agenda he has set for himself. I doubt that he can get over himself in order to get his agenda through, and the smart money would have to be on him failing - but if he did, greatness awaits and the smart money can keep to themselves.

How poor history leads to poor analysis

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

- George Santayana (1863-1952)

This article shows how those who misrepresent the lessons of history will end up without a clue about what's going on.

Abjorensen's spelling and punctuation are sound, but his very first sentence contains the conundrum that engulfs his whole argument. By the time we have waded through his lazy attempt at an overview of Liberal history we can have no confidence in his postulations on that party's present:

After Holt’s untimely death in 1967, his successor, John Gorton, enjoyed markedly less emulation, if only because he was an erratic leader unmindful of such Liberal sacred cows as states’ rights.

Gorton was the last Liberal leader thus afflicted. Menzies had left the states alone; he would never have invoked the corporations power for fear of the private sector getting ahead of themselves public-policy wise, and after failing to ban the Communist Party he was war of constitutional reform. Holt left the states alone too. By the time Gorton made relatively modest calls for national co-ordination in certain areas, premiers like Bolte and Askin had gotten used to acting on their own and lashed out; every successive prime minister had no hesitation in jerking the states' fiscal lead. In 1968 Joh Bjelke-Petersen was beginning his long reign as premier of Queensland - how different would that have been if he had been taught early on that Canberra can and does act as a check on his power, and that if he wasn't that interested in health or education or transport then state politics just wasn't for him.

Was John Gorton really more erratic policy-wise (leaving aside late-night grog sessions) than Fraser or Howard or Abbott? Really?

When Gorton was deposed in 1971, both government and party were tired and seemingly inured to looming defeat, and few took Billy McMahon’s leadership sufficiently seriously to think much about him.

Really? Why didn't McMahon just give up and/or just faff around the edges, like Jay Weatherall is doing in SA or as Kristina Keneally did in NSW? Why was Whitlam elected and re-elected with single-digit majorities, with a Coalition government back in office just three short years after McMahon lost office (and headed by a McMahon government minister)? Yes yes, I realise this is received wisdom/groupthink from the press gallery at the time, but it's equally clear that is inadequate as an explanation of history.

In opposition after 1972, the hapless Billy Snedden mostly failed to inspire ...

Well yes, until you realise that he was the Tony Abbott of his day. This is the man who described organisers of a protest march as "political bikies pack-raping democracy", of a piece with any of Abbott's top-of-the-head offerings. In 1974, he refused to concede that he had lost the election but had merely failed to win it, as Abbott did in 2010 (the difference is that the entire Liberal Party is under the same delusion as the leader, and that the press gallery fail to regard the Liberal leader as a laughing stock).

Fraser ... stamped his seal on the Liberal Party even more forcefully than Menzies ever had and, like its founder, was not only the public face of the party, but its mind, body and soul.

What a fatuous statement that is. Its fatuity is established by Abjorensen's very next paragraph:

Nothing more exemplified Fraser’s dominance than the abrupt and unannounced policy shift after the Liberals’ 1983 election loss. When Fraser quit as leader, his party’s tough stand on the minority white regime in South Africa – an abiding passion of his that chafed against the views of those within the party who supported apartheid – simply vanished from the radar.

It's proof of his lack of dominance, actually. After Fraser lost office in 1983 Liberals distanced themselves from him and much of what his government did; none more so than Fraser's Treasurer, John Howard. It wasn't just foreign policy but pretty much every aspect of Fraser's social and economic policy that came under question, if not derision, throughout the 1980s and '90s.

In terms of Fraser having been the "mind, body and soul" of the Liberal Party during the period 1975-83, I bet Charles Court or Dick Hamer would be fascinated at that idea. I bet John Carrick would have allowed himself a wry grin, considering his control over the party in NSW which was inversely successful electorally to the old man's degree of control over it; similarly John Moore in Queensland. If you're going to go John Gorton over his relations with premiers, then state-level figures during Fraser's time deserve the examination that Abjorensen fails to offer.

... with the arrival of the circuit-breaker, John Hewson, after a fourth successive election defeat in 1990, the party miraculously converted en masse to the new leader’s brand of aggressive liberalism.

Well, not quite. I can still remember John Howard shirtfronting Hewson in the final week of the 1993 election campaign. I can also remember that nobody was across Fightback! but Hewson himself, and that the party was cool with it so long as Hawke floundered in the face of it and was subsequently cut down. Once Keating began to climb all over it - and, by extension, all over Hewson and the Liberal Party - the Liberal Party expected Hewson to change tack and do Keating over as he had done Hawke. That didn't happen; Hewson always said Keating had a glass jaw but it was Hewson who hit the canvas first. Hewson couldn't even do Keating over once the L-A-W tax cuts were abandoned.

Ironically, the same party blamed Hewson and his Fightback! doctrine for the failure to win the 1993 election ...

Yes - the Liberal Party has tended to be good at learning from election defeats, which is the main reason for its electoral success. A manifesto born from one man's head could be vindicated only by electoral victory. Absent victory it was just another manifesto to be used as political mulch for the next government - as it proved.

Howard was very much a creature not just of the Liberal Party, but also of the party’s distinctive NSW division, with its old free trade tradition, in contradistinction to Victoria’s social liberal and protectionist tradition.

The latter tradition had pretty much been stamped out at the federal level by the lead-up to the 1990 election, and by the time Jeff Kennett finished with it the tradition was non-existent.

Having led us through a wasteland of historical crap, Abjorensen stumbles across an oasis of reliable fact:

Howard’s own political fetishes – labour market deregulation and the primacy of the small business ethos – quickly became Liberal orthodoxy. He also tightened his control over the entire party in a way that neither Fraser nor Menzies had, effectively taking personal charge of the once staunchly independent, and nominally autonomous, state divisions through a centripetal shift of resources to the federal secretariat and a de facto veto over appointments of state officials. It was Howard’s party in a far more proprietorial sense than it had ever been Menzies’s: the party was Howard and Howard was the party, in very much the same sense that Louis XIV could say, reputedly, l’état, c’est moi.

OK, so the Louis XIV non-quote is facile and pretentious. Here are three verified quotes from him that are more applicable to Howard:

• He said to his successor: "Do not follow the bad example which I have set you; I have often undertaken war too lightly and have sustained it for vanity. Do not imitate me, but be a peaceful prince, and may you apply yourself principally to the alleviation of the burdens of your subjects".
• Saint-Simon said of Louis XIV: "There was nothing he liked so much as flattery, or, to put it more plainly, adulation; the coarser and clumsier it was, the more he relished it". Nobody who has seen a bunch of mouth-breathing bullet-headed right-wing stack-fodder hail him as saviour of the party and the nation, and seen Howard return the favour by declaring them to be the very essence of what it means to be Australian, will dispute the parallel.
• On his deathbed he said: "Je m'en vais, mais l'État demeurera toujours." ("I depart, but the State shall always remain.")

(These quotes come from from Wikipedia, a far more reliable historical source than Norman Abjorensen.)

We saw the [Liberal Party] ... without Fraser instantly forgetting about apartheid.

That's an exaggeration: Howard muddied the waters but succeeded in downgrading it as an issue for Liberals. It meant that Australian foreign policy was caught unawares when the de Klerk-Mandela rapprochement began to seal the end of apartheid. Even though we are a major migration destination for thousands of South Africa expats, Australia did not keep sufficient tabs on developments in South Africa to play a leading role in that country's political transition, internally or as a global intermediary, mainly because Foreign Ministers Evans and Downer and the entire foreign policy establishment of this country botched it. But anyway, that's for another time.

But losing both office and Howard in 2007, and with Peter Costello declining the proffered crown, the party had an immediate and unexpected identity crisis: it was an orchestra without a conductor.

This is the last bit of valid analysis in the whole article.

The challenge was to protect the Howard legacy – essentially the existential core of the present-day Liberal Party – and start planning a comeback, while at the same time healing the wounds and avoiding the kind of damaging public recriminations that were aired in 1972 and 1983.

The number one priority of the Liberal Party, when it finds itself in opposition, is to get back into government. The airing of recriminations is an inextricable part of "healing the wounds". Those that occurred in 1972 were clearly forgotten within three years, and while those from 1983 lasted longer they were the result of a party that had failed to take the lead in debates about the economic future of the country. Labor's years in the political wilderness during the 1950s resulted from the same political carelessness; in a major party you are at the forefront of economic and social policy debate, or you are nowhere.

The Liberal Party failed to lead debate about how the Australian economy is changing in two important respects. First, with the rise of China and its demand for our mineral resources. It was happy to give away the surpluses but did not trust them enough to engage in infrastructure spending. Second, the Workplace Relations Act needed revision in light of an increasingly casualised workforce (as did notions of family values in light of working arrangements that increasingly could not sustain stable family life); WorkChoices was not the revision it needed. Those failures are why Peter Costello's longevity as Treasurer does not translate to greatness in that role; and no, a bit of tinkering with sales tax does not vault him into the first rank.

The Howard legacy is the default option for the Liberal Party. All Liberals agree that he ran a great government, whatever they might want for policy going forward. Nelson and Turnbull failed to recognise that going back to Howard was always an option for the contemporary Liberal Party; it was the only option that hushed dissent. Abbott knows this and it is why his policy ventures beyond a simple Howard Restoration have been timid. Claiming that a policy that made Howard popular in 2003 is necessarily right for Australia in 2013 is questionable, and Labor should be able to highlight it as proof that the Coalition can't cope with the challenges before us now, let alone plan for the future.

A decisive break with the past was offered by Malcolm Turnbull, but the party preferred the anodyne Brendan Nelson, essentially a stop-gap, with whom the Howard legacy was safe.

Nelson struggled for nine months to make any headway against a popular Kevin Rudd, eventually falling to Turnbull’s challenge.

Rudd had made the case to the Australian people that Howard's capacity to take the country forward had been exhausted. Turnbull took it as a given; the rest of the Liberal Party did not, and Turnbull's leadership then as now depends upon his ability to develop a narrative that moves on from Howard's legacy without either breaking from it or embracing it. For all his intellect, Turnbull hasn't thought deeply about where this country is going and what it needs from government; there are fits and starts of insight into particular issues but these are more like the brilliant essays of a student rather than the parts-of-the-whole musings that come from the reflections of a leader.

By contrast, Abbott carries around the Howard Restoration like a hermit crab carries the shell of another creature that has vacated it to hide his own squishy bits rather than necessarily presenting a strong front to the world.

Howard, it needs to be remembered, grew up in a state that, for the first quarter century of his life, was governed by Labor in an unbroken stretch from 1941 to 1965. The patronage the NSW Labor Party built up over that time extended into every area of civil society; Howard, imbued with the small business and Protestant ethos of his family, always saw Labor and its union base as the collectivist enemy of the dominant values of his self-reliant and individualistic world.

This world view – clannish, suburban and narrow – permeated the Howard era.

Why would a political ethos that had failed for a generation succeed in an era (and in the national context, including but also beyond NSW) that was markedly different to that of 1941-65? Howard's opponents inside the Liberal Party and out simply portrayed him as a man of the 1950s, underestimated him as a result, and fell by the wayside when defeated by someone who was clearly so much more than that. Was Howard really more narrow than Hewson, or Simon Crean?

It was – and conservatives bristle at this – a revival of class war, usually associated with the left, but class war with a difference: while Howard wanted to crush Labor by destroying its union base, he also sought to woo, with some success, traditional Labor voters by means of a cultural offensive.

This is so wrong that it is wrong on multiple levels.

First, conservatives don't bristle at the idea of class war by other means. Starting with William F. Buckley in the United States and Keith Joseph in Britain, conservatives have sought to demonise intellectuals in academia, public broadcasting and government as the most dire threats to our way of life, so that they might be forgiven for ignoring other more pressing threats such as losses of secure jobs, and the managerial skill necessary to create new jobs out of opportunities that are not yet apparent. Conservatives to not bristle at culture war, they perpetrate it, even though they lack the ammunition with which to pursue such a conflict (for example: Miranda Devine is an opponent of, but not an alternative to, Tim Flannery). Every edition of Quadrant contains the phrase trahison des clercs, invoking it enough to give it a currency, a substance and a potency that the notion lacks utterly.

Second, Howard did not destroy Labor's union base with WorkChoices, he energised it. This fact must be taken into consideration when it comes to "protecting the Howard legacy": either Labor's union base isn't that significant and should be left alone, or it must be destroyed by some means other than one which actually drives non-unionised workers into the arms of unions in order to protect them from threats far more real than those featured in the "culture war".

The Liberal Party’s dislike of Labor under Howard went from the political to the visceral; not a single appointment under Howard had the slightest tinge of bipartisanship about it ...

The only contra-example I can think of was when Nelson Mandela visited Australia and was gushed over by John Howard. Mandela received his award with barely contained disgust, from a man who was more than comfortable both with his bogus conviction and with the idea of him rotting on Robben Island for the term of his natural life. Apart from that, Abjorensen's claim holds.

The recent unprecedented interjection in parliament directed at the prime minister from the advisers’ boxes by Abbott’s chief of staff, Peta Credlin, is simply a manifestation of the new Liberal tribalism; it is anger, resentment and frustration all rolled into one, underpinned by an intense loathing, verging on hatred.

Peta Credlin is not an authentic product of the Liberal Party in the way that Howard was. Howard sat through thousands of branch meetings, steadily building support, while Credlin has almost certainly never done so unless she were waiting for one of her bosses. She is a creature of a staffer system that is bipartisan; her skills are absolutely transferable to the offices of Gillard or Swan or any other leading politician. Her outburst should be seen as a lack of confidence in Abbott to get across the message she crafted for him, the control-freak's frustration of "do I have to do it all myself?". She does not have the sort of confidence in Abbott that a facile reading of polling data might suggest the Liberals ought to enjoy.

As one veteran Liberal MP lamented, “We are constantly exhorted now to see Labor not as a political adversary but as a hated enemy. That does not go down well in the electorate.”

You bet it doesn't. Any fool can create more heat than light. If you don't have any solutions - an Abbott doesn't - then it's incumbent upon you to shut your face. Maybe Turnbull is developing solutions, maybe he isn't. Gillard definitely is developing solutions, but how well they're accepted is more of an open question than commentators would expect.

Of course, Australia and the Liberal Party are not alone in bringing a virulent tribalism into the once placid waters of conservative politics. The trials of the contemporary Republican Party in the United States also represent a new-found conservative tribalism that brooks no compromise and sneers at the concept of the middle ground, and for which any hint of bipartisanship is akin to treason.

Abjorensen is confusing correlation with causation. The US Republicans took the lead and the Liberal Party of Australia takes its lead from Republican consultants who have gone further down that road than Australian Liberals have. The different dynamics of US politics, where mobilising a small but virulent base is easier and cheaper than appealing to a majority of adult citizens, is crucially overlooked. It's why Abbott's repulsion to many voters not rusted onto Labor is laughed off by Liberals who are otherwise sensible of and concerned about political risks to their party.

Malcolm Turnbull, it has to be said, does not fit this picture; he is a man out of time, out of place and, barring a political disaster for Abbott, all but out of contention to return to the leadership of what is still essentially Howard’s party.

It is foolish to claim that such a 'disaster' is unforeseeable. Abbott cannot lift above simple gainsaying and nor can he curb his adolescent tendency to the nasty and the snide, qualities that do not help in resolving intractable problems or focusing attention on might yet be.

The 'disaster' Abjorensen refers to is the realisation that the Howard legacy is insufficient in dealing with the problems and opportunities facing Australia, and insufficient to persuading people that they should be governed by the Liberal Party into the future. This will involve a bit of dissent, and will involve situations where many who are now senior Liberals become private citizens. However uncomfortable this might be for individuals - including Abjorensen - it need not be disastrous for the party or the nation. As a hack, Abjorensen can't see that, but it's true nonetheless.

While Turnbull’s style will always ruffle feathers (and there is more than a touch of Rudd in this regard), it was not so much his style that cost him the leadership after just fifteen months as his willingness to trade with the enemy over the doomed emissions trading scheme.

Ruffling feathers is neither here nor there: none of the leaders Abjorensen praises can be claimed to have eschewed this practice. It doesn't even bear mentioning. Turnbull's horsetrading over the ETS was so condemned by Liberals because it succeeded in making Rudd look good. Turnbull should have managed it in such a way that he looked like the winner, not Rudd; the Liberals would have stuck by him had he pulled something out that enhanced his position at Rudd's expense. To do that, Turnbull would have needed more political skill than he has.

Almost as bad was his tacit acceptance of the reality of climate change in the first place, when many, perhaps even most, of his colleagues agreed with former minister Nick Minchin that climate change was nothing but a leftist plot to de­industrialise the Western world.

The Western world is being deindustrialised due to many factors, of which climate change policy is a minor part. Even in Adelaide this is obvious, so much so that Tiberius-with-a-telephone Minchin cannot escape this reality and cannot persuade anyone with a brain that climate change policies can or should be resisted indefinitely.

Turnbull needs to go back to first principles and treat Liberals as though they are as intelligent as he is, all without damaging his credibility any more than he has already; no mean task but not impossible. Australia has a government; the Liberal Party needs to convince the country that it offers better government than the incumbents, and if it can't do that it's the party's problem, not the country's. The Liberal Party has a leader; if Turnbull wants to replace that leader and become Prime Minister he needs to do more of a persuasion job than he has already.

Where Abjorensen and other detractors are wrong is that Turnbull operates from within the Liberal Party, not outside it. He has bent over backwards to demonstrate his loyalty to a party that was almost entirely united against him in the late 1990s. He was a member of Howard's cabinet as much, if not for as long, as Abbott was. Articles like this show that Turnbull's political enemies are those of the Liberal Party. Turnbull hasn't done a great job at persuasion not because he lacks drive or commitment to the Liberal Party, he just hasn't thought things through as well as he might, and just waiting won't be enough. The thinking and the persuasion lies ahead of Turnbull, and it will come within the context of the Liberal Party, which cannot win the next election with a warmed-over Howardism without Howard or Costello.

That loss, every bit as 'unexpected' as 2007, is the 'political disaster' that Abjorensen fears but cannot articulate. He's tried a long run-up through history, but it's such bad hack-history that his conclusions are only right by accident, and not right enough to be reliable. Liberals are better served by preparing for Abbott to go down in accordance with his weaknesses, and to persuade Malcolm Turnbull to get over himself. Lots of hard work in that, far more than being a complacent hack; but fortune favours the brave while the hack can only describe it (or not, in Abjorensen's case).

The politics of the ether

Julian Assange said he would run for the Senate, and there was a bit of publicity about that with a lot of very silly extrapolation as to what such a candidacy might mean in terms of future elections. I'm more interested in what constituency he'd appeal to, and how such a flighty man might deal with the drudgery of parliamentary committee work and the bullshit of the politico-media complex.

From this bit of fanboy work, we can see that Assange is pitching directly to the broken heart of Australian politics: moderate liberals, people who have been either chased out from the Liberal Party or who remain as hollowed-out husks, or else those who found themselves trapped beneath the wreckage of the Democrats.

Julian Assange says he wants to bring liberty back to the centre of Australian politics, using his Senate candidacy to defend free speech and the "right of citizens … to live their lives free from state interference".

The WikiLeaks founder also plans to be a "fierce defender of free media" if elected to the Senate, using parliamentary privilege to break court suppression orders and other "excessive constraints" on free access to information ... Mr Assange said he "could be described as a libertarian" and nominated Australian Democrats founder Don Chipp and former prime minister Malcolm Fraser as political figures he admired.

Libertarians and Malcolm Fraser. There's a problem with defining your constituency right there: it certainly poses a challenge of conciliation. The silence from your IPA and CIS in support of Assange has been deafening, but you'd expect that from those who by definition are resistant to organisation let alone mobilisation.

Assange himself has been critical of the Federal government for not supporting him in his travails with at least three other countries' legal systems, so maybe he takes a selective approach to "state interference".

While not charged with any offence in Sweden, [Assange] fears extradition will open the way for his extradition to the United States on possible espionage or conspiracy charges in retaliation for WikiLeaks' publication of thousands of classified military and diplomatic reports.

Australia will co-operate with any US extradition request every bit as much as Sweden, or the UK for that matter; if not more so.

Mr Assange was sharply critical of both the federal government and opposition, saying there is "very little difference between Liberal and Labor - especially once they get into government. Labor suffers more from cronyism, while the Liberals care more for big business."

Big business thinks about as much of Abbott and Hockey as they do of Gillard and Swan. That said, Assange has detected that Australian politics is in a period of deep disillusionment with the major parties (yes, both of them; Liberals relying on the sky-high polling for their side really are kidding themselves).

This parallels the period in the aftermath of the Whitlam Dismissal from which the Democrats sprang. The Democrats maintained a presence in the Senate and in the upper houses of three states for a generation, until it became clear that they were not the answer to the essential question that they put to the Australian political system. After the GST deal in 1999 the had years to establish an alternative vision for their party, and having failed to do so were pried from the political system as soon as electoral cycles permitted.

He is considering "all possibilities" for his Senate bid, including running as an independent, seeking an alliance with another party, or launching a new party devoted to open government. While support for WikiLeaks is strongest among Greens voters, Mr Assange noted recent polling had shown 53 per cent approval across the spectrum.

Assange has no political organisation on the ground here. The way to build a political organisation is not to threaten to build one, or to boast about your potential to build one, but to actually build one. A year from now the election contest will be more intense than it is now, which is why Assange should be much more advanced than he is in building his support base. I don't doubt that the net "hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him", but there should be more substantial evidence of it by now than there is. The idea that he might be ambivalent about joining the Greens, joining some other existing organisation or building his own from scratch is crazy at this late stage.

The Greens would be mad to take him. They have two core constituencies: people who have devoted their lives to environmental campaigns (e.g. Bob Brown, Christine Milne) or who have risen through the ranks of inner-city community organisations (e.g. almost any other Green politician currently serving), and Assange is neither of these. He offers them little that they lack already: the Greens have all the profile they need, thanks anyway. At the next election the Greens are almost guaranteed to win a seat in Victoria, NSW and Queensland, and may well beat the Liberals in the ACT; the candidates to be elected to those seats have almost certainly been active Greens for years and have shored up considerable support already. For Assange to be starting now without so much as a list of numbers or e-mail addresses of Greens members, and expecting to win their votes for zero quid-pro-quo, is simply ignorant of political realities.

The failure to court existing organisations, however loosely organised, that might support him is similar to Malcolm Turnbull's disdain for republican movements that preceded his own. Assange seems to assume a support organisation will appear in Australia, and his background shows that he will split it when he comes to take charge of it. Contrast him with the slow and patient work that Nick Xenophon has put in building his base in South Australia - after the demise of the Democrats.

He emphasised his record as "a fierce defender of press freedom … even though I have known only too well smear by unethical media".

Assange has chosen to make his life an open book. Others who have been dragged into the spotlight and misrepresented, as referred to in the Finkelstein Inquiry, will struggle with Assange through sheer mutual incomprehension. The only organisation in this country with countervailing power to that of the media is the government; Assange has said that he will not use government power against the media. The media organisations themselves, and many libertarians in the community, will simply delegitimise any attempt to do so with the call of the turkey of irresponsible journalism: Goebbels, Goebbels, Goebbels. The media are only a force for good when their capacity for harm to those with limited ability to fight back is limited; when that capacity is unlimited, as it has been for a generation, those who trumpet the importance of a free press are treated with suspicion (and the idea that only an unregulated media stand between where we are now and tyranny is risible and patronising).

Mr Assange nominated Don Chipp as an inspirational figure with whom he shared "many basic ideas", including the importance of "keeping the bastards honest".

The Democrats got and kept considerable power in Australian houses of review through assiduous committee work, reviewing the minutiae of government as it is practiced from the loftiest ministerial statement to the lowliest clerical busywork, comparing documents that appeared to tell different stories about the same thing, and demanding accountability in ways that even the slipperiest politicians could not escape. Assange has demonstrated no ability in this area, no knowledge, no recognition that it even matters. Would he even turn up to sitting day after sitting day? As with building a support base, this capacity can be developed only through exercising it. The Greens recognise this and they live it.

He also singled out Malcolm Fraser for speaking up for civil liberties and humane treatment for asylum seekers.

Again, the lack of reciprocal support (from someone who knows a thing or two about how politics actually works) is telling.

On global issues, he argued that Australia must take into account the likelihood of "serious decline" of the US over the next 15 to 20 years - indeed "collapse of its superpower status". In this case he supports much greater regional engagement and an increased defence and intelligence budget "to reduce our reliance on the US".

He supports what?

It's a poor journalist who would not call Assange on the fundamental contradiction of calling for greater Australian defence and intelligence activity? Will his overarching commitment to freedom of information not undermine it? Which regional politician/diplomat/military official would say anything of substance to an Australian counterpart, if they suspected that it will be all over the internet within minutes? Is the US alliance not a cost-effective strategy toward these ends? Had Dorling been a journalist rather than a stenographer he (or his even more culpable editors) would have picked that and put the conundrum closer to the heart of this story.

He repeatedly emphasised the importance of protecting small business and individuals from the power of government and large corporations.

Small business, eh? One of the best things that government can do for small business is to pay their invoices on time. In his quest for the big issues of infoliberty, I just can't see Senator Assange getting bogged down with stuff like that. He'd be a nightmare to work for too, with Mirabella levels of staff turnover. His declaration o pecuniary interest would be interesting.

In late-night Senate horsetrading who could trust Assange to deliver? To give one example of a real issue with real impact on both Canberra insiders and the populace at large: pokies. Given that the government has kicked pokies reform into the next term of parliament, it is unclear where Senator Assange would stand: for the freedom of gambling venues to conduct their business as they will, or with weakened individuals who need government to develop a policy position and a structure so that they can deal with their addiction. This is an issue that has been all over the media for quite some time and no political aspirant has any excuse not be be across it. What would he trade for his vote?

On controversial social issues including same-sex marriage and euthanasia, he acknowledged "strong arguments on all sides".

Well, yes. That flash of pragmatism is going to turn off the committed support base Assange doesn't even have.

Former Australian Democrats leader Natasha Stott Despoja last week observed: "There will be many Australians who prefer to side with those who reveal, not conceal, so get ready for a fascinating campaign and watch the scrambling for [Assange's] preferences."

That scramble for preferences involves quid pro quo. Assange is happy to take the quid but less so in giving - or indeed being capable of delivering - the quo. The party hard-heads who "shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste" in conducting preference negotiations will understand this, and the 'scramble' might be less watchable than Stott Despoja might imagine.

There are considerable undercurrents of political support that are capable of propelling candidates into parliament, and which do so in other countries. In Australia, the major parties can and do keep these movements divided:

• Christianists are cleft between right-wing Fred Nile/DLP, who preference the Coalition, and other compassion-based movements that preference the Greens or Labor.
• People who support fewer restrictions on guns and access to national parks are split between the right-wing Shooters and the more even-handed Outdoor Recreation Party.
• Libertarians are split between civil libertarians on the left, economic libertarians on the right. Occasionally there is outreach by the latter to the former, as in this article or the Sex Party, but it is too rare to be politically reliable and too weak to force significant and sustained change. Libertarians are skittish in dealing with government at all, and sustained high-quality engagement is essential to bringing policies into being and keeping them going.
• The most significant and interesting example of this is occurring now with the Greens and rural anti-mining movements. People like Barnaby Joyce are frantically attempting to keep rural people within the Coalition fold who had been disenfranchised by mining rights, while the Greens are seeking to co-opt them. A movement that spans inner-city activists and conservative farmers may well be beyond the current generation of politicians - it is certainly beyond Assange - but it has the best potential to break the two-party system (at the very least, it will almost certainly deny office to Tony Abbott in the short term).

If Assange's last address in Australia was in Victoria, then that's the jurisdiction where he'll have to run:

• The good news is that it is also the jurisdiction most receptive to the sort of small-l liberal message Assange appears to be crafting. The other two jurisdictions that have historically been receptive to liberalism are South Australia (Xenophon has that political market sewn up) and NSW (which no longer offers a constituency for it; conservatives in the ALP and Coalition have chewed liberals up and spat them out and voters have ratified those decisions).
• The bad news is that he will have to win more votes there than in any other jurisdiction (other than NSW) to get elected. Brian Harradine built a long Senate career from Tasmania with the sort of vote that would have consigned him to the fringes in Victoria or some other larger jurisdiction.
• Andrew Landeryou's claim that Assange would take a seat from the Greens is mistaken. Their constituency - inner-city activists and those concerned about environmental issues - would hold off any challenge from Assange. The threat he poses is to the last vestiges of the idea that the Liberal Party represents liberals. It is from that party that he would take votes (and even that assumes he'd run a committed and sensible campaign) because it has lost the ability even to talk respectfully to small-l liberals, let alone encourage them to remain within an abusive relationship and support that revolting oik from Sydney. The only Greens votes that would go to Assange would be from small-l liberals who rely upon the kindness of political strangers.

If Assange were elected as a pure independent, and if he were prevented from seeing out his term (either through failing to attend sitting days as required or through some sort of misadventure) it would be fascinating to see who would take in his place, and how the Victorian/other jurisdiction would come to that decision.

Pinning down Julian Assange in the Senate is a whimsical but impractical idea that in many important respects has already failed. Its appeal and its impossibility makes it the early-21st-century equivalent of subjecting Clancy of the Overflow to do clerical work. I can understand why journalists might toy with the idea but I wish they had given it the examination that a strong application for public office warrants. Buried beneath what is already a dead idea are live issues surrounding freedom of information in a digital age, and those ideas will have their day at the centre of public life; but substantial political forces compel their ideas into the public debate in a way that Assange hasn't and can't. That is why - to coin a phrase - "I doubt he'd suit the office".

Another Drum piece

Come for the amateur foreign policy analysis, stay for the comments.

Here is the full text which I sent to The Drum for you to appreciate their editing:

Australian foreign policy is not connected to our political system, and it is utterly unrelated to the way Australians interact with other countries. We lack the political leadership to better engage with other countries, let alone exploit any opportunities that may come our way. The coming of Bob Carr to Canberra has not resolved the lack of foreign policy leadership, and nor will replacing this government with the opposition.

When Kevin Rudd recontested the Labor leadership – was it only a month ago? – his backers made two claims for him. They claimed he had changed his bad administrative and interpersonal habits, and that he was a vote-puller. The reason why I didn’t believe them is because of what Rudd didn’t say and do during his time as Foreign Minister.

Studying Chinese at uni and having built his public profile as Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, Kevin Rudd clearly has a passion for foreign affairs and Australia’s place in the world. Rudd could have transformed our understanding of foreign policy in the way that Paul Keating transformed our understanding of economics. In the 1980s Keating wanted to transform the economy and become Prime Minister, but he knew that he could not do either until he learned to put his policies in pithy, cut-through phrasing. He used that phrasing over and over and over until journalists and caucus members talked about nothing else but what Keating wanted to talk about. He even led the country into a recession and told us we had to cop it, an extraordinary act of persuasion.

This country urgently needs a clear understanding of how we are to engage with the Asia-Pacific. Our history has been one of longing looks to far-off Europe and America, oblivious to and fearful of Asia as a whole. Asian countries seemed to be full of people who were either incredibly docile and friendly, or incredibly violent and threatening. Over the past twenty years policy-makers have exhorted us in general terms to become part of Asia, and at the same time assured that we are already part of Asia. When he was appointed Foreign Minister, Rudd could have told us – and showed us – what we can do in our daily lives to engage more fully with Asian countries, Asian cultures and Asian economies.

Australians are not only travelling to Asian countries in record numbers but spending more and more time there – in places like Bali and Thailand, thousands of Australians are even buying homes. There has been political turmoil in Thailand over recent years, a country visited by thousands of Australians each year and now one of our largest trading partners. In terms of telling Australians what’s going on there, the ABC’s Zoe Daniel has more than earned her pay and Kevin Rudd very much hasn’t. It’s time for policy to catch up with where we are at as a people, and to get specific about where we need to be.

Over recent weeks there have been a lot of earnest and wide-ranging screeds about Australian foreign policy published in our newspapers, designed as primers for incoming Foreign Minister and Senator Bob Carr. There was lots of stuff about the US vs China, and the growing power of Asian countries generally, and the challenge to encourage growing powers away from the temptation to become more powerful through war. Most of those articles could have been written for pretty much anyone who replaced Kevin Rudd, whether this was Stephen Smith, Simon Crean or – if Labor really imploded badly – Julie Bishop (about whom more later).

There has been a lot written about Carr too, and before he was appointed to his current role we should have seen more articles examining his performance as NSW Premier and fewer about what a great communicator journalists find him to be. Carr is one for the Big Themes, like US-China. Even second-order foreign policy challenges like Burma can be framed in terms of Tyranny vs Freedom, with of course the iconic figure of Aung San Suu Kyi. Where Big Themes are hard to find in an area of foreign policy, it will be hard to hold Carr’s interest.

This was demonstrated early and well with his ham-fisted response to the political upheaval in Papua New Guinea. Political upheaval is frequent, if not normal, in Papua New Guinea while it is much less so here. Except for our military campaign there in the early 1940s (and that was targeted against the Japanese than for the people of PNG themselves), Australia’s relationship with PNG has tended to be exploitative and patronising. It isn’t part of Australia, so we don’t control it; but it has strong strategic importance to Australia so our leaders and policy-makers can’t ignore what goes on there.

Carr backed down from his threat to cut off aid, and no doubt he will go there soon covered in ashes and sackcloth to some extent. It would be a mistake to assume Carr will reinvent Australia’s relationship with our near neighbours in Melanesia and Polynesia. The Big Themes simply don’t fit there, and nor is there much scope for spin and hype in this foreign policy issue: the “24 hour news cycle” can and does go for weeks and months without even mentioning PNG, the Solomons, Fiji, Samoa or Tuvalu.
As Premier of NSW, Carr disdained the quotidian. He could release a high-level statement about the economy with high-minded stuff about jobs and growth, but the details of taxes, privatisations and budgeting left him cold. So long as schools taught history he didn’t seem to care much what else went on within them, including Asian languages. Jeremy Sammut has given a good summary of his health policy. Carr was only interested in sport during the Sydney Olympics, but then failed to capitalise on the opportunities it presented. The housing shortage in Sydney, and don’t get me started on transport … I could go on, as many others have, but all seemed to fall strangely silent during Carr’s ascent to the Foreign Ministry.

It is easy to say that Carr will engage with the Big Themes and leave the quotidian to others, but it isn’t that simple. Watch him in the Great Hall Of The People as he soaks in the awe and majesty of China, and watch his eyes glaze over as his hosts talk about the particular types of dirt from Western Australia in which they are keenly interested. Watch him rhapsodise about Indonesia while attempting to dodge questions about boat-borne refugees (which he could do as a state premier). Watch excited Papua New Guineans ask him about rugby league, and although he has lived his life in Rabbitohs country he will have little to say. Carr is a fast study, but there’s a line about old dogs and new tricks that applies here.

All this means the Opposition’s foreign policy is worth a look. In a long speech to the National Press Club on 1 February, Tony Abbott devoted just one sentence to foreign policy:

We will concentrate on the areas that are most important to Australia and where Australia can make the most difference, so our foreign policy will have a Jakarta focus rather than a Geneva one.

What about an Australia focus? The last Coalition government was often accused of having a Washington-focused foreign policy, is that gone now? In addressing the rising power of India, do we have to first consider what Jakarta thinks? What could “Jakarta focus” mean?

On 10 March 2010 Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono addressed Federal Parliament. His speech was warm and generous, focusing on Australia-Indonesian relations as the solving of problems and the pursuit of opportunities. The Prime Minister responded in kind. The Leader of the Opposition did not, telling the President that his country was a source of people-smugglers and other problems. To focus on problems between countries rather than solutions and friendship is an act of hostility, and as was said at the time an act of rudeness by Abbott towards Yudhoyono.

Since then, Tony Abbott and his immigration spokesman has called for asylum-seeker boats to be turned around and sent back to Indonesia. Shadow Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has reportedly assured the Indonesians that this is for domestic consumption only, and that Liberal foreign policy (such as it is) is actually well disposed toward their country. The fact is, domestic politics trumps foreign policy every time: there is no better example of this than Kevin Rudd, whose foreign policy platform fell out from under him because he mishandled his domestic politics.

The proposal to station US drones on the Cocos/Keeling Islands was initially reported for its impact on the Big Themes of US and China. It took a concerted effort by Indonesia policy-wonks to get media attention on the impact such an announcement might have on Indonesia: the Cocos/Keeling Islands are far closer to Jakarta than they are to Canberra, or Beijing for that matter. By then, however, Tony “Jakarta focus” Abbott had endorsed the proposal.

Liberal foreign policy promises honeyed words toward Indonesia while our armed forces patrol the seas and skies expecting threats and incursions. This is poor foreign policy, there should be more to our interests than that. The recent visit by Indonesian Foreign Minister Natalegawa to Canberra was an implicit rebuff to Abbott; so much for the Coalition’s Jakarta-focused foreign policy.

At this point the political professionals might pipe up and declare that foreign policy isn’t a vote-winner: yes, but bad foreign policy is a vote loser. In 2004 Abbott’s predecessor Mark Latham made disparaging remarks about US President George W. Bush. This is not to say that Bush was a beloved figure in this country, but it’s a fact that the Prime Minister of Australia must have a good relationship with the President of the United States. They don’t have to be chummy – John Howard’s relationship with Bill Clinton was awkward, but the two men worked together for the sake of both countries. Latham wasn’t prepared to get over himself to do that, part of the reason why he didn’t become Prime Minister but his more accommodating Shadow Foreign Minister did.

Australians have never really had an input into foreign policy, but the way Australians trade and travel and otherwise interact with other countries could not be any more disconnected from the way our officials do so. We lack the political leadership to bridge the gap between Canberra and the rest of the country, a gap that makes room for mischief and misunderstanding to impede our relationship with our world.

The work to be done in Queensland

There are two aspects to the Queensland state election: the LNP has won it and the ALP has lost (and as usual, my predictions sucked). There is a lot of silly commentary about the Federal implications, with Coalition people dressing up their best-case scenario as "pragmatic reality" to the point where journalists accept it as a real story, and it's time to have a long hard look at that.

The size of the LNP margin puts such high expectations on them that they will be unable to meet them.

In many Asian countries, the government is less than transparent and accountable when it comes to awarding tenders for major infrastructure projects. In return, they insist those projects delivered to specification, and stay within time and budget constraints. In Australia, government can be less than transparent and accountable when it comes to awarding tenders for major infrastructure projects at times, but almost always those projects regularly suffer from time and budget blowouts, and the companies involved retreat and let the relevant minister or head of government cop all the flak. If you're going to get schmoozed by a big company and do them a billion-dollar favour, surely you'd insist on absolute rigour in terms of reporting and no excuses for failure. Expecting that all state government infrastructure projects in Queensland will be models of probity and lessons in how to manage a large-scale project effectively is probably, if you pardon the expression, a bridge too far.

The fact that the CMC cleared Campbell Newman of misconduct allegations surrounding property deals (or at least recommended they be referred to the Ombudsman) should mean that the LNP is especially vigilant in steering clear of any and all perceptions of corruption. Look, it might work, but you have to be prepared for the possibility that it might not.

To give one example: Queensland needs a better health care system. The Bligh government concentrated on building capital equipment, albeit from a depleted base, to look like they were doing plenty when they weren't doing enough. They got the rewards that governments get when they privilege capital expenditure over operational, which is: thanks for the new gear, now rack off! A focus on capital expenditure is designed to treat people like shallow yokels who are meant to be overawed by the $millions attached to such projects. Those who propose such projects tend to believe their own publicity after a while, and wonder what "the punters" could possibly want more than a shiny new building worth $millions, catching themselves in their own shallow-yokel trap. Newman is going to lead a new government trying new things, and he's going to be transparent? Yeah, right:

The LNP knows that good economic management and careful planning can deliver health services on time and on budget.

Where's the proof that it can deliver "good economic management"?

... and less beds than originally promised.

Even though this is Queenslanders writing for Queenslanders, it's still fewer, not less. If you focus on this "accountability" too much you have health care professionals spending all their time answering to snippy auditors and spinners. This might not be that different to what they do already.

The LNP has won 44 seats. There are 89 seats in the Parliament. Add to that other MPs who didn't contest this election and were replaced by a member of the same party, and new members such as the Katterites, and you've got a Parliament where a majority of members - including the Premier - doesn't know their way around the details of Parliament and government. Basically, the LNP will need to run the perfect government in terms of delivery and probity, in order to match the high expectations reflected in last night's vote. No stumbling new ministers, no new MP who have dodged the kind of scrutiny that felled two candidates for Broadbeach but who may yet slip up.

It will also need to run a perfect government in order to carry the dead weight of their Federal counterparts, and Misha Schubert:

Coalition strategists say Labor would be "massacred" in Queensland if Gillard were forced to head to the polls soon. Of its eight seats north of the Tweed, they think Labor will be lucky to hold just three ... Griffith might fall too if Kevin Rudd does not recontest.

Here is the wolf of one party's wishful thinking dressed up as the sheep of pragmatism. On what basis would the Federal government be "forced" to the polls? Would Tony Windsor wake up one day and suddenly regard Abbott as a man of substance and discernment? Is Craig Thomson finally going to fall over (and is Dave Mehan really going to be unable to fend off whatever deadweight the NSW Liberals foists upon Dobell?)? It's a weak premise on which to hang a story. Besides, all those Liberal wannabe strategists seem to overlook the vote-repelling presence of 'Stinky' Gambaro in Brisbane.

Campbell Newman is not Tony Abbott. Newman has made some mistakes but he's a far better man than Abbott and he appears to actually like and respect women, in general rather than in particular. Newman has a record of achievement in his own right whereas everything Abbott has done has been under the close but paternally indulgent supervision of Fr Emmett Costello, Trevor Kennedy or John Howard. By the time of the next Federal election:

• Newman and the LNP will have lost some of the best wishes and benefit-of-the-doubt it has today. It may not necessarily have lost all credibility whatsoever, but it will be a bit more shopworn than it is today; and
• Gillard will have a greater record of achievement than she has already; and
• Abbott and "Liberal strategists" will still be looking for that one knockout blow that obliterates all of Gillard's patient work.

The Queensland result looks to confirm the Federal Coalition in its policy inertia, which may be no bad thing.

Katter has arrived. He would have been embarrassed with no seats, but two seats is a start without the flash-in-the-pan aspect of Hanson's 11 in 1998. Katter took almost all the swing against Labor in regional Queensland. They'd have to be a strong chance for a Senate seat at the Federal election. In other states:

• The WA Nationals seem to do what Katter is doing already;
• Katter has a real ability to take votes from the Nationals and Liberals in rural NSW, particularly if he wades in to the Murray-Darling dispute;
• He could do well in Tasmania as the anti-Green, attractive to disenchanted Labor voters who can't go all the way to the Liberals;
• He could split the CLP in the NT, just as Labor is on the ropes there with its inadequate response to the Federal intervention; and
• In other states he could be interesting.

By the way, a big raspberry to all those "professional" journalists who insist that Queensland Labor has been decimated. It hasn't. "Decimation" means a substantial reduction, and comes from a practice inflicted on the Roman Army by its own ranks as a disciplinary measure. What happened to Queensland Labor was far more than mere decimation, and it wasn't inflicted by their own ranks.

Anna Bligh faces the prospect of spending every day for the next year getting hammered by the new government, now wonder she wants to get out as soon as possible. The problem is that she is going to be replaced by one of the dauphins whom the LNP rightly targeted, who will have (like the Bourbon monarchs of France) learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

If Cameron Dick or Andrew Fraser or [insert other name of a recently defeated Queensland Labor MP who is a real loss to public life here] was really all that, have them teach a class or practice law for underprivileged people or something like that - not as a one-off media stunt but as a job that needs to be done, regardless of who's in state government and what they're doing with it. However convenient it may be to shun them into a political staffer job or something with a union, it would be counterproductive for Labor over the long term. Even in a caucus of seven or eight, if Annastacia Palaszczuk (pronounced palla-shay, apparently) becomes leader the media scrutiny on he new government will become distracted by phantom stories of the dauphin in South Brisbane maneuvering against Palaszczuk.

Last night Bligh was gracious in accepting defeat. It wasn't the time for coulda-shoulda-woulda but Labor does need to face up to why it lost. Assuming Newman will be incompetent and corrupt is a recipe for 20 years in Opposition. The dauphins are the answer to the wrong question. Gillard faces different challenges but is not prevented from getting out there and communicating what she's doing, and what Abbott isn't doing; she is not shackled to the corpse of the Bligh government by any means, and nor should she cringe before the phantom of the essentially dysfunctional LNP rolling over her.