The Soap Opera That Is Australian Politics, 2015

Politics & Elections
1

Who else is sitting down with a big bucket of popcorn right now and enjoying all this?

For those geographically distant from the current farce - the story so far:

A year and a half ago, in a fit of absentmindedness, Australia elected the Liberal Party, headed by Tony Abbott - running on a platform of Not Being Kevin Rudd and Not Being Julia Gillard - to Federal Government.

Interpreting the public’s lukewarm lack of actual hatred of them (as of September 2013) they promptly declared a Mandate To Do Everything they wanted, which in many cases was quite a different thing to what they had actually said pre-election.

Highlights of the administration since then have included reversing Australia’s first carbon pricing scheme, attempting to suck money out of Medicare (pissing people off), attempting to suck money out of the welfare system (pissing more people off), cutting foreign aid to pathetic levels (not pissing off as many people as SHOULD be pissed off) and trash-talking the economy at every possible opportunity (pissing all the economists off)

This week’s foot-feeding exercise was Abbott’s bizarre executive decision to award a knighthood to Prince Phillip on Australia Day, a move which has the full support of an overwhelming 12% of the population, and seems to have been the straw that broke the backbenchers’ backs through its sheer ridiculousness and because it’s just so, so quintessentially Tony.

Now there’s open speculation of a leadership change to either Julie Bishop (deputy PM) and Malcolm Turnbull, who only lost out to Abbott by one vote when he got the job in the first place. Complicating factor here … ditching a sitting Prime Minister is exactly the sin that the Liberal Party just spent four years dissing the last Labor government for committing (twice)

I don’t remember EVER having such fun following politics.

Any predictions, fellow Aussies?

Mine: I think Liberal Party discipline is probably strong enough to keep him in his job for the moment. It’s been a week - if it was going to happen, I think it would have happened by now. I don’t think he can hang on till the next election though. Next time he does something really stunningly out of touch … probably in about a month or so, the axe comes down. And I think the beneficiary will be Julie Bishop. Lots of voters like Turnbull, but they’re all Labor voters. Julie has kept her head down, like Bill Shorten (current Labor leader), meaning that nobody really thinks she’s wonderful, but nobody actually hates her (yet). And that appears to be what politics is all about at the moment.

2

I dread the future. All I can see is that our political leaders are becoming progressively worse. And the electorate is following suit, you don’t even have to be sane now to hold a seat in parliament. You may as well elect dogs and cats if the likes of Clive Palmer and Jacqui Lambie can get elected.

3

OTOH, Jacqui is no worse than Pauline, and Clive is no worse than Joh…

#unreasonableoptimism

4

Pauline is stupid and ill-informed, I don’t think Jacqui is the full quid. I must admit I do tend to block out Joh just as I did at the time - who cares he’s only fucking up Queensland. But yeah he was as bad as, or worse than, anyone you care to name.

5

Sometimes, jebus give me strength, I just want to march down to canberra and drop a steamy pile on parliament lawn. Its such a freakshow right now and somebody in that building needs to learn how to clean up turds.

6

Oh and about a prediction, I agree with the OP that Tony won’t be headed off. The liberals cannot be that dumb. They will wait until the next election and then ask him not to contest it knowing that he is about as popular as a dogs testicle.

7

Funny OP, very well observed. Only…

It wasn’t absentmindedness, it was pure Not Rudd/Not Gillard. You had the bizarre situation for quite a while during the recent Labor years of the Libs polling well while their leader Tony polled like a bag of fishheads left in the sun for a week. No one has ever liked Tony. I doubt his best friends like him.

…which was popular, because if there’s one thing Aussies are more concerned about than climate change, it’s having measures to prevent climate change impinge on them in any way whatsoever. Stopping the refugee boats, which Abbott’s government has done brutally and effectively, was also popular.

Abbott’s government could be riding a sea of redneck popular right now, if it wasn’t for the fact he has the charisma of a dry turnip and the common touch populist instincts of Bob Hawke in reverse.

12% is the highest figure I’ve seen. I saw 2% somewhere I think. This was the single most bizarre decision by an Australian politician I’ve ever seen. As I keep saying, normally even when I disagree with a political decision I can usually understand why it was made, or at the very least understand the mindset behind it. But Abbott’s head is in a place so weird I just can’t even begin to get my head there.

He is only a few years older than me and is a fellow Australian but I don’t even…

I think nonetheless it’s what they must do or they will get Newmanned. Come next election, Abbott won’t be Not Rudd/Not Gillard, he will be Abbott the weird alien borg up against Shorten the pleasant and likeable and Abbott will be out on his ear. So the Libs need to shoot him - right now - so that everyone’s forgotten about the blood come next election. No one likes him anyway. Political parties have always offed their leaders now and again, the embarrassment with Labor recently was that (a) they did it to someone who was an impossible dick to work with but (b) liked by the electorate and (c) did it more than once.

I think they should go with Turnbull. Winning elections is all about moving towards the centre enough to pick up the centrist voters while leaving those further out on your side of the spectrum with no one to vote for but you.

8

I assume you mean Clive, not Joh the latter being dead for a quarter century.

Clive’s a joke. He’s not going to get a single seat in Qld’s recent elections.

9

Would have thought that alone justified a landslide.

I reckon the history books will be pretty kind to Julia, given the awful hand of cards that she was dealt, I thought she played them with rare skill.

On this, simply words fail me. There must have been somebody in the PMO or his confidants who thought this was a good idea, but I can’t work out who. Why Phil? Some sort of compensation for the fact his missus is head of government and Charles having that gong since 1981 or summat? Bizarre even for Tony.

Yeah, but the bulk of the chattering is coming from the the political journos, for whom it’s a cheap and endless source of column inches which can be fanned irrespective of there actually being embers or not. Some backbenchers in marginal Queensland seats are getting nervous about their pension plan following that State’s election. Que sera, sera.

Bishop has been a revelation as foreign minister, but she’s been barely adequate in the various domestic portfolios that she’s held. I think she could be at least as effective as Julia was but IMHO she is behind Turnbull, Hockey and Morrison, were there a leadership race in the offing.

The four of them get on well and would probably vote in a bloc on virtually any issue in a free vote so there isn’t much between them on a policy basis. So the option is changing who sells the message, not changing the message.

If it did have legs, and it doesn’t then Turnbull is the only option. You’d think would be superb at the job … he’s on top of his brief, he’s cluey, has the confidence of a self-made man, he’s articulate and can sell the big picture , but his last stint as leader wasn’t good on several levels.

So I think Abbott is safe.

While the LABs Rudd-Gillard-Rudd shuffle is a key argument against the LIBs using the same playbook, the “you can’t change PM between elections” argument doesn’t cut any ice with me. If the PM goes off the rails I think it’s a commendable feature that they can be turfed out in a party room coup with about 2 hours notice.

10

No no - look back at the conversation, we were playing ‘how bad can politicians get’ … Joh was my entry.

That’s always been my opinion too. I’m a big fan of the carbon tax and the NDIS, though the latter will be expensive. I can’t think, off the top of my head, of any of their policies which were truly awful (well, I hated continuing asylum seeker detention, but I do recognise it’s me that’s to the left of the general populaiton on that). The insulation scheme was badly run, and the Mining Tax didn’t bring in as much money as it could have, but … shrug. Even Rudd, there was nothing wrong with his policies as far as I can see, he was just personally unworkable-with.

The last government’s biggest problem always was that they had two wreckers - one inside, one outside - undermining them relentlessly. What I really want right now, no matter how it happens, is for Abbott to get punished, and punished hard, for being no more than a wrecker - I want people to look at his political career and go ‘well, crap, not trying that again…’ otherwise, like ** don’t ask** said, the future of politics really will be in a bad way.

11

Four people died because of how badly that program was run.
We are into the realms of criminal negligence, not some common garden variety bureaucratic snafu.

12

As I saw it put “this is what happens when you have an analog Prime Minister in a digital age.”

13

Criminal negligence by who? All the government did was hand out cash for installation of insulation, which was a very good idea, at base. Australian has in place extremely stringent workplace health & safety laws, some of the strictest in the world. And based on my work I would say enforcement of those laws is quite well funded.

Some get rich quick businessmen (probably Liberal voters :D) then got in on the act and broke every WH&S law on the books while trying to install insulation too fast and people died. They deserve to go to jail.

The government? Well I guess you could argue they should have foreseen that corners would be cut and nanny-stated the whole operation by having the insulation installed by government employees or having government employees stand over the shoulders of the private enterprise contractors.

But basically IMHO the blaming of Labor for the catastrophe is a politically driven beat up. The underlying idea was good, and the idea of having private contractors install the insulation was good. Let’s face it, the Libs would have been dead against the idea of anything else, before people started dying.

The end result is that a worthwhile policy has been totally derailed by a mix of callous businessmen trying to make a fast buck at the expense of other people’s lives, and politicians trying to make hay in a way that will make any future attempt to bring the program back political poison forevermore, despite its underlying soundness.

14

Yous guys haven’t even mentioned the NT! Late night party coup attempts to overthrow the party’s leader; Giles refuses to resign; cabinet reshuffles…

15

This is true … but when we had a digital PM in a digital age (i.e. Rudd) the end result was disturbingly similar.

16

Touche’, but not even the participants can explain what happened.

Fortunately it’s a tempest in a teapot but as an exercise in practical politics I’d score that as at least as bizarre as Tony’s K for Phil.

:smiley:

17

It’ll all be OK. Tony said he’s gonna be more consultative from now on. What a relief!

Oh, was it written down? I didn’t notice.

18

You mean he’ll ask Peta?

19

Heh.

20

It also seems Tony is determined not to be confused with an in touch person, trying to sell both himself and his metadata rubbish from within an AFP conference room. Ah huh. I’m just so glad I am safe from those nasty drug dealers, now that the government spies on us. So relieved.