Government By Disaster

...Of The Disastrous, By The Disastrous, For The Disastrous

What a day of pasting. If I were the media advisor for the Abbott Government, I'd suggest quitting while being far behind. It's a bit of a free-for-all in the Fairfax presses, slamming the government's performance every which way.

The first big one was Laura Tingle who is the politcs editor on the AFR, but her article made it on to the SMH website. (By the way, I understand SMH now also stands for "Shake My Head" in internet argot. There's a certain truth to that)

Bombing Syria. Messing with the constitution to get a political outcome on same sex-marriage. These are now the playthings of a prime minister so desperate, so out of control that he is overseeing the complete surrender of proper governance to day-to-day tactics. 

The problem is that it isn't even working for him. Every issue that is running in politics at present is highlighting the bitter divisions, or policy confusion, or both, within the government. Cabinet ministers are publicly brawling over the appropriate legal vehicle, and timing, for deciding the question of same-sex marriage. Attorney-General George Brandis dismissed Scott Morrison's suggestion that there should be a referendum, and was publicly backed by two other senior ministers. Six MPs indicated they would cross the floor to vote in favour of same-sex marriage. 

Coalition MPs recognise that Tony Abbott's suggestion this week that the issue of same-sex marriage issue should go to "the people" was a purely political gambit to get it off the agenda short-term, shore up his support with conservatives in the party room, and bury it all together long-term. 

But the glaring tactical flaws in this idea - the belief it would both stop the debate and could somehow stop same-sex marriage being an election issue - are so spectacular that even some of those close to Abbott are scathing. Then again, the Prime Minister is now at war with his own party. His tactics are as much directed at his colleagues as his political opponents. He was quite happy to allow a party room debate to take place that saw 16 of his ministers argue against his position on same-sex marriage. 

It's not just on issues of social policy, however, where things have gone off the rails. The government continues to announce policies that are long on columns of smoke, large in cost and short in detail.

And there's a good deal more there but the essential point is that this government has lost its way. Not only has it lost its way, it has traveled so far off the map that it can be likened to Whitlam's time in Government. But of course Whitlam's was a busy government trying to do too much at once. This one is exactly the opposite according to Mark Kenny:

Despite what used to be urgent debt and deficit crises, the 44th parliament has become notable more for its absence of urgency, its dearth of pressing business. That, and for being regularly derailed by controversies like Thursday's revelations of inadvertent political fundraising by the hand-picked trade union royal commissioner, Justice Dyson Heydon. 

True, some important legislation has been passed this term and plenty blocked, but hours this week alone, have been devoted to bloated speech-making about deceased former MPs and an uncontested motion commemorating the Gallipoli landings 100 years ago. Notwithstanding that non-government MPs have largely stopped contributing, the Gallipoli commemoration debate has wound on an on, its wordy importance helpfully filling the airy spaces and eating up time.   

So "crucial" is the debate about the 100th anniversary that even when news broke on Thursday, exposing Heydon's extra-curricular activities, Christopher Pyne opposed any suspension of proceedings to discuss it, pretty much on the grounds that the commemoration was of primary importance. 

Perhaps this is apt because this penchant for rear-view romanticism over current business feeds Australia's ongoing self-delusion. 

Indeed, our national character has long been framed by its curiously concocted Anzac legend. We are, we like to believe, a nation of iconoclasts, or as we might prefer to say, larrikins - good natured if disrespectful, egalitarian by instinct, inclined to challenge authority, suspicious of station and wealth, and above all, courageous. 

But how courageous really? And how genuinely egalitarian? The marriage equality challenge has revealed a woeful failure on both scores with fear of the future again emerging as the locomotive 'force majeure'. 

The country that will not consider changing its flag, cannot imagine constituting itself independently, and can no longer even discuss economic reform except by way of wild misrepresentation in the negative – think industrial relations, renewable energy, taxation, and the federation - has lost its bottle for social reform also.

And there is much more there. Kenny too thinks that the problem is that the government is too scared to face up to the future and so spends its time in abject denial of the changes it cannot control. 

Comparable countries have moved on marriage equality and done so under conservative governments. Think David Cameron's Britain, Stephen Harper's Canada, and John Key's New Zealand, not to mention predominantly Catholic Ireland. 

But not Australia. The famed social laboratory of the 19th and 20th centuries has become the laggard of the 21st. Scared, meek, backward-looking, gripped by polarisation and lumbered with a class of political leaders cowering against change.

They're pretty damning words - and that's just us talking about it as Australians. Turns out Peter Hartcher's been talking to some Kiwis, and they have offered some interesting insights:

The collective analysis of Key and his ministers, which came together over glasses of red that evening in Sydney, was two-fold. First, they saw that the Abbott government had no reform narrative. It had slogans, but no persuasive case.

Second, they concluded that it had no "political architecture" to manage the government. They were "puzzled about the absence of an architecture for conducting the business of government – how to take the backbench along with the executive, how to reach out to the crossbenches, how to connect with key constituencies", says a participant.

A glaring example the Kiwis remarked on – how could a political party whose support base is 50 per cent female have but one female member of cabinet?

In sum, Abbott was not equipped to carry the people or manage the government. These fundamental failures fated the government to fail. 

It was obvious to an experienced overseas leadership team a year and a half ago, and it's now glaringly, distressingly plain to all.

It's a little dramatic of Peter Hatcher to be writing that. Let's face it; if we exercised even a teensy-weensy bit of imagination back in say, - oh, I don't know - September 2013, it was glaringly obvious that Tony Abbott and his team were ill equipped to actually govern this country. Indeed Paul Keating even warned us saying "God help us, God help us all". It was glaringly obvious to most sane human beings of this nation, but not only did the Murdoch presses line up to shove this brain-damaged junkyard dog into the Prime Minsiter's office, most of the editors of the Fairfax Papers wrote they supported a change to this lot led by the brain-damaged ex-Oxofrd-pugilist. 

Since then it's been crappy policy enactments, one after the other; Sadistic treatment of asylum seekers arriving by boats? Sure. Wind back the carbon pricing mechanism that was working so well to cut emissions? Sure thing. Scream about a budget deficit problem like we're the next Greece? Why not? Worse, shittier NBN? Signature policy! Partisan ideologically driven budgets? Glorious! None of these moves are or were supported by the wider electorate - but they did it anyway, and they think they've done a good job.

And they wonder how they got into this mess.

Back to Laura Tingle who closed her piece with this bit:

If you hang around in Canberra long enough, you start to recognise the point where a government has become terminal, where the death spiral is irretrievable. It's got nothing to do with the polls, or leadership rumblings. 

It's the point where the sheer stupidity of its decisions is so obvious, so craven, so contradictory, that everyone involved - ministers, backbenchers, the opposition, the media, voters - just know it can't go on like this. 

Some would argue that most of the Whitlam government's time in office was like that. But the days when Malcolm Fraser warned voters their money was safer under the bed than it would be under a Labor government, the days of forged faxes under the Keating government, the days when John Howard pledged $9 billion of spending in just one campaign speech, when Kevin Rudd announced the moving of the Sydney naval base to Queensland, all smacked of that time when everyone knew all was lost. 

But with the exception of Whitlam, all these things happened with just days or weeks to go before polling day. 

We are as much as 12 months from the next election. Abbott's conservative supporters might not want to abandon him. Scott Morrison is clearly positioning as an alternative conservative candidate. 

But at some point the conservatives - and the Coalition more broadly - will have to decide not just whether they are prepared to lose an election, but whether they are prepared to have the Coalition's reputation for good government become likened in history to that of Whitlam's.

Tony Abbott certainly doesn't want to admit it, but the writing's on the wall. It's "game over" with nothing but the running down of the clock. As Tingle notes, it is amazing that there's 12months to go to the next election from this point in. It feels way more terminal than that. I'd be surprised if Tony Abbott was still Prime Minister in October. Just looking at these journos, it is clear there is a groundswell of a chorus in the community that wants Tony Abbott to go. The Liberal Party just isn't listening. That leaves us with the continued train-wreck-governance to carry on until the next election. 

When they said may you live in interesting times, I sure didn't expect it to be this kind of 'interesting'.