OK, I can’t do it anymore. For too long I’ve been holding out, hoping against hope, straining to see the good things being done by the Turnbull government, but I can’t resist the evidence any more: this is a dud government. And it might be as bad as the Abbott mob.
Not that there aren’t some good things: Christian Porter’s interest in evidence-based welfare policy, Sussan Ley’s patient work to dig out rorts and waste in the health system, Scott Morrison crafting an ugly but workable solution on super — which will make a material difference to the jobs of Treasurers and Finance Ministers in the 2020s. And we’ve even seen a sustained lift in public sector infrastructure investment in this week’s engineering construction data. But they’re all atypical of a government that is struggling to offer a semblance of coherence and competence, and which this week served up a series of shockers so extensive they’re overshadowing each other.
On Monday, former MP and, more to the point, former minister Ian Macfarlane was revealed to have taken a gig as CEO of the Queensland Resources Council, in what is a blatant breach of the government’s ministerial standards. Under Tony Abbott’s statement of ministerial standards — which have the same requirement as under Malcolm Turnbull’s — “Ministers are required to undertake that, for an eighteen month period after ceasing to be a Minister, they will not lobby, advocate or have business meetings with members of the government, parliament, public service or defence force on any matters on which they have had official dealings as Minister in their last eighteen months in office.”
Macfarlane handled resources up until he was dumped after the Turnbull coup a year ago. He starts in November in a job that will involve advocating for the resources sector. It’s an open-and-shut breach, without even Martin Ferguson’s silly fig leaf of being on APPEA’s “advisory board” after leaving politics. Yet according to Macfarlane, Turnbull’s office signed off on it. If true, such an act makes a joke of any “ministerial standards”.
Then there was the backpacker tax backflip on Tuesday. With farmers, fruit growers and horticulturists warning of high-value produce being left to rot due to the dearth of holidaymakers to harvest it, the government belatedly slashed the proposed tax rate and arbitrarily upped that long-term go-to for cash-strapped governments, the passenger movement charge, to pay for it. But industries reliant on holidaymakers for their workforce, like hospitality, were still unhappy and worried they wouldn’t have a workforce.
No industry likes taxes, of course, but for a government supposedly with low taxes in its DNA — and made up of a coalition with an agriculture-based party — it was a peculiar and unnecessary bungle that, had it happened when Labor was in government, would have been the stuff of front pages for weeks and portrayed as more evidence of how disconnected Labor was from business and farmers.
[Coalition can never have clean hands on education funding]
On Wednesday, there was another iteration of the ongoing debacle of the NBN, with NBN Co announcing it was dumping the Optus HFC network as too rotten to remediate, in favour of “fibre to the distribution point” to hundreds of thousands of residences. The decision made a mockery of Turnbull’s bland assurance in 2012 that the Optus network could be upgraded for a “modest cost” to provide equivalent services to the NBN. As late as early this year NBN Co and ministers were dismissing leaks showing it would cost $400 million to fix the Optus network. Now the leaks have turned out to be true. No wonder Ziggy Switkowski is so determined to use the Australian Federal Police to identify the whistleblowers who revealed the scandal.
Yesterday was given over to the government reverting to the Abbott-era war on renewables, with the likes of Barnaby Joyce bending facts and the basic rules of physics to blame renewables for the South Australian blackout. The Prime Minister’s remarks weren’t so unsubtly stupid as Joyce’s, but he used the blackouts to attack “state Labor Governments [that] have over the years set priorities and renewable targets that are extremely aggressive, extremely unrealistic, and have paid little or no attention to energy security”.
It is indeed problematic when state governments pursue their own energy policies in an interconnected energy market, but in the absence of effective action on renewables from the federal government — the last policy initiative from the Coalition was to cut the Renewable Energy Target and establish a “Windfarm Commissioner” — state governments that understand the long-term need to transition away from highly polluting coal-fired power have no alternative. If the federal government fails to act or, in the case of the Coalition, actively tries to undermine the renewable energy transition, then responsible state governments must pursue their own transition. There’s minimal difference between Joe Hockey complaining that wind farms are ugly and Turnbull’s more sophisticated, but equally hostile, attack on state renewable energy plans.
As for lack of energy security, try telling that to Australian households who for years have been paying via their power bills for gold-plating and over-engineering — supposedly justified by the need for network resilience — under governments of all stripes, plus privatised and state-owned power sectors.
The Gillard government had similar moments to each of these, but never all in one week, never piled up together like this. Labor had the good grace to separate its stuff-ups by a few weeks to give the media time to chew them over properly. It’s so bad that Stuart Robert — giving parliamentary speeches written by donors that placed Australians facing trumped-up charges under dodgy regimes abroad in greater jeopardy — and Wyatt Roy, coming within kilometres of breaking the foreign fighters law he voted for when he was an MP, are almost footnotes.
We all had such high expectations of this government. After this week, there’s a genuine debate about whether it’s actually better than the one it replaced.
Can’t believe it’s taken this long for you to reach the obvious conclusion. Interesting to watch though as many good journalists are starting to pen these sorts of articles. Michelle Grattan seems to have reached a similar conclusion lately.
I thought the same thing. 55 weeks to come to this conclusion. Slow learner, Bernard?
Plus Michelle is still making comparisons between Turnbull and Gillard that are invidious to Gillard. No surprises there but it is evidence of the length of time it has taken nearly all political commentators to realise that Malcolm is exactly as promised – different elocution from and a better suit than Abbott but not a leader’s bootlace.
Re the Grattan reference, I was so surprised I went to The Conversation website to read any article that could be as you suggest. I stopped reading Grattan’s nonsense 2 years ago, despite being a financial supporter of The Conversation, so I was a bit excited to imagine she had matured.
Sadly I could find no such article, I would love a reference if you read this and are kind enough to supply one. My request is genuine, as my opinion of the CPG members is about the same as , well nothing printable.
Cheers
Paul
And if Wyatt Roy had been named Mustafa al Haq would the AFP been out to arrest him? As for the chicken little Turnbull government, the Australian electorate has spoken, we Australians live comfortably with mediocritry, the NBN achievements, overseen by our own Malcolm mediocre and sexy finger Ziggy as we all know from his Telstra days, …everything he touches gets fucked.
Must say, there is one area that he has completely turned around. Turnbull is handling Islamic relations as well as Abbott was stuffing them up. Inclusive, calming statements after a flashpoint. Balm on wounds Abbott was rubbing raw.
But apart from that … ? Disappointment. He needs to learn the parable of the Rudd years, “To whom much is given, much will be required.” Don’t squib the great challenges! Political capital is there to be spent, it goes off quickly.
It has always surprised me that Australians could vote in a party that thinks that market prices are a substitute for nation-building policies.
At long last, Bernard. I never had any high expectations of Turnbull: the man is too conceited and opportunistic to ever do the hard work necessary to make positive contributions. His silly business tax cut is strong evidence of that. Now business groups can only claim its advantage is that it will be “Australia wide”, as if that could be an “advantage”. It would be far better if the same amount of addition to the deficit were spent on infrastructure -especially, but not only, on transport infrastructure, which would reduce business costs and might actually benefit the public.
Today Turnbull wasted everyone’s time by repeating his opportunistic claim that the situation in South Australia showed that we had to go slow with renewable energy. As Daniel Andrews is reported as saying, Turnbull’s claim is ignorant nonsense.
The state wide blackout in SA had nothing whatever to do with the power generation mix there and everything to do with over 20 high voltage transmission towers being taken out by a twin tornado south of Port Augusta and 80, 000 lightening strikes.
Nor did the problem in SA in July have anything to do with the energy mix, apart from an over reliance on wind as opposed to solar, that can be fixed now that solar costs have fallen. The July problem had everything to do with repairs to the sole connector with Victoria and with the private provider’s decision to price gouge rather than bring on more power from its gas powered generators. It is the unreliability of the private owner of gas powered generation assets in SA that makes SA power unreliable, rather than problems with the variability of wind and sun.
The instability of the SA power system therefore has everything to do with the Olsen Liberal government’s privatisation of ETSA as a monopoly provider, which gave the private provider little bonuses, like reducing competition from interstate by ruling out a connector to NSW. The possibly highest power prices in the world in SA has everything to do with that privatisation, which brought with it regular power outages that have reduced in recent years only because customers are now paid a cost penalty by the monopoly provider.
The problems in SA have also got something to do with the state government’s lack of courage and frequent lack of numbers in the SA legislative council that have stopped passage of legislation that would undo Olsen’s privatisation.
And they have had something to do with the federal government’s failure to modernise our power transmission system so that it is more decentralised and has better back up. This modernisation might have made for a part rather than whole state blackout. Nor does Turnbull’s attack on Victoria and Queensland’s targets for renewables make sense. Turnbull asks what plan do the state governments have to get from where they are to those targets and then puffs that they have no path set out. Now, of course, they cannot have a path set out, since getting to their targets will depend on new technologies that will emerge over the next twenty or so years. Once again, Turnbull’s opportunism shows forth.
Yes, the Turnbull government is as bad as the Abbott government, though its spokesman lies more smoothly than his predecessor.
We are now to witness the reduction of Gonski funding, so that it fails to remove the widening gap between better and poorer schools, which has in turn led to a widening gap in outcomes that has meant that more money spent in education has contributed to widening inequality rather than kept our education system up with other countries.
TL;DR
10/10
Agree.
As a South Australian, I completely agree with your comments.
Pity about the politicians and the ABC trying to make the situation into something it is not!