What a miserable week in a thoroughly shitty political year. And it’s only March.
The government wanted this week to be all about Bill Shorten’s “character”. As the Coalition’s shell-shocked troops returned to Canberra to contemplate how badly a “good” (i.e. not marked by any debacles) start to the year had been fried in the nuclear explosion of Barnaby Joyce’s ego, the idea was to go on the offensive by focusing on Shorten. The Opposition leader “didn’t have the character to lead either at home or abroad”, Julie Bishop told the joint partyroom meeting on Tuesday. “He has no shame, no principle, no character,” Malcolm Turnbull said in Question Time that day. Peter Dutton went further a few questions later.
He has been involved in a number of affairs across his adult life. He’s broken trust with so many people across his adult life. There are many members behind him who have been doublecrossed by this Leader of the Opposition.
Dutton warmed to his theme next day. “This Leader of the Opposition fails the character test on a number of fronts,” he told parliament. “People smugglers recognise in this Leader of the Opposition an inherent weakness in his character, which is now known not only to those behind him but also to the Australian people.”
Outside parliament, Dutton elaborated. “We’ve sat here taking a morals lecture from Bill Shorten in relation to Barnaby Joyce over the last few weeks and people know that there’s a history of problems in Bill Shorten’s personal life, Tony Burke’s personal life. And to be lectured by the Labor Party really sticks in the craw.”
In that context, Michaelia Cash’s threat to name young women in Shorten’s office about whom there were “rumours” looks less like a brain snap than Cash’s typically cack-handed implementation of the government’s political tactics. Well, cack-handed, cack-legged, cack-limbed. And a giant pile of cack for the government. By the end of the week, Chuckles was in witness protection from the media, with that whiteboard being deployed, to national mockery.
Take a tip from the Keating years, folks — stay away from whiteboards.
Malcolm Turnbull helpfully doubled down by claiming Cash had withdrawn her comments unreservedly, when she’d done nothing of the sort, forcing Cash to then have to withdraw them unreservedly. And he said Cash was a victim of Doug Cameron’s bullying. Cameron is a canny operator and true believer, but bullying? The only time he gets aggro and that Glaswegian burr turns threatening is if you spill his tea.
Cash thought Cameron had been alluding to rumours about a member of her staff, when he was simply continuing to explore the AWU raid tip-off scandal, which at the same time as Cash was having her brain snap was metastasising, with claims Michael Keenan’s office was involved in tipping the media off as well.
Indeed, Labor has almost religiously avoided going near the private lives of Barnaby Joyce, Vikki Campion or any other ministers and staff. Labor knows perfectly well there are no winners from a sleaze war.
It’s strange tactics, then, for Dutton to justify attacking Shorten personally — complete with snide references to “a number of affairs across his adult life” — because “we’ve sat here taking a morals lecture from Bill Shorten.” There’s been no such lecture, except from some of Joyce’s own colleagues. The message from the Coalition to Labor is “we know you didn’t go after Joyce’s personal life, but we’re going to go after yours.” Maybe great minds within the government think that they have no way out of the mess they’re in, so they may as well pull Labor into the swamp as well.
But as the Cash incident demonstrates, there’s now a problem for female staffers across parliament. Courtesy of the Prime Minister having made a staff member’s relationship with a frontbencher a matter of public interest, any female staff member who moves offices faces the potential for rumours of an affair with the boss. Parliament House is always awash with rumours about who’s sleeping with whom, most of them rubbish. That sort of garbage now takes on the potential to damage careers even more than it already does. And, of course, it’s always women who suffer the damage, not men.
Until all of us are grown up enough to see a professionally successful woman and not wonder whom she slept with to get her job, Parliament House will remain a toxic workplace. This week seems to have guaranteed that.
The libs are certainly in a mess at the moment; even the more experienced performers are going off message. And the latest from the guff prone Cash – is she on something, poor thing?
Methinks Turnbull’s weak, inconsistent leadership is really now starting to infect the whole organisation. So what next?
Surely not, is it possible? – Abbott has another go… Right now the libs seem poised for another coup, and the mad monk looks like he has been limbering up recently.
The usual. The Liberal Party engages in gutter attacks and most of the press (not Crikey! It’s refreshing!) just talks about the decline in political standards in a ‘both sides are equally as bad” way, thus encouraging them to keep on doing it.
No-one lost their career over Children Overboard. Stuart Robert is still in Parliament wasting taxpayers’ money and Michaelia Cash is copping more criticism over the whiteboard stunt than over the fact that the government’s pet ROC initiated a totally unnecessary and uncalled-for police raid, with media coverage ensured by Cash’s press officer who obviously thought the boss would approve (and who has been given a cushy spot with the AHA as a reward for taking the fall for Cash), a police-state tactic that you’d think our freedom-loving media should abhor.
But hey, Sam Dastyari isn’t in Parliament, because when an ALP Senator does the wrong thing they get hounded out in a way that Coalition members just don’t.
It was striking, I think, that when Plibersek was interviewed yesterday about Carr’s stupid Hitler Youth crack she said not a word – at least in the interview I saw – about the “Russian Revolution” provocation but, instead, just said that Carr’s comments were wrong and were appropriately withdrawn immediately. By contrast, Turnbull had to cite the ‘provocation’ of an utterly imagined innuendo in his defence of Cash and failed to condemn her – quite incredible – remarks. So I agree, Arky: this is not a “both sides are equally as bad” scenario at all.
(BTW, what Cash was doing has a long political pedigree – Google “LBJ pig sex” for the iconic case from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail!)
Thanks Decorum – I did as you recommended and found the passage by Hunter S Thompson. It is exactly the tactic being employed by Cash (and Dutton for that matter).
If there was a poll (say an online poll, nudge-nudge Crikey) about which member of parliament was a member of Hitler Youth, Paterson would win it hands down (even with competition from Dutton, who afterall was a copper in Bjelke’s Queensland … ).
Last night on the news, when they went from showing Senator Carr to Paterson I involuntarily laughed out loud, lol. Carr absolutely nailed him. And really was there ever a better case of backpfeiffengesciht? (Well ok, I concede: Madame Cash, but we have Penny Wong for that, and she did it magnificently. Coming from an Asian-Australian non-hetero female made it even sweeter.)
But it’s not so funny when you read the IPA’s wishlist of 100 things they would like to do to Australia, which as the Senator for IPA, Paterson is bound to try to implement.
I suspect the reference to Hitler Youth may have arisen because of young Les Paterson’s striking likeness to Reinhard Heydrich, . Of course it is not young Les’s fault that he looks like Reinhard, just an unfortunate coincidence.
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=reinhard+heydrich&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-ab&gfe_rd=cr&dcr=0&ei=qN6YWtyXLcTN8geCsrcg
Exactly.
But Barry Humphries might object to your confusing the young Les with the young James … even if reality and parody are increasingly difficult to tell apart in Australian politics. While James might metaphorically foam-at-the-mouth, especially when on Q&A (which non-ironically he is trying to close down ..IPA policy wishlist #50-51) I don’t think he actually dribbles.
Now, while we shouldn’t pick on people’s genetic features or appearances, with the young James Paterson I strongly suspect there is a process akin to Nominative Determinism (where one’s occupation is pre-determined by one’s name). But actually it is a kind of inverse process: certain people unconsciously adopting the appearance that most matches their self-conception or inner values. Of course he was the director of communications and development at the IPA. Such stirling preparation to run the country at age 27 (when the Libs found the Victorian talent barrel so empty, and of course no worthy women …).
………………………..
50 Break up the ABC and put out to tender each individual function
51 Privatise SBS
plus:
14 Abolish the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA)
15 Eliminate laws that require radio and television broadcasters to be ‘balanced’
16 Abolish television spectrum licensing and devolve spectrum management to the common law
17 End local content requirements for Australian television stations
47 Cease funding the Australia Network
Err, some of his attitudes would have something to do with it, but yeah, he looks the part.
Carr’s comment at Paterson was wrong for sure, but looking at Paterson and the way he spreads whatever propaganda his minders at the IPA and LNP-HQ tell him, and indeed his snivelling demeanour, you can certainly see where Kim was coming from.
But Carr and Cameron are from the Keating school – vindictive but with some wit and humour….Cash and her colleagues are from the Abbott school – all malice and no wit at all.
Cash lost the plot when Cameron asked who was her new Chief of Staff because she (the COS) is a woman, who was moving from Ciobo’s office. It seems Cash was anticipating Cameron’s next question was going to relate to a woman transferring from the office of a male minister. Clearly the Government has been rattled by the Joyce Syndrome.
Meanwhile, I thought the next question was probably going to be relating to the high turnover of staffers within the Liberal Party in general. Cash, herself, has lost 4 members of her staff since mid-2017.
Is this it? Is this modern politics Australian style? Is this all that our contemporary bunch of politicians have to offer? Incompetence, anger and outrage, and snouts in the trough? Devoid of wit and intelligence and refusing to govern for the good of all? Is this truly what it’s all about?
Does one grow numb to the outrage of it all? Or is it best to resign oneself to day after day of this grey stodge being served up to us all as Australia’s model for effective government and good governance? I don’t know. I spent the Howard/Rudd/Guillard/Rudd/Abbott years out of the country safe in the arms of a European social democracy. So I truly don’t know how to cope with this.
At the moment it seems it is all there is. The sad truth is that we no longer have a democracy – what we have is crony capitalism, with big business running the country. God knows how we get out of it. I am now in my seventies and daily weep for what has become of my country.
Yes, it is enough to make you feel like weeping. But surely not every day! There’s a lot to weep about these days and there’s only so many tears to go around!
Turnball and the crew covering themselves in glory again.
On Dutton and his tactics; you can take the boy out of the Queensland coppers but you can’t take the Queensland copper out of the boy.
Boy being the operative word here. I doubt he got all those investment properties by being an honest cop.
However he got them, surely it would play well in an ad:
“This man owns 14 houses. Do you think he understands how hard it is for you to own one?”
While I agree Dutton is beneath contempt, I have ceased using the Qld copper story, so as not to disrespect the great Bill Hayden.
By way of comparison with their backgrounds, Hayden went to govt schools, whereas Dutton, the son of a businessman, is a private school boy.
But you could have guessed that.
And yet the ABC still repeats his mendacious drivel ad nauseum – false balance anyone?
Have to ask yet again , how on earth did Dutton get to the position he is in ??