With an end-of-year reshuffle due after parliament rises this week, public servants will be busily preparing new minister briefing packages so that ministers can get their feet under the desk before the summer break.
Who’s in and who’s out? We’ll find out in due course, but here’s a form guide to what a reshuffle based on merit and political smarts might scoop up.
Duds
Richard Colbeck
Intended to be a placeholder for the government’s response to the aged care royal commission when it made its report, that idea went to hell when the pandemic erupted and ripped through two nursing homes in Sydney and then through much of the private aged care sector directly regulated and funded by the Commonwealth in Victoria.
Hundreds died as a result of an out-of-its-depth regulator and a minister with no standing within the government. Watch for Morrison to insert a close ally to craft the government’s response to the royal commission in the 2021 budget.
Paul Fletcher
Like Colbeck, Fletcher is a modest minister with much to be modest about. In the Communications portfolio mainly as an errand boy for the PMO, Fletcher mostly spends his time attacking the ABC, sending cheques to News Corp and devising ever more absurd media policies.
Angus Taylor
The energy minister now looks like an impediment to a government that increasingly feels the need to pretend it believes in climate change. Openly at war with state colleagues on climate action, including Liberals in his own home state, the scandal-plagued climate denialist could pay the price for an attempted climate “reset” — even if only rhetorical.
Peter Dutton
It surely hasn’t escaped notice within the government that Home Affairs has, for years now, been the least competent, most scandal-prone department, with a long list of major bungles, often with tragic consequences.
The Dutton to Defence rumour has been around so long as to invite deep scepticism, but it would solve significant problem for Morrison. Defence is where senior ministers’ careers go to die — few are the ministers in the last 30 years who have returned from Russell Hill; those that have were usually relatively junior before promotion.
On the other hand, would you trust the man who has “run” Home Affairs in recent years with an even more massive department, with a budget with another two zeroes on it? Only if a competent and active defence industry minister were dispatched there as well, which brings us to…
Melissa Price
We know Price spends most of her time in witness protection, but has anyone heard from the Minister for Defence Industry? Does anyone want to hear from her? With the new submarine program in an uncontrolled drift to the bottom of the ocean, a competent minister is needed to get the program back to rights and provide some public reassurance that we’re not wasting even more tens of billions of dollars than we were already wasting building these things in Adelaide.
The rising talent
Ben Morton
The former head of the WA Liberal organisation and now Morrison right-hand man will be elevated, though his perceived competence may be punished by being given one of the more toxic policy messes facing the government.
Andrew Hastie
Hastie has been the best chair of the intelligence and security committee in this government — and there have been a few. Indeed, that might count against him given he has been prepared to push back against the overreach and incompetence of Peter Dutton and the Home Affairs department on national security. But when Hastie speaks on national security matters, he does so with more authority than anyone else more senior.
Sarah Henderson
Having lost Corangamite, Sarah Henderson has been given a new lease on political life in the Senate, where she has diligently applied herself to bucketing her former employer the ABC. Watch for that to be rewarded in a government where Michaelia Cash was hilariously promoted in order to avoid drawing attention to the Coalition’s persistent lack of female representation.
Darren Chester
Saying the Nationals are thin on talent is a statement of the blinding obvious; one of the few talented Nats, Darren Chester has been taking a hammering for 18 months on behalf of Scott Morrison in the veterans’ portfolio because the PM stolidly rejects the idea of a royal commission into veterans’ suicide.
The promotion of Chester back to the senior levels he occupied in 2017, before he was done over by Barnaby Joyce, would provide a useful addition of competence.
Barnaby Joyce
As for Joyce, can he transition back from barking mad videos to a ministry? Problem is Barnaby Joyce is an accused sexual harasser (he denies the claims) and his party has never bothered to resolve those allegations.
After what Four Corners revealed about the antics of senior ministers, what kind of message would a return for Joyce signal?
What are your picks for a cabinet reshuffle? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say column.
I’d be more interested to know what’s in store for the fab three: Porter, Tudge and Sukkar. Can SloMo really polish those turds so they shine brightly?
Yeah, young turds on the turps.
Nice epigram – may I nick it?
I was once warned by a learned friend “Just remember that you can only polish a turd, so far, because its inherent nature will still shine through”
I must have missed the deplorable Tudge who publicly names Centrelink recipients, along with their details. And Porter of ‘it takes years to get an integrity commission up and running’ fame, let alone the two of them and their extramarital shenanigans. For heaven’s sake, why stop there? Let’s include that lying rat, the PM, who today was able to accuse Albanese of not having a grip on truth and reality. The irony was completely lost on him. And Frydenburg……. Enough! It’s the most terrible and incompetent government in our history.
“It’s the most terrible and incompetent government in our history.”
Hmm. It certainly is remarkable, but is it definitely worse than the Abbott & Hockey crap show? Maybe it’s a tie?
There is actually a difference between being competent and being part of the Scottie from marketing’s cheer squad and there we have the conundrum.
I am searching for talent that does not include knifing the Prime Minister in the back or alternately is not part of his prayer club. There isn’t any, is there?
Complete Duds
Michaela Cash and Melissa Price have been in witness protection for so long, and yet.
No one has forgotten the media turning up an hour before the AFP arrived, to raid the union headquarters to seize a document that was already on the public record!
What a hoot! and then no one was to blame really!! Whiteboards to the left and right, so that Michaela didn’t get lost going into the Senate hearings, ha!
And of course then there was the tired and emotional Melissa Price hectoring the Nobel peace prize recipient, Ange Tong about his Climate Change lobbying and “How she had left her cheque book at work”!
All duly heard and remembered clearly by Pat Dodson who happened to be on the same table as Ange Tong for dinner.
Ah Colbeck, Fletcher and Taylor, we did have to mention them.
Taylor could be problematic because if he is cut from the ministry, the Nat’s will replace him and then he could start talking about the briefings he received regarding the former Fire Chiefs that had been desperately trying to warn Slomo he was sitting on a fire bomb.
I could go on, but it depresses me to think that they may be re-elected.
You are, unfortunately, right. Unquestioning loyalty and adherence to the party dogma are the only sought-after qualities. Any display of competence is frowned on because it makes the others look bad. Ethics or moral principles are even worse.
To be crude about it I’d begrudge any of them the steam from a chamber pot. Let’s hope the next election can sort them out. They sure as hell need it – for Australia’s sake.‼️
Unlikely RM, the MSM has boosted them beyond all recognition. The footy fan site that I frequent (with the intent of influencing grass roots opinion – yet another triumph of hope over experience) has Scummo and Glad odds on despite (maybe because of) my megaphoning their myriad shortcomings which might be read about anywhere but in the MSM. And Chinaphobia…see it and believe it. There might be a silent majority but it’s improbable. Makes me laugh when I hear that democracy virtue signalling claptrap that’s supposed to put China in a bad light. I hear it all the time in Comments here.. and in opinion.
“Rising Talent” = “unflushable”?
Henderson? “The Bellarine Pool Hustler”?
“I saw nothing” Hastie?
And “Cousin Jethro”……
Holidaze can’t come soon enough.