No, Tony Abbott, nothing about the Senate negotiations was 'normal'

Extract from The Guardian

The government is going to have to work smarter, and slower, to lock in legislative deals. It is going to have to argue out the detail

• Lenore Taylor, political editor
• theguardian.com, Friday 11 July 2014 19.25 AEST

Yes, Tony Abbott, it is “situation normal” for a government to have to deal with minor parties in the Senate to get its legislation through. But the way your team handled those “negotiations” in the Senate this week is not “situation normal” at all. In fact, in 26 years of reporting politics, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
It is extremely abnormal for a government Senate team to negotiate an amendment with a lower house MP and a gaggle of others in a corridor as journalists watch on and the clock ticks down on the government’s own gag motion.
The most abnormal thing in the current equation is Clive Palmer himself, who, unlike many crossbench senators in the past, has no discernible policy framework and appears mainly intent on using his Senate power to create havoc and place himself at the centre of things.
This is, after all, the bloke who said this week, while launching a publication on the renewable energy target:, “When it comes to fighting climate sceptics you have to persevere.”
But before the election, asked on the ABC whether he agreed that global warming would have a big impact on Australia, he said: “No, I don't believe that's so. There's been global warming for a long time. I mean, all of Ireland was covered by ice at one time. There were no human inhabitants in Ireland. That's how the world has been going over millions and billions of years and Ross Garnaut knows that's true, so I think that's part of the natural cycle.”
That kind of inconsistency, and the sheer number of crossbench senators, does make this situation particularly difficult.
But the government’s tactics have also been inept, trying to score quick political “wins” by insisting the new Senate sit almost immediately in July and then forcing through a vote, rather than taking the long and frustrating road of first locking down deals in the back rooms.
The closest Senate I can recall for unpredictability is the one Paul Keating had to deal with from 1993 to 1996, when Labor had to win over the Democrats and the Tasmanian independent Brian Harradine, or the two West Australian Greens, Dee Margetts and Christabel Chamarette.
Keating, while forbidding then treasurer John Dawkins from attending a Senate estimates committee during the previous parliament, had already labelled the upper house “unrepresentative swill”.
And that was before the 1993 Senate – which so stretched the patience of the government's then Senate leader, Gareth Evans, that he told Chamarette during negotiations over the Mabo native title laws to ''stick your bottom line up your bottom and get out of here''.
Recalling these similarities during Thursday’s dramas I tweeted, with – I thought – obvious sarcasm, that the Senate had not been this much fun since Margetts and Chamarette. The Daily Telegraph, bless them, thought I was seriously having a good time, and tut tutted in an editorial on Friday that “fun” wasn’t the word they would use for it.

The senate hasn't been this much fun since Dee Margetts and Christabel Chamarette #auspol
— Lenore Taylor (@lenoretaylor) July 10, 2014

It’s nice to know they are paying such close attention, but the point of exhuming this piece of ancient history is that it provides some lessons for the government’s current policymaking dilemma.
Despite Chamarette reportedly believing cognitive dissonance had a place in political decision-making, and despite Evans not being most people’s idea of a natural born conciliator, after weeks of long and exhausting negotiations and 238 amendments, the Mabo legislation was eventually passed.
When it comes to the Senate, governments have to play the hand they are dealt, unless they are prepared to go back to the voters, which for a government trailing by 10 percentage points in two-party-preferred terms would not appear to be on the cards.
And no amount of yelling from the House of Representatives, or from the editorial sidelines, or front page PhotoShopped pictures, is going to make the three Palmer United party senators go away.
The government is going to have to work smarter, and slower, to lock in legislative deals. It is going to have to argue out the detail. Transparency could be the best way for the government to try to avoid chaos, or at least to prove that it is not chaos of its own creation.
And it would always seem unwise to impose deadlines on itself that give Palmer the chance to create the drama he thrives on.
It remains extremely likely that the carbon tax will be repealed next week.
But ominously, next Friday is another deadline – the date after which electricity retailers say they cannot continue to act as though the tax is repealed if the parliament hasn’t actually done it. And the government is still negotiating last-minute changes to the last-minute amendment to the repeal bills proposed by Palmer. They haven’t yet started on the budget.
The government needs new tactics, and quickly, to deal with this new normal.