Turnbull shrivels in the spotlight as mass panic grips dead government walking

Extract from The Guardian

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Katharine Murphy on politics

Katharine Murphy

The Coalition’s desperate response to this week’s constitutional chaos made it a public laughing stock – and governments generally don’t survive that

‘Malcolm Turnbull is not in a position of being able to distance himself from the growing perception that his government has no ballast to help it weather storms.’ Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian

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Friday 18 August 2017 14.52 AEST Last modified on Friday 18 August 2017 14.53 AEST

In a political week bizarre enough to defy any attempt by any analyst to find sense in the chaos, it can be useful to grip particular moments in time and seek some meaning.
This past week took me back to the wilder moments of the Gillard government – the moments where the minority parliament seemed to hold its collective breath and the government seemed to hang by a thread.
One such moment was the day of the famous misogyny speech, where events required Gillard to attack, and savagely, on her feet. Tony Abbott came at the Labor government in early October 2012 with full rhetorical force in an effort to blast out the House Speaker, Peter Slipper.

Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech

The misogyny speech now just hangs out there in memory and on the webiverse devoid of its context.
It’s a cultural moment, iconography for a generation of women sick of the manspreading and the mansplaining and the ugliness of the unfiltered bro culture which remains stubbornly pervasive in this country.

It’s a little sacred feminist site.
But at the time, weighted with its context, it was a prime minister fighting for her political life.
I watched Gillard again this week, suspended in her moment in time, absorbing all that pressure, carrying the weight of the restive and jittery colleagues sitting behind her, well aware of the forces arrayed against her, holding the full force of her anger in check to better land blows on her opponent.
Gillard looked forward for most of the speech, across the dispatch box, right at Abbott, and the people sitting behind him.

Then, and now, it was a gripping battle of psychology and will between two leaders.
Abbott met Gillard’s prime ministerial gaze, starting out with an expression of smug defiance, but by the end of Gillard’s demolition job, if you watch, he is surly, angry, mentally rejecting the version of himself she has just packaged up and flung at him over the dispatch box.
The evisceration of Abbott didn’t help her on the day, or in the end. What was broken inside that government couldn’t be fixed. Slipper stood aside, the media crucifixion of Australia’s first female prime minister rolled on unchecked, and Kevin Rudd closed in and brought her down.
But on that day, in that moment, Abbott heard very clearly what she said. The critique settled on him, if only for a few minutes. You see him mulling, absorbing, rejecting.
Two political protagonists were locked in an epic tussle of mental agility and toughness.
There was a contest, as visceral as political contests get.
This week Malcolm Turnbull also rose in the parliament, on Thursday, at the end of a week studded with the same sense of contingency and chaos as the 43rd parliament.
The stakes weren’t nearly as high as on misogyny day, there was no immediate focal point, Turnbull was drifting in indeterminate territory between Barnaby Joyce being a Kiwi on Monday and Fiona Nash being a Brit later that evening – and Pauline Hanson was running considerable interference in the Senate with her atrocious burqa stunt.

 George Brandis attacks Pauline Hanson’s ‘appalling’ burqa stunt

There was no immediate crisis, no House Speaker tottering in his chair, just a pervasive sense of events being outside the government’s control – a week bad enough for the prime minister to have to stand up in a suspension debate and set the tone.
So what can we make of Turnbull’s moment?
The prime minister’s speech on Thursday had none of the razor-sharp focus of Gillard in extremis. The chamber wasn’t gripped. There was no obvious connection, frisson and contest, just a workaday monologue.
Bill Shorten turned his back on the prime minister and chatted with colleagues, not because he was feeling pressure, but because he felt absolutely no pressure.
And rather than directing his attack across the dispatch box at Shorten, demanding that his opponent engage, summoning all the authority and command of his office, Turnbull turned instead and delivered to his own backbench.
Turnbull’s own body language betrayed the reality that the target audience for the intervention was, predominantly, internal.
There was no ritualised display of dominance over the opposition, no fanning of feathers, which is what the grim theatre of parliament demands. The opponents and the voters outside had become entirely irrelevant to the exercise.

The toxic Canberra hothouse had sealed shut.
Politicians are, by instinct and conditioning, pack animals, asserting acts of dominance over one another to establish the hierarchy.
It’s grim, and zero sum, and deeply alienating for humans – but it’s the life. It’s what’s required: mark your territory, or have it taken from you.
Earlier on in the week, on the day the government in a mad act of desperation had tried to spin its own citizenship dramas into an elaborate international conspiracy, Labor roared laughing throughout question time.
Sometimes politicians roar laughing in parliament to be theatrical, to unsettle their opponents, as a bit of unconvincing performance art.
Not this week. People were doubled over laughing because the government was turning itself into an airport novel, and nobody could quite believe it was happening.
Governments can weather a lot of storms, even in our febrile, half-mad times, but they don’t generally survive a loss of authority so profound as to become a public laughing stock.
That’s dead man walking, dead government walking, territory.
The constitutional dramas that have plagued the government in recent weeks are not Turnbull’s fault.
This is not a drama created by prime ministerial deficiency, but by institutional laziness, incompetence and deficiency inside political movements.

The lack of care taken by a number of politicians about something as basic as their eligibility to sit in the parliament speaks volumes about the lackadaisical attitude of Australia’s political class to the rules of their road, which reflects our entirely deficient mechanisms for accountability and enforcement in politics.
When there are rules that are never properly enforced, you get precisely the kind of problem that is unfolding now.
So it’s unfair to lay the current problems squarely at Turnbull’s feet.
The distinct lack of interest in having a serious accountability regime is a collective and pervasive affliction in Australian politics, not a specific failing of one political leader.
But how you respond in moments of crisis, matters.
Whether you can project a sense of calm and confidence, matters.
Whether you are still in an active contest with your political opponent, matters.
While the prime minister can credibly say a lack of attention to detail by the National party is not his fault, nor the fault of the Liberal party, Turnbull is not in a position of being able to distance himself from the growing perception that his government has no ballast to help it weather storms, no clear sense of purpose or intention, and little collective resilience or clear thinking under pressure.
When the question demanded by the events of the week is as existential as is your government legitimate – your answer cannot be intemperance, inconsistency, florid overstatement and mass panic.