Congratulations
Australia. Two years have passed without a leadership coup being
launched against a sitting prime minister. In our unhinged system, that
level of stability is a genuine achievement.
So, hooray for #auspol. Except the voters are still ropeable, and politics doesn’t feel all that stable, does it?
Old debates churn round in enervating circles, deeply silly business persists, and one of Malcolm Turnbull’s rewards for surviving two years in the top job was a harrowing account of Tony Abbott’s wounding and scarring exit from the prime ministership “at the height of his political career” in the Daily Telegraph on Friday.
Poor old Tony (the paper’s political editor, Sharri Markson, noted by way of exposition) didn’t like talking about his emotions, “like most men”.
But given opportunity, Wronged Tony™ rose nimbly to the occasion.
Of course losing the prime ministership was wounding. “Of course you carry scars,” Abbott noted, movingly. Not being prime minister still hurts, but you just have to put disappointments behind you “and make the most of every day and that’s what I’m doing”.
It certainly is what he’s doing. Fortunately for him, sorrow seems a healthy working distance from Abbott’s daily default disposition.
This week, the former prime minister took a day off from his parliamentary duties to help put out bushfires. That made a refreshing change from lighting them – metaphorically of course.
Two years after his own party ran him out of Dodge, Abbott is not ubiquitous in the political landscape, but he’s determined to be assertively present, a little pulse of mischief.
He’s present in the marriage equality debate, defending religious freedom, holding back the scourge of progressivism – although it is mildly curious that the public running on that issue at the moment has defaulted to John Howard, rather than the member for Warringah, almost as if there has been a subtle baton change.
Abbott is also making noise in the government’s fraught energy debate, having warmed his jets on the tarmac on that issue for some months, telling that nice Ben Fordham on 2GB all about his plans for a “100% reliable energy target” – a policy that carries the mild inconvenience of being technically impossible to deliver, given no energy system is ever 100% reliable.
But then targets are, presumably, strictly optional for a political leader who willingly signed Australia up to the Paris climate agreement, and now says we don’t have to do anything serious on emissions reductions, because international agreements are not a “straitjacket”.
While Abbott is never one for fine policy detail, or constrained particularly by facts in the crafting of a deft political argument, he’s been very determined to front run the inevitable crab walk by the government in the direction of coal.
The government is in the middle of its energy policy crab walk, and has picked a partisan fight with Labor, and the energy company AGL, to kick up sufficient dust for shellshocked Coalition MPs to get their tails up, and allow the cabinet to get on with settling the new investment framework.
The energy plan is in transition, right before our eyes. The volume is being turned right down on the clean energy target recommended by the chief scientist, Alan Finkel, and we are moving clearly in the direction of an overhaul of national electricity market rules.
The market operator wants a day-ahead market, which allows better planning to ensure sufficient quantities of dispatchable energy are available in the system, and there is talk of a shift to a capacity market, which exists in Western Australia.
While the rule changes look sensible, how any clean energy target fits with an energy market overhaul remains a bit moot, except it’s clear that if it survives, the level of ambition for emissions reduction will fall below the already low level aspired for in Finkel’s report.
If all this comes to pass, the question will be about how can Australia meet it Paris climate change target – the one Turnbull says is not aspirational, despite what you might hear on 2GB every Wednesday afternoon and every second Monday morning.
The next question will be whether the government can get its energy policy fix through parliament – or whether it actually wants to fail on that front in order to dust off the old political fight with Labor over climate policy and energy.
Could it think that failing to fix this mess up is the viable path, politically, to winning the next election?
Out in the real world, tolerance for such antics is low, but the picking of the old partisan fight has been mildly positive for morale among government MPs, as has the postal ballot’s survival against the high court challenge.
You’d think shouting your way, incoherently, to victory would be impossible, absurd, ridiculous – except that modern politics is really a curious business. Shouting furiously about things often substitutes, successfully, for doing them.
One little reported example this week can tell you a story about what sort of collective hole #auspol is in, when it comes to posturing and blathering being more important than substance.
In the media policy debate, the main verb of the political week, the Australian Conservatives senator Cory Bernardi drafted some amendments that would have allowed One Nation to vote for the deal it had negotiated with the government.
Let me step through this carefully lest I get confusing.
Several weeks ago, the One Nation bloc gave the Coalition its support for the government’s long-planned overhaul of the media landscape – the one that is going to make the Australian media sector even more concentrated in terms of ownership than it already is – in return for some nasty business against the ABC.
The ink was no sooner dry on that agreement when it became clear it was an agreement in air quotes – a deal in name only.
Being nasty to the ABC would require changes to completely separate pieces of legislation, not the broadcasting bill now before parliament, and no one else in the parliament was that interested in being nasty to the ABC, mass political suicide not really being in contemplation.
Bernardi, who is of course in competition with One Nation for votes, thought he’d fix that problem for them by drafting detailed amendments grafting the ABC changes to the bill immediately before parliament.
See Pauline, I’m delivering your deal, Bernardi said – cherubic.
So did One Nation go ahead and vote for Bernardi’s amendments to deliver their own deal with the government?
Well, no, it did not.
The senators hovered outside the chamber during the division, abstaining from the vote to deliver their wish list.
The numbers weren’t there in parliament to legislate the Bernardi amendment, but that doesn’t explain why One Nation refused to vote for, wait for it ... its own deal.
Dare we suggest it is more important to have a Facebook live event moaning about the ABC than doing anything concrete to follow through on your moaning?
It would seem Australian politics really can be that postmodern.
So, hooray for #auspol. Except the voters are still ropeable, and politics doesn’t feel all that stable, does it?
Old debates churn round in enervating circles, deeply silly business persists, and one of Malcolm Turnbull’s rewards for surviving two years in the top job was a harrowing account of Tony Abbott’s wounding and scarring exit from the prime ministership “at the height of his political career” in the Daily Telegraph on Friday.
Poor old Tony (the paper’s political editor, Sharri Markson, noted by way of exposition) didn’t like talking about his emotions, “like most men”.
But given opportunity, Wronged Tony™ rose nimbly to the occasion.
Of course losing the prime ministership was wounding. “Of course you carry scars,” Abbott noted, movingly. Not being prime minister still hurts, but you just have to put disappointments behind you “and make the most of every day and that’s what I’m doing”.
It certainly is what he’s doing. Fortunately for him, sorrow seems a healthy working distance from Abbott’s daily default disposition.
This week, the former prime minister took a day off from his parliamentary duties to help put out bushfires. That made a refreshing change from lighting them – metaphorically of course.
Two years after his own party ran him out of Dodge, Abbott is not ubiquitous in the political landscape, but he’s determined to be assertively present, a little pulse of mischief.
He’s present in the marriage equality debate, defending religious freedom, holding back the scourge of progressivism – although it is mildly curious that the public running on that issue at the moment has defaulted to John Howard, rather than the member for Warringah, almost as if there has been a subtle baton change.
Abbott is also making noise in the government’s fraught energy debate, having warmed his jets on the tarmac on that issue for some months, telling that nice Ben Fordham on 2GB all about his plans for a “100% reliable energy target” – a policy that carries the mild inconvenience of being technically impossible to deliver, given no energy system is ever 100% reliable.
But then targets are, presumably, strictly optional for a political leader who willingly signed Australia up to the Paris climate agreement, and now says we don’t have to do anything serious on emissions reductions, because international agreements are not a “straitjacket”.
While Abbott is never one for fine policy detail, or constrained particularly by facts in the crafting of a deft political argument, he’s been very determined to front run the inevitable crab walk by the government in the direction of coal.
The government is in the middle of its energy policy crab walk, and has picked a partisan fight with Labor, and the energy company AGL, to kick up sufficient dust for shellshocked Coalition MPs to get their tails up, and allow the cabinet to get on with settling the new investment framework.
The energy plan is in transition, right before our eyes. The volume is being turned right down on the clean energy target recommended by the chief scientist, Alan Finkel, and we are moving clearly in the direction of an overhaul of national electricity market rules.
The market operator wants a day-ahead market, which allows better planning to ensure sufficient quantities of dispatchable energy are available in the system, and there is talk of a shift to a capacity market, which exists in Western Australia.
While the rule changes look sensible, how any clean energy target fits with an energy market overhaul remains a bit moot, except it’s clear that if it survives, the level of ambition for emissions reduction will fall below the already low level aspired for in Finkel’s report.
If all this comes to pass, the question will be about how can Australia meet it Paris climate change target – the one Turnbull says is not aspirational, despite what you might hear on 2GB every Wednesday afternoon and every second Monday morning.
The next question will be whether the government can get its energy policy fix through parliament – or whether it actually wants to fail on that front in order to dust off the old political fight with Labor over climate policy and energy.
Could it think that failing to fix this mess up is the viable path, politically, to winning the next election?
Out in the real world, tolerance for such antics is low, but the picking of the old partisan fight has been mildly positive for morale among government MPs, as has the postal ballot’s survival against the high court challenge.
You’d think shouting your way, incoherently, to victory would be impossible, absurd, ridiculous – except that modern politics is really a curious business. Shouting furiously about things often substitutes, successfully, for doing them.
One little reported example this week can tell you a story about what sort of collective hole #auspol is in, when it comes to posturing and blathering being more important than substance.
In the media policy debate, the main verb of the political week, the Australian Conservatives senator Cory Bernardi drafted some amendments that would have allowed One Nation to vote for the deal it had negotiated with the government.
Let me step through this carefully lest I get confusing.
Several weeks ago, the One Nation bloc gave the Coalition its support for the government’s long-planned overhaul of the media landscape – the one that is going to make the Australian media sector even more concentrated in terms of ownership than it already is – in return for some nasty business against the ABC.
The ink was no sooner dry on that agreement when it became clear it was an agreement in air quotes – a deal in name only.
Being nasty to the ABC would require changes to completely separate pieces of legislation, not the broadcasting bill now before parliament, and no one else in the parliament was that interested in being nasty to the ABC, mass political suicide not really being in contemplation.
Bernardi, who is of course in competition with One Nation for votes, thought he’d fix that problem for them by drafting detailed amendments grafting the ABC changes to the bill immediately before parliament.
See Pauline, I’m delivering your deal, Bernardi said – cherubic.
So did One Nation go ahead and vote for Bernardi’s amendments to deliver their own deal with the government?
Well, no, it did not.
The senators hovered outside the chamber during the division, abstaining from the vote to deliver their wish list.
The numbers weren’t there in parliament to legislate the Bernardi amendment, but that doesn’t explain why One Nation refused to vote for, wait for it ... its own deal.
Dare we suggest it is more important to have a Facebook live event moaning about the ABC than doing anything concrete to follow through on your moaning?
It would seem Australian politics really can be that postmodern.
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