Analysis
Posted
It feels like an eternity, rather than just three
months, since our politicians were in Canberra going through the
physical process of governing us — though eternity is not necessarily a bad thing.
They
return next week — or at least some of them do, with some new
colleagues — into a new Parliament, with a sort-of new government trying
to put an unpleasant past behind it, and a prime minister promising to
concentrate on us, Mr and Mrs Everybody, not political games.Getting promised tax cuts through the Parliament is therefore a first-order priority for the Government and a quandary for Labor, despite it reaching a formal position on the three stages of the tax cuts.
Political gamesmanship will not really be far away of course, because the Government wants to embarrass Labor as much as possible about the tax cuts — and its election loss — and Labor has to tack and weave to convince people of the merits of its case for (and against) various aspects of the tax cuts.
The quality of the parliamentary manoeuvres will be fascinating to watch: the combination of a new Opposition Leader who is a master of the Parliament at work with a formidable Manager of Opposition Business, Tony Burke, versus a Prime Minister invested with the authority of an election, teamed with a new Leader of the House, Christian Porter, and a government no longer weighed down by the ongoing tensions of the Abbott-Turnbull struggles.
There are also the changing dynamics in the Senate, where the crossbench has been pruned to a much more manageable size.
But it is impossible to escape the ramifications of power plays made in the past, particularly when hands have been overplayed.
"Never hate your enemies," Michael Corleone advised in The Godfather. "It affects your judgement."
And two particular episodes of our recent political history with echoes of that advice ignored are likely to continue to echo through the new parliament next week.
A rich portrait of a government in shambles
The first of those episodes concerns the collapse of Malcolm Turnbull's prime ministership last August, which comes back to the fore amid a range of new books and television programs emerging this week.The absolute stand-out of these contributions is Niki Savva's book Plots and Prayers, which is officially released on Monday, though two extracts appear in The Australian newspaper.
The first of those extracts detail the extraordinary tussle between two of our brightest lawyers — Malcolm Turnbull and his attorney-general Christian Porter — over whether the original contender last year for Mr Turnbull's job, Peter Dutton, was legally eligible for the job because of constitutional issues.
Fighting for his political life, Mr Turnbull threatened to advise the Governor-General, as the outgoing prime minister, that Mr Dutton was ineligible to serve in the job.
As Savva says: "If Turnbull had followed through, it would have had the potential to trigger a constitutional crisis rivalling that of 1975.
"Back then, Sir John Kerr had sacked a Labor government and a Labor prime minister at the urging of the Liberal leader. Turnbull was seeking to have his own government sacked."
But beyond this extraordinary story, the significance of the forensic detail of Savva's reporting is that it tells us not just about our political leaders, but about what the key figures who remain in the Government think of each other. In many cases, the answer is "not much".
Few of the current crop of politicians come out of the story well, with Mr Porter and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg being two exceptions.Like Labor in Power in the 1990s, Savva's book has a wealth of on-the-record quotes from the key players in the Government who clearly spoke thinking it would be a book emerging after their election loss, and being perhaps too frank as a result.
There are days, weeks, and months of rich pickings for Labor in the book.
But what it also highlights is a point lost in the acres of coverage of the leadership coup last year: the shambolic nature of Mr Dutton's quest to oust Mr Turnbull from one of the people supposed to be one of the sharpest political operators in the Parliament, and, equally, the chaos of those still clinging around Mr Abbott.
That is, despite all that effort taken to drag Mr Turnbull's office, over years, the Abbott forces, and the right in general, emerge as a politically disorganised rabble and even a hindrance to the efforts of Mr Dutton to challenge his prime minister. Scott Morrison is the beneficiary of this.
Much of this seems driven by the distraction of wanting to tear down Mr Turnbull, rather than focusing on installing Mr Dutton: a classic case of hated enemies and clouded judgement.
Scrambling to get the media back on side
The other dynamic that will haunt the Parliament goes to the overreach involved in the police raids on journalists in Canberra and Sydney.And that's overreach as privately conceded by figures across the Government, about raids conducted well after the leaks that inspired them, with post-election timing that suggested judgement clouded by hubris, if not hatred, of any suggestion of lack of control over events and information.
The brutal and pragmatic truth is, one suspects, that most people don't give a rats about journalists being raided by police or even press freedom. The media is, after all, one of the least trusted institutions in our society.
But what the raids did splendidly achieve was a unity ticket across media organisations — from News Corporation to Nine and the ABC — which was on display at the National Press Club this week.
Achieving unity from this group is really quite a feat. News Corp, in particular, spends a large slab of its journalistic and columnists' efforts obsessing about the alleged sins of the ABC.
But its greater significance long-term could be a much more cautious and critical approach to further intrusions on personal freedoms in the name of national security than we have seen in the two decades since 9/11.
Recognising this, there is talk within the Government of a shift in gear to deal with whistleblowers and journalists, and secrecy generally, in future.
The idea is what might be called a "graded regime of leaking sins", to better guide the wallopers of the Australian Federal Police who have been left carrying the can for the heavy-handed nature of the most recent raids.
That is, much clearer guidance to the police about just how far and hard they go in pursuing leaks, and also greater emphasis on the idea that it is the leakers, rather than the journalists, who are in the law enforcement agencies' sights.
The clear hope is that such a regime will reduce the pressure from media organisations. But it shouldn't.
Journalists and news organisations should have as much, if not more, interest in protecting whistleblowers as they have in protecting their own interests.
In all the examinations of both the leaks and the Government's already extensive powers to scrutinise us, this will hopefully not be forgotten.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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