Extract from ABC News
Analysis
Like any group of humans forced awkwardly by circumstance to share a workplace, the denizens of Parliament House have evolved a series of loose festive traditions.
In the concluding days of the parliamentary year, in the past these have included:
- 1.Ritual sacrifice of party leaders to appease the pagan gods of Newspoll.
- 2.Inebriated late-night patch-up jobs on legislation freshly fished from the too-hard basket, creating the sparkling promise of a High Court intervention down the track.
- 3.Jolly concluding speeches from the party leaders thanking the Speaker and the chamber staff, wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and festively-not-mentioning the hideous low points of the foregoing days' debate in which your colleagues called the other guy a paedophile protector. God bless us, every one!
For the Albanese government, the 12 days of its second Christmas in office were definitely not meant to look like this.
Sketched out in the optimistic days of the New Year, the original mood board for 2023 involved a lot more turtle doves, geese a-laying and lords-a-leaping than ever actually materialised.
By this date, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had hoped to have a historic reconciliation vote under his belt, engendering a national mood of unity whose warm glow would burnish further his efforts on behalf of low-paid working Australians through the industrial relations reforms, whose grateful beneficiaries might in turn be less cross about Mr Albanese's determination to proceed with a $300 billion-plus round of tax cuts for the rich, which kick in next July.
Instead, of course, the Voice referendum was lost after a national debate remarkable for the speed with which various combatants at various junctures reached for and deployed the kinds of tropes and language an optimist would have thought to be absolutely behind us as a nation.
The Voice having been seen off the property, an uneasy silence prevails.
And the industrial relations reforms, far from sailing through the parliament, were instead filleted like a snapper in the Senate by Jacqui Lambie and David Pocock, passing some elements but leaving the rest to go a bit off over summer unless someone makes stock out of it quick-smart.
And it's fair to say that no one was expecting the 2023 ditty to end with "a paedophile in a pear tree".
A High Court decision, a testy press conference
The High Court's decision to overturn the longstanding indefinite detention regime initiated in the Howard years, and the government practice of stripping alleged offenders of their citizenship (a Peter Dutton initiative) has had a hugely scattering effect on the present occupants of the Treasury benches.
Despite the decision being eminently foreseeable, the government seems to have underestimated, initially, just how much damage an ex-cop opposition leader could possibly do with the key words "criminals", "non-citizens" and "released".
The first response was, effectively, "freeze in horror", followed by a fairly undignified legislative scramble with much talk of ankle bracelets and a preventative detention regime that was whipped through the parliament with zero debate on Wednesday night.
How will the new laws work? Tom Lowrey has your back here.
But it was the news away from the parliament that created a sense of chaos well beyond the opposition leader's most optimistic tactical daydreams.
Not one. Not two. Not three. But FOUR of those released have now been either arrested or charged.
It made for a testy press conference featuring the AG, home affairs minister and immigration minister, their first three-way (presser) since the High Court "shall so ruled".
Killed and eaten for your trouble
And sure, yeah, the Rohingya man called NZYQ, a convicted paedophile who is at the centre of the High Court case, is only in the country because Peter Dutton as immigration minister approved his pathway to a visa, as RN Breakfast host Hamish MacDonald reminded an unwilling-to-engage-thank-you-Hamish Sussan Ley, deputy Liberal leader, on Thursday morning.
But released criminals are released criminals; the fine print barely matters when you're on a roll, right? And now the "debate" has moved on to who should apologise to whom, who should be sacked and so on.
It is an unexpectedly target-rich environment for Mr Dutton, who plodded into office well aware that the fate of an opposition leader elected in the days following an election defeat is very analogous to that of the male redback spider. You get in there, you do your duty, you get killed and eaten for your trouble.
But here he is, watching the prime minister's poll numbers slide and looking forward to a happier Christmas than anticipated.
Does it matter in politics when you find yourself unexpectedly soaring, whether you are borne aloft by your own wing power or you are riding the warm updraft of your opponent's unexpectedly flatulent burst of incompetence? Not a bit, friends. Not one single bit.
Plibersek, and ye shall find
Interestingly, not everyone in cabinet is having a bad time of it. Tanya Plibersek — the former deputy Labor leader whose reasonable expectations of being education minister in 2022 were unceremoniously thwarted by her factional rival and brand-new PM Mr Albanese, who instead chucked her the environment portfolio complete with the exploding cigar that is responsibility for water management — is bowling along rather nicely.
The Murray Darling Basin Plan is a document whose drafting and amendments have sent many a minister grey before their time. Farmers, irrigators, environmental activists, scientists – every single party to this thing is more or less perpetually disappointed.
And yet, Ms Plibersek looks fresh as a daisy after last week landing the deal on the plan, and this week getting the Greens on board to pass the Nature Safety Repair Bill. But basically it allows farmers, resource companies and so on to be rewarded for good environmental practice.
Ms Plibersek has spoken in the past of how Australia could create a "Green Wall Street" of credit trading, while the Greens say it will mean that the feds get to have a say on the Beetaloo fracking plan.
Given that the Greens spend every federal election trying to boot both Ms Plibersek and Mr Albanese out of their inner-city Sydney seats, one must assume that this truce is a temporary one.
The PM giveth so the states can taketh away
Proving that it doesn't matter if they're all on your side, the words of Paul Keating (who likely ranks at the bottom of Albanese's favourite former PMs) were likely ringing loudly in his ears as he prepared for the National Cabinet this week.
Keating famously declared that you should "never get between a premier and a bucket of money", a lesson Albanese had the pleasure of learning this week, even if that cabinet is filled with Labor leaders from coast to coast across the mainland.
For months, Albanese's Labor predecessor Bill Shorten has been making the case for why states and territories need to contribute more to disability support payments. A program worthy of national pride, the National Disability Insurance Scheme is also the nation's fastest-growing government payment. Having vowed to limit its growth in future years, the PM has now managed to get the states to chip in more — and yet it comes with a multi-billion-dollar catch for the federal purse.
Christmas drinks are on the premiers, who left Canberra with an extra $3.5 billion a year in GST payments and an extra $1.2 billion for their healthcare systems.
A year ending like it started … on a sad note
Peta Murphy was one of the rare figures in parliament in that she was genuinely liked across the political divide. On Monday, the PM announced her death, just days after her final trip to Canberra.
Murphy was a whip-smart, funny, kind, squash-loving 50-year-old. Having recovered from breast cancer in her 30s, it returned in her 40s, two weeks before she was sworn in as the first female Member for Dunkley, having won the seat from the Coalition.
Murphy was loved by her staff, respected by her colleagues and leaves behind a legacy from four years in Canberra that many don't achieve in decades. The House of Representatives returned a day early to offer condolences for the late Labor MP, going into the early evening, such was the regard she was held in.
Her death bookends the parliamentary year like it started, with Liberal senator Jim Molan having died at the start of the year from cancer.
Sorry the end of this newsletter is so sad. It's been a pretty grim year for everyone, and we'd like to wish you all the odd moment of peace and goodwill over the summer. May wildfires not start, may our leaders inspire us, may conflict subside and not escalate, and may your family not raise awkward subjects over lunch.
Many thanks to our ever-industrious colleagues in the ABC Canberra bureau, who pay attention to the boring stuff so that you don't have to, who are on the scene filing long after sensible people have clocked off, who always work especially hard in the final sitting weeks of the year, and who have plugged through a tough year with stout hearts.
See you next year!
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