Fasten your seatbelts
IN the 1960s British Prime Minister Harold Wilson famously said that a week is a long time in politics.
How right he was. Just over a week ago Malcolm Turnbull was preparing to travel to Indonesia to announce a lucrative trade deal with our northern neighbour that would give Australian exporters access to a rapidly modernising market of 260 million consumers.
The Australian economy was ticking most boxes, despite a growing gap between haves and have-nots, and Turnbull was talking up plans to reduce electricity prices.
All appeared rosy for the PM.
Today he is out of politics altogether.
Turnbull is the sixth Australian PM in the past eight years if you count Kevin Rudd twice for his two stints. Not one of those six has gone a full three-year term.
It’s not always been this way. In the 27 years before Rudd was knifed by Julia Gillard, Australia had only four PMs.
The business community — including Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox, ANZ senior economist Felicity Emmett, Australian Finance Group chief executive David Bailey and the Commercial and Asset Finance Brokers Association of Australia — have all gone public to warn of the negative impact of such political instability.
PM Scott Morrison has distanced himself from the turmoil, saying he is part of a new generation. His supporters suggest that because he fell into power as a result of a Right-wing insurgency that failed to get its man, Peter Dutton, into the top job means he does not have blood on his hands. They reckon the party will fall in behind the new PM like clockwork as a functional, united team.
It’s laughable and it’s bollocks.
In the days after their failed coup, Dutton said he had no regrets, and his partner in the skulduggery, Tony Abbott, suggested their madness had left the Government in a better place.
Mathias Cormann spent two days telling the media, for the benefit of colleagues as much as the public, that his betrayal of Turnbull was in the national interest.
As one Mercury letterwriter put it this week: “They just don’t get it.”
Too right. Dutton, Abbott, Cormann and their cabal should regret their actions.
In their self-absorbed political games, they have failed to do their jobs. They have ignored the suffering of drought-stricken farmers, the frustration of working families who can’t find the money to pay their bills, and the desperation of the homeless struggling to stay fed, warm and dry.
Abbott has been agitating for years, Dutton is disliked outside of his Right-wing support base, and Cormann is still living down being photographed smoking a cigar after handing down one of the most painful and unfair budgets in recent memory.
The feral trio has likely destroyed any chance of their Government being returned.
No amount of concerned looks while wearing Akubras or strident marching in hi-vis vests or kissing of babies will undo this mess.
The Coalition’s faint hope of re-election rests on getting clear air, without infighting or scandal, until the next election, likely to be in May. Is that possible? Eight months of public unity?
That rests on whether Tony Abbott gets his way.
The trigger for this latest showdown is not a mystery, as many credentialled and well-informed commentators have suggested. It’s just hard to prove because no one in the Coalition will fess up. It’s about coal. If Morrison’s team bows to his demands on climate policy and its impacts on energy, agriculture, trade and foreign affairs, Abbott will grant his party the space to make the running in an unlikely, but not impossible, bid for re-election.
If not, he will scupper it from within.
Abbott has a gun to the head of his party and has this past few weeks displayed the kind of kamikaze temperament that Mel Gibson portrayed so madly in his character Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon.
The ideological warfare that kindled this madness is nowhere near over.
I suspect there are many in the Coalition with the intelligence to understand the scientific briefings about the ramifications of anthropogenic climate change.
The CSIRO, the Antarctic Division and a network of cooperative research centres and universities throughout this great land have made it clear what is happening, what is likely to happen, and who will pay in the end. Besides, you only have to look out the window.
While the Left has championed the cause, the looming climate catastrophe is apolitical and will affect everyone from wheat farmers in Western Australia to salmon farmers in Tasmania.
Abbott is holding his party and a government to ransom, thwarting the will of the Australian people and jeopardising the world’s habitats and the prospects of future generations.
That’s a remarkable amount of power for one who represents so few.
The Morrison Government has no choice. If it wants any chance of re-election, it must bow to Abbott’s demands on climate policy.
It’s a hostage situation and the hijacker is in the cockpit. Fasten your seatbelts.