The ultimate demise of Tony Abbott

After getting knocked off 54-44 by Malcolm Turnbull in a spill this evening, Tony Abbott ends his career as the shortest serving Prime Minister since Harold Holt. Andrew Elder leads the celebration.

As a Prime Minister, he was a victim of the malaise affecting both parties: that neither right nor left can claim any connection with their respective bases any more. Labor can't claim it's the voice of workers since the Hawke/Keating era of neoliberalism which put a lock on real wage increases; the Liberals can't claim they're the voice of business because their anti-Keynesian stewardship implements anti-economic policies which are ultimately poor results for demand which underpins growth for business.

Coming mere days after the election of Jeremy Corbyn as the new leader of Labour in Britain, it is tempting to draw the conclusion when considering the concurrent rise of Syriza and Podemos - not to mention Bernie Sanders who is tipping Hillary Clinton to the left in the US Democratic primaries - that there is a resurgence of populist anti-inequality thinking among centre-left elites. This would most likely be too pollyannaish, as there's still a lot of power residing in the Blairite, Ruddeqsue, Clintonian centrist elites.

There is an argument that America was the first Western electorate to show the polarisation of the electorate with the centre unoccupied by anyone electable, which Europe has followed and the UK is only the last example. There are very few Blue Dog Democrats left, or centrist Republicans. Similarly, Blairites hold very little power in the current Labour Party.

From an domestic Australian perspective, nevertheless, I still have the capability to be cynical about this "victory" on behalf of the left. I still think the most likely scenario in the medium term is that Turnbull loses the next election, hopefully to Albanese or Plibersek. I shudder to think that NSW Right machine man Shorten will lead the ALP to the next meaningful clash. As an example, consider my old mate Paul J who has finally left the ALP after many years of service as a branch member, due ostensibly to asylum seeker policy but more broadly due to machine-based lack of democratic accountability.

Both sides of politics in Western countries should be facing their ultimate mortality because they have lost touch with their bases. When one or the other side is forced through electoral reality to face that weakness, democracy is the winner. I hope Labor is similarly shocked out of its ennui before the next election.

The coming Australian recession...?

I buried my prediction of the first Australian recession in decades in a post back in May, because I wasn't quite sure it would come to pass. Today, in the light of the most recent quarter having growth of a measly 0.2%, Fairfax runs an Ian Porter piece laying out the reasons for believing that the recession will come in the next year or two, which boils down to the delayed effect of the Abbott decision to cut off assistance for the car industry and its subsequent withdrawal from the Australian economy.

The timing is interesting electorally, because the process of up to 200,000 automotive workers losing their jobs is due to be completed in 2016/17, with a full Abbott term due to finish in November 2016. We are already in some hinky territory with the Chinese slowdown, albeit currency devaluation has solved a lot of problems for our exporters and there's probably more room to drop below the current ~70c.

The last budget was a cash splash so large that it caused many pundits to think it was priming the Keynesian pumps for an early election, yet the economy is barely escaping contraction as it is. Far from a budget emergency, now we have a growth emergency, which will be followed by an employment emergency. Hockey hasn't really got any more gears to shift up fiscally, so when the automotive fecal matter hits the Centrelink air circulation equipment, the job of stimulating the economy is going to fall to the RBA, which has only 200 base points to play with and would only be forced to burn them under great duress given the housing market is already hubba-bubba-double-trouble. Then we hit the zero lower bound, and we're cactus in a Mad Max Fury Road scenario.

This is playing out a bit like George W. Bush's last days, where all of his dud decisions culminated in a massive economic and political collapse. Just as Dubbya is now seen as a contender for the worst US President in history, Tony Abbott is shaping up to be the worst Australian Prime Minister in history if these doomsday detentes come to pass. All we could do was sit back and enjoy the hot licks from the Doof Warrior.

The zero lower bound government

Another budget has been and gone. Instead of the steaming turd that was the last budget, which was largely blocked by the Senate, this time we have zero. The Abbott government has spent the intervening period announcing bad policies, extracting the maximum amount of negative reaction as the public gradually and painfully rejects them, and then quietly dropping them. What they are proceeding with are much the same settings as were left by Swan, but adding a bunch of conservative nudge items which blow the deficit out. Hockey is deliberately doing nothing in the hope that revenues will rebound naturally from historic lows under Swan.

For me, the most astounding stat from this year's budget is that despite a projected deficit of over $35B, it will actually create an annual lag on the economy of as much as 0.5% of GDP (read it somewhere yesterday, now can't find the link, grr), and will do nothing to help slowly creeping unemployment. From a Keynesian macro perspective, it is the worst outcome possible. Most worryingly, it is based on assumptions that are rosy at best.

I have been feeling for a while that it is only a matter of time before Australia joins the rest of the Western world in hitting the zero lower bound of interest rates. All it is going to take with the current budget settings is one big assumption to be wrong - China hiccuping, the iron price plummeting below $35 as Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton squeeze out competitors, opportunistic currency markets persisting in inflating the $A - for the RBA to be faced with the prospect, given that fiscal policy is so pissweak, of having to further cut rates down close to zero where it is in America, Japan and Europe. And once you reach the zero lower bound and bring on all of the weirdness that happens in an economy as a consequence, it's very hard to raise them again, as Japan showed us from the 1990s on.

Australia under zeroed interest rates would be a scary place, given how our economy is structured so strongly around housing as a speculatory tax haven. If, as some pundits are saying, this budget is a precursor to an early election, that may be the last chance to avoid the unhappy fate of the ZLB. The Liberals don't have any ideas.

Barmy Harmy and the long walk

Katherine Murphy runs with a nice little analogy:

We can see right now that the Abbott government is doing that long walk that fast bowlers do before rounding on their heel and coming back full tilt at the crease.

Only problem is, this was Tony Abbott's first ball:

Short Kicks: Whoa-oh, onion skin

Still snowed under with work, so no time for longer pieces.

- I presume no domain expertise on Aboriginal matters so I can only sit back in my chair while reading pieces like this from the Oz or this from Piping Shrike, One aside from the Shrike stood out for me, though:

By the Martin Place siege, Abbott was toning down the cultural warrior rhetoric, which he could while his main threat was Turnbull. Now in attempting to cling on to right support against a more serious rising threat from Morrison, he has speeded up again.

Yep, that appears to me to be a pretty cutting summation of Federal politics at the moment, as the Christian/Tory wing of Eric Abetz and Kevin Andrews is suddenly the only constituency that Tony Abbott cares about, as it's the factional key to a Scott Morrison succession.

- The Clive 4 Eva bandwagon has its wheels on fire, rolling down the road. He only has himself to blame. If I was an American lefist blogger here I might start railing about the double standard in the media, in that Abetz and Hockey don't get nearly enough scrutiny for their near complete lack of negotiating skills to get the 2014 budget through the Senate. Journos seem to be giving them somewhat of a pass as an indirect commentary on the quality of the independents. How Abbott must yearn for the prudent competence of Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott.

- Abbott ate a raw onion in front of TV cameras, brown skin and all. Who does that? Has that ever been a thing? Is he actually clinically insane by this point? What is the procedure for having the Prime Minister taken away by the men in white coats?

39/100: fractional factional friction

So, the first #libspill came and went, largely as I predicted with Abbott keeping his job but none of his credibility. The only thing I didn't expect was chief whip Philip Ruddock deciding to make the pre-spill vote a secret ballot - but Cabinet solidarity extended to all but six members anyway (according to the Tele). If that last snippet is true and assuming 35 members in Cabinet went 29-6 against the spill, then the numbers from the backbench were 33-32 for the spill.

Several things should be said that I don't think I've heard much of elsewhere. The first was hinted at by Piping Shrike.

Abbott's #abc730 interview had absolutely nothing new for anyone but his Liberal colleagues.
— The Piping Shrike (@Piping_Shrike) February 9, 2015

That was true of the entire process, actually. This is the nature of spills in parties in the Westminster tradition, where the party is focused almost exclusively on what Abbott calls "internals". The PM talked about being more "collegiate", but you have to be a member of the right college for that to matter. When he did remember to mumble platitudes about listening more to voters, it was always as an afterthought behind the real targets of his rhetoric, the elected members of his own party. The changes to the ALP's process after the Rudd debacle means that Labor won't make that same mistake, though they will probably discover all new ones.

Speaking of the Shrike, he reckons this could have been Turnbull's best shot.

So what next? It would be tempting to wonder if the right, having instigated this instability, then suddenly going quiet, with those like Howard and Bernardi appearing only at the last minute, had shifted its priority from replacing Abbott to just stopping Turnbull in his tracks. The talk was that Morrison, probably their preferred choice, was not yet experienced enough in senior portfolios to take over. This sounds phoney, probably the numbers weren’t there yet. If so, it would suggest that Turnbull might have just missed the best chance he had to regain the leadership.

That may be true, but it may also be true that 39 votes was the best he was ever going to get from the current party room, populated as it is by so many of the right wing of the party. I haven't seen much analysis of where those 39 votes came from in terms of factional groupings. The narrative of this being a peasant revolt by backbenchers without reference to ideology is too cute, too convenient.

One would assume the Christian/Tory wing of Kevin Andrews and Eric Abetz would be right behind Abbott, whereas the smaller Julie Bishop faction would be mostly for the spill as Bishop has been highly cheeky in the indirectness of her public support for it. The Hockey club (cigar club?) would surely be in a bind at the moment; their leader has been smashed from pillar to post for attacking the Age of Entitlement, to no effect. Would a new Treasurer under a new leader be from the same club, and thus it doesn't matter who is given the poisoned chalice, even though that means the nominal factional leader gets the lemon sars? I suspect the clubbers think Turnbull wouldn't be good for their prospects for advancement, but there are a lot of younger members who have been champing at the bit for the dead wood to be cleaned out of Treasury so factional solidarity wouldn't be all that great. Then we come to the more regional alliances: Pyne's South Australian mob who must be staring at electoral oblivion given how poorly Abbott has treated them; and Greg Hunt whose Victorian cadre stand to lose 6 of their 16 seats if current polls hold up and must feel unloved given the dominance of NSW in the modern Liberal Party.

Finally, there's the Scott Morrison faction, which has been called Right with a capital R, even though Morrison is quoted as having some wet economic positions, and his ascension to Parliament was over the body of a candidate of the Right. Would the members of his faction have been voting for a spill? I suspect not. They would have been some of the first names on the list of 70 pledges that Abbott's numbers men drummed up on the weekend, as loyalty to the leader suits Morrison right now. Some of them may have lied, but not all that many did.

The long game is for Morrison to capture enough votes from enough of these groupings to win a spill, and the obvious first target is the Andrews/Abetz faction because that seems to be the dominant one in this Parliament. Changing their vote en masse in favour of a spill would be a fait accompli for Morrison. Being a committed Christian doesn't hurt his chances of capturing this faction, albeit his religion is of the Pentecostal evangelical variety - but the American Right managed to accept Mitt Romney and his Mormonism, so political factions tend to override religious denominations as long as God is in the House. Morrison has been promoted by both Turnbull and Abbott in his brief career, and he is talked about as a unity candidate. He should be the favourite when the decisive spill in this inexorable process is held.

In closing, it would be remiss of me not to note Sinclair Davidson going all in for Malcolm Turnbull prior to the vote. He misses the obvious solution to his own dithering dilemma: Morrison as PM and a man who can "drive the process"at military speed and efficiency, with Turnbull as Treasurer doing the sales job for hated "reform" that Hockey can't.

Tony Abbott: see you next Tuesday

The #libspill is on. Only problem is: nobody is standing against Tony Abbott yet. Julie Bishop has ruled herself out, as has Scott Morrison. Malcolm Turnbull is the only viable alternative candidate, and he's working the numbers.

I have not had the greatest of luck in predicting these things - I thought Rudd wouldn't run against Gillard and said so on the fateful day that he won back the leadership - but I reckon the most likely scenario is that Turnbull realises he doesn't have the numbers, and doesn't stand. He may run and lose, but that won't solve anything, just as it didn't solve anything when Rudd ran and lost a couple of times before winning. There will be plenty of opprobrium to share around in any case. Abbott's leadership will still be terminal, he still won't have a mandate, and his position will be even worse because he'll have to bone Turnbull from the front bench and appoint someone less qualified.

This all plays into Scott Morrison's hands. Abbott and Turnbull can bash each other up across multiple failed spills, and he can wait for the right moment to come around the outside like Kiwi in 1983. (Note to self: must update sporting analogies to 21st century.) As he rolls out social security policies, Morrison will look like the only one who is still accomplishing anything at a level of competency befitting a leader.

I feel like Steve M. over at No More Mister Nice Blog who is similarly wailing abut Scott Walker being the quiet favourite for the 2016 GOP primary. I think it's important to know the real enemy, and why he is the dark horse based on his attractiveness to right wing extremists. Walker puts the wind up Steve the way that Morrison puts the wind up me: they could cause the most destruction to the apparatus of social democracy if they ever fluke their way into office. Leftists hate Walker and Morrison, but they get results in implementing their hated policies. It's the quiet ones who are most dangerous at times like this.

Arise Scott Morrison, the cromulent Cromwell

I have long thought that Scott Morrison would be the next leader of the Liberal Party, but I wasn't quite sure he would be the next Prime Minister of Australia until the events of this week.

Not only is it now inevitable that the Libs bone Tony Abbott - there is no coming back from here, as the Prince Phillip disaster was followed by a Press Club speech basically telling the party room that he was never going to change so you can take the keys to Kirribilly out of his cold, dead fingers - there will be a spill presently which will be the first of several, so the process is drawn out as painfully as possible. There are only 30 or so of the 102-strong caucus who would vote against Abbott, so he will most likely win if Warren Entsch goes ahead with his plan to cause a spill.

Morrison knows what's coming, mainly because he saw it with his own eyes when Labor went through it not that long ago. He knows the Abbott coalition-within-the-coalition is still the largest voting base in the party room, which is why he is on Abbott's side working the numbers and acting as Team Tony's front man for the media. He will be able to point to his superior loyalty after he eventually wins the one that matters, drawing a sharp distinction between himself and those tarred with the Tone Def brush.

Scott Morrison is the answer for which many on the right yearn. The question being asked by the faceless men is, "who will satisfy the Liberal party room and its base, without bringing unworkable baggage?" Everyone else conceivably in the running has too many faults. Bishop is a lightweight, Turnbull is not ideologically acceptable, Hockey is a beaten man.

Liberal voters love an authoritarian who dominates on their behalf. Morrison will frighten some horses with his cromulent Cromwell impression, but as long as they are mostly millennials and/or leftists, that's perfectly fine from the perspective of the blue rinse set.

Abbott and elitism

There have been various justifications made for why Tony Abbott knighting Prince Phillip on Australia Day has been so universally condemned by everyone except David Flint and Kevin Andrews. It's a broken promise, it's a bad look, it's tone deaf, and it's poor process. However, many other such decisions by the Abbott government have been made without the instant cacophony of vitriol from every quarter. The underlying problem, to me, goes back to the old saw I have been banging on about for a while now: elitism.

The monarchy is the ultimate elite in Westminster democracies: unelected, unaccountable except in the most ethereal of manners, and unapproachable except in carefully controlled glimpses. Buckingham Palace is the apotheosis of the gated community for the rich. Giving the consort of the monarch Australia's highest honour makes Abbott look like the Queen's suckhole. Worse, the only people whom he consulted were Angus Houston, whom he also gave a knighthood, and the Governor-General who is bound not to give harsh advice in pretty much any matter to the Prime Minister.

Abbott's one-man conga line has been contrasted with a similar bauble handed out by Bob Hawke in the 1980s, but that was the 1980s. These days, leaders have to be careful not to seem as if they are only concerned with elites, and this is perhaps the most elitist thing that a PM of a Commonwealth nation could do.

There have been  points made about Richie Benaud, who like the Prince is elderly and infirm, asking why Abbott didn't extend his honours to the legendary and much beloved sportsman. This point is valid, and perhaps even more important is that Abbott only gave out two knighthoods, thus reinforcing how exclusive is the club that he and the knights belong to. That's the basic message out of this mess: Abbott is part of an elite, and you're not invited, and he doesn't care what you think about it. In a democracy, this is the worst kind of message to send.

At this point, Abbott is Labor's best friend. He got rid of Napthine, he was the difference maker in the weekend's election in Queensland to oust Campbell Newman, and he will likely cause major heartburn for NSW Liberals on March 28 when they try their luck. The Libs are up by eight points at the moment in NSW, although Newman was supposed to be up by four points in Queensland so the pollsters will be scrambling to reallocate preferences on new parameters.

Can Abbott last until April to make it a hat trick of Liberal premier scalps in the last six months? Scott Morrison is still my favourite to take over at some point, and he's making all the right noises about unity and moves in support of Abbott today to ensure he can't be accused of disloyalty. Things are going to get a lot more ragged in the next two months. It will be rough.... Mal Brough. Should be another interesting day today, for example, with Abbott standing up in front of the Press Club. Can he even make it through the day? Popcorn time.

Base motivation

We are at the point now where political pundits have to make up reasons why Tony Abbott does things. Andrew Elder has a lash:

As I've said before, when Tony Abbott gets into trouble he will reach out to his base on the far right, and that's why he offered Prince Phillip the knighthood. 

The only problem with this analysis is that the far right now hates his guts so much that this has only made things worse with them. The relevant Catallaxy Files thread is almost wall to wall with exasperation, you can hear the heavy sighs from here. There is a lot of talk about the base in that thread, which is an American phrase that nonetheless describes something locally real. By the way, I am not holding up that site as "the base", only "a base". There are others:

@sprocket___ Abbott knighthood a joke and embarrassment. Time to scrap all honours everywhere, including UK.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) January 27, 2015

Tony's lost Rupert, as well as Miranda, Tim Blair, Chris Kenny, and probably Andrew Bolt when he returns from holidays. That's the News Ltd faction offside, good job there. Then there's the 3AW demographic:

Mr Abbott responded: "What is the specific problem, is there a policy thing you don't agree with?"
"Prime Minister, it's the way you do things, like the Medicare thing, with the education, you've done so many backflips, people don't know where you are going and business is saying there are roadblocks because there is no direction and no leadership … as a Liberal voter, I don't particularly like you," Andrew replied.

Ouch. That's not relaxed or comfortable, it's aggravation and rage. Many pundits can't resist the temptation to frame the market for the seemingly inevitable #libspill, including John Quiggin. The motivation for doing so in some quarters is hoping that the resultant chaos will lead magically to the enactment of the pundit's pet policies; in Quiggin's case, this means Julie Bishop somehow singlehandedly reversing the global movement by the right over the last decade to climate change denialism.

Don't worry though, I've had such thoughts too. I mean, if he's going to lose anyway and he has no other options, why shouldn't Abbott dive bum first into the too-hard-basket and wrestle generational problems like negative gearing and superannuation? He's going to be punished by the electorate and the media no matter what he does at this point, so he might as well build a legacy of policy that will be respected in ages to come.

Of course, that's not what Abbott is about. He is an old fashioned Tory who doesn't particularly like economics, and now has the misfortune of short term economic forecasts not liking him. His only chance is to hang on and play his negative sum game until some externality comes along. Now that OPSOB has meant that all the SIEVs from I through X and beyond means there won't be another Tampa situation, it would have to be something else more serious. A lovely little war? Who knows. That's why we're just pundits and not billionaires.

UPDATE: Yep, lost BoltA too.

No policy for you! Seinfeld identity politics

There are a lot of parallels between Australian and American politics at the moment. Last year, Tony Abbott won government by running an almost entirely negative campaign, such that he has no meaningful mandate to accomplish any policy goals of his own once in power. This year, the Republican Party gained control of the Senate in a wave election fueled by a similarly Seinfeldian campaign about nothing, dominated by short-term non-policy issues.

Last year, Abbott's main policy was that he wasn't Julia Gillard; more cogently, he represented an older, whiter, more traditional set of values than the progressive feminists and watermelon greens. This year, the GOP's main policy was that none of its politicians were Barack Obama; specifically, very few of them were non-white or were younger than baby boomer age.

Last year, Abbott swept into government despite the electorate largely preferring the left's policy platform. This year, Republicans now enjoy control of both houses of Congress despite America as a whole (as opposed to the minority who vote in mid-terms) consistently polling favourably towards the Democrats' policies.

So we come to the rise of what is called "identity politics". Policy doesn't mean much in this framework. Who you are is much more important than what you say or do. Tribalism has been used in politics to further policy ends, but this is tribalism as an ideology in itself. There is an argument to be made that this is just tribalism being used as a pretext for running far-right ideology, and there's something to be said for that since I'm sure there are operatives who think that way. Just as Seinfeld was a show ostensibly about nothing but really about the self-centred obsessions of borderline autistic arseholes, identity politics is now being used as a front for the Koches of the world to further their ideological goals. The effect is the same in any case: old white guys running the show and doing what they like.

It's a cliche of Australian politics by now that since the Hawke/Keating era, the big policy reforms have all been accomplished and there are no "low-hanging fruit" left, thus policy-based politics is bloody hard yakka. Most posts by the Piping Shrike riff off this meme, along with the related one about unions ceasing to be relevant and thus rendering Labor without a mission. The right never really had a mission either except to oppose the left, so they should be vastly more experienced at governing without policy.

However, it's much easier to run identity politics in America with its sharply delineated white, black, Latino and Asian communities, which despite generations of effort still remain segregated to a significant degree. Here in Australia, Abbott is reduced to the rather feeble formulation of "Team Australia" to push his version of identity. Pauline Hanson literally wrapped herself in an Australian flag, and Abbott's attempts to figuratively do the same just make him look rather lame. At least John Howard's green and gold tracksuits came from a genuine place in his heart, and didn't try to exclude anyone. It's just another example of Abbott's tin ear.

During this Great Interregnum, as the world (apart from China) deleverages together, we are in a global Green Room, waiting for the show to start. What's the next act? Is it China imploding? Is it Hillary Clinton turning the tide against austerity? Is it Germany losing its fear of Weimar-era inflation and removing their economic jackboots from the earholes of Europe? Is it a massive El Nino to finally remove all doubt as to the effects of climate change? Cue the bass guitar and synth riffs, and we'll find out after the break.

The new paternalism of Big Daddy

I have not blogged for a while, but I have an excellent excuse: my firstborn son is a month old today. Thanks for those who have already congratulated me, and those who may do so in comments. Everyone is well, if a bit tired and hungry, alternately.

As a  father, of course now I know everything there is to know about how the universe works, and wish to impose my unique insights into how to live onto others through this blog! In this, I appear to be of one mind with the current Prime Minister, who is treating the country as if he is its stentorian patrician. Voters are not as forgiving as his three daughters of his Pinocchio routine, however. 

Most of his thought bubbles since the interlude of MH17 have been either failures or annoyed his base: budget stuck in limbo so deep that Palmer is calling for a mini-budget, Medicare co-payment no chance of passing the Senate, PPL shelved, Newstart cruelness summarily dismissed by public backlash, metadata collection made a national joke by babbling George Brandis, s18C of the RDA retained despite IPA howls, Tory rumblings about links between abortion and breast cancer squashed. As a father figure, Abbott is becoming a figure of fun. Very little is going right for him, especially for those arguing from the right.

If Abbott wants to be Big Daddy to us all, he's going to have to be less of an Adam Sandler kind of Big Daddy by refraining from pissing on walls. Let's not mention the Bioshock kind of Big Daddy, that's just weird. No, Abbott is much more suited to the Big Daddy Pollitt of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Tony Abbott, the Pollitt politician, with a sequence of polls that firmly puts his leadership in "death's country". Those of us out in the masses of Team Australia are the Brick in this passion play, refusing to bow to Abbott's rules of morality or adhere to Abbott's vision of living as the patriarch deems worthy. 

On the Team Australia meme, it's peculiar that Abbott is invoking memories of Howard's nationalism without also actually immersing himself in it. When Howard donned the green and gold tracksuit or called himself a cricket tragic, he didn't have to say anything more about what team he was on. Sport is one of Australia's great melting pots, where ability is promoted regardless of race or creed. What is Abbott's vision of Team Australia, what are its intellectual underpinnings, how has he interpreted Howard's legacy? It's not a crime that the PM isn't a sport lover - plenty haven't been - but if he's going to talk about the country in sporting terms, merely pilfering the phrase from sporting jargon and Liberal history without also inhabiting the patriotic nature of sport means it loses as a serious talking point in the modern day.

Like the Big Daddy of Tennessee Williams's play, Abbott has a reputation for hating mendacity but is constantly guilty of it himself, as evidenced by his string of broken promises. One of the biggest lies is that his "base" - an Americanism that is creeping into local political discourse through the agency of Andrew Bolt - actually matters a jot to him. It's not a lie he has told, but the right is telling it a lot about him lately, 

With unemployment higher than it has been for a decade after years of failed attempts by the RBA to stop a high Australian dollar from gutting our non-resources export industries, we are not quite a banana republic yet but it does feel like Abbott wants to turn the joint into his personal cotton plantation. Thankfully, the electorate still enjoys universal suffrage in this country.

Reactionary and uncomfortable

Someone linked the ALP-friendly blog The Pub the other day on Twitter, and I read it idly because its stuff too often descends into boilerplate rants, and this one was no different. One passage perked up my interest, though.

People are sick of eternal struggle. They’re sick of politics and stress. They want to relax and enjoy the benefits of this great country they live in, without being hectored, divided into factions and demographics, and then encouraged to disparage, heckle or pick on each other.
Australia is not a hot-headed country. We’re more laid back about our politics. We like to be “relaxed and comfortable”. Culture wars, seething anger, envy, polemics, lies, spin, scandals and the rest are fun while they last, but we’re tired now.

Now, it is possible to overstate the dominance of Howard's ethos - while he did mouth the phrase "relaxed and comfortable" to describe how he wanted the populace to feel, the culture wars were a hallmark of his reign, with conservative elites pushing on with their social issue battles regardless. As part of Abbott's policy of retreading most of the Howard era, the new culture wars are well underway, not only with the reintroduction of dames and knights but the ongoing efforts to reverse the nanny statism of things like tobacco plain packaging.

Thus, articles like this one from the Saturday Paper about the sinister, shadowy influence of the Institute of Public Affairs are sonorously intoned into the public conversation, warning of the attacks from the far right. Personally, I think this is all a big nothing. Historically, the IPA has been a perennial loser when the actual results of the battles are tallied up. Howard may have emboldened the right to fill endless column inches with screeds on social issues through the turn of the millennium, but he was the one who implemented tough gun control after Port Arthur, he was the one who nearly doubled immigration intakes over his reign (having learned his lesson after been dumped as Liberal leader in 1989 due to an ill-advised excursion into anti-Asian rhetoric), and he was the one who increased government spending on middle class welfare to create a Big Australia by funding families in true conservative tradition.

Under Abbott, the right wing bully pulpit is well and truly in session, but as yet the government has similarly not made many actual decisions to enact the IPA's agenda. Like Howard, Abbott has increased spending on Tory pet projects like paid parental leave and defence procurement. Unlike Howard, however, Abbott seems to want the Australian public to feel vulnerable and afraid, so that he can verbal the Senate into rubberstamping his cuts to the social security net. The polls steadfastly refuse to show this strategy is going to work. Australians are economically literate enough, since Keating, to see through this bullshit. We know there is no budget emergency. We can see no urgency to slash entitlements.

Being "sick of politics" is the sort of thing that a Rudd can tap into when he runs as an anti-politician, with mixed results. Abbott is a regular, garden variety politician who lies like the rest of them and can't be trusted. If he's going to go retro Howard on us, he has to understand that an essential part of that was that Howard, like Reagan before him, was secretly a tax-and-spend big government Tory whose electoral success relied in part on disappointing the dries of the IPA. Joe Hockey understands this. If Abbott doesn't get it, he'll get booted out.

Randsformers versus Establicons

It seems everybody hates Tony Abbott these days... well, almost everybody. Mike Seccombe makes the case in the Saturday Paper for the Institute of Public Affairs being Abbott's only friend, with some quotes from the IPA's John Roskam. Yet Seccombe's argument falls down at the first hurdle, as he has to acknowledge that Abbott has not been doing the IPA's bidding on (to them) key policies like repeal of s18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

The repeal of section 18C of the RDA became number four on the IPA’s policy wish list, and before you knew it, Attorney-General George Brandis had personally drafted changes to protect, as he memorably put it, the right to be a bigot. Alas, the public debate has run overwhelmingly against them. Roskam fears “we’ll lose that one”.

Similarly, Quadrant calls Abbott and Brandis cowards and quislings for failing to stand up for the rights of old white guys like Andrew Bolt to be racist. The paleoconservatives at the Sydney Traditionalist Forum, who at least are open and honest about their nationalist strain of white power politics, characterise this as "establicons" turning away from the Coalition.

Meanwhile, the Ayn Rand acolytes of the libertarian movement are in even more disarray. David Leyonhjelm got smashed from pillar to post on a recent proposal to sell Australian citizenship for $50,000 a pop by the Establicons, with the Randsformers powerless to defend the silliness of the LDP's egghead Pollyannaism. Open the front door, says David? Shut the front door, say the Cat's resident tories.

So, libertarians hate him for failing to defend freedom or lower taxes, while conservatives hate him for reindexing pensions and disrespecting diggers... is there anyone left on Tony Abbott's side? One has to turn to the News Limited papers to find them - some of whom are connected to the IPA, to be sure. Murdoch's continued support is not about ideology, though, but about media ownership laws. As Jason Clare said yesterday:

“Media reform is a well-trodden minefield and Malcolm Turnbull is welcome to it.”

Turnbull can't even have lunch without causing a national incident, so if Murdoch thinks the Liberals are going to be able to finesse a bill through the Senate past Clive Palmer to enable him to take over the Ten Network for which he has been angling for years, he's going to be sorely disappointed.

Democratic centrism in action

So George Brandis is allegedly going to water down the promised nobbling of s18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, after pressure from Liberal MPs sitting in traditional Labor seats trumped the whining of Andrew Bolt:

The Attorney-General was forced by the cabinet in March to soften his original plans amid a welter of protest from Coalition MPs in marginal electorates, some of whom represent large ethnic communities.

It sounds like nothing will happen at least until the budget falderol is resolved, and maybe not even then. Clive Palmer hasn't announced which way his party would vote, but it would be very easy for him to side with the little guy (e.g. the Jewish lobby) as part of his pants-seat-flying platform of populist opportunism.

The tears of the wingnuts on this are delightful. The IPA has no meaningful constituency, as such, whereas ethnic communities are well represented at grassroots level. I would imagine a lot of those marginal seats are in suburban Sydney where there are geographically dense enclaves of ethnic populations - Chinese, Jewish, Vietnamese, Lebanese et cetera - who would all be telling their newly minted MPs that s18C protects them from the depredations of white wingnut wannabe wideboys. The latter demographic, tiny as it is, is well represented at Catallaxy where they are getting to that endlessly enjoyable stage (for me) of morose nihilism. I just love it when they realise, periodically, that all hope is lost and the world won't conform to their wacky internal realities.

Commenter Viva sums up the cognitive dissonance of wingnuttery:

You won’t cut the guy any slack even though he has to operate in an environment which has been totally unforgiving from the get go. You refuse to even consider the problems associated with culture change and the need to compromise and take a longer view. Your prescriptions must be followed to the letter right here, right now. The world just doesn’t work like that. You are surely all old and enough and ugly enough to have learnt that by now. Why haven’t you?

This is the sort of thing you would never see in America these days, with the shocking gerrymander in place for Congress ensuring very few representatives are from ethnically or demographically diverse electorates. Such pressure from the grass roots on marginal MPs is a triumph for the Australian Electoral Commission and the system which empowers it to ensure diversity in electoral zoning.

The Green & Gold Lantern Theory of the Prime Ministership

Ezra Klein details the Green Lantern Theory of the American presidency, something which the US Left uses constantly to bash Barack Obama. In short, the theory is that even though the US Constitution built in all sorts of safeguards against executive power including vetoes all over the place, filibusters, congressional conventions and other rules to stop the President shooting lightning bolts from his fingertips... if the President just closed his eyes and pointed his superhero equipment at the baddies they would be vanquished and all of the comic book theorists' pet policies would be enacted by magical Marvel fiat. Thus you have wailing like this Jesse Eisinger piece, attacking Obama from the left for not passing financial industry reform laws, as if that was going to be possible via a click of the fingers.

In Australia, the talk is similar when the Prime Minister can't get his agenda implemented, but mostly we talk about a democratic "mandate". For instance, Alan Moran has a whinge today about Tony Abbott's failure to bone the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and other green instruments of the Gillard administration, which were established through acts of Parliament and would require the consent of either the Greens or Clive Palmer for repeal bills to pass the Senate. His view is that the green industry has "sandbagged" the CEFC and other encouragers of environmental investments which the right dismisses as "green hedge funds". The comments are filled with utter stupidity, ranging from calls for Cyprus-style bank account confiscation to Thailand-style martial law.

If Tony Abbott has a mandate, it is to implement Labor's policies, at least for this term. That is the corner he boxed himself into by promising not to cut most of the Labor spending areas. He will have to deal with Palmer as the founding fathers intended back in 1901. There are good reasons why America, England and Australia have safeguards in their constitutions to give competing mandates to politicians in different chambers, and bestow veto powers upon them. The end result should be a centrist compromise, if both sides are willing to make concessions. This is not Russia where you can send Clive to the gulag, much as the right might wish. Abbott is not a superhero, and nor is he a supervillain. He will have to find common ground with at least one other member of humanity on this one.

Peta Credlin can only dream of DD

The right is tying itself in knots trying to think its way out of Abbott Disappointment Syndrome. The latest lead balloon to be floated is the idea of a double dissolution to solve the upcoming intractability of a Clive Palmer controlled Senate, which Laura Tingle does her best not to laugh at.

Government ministers who have dealt with Clive Palmer for years believe what will drive his approach in the Senate will not be policy but opportunities that allow him to look like he is running things.
They see this as simply intolerable and say Abbott would rather go to a DD poll and lose some of his margin than be perceived as driven by Palmer, as Labor was perceived to be driven by the Greens after 2010.
Many people might have dismissed Abbott’s DD talk this week. Coalition staffers may have been gobsmacked to hear Abbott’s chief of staff Peta Credlin declare that this was a budget she would take to an election. But this is really just the first shot across the bow of the Palmer juggernaut.

Some of his margin? With the polls at 47:53 the other way, that's a bold statement. That braggadocio is all very well for Peta to project, but she doesn't have a seat to lose. Coalition backbenchers can see the polls too, they all know their cushy positions would be on the line in a double dissolution election with an unpopular government. The 2014 budget was an ambit claim that will shortly meet electoral reality.

The current wingnut solution du jour is for Abbott to somehow become "retired", much in the manner of a Phildickian replicant, in favour of Morrison as a "strong man" to lead us like some barechested Putinesque roughrider into an authoritarian utopia. This is high comedy. Abbott has spent a lifetime in politics to reach this moment, why would he withdraw gracefully? His mentor John Howard had to have the prime ministership pried from his cold, dead electoral fingers.

No, Abbott will remain leader in the short term, and he will eat the shit sandwiches he was given, and will have to force down the ones he didn't need to eat but brought upon himself, like the brawl with the states that Tingle finishes her piece by detailing. So far the Abbott plan - in the face of being elected with a mandate to run all of his opponents' popular policies - seems to be to run his own plan anyway, and dare everyone else to try to stop him.

Unfortunately for Tony, there is one man who stands in his way, and his name is Clive. At this point, everything Tony does or doesn't do seems to benefit Clive. There are no options left that don't deliver Clive with a gift-wrapped prime ministerial arse. No wonder the wingnuts are in disarray. At least when Labor was in power, the conservatives and libertarians had a common enemy.

The cost-benefit analysis of bitumen boondoggles

The right banged on and on about cost benefit analysis for the NBN and other big-ticket projects announced by Labor under Rudd and Gillard. In government, it seems they are going to break yet another promise with rank hypocrisy, by abandoning all thought of prudent infrastructure planning in favour of propping up Liberal premiers by funding their irresponsible bitumen boondoggles.

Doing precisely what [Productivity Commission chairman] Harris says politicians should not do, Abbott and the Victorian premier, Denis Napthine, have already announced that the commonwealth will be chipping in an additional $1.5bn to the second stage of the East West link. 

Abbott said the commonwealth's contribution depended on the Victorian government providing a business case for the second stage, but he was “confident it is a worthwhile investment”. He didn’t say how he could be so confident without a business case, or how likely it was he’d take back the cash if it didn’t pass muster. Presumably, not very.

Lenore Taylor does what a good journo should do, which is hold politicians to what they say - in this case, what Tony Abbott said in May 2012, reiterating an announcement from 2011:

There will be a published cost benefit analysis for any infrastructure project to which a Coalition government commits $100 million or more. 

As with most other Liberal incompetence it was plain to see before the election, as Anthony Albanese called it with his speech to the same set of suits during the 2013 campaign.

And despite this promise of  a “new approach”, the Federal Coalition is already failing to practice what it  preaches.
It has agreed it would take  the advice of Infrastructure Australia and only commit funds to projects with a  cost-benefit analysis.
Yet Tony Abbott has already  promised billions of dollars to projects not currently recommended by  Infrastructure Australia, well before any business case or cost-benefit analysis  has been conducted.

One wonders whether Judith Sloan will stick up for her Productivity Commission mates on this one.

Sinclair Davidson, professional kurdaitcha man

RMIT economics professor Sinclair Davidson got his head on 7.30 the other night, attacking the government from the right on its debt levy.

SINCLAIR DAVIDSON, ECONOMICS PROF., RMIT: My view is very similar to Milton Friedman's dictum that there's nothing more permanent than a temporary government program. So I think this temporary program, this temporary tax is going to be with us for quite some time.
[...]
SINCLAIR DAVIDSON: Without a doubt in my mind whatsoever, this is a broken promise. Mr Abbott promised before the election, he gave absolute assurances, that the tax burden would be lower under a Coalition Government than it was under the Labor Government.
This is his moment that Ms Gillard had when she stared down the camera and said, "There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead." This is exactly what Mr Abbott is doing.
Ms Gillard never survived from that moment and I think Mr Abbott faces that same problem. Politically it is a disaster for him.
[...]
SINCLAIR DAVIDSON: Politicians, who are the people who got us into this budget problem in the first place, should have the kind of incentives to get us out of this problem.
And, for example, you could have a rule whereby while the budget is in deficit that their salaries get cut by 50 per cent and they remain at that level until the budget is back into surplus.
SABRA LANE: In this season of speculation, that's one idea that can safely be ruled out.
SARAH FERGUSON: Sabra Lane reporting.

The first thing that strikes me in what he says is that there is not much economics content, an affliction that also cruels the works of Henry Ergas in The Australian, a fellow Catallaxian. For a bunch of economists, the Australo-Austrian School, or whatever they call themselves, seem to spend a lot of time talking politics and not enough talking straight economics. Perhaps that is because, as Steve from Brisbane details, when their minds do turn to economics they struggle to mount a solid argument.

Sinclair has been running a series of posts on Catallaxy Files running much the same line, similar to the series he ran after the carbon tax was introduced by Gillard Labor in July 2012 and drawing a direct connection between the two issues. If he wants kudos for messaging independence from the Liberal Party, here you go: let it be known that I have awarded you One Kudos Point.

Of course the game's made up and the points don't matter... the points are like Catallaxy Files itself. They talk a lot over there about useful idiots, a phrase popularised in wingnut circles by Ludwig von Mises to describe liberals who ran interference for Lenin and Stalin - but Sinclair is just as useful to Abbott right now as "proof" of the government's centrism. As long as we can still see the scary silhouettes of Davidson and Ergas through the Overton Window, it's in the right spot for a conservative party. Libertarians are the mystical boogeymen used by conservatives to scare liberals into compliance. Does Sinclair know that this is what he is doing on behalf of the centre right, or does he really believe in the extreme silliness he retails?

Speaking of magical thinking, the particularly stupid elements of the right have been openly hoping that the debt levy is some sort of ruse, a false flag operation which will be revealed on budget night to have been just a joke guys, had you going there, sucked you all in didn't I eh? Fairfax's Paul Sheehan has been (indirectly) fanning these flames with an unsourced and uncorroborated assertion on Twitter that the debt levy would be boned. He also pinned the lead balloon on Joe Hockey, setting up a potential fall guy if his prediction does come true but somehow figuring that Hockey will come out smelling like roses.

#auspol If Abbott was slashed by his own Gillard Moment "There will be no new taxes", who benefits most? The man who floated it, Joe Hockey
— Paul Sheehan (@Paul_Sheehan_) May 7, 2014

If this was Labor in government, the wolfpack in Canberra would already be barking for for a spill, Sky News and ABCNews24 would be on it round the clock with journo jerks circling each other for the scoop. But it's the Liberals, who get off scot free and leave Scott (Morrison) free to accumulate backroom numbers without significant scrutiny.

UPDATE: I note that Sheehan has deleted the above tweet implicating Hockey, but not the original one predicting that the debt levy would not proceed. Everyone else in the media is assuming it will go ahead.

What is good for the goose is good for the other goose

Fairfax has kicked off what will no doubt be a long series of reports on links between the Liberal Party and corporate lobbyists with an attack on Joe Hockey. After all, as the Piping Shrike has presciently pointed out, if Labor is going to be smashed on links with dodgy unionists all the way through its term in government, why shouldn't there also be pushback on the Liberals' functionally identical links with the business end of town when they assume high office?

While I agree with the Shrike's conclusion that Clive Palmer is the big winner in all of this as the major parties have no answer to charges that they have been captured to some extent by rentseekers and grubs, I think some further thought is required on the implications for the Australian polity. Palmer will be a populist, but what does that mean exactly? Will he target the Nationals' base and support a return to protectionism? How much of the Liberals' platform will he block? What will be the price he exacts out of Abbott... how much of his arse will Abbott have to sell? The longer the Abbott administration creaks on and the more that the polls go against the government, the more power Palmer accumulates in the forthcoming negotiations.

Meanwhile, the Kouk reckons rising inflation (2.8% annualised on latest figures) means we should already be seeing interest rate rises, and the RBA will be dragged into monetary action by the turn of the year. December is a common time for federal major party leadership spills in Australia (four of the last ten), and December 1 this year will mark five years since Abbott himself challenged Turnbull and won by a single vote.

The Sydney papers smell blood with ICAC just having boned a prominent NSW Liberal, and they are already tarring Hockey and Abbott with the brush of Eddie Obeid. Media pressure will grow as the new Senate sits, giving Palmer a rails run to insert whatever will get him more votes into the government agenda. A defection or two from the Nats would further destabilise the chaotic Senate.

It would not be surprising at all to see momentum for Scott Morrison build and build. A shift in leadership would mean a fresh start, and an opportunity to slough off the barnacles of Abbott's promises - specifically, his pet projects like PPL and Direct Action. The logic is inescapable for the Liberal back room, and they wouldn't care much about looking like Labor. Abbott has already done that for them.