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.

Reform, and other lies told by rent seekers

An excellent if highly cynical piece on yesterday's Reform Summit by Liam Hogan in the Guardian:

The one thing I would not have expected out of our democratic, parliamentary, capitalist system in 2015 is how much a lot of its managerial politics would resemble 1970s Soviet “actually existing” socialism.

As a hearkening back to the glory days of the Hawke summits which led to the Accord, it was history repeated as farce: special interest groups and other rent seekers reciting their laundry lists of demands, talking past each other and agreeing only to a meaningless and non-binding communique which was rightly pilloried by Catallaxy Files as being largely pre-arranged. Hogan's cynicism doesn't go far enough.

The appearance of many of the usual suspects from the stable of right-wingers employed by The Australian at an event organised by Labor's Craig Emerson was not all that surprising in view of Nick Cater's summary of the day's festivities, which consisted of listing all the wonderful ways that the Summit would enable Labor to give in to the Right's policy agenda of lowering Australian worker living standards to match those of Asia in the name of "productivity", "flexibility" and "competitiveness" - i.e. to line the pockets of the capitalists in ye olde Reaganite fashion.

If there is to be an actual bipartisan reform platform in this country, it has to be built with a view to the effects of the 1980s reform and how its effects have played out in the intervening decades. Primary among these is how workers were stiffed by the decision of Labor to put a dampener on real wages, because workers have not enjoyed the benefits of their own productivity gains since the 1980s. Meanwhile, capital productivity has lagged considerably even as executive pay has skyrocketed and share dividends have fattened. Multifactor productivity has been dropping over the past decade, by almost a full percentage point, despite labour productivity rising by 1.5% p.a., because capital investment has proved to be wasteful, particularly in mining.

Hogan makes some compelling arguments for the Soviet metaphor, but I also detected some Chinese influence in what is these days an outpost of the Chinese mixed economy. Kevin Rudd may not have been present to speak Mandarin to the assembled mandarins, but there were parallels to the five-year plans by faceless man in the central committees of those other modern faces of the jerry-rigged communist/capitalist hybrid experiment. There was no Xi, or Che for that matter, but one hopes the feng shui of the room was tickety-boo.

Now that the AUD is back within more regular historic parameters, the bleating about international competitiveness should stop. We should not lower our wages and workplace standards to match those of Asian countries, as that is short-term thinking. The next major growth source for Australia is the burgeoning Chinese middle class - and that of India to a lesser extent - and if we are to ride that wave for another boost to prevent recession post the mining boom, we have to work towards an economy which can sell to it.

"Reform" in this country is too often conceived as a zero-sum game where workers and employers fight over the scraps of the world economy in a race to the bottom to serve the lowest common denominator. That is not Australia's natural role in the Asian century. We can't be the Singapore or Hong Kong of the region because those trade hub positions are already filled, and we can't be Taiwan or Bangladesh either with their focus on manufacturing. We can supply the Chinese bourgeoisie with small amounts of high-quality shipped goods and large amounts of low-cost digitally-delivered services. Whatever policies are attuned towards building that scenario are the ones that will underpin our future growth. I doubt anything will come out of the Reform Summit that would come anywhere near towards that.

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?

Elitism and bullshit

Jeff Sparrow gets on the elitism bandwagon - by which I mean treating elitism as a subject of political discussion all of its own - in examining recent literary ejaculations by David Flint and Nick Cater.

We’re now in a position to understand the relationship between elitist anti-elitism and the more recent anti-democratic turn. Almost by definition, elitist anti-elitism depends on external commentators like Cater or Flint to mystically interpret and convey the sentiment of the masses. If the man in the pub were to argue for himself – or, worse still, to agitate or organise – he’d immediately lose his authenticity. If he starts to talk, he’s half way to becoming one of those hated intellectuals.
Abbott saw no problem with knighting Prince Phillip, since he and Flint know in their bones that only elitists could hate the monarchy. The unpopularity of the knighthood doesn't change anything – it merely shows that the elitists have somehow corrupted the natural instincts of honest folk.

My initial reaction to the nonsense put out by Cater and Flint is to conclude that "elitist anti-elitism" is, not to put too fine a point on it, complete bullshit. Sparrow calls it "mythology", but my gut feeling is that it is just bullshit, plain and simple.

Lest you think I'm merely being scatological for its own sake, bullshit has become a subject for serious intellectual study in recent times. As a rhetorical technique, it has been defined as subtly different from lying and humbug. The difference between lying and bullshit has been summarised thusly:

The liar believes that A is the case, but he wants to convince you both that Z is the case, and that he believes Z is the case. The bullshitter, by contrast, wants to convince you that Z is the case and that he believes Z is the case, but he is indifferent as to whether Z is the case or not[.]

As for a delineation between these two and the concept of humbug, to me it seems committing humbug incorporates some level of pretence, insincerity and/or trickery on behalf of the humbug, but apparently it stops short of outright lying. In the above formulation, the humbug wants to convince you that Z is the case and that he believes Z is the case, but he is ambivalent about whether Z is the case or not. (Ambivalence and indifference can be contrasted by saying that indifference means you don't care, whereas ambivalence means you don't know).

So do Flint and Cater really believe their bullshit, or are they just humbugging it up with straight out lies? Which faith are they arguing in badly? This matters in the sense that it important that the right maintains some semblance of attention towards the truth, because Harry Frankfurt's message with his 1986 essay was that too much bullshit was toxic for the soul. At least if they are merely lying, they can eventually be proven wrong. If they have caught the Baudrillardian disease of forgetting to care about reality in the first place and immersing themselves in their abstracted truthiness, then we're in trouble.

I think, on reflection, that Cater and Flint are engaging in humbug. They have come up with a quasi-intellectual framework of post hoc justification for their identity politics, but they have done no academic work to put this in context of the rest of scientific thought on the issues. They just don't care about the reality of the situation, as long as they keep getting attention and/or cheques. The lies suit their purposes. Don't look behind the curtain, because there's nothing there except an old white man running a scam.

They are not as bad as the George W. Bush era's self-appointed creators of reality, though perhaps that's only because they are so relatively powerless. Thankfully.

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.

Short Kicks: The furniture is revolting

Still working hard on business stuff so no time for anything more than Short Kicks.

- As Piping Shrike rightly points out, the current leadership tension over Tony Abbott's increasingly woeful performance on so many issues is not going to have a happy ending for the Liberal Party. Backbenchers are leaking, journos are hyperventilating, it's #ruddmentum all over again. But as with the disappointing Rudd return, there is no thought that replacing Abbott with any of the clowns in the current front or back bench would lead to any different policy agenda. Perhaps getting rid of PPL and Abbott's other pet projects would be enough in itself. I doubt it. The only logic that works for the Libs at the moment is the same logic that they relentlessly mocked Labor for, in that they could write off the next election result but with a short term honeymoon poll bounce they could "save the furniture" by minimising the losses with a view to jagging the next one.

- As such, Abbott may look like a galah on the national stage on a daily basis but he is showing a some rat cunning regarding internal Liberal Party politics. His cabinet reshuffle seems to be focused mostly on making everyone else look bad in comparison to him, even though that is a negative-sum game. Sussan Ley has already been thrown to the wolves through the public humiliation of announcing the backflip on GP co-payments. Shifting Scott Morrison to Social Services is very shrewd, I think, because it means Morrison can wear all the blame for terrible decisions that Abbott makes as he tries to shaft his gray power voting base with tax hikes and welfare cuts in a vain attempt to balance the budget. Abbott has left Hockey as a shag on a rock for the most part during the failed budget negotiations, even though there have been leaks to try to pin blame for Abbott's dud policies on the PM. Turnbull is busy being shoulder-deep inside the Telstra cow, planting fiscal timebombs. Abbott has also allowed the media to scrutinise Julie Bishop without coming to her aid particularly, and since there's never been much substance there, that's a bad thing for Bishop's aspirations. Morrison is still the only hope for the Libs, but only if he makes a move before he gets too much of the Abbott stink on him.

- Meanwhile, though I got excited about Palmer populism last year, the cat of reality was quickly belled by Lenore Taylor and the public has reacted by abandoning PUP in the polls. Palmer has now stiffened up somewhat on other budget measures, but it's too late for his electoral fortunes as I suspect he has lost his chance to be the new face of people power. My analysis was not wrong as such, because the opportunity for Clive was real at the time - I merely overestimated him. Oh well, what can you expect from a billionaire. If only we had an Elizabeth Warren type in the Australian parliament.

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.

Hawks enjoy back-to-back flagwaving

Not much posting lately, for which I apologise. Three month old firstborn child, you understand. Not that much of long term interest has been happening in Australian politics lately. It's been all terrorism this, war that. YAWN! It is all entirely predictable, and plays perfectly into Tony Abbott's obvious desire to pick up right where John Howard left off. In keeping with the Abbott era's complete lack of originality, the war is even in the same place.

The war hawks have been dominating the media just like the Hawthorn Hawks dominated the AFL grand final, mainly because in both cases the opposition just didn't show up. Bill Shorten did not have any wiggle room, because the polls were always going to favour the PM at the start of a war. Shorten has to bide his time and rely on the inexorable turning of public opinion once the grim realities of war become apparent, as they always do eventually to shame the chickenhawk granny bloc into changing their minds. At the moment, Shorten is playing Ryan Schoenmakers to Abbott's Tom Hawkins, and ISIS keep bombing the ball long to the square for the Speedo-clad Tomahawk to grab easily and bang through for goal after goal. Would Anthony Albanese have been the Brian Lake equivalent, a more capable operator who can take on the gorillas and nullify the threat? The supply from midfield is too great at the moment. (I think I've waterboarded that analogy enough now.)

As with the Schoenmakers situation at my beloved Hawthorn, the only emotion I have in watching Abbott strut about the national stage saying stupid things and not being punished for them is exasperation at how easy it all is for him. The beheadings are horrible, yes, but it's just way too simplistic to use them as an excuse for jingoistic nationalism as a pretext for war. Bill Clinton was never seriously punished electorally for his Kosovo bombing campaign under somewhat similar circumstances, because the troop losses were minimal and the war only lasted a handful of months; can the current coalition get as lucky? The facts are different in this case, as this one won't be over quickly, the world is paying much more attention, and it's a different era where YouTube is as much an instrument of militarism as RPGs. Even if there aren't a heap of body bags containing Western soldiers, a My Lai situation is more likely in this theatre.

The timing is wrong for Abbott on this one. By the time the next Australian federal election rolls around, the Iraqi quagmire will have had a good two years to drag him into it. Interestingly, it will probably coincide with the 2016 presidential election in America, with the looming Hillary Clinton era promising a war hawk wonderland. Will Obama be able to wrap up the ISIS bombings before the voters in the Western coalition get disenchanted, like Bill Clinton did for Kosovo? I doubt it.

Hate to the left of me, haters to the right

Reading this WaPo piece on exactly how Americans hate the Republican Party, it put me in mind of similar polls on Obamacare, which also enjoys poor ratings. In both cases, while the headline number is rather low, when you break it down to opposition from the left and opposition from the right, a more interesting picture emerges.

"Not all of the opposition to the health care law comes from the right," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "Thirty-eight percent say they oppose the law because it's too liberal, but 17% say they oppose it because it's not liberal enough. That means more than half the public either favors Obamacare, or opposes it because it doesn't go far enough."

The WaPo points out that the same effect for right-wing politics implies that the GOP still has a comfortable set of "fundamentals" for the 2014 mid-term elections in America, since those who hate the Republicans from the right are presumably still going to vote for them. This is the reason why every poll analyst who includes fundamentals in their poll model, which is pretty much everyone except Sam Wang, still forecasts control of the US Senate shifting to the GOP despite the raw polls saying otherwise.

This sort of granularity in polling is sadly rare in Australian polling, with the likes of Essential and Newspoll not doing enough in this area - but at least they're still going, unlike Nielsen which Fairfax just cut. I suspect that Bill Shorten's low popularity has a significant hate-from-the-left component: Essential puts his dissatisfaction rating at 16% of Labor voters, compared to 9% disapproval of Abbott by LNP voters. How would the election of Anthony Albanese as Labor leader have changed this dynamic? The left would have been much happier with him, and I don't think he would have done much different in policy terms than Shorten is doing now. Albo might even have raised some objections to the folly of war.

The doctrine of the Stupid Shit Funnel

Lest I be accused of running a hate site against Club Troppo after my previous article criticising aspects of their wonkery, today's Troppo joint on the West's reaction to ISIS is excellent.

Whose going to win if the West gets entangled in this maelstrom? Well for a while it will be our fearless leaders as their chest thumping arrests their slide in the polls and simplistic News Corp pundits who love a good war, but in the end the West will once again waste blood and treasure.
And the winners? Well I bet Vladimir Putin reckons he’ll be a winner as the West gets distracted and weakened in the Middle East – but no we’ll feel the need to have a go at Putin after this one.  Our last hurrah quite possibly
No I think It’s pretty clear that when all is said and done the winner will be the nation who best absorbs a lesson from  Sun Tzu’s Art Of War.  “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”  That nation, appropriately will be China.

This Rex Ringschott piece is of a piece with this other piece in the Atlantic detailing the always-wrong perma-hawks who dominate US media, and when you piece them together it forms a jigsaw of G.W. Bush era recidivism, where no lessons from the failed Iraq and Afghanistan forays have been learned at all.

Having said all that, I am not going to connect the dots and narrow down the focus to Halliburton, Blackwater and crony capitalism in the military industrial complex. I acknowledge that there is a genuine philosophical underpinning to the neo-con thought process on this one. It is, as Ringschott mentions, the "simplistic moral argument" of the sanctity of human life. The slaughtering of Western journalists is a terrible thing (albeit that Muslim journalists were slaughtered in exactly the same way weeks before and the West ignored it). It reminds us that ISIS is committing atrocities on innocents, as Saddam Hussein did, the Taliban did and Al Qaida did. Opposing these people seems like a "good" thing to do, even if you don't want to touch the concept of them being "evil". Lives can be saved; not just Christian lives but Muslims and those of many other faiths and races.

I am on record as having some sympathy with that viewpoint, as in the asylum seeker debate. One should always pay respect to a credo which has as its foundation the primacy of human existence. In the case of asylum seekers, the figures are in and the deterrent, while individually abhorrent, has been shown to work to prevent the rush of asylum seekers by boat, and remove the prospect of hundreds of horrific deaths at sea. It seems rather mercenary to balance one poor bastard getting septicemia or shot in a prison riot with hundreds of corpses in the Arafura Sea, but that's the equation we're faced with and I'm prepared to accept the utilitarian argument from the right on this issue.

In the case of war in the Middle East - and in most other regions where rival superpowers funnel weapons to opposing sides and let them fight it out as proxies for their imperial ambitions - the figures are also in, and the effect of starting the Iraq war was to destabilise the region and cause more deaths than it would have saved. Specifically, the rise of ISIS is everything to do with George W. Bush's decision to remove Iraq's power structure, ship tonnes of ordnance to the Iraqi theatre and then leave all that firepower in the hands of underprepared locals who have mostly abandoned their posts or been mown down.

The lives that Australia and other Western nations have saved directly through combat boots on the ground were then forfeited when they left. Ah, the right might say, so it's Obama's fault for withdrawing troops? First off, that was a withdrawal signed off by Bush before Obama came to office, as part of setting up an independent Iraq. Second, how long is the West supposed to occupy Iraq for? Are we actually there to "liberate", or is the right's paternal instinct too strong to let the kids leave home?

Funnelling arms to Iraq has only caused more bloodshed, not less. It's as if the right wants to go against Obama's "don't do stupid shit" doctrine by doing all the stupid shit it can, but funnelling that shit into foreign war zones where their ideological beliefs can be tested in experiments using other people's lives. The Stupid Shit Funnel has been poised over Iraq and Afghanistan for a long time, raining down a steady stream of weaponry and armoured vehicles, and now it's also making detours to Ukraine.

Ringschott's conclusion - that the winners would be those who don't play, China in particular - dovetails nicely into my conclusion from my discussion with Noah Smith. Winners don't do war.

PS: I am seeing that "blood and treasure" phrase around a hell of a lot lately. It's 2014's version of "known unknowns" in trendy military jargon that pundits use to make them seem like insiders. Also, the word "wus" is not spelled correctly; it's either "woos" or "wuss". This concludes today's instalment of Slang Nitpickery!

The abject failure of the Institute of Public Affairs

Following on from Alan Moran's sacking from the Institute of Public Affairs for anti-Islam tweets, John Quiggin sticks the knife in by comparing the IPA to their American counterparts, the Heartland Institute.

Finally, there’s the question of how long the IPA can avoid the fate of Heartland, which has lost most of its corporate sponsors (except for a few diehards from the fossil fuel sector) and is a shell of its former self. the IPA has already gone a fair way down the same track, and is now, in large measure, a private plaything of Gina Rinehart. In return for her bounty, she has demanded the most humiliating obeisances, most notably support for Northern dam projects like the Ord River scheme. Until recently the IPA was a reliable critic of such boondoggles.

Similarly, Andrew Elder details the flimsiness of Dick Warburton's review into the Renewable Energy Target, and how the agenda from the right is to abandon economic rationalism in favour of killing off entrepreneurialism and disruptive innovation of companies like Silex and ARENA, and handing money over to established monopolists.

The government's anti-RET position means that current electricity provider(s) will be able to buy the intellectual and other property rights for the proposed solar facility at a fraction of the cost that it would have been worth as a going concern. This means that the incumbency of existing providers will be maintained without them having to do the hard work and take the risk that Silex/ARENA took, while reaping the rewards properly due to Silex/ARENA. 

Are we starting to see a pattern yet? How about the cost-benefit analysis of the National Broadband Network, yet another rubbish report prepared by expensive external consultants to produce exactly what the government wants to hear: specifically, that the Internet doesn't have exponentially expanding bandwidth demand and Australians aren't going to want any more bandwidth in ten years than they already do now. This is patently stupid, but nothing more than can be expected from the Minister for Ill Communication, Malcolm Turnbull.

David Walker at Club Troppo runs interference for Turnbull, which is understandable because Turnbull pushes all the buttons of a high-level wonk. The Minister sounds like he's well briefed and in command of all the facts; a cursory glance at the Delimiter story stream on Turnbull - culminating in an apology by Renai Lemay for ever thinking Turnbull was on the level - shows that his position is a Potemkin village that only impresses those who don't know the hollowness of the Liberal policy platform. Just as Henry Ergas believes his economics credentials qualify him to blog about politics without justification, David Walker thinks that as a journalist, consultant and policy wonk that he can grok broadband technology just like that, and wave through Turnbull's cunningly constructed consultancy conclusions.

Now, allow me to set out my credentials in this one: I was originally a technology journalist, starting in 1997 on weekly newspapers and then moving to bi-monthlies including Internet World Australia where I covered a lot of ISP and Internet industry stories during the dot com boom. Additionally, I spent a year or two in the mid 2000s doing sales for Neighborhood Cable, so I have some direct knowledge of what regular customers want out of their broadband connections.

Walker's justification for agreeing with Turnbull is that we don't need broadband for anything other than pirating video content.

Trouble is, most of the innovations we have come up with recently don’t use all that much bandwidth. Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram are only medium-bandwidth even at their most intensive. Twitter and smart electricity grids are low-bandwidth. Networked games like Halo 3 use surprisingly little bandwidth too, with local hardware doing most of the work. And beyond a certain point, the speed with which you see Web pages has little to do with bandwidth; it’s mostly about server responsiveness and network latency.
Most projected e-health applications, including your latest x-rays, won’t use that much bandwidth either. Even fairly decent video-conferencing for education and medical consultations and business meetings uses perhaps 2 megabits per second, according to the demand document. To the extent that something is limiting growth in the use of such technologies, that something is generally not bandwidth.
The real policy problem with the NBN is that high-speed broadband just isn’t that much of a revolution. And to justify the cost of universal provision, it needs to be.

There are all sorts of things wrong with this mode of thinking. Correlation does not imply causation; perhaps the applications recently developed are low-bandwidth because they have to deal with crappy networks that don't enable innovation of more bandwidth-heavy content?

The assumptions in the demand document are slanted towards broadcast media. For instance, the 2Mbps quoted for videoconferencing is just for one-on-one calls, yet videoconferencing is made for more than two callers at a time, for collaboration in business and family or party calls in private usage. The one-on-one model is a relic of the broadcast media era, and that's the revolution that the NBN promises: the disruption of the one-to-one or one-to-many modes of communication, and the enabling of many-to-many modes.

With these things, it's always instructive to follow the money. Who stands to lose the most from the rise of the Internet and its disruption of existing businesses? If you look at the bandwidth usage, it's video content that eats up a lot of it. Foxtel is the major provider of paid video content in Australia. News Corp is the entity most at risk if the Internet is used to bypass its paywall to access content-that-wants-to-be-free. (In previous years I would have included Telstra in this part of the rant, though they don't really care as much as they used to about this stuff, since they have started to give up on owning content and focus on getting paid to operate the networks no matter what runs over it.)

I got questioned recently on why I don't join much of the rest of the left in bemoaning the supposed dominance of the IPA, its ubiquity on ABC platforms, its frequent appearances at The Conversation, its infection of Liberal Party processes, etc etc. My contention is that the original aims of the IPA - to be the intellectual arm of the Liberal Party and guide its policy development along ideological lines - have comprehensively failed. These days, as Quiggin rightly notes, the IPA is a cheerleading outfit for Gina Rinehart, Rupert Murdoch and the tobacco lobby, at the expense of any policy credibility they might once have enjoyed. As Elder goes through, the IPA is no longer a defender of entrepreneurialism, but a paid shill of crony capitalists. They actively lobby against Schumpeterian creative destruction, because they are paid by the people whose businesses' destruction would be caused by healthy capitalist competition. They have almost completely abandoned Menzies' founding principles, as evidenced by their recent dabbling with anti-Islam bigotry.

The reason I am ambivalent about this situation - the IPA's continued success of getting their message out to the public, combined with the poisonous nature of that message - is summed up by Harry Clarke in a comment on the Quiggin piece:

The IPA has been spectacularly successful at getting its extremist message across. I congratulate them. The difficulty is that people don’t like their message. I think the great Australian descriptor “ratbag” describes them well. Fundamentalist economics that perverts what economic theory instructs. I agree with you – the CIS relies more on reason.

In the words of John Williamson, Australians revel in our ability to "tell our leaders to go jump in the lake (but we'll never knock Australia, you make no mistake)". Yeah, we're fair dinkum in this country about recognising galahs when we see them. I believe in democracy, and the capability of the Australian public to work out who is on their side. The more the IPA's message is disseminated, the more Australians jeer and laugh at it. I know enough about the IPA to conclude that it is a failure, a folly, a flailing flinger of falderol, a figure of fun... the rest of the nation is just catching up on the news.

By the by, it should be pointed out that Moran's "sacking" from the IPA hasn't stopped him from posting on Catallaxy Files. This suggests a schism developing between John Roskam, still lurking about in the race for preselection for the Victorian seat of Hawthorn being vacated by Ted Baillieu, and Sinclair Davidson, who runs Catallaxy Files and has done nothing to stop its strong shift to becoming a secular freak show of anti-Islamic hatred, to the extent where Davidson ran a guest post this week tying a possible Australian conspiracy by public servants around a Rotherham-style Muslim child sex ring to the abandonment of the repeal push for s18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. The cognitive dissonance of holding the belief that the appalling Rotherham case presages a global epidemic of Muslim-on-white-teen rape after having defended the Catholic Church against allegations of a global epidemic of organised Catholic-priest-on-white-teen rape does not seem to bother anyone there. It is at the point right now where many Cat commenters would be welcome to speak at a Catch The Fire Ministries event, since their ideologies are functionally identical. With the abandonment of ideological principle, the IPA and its blog Catallaxy Files don't have much left to talk about, so they are in danger of descent into contagious conservative fear.

Atlas Stevens while Abbott shrugs?

Stephen Koukoulas is on his hobby horse again about Glenn Stevens and the RBA not being loose enough with monetary policy. In his unofficial role as Australia's (partial) answer to Paul Krugman, he's bashing Stevens about refusing to lower interest rates in the face of a complete lack of interest from the fiscal side in doing the heavy lifting to rescue certain parts of the economy from the depredations of a globalised market.

In these circumstances with below trend growth, a high and rising unemployment rate, a currency that is hurting the traded goods sector and risk still a dirty word, why not cut interest rates?

The obvious answer is that there's not all that many basis points to go before we hit the zero lower bound of 0% interest rates, and as can be seen from the current US and European live experiments, that's not a position that you want to be in. The Kouk wants 50 points to take the official cash rate from its already historic low of 2.5% down to 2%, but it's rare for that to be the extent of a shift in policy. Once the RBA starts moving in one direction, it's difficult to reverse momentum.

No, just because other Western countries have made the mistake of locking in procyclical fiscal austerity and relying on the steaming new theory of market monetarism, doesn't mean we should follow suit. This is about as low as we want interest rates. As Greg Jericho says:

Perhaps we are asking too much of monetary policy.

Jericho goes through the arguments for and against macroprudential tools, as a way to lower interest rates without encouraging a bubbly investment in housing instead of support for solid, growth-producing business. He ends up cautiously endorsing the use of those tools, presumably in conjunction with further easing.

My thoughts go back to one of the key reasons for the housing boom in America that led to the GFC: government intervening in the housing market to incentivise financial institutions to provide "sub-prime" home loans to people who often couldn't afford to pay them off. Now, I know the situation here is a lot different. The thread I see running though is the law of unintended consequences. We just don't know how those macroprudential tools would work in practice.

Perhaps more importantly, we DO know how well fiscal stimulus works, as we have decades of empirical data of successes to show for it, most recently in 2008/09. Expecting Glenn Stevens to be Atlas while Tony Abbott shrugs is too much to ask. The pressure should be on the government, not the wonks. We know what to do, the elites have to be told.

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.