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.

Clive Palmer feeds chooks their own entrails

Today, apart from being the one year anniversary of Rudd deposing Gillard, is the day where Australia and its media commentator "chooks" try to figure out what is in Clive Palmer's head by poring over the chicken entrails after his presser yesterday with Al Gore. The primary sources are the transcript of the presser (can't find a full one but long excerpt here), and the transcript of his interview on Lateline.

When you have news.com.au declaring victory for Gillard, Business Spectator speculating that Malcolm Turnbull is the big winner and Catallaxy Files calling it as a sting operation on Al Gore, you know we're in Clivezone where the old way of doing things in Canberra has been shaken up a little bit. I think Andrew Bolt's ambivalence is closer to the truth, as there's something there for everyone.

My reading is that Palmer is trying to #occupy the centre, and has orchestrated a deal which all parties can find fault with, but all parties can find something they like - as with all good compromises. He comes off looking a bit like Bob Hawke in the process, which is remarkable for a first attempt by a minor party leader, and certainly more elegant than anything the Democrats or Greens ever achieved.

In summary:

• Liberals (especially Joe Hockey) should be happy that the new ETS would zero-rated until major trading partners join the party so that it's effectively a short term Keynesian stimulus, but sad that the Rudd ETS framework would be left intact for a future Labor government to switch on without much fuss;
• Labor should be happy that they get much of what they would have achieved if Rudd had won, albeit only medium-to-long-term, and can look forward to cheering on Hillary Clinton to reverse the failure of Copenhagen when she sweeps in 2016;
• Greens should be happy because they get to keep the CEFC and RET (if Clive follows through), even though emissions will blow out again in the short term from the zero-rated ETS;
• The electorate should be happy because Canberra is actually working to produce a compromise.

What Palmer has done is attempted to unilaterally define the terms of battle. Due to him holding the balance of power and - crucially - the failure of Abbott to have the gumption to set down the rules before him, he is probably going to get away with it, because Abbott will most likely accept the terms. Abbott just doesn't have the chops to negotiate anything more favourable, due to a serious lack of talent in his parliamentary team and a lack of empathy with ideological opponents. Whether the proposed amendments are in fact terms of surrender by Abbott or the blueprint for his success is going to be contingent on whether Clinton really does change the world with a tsunami of votes to remove US Congressional blockages in the mooted 2016 "wave" election.

It is Australia's lot to be a cork in the ocean, bobbing about in every which direction the global currents take them. The Palmer deal only makes this more transparent. It's too politically difficult for Australia to bleed itself to lead the way on carbon emission reduction, fair enough, the public has spoken on that. Palmer's compromise ensures that we aren't a roadblock, however, and it would allow Abbott to host the G20 without becoming an international pariah. The pressure should be on the trading partners whom Palmer mentioned. We can say that we'll be there when they are. That is the politics of the possible.

At first blush, Clive has shown himself to have a more deft hand than many would have given him credit for. Clivezone 1, Chooks 0.

UPDATE: Posted this on John Quiggin's thread on the subject:

It is true that the fact that Clive did not make his vote to repeal the carbon tax contingent on passing his ETS amendment does dilute his message somewhat.
However…
Abbott might be well served to follow Clive’s lead and pass his ETS anyway, since it makes a hell of a lot of sense for him politically. It heads off the threat of Turnbull and the wets in general, since Malcolm (or Joe) can’t wedge him on the issue any more. It also means that Abbott can host the G20 without being an international laughing stock, and in fact means Abbott can get on his high horse and lecture Asians about his superior morals, which is right in his wheelhouse. Plus, he doesn’t have to negotiate anything, and the Greens would hate it which makes him very happy. There’s a lot to be said for it benefiting Tony Abbott.

Piketty populism and Clive Palmer

Just as economists seem to be talking about nothing else but Thomas Piketty and inequality these days, it seems to me in reading political blogs that little else is more important in politics right now than the ongoing debate between populism and elitism. Yes, even more important than discussion of war in Iraq, because arguably that debate is just another aspect of the ongoing backlash against the elites.

The reaction of the American left to the American right's utterly predictable hawkishness on Iraq is to tell those wrongheads to shut up, as summed up by Paul Waldman and quoted favourably across the left poliblogosphere over there last week. After 9/11, political elites in the west enjoyed the effects of populism as they were able to channel the public's unfocused anger into support for a war on an unrelated target. George W. Bush is now universally reviled as the worst president in that country's history, which means the hawk agenda of the elites who benefited from his largesse is now similarly repudiated in the electorate.

For its part, the right these days seems to be trying to turn "populist" into an insulting epithet, much the same way as they have tried to tarnish the word "liberal". (They lost that one, as opinions inexorably turned in favour of liberalism on issues like gay marriage and abortion.) This is a reversal from a few years ago when populism benefited Dubbya, or in Australia when it lifted Pauline Hanson from obscurity into flag-draped power. In the age of Piketty where elites have over-reached, the right now condemns populism because the people actually want liberalism.

In democracies, it is not sustainable for a major party to attack populism over the long term. Will the right rediscover a blend of populism and ideology that will rescue their terrible poll numbers? While there is always a stream low level stories of racism and other right-wing populist techniques which supply the US leftist blogs with fresh meat on a regular basis, there is no discernible Hansonism in Australia at the moment, and that is because Clive Palmer seems to be going down a different road, as in this op-ed in the Fairfax papers yesterday.

How long will it be until this country gets a government that cares about its people? To serve in Parliament and to serve your fellow citizens should be the highest calling in our society. But that's not how the nation views those in Canberra. Rightly so. 

Australia needs to project what we might become. The problems we have in this country have been made by Australians and they can be solved by Australians.

It is pure populism without much ideology, and none of the xenophobia of Hanson. The consequences of the actions he sets out here would variously disappoint both left and right - he talks a lot about raising benefits and investing in education as well as blocking direct action, but he sidesteps the question of whether he will block repeal of the carbon tax.

Palmer is still playing small ball, nevertheless. Worthy as are his stories of pensioners and war widows, there is no vision there. The ultimate implication of this approach will be that if Palmer succeeds in blocking the nastier elements of Abbott's agenda, he will lock in the Rudd/Gillard legislative legacy for a generation. Seeing as the Abbott administration passed only seven bills in its first seven months, signs are that he and his parliamentary team don't have the skills to accomplish much in the House.

The Palmer United Party is still struggling for life at the moment, and the urgency which this brings to their policy pronouncements is a stark contrast to the inertia caused by factional divisions in both major parties. Tony Abbott is playing the tired old game that John Howard played before him, but as with Bush the public have seen it all before and we're not getting fooled again. This time, we demand more adherence to reality from our political leaders, more attention paid to what is actually happening to real people in the community.

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.

Clive Palmer as anti-road roadblock bloc

In a political climate where a man who led a state Liberal caucus five years ago can become a minister in a Labor government, things are getting a bit loose at the moment. Something that seems to have been ignored largely by the mainstream media is this Guardian piece yesterday on Clive Palmer stonewalling. The main story is about Labor denying an earlier Guardian report that they would support a freeze on family tax benefits, but I think the Palmer element is more compelling anyway.

The PUP’s leader, Clive Palmer, told Guardian Australia on Monday that he and his three senators had met over the weekend and resolved they would not negotiate in any way or even speak to the government about any budget measures.
“This is an attack on Australia’s way of life. Our party room resolved not to talk to the Liberal and National parties at all,” he said.
Asked whether a carte blanche refusal to negotiate was not an unusual tactic for a party holding balance-of-power votes in the Senate, he said: “Well we are unusual, we don’t like them, we don’t like this budget and we aren’t going to talk to them.”
The stance, if adhered to, would put in doubt any legislation the government sought to pass through the new Senate – which sits from 1 July – that was opposed by Labor and the Greens.

The media seem to be treating this as Clive-being-Clive, just another act in the circus. What if he held fast to this threat, not just on the budget but everything else he didn't like about the Liberal platform, which seems to be most of it? What if the PUP turned into another Tea Party, blocking everything they can to cause maximum pain for political elites? The Tea Party prevents a huge raft of legislation supported not only by Democrats but also the non-TP establishment faction of the Republican Party through the Hastert Rule, which nobbles majority rule in US Congress through a twisted interpretation of the rules of party discipline.

Assuming that the AMEP senator follows Clive's lead, a PUP bloc of four which votes no on everything means the Liberals can't get legislation through with the votes of the other minor parties. If the PUPs abstain, leaving 72 live votes, that means the government could still win with their 33 plus all four of Xenophon, DLP, LDP and Family First - though getting all four of those cats to agree on herd direction will be highly problematic.

Operationally, it would mean that the Liberals would have to turn to the Greens or Labor to pass their legislation through the Senate. As Taylor says, the Greens have a lot of problems with the road-centric vision of Keynesianism that the government is presenting, so they could be an anti-road roadblock bloc just as much as Palmer, for different reasons.

In some ways this would be a relief to Abbott, as he is clearly unsuited to negotiation with minor parties and is much more comfortable bashing Labor for not cheering his every exhalation. He might even welcome Washington-style gridlock for three years, because it would allow him to revert back to opposition leader mode. Local ACT businesses might be terrorised once again on a daily basis by the media press pack descending at sparrow fart to film Abbott unloading eggplants, filleting barramundi and punching pig carcasses, followed by rousing condemnations of This Illegitimate Pseudo-Government. The fact that his government might not achieve anything wouldn't concern him, as it was never destined to in its first term anyway.

The public repudiated both major parties, and empowered Palmer to keep the bastards from wrecking the joint. Clive saying no to Abbott would only be a continuation of the electorate saying no to Abbott via the polls. It's classic populism, and it works. That's democracy for you.

In defence of Clivezone populism

Australia's first Federal Cabinet in 1901

I confess that I never read Larvatus Prodeo from cover to cover, as many of its posts seemed boring to me with interminable series on subjects that didn't grab me. LP alumnus Mark Bahnisch's new blog is much more accessible, however, as in his budget posts like this one, which is of a piece with the Piping Shrike's thoughts on the matter. Both bloggers identify this budget as some sort of apotheosis of the failure of mainstream politics to engage with the public - the Shrike blames the loss of major party connection with their traditional bases, while Bahnisch concentrates on the psychopathy of the "political class". These are aspects of the same story: unaccountable elitism meeting electoral reality.

The opposite of elitism is populism, and this is the large empty space that Clive Palmer has decided to #occupy. As the Shrike argues, some of the noises out of the Palmer United Party have sounded left wing, and it's tempting for leftists to enjoy the carnie atmosphere of the 44th Parliament for reasons of schadenfreude, but he evidently thinks we should direct a jaundiced eye at such theatrics:

The real threat comes from those who have interests in taking advantage of the weakness of both sides. Clive Palmer has immediately focused on the weak point, the ideological nature of [the budget], and has been the only one refusing to give ground that the deficit is a problem in the first place. If Clive sounds rather left wing, however sincere/insincere, it indicates not only which way he sees the votes are going right now, but also how little difference there is between what passes for left-wing and what big business like Palmer’s actually wants – more spending to prop them up.

Threat is a strong word. Is Clive threatening, or dangerous, or other such weighted words of alarmism? Who does he threaten?

The last great populist in the Australian Parliament was Pauline Hansen, who was legitimately dangerous and threatening. Her isolationist Small Australia policies would have plunged the country into recession and led to a far less tolerant society. To the extent that the Howard administration adopted her platform - not to mention her long white fingers manipulating Rudd's asylum seeker policy - the nation is poorer for it, both economically and culturally.

As Bahnisch points out in a subsequent post, Palmer hails from not far away from Ipswich but has a different pedigree:

My strong suspicion is that Clive Palmer will equivocate over some of the Budget measures, thinking out loud to draw attention to PUP and to the impacts of the said measures, then end up voting against most of them. [...] Don’t forget that the anti-politician Palmer learnt his politics at the feet of Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Now he was a cunning populist…

Palmer cut his teeth in the Liberal National Party and has now defined himself largely in opposition to it, which means he has more in common politically with Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott. The latter two collaborated with the Gillard regime to make the 43rd Parliament one of the most productive in terms of passed legislation in national history. Palmer faces Abbott: a man with no mandate to call his own, representing much of what he is sworn to oppose, who has shown exactly zero skill in negotiating with anyone who is not on his side.

Palmer will become in July the effective leader of the opposition, an avatar empowered by Australia's founding fathers (as per my last post) to represent the voice of the people to veto an unpopular leader's peccadillo policies. Some may try to portray this as a period of craziness, and looking at the words coming out of Jacqui Lambie's mouth it is easy to come to that conclusion. However, the major parties and Abbott in particular only have themselves to blame for having to deal with someone like Clive through their abandonment of democratic responsibility, and Palmer's rise only underlines the greatness of the foresight of those founding fathers in allowing someone like him to stand up to political elites.

Just as the Tea Party wagged the GOP dog to bring gridlock to Washington DC by using constitutional protections against executive power to limit the activities of Barack Obama and force him to shrink the size of government, if what Bahnisch predicts does come to pass then Palmer will do much the same to Abbott by blocking most of his legislative agenda and preventing him from setting fire to the furniture. In the continued absence of the emergence of fascist superpowers from the Prime Minister, he will have to continue on with many of the Gillard era reforms, as the public wanted in the first place. Palmer's effect will be to hold Abbott to his promises, which were to support Labor's popular policies. Abbott will have to be content with keeping up spending levels but doing a really, really crap job of delivering outcomes.

That it took a billionaire to buy his way into Parliament to do this does not gainsay the power of his populism, nor lessen the impotence of the Prime Minister in protesting against the will of the people. Clive and his circus troupe will get more than a little loose, no doubt. Queensland under Joh was called Godzone, and now we are all living in Clivezone. The Australia that is created from this sudden reintroduction of democracy won't be so bad.

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.

#commissionerfarted

The National Commission of Audit is a joke, a cartoon-level Young Liberal policy wishlist devised by a corporate loser and a rogue's gallery of superannuated Liberal hacks. It is a naked attempt to move the Overton window to the right by terrorising little old ladies, monotonous in its regularity in the first term of a conservative government and just as ineffectual. It makes the IPA's wishlist look coherent by comparison - at least the IPA are consistent in application of their narrow ideology.

As Gittins rightly points out, the hidden story here is how Abbott has boxed out the right wing of his party into meaningless make-work schemes, idly doodling their fantasy of a Putin-style dictatorship to implement a laissez-faire paradise, while the LNP gets on with the business of trying to convince a skeptical public that it is responsibly moving towards the centre. The right sees this bat-signal, and various factions are currently arguing amongst themselves about whether to join what they see as the Justice League, or defect to Solomon Grundy or whoever it is who heads up the LDP these days. Meanwhile, Clive "Call Me Lex" Palmer installs death rays inside his giant plastic dinosaur, and rubs his white-gloved hands with pantomime glee.