They managed just over a week, give or take. Ignoring Wilson Tuckey’s little outburst about Tamil suicide boats wreaking havoc on the North-West Shelf, the Federal Opposition managed to nearly get through an entire sitting week last week without making themselves the issue. Add on the previous weekend and a few days prior to that and heck, if they’d held their nerve they would have been looking at an entire fortnight of allowing the Government to stay in the spotlight.
But nope, Nick Minchin and Barnaby Joyce had other ideas.
Barnaby Joyce was first cab off the rank last Thursday, claiming it was Bill Heffernan’s and the Liberals’ fault the vast cancer that is Cubbie Station had gone into administration. Subsequent events reveal that Joyce was just itching to have a go at the Liberals, so the actual issue, in retrospect, was not so important, particularly given Nick Xenophon had said precisely the same thing about Cubbie as Heffernan.
Then on Friday Nick Minchin was careful to make a point of explaining that even if the Government agreed with every single ETS amendment, the Coalition might still reject it.
Minchin’s statement was one of the obvious – except for his emphasis. Whenever Ian Macfarlane says much the same thing, he makes a point of saying that if the Government agreed to the Coalition amendments, he – and in effect shadow Cabinet – would recommend to the Coalition backbench that they support it. The words had barely left Minchin’s mouth when the Governmetn started accusing the Coalition of bad faith in negotiating over the CPRS.
And, really, the Coalition is going to be in a terrible pickle if the Government agrees to most of their amendments and the backbench decides that that’s not good enough. It effectively neuters the Coalition line on the CPRS – that it will be a job destroyer. The Government can note that it offered to change the CPRS to meet the Coalition’s concerns and still got rebuffed.
The broader point, though, was that Minchin only needed to parrot Ian Macfarlane’s line on the issue and there would have been no opportunity for the Government to redirect attention back to its opponents.
Today it got worse. Glenn Milne apparently wasn’t too busy trawling through Canberra’s gutters and rubbish bins looking for salacious gossip to interview Barnaby Joyce on the future of the Coalition, or lack thereof, with Joyce issuing an extraordinary set of demands that even John Howard could and would never have been able to agree to – in effect silencing any Liberal who criticised the Nationals.
Yet again, the Coalition is refocussing attention on itself, at a point when the Government is rattled and deeply worried about the asylum seeker issue.
There’s a Newspoll out this week and it must surely show some increase in the Coalition’s support, given the Prime Minister’s stumbling on asylum seekers over the last fortnight. If it doesn’t, the end might come for Malcolm Turnbull sooner rather than later. Many senior Liberals, some of them former strong supporters, have given up on him. There’s a growing perception that he is “damaging the brand”. Everyone knows Joe Hockey doesn’t want the job, but he may not be given the choice if the Liberals decide that emergency amputation is needed to save the party.
Will that fix Barnaby Joyce or the ETS issue? Nope. But things couldn’t be any worse.
14 Comments
Don’t think Rudd could have done much more than he did regarding the 78. Rescue them, take them to an Indonesian port, then have to wait. We know why they refused ID checks now, they have been living in Indonesia for some time.
The media and the Liberals have made every effort to make it seem chaotic.
The worst thing for Turnbull is his gradual transformation into a right wing zombie to keep the rabid ones at bay.
Well Hardtalk wanted to discuss Howard’s legacy with him the other day. What he neglected to include as a legacy is a ruined spiteful party with just about no moral compass and no idea of who they are or what they stand for.
“Prime Minister’s stumbling on asylum seekers”
Like Thomas I just don’t see where he stumbled, can you enlighten us?
Bill Heffernan is the politician who did a complete character assassination on leading judge Michael Kirby, with a little help from his mate John Howard. Bill it seems has not learned from his past mistakes, and would do well to remember the old saying; better to remain silent and be thought a fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt. Regards Richard Ryan
Memo to Keith is not my real name. Imposters or bloggers using fake names and making comments, I liken to a person having a ‘wet dream’ and then telling the world thay had sex.
“Will that fix Barnaby Joyce or the ETS issue? Nope. But things couldn’t be any worse.”
never challenge worse they could end up with the Mad Monk he at least will still have a seat after the next election but with a reduced majority and fewer fiberal colleagues to argue with.
RICK68
Whatever gets you through the night Mr 68
Would Hockey want the poisoned chalice before the next election?
Turnball’s metamorphosis into a Howard clone has been sad to witness!
Barnababy Joyce is lucky that his country folk can’t get internet services and have to listen to rupert ’s world or they would dump him . With carbon trading ,this guy is not helping his voters cash in on the carbon cow. I just hope the Greens can grab some of the votes from the lib/nats.
When the Nats observed the pecking order of Libs first and everyone else can suit themselves – they made it through to Howard’s meltdown. Then up north they converted to LNP bamboozling themselves and the nation. Who’s a Liberal, a National and are they interchangeable? The more rustic than ever Joyce and Boswell became power brokers back home and silent partners in the capital. Neither party can stand being in Opposition, they loath each other and their leader and both are slow to fix the mess. The Coalition of confusion has more things to fret about than asylum seekers and climate change and it’s showing.
Well you know, and don’t take this personally, politicians can’t do very much, nor their watchers by definition on blinkers. So the Govt/Opposition cook up confected arguments about 1,000 when the real issue is 400,000 immigrants and runaway population growth, and global factors they are POWERLESS to deal with.
Powerless must be next to tiredness as taboo items of discourse down there.
And objectively there is this reminder …
Literally 5.8M gallons of oil
(1/2 Exxon Valez, 70 days x 2,000 barrels a day (Estimates Dept of Env/Geo Science Australia 21 Oct) x 42 gallons per barrel)
have probably spewed out of West Atlas/north west Oz, so big party pollies talk about 3mm of sea rise in south east Australia. And even then they and big media (Bolt-head on Insiders yesterday etc) miss the real story:
When something changes from 1mm to 3 mm in only 20 years or so and not linear but following a J curve. Well, then, exponential gets a whole new mojo in geological time spans compressed into less than 100 years.
The headline might have read ‘the 2 party system is …..’
Tom McLoughlin, if you must insist on banging on about Montara in irrelevant threads, you could at least include the qualification that the 2000 bbl/day was an upper limit/worst case estimate.
Just thinking that even senior Liberals know they’re rooted, and that the best thing for them would be to have an election, even a double dissolution. A sort of ‘get the bloody next election out of the way and then start rebuilding the party without the detritus of 2007’s result hanging around’ approach. Look at their crazy behaviour – it can really only have one reason: they’re feeling already defeated. After all, it’s taken a long time (2 years) for many of them to realise that the electorate was looking for a viable alternative to the previous regime for some years prior to November 2007, and that there is deep-seated disenchantment with the ‘brand’ that will take at least a couple of elections shake off. Trouble is that a double dissolution would make it more likely that crypto-Liberals like Fielding, Xenophon et al would be elected to the Senate and again have power and media interest completely disproportionate to their electoral support. Maybe they’d prefer that. And Turnbull had a chance – being basically a decent human being -but got so impatient of being outside of the power hub that things were allowed to go awry through sheer desperation. Hockey won’t undo that damage, nor will Abbott and Dutton. Maybe the next Liberal Prime Minister is not yet in the Parliament?
Does anyone else feel that Kevin hiring all the senior talent is a way of keeping them quite on the sidelines?
Rudd cocked up by lying to us about what he is really doing with refugees. He is not having a regional arrangement, he is bribing brutal regimes to illegally jail refugees in Malaysian and Indonesian prisons, he is helping Sri Lanka jail and suppress the Tamils, he sent cops to prevent any Afghans or Pakistanis ever reaching Australia and this is all illegal.
Reading estimates from 20 October and the paranoic rantings of the DIC’s was like reading the worst spy novel ever written but apparently it is true.
Instead of ASIS and the AFP looking for drug dealers, sex slavers, child prostitution rings and other crimes, they are out there all over Asia illegally tracking the movements of refugees. Monthly figures published on the UNHCR website would give them the same information for free of course.
Rudd is also spinning the yarn that the UNHCR is entirely responsible for assessing refugee claims, it is signatory states who assess the claims of refugee claimants as the UNHCR state over and over again to them.
He lies because we have always known that Indonesia does not provide protection for refugees, he lies because he knows very well that they live in a hellish, brutal limbo for years on end and we are paying for it.
And just because the Tamils had been in Indonesia in our introduced hell does not make them any less refugees. We have set up a “queue” in Indonesia but we are so bloody minded that since 2001 we have only accepted 460 refugees from that queue while we waste time and money importing refugees who have been safe for 25 years or more and calling it humanitarian.
It’s a bit like stepping over the wounded man on the street in front of your house in case there is a worse wounded man 5 streets over.
You always help the people in your face don’t you?
Rudd’s ridiculous whining about people smugglers is also untrue, no refugees are smuggled into Australia simply because it is their right to come here with or without papers and have their applications heard and dealt with fairly and equally.
I take great comfort that I helped blow the whistle thanks to an old union man working for an ALP senator who could not speak out.