Economy

Drought is ravaging the land. Large swaths of eastern Australia are experiencing some of the worst seasons on record. Frosts have wiped out large areas of crops in Western Australia, southern New South Wales and Victoria. Hail has beaten crops into the ground in Queensland. The government is scrambling to be seen to be doing something meaningful for farmers, particularly in Queensland where traditional National voters are looking to desert in favour of minor parties, such as One Nation and Katter’s Australian Party. At the same time, the climate change debate proceeds at a crawl.

Turnbull allies in the parliamentary party are increasingly sceptical of Scott Morrison’s ‘I knew nothing’ stance. One says Morrison confidant Stuart Robert, a former soldier, planned the manoeuvre with military precision, dudding Peter Dutton and Turnbull in the process. So with emotions still so raw it is little wonder the newly minted prime minister runs for fairly unconvincing cover every time the issue of the ‘coup’ is raised.

As far as his Nationals colleagues are concerned, last Sunday night’s nationally televised interview was Barnaby Joyce’s political death warrant. Kevin Humphries, whose state seat of Barwon is within the boundaries of Joyce’s federal electorate, told Ten Eyewitness News that ‘for his own sake, Barnaby should move on’. Humphries’ assessment of the damage was chilling for his federal colleagues. He says, ‘People want consistency in decision-making. You need discipline in government and that’s not currently being displayed, so that’s got to change.’

Voters are being asked to buy a pig in a poke. Morrison wants them to take him on trust. This is despite the fact he is a treasurer whose budget last year did not foresee the massive revenue increase that materialised over the past four months, a revenue lift that Treasury has baked into its forecasts for the forward estimates and projections out to 2025. In all budgets, assumptions are contestable, but some of the key ones in this budget are close to unbelievable.

In the great scheme of things the cricketers are small fry. They haven’t killed anyone, raped small boys or turned widows and orphans out onto the streets. Their chief crime was to lay bare the national delusion that our sunburnt country produces generation after generation of clean-limbed superheroes, morally spotless whether they are bayoneting Johnny Turk or hurling cricket balls at South Africans. So much for that. Appalling as it was, the cricket cheating scandal is merely a symptom of a wider national sickness. A culture of greed, selfishness, envy, cruelty and often criminal corruption is gnawing at the nation’s heart.

The atmosphere was electric when Labor’s victorious Batman candidate, Ged Kearney, entered the room flanked by Opposition Leader Bill Shorten. You would think they had just won the general election rather than retained a seat they had held for the past 50 years. But this was no ordinary byelection result.

As market capitalism has become monopoly capitalism – markets without competition – the potential capacity to see beyond it becomes ever greater. In a society benighted by privatisation, people can begin to see again what they had forgotten: that water, power, transport and other entities are social in nature, and should be controlled thus.

Turnbull effectively signed the death warrant on forests in a whole brace of reserves. He also endorsed logging of 159 forest coupes already listed by Tasmanian Premier Will Hodgman for clear-felling in other Tarkine forests, including in the headquarters of the Frankland River where protesters up trees have held off logging during the past year.

For the first time in decades, large numbers of people are willing to think of the state’s role in the economy as being something more than an enabler of private capital, a limited safety net and corporate regulator.

Seven years ago Malcolm Turnbull’s assessment of CCS was that it was an industrial pipedream. He said it was sobering that “as of today, there’s not one industrial-scale coal-fired power station using carbon capture and storage – not one”. This week Josh Frydenberg pointed out that government has invested $590 million in CCS and said it is now being successfully employed in three overseas power plants. But a closer look shows the lessons learnt from those plants mean its use has already peaked.