Politics

The loss of faith in politicians and the political system has been the most conspicuous aspect of the hollowing out of democracy in this country. The time to fix it is now – with possibly less than a year before the next federal election – by attempting to restore trust with a program of genuine political reform.

The recent Tasmanian election reinforces the postwar trend of a sustained drift away from the major parties. Voters are increasingly preferring to trust independents and minor parties, mostly because of their authenticity and closer association with their communities and their views on key issues.

The Albanese government goes into the long break before parliament resumes for the May budget with its reputation tarnished after an attempted ambush that misfired. No doubt they had in mind payback for the opposition, which made hay accusing the government of being unprepared and incompetent in its response to the High Court’s striking down of indefinite detention late last year.

On Monday, 10,000 metres above continental Australia, Anthony Albanese made dead sure his government would not be distracted by another divisive culture war. There was no way he was going to allow the Coalition to suck the oxygen out of his government’s economic agenda in the run-up to the federal election.

A measure of the success of Albanese’s Top End foray, according to a key strategist, was that no peep was heard – neither criticism nor praise – from Dutton or his nearly invisible shadow minister, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.

Anthony Albanese had a good week, thank you very much. His opponent, Peter Dutton, not so much. In fact, you could say the Dunkley byelection blew the opposition leader’s credibility out of the water and left him stranded for a reset.

At a meeting with the then editor of The Australian newspaper, I was told I needed to understand they had an agenda ... if I advocated off their agenda, I could expect to be chastised and criticised for doing so, and that was a certainty.

Labor is convinced Dutton shares with Morrison the same vulnerabilities in appealing to voters. Its research suggests the opposition leader is particularly unpopular in Victoria … Yet campaign insiders say that in the byelection this may not be a deal-breaker for the Liberals.

The behaviour of some of the commissioners and revelations of conflicts between them suggest ASIC has had serious troubles stemming from its leadership ... The response from ASIC on all these matters suggests an approach of ‘nothing to see here’.

If the Liberals fail to win Dunkley, the rational case for Peter Dutton continuing as leader essentially evaporates. Dutton’s obvious successor was glimpsed in the surface fleet announcement this week: opposition defence spokesperson Andrew Hastie.