Politics

You could forget in the middle of all this low comedy that Cash has pushed the back-and-forth of Australian politics about as far as it can go without becoming something else. There’s the police raid on the Australian Workers’ Union offices, the tip-off to journos from her office, the almost-maybe of what she knew and what she told the Senate, the whiteboard she hid behind. And now the subpoena directing her to front the AWU’s court case challenging the legality of the raid. All of this is such farce that it is easy to miss how serious it is.

The exasperation in the government is palpable. ‘The only thing anyone is talking about this week is the Barnaby Joyce soap opera,’ was the reaction of one fed-up backbencher. But it is not only the distraction that is the issue; it is the spectre of the former deputy prime minister out for payback against his own side of politics.

Simple things, which were completely normal, caused them shock and disturbance. The men had suffered mental torment for so long they imagined they were still on Manus in the detention centre, and so couldn’t put themselves into the real world. They had become institutionalised by the processes that took place in offshore detention. As a consequence, they were constantly concerned there would be no food left, so they all lined up at the same time for their meals. They could not remember simple behavioural practices.

Consistency is not Hanson's strong suit, but on Tuesday she sounded Trumpesque in the way she was contradicting herself. She capped off her Hobart news conference by saying “business needs immediate relief, not seven or eight years down the track”. It seems that, when you are a vehicle for protest, or anger or resentment, you don’t need the credibility of other mere mortals.

The fact is Labor senator Katy Gallagher referred herself to the High Court as a test case for “reasonable steps”. Turnbull’s attack on Shorten for gaming the system is very rich given he argued that Barnaby Joyce was eligible until the court declared otherwise. Joyce remained deputy prime minister and sat in the parliament for 74 days even though he was under a cloud. There is no real substance to the demands that the members now facing the voters again should apologise for the inconvenience and expense the byelections will cost. In all their cases, their good faith is established by their genuine efforts to comply with section 44, according to serious legal advice, which was clearly not the case with the politicians who were bundled out of the parliament last year.

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.

If Shorten is having nightmares over the thought of Morrison demolishing his politically toxic corporate tax cuts, the Business Council of Australia has signalled it is putting together a war chest estimated at $26 million to campaign for them. Here, the Liberals should be careful what they wish for.

The government attacks the unions, particularly the CFMMEU, for seeing fines as the cost of doing unlawful business. It has now been exposed as being far more tolerant of its corporate mates doing the same thing. No wonder Labor can throw back at the Liberals the charge of running a protection racket for the banks. The stench coming from the royal commission is souring the government’s attempts to have the Senate pass the final $35 billion stage of its corporate tax cuts. The big banks stand to be major beneficiaries, to the tune of $13.2 billion in tax savings over the next decade.

Credlin is no run-of-the-mill commentator. One veteran Liberal says there’s no doubt she’s one of the key campaign strategists for the Abbott camp. ‘She’s a player,’ he says. Just how big a player is hard to determine. But so deep are the suspicions within the party that another backbencher says he wouldn’t be surprised if she had a hand in a sensational story, in the News Corp tabloids, saying Turnbull has personal investments worth a million dollars in a fund that profits when Australian companies lose.

The same strategic miscalculation was at play when other ministers decided to answer journalists’ questions with the same candour as Dutton. It was simply extraordinary that Treasurer Scott Morrison or Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg didn’t see that the last thing the government needed was them adding to the perception that new leadership would be needed thanks to Turnbull’s failure. The most agile was Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. She said her priority was to focus on the ‘jobs and responsibilities I have now’. The only conclusion can be that the others didn’t do this because they are off and running and want to make sure their colleagues in the party room know what their options are.