Politics

With Abbott’s call to arms for conservatives “to take our party back”, the prime minister has no real option but to retaliate. And nothing is more basic than defending his leadership as completely Liberal orthodox against accusations that he is a heretic pushing the agenda of the Labor Party.

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.

Again we are seeing Abbott the pugilist, rejecting bipartisanship as a false mantra. Labor’s Mark Butler, in a thoughtful book released this week, unsurprisingly called Climate Wars, spells out the enormous price the country is paying for Abbott’s no-holds-barred approach. Foremost is the collapse in power investment thanks to the lack of a political consensus.

The process of selection is utterly foggy. No public advertisements, no need to be interviewed and no due-diligence panels. One recently appointed member just wrote to Brandis asking whether any jobs were available because he was out of work at the moment. Bingo, he secured an appointment worth up to $275,000 a year.

Bolt invited renegade Liberal senator Cory Bernardi on his show to begin what is now a Pyne pile-on. Bernardi, who betrayed the Liberal Party to form his own Australian Conservatives, claimed “Christopher Pyne is the most untrustworthy person he has ever met in politics”. He said he was cooking something up to get same-sex marriage off the agenda, “but the price of that will be it will destroy the Liberal Party.”

Turnbull has unveiled a needs-based schools-funding package winning Labor’s champion reformer David Gonski to its cause. And he began to look and sound like the Turnbull of yore with a clean energy target scheme that takes climate change seriously and sets out to reduce emissions. For good measure he has begun to bang the national security drum more. And yet the dark clouds have not lifted.

While Birmingham and Turnbull adopted the original funding formula’s idea of an SRS – simply what a school needs to do its job properly – they appear to be using it in a way that risks abandoning the principle of funding schools according to student need. In other words, Gonski 2.0 may turn out to be a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing funding formula.

To the consternation of much of Australia’s legal fraternity, Dutton has set about the deliberate undermining of confidence in our judicial system. He framed changes to visa and citizenship requirements in terms of new members of society embracing Australian values and positively contributing to Australian society.

Is Inland Rail a real goer or is it just doing the political rounds as once again the Nationals are threatened by One Nation? Will anything actually be done before the next federal election? Going by Australian Rail Track Corporation documents prepared for the government in 2015, there is still much to talk about, including the all-important route determinations – after 21 years of deliberation.

Politicians playing the blame game are nothing new, especially in the current febrile climate. It is made all the harder for Turnbull because he is under fire from within his own ranks for not being more outspoken on ‘Islamic’ terrorism. As a result, it is a term he and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop are now employing more.