Comment

The election campaign is in full stride and citizens at long last are getting their money’s worth. Scenes of Pauline in tears over Steve Dickson’s derailment of her plans to turn Australia into a bogan paradise were particularly endearing. This was a terrific performance of a grievance peddler playing the victim. Unfortunately, it’s the distressing but inevitable fallout of her party’s preselection processes, which are carefully designed to get drongos running for parliament.

How much easier would life be for Scott Morrison if he was a Liberal prime minister seeking his third term in government? He could point to the delivery of an agenda outlined back in 2013 and his leadership of a united, cohesive team of senior ministers who have mostly delivered and become household names. Sadly, for Morrison, that is not his reality, and it is showing. He dare not mention the war.

Where once ‘the environment’ was just one political issue among many, years of inaction have brought on a state of paramount urgency. As David Attenborough put it recently, ‘If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.’ Change is coming. Every election is now a climate change election.

Gadfly always had a strong feeling The Beetrooter and Gussy Taylor would rescue a dismal election campaign from complete boredom. Citizens are now focusing on the brilliance of making $79 million from taxpayers by selling rainwater and sending the loot to the Cayman Islands where it is safely tucked up out of reach from the grasping maw of the taxman.

Just when many of his troops were beginning to believe Scott Morrison’s Easter prayers might be answered, their hopes were shattered by Barnaby Joyce. The New England MP has form in derailing Liberal prime ministers when they appear to be making headway – just ask Malcolm Turnbull. The $79 million water buyback imbroglio had been simmering for more than a week, ever since The Project on the Ten Network picked up the work of business journalist Michael West in a major report.

The nation will soon head to the polls with public integrity a higher-profile issue than perhaps ever before in Australian history. The two major parties, however, seem to be the last people in the country to realise this. Trust took a dive not only because citizens suddenly felt unsure that their vote mattered. It was also the flip side – concern about the failure of due democratic process and the role of undue influences over the decision-making in Australia’s highest office. This is the message the major parties seem to have missed.

Scott Morrison is a man without promise or promises. It is not clear why he wants to lead the country. He has yet to lay out a plan for it and gives no sign that he will. When he talks about Bill Shorten, he warns Labor will change everything. His own undertaking is that he will not. His proposition is the status quo.

So good to see the Shortens among the shorthorns, baby goats and bottled preserves at Sydney’s Royal Easter Show. But it was on the Central Coast where the leader of the opposition made a lasting impression while participating with a whole pile of little kids in a “slip, slop, slap” awareness moment. Gadfly has been unable to get out of his mind Shorten’s eccentric use of his knuckles in applying sunscreen to his face. I suspect there’s a lot we don’t know about this man but the sunscreen incident was a valuable insight.

Peter Dutton’s war chest to save his seat is believed to be in the vicinity of $1 million. He refuses to say how much he is spending but his face is splashed across every billboard in Dickson. A Labor insider says, ‘We are delighted to see his visage everywhere.’

Of all his holdings, Murdoch has always loved his papers the most, even if some are money pits. His empire began with the inheritance of his father’s papers, Adelaide’s The News and its Sunday edition, The Mail. Now he controls two-thirds of daily newspaper circulation in Australia. He publishes the only national broadsheet, The Australian. As in the US, and in Britain too, he has used his papers in Australia as political bludgeons.