Comment

This amount of ridicule this early in a prime ministership is unprecedented and probably irreversible. Even Billy McMahon fared better in his ill-fated 21-month-long prime ministership before falling to Labor’s Gough Whitlam. Has any prime minister missed their own honeymoon? Has there ever been a prime minister not to win a single Newspoll? Is there another prime minister whose first political outing saw the loss of a seat held by their party since Federation?

It could be argued, depressingly, that there is an inverse relationship between the growth of universities and the level of community engagement in politics. In fact, the level of political discourse was far more sophisticated in 1860s America than it is today in 2018 in either country. Lincoln delivered his famous Gettysburg Address in November 1863 at the dedication of a Civil War cemetery. I have long speculated what Lincoln might have said in 2018. Lincoln’s speech was only 272 words long. My draft here is exactly the same length.

The near 20 per cent shift against the Liberals in Wentworth is the harbinger of impending doom for the Coalition government. The third Liberal prime minister in five years admits he has a significant challenge ahead but says he’s “getting on with the job”. Evidence shows he’s not up to it – and frankly nobody is. Because what is required is a complete rebuild of the edifice that is the federal Liberal Party. That sort of remake can only be undertaken in Opposition, with time to sort out differences and test policy directions that are acceptable to what John Howard called “mainstream Australia”.

During the past six years, real wage growth has all but ground to a halt in Australia. Just as in the first 50 years of the Industrial Revolution, productivity is growing at a solid rate. But employees’ share of the national pie has been shrinking. Part of the explanation lies in the fact that just 13 per cent of Australian workers are in unions, down from half the workforce in the early 1980s. Trade union membership is lowest among private-sector workers (9 per cent), 20-somethings (9 per cent), recent migrants (5 per cent) and people who have been working for less than a year (5 per cent).

Voters don’t like Shorten, or trust him, because, among other negatives, ‘he knifed two prime ministers’. But a new book by respected press gallery journalist David Speers, On Mutiny, casts serious doubt on Morrison’s ‘plausible deniability’ that he had nothing to do with the decapitation of Turnbull. Speers writes that Morrison’s closest supporters, Alex Hawke and Stuart Robert, had been on the phones ‘for more than twenty-four hours, albeit without a declared candidate’. We are expected to believe they were doing this without Morrison’s approval.

I keep asking myself what I have done by putting up a tentative hand as a possible independent candidate for the seat currently held by former prime minister Tony Abbott. And, more to the point, why exactly have I done it? Do I really have anything worthwhile to offer the people of Warringah? Am I the right person for this job?

The previous time a byelection was held to replace a prime minister dumped by his own party, the government lost the seat. It was 26 years ago, when Bob Hawke’s seat of Wills fell to the independent Phil Cleary. The Morrison government is giving every impression it fears the same is about to happen in Saturday’s Wentworth byelection. This is in itself remarkable, although the Wills precedent is pertinent. Labor had never lost the seat before its 1992 byelection defeat. Wentworth has been a non-Labor stronghold for 70 years and has close to an 18 per cent margin – twice what Labor had in Wills. But the stakes are infinitely higher this time.

Perhaps they are afraid that one day it will finally dawn on us that to be “white” does not denote an inherited ethnicity but an acquired power. That if we were to untangle being white from being English or Australian or Canadian or European, then we will see whiteness for what it is: not something you intrinsically are, but something to which you are granted access. That whiteness exists only because systemic institutionalised racism exists, and to dismantle racism by definition entails dismantling whiteness. White people are bound not by a shared culture or skin colour but by power.

Morrison is signalling he wants stronger laws exempting religious institutions from Australia’s discrimination laws. Government sources say Morrison believes the Ruddock recommendations are too weak. For example, its recommendations on the legality of refusing gay students say a discrimination policy should apply only to new enrolments and when “the school has regard to the best interests of the child as the primary consideration in its conduct”.

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.