Comment

This was not just negative campaigning as it is usually understood – attacking your opponent rather than focusing on your own strengths. Instead, each side put its case in terms of what couldn’t be done if the other side got its way. On company tax cuts, a Liberal source told Tillett, ‘If you don’t have a strong economy, you can’t afford to fund hospitals.’ On the same topic, a Labor source said: ‘When you tell people you can’t give any more money to health care because it is going to the banks, that goes down badly.’ This campaign is literally twice as negative as usual.

Anti-association laws, similar to those proposed by Victoria, were adopted by the NSW government in 2012. During a review of these laws in 2016, the NSW ombudsman found that 7 per cent of “consorting warnings” were directed at children. Indigenous Australians were subject to 40 per cent of such warnings, more than half of them directed at Aboriginal women. Two thirds of the 83 children aged between 13 and 17 years old who received consorting warnings were Aboriginal. In 2011, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders comprised 2.9 per cent of the total NSW population.

Early in his prime ministership, approval numbers rocketing, he would have imagined himself breaking the mould, a new type of leader. But like most political leaders, over time Turnbull has, wisely if not admirably, accepted the narrowness of his immediate task. His job is not to outdo great leaders of yesteryear. His job is to beat Bill Shorten. If that involves making political hay out of immigration, Turnbull is prepared to do it.

This simple enthusiasm for socialism – by which people mean a mixed economy with rational feedback loops, in place of the liquid nitrogen-filled Mack truck careening towards the freeway fire that is capitalism – has panicked the right into a spiral towards authoritarianism. That’s why the movement that purports to stand for free minds and free markets fantasises about compulsory purchases of coal-fired power stations too valueless to sell, charges whistleblowers for espionage without a peep, and wants to use the state to crack down on universities offering the “wrong” lessons.

On Twitter he is “Real Mark Latham”, as if the rest of the time it was an act. Unmasked, he is a Rivers catalogue of cruel misogyny and transphobic venom, a man who wears wraparound sunglasses and believes brown is colourful. He mocks schoolchildren and working mothers, disbelieves psychiatry and demands that everyone speak English. Mark Latham is a gout on our politics. But the whole Falstaffian body is set with pox. It is a picture of sad urges and failing organs. Its ills trace back to men such as Mark, to the basement out of which he now broadcasts, but they do not end there.

I have just returned to Australia from some months spent in London, and it was something of a shock to return to all this. Howard fighting culture wars, Hanson pulling stunts, Latham yelling – oh, and there was Abbott, too, trying to tear down a leader by talking about climate change. What was this hellish time machine that had somehow managed to gather together the worst bits of all recent eras? Beyond the generalised horror, two things struck me. The first was not a surprise but was more depressing for the recent distance: this is Australian politics now. A constant parade of novelty and spectacle; anything for attention.

These are the stories of our lives and they are being written without any chance for us to control or influence them. We are pawns in a larger game. That is the shameful carelessness of racism – some people are viewed simply as a means to an end. For politicians, we are not people with lives, with children whose dignity and worth we seek to preserve, with loved ones who will be denied employment, with mothers who will be called “black dogs” while going to a shopping centre, with brothers who are afraid they will be mistaken for gang members when they are out with their friends. To these politicians we are not people. We are not even fellow citizens.

When the world’s first official MSIC opened in Bern, Switzerland, in 1986, Australia was a world leader in pragmatic public health interventions. Faced with the serious threat of an HIV epidemic beginning among people who inject drugs then spreading to the general population, policymakers took action and introduced programs such as the needle and syringe exchange. But in the decades since, as almost 100 MSICs have been opened around the world, Australia has dragged its feet.

Last Tuesday night, Tony Abbott was in his element. Surrounded by climate change sceptics and deniers he set about destroying Malcolm Turnbull’s signature energy policy. And he did so with panache, his opening line more a battle cry: ‘It takes character to do what’s right and it takes courage to disagree with your peers.’ It was a masterclass in undermining and made Anthony Albanese’s effort two weeks prior look like a glowing endorsement of his leader Bill Shorten.

On Wednesday, the government parties in the Senate voted with a Hanson motion calling for the building of new coal-fired power stations and the retrofitting of existing base-load power stations. It failed 34–32, but proved a revealing insight on where the whole energy debate could be heading. There is considerable optimism that the NEG will win majority party room support in the end. But there is a long way to go. The brawl over coal has alarmed the ACT’s minister for climate change and sustainability, Shane Rattenbury. The Greens minister has the capacity to sink the entire NEG as the federal government needs all the states and territories on the east coast to endorse its delivery.