Comment

I have lived my life in the shadow of a myth: the angry Arab, the enraged ethnic, the unruly barbarians. It was made mythic only by a white conservative media. At home I knew one reality close to this – worn Arab hands that held the cane, the belt, the brush, the wooden spoon, the broad shoe, the vacuum cord that split my skin – but this iteration of violence was not what the world feared. It was the public kind they knew and cared about, specific acts of violence by men of colour that could fire the torrid imagination.

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.

While crime rates are declining in Victoria, Dutton made claims about lack of deterrence of crime in Victoria. In a radio interview he said Victorians were ‘bemused’ when they looked at ‘the jokes of sentences being handed down’ due to ‘political correctness that’s taken hold’. In an extraordinary attack on the Victorian judiciary, he demanded that Daniel Andrews’ government pass stricter bail laws and stop appointing ‘civil libertarians’ as magistrates. This is racist bullshit from an old Queensland cop. It is also dangerous. I’d welcome him on the stand at a royal commission.

This trashing of the Liberal Party’s defining philosophy has some on the back bench shaking their heads. It is one thing for the Nationals, often dubbed agrarian socialists, to call for a renationalisation of energy supply. It’s quite another for the champions of market forces and free enterprise who are supposed to inhabit the Liberal Party room to do so.

Through all this, the notion that consent may be withdrawn retroactively looms large as the debate’s most dangerous idea. Beyond the fringes of radical feminism and the nightmares of “men’s rights” activism, however, the concept is less about women deciding, wilfully, to repaint past experiences as rape, and more about empowering people to appreciate the moments in their lives where consent may not have been freely given.

The fact is Abbott has given up on the Coalition winning the next election. Last weekend he told an invitation-only meeting in his Sydney’s northern beaches electorate that the government ‘is heading for a massive defeat’. The upside to this prospect, he told the 20 or so people present, was it that would ‘help the Coalition to rebuild’. But the former prime minister says there’s no appetite to change the leader ‘even though the political situation is so dire’.

In the great scheme of things the cricketers are small fry. They haven’t killed anyone, raped small boys or turned widows and orphans out onto the streets. Their chief crime was to lay bare the national delusion that our sunburnt country produces generation after generation of clean-limbed superheroes, morally spotless whether they are bayoneting Johnny Turk or hurling cricket balls at South Africans. So much for that. Appalling as it was, the cricket cheating scandal is merely a symptom of a wider national sickness. A culture of greed, selfishness, envy, cruelty and often criminal corruption is gnawing at the nation’s heart.

The atmosphere was electric when Labor’s victorious Batman candidate, Ged Kearney, entered the room flanked by Opposition Leader Bill Shorten. You would think they had just won the general election rather than retained a seat they had held for the past 50 years. But this was no ordinary byelection result.

There is a moral case for moving Malcolm Turnbull on. If principles of right and wrong mean anything, using one standard to unseat a rival and another to hold on to the job you stole from him while failing to meet that standard yourself is hypocrisy on a very grand scale. It is the marker of a weak, untrustworthy person.

Bill Shorten seized the political agenda in a dramatic way on Tuesday, overshadowing practically everything in domestic politics. He did it by homing in on a tax concession that is costing the budget billions but is a sacred cow for the Liberals. Donning his Sherwood Forest finest, the Opposition leader vowed to fight the government’s scare campaign ‘because I’m going to choose the battler over the top end of town’.