Comment

The old boys’ network will zealously shield their progeny from adverse consequences – not simply out of a filial loyalty, but to protect the institutions from which they drew their own power. While researching The Red Zone Report we heard from several former college students who had either self-harmed or become suicidal in response to the hazing they experienced at college. But we also discovered that the most vociferous defenders of hazing and initiation rituals were alumni groups themselves.

Of course preferred prime minister is not an indicator of an election outcome – it is not unusual for a premier or prime minster to be preferred right up until the time voters dump them and their party. But this metric was for a long while a morale booster for Turnbull and his team. Now even that shield has gone and the PM is left languishing with Shorten in deep negative territory of disapproval.

The success of the Australian economy is not down to economic management. Despite what the constant political posturing would have us believe, it is because a benefit has been derived from the Indigenous people and cultural lands without any payment. Only a small portion of the cultural lands have been returned to traditional owners and almost all of the land “returned” is vulnerable to native title extinguishment for mining if they are not already subject to the 99-year lease provisions.

The fate of the Turnbull Coalition government depends on McCormack holding his party together. It is no easier task than Turnbull has with his party – although the Liberals seem to have come to the realisation that Tony Abbott is no longer the answer to their problems, nor is anyone else on offer. The government’s one-seat majority makes every member – Liberal and National – capable of bringing down the whole show.

Anti-Australian sentiment grows among Manusians, as they believe Australia exploits their tiny island with a colonial mentality that never retreated. People in the forest villages beside Hillside and West Haus are kind towards refugees, but they have held demonstrations outside the camps to voice their opposition to this profound disruption to their lives.

If the Nationals were paralysed by fear that if they sacked Joyce he would set about destroying the government from the back bench, they will now see if his own resignation spares them that. As one National MP told me before Joyce’s announcement: ‘If you think Tony Abbott is bad, Joyce would be much worse.’

Like the Skynet computers of the Terminator films – which mythologised the rise of this class and the cultural sidelining of the Western working class – the knowledge class became self-aware some time around the 2000s. This new class coming to prominence has always conceived of itself as transformative and transgressive, as a group fighting the power. But what do you fight when you are the power?

It will take quite some work to restore credibility to the Nationals as the “family values” party. If the party room sticks by Joyce, they are endorsing his hypocrisy – nowhere more on show than in his support of the “No” case on marriage equality. He spoke at an Australian Christian Lobby rally about the need to give children the stability of a committed, heterosexual relationship.

As a marginalised poet beginning to have some small measure of success, I’m not supposed to talk about this. I am supposed to take what is given, speak as wound, as tragic past come good, and if I should succeed, treat it as the accidental byproduct of a system that took pity on me, never something I had a hand in making.

The difference difference in life expectancy for Indigenous people is 10 years. The target was to close that gap by 2031. The report admits that this critical target is not going to be met; in fact, in the past 10 years, they cannot even claim a one-year improvement in the difference.