Comment

Maybe Bill Shorten’s luck is running out. Complicating Labor’s campaign in Bennelong is Senator Sam Dastyari’s highly controversial dealings with Chinese billionaire Huang Xiangmo. Turnbull slammed Dastyari as an ‘agent of foreign influence and you can’t have an agent of foreign influence sitting in the senate’.

It has often been said there will be wars over water. In its own way, the scene I was watching was a skirmish in what has the potential to become a war and rewrite the politics of water, land use and energy in this country. It was also an insight into how threatened the farm community felt and demonstrated how it would be difficult to fight these farmers’ guerilla tactics. It was a warning they were serious players.

The Courier-Mail says eight Queensland federal Nationals will divorce themselves from the LNP campaign at the next election. The eight are counting on Barnaby Joyce to win this weekend’s byelection in New England and to relaunch them in the bush under the old green and gold colours. It is eerily like the response from the Nationals 19 years ago.

The rhetoric used by those in power is reductionist. It pits First Nations people against the rest of the community. This politics of division is convenient, because it allows the government to control messaging in a racially charged environment of its own creation while at the same time using saviour language.

The Turnbull government’s overdraft with the Australian electorate is well and truly spent. And the prime minister’s desperate attempts to keep his creditors at bay have only served to worsen his precarious position. His decision to cancel next week’s sitting of the house of representatives is akin to shutting the doors to stop a run on the bank. It cannot work and it won’t.

This is a victory of the people over the church, of secular views over dogma, of human rights over religious constraint, and of empirical evidence over fear and doubt. The bill allows, very simply, for people who are terminally ill and suffering intolerably to ask a doctor for assistance to die.

The dangerous, retrograde bigotry pushed by many on the “No” side was rejected overwhelmingly in the survey. Fellow travellers on the right saw voters disprove their claims that they were speaking for most of them. Their mistake is to equate their electorates with the members of their local branches. Religious extremists have begun infiltrating Liberal branches around the country. Their potency comes at preselection time, when they determine the fate of an MP.

With only occasional exceptions – someone like Clive Palmer – the working hypothesis of the gallery is that every political actor is rationally self-interested and transparent to themselves in their motives and desires. They could get away with this approach in the Hawke–Keating period, and, at a stretch, up to the end of the Howard period, when personality remained constrained by political forms, to a degree. But now we have a politics whose dominant figures have slipped their ideological moorings, and the interpretive gap shows keenly.

It’s likely Malcolm Turnbull doesn’t want to cross Immigration Minister Peter Dutton. The creation of the new Home Affairs ministry, against the objections of erstwhile allies in cabinet such as Julie Bishop and George Brandis, is as good an indication as any of Dutton’s clout and Turnbull’s craven need to appease him.

Like the story of the Daintree, the Adani campaign is about people standing up for what they believe in – taking courageous action to protect our future and the natural environment upon which it depends. As Adani promises to start work on the mine, we should remember that this is an issue that affects us all and step forward to offer our support.