Comment

Turnbull’s message: “It’s business as usual.” That’s meant to assure the nation that the government will keep governing smoothly. The fixed smile can’t mask the reality. Business as usual means more of the same dithering and internecine strife that makes a big issue of a simple decision such as who will mind the shop while the prime minister is away.

The government’s decision, although discourteous and bitter, has triggered what’s been missing for 10 years, an authentic people’s movement, a coalition of Australians from all walks of life who found the government’s rejection of the ‘Indigenous Voice to Parliament’, and the silencing of public debate, as the most powerful and persuasive reason for the reform.

While #MeToo may be an organic social media campaign, it carries with it the same expectation to perform trauma as personal narrative, and the same expectation that not doing so is somehow a betrayal. This is a culture of confession as substitute for systemic analysis – what the writer and activist Yasmin Nair calls the liberal feminist “imperative to reveal oneself as the wounded subject”.

While Xenophon would dearly love to run 30 candidates in SA, finding the right ones takes more than wishful thinking. The infrastructure has to be constructed from scratch and the money has to be found to fund it. Other minor parties, such as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, are testament to the car crash it can become.

There is an irony in all of this. Turnbull moved away from the CET because Abbott and many in the party room thought it was too close to Labor’s policy. Ditching it was to emphasise product differentiation and, according to government insiders, their best chance of getting back in the game. What happens if Labor accepts the worked-up version of the national energy guarantee?

Milo’s year-ending whistlestop is called the Troll Academy Tour, and the baffled reaction of the Sunrise hosts recalled a more innocent time, when alt-right figures weren’t the warm-up act for the Cash Cow. You can chart the change in mood just through the nastier tabloids.

Flying in the face of science is not something Turnbull or Frydenberg say they want to do. Neither, incidentally, did Abbott when he was prime minister. But now if we are to believe Abbott’s London speech, that was all a charade. He never really stopped believing the science was “crap”. We know his characterisation of the Labor government’s carbon price as a “tax” was also a confection.

This is the sad song of contemporary feminism: burnout for the women who speak up, endless “cookies” for the men who offer little more than lip service. It’s bittersweet to admit that women and other marginalised people don’t seem to be able to shatter this status quo: if we are truly to conquer the Stone Age behaviours of men such as Harvey Weinstein, we need their fellow straight, white men to intervene, to demand a different standard.

There is a strong conviction that outside of Brisbane and the increasingly urban conglomeration that is the Sunshine and Gold coasts, guns swing votes. They are “a freedom issue”, as Katter proclaimed after tough restrictions were imposed on the Adler lever-action shotgun. Hanson, too, strongly opposed the temporary ban and the subsequent tougher limitations on that weapon.

As market capitalism has become monopoly capitalism – markets without competition – the potential capacity to see beyond it becomes ever greater. In a society benighted by privatisation, people can begin to see again what they had forgotten: that water, power, transport and other entities are social in nature, and should be controlled thus.