News That's Fit To Punt - 17/Aug/2015

When You Are Crap, The World Craps On You

167 bad polls in a row, would tell you something, most likely that you're not loved and you're not going to win.

Inside the Prime Minister's inner circle, they tell themselves that they can win the next election because Bill Shorten is so hopeless. 

They've told themselves that 166 times in a row; that's the number of consecutive polls since the government was ahead in any of them.That's counting all the surveys conducted by all six national pollsters, according to the research consultant John Stirton. 

With today's Fairfax Ipsos poll, they'll have to tell themselves once again, whistling past the graveyard for the 167th time. 

You have to go back 16 months, to a Newspoll in April 2014, to find any survey that put the government ahead. 

"I think the government is essentially stuck" in its long losing rut, says the Ipsos director, Fairfax pollster Jess Elgood. 

The closest Abbott came to breaking into winning territory was with its second budget, in May this year. 

The Coalition levelled with Labor on 50:50, on the election-deciding two-party preferred measure. 

"Its second budget was well received and its polling bumped up," says Elgood.

But three months on, we see that the budget was not an elevator to a higher level of support but a momentary appreciation. 

The electorate doesn't disagree with the Liberals' assessment of Shorten. The Labor leader's approval rating consistently has a minus sign in front of it. It's just that the people think Tony Abbott is even more hopeless. 

The really interesting thing there might be the run of one sentence paragraphs. Gotta love these subeditors out in New Zealand. :)

More seriously... it should be obvious by now that Abbott didn't really win in 2013 on any merit whatsoever except for the single fact that he wasn't from the ALP. It's getting to the point where Abbott's doing serious harm to the country. He might be doing things pleasing to the nut job right wing of the Coalition, but the more they insist on their crappy agenda, the more it locks the entire government into the electorally hated zone. And let's make no mistake, even the long-time Liberal voters in blue-ribbon seats hate Tony Abbott. They only vote Liberal because it's religion (and there's really no cure for that variety of stupid).

Of course, the obvious man with electoral appeal is exactly the man the right wing of the Coalition cannot abide, Malcolm Turnbull; which essentially duplicates - in mirror image - the problem of the Gillard Prime Ministership wherein the factional heads loved Julia Gillard, but she had minimal appeal outside of her base supporters. This allowed Kevin Rudd to stalk her leadership all the way - but the faction leaders hated Rudd too much to have the good sense to go back to him. And so, the right wing powerbrokers of the Liberal Party who continue to back Abbott might end up losing their seats. Worse still, it's threatening to take down swathes of rookie Liberal and National MPs who came to Canberra on Tony Abbott's coattails. These backbench will get restless about that sort of projection. It's the same calculations that brought about the Gillard downfall. It's hard to defy the gravity of 167 losing polls.

The worst thing then, might be to pretend that polls go up and polls go down. In the case of Tony Abbott, they've never gone up enough call 'up'.

More On Dyson Heydon, Partisan Warrior

Not that I was ever close to the possibility of becoming a Rhodes Scholar back in my day at Uni, the notion of becoming a Rhodes Scholar does carry a certain gravitas with it. Well, it did, until I got up closed personal with some of the people who became Rhodes Scholars and quickly came to the conclusion that it wasn't on the basis of the kind of merit or character that normal, ordinary people would call merit or character. Certainly my day, which was the second half of the 1980s, it was abundantly clear that it was more a case of smarm than smarts, charm than marks, connections and patronage than merit or character. I won't name names - it would be boring to do so - but I will say I lost faith in the title long ago.

That Tony Abbott was a Rhodes Scholar gets bandied about as if he were an ace guy on campus. I don't know. He was a decade before my time so it's hard to say for sure but I've long suspected that by the time Tony was handed his, this fine institution had been rendered weak-chinned-and-neutered. Today we find out that none other than Dyson Heydon was on the panel that handed Tony Abbott his Rhodes Scholarship.

Mr Heydon was part of the seven-member Rhodes Trust selection committee in NSW that in 1980 handed the prestigious Rhodes scholarship to the future prime minister, then a 23 year-old student politician at Sydney University.

Tony Abbott, some time before his fateful boxing match that damaged his brain

According to documents seen by Fairfax Media at the NSW state archives on Monday, the selection committee was chaired by former NSW Governor, Sir Roden Cutler and "Professor JD Heydon" was a member.

The emergence of the Rhodes scholarship connection sets the personal relationship between Mr Abbott and his hand-picked judge to lead the trade union royal commission back decades.

Which all goes to show, it was smarm, charm, connections and patronage.  The men might deny - as they must, and as is their wont - but as any reasonable person could surmise, Tony Abbott was nothing special:

In his 2012 essay Political Animal, journalist David Marr, recounts how Mr Abbott "impressed a panel of worthies chaired by the governor of NSW, Sir Roden Cutler". 

"For Anglophiles and rugby players, the Rho­des was died-and-gone-to-heaven time. Winners must be scholars fond of sport who display "moral force of character and instincts to lead". The award to Abbott came as a surprise, particularly to those who had seen him up close on the SRC. One jibe at the time was, 'second-grade footballer, third-rate academic and fourth-class politician.'," Marr wrote.

Some men know how to cheapen the most impregnable heights of Empire. That's our Tony - everything he touches turns out cheapened; even the Rhodes Scholarship, even the Prime Minister's office. In some ways it is remarkable that a man could be of such low character and not get noticed on the way to the highest of offices. But that's how patronage works - picking out the people who would continue your cultural prejudices. And really, that's the kind of miserable government we've got, thanks largely to Tony Abbott.

As for Dyson Heydon, it seems he was getting his back scratched nicely by getting this appointment to look into corruption in the Unions. A real a snout-in-the-trough appointment by Tony to repay an old debt. Merit and character be damned. 

Mac Bank Boss Calls Out Government, Government Wimps Out

It seems to happen every day these days that the Liberal Party's own supporting lobbies step forward and slam the government for its bad governance and absence of policy worth spit. This time it's Macquarie Bank, which must feel like friendly fire with a howitzer in the back. 

Kevin McCann, the chairman of Macquarie Group, says the state of policy in Canberra is so dispiriting he feels he has to say something, despite his wariness about entering the political debate. 

In rare public criticism of the government of the day, Mr McCann has called on the Abbott government to stop fighting so many policy battles at once and to try to focus on just two or three priority areas.

"I've always been reluctant as chairman of a large company to start lecturing politicians and the community about what they should do, but I think I'm reluctantly changing that," Mr McCann said on Monday.

"With no disrespect to [Treasurer] Joe Hockey or [Assistant Treasurer] Josh Frydenberg, policy seems to have fallen off the table in Canberra."

Which is, neither here nor there, on its own. This bit however is pretty telling:

Mr McCann said on Monday that the Abbott government was failing to take the public with them on crucial policy reform and they desperately need to construct a narrative the public will find believable. 

And he singled out the Commission of Audit report as an example of the way in which the government had bungled its political messaging over the last 12 months. 

"I think it was a mistake to have the Commission of Audit say the country was busted, because the community knew that we weren't busted," Mr McCann said. 

"Surely we've got budget issues, but at the moment the community [feels] 'we're doing okay, why do we have to go through all this pain?' We've got to stop lecturing these people, we've got to have conversations and we've got to build up support," he said.
Mr McCann was speaking at the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry's business leaders' summit, held at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. 

He was sharing a panel with Mr Frydenberg whom defended the government's reform efforts, saying it is unfair to say policy has fallen off the table.
"The question [is], how do we get [reforms] through Parliament?" Mr Frydenberg said to the audience. 

"Let's call a spade a spade. The Productivity Commission ... was tasked by us to produce a blueprint for reform in industrial relations. [But] before they had even released their interim report the unions had come out against it. 

"[You should] say to our political opponents, don't run scare campaigns on issues as important as IR before the report has even hit the desk."

Good God Josh Frydenberg! So that awful Productivity Commission report which was a wishlist of crazy rightwing wet dream fantasies was the blueprint, and now that the Unions got up in arms and opposed it, they don't feel like they can get it through? It's not as if it's - God forbid! - a hung Parliament. They have the majority in the Lower House and the Senate has always been the place where negotiations took place. Just because you don't have the skills, patience, brains or stomach to negotiate in good faith, doesn't mean Australia's somehow ungovernable. It means you are insufficient to the task. It means you're not competent, worthy or appropriate for the job. It means you should quit.