For the 5th time in 5 years we have a new Prime Minister! It was like I was in delirium, only to wake up as the action began to unfold on the TV. Before I go into that one, I just want to describe to you my past few days.
The Backstory
On Friday I contracted a Flu. Call it "Flu Strain 2015". As you may recall I only recently got out of under the Norovirus thing, so my immune system was not ready for this event. By 10pm on Friday night I was running a fever, my nose was running like a waterfall, and all the joints in my body were aching. I think I blacked out for most of the next 48hours. If you asked me where I was I could only tell you that I was at the fevered gates of hell trying to solve mathematical puzzles about logistical problems that didn't exist, while writhing and groaning in pain trying to find a comfortable position to rest. When you're like this, the bed becomes too soft, the floor is too hard, the couch is too cool, the bed is too hot; and around and around you go, twisting and turning and labouring under a head splitting headache, just trying to find a modicum of comfort that does not exist.
You think about dying and 1919.
The back hurts because you've been lying on it too much and your shoulders hurt because you've been lying your side trying to avoid lying on your painful back. The head thing was great. I felt like I'd caught a falling piano with my skull. I managed to lose a substantial amount of muscle mass in mere days, and now I can hardly get up, let alone eat anything. I went through 14 bottles of water and still felt dehydrated, crunched through and swallowed 50 Vitamin C tabs in that time. Now I'm on a course of antibiotics to stop secondary bacterial infections moving into my lungs.
Pretty happy scene over here.
Did I mention the fact that I stopped drinking coffee during this time? Well, that happened not out of choice but because I couldn't stomach anything - but it also meant I added the caffeine-withdrawal headaches into the equation. On Monday, I finally ate a scoop of ice-cream, a cob of corn and a wafer cracker as I hunkered down to watch some 'Daredevil'. This is the virtue of binge-watching on Netflix. You don't have to think about what you're going tow watch next. There's always more good content, it just keeps coming. You could be semi-comatose like I was and still get through the day, let time flow in a way that doesn't leave you thinking about dying and 1919 straight through the agony.
Anyway, around 4pm, I got bored, and switched over to ABC24, just to catch the beginning of the drama, with Malcolm Turnbull fronting the microphones, announcing he was challenging Tony Abbott for the leadership. It was on! And that meant I lay there sprawled on the sofa watching the whole damn thing - which was mostly commentators conjecturing and editorialising and parsing statements made by politicians. It's funny how irrelevant all this looks when you've just spent 48hours in a fevered hell.
I don't buy the Turnbull contention that Bill Shorten would be a catastrophic choice for Prime Minister should he win against Tony Abbott, any more than I buy the contention that this is a good or solid government as argued by the likes of Hockey, Abetz and Kevin-Bloody-Andrews. The pundits who are brought on for right wing balance sounded even more detached from reality than some of the fevered nightmares I was having earlier.
Still, the "Told-You-So" moment is resonating big in me because I did predict Tony Abbott's Prime Ministership wouldn't make October.
"Not The ALP"
Tony Abbott made his statement and his pitch was essentially, "we're better than them. If you replace me, we're no better than them. Do you really want to be them?" The interesting thing about that rhetorical construction is that by the time he's asking it, it's too damn late - your party has already become the enemy you so despise. Which is not surprising because these kinds of hatreds embody projections and misjudgments coloured by one's own prejudices. I for one just can't get into the mindset of conservatives who think Tony Abbott was doing such a bang up job.
It's also symptomatic of Tony Abbott's gaffe-prone leadership in as much as he opens his mouth, simple un-nuanced sentences come out, the meaning is parsed and misinterpreted, and results in a backlash. Malcolm Turnbull of course has a wonderful faculty of language where he speaks in full conjugated sentences and can convey nuanced arguments with varying shades of grey distinctions. It's really no match - but it explains the hostility of the rusted-on conservatives towards Turnbull. They just don't understand him. Because they're idiots.
If you had to put some finer point on Tony Abbott's failure as a leader. it was that he was not a terribly deep thinker. And as a trivial thinker, his worst mistake was that he hardly knew himself, but presumed to know the world. It's extraordinary in a man so traveled and educated and in such high office, but the man simply could not figure out the logical inconsistency of his platforms. Which effectively made him look like a functional idiot. And of course - as Machiavelli noted - once contempt sets in against a leader it is corrosive to the point of destruction. I am hoping today is the last entry wherein I tag my entry with both 'Tony Abbott' and 'Stupidity'. It is best for all sides to just out that Tony Abbott Prime Ministership into the record books and move right along.
And so it came to pass that Malcolm Turnbull finally ousted Tony Abbott.
Let's Not Get Carried Away, Their Politics Still Suck
I've written in the past what I think of Malcolm Turnbull as the alternative. I'm not so high on him as some on the left are. I think he's going to do the expedient thing to stay in power for as long as possible, which means he won't be putting through legislation for gay marriage or shut down the Nauru and Manus Island concentration camps. He is, above and beyond Tony Abbott himself, a candidate for the big end of town.
The marginal improvement will be that he won't be so beholden to particular people on the lunar right like Tony Abbott was to Gina Rinehardt. Instead, you can count on him to be deeply in cahoots with the Telco oligopoly, the Banking oligopoly, the Supermarket oligopoly the Mining oligopoly, and whatever else links he might have with boards of the ASX200. In other words it would look less like crony capitalism without executions - but when they talk about reforms to increase productivity, they're still talking about whacking out penalty rates and weekend rates.
As Tanya Plibersek blurted out this morning, it's the same package, different salesman. People are reading way too much in to the apparent socially-progressive-ness of Malcolm Turnbull. If he looks socially progressive, it's only because he wants a Republic, believes in climate science and climate change, and supports Gay Marriage. He's still into regressive taxation and $100,000 uni degrees, and dressing these things as "opportunity".
The Meaning Of Five In Five
Why has our polity been beset with the kind of ructions that result in 5 Prime Ministers in 5 years? This is the topic that will be studied for years to come. Antony Green, ABC election analyst offered up the view that our two major parties are now too rigid. The fact that in other parliamentary democracies, voting with the party is not enforced so vigorously, it gives rise to vote with the conscience. The flip-side of that is if a faction wants something their way, they have to install a leader who sees things completely their way. And this explains the tremendous amount of rope Julia Gillard got from the unions as well as the carte blanche destruction Tony Abbott was asked to wreak upon the renewables sector in this country by the climate sceptics in his party.
Is our democracy somehow broken? Tony Abbott blamed the media in his final speech as Prime Minister, but it seems what has happened is that the population has learned to hit the polity hard through polls. They voted in Tony Abbott because they didn't like the ALP. Then they realised they liked Tony Abbott less, and so they kept sending messages to Canberra. Eventually the party power structure took notice and swapped out the Prime Minister. The frenetic polling is in a sense, the substitute for voting - but it got the job done. Seems to me the people got what they wanted so democracy must be working quite fine.
The other notable phenomenon is that Australia has become incredibly diverse. The views held by the electorate - and let's remember there's compulsory voting so everybody's thinking counts - has become equally diverse. In many instances, the combined political views are simply too diverse to be put under 2 major parties all the time. There is no comfortable middle. There is just the frenetic movement of the opinion needle and polls, poking their displeasure at the politicians for not being as diverse as the public it serves.
The years Tony Abbott was Leader of Opposition and then Prime Minister represent 6 years in which the lunar right of the Liberal Party got a hold of the agenda to push it as far as it could take it. Naturally the public objected and so the lunar right's 'man' has been pushed out of the driver's seat. Democracy is still functioning.
The Demographic Long Game
The instalment of Malcolm Turnbull by the Liberal Party also marks a decided move to fight history. It is the conservative way. If the future comes knocking, they do their best to lock the doors and turn out the lights, and make like nobody's home. It's actually a pitched attempt to dig in with the Baby Boomer generation and up, one last time. If the current group of Libs lose to the ALP and Greens in the coming election,they would have to go through a generational change, and then it will be Generation X on leadership in both sides of the house. For the Boomer demographic, this is possibly the last or next to last stretch in which the demographic weight associated with the Baby Boomers can call the shots.
The move to Turnbull shows the Boomers are not going out with a fight - and this has interesting implications. If Bill Shorten is ousted and the ALP look for an alternative leader, they might settle upon Anthony Albanese who was the runner up at the last contest for ALP Leader. He's a Boomer. So the picture becomes Turnbull versus Albanese, Boomer versus Boomer, locking in an entrenched position. If Malcolm Turnbull's should turn into a lengthy government, then we'll be holding off Gen-X for a long while yet, in which case the conservatives win big time.
It stands to reason. All the forces with the invested capital betting one way and one way alone on fossil fuels are not, will not, cannot just give in to the upcoming generation change. They have to delay it as long as they can to suck the most money out of the system to pay for their retirements. This is the core of the conservative cause, which used to be the grey power block in the votes. The fight is to entrench the interests of the elderly - which nobody disputes is important - but as economic growth has stalled globally, this has meant it comes at the expensive younger generations; something that 'the young' do not yet understand if some of them intend to vote for Malcolm Turnbull.
Yet the conservative cause in this country knows full well where the lines drawn because Joe Hockey's moving of the retirement age up to 70 starts with Generation-X, deftly keeping entitlements in place for the last of the Boomers. It also explains the $100,000 degrees, and a great deal of other unfair things in the 1st Hockey budget.
The trick is, when the following generation comes through, they might not look upon the entitlements as necessary as the current generation of politicians. I've long predicted that Generation X will be forced to not pay those debts because there will be other debts that have to be paid, and this is going to be a social fault line. Everybody knows this, so the game plan is lock in the entitlements now so it becomes impossible to lock-pick. And to that end, the conservatives needed somebody who can feasibly hold office a lot longer than Tony Abbott. Faced with being wiped out, and then seeing a rising Gen-X leadership of the ALP taking over, the conservatives must have figured they can't go down without firing their best weapon.
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