They dont know how to DO anything, so they just UN-DO. There is no more to it than that. You will NEVER see this bunch of cretins CREATE anything. End of story. #auspol #ausvotes #DDElectionNOW The Government, having enjoyed the best and most productive year of conservative rule since either a: Thatcher, b: Churchill or c: the creation of coal, might still be forgiven for looking a little fondly toward the looming calm of the Christmas break. The recent pace has been fierce, a year of achievement capped by several days of frantic policy inversion. Presumably having stopped the boats and cut various taxes, the Government has made the decision that its best work lies in undoing rather than creating. Having spent its first few months undoing the deeds of Rudd/Gillard Labor, it has now turned with some energy to undoing itself. The GP co-payment, unloved in both the court of public opinion and the Senate, has been trimmed and retooled through an intelligent and sophisticated process, before being handed over to unsuspecting GPs for collection. The PMs signature policy of paid parental leave is in the process of being unwritten. And, perhaps most tellingly, $200 million will go to the UN Green Climate Fund, which smacks of throwing good money after bad warmist bureaucracy, but may placate a Foreign Minister apparently in a state of perpetual fury over her professional and close working relationship with the Prime Ministers chief of staff. The talk, especially among the commentators of the normally sympathetic conservative press, is now of challenged unity and precarious strength is in itself telling. As Paul Kelly observed yesterday: The lethal combination that can spell political death has emerged. It is entrenched poor opinion polls, tensions among senior ministers, criticism of the Prime Ministers office and a media mindset that the governments woes are the pervasive story - all of which have a self-fulfilling potential. And in that now familiar narrative of fading political fortune and blood-crazy journalistic enthusiasm, we have passed another marker, with the first flurries of unsourced but authoritative accounts of turmoil and division. As we saw with the decline and fall and rise and decline and fall of Kevin Rudd, internal conspirators and malcontents will always find an eager audience somewhere in the fourth estate. Through the convenient meta-logic of performance politics, the very fact of their aired grievance substantiates their claims. It seems an unstoppable cycle once begun, though one that might one day be countered by a public that suddenly voiced a taste for determined and coherent policy in the face of almost numberless national anxieties and challenges. As things stand we seem to have an electorate that votes more for what it doesnt want than it does for any sound prescription of serious policy and thought. Its a voter position that breeds an obsession with approval ratings as well as negativity and discontent. Its the enemy of policy ambition, the friend of ambition itself. Somewhere in the depths of judging the history prize the culture warriors had a notable victory, giving recognition to the quickly disputed revisionism of Perth polymath and Quadrant luminary Hal Colebatch. If the PM felt any discomfort as the winner made his rambling and conspiracy thick acceptance he didnt show it. But then came the lingering surprise of the night, when, apparently thanks to Prime Ministerial fiat, writer Richard Flanagan was awarded a share of the prize for fiction. Flanagan of course, is a political foe of the Government and man who famously aired his shame at being linked to team Australia. The PM showed the courage, insight and generosity to embrace his critic. It was a reminder that Tony Abbott is a man chronically underestimated, but a politician who has an instinct for political survival and compromise, and the capacity for unexpected reversal: in book awards as in GP co-payments and conciliatory gestures to his party deputy. All of which might even be enough to save him from the counter pressure of the ideological warriors, a force in his party that once elevated him, but might yet, if he stays too close to the hardline, provide the division that drags him down.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 03:47:42 +0000
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