From Gotti today:
If Malcolm Turnbull remains as Prime Minister after the 2016 poll, he must start to use his knowledge of what works in the corporate world, the world he left to go into politics. Corporations that succeed make sure that underperforming executives are given other jobs or discarded and star performers are moved into vital areas.
Accordingly, the Coalition’s star performer for many years and particularly in the 2016 election campaign, Julie Bishop, should be appointed Treasurer. She will have the strength to avoid being snowed by Treasury and the marketing ability to sell her policies to the nation and to the Senate.
Scott Morrison should have been a great Treasurer as he performed brilliantly in his previous portfolio but, according to Victorian Liberal party President Michael Kroger, dithering over tax reform was a key reason for the poor Coalition election result.
That dithering included flirting with increasing the GST, curbing negative gearing and giving the states income tax powers. None of these ideas came to anything and were dubbed “thought bubbles” by the Opposition.
Sure, Morrison should get the arse. He learned his trade at the university of Professional Lying, the Property Council of Australia. His Budget was a lie. His misrepresentation of negative gearing reform was a lie. His policy flip-flopping exposed untruths at every turn.
But let’s not forget the PM’s involvement:
- perhaps spooked by his own failure, the PM engineered a remarkably self-serving and flimsy double dissolution trigger in its Australian Building and Construction Commission legislation (which is good idea) despite having declared consistently that he would run his term thereby immediately trashing his own polls given the severe lack of national interest in the policy;
- he unilaterally shifted the Budget timetable to accommodate this desperate ploy but failed to tell his Treasurer and thus filled the media with a week of speculation about a failing relationship which, let’s face it, would be no surprise given the number of occasions ScoMo has been hung out to dry;
- the day before COAG, the PM unilaterally declared that the states ought to be raising their own taxes and that they would get no money unless they did. Despite the idea having merits, the complete lack of a process to implement such an huge Federation reform agenda meant it was treated with the contempt it deserved by state premiers;
- next the PM threw a high speed ponzi-rail Hail Mary proposal to link eastern cities funded largely via dealing the developers into the resulting land value increases. Just a day later, his own head of the task force, John Alexander, openly confessed that the plan was all about spreading the Sydney and Melbourne property price bubbles into regional areas, the very opposite of improved competitiveness and productivity that is need to address the post-mining boom challenge;
- Labor then blind-sided the flailing prime minister again when it announced a Royal Commission into banking malfeasance, something that is years overdue, to look into both financial planning and interest rate setting scandals, so the desperate PM (or Treasurer or both) immediately responded by seeking to boost funding to the (ir)responsible regulatory body, ASIC, which pointed out that it was Coalition budget cuts that had gutted its functions in the first place.
Morrison has been playing catch-up to a PM policy Catherine Wheel who has himself been turned back by his own uber-conservative rump at every turn.
Morrison deserves the sack but don’t kid yourself, Gotti, it won’t fix anything. The problem is structural in the warring factions of the Coalition which make correct policy process impossible.
