“It’s like fascinating yourself with the drivel scrawled on the back of a toilet door,” a frustrated Barnaby Joyce explains.
“It’s best you just ignore it, do your business and move on.”
He’s talking about the ongoing distraction over the conservative cause celebre – changing section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act in the name of free speech and to halt its enemy, political correctness.
The death of cartoonist Bill Leak a fortnight ago – who had been investigated under the Act for a cartoon – gave those championing the changes a shot of adrenalin.
After a Cabinet meeting on Monday night and a joint party room meeting on Tuesday, there was a feeling in Coalition ranks a change was needed.
Tasmanian Senator Eric Abetz, who occupied top spot on the Tasmanian Liberal Senate ticket at the last election and threatened he would cross the floor on the issue in 2015, applauded the decision as “common-sense reforms”.
But Barnaby Joyce, the Deputy Prime Minister known for calling a spade a spade, remains of the view most voters don’t give two hoots about an obscure legal argument about free speech.
They worry more about country kids being caught by the horrible scourge of ice addiction than an intervention on Facebook posts by a woman called Gillian Triggs (President of the Human Rights Commission).
God knows what cartoon Bill Leak would draw up about his own misappropriated death.
Honestly, Abetz ought to look at his brother’s fate in WA: deal done with One Nation and turfed out of office. One would have thought that with his family’s Nazi background he’d at least see discretion as the better part of valour.
I am very tempted to afoul of 18c myself at this point but I’ll let it go out of respect for post-WWII civil discourse.
Meanwhile, Coalition groupie Nikki Sava wants to throw the Budget to the wolves:
The hardheads inside the government know what needs to be done to secure a third term. They knew it was possible even before the uptick in support in Newspoll and despite the many days left between now and whenever the next election is held, their sense of a victory in the making grows stronger.
They are not stupid. They are not complacent, nor can they be because they know exactly how much work is ahead. They know, above all, that they have to win the arguments on the economy. The budget on May 9 is another chance to gain ascendancy.
Here’s an idea. Instead of a mishmash of measures to tackle housing affordability, why not put half the money set aside for tax cuts for large companies — $40 billion — destined for defeat in the Senate, towards personal income tax cuts? The other half can go to deficit reduction.
Taxpayers get a bit of help with the bills or for a deposit, the budget bottom line improves and the economy still gets a bit of a lift.
The hardheads also know they have to win the arguments over energy, which is more than a fight about who has the biggest battery storage. They are confident Malcolm Turnbull is full bottle on the concept as well as the detail; he just has to watch he doesn’t get so bogged down in explaining the differences between megahertz and kilowatts that he forgets to use energy as part of a narrative on jobs, investment and the cost of living while making the contrast with Labor’s failures to plan ahead because of its ideological commitment to unrealistic renewable energy targets.
One of the drawbacks of having an intellect as broad, as deep and as agile as the Prime Minister’s is the tendency to dart from subject to subject, driven by a compulsion to share every complex detail, when what is also required in politics is relentless commitment to selling a clear message.
Nikki, that’s not a deep intellect, it’s a neurotic. Re-running the Howard era mistakes of turning a cyclical bounce into a structural deficit would be the mother of all bad policies. Notwithstanding the fact that the economics is perfectly circular given there is only an improvement to the Budget if you assume that the corporate tax cut is already in place. Personal tax cuts will grow the deficit from here. As well, the government’s energy policies are a farce until its addresses the gas price.
How about this, Nikki, you encourage your party to govern in the national rather than its own interests, then it might have a chance of surviving the coming wipe out as an opposition party.
