Via David Crowe:
Malcolm Turnbull is fighting to protect his government from the sudden loss of two cabinet ministers and a dire threat to his control of parliament, as Labor moves to exploit the expulsion of Barnaby Joyce to bring down the Prime Minister.
Mr Turnbull moved to shore up his numbers on the crossbench and delayed an overseas trip to respond to a devastating High Court decision that forces Mr Joyce to fight a December 2 by-election that will test the government’s support among voters.
The court ruling has thrown the Prime Minister’s plan for a cabinet reshuffle into doubt, amid tensions between the Liberals and the Nationals over the replacement for Nationals deputy leader Fiona Nash, who was also disqualified.
The Nationals are battling to keep their numbers in the cabinet and the wider ministry as Liberals blame their Coalition partners for the citizenship scandal and insist that Ms Nash must be replaced in the Senate with country Liberal candidate Hollie Hughes.
The dispute ruined plans last night to offer a clear statement on who would serve as acting prime minister while Mr Turnbull was overseas, with the Nationals demanding the job go to their interim parliamentary leader, Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion.
Liberals are furious at the Nationals’ demands and believe the role should be taken by Foreign Minister Julie Bishop because of her elected position as Liberal deputy leader and her seniority in cabinet.
The High Court has delivered a damaging political blow to the Turnbull government — its survival as a majority government is at risk, its long-run survival may be compromised, Barnaby Joyce is forced to a by-election, Malcolm Turnbull is humiliated and the government faces immediate policy problems in the parliament.
The moral, propaganda and numerical victory for the Labor Party is immense. Barnaby Joyce, having put the government at risk, must now save its majority by winning the by-election for which he is favourite — but the High Court’s black-letter judgment raises the fear of more undisclosed MPs now ineligible due to dual citizenship, an event that could threaten the government down the track.
The government will not fall in the immediate period before the December 2 by-election. Its numbers have fallen from 76 to 75 seats out of 149 MPs for the next five weeks with Joyce being ruled out. It can survive in its own right and independent MP Cathy McGowan is pledged to support on confidence.
Expect a long list of candidates for the New England by-election. But Joyce seemed more like his old self yesterday, saying he expected this result and that he still had “fire in the tank”. Voters are most unlikely to punish Joyce, an authentic Australian and a local, for the High Court’s disqualification. The announcement yesterday by his principal enemy, independent Tony Windsor, that he will not run empowers Joyce as favourite.
Any December 2 by-election win by Joyce will restore the status quo and Turnbull’s majority position. It is easy to forget this amid yesterday’s dramas. However, if Joyce loses — and the combined progressive forces and the unions will launch a fearful assault upon him — then politics would be transformed, with the Nationals permanently losing their leader and the Coalition reduced to 75 out of 150 seats, no longer a majority government.
The task facing Turnbull is to sustain his authority over the next month following a disastrous week dominated by pressure on Employment Minister Michaelia Cash over the police raid on the AWU. Given its superior tactical nous, Labor will torment the government in parliament, seeking among other motions to secure the royal commission into banking — where any Coalition defections would be lethal.
Dismiss all the desperate spin and sugar-coating. Nothing can obscure the fact that these are dark days for the government and a humiliation for the Prime Minister personally.
While Malcolm Turnbull cannot be blamed for the Nationals’ slap-dash vetting procedures going back decades, his ill-judged bullishness in response to the citizenship questions once they arose was all his own work.
“The leader of the National Party, the deputy prime minister is qualified to sit in this house and the High Court will so hold”, he decreed during a raucous question time on August 14.
The High Court held no such thing. And it held no such thing, unanimously.
Turnbull’s brash disregard for the separation of powers by enunciating so decisively on a matter before the country’s most superior court was surprising.
But it was compounded by the contempt he conveyed to the wider nation by keeping a clearly compromised deputy prime minister in place, when even Joyce himself figured he was toast.
Malcolm Turnbull’s fixed smile in his parliamentary courtyard on Friday fooled no one.
This is now pure crisis management for the government, which, in its worst week since taking office, has lost two ministers courtesy of the high court’s deliberations, and its working majority on the floor of the parliament.
…Tony Windsor won’t be running in New England but that doesn’t mean the New England byelection will be a cake-walk for Joyce.
Windsor can still stir the pot, in the full glare of the national media, which will be swarming around New England like wasps around a nest. There will also be a One Nation candidate, giving country folks a place to park a protest vote in the event they are so inclined, and possibly a candidate from the shooters party.
Joyce was also overly frank on Friday. Perhaps it was his relief talking, but he admitted that despite occupying his cabinet post tenaciously in the face of the serious questions over his eligibility, in his “gut” he knew he was gone.
If anyone wants to challenge the ministerial decision-making during his period in no-man’s land, that’s a handy admission to have in your back pocket.
Labor was onto this stumble in two seconds flat, and will use it (not that it needs any encouragement) to raise merry hell once parliament resumes – if it resumes before the New England byelection on 2 December.
Courtesy of the high court’s deliberations, the current numbers on the floor of the lower house are 74 government, 74 Labor and crossbench. Those are mischief numbers, heart-stopping numbers.
Bravo High Court.
More to the point, this is just another example of the poor policy and political judgement of the Do-nothing Government. Barnaby should have resigned and the government taken control of the by-election process. Instead Do-nothing Malcolm looks like a shifty goose all over again trying to dodge the legal system.
The Do-nothing Government is dead man walking. It has no record of effective governing, a long record of ineptitude and failure, a fatal ideological and personal division, deep Coalition enmity and a leader that makes no sense to the polity. It is a phony in a period when all the polity wants is legitimacy. Newspoll says as much today, passing 22 consecutive duds:
Malcolm Turnbull has taken a thumping from voters amid the shock loss of two cabinet ministers and a political storm over union raids, with the government trailing Labor by 46 to 54 per cent as it fights a by-election to hold its majority.
Voters have marked down the Prime Minister when asked if they are satisfied with his performance, while also cutting the Coalition’s primary vote from 36 to 35 per cent, one of its lowest results for the year.
The latest Newspoll, conducted exclusively for The Australian, shows the Coalition has lagged Labor by 46 to 54 per cent in two-party terms for three consecutive surveys after weeks of attacking the opposition on energy prices and union power.
Next up is phony One Nationals:
Barnaby Joyce has a big job he wants to get on with. He’s writing a book to set out his agenda: “A lot of it will be politically incorrect – I want to shock, I want to startle people into action,” he tells me. To do what, exactly? “To give greater economic and personal advancement to the people in the weatherboard and iron in the regional towns.”
It’s about their economic wellbeing and their social standing. “I’m writing a comparative analysis” that looks at “the social opprobrium attached to poor white people in Australia’s towns and regions.” Joyce doesn’t use the word, but it’s about recovering respect. Respect for the people who live outside the big cities and feel overlooked.
His approach is bifurcated. He is deputy prime minister and takes advantage of incumbency to promise more government-directed benefits for his electorate – infrastructure, decentralisation of government agencies, trade deals. Yet he also talks like an angry outsider appealing to the alienation of “poor white people”. He is the very embodiment of the establishment, promising largesse, yet he musters anti-elite anger as well, appealing to both the satisfied and the seething, the fattened and the forgotten. All at once, all things to all people. This is designed to shut One Nation out. They can seethe but can’t satisfy – they are a party of protest.
Perhaps, but ON is also fair dinkum, underlined by its line-up of nutters, like it or hate it, so Barnaby is just pork dressed up as ON. He can’t compete.
And things are going to get harder not easier as 2018 develops. House prices are stalling and falling. Wages growth has gone AWOL. The local stock market has dislocated from a huge global rally. Households stress is mounting as the energy shock builds. China is slowing and the Budget will resume downgrades on crushed national income next year. The whole box and dice is now the butt of global media jokes.
Australian exceptionalism is itself unraveling, that phony self aggrandisement that has prevented us from dealing with underlying policy problems. A deeply illegitimate government full of fakes and phonies is the perfect exemplar of said economy. It will be blamed for it, even more so thanks to a strange determination to reflect it.
If they’re not careful, the next election will destroy the Coalition.
