Chaos fills the Do-nothing Malcolm black hole

Chaos is filling the Do-nothing Malcolm black hole. Kevin Rudd kicks it off:

“So when Turnbull is smashed at the next election, and he will be, let us understand that holding the reins of government as a progressive political party in Australia is a precious thing, to be nurtured carefully, not to be thrown away lightly through petty personal ambition, and then for government be deployed to the absolute full in the prosecution of a reformist agenda to secure the nation’s future,” he said.

But he reserved his most savage words for Mr Turnbull, whom he publicly fell out with over the United Nations Secretary General nomination, when he accused the Liberal leader of reneging on a deal to formally nominate him for the position.

“Turnbull is neither fish nor fowl,” he told Labor party supporters.

“Neither Conservative nor Liberal … the final fulfilment of personal political ambition utterly detached from any real policy agenda,” he said.

“Turnbull is just Turnbull – standing for nothing apart from Malcolm himself, a profound disappointment to his party, which has now become a little more than a bad joke – just being there,” he said.

“Malcolm, for the good of your party and the country, just go,” Mr Rudd said.

John Howard arrived in the other corner:

John Howard has given unqualified support to Malcolm Turnbull and called for an end to the “madness” engulfing the Coalition, following the bizarre call by NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro for the Prime Minister to resign ­“before Christmas and as a Christmas gift” to the people.

Mr Howard told The Weekend Australian yesterday: “I continue to support Malcolm Turnbull very strongly. The best option for the Liberal Party is to help make Turnbull’s leadership work and succeed. In my view, he can still be successful.

“Another leadership change, in anything other than the very short term, would do very significant damage to the Liberal Party and government.”

Mr Howard’s call comes after an extraordinary week in which renegade Nationals, by joining with the Greens and Labor, forced Mr Turnbull into an abject retreat and imposing his own royal commission into the financial sector. Given this high tide of Liberal-Nationals tensions, the Barilaro comments were destructive and provoked condemnation from Barnaby Joyce, Nationals Senate leader Nigel Scullion and Mr Howard.

Mr Barilaro, the Monaro MP who succeeded Troy Grant as Deputy Premier last year, was also targeted by state colleagues, with a NSW minister describing him as a “maniac” and indicating the ­inflammatory comments would “kill us in Bennelong”.

But Barilaro and Rudd are right. Turnbull is a resoundingly empty vessel as man and leader and he should go given that emptiness cannot address any of the problems confronting nation, party nor the chaos engulfing itself.

Those problems have not changed since the GFC. They have so far claimed four PMs in seven years, all of whom failed to address the root issue for politics, the fall in Australian living standards:

• Rudd tried and failed to raise taxes;
• Gillard watched the Budget collapse;
• Rudd was directionless;
• Abbott tried to fix the Budget in all the wrong ways, and
• Turnbull has relied purely on mass immigration to boost headline growth while per capita falls away.

All have made the same mistakes over and again, addressing a deteriorating economic structure overly reliant on banks and miners with cyclical fixes that only make it worse.

Turnbull’s only policy address, mass immigration, is killing his Coalition partners, the Nats, as the anti-immigration Right splinters into socially conservative and anti-immigration movements. Barilaro all but said it:

“Turnbull is the problem, the Prime Minister is the problem,” he said.

“He should step down, allow for a clean out of what the leadership looks like federally.

“And whoever governs the country needs to make sure that they put the country and its people first.”

Under Turnbull, the Nats new strategy to survive is attacking Turnbull. Absurd, yes. But unavoidable. The banks are the first target:

Presumably, Barnaby Joyce will win the byelection in New England on Saturday and be back as Nationals leader by the end of the week.

Whether it will make any difference to the current state of affairs is debatable. Even before he was dismissed by the High Court, Joyce struggled to maintain discipline, mainly because he was hardly in a position to command it.

Joyce built his reputation as a renegade, as Nationals frontbencher Keith Pitt noted last week when defending the right of backbench colleagues to push for a commission of inquiry into the banks.

“We’re led by Barnaby Joyce who crossed the floor more than 20 times,” Pitt said.

But it won’t stop there because it won’t be enough to bring in the splintering Right of the polity. And meanwhile, the Nats strategy has of course destroyed the PM, from Ross Gittins:

In his most recent attempt to head off pressure for an inquiry, a proposed arrangement to compensate victims of bank misbehaviour, the banks would have been paying.

When the political smarties look back on this saga, my guess is they’ll conclude Turnbull was mad to lose so much political credit in his abortive attempt to protect the banks from the public’s disapproval of their greed-driven misbehaviour.

He should have got, much earlier than he did, the message that the era of governments pandering to big business was over, killed off by voters’ disaffection with the political mainstream and willingness to flirt with the populist fringe.

And Dennis Shanahan:

This is the end of Camelot. No matter whether Malcolm Turnbull survives to this Christmas or the next, no matter what the result in the Bennelong by-election and no matter when the next election is held, the Prime Minister’s authority is gone. As Alfred Lord Tennyson had it, a mortally wounded King ­Arthur bemoaned himself: “Authority forgets a dying king.”

Malcolm “King Arthur” Turnbull rose to power on the basis of popularity and with the promise of ­leadership and better management. He was a bright new hope to a disenchanted electorate — “From spur to plume a star of tournament” — offering strong economic leadership.

Instead of acting immediately in the last quarter of 2015 and setting a new direction, embarking on serious reforms — including the ­deposed Tony Abbott in the ministry, seeking to heal splits within the Liberal Party and Coalition, and preparing for an election in early 2016 — Turnbull luxuriated in leadership and fatally delayed. That was the time to pick up the gauntlet and charge into the lists.

Joyce was returned in New England as expected but in Bennelong two groups are coming for Turnbull:

For Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives party, the Sydney by-election is its first electoral test. The South Australian senator defected from the Liberals to set up his own party in February.

He told The Weekend Australian his party offered a “safe” way for conservative voters to “voice their discontent with the government”. He was quick to stick the boot into the Prime Minister at the launch of his party’s Bennelong office in Ryde.

Also fighting for the conservative vote is Fred Nile’s Christian Democratic Party, which in 2016 pulled in 6.4 per cent of the primary vote.

This time, the party is fielding pastor William Cao, who said he had a calling from God to run as a candidate and believes he can win 20 per cent of the vote. He believes his background — he was born in the Chinese city of Xi’an, the home of the terracotta warriors — will help him in an electorate in which 21 per cent of people have Chinese ancestry. “First, I’m the only Asian (candidate). Second, I’m the only one living in Bennelong,” he said. “All the other candidates … are from other areas.”

Turnbull is dead man walking. But not yet to be replaced, according to Peter Hartcher:

So far in Turnbull’s prime ministership he’s been very ready to dump policies, positions, principles and personnel to hold his position. It’s been the only consistent thread running through his term – survival at any cost. He seems an improbable candidate to become the first prime minister in half a century to walk away without a fight.

If Turnbull were leading the party over a cliff at the next election and refused to resign, would Dutton strike? That’s the judgment he would have to make; people close to him suspect that he would act rather than acquiesce in a government death spiral. He was spotted this week jogging around Parliament House. In Australian Kremlinology this is taken as a sign of leadership ambition.

In either scenario, whether Turnbull were to stand down, or if Dutton decided to turn against a hopeless leader, would Bishop stand by? Would the deputy Liberal leader who’s served four leaders over the past 10 years line up to serve yet a fifth leader?

Let’s be plain. Bishop and Dutton loathe each other. They work professionally together in cabinet but they share a deep mutual animosity. They are both confident, capable people with thick skins and high resilience.

They each regard themselves as standard bearers for the Liberal Party. They are at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, within the Liberal firmament.

The prospect of a Dutton takeover is probably the one scenario that would galvanise Bishop into contesting the leadership. Again, people close to Bishop suspect that she would act rather than acquiesce.

The weekend IPSOS poll gave Dutton no chance:

Malcolm Turnbull has seized on Barnaby Joyce’s thumping byelection win to declare he can lead the government to victory, as a new poll shows the Coalition still lagging Labor but voters are hostile to another leadership change.

While a buoyant Mr Turnbull hosted Coalition MPs at The Lodge on Sunday night ahead of what promises to be a bruising and volatile final sitting week for the year, the latest Fairfax-Ipsos poll showed the government trailing Labor 53 per cent to 47 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis.

The government has spent the past few weeks reeling from one crisis to another, raising speculation about the leadership. But 71 per cent of those polled oppose the government changing leaders between elections and this jumps to 80 per cent among Coalition voters.

Julie Bishop has moved past Mr Turnbull as the preferred Liberal leader for the first time but the Prime Minister remains the favourite among the party faithful

Ms Bishop is on 32 per cent as preferred Liberal leader, Mr Turnbull is on 29 per cent. In a distant third is Tony Abbott on 14 per cent followed by Peter Dutton on 5 per cent and Scott Morrison on 4 per cent. Equal third is “don’t know” at 14 per cent.

And today’s Newspoll rebounded:

Malcolm Turnbull has gained a vital polling boost to his leadership as the Coalition regains ground against Labor ahead of a bruising parliamentary debate on same-sex marriage this week that is set to spark a divisive push by conservatives to widen religious protections.

After a week that included internal attacks on his leadership, Mr Turnbull has widened the gap against Bill Shorten as preferred prime minister to lead by 39 per cent to 33 per cent as the government gained on Labor but still trailed by 53 per cent to 47 per cent in two-party terms.

Mr Turnbull’s poll bounce as preferred prime minister halted a perilous slide in support as parliament resumes today with a fight looming over same-sex marriage and citizenship questions facing dozens of MPs.

Unbelievably for the worst government of our lifetimes, the election is still winnable in polling terms. The point that matters is that One Nation must be destroyed to save the Nats and unite the party and only one policy shift will do it, a cut to immigration:

• wedges Labors’ negative gearing reforms and abdication of fair pay for fair work;
• wedges the anti-environment Greens;
• wedges every inner-city wowser stuck in traffic, and
• destroys One Nation.