OK, so they’ve done it: pushed the red button. ScoMo has no time and no space to move in.
His platform has just sunk into the gentling lapping waves off Point Piper.
His new deputy has been promoted for conceiving of and then botching the biggest policy fuck-up of our time, the National Energy Guarantee (NEG). So big, in fact, it has just cost the PM his job.
His party is riven to the core and in its uttermost depths lurks a leviathan malice so deep and scary that Kurt Russell himself would piss his pants in Tony Abbott.
Last but not least, opposite him in the chamber is the great Machiavellian force of the Australian Parliament in our time. Quiet assassin of four prime ministers, the blood-soaked and grinning Bill Shorten, poised at the very threshold of his destiny.
You get the picture. Sco Mo is in it deep. Deepest, darkest, stinkiest deep. Impossibly deep. So, what is he to do?
Well, at times like these I like to pare stuff back to its essence. ScoMo has been put into the Big Chair by 45 career-trashed desperadoes who will do anything, and when I say anything I put the emphasis on anything, to not lose the fat salary that they are way too dumb to attract in the private sector, the fat pension on the end of it, and the prestige that has fatally corrupted any notion of a future normal life.
His job description is simple. Win the fucking election you prick.
So, as markets bounce a little from the glittering prize that is ScoMo, it must be remembered that he is not there for them any longer. Any dubious commitment ScoMo ever had to markets in theory or practice is now entirely irrelevant. He is now a Labor slaughterhouse pure and simple.
That means everything is on the table. Most especially immigration cuts, perhaps softened for the snowflake states with some gesture politics. But cuts nonetheless. They must be visible. Loud even. Or those renegade One Nation bogans are going to keep sucking on that vodka charged watermelon and tell him to piss right off. They must be large enough that he can condemn Labor for trashing wages and crush-loading the cities.
To offset the little blow to housing for the faithful a little Property Council Exocet should do the trick in allowing First Home Buyers to get access to super for mortgage deposits. It also lands square in the lap of the banks to win them back.
The managed migration and housing stimulus will boost ScoMo’s natural demeanor of corpulent clown to something more approximating the outlines of a barrel-chested “strongman”, at least for the few months leading up to the early election while the fog of war will obscure his full form.
Consider this: the only thing now holding the Australian dollar aloft is the blabbering minstrel, Poop Morrison.
