Chaos is the New Black

All the shocks and surprises of this new senate have left the press gallery with a serious case of the vapors. Its as if the current drama was unknowable, unseen and unreadable pre-September. Well, atleast this is what folks like Mark Kenny want you to think, or want to believe themselves.

Polling and the realities of the senate were well understood before the last election. And in the subsequent months our knowledge of the senate has only increased. Why all the shock then?

You see, people like Kenny have this funny idea about how our federal democracy works. They seem to think that if a party 'wins' government, it wins everything, the whole house. Clean sweep. However, the reality is the party that 'wins' only ever wins a majority proportion of seats in the lower house. So we have an opposition, which represents a substantial minority of the population. It only ever wins a proportion of places in the senate, in this case a minority.  So it then has to 'negotiate' the passage of its manifesto through at least one of these houses. To complicate this Australia is also a federal system, with states and territories, who usually have their own ideas about how the joint should be run. And to complicate things even further there is all this governmental, and not so governmental, bureaucracy that is to varying degrees answerable to the federal government. Examples of this are the ABC board, Treasury, Tim Wilson the new human rights commissioner, and ARENA. To put it bluntly, nothing happens overnight. This ship is too big to turn on a dime, and some things will simply NEVER be possible.(I'm lookin' at you state based 'taxes')

Is that an iceberg ahead?

This isn't a bad thing: as an off-shoot of the Westminster parliament, with some very important bits borrowed from the U.S of A, our democracy has hundreds of years of political drama, subterfuge and bastardry to draw on. We have all these 'checks and balances' because our history has taught us they are necessary. One only has to look to the utter shamozzle of Queensland to see what happens when you tinker too much with the system; A unicameral parliament shoe-horned into a bicameral polity. We will never know for sure how the current Queensland drama would have played out if it still had its upper house, but I doubt it would be quite so lop-sided or prone to flights of fancy like this Chief Justice malarkey.

We have a 'hands off' attitude to some appointments of government connected organisations to avoid politicising such organisations. It may only be a fig leaf, but it is an important fig leaf and should not be down-played: much of our system of government involves "conventions", and they only work because all players agree that they should work. In a sense its all an illusion, like money or what constitutes good table manners. We have all agreed that broadly this how things should work, and because we all agree on it that is why it works this way.

So many rules

History has taught us that revolutions make for great art.......

Now I'm not suggesting the LNP is trying to subvert Australia's democracy, although you would get such an impression from reading some of the drivel pumped out by journos like Kenny. Not as a call to arms, mind you. Not because he believes the running of government is being subverted by anti-democratic and unconstitutional monsters, which is clearly a bad thing. No, because he apparently wants our government and democracy to be subverted! As do many others in the press gallery.
They all just want to see 'things' get done, and to hell with how this effects Australia's democratic system.

"We had an election!" they all cry.

"Mandate!" they all shout.

.......however they don't end for the best, you know?

While ignoring the fact that we do not have a winner takes all system....which is exactly how a successful democracy should work. Culturally, this was learned the hard way. Endless civil wars, assassinations, putschs, revolutions, have all taught the collective West (and many of the Rest) that "winner takes all" systems are bad: they are not stable, are not good for economic development, are not good for the people, and do not last. That our democracy has lasted so long is a testament to the success our system has had in convincing both winners and losers that their aims are best served by maintaining all the built in checks and balances, and to not try and make a blind grab for unparalleled power.

How the press gallery imagines the 2013 election.

What of the supposed "chaos" of the last few weeks? This apparent "chaos" is primarily due to the media's credulity and the inability of this government to successfully prosecute the politics of the changes it wishes to make. It is the government that has dropped the ball, allowing everyone else to hog the middle ground. Making bold statements about your legislative agenda is just so much hot air. If you don't have the numbers, then too bad. This government is in complete legislative turmoil because of its own bizarre failings. This is the story the media should be reporting on, but instead we get drivel about how Palmer is wrecking the joint.

looks pretty civil to me

That Palmer should be seeking now to claim his pound of flesh is besides the the point. Everyone, including the media and the government, should have seen this coming and reacted accordingly. This is not the 90's; there is no such thing as a 'mandate' to do anything in the senate. There are now many more cross-benches and minor parties, all elected  by their own electors, who have their own agenda's. Why should they help a floundering and unpopular government? Just so they can be dragged down as well? This is a mess of the LNP's doing, let them sort it out themselves. The government will have to compromise and it will have to do a dirty deal(s).

Welcome to politics.

lol

At the end of all of this, I would just like to quote a few words from the man who has done the most to show that the emperor really does have no clothes on; Clive Palmer:

Asked whether the government had tried to trick PUP, Palmer said: “It could have been, but you never want to underestimate the incompetence of the Abbott government.”

Says it all, really.

Palmerama

Clive Palmer and Al Gore. Just think about it for a second.......yup it actually happened.

I've woken up in stranger situations

Lets have a quick run-down on how we got here.

You see, Clive Palmer rode into Canberra last year on a beast named 'anti politics'. Canberra had never seen such a sight before......well at least not for years. What did it all mean?

Clive, for his part, couldn't quite believe what he was seeing either: everything was fake. All the structures the insiders were so very proud of were just cardboard cut-outs, like movie sets. Once Clive got close enough it was blindingly obvious. Why couldn't they see?

Yet, when he asked all the thronging insiders "what do you see?" they all shouted "RESPONSIBLE ADULT MAJOR PARTIES WITH VERY IMPORTANT POLICIES"

"Ah!" Clive thought, "They're all under a spell!"

So he decided to see what would happen if he just gave it all a little.....push.

And everything began to collapse!

And all the insiders shouted as one "STOP YOU BUFFOON! YOUR STUNTS ARE WRECKING ALL THE WONDERFUL THINGS THE RESPONSIBLE ADULT MAJOR PARTIES HAVE CREATED!"

But Clive said "Its not real, you idiots! The people should see! Why are you hiding this from them?"

And he didn't stop, he kept pushing and pushing.

And all the insiders were VERY angry with Clive! Naughty Clive!

Such is the fairytale of current politics in Australia.

Stating the obvious is not allowed in politics in this country

So now we are up to date, what does it all mean? Is it a stunt or a joke?

I think the press gallery keeps making the mistake of casting Palmer as a buffoon or a joke. It stops our political journalists from actually being able to see what is going on. I understand it's difficult: what to do with a very powerful political figure that doesn't fit neatly into your left-right schematic of Australian politics?

Palmer has created a many headed hydra of a problem for the government. Firstly, Carbon pricing as an idea will now be debated up until, and past, the next election. This is not the clean ending Abbott and co wanted. In fact, when you take into consideration the building international pressure to act, it's the worst possible scenario you can imagine. It means that it is almost certain we will have some sort of ETS as a policy post 2016, or whenever Abbott is turfed.

Secondly, a large and important part of the mitigation mechanisms is going to be left in place. This is another headache for the government, and especially Abbott because it serves to remind his supporters and party backers just how impotent he really is. The risk for Abbott is that after he gets a double dissolution trigger, he will feel forced to pull it for fear of looking weak. Nobody should be under any illusion on how that will turn out. It will mean an election where everyone else but the LNP has a viable climate change policy, in an international situation of building pressure, and a business community that can now clearly see the writing on the wall. It will mean certain defeat because of the government's toxic unpopularity; and it will mean a bunch of nutters will fill the senate, making it far worse and unworkable than it is now.

But you don't really get a sense of this new reality from what is being written or said about Palmer and Gore. As an example, watch last week's 'Insiders'. Yes, I know it's really boring. What you will notice though is just how angry Farr and Coorey are about the whole thing. Like, really pissed. They do not like Clive at all, he upsets them.

Why?

Clive makes the media look very silly. Here they are just trying to report what this government they shoe-horned into power is doing, and Clive makes them into idiots and liars before the week is out. When a minister vomits out a press release and journos like Coorey just reprint the talking points verbatim, it must be pretty upsetting to then have it all made to look so mistaken by Clive. The same can be said about all the cross-benches. It's as if the press gallery says to itself:

"How dare these buffoons and bumpkins come to our parliament! Who do they think they are? They are certainly not the sort of people we want making decisions!"

The subtext, of course, is that they are the sort of people that should be making the decisions.