This was published 7 years ago
Turnbull 2016 report card: must try harder
A lot of last minute saves are looking like seeds of bigger problems waiting to happen for the Turnbull government in 2017.
By Andrew P Street
Parliament has risen for the year - a year in which it barely sat at all, what with the double dissolution and the horrendously extended election campaign - and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull defied all the critics by still being Prime Minister, and even getting a bunch of signature legislation through Parliament! Sort of! In a way!
And what better way is there to illustrate this Rorschach test of a result than by taking as our model the children's classic What Good Luck! What Bad Luck!?
"Dear St Santa, please bring me a shiny new attorney general…"Credit: Andrew Meares
What good luck! The government successfully passed the ABCC bill which was the entire reason for the double dissolution election, thereby giving Malcolm Turnbull some breathing space where he can be reasonably confident that he won't face a leadership challenge in February.
What bad luck! In order to pass this symbolic piece of legislation the government was forced to gut it of almost all of its punitive powers, insert a huge amount of extra regulation, impose local content requirements and local-hiring conditions which will necessarily push up prices, and guarantee that the unions will fight tooth and nail for wage rises to offset the conditions they're set to lose when new laws come into effect mid-2018. And that extra red tape should really give a kick to our slowing economy…
What good luck! There's so much talk about freedom of speech, particularly with regard to eliminating or changing section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act - a process, incidentally, that very quietly called for public submissions with no promotion, almost as though those who were arranging it we trying to ensure that only the people they told about it would make submissions!
Fortunately here's a link right here if you want to let the committee know what you reckon - including if you think that the right to racially abuse people is possibly not the most important free speech issue in the country. One might even say especially if you think that.
What bad luck! Those same people so gung ho about freedom of speech and how very very very very very very very important it is to be able to abuse people for being foreign did not at all like those naughty protesters expressing their speech freely on the subject of Australia's hideous offshore detention system.
Everyone (bar the Greens) agreed that it wasn't what the protesters said that was the issue but the gosh-darn impolite way the protesters said it. And thus our pollies made damn sure no-one was talking about anything the protest was actually about while complaining about how un-democratic it was for members of the public to presume to take a message to their elected government. And speaking of which…
What good luck! The government could point to its resettlement deal with the US for refugees languishing in the soon-to-be-closed camp on Manus Island and the humanitarian disaster that is Nauru as proof that… um, are we still saying that this is all about saving lives at sea, or have we moved on to some other dubious justification for imprisoning children?
What bad luck! As this very column pointed out earlier this week, that resettlement deal is never going to happen. Hope you've got a lot more protesting in you, protesters: 2017 looks like it's going to be busy.
What good luck! The backpacker tax passed, meaning that the government got another contentious piece of legislation through Parliament. Although this change was actually a desperate attempt to fix a problem created by the Coalition when Joe Hockey decided in the March 2015 budget that all holidaying workers would pay 32.5 per cent on all money earned, with no tax-free threshold, without thinking, "Hey, maybe it's worth modelling this idea, or at least mentioning it to the farmers that are going to be affected by it?"
And while this issue also has some less-than-great optics regarding enshrining the use of foreign workers to work in traditionally high-unemployment rural areas, that's nowhere near as big an issue as the Baird government offshoring it's IT stuff despite many people in Sydney being computer literate.
What bad luck! Aside from the hit to the budget bottom line it relied on the support of the Greens - the very people that were supporting all that undemocratic protesting! - and cost a bonus $100 million in grants to Landcare. Also it became yet another wedge in the increasingly wedge-filled relationship between One Nation (which supported the government proposal) and One Nation's WA Senator Rod Culleton (who held out for a lower rate along with independent Derryn Hinch, and thereby gave the Greens a negotiating edge).
What good luck! Education minister Simon Birmingham got to rail against those dumb education ministers in our majority-Labor states over Australia's pitiful showing in international education standards, now running behind countries like Kazakhstan and Slovenia. "I am embarrassed for Australia that we are not performing at the standard that we would expect our schools to perform," he seethed, signalling that he'll be getting very cranky with the states about the need to arrange a better needs-based education funding system.
What bad luck! All that talk just reminded everyone in the nation about a very popular needs-based funding system which already made a tonne of recommendations to address this very issue - that David Gonski fellow was involved, if memory serves - but was weirdly shelved by the government of which Birmingham is a member. Whoops!
What good luck! Despite a number of horrendous embarrassments, including the pointed resignation of the solicitor general, Attorney-General George Brandis has survived the year! Nice work!
What bad luck! Although he'll probably quietly resign over the break to spend more time with his books (including a slew of anti-Abbott books he purchased with his publicly funded book allowance, including one especially long-titled one by an author you may recognise…) rather than face that forthcoming Senate inquiry into his involvement in a legal kerfuffle which might have precipitated the aforementioned solicitor-general situation. Yikes!
All in all: 2016 might have been a mess, but 2017 looks set to be just as… um, colourful? Well, except for the increasingly pale-and-dead Great Barrier Reef - but that doesn't need any further attention, apparently. What good luck!
Be like George Brandis and grab copies of Andrew P Street's The Short and Excruciatingly Embarrassing Reign of Captain Abbott and The Curious Story of Malcolm Turnbull: the Incredible Shrinking Man in the Top Hat, just in time for Xmas! #buygeorge