In the Punch and Judy show of Australian politics, we are at the moment just before the crocodile arrives. The venerable form of puppet theatre has had many plot variations through the years. But there are some constants. One is the increasingly frantic violence that consumes Punch and Judy as the play progresses. They whack each other hysterically with a slapstick, the implement that lent its name to the comedic form, at a breakneck pace.
Sausages usually, but not always, make an appearance somewhere in the plot. The sausages are spoils to be fought over.
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Turnbull v Shorten: Round 2
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has taken his attack on Bill Shorten even further, with the Labor leader landing a few of his own blows. Courtesy ABC News 24.
Another constant is the crocodile. The crocodile is the final vengeance.
It's been much remarked, obsessively among the front-row seats, that the pace of the political violence accelerated wildly this week in the Australian political version.
![Illustration: John Shakespeare](/web/20170218150145im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/a/8/v/l/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guaiwf.png/1487185705321.jpg)
Bill had been whacking Malcolm for ages. Suddenly Malcolm grabbed the slapstick and whacked Bill. Really hard. Really fast. Really unexpectedly.
This exciting reversal thrilled the audience in the front row of the political contest, though most of the crowd was only dimly aware and largely uninterested, busy with life's grittier exigencies.
The new Turnbull aggression is one element, a force multiplier, in his plan to try to retrieve his prime ministership.
The other elements? He has assembled a few of slapsticks to attack Shorten with. One is electricity prices. He poses as the champion of low power bills and reliable energy supply. He does this by arguing that Labor's higher renewable energy target will require more expensive and more unreliable new wind and solar.
![Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in a forthright attack on Opposition Leader Bill Shorten during question time.](/web/20170218150145im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/8/a/1/d/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guaiwf.png/1486872438279.jpg)
Another is childcare. He is proposing bigger and better federal rebates and also an extra two weeks of maternity leave paid by taxpayers. He paints Labor as the enemy of working mums and struggling families. He can do this because Labor opposes the government's method of paying for the extra childcare money. The government has made it conditional on cutting back the Howard-era family payments system, putting the two sets of measures into a single "omnibus" bill and Labor is blocking the lot. This recalls the line of American poet John Godfrey Saxe, usually misattributed to Bismark, that "laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made".
These laws and proposed laws, on renewable energy targets and childcare, are the sausages that Punch and Judy fight over.
These are important household and family matters that Turnbull is trying to turn against the Labor party. He seeks mastery of the cost of living agenda, long regarded as the Holy Grail of politics by Liberal pollster Mark Textor.
Third is Turnbull's attack on the person of Bill Shorten. The Labor leader is not much liked by the people. Turnbull's critique, like all successful political attacks, crystallises the reasons for the public's dislike â that he's insincere.
Because he's a "sycophant of billionaires", a hypocrite and a fake Labor man, "blowing hard in the House of Representatives, sucking hard in the living rooms of Melbourne".
Applied with new vigour, he intends to whack Shorten senseless with these slapsticks. This is an essential fight for him.
Turnbull has stalked a failing prime minister. He knows that survival in the contemporary party room is a confidence game. When confidence in the leader is lost, the party pounces and the leader is torn apart.
The collective coalition confidence took some hits this week. A bad Newspoll and the defection of Cory Bernardi shook the Liberals. The morale of the moderates took a further blow when a nascent effort to revisit gay marriage was swiftly stifled.
To survive as prime minister, Turnbull knows he has to keep his party's confidence up. That's why he grabbed the slapsticks and got busy on Shorten. Turnbull had to show that he can prevail against Labor.
His performance so excited his party that, the next day, Scott Morrison threatened Bill Shorten in the House with a lump of coal, Josh Frydenberg threatened him with an attempt at stand up comedy, and Peter Dutton just threatened him: "We've only just started on this Opposition Leader," he intoned, glowering across the chamber.
So Punch successfully whacked Judy. This will not win him an extra percentage point of public approval, but it will allow him to live to fight another day.
But the crocodile lurks. It's the outside force, the agent of popular retribution, coldly indifferent to the tribal rituals that animate the established parties, and it's gathering its energy. In this Punch and Judy show, the crocodile is the rising populism that threatens to overtake Australian politics as it has elsewhere. Here, it wears the face of Pauline Hanson.
The main parties aren't oblivious. Both leaders are acting to clean up the political ecosystem â "draining the swamp", as Donald Trump describes that agenda. If Liberal and Labor can drain the festering swamp of politics as usual, and do it fast, decisively, they will depriving the swamp predator, the croc, of its preferred habitat.
They know that it's coming. That was a key reason that Bernardi abandoned the Liberal Party this week. He wants to be able to ride the populist anger, to pose as an insurgent and to benefit rather than to be an incumbent and be consumed.
Turnbull says that political leaders need to "rebuild trust in the political system". Shorten says that "there is one certainty in 2017: people are disengaged from politics and they're distrustful of politicians," and that "we, collectively, need to lift our game". A problem â even though Labor and Liberal are acting on this agenda, no one much is noticing. This week, for instance, Turnbull abolished the notorious Gold Pass â the lifetime free travel pass for retired federal politicians. Over the past 17 years it has cost taxpayers $17 million. "We have an opportunity to show Australians that the current generation of parliamentarians will subject themselves to higher standards than ever before," declared the Special Minister of State, Scott Ryan, with Labor's support, in announcing the Gold Pass was closed to all except former PMs.
Except that few Australians noticed. Ryan made this announcement the very day Bernardi quit the Liberals. The Bernardi story, given saturation coverage far out of proportion to its consequence, crowded out everything else.
Likewise, Turnbull's welcome move to create an independent authority to police parliamentary expenses. He called it the "biggest reforms to the management of parliamentarians' expenses in more than a generation", and he's right.
Another important step in fixing the system, another action for which he gets scant credit. He was dragged into it to quell public outcry over the travel expenses of his former health minister, Sussan Ley, and so, seeming reluctant, is assumed to be insincere.
If the main parties want serious recognition for fixing the system, they need to be more serious, more decisive and more thoroughgoing in the way they do it.
Besides, it's necessary for the establishment parties to fix the established system, but it's insufficient to fend off the encroachments of the crocodile. Because the main parties need to address not just the problems of the political system but also the problems of people's lives.
Turnbull is busy rejoicing in the Punch and Judy opportunity to use electricity as a political instrument of punishment. He has failed to take meaningful steps to fix the electricity system.
He has called electricity pricing and reliability "the defining issue of this parliament". As the people swelter through hot days and suffer through power outages, they'd prefer that Turnbull embrace it as "a defining reform of this government".
To now, Turnbull has gleefully pointed to South Australia's three major blackouts of the past four months to claim it's all about renewable energy. The state, more reliant than any other state on solar and wind, has bungled the transition and fallen victim to the stop-start electricity that they generate. Turnbull uses this failure to say that Labor now wants to replicate this across the entire country with its proposed 50 per cent renewable energy target.
But hold on. On Friday, NSW suffered an electricity shortage. The state was forced to choose between supplying families or supplying industry.
This is a serious inconvenience for Turnbull's narrative. Why? Because NSW is the least reliant on renewable energy of any state. Almost 90 per cent of NSW electricity is generated by burning coal. This is a problem of a failing national grid, not of one state's renewables policy.
Turnbull said some South Australian businesses had complained to him that "it's like being in a Third World country, where you can't rely on the energy supply". Yes Prime Minister, and it's not just South Australia and it's not just renewables. It's a serious national failure. And if it's like a Third World country, Malcolm, how does it feel to be its leader, responsible for the failure?
Punching Judy won't put megawatts into the wires. Australians will be rightly furious and demand serious solutions. If Malcolm and Bill are only as good as Punch and Judy, the crocodile will soon appear, full-grown, and swallow the show.
Peter Hartcher is political editor.
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