Beyond the fatal quinella, there’s mention of Hannibal Lecter and the future Mrs Edelsten
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Malcolm Turnbull should obviously resign and go do something else with his life. It’s over. And it’s a measure of the times that between writing this and sending it to the Crikey bunker, Turnbull may well do so. Your correspondent had always assumed that Turnbull was dead meat — he was fatally wounded by the Grech affair. Without that disaster calling into question his judgement, nous and skills, he might have been able to survive the ETS brouhaha. But the two were a fatal quinella. The past six months resemble nothing so much as a trail of blood across the tundra, the wolf who chewed through his foot to get free of the trap, bleeding out beneath a winter sky. Your correspondent picked it months ago, of course. While the dinosaur media was humming and haahing about Turnbull’s chances, let the record show that we noted: “Turnbull is dead”. The only mystery is why he lasted as long as he did. So, if Mr Tony takes over, what is the strategy? Abbott may be delusional enough to believe he’s a contender, but those around him surely don’t. If he gets up, then the Liberal Party would have to consider a reversal of the longstanding “single shot” leadership, where you get one go at gold and that’s it. They could instead all but acknowledge that 2010 is lost, and present an Abbott-Hockey or Abbott-Bishop (ohhhh godddd, we just got shot of the Costello gags) leadership as a five-year proposition — reconstructing the party, redefining liberalism and conservatism etc. A 2010 loss wouldn’t then count against Abbott, because he would set it up as pretty much what he wants — an opportunity to rebuild. The only problem with that little strategy is that most of the electorate think that Abbott is a prick. He’s obviously the smartest, feistiest, best politicker around — but the Banton stuff, the teenage (non-) paternity, the RU486 sleaziness, the Pauline Hanson stitch-up, the excess aggressiveness he reserves for female opponents, they all ring alarm bells, especially in women voters. He may well give Labor up to five seats extra. Indeed under an Abbott leadership, the coalition would be fighting for its life in a seat such as Higgins, and other previous heartlands. Unless Abbott could convince the party and its penumbra that he is rebuilding a genuine liberal-conservative coalition, then he would be taking the party along the same route as the US Republicans, which is, yeah, really an outfit to emulate. Cleaving the Liberal party to conservatism would exile them from the metropolitan centre, and threaten to transform Mr Menzies grand ventre into a permanent minority party, its core support in rural areas, and seats with aged anglo populations, lower middle-class ressentiment etc. Gumboots and white shoes is what the party will be wearing when it kicks the bucket. Could Abbott reunify the party from the right? Maybe, but he can’t or won’t refashion it politically culturally in the way that David Cameron has done with the UK Tories. Intellectually and in other ways, Abbott appears to be dominated by Christopher Pearson, the ex-Maoist celibate gay ultramontane Roman Catholic former editor of the Adelaide Review. Immensely intelligent, learned and effective in micropolitical intrigue, Pearson’s influence jerks the chain whenever Fido Abbott shows signs of wanting to range further across the fields (the smell of a dying wolf in his nostrils). I don’t mean Pearson’s standing behind Abbott, whispering in his ear — a la Double Indemnity he’s much closer than that.* Thus, Abbott just can’t help himself — at the end of weeks of trying to remake himself as a nice guy you’d want at your barbecue, he’ll make some remark about Kevin Rudd being responsible for kids drowning in a leaky refugee boat, and suddenly the mad monk steps back out into the light. That will never happen, for the tragedy of the modern Liberal party is that it is evenly split between people who believe deeply in absolutely nothing, and those with a concrete and explicit political cosmology that would be most appropriately illustrated by Hieronymous Bosch. At the moment, there’s no one in the front rank who gives the Australian people even the slightest sense that they are focused on the issues that really confront a 21st century nation, so their vote is reduced to the immovable third share of loyalists who would support them even if Hannibal Lecter and the future Mrs Edelsten were the leadership team. They won’t do anything radical about it either — like, say, introduce a US primary style system, capable of throwing up a leader such as Petro Georgiou, politically loathed by a hardcore within, but an instant hit with the public were he to don the mantle. They won’t, of course. The right will stay and stay and stay, hoping they can be in place when Kevin ‘27 is caught with the proverbial live boy or dead netball team. God knows since I started typing they may have changed leaders twice. Strange things happen in the wilderness, with no shelter and only the howl of a dying animal for company. * when Fred MacMurray, the insurance agent who has murdered Barbara Stanwyck’s husband for a huge payout (Double Indemnity), he’s eventually caught by his boss, Edward G Robinson. “You were looking for the bad guy all this time,” says MacMurray, “and there I was right across the desk from you.” “Closer than that,” says Robinson. **on which grounds Joan Didion suggested that Californian civilisation was one in which fidelity to the King James Bible had been replaced by a literal interpretation of the plot of Double Indemnity. |
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23 Comments
Give that Rundle Guy a gold star and a bloody Walkley!!!
Outstanding stuff!!!
So many scary images, so many truths……such an excellent summation.
This rehashes what Rundle’s already said in the last few days: the Turnbull Cameroons are “21st century”, the Lib Right are the Lungfish of politics, not extinct but overdue:
“(Abbot) can’t or won’t refashion (the Libs) politically or culturally in the way that David Cameron has done with the UK Tories. “
Of course he won’t. Abbot is Santamaria’s love-child. But he is also smarter than Rundle: Cameron may have a bike in the garage but Toryism still drives a Bentley. British Conservatism will tolerate cosmetic change only and the same applies here.
Logically, the Libs should elect Hockey. For a start he’s electable. No one wants a Christian Brother on the premises. Hockey will have to become Joe Hockey-stick though. See the climate graph upside down. This IS all about the ETS. If Hockey is alert, he’ll realise that he must bet against AGW. Polls say the electorate is fast becoming sceptical of the millenarian cult. The ETS would have no effect on local CO2 for 26 years, so Rudd’s spruiking of The Cult is hypocritical. Why the frenetic urgency? People aren’t stupid. So, Hockey calls Rudd’s bluff. He might lose respectably in 2010. If the globe inconveniently fails to heat up, partisan Bumcrack scientists notwithstanding, the Libs could knock off Dr Death in 2013.
Rundle has missed the essence of this political drama: it’s not the dying spasm of an archaic Right- we’re seeing the reassertion of capital’s naked power. Tossers beware. The soggy, “modern” Turnbulls are being spat out. Capital has woken up to the fact that Rudd corporatism will hobble big capital. The ETS may just be for openers.
Therefore, Rundle’s prognosis is false: “Cleaving the Liberal party to conservatism would exile them from the metropolitan centre, and threaten to transform Mr Menzies grand ventre into a permanent minority party, its core support in rural areas, and seats with aged anglo populations, lower middle-class ressentiment…”
The Libs have slammed the door on Rudd’s massive Trojan horse just in time. Turnbull was about to bend the knee as vassal to King Rudd. Off with his head. Now the climate war is joined, Capital cannot afford a Republicanesque moralistic Abbot/Andrews Liberal Party to alienate voters. Religion is the piss of death in Australian politics. Uncle Joe with his vapid theistic generalities is tolerable.
Look who we’ve got now! Unctuous, faith-based Rudd. And that droning Lesbyterian, Penny Wong, intoning daily about climate heresy.
There’s no doubt the shrill millenarian hysteria of the climate cult has driven the faithful to the pub. The Hamilton Syndrome.
A new secular Liberal Party could give Rudd a run for his money in 2010.
Spot on.
I have said it before but I will say it again: the libs should call it quits.
Their sitting members can move in a couple of directions: The climate change deniers and other ultra conservatives (seems like over half of them) should join the Nationals. The ordinary conservatives should join their fellow conservatves in the Labor Party. And the Greens should become the real opposition in this land.
Then we will see it for what it is:
Green left of centre; Labor right of centre (where they are now); and the Nationals further right still.
Nice try Frank. It is so rare to read a Liberal Party climate skeptic who is literate enough to be able to punctuate and unctuate at the same time.
Abbot, Minchin, Andrews and co should quit the Liberal party and start up their own Conservative Party. However I suspect (a) they’re having too much fun raining on Turnbull’s parade and (b) they’re too incompetent to actually create anything. Hence all the ‘political terrorism’ we get from them instead now they don’t have a bevy of public servants to cover for them.
ARON - JIM R - Couldn’t agree more. The Libs (the real right wing nutters)are showing themselves in their real colours. I can’t see how women in this country would ever vote for Abbott! He makes my skin crawl. He also walks like an ape (my apologies to apes?). He’s a repugnant human being, and his extreme oppressive views re women are anathema to most women - and many men too I suggest!
They should have the guts to start their own party as you suggested Jim, but I doubt they will - no guts, just a death wish. Bring on the DD, and let’s see how fair dinkum the electorate is re climate change. I’m not happy with the govt’s legislation, but at least it’s a start. One of the arguments the Libs had, was the lack of commitment from other countries. Well, about 5 of them have publicly committed in the last few days, including China and the US. So that’s one less argument they have. Minchin is just an idiot, who was never going to agree to any proposal - he doesn’t give a stuff! So he should step down and let someone else have a go at being responsible.
Bring on a DD election! Show me the way to the polling booth(so to speak). I’ll vote for the Greens, as I’ve been doing for the last few years! I want my grandkids to have a future, and their mates too! This is just a disgrace! I’m sick of it now, I just want action!
The Howard Party should cleave from the Liberal Party. Is it as simple as that? Conservative and Liberal party seperation of conjoined twins? Sure one will suffer either brain injury or death, but it’s not like they are little girls in hospital for real.
Also I agree Abbott has a certain gait in parliament I observed last week Tues and Wednesday. Very deliberate pacings.
The liberals didn’t realize when the elected John Howard to Parliament in the mid-70’s that they brought into the Liberal house of Menzies what would become a layer of toxic asbestos like lining & in the course of time the disease is manifesting itself . The party is going to die or become a short lived monster . What we are seeing is John Howard’s legacy unfolding
Makes you proud eh John!
When Tony is leader, and eventually PM, he will have George Pell as his Chief of Staff, Senior senior policy advisor, Chief Climate Change Denialist and hard man.
The child protection arm of the AFP will be replaced by a branch of Thought Police with powers and methods not disimilar to the Spanish Inquisition. They will ferret out all the religious, industrial or economic heretics at large in the populace. When they find them, Christmas Island will no doubt be put to good use housing those doubters and providing the instruments to change there minds.
Talk about our worst nightmare and things that go bump in the night.
michaelwholohan1 - it’s more than that. The Liberals have spent the last 30 years methodically ejecting/compromising (think Ruddock)/marginalising the true liberals, with the result that it’s become more a party of the hard Right rather than the broad church that Menzies created and successfully maintained. Howard IMHO was a symptom of this, not its cause. What’s happening now is that with Turnbull and CPRS we’ve seen an ascendency of a liberal Left response to an issue which has upset this progression. Hence the Right’s need to stamp out this heresy.
A modest historical anecdote. I was a student at Sydney Uni in the mid-late ‘70’s, when the Right began its rise. Turnbull was there for the first two years (‘75 and ‘76) and was head of the Liberal club, which like most young/Young Liberal branches was to the left of the party. IIRC in 1976 a group of DLP/NCC-affiliated Catholic right wingers stacked the Liberal club’s membership and pushed it overnight in a hard Right direction. Later along came Tony Abbott as their golden boy (and, it was rumoured, Bob Santamaria’s chosen heir and successor) and the rest is history.
In other words, *** Turnbull rather than being the future of the party, is the last gasp of its past. Abbott, rather than a throw-back, has always been at the front of its historical direction over the last three decades.***
(By the way, Abbott was a pr*ck even then. I attended a couple of SRC meetings deputising for a friend when he was SRC president and was Not Impressed).
I think this came out of the decline of the DLP. It was obvious that the DLP was going to die once a Labor government was elected and Australia didn’t turn into a communist dictatorship overnight, so the Catholic right looked for a new home (like a parasite looking for a new host) and it became the Liberal party. And in turn the Liberal party now looks more like the DLP (minus pretense at social conscience) than the party of Menzies or even Fraser.
‘though I must say that seeing Minchin and others mouthing off conspiracy theories about global warming makes me think they’re now heading to channeling the League of Rights
Turnbull was “fatally wounded” long before all this and the Grech affair. His mistake was standing in the first place - thinking that Rudd could be defeated in 2010. Costello had the smarts to see the truth. Turnbull thought he could change the trajectory. The weak minds of the party now have a reason other than themselves to explain their imminent defeat. Blame not themselves but Turnbull. What the Liberals need is a gallant loser. They had Brendan Nelson but Turnbull stuffed that. Hockey? Well he could actually be the only one who doesn’t look like a loser if he loses. The problem is, how to get rid of the real losers. Maybe that can never happen, because of the nature of the party and the people who push to its front. This is a party that is still people by Bronwyn Bishop, Kevin Andrews, Phillip Ruddock (where’s he?) Tony Abbott and so on. They thought Howards would look after them forever. When he want they knew that they would have to live with defeat. But they prefer to find someone to blame. Now they are faced with having to choose one of their own. But since they don’t have decent people to choose from it will have to be poor Joe. Imagine his horror if he were to win!
Just declare Kevin 07 the winner now please; he is a political genius.( Yes even better than Little Johnny and his children overboard). Destroying the Liberal Party from within with one piece of legislation, albeit it a dastardly (to right wing Liberal eyes) piece of work.
Dan Cass: It’s “sceptic” in Australian English, Dan, not “skeptic”. Just another example of unconscious colonisation by the Gringo Empire.
I’m a Greens voter, Danny, and have been for 20 years since I left an ALP infected with corporatism. I realise this is hard for you and the facile Rundle to compute, but keep pedalling.
Some have doubted my assertion that Tony Abbot was Bob Santamaria’s love-child. For those who don’t know who Santamaria was, think of him as a double agent, part Pope, part CIA. Bob’s job was to destroy the ALP in the days when it was a Labour Party and not a corporation.
I was present at Abbot’s birth. It was of course a caesarian : in spite of his name, Santamaria was a man. It took place in Raheem, an obscure mansion in Melbourne. The shock on seeing tiny Tony emerge was palpable. He was covered in hair and looked like an exhibit from the Scopes trial. Darwinian sarcasm perhaps.
There was no afterbirth, just a strange yellow metal ring, the diameter of a dish.
Years of treatment transformed the hirsute tot, but nothing could be done about the ears or gait.
It was, naturally, a virgin birth.
Malcolm Street-Suzuki:
” Turnbull, rather than being the future of the party, is the last gasp of its past. Abbott, rather than a throw-back, has always been at the front of its historical direction over the last three decades.”
Just shows what a bit of personal experience can do for history: Malcolm, you were there, you saw the Cold Catholic Warriors and their Thatcherite allies terminate a string of liberal Liberals…Ian MacPhee, Georgiou et al…Remember “wets vs dries”?
Murdoch’s whorehouse of ideologues was essential to this Catholic Right/Protestant Thatcherite ascendancy…Shanahan, Sheridan…
But where does this leave us now? Why is this toxic slime oozing under the door of the 21st century? Because of the gullibility of the play-nice Cameroon Right in the face of the corporatist ALP’s AGW schemes. Forget the Minchinesque commo conspiracy crap, this is about who controls capital, not who owns it. Big capital is tempted by the trough of climate pork they see on offer, but it’s dawning on them that it’s a trap. Big capital doesn’t give a stuff about global warming- they just want to exploit it and keep all their prerogatives intact. Now they realise they’ll be hobbled by the corporate social democratic state. All they’ve got in the parliamentary arena to resist this is a shambolic bunch of simian men in crumpled suits, led by the Last of the Groupers.
Rev.Rudd and the Lesbyterian will wipe the floor with these crumpled suits if an election is called now. But the Fossil Right is correct: the two AGW schemes are a colossal waste of money and will have no effect on global warming whatever. MRET delivers all capital to useless wind power instead of developing base-load renewables. The “carbon pollution reduction scheme” will, at staggering cost, fail to reduce CO2 by one jot (on its own admission) for 26 years. If the AGW hypothesis is confirmed (by no means certain, regardless of what posturing ignoramuses like Rundle say), we really will be up shit creek without a powerpoint.
The ALP triumph will be short-lived. Big capital will re-group. The idiocy of MRET and CPRS will become evident. We’ll be a lot poorer, possibly hotter, and the Right will be in the ascendant.
Dosages, Frank, dosages
I just wonder what the monarchist Abbott and co have to say about this:
<a href="http://www.canada.com/business/Queen%20urges%20Commonwealth%20lead%20climate%20change/2275617/story.html" Queen urges Commonwealth to take lead on Climate Change
Originality, Guy, originality. And repetition, repetition…like your piece. Gentlemen prefer creative insults, not old sitcom jokes. Come to think of it, you are a sitcom. A red couch potato. Turning purple as the Hunter S Thompson takes effect…
I notice you rarely comment on comments (apart from slagging me). Laziness? or maybe you just don’t know enough about the empirical world. Better to stay up in the canopy of abstraction, dropping potted history on the sweating gleaners below…
Dare we gaze upon the Queen’s carbon footprint?
Offsets, Frank, offsets.
Aron: quite. Export the “pollution” and pocket the dosh. Climate pork, climate hypocrisy. Big capital has been torn between its greed for climate pork and worry that Rudd will corral it. The ETS is not only colossally expensive, it’s a precedent for control. The big end of town has jerked the strings on the Liberals, very late in the day. Maybe the East Bumcrack emails tipped the balance…