By Mike Carlton
Always look on the bright side of life. Stalemate though it is, an election which rids the nation of Wilson Tuckey and the Family First Senator, Steve Fielding, cannot be all bad.
Tuckey is gone, hurrah, the voters of his Western Australian seat of O'Connor deciding at long last that they could stand the oaf no more. A regrettable flaw in the constitution means the idiotic Fielding will pester us in the Senate until next July, but his end is in sight.
To dilute the excitement, some obscure preference deal by the bottom feeders on the Victorian senate paper might well see a candidate from the Democratic Labor Party take last place there. From the what ? I thought the DLP had been snuffed out in 1974, when Gough Whitlam dispatched that smelly old sot and air hostess groper, the Queensland Senator Vince Gair, off to the joint embassies of Dublin and the Holy See. (A great joke but a fatal mistake as it turned out, although that's another story.)
Apparently the DLP is b-a-a-a-ck in the person of one John Madigan, a Ballarat blacksmith - whoa, there Neddy - who, if he stands true to party form, will be fish on Fridays and a fan of the Spanish Inquisition. Again, the cold, dead hand of Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria, progenitor of the DLP, rises from the crypt to give us the one-finger salute. The same bony claw can be blamed for shoving the Mad Monk into frame as a putative prime minister, of which there is more below.
Labor, meanwhile, sharpens the knives. On election night television, the defeated Maxine McKew's stab at the party's backroom stuffwits sliced to the bone, but the quick cutaway shot of her stricken partner, Bob Hogg, a former ALP national secretary, said more. The ALP campaign was a shambles, right from the bungled coup d'etat that deposed Kevin Rudd, and you could see that Hogg knew it.
He was far from alone. Morris Iemma came out on Monday to suggest that Karl Bitar, Labor's national secretary, should be off to McDonald's to flip hamburgers.
That was unfair. Maccas have done nothing to deserve such punishment. If Bitar was to bring to the Golden Arches the bottomless incompetence he displayed at the election there would be exploding McNuggets, corpses in the rest rooms, Ronald McDonald unmasked as a whips'n'leather fetishist and the punters stampeding down the road to Hungry Jack's.
Bitar should go now, and take with him his Sussex Street mate Mark Arbib, another architect of the debacle. This would not bring the whole rotten edifice of the NSW ALP Right crashing to the ground, but it would be a useful start.
❏ ❏ ❏
ALL THOSE well-bred Tory ladies and conservative think-tankers rushing to hail Phoney Tony as their new messiah have overlooked some significant points.
Clearly, the vote has demonstrated that Abbott is no more electable now than he was a year ago. As I write, with 81.72 per cent of the vote counted, the Australian Electoral Commission reckons there has been a national swing of just 0.61 per cent to the Liberal Party.
Even if you toss in smaller swings to the Nationals and that pushmi-pullyu beast, the Libernats of Queensland, you come up with a move to the coalition of only 1.51 per cent, hardly the stuff of thumping prime ministerial mandates.
To the disappointment of George Cardinal Pell, no doubt, the Greens were the big winners this time, picking up a swing of 3.59 per cent for nine Senate seats and one in the Reps, only the second they have had there. By any sane reading, the country came out last Saturday for what you might call the progressive centre-left. On first preferences Labor and the Greens combined got 49.9 per cent of the vote. The Coalition chalked up just 43.3 per cent.
Abbott's failure is probably not all his own fault. The Liberal Party machine in NSW, neutered by the ongoing war between its so-called moderate wing and the Opus Dei nutters, did him no favours. Properly managed, the Libs might have picked off another three seats here, enough to have snuck them into government. That flop will be giving Barry O'Farrell a few sleepless nights as we head towards the state election in March.
And so the horse-trading goes on in Canberra. The outbreak of niceness on all sides is hugely amusing, reaching a peak of hilarity in Abbott's promise of "a kinder, gentler polity". If ever that is to happen he will need a word in the cauliflower ear of Barnaby Joyce; that "fool" as the independent MP Tony Windsor correctly called him. Joyce's abuse of Windsor on election night was beyond bizarre.
Perhaps a cook-off might solve the deadlock. Get Julia and Phoney into the MasterChef kitchen. Best filet de boeuf en brioche wins the keys to the Lodge.
I'm here to tell you what you want to hear
FOCUS groups be damned. They might be useful if you are designing a cereal packet. As a tool for charting the nation's future they are a reckless abandonment of responsible political leadership.
Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard sounded almost identical in the election campaign because focus groups were telling them what to say. Unsurprisingly, both leaders got the same message, regurgitating the same meaningless pap that the marketing soothsayers threw up from their bogan seances.
Politicians no longer answer questions put to them, however innocuous they might be. For example:
Q: Are you in favour of Christmas trees, Aussie meat pies and little warm puppies ?
A: (Cue tinkling laugh if you are Julia, guffaw if you are Tony). Look, I'll let others make those judgments, and I have no doubt that the commentators in the media and elsewhere will have their say. I'm here to make it clear to hardworking Australian families that I am all about leadership, about going forward for our children and our children's children in this great country that we all love. Blah blah blah.
Kristina Keneally has become more than expert at this rubbish, but she does tend to regard the business of government as one endless photo-shoot.
smhcarlton@gmail.com