Originally published at TheVine, 3 April 2015

Or, how to lose friends and influence people against you

One of the things that gets said with reasonable regularity in response to the government’s less-than-stellar track record with regards passing legislation is that the Opposition keep blocking things in the Senate.

It’s a standard argument used by right-leaning commentators, government MPs and angry people on my Facebook page: the reason that all this Medicare co-pay stuff, or the changes to Centrelink eligibility, or the deregulation of universities and most of the budget (still unpassed and coming up to its first smash anniversary!) gets blocked in the upper house is because of Labor’s intransigence. Why oh why do they hate Australia so much?

Here’s the thing, though: Labor don’t block anything. They don’t have the numbers. Indeed, Labor and the Greens together don’t have the numbers.

Here’s the breakdown of the 76 members of the Senate:

The Coalition has 33 senators. Labor has 25. The Greens have 10. And then there are those eight other guys.

Passage of legislation through the Senate rests on a simple majority, thus the balance of power is held by eight independent-slash-microparty senators. It is they whom control the passage of legislation, and it is they whom the government needs to convince.

More specifically, assuming that Labor and the Greens are blocking a piece of proposed legislation, they need to get six crossbench votes (assuming that all Senators are present).

So the problem must be that the crossbench are all radical lefties with a strong anti-conservative bent, right?

Um, about that.

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The eight senators who determine the passage of legislation are three sorta-kinda libertarians, two puppets of a mining billionaire, a conservative Christian, a former soldier turned outspoken Islamophobe, and a dude who likes cars.

Number of radical lefties? Zero. Number of people who would, on the face of it, disagree with the sorts of policies beloved of a Coalition government? Zero.

And that’s more or less what the government thought when they got into power, which is why there was so little transition between the steady-as-she-goes promises the Coalition made ahead of the election and the right-let’s-start-cutting-everything-promises-be-damned approach they took after taking office.

Now, admittedly it’s not quite as cut and dried as the above description suggests.

Clive Palmer sank millions into creating Palmer United for the express purpose of getting his vengeance on the Liberal National Party to whom he had been such a heavy donor, and the idea was always to become a potent enough force to hurt Queensland premier Campbell Newman and, to a lesser extent, Tony Abbott.

After the election it appeared Palmer controlled four of the eight crossbenchers. The party had three senators: WA mining executive Dio Wang, former QLD rugby league star Glenn Lazarus, and Tasmanian ex-soldier Jacqui Lambie, plus the Motoring Enthusiasts Party’s Victorian senator Ricky Muir, a former timber worker who had reportedly agreed to vote with the party as a bloc.

Before too long that alliance had splintered: Muir voted independently of PUP, and Lambie and Palmer engaged in an escalating war of crazy (largely over whether PUP would support Lambie’s planned legislation banning Muslim headscarves) until she abruptly left the party.

This would, under normal circumstances, look like a godsend to the government. Sure, PUP was largely attempting to balance populist policies with opposing government measures, which led to seemingly contradictory policies like scrapping the carbon not-actually-a tax but supporting the renewable energy target. But how hard could it be for the government to negotiate with a pair of confused newcomers with right-leaning personal politics?

Instead they started a war with Lambie over defence pay, and Muir (who had struggled to find a job for the nine months between being elected and taking office) was put offside by the government’s draconian employment benefits policies.

And they’re not alone. You want to cut government spending, Coalition? That should be a slam dunk for small-government advocates like David Leyonhjelm and the Motoring Enthusiasts Party. Yet neither have proved easy to convince.

A government that openly opposes marriage equality and supports socially conservative policies in place of existing programmes (who can forget former Social Services minister Kevin Andrews cutting funding for groups that provide emergency women’s shelters, but providing discount marriage counselling coupons?) should find plenty of common cause with Family First’s Bob Day and former DLP senator and avowedly religious anti-abortion campaigner John Madigan. But again, it’s been an uphill battle.

And with the Prime Minister loudly declaiming Muslims as not being appropriately anti-terrorism, Lambie should be a strong ally – yet she’s consistently voted against every piece of legislation the government proposes, and pledged to continue to do so until there’s a pay rise for defence personnel.

The only senator one would generally predict to be opposed to the government would be centrist SA independent Nick Xenophon, but he’s voted in support of several surprising bills – including granting sweeping new powers to the Immigration Minister. The man’s a wild card.

In other words, any difficulty the government has in negotiation is not down to the opposition of the Greens and Labor, but their own ineptitude at negotiating with people who are, after all, heartland Coalition voters.

Put simple: the Abbott Government have done the seemingly impossible: they’ve found a way to argue with people that agree with them.

Which raises the tantalising question: would a new and more responsive leader make those negotiations easier?

After all, it’s impossible to see how it could make things worse…

Originally published at TheVine, 12 February 2015

Who’ll be leading the country in the next three-to-six months? Let’s find out!

In 1969 the management theory book The Peter Principle was published, written by Lawrence J. Peter (hence the name) and Raymond Hull, whose central premise was a simple and powerful one: in every profession, people rise to their level of incompetence.

The idea goes like this: if you’re good at your job, sooner or later you’ll be promoted. However, the skills that make you a kick-arse rotisserie chicken cook may not guarantee that you’re great at managing your coworkers. If you’re a lousy shift manager, that’s where you’ll remain – but if you’re a good one, you’ll be promoted further up the management ladder. And again, good people skills may not extend to running inventory and keeping track of suppliers, so if you’re bad at that, that’s where you’ll stay. If you’re good, you get promoted again – until you find a role in which you’re genuinely incompetent.

It’s an elegant idea, and one that answers the question “why the hell is this person in this position?” with the satisfyingly correct-feeling answer “because they suck.”

Like virtually every prime minister Tony Abbott has been Peter Principled into the big chair because he was good at his previous gig – in Abbott’s case, opposition leader.

However the skills to effectively tear down a flailing government are not the same as the skills required to lead and unite a nation (we assume, since there’s no evidence he’s tried that yet).

However, it’s an all-but-foregone conclusion that Abbott will not lead the Coalition to the next election. The leadership spill was a wound that won’t heal, and history suggests that sitting leaders who survive leadership spills do not remain in power once the electorate see them as vulnerable.

—

Failed challenges upon sitting PMs only happened rarely. In the Liberal camp Billy McMahon challenged John Gorton in 1971 and Andrew Peacock challenged Malcolm Fraser a decade later – and the Liberals took a beating at the subsequent elections: Gorton had the wisdom to realise he was doomed and retired, thereby letting McMahon have his arse handed to him by Gough Whitlam, and the stumbling Fraser government was wiped out by Bob Hawke’s historic majority in 1983.

For Labor the situation is even more ominous: both Keating and Rudd challenged their sitting PMs (Hawke and Gillard, respectively) and failed, before trying again and… well, you know how those worked out.

Abbott’s situation is even more dire because there was no actual challenger – yet two-fifths of the party voted for Someone To Be Named Later over the sitting PM. And that’s the only reason he’s still leading today: the party want him gone, but there’s no obvious alternative ready to step up 2 the federal streets.

But here’s the thing: someone is going to be moulded into leadership material by the terrified Liberal Party, and soon. So who is it going to be?

—

There are all sorts of concerns that parties consider when they choose their leader and deputy. They need to be from different bits of the country – so Labor lovin’ lefities can abandon hope of an Anthony Albanese/Tanya Plibersek double act, for example, since they’re both inner-city Sydney MPs.

Also, they need to balance the factions. For example: Labor leader Bill Shorten is Right and from Victoria, his Sydney-based deputy Plibersek is from the Left.

Also, somewhat predictably, the leader is almost always from either Victoria (10 PMs) or New South Wales (12). Bigger states mean bigger name recognition.

Let’s meet the alternatives:

MALCOLM TURNBULL

Centre, NSW

Best known for: your shitty internet connection, being the leader most non-Coalition voters say they’d vote for.

Pros: He’s actually smart and charming, seems like a human being with human thoughts and feelings. He’s also a millionaire, thereby ticking the “privileged white man” box that the Liberals need to feel comfortable with. And he’s not tied so closely to Abbott as to make it seem like a betrayal if he knifed him.

Cons: He’s been leader before. That’s not a huge impediment, as John Howard demonstrated, but during his tenure he made a lot of enemies in the party. While he’s a stone-cold economic rationalist he does have some socially progressive views – he’s pro-marriage equality, for example – which concern the conservative faithful.

He also takes climate change seriously, but you can absolutely rule out any hope of him leaping into the fight for renewable energy if he got into the big chair: his support for a bipartisan emissions trading scheme was what got him rolled as leader by Abbott.

Challenge potential: Easy frontrunner, which is why everyone’s just assuming it at this stage. And he should be confident: going by the spill result, 60% of the backbench basically voted for his shadow.

JULIE BISHOP

Centre, WA

Best known for: our not being at war with our closest international neighbour, looking exasperated next to the PM, snarking on Peta Credlin.

Pros: Like Turnbull, she’s articulate, smart and actually smiles every so often. She’s also been an effective Foreign Minister, successfully negotiating the tricky oh-yeah-we’re-spying-on-Indonesia thing with great success, despite having both the PM and the Immigration Minister actively working against her. She’s also the obvious favourite of the Murdoch Press, which historically has meant victory.

Cons: She was a lousy Education Minister under Howard, and an equally lousy Shadow Treasurer while in opposition. She’s also a female deputy of the party who has been vocal about her support for the PM, which would make a sudden challenge look distinctly Julia Gillard-esque – a deep problem for a party that used the Rudd/Gillard challenges as a stick to beat Labor with ahead of the 2013 election.

Challenge potential: Probably not any time soon, but she’d be a strong candidate to lead the party in opposition – which, realistically, is what she’s holding out for.

JOE HOCKEY

Centre, NSW

Best known for: saying poor people don’t drive, not understanding percentages, releasing a budget that has yet to pass, having a nice cigar after passing said budget, being the subject of 2014’s most unintentionally hilarious biography.

Pros: Politics is almost completely about economics – or at least has been since Paul Keating made it so, and no-one’s yet challenged this implausible-sounding assertion – and the guy’s the Treasurer! He knows about economics, right?

Cons: By any measure he’s been a terrible treasurer. He’s presided over rising unemployment, shrinking GDP, a diminishing dollar, an increase in debt (which he has made the biggest focus of his role by bitching about it in opposition) and – as mentioned above – releasing an unpassable budget. Also, he keeps saying incredibly ill-considered things in public.

He’s more socially progressive than you’d probably realise, but right now the party realises that he’s a huge liability – realistically the only hope that Abbott has is to cut Hockey loose. A Hockey challenge would be over before it began – at least, that’s what happened last time.

Challenge potential: Only if he wanted to go out in blaze of glory.

SCOTT MORRISON

Right, NSW

Best known for: stopping the boats, stopping the reporting on the boats, stopping the scrutiny over what happens to the people on the boats, stopping the adherence to our international treaties regarding human rights (especially with regards people on boats).

Pros: Has genuine success in his last portfolio as Immigration Minister, although that success was entirely down to stifling reporting regarding his portfolio. Also, stopping the boats is a pretty dubious goal to start with, the billion-dollar-a-year cost and the whole abuse-of-human-rights things notwithstanding. He’s deeply beloved by the Right and seen as an effective minister. Perhaps… perhaps a little too effective…

Cons: The public see him – not incorrectly – as a hardline religious zealot with few traditionally Christian characteristics regarding things like “charity” or “humility”. His behaviour as Immigration Minister and now as Social Services Minister also – again, not incorrectly – suggests he genuinely doesn’t care about people. He’s also very closely tied to Abbott, which would make a leadership challenge look like a betrayal.

Also, when he smiles he looks like he’s going to bite someone.

Challenge potential: Slim to nil. Despite this, Abbott knows he’s a potential threat within the party – hence the move to Social Services, one of the most up-fuckable portfolios

CHRISTOPHER PYNE

Centre?, SA

Best known for: the most hittable smile in Federal politics, calling people cunts, looking like a private boarding school prefect that’s just masturbated into the mashed potato.

Pros: Um…

Cons: Literally everything. Even if he wasn’t associated with his attempts to gut higher education funding at the moment, he’s a man that exudes a powerful anti-charisma that makes whatever he says seem sly and venal. It’s not helped that this is also largely the qualities of what he says, though.

Challenge potential: He’s tied himself so tightly to Abbott that it’s doubtful that he’ll even keep his portfolio when Abbott goes – and since he’s managed to turn one of the safest Liberal seats in South Australia into a projected loss for the party, no-one’s going to risk letting him give it a try anyway.

CORY BERNARDI

Right, SA

Best known for: the whole comparing-homosexuals-to-bestiality-enthusiasts thing over which he got moved to the backbench, lying about abortion statistics, the fact that he never blinks

Pros: It would be genuinely hilarious.

Cons: We’d need to burn the country down.

Originally published at The Vine, 26 November 2014

Who’d have thought a deal rushed through in secret might have a few worrying conditions attached?

Trade has been enormously beneficial to the world –  at least, so long as you prefer it to war.

Throughout history the nations that traded the most became hubs of knowledge – Rome in the first century BC, Alexandria in the 6th century, Amsterdam in the 17th century, London in the 18th, Shanghai in the 19th, New York today – and there is a direct correlation between the amount of trade between nations and the global decline in armed conflict.

It’s not hard to see why. The Age of Empires was an expensive one; conquering new territory was a pricey process, and hanging onto it was even more costly.

Conversely, a trade partner offers plenty of material benefit and zero outlay on armed invasions or open-ended occupations.

Russia’s just learning that with regards its newly annexed resource-poor and people-that-expect-services-rich Crimea, and (as discussed before) ISIL are starting to face a similar challenge in Syria and Iraq.

And there’s a lot to be said for trade if, like me, you’d rather that people didn’t just straight up kill each other. It can be exploitative, sure, but it typically doesn’t end with quite so many corpses.

And the global marketplace has more countries talking and less countries bombing each other than ever before. Hell, we just had countries that have ongoing diplomatic hostilities – Japan and China, China and India, Russia and everyone else – sit down together in Brisbane the other week and have a civilised chat about trade. For all of the limitations of the G20 visit, this is actually significant progress.

Here’s the thing, though: there comes a point where free trade stops being liberating, and starts becoming dangerous and constrictive. And the newly-announced China-Australia Free Trade Agreement is a clear example of this.

—

As Trade Minister Andrew Robb admitted to SBS, the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement was rushed though at “five minutes to midnight” to make the photo-op that was the G20, and that there was no time to do actual modelling on how it would actually work.

Despite this, it was very swiftly hailed as a triumph of negotiation by the government, who then got very, very quiet about it.

The reasons for this were not hard to fathom as details of the deal emerged and it became clear that getting access to the massive Chinese market would require certain… shall we say, “flexibilities” on the part of Australia, and on the workings of our democracy.

But we’ll come to that. First up, let’s look at the economics.

The Nationals – the team sitting at the kids table of the Coalition dinner party – had the unfortunate job of admitting that local food prices would rise as a direct result of the deal.

Deputy PM and Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce conceded that “Another market means competition, and competition means that [Australian primary industries are] going to get a better price. And we’ve got to do that – we’ve been asking the supermarkets for so long… well now they’ve got somewhere else to go.”

Hear that, Middle Australia? The same rise in your household bills that was the apparent justification for killing the carbon tax is now being hailed as a triumph for the FTA. Huzzah!

—

Never mind the local price rises: there’s also very little evidence that Australia will actually make anything out of the deal at all.

The “$18 billion increase in by 2015” trade number that was bandied about at the time sounded impressive, but it transpires that it’s not quite as true as you might have assumed. Especially since, as Robb said, there was no actual modelling done.

More specifically, the $18 billion increase was based on modelling done in 2005, for a very different China-Australia deal that was assumed to have been signed that year. That number was the amount estimated for the subsequent ten year period – in other words, meaningless with regards the deal that was actually signed.

What are some of the differences? Well, this model assumed that tariffs would be immediately dropped (they weren’t: the majority of reductions are being phased out rather than eliminated) and that it would include sugar and rice (which it doesn’t) – and, more importantly, that prices for thermal coal and iron ore hadn’t plummeted dramatically since 2005, which they have.

Even if the modelling wasn’t worthless, going by its own conclusions the deal was pretty lousy, giving Australia’s GDP an annual increase per year of a pitiful 0.37%, according to an analysis by the Guardian’s Greg Jericho, which is approximately nothing. Hilariously, or distressingly, the same feasibility study also calculates growth at an even more pathetic 0.04%, or “a rounding error”.

And, as Jericho also points out, our 2005 FTA with the US – spruiked at the time as a deficit-killer by then-PM John Howard – increased our trade deficit by half, to its current level of $15.4 billion.

Adorably, Howard also predicted that the deal would open up the US market for Australian automotive manufacturing, with “a very big, potential, exciting market for Holden.” So, how’d that turn out?

—

However, the biggest problem is “a controversial clause in the deal that will allow Chinese corporations to sue the Australian government if the government introduces laws or regulations that damage the profits (or ‘future profits’) of Chinese companies,” as Fairfax’s Gareth Hutchens put it.

This clause will also be part of the upcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and will retroactively be inserted into our current FTA with Japan.

And not that I wish to sound like a broken record on this subject, but… well, I bitched and moaned about the “investor-state dispute settlement provisions” as laid out in our FTA with South Korea in 10 Things back in December 2013.

You see, these clauses

… allow foreign corporations to sue our government if said government does something that the company deems threatening to its profits. For example, if you were a tobacco giant based in a country with which Australia had an ISDS, you could theoretically sue Australia for introducing plain packaging laws on cigarettes on the grounds that it was anti-competitive.

If that sounds like an alarmist stretch, be advised that this is exactly what has already happened.

See, the Hong Kong subsidiary of Philip Morris launched a High Court challenge against the Australian government over plain packaging, citing the 1993 Agreement between the Government of Australia and the Government of Hong Kong for the Promotion and Protection of Investments. They lost the High Court case in August 2012, mainly on the grounds that they knew the laws were coming in when they bought out the Australian subsidiary’s operations, but immediately launched another case which is still before an international trade tribunal.

And if you’re wondering “hey, isn’t Philip Morris is a US company? Why is the Hong Kong arm suing us?” the answers are “yes” and “because the US and Australia don’t have a trade deal with an ISDS, but we and Hong Kong do”, respectively.

A similar case is currently before the courts in Canada where US energy company Lone Pine Resources is suing under the North American Free Trade Agreement after Quebec called a moratorium on fracking ahead of environmental studies about the likely impacts.

That’s what the China-Australia FTA already has in place, that’s what we’re about to get with the US and Japan. These clauses enshrine in law the principle that your health and wellbeing is secondary to the commercial interests of overseas companies.

Laws restricting emissions in Australia could be deemed anti-competitive and struck down. Ditto labelling on foods, or restrictions on harmful products. Want to ban a defective crib that puts babies at risk? You’d better hope it’s not from a country with whom we’ve signed an FTA.

And this isn’t crazed lefty fearmongering: as of the signing of this deal next year, Chinese mining companies will have more rights than you do when it comes to the level of pollution in your air and water.

Does this scare you? It should.

And there’s more to come.