New ‘normal’ in Canberra includes Sam Dastyari’s interview, a $444 million reef grant and the drought

IT’S been a week of weird, wretched, wasteful and woeful adventures in the world of federal politics, writes Dennis Atkins.

S AM Dastyari once sat with me outside the Queens Terrace cafe at the front of Parliament House and explained what motivated him in politics.

It was in the final days of Kevin Rudd’s first ride at the prime ministerial rodeo and the place was in its usual state – somewhere between madness and conspiracy.

“I just want to wake up one morning and read that we (the Labor Party) has waged war against poverty,” Dastyari said.

He was about a month away from becoming the general secretary of the NSW branch of the Labor Party at just 26 – the youngest person to hold that prized job.

What Dastyari wanted was a big-picture campaign built on a grand dream like Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society or Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The man in a hurry with an incredibly short attention span didn’t launch a war on poverty when he got into the Senate three years later, but he did make a name for himself as a warrior taking it up to corporate Australia over tax evasion and avoidance.

Dastyari also made a mark as the guy who cosied up to the Chinese so much he was sprung getting his bills paid by them and allowing himself to be used for propaganda purposes. In the end it brought the curtain down on his Senate career after just 4½ years. Now he’s pitching tabloid reality TV for the Ten Network based on people like himself who’ve suffered disgrace in their lives.

Sam Dastyari, centre, with Kyle Sanidlands and Jackie O.

An extraordinary cover story in the News Corp magazine Stellar last weekend saw Dastyari confess all to Joe Hildebrand. The former senator said he sought solace with FM radio shock jock Kyle Sandilands when he sunk into the depths of depression.

“I think I’m the only person in Australia who was taken out of depression by Kyle Sandilands and not put in it,” quipped the ex-politician. “It’s like being at your own wake and then, two weeks later, people get on with their own lives and the calls kind of stop and that for me was when that darkness really hit.”

Just like the end of Dastyari’s career in Canberra, the interview was a slow-motion train wreck and in some ways a fitting metaphor for modern politics.

To have the week begin with Dastyari posing on the cover of Stella in electric blue pyjamas, wearing luxe black slip-ons and eating rice out of a red bowl seemed normal. It was far too normal, as the week dragged on.

Last week’s Stellar cover. Photo: Daniel Nadel

What wasn’t normal was Fraser Anning’s maiden speech in the Senate – delivered on Wednesday night, some nine months after he fell into the Parliament courtesy of One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts’ inability to remember where his father was born.

Anning became a senator after getting just 19 first preference votes but he ended up with fewer than 19 political supporters for his extreme and more than a little jumbled views. Anning wanted a return to a 1950s, white picket fence Australia where our immigrant pool was sourced mostly from Europe – not those Muslims who the senator said were leaders of the pack in crime, terrorism and welfare bludging.

After a string of incorrect or dubious claims, Anning concluded his diatribe on immigration by invoking Nazi Germany.

Senator Fraser Anning maiden delivering his maiden speech this week. Photo: Kym Smith

“The final solution to the immigration problem is, of course, a popular vote,” he told the Senate. “We need a plebiscite to allow the Australian people to decide whether they want wholesale non-English speaking immigrants from the Third World and, in particular, whether they want any Muslims or whether they want to return to the predominantly European immigration policy of the pre-Whitlam consensus.”

Of course, Australian politics went nuts – which was the aim of the Anning speech.

His new political home, Katter’s Australian Party, backed him “1000 per cent” while the vehicle he used to get into Parliament in the first place, One Nation, thought he’d gone too far.

While all this was happening, the Turnbull Government was defending a $444 million grant to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, a previously unheard of charity that was doing good but modest work. The Prime Minister and his Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg gave them almost half a billion with minimal paperwork. The charity CEO said it was like winning Lotto.

Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg (left) with Malcolm Turnbull during Question Time this week. Photo: AAP/Lukas Coch

A few months after this was waved through in May and June, the Government discovered the worst drought in half a century. They said they’d give farming families grants of $12,000 in two $6000 instalments which could be obtained after wading through 85 pages of bureaucratic demands.

Just for those who are wondering, that $444 million is equal to 37,000 $12,000 drought relief grants.

And it was given with 1/85th of the paperwork.

Dennis Atkins is The Courier-Mail’s national affairs editor