Joe Hildebrand: MPs give voters a choice between dumb and dumber

MPs have tested our patience with dumb and dumber theories of governing. The result is ridiculous and chaotic, writes Joe Hildebrand.

ANALYSIS

The only thing dumber than doing something dumb is doing it twice.

As George W Bush so memorably said: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me … Er, you can’t fool me again.”

Of course what the 43rd president was trying to say was: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

In other words, if someone gets tricked once, it’s the trickster’s fault for being an arsehole. If someone gets tricked twice it’s their own fault for being a chump.

And that is what is most staggering about the biblical-scale clusterf**k engulfing the government: It’s not just the apocalypse, it’s the apocalypse stuck on repeat.

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Canberra has managed to engineer a monster that is somehow both deeply terrifying and highly annoying at the same time.

And now, not content with twice repeating Labor’s first disastrous mistake, the Coalition has decided to repeat its second.

But first, let us recap.

I know that to observe politics these days requires most people to be lashed to a mast and have their eyes stuck open with toothpicks but in much the same way as medieval children were told cautionary fairytales to prevent them being eaten by cross-dressing wolves, it is important to remind ourselves how heavy this millstone of stupidity really is.

First, the Labor Party tore itself apart by decapitating a first term prime minister only to decapitate another one and lose in a landslide.

In response, the Liberal Party decapitated a first term prime minister only to decapitate another one and is about to lose in a landslide.

Pass the smelling salts: The PM and his colleagues have expressed shock after recently deposed Turnbull refused to rally in their corner. Photo: Dan Himbrechts

Amazingly, the Labor Party was actually surprised when the prime minister it decapitated turned out to be a little bit peeved and started to destabilise the government.

And even more amazingly, the Liberal Party was actually surprised when the prime minister it decapitated turned out to be a little bit peeved and started to destabilise the government.

It is dumbfounding enough that a bunch of political masterminds would not anticipate that a leader they cut down in his prime might seek some kind of retribution; it requires a whole new level of amazement to conceive that after watching the whole bloody tragedy plays out their opponents would still be caught pantless when their own deposed leader did exactly the same thing.

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It is a tribute to the Australian electorate’s patience — or perhaps merely its despondence — that after the Liberals’ first copycat coup 25 million people didn’t just storm Parliament House and stick Warnie on the throne.

But, for better or worse, they didn’t. Instead, as they had with Labor, they gave the Liberals the slimmest of second chances. And, just as Labor did, the Liberals stuffed it up.

Indeed, not content with repeating Labor’s mistakes, the Liberals went on to repeat their own.

At least when Labor rolled their second first term PM, they put the old one back in. It wasn’t enough to repair the damage but at least it displayed some evidence of intelligent life on the Monaro Plains.

Scott Morrison shakes hands with former PM Tony Abbott. Picture: Kym Smith

The Libs, on the other hand, attempted to knife a moderately unpopular leader and replace him with an extremely unpopular leader and, as it turned out, couldn’t even manage to do that. This is a party that even when it’s trying to shoot itself in the foot somehow manages to miss.

And then, to top it all off, they were left clutching their pearls in shock and indignation when the PM they just knifed declined an invitation to campaign for them. As my dear friend Craig Bennett would say: Pass the smelling salts!

And now the Liberals have replicated Labor’s bizarre rule of effectively banning MPs from doing their job, namely electing the best person to lead the country. During some late-night callisthenics at Parliament House, the Libs changed the party rules to make it impossible to roll a first term prime minister without two-thirds of the party room vote — an all but impossible target.

Scott Morrison has introduced “historic” new Liberal party laws that will make it extremely difficult for his party to turf him. Picture: Tracey Nearmy

Prime Minister Scott Morrison proudly hailed the rule change as an “historic decision” that was the biggest rule change since the party was founded by Robert Menzies in 1944. But of course there is a reason this rule has never before existed in the Liberals’ 74 year history: It never needed to.

It seems it is only now in the second decade of the 21st century, an age of unparalleled science and limitless knowledge, that MPs need a rule banning them from making stupid decisions. One wonders what the next rule will be — perhaps a ban on sticking your head in the oven or taking a dump standing up.

But maybe it is a symptom of the times. Much like today’s youth appears to crave censorship over sensibility and regulation instead of rebellion, today’s governments have declared themselves incapable of governing and so spend their time coming up with new rules to govern themselves. Our MPs have become Millennials.

And yet they are seemingly incapable of even understanding what it is they are doing — or indeed failing to do.

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In announcing these very changes, Scott Morrison said the rule change was about MPs taking responsibility for the catalogue of woe they have inflicted upon voters.

“We understand that frustration. We understand that disappointment. We acknowledge it and we take responsibility for it,” he said.

And yet this is the very opposite of taking responsibility. Taking responsibility means controlling your own actions, not inventing a rule to control them. It means doing the right and sensible thing because you know it’s the right and sensible thing to do, not because you’re forced to.

We elect our MPs because they tell us they’re the best people to decide what’s good for our communities and good for our nation. Now they tell us they need to ban themselves from trashing our democracy.

Voters find themselves disengaging as politicians busy themselves in a slagging match. Picture: Adam Yip

And all of this comes from the “Liberal” party — literally the party of freedom. A party that prides itself on the philosophy of personal responsibility and has just admitted that its elected representatives can’t be trusted to have any.

Now the party is like a madman who can’t stop punching himself in the face and has decided that the only solution is to cut his arms off.

And as both major parties descend into a slagging match over which is less worse than the other, voters will flock to even more dysfunctional basket cases like One Nation and the Greens and whatever Clive Palmer is saying on his billboards these days.

Once the electorate only had to decide between Dumb and Dumber. Now we have a choice between Dumb and Dumber and Dumberer. And that’s what really smarts.

— Joe Hildebrand co-hosts Studio 10, 8.30am weekdays, on Network Ten and is editor-at-large for news.com.au. Continue the conversation @Joe_Hildebrand