This is a weird selection of a shadow ministry and one that stores up bountiful troubles for the future.
Granted that short of complete self-immolation, which in fairness the opposition tried last week, nothing that Sussan Ley’s tribe does just now will make any difference to voters who aren’t paying attention.
There’s a noble illogicality, a determined refusal to use relevant expertise in relevant areas, and overall a studied commitment to incompetence about this shadow ministry.
Angus Taylor gets defence? Taylor as opposition Treasury spokesman in the previous term of parliament was the Coalition frontbencher most unsympathetic to making a serious financial commitment to defence.
He has been the most sceptical of any senior Liberal about the ability of defence to make meaningful use of extra money.
Similarly, in government he did little about resilience or supply chain security.
He was surely as discredited as Peter Dutton by the election campaign and has now probably been leapfrogged in the leadership stakes by Andrew Hastie.
Michaelia Cash gets foreign affairs? This portfolio, like Treasury, is a huge opportunity in opposition because it’s always in the news.
Kevin Rudd used it brilliantly in opposition.
The Liberals have, in Dave Sharma, a superbly qualified professional diplomat, smart politically, embodies core Liberal values and knows foreign affairs intimately.
So naturally Sharma gets the smallest possible frontbench role.
All Liberal leaders seem to be instinctively hostile to colleagues who build independent media and professional profiles, which is why the great Jim Molan was never given defence.
A lot of these weird decisions store up certain future trouble.
Demoting and humiliating Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is surely the stupidest single thing Ley has done in her career.
Price made a mistake jumping from the Nationals to the Liberals. She put way too much faith in Taylor as a potential leader to replace Dutton.
Nonetheless, in a virtual cricket team that would struggle to field a suburban grade side, she is one of the only Coalition politicians to have scored a Test century, so to speak.
Effective leadership means harnessing the talents of colleagues you might not necessarily like.
Keeping Price in Indigenous affairs would have been a kind of demotion, in that it wouldn’t have been a promotion.
But it would have ensured one of the Coalition’s only strong media and community performers remained an important national voice.
Ley has effectively chosen to leave Steve Waugh in the dressing room. This is monumentally stupid, morally ungenerous and will surely end in tears.
Tim Wilson is a good promotion. Dan Tehan in energy is a good choice.
And James Paterson was one of the better performers during the last term.
But the unresolved conflict over a target for net-zero carbon emissions remains in the Liberal Party. It is bound to explode in time, and it festers across the whole Coalition, as evident in the almost equally suboptimal National Party frontbench choices.
By far the most policy-competent and intellectually substantial National is Queensland senator Matt Canavan. He can’t be on the frontbench because he won’t support net zero.
A Nationals partyroom with the party’s two most effective politicians, Canavan and Barnaby Joyce, on the backbench is bound for trouble.
The one benefit of a Coalition split is we would have got a serious debate on net zero.
The Canavan position is probably shared by most Liberals.
On ABC’s Four Corners, Hastie, the hope of the Liberal side, declared he was breaking free of net zero, and the question was why Australians couldn’t use coal and uranium if it’s morally and politically OK to export these overseas.
No doubt Hastie will toe a shadow cabinet line. But the Liberal Party is bitterly divided over this as centre-right parties, such as the Nationals in New Zealand, and indeed whole nations such as the US, are abandoning the inherently fraudulent concept of net zero.
The problem is the Liberals lack the courage of their convictions – to mount a serious critique not of climate change but of the net-zero target and to campaign for an alternative passionately.
But they also lack the courage of their lack of convictions – to pretend convincingly they believe in net zero.
The new shadow cabinet is proof of the old adage: nothing is so bad that it can’t get worse.
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