Jack the Insider: Turnbull’s Tuesday heroes, Friday zeroes

Malcolm Turnbull is like the Wile E. Coyote of Australian politics. Possibly this is giving Bill Shorten more credit than he deserves as the Road Runner.

Another Friday afternoon, another shambles for the Turnbull government. The Deputy PM, Barnaby Joyce has gone. Fiona Nash joins him in walking out the door. It is proof if it were needed the Turnbull government are champs on Tuesdays but chumps by the weekend.

There is a prescient sense of deja vu about this. The Turnbull government often starts the weeks well but come the weekend, the control of the agenda has been lost, a scandal has emerged, or infighting on the backbenches has turned into a donnybrook. The familiar theme is, in any one week of the Turnbull government, one step forward and three back.

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Indeed it has happened so often the thought occurs that possibly Malcolm Turnbull isn’t very good at being prime minister.

The harsher verdict is Turnbull doesn’t understand politics, never has and never will and he is locked in a battle with a man who has lived and breathed it from the time he left school.

The brouhaha surrounding the Registered Organisations Commission investigation of the AWU donations to Get Up! and to Labor candidates at the 2007 election, including Bill Shorten and the subsequent AFP raid on the AWU offices has had so many parallels with the Utegate fiasco it was difficult not to believe we had slipped into a wormhole and gone back in time.

Back in 2009, Eric Abetz led the charge from the then opposition in the Senate. Later he apologised for his role in the Utegate scandal and how he was misled by the chameleonic Godwin Grech but the then leader of the opposition never did. That tells me that Turnbull chose to learn nothing and the knock on him then — intemperate, impatient, reckless and unwilling to consult with colleagues — remains the knock on him now.

Then and now it is Turnbull as the Wile E. Coyote of Australian politics chasing down his opponents, failing ignominiously, leaving him battered and smeared in cordite. Possibly this is giving Bill Shorten more credit than he deserves. He doesn’t have the speed, agility and let’s face it the bountiful good luck of the Road Runner. But likewise, Turnbull doesn’t have the dark genius of the ACME Co. to call upon as required.

Let’s put aside the events of Wednesday and Thursday where the Employment Minister Michaelia Cash was left embarrassed and hanging on to her job by a thread for a moment and examine events as they unfolded on Tuesday.

I was chatting with some old stagers and experienced political observers on Tuesday night. We had been around long enough to know an event such as the raid on the AWU almost always blows back on the instigator. Of course we weren’t to know that Senator Cash’s office would become embroiled in the scandal but there was a common view that this was a 24-hour news story and the following 24 hours would produce something much bigger that would once again deliver the Turnbull government from Tuesday heroes to Friday zeroes.

Sure enough, come Wednesday evening there it was. You can set your clock by it. You could almost hear the panicked calls coming from the PMO. “Can we get the jaws of life down here? It seems the Prime Minister has got his head stuck in a chair again.”

How would non-aligned voters have viewed the raid on the offices of the AWU? Many would have regarded it with confusion, simply not understanding what was going on while others would have regarded a police raid based on 11-year-old donations with distaste.

Those Australians who had come to this country from totalitarian states, be they in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa or parts of Asia would have viewed the raid with alarm if not outright fear.

A great number of voters across the country would have seen what was happening and been left with disquiet. In short this was no vote-winner and that was before the backfire. Within the Turnbull government, there appears to be no measuring of political pitfalls, no appreciation of electoral response and no risk management in the event that things take a turn for the worse.

We know the AFP acted independently and the ROC obtained a warrant of its own accords but the perception at least is the government has been the architect of all the sound and fury. Certainly the government spent Wednesday morning crowing about it the raid with the PM and his senior ministers standing under banks of microphones saying, “Bill Shorten has questions to answer”.

Whether he does or not, it doesn’t really matter now. Perception is what counts and the perception is the Turnbull government lit the fuse on one of those cartoon bowling ball-sized bombs, hurled it at Shorten only to see it bounce back off the ACME Co. giant rubber bands, leaving the PM to pull out of the sign that says ‘Yikes’ with an explosion imminent.

The PM has now lost his deputy and another minister, leaving a government in tatters, its majority on the floor gone and the possibility of the parliament being prorogued and an ensuing constitutional crisis.

It’s deja vu all over again and another Friday where last Tuesday seems an eon ago.