Charles Wooley and Eric Abetz: The odd couple
Filling 52 columns a year has never been quite the herculean labour it might have been, thanks to one man: Senator Eric Abetz, writes Charls Wooley.
Opinion
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After five years of writing this column I suddenly find myself contemplating a future state of Abetzlessness.
It is frowned upon in my trade for opinion writers to write about the difficulty of finding something to write about.
But in my case, filling 52 columns a year has never been quite the herculean labour it might have been, thanks to one man: Senator Eric Abetz.
Eric and I have scarcely met. Over the years there might have been the occasional radio or television interview, but no social intercourse. Outside of the studio what was there to say? No common ground. We agree on nothing. From woodchipping to social reforms, climate change to a federal ICAC, salmon farming to the price of eggs, we were always the flintiest of chalk and the hardest of cheddar.
There were times when I came to agree with Eric only to find he had switched to adopt my previous position.
For instance, when I warned in this column about the improvidence of allowing a Chinese company to buy our biggest dairy company, Eric told this newspaper that I was “xenophobic”. Unlike Pauline Hanson I didn’t have to look it up. I argued I was no Hansonite, but I did have a fear of the Chinese Communist Party.
Eric had, to my mind, always been a dead-set anti-communist. But in our star-crossed ways it only ever took me to set a course similar to his to find him violently gybing on to my previous tack.
Like when I supported the good conservative right-thinking burghers of Swansea in their opposition to a massive communist Chinese colony on their doorstep; Eric’s protege, Jonno (the former Jonathon) Duniam described such people as “the anti-everything brigade” and Eric readily agreed.
Later, when Eric reverted to his former role of an anti-communist cold warrior and condemned China’s military ambitions in the Pacific, I felt impelled to adopt the opposite stance. I cast around looking for some evidence of President Xi’s better self.
I’m still looking.
Meanwhile, by some dark occult practice at midnight in the Liberal graveyard, “Jonno” (the former Jonathon Duniam) came to replace his patron, seizing Eric’s long-held number one place on the Senate ticket and relegating the old magician to the unwinnable number three spot, behind the unknown and shadowy figure of Wendy Askew.
Don’t ask “Wendy who?” In the words of Adam Bandt: “Just Google it, mate.”
There has always been some degree of ill-feeling within the Libs about Abetz’s masterful control. Former Tasmanian Liberal premier Will Hodgman once confided to me in a weak moment at a Hutchins losing footy game: “The greatest cross I have to bear is Eric Abetz.”
Will said: “I have often told him if he stood for a seat in the state’s Lower House, he would totally fail to get elected.”
In the end, what legerdemain, what treachery, what malevolent alliances brought down the good senator?
We will only know if Eric exacts a terrible tell-all vengeance.
Canvassing my conservative sources, I suspect the deadly potion was brewed in the Northland, which has always been coven-central for the worst witchery of Tasmanian conservatism.
The dark bourne, where Robin Gray, John Gay and Edmund Rouse are still held in secret esteem. And where all things Hobart are despised.
It must have been around midnight on one of those bone-chilling, foul and foggy Launceston nights, straight out of Macbeth, deep in the reedy, odorous Tamar marshlands when Eric’s enemies brewed their poison:
“Fillet of fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake,
Eye of newt and toe of frog.
Wool of bat and tongueof dog,
Adder’s fork and blind worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and howler’swing,
For a charm of powerfultrouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.”
How well Shakespeare understood the evils that underlie all political ambition.
It was Eric’s long-time support of the above-the-line voting rort that eventually backfired on him.
In the same play Macbeth has an apt line:
“We but teach bloody instructions,
Which, having been taught, return to plague the inventor.”
CHANGES of government are always occasions for optimism, among those of us who hope for better.
It is tempting to look out for fairer days ahead if only because the ScoMo government was one of the most divisive and mean-spirited I can remember since Malcolm Fraser. And if you don’t remember him kiddies, don’t Google. Just consider yourselves fortunate.
It’s only a week, but so far so good. In Japan, in the same room Albo didn’t seem any less compos mentis than the leader of the free world. Joe even congratulated our new PM for being awake in the meeting.
Meanwhile, Penny Wong won plaudits all round for her strong appearance in Fiji and I am looking forward down the track to what the Chinese Communist Party will make of her.
Conservative newspapers that supported Josh Frydenberg have conceded that the new Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, has “slotted smoothly into his new role”.
There seems no need for alarm. Nothing got nationalised. The capitalists still run the joint.
It’s business as usual except for a worrying change of character on the part of the incoming Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton, who is now threatening us with his “gentler and more caring side”.
This was scary enough for Labor’s Tanya Plibersek to compare Dutton with the Harry Potter villain, Voldemort.
Both are bald and tall, but still Albo didn’t think the comparison was fair. “Not acceptable,” he said, and Tanya had to apologise. It is clear that the new PM really does want to do “politics differently,” as he hopes for a parliamentary era that will be “more inclusive, more respectful and less divisive”.
Well, we can only hope, even if it goes against all experience.
MEANWHILE, in our little sandstone parliament on the Hobart waterfront it was as if there had also been a change of government without the inconvenience of an election.
The unelected new premier, Jeremy Rockliff, caused a popular revolution with his surprise plan to restore the House of Assembly to 35 members at the next election.
This is so blindingly obvious it would be a waste of words to praise it.
It is not often that Cassy O’Connor is stuck for a line, but for once there was such sweetness and light on the floor of our parliament that there wasn’t much to say.
“I want to sincerely thank the Premier for his courage and his leadership,” Cassy said, and no one disagreed.
I know a lot of you don’t like politicians and you don’t want 10 more of them on generous six-figure salaries, but the truth is the joint hasn’t worked since 1998 when the major parties agreed to cut 10 seats for no more lofty a reason than to make life harder for the Greens. It was a stupid move that made life harder for everyone.
If you want to get rid of politicians, there are 15 of them in the Tasmanian Upper House. Their average salary of about $140,000 is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the cost of funding this curious colonial relic.
Of course, they won’t go easily. It took two goes in the early 1920s to get rid of Queensland’s upper house.
In the banana-land parliament the first set of abolitionist candidates enjoyed the pay, the free tucker and the grog so much they changed their minds.
It would be the same here. The sitting members would probably have to be evicted. The best of them (and there are some good’uns) can set their sights on the 10 new seats in the Lower House.
But one of them might have to fight for a place with Eric Abetz. (You see I just can’t let go of him.)
The rest will have to look for real jobs.
Take the time to make your vote count and vote below the line
IF Labor wins today’s election, there’s a small problem. They will inherit a total gross Australian Government debt of around $834bn. A portion of that – $300bn – was additional debt accrued during the Covid pandemic.
Incoming governments almost always play up “the bad set of books” bequeathed by the “incompetence and wastefulness” of the outgoing government. The urgent work of “cleaning up the mess we were left with” is pretty much bi-partisan code for doing very little of what was promised.
It’s a fair enough argument, but only for about three months. By spring (if most polls have been right) we will have forgotten ScoMo had anything to do with it and will blame Albo.
That is the beauty of democracy in our happy land. We are not great recriminators, or perhaps we have the memory of a goldfish. Either way it is remarkable how forgiving we are and how quickly we forget.
Whether it’s the transgressions of high-profile members of the government, like Sussan Ley or Barnaby Joyce (disgraced one day and restored the next) it is always too easy to take advantage of both our good nature and our collective amnesia.
Nor is this tendency restricted to one side of politics.
The late Senator Kimberley Kitching’s mistreatment by Labor’s so called “mean girls” was soon forgotten and today they still remain among the brightest stars in the skies above planet Albo. The Canberra press pack worried that bone for a few weeks but when Albo attended the National Press Club lunch on Wednesday, it wasn’t anywhere on the media menu.
Fouling a seven-year-old at a kid’s soccer game in Devonport, ScoMo has been playing to his own strength this week. Coming from the world of advertising he knows impression and promise, not substance, sells the product.
Television ads for cars aren’t talking about the motor or the performance. In the wake of lockdowns, they are selling not a mechanical contraption but an idea: the freedom your new set of wheels will bring you.
Likewise, with Covid running rampant, making Australia one of the highest per-capita infected countries in the world, the PM is saying that “coming out of Covid” he looks forward to “people not talking about Covid every day”.
Despite a week of extraordinary overload on our nation’s hospitals ScoMo is selling freedom: the dream rather than the reality.
And today the question is after two years of fearful living, how much do you want to buy that dream?
As an adman the PM is a master of perception, of market surveys, focus groups and opinion polls. He knows us the way an animal behaviourist knows his lab rats. Knows how devoutly we wish for the cheese and how much we might want to believe we can have it without the trap.
One opinion poll ScoMo must have read avidly this week was the Guardian Essential Poll which affirms that Australians, despite all the problems that beset our nation are “happy”.
Yes, we worry about the economy, the environment, national security, aged care and homelessness. But two thirds of us, comfortably enough ensconced in our own homes, contemplate these problems with enough equanimity to consider ourselves “happy”.
This time the “miracle” ScoMo is hoping for is based on hard-headed secular polling. The mob might not like him, but if they are happy, why should they stampede?
Fifty years ago, the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan enshrined the notion of happiness as the country’s most important social indicator. That nation declared, “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product.”
In a way they were just reinventing the democracy prayer wheel.
In 1776 Thomas Jefferson and his revolutionary associates enshrined the ideal of human happiness in the United States Declaration of Independence; “That all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
“The pursuit of happiness” is a delightful expression to find in a constitutional document. The Australian Constitution has nothing like it. Ours is a dry, dull, legalistic outline of procedure. It says much about freedom of trade between states but nothing about the important things like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
But our Constitution does provide for the happiness of the little state of Tasmania should we wish to seize the day.
“The Senate shall be composed of senators for each state, directly chosen by the people of the State, voting as one electorate.”
Which in effect means each state of the Australian Federation, regardless of its population has an equal number of senators.
That is why Tasmania with 540,000 people has the same number of senators (12) as NSW with 8,000,000 people.
It isn’t a rort. It was the price of our joining the Federation. The Senate is the State’s House where the equality of representation means that the smaller states are not swamped by members from the more populous states.
By contrast, in the House of Representatives, NSW for instance has 47 seats and Tasmania only 5.
That’s five out of 151 seats. Not much clout.
Which is why the really important vote you cast today as a Tasmanian is your Senate vote. Choose the right people and we might punch above our weight. Or continue to choose people less concerned with the wellbeing of Tasmanians than with securing their place in the party hierarchy along with the $211,000 per annum basic salary and you guarantee nothing will change.
Above the line you have to number 6 boxes. Below the line you have to number 12 boxes.
That’s not so such of a chore when you consider you are selecting your own senators rather than those chosen for you.
Even if you have a favourite within a major party, beware voting the party ticket. You might prefer (to stretch the argument) to support Eric Abetz. Voting the party ticket for the Senate might seem easier and quicker but in fact, you would be wasting that vote. Abetz was dramatically busted to the unelectable number three position on the Liberal Senate ticket after a palace coup. The sordid details of that we will learn if Abetz is not re-elected.
But for now, the veteran Senator campaigns as a de-facto independent conservative (pointedly without the usual Liberal branding) requesting your number 1 vote where it now counts for him: below the line.
Yes, I know. It is salutary for Abetz. He has survived for so long on in-house political skills keeping him top of the Liberal Senate ticket. Now his political future depends on convincing electors to be judiciously and independently mindful when they vote. He now wants them to exercise unfiltered democracy, directly voting for an experienced candidate who might have been relegated by his party but still has a valuable contribution to make.
I have not always agreed with Eric Abetz, but I will if he belatedly sees the light on the electoral travesty of above the line voting. It is a distortion of the democratic process which I suspect, after decades of benefit, Eric has now come to recognise the hard way.
For the electorate, voting the party ticket is to accept being rorted by faceless powerbrokers and by the worst of the party system. Too frequently it results in the election of insipid and compliant nonentities. Which is why I am able to defy you to immediately name even half of your current 12 Tasmanian senators.
Meanwhile good luck picking winners and I’ll see you on the other side for a democracy sausage.
Get it over with already – We’ve made up our minds: May 14
You don’t have to like him.” A member of ScoMo’s government said this week. “It is really a question of who is up to the job of being prime minister of this country.”
Let’s pretend I’m having an Albo moment and can’t quite remember who said that. It could have been almost anyone in the Coalition because hardly anyone there likes Scott Morrison. His deputy Barnaby Joyce was certainly not Robinson Crusoe when he described his boss as “a hypocrite and a liar”.
Though coming from Barnaby, some might see that as a character reference.
Having spent some enjoyable time down the country road with the Nationals leader, I couldn’t possibly comment.
If ScoMo doesn’t win an outright victory his own party will have no compunction at all about replacing him with someone more “likeable”. I fancy the very decent Josh Frydenberg but if ScoMo doesn’t get back it might be because Josh has lost his so-called “teal seat” of Kooyong.
In those unhappy circumstances Peter Dutton would be interesting. As the instructions said on the Chinese fireworks of my childhood: “Light blue torch paper and retreat to safe distance.”
In the Labor trenches, at first there was internal alarm at what seemed to be Albo’s early onset Joe Biden Syndrome.
The polls this week suggest the voters don’t really care, but the ALP leader will surely not survive anything short of a clear electoral victory.
Both leaders claim they will not deal with the minor parties nor the independents if you, the people, fecklessly elect outsiders. True enough. In the event of a hung parliament, neither leader will still be around to do any deals. But a new leader will. That is what Westminster parliamentary politics is about; the prime minister is the person with the skill to negotiate a majority on the floor of the lower house by dealing with the elected representatives that voters in their wisdom have chosen.
Well, that’s the theory and it’s why around the world most democracies are coalitions, often of many parties and individuals. It is a dark and pernicious threat to democracy in this country whenever the two major parties tell us we must only vote for either of them. They threaten anarchy or even worse; that like naughty children, we will be sent back a second time to get it right.
Wouldn’t you be happy to see both leaders replaced in the event of a hung parliament? Jason Clare is my Labor choice. He is a political star, a comet really, who blazed into our ken only because Albo was stricken with the China virus. If not this next term, put your money on Clare as a future Labor prime minister. Standout candidates for that job emerge only once in decades.
When I had a national radio show, Australia’s most cunning commercial broadcast boss, the late Sam Chisholm told me: “Never take time off and if you do make sure you don’t fill-in with someone better than you are.”
Albo might not have seen Clare coming, only because almost all of the shadow cabinet are better public performers than their leader. If the polls are right and Albo forms government after next week, we can only hope that his real strength lies behind the scenes, as a team leader. But if he fails to form government watch out for Jason Clare.
ScoMo said this past week that the election was, “not a popularity contest”. But in fact, he was wrong. For a long time now, it has been a popularity contest in the American Presidential style. I would not really be voting for a local candidate so much as for Morrison or Albanese or (in my case) neither. In my electorate of Lyons, I can hardly vote for Labor’s social media disaster, the sitting member Brian Mitchell, who once posted about “massaging boobies” and about women’s inability during protracted debate to control their bladders. “We are going to need mops,” he once said of an ALP national conference.
Labor’s Brian Mitchell at the Ingham chicken plant at Sorell on Wednesday, May 11, 2022.
Nor am I likely to vote for the Liberal candidate Susie Bower, an unknown who doesn’t have a record of silliness, but who comes from the Meander Valley and has rarely if ever been down Dodge City way.
The point is again, like all of us I will be voting for Albo or ScoMo or against both. As a Dodge City local told me told me this week, “I don’t know the candidates and it doesn’t matter. I’m voting for the butcher, not the maggot on the block.”
In Nine’s debate at the beginning of the week, the politics drowned out the policies. Two blokes, whom we didn’t much like, yelled at one and other for an hour during which we learned nothing. For most Australians, important issues like national security, aged care, health, climate change, and integrity in politics seemed to go unaddressed.
So, what can we do?
Well one sensible thing would be to vote below the line. Not to slavishly endorse either of the major party tickets which were designed by faceless powerbrokers for whom you are the least of their considerations. Take the time to make up your own ticket. Vote across the parties if you wish and for independents and minor parties. For instance, my Senate vote will include the Local Party’s Leanne Minshull, the Greens Peter Whish-Wilson, someone from the Shooters and Fishers and Eric Abetz because I would miss him.
And Dusty the dog has drawn my attention to the Animal Justice Party.
Admittedly psephologists would be confused by such a messy and contradictory voting pattern. But surely my way, even if it brings the end of the world as we know it, is so much better than being lectured on how to vote by the major parties.
In contrast to Nine’s shout-fest, Seven’s midweek debate was civil and sedate, with a more sensible set which placed the moderator between the immoderate. It worked well, though perhaps it was not so entertaining without the shouting. But if we wanted to, we could actually hear what the leaders were saying. Though so late in the campaign is anyone still listening?
Polling suggests the punters have picked a side and it’s a landslide to Labor. But as we know from last time, polls can be so wrong. In politics as in earthquakes, you can’t insure against an act of God. ScoMo had his “miracle’ in 2019, but surely this time God is too busy in Ukraine.
Well, He should be. The ratbaggery of Australian party politics is unworthy of divine intervention.
Having already made up their minds, this week millions will cast early votes in order to get away to somewhere quiet on election day and try to ignore the whole thing.
But they will wake up as always on the following Monday morning and know the truth of the wise old French saying, “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose”: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
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