By some miracle, Australia’s much-derided political class made it to the end of parliamentary year 2016 without coming to blows.
Malcolm Turnbull wanted to end the final sitting week with legislative wins, because legislative wins would result in the much-derided “elite” media class declaring, pliantly, and preferably on the nightly news bulletins, that progress was visible, palpable, wonderful – a semi-official history that would conduct out along the echo chamber.
In order to generate that cheery narrative of progress, the prime minister and his colleagues adopted a posture of make the damn deal, hang the cost, so what we saw in the final parliamentary sitting week was a game of Senate roulette, balls rolling, wheels spinning, a bunch of random landings that were later spun as grand bargains and cunning plans.
Let’s be clear what the final sitting week was: close combat and chaos.
There was progress all right, but it was progress at a price.
Just one of the random transactions of the last parliamentary sitting week of 2016 tells the story.
The government had the numbers in the Senate on Thursday to pass a backpackers tax rate of 13% without totting up additional expenditure, but it chose instead to do a deal with the Greens that landed an effective tax rate of 13% (once a lower clawback of superannuation payments was added to the mix) and required an additional $100m worth of expenditure for Landcare.
Now, much as Landcare could use some additional investment, particularly given the government has pulled hundreds of millions out of the program since 2013, the backpackers tax was supposed to be a budget repair measure to help address the now long-forgotten budget emergency the Coalition used to issue hourly apocalyptic warnings about.
Asked to explain why the government took the more expensive option when it had a cheaper deal available, the prime minister told reporters he loved Landcare and wouldn’t have a word said against it, which is delightful as far as it goes, but hardly explains the earlier defunding.
Let’s just apply a quick sniff test. If you had burst into the prime minister’s office early on Thursday morning, and told him you had a spare $100m burning a hole in your pocket, and he could spend it on anything he fancied, would Turnbull’s answer have been: “I know, let’s top up Landcare!”
Seems pretty unlikely, doesn’t it?
In any case, pragmatism in Canberra is now a virtue. “We’ll do a deal with anybody to get things done,” the manager of government business, Christopher Pyne, said on Friday with characteristic chutzpah.
In many respects this is a good thing. Having a prime minister prepared to be flexible and, dare we say, agile, consigns to history the grim futility of the Abbott period – all those petulant tantrums about how the feral Senate wouldn’t rubber stamp manifestly unfair policy propositions and broken election promises.
There are two other main upsides.
Having to deal your way to legislative victory does, in some instances at least, provide the prime minister with protection against internal ideologues who want to shift the government’s centre of gravity to the hard right.
Deals struck across a spectrum of players in the parliament also have the prospect of presenting to the voters as genuinely representative, which is no bad thing in a climate where many voters regard the parliamentary precinct as little more than a toxic swamp.
That’s the good news.
But here’s the bad news.
The government has set some very big precedents in the end-of-year rush to stage a capital V victory for the prime minister. It has basically told the Senate to name its arbitrary price, and if the wheel spins in the right direction at the right time, bounty will follow.
Through its own behaviour, the government has told the Senate blocs – who are in fierce competition among themselves for oxygen and influence, and some of whom are in direct competition with the Coalition for votes – the best way to get what you want is hold out until the last minute and then bring the hammer down.
In a managerial sense, if you incentivise deal-or-no-deal, it’s a recipe for maximum mischief in the red chamber, which I suspect is rather enjoying its transformation during the last two parliaments from Sleepy Hollow to WWE.
Naming your arbitrary price presumably won’t thrill the ratings agencies, who are sitting on the sidelines, revving their engines, analysing the pattern of behaviour emerging from the 45th parliament.
The treasurer, Scott Morrison, would presumably wave this concern away by saying all the sweet deals will be offset by savings (as he already has about the backpacker tax handshake) – and that may be true, or at least true enough to be valid.
But that rationale creates a dynamic where the government is locked into responding to other people’s priorities rather than getting clear air for its own.
You are, in essence, cutting your own programs to fund the spending priorities of your political rivals, which is an enormously generous way to run a government, but will inevitably create internal tensions over time.
Being pragmatic in politics is a good working disposition to adopt, but it has to be balanced with the clear articulation of values and priorities, lest voters fall into confusion about what you stand for.
And as the parliamentary year closes out, this remains the biggest problem facing the prime minister and his government: there’s still a vacuum at the centre of the mission.
If you had to explain the raison d’être of the Turnbull government as of the first weekend in December 2016, the only honest answer you could provide would be: sorry folks, at this point, not a clue.
