The NEG lottery winners and losers

An AMP executive admitted at Royal Commission hearings in Melbourne yesterday that an investor who ponied up with $100,000 would find his nest egg whittled away eventually to nothing. Adding interest minus commissions and fees, the unlucky punter would have lost almost $500 after three years.

Australia’s largest wealth manager has promised to provide some 12,500 existing investors a share of $5 million in compensation.

Meanwhile two unidentified people who are too stupid to understand probability pocketed a breezy $50 million each.

The Turnbull government was dragged kicking and screaming to announce the Financial Services Royal Commission. In the end it was left to the big banks to give it the green light. In public hearings where bank and finance company executives have been forced to make admissions of chronic malfeasance if not downright criminality, have shown not only that this Royal Commission was necessary, but that it should have happened years ago.

The Great Barrier Reef Foundation experienced the mother of all windfalls when it was handed $443 million by the government. The only difference is the GBRF did not actually buy a ticket in this lottery, nor did it excitedly flip through the back of the paper looking for the numbers.

The foundation’s chair, John Schubert, chairman of the Garvan Medical Research Institute, a former Esso CEO, former chair of the Commonwealth Bank and previously a director of BHP Billiton and Qantas, merely turned up to a meeting in Sydney on 9 April in an office where the only other two attendees, Malcolm Turnbull and Environment and Energy Minister, Josh Frydenberg, cut him a cheque.

At face value, it smacks of a Turnbull captain’s choice. The reasons for the almost half billion-dollar one off largesse, however, are more complicated and go to a $716 million spending commitment the Turnbull government made to UNESCO last year to ensure the Great Barrier Reef retained its World Heritage listing.

In other words, the Turnbull government can say the money or most of it has left its coffers although not a brass razoo has yet been spent on saving the reef and in all probability, the GBRF will have to contract government departments to assist in providing services.

Maybe the government’s best and perhaps only chance of re-election is to give $443 million to everyone who didn’t ask for it.

18 months ago, at Bill Leak’s wake, I had a discussion with two political observers of some note over a beer. I asked them how long they expected the Liberal Party to remain in its current form, structure and with the political muscle it has historically enjoyed. One, who is closer to the Liberal Party than the other, remained silent. The other suggested five to ten years. Two, I told them. And then I told them why.

The Liberal Party today is not the party of Menzies nor even of Howard. It is a party laced with intrinsic ideological conflict combined with toxic personality rivalries. These stresses and strains were going to be sorely tested over the same sex marriage issue but taken to the point of explosion over energy policy.

And here we are.

The amusing thing is voters haven’t got a clue what all the fuss is about.

One of the points of anger is that Turnbull has not sold or even adequately explained what the NEG is and how it will work within his own party room. What is even more bizarre is the people who vote them in or out have been wilfully left ignorant.

Whenever prime ministers and ministers of the crown babble in acronyms, the battle is already lost. One can almost the feel the eyes of a nation glaze over, the aggregated shifting of arse cheeks on couches and the collective reach for the remote.

Acronyms are a politician’s worst enemy, the tool of the lazy and/or uncertain. The punters may not oppose the policy. They simply have no idea what is being proposed. In the case of the NEG, all they will see is an unseemly brawl within the government. They may see resignations of cabinet ministers, they may see the prime minister toppled and replaced by a person they barely know.

They may witness a fully blown schism within the Liberal Party either before the next election or directly in its wake. I can virtually guarantee it.

The internal feud over energy policy is not just another nail in the coffin of the Turnbull government’s re-election prospects. It is a 15-centimetre long, galvanised, zinc-coated roofing nail that will keep the lid firmly shut. There will be no beyond the crypt Karloffian reanimations here.

We could trace the Liberal Party’s decline back many years. Suffice to say, it began in earnest on 14 September 2015 when Turnbull rolled a sitting prime minister. The stated reasons for doing so made no sense then and even less now.

Turnbull has failed to connect with voters, and if you asked any one of them what the Turnbull government is about, what it stands for, and what its agenda is, they could not tell you. That’s not the voter’s fault, by the way. The Turnbull government is bereft of purpose or direction.

The disconnect was reinforced in Turnbull’s awful performance in the 2016 election where Tony Abbott’s enormous majority was hacked back to just one.

Turnbull was outcampaigned by Shorten, routinely outplayed and outsmarted.

The double dissolution election that Turnbull faithfully assured the nation would sort the Senate out once and for all did precisely the reverse, and left the Upper House the sort of rolling freak show that the election of the Bearded Lady or Lobster Boy would only have raised the tone of the joint.

In the recent ‘Super Saturday’ by-elections, we saw Turnbull wagging his finger at voters, more interested in winning arguments than votes.

Bill Shorten already has a copy of the NEG draft legislation while Turnbull’s own partyroom does not. That tells you everything you need to know about where Turnbull’s best chances of survival lie. Labor will be disinclined to throw him a lifeline. Anyone who has witnessed Labor’s conduct over the last 20 years knows it regards the national interest as falling a long way back in second place to its own.

It is in Labor’s interests to stand back and watch the government tear itself apart.

You know, some days Shorten must feel like he’s won the lottery.

This column was first published in The Australian 17 August 2018.