Table Talk: Bob Ellis on Film and Theatre

Today is a measure of how small an arsenal the Liberals have. Once again they spoke of Thomson’s criminality; once again, they claimed Rudd was coming back.

Everything else they tried on, zilched. Hockey said he would cleave the tax office; that he might reduce the child rebate; that Howard’s giveaways, though they caused the current deficit, were okay with him; that he hated homosexuals marrying; that the most-praised economy in the world is in ‘emergency’; ‘emergency’ being redefined as ‘not being in suplus yet’; that the head of Treasury was lying with his every breath but his job was not in danger.

It was mooted that the Liberals would sell the ABC — to Singo? Gina? Lachlan? — and would take away the schoolkids’ money, because they said Labor ‘was going to do it anyway.’

They haven’t got many places to go any more. Only Slipper, Thomson, Rudd and the boats will get them headlines, and their boats policy — piracy, plus grovelling to Indonesia — looks more and more like lunacy.

But they have 114 days to go, and no good news anywhere.

Discuss.

What is wrong with the following sentence:

‘Newspoll is owned by Murdoch and behaves honestly’.

?

Hockey’s Press Club address in the Great Hall of Parliament was unimpressive, genial, mannerly, good-humoured, and beset now and then with with shafts of lunacy.

He said Martin Parkinson would keep his job though his numbers were obedient fabrications. He said Labor would cancel the schoolkids’ money within a month of winning, and he was astonished it wasn’t cancelled in the Budget. He kept saying Swan’s figures were lies, though they weren’t Swan’s figures but Parkinson’s, and Parkinson was lying when he said they were his.

Brown and stomach-stapled in a suit ill-cut by his brother the bankrupt Chatswood menswear business failure, he looked more like an Iranian rug merchant than is good for the Liberal Party which is mostly Anglo and sniffy still. He said he could not betray his principles, and hell-bound sodomites must not marry, though he ‘respected’ the opinions of those who said they could.

It is possible that Joe is not very bright. He has redefined the word ‘emergency’ to mean ‘not being in surplus yet’, but he won’t say when we will be in surplus if he is in charge of the money. He says he can’t possibly predict that without getting the figures. The figures were supplied this morning.

The dismay of the journalists was vivid on their faces, the silences palpable, the questions hostile. The stories will be mild but, in Joseph Heller’s words, ‘Something Happened’.

The turning point has been reached, I think. Labor, on 48.5 now (once you reconfigure Katter’s preferences), will be ahead after the weekend.

On the weekend a lot of Young Liberals — the party’s future — will vote to sell off the ABC to Gina Rinehart or Singo or Lachlan Murdoch.

And it’s all downhill from there.

Hockey has no trust in Parkinson’s numbers and will not fire him? What will he do with him?

10.15 am

No doubt the extra charges laid against Craig will be more to do with ice creams than whores, and with local indications that he would retain his seat, and rejoin the Labor Party after his re-election.

The malleability of the Victorian Police in this matter is not unexpected, given their nasty criminal history, nor the desperation of the Victorian Liberals, in the day after it became known they wanted to privatise the ABC, and would put this to the State Conference on the weekend, to find a ‘sexy’ distraction from their own internal ructions, now approaching fratricide, farce, musical comedy, and schism.

When I know more, I will add to this.

10.37 am

Hmm.

The ‘total amount’ of money spent is now 42,000, down from an initial slanderous overestimate by Laurie Oakes of half a million. 7,000 of this is for the drab, slack hooker he didn’t turn up for twice, when he was in Perth and on the Central Coast, and was nonetheless paid for, probably, by a forged electronic signature who said she hadn’t met him. That leaves 35,000 over seven years, for ice creams, taxi rides and cigarettes, and sumptuous Chinese meals, at a weekly rate of … 96 dollars.

Wow.

And this is before there were union rules — imposed by his crazed Liberal-voting successor Kathy Jackson, who increased her own wage by 200,000 dollars and gave herself a new Volvo and lots of baby-sitting — on what could be spent on what.

The horrific total here alleged is … 13 dollars a day.

To the stocks with him; pelt him with rotten fruit; carve ‘Thief’ in his forehead.

How dare he.

11.14 am

In the Fairfax report there is mention for the first time of ‘pornography’.

In the ABC report, no such item.

It is important the relevant Fairfax reporter, Kate McClymont, who started all this, and ruined my life too, be dealt with severely.

She is sitting on a report linking Abbott with Torbay and Obeid, and will not let it out.

I encourage her to do so lest I come down on her like a ton of bricks.

11.45 am

A call from Craig’s electoral assistant, David Gardiner, who is in Queensland on holiday suffering the flu. It is ndeed, he tells me, more ice creams, taxi rides and cigarettes, which they knew about and expected would be added by these scumbags at a moment convenient to the Liberals.

There was a part of the conversation I should not reveal, and Craig may — or may not — speak to the media soon.

David said that there was no mention of pornography as far as he knew. A typical hateful McClymont hyperbolical inexactitude.

Or, as we old-fashoned liberals like to call it, a Big Lie.

4.03 pm

At Bookoccino drinking cammomile and reading the news online. Craig may be the first man in world history on 169 charges no reporter clarifies. It would be good if ‘caffe latte — 2.50′ were on the list of heinous offences, or ‘taxi home — 9.50′; but this of course would humanise him. And that would never do.

No poll of his electorate has appeared either. Not too hard to do. He would have got a weekend ago, I think, 53 percent two-party preferred; but now there is to be a Labor candidate, he may be down to 35. It would be fair if a poll were done. And the hooker found, of course, and interviewed.And asked what she did on the two nights he did not turn up.

Perhaps I could organise a poll myself.

I need five young people with mobile phones and a day to spend on the Central Coast, who were willing not just to ring a hundred landlines each but to speak to, oh, a hundred people in supermarkets and parking lots and ask what they think.

I will seek volunteers.

8.30 pm

Pyne has just told Richo he woukd not accept Craig’s vote even if it was what elect them to government in a No Confidence motion. His vote was tainted, he said, and he must therefore, like a nigger, go to the back of the bus and not enjoy the democracy, and the parliamentary vote, the Central Coast elected him to.

How seriously mad these people are.

And how doomed.

There are no engagements the Liberals have won since the launch of their gimcrack broadband, and the number is quite a few.

The very fast train; the need for a surplus; the need to keep the Baby Bonus; the need to keep Michelle Rowland away from her baby; the initial refusal of a levy for the NDIS; their refusal to turn up for the NDIS debate; the Battle of the Prime Minister’s False Tears; the battle over the worthlessness of Bracks; the need for a bigger GST and a smaller super; Abbott’s refusal of a conscience vote on gay marriage; the battle with O’Farrell over the ‘con’ of Gonski; the need to privatise the ABC: all these fairly significant skirmishes they have lost outright.

It is hard to see how they can survive any more such losses. They are seriously bleeding. And there are 115 days to go.

More and more it seems like Labor, by a landslide.

Of 10971 votes cast thus far, 1755 are in favour of privatising the ABC and SBS and 9217 against, in a poll in the Age and the smh.

The enormity of this proportion would argue the Liberals have lost at least some votes overnight, perhaps as many as 1 or 2 percent of the Australian electorate they won’t get back. Many of them would have been ethnic Australians afraid of losing their foreign language news services and foreign language movies.

You can vote in this survey for seven more hours, and I urge you to.

I presume it was McTernan who proposed the September 14 election date be announced in February. The results for Labor have been spectacular.

For they now have time to argue things. In a 35 day campaign the American tornadoes, for instance, could overwhelm four days you cannot afford to lose. But in a 218 day campaign you can survive it. You have time.

Thus it was we have had time to bring up and thrash out the persecuted baby; the worth of Gonski; the wastefulness of the Baby Bonus; the acceptability of the NDIS levy; the acceptability to New Zealand, Britain and Barry O’Farrell of gay marriage; the folly of Abbott forbidding a free vote on it; the stupidity of Paul Murray saying the Prime Minister’s tears were false, she was ‘bunging it on’ when she cried for disabled children; the cruelty of Julie Bishop, who wanted to sack a Victorian hero, Steve Bracks, from a job he deserved; the moral oddity of Abbott, who opposed gay marriage, defending a pederast, John Nestor; the moral repulsiveness of Abbott, dressed as a priest, seducing women; the memoir by Kevin Lee of the ‘homosexual culture’ Abbott went to college in but did not snitch on; the foolishness, while tornadoes fulminated, of him continuing to oppose action on climate change; the unpopularity of his cut-and paste broadband; the resurgence of the republican debate, with him and Turnbull on opposite sides; the ugliness of the Howard cabinet which he, Abbott, proudly evoked in his Budget reply; the fraudulence of the Newspoll which asserted that Gillard had gained a quarter of a million votes but Labor not one; the Liberals’ opposition to the empowering of local government; the Liberals’ plan for a bigger GST, to be enacted next year after a Double Dissolution election in May 2015; the innocence of Slipper and Thomson, and the guilt of Ashby and Brough; the bizarre proposal of Abbott that boats with children on them be ‘towed back’ by illegal dangerous piratical means to a country that won’t accept them; and that Abbott will ‘apologise’ to the Indonesians for denying them the thrill of torturing our pregnant cows; and the Victorian Liberals’ plan to sell the ABC to Rinehart or Singo or Alan Jones.

There has been time thus far to discuss these things in some depth; and there are still 115 days to go, which is three times the length of a normal campaign.

We still have time to discover what crimes Tony Abbott is covering up from his seminary years; the crimes of others, that is; if any. We still have time to discover what majority he is praying his God to give him, and whether he is still confident his God is on his side, and that eating his living flesh on Sundays, and drinking his blood, is a good idea. We still have time to ask if he will ban, this time, the morning-after pill for raped teenage girls, or why he will not.

There is time, thanks to McTernan, there is time. Time equivalent to the interval between Dunkirk, a seeming disaster, and the winning of the Battle of Britain on September 15.

We can go at it now with a good heart. We are on about 48.5 and we need another 180,000 votes, or preferences from Palmer, Katter, the DLP or what might be called the ‘Windsorites’.

With 35 days the public might have been fooled.

With 218, we have an even chance.

So now they want to privatise the ABC.

McTernan, bless him, has given them time to show how mad they are.

If you want Gina and Singo running the ABC, vote Liberal.

Paul Murray has been off air for two days. It is hard to see why. He is said to be sick. Sick with what? One of Boris Yeltsin’s ‘heavy colds’?

It is likely, I think, that Murdoch has pulled him off air, fearing Gillard will sue him, now or later, for having said her tears were false on Thursday. That it was libel is not in doubt. That it was malicious libel is not in doubt; you only have to punch up seven hundred of his programmes, to check on the level of his prejudice and the venom with which he gives it voice.

It may be that we will never see him again.

Sad, sad, sad.

Is Tony Abbott a good man? The evidence is thus far not convincing.

He refused to marry, twice, his twice-pregnant girlfriend. He seduced young women while dressed as a priest.  He swore to the good character of a convicted pederast, and a Governor-General who defended pederasts. He sought to deny desperate women the morning-after pill. He went along with WorkChoices. He believes his sister will fry in hell for a billion years for sodomy.

In the past eight days he has gone back on a payment for motherhood; persecuted a baby; opposed a good education for the needy; boycotted a debate on the Disabled; called his ally O’Farrell a damn fool; and fucked, it would seem, a drunk driver. In a week of raging tornadoes, the worst in world history, he still believes climate change is ‘bullshit’. He has threatened to sack the esteemed Australian Steve Bracks if he goes to New York, though he would not do so if, say, it was Jeff Kennett who got the appointment. He has furthermore said he will not allow homosexuals to marry, or allow his colleagues to vote on this as they want to.

Is he a good man? The evidence is growing that he is not.

He has used the ‘character issue’ on Gillard. Others should use it on him.

Can anyone tell me what Morgan said today?

These two emails came in yesterday from Kevin Lee. They touch on Abbott’s three years in the seminary, before he was asked to leave, and clear up some things for those who have had, like me, some doubts concerning his moral character.

Hi Bob,

Thanks for an interesting read. As wouldabeenthesbeian says I do have an interesting story for you. I know Tony and met him in the seminary. And I know exactly why he left the seminary. Its not as clear cut as most would believe. It has less to do with celibacy and more to do with people in the church not wanting him to become a priest because he thinks for himself. The Church wants drones and self-seeking sycophants.

I know John Nestor too and i can fill in a lot of gaps for your blog’s readers about why he was dismissed from the priesthood. Again less to do with his sexual habits as his unyeilding individualism. My book is already published. You can get it at my website. It will open a lot of drawers and you will find the things under the top layer will explain why so much in religion and politics in Australia is Catholic coloured.

I can also tell you why I was courted by the Liberal party before and after I left (was kicked out of priesthood) and you will be amazed at the insights I have about who and why my path to politics was thwarted. It was the conservative Catholics (Opus Dei)who prevented me getting a start even after some high ranking Libs were backing me for a candidacy. There is another book in that story.

2

Sorry for the late reply but I only was alerted to your blog today when someone said I was mentioned then I saw the context. Just read my book Unholy Silence to discover the depth of homosexual depravity that had descended on Manly seminary by the time I arrived there, the year that Tony Abbott left. His leaving had less to do with the sexuality of the students and professors there than it had to do with his “inflexibility”.

I had a lengthy conversation with him last year about why he was forced to leave. He was a man who didn’t like being told what to believe and think. But to be a Catholic priest you have to assent to all that Holy Mother church believes and teaches. Some of us who are not frauds, refuse to do that. It is illogical.

Then second comes the realisation that we had been sacrificing our sexuality to an institution that has lost its right to call itself “God’s Church” especially after the daily revelations of the raping of children by clerics and the blatant indifference of the rest of the Church hierarchy and people.

A hint of Groucho, a touch of Tevye, a gathering aroma of Bruno Ganz’s Hitler and just a soupcon, maybe, of Jack Benny inform Kevin Spacey’s lurching and grimacing Crookback but do not bruise or diminish the sinuous rock-ribbed verse, which Sam Mendes, the director, has allowed to remain the star turn of his Richard III, by William Shakespeare, now touring.

The setting, a stained grey hallway of many doors and a grey brick wall on which newsreel projections dance (a frail, bearded king, arriving; Chamberlain-era throngs, cheering) might be Barcelona 1936 or Sarejevo 1998, and many headshaven men talking into their sleeves in the foreground give us, in our day, what Shakespeare’s hushed groundlings must have seen in theirs: a world very similar to their own, of half-remembered shabby suits and crumbly buildings, war medals and uniforms from their grandparents’ time; and, of course, in blood-smattered black-humorous blank verse, bitterly brandished memories of the slaughters of which most kingdoms are made.

Performed uncut, the text reveals more large, lavish women’s roles than any other tragedy: assassinations’ widows and mothers mourning butchered sons and spouses like those of Chile’s Disappeared; some weird rough Plantagenet chivalry having spared the women’s lives, it seems, and let them run like shrill Cassandras through palace halls unguarded.

Of these, the half-mad Queen Margaret, widow of the mutilated Henry VI and mother of his mutilated son and heir, and murderess herself of the dynasty’s much mourned kingmaker York, is the most unlikely palace guest, and poses for this director and all before him a near-insuperable problem of why she is not eftsoons beheaded or clapped in a padded cell — which Olivier testily dealt with by excising her, bag and baggage, from his movie altogether.

Mendes has made her part ghost, part mad plaintiff, heard out with bored amusement by snide shrugging courtiers as Margaret Thatcher in her present mumbling dementia might be heard today; and he has added her as well to further scenes as vigilant prophetic witch overseeing the carnage her curses have brought on Crookback’s kingdom supernaturally. In this role Gemma Jones, once the Duchess of Duke Street and lately Bridget Jones’s tempestuous randy mother, delights as she did in Brook’s Dream in and Bennett’s Getting On in 1970 and 71, a wellbeloved legacy, much missed already, of better times.

A cast of twenty, more than Shakespeare’s Globe afforded, beating ominous drums and interjecting from the audience, excel at every turn in Lancastrian, South London, Kentish and mid-Atlantic accents here mixed promiscuously and well. A black Buckingham is a bit of a surprise, more so when Richard calls him ‘cousin’ but, as a good and trusty servant betrayed by his colonising master, he fits the last African century quite well; but not, I would think, not Buckinghamshire…

No, no, no. No. I do not like it. In even an era of a Blanchett Bob Dylan and Richard II and a Nevin King Lear and Mark Antony (‘I look forward,’ I told the great lady, ‘to your Antony and Cleopatra, co-starring Gerry Connolly’), two cousins must bear some resemblance to each other. Shall a black Desdemona, or female Falstaff, or dwarf Coriolanus, follow? I hope not. Though Mr Chuk Iwuji is an excellent plausible torn hob-nobber with manifest evil he is, as we used to say, ill-born, on the wrong side of the Buckingham blanket.

Maureen Anderman, Stephen Lee Anderson, Jeremy Bobb, Nathan Darrow, Jack Ellis, Haydn Gwynne, Isaiah Johnson, Andrew Long, Howard W Overshown, Simon Lee Phillips, Gary Powell, Michael Ridko, Annabel Scholey, Gavin Stenhouse, Hannah Stokely and Chandler Williams excel in their many worrying roles, including two infant princes who speak in unison, and a Duke of Clarence who drowns in a butt of Malmsey in real time right there before our eyes, giving beef and marrow and poignancy to walk-on characters oft played heretofore as mere nodding muppets. Katherine Manners is particularly good as King Edward’s tall bony widow Elizabeth, out-hollering Spacey through a twelve-minute scene of repetitive unabashed hortation and shrieked blood libel that might, just might, have been cut down a bit; it’s already 11 pm, after all, and some of us have elderly bladders. And yet, and yet …

Spacey’s lumbering, smirking Richard is as fresh and pungent in its impact as Olivier’s must have been on that first night in 1945. But unlike Lord Larry he flaunts no vocal tricks nor pirhouettes. He plays the dialogue as dialogue, the monologue as human speech, with an unaugmented naturalism that startles with its directness and modern, everyday cadence. Occasionally he pulls a face, or raises a crippled languid hand satirically, or mugs a gasp or eye-roll at his own perverse duplicity, but this is what the role demands. This is Richard as written, the Sir Les Patterson of his day. There are no bolt-of-lightning moments till the very last, wherein he hangs feet up like a slaughtered hog, or Mussolini, as Larry did as Coriolanus in 1957, bleeding and twisting on a hook.

But his triumph, and it is an enormous one, and the standing ovation true earned as few in our time, is built up line by line within the meaning of what is said, and hinted, and thought; and when, after three hours lurching and smiling and wooing and roaring his lungs to shreds, he goes into a punishing sword-fight, steel against steel, with fingers and foreheads at risk, he climaxes at infarct’s throbbing frontier a physical marathon that would have pole-axed most Olympians (or, more aptly in this case, Paralympians), and does it sometimes twice a day.

I give him best, and wish him well, good health and survival. Bell, McKellen, Olivier, Pacino have not come near him. This is a Richard Crookback for the ages, and should be preserved.

I first saw Laurence Olivier in Richard III in 1953 and thought he looked like that. His capering, mocking, domineering, evil, attractive hook-nosed tyrant drew me to him, and I watched him closely thereafter, four times in the flesh at the Old Vic, and my much-praised co-written play about him, Intimate Strangers, soon to be performed as a reading again at the Bondi Pavilion, was lauded in London when Greta Schacci, the last actress to be in bed with him on screen, directed it at the Comedy in 2007.

Olivier was a gangster-entrepreneur-showoff-bully and the ‘vile toad’, the ‘bottled spider’ Gloucester suited him, and seeing it again after thirty-five years on ABC on Sunday night (I sought to go to bed, but he held me, as always) was a retrieved memory, a resident ghost, unlike any other. His opening soliloquy, which I and Bob Carr would sometimes recite in duet, is not as I remember it, quacking and yelping, at all. It is much more … still, and mild, and chilling: the Devil tells you of his plans, confidentially. More to come.

O’Shannessy’s contortions continue. Though Gillard picked up a quarter of a million votes, Labor picked up not one, he says. Though Abbott attacked super, ended the Baby Bonus, threatened the Disabled, abused Steve Bracks and persecuted a baby, he lost not one. Though Hockey got his shadow Budget wrong by half a billion dollars he was thought the better Treasurer. Though 35 percent favoured the Budget, and 21 percent were undecided, it failed. Though as ‘better economic managers’ Labor got 41, the Coalition 41 and 18 percent were uncommitted, the headline was ‘ALP Base Rejects Budget’. Though a quarter of a million more people approved Gillard, ‘no-one was listening to her’.

We used to call this ‘brainwashing’. The next stage is not to report political news at all for a while because anything to do with O’Farrell being ‘conned’, or Gonski dropped, or Peta drunk, or Abbott fucking her, or Slipper innocent, or Thomson picking up votes, or Palmer winning his seat, or Brough going to gaol, or Abbott’s connection to Obeid and Torbay, would hurt the Opposition.

There will be silence for a while. And decorous avoidance in any headline of any evidence that Labor has momentum.

That should do the trick.

Essential Polling shows Labor on 35. It was on 38 at the last election, which it won; or pretty much won. Other/Independent is on 9, up from 6.6 in 2010. It is clear, pretty much, or clear to me, that the extra 2.4 are Katter Party people; and a recent Queensland poll (of 36,000 people) shows 80 percent of their preferences going to Labor.

That brings Labor up to 36.9. They will get 55 percent of the Other/Independents (they are mostly Oakeshott, Windsor, Wilkie and Katter) which brings them up to 41. They will get 90 percent of the Greens, which puts them on 48.2.

It is not too hard to win from there.

Especially now a GST is mooted, and a loss of Gonski, and a broadband that fifteen million Australians don’t want.

And you should add 1.5 too for the mobile phones that aren’t rung.

We’re on 49.7, and very close.

If O’Farrell has been conned, should he be replaced as Premier?

Lies continue to be told. SBS has just said Gillard’s ratings had gone up, but Labor’s position had ‘not improved’.

Wrong. Nielsen showed Labor’s vote improved by 380,000 people; Morgan by 440,000 people; Essential by 450,000 people; in a fortnight; and the nation divided 44-44 on the Budget. This puts Labor at best, once Katter’s preferences are reconfigured, 120,000 votes away from victory; at worst, 480,000 votes away.

Gillard picked up a million votes in five days. And there are one hundred and sixteen days to go.

In that time, half a million is easy. There are a million ‘undecided’, and 130,000 ‘refused’.

It is wrong to lie. It is wrong to lie. It is wrong to lie.

I wanted to fly Hackers down to Adelaide to read, in her lovely nut-brown voice, some pre-Shakespearian verse in a show we were doing in Holden Street last August. But I couldn’t find her in the couple of hours I tried to. None of those I thought were her old friends knew where she was. She had ‘gone to ground’, as the fox-hunting simile says. She was playing hookey. She was unavailable for interview. It is clear now why she was, and I wish I had searched longer.

For I loved her very much for about thirty years, and so did hundreds of us. She was one of the five or six women I would have married had I met her earlier and had she liked me enough. There were probably fifty other worthy enough young men who felt the same way, and were similarly stirred.

The reasons for this were many, in all of us. She was a fine actress. She had lovely contralto voice, exactly the same voice as her friend Jennifer Hagan, and Judy Davis. She was a brilliant writer, with a perfect English mandarin style, like Evelyn Waugh’s, as her book on her ancestor Barbara Baynton shows. She was beautiful in a way that reminded you sometimes of Lauren Bacall and sometimes of Judi Dench. She had a quality I called ‘aristocratic vulnerabilty’, much like that of Dench, or Deborah Kerr, or Glenda Jackson.

But there was another quality that made you love her. It was a decent straightforwardness, an inexhaustible sympathy, a buoyant directness mixed with good-mannered Englishness, upper-middle -class mannerly Englishness (her father was a career soldier) that could have walked in a big white hat into Downton Abbey and been perfectly at home.

I can’t think of anyone who disliked Hackers. It is horrible she never married and had children. She must have had offers. There was a careless adventurousness about her, though, an indecision, a flightiness and a capacity for sudden, brief emotional collapse (I witnessed one) that may have thwarted this, or delayed it, or whatever.

I have been thinking about her all day, remembering things, and the tears have not come yet. I think of her dancing sassily with big breasts in the second act of King O’Malley in Burnie, Tasmania, in 1970. And how smitten I became, and how I pursued her.

I think about Yeats’s ‘Vague Memories’ poem, and wish I had written one, as I could have, when there was time.

I should do one, and put it up here.

Nielsen showed Gillard picking up a million votes, Newspoll only a quarter of a million, and my friend James Carleton called the situation ‘much the same’, a gap too big to be closed in the hundred and seven days remaining before September 14.

(Well, the gap is half a million. Labor picked up 370,000 votes in the last five days. There are 107 days to go — the equivalent of the time between Dunkirk and the winning of the Battle of Britain — and poor hag-ridden Jim says it is too long a time for Labor to creep back in. At the present rate of change, it would take a week.)

There remains the Newspoll two-party preferred, 56-44, the best poor enshackled O’Shannessy could do for Murdoch, who demanded 58-42, I imagine, on Friday last and was dangerously defied. He moved the Newspoll a day forward though, so as to quash or quench or mitigate Nielsen’s Labor Doing Better headline. He gave Gillard the quarter of a million vote gain as preferred Prime Minister because he had to. Anything less would have seemed like lunacy.

Murdoch’s headline, Labor Base Rejects Swan Budget, from a finding of 35 ‘good’, 37 ‘bad’, and 21 percent ‘uncommitted’, shows a ‘bad news’ budget doing really well though, and Labor, overall, doing fine.

Because, you see, there are still a million ‘undecided’, or this is what Newspoll thinks. And eight hundred thousand voted Labor last time. And Labor needs only a quarter of a million of these ‘undecideds’ to win.

This is because Bob Katter’s KAP Party (aka ‘other’) is currently scoring 600,000 votes, according to Nielsen, and 70 or 80 percent of its preferences, misallocated by both Nielsen and Newspoll, are going to Labor; which puts our oldest party not on 46 but 48.5. And a quarter of a million ‘undecided’ out of a million, fairly easy to imagine, gets us there.

The most peculiar poll of all is the one by O’Shannessy this morning . It’s on whether Hockey or Swan is a better Treasurer. In this Newspoll’ Swan scores 29, ‘uncommitted’ 30, ‘neither’ 6, and Hockey … well … none; he’s not there. And Turnbull, for some reason, is on 35. (Clearly there was some shouting down the phone; I do feel sorry for O’Shannessy, future gaolbird, sometimes, I really do.) Somewhere in these numbers we see Swan beating Hockey, narrowly, 38-37, in February, 2013; beating Julie Bishop, hugely, 45-21, in December 2008 (!); and … um …

Yes, it’s a Hockey-Swan Better Treasurer contest in which Hockey, amazingly,does not appear; lest Hockey lose,I guess, I guess. He lost in February, and has not been heard of since. The Turnbull figure is from April ’08. Why is it up there? Why is any of it up there? What is going on here?

O’Shannessy was scared, haemorroidal, sleepless and frantic, I guess, I might be wrong, and taking midnight phone calls from Rupert.. Can there be another explanation? Can’t see what it is.

So: under ‘better economic manager’ it is 41-41, an even Labor-Coalition split, with 18 percent ‘uncommitted’; taken, I guess, before the Budget, or we would have been given a date more precise than merely ‘May’.

(Taken before the Budget and published after? Oh boy.Oy vay.)

If Murdoch thinks he can get away with this ragtag, criminal botch he may be mistaken. Gaol is imminent for fraud, in my view, for somebody; somebody soon; as it is for Rebekah Brooks.

There is, for instance, the 2.5 million people supposedly ‘uncommitted’ on who would be the better Prime Minister. Do you know any of these people? There are 2.5 million of them, the adult population of Queensland, who don’t know who they want as Prime Minister. Really? Really? What is he playing at?

It’s pretty clear, if you give it a moment’s thought, and why shouldn’t you, what in fact is going on. It goes like this. 39 percent want Gillard. 40 percent want Abbott. 14 want Katter. 3 want Palmer. 4 want someone unavailable, like Bracks, Beattie, Gallop, Carr, or Brown.

And if you distribute the ‘uncommitted’ second preferences, which O’Shannessy never does, Gillard would be on 52, and Abbott 48.

But that is mo what we see in The Australian. Murdoch prefers to print the Big Lie that there are three million people who have no preference at all.

This is how criminal Rupert Murdoch is; in my view. But we already know that. He resisted expert advice and printed the Hitler Diaries, and made a wad of money. He constantly had Romney ahead in his US polling last year. He called it for Bush when 500,000 Florida votes were still to come in. He is, old friend, as fraudulent as that. As big a forger of numbers,

It would be reasonable, on the botched Hockey figures alone, for the Attorney-General — or a Senate committee — to investigate poor sad O’Shannessy and put him in prison for ten years. In my view.

And to ask him if he makes his pollsters ring certain prefixes. And ring Friday nights when nobody young is home. And ring only landlines when no-one young has one.

And whether he did this to create headlines that give a sense of Labor being in big trouble; and Abbott, though disliked, inevitable as Prime Minister.

I ask the relevant officers to look into this.

10.10 pm

Watching Paul Murray gobsmacked by a six-figure swing Labor’s way in the Nielsen Poll was a quiet, unastonishing joy for me and I had another muscat.

This figure plus the two percent Labor gets from the misallocated preferences of the KAP and Windsor and Palmer and the 1.5 they get from mobile phones not rung by Nielsen it is on 49.5 and the GST and Gonski have not yet sunk in.

There will be a similar swing on Morgan on Tuesday, to 46 or 47 and the game will be afoot.

10.40 pm

He’s now aghast that Gillard is level-pegging with Abbott on 46, a swing her way of a million people, and saying ‘Crying works’.

What an enjoyable evening this is turning into.

10.50 pm

They are saying moreover that her tears were bunged on, or that she was ‘crying for herself’ and her lost career. Gillard, a lawyer, could go them for this, and get a lot of money from their proven malice and big lies. I saw Shorten in tears after meeting disabled people (‘I met three heroes this morning, mate’) and she had met some too a short time before she rose to speak.

It is to be doubted Murdoch would stand Murray the 250,000 dollars plus costs if she wins, or even if she loses, the election and come after her Skynews harassers.

10.15 pm

Nothing on ABC yet.

As in America, where the whole game depended on the Obama youth vote not coming out a second time, and it did come out a second time, there is no Plan B. Here the Murdochist bullies had only one plan, to gloat over the bad polls, to mock and chitter and whoop and jump about and jeer and pull faces,, and keep this up till the people obediently capitulated to this form of reasoning and voted along.

It depended on the poll numbers staying low and not moving. And now they are moving, Labor’s way. And Abbott’s policies look shonky, secretive and cruel.

And what, my masters, now this is known, and 46 percent of the people want Gillard and only 46 Abbott, is Plan B?

They have none, and they’re in trouble.

Discuss.

11.30 pm

Watched Fry on Wagner, and am settling into Olivier’s Richard III.

1.40 am

Olivier’s Crouchback is remarkable, unlike any character — demonic, macchiavellian, psychopathic, scarred by natal wrenching and mockery thereafter — ever on the stage.

Among recent public figures he resembles only Rudd: testing his power always, scorning all who have helped him, seeing what each new cunt-act he can get away with. I kept proposing to go to bed but I couldn’t.

What an interesting day.

It is good to see Mathias Cormann in his obergruppenfuhrer accent and prognathous, Buzz Lightyear jawline bucketing Labor’s ‘relentless negativity’ and the Prime Minister’s changeability after Abbott in a week went back on the baby bonus, Gonski, super and a GST O’Farrell and Barnett sorely wanted, and didn’t turn up for the NDIS debate while Gillard wept for the halt and the lame and the blind sincerely, and Pyne persecuted a baby.

No headline saying ‘Liberals In Chaos’ will occur tomorrow I guess but it is hard to see how they have won the week, or, after offending retirees and the parents of schoolchildren (this is eight million people) picked up votes.

It will be a big lie O’Shannessy tells tomorrow or Tuesday, but tell it he will; he will; he has to. In my view.

And the police, in due course, will come for him.

In my view.

So … the economy is in emergency, and a GST may solve it, and you won’t bring it in for five years? Emergency, you say? Five years, you say? Longer than World War 1? Can you run that by me again?

So: you want a mandate for the GST? And you think, like Barry O’Farrell, it’s a good idea? And all the Liberal Premiers think it’s a good idea? Why not seek one now? Why not seek an electoral mandate now?

If Barry O’Farrell wants it, and it needs to be tested at an election, why not do it now?

Barry O’Farrell can hold the enquiry, Joe Hockey can say who should be on it, and it can reprt by August 1.

And the people can decide.

O’Shannessy usually has an explanation when he puts up an irrational surge to the Liberals. After Abbott was booed by the women for having enforced an adoption on a woman now dead and Gillard crushed Rudd he claimed Abbott’s better numbers three days later, and Gillard’s worse ones, were due to Labor being in ‘leadership chaos’. After Gillard came back from China with a terrific trade deal and the interest rates went down and the full time jobs went up and the dollar became more competitive and everyone liked the broadband, the NDIS, the Gonski deal, and the very fast train, he said the people had ‘stopped listening’.

This week is more difficult. Abbott backed down on the Baby Bonus, boycotted the Disability debate, abolished Gonski, persecuted Steve Bracks and a sick baby and found himself in a big public fight with O’Farrell over the GST; but there were no upside stories about him, none at all, none at all; except, perhaps, the one about how he delivered his Budget speech without a stammer and his family applauded him.

When O’Shannessy, tomorrow or today, shows a ‘counter-intuitive’ surge to the Liberals, and he will, he’ll have to have a reason. He’ll have to have a good one.

And there isn’t one.

Joe Hockey says he may extend the GST but only after he ‘tests it at an election’.

Why not test it at this one?

Is he in favour of it, or not?

Why not make up his mind?

Labor seems to have picked up a quarter of a million votes since Tuesday night if Murdoch’s Galaxy is to be believed. All the polls had Labor on 44 last week but Galaxy now says 46.

Though this is a gain of 60,000 votes a day Skynews claims it is ‘insignificant’.

Fingers in ears, la, la, la, la.

A landslide, comrades, a landslide is coming.

A question to Joe Hockey:

Do you favour, now, a GST, or disfavour it? If your chosen committee wants one, will you bring it on?

The Mads Mikkelsen film The Hunt, about a witch-hunt in a small town of a man wrongly thought a pederast, reminds of me of Slipper, of Thomson, of Hicks, of Haneef and Assange and Kernot, and, yes, Lindy Chamberlain, and all those innocents Cult Murdoch has targeted for assassination in the past forty years.

An allegation is made; it is proved untrue; the smear continues. A life is ruined. The caravan moves on.

Craig spent money on milkshakes, taxi rides and restaurant meals at a rate of about a hundred and twenty dollars a week for seven years when there were no restraints on such spending. I don’t think he even bought a beer in that way. He is alleged to have bought the services of an ugly girl he twice didn’t turn up for with a union Visa card that others were able to use, in years when he was running for preselection for a socially conservative seat of retirees and young marrieds. It is implausible a man so placed would have done this – and not turn up for the fuck, especially – yet he has been albatrossed with it, and Pyne and Abbott scuttered out of the House because of it; because he was too vile a slimeball to vote alongside, for something they believed in.

And so it goes. It is called ‘niggerisation’: up the back of the bus for you, nigger, you no longer count. And an egalitarian society goes along with it.

Or do they.

I have my doubts about this now, in this age of omnivorous information and unfettered scrutiny and the arrest of most of Murdoch’s top floor. Hicks goes to work unthreatened. Habib got compensation. Haneef can work here anytime if he wants to. And I think that Craig, like Mikkelsen, may survive this calumny of crackpot accusation, as Katter survived, and Oakeshott, and Windsor, and Crook, and Wilkie (called by Howard ‘mentally unstable’), and Andren, and Mack, and Moore, as Independents in the new parliament. I think it could be so.

One sign that this is coming is the sudden silence in all the media today of most political news. It is not being said that Hockey greenlighted on Insiders O’Farrell’s deal with Gillard. It is not being said that he swore to mitigate NDIS. It is not said that Abbott is facing questioning over matters relating to Torbay and Obeid.

The move towards Labor is beginning, and they are covering it up, fingers in their ears, la,la,la,la…

We will see what we shall see.

Tony Abbott says there is an ‘emergency’ though revenue is rising; discuss.

I ask Skynews to supply me with a transcript of the Penny Wong interview on Thursday night or say why they will not.

The Hunt is one of the better films ever made. Like A Separation, it deals with consequence; like The Crucible with small-town suspicion, and, in a very real sense, ‘demonisation’.

Lucas is a kindergarten teacher, following the downsizing of the high school in the small, churchgoing, deer-hunting town he grew up in. He is divorced, and seeking more time with his teenage son Marcus. He has a dog Fanny, who is his constant beloved companion. His oldest friend Theo has a tiny daughter, Klara, whom he only once, when her parents are fighting, walks to the kindergarten, and home from it. She adores him, and offers him a present, and a kiss on the lips. He says she mustn’t do that. She turns against him.

One small thing she says troubles the headmistress. She is questioned, answers ambiguously. Soon he is suspended, then arrested, then released, refused service in the supermarket, beaten up in a carpark, has rocks thrown through the window at home. His son is refused service too and becomes enraged, and violent, and feral.

The poison spreads. Over all of it we hear unbearably beautiful Christmas hymns, in a postcard town with snow falling. Everybody in it is righteous, and civic-minded, and ‘correct’ on the face of it, and acting and responding appropriately, and even the little girl says she ‘said something foolish’.

Her performance is remarkable. Her name is Annika Wedderborg and she is about six and may have an Oscar before she is ten. Excellent as well is Lasse Fogelstrom as Marcus and Thomas Bo Larsen as Theo, a man of drunken affections, deep anger, laziness, delusion and implacable parental fondness, and Anne Louise Hassing, as Agnes, his tempestuous loving wife, and Alexandra Rapaport as Lucas’s foreign, English-speaking, horny, adventurous girlfriend Nadja. Best is Susse Wold as the mild-mannered, respectable, quietly punishing headmistress Grethe, who turns a borderline suspicion into a Way of the Cross.

Best, that is, apart from Mads Mikkelsen as Lucas. Already a legendary actor, along of the lines of the early Gerard Depardieu, he gave us last time in A Royal Affair a hard-drinking, brilliant, lustful Enlightenment essayist, surgeon, whoremonger, Prime Minister and royal courtier. This time it is a mild, abstemious, careful, reined-in, unambitious, gun-loving, ordinary decent man astounded by the hatred massing around him and trying to stay sane and alive, in, as they say, difficult circumstances. In this quest he somehow achieves a higher goodness which we used to call Christlike, unevenly intermixed with a despairing, mad-dog vengefulness which, at the end, or near the end, veers close to murderousness.

Based on a true story, the script, by Thomas Vinterburg, the director, and Tobias Lindholm, is a model of cinematic minimalism. No courtroom judge is seen hearing evidence, or giving a verdict. A crucial reconciliation scene between Thomas and Theo is not articulated, merely begun. We know all we need to know. And, at the end, what not to know.

It will get an Oscar for Best Foreign Film and Mikkelsen get a big, villain roll in the next DieHard, I suppose, and play it well. And that is fine. But what it is about, which goes to the heart of our devil-seeking post-Christian Western society is very, very important. And it should be made a compulsory text in every teacher’s college, and every high school. It should, like The Crucible, be a gospel for our time.

O’Shannessy this weekend is in more difficulty than he has faced in many a year. He must be loyal to Murdoch, and go to gaol; or he must tell the truth and help elect Gillard and thereby lose his job.

It is the normal Newspoll practice to give the Liberals good news when common sense declares the news is bad. Thus, when the largest gatherings of human history were massing against the Iraq War and Howard was loudly for it, Newspoll showed Howard — ‘counterintuitively’ — picking up votes. When women booed Abbott at the Forced Adoption Apology because he had forced an adoption on a woman who had lately died young, and the Rudd ‘challenge’ imploded, and Gillard triumphed, Newspoll showed Gillard’s vote going down, and Abbott’s going up; counterintuitively, of course.

This weekend, though, it is very, very difficult. Abbott has been shown to be keen to impoverish the old, and to disadvantage all children in public schools and to enrage his friend O’Farrell by ripping up a deal involving billions he has already in good faith signed up to, and Alan Jones has bagged Joe Hockey for being a wimp. Yet O’Shannessy must show Abbott gaining 150,000 votes, or he loses his job. He works after all for Murdoch, auteur of the Romney polls and the Bigotgate lies and the Hitler Diaries, and no forged falsehood may be refused.

He will do it, of course; misallocating Katter preferences, diminishing Palmer and Thomson votes and calling only landlines when only old people are at home; for even 100,000 votes the other way (the actual number is 300,000) will show the momentum to be with Labor; and, if that occurs, they win.

I am in some sympathy with poor O’Shannessy. He is not the first man to have lied on a regular basis to keep his job. But in this case he is tampering with our democracy and he should have a care. Fraud is a crime, and gaol is what happens to those who commit it.

He should be very, very careful.

Tony Abbott said it wasn’t an economic crisis, it was a Budget crisis.

I thought the Budget was the economy.

In his first forty years of politics, he made no speech on the Disabled, ever. In his twenty-five years of journalism, he wrote no piece. He did not turn up for the debate on it; nor did any of his party. He is pledged to end the Levy at the first opportunity.

They — and we —should be very, very afraid.

I used to think we would lose by one seat, but that is no longer now a possibility.

Labor by a landslide.

You read it here first.

Mark down the day.

I should have put it in my Canberra diary. But Penny Wong gave the best performance that I have seen in politics since Obama’s response to the foolish, fervid rant of his good friend Jeremiah Wright in a speech that saved his candidacy; she did this on Thursday night on Skynews. Brief, tired, eloquent, dismissive, scoring bull’s-eyes every four seconds, she showed in five or six minutes the oafishness and fraudulence of Abbott’s priorities and, though clearly fearing Labor would lose, the manifest injustice of this likely outcome.

If it can be retrieved, or if it was transcribed, all of this readership should urgently experience it, and learn from it; and take courage.

Now that you have four hundred and twenty million more, what will you spend it on?

This question to the Leader of the Opposition:

Do you stand by your publicly stated view that Peter Hollingworth should not have been forced to resign for having defended pederasty while Governor-General? Will you say if you have changed your mind? Will you say what led you to do this?

C. Northcote Parkinson said once that the British Army was always perfectly prepared for the last war but one; and Peter Hartcher — ‘Malvolio’, I have coarsely nicknamed him — is, I think, of a similar cast of mind. He talks today, for instance, of the Swan Budget’s ‘old-fashioned responsibilty’ and how this is part of Labor’s darker purpose of a ‘dignified exit’ from power.

And he declares this exit inevitable though a million voters are Undecided and most of them voted Labor last time, and all were told on Thursday that their kids would not get a good education nor they themselves a comfortable retirement and this morning that Joe got some figures wrong by half a billion dollars. He notes, of course, that our triple-A rating, greater than Costello ever got, continues to outscore all others, yet fails to say why Labor deserves to lose.

This is a curious omission. Why not say what he believes? Is he behaving corruptly? You may say that, Mattie; I couldn’t possibly comment.

He is saying, amazingly, a hundred days out — a period as long as the time between Dunkirk and the winning of the Battle of Britain — that the outcome is certain. My information is that police inquiries into Abbott’s dubious activities in two jurisdictions, in Queensland and New England, will alter this, but even if I am wrong the incompetence of his economics will do for him anyway.

He is robbing some retirees of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, or two hundred dollars a week, in their most vulnerable years. He is robbing all schoolchildren of forty dollars a week at an equally vulnerable time. He is sacking a hundred thousand breadwinners and, by this depletion of the economy, threatening with dismissal two hundred thousand more.

And Malvolio is saying he is bound to win. And somehow saying he deserves to win; on a morning when he got his figures wrong by four hundred and twenty million dollars. This is a lot of money; more, even, than John Howard gave to Saddam Hussein.

Yet Malvolio says he is bound to win, and Malvolio is an honourable man, and seems to think an oaf like this is deserving of office. The man who mistook another man’s child for his own, and declared his sister would burn in hell for sodomy, and Christ’s living flesh is worth eating on Sundays, and Hollingworth should not resign for having defended pederasty while GG.

Malvolio mistakes the way he thinks for intelligence; but it is almost certainly the result of early brainwashing.

Or corruption, perhaps. One must never discard that possibility.

At all events it marks him as a significant fool: prim, cross-gartered, self-regarding, and raging at midnight at a world of enjoyment beyond his understanding.

Your voices, your sweet voices.

Okay, I will continue.

I will reduce the money I will settle for to one hundred and eighty thousand from frangipani (though nine of our children died, I do not regard my wife as a ‘baby factory’) and one hundred and fifty thousand from Bob Ellis’s Salad Dressing (I did not, like Goebbels, ask my wife to kill six of those children) if he reveals the name of the Labor minister who so nicknamed me, in order that I may sue him also; and he then sue Bob Ellis’s Salad Dressing for lying about him, I suppose.

I forgive Johnsalmond, who may have mistaken frangipani’s malicious hectic lunacy for harmless raillery, and also, after a week in the sin-bin, the boring Wombat.

I do all this because, in part, of the crumbling of Abbott’s numbers overnight (he is saving four hundred and fifty million dollars that are not there) and Hunt’s threat of two elections, not one, if we refuse to let them speed the ending of the world.

I need the phone numbers of two lawyers. The four hundred and twenty thousand dollars I will now settle for, or the six hundred and seventy thousand if the minister truly exists and said indeed what poor doomed Salad said he said, I will bet on Labor at eight to one.

And so, old friend, it goes…

Frangipani came back and insulted my dead children again.

I am suing her, and abandoning the blog.

Good night, children, everywhere.

It appears Julie Bishop thinks that Steve Bracks, an acclaimed and successful Australian leader of Lebanese extraction, should not be ambassador to anywhere, and she will sack him if he goes to New York, and make him give his wages back. No such outrage attended the appointments overseas of Brendan Nelson, Tim Fischer, Amanda Vanstone, Andrew Peacock, Richard Casey, Stanley Melbourne Bruce or Peter Reith, and it is odd that she made this exception; and hard to see why.

I therefore suggest Steve sues her for malicious libel, and they settle out of court.

I note that Peter Van Onselen called me ‘incompetent’ on The Contrarians, and my Budget ‘shameful’. I would remind him that my management of this country has earned a triple-A rating from all three big agencies, something Peter Costello never achieved, and I have been called ‘the world’s best Treasurer’ by a group of international commentators, something Peter Costello never achieved.

I am therefore suing Van Onselen for malicious libel. I will accept a settlement of two hundred and ten thousand dollars, and a comprehensive apology, broadcast eight times a day for two weeks on Skynews.

Peter Van Onselen will shave his head if Gillard wins. He talks now of ‘when, not if’ Abbott wins. He cannot imagine a universe in which this will not occur.

I would refer him to the million ‘undecided’ in Newspoll. Eight hundred thousand of them voted Labor last time. Seven hundred thousand have never voted anything else.

Abbott last night said he would sack a lot of people, and take a lot of money from their schoolchildren, and from their old age in reduced superannuation. It is likely that four hundred thousand of them instantly decided to stick with Labor; and, when Abbott is questioned by Commonwealth Police in the next few days over two matters, or maybe three, that I may not now reveal, three hundred thousand more will come back to Labor.

This is a swing of three percent from the 44 or 45 Labor is now on. Two more percent will move toward Labor when Abbott’s criminality is noted, or rumoured, or proven.

From there Labor can win.

How, then, can he say, ignoring a million voters, that anything is certain?

The man is a fool, and, like O’Reilly and Hannity, corrupt.

I used to think him intelligent.

Ah well.

I will discuss these matters with him any night, on his show.

I now ask Barry O’Farrell: do you agree with Tony Abbott’s promise last night, to cancel the deal you have already signed with me on the Gonski money for education? We can rip it up now if you want.

This is an unedited transcript of what Tony Abbott said to Sabra Lane this morning. It is strong evidence that he is an economic oaf and cannot now, on his present policies, win a fair election. If the ABC resents me putting it up, I will take it down.

SABRA LANE: Good morning Mr Abbott. Welcome back to AM.

TONY ABBOTT: Nice to be with you Sabra.

SABRA LANE: You’ve said that Australia is in a budget emergency. How is it an emergency?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, plainly this is a government which was promising us to get back to surplus this year. No surplus this year, no surplus next year, no surplus the year after and as the Prime Minister and the Treasurer told us again and again, the best thing you can do to take the pressure off families is to get the budget back to surplus.

SABRA LANE: But unemployment is low, we have low interest rates, low inflation, debt to GDP, the ratio is low compared with other comparable nations. How is that an emergency?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, I said it was a budget emergency. I didn’t say it was an economic emergency. Australia’s economy has some fundamental strengths thanks to the reforms of both the Hawke/Keating governments and then the Howard/Costello governments, but the budget is in crisis because this is a government which is just addicted to constantly spending.

SABRA LANE: If it is an emergency, a budget emergency, why are you pressing ahead then with delivering tax cuts?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, unlike this Government, we are showing clearly how we can fund the tax cuts that we want to keep and that means that under us the tax cuts and the benefit increases will no longer be compensation because we’re abolishing the carbon tax, they’ll be fully funded by sensible savings in government expenditure.

SABRA LANE: And you’ve said that prices will fall. Can you guarantee that?

TONY ABBOTT: Go back to the time of the introduction of the GST. The GST also involved the abolition of the wholesale sales tax. Now a lot of prices did come down at that time because the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) was very vigilant in policing the removal of the wholesale sales tax, which in many cases was considerably greater than the GST.

So we will have the ACCC policing the removal of the carbon tax and look, the Government tells us that the carbon tax has added 10 per cent to the price of power. It tells us it has added 9 per cent to the price of gas. If the ACCC is out there policing these things, presumably that means a commensurate reduction in the price when the carbon tax goes.

SABRA L ANE: So they’ll fall by 10 and 9 per cent?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, as I said I’m not, I don’t know what else might be happening in these markets at the time the carbon tax goes.
R
SABRA LANE: But you can’t guarantee it?

TONY ABBOTT: Prices will go down, power prices and gas prices will go down when the carbon tax is removed.

SABRA LANE: You’ve announced a Commission of Audit to review the size and scope of government. Who will you get to head it?

TONY ABBOTT: We will announce that at the right time but it is 15 years or so since the last Commission of Audit. In fact, it was something that the Howard government did very early on in its term. This is something that does need to be done every couple of decades because it’s important to be sure that government is doing only those things that people can’t do for themselves.

SABRA LANE: Will you get someone like Peter Costello or will you get an independent economist to head it up?

TONY ABBOTT: The important thing Sabra is to ensure that the audit that we do, that the review of the size, scope and efficiency of government that we do is credible and respected so you can be absolutely confident that the last thing that we would want to do is damage our credibility as an incoming government should we win the election by appointing someone who doesn’t have wide public respect.

SABRA LANE: To achieve the budget bottom line in the black, you are going to have to make further huge cuts, painful cuts that you’ve not yet announced.

TONY ABBOTT: We will be very upfront with people in good time before the election but one of the points that I made last night Sabra is that while much that the Government has done by way of cutting in this budget is objectionable. We can’t guarantee to oppose anything, can’t guarantee to rescind anything and indeed may well have to implement these things as short term emergency measures to get the budget back under control.

SABRA LANE: There is no clear difference though to the budget bottom line in what you’ve proposed last night. You’re cutting 12,000 public servants, delaying the boost in superannuation contributions to pay for other things. The measures that you announced last night will not measurably change the budget bottom line.

TONY ABBOTT: Well, Sabra, I don’t accept that. Certainly we are funding our measures and we announced how we were going to do it last night. We also indicated that we were prepared to accept all of Labor’s cuts but we certainly weren’t going ahead necessarily with all of Labor’s spending.

So given that what we’ve done is fully funded, given that we’re prepared to accept at least short term emergency measures all of Labor’s cuts but not go ahead with all of their spending, I think the budget is in much better shape under us than under this current government.

SABRA LANE: So short term, define short term. How long will these measures need to be in place?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, we will be responsible and I think that’s what the public expect. I think the public understand that this has been a poor government, a terrible government in many ways. Even this government’s strongest supporters would accept that it’s been a bitter, bitter disappointment so I think the public understand that there is going to be a fair bit of putting the house back in order.

SABRA LANE: With an $18 billion deficit predicted for the next financial year, Treasury is forecasting a growth at around seven, 2.75 per cent. The Reserve Bank is around 2.5 per cent, both down on what we’re expecting this year. How low would you be prepared to see growth go to see a reduction in the deficit even further beyond that figure?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, normally economic growth is good for the budget and I want to get economic growth up and the great thing about cutting the carbon tax, cutting the mining tax, getting rid of unnecessary regulation, moving the workplace relations pendulum back to the sensible centre is that we should get productivity up, competitiveness up and ultimately economic growth up.

SABRA LANE: What trade off are you prepared though to make between making big spending cuts which could trigger a recession and growth?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, if the private sector starts spending, that’s going to be good for the economy and as confidence comes back I think the private sector will start spending. One of the reasons why the private sector is not spending at the moment and the household savings rate is sky high is because people don’t trust the Government.

So I think there will be a very strong confidence boost if there is a change.

SABRA LANE: Is there ever an acceptable level of net debt?

TONY ABBOTT: Ah, I’m not against debt. For instance I’m very strong on infrastructure spending and I made a series of very important infrastructure commitments last night but if you’re going to borrow, let it be borrowing for something that lasts. You can’t just borrow to blow it and that’s the problem. This Government is…

SABRA LANE: But what is an acceptable level?

TONY ABBOTT: This Government is borrowing for a current spending. It’s not borrowing for capital spending, and that’s the big difference. If we’re borrowing, let it be borrowing to build something that is really going to help our country like WestConnex, like the East-West Link, like getting the Pacific Highway duplicated. This is the sort of thing that we understand.

SABRA LANE: You’ve put reform of tax and Commonwealth/State relations firmly on the agenda. You’ve announced white papers on both. If the tax review recommends broadening the base of the GST and lifting the rate as many economists say is now essential, is it possible that you will take those proposals to the following election?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, that’s a hypothetical question that you’re asking me. Sabra, we have no plans to change the GST. We don’t intend to change the GST. Anyone who wanted to change the GST and that wouldn’t be us, would have to get the agreement of every single state and territory because it is a state and territory tax and anything that we might do arising from our white paper, we would seek a mandate for – not at this election but at the election after. We won’t do anything without seeking a mandate.

SABRA LANE: Mr Abbott, thanks for your time this morning.

TONY ABBOTT: Thanks so much Sabra.