“If you live in Frankston, and you’ve got a problem with Victorian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor. “If you do not want to see Australian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor. Send Labor a message.”

Labor easily wins Dunkley, increasing its primary vote to forty per cent. As no-one predicted. On her way to Canberra is Jodie Belyea, who introduces herself as “a mum from Frankston with two dogs and a mortgage” and a local woman dedicated to empowering other women. The likeable, highly-respected and refreshingly unassuming, local community activist and founder of the Women’s Spirit Movement (2018) is the candidate preferred, at last count, by at least 52% of the 133,000 registered electors who cast a valid vote, in the Port Phillip Bay sand-belt electorate where On the Beach 1959, a film about the end of the world was shot.

It’s another crushing defeat for Peter Craig Dutton, who is now lying low over Anklegate a scandal in which a released detainee fingered by Dutton and deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley in Question Time for sexual assault and stalking turns out to be the wrong man – because the data from his electronic ankle bracelet wrongly put him at the scene of an alleged crime.

It’s par for the course for Dutton – a serial dud in every portfolio he’s ever held, from Health to Home Affairs. He’s now following Morrison’s delusion that Liberal Party salvation lies in the outer suburbs. The lie that Labor would tax utes and family cars when, in fact, its vehicle emissions standards will save money and help preserve what’s left of our planet’s atmosphere apes ScoMo’s abortive bid for the vote of a mythical outer suburban tradie.

But there’s more. Everybody loves trains. $900 million will treat rail travellers to an upgrade of the link to Baxter in the very Liberal seat of Flinders, should they wish to brave Stony Point mosquitoes in their eagerness to take a day trip to see how the other half lives.

For Liberal candidate Nathan Conroy, it’s all over. He did his best with a bad script about how bad crime was. Locals love that stuff. Is he a sore loser? It’s fashionable, in the heady hyper-partisan slanging match our politics is today, to maintain your hate. A developer-friendly Frankston Mayor for three years in a row, with a rate rise every year to show for it, Conroy, formerly of Cork, is a big man with a slab of a face such as you might encounter in a friendly punch-on in a rugby scrum or in a grudge-match of Gaelic football.

Thirty-one-year-old Conroy, who boasts he once ran a multi-million dollar business -as manager of a Richmond bowlo- (that’s a lot of parma)-is the Liberals’ archetypal pin-up boy. White, straight and blokey. With the business background, he could be another Bruce Billson who held Dunkley until he got a job representing small business, for which he was being paid months before he quit politics. Conroy is slow to congratulate his opponent – as are other Liberals – but he does publicly congratulate himself on his wife’s pregnancy.

He doesn’t know where he found the time … (to make a baby) … but he did, he says.

Conroy grins, sporting teeth like a barracuda. They are neat teeth in a crooked smile.

Mrs Conroy doesn’t know where to look. Does hubby think he’s at a buck’s night? Ley, who is as high as a kite, comes to the rescue; proclaims Nathan a national Liberal hero. Even better than making babies, he’s made Dunkley marginal. The truth is, the absence of One Nation and UAP from the ballot accounts for what Murdoch and our corporate media brand a four percent swing to the Coalition.

“We are coming for you,” Ley warbles, adding that a three to four percent swing across the nation would win the Coalition government. It wouldn’t. It holds fifty-five seats. Twenty-one are needed to form a majority government. The swing looks around 3.4 per cent at the AEC Tally Room, Sunday. But bunkum and bluster are the order of the day in the politics of a post-truth, Trumpian age era. Expect more “alternative facts” after Sky’s Peta Credlin stoutly declares that Dutton resonates in Dunkley.

Credlin strikes gold on the night. The heartland. It’s the Liberals’ Lassiter’s Reef. And it’s in Dunkley. Ground zero is probably half-way up Oliver’s Hill, under that cantilevered bungalow, where the late Graham Cyril Kennedy, AO, had an unimpeded view of Port Phillip Bay.

“… the base is back, the Liberal heartland is back”!

“Coming for you” means more smear ‘n fear. Look out, Albo. Albo is at least in Dunkley. Unlike Dutton, who does a bunk and is QANTAS clubbing his way back to Dickson. Classy.

The electorate is named in honour of feminist, telegraphist and union leader, the fearless, tireless, eloquent, advocate for equal pay for women in the public service, Louisa Dunkley 1886-1927. Victorian Liberal senator, Crumb-maiden Jane Hume, who is also at the Liberal campaign wake, thinks quotas are OK for corporations, but the Liberal Party is “a different beast”.

Discretion is the better part of valour, but it does mean Spud’s abandoned Ley and Hume at the bar to do the obsequies? At least former Frankston school-boy and Liberal fund-raiser, Jeffrey Gibb Kennett, is celebrating his 76th birthday there. It leaves Peter time to warm up the party bus. Tomorrow, Ley will be the scapegoat for that stunt about the released detainee being arrested by the police on charges of sexual assault and misconduct. After howling down Albo in parliament about his dereliction of duty in failing to defy the High Court and lock up all the detainees, most of whom, Team Dutton reckons, are hardened criminals and all primed to rape, pillage and “re-offend”.

Some detainees have already been locked up for a decade. Some have been offenders, but all have done their time. For most, their only “crime” is to seek refuge here by boat. We lock them up for the rest of their lives and when a High Court forces us to let them out we insist that the harmless and innocent majority wear ankle-bracelets alongside the few who have committed serious crimes? What could possibly go wrong?

But it’s not about justice, it’s about the theatre of cruelty as deterrence, and was once very popular. We’re so proud of our boat turnarounds, we’ve exported the idea to Rishi Sunak’s Littler Britain, where “illegals” will be exported at great expense to Rwanda.

Or back to certain death. Dutton once locked up “Deva”, a blind, mentally ill Sri Lankan man for ten years who sought refuge after being tortured by the Sri Lankan army, a fact established by Australian authorities. He could choose to go home, a type of death sentence. Or stay in detention. But we were flexible.

The Minister might grant him a visa. In the future. Which he wouldn’t get because the Minister had decided he had failed the character test. Concerns were raised then about Dutton’s use of the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose, god-like, arbitrary power the Home Affairs Minister has to either grant or deny visas at whim.

“In his decision, Federal Court Justice Rares called it “absurd” and “unacceptable” to put forth that Dutton might issue Deva with a visa in the future when he had just found – on grounds not disclosed – that the mentally ill refugee failed the character test. The justice found that the government’s position was unreasonable and legally invalid.”

It may be rhetoric when Team Dutton pledges to lock asylum-seekers with criminal records up again. That is, whilst the Coalition is in opposition. But cheap words cheapen lives. Demean our own. Not to be outdone on “sovereign borders” a high-sounding nonsense in the game of chicken that is our asylum-seeker debate in Question Time, Labor has already been forced into the squalid compromise of the ankle-bracelet.

Perhaps there’s a glimmer of hope. Demonising can be a vote winner. But not in Dunkley. It might have worked once for Howard and again for Abbott, who in turn fostered con-artist Morrison, who gave us his tough cop on the beat, while letting Mike Pezzullo take charge via intermediary Scott Briggs. For five years, Pezullo gave the orders. Not that Morrison has anything to atone for because his God forgives him. It’s in his valedictory speech. And Ley has still not retracted her women-assaulted-by-foreign-criminals tweet on X.

An increasingly rubbery figure, Ley easily wins most mobile face on a night of such jubilation and jocund hilarity you would swear that the Liberals had won. At least she’s fronted up. Eighty percent of success is showing up, Woody Allen reckons.

Delivery? Ley puts so much into it that it’s exhausting just to watch. Has she had elocution lessons from Michaelia Cash, the lip-reader’s friend? She somehow finds extra facial muscles to come up with the whopper of the night. Tonight’s swing will win us government.

You know, she knows it’s a monstrous lie by the way she moves her jaw. Like a python swallowing an ox.

Dunkley, take a bow. The electorate is still “reeling”, as the Canberra gallery loves to say – it’s what you do after “bracing” yourself – another favourite cliché. But there is no word for how you recover from a sordid, multi-million dollar, US-style shit-storm of lies, stunts, and slurs amidst the static of Ley’s disgraceful racism, pitched so low it sounds as if it’s scripted by a tipsy One Nation intern.

The high spending low-punching campaign of fear, hate and racism is new to Dunkley, where the exotic and the aberrant are mainstream but try not to make eye contact after dark, especially in Young Street, Beach Street and around the train station subway. Even unflappable, seasoned, seen-it-all-before Frankston has never seen this before.

Ley may be a contender for a door prize, but what really steals the show is Advance. The Liberals are outspent by their bag-men and women, the billionaire, dark money propaganda unit Advance. But unlike The Voice, this time, the punters are not buying it. Cynics would say that the stage three tax cut beat Advance to it – a negative campaign doesn’t do so well against money in your pocket. But this battle for the hearts and minds of Dunkley probably is its own worst enemy. More than overkill, there is a sterling failure to communicate. And it’s hard not to see the whole, baroque excess of the assault, as something out of Monty Python; a futile exercise in lurid self-parody.

Perhaps we can take heart in the defeat of billionaire-backed Advance’s hate-bombing saturation campaign of lies, aggressing voters; “hammering letter boxes” texting, in-your-Facebooking, tweeting and other anti-social media sledging and its fleet of Truth Trucks, the mother of all defamatory mobile billboards. One features Chinese president, Xi Jinping, voting Labor insinuating that our ALP is somehow a crypto-Communist party. But the billionaires are thrifty. It’s the same image Advance deployed in the 2022 federal election.

It’s a wonder they weren’t laughed out of town. Advance’s outrageous assault on truth, democracy and decency belongs in Trump’s America. It’s an import we don’t need and won’t heed, however much a group of tone-deaf billionaires want it. But, it won’t stop trying. As Dr Jeremy Walker points out, behind Advance is the Atlas foundation, a global network of over six hundred libertarian think tanks.

Advance is a shadowy group funded by billionaires, including Gina Rinehart, also a queen pin in the IPA’s opaque funding and the man who did so well out of pro-coal Coalition energy policy, Trevor St Baker. It easily outspends the million dollar plus Liberal budget. It played a key role in sabotaging The Voice, but in Dunkley, failed to reprise its undermining of established democratic processes. As far as we know. We need, nevertheless, to demand to know who is behind it and what it is up to. Anthony Klan reports for Michael West Media, that Advance is being investigated by The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) because of its peculiarly opaque ownership structure.

Just as worrying is Advance’s calculated misrepresentation as some type of grassroots movement, a concept which Advance has already capably seeded in a corporatised and monopolistic Australian MSM where you can hear your ABC selling it as just a right-wing equivalent of Get-Up or the Unions. Every channel has the same pitch. We are being sold a pig in a poke.

In the meantime, we are vulnerable to a powerful propaganda machine, which may be crude at this stage but which will certainly be capable of refining its techniques.

We need to know just how tightly Advance has bound itself to the Coalition. The negativity of the “Noalition’s” campaign is an alarm call. Forget policy, issues, leaders’ integrity or party achievements, the Dunkley by-election is reheated leftovers and the Coalition’s happy place – rapists, paedophiles all aboard Tampa Redux; Howard’s trump card, politics as theatre of cruelty.

And Anklegate. Much as there will be a scapegoat at hand, the fiasco raises such serious questions about the role of the police and the liaison between it and the Coalition that in a healthy democratic system, Peter Dutton and Sussan Ley would already have resigned.

Sending Labor its threadbare message is less a federal opposition than the remnants of Morrison’s divide and rule legacy, not so much a Liberal parliamentary party as ten separate factions, headed by a duo of desperadoes, Peter “Paladin’s Cave” Dutton and deputy Sussan Ley who resigned from “Fizza” Turnbull’s cabinet over her 2015 “impulse buying” of a $795,000 Main Beach, Gold Coast investment property -from a Liberal vendor and party donor, whilst a gullible nation paid her travel bill to fly to Wesley Hospital in Brisbane to list new medicines on the PBS list. As you do. Team Dutton has swallowed Trump’s playbook whole in its bid to get attention; its eagerness to embrace the dark arts of media manipulation, disinformation. Lying its head off.

Flooding the zone with shit, Steve Bannon calls it. In other words, as Mike Seccombe explains in The Saturday Paper:

“Make outrageous populist pronouncements and then wait for the mainstream media to report them. Inevitably the other side will seek to debunk them. Ed Coper, Ed Coper, CEO of progressive communications outfit Populares. calls it the “weaponisation of lies”.

We should not be too startled by the right’s uptake of the tactics. Lying is a Liberal tradition. Wanton wastrel, a sterling pioneer in the politics of squander, John Winston Howard, took the proceeds of a mining boom and blew it on the middle class and the rich. Lied his eyebrows off over babies overboard to win the 2001 election. Howard is still lying about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. He “misled parliament” or lied to the house that our illegal attack of Iraq was constitutionally justified. He’d taken expert advice.

Failed priest, Tony Abbott, who crashed and burnt as PM because although he had the keys to the Lodge, he had no idea how to drive it, tipped off a startled nation in 2010 that you could only take as the “Gospel truth” stuff which he had written down.

But it’s not just the lies that paint Labor as an enemy of the people. Beneath the rabid dog-eat-dog, rancorous, hyper partisan, post-truth politics of our increasingly rattled right wing you can feel the fear and the desperation mounting. Link it with unlimited resources – and what could possibly go wrong?

Let’s put the band together. Supercharged with fear and the dark money of billionaires’ right-wing lobby mob, Advance, lead vocalist, Federal Coalition deputy-leader, Siren Sussan Ley, belts out her wog rapist in our midst shtick. Her leader and stand over tactician for Xenophobes-R-Us Benito Dutton, currently in witness protection because Victorians hate him – is on percussion. The Big Lie is that Labor (rather than the High Court) has released 149 former indefinite detainees into the community, a Goebbels-type lie central to a campaign of primal fearmongering, racist dog-whistling in conjunction with his corporate media backers.

Forget the light on the hill, we are out in the paddock in the ute, at night, roo-shooting, but with “rapists, paedophiles and murderers” in the spotlight. And not just at home. In the world theatre, “human animals” are to be exterminated by zealots.

Dunkley is won by a woman dedicated to the empowerment of women; Jodie Belyea represents some of the best values which are part of Labor’s democratic, social justice, working class heritage. Her victory gives us hope.

On the Coalition’s side of the ledger of party politics appears a yawning chasm of moral deficit and at times comically incompetent leadership, a party ripe for exploitation by Advance, a sinister organisation with its own agenda masquerading as a popular, home-spun movement. This enemy of the people is controlled by a small group of powerful billionaires with international links. Beneath the theatre of the by-election and the alarming spectacle of the Liberal Party’s decline are symptoms of its capture by a secretive, self-interested cabal which warrant urgent, extensive and through investigation.

Scott Morrison smirks and sniggers as Bill Shorten shreds the ex PM’s attempt to play the victim over Robodebt. Mugs the camera. Peter Dutton needs a stunt to distract from his deal with a corrupt contractor Nauru. Or the stench from his rejection of six indigenous applications to the 2019 safer communities fund. But it takes more than chutzpah to repudiate a Royal Commission.

Dismissing Catherine Holmes’ report as “unsubstantiated, speculative and wrong”. Morrison denies all responsibility and blames public servants for keeping him in the dark. As for his not giving truthful evidence, the notorious liar simply says Holmes is wrong. We can take his word for it.

You can’t swagger and sit at the same time but somehow Morrison manages to drape himself over the green leather of the back bench as if it’s a throne. I’m still Boss Cocky, the body language says. John Howard shrank his party and the nation to fit his meagre, “mean and tricky” leadership.

A deluded egomaniac, Morrison fancies he can still cut Labor down to size. And he’s always fancied himself as a black belt in rebarbative wit. The Sultan of Sting.

Instead, Morrison’s an epic failure; he’ll go into the record books as the Liberal’s most talentless has-been, or never-was PM, a fraud who fluked a second term in office he didn’t deserve and whose Rorts R-Us racist, sexist, chauvinist government was contracted out to the gas lobby only to waste years in office doing nothing.

His bogan chauvinism? OK, he’s the only PM to wear the Australian flag on his face.

Or unless you count epic corruption; the Buttrosing of our ABC; an eagerness to appease corporate greed and tax cuts for the rich. And galloping inequality.

The PBO finds that the stage three tax cuts will cost $20.4bn in their first year, 2024-25 and increase every year to $42.9bn in 2033-34. Yet 3.3 million people now live below the poverty line; 761,000 of whom are children. Let’s not talk about AUKUS and the four hundred billion dollars we plan to sink on obsolete, nuclear submarines that we can’t fuel, dock or crew. That’s a lot of aged care or welfare. Buy a lot of social housing.

Flash back to that Robodebt moment in Question Time, another parliamentary convention Morrison continues to abuse. Parliament is lessened by the presence of an ex-PM and poly-minister, under a cloud whose legacy includes his Robodebt monster; his undermining of responsible, democratic government, a holiday in Hawaii and that kamikaze ending – in which his embrace of ugly transphobic bigots and his capture by the dirty liars of coal and methane mining helped the federal Liberals destroy themselves.

But how he smirks. Scotty could smirk for Australia. You wonder what’s wrong with him. Or, perhaps, like Macron, you don’t wonder, you know. ScoMo’s a sociopath. Not just naff; grotesquely inappropriate. Dangerous.

Shorten talks of the human cost; lives ruined. Or poor people who took their own lives to escape ScoMo’s shakedown extortion racket. As he acted out the tough new cop on the welfare beat, a Kafkaesque terror was unleashed on the poor, the weak and the vulnerable. Nearly half a million of us received false debt notices, some with AFP logos. We were told we would go to jail, victims say. Or they punished us for speaking out.

Take a bow Alan Tudge. To “Tudge” should be a transitive verb in the vocabulary of state sanctioned violence. To Tudge is to order your underlings to get the personal files of everyone who complained about Robodebt and then leak their details to mates in the media. Alan Tudge did that.

Michael Towke, pre-selected for Cook, suffered something very similar, except his vilification ran for four excoriating articles in The Daily Telegraph filled with lies. One claimed Towke faced jail; a headline that sent his mother in hospital while eminence grise Morrison got the nomination for the safe Liberal seat in a second ballot.

Unless you’re a Scott Morrison, or a Tudge or a member of the Coalition who condoned if not cheered them on – or any one of the countless public servants who went along with Robodebt. It’s unfathomable. You wonder what it takes to be a Minister who demands the files of every public complainant about an illegal income average strategy to levy false debts on people who couldn’t pay. Wonder what it says about us.

What is not in doubt is that as PM Morrison knew exactly what was going on. His utterly unrepentant denial is completely at odds with the reports of his colleagues.

Fran Bailey at Tourism Australia, his boss from 2004-2006, reports a complete lack of trust. Says Morrison hasn’t changed. Cites his need for secrecy, lack of consultation and a “supreme belief that only he can do a job”.

Or take credit for others’ dirty work. To the average man or woman, Morrison’s boat trophy boast “I stopped these” would evoke the destruction of so many lives. Terror. Separation from family. Crushing poverty. The death in life of indefinite detention.

It gets weirder when you know it’s a lie. Rudd stopped the boats.

Morrison’s disconnection is disturbing. Imagine. You withhold vital information from your cabinet; duck your duty to inform your colleagues and wage a dirty war on Australia’s poorest and most vulnerable. Only to achieve abject failure.

“Not my doing” you lie to the Royal Commission and you bully Rachelle Miller, who worked closely for former Human Services Minister, Alan Tudge.

Although Morrison swears that he ceased his Robodebt involvement once he got promoted, Miller confirms that it’s just another lie.

“We were getting feedback from the PM’s office that this was playing quite well in the marginal seats, Western Sydney, that sort of thing.”

Back to the chamber. Government Services’ Minister, Shorten, uses last Tuesday’s (1 August) Question Time to rebuke the disgraced former PM over his self-indulgent statement on indulgence the previous day.

A brazen kleptocrat who stole five colleagues’ portfolios from under their noses between 2020 and 2021, Morrison just loves to steal any show. Bad news is good news in the moral algebra of the post-truth- post shame ScoMo-Dutton-Trump era.

Never waste a good crisis; even if you have to set your own pants on fire.

“Very personal, Bill…And we all know why,” Morrison heckles across the chamber stooping to personal innuendo himself. But the sly dig only encourages the Sisyphean Bill Shorten, one of Labor’s top performers. Bill knows he’s drawn blood.

Shorten belabours the failed federal Liberal Leader over ScoMo’s lonely, tone-deaf, off-key solo played to a deserted chamber, Monday 1 August, in which the dreadful ham plays the victim of a political lynching.

It’s a TKO. In a powerful, mounting incremental repetition, Shorten lists a dozen real victims of Robodebt to ridicule Morrison’s public display of self-pity. Here’s a couple.

“The real victims were those who suffered trauma, anxiety, distress. The real victims were those who took their own lives. The real victims are the mothers of those who took their own lives.”

“The real victims are all those Australians who lost trust in government because of an unlawful scheme run for four-and-a-half years.”

“One person who is not a real victim is the member for Cook.”

Morrison’s snide riposte accuses his nemesis of personal revenge, payback for ScoMo’s key role in Kill Bill, a campaign of AFP raids, ridicule, innuendo, slander and bastardry which Liberals have run since 2013 but only with the collusion of our MSM and with our ABC increasingly over-eager to join the anti-Labor fray.

Shorten’s under no illusions about ScoMo. Bill’s late mother, Ann, was not off-limits. Lies appeared about her in The Daily Telegraph, in May 2019, alleging her son had lied about his mother’s “illustrious career as a lawyer”.

Some hear a dig about 2019 where Labor lost the unlosable election largely in Queensland and chiefly because of Clive Palmer and Pauline Hanson. But the Liberal team plan is to pummel Labor at every turn, as it does via the reporting of Morrison’s melodramatic stunt almost alone in the chamber Monday.

It’s a dramatic contrast to last November and Labor’s censure of his secret powers; appointing himself to other key ministries. In the end, Morrison was in charge of six of the fourteen departments of state, as former High Court Judge Virginia Bell notes, early in her report. Then, Dutton organised a show of solidarity with a notorious liar who continues to undermine our democracy. Morrison is the Dutton regime’s totem.

In November, every Opposition MP was rounded up by Whips despite klepto-Mo’s dim defence of his multiple ministry megalomania. He had to keep his new portfolios secret so that his colleagues wouldn’t have to second-guess themselves. But he expected them to find out when it was all gazetted?

Of course, nothing was gazetted. And Greg Hunt was told. Another lie is called for. His lawyer writes to Bell adding another crazy evasion.

The public statements by Mr Morrison were directed to the fact that he did not inform all relevant ministers or members of the public of the ministerial appointments by way of media release or public statement. However, this in no way suggests that he did not expect that the usual practice would apply and that PM&C would publish the appointments in the Gazette.

As in Robodebt, Morrison poses as the innocent victim of dud public servants. Which brings us back to his latest one-man political lunatic fringe festival show.

You could hear a pin drop, says Paul Bongiorno wryly – not because Scotty from marketing has his audience rivetted but because there’s no-one there. But be fair. The theatre of self-pity can be a lonely place. And let’s not kid ourselves that “Optics” Morrison’s orchestrated performance falls on deaf ears.

Or that professional nihilist, Peter Dutton, is not in on the act. He has the Whip hand. In a flash, Uncle Spud’s on plasma TVs across the nation: “Mr Morrison has put a very strong case in relation to his position”. Archly, Dutts adds, “He is right to put it in parliament and he is right to serve in parliament after having been elected.”

Dutts is all loved-up, buff, refreshed and reset after a quick second honeymoon – all part of his reinvention as a loving husband and family man – which buys him some time to ring the odd mate in the AFP and dodge a bucket of dung dug out of the muck-heap that was his realm as Czar of Home Affairs and Minister for stopping people at random on Melbourne streets in 2015.

Did Dutton do a deal with a dodgy contractor, Mozammil Gulamabass “Mozu” Bhojani? At first, AFP spokespersons claim they tipped off the Minister that Mozu was bribing local politicians on Nauru. Seriously? It would be news if he were doing business without bribes. Is that possible on Nauru?

“The AFP acting commissioner provided a verbal briefing on the investigation to the then minister for home affairs on or around 12 July 2018.”

Minister of Home Affairs Supremo, Spud-who-just-can’t-recall anything is briefed Bhojani is under AFP investigation, on Nauru, a twenty-one square kilometre island of fossilised bird turd which is now eighty percent mined out, a uninhabitable and infertile wasteland, leaving its people to eke out survival on its coastal rim; a tribute to our proud history of colonial exploitation. Or is he?

The time frame is telling. Dutton returns, aglow with connubial bliss, flash as a rat with a gold tooth. Now the AFP retracts its claim. What it could have done is “used tighter language”, is their latest response to Labor senator Helen Polley, earlier this year.

Polley knows something. She asks if AFP told Dutton or his office that it was investigating Mr Bhojani for foreign bribery prior to September 2018.

At first AFP say they provided “a verbal briefing on the investigation to the then minister for home affairs on or around 12 July 2018.” Now it claims that it warned of the danger an over AFP presence might pose to diplomatic relations.

That exceeds peak implausibility. This is the same Nauruan government which in 2015 is reported to have colluded with Australian Immigration Department officials in the persecution of public enemies. Yet our dodgy dealings go back a long way.

The former island paradise is now a wen of nepotism and corruption, run by gangsters; a tribute to the civilising mission of Australia’s imperial past. We had the power to help make the place whatever we desired but instead, with our customary colossal colonial conceit, we have fashioned it in our own image.

A type of portrait of Dorian Gray, the ravaged wasteland of what was once a fertile Pacific idyll is now a desolate, barren husk where Islanders struggle to exist on the rim. Nauru attests to our appetite for environmental degradation. Most of the island’s vegetation is replaced by unsightly mining tailings. Using the miracle of mercantile enterprise and The Pacific Phosphate Company much of Nauru disappeared long ago; fertilising paddocks all over Australia and New Zealand.

“A worked-out phosphate field is a dismal, ghastly tract of land, with its thousands of upstanding white coral pinnacles from ten to thirty feet high, its cavernous depths littered with broken coral, abandoned tram tracks, discarded phosphate baskets, and rusted American kerosene tins,” Photographer Rosamond Dobson Rhone, writes in 1921 for National Geographic Magazine

The people of Nauru took us to the International Court of Justice in 1989 seeking compensation for mining away their home. They won a pittance. Since then, Australia has been involved with economic help and most recently with its regional processing centre but under the relationship corruption has flourished.

Mozu was up to no good. Even if bribery is endemic. What could come out about Nauru may help terminate Dutton’s career. But, stop. Look over there!

Within hours, Morrison’s package of lies; his capture of the narrative is faithfully relayed on all MSM stations across the nation, in all its defamatory glory, with ScoMo safe in coward’s castle; parliamentary privilege.

Scott Morrison accuses Labor of a campaign of political lynching, The Guardian Australia, happily gurgles, regurgitating a key theme in Opposition HQ comms. It does help to flood the zone with shit, as master of disinformation, Steve Bannon, puts it. MSM help him subvert the narrative of the Royal Commission’s indictment of Morrison for failing to act responsibly in presenting Robodebt to cabinet whilst knowing that it was illegal.

Of course, there’s more. Morrison lied. Commissioner Catherine Holmes also found the liar from the shire lied to the commission. Or presented untrue evidence. No-one ever told him income averaging was an established practice yet he claims he was given verbal assurances of this fairytale.

It not only beggars belief that Morrison had nothing to do with Robo-debt after he became Treasurer or PM, as he claims, it upends ministerial seniority. In ScoMo’s absurd version, he grew less responsible the higher his rank.

It gets worse. Echoing Julia Banks who says that he was a “menacing, controlling wallpaper”, Commissioner Holmes found that Morrison then bullied public servants; or “pressured departmental officials” over Robo-debt.

Liberals knew Robo-debt was illegal in 2014, before the scheme even started. David Mason, Acting Director within The Department of Social Services DSS told its delivery arm, then known as the Department of Human Services

“We would not be able to let any debts calculated in this manner reach a tribunal,” Mason warns.

“It’s flawed, as the suggested calculation method averaging employment income over an extended period does not accord with legislation, which specifies that the employment income is assessed fortnightly.”

Robo Debts are still being collected. Those who were coerced into paying back an illegally assessed debt and money they didn’t owe are still meeting instalment arrangements which Centrelink says must be honoured. The culture of the department administering them hasn’t changed even if the rhetoric of its Minister is upgraded.

As ever, there’s a touch of the torch song of unrequited love from Morrison. Narcissus drowning. Tragically, grotesquely overcome by self-love and self-pity, a vainglorious lout who is in love with himself, can have no rivals.

Mixed with bile and venom, ScoMo’s swan song (we can hope) is a bizarre, discordant, contortion of lies, crack-pot logic and Trumpery which slanders the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme as a part of quasi-legal political lynching while the coward in him abuses parliamentary privilege.

Morrison who is fresh back from serving his electorate of Cook by holidaying in Italy and Greece, is “a bottomless well of self-pity with not a drop of mercy for all the real victims of Robodebt”, Shorten tells Parliament.

But it’s worse than that. Our attention is turned away from some serious corruption to an easier narrative; the fiction of Labor’s vendetta or political lynching of poor Scott John Morrison whose own version of the truth – a bit like the apocryphal tale of the boy who put his finger in the hole in the dyke -he was only maintaining the system’s integrity and saving taxpayer dollars is grotesque and insulting but a cunning parody, nevertheless.

Worse. Trumpista Morrison would have us believe that he is the victim and that Commissioner Catherine Holmes, a former Chief Justice of Queensland, has let herself become a Labor Party stooge in Shorten’s vendetta. It’s defamatory and untrue but our parliamentary privilege convention makes it all somehow OK if it’s said in parliament?

As with Trump, there is the chance of legal proceedings against those mentioned in the sealed section of Holmes’ report. Holmes also warns of victims suing individual ministers for misfeasance in public office.

A fitting outcome would be the prosecution of both Dutton and Morrison over their engagement of a contractor known to be corrupt given he was sentenced before the then PM and Home Affairs Ministers renewed his contract.

But who knows what other evidence of misfeasance may turn up? Dutton and Morrison must have upset enough AFP and Border Force operatives in their race to the bottom that more damaging evidence of corruption Is highly likely.

Not that you’d wish a prison sentence on anyone. Some community service on Manus Island or Nauru would be most appropriate for either as long as the pair are kept apart. Indefinite detention, whilst fitting, is probably a patrol boat bridge too far. But no mobiles, no conjugal rights and don’t let Morrison near a camera. Ever again.

“Marxist” teachers are teaching our kids “absolute leftwing rubbish.” NSW Senator, Hollie Hughes, Shadow Minister for denying climate change and promoting fossil fuels, moonlighting as Opposition national curriculum cop, reads from the Republican playbook’s false alarmism about critical race theory and gender whispering being taught in schools. The Coalition sideshow is pumping now Dutton’s obsessed with vetting what goes on in the classroom because it works for right-wing politicians in the US.

Marx? No one’s sure if she’s talking about Groucho, Harpo or Karl. Having lost the plot long before it lost power, the opposition will struggle to hold Labour, or anyone else to account, but at least it can do some public good by holding itself up to ridicule.

Dutton’s on a week’s leave so “Lying Cow” Linda Reynolds tries a bit of biting self-satire with her “targets with teeth”, a way of talking about quotas without mentioning the “Q” word. “Inaction is not a strategy”, she tells Sky News, a refreshing insight from a former minister in a government which gave new meaning to inaction, inertia and ineptitude.

Reynolds’ best gag, however, is her claim that her government “did more for women than any other”. This is the same government that helped push Australia further and further down the greasy pole of the Global Gender Gap Index.

Standout performer in the well-contested absolute rubbish arena, however, goes to the Reserve Bank of Australia’s top tipster, Phil Lowe. Phil’s RBA has a patchy track record but to our right-wing media controlled by vested interests, he’s some type of High Priest instead of an investor-class shill who can fiddle the till by printing money.

Phil’s out and about peddling the lie that we’re in a wage-price spiral. Given real prices have been going backwards for a decade it’s not strong on logic but it meets the Reserve Bank brief which is for its CEO to come out as required to beat down wages, in the name of “stability”. Hiking interest rates does, however, leads to joblessness which neoliberal governments love to use to suppress wages – even if it is utterly at odds with the RBA’s other goal of full employment.

Although not counted in the CPI, mortgage payments and rents are nudged up by interest rates which now rise every time the banksters and usurers’ pals on the RBA Board attend their monthly meetings. Real estate values fall as the cost of borrowing goes up, while a price-profit spiral beggars the poor and threatens the wealth of our investor class.

Our celebrity media does its best. Even our ABC repeats the old gag that it’s a wage-price spiral. Blames selfish low-paid workers for daring to get a pay “rise” below inflation.

Inexcusable, however, is Phil Lowe’s cameo appearance on ABC 7:30, jaw-boning the lie that wages rises equals inflation which is easily kept in check by raising interest rates. In reality, none of this is true. But he’s a performer in a circus where illusion is everything.

Phil’s got a great sense of humour, too. All those years he’s been dog-whistling wage rises and now he turns around and blames inflation on greedy workers asking for enough pay to buy groceries and pay the power bill. And look how he stooged us all with his “No rate rise before 2024.” What a crack-up. Especially to those who borrowed big on the strength of his prediction and now face job losses. You’re a funny man, Phil, even if you’re full of bullshit. All you care about is protecting investors’ profits. And your board is a dud.

Five out of nine RBA board “business leader” members have no qualifications whatsoever in setting monetary policy, the bank’s core business. Overseas, reserve banks attract the top echelon, the experts who write the textbooks. Luckily, Phil’s RBA minutes are secret.

It’s impossible to find out how the RBA reaches its decisions. Or makes so many mistakes. Like the National Cabinet, there’s no record of who said what. But it all ends up costing a fortune – not just Phil’s million-dollar salary but in unemployment growth.

Keeping the cash rate too high in the four years before the pandemic cost us 270,000 jobs, reckon Dr Zac Gross and Dr Andrew Leigh, our assistant Treasurer, in fresh research out this month. Dr Gross notes, for perspective, that closing down coal mining tomorrow would cost only 38,100 jobs. Lowe is on ABC 7:30, however, telling tired old lies about our inflation being a wage-price spiral when it’s driven by profits and price-gouging.

No one asks Lowe about the massive debt his bank helped create over the last few years, ostensibly, to get us through the pandemic by throttling back interest rates whilst printing money, a nifty trick known as quantitative easing. Pioneered by the Japanese in the 1990s, it didn’t work for Japan either but it’s a sure-fire way to devalue assets and elevate Australian household debt to around $2.5 trillion, a record 120% of GDP.

Household debt as a proportion of disposable income is at a historic high; all of which is oddly dissonant with Lowe’s mantra that we’re all cashed up at home. Sitting on an extra $240 billion because we couldn’t go out and spend during lockdown.

“We have a big potential problem courtesy of the way we have run our housing system, for not just the last decade but for the last at least three decades,” says Chris Martin, UNSW’s City Futures Research Centre Senior Researcher.

Martin’s concerned policies such as low-interest rates, negative gearing and capital gains tax discount encourage punters to take on more debt, particularly to purchase investment properties. The latter two benefit the top ten percent and drive up house prices, argues The Australia Institute’s Matt Grudnoff.

Never to be upstaged, there’s a Barilaro of laughs in the Big Top of Politics Oz. The former deputy Premier of NSW will still call Australia home after being forced out of a cushy new $500,000 post in New York, a fabulously public-spirited boondoggle he set up for himself. Shit happens, Tony Abbott says, but now Bruz is Perrottet’s unflushable turd.

Where would we be without Barra? John “Save the Brumby” Barilaro, rips up his ticket to ride in a boilover at the starting gate in the Dom Perignon New York Stakes, a race identical to the Berejiklian event run last year. He’s forced, Barilaro says, by The Media, out of the saddle of firm favourite, New York under syndicate instructions.

Given that his rival, top hoop, Jenny West, won Berejiklian’s race only to be disqualified afterwards, like Dancer’s Image in the 1968 Kentucky Derby, “Bruz ” thought he was unbackable. Whilst an inquiry learns that West was “overqualified”, that wouldn’t help her.

The rules are changed after the start as Amy Brown, CEO of Investment NSW explains, to eliminate West, in a late “change in government policy to convert the roles into statutory officers appointed by a minister”. No wonder Barilaro feels ripped off. His sense of injury is no doubt assuaged as Ms Brown explains the Investment NSW process.

“We give it to God and pray and pray and pray, and he will work out his purposes.”

Our showbiz-MPs, with their performative rorts, ugly skulduggery and shagadelic sleaze-baggery, work hard on their show routines, while they cook the books and the planet. Say what you may about the light on the hill, or the deep twilight of a captured state; the venality, corruption and deceit, our politics is still show business for ugly people.

But we’ll have no appearance-shaming here, given the peculiar potency of our defamation law to silence criticism and dissent. Giovanni Barilaro is a winsome, over-achiever of inestimable talent and a natural crowd-puller. A stud muffin. True, he’s the Barnaby Joyce of NSW politics because he’s so divisive. But you can’t pull all of the people all of the time.

He hasn’t won over Barnaby. Barilaro is “grating and pushy” Joyce says.

Politics, of course, is also a means to wield power for its own sake in every possible way, as it is for the incredible sulk, False-Messiah Morrison, a man who heard voices and saw a vision in an eagle photo, telling him he was chosen by God to lead us out of the wilderness. He is now in witness protection, surely, after driving his Liberals into a mountain.

Morrison’s means included disinformation, weaponisation of asylum seekers, and the stacking of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT), the ABC, The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and other bodies. Labor promises its federal ICAC by the year’s end, while it says that the AAT, a fabulously well-paid dumping ground for failed Liberal politicians and retired party apparatchiks. will have to be disbanded and rebuilt fit for purpose.

Former family joinery artisan, a man who knows all about opening doors, deputy NSW Premier, National Party star, Barilaro is a barrel of laughs as he handcrafts his own plum job in The Big Apple. But he’s not just a funny man.

John’s public-spirited, humble and self-reflective, too. Two years ago, he pulled out of preselection for the Nationals’ ticket in the Eden-Monaro federal byelection. Why?

“In politics, ego can quickly skew decisions … In this time of self-contemplation, it is clear I can do more as NSW Deputy Premier,” he promises, selflessly.

A day later, his text to Deputy PM Michael McCormack takes another tack.

“The Nats had a chance to create history, to change momentum, and you had a candidate that was prepared to risk everything to make it happen”.

Barilaro is right the first time. Do more? He games the game of mates. Takes jobs for the boys to a new dimension with his DIY, $500,000 a year plus $100,000 perks, New York-based gig as Senior Trade Commissioner to the Americas. What does such a Trade Commissioner do? He does lunch. And he does dinner, too, on the taxpayer dollar.

But always in style. Amy Brown, CEO of Investment NSW, advises a parliamentary committee of inquiry that the fit-out for a New York office for Barilaro cost $AU 1.3 million.

Oddly not in the news is that Austrade, the federal government department for wining and dining prospective investors and carpet-baggers, already has a Trade and Investment Commissioner in its very capable General Manager for The Americas, Tony Davis.

An engineer with computer science qualifications, Tony is a highly experienced businessman whose career has spanned three decades leading highly complex Industrial, Energy, Aerospace and Defence domestic and international organisations, whose career includes a former CEO of Rolls Royce Royce Power Systems AG.

Barilaro has a TAFE Certificate IV in Real Estate. But heaps of experience, as Kate Carnell tells those still watching ABC’s The Drum, where the former ACT Liberal Chief Minister and pharmacist, gets a regular spot to barrack for the blue team, now hyper partisans peddling disinformation are deemed to supply balance on our ABC. In Carnell’s view, it must be just bad luck Barra has not one but two separate inquiries into the scandal. Or is it now three?

Joe Aston’s not amused. The AFR’s most trenchant critic of poseurs is agape.

“A person labouring under the Dunning-Kruger effect is like a gruesome traffic accident: repulsive but impossible not to stare at.”

Not so funny is former Investment NSW deputy secretary, Jenny West’s story. The senior public servant is told the job is hers, only to hear, subsequently, that the offer is rescinded. Later she pens a forty-five-page letter to get a few things off her chest. West fronts the state parliamentary inquiry, 11 July, in an appearance, she requests, be kept private. Tragically, this is overruled by the Greens Senator chairing the committee.

It will take all of forty-five pages to chronicle Barilaro’s byzantine, self-promotion, self-demotion and the metamorphosis of his New York post; a statutory appointment, then a public service process. NSW Libs love a game of musical desks, Twister, or pass the parcel. But it won’t end well for the Premier. Barra-gate may bring Dominic Perrottet’s demise. Guardian Essential’s latest poll shows support for the Liberals is now below 40%.

In the end, politics can also be an old black ram tupping your white ewe, as Iago tells Brabantio, which, despite the racism of Shakespeare’s day, is not a bad way of portraying what is done to innocent Australians every day, by the powerful in their determination to have their way. And not just in NSW.

Barilaro may bring Perrottet down, while Dutton’s opposition can only further disgrace itself and the Liberal brand of expediency, deceit, self-aggrandisement and naked self-interest. Meanwhile, the RBA is exposed as an accomplice in the redistribution of wealth from labour to capital that has disgraced our politics since Neoliberalism took hold of Hawke and Keating.

It is to be hoped that the new Labor government has the bottle for long-overdue reform, not just of the RBA but of the corruption, the venality and degeneracy of our politics itself.