The Coalition have been getting quite a lot of advice recently. This always happens when you lose and it’s good to listen to advice. Listening to advice, however, doesn’t mean that it’s not completely within your rights to ignore it when it doesn’t suit the narrative you wish to spin.

So let me be quite clear about the position the Liberals and the Nationals are taking with regard to Scott Morrison and the current predicament they find themselves in.

1. Losing the election was a mistake. If it hadn’t been for losing the election, nobody would have needed to know that Scott Morrison had taken on a plethora of portfolios without telling anyone.
2. Scott did a lot of good things too. We’d rather concentrate on them and it’s all very well to use hindsight to say that he shouldn’t have had those secret ministries. He was just trying to keep Australia safe and he took on more jobs to do that, but let’s not forget that he didn’t do anything in any of them apart from telling the Resources Minister that he didn’t have the power to make a decision. All the other ministers could keep making decisions because they were making the correct ones which Scott approved. To paraphrase Churchill: “Never has one man done so little with so many jobs.”
3. Barnaby Joyce told Insiders that he was informed about Scott Morrison holding the ministry with Keith Pitt but he was told over time so it was quite clear when he knew and he wasn’t told by anyone specifically on any specific date but was told “over time” so it wasn’t something that he could… And look, he couldn’t be any clearer. Keith Pitt was still the minister even if he wasn’t the minister that made the decisions and if Barnaby, as leader, had pointed out that this breached the Coalition agreement then Scott would have just taken away all the ministries that they weren’t entitled to and it’s better to have a ministry that you have no control over than to lose it because you’ve got more than you’re entitled to. Not to mention the extra staff that you weren’t entitled to. The age of entitlement might be over, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t get more than you’re entitled to if you just go along with the PM. And no, David, Mr Morrison didn’t say that but be real, you know what he’s like!
4. The whole Scott Morrison thing is in the past and Labor is just trying to use it for political gain and we should be talking about the current problems and trying to find solutions. After all, we haven’t mentioned pink batts and Labor’s debt for a good couple of weeks now, so it’s really time to move on and talk about cost of living and skills shortages.
5. Of course, when we say talk about, we don’t mean sit people down and have something like a jobs summit because that’s just a stunt so we won’t be taking part in that… Oh… David Littleproud is but that’s his right because he won’t be a prop like unions and business. As Sussan Ley said there’s a danger that big business could be used by Labor to make it look like they’re actually achieving something when we all know that this summit won’t achieve anything.
6. Labor are trying to ruin the weekend again by raising fuel emission standards in line with most of the developed world. This means that car companies won’t be able to dump high-emitting vehicles here and this will drive up the price of a Hi-Lux from $54,000 driveaway to a price so high that pensioners won’t be able to pay for it with their franking credits and they’ll actually need to sell some of their shares or dip into their superannuation. This is part of the plot to force us all to drive electric vehicles which aren’t suitable in Australia because they have to be re-charged after 600ks and we can drive our petrol cars from Melbourne to Sydney without the need for re-fuelling or a break for a meal.
7. Let’s not forget energy prices. They’re going up and we should be concentrating on them instead of something that we all agree Scott shouldn’t have done. Jane Hume thinks that whatever he’s done in the past is behind and we should be moving on and not turning this into some sort of “witch-hunt” and she’s accusing Labor of “pearl-clutching” and she wants to keep her pearls to herself.
8. We need to have solutions to the pain people are feeling now and the solution to energy prices is nuclear energy which should be on the table because it’s perfectly safe, even for the table. There’s a lot of hysteria and we’re already behind in the race to build modular reactors, according to Barnaby, who doesn’t remember that he was Deputy PM just a few weeks ago. Why he didn’t raise this when he was in power, was possibly because he was afraid that it was outside his portfolio and Scott would take away his staff and Barnaby hated to think of his staff losing their job because he’s a man who loves his staff.

Yep, I think that about covers it. Ignore the past, don’t have talkfests to talk about the future, act without consulting, build nuclear reactors to bring prices and emissions down sometime before 2050.

And remember that John Howard is always available to promote his book and to remind you that the Liberals believe in the free market so they’re prepared to spend vast amounts of government money to ensure that the free market works effectively.