As political surrenders go, Thursday’s was entirely comprehensive.



On Tuesday Malcolm Turnbull dug in publicly against a royal commission into the banks. By Thursday morning, we were having one.

The why of that is obvious and, when it came to the reckoning, Turnbull was commendably, if disconcertingly, frank.

He said two things.

The first was government policy was government policy right up until the moment it wasn’t. (Somewhat bracing, that observation, when steadiness in politics is generally considered a virtue – but useful to know, given that this really is the credo of Malcolm Turnbull, prime minister, who declared in his very first prime ministerial interview with Guardian Australia: “If something isn’t working as well as you want, chuck it out. I’m not afraid of people saying, it’s a backdown, or a backflip. An agile government is prepared to abandon policies that don’t work.”)

The second Turnbull observation was about parliamentary numbers. He noted his government is now two numbers down in the House of Representatives, which is a diplomatic way of acknowledging publicly that his government can’t control the parliament.

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So what this means in plain English is this.

A banking inquiry was clearly on the way, whether the government wanted one or not, because dissidents in the National party had absolutely no intention of getting back in their box.

Faced with a choice – have an inquiry we can’t control, or have an inquiry we can control – the prime minister and the major banks evidently chose the latter course.

When you can’t control the numbers in the parliament, because you can’t control your own people, and because events have gotten on top of you – that’s the only choice you have.

So there it was.

A tidy backflip by the banks to the Australian Stock Exchange articulating their own terms – the commission must be led by a judge, have thoughtfully drafted terms of reference free of political influence (which means look at how we operate in the market but not the political sphere), and cover the whole financial services sector, including superannuation. And PS: replace other, ongoing inquiries.

And then the early morning confirmation in the prime minister’s courtyard that the royal commission (undertaken broadly on the bank’s terms rather than on the terms established by Nationals dissidents, the Greens and Labor) was a “regrettable but necessary action”.

Regrettable but necessary meaning a distance short of a triumph, and executed right where this government generally finds itself – half an inch back from the cliff face.

Queensland’s George Christensen, serene in triumph, couldn’t even bring himself to be gracious once the backflip was confirmed, noting caustically that Nationals backbenchers had dragged the prime minister “kicking and screaming” to this decision – just in case we might have somehow missed that everyone in politics is now taking no prisoners.

While the government stood up and proclaimed to the world that stuff was going to happen in Canberra now because policy is intrinsically flexible and insurrections were an unfortunate part of life, at least until after the two byelections (touch wood) – the Labor senator Sam Dastyari must have thanked the royal commission gods for his brief respite.

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Possibly the Labor senator’s latest misjudgment will now be down page one, or the second leg of the nightly political news package, but it remains a serious misjudgment nonetheless.

Dastyari is likely to be sincere in his contrition, it’s possible he might have learned from past missteps, and there are, as the Greens suggest, some intriguing questions to ponder about how and why this new information about the Labor senator came to light.

But the fact of the matter is Dastyari has amply demonstrated time and time again that he lacks judgment and restraint: he generally talks too much and thinks far too little.

Bill Shorten has issued an official wrist-slap and contends Dastyari will learn from this experience but the qualities that make the Labor senator strife-prone – the enthusiasms, the front-running – are a fixed and recurrent part of his personality.

While a government in perilous political circumstances is desperate for a distraction, any distraction, and while there has been a nasty overlay in some of the commentary about Dastyari (one government man referred to his Iranian heritage as if that were a case against him), the broad points government ministers have been making about his position being untenable are reasonable.

A senator in the Australian parliament should not behave in the way Dastyari has behaved. No senator or parliamentarian should behave in that fashion.

Not many things in politics are simple. That one is.