Before we get to Tony Abbott – and believe me, we’ll get to Tony – I want to begin with Ahmed Fahour as a little case study about the brutality of contemporary politics.



Fahour, readers will know, is the $5.6m dollar man – the chief executive of Australia Post – who announced on Thursday it was time to move on.

Fahour’s generous remuneration package, once the dollar figure was revealed, had become a water cooler topic over the past few weeks – a talkback and tabloid sensation, for obvious reasons.

People behind the scenes say things got rugged between the government, Fahour and the Australia Post board in mid-February, as the atmosphere got politically hot. One account from a person in a position to know says the government delivered an ultimatum to Fahour and the board: if you want to stay, you are going to have to take a pay cut, and if you refuse, action will be taken against the board.

The government confirms there was dialogue between the shareholder ministers, Mitch Fifield and Mathias Cormann, and the board. A spokeswoman for Fifield says the government requested the board “give more rigorous consideration of remuneration in line with community expectations”.

She denies an ultimatum was given. In any case, Fahour is gone. “The managing director’s decision to resign was his own,” Fifield’s spokeswoman says.

If we are assessing Fahour’s performance objectively, using conventional measures, he’s been a successful chief executive, booking a $197m profit before tax for Post in the first half of this year – and this in a business that’s supposed to have been rendered moribund through technological disruption.

But insiders point out he made the critical mistake of coming to the attention of Pauline Hanson. Once the One Nation leader learned Fahour’s remuneration package was north of $5m, she grabbed the proverbial smelling salts, and fanned mass outrage on every possible communication channel.

Given Australian politics is currently orbiting around Hanson – well, not really her, in truth she’s incidental, the collective fixation in Canberra is with courting her disaffected supporters, they have become the barometer of everything – the One Nation lock on Fahour was inconvenient to say the least.

This story is more complicated than the government wanting to extinguish a bushfire in intra-day politics, but nonetheless, the story ended predictably, with Fahour smiling ferociously as he departed his post on Thursday.

On the way out, he told journalists the departure had nothing to do with the salary controversy, and he lobbed a free jibe in Hanson’s direction. Fahour noted (à propos of nothing) that big organisations were more complicated operations than “fish and chip shops”.

Later, on The Project, he wondered whether Hanson had a problem with something other than his performance. “You know, what Senator Hanson should really work out: does she have a real issue with how Australia Post is performing or does she have an issue with the colour of my skin or my religion?”

Hanson video

Hanson says absolutely not on her Facebook page, where she couldn’t contain her glee about the departure – a development for which she claimed full credit. The Greens had called her racist, Hanson noted mid-ebullience, but these Greens “wouldn’t have a bloody clue, they have no idea”.

This was about fat cats, and little people, and jobs – and by the way Ahmed, don’t even think about joining the unemployment queue.

I suspect no one much in voter land will shed a tear for Fahour, given the entirely reasonable public impatience with the bloated excesses of executive remuneration, and given wages growth for us mere mortals has slowed to a crawl – but the whole furore is another little case study of how brittle and tribal everything is.

There are people around the Coalition who think the whole episode has been a crude capitulation to populism, at a time when populism needs to be resisted.

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It is also consequential in a couple of ways. Having watched the recent trajectory, would you want to be the next chief executive of Australia Post? Expose yourself to the institutionalised madness of contemporary politics? I wouldn’t.

The second practical consequence concerns how the new executive pay regime will work at Post now the government has removed the discretion of the board to determine pay and conditions. Depending on how that rolls out, it is possible that the next CEO of Post could earn less than the senior executive team working around him or her, which seems a little ... unorthodox.

And the casual brutality and incoherence rolls on.

And on. And on.

Yes, we have reached Abbott now, and that intervention.

The right in Australian politics is currently hell-bent on consuming itself.

Civil war keeps erupting before our very eyes.

Tony Abbott dished it out to Malcolm Turnbull on Thursday night in most extraordinary fashion. His intervention was a precision strike against the man who took his job, with Newspoll in the field over the weekend, and federal parliament returning next week.

Abbott wasn’t actually talking to the colleagues, which is probably wise, given many of them want to lock him in a cupboard and throw away the key.

It was more vicious than a conventional party room courtship exercise.

He looked over their heads, and spoke instead to the voters Malcolm Turnbull is currently intent on trying to woo back: white working-class voters in regional areas stranded at the fag end of the mining boom – the folks drifting dangerously in Hanson’s direction because they’ve had a gutful of the circus in Canberra.

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Abbott had one simple message for those people: the emperor has no clothes.

Abbott took the central pitch of Turnbull’s new year strategy to put a floor under the Liberal party’s ebbing primary vote – the energy security offensive and the government’s big coal pivot (which resonates in the post mining boom regions) – and he demolished it.

He said the government’s policy on climate and energy was an incoherent crock.

Not content with yanking the rug out from under Turnbull and the government’s political “recovery” strategy for 2017, Abbott then upped the ante in the political arms race for disaffected conservatives.

He put immigration on the table. Apparently we need to cut immigration to help housing affordability – a complete nonsense, and incendiary to boot – but designed to hit the front bar “nod” test. (“So that’s why I can’t afford a house. Bloody immigrants. Hogging Aussie houses.”)

It’s a little fire you light in fractious times, and watch the embers burn. If voters have logged the substance of Abbott’s pitch, rather than just consumed it as colour and movement, his message will certainly resonate in some parts of the country, and it also reflects one view inside the government.

The chairman of the government’s backbench committee on environment and energy, Craig Kelly, just to take one voice, agrees with most of what Abbott said on Thursday night, including the desirability of lowering the immigration rate.

The Abbott 2.0 manifesto does, however, generate one obvious response for those of us still trying to reside in a fact-based universe: if this is the answer to what ails Australia, why didn’t you do it yourself? When you were ... you know ... the prime minister. With power.

Abbott’s speech was, in a fact-based universe, mildly delusional, and almost entirely hypocritical. But as acts of rank political bastardry go, it was comprehensive.

There is only one conclusion to take away from the performance, and that is that Abbott is hell-bent on Turnbull’s destruction, never mind the cost, never mind the casualties.

If he can’t take him out in the party room because he’s a general without an army, then he will take him out with the conservative base, and drive a cleaver right through the heart of rightwing politics.

If the political right shatters into shards, so be it.

At one level it’s pure nihilism.

Abbott’s pitch, and the warm-up sorties before it, has gone down very poorly internally, at least with senior people. It’s very hard to see how he could plot a path back to the leadership when his current rusted-on support base is Eric Abetz, Kevin Andrews, Andrew Bolt and a revolving cast of Fox Lite talking heads on Sky News. He seems to lack numbers, to put it mildly.

But we all know Abbott is possessed by a spirit of irrepressible opportunity. We also have Cory Bernardi’s expert testimony on this question. Bernardi called Abbott out comprehensively on the proxy warring at the time he split from the Liberals – just burned him to the ground, by calling a spade a shovel. Bernardi said Abbott wanted his old job back, and he, for one, wasn’t inclined to help him.

Senior conservatives have rallied robustly for Turnbull, particularly Mathias Cormann, who was really forceful against Abbott on Friday. Cormann, once one of Abbott’s strongest supporters, said on Friday there was no way back to the leadership. No ifs, no buts.

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Some inside the government have a wary eye on Peter Dutton, but senior players are adamant that Abbott is not being a trojan horse for the Queensland conservative – no way, no how.

While the prime minister has looked a lot more confident in the past fortnight, things are also a bit free-form inside the government: there’s a blindingly obvious fracture between Turnbull and his treasurer, Scott Morrison; perennial backbench favourite, Julie Bishop, is currently not inclined to suffer fools gladly; Dutton, looking just that bit too pleased with himself; Christopher Pyne, freelancing copiously for reasons some colleagues can’t entirely fathom.

All a bit creaky. All a bit battle-scarred.

So where have we washed up in our tale of woe?

There are two substantial headwinds buffeting the Coalition at the present time.

One is disruption of the established order of Australian politics, and the other is disunity.

Disruption and disunity.

Unless both can be managed, the prognosis is inescapable, and bleak as a Canberra winter.

It’s death.