On Sunday, Kate Galloway wrote about the NSW Supreme Court’s decision in Ashton v Pratt.  The details of the case are pretty much of the ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and the Famous’ kind.  The story goes: Richard Pratt is fabulously wealthy and travels about the place sans his wife.  He meets an escort, Ms Ashton, and — in a supposed exchange read into the decision which definitely needs to be poorly acted by Home and Away starlets — says to her: ‘If you stop being an escort and “concentrate on my needs and wants” (mistress), I will give you a swag of cash.’

The best line of that exchange: ‘after all, I am Richard Pratt, one of the richest men in Australia’.

The court found:

Ms Ashton’s case in contract fails – although the terms of those arrangements were not too uncertain and incomplete to amount to a contract – first because Mr Pratt and Ms Ashton did not intend to enter into binding and enforceable legal relations, and secondly because public policy denies enforceability to any such contract as alleged. [At 88]

The second part of this decision is what interested Galloway:

Although the Court found there were insufficient indicia of a contract (ie the arrangement lacked intention to create legal relations) Brereton J nonetheless turned his mind to whether such an arrangement could theoretically be enforceable, or whether it would be against public policy. The public policy in question was rendering void and illegal, contracts that are ‘sexually immoral and/or prejudicial to the status of marriage’.  [Source: Galloway, 'Sex & Immorality: The Court's Take'

Public policy is a weird bit of contract law.  It basically says that there are some contracts which would be repugnant to community standards to enforce.  Ordinarily, public policy problems shouldn't arise because people don't really make a habit of entering into contracts which offend standards of decency.

It's such a weird area of contacts that I had to go back to the textbooks to make sure I had all my ducks in a row.  There are some great quotes about public policy because the idea of courts being able to determine whether a contract was, when it gets down to it, immoral spooked a lot of judges.  In an 1824 English case, Richardson v Mellish, Burrough J calls public policy 'a very unruly horse, and when once you get astride it you never know where it will carry you'.  Public policy takes away the autonomy of people to enter into agreements which they find accord with their moral values and surrenders that decision to the courts.  Over time, judges became so spooked by the idea that they halted its development in common law.  In another English case, Janson v Driefontein Consolidated Mines, Halsbury LC rejected the view that 'any court can invent a new head of public policy.'  This reasoning led to a decision by an Australian judge, Windeyer J, in Brooks v Burns Philp Trustee Co Ltd:

The House of Lords has said that it is not for courts to create new heads of public policy.  [...]  The proposition continues to excite controversy among those who doubt whether the fertility of courts in the 19th century has now given way to sterility, resulting from senility, in the common law.’  [Source: Brooks v Burns Philp Trustee Co Ltd (1969) 121 CLR 432; quoted in Paterson, et al. Contract: Cases and Materials]

And yet here we are in 2012 with a case which shows public policy considerations are alive and well.  In this instance, the contract was considered unenforceable because it was sexually immoral.

Galloway argues that prohibiting contracts which are deemed sexually immoral by the courts is problematic.

A feminist reading of this case might identify that the Court framed its inquiry around the ‘social’ and sexual (ie private) nature of the arrangement. In positioning Ms Ashton’s claim as private, it existed outside the law. This reveals how contract law privileges the so-called objective, rational, autonomous public face of the market place – for it is these arrangements that will be enforced by the law while others within the domestic or social sphere will not.  [Source: Galloway, op. cit.]

But I’m a bit worried by this reasoning.  There’s already a shaky understanding in contract law that courts don’t like to mess about in family matters: Balfour v Balfour ran with this idea that, because a contract is formed when the parties intend to create a legally enforceable agreement, agreements between spouses (and, by extension, family members) weren’t obviously contracts.  If I say to my brother, ‘Hey, Ian.  You can crash on my floor when you visit’, I don’t expect him to sue me if, for whatever reason, it turns out that him crashing on my floor is impractical.  When I go about my social interactions with my family, I don’t think that it’s obvious I’m creating all kinds of legal obligations.  I might create moral obligations.  I might be considered to be a terrible person if I let my brother down by forcing him to stay at one of the many Canberran hotels when he comes to visit.  But I don’t think I’m a legally culpable person.

At the heart of this, I don’t like the idea of my life being reduced to legal interactions (in the same way, I worry when libertarians tell me that my life is merely a collection of economic interactions).

In The Hidden Gender of Law, Graycar and Morgan cite Atkin LJ: ‘Each house is a domain into which the King’s writ does not seek to run, and to which his officers do not seek to be admitted.’

But people disagree with this idea.

Again in Graycar and Morgan:

[T]raditional feminist arguments raise concerns about the private sphere as notionally unregulated, for example, in suggestions that ‘the legal system’ has traditionally failed to respond to violence against women in their homes.  Not only has this approach meant an over-reliance on an analytical tool that fails to encompass the experiences of many women [...] but Lacey suggests that some feminist critiques imply that privacy ‘has nothing to recommend it to women.’  [Source: Graycar and Morgan, The Hidden Gender of Law, p 20]

Unpacking the gist of the argument: if there’s an area of social interaction ungoverned by law, then there’s an area of social interaction where the socially disempowered have a means of redress for wrongs.  This seems to be where Galloway’s argument is heading here:

The law reveals its gendered nature in presuming that a person will delineate their life in a work/home dichotomy. In contrast, in the private sphere a person might see work and family as mutually defining. This would however fall outside the consideration of the law. In this way, the processes of contract law subtly privilege that which inhabits the public domain to the exclusion of inhabits the private.  [Source: Galloway, op. cit.]

As I’ve mentioned at length elsewhere, I don’t identify as a feminist.  Although I can see Galloway’s point — that people in the private sphere might have a need to seek legal remedies to problems, and that the law does not empower people in the private sphere to overcome differences in power — I’m still not sure legalism should creep into private interactions.  Then again, I might just be intuiting this because I’m in a privileged position as a conservative white male.

But more to the point, are we sure we want to argue that contracts which establish ‘mistress contracts’ should be enforceable in the courts?

In this example, Ms Ashton would have benefited from the contract being enforced.  She was the mistress and held up her end of the contract; therefore, Mr Pratt’s estate should fulfil its end.

But what if Ms Ashton did not benefit from the contract?  The agreement between Ashton and Pratt didn’t include an exclusivity arrangement, but it might have.  The agreement might have been: ‘I am Richard Pratt, one of the richest men in Australia, and I want you, Ms Ashton, to be my mistress.  When I’m in Sydney, you will provide me with sex.  You won’t have any other partners beside me.  In return for sex and exclusivity, I will give you a swag of cash.’  It would be strange if Pratt tried to have the contract enforced if Ms Ashton had extra-extra-marital affairs.  It feels like it would offend basic norms of morality for the court to enforce the contract.

Because the contract seems to favour Ms Ashton in the original example, we might be tempted to think that the court is imposing its ye olde morality into contract law.  But I think we would be appalled if the contract didn’t favour Ms Ashton and Pratt’s estate were trying to have it enforced by the courts.  I think it’s the same revulsion we feel when people try to restrict access to divorce to permit ‘at fault’ divorces only: it’s not really the court’s role to get involved in people’s sex life.  These ‘mistress contracts’ invite the court in for a ménage a trois of contractual bondage.

I quite like that last sentence.

I feel as though something is wrong with my reasoning.  Am I relying too heavily on my intuition of the private as a justifiably unregulated space?  Am I too quick to think that mistress contracts are repugnant, and that more people would agree with me if the contract disadvantaged the woman?

If nothing else, am I correct that the ’fertility of courts has now given way to sterility, resulting from senility, in the common law’ quote is really awesome?

The Index operates around a single principle: any State interference with the Press is unconscionable and tyrannical.  Regarding Australia, RWB said:

In Australia (30th), the media were subjected to investigations and criticism by the authorities, and were denied access to information [Source: http://en.rsf.org/IMG/CLASSEMENT_2012/C_GENERAL_ANG.pdf]

The cheek of authorities criticising the Press!  And investigations?!interrobang?!

Let’s unpack this mystery of Press Unfreedom in Australia.  The period in question was 1 December 2010 to 30 November 2011.  Thus, it would cover the period where the Australian Government was establishing the Media Inquiry.  It would cover the period where The Australian took aim at the Victorian Chief Commissioner of Police.  It would cover the period where Australia responded to the News of the World phone hacking.

It seems that the inability to tolerate criticism is not a domestic issue.

There are some fundamental issues about the news to which we need answers.

Are news companies part of the entertainment media or are they something different?  All of our major news outlets have entertainment branches as sister companies and the overlap between news and ‘infotainment’ is getting larger.  Is this appropriate?  Is the only news worth knowing entertaining?

Are news companies a fourth estate of a healthy democracy?  If so, why do the other estates of a healthy democracy engage in checks and balances but not the news?  Why is a free press an unaccountable, irresponsible, unchallengable press?

Finally, what protects the ordinary citizen from the awesome power of the press?  Why are we all fair game for their thirst for scoops?  Why doesn’t my privacy deserve protection?

Despite the ridiculously little amount of information circulating about what seems to be a fairly major event, the usual pundits haven’t taken breath before firing out their usual talking points and cheap debating riffs.  The result is an absurd hodge-podge of a narrative where readers are choosing their positions based on what resonates best with their prejudices.  Some writers have even managed to advocate entirely contradictory positions without anybody calling them out on it.

It all starts with a statement by Tony Abbott, Leader of the Opposition, who either said: ‘It’s been 40 years, a lot has changed in the recognition of Indigenous issues, so the Tent Embassy has run its course and it’s time to move on.’ Or: ‘It’s been forty years; it’s time to shut down the Tent Embassy.’

He maintains it was something along the former.  The message passed on to the Tent Embassy was something along the latter.  Ordinarily, we’d look to the media to report what was said: instead, in this issue, they seem to have taken a leading role in generating the drama rather than report it.

Isn’t that sad?  We can’t turn to the media for an account of what happened because we can’t trust them to report accurately.  What a joke.

It’s on this point that there’s some division.  If he said something along the latter, it’s despicable.  If he said something along the former, it’s not a flatly unreasonable comment (though, for my money, it’s incorrect).

This hasn’t stopped people from deciding the facts of this point based on their prejudices.  The winning comment on this was by @Pollytics: ‘he was deliberately ambiguous’.

Isn’t that great?  We can read comments reported second hand and then peer into the mind of the reported speaker to know their sinister intentions.  Evidence is for chumps.

Then there’s the question of how the reported comment was passed on to the Tent Embassy.  It has been revealed that it was done by one of Julia Gillard’s staffers through an ACT MP complete with the location of Tony Abbott at that exact moment (a few hundred metres away).

There’s so much baffling about the commentary relating to this part.  Let’s go through it step by step:

1. Gillard’s staffer orchestrated a scene to confront Abbott with a mob

This is probably the most insane part of the whole affair.  A staffer to the Prime Minister thought it was sensible, reasonable, appropriate, and civilised to stir up a crowd of upset people (they were protesting against the celebration of Australia Day because it represents the start of the dispossession of the First Australians) and direct them towards the Leader of the Opposition.

My Twitter feed (mostly lefties) is portraying this as: ‘Tony Abbott’s location was a secret and Gillard’s staffer leaked it. How stupid.  Abbott’s location isn’t a secret.  Stupid rightwing media.  Conspiracy!’  But it’s obvious to anybody who thinks about it for two seconds that it’s not that Abbott’s location was revealed, it’s that a staffer was involved with manufacturing a scene to confront the Leader of the Opposition with an angry mob.

It’s not even difficult to see why this is inappropriate.  When the various anti-carbon tax rallies were on, it would have been inappropriate for one of Abbott’s staffers to announce to the mob that Gillard was dining in a restaurant a few hundred metres away.  If they had, the lefties of Australia would have brayed about how inappropriate the act was: bullying, misogynistic, and uncivilised.

But when the politics suits them, they change their tune and misrepresent the problem.  Typical.

2.  The mob is so easy to manipulate

At the moment, it seems that the comments attributed to Abbott weren’t entirely accurate.  This didn’t stop the mob from being whipped into a frenzy by scant evidence.  A hundred odd people, banging windows, shouting, and generally being intimidating, went to confront a single man based on something presented without evidence.

Not a single one of them has come out to say: ‘Oh, shit.  My bad.  It was a hot day.  There was a lot of beer and we were really upset about the dispossession of Indigenous Australians.  We weren’t thinking straight.’

Instead, it’s this massive cop-out.  ’Oh… Oh… It’s somebody else’s fault!’  I had a beer last night with a guy who was formerly really active with the Greens here in the ACT, and he put it a lot more succinctly than me: ‘The crowd just didn’t think.  Make a noise now; ask questions later.’

3.  The location of the event is questioned

The next two points are related to (2).  Instead of questioning whether the mob should have rioted, pundits started asking whether it was wise to hold a function a few hundred metres from the Tent Embassy.  See the above point about things being everybody else’s fault.

But it also feeds into another issue which we’ll see again in this post: nobody trusts experts.  The venue was agreed to be appropriate by three groups: public servants from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Prime Minister’s staff, the AFP.  Frankly, the risk that a peaceful protest would be stirred up by mischief makers using misrepresented comments by the Leader of the Opposition wouldn’t have been seen as terribly unlikely.  I’m reliably informed that the venue wouldn’t have protected against alien invasion, outbreak of zombies, or a Godzilla rampage.

But is this the sort of environment the left wants in Australia?  When they’re holding a protest somewhere, everybody needs to treat them like a serious risk?  Really?  Is Canberra too small for us all to share?

4.  The competence of the police is questioned

The next group of experts nobody trusts is the police.  The same people have said that the police were unprepared for the riot and were too risk-averse.  Cack-handed, one person dubbed them.

For this sort of event, you only need a handful of coppers to hold back crankers and ranters who might try to gatecrash.  The thought that a riot could spring up from nowhere was implausible.  Given the events which led up to the riot, it should still be implausible…

Does the left want an environment where the PM only holds functions when surrounded by paramilitary?  Is that the environment they want?  Would that make them feel better?

The footage shows them trying to disrupt the awards ceremony, thumping windows, throwing things, and trying the block the escape car.  That all seems kinda intimidating and threatening.  Commentators have accused the police of being heavy-handed.  The people bashing windows, trying to gatecrash, and throwing things weren’t being violent.  No, no.  It was the police.

Further, there haven’t been any charges.  Therefore, it was a peaceful protest to disrupt an official function and intimidate one man.

The police have solved the latter argument; they’re going to go through the footage and charge identifiable people with disorderly conduct.  Good work, Team Left.

The whole argument is stupid.  Watching the footage, I could see one instance of where I felt a copper had probably retaliated to being pushed with a bit too much force.  On the whole, it seemed fairly fine.

But, no.  There can’t be an altercation of police with rioters without the rioters complaining that, despite outnumbering everybody else involved, they were somehow victimised.

And, finally, 5. The mainstream media are spinning this to Gillard’s disadvantage

We’ve already called into question the media’s role in this fracas.  The protesters themselves aren’t going to take responsibility, it’s unclear exactly what Abbott did wrong (except express the opinion that the point of the Tent Embassy was to get Indigenous Australia on the political agenda, which it now is) and that leaves Gillard with her stirrer staffer.  The media could try to hold the protesters to account, but that would be politically insensitive.  Thus, the only story to come out of the affair is not a reasoned discussion of Abbott’s point but the role of Gillard’s staffer.

We shouldn’t be upset that the MSM is taking Gillard’s staffer to task.  That is, as we saw above, reasonable and sensible.  We should be upset that nobody’s discussing Abbott’s thought bubble.  Are Indigenous issues well and truly on the agenda?  I’m not sure that’s accurate.  Are there different kinds of Indigenous issues which need to be on the table?  Is the disadvantage experienced by First Australians who remained segregated in settlements, &c., the issue as the disadvantage of Stolen Generations (and their descendants) in other parts of Australia?  Is the Tent Embassy bringing all of these issues to the national debate?  Should it?  Is that it’s purpose?  Would moving the Tent Embassy into Old Parliament House (for example) be a way of giving the Embassy the resources to do broader activities?  Or would that make the Embassy less visible?  Does ‘White Australia’ have anything useful or intelligent to say about the issue?

But, no.  Good guys v bad guys.

What does need to change is the tribal ‘Abbott did something evil until proven otherwise’ mentality.  I’ve been told time and time and time again that Abbott’s latest statement on some issue will be the end of his political career.  As a conservative who spends most of his time submerged in leftwing media, it feels like we’ve got a population with two entirely different sets of ‘facts’: and it’s not obvious that the left is always on the side of the factually correct.

This is a recurring problem and it needs a solution.

The latest manifestation is a series of Tweets informing readers that the ‘debate’ isn’t between pro-lifers and pro-choicers: it’s between pro-choicers and anti-choicers.

Meanwhile, the attacks on Melinda Tankard Reist are getting more personal: if she’s anti-abortion, can she really be a feminist?  Really, really?  Has anybody seen her feminist barcode tattooed to her neck?

The first issue sheds some light on the latter, so let’s start there.  By way of disclosure, I’m a white conservative male who doesn’t identify as feminist and who is pro-death.  I don’t have a horse in this race.  I disagree with MTR’s pro-life stance and I also disagree with the increasingly vitriolic, personal attacks against her (particularly the: ‘Ignore her arguments; remember she’s a Christian!’ rhetoric).

The way we talk about issues shapes the way we think about them.  It is notable that both sides of the ‘debate’ refer to themselves as ‘pro-something’.  More than that, they both refer to themselves as ‘pro-something-everybody-should-be-pro’.  The language is to reassure the advocate: they are on the side of angels, defending things which are worth defending, be it choice or life.

But the language we use is also a way of posing their side of the debate as default rational.  Of course you should be pro-life; are you anti-life?  Of course you should be pro-choice; are you anti-choice?

As such, the labels we use are shorthand for thinking.  Condensing a complicated argument down into 140 characters means resorting to snappy, emotive caricatures of our opponents.  With issues as deeply personal as abortion, it seems almost inevitable that we’re going to demonise our opponents.

As said earlier, I’m pro-death.  I’m fine for a woman to terminate her baby right up to labour, and for parents to issue doctors with Do Not Resuscitate instructions for their newborns.  I can understand why people wouldn’t agree with my position.  In today’s intellectual climate, it seems rather extreme but it’s founded in the idea that not every life is worth saving, that medicine is about quality of life, and that parents should be able to decide whether they want to undertake the burden of raising a child with severe health issues.

It also sits comfortably with my conservative views: some life isn’t worth saving.  Quality life is worth preserving.  Who decides the threshold for quality?  The people who are living it.

I understand the argument against my position.  I have a lot of sympathy for it but I’m not convinced by it.  I understand that there are some moderate pro-choicers who are uncomfortable with the idea of post-natal abortion.  Being honest, I suspect that they’re in the clear majority.

It would be absurd for me to declare them ‘anti-choice’ just because they disagree that post-natal abortion is a morally acceptable choice.  It would be absurd for me to demonise them.

And yet that’s what the main players in the debate do to each other on a daily basis.

It is not difficult to understand why a pro-lifer sees a similarity between abortion and murder.  It’s the deliberate ending of a life.  It’s the deliberate ending of a human life.  Many vegetarians and animal rights activists argue that we should extend the right to life as broadly as we possibly can.  Logical conclusion: unborn human life should be protected.  We might disagree with the idea, but it’s not pants-on-head stupid.

Characterising people who disagree with us as ‘anti-choice’ trivialises their position.  Weirdly, people on the pro-choice side of the ledger tend to have the most ridiculous assertions.  Consider the ‘If you ban abortion, women will have backyard abortions’ argument.  It’s clearly absurd.  The anti-abortion advocate is obviously against backyard abortions as well.  It’s not inconsistent for the anti-abortion advocate to champion better services for women to reduce the need for backyard abortions: better family planning, easier access to contraceptives, campaigns to reduce shaming of out-of-wedlock pregnancy, free education for women, &c., &c.

And it’s here that we crash into the ‘Is Melinda Tankard Reist a feminist?’ question.

If you believe that prohibiting abortion is a means by which males control female bodies, then feminists cannot be pro-life.  But this isn’t the only valid concept of anti-abortion.  If you believe that a feminist is a person who champions the endowment of women with the maximum scope of rights, but do not consider access to abortion to be a legitimate right as it infringes on the rights of the unborn baby, then it is not inconsistent for a anti-abortion champion to also be a feminist.  Similarly, I don’t think it’s the case that you have to champion my pro-death, maxi-choice position in order to be a feminist, even though my position extends more rights to women than most pro-choicers.

So if I’m not pro-life or feminist, why throw my hat into the ring?  Because I think it’s illustrative of a problem which does affect me: a problem I call ‘Positionism’.

Positionism is when a person tries to determine which political label applies to a person based on the positions held by the person and not the reasoning behind the position.  To the positionist, a person is left wing if they affirm a series of sentences.  You care about the environment, homosexuals, asylum seekers, women, and poor people?  You’re left wing.  You care about the privileged, corporations, and stomping on kittens?  You’re right wing.  You care about equality of women?  You’re feminist.  You don’t think women should be allowed to have abortions?  You can’t be a feminist.

It puzzles people that I, a conservative, can agree with left wingers on a variety of topics.  When I go through the various positions and show that they can be reached by two, diametrically opposed ways of viewing the world, they seem shocked.  (I always take advantage of their shocked state to induce post-hypnotic aversions to supporting the Greens)

We need to get away from this kind of tribal political discourse.  Not only is it stupid, it’s damaging.  It encourages group think (which has almost completely destroyed the atheist community) because to maintain the self-identification with a label, one feels the need to advocate a particular set of beliefs rather than employ a particular set of reasons.  Stating that MTR can’t be feminist because she’s pro-life is to completely ignore the reasons why she advocates her pro-life views and to privilege dogmatically a particular conception of abortion.

More than that: perhaps it’s just time to stop treating everybody who disagrees with us as being too stupid to operate their brain properly.  How I long for that day.

I guess there are two parts to my complaint.  First, QANTAS staff have informed me that you have a weirdly Kafkaesque policy which causes the automatic cancellation of a booking if the first flight of a sequence is missed.  In my case, this meant that my rescheduled flight was cancelled and I only found out about it on the day I was supposed to fly out.

The second part of my complaint is really the reason why I’m complaining: there were several points during my infuriating experience with my booking where QANTAS could have intervened to assist me.  That QANTAS missed every opportunity to help me before it was too late is what has upset me and I feel QANTAS acted unreasonably.

In late November, I booked a return flight from Canberra to Melbourne to attend a family function in early December.  There were two flights: one on the Saturday morning and one on the Sunday afternoon.  For whatever reason, I missed the Saturday morning flight.  Knowing that I had to fly again in January, I went to the ‘Manage my flight’ section of the QANTAS website to reschedule the Sunday flight.  I found that I could only reschedule for a Melbourne-Canberra flight (which I thought was weird at the time and, in hindsight, should have made me realise something was wrong).  I went through all the online steps.  I was expecting to receive an e-mail confirming the change.  When one didn’t appear, I worried that I’d done something wrong and logged back in to the ‘Manage my flight’ section.  The January date I wanted was still listed, so I figured that everything was okay.

In January, I booked a Canberra-Melbourne flight, effectively giving me a return trip: Friday night out; Sunday afternoon return.

On Friday morning, I received the e-mail asking me to confirm my flights.  I found that I could get into the ‘Manage My Booking’ for the Canberra-Melbourne flight, but I couldn’t use the existing booking reference to get into my rescheduled Melbourne-Canberra flight.  Instead, I received an error message telling me to ‘contact [you]‘.

The error messages on your website do not give any clues about how to contact you.  Instead, I had to bury through the website to find details.  Should I call reservations?  Should I call one of the other numbers?  Should I try the webform even though it says it will be answered in a few days, and I was expecting to fly out that evening, not knowing if I could get back?  When I received the error message, QANTAS was basically telling me to broker a solution by myself.  Instead of being given the details on how to resolve my problem with the error message, I had to work it all out for myself even though I had none of the tools I needed.

This attitude is a recurring theme throughout this complaint, and is basically the reason why I’m complaining.  If it were just that my flight got cancelled, I’d have stoically paid for another flight, grumbled a bit, and you’d never have heard from me.  Instead, I repeatedly came up against this attitude that customers have to sort out their own problems without assistance from QANTAS.

I found the reservations number and figured it was my best shot out of the available numbers.  I spent half an hour on hold before I gave up.  I tried again later in the day.  After being on hold for another half an hour, I send a Twitter message to @QANTASAirlines to ask why it was taking so long.  I then realised that @QANTASAirlines isn’t the correct Twitter account for problems.  I should have been messaging @QFcustomercare.  I sent a few messages stating that I was getting error messages on the site and that, by then, I had spent nearly an hour on hold.  @QFcustomercare didn’t attempt to work out what my problem was, or conduct any sort of triage on my problem.  Was I even calling the correct number out of all the ones listed on the website?  I had no idea how much longer I could expect to be on hold.  @QFcustomercare just told me to be patient and stay on hold.

After an hour, I gave up and tried again later in the day, only to stay on hold for another half hour.  At that stage, I figured it would be easier to go in earlier for my flight out and try to resolve the situation at the counter.  At least then I’d be sure of getting service.

Of the entire situation, the woman who was on the QANTAS ticket counter at Canberra airport was wonderful.  She was calm, courteous, and seemed to understand that I was frustrated at the experience.  Unfortunately, it seems that QANTAS has a different IT system at airports to that available to the 13-numbers.  When I needed a solution to the problem — and I still didn’t know what was going on with my booking — she had to tell me to call the 13-number in order to get assistance.  I explained that I’d spent upwards of 2 hours on hold by then, and she informed me that one of the call centres had been down, but she was unable to help.

So I had to stand at the airport and call the company whose front desk was barely a few hundred metres away.  It’s like ordering a pizza for pickup, going into the shop to pick it up, and then being asked to call head office when they don’t have the pizza ready and don’t know how long it will be.  Again, the customer was expected to work out the solution for themselves; there was no way for me to go to one part of the organisation and have it escalated over to the correct part of the organisation for attention.

To be honest, if the woman on the desk had said ‘Look, there’s nothing I can do, but I can take the details and forward them to the correct people.  In the meantime, you’ll need to buy another ticket for the Sunday, but if we find that there was a problem that was our fault, we’ll refund you the money’ I would have been fine.  I would have been annoyed, but at least I would have known that QANTAS was dealing with the problem.  I would have at least known that I could get back from Melbourne in time for work.  Instead, I had to go back on hold; again, I had to work out a solution for myself.

I was on hold for another twenty minutes on my mobile.  When the call was finally answered, I was elated at first — then I discovered that I’d been delivered to the most obstructionist person possible.  She told me that I was incorrect: I had never tried to reschedule my flight and that there was nothing she could do.  I confused the terms ‘flexi-saver’ and ‘fully flexible’ (I only remembered the ‘flexi-’ part), which seemed to annoy her.  When I tried to work out why the website would indicate that I’d changed the details, she became flustered at me.  Somewhat bafflingly, she changed the subject to say something about paying $40 and the difference between the missed flight and another ticket for the weekend, but when I tried to return to the question of why the website would show the details, she hung up on me.

I don’t think that I was discourteous (but I’m probably the worst person to judge given the situation).  I admit to being flustered, but I didn’t swear or personalise the issue.  I think I even said at several points that I realised the issue wasn’t the fault or problem of the person on the phone, but I was baffled by the situation.  When she hung up the phone, I was disgusted by the treatment and I wasn’t going to spend another indefinite period of time on hold.  Worse, it felt like, even if I could get back through the limbo of being on hold, there was nothing that the call centre could do for me.  They’d just tell me that I’d never tried to reschedule my flight and that, as far as they were concerned, was that.

So I went back to the tickets desk.  When I said that the reservations help desk had hung up on me, she seemed shocked.  She found the number of somebody who could help and discussed the issue with them.  It was then that I learnt of the automatic cancellation of my second flight when I missed the first.  Apparently, the second flight was cancelled four hours after I missed the first and the only way to stop it is to call QANTAS.  I thought it was really weird that I wasn’t notified by an automatically-generated e-mail that my booking had been cancelled outright: after all, if I’d received that e-mail, I could have sorted this situation out months ago, rather than right before I was about to board a flight.

She then told me that the only people who could help me with the problem was @QFcustomercare.  I laughed when she wrote it down on the post-it note (and uploaded a photo to Twitter); the people who had been fobbing me off all day were the only people who could resolve the issue, and they wouldn’t be back in the office until the day after my flight.

The woman on the tickets desk was wonderful and she helped me to find an available flight, which cost me an extra $350.  I said at the time that I’d be lodging a complaint, and she seemed to think that was the best idea.  Once again, I was forced to escalate the problem myself.

I’m annoyed that my booking was cancelled, but I’m more frustrated by the way my problem was handled.  There were plenty of opportunities for QANTAS to take ownership of the problem and resolve it for me.  When the website returned an error, I should be able to leave my contact details, a short description of my problem, and have somebody e-mail me or telephone me to let me know that my booking no longer existed.  At the very least, immediately after the words ‘contact us’ should be the telephone number on which you’d like me to contact you.  When I was on hold, there was the opportunity to let me know what the estimated hold time was (or at least inform me that one of the call centres was down causing the delay, and when it was expected to come back on-line).  When I sent a Twitter message to @QFcustomercare (who ended up being the correct people to contact), they could have taken slightly more interest in making sure I was on a pathway to getting my problem resolved.  Even some basic triage would have helped here.  When I approached the tickets desk, they should have been able to escalate the problem for me, rather than asking me to escalate it through another channel.  When I spoke to the call centre, they also could have escalated the problem for me to work out why my situation occurred.

Regardless of how this gets sorted out, I’m likely to fly QANTAS again.  When nothing goes wrong, I much prefer to fly QANTAS than the other airlines and even despite the recent press.  It’s just that when something does go wrong (such as in this situation, which — to be honest — is rare; I’ve only had a few problems over the past few years), it feels like QANTAS isn’t interested in helping customers to solve the problem.  I feel like QANTAS is unreasonable in its ‘hands-off’ approach to problem resolution and, given that the company’s business is helping people get through the most stressful aspect of travel, I feel my expectations weren’t met.  You have my money, you have the planes, you have the computer systems, but you made me — the person with utterly no power in the situation — try to work out how to solve the issue.

It all started when pseudonymous opinion writer, @drag0nista revealed herself to be nymous opinion writer, Paula Matthewson.  While I thought the conversation would soon turn to the conspiracy theory that there’s only one woman on the whole internet and all the ‘females’ on the internet are just the sockpuppet of one person, what instead happened was so baffling, my baffle-buffer exploded and I was left baffled.

Scroll down in the comments and you uncover a strange little conversation about the APS Code of Conduct.  As Matthewson was working as an adviser within the Department of Climate Change, clearly — so the argument goes — it was a breach of the APS Code of Conduct for her to write (even pseudonymously) about climate change.

Meanwhile, the APSC (the department which is theoretically in charge of the Public Service but, in practice, is just a building filled with public servants whose serviced public is public servants: like a meta-public service) has released grand spanking new guidelines to help APS employees make public comments and participate in political debates online.  Of all the guidelines to do with the public service, this gets disproportionate attention for a whole host of stupid reasons.  Did you know that the APSC released guidance on how to terminate public servants?  Did you?  Probably not.  Know why?  Because in comparison to the media talking heads to say something witty and clever about the ‘Twitter Guidelines’, how many fucks were given about anything else said by the APSC ever?  Count?

Zero! Zero fucks!

The highlight, for me, was Greg Jericho on the radio talking about the new guidelines.  Greg Jericho — as most of us remember — was the public servant ‘outed’ by the Australian for writing a blog post so popular that ABC’s The Drum reposted it.  Greg Jericho’s post complained that the media coverage of the election campaign had become trite and trivial.  As if proving the rule that any commentator left in the public sphere for too long eventually goes meta, here on the radio was a celebrity public servant saying not terribly much insightful about the new APSC guidelines.

A lot has been written on the APS Code of Conduct (and of the Public Service Act in general).  It is a complex, strange, and — beautifully, intoxicatingly, ineffably — broken.  What it does — or, at the very least, tries to do — is create a ‘spirit’ to the APS.  Instead of being the prescriptive, deontological, rules-based approach to the values of the APS, it’s an aspirational document.

It’s an aspirational document in the middle of a cold and nasty bit of legislation.

But the people who write comments on internet articles and various megaphones in general are too busy to read… what is it? About three-quarters of an A4 page of text?  Yeah, they’re too busy for that.

For most people, the Code of Conduct seems to be:

1. Don’t write things I disagree with.

It happens on both sides of politics.  If a person identifiable as a public servant makes any kind of public comment, opposition to the idea won’t be: ‘They are incorrect for these objective reasons’.  The e-correct response is: ‘OMFG! U R MENT 2 B APOLITIKAL!’

Hell, if you’re the Leader of the Australian Greens, public servants are breaching the Code of Conduct if a third party reports an account of what was said.  The Greens are all about procedural fairness.

Similarly, Ken Henry was being apolitical when he released a report on taxation reform… unless you disagreed with the recommendations, in which case he was a stooge retrospectively planted by the ALP while Howard was in charge.

There’s a strange inversion of this rule which I call ‘Eltham’s Law’: ‘Something is apolitical if it agrees with me’, used here to explain why Allan Asher (former Ombudsman) was acting apolitically when he colluded with the Greens in order to steer Senate Estimates to his advantage.  I could have sworn I read the words ‘honesty and integrity’ somewhere.

Thus, when we get to Matthewson’s piece, we see the same reasoning.  Matthewson wrote something with which we disagreed while she was linked to the APS, thus it was a terrible breach of the Code of Conduct.  Firings for everybody.

It’s pathetic whining.

There are two important things to take away from the new APSC guidelines and the APS Code of Conduct.

The first is conflict of interest.  People, in general, have a very poor understanding of the concept.  The vast majority of public servants are mooks.  Day in, day out, they see the same type of form, enter it into the same dodgy computer system programmed in the mid-eighties, and cultivate the greyish tan from the rapidly flickering fluorescent lights.  In return for their shitty job which eats at the remnants of their souls, they are forbidden by the Constitution to run for Parliament.  The idea that they can’t vent about their jobs on Facebook like any other mook employee around Australia is preposterous.  The idea that they can’t write self-important blog posts (like mine, for example) about the state of Australia and how much better it would be if Fred Nile were running the show is ludicrous.  For the vast majority of public servants, they’re doing a low-skill job like most of the population.  There is no way that they have a potential conflict of interest, even if they tweet or blog about something they’re indirectly working on.

The people to watch out for are the 15-20% of non-mook public servants who actually know something worth knowing.  Lo and behold, they’re the 15-20% of public servants not terribly likely to make horrendous judgement calls about conflicts of interest.  They’re not going to update their Twitter feed with latest Cabinet-in-Confidence work, with the latest on contract negotiation, or even with where they’re hiding the bodies.

The APSC guidelines are to provide Public Servants with a document to point to when somebody starts whining about apolitical public servants using Twitter.  It’s particularly helpful if that person whining is a senator.

There was a recent example of a Serco employee being suspended for comments he made on Facebook.  Sure, the guy made some vulgar troglodyte comments (Muslims shouldn’t get Christmas presents; Muslim males taught children that women didn’t have rights), but they’re not extreme or radical.  They’re ugly views which don’t really have much place in a sensible world, but they’d barely rate a mention on my ‘PoliticalComment-O-Detector’.  Without more information, the story looks like asylum seeker activists were out looking for indiscretions of security officers to cry about.

Also, it’s not that great a stretch of the imagination to consider an example where a person made a comment or flippant remark or tasteless joke, and then finds themselves in a politically-sensitive area.

We need a bit of a reality check when it comes to conflicts of interest.  A person can hold and express all kinds of private views about their work without it necessarily becoming a conflict of interest.  It seems like the various blowhards seem to think that people only hold private views if they express them.  The Myers-Briggs extroverts are the only people with thoughts.  It’s like behaviourism on steroids: the only mental states are those which are performed to others.

The alternative is that public servants continue to hold their private views, but never express them to anybody, and continue to do their jobs in exactly the same way.  Because they have a particular job, they are to forever keep their beliefs and opinions hidden in the closet.  If the private views are wonky, they’ll never engage with ideas which might challenge them.  Not really a desirable outcome.

The second is much more interesting due to its curious absence: social media and security clearances.  Sure, information which is classified can’t be discussed in the public regardless of what the APSC online participation guideline says.  No guideline is needed to explain that.  What is unclear is how past participation in online activities would affect a person’s future ability to get a clearance.  Let’s say I’m a young rebel who enjoys participating in or supporting Anonymous’ cyber-activities.  Let’s say I’m outspoken in my support of Wikileaks on my Twitter account.  Let’s say I’m a noxious troll mercilessly flaming furries and other internet subcultures.  Things posted online are, potentially, there forever.  Worse, individuals are now the object of collaborative decisions about privacy: I can’t stop somebody from revealing information about me on my Facebook wall, or uploading a photograph of me getting completely wrecked on cheap Greek table wine (manufactured in Germany) and tagging me in it.  If you’re outspoken on a certain issue and, one day, it happens that you end up as the Assistant Secretary in charge of Not Getting Wrecked on cheap Greek Table Wine Branch, what stops past-you from tripping the APSC guidelines?  How can you still appear to be impartial and apolitical when past you still roams the internet in Google caches and wayback machines?

In the old days, young lads could turn their back on their rebellious pasts and become upstanding civil servants.  Now, you have no idea when a stray link will show up on Google.  Will past actions on social media start to interfere with an applicant’s ability to get security clearances?

Until we start to grapple with the concepts and ideas underpinning the apolitical public service, we’re going to continue to see the same dimwitted narrative of ‘Statements I dislike are a breach of the Code of Conduct’.

Recently, Jennifer Wilson of No Place for Sheep discovered a new passion for informing anybody who’d listen that Melinda Tankard Reist was a certain type of Christian who regularly worshipped at a certain church in a certain suburb of Canberra.  Melinda Tankard Reist is unpopular for a variety of reasons: not least, she has the audacity to argue that the porn industry, taken as a whole, exploits women.  The cheek!

Very few people try to engage MTR in her views because it’s far easier to belittle her.  I’ve written about this before and complained that it’s yet another indication of a toxic public discussion.  When I wrote about the state of the discourse, Jennifer Wilson appeared in the comments.  Not to discuss the post, mind.  She had absolutely no interest in the problems with the public discussion of pornography.  What she really wanted to say was that MTR was a Christian.

Wilson’s argument is that it doesn’t matter what MTR’s arguments are.  What matters is who MTR is.  We should all know that MTR’s arguments are actually a conspiracy by shadowy religious types to destroy women’s rights while arguing that pornography exploits women… or something.  It’s not entirely clear exactly why Jennifer Wilson doesn’t understand why this ad hominem argument doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Perhaps it has something to do with where Jennifer Wilson’s kids go to school…

Oh, wait.  I totally wouldn’t start revealing information I’d mined from Facebook, Twitter, &c., &c, (if I could be bothered stalking her like some people stalk MTR) because that would be a Dick Move.  I understand that it would be a Dick Move and that it would likely upset Dr Wilson and, being the wonderful human being that I am, I don’t do it.

Initially, this post was going to be about privacy torts and why Australia should have them.  Natural persons, regardless of how famous they are or how much of a moral crusader they are, should be able to control the amount of information revealed about them.  But it’s deeper than that.  This is less about legality and significantly more about being decent people.

I first came across MTR when somebody directed my attention to absolutely vile threats made against her.  If I got the number of rape threats as MTR, I would be cagey about my whereabouts as well.  I might even make slightly stretched defamation claims in order to get rid of that info.  What’s weird is that so many women — from both sides of the political spectrum — are subject to utterly disgusting threats by guys who don’t like to be challenged.  Subjecting women to these threats is a way of silencing them.

Fortunately for all the pro-porn advocates who think what MTR really needs in life is a good shag (perhaps even with a firehose…), Jennifer Wilson doesn’t believe in respecting privacy.  Instead, Jennifer Wilson and Catherine Deveny (sigh) think that it’s more important that crafty theists like MTR are outed come hell or high water.  If something does happen to MTR, well… it was hardly their fault, was it?  Freedom of speech, something, something, therefore they are blameless.  Plus, Deveny really hates theists so it’s all cool, guys.

But Wilson and Deveny are just jumping on the silencing opponents bandwagon.  Women who disagree need to be outed and denied the ability to control information revealed about them.

Jill Singer makes the strange argument that MTR’s attempt to protect her privacy is actually her attempt to silence opponents.  Perhaps she’s right.  There’s so much silencing going on, it’s amazing there’s so much noise.

At the end of the day, we should just look at ourselves and ask: ‘Why should I have more say in the control of another person’s private information than they do?  Who am I to say how much information about them is made easily available to others?  Does finding snippets of information in Google caches really mean the information is public domain?’

‘Cause, frankly, I think it’s just another case of people being unreasonably shitty towards each other.

The recent brouhaha started off with Corinne Grant’s post specifically about the term ‘male feminist’.

I could slide here into a discussion of comedians as social commentators.  I don’t know if this is true in other countries, but I feel that social commentary is dominated by people who are better at being funny than insightful.  Grant fits into this category along with Tim Minchin and everybody involved in The Chaser.  Catherine Deveny would fit into this category but she’s not funny.  There’s probably another post in here somewhere about our need to be entertained rather than informed, but this post is about why guys can’t be feminists.

The boring answer is that it depends on what we mean by ‘feminists’.  I’ve spoken to a lot of people about this topic over the last week, with people much more intelligent than me.  What’s striking is the diversity of the term.  Does it mean ‘a person who thinks that men and women should be equal’?  Does it mean ‘a person who critiques social power structures which disempower women’?  Is it both?  Is it neither?

I’ve surprised at least one of my friends by being both conservative and having an understanding and appreciation of privilege.  It goes to show that you can be both conservative and not stone stupid.

I think — and I could be incorrect — that ‘feminist’ has to mean something more than just ‘believes in the equality of men and women’.  People who are advantaged by privilege are in the worst position to judge what is ‘equal’.  In the Andrew Bolt case, far too many people thought that it was ‘unequal’ for racial minorities to be granted protections in law denied to the white majority.  What they failed to grasp was that the legal protection was to bring them on equal footing with our socially guaranteed protection.  Nobody is going to attack me for being white.  Using exactly the same language, we can disagree wildly about what is ‘equal’.

But if feminists are just those who critique the social structures which disempower women, we’ve neutered feminism into a dry academic discourse.  Feminists are those who write the US-centric essays about unpacking privilege.  Feminists are those who can reposition Marx’ material dialectic into a gendered discourse.

I don’t mean to disparage feminism as an academic endeavour.  I’ve got a low opinion of gender studies as a discipline, but the quality, meaty, intelligent output is superb.  It’s just that it’s filled with so much guff (probably a by-product of its links to Continental philosophy, which has the same problem.  The great stuff is magical, sublime, and exceptional.  But most of it is rot).

But if it is this academic endeavour, guys aren’t part of that project either.  Part of privilege is that society renders the power structures invisible to those who benefit most.  We’ve normalised it: it’s the background stage upon which we strut our funky stuff.

In truth, ‘feminism’ is probably going to sit in the grey area between the two extremes of the popular and the academic.  But the arguments as to why a guy can’t be a feminist at either end still apply in the middle.  There’s no way for a guy to not think like a guy.  We’ve been socialised to do it.  Feminism requires non-guy thinking.  It’s the external critique to show us that the things we think are ‘normal’ or ‘obvious’ or ‘default rational’ aren’t.  That critique, that discourse, can’t happen if we’re on both sides of the fence.

But — as an extremely learned and excellent friend of mine pointed out — in making this argument, I’ve dichotomised gender.  By dividing the world into two groups — those who can be feminists and those who can’t — along gender lines, I’ve forgotten the fluidity of gender.  What about trans-folk?  Are homosexuals similarly unable to critique the dominant masculinist mode?  Is it just a certain kind of guy who can’t be a feminist?

The long answer is: I don’t know.  There are so many conceptual issues with gender fluidity that I think the brutal ‘Guys can’t be feminists’ needs to take on some subtlety and nuance that I can’t muster here.

The shorter answer is: maybe there might be exceptions, but when we’re talking about guys being feminists, we’re not usually talking about anything except cismen who declare proudly that they’re ‘male feminists’.

Guys can’t be feminists.  Not really, at least, because merely by interacting with the world, we’re taking advantage of all the privileges we don’t need to acknowledge.  We won’t understand what it’s like to be women and, frankly, the guys who describe themselves as feminists are sort of pretending that they do.  Guys should be content with ruling the world and stop trying to conquer and dominate the spaces created by women to advance their equality.

Lefties, as I’ve said before, love Turnbull with a passion I struggle to explain. He likes WorkChoices, is libertarian, and had a meltdown over Godwin Grech. The only reason I can come up with to explain this inexplicable love is that he was so ineffective as Opposition Leader that Kevin Rudd was able to enjoy several months of unprecedented popularity.

Of course, the current LNP isn’t setting the world alight with its sensible decisions and consistent logic, so my wager is perhaps an unsafe one.

So what happens when the suspension of disbelief generators currently powering the Abbott campaign (and why is there an Abbott campaign outside an election period?) break down? Who will take over the leadership?  And why don’t we hear more conservatives writing about potential leaders in the LNP?

Let’s go through the Shadow Cabinet and look for some potential leaders:

Julie Bishop

I only hear from Bishop when she’s said something stupid.  I’m still not sure why she’s got this portfolio.  Is it because Abbott is the go-to guy for comment on international relations?  LNP policy seems to be ‘Pick up the phone to [Insert foreign leader here].’  Would LNP go back to Howard-era foreign policy?  Admittedly, I don’t get the ALP foreign policy either, which seems to be little more than Rudd’s Whim.

Bishop has a reputation for being hard and strong, but I can’t think of a time when she’s used these attributes to demonstrate that she’s a potential leader.  That she’s been deputy to so many leaders suggests that she doesn’t have many strong views of her own, but shifts with the changing winds.

Joe Hockey

Hockey is the Beazley of the LNP: by all accounts a nice guy, but pragmatic in a way which leaves people wondering what he really believes.  You want a leader who can say: ‘This is what I believe in.  When I negotiate with other parties, those beliefs support and direct me towards suitable outcomes.’  It’s the idea of a ‘No Surprises Please’ leader.  Hockey doesn’t provide this.  Apart from babble about shopkeeper parents and something about sitting in the dirt with indigenous elders, I have no idea what this guy is about.  Thus, his Hockeynomics nonsense is his only defining characteristic: a haphazard collections of weirdo-land economics and oafish outbursts at people who question the ‘auditing’ of his numbers.

Christopher Pyne

Pyne is a strange beast and his career seems to be on a similar trajectory as Howard’s.  In fact, of all the contenders, he is probably the most able to adopt the same political strategies as Howard.

In the 1970s-80s, Howard came across as a cheap and nasty used car salesman.  The whiny voice, the mealy-minded and often mealy-mouthed persona did nothing to put people at ease.  When he rose to power in the ’90s, this image had changed into an almost grandfatherly statesman.  Few of his opinions had changed, but his ability to convey them had.  It was an image that had little to do with the reality: Howard was a reactionary who was out to squash anything which threatened his utopian views and he spoke exclusively to the nastiest parts of the electorate.

At the moment, Pyne comes across as a sneering, visionless, yapping poodle of a man.  He is almost identical to the early Howard, but cleaner (look at early pictures of Howard; the guy looked like he needed a bath).

If Pyne made the same cosmetic changes as Howard, he could easily fit the role of leader.  Slow the voice down and drop it a few octaves: people find deeper voices more reassuring and less panicked.  Be seen more regularly around reassuring things: dark, laminated tables, bookshelves with leather-clad books, and the transformation would be complete.  I think it’s telling that Pyne avoids the same stunts as Gillard, Abbott, and Hockey.  You don’t see him in hard-hats pretending to be a worker.

The important part to the Pyne-as-Leader theory is that leadership doesn’t necessarily have to be about content.  Howard had very little content and yet managed to be a good (in the sense of long-lasting) leader.  Pyne could continue in this fashion (certainly more effectively than Rudd, who tried similar tactics).

Andrew Robb

I have a soft spot for Robb.  Robb is an intelligent guy surrounded by morons and when you have to second guess what morons are thinking, you end up a bit baffled.  Indeed, the only time I’ve heard the guy gaffe is when he’s been trying to make sense of the absurd nonsensery of his colleagues.  I don’t know whether his public history with mental illness will be a disadvantage.  Would the ALP stoop to that kind of muck raking?  Probably.

He struggles with communication of ideas.  He worked with Hewson during the ‘Fightback!’ years (which was probably the last time the LNP had an intellectually interesting — even if wrong-headed — policy platform).  If he had more charisma and better communication skills, he’d probably be a good leader.

Malcolm Turnbull

He crashed and burned the last time he was leader for all the obvious reasons.  The guy is all hype and he’s an easy target.  He doesn’t cope with crises well.  He doesn’t have the advantage of being as slippery as Pyne or as level-headed as Robb.

Kevin Andrews

I don’t think there’s any way to resuscitate this man’s career.  Andrews is toxic and is only still in the Cabinet because of his links to Abbott.  There is no way that this man will rise any higher.  I’m shocked that he’s still in Parliament, to be perfectly honest.

Greg Hunt

You poor bastard.  You poor, poor bastard.

I don’t know how this guy doesn’t cry himself to sleep each night.  This is the guy who has had to front up to the media and say with a straight face that he is responsible for the LNP’s eleventy dozen climate change policies over the years.  I don’t know how he manages it.  Greg Hunt is what happens when you give bright, rising stars poisonous portfolios.

Here was a guy who managed to keep Downer’s nose clean for the most part while he was Foreign Minister.  Downer is a self-destructive moron, but Hunt somehow managed to keep him vaguely on target.

I doubt Hunt could ever manage to get the profile needed to be leader with his current baggage, which is a shame.  I see him as the Bill Shorten of the LNP, but without the backstabbing.

Scott Morrison

Not a chance.  To his credit, he’s managed to have his own profile despite Abbott dominating the media with his immigration strategy, but Morrison hasn’t been able to say anything significant beyond Border Protection.  He comes across as a bully rather than as a statesman, and has no opportunity to soften that image.

Sophie Mirabella

The Gillard of the LNP.  The similarities are weirdly striking, even down to the annoying voice.  I’m always a bit surprised that she doesn’t get better portfolios, but until things stop dropping out of her personal life into the chattering pages of newspapers, I doubt we’ll see her rise.  Then again, I never expected Gillard to be leader for similar reasons.

Bruce Billson

Who?

Hmmmm… That doesn’t look promising.  The political machine breeds mediocrity, but to have so few serious leadership candidates in the Shadow Cabinet is more than slightly depressing for a young conservative like me.  Then again, do leaders choose Shadow Cabinets in order to reduce the potential for leadership spills?  Anybody interesting on the back benches or outer Shadow Cabinet?