The list is out and it can be found here.
Julie Bishop is the new Shadow Treasurer.
Contrary to Turnbull’s own claims, it’s clear that he’s rewarded his own supporters and demoted or discarded some of Nelson’s – such as Nick Minchin and Tony Smith. Tony Abbott seems to have shot himself in the foot with his undisciplined comments that he’d rather be closer to the action leading to his remaining where he was.
And Sophie Mirabella joins the Shadow Ministry. That might tell you something – along with the elevation of Concetta Fioranti-Wells – about the depth of talent Turnbull has to work with.
Andrew Robb gets a particular ETS role which is interesting.
Eric Abetz as shadow minister for science! Does he believe in evolution, let alone global warming?
A sign of Turnbull’s desperation, the low priority he places on science and technology or just a sort of joke?
Sophie Mirabella? Should I start making jokes about Rosemary’s Baby or The Exorcist?
Steven Ciobo for Small Business, Independent Contractors, Tourism and the Arts. The Arts?
Gold Coast dude/arts.
Arts/Gold Coast dude.
What’s not making sense here?
Mirabella AND Fioranti-Wells? Eeeep.
Who cares? It’s just the shadow ministry. They’re the people who get to play without the ball.
Both are right wingers who swapped their vote to Turnbull. That must indicate *talent*.
I think the funniest thing is giving the terminally dopey Coonan Foreign Affairs. Jesus!
Agreed. If there’s anything that demonstrates a shallowness of talent, it’s Coonan’s position, not Mirabella’s.
BBB
Oh god, it’s a horror show. Not just the shallow talent pool, but his elevation of several right wing freak shows to the main shadow ministry is just awful. Robb on ETS?? Abetz with Science?
Gawd, precisely how much of his allegedly small-l liberal soul did he have to sell to get the leadership?
Well, he can let the righties in as per whatever deals he made to get the gig, let them make idiots of themselves up to a point, then show ’strong leadership’ with a reshuffle far enough out from the next election to make a coherent alternative government. Too Machiavellian?
Should be fun to watch, anyway.
The policy interest in all of this is nil.
But it is interesting to note that Kevin Andrews is still on the backbench.
Punishment for WorkChoices, Dr Haneef or both?
Yeh, well if Helen Coonan’s so dopey, how come she managed, when she was minister in charge of the insurance industry, to get the maximum $200,000 payout out of the home owners’ warranty insurance scheme, when the original estimate for fixing defects of her Woolahra pile was put at between $60,000 and $80,000, and everyone else seems to be able to get buggar all, and having to spend year$ on lawyer$ to get that?
(It’s an absolute magic pudding of a scheme, whereby insurers have paid only $16 million in claims since 2002, while an estimated $200 million has been collected in premiums. Gosh, that means old HC has scored over 1% of the total payouts for herself, good work huh?)
All it took was for her to use her ministerial letterhead in private correspondence with the insurance company over her claim.
You gotta admit, leveraging a few cents worth of ink and paper into 200,000 big ones demonstrates economic management smarts. That after all is the only brand/issue Turnbull’s tories are really interested in dominating in the public imagination, a necessary and sufficient condition as it were.
So of course she should be on the team, and he couldn’t really put her anywhere she’s been, could he?
saying that Turnbull has demoted Nelson’s supporters (I notice an SMH headline has framed it the same way) is one (certainly reasonable) way of looking at it – but were Minchin, Smith etc ever really Nelson-boosters in a meaningful way? Couldn’t their support for him be more accurately described as anyone-but-Turnbull? Which I think puts a (slightly) better light on the decision to demote them.
danny, it would be hard for Turnbull to resist a fellow denizen of the Eastern Suburbs who knows how to play the system to her advantage. They are not merely in the same tribe, they share large globs of DNA.
Well, looks like nobody going to say it, so here goes…
Which ones are the winners?
Coonan’s promotion appears to reflect the US’s Paulson ‘experiment’; for want of a better word. And as for Sophie Mirabella – well as one highly-trained mouthpiece to another Mal probably simply dips his lips. This Turdbull experiment is beginning to resemble Dr Frankenstein’s, but please, please, please; don’t Minchin the war.
Winners – Ronaldson, Johnston, Pyne, Keenan, Stone, Ciobo. Abetz wasn’t ‘rewarded’ with Science, he stayed put.
FDB
Probably all of the Labor Front Bench with the exception of Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan, who seem to have drawn the toughest opponents.
How is Julie Bishop a “tough” opponent?
Mark,
She’ll take all the credit whenever they say, “the eyes have it”.
Yep, and she can enunciate perfectly when asking questions like “Why has the economy gone backwards since the election of the Rudd government?”… which is about as sophisticated as it gets most of the time from the opposition in Questions.
I’m looking forward to when both leaders our out of the country and the acting ones are…. Julia and Julie. Noting the National Party Leader no longer gets to be deputy/acting leader in charge from the seat of a tractor, so I guess that makes them losers.
Wow, and this could have been our government!
Maybe in the spirit of bi-partisanship Rudd should offer Turnbull some of his people for shadow ministries since he is lack so much talent on his side.
Egads. Mirabella & Fierravanti-Wells as junior parly-whatsits.
Wasn’t Senator Ficus available?
I must say I’m a bit surprised to see my member Scott Morrison up there as a Shadow Minister (let alone for Housing…). He was only elected at the last election… Come to think of I actually pity the guy a bit – he has to work that close to the Mad Monk.
Not really. He’s staying where he was. It hasn’t cost him anything. If he hadn’t uttered his ambitions he might’ve gone backwards you never know. His remarks were hardly an infringement of party discipline. Given that Turnbull and Abbott are on opposite ends of the LPA spectrum it’s not so bad for him. Maybe Turnbull gave ol’ Irish a break out of in-law ethnic solidarity. (Bollocks)
Such cynicism. They do have talent and its obvious. They have an abundance of the only talent that really matters in this job: fine-tuned ultra-powerful rectum-seeking nasal passages.
Yeah, Adrien, but Abbott was one of Turnbull’s biggest boosters – or Nelson’s biggest underminers if you want to put it that way.
Mark and All:
Noticed that Michael Johnson, the MHR for Ryan [in the leafy suburbs on the western side of Brisbane], didn’t score a guernsey as Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration. Next time perhaps?
Johnson’s a flake, Graham. Not that there aren’t flakes on the front bench… But perhaps you’re alluding to the large number of branch members who voted for him in his preselection who were resident in Singapore?
?? resident in Singapore? How can this be?? Do Party rules allow cross-national or multinational forays of such fiendish cunning??? Ah, so “ethnic branch-stacking” isn’t confined to the ALP? Perhaps the OO might investigate.
Mark:
Well, there you go ….
Given this line-up of talent, Nelson was very wise to deline a seat on the front bench.
Elsewhere, I mischeviously suggested that Rudd might offer Nelson a ministry [highly unlikely but not impossible] …. now that the shadow ministry has been announced, has the remote likelihood of that come an inch or two closer?
Shadow ministry? Why do I keep thinking of Akira Kurosawa’s epic film “Kagemusha” ["Shadow Warrior"]? They have nothing at all in common, do they?
I gotta admit, the first thing I thought when I saw the list was out was “Will they have had to scrape so low as to to give Michael Johnson a gig?”, to try and keep secure the sacred seat of Ryan.
Flake maybe, but he just may be in contact with more chinese money than Kev, or maybe even Therese’s Rein Foundation, whose chief executive was reported (mid April) as entering into a $1 billion joint venture in China..buying up commercial property portfolios and then listing them on the Australian stock exchange… … (That’s guanxi for ya).
Therese quietly shut down the foundation in May, concerned about potential conflicts of interest with her husband’s political career. I guess the foundation’s CEO would have been a bit busy with his new billion dollar day job to concentrate on the philanthropy gig, so it’s a good thing that Therese then shut it down.
My point: Michael Johnson, (and Therese Rein BTW), may very well be Malcolm’s type of people. That forum of Michael’s had China’s richest man on the speakers list, and Clive Palmer, and you’ll find Michael Johnson is the only person from Australia invited to the Fortune Global Forum ( as in Fortune 500) they hold every year in china, so maybe Michael Johnson doesn’t care too much about crappy domestic issues, and doesn’t see himself as a loser for not getting a portfolio. Malcolm will understand, and give him time off.
Ambi, it’s old news. The said branch stacking took place in 2004. It was certainly widely reported at the time.
Pairing Mirabella and Pyne in the same portfolio made me laugh. Turnbull and Coonan both lawyered for Kerry Packer, they are old mates. Nicola Roxon will make short work of Dutton. I’ve commented elsewhere on Abbott, and Tony Smith is a Costello Mini-Me.
Maybe it would have been more appropriate for our Sophie to have been appointed Shadow Minister for Exorcism.
Danny [33]:
Hmmmm. So the chair-shuffling in the House of Rubber Stamps may be a petty distraction from the main power game then?
Mark:
There are a few talented people in the new Shadow Ministry but as for the rest, well ….
If, as I’ve been predicting for ages, the Liberal Party follows the United Australia Party into oblivion, sooner rather than later, …. does that mean it will be the National Party that becomes the actual Opposition and forms the Shadow Ministry from its own members and from the herd of former Liberals on the cross-benches?
Sorry for not telegraphing it better, but my #16 was a gag. They all look like losers to me.
Graham: “the chair-shuffling … may be a petty distraction”…
I’ve just always assumed that somewhere in Canberra is a big, secret, non-descript, windowless building exactly like Scrooge McDuck’s Money Bin, full of gold and silver and rubies and all manner of treasure, and that is the actuality of the superannuation funds for our parlimentarians and the senior service level bureaucrats, and every day after they’ve put in another hard slog of pretending, they meet up to frolic in it, just like in the cartoon.
All else is nod-is-good-as-winking.
Why cant anyone give credit where it is due. There is enormous talent on the front bench. Bishop, Hockey, Dutton, Pyne, Robb, Keenan, Ciobo, Ronaldson. All these persons have been successful in their lives and they know what management is about. And of course the ALP is full of talent isnt it. Thats why they’ve got Albanese, Carr and Conroy as senior ministers. They are useless and what makes it even more ridiculous is you have got someone with a doctarate in economics (Craig Emerson) who can only make it into the outer ministry. Give me a break.
There is indeed ebormous talent on the Opposition front-bench – Like a shadow treasurer who doesn’t know the official interest rate. Absolutely enormous talent!
“Give me a break.”
What did you have in mind, if you’ll pardon the expression ?
With the exception of Dutton (cop) and Robb (economist/interest group boss), all the rest have made careers as political hacks with the obligatory stint as a lawyer, haven’t they? I don’t know about the last three. They’re rather obscure. Hiding their lights under a bushel no doubt.
Lyn -
Go and have another latte. You’re so out of touch with the salted Earth of this country. The Gold Coast is one big work of Art. It’s a 3D version of The Jetsons. It’s of a place a 1000 kilometres closer to equator than they are called: Witeloafer City.
.
Drop acid sometime and go for a walk ’round Surfers: hilarious!
Methinks he would be leader sometime. He suffers from the delusion that Howard’s one time popularity had something to do with his reactionary sexism when all the time it was his reactionary racism that was the key. Anyway such a fellow’s akin to badly secured artillery equipment. Best to let him roll around down in the pits with the rest of the plebs.
Danny [39]:
So that’s what the politicians, senior public servants and **** Court judges get up to when they know we’re not looking. I’ve always wondered.
No. I was thinking of the real decision-makers, the ones who change our lives and our livlihood over a bowl of spicy gongbaojiding and a plate of the finest jiaozi ever made.
Everyone:
I would like to remind you that both Costello and Nelson are still in this Parliament. As the saying goes “The Devil finds work for idle hands”.
Failing to give top priority to attending skilfully and appropriately to both men – and especially to both their aspirations and their potential – will eventually finish off Turnbull, not today or tomorrow but perhaps even before the Liberal Party itself has collapsed in a heap. It’s too late now for him to do anything about his grave omission.
Mark [43]:
You’ve hit on a chronic and very serious defect in both sides of government in Australia: they’re overstuffed with lawyers.
Of course it is good to have accomplished lawyers contribute their experience to the making of legislation …. but do we need so many lawyers in our parliaments that other groups and classes are are d*mned-near excluded and we end up with homogeneous parliaments that come up with homogenous laws?
The last things we need, if we are to survive this Depression and its inevitable aftermath, are homogenous parliaments chock-a-block full of those afflicted with group-think.
Turnbull’s uninspired shadow ministry line-up shows it will just be more of the same. Hardly what would inspire our confidence in Turnbull as an alternative Prime Minister in this time of perilous crises.