The Sussan Ley scandal highlights the monumental problem facing the Turnbull government in restoring its public standing to anything remotely good enough to be re-elected. As usual, it has all been its own doing. Ms Ley’s lavish use of public money for private purposes is so blatant and brazen that it could not have happened by an oversight or by misinterpreting the opaque rules that govern these so-called entitlements. It has come about, first, because there is no discipline from the top and because of an unhealthy intermingling of private interests and public duty. The revelation that the Minister used a taxpayer-funded flight and accommodation for her partner and herself when she bought an investment property is only the most recent example. She pretends that she just happened to be on the Gold Coast making an official announcement and wandered past an auction miraculously taking place and forked out $800,000 to buy the place. No rational person could possibly believe such dissembling. These scandals come and go like the phases of the moon, with ritualistic apologies, tears and promises to reform the system which everyone knows is just a hiatus. They will continue as long as the prevailing attitude, from the top, is that public duty can be fiddled to promote private interest until you are caught.

But she strikes a nice balance with the ALP. Senator Dastyari made Australia the only country where you can remain an elected representative when an outside donor paid your private debts. Senator Ley makes us the only country where you can remain in the parliament after having the government pay for you to fly around buying private property. And what a black irony it is to have her replaced by Senator Sinodinos. Again, 2016 ended on a low note as we read of the pork barreling by federal politicians under the absurdly-named Stronger Communities program. This was a racket set up to allow MPs to spend $150,000 in each of their electorates on ‘small capital projects’.   The total amount in the cookie jar was $ 45m. The scheme was set up in the last budget as an election bribe so that MPs could ingratiate themselves with local community organisations, particularly multicultural and ethnic outfits, but also RSLs, Rotary clubs and the like. The grants made by MPs include iPads, computers, lawnmowers and barbeques; the most concerning was a grant by Scott Morrison to a priest in his electorate to have his house painted; the most bizarre was a grant to a Finnish Society for a new sauna. If Finns are so keen on saunas, they should pay for one themselves. There is also a distinctly unsavoury tone about the whole process; the local MP is the sole judge of who gets what, there is no tendering and no assessment of need. MPs are allowed to assess their weak points in the electorate and then, like Tammany Hall spivs, shore them up with a healthy dose of public money. It is an institutionalized bribe. The new motto for politics in Australia should be: ‘Don’t talk the talk or walk the walk; just bribe the tribe.’ We rage at a building company painting the house of a union boss to keep him on side and call it corruption; we do the same thing for the same reason on a priest’s house, but with taxpayers’ money, and call it Stronger Communities.

But why should I be surprised that the Liberal party is up to its eyeballs in this and other rackets? The party is now a mendicant for government handouts at every turn, which just adds to my steady disenchantment with the party as a whole and the principles to which it apparently subscribes. Worse still, it is part of a process of mingling money and influence in politics through former ministers taking directorships in companies in the same field as their previous portfolios after a ritualistic pause of a few months, another growing scandal. It was bad enough to see Mark Arbib, a dubious ALP minister from the renowned NSW stable become a consultant to Packer’s casino. It was worse to see Kim Beazley, hot from our embassy in Washington with access to all sorts defence secrets, casually sashay into a directorship at Lockheed Martin. But to see the succession of ex-Liberal ministers like Coonan , Costello and Robb, whom one held in high regard, trotting off as directors or consultants to television stations and casinos or Chinese developers is doubly disappointing and concerning in the extreme.

Take another recent example of trust and belief. The Liberal Party is cock-a-hoop about rejecting the anti-semitic UN resolution 2334 on Israel. Everyone, except me, seems to accept Julie Bishop’s statement as meaning that Australia rejected the resolution. She did not say that at all. Nor did she say, as this distinguished journal claims, that it was ‘unlikely’ we would have voted for it. Nor did she say, as my valued colleague David Flint reports, that ‘we would have’ opposed it. She did not even issue a statement, so grave was the issue. This non- existent statement is not even noted on her department’s website. I suppose that after listening to dubious witnesses for 50 years I tend to look at what people actually say and what they could have said but did not. She said that in voting in the past, on other resolutions, we had ‘not supported one-sided resolutions targeting Israel’. I thought we were discussing how we would and should have voted on Resolution 2334 , not how we voted in the past on entirely different resolutions. And why could she not simply say: ‘Australia opposes this resolution. We definitely would have voted against it. We support Israel.’ And why did no-one in our ever-vigilant press corps ask her? Our politics is now sick in almost every way and it seems to get worse every day.