Mistake-laden week: Tony Abbott leaves question time in Parliament on Wednesday.
Mistake-laden week: Tony Abbott leaves question time in Parliament on Wednesday. Photo: Andrew Meares







Friday is a red-letter day for the Abbott government.



It marks 100 days since any successful people-smuggling venture has made it to Australia.



The government has not been shy about its Operation Sovereign
Borders milestone nor for that matter the 30 or 40 daily increments
leading up to it.



It comes ironically enough, at the fag-end of the most
mistake-laden fortnight for the government since the travel entitlements
debacle marred its first weeks in office.




Back then Tony Abbott had been strangely absent, his
minimalist approach erroneously designed to position him as the opposite
of the news cycle-obsessed Rudd-Gillard outfits.



What it actually conveyed was a government without a message and a prime minister without a firm hand on the wheel.



Opinion polls reflected this vacuum and by the close of 2013,
press gallery journalists were being backgrounded to the effect that
things would change in 2014.



Abbott’s performance since has been more positive and the government had looked to be settling in.



But the sitting fortnight just concluded, the last before the
May budget session, has been anything but impressive, starting out
badly and getting steadily worse.



And with each day, the prime minister’s normally confident body language in parliament has chronicled that slide.



First came the storm over the past business dealings of his assistant treasurer, Arthur Sinodinos.



Sinodinos stood down from his post last week pending
Independent Commission Against Corruption hearings into Australian Water
Holdings, but it wasn’t Abbott’s doing. He continued to
enthusiastically spruik the imminent return of Sinodinos to the
ministry.



In any event, the voluntary suspension has failed to defuse
the issue amid new testimony at ICAC that Sinodinos was expressly warned
of governance problems including the possible insolvency of AWH, when
he was chairman in 2010.



Sinodinos himself will give evidence to the first of two ICAC
inquiries next week, with commissioner Megan Latham pointedly leaving
open the possibility on Wednesday of an actual corruption finding
against Sinodinos - ostensibly the government’s chief ministerial
guardian of corporate governance - if he is judged to have breached his
duties as a company director. Counsel assisting the inquiry, Geoffrey
Watson, SC, appears hot-to-trot on this score, arguing the ICAC Act
contains a section dealing with corrupt conduct which ''seems to be
capable of being applied’’ to directors’ duties ‘‘depending on the facts
which emerge’’ in this case.



This has become a running sore for Abbott. Colleagues worry
that Abbott’s support will make it harder to cut the minister loose if
needed, but it might actually make it easier, allowing the Prime
Minister to explain the dismissal as anything but a personal preference.



Either way, there is a noticeable cooling of support for
Sinodinos’ return. And there is other fallout too, such as the related
decision this week to suspend imminent legislation undoing Labor’s
Future of Financial Advice reforms. The FoFA law had ended the lucrative
practice of financial advisers taking hidden commissions associated
with particular investment products. It also required advisers selling
such products to act in the interests of consumers. The suspension of
the rollback was a bad look if only because it felt messy and fuelled
the appearance that there may have been a conflict of interest in
Sinodinos’s championing of the bank-friendly change given his past role
as an NAB executive.



The decision to consult further was made by Finance Minister
Mathias Cormann, who assumed responsibility for FoFA from his ousted
colleague following pressure from the usually conservative National
Seniors. Its members stand to lose vital consumer protections under the
changes.



Some Liberals are critical of the consultation work done by
Sinodinos, noting that even the Financial Planning Association peak body
had expressed reservations about the reintroduction of commissions for
general financial advice, despite complaining of a welter of new
regulations since FoFA came in.



On top of these problems came Attorney-General George
Brandis' ham-fisted sales job for his changes to the Racial
Discrimination Act. His legally correct yet politically insane
observation, that people have a right to be bigots, was an horrendous
own-goal.



Then came the Prime Minister’s stunning return to old empire
via the restoration of knights and dames in the Australian awards
system.



One Liberal observed that not even John Howard had wanted to
turn the clock that far back and right on cue, Howard himself confirmed
it, telling Fairfax Media, that even conservatives would view the move
as ‘‘somewhat anachronistic".



Howard used to rail against Labor’s tendency to govern for section interests.



But this week, it was the Abbott government which turned its
back on mainstream opinion to pander to a couple of mouthy conservative
commentators wanting to legalise hate speech, a cloister of protected
banks wanting to reintroduce skimming, and a tiny cluster of 19th
century monarchists.



Little wonder the Prime Minister has been ashen-faced in parliament this week.



Mark Kenny is Chief Political Correspondent.