Relax! Australian cricketers are back. But it’s not a double standard, right?

First published in The Guardian

Everybody relax – our male cricket stars are back from India. Or in fact from the Maldives, where they’d been whisked to safety from the pandemic that has been devastating millions in India who weren’t lucky enough to be whisked to the Maldives.

The players flew into Sydney Airport on Monday aboard a flight chartered by the Indian cricket authorities, who seem far more effective at repatriating Australians than our own government. And they’re now in comfy hotel quarantine in Sydney, as opposed to being isolated in Howard Springs, a place where there’s no hope of getting a decent laksa on Deliveroo.

This isn’t a double standard, though, and that’s the official position of the Australian government. The PM himself was eager to make it clear to reporters that [the cricketers] “haven’t been given any [special dispensation]”, because “NSW government is happy for them to come in over the cap”.

Over the cap – so, literally by special dispensation, then. Although it is a pleasant surprise to see this government going soft on queue jumpers.

Or was the PM instead trying to argue that our cricketers had received super-duper-special dispensation with a cherry on top? He was certainly keen to take credit for this piece of immigration wizardry, saying that the cap exemption was “something we insisted upon, and [NSW was] happy to agree with that”. The Morrison government had hitherto not dazzled observers with its enthusiasm for repatriating Australians from India, given that until just hours beforehand, it was a criminal offence.

To be fair to the players, though, they must have had a terrible shock, what with the sudden cancellation of the Indian Premier League just a few weeks after it became patently obvious to everybody, even Piers Morgan, that it should be cancelled. And nobody can begrudge any Australian citizen their safe return – it’s a fundamental human right, like ignoring Piers Morgan.

Nine thousand other Australians in India wanted to come home once the new strain emerged and the case count skyrocketed, but weren’t lucky enough to be cricketers. And some of them urgently needed to – Australia’s high commissioner Barry O’Farrell recently said that 900 of the 9,000 Australians waiting to return were classified as “vulnerable” by DFat due to financial distress or health problems. Only a handful got to board the first Qantas flight home. Why are the rest less deserving of safety than our healthy, wealthy cricketers?

Surely these extremely fit, young men could have spent a while longer in their luxury hotels, while the most vulnerable people got to chillax in the Maldives then board their chartered flight? If Steve Smith had given his seat to an immunocompromised grandmother, we would all have agreed to make him the next captain, and never mentioned the sandpaper thing again.

Instead, the BCCI, the game’s governing body in India, kept its promise to keep everyone safe, and Cricket Australia held a press conference to say that “their welfare is our absolute No. 1 priority” even though the players weren’t representing their country while playing in the IPL. Multiple Australian governments made sure the 38 players were waved through, and it’s rare for them to agree on anything.

Full credit to the BCCI for keeping its word – if only the Modi government was so determined to protect everyone under its care. But given the restrictions placed on Australians, the treatment of our cricketers feels fairly nauseating.

If these players want to represent their country, well, we’re currently running it like a pernickety boarding school, where anyone who wants to leave needs formal permission, and probably won’t get it. The most Australian thing our players could do right now is stay here, and make anyone who wants to play them go through hotel quarantine.

Still, they’re home now, and no doubt everyone involved has learned their lesson – no more unnecessary trips to risky countries just to play cricket, OK?

Not quite. On the very same day that they returned, Cricket Australia announced its squad to play in the West Indies in July. They’ll be visiting Barbados and St Lucia, places where the US Centers for Disease Control says there’s a “high” and “very high” level of Covid-19 respectively, and it advises people to avoid all travel.

But these aren’t just “people”, they’re Australian cricketers. Regular public health rules don’t apply – they can flit across closed borders with the ease of Tony Abbott dashing off to London for some trade adviser job.

So let’s hope Cricket Australia’s got more accommodation booked in the Maldives for the next tour. Perhaps the Indians could organise another plane? Our players won’t be getting any better treatment from our governments than they got this time, though. And honestly, how could they have?

Who's up for another election?

Hallelujah, the election is over! Well, overish. Well, a result seems likely, at some point in the not too distant future, definitely this year. Probably. Once the AEC, the planets and Antony Green are all in alignment. Subject to recount, rethink, relapse, the Court of Disputed Returns, and the mercurial whim of Bob Katter.

At the time of writing, Malcolm Turnbull was the more likely prime minister, not least because he’s currently the prime minister, and will remain so until anybody else is.

And while his plea of “stick to the plan” has been met by the electorate with “no thanks, we prefer knife-edge near-chaos, if it’s all the same to you”, the PM is likely to be able to make the stronger case to the crossbenchers. Perhaps not numerically, but as we saw on election night, certainly in terms of emphatic, fistpumping rhetoric.

Ultimately, of course, the Australian people choose our leaders. But we also reserve the right not to choose, and to be so underwhelmed by both options that we leave the parliament to knife-fight it out among themselves.

That’s what we did in 2010, placing our government in such a precarious position that not only was Julia Gillard forced to play nice with Kevin Rudd and Craig Thomson, but that co-opting Peter Slipper seemed like a really smart idea. And that’s what we’ve chosen to do again.

Perhaps, in our collective wisdom, we looked back at Gillard’s prodigious record of getting legislation passed and decided we’d like more of the same, please? Perhaps we felt that neither “seriously guys, stick to the plan, or we’ll have more of the instability that I caused nine months ago” or “they’ll privatise Medicare even though it’s a payments system that would defy logic to even find a way of privatising – woo-ooo, are you scared yet?” deserved to be rewarded with a comfortable majority.

Or perhaps, as I suspect, when we voted, we were thinking primarily about whether to buy a second sausage on our way home.

However we’ve arrived at this impasse, it now seems clear that stable government is off the table. Even if the Coalition cobbles together a three-seat majority, which now seems about as likely as Kevin Rudd joining Gillard in the Western Bulldogs’ forward line, the requirement to provide a Speaker will give them a narrow margin indeed.

What’s more, the Coalition doesn’t have Labor’s system of caucus discipline, instead allowing backbenchers to do their own thing as though they were members of a jazz orchestra, or enrolled at a Steiner school.

We saw some admirable examples of this from the likes of Kevin “Happy To Lead” Andrews and Cory “Going Solo” Bernardi during the campaign. Plus, Tony Abbott is still in the parliament. Malcolm Turnbull can’t rely on his whole team to fall into line, as he’ll need every vote.

Fortunately, there’s one obvious option to solve all of the potential minority government’s non-potential huge problems. And it’s the solution they use in the AFL when there’s a deadlock after four quarters.

They go back and do it again.

This may sound like an exhausting prospect, and after a horrifyingly long campaign, it is. But if our footballers can pick themselves up at the end of a punishing season for a grand final replay, then so can our politicians. And with another election, at least there’s no prospect of Collingwood winning.

Admittedly, the AFL has now dropped this rule in favour of extra time and golden point, but there’s no easy way of doing that with elections. We could, I suppose, just ask the voters of Eden-Monaro to decide, but they seem on track to lose their bellwether status, having been seduced once more by the sheer excellence of Mike Kelly’s moustache.

Having a do-over election wouldn’t be that bad. Back in 2013, voters in WA were obliged to front up for a second Senate poll. Admittedly, that wasn’t courtesy of a tight result but an AEC stuff-up – and the results differed significantly the second time around. Would it be so terrible if we had to have another go?

Personally, I’d welcome another election. Even the prospect of another series of Sammy J’s Playground Politics would be reason enough to go back to the polls. It would mean more debates, more doorknocking, more fake/real-but-amusingly-eccentric tradies, and perhaps even a more compelling reason for re-electing the Coalition than “stick to the plan”?

And best of all, it would give us all a second helping of democracy sausages.

Back in school, if you didn’t try hard enough, the teacher often sent you back to do an assignment again. We voters marked the members of our government fairly harshly on 2 July, so it’s not at all unreasonable to expect them to have another crack.

Another election would most likely mean that instead of a government of either complexion scrambling desperately for support on every issue, making unpalatable compromises with both crossbenchers and backbenchers, we would endorse a clear agenda for the next three years. Whether it was the government’s or the opposition’s, we would at least know where we were.

Or, we’d vote the same way and choose another hung parliament. At least then, unlike so many Brexit voters, we’d be clear on what we were choosing.

Malcolm Turnbull recently said he would prefer a Labor government to another hung parliament, and although he’s now eating those words as though they were made of organic green tea, he had a point.

It would be expensive to go back to the polls, but there’s a possibility that if Labor wins, or if the PM gets to run on the platform he wants this time, we might not need to have that problematic plebiscite. So there’s at least a chance of breaking even.

Unfortunately, if we had another election, it would only be for the lower house – we’re stuck with the Senate we’ve got until 2019, except in the incredibly unlikely event that the government chances its arm at another double dissolution.

But the fractiousness of the new Senate is all the more reason to go back and elect a majority government this time. In my electorate, the corflutes are still up. So let’s bulk order some more budget fundraising snags and let the people decide where we should go as a nation. Again.

The promising debate that nobody watched

This election campaign still has five weeks to go. More than a month left, and we’ve already slumped into the contemptuous torpor of Johnny Depp in a quarantine apology video.

And to give you an idea of how long we still have to endure, that video was posted six weeks ago. Depp’s marriage to Amber Heard didn’t survive as long as we’ve still got to go in this campaign, and I’m beginning to wonder whether we will, either.

In an election where even the leader of the supposedly irreproachable Greens has been accused of paying people peanuts – or in peanuts; I don’t know what food they serve at the Di Natale Ranch – it’s no wonder that the opinion polls have been registering dead heats. Presumably everyone hangs up when they hear the word “election”, and stomps on their phone so it can’t happen again.

It’s not that we don’t care, because that would suggest indifference. Rather, we actively despise this campaign, like toddlers being dragged around the Museum of Australian Democracy. Without compulsory voting and the sausage sizzle, even the candidates probably wouldn’t bother to turn up on election day.

The only way this contest could be more dispiriting is if Donald Trump could win it, which is why I know you won’t believe what I’m about to tell you. Both potential prime ministers are articulate, clever men, with an excellent handle on policy detail, and both seem to be attuned to the needs of voters.

Honestly. I’ve seen it. Because unlike just about everybody, I watched the first debate.

It was a perverse thing to do, especially when I reveal that I was a) on holidays in London, b) it was hard work finding a stream, and c) I hadn’t been chained to anything.

It screened at 7pm on Friday 13th (seriously) on Sky News, and as someone who used to host a phone-in quiz on digital radio at that time, I can guarantee that nobody’s listening to hard-to-find media platforms when it’s two hours past beer o’clock and the footy’s on. It’s such a challenging timeslot that I almost feel sorry for its usual occupant, Andrew Bolt.

I can’t get enough of the moderator, David Speers, so I’m glad that he apparently lives at Sky News during election campaigns. But it was the questions that were truly extraordinary. Looking back over Katharine Murphy’s live blog (it’s not impossible that she and Mike Bowers were the only viewers beside me), I’m reminded of just how many key policy areas were touched on.

Here’s the complete list: housing affordability, education and childcare availability, super, the banks, privatisation, offshoring, multinational tax arrangements, GP co-payments, arts funding the burgeoning budget surplus, and most crucially of all, extradition treaties with Serbia.

But a rate of only one self-indulgent hobby horse question in an hour would leave any writers’ festival for dead, and what’s more, the leaders genuinely answered most of the questions. Yes – they actually spoke like human beings, to human beings, without relying purely on dull, focus-grouped phrases.

As an ex-barrister, Malcolm Turnbull is generally as comfortable on his feet as he is at the opera or on board any given train, but he spoke concisely, with charisma and charm. He realised it wasn’t a debating tournament, but a chance to empathise and connect, and he did so impressively.

The real revelation, though, was Bill Shorten, who benefited from lower expectations. After an ignominious beginning where he regurgitated a line about “positive policies” so often that I began to wonder whether the “vomit principle” was going to lead to vomiting from the audience, he quickly warmed up.

Shorten had an impressive grasp of policy detail, and spoke with passion that at least appeared genuine, which shows either that there’s an actual human being underneath somewhere, or that his media trainers deserve a bonus.

It was a genuine contest of ideas, where both leaders outlined competing visions for how Australia should work, and for the most part connected their policies with voters’ genuine concerns. It was a conversation about our lives and how the people we pay to run our country might be able to improve them, which is presumably why it was languishing on cable when everyone was either out or watching footy.

The next debate is on Sunday night in prime time, when the nation will find it easier to watch, if it can be bothered. It will probably be excruciating, now that we’re a few more weeks into the campaign, the boatmongering has resumed, and we’ve spent much of the last few weeks talking about gaffes.

But anyone brave enough to go back and watch the Friday 13th People’s Forum can reassure themselves that either leader would be someone who’s a strong communicator who will be able to govern the country on the basis of common sense and evidence, rather than a worn collection of prefabricated ideologies.

I don’t say this lightly – especially when they’ve still got five weeks left to crash and burn – but on the evidence of the first debate, the next PM might even be worth keeping in the job for three whole years.