I forgot to include Angus Taylor on the impressive rap sheet:

https://michaelwest.com.au/scandal-magnet-angus-taylor-fails-to-disclose-virgin-and-qantas-freebies

Here is another link covering Julie Bishop and her controversial appointment with Greensill, which engaged in the notorious reverse factoring supply chain finance:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/16/julie-bishop-takes-job-with-greensill-the-firm-pushing-controversial-financing-practice

It is pure gangster capitalism amidst a festering Ponzi scheme underpinned by pyramid selling, which inevitably collapses.

The debacle is often followed by a royal commission or parliamentary inquiry with constrained terms of reference, which ensures the vast profits are privatised to protect the interests of obsequious party donors and losses are socialised accordingly.

Jason Clare is an impressive figure in a party that, factional machinations notwithstanding, seems able to produce more than a few examples.

For example, I am a particular fan of Mark Butler, who was a deeply impressive Minister for Aging and of Amanda Rishworth, whom I have known since she was a toddler. Both are highly intelligent, articulate, genuinely empathetic and very committed to making Australia a better place for everyone.

Should Anthony Albanese become Prime Minister, he will preside over a Cabinet that is full of talent, unlike ScoMo's assembly of mostly mediocrities masquerading as people of substance.

So all Albo has to do is be a competent 'Chairman of the Board' and give his ministry permission to get on with the job without the necessity to scrutinise their every decision and he will place himself in a far better position than Morrison to focus on the big picture issues that should take up most of a PM's time.

Morrison's lack of administrative competence, poor judgement, lack of genuine empathy and an apparently instinctive tendency to want to micro manage everything is part of the reason he is such a poor PM. It may also help explain his problematic employment record before he entered Parliament.

I have seen his type before. They are people who lack the personal qualities needed to be an effective leader yet insist that they know best even in the face of ample evidence to the contrary. If a decision goes bad then it is obviously down to those trying to implement it, not because the decision was inherently flawed to start with.

Vladimir Putin is a prize example of this in action right now, where he is doubling down on an already disastrous series of decisions and compelling his increasingly alarmed and degraded military to try to do things that, in practice, they lack the capacity to achieve. What could possibly go wrong?

The saddest thing about a possible win for Albanese is that he and his colleagues will inherit the numerous now hidden economic problems that have been created by successive LNP governments through their often irrational and counter productive adherence to neo-liberal economic thinking.

When these problems become manifest they will, of course, promptly blame an Albanese government for allegedly mismanaging the economy.

This has been the LNP modus operandi since Robert Menzies was PM and far too many Australians are sufficiently credulous to believe it.

Our 'Pacific family' had better hope that Albo becomes PM because he and his colleagues are likely to do much better in terms of listening to them and trying to better meet their expressed needs.

With Morrison, it will just be more of the same: patronising lectures, finger pointing and studied indifference to their expressed concerns about things like climate change.

When I first came across this bloke I wondered why Labor wasn't making better use of him.

He'd be a great replacement for bumbledoom Richard Marles. How he made deputy leader is hard to believe.
________

The party clearly needed someone from Victoria to retain 'balance' in its parliamentary leadership, but the choice of Marles was perplexing. As Phil notes, he is a mediocre performer - even in his supposed specialist area of PNG and the Pacific and, like Albanese, he's not very good on his feet. But then the Victorian ALP works in mysterious ways with factions, sub-factions, cliques, fractions, tendencies and segments all held together by some complex simultaneous equation - KJ