George Megalogenis in an article in today’s Saturday edition of The Sydney Morning Herald reckons the Abbott Government’s royal commission into trade unions was unsuccessful.

Really, George? Seriously? Do you, really, truly believe that?

For a long time now, the MGH has suspected there’s some some sort of ongoing Sliding Doors thing happening in Australian politics – that the world of politics that our mainstream media politics glitterati watch and assess is an entirely different version from the one us mere mortals take in.

Take the recent federal election. People with a modicum of intelligence and general knowledge of the federal voting system knew that the opinion polls consistently hinted at a win for the Labor Party.

Yet the campaign being watched by the likes of Chris Uhlmann and Phillip Coorey was unfolding to an entirely different set of mathematical equations and points of logic and twisted interpetations. A poll with both the LNP and Labor on similar primary vote meant a hung parliament and disaster, they repeatedly claimed as they clearly tried to panic voters back to the devil they knew and love.

And now George Megalogenis comes up with an equally absurd assessment of the Abbott government’s witch-hunt into trade unions that had no other aim than to damage the reputations of Julia Gillard and Bill Shorten.

The stark reality – one that George Megalogenis cannnot see, or perhaps remember – is that the royal commission into trade unions by serial female pest Dyson Heydon proved to be many tens of millions of taxpayers’ money very well misspent as far as the LNP government back then was concerned.

The bitter old hacks behind The Bug and the MGH have a simple challenge to George: let’s book a hall, invite some people and The Bug staff will happily argue the affirmative case: “That the RC into trade unions proved a very successful exercise politically for the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments”.

Lots of luck finding other team members to argue the negative, George! We’ll try not to smirk too arrogantly as you argue that the RC was a failure because it did not find Shorten guilty of any criminal activity over which charges could be recommended.

The shameful bottom line is that all three of the aforementioned dreadfully average PMs used parliamentary Question Time after Question Time for years to pillory Bill Shorten with their own concocted versions of what that RC found. Shorten used workers for his own selfish advancement. He was a brown-noser trying to get his feet under the tables of billionaires, somewhere he did not belong. He was a snake in the grass trying to slither his way into The Lodge.

The Bug has no doubt that Fizza Turnbull’s very narrow win in 2016 where he showed he had all the charisma on the hustings of a busted boil, and Morrison’s narrow “photo ops” win in 2019 were only possible due to the absolute hatchet job those three did to Shorten’s reputation on the back of Heydon’s royal commission witch-hunt. Not to see that makes George Megalogenis an absolute dunce in our view.

His view that the RC was unsuccessful is absolute nonsense. Along with Coorey and Uhlmann, Magalogenis makes anyone with a modicum of interest in politics entitled to wonder how the fuck the likes of these three somehow and undeservedly floated to the top of mainstream political journalism and that their opinions for some bizarre reason deserve column space or air time.