Readers, let your minds drift back to pre-Albanese times. And then imagine your typical Coalition government cabinet meeting as the ministers turn to consider crucial appointments to some of the most important positions in the country.  Actually, there is no need to imagine anything as The Spectator Australia recently put together – from all available sources, with the finest forensic people in the business, and so as to best explain the actual choices ultimately made that led to no actual conservatives ever being appointed to anything for almost a decade – a compressed, amalgam account of a typical such Coalition cabinet meeting during their nine years in office.  The Speccie now puts you in the very room where it happened….

PM: Well, that brings us to item 13, appointments. Everyone still awake? Most of us at least? Okay, where shall we start?

Attorney-General: Why don’t we begin with the openings for the High Court of Australia?

Black Hand Brigade Minister #1: It’s got to be a woman. That’s what Labor and the Greens want. We can’t afford to be outflanked by them.

PM: Good point. Any other comments or suggestions before we hear the A-G on this?

Sidelined Sole Cabinet Minister Who Values Freedom and Conservatism More than Focus Groups: This party’s founding principles compel us to pick a top judge who will not indulge in judicial adventurism and usurp the legitimate power of the elected parliament. We need an interpretive conservative and we need to pick the best person who fits that criterion. Merit should be our guiding principle.

PM: Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a female candidate who is interpretively conservative? This is only supposed to be a three-hour meeting. Have you seen what our law schools are producing these days?  Have you tried to walk into a big Sydney law firm without your preferred pronouns emblazoned on three different items of clothing? Anyone got any plausible ideas here?

A-G: I think our best shot is to go with the wife of the retiring High Court judge. No one will see that coming. It’ll be a world first.  No idea, really, if she’s remotely interpretively conservative. But she might be, right?  Always a chance. Worth a flutter. Anyway, we can just tell our core supporters who care about this that we think she is.

Black Hand: Is that fair to the daughters of High Court judges? Why a wife and not a daughter? Doesn’t seem to be a principled distinction at work there.

A-G: Good point. We’ll try that in the future. I’ll make a note of it.

Sidelined Minister: Isn’t this really short-sighted? Leave aside how this ‘gotta pick from this group’ amounts to an embrace of left-wing identity politics over merit. Self-interest as a right-of-centre party should be driving us to pick judges who aren’t inclined towards judicial activism. It’s almost never Labor legislation that gets invalidated. And what if the High Court down the road decides a case that is interpretively preposterous in the name of woke, right-on, identity politics and the judges we appointed are the main drivers? Our voting base will be incandescently angry.

Black Hand: That’s pure scaremongering! Do you seriously think the High Court judges we appoint would – I don’t know – just make up special rules for those who claim to be Aborigines? Maybe give special entitlements to non-citizen ones to make it impossible to deport them? You think our appointees would just re-write the constitution? And all while throwing around post-modern gobbledygook about ‘otherness’, ‘deeper truths’ and ‘spiritual and metaphysical’ connections to the land, all to give them special rights not possessed by the rest of us?  Won’t happen! We simply have to stop this scaremongering and just go with the A-G’s suggestions. Our top judges need to reflect how the wider community looks. Besides, it’s irrelevant how they’re likely to decide cases. So is the interpretive approach they’ll bring to the table. Just ask the focus group we put together on this. If it’s good enough for the focus group it’s good enough for my 24-year-old chief advisor. And that makes it good enough for me.

PM: Sorry to interrupt. Four ministers are asleep at the back. Wake up! We’ve got a whole big list of appointments to make this afternoon. And I’m being interviewed by the ABC tonight so I’ll just step in and sign off on the A-G’s suggestions. Let’s turn now to the top positions at the ABC. Remember, the national broadcaster already hates us. No reason to make them even angrier.

Sidelined Minister: Some of my constituents want us to appoint someone like Andrew Bolt as managing director. We all know the national broadcaster isn’t remotely balanced or politically neutral. Why do we stand for this?

Black Hand: Rubbish. I agree with near-on everything I see on the ABC current affairs shows. And not just the stuff I leak to them. We need to follow our usual practice and pick someone that Labor and the Greens would happily pick.

PM: That takes us to the Australian Human Rights Commission. The A-G and I think it would be good to try to pick a president and commissioners who will nitpick in favour of every claim raised by every single person claiming to be a refugee as long as the entire AHRC wouldn’t utter a peep if, say, some pandemic swept across Australia and we in government were inclined to clamp down brutally hard on people’s rights. Imagine that we and the states (with our help, of course, and a few knowing winks) imposed the biggest inroads on the civil liberties of our citizens in the country’s history. We want AHRC appointees who won’t say a peep.  Nada. Zippo. ‘Nothing to see here Mr PM.’ Let’s pick those sort of people.

Black Hand: Great idea. And can we finish by picking an eSafety Commissioner?

Sidelined Minister: At least this appointment can go to someone who believes in the John Stuart Mill commitment to free speech and that best outcomes flow from the cauldron of competing views. Right?

PM (with the A-G and Black Hand nodding along): You must be joking! We can’t pick someone who believes in a robust, principled understanding of free speech to make the calls about whether true content should be taken down. That’s just free speech extremism. Free speech never created a single job! Just stick to our normal path – we’ll pick a woman that Labor and the Greens could have picked. It’s the risk-free option.