[Envitro]

A couple of excerpts from Matt Gurney's article in The Line today:

We can give the PM some marks for tactical cleverness. The announcement last Monday seemed sincere enough that it really was plausible his government was bowing to reality. Everything the prime minister and his party have done since, though, has revealed that last Monday’s announcement was purely for the show. Tactical theatrics.

There’s nothing new about this government promising more than it'll deliver. To be honest, that’s an alarming percentage of their entire MO. But it was rare to see them be quite this shameless. To have the prime minister announce a series of special measures followed by Liberal committee members missing an important meeting literally within the same 24-hour period is next-level bonkers.

and

What we have here is an absurd situation where the Liberals, as the governing party, are doing two things at once: promising a credible and transparent review of a problem while simultaneously attempting any conceivable stunt to sabotage opposition efforts to learn more about that same problem. Like, sorry guys, but your willingness to do the latter necessarily raise questions about the former. You can’t tell us about all the important things you’re going to do while doing silly things. It necessarily blows up any confidence we could have in any of the proposals you’ve made. This is “half-pregnant” territory here: the Liberals take the matter of Chinese electoral interference seriously, or they don’t. It’s a binary choice.

And they’ve clearly made it. They don’t.

Meanwhile, the fundamental issue here hasn't changed, either for the Liberals or for the country. Chinese electoral interference remains a national security issue that a grownup country would find a way to give appropriate attention — all the way seriously, not the semi-serious "We'll do some good things but also do bad things" approach the Liberals are offering us. And for the Liberals, this remains what it was before: a political threat to them.