There's no need for chicken entrails, tarot cards or cystal balls for domestic political fortunes to be foretold for 2019. The writing is on the wall.
That merry band of funsters - the L/NP coagulation of corporate leg humpers and would-be time travellers misrepresenting itself as a government is busily looking for more matches after setting fire to their own hair for 5 long, long years.
Retribution is imminent yet they persist with their discredited dogma, dated ideologies and straight-out idiocies. So their behavours as well as their fate are readily predictable.
An election is to be held somewhere before May '19. As their desperation becomes even more palpable we will see their tactics become shriller and sillier.
Kill Bill will be ramped up to 11
Shouty, spittle-flecked, red-faced invective has been hurled non-stop at Bill Shorten whose un-endearing, wooden persona is a clutching straw for the desperation that has devolved into hysteria from a drowning Tory rabble.
The malignancy that was Tony Abbott PM's abbreviated yet destructive term in office had the big guns pointed at Shorten in the cadaverous form of Dyson Heydon QC and his Trade Union Royal Commission.
Heydon had prior acquaintence with Abbott and ironically is the author of the opinon that a judge should be"...an independent arbiter..who must possess:… a measure of independence from the wrath of disgruntled governments..." Yet he presided over a Royal Commission established for the blatantly political and maliciously wrathful, disgruntled purposes of an unprincipled junkyard dog in Abbott.
Shorten survived unscathed with the hint of a smile but nary a scratch after the Tories, in true conservative style, had spent $80M of other people's money (ours) on a futile vindictive attempt at character assassination.
Yet Kill Bill is still all they've got and so they will cling to it. Devoid of imagination, insight or initiative, focused on an entitlement to power and its perks and with only a crude agenda to serve the interests of their avaricious, ammoral banker and miner mates the Libs have lost all credibility.
They've been trying and failing to kill BIll for more than five years. Their dirt file is bare, their powder is soggy, their last feather has flown - what could they possibly do further?
They'll go full retard on unions generally and the CFMMEU in particular to tar Shorten with the dodgy ex-union boss brush. Expect further union office raids by the AFP, the Lib's private police force and expect anti-union tirades. Perhaps with some assistance from their corporate mates they'll provoke unions into a reaction and then cry foul. Murdoch, SkyNews, Hadley, "Gloria" Jones and that nut Bolt will be swaddled in apoplectic, confected outrage.
Avoiding scrutiny, attacking dissent
The cowardly wretches have fled challenge by proroguing Parliament; stricken with stupifaction their fear is palpable. They shuttered our democracy - the fetid stench of the gutted chickens wafts from Menzies House.
They cannot avoid parliamentary scrutiny entirely with 13 sitting days prior to the budget and subsequent announcement of an election. Hence they will play their gratuitous, dog-eared "it's Labor's fault" card, Morrison will go to full, obnoxious Shouty mode baited by Shorten who will sit back and enjoy the spectacle.
They now don't dare bully the independents as is their natural inclination. Those independents (Andrew Wilkie excepted) will be schmoozed and bribed with pork barrels - ones that will never be delivered of course.
In those 13 sitting days Labor will look to refer the spud-headed Dutton to the High Court over his eligibility under Section 44. This will be mischevious as they see this incompetent Adolf Kipfler, a chip off the old neo-Nazi block as an asset for their own side; and he'll be shot in the head in the general election anyway.
Labor will keep up the heat with the Banks RC fallout and the Lib's protection racket for their filthy rich mates. They will press Morrison's buttons by challenging aspects of his Clayton's Integrity Commission. In the Senate they'll continue to make Michaelia Cash sweat over her deceit and obfuscation on her choreographed union raid.
UPDATE: It looks like Car Crash Cash has dodged a bullet - the AFP declining to lay charges. There is little doubt in my mind that an outfit like the AFP is full of rabid right-wingers who'd support the Libs to the point of criminal collaboration. However the AWU is pursuing its legal challenge and Cash is subject to subpoena for that so there's still potential to expose the nasty cow's behaviour.
FUD
Fear, uncertainty and doubt, a standard political tool but mastered by the conservtives whose speciality is victimisation ("lifters and leaners", "the taxed and the untaxed"). No potential target will be safe from attack - the more marginalised the better.
There will be outright attacks on the unemployed, a favourite whipping boy. There will be dog-whistling about refugees and undisguised scare mongering. A staged raid or two, with full media coverage will occur on suspected "terrorists". Any weirdy-beardy who sticks his head up will get the full spotlight. Will they manufacture a terrorist event? It's far-fetched but never under-estimate the level of muck that they'd be prepared descend into.
Bogeymen will be invented for retirees' tax-breaks and for house prices - the spectres of Greece and Venezuela will be farcically mentioned ad nauseum as representing our fate should Labor be elected. "But Labor" will become a standard mantra.
UPDATE 15/1/19: Mr Potato Head will, as a matter of course, maintain his monotonous mantra about the refugee boats re-starting at the merest hint of a Labor government. This nasty piece of dog puke will now publicise every boat that heads our way, his hectoring will become more demonic as the polls get closer and his fate more real. He'll likely take up Trump's rants about murderers and rapists. A truly evil scumbucket.
Abbott lurks about the S-bend
Jonathan Swift wrote in 1721: "Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion which by reasoning he never acquired."
Australia's most prominent unflushable turd, the shoulder-rolling, bow-legged, quacking, stuttering professional regressive is scheming his nefarious schemes, convinced of his return as leader of inevitable Oppostion and from there a re-run to the PM's big, green swivel chair.
Good friend and confidant of the Vatican's most senior sex offender, character referee for a jailed paedophile priest Captain Catholic is quite flexible in his principles. His consistency is his dogged adherence to ratbag rightwing lunacy where facts and evidence are entirely dispensible.
Abbott wants the Libs to lose. It's a part of his grand plan to regain the #1 spot. Expect some handgrenades from the deceitful weirdo if his delusional self-regard continues to go unrewarded.
Clusterfucks
The L/NP "core competency" is clusterfucks. 5 years of amateur circus acts where one could be forgiven for thinking that they fucked things up just to cover up the preceding fuck-ups and now it's just become a habit.
When is the next one due? ......Wait, the news has just come on the tellie. There we go - Spud Dutton and his Neil Prakesh citizenship fuck-up.
There's 3 - 6 months to the election. That's circa 12 - 24 fuckups that they will initiate.
Possible but less likely events
Tony Abbott loses his seat. OK, I'm probably dreaming but there's significant discontent bubbling away in the safe Tory enclave of Warringah. More likely he'll retain it but see the margin slashed.
I'll dream the dream right up to election night.
Shouty Morrison gets rolled before the election. Spud Dutton, aka Dick Tater the Adolf Kipfler of the LNP Gestapotato (too much?) is on a knife's edge in his seat. He believes that PM status can save his egregious arse. Will the innumerate, autocratic, bumbling cloaca have another shot? It is certain that he will play the fear angle at every opportunity, exaggerating threats, even inventing some to pander to the population's baser instincts and to repeat his mantra that Labor is soft on border protection. This stand-in Bond villain and his patently obvious 'potato wedge' politics insults our national intelligence by deluding himself that he is PM material.
Jewels Bishop. Jewels hung about post-Turnbull to keep her safe seat out of the clutches of her duplictious neighbours - Cormann the Belgian Waffler and UnChristian Porter. She may hang around post-election but she's used to the high-flying lifestye that Opposition does not provide.
She may stay, thinking she'll get a go as Lib leader but she must know the misogonystic troglodites who run the show won't tolerate a female leader.
Schism. Utopia. A triumph of hope over likelihood? But, if the LNP is truly devastated at the pending election then the internecine warfare will come out into full view. The RWNJs will blame the moderates and look to form a new far-right party, consigning the conservative forces to Opposition for a generation.
It happened to Labor in 1955 and it can happen to the Libs in 2019.
Place your bets and get a comfy seat ready to watch the National Tally Room results come in after which Australia can start to repair 5 years of vandalism, incompetence and pandering to the privileged.