David Johnston really ought to be congratulated. He achieved something this week that has rarely, if ever, happened before; he managed to get the SA Libs to come out strongly against their federal colleagues on a matter of parochial self-interest.

The Abbott Government poured scorn on Holden while General Motors weighed up its future in Australia and the state Liberals, despite facing a general election within months, barely raised a whisper in objection.

The feds then clearly broke an explicit commitment to build the next generation of submarines at ASC’s Osborne base, with Defence Minister Johnstone instead weighing up a raft of alternative options and using increasingly strident “rhetorical flourishes” to berate the Government-owned South Australian-based builder. The best Steven Marshall could muster was a limp statement explaining he’d continue to lobby for naval subs to be constructed in SA, while welcoming the Commonwealth spin about new SA jobs being created regardless.

So, it’s fair to say, it was gonna take a lot for the state Opposition to really fire up against their partisan brethren.

Something in the order of: “I wouldn’t trust ASC to build a canoe.”

When you’re the Federal Defence Minister, and members of your own party, including the SA Liberal Leader, are publicly describing your position as “untenable”, it’s fair to say you’re not having a great week.

When the Prime Minister is forced to put out a statement effectively rebuking your stupidity, it’s a positively bad week.

To be fair, Abbott did leap (somewhat over-effusively) to his cretinous Defence Minister’s … um, defence, praising him for doing “an absolutely outstanding job”. I presume he meant “Outstanding” as in “Egregious”.

I have been wracking my brain for a rational explanation for Senator Johnston’s weird outburst (which, it must be noted, is not a million miles from the sort of rhetoric he’d already been employing publicly about the shipbuilder).

The only one, of course, is that he’s keen to justify breaking his pre-election pledge (both pre-2010 and pre-2013) to award the subs contract to the SA-based manufacturer. That, it seems, simply won’t happen. You might have got that impression when he said he wouldn’t trust them to build a canoe, let alone a $20 billion (or $80 billion, depending on which spin you listen to) submarine fleet. But even then, it was unnecessarily heavy-handed, desperate even. If Johnston’s serious about sending the contract offshore, the business case will have to transparently stack up; it will require more than petty ministerial shit-stirring.

… far from merely antagonising Labor, his Canoe jibe has the state Liberals sweating on the by-election fallout, SA-based federal colleagues up in arms and dispassionate observers scratching their heads about just what kind of ship of state we’re sailing here.

But even allowing, generously, for that semblance of method to the senator’s madness, there are infinitely more reasons why his remark resembles idiocy of the highest order.

Let us count the ways.

If, as suspected, the prevailing Commonwealth bent is to privatise ASC, stridently labelling it a dud ain’t going to help yield top dollar. If you’re selling a house, you don’t stand around at the outskirts of the open inspection, pointing out leaking taps and rising damp to prospective buyers. If you’re trying to offload a car, you avoid phrases such as “perfect for scrap and little else”. And if you’re trying to sell off a public manufacturing enterprise, bon mots such as “can’t be trusted to build a canoe” tend to diminish the purchasing pool, if not the price. And when you’re selling off the family silver, selling high is kinda the point.

Then there’s the own goal to Johnston’s own party. It might have escaped his attention over in his sheltered senate workshop in asset-rich WA, but there is a fairly important by-election in struggling SA in a week’s time. A Liberal victory won’t quite send the Government packing, but it will position the Opposition for an optimistic tilt at power in 2018. Conversely, a Liberal loss will effectively spell the end of Steven Marshall’s leadership.

Respondents in Fisher have reportedly cited the usual bugbears to the various candidates – cost of living, the Emergency Services Levy spike – but also, surprisingly, a large proportion in the southern suburbs seat have cited preserving the state’s ailing northern-suburbs shipbuilding industry by securing the submarine contract. So the timing, if not the spurious, poisonous rhetoric, of the minister’s self-described “rhetorical flourish”, was supremely unhelpful.

Then, of course, there’s just the simple fact that in democracies in which (we’re told) the adults are in charge, it’s not normally best practice for ministers to tell parliament their manufacturing output is deeply flawed. Particularly when the minister is responsible for a strategically sensitive portfolio like, say, Defence.

What the hell was he thinking?

The only logical answer I could come to was the one his colleagues I spoke to had evidently arrived at themselves: he really is just that stupid.
While that requires him to be moved on, I’m told it’s unlikely to happen before later next year, since Abbott is not about to be forced into demoting one errant frontbencher (or removing a barnacle from his hull, as he might put it), so close to year’s end.

Which means he’ll probably still be in place to oversee the Government’s infamous Defence White Paper, to formalise another broken Liberal promise; in this case, one uttered from his own lips, standing ridiculously out the front of Techport, unauthorised as then-Opposition spokesman to gain entry, with a trusting, grinning Steven Marshall by his side, repeating a long-held mantra: “We are absolutely committed to the Australian Submarine Corporation building submarines for Australia in Adelaide.”

In Government, that mantra instead became a rendition of: “We should make decisions based on defence requirements, not on the basis of industry policy or regional policy.”

Which is all very well, it’s just not what was explicitly stated in Opposition. And since so much of that Opposition’s strategy centred on reminding the voting public about Julia Gillard’s infamous broken promise, one might have thought honouring explicit election commitments would be higher on the Coalition agenda.

There is more to it, of course. There always is.

I’m told Johnston’s fevered beef with ASC is fuelled, at least in part, from his belief that Bruce Carter, chairman since 2010, is Labor’s man (which, to be fair, is somewhat understandable).

But, far from merely antagonising Labor, his Canoe jibe has the state Liberals sweating on the by-election fallout, SA-based federal colleagues up in arms and dispassionate observers scratching their heads about just what kind of ship of state we’re sailing here.

As one of the above put it, it was “not just an own goal; he got the ball from the back of the net, turned around and kicked it back in!”

Johnston’s position has been described as “untenable”, a sentiment so overused in political parlance that it becomes about as limply damning as a Senate censure motion, which merely formalises that everyone who isn’t duty-bound to say otherwise thinks the Defence Minister is a complete cretin.
But it is true; his position is untenable. He has no faith in a key component of defence manufacturing and the industry (let alone the public) has no confidence in him.

He cannot remain in his role. Again, it is such a political cliche to say so, but believe me that I don’t say it lightly: if the Prime Minister will not remove him, and soon, he must resign.

He is up the creek without a paddle in a canoe evidently designed by his friends at ASC.

Tom Richardson is InDaily’s political commentator and Channel Nine’s state political reporter.

In January 2015, he will join InDaily’s reporting staff full-time.