Politically homeless

The National Pikers' Club

2012-02-01T23:18:00.000+11:00

Mirrors on the ceiling
The pink champagne on ice
And she said "We are all just prisoners here, of our own device"
And in the master's chambers
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives
But they just can't kill the beast

- Eagles Hotel California

Tony Abbott made a speech at the National Press Club yesterday.

The more gullible members of the journosphere claimed yesterday morning that this would be the speech where Abbott went positive rather than just gainsaying Gillard. They had no basis for reporting that, as Abbott wouldn't have shown them the speech beforehand, so they made this claim on the basis of Liberal spin, which they passed on without thinking whether or not it might be true. Why would Tony Abbott want to "go positive", given his success as a nark? On what basis could he do so, given his record? This sort of scrutiny is what adds value in journalism; in today's reporting from the Canberra press gallery it is almost entirely absent.

Abbott has achieved what generations of politicians have only dreamed of: the media take him at his word. His speeches are reported verbatim and accorded a merit they do not deserve. Where his words differ from those of others (particularly the Prime Minister and members of the incumbent government), he is assumed to be right and they wrong. This veneration of Abbott by the press gallery (always "Mr Abbott" from the press gallery; he is rarely addressed as "Tony" while the Prime Minister is addressed regularly as "Julia") is unprecedented in a democracy. Stalin achieved this state of absolute credibility at some point in the 1930s; so too did Mao 20 or 30 years after that. It's unnatural, and in a country like Australia - not only a robust democracy but a place that prides itself on taking the piss - this uncritical approach to a politician is unheard of.

References to appalling dictators aside, the reason why the Australian media give Abbott the free pass that they do is not from any sinister intent, or even a consistent ideology. Abbott is the anti-Gillard. You can't make the case that Gillard is a hopeless cretin who should be chucked from office at the first opportunity if you believe that Abbott would be worse. So, they pretend that Abbott wouldn't be worse, and that when he says he loves his country and wants to help the unfortunate, such statements treated as though the unfortunate are being helped by his very words - if only that damned incumbent government would just rack off out of his way.

What follows is a very long post which takes Abbott's speech, and some of the media commentary that followed it, seriously. The speech shows up Abbott's weaknesses and why he can't lead an effective government (and reinforces my long-held view that the guy will never lead the Liberals to victory).

The headline of the speech is "My Plan for a Stronger Economy and a Stronger Australia". It's mostly a "greatest hits" of attack lines, combined with a wishlist about how he'd like his government to go if everything went as well as it possibly could all the time. There's no plan, only a dream.

It's nice that he wishes things were different and better, we all do. Abbott has only showed that he doesn't have what it takes to get our country to that better place. He's been Opposition Leader for more than two years now, head of a party with a long and proud record in government, and the best he and his people can come up with is a wishlist with a few punchlines embedded in it.

It is a testament to the stupidity of the Australian media that they regard it as a "fresh start", "promising", or other descriptions which belie a keening urge to believe in Abbott so long as he remains a potent threat to Gillard. Don't let me colour your perceptions though, heavens no. Here, read it:

The government often cites the fragile international economic situation but fails to propose any new policies to respond to it.

Nowhere in this speech are any new policies for the Coalition.

Labor’s economic strategy is to hope that China’s strength will keep our economy growing. It’s lazy, complacent economic management ...

It sure is, and it's the very economic policy that the Howard government pursued since about 2003. Those assumptions are baked into Abbott's assumptions too, as we'll see.

The Eurozone crisis is a terrible verdict on governments that spend too much, borrow too much and tax too much yet our prime minister is lecturing the Europeans while copying their failures.

You only say something like this if you know you're talking to mugs. Europe's in debt, Australia's in debt, therefore Australia must be down the economic toilet like Europe is (the UK is outside "the Eurozone" but it is still in economic trouble, far worse than Australia's). Only if you are sure that you'd get away with it would you even make such sloppy linkage.

At the heart of Labor’s failure is the assumption that bigger government and higher taxes are the answer to every problem.

That assumption doesn't support the fact that government is smaller as a share of GDP and the tax take is smaller in real terms than it was under Howard and Costello. It was true that Labor loved big-government solutions, but not in the past 30 years or so: strangely, toward the end of his speech Abbott cites Ben Chifley with approval, but never once mentioned Menzies or any other Liberal other than Howard.

Gambling is a problem so let’s force every club to redesign every poker machine.

The government has completely failed to appreciate the iron law of economics that no country has ever taxed its way to prosperity.

That's as dishonest a non-sequitur as anything we've seen from the gambling lobby, the government or anyone else. Measures to help gambling addicts are not taxes, they actually depress government revenue.

To anyone who thought Wilkie's proposals were flawed, and that Gillard's offhand sop to him was worse, note this speech: an Abbott government will do nothing to help gambling addicts. They don't see it as a public policy problem, and will therefore propose no public policy solutions. It's no good asserting that you feel great sympathy for gambling victims and their families, or throwing some money at counselling. There was a time when gambling reform was possible, the time has passed; and those who wanted change and were clear about what they wanted have to wonder whether they did as much as they could. Abbott wasn't obliged to go into detail about this issue in this particular speech, but he also wasn't obliged to be quite so naked about the sheer absence of any motivation to consider whether pokie addiction is a problem, let alone whether or not there are appropriate and cost-effective public policy responses open to a Coalition government.

The only foundation for a successful country is a strong economy. The only way to take the pressure off family budgets, to increase job opportunities, and to have the better services and infrastructure that every Australian wants is to build a stronger economy.

That’s why my plan for a stronger economy is to scrap unnecessary taxes, cut government spending and reduce the red tape burden on business.

This is the heart of the speech: a gobbet of banality. He doesn't understand, here or anywhere else in the speech, that in order to "have the better services and infrastructure that every Australian wants" is to increase taxes; conversely, that to reduce taxes means some of those services and infrastructure will have to wait. It's dishonest to pretend that you can have better services/infrastructure while cutting taxes.

Again, you can only get away with saying stuff like that if you know your audience are ~~credulous~~ mugs.

My plan to reduce the cost of living pressures on families is to take the carbon tax off their power and transport and make government live within its means. That way, there can be lower taxes and less upward pressure on interest rates.

No: power and transport costs will increase anyway, and Australians will miss out on trade opportunities from international commercial action on climate change. Some plan.

Australians can be confident that the Liberal and National parties will provide good economic management in the future because that’s what we’ve always done in the past.

We’ve done it before and we will do it again. After all, 16 members of the current shadow cabinet were ministers in the Howard government which now looks like a lost golden age of reform and prosperity.

Australia was a stronger society because we had a stronger economy. Between 1996 and 2007, real wages increased more than 20 per cent, real household wealth per person more than doubled, and there were more than two million new jobs.

Not only were the latter achievements due to the "lazy" policy of relying on Chinese growth, but also on the crazy asset-and-debt manipulation which has reaped the whirlwind of the Great Recession/Global Financial Crisis. Only Liberals, aching for the perks of office, regard the Howard government as "a lost golden age of reform and prosperity"; it is flatly dishonest to imply, let alone state, that a Coalition government could or would Restore The Good Old Days.

Besides, Abbott has promised to abolish the carbon pricing mechanism before. Nowhere in this speech is a new initiative. He's also being sneaky in implying that such abolition won't impose costs on the economy (and yes, on household budgets) in the same way that interest on borrowings is a cost.

What Australia most needs now is a competent, trustworthy, adult government with achievable plans for a better economy and a stronger society.

Abbott and his crew can't offer that - neither absolutely, nor relative to the flawed Gillard government. Aspirational statements just don't count - not after two election losses, and two years as leader. There's the usual snark about whether Abbott can be described as "competent, trustworthy, adult" in himself, or that his team can be described as such - both in themselves and in comparison with the incumbents.

My vision for Australia is to restore hope, reward and opportunity by delivering lower taxes, better services, more opportunities for work and stronger borders.

The government I lead will do fewer things but do them better so that the Australian people, individually and in community, will be best placed to realise the visions that each of us has for a better life.

In the above quote, "vision" should be replaced with "wish". People will have their wishes but they can only be realised if we drop the pretense that Abbott can or will run a government that delivers better services and infrastructure (I'll get to his terrible cant about disabled people presently).

At the heart of our plan for a stronger economy is getting government spending down and productivity up so that borrowing reduces, the pressure on interest rates comes off, and taxes can responsibly come down ... Australians can have tax cuts without a carbon tax but only if we get government spending down by eliminating wasteful and unnecessary programmes and permanently reducing the size of government.

What Abbott is proposing is to return the tax base to what it was under Howard and Costello. That tax base was headed for a structural deficit over time, with an ageing population - and without skewing taxes toward economic growth areas and away from taxing small business and personal incomes. There's nothing strong about a structural deficit, quite the opposite in fact.

Abbott has no right to be believed that he would cut the size of government. Nowhere in his background is there even a single event, like Howard standing against car industry donations in 1981, in Abbott's background. Abbott is all about spending more money with less accountability over time. Small government fans have set their cap at the wrong man; he is not entitled to be taken at these words. Geoff Kitney does so in The Australian Financial Review today - it's a junior-reporter error and every greybeard who made it should be sacked at once.

... pink batts ... school halls ... Victorian brown coal power stations ... Telstra’s copper wires ... a National Broadband Network that people don’t need ... The last coalition government turned an inherited $10 billion budget black hole ...

Blah blah - he's happy to talk about infrastructure and stimulus in general but he decries it in the particular. He's decided that people don't need NBN, a quote that will haunt him throughout history and wreck any claims he may have to being a visionary, or understanding the serendipitous effect that infrastructure generally (and communications in particular) has on economic growth and development over time.

At the last election, the coalition identified $50 billion in responsible savings ...

No you didn't, and all the little mice who've been in the press gallery for two years or more should have called bullshit on that.

Finding savings is a big task but we’re up for it and will release all our costings in good time for the next election.

What patronising drivel - "in good time"! Abbott's costings are vague and sloppy at the best of times an they seem to have learned nothing from the last election, other than to blame the accountancy firm that gave the cover (if you're running a consultancy, and the Federal Opposition approaches you wanting some work done - run for your life!). He has no right to be taken on face value. Such assertions should simply be regarded as "uncosted" or "unsupported" until proven otherwise.

The starting point will be programmes that have become bywords for waste. Discontinuing the computers in schools programme, which parents are now having to pay for anyway, could save over half a billion dollars.

Why has it become "a byword for waste" and are there no benefits to investing in young people in this manner? None at all?

Not proceeding with the extra bureaucracies associated with hospital changes that no one will notice could save over half a billion dollars. Not proceeding with the so-called GP super clinics which are delivering new buildings not more doctors could save about $200 million.

Reversing bureaucratic changes is not cost-free. How much could be saved by not proceeding with a new layer of bureaucracy supporting local busybodies who can hold up efficient healthcare delivery without improving it? Oh wait, that's actually a Coalition proposal.

Big savings could be made in the government’s $350 a throw set top box programme since Gerry Harvey can supply and install them for half the price.

How much would you expect to pay, Tony? How much would you expect to pay? Harvey has been blindsided by e-commerce, what do you think he knows about set-top boxes? Are you seriously going to base public policy reform on an idle comment?

Vastly reducing the number of consultancies (which have cost over $2 billion over the past four years) would produce significant savings.

Sure - but then all oppositions say that, don't they. No consultancies would wan to work for the Coalition after their disgraceful treatment of Horwaths.

Not proceeding with the carbon tax would deliver $31 billion in savings over the forward estimates period with a net improvement of $4 billion in the budget bottom line. Not proceeding with the mining tax would deliver $14 billion in savings over the forward estimates period with a net improvement of $6 billion in the budget bottom line.

All of those figures are bullshit. This isn't my fault, I'm just pointing it out; and journalists should do so too.

There are many problems with the government’s so-called Fair Work Act: there’s a flexibility problem, a militancy problem but above all else a productivity problem which is hardly surprising when workplace negotiations are always meant to involve outside union bosses rather than the employees of a business.

A serious review of the Act would have been given to the Productivity Commission rather than to departmental officials even under the auspices of a distinguished committee.

That would be the same Productivity Commission that proposed mandatory limits on pokies, and the disability care scheme that will be axed (more on that below); you'd think that the Coalition would have done its own review and come up with a few ideas of its own, surely.

The coalition will save business $1 billion a year in red tape expenses by requiring each department and agency to quantify the costs of its regulations and to set targets to reduce them.

Garbage. What self-serving nonsense that would be on the bureaucrats' part, and hardly cost-free.

We’ll give people the chance to show what they can do – not what they can’t – by offering employers incentives to take on young people and seniors who might otherwise become trapped in the welfare system.

There will be tough love too. Why should fit young people be able to take the dole when unskilled work is readily available? Why should middle aged people with bad backs or a bout of mental illness be semi-permanently parked on the disability pension because it’s easier than helping them to experience once more the fulfilment of work?

Why haven't any of those half-arsed incentive schemes worked? Why would they work just because Abbott hopes they might?

We’re going to work with the states to make public hospitals and public schools more accountable to their communities with local boards and councils choosing leaders, employing staff and controlling budgets.

Nowhere is there any evidence that this will improve health an education outcomes: quite the opposite, especially when you consider just how skewed the board members will be if the US experience is any guide. The US provides a warning, not a model, for Australian health and education services, and this should receive greater scrutiny than it has.

And we’re going to deliver a fair-dinkum paid parental leave scheme, not the government’s re-badged baby bonus.

I want to change Australia for the better. That means change which reflects our best work and family values and our deepest instincts. That’s why paid parental leave is best understood as a conservative reform that makes it more achievable for women to have combine larger families with better careers, if that’s their choice.

That's the nearest there is to a tangible "plan"; it was announced already, and the funding model was bogus (a "special levy" rather than a Great Big New Tax That Will Be Passed Onto Us All).

As far as I’m concerned, there should never be first and second class Australians based on where they were born, how they worship, or the length of time their forbears have been here.

Fine words. The leaders who believed that sentiment, like Malcolm Fraser, jumped on splitters like Cor Bernardi with both feet when they attempted to play up community divisions. Next time a Liberal does this, watch for Abbott to do absolutely bugger-all or come out with some weaselly Howardism like asserting their right to free speech.

Now, I want to end forever any lingering suspicion that the coalition has a good head but a cold heart for dealing with Aboriginal people.

Yes, let's. No evidence-based policy, arbitrary shifting of goalposts every few years, and a refusal to consult anyone other than Pearson makes Aboriginal policy an absolute shambles. Abbott turns up to Aboriginal communities in order to patronise,not to learn.

Should I become prime minister, I will spend at least a week every year in a remote indigenous community because if these places are good enough for Australians to live in they should be good enough for a prime minister and senior officials to stay in.

Imagine the expensive facilities used for once a year by Prime Minister Abbott and a squad of bureaucrats, and know that they'll be better than the facilities of people who live there every day - and that little Potemkin Village will be better than the standard, and not much else will change.

After all, the measure of a decent society is how it looks after its most vulnerable members ... The coalition strongly supports the Productivity Commission’s recommendation for a disability insurance scheme but, with an estimated price tag of $6 billion a year (roughly equal to the Commonwealth’s current interest bill) this important and necessary reform can’t fully be implemented until the budget returns to strong surplus.

The whole idea of the national disability insurance scheme is to improve independence and outcomes for people while joining up expensive programs that are currently disjointed. It is a revenue-saving, intelligent-spending measure, not some expensive nice-to-have that is forever on the never-never.

One of my final acts as health minister was to establish the Medicare dental scheme to give people on chronic disease care plans access to up to $4000 worth of dental treatment every two years: not check-ups but treatment.

I always envisaged that this would be the precursor to putting dental services more generally on Medicare ... The big problem with Medicare, as it stands, is that it supports treatment for every part of the body except the mouth. People sometimes spend years on Medicare-funded antibiotics because they can’t get Medicare-funded dentistry. One in three Australians say that they’ve avoided dental treatment because they can’t afford it.

I stress that Medicare funded dentistry is an aspiration not a commitment.

The whole reason why politicians get elected to government is to solve problems. Pissant quibbling over "an aspiration not a commitment" undermines any benefit gained from talking about this issue in a considered way, and completely negates any digs at the incumbents for not acting. There was all this build-up, addressing a real issue, and then - pfft, it's not a commitment, I'm not promising anything, blah blah weasel weasel.

It’s the kind of initiative that can’t responsibly be implemented until the budget returns to strong surplus but it’s the kind of social dividend that should motivate the economic changes that Australia needs.

In other words: it will be put on the never-never forever and a day by the Coalition, if you really want it you'll have to vote Labor.

Politicians have to address issues as they arise. It isn't good enough to say (as Abbott does) that you'll only deliver when everything's absolutely perfect, when there's plenty of money and the sun is shining and the wind's in your hair and your footy team is winning and ... no. Politics is the art of what's possible under the circumstances. Abbott is vague about the circumstances in the hope that nobody will notice the fact that he's vague about what he'll do. Because he's talking to a bunch of people who are desperate for him to succeed, they overlook the fact that he's a fair-weather sailor and would be hopeless if circumstances turned against Australia.

No one should be fooled by Labor’s carbon tax which is socialism masquerading as environmentalism and won’t actually start to reduce domestic emissions until the carbon tax is well over $100 a tonne. The best way to reduce emissions is to invest intelligently in the changes that cost-conscious enterprises are already making to become more energy efficient.

That’s what our $10 billion emissions reduction fund is for: reducing domestic emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 by reinforcing what businesses are already doing.

This point has been made before but it bears repeating: Abbott believes Labor's market-based solution is socialism, whereas his plan for splashing around billions of dollars of taxpayer money "by 2020 by reinforcing what businesses are already doing" shows that he really doesn't understand the business of politics, he doesn't understand what words mean; politics and words, the very business he's in.

That’s why the Green Army providing a reliable, substantial workforce to support the land care efforts of local councils, farmers and volunteers should turn out to be one of the next coalition government’s signature policies.

There's going to be a layer of bureaucracy over volunteers doing what farmers should be doing themselves - sounds pretty nanny-state socialistic to me.

A Plan for Strong Borders

You've heard this shit before: next.

Finally, the coalition’s plan for a more prosperous future will try to ensure that our children and grandchildren look back appreciatively on the big decisions this generation has made.

We have a responsibility to ensure that our land is as productive as possible, that’s why we are looking at new dam sites especially in northern Australia which could become a food bowl to Asia.

He negates himself once he gets down to details. Sic 'im, Grog!

With abundant coal and iron ore, Australia should have a natural advantage in making steel.

Should, but doesn't. Graham Bradley imperiously led Bluescope as it ignored the possibility that China might become a net steel exporter, and now that it has done so (China, that is) it appears that Bluescope has been wagered on the wrong outcome. If Bluescope's taxes were cut to $1 and all its employees worked for free, it would still be unable to exploit this "natural advantage" because there is no defence against dopey management. What's Abbott going to do about it anyway? Keen and rend his garments for the people who first labelled Menzies "Pig Iron Bob"?

With abundant bauxite and cheap power, Australia should have a natural advantage in making aluminium.

Cheap power? Really? I thought it was hellishly expensive, especially when you consider how far apart where the bauxite is and where the power stations are. Oh well.

With greater export orientation to drive higher production volumes, there’s no reason why Australia can’t sustain a viable motor industry.

There's sixty years of reasons why Australia can't have such an export industry, if only you'd face up to it. Here's why a domestic car market can't justify itself either.

The demands of the resources sector should help to sustain a sophisticated heavy engineering capacity in Australia. In this case, the tyranny of distance should actually be working for us, not against us.

Yes but it fucking doesn't, you stupid man. Engineering shops in WA are hitting the wall because mining operations are importing their heavy engineering ready-made rather than have Australians make it: high dollar, high wages, it's been going on for years. If you're going to strap on the fluro gear an the hard hat I wish you'd go to those places and find out why.

The ministers in the next Liberal National government will be responsible reformers.

No, they'll be people like Kevin Andrews, who had no idea, and Sophie Mirabella or Barnaby Joyce, who have no idea.

... we also understand that Australians are an optimistic people who want a government that sees potential rather than just problems.

And you will piss away that potential on dams with aluminium walls up in buffalo country, which is why you mus never become Prime Minister.

By the close of the next coalition government’s first term, I am confident that waste, mismanagement and reckless spending will have been brought under control; more tax cuts will be in prospect; there will be community controlled public schools and hospitals; and just about every fit working age person will be in work, preferably for a wage but if not for the dole.

Based on what?

What economic forecasting is going to claim that the economy will be strong enough to sustain full employment in five years? What does "in prospect" mean, and how is it different from "in your dreams"?

Better broadband will once more be delivered through market competition freeing more money to tackle traffic gridlock.

I've already called bullshit on that, and will do so again.

Instead, as the new parliamentary year dawns ...

Yes? Is this the bit where he gets all positive and gives us a glimpse of the sunlit uplands?

... Fair Work Australia ... Craig Thomson ...

No.

The best way to help the country right now would be to change the government and the best way to change the government would be to give the people their choice at an election. Changing the government, of course, is but a means to an end: to bring out the best in our people and in our nation.

Depends who you mean by "our", really.

In his famous “light on the hill” speech, Ben Chifley said that the purpose of public life ...

Famous what? Fucking who?

It's a good thing I wasn't at the National Pikers' Club for this, because this would have been the point when my skull exploded from bullshit overload, and a whirring sound would have emanated from a simple plot in the Bathurst Cemetery.

Chifley was talking about the purpose of the labour movement, not some airy notion of public life. Abbott diminishes himself by misrepresenting Chifley in this manner, a bum note toward the end of what was supposedly a major speech. Chifley lost because he was deaf to fundamental shifts in the nation's development in his time, too.

But cheer up, it gets worse:

People should be in public life for the right reasons. Mine are to serve our country, to stand up for the things I believe in, to do the right thing by my fellow Australians as best I can, to build a nation that will inspire us more and to lead a government that will disappoint us less.

With ideals like that you might make a useful backbencher, but never a Prime Minister. A "government that will disappoint us less", well hooray for low expectations!

Members of the National Pikers' Club could have saved themselves time and embarrassment by reading this, but instead they lined up to take Abbott at his word:

Lenore Taylor adopted a Grattanesque more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone, declaring that however bad Abbott's speech was it was better than anything Gillard could offer. She made no case for such a claim. Abbott was so vacuous and slippery that he ought to have no standing other than the formal title of his office to criticise Gillard for anything.
Peter Hartcher said it was "a new start". The guy's been in office for two years and there was nothing new in that speech at all. It's not new and it isn't a start. It's bullshit, Abbott is bullshit and so too is Hartcher's hit-and-miss reputation as a commentator.
Phillip Coorey said the Coalition have a plan. There was no plan, there is no evidence that there ever was a plan, more bullshit.
Lanai Vasek tiptoes gingerly around the idea that, you know, it's possible that Abbott could be talking bullshit but other Liberals are talking bullshit too, so at least they're being consistent.

You don't have to go after Abbott in detail like I have here (thanks for making it this far). What you have to do to inform yourself about the alternative government and relate what they say - insofar as they say anything, "aspiration not commitment" - to observable reality. Maybe we could have some journalists unimpressed by puffed-up office-bearers who might do this. Instead, we have supposedly major speeches given by a piker to pikers, who congratulate him on squibbing the major issues of our time and claim this is better than struggling to address them.

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on the National Press Club. Come, Mrs Reinhart, and sack the press gallery space-fillers over whom you will have influence or managerial control. Realise how little would be lost, and how well politics could be reported on from the communities affected by it.

On the Drum

2012-02-01T10:17:00.001+11:00

Here is my latest article for ABC's The Drum ("The beast" refers to the notion that the media is a hungry beast which must be fed constantly, regardless of what it feeds on, as though it is excused from human agency). Here is a list of all articles I've written for them.

Why the Queensland election matters

2012-01-26T22:17:00.001+11:00

The Queensland election is to be held on 24 March, and it should be of no interest to anyone who doesn't live there. It matters because it is a better indication of the 2013 Federal election than any other election to be held in this country before then:

Though NSW sets the country's political norms in may respects, last year's election was a freaky, freaky set of circumstances;
Victoria was and remains a close-run thing, thanks to Baillieu's failure to entrench himself and devastate his opposition;
Tasmania is freaky too, with its huge Greens presence, and its almost total absence of scope for economic growth in the twenty-first century (which is why they haven't made much of the NBN or those Harradine-era telco reforms that preceded it), not to mention its wacky voting system;
Western Australia's government has, in contrast to Victoria, both entrenched itself and devastated its opposition;
The South Australian election will be held after, not before, 2013; and;
NT, ACT and other local government elections: too small, too freaky, who cares?

In 2007 Queensland voters took nine seats away from the Coalition to make one of their own Prime Minister, and when his party dumped him in 2010 they gave the Coalition nine seats back. What will they do next time?

The conventional wisdom is that:

Labor will get hosed;
the LNP will win with a thumping majority; and
the LNP will govern Queensland for a long long time.

We'll see. 89 seats, one House; first to make it to 45 wins. Currently it's 51 Labor, 4 independents, 34 LNP.

Labor has been in a long time, 20 of the past 22 years. Labor people make much of the "new faces" in the Bligh cabinet, but hacks are always overrated because they assume that popular appeal is just some mysterious part of public office. Dumping the rural fuel subsidy and privatising state assets are long-overdue injections of the sort of things the rest of Australia went through in the 1980s, which only emphasises the indictment of Labor's supposed political smarts in getting them to the position they are in now. They won't be thrashed because they are not the rabble that NSW Labor was (and is).

Every new initiative by Labor is an implicit criticism of their own experience ("Why didn't you do this 20 years ago?"). An example of this is the response to the flood that devastated Bundaberg in 1991: a report was commissioned into that flood and it recommended that a levee be built. ~~The mayor,~~ Robert Schwarten, entered state politics on the Labor side and even became Minister for Public Works. Schwarten retires at this election and the levee still hasn't been built. At some point over the next two months someone is going to promise to build that levee, and the voters of Bundaberg will be entitled to believe it when they see it.

The polls have favoured the LNP but in an election campaign like this, so what? Voters are still baulking at Newman, Seeney, Nicholls, Langbroek et al actually running the government. The parallel here is with the first week of the 2010 federal campaign, where Australia realised that a vote for the Coalition means Tony Abbott becomes PM!, leading to Labor getting a second chance. If Newman starts getting rattled or snappy on the campaign trail, or if the boofheads from the bush or the LNP machine override him, Queensland state politics could turn very quickly.

I've had my say on the LNP. Graham Young said this morning on Radio National that the directionless and unelectable nature of the LNP was "cure[d]" by the appointment of Campbell Newman as leader, but in an election contest like this it is wishful thinking. If you put a glacée cherry on top of a cowpat it does not become an ice-cream sundae, and it doesn't matter if you have polls that say otherwise. If Newman promises something to Brisbane voters that rural MPs such as Jeff Seeney do not like, they will simply contradict him. If the reverse happens, Newman will be expected to suck it up in the name of "loyalty". Newman hasn't solved all this simply by turning up. Newman will not fare well over a marathon eight weeks. He's used to being obeyed and not used to being challenged.

This is not to say that Labor are being smart in wearing Newman down over the long run; they too will get tired and prone to mistakes. Newman has take a leaf out of the Tony Abbott playbook by bagging Bligh's unpopular fuel subsidy, but he hasn't promised to reinstate it himself. If Bligh does a Beattie-style mea-culpa and reinstates it, the LNP will have a real fight on its hands.

Ashgrove will not vote for Newman if the rural LNP or the party machine get ahead of themselves. If Newman doesn't win Ashgrove the LNP won't win government, and vice versa. Swinging voters in regional Queensland or even other parts of Brisbane won't vote LNP if Newman is too worried about his on seat, which will mean the people of Ashgrove won't vote for him, which will reinforce etc etc and this is how you get a downward LNP spiral - now, does somebody still want to preach to me about polling and how important it is to react to it?

In NSW and Victoria the Greens pose an existential threat to Labor's inner-city heartland. They pose no such threat in Queensland's unicameral state parliament (though next year, the third-placed Labor Senate candidate will have a run for their money against a Green). The LNP face a direct threat from Katter candidates, particularly those rural areas threatened by CSG or other mining. The idea that the LNP won't enter into a coalition with Katteroids is stupid if the alternative is 24 years out of power.

Federal parliament will sit for much of the Queensland campaign. Of course the MSM are filtering it through their Rudd-Gillard ~~prism~~ ~~frame~~ obsession: what they haven't focused on is that Abbott will do about as much campaigning as Gillard (but without the protection of her bodyguards). Where is the LNP state candidate whose vote will go up as a result of The Situation waddling down their street? Sure, there'll be a swing to LNP and Abbott will claim credit for it. The Canberra press gallery will give him that credit, because they're stupid. The arrogant machine running the LNP will pay even less heed to Abbott in the run-up to the next Federal election than they have. Labor will gain ground in Queensland at the Federal election because the LNP will be deaf to opportunities to grow or hold votes from 2010, wounded from blowing a huge poll lead.

Prediction for next Qld Parliament: Labor 40, independents/other 7, LNP 42. Newman will demand the bigger party gets independent support, especially as most non-Labor seats will be "normally" LNP seats anyway. In a close fight you'd have to back Bligh because a close fight would mean the LNP had squandered it.

If the LNP win such a fight they will chafe against a minority government and go down at the next poll, like the NSW Coalition did 1991-95 (and, indeed, like the Borbidge government did; consider that Borbidge was a more stable leader than Newman has proven so far).

Whoever loses the Premiership, Bligh or Newman, will probably run against and beat "Stinky" Gambaro for the federal seat of Brisbane. The LNP will give it to Newman as compensation for their stupidity, because he can't go back to City Hall with his tail between his legs. They will ignore Abbott's pleas for his frontbencher. Gillard would want Bligh in Cabinet and, after she licks her wounds, she'd leave state politics to others to take on such a challenge.

For more measured, sensible and informed contributions, I recommend Antony Green as well as Mark Bahnisch and the LP crew. Suggestions for other sites are not only welcome but actively sought.

The relics of Manne

2012-01-24T15:39:00.001+11:00

Robert Manne is a professor of politics. His analysis can be very good, but it's been quite some time since I've read a piece of his that showed a genuinely impressive breadth and depth of learning, and which illuminated a commonplace issue in such a way that makes you look at it differently. This recent piece, purportedly written by Manne, is a textbook example of slovenly analysis. Maybe blogs just aren't his thing.

For better or for worse, unlike most commentators, my judgments about Australian politics are generally formed not by conversations with Canberra insiders ...

Neither are mine. Depends who you mean by "most commentators", I suppose.

... but almost solely by reading history books, listening to radio, watching current affairs television and following the newspapers. As it happens, opinion polls are among my most valuable sources of information.

Oh dear.

Only after reading this do you realise this is a warning: Manne really does forsake any pretense to scholarly analysis and gives us a half-arsed summary from the tailings of the mainstream media. What he should be doing is showing us how inadequately the media covers politics, how poorly it acts as a conduit between the people and the representatives - he hinted at such a case with his work last year on The Australian, but here was a chance to make a wider case and he squibbed it.

Imagine Robert Manne and Gerard Henderson both listening attentively to Radio National. Talk about diversity.

Kevin Rudd governed Australia for two and a half years. Here, according to Newspoll, is the remarkable story of how his government fared, as measured in “two-party preferred” terms: 63% to 37% (once); 62% to 38% (once); 61% to 39% (once); 60% to 40% (once); 59% to 41% (five times); 58% to 42% (seven times); 57% to 43% (nine times); 56% to 44% (nine times); 55% to 45% (twelve times); 54% to 46% (four times); 53% to 47% (twice); 52% to 48% (five times); 51% to 49% (once); 50% to 50% (once); 49% to 51% (once).

This should be more embarrassing than it obviously is. A professor of automotive engineering who enthused about a particular car's paint job, ignoring its inadequate engine and bumpy ride, would be laughed out of the profession. A professor of medicine who looked a patient up and down and diagnosed, "Well, you look fine to me", would face disciplinary charges for negligence. Robert Manne has made the sort of assessment of a political situation that would embarrass Malcolm Colless and Dennis Shanahan after a long boozy lunch.

The Rudd government failed because its administrative structures failed. Announcements were made that were not followed up. There was little sense of the cohesive moral core to that government that appeared in Rudd's two articles for The Monthly while he was Opposition Leader; I had rather hoped Manne would have done something like that, compared the promise to the delivery. If Manne was going to do polls, I thought he'd be a bit forensic and go into particular demographics, issues, and points of time; sadly, no.

While it is logically possible that this year the Gillard government will see a revival of its fortunes, at present this seems rather unlikely unless some disaster befalls the Coalition or its leader.

You have got to be kidding.

Manne regards Tony Abbott as the constant, while Gillard is some sort of stumblebum who can't do anything right. Manne lacks not only the good grace but the sense to acknowledge what Gillard's legacy would be if it all ended tomorrow: that she did what Rudd said he was gonna do, with the carbon price and soon the national disability scheme. Just as Ginger Rogers was said to have been every bit the dancer Fred Astaire was, but moving backwards and in high heels, so too Gillard deserves more credit rather than less for manifesting the high ideals of Rudd under the circumstances of the current parliament.

Indeed if the poll results achieved since April 2011 continue for several months into 2012 ...

Never mind what follows that quote, look closely at the assumption: how likely is it? Polls are what the economists call a ~~leading~~ lagging indicator, they react to events. The sillier members of the politico-media complex react to polls as new initiatives, ignoring the events to which they react. It would be a mistake to assume that the Gillard government will achieve bugger-all between now and the end of the financial year. Whether or not they get any credit from those who filter information through to Robert Manne is an open question.

Or it will return to the leader it destroyed. If this indeed turns out to be the way the choice presents itself, my recommendation would be for a return to Rudd.

The first sentence in the above quote is scarcely a sentence at all. It also shows the limits of political hyperbole: if Rudd had indeed been "destroyed", he can't become leader again. Mark Latham, Bill Hayden, James Scullin: there are three ex-leaders of the ALP whose capacity to return to that office can be said to be finished. The modifying clause in the second sentence is a pointless piece of backside-covering. If Manne wants a return to Rudd, why didn't he just say so?

In general, Kevin Rudd led a very successful government, at least until its final months. It is true, as Rudd has admitted, that he then erred very badly in postponing the introduction of the emissions trading scheme.

To return to a medical analogy, you could equally say that my grandmother was in good health until she died from cancer. Rudd's government was weakened by its administrative failure, and by the binary nature by which the once-proud ALP went from swallowing whatever he put up to having none of him. Manne should have sourced the shortcomings of the Rudd Government more widely than Rudd's own account.

Rudd lost office in part because he made some errors; in part because he made some serious mining and media enemies; but perhaps most importantly of all because he had spectacularly failed to win even the minimal loyalty of his Cabinet and caucus colleagues.

Prime Minister is the ultimate job in Australian politics. The failure to be hail-fellow-well-met and keep people on side is a basic requirement of politics. The 25 Prime Ministers before Rudd had all been experienced politicians, who had won and lost their share of fights, and who worked with colleagues who liked or disliked them to varying degrees (and who often faced more committed opponents from their own side than from across the floor of parliament). The idea that Rudd has been treated extraordinarily unfairly is an ahistorical nonsense that ought no be tolerated from a junior reporter, let alone a Professor of Politics.

The enduring popularity of the Rudd government was of course no accident. The single most important reason can be stated simply. Rudd led virtually the only government in the Western world to survive the global financial crisis without falling into recession.

That was the period in which the popularity of the Rudd government began to decline. Australians do not give credit to governments that deliver them from economic peril, nor punish them for leading them into it. Paul Keating became Prime Minister after, not before, "the recession we had to have" and won the election that followed. Following the 1961 "credit crunch" the Coalition spent another decade in office. Rudd promised to open opportunities that were not open under Howard; he had little to show for all his talk.

The overthrow of Rudd must seem to casual foreign observers of Australian politics almost entirely crazy.

Australian politics is not conducted for the benefit of "casual foreign observers".

In my observation, Australians expect their Prime Ministers to have a vision for the future of their country and to move confidently on the international stage. Unlike his successor, Julia Gillard – the least impressive Australian Prime Minister since Billy McMahon – Kevin Rudd had a vision and an international presence.

Ah yes, the old "Prime Ministerial" thing.

Whitlam didn't fail because he lacked vision; he failed because his execution was so poor. Rudd failed for the same reason. Rudd spoke Chinese but the Chinese came to despise him, and bilateral relations are no further advanced today than they were when Alexander Downer was Australia's Foreign Minister. Gillard has matched Rudd's international presence in half the time of his government.

Manne's barb about McMahon is telling. Since Gorton, all Prime Ministers bar two have actively duchessed the press gallery (including Radio National, The Age, and such other media as Manne consumes) in order to get into that office. The two exceptions are McMahon and Gillard. The press gallery, wounded at being shut out of big announcements and perfectly happy with petty ones like Abbott's Daily Stunt, are gunning for Gillard and happy to frame her announcements against how The Situation reacts to them. From this framing comes the apparently uncritical perspective of Professor Manne.

Thus far at least, in addition, partly through a lack of information, the nation’s journalists have failed to provide an even remotely adequate account of what actually took place between the conspirators in the weeks, days and hours before the coup. (By contrast, within months of Howard’s near-removal in September 2007, at the time of APEC, excellent, detailed accounts of the episode were written by Pamela Williams in the Australian Financial Review and Paul Kelly in the Australian.)

Partly, this shows the failure of press gallery journalists, who cannot gather information that isn't spoon-fed to them (the contrast is silly, because "within months" of September 2007 the Howard government was out of office. Gillard, Rudd, Shorten et al are all still in government. When the current government loses you watch them sing like canaries). Again, Manne should be awake up to this.

As Rudd seems to many Australians, especially those who do not belong to the political class, to have been dealt with unfairly, his restoration to the Prime Ministership of Australia will seem to them to be the righting of a wrong.

Many people felt the same way about Whitlam after 11 November 1975. Didn't happen though, did it?

If things go on under Gillard as they are, or if in a few months a new leader from the improbable list of successors is chosen, Labor will almost certainly suffer a defeat only a little less humiliating than the one that brought down New South Wales Labor last year. If however an election were to be held shortly after the restoration of Rudd, there is a reasonable chance that Labor might put in a respectable performance and even an outside chance that a Rudd government might be returned.

Of course if Rudd were to return to the Prime Ministership of Australia things would need to be very different this time. In his last political essays, George Orwell often wrote about how individuals were sometimes required to make what he called a “moral effort” in order to be able to acknowledge uncomfortable or unpleasant facts about themselves. If Rudd regained the Prime Ministership, he and his supporters would have to make the moral effort to understand why his rhetoric so often overreached his performance and why he so comprehensively failed to win the loyalty, trust and affection of his Cabinet and caucus colleagues and also of the senior members of the public service. Searching self-criticism, and in particular with regard to questions touching on character, is tough. Without it, however, if there is a second Rudd Prime Ministership, it will be doomed to failure.

Maybe Manne is writing for the benefit of his "casual foreign observers", because these two paragraphs in particular are so banal they are not worth reading; why he imagined them worth writing is a mystery. There is no evidence that Rudd or any of his acolytes have done the “moral effort”. This is probably the most significant reason why it is so idle for people like Manne to hope for a restoration of a government he clearly did not understand.

Another matter for reflection, if Rudd is restored as Labor leader, is the Party’s relationship to the Greens. Under Rudd relations were very poor. Under Gillard, mainly through force of necessity, they have improved. It seems clear that in the short and the middle term, if the Left in Australia is to have a future and if the populist conservative tide is to be turned, some form of Labor-Greens alliance is vital.

See? An admission of that kind is not so hard. Instead of hurrying on as though it never happened, a bit of reflection may have yielded a different and better piece by Manne.

... the Gillard government, following the High Court’s ruling on the Malaysian solution, implicitly looked to the Coalition for asylum seeker policy support. This was always entirely foolish ...

Indeed it was. A Labor-Green alliance would have worked toward a regional solution, which would require a Foreign Minister who can tear himself away from the beige corridors of Brussels and work regional capitals. That's the type of Foreign Minister this country needs: now compare that ideal against the incumbent and the problem, which undermines Manne's whole thesis, becomes clear.

The current situation, as described earlier, does not have to be described or even understood against the frame of reference set down by the Howard government. The fact that the government attempted a bipartisan solution on a matter of national importance makes their position stronger, while making the Libs look like a nostalgia act deliberately reaching for an extreme position.

The third-last and second-last paragraph of Manne's piece are fair enough as far as high-level summaries go, but he is wrong to attribute such measures as disability insurance and mental health to Rudd. The difference between the guy who talks a big game and the woman who gets things done is a commonplace piece of black humour at the workplace, but Manne is flatly wrong to assume that he policies he describes are not part of Gillard's program. This sets up his final, concluding paragraph to be a false dichotomy, a non-sequitur to what wasn't much of an argument anyway, and then a bit of idle speculation worthy of - well, a "casual foreign observer", rather than a well-regarded professor of political science.

Robert Manne has the depth of knowledge about the political system and how it works to make a far better commentator than he is. He chooses instead to engage in such stale, warmed-over, fifth-hand punditry that you may as well take his media reports directly and forget about his poor perspective. Manne is scarcely better than or even different to Malcolm Farnsworth, who for all his inadequacies is trying his best. If I want Robert Manne's opinion I'll get it direct from Michelle Grattan. There is an adjustment process to be undertaken here where a once-important commentator should be turned down in the mix to join the background noise rather than the eminence due to Manne's clear writing and strong analysis, which is apparently a thing of the past.

Drifting helplessly

2012-01-22T21:08:00.000+11:00

Does anyone know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?

- Gordon Lightfoot The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Laurie Oakes has finally tumbled to the idea that Abbott is unsuitable as Prime Minister, but not because of his sense of humour. Abbott is only propped up as a credible leader by the press gallery because it intensifies pressure on Gillard; his strengths are magnified and lauded and his shortcomings are glossed over. The archives of this blog show intense frustration at the prevalence of this senseless position, but I had underestimated just how much the gallery need a strong opponent for a Prime Minister who doesn't need them. Once you realise there's no real pressure being exerted on Gillard, Abbott isn't much of a stalking horse. Oakes is one of the first to call time on him.

TONY Abbott's quip in his Adelaide FM radio interview on Thursday had the hosts hooting with mirth.

The Opposition Leader, greatly amused by his own wit, joined in the laughter.

But Liberal minders worthy of their salt would have recoiled in horror, recognising it as one of those moments that raise the question: "Is Abbott fit to be prime minister?"

Well Laurie, use your extensive contacts on both sides of politics: were there any? Never mind "would have", how about what these people actually did? Anyone on deep, deep background who wanted to express their revulsion at the very idea any Liberal leader would make such a comment? For a third of a century until 2007, if any leader of the Liberal Party other than John Howard had said such a thing, you can be sure it would have been rebuked by John Howard in the name of Decency, Fair Play and Propriety.

He treated the tragedy [of the Costa Concordia] as a joke. It is hard to think of anything grubbier.

The incident brought to mind previous Abbott lapses of judgment, particularly in the 2007 election campaign.

Oh, there have been plenty since then Laurie, plenty. Every time he's replied to a foreign dignitary addressing Parliament on Australia's place in the world, Abbott sniggers about pink batts and carbon tax - as if he'd do any better. One slip by "Stinky" Gambaro looks like an accident, but two reeks of some sort of sneaky having-it-both-ways tactic by her 'leader', and the Laurie Oakeses of this world should call him on it.

Many of us thought Abbott had grown up since then.

Based on what? Seriously, are those who observe Abbott at close quarters and report on his doings to the rest of us as stupid as this?

Earlier in the week, though, Abbott had given a stunning demonstration of what has made him so successful since taking over the Liberal leadership.

Returning from holidays, he weighed into the debate over Julia Gillard's apparent backing away from her agreement with independent Andrew Wilkie on poker machine reform.

And he went unerringly to the Prime Minister's greatest weakness - her credibility.

"It looks like the Prime Minister is about to doublecross Andrew Wilkie on this, just like she's doublecrossed the Australian people over the carbon tax," he said.

Whack! When it comes to delivering a clear, brutal and effective message, Abbott has no rivals in Australian politics today.

That's also Abbott's central weakness, credibility.

There is no evidence that Abbott gives a damn about pokie addicts: not in the above quote or anywhere else. The clubs play both the ALP and the Liberals off an even break, and with Liberal governments in the two most pokie-infested states there is no way an Abbott government would have done even the little that Gillard is doing. Abbott promised $1 billion for a new hospital in Hobart, and that would have disappeared into a Labor Black Hole too. I'm totally ready to hear Abbott talk about what a double-crosser Gillard or whoever else may be, provided we keep in mind this is Tony Abbott we're talking about here. Whack indeed, Laurie Oakes: that's the sound of one of Abbott's boomerangs returning to his own silly bonce.

Despite the obvious dislike of Gillard that emerges in poll after poll, Australians have serious doubts about handing Abbott the keys to The Lodge ... This matters because, while many issues will drive federal politics this year, the leadership question will be crucial.

At this stage, Gillard's problems in that area are certainly more obvious and more serious than Abbott's.

No, they're about the same. Both positives an negatives for Gillard and Abbott are about the same. Abbott can whack Gillard all he likes but it only reinforces the fact that he has no more idea than she does. He's going to back the pokie palaces over the pokie addicts, and he's going to keep up donations to the car industry.

The voters baulked as one in the first week of the 2010 election campaign at the prospect of Tony Abbott PM, and there has been no movement at all in favour of himself or his party. Opposition Leaders who become PM - Laurie Oakes has seen four come and go in his time - all have popularity ratings ahead of their parties, so that they drag candidates over the line based on their personal appeal. Opposition Leaders who lose elections - Oakes has seen a fair few of them too - have popularity ratings behind their party, so that their party drains its goodwill by propping up a dud.

Gillard's the incumbent, and incumbent PMs have the advantage of being able to say, for a while at least: I don't care if you like me or not, I make the tough decisions and get things done. Tony Abbott makes no tough decisions and his adolescent stunts show that he should not be entrusted with any. The Opposition Leader who hasn't got what it takes to become PM is wasting everybody's time, including his own. Not to mention Laurie Oakes'.

She is not trusted, largely as a result of the broken "no carbon tax" election promise.

She is not trusted by the press gallery because she's the first Prime Minister since McMahon who got the job without duchessing the press gallery first. 24 hours before she became Prime Minister, none of the scoophounds in the press gallery had any inkling such a move as on the cards. All this "Rudd poised to strike" crap since has been an exercise in the press gallery fighting the last war rather than reporting what's going on now (the elevation of Peter Slipper to Speaker showed that 'insider journalism' has its limits - which is bad news for Laurie Oakes, a doyen of 'insider journalism' if ever there was one.

And she is seen as weak, primarily because of the compromises made necessary by a hung parliament.

All politicians make compromises, whether they have the sort of majority Malcolm Fraser had in his first two terms or the sort of majority that Barry O'Farrell has now. The News Ltd line on Gillard is that she is weak, so that's what Laurie Oakes in the Herald-Sun focuses on.

Her new communications director, John McTernan, former adviser to the Blair government in Britain, penned an interesting column for a London newspaper before joining Gillard's office late last year.

"Ease and authority. That is what counts in modern leadership," he wrote.

"Do you look and act like a leader?"

Well, his new charge does not look and act like a leader. She has never appeared at ease as PM, and still exudes little authority after 18 months in the job.

So McTernan has his work cut out.

Toward the ends of their terms, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had 'ease and authority' to burn. At that stage it just looked like they didn't get it. Few people affect a more easy manner than Abbott; and as you can see it takes only a couple of chuckleheads from Adelaide to drain away what little authority he has. Gillard shows all the ease of someone who can't avoid dealing with people whom she knows can never and will never give her a fair hearing, or will filter it through an unworthy opponent.

But some pundits suggest the PM has started the new year looking stronger because of the way she has taken charge of the poker machine issue and moved to get out from under the Wilkie deal.

Certainly this has gone down well in the Labor caucus, where concern had been growing over the electoral damage being caused by the pokies controversy.

And if the caucus is happier, the prospects of a leadership change - in particular, of a Kevin Rudd comeback - will recede.

No, "some pundits" are trying to cover for a leader who has not only gone back on a promise made to one MP, but who has raised and dashed the hopes of vulnerable people. Helping pokie addicts was of a piece with the payrise granted to underpaid casual jobs which tend to attract women in disproportionate numbers, namely the sort of thing you'd expect from a Labor government. Now she's kicked that can down the road, and hopefully she can make a better case for action that helps people once the data from the ACT is in.

Gillard knows she has to lift her game, and if she forgets it McTernan will be there to remind her.

But it is not so clear that Abbott sees the need for improvement.

More to the point Laurie, which is more likely to lift their game? Which is more capable of lifting their game? Abbott is running at full clip whereas Gillard is idling. Gillard's supporters are frustrated while Abbott's are quite satisfied that their guy is doing the best that could be expected of him - even exceeding expectations for many. Why should he lift his game? How could he lift his game? You see the problem here - anyone who ever thought Tony Abbott was more than just another boofhead and serious PM material is, and always has been, kidding themselves.

Anyway.

On a similar theme, and as with most articles for The Australian, this article is like a badly poured beer, you have to go down past the froth-and-bubble until you find the real substance:

... Mr Abbott said he would expect the Navy to turn boats heading for Australia back to Indonesia if that was their point of departure.

"These are Indonesian flagged boats with Indonesian crews from Indonesian ports with people who have been residents in Indonesia," Mr Abbott said.

"There is no place for them in Australia, but there is a place for them in Indonesia."

Abbott kyboshed the Malaysia deal because it isn't a signatory to UN conventions on refugees. Indonesia isn't a signatory either. Ean should have asked him about that instead of just making sure that he transcribed the press release accurately.

Abbott is seriously proposing that the Royal Australian Navy abandon people at sea to die. Nobody joins the Navy in order to do that. Dealing with refugee boats for the sake of chucklehead politicians is the least favourite part of naval personnel jobs; it may explain why the RAN is finding it hard to recruit and keep its people. There are no votes whatsoever in this proposal; nobody who voted Labor in 2010 will vote Liberal on the back of this.

Defence personnel vote Coalition more than any other occupational group. When I saw this (filter out the responses and look to what the Minister actually said; this is how the ABC does news now), I thought that Smith was being crazy-brave in taking on the ADF culture of cover-up, where every incidence of inappropriate behaviour is "rotten-apple" rather than "rotten-barrel" stuff. He could well be onto something. If Labor's Smith wants to take on the dead weights, dead-beats and deadshits atop the ADF, while Abbott wants to use them as a backdrop for partisan politics and abandon people at sea against maritime traditions older than modern Australia, a key Coalition demographic may shift in ways that the pundits may not anticipate.

This is where future Coalition MPs will find it hard to crawl from the impending wreckage that Abbott will bring upon his party. Nobody has condemned or even laughed off this pathetic strutting at the expense of people's lives - not least those of RAN personnel. By then Abbott will "fall overboard" in plenty of time and come up OK, just like the captain of the Costa Concordia.

Tony Abbott is not a strong opponent for Gillard; she has shown how to wear him down, slowly and methodically, as she has throughout her term. Abbott is not a strong opponent because he's not a serious alternative; almost nothing would get better for our country were he Prime Minister instead of Gillard. People want proof to the contrary, and if there were any Gillard would be finished. The story the press gallery should be telling us on Abbott versus Gillard is the one they can't bear to face: the incumbent who disdains the press gallery has it all over the Stunt Man who makes the press gallery feel worthwhile. Whack, Laurie Oakes! Whack, Ean Higgins! Whack, marginal-seat holder "Stinky" Gambaro! Whack, indeed.

On having one's arse handed to one by the internet

2012-01-20T18:19:00.000+11:00

Earlier this week I posted about the killings of Iranian nuclear scientists. Responses to that post on the blog and on Twitter have been instructive to say the least.

It showed that, unlike most bloggers, I can no longer just squeeze out any old brain-fart and expect what has become an established readership to just deal with it. That sort of mentality is clearly good enough for the Leader of the Federal Opposition (and his Giggle Squad in the press gallery) but, having flailed professional journalists for not doing the background work necessary on such an issue I am defenceless to the usual barbs of "don't know what you're talking about".

My parents were great admirers of Plucky Little Israel and I absorbed that. When I first became interested in politics I just assumed that the political problem of Israel and its neighbours was an intractable one, but then I thought the same about communism. When Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, and after the Oslo Accords when Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat almost all of what he wanted for a Palestinian state only to have it rejected, I gave up on following Israel's troubles with Palestine and other countries in the region. It represented another failure for moderate, transactional politics, which I regarded then (and now) as the harbinger of dark times politically. I hadn't really paid much attention to the politics of the region since - unless you count the so-called "Arab Spring", which doesn't really relate to Israel anyway.

This doesn't mean I'm now knee-jerk anti-Israel, far from it. Over at the other post in the comments section I've attempted to give some nuance to my views and how they've changed. I'm not sure that the debacle in Iraq means that all cries of "Wolf!" (or, to use the old libertarian scenario, the cry of "Fire!" in a theatre) are to be derided and dismissed. I'm still biased against the Iranian regime, but I still don't have a cogent response to the bush-lawyers of "international law". You can see I have a way to go.

Say what you will about my appalling ignorance of Middle Eastern politics, and the degree to which I've been sucked into facile propaganda, etc, etc. When you're done with piling on, dare to gainsay the following statement: my knowledge of Middle Eastern politics today is well above that of the average member of the Australian Parliament, including some who've copped a junket there.

Now I'm doing a lot of reading about Israel and its place in the Middle East. As with any other issue I can say that there's a lot of good stuff and a great deal of crap out there. I'm not out to reinforce any biases because that hasn't done me much good. Doubt that I'll be flying too many more kites as I have with this issue, and I will stick to the core business of Politically Homeless: the inadequacy of the conservative response to a time of great change, and the apparent death-wish of the Australian media in refusing to address the changes to its own environment and the stuff which they presume report to us.

Update: Yes, I have seen this.

That car won't start

2012-01-16T19:07:00.000+11:00

In this article, Misha Schubert takes Brian Loughnane on face value. She dutifully reports what he says and concludes that he's defining the Gillard Government. Brian Loughnane doesn't control the Gillard Government. Brian Loughnane is Director of the Liberal Party of Australia. That's the organisation over which he has some degree of control, and he's exerting that control to tell its members to shut up.

Consider Loughnane's audience: Young Liberals, full of energy and ideas amongst other things. Bri-Bri thinks he's helping them by showing them how modern politics works, and it works in the way that people like Bri-Bri like it to work. He and Peta Credlin*, Abbott's chief of staff, started out as junior staffers who weren't responsible for making policy decisions, but who took decisions that had been made and foisted them onto journalists and minor-party Senators. Along the way they picked up no experience whatsoever in analysing the strengths and weaknesses of policy options from the point of view of those affected by the policy (as opposed to "how it plays" in the media, or with particular interest groups), or projected into the future beyond the following election. Now they are in positions where they can and do stymie the process by which policy is developed, insisting that any and all such activity be suborned to a) media and interest groups and b) their predilections above all. They must be seen to "win", and if a good idea must die for the sake of that then it's a sacrifice the Liberal Party must - and does - make.

Over the past week we have seen a much-needed debate on donations to the vehicle industry (and because there is no link to performance by the industry, and no penalties for sixty years of underperformance, let us call them for what they are: donations). Joe Hockey is against further donations; Sophie Mirabella, Eric Abetz and Barnaby Joyce are for more donations, as is the Gillard government.

This is a bizarre situation: usually Abetz and Mirabella bristle at any attempt at bipartisanship. These are people who have spent their political careers emphasising that the Liberals should be a choice and not an echo of Labor. Whenever there is bipartisanship they shake their heads and claim they don't know what the Liberal Party stands for. If you think that pink batts or school halls are salient examples of government waste, wait until you see the sheer epic scale of nation-building opportunities this country has pissed away after years and years of donations to the shareholders of Detroit and Tokyo.

As I've said earlier there might be two seats up for grabs if you don't think about it too much, and I can understand Mirabella et al focusing on that; but everybody in either Corangamite or Wakefield who is really concerned for Australian vehicle manufacturing is going to vote Labor, because they believe in vehicle industry donations wholeheartedly. The right pride themselves on being hard-hearted realists when it comes to winning votes, but on this issue they are kidding themselves.

Peta and Bri-Bri don't care what the policy is, as long as there is one - not several, one - and that all the Coalition gets 100% behind it, whatever it might be. They don't understand the process of policy development and they certainly don't want any of your broad-based input that theoretically comes with democracy, thank you very much. Bri-Bri thinks he's tough and clever by screwing down the lid on a simmering pot.

Geoff Kitney in The Australian Financial Review gave important historical context to the debate over public support for the Australian car industry in this article (you'll need to be a subscriber). He points out how the Fraser government in 1981 proposed a round of donations and the lone voice in Cabinet against them was the then Treasurer, John Howard. The then-nascent economic rationalist MPs in the Liberal Party hailed Howard and would form the core of his support during the 1980s, until they all gave up in about 1990 and were not replaced.

Kitney says that Abbott might follow in Howard's footsteps, but he has the analogy wrong. Abbott is leader of the Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party, a position held in 1981 not by Howard but Malcolm Fraser. Howard was Treasurer then; today the Liberal equivalent is Shadow Treasurer is Joe Hockey. Hockey is arguing against car industry donations in 2012, just as Howard did in 1981 (and as he never did when Prime Minister).

Economists like to mock Hockey for his apparent lack of knowledge of their profession, but he's no worse than any other Shadow Treasurer (Swan included, and yes Keating for the month or so he held that job) in that regard. Where Hockey is good value is in the old-fashioned political skill of building a consensus, and sticking it to old-timers who think they can fudge away reforms whose time has come. In the late 1990s Hockey's work on corporate law reform got up the nose of the then Chairman of AMP, Ian Burgess, who went over Hockey's head direct to Howard. When Howard stood by his minister Burgess got the shock of his life and shuffled into retirement, leaving AMP far better off for his absence.

Hockey is right on vehicle industry donations, and chances are when it comes to Liberal decision-making forums he'll have done his homework and be armed with a strong case against an industry that's only holding this country back. He'd be an iconoclastic economic reformer if he got the chance; he has already achieved more in politics than Mirabella and Abetz have or will. I would have expected the IPA to come out as strongly for Hockey as they did for race-baiter Andrew Bolt; nothing so far, nor has the CIS (whose offices are in Hockey's electorate) rallied to his side.

There is absolutely no chance at all that the Coalition will come out against donations to the car industry. Abbott always dances with those who brung him, and the right want vehicle industry donations to continue. If you read Battlelines, and if you see Abbott's performance before he became leader, you'll see him sighing and eye-rolling at every instance of bipartisanship that supposedly played into Rudd's hands. He brought down Turnbull over the bipartisanship over the ETS; the passage on the carbon price in the very teeth of his most determined opposition shows the limits of his "choice not echo" position.

Now that he has to appear less confrontational to round out his image, it will be hilarious watching him try to justify falling into line behind Labor while at the same time burning his Shadow Treasurer's attempts to "cut the waste". You can expect those half-hearted statements by Judith Sloan, Hugh Morgan et al in favour of increasing unemployment benefits to vanish overnight if the right keep on insisting Hockey cut the budget while going into bat for their pet programs.

Kitney further disgraced himself in his second article in the weekend's AFR with this idle and defenceless throwaway:

... [in 2012] Abbott can be expected to prosper.

He'll get away with murder if the more obtuse members of the press gallery continue to give him a free pass, and that's most of them. Kitney runs the risk of becoming a nostalgia act like Tony Wright if he doesn't improve in relating the landscape before him to the way things were.

After the latter part of last year's parliamentary sittings, with vast amounts of legislation passed and Abbott reduced to a frothing mess (negating Bri-Bri's insistence that the Gillard Government doesn't have a record to run on). It could go either way: either they will take Abbott seriously and call him to account for inconsistencies and evasions, or they will indulge him as he hangs his elbow out of a Holden ute and rhapsodises about how he loved to watch Brocko beat Dick Moffatt on The Mountain.

If the MSM do the latter Peta and Bri-Bri will consider their job done, and take no more interest in all that palaver about budget expenditure than most of us do - just so long as it doesn't blow up, so long as there is no public controversy over the expenditure of billions of dollars of public money. You hear that, Young Liberals? As long as everyone just shuts up, everything will be fine.

* The fact that Credlin and Loughnane are married is neither here nor there. A lot of people obsess over it but I'm not going there. The fact that they act as a team to stamp out what they don't understand and can't control, regardless of its merits, is what gets me. It can't last and within two years I expect both to be deposed.

On the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists

2012-01-14T11:18:00.000+11:00

Recently I let out a stray tweet on the targeted killing of Iranian nuclear scientists, and I was challenged on Twitter as to why I took the approach that I did:

I'm not sure it's my job to develop or propound any sort of "doctrine", but here's what I think about the targeted killing of Iranian nuclear scientists.

First, the assumptions I operate under, in no particular order:

I think that the Israeli government, or organisations affiliated closely to it, is responsible for those killings. This is not based on any sort of inside knowledge but a crude application of the notion of cui bono? - who stands to benefit?
I doubt the Iranian government is doing this to keep other nuclear scientists on their toes, or to deal with any dissent by these particular scientists in a more swift and brutal manner than the misgivings of J. Robert Oppenheimer were dealt with by the US Congress in the 1950s.
Further to 1 above: I don't believe that Iranian dissident groups or your bog-standard criminals have the organisational skill to pull off events like these. Nor do the US have sufficient intelligence on the ground in Iran to play much of a role - even after having tens of thousands of their troops stationed to the west and northeast of Iran, in Iraq and Afghanistan respectively.
I assume that those scientists identified as having been killed really are dead, and these reports aren't some sort of sympathy-seeking scam on the part of the Iranian government like the supposed death of baby Hana Gaddafi.
The Iranian government is developing nuclear weapons and its protestations to the contrary are bullshit.
The Iranian government has a firm and oft-stated policy of wiping the State of Israel off the face of the earth.
The State of Israel has a right to exist, which means that it has the right to head off threats like the Iranian nuclear program, which is a real and major threat to the existence of Israel.

There are international measures for regulating the development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons, including through the IAEA. I'm sure that Israel is working within those structures to monitor Iran's nuclear program:

I'm equally sure that Israel's ability to do this is limited by the lack of good faith it has shown in dealing with Palestine, which I regard as a real but separate issue.
Israel may fairly be accused of subverting multilateral measures by these targeted killings, but so are the Iranians for lying about their program; and for developing nuclear weapons with aggressive intent rather than just to participate in "the nuclear club". Faults on both sides, no point hammering one and giving the other a free pass.
Israel does not have to wait until a nuclear weapon detonates on its territory, or passes into it, or even is completed, given the fact that these are expressly and explicitly to be used against Israel.

By targeting Iranian nuclear scientists, Israel is forestalling the development of a real and major threat to its existence.

Imagine that the Los Alamos Atomic Laboratory had been destroyed, or that individuals associated with it (e.g. Oppenheimer or Edward Teller) had been targeted for killing by the Axis powers or forces allied to them before the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Such action would have been legitimate acts of war.

Would I be upset if Australian scientists got picked off by bombs? Yes, I would (and not just because Sydney traffic is bad enough as it is). For all the criticisms that may be made of Australian foreign policy, I don't believe that the Australian government is engaged in wiping another country off the face of the earth.

Iranian nuclear scientists are 'combatants'. Yes, they are. Given the regular official harangues against Israel - not dissimilar to those against Iraq before and during the conflict of the 1980s - Iranians who participate in their nuclear program know full well that they are threatening Israel and participating in a malevolent foreign policy. The development of a nuclear program by an explicitly and demonstrably aggressive Iran is the same sort of belligerent act as as the amassing of troops, beating ploughshares back into swords, and other acts indicating that a state is initiating war. Again, Israel is not obliged to place its exclusive trust in international agreements or to be bereft of options should those agreements fail to protect it from destruction.

Iran has been practicing terrorism against Israel, with its rhetorical threats backed up with their support for militant Palestinian elements. Targeting Iranian nuclear scientists has the same terrorist effect. Iran can still exist without its nuclear program, but Iran's threats against Israel are threats to the whole nation, its whole people. I think the targeted killings have been clever and resourceful against heavily protected nuclear scientists who are working to obliterate an entire people.

By contrast, the Iranian government has been boorish and inept in hoping that wiping Israel off the map is some sort of rallying cry for a failed regime. Its treatment of Iranian dissidents does not give the Iranian government, nor anyone else, any grounds to complain about the targeted killings of nuclear scientists.

If the Iranian government caught any agent in the act of preparing or placing those bombs, it would be hard to call for or expect proper due process in dealing with such a person.

Israel's behaviour is far from perfect but in seeking to forestall Iranian nuclear weapons my sympathies are with them, and I believe that sympathies for Iran on this matter (beyond a simple and true human empathy for the grieving families of the individuals killed) are misplaced.

Decisions from the Coalition

2012-01-13T17:17:00.000+11:00

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don’t much care where -" said Alice.

"Then it doesn’t matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"- so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you’re sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

- Lewis Carroll Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The Federal Coalition starts 2012 on the horns of a number of policy dilemmas. In each of these there are good reasons for going one way or another, but in each of these decisions will have to be made and defended in such a way that makes them look like a credible alternative government. The Coalition is ill-equipped to make those decisions, and to stand by them, which will mean this year won't be one on which they'll look back with unalloyed fondness. There might be vicarious triumphs in the states, but federally this is a year where decisions get tougher the more they are delayed.

These decisions will mean that those hoping the Coalition would go another way will be disappointed. With a consistent framework to operate by and a tough hide, you can get past this disappointment and, if the disappointed are supporters, mumble vague promises of compensation at some later stage. Howard did this all the time and so does every successful political leader. Abbott, however, will put his seemingly random and lightweight decisions out there in the hope that people are impressed with:

The sheer damn firmness to which he holds to his decisions, and the boldness with which he ascribes his decisions;
The sneering with which he puts down alternatives not chosen - not so cutting that the opposition withers and dies, nor witty enough to leaven the disappointment;
The sheer athleticism with which he backflips and pikes out of decisions which turn out later to hurt him; and
The sincerity-veneer that he applies to foreseeable questions that, well, just because he changed his mind on [this] doesn't mean he'll do so on [that].

First, there's this dog's breakfast written up as a meaty offering. Australia needs both farms and coal seam gas. Australia needs foreign investment, in agriculture as well as other parts of the economy. But for me the real tragedy was this:

In an exclusive interview with the Herald, Mr Hockey identified the government's $36 billion national broadband network as the Coalition's big political target this year.

Mr Hockey also unveiled the Coalition's three-point economic plan for the year and a "strong, positive agenda", following a year in which the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, was criticised for being too negative.

Only an experienced press gallery journo could write those two paragraphs and fail to realise that the hopes for the latter were pretty much cancelled out by the reality of the former.

"I mean, it's multiples of anything that's ever been off-budget … it detracts from productivity," he said.

Much of World War II and the Snowy Mountains Scheme, to name two, were off-budget. The rollout of the national copper-wire telephone network in the 1950s failed to account for data transfer or for rental income from a Singaporean-owned competitor. Lift your eyes above the budget and speak for the nation!

In terms of 'detracting from productivity', the business case for NBN can be made simply by getting the club foot of Telstra off the nation's throat. All those retailers who bellyache about the internet (while, like Harvey Norman, selling people the means to get onto the internet and avoid lazy and bloated retailers like Harvey Norman) will be kicked into touch by the NBN. Fewer rentseekers - just imagine that, you can feel the surge in productivity already.

Mr Hockey vowed to increase accountability of the government's off-budget initiatives, including the broadband network, the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the planned National Dental Scheme.

That's the way to go positive: skimp on the halt, the lame, the snaggle-toothed, and create FUD about policies to rob them even of hope.

Workplace relations was the subject of an internal Liberal Party brawl in September when the former workplace relations minister Peter Reith urged Mr Abbott to make it a front-and-centre issue.

Mr Abbott ignored the call and ruled out a return to statutory individual contracts.

Well, that's that. Obviously the issue of how millions of Australians work and what they get in return is now settled for all time. Joe Hockey is a former workplace relations minister; why does nobody ask him about WorkChoices and future options for regulating workplaces to ensure growing productivity?

There is a case to be made for a light touch IR system, like that of the Fraser Government. The Conciliation & Arbitration Commission and all that it represented reached its peak under Fraser. Having smashed the ALP at the ballot box and in Parliament, the softly-softly approach to what used to be known as industrial relations gave the President of the ACTU, Bob Hawke, a rails run as the Fraser Government's most potent political threat.

On the other hand, there's also a case to regulate the workplace relations system in a different way to the way it's regulated now. The clearer they are about that different way, the less vulnerable the Coalition will be to spectres of WorkChoices, or the one-two punch from the broader labour movement (such as it is).

Of course, fearless journalist Jacqueline Maley went in hard, didn't she? No, she changed the topic:

Mr Hockey revealed a review of foreign investment guidelines would be part of the Coalition's economic policy agenda.

Look over there! If there isn't a Walkley in that, I don't know what is (seriously, I don't).

A Senate inquiry chaired by the Liberal senator Bill Heffernan is also looking into the issue.

And isn't that the hallmark of political effectiveness. The Father of Agriculture in Northern Australia himself. The man who erased Michael Kirby from history. All piss and wind. Yes indeedy, if you're concerned about foreign investment in Australian agriculture, you can wait for the Heffernan Report into the issue or you can help yourself to a nice deep draught of fuck-all ahead of time and avoid the wait.

The real worry for the Coalition, though, is this:

Mr Hockey said "some" of the Coalition's policies would be submitted to the Parliamentary Budget Office for costing.

During the 2010 election campaign, the opposition refused to have its policies costed by Treasury, opting instead to have them assessed by a West Australian accountancy firm, WHK Horwath.

The accountants who completed the costings have since been found to have breached professional standards and were fined for misrepresenting the costings as an audit.

That's right, accounting/consulting firms: if the Federal Opposition approach you, run for the sake of your professional reputations. They will screw you and leave you in the dirt: don't work for these people. George Megalogenis was right when he said:

For those on the Coalition side with longer memories, the antagonism echoes the Whitlam era hostility towards Treasury in the 70s.

The Coalition should get over itself and learn to respect the economists.

The lesson of the Whitlam government is that whenever one side sees the bureaucracy as the enemy, it knows less about governing that it realises.

Quite so: you aren't ready for Treasury, you aren't ready for government. When Treasury does fall short (as it did over the mining tax) it made the mistake of getting ahead of the politicians rather than supporting them in making decisions; this doesn't mean that the best Treasury is one that's willing to play Horwath-style patsy to The Situation. The Coalition aren't ready for government until they can strike that balance between leading Treasury and working with it.

Then there's another longterm dilemma of governing this country, the car industry. There are lots of good arguments for an Australian vehicle manufacturing industry, but if you make them you're missing a big opportunity to cut expenditure. You can't really complain that Australia isn't embracing an innovative future while you're siphoning public funds to donate to US shareholders.

Yes, people are buying fewer Commodores and Falcons, but apparently there is this wonderful export industry for such vehicles which, though apparently luicrative, still requires handouts. I quite like this elegant proposal from Nicholas Gruen seeking to create a niche where there is currently only a rut. Not only would the Coalition would reject it out of hand, there is no evidence that it even entered their minds:

But the Coalition’s acting industry spokesman, Eric Abetz, said Australians “don’t mind some support from government”.

Great! Let's remember that the next time Eric whinges about Centrelink recipients, or Fair Work Australia cracking down on free market champions like Qantas.

And the man helping review the federal Coalition’s industry policy in the environment of a resources-driven high dollar, frontbencher Ian Macfarlane, also said Australia needed to retain a sophisticated manufacturing capability. But he would not be drawn on the issue of subsidies.

Let's leave aside the fact that this is a poor article. The only evidence of a "Lib split" on the issue are Liberals with the bulk (if not the whole) of their political careers behind them. Macfarlane and Abetz might think they're clever by holding an inquiry with the end result predetermined, but what's clever for them is not necessarily clever for the country, or indeed for the Liberal Party.

The Australian car industry is mostly locked up in the sort of electorates where Labor wins overwhelmingly and the Greens come second. The exceptions are two Federal electorates, Corangamite (Vic, on the fringes of Geelong) and Wakefield (SA, including Gawler and Elizabeth): both marginal Labor-held seats at the last two elections, eminently winnable by a resurgent Liberal Party.

There has been a great deal made of the "Howard battlers", blue-collar workers who vote Liberal rather than Labor. These tend to be people who are self-employed or who recognise that their employment is contingent on the business cycle generally and their bosses' ability to reel in business in particular. Those who cling to cradle-to-grave jobs from big corporates or government still vote Labor. There is no advantage for the Coalition in maintaining thousands of Labor voters in marginal electorates.

Then, there's the fact that the most powerful advocates for the Australian car industry are two unions who, as Crikey recently observed, so lack confidence in their own members that they don't rate them as an investment. Two of Labor's greatest mainstays: why are they even a consideration for the Coalition? This is the press release I'm waiting to see:

The Leader of the Opposition today announced that the Australian car industry no longer requires subsidies from public funds and will rely upon income from customers from hereon in, just like every other business does.

"And if Paul Howes and Dave Oliver don't like it, they can go and fuck themselves", he added.

There will be difficult decisions required for all of these issues, and it's part of getting ready for government that you can manage interest groups. There is a line between steadfastness of purpose and obstinacy, and Abbott is on the wrong side of this because he has no discernible principles on economics:

He's trying to play an unconvincing double game on workplace relations.
He seems to think a farmers-vs-miners stoush can simply be settled in favour of farmers (well, until the next time Gina rattles her jewelry).
He really thinks that the rolling program of cash for cars is just something Australian politicians have to keep doing and put up with, like similar flare-ups over their own pay from time to time.

There are difficult decisions to be made over the coming year, the quality of which put in doubt to related questions that some might like to think are already settled: do the Coalition understand the issues facing this country, and can they govern Australia?

Oh say, can you see?

2012-01-03T21:42:00.000+11:00

On the first ~~Saturday~~ Tuesday in November this year, the voters of the United States will elect a President and a Congress. Many non-Americans, such as myself, will be following the race avidly. In times of old we would turn to the Australian media for their summaries of the US race: no more, but still the mainstream media insist on running this absurd nostalgia act.

I've been following US campaigns online since 1996. I loved Michael Lewis' coverage of the minor Republican candidates for The New Republic (later published in the book Losers, highly recommended), and found it was best to be fairly omnivorous politically in terms of the US spectrum. It was best to read a well-written article with which you disagreed, challenging your position and increasing your knowledge, than a bland reinforcement of your prejudices.

By the following election I could read Australian coverage of the US elections with a jaundiced eye. The inevitable rise of Bush and Gore to the candidacies of their respective parties as reported by the Australian media was pretty much a distillation of coverage from The New York Times or The Washington Post, with a bit of CNN thrown in. At that time, there was very little that a fully-equipped Washington correspondent from an Australian media outlet could contribute to the understanding of Australians that couldn't have been done at a fraction of the cost by someone not very different to myself.

By 2008 the model of an Aussie reporter digesting a vast and unruly set of understandings of American politics in a Presidential election year, and summarising it for Australians, was pretty much dead. The Washington correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald was Anne Davies. Before that she had disgraced herself as the last NSW press gallery journalist who actually believed a single damn thing that the NSW ALP government actually said, and whose idea of investigative journalism was to ask a minister's office if everything they said in their press releases was in fact true.

As Washington correspondent, Davies did a quick summary of East Coast US newspapers and concluded that Hillary Clinton was on track to inevitably becoming Democrat candidate and President. Any sort of wider reading from this distance showed that Barack Obama was a serious rival early in that year, and it was fascinating to watch US commentators change their minds and at least take Obama seriously, Davies held the line; the fix was in, the Democrat establishment would have Clinton and that was that, no further correspondence would be entered into. When Obama put out a well-considered position on US foreign policy toward the Asia-Pacific, Davies ignored it and did not start any sort of conversation about what it might mean (meaning that President Obama's speech in Canberra late last year came as more of a surprise than it should have). In other words, Davies failed at her central role at explaining how US politics affects Australia. She wasn't the only failed Australian Washington correspondent by any means, but she's a prime example.

In a dysfunctional organisation, failures are not expelled or learned from but promoted: Davies is now head of investigations at Fairfax.

Australian media organisations do not need correspondents in Washington (or London for that matter). Foreign correspondents should be limited to places with little coverage from other media: Port Moresby and Kabul come to mind as places where Australia's interest is strong but media content would be scant were it not for Australian media outlets sending correspondents there. Washington correspondents are an impediment to Australians' understanding of what is going on in US politics. Australian mainstream media organisations should resist the urge to offer beef-witted summaries of information freely available online: to not do so would be a waste.

The MSM got off to a bad start with this poor offering from Tom Switzer, which is always more about himself than conveying any understanding of large and complex issues. Yes, Obama is doing it tough: but he only has to defeat the opposition in front of him. How does Switzer summarise a range of personalities and positions in the Republican Party, from Gingrich to Bachman to Paul to Santorum? He was a former intern at the conservative Heritage Foundation, you'd think he'd be the guy to tell us about the anti-Obama field, right?

They're uncharismatic, uninspiring, gaffe-prone, scandal-plagued, serial flip-floppers: all these barbs have been hurled at a plethora of unorthodox candidates that reminds one Washington Post columnist of "that famous bar scene in Star Wars".

See how Switzer defines them: victims of hurled barbs.

It is not strange or even unfortunate that politicians are criticised. Conservatives believe that if only any and all criticism of conservatives evaporated, we would instantly attain some sort of conservative nirvana. I have been critical of this attitude in the past and I remain so: there is no place for conservatives to be stunned and appalled that their candidates might attract criticism, and that any and all such criticism is unfair, and that conservatives deserve sympathy for such cruel and unusual treatment.

To look at each of those candidates, to read and hear their words in context, is to see a real constituency being represented. Switzer could do that, but he's patronising us instead by being blithe. As you'd expect from an ivory-tower academic, he's missed an important practicality of politics: in an election you only have to beat the candidate in front of you.

Switzer is right that Obama is facing the worst unemployment and other indicators than any President since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Now look at the turkeys that the Republicans put up against FDR: I mean, "the barefoot boy from Wall Street"? Any one of those guys would be a titan in the 2012 race.

([Mitt Romney] once rebutted accusations of supporting polygamy by pointing out that he's the only GOP candidate to have had just one wife.)

There's more to it than that. American Conservatives bang on about how they support traditional families, and scorn family configurations other than the nuclear family - then they are exposed in their private lives as acting against what they espouse as traditional family values, which makes you wonder whether there is any link between what they say and what they do.

Romney's problem is that the Tea Party conservatives won't stomach him.

It's the Tea Party's problem too. The Republican Right has held out for a generation for candidates who'll do whatever they want. The Tea Party are too far to the right and Romney should tell them to go boil their heads: he'd be a mighty leader if he did that. Tom should stop fretting about what non-Massachusetts people think about their healthcare and start asking Massachusetts people what they think; and considering whether non-Massachusetts people might be better off with that, with whatever Obama has set up, or with the status quo. That would be proper analysis: blithe whimpering about hurled barbs - in politics! - isn't good enough.

... although the twice-divorced Gingrich could redeem himself in primaries later this month in South Carolina and Florida where he remains popular.

Hardly. Virginia is where Gingrich lives, and it has ~~more~~ 50 crucial delegates ~~than South Carolina and Florida put together~~. If I worked ~~for~~ at the United States Studies Centre, I'd know that.

His low-tax and civil libertarian views, combined with his anti-war activism, may resonate with a solid group of young limited-government advocates in Iowa. But it will spook the GOP faithful with the prospect of turning the party over to fringe elements.

Paul can be safely ruled out of winning the nomination, though there is always a risk he may run as a third-party candidate in the election. Any independent candidacy, of course, will likely help Obama by sucking away votes from Republicans.

Like Ralph Nader did to Gore in 2000: you say this like it's a bad thing, Tom. Are "the GOP faithful" who resile from Paul the same people as "the GOP establishment" who are apparently backing Romney?

That could change, as it so often does, during a long election year. Trial by fire, as Obama himself remembers from his 2008 duel with Hillary Clinton, can make a candidate stronger.

Here Switzer is, as George Orwell said, attempting to give an air of certainty to pure wind. Long campaigns more often weed out weak and unsuitable candidates more than they burnish champions (read Michael Lewis' Losers, go on). The last man standing is often unappealing to the voters, however much they may be embraced by their own parties, as Johns Kerry and McCain found out in recent contests.

C'mon Tom, do some analysis.

We've all heard the 1992 campaign mantra, "It's the economy, stupid." That is especially true in 2012. The economy is very weak and, given Europe's fiscal crisis, it's unlikely to experience a robust recovery by November.

Yes, and it's even less likely that any Republican will credibly establish that they can do a better job that Obama is doing. It puts the lie to what Switzer would have liked to have been his piece's final line:

... it appears that the President's prospects are perilous.

You wish. The final paragraph is so weak it doesn't bear examination. Obama has to be defeated by a better candidate and there isn't one. If there was, you'd have made a better case than you did.

You can expect that the mainstream media in Australia will do more of this, trot out so-called experts who do stale summaries of events that are too big and complex for them to understand or convey. I can understand why Australian media feel the need to cover the twists and turns of the US election, but hopefully they can do a much better job than they have. Early signs are that the MSM will determinedly churn out must-ignore content and therefore cement their own irrelevance. It shouldn't be too late for them, but it probably is.

The information you need

2012-01-02T14:45:00.001+11:00

The mainstream media isn't giving us the information we need. It is giving us what they think is good enough for people like us, gathered by people that mainstream media organisations regard as competent; but this is not the same thing at all.

One of the best analysts of public affairs in the Australian media is George Megalogenis. We all have our blind spots, and Megalogenis' is the role that the media plays in public life, as seen in his Quarterly Essay and also in this more recent article:

ONLY one organisation in Australia is viewed, statistically speaking, as totally untrustworthy: the media. The scoop in the 2010 Australian Election Survey, published this week, wasn't so much that the messenger finished last but that the gap between us and the political institutions we are supposed to hold to account was so wide.

There are two major errors in that paragraph, and they bode ill for the rest of the article:

No idea why it's a "scoop", George; this is a commonplace that has been known for some time, and much commented upon in this blog and other outlets. When the weather report announces that it's a lovely day here in Sydney, or that Australia won the Boxing Day cricket Test against India, this is not a "scoop"; and
The gap between the mainstream media (assuming that's who Megalogenis means by "us") and the political institutions isn't wide at all. It's so close as to be symbiotic. The gap is the one between those who are supposed to be explaining what's going on and those who are to be explained to: media consumers, taxpayers, voters, citizens generally. People who in their different roles are affected by decisions of government but who are too busy to keep close tabs on what's going on (and who, in bygone days, had no means of doing so) relied on the media to find out what was going on. What is reported is irrelevant (monkey-house antics at Question Time, Abbott playing at jobs other than the one he's paid to do, gaffes) and what is relevant isn't reported (don't get me started).

After such a poor start, surely Megalogenis picks it up a bit? No, he quibbles with definitions:

The term "the press", like its twin in generalisation "the media", can mean anything. Obviously, the fence-sitting professionals at The Australian, the ABC, Fairfax and elsewhere should not have to answer for the celebrity hecklers on commercial television and radio. But we all should, nonetheless, take the public rebuke on the chin. (And, perhaps, be grateful that the question wasn't asked after Hackgate in Britain, because the proportion of voters who had confidence in the press here might have fallen to single digits.)

fence-sitting professionals at The Australian ???

Would you regard Laurie Oakes (News & Current Affairs, Channel 9) as part of the press/media? If so, why not Tracy Grimshaw (News & Current Affairs, Channel 9)? Regardless of what he may say, whenever Derryn Hinch (a celebrity heckler on commercial television and radio if ever there was one, and at the same time a journalist) is penalised for breaching a court order, where is the journalist who does not rally to his cause? Is Andrew Bolt, who is paid by the same employer to do a job not very different to what Megalogenis does, part of his press/media? In the following three paragraphs Megalogenis is surprisingly concise as to what constitutes the press/media/whatever; criticism can be quibbled away but job losses focus the mind.

His point about "the banality of the doorstop" is well made:

The doorstop is the fax machine of political communication. We know it is out of date, but no one has the guts to throw it out.

It's part of a wider problem, one that Megalogenis can't bear to confront:

The media's error at the last election campaign is easy to acknowledge. Australia almost had a change of government without serious scrutiny of the coalition's uncosted policies.

The error is perpetuated every time the opposition gets "equal time" to accuse the government of financial irresponsibility, without being called on it (but more on that later). It's a structural problem with the way that the Australian media covers politics: the idea that if you have a quote you have a story, regardless of whether the speaker has any credibility or even how a statement may fit with other factors in the subject-matter of their statement. You can bet that the next election will be covered in the same banal and facile way as the last one.

... the government we wound up with had very few policies of its own to begin with ...

It had very many policies that were mishandled by the immediate past Prime Minister, and these policies should not have been regarded as "yesterday's news" but as issues that affect the same Australians that consume media offerings and are subject to laws etc.

So the bullet dodged of an unready coalition was followed by the let-down of a minority Labor government that had lost its beliefs.

No, this was a government that had to compromise to stay in office. It is possible to compromise without losing core beliefs; the Coalition was unwilling to compromise, and as a result remains out of office.

In any fair analysis, the press contributed to the systems failure of 2010.

Note that this admission appears two-thirds of the way down the article. It is immediately followed by an equivocation:

Nevertheless, the media can't fix the problem of its subject matter.

Depends what you regard as the subject matter of reporting on the activities of government, really. The "political institutions we are supposed to hold to account" ought not be limited to the announcements and antics of parliamentarians. The "fence-sitting professionals at The Australian, the ABC, Fairfax and elsewhere" find it convenient to limit their coverage of government and governance to what's accessible to the press gallery, and they present this to us as the be-all-and-end-all of what politics is.

It is too much to ask of the media to ignore the mutually reinforcing character flaws of the two leaders.

It is not too much to ask to shift it from front and centre to minor features of much, much wider issues.

Gillard and Abbott are a mix of stubborn and flaky.

So are all politicians; you could apply that to Howard and Latham, Keating and Hewson, Hawke and Peacock, Menzies and Evatt, Cameron and Miliband, take your pick really. The same could even been said for journalists. Banality clearly isn't limited to doorstops.

Banality appears to be house policy at Fairfax, according to associate editor Shaun Carney:

And the media also have a role ... Because the economics of the industry have changed, the media have had to go out chasing audiences, knowing that the audiences are distracted and seeking quick gratification. Complexity and considered assessment of difficult issues sometimes have to make way for instant judgments, simplification and plenty of conflict.

Not sometimes: pretty much always. Consider what it is that 'distracts' people from avid consumption of the mainstream media, then set yourself the challenge of describing the day's news in ways that relates to those 'distractions'. If there is no way of describing fatuities in ways that relate to policy outcomes, leave them out of media content. Conflict is a media construct rather than a public demand; people will appear to conflict when there is substantial underlying agreement, or pretend to be in accord when there are significant differences (and this applies to situations other than the Gillard-Rudd relationship).

As the parties have found ways to tailor and target their messages with the intention of seeking a short-term advantage, the community has grown more cynical. What is lost is the sense of connection between voters and the citizens they elect.

And the media we consume, Shaun. You need us more than we need you.

When you're talking about banality and missing the point, though, you have to talk Jacqueline Maley:

During a wide-ranging interview presaging the new year, Mr Swan talked up the government's economic credentials - a perceived Labor weak point according to the polls - arguing that Australia has "a set of fundamentals that just about any other developed economy would wish to have".

Imagine you could have a wide-ranging interview with the Treasurer. Would you do your research on Swan and the economy and get some information that no other outlet had before, or would you just do the sort of standard bullshit that you could do if you'd never met Swan? If you were Jacqueline Maley, you'd trot out the same lazy bullshit: Rudd challenge, the surplus.

But the Treasurer stopped short of using the word "guarantee" in relation to the slim budget surplus the government has promised for 2012-13, which was downgraded from the $3.5 billion forecast in its May budget ...

Never mind the economics, feel the semantics. Swan isn't going to guarantee anything until the 2012-13 budget is actually released. The fact that he won't tie himself to a guarantee is standard practice for politicians, really. Even though it's tiresome bullshit, Scoop Maley is going to plug away at the same dry waterhole. After four paragraphs on the same non-topic I'm starting to wonder how "wide-ranging" this interview actually was.

You know that if there is a surplus in next year's budget, Jacqueline Maley will dismiss it as a political fetish rather than an economic imperative, and claim that there are accounting stunts involvd (as though no Treasurer has ever done this).

China's usually muscular manufacturing sector, which is heavily dependent on exports to Europe, this month contracted for the second consecutive month.

That's just clumsy writing. You don't have to interview Swan to get that. If you're going to quote that, however, consider how it relates to what Swan said (in that interview or elsewhere) and factors in the Australian economy dependent upon China's manufacturing sector in particular.

If you're going to interview the Treasurer, or do the Fourth Estate thing of holding pollies to account, you really need a basic understanding of economics. It's an old journosphere claim that people aren't interested in policy, but what they mean is that they can't write about it in an engaging way. Maley got an interview with the Treasurer but couldn't convey what he said except through banalities.

Mr Swan said there was no update on the asylum seeker impasse the government has been seeking to resolve through talks with the opposition ...

There is a whole story to be written on that, why aren't you writing it?

... but [Swan] refused to concede [the government] had made blunders on the issue.

Well he would, wouldn't he, especially in contrast to the unalloyed success of the Howard government's policies.

Maley didn't add much with a second story from the same interview:

But the shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, said the reforms were "stupid policy"

He would say that, wouldn't he.

Why are they stupid, Jacqueline? Are there any aspects to banking reform other than mortgage exit fees? These are questions that a real journalist, rather than a space-filler, would have asked.

But Mr Hockey said Mr Swan was "clutching at straws" drawing a link between the changes and the banks passing on interest rate cuts. "You would think the acting Prime Minister would have more integrity than to lay claim to things which are unprovable," he said.

Maley lets this go unchallenged.

It would be easy to bag Hockey personally, but I won't; the Joe Hockey I knew was a person of integrity and I doubt that being Shadow Treasurer has corrupted him in any meaningful sense. It is perfectly appropriate, however, to say that Hockey's shenanigans with costing his economic policies last year does not give him any sort of 'right of reply' to Swan. Maley is being lazy in getting a quote from Swan and a countervailing quote from Hockey, and thinking that she's done her job; yet she has layer upon layer of Fairfax management (including Carney) who reinforces her in that position.

If I was Swan I'd wonder why I bothered with clowns like Maley at all. She could sit at home and write that stuff. No insight, no correlation of what pollies say with any objective reality, and cliche after cliche. She'll probably get a Walkley for that series of articles but it is the very sort of stuff that makes the mainstream media such inessential reading.

The mainstream media isn't giving us the information we need because it can't be bothered. Any slapped-together crap from Jacqueline Maley is good enough for the likes of you, and certainly doesn't cost much. In the new media environment you'll have to spend money to make money and take some time to find the information that people really need, rather than what you feel like dishing up in line with journosphere heritage and standards. The future of the media belongs to those who don't flinch at the inadequacies of the current system. Just as Qantas didn't grow out of Cobb & Co., so you'd have to bet against the journosphere getting over itself in time.

Disappeared and lost

2012-01-01T09:40:00.000+11:00

While enjoying Christmas and the Melbourne Test as much as anyone, it is more than a little strange that an issue that was absolutely burning last week is non-existent today. It'll flare up again: but I'd hoped for better from the journosphere that a story that was red hot last week, and a perennial issue in he country's politics, has pretty much vanished from public debate. The so-called newshounds of the Fourth Estate just let it slip away.

Just last week the journosphere was full of one issue: asylum seekers. There was this piece by Robert Manne (which was topped, literally and figuratively, by John Spooner's cartoon here). The ALP conference passed a policy motion by and for the Immigration Minister which bound him to do what he planned to do anyway, demonstrating the power of membership and democracy in the ALP today.

The Leader of the Opposition pledged to work all through Christmas to resolve the issue once and for all, which in his mind involved restoring all elements of the Howard Government's immigration policy from five years ago; thereby demonstrating that the Rudd-Gillard government was some sort of clerical error on the part of the voters, and the Coalition will take it from here, thanks. He put out a cheesy picture of his family over Christmas, proving to everyone but goldfish-brained journalists that he was not actually involved with asylum-seeker policy at all. There was this palpable difference between what Abbott said and what he did, and that kind of dissonance has the potential to wreck the way that the journosphere covers politics.

Abbott had insisted on conducting negotiations himself, and not allowing Scott Morrison to bind the Coalition in any way in negotiating with the government. At any other point in the history of the Liberal Party the shadow minister would have said to the leader: what are you afraid of? Do you want me to do this job or not? If you don't want me to negotiate the details of my portfolio with my soon-to-be-predecessor, why am I even in this job? Get your fucking chief of staff to do it herself if she's so toey about me doing this.

People are still risking life and treasure to come here by boat. They are not on holidays like Australian politicians and journos are, and nor are they necessarily distracted by:

DRS.
Retailers trying to establish themselves as the new farmers: Dollar's up so give us a handout. Dollar's down so give us a handout. Weather's fine so nobody's shopping, give us a handout. Weather's terrible so nobody's shopping, give us a handout. No matter what the conditions are these titans of Australian business can't make a go of it, and won't change to suit the market. The only possible answer is to dip into the revenue stream that the government uses: government can send you to prison for not giving them money, a power unavailable even to the most ferocious retail marketing campaigns.
The fact that Launceston has exported its typical summer to the entire country, causing climate change deniers to declare victory once and for all.

Asylum seeker policy has been a perennial issue of Australian politics, certainly in the last dozen years or so. Absent any personal financial or sexual issues on his part, immigration and racism was the dirtiest and darkest aspect of Howard's legacy. The fact that the issue went from being uppermost in the public debate to having utterly disappeared is astonishing. The media will be diminished the next time they decide to crank it up, and try and reverse-engineer what is happening with that policy behind the scenes now.

For its part, the Left has generally been unwilling to concede that as a means for deterring asylum seeker boats the Pacific Solution actually “worked”. The evidence here is straightforward. Between 1999 and the introduction of the Pacific Solution in late 2001, 12,176 asylum seekers arrived by boat. In the years of the Pacific Solution – 2002 to 2008 – 449 arrived. Since the abandonment of the Pacific Solution toward the end of 2008, 14,008 asylum seekers have reached Australian shores. Yet on the Left the meaning of these facts, for some reason, continues to be resisted. The Left’s unwillingness to acknowledge what ought to have been self-evident has been of even greater political significance in recent years than the moral callousness of the Right.

For his part, Manne assumes that asylum-seeker policy must be judged against the Right's frame of reference. It doesn't matter how many people do or don't come here. Manne ignores the push factor that propels people from their homes, communities and nations: in 2005 every country in the world (except Zimbabwe) recorded economic growth, a factor that lessens emigration.

Like most commentators Manne also ignores the economic arguments. In domestic law-and-order debates it is frequently noted that the cost of incarcerating someone for a year exceeds the cost of putting them up and a five-star hotel and sending them to university. During the Howard Government, it was frequently noted that Stalag Nauru cost over a billion dollars a year and 90% of claims were found to be legitimate. Both a government seeking a surplus net year and an opposition seeking $70b of savings from the current budget, reinstating Nauru is untenable. Why an Abbott Government would seek to reintroduce such an absurd situation is unclear, unless you accept that they lack imagination and sense and are seeking a return to 2005 above all else. Why Robert Manne gives Abbott a free pass on this is so unclear as to be bewildering; a light dusting of pox-on-both-your-houses is simply inadequate.

So far as I know no one on the Left with an interest in asylum seeker policy – and I include myself – was farsighted or independent or courageous enough to offer the incoming Rudd government advice along these lines.

Manne is a Professor of Political Science. I know for a fact that there are numerous members of the Liberal Party who have, over the years, become active in inter-party debates on this topic from that perspective. I have no doubt that the ALP and the Greens have many members who have done the equivalent in their party. The fact that Manne ignores even the possibility of such people is an astounding oversight.

Guy Rundle insists that Robert Manne is not a member of the Left at all. I was originally going to ignore this internecine squabbling but it raises a larger question: why should Manne be or feel excluded from "the Left"? Cliff Richard still insists on his membership of "the rock-n-roll fraternity" and nobody from Rammstein calls him on it. I thought "the Left" was like any other kind of faith, where espoused belief alone was sufficient for membership: in the words of Curtis Mayfield, "You don't need no baggage, you just get on board".

Rundle's piece is the better one, arguing from first principles about our obligations moral and legal. He doesn't make much of a case, however, for building a broad movement. Centrist Liberals like Judi Moylan or Russell Broadbent are part of this debate, despite he fact that either have more to show for their advocacy in terms of both achievement and personal struggle than Rundle has for his, on this or any other subject. You don't build a broad movement by just arguing your own corner and that ultimately is the limitation of this piece by Rundle and pretty much every other by him.

This excellent piece from The Politics Project makes an important point on any hope for 'a regional solution':

... asylum seekers know that the trip is dangerous. But they do it anyway. Doesn’t that tell us something about their plight? Doesn’t that tell us that these people would rather risk their lives, and the lives of their children, rather than remain indefinitely in the squalid and dangerous conditions of Malaysia or Indonesia, countries that are already poverty-stricken and cannot afford to look after their own people?

The debate is currently focused on “stemming the tide of boats”, on making the issue go away so that we, Australians, don’t have to worry about it, or feel guilty about it. Offshore processing is a way of making the issue disappear, for us. It will have absolutely no benefit for those seeking asylum; it will not help those developing countries which serve as transit zones for refugees; it will not in any way solve the issue. But it will make us feel better, and it will help our politicians to be re-elected.

We hear a lot of talk about finding “regional solutions” … to stop the boats. Not regional solutions to deal with the causes of displacement, not regional solutions to ensure that refugees have access not only to human rights protections, but also to adequate food, clean water, shelter, education and healthcare.

(I say the above is "excellent" and "important" not because it agrees with my position: it doesn't. It makes the flimsy basis for my belief in the Malaysia Solution as a first step very damn difficult.

It isn't news that the same-old-same-old has come out for another airing. It is news why the country's leading politicians can't even talk about it in a sensible way, and why those who can and do are shunted to the margins and ignored; and whether "public opinion" really does want this issue to fester like a suppurating sore on the face of the body politic. It is news that such an issue should go from red-hot to non-existent without either a solution or a circumstance that fundamentally changes the debate. If you really think that the journosphere focus on its own industry, news-as-news, is actually valid then chew on this:

Why has the political system failed those of us who elect it to represent us and settle political debates in policy and legislation?
Why has the so-called Fourth Estate devoted far more to the challenge to the Investec Loyal than to a debate that was supposedly going to go all through Christmas until it was settled?
Given that the politico-media complex has failed us, why is anyone surprised that interest in either party is waning, and why do so few wonder what the consequences of that disinterest will be (other than job losses)?
Who dares try to reframe the debate on asylum-seekers while maintaining a viable political career?
Who dares pursue an issue of enduring importance, and stand up to those who would reassign them to less important issues?

The reshuffle

2011-12-19T00:39:00.000+11:00

At the start of this week the Prime Minister reorganised her ministry. By the end of the week it is clear that the mainstream media have failed to report what happened, and that bloggers have done a far better job of explaining to people what the changes mean as far as the way we are governed. That reshuffle may be more far-reaching and enduring than the political one.

There was no parallel in the newspapers, radio or TV to any of the following:

The most excellent summaries here and here by Bushfire Bill;
This piece by blogger-at-heart Greg Jericho, in which he discusses the public service implications of the reallocation of portfolios; or
Crikey's health sub-site which canvassed a range of health professionals to see what former Health Minister Roxon did right/wrong and what they hope for from the new Minister.
Peter Martin on Nick Sherry, whose resignation precipitated the whole reshuffle and was ignored by the credulous press gallery.

(Thanks to @Leroy_Lynch for bringing some of the above to my attention.)

BB makes a convincing case that Emergency Management must be a Cabinet role, while Jericho is less convincing in his contrary view. Read them to know what good political analysis looks like, because it shows that scrutiny of public affairs can be well-written and entertaining. It shows that covering politics need not be sneering, facile or sanctimonious like it is in the mainstream media. Then, turn your eyes from these amateur diversions and look with pity and scorn upon the so-called professionals, who are paid to knock around Parliament House and report on this stuff for a living.

Nominally, the mainstream media claim that they cover politics in order to explain to we taxpayers, voters and consumers how our taxes are spent, what priorities public services are directed to place ahead of others, and to what extent our cries for more of this and less of that are heeded (or not) by those who rule us. That high-minded spirit animates reporting so rarely that we might safely say that journalists who love the tittle-tattle and horse-race aspects of politics are the norm, while those who explain politics effectively are so rare as to be almost freaky.

Let's take to the program that sets the news agenda more than any other: ABC Radio's AM program, always good for a bucket o' Walkleys, but almost always rubbish when it comes to political interviews. Here's Alexandra Kirk focusing on Kim Carr:

Carr is a long-time factional operator in the Victorian ALP. Over the years, he's dished it out to people and he's copped some back. He's a grown-up and should be treated like one. No allowance should be made for any sulking on his part. If he really thinks he's hard done by, if all the emoluments of ministerial office aren't enough, he should get out of the ministry or even out of Parliament altogether (as a Senator, no byelection! Lots of Victorian ALP displaced by Brumby's folly hungry for a step up ...); and
Carr is minister for manufacturing, and in a few weeks he's off to Detroit and Tokyo to discuss Australian vehicle manufacturing with those companies. Will those discussions be harder if he's a non-Cabinet minister? What about dealing with local manufacturers, like the no-marks who've run Bluescope Steel into the ground? So,
Given that AM is so hard-hitting, and that Kirk is one of its experienced journalists, you'd expect her to focus on the politics and the policy ...

No, sadly.

Kirk's line of questioning is, to be generous, juvenile: you got de-mo-ted, ner-nerny-ner-ner, are you pissed off? Are you still besties with Jules? Do you reckon you'll be better off if Kev comes back? Carr handled himself with considerable dignity, allowing himself a human moment of disappointment in amongst steadfast professionalism. Carr is doing a serious job as manufacturing minister, and there are questions to be asked about the extent to which traditional measures like subsidies or sweetheart deals with the relevant unions are actually going to do much into the foreseeable future. Kirk wallowed in the goss and left the hard stuff, and it isn't the first time she's done it. For serious political analysis, best to skip AM.

Serious journalists like Fairfax's Lenore Taylor and Phillip Coorey and Laura Tingle, and almost all TV correspondents, are back to the stale line that everything this government does is a pratfall. Take Michelle Grattan's silly effort (no link, can't be bothered) where she referred to McClelland's portfolio as a grab-bag - but then made light of the similarly incongruous portfolio of Mark Arbib, and nothing of Greg Combet's (if he's Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, and Minister for Industry, and that he's pretty much led the case for the carbon tax, why is someone else Minister for Energy? Why is the Minister for Energy wittering on about nuclear, an energy source currently used by 0% of Australian households and industry, rather than focusing on renewables or even questioning the need for a "grid" in the 21st century? Why is this sorry little blogpost the only place you can even read about that stuff?).

For desperately silly, however, you have to go to the national affairs correspondent for what was once regarded as the best newspaper printed in English. The paper for which Alfred Deakin and Keith Murdoch wrote. I refer - how have the mighty fallen - to The Age and Katharine Murphy:

AUSTRALIA ends the year with two governments. There's Julia Gillard's minority government. And there is the government in exile, led by Kevin Rudd.

I thought the Coalition was the alternative government. Even if you do accept that Rudd is undermining Gillard, that's not the same thing as saying he's running an 'alternative government'. Between his first failed challenge and his second successful one in 1991, Paul Keating was not running an 'alternative government'. The Opposition aren't an 'alternative government' because they don't have any policies worth the name, and none that you can trust. Gillard is pretty much doing what Rudd promised but failed to deliver. What makes Rudd's castle-in-the-air an alternative government?

To confuse matters further, these competing regimes manifest their own divided states of being.

Nobody's confused here but Katharine herself, and anyone who hasn't realised she's a dill.

Can Julia Gillard unite her divided states in 2012? Right now that looks impossible, because the Prime Minister who can scale Kosiuszko [sic] is the same PM who is standing on quicksand, sinking before our eyes.

That second sentence shows the appalling imagery that only comes, as Orwell pointed out, from someone who isn't thinking about what they're saying. If you've scaled Mt Kosciuszko (sp.) you'll know that it's an easy stroll. Only in the movies do people sink completely in quicksand. Murphy is revelling in a return to the whole Gillard-as-stumblebum routine that the whole press gallery has returned to like so many dogs to their vomit, and no amount of policy or even parliamentary achievement is going to dissuade her from ground on which she feels secure.

This week's cabinet reshuffle was supposed to buy Gillard six months of clear air to do two things: lift Labor's primary vote above 30 per cent, and force Tony Abbott to tell his own story ...

Clear air. What does that even mean? It's one of those meaningless terms of the politico-media complex, nothing to do with actual quantifiable atmospheric pollution. The government gets a focus on its policies and the absence of those from the Coalition when it actually does things like legislate a price on carbon rather than just talk about it, and force Abbott into pledges so silly that he gets only the pity that is his due. Action speaks louder than words and reshuffles are always temporary events that focus on a government's internals. Why have great polling when you can play the long game that wins votes and denies them to Stunt Man?

...the reshuffle was supposed to turn all of Bill Shorten's well-honed ruthlessness on Abbott in an area where the Coalition is vulnerable, industrial relations.

It was supposed to turn Greg Combet's quick policy mind to the task of winning back the blue-collar manufacturing base ...

Yes, Katharine, it did both those things. It just didn't do them before your deadline; if it had, you might have written a better story. Abbott has had a good run for two years and he's not going to be sunk in two days. Shorten and Combet are players of the long game and are wise to know what powder they have at their disposal before they embark on the process of keeping it dry.

I noticed, as Katharine Murphy and the rest of the journosphere didn't, that Shorten's shadow minister Eric Abetz has been very, very quiet. If Abetz had the genuine assuredness his cocksure manner is designed to hide then he'd be all over Shorten this week, forcing the new boy to dance to his tune. Abetz has no tune to dance to and when Shorten is done with his swotting and the preliminaries, you can bet that one of the biggest guns in the Coalition front line is about to be taken out. Shorten's teeth-cutting will be on Abetz's hide. With the O'Farrell-like ascendancy of Will Hodgman in Tasmanian state politics, 2012 is shaping up as a year for Eric Abetz to forget before it's even begun. Eric's super is maxed out, his links to the far right and lack of links to business large or small will be no help at all, as is his record of failing to stop a single piece of Labor legislation in a hung parliament: bye bye Eric.

As for Combet, he's up against the hollowed-out husks of Greg Hunt and Sophie Mirabella. See, that's basic political reporting right there, and like the rest of the peanut gallery your old pal @murpharoo has missed the idea that the government has only to beat the opponents in front of them.

Murphy embarrasses herself by quoting Lachlan Harris, a man who has gone from obscurity to nowhere without any intervening period of achievement or demonstrating any sense: sneer ye not at bloggers so long as you quote Lachlan fucking Harris. Malcolm Farr should know better than to report Abbott cheered for half-witted platitudes, Burke jeered for failing to solve large intractable problem shock. Marius Benson just embarrasses himself with the whole of this shower of drivel.

Forget those jerks and accept that the mainstream media is in a tailspin out of which it lacks the sense, clout and skill to pull. The press gallery was embarrassed by its failure to pick Slipper taking the Speakership this year, and Gillard taking the Prime Ministership last year. Insider status means nothing, press gallery doyen(ne) status nothing, nothing at all.

Let's look at the government. We have some idea of what this government is about. We know that ministerial reshuffles involve compromise and bastardry at the best of times, let alone in a hung parliament. We're adults, so the shock-horror that people might be displeased while others are pleased is not a story in itself. Here's how the reshuffle should have been different in order to more closely align the government's activities to its goals:

Garrett should have replaced Macklin. Macklin has achieved nothing in four years, not in policy substance or communication of same; adding Disability Reform, a large and significant reform, to her portfolio is just cruel. Garrett has both the plodding policy credibility and the promotional skill to do this really, really well.
Energy should have gone to Combet.
Ferguson should have combined Resources with Skills Training, giving him something significant to tackle rather than rehash Gorton Government platitudes about uranium ("perfectly safe").
Ludwig should've been replaced by someone to take on the enfeebled Nationals.
Mark Arbib should not be Minister for Sport and should have been offered the most pissant ministry available, which he might have rejected so that he could then sulk on the back bench and leak to Michelle Grattan and Malcolm Farr. Hopefully it will be obvious that an Assistant Treasurer who doesn't focus on policy detail or give a stuff about policy is a bad thing and he'll immolate over the coming year at some point.
It's great that Childcare has a minister, and hopefully Kate Ellis will have better luck than Maxine McKew.
It's a shame there's no assistant minister in Foreign Affairs so a young rising star can learn those ropes.
Mark Dreyfus and Mike Kelly should've got something more substantial.

The reshuffle shows that the mainstream media can't help you understand your government, and it puts out the stories it wants to put out. The entire politico-media complex is in for a seismic jolt once this government gets re-elected. Imagine a government that doesn't cower before the journosphere, that just gets on with it, and a populace that turns away from the journosphere to understand how it is governed. If you can imagine that, the confusion and still-forming shapes before us start to take clearer form, and what looks like serious and informed commentary appears as so much wind. Call it a reshuffle of the mind.

Update from before the above was posted: Preston Institute.

Policy against type

2011-12-12T05:59:00.001+11:00

One of the amazing things about politics is that you'll have a picture in your mind about a former politician, and you'll have to admit something which goes against that image is nonetheless inextricably part of that politician's record. Whether it's John Howard picking up the long-held leftist cause of Timor Leste, or Gough Whitlam selling them out in the first place, politics can be a funny business. People are entitled to reap the benefits of a particular policy regardless of its political provenance.

Each of Abbott and Gillard face policy positions that go against public perceptions of who they are and what they're about. There are dangers for them in pursuing those positions. They illustrate the limits of political tactics, where it's assumed that putting out a press release with a position statement on it is to be taken seriously on that position.

For Gillard, this happens with gay marriage. Whether it's her student activism in favour of "homosexual rights" (doesn't the turgid prose reveal it as authentic?), or the persona of her adult life as a leftist lawyer, it is absolutely in keeping with the image of her that she would support gay marriage. Her protestations to the contrary look like a feint than a deeply-held conviction. There are three positions against gay marriage, and none of them fit Gillard:

Those who are in heterosexual marriages and who do not believe and/or cannot admit that gay/lesbian relationships are as valid as their relationships are;
Those who, for religious reasons, are celibate and have fixed ideas that marriage is for heterosexuals only (in support of 1. above); and
However unwittingly in support of 1 & 2 above, those gay/lesbian people like the eloquent and learned Sue-Ann Post, who believe that rejecting marriage is an essential part of being gay/lesbian.

At the ALP conference earlier this month, the Right claimed they were "protecting" the Prime Minister and the journosphere reported this without examining it. Protecting her from what, from whom? With the conscience vote on gay marriage, Gillard faces two options:

Gay marriage gets up, in which case Gillard can't claim credit for it. Supporters of gay marriage won't give her credit, opponents will resent her, and those who are ambivalent will rightly perceive the lack of leadership ahead of the rights and wrongs of the situation; or
Gay marriage does not get up, in which case we're back to the situation where Abbott looks strong and Gillard looks diffident and shifty. Gillard won't be believed when attempting to dismiss this as a big issue for her.

Neither option is within Labor's control and neither reflects well on Gillard. If you had more respect for Labor's Right than I have, you'd accuse them of setting her up. She's leader of the Labor Party, they feel strongly about this issue, so she should get over herself and lead them. The idea that Gillard looks like a strong leader for standing against gay marriage is beyond wrong, it's absurd.

Abbott's equivalent is a position he does not hold yet, but toward which he is being nudged (towed?) by those who back him: pulling out of Afghanistan. Abbott is no more interested in foreign policy than Gillard was, but he will always default to dance with those who brung him.

The US alliance was a given in Australian Cold War politics, regardless of who was in power in Washington or Canberra. Now it's a political plaything: With Keating and Clinton the US alliance was strong, but less so with Clinton and Howard. Things warmed up again with Howard and Bush II: the latter had the temerity to warn Australians against not re-electing Howard, who similarly disgraced himself by warning Americans against electing Obama. Both Rudd and Gillard enjoy good relations with Obama but it is clear that the bilateral relationship is no longer bipartisan.

People like Greg Sheridan and Tom Switzer are absolutely unconvincing with their hand-wringing pose that the war in Afghanistan cannot be won. Having failed to define victory in the first place they declare their political opponents incapable of achieving it. Such a position enables them to both jeer at them for further deaths and disasters arising from staying while also snarling at them for abandoning the Afghans and being reactive to terror threats should they withdraw. It's a despicable position for the right to take (compounded by their refusal to accept that those fleeing that war are legitimate refugees), and while utterly in line with Abbott's core of principle, it goes against the whole action-man persona.

When Abbott went to Afghanistan he insisted on being photographed in a bomb-disposal suit, denying its use to those who work in them. Before that he insisted on firing weapons and going on missions, despite his complete lack of training and discipline, which would mean the troops would spend all their time defending him rather than achieving the goals set for them. However stupid these were from a perspective of military operations in a dangerous environment, these actions were consistent with Abbott's action-oriented he-man image.

When you tell most people that Billy McMahon pulled almost all Australian troops out of Vietnam well before the 1972 election, they are puzzled: surely it was Whitlam who brought the troops home? For Abbott, wringing his hands and fretting over war dead goes completely against the whole persona. What's OK for gibberers like Switzer and Sheridan will not wash for would-be Prime Minister Abbott. Gillard can get away with staying or going, but not Abbott.

For the media, the fact that a politician makes a statement is the story. For everyone else, the fact that a politician makes a statement is neither here nor there. A politician who makes a statement out of character will be assumed to be a gibberer unless there is overwhelming proof to the contrary. Political tacticians who think it's smart for Abbott to call for withdrawal from Afghanistan, or for Gillard to stand like a bulwark for heterosexual marriage, measure their success only by press coverage.

There was no public clamour for Hawke and Keating to float the dollar. It was big and they made the case that it was right, so the public went along with it. Similarly, there was no public clamour for Howard to introduce a GST, bit it was big and they made the case that it was right, so the public went along with it. Gay marriage and withdrawal from Afghanistan are big and require leadership to get up; done badly these issues will damage leadership.

We saw this when Abbott proposed paid parental leave. You just knew that he would toss it straight into the maw of Labor's Budget Black Hole, so why vote for it? Just because gibberers in Canberra want to talk about it, and tell us "the policy is pitched at the mums and dads", doesn't mean that said target group have to behave as the strategists would wish. Abbott might call for Afghanistan withdrawal to "soften his image", but his lack of foreign policy knowledge would undermine any attempt at looking genuine and he'd just water down the appearance of toughness that it his one political asset. Gillard would get a lot of kudos for backing gay marriage, and it would expose the SDA (and thus exposed, diminish the ridiculous amount of power they appear to wield, leaving Gillard freer than she is and looking more powerful than she does).

Sometimes taking a contrary position is a sign of personal growth, a sign that you have to look at a politician in a new way (and thus think about the country and its politics in a new way). Mostly, though, it's the politician and their advisers attempting to look more clever than they are. Journalists don't look clever at all for failing to call them on it, or even know the difference between thought leadership and its absence. When policy goes against type it's the policy that suffers, and so does everyone who needs better policy from the politico-journalism complex.

The Australian media in 2011

2011-12-10T15:55:00.001+11:00

See my piece in The Drum.

Your satire shows how shallow and city centred you are.

No it doesn't, it shows that the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery can't get out of its own way. You'll notice no reference to Fukushima, Christchurch, or the various flavours of extremist sticking the oars in to the Greek riots who get Guy Rundle all moist. If you need information you have to go around the press gallery, not rely upon them for anything but the satire which they cannot and dare not get.

You're dead right it's "the same joke written over and again in too many words". That's what the press gallery gave us in 2011. The cracks of light in that united front of blah were the exception rather than the rule. If the press gallery were better, this piece would have been written differently - or not at all.

I slept on it and opened my hard copy of The Sydney Morning Herald today. Blow me down, the very things I protested about yesterday were there, in spades, in two supposedly thought-out pieces on the direction of journalism.

There was this effort by Chris Rau, ostensibly on Bali Dope Boy but seeking to involve us all in the wider malaise (except journalists, of course):

... the media ran videos and photographs of hessian bags put up by his family to protect privacy at their ... home ...

Rau names the place where they live, not exactly lifting herself above the ruck of those who would deny this family their right to get back to their lives.

If a judgment is required, judge the people who feed off the distress of others. They include the agents and the media audience. The media can be judged by how they exploited - if they did so - the family during their ordeal.

You bet judgment is required: it's part of being the discerning reader that media outlets say they want, but whom journos and their managers immediately dismiss should they fail to consume quietly.

Look at the sheer gutlessness in that paragraph. The idea that the prying journalist, breaking laws and unenforceable journo-rules, is really an authentic representative and 'umble servant of thousands of slavering readers hanging out for the latest updates. The idea that editors have an unerring knack for knowing what the public is clamouring for, and that they meet that need in full. These are the sustaining myths of the journosphere but there is no connection between them and what actually happens.

If that story disappeared and was replaced by another story, it would not be missed; it is in the media because people who run the media want it there, and because the story can be captured easily by the lazy and dull-witted people they have chosen as their subordinates. There is no evidence that "media consumers" are hanging out for more and more details on a story that has passed. Against this, Rau's proviso "if they did so" is an appalling cop-out. She really can't believe that a journalist might even be capable of anything unethical.

The only journalist worth the benefit of the doubt would be the one who, when told to go to the place where Bali Dope Boy comes from, refused to do so. Chris Rau can't imagine such a person and has produced no evidence of one.

Bali Dope Boy isn't a story, it's a band name waiting for a band to reap the free publicity.

I was waiting to read how Rau would tie this in to the Finkelstein Inquiry and the unrelenting insistence that journalism must continue to operate above the law. Still waiting.

Then came pifflemonger Mark Textor on datajournalism. Having dismissed it as "pretty chart[s]", he went on and on about it, which made me suspicious.

Textor did not get where he is by "accuracy, objectivity, verifiability and contestability", nor by the release of data that he and others like him do not control or even fabricate. He got where he is by flatly denying that facts were true and insisting that constructions should and must take their place. All those snappy, empty one-liners from The Situation are the very kind of factoids, or non-facts, that Textor would seek to warn you about.

Datajournalism isn't the vaccine against people like Textor but used well, it can make a much smaller place for such people than we find in our politics and journalism today.

The last paragraph is the pathetic bleat of a man watching his business model go down the S-bend. I think there should be a moratorium on "internal polling" of the type excreted by CrosbyTextor, but I'm not one of those gullible editors.

2011 was a year where the Australian media was confronted with the prospect of its own irrelevance and resolved to do more of the same. The consequences of this will almost certainly be damaging but they are definitely risible. let's hope for better in 2012, otherwise the media at their most earnest will only be funnier than they are.

Something to talk about

2011-12-06T21:29:00.000+11:00

In the last month or so the incumbent government developed a reputation for doing things, rather than talking about proposing to form a committee to convene a gabfest based on focus groups that may or may not do something. People began to look on the government and its leader in a whole new light.

People also began to look upon the Coalition in a whole new light once its entire strategy - wait for the government to stuff up - seemed to fall apart. As with the ALP at its worst there was no Plan B. That absence of fallback options makes for poor government, and shows why political skill is indispensable to effective government. Nobody in the Coalition seemed to consider that there was a possibility that Labor could do a passable impression of a competent and proactive government. Scales started to fall from the eyes of previously sycophantic journos on what sort of alternative the Coalition actually offered.

It was a category error of a piece with Labor assumptions that The Situation could not maintain the discipline necessary to be a potent threat but would inevitably revert to being a boorish gobshite. Sometimes I despair of the self-limiting nature of the so-called professional political class.

Anyway, the point is that the government's good work was pretty much undone by the ALP conference on the weekend.

The idea of all those topics up for discussion was to give the government the impression of momentum over the summer break. All it did was push the government back to where it had never wanted to be: in the land of Gonna-Do. Gonna give gays and lesbians the right to marry, gonna sell uranium to India, gonna gonna gonna; no have-done and are-doing and will-be-doing-even-more-and-better.

Gay marriage is one area where the Liberals are not going to claim to be able to do better than Labor. Abbott will have no credibility doing anything other than damn-the-torpedoes opposition. Any attempt to leaven this position will be undone by retribution at those who dare cross the floor over the issue.

There is now no benefit in staying on Tony Abbott's front bench in terms of career advancement. If Turnbull and others were to leave the frontbench and cross the floor, Abbott would be looking over his shoulder every day until the end of his leadership. If they didn't, there'd be no point to them at all (and it wouldn't save Abbott anyway). There won't be a conscience vote because Old Nick won't allow it. It would mean Abbott was no better than Gillard. The disintegration of Abbott will be a marvelous thing to see, all the better for being protracted and at the hands of people he doesn't respect.

Howard's position on selling uranium to India was weak, shilly-shallying nonsense. Abbott needs a position other than going along with the government, not for the sake of policy but for his own reptilian kill-or-be-killed mind; his problem is there isn't one. His foreign affairs spokesperson is not exactly the Percy Spender of our age. For all the explosion in International Relations courses, this country sure has been beset by the most appalling failure in coherent foreign policy.

There should have been no mention of refugees. The regional solution is a matter for the diplomats now. The idea that the government can play both sides of that game - insist on limits and due process while increasing intake numbers - is way beyond wrong, and well into the realm of stupid. The proposal put by Chris Bowen was just another bet each way that pleases nobody and satisfies no need, it should have been scratched by the stewards. Labor should just shut up and come up with a regional solution rather than draw attention to the awful predicament that it, and the country, are in over this issue.

I expect that the ALP conference would be disappointing to people who care about the ALP, but the pantomime about party reform being shunted off to a room full of factional hacks is no longer tragic or even funny, just boring. It's like an alcoholic promising to swear off white wine: they might think it's a compromise but it is actually missing the whole point entirely, and you can't tell them. Others can wail and rend their garments, but the only thing to do is just turn and walk away and ignore attention-seeking behaviour.

The ALP conference was also notable for the fingering of Rudd as responsible for the leaks that damaged Labor's 2010 campaign. History, as William Faulkner said, isn't gone and it hasn't passed. Labor's presentation of its national conference showed that it still sees its core role as throwing up announceables, assuming that news editors have a better sense of what the public want and are interested in than elected politicians and supposed numbers-men. This was not an event to maintain the momentum that will see Abbott eating Labor dust (and worse) for the next year or so. It was an event to let The Situation catch up, by playing the only game he can play: calling the government out for being all talk, just like he is.

Status quo journalism can't deal with change

2011-11-30T22:57:00.000+11:00

When I think journalism of the status quo, I think Michelle Grattan, and the son she never had, Malcolm Farnsworth.

We live in a time of great change: journalism is undergoing far-reaching transformation, and so is the subject-matter of political journalism. Long-standing observers should be able to draw on their experience to identify what is going on, or else sit back and do in-my-day fatuities contrasting with the modern hurly-burly. Grattan is trapped in an eternal present which makes her largely useless as a commentator, and Farnsworth can't see the forest for the trees.

First, to Farnsworth:

The Labor Government celebrated four years in office on Thursday with a manoeuvre that all but guaranteed it will serve a full term ... But not much else has changed. Only the madly optimistic believe Labor will make it to a sixth birthday.

What he means here is that he doubts that Labor will be re-elected. He thinks that people who don't conform to the herd mentality that he inhabits must be mentally ill.

I could take issue with Malcolm's characterisation of the anniversary: last Thursday (24 November 2011) was the fourth anniversary of the 2007 election, not the anniversary of when the current government took office, which happened once the electoral and constitutional formalities had been properly observed and ... oh, never mind. The point is, Malcolm starts off trying to sound like some sort of oracle who's done a bit of research, but he uses facts as decoration rather than as a guide for an argument. His whole piece overlooks a key point about politics: you only have to beat the opponent in front of you.

Menzies knew that you only have to beat the opponent in front of you. Hawke knew it too. Howard knew it but forgot. He can't bear to think that, just maybe, Julia Gillard has started to realise that her future lies over the political corpse of Tony Abbott. This is what's happening in front of Malcolm's eyes but he dismisses it angrily; if it doesn't fit the Farnsworth narrative it ain't a story.

As 1954 loomed, Robert Menzies faced an unsettled economy. Inflation eroded his electoral base. His treasurer had handed down a famous 'horror budget' and joked that he could hold a meeting of all his supporters in a telephone booth. Mid-way through his fifth year, Menzies clung to office in an election in which the ALP outpolled the Liberals, despite the burst of red baiting provided by the Petrov defection. Had Menzies lost, we might well ask now what he achieved in four years in power.

Where to begin with such drivel? Firstly, a 'horror budget' would surely be infamous?

For a decade before 1954, Menzies had worked on shifting the conservative base away from the well-heeled and toward low-income strivers seeking material comfort, if not prosperity, from the social and economic fluidity that arose from World War II. This was made much easier by Labor's clumsy lunge at nationalising the banks: not for Australian Labor the well-considered Beveridge Report, which made state socialism attractive through a whole range of measures such as public healthcare and other essential services designed to offer a real and positive alternative to the racial basis of nationhood. Labor blew its chance at defining postwar Australia by not having properly considered the matter when it had the chance to do so.

Paul Keating was right to deride little Johnny Curtin wringing his hands about the safety of the troops across the Indian Ocean, only to then threw them away at Singapore, rather than starting the process of imagining what sort of country those troops would fight for and could come home to. Ben Chifley insisted that the labour movement was about more than putting an extra sixpence in someone's pocket, but never really defined what that was.

Chifley would have gone to the 1949 election with a very different program had he actually believed all that "light on the hill" business.

Menzies beat the opponent in front of him. He portrayed Chifley as a steam-driven man in a diesel-powered age. Strangely, Labor kept him there after the defeat and Chifley would have led Labor to the following election had he not died. Labor replaced him with Evatt, a man who had not given a moment's consideration as to what postwar Australia might look like apart from a bit of lawyerly trimming and quibbling here and there. Evatt arrived just in time to see Percy Spender put in place the ANZUS Treaty and other instruments of this country's Cold War position. It did not quite eradicate Evatt's work at the UN but it did change the game to the point where policy rollback was not possible.

As to the economy, Labor had no understanding of and no answer for the inflation and other issues that beset Australia in the early 1950s. Labor were policy-lazy and thought they could just promise a return to the days of Good Old Chif, but without Good Old Chif (in the same way that Tony Abbott is promising a return to the Howard era without Howard). After 1954 policy-lazy Labor would be in opposition for another eighteen years. The lessons to glean from 1954 are:

There are no second prizes in elections. Calwell learnt that in 1961, Snedden in 1974, Peacock in 1984, Beazley in 1998 and, yes, Abbott in 2010. Near enough isn't nearly good enough.
Policy-lazy oppositions never win government and can barely hold it together once the policy focus dissipates.

Menzies beat Evatt by playing up the divisions within Labor. The very question as to how best to identify workers' interests, let alone represent them, was an open one in the 1950s and if Evatt was half the intellectual his fans make him out to be then he would have come up with some way of keeping the labour movement singing from the same songsheet.

Three decades later, as Bob Hawke's Labor government moved into 1987, it had notched up an impressive record of economic and social reform, although the economic climate was now more unsettled and treasurer Paul Keating had warned of an Australian banana republic.

Hawke faced a divided opposition.

No, Hawke caused a divided opposition. Those "economic and social reform[s]" struck at the very heart of what it meant to be a conservative, even a Liberal. The Howard-Peacock rivalry embodied NSW v Victoria, free trade v protectionism - if you read nothing else he writes, read the Introduction to Paul Kelly's The End of Certainty to understand what went on. Hawke beat the opponent in front of him.

In early 2000 ... John Howard was a two-time election winner ... He had thrown away his massive majority in the 1998 GST election. The popular vote went to Kim Beazley but Howard won enough seats to hang on ... GST ... The government looked unsteady. It was polling badly. Whispers about Howard's leadership ... Disparate cost of living pressures bore down [sic]. Howard's fight back ... Tampa and September 11.

Howard bet that he had Kim Beazley's measure, and he did. A bunch of Hawke-Keating lags with nothing better to do stuck around to nurse their sense of entitlement, much like former Howard ministers like Kevin Andrews are doing now. Maybe the generation of ALP activists who eventually replaced Howard - e.g. Rudd, Gillard, Swan, Smith - would have been better off if they'd had to fight a bit, like Kelly O'Dwyer or Jamie Briggs are against Abbott.

Curtin won a massive election victory in 1943 at the height of the war effort.

I would have thought the effort peaked in the initial mobilisation and then again in 1942, after the Battle of the Coral Sea and the attacks on Darwin and other northern cities. Curtin won in 1943 because the underpinnings of Australian conservatism had been broken:

the Empire had demonstrably failed;
the socialisation of Australian society involved in the war de-emphasised free enterprise and personal independence;
traditional conservative forces such as church and family played less of a role in people's daily lives; and
leading lights such as Menzies were replaced by second-rate opportunists like Tom White and Billy Hughes.

Malcolm Farnsworth has learned the wrong lessons from history. Governments don't arise from the soil by sheer force of will, they are comprised of politicians who group together to beat other groups of politicians.

Much of the commentary of recent weeks has been absurd. There is no revival yet for this government.

You don't decide that, Malcolm. Two things have happened, and rather than get tetchy about them you should make note and adjust your themes accordingly, regardless of whether or not the journosphere or the polling have caught up.

The first thing that's happened is that the government can stop talking about what it's gonna do and is actually doing it. A key part of the frustration with this government is that it went past the point where gonna-do was attractive or even credible. Now it no longer has to be taken on trust.

The second is that The Situation's three-point strategy of "no, no, no" doesn't give the Coalition the sort of momentum it needs to get into government. The next Coalition government will have to be different to the Howard government, just as Howard's government was different to Fraser's. Abbott's whole pitch is that all the Coalition needed to do was unpick everything (or, in Malcolm's terms, what little) the Rudd-Gillard governments did and hey presto, we're back to 2005. Only now is it clear that people want more than just a reversal, and that they expect the Coalition to offer a clear idea of what that might look like. That is what Malcolm Farnsworth should have observed, and used the lode of historical material to help teach that lesson. Instead, we have a bad impression of a middling hack rather than any sort of incisive observation about what's going on in our political system.

Out in the shires,

Out in the what!?!? Particularly clueless Poms talk that way about their own country, and though Wilfred Owen's calling bugles still tears at the heartstrings, it is a nonsense to speak of parts of Australia as "the shires". It is to demonstrate the very insular behaviour that you would wish to rail against.

Besides, there is only one Shire.

I also laughed at this:

Aside from Albanese and a handful of others - the ambitious Shorten, Roxon when she's gunning for the tobacco companies, or Combet when he's methodically dismantling an opposition argument - the Government lacks a team of heavy hitters. Who is Gillard's Jack McEwen? Where is her hit squad of Anthony, Sinclair and Nixon? Where is the unparalleled talent of Keating, Button, Evans or Dawkins? Where is Albanese's support team, a version of Costello and Reith, or Young and Daly?

Malcolm can see the trees very clearly; what he can't see is the so-called forest.

The phenomenon he describes is the decreasingly relevant "parliamentary theatre"; he's right to wonder why he keeps tuning in to such dull fare but he's wrong to blame the government for not playing the fruitless Abbott-Pyne game of rendering Question Time as a monkey-house. Keating was a master at Question Time, but people got tired of him snarling every night. They got equally tired of Peter Costello smirking at them. Parliamentary theatre is bullshit. Just as the Gillard government has gotten around the press gallery, so too it has gotten around Question Time; if it lacks a delivery channel, that's its problem, but it is lacking a lot less now that it has more to show for its efforts.

The forest-for-the-trees thing diminishes Malcolm Farnsworth's abilities as an observer of the broad themes of Australian politics. Can you imagine going into a pub with Malcolm Farnsworth?

BARPERSON: What would you like?

MALCOLM: I'd like a beer.

BARPERSON: (gesturing to the range of different beers on offer) Any type of beer ...

MALCOLM: Oh yes, I note the branding strategies of VB, Heineken, etc., but I just want a beer. I don't want to limit myself to just one type, if you know what I mean.

BARPERSON: (picking up a schooner glass) Would you like it in a schooner, mate?

MALCOLM: I acknowledge the role of mateship in Australian life, and in advertisements for certain types of beer, but what does that have to do with ...

Malcolm Farnsworth is emulating the style of Michelle Grattan, who is a fan of politics rather than any one party or individual. This is someone who likes the sizzle rather than the sausage, and who needs the memory of a goldfish to find drama and tension in the most lame of set-pieces. In this piece, she lets Warren Entsch confuse himself with Jesus Christ.

It was Entsch's job as Whip to keep Slipper in line. Entsch and Slipper have known one another for years. Entsch is aware of the shock of Slipper accepting the Deputy Speakership last September and should have considered himself warned. Having thus failed in his job, Entsch comforts himself with divine comparisons. It should set the stage for a rollicking piss-take, but Grattan spoils it with fault-on-both-sides as though the business of politics should be to avoid dramas like this.

The Coalition had been living on a knife edge of anticipation, despite many Liberals talking about the likelihood of a full-term Parliament. But the reality check hadn't quite got into Abbott's head (although at his drinks for journalists on Tuesday he jokingly alluded to his excessive optimism at his 2010 Christmas function, in thinking he might by now be in the Lodge).

One Liberal says Abbott has been "stuck in a mindset that we could be in an election any time".

It's not just a mindset, or a psychological issue with Abbott himself. The Coalition's whole strategy has involved sprinting where the longer game of the marathon was more appropriate. The whole way the Coalition ignores the idea that it has to offer an alternative, and its desire to shirk the risk that it may be less appealing than that offered by the incumbents, is what's at stake here. Who said what at some party is neither here nor there.

Even without the new circumstances, over the summer, Abbott would have needed to readjust, to try to look more prime ministerial - to become more than the tactical oppositionist (though he has to remain that too).

So now we're offering strategic advice to Tony Abbott? Why not, given forty years of reporting, examine the idea of Abbott "readjust[ing], to ... look more prime ministerial", and whether he really is capable of it.

One Liberal says the opposition cannot go on living "week to week, month to month" - there can't be excuses now for putting off the long view. "Tony probably appreciates it's a marathon, not a sprint. I don't think he's particularly keen about that. It's a tough task to hold things together over the longer term, maintain discipline, keep everyone happy." But now "he can't ignore people who have views on core policy issues".
Abbott will also have to think about whether he is getting wide enough advice: this year there has been a lot of internal party criticism that he relies on too narrow a circle, and especially on his chief of staff, Peta Credlin. He would do best to both broaden his advisory circles and to be seen by his troops to be doing so.

Again: can he do it? Has he demonstrated that he can flick this switch, or not?

The idea that "if you've got the quote, you've got the story" is bullshit, but it's central to the goldfish mentality that Grattan applies to reporting. She has no excuse for not recognising that "no, no, no" has lost its power in the face of substantial achievements from the government, that Abbott can't get a new narrative and that Credlin - the latter-day Ainslie Gotto - can't do it for him. Grattan's apprehension of "rogue events" shows she is such the creature of Canberra that she can barely explain it to outsiders, so her only hope is to report anonymously what someone sidled up to her and said at a cocktail party.

Bad Labor polls are Abbott's lifeblood. A significant recovery by Gillard would drain some of that away. Gillard's polls will be determined by how the government performs in coming months.

See, that just isn't good enough. It makes the reader cry out ""Well, der!", a sign that your authority and communicative skills are not quite what they should be. There should be more to a potential Prime Minister than some bloodless husk, don't you think? Well, don't you? Sometimes I swear Grattan is using Glenn Milne as her ghostwriter.

It's far from clear that the government will be re-elected, but so what? The time between elections is the very stuff of government and politics, not some dull interval punctuated by cocktail parties until you can traipse around the "shires" once again and admire the people's representatives patronising those whom they would represent. It's absolutely clear that there are substantial shifts underway in the politics of this country, and while Malcolm Farnsworth and Michelle Grattan are well placed to observe and report on these, they simply aren't doing the job.

Australia's second-worst political machine

2011-11-27T22:12:00.000+11:00

Australia's second-worst political machine has to be the LNP in Queensland (NSW Labor is worst). Yes, the Frankenstein's monster of this country's politics, made up of the Liberal and National Parties in that state, bits of One Nation and God only knows who or what else.

Like all Queenslanders they have their dumb luck. They contributed nine seats to Abbott's so-close-but-yet-so-far at the last eletion, and at the next state election they look odds-on to win. The latter is simply unbelievable considering what a rabble they are. Under the Politically Homeless theory that the polls don't matter but underlying political quality does, the next Qld election is the LNP's to lose. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory (or some result like Newman losing his seat but Boofhead Seeney becoming Premier) cannot be ruled out.

The thing is that if the LNP do win state government next year, it will lance the anti-Labor mood going into the Federal election. Whatever happens at the next election the LNP vote will go down in Queensland.

The LNP should have no chance in the next Queensland election. Its state parliamentary line-up is almost absent of people capable of being good and innovative ministers. It is facing an incumbent government that has been in so long that it is populated by people who either have just been in the public eye too damn much over the years, or who are bloodless hacks. Yet, the LNP's central weakness is its party machine: it's too intrusive and will be unable to resist the urge to jerk elected parliamentarians back into line.

Nobody who isn't a paid-up LNP member voted for Bruce McIvor. Newman will bristle at this and set up some sort of showdown where the LNP must choose between him and McIvor, and McIvor will win it (or, will not be smart enough to let Newman appear to win it). The Queensland Parliamentary team, led by Jeff Seeney, know which side their bread is buttered on and will not side with Newman (had McIvor persuaded an LNP MP to stand down for Newman, things might have been different; Newman is on his own). After they lose, the inevitable conclusion will be that McIvor needs more power over the LNP and he will get it.

People hate machines like that and it will hamper the Feds, too. The Queensland Libs had to temper their wilder excesses when they were part of a nationwide organisation, particularly in federal elections. The same was true of the Nats (to a lesser extent, with Queensland having a disproportionate place in the nationwide organisation, and the record of the Joh Nationals in 1987). As the LNP, they're a law unto themselves.

Of the 20 remaining LNP Members of the House of Reps, seven will be 60 or older in 2013. They've all (apart from Jane Prentice) had a good go. None of them could bring themselves to step down in 2010, seriously believing the Abbott pitch that they had one shot left. Being mostly in safe seats, the LNP could have taken advantage of good polls and replaced them with solid people with good potential - if only they had any such people available:

Bruce Scott is just being bloody-minded in not standing down for Barnaby Joyce. True, Joyce is a moron who will probably flame out within 5-10 years, but the LNP and the Federal Nats need Barnaby more than they need Scott.
Warren Truss is going through the motions because he doesn't know how to do anything else. Truss holds the electorate with the lowest per-capita income in the country and it is an indictment and a mockery of Labor and the left that they can't mount a serious case to represent local people there.
For all the Federal Nationals' supposed boldness in resolving the CSG-farming conflict squarely in favour of farmers, the LNP is trying to play both sides on this issue. They are absolutely flat-footedly vulnerable to a well-orchestrated campaigns in farming communities, in the only state where a majority of the population lives beyond the state capital.
Alex Somlyay is only pissed off at Slipper because the latter had the guts to stand up and take the prize, and it is now more true to say that Slipper has achieved more than Somlyay ever has or can.

Ah yes, Slipper.

If the LNP was any sort of political machine it would have dumped Slipper before the last election (or the one before that) and last Thursday's events need not have occurred. Slipper has outfoxed them all, and while he has more past than future he is now in a position to be in for a good time rather than a long time. It's one thing to be outmaneuvered by a master but Abbott and Pyne accept no masters; this is their tragedy with Gillard, too, another opponent they don't respect and can't beat.

Turkeys like McIvor should have realised that in such a supposedly tight situation require all hands to the pump, and that characters like Slipper require careful management - part of which includes the occasional swallowing of pride. The fact that they forced Slipper into a corner, where his only options were betraying the LNP or accepting extinction, show that the LNP are not the cluey professionals they regard themselves to be. The same applied to Abbott, but Parliament does not sit for most of the year - for most of the year MPs go to their electorates, and in Queensland Coalition MPs are subject to the tender mercies of the LNP. Slipper's slippage is mainly the LNP's fault, with contributory negligence on the part of Abbott, and yes Slipper himself.

Slipper hasn't led a life of blameless purity but neither has he been charged with anything. Craig Thomson's handling of funds at a NGO have received much more focus than Slipper's handling of public monies. If the press gallery really was holding politicians to account, Slipper would be washed up long ago. The Sunshine Coast Daily has done what it can but the press gallery is full of journalists who consider the work of the mighty Daily to be beneath them.

Abbott's threat to go after Slipper like Faulkner and Ray did to Colston in the late 1990s is absolutely hollow, for two reasons.

When you read about Faulkner and Ray at Senate Estimates Committees, you get some inkling of what a House of Review is supposed to be. When you see Coalition Senators at Senate Committees today, they take a very firm grasp of the wrong end of the stick and wave it around, hoping it will get them on television, while huge issues with the government's performance pass unnoticed before their very eyes. The Coalition do not have the capability to run such a forensic campaign over months and months; I mean, Michael Ronaldson, I ask you (well, people like Kelly O'Dwyer or Jamie Briggs might, but Credlin and Abbott are hardly going to get over themselves enough to ask them).

The second reason is blowback. Slipper was and is, shall we say, his own man in lots of ways. Even so, it is impossible to believe that his whole political operation over 19 years as a Coalition MP ran absolutely parallel to that of the LNP, Liberal and National Parties. To go after Slipper's associates, donors, fundraisers, enablers and old muckers generally, you are going to incur a lot of collateral damage on people who are pretty central to the operations of the LNP itself. Slipper is Gillard's man to some extent, but any trawl back through receipts and meetings and who said what and who did what when is unlikely to include a lot of rusted-on Labor people.

The McIvor LNP machine is an accident waiting to happen. The next Queensland election is the LNP's to lose and at the very least they may end up with less of a public endorsement than they might hope. Don't give me any of this crap about "too early to tell" for the Federal election, only poll junkies believe that. They are structurally weak and as such are more vulnerable than the lagging indicator of polling might allow). Speaking of people who've overstayed their welcome:

Chief opposition whip Warren Entsch, a blunt North Queenslander, doesn't feel the need to hold his tongue about his erstwhile colleague Peter Slipper. "He's played the role of Judas," he said yesterday. "He's accepted his 30 pieces of silver.

Betrayal, perhaps; but you only ever accuse someone of being a Judas if you've already assumed Christ for yourself. That's always a stretch for mortals, particularly so for politicians. There was a time when conservatives would cop a lot of friendly fire for that, and backtrack accordingly. Entsch's job is to convince the Coalition backbench that there is nothing to be gained from ragging the Speaker, and that patience is the best approach to such a man.

The McIvor LNP machine is similar to the "Sussex Street" machine of the NSW Labor Right. In the 2007-11 term of NSW Parliament the machine got way out in front of the parliamentary party, such that successive Labor Premiers weren't regarded as speaking for their government or even their party. By the time the election came around the machine was rejected and the parliamentary team with it. This is the fate awaiting the LNP: one day a LNP Premier is going to say something Bruce McIvor doesn't like, and the Premier had better win because otherwise they, the LNP and possibly McIvor are all finished. McIvor won't cop the slightest infringement to his authority, so watch a (potential) LNP government scuttle itself over a trifle.

That said, Labor have to get rid of Andrew Fraser. He's the nearest thing Labor have to born-to-rule. Shunt him off to Canberra, or send him to a menial job in the backblocks Cultural Revolution style, but on no account must he become Opposition Leader or Premier without a long walk through the wilderness. It just isn't right and will do more harm than good.

Over the coming year the LNP should, but won't, set about reinventing itself for and in government, on the state and federal levels. Under the McIvor crew they can't and won't do it, so the story of limited people up against their limits will be the stuff of great political drama.

When the bubble bursts

2011-11-21T18:35:00.001+11:00

The dynamic nature of politics means that a policy vacuum rarely remains a vacuum for long (even so, this does not mean a policy can't be described as vacuous almost indefinitely). The whole Abbott-Credlin method of opposing every policy Labor puts up is starting to implode because people need to act on the basis of what's real. You can't sustain anyone or anything on the fantasy that a couple of media-management junkies seek to project, as though it were - or might one day become - real.

This is the problem that the Coalition face with the mining tax, as reported here and here. The legislation hasn't been passed, but recent examples with the carbon price and the US base that Howard lusted after for a decade show that the government can now be taken at its word when it says that it intends to push ahead with a particular policy. The MRRT not only promises big bickies but enables a shift away from income and business taxes, benefitting taxpayers and government alike.

When the opposition resources spokesman, Ian Macfarlane, said over the weekend the Coalition would consider supporting amendments to lift the threshold, he urged people not to get carried away. The Coalition, he said, would still abolish the tax if elected.

If the legislation was destined to pass, in the interim the Coalition may as well ameliorate its impacts.

However, a small but growing group in the Coalition is urging a rethink. One MP, who comes from a mining state and who was vehemently opposed to the tax when it was announced a year ago, told this column the group believes the threshold should be lifted to give smaller miners a break but the tax retained to ensure the bigger miners contribute.

Such a policy about-face would be a humiliation for Tony Abbott, who has vowed to fight the tax to his last political breath and, for this reason, it is unlikely he will flip.

Abbott backflips all the time, and the press gallery never call him on it. Abbott has to answer how he will raise the revenue other than through the MRRT, and the press gallery never (in the Peter Fray sense of the word 'never') call him on that either.

There is also the question of broadening the tax beyond iron ore and coal. Gold is enjoying super-profits and so are rare earths; why they should be excluded from this tax is unclear. It shouldn't care what stage the negotiations are at; at Christmas I shall be having ham, but this is not to say that I'm holding talks with the relevant pigs.

Anyway, back to the Coalition: they aren't having much luck with finding cost savings so additional sources of revenue that can't be shunted off-shore is a better bet than they would credit. The people calling for the broadening of the tax base to include long term super profits are not only right but are likely to prevail when the Coalition eventually makes it back to government.

They are likely to prevail because there is no alternative. Abbott and the leadership group could kill the idea of the MRRT remaining in place under a Liberal government simply by coming up with some other funding model. From the Coalition, any chatter would stop because The Party Line had been decided, end of. To do that, however, would require some consideration on the Liberals' part as to where Australia is at right now, where we're going and the right option among the many that will help us get there. This policy development isn't happening, and announcements that it is underway should not be taken at face value. The Federal Coalition does not do policy any more. It does press releases instead.

So apparently Abbott is "playing down suggestions that some Coalition MPs would prefer the scheme be amended and retained" - well he would, wouldn't he. It might be enough for The Australian to take as given but it isn't enough for the rest of us. The Australian is a useful guide to what the current Coalition leadership is thinking but it is not a useful guide as to what is going on or what should happen.

Here's what John Howard would have done: he would recognise this backbench rumbling as a challenge to his leadership. He would have come out with a defiant statement that his position was clear and he wasn't going to deviate from it - then he would have taken soundings among his backbench. The weaker souls would have stopped their comments on Howard's announcement and assured him everything was fine. The stronger ones would speak to Howard politician to politician: you're giving me nothing to work with here. Do you really expect either of us to win any votes at all promising FA and plenty of it? Howard would see the sense of this (provided it wasn't leaked) and act accordingly, quietly, denying that he'd backed down but doing what needed to be done.

Abbott is too proud for that, and hasn't been through the wringer like Howard had (not that Abbott would or could survive half the adversity that Howard went through).

Another sign of the Coalition vacuum is the NBN. Yes, the Coalition policy is that they're against it and will repeal it, while at the same time Coalition MPs want their fair share, mocking that on which they feed. Your garden-variety hypocrisy and feeble charges thereof just don't cut it here. We all want better broadband, but there was no credible alternative to the NBN before the last election and there isn't one now.

MPs are doing their job when they call for a government service to be extended to their constituents. If there was an alternative broadband strategy, Coalition MPs could offer it as the alternative to citizens wanting that service. This puts Coalition MPs in an uncomfortable position but not an impossible one.

It is political suicide to expect politicians to choose between their constituents and their leadership. Constituents ensure that a politician keeps their job; leadership threatens politicians with loss or diminution of their job. Any Coalition MP/Senator knows Peta Credlin won't help them get another job. Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd and Brendan Nelson and every other party leader who ever got rolled, did so on the basis that their 'leadership' was imperilling the ability of the politicians they led to appeal effectively to their constituents.

This is particularly true with a populist leadership; if people want the NBN or MRRT, who is the leader to say we can't have it? On what basis, within what framework and what priorities - and offering what alternative - can the contrary claim be made?

Into the policy vacuum go a series of politicians who can't accept the vacuum is there as part of some wider aesthetic. They fill it with the status quo because people, inside Canberra and out, can relate to what's actually true and real and tangible. Despite what media management ~~frauds~~ professionals might think, reality is a great starting point from which to develop policy, and there should be more of it. If there's any conflict between what voters want and what feeds the leader's vanity, you can't expect retail politicians to vote for what feeds the leader's vanity.

The only way you can get clarity on policy is not for one person or another to hand out a songsheet and pleading with/shrieking at people to sing from it. The only way you can get clarity on policy is to have clear policies, that candidates can tailor to their audience.

True, only journalists really care about detailed policy and there is the Hewson thing. Hewson had to go into detail because he didn't have decades of frontline political experience to draw upon. That said, a detailed policy that is based on some sort of consistent bedrock of proven behaviour and principle resonates even with voters who don't pay much attention to politics. This is what happened for the Coalition once they got rid of Downer in 1995-96; they released a whole lot of policies that weren't particularly detailed but set out broad parameters. People saw them and thought: yep, sounds like what you'd expect from the Liberals. Howard knew he couldn't get away with what Abbott still thinks of as his only option: "trust me", with a wink and a grin.

Labor isn't improving because Gillard "seems more Prime Ministerial", as the press gallery would have it ("Waiter! Another jug of Old Prime Ministerial, put it on my tab!"). Labor is improving because they've stopped with the announceables and have something to show for them at long last. This isn't a game of competing vacuums any more; the party that made the most convincing break with the politics of 2010 wins in 2013. Right now Labor only look unbeatable because the Coalition are still playing 2010 politics, it's what they're best at. The Coalition aren't in the game (poll junkies please note: the polls will catch up to reflect this reality. Polls are what economists call 'lagging indicators': they are not useful at predicting behaviour two years out, only assessments of structural capability can do that).

There was a time when the Coalition policy vacuum acted as a bubble that saw the Coalition float above the government and bounce off solid realities and even the odd pointed question. Since the government has stopped responding to that vacuum with its own counter-vacuum, people and things are getting sucked into the Coalition vacuum in a way that the party's leadership can no longer control. Using that vacuum as a platform is about as politically stable as a multistory building in Christchurch (it takes real talent to mix three metaphors in one paragraph, but as ever it's the thought that counts).

People want to vote Liberal because they want stability, and people only do vote Liberal when they can credibly offer that. Nobody votes Liberal because they're enamoured with some eccentric in sluggos who could do any random thing at any random time to any random person or group of people. Nobody who insists the contrary ought to be as safe atop the Liberal Party as they appear to be.

Draconian journalism

2011-11-16T20:04:00.001+11:00

Legislation and regulation is an inexact science and in Australia they tend to be light on punishments for their own sake. Penalties are put into certain laws with a view to modifying behaviour for the greater good. Some people don't want their behaviour modified, and they can have their go at changing it but generally it is possible to live and work within this country's laws without necessarily cowering.

An example of this is the carbon price. It is not, despite what some would have you believe, designed to suck as much cash from the economy as possible and funnel it into the great sucking maw of government. It is designed to modify the behaviour of industries that emit carbon pollution into the atmosphere as a by-product of what they do. The price imposes costs upon those producers, giving them an incentive to minimise their carbon emissions. Getting people to minimise carbon emissions is the policy objective.

In reporting the debates leading up to the passage of the carbon price legislation, it is more than fair for journalists such as Murphy to quote opponents of the scheme describing the legislation as 'draconian'. It's a journosphere cliche that unwanted legislation is 'draconian', and lobbyists wanting to draw media attention are best advised to use their cliches so that they can bolt them together and assemble some content.

'Draconian' comes from the Latin word dracon, meaning 'dragon', a mythical creature which inspires fear but which does not actually exist.

There are journalists who are employed to report on legislation passing through Federal Parliament. One of them is Katharine Murphy. Her working life involves watching legislation being formed: the debates among stakeholders, the development of bills for submission to parliament and the lobbying by lobbyists, and the horsetrading by politicians as the bills proceed through both houses of parliament (well, like most press gallery journalists she doesn't come close to covering the full range of her brief, but her editor doesn't push her and press gallery groupthink encourages her to think that whatever she does is sufficient).

Katharine Murphy should have plenty of experience in listening to dire warnings of self-interested lobbyists and rentseekers, warning that this or that measure will be 'draconian' and will have far-reaching and dire effects on the economy and Australia's way of life generally. She should know that few, if any, of those spectres actually come to pass.

In this piece, Murphy acts like just another self-interested rent-seeker and insists that any outcome from the Independent Media Inquiry can only ever be - yes, you guessed it - draconian.

She tried to develop a bit of perspective, with that hand-wringing about how journalists have brought it all on themselves, and maybe she's right to despair of her managers and their peers across the mainstream media to accept that reader interaction is the way things are done now (and that decades of journosphere tradition to the contrary are not only invalid but counterproductive):

If there's intent behind Finkelstein's persistent interrogation on matters such as whether there should be a statutory regulator for newspapers, an automatic right of reply when people are wronged or whether the Press Council's standards need to be strengthened - then the industry is in for a swift kick in the pants.

And the worst of it is we deserve this whole discussion. We've brought it on ourselves. We have soiled what should be an open-and-shut case for self-regulation by abusing the privilege, by arrogantly failing to accept that the freedom of journalism carries with it significant responsibility: to get it right, to be fair, to understand the difference between fact and contention.

Part of the call for openness and feedback that social media makes possible - and necessary - is that the mainstream media should have gotten over itself and adapted to build communities of interest, rather than propping up the walls of legalism and bluster that has maintained those organisations throughout the centuries. Commercial pressures have failed to move them forward, so a kick in the pants may well be their only method of locomotion (yes, 'at some point'; it is possible that Finkelstein's report will be shelved and that the issues he raised will be revisited later). It will certainly be better for the mainstream media than the defensive assumptions they operate under currently.

Because the practice of journalism is not actually about us. It's about you, the readers who rely, still, on the veracity of what we do; and who need someone, institutionally, to stand up and ask questions where there are real abuses of power.

Yes, the practice of journalism really is about those who are employed as journalists, and how well or badly they do their job. Something can be true without being important.

Journalists should of course be alert to abuses of power, but there are three main issues with that:

It is almost impossible that any such abuses will be uncovered within the press gallery at Parliament House.
Given the scare campaign about how any and all restrictions on journalism are and must be 'draconian', are these the people who really can distinguish loud and obvious hype from quiet and obscure truths?
Far-reaching Watergate-style abuses are few and far between, and can't fill up hourly/daily news reporting requirements. Reporting is best served in explaining what policies and legislation is coming at us, explaining the context and the effects of those, and asking: is this what you really wanted?

The most impressive journalism Murphy did was far from Canberra and its stultifying groupthink: here, a real story with real impacts on real people. She could have travelled to the APY lands and to those communities already interventioned against to see what this might mean, or her editors could've done so - but there's no regulation that can weigh against poor follow-through. It's a lie to assume that reporting on what government actually does must be worthy and dull, while writing about trivia (e.g. blow-by-blow accounts of Question Time) is compelling reading and high-quality journalism. It's a cover for sloppy and boring journalism.

Worse than that, it's a lie that makes journalists feel better about themselves inversely to the regard they are held by the society they're supposed to serve. This sustaining lie can be compared to the increasingly rare highs experienced by the addict in the degenerative phase of their addiction. The tragedy of Murphy and others is that they're dimly aware of their problem but cannot snap out of it.

Forgive me sounding furrowed-browed and uncompromising, but I've had the privilege of a long apprenticeship with Michelle Grattan, a person who epitomises a simple journalistic creed - take all the steps you can to get it right, and if you don't know, don't pretend.

To get what right? This idea that you're meant to be impressed with the firmness of the grasp of the stick rather than whether or not you're grasping the wrong end of it (or, indeed, the wrong stick) just makes me laugh.

A prime example of that is this, in which Annabel Crabb portrays Gillard and The Situation locked together in combat like Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty tumbling down Reichenbach Falls. It is possible to examine what it is they're arguing over, and what the consequences are of either prevailing, but the Grattan Doctrine is that to describe the conflict in as dull a way as possible is to have the story (with the implicit pox-on-both-houses that comes from any conflict in which you're not engaged).

Another example is where a journalist will accurately quote a politician, business leader or someone else saying something which isn't true, deliberately or otherwise; as though the words should be taken on face value and not related to the facts behind them, or those affected by such crap-talking. This is a failure of journalism and its focus on a false fact/opinion dichotomy means that powerful people are taken at face value.

I'd love to see "an open-and-shut case for self-regulation", or even an example of where it has worked to ensure probity and accountability in any other facet of Australian life. Self-regulation with no legal checks only ever works for insiders against the interests of outsiders. No sly co-option of readers/viewers by journos can change that. I thought Jonathan Holmes would provide it, but I was wrong about that too.

The only acceptable self-regulation of the media is, apparently, Uncle Jonathan squeezed into a spare ten minutes on Monday nights: wagging his finger, raising his eyebrow, with a bemused and indulgent smirk at scallywag young journalists trampling this and tripping over that in pursuit of "the story". Occasionally he gets up on his high horse about Bogan Media (e.g. Today Tonight, A Current Affair, Alan Jones), but either way there's no harm done and nothing really changes.

To paraphrase Holmes up to, but not beyond, the point of parody: journalism is conducted for no purpose beyond the employment of journalists. We journalists only rope in the public to our defence when we feel that inertia - which succeeds in dampening most initiatives - might not defeat a particular initiative. When we're back to our default state of smugness, which is inevitable among mortals who regard themselves as indispensable, we just shunt the public back out into the cold so that they may just consume in silence that which we choose to pump at them. Any issues should be sorted out behind closed doors, because that's what's best for everybody. Nothing to see here, move along now, no need for an Inquiry! We chaps conduct all the inquiry one could possibly want in the front bar of the pub nearest the office. See you there!

Holmes seriously believes that your only acceptable recourse against misreporting is to accost media owners Kerry Stokes, in any of the many avenues where you might have the chance to approach the man at all. Leaving journalists to do what they will ensures their freedom and that of us all, apparently. The preceding paragraph is not nearly as absurd as the core beliefs of an experienced media practitioner. The Holmes model assumes that journalism is simply a conduit for reporting issues raised by others and is not a source of legitimate or substantial issues in itself.

The Holmes model does not work for those of us who are not journalists, and who can't be sure that editors/news directors or senior executives would take our call (the SMH's Readers' Editor and the ABC complaints process are a waste of time, a source of instruction to readers/viewers rather than a channel for feedback by them/us which materially changes the way reporting is conducted). Perhaps it isn't meant to, if you take the approach that the media is journos first and bugger the rest of you; if you take the approach that "the plethora of media platforms" needn't materially change the way journalism is practiced.

The case for regulating journalism is much the same as that for regulating companies: if the regulatory settings are wrong, innovation and economic growth are stifled, but if they are right then it can free economic growth and innovation from market restrictions such as collusion, graft, and abuses of market power such as monopoly, monopsony and oligopoly (these being forms of power vulnerable to abuse to which the Institute for Public Affairs and Centre for Independent Studies are wilfully blind). A balanced approach is, given the evidence of other organisations, possible; to complain that these processes are imperfect is no argument against regulation per se.

The challenge facing the Independent Media Inquiry is to identify a balanced approach to regulation of the media, having identified exactly what is being balanced. It does no-one any favours to pretend that Finkelstein is either a dupe or a some sort of catspaw for dark and sinister forces, particularly when reasonable change has been ignored or dismissed for so long. The idea that the only outcome possible from the Finkelstein Inquiry is a kind of blunt legalistic cudgel that can only stun, maim or even kill journalism in this country, is unworthy of experienced journalists and deserves far less respect than it has so far received. Even less is the idea that the media is already staggering under the burden of regulation besetting it already: this is the very sort of thing you get from lobbyists.

You'd hope that experienced journos would stop and think about parroting the most inane lines of lobbyists. Why be constructive when you can just sit back and shriek about how 'draconian' it all is (or might be)? To do that, they'd have to get over themselves: some can't even do that, but lip service is not the only alternative and nor is it adequate. It's hard to pity a profession so committed to its destruction, and despite what Tim Dunlop thinks, there's no incentive to encourage it in its collective folly but every reason to encourage successful breaks from journalistic groupthink wherever they can be found.

Bigger than Mark Textor

2011-11-12T13:34:00.001+11:00

Every Saturday, Mark Textor writes a column for The Sydney Morning Herald , and every week it is rubbish. Textor has been all over the world and spoken to interesting people, yet all he can do is offer insights into his own piss-poor self. What is he trying to say in the latest one? That although he fights the conservative corner he has a sneaking affection for the left? That might be what he's trying to say, but what he's really saying is two things: first, he's so awesome that he can't get over himself; and second that his whole modus operandi doesn't bear scrutiny even from himself, and it evaporates as soon as he starts looking at it.

The idea that ordinary Australians are beset by elites does conservatives no favours. Labor was at its weakest when it raged against "Mr Menzies and his wealthy friends". By playing the politics of envy it forfeited its chance at shaping the postwar future and had no answer to communism. Labor has only become competitive in Australian politics when it sets that rubbish aside.

At least, though, wealth can be defined. I think of the way a dictionary might define 'elite':

a group of persons exercising the major share of authority or influence within a larger group

Then I read Textor's cod definition of 'elite':

We think of the academics, the writers, artists, the Melbourne Club folk, the members of the pulpit politics clergy. Even human rights lawyers.

Speak for yourself: I've rarely seen such a harmless bunch in my life. The Melbourne Club might have been a big deal in 1951 or 1881 but it has little impact on Australian life in 2011. Academics have awesome power in an uneducated society, less so now. Do people selling jewellery or watercolours at Mindil Beach Markets really exude serious clout? As for "the pulpit politics clergy", I don't know what Textor means and neither, it appears, does he.

For a bloke like me, from the suburbs of Darwin, they sound like an awful little group. Their type would be decked within five minutes in one of my favourite Darwin pubs. Two minutes in the old Dolphin Pub.

Apparently Textor wants you to take him at face value. He's the son of an NT policeman; I doubt he spent much time at the Dolphin or any other pub, or even glides by them in his stretch limo on rare visits. If this piece were published in the NT News he'd be called on it. For the effete readers of the SMH, a line like that adds swagger and colour to a life dedicated to turning powerless fear into powerful rage and avoiding the consequences of doing so.

The rest of the article describes how Textor had to go to Eastern Europe to find decent and good people working away at jobs that weren't lucrative, but about which they cared deeply. For a bloke like him from Darwin, it is unclear why he didn't slide on down to the Royal Darwin Hospital and watch the nurses stitch back together people who'd been decked at Darwin's pubs. For a bloke like him from Darwin, it remains unclear to him why people do any job that pays so little and from which you can only draw non-material satisfaction.

People in the caring professions can draw heavily upon non-material issues such as community benefit and care for others, assuming that it counts for more than it does for blokes like Mark Textor. What is unclear is why it grates on blokes like Mark Textor as much as it does.

In fact, I'm an atheist

There are many solid intellectual cases to be made for atheism, but blokes like Mark Textor don't make them. This leaves blokes like Mark Textor vulnerable to the two main arguments that religious people make about atheists:

they can't imagine anything bigger than themselves; and
when you don't believe in something, you'll believe anything.

Guilty on both counts. When Textor runs a focus group he believes he has aggregated the collective wisdom of that group, which enables him to screech at elected officials that he knows more about their electorates than they do. Textor's belief that artists and human rights lawyers run our country is every bit as well-founded as other people's belief in Cthulhu or Yahweh. By failing to acknowledge anything more awesome than himself (whether notions of community and humanity, or a divine presence above and beyond), this bloke from Darwin is a sadly diminished little man.

The thing that struck me about [Jan Carnogursky] this former associate of the "elite" was that he had fought for true democracy, he had earned his stripes. He had done what he'd done for the right reasons.

What a sucker, eh? Carnogursky's opponent Vladimir Meciar presided over the asset-stripping of Slovakia's few assets. People who do that sort of thing truly deserve to be considered elite, marrying political power to economic power. To do that sort of thing in a society like Australia, it is necessary to engage someone like Mark Textor to pump out the FUD and skew the debate. The idea that people might presume to engage in politics without paying him or his brother-from-another-mother Bruce Hawker for the privilege is what it means to be "fiscally clueless". It is necessary to get people to regard public debates with the sort of incredulity Mark Textor applies to people who actually participate in them for no direct personal benefit:

And what is an actor "risking" apart from a fragile ego in criticising a political position on immigration, or a chief executive doing the same who doesn't live in a suburb affected by social change?

Why would an actor, or anyone else, care about the sort of society they lived in? You can't get it through to Textor so don't even try (this lack of ability to understand others and their motivations counts against Textor's perceived reputation as a political strategist).

Where is "the suburb [un]affected by social change"? Seriously, where? Which electorate is it in?

This too does Textor no favours.

But one thing is for sure. Whether they're annoying, patronising, paternalistic or not, I'm glad the elite exist. I don't like them, and I disagree violently with most, but I like that they are there, somewhere.

All the adjectives in the second sentence can apply to, say, Alan Jones. The rest of that final paragraph reads like the work of a man floundering. Textor has set up a straw man and, in knocking it over, it has fallen on him and pinned him down to an unsustainable position. He's too proud to ask for help so he needs to start by saying that the imaginary group against which he and his imaginary friends have been violent mightn't be so bad after all. It's both feeble and funny, this projection of pomposity onto others and a complete misunderstanding as to where power lies in society. All the great comics show their appreciation for that truism - Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Andrew Bolt - and now a private man who wants to exert public power from a weakly defensive mindset has stumbled into their ranks.

Maybe he does have such contempt for SMH readers that he'd write this shite, and you do yourself few favours by reading it - except to understand what sort of mind lies behind the focus groups, policies and communications of the Liberal Party and his other clients. Textor is so caught up in his imaginary constructs that he can't present to his clients an accurate picture of what is going on out there. He's testament to the idea that travel broadens the mind but he still has to work on the idea that other people matter even if they don't give you money.

Update 14 Nov: Another example of Textor's work is here, strangely unacknowledged by Coorey. CrosbyTextor are in charge of Qantas' public and regulatory perceptions. After the debacle of the board trying to sell the airline to private equity companies in 2009, and now this, it must be said that any further triumphs by Textor and his crew could be fatal.

The Peta Principle

2011-11-10T22:25:00.000+11:00

Over the past week the structural shortcomings of the Coalition have been highlighted as starkly as they were once skated over. The Coalition has time to deal with those shortcomings, but it does not have the perspective or the will to do so. It will not get these qualities until after they lose the next election.

(Note for those who are new to this site: I'm not interested in polls going up or down, I'm interested in who has the capacity and the wit to use power effectively. I think that the Coalition lack the capacity and the wit to govern. I think Labor have both, but are only starting to realise that and are only just starting to use them. Commenters who want to go on about how Gillard is "embattled" or Abbott is "riding high in the polls" can post on one of the MSM sites, they needn't bother posting here.)

The profile of Peta Credlin in The Weekend Australian shows the basic problem with a policy-averse Opposition. It can only go so far, but not into government, in the sort of environment that makes her such a key operator. Already the limitations of that model are starting to show and rob the Coalition of momentum: the fact that the Coalition had no story regarding Qantas (see previous post) and had nothing to say about the carbon price other than to rack off to London.

Credlin describes herself to colleagues as "the Queen of No" and her sole mission, for now, is to get Abbott into the Lodge ... She's a control freak.

When you focus on day-to-day images, as Credlin does, you might get to drive past The Lodge but you'll never get anyone elected to live in the joint. For a start you need a clue about what it is you should and shouldn't say no to, and there is no proof Credlin has such judgment. The vetting of Abbott's diary and other petty actions described by Legge tell you all you need to know about Credlin - namely that she's not ready for Prime tiMe and that she can't take Abbott there either.

All PR dollies who claim they have all the information anyone could want are bullshitters. At best they are like those people Oscar Wilde described as knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. At worst they are just bullies floundering out of their depth: nobody can or does know everything about economic policy and health policy and defence policy and all the other policies that go to make up modern government, and the idea that someone like Credlin sits in judgment on it all saying no, no, no is just too silly. She knows nothing about the country or the Liberal Party or what limits there should be on government; she'd just like a low-profile but high-impact job at the centre of it, is all. People like Kate Legge might take that on face value but I bloody won't.

"No one person should have that much influence," despairs an Abbott supporter who believes the leader needs exposure to alternative sources of advice. "She's on the road with him all the time, making herself indispensable. She does everything for him; whether he needs a cup of tea or an important policy paper, she's there. He shrieks, 'Peta, Peta, Peta'. It's too close."

Credlin is Echo to her employer's Narcissus, with her focus on the "media cycle" and her lack of understanding, let alone respect, for the longer game of the country. She should realise that Abbott is a sharply limited character and that he needs people around him that complement him, rather than just those who compliment him. This is why Abbott has no switch to flick in order to become Prime Minister; like Howard in the '80s he'd rather conviviality than challenge in his office, which leaves him free to waddle about with such utter certainty. Had he been challenged a bit and been aware of the safety net prepared for him by others, he'd be a more complete man and a better candidate for Prime Minister, and aware that the job was bigger than just him. John Howard came to realise this by the '90s, with people like Grahame Morris and Sinodinos complementing him and giving the appearance of breadth and humility that a Jesuit education clearly can't do by itself.

The fact that the Coalition went to the last election with less of an economic policy than would be necessary for a small business to get a small loan is Credlin's fault. The fact that Abbott waved through a supposedly toxic Gillard tax on 28 June that he had vowed to oppose is her fault, because she was so focused on the stunts and the correspondence or whatever that actual policy affecting thousands of Australians simply slipped by. These are far bigger blunders than the one Legge describes when she let Turnbull down. Yet, if someone like Morris or Sinodinos (but without the reputations those guys have since established) presented themselves to Abbott offering their services, you can be sure that Credlin would look the gift horse in the mouth and declare it wanting.

Poll numbers appear to support Credlin's modus operandi.

The way Credlin and Abbott work is to create a constant sense of crisis in the government, which means that any Liberals who think about alternative ways of governing the nation are splitters and not people with the wider interests of party and nation in mind. Alternative approaches are not considered because they have no capacity to do so - the Credlins of this world would look feeble arguing for one position over another, so simply insisting that the position has already been decided and forcing all Liberals to echo it might look like strength, but it doesn't last when journos and the ALP stop playing along and asking questions about what an Abbott government would do. Polls can't last in the face of structural weakness.

How would Peta Credlin know what an Abbott government would do? She gets given a brief and told to push it through. Now that she's in a top job she can't not know what an Abbott government would do but the fact is she doesn't care about much beyond the "media cycle". People who care about policy are suckers to be manipulated. Do whatever it takes, say whatever it takes, screech at people who disagree and bag them to the point where their opinions don't get a hearing. That sort of thing only works for a while, and someone with Legge's experience should know that.

Talented individuals often alienate peers.

So do talentless bullies, particularly if you can't tell the difference and share their perspective that the context (in this case, the policy direction of the putative next government) is all about them. Just because you can wheedle something through a Coalition-controlled Senate doesn't mean you are in any position to assess the workings of government policy beyond the outer rim of State Circle.

"She shouldn't tell people what to do and what not to do," complains one Liberal backbencher who has tested Abbott's patience. "It's perfectly understandable that Tony Abbott wants to stay on message. But MPs are MPs. As long as you're not a member of the executive you're entitled to talk about issues." ...

... that's where the negativity comes from, especially when you have junior shadows and MPs thinking, 'Who are you to tell me what to do? You're only a staffer'."

Legge is so starstruck with her subject that she's missed a very important principle of the way we are governed: here 'negativity' (i.e. Princess Peta not getting everything her own way) and feminism are beside the point. The fact is that a backbencher has been elected by their party and thousands of Australians outside it to represent them in the Parliament. Staffers should be very careful in abrogating the representative rights and obligations those people have, and (we are talking conservatives here) the Burkean notion that a representative owes electors free exercise of judgment (mind you, any Liberal MP or staffer who has to do a Google search as to what the hell a Burkean notion is should be sacked). Legge just skates by that, and its implication for what sort of government we might have if this person and her employer end up running it. Blithely ignoring an issue of such importance is what turns a dispassionate journalistic profile into a puff piece.

How does Credlin measure up? Reviews of her policy skills are mixed ...

They're non-existent. She is like a dog with a bone once a bill is introduced, she doesn't get to choose which bone or even the beast it's cut from, or why the hell we're butchering animals and chucking their bones around at all. That sort of perspective is essential from senior officials in a good government, and that's the standard against which you judge people like Credlin (not whether you can get idlers like Greg Hunt or Brendan Nelson to make a phone call). Look at the shambles of Coalition policy, look at Credlin's power and control-freakery, and do some journalism.

"Who is going to shirtfront Loughnane with complaints about his wife and vice versa?" worries one Liberal upset by losing the safety valve for letting off steam ... Younger conservatives defend the status quo: "In a perfect world you wouldn't want a couple in these two positions. However, they are both talented individuals. It would be to the party's detriment if one was forced out." Some argue it's a plus, with twice the networking, leak-proof communication between the leader's office and the party wing and double the investment in success.

That's fine so long as both are doing an absolutely excellent job in all respects. Those "younger conservatives" quoted really have no idea, do they: no sense of history, no sense of how a long-festering sore covered up can cripple rather than heal, and both Credlin and Loughnane are in the cover-up business. "Letting off steam"? Loughnane's only win was against Mark Latham, come on Kate.

Earlier this year former Howard cabinet minister Peter Reith failed in his bid to topple party president Alan Stockdale, who was treasurer in the Kennett government. Reith's backers traced the fingerprints of Loughnane and Credlin locking in the "old guard". Abbott had encouraged Reith to run and then made a surprise last-minute switch. "Peta got to him," one insider insists of a result that suited Loughnane's preference for the status quo.

The couple has everything riding on Abbott's success. "Peta and Brian have got stars in their eyes," snipes one insider. "They've got 'soon to be PM' fever. They think they are going to be in the Lodge in the next 10 minutes." Discontent is kept in check while Abbott prospers.

Well they would, wouldn't they. They need to think that - and inculcate that belief across the Coalition - otherwise the prospect of hard slog and weighing up competing policies for the good of the nation in challenging times is just too damn hard. A reflective Liberal Party is an environment in which neither CredLoughnane would thrive let alone succeed. No-one minds them building castles in the air but when they shriek at people as though they were serfs whose role in life was to maintain that castle - that's where the problems start. The best backroom operators are realists first, and realism means cutting people some slack incase they may one day be right about something important. That's the real reason why the Liberal Party used to think the 'broad church' was important, and the secret of its success until the 1980s. Hawke Labor had the same success until the Faustian bargain with Richo became too expensive. Credlin can't understand that: diversity is death for robots like her.

Leaving Andrew Robb out of a phone conference about superannuation is not strong, it's pathetic. If you're going to do that, do the whole Lucrezia Borgia thing and sack him for disloyalty: Robb won't come back from a sacking. A real powerbroker would have lined up Robb's replacement in Goldstein by now - or if not run for it herself, pushed one of the hapless Senators into it. That's what a real powerbroker would do, Kate Legge, not act like some nasty schoolgirl because Robb makes Bri-Bri feel insecure.

She once sought the counsel of senior Liberals on a Senate spot. They think she'd be stunning.

Well, yes - but who wouldn't? Look at the Victorian Liberal Senate team. You'd never guess that Victoria was once the jewel in the Liberal crown: someone's snippy ex, a pensioner from Ballarat who is more arse than man, and two staffers way, way out of their depth. Almost every local council boasts a more impressive line-up than the Victorian Liberal Senate team. Credlin is entitled to think that she'd be able to mix it with those clowns. Neither Legge nor Credlin nor anyone else is entitled to think that the Victorian people would be better off for such a deal, or that our heroine would take well to the medicine she dishes out: do what you're told and shut up.

For every hater there's an advocate who loves her to bits.

I'd be very surprised if it was a 1:1 ratio, but I would absolutely bet it blows out something shocking once polling day draws nigh and people still would happily get rid of Gillard only if it didn't mean Abbott getting in. The prevalence of such a perception, after two years and a lost election, is an indictment on Credlin's so-called political skills.

It is so lame doing a profile on someone who is so widely known as a bastard/bitch to trot out some sillyhead who insists they're really all rainbows and ponies. The trick is to find some evidence of that in the way policy is actually made. If the Liberals come out against the disability and injury insurance schemes, this will count for absolutely nothing at all.

"It was hard to get good people, many were exhausted, people went AWOL, they buried themselves in grief," Nelson recalls of his scramble to staff the leader's office. "I rang her to see if there was any chance she'd come back to politics. I couldn't believe my luck when she said, 'Yes, I'd love to.'"

Getting on with your life after the work is done is going "AWOL"? What an arrogant little turd.

The whole notion that Credlin is such top quality is undone by that quote - talk about damning with faint praise.

Tony Abbott is in London seeing what a post-Murdoch Anglosphere government looks like. It has more liberals in it than he'd be comfortable with. He may come away from the experience with a new perspective, realising that Credlin isn't the wind beneath his wings; if he does, he'd have to be a stronger man than he is to let her go and reshape his office and party with a breadth and reach that it doesn't currently have. He'll come back to Credlin and Credlin will lead him to stumble after stumble, week after week, snarling and spitting as her dream evaporates. Someone like Abbott might yearn for a great showdown but he'll get pecked to death by gaffes and slip-ups, and the policy equivalents of bringing a butter-knife to a knife-fight with a government growing in confidence.

At a nearby table Prime Minister Julia Gillard looks surprisingly calm given she's got the most to fear from the giraffe in the room.

Given what Legge tried to say but couldn't, Gillard is right to be calm. She has nothing to fear from Credlin, and if this government's record is any guide then after it is re-elected in 2013 they will probably offer Credlin a job, and she will probably take it; the whole Howard fabric, tattered and unsustainable, will be irreparable by those who could not tailor and trim where needed. A blood pledge here, a new tax there, low unemployment or carers' relief or - who knows, something for Aborigines - and the very things Credlin should have prevented from happening will happen because she's there and won't go away, because and not despite the vision and the competence that are as sharply limited as those of her current boss.

Peta Credlin will always come up smelling of roses, and maybe that's why Legge admires her. Only when that ceases to be the point of the exercise for the Liberal Party will it realise how much it has truly been had. Until then, accept that the situation that makes Peta Credlin possible is that party's problem. Those invertebrates who wanted to give Kate Legge the real dope on Credlin but couldn't will not be part of the next Liberal government either.

Soon after 2013 Bonnie Credlin and Clyde Loughnane will be gone, but they'll be back when the next Liberal government takes office, and the press will make a big fuss about their much-vaunted political skills for old time's sake (like they are doing with Richo now). That's a long way off though, and we'll see what happens.

Lessons from the Qantas shutdown

2011-11-07T19:04:00.000+11:00

Turn off all life support systems, I'm finished for the day
I'm on the midnight flyer and I've really got to get away
Shut down all your main engines, I'm going on reserve
There are things still undiscovered, oh I hope I've got the nerve

Shut down, turn off until the morning light
Slow down, splash down time to end the flight
Make way dream time, here comes another night
I wish I could remember where I've been

- Little River Band Shut Down, Turn Off

Qantas gave advance notice of their shutdown last week to the Coalition. Let the journos quibble about who knew what, when. The fact is when you get information like that you are meant to have an advantage: 'forewarned is forearmed' and all that.

What's also a fact is that the Coalition was no better off for having that information. Abbott just looked like a gibberer when he went on about how he expected the government to act under Section X of the Fair Work Act when he wanted them to have acted under Section Y. His whole modus operandi relies on him setting traps for the government who then falling into them, and when the government won't act to his initiative he's pretty much bereft.

The government seemed on top of the whole issue by mid-week. The person who should have alerted them to the Qantas shutdown was not only Qantas management but also the head of the Transport Workers Union, Tony Sheldon. Sheldon has been playing brinkmanship with Qantas management for weeks, warning of strikes then cancelling them at the last minute, causing uncertainty for Qantas passengers and management without looking like the bloody-minded union leader.

Old-school Qantas management would have kept the planes flying at all costs. The reason why Qantas employees have great job security and other perks can be credited to hardball unionists, but also to a management ethos that had the cash and would shovel it around to keep the business going. Sheldon thought he was dealing with old-school Qantas management, which is why he looked so rattled when management shut down the airline themselves.

Sheldon was dealing with Alan Joyce, a veteran of the shakeup of European airlines in the 1990s, and Leigh Clifford, who showed the mining unions that once management lift their game on pay and OHS the unions have little to offer prospective members. Old-school Qantas management took government protection for granted in a way that Joyce and Clifford clearly can't. He should have known that the game had changed. Sheldon was playing 1970s-style bash-and-barge rugby league in a game of Aussie Rules, where his opponent had sailed above him, taken the ball, booted a goal, and elbowed Sheldon in the eye for good measure; all without the ref seeing.

Sheldon did not look like a union leader who was outraged on behalf of his members. He wasn't doing the sort of confected bluster combined with lovin'-the-attention smugness you'd expect from Paul Howes in that position. He wasn't doing the quiet more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger determination thing that you might expect from the people currently running the ACTU. Sheldon had the sheepish look of a man who had been fucked and burned in a high-stakes game, and who then had to front the media and describe in detail just how badly he had been both, ah, fucked and, ahem, burnt, again and again.

Tony Sheldon is a big wheel in NSW Labor and is running for Federal President of the ALP. He may be the only union leader with a Chief Of Staff; a union leader needs a Chief Of Staff like your local mayor needs a goldie-lookin chain that makes them look like something from Gilbert & Sullivan. While Sheldon isn't entirely responsible for the predicament NSW Labor is currently in, it is there because he and a couple of others not only failed to stop the rot but even to identify it as such. This dispute with Qantas is not a case of teething problems, it is core business for a long-serving union leader.

The fact that he has failed to intervene effectively in his members' interests and warn a Labor government of a significant issue of policy and perception casts serious doubt over Sheldon's suitability for positions he holds now, never mind those to which he might aspire. Gillard and Albanese should refuse to have anything to do with him. What distinguished Labor powerbrokers of old from those of today is that they would have gently nudged Sheldon out of the running for the Labor Presidency, my members are priority number one, etc.

You can demonise Joyce all you like but he's given nothing away to Sheldon and the other unions involved, who are not reacting at all well to the situation Joyce and Clifford have put in front of them. Yes, Joyce and Clifford have played the game masterfully, but there's no grounds for CEO-worship there: if you are in a game and yours is the only team playing the game, how can you lose? Your opponent can shadow-box as much as they want but you only have to land a blow they're not expecting, and down they'll go. Joyce knew that, Clifford knew it - and now Sheldon's learnt the lesson good and hard, one he has no excuse for not knowing beforehand.

I wanna talk to the pilot, he's in charge of my dreams
But he insists on vanishing just as soon as he thinks he's been seen
I wanna recharge my batteries, leave me alone for awhile
We'll set off again in the morning on a wing and a prayer and a smile

But back to the Coalition (oh yes). They had the advance warning, and as usual they had a few snappy lines. What wasn't usual that it wasn't enough. The Qantas shutdown was a serious issue and in venturing comments on it, the Coalition invited serious comments. In the face of serious comments about a really important issue, the Coalition wilted.

The fact that CHOGM delegates were inconvenienced was a matter of significance for Australia, one they let slip by (showing that the Shadow Foreign Minister has little idea of the significance of such an event held in her home town, and/or little clout in Coalition strategy sessions).

They were wise to skate around the whole inconvenience to the Melbourne Cup - yes, racing is a multi-billion-dollar industry, but to most Australians it's a trifle and combined with the focus on pokies at the moment it would be a bad look for the Coalition to remind people how much they are in bed with the gambling industry.

This leaves them relying on policies on transport and industrial relations, which they don't have. It isn't good enough just to say that the details of those policies haven't been finalised, wait until the election etc. In the 1980s and '90s Liberal policies were constantly under review and when journo put John Howard on the spot he could come up with a coherent statement on most key issues, even if he was winging it, in general accordance with previously stated policy principles of the Liberal Party.

The difference now is that Tony Abbott has no principles to speak of, save the tattered DLP ones of his most callow youth. These included job security and perks for those in protected industries - the unions up against Qantas are fighting on much the same basis. They are fighting for qualities that retreated from much of the unionised workforce in the 1980s, and which the recession of the late '80s/early '90s pretty much finished off. By the late 1990s the only one gibbering about Aussie jobs for Aussies was Pauline Hanson.

Abbott could have gone for populism. I half expected to see him in an airport terminal egging on livid passengers stuck in Adelaide for four days, or strapping on the fluro to tell locked-out workers that he's the one who can guarantee cradle-to-grave job security. It is to his credit he did neither. What he needed to do was flick the switch to Prime Ministerial and show the nation what might have been, and what might be yet. He couldn't do that because he has no sense of what is in the nation's best interests, no reservoir of principle to contrast the present situation with the way it should be. This is where policy laziness bites you. Had this dispute taken place next November Abbott's position would be in question, if not in play.

There are still two years to go before an election (oh yes there are) which is plenty of time to develop some policies. If it's true that business is starting to take more of an interest in donating to the Liberal Party, then there's no reason why business can't donate time and resources to help develop some policies that go beyond dot-points. That's what a broad-based movement would do: a small, tightly-controlled outfit focused on the "news cycle" today and tomorrow won't, however. They see the Qantas dispute as an issue to be put behind them for the sake of unity and tomorrow's news cycle.

Shut down, turn off, until the morning light
Slow down, splash down, time to end the flight
Make way dream time here comes another night
I wish I could remember where I've been

Where have I been?

On a Qantas plane recently full of white-collar workers who are well and truly accustomed to contracting and outsourcing, it was at times quaint, funny and pathetic listening to pilots bleat about the perils of such an arrangement befalling them. You'll survive, guys.

The Qantas shutdown last week is the very sort of incident where people's perceptions become fixed in place: the very sorts of perceptions that are so hard to shift in election campaigns. Big industrial disputes usually go on for weeks, but this one was off the boil (if not fully resolved) within days. The whole idea that the incumbent government is incompetent is starting to look a little thin, while far from being comprehensively rebutted. The whole idea that the Coalition are no better, and may even be worse, is starting to take hold and the proof coming from this incident counts against the Coalition.

Qantas management knows what it is about and the unions up against them do not; the odd engine malfunction in some far-off place is having no impact on questions of safety, job security and engineering utility. The whole Aussie Jobs For Aussies thing is hard to distinguish from a toxic brew of self-interest and xenophobia. The only thing that will give that argument any currency at all will be the worst outcome possible, something that won't be dealt with by Fair Work Australia: a Qantas aircraft crashing to earth, with the sorts of people who were inconvenienced last week wedged among the wreckage.

Yes, Virginia, there are bigger issues at stake here than who might have phoned whom when.

Shutdown turn off until the morning light
Slow down, splash down time to end the flight
Make way dream time, here comes another night
Oh, I wish I could remember where I've been

Shutdown turn off until the morning light
Make way dream time, here comes another night

(Lyrics: Glenn Barrie Shorrock)

Exclusive*: News Limited plot exposed

2011-11-03T20:35:00.000+11:00

Simon Benson is not denying reports that he will become editor of The Daily Telegraph as early as this month.

News Ltd sources behind the push for the wannabe editor to take the job that was cruelly snatched away from him and given to some luckless ponce from The Australian not good enough to be pinched by Fairfax have confirmed he was now being advised by his closest confidants not to wait until next year but to launch a challenge as early as the second last week of November.

Senior sources within Holt Street claim the leakage of support away from Mr Whittaker, who flew out last night for some sort of Murdoch hajj, was snowballing.

"There are three things that are certain: there is a editorship challenge under way, Benson doesn't have a majority yet but has enough numbers to be a contender, and they are strategising about how to get it done," said a senior News Ltd source.

But there was mixed support for the idea of an early move, with some Murdoch minions claiming they would "deliver the editorship" to Mr Benson in February - if he waited.

In a sign Mr Whittaker is now taking seriously the threat of a challenge, an internal counter-offensive has been launched to shore up his editorship.

Mr Whittaker is reported over the past week to have lobbied key Holt Street figures with influence over executive members as to how Mr Hartigan takes his coffee and what his recreational pursuits are. Steve Lewis is also believed to have privately warned several NSW News colleagues that he would resign if they supported a move to impose Mr Benson as editor, having had his reputation shackled to Mr Benson over one of the silliest examples of journalism in Australian history.

Politically Homeless has spent the last two weeks sitting on reports that News Ltd executives were softening in their support for Mr Whittaker following the bungled anti-terrorism raid and their deepening concerns that News Ltd can't just make stuff up and sell it as though it were real.

Should Whittaker be replaced with Benson? Tell us below

"It sent Whittaker's office into a panic. Lewis has told people that he would quit if we went to Benson but I doubt he was serious. He wouldn't want to be remembered as the bloke that brought down a News Ltd masthead," a senior member of the News Ltd executive said.

"That's our job."

"I mean, can you imagine if Fairfax or the ABC spiked an anti-terrorism investigation? We'd be all over them like ants at a picnic. Now, all the Ala Akba or whatever they're called have to do is gissa call, and we'll bugger up the AFP investigation for them."

"We're handy like that."

Mr Lewis would not comment last night.

News Ltd has only one working week left after this week, after which employees will run over to Pyrmont and beg to be hired by Fairfax, or at the Fish Markets, or by anyone really, to avoid the next visit from the Great Helmsman with pink slips in both of his scaly, spotted fists.

Sources close to Mr Whittaker said he was well advanced on a policy pitch to address News Ltd's desperate credibility problems over issues including public transport in Sydney, the carbon tax and problem gambling.

One senior News Ltd, a Benson supporter, claimed advertisers were starting to "get edgy" over the government's unresolved editorship crisis.

"Advertisers know it's a question of when and want it sorted," they said.

Despite Mr Benson's self-professed popularity, a boost in support for the Tele if Mr Whittaker was rolled was not assured. Secret Politically Homeless research conducted recently in secret (in contrast to, say, a Federal Police raid on a terrorist cell) concluded voters believed the paper was drifting.

Other editorial candidates such as Miranda Devine and Annette Sharp refused to return calls by deadline. Even Joe Hildebrand, the Chris Pyne of journalism, refused to rule out a tilt at the top job "down the track".

Why buy the paper in the morning when you can check it for free on your phone, and then get a copy handed to you titled as "MX" in the afternoon?

Voters believe News Ltd's policies are out of synch with mainstream values, targeting key policy areas including the carbon tax and asylum seeker policy. They also expressed concern at the influence of the so-called Murdoch Family (diddly-dum, click click ... read the lyrics and change the family name).

Then again they're only punters, so fuck 'em.

* The reason why this is Exclusive to Politically Homeless is because I've made this up.

Update 5 Nov: Not content with a shot at the editorship "down the track"*, Joe Hildebrand lunges for martyrdom. Each of those amounts look pretty hefty until you realise that his employer charges that for each ad about the size of a coffee cup that appears in a newspaper. If he can get one or two of those weepy ads that Andrew Bolt's pals put together he needn't worry.

Assange and Bolt, false and unsound

2011-10-30T23:36:00.003+11:00

Julian Assange wrote an article about free speech which was wrong on a few key assumptions, particularly this:

Opinions must be shared in "a free and open encounter" because it is the competition between ideas that produces the truth. As Fredrick Siebert explained: "The true and sound will survive. The false and unsound will be vanquished. Government should keep out of the battle and not weigh the odds in favor of one side or the other."

The idea that Aborigines are an inferior people, unfit for or incapable of participating fully in Australian society, puts the lie to Siebert's wish. This is one of the most prevalent ideas in Australia. It is also false and unsound. No amount of patient engagement and disproving, nor frequent and exuberant demonstration of excellence by Aborigines, can eradicate this lantana-like idea.

I'm a liberal too, but confrontation with this reality made me change my mind. First you've got to go with the fact and work the principle around it. I might have to lose the 'liberal' tag, but that's OK, it isn't all about me. Doing the reverse, like Assange does, simply does not work.

Hate speech laws in Australia are a form of censorship, backed by sanction and justified by the perceived need to protect historically persecuted minorities and maintain racial harmony.

Persecuted minorities don't need to be protected, they need to participate in Australian society. For that to happen you need to stop excluding them from it. Lazy bullshit that implies racial classifications trump common humanity excludes Aborigines from Australian society. A few paragraphs later Assange tries to assert that free speech is more of a unifying force than measures such as these, but the proof exists only in theory.

In the US, the First Amendment guarantees the right of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis to march through the streets. The law sanctions speech only if it incites violence. Rather than flourishing, the Klan and neo-Nazis have been withered by the robust criticism that such protections afford their critics.

For the first hundred years or so, the Klan and the Nazis had a pretty clear run, and the First Amendment was in effect the whole time. Giving effect to their core beliefs involve excluding people from society and killing them. They underwent robust criticism to be sure, but a lot of people died in order that they might speak freely, and only when legal sanctions and force were applied against them did their positions become unsustainable.

People get squeamish when arguing against censorship laws that protect historically persecuted groups.

People get squeamish all the time. The question is, why do they get squeamish, what are the consequences of that squeamishness and do people have a right to go around making other people squeamish in order to boost their media profile?

The basis of the whole Bolt case is that some people from a historically and systematically persecuted minority have been able to embrace their identity, now that the legal aspects of social inclusion have been uninstalled, and that some jobs have been created which are only open to people of that minority. Along comes Andrew Bolt, claiming that the historically persecuted minority are actually privileged (and that the disadvantages that come from historic persecution are over, hooray and forget it ever happened). Bolt believed that his classification as to who was Aboriginal and who wasn't, based on a bit of Googling, was superior to the classification applied to and by Aborigines themselves.

The law which Bolt transgressed acknowledges both the prevalence and the falsehood of racial profiling in Australia. From my understanding it says that if you're going to comment on people's race you have to be careful. The judge found that Bolt hadn't been careful, and I note that no appeal has been lodged. Assange, and Bolt, believe that Bolt's right to toss off a comment trumps the slow but considerable efforts the historically persecuted minority are making to overcome historical persecution and participate freely and fully in Australian society.

Censorship is fine, they think, as long as it is designed to protect gays and indigenous people.

The law under which Andrew Bolt was convicted protects us all. It enables Siebert's wish that sloppy ideas go down to become reality.

In much of Europe and Australia, it is unlawful to deny that the Holocaust took place - this is "acceptable" censorship.

Quite so. It makes it easier to stop that sort of thing having the catastrophic effect it did on individuals and society. It forces people to face up to reality, which is no bad thing.

But in Turkey it is a crime to assert that the Armenians were subjected to genocide. Imagine if Australia introduced a law prohibiting use of the word "genocide" in respect of the treatment of indigenous Australians?

Can't see it happening myself, no point in protecting anyone against non-threats. A bit like Andrew Bolt complaining that he's barred from applying for some $25k part-time short-term dead-end job which is only open to Aborigines.

There are threats to the balance between our liberties and our social cohesion all the time. What won't and can't help protect us from imbalance and injustice are lazy postulations, including that hidey-hole of the intellectual poser who hasn't thought carefully about whatever they claim to be particularly concerned about: the "slippery slope". Assange loves a slippery slope.

Many debate whether the term should be used or not but it would cause outrage if our government stymied that debate by making it unlawful.

It isn't just a bit of chat, it's a debate of real significance. Have the debate, but face up to the facts and do your research like Bolt didn't. The idea that the Australian government would follow Turkey in that regard is just sloppy, straw man work.

So what subjects are off limits? What societal "goods" are worthy of protection through censorship?

Science says climate change is happening ... United Nations Security Council ... Why don't we just introduce a climate change-denial law prohibiting Barnaby Joyce from rubbishing climate change ... may sound ridiculous ... parliamentary privilege ... but therein lies the danger of allowing the state to regulate what political speech is acceptable.

More "slippery slope" work, showing how an extreme example obscures rather than illustrates the point at hand. Barnaby Joyce isn't a threat to anything and you can participate fully in Australian society - including the shaping of climate change policy - regardless of your attitude toward climate change.

The law, whether civil or criminal, is a serious business. At its end is the deployment of armed police to imprison people or seize their assets by force. It should never be used to regulate disfavoured views.

It is always used to regulate disfavoured views. People who assert a right to commit armed robbery are not only expressing a disfavoured view, they are limiting the abilities of others to participate fully in society.

Free speech must protect all speech, however offensive. Debates that offend the "ordinary" or "typical" Australian are precisely the debates we need. It is precisely when the majority shares a view that it needs to be challenged, because if it is wrong, then we are all imperiled.

If you're going to have a debate on issues that entrench disadvantage against those who are historically and systematically persecuted, you'd better be careful to have your facts together. This improves debate all round, rather than just being some sort of lotus-eating talkshop which makes no difference other than selling newspapers. Racist conjecture is not a debate and nor is it a challenge. It's oral spam and makes it harder rather than easier to take ideas of free speech seriously.

I'm appalled at the idea that Andrew Bolt might redefine who my father was or arbitrarily make my job more difficult (if not impossible) based on his lack of skill at using a search engine. Mind you, I'm appalled at the idea that Josh Frydenberg didn't cop the sort of treatment currently being meted out to Bradley Manning for passing information to Andrew Bolt that was accurate and important, but which Bolt toyed with rather than expose as Assange did. Bolt vilified a truth-teller and made his job impossible, and he had no right to do so. I keep waiting for the Great Boomerang to whack him and his mate Frydenberg on their silly scones for that one.

Now Assange wants to stand up for Bolt's right to misrepresent people and keep them at a disadvantage. If the bastard hasn't got his facts right then he can shut his cakehole. That is both ridgey as well as didge, dinky and di at the same time; not only that but it elevates the debate to a level where historical and systematic (dis)advantages play a less of a role than they otherwise might. Rather than being imperiled, it's a challenge to lift your contribution to debate to a level where racism and other dead ideas can't compete.

Bolt is an experienced communicator and has participated in public debate for decades. His claims about being 'silenced' buzzed around the Australian media like so many blowflies in a public toilet, until they lost all meaning and credibility. To agree with Bolt that he is being silenced - and to agree with his fatuous extension that others are being silenced too, and denied some asserted right to tag and bag Aborigines - is not to be a truth-teller but a willing accomplice in a deception.

Barking at nothing, part 2

2011-10-29T09:50:00.000+11:00

Why is there a parliamentary press gallery? What is it for? It is an institution that has outlived its usefulness, and it is a symptom of mainstream media failure that they continue to focus on it as much as they do.

We need to know how we are governed. We need to know what services the government is giving us, what laws the government is imposing upon us, what it is doing with all that tax. We turned to the mainstream media to act as the trusted (well, only) intermediary between the government and the governed.

For most of this country's history, the only way to find that out was through the media, and specifically from press gallery reporters. Government took place behind closed doors and was largely impenetrable. It only broke into clear sight when it was debated in Parliament, or in Cabinet, or came from a minister's office: journalists there had the ability to explain what it was that came from these bills and other instruments, and the interplay between personalities that we call politics, and how said personalities and interplay shaped the outcomes of government. When the first colonial parliament commenced in Sydney in 1856, it had a press gallery from day one. All subsequent parliaments in Australia were also set up with one.

Today, it is no longer true that the press gallery is the only place you can find out how we are governed. You can get that information in government reports, press releases and other information to a device wherever you are. You can get information directly from government departments, opposition parties, interest groups and some of your better blogs. Politicians hold media stunts using different parts of the country as a backdrop. You don't need to be in the press gallery in order to find out what's going on in government and politics.

In the US, media outlets don't just have a "Washington correspondent". They have a correspondent at the White House, a few at the Congress, one at the Pentagon and another at the State Department, and still others at different agencies of government (such as the Supreme Court).

Australian media organisations are lazy and stupid taking up space in a press gallery and assuming they've got politics covered.

It would be great if there was a High Court correspondent with legal knowledge, who could explain goings-on there in plain language, rather than journo cliches. It would be great if there were more defence policy specialists, following not only the ADF and the Minister and Shadow, but also the contractors and lobbyists. There should be foreign policy specialists.

Hell, all politics/government reporters should focus on policy first, and then assess politicians on how relevant they are to the debate. We might never hear of Christopher Pyne or Mark Arbib ever again.

If you want to know what's going on in government and politics, we are getting to a stage where it's actually better for journalists not to rely on politicians to tell them what's going on. Just because a politician says something, it doesn't mean that will happen.

People who are shocked by the extent to which the people of NSW abandoned Labor should consider the announcement of the Parramatta-Epping railway. Parramatta and Epping are two Sydney suburbs which each have a railway station, but those stations are not connected directly. In the late 1990s the Minister for Transport announced (actually re-announced a commitment from the previous Liberal government) that a line would be built to connect the two, and the press gallery trooped out to record the minister announcing that it would be completed by 2010. Then, after a while, it was re-announced again, and again, and again and again and again. A third of the track has been completed at twice the budgeted cost.

It became a joke, but that didn't stop journalists reporting it with a straight face. It didn't stop editors and news directors sending journalists out to cover those announcements, as though they were really news. The fact that a minister makes an announcement isn't news. The sun rose in the east this morning too, bears do poo in the woods, the Pope really is a Mass-going Catholic, and politicians make announcements: none of these things are news.

If mining activity is going gangbusters then surely this must cast some sort of light upon political rhetoric that taxes targeted at that industry will ruin it. A journalist cooped up in Parliament House, subject to phone calls from idle people and the appalling dramaturgy of "parliamentary theatre" cannot be said to know anything at all, regardless of how well or badly they report politics as a horse race or as Hollywood.

The fact that Tony Abbott contradicts himself and says things which simply aren't true is starting to be seen by journalists as an anomaly, rather than as fascinating or some sort of post-modern oddity which journalists observe but over which they have no control. It took a bunch of comics to give him the grilling that professional journalists couldn't bring themselves to do. It simply isn't worth drawing any sort of link between what he says and what might actually happen to our taxes, our society. After two years and an election he still has no policy consisting of more than dot points. He is a gibberer and even if he does get in he's just going to shrug his shoulders and say I lied, and a disconcertingly large number of press gallery will just accept it.

Politics and politicians have an impact upon government services as delivered, but a journalist need not be in the press gallery to report that. Being in the press gallery or having spent time there has an absurd amount of cachet among journalists, and when you consider how badly they fail at conveying any sort of meaning from the experience it should be something that falls off the resume.

If a bunch of journalists go into a location where they're outnumbered by PR people, they are probably in the wrong location. That's what happens in Parliament. Journalists are beset by gibberers. However much the journalists love it there is increasingly little link between what they write/say and what really happens, or even matters, which is why journalists can spend their entire careers on stuff like the imaginary challenge from Kevin Rudd/Stephen Smith against the Prime Minister.

The idea that the media can be managed is a lie. There are increasing resources devoted to preserving and extending this lie. The idea that it is worth managing the media at a time of media decline is also a lie, and silly. No politician should expect to have their words reported verbatim and everyone, everyone promising such is a charlatan. Journalists should have nothing to do with people who pretend to manage them.

Politicians tailor their output to catch the eye of journalists, who are looking for cliches. Parliament is designed to be the venue of great national debates, but great national debates occur far from the Parliament. Apart from each year's budget, the last truly unmissable parliamentary speech of national importance was Kevin Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generation on 13 February 2008. When the ALP rolled Rudd, everyone at the US Embassy or the AWU knew before even the better-connected members of the Press Gallery. All that connection-building, all that skulking in corridors and drinking in Kingston bars was wasted in the face of such a big story going begging. If the press gallery didn't pick up on that story, what did they know about anything? The press gallery is a waste of time.

Part of the reason why the press gallery is a waste of time is because politicians increasingly are. Party leaders notice that journalists don't interview colourless public servants, even though they know what's going on better than politicians, so they preselected party hacks who can't deliver a speech and who read the speeches written badly for them. The idea that these banal people might do something innovative and interesting is about as likely that they will do anything catastrophic, but neither are of sufficient consequence or interest to warrant the investment that goes into the press gallery.

Part of the reason why press gallery journalists report non-stories is the disconnect between journalists and their audience. Journalists disdain education, which means they're looking for cliches to dish up to "punters". People who are interested in politics and government are asking questions that simply don't occur to any but a handful of journalists, such as:

Is there anything else that can be done about intractable problems, other than the feeble and self-defeating pantomime before us?
How might money, time and resources be better spent? (a good Opposition will suggest alternatives, but I can't remember the last good Opposition we had);
How do the policies of political parties affect people who work in, or are otherwise affected by, those policies? The odd colour piece at election time isn't good enough;
What is it that parties do, anyway?

Bloggers answer those questions, not journalists. When confronted with economic policy most journalists do things like "beer, cigs up", or televise that groaning from the floor of parliament that has viewers lunging for the channel-changer. A few bloggers will paint the sort of complete picture that newspapers aim to achieve with special supplements, or that ABC Radio aims to achieve with AM and PM. Journalists can't handle policy and they can't get it across well, regardless of the medium, and they never will so long as they are confined to the parliamentary press gallery.

Smart journalists should fan out away from the press gallery because if you want to tell us what's going on you need to know what's going on, and you're unlikely to ever find that out in Parliament. We need to know how we are governed, and politicians can't tell us that because they just don't know, they've lost the words to describe it and bring people along with them. For journalists, it's time to strike out to the territories, find out what's going on and present it well. We will be grateful, but there are less grounds for gratitude for the sorts of journalism that comes out of the press galleries than you might imagine. The press galleries are broken and cannot be fixed. Abolishing the press gallery need not mean some sort of catastrophe for democracy, and maybe we might have to wait until Laurie Oakes or Michelle Grattan have died - it could be the very thing that breaks the politico-media complex and makes both politics and journalism better off.

Barking at nothing, part 1

2011-10-26T19:31:00.009+11:00

It started with a bit of typical journo blindness to their own profession, and then moved through some slightly more insightful pieces, before I started wondering what it was all about.

Amanda Meade told readers of The Australian all about the Twitters:

But my pet peeve on Twitter is the way people congratulate each other in a very public way -- a kind of air kissing via tweet.

This made me laugh until I realised that Meade probably doesn't read her own paper. The worst offenders at blowing smoke up one another on Twitter are News Ltd employees. The following exchange ensued:

She's under no obligation to work with jerks, either. I started pitying journalists, and read the recent pieces by Laurie Oakes and, yes, Annabel Crabb and even Bernard Keane.

The Andrew Olle Lecture always starts out being mawkish and climaxes with a circle-jerk about how great journalism is and how great journalists are. Good on Laurie Oakes for resisting the urge to intone "I think journalists do a great job" (based on what, I hear you cry). Oakes misrepresented Tanner's argument with a bit of journo self-pity, which I bet went down a treat among his half-cut audience.

We like to think of ourselves as watchdogs

Watchdogs bark to scare off intruders and to warn their masters of danger. Dogs that yap, yap, yap all the time, particularly at things which aren't there at all are just bloody annoying. It ought to surprise nobody that you switch off constant yapping about nothing at all; what's surprising is the, er, dogged insistence on being called a "watchdog"when you're just needy and insecure.

Many of those bemoaning the media's performance seem to think the nation is crying out for more high quality news and analysis and heavier current affairs programs.

They're dreaming. If that was the case, Four Corners would outrate Masterchef. And I'd still be doing interviews on the Sunday program and writing for The Bulletin magazine.

And George Negus might still be on air.

That's right: there was only ever one definition of quality journalism, it's never ever coming back in any form, so just jump into the sewer and surf the swill. Don't bother with any rethinking about ways of presenting information, just admit it's all too hard and can we get Stephen Smith for next week?

Ask any of the political party back room operators why Labor and coalition election campaign commercials rarely feature detailed explanations of policy, and-if they're honest-they'll answer: "Because no-one would watch."

That's the whole idea: they are trying to bore people into disengagement so that they can do whatever the hell they like. They've done it to their own members, why wouldn't they do it to the public at large?

The main theme of Oakes' talk is that journalists churn through stories and are vulnerable to spin. Poor journalists. The question is, though, where is the value in that?

Who is it that's determining a faster and faster cycle of news, and a focus on trivia? I'm not. It's timid news directors who think that treading water at great speed is how they keep their jobs.

Whether it does or doesn't save the news directors' jobs isn't the point. Journalists will only lose credibility by churning out scatty, shallow and pointless stories. The output has no value, and over time those who produce no-value products themselves become devalued. Oakes foresees clearly the demise of his profession, and has no answer for it.

What Meade and Oakes fail to realise is that social media provide streams of links to information that make journos redundant. If I've clicked on a link in my tweetstream about recent events in Libya, why the hell would I want to read what Amanda Meade thinks about it? Why would I pay to do that? Why would I get up from Twitter and watch Laurie Oakes seek the views of the Shadow Foreign Minister, who won't have read the article or much else on events in that country?

Crabb does get the idea of the journalist-as-intermediary is now dead. She lets her cover slip by nominating Grog's Gamut as a good example of an up-to-the-minute blog, when its esteemed writer has been co-opted by the same outfit for which she works.

More importantly, Crabb lets herself down by underestimating how good writing makes a difference.

If you are a foreign policy wonk, you might well complain that your area of interest doesn't warrant enough serious column space in various of the daily newspapers in Australia. But can you really argue that you have less to read now than you did 10 years ago?

I've got a whole separate article in the works about foreign policy, but here we can answer Crabb by saying that quality writing and presentation will attract readers and better inform debates.

It isn't sufficient to say that one bit of journalism is as good as another, or that if one journo has deigned to wade into some difficult area of policy then that should be good enough for you, dear reader, and one less article Crabb doesn't have to research and write. A stressed and ill-informed journo will be trounced by a subject-matter expert who can write a bit and/or talk fluently every time.

By focusing on niche areas and regarding them, as fragmentations of the fewer and bigger media outlets most of us have known, Crabb misses the point about the fluidity of new media. Niche markets have always been lucrative for the mainstream media. The magazine Wheels is infinitely more profitable than the section of the newspaper which deals with cars. So too with Rugby League Week versus the couple of pieces on that game in the nightly news.

klieg light swung at him (yes, him), whereupon he would churn out some gravitas as befitted a dedicated, veteran journalist. Neither of these tried-and-died solutions are superior to what happens now, and the nostalgia acts can boil their heads.

The same applies to a lot of issues. The big news organisations just aren't that nimble. By the time the journo from Big Media has wheezed into place, the story is already out without the need to maintain a huge infrastructure or claim back money from expenses. It means that news is no longer best covered by journos, and that they're not trusted intermediaries any more.

That said, I don't want to end up like some techno-hippy like Bernard Keane:

The community-generating power of the internet is in direct contrast to the atomising power of television. The internet connects where television isolates.

What got me thinking about political reporting in particular were two quotes, one from Crabb and one from Keane:

Crabb:

... I think we should be very careful indeed about assuming that there is only one correct way to learn about politics, and that is to sit down with a cup of coffee, a madeleine and the Australian Financial Review.

Ah yes, madeleines, prompters of reveries in Proust ... but then I thought, Annabel Crabb could learn a lot from politics coverage in the AFR.

Then, this from Keane:

But neither [Oakes nor Crabb], for mine, really got to grips with the central problems confronting the media and politicians.

Neither does Bernard, by the way, but more tomorrow.

Still doubting that Gillard can win?

2011-10-25T23:51:00.020+11:00

Read this:

As recently as two years ago, Mrs. Kirchner had seemed a long shot to win a second four-year term. Her combative style, highlighted by a heated dispute over [commodity] export taxes, sent her approval ratings below 30 percent.

Now, take out the rampant inflation and cronyism, as well as the lack of foreign investment. For goodness sake, leave aside her personal arrangements. Substitute mining for agriculture in commodity terms (and look at the special tax on an insanely profitable industry that facilitates tax cuts across the board). Most importantly look at an opposition that doesn't really know what it believes in - and tell me if there aren't recognisable patterns here:

The economy emerged as the central issue on voters’ minds. By many measures [the country] is booming: the economy is expected to grow ... employment has reached record levels; and the poverty rate has been cut by more than half since 2007, the government said. The country continues to benefit from heavy government spending, high commodity prices and strong demand from China for its ... products.

Can't happen here?

Flick the switch

2011-10-23T08:42:00.199+11:00

Tony Abbott fans freely admit that their boy is a bit of a boofhead (but isn't it having some fantastic results!), and that one day he'll just flick the switch to Prime Ministerial - and when the time comes there'll be none of this talk that the Coalition polls are just some protest against the incumbents, oh no, they'll be finished. When the appropriate time comes, when all the ducks are in a row and the sun is shining and the wind is at his back and everything's just perfect, then the idea of Prime Minister Abbott will be an inevitability.

Here at the Politically Homeless Institute, we've always regarded "Prime Minister Abbott" as a punchline in search of a joke. He's always lived by the idea that he can pull something off at the last minute, and it's always been bullshit. Nonetheless, we have more respect than you might imagine for the contrary view. Let's say there is a switch there, and that Abbott can flick it (unlike John Hewson, who insisted that Keating had a "glass jaw" but could never land the blow that sent him sprawling to the mat).

Abbott has until Easter to prove he's a real potential Prime Minister. If he's not coming across as the mature, thoughtful and stable soul his fans claim him to be, capable of bringing about the mature, thoughtful and stable Australia that has apparently eluded us so far, then he's pretty much finished in '12.

After Easter comes the Budget. The Treasurer will have a lot of money to play with, what with the carbon price mechanism and the mining tax. While (if he's still in the job) Swan will err on the side of caution, the Budget and the reality of the new economic environment brought about by these taxes will shift the whole debate about the Australian economy and what it means to participate in and run it. Journalists will be trapped in their "beer, cigs up" clichés and will miss the sheer breadth and depth of the changes (and what might have been) in a way that their forebears in the 1980s didn't. Economist bloggers will get it and eventually journos will have to follow their lead, grudgingly and without attribution.

True, nobody will, as Shaun Carney helpfully points out, join hands and dance around in a circle when the carbon compensation comes in. Nobody did this when equivalent measures were introduced for the GST in 2000, either. Anyone who expected otherwise might be a valuable inside source for journalists, but they have little else going for them. The fact that the government will have shifted the whole economic debate will be the main issue.

Federal taxes in Australia have fallen heavily upon individuals and companies. A shift of the burden to miners and carbon polluters doesn't mean that we get a free government but it does alter our relationship to government and it to us. Having introduced all those taxes, Labor is in a position to show that they form part of some sort of coherent whole, a way forward. Yes, they'll do it in a cack-handed way and we're all getting used to that - but since when were Australians moved by silver-tongued oratory?

There is no Liberal response to that. The idea that they are going to cut $25b of carbon compensation and $70b or so from the new tax forms - together about a third of the Federal budget - has no credibility at all. It will have less credibility once the status quo shifts to the point where it simply will not do to insist that the new paradigm can be reversed.

The Liberals tried this with Medicare, which was introduced in 1985. They kept insisting that Medicare was a terrible burden on the nation which could be unwound; both notions were rubbish and they lost election after election trying to maintain otherwise. After a decade or so they made their peace with it. Howard gave the impression that he'd learned some lessons along the way rather than just waiting for his turn. When that happened voters started taking them seriously as a government.

Try Tony Abbott on what he's learned in opposition: nothing. He and his think the election of 2007, never mind 2010, was lost on technicalities and bullshit.

You could argue that the European meltdown might hit Australia, and that if/when that happens people will abandon what little support they have for the incumbents and flock to the Coalition. Again, this is bullshit. The Coalition have almost forfeited the once impregnable perception that they were sound economic managers. That perception is central to Liberal self-identity: an economically illiterate Liberal Party is a house that cannot stand, a sign that self-doubt has become panic, as John Howard learned when he saw his party riven by self-doubt on this very front during the 1980s and '90s.

Tony Abbott, stunt man and wrecker, is an economic illiterate: yes, he is. Nobody turns to an economic illiterate when there's economic trouble: that's when people end their dalliance with the alternative and go for The Devil You Know. Carping that the government has stuffed up didn't work for his brother-from-another-mother Latham, it didn't work for Beazley or Hewson or Peacock or Hayden or Snedden - especially when he has (like they had) no answers other than cuts. Nobody who isn't already rusted-on Liberal will want such a person to run anything. To believe that people will eventually love the carbon tax is no less silly than the idea that wacky, say-anything Tony Abbott is the man to lend gravitas and an even temperament to issues that are obviously too complex for him.

John Roskam's article in Friday's AFR about democracy was deeply silly. There is no future for the Liberal Party in mocking business, and people like Hockey and Bishop (J, not B) know it. Gillard and Rudd were getting similar messages about their party led by Latham in 2004, and like them back then, there's bugger-all they can or will do about it until time boxes them into a corner in the Death Zone (see below).

By Easter it will be clear that none of the independents will come across. If Abbott is to "flick the switch" to being the post-reno occupant of The Lodge, it is the six independent MHRs who will have to bear witness to it. If they all continue to think he's a dickhead, and they work with him, Abbott has no chance of convincing the rest of us that he's much chop.

After mid-year come the adjustment stories: and not just those in the media, or even online, but in people's lived experiences. Sure, there'll be stories about people genuinely disadvantaged by the new regime, and there'll be as much sympathy for that as there is for any other form of entrenched disadvantage really. Mostly, there will be a lot of grinning and bearing it through the adjustments and ingenuity in cutting emissions. Again, nobody is fooled by images of happy workers eating crap and loving it, but when everyone is getting on with it and making do, people will switch off endless carping; nobody will believe it can all be wished away. Rollback is rubbish.

Soon after that comes the vortex of September through which no politics permeates. Politicians would have to get shot to be noticed. Jeff Kennett thought he was terribly clever going to the polls just ~~after~~ before AFL Grand Final Day 1999 [thank you Linda], turns out he wasn't so clever after all. After September (i.e. a year from now), the Opposition Leader heads into the Death Zone.

The Death Zone culminates in the December of the year before the election is due. In the last four Parliaments, the Opposition Party has dumped their leader in the Death Zone. I reckon the Libs will dump Abbott because he won't magically convince any constituency that he's PM material while he will disappoint swathes of those who are today of that opinion. That said, even those with the most roseate view of Abbott would agree that the Death Zone is too late to persuade people if there's any doubt about your standing.

Abbott hasn't got a year to go before hitting the Death Zone, and it's less true to say that he's got months. To hit the pre-Budget period in Easter with any momentum he has to start turfing events organisers and press release wranglers now, and get on board the kind of serious staff that Howard assembled in 1995. This is not to say that shunting Arthur Sinodinos into the Senate is going to work for anyone. However much Howard indulged Abbott, Sinodinos spent a decade hosing down Abbott's ill-considered musings, ditherings and clangers on economics. He might have done so deftly enough, to the point where he and Abbott are clearly on better than speaking terms. The fact is that Sinodinos will spend the next year or so covering his eyes at Abbott's beef-witted forays into serious, nation-defining economic policy, like the Julie Andrews character in The Princess ~~Bride~~ Diaries.

Abbott, as I've said elsewhere, needs a serious staff and he needs it now. Trouble is, no such staff is available to Abbott. For any Liberal to swap state government (or the prospect thereof in Queensland) for a stint with Abbott would reflect political acumen so callow they could not possibly contribute anything toward the Coalition cause. He has to get rid of the stunt organisers and soundbitesmiths now, they've done their job; the next phase requires different skills. Like Richard III screaming for a horse, like that moment in Power Without Glory where John Wren realises he's surrounded by dills, Abbott faces the prospect of entering the Death Zone surrounded by grinning loyalists waiting by eerily quiet phones: the equivalent symptom in politics to the tide rushing out preceding a tsunami.

Now is the time for Abbott to drop the stunts: they've worked about as well as they are going to: polling numbers don't get any better than they are now, and as I've said Abbott himself is a prophylactic on the chances of a Coalition government. He'll also have to reconfigure his staff. That said, I say he will stick with the stunts as they've worked so far (if it ain't broke, remember). His fans will (increasingly stridently, but hoping to hide a growing sense of dread that they might be ignored) start urging Abbott to flick that switch to PM-material: Dennis Shanahan will be convinced that it's already happened, and will try to convince his readers likewise.

The last-minute thing didn't work in 2010 and it won't work next time either, people are awake to Abbott now. Politics is a messy business and the ducks never line up perfectly, especially for someone with attention-deficit issues. The idea that it is all moving to plan will not hold when the ground shifts underneath him, and will be trashed when the business community decides that it doesn't really want to go back to 2006 anyway. Abbott fans need to give their boy a nudge. He had his chance to protect us from the carbon thing, too late now. You can't expect him to be taken on trust any more.

Update: Drag0nista.

Broken-down machines

2011-10-22T13:05:00.000+11:00

This was my piece in The Drum, published by the ABC. I've had a couple of pieces posted there before but they have been copies of posts on this blog.

Basically, I said that the party machines are too busy working on perpetuating their own power to help anyone else get into or stay in government. This point is echoed by Bushfire Bill, who refers to the conventional wisdom thus:

... no matter how ridiculous, bizarre, uncosted, contradictory or outright unhinged an Abbott utterance may seem, wiser minds will take him quietly to one side after he is elected, and impress upon him the responsibilities of government by rational exercise of executive power

There are no "wiser heads". There used to be, but Abbott got rid of them. No "wiser heads" in Labor either, just factional chuckleheads. That's why egotistical leaders careen around unchecked (except by a bullet in the back of the neck from those close enough to deliver such a blow) and parties are reduced to uncritical fan clubs of said leader. That's basically the point of the article.

There were 103 comments. Most of them came from the horse-race calling perspective, whether/when Rudd was going to challenge Gillard or Turnbull Abbott. Such people missed the point entirely. I remonstrated gently with one such commenter and gave up thereafter.

Anyone want to comment on the issues I actually did raise?

The shadow boxing champ

2011-10-18T19:03:00.009+11:00

The best things in life are free
But you can keep them for the birds and bees
Now give me money
That's what I want
That's what I want, yeah
That's what I want

- The Beatles Money

There is no point in giving this parasite a column to justify his own existence unless you can call him on his more egregious bullshit. Mark Textor is on a very sweet arrangement thank you very much and you will not do anything to upset that arrangement.

The headline is wrong for a start - Mark Textor doesn't want to give the public a voice. He's never been in the public voice business, no money in it. P J O'Rourke said that the public might trample you to death but they will never buy you lunch. What Textor wants is for the public to shut up and not only listen, but give his words more credence than they often deserve.

political parties exist for only one simple and, yes, confronting reason: winning votes for candidates. Sound bad? It's not.

Classic bit of straw man work there. Nobody thinks political parties soliciting votes is "confronting". Nobody thinks it's "bad". He's trying to knock down an argument that nobody makes in the hope that nobody will put a telling argument to him, one that costs him in dollar and reputation terms.

And before folk scream "political parties are just negative"

What 'folk'? What screaming? Is it not possible to hold to such an opinion after careful consideration of facts, and speak it in a voice so quiet that Mark Textor and other mainstream media bloviators will just talk over it?

Let's put that back into context and have a good look at it:

[Political parties] can do this only by discussing what is personally relevant to voters, after carefully listening to their views and offering them a clear choice between parties. And before folk scream "political parties are just negative", two things: forget the bluster of Parliament, most candidate material is positive and these days most successful political advertising is positive. And, to the extent there is negative messaging, our adversarial system is based on keeping the others to account.

When you counter one dollop of bullshit with another, you aren't holding anyone or anything to account. And Textor's idea of "positive" isn't mine. At the last election I lived in a marginal Labor seat. Textor-inspired drivel rained down upon me and went into the recycling bin because he didn't and doesn't care what I think. The material was "positive" in that it presented the candidate in the best possible light in some highly general sense, but wasn't positive in the sense that it would explain how he gets things done. I participated in a forum recently where the now-MP answered every question with "That's a very interesting question!" - if Textor had explained this was the sort of muppet he was putting up it would have been a lot more positive.

Your lovin' gives me a thrill
But your lovin' don't pay my bills
Now give me money
That's what I want
That's what I want, yeah
That's what I want

Besides, political parties put people into Parliament and have more responsibility than Textor accords them in producing little more than "bluster".

If political parties are not funded adequately, I would suggest this would encourage corruption of our political system, not diminish corruption.

Well Mark, how much is "adequate"? In the absence of such a definition, people are probably going to cut corners. We needn't wait long before Mark offers a suggestion as to how much is enough:

Why? Share of voice.

If political parties cannot speak directly to voters - through direct mail, radio and TV advertisements, the internet and through resourced direct contact - then others have control of that otherwise open conversation.

How much is enough for a political party, in Mark Textor's terms? Enough to be the controlling, if not the only, voice across all media. That's all.

In 2007, the Howard government spent more than $50m of taxpayer money on advertising WorkChoices. Even so, there will still other voices in the community expressing different opinions. Under Textor's theory, the then government should have ramped up the spending so that if you wanted to know anything about WorkChoices, the only voice you'd hear would be that of the government.

WorkChoices wasn't an election campaign in itself but it is an example of how (not) to get a message across, and what it takes to do so.

"Share of voice" is a nebulous concept. I have a voice, and you do too, and so does Mark Textor. Textor doesn't want share of voice. He wants you to listen only to what he wants to tell you. That's share of attention, not share of voice - but he dare not convey that he doesn't want to share attention with anyone else.

A hundred or so folk in the Canberra press gallery decide what you should hear, not what a candidate wants to tell you based on their feedback from the community.

First of all, this overuse of "folk" grated when Kevin Rudd used it, and it's no better when used by someone who wants all the benefits of political power without the hat-wearing, glad-handing, pie-eating and income-disclosing that goes with running for public office.

Second, the press gallery runs free advertising for political parties. The Liberal Party are getting the best run you can get from a press gallery at the moment. Yes, they would be crazy to rely on them continuing to run their lines on face value and not considering basic questions like whether Abbott really would be a better PM than Gillard, and why - but this leads to my third point:

I read the tweet and tried to think of a single example in the history of Australian politics where a major political party spent absolutely nothing on advertising and relied entirely upon free media in the journosphere. There isn't one (let the monkeys who work for him support their boss' claim that there is). Textor's idea that poor political parties are being held back from advertising at all until they get into a position of "control" is, frankly, ridiculous.

Fourth, candidates decide nothing in election campaigns - people like Textor and his equivalent Bruce Hawker decide what the message is. Candidates' faces and names are used to endorse whatever message has been cooked up by the Textors of this world, and if the community doesn't like the message then the candidate wears it - and Mark Textor can't be blamed for low-quality candidates out there, can he?

So there goes the theory about a reduction in negativity if advertising is banned.

What theory? Whose theory? More straw-man bullshit. To reduce negativity in public debate you need a shift of focus by the media onto issues rather than on what Textor calls "bluster".

You could argue that, in Britain, the absence of electronic advertising has led to political editors deciding what gets discussed in the community, rather than the citizen, leading to too much power for some publications and the issue of press corruption, as witnessed recently.

You could, if you weren't paying attention. Textor thinks the answer is to give newspaper editors unlimited amounts of money, because only that will stop/prevent corruption.

Further, if political parties cannot speak to the people directly through a variety of, if expensive, mechanisms (still preferable to a 10-second grab on television), then others will advertise anyway, but on a narrower, less mainstream set of issues. The recent rise of US-style, advertising-led lobbying that targets government and opposition would dominate.

You say that like it's a bad thing, Mark. US-style advertising is one of CrosbyTextor's main offerings for its clients in a campaign. Why Textor is denouncing one of his key weapons is unclear.

The parties act as a clearing house to discuss more mainstream issues ...

No they don't. The parties pitch issues that make them look like potentially responsible and appealing governments. They don't 'discuss' because that suggests an openness to changing their minds which people like Textor have beaten out of them. They are not "a clearing house", they are part of the debate.

So how should the political parties be funded? To me the safest way is a mixed funding model. That is because there are major failings in relying on one source. An over-reliance on public funding would leave political parties vulnerable to the government of the day mandating the use of those funds ...

The key phrase in there is "to me". This is all about Mark Textor's income. It is not about "free speech", because Textor has never been about that. I left that phrase off the end of the quote because in this context it made me gag.

Textor isn't about free speech and the open exchange of ideas about how public policy might work best. No proof that he ever was or is. He';s about getting his message out and getting you to believe it, whether or not that message is what the country needs is a question for people he despises. What he really despises, though, is anyone who gets between him and a big pot of cash.

Money don't get everything it's true
What it don't get, I can't use
Now give me money
That's what I want
That's what I want, yeah
That's what I want

Textor knows full well Liberal fundraisers can't raise enough cash to keep him in the lifestyle to which he has become accustomed, thus the "mixed funding" thing. This is why Textor has very generously agreed to allow the taxpayer to top up his income through so-called "education" grants to parties, which go directly to people like Textor. Public funding will lessen that party's dwindling reliance on volunteer members repulsed by what he has turned the Liberal Party into, so everyone who matters to Mark Textor is a winner from that scenario, and that's the main thing.

In my experience, reliance on low-donor funding leads to the temptation to pursue "shrill" issues because the US experience has taught us small donations are best gathered by "mining" emotion based on reaction to political events. The "angry" on the left and right may dominate under this model.

All advertising aims to harness consideration of election campaigns to the power of the emotions. The US experience shows the opposite, where small donations outweighed the power that comes with a few large donors. Having lots of small donors also gives lots of people a voice, a prospect that appals Textor. President Obama's 2008 campaign wasn't a fringe campaign - and if it was, why would that be a bad thing - oh wait, fringe campaigns don't hire Mark Textor.

Another of Textor's campaign tools is the use of talkback radio, where randoms like the ones he describes have their "share of voice" at no cost (bar the phone call, and that doesn't go to Textor either) - you can see why it upsets him so.

Textor-inspired ads for Tony Abbott's Liberals last year were all about fear rather than a careful consideration of Liberal policy (such as it was) and its applicability to the needs of the country. It held nothing and nobody to account.

A "free market" in large, corporate and union donations could (in the absence of the regulatory regime we have in Australia) lead to undue influence. Again, no funding means media interests dominate.

Who's talking about unpicking the existing regulatory regime, rendering it absent? Who's talking about "no funding"? Small donations are the antidote to big donations, aren't they?

I'm aware that there are specific proposals out there to limit campaign funding. If I were addressing them I'd identify which ones I was talking about and address those - but that's me. Textor refuses to acknowledge them - classic media strategy right there - which prevents the direct engagement that is necessary for an effective democracy and a civil society. I think debate is more important than media strategy. In fact, everything is more important than media strategy. Media strategy does the media no favours, I have no idea why editors shrug and accept it rather than waging war on it.

Anyway, back to Textor: on top of a series of hollow arguments he basically equate his business model with Australian democracy itself. That's where he moves from the merely parasitic to the despicable.

An appropriately regulated mix of annualised public, corporate and low-donor funding of political parties is the best model I've seen.

In other words: it's a system that I, Mark Textor, have learned how to game - and none of you punks are going to mess with my business model.

I could go on and quote the rest of the article but is dissolves into so much treacle: there is no noble principle being defended here, only a bit of shadow-boxing in defence of self-interest. Nothing wrong with self-interest either - I just wish Textor was up-front about it. In Britain, you could argue that four Poms from the 'sixties were up-front about what they were about:

Well now give me money
A lot of money
Wow, yeah, I wanna be free
Oh I want money
That's what I want
That's what I want, well
Now give me money
A lot of money
Wow, yeah, you need money
now, give me money
That's what I want, yeah
that's what I want

Sweating blood

2011-10-17T20:58:00.001+11:00

Tony Abbott's whole strategy has been based on toying with the government. Whenever Gillard has come to Abbott to cut a deal he has pretended to consider the idea, possibly with an amendment or two, before eventually declining to support. The idea behind this is to portray the incumbents as a do-nothing government so that by the next election it will offer no alternative to an Abbott government.

Last week that strategy failed. It failed publicly, and utterly. It will keep on failing as the government gets up off its hind legs and the measures proposed in the past week come into force, which reinforces the perception that this government is acting like a real government, which gives it more confidence (but hopefully not too much), etc.

Last week we saw three events that made the government look like a real government:

It consulted widely on tax reform;
It enacted a budget-sized raft of legislation to institute a carbon pricing mechanism, after years of talk and bluff; and
It settled, for better or worse, on a policy for dealing with asylum seekers.

In each case, the government broke from its standard practice of going cap-in-hand to the opposition and asking for their support. This had made the Coalition look like the determinant of what was legitimate and what wasn't, feeding the idea that the erratic and flaky Abbott could in fact lead a government committed to stability and security.

This is the lesson that the Liberals learned from the failed ETS deal in 2009. The Liberals engaged in a protracted negotiation process with Rudd, who was at the peak of his powers, and after stringing him along they eventually decided against a deal, which left him (as they say in Canberra) fucked and burnt. Naturally they are seeking to do the same again: all they need is a dumb Labor government that learns nothing.

A press gallery with the memory span of goldfish is also useful to Abbott, as Philip Coorey shows:

TONY ABBOTT has indicated he would have said no to a compromise asylum-seeker policy that included Nauru, vindicating Julia Gillard and others in the cabinet who argued against making such an offer.

Well, no kidding. If the government had proposed restoring the status quo of 2006 Abbott would have squealed that the government had stolen his policy, unfit to govern etc. When you've been involved with press gallery journalism for as long as I have you can pick patterns like that.

The government stopped whinging about Abbott, and got on with it. This is what it always should have done (and those of you who think I'm being wise after the event can go back through this site and see that my hitherto futile calls for same have been a recurring feature of the past two years or so).

Buried way down in this tendentious article is a real gobbet of news, with which your old-school newshound would have led their story:

Mr Abbott's approval fell 2 percentage points to 41 per cent and his disapproval rose 2 points to 54 per cent.

These are his worst ratings since becoming Opposition Leader on December 1, 2009, and are similar to numbers experienced by Mr Turnbull just before he was deposed.

And there you have it. Almost two years into the job, after hundreds of stunts and thousands of pointless words nobody is any more convinced that they ever were that they want this man to be Prime Minister. Why no ABBOTT LOSER CHALLENGE ANY DAY NOW SHOCK headlines?

Now you can see why Abbott went on with all that blood-oath stuff. Not because he's in a position of strength but because he's panicking. Over the weekend he sent out Greg Hunt to destroy what little credibility he had by swearing blind that the carbon mechanism was going to be repealed. It's highly likely that Opposition spokespeople responsible for the budget bottom line and productive relationships with business wouldn't have a bar of it (e.g. Hockey, Robb, Macfarlane) or have other issues on their plates right now (e.g. Mirabella). The Situation himself can only announce this and flit onto something else, trailing credulous journos in his wake.

Hunt is providing the textbook example of why you should resign rather than humilate yourself by selling a position that is so obviously bullshit. He's like the loyal soldier who gets sent by donkey superiors to charge the enemy machine-guns over open ground.

The poll finds 44 per cent of voters back Mr Turnbull as Coalition leader compared with 28 per cent for Mr Abbott and 23 per cent for Mr Hockey.

Mr Turnbull has much stronger support among Greens and Labor voters.

Depends what you mean by "Greens and Labor voters", really. If we're talking rusted-ons, those figures are pretty much irrelevant. If we're talking people who voted Labor in 2007 and '10 but might be persuaded to vote for a Liberal Party not led by Tony Abbott, that's significant.

There are few articles more ridiculous than Labor isn't getting its message out because the press gallery is in thrall to Abbott, and this is Labor's fault, because the herd mentality of the press gallery is never ever wrong.

But in Tony Abbott it is facing the most skilful retail politician in recent memory, a leader with a proven ability to slice up solid arguments with sound bites.

Only if you think a sound bite is sharper than a solid argument, or even real policy with actual results to show for it. This was all very well if you just treat leading politicians as duelling windbags, but in the past week we've seen real policies put in place with real costs and real outcomes. This would be the perfect opportunity for a journalist to ask some searching questions about what a rollback might look like - but then you'd have to ask someone other than Lenore Taylor:

But the Coalition leader has already skipped on ...

And who's more happy to let him skip than Lenore Taylor? She could examine the way that Australian politics has changed and how Abbott is adapting to the new environment we find ourselves in, but she'll just let Abbott skip, skip, skippety-skip.

The factional system, which always provided structure when Labor was in crisis, is broken. "They broke it themselves," says one senior Labor figure. The overthrow of Kevin Rudd, sprung on the caucus by factional bosses at a stage when it was almost a fait accompli, is a process that poisoned its own outcome. The party is now inherently wary of any organised leadership challenge.

That looks like the sort of solid journalism you can usually expect from Lenore Taylor - but then she falls straight off the wagon and spends the rest of her story insisting that something broken is not only functional but powerful enough to knock off a Prime Minister. It's one thing for pollies to contradict one another but when a journalist doubles back on her own story she is only making a spectacle of herself.

Often a "source close to" a politician is the bloke himself.

Thanks for the tip. Shame the journo thinks they're being clever in not just quoting "the bloke himself".

Then there's the thousand words in the Rudd-Gillard kiss last week that the News Ltd papers couldn't write: Rudd saw that Gillard got the carbon mechanism through, in a way that he couldn't. Didn't you see that as an act of contrition, if not capitulation?

Tony Abbott is doing what he's always done and this past week it stopped working. His fanclub just assume he can switch gears to becoming Prime Ministerial, but this just isn't possibler. There is no calm and measured authority, only jumping from one stunt to the next. His only way out is more maxxxtreme stunts that makes Lenore Taylor ooh and aah - and that's what we'll be seeing, until The Situation gets so pathetic that they yank him off stage.

In a week where the government did what it gets paid to do, nobody should expect a grateful populace to cheer from sheer gratitude. We're just doing our jobs, and now the government is too it would be nice if journalists and the Opposition would do theirs.

No refuge II: pressure on

2011-10-13T22:50:00.002+11:00

In 1930s Washington DC, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was apparently confronted by a group lobbying for a particular outcome. At length he said, "OK, you've convinced me. Now go out and put pressure on me".

I'm tempted to say that the Prime Minister has done something similar with this. There is scant evidence that she has been so wily in the past. Then again, she's learning on the job, in a job where the previous occupants tear up the manual as they go.

It isn't having it both ways to honour the deal with Malaysia. I still think that the regional dialogue I went on about here is important and it would have been impossible had the Malaysians disgraced themselves by agreeing to drop it. Also impossible would have been articles like this without the focus on refugees in Malaysia. This is the start of something big and important in regional engagement, hopefully not limited to refugees. If nothing else, it's a bit more proactive than sitting back and waiting for the next boat to come over the horizon.

So, we're going to have more people coming here. Where should they go?

Where they should not go is to be dumped into high-unemployment areas of capital cities, where they arouse resentment from bogans and apathy from the rest of the community, and have the apathetic come to confuse the voice of the resentful as the voice of Australia.

They should not go to mining areas because almost all of them are already areas of high unemployment, and because it is a myth that mining companies need vast numbers of proletarian workers who will just labour all day without complaint. No part of the economy that used to need workers in vast numbers - not industry, not construction, not retail or even the defence forces - now has such a need.

The best I could think of was to those rural communities which supposedly let foodstuffs rot because the fleeing or apathetic locals, backpackers and grey nomads who happen to be there at harvest time aren't sufficient in numbers or remuneration to get the job done. It also conflicts with Pacific Islander communities who could do such work on a fly-in-fly-out basis.

Dumping people in communities with few options might not be clever, notwithstanding their potential to prop up infrastructure that might otherwise fall into disuse. You also fall into a trap of positing rural communities as The Real Australia, having people learn English by reading Adam Lindsay Gordon or whatever. Maybe they will just flock to the cities when there's nothing stopping them from doing so. Maybe they will have to in order to exploit training opportunities that are unavailable in the mighty Bush.

I'm trying, and it's heartening that the government too is trying to deal with a complex issue with other policy tools than press releases. One guy who's trying way too hard is The Situation, a man who has painted himself into a corner with his own blood. He's frantic, because he knows he has nothing to show for all that ferocity: it's only worth it if the slow and steady achievements of the past week or so never happened, and weren't seen to have happened. Yes, the government was forced into the position it has now taken - but there is nothing so becoming of a government than the ability to make lemonade when handed lemons. That was John Howard's real skill - his fans call it humility, but even his opponents agree it was a contrast from the approaches of his two Labor predecessors, which was more in the vein of "Oi! Who put these fucking lemons here?".

Abbott could get his photo taken squeezing lemons but you know he hates the taste and nobody wants to drink anything prepared by a smarmy git who despises them. The smarm has gone with all this blood-oath, eating-out-a-carcass stuff, and we're beginning to see them as they are. Abbott is redoubling his efforts, which only moves him from ferocious to frantic. Even his most loyal lags in the press gallery must now accept that Abbott is becoming a figure of ridicule, that the can't-do-anything-right tag that applied to the government a month or so ago now rightfully belongs on him.

What Abbott and his chroniclers can't bear to face is what all the great comics knew: that frantic is funny. Think about Harold Lloyd hanging off that clock, Harpo Marx's charades, John Cleese in "the right room for an argument", or Lucille Ball berating people Mirabella-style while being led into a surprise party. The more calm government we get, steering the nation through the storms and past the shoals, the crazier the Opposition we'll get too; it will get to a point where only journos will give a damn about the fraught but comparatively functional Gillard-Rudd relationship. How quickly things turn: but that's politics for ya.

Back to Washington, and it was Roosevelt's predecessor Abraham Lincoln who said, "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power”. After this week the government realises that it has the power, and that by standing up to Abbott it accrues power rather than losing it. It will be interesting to see how it rises to a challenge that Kevin Rudd has already failed, and which Abbott is watching slip away from him too.

The passion of Sophie Mirabella

2011-10-12T22:14:00.001+11:00

I met Sophie Panopoulos at a Liberal students' conference in the late 1980s and at the time, as I've tweeted earlier, thought she was a great sucking hole of need. If she was a bloke she'd have a chip on her shoulder, but let's not be sexist. We all wanted to be MPs at that age, but I underestimated how much sheer need would count toward that end.

Liberals of my generation were convinced of two things, apart from our own special brilliance. Firstly, that the Fraser government had failed so utterly that the Liberal Party could and should be recreated from scratch. People who revere John Howard and regard the Liberal Party as something he invented and shaped in his own image have a bad case of this. I remember one debate supporting pokies as "voluntary taxation", not just focusing on the revenue stream that would enable other taxes to be cut but also the very idea of non-compulsion in the collection thereof.

The second thing of which we were utterly convinced is that being a staffer offered an apprenticeship to modern politics that was quicker and more comprehensive than building a community profile over decades and then eventually convincing that community that you should represent it in the hallowed halls.

Panopolous was briefly a staffer in the NSW government, as was I; she ended up working in a cafe soon after moving from Melbourne to take up the role, as I was told by someone who enjoyed her change of employment more than I did. I went to that cafe and while she refused to take my order, she plonked down the coffee so that it splashed me. "Sorr-ee", she said, and it's the last time I saw her. Yes, it was years ago, but I still don't remember having done anything to her to deserve that. Those who did deserve an apology, members of the Stolen Generation, were denied one from Sophie when she boycotted the House on that memorable day in 2008 on utterly bogus grounds.

I noticed that she missed out on becoming a staffer when Howard came to office, and apparently she had never been a staffer in the Kennett government. It's one thing to admire her, as many conservatives did from a distance, but it's quite another to have her in one's office, berating the receptionist and patronising public servants. Her peers, like Tony Smith and Mitch Fifield, got those jobs. Even people who were freshers in Liberal student politics when she was la grande dame, like Josh Frydenberg and Kelly O'Dwyer, got those jobs.

It never occurred to me that Sophie Panopoulos would make it as a Liberal MP in Victoria. I assumed she would just be preference fodder for vacuous box-ticker candidates like Tony Smith, and then go on to be some sort of backroom player in that state. I should have known better: both Bronwyn Bishop and David Clarke in NSW offered nothing besides the talent to make other people confuse her sheer rage and inadequacy with energy and depth. I expected her to become a spokesperson - like Melinda Tankard Reist, the sort of person who'd start off with a good cause but whose lack of discipline in the face of a media whirlwind would see her branch out into the bat-shit apocalyptic, or even someone who started there like tobacco gobshites.

It's the "should have known better" that explains why moderate and other Liberals at the time let such a person slip through a selection process that should be more rigorous at vetting people. Not only that, but having beaten such a system makes perpetrators scorn it, in the same way that Groucho Marx jokingly didn't want to join a club that would have him as a member.

Anyway, make it she did and out came the attack-dog lines, hoping to give her opinions an intensity that they lacked in integrity: Petro Georgiou and Judi Moylan as "terrorists", Gillard as Gaddafi, blah blah blah.

The only way you could have any sympathy for such a person is for her to be attacked by Belinda Neal, less an opposite than a mirror image on the House benches. The same slightly questionable use of personal relationships to get the mentoring that young men apparently get more readily. The same hatchet faces and repellent personalities, except to those who must be charmed: kiss the hand you cannot bite. As Labor politics might have given Neal a veneer of compassion for the downtrodden, so in conservative politics Panopoulos might have sought some appearance of status and class from defending the monarchy, the Bush Administration, the Howard government, etc.

I have no idea what the truth is in this or that. Those issues are yet to play out in court and other forums and none of what appears here should indicate any opinion one way or another on issues that have nothing to do with me really. I have noted the division between those who can help Sophie and those who can't; I note the arc by which one person started off as powerful and helpful to Sophie and who over time became less powerful and helpful to her.

Like US politician Newt Gingrich, Panopoulos/Mirabella spends so much time with mouth-breathers that she is regarded, and regards herself, as intelligent to the point of genius. I remember seeing the video from which this image was taken:

Never before or since have I seen her look so utterly calm and in control. That was the moment she truly arrived. I have no idea whether or not it was the happiest day of her life, but surely it must be close. Surrounded by nongs and imbeciles, she was beatific: I half-expected her to do that air-scooping wave that the Queen does.

Part of the problem with the intensity over-intellect approach is that you're going to lose it at the wrong moment. That's what happened when she got chucked out of the House at the most crucial juncture of her career. She's a member of shadow cabinet in a hung parliament; had the carbon price votes gone the other way she could well have become a Cabinet Minister with billions of taxpayer dollars at her disposal. Now, she got sent off at a point where her side was miles in front but her opponents were starting to catch up. In sport, players who do that become known as pikers and are spoken ill of for decades.

One of the 20-or-so bills passed as part of the carbon price was to transform the steel industry. The Leader of the Opposition made a point of touring steelworks as part of his campaign to drum up opposition to the whole carbon ~~tax~~ ~~price~~ thing. The person responsible for developing a coherent Coalition position on the steel industry, carbon thing or no, was the Shadow Minister for Innovation, Industry and Science, Sophie Mirabella MP. Oh well.

The whole scope of Australian industry is pretty broad and even a committed person would struggle to identify how exactly the carbon mechanism will affect it. So, Mirabella falls short of lofty expectations - but is it really that lofty to expect the Shadow Minister to produce something more than press releases? You can criticise Abbott for saying no, no, no all the time - I certainly do - but in the absence of solid backup by someone with nothing better to do than provide it, the guy has to say something.

Let's go to a policy issue squarely within her scope and competence. When I knew Sophie Panopoulos she was big on voluntary student unionism (VSU). She was a MP in 2005 when the Higher Education Support Amendment (Abolition of Compulsory Up-front Student Union Fees) Bill 2005 was passed, and spoke glowingly of it. She might not have been a prime mover behind that legislation but she was entitled to be proud of it in a way that pollies do when one of their big causes gets enacted. When that was reversed she was suspended from Parliament - in a hung parliament, where her persuasive skills might have seen this achievement retained.

When she was chucked out Peter Slipper was in the chair. Slipper has never been the Coalition's poster-boy and is much, much less so now. It's one thing to disrespect such a man and to play to your pals who all disdain him too: but in an environment where so much is at stake, where the Liberal Party expects that every man and woman will do his/her duty, a senior frontbencher should have enough discipline to keep the focus on the main game. Note how Jamie Briggs was slapped down for expressing an opinion, and contrast it with Abbott's apparent indulgence of Mirabella dropping the ball on the try line.

Tony Abbott will not get rid of Mirabella. Others tear down wacky right-whingers; he builds them up and defends them no matter what. It is likely that the next leader of the Liberal Party will give her a spell in the back paddocks, but Abbott will stick by her to the death. If he really had to get rid of her, if her public image became so bad that it affected Lib polling and the backroom boys began to lobby him to get rid of her, it would be the sort of thing that would make Abbott wring his hands. This isn't because Mirabella commands some vast number of votes - she'd influence no vote in Canberra beyond her own. On the other hand, he'd have doubts it for the rest of his life - and this is a guy who just doesn't do self-doubt and examination.

Indi (Mirabella's electorate) is within the Murray-Darling basin. If Tony Burke and Craig Knowles aren't all over that electorate they have really lost their touch. This isn't to say that Labor can win Indi, though stranger things have happened. They do have a once-in-a-generation chance to mess with the heads of a political opponent who has given them so much grief, in that opponent's heartland, at a time of hung parliament - and if they pass it up Labor activists will be right to disown them.

The Liberals of Indi took her on the basis that she was a go-getter and someone with a future. Having your local member in Cabinet is no small thing for any rural community. There must be some doubt as to whether they'll get there with the incumbent; I bet Panopoulos/Mirabella has burnt so many bridges with local Libs that she'd now be up for some sort of levy in that legislation passed today. Is there a Liberal preselection candidate in Indi (or moving there soon) who could knock her off? Will there be an exception to the Thou Shalt Not Knock Off A Sitting Member rule made for our Soph - and if so, is there a Wangaratta Windsor or a Benalla Katter who can win an election without having a party behind him/her? Do the Victorian Libs want to put another jewel-in-the-crown in play by hanging onto her?

Mirabella is, however, representative of a generation in the Victorian Libs who have been around long enough to appear on the public stage and make a few errors but not long enough to get the big jobs and make the big decisions: Tony Smith is bored bored bored but has not proven himself successful at anything since he learned how Peter Costello likes his coffee. Greg Hunt has put in so much work defending the indefensible that he will find it hard to rebuild any sort of credibility. Mitch Fifield is going the way of Chris Pyne or Michael Ronaldson, a politician of no achievement besides getting himself re-elected. These people were going to run the entire Liberal Party, and with it the country: now, they are just going to watch the demise of one of their own (oh yes) with a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God helplessness.

The rise and fall of Sophie Panopoulos Mirabella MP involves more than just one person and those who care about her, who have watched her go από την ύβρη προς Νέμεσις in such a short time. It involves the death of several big ideas:

that you have to be accepted for the front you present to the world;
that you accrue class and status for yourself by defending those with class and status;
that you can reshape the Liberal Party and the country any damn way you please, and that anyone who doesn't like it can just piss off;
that intensity makes up where integrity falls short; and
that ferocity conquers all.

Like Andrew Bolt, she's still not sorry. She never will be, because she can't be. She'll think that her failure came because she wasn't intense or aggressive enough, and there will be enough of those who support her in that, to the point where the rest of us who point and jeer won't matter one bit.

When you're like her, as many Liberals are, you can't self-examine and apologise without unravelling. If you thought the unhinging was bad, just you wait for the unravelling.

Where journalism fails

2011-10-07T21:13:00.002+11:00

The whole idea of journalism is to go to people who have varying kinds of power and influence over our lives and tell us what they're up to, because we don't have the time to be everywhere at once like big news organisations can.

There are plenty of examples where mainstream media organisations execute this magnificently well. As with other fields of human activity, journalism is done very well very rarely, done well-to-average-to-somewhat-below-average most of the time, and done appallingly more often than is acceptable. Even more unacceptable, poor journalism refuses to lie still and be buried as with other types of human waste, but will go and wrap itself around lofty principles like Freedom Of Speech or Excellent Journalism in order that its sheer crapness might not perish from the earth.

Bolt's been done and he doesn't care anyway. Here are two examples from award-winning journalists who should know better, who don't know or care that you can't complain about journos having too little time or resources when you produce imaginary bullshit from real events.

Earlier today ABC journalist Helen Tzarimas used her Twitter account to advertise her role in a non-story:

It was just as bad as it looks. The Foreign Minister was overseas engaging in foreign policy, and instead of being asked what he is doing Helen and the gang ~~report~~ chew up time and resources with what he's not doing.

Kevin Rudd wasn't running for Prime Minister yesterday and he probably won't run tomorrow. You think the media would have learned from Peter Costello - he spent 19 years in parliament not running for Prime Minister. Whole careers in journalism have begun, lived and died in producing the thousands upon thousands of radio and TV and newspaper things about how not Prime Minister Peter Costello was. When Costello quit in 2009 the supposedly serious Australian media couldn't believe it was all over.

The comeback of Kevin Rudd is exactly that kind of non-story. What's worse is that, for all their "insider" pretensions, you can bet that the parliamentary press gallery will be the last to know if Rudd takes his former job back; the guy who weeds the gardens at the US embassy will have a much better idea than all of the doyen(ne)s and other rabbits who make up the Australian media.

When I called Tzarimas on this, she replied:

That's right: an experienced journalist seriously wanted me to believe that I can tell the Foreign Minister what to do from my phone. Was she trying to deflect criticism or did she just not get it? I want to know what the government is doing, not what it isn't doing. You can make up crap all day really:

Kevin Rudd refused to rule out a tilt at the Bathurst 1000 this weekend;
Helen Tzarimas refused to rule out something she never really mentioned;
etc.

When the news is full of bullshit like that you make it harder to defend good journalism and freedom of the press. All sorts of bullshit rumours floats and swirls around in the crevices between journalism and politics; very few of them get an airing so there's no excuse for this crap.

Crap leads us almost inevitably to Annabel Crabb. Ken Henry spends his life in the interface between government and the economy - you have to work hard to belittle such a man but Crabb succeeds. She does her usual trick of starting with a small anecdote in the hope that it might illustrate a wider point; she either chooses the wrong anecdote or draws the wrong conclusion from it, or both as she does here:

"I don't like change," he confided to the patient tillmaster.

At the time, I thought it fascinating that the man responsible for so much Australian money should harbour a personal distaste for having it in his pocket.

Henry's tax reforms are all about increased efficiency: more money collected requiring less work for the revenue-raisers and the effect on economic activity in the economy either unaffected much or enhanced in some way. If you can have a $2 coin in your pocket this is to be preferred to a dozen jangly silver coins - it doesn't mean you have less money, simply fewer coins. Efficiency: Henry lives it. It's a hallmark of genuine leadership that people in exalted positions live their values. Yet again, Crabb has a firm grasp of the wrong end of the stick.

This week, he was back again in Parliament House's Great Hall, once more rehearsing the arguments for the sorts of reforms he advocated in the review of tax that was commissioned at Parliament's last big think-in.

No, he wasn't rehearsing - you don't rehearse for an event that has passed. Henry was reiterating the case for a proposal to a different audience, after events had changed perspective on that proposal.

"It can't be very easy, being Ken Henry", she patronises, then compares a government revenue stream that adapts to the nation's future economic development to a piece of jewellery and a fancy car. She then gives a perfect demonstration of the pearls-before swine nature of journalists being present at important events and misreporting them:

"More important though is the general point that good policy outcomes are more likely where there has been high-quality debate. Good policy outcomes are much more difficult to secure where visionary ideas, big challenges and creative approaches are floated for the first time in the announcement of a policy decision."

Dr Henry's patience demonstrates why he is a hit with Northern hairy-nosed wombats.

If that was a parody nobody would believe it - what should have been a bracing slap in the face for every sorry excuse for a journalist was, for Crabb, just a pretext to talk about wildlife.

She then goes and blames on "politics" what is more properly the fault of the media. The following two paragraphs should have been collapsed into one.

"I mean, let's not forget, the GST in the first place was meant to be applied to food and services," Mr Briggs observed. "I think it has to be discussed ... if you're serious about having a tax forum."

If you're going to have a tax forum of indefinite duration and resources, yes; if you've got two days with a lot to talk about, you have to draw the line somewhere. As it was, the sheer breadth and depth of the debate made the heads of Crabb and Professor Judith Sloan spin. Every single Coalition MP (and Professor Sloan) said exactly the same thing about the Tax Forum, that because the Tax Forum just past covered only 99% of taxes levied in this country, it was some sort of sham - and to say so is "uncontroversial"?

Having authored this - under the circumstances - fairly uncontroversial remark, Mr Briggs spent the rest of the day being kicked about by Wayne Swan and disowned by his leader

No, this was the story of the day: those who dealt with 99% of the nation's taxes were drowned out in the media by part of the 1% that wasn't up for discussion. It was a joke. Briggs' leader has no right to disown any sort of specific proposal given his own vacuity, but once again the journosphere failed to call him on it.

Speaking of vacuity:

The Member for Bennelong, John Alexander, suffered a similar fate a few months ago when he expressed the opinion at an electorate function in August that weekend penalty rates could do with some fiddling ...

The whole idea that penalty rates are some crippling impost on Australian capitalism is an idea that was fairly feeble in the 1970s. You show me a business whose success or failure depends upon penalty rates and I'll show you a badly-run business.

Members of Parliament - even newbies like Alexander and Briggs - have vast resources at their disposal. They've had months to prepare for the Tax Forum. Both men claim they got into politics to make good things happen. And all they can come up with is GST on food and bloody penalty rates, neither of which are within the fairly broad remit of the event. God help us. I wondered why Crabb referred to the Tax Forum as a "think-in", until I realised that thinkers will be abandoning Parliament House to the likes of Briggs and Alexander in a matter of weeks.

Someone like Crabb should be calling out these dummies, as well as the media auction of fatuities that arose from their comments. Is she doing that, though? Is she hell:

When did we stop thinking it was a good idea for backbenchers to have opinions on things?

As Greg Jericho tweeted today, it depends who you mean by 'we'. Backbenchers go all boring and rehearsed so that you don't get Annabel Crabb and Helen Tzarimas making up crap about what you're not doing and ignoring what you are doing.

And as far as the GST goes, it's not as if there aren't reasonable arguments to be had about it - the thing's 10 years old, after all.

Perhaps if the tax summit had been allowed to discuss it, we'd have heard them.

And if those discussions had been "allowed", Annabel, you'd have ignored them, like you ignored and belittled everything else that went on.

Are you suggesting Briggs was "silenced"? Go on, you know you want to. Briggs is a Member of Parliament. He has no shortage of small-f forums* on which to address GST generally or GST on food. The idea that by circumscribing the Tax Forum from 100% to a mere 99% is a dagger at the heart of Jamie Briggs and that his chance even to speak has forever gone, is rubbish.

Mind you, the comment about Alexander and his tennis racket is fair comment. Alexander is more significant as an ex-tennis player than as a contributor to public debate. The man has clearly peaked at the age of [insert Alexander's age when he won that really big tournament].

Journalism fails in the insistence that what isn't there matters more than what is. Genuinely crappy journalism, the kind that props up dictatorships does this all the time. This week we saw a real shift to real news with real things to report and analyse - and two experienced journalists, Helen Tzarimas and Annabel Crabb, couldn't handle it. We look to the ABC for the real news but this week they were appalling. Feed us crap, they insisted, and if we don't get the crap we expect then we'll make some up. We are all impoverished by journalism like this and the editors who make it possible.

Pearls before swine at the Tax Forum

2011-10-05T20:52:00.004+11:00

Journalism on the Tax Forum has sucked really, really hard. It shows the limits of the Australian media in their basic job of telling us what's going on, and how we are being governed. It shows their limits for readers/consumers/citizens/taxpayers in showing us how things might be for this aspect of life in our country and what we can do in order to shape that future.

Nobody expected the Tax Forum to be some be-all-and-end-all session where some ideas would triumph and be legislated while others would be kyboshed, never to be heard of again. It isn't the Grand Final of Tax and it's sloppy reporting to express it that way (journos might claim that they're bringing in readers by hyping it, but they'd be wrong about that too). Equally, given both the breadth and depth of experience represented there and the possibilities in a hung parliament, it is not just a "gabfest" either (another journo cliche that fails to either heighten interest or elucidate the issues).

Let's look at the last major attempt at tax reform. The idea of a GST was first raised in the Asprey Report, commissioned by the Whitlam Government in 1975, after value-added taxes had been introduced in European countries and US states for some years. It was raised again in fits and starts over the years, including in a tax summit not dissimilar to this one in 1985, and in Fightback! in 1993. It was still a live issue at the following election, when John Howard denied that he'd introduce one, and at the following one where he said he would.

There was a scare campaign around the GST when it was proposed in the 1990s, which is amazing for something covered so comprehensively. The Democrats amended it at the last minute to exempt food, education and healthcare. After it was enacted there was a high degree of adjustment to and acceptance of the new system (which was accompanied by Business Activity Statements and other compliance issues that were not adequately explained). The degree of acceptance and adjustment is something that the media at the time played a very small part in bringing about, whereas it played a very large part in hyping up the scare campaign.

Not having learned anything from any wide-ranging previous efforts, Peter van Onselen complains that GST and mining tax were left out. You've got to draw a line somewhere, but oh no - it's censorship:

The agenda for the forum deliberately omitted the GST, the mining tax and superannuation reforms. Three of the most important areas for taxation policy debate aren't important enough for this government to open them up to specific sessions.

Oh, fuck off. The GST alone took a quarter century. As for superannuation, rather than the various experts coming to Canberra to get sneered at by ignorant clowns in the press gallery, the relevant minister (Bill Shorten) has been going to them - something similar is apparently happening with the mining tax.

As it is, the gamut of this event is so broad that it is likely that good ideas (such as reforms to funding of local government) will not get the chance to be fully considered. Or as van Onselen puts it:

... general sessions where they will be quickly moved on from very limited discussion. It's a joke.

You can't win with Peter van Onselen, but you have to do what you can.

The Henry Report was treated like a joke way back when it was released, last year. There was a lot of facile media coverage at the time about wombats and such, then that died away. Then the Rudd government said it would implement some things and not others without any sort of debate as to why (and no hope that they might change their minds). The alternative government did not respond to the report itself or the government's reaction in any meaningful way. There it sat, another artefact of public-policy archaeology, until Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor insisted that the Henry Review have the follow-up it deserved.

The Forum should have been part of a wider debate, linked to issues like housing prices and the two-speed economy and the ageing society - you know, irrelevant, dry-as-dust stuff like that. In such a process all of the scare campaigns could have been tried on and fizzled out before they started clogging up Hansard.

It's easy to have sympathy for the states not keeping their end of the bargain when GST revenues started flowing. Ever since the commonwealth assumed full income taxation powers during World War II, the states have struggled to find the funds to operate the many services for which they are responsible: schools, healthcare, roads and transport. But it's time something was done. Glory-seeking politicians gravitate towards the federal arena, but it is at state level the heavy lifting of government really goes on.

Explains why glory-seeking journalists will bypass a number of state capitals to fly across the continent to sneer at amateurs daring to venture considered opinions on matters in federal politics rather than cover complicated issues in healthcare, infrastructure, law-and-order or infrastructure provision.

It's a political decision, not just a tax-wonk decision, that a government that spends taxes should be responsible for raising them. It is perfectly understandable that, with so many participants and so little time, the Tax Forum concentrated on real issues it could address.

Ross Gittins snarled in agreement with van Onselen:

If you're detecting a touch of cynicism in my reaction to all this, you're not wrong. Economists, business people and professional lobbyists would happily meet in Parliament House once a month to preach to each other about the need for tax reform.

But if ever there was a country that runs a mile at the hint of tax reform, we're it. Most of the rest of the developed world introduced a GST in the 1960s and '70s, but we trembled on the brink for 25 years before taking the plunge in 2000.

The way tax reform works in Australia is that whenever governments are persuaded to introduce some major reform, the opposition automatically opposes it and starts a hugely successful scare campaign, urged on by every adversely affected interest group, the shock jocks and any other media outlets looking for cheap cheers ... And the polls say the man with the neanderthal views on tax reform will be swept into office at the first opportunity.

When it comes to tax reform, Australians are utterly lily-livered.

We can only act on the information we're given, Ross, and personally I think someone like the Economics Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald should play a greater role than he has:

Television and radio are no good for putting forward complex ideas about tax reform in Australia.
There are foreign news outlets that do this stuff but it's hard to extrapolate foreign experiences, costs and systems to what happens in Australia.
The Murdoch press aren't going to do it.

Our only hope for solid and well-presented information is the Fairfax press and perhaps the ABC's online offerings, as well as a few specialist econo-wonk blogs.

Instead, we get both kinds of reporting on the Tax Forum of which the Australian media is capable:

Straight who-said-what reporting, with everything equally valid and no qualification of what was said; and
OMFG, tax is, like, soooo boring, not at all as cool and exciting as, say, sitting through inane questions in parliamentary committees (and not realising they're inane), watching the Opposition Leader wave around a boning knife or getting bawled out by a DJ.

Both of them are fairly adolescent approaches to a subject that affects all adults, but which is inaccessible to most adults because of its specialist, jargon-ridden nature.

None of the ideas put forward at the Tax Forum were particularly new. Each one of them had been carefully thought out. Some of the proposals are actually in place in other jurisdictions - but whether or not we can see these taxes at work in the real world, the fact is there is an extensive literature about different taxes and their impacts on business investment, poverty, employment and other socio-economic factors. Journos, and their editors, have no excuse for not having done their homework and reporting/analysing the Tax Forum in a way that adds value. There are no boring topics, only boring writers - like Sid Maher:

THE Productivity Commission chairman, Gary Banks, has sounded a warning to the government against using the tax system to change community behaviour in areas such as gambling, road congestion and carbon pollution.

Really? Let's see:

... Mr Banks warned that raising taxes to change behaviour had to be done in "the right way to the right extent".

"That is very hard," Mr Banks told the forum. He argued that much of the detail on how to change behaviour with taxes was "unresolved" and risked authorities' ability to convince the community that the taxes were worthwhile.

On carbon pricing, Mr Banks said "the complexities are unbounded" ...

Sid, he didn't say not to do it - he said, be careful about the way you do it. This is basic journalism failure right there. If I thought I could do anything to avert further failure by reporting Sid Maher to some sort of disciplinary and remediation outfit, I'd do it - but there isn't, so know that if you want to know what's going on then Sid Maher can't help you.

George Megalogenis might, though, provided he's not in journalism-for-journalism-sake mode. Starts off with a high-minded denunciation of "the Australian political system" - all very lofty so far - then this:

As Ken Henry, former Treasury secretary and now special adviser to Julia Gillard, observed: "You could have written the script to this before coming in." Employers want a tax cut; the unions want to deny them.

The Tax Forum isn't a wage negotiation George, it's a discussion about the way the government raises its money, hopefully in such a way that doesn't get too much in the way of business and inequality and other laudable goals. But, in amongst all those people talking past one another you've actually found some people at loggerheads: one person says one thing, another says something else, TAX CONFLICT CLASH SHOCK and hold the front page!

Here, however - and again toward the end of his article (why does News Ltd bury the good stuff?) - Megalogenis is dead right:

Imagine if Swan had held a tax forum last year. The mining tax would be law by now, and a budget surplus locked in for 2012-13.

Anything that does come out of the Tax Forum will not be considered carefully by the media. There will be ignorant statements by people who weren't part of the process and these will be treated equally with the dry and detailed work of the tax experts - for the sake of balance.

I expected better of Megalogenis. I hoped for better from the media generally. I even hoped for better from Joe Hockey:

The Tax Forum reminded me a lot of your own derp-and-CLERP approach to corporate law reform under Howard, Joe. Some issues are too big to just pooh-pooh like that, as you used to know before you got ahead of yourself. You can lose the smuggled-in apostrophes too.

We need to know how we are taxed, and what our options are for being taxed going forward. It's dull stuff and arcane, so we need journalism that can explain it to us. They won't and can't, so we turn away from them - and we're the ones with the problem for not consuming enough "proper" journalism?

Update 7 Oct: Peter Martin's coverage is excellent. Of all people, Jack the Insider does the essential element of all successful change programs - create the burning platform - and in the first half of the article. Who needs journalists?

Wait for the rest of your life

2011-10-04T11:18:00.000+11:00

In this article, Amanda Vanstone is pretending to a wisdom she clearly lacks. She has somehow become less knowledgeable about how government works for the country and the economy than she did in Opposition.

Schools, research and health will have to wait till we pay off our debt.

We've been here before. When the debt gets paid off, people like Amanda Vanstone regard education and health as fripperies and call for tax cuts, which means that schools, research and health get cut no matter what.

In 1996, Amanda Vanstone became Education Minister in the newly elected Federal government. She came and spoke to a NSW Young Liberal thing which I attended. Moderate liberals of my generation regarded her as Good Old Mandy, whose Heart was in the Right Place and whose abrasiveness when riled was entertaining; she was one of the few moderates who'd get up on her hind legs and give as good as she got rather than smirk her way to irrelevance. Young Libs five, ten years younger than me who were at uni saw her as the psycho bitch who shredded the education budget and made it impossible for Liberal students to get elected to student organisations. The tension in that room was palpable and something of an ambush for the organisers, who started off sanguine and moved to alarm through the course of the night. It was like those eastern European leaders a few years earlier who had addressed crowds of sullen workers for years only to be suddenly confronted with boos and abuse.

Education and healthcare are major generators of internal demand and of our economic future, you dingbat! They are not optional extras.

When the global financial crisis hit, governments stepped into action to keep their economies turning over. That was a good thing.

It sure was. Strange that the Liberals opposed it though.

But the money did not come out of thin air. Governments went into more debt.

As opposed to what, higher taxes? If you don't support economic stimulus, have the guts to do what Turnbull and Abbott did and say that you oppose it no matter how it comes. The idea that economic stimulus should be "a good thing" but any measure to bring it about is 'bad' is a sorry attempt to box clever.

Many believe that our government spent far more than it needed to and spent it unwisely. We now pay $5 billion a year, or $20 billion in a four-year budget cycle, in interest alone. If we start to climb out of the problem and pay back the same each year in principal, it becomes $10 billion a year and $40 billion over the budget cycle. That's billions our economy is generating that we can't spend on medical research, schools and other things.

I doubt that every cent the Howard government spent could be accused of being carefully targeted, Amanda. The economy wouldn't have the ability to generate debt repayments if it had hit the wall, which it would have if it hadn't been fiscally stimulated in 2008.

But some governments still seem addicted to spending beyond their means ... In Europe, the problem with the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) debt has been understood for some time.

Actually, that acronym is PIIGS - the other "I" stands for Italy, to which Vanstone was Australian Ambassador for some years. If she's going to give us some insight into the European financial crisis you'd think she'd be in a position to do so. Alternatively, if she's going to pull her punches - well, that would be a first for Amanda Vanstone, but basically the idea that she should be so strident about Greece or Portugal being "addicted to spending beyond their means" while skating around Italy - a much bigger economy and a much bigger problem, in both financial and regulatory terms.

The PIIGS countries had levied relatively low taxes. Each of those countries had established tax-avoidance mechanisms for people who had both great capacity to pay and much to be grateful to government for, gratitude for which was expressed not as tax but as political donations or bribes. To say that lower taxes are an answer to our current predicament is less valid than it was four years ago. When Vanstone does turn her attention to Italy, she fails to note that it has a populist conservative government with little in the way of core economic policy. Cheer up Australia, it could be worse.

Note a recurring theme of this article:

The problems facing the world economy are not new. They have just been getting more attention of late ... In Europe, the problem with the ... debt has been understood for some time ... I know firsthand how little Australians care for being told they are no longer getting something for nothing, or as cheaply as they did in the past.

This is designed to create the impression that Vanstone knows what she's talking about, which she doesn't. If they're so well understood, you'd hope that the responses would be smarter than they are. Vanstone might have copped some disappointment from those who'd done well, but what made people really angry was that she cut things that were important and productive. If you're going to make this narrative All About Amanda, however, then one angry person is the same as any other and they could all rack off.

Cuts are easier to take if there's a unifying narrative: from the PIIGS, and the Howard government, we learn that if there are just swingeing cuts then it just builds resentments which play out in all sorts of unexpected and unmanageable ways.

I was part of a government that did the hard yards of finding savings to put our budget back into the black after Labor last had its hand in the till. And then we paid off debt, and set up the Future Fund.

But you didn't restore funding to health or education, did you?

This is an idle exercise. It assumes that nobody who has never been a government minister is allowed to criticise the actions of government, or that any and all such examination of public issues must necessarily be vacuous (a wish list? Really?). I left out the "barbie and a good red" because it reinforces the idleness and indulgence Vanstone is trying to convey, and definitely not because Vanstone herself can pack away the red when she chose to do so.

... in the last budget, Treasurer Wayne Swan was asking to borrow another $50 billion. With that spending record, what will we do if GFC2 breaks out? What if Asia stumbles and we have a few years of lower commodity prices?

Luckily we had the stimulus in 2008 otherwise we'd be stuffed, eh Amanda?

We could all help by avoiding the indulgence shown by Europeans who keep demanding more.

In particular, billion-dollar bludges like this have to be knocked on the head. Education and health aren't bludges or indulgences, they're central to the present and future of the nation - in a way that, say, The Situation isn't.

The government should have the strength to restrict spending and the capacity to stop wasting money ... Swan recognises the need for tweaking.

To that end, the government must not be run by Tony Abbott, Andrew Robb, Barnaby Joyce and Joe Hockey, and must include Swan.

Also, it could get on with helping to boost productivity by recognising its industrial relations overkill.

Part of boosting productivity involves having the clowns who ran Foster's and Bluescope into the ground sent to Christmas Island, or somewhere other than in positions of power over Australian workplaces. If there are industrial relations changes to be made (see my article coming soon elsewhere on this), chances are Swan and his people will make a better fist of it than the clueless and risk-averse Liberals.

Vanstone started the article attempting to create a fug of certainty, and ends it with a shriek of a question. In between she wants to create a narrative of her own wisdom, and that of the Howard government, versus the stumblebum incumbents. It doesn't work and shows the government in a more favourable light than she might have intended. When you consider that there have been more developments in health and education in the past year (despite the budgetary position and the hung parliament) than there was in eleven years with Amanda looking on - it seems that Good Old Mandy's bark and bite are not what they were.

Tattered washing on the line

2011-10-03T09:06:00.000+11:00

It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

- H L Mencken

Now that the Coalition are riding so high in the polls, they and their media shills are calling for Rudd to replace Gillard, or claiming some special insight into the Labor mind that means Rudd will replace Gillard any day now ... any day now ... any day ...

I could go on about journalists, how stupid they are to run a story that so obviously has no substance and how easily they can be stampeded. Many of them are the self-same people who believed that Peter Costello would challenge John Howard any day now ... any day ... and who chewed up hours and hectares of media space with non-stories to that effect. How's this for a vacuous piece, by the same journalist who insisted throughout 2007 that bad polls were good news for John Howard: any day now, any day ... Shame on you if you fool me once, etc.

I'm more concerned about the Liberal Party, and why they are jonesing (pardon the pun) for a change of leadership. Why not adopt an attitude of quiet confidence that they can beat whomever Labor puts up? This is what winners do:

When it became clear in 2009 that NSW Labor Premier Nathan Rees started to reek of stale piss and Joe Tripodi's cigars, Barry O'Farrell was pretty sanguine about whether Rees should stay or be replaced; the NSW Coalition was rightly confident they could beat any figurehead atop NSW Labor;
In 2007, Kevin Rudd teased Costello about not having the ticker to run and expressed confidence (well-founded as it turned out) at being able to beat Howard, Costello or whomever else the Liberals put up;
In 1995, John Howard was not calling on Labor to roll Keating or predicting that Kim Beazley would challenge him any day now ... any day ...

Given that Gillard is so on the nose, why bother invoking Rudd? Rudd put Abbott squarely in his place in the National Press Club debate on health and would probably have done so again in the context of an election campaign. On what basis would Rudd be even more of a patsy for the Libs than Gillard? On what basis would Labor vote so as to maximise the Coalition's chances? There are two facets to the answer, neither flattering to the Libs.

First, their central (and seemingly only) criticism of the government is that it is a do-nothing government. On the table between now and Christmas is what Tim Fischer would call "bucketloads of extinguishment" of that notion: carbon price, the disability scheme, broadband, and other issues besides. If Labor change leaders and Rudd reinstates his old way of doing things, the prospect of actual achievements disappear. Instead of a mass bloodletting within Rudd Labor II there would be the slow spread of fear and loathing, like that of East Germany in the 1950s when the populace realised they were trapped and could only sullenly welcome their totalitarian overlords.

Second, there is this notion that Abbott can't handle being beaten by a woman. However overblown it may or may not be in Mitchell's book, there is a kernel of truth to it. Gillard vaulted to being a leadership contender by being Shadow Minister for Health to Abbott as Minister, taking him apart forensically until her good work was undone by having to sell Latham's Medicare Gold.

If Abbott were confident in himself and his masculinity in taking on a woman - as O'Farrell was in taking on Keneally, as Kennett was with Kirner - he'd not bother yearning to have Rudd back. Those men would have been more gracious about their opposite number's birthdays, knowing there was no mileage in being otherwise. He, and proxies like Shanahan and Savva or even dills like Katharine Murphy, protest too much about Gillard. Why?

INCREASINGLY, Julia Gillard's days feel numbered. That's an objective call.

It's subjective because it isn't manifested in any testable reality. Murphy's colleagues have undergone mass hypnosis to this effect and are trying to project a reality so hat they can justify the time they've spent on chasing a story that simply isn't there.

... Gillard has floated past the point of no return, and has washed up in the worst possible leadership zone - the "destabilisation" phase, where every half-baked piece of garbage takes on a resonance it doesn't actually deserve.

And half-baked garbage is a specialty of Murphy and at least 90% of her colleagues, which is why I repeat my call for them to be boiled in their own piss. The Finkelstein Royal Commission should be thus empowered.

Fundamentally, Abbott believes he has Rudd's measure, and the quicker the Labor Party can tear down Gillard and replace her with Rudd, the quicker Abbott can see him off for a second time. Such is Abbott's self-belief (which, in fairness to him, does reflect an objective fact - he did help see Rudd off once before).

It is an objective fact that Rudd was rolled as PM. It is an objective fact that Abbott was Opposition Leader at the time. It is not an objective fact that Abbott inflicted the wound on Labor, or that he has some mesmeric power to force them to switch leaders to suit him.

Julia Gillard is getting on with it, in her own stumbly way, and nothing Abbott does is working. The Coalition pulled out the big guns on Craig Thomson, and all that happened was that they looked mean for threatening to prevent him attending the birth of his child - and their shadow Attorney-General was cruelly exposed, a man at the topmost pinnacle of posh if ever there was one. They are running out of expedient options, which will mean that they will have to re-examine the way they do things - and that won't be pretty, as we saw in the 1980s and '90s.

The Liberals want to beat Rudd because he beat them in 2007, and had he beaten them again they may have learned some lessons about why they lost and adjusted their position accordingly. Instead, the Howard restoration fantasy is left undisturbed within the Libs, and they remain stuck in their abysm of pish. The need to carefully rethink their position can be fended off with the creation of an atmosphere of crisis, buttressed by the fantasy that they are this close to winning back power, that the supposedly flaky independents will succumb to the inevitability of the Howard restoration any day now ... any day now ...

This rhetorical flourish was described by one Labor person ...

Media coverage doesn't get much weaker than that": "one Labor person" indeed. Murphy should have had this flung back in her face and threatened with the sack if she ever turned in crap like this again. Imagine being a journalism graduate who can't get work, reading that and wondering why Murphy and Shanahan can't be cleaned out (or made to report on actual substantial stories). Imagine having a Parliament chock-full of the issues of the day and being able to see nothing more than the monkey-house of Question Time. The real problem with journalism is the editors who not only allow this stuff to get through, but who commission it.

Old-school media management says that once you've convinced journalists to run the story you want them to run, you've got it made because everyone just consumes media unthinkingly. The sheer apathy with which people greet the ~~careful~~ misguided framing of issues requires a rethink of this approach.

I promised that I wouldn't go after the journalistic equivalents of stale bean soup that you get from people like Murphy and Shanahan, but I can't help it. We need better media than they can provide. Bloggers are trying to fill the gap but there's only so much you can do; it's first aid for a deeper problem that the professionals can't and won't address. Tony Abbott presents the sort of brash, utterly baseless confidence that you get from media executives like John Hartigan or David Leckie, and journos are drawn to that like flies to shit. They can't see that Abbott is a fraud because they can't afford to, which weakens their ability to tell us what is going on in Federal politics.

Abbott's stunt-based politics as a means for deflecting attention from real and big issues works for journalists, not for the public at large. Policy-nerd Rudd had sky-high ratings and lost them when he dropped important policies for the sake of expediency. Policy-nerd Gillard was also well regarded and lost them when she too became just another expedient pol. Abbott fans like Paul Kelly can only maintain their position by confusing the Coalition's high poll ratings (which are anti-Labor rather than pro-Coalition) and glossing over the rusted-on dislike of Abbott, who is a prophylactic on the chances of a Coalition government.

Abbott has thrown everything his reptilian, short-term brain can think of at the Gillard government, nothing has worked. The government is still standing and the independents have gone from being disinclined to actively hating the guy. The idea that he's all bark and no bite is cemented in place pretty much everywhere outside State Circle, ACT; his response is to bark louder, which is annoying but impresses the hell out of nongs in the press gallery, they will keep on doing his laundry for him. Even so, Abbott is getting increasingly frantic; if he can't knock over Gillard soon he's going to be left exposed.

The press gallery will then be faced with a choice: report that he's exposed, or continue covering up for his utter absence of policy substance and wilful refusal to address the big issues facing our country. They could turn their backs on his pathetically limited display and report some of the bigger and more immediate issues, but that would require courage and reflective ability on the part of the journosphere which they - like the Coalition - lack. The wider public doesn't lack these qualities, which is why we are so badly served by both the Coalition and the press gallery.

Bet against Mark Arbib

2011-09-26T22:25:00.003+10:00

Mark Arbib could have made sure that the revolt by leading sports administrators over pokies never happened. A politician of his supposed calibre should have foreseen the political danger with Andrew Wilkie's demand, and should have been working on it every day for the past year.

Someone like Arbib would have heard Wilkie's high-minded position on pokies during last year's negotiations on government and known immediately that it was a dagger at the heart of two of Labor's major sources of funding: pubs and clubs. Aside from unions and property developers, NSW Labor's major funding sources are the alcohol industry and the outlets that sell it. NSW Labor have been extraordinarily generous in handing out pokie licenses to pubs and clubs, which have in turn donated millions of dollars to NSW Labor, and so on. The overlap between members of licensed clubs and those who vote Labor is significant, to say the least.

In the absence of a Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Imposing Limits on Poker Machine Gambling, someone like Arbib should have done the groundwork with pubs and clubs and the gambling treatment lobby, proving himself to be the sort of deft politician that he and others imagine him to be. He couldabeen someone who solves problems rather than someone who runs away from them shrieking "it wasn't me!". He couldabeen indispensable, the sort of power-behind-the-throne that Graham Richardson was after the 1990 election. All gone, and too late now.

Who else could have seen this policy through? All the other factional wide boys were busy with actual policy, in communications or financial planning or whatever. Arbib is the Minister for Sport, for goodness sake: what else does he have to do? The Minister for Sport doesn't re-engineer the economy or comfort the stricken. The Minister for Sport doles out cash to popular sports in the hope that the popularity of that sport might rub off onto the Minister and his party. It isn't like he was organising some nationwide effort to curb obesity or get people engaged in mutual community activities or something.

Arbib's political antennae should have been twitching overtime at an issue like this - if he had any.

Because Arbib has botched it - and he has - the government is bogged down yet again, in an issue that shouldn't be such a big deal. Yet again Arbib can project his political failure onto the leader silly enough to accept his backing. Just as he advised Rudd to drop the ETS, then blamed him for dropping the ETS. Now he can blame Gillard for botching the relationship with sporting clubs and take action against her because clubs are so important to NSW Labor, and mate you can't have a leader who goes against NSW Labor, come on.

It is an understatement to say that AFL identities like Eddie McGuire and Jeff Kennett are highly political. It is also true, both in the fact itself and the understatement, to say that of their counterparts in the NRL. Arbib is the first Federal Sports Minister these guys have openly and blatantly shirtfronted. He must be the first minister in that role to be so blatantly disrespected in living memory. He's finished.

Those sports take millions of dollars from the Federal government, and what does the government get for it? Gillard and Swan, as if they don't have enough to do, are going to have to sweet-talk and bribe a bunch of overstuffed sports administrators because Mark bloody Arbib couldn't execute the little responsibility with which he was entrusted.

Nobody blames the clubs administrators for trying it on, but club members know that's what they're doing: trying it on. Club culture, if you can call it that, is strongest in NSW and Queensland, where Eddie McGuire is just that guy on telly who hypes up an otherwise dull quiz show. In Victoria he has a far more all-pervasive presence, but north of the Murray he is seen as a grifter and if the government stands up to him then respect for the government can only increase.

And the man who helped install Julia Gillard as Prime Minister, former national ALP secretary Karl Bitar is now helping to coordinate the campaign in his new job as a Crown Casino lobbyist.

Up to 25 Labor MPs are also threatening to vote against the plan in Caucus.

Every last one of those 25 are morons. The clubs pump their propaganda into people's homes but only the truly gullible members really believe it. You have nothing to lose, you people: if ever you were ever a bit frustrated with Karl and Mark, this is your chance to grow some spine and save both yourselves and a Labor government (with nothing to lose but, well, Karl and Mark).

Club members tend to be older people, claiming a public space in their club after being slowly squeezed out of workplaces (through retirement, forced or otherwise) and shops (low income earners don't have much to spend, retail is geared toward younger people). The club nearest my place is dominated by Anglo-Saxon people in a way that the surrounding suburb was but is no longer. They look the other way when confronted with the idea that their club, and all its works, is subsidised by those with serious problems. If Mr Wilkie and the government step in with their loss-limit devices, these people will respect them for doing so.

While Kennett displayed rare gutlessness in allowing tobacco advertising for the Grand Prix, the politicians who banned tobacco sponsorship of sport ran rings around a lazy arseclown like Mark Arbib.

The fruits of Mark Arbib's career can be seen in Macquarie Street. State Labor Opposition Leader John Robertson has a smaller caucus than William Holman before World War I, and Holman left that. It's doubtful that anyone in State Parliament who was also a member of the ALP would buy Arbib a cup of coffee. Those who would stoop and build up NSW Labor with worn-out tools have nothing to thank Mark Arbib for, nothing. A bit like the thousands of members of the Green Jobs Corps, really.

People complain about NSW Labor, but if the Keating-Richardson era NSW Right were still running things Arbib would already be on his way to some remote embassy, a cold-eyed killer would be slotted into the Sport portfolio to rearrange things and warn anyone that one stray word about a policy not directly related to sport might be very, very costly in all sorts of ways, and a chastened non-entity would humbly assume the role of NSW Senator.

So-called savvy Canberra watchers didn't blame Gillard for inviting so few new names into the ministry after the last election, and there is an assumption that all Labor backbenchers are dills like John Murphy. Here are seven Labor federal backbenchers for whom I have no particular brief, but of whom each would be a better than Mark Arbib:

Laurie Ferguson (in this list from sheer pity, admittedly, but still a superior candidate)
Ed Husic
Kirsten Livermore
Senator Gavin Marshall
Deb O'Neill
Julie Owens
Senator Glenn Sterle

Each one of those people would be a perfectly capable Minister for Sport (and as for Aboriginal Employment, and the grab-bag of other areas Arbib is mismanaging, don't get me started).

Journalists fail to realise that there is less likely to be a story in a politician who is shooting his mouth off than there is in one who's being very, very quiet. Mark Arbib is being very, very quiet. Journalists are leaving him alone because they are stupid, and they think that when a politician says 'no comment' then all possible avenues for a story are utterly closed, and oh look is that Chris Pyne turning cartwheels in order to draw attention to, um, himself? There was a time when one could simply say 'that's journalism'; but now the sheer slackness of the press gallery is nothing so much as an argument why at least 90% of them should be boiled in their own piss.

Mark Arbib has failed as a minister. He's had four years, longer than Morris Iemma got as Premier. His powers of quiet suasion no longer exist, if they ever did. He is a power vacuum and should be removed before others are sucked in and wedged fast. He should be removed and replaced with ... well, anyone really. The fact that he can't recognise that his own time is up is all the testament you need to the sheer political failure of Mark Arbib.

Blogger does journalist's work (or, why Paul Daley is a wanker)

2011-09-25T19:49:00.003+10:00

Paul Daley is a wanker because he allowed this article to go out under his name.

A STRANGE thing happened last week. A federal shadow minister actually came up with something that seemed kind of almost a bit like a policy.

Remember policies? Oppositions used to have to come up with them if they wanted to become governments. It was all about creating a genuine point of intellectual and ideological contrast between the incumbent government and the administration-in-waiting so voters might actually weigh up differences on an issue-by-issue basis, thereby enabling them to make a reasoned decision about who they wanted to govern this place. It involved an element of creativity and risk taking. Novel, I know.

It isn't novel because it actually happened. Daley here is implying that he has some respect for policy, policymaking and intellectual points of difference. Firstly, if he did then the case he cites, Senator David Johnston's interview, isn't worth the fuss. Secondly, Daley doesn't assess what Johnston says in policy terms.

Daley doesn't appreciate the policy, he wants to play the same game that created the zero-sum politics that we all despise, and that he wants to pretend he too shares our opinion. That's why he's a wanker.

The shadow defence minister, senator David Johnston, cogently outlined in an interview with The Australian critical elements of the Coalition's supposed plans in a portfolio that is as notorious for wasting billions of taxpayer dollars as it is for ending the careers of ministers who oversee it.

Defence policy, strategy and funding is a minefield for both ministers and their opposites. Oppositions usually approach it with cautious bipartisanship; they like to own the successes but quickly deny any responsibility for the failures.

Spending overruns in defence often go into the billions, rather than millions, of dollars.

You can really only judge waste when you have a clear idea of what your priorities are, and it isn't clear what Johnston's priorities are. He proposes a grab-bag of cost savings. Johnston does not offer a cogent view of what it means to defend Australia in a meaningful and practical sense in the world we live in, and the world that is foreseeable.

What Johnston is proposing isn't a policy, it's a shopping list. It's an indictment of Daley that he can't pick the difference. It's an insult to the rest of us that he, and his editor, thinks his ignorance is good enough for us.

First, let's look at what Johnston said in the Brendan Nicholson article, and assess that against the country's defence needs. Second, let's look at Daley's respect for and treatment of policy and see whether he's right to wonder why there isn't more of it.

The changes outlined by Johnston include considering cutting by half the planned purchase of 100 Joint Strike Fighters for the RAAF ...

Why half? Is this purely a cost-saving measure? Given that the JSF is such a crock, why not cut it by 100% and buy the best fighter plane on the market: the Sukhoi S-37. For Australia to buy that aircraft would nullify the threat posed by other air forces buying it.

Mind you, all that assumes some consideration of the role of fighter aircraft in the 21st century. It is significant that no Australian fighter aircraft are deployed in the operational theatres in which we have been involved over the past ten years: Solomon Islands, Afghanistan ~~and Iraq~~. The aircraft used in East Timor were transport aircraft, helicopters - and the old faithful "pigs" (F111), which date from the 1960s. No evidence such thought is in evidence from Johnston's own site, which offers a shallow critique of the current government's actions rather than real in-depth thought into how you defend Australia.

It isn't necessary to spell out detailed alternative policies, pace Ross Cameron - but it is necessary to show some breadth and depth of thought that shows evidence of capacity. The Defence Ministers who've foundered in that role have lacked that breadth and depth. Any fool can quibble over receipts, and that is all that Johnston is doing. We can have no confidence that this guy will make a blind bit of difference in Defence.

... and urgently reassessing plans to build 12 big conventional submarines in Australia. A Coalition government would consider buying smaller and cheaper models off the shelf overseas instead.

They'd consider it. Imagine if Gillard announced that she was considering but not committing to something costing billions of dollars and with massive potential impact to the nation, and how The Australian would jump all over it.

This is a reference to the half-dozen or so German submarines often raised by people who think one submarine is as good as another.

Submarines are important to Australia's ability to protect shipping going through southeast Asian waters; Australian trade stops or becomes vastly more uneconomical with restrictions on that shipping. Submarines are hard to staff, being labour-intensive and more demanding of time and effort than most Australian workplaces.

This is not to say that one submarine is as good as another. The German submarines are designed for the cold, deep waters of the North Sea. They would be ideal if the main threat for which submarines were the most effective response came from Antarctica. They are far from ideal for moving through the warmer, more shallow waters to our country's north.

No evidence that Johnston has considered our country's need for submarines, or that "professional journalists" like Nicholson and Daley judge Johnston against what's right for the country.

Johnston promises a comprehensive review of progress of the plan to re-equip the ADF if the Coalition wins government.

Complete with shock-horror stories of budget blowouts, and no elucidation of what the country needs from Johnston, Nicholson or Daley.

Johnston says the multi-role and stealthy JSFJSF. Because of concerns that the JSF would arrive late, the Howard government ordered 24 Super Hornets, which are in the final stages of delivery.

Early this year The Australian revealed that because of further delays with the JSF it was likely the Gillard government would have to buy an additional 18 Super Hornets on top of the initial 24 to plug a looming capability gap.

That was vehemently denied the next day by the RAAF, which badly wants the JSF, but then confirmed weeks later by Defence Minister Stephen Smith, who said he was concerned about delays and that buying more Super Hornets was an option.

And Johnston's position on Super Hornets is ...?

Someone like Paul Daley might be fascinated by Johnston going back on what the Howard government did, but the broader question is what the country needs, followed by an assessment of how effectively Labor and the Coalition are meeting those needs. Nothing: Nicholson takes Johnston on faith and Daley is concerned only with clichés of COST BLOWOUT SHOCK.

Johnston quotes from a number of papers by experts in the field, and some cranky responses from incumbent minister Smith, but it's hard to tell what sides of the debates Johnston and the Liberals are taking. Finally, Nicholson admits:

Johnston has not so far suggested that the changes he wants are based on a different view of Australia's strategic future than that reached under Labor.

Well, what a waste of time that was. Johnston's going to quibble a bit with the accounting at the project level.

Daley says:

It was gratifying, then, to see Senator Johnston seemingly take such a strong stand. He was quoted as saying a Coalition government would: quickly "redo" the government's 2009 defence strategic and spending plan (or white paper)

The last white paper was delivered in 2009, with a revision due in five years (i.e. the next one is due in 2014). The next election is due in 2013. Whoever wins that election will have to "quickly redo" the white paper. This isn't newsworthy if you've been paying attention. Johnston is trying to present normal service as some big new development.

All are reasonable positions to argue ... So bring it on. Let's have the debate now.

Yes, let's. Let's have some information on defence priorities and spending to conduct that debate, Paul. We might need some journalism. Where might we get that, Paul?

... there are serious economic and diplomatic costs associated with undoing or dramatically altering defence programs and purchases.

Scrap or radically alter the local program and you create unemployment, not least in South Australia, where at least 2000 jobs could hang on the submarine project. Ditto with such a massive US-based program as the Joint Strike Fighter.

What unemployment would be created in South Australia if the JSF were canned? Is unemployment the biggest consideration with a defence program? Might employment be taken up by other projects, and if so what might they be? Nope, me neither.

Johnston has been shadow minister for three years now. He has seen off two Labor defence ministers in Joel Fitzgibbon and John Faulkner and he has effectively niggled a third, Stephen Smith, who is now experiencing the same frustration with his department on paralysing cost overruns and delays as his two immediate predecessors.

What a silly piece of writing that is. Johnston's contribution to the downfall of Fitzgibbon is zero. Faulkner announced that he was a placeholder on day one, despite and not because of the eagle-eye of David Johnston bearing down on him. Smith has been entirely self-motivated in reviewing Defence programs, and has been so transparent that Johnston has followed rather than led ministerial scrutiny of those programs.

Johnston has nothing to say in this article on asymmetrical warfare, or the sexism in the armed forces that leads to regular eruptions of sordid behaviour that puts the lie to regular assurances that the matter is a) a one-off and b) always the fault of junior parties, usually females. Also nothing about asylum-seekers as a Defence issue gets the shortest of shrift, rightly so and praise be.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott publicly reassured us he would "never make savings at the expense of the operational capabilities of our defence force … No one has said that we would tear up the defence white paper".

Not surprisingly, Defence Minister Smith highlighted these apparent differences.

"We've seen the shadow minister for defence tearing up the white paper, the Leader of the Opposition saying that won't happen and the manager of opposition business [Christopher Pyne] saying these were all musings," he said.

Having skated over substantive issues (Daley's summary might be summarised as: ooh, it's all so controversial, isn't it), he then goes to the stunning discovery that different politicians have different views. The Situation has refused to be pinned down on policy but insisted on his credibility as Prime Minister nonetheless (and not challenged by the media), and who gives a damn was Chris Pyne says? Fancy doing any sort of work - certainly not three years' worth, let alone the giant-killer reputation Daley falsely ascribes to him - only to have Pyne sprinkle it with piss.

Is this not further proof that the Liberals are unfit for government? The wannabe PM interprets questioning of cost overruns as cutting operational capacity. Three years in a position and you get slapped down by Pyne and Abbott. If Johnston had any dignity he'd quit; if Abbott had any sense he'd put someone else in the role.

Daley would confuse movement with progress in terms of policy development, but that's Paul Daley for you: starting off with the impression of policy but really focused on the very kind of Canberra insider goings-on that makes policy development impossible. Wake up to yourself Daley, and your own role in the impoverishment of our political debate, and stop being the sort of wanker who alienates us from our politics.