While the High Court of Australia on 14 November 2006 may have claimed WorkChoices is constitutionally valid, my books published in the INSPECTOR-RIKATI® series set out how the court deceived the people and concealed very relevant and vital details from their judgment as otherwise it would have had to declare WorkChoices to be unconstitutional, as it still is.
Look for example at the High Court of Australia having persisted to rule that voting is compulsory, yet, I succeeded (after a 5-year legal battle) on 19 July 2006 that you do not have to vote As Section 245 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 is unconstitutional.

As I published in my 27-5-2007 published book about WorkChoices in “032-Chapter 003 LEGAL FICTION - persona designata� that the High Court of Australia sitting as “persona designata� for the Parliament as a Court of disputed Returns is not a Court of law and as such has no judicial powers (consider Sue v Hill) and as such it is abusing its judicial powers to pretend Politicians now have judicial powers.

What we have seen is eroding of our DEMOCRATIC system and electors are gullible to support it.

Look at the unconstitutional invasion into the sovereign nation Iraq. John Howard had no prerogative powers to authorise the invasion of Iraq by Australian troops, yet no one seems to hold him accountable for his terrorism upon another country. Yet, we are quick to lock up people accused to possibly conduct terrorism, regardless they may be innocent.
The deportation of Vivian Alvarez Solon was underlining how incompetent Phillip Ruddock was as a Minister for Immigration yet he is then subsequently appointed to be the Attorney General.

What we see is that politicians are not playing catch up politics but simply are playing the fools of electors who are willing to accept this nonsense and criminal conduct rather then to take action against them.
For example, if electors were to massively vote for INDEPENDENT CANDIDATES as to give a clear lesson to political parties that they are out when failing to represent the electors, then perhaps we might just get finally some real “representation�. However, anyone who sees it as catch up politics may just misconceived that the electorate are played as fools by politicians as they know that whatever garbage they give the electorate will go along, regardless that it is all lies.
For example, anyone who is in the belief to be an “Australian citizen� as an “Australian national� is a fool, as there is no such country called “Commonwealth of Australia�, hence those believing to have the Australian nationality have been sufficiently brainwashed to accept any rot. The Commonwealth of Australia, as like the European Union, is a “political union� and is not and cannot be a country, republic, kingdom, empire! Sure you can pretend it is a country but if you desire to belief in LEGAL FICTION so be it and then accept the rot politicians are dishing out! And, if you are back to LEGAL REALITY you might just discover that we do not even have a constitutionally valid government either.
Well, those were some of the constitutional issues I raised in my case and succeeded upon them UNCHALLENGED. As such, I proved in a Court of law what I have claimed and proved to succeed upon it!
Politicians are swindling the electorate time and again and fool you if you accept it.

http://andrewbartlett.com/blog/?p=1551

Robert, I liked yours - very thoughtful piece. I suspect you are right about the cyclical thing, at least in a broad brush sense.

In 1999, Bracks promised to be more fiscally responsible than Kennett, prompting him to face accusations of selling out but with the consolation of winning government.

Catch-up politics requires the government maintaining its legitimacy and not looking like a pale shadow of the opposition. There’s a fine line between neutralising an issue and being me-too; Bracks was on the right side of that line, Kim Beazley the wrong side.

To catch-up, Howard has to stop putting himself in positions where he looks like an old man who doesn’t really get it, as happened with broadband or the Kirribilli House drinkies thing. The plans for Aborigines and for water are high-level, knee-jerk, unfunded resonses - as long as tough, smart and articulate people keep throwing curly questions at him about the details, and avoid tropes that he can attack (e.g. civil liberties), he can be put in the position of pale imitation.

If Costello became PM now he’d be seen as a pale imitation of Rudd.

Providing a very small target and not stating a “vision” or broad, deep policy platform is what got Howard elected in the first place, but this requires broad disillusionment, anger, rejection with the sitting government. Stating that his vision of Australia under his leadership was “to be relaxed and comfortable” was the ultimate in non-vision, non-policy. keeping patiently (opportunistically) under wraps the key objectives of his policy agenda seems to have been critical. Howard’s played is strong, tightly-held cards (Telstra sell-off, WorkChoices, Immigration & detention, “security” legislation, electoral “reform” and others) when Labor has been unable to counter-play anything except create noise.

Of course the counter-example is Beasley’s attempt to emulate this “small target” approach that failed.
And then there’s Latham’s attempt to present a broad visionary “Ladder of Opportunity” platform that was undone by very successful catch-up politics combined with fantastic poker-playing from the PM in out-blinking Latham on the environment and Tasmanian Forestry policy. And also Labor’s complete and utter failure to counter the fundamentally unprovable “interest rates will always be lower under a Howard Government” slogan.

So that brings us to 2007, where Rudd has outlined some key “visionary” (I’d suggest they’re not that visionary) areas: broadband, climate change, education, and Howard has played catch-up very aggressively, even stealing the “Education Revolution” slogan from Rudd. Now that’s ballsy poker-playing!

Now we see Howard finding an “opportunity” to take back control of the poker game: Aboriginal affairs. the questions are deep and many addressed in other blogs here and elsewhere. Rudd has a choice: seek to play catch-up on this policy area, lie low (which he seems to prefer here) and wait for the next card to be played, or find other areas to re-claim the initiative.

(a) A Crock….
(b) The desperate attempts of a fading politician who needs a policy legacy.
(c) The assertion of a man who finally wants to do right.
(d) The mark of a statesman ready to take us in to the future.

There are costs and benefits to ‘agenda-setting’ governments. The benefits are easy: governments can more the country along in a big way. Hawke and Keating were prime examples here. Keating led the country on land rights and competition policy. These were things that actually got done. When it works, it really works.

I think perhaps that’s part of the context for this question. The Howard government really hasn’t had much of a big agenda (hence the fact that we here before every election that there’s no “vision” for the next term) with the exception of some ideological obsessions such as WorkChoices. So perhaps they’re particularly prone to catch up politics? Perhaps it’s characteristic of conservative governments generally?