Cross-posted from Online Opinion, with thanks:
If you had an unexpected windfall of $10,000, what would you do with it? Give half away to family and friends? Get your teeth fixed? Take a community college course? Put some aside for a rainy day?
What if you had that kind of money to play with every year? The question is worth thinking about, because in round figures the Commonwealth Government spends $220 billion - or $10,000 a year for every man, woman and child in Australia.
Here’s how Mr Costello spent your $10,000 last year:
Denunciation of middle-class welfare follows at OLO, comments and rotten tomatoes welcome below!
From today’s Crikey email:
Ministers have been singing from the same song sheet since Julie Bishop appeared on Lateline on Monday night – the budget bounce is coming – in about two months when tax cuts appear in pay packets and cheques pop up in the mail.
However, the most salient numbers in Newspoll have been entirely ignored by the punditariat (including by The Australian who commissioned it). One would imagine politicians might have been paying closer attention.
Newspoll actually conducted two polls – one on voting intentions and a specific poll on the reception of the budget. The latter has been very selectively covered – the figures about general approval for the budget have been cited, but there has been no commentary at all on a question Newspoll asked on whether the budget would shift votes.
26% of voters told Newspoll they would be more likely to vote for Labor as a result of the budget. 19% said the Coalition, and 49% said it would make no difference. The Labor budget bounce effect was present across all age groups and income levels.
So voters have already made up their minds – and it could be reasonably inferred that they’ve decided that they’re not eating the political carrot. But this goes unmentioned by the punditariat.
But what’s equally puzzling is the government’s tactics.
Continue reading ‘A tale of two polls’
I can’t resist. In 1989, shortly before our now Dear Leader was ousted in a party room coup by Andrew Peacock, the Bully had a front cover with Howard’s photo and the slogan “Mr 18% - Why does he bother?” - The Libs now trail Labor by 18 points in the Newspoll 2PP. Labor up by two. Howard down to 37%, a full 12 points behind Howard as preferred PM.
Labor got a budget bounce.
So you may well ask? Why did Howard bother with his second Australia Rising speech? You can read it here in The Government Gazette Australian.
Aside from his extraordinary attack on Labor for allegedly rendering education an “almost soulless and narrow form of national economic service” (hint to Howard, just because you’re acting like an Opposition, doesn’t mean that you need to attack your own government), we’ve now got the number one issue in education - DISCIPLINE! Let’s have a moral panic on state schools! Hang on, did that before the last election, and nothing actually happened in terms of action.
Oh, and we’re engaged in a Global War for Talent! Or Global War on Talent… that one will get a bit confusing what with all the other GWOTs the government supports.
Unsurprisingly, all this guff reduces down to yet another state (and state school) bashing exercise, and a belief that if only principals could sack teachers, all would be well. In the Global War for Talent.
That’s the government all over - how to solve a problem? Support authority figures sacking workers.
More money for education is generally welcomed by everyone. Except, of course, when it contains the magic word voucher, as in in Julie Bishop’s press release:
$457.4 million over four years for the National Literacy and Numeracy Vouchers programme which will provide direct assistance to parents of students who have not achieved minimum standards in reading, writing and mathematics in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 so that they can get additional help for their children;
The Australian Education Union were amongst others who aren’t fans of this scheme, arguing that the money would be better spent directly on schools rather than “unaccountable” private tutors.
While there are broader ideological issues at play here, it’s a pretty fair question: what has the federal government done to establish that paying for after-school private tutors is the most effective way of improving student outcomes? Continue reading ‘The tutorial voucher scheme evaluated’
There’s been a lot of very interesting discussion, particularly on this thread, about the increasing dissonance between the almost unanimous narrative of the punditariat and the reality of politics in this election year. I say “almost unanimous”, because there’s some difference in the degree of overt partisanship between say, Dennis Shanahan, and Michelle Grattan, but almost no departure from the press pack “honeymoon is over”, “Howard is a political genius” tropes, which may I just point out, are also in a sense partisan as they can’t be unrelated to what Coalition spinmeisters are saying. The latest Morgan poll shows no change in the two party preferred - 60/40 in Labor’s favour - after the alleged “tipping point” of the ALP conference and a week of business and media IR hysteria (which should not be dignified with the term “debate”). The punditariat don’t appear to have noticed that as early as Clinton’s election campaign in 1992, winning politicians have sought to speak over the heads of the political media to the people - through grabs on the news, lifestyle shows, talkback and now the nets. They do notice it with regard to Howard’s use of media, but this then just gets reinscribed into the political genius narrative, without consideration of the fact that the distant and self-referential discourse of the Canberra press gallery both floats free from voters’ lived experience and has little role any more in shaping political perceptions in the electorate.
I’m posting two stories from today’s Crikey over the fold which I think can be seen through this prism - one from Christian Kerr and one from me. It will be very interesting indeed when the history of coverage of this election comes to be written, what roles the punditariat and new and independent media respectively will be seen to have played. In this sense, I’d like to pick up on an insight from Joseph Pearson, referenced in this post:
What this and most definitions of the concept egregiously labelled ‘citizen journalism’ get wrong is the emphasis: it’s on the source.
It may well be that the quality of commentary from new and independent media is better, not because of any great quotient of superior intellectual skills at political analysis, but because those of us outside the punditariat are literally outside it - embedded in our everyday lives and work, friends, families and community networks and perhaps therefore better placed both to read what’s happening in the electorate and to critique the very narrow perspective of the richly rewarded Canberra media machines.
Continue reading ‘The commentariat vs. the people?’
Anybody who might just happen to be looking for somewhere to cut some dough out of future budgets might be interested in this graph from the budget papers:
Continue reading ‘The endless rivers of defence procurement dough’
A couple of weeks ago, on the way home from work, after getting off the bus and heading down to Coles, I turned the corner onto Merthyr Road to be confonted by half the road having been torn up by an exploding water main.
One of the smartest aspects of Rudd’s budget reply was his leaky pipes promise - because it responds to people’s actual lived experience, not the scattergun bribery and headline grabbing symbolism Costello specialises in.
We’ve got hundred year old water mains in Brisbane’s inner north - as Rudd would know. One of the things that most surprised me on Tuesday night was that Costello didn’t even acknowledge water and the drought in cities. To be frank, most voters in Brisbane are much less concerned about the Murray-Darling and farmers’ water allocations than whether we’ve actually got town water next year to drink. There are nearly 2 million voters in urban South East Queensland living through level five water restrictions, which will probably go up to level six in November, and yet another dry autumn, after yet another dry summer where most of the grass around the joint is basically dead.
And everyone knows the feds haven’t contributed a cent to building the recycled water pipeline that’s going to make sure we’ve got water to drink in 2008. And there are an awful lot of winnable Coalition seats in Queensland. And as electoral history teaches, in this part of the world, when a swing is on, it’s on big time.
How’s Rudd doing? What do people think of Labor’s response so far?
Tonight, I expect Rudd to play the federalism card, pointing to a cooperative approach with the states on education particularly, and outlining how Labor would spend the money allocated differently. Early childhood education and VET will both be emphasised to ram home the “budget is about the Coalition’s future, not the nation’s future” theme and to reclaim ground on one of Labor’s key issues. The inaction on climate change and water will also get a mention. I don’t think Rudd will be pulling any rabbits out of his hat - the way that Labor is going to run on economic management is to paint the government as the fiscal drunken sailors - interest rates will get a mention (and the Fin’s coverage yesterday was far more downbeat on this than the Costello fest in the Oz) and the key to Labor’s approach will be to stay within strict fiscal limits. The two most important answers Swan gave in his interview on Tuesday night were that Labor wouldn’t spend next year’s surplus (implying that Howard probably will in his campaign launch, if not before, should there be no or a negligible budget bounce) and that Rudd is a “fiscal conservative”.
I have a feeling the politics of porkbarrelling and vote-buying won’t save the government this year.
Commentary, links, analysis invited.
To kick debate off, there’s a piece from Christian Kerr in Crikey which I think captures the politics of Rudd’s reply well. Over the fold.
Update: Here’s Rudd’s speech.
Elsewhere: James Farrell at Troppo, and Tim Dunlop at Blogocracy.
Continue reading ‘Open Budget reply thread’
My thoughts on the politics of the budget have been published today at New Matilda. I’m very grateful to NM for commissioning the piece, which gave me a chance to reflect at some length on what I see as the key political issues.
It has already been noted, not least by the Ruddster, that climate change didn’t get much of a look in in the budget. Instead, as foreshadowed, we got a stunt: the doubling of the rebate for installing solar panels on your roof, from $4,000 to $8,000.
Don Henry of the ACF was interviewed on ABC radio to provide a green perspective in response. To summarise, he correctly noted that the project was “modest” in scope (ie, a stunt), but said it was good as far as it goes.
No it isn’t. Not only is it a stunt, it’s not even a useful one. Continue reading ‘Costello can’t even get his climate change stunts right’
I’ll have something to say about Dollar Sweetie’s rabbits (bring back the parliamentary tradition of wearing hats to make a point of order, I say!) tomorrow - I’ve been asked to do some political analysis of the budget by New Matilda, but here’s a thread where anyone can post any commentary, analysis and links. Someone out there may even be liveblogging the budget though I can hardly think of a worse way to spend a Tuesday night.
Update: More blogosphere budget commentary so far at Catallaxy and Polemica, and from the three Andrews, Bartlett, Leigh and Norton. I’m sure there’ll be much more tomorrow, so please feel free to link to any posts in comments and I’ll update again when I get a chance.
Further update: More at Blogocracy, John Quiggin and The Poll Bludger (not really, but watch for the comments thead). I think Quiggin gets the politics spot on.
Yet more posts at Ambit Gambit, Catallaxy, and a couple at Troppo, but it doesn’t seem to want to load so I can’t link directly.
And Ken at Surfdom wants to spread his outrage!
The biggest danger for the government is that no one will take any particular notice of the budget. Not only have previous “budget bounces” been derisory, all the signs are that Howard has increasingly been written off by the punters as a tired and too clever by half politician. That $60 billion spending spree in the last campaign launch was a very bad omen for Howard. All he probably needed to do to win was hang up a sign outside each polling booth which said “Mark Latham is the Labor leader” but the purported political genius is a good judge of his own campaign skills.
But it’s not voter cynicism I’m talking about, or not just. It’s the cynicism of largely symbolic spending announcements which are supposed to win over a particular segment of the electorate. More often than not, except for the actual cheques in the mail, or the milkshake and a sandwich we all enjoyed after a tax cut, nothing happens. Where’s all the money diverted from the Telstra sale in 1996 gone? It was meant to fix the Murray Darling, remember… Or what about all the money allocated in several terms for “better telecommunications”? How many of the technical schools are operating and what difference have they made? Has the skills shortage been solved by giving apprentices a toolbox? Have baby bonuses improved early childhood outcomes? Have Australian flags improved public education? Have tv ads won the “war on drugs”? What concrete benefits to public services and infrastructure have the Howard government actually delivered?
To be fair to them, that’s not traditionally been the role of the Commonwealth. But we’ve seen Howard and all the gang spend the last few years denouncing the states day in and day out. Yet announcements made to deal with water - for instance Turnbull’s pipeline from the Clarence to somewhere or other in South East Queensland - are demonstrably just political thought bubbles. If the government have succeeded in convincing electors that they are responsible for doing something meaningful in areas like infrastructure and education, then it’s long past time for some results to be evident.
Continue reading ‘It’s the cynicism, stupid!’
So, tomorrow night is federal Budget night.
Make your blatant vote grab predictions here.
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