Tag Archive for 'economic management'

“Ghosts go along with us to the end…”

Published
by
Mark
5 months ago
in Howardia and Polls
. 41 Comments

So, what happens if the Opposition, and their media echo chambers, tried every Howardian trick in the book, and nothing worked?

Possum explains the significance of the latest polling numbers:

With the phone poll average in the sidebar now showing 109 seats going to Labor were the latest round of phone polls repeated at an election, there must be some pretty nervous Coalition marginal and not so marginal seat holders.

Look back at the tactics of the Opposition over the last few months where every card from the Howard era was played. Rising Interest Rates…. tick. Labor’s debt…. tick. Boat People….. tick.

It’s like that episode of the Simpsons where Lisa tests the difference in learning capability between a hamster and Bart. Sure the cupcake is electrified, sure every time he tries to grab it he gets shocked – after a few tries even a hamster would learn – but Bart keeps grabbing away time and time again, hoping that this time he won’t be zapped. Hoping this time it will be different.

When you change governments you change the country – as Keating said, but the national zeitgeist also changes with it and pulling these old cards out from the Oppo benches is a roadmap to failure.

Meanwhile, Essential Research finds 66% of respondents rating the Rudd government’s performance in handling the Global Financial Crisis as good or excellent. But over at The Australian, they’re banging on about the Liberal leadership, and declaiming:

…debt and deficit are now a concern of most Australians…

Oh. Really?

Elsewhere: Bernard Keane.

The Liberals’ two hour strategy

Published
by
Mark
6 months, 1 week ago
in Media and Politics
. 38 Comments

In discussing Joe Hockey’s latest musings on the need for tens of billions of dollars of spending cuts yesterday, I wondered whether the Libs had conceded the next election, and were trying to position themselves for the one after. I also speculated that it might just be random, and that to imagine that the opposition had a coherent political strategy might be to impose a bit too much form on chaos.

There’s an interesting piece by Alister Drysdale in Business Spectator this morning, which rips into the Liberals:

There is no sign whatsoever of alternative public policy – just oppose. For Rudd, Gillard and Wayne Swan the Opposition modus operandi – exemplified by Question Time idiocy – must give them not a moment’s lost sleep. They’ve been lashed by the proverbial wet tram ticket, and feel no pain. And for that, we all lose.

I don’t know Drysdale’s work, but it’s interesting to see this sort of critique in a publication targeted at a business/finance readership. The alienation between business and their natural political allies is one of the most interesting and least analysed stories of the Rudd incumbency.

It’s also ironic to see John Howard ’stirring from his sick bed’ to denounce Labor in opposition for, well, opposing. (Not that I think the great debate Dennis Shanahan and his mates claim is occurring on Kevin Rudd’s latest red rag to the bulls is pre-occupying public attention).

For all the claims from the Libs and their media mates that Rudd and co are pre-occupied by the media cycle, it’s clear that Labor has successfully laid down a narrative and shaped public opinion. Drysdale’s argument is that the Liberals are narcissistically obsessed with popping up on Sky News and tweeting to political tragics, and have eschewed all the things oppositions should do in favour of playing to the press gallery’s short attention span. He’s right.

No wonder the polls never perceptibly budge.

A two term strategy?

Published
by
Mark
6 months, 1 week ago
in Economics, Howardia, Media and Politics
. 37 Comments

You could be forgiven for thinking that there is no such thing as Australian federal politics any more. Nothing budges in the polls. As Possum reminds us:

Remember when a party getting 55% in a poll created headlines of impending doom for their opposites? To show just how blase we’ve all become lately, 97% of all polls taken during the Rudd government have shown the ALP to be on a two party preferred off 55% or greater. Even if we just use the phone polls, 91.2% of all phone polls have shown the ALP to be on a TPP of 55% or greater.

Poll after poll, these extraordinary results roll in and we all just go “Oh yes, there’s another one“.

Landslides have become normal. [My emphasis]

The commentary, and the shadow boxing goes on… But surely the whole theme of “this happened, and that happened, and this paper highlighted GOVERNMENT WASTE and Malcolm Turnbull’s approval rating moved by 3%” completely misrepresents what’s actually occurring, because its premise is that people are paying some attention to the Canberra political game. I suspect a lot of us are enjoying a rather protracted holiday from it all after a surfeit of political scares and alarums during the Howard years.

But the opposition, I suppose, can’t just go and take a long ski-ing holiday in Europe. And Joe Hockey has actually announced something that vaguely resembles an election agenda – a promise to slash public spending (he says $14 billion, but Bernard Keane thinks his figures are wrong and it’s more likely to have to be 30 or 40 to reach his GDP share target). It’s the logical corollary of the ‘debt and deficit’ mantra, at any rate.

Continue reading ‘A two term strategy?’

Lame claims: invoking the Reserve Bank and Treasury politically

Published
by
Mark
7 months ago
in Economics, Media and Politics
. 16 Comments

Sometimes, in politics, it might be better to remain silent.

Glenn Milne’s latest intervention, talking up a line from Liberal MP Scott Morrison, has to be one of the lamest ever political attack lines. [For those who don't want to wade through a farrago of fallacies expounded at excessive length, his core point is echoed by Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy, though without attribution to Milne. Rendered in short form, the basic logical fallacy is starkly evident.]

So, there’s going to be an “emissions financial crisis” and the Reserve Bank wasn’t consulted by the Government before climate change legislation was prepared? A non sequitur built on speculative and incoherent fantasy does not make for an effective political attack. ‘OMG! Governor didn’t read legislation! Rudd FAIL!’…

The political syntax of this claim, of course, is that Rudd and co successfully berated the Liberals for ‘ignoring 20 (or whatever it was) successive Reserve Bank warnings’ in the lead up to the 2007 election. Now, we have the Liberals, and their echo chamber, arguing that the Reserve Bank should have been given a chance to warn. Somehow a hypothetical and unlikely warning was pre-empted by the Government deliberately choosing not to do what it doesn’t have to do. Try to make any sense of that.

What would be far more interesting to examine would be the politics of invoking the Reserve Bank (and for that matter, Treasury and its ubiquitous Secretary, Dr Ken Henry). Continue reading ‘Lame claims: invoking the Reserve Bank and Treasury politically’

Kevin Rudd the essayist

Published
by
Mark
7 months, 4 weeks ago
in Climate change, Economics and Media
. 142 Comments

[Via Terry Flew] In the wake of his essay for The Monthly, Kevin Rudd has written close to 7000 words for the Fairfax papers on the economy, claiming that the opposition’s approach is something akin to the Premiers’ Plan of the Great Depression. In this piece, Rudd poses the alternatives to Labor’s course of action – do nothing or retrenchment in spending. The latter, is of course, the logical implication of the Liberals’ obsession with debt and deficit.

The article follows a week when the Liberal Party again tore itself apart on climate change, ending with a bizarre op/ed from Tony Abbott (the frontbencher who won’t comment on Indigenous housing – core to his shadow portfolio – because of an embargo from the publishers of his book). Abbott recited all the old denialist saws about “cooling”, but in the process called on the opposition to pass the government’s CPRS because the Coalition needed clear political space to concentrate on its economic message.

But what is that message? There isn’t one. It’s an entirely oppositional stance – repeating the mantra of “debt and deficit” at every opportunity. The Liberals gave up even trying to articulate an economic policy, hoping – as Shaun Carney observes in an acute analysis – that the economy would hit rock bottom and that they would resume their rightful place as natural “economic managers”. As Carney observes, economic credibility isn’t a given, it has to be established. That groundwork has not been laid. And, if things turn out not to be as bad as everyone was predicting, the Coalition is left without any political strategy whatever.

The politics of austerity

Published
by
Mark
9 months ago
in Economics, Elections and Politics
. 32 Comments

In an interview with the Financial Review a little while back, Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner commented that governments might face some difficulty down the track when the need for economic stimulus has passed, but when also public revenues are not flooding into the coffers as they were at the height of the mining boom. It’s not terribly surprising to see Tanner thinking ahead – and no doubt the government is also thinking about what sort of narrative might be utilised to justify an era of diminished expectations to the voters.

It’s interesting to set these remarks aside a leak from the Coalition party room yesterday – apparently Malcolm Turnbull mentioned that there may be a need to raise tax in the future. Predictably, this was howled down as being “contrary to Liberal philosophy”.

Therein lies the rub.

Aided and abetted by a quite unique set of economic circumstances, the Coalition’s “economic management” over the last few terms of the Howard government basically translated to reducing personal income tax while maintaining the rate of corporate tax. Add to the mix a crazed melange of transfer payments and electoral bribes, and for a while they had a winning electoral strategy.

It did, of course, trash “core Liberal philosophy” if that meant what John Howard supposedly stood for in the 1980s – ‘dry’ economics. Reduced to a few slogans, the Liberals have proved themselves completely incapable of arguing any economic direction which even vaguely makes sense ever since their defeat in November 2007. Turnbull’s comments, and Tanner’s remarks, suggest that the political playing field of the economic game will be a much transformed one over the next few political cycles. Labor seems to understand this. It’s highly questionable if most Liberals even grasp what’s going on. That absent centre at the heart of their ideology and their political strategy will prove a bigger problem for them than their leadership and their day to day political tactics and messaging. The dysfunctions of the latter are only a symptom of the underlying disease.

The budget is not the economy

Published
by
Mark
9 months ago
in Economics, Media, Politics, Queensland and State/Territory Elections
. 16 Comments

I think there are quite a few self-inflicted political problems for Queensland Labor in the presentation of the budget handed down on Tuesday afternoon. But Anna Bligh and Andrew Fraser certainly aren’t helped by the ubiquity of the ‘debt is evil’ theme. Witness George Megalogenis’ front page column in The Australian yesterday:

QUEENSLAND has replaced the usual suspect of NSW as the nation’s sickest state and threatens to drag Australia into a prolonged recession.

Queensland has by far the worst budget position of all the states, and its citizens face the sharpest fall in living standards as unemployment is forecast to almost double in the next two years, from 4.25per cent to 7.25 per cent.

In fact the budget projections show Queensland below the national average in unemployment, and contracting less than the national economy. It is certainly legitimate to question the Bligh government’s economic strategy – and also to question why more wasn’t done in the Beattie years to build up infrastructure and public services. But Megalogenis’ argument conflates the state’s fiscal position with the health of Queensland’s economy in a false and unhelpful way… though it’s probably less unhelpful to Bligh than the “85 billion on the credit card” front page in the Courier-Mail yesterday. Perhaps she can take some comfort from the fact that the C-M’s overt bias towards the LNP had no discernible impact on the March election result.

New LNP leader John-Paul Langbroek delivers his reply in Parliament today. No doubt it will be all about debt and deficits. The ALP is more interested in beating up stories about a leadership challenge, part of a move to wedge and split the LNP on the privatisation bills. It’s a mystery to me why Labor Ministers would be chortling about the prospect of LNP (probably former National) members voting against a firesale of state assets.

Ps: For those interested, the Queensland budget papers can be found here.

John Hewson discovers excitable punctuation, anti-political fantasies and other stuff to do with the end of political year 2008

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 3 months ago
in Activism, Christmas, Climate change, Economics, Energy, Federal Elections, Foreign Elections, International, Markets, Media, Policy, Politics, Sociology and USA
. 12 Comments

End of year reflection on the state of politics and the nation type articles can be interesting. They can be tedious rehashes of trivia and reinventions of an already distorted reality to prove punditarian narratives r us and are ace (read any column in the Opposition Organ for an example). They can be quite thoughtful and rise above the usual trivia and actually say something. Or they can be quite weird.

John Hewson’s contribution in today’s Fin falls into the latter category. I strongly suspect his article is the first time evah a columnist in the venerable biz organ has written the sentence: “Whatever!” – indeed, Dr JoHew has been rather exuberant with his punctuation for emphasis in what is a sustained attack on the Reserve Bank. He may have a point that Glenn Stevens indicating that he’ll be taking a rest over January isn’t the best idea – as he points out, the Fed has rates heading down to a range between 0% and 0.25% and UK rates are at 2%. Perhaps Stevens thinks that in the month or so of the Great Australian Stupor, we’ll all spend the economy back to health by splurging on alcopops and sunscreen. On the other hand, Hewson is probably right that Aussie parochialism can’t be afforded anymore – the rest of the world may not understand that we’re all at the beach.

But Hewson’s paradox is that his solution is typical of what got us here in the first place – better “governance” and a more “independent” board – which sits uneasily with his own complaint that no one is allowed to complain about the independent Bank. This is the sort of neoliberal managerialist fantasy that landed us in this mess (in part) and the proscription is even more technocratic wonkery!

Speaking of which, that takes me to my segue about Kevin Rudd, political reality, climate change and technocratic wonkery.

Continue reading ‘John Hewson discovers excitable punctuation, anti-political fantasies and other stuff to do with the end of political year 2008′

OMG! Only 32 bucks in discretionary spending today! The economy is finished!

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 3 months ago
in Consumerism, Economics, Film, TV, Video etc, Media and Politics
. 44 Comments

… of course I am unstimulated, being neither a pensioner nor a family. But for what it’s worth, I bought Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy and Urban Legend at Rocking Horse, contributing to alt.music store sales and the retail sector employment prospects of rockers in skinny leg jeans.

Bernard Keane has a very informative piece in Crikey today wrapping up all the hysterical coverage of Kevin Rudd’s Christmas fiscal stimulus spendathon. Random vox pops on tv news shows and a News Limited online survey, naturally, prove that the payments will be saved rather than spent, thus confirming Malcolm Turnbull’s talking points, of course. Forget Treasury estimates that 70% of the stimulus will be spent.

What’s going on here? I think partly we’re seeing the 24 hour news cycle at work – anything that happens has to be pronounced instantly a success (boring) or a failure (exciting!) on the basis of scant anecdotal evidence and off the top of the head commentary. God forfend that we could wait for the December retail sales figures. But the media/politics/commentariat bandwagon will have moved far on by then. An alternative hypothesis from Keane:

Continue reading ‘OMG! Only 32 bucks in discretionary spending today! The economy is finished!’

Fiscal stimulus: Eight economists and a few politicians

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 3 months ago
in Climate change, Economics, Environment, Industrial Relations, Markets, Middle East, Policy and Sociology
. 11 Comments

Picking up on Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens’ remarks about “borrowing to invest” and not being afraid of a deficit if there are good policy outcomes to be had, eight prominent economists (including a couple of blogging ones) have written an open letter to Kevin Rudd making suggestions for a further fiscal stimulus under three headings of policy – Superannuation flexibility, Building the nation and Preparing for climate change. The text is here at Troppo (one of the authors is Nicholas Gruen).

There’s been a bit of press coverage this morning, and no doubt it’s a worthy thing to stimulate debate by proposing substantive policy measures rather than just advancing critique. It may be an even worthier thing to shift the terms of the debate, regardless of the merits of the proposed policy directions. We don’t see enough of this sort of initiative.

But I do wonder if the economists stop and think about the political feasibibility of their proposals.

Continue reading ‘Fiscal stimulus: Eight economists and a few politicians’

Economic and political disconnects (and the sociology of knowledge)

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 3 months ago
in Consumerism, Economics, Government, International, Markets, Media, Sociology and USA
. 18 Comments

It’s hard to know whether to blame the pollies or the press gallery more for the sorry standard of political and economic debate in this country. Did that golden age Paul Kelly used to talk about when Paul Keating had everyone trained to cross swords on the arcana of economic levers actually ever exist? Anyway, as non-farm growth fell into negative territory and the Reserve Bank cut rates again (moving them back into an expansionary posture), all eyes were on Julie Bishop’s cat claws, and her non-performance was at the centre of the parliamentary stage.

But perhaps, although he presumably wouldn’t welcome the Bishop meltdown, Malcolm Turnbull isn’t too worried about the level of triviality in the great economic management debate. The budget deficit yardstick went missing yesterday (that was so… last week) and Turnbull might not like to be reminded of his inconsistency and constant contradiction – whatever happened to that “economic narrative” we apparently were awaiting from him? Anyway, Malcolm Turnbull doesn’t think there’s much of a global financial crisis any more – because he hasn’t heard of any “big events”. Presumably events only happen if they’re on the front page of Australian newspapers. He might like to check out the leading indicators of the credit crisis which suggest we’re not exactly back to normality. But so parochial are our political leaders and media that debates about the restructuring of global finance and the dangerous leadership interregnum in the United States are apparently off our radar.

But there’s another disconnect happening in the economic sphere too. Continue reading ‘Economic and political disconnects (and the sociology of knowledge)’

Kevin Rudd and the “D word”

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 3 months ago
in Economics
. 36 Comments

No doubt because Malcolm Turnbull has demonstrated his stunning grasp of economics yet again by claiming that the Commonwealth budget going into deficit is some sort of yardstick of economic failure, there’s been an immense amount of commentary on Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan’s willingness to utter the word “deficit”. The latest instalment in the saga is documented by Peter Martin here – Rudd’s conceded that Australia may have to sustain a “temporary deficit”.

Just as Turnbull is privileging politics over economics, so too the Rudd government’s tactics are – in part – about politics. I’m surprised, though, that there hasn’t been a lot of sensible discussion about what they are up to politically. Guy Beres provides a corrective:

In short, Kevin Rudd’s personal approach to the economic situation as Prime Minister seems to revolve around straight talking, with a cautiously pessimistic bent. If things could get worse, then the Prime Minister seems to want to make it clear to everyone that they should be prepared for things getting worse. Rather than trying to create an oasis of blissfully ignorant confidence at the head of government – something the Howard Government probably would have done in the same position.

Rudd one year on

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 3 months ago
in Government, Howardia, Policy and Politics
. 111 Comments

Well, having opened a thread that perhaps proves that Ute Man is still out there but not actually supporting Emo Man, it behoves me, I guess, to have a bit of a say about the tenure of the Rudd government to date. To some degree all these sorts of anniversaries are somewhat artificial, as you can easily see in the United States with the fetish of the “first hundred days”. Governments will eventually be judged by the electorate in due season, as Kevin Rudd would say, and as almost all politicians intone (particularly those who are dissatisfied with their contemporary popularity), in the end they will be judged by history – whose verdict is perhaps as mythical as the Judgement of Paris, but never mind that. However, as I was suggesting, if politics and public discussion is cruelled by the vagaries and obsessions of an ever shorter media cycle, a year really is a long time in government, and it is worth taking stock.

It can also be interesting to compare first term governments at this stage of the electoral cycle, and here the obvious contrast – despite all the media beatups – is the absence of major scandal and ministerial resignations compared to both the Hawke and Howard governments. That doesn’t, of course, imply that all the Labor ministers are fabulous, but it is worth observing.

One of the things that’s interested me in the discussion that had already began quite a while before we reached the actual milestone is that in both comments on this blog and in conversations with some friends I’ve seen the sentiment expressed that simply avoiding hearing a daily litany of horrors from the Howard crew is Rudd’s greatest achievement. It might, and no doubt will, be objected that – “lefties would say that, wouldn’t they?” But I think there are a couple of points here. First, there is no doubt that a government with a more humanitarian tinge and an appreciation of propriety and ethics is to be welcomed, and that sentiment – along with the promise keeping – will be a contributor to Labor’s continuing lead in the polls. Secondly, I think The Howard Years has been interestingly timed to stimulate some comparison and to reinforce the whole sense of relief that we don’t have that turgid mob to kick around any more.

But, again, one thing that wore out the Coalition’s welcome with the electorate was the constant “rabbits out of the hat” and the whole bag of divisive tricks, along with the internal ructions and the cockiness of ministers. I agree that the Liberals are still playing at the same game in many ways. John Howard was elected in 1996 as a safe pair of hands and the Libs were “the party of order”, if you like. By the end of their fourth term, they looked like the risky and unsafe proposition and Kevin Rudd’s calm demeanour undoubtedly contributed much to Labor’s victory. WorkChoices was also probably the biggest single mistake the Coalition made, and the related apprehension that worse would follow and more leadership instability also condemned the Howard government to defeat.

But what of policy, and that shibboleth beloved of the punditariat, “the narrative”? Continue reading ‘Rudd one year on’

The polls, Malcolm Turnbull and the economy

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 4 months ago
in Economics, Media and Polls
. 10 Comments

There’s a Galaxy and a Nielsen poll out this morning, both of which show Labor with a 55-45 lead on 2PP, and Kevin Rudd on better numbers than he enjoyed a year ago – and these are some of the last polls (Essential Research follows tonight) before the first anniversary of Labor’s election.

This is quite interesting:

Coalition attacks on almost every aspect of the Government’s response to the crisis have had no impact.

Possum on Malcolm Turnbull:

These ratings trends differ slightly from Newspoll (conveniently seen over at the Polling Charts page) with Nielsen suggesting that Turnbull is failing to convince those that were initially undecided about his leadership to the point of slowly alienating them, while Newspoll is continuing to show slight growth in Turnbull’s satisfaction.

Intuitively, I suspect Nielsen is right about Turnbull. We might be a better barometer here than might be expected, unrepresentative sample that we no doubt are. If you cast your mind back to the reaction of LP commenters when Malcolm became opposition leader, a lot of us were prepared to cautiously welcome his election, having in mind his performance in the past and his social progressivism.

Continue reading ‘The polls, Malcolm Turnbull and the economy’

The day politics changed

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 4 months ago
in Economics, Markets, Sociology and USA
. 52 Comments

It was not without significance that Wayne Swan chose to release the Mid Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook on Wednesday – the day the news cycle (and the attention of political junkies) was focused on the election of Barack Obama. Whether or not you think Swan’s timing was calculated, it’s significant in that the shape of Australian politics also morphed – although in a minor key compared to what were world-historical events in the United States.

Laura Tingle, writing in today’s Financial Review, mapped the new political terrain neatly – the post-election “blame the Howard government” game is over. We’re no longer talking about the legacy of interest rate rises (and what about that “always higher under Labor” line?) and inflation. We’re no longer bemoaning the lack of investment in human capital and infrastructure in the Howard years and seeking to rectify it while the good times last. Because we’re about to find out what “beyond the mining boom” is like without the luxury of its dividends to spend in the cause of diversifying our economic base and an ambitious innovation strategy.

As Wayne Swan said, it’s the time for hard choices.

It remains true that we’re much worse placed to weather an economic downturn because of the policy laziness and wasteful spending and disinvestment of the Howard years than we might be. But it’s now up to Labor to demonstrate it can steer us into a better future. In many ways, opportunities for reform and a change in philosophy present themselves in a recessionary climate – as Paul Keating would know well – and Kevin Rudd’s statements today about avoiding “extreme capitalism” in the childcare sector mean more than they say on the surface. There are going to some shifts in economic thinking ahead – and some of the neo-Keynesian signs of the global financial crisis’ wake will write themselves into our economic narrative in this country as well.

Continue reading ‘The day politics changed’