The government appointed a committee to consult on methods of protecting human rights, headed by Jesuit priest and lawyer Frank Brennan, early in its term. McClelland has now released the government’s response, which is a masterpiece of ambiguity and weasel words.

The Rudd government certainly hasn’t distinguished itself in the realm of civil liberties.

I find myself in agreement with the conclusion of Guy Beres’ post:

All things considered, it’s hard not to view the government’s performance on this issue as rather weak, and the outcome here as an indictment of the Rudd Government’s use of the public consultation as a mechanism for guiding policy. If you’re going to make public consultations part of your modus operandi as a government, you better well make sure that you provide a robust explanation for why you have flatly rejected the recommendations of the people you are consulting.

And also with this:

However, I am somewhat confused by the assertion that the introduction of a national act would be somehow “divisive” or would create an atmosphere of “uncertainty or suspicion”. Surely one could argue quite effectively that the absence of any legal bedrock on human rights in Australia is a fairly considerable source of division and uncertainty? A federal Human Rights Act would lay Australia’s human rights cards on the table for all to see.

Indeed. A Charter of Rights seems divisive only to hardline religious figures, conservative commentators, Tony Abbott and John Howard and NSW Labor hacks.

Elsewhere: Woolly Days, Andrew Norton.

Today my daughter was playing with her pink superball while my son was asleep (it’s small, so she’s only allowed to get it out while he’s sleeping). I heard her mutter to her toys while brandishing the pink superball, “This is the Prime Minister, and if you do something he doesn’t like, he will bounce in your eye.” My husband has pointed out that she may have learned the concept from a book entitled Blossom Possum (beautifully illustrated by Rafe Champion’s late wife, as it happens). I have also tried to explain to her what a Prime Minister does, but given the actions of the superball, I’m not sure if she quite “got it”.

Anyway, after I posted this incident on my Facebook page, the post started off a string of reminiscences about people’s childhood political memories. It transpires that an amazing number of my friends just loved Bob Hawke when they were kids. I don’t know if that means my friends’ families were generally Labor-leaning, or that Bob had a special appeal which made him loved by kids? When my sister was a little girl, she loved Bob. One general election, she asked Dad who he voted for, and Dad teasingly said he voted for Andrew Peacock because the Liberals gave him a shortbread round (actually he’d bought it at the school stall at the voting booth). My sister sobbed and sobbed, and said, “Now the forests will die because you haven’t voted for Bob!”

Mark Bahnisch commented that when he was in Grade 2, he wrote a poem about Gough Whitlam. Then Mark and I decided that we should write a joint post about what everyone’s earliest political memories are. I remember that I never liked Joh Bjelke-Petersen as a child. In addition, with a child’s merciless observation, I noted his head was shaped like a peanut, and thus I thought it was extraordinary that he was an ex-peanut farmer. Like my sister, I also loved Bob Hawke when I was little.

Do you remember whether you liked particular politicians when you were young? Or did you dislike particular politicians?

Writing in Crikey yesterday, Bernard Keane observed:

I’ve been watching or listening to Parliament since the early Hawke years and I can never recall Question Time not being made a mockery of.

Speaking as a recovering question time tragic, I’m not sure I agree with that. It’s true if the ritual is compared to some sort of Platonic eidos – as if its essence (dignified accountability and/or razor or rapier sharp wit) must incarnate itself in the chamber on a daily basis. In truth, a lot of the mysticism about parliamentary discourse – and accountability – is just that. If some sort of conception of parliament as a pure space, an agora if you like, for the exchange of ideas and reasoning was a large part of the mythos of nineteenth century liberalism, that doesn’t mean that we should expect that it would have a lot to do with the pragmatics of twenty-first century Australian politics, though its traces remain.

Back in a more Aristotelian world, I think we can discard the Bagehot for a bit, and make some observations about precisely when and why parliamentary tempers boil over.

Paul Keating’s famous comment to John Hewson – “Mate, because I want to do you slowly” – was made in the thick of an incredible campaign by the opposition. When not indulging in silly stunts (which would have made the makers of small Australian flags very prosperous), the Coalition deliberately tried to goad Keating to lose his temper, betting that PJK in full flight on the nightly news would be a turnoff.

I’m not old enough to remember, but I’m sure that when Edward Gough Whitlam deigned to descend from his Olympian heights (and to pop into Australia in between inspecting the Elgin marbles), he didn’t land in the midst of dignified behaviour. In fact, Whitlam’s over-ruling of the Speaker, Jim Cope, effectively forcing his resignation, fleshes out Michelle Grattan’s retrospective picture of the House as characterised by “chaos and impetuousness”.

A lot of this kerfuffle and piffle, to adapt a PJK-ism, has one simple cause – the inability of the serried and suited ranks of those who see themselves as the country’s natural rulers to accept the verdict of the electorate as anything other than a temporary aberration. In the case of “Rudd rage”, that rancour is heightened by their complete failure to disrupt or shift the image the electorate has formed of Kevin Rudd.

And one of the reasons for that failure is the increasing irrelevance of question time, and parliament itself, to the actuality as opposed to the putative essence of Westminster democracy, 2009 Antipodean style.

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.

The Rudd government does appear to have developed more backbone in holding or advancing a policy line in the face of attack. One good example was the risible attempt to talk a “Khevlani affair” out of nowhere, which probably got lost in the Julie Bishop noise (her one original contribution apparently being to think it very clever to argue that there’s a “whiff of Whitlam” about the Rudd government.) Trying to articulate together a bit of dog-whistling about the Middle East and memories of State Banks and the Whitlam era with the deficit/debt line was always a complex message and rather dumb politically at that, and I suspect that the Liberals are trying to persuade themselves of the Whitlam comparison in the hope that the Rudd government will be short lived (apparently forgetting Gough was re-elected to a second term.) What was really at issue was a technical (and rather neat) solution to a problem state governments have with bonds in accessing debt. Wayne Swan may have been reading the Fin Review last weekend and noticed unnamed bankers and execs bemoaning the fact that he worried about what Malcolm Turnbull said at all, as “no one else did”, but in any case, he made it clear that if he decided an infrastructure bank was a good idea, he wouldn’t be deterred by the opposition’s politicking.

Now, no doubt one could have all sorts of fun thinking up possible opposition attacks on the proposals of the eight economists, but that’s not the only political point here. They also have to pass muster through the gate of the government’s own political imperatives. While super is in the policy review mix, it would be a difficult sell to cut super – even temporarily and with the promise of more cash in hand from wages. Super, after all, is one of the pressure points – along with household wealth – where the global financial crisis really does have an immediate impact on voters’ psyches. And the temporary nature of the proposal is also problematic – I can hear employer associations screaming already that they’d have to maintain wages at the higher level employees had enjoyed and pay more in super when contributions rose. “Here, have some more money to spend for a while, but then we’ll force you back into saving it” – not the easiest of inducements, I’d have thought.

I’m refraining from comment on the merits of the proposals themselves – except to observe that I think some sort of independent fiscal policy is a fundamentally anti-democratic idea. And I’d also suggest that technocratic worthies have hardly distinguished themselves over the last little while – whether here, in America or elsewhere. But, again, this is just not the sort of thing any government is going to do.

It may well be that the economists in question think it’s better to advance such ideas in their policy purity before the game of sifting and compromise starts being played, but conversely, whether or not that game even begins is surely dependent on the initial political appeal and defensibility of such ideas.

Elsewhere: Joshua Gans and Catallaxy.