Quoth Abbott:

The public no longer support immigration the way they did under the Howard Government. We’ve got to rebuild support for the immigration program, as happened under John Howard.

Oh really? Not if you believe a Morgan poll taken this month. Read why at Andrew Norton’s blog.

According to the government, he needed to identify at least $15 billion in spending cuts to fund the promises he’s already made. According to just about everyone, he needed to outline some substance on policy, and how he would return the budget to surplus – it’s a fundamental requirement of his discredited “debt and deficit” message. And since he’s opposing a wide range of measures already factored into the government’s numbers, the onus is even more strongly on him to deliver.

Perhaps it’s inconsistent with his claim that the Treasury numbers are unbelievable to actually outline a fiscal policy. Or, as we heard tonight, perhaps Joe Hockey will tell us all next Wednesday.

Abbott should have flicked the switch to policy positivism. Instead all we got was carping, negativism and a speech almost entirely dominated by attacks on Kevin Rudd’s record. I kept waiting for him to outline something substantive, but to no avail. We were drowned in nostalgia for the Howard era, and the strange assertion that we’d been saved from the GFC by the resources sector alone – apparently the reason why he wants the election to be fought on the Resources Super Profits Tax. Economic management, Abbott style, it would seem, is all about fat profits for the mining industry, and a free ride from China’s demand for energy.

What remains to be seen is whether Abbott will ever have anything to offer Australians, aside from the twin claims that life was much better under Howard, and that Rudd is a spendthrift. Evidently, no matter what the Rudd government did, he was always going to run his “great new tax on everything” scare campaign, even if the RSPT isn’t the best candidate. But we’re still hearing nothing but negativism from Action Man Abbott. The recitation of total nonsense about the size of government always being smaller under the Coalition (only one of the demonstrable lies Tony told) won’t cut the mustard.

NB: Previous budget reply discussion <a href="here.

Elsewhere: The Twitter hashtag for the Budget Reply is, naturally, budgies.

Update: Still Life With Cat, Bernard Keane.

Update: I thought Abbott’s attack on the public sector was worth a post of its own.

Update: Ben Eltham – Someone Lend This Man An Economics Textbook.

What the longevity of almost all state and territory governments suggests is that it is difficult for an opposition to come to power except through the electorate’s view that it is time for a change… It is unlikely, however, that this will stop the Canberra press gallery working itself into a state of excitement over this year’s national and state votes.

From The Australian today.

In related news, I was somewhat heartened by Greg Hunt’s declining to start ranting and raving over the ‘solar panels will burn your house down’ thing last night on Lateline, when effectively invited to do so by Tony Jones. The question followed a story which was clearly framed to build momentum for the ‘Peter Garrett Must Go’ campaign.

I thought, and still think, that Garrett’s position is worth debating, and as Roger Jones noted, the comments thread on the post here has been quite illuminating compared to the media coverage. But I’m not so sure that the press has the responsibility to collude in a campaign to take a ministerial scalp. My memory may well be faulty on this score, but I really don’t recall the same level of intensity and pursuit of Howard government ministers. Given recent admissions by AWB, it might be instructive to go back and look whether Alexander Downer faced constant front page stories on the Wheat for Arms scandal.

Sure, all the ingredients for a press frenzy are there in the insulation debacle, including human interest stories from relatives of those who tragically lost their lives, or workers who were injured themselves. But perspective seems sadly lacking, or even basic research, as Bernard Keane observes in Crikey today.

Just how dire the gap between Liberal obsessions and public opinion is can be discerned from a perusal of Possum’s close reading of the figures in the latest Essential Research poll.

All this raises the question of Joe Hockey’s suitability for the Shadow Treasury. He’s been touted by Malcolm Turnbull as a “great communicator”. Opinions might reasonably differ on that. But if we accept the claim for the sake of argument, what exactly will be communicating?

It hasn’t escaped notice that Hockey’s elevation (and Christopher Pyne’s promotion) leaves a gaggle of “moderates” at the top of the opposition tree. Perhaps there’s a need to pacify the Liberal right by reciting endless mantras about the virtues of free markets (although again, whether the Howard government incarnated such virtues is surely dubious). The problem here is that “free markets” are, in the public mind, the cause of our current woes and pledging one’s faith in their wonderfulness is also coming across as code for… doing nothing. And waiting for the economy to tank.

I’ve always argued that to claim that Malcolm Turnbull has an “economic strategy” is to stretch words beyond the limit of their meanings. Hockey, or someone or other, must have been sending a few signals out to the press aside from the official line about markets. It was suggested in the Fin yesterday that Hockey would be criticising the substance of anti-recessionary measures rather than the need for them, and contrasting the Rudd government’s performance with the Golden Age of the Howard government.

Here, there’s also a problem. The public like what’s being done. If the opposition go down this route, they risk incarnating another political cliche – The Carping Opposition. And talking about the past – and themselves – well, you join the dots.

As always with the Liberal Party post November 2007, the real issue isn’t the messenger. It’s the message.

There’s a desire to avoid the mess that happened last year when they split in the Senate, and according to Laura Tingle, they’re searching for a “legacy issue” they can campaign on. Apparently, they realise they can’t say anything good about the Howard government on IR or Climate Change, so “economic management” it is. Possibly Tip’s reappearance is supposed to make us all nostalgic. Or something. But make no mistake – while “tax cuts” might be a rallying cry that will unite all the fractured parts of the Coalition and perhaps their fractured constituencies (and see Possum’s recent interesting post on this) – it’s got very little to do with the public good.

Elsewhere: Evidence from Ken Henry to the Senate Committee suggests a stimulus package of the size Turnbull half-heartedly advocates is a recipe for recession.

The time has come, off the back of the current crisis, to proclaim that the great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed, that the emperor has no clothes. … Neo-liberalism, and the free-market fundamentalism it has produced, has been revealed as little more than personal greed dressed up as an economic philosophy. … Government is not the intrinsic evil that neo-liberals have argued it is. Government, properly constituted and properly directed, is for the common good, embracing both individual freedom and fairness, a project designed for the many, not just the few.

Paul Kelly has pinged the politics:

He shuns any embrace of old-fashioned socialism. For Rudd, Labor’s task is to hold the middle ground – between state socialism and free-market fundamentalism. He argues the failure of neo-liberalism has made the state the primary actor; it must save the financial system, stimulate the economy and impose a new global regulatory regime.

Rudd has put Turnbull on notice. His plan is to convert the global crisis into a historic failure of Liberal Party philosophy and its pro-market ideas.

I’m a bit sceptical about whether the Howard government actually was a neo-liberal regime. Dirigism for its supporters at the top end of town and populist handouts for the masses, while seeking to control more or less everything was more its style. But here probably the direction and intent of regulation and interventionism is more important than the size of the state. I suspect, though, Rudd will get away with making the charge stick to the Liberals. And that, I think, is the purpose of the exercise. I’m not sure how much ideological content there actually is in Rudd’s essay. I think the ideological chasm Lenore Taylor perceives might be a tad illusory.

Elsewhere: Jason Soon, probably predictably, isn’t impressed, but I think he has exposed some flaws in Rudd’s argument and logic.

Elsewhere: Guy Beres.

Anyway, this might be an opportune time to link to a post from Possum – wherein he has crunched some polling data comparing the first year of Howard’s first term with the first year of Kevin Rudd’s. As is his wont, Possum has provided some nifty graphs. A comparison of their respective performances is worth filing away next time the “one term” stuff pops up in the media.

But perhaps some of the conceptual slippage (which is really important politically) is understandable. The policy has more than one aim – and one of its aims is to foster early childhood development, and the assumption here is that direct involvement of a parent or parents is crucial at the early stages of infancy. But, nevertheless, it is worth reinforcing the fact that insofar as non working mothers have made a choice not to work, that under the current policy design, 10 hours a week for a year would be enough to trigger the paid parental leave entitlement.

So, that’s that. But there are some ambivalences around all this, some of which I share. Writing today in The Australian, George Megalogenis launches an assault on “middle class welfare”, giving readers a history lesson about when family payments took off, and pointing out that in the age of Menzies they were small change. The implication seems to be explicitly that politicians are in the habit of tossing bribes around, and that virtuous self-reliance was the norm for 50s and 60s Australia. What this ignores, though, is that Menzies Land was surrounded by high tarriff walls and as a result of the Australian settlement, had a highly regulated wage system that was openly premised (from Higgins onwards) on the male wage as a breadwinner’s wage sufficient to support two adults and the then average number of children.

As Kim pointed out in a post here a month or so ago, reflecting on Betty Friedan’s legacy, the second wave of feminism and the movement for women’s workforce participation coincided with the increasing inability of a sole wage to sustain the level of consumer demand that sustained a consumption oriented “modern industrial economy”. Feminism, if you like, lent a hand to save capitalism. Megalogenis is right to point to remaining hurdles in the tax/welfare mix to participation in the labour market, but I want to trouble the logic that this should be the sole aim of policy.

In doing so, I don’t want to argue that those barriers should not be addressed, nor that a thorough going review of the welfare and tax systems is in fact vital. The current demands for a $30 increase in the single aged pension are a symptom of the dysfunction inherent in segmenting the worthy demographics according to short term political advantage. Not only do such demands ignore those on disability and other pensions, but they also don’t do anything whatever to address the urgent needs of those who are poorest. (And not all pensioners are in that category – consider the plethora of concessions and also housing ownership, as well as the fact that many pensioners enjoy significant levels of wealth and income, not to mention the fact that the pension is set at a rate above the poverty line, unlike other benefits such as NewStart.) The recent Catholic Social Justice Statement identified horrific levels of poverty and social exclusion across a number of parts of the community, but as Eleri Harris noted in Crikey, it was more or less ignored in the media and political debate.

Lots of folks are actually “doing it tough”, and while that shouldn’t provide an excuse to ignore the need to redress the plight of pensioners of all stripes, nor should it mean that a quick fix should trump a holistic examination – with social justice principles foremost in mind – of disadvantage and welfare globally throughout the Australian community.

I was also interested to read this contribution from jo on the Parentonomics thread:

In respect of middle class welfare – I believe it psychologically binds people into a ‘cradle to grave’ welfare mindset and therefore they are more likely to feel emotionally connected to the system and will therefore support the entire system, including OAP’s, disabled and carers pensions, unemployment benefits etc, of which they may never need, as others may never require child related payments. (Not sure if there is more support for Govt welfare schemes than in previous periods, & how would you account for the relentless top down neo-con conditioning over past decade or so.)

Obviously, there are matters of fairness in respect of overall tax burdens, thresholds, bracket creep etc – and there is also the matter of the current situation where some pension payments have dropped below cost of living etc – which needs to be rectified and hopefully will be soon, but the idea that idea that people on middle incomes paying their correct level of PAYE taxes are just ‘bludging on the system’ is not reasonable and pretty narrow-minded, frankly.

This does underline the fact that in neoliberal regimes, the promotion of private “choice” (with reference primarily to healthcare and education) leaves the public system looking like a residual safety net, and as middle class voters withdraw from universal public health and education, correspondingly political support for universal provision has a tendency to drop. The same logic is at work with the division of welfare into “worthy” and “undeserving” recipients – which is why (among other reasons including basic civil rights) the small carrot/big stick approach to poverty and disadvantage is worth fighting, although very few are prepared to take up the cudgels.

There is no doubt that an “entitlement mentality” has been created, and that it becomes a social fact. In many instances such a mentality – which is encouraged by political segmentation of the population – undermines the universality and legitimacy of redistributive spending as a whole. But it doesn’t mean that we should place the purported needs of the labour market and the supposedly universal value of work (however demeaning, poorly paid and alienating the jobs provided are) above all else. What it does mean is that we should start thinking about employment rights and the welfare system from the point of view of the community as a whole, and particularly from the point of view of justice.

The IMF didn’t think so. The Fin has obtained leaked Treasury documents prepared for discussions with IMF officials last year. The upshot of the story can be summed up by its tagline – “Peter Costello’s fiscal policy was potentually more damaging than any other period since the Whitlam years”. IMF wonks were deeply concerned about a stimulatory budget and fiscal policy at a time of economic over-heating, and the article by Paul Cleary concludes:

… from 2003 onwards, Costello executed a sustained expansion of fiscal policy during a sustained upswing in the economy. Looking further back, his predecessors had only engaged in such a policy during recessions. The result of this outbreak of bad policy in the last years of the Howard government is likely to be a long period of inflation and weak economic growth, and it may take some considerable time, and pain, to get the balance back in the right order.

For all I know, Costello might blame John Howard for this in his memoirs, if he mentions it at all. That was certainly the line he took in interviews for the Van Onselen and Errington biography of Howard which came out last year. But it begs the question of how a weak Costello completely failed to restrain the fiscal profligacy of the PM.

Costello’s anodyne musings on economic policy have been subjected to an unwarranted level of parsing and “Costellogical” deconstruction. In truth, it may be that the record suggests that he was among Australia’s worst Treasurers.

None of this, or Costello’s confirmation of what almost everyone who wasn’t a member of the punditariat knew all along, appears to have stopped either the endless media speculation about his leadership prospects or the constant talk of a coup against Brendan Nelson. Bizarrely, there’s still an arcane discussion going on within Liberal ranks about the appropriate level of deference to Howard Costello is supposed to adopt in his memoirs in order to keep his non-existent leadership ambitions alive:

Mr Howard is likely to become enraged by any criticism of his wife. Opposition insiders last night said reflections on Mrs Howard were one thing he would not accept.

However, Liberal frontbencher Tony Abbott said he had been assured the book was measured and paid appropriate tribute to Mr Howard.

Abbott himself is now being compared to Sarah Palin, so ludicrous has all this become, and his incessant public commentary on the polls and the leadership, which Joe Hockey was quite right to say is totally counter productive, may be a reflection of his own ambitions for the Deputy’s gig.

This mob very rarely seem to have anything to say about their own shadow portfolios, expending all their energy on plotting and commentary on their internecine disputes. It’s obvious that they’ve still got one eye looking over their collective shoulder to their former Dear Leader, who haunts them from beyond his own political grave. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that Howard and Costello’s legacy is deeply flawed.

Some bright spark within the Opposition might like to consider the unglamorous but essential strategy of actually doing some policy hard yards, rather than placing all their eggs in the twin baskets of stunt-dom and the watch for the next leadership messiah.

Also, and just asking, how does Anna Clark, who did a lot of actual research into what high school students in Australia and Canada thought about their national histories (answer – boring as) get pinged constantly as “Granddaughter of Manning Clark”… ZOMG! Probs a Commie too! Just like Stuart MacIntyre! We await the family tree of Dr Kevin Donnelly and Mr Keith Windschuttle. We trust their antecedents are pure. Or maybe this silliness only happens because Anna is… (shock!) a female. And therefore presumably unable to be distinguished from her Grandfather.

Taking this nonsense seriously for just one second, has it occurred to teh History Warriors that maybe Stuart MacIntyre is actually performing a bit of a public service? Not everyone is an underemployed “education consultant” or thinktank “Fellow” and able to drop everything to ensure the teh kidz learn teh Story of Australia.

Or, maybe this nonsense shouldn’t be taken seriously at all?

Elsewhere: Carlton’s lone classic liberal Andrew Norton on conservative educational delusions.