Will Robb do better than Gerald the Gnome?

There was some pointscoring, of course – Smith had some good lines about Tony Abbott’s Anglosphere brainfart from Battlelines, Bishop had a couple of pointed remarks about the East Timor “solution” – but there were some points about differing philosophies to diplomacy; Labor placing more emphasis on multilateral engagement, the Liberals on bilateralism and particularly the bilateral relationship with the USA.

However, it also served as an illustration that some critical topics in foreign affairs are essentially not open for public debate in Australia – or, at least, not open for public debate between senior members of our two major parties.

Rory Metcalfe, before the debate, bemoaned the complete lack of discussion of the possibility of expanded military-to-military contacts with China, and, more broadly, the strategic challenges created by the continued power shifts taking place in Asia.

Lo and behold, Linda Mottram pops up at the foreign policy debate and asks a question about the rise of China and the security implications for Australia. After complimenting Mottram for raising the first question on the topic he’d heard during the election campaign, Smith proceeded to deliver a lengthy non-answer to the question. Julie Bishop followed, and provided a similarly uninformative non-response.

Despite this, it is abundantly obvious to anyone who has been paying attention that the rise of China, and the implications thereof, have been exercising the minds of the foreign policy establishment for some time now, and the government has been acting on it. For instance, the Australian enthusiasm for the G20 has everything to do with the rise of China (and to some extent India). So, for that matter, is the proposal for an Asia-Pacific community. But alongside that there is the Defence White Paper. You don’t buy submarines to deter people smugglers or conduct stabilization missions in the Solomon Islands.

But – aside from the ingrained snobbery in the foreign policy establishment about the public having their say – it’s genuinely difficult to see how a wide-ranging public debate about it can be conducted in Australia. China is both a massive economic opportunity and a potential long-term strategic threat, if things go awry. It has simultaneously improved the lives of hundreds of millions of its citizens, while remaining a totalitarian regime that does things to its citizens that offend most Australians. Australia’s capacity to influence China is limited – not zero, but limited – while China’s ability to influence Australia for good or ill is not insubstantial and will only grow.

And, even more than other countries, the current Chinese leadership appear to be extraordinarily sensitive to anything other than the most banal comments made about them in public by anyone in positions of leadership.

As such, it’s difficult to see how senior Australian politicians can possibly get involved in substantive public debate on the issue, particularly in the midst of an election campaign.

So, back to the point made in the title of this post. If it’s a public debate on Asian power shifts we want, we can’t and won’t get it from our senior pollies unless some dramatic event intervenes. So how is one supposed to occur?

As Mark noted, the Ministerial debates have actually provided more policy meat than just about everything else on the campaign trail. I’m not expecting much from this one though, not least because foreign affairs is (for better and worse) mostly an area of bipartisan wonk consensus. The only area of foreign policy that has any political traction at the moment is Teh Boats; I’d expect Julie Bishop to attempt to swing the conversation onto the topic whenever possible.

Update: I’m going to try twittering here. Be kind…

Over the weekend, I read Annabel Crabb’s Rise of the Ruddbot.

It’s fascinating to take a trip back to a time when a Liberal leadership team of Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop seemed fanciful. Just as much as it’s weird to go back and read right wing columnists opining in the 2007 election campaign that if we voted for Kevin07, we’d really get Julia Gillard as PM some time in the parliament’s term.

Funny business, politics.

Reading Crabb’s account of Malcolm Turnbull’s fighting press conference as his leadership crumbled, I was struck by how so many of us citizens (and so many Liberals) thought we’d be seeing his warnings that the party he led risked becoming a “right wing fringe outfit” endlessly portrayed in Labor ads. Up until very recently, the default ALP advertising gambit would have been to feature vision of successive Liberal leaders and wannabes and has-beens all trashing each other gleefully.

But we’re not seeing those ads, and for an obvious reason.

In an era of short memories, the retooling of the Ruddbot as KRuddMP has enabled the Liberals to claim that their party represents experience and safety (although Bronwyn Bishop, Kevin Andrews and Philip Ruddock, notable Howard era returnees, don’t seem to feature in their campaign).

There’s more than one irony in the way both parties are trying to position themselves on the right side of the fear/security dichotomy in this campaign.

Cross-posted at the ABC’s Campaign Diary blog.

Yesterday, we saw Flynn MP Chris Trevor make an impassioned defence of Kevin Rudd against what he identified as the factional forces that brought him down (pointedly including Big Bill Ludwig and the AWU). Trevor, who won his regional seat from the Nationals in 2007, had considered not re-contesting. Reading between the lines, he was obviously reacting to a widely reported sentiment among ALP MPs that Kevin Rudd would just disappear at the election, and resentment that he was promised a cabinet post by Julia Gillard.

Secondly, I wasn’t kidding when I wrote that you could barely walk through a shopping centre in a South East Queensland marginal seat without tripping over Julie Bishop or Christopher Pyne. The Liberals have been blitzing Queensland seats, many of which would not be in a lot of people’s list of possible Labor losses.

Historically, Queensland has been fallow ground for the ALP federally.

Even when in government, Labor has often enjoyed only a small advantage in seats, or a small deficit as against the Coalition. 2007 and 1990 are about as good as it gets.

And, at both state and federal levels, Queensland voters go all out when the swing is on. In 1996 and 1975, Labor’s representation in the House of Representatives almost disappeared, with only 2 and 1 seats held.

I’m of the view that Queensland is a prism for a lot of what is currently hurting the government. Forget about asylum seekers – a state which once had low housing costs (and low wages) has drastic shortages of houses and wages haven’t caught up with Southern levels outside those of the professional classes in Brisbane, where rents have leapfrogged Melbourne to reach Sydney like levels in many areas.

Many of the marginals won by Labor last time had very high proportions of part time and casual work, and average income well below national levels. The cost of living, health, infrastructure, and jobs remain big isssues here, astutely exploited by Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan last time around.

But now the boot is on the other foot.

The resources tax may have been supported by the CFMEU, but the concern was how fragile regional economies are for those who don’t work in the mines. In a very decentralised state, a confluence of the mining boom, tourist development and sea and tree changers has seen housing prices rise to near-metropolitan levels, and the cost of food and petrol has always been significantly higher outside the South East corner. Now we have huge electricity and water cost rises, driven by privatisation (or at least that’s the perception).

We also have a state government second only to NSW’s in its unpopularity, with the least popular Premier in Australia. The privatisation of public assets has destroyed Anna Bligh’s credibility, and seen Labor’s vote plummet.

A Galaxy poll taken just after Julia Gillard became PM showed more distaste in this state for Kevin Rudd’s removal than in other states. I live in Kevin Rudd’s electorate of Griffith, where that sentiment is certainly widespread, but there are a lot of indications it goes beyond Rudd territory.

Whether or not that translates to a shift in voting intention is another matter, but Nielsen’s state numbers on Sunday (more significant than usual because the national sample was 1400) showed a 5% swing away from Labor – with a 2PP vote of 55-45 in favour of the Coalition.

If you plug that into Antony Green’s election calculator, you see 10 Labor seats falling to the Coalition: Brisbane, Bonner, Petrie, Leichardt, Forde, Dawson, Flynn, Longman, Dixon and Herbert. Labor is no longer looking competitive in Ryan and Wright. Swings are not uniform, though some seats with stronger margins such as Blair don’t look really safe, and Labor would be better placed in some than others, but if only 8 dominoes were to fall, that would see Labor only needing to lose 3 seats elsewhere in Australia to lose an overall majority.

Dennis Atkins observed in the Courier-Mail that Labor polling showed 10 or 11 seats in play under Rudd. While he believes the ALP’s “outlook is better”, they remain in play.

What’s happening in politics in Queensland goes under-reported in the national media, but could be crucial to the outcome of this election (as it was to the last). With that in mind, I’d be very interested in hearing from other Queenslanders what their perceptions are, and what they’ve noticed happening on the ground.

I’m not going to repeat anything she’s written because it’s unnecessary, rather I want to talk about another thing I’ve noticed through all the exciting #spillage of the last week, and that’s the role of women in the events themselves. We’re really starting to see the effects of decades of pushing to get women accepted into all areas of public life, while at the same time we’re still seeing the effects of keeping them marginalised for so long.

This week, after Penny Wong negotiated a deal with the Liberal party on the ETS, we’ve had Sophie Mirabella’s exit from the front bench alongside Tony Abbott, triggering a mass walkout of further Liberal frontbenchers. We’ve had “loyal girl” Julie Bishop, who has managed to survive three leadership spills and keep her job. We’ve had the brave and principled senators Judith Troeth and Sue Boyce, who walked the walk when other Liberal Senators toed the party line. While all this unfolded, Kevin Rudd was overseas, leaving Julia Gillard to run the country, while the new opposition leader promises to stop flirting with her. And over in NSW, the ALP caucus voted to make Kristina Keneally their first female premier.

Meanwhile, Annabel Crabb made her ABC debut, becoming one of the go-to journos for smart, insightful political analysis, along with Samantha Maiden and Laura Tingle providing great information and analysis of events as they unfolded. And in another mini-spill, Sophie Black took the reigns and became editor of Crikey.

I’ve forgotten plenty of women, no doubt. I hope I have actually. It shouldn’t be possible to list all of the women involved in events this big.

So… to the Problems. Mirabella and Bishop are criticised for selling Australian women out in supporting Abbott. Keneally can be seen in the long tradition of Labor only making women their leaders when things have gone entirely to shit, further reinforcing the pressure for women to be nurturers, healers and uniters. Meanwhile Bishop is again criticised for playing a uniting role, lining up behind the three leaders democratically chosen by her party. I won’t go on, there are plenty of words to be found about how women are fucking up, some fair, some not.

But the Good Things! We have a new female premier to add to the list, and she’s not from the left. Another step further towards providing enough variety that they are seen as Premiers first, not Women Premiers, as if that’s some kind of category. We have female Liberal MPs putting their electoral and preselection chances at risk in order to stand up for what they believe in, be it Mirabella and Adams or Troeth and Boyce. We have Julie Bishop playing a clever factional game, making it almost impossible for her to be dumped from her spot as deputy leader. We have Ms Crabb, who is seen as one of the most insightful political analysts working today, and hardly anyone is putting the word “woman” or “female” in there. And yet we have Miranda Devine being given a platform to be as mad and wrong as the maddest and wrongest op-edder The Australian has to offer. And while Dr Cat is right about the lack of genuine understanding about what, exactly, Abbott’s women problem really is, it’s now just a given that you cannot win elections by completely alienating women.

I can’t find the exact quote, but Amanda Vanstone once said that women won’t be equal until a woman as useless as the most useless male MP can be elected. While we’re still at a point where women being in the spotlight at all is remarkable, the incredible variety of women we’ve seen this week should give us hope that we’re slowly reaching that point where women will be judged for the work they do, and not the work they do As Women. And hopefully along the way, we’ll all come to understand that men like Tony Abbott don’t have a problem because they don’t get “women’s issues”. They have a problem because they don’t get that women are people, and they are more and more reluctant to put up with anyone believing they are anything less than that.

Diablo Cody nails it:

K, here’s a problem that is holding back feminism and you see it on the blogs. We all hold each other up to an incredibly high standard in a way that men do not. Let’s say a woman directs a movie that’s not very good—everybody piles up on her. It’s, like, “No! You’re representing us! It has to be perfect!” And that’s not how it works! Women should be allowed to make bad movies. Good movies. Porno movies. Terrible made-for-TV movies. Women just need to be out there directing as many movies as men do. We don’t all have to be the model woman—what we need is to be more visible. We really, really are tough on each other.

As long as there are ludicrous opinion pieces being written, I’m going to celebrate that some of them are being written by women, and as long as there are both political ideologues and factional warriors lacking in any sort of policy beliefs at all, I’m going to celebrate that some of them are women, too. Here’s to Crabb and Devine; to Gillard and Bishop; to Mirabella and Troeth.

ANZ economist Katie Dean said the stimulus package had worked to retain jobs in January in tandem with aggressive interest rate cuts. “The stimulus measures are having an impact,” she said.

Interesting news for the Liberals, you’d think. The Shadow Treasurer’s reaction?

The Coalition’s Julie Bishop said it showed the jobs market was strong enough not to need the “$42 billion spending spree” rejected by the Senate.

Right then.

As well as the economic impact, the measures have also been chosen carefully for their political impact:

Its primary targets are Rudd’s core constituencies and concerns: the ill-defined “working families”, education, housing. Criticism of the package will become criticism of taxpayers, of our schools and the right to a decent home. The Opposition, which has painted itself into a corner backing tax cuts uber alles, has to either take those on or look even more confused than it already does.

This is stimulus à la Rudd.

So has Malcolm Turnbull fallen into the trap? Early signs aren’t encouraging for the opposition – Julie Bishop’s embrace of Laffernomics, Warren Truss’ claim that “our kids” will be paying for the deficit, and Turnbull’s rather silly call for Swan to explain his “plan” to return to surplus. The “plan” is obvious – stimulate growth counter-cyclically and wait for tax revenues to recover.

It’s pretty clear that voters don’t blame the government for a world crisis. What will be interesting is whether voters take Rudd up on his invitation to blame the opposition for their negativity. Will bleating about tax cuts and raving about deficits do the trick? Quite possibly.

Around the traps: Gary Sauer-Thompson, Andrew Bartlett, Possum, CoreEcon and Ben Eltham at New Matilda.

Update: More from Gans.

But of more moment, probably, is the response of those who actually make decisions about the labour market. Predictably, the Howard era Fair Pay Commission Chair, Ian Harper, warned that the low paid couldn’t expect much. This, despite the fact that the pay rises awarded by the FPC over the past two years failed to have the dire impact on employment predicted by business lobbies. It was interesting in this context to read a good piece by Mike Steketee in The Australian last week:

Some economists argue that cutting wages, particularly for the unskilled and low skilled, is the surest way of keeping more people in work. Quite apart from the fact that Labor’s ruling out such an option helped it win the last election, the main problem facing businesses is lack of demand for their products.

Cutting wages would reduce consumer demand further and it would run directly counter to the Government’s policy of putting more money into people’s pockets to try to put a floor under demand. In any case, the wages share of national income is the lowest for a generation, suggesting labour costs are less of a burden for business than in the past.

In short, it’s aggregate demand, stupid.

There’s some anecdotal evidence around that some employers are looking at other means of addressing costs than shedding labour. At issue here is also the skills shortage – it’s precisely the less skilled and lower paid who are at more risk in an economic downturn which widens inequality, as Steketee points out. So disinvestment in skills is also a false economy. But it’ll be interesting to see whether an understanding of the nexus between consumer spending and employment and employment expectations actually cuts through. Harper’s tired nostrums suggest that certain orthodoxies have survived the global financial crisis.

After a decade or so when we heard so much blah about corporate social responsibility, it’d be nice to see some recognition from business that the economy is part of that responsibility. That’s actually in the collective self-interest of business, but as Keynes and others showed, that’s precisely what the incentive structure of capitalist economics has difficulty incorporating. There may well be some room here for some creative thinking from government, going beyond pump priming. Fingers crossed.