Meanwhile, as the Gillard government plans to introduce legislation to restore offshore processing of refugees, the same poll finds 54% believe asylum seekers should be processed onshore.

Update: Peter Brent argues that a Labor leadership switch would lead to Tony Abbott’s demise as Liberal leader, a scenario I canvassed here.

I think the return of Rudd would put the spotlight on Abbott’s total fraudulence, maybe even paving the way for the Rudd vs Turnbull election we should have had last time.

That’s an interesting reflection, because amidst all the sound and fury that surrounds the Gillard government, the related facts that Tony Abbott is not popular and that no one knows what an Abbott government would do except try to return to Howardia are not highlighted enough.

Tony Abbott stands for endless upheaval. He’s the permanent revolutionary of the Coalition side.

On his stated platform, there would need to be another election should he become Prime Minister. In quick order.

That’s simply because what he says he wants to do (repeal the carbon price, undo the resources tax, shift towards individual bargaining in workplace relations, dissolve the NBN and so on) would not, in all likelihood, be capable of being carried through a Senate where the probability that The Greens will retain the balance of power is high.

So an Abbott government would be more of the same. Lots of yelling and posturing, with the view to forcing a double dissolution.

Abbott’s implied assurance that calm and stability and Howardian goodness would return in an instant, and all the many, many grievances he has fostered would be instantly wiped away is impossible of attainment.

Having won power, it’s hard to see the Coalition (which is always of the view that power is the oxygen it ought to breathe) chancing it on another throw of the dice. It would be under a PM whose sole virtue is his not-Gillard-ness.

It is not at all impossible, indeed I’d say likely, that there might be a Liberal leadership change either before the 2013 election (which may occur earlier) or shortly afterwards. Put your money on before. I suspect that John Quiggin is right that a Labor shift to Kevin Rudd (and probably only to Rudd) would act as a catalyst.

On the Labor side of things, reality has to be confronted.

Labor’s primary vote has collapsed, and Julia Gillard’s approval has collapsed.

In reading over the thread about Peter Beattie’s little play, two themes are interesting:

(a) It’s all the fault of the media;

(b) Julia Gillard’s government has done good things.

(a) can be disposed of easily. Kevin Rudd did not have News Limited in his pocket, and he and the ALP enjoyed very high popularity from the end of 2006 to the end of 2009. A hostile and febrile press gallery, and “campaigning” newspapers are simply just the environment in which a Labor government now has to operate.

(b) mistakes legislative command, more often than not, for political and governmental authority. No one is really going to vote Labor because 188 (or whatever) bills have been passed by Parliament this year. A government which looks to be in a state of panic, like a bunny in the headlights, when confronted by the inevitable implosion of an ill-judged and rushed policy fix has little claim to authority.

The good things that have been done (a proper paid parental leave scheme, health funding reform, the NBN, and so on) do not redound, for whatever reason, to the government’s credit.

Over and above that, as Malcolm Farnsworth makes clear in an excellent piece at The Drum, there’s a longer term hollowing out of the Labor project which is really starting to show.

Kevin Rudd’s removal, whatever his faults, were symptomatic of that decline.

Kevin Rudd’s removal also explains most of why Julia Gillard has not been able to make a success of things. The accusation of a ‘lie’ gains so much traction because she can easily be perceived as having seized the leadership by stealth.

Now, that is not true, but the fact that the political logic behind that perception is at work is a fact, and a fact that must be reckoned with.

I don’t think the “hold the nerve with Gillard” strategy is a goer any more.

The three policy issues Julia Gillard herself nominated at the time she became Prime Minister are causes of the government’s pain. Principally, climate change and asylum seekers, but the resources tax is also not settled, and the departure from the original design has, it’s become clear, exacerbated all the political issues associated with the “two speed economy”.

On climate change, Labor gave the issue away to The Greens. On asylum seekers, Labor gave the issue away to the Right.

What we need is a return to sanity in Australian political life. So, Quiggin is probably right that a Rudd-Turnbull contest would promote that. We may not get there. Anything can happen. But Julia Gillard’s effective Prime Minister-ship is almost certainly over.

Again that is not fair, but there it is.

I think that if the leadership were to change, the most likely outcome would still be a sizeable Coalition win. This Labor government is beyond saving. But some of the furniture needs saving, one of Australia’s two principal parties of government needs to recover some dignity and self belief, and the country needs anything other than an Abbott-slide.

Julia Gillard should think about that.

The problem now with the ‘hold your nerve with Julia’ strategy is that her personal and policy performance appears to be a very poor argument for it.

It’s true that the ALP has some runs on the board (the NBN, parental leave, and so on) but it appears incapable of selling them, and stuck in this horrible vortex where its attempts to play on the field the Right has layed out look ever more self-defeating and anarchic.

Peter Beattie’s son appears to be his official spokesperson, which is odd, but it’s hard, having lived with the bloke as Premier for so long, to believe that he’s not touting himself as a Labor messiah.

That this could even be taken seriously is an index of how much has gone wrong, and how quickly.

Probably the only chance the ALP has is to go back to Kevin Rudd, but I don’t think they’re going to. And I don’t think they’re going to face up squarely to the way they have contributed mightily to their own woes over the past year, which would be a precondition of doing that.

So, what does the ALP do?

I’m not certain they can answer the logically prior question – ‘what is the ALP for?’ And there’s the rub.

Politically, of course, as Bernard Keane observes today, the impact of the decision really is to drive another nail into the Gillard government’s coffin.

It is very puzzling that, given that Ministers would no doubt have been supplied with excellent advice from the Commonwealth Solicitor-General, this result wasn’t foreseen. It really does point up the desperation and short term media cycle driven horizons which have bedevilled the Gillard government, ironically to a degree greater than they bedevilled the Rudd government. The incompetence narrative seems to reflect truth.

We are not going to see a legislative fix to the issues identified by the Court, because The Greens, independents and Coalition, for very different reasons, will not support one. And nor should one be advanced.

In commenting on the ramifications of the Court’s decision at Troppo, Ken Parish writes:

The Gillard government should now accept the inevitability of its forthcoming election defeat and concentrate on putting in place asylum seeker processes that are as sound as possible from a policy (rather than short term populist) perspective. As I’ve argued previously, a policy based on community accommodation, rather than mandatory detention, of asylum seekers once initial health and security clearances have been passed, is clearly preferable from a policy viewpoint. It will almost certainly result in a measurable upsurge in arrival numbers, but that is unlikely to result in total numbers that Australia will be unable effectively to absorb.

I could not agree more.

When I was discussing the Centre for Policy Development’s paper, Breaking the stalemate on asylum seekers and refugees, I wrote:

It would not be too hard to argue for a completely different path. It would take courage. But Labor has very little to lose, and potentially a lot to gain, by doing the right thing.

It is very hard to see a path for the Gillard government to be re-elected. But outcomes are not pre-determined. If Ministers have not read the CPD Report, they should be doing just that as a matter of immediate pragmatic political priority.

If the ALP is to lose anyway, the paradox might be that by regaining its soul, it might just avoid its fate. If not, then it might just provide a path by which Labor could return to opposition demonstrating that it actually stands for something.

It really should be very clear now that playing defence on a turf shaped by its political opponents and the media is absolutely and fatally counter-productive.

The meltdown that followed the end of the credit and housing bubbles was addressed by governments stimulating demand. All very Keynesian.

However, there was a second string to the response to the GFC that got forgotten as quickly as you could say “recovery” (and “Goodbye, Kevin Rudd and Gordon Brown”!)… that was the whole “regulate international finance flows and markets and bankers and stuff” bit. Remember what the G20 was going to do?

So we now have the situation where ‘markets’ have demanded, and got, austerity economics. But that has led to continued economic gloom. And states who might wish to continue to stimulate demand would have to borrow further from… markets. So the aforesaid markets display their ‘animal spirits’ and jump off a cliff.

And so it goes.

Keynes’ whole point was that there were very large scale irrationalities at work in market behaviour, even if some of the time it operates within its own rationality. Hence, in his book, the need for states to temper their excesses. None of this, by the way, is or should be particularly radical.

Gordon Brown was actually right that stimulus should have been maintained for longer, and the overweening irrationality of markets addressed at the international level. It’s interesting, now, in some of what’s starting to come out in memoirs, that he faced a lot of opposition from Newer Labourish types in his own party, who wanted to jump onto the ‘cut debt now’ wagon in advance of the Tories.

Tony Blair’s (really weird) memoir Journey, by the way, ends with a call for even more markets.

One for the true believers.

O’Neill is apparently an alumnus of some Trotskyist group or other, and like other leftie turned righties (or Euston Manifesto Decent Lefties), has remembered how to use his time honoured bag of rhetorical tricks.

This sort of argument, or very loud and repetitive non sequitur, is now the stock and trade of right wing columnists more generally.

Just as Christopher Pearson, for instance, can argue, apparently seriously, that the timing of Kevin Rudd’s aorta valve replacement is all about his continued leadership ambitions.

It’s this reductio ad absurdum set of debating maneouvres that takes on a life of its own, and sometime reveals more than it intends. This febrile ‘win at all costs’ mentality – characteristic of the culture wars – is now almost dominant across the mediascape.

So, last night, we had Brendan O’Neill arguing that journalists had to be allowed their illegality. They’re the fourth estate!

The problem is that it’s not just left libertarian gadflies who believe this. O’Neill, far from being a contrarian, is actually reflecting back at twice the size the emptiness of the Fourth Estate We Hold The State To Account excuses of the media as it thrashes around attempting to escape democratic accountability.

So, we had all the usual “ZOMG! Press Freedom!” stuff we’ve come to expect, before O’Neill was unwisely pushed into speaking the secret hidden in plain sight out loud. The press actually believes that the law does not, or should not constrain it. Or, rather, if it does, it ought to be some sort of question for pondering in newsrooms and in the arcanae of journalistic codes of ethics. “How can we get our stories?”

Sadly, there are some Australian media commentators, and I’m not thinking of News Limited ones, whose blindness to questions of democratic accountability is such that they’ve actually aired this professional view in public. It’s characteristic of a profession stripped of meaning, of future, and of purpose, a machine blindly hurtling in the only direction it knows.

It’s more charitable not to name these people. They should know better.

This is premodern.

If sovereignty is about the decision as to when the law applies and when it does not, then it must stand above law, and stand above democracy. The media seems to arrogate to itself the position of King Louis. The Enlightenment actually existed to counter this arrogance.

We’ve gone beyond ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’…

What O’Neill and his journalistic colleagues appear to argue is that it is they who determine law and right.

That is rubbish, and should be called as such.

It’s all very well to prattle on about holding the powerful to account, but the media needs to be judged by what it does, not what it says. “By their fruits you shall know them”: hacking phones, murder pr0n, tawdry celeb exposes, casual but relentless Islamophobia, ad hominem attacks on critics, “campaigning journalism” that lies and distorts. That’s what we have.

Nor is it about ‘freedom’ or ‘censorship’. A considered, judicious and measured conversation needs to occur, and might well occur by way of public inquiry, about the danger the press Leviathan poses to democracy itself. That transcends questions, trite as they are, of ‘the future of journalism’ or the prevalence of the right wing noise machine. What it goes to is how we can protect ourselves from dying dinosaurs.

Turnbull made a strong case both for the absurdity of denialism and for the real stakes of the climate change debate. He compared climate change skepticism to a pub conversation where smoking is alleged to be harmless because Uncle Ernie puffed like the proverbial chimney and lived to be 95:

And this is actually — this war on science and on scientists which is being conducted is much worse than the case of person who ignores his doctor’s advice and follows the advice of his friend down the pub, drawing on the life experience of the fortunate Uncle Ernie.

Because the consequences of getting our response to climate change wrong will not likely be felt too severely by us, or at least not most of us, but will be felt painfully and cruelly by the generations ahead of us. And the people in the world who will suffer the most cruelly will be the poorest and the people who have contributed the least to the problem. There is an enormous injustice here. When people try and suggest to you that climate change is not a moral issue, they are wrong. It is an intensely moral issue raising grave moral issues.

Those of us who do not believe the CSIRO is part of an international Green conspiracy to undermine Western civilisation or do not believe that leading scientists like Will Steffen are subversives should not be afraid to speak out, and loudly, on behalf of our scientists and our science. We must not allow ourselves to be deluded on this issue.

Interestingly, Essential Research found this week, in a question commissioned by Channel Ten, that 46% of respondents are more concerned than they were two years ago about the environmental effects of global warming.

At the same time, of course, public opinion has moved strongly against carbon pricing, or at least against the Gillard government’s carbon price plan. (It would be interesting to see if there were more support for carbon pricing in the abstract, though in practice hard to separate that out from the actual carbon tax proposals on the table).

What accounts for this?

It is largely a matter, I’d suggest, of communications errors from the government (and to a lesser degree from other advocates of carbon pricing). It’s not just the litany of reasons why Julia Gillard has a trust problem (most of which are traceable back to the manner of her ascension to the top job). It goes deeper than that.

Three fundamental strategic errors have been made.

The first was to switch the conversation away from the deleterious effects of global warming. Perhaps this was a response to the noise of the so-called ‘debate on the science’. But it’s had the effect of sundering measures to mitigate climate change from the issue itself. Turnbull, rightly, talks about the moral challenges of climate change. Labor, since Kevin Rudd dropped the ball, is unable to.

A related error is to be reactive and frame the plan in terms of economic reform. This stems from the usual round of criticism from newspapers and commentators that the Labor government pales into insignificance compared to Hawke and Keating. But playing the game in terms of tax feeds the critique. So, when the Clean Energy Future detail was released, everyone rushed to the online calculator to see if they’d be ‘better off’ or ‘worse off’. It became all about short term gain and pain, and reinforced the narrative that Labor was ignoring cost of living pressures.

Again, an own goal.

(Incidentally, it was very regrettable that more effort wasn’t made to make it clear that the modelling which produced the numbers about ‘cost to households’ made the assumption that there would be no changes to consumption patterns. Choosing cleaner energy, which will be able to be done off the grid as well as by installing solar panels or whatever, could well, and in fact should over time, reduce costs.)

And here’s the third error; another one where strategy has been shaped by being to reactive to the agenda of carbon pricing opponents. Releasing modelling, and highlighting it so much, renders the debate both abstract and static. Talk of % increases in employment or whatever pales against the putative reality of lost jobs (and the employment insecurity which drives those concerns). It would have been much better to communicate some concrete examples of people working in ‘Green Jobs’, to highlight the skills needed to re-equip workers and re-equip kids for prosperous and sustainable futures, and generally to shape a message which resonates with the everyday. And makes a contrast with a positive future and what lies ahead for us if nothing is done.

What to do? Turnbull has actually pointed the way. Whether Labor is or is not capable of taking a leaf out of his book is moot. But Labor is not the only force involved in the climate change and carbon price debates. Others should take heed.

Update: Cross-posted at The Drum.

At Catallaxy, Judith Sloan reposts the text of an op/ed critical of the government’s health and hospital reform agenda. She concludes by decrying the results of the plan’s implementation, claiming all that has been achieved apart from “much higher funding from the federal government” is:

a motley collection of cute sounding schemes, such as the GP super-clinics and Medicare locals, with little purpose.

Over the last year, I’ve been working on a couple of research and consultancy projects in health workforce innovation and health systems research. So, among other things, I’ve learnt a bit about GP Super Clinics and Medicare locals.

Both are responses to a couple of inter-related issues: the difficulties of co-ordinating the provision of care (including through markets) and workforce distribution.

We’re often told that there are massive shortages of health professionals. But since the increase in medical places, we have more graduate doctors than health departments know what to do with. The actual problems go to how and where health professionals work.

GP Super Clinics are designed to take pressure off emergency departments, and particularly to do so in places where access to private doctors is restricted by cost and supply. Unsurprisingly, GPs tend to go to where the most money can be made, because of incentives driven by fee for service cost reimbursement models. That’s usually in the inner city and wealthier suburbs. Just as importantly, GPs aren’t necessarily the most efficient providers of all aspects of primary care, and Super Clinics are based around models of care which bring together nurses and allied health workers, and use the full set of their competencies and skills to the utmost.

Such “new models of care” also respond to the fact that changes in population health mean that patients are increasingly suffering from “co-morbidities”: that is to say, a range of often inter-related conditions for which “bits of the body” specialists can’t treat the whole patient. Think older people living with diabetes. Medicare Locals are intended to co-ordinate care for patients so they’re able to access what they need in one spot, rather than being bounced from clinic to hospital to specialist to GP. They’re also intended to deliver care better and more cheaply in the community, rather than in acute care public hospitals.

Anyone interested in the Medicare Local program should read the excellent coverage at Melissa Sweet’s Croakey blog.

My biggest criticism of the implementation of these initiatives would be that the original vision has been diminished by separating primary care from acute hospital care governance, contrary to the Kevin Rudd plan. That’s going to make it harder to achieve the co-ordination of care, and potentially re-opens the whole can of worms about blame and cost shifting. But to say that these are just “cute sounding schemes” is manifestly wrong.

Part of the problem here, aside from the perennial issue of vested interests and turf wars that plagues health policy, is that the government itself hasn’t departed from the one note narrative of “more nurses and more doctors”. That’s a pity too.

NB: These comments represent my personal opinion, and not that of my employer or of funding bodies which have supported research in which I’ve been involved.

“I also believe that it’s important if you lead a team to rely on the collective efforts of the team. We are all enhanced by working in a team together.

“So it is my intention as Prime Minister to lead a government that draws on the best efforts of our caucus to ensure that our government is on track, doing what Australians expect us to do – providing decent services, protecting their jobs and ensuring that they get decent treatment and fairness when they perform those jobs.”

The Keane/Barry piece at Crikey details how how Rudd’s autocratic, dictatorial style was evident from the outset and didn’t improve from there. In reflecting this week, Rudd himself identified the need to consult more as one of the lessons he has now learnt from that time.

One of the reasons I had hope for Gillard as prime minister was that she seemed to promise a return to cabinet government and genuine teamwork. There were reports that Cabinet worked well when Gillard took over in Rudd’s absence. Meeting were conducted with humour, people’s were asked their views and people enjoyed attending. In her own portfolios she had a record of getting people around a table and negotiating an outcome.

Laura Tingle, in yesterday’s Australian Financial Review reports that such teamwork just isn’t happening. Cabinet procedures have been restored, but nothing is ever discussed there in an engaged way.

In personality terms, Gillard never has tantrums, doesn’t blame others when things go wrong, Colleagues, staff and bureaucrats comment on her inner strength and calmness at the centre of a storm, which is just as well, because that has been the constant situation since she took over. Unless she is very tired, when “some sense of a siege mentality” might appear.

Tingle says that the closer you get to Gillard the more you hear of “a very different person to the one voters have decided they don’t like.”

Nevertheless, it seems that a culture has prevailed where ministers work as isolates and never consult each other or talk to each other about anything important. Ministers have discovered that they can get on with their own work without interference by others if they reciprocate by not poking their nose into anyone else’s affairs.

So the Government lacks collective wisdom, ownership of each other’s issues, and a strategic sense overall. As an example, there was no collective strategy for selling the budget. It was simply assumed that it would be handled by the Treasurer’s and the PM’s offices. One bureaucrat Tingle spoke to put it this way:

“Combet, Ferguson, Macklin, Swan, Wong. There are lots of good ministers in this government but the whole doesn’t look as good as the parts.”

All that having been said, and I have no doubt Tingle is close to the mark, Simon Crean gave a competent and spirited account of the Government’s record speaking to Fran Kelly this morning. And once a week, Madonna King on local radio here has a discussion with Craig Emerson and George Brandis. Emerson is invariably calm and rational in defending the Government across a range of portfolios. But it’s hard for a government to convey a sense of strategic purpose when it is basically confected in the PM’s office. Or so it would seem.

As endless talk of The Anniversary has shown, political commentary in this country consists of a small, narrow group of ‘journalists’ and other insiders giving their opinion across multiple platforms.

Yesterday in the Australian Financial Review Laura Tingle, one of the remaining quality journalists, had a look at Gillard’s record on foreign affairs, saying that her:

increasing fluency with world affairs and foreign policy comes at a time when international issues demand her attention.

Many commenters are stuck with her frank disclaimer to Kerry O’Brien, which is worth quoting in full:

“Kerry, I’m just going to be really upfront about this: foreign policy is not my passion.

“It’s not what I’ve spent my life doing. You know, I came into politics predominantly to make a difference to opportunity questions, particularly, make a difference in education.

“So, yes, if I had a choice I’d probably be watching kids learn to read than here in a meeting in Brussels at international meetings. But obviously in this role I will serve as prime minister doing the full job, and the full job includes coming to places like Brussels to be a feisty advocate for Australia’s national interest. And that’s what I will do. It’s what I’m doing here.” (Emphasis mine)

Most, I think, remember the disclaimer rather than the statement of intent. Since then she has been clocking up the frequent flyer points quite impressively.

Tingle says her visits to Korea, Japan and New Zealand were a great success. She has settled relationships with China, which became troubled under Rudd. Growing in confidence and competence, she has

played to her strengths, cutting through at the level of politician dealing with other politicians facing difficult issues which they must sell on their own domestic stage.

That worked well with leaders, including Obama, Tingle says. Now she is showing signs of putting foreign policy at the centre of her strategic deliberations.

Obviously, a clumsy beginning on the asylum seeker question, hardly improved by the Malaysian initiative, continues to bother her. On Afghanistan, Tingle says she spoke with genuine power and passion, but there too her position looks increasingly tenuous, compared, say, to the more pragmatic stance taken by New Zealand.

The anniversary has two aspects, the rise of Gillard and the fall of Rudd. As to the latter, Bernard Keane and Paul Barry suggest that ultimately Rudd was the author of his own misfortunes:

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane and senior journalist Paul Barry draw a portrait of a man at the height of enormous power, and how quickly his base was eroded. Keane and Barry plot how Rudd unwittingly trashed his own power base with astonishing swiftness — hollowing out his influence so effectively that when his public popularity collapsed, so too did his prime ministership …

What remains is the question as to whether having Rudd around is going to be a negative or a positive for Gillard and Labor. As an example of the potential for mischief, it was noted that Rudd got up and left the chamber the other day when Gillard was talking about a price on carbon. In fact he was taking a call from his Indonesian counterpart, a relationship that does need careful handling in the light of the live cattle export issue.

Some say that Labor needs Rudd to be a more positive advocate for Gillard and Labor in Queensland. Peter Beattie, full of advice as always, reckons Rudd should go to the backbench and retire at the next election. Rudd says he is going nowhere.

My own impression is that the relationship between Gillard and Rudd is professional and successful in terms of foreign policy, but it does give the Opposition and the press opportunities for creating mayhem.