As John Quiggin suggested it might, the Garnaut Review report has begun to reframe the debate on climate change policy. Based on an inspection of the weekend papers, it’s also started to reframe the political analysis, with some of the punditocracy remembering that an election doesn’t have to be held until 2010. (Planet Janet, of course, is one of the more prominent exceptions to this rule.) So, suddenly, the fate of Kevin Rudd doesn’t depend on one by-election in a safe Nationals seat or next week’s Newspoll, but how he responds to the big challenge of climate change. How long that perception might last is another matter. But while we’re talking about the long term, Possum Comitatus has compiled a fascinating cornucopia of data on the long term demographic challenges for the Coalition’s vote, building on some work by political scientist Ian Watson which was discussed in a post here a while back. Possum also has some unsolicited advice for the Liberals in responding to climate change:
So the Coalition has to start appealing to much younger demographics or they will likely find themselves in permanent opposition.
Something for them to keep in mind if they start trying to play political games with the emissions trading system and climate change – issues with large support in the younger demographics.
Here’s the dilemma for the opposition. Continue reading ‘Climate change conundrum - the Coalition’s generation policy problem’
It was interesting to read the acres of newsprint devoted to Budget specials today for two reasons - one to note that so much of the “interest group” reaction is typical - one headline - “teachers say more is needed for schools” - probably writes itself, and could be run nearly every year. That’s not to have a go at the teachers, but it might be more to the point if the media spent more time on doing specialist analyses of each portfolio (as New Matilda has been doing for a few) and less on highlighting understandable (from the point of view of those concerned) calls for more spending. An assessment of priorities and discrete policy initiatives might be more informative than a de facto assumption that the cake is of infinite dimensions - which it would almost have to be if every interest group were placated. In some ways, being Treasurer would be an unenviable task, and as I argued last night, the politics of the budget include a real attempt to persuade people to look at the collective public good rather than “what’s in it for me?”. Obviously people want to understand how they (and policy areas they care about) are affected, but the sort of “thinking” that goes into this sort of nonsense - “Yet again, Generation X gets screwed” - makes me wince, even as a member of said generation (not to mention the factual vacuum contained in that silly little article).
This leads me onto my other observation - the paucity of any reference to any views that the opposition might have. Shadow Ministers were clearly not - on the whole - interested, informed enough or motivated to release anything portfolio specific. So all we got was short shrift - at least in the print media - to the rather inconsistent and confused bleatings of Malcolm Turnbull and Brendan Nelson, who according to Trevor Cook, looked like he was “on life support” on the telly. A couple of paras on average across the two 30 something page budget liftouts I read. So, how do the attention deprived respond?
By musing (threatening might be far too strong a word) about blocking the changes to the baby bonus in the Senate. Continue reading ‘Opposition Budget politics, 2008 style’
While I’m quite a fan of allohistory, I rarely engage in it because (a) I’m not very good at it and (b) it’s rather self-indulgent. But like most indulgences, it’s a bit of harmless fun and it won’t make you go blind.
So here goes: This letter in today’s Oz alerted me to the intriguing possibility that a bit of judicial activism by the High Court over WorkChoices might have been enough to save the Howard government from electoral oblivion.
While the High Court’s 2006 judgement on WorkChoices makes an unassailable case for the legal correctness of upholding the legislation, let’s pretend things were different. If the High Court judges had gone all activist and concocted a convoluted Constitutional argument to strike down WorkChoices, then the result of the 2007 election might have been very different.
Continue reading ‘Would judicial activism have saved the Howard government?’
In today’s Australian Bill Hayden pays tribute to his late friend Patriarch P. McGormless Padraic P. McGuinness.
In the process Hayden - erstwhile globe-trotting Federal Government Minister cum Governor-General in his Vice-Regal clobber cum wealthy Lockyer Valley gentleman farmer and Quadrant editorial board chairperson - reinvents a working class identity for himself and an identity as “workingman’s friend” for McGuinness:
Continue reading ‘Bill Hayden intensifies the Crass Struggle’
One thing that’s become very clear from the US election season is that there’s a distinct appeal in change and freshness (and yep, they’re empty cliches and let’s hope some substance fills them out). But we might have observed that already from our own election campaign, or indeed Nicholas Sarkozy’s win in France where he ran against his own party and predecessor and business as usual. It’s also a dilemma for Gordon Brown, whose biggest challenge is squaring the circle between experience and change - the horns of the same dilemma that caught Hillary Clinton in its traps.
Poor old Guy Rundle was lampooned a while back for having the audacity to suggest that conservatives in the public arena in Australia had to find at least some point of contact with reality in order to continue to have influence. But he was right. It’s interesting to see some American right wingers, including former Bush acolyte David Frum, realising this - which you can read about in this review by Michael Tomasky (who isn’t confident that the factions that control the GOP will actually take any notice), and this column today from Daniel Finkelstein, a former adviser to the British Tories. As Andrew Elder remarks, the Reaganite right and their antipodean counterparts just don’t get that the public would rather pay for basic services efficiently delivered through tax than often infefficiently and expensively delivered through the private sector:
… there is the waning appeal of small-government rhetoric. In the 1970s, speeches about government being the problem, not the solution, resonated. Now this language is much less potent politically. Government remains often inefficient and too large, but winning support to change it is harder. Conservatives need to show that they can run government, providing services, not merely talking about shrinking them.
And the American right, or at least sections of it, is starting to realise that just blathering on about tax cuts has also lost its appeal. It didn’t win Howard the election, did it?
Continue reading ‘“The times will suit me” or “The times they are a-changin”?’
I’m not sure if Quadrant is now under the editorship of Keith Windschuttle (whose 60s adventures are in the news today) or whether P.P. McGuiness is still in the chair. But their leader writer doesn’t appear to be such a Howard-hugger as you might have expected:
Howard’s behaviour throughout 2007 can only be characterised as hubris, and he can only be personally blamed for this. Whom the gods would destroy … This is a pity, since the former prime minister’s record remains permanently stained, and his record in government only able to be discussed through this defect.
I wonder if Howard still thinks this way?
Its free and sceptical spirit has contributed enormously to intellectual and political debate in this country. It has displayed in relation to each of the great philosophical challenges that have come along through their domestic manifestations here in Australia in my lifetime a tenacity towards principle, a consistency in advocating basic values and beliefs, and a broad-mindedness and an eclectic gathering of people from different backgrounds that does this magazine and the values that unite it great credit indeed.
As to the “free and sceptical spirit”, what’s quite bizarre is that the Quadrant crew appear to be the only mob left in Australia who actually believed and even more bizarrely, still believe, Howard’s dire warnings about the sky falling in under Rudd. You might well be sceptical as to whether this constitutes an enormous contribution to intellectual and political debate in this country. But - in a free market sense - I suppose that’s up to its tiny readership and its sponsors in the nanny state Australia Council to judge. Hang on…
Continue reading ‘Then… and now’
’tis the season to catch up on the reading that you don’t get the time or inclination to do during the rest of the year. I’ve certainly had a chance to plough through a few books.
Judith Brett’s Quarterly Essay on Howard’s demise is out, and it’s very much in her typical style. Psychoanalytic interpretations of the electorate, and to some extent the leaders, abound. One assertion that I found considerable room to quibble with, however, is her claim that the seeds of Howard’s political demise were sown with the ascension of Rudd to the Labor leadership. While we’ll never know, I suspect Labor would have had a pretty fair shot of winning this election with Beazley - or Julia Gillard - as leader. Perhaps the scare campaign about union influence might have more effect given a Gillard leadership; perhaps the It’s Time factor wouldn’t have been as great if Beazley had still been in charge. And Brett, in an almost throwaway manner, states that Andrew Bolt has been crucial in keeping Victorian working-class votes in conservative manner. Does Bolt really have any great influence on swinging voters, or does he just preach to the converted, a shock jock of the print world? In any case, there is one particularly good reason to read this issue of QE: an extraordinarily insightful and beautifully-written piece of correspondence at the back. I agree with every word the author wrote…
Continue reading ‘Holiday reading’
John Howard was right about something yesterday. We do know what he stands for. As Tony Wright observes in a punchy piece in The Age, he stands for middle class welfare - means testing apparently is “discriminatory” or something - hey, why shouldn’t everyone no matter how big their income get a tax break for their kids’ private school fees? It’s all about “choice” and “the opportunity society”, right? This boondoggle, as Kim Beazley might have put it, is the reason why the Howard version of the Kevin07 education rebate costs billions more. What’s the politics of this? Forget the elephant in the room - the spendathon inevitably leading to higher interest rates, as the Reserve revises its forecasts upwards and the IMF warns about fiscal policy - what Howard is after is a wedge. Labor, according to his script, is supposed to come out and agree with the public school lobby’s complaints (quite justified for mine). Rudd’s unlikely to fall into this trap. He doesn’t need to. He can just keep pointing out that Howard’s here today, gone tomorrow, and change the subject on Wednesday at his campaign launch. That’s the reality of the super-speed election news cycle.
Cross-posted at PollieGraph.
Originally posted at LP in Exile.
It’s interesting to observe that The Age is promising to publish today a liftout of longer essays by “prominent Australians” (for which, read the usual suspects you’d anticipate being in such a supplement) reflecting on issues which are lost in all the campaign noise. On one hand, that’s a very welcome development, but on the other, it’s worth wondering why their standard election coverage doesn’t already do this. Not that I’m singling out Fairfax.
No Australian paper has been brave enough to try an experiment in “public journalism”. Margaret Simons describes in her recent book The Content Makers: Understanding the role of the media in Australia what the Virginian-Pilot set out to do in covering the 1995 state legislative elections. The paper eschewed reporting personal attacks, and, as Simons writes:
The paper would report politics as though it actually mattered and made a difference. There would be no talk of the ‘voters’ or ‘the public’ as though they were bodies other than the readers. There would be no talk of how things might ‘play’ in the electorate, and very little commentary based on backroom chats or the office gossip of politics. There would be some discussion of politics as strategy, but it would not be allowed to dominate. The assumption was that the audience had a stake in the news. The resolutions transformed both the newspaper and the conduct of the campaign.
I dare say I don’t need to spell out how far this style of reporting is from the coverage of this year’s Australian federal election. There are some moves in this direction from online media such as New Matilda, Crikey, YouDecide2007, this blog and others, but there certainly aren’t any major media outlets prepared to take a punt and invest the significant sums of money that it would take to make such an exercise mainstream. In many ways, even though some online media makes or aspires to make a profit and pays contributors, we’re still very much in the realm of what Simons, picking up on an anthropological motif, calls “the gift economy”. It’s not called “citizen journalism” for nothing.
Continue reading ‘“Politics as though it actually mattered and made a difference”’
Lenore Taylor in the Weekend AFR reported that Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull had taken a submission to cabinet suggesting that Australia ratify the Kyoto Protocol immediately.
Government sources have told the Weekend AFR that Mr Turnbull argued the government would gain kudos and lose nothing by ratifying the international climate change agreement.
But cabinet decided such a backflip would not look credible to voters given the vehemence with which Prime Minister Howard had argued against Kyoto for a decade, even though it was looking for ways to redefine the coalition’s image in the electorate.
It is understood that Mr Turnbull was not the sole voice for ratification at the meeting, held about six weeks ago, but that a clear majority of cabinet did not think changing the government’s stance was a viable political position to take.
Turnbull is not denying the story, so it’s probably true.
Continue reading ‘Climate change issue comes alive - almost!’
Kim Beazley gives his answer to the question “Will WA poll count?”
If you see on the night that Labor’s share of the so-called two-party preferred vote is about 52 per cent, you will know it’s really on; much less than that and the Government will be returned.
If it’s up anywhere near where the ALP has polled in the opinion polls this year, there won’t be huge numbers of Liberals left.
But about 52 per cent, then what happens is Stirling, Hasluck, Swan, Cowan and maybe Kalgoorlie will determine the outcome.
Continue reading ‘What about the West?’
As I suggested it would on Monday, the Galaxy Poll of four Queensland marginals has done more to mystify and shape the media narrative than to enlighten. Witness stories like this one in the SMH which asserts that Labor needs to win 6 seats in Queensland to form government (as QUT Political Science professor Clive Bean keeps emphasising, 2 would do and the Mexicans can take care of the rest) and that the swing shown is state wide (and thus Labor won’t win Blair) – which it isn’t.
It’s also unleashed a veritable flood of leaked party polling. It’s worth demystifying both Galaxy and the motives and significance of the leaking of “private� polls.
Continue reading ‘Demystifying tracking polls’
Well, are we bored now? Mr Lefty is. One way of looking at this campaign is that the only thing that would make it interesting would be the playing out on Sunday night of 1 or other of 2 of the 4 scenarios that Guy Rundle sketches out in Crikey:
SCENARIO 3: Howard does the whole shebang at the great hall of parliament, talking to 200 stooges for ninety minutes, as always without notes, rambling round and round a few key points like a bumble bee approaching a flower. The farce remains unbroadcast. It’s an old man talking in a half empty hall on a Sunday night.
SCENARIO 4: He does the whole thing, ABC TV dutifully televises this making it the more most boring show since MDA . People tune in to watch an old man talking to himself for 90 minutes. It becomes a classic piece of mad performance art.
Alternatively, Continue reading ‘General election thread’
As part of LP’s coverage of the election campaign, I’ll be reporting on what’s happening in the seat of Stirling, in Western Australia, one of the seats that the Labor Party is eager to win back from the Libs.
In short, Stirling is a very marginal seat that has changed hands regularly since it was created in 1955. It doesn’t, however, always swing with changes of government – it isn’t really a bellwether seat. Labor’s Ron Edwards held the seat for 10 years, and lost to Eoin Cameron in 1993. (My favourite Cameron story is when he told Noel Crichton-Brown that “if you love the Liberal Party as much as you say you do, you should resign immediately�.) He lost in 1998 to Labor’s Jann McFarlane, who lost in 2004 to real-estate agent and former political staffer Michael Keenan.
The current margin is 2% - around 1750 votes.
Continue reading ‘Stirling effort’
Guy at Polemica comments on Beazley’s final speech to Parliament - a prolix, somewhat rambling, knowledgeable, and big-hearted political valediction entirely appropriate to the man.
There’s lots of history to chew on, from Whitlam’s trip to China to the economic record of the current government. But in amongst it all, there’s a disturbing anecdote from Beazley’s most successful political era - his time as Defence Minister, about the reliability of the USA as a defence supplier:
Continue reading ‘US sold us crippled Hornets in 80s, according to Beazley’
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