Rudd’s political style, whether his prolixity or his obsession for control, was always destined to be viewed more harshly when the politics became tougher.

Eventually it might work, but it’s not so far, because Abbott, blemished as he might be, is seen as ”authentic”, just as people are starting to ask ”will the real Kevin stand up?”…

But the dynamics have changed, the government is worried and the public, for the moment, seem to be hoping the underdog makes it a contest.

There’s lots, lots, more, and in fact the whole piece is something of a mind dump rather than a considered analysis. But what’s worth highlighting is the elision between “the public” (referenced anecdotally), the polls (alluded to) and “people”. The story is largely written in the passive voice beloved of such authoritative pronouncements – stuff just happens, and it’s unclear who thinks that it has, and who has been doing the doing. Who is doing the viewing of Rudd in the para I’ve excerpted? What is this destiny?

What it really adds up to is a picture of the commentariat-bot at work.

Not everyone is as artless as Alexander Downer, claiming to detect a sea-change in public opinion on the basis of random airport encounters, quickly morphed into “people think”, and “people say”, but the underlying illogic is the same. Public opinion has changed because the commentariat says it has. The absence of much hard data, or even reference to such data as exists, only serves to highlight the constructedness of the narrative.

For a corrective, one might try Possum.

How popular is Kevin Rudd? It’s the question on the tips of the lips of political commentators everywhere. The exciting answer is that he’s on the nose, he’s doomed, the honeymoon is over, his popularity is plunging to new lows – add exclamation marks for effect.

But the boring – boring and correct – answer is, “about as popular as he was last time there was an Opposition leadership change”.

And on the federal polling from the same Galaxy sample as the horror poll for Anna Bligh, headlined as “Coalition surges to poll lead” by the Courier-Mail:

Effectively, these polls suggest a net loss to Rudd of 1 seat in Qld at the moment compared to the 2007 election results applied to the new electoral boundaries.

Compare that to Stephanie Balogh’s story:

SUPPORT for Kevin Rudd in his home state has crashed as Tony Abbott’s new-look Coalition powers ahead of Labor for the first time since the 2007 federal election.

I noted the other day that Dennis Shanahan was something of a barometer for the current state of the ‘political narrative’. I should have remembered that an even better one, whose often indecipherable columns frequently seem to be pure stream of consciousness, is Malcolm Colless.

Writing today in The Australian, he seems to think he is delivering some sort of killer punch:

Returning from Copenhagen, where he failed to make any ground, Rudd calmly began unveiling a whole series of new visionary canvases depicting future challenges around issues such as health services, population growth and the need for greater productivity to support an ageing community.

One thing that impressed me about Rudd on Q&A last night was that he quite rightly conveyed the message that the government, any government, can’t fix everything. That’s surely just truth, but Tony Jones response in the interchange on the alcopops tax and the drinking age showed the media reflex where the government is expected to have solved every problem yesterday in spades – “But then they’re just drinking something else”. As Rudd pointed out, the stats actually show a fall in alcohol consumption in younger demographics, but apparently that’s immaterial if a policy measure which has some impact doesn’t act as if it’s a magic wand?

What, exactly, is wrong with debating what sort of infrastructure, skills and services are needed for a growing population now? If you stop to think about it outside the drum beat of the political narrative, it’s a hard question to answer.

Kevin Rudd won the 2007 election, in part, because he could articulate a longer term vision. John Howard didn’t have one for even a single term, let alone one for the nation. What sort of Australia would Tony Abbott like to shape? We simply don’t know, if we were to go on his current public statements. His timescale is the eternal now, the cost of milk, today’s political opportunity, a soundbite from question time. Lost in the endless stream of applause for his being “pugilistic”, “authentic”, “interesting”, etc. is any debate about what he might actually do as Prime Minister, let alone any public debate on what are urgent questions which we must address as a nation.

Sure, Rudd can be criticised for raising expectations about a quick fix to the health system. But why are so many so critical when he actually does have to negotiate his way through a complex policy domain with multiple stakeholders? What would Tony Abbott’s “decisive” or “direct action” on health actually imply? Do any of the commentators even stop to think about what the answer might be?

Jacques Chester, I suspect, has pinged what’s going on with all this:

It’s a lawyerly way of arguing. Pick an argument, any argument, that might be plausible, and throw it at the judge. You never know, it might stick.

There are certainly some straws blowing in the wind over the past few days, which in the way of these things, either represent columnists in The Australian flying kites for the opposition to grasp, or reciting lines fed to them by the Coalition. The always all over the place Malcolm Colless, whose stream of consciousness writing is valuable precisely because the multiplicity of disconnected thought bubbles probably do act as a barometer of right wing thinking, opines:

With a solid financial background under his belt, Turnbull must not fall for the politically correct line that opposing government policy makes the Opposition guilty of economic vandalism. He needs to counter this with firm leadership and conviction.

There’s also a bit of blah in there about the fiscal stimulus package not representing “macro-economic reform”, whatever that might mean. However, the dots can be joined by reading Michael Sutchbury in the same paper:

KEVIN Rudd and Wayne Swan’s emergency fiscal stimulus is unlikely to end up being a good investment of $10.4 billion of taxpayers’ money.

The great bulk of the “economic security strategy” package won’t improve Australia’s economic security because that would require supply-side measures to improve productivity.

This, obviously, ignores the fact that infrastructure spends take a very long time to stimulate demand, and the package is all about short term stimulus in order to forfend a recession. Supply side interventions were, of course, very thin on the ground under Howard and Costello, and improving the skills base and economic infrastructure (both soft and hard) is a medium term rather than a short term project. But what’s important about all this is that it neatly articulates with the anti-deficit argument that the Liberals are starting to run.

Former treasurer Peter Costello also criticised Labor’s move to drive the budget surplus into a potential deficit, as financial analysts predicted tax revenue generation would slow as the economy grinds down.

Mr Costello, who engineered a strategy to allow the budget windfall from the revenue boom to build, said it was better economic policy to operate a surplus.

“When the economy is growing the budget should be in surplus,” Mr Costello told The Australian yesterday.

Costello has apparently forgotten that he once understood that counter-cyclical fiscal policy implied being comfortable with deficit budgeting during turbulent economic conditions, and that the whole point of a fiscal stimulus at this stage is to boost economic growth, which is in danger of slowing to a halt.

Mr Turnbull urged the Government not to squander the savings of “a decade of responsible financial management”.

There are more than a few echoes of the Keating legacy in all this.

First, the “defend the last government’s legacy” line – initiated by Keating himself – which was rapidly transformed through its appropriation by pundits such as Paul Kelly into some sort of conventional wisdom: that the Labor party cruelled its chances of escaping opposition early by allegedly trashing Keating’s legacy. The holes in that argument as a political story should be too gaping to need spelling out. But it’s been seized on – at the instigation of another former PM, John Howard – as an iron law for the Liberals in opposition. Never walk away from John Howard. So we get all sorts of bizarre positions all unified by a desire to preserve the “Howard legacy” – in this case a preciousness about the surplus that was in fact created as much by serendipitous movements in commodity prices and an addiction to bracket creep coupled with election winning handouts as by “responsible financial management”.

Secondly, we have some resonances of Keating’s “recession we had to have” position lurking around. It’s as though, at some level, Liberals and pundits expect Labor to bring on another recession to further the cause of reform. Bizarre. The praise for the Keating government’s One Nation stimulus package from the opposition benches seems to completely elide the fact that it was too late and too slow. And the argument about the Treasury numbers – which is as much about attempting to give the political line that “Rudd is wasting the surplus” legs as any real desire for accountability – ignores the fact that the formulation of growth projections is a time consuming and deeply bureaucratic exercise. Ken Henry’s much more likely to have relied on his best reading of the circumstances than set Treasury minions to work on a full scale forecasting exercise. If we waited for that, in the current climate, it would almost certainly not be worth the paper it was written on by the time it arrived.

Nicholas Gruen puts the politics of all this into perspective neatly:

But back in Australia wouldn’t the Opposition give the government hell if it took the Coalition’s string of surpluses and started running deficits? Too right it would, just as the ALP would with roles reversed. But, if another fiscal stimulus proves necessary the government will have to decide. Politically they’ll need to choose between a faltering economy, rising business failures and unemployment – or giving their opponents some ammunition that they’ll use. Economically, one way spells misery, the other hope and a better chance of success.

I’ll bet some of the Government’s political advisers counselled against the bold approach the Government took last week. “Couldn’t we keep more of the surplus?; Have two bob each way?” Now they’re eating their words. Using the economic textbook to manage the economy decisively is a political winner.

I’m only an economist. But if I were a Government politician I know which path I’d choose. If the economy falters I’d fight recession. I’d take some nasty hits from the Opposition rather than die the death of a thousand cuts while I waited for recovery to come in its own good time.

That takes me to my third instance of Keating’s least impressive legacies. The opposition appears to be banking on their “Labor = deficits” line being available for revival, under the illusion that it was some sort of killer blow to post-Keating Labor rather than shadow boxing. People were always (and rightly) much more concerned with crippling interest rates and job losses rather than some arcane argument about fiscal policy. In a way, it was also an artefact of Keating’s wonkery – mistaking political narratives for political and social facts. I’m 100% certain that Australian electors today would rather have a government staving off recession than being able to sit around patting Peter Costello on the back for his record of surpluses.

Ps: Incidentally I’m inclined to completely ignore the “what did Kevin Rudd say about what Ken Henry said about what Glenn Stevens said” furore – total beatup in my view. Although, I’m surprised that the omniscient Malcolm Turnbull didn’t use his own purported financial expertise to spot the problem which is the occasion for the said furore. But I suppose his credit claiming for the bank deposit guarentee is so last week’s media cycle.

But there’s something more at stake here. Colless’ mind dumps very often give readers an insight into what passes for thought among the managerial minds of the press. Perhaps precisely because no one is reading his stuff, he’s departed from the News Limited correct line and failed to decry the Fairfax cost-cutting as a threat to the quality of journalism. What you can make of this tangled paragraph is probably up to you:

McCarthy cannot afford to be blindsided by sweeping and emotional claims that change, of itself, will necessarily destroy quality journalism. Quality, after all, often can be the exclusive prerogative of the creator. But at the same time he should be careful not to confuse muscle with fat as he wields his cost-cutting scythe.

But, unwittingly, with his union bashing schtick, Colless has actually exposed a fault line that bedevils and cripples the quality of the quality journalism debate. It’s still too much about ownership – either a faceless public company with corporate buccaneers focused solely on cost cutting like Fairfax, or a private(ish) media fiefdom run by an almighty Proprietor like Murdoch’s News Limited. According to News, the latter allows quality journalism to be funded, while the impersonal mavens of corporate capitalism sacrifice the fourth estate to the lowest common denominator – the bottom line of the buck. And indeed, there’s another irony in the defence of Fairfax – for several years the venerable mastheads have been the go to place for celebrity trash on the intertubes while their print editions have increasingly adopted a tone narrowly tailored to an inner city and Eastern suburbs audience.

What we really need to be thinking about here in the new media landscape is less about ownership and more about an information and analysis commons. Part of the argument in the journos v. bloggers wars is often a reiteration of a tired meme that bloggers are parasitic on content created by journalists. Maybe so. But that’s actually ignoring something central to the information architecture of an innovative and creative economy – value is added by re-arranging, analysing and deconstructing bites of information and opening them up rather than acting as a one directional transmission point from authoritative reporter of “news” to “consumer” or “reader”. There have to be viable options other than a dependence on either the God Proprietor or the corporate megalith which professional journalists of good will and citizens can work together on facilitating.

Maybe some of these issues will be discussed at the Walkley Foundation’s Future of Journalism shinding on Brisbane on Saturday. There’s some discussion of the event here from Axel Bruns, and as Mark is one of the speakers, I’m sure he’ll be writing something about it too.