Today’s Question Time saw some interesting tactics from the government; suspending standing orders to allow Tony Abbott to talk about health and hospitals policy. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who saw the debate, but from what I heard on the tv, it looked like Abbott was mostly in bluster mode, and Rudd quite assured. Clearly Labor believes that Abbott wants to talk about anything but health, and that his lack of command of the detail, and lack of any substantive alternative policy will work to the ALP’s credit.
So, the debate Rudd challenged him to on Tuesday will be interesting. It’ll also keep the media focus squarely where the government wants it to be for the next little while.
Elsewhere: Bernard Keane.
Elsewhere: Tigtog at Hoyden.
Update: The commentariat seems to be impressed by Abbott’s performance. By way of example, Samantha Maiden:
But the egg ended up all over Labor’s face as the Opposition Leader rose to the challenge, hurling abuse at Kevin Rudd.
Righteo, then.
Update: Bernard Keane in Crikey today:
If Abbott could spend Tuesday’s debate repeating yesterday’s dose and bagging the Government and explaining that he didn’t cut health funding, it’d be fine, but there’s now an expectation he must do more than criticise Rudd, that he must offer something positive. It obviously wasn’t in the Coalition’s planning to be producing a full-blown health policy at this stage. Rudd himself will presumably use the debate to make yet another of the many announcements about health funding that he promised back when he kicked off the health debate. If so, Abbott’s failure to produce something of substance will look particularly poor.
All of which is why, despite the alleged risks of debating your opponent, Rudd is happy to be doing just that.
Former Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull spoke in the House of Representatives today, in debate on the reintroduced CPRS bills. Bernard Keane has a full wrap at The Stump. From Keane’s coverage, it appears that Turnbull devoted most of his time to demolishing Tony Abbott’s plan:
Turnbull tore apart the proposed plan as economically inefficient, environmentally ineffective and unable to meet the task of reducing Australia’s emissions by 5% by 2020.
Update: Peter Martin reproduces the text of Turnbull’s speech.
You really have to feel a bit sorry for Malcolm Turnbull. Any chance he had of representing himself as leading a party enlightened on the policy response to climate change is gone completely, no matter what happens in tomorrow’s party room debate on the amendments negotiated between Ian Macfarlane and Penny Wong.
Tonight’s Lateline had the New South Wales National Senator, John Williams, orating about “global control” and declaiming “carbon is not a pollutant”. Then we saw Kevin Andrews, of all people, in effect refusing to rule out a leadership bid. Very hard to say which is more insane…
Earlier on LP: Previous post and discussion on the politics of the Liberals’ divisions over the CPRS.
Update: D-Day developments covered here.
Parliament goes into recess next week, after a sitting whose most prominent contribution to political discussion was the unruliness of question time (aside, of course, from the usual shenanigans of opposition disunity, which are now customary).
Writing in Crikey yesterday, Bernard Keane observed:
I’ve been watching or listening to Parliament since the early Hawke years and I can never recall Question Time not being made a mockery of.
Speaking as a recovering question time tragic, I’m not sure I agree with that. It’s true if the ritual is compared to some sort of Platonic eidos – as if its essence (dignified accountability and/or razor or rapier sharp wit) must incarnate itself in the chamber on a daily basis. In truth, a lot of the mysticism about parliamentary discourse – and accountability – is just that. If some sort of conception of parliament as a pure space, an agora if you like, for the exchange of ideas and reasoning was a large part of the mythos of nineteenth century liberalism, that doesn’t mean that we should expect that it would have a lot to do with the pragmatics of twenty-first century Australian politics, though its traces remain.
Back in a more Aristotelian world, I think we can discard the Bagehot for a bit, and make some observations about precisely when and why parliamentary tempers boil over. Continue reading ‘Question time: The classical philosophy edition’
A long serving Liberal party backbencher indicated today that he will not be renominating for the next Parliament.
It’s been a shocker of a week for Malcolm Turnbull. We’ve had the Julie Bishop shenanigans, the missing deficit as a yardstick line, second guessing the Reserve Bank to argue that interest rates rises tanked the economy (which is an arguable point, but politically worthless when interest rates have been rapidly falling), a Nationals revolt, losing Fiona Nash from the frontbench, the embarrassment of Christopher Pyne’s arguments being repudiated by the private schools sector and a major win for Julia Gillard, and the revival of Howardism on mandatory detention and border protection – which created its own ripples and waves of internal dissent.
And it goes on.
Stoushing on the government’s infrastructure bill revolved around Coalition claims that it would enable a slush fund for porkbarrelling. A last minute about face by Shadow Cabinet recognised the reality that opposing it, with the House rejecting Senate amendments, might be a bad look – as such opposition could easily be painted as frustrating the desire to stimulate the economy. But the Nationals had drawn their own line in the sand – basically, because they wanted to ensure that the principle of porkbarrelling for rural and regional electorates endured! The result? Malcolm Turnbull was exposed as unable to enforce any sort of discipline on his own party:
There were another two hours of debate before the bill was brought to a vote. And when it was, only Senators Johnston, Ronaldson, Brandis, Coonan, Mason and Troeth from the Liberals voted for the unamended bill, although Mason missed the division on the sale of Telstra funds. Senators Eggleston and Ferguson voted with the Nationals in favour of the amendments. This was the second time in a week that Eggleston, from Western Australia, has stood apart from his colleagues, having joined Petro Georgiou earlier this week in backing changes to the mandatory detention of asylum seekers.
Johnston, Ronaldson, Brandis and Coonan are all shadow Cabinet members and thus are bound by Cabinet solidarity. Mason is a Parliamentary Secretary. According to the ABC, there was confusion within the Coalition over who was required to vote and who was allowed to abstain, and reports of Coalition senators trying to bolt the chamber before the doors were locked for the vote.
The mass abstention was a poor look for Turnbull, especially with his Senate leader being amongst their number.
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Continue reading ‘The opposition unravels’
Back when Malcolm Turnbull’s reshuffle was announced, we had a request from Laura for a Chrissy Pyne watch. I can’t find the comment in question readily to link back to, but the LP collective memory is evidently elephantine… So, what’s young Christopher been up to? Parliament has a plethora of bills to consider in its final week of sittings for the year, and Pyne is evidently competing for the end of term sophistry prize. So outraged are the Liberal party that private schools’ funding sources might be made transparent, that Pyne has been reaching new heights of absurdity in thinking of reasons why a bill providing for $28 billion in funding for 2009 should be amended, split or held up. Apparently, requiring private schools to report on all sources of funding is akin to bureaucrats wanting to poke about in private bank accounts! (Forget any sort of transparency in governance or for that matter, accountability to parents who might benefit from some info about the real financial position when contemplating solicitations for funding or fee levels…) And they can’t be expected to deliver a national curriculum because it’s still being worked on – it’s like being asked to sign a blank cheque! Julia Gillard has a secret socialist agenda! There are actually more gems from Pyne, but perhaps you can go hunting for those themselves. Or try your own hand at making some up…
The argument about the national curriculum is quite bizarre from the mob who spent years telling us all how essential such a requirement was. But anyway…
In the wake of the punditariat’s latest game of deconstructing each parliamentary interjection by The Great Pretender and wistfully wishing his incoherent comedy lines on the public, it’s worth taking a step back and asking whether – even if you think Peter Costello’s schtick is remotely worthwhile – it matters.
Andrew Bartlett points out:
I remain to be convinced that being the best performer at ‘throwing the switch to vaudeville’ does much on its own to attract public support.
Kevin Rudd didn’t defeat John Howard because he had a lot of witty putdowns in parliament. Nor did John Howard win against Paul Keating in 1996 for this reason. Indeed, one could argue that this fixation with Keating’s apparently unchallenged ability to dominate the arena during Question Time was a key reason why so many commentators argued he still had a chance of winning in 1996, well after the electorate had already decided they’d had enough.
Exactly.
Continue reading ‘Bursting the Costello balloon’
When I noted the establishment of OpenAustralia as a new initiative in facilitating public scrutiny of Parliament, I expressed a wish that the Senate would be included as well as the House – because that’s where a lot of the action is in terms of committees and bills. I’m very pleased to read that just in time for the first sitting of the new Senate next week – when The Greens, Nick Xenophon and Steve Fielding will hold the balance of power – they’ve added the Senate to their website.
Shock! Horror! Political journosphere shocked by the ALP playing politics!
Ben Eltham has a wrap up of the week in politics at New Matilda. It’s certainly fair to say that it certainly didn’t go all the Coalition’s way. What surprises me about the commentary we’ve seen in the lead up to and after the resumption of Parliament is some sort of default assumption that Tony Abbott would release his climate change policy, and happily elope with the voters, and that’s the last we’d hear of politics in an election year. Dennis Shanahan is, as always, indicative:
There’s some sort of bizarre alternate reality here, where the Opposition is constantly at the centre of events, and any sort of response which doesn’t play to the ‘media narrative’ from the Government is somehow electoral poison.
It’s just nuts. I suspect, in part, it derives from a belief that if the Liberals could unite behind one leader, all would be plain sailing from there on in. In fact, as one week of Barnaby-isms demonstrates, even without leadership speculation, they’re still shambolic. I think there’s still some sort of weird assumption that the Liberals are the natural party of government, and that the electorate are finally waking up to the mistake made in 2007; hence Labor is represented as being panic stricken after a single poll where their two party preferred vote is 52-48. (John Howard’s first term government, by contrast, spent a large part of the time behind in the polls.)
So we also get a bizarre perception that Labor is some sort of immovable object, locked in behind last year’s politics, and unable to shape the political landscape. This is reinforced by constant generalisation on the basis of anecdote – “voters are concerned by debt and deficit”, “Rudd is untrustworthy”, “climate change skepticism is on the increase”, very little of which has much support in any relevant polling. And the descent of Rudd’s own approval rating from its stellar heights is seen as an avatar of doom, without any particular attempt to correlate it with the party vote.
All very odd.
Like I said early in the week, watch the political narrative change.