After almost disappearing last night, the election was back on Brisbane’s Channel Nine news tonight – big time. The PM was in Brisbane, appearing with Anna Bligh to announce around $700 million for that hardy election perennial, a rail line to Redcliffe. (For background, see Andrew Bartlett.)

It certainly is a slog to get to Redcliffe by public transport, involving a long bus trip from either Petrie or Shorncliffe station. There was a bit of scepticism expressed on the vox pops, because this promise is regularly made by both major political parties in both state and federal campaigns, and nothing ever happens (it was first mooted in the 19th century, and land was resumed in 1978).

What this does tell us is that the electorates of Petrie, Longman and Dickson are still very much in play. Gillard and Bligh were flanked by first term Petrie MP Yvette D’Ath (as well as the Moreton Bay Regional Council Mayor). Petrie is obviously shaky, being the site yesterday of not just Tony Abbott’s childcare announcement, but also a visit from Simon Crean. More confirmation that there are quite a few closely run seats in Queensland…

The second election story was a Laurie Oakes “bombshell”. He claims that Julia Gillard, as Deputy Prime Minister, opposed the ALP’s paid parental leave scheme in Cabinet, on purely electoral grounds. She’s also said to have expressed reservations about an aged pension increase, commenting that older people didn’t vote Labor. The leaker? “Government sources”, according to Oakes.

Tony Abbott has his own parental leave problems, confirming that men taking leave would be paid at their female partner’s pay rate. That presumably conforms with Action Man’s ideology that raising kids is women’s work, and indeed, he said that the payment was “primarily to allow mums to bond with their baby”. So much for Joe Hockey’s blather about productivity…

What we’re seeing here, I think, is a combination of Kevin Rudd’s very conservative personal values and political calculation.

Ps: Incidentally, Julie Bishop’s point on Lateline about the contrast in the degree of information given in Keating’s economic statements compared to Rudd’s announcement might have some validity in terms of transparency, but it ignores the fact that the Keating government’s interventions occurred after recession was well and truly entrenched (and arguably thus too late) and were prepared over a time scale of months rather than a weekend in response to an emergency. The opposition appears to be playing a complicated game – trying to weave together a message of holding the government to account, blaming the government partially for what’s occurred, and suggesting that Malcolm Turnbull is a bright spark who thought of it all first. I’d have thought all this – combined with the whining about briefings – puts them at the centre of their message rather than the economic situation itself, and risks looking petulant. I think they’d have done better to stick to their initial reaction – nobly supporting the government’s endeavours in the public interest at a time of crisis, blah blah.

NB: Previous post and thread discussion on the stimulus package here.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Steve Fielding was tipped off about this – it might contextualise his about face on voting for the alcopops tax and the Medicare Levy changes.

This is the fiscal policy two step following up the Reserve Bank’s 1% cut in rates – which is still a tad contractionary.

Possum has all the spiffy graphs.

As The Poll Bludger notes, there are two really interesting trends in the aggregate poll. First, the Rudd honeymoon is still very much alive for the 18-34 demographic (and it will be intriguing to see some good data on how Turnbull’s elevation shifts this – if at all – down the track.) Secondly, Labor is still doing poorly in the West, and has gone a fair way backward in South Australia. (Incidentally, the data supports the point Kim made here the other day about Labor trending upwards in Queensland federally while Anna Bligh’s state regime goes into a slump – albeit a slump which is still of election winning dimensions even if it’s not a Beattie style landslide. And federal Labor hasn’t been hurt in New South Wales by the implosion of the Iemma government.)

A lot of folks are attributing Labor’s performance in South Australia to the Murray-Darling basin issue. Again, it’s worth noting that Labor still has a primary lead of 3 points over the Coalition, but it is no doubt significant to see eight points knocked off its lead so quickly in the last quarter, after having been stable at 49% more or less since the election. I’d be interested to hear from South Australian LP-ers about what they think is going on.

If it is the Murray-Darling, this might say something interesting about the Rudd government’s ability to deal with relatively intractable problems through its preferred mode of governance. COAG is meeting today – in Perth, for the first time since the defeat of the Carpenter government. Writing in Crikey, Bernard Keane observes:

There’s something faintly pathetic about the Prime Minister sitting down with the mugs who make up our State premiers today to debate the minutiae of consumer credit laws, hazardous materials and registering business names. The contrast between that and the conflagration engulfing financial markets makes the whole COAG process look like an exercise in unreality.

Appearances are deceiving, however. The boring work of getting the Australian federation to work in as effective and business-friendly a manner as possible is a key reform, and the Prime Minister’s determination to cajole, beg and bribe the states into harmonising their regulatory frameworks across a range of areas is laudable.

Economic reform in Australia doesn’t tend to get noticed unless it comes with a capital R — the floating of the dollar, the end of protectionism, a new industrial relations regime, a GST. The smaller stuff, the 5% stuff, is mainly of interest to businesses.

It’s not glamorous, and it’s not easily spun into a “narrative”, but this sort of “5% stuff” is the nuts and bolts micro-economic reform Rudd, Tanner, Gillard and Swan promised would be a key feature of the Labor government. Most of it will probably survive the end of “Coast to Coast Labor”, and it’s probably more prone to defeat through bureaucratic and policy inertia than through some sort of crusade from Colin Barnett – which he would know well is not in his state’s interests. The days of Premiers’ conference fireworks are well and truly gone.

[It is worth observing, however, that the performance driven school bit of the Education Revolution is something Barnett wants nothing of. The politics of closing down schools - as LP observed at the time - is fraught, and if push ever came to shove, would make all the policy wonk rhetoric of metrics and incentives look completely irrelevant in electoral terms.]

Keane is right to say that much of the COAG agenda is necessary. But where it falls down may be in its intersection with issues which are both far more politicised and far more difficult to solve. In an interesting commentary in The Monthly, Judith Brett dubs such issues “Wicked Problems”:

The transition from Howard to Rudd is not about new national narratives, nor Big Ideas. It is about the hard work of solving complex policy problems which are linked by little else other than that they have been neglected for so long. Each is extraordinarily complex, and has a myriad of stakeholders and potential losers.

The Murray-Darling is one of those, as is student performance in schools, as Brett notes.

The Rudd government’s approach probably works best where policy issues are confined to one domain, with a finite number of stakeholders and a large degree of policy knowledge and smarts which can be tapped – often by doing an end run around the public service as a whole and/or by privileging Treasury’s role. Tax and welfare probably are amenable to some sort of policy fix, though the pensions issue shows how the politics of reviews and committee governance can come close to escaping attempts by the government to contain it. But issues like the Murray-Darling are just not fixeable in the same way, and climate change presents another dysfunction of the review governance model – delay costs, and stakeholder input (or rentseeking ranting from business) may well be the way that policy is watered down so much that it becomes meaningless or even counter-productive. Some old fashioned big picture instant decisions might be the better way to go.

We don’t have the constant distractions and bells and whistles of the Howard government to watch any more, but we nevertheless still do live in interesting times for Australian politics. I’m inclined to think that Rod Cameron still has the most elegant explanation of the Rudd government’s continued polling success – that public trust in government is being rebuilt through the rigid adherence on the part of Labor to keeping its election promises. But it’s still early days for the policy model and its politics, and it may be that there are some significant clues to its sustainability in the South Australian polling.