For those who don’t want to wade through all of it, Bernard Keane has analysed Abbott’s address at Crikey:

Yesterday’s economics speech by Tony Abbott was a major disappointment, confirming rather than reversing the impression that the Opposition leader and economics don’t have much more than a nodding acquaintance.

Keane’s on the money in suggesting that it’s thin gruel, when you strip away the decontextualised Keynes quote and the statistics. Its sole take away message appears to have been contained in the twin claims that the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis was a bigger threat to the Australian economy than the Global Financial Crisis (demonstrably untrue, but in the Abbott style of “our crisis was bigger than your crisis”) and that Tony is not actually the ghost of B.A. Santamaria but rather imbued with the values of Peter Costello and John Howard. (It would be interesting, of course, to discuss precisely what constituted the values of Peter Costello and John Howard.) So, it’s really an attempt to reassure the business horses who were stampeded by Abbott’s recent thought bubbledom.

For what it’s worth, I thought Joe Hockey made a better fist of defending a very shaky brief on Lateline last night than his Leader, though Tony Jones was able to expose the contradictions in what passes for reasoning among the Coalition – the Liberals stand for low taxes, but on the other hand, we might need an awful lot of levies because of Labor’s terrible wasteful spending. What Hockey did show, as did Abbott, is that the cupboard on either substantive policy measures or the savings that would need to be identified to make the ‘debt’ line more than rhetoric is bare. It’s certainly not impossible for the Liberals to advance a fiscal policy from opposition, but they’re always waiting; waiting for Henry, waiting for the Budget. As with health, this mob don’t have much of a clue what they might do if they were elected. They just know they’d like to be.

Elsewhere: Public Opinion.

Update: Ben Eltham in New Matilda.

That assumption seemed to be shared by the panel. It surprised me, because Christopher Pearson reproduced a transcript of Abbott’s remarks in his column in The Australian on Sunday.

The part about “the poor will always be with us” is indicated, rather than quoted, perhaps because (as often occurs) it was a question from the floor and the recording wasn’t clear. Sometimes when a session is transcribed, the speaker’s comments are also omitted if a question can’t be accurately redacted. But the substance of Abbott’s remarks, mostly verbatim, is in fact on the public record.

What the longevity of almost all state and territory governments suggests is that it is difficult for an opposition to come to power except through the electorate’s view that it is time for a change… It is unlikely, however, that this will stop the Canberra press gallery working itself into a state of excitement over this year’s national and state votes.

From The Australian today.

In related news, I was somewhat heartened by Greg Hunt’s declining to start ranting and raving over the ‘solar panels will burn your house down’ thing last night on Lateline, when effectively invited to do so by Tony Jones. The question followed a story which was clearly framed to build momentum for the ‘Peter Garrett Must Go’ campaign.

I thought, and still think, that Garrett’s position is worth debating, and as Roger Jones noted, the comments thread on the post here has been quite illuminating compared to the media coverage. But I’m not so sure that the press has the responsibility to collude in a campaign to take a ministerial scalp. My memory may well be faulty on this score, but I really don’t recall the same level of intensity and pursuit of Howard government ministers. Given recent admissions by AWB, it might be instructive to go back and look whether Alexander Downer faced constant front page stories on the Wheat for Arms scandal.

Sure, all the ingredients for a press frenzy are there in the insulation debacle, including human interest stories from relatives of those who tragically lost their lives, or workers who were injured themselves. But perspective seems sadly lacking, or even basic research, as Bernard Keane observes in Crikey today.

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?

It appears that no matter what the ABC does it just can’t find enough sympathetic Coalition voters to balance a Q&A studio audience and keep Senator Abetz happy.

Mr Scott said the ABC pursued “a number of different strategies” to bring together a more diverse audience, including contacting law and accounting firms, the Australian Retailers Association, the Sydney Chamber of Commerce, the Australian Christian Lobby, the Australian Family Association, Young Liberal groups and every state Liberal MP within one hour’s drive of the ABC’s Sydney studios.

“We have tried a number of different things to try and ensure that we have all the viewpoints represented in the audience and I think we have,” he said.

“I understand that Liberal MPs were approached asking whether in fact they were aware of people who might like to come and join our audience.”

Of course he forgot to memo the ABC board and I’m surprised the Young Liberals couldn’t find a bus load of guys like this charming young chap within an hours drive of the ABC studios?

Or maybe it’s just that they are all too busy charting the complicated metrics of bias in our cultural institutions and wasting everyone’s time making Senate submissions to attend.

If a bank wants to borrow money, a broker needs quickly to find someone prepared to lend at an attractive rate; if a bank wants to lend, he – it’s a predominantly male profession – needs to find a borrower ready to pay a good rate. So a broker needs continuously to know who wants to borrow, who is prepared to lend, and on what terms. As one of them said to me, a broker might ‘speak to his big clients … have conversations with them maybe twenty-five times a day, which is twenty-five times as often as they speak to their wives’.
A broker needs to pass information to his clients as well as to receive it: that’s a major part of what they want from him, and a good reason to use the voicebox rather than the screen.

The brokers’ code of conduct prohibits passing on private knowledge of what a named bank is trying to do (unless a client is about to borrow from it or lend to it), but that restriction leaves plenty room for brokers to tell traders what has just happened and to convey the ‘feel’ of the market. There’s a grey area in which euphemisms can be used: in context, a broker and a trader might both know which bank is meant when the broker says that ‘the usual German’ has just done something.

That’s from Edinburgh Sociologist Don Mackenzie’s extraordinarily rich account of brokerage in the Current London Review of Books (the broader project of which it’s a part is outlined in this 2005 paper). As they say, read the whole thing. However, as Krugman pointed out yesterday, even if these and other credit markets are ‘unlocked’ (which – if the easing of the LIBOR price is anything to go by – they look like they will be) there is still ‘real world’ economic contractions to take place: GM will close plants, regardless of how politicians ‘talk up’ or ‘talk down’ the economy.

Elsewhere: Andrew Bartlett on Boosting First Home Owners Grant:

Why spend $1.5 billion dollars of taxpayer money to push up the price of housing? There may be downward pressure on house prices in some parts of Australia, but it is from a seriously overvalued level. We should try to let the air out of that bubble slowly, not use public money to keep pumping it up, especially when there are still so many problems with housing affordability in other parts of our housing markets.

Update: Will Hutton: The nightmare continues – on a high street near you

Ps: Media tart Peter Costello is also on, in close proximity to David Marr. Perhaps sales of teh book are disappointing? Can he revive them by starting another round of leadership rumours?

Germaine Greer will also be a guest. Greer has just released a new essay in book form – On Rage, which I’m very much looking forward to reading. I was interested to see her obvious frustration last night in a Lateline interview with Leigh Sales at the difficulty of articulating any position that goes beyond tired dichotomies on Indigenous Policy and the NT intervention (including those which claim to transcend tired dichotomies). Or perhaps it would be better to say the inability to hear any heterodox position. I suspect a lot of the rage directed at Greer herself comes from an inability to comprehend or recognise any thought that doesn’t follow the predictable grooves of a “debate”, and indeed any call for reflection on issues and stories a lot of us would rather not face. So it’ll be interesting to watch her in this format too.