How I voted 2015

I went the polling booth with my young son, who has seen documentaries about the Great Barrier Reef and had the basics of the electoral system explained to him. He is convinced that voting Green will save the Reef, and having taken the how-to-vote from the Green person at the polling booth he waved it at me and said "this one. This one, Dad". It was the first time I had been actively lobbied for my vote since I left the Liberal Party 15 years ago.

The last Liberal preselection I voted in was the one for the state seat of Manly in 1999. The seat was held by an independent - one who had conspired to bring down Nick Greiner - and it was kind of depressing as there was no stand-out candidate. Half of them were outright fools, claiming fealty to Tony Abbott and implying that he was returning the sentiment. I voted for one of my contemporaries who I thought would make a useful MP - not Mike Baird. I had heard Baird would be one of the stars of the preselection, but his speech was a patchwork that he seemed to find unconvincing. When the questions came, rightwing delegates played him like a trout and made him look rattled and defensive. I was tired of voting for losers who got chewed up by sharks in the NSW ALP and picked off by the clowns on the right. As voting went on, my preferred candidate went down and I voted for another guy who seemed nice enough, and worthy, but lacking in the colour, the vision and the mongrel to make a truly effective MP. The winner of that preselection was a boofhead who made Abbott look like a Rhodes Scholar, and who went down screaming against the independent.

That defensive Mike Baird was on display again in a radio interview on Friday. Thankfully for him it was on Radio National so nobody heard it. You will be seeing more of that Mike Baird going forward. He has charmed the press gallery individually such that they do not come after him collectively, and he faced a weakened opposition. The opposition has now been strengthened and the press gallery regards him as less of a novelty. Having no ability to question Baird on policy, and not having put him under much pressure thus far, the press gallery will act all surprise when Baird stumbles. This isn't to say he's a cream-puff - he isn't - but he just won't do that well explaining lots of complex ideas in non-technical terms under sustained pressure.

John Robertson went in hard against Barry O'Farrell and ended up looking like a prick. When O'Farrell fell it had nothing to do with Robertson, who was still a prick, and Baird only made him look worse. Luke Foley was smart not to try and rip away Baird's nice-guy persona, learned from having the blood of three Labor Premiers under his fingernails. If he goes in too hard against Baird then he too will go the way of Robertson; you can do that stuff in Labor backrooms, not in public. Is Foley a nice guy? We don't have enough information where to put him on a scale from Abbott to Baird, much less trust those judgments against policy positions.

Baird even makes Tony Abbott look like more of a prick than he already is. This effect will be enhanced when Abbott plays silly-buggers with COAG, leaving Labor Premiers do the hard yards advocating for state-delivered services. By bringing forward the rollout of NDIS while privatising disability support services, Baird is creating a whole lot of mixed messaging that will come back to bite him over this term.

Anyway, I went to the polling booth and got my two bits of paper. The Legislative Assembly (lower house) paper brought on an immediate bout of hate-voting: no representatives of the various flavours of marxism or blatantly racist parties, but Fred Nile's franchisee (increasingly racist now that homophobia is a non-starter) and No Land Tax immediately took [5] and [4].

The next choice was harder. Jerome Laxale is a young guy who wants to be a MP and he's ticked all the right boxes: joined a major party (Labor), moved into the area and got elected to the local council (a deeply dysfunctional one, which local government reform will almost certainly sweep away). He is still just a political-class muppet and I am doing him a favour by forestalling him becoming Penny Sharpe or Mark Coure.

NSW Labor just aren't ready. Their message of dump-Baird-and-Abbott-goes-too was redundant as Abbott is finished anyway. Their only real objection to the donations that have bedevilled the Libs is that none of it is going to them. Their transport policy was empty, as I said last week, politically and policy-wise. They had no education policy worth the name, they had a real lacuna in law-and-order hysteria to float some new ideas, a bit on health and a few other snippets here and there, but nothing to show for four years in the wilderness. They promised to build a new high school in the area, but they closed the last one and I have no more idea than they do where it might go. I don't believe them on power or disability services or anything else, really; the flirtation with xenophobia regarding Chinese state-owned enterprises was revolting. NSW Labor just isn't like Victorian Labor or SA Labor or Queensland Labor, no good pretending otherwise. Labor [3].

This left the Green and the Liberal. Greens talked a good talk on local issues and have started to think about policy from the ground up. They seem to link bits and pieces from different policy areas into a coherent whole, which it hadn't as a smaller fringe party, yet you can take bits of that agenda and leave others (which wasn't possible as a smaller, more intense outfit). Their third candidate for the Legislative Council was a dux of Duntroon; their other candidates are, increasingly, the sort of impressive, professional, well-educated candidate the majors used to attract.

The old saw that the majors will put together all the governments from now until the end of time is not, as it were, sustainable. They continue attracting impressive candidates who rethink what it is to govern from the ground up (which attracts impressive candidates - an upward spiral opposite to that facing the majors). They deserve the benefit of the doubt, Labor doesn't: Green [2]. My son was disappointed with that but more disappointed that he didn't wish a Green government into being.

The local MP, Victor Dominello, takes his constituency responsibilities seriously and seems to like people, unlike Federal MP John Alexander. He represents a government that has quite good education and transport policies, adequate ones in other areas, and some terrible ones (e.g. disability services, women's refuges) which may be turned around by strategic voting. This isn't the best government can get, but it is the best one on offer at this time, which is why I voted Liberal [1].

In the Legislative Council (the upper house - I wish journos would stop referring to it as the Senate), I voted below the line for a whole lot of candidates who may push to ameliorate the very issues nominated above as weak issues for this government. This is called tactical voting and it beats the hell out of voting the party line and having that line shift without reference or recourse to you. In the Coalition candidate list there are some who will do well at negotiating policy through the Council (but mostly they are just making up the numbers, put to most effective use shutting up and doing as they're told): they can earn their money dealing with a multiplicity of views.

Across safe Liberal seats the Greens came in second. Wealthy areas are described in media cliche as 'leafy', and however much it bemuses Labor die-hards from industrial suburbs it is no surprise that Green activists come from sylvan glades and are well-educated and articulate. It isn't true to describe Greens as the new moderate liberals but it's less of a stretch that it was when the party was dominated by watermelons. Now that you can vote Green without sending the entire economy and social services into perdition, they are the real alternative to Liberals - far easier to imagine a Green as your local MP than Labor.

Only when you understand that can you clarify the hysteria behind this:

Many commentators have seen the Greens' victory in Balmain and Newtown as a sign of the progressive shift to the left in the inner city seats.

But Dr Burgmann says it's actually a sign of a conservative shift away from working class Labor politics that will eventually see those seats held by the Liberals.

"It's a demographic change of the inner city," she said. "It's the very wealthy, well-educated who will never need the services of the state but who can't quite bring themselves to vote Liberal.

"But eventually they will be Liberal seats."

It's worth noting, however, that the Liberal primary vote in Balmain was down by 6.7 per cent at this election, back to roughly what it was in 2007. The Liberal primary vote was also down by 4.4 per cent in Newtown.

Old woman shouts at cloud. A Green voter is someone who "can't quite bring themselves to vote Liberal" in the same way that Dr Burgmann can't. The Greens Political Party offer a starker contrast with the Liberal Political Party policies than the Labor Political Party (all right, I'll stop it now). In inner-city communities Greens are committed users of public transport and education, more so than old-school Labor people who have long since left education (public or private) behind and who accepted ALP blandishments that a dollar spent on public transport should be spent anywhere but in the inner-city. The idea that Dr Burgmann's niece was defeated by a proto-Liberal is bullshit, but if it helps her sleep at night the theory may have some value yet.

Quite why inner-city Sydney turned away from Labor, while inner-city Newcastle and inner-city Wollongong turned toward them, is unclear. Expensive flats may yet create a Liberal constituency that does not exist today, but this would imply the Liberals will develop sophisticated appeal mechanisms that, frankly, does not exist either. We are not yet in speculative fiction territory but you can see it from here.

It seems a shame that the traffic can run only one way: Labor-to-Green-to-Liberal. Why Labor cannot use Green preferences to turn Liberal seats into Labor ones over time, or imagine a Green incumbency that lasts only until Labor can wait it out, is unclear - and probably a failure of imagination on Labor's part.

Why the north coast turned toward the Greens is clearer, and CSG is only part of the answer. Over time the Greens have put themselves in a position to take the advantages that Lismore and Ballina presented them this time.

North coast communities were dominated by rural conservatives who got wealthy selling tract housing to people on lower incomes than they. That new housing became urban communities not very different to sub-urban communities in the cities, but without the infrastructure of those communities. Labor were the first to twig to this demographic shift and what it meant politically; Liberals wrung their hands over invading National turf, leaving it to hayseeds who defined themselves against urban communities to try and represent them.

The Green base thought about government and community and environment from the ground up; people who move to an area are more likely to do this than those who unquestioningly accept it from childhood. Greens started with dessicated old hippies but moved out beyond them as communities changed. Nationals found validation in fossils like Thomas George. Labor's incrementalism worked against them as the Greens offered the more substantial alternative than Labor (without being scary or politically unrealistic).

The Liberals couldn't tell the difference and couldn't afford the aggro with their "Coalition partners". If they are to replace newly-elected Greens in Ballina and Lismore (and, going forward, in Port Macquarie and Coffs Harbour) they will have to start from scratch, today, and somehow persuade their "Coalition partners" that their future lies west of the Dividing Range. Again, this requires Liberals to be bold and innovative and ... you can see the problem here.

I have no idea what Indigenous people want from the NSW government, or what anyone was offering them, if anything.

How do you plan cities in a real estate market like this, and for whom? None of that is clear. The traditional media weren't asking, and the Political Parties can only avoid questions that nobody else asks.

We have in NSW a state government that wants to sell electricity distribution networks at the very time their value is collapsing, and which won't get the political support necessary to do so. It may go into debt to fund big-ticket infrastructure but they won't be around when it comes on line. It will come under pressure on health at the very time that their resident expert, Jillian Skinner, has had her best shot at reform and no-one else steps up to show what the next steps look like (the most likely alternatives being niggardly, self-defeating budget cuts that create more problems than they solve, much like the 'reforms' coming from the federal government). Its mixed messages on disability services, and small-scale donations, will wear it down without a clear way forward.

Foley seems disciplined but will make mistakes. He's already gone further than his Young Labor antagonists Reba Meagher and Joe Tripodi, but that will count for less and less over time. He didn't get where he is by entrusting policy development, electoral tactics or anything else to the wider ALP membership, so forget that. It will be interesting to see the extent to which education and health bureaucracies start leaking to Labor, and of course once the police do so it is all over. I trust Labor to make political capital from prison facilities that are both increasingly decrepit and overcrowded, but not to do much about it.

Still, where else would you be, etc.

New South Wales twenty-fifteen

This NSW election is a bizarre one for me, on a number of levels. My Young Liberal contemporaries are in positions of power. Labor have sprung back with a series of positions that simply don't stand up to scrutiny. They are complaining about dodgy donations, particularly as none are coming to them. It's becoming increasingly clear what a politics that transcends the governing parties looks like, one with sufficient depth and ballast to pull the majors into line rather than the reverse - and the Greens play a smaller part of that (and Fred Nile a greater one) than I thought. This election is more important than the inevitable last one or the weird, tentative one before that.

Blindsided

Mike Baird and the Liberals have been blindsided by the idea that 'asset recycling' is unconvincing. They should have developed a narrative that explains and defends it (and why asset sales are to be preferred over debt in an era of low interest rates and investment capital seeking solid projects. They should have foreseen that Labor would do well in Victoria and Queensland opposing asset sales per se, and that the same magic would work in NSW (particularly as business is all but ignoring Labor).

Just as the party had cauterised the bleeding from those self-inflicted wounds at ICAC, up pops Joe Hockey suing Fairfax and reminding everyone about the big-money donations flowing into the Liberal Party. Nice one Joe! Even if you do have any money for no-hopers in seats like Oatley, they won't thank you.

There are a number of reasons why they didn't. Their membership base is so small that they don't represent a large cross-section of the community any more. Like any dysfunctional organisation, they equate questioning, challenging individuals with fifth columnists and incompetents and manage them out accordingly. To engage with an idea for the purposes of probing its weaknesses, stealing or concealing its strengths, and overcoming its advocates, is no longer seen as useful work; far easier and quicker to assemble dirt files and background the more gullible remnants of the press gallery, who can't cope with policy anyway.

Power

The NSW electricity grid is ageing and almost entirely energised by burning coal. There have been several attempts to privatise it over the past two decades, depreciating in value each time. It is likely that households will be powered by solar or other small-scale power-generation systems, backed up by large-scale distribution systems that will depend less and less on burning coal, poles, wires, and all that nineteenth-century crap on the auction block right now. To flog it off now would see private industry bear the risks of transition that can only be borne by the public; and there will be public 'sweeteners' to mitigate that risk, which is what I'm worried about.

The relevant minister, Anthony Roberts, isn't a policy innovator like Gladys Berejiklian or Adrian Piccoli are, and the wide boys from the merchant banks will pull the wool over his eyes and pick his pockets before he has worked out what's happened. He thinks he's being clever by downplaying renewables, but history won't be kind to his dithering.

I'm not being hard on Robbo, I'm just holding him to standards he could never meet. Sometimes when you set the bar really high, people like him do the limbo under it and laugh at you: that's politics, baby.

The NSW electricity grid is a depreciating asset. There is a significant element in Labor (probably the majority of its remaining members) who regard it as 'sacred' or 'iconic' - but if they really believed that they would never have let it deteriorate to this extent. They let it deteriorate because they know it's a depreciating asset, and that the jobs are all in renewables - and that those workers won't be easily herded into union membership like employees of the old Electricity Commission were.

I agree with Peter Wicks when he says:

If Mike Baird wins the election on the 28th and the electricity sell off occurs, I predict that within a few years the boardroom of whatever corporation ends up running our power network will not only be made up of greedy profiteering businessmen, it will also be loaded with former Liberal Ministers.

Yep - and if Labor are in government then, one or two old hands who can pull the young pups into line.

If ever there was a time to hedge your bets until the future becomes clearer, now is that time. Such a choice flies in the face of that great political imperative, Being Seen To Be Doing Something. All the soft options in this area have been whittled away, leaving only cynical and empty group exercises that political-class smarties regard as the only role for mass participation in modern politics.

I just don't believe NSW Labor

Luke Foley was up to his eyeballs in the rise and fall of the last three Labor Premiers, just as John Robertson was. Labor's framing of him as a cleanskin is bullshit. Labor's insistence that he is to be taken at his word, just like Tony Abbott was before the last federal election, is bullshit. I don't trust Foley to avoid some sort of Damascene conversion to tollroads or coal-seam gas or selling poles-and-wires or banning all abortions.

NSW Labor has reformed itself considerably in the last four years, except when it comes to policy. I don't believe that Labor has learned the lessons ICAC and the voters tried to teach it, in the same way that the federal Coalition under Abbott avoided learning the lessons that Howard's failure was trying to teach them. It's all stunt work: handing back Goat Island to Aboriginal communities with bigger priorities, demountable classrooms, penny-ante stuff worthy of Bob Carr at his most diffident.

Art and culture

Yes, art and culture. I wish there were more evidence of local community art projects, embassies and training-grounds from the cultural powerhouses of the inner city: not just repositories of local kids' paintings from three years ago, nor seniors' crochet work, nor half-baked productions of Oh What A Lovely War!. Neither of the majors deserve the benefit of the doubt on this.

The Powerhouse Museum should be relocated to what is now an abandoned school site by O'Connell Street, Parramatta, on the northern side of the river. It should be much, much better than it is - better than this, dream big! - hopefully without being some glistering mockery of deindustrialised western Sydney.

Transport

This is what all election analysis should be like: the focus on state and community and what it needs, not fluffing aimed at keeping up press gallery relationships. Penny Sharpe has received more publicity than almost anyone on Labor's frontbench, as you might expect from someone who learned their politics at the National Union of Students, but once again NUS has thrown up another hack who succeeds at nothing but attracting publicity for its own sake. Sharpe was up against one of Baird's better ministers - you can see why, on election night 2011, Barry O'Farrell wanted to talk only to Gladys - but that's no excuse. Sharpe concentrated on nitpicking current transport policy and couldn't even do that convincingly. If the Greens get up in Newtown they may have done Foley a favour.

The Newcastle rail line, the Pacific and Princes Highways, Westconnex - there are other issues, of course, but Labor are pretty much absent from them all. The Coalition is doing or has done all it intends to do. Few independents are out there galvanising those issues, which is a pity.

Education

While Federal Labor deserve praise for their commitment to Gonski's school resourcing proposals, state Labor don't deserve to insinuate themselves into voter assumptions that they would support those proposals. Adrian Piccoli is the country's best education minister and he wears the crown of thorns bestowed by Pyne and Abbott for showing up those arseclowns in Canberra. He seems to have learnt from a debacle like this, the sort of thing that pole-axes governments elsewhere and which gives some indication of what a future in participatory politics looks like.

Disclosure: While TAFE is a huge issue in this election, and I have lots of opinions and feels about vocational education, there won't be any comment on it in this blog. I've worked for TAFE NSW, and sometimes knowledge and insight comes with a determination not to make a tough job harder for those who remain. Plenty of other avenues for you to read up and comment about that.

Health

When Jillian Skinner beat off the independent forces of Ted Mack and restored the Liberals to the lower north shore, she focused on health policy and was (eventually) rewarded with the ministry. When Labor was wiped out in 2011 its only remaining member who knew anything about health, Andrew McDonald, became shadow minister. There have been a few changes and a few blow-ups but no real shift in emphasis. There have been no big epochal debates despite being a huge, politically sensitive, fast-moving and interesting area; again, political-class smarties regard this as a sign of success, but fuck those people. McDonald is quitting at the next election and apart from some Victoria-style union stunts by and for nurses and ambos, there is no real alternative policy.

Aged care and disability services

Baird was stupid and wrong to outsource these services to the private sector, and I note that Labor won't restore the status quo ante; maybe that's why Linda Burney was a non-starter to replace Robertson. But no, since you asked, I don't have a better idea in my back pocket either.

Policing, Justice, Law and Order, Gaming, Alcohol licensing, Drugs, Indigenous people in detention, ...

(covers face with hands, groans as though gut-punched)

Prognostication time

Read on at your own risk. Regular readers of this blog know that I am rubbish at forecasts, going on feels rather than polls and underestimating the extent to which people are taken in by press gallery coverage.

The upper house

The lower house might propose but the upper house disposes, and frankly one of the glaring weaknesses of political coverage (state or federal) is its lack of understanding and reporting of what goes on in the upper house.

First, read this. Antony Green is the master psephologist but he hates minor parties, they always blindside his software on ABC election night coverage. He is right to say that NSW has limited the impact of minor parties to a greater extent than in federal elections, but this election will see a stronger showing from parties other than the majors. This isn't only because there are so many candidates and minor parties.

If the Coalition was going into this election with the same sort of momentum that they had in 2011, they might win 11 of the 21 seats on offer in the Legislative Council and hence control the upper house - but they aren't. They will need to control both houses of state parliament to sell off the electricity grid - but they won't. So much for that.

The Shooters and Fishers have overplayed their hand with free-fire zones in National Parks and with their support of this government's less popular measures. They may yet attract conservative voters who think Baird's too moderate but Nile's too preachy and anti-Muslim, but S+F aren't doing much to hold those voters.

Nile hasn't gone forward or backward, he will remain in place like a little pebble.

While the anti-CSG forces won't win any seats in the lower house, they will coalesce in the upper house - and it is almost impossible to to believe that someone opposing coal-seam gas won't also oppose selling the electricity grid. This person may or may not be Green, but they won't be the inner-city denizen thrown up by that party on the mainland. They may be someone who's clearly rural and working-class and defiantly anti-political-class, like Ricky Muir.

Prediction: the majors 8 each, Nile, at least one Green - and, uh, another three not to the major parties.

The lower house

There are 93 seats of the Legislative Assembly (the lower house), so you need 47 to get a majority in that house to form government. See, I'm not totally innumerate.

Again, read Mr Green. Go to the list of Coalition seats on the left-hand side and scroll from the top down to The Entrance: that's 20 seats. Give them all to Labor, except Coogee and Kiama. Give Labor Port Stephens too.

Too hard to call from this angle:

• Blue Mountains
• Mulgoa
• Parramatta

The Nats may retain Tamworth, and they may hold political-class girner Steve Whan out of Monaro if Barilaro has kept up his local-boy-done-good schtick. Or not.

It looks like independents have missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to punt the Nats from Upper Hunter. Thy are, however, starting to rattle the Nats along the north coast, learning lessons that will do for Hartsuyker and Gillespie at the next federal election.

That gives the Coalition 45-50 seats out of 93, a kick in the teeth but most likely still in government. Abbott is gone no matter what.

Health and education

The consensus in political science and journalism for a generation has been that the major parties are converging in terms of policy and personnel-types. There's a lot to commend that theory, what with the political class and Large and Powerful Interests and so on.

The last hold-out, it seemed, was in workplace relations. Unions would not let go of the ALP, and Labor attempts to snap off the wrist of the unions look half-hearted. Yet, even that fundamental political difference has succumbed to policy inertia. Despite a ferocious pseudo-campaign over labour productivity and union corruption, the Abbott government has not proposed a single amendment to the Fair Work Act, let alone take their chances in the Senate.

This isn't to say that they won't; Eric Abetz could well throw something out there from sheer boredom as much as anything else, particularly if this government gets to a point where it knows it can't win.

It seems that the major parties do have a real cleavage on points of principle, ones that affect people day to day and which have real budgetary impacts. These differences go to big questions like what and whom is government for.

Health and education seem to be the big political cleavages that matter in Australia. Labor believes in public health; it will make changes around the edges of that, but basically can be trusted to maintain Medicare more than it can necessarily be trusted on other issues. The Coalition start from the a priori assumption that Medicare is too big and must be wound back, making healthcare confusing and expensive in some neo-Marxian attempt to make conditions so intolerable that people will overthrow the system.

It is generally agreed that the government backed down/backflipped on a decision to impose a $20 levy on GP visits, the first time the press gallery as a whole has openly accused the government in this way.

Until recently the press gallery was confused whenever Abbott backed down/backflipped. Either they would simply report the new development without any context, or it would treat the idea that a politician may say one thing but do another as though it was bewildering, some aberration that would soon pass. It isn't possible to do that with the issue of healthcare. Nobody believes the issue can be fully understood as a revenue-saving measure, or as just another he-said-he-said political football.

Even Sydney's Murdoch tabloid The Daily Telegraph has noticed price signals in medicine matter. Yet, in this piece, Richard Chirgwin shows price signals are almost beside the point: why can't specialists issue scrips? There are plenty of other savings going begging in pursuit of cut, cut, cut.

For the Opposition, this isn't just an excuse to stick it to Abbott. The last Labor government had a strong record in the area, make it difficult to support the 'chaos' narrative. They seem to be embracing public health as core business, as a way of rebuilding themselves rather than just pulling the other guys down. It's one reason Labor health spokesperson Catherine King made it atop this list, and why Labor candidates in winnable Coalition seats will want her to visit as often as possible.

Peter Dutton was technically the Coalition's health spokesperson in opposition, but he was canny enough never to challenge Nicola Roxon or Tanya Plibersek on their grasp of policy. He did no policy work and could claim no mandate for anything he did. Sussan Ley's promise to 'consult' has been universally interpreted by the press gallery as a weakness on her part, but her career suggests she is not some patsy who will do whatever the PM's office says (unlike, say, George Christensen). The consultation process may well see Ley develop and own a solution rather than play for time and await instructions from Credlin. This would demonstrate a normal functioning of government, and the press gallery will almost certainly misreport it.

That said, this is excellent. It explains complex policy and politics clearly. Taylor's admission that the Abbott government's policy incompetence was foreseeable is a breath of fresh air against those who insist Abbott still deserves the benefit of the doubt, like this or that. Read Taylor's article once, to get across the policy issues.

In a social media world where people are hyper-alert for bias, read it again to get a feel for what good just-the-facts reporting looks like. Taylor is not trying to fence-sit, measuring out faint praise and muffled criticism to 'both sides'; she is playing the cards where they lay.

Read it a third time to wonder what the value of press gallery reporting is. Good, solid research - links to ACOSS and the Grattan Institute and a paper from the parliamentary library, even the generosity to link to a Murdoch piece. You don't need a press gallery pass to do any of that. No cosy quote from a politician, no pointed press-conference exchange, no press release as primary source. That article owes little, if anything, to inside-Canberra tattle of the sort necessary(?) for something like this.

When Lenore Taylor has written lesser articles than that this blog has gone her hard. She deserves the benefit of the doubt as one of Australia's better political commentators, and will be getting it without exempting her from any criticism at all.

The idea that Labor is good at health policy kept Jay Weatherall in office in South Australia, it helped Labor win government in Victoria rather than a nice-try-but-not-this-time, and in Queensland and NSW the perception of competence has brought the party back from the dead. It's one thing for Labor to corral nurses and ambos into grass-roots campaigning; when they start running more of them as candidates in winnable seats, it will be clear they recognise the centrality of health to their identity and future. Mind you, it will also likely mean that the party operates on the basis of shared assumptions and groupthink that non-healthcare people don't have.

As manufacturing declines, watch the nursing and allied health professionals step up. Watch the scourging of Jacksonville and see whatever rises in its place - that's where Labor's future could be.

Labor have overcome their historic reluctance to embrace education as a vehicle for class mobility. Neville Wran was right about working to get out of the working class. It is the one issue that they can reliably use to connect with the people who were once their base.

Labor can't commit to Gonski-style funding and to opposing Pyne's amendments to university funding because this would bring on questions about revenue for which Labor isn't ready, questions that have killed all but a few would-be Labor governments. It should, though, but this is easy to say from the sidelines:

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten should adopt a less negative stance and try to cut a deal with the Abbott government on higher education policy, according to former Labor MP Maxine McKew.

She would say that. In his attempt to simply quote what people say and never mind the context, Matthew Knott has overlooked the fact that Pyne's proposals stand to benefit bigger, more established universities like ... McKew's employer, the University of Melbourne. Long-term Labor MPs who've been in and out of government must be killing themselves laughing at being lectured on More Labor Than Thou by a oncer.

McKew might have a lot to say about what universities are and should be for, but perhaps Knott is not the person to explore that sort of big-picture stuff.

Education Minister Christopher Pyne backed Ms McKew's comments and said Labor had become a "laughing stock" on higher education policy.

"I have invited the Labor Party to enter into negotiations with the government regarding higher education; however, they have steadfastly refused, despite many of their members privately supporting our reforms," Mr Pyne said.

He, too, would say that.

Fancy giving Pyne the last word in your article. Knott really thinks he's being 'balanced' by quoting one person who proposes supporting Pyne's proposals, and then quotes another who also supports that outcome. The case for those proposals is no further advanced by this article. It was not worth writing or publishing, let alone reading. There are people struggling on local papers who are infinitely better journalists than Knott, and they should be rotated through the press gallery until the folly of Fairfax's self-negating hiring policies become clear.

If you don't know anything but transcribing, you can't be an effective reporter. To say that the people who run traditional media companies disagree with that wholeheartedly is beside the point - I'm solvent and they aren't. I'm the audience they need but can never understand. Knott is an overpaid transcription service, and Fairfax readers are poorer for having to go around this sort of stuff in order to find out what is going on in public debate.

Media courses have attracted the best and brightest of a generation. As one of the last traditional media outlets, Fairfax could have the pick of that generation, curious active and well-informed, people who could yet save the company from going to the dogs. Who have they chosen? Obtuse clerks like Knott, Latika Bourke, and Earring Girl, who shows how bleak her employer's future is by simply quoting social media on delay. You can't set yourself above social media while trailing after it. If you think I'm being unfair, compare the pithy wit of this to Cox's entire clippings file. If people will tweet for free, how long can Fairfax keep paying these dupes?

Look, w(h)ither Labor? questions are properly matters for ALP members, and having lapsed back into media criticism I might just leave it there. You need to get across health and education policy if you're going to understand 21st century politics in this country. Merely critiquing politicians' messaging, like most of the press gallery do most of the time, is not healthy or educative. It is a non-job with no future.

Evaporating in the heat

Three examples show that up-and-coming Liberals simply don't believe their own rhetoric. They don't believe their own rhetoric because there's nothing behind them. The fact that politicians say things without any backup should be noted by journalists, rather than them assuming today's rhetoric is tomorrow's reality.

The first example is Greg Hunt eating his own dogfood, or attempting to.

If his Green Army had any credibility at all it would be further advanced than it is. Note how strong-sounding, how definite those first five paragraphs are; then comes the admission that, less than twelve months to the election, he's got nothing:

We are asking the Peninsula community to submit ideas for worthwhile projects. It may be cleaning up a local creek, restoring a bushwalking path, establishing a boardwalk or rehabilitating the foreshore, for example.

We are keen for local environment groups or councils to be involved. They may work together with the Green Army to get the job done or they may act as co-ordinators for projects which they see as a priority for our area.

Areas such as Chinamans Creek, the Balcombe Estuary, Red Hill-Main Ridge walking and equestrian trails and the foreshore around Western Port and Port Phillip bays are possible options for a Green Army scheme.

Importantly, we want the community to come up with the projects to ensure they are locally driven and are the right priorities for the Peninsula.

Never mind the use of the royal pronoun here. If Hunt was in any way serious about his policy, he would have issued the above press release two years ago, and used his own electorate to deal with teething problems in the scheme. He would have been able to say to Coalition MPs and candidates, to the media and anyone else: I believe in this policy, it works on my home turf and it will work for you on yours too.

Sitting here in Sydney, I could have done a quick scan of local papers from the Mornington Peninsula and tossed out some idle ideas like Chinamans Creek or whatever, and sounded every bit as keen and as knowledgeable as Hunt is in that statement. If he really was "keen for local environment groups or councils to be involved", he'd know those people by name, he'd convince them of his commitment and bona fides, and have them support a community action plan that works for that area - and which shows the nation how it's done.

Now, it's just too late. The hoo-ha over the carbon tax and how it was going to ruin us all has shot Coalition credibility on environmental issues. There seems little point in planting millions of trees if they are just going to burn every other summer, and become the Coalition's equivalent to Labor's "fatal pink batts". The fact that the Coalition don't budget adequately for the initiatives Hunt talks about is a worry. Those issues are too big for Hunt and Abbott to nail down between now and the middle of the year, when the election campaign will start in earnest.

Then there's this:

This is what you'd expect from some idiot on gruntback radio, but not for the Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Health and Indigenous Health. He compounded it with this:

"To clarify" be damned. This wasn't a clarification, it was a reversal; or it would have been had Laming seriously believed he had made a mistake and sought to rectify it.

You're dead right jobs and training are the key for Aboriginal and Islander people who face the various kinds of disadvantage which led to that riot. It remains unclear what Laming is doing with all the resources provided to him by the taxpayer to "[work] together with those communities".

The tweets Laming has sent since those are telling: no references to meetings with communities, working towards peace and jobs and all good things, but merely how successful he has been at getting his message out. Laming's tweets are not boofhead aberrations, they are the real deal for this man, who he is and what he's about.

The idea of the second tweet was to say anything to get the issue off the front pages. J'accuse Liberal Ambassador to Social Media Tommy Tudehope here. Journos should be alert to hosings-down and ramp up their attention accordingly.

One of those cliches that the mainstream media swear by, and which is slowly killing their entire industry, is that we are now in "the silly season"; that no issue other than cricket is worth reporting on, and that there is plenty of footage from the northern hemisphere to pad out news bulletins. The fires have put paid to that. Nobody gets a month off over January any more. It is entirely reasonable to expect journos to look into issues and not just rely on tweets (besides, [insert standard journosphere dump on social media here], amirite?).

There is no reason why a journalist should not be looking into the extent to which the Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Health and Indigenous Health actually deals with indigenous communities other than Noel Pearson. Simply reporting Laming's initial tweet and the follow-up as POLITICIAN GAFFE SHOCK was identical in terms of scope and depth to the analysis of the matter provided by social media, which pretty much invalidates [insert standard journosphere dump on social media here].

You can see why those who run the Coalition want to crack down on their people using social media. Laming is supposed to be one of the more knowledgeable ones on this score. Mind you, those who run the Coalition have decided we need to know more about the workings of Peta Credlin's fallopian tubes than Greg Hunt's environment policy or Andrew Laming's indigenous health policy. They thought it was a good idea for Abbott to purloin a truck from a bushfire brigade and use it for purposes not designated by that brigade or by RFS headquarters.

It is absolutely true that the Rudd government did not release its election policies this far out from the last election. It is also true that the Rudd government had produced two budgets by that point, and for better or worse had a track record. The Coalition have no track record other than saying no and cutting back on existing policies. Any promises that the Coalition made on the environment or indigenous health would be sucked into its "budget black hole", an example of one credibility-sapping theme cancelling out just about every other. The Rudd government did not win a majority of seats at the last election, and it is unclear why the Abbott opposition want to follow such a strategy anyway.

The third example comes from before the last election, and should have been more searing than it was. As I said at the time on my blog, and Greg Jericho said in his fine book The Rise of the Fifth Estate, then Shadow Communications Minister Tony Smith hadn't done his homework on telecommunications before launching his policy. He had a collection of motherhood statements that simply didn't fit together, and which was eviscerated by tech journalists who attended his launch. Hunt and Laming - and every other member of the Coalition - should have vowed not to let themselves get so exposed as Smith was (and as Peter Shack, Shadow Health Minister in 1990, had been).

Hunt, Laming and every other member of the Coalition is every bit as exposed as the Coalition were in 1990. Journalists should be alert to this and it is an indictment on them that they aren't. This is the point where it's too late to flick the switch to policy substance: there is no switch and the wire hasn't been earthed, so someone is going to get burnt (and it isn't the government).

It isn't too late for the journosphere to use this opportunity to do some scrutiny on a blithe Coalition, as Richard Ackland demonstrated. Ackland's long-standing and specialised focus on law and justice issues made him a blogger before there were blogs. A regular contributor to The Sydney Morning Herald but not of it, Ackland puts the lie to those in the journosphere who fear outsourcing and the so-called "diminution" of their "profession".

When the heat is on you see what people truly value, even if they panic and act clumsily. Greg Hunt values spreading his message widely but not to any depth, not in his backyard nor in mine nor yours. Andrew Laming thinks he's being paid by the taxpayer to turn flatulence into words, like Piers Akerman or Gary Hardgrave do. Paid journalists take them at their word when they say they are actively acting action, or that they're contrite: it is possible that they have lost the ability to fossick for stories that go beyond the press release.

JG and the Premiers: the more things change

In 1968 the Prime Minister was John Gorton. He denied conservative Premiers in Queensland, NSW and Victoria access to "growth taxes" and thwarted the Queensland government's attempts to mine the Great Barrier Reef.

In 2012 the Prime Minister is Julia Gillard, the issue the NDIS. She didn't have to pick a fight with conservative Premiers, but if they were silly enough to play Abbott's "never give Labor an even break" game, they were bound to be played just as Abbott is being played.

The Productivity Commission said that the NDIS should be funded 100% by the Commonwealth, mainly because they have access to all those growth taxes (thanks to the Gorton government). The states do a lot of the service delivery work in disability services, and such services as disabled people and their carers do get from government tends to come from states/territories.

O'Farrell and Baillieu have grown-up, serious governing work to do, unlike Abbott. No Liberal State MP would go out meeting-and-greeting with Abbott. They realise Abbott is doing them no favours, so why should they go out of their way for him?

They were both quick and right to realise that the NDIS was one of the few issues in Australian public life where (even though it's still a theory and hasn't yet been tested) the very idea is so valuable that anyone who mucks about with it is politically dead. This sort of issue flies in the face of conventional political wisdom, where Australians are so materialistic that they'll keen for something that is taken from them but won't miss something that is promised but not delivered.

Rudd was finished after measures to deal with "the greatest moral challenge of our time" were promised but not delivered. Keating was finished after his "L-A-W" tax cuts were promised but not delivered. Political commentators get in such a flap when this happens, because they tend to be idiots. This sort of thing is not mentioned by polls.

In the late 1980s/early '90s both Nick Greiner and Jeff Kennett worked with Hawke and Keating on national reforms. Neither went too far out of their way for John Howard (though Kennett worked with Howard on his biggest reform, gun laws). This was as it should be.

I have no idea why the Hunter (NSW) or the Geelong-Barwon area (Vic) are those states' chosen venues for the NDIS. Do those areas have high numbers of disabled people and carers? I know that those areas tend to have lower incomes than those in the capital, but this again is a failure of political journalism. It's possible the press gallery was given that information at a press conference or in a briefing document, but they are too lazy to review their notes and it's just easier to talk about polls or whatever.

The Premier of Queensland offhandedly nominated Gympie as his preferred location for the NDIS trial. Has the Queensland government done a cost-benefit analysis on Gympie vs other places in Queensland? Again, he demonstrated no real reason why it should be preferred over anywhere else. Gympie and surrounding areas is one of the lowest-income areas in the country, but as to its disability stats ... then it struck me. After its penny-ante culture-war targeting of Aborigines, litterateurs and gays/lesbians for budget cuts, after e-mail gaffes about feminism, it's entirely possible that the Queensland Government nominated that town because it is a homophone for an insult often applied to disable people: gimpy. A Gimpy Scheme for Gimpy Town. Yes, it's awful; but make the case that the Queensland Government is above that.

Abbott and Newman said that they are supporters of the NDIS but given that neither man has committed to funding it, what does this "support" mean? Naturally, Michelle Grattan takes Abbott at his word but she should be questioning what he means. Neither she nor the ABC's Marius Benson questioned the Federal Opposition what they meant when their spokesperson said stuff like this:

The National Disability Insurance Scheme, I think, is far too important to be mired in day to day partisan politics, which is why Tony Abbott wrote to Julia Gillard offering to establish a joint parliamentary committee to oversight the implementation of an NDIS to be chaired by the front benchers in the disability portfolio of both sides of politics.

Hmm, oversight by a parliamentary committee where one side can checkmate the other. That's the way to get things done.

MITCH FIFIELD: Joe Hockey is a big supporter of the NDIS, as is Tony Abbott, as am I. But Joe Hockey has been making the pretty self-evident point that the Government has only allocated $1 billion towards an NDIS over the forward estimates. The Productivity Commission over that timeframe said that there should be $4 billion. So the Government haven’t fully committed to an NDIS and they haven’t indicated where the bulk of the funds will come from. And they need to.

Any my goodness, can't you just take those guys at their word. Michelle Grattan does. Joe Hockey will demonstrate his commitment to the NDIS when he puts that $4b figure in his own forward estimates - and not before. That goes for Mitch (who worked under Barry O'Farrell in Bruce Baird's office).

The difficulty that we have at the moment is that the Commonwealth, the current Labor Government, haven’t sat down with the states and territories to talk about funding sources and funding shares.

Well Mitch, they did; and the states proposed $0, and apparently the Prime Minister wasn't being "bipartisan enough" by just accepting that's how it has to be.

No government can know what their funding share will be unless they actually sit down with the state jurisdictions and have those discussions.

What they need to do, Mitch, is have a trial and see how it all works, not just engage in your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine bluff and counter-bluff. Things are working out as they should.

That, Marius and Michelle, is how you do journalism - not just stick a microphone in front of someone and transcribe what they say.

Both of these supposedly experienced journalists relied heavily upon their shared fantasy that the Coalition will inevitably win the next election, which it won't and can't. The government has done a lot of work on the NDIS, consulting with interest groups to get the set-up right; the Coalition at state and federal level appear to have done no work at all. The NDIS is based on rights and responsibilities rather than charity and gratitude.

The Coalition would give us a cut-down, half-arsed version of an NDIS, as an act of charity rather than a manifestation of rights to those Australians who need more help than most. In this sense it would be like their not-the-NBN proposal or kind-of Medicare; a half-baked shambles deemed "good enough for the likes of you" by a bunch of Canberra shinybums. Only a federal election loss will knock this mentality out of them.

Maybe even that won't do it. In 1939 Robert Menzies claimed that he wanted to introduce a national insurance scheme, and resigned from the Lyons government because it rejected the proposal. 27 years later Menzies retired as the country's longest-serving Prime Minister and the insurance scheme proposal was no closer to realisation. Imagine if we'd had something like an NDIS in place for decades.

The idea of a levy to fund the NDIS comes from this mindset that throwing a few bucks to the disabled is an act of charity that you can turn off and on as pleases you. It was also a political trick; whether it's school reform or transport infrastructure the states don't care where Canberra get the money from, so long as they pay up.

The government should have sweetened an NDIS deal by offering to fund state/territory disability services without any loss in revenue transfers to the states, for early adopters. Barry O'Farrell is as concerned about vertical fiscal imbalance in 2012 as his predecessor Bob Askin was in 1968; ditto Baillieu for Bolte, Giddings for Reece, etc. They could have demonstrated the multiplier effect in delivering more services for less that the NDIS is supposed to provide. But, if the states are just going to say no then bugger 'em.

I'm glad that we'll have an NDIS. I'm glad that the Premiers of NSW and Victoria have come to recognise disabled people and their carers as a political force; unseen but substantial, like the icebergs that sunk the Titanic. I wish the Prime Minister would start mentioning it when asked what her government is doing to ease pressure on families.

A study in character

See this in its entirety: thirty minutes of your life you won't get back, but it's all about the context.

It is ironic that GetUp! achieved greater insight into the way our political system works through an accident than it has for many of its best-orchestrated campaigns.

When Simon Sheikh passed out on the set of the ABC's Q&A:

• The host, Tony Jones, just sat there (some host!)
• Lenore Taylor, a journalist, also just sat there
• Greg Combet MP, a government minister, stepped up and helped Sheikh
• Grahame Morris, a lobbyist, stood up at his desk and looked concerned; a man no longer accustomed to getting his hands dirty, Morris is used to having people scurry around at the sight of him doing something really dramatic like standing up at his desk looking concerned (or maybe he wanted to do to Sheikh what he advocated doing to the PM, and "kick [him] to death"), and
• Sophie Mirabella MP, who was sitting next to Sheikh, regarded him with revulsion and then, realising that others were making her look bad and that there was nothing she could do about it, put her hand on his shoulder.

This was a test of character for all concerned. The idea that they all deserve a free pass because "hey, that's just live television baby!" is just bullshit.

Combet showed himself to be a leader in our community, which is what you'd hope for from someone in his position. Some Coalition MPs would have stood up and helped in such a situation, and not just those with medical qualifications. Mirabella, who aspires to the job currently occupied by Combet, showed only that she must not be put in a position of any responsibility whatsoever and must be removed from any such position she now holds. Simply calling for help would have showed the humanity that is needed in her position, but which she clearly lacks.

Lauren Rosewarne thinks Mirabella was criticised for "failing to emote". She was actually and fairly criticised for failing to render assistance where assistance was required. It is stupid to accuse Sheikh of 'crying wolf' as some sort of invalidation for medical treatment.

Medical emergencies always happen quickly (or, as Rosewarne put it, "Under. One. Minute."). It's part of your civic duty to find out how to help people who need help, and wait with them until the professionals arrive (or, as Rosewarne put it, "Florence Nightingale mode"). Medical emergencies transcend gender politics, and if her failure was not at the heart of this issue the very first person to assert this would be Sophie Mirabella.

Let's give the benefit of the doubt, if not congratulations, to off-camera staff at the ABC studios that night. Their actions, unseen by viewers outside the studio, may explain the (non-)actions of Taylor, Morris and Jones. The latter may think it's his role to keep his head while all about are losing theirs, but I still think there is more to it.

Sophie Mirabella failed the basic moral test of refusing to assist someone who needed it. Having wound herself up she couldn't get over herself in order to render basic assistance. Everyone on that panel is judged on the same basis, regardless of gender; most found wanting. Lenore Taylor hasn't done much emoting today over this matter, but so what? Practical assistance, and the need thereof as required, is much more important than irrelevant disquisitions on "emoting".

It's probably more important to be able to help people when they need it than it is to enrol to vote, but at the time of writing I am too pissed off to even think about that. This is partly because I have just reviewed the earbashing that Mirabella gave the nation once again. Along with Macquarie Street troll Peter Phelps, a piece of jetsam swept up in a king tide, Mirabella embodies that perverse strain of the worst, Pellite notion of conservatism: that you are entitled to deference by sheer assertion/gall and the occupation of titles, but that none dare expect any from you. That's why this doesn't work:

Lindy Chamberlain. Casey Anthony. Joanna Lees. Women who were each publicly vilified based on the weakest and yet most damning of evidence: the failure to appropriately – to femininely – emote.

Weak, yes, but hardly damning. Lees emoted like billy-o when it suited her and Chamberlain didn't just sit by and watch her baby being dragged to death. Whatever point Rosewarne might have is stranded by the sheer fatuity of her parallels and her simple inability to perceive the situation on which she commented (click the link at the top of the page, Lauren, and watch it). That, and the fact that Sophie Mirabella has spent what passes for her life sneering at "do-gooders" (of whatever gender, Lauren) who render aid to others completely flouting Randian teachings.

Mirabella did express emotion towards Sheikh: the emotion was disgust.

There isn't a question anyone could have asked that so clearly demonstrated who stands where, who can be relied upon and who can't. As a telling moment about those who would govern us it was up there with Joe Hockey's moment of weakness/moral failure on gay marriage with Penny Wong.

The civic-minded among us can get first aid training at a location near you from Australian Red Cross or St John's, or other organisations I'm sure. Get some. This blog will still be here when you get back - and yes, I have, and do - and stuff any "Florence Nightingale" bullshit. Some good thing has to come from this sorry and absurd episode.

On drugs

The series of articles on drug laws and the need for reform in The Sydney Morning Herald has been positive, arising from the Australia21 report on the issue. The SMH have much to show their News Ltd colleagues about fostering a debate rather than running a campaign. While it's telling that so many major figures have come out against prohibition, with Mick Palmer not the least of them, this has been a debate that's been part of our lives more broadly. Drug law reform can't and shouldn't succeed until its scope is broadened; it is a shame that both Australia21, and the SMH, have overlooked that.

There's more to the drug debate than just prohibition vs decriminalisation. You can see that in the debates going on elsewhere that both Australia21 and the SMH has rigorously quarantined from its coverage of drug law reform. Perhaps they have done this in an attempt to bring clarity to what everyone agrees is a complex issue. I disagree that it will be effective or desirable in either securing drug decriminalisation, or in mapping out what might or should happen once drugs that are now illicit become legalised.

People want drug addiction to be seen as a public health issue. Let's do that, and in so doing let's look at a public health campaign that has been hard-fought and almost won, and which is not at all unrelated to the debate on other drugs: tobacco.

The first thing to remember is that tobacco is a more serious health problem for Australians, in themselves and in terms of costs to taxpayers and the economy more broadly, than illicit drugs. The cost of prohibition should take account of the averted costs of its alternative, rather than simply being written off as some sort of dead loss.

The second is that, just as the tobacco industry faces the prospect of sinking to its knees under the weight of plain packaging, it faces the prospect that decriminalisation will not just throw it a lifeline but open a cornucopia of commercial opportunities. All of those charges levelled at tobacco and alcohol companies about marketing to minors will come back with a vengeance when tobacco growers get a licence to grow cannabis, and when smaller companies that form part of the tobacco distribution network see the opportunities in now-illicit drugs as compensation over the government's war against tobacco. Big companies will sneak their special-treatments in with the smaller ones, and government will give them. Those hoping for additional funds to be spent on healthcare can only watch the money flow away from them as "incentives" for those who have waged war on public health campaigns.

You may think that your local neighbourhood drug dealer sidling up to the kids after school with a collection of little baggies is A Threat To Our Children, if not to Our Way Of Life. Wait until the perfectly legal, expensive and sophisticated marketing campaigns hit full stride. Look at the success that junk food has had over a younger generation, and imagine how successful similar campaigns for illicit drugs would be. Now contrast that against the odd junkie scuttling into the shadows for their hit in terms of the length and breadth of a real social problem, and ask yourself whether you are really making things better.

These companies will make the case that they can take the illicit trade out of the hands of thugs - subjecting them to taxation and regulation - just as legalisation did for gaming and abortion. They will be right, too. Do not doubt that those interests will prevail over those who would tightly regulate those drugs that are now illicit, as per the Australia21 report.

Purists will maintain that illicit drugs should be reserved for medicinal purposes only, e.g.:

• Pure heroin for use in safe injection environments, as part of programs to work addicts off the drug, or
• Distillation of those chemical compounds within cannabis that stimulate appetite and create feelings of well-being to counter the ravages of chemotherapy.

Setting up this new regulatory environment will require a great deal of expenditure on the part of government with little or no offsetting income. There will be adjustment difficulties that make government look stupid. It will still require the enforcement of prohibition against those who desire drugs and have the means to pay for them, but who have no need for them as determined by medical programs operating within government regulation and budgets.

Peter Baume was a moderate Liberal who was Health Minister in the Fraser Government for less than a year before it lost office, the last Federal minister in that portfolio who didn't have to deal with Medicare. He was a factional opponent of John Howard and the Liberal right and he retired from the Senate ahead of the boot as the party changed around him. Many of the arguments that appear in the Australia21 Report are those which he tried to push through the Liberal Party in opposition, including trying to push through the Young Liberals during my time there. The moderates were under such sustained attack that to support Baume was a factional stand in favour of a pluralism that has now gone. Baume became tetchy when challenged, even by moderates, which detracted from messages like this:

Heroin was legal and could be prescribed by doctors in Australia until 1953. That is, heroin became a problem after, and not before, it was prohibited.

In 1953 authority had a greater hold over the population than it does today. The campaigns against the non-medically sanctioned use of opiates in the nineteenth century still applied in 1953: it was something that was the preserve of Asian people and was proof, for those who sought it, of their inferiority to White Australia.

Baume has been impeccable against race-baiters, and I defer to his understanding of the dimensions of heroin addiction as a real public policy problem; but in an age where Authority in general is much diminished there is no equivalent social repellent to turn Australians away from a dangerous drug. Public health campaigns against addiction have the appearance of make-work schemes, doing worthy work but too little against a problem that can only grow.

The first group of Australians to experience heroin addiction as a significant problem were much overlooked in their time, especially in terms of their health. They were the first Australians who travelled to and from Southeast Asia in their thousands: Vietnam veterans. They had problems with alcohol and Agent Orange exposure too, and these problems were simply and flatly denied. The fact that heroin was illegal, that alcohol wasn't and that nobody went out sculling DDT is to ignore the lessons of that time.

Simply legalising and containing heroin addiction within health programs is an inadequate response to a much wider problem. It's foolish to graft on yet another health program to the ragged patchwork already in place and expect any benefit beyond the marginal, at a cost that will have to be massive in order to be realised. Let's not even talk about co-ordination of other policies beyond law-and-order and health (e.g. housing, welfare payments).

Baby-boomers weren't politically powerful in 1953. Decisions were made on their behalf by a waste-not-want-not people, in the parliament, in the bureaucracy, in pharmacies and doctors' clinics and police stations, and in the community more broadly. They pushed for drug decriminalisation in their youth for lifestyle reasons, and now as they enter their dotage they appeal to medicine and palliative care. The political question is, do baby-boomers still have the power to command public resources for a policy that suits them, and won't necessarily benefit the rest of us? Will they tolerate health funds being diverted toward younger people, away from them?

It's a basic flaw of the Australia21 report that it focuses on heroin overdoses and other drug deaths. It refers in passing to incidental crimes committed by addicts to fund their habits, but there is more to the drug problem than that and costs from widespread, normalised drug use should have been factored in, even if funding for the report did not allow for detailed modelling. I'd be fascinated to see the soil degradation, runoff and other environmental impacts from an industrial-sized cannabis crop (what do you mean, no modelling has been done?).

Australians in particular mix drugs. Australian policy must relate to Australians. "Social smokers" who consume tobacco when under the influence of alcohol, and who combine alcohol with drugs of varying legality and chemical composition, show that demarcating illicit drugs in the name of 'clarity' or 'focus' are chasing a mirage and doing the country a disservice. The report skates over mental illness in drug use, particularly for those abused as children, but it needs to be part of a bigger solution than decriminalisation. Anyone who thinks that illicit drugs is so different to pokies, alcohol etc. can shove their apples and their oranges; those issues are more similar than different.

The other fundamental flaw with the Australia21 is a misreading of the political system. The report is predicated upon an assumption that bipartisan support for their position is desirable and even achievable, despite a sop of realism to the pressures on politicians to avoid controversy. This is so wrong that it completely undermines the report, and is puzzling from a board that has operated at the highest levels of government.

Led by Tony Abbott, the Coalition have trashed bipartisanship. The changes to the Liberal Party that forced Peter Baume into retirement have continued to the point where a latter-day Baume would flee from his first branch meeting, and would have no hope in a preselection. There is no way that the Coalition as currently configured can or will consider legalising now-illicit drugs. Any individual Liberals who might have considered it are keeping their heads down and toe-ing the Abbott line (e.g. Joe Hockey, Marise Payne), or are marginal figures (e.g. Mal Washer), and put together they couldn't actually change policy and spend additional money.

Consider that Peter Dutton has been shadow health minister before and since the last election, and this is the nearest thing he has produced to a policy. His most substantial policy after all that time is reaction and denial about an issue from the fringes of significant public health issues affecting this country.

If ever there was a field where the status quo of 2004 is inadequate for 2014 (which is the central message of the whole Howard Revival), health is it. Dutton has not contributed in any meaningful way to health policy debates: the former health minister was promoted, whereas if Dutton was an effective shadow she should be political roadkill. A new minister is firmly established in the portfolio free of any challenge from her "shadow".

Dutton seriously regards prohibition as a good idea that has never been fully tried. This is a clear indication of:

• His ability to address issues in the community;
• The quality of the man as a future minister; and
• The sheer futility of expecting, or even hoping for, bipartisanship on this issue.

The Coalition clearly regards illicit drugs as a law-enforcement issue (supposed concern for addicts is so much mealy-mouthed bullshit waiting to be scythed in expenditure review - c'mon people, am I the only one who has learned how Abbott works?). Like Dutton, Brandis grew up in Queensland under Bjelke-Petersen; he'd know all about drug prohibition. The silence from the alleged shadow attorney general on this issue - a normally voluble man who goes on and on about much lesser legal issues - is deafening.

Forget the Coalition. Forget bipartisanship.

The only hope for an enlightened drug policy, with a carefully thought-out public health response and a sound communications strategy, rests entirely with Labor. It would have to be led by a strong and progressive leader such as we have not seen in a generation, and the prospect of which is indiscernible to those who watch federal politics closely. That leader would have to be prepared to go all out to secure their policy against both internal opponents (who would want scarce health resources spent on anything else). That leader would need the courage to prevail against nervous nellies inside their party (including those armed with polls and conference-floor delegates), go the polls with a consistent policy, defeat a prohibitionist Coalition and divert health funds away from baby-boomers in order to ease druggies off their addictions.

Nope, me neither.

I'm sure that the Australia21 board and supportive contributors to the SMH are aware of the current political situation. I share their optimism that it is a passing phase - not only the defeat of an Abbott government but also President Obama defeating the US Republicans this November will hopefully break reaction as political strategy. However, I've been wrong before, and so has Peter Baume; the prospect that the future of Australian politics lies in the major parties emphasising their differences (while "playing it safe" with the status quo in drug law) should not be discounted.

Look, I dare you, at the shambles that is the regulation of poker machines and alcohol in this country. Know that this is the fate for the regulation of drugs. Listen to the cries of alcoholics and pokie addicts in their more lucid moments, and of those who care for them despite everything. Know that those travails can and shall be compounded by the direct and indirect victims of legalised drugs. Forget policy that makes things harder rather than easier.

For those who like the personal touch injected into this debate, my late brother was an alcoholic who died in a motorbike accident. Readers can take comfort in my assurance that this is not the start of a campaign to ban alcohol, nor motorbikes for that matter; as the report points out, alcohol is also a much greater issue than all illicit drugs put together. I realise that piecemeal efforts against drugs that are now illicit are inadequate, but the alternative is worse because it hasn't been thought out properly.

Proponents think they are being clever by separating drugs off from other problems like pokies, alcohol, tobacco etc., but I'd suggest they are not being clever enough. Like the republicans of the 1990s they are mistaken in thinking that they are being clever in proposing a small reform and selling it as a big one. There should be linkages across disciplines among people doing good work and making whole-of-government NDIS-style solutions. I am just not interested in any policy that will detract from efforts against real problems, and the prospect that they might add to them leaves me cold. I am sick to death of rallying behind well-meaning but ill-considered policies and getting run over by the foreseeable.

Adding value

Tony Abbott made a lazy speech in reply to the budget last night. He thinks he's going to cruise into office. Against a dispirited and disorganised government, and given a lazy but powerful press gallery, he may be right; but the government is showing some fight and the press gallery are less than they were.

Lenore Taylor points out that Abbott is relying on a set of lazy assumptions, and she's right. What she doesn't point out is that it's fair for Abbott and Liberal strategists to make that assumption.

Taylor and her colleagues have demonstrated over the past few years - not over the past couple of "24 hour media cycles", we're talking years, including before Abbott became leader - the press gallery will not call Abbott on it. They won't question him, they won't impose conditions on his access to their media space or add value in their own right. Apparently it is better for the press gallery to perpetuate a low-value existence than to take a chance on adding value for media consumers but irritating politicians and their staffs within Parliament House.

The lowest value journalist is the one who merely reports on and broadcasts what a politician says. The ABC's Latika Bourke has become a national punchline for her tweets that begin with "Tony Abbott said ...", as though we'd have no idea that the man had spoken without her tweets, as though reporting consisted of merely passing on his words unmoored to any facts or data or alternate perspectives; as though Abbott were paying her salary, and that his interests were hers. This is the lowest value journalism because it rests on the assumptions of an age that has passed, that a politician must rely wholly upon journalists to get their message out, and that the message is best reported when a politician is taken at his or her word.

Only in political reporting is a participant taken at their word. When business leaders talk about the competitive environment in which their company operates, business reporters put the announcement into context of the company's performance against its competitors, the exchange rate, and other related issues. When a sportsperson says something like "the boys really put in the work, we done real good", this is reported in context of how the speaker's team actually fared, the hard cold reality of the score, and their prospects for the season given patterns of actual performance to date.

No politician is entitled to be taken at their word. No quote makes sense out of context. The value of journalism lies in contrasting a politician's words to observable reality because therein lies the value of the words, and of the politician. Merely broadcasting their words might make a politician feel important, but it's not enlightening or helpful really.

Taylor's journalism is the next worst to the mere broadcasting of quotes. Taylor would have you believe that lack of scrutiny of Tony Abbott's words is like bad weather, something to be noted but something mere mortals can't do much about. Why she wants to advertise her own indolence to an employer with a yen for cutting costs is a mystery.

It falls to someone like Stephen Koukoulas to do the work that journalists can't and won't do. This is what added value looks like. Yes, it's pitilessly unsympathetic to Abbott and it leaves him looking merely negated, rather than wondering what Abbott really is about with such a major speech full of holes. This is the foundation of a story (or several) rather than a media story in itself, but in terms of valuable journalism it knocks anything Bourke does and most things Taylor does into a cocked hat.

I am sympathetic to Koukoulas' analysis of the numbers but even if you disagree with him, the following is designed to be numerically agnostic. What follows is a detailed look and what Abbott said and how he said it; it's the kind of thing that journalists should do but can't be bothered doing, because see you down at Kingston and mine's a Mai Tai!

The job, Madam Deputy Speaker, of every member of this parliament is to help shape a better Australia.

It’s to listen carefully to the Australian people, respect the hard-won dollars they pay in tax, do our honest best to make people’s lives easier not harder, and honour the commitments we make to those who vote for us.

If that’s how we discharge our duties as members of parliament, politics is an honourable calling, the public can respect their MPs and MPs can respect each other even when we disagree.

The first thing that occurred to me on hearing this soaring opening was: who are you and what have you done with Tony Abbott? Where is the hot blast of negativity? It didn't take long for the dog to return to his vomit:

The fundamental problem with this budget is that it deliberately, coldly, calculatedly plays the class war card.

It cancels previous commitments to company tax cuts and replaces them with means-tested payments because a drowning government has decided to portray the political contest in this country as billionaires versus battlers.

It’s an ignoble piece of work from an unworthy Prime Minister that will offend the intelligence of the Australian people.

Why have respectful disagreement when you can have: deliberately, coldly, calculatedly, drowning, ignoble, offend the intelligence of the Australian people.

Abbott could have lifted the tone if he'd wanted to - but don't blame him, it's our unhealthy democracy:

In a healthy democracy, people need not agree with everything a government does but they should be able to understand its purpose and to appreciate why it could be for the long term good of the nation as whole.

A democracy which puts Mr Abbott out of government is inherently unhealthy, it would seem. This is a contemptible attitude and he ought not be rewarded for holding and asserting it.

Government should be at least as interested in the creation of wealth as in its redistribution.

Government should protect the vulnerable not to create more clients of the state but to foster more self-reliant citizens.

The small business people who put their houses on the line to create jobs deserve support from government, not broken promises.

People who work hard and put money aside so they won’t be a burden on others should be encouraged, not hit with higher taxes.

This is the sort of stuff the Liberals said during the 1980s, which inspired me as a Young Liberal. I had no idea that they lacked the policies to realise those statements. John Howard used to say that sort of thing often, then he became Prime Minister and insisted on creating as many clients of the state as the Australian transfer payment system would bear. This is an example why Abbott isn't entitled to be taken at his word.

And people earning $83,000 a year and families on $150,000 a year are not rich, especially if they’re paying mortgages in our big cities.

Nobody but the Murdoch press said they - we - were. In a time when we all have to be careful about spending, it is understandable that the gravy train will pull into the station and some of us will have to get off, and that's what happened in this budget. The idea that we should shriek about our entitlements is nonsense, as Joe Hockey pointed out. I spent many years in the Liberal Party being confused about the rhetoric against entitlement and the reality in favour of it; now I just wish they would just decide which way they're going to go and stick with that.

Madam Deputy Speaker, from an economic perspective ...

Abbott has no right to claim such a perspective. Never mind what follows, this is simply not a perspective that he has.

Without a growing economy, everything a government does is basically robbing Peter to pay Paul.

But we aren't "without a growing economy". The economy is growing at about 3%. It should be possible for the standing orders or convention to interrupt Abbott with a point of order to point this out. Abbott is warning about a problem that doesn't confront us.

With a growing economy, it’s possible to have lower taxes, better services and a stronger budget bottom line as Australians discovered during the Howard era that now seems like a lost golden age of prosperity. It seems like we were being set up for the great fall that was the GFC. Some places fell harder than others, and I have more sympathy for this government than many do because of that. There is an implicit idea that Abbott can bring back the good times is a lie. It isn't charming, as his fans think. It isn't a fact to be reported, as Bourke or anyone at Sky News thinks. Nor is it the sort of thing you just have to put up with, as Lenore Taylor would have it.

As this budget shows, to every issue, this government’s kneejerk response is more tax, more regulation and more vitriol.

Sounds just like Howard. Seriously though, fancy Abbott complaining about vitriol: anyone who dishes it out like he does should be better at taking it.

The Treasurer referred just once on Tuesday night to what he coyly called the carbon price ...

What was coy about it? It's not a tax. Remember how Joe Hockey goes on about how it's designed to decline in revenue terms over time? Taxes don't do that. It's designed to impose a price to encourage low-carbon outputs: much like the Howard government's policy in the 2007 election, way back in the golden age.

Look at Peter Costello's 2000 Budget speech: he didn't labour the point about the GST because he didn't need to. The then opposition's screeching about A Great Big New Tax and promising to roll it back did them no favours.

If the carbon tax won’t hurt anyone why is the government topping up compensation in this budget?

If the carbon tax won’t hurt anyone, why did the Prime Minister promise six days before the last election that there would be no carbon tax under the government she led?

If the carbon tax won’t hurt anyone why are Labor members of parliament now frightened to go doorknocking even in their heartland?

Let’s be clear about this: no genuine Labor government would be hitting the families and businesses of Australia with the world’s biggest carbon tax at the worst possible time.

Let's be clear about this: why would the Liberals seek to compete with a Labor government about who's more genuinely a Labor government?

When I was in the Liberal Party, moderates like me were blasted hard and often by people like Tony Abbott, who asserted that moderate policies and beliefs were not really Liberal and that people who held them should go and join the Labor Party. Now all the moderates have gone and Abbott is fighting Labor over who's more Labor. It's funny how things turn out.

It doesn’t matter how many times the Treasurer refers to a Labor government with Labor values, the real Labor people with whom I mix beyond the parliamentary triangle despair of the politicians who have sold their party’s soul to the Greens.

The "people with whom [Abbott mixes] beyond the parliamentary triangle" include Clive Palmer, Ray Hadley and Cardinal Pell, all of whom have disparaged the Greens and Labor's association with them. Even so, it's hard to determine how such people might be considered "real Labor people". Abbott would have a hard time mixing with people who don't substantially agree with him, or at the very least won't challenge him, which would make any of his muckers who might fairly be described as rusted-on Labor few and rare. It's unlikely such people would do much mixing with our Tony anyway because, y'know, he's a busy man.

Madam Deputy Speaker, I applaud the Treasurer’s eagerness to deliver a surplus – but if a forecast $1.5 billion surplus is enough to encourage the Reserve Bank to reduce interest rates, what has been the impact on interest rates of his $174 billion in delivered deficits over the past four years?

Hmm, not sure. What about all those countries that have deficits bigger than the Australian government's budget, and whose reserve banks have interest rates at or near zero? I'll leave this to economists, but basically Abbott's assumption that government deficits = high interest rates isn't strong, and if someone's economic assumptions are dodgy I won't vote for them.

Madam Deputy Speaker, I know what it’s like to deliver sustained surpluses because I was part of a government that did

You helped lead us into the GFC? Is that your idea of economic credentials? You're going to manage the budget so that walk smack into another disaster, unprepared? Thanks for the warning.

I challenge the government to stop hiding this massive lift in Australia’s credit card limit in the Appropriation Bills and to present it, honestly, openly to the parliament as a separate measure where it will have to be debated and justified on its merits.

If they did that, it would sail through just like every other piece of legislation this government has put up.

Madam Deputy Speaker, just two months ago, the Prime Minister said that “if you are against cutting company tax, you are against economic growth. If you are against economic growth, then you are against jobs”.

In dumping her commitment to company tax cuts...

Business could've had a bigger tax cut had the mining tax been bigger, but they didn't support the mining tax at all. They elected Graham Bradley as their spokesperson, the man who ran Bluescope while ignoring rising Chinese self-sufficiency in the product which he was increasingly less successful in selling them. Business has kicked the government unrelentingly, and not so much as asked the Liberals to vote them a tax cut. It's to the government's credit that they gave them nothing: self-respect at last.

... the Prime Minister has reinforced her trust problem: why should this year’s budget commitments be any more reliable than previous ones, especially when so much is such obvious spin.

Every Opposition says this. Even the ones that are no mean spinners themselves.

He hailed the delivery of the National Disability Insurance Scheme but neglected to mention that it was short-changed $2.9 billion from the Productivity Commission’s version.

Abbott should have mentioned that he regards the NDIS as an optional extra, to be introduced at some undetermined point into the future as and when he felt like it. That would have been the decent thing to do.

The Treasurer insisted that military spending could be cut, breaking more commitments in the process, without harming our defence capability even though defence spending, as a percentage of GDP, will soon be at the lowest level since 1938.

I am so sick of the idea that more money = better defence. If Abbott is seriously making the case that our country today faces the same threat that it faced in 1938, he has a duty to let us know and make a case against it, like Churchill did at that time, not just fling it across the dispatch box like some verbal booger.

Madam Deputy Speaker, the Australian people deserve better than this and they’re looking to the Coalition for reassurance that there is a better way.

Notice how Abbott buttresses his more dodgy assertions with unrelated but sturdier claims. That "the Australian people deserve better" is unarguable; that "they’re looking to the Coalition for reassurance that there is a better way", less so.

The Coalition has a plan for economic growth; it starts with abolishing the carbon tax and abolishing the mining tax.

So big mining companies can rake it in and hopefully it will trickle down to the rest of us. That's how it starts, so the rest of it would want to be a doozy.

Abolishing the mining tax will make Australia a better place to invest and let the world know that we don’t punish success.

Where is the investor holding off investing in this country because of the mining tax? It's one thing to stand up for one interest group over another, but standing up for an interest which doesn't exist is not necessarily a winning strategy. Standing up for mining companies isn't standing up for families.

Abolishing the carbon tax would be the swiftest contribution government could make to relieving cost of living pressure; it would take the pressure off power prices, gas prices and rates; it would prevent more pressure on transport prices.

If we keep emitting carbon at the rate we are, cost of living pressures will increase. The campaign against carbon emissions is not just another environmental campaign, like those for whales or koalas; it is economic policy at its most hard-headed. Going ahead with the carbon price avoids compensation to the big emitters; Abbott may bristle at the whole idea that he's taking money off battlers to give to billionaires, but that's what would happen if the carbon price were to be repealed.

It would help to ensure that we keep strong manufacturing, vibrant agriculture, growing knowledge-based industries and a resilient services sector – as well as a mining industry – in a vigorous five pillar economy.

Pillars aren't vigorous, they have to be still and inflexible and separate in order to hold up, uh, whatever it is they're holding up. I know the difference between agriculture and manufacturing but I'm less clear about the difference between "knowledge-based industries" and "services". You need a bit of knowledge to be successful in agriculture or mining. Again, I'd want Abbott to explain what he means, given that his understanding of the economy depends on it. It would be nice if one of those professional journalists he mixes with inside the parliamentary circle would step up and put this to him, rather than leaving it to scruffy unprofessional bloggers.

Under the Coalition, there will be tax cuts without a carbon tax because we’ll find the savings to pay for them ... The Coalition identified $50 billion in savings before the last election and will do at least as much again before the next one.

Government is smaller today than it has ever been under the Coalition. The Coalition didn't identify anything like that amount of saving before the last election, one reason why it is not in government; Abbott is wrong to assert that they did, not only to avoid rewriting history but because it won't help him change to get a different result next time. Before and since the last election they did, however, burn a vibrant knowledge-based industry provider in the process.

Why should the government commit nearly $6 billion to power stations that the carbon tax would otherwise send bankrupt rather than just drop the carbon tax?

Because dropping the carbon price won't help. The electricity sector in NSW was in trouble before the carbon price and only a carbon price will lift the thinking about our power needs above the half-witted political fixes that we saw from Egan et al.

Why spend billions to put people out of work rather than into it?

Good question. Then again, carbon-intensive industries were putting people off long before carbon price.

Why does the Defence Materiel Organisation need 7000 bureaucrats especially when major equipment purchases are being put off?

Ah, but that would mean "DEFENCE CUTS", you see. I see what you're doing there. Why not retrain them as submariners, or teachers of Asian languages?

Why does Australia need to spend millions to join the African Development Bank?

Much more cost-effective to wait until their economies collapse and welcome them in as refugees. Oh, wait ...

Why spend $50 billion on a National Broadband Network so customers can subsequently spend almost three times their current monthly fee for speeds they might not need?

This is an address in reply to the budget. The NBN isn't in the budget. Future generations will laugh at the very idea of "speeds they might not need". Indeed, contemporary Liberal MPs whinge loudly that the NBN isn't coming to their areas now.

Why put so much into the NBN when the same investment could more than duplicate the Pacific Highway, Sydney’s M5 and the road between Hobart and Launceston; build Sydney’s M4 East, the Melbourne Metro, and Brisbane’s Cross City Rail; plus upgrade Perth Airport and still leave about $10 billion for faster broadband?

Great ideas all; how are you going to pay for all that? Why not jack up the mining tax?

And why spend another $1.7 billion on border protection cost blow outs because the government is too proud to admit that John Howard’s policies worked?

Worked at what? Was there really a correlation between punitive detention and reduced refugee numbers, or were other factors at work? If reintroducing those policies would make the country less proud, let's not.

Madam Deputy Speaker, the Treasurer boasts that our economy will be 16 per cent bigger by mid 2014 than it was in mid 2008 before the Global Financial Crisis.

What he doesn’t mention is that over the previous six years growth was 22 per cent ...

Yeah, anyone can achieve growth in an overheated economy.

We’ll cut business red tape costs by at least a billion dollars a year by requiring each government agency to quantify the costs of its reporting and compliance rules and delivering an annual savings target.

Public service bonuses won’t be paid unless these targets are met.

A recipe for Canberra fudge, right there.

There’ll be a once-in-a-generation commission of audit to review all the arms and agencies of government to ensure that taxpayers are getting good value for money.

Like Kevin Rudd, he'd hit the ground reviewing. That, and the pantomime surprise of it all being "worse than we thought".

We will respond carefully but decisively to the problems that the community has identified in the Fair Work Act so that small businesses and their staff can get a fair go and our productivity can increase.

What community? Is this a definite policy, or a placemarker that doesn't bear scrutiny?

... unlike the government, we didn’t need the Fair Work report into the Member for Dobell to realise that some unions are corrupt boys clubs.

Proof? I've blogged on sloppy governance in the union movement but I make no allegations as Abbot does. Why unions have let this pass is a mystery.

We’ll work with the states to put local people in charge of public schools and public hospitals because they should be as responsive to their patients and to their parents as businesses are to their customers.

What Abbott wants to do here is appoint busybodies who think all health policy involves abortion/euthanasia and all education policy is about sex and/or religion. This would be an accountability nightmare with no improvement in outcomes.

Where unskilled work is readily available, unemployment benefits should be suspended for fit people under 30 – as recommended by Warren Mundine, a former Labor Party National President.

As long as there's an hour a week somewhere, no unemployment benefits for anyone. Remind me why Warren Mundine is any sort of expert in anything?

And yes, there will be a fair-dinkum paid parental leave scheme, giving mothers six months at full pay with their babies, to bring Australia into the 21st century, finally, and to join the 35 other countries whose parental leave schemes are based on people’s pay.

Parental leave is a workplace entitlement not a welfare benefit so should be paid at people’s real wage, like sick leave and holiday pay.

Ah yes, the Great Big New Tax.

Plus there’ll be a Productivity Commission inquiry to consider how childcare can be made more flexible and more effective, including through in-home care, so that more women can participate in a growing economy if that’s their choice.

This is why public servants hate politicians.

There has been enquiry after enquiry into publicly subsidised nannies, and every one of them has said it's a crap idea. The PC will almost certainly return the same finding. Then there'll be another enquiry, and another one, until Abbott says: we had the inquiry, promise fulfilled, and everyone who voted themselves a nanny will feel cheated. Ever since the Women's Land Army there have been career opportunities for women in this country other than nannying. In an era of 5% unemployment it isn't clear where these nannies will come from, unless ... nah, as if Immigration Minister Ray Hadley will let us have Hazara nannies, I mean come on.

I will continue to work with Noel Pearson to help shift the welfare culture that’s sapped Aboriginal self-respect and with Twiggy Forrest to get more Aboriginal people into the workforce.

More than what? Forrest's employment program has been embarrassing window-dressing at best.

I will keep spending a week every year volunteering in Aboriginal communities and I hope that a tribe of public servants will soon have to come with me to gain more actual experience of the places we are all trying to improve.

Do you want people to develop self-respecting communities or do you want a Potemkin village with a "tribe" of public servants on allowances? You haven't thought this through, have you.

The Coalition will reward conservation-minded businesses with incentives to be more efficient users of energy and lower carbon emitters.

Our policy means better soils, more trees and smarter technology ... There will be a standing Green Army, an expanded version of the Green Corps that I put in place in government, to tackle our landcare problems so that beaches and waterways can be cleaner and land more productive.

That policy, not the market-based mechanism of the ALP, is "socialism masquerading as environmentalism". It's more expensive and less effective.

The next Coalition government will fund infrastructure in accordance with a rational national plan based on published cost-benefit analyses.

We’ll also find the most responsible ways to get more private investment into priority projects so that the new roads, public transport systems and water storages that we need aren’t so dependent on the taxpayer.

All infrastructure is dependant on taxpayers. They're going to do the cost-benefit analyses, aren't they? Well, aren't they - or are merchant banks proposing the projects also going to do the CBAs, like those expensive and ill-used road tunnels in Sydney?

Madam Deputy Speaker, too often, government’s focus is on the urgent rather than the important; on what drives tomorrow’s headline rather than on what changes our country for the better.

Abbott shows he'll keep this going. An Abbott victory is a victory for the idea that the media stunt is the only way to run this country.

We are supposed to be adapting to the Asian century, yet Australians’ study of foreign languages, especially Asian languages, is in precipitous decline.

The proportion of Year 12 students studying a foreign language has dropped from about 40 per cent in the 1960s to about 12 per cent now.

There are now only about 300 Year 12 Mandarin students who aren’t of Chinese-heritage.

Since 2001, there has been a 21 per cent decline in the numbers studying Japanese and a 40 per cent decline in the numbers studying Indonesian.

This is because the Howard government axed the Asian languages program. There were six more years of Howard government following that, including with the now Shadow Foreign Minister as Education Minister. There is no demonstrable Coalition commitment to Asian language teaching.

If Australians are to make their way in the world, we cannot rely on other people speaking our language.

Starting in pre-school every student should have an exposure to foreign languages.

This will be a generational shift because foreign language speakers will have to be mobilised and because teachers take time to be trained.

Still, the next Coalition government will make a strong start.

The only way to get that generational shift happening is to import graduates from Asian universities who are native speakers and willing to train as Australian teachers. If you're going to do this there would have to be thousands involved ... see, the Coalition aren't as visionary as they need to be, In their current configuration the Little Australia mob will hold them back.

My commitment tonight is to work urgently with the states to ensure that at least 40 per cent of Year 12 students are once more taking a language other than English within a decade.

This is Abbott's clearest promise, and his least credible. He doesn't have the money and nowhere in his past is there any sort of commitment to Asian languages - not a semester of Japanese, no post-graduation trek through Thailand, no Hong Kong girlfriend. Nothing.

Rudd's scheme had credibility because of his own studies in Mandarin and his lived experience. It is flatly untrue that Abbott could or would introduce such a scheme. To see his contempt for Education generally, look at his shadow minister, look for any evidence of policy.

Madam Deputy Speaker, there is little wrong with ... our cities.

The same bogus wishlist, reasserted but not costed or put into any context about what our country wants or needs.

Every day, with every fibre of my being, I would be striving to help Australians be their best selves.

Not with that list; you can't even be your best self.

Madam Deputy Speaker, as someone whose grandparents were proud to be working class, I can feel the embarrassment of decent Labor people at the failures of this government.

Maybe this is another legacy of taking too much notice of pinheads from the US Republicans: embarrassing attempts at reverse snobbery and insinuation into a working class that no longer exists and doesn't include that speaker. Those "Howard Battlers" who elected Liberal MPs from seats they'd never won before know now that Abbott is jerking them along, that he isn't one of them/us and can't deliver Howardism redux.

I regret to say that the deeper message of this week’s budget is that the Labor Party now only stands for staying in office.

Only if you ignore all the policy and economics and stuff, and if you can rely on a lazy and stupid media to present your view as much more valid than all that.

Everyone knows that the Prime Minister is a clever politician but who really trusts her to keep any commitments?

Change the pronoun and you could have said that about Howard. Abbott does this when he gets frustrated that the government won't just lay down and die like he wants it to, that he has to fight a tough and shrewd opponent - and who instead can only gut an already-dead fish with an already-sharpened knife until the cameras switch off and he hands that work back to working-class people who do that sort of work every day.

Then this parliament can once more be a proper contest of ideas between those who see bigger government and those who see empowered citizens as the best guarantee of our nation’s future.

In such a debate it isn't clear which side Abbott would be on. Maybe a journalist might ask him, one who'd know big government when they saw it and who understands why it's an issue.

As budget week has demonstrated, minority governments are too busy managing the parliament to manage the economy properly.

Seems they're doing both. Labor has demonstrated the ability to turn minority government into majority government; Liberals can't make the transition, which is why Abbott is having problems with his so-close-but-yet-so-far predicament.

With each broken promise, with each peremptory change, with each tawdry revelation, with each embarrassing explanation, the credibility of this government and the standing of this parliament is diminished.

Abbott can't promise or deliver decent government. James Ashby is proof of that.

At least half that speech is the same old shit Abbott says at any occasion where he is called upon to speak: journalists have heard it so often they don't question it, but if Australia deserves better as Abbott says, then the scrutiny has to be applied - to his face, and by cross-checking what he says against what actually happens.

It doesn't need Peter Costello shouting speechlessly at Abbott's flukes of thought to see that the guy is cruising to irrelevance. This week showed the government can stand its ground when it has no choice. The politics was settled with the Rudd burial, now the policy is in place with the NDIS, carbon price and a surplus budget. If the experience of senior press gallery members was worth anything, they'd spot this shift and tell us more than what I could see.

Abbott will not collapse in a hurry but already his momentum is not what it was. His attacks have an increasingly cracking-hardy air and the faces behind him on the Coalition benches last night were grim. They were not the forward-leaning, grinning and urging faces you see from an opposition that can smell government approaching. I doubt the faces of government MPs opposite them had the beaten look that they needed to reinforce them and their leader. They seemed to be doing what Liberals do best: keeping up appearances, and waiting for a real leader to come along and sort them out.