Constant Constance Face

NSW Transport Minister Andrew Constance should be a politician at the top of his game. He is the steward of several large transformative infrastructure projects, and a former state Treasurer: all that, and not yet 45. In his current predicament he is more like someone at the top of that slow initial climb of a roller-coaster, just before plunging and being jerked this way and that before eventually being returned to where he started.

Transport is one portfolio that resists nimble, blithe solutions. Decisions made 50 years ago limit the options available to decision-makers today, and those made today limit those going forward. This article gives a good summary of why the problems with Sydney's passenger rail system are so intractable and multi-dimensional; they also show why Constance, a politician largely focused on the current news cycle, is so badly placed to deal with them.

History is a nightmare from which Andrew Constance is trying to awaken. No minister ever gets a blank slate and unlimited resources, yet Constance has no sense of historical continuum and his place within it: you can't appeal to him on that basis in the same way you can't argue with your cat about rugby league. For him, there is no history, and no future beyond the next news cycle or election, there is only now.

Whether it's the tram tracks to Sydney's inner-west being of a different gauge to the proposed tram line through the inner-east, or arguments over proposed routes of tram and train lines that haven't been well managed, or now train timetabling that stretches human and physical resources beyond safe and sustainable usage - Constance isn't good at addressing issues with complex long-term causes and where the few options available are all controversial.

The decision to hold a public contest to name a ferry and claim 'Ferry McFerryface' was the popular choice (even though it wasn't) shows some important political lessons, and not just the ones about lying:

• The UK contest in 2016 that would have named a government research vessel 'Boaty McBoatface' was a clear expression of contempt by those who voted against their government and political class. Constance's "captain's pick" in favour of 'Ferry McFerryface' shows that contempt returned in full measure, with interest.
• The contest overseen by Constance returned 'Ian Kiernan' as the popular choice for the ferry. Kiernan was a property developer and a recreational yachtsman who is best known for having founded Clean Up Australia. Unlike most property developers/yachtsmen, Kiernan was never beholden to the Liberals. He organised a broad, well-regarded social movement that is the envy of any political party. In the past, a Liberal Transport Minister might have gritted teeth and done a grip-and-grin with Kiernan in front of the new ferry bearing his name, but Constance has used the more basic tools of PR to deflect onto May Gibbs (there are those who admire this sort of thing, many of them journalists covering politics).
• Constance's attempts to raise the bogeyman of unionism are absurd. Previous leaders of the union covering train drivers, like Bernie Willingale or Michael Costa, were bloody-minded negotiators who happily inconvenienced the public at the slightest provocation. Constance can and does stick to a script, lacking the wit to realise that underlying assumptions have changed and confusing persistence with commitment. He is going to have more trouble going forward in that portfolio rather than less.

Constance has no experience of having to negotiate with workers to keep an enterprise running, and nor does he come from the IPA/CIS wing that militates against union privileges. The fact that the union was quickly shut down by the Fair Work Commission in its attempt to strike undercuts the scare campaign. De-fanging the union movement makes them look like benign workers' self-help societies. For a government focused on the future, with infrastructure projects and Gonski-level education funding, carrying on about unions is a throwback to an earlier time.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian is someone with a sense of history and future, and has set many of the directions within which Constance has to work. She has put him in a portfolio she knows well, and she backs him because she sympathises with the limits which he faces. There are, however, limits on her ability to indulge Constance indefinitely. There will be a state election on the last Saturday in March 2019, which means 2018 will be a year of clearing niggling controversies. Given that Constance is a fuckup ongoing source of controversy in a high-profile portfolio, he can't last as Transport Minister. She is loyal - she and Constance go back more than 20 years together - but she is not overly sentimental.

The ongoing war within the NSW between the far right and the relative moderates means the right will be out for blood. They are not going to take on Berejiklian directly, and nor will they take on sitting federal MPs. Berejiklian will be able to toss them the severed head of Andrew Constance and appoint one of their mouth-breathers as Assistant Minister for Whatever. Factionalism aside, it is hard to see where Berejiklian will find someone with the requisite depth of skills and understanding to be a useful Transport Minister, unless she deprives another equally important and complex portfolio of its minister.

There were rumours that he might switch to federal politics. Safe Liberal seats in NSW are largely held by his contemporaries, bar one - Warringah - but he doesn't have the political skills or momentum to knock off a former Prime Minister. Constance holds the state seat of Bega; I'll defer to others who know the politics of that area, but I note as Treasurer and now Transport Minister he hasn't been that successful in improving the road that holds that electorate together, the Princes Highway. Two federal electorates cover that area:

• Eden Monaro is increasingly safe for Labor due to demographic overspill from the ACT, and the formidable incumbent Mike Kelly.
• Gilmore is represented by the hapless Ann Sudmalis; if the Court of Disputed Returns found against Sudmalis, or if she trips over her own shoelaces again, it is entirely possible Constance would fly the Liberal flag (with Turnbull offering one of those Assistant Minister for Whatever roles). However, Gilmore is one of those seats standing between Labor and federal government. If the polls are as indicative as their sponsors hope, I don't fancy his chances.

This is not to say that Constance is finished altogether. He might make a solid Minister for Tourism, state or federal; those who thought more highly of him, including himself, have been shown up. People who like him and those who don't agree that he can be warm and engaging in person. When they concede that, his various political opponents should be forgiven by their respective bases.

He was always going to graduate to one of those roles post-politics that involve lunching and golfing and opening doors for one's lunch/golf companions. It's just that the moment has arrived 15 or so years earlier than he might have planned. He is older than Nick Greiner, Nathan Rees, Kristina Keneally, Mike Baird, and Gladys Berejiklian when each became Premier; older than John Howard or Peter Costello when each became federal Treasurer. He doesn't have the sort of resume that makes the private sector create board seats for him (and aren't the boards of corporate Australia crying out for more mediocre white men). Sydney lacks Melbourne's parallel power structures of gentlemen's clubs and AFL clubs.

The great political-class fantasy is that you can get into politics at a young age and bypass all those worker ants climbing the corporate ladder, landing some cushy all-care-no-responsibility corporate job that will take you through middle-to-old age. Yet, the very rhetoric of politics these days is that there are no free rides, no featherbedding, and everyone has to pull their weight. We see this in an age of mass sackings and insecure jobs, where CEO tenures last scarcely longer than fruit flies.

Very few operatives who have made their careers in politics actually make it to the sunlit uplands of non-executive directorships. They bristle at the indignities of freelance consulting, only realising post-politics the nature of the "jobs jobs jobs!" they trumpeted while in office. They often seem to be unfulfilled somehow, hanging around party head office during election campaigns but contributing little, maybe sounded out occasionally by up-and-comers or journalists desperate for a "senior party source". If they're willing to delude themselves about their own careers, you can see why they do the same to gullible journalists and their dwindling audiences.

The worst kind of political journalism

No political journalism can ever be good if it patronises the people to whom it reports.

Politicians regularly call press conferences for journalists to ask questions. Mostly, their questions are inane - rather than ask better questions, press gallery journalists simply petition the ABC (the network that most often carries live press conferences) to muffle the often silly and ill-considered questions they ask. They usually seek to reinforce a narrative which does not relate to the subject-matter at hand, which is why politicians get a perverse pride in not answering questions or reading slabs from the very press release which initiated the press conferences in the first place.

Politicians almost never convene people for the purposes of asking questions. Some state governments, and the Gillard government, held community Cabinet meetings where they often fielded better and more pertinent questions than the press gallery ever could.

This is patronising garbage. The journalist seriously believes that interrupting a press conference to talk to a politician is some sort of breach of etiquette, and that people should just sit back and consume whatever drivel the media pumps at them.

Here's what happened: the Prime Minister was in Whyalla and someone came up to talk to him. End of.

Any time I have to do my own editing and presentation of a story, the journalist has failed. It's not that the journalist has presented the story in a different-but-equally-valid way, or using some superior journalism imperceptible to those of us who've never lolled about in a newsroom: the wanker who wrote this seriously believes that only journalists may question politicians in public.

Despite the best of preparations and the fullest of precautions, every time a politician appears in public they take an enormous risk: encountering a real voter.

Oh, piss off. A "real risk" involves getting killed. Politicians deal with voters much better than journalists do, which is why the traditional media has no future as a conduit between politicians and voters.

So it was for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Wednesday, who was beset by the dog-walking Raylene Mullins following an announcement in South Australia.

What a dickhead: "beset" and "dog-walking" tell us nothing about this person or what they wanted. They belittle and de-legitimise this person ("where's your press pass?"). What a hopeless lead-in to a story. What a bad attitude this turkey has. Earlier headlines actually referred to Ms Mullins as "errant".

Wait until I find a press gallery journalist who walks their dog. Wait 'til Koziol does: it will rock his empty little world.

Proving that the township of Whyalla was never wiped off the map, Raylene confronted the PM about the government's free trade agenda and its impact on the local steelworks, her husband's employer.

Another silly lead-in: surely the presence of the Prime Minister proved Whyalla's ongoing existence? Why do we have to fight our way past Koziol's silly lead-ins to get at the story? A person spoke to the Prime Minister about his policies and their impact on the local community. You could write a good story about that, having sent a journalist all that way.

"The produce is being ruined and nothing will help Australia if there's another world war because we wouldn't be able to exist," she said.

"Now, why don't all the parliamentarians in the past and in the future think about that, because where are our grandchildren, their children and their children going to work? You can't just have office jobs and health jobs."

The steelworks, which employs about 10 per cent of the town's working population, has been slated for possible closure following financial difficulties. Owner Arrium, previously OneSteel, said the plant posted an operating loss of $43 million in the first half of this financial year due to cheaper Asian steel prices. A decision on its future is due in April.

See? You can so do proper journalism when you have no other choice.

Mr Turnbull was keen to avoid discussing the date of the upcoming budget, but Raylene's ambush proved harder to avoid.

Back to wanky sub-clauses, as though Canberra narrative was more important than actual economic policy. You have an announcement about $600m right here, what makes you think you can address an entire budget?

A non-journalist questioning a politician is not an "ambush", it is democracy in action. When they venture out in public, every Prime Minister gets asked questions by members of the public. It's part of the job. It's always been part of the job. It is not an ambush, and it's not extraordinary.

In response, the PM reiterated his earlier announcement that a major upgrade to 600 kilometres of South Australian rail infrastructure would be brought forward, enabling the steelworks to be more productive.

Not if April's announcement sees the steelworks closed down. We've scrapped the carbon tax, but the steelworks is still losing money: clearly the carbon tax wasn't the problem. Had this journalist dropped the wanky lead-ins they'd have more space to write about what was in front of them, and bring to bear all that knowledge and experience that makes professional journalism so very valuable.

Later, the 64-year-old Raylene told the cameras why she had decided to give the PM a piece of her mind.

Could this guy get any more condescending to "the 64-year-old Raylene"? Did he pat her on the head? She may as well have talked to the cameras - no point talking to the journalists.

"I was walking my dog at the Ada Ryan gardens, didn't know he was going to be here," she said.

Clear failure on the part of Whyalla media. If you don't know the Prime Minister's coming to town, what do you know? How does your market trust you? Is that why Ms Mullins had to ask the Prime Minister about an operational matter, because the local branches of national media are obviously such crap? He actually mentioned the dog-walking thing again, as though it was something people he knows simply don't do.

But the PM defended his government's pursuit of free trade agreements, telling Raylene that future prosperity was dependent upon Australia's access to the large markets of Asia. "We share a passion for Australia ... we have a slightly different view of free trade," he told reporters.

If you're going to splash around $600m to boost one company over others, you sure do have a different view of free trade, and its place in economic and trade policy. Again, instead of proving himself to be a dickhead across state borders, the reporter could have thought about whether that money could not have been better spent elsewhere: $600m on rail in suburban Melbourne would have yielded greater improvements to the economy and broader appeal to voters.

At the risk of appearing cynical, how much tax did Arrium pay last year? How much, if any, did it donate to the Coalition parties? Do you think our hot-shot reporter gave the press release any scrutiny whatsoever?

Whyalla is in the federal electorate of Grey, one of the largest electorates of any parliament in the world, which voted Liberal with a 13.5% margin at the last election. Rowan Ramsey, the local MP, has been there 20 years and (at this stage) is seeking re-election. $600m to shore him up? What does Ms Mullins think of Ramsey - any idea?

As a close and avid reader of political journalism over many years, that piece was utterly worthless.

Fairfax should be culling dickheads like Paul Sheehan and this fool Koziol. Instead, they are getting rid of reporters in regional areas. You can't patronise locals like Raylene Mullins when they're your neighbours and regular readers, but you can if you just jetted in from Sydney/Canberra.

Rowan Ramsey might be safe in two-party terms, but if there's a third party waiting to send Grey the way of New England or Indi our man on the spot wouldn't be able to tell you: he simply can't get past the idea that people walk their dogs in the park.

All about that

I've blogged very little on NSW politics, but now this:

Nick Greiner, who has known Mr Baird since he was a boy, speaks of him glowingly.

"I think he will be fantastic. His first strength ... is that he's economically and financially literate, and the state government at the end of the day is all about that," Mr Greiner said.

Uh-oh.

Mike Baird has just been sworn in as NSW Premier, and he is already doomed. Nobody will buy this asset sale recycling thing, and Baird won't be much good at selling it. Nobody believes that selling electricity assets will make consumer electricity bills cheaper, nor that selling public hospitals will improve healthcare, nor that better roads or other services will result from sell-offs.

Baird will probably not be as economic rationalist as Greiner was, and in the last two paragraphs of this he appears to back away from privatisation proposals. However, having defeated Labor, and with a party apparatus that is not above the self-defeating behaviour of its opponents, Baird needs a narrative to stay in office. That narrative is asset recycling: selling existing assets to build new and better ones.

As far as privatising hospitals goes: no, and no. Any Coalition MP who has a hospital privatised in heir area is done for next March unless they fight it tooth-and-nail, regardless of their margin in 2011.

NSW's electricity network is run down because successive governments have taken the money that should have been used for upgrades and put them into consolidated revenue, decreasing the amounts they have needed to raise from taxes and from Canberra. It operates on a nineteenth-century paradigm, where coal-fired generators far from the city transmit power to the city along high-voltage lines, such that the amount of power that actually reaches businesses and homes is far less than that actually generated at the state's ageing power stations.

The previous Labor government had a number of goes at selling the state's electricity infrastructure. Every time they tried, the price got lower and lower. Every time the sale was stymied by the relevant unions, which were influential in ALP preselections and affected policy accordingly. Now we have a government where unions play no role in its preselections; generation companies have been sold, and the distribution systems ('poles and wires') are next. Barry O'Farrell said that he would not sell them until he had a mandate, and now Baird is saying the same thing (i.e. the sale will take place next year).

They are repeating the malarkey that the sale of the distribution system means a better deal for consumers, without explaining how this is to be achieved. It's bullshit strategy and the government will embarrass itself every time it pushes this. At about the time the distribution systems are to be sold, the Federal government is expected to have demolished the carbon pricing mechanism, and go through the pantomime of acting all shocked when a) household electricity do not go down as promised, and b) whatever pissant concessions are wrung from power companies will not last long and incur no gratitude from voters.

The NSW government will be promising voters that they'll get a better deal from their power going forward, while sweetening the deal to potential purchasers which will not involve limiting what they can charge consumers. You'd need deft political skills to talk out both sides of your mouth like that, and just because you have what it takes to get the job it doesn't necessarily mean you have the skills and rat-cunning required to do the job.

NSW has a lotta roads to build: the Pacific Highway up the north coast, the spaghetti junction around Badgery's Creek, and the WestConnect proposal, not to mention rail links across Sydney that barely scratch the surface of what the city needs. There is a lot of downsides to cancelling those projects, or letting them run over time/budget, but no upside in having delivered them.

If all that means Baird takes the $30 billion privatisation of the state's electricity "poles and wires" to the election, he will face a fierce opponent in Labor leader John Robertson.

Garbage. Robertson has been a joke for three years.

Three years before that, as NSW Labour Council Secretary, he overplayed the unions' hand in a prior episode of the power sale game, bringing down Morris Iemma as Premier and Michael Egan Costa as Treasurer; Robertson replaced Egan in the NSW Legislative Council, bringing on him this letter from Paul Keating. Robertson is still the leader of NSW Labor, and none of its shortcomings have even been addressed. Labor have played a small target, hoping their flaws had been forgotten, and might somehow fix themselves.

It's lazy analysis on the part of the state parliamentary press gallery to assume that bad news for the Coalition is good news for Labor, or vice versa.

The seats on the state's northern coast are good examples where the failure of this approach is evident: if the Coalition are going to lose those seats, they will more likely lose them to independents rather than Labor. The press gallery hear a lot about western Sydney but don't know a lot about it; wait until this government, like its federal counterpart, gets mugged in rural areas by independents.

Mike Baird will need to be a master politician to counter this drift away from his government, to stop voters taking it for granted and to stop them/us regarding him as some dessicated calculating machine. He may not be around to see the completion of the 'recycling' (those shiny shiny new fully-funded and costed assets, which politicians love to declare open). Mad politics happens between the commissioning of things and their completion. Appointing Andrew Constance, a jukebox of political cliches, as Treasurer may well help Baird reinvent his persona but it won't help the way he thinks. Baird is yet to be tested as a deft warrior in dealing with disparate groups (gunlosers, independents, Christianists); in a sense, Labor is the least of his worries.

Mere economic competence is not sufficient. Barry O'Farrell knew this, Nick Greiner still hasn't learned it. John Robertson probably understands this, but he is far from being a master politician. We are more likely to see the emergence of masterful practitioners of politics at the micro level, who will come together and work out what the macro system needs. This presages a new politics, tentative and ramshackle but agile. This new politics will occur over the dead body of the traditional media (of which the press gallery, and its absurdly exalted role within traditional media organisations, is part), and I'm cool with that.

On a journey

I can't disguise the pounding of my heart
It beats so strong
It's in your eyes, what can I say
They turn me on

I don't care where we go
I don't care what we do
I don't care pretty baby
Just take me with U

- Prince Take me with U

At today's Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, there was the usual smoke-and-light-show with figures based on changed frames and assumptions, about which you can read on other blogs. It was no different to any other economic statement really: the Need For Fiscal Prudence, Taxed Enough Already, etc. The bit about taking the entire country along was jarring. Joe Hockey said in passing that he wanted the Australian people to come with him and the government on a "journey" toward a weakening economy, less government expenditure, and possibly even a budget surplus. That's the moment when I knew this government has no hope whatsoever.

Hockey started off with a short personal anecdote. Liberal preselection speeches in the 1990s used to all start with this device, to invite you into the candidate's world, which was then followed by a tenuous attempt to link that to a wider theme. There you'd be, smiling away at some innocuous image from a 1950s/60s Aussie childhood, only for it segue into a diatribe on tax reform or crime/immigration like some jerry-built freeway on-ramp. So Joe Hockey went up Mount Kilimanjaro - without assistance or acknowledgment, it would seem - but why he did so was not clear. What would have been the consequences had Hockey not climbed Kilimanjaro? What stopped him ending up like Hemingway's dead leopard? This lack of clarity and urgency swept through his speech like one of his clunky and obviously scripted arm movements.

For years now, Tony Abbott has been trying to do two different but complementary things: rally people to popular causes, and to create an air of seriousness around those that are Unpopular But Necessary In The Long Term. He has failed at both. People voted against the particular model for a republic in 1999, not because the nation loves the Queen and unelected authority as much as Tony Abbott does. In 2007 people voted against a government that had been very popular, and a Prime Minister whom Tony Abbott quite admired; an election that actually resulted in that government, that Prime Minister, and his own good self, being flung into the political loserdom of opposition. He thought he could pick off The Nerd and That Woman, but could only do so once both had weakened one another.

His stunts, the personality patch-ups with Margie-and-the-girls and other props, have all failed to rally people behind anything positive. It's all stop this, and cut that - and even if it does all come off, what? It has no ability to rally the wider public, no ability apart from polling to sniff the political wind - governments that lose touch get marooned long before they are defeated. This government faces the real prospect of being marooned before it delivers its first budget.

No government ever gets to set the lights by which it is judged. Every one of the 26 Prime Ministers before Abbott had issues with the Senate, and as for an opposition voting against what they supported in government - nobody is listening because all governments have to cop that, and insert temperature-related vacation of the kitchen here. For once the press gallery was impatient with Hockey, and his complaining about situation normal in Canberra; Hockey had the discipline not to blurt out "but I thought we were buddies!", but only just.

Hockey spent three years claiming debt was a huge problem for Australia. Then in office he hosed this down, and political and economic commentators united in praising Hockey for ditching his central message. Today, he tried to hose debt back up (a clumsy image I know, but the politics is clumsier). That ploy cannot succeed, and I don't care if Peta says it will.

The idea that people will go along with cuts to areas they consider important in the name of the abstract and easily fudged budget surplus is sheer bullshit. Any old pol who's won and lost a few elections in the community where they live knows this.

Two years ago in London, Hockey made a speech in which he declared an end to the idea that government could buy people's loyalty through welfare transfers. That was a bigger call than Hockey realised, not least because nobody really called him on it. Even those who could see Hockey would be Treasurer after this year's election didn't seize on it for hints and signals as to what an Abbott government economic policy might look like. There are a number of reasons for this. First, political journalists are stupid and flock-oriented, and economic journalists are better at predicting what has happened rather than the less certain future. Second, if you did a serious critique of Hockey's economic policy then you'd have to evaluate it against that of the Labor government's policy; see the first point, but also if you compared the Coalition to Labor you run the risk of a 2004 repeat, where a flawed government found itself returned against an inferior opponent.

None of the commentators have referred to Hockey's End of Entitlements speech as the prequel for today's effort. This is because press gallery experience means diddly-squat. Can you imagine how insufferable Rudd would have been had he won the election in September? Nah, give Tony the green light.

If the MYEFO with all its bluster and hype is to mean anything, Parliament will be recalled next week and will bloody well sit until the cuts are made, or until the government has a quiver of double-dissolution triggers. That won't happen, so the bluster and hype emanating from MYEFO means nothing.

If Hockey's throwaway comment about the nation coming with the government on the journey through The Valley Of The Shadow meant anything, there would be six months of painstaking explanations between now and the budget. There would have to be a lot of preparation with key stakeholders. Do you reckon that preparation has taken place? Do you reckon they even know who their stakeholders are? Is there going to be a lot of knee-jerk bullshit and self-defeating statements from The Situation?

Paul Keating would never have ceded the limelight to Peter Walsh. Peter Costello did joint appearances with Finance Ministers under sufferance, and always outshone them. When Wayne Swan did joint appearances with Penny Wong, there was a perception of warmth and unity to the government of which they were part. When Hockey shared the stage today with Matthias Cormann, however, he made Cormann look like the brains of the outfit. Cormann will soon be distracted by the coming implosion of the WA state government.

What's going to happen is that vague but menacing proposals for budget cuts are going to sit in the Aussie sun for the better part of a month. Christmas-/ Festivus-/ other-table arguments ring to the sounds of people arguing how awful a job Abbott is doing. After Graincorp and school-funding and other debacles, we know already that if an interest groups screams loudly enough, in chorus, for a few days then this government will cave. Even if it doesn't, it will stand firm on the wrong things:

• It will claim education is important, but bellyaches about the schoolkids bonus and isn't measuring teacher performance in any real way;
• It will commit to infrastructure, without realising that big projects suffer cost and time blowouts, that any project given to Tony Shepherd's company might be misconstrued (yet if his company is denied opportunities, there'll be hell to pay from business), and that nothing big will be ribbon-ready by 2016;
• As soon as Abbott started talking about the lost cause of Olympic Dam to replace jobs lost at Holden, and then cut training programs, it was clear he had no clue and would have tens of thousands spiral into long-term unemployment. Talking points are meant to indicate vision, not disguise its absence; and
• Nobody wants to trash the Barrier Reef. Nothing this government does on environmental matters can or will make up for that.

All of that will create inconsistencies to the point of weirdness, such that nobody will know what this government stands for. Hockey is the only one who could really have made a coherent case - not any more. He's going to cut just as people turn to government for services in a softening economy. Nanny-state lectures about how Austerity Is Good For You don't wash; they breed only resentment, and ours will be a sullen nation by mid-2014. Only Hockey had anything like a coherent narrative, given that his Cabinet colleagues can't even manage their own portfolios, and now he hasn't even got that. Hockey cannot sell austerity.

The whole idea of the welfare state was to get and maintain people's buy-in to the idea of the state for sustainable reasons. Previously the idea of the state was a collection of People Like Us - people who look like us, talk like us, pray like us. Enemies, real or imagined, were fought abroad and purged from within. Nation-states operated for hundreds of years on that basis, but a focus on Volk leads nation-states to a bad place. If you're going to wind back the welfare state at a time when the market and other institutions are failing to provide for general prosperity, surely talk about people expecting less from government is idle. Why would people even retain a government that thought and acted like that? Never mind ideas about recasting the form and purpose of government altogether.

The very idea that people will take to government service cuts with good grace, and will reward achievement of abstract targets, should have died with the Greiner government in NSW and the Kennett government in Victoria. They should have learned from Howard - 16 ex-ministers, and none of them worth a cracker. This government has forgotten nothing from those examples because they had learned nothing.

The IPA lost all credibility when it put out its Northern Australia thing, wondering how to both cut Mrs Reinhart's tax bill while also increasing the flow of government largesse directly and indirectly to her. The fact that Tim Wilson has taken up a government sinecure and Chris Berg a taxpayer-funded study of the public sector has diminished it still further. Its founder, CD Kemp, offered the IPA to Menzies as the Liberal Party's brains trust, but Menzies cultivated his own counsel (the UAP had failed because of shadowy links to opaque business-funded entities) and he kept Kemp at arm's length.

Kemp's sons became ministers in Howard's government and the IPA became the de facto brains trust for a hollowed-out Liberal Party in recent years. Today, it stands depleted at the very point where its prospects for victory are closest to hand. The political carrion-eaters who picked over the Democrats in recent years have their beady eyes on the IPA just as those who know it best are fleeing. It, and libertarianism more broadly, had been a useful intellectual scratching post - but now it's not even that.

When you realise that Hockey has thought more deeply about his portfolio than all other members of the government put together - including the Oxford-educated Prime Minister - and that his thinking is shallow and counterproductive, you can see what a joke this government is. It cannot succeed, and its sheer force of will (less than you might imagine, really) won't count. This government will drift, it will overvalue the unimportant and undervalue what's vital, and leave us all 20 years behind where a modern productive nation should be.

A press gallery that could not evaluate policy if it wanted to should have compared and contrasted Labor and the Coalition, but could not risk Labor re-elected. Yes, insofar as it even matters now, Gay Alcorn was completely and utterly wrong to see a better side of the occupation to which she devoted her life, and hasn't been big enough to admit it. The press gallery is pretending the government's ineptitude is a surprise, but in saying that they only draw attention to their own ineptitudes. The failures of their 'profession' arise not from technology, but from their abrogations of fourth-estate responsibilities.

This government cannot and will not stay the course to austerity and fiscal rectitude, and as a result you can expect a blizzard of culture-war crap like Peppa Pig hoping to distract from this essential failure. It will distract the press gallery, because they're stupid, and if the government turns off the drip-tap almost all of them have nowhere else to go.

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On that note, this will be my last post for 2013 as family holidays demand a respite from this and other toils. I offer more goodwill to all than you might imagine, so ding dong merrily on high and see you back next year (especially you). This blog will see off the Abbott government, and probably the IP bloody A at the rate it's going. There shall be much more interference in traditional media from this platform in 2014, just you mark my words: the ambivalence some detected earlier this year in these pages has well and truly gone.

The teachable moment

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened — that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?

- George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four

Events come and go, and all newly-elected governments have teething problems. It's tempting to confuse (or, in wishful terms, conflate) teething problems with crippling deficiencies that will ultimately do for this government. Yet, there are deficiencies among the Coalition that were detectable before they entered government. They are well and truly on display right now. There is no evidence of bureaucratic envelopment or wise counsel or other measures that might help this government grow the brains and capabilities that it so copiously lacks, and has always lacked.

Apart from Abbott himself, nobody in the Cabinet is more media-savvy than Scott Morrison. Morrison underestimated his skill in being all over the media before the election, and then engaging in blocking tactics afterwards (e.g. refusing to confirm his own statements, refusing to confirm that he talks to the PM, using a staff officer to lend him the authority that he lacks). The dissonance in Morrison being present yet absent for the media, and the fact that the Indonesian government (and the Indonesian media) is being as sensitive to Australia's internal politics as Abbott (and the Australian media) was to its, all makes for something of a gap between the responsible adult government we were promised and the shambles we were delivered.

That promise came not only from the Coalition, but from the press gallery. The press gallery cannot credibly maintain its hastily-constructed claim that this government's shortcomings have come about suddenly (and thus unforeseeably).

Soon after he became Treasurer, Peter Costello went to Washington and had a private conversation with then-Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan. Costello breached protocol and related Greenspan's words to the waiting media, and US stock markets and exchange rates juddered and lurched as a result. Costello learnt his lesson, but it is unclear what lessons Julie Bishop is learning about statecraft. If she is learning anything, she's doing it the hard way and expensively - but hey, maybe that's just Julie's style.

Having brought on rebukes from both Indonesia and China should be enough to get anyone sacked from the position she occupies, surely; a loyal deputy for six years under three leaders, she is letting the side down. She is certainly no Percy Spender, who put in place the entire architecture of postwar foreign policy in 19 months. She even offers less than the cross-continental dithering we saw in the last government from Smith, Rudd, and Carr. She has no excuse for being so unprepared.

There is no hinterland of considered thought, writing and speaking on which to build a hope for more and better in this vital area of federal government policy: only the partisans, with faces painted and screeching encouragement, can truly believe this pivotal moment in our foreign relations is best handled by someone so out of her depth even with basic political and diplomatic niceties.

It's possible that the last of the foreign policy wonks will take in hand these wayward ministers and lead them through to the fallow but safe-seeming ground of foreign policy conventional wisdom (much of which remains from Spender's time early in the Cold War). Being involved in this country's political class pretty much precludes long periods overseas during adult life, learning languages and other ways of operating; it's the one area of policy that smart-arse politicos seem happy to leave to the professionals, where gimps with focus-groups and standard deviations on internal polling simply have no impact. They airily claim that WesternSydney^TM has no interest in foreign policy, but in an interconnected world (and given the ethnic diversity of that area) how sustainable do you reckon that is?

An adult government need not come to office with a complete manifesto; Menzies didn't in 1949 and neither did Hawke to any real extent in 1983. It needs to hit the ground running though, or at the very least emerge from post-swearing-in hibernation looking co-ordinated. The whole promise of "no surprises", of government run entirely from the PM's office, leaves no excuses for the disjointed effort we've seen from this government in its establishment phase. The sheer absence of a clue means that someone like Mark Textor, wrongly regarded highly for his tactical acumen, screams and postures in the backrooms about Strategy but can only fluff and bumble when the limelight falls on him.

The floundering of Chris Pyne in education, however, shows just how far the rot in this government descends.

Like Morrison, Pyne is one of the government's more savvy operators. He is not some junior woodchuck acting above his pay grade, he has been in parliament for twenty years and was a minister in the last Coalition government. He cannot be said to be good at anything if not at managing the media: for many years he kept up the narrative that Peter Costello was thiiiiis close to knocking off John Howard, the model for Rudd's more successful guerrilla sulk, and has been a "senior Liberal source" ever since. Many members of the press gallery know Pyne more closely than do members of his family. His witterings about media misunderstandings are laughable.

Here is Pyne's political calculus: the largesse given to private schools will reinforce private school communities to strongly support the government, while public school communities are weak and will not rally against the government. That's it, really.

It seemed to be effective under Howard, although he had the advantage of Labor leaders who were ineffectual (Beazley, Crean) or unbalanced (Latham). Shorten appears to be neither of those things, but like Bill Hayden be could end up as nothing else either. Coalition state governments have not trashed the public school system to the extent necessary for Pyne's calculus to take hold.

With the fading of the resources boom, and the passing of the idea of almost effortless upward mobility that Howard sought to cultivate, people came to realise that education was all we could count on as a reasonable prospect for the future. That's why Gillard pinned everything on education. That's also why Pyne and Abbott pledged a "unity ticket", which they've since torn up; it was the difference between what they have now and much, much less, if not oblivion.

When Pyne mouthed off against Gonski earlier this year, Barry O'Farrell hauled him up to Sydney to show him what actual government and its needs are really like. The fact that neither man spoke about their encounter after the fact indicates that O'Farrell tried to knock some sense into Pyne, which he has clearly since lost. Nobody in NSW would choose Abbott over O'Farrell. Nobody in the Liberal Party wants the two to come to blows, but if they have to sacrifice the twerp from Adelaide to make peace do not doubt that he shall be sacrificed. Abbott is in the stronger position constitutionally but O'Farrell is the superior politician; if he has to run against Canberra then that's what he'll do, he will play grassroots populism better than Abbott will or can.

Education has retained both a depth of community feeling and of community organisation that the political parties have lost (they even used to be the same people in a more community-minded, less busy-busy age). Your average Parents and Citizens/Friends will have far greater tactical nous and organisational ability than your local branch of any political party. Any backroom operator, any Cabinet minister or inner circle denizen, who thinks the Abbott government is going to embrace that third rail and survive is kidding him/her/itself. Nobody who remembers the popular revolts in NSW against the Greiner government's education policy in the late 1980s/early '90s will ever forget it. O'Farrell doesn't. The sheer force of it propels Greiner's wife Kathryn onto the Gonski committee more than two decades later. Those who forget the lessons of history, at the very least, have no business mucking about with the curriculum.

If not Gonski, what? Under an adult government there should be an orderly transition to another funding model, not some dusted-off effort that led to longterm decline in school performance, and which was wrongly romanticised by Liberals (if Textor's advice was worth anything, he should have advised the Coalition to cut the nostalgia act as it impressed nobody who wasn't rusted on). Under an adult government the Education Minister would not be flinching and mincing at his own discomfort, but instead offering clear guidelines within which professionals can conduct careful planning. Bronwyn Hinz and I were completely wrong in April to assume that Pyne was doing any education policy work worth the name. At least he's had the good sense not to wheel out culture warrior Kevin Donnelly, when no other Coalition government is having anything to do with him.

There are a number of newly-elected Coalition MPs who won't make it past the next election because Pyne blundered into a political minefield. Pyne himself, having taken a safe seat to a margin under 5%, might well join them. He's sticking to his guns, but they're badly calibrated and pointing the wrong bloody way, and guess which fool placed them there? When constituents come to them and say that Marginal Vale Primary is losing this, or St Preference's is losing that, how will Pyne help them? He'll brush it off, and in doing that a lot of the respect that he earned by decades of hard slog that seemed to have paid off (for him at least) will be brushed off too.

Joe Hockey cut his political teeth under Greiner too, and has no excuse for gibbering about infrastructure in the hope that it will lift this government above the fray (let me guess: another second Sydney airport study), with all that crap about taking "tough decisions" instead of smart ones.

Much of the big important stuff that defines any government happens early in its term. Well, here we are early in the Abbott government's term. What's to show for it? No going to war as part of the new United Nations, no floating of the dollar, no gun buyback - no responding to Events in an adult-government way at all.

There is a school of thought that says a government should get its bad news out early. The trouble with this government is that it can't be sure its run of bad news is over, or that they have the power to decide when it is. Pyne's troubles over education do not detract from Morrison's problems with Indonesia, they compound the sense that this government is a bunch of stumblebums. This failure should be sheeted home to Abbott, and to strategists like Credlin and Textor. There is no suite of well-thought-out policies ready to go to stabilise early jitters, and thus nothing to bear fruit into 2014-15 to be harvested at the next election. Their only options are knee-jerk stuff, and that's when you get dopey policy outcomes like the ones that the Coalition try to hang on the previous government.

The idea that the press gallery is surprised at this government performing under expectations shows only that they haven't been paying attention, and have therefore rendered themselves redundant well ahead of the inevitable decisions of their current employers.

A government that wastes time eradicating any trace of the previous government incurs two big opportunity costs. First, you can't blame a government for all your woes and constraints if nobody remembers them. Second, and more tellingly, a lot of the big scope for action gets frittered away as momentum and goodwill dissipate - as they do, and nobody in the backroom or at the top table knows how to stop it. Labor, the Greens and other parties aren't exactly cringing before the threat of a double dissolution election. Looks like blocking the carbon tax is all this lot really have; anything else they do will be an accident, for good or ill.

Full of promise

Life is great in the Sunshine State
Every Queensland heart sings a song
To its tablelands and its golden sands
We are proud to say we belong

And our faith is great in the Sunshine State
For our Queensland future is grand
From the northern cane to the western plain
It's a full of promise land

All the while every mile, there's a sunlit smile
And a welcome handshake too
For friendship's great in the Sunshine State
May its sunshine keep smiling for you

- Official state song of Queensland

When the Coalition engaged in a development plan for northern Australia, it was a sign of their intellectual bankruptcy. Their policies mainly benefit large landholders and larger mining companies, proposing more infrastructure built from the public treasury while also promising that those who stand to benefit most from their policies should also be given tax breaks. They are vague and frankly untrustworthy about measures to help ordinary people (e.g. encouraging people to move to urban centres like Karratha or Townsville, skills development), measures that might've had more credibility in the 1950s than they do today.

That policy was largely written by the IPA. No longer independent of those who pay them, the IPA have a pseudo-policy development capacity that the Coalition no longer has, generating dull and senseless prose and meaningless picto-stats on demand to plea for government lolly. Any document with a Liberal/National logo on it longer than a press release has been outsourced, and probably not read by the shadow minister nominally responsible for it. It will certainly not be read by candidates, who are all being treated by Liberal Campaign HQ as though they are as stupid as Jaeiuymz Diaz.

At first it was surprising that the ALP would even try to match such policies, but a quick look at the electoral position in that area explains why:

• Coalition-held seats in far north Queensland like Dawson, Herbert, Hinkler, and Cook Leichhardt are up for grabs;
• Durack in northern WA, as with Capricornia in Qld, is open to a credible appeal from a candidate who would champion communities in those area as distinct from FIFO destinations; skyrocketing house prices are useful only if you want to move out of those communities. Labor, Katter, or a reformed conservative (e.g. Windsor, Wilkie, Oakeshott) independent would be well placed to make such a case - Rinehart's LNP or Clive Palmer's outfit, much less so;
• Wide Bay, the nation's poorest electorate (see tables with supporting data linked from here), is represented by the docile, experienced and relatively moderate Warren Truss. Rightwing parties like the CEC are represented all too well in his electorate and, because the right are morons, it is likely they will try to knock Truss off or replace him when he retires. Any LNP candidate who replaced Truss would be weaker, and probably more than flirt with far-right ideas, putting Labor, Katter or a solid independent in a solid position to take the seat by default; and
• Solomon, which takes in metropolitan Darwin, is currently represented by Natasha Griggs. The local Coalition franchise, CLP, holds the Territory government and has blown its goodwill in the sort of credibility-bonfire to be expected from rightwingers unprepared for office. People will be looking to send them a warning - and if that means Tony Abbott finds it harder to win, too bad for him. Griggs needs to learn that the reason why you stop to help people in accidents is because you never know when an accident might befall you.

The above list doesn't take into account expected ALP gains in the Gold/Sunshine Coasts or suburban Brisbane. There are as many, if not more, seats in play in the nation's north as/than there are in WesternSydney™ - and not just in Lab-Lib terms. The people there are subject to the same sort of half-witted stereotypes from those of us who don't live there as in WesternSydney™. They also lack services, with the Queenslanders (being the majority of people in Australia's north) having voted against Anna Bligh for reasons other than her government's service provision, and not having realised that Brisbane would be no better disposed to the region under Newman than it had been under Bligh, or Beattie, or anyone else really.

This makes Labor's half-hearted me-tooism understandable.

For a start, Katter is preferencing Labor on the strength of that 'commitment'. Katter is preferencing Labor because his politics are all about a sentimental attachment to Queensland Labor policy of a century ago: protectionist and mercantilist, welcoming-handshake inclined, not necessarily racist but none of your southern celebrating-difference bullshit either. Katter's conservatism comes from Labor having moved away from that. Rudd can talk from that heritage but he can't necessarily live it; Wayne Swan was part of that generation that excised that legacy from Queensland Labor's brand, whereas someone like Gillard didn't even know where to start with that stuff.

Rudd can also do things like disendorse the Labor candidate for Kennedy so that Katter has a freer run. This is a bit of political sophistry for which the press gallery exists in order to report on, but which in this instance they failed to even detect: lumping Kennedy in with a slice of suburban Melbourne is irrelevant, point-missing journalism.

Labor's northern development policy, such as it is, is not limited to viewing local communities as life-support systems for mining companies. The reference to the NBN holds out more promise to the future of communities like Mackay and Karratha than a few jobs at some increasingly mechanised mines or non-jobs in agriculture. If only a car company would build a factory at Port Hedland. Seriously though, the policy should have gone into greater detail, but to do so would require answers from infrastructure-deficient communities elsewhere in the country.

Part of the infrastructure problem for the north involves protecting it from extremes of weather, which will only get more extreme over time. These can no longer be regarded as freaky occasions that incur acts of charity from the rest of the country, but as part of the costs of living and doing business in that part of the country. There was none of that in Labor's policy, nor the Coalition's: but few political commitments are so bipartisan as those involved in avoiding issues that are real, large, and uncertain in resolution.

The NT has long sought to diversify its agricultural sector beyond beef cattle. Such success as it is starting to have is coming at the expense of northern Queensland, offering a similar climate for produce that requires it but with less risk of the cyclonic wipeouts that afflict that region. Producers in the region can offer Asian markets neither the mass production volumes nor niche specialisations such as pesticide/fertiliser-free certified-organic niches. From a national perspective, depleting established agricultural communities in northern Queensland to boost those in the Territory is a zero-sum game, yet any post-facto justification of a northern development policy will tout NT agriculture as part of the "good news story" to pitch to gullible journalists.

The biggest thing that the Federal government could do to boost communities in northern Australia is to station more ADF personnel there. ADF personnel are skilled and disciplined and get paid a fraction of what equivalent workers get in the mines - and in times of low unemployment the ADF can barely meet recruitment levels while maintaining standards.

The Great Barrier Reef is a greater economic resource than almost any other use to which that area can be put, including oil exploration. Yet, any credible economic (and hence population) plan for northern Queensland will include creating shipping channels to ports such as Gladstone and Mackay, which will end up segmenting the Reef and leaving each segment worse off environmentally. The reefs and other environmentally-sensitive areas of coastal northern WA are under still greater pressure from ports and offshore developments. Again, neither the Coalition nor Labor address those issues (except in the Coalition's fatuous and self-defeating term "green tape"), which reveals the limits on their commitment to making northern development happen. And before you talk about the Greens saying no to dredging and whatever else - it also reveals their lack of commitment to northern development, too.

Labor, the Coalition, and the Greens don't have much to say about engaging Aboriginal communities in the area with regard to economic or community development in the region, or on any other issue really.

Northern development plans have a wider purpose, however, than what's in them and whether or not it adds up. They're about respect for people who are few and marginalised. They're not stupid: they know that decades of northern development plans have been floated and died, and these most recent ones will almost certainly go the same way. In that sense, northern development is a bit like gay marriage - a small minority of the population is even affected, and a fair subset of those are don't appreciate what's on offer, but they seek the gesture nonetheless in the name of equality and respect. As with gay marriage, most Australians are well disposed to the idea of northern development, and only a stingy, nasty few are actively hostile.

In a political environment of programmatic specificity and rigid adherence to talking points, northern Australia provides the impression of blue-sky, limitless vision. You can look at tablelands and golden sands and see anything you want, I suppose. You can see Rudd or Abbott as Prime Minister. Whatever else might happen, in northern Australia as elsewhere, is in the eye of the beholder.

Coalition road split leadership shock

If this article had been written by a Murdoch journalist for a Murdoch outlet, and the Murdoch outlets were as down on the Coalition as they are on Labor at the moment, it would read like this:

HAPLESS, HOPELESS AND HELPLESS TONY ABBOTT has been undermined yet again, this time by his transport spokesman, over his promise that Coalition funding of $4 billion for big projects will put cranes over Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane within a year of its election.

Mr Abbott said that he wanted to be a prime minister "who revels in seeing cranes over our cities, who revels in seeing bulldozers at work" and has pledged that three big projects, including the WestConnex road in Sydney and the east-west road link in Melbourne, would be "under way within 12 months of a change of government". Today, Mr Abbott is not so much revelling as reeling after an interview with the Coalition transport spokesman, Warren Truss, conceded a start date for the projects could be further away - if at all.

"The project in Melbourne ... will require considerable time associated with planning and various approvals to get under way - the Sydney one as well. It is part of a bigger project now, and so there will be time ... I think it will take at least a couple of years and maybe longer for those two to start construction," said Mr Truss.

This latest twist comes after a sequence of poor polls for Mr Abbott, where more Australian women would rather play footsie with a blue-ringed octopus than have him as Prime Minister. Given his inability to lay a glove on the Prime Minister during the AWU fizzer, and after serious doubts over his recent campaigns against Peter Slipper, Craig Thomson and the carbon tax, the last thing Tony Abbott needed was to have his flimsy policy platform white-anted.

Truss' off-hand references to "the project in Melbourne" and "the Sydney one" are telling. Holding a relatively safe seat in southeastern Queensland, Truss can afford to be insouciant about these projects. Like fellow banana-bender Barnaby Joyce, Truss has a folksy disdain for policy detail and hopes this will translate into the kind of popular support enjoyed by the state's Newman government last March.

Mr Abbott had promised $1.5 billion to the WestConnex motorway, $1.5 billion to the east-west link and $1 billion to the Gateway extension road in Brisbane.

The O'Farrell government has committed $1.8 billion to the WestConnex road, expected to cost $10 billion to $15 billion.

But it is uncertain where the rest of the funding will be found, even if a large proportion comes from tolls on the motorway, a 33-kilometre road between Auburn in Sydney's west that will connect to the airport and the M5 motorway in the south west. The government has set up a project office to come up with a detailed case for WestConnex by the middle of next year. It had said construction would start before the state election in March 2015.

Given Australia's fairly poor record in toll road modelling and the fact that the companies behind projects such as the cross-city and Lane Cove tunnels in Sydney and the Clem7 tunnel in Brisbane have ended up in administration, Mr Truss said the Coalition was looking for innovative ways a Coalition government could attract private investment for the projects.

"I've been approached with lots of ideas about how the government could share the investment risk on these projects," he said.

"I am not attracted to proposals where the government takes all the risk and the private sector gets all the profit. But risk sharing is something I am prepared to look at". Many of the people who approach people like Mr Truss with ideas such as these as constituents of Mr Abbott (for a waspish sneer at such people, see Miranda Albrechtsen on p. 19).

"We will have to find ways to leverage private-sector funding - particularly the Sydney and Melbourne projects are likely to require a mix of Commonwealth, state and private funding", said Mr Truss. This overlooks the fact that Mr Abbott has already committed to funding, and that journalists reported this on the assumption that the sums had already been done.

Now Mr Truss - who would be Deputy Prime Minister in an Abbott government - is casting doubt over the very idea of careful planning for major capital expenditures on infrastructure projects. "This is further proof that the Coalition is in turmoil", said a senior Canberra observer. "If the Coalition does not succeed, it runs the risk of failure".

"Investors say since toll finance projects haven't gone so well recently, they want an arrangement where the government takes some risk if toll revenue turns out to be less ...

Once a patronage estimate has been established there might be a formula under which a certain percentage of risk and profit is shared with the government, with the percentage getting bigger or smaller depending on the size of the divergence ... I haven't said yes or no to that yet but I am looking at it," Mr Truss said.

Neither Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey nor Shadow Finance Minister Andrew Robb could be contacted for comment.

This overlooks the fact that the last Labor government in NSW spent a decade bending over forwards to make unprofitable toll road projects happen. Truss was federal transport minister during this period, and during the Clem7 debacle. It is clear that nothing has been learned from this expensive experience, and that there is no hope for a better future for infrastructure projects as a result.

Under pressure on the leadership front, Mr Abbott needs these comments from Mr Truss like a hole in the head. Coalition hopes of winning support in Sydney and Melbourne must be in doubt thanks to Mr Truss' airy comments. The Coalition needs to fix this perception of division and uncertainty - and if Mr Abbott won't, someone else will do it for him.

Decisions from the Coalition

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don’t much care where -" said Alice.

"Then it doesn’t matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"- so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you’re sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

- Lewis Carroll Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The Federal Coalition starts 2012 on the horns of a number of policy dilemmas. In each of these there are good reasons for going one way or another, but in each of these decisions will have to be made and defended in such a way that makes them look like a credible alternative government. The Coalition is ill-equipped to make those decisions, and to stand by them, which will mean this year won't be one on which they'll look back with unalloyed fondness. There might be vicarious triumphs in the states, but federally this is a year where decisions get tougher the more they are delayed.

These decisions will mean that those hoping the Coalition would go another way will be disappointed. With a consistent framework to operate by and a tough hide, you can get past this disappointment and, if the disappointed are supporters, mumble vague promises of compensation at some later stage. Howard did this all the time and so does every successful political leader. Abbott, however, will put his seemingly random and lightweight decisions out there in the hope that people are impressed with:

• The sheer damn firmness to which he holds to his decisions, and the boldness with which he ascribes his decisions;
• The sneering with which he puts down alternatives not chosen - not so cutting that the opposition withers and dies, nor witty enough to leaven the disappointment;
• The sheer athleticism with which he backflips and pikes out of decisions which turn out later to hurt him; and
• The sincerity-veneer that he applies to foreseeable questions that, well, just because he changed his mind on [this] doesn't mean he'll do so on [that].

First, there's this dog's breakfast written up as a meaty offering. Australia needs both farms and coal seam gas. Australia needs foreign investment, in agriculture as well as other parts of the economy. But for me the real tragedy was this:

In an exclusive interview with the Herald, Mr Hockey identified the government's $36 billion national broadband network as the Coalition's big political target this year.

Mr Hockey also unveiled the Coalition's three-point economic plan for the year and a "strong, positive agenda", following a year in which the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, was criticised for being too negative.

Only an experienced press gallery journo could write those two paragraphs and fail to realise that the hopes for the latter were pretty much cancelled out by the reality of the former.

"I mean, it's multiples of anything that's ever been off-budget … it detracts from productivity," he said.

Much of World War II and the Snowy Mountains Scheme, to name two, were off-budget. The rollout of the national copper-wire telephone network in the 1950s failed to account for data transfer or for rental income from a Singaporean-owned competitor. Lift your eyes above the budget and speak for the nation!

In terms of 'detracting from productivity', the business case for NBN can be made simply by getting the club foot of Telstra off the nation's throat. All those retailers who bellyache about the internet (while, like Harvey Norman, selling people the means to get onto the internet and avoid lazy and bloated retailers like Harvey Norman) will be kicked into touch by the NBN. Fewer rentseekers - just imagine that, you can feel the surge in productivity already.

Mr Hockey vowed to increase accountability of the government's off-budget initiatives, including the broadband network, the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the planned National Dental Scheme.

That's the way to go positive: skimp on the halt, the lame, the snaggle-toothed, and create FUD about policies to rob them even of hope.

Workplace relations was the subject of an internal Liberal Party brawl in September when the former workplace relations minister Peter Reith urged Mr Abbott to make it a front-and-centre issue.

Mr Abbott ignored the call and ruled out a return to statutory individual contracts.

Well, that's that. Obviously the issue of how millions of Australians work and what they get in return is now settled for all time. Joe Hockey is a  former workplace relations minister; why does nobody ask him about WorkChoices and future options for regulating workplaces to ensure growing productivity?

There is a case to be made for a light touch IR system, like that of the Fraser Government. The Conciliation & Arbitration Commission and all that it represented reached its peak under Fraser. Having smashed the ALP at the ballot box and in Parliament, the softly-softly approach to what used to be known as industrial relations gave the President of the ACTU, Bob Hawke, a rails run as the Fraser Government's most potent political threat.

On the other hand, there's also a case to regulate the workplace relations system in a different way to the way it's regulated now. The clearer they are about that different way, the less vulnerable the Coalition will be to spectres of WorkChoices, or the one-two punch from the broader labour movement (such as it is).

Of course, fearless journalist Jacqueline Maley went in hard, didn't she? No, she changed the topic:

Mr Hockey revealed a review of foreign investment guidelines would be part of the Coalition's economic policy agenda.

Look over there! If there isn't a Walkley in that, I don't know what is (seriously, I don't).

A Senate inquiry chaired by the Liberal senator Bill Heffernan is also looking into the issue.

And isn't that the hallmark of political effectiveness. The Father of Agriculture in Northern Australia himself. The man who erased Michael Kirby from history. All piss and wind. Yes indeedy, if you're concerned about foreign investment in Australian agriculture, you can wait for the Heffernan Report into the issue or you can help yourself to a nice deep draught of fuck-all ahead of time and avoid the wait.

The real worry for the Coalition, though, is this:

Mr Hockey said "some" of the Coalition's policies would be submitted to the Parliamentary Budget Office for costing.

During the 2010 election campaign, the opposition refused to have its policies costed by Treasury, opting instead to have them assessed by a West Australian accountancy firm, WHK Horwath.

The accountants who completed the costings have since been found to have breached professional standards and were fined for misrepresenting the costings as an audit.

That's right, accounting/consulting firms: if the Federal Opposition approach you, run for the sake of your professional reputations. They will screw you and leave you in the dirt: don't work for these people. George Megalogenis was right when he said:

For those on the Coalition side with longer memories, the antagonism echoes the Whitlam era hostility towards Treasury in the 70s.

The Coalition should get over itself and learn to respect the economists.

The lesson of the Whitlam government is that whenever one side sees the bureaucracy as the enemy, it knows less about governing that it realises.

Quite so: you aren't ready for Treasury, you aren't ready for government. When Treasury does fall short (as it did over the mining tax) it made the mistake of getting ahead of the politicians rather than supporting them in making decisions; this doesn't mean that the best Treasury is one that's willing to play Horwath-style patsy to The Situation. The Coalition aren't ready for government until they can strike that balance between leading Treasury and working with it.

Then there's another longterm dilemma of governing this country, the car industry. There are lots of good arguments for an Australian vehicle manufacturing industry, but if you make them you're missing a big opportunity to cut expenditure. You can't really complain that Australia isn't embracing an innovative future while you're siphoning public funds to donate to US shareholders.

Yes, people are buying fewer Commodores and Falcons, but apparently there is this wonderful export industry for such vehicles which, though apparently luicrative, still requires handouts. I quite like this elegant proposal from Nicholas Gruen seeking to create a niche where there is currently only a rut. Not only would the Coalition would reject it out of hand, there is no evidence that it even entered their minds:

But the Coalition’s acting industry spokesman, Eric Abetz, said Australians “don’t mind some support from government”.

Great! Let's remember that the next time Eric whinges about Centrelink recipients, or Fair Work Australia cracking down on free market champions like Qantas.

And the man helping review the federal Coalition’s industry policy in the environment of a resources-driven high dollar, frontbencher Ian Macfarlane, also said Australia needed to retain a sophisticated manufacturing capability. But he would not be drawn on the issue of subsidies.

Let's leave aside the fact that this is a poor article. The only evidence of a "Lib split" on the issue are Liberals with the bulk (if not the whole) of their political careers behind them. Macfarlane and Abetz might think they're clever by holding an inquiry with the end result predetermined, but what's clever for them is not necessarily clever for the country, or indeed for the Liberal Party.

The Australian car industry is mostly locked up in the sort of electorates where Labor wins overwhelmingly and the Greens come second. The exceptions are two Federal electorates, Corangamite (Vic, on the fringes of Geelong) and Wakefield (SA, including Gawler and Elizabeth): both marginal Labor-held seats at the last two elections, eminently winnable by a resurgent Liberal Party.

There has been a great deal made of the "Howard battlers", blue-collar workers who vote Liberal rather than Labor. These tend to be people who are self-employed or who recognise that their employment is contingent on the business cycle generally and their bosses' ability to reel in business in particular. Those who cling to cradle-to-grave jobs from big corporates or government still vote Labor. There is no advantage for the Coalition in maintaining thousands of Labor voters in marginal electorates.

Then, there's the fact that the most powerful advocates for the Australian car industry are two unions who, as Crikey recently observed, so lack confidence in their own members that they don't rate them as an investment. Two of Labor's greatest mainstays: why are they even a consideration for the Coalition? This is the press release I'm waiting to see:

The Leader of the Opposition today announced that the Australian car industry no longer requires subsidies from public funds and will rely upon income from customers from hereon in, just like every other business does.

"And if Paul Howes and Dave Oliver don't like it, they can go and fuck themselves", he added.

There will be difficult decisions required for all of these issues, and it's part of getting ready for government that you can manage interest groups. There is a line between steadfastness of purpose and obstinacy, and Abbott is on the wrong side of this because he has no discernible principles on economics:

• He's trying to play an unconvincing double game on workplace relations. 
• He seems to think a farmers-vs-miners stoush can simply be settled in favour of farmers (well, until the next time Gina rattles her jewelry). 
• He really thinks that the rolling program of cash for cars is just something Australian politicians have to keep doing and put up with, like similar flare-ups over their own pay from time to time. 

There are difficult decisions to be made over the coming year, the quality of which put in doubt to related questions that some might like to think are already settled: do the Coalition understand the issues facing this country, and can they govern Australia?

Wait for the rest of your life

In this article, Amanda Vanstone is pretending to a wisdom she clearly lacks. She has somehow become less knowledgeable about how government works for the country and the economy than she did in Opposition.

Schools, research and health will have to wait till we pay off our debt.

We've been here before. When the debt gets paid off, people like Amanda Vanstone regard education and health as fripperies and call for tax cuts, which means that schools, research and health get cut no matter what.

In 1996, Amanda Vanstone became Education Minister in the newly elected Federal government. She came and spoke to a NSW Young Liberal thing which I attended. Moderate liberals of my generation regarded her as Good Old Mandy, whose Heart was in the Right Place and whose abrasiveness when riled was entertaining; she was one of the few moderates who'd get up on her hind legs and give as good as she got rather than smirk her way to irrelevance. Young Libs five, ten years younger than me who were at uni saw her as the psycho bitch who shredded the education budget and made it impossible for Liberal students to get elected to student organisations. The tension in that room was palpable and something of an ambush for the organisers, who started off sanguine and moved to alarm through the course of the night. It was like those eastern European leaders a few years earlier who had addressed crowds of sullen workers for years only to be suddenly confronted with boos and abuse.

Education and healthcare are major generators of internal demand and of our economic future, you dingbat! They are not optional extras.

When the global financial crisis hit, governments stepped into action to keep their economies turning over. That was a good thing.

It sure was. Strange that the Liberals opposed it though.

But the money did not come out of thin air. Governments went into more debt.

As opposed to what, higher taxes? If you don't support economic stimulus, have the guts to do what Turnbull and Abbott did and say that you oppose it no matter how it comes. The idea that economic stimulus should be "a good thing" but any measure to bring it about is 'bad' is a sorry attempt to box clever.

Many believe that our government spent far more than it needed to and spent it unwisely. We now pay $5 billion a year, or $20 billion in a four-year budget cycle, in interest alone. If we start to climb out of the problem and pay back the same each year in principal, it becomes $10 billion a year and $40 billion over the budget cycle. That's billions our economy is generating that we can't spend on medical research, schools and other things.

I doubt that every cent the Howard government spent could be accused of being carefully targeted, Amanda. The economy wouldn't have the ability to generate debt repayments if it had hit the wall, which it would have if it hadn't been fiscally stimulated in 2008.

But some governments still seem addicted to spending beyond their means ... In Europe, the problem with the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) debt has been understood for some time.

Actually, that acronym is PIIGS - the other "I" stands for Italy, to which Vanstone was Australian Ambassador for some years. If she's going to give us some insight into the European financial crisis you'd think she'd be in a position to do so. Alternatively, if she's going to pull her punches - well, that would be a first for Amanda Vanstone, but basically the idea that she should be so strident about Greece or Portugal being "addicted to spending beyond their means" while skating around Italy - a much bigger economy and a much bigger problem, in both financial and regulatory terms.

The PIIGS countries had levied relatively low taxes. Each of those countries had established tax-avoidance mechanisms for people who had both great capacity to pay and much to be grateful to government for, gratitude for which was expressed not as tax but as political donations or bribes. To say that lower taxes are an answer to our current predicament is less valid than it was four years ago. When Vanstone does turn her attention to Italy, she fails to note that it has a populist conservative government with little in the way of core economic policy. Cheer up Australia, it could be worse.

Note a recurring theme of this article:

The problems facing the world economy are not new. They have just been getting more attention of late ... In Europe, the problem with the ... debt has been understood for some time ... I know firsthand how little Australians care for being told they are no longer getting something for nothing, or as cheaply as they did in the past.

This is designed to create the impression that Vanstone knows what she's talking about, which she doesn't. If they're so well understood, you'd hope that the responses would be smarter than they are. Vanstone might have copped some disappointment from those who'd done well, but what made people really angry was that she cut things that were important and productive. If you're going to make this narrative All About Amanda, however, then one angry person is the same as any other and they could all rack off.

Cuts are easier to take if there's a unifying narrative: from the PIIGS, and the Howard government, we learn that if there are just swingeing cuts then it just builds resentments which play out in all sorts of unexpected and unmanageable ways.

I was part of a government that did the hard yards of finding savings to put our budget back into the black after Labor last had its hand in the till. And then we paid off debt, and set up the Future Fund.

But you didn't restore funding to health or education, did you?

This is an idle exercise. It assumes that nobody who has never been a government minister is allowed to criticise the actions of government, or that any and all such examination of public issues must necessarily be vacuous (a wish list? Really?). I left out the "barbie and a good red" because it reinforces the idleness and indulgence Vanstone is trying to convey, and definitely not because Vanstone herself can pack away the red when she chose to do so.

... in the last budget, Treasurer Wayne Swan was asking to borrow another $50 billion. With that spending record, what will we do if GFC2 breaks out? What if Asia stumbles and we have a few years of lower commodity prices?

Luckily we had the stimulus in 2008 otherwise we'd be stuffed, eh Amanda?

We could all help by avoiding the indulgence shown by Europeans who keep demanding more.

In particular, billion-dollar bludges like this have to be knocked on the head. Education and health aren't bludges or indulgences, they're central to the present and future of the nation - in a way that, say, The Situation isn't.

The government should have the strength to restrict spending and the capacity to stop wasting money ... Swan recognises the need for tweaking.

To that end, the government must not be run by Tony Abbott, Andrew Robb, Barnaby Joyce and Joe Hockey, and must include Swan.

Also, it could get on with helping to boost productivity by recognising its industrial relations overkill.

Part of boosting productivity involves having the clowns who ran Foster's and Bluescope into the ground sent to Christmas Island, or somewhere other than in positions of power over Australian workplaces. If there are industrial relations changes to be made (see my article coming soon elsewhere on this), chances are Swan and his people will make a better fist of it than the clueless and risk-averse Liberals.

Vanstone started the article attempting to create a fug of certainty, and ends it with a shriek of a question. In between she wants to create a narrative of her own wisdom, and that of the Howard government, versus the stumblebum incumbents. It doesn't work and shows the government in a more favourable light than she might have intended. When you consider that there have been more developments in health and education in the past year (despite the budgetary position and the hung parliament) than there was in eleven years with Amanda looking on - it seems that Good Old Mandy's bark and bite are not what they were.

Gold and soil and wealth for toil

Who'll manage our sovereign mineral wealth? That's the answer to who'll win the next Federal election. Labor have put the next election on the carbon price and the mining tax. The Coalition, it would seem, are softening us up for a sovereign wealth fund (SWF).

I got halfway through writing an article like this, but not as good, to show how the Coalition had bet everything on being able to knock off the carbon tax - only to find that Jane Shaw had already written it. Read Shaw's piece, it's good; see you when you get back.

Shaw is right about the frantic attempts to get rid of Thomson. If the Coalition had been smart they would have gone after him during the negotiations with the independents: Crook, Wilkie and Oakeshott would have found it difficult to support Labor and Gillard would probably have forced Thomson out for the sake of keeping them on board. If Thomson survives until the election then Ross Cameron (hi Ross! I know you Google your name often and end up here) will be absolutely spewing.

This article by Josh Frydenberg is the tipoff. There are two things you need to realise about Frydenberg. First, he's intensely ambitious. Second, he's not smart enough to live up to the expectations placed upon him. He works hard at nothing other than networking, and he's a sillyhead. It's a poor article and normally I'd rip straight in, but there's a broader issue here to which Josh thoughtfully alerts us:

... the calls for a sovereign wealth fund from senior business leaders like Mike Smith at ANZ, Ralph Norris while heading CBA and CSL's Brian McNamee ... the IMF and Australia's own Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens ... OECD secretary-general Angel Gurria .. my colleague Malcolm Turnbull has made a thoughtful and considered speech on the subject, and Joe Hockey ... Both are more attune to the debate than the government.

And that's the heart of the article: arse-covering and name-dropping, an authentic product of its author.

Seriously though, there might well be a case for a sovereign wealth fund. It's just that Josh isn't the one to make it. The first quarter of the article is a nice rundown of Australia's macroeconomic situation. Then there's this:

Ensuring the competitiveness of our manufacturing base and other important exchange rate-exposed sectors like tourism will not be easy.

No, it won't be easy, and that's why Josh won't refer to those industries again in this article.

As far as tourism goes, what more do they want? If ever there was a lazy industry that has to be weaned off the public teat that has to be it. We've given them the Olympics and the Rugby World Cup three years later. The renovation craze that swept pubs, licensed clubs and people's homes has bypassed the tourism sector. They are still relying on products from another age as good enough for the likes of us, still keening for Americans when millions in Asia have the time and the money to come see us but aren't being pitched to by dull-witted government tourism bureaucrats and the spivs they notionally serve.

Workplace reform and productivity gains will be key.

No they won't, they'll be fiddling at the margins. As I said recently, if the employees at Bluescope worked for nothing it would still be run into the ground.

But at the same time, Australia has a unique opportunity.

Yes it does. That's Josh's code for "let's move on from hard issues".

We must save some of the proceeds of the boom and invest them for a time when they are needed most.

When will that time come? How will we know when it has arrived and what does Maximum Need look like?

Are the guys who rolled over so completely on the mining tax really the guys who'll stand up and demand a sovereign wealth fund? Are they strong enough to fend off vested interests from pecking it to death?

Imagine we had a sovereign wealth fund today:

• Should we have given SWF money to the flooding of our third-biggest city? You'll remember how the Coalition wailed about a flood levy.
• Should we have given SWF money to build education facilities? What if we could guarantee those projects had a 97% acceptance rate?
• Should we give SWF money to high-speed rail? What about the Christchurch quake victims or those burnt out of Marysville? Maybe a Tasmanian AFL team (you know, productive assets).

Let's look at those engines of global growth, China and India. What are they investing in? Infrastructure: roads, rail, optic fibre networks, education, urban communities. What are they not investing in? Shutting apples out of import markets, and whatever other pissant measures that Josh and his pals consider to be extremely important.

Why not actually invest in productive assets directly? Why bother setting up some Great Artesian Fund that just second-guesses speculative investments? Why not identify major projects that promise a productive return to the country as a whole, and invest in those? We have a number of shocking roads in Sydney that were built by merchant bankers, there is no reason why we can't have better infrastructure funded directly from mining income.

International experience indicates that a sovereign wealth fund for a commodity-driven economy like ours could be an appropriate vehicle towards this end.

Sovereign wealth funds are not new. Kuwait established one in 1953, Abu Dhabi in 1977 and Norway in 1990. Owned by the government, these funds and others like them in Chile, Russia and Qatar hold, manage or administer a diverse set of financial assets in the pursuit of commercial objectives.

It's hardly a ringing endorsement to say that a SWF "could be appropriate". You'll notice that Josh has neglected to mention the SWFs in France and Ireland, which are stuffed chock-full of - um, what?

A sovereign wealth fund can perform a number of different functions: it can be the source of long-term wealth creation, otherwise known as intergenerational equity, or have a shorter-term objective to stabilise revenue cycles.

In the case of the former, when the finite resources run out, future generations will still benefit from the wealth created.

This can be done by investing directly in productive assets. Texas and California have pretty much run out of oil but they still have the educational institutions and the hi-tech economies that came from shrewd and direct investments. God only knows what those states would have spent a SWF on.

And in the case of the latter, when commodity prices take a downward turn, there will be money available for governments to call on should it be required.

Just like Ireland and France.

In both instances countries that use the significant reserves of a sovereign wealth fund to invest offshore may see downward pressure on their exchange rate ...

May see? First he's ambivalent about whether it's appropriate at all, now he's not sure whether it will have any sort of effect of the kind so often advanced as a prime reason to set up a SWF. Don't go cold on us Josh!

In terms of determining the best fit for Australia, Chile's sovereign wealth funds are quite instructive. In 2006, they morphed their existing Copper Stabilisation Fund into two new funds: first, a pension/savings fund, which they seeded with $600 million and which receives 0.2 per cent of the previous year's GDP on an annual basis.

In the event the fiscal surplus is greater than 0.2 per cent, the fund can receive a maximum of up to 0.5 per cent of GDP. Significantly, no withdrawals are allowed from this fund for the first 10 years.

The second fund, which began with $5bn and now has more than $20bn, is the recipient of fiscal surpluses when they are above 1 per cent of GDP.

Given Chile's strong commodity-based economy, both these funds are designed to provide the government with fiscal flexibility should the commodity cycle turn.

Why two funds? If the first is about pension/savings, what does the other one do? Why are commodities less valuable depending on whether or not the government has a surplus? How is Chile's manufacturing and tourism bearing up under all of this: thriving, is it?

I could look up the answers to all those questions but I'm not the one making the case for an Australian SWF. Given that the government can't withdraw money it doesn't provide any sort of flexibility: it isn't an option.

Domestic superannuation fund is not a sovereign wealth fund as [Shorten] likes to tell us. It provides no insurance against a downturn in the commodity cycle; nor does it impact the exchange rate in the way a major sovereign wealth fund can.

Australia's superannuation is the fourth-largest such fund in the world and keeps on accruing so long as fund members stay employed. It is possible that unemployment could rise coincidentally with a commodity price fall but the two are not linked. It's worrying that the exchange rate impact still seems to be a matter of theory rather than fact.

Joe Hockey has called the sovereign wealth fund idea the "Maserati of public policy".

What could this mean? It's flashy, all the merchant bankers want one but it breaks down regularly?

the Coalition, when last in government, put in place a Future Fund to meet the unfunded superannuation liabilities of commonwealth public servants ...

That was from the sale of Telstra, and why were those liabilities unfunded in the first place?

... now, five years on, Australia should actively consider a new, broader sovereign wealth fund as a means of securing its long-term economic interests.

But are our longterm economic interests really served best by measures other than investment in infrastructure?

This could be the answer to the great gaping hole where the heart of the Liberal pitch at the next election should be. If they are going to cut $70b from the budget then they can't promise much (well, they can if the press gallery keep letting them get away with it). When BHP Billiton announced a record profit immediately after crying poor over a RSPT, and when miners celebrated their great victory by squabbling amongst themselves, the idea of getting more money out of our finite resources took on considerable popular appeal. Thankfully, though, Josh is pushing it back on the list of priorities:

Before establishing a sovereign wealth fund, a number of relevant issues would need to be canvassed around governance, mandates and the overall opportunity cost involved.

Crucially, it would also be necessary to first return the budget to surplus and pay down Labor's $107bn of government debt.

He's run this idea by Joe Hockey and it hasn't exactly been seized upon with inarticulate cries of delight. Any idea, good or bad, can be shunted to the back of the queue with this fixation on debt and deficit. Hockey saw how Peter Costello established his authority over Howard's ministry in '96 by telling them what they could and couldn't do with their shiny new portfolios, and he wants some of that for himself. That imperative has clearly come ahead of one big idea that could lend a bit of credibility to promises in need of funding (or the appearance thereof).

Watch for the idea of a sovereign wealth fund to become more and more prominent from the Liberal side. Any idea floated by Turnbull and Frydenberg has deniability for The Situation; candidates will be unable to help themselves in indicating that it might be a good idea, allowing Liberals to claim the appealing aspects without facing the scrutiny that comes from an official policy (assuming, of course, that the press gallery get back into the business of scrutinising what the Liberals come out with).

In terms of the rights and wrongs of a SWF I had to go hunting for stuff like this. It was simply not possible to trust Josh Frydenberg and his half-baked equivocations on this important issue. As with nuclear power, a SWF needs to be highly and forcefully regulated in the face of powerful interests. Josh isn't the man to do that or even propose it with any credibility.

This isn't to say that the idea is dead, far from it; Frydenberg has a reputation as a thinker and a smart operator among the journosphere, provided you have no experience of thinking nor any sense for a tragedy waiting to happen. In this environment a sovereign wealth fund is an easy sell. Expect the Liberals, their camp-followers in the press gallery and more than a few Queenslanders to be all over it.