Same-same

Tony Abbott will never, ever pass same-sex marriage into law while he is Prime Minister. He will support those who resist it so long as he lives. All the Canberra-insider hints that he might accommodate it are just bullshit, beating up a story that does not exist.

When John Howard became Prime Minister, Australia's political momentum toward a republic was growing. Howard shored up his monarchist base and invoked his authority as leader by pretty much declaring that Liberals who supported this cause were not Liberals at all. Liberals lose office when they're seen to be on the wrong side of history, and nothing is truer to the Liberal tradition than wanting to win elections: Howard divided republicans and saw off any threat a united anti-monarchy movement might have made to the political structure which he had come to master.

Same-sex marriage advocates have done everything you would hope in a democracy to promote their cause. They have written letters to and met with local MPs. They have raised money and organised peacefully. Any demonstrations have been polite affairs: nobody has been arrested, no conflagrational symbolism as with draft cards and brassieres in a bygone era. No same-sex marriage opponent has suffered personally for their views as Stephanie McCarthy has suffered for being who she is. Proponents may even believe that Abbott is giving them some sort of tacit support, and some Liberal MPs may be under a similar misapprehension.

They have been clever in framing the issue as being about equal rights. But Abbott can frame as well as anyone, and the press gallery are helpless as kittens before his framing (even especially the 'experienced' ones).

It is not reasonable to expect that a Prime Minister will sit back and allow legislation to which they're fundamentally opposed to just slip past into law. It has never happened. Again, when Howard was PM the press gallery mused how ironic it would be that lifelong monarchist Howard would usher in a republic: there was no republic, and hence no irony. Now the same people muse how ironic it might be for Christianist homophobe Abbott to usher in same-sex marriage:

• Have they learned nothing?
• Are they stupid?
• Why listen to them?

There are many in the Coalition who feel as Abbott feels about this issue. There are those in the ALP, and on the crossbenches, who oppose same-sex marriage too, and they will cast their votes as they see fit. Like any politician, Abbott shores up his base when his overall position is weak. Any credit Abbott gets from rock-ribbed conservatives on terrorism and the ensuing loss of civil liberties (inside or beyond the Liberal Party) would be wasted were he to let same-sex marriage pass.

Just four months ago, Abbott faced down a leadership challenge. Nobody believes that he might sit back and allow a piece of legislation to pass to which he was fundamentally opposed, and that such passage would not reflect negatively on his leadership. This is where we get to Abbott's framing, and why that framing counters the equal-rights framing by same-sex marriage proponents.

Abbott was being too smart by half when he insisted that the only same-sex marriage bill that would pass was one he would move himself, and that any other bill (initiated by Shorten or Leyonhjelm or anyone else) was just 'posturing'. He will never move such a bill himself. The idea that he might is itself just posturing. So too are the timid announcements from Coalition MPs who say they'll vote for same-sex marriage if there's a free vote: there won't be a free vote, so the promise is hollow.

Let's use a sporting analogy to illustrate Abbott's yeah-nah position. Let's assume that former Carlton coach Mick Malthouse could and would have insisted that his team would only take the field if they played with a ball that he owned. Let's also assume there was no penalty for forfeiting games. Malthouse would refuse to let any of his balls onto the field, Carlton players would declare themselves undefeated, other teams would play to their supporters by expressing a willingness to play (one or two Carlton players might do the same). Assuming AFL journalists are as bad as the press gallery, they'd hail him as a wily genius. Nothing would change - and to leave the analogy, that's what Abbott wants, to change nothing. Happy to have the charade of change, happy to frame any and all change as a charade really - but nothing will change so long as Abbott has his way.

Same-sex marriage is not a 'distraction'. Given that Australia is exposed to the ebbs and swells (and reefs) of the global economy, given that the government can't do much about interest rates or property prices or even tax, pretty much everything the federal government does is symbolic. They don't accept that their opponents can do symbolic politics that resonates with people. This is a government that lives or dies by culture war. They love a bit of symbolism. They just don't like having its most potent weapons turned against them.

Many Liberals are as opposed to same-sex marriage as Abbott is; many, if not most, are not. Surely these are the people who will join with most of the ALP, a few crossbenchers and all* the Greens and pass same-sex marriage into law? No.

Those Liberals can take or leave same-sex marriage. Let's face it, nobody who was truly concerned about same-sex marriage voted for the Coalition in 2013. There are no votes to be lost for not voting for same-sex marriage, or engaging in parliamentary shenanigans so that the vote doesn't come up.

Liberals are primarily concerned about looking like a leaderless rabble. They are in government because they framed Labor for acting like that (and the press gallery love a bit of framing). Any same-sex marriage talk makes Abbott look weak. By toeing the party line on same-sex marriage they are protecting their leader, and nobody expects any more or less of any Liberal. If anyone breaks the party line, or if there is no line to toe (i.e. a conscience vote), you put Liberal MPs in a position where their personal moral positions are exposed and have to be justified.

While previous generations of Liberals were more than happy to do develop and justify their own positions on broad social issues, today's line-toeing Liberals regard personal beliefs as an indulgence. Individual-freedom-to-the-max Liberals like Amanda Vanstone get nowhere in today's Liberal Party - just ask John "Third Preference" Roskam. On the rare occasions when the government allows voices from the backbench into the media, it puts up careerist sucks like George Christensen or Andrew Nikolic rather than randoms like Andrew Laming or Dennis Jensen.

Broad philosophical positioning used to be core business for a political party, now it is outsourced to consultants. If you want to know what it means to be a Liberal in 2015, don't ask Tony Abbott or Julie Bishop or Mike Baird: ask Mark Textor.

Don't believe Peter Reith either. Reith opposed four binding referenda in 1988 because they would limit the scope of professional politicians like himself. He spent more than twenty years in politics doing nothing to advance the cause of direct democracy; the nearest he came was to use high office to pollute democracy by lying about asylum seekers.

If the marriage reform is not dealt with this year, political backroom advisers will encourage politicians to focus on bread-and-butter issues, which do not include same-sex marriage.

Rubbish. In his budget reply speech Bill Shorten talked a lot about science and technology, which also lies outside what Reith would consider "bread-and-butter issues". The reason why he did that was to frame Abbott as unprepared for the future, of not being open to or equipped for its challenges. Same-sex marriage fits that narrative perfectly.

Consider the past three Labor victories over Coalition governments (2007, 1983, 1972) - in no case did Labor win on "bread-and-butter issues". In every case Labor won on the perception that it was more flexible and credible than the obstinate incumbents in dealing with an uncertain future.

For supporters of reform, waiting for politicians to give the public the right to have a say is a mistake.

It's begging the question to claim a popular vote is the only way the Marriage Act can be changed.

To ensure reform the best approach is to demand a plebiscite.

A plebiscite is a non-binding vote. Proponents of same-sex marriage want real legislative change, which won't be achieved with a plebiscite. Strangely, those who want a plebiscite on same-sex marriage are dead against the same measure for a republic.

If the reform or its timing is left in the hands of politicians, there is no guarantee.

Yes there is: you replace the politicians. It's called democracy. Then again, Eleanor Robertson has a good point about learned helplessness, and if not this what? Here we start getting all Letter-from-Birmingham-Jail about the very question of effecting political change.

... both sides are struggling with the issue.

Rubbish. Labor's leader and deputy leader made their position clear. Senior Labor figures who might have opposed same-sex marriage, like Tony Burke, declare themselves supporters while none are going the other way.

During the republic debate in the late '90s, people like Reith insisted that Labor was riven over that issue; I am yet to meet a monarchist Labor voter, and I suspect Reith is happy for such a bunyip to stay out of his sight too.

There is no government bill. Tony Abbott has not said if there will be a party room discussion on the issue. The Coalition party room has not yet decided to allow a conscience vote. They may stick to their current position.

This is Scott Morrison's position: the Liberal Party will not be rushed, and if it does not get around to same-sex marriage then it will not happen, and you'll just have to accept that.

Understandably, the Prime Minister wants to keep Bill Shorten at bay and Shorten is desperate to get the kudos of allegedly having championed the issue.

One of those guys is desperate: the one trailing in the polls, the one with more to lose, would be the more desperate.

That would work for Abbott in the same way as when John Howard opposed the 1999 referendum. Howard ensured a fair process which empowered the Australian people to decide whether Australia should become a republic. Howard was widely respected for allowing the vote.

Howard started from a position of opposing a republic and framed it so that it couldn't win. Reith and Abbott saw that up close. Abbott is playing a similar game with same-sex marriage and Reith is happy to play along.

Reith is dishonest here, as he was in the Irish example, for conflating binding referenda with non-binding plebiscites.

Australia runs a pretty good democracy. We enjoy telling our politicians what we think of them but we have a lot of quality people in the political elite in Canberra, including the media as well as the MPs.

Reith's idea of democracy is to minimise real public input, to frame it as something flaky, while the politicians make the real decisions. His idea that there might be "quality people" in the press gallery is almost entirely wrong, until you realise he spent most of his parliamentary career in the press gallery leaking against every Liberal leader who wasn't John Howard.

Tony Abbott's breach of faith with the electorate is every bit as great and irrevocable as that of Julia Gillard in the middle of her term as Prime Minister. Reith is right when he says "Abbott could not switch from his long-standing and principled opposition", because that would be like Kevin Rudd abandoning climate change.

Christine Forster is a bonnet ornament on the same-sex marriage cause, not a driver and not part of the engine. Abbott has been happy to use his wife and daughters and props to create the impression of being more awake to women's issues than he is. Opponents can't simply brush his sister off, but nor is she much use in making the case.

Mind you, this is the site that predicted Abbott would never become Prime Minister at all, and Reith has forgotten more about politics than I've learned; there's your grain of salt. Doesn't mean that Abbott will pass same-sex marriage though. The press gallery can't bear to report on Abbott as he is, as they know him to be. They cling to their fantasy that he might change, that Tony 2.0 is real and just around the corner, and this fantasy prevents us realising properly how we are governed.


* I can't think of a single Green politician who's opposed to same-sex marriage, not even from the perspective that marriage is a patriarchal construct. Is it even possible to be a member of the Greens while opposing same-sex marriage?

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.

-----
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.

Comparing apples

When you ask a politician a question about policy that they find uncomfortable, their standard fob-off is to say "I think you're comparing apples with oranges", and then to recite the talking-points that has been prepared for them, forming a protective shell for the half-baked assumptions that you were attempting to examine with your question.

The debate over importing New Zealand apples has been fascinating for someone whose political outlook began with the whole role-of-government-in-the-market perspective, one that used to be fairly strong within the Liberal Party.

Firstly, I expected the Kiwis to be faster out of the blocks in spruiking the excellence of their apples. I thought they would present the scientific evidence that allayed the WTO in more consumer-friendly terms to Aussie consumers, in keeping with that "100% pure" image, maybe handing out free samples on Martin Place or Collins Street. WTO rulings are a start but you only get income when consumers actually stump up cash for the product. At the moment NZ need all the export income they can get.

Secondly, I expected someone in the Liberal Party to stand up for consumers (other than Mary Jo Fisher). Cheaper and better apples: what's not to like? At a time when banana prices skew the Consumer Price Index, does that not fit with notions of "easing the squeeze on Australian working families"?

Apparently not: the Liberals have no opinion on cheaper produce as any sort of bonus for consumers. To find their stance on this policy, you have to click the "Regional" tab, because apparently city-slickers in Liberal seats like me don't consume apples. People in marginal seats apparently don't consume apples. That's why they've flicked their position on the issue to the Nationals:

‘The retrograde protocols agreed today by the Gillard government to import apples from New Zealand almost guarantee the import of the disease fire blight to Australia,’ the Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Food Security John Cobb said today.

You're meant to start a press release with a statement that grabs the reader's attention. This is such bullshit that the reader is repulsed.

‘The acceptance of standard New Zealand orchard practices without on-farm checking by Australian inspectors is an abrogation of Government responsibilities.

‘The Minister in his wisdom has implemented his new secret weapon in the fight against fire blight:

“A supply chain trace-back system for apples from orchard to arrival in Australia”

‘Wow!!! The Minister has really outdone himself. This means that when Australia gets fire blight we will know which orchard it came from in New Zealand.

When negotiation fails to get you into government, use sarcasm?

Seriously though, what does this mean for a Coalition in government? Are we really going to have Australian quarantine inspectors travelling far and wide, inspecting NZ orchards and Indonesian abattoirs and Malaysian palm oil plantations? Forget the Navy, join AQIS and see the world. No wonder they hid this over on the Regional tab: Joe Hockey's search for $70b of savings is doomed once he discovers this hidden batallion of the Green Army.

‘Unlike the government the Coalition believes Australia’s robust, science-based quarantine protections must not be compromised.

That is rich: the Coalition, standing up for science and acting on the basis of its findings.

Mostly, the Coalition generate more heat than light with their blanket opposition to everything the government does. There are times, however, where you have to stop rolling your eyes and pleading for a political debate that is worthy of this country and the issues facing it - and just have a good laugh. I mean: Coalition! Science! Who is the Shadow Minister for Science anyway? Talk about laugh.

Our pest and disease-free status has been hard won and the government’s rubber stamping of NZ apples imports into Australia, without the same checks and balances applied to other countries, sets a dangerous precedent.

If the WTO were satisfied with NZ's scientific position, on what scientific basis is the Coalition not satisfied?

‘I am so concerned about the disease risk that this government presents for our nation that I have been forced to take the extraordinary measure of introducing this Quarantine Legislation Amendment (Apples) Bill 2011 to safeguard against fire blight.

‘This Bill, to be introduced on Monday 22 August ...

Here is the list of bills before parliament as at close of business on Monday 22 August 2011. Protection of the Sea, Remuneration ... what, nothing? For all their talk they really are rubbish at blocking legislation, aren't they. Why would Cobb do such a thing, break a promise in order to stand up for the science?

Oh wait, Coalition MPs are going to second-guess the scientists:

Opposition agriculture spokesman John Cobb was due to introduce a private bill to parliament yesterday ... But he said in a statement he's holding off until he and a small coalition delegation return from New Zealand.

Wouldn't it be easier just to read what the WTO said? Cobb will find NZ has scientists of its own, and people every bit as committed to stamping out fire blight as Cobb appears to be. This might be another "Wow!!" moment for the excitable Mr Cobb, and at least some Nats will get a junket in. There is no indication as to what will happen upon his return, or whether the cheap headlines of Monday 22 August will result in expensive policy of any sort.

Cobb has capitalised the Apple Industry, the first time I've seen it referred to in that way: I assume that puts it on par with the Aboriginal Industry.

All this mucking-about by Cobb and the Coalition created the perfect environment for someone to step in with a clear policy direction. Nick Xenophon represents a state with a small number of orchardists and a large number of apple consumers. You'd think he'd stand up for consumers, right? It would be consistent with every other position he's held.

Not a bit of it:

Senator Xenophon says his bill will be based on scientific evidence and will be compliant with World Trade Organisation rules ... "Fire blight is like the herpes of fruit, once you get it, you can never get rid of it, it just keeps coming back and back."

NZ apples will fuck with your mouth, eh?

If John Cobb and his junketeers can't find the science, I'd love to see what Xenophon comes up with. We haven't even addressed the whole issue of NZ as a market for >$8b of Australian exports, and their rights to exact reprisals for the sort of Cobb-lers proposed above.

Politically, the free market is down 2-0. Apart from partisan support for the government, where to turn for intellectual support in understanding what is going on?

I looked to Catallaxy to see if they had anything to say on the subject: at time of writing (and with that crucial day 22/8/11 fading into history), nothing.

I looked to the oligopolists of free market theory in Australia, the CIS and the IPA. Nothing from the IPA: the CIS had a useful summary from before last year's Australian election but that's about it. These omissions support the theory that the CIS and IPA are lobbyists rather than purely interested in free and open markets for their own sake.

The case for any sort of reform has to be made continuously by its adherents: either you believe in the idea and the benefits that flow from it or you don't. If you're going to stand against one form of restrictive trade practice (e.g. tobacco packaging) surely you will praise incidents where restrictive trade practices go down (e.g. apples), particularly measures where the technology is ahead of where it was in 1921. All the Australian apple orchardists "protected" by that measure are now dead; as are the NZ apple exporters disadvantaged by it, enacted just six years after the ANZAC bonds forged at Gallipoli.

The case for free market reform has waxed and waned within Australia's right-of-centre parties. The IPA and CIS have always enjoyed close links with the Liberals but we are now in an age where libertarians have to wonder what they get from an arrangement where they are so obviously being played for mugs.

People like Chris Berg and John Roskam keep their profile up and hope the Liberal Party will notice them, rather than offering intellectual coherence and badly-needed research capacity to a major party in opposition - a party that bears out what Hayek meant when he insisted that he was not a conservative. In Victorian Liberal preselections Roskam is everybody's third preference rather than a force to be reckoned with and accommodated, in terms of both positions and policy. A libertarian who wants to get things done must push aside the IPA and CIS, with all the dead weight of its Fellows and what have you. C D Kemp would be disgusted at this avoidance of real debate over real issues, especially with so little to show for it in terms of achievement and impact.

Whatever game the libertarians are playing, it better be lucrative - otherwise they'll have sold out with nothing much to show for it. The Coalition and Xenophon aren't going to get many votes out of apple prices either way, but a bit of relief from scaremongering as a substitute for science-led debate would have been nice. Next time farmers complain about "food security" I'm going to be sceptical, aren't you?

This leaves us with a policy outcome forced on the Australian government, an outcome that could be good for consumers or terrible for both consumers and producers in this country (well, insofar as a temporary disease-led shortage of apples might be considered "terrible"; I miss cheap bananas but let's keep things in perspective). Where do we go with this?

Public debate over policy issues is impoverished where nobody who isn't turning a dollar from one possible outcome participates in the debate. Journalism and politics both fail when it can't present quotes and stunts within that wider context. You can participate and do what you can, but you're still at a disadvantage when those who set the context are in thrall to the most hysterical advocates and especially their insistence that they are the only "players" who count.

Raising doubts

In recent days we've seen the self-defeating vacancy at the heart of the modern right: the desire to create doubt rather than certainty.

Edmund Burke expressed this sentiment best when he said: "We fear God, we look up with awe to kings: with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility". That sense of assurance that the country is in good hands and that the common weal managed prudently, is the very essence of conservatism. It takes a lot of hard work to make that manifest - but not so much that you look like a try-hard, as Rudd and Swan do.

Cory Bernardi, in Friday's AFR, hooting about fobbing off both the ETS and Turnbull: "people like me were out there raising doubts [about the ETS]. The leader usually shapes policy in our party, but in this case Malcolm was unable to carry the party". It's not the role of a conservative to raise doubts, you fool: the role of the conservative is to allay doubts.

Then we have this shambles of a piece of journalism. Barnaby Joyce has gone from being The Scourge Of Labor, Bill McKell in reverse (but without the organised crime links), Cincinattus leaving his accounting practice - to being such a pitiable figure that Malcolm Colless is calling for the city folks to subsidise him.

Colless points out that Joyce raised a lot of doubt about the ETS, and also (however unwittingly) points out that he has failed to do much else since, particularly anything of a constructive nature.

This is all very well but now, as a member of the opposition front bench, Joyce must exercise a discipline in his approach to policy issues that does not come naturally or easily to him. Against this background it is difficult to understand why, so early in his new role, Joyce chose to make his recent televised address to the National Press Club in Canberra.

And once aware that he was fronting this media bearpit, why didn't Abbott suggest that Joyce run through his proposed speech with him and his staff, along with suggested responses to the sort of questions his address would likely prompt?

More to the point, why did Joyce wing it? Why did he think he'd take to an unfamiliar and daunting environment with ease?

Why did he not seek to exude an air of calm that the finances of the Commonwealth would be in good hands if those hands were his? This is what Peter Costello did, to the point of complacency: a few stats here, a bit of cross-referencing to observable phenomena in our society, and before you know it he'd lulled you into a torpor and you couldn't imagine the nation's finances in any hands but his. Credible future finance ministers are not dismissed in three minutes on light-entertainment programs. Their role is too important to be dismissed entirely, as Roskam did in the AFR on Friday.

Colless could have explored that, but he trots out the usual Nats whinges verbatim and unexamined. The Nationals' vote in Richmond declined from 70% under Doug Anthony to 30% under Larry; the Nats are irate not because they have "no chance of winning Richmond", but because their chances of are better than the Nats'.

... despondent Nationals are discussing retaliating by standing candidates in federal Liberal seats in NSW, including Macarthur, Hume and possibly Farrer on the NSW-Victorian border.

All of those seats were once Country Party seats - none has been held by the Nats for a decade, if not several. The moment the Nats' bluff is called is the moment it is all over.

The threatened hissy fit over the dumping of David Clarke from the NSW Parliament is another example of this. As a man in his late sixties Clarke should be sanguine enough to hand over to a youngster, secure in the knowledge that church and family and all good things will prevail and prosper once he is gone. Instead, he has no achievements and no pride, and is thus threatening the Liberal Party with what it fears most: fear, uncertainty and doubt. Clarke isn't concerned that his absence will mean the defeat of all that he holds dear: he knows that everything will be fine - no, much much better - without him.

The reason why the far right has abandoned conservatism is because it is too hard. In a shifting world all that is solid melts into air, which is why the metaphysical has become more important, not less, for many. What the far right have embraced, however, are intellectual boat-people from the far left, who have treated moderate territories of the political terrain as flyover country. These people have brought with them their Leninist assumptions: assertions that the people are with you, a perverse comfort that your position is unpopular but inherently right for that, and the assumption that your enemies will wither in the face of sarcasm and ad-hominem abuse.

Old time Liberals like Peter Coleman treated these intellectual refugees like prodigal sons, setting aside suspicion and slaughtering fatted calves. These days the fatted calves are gone and the hills are bare, yet the far-right Leninists hold the high ground and are leading the Liberals not to certainty and comfort, but to the kind of indolence and irresponsibility we have seen from the California Republicans since Reagan left the Governor's mansion.

It takes a good man to build a barn, said Lincoln, but any old mule can kick it down. Like mules, modern Liberals can take no pride in their recent heritage nor have much hope for their future. Conservatives need to start creating certainty, not doubt, and if that means that mules like Joyce and Bernardi must be replaced then we can take comfort that it is for the best.

Postscript: I've quoted from and referred to the AFR here, which is behind a paywall. That's the risk you take I suppose, I hope the AFR is happy for me to interpret its precious content as I wish.

Vactoria

Sooner or later the Liberals will have to replace many of the MPs who survived the 2007 election with those who have something to contribute to the future. I have mentioned that there is plenty of dead wood there, but the great state of Victoria is, however unwittingly, doing its bit to show us what the future of the Liberal Party will look like: a reprise of the immediate past.

The only Federal Liberal MPs to have entered Parliament since the 2007 election, Jamie Briggs and Scott Ryan, were ex-staffers. We now face a prospect where "renewal" means replacing a sitting MP with a staffer.

First, there was the winnable seat with the proud name of Deakin in Melbourne's outer eastern suburbs, once held by a nice-but-dim man named Phil Barresi. Labor won the seat in 2007 and you have to fancy their chances there again - not because of anything to do with Canberra silliness over utes or even big-picture issues surrounding economic management - but because the Liberals preselected Barresi again. His only real competition was another former MP who was even sillier than Barresi.

Then, there was the preselection that won all the headlines: Kooyong, where a staffer won.

Now there are vacancies in Aston (Chris Pearce, whose behaviour during the Apology signalled his lack of both commitment to and suitability for high office), Wannon (David Hawker, the guy who replaced Malcolm Fraser and achieved nothing other than the attainment of titles) and Higgins. In each case, staffers are touted as frontrunners, a dreary prospect of perpetuating a situation where these would-be MPs:

• see themselves as relay stations for Liberal policy - and Howard-era policy at that - rather than shapers of it;


• have so absorbed the disunity-is-death theme that they fail to realise that paralysis and lack of moral courage are toxic too;


• do not and cannot look at the issues facing this country without the excruciating question of What Would Howard Do (WWHD)?


• the disconnect between the voter revulsion surrounding Parliamentary theatre and those who are awestruck practitioners of it will widen;


• think that every issue which cannot have Howard rubrics applied to it is too hard or infra dig; and


• perpetuate this myth that Experience with the Media is essential to operating in Canberra, rather than learned on the job by a reasonably intelligent person.

It is an indictment on the Victorian Liberals that these jewels are not placed into better hands. The fact that only staffers can handle the toxic swamp, and that eminent Victorians who've been sounded out at various Clubs for their interest have laughingly scorned their advances. Why is it that only staffers are getting sucked into this vacuum? Is it any less of a vacuum for their being there?

White-collar Underbelly

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.

- Shakespeare Julius Caesar Act III Scene II

The sight of those two rogues, Vizard and Elliott, at Richard Pratt's funeral were reminiscent of the funeral scenes from Underbelly, where a different Carlton Crew were out in force.

The fawning over Pratt has received a great deal of attention, but it's a fraction of that showered on the late Kerry Packer. Both men had a mistress in Sydney, and both are responsible for screwing consumers and producers in search of a quick buck. Was the box market in Australia any less competitive than the television market? Has Graeme Samuel suffered more opprobrium for going after Pratt than Frank Costigan did for uttering the most timorous mention of Packer? At a time when the consequences of inadequate regulation are being felt across the community, the vilification of Samuel is absurd. Being bagged by John Elliott might be a badge of honour, but wouldn't Lindsay Fox be better off schtumm?

Whatever you may think of the merits of the way Pratt built his market power, it is likely that had he been a much less wealthy man, he would have been similarly philanthropic. Had he been a farmer like his father, or pursued either of the careers he flirted with in his youth (Aussie Rules player and Hollywood actor), Pratt demonstrated a greater sense of community in any of his toes than Packer ever had. Yet it was Packer who got the state memorial service.

Nobody (except, perhaps, Christopher Hitchens; and this must be one of the few subjects on which he has been silent) is obliged to speak the unvarnished truth about a man in the hours surrounding his death. Rudd struck the right note both in praising Pratt's achievements and not attending his funeral. While two of Rudd's predecessors attended Pratt's funeral, they diminished themselves by showing that they, Hawke and Howard, could have done more to rein in market-distorting greed and distance themselves from wealthy men in the name of good governance in their day, if only they'd had the guts to do so. It is doubtful that a Melbourne-based Prime Minister could have afforded not to be seen there.

Daniel Bernstein's comparison of Pratt with Marcus Einfeld is telling: a man of great achievement sullied by petty avarice, but because Einfeld is not yet physically dead he is denied the oratorical excesses excusable by grief.

Noticeable for being so quiet about Pratt are those lions of free enterprise, the Eye Pee Yay. Pratt made small producers pay more for an essential input to their business while restricting their capacity to go elsewhere for it at a better price. Consumers paid more for unrelated goods thanks to Pratt's connivance and greed. It was Adam Smith who identified collusion as an unfortunate part of the free market, but his more intellectually lazy heirs have a blind spot to market distortion and monopoly/oligopoly power. Now that Roskam has dipped out of Kooyong, and thereby denying a battle of intellectual titans with Frydenberg, he should work on remedying this defect (if it is possible to do so without the entire IPA suffering a capital strike).

It remains to be seen whether Anthony Pratt suffers the sorts of comparisons with his father under which Jamie Packer has laboured. The sins of Richard Pratt against the corporate law are visited upon the son, and Pratt's other corporate heirs at Visy. In going after Pratt, Graeme Samuel has shown more teeth than all Australian corporate regulators combined; together with the recent James Hardie decision, Australian business are on notice about sloppy compliance. No amount of philanthropy or the extraordinary Melbourne showbiz-political vortex that is AFL can save you from corporate malfeasance, it would seem.

Richard Pratt, child of the Depression and the Shoah, man of late twentieth century Australia; as the country entered the twentyfirst century you were lost, alternating between venal collusion and lavish generosity, both shocking to those incapable of either extreme. Now you've died and those who were part of your life (for good or ill) must make do without you: let's see how they go.

Give John Roskam a break

John Roskam has scoffed a fistful of the Tony Abbott Angry Pills and complains that Kevin Rudd isn't giving him a break.

The main thing to say about Rudd is that he hasn't leapt out of the blocks like a sprinter, but has started with a canter like marathon runners do. With all those inquiries and a general refusal to throw babies out with the Coalition bathwater, this is a man settling in for a long time rather than a good time.

It would have been easy to go for gladhanding populism from day one. It certainly would have pleased so-called tough guys in the back rooms of ALP head office - the polls would have stayed up and so would the fundraising. However, there's more to governing than that. So Labor missed the chance to win a seat it has never held - a "rebuff"? Give me a break.

At the moment the most challenging job for Canberra bureaucrats is keeping count of all of the Government inquiries being held.

Really? Well, someone has put together a Budget. Someone is busy rewriting industrial relations legislation. Someone is reworking the way that immigration applications are processed at a time when more people are migrating to this country than ever before. Someone is reworking the way that universities operate. Someone is fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan and insurgents in East Timor. Someone is putting together an emissions trading system (as Roskam points out) in the absence of any workable model for this kind of thing. If the bureaucracy isn't doing that, who is?

Roskam's catalogue of the Rudd Government's activities to date is clearly taken from the kind of shallow analysis we'd expect from the Canberra press gallery. Personally, I despaired for their shallowness - Rudd has built an entire new government but, because he didn't put out any press releases about it, shallow people like Annabel Crabb and John Roskam focused on cocktail parties. You'd hope that an Institute of Public Affairs would examine the activities of government more closely - give me a break.

At his meeting with premiers this week, one of the biggest arguments the Prime Minister faces is whether the Commonwealth or the states will pay for the electrical equipment required to implement his "education revolution".

Really? The biggest state in the country has folded. The Feds have the money, they have the legislative force majeure, and none of the shopworn Premiers/Chief Ministers are going to win politically by holding out on the most popular leader in the country. What is there to argue about? You haven't been sucked in by shallow press gallery hype again have you John?

It's true that some spending has been cut, but means-testing the baby bonus to stop millionaires getting it was also popular.

Damn these politicians for doing something popular! Curse them for wrecking Roskam's vapid little theses! Give me a break.

It's not too tough for an MP to hand over a cheque to the local sporting
club.

Considering that sort of thing didn't save the Howard Government in 2007, nor the Keating Government in 1996, and will be forgotten by whenever the next election is - this could be tougher than you think.

First and foremost, he hasn't brought down the cost of groceries, petrol, or mortgages. It's true that Rudd was clever enough to avoid any explicit promises about these things during the election campaign. But he was happy enough to leave the impression with voters that should he become prime minister he would help alleviate the monetary pressures on working families. Now he says his government has done as much as they can for them. To most people this sounds like a feeble excuse.

What it sounds like is politics as usual. You don't have to be John Roskam to see through non-specific promises. The fact that Rudd's then opponent didn't see household expenditures as a major issue accounts for Rudd's success at and since the last election. Give me a break.

Second, the Government hasn't revealed what it is going to do to improve the quality of life of indigenous Australians.

Did he promise, explicitly or otherwise, to do this? Will this not take many years of extensive consultation (part of which, IPA-style, will inviolve the government leaving them alone)? Hasn't the first step, the apology, been taken? Given that Rudd has never said, nor does he apparently believe, that >2 centuries of Aboriginal disadvantage can be redressed and reversed within a single year - what makes you think that?

Labor has done its best to avoid revealing what exactly is its position on the Northern Territory emergency intervention.

Assuming it has one. I thought that public servants were monitoring and analysing this, but what would I know?

Instead of worrying about things that may or may not happen in 100 years' time, the Government could focus on what's occurring right here and now in indigenous communities.

Instead? What about "as well"? Is the climate debate focussed on 100 years time, or is it focused on the next decade? Are you really sure that there is no focus whatsoever by the Rudd Government on Aborigines?

Can you really make the case that Gippsland voted as it did because of a concern for Northern Territory Aborigines? Me neither. Give me a break.

The third thing Rudd hasn't done is to tell Australians anything about his emissions trading scheme for greenhouse gases. All we know is that we're going to have one and it is going to start in two years. We don't know how it will work, how much it will cost, and how many jobs will be lost because of it.

Probably because they are still working this out, John - when they're not having cocktail parties and keeping track of inquiries, of course.

The comparison to Hewson in 1992-93 is more than fair. However, Hewson did this from opposition - Rudd was smart enough to wait until he had the practical help of government and some political momentum behind him. Same with Howard on the GST after 1998.

Roskam can't hold Rudd to Roskam's standards, insofar as he has any. Roskam can't hold Rudd to Rudd's standards, failing to resist a flight of fancy over the living conditions of Aborigines, an issue he clearly considers both difficult and tedious. I wonder why Roskam bothers, and it's a shame he doesn't. Give yourself a break John, because it won't just be you who's better off for it.

Wrong again, Roskam

The Friday night funnies strike again, counting the ways that John Roskam is kidding himself and the otherwise sensible readers of The Australian Financial Review that he has any sort of insight into public policy in this country.

... it's no surprise that a "tax review" was one of the ideas to emerge from the 2020 Summit. In the absence of any specifics about such a review it was easy for summit participants to agree to it ... Only a brave person would have opposed the review. And only an especially brave person would have said: "Wait a minute - should we trust a brand new federal Labor government with a review of the country's taxation system?".

As opposed to whom, John - should this be the preserve of the unelected cranks of the Eye Pee Yay? Who else but the duly elected government is better placed to review, and amend where necessary? Bravery is not the quality required for a silly idea to prevail. Australian voters knew the consequences of having one party govern and federal and state/territory level, and they voted for it anyway. The proposal that came out of the 2020 summit seemed pretty clear, more so than you give it credit for; the fact that it did not have the kind of carefully-worded terms of reference you might expect of a royal commission doesn't invalidate the idea altogether.

Co-operation between a Labor prime minister and Labor premiers extends only so far. Opening up questions about revenue-sharing between Canberra and the states would provoke a brawl of Joh Bjelke-Petersen versus Bob Hawke proportions.

You've missed the point that Bjelke-Petersen and Hawke were from opposing parties, John. You've also missed the point that no Premier/Chief Minister has anything like the popularity of Kevin Rudd: Rudd holds the upper hand politically and constitutionally. He might not get his own way all the time, but who does?

Based on the experience of both Labor and coalition [sic] governments, realistically the best to be hoped for is that anything that emerges from a review is revenue neutral.

Fair assumption. Over time you'd hope for revenue savings in reduction of federal-state/territory functions, but there are too many variables to forecast that accurately.

If the government had wanted its review of tariffs to be dispassionate and analytically rigorous it would have got the Productivity Commission to conduct it. But instead the commission [sic] was sidelined.

The Productivity Commission can't do everything, and it would be amazing if it were excluded from such a review to the extent you describe.

Business organisations have convinced themselves that the Labor government will listen to them when it comes to tax. The problem with this theory is that those same business organisations did not have too much success getting Labor to listen to their views on WorkChoices.

Business organisations understand that industrial issues have a certain resonance inside the Labor Party that non-industrial issues don't have. Howard lost the WorkChoices debate not because of too much negotiation with business organisations, but too little. It remains to be seen what extent the government has or hasn't listened to business as the legislation amending WorkChoices hasn't yet come to light.

Business should not delude itself [sic] into thinking that the trade union movement will not be intensely interested in a tax debate.

Who said it [sic] did, John? This is a straw man if ever there was one. Nobody is going to be ambushed by a feature of the Australian political landscape standing for over three decades.

And wasn't the ending a load of patronising cobblers. You can't really help anyone who's stuck in 1983, and unlike John Stone he has no excuse for this.

Outside the tent

John Roskam hasn't been invited to the 20/20 thing so it's the end of democracy as we know it, apparently .

Obviously the Prime Minister's media advisers calculated that the sight of Kevin Rudd discussing the nation's problems with Hollywood celebrities would combat his image as a boring bureaucrat. So far those advisers have been proved right.

well, they haven't been proven wrong either. Who knows what burden of proof exists for this? If you don't bring glam to this event you need knowledge and analytical skill - unfortunately, our old friend Roskam is not offering that, either. If you see the list of attendees, it's hard to sustain Roskam's early sneer that the summit exists of vacuous human tinsel. Roskam's Eye Pee Yay has spent years developing a fraction of the kind of expertise that Rudd can knock together - and dismantle - in the space of a few weeks.

There's nothing wrong with Labor (or the Liberals) having summits, conferences, and talkfests. Sometimes it is useful to get experts together to debate policy, and occasionally a good suggestion might emerge.

But the timing of the summit is curious. It was only four months ago that Kevin Rudd won an election after he promised he had all the solutions. Obviously Canberra's 155,000 public servants can't provide the answers the Prime Minister needs - if they could he wouldn't need a summit.

Did Rudd claim that he had all the answers? All he had to do - and if I remember correctly, all he did - was establish that he wasn't intellectually stalled and politically deaf like John Howard. A change has proven to be better than a holiday. I'm pretty sure that people like John Roskam were criticising Rudd for not putting up any fresh ideas so that people like John Roskam could twist and/or dump on them. Having been frustrated at Rudd's unwillingness to fall for a simple trap, Roskam puts Rudd into the position he wishes he'd been in.

As to public servants - if they have all the answers, why do we need an elected government or a legislature? Was there some halcyon day where public servants had all the answers to everything? There's certainly nothing in accepted understandings of the Westminster system of government that sets such an impossibly high standard.

The problem with Labor's summit is that 95% of the participants will be in enthusiastic agreement that the Rudd Government is good, that the Howard government was bad, and that the solution to any problem is higher taxes and more government spending.

Again, look at the list of attendees, John. Here are more than fifty people who would not share the political views you ascribe to them, and nor would they necessarily believe that higher taxes and more government spending is desirable, let alone necessary.

The next few paragraphs are so silly that sarcasm is an appropriate response. The lowest form of wit they say, but what sort of -wit descends to this sort of thing in an op-ed piece anyway?

The Australia 2020 Summit is an exercise in pure and simple politics.

No! Really?

The summit will co-opt the country's elite into endorsing the Rudd Government's policies, and in the process the Howard government will be airbrushed from history.

That's right, and because there's nothing so stupid as an elite, they'll follow along blindly and get trapped into something like that.

If summit participants are to be encouraged to confront the challenges of the future they should at least be told about the conditions of the present.

Yeah, because they wouldn't know otherwise. They have no idea about Australia as it is or as it could be, so what they need is a briefing paper written by the very public servants Roskam disparages.

Clearly, the summit is not intended as some warts-and-all review across the entire gamut of government in Australia. This is the standard Roskam holds it to, and of course it's going to fall short of standards that were never set for it.

It's impossible to consider indigenous policy without examining the results so far of the Coalition's Northern Territory intervention. The background papers, however, make no mention of the intervention.

Indigenous policies will have to wait for another time, then. Perhaps at the separate, non-20/20, one-year review already stated elsewhere by Rudd and Macklin and others. If you're going to look into the NT intervention, you have to consider why it wasn't launched ten years earlier than it was.

Similarly, social welfare reform is discussed without reference to the single biggest welfare reform in a generation, namely the introduction of "mutual obligation" and work for the dole.

By 2020 one would expect this to be old hat. This is not intended to be an exercise in nostalgia or kicking over the traces.

Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with the Iraq war, you'd expect it would be in the section on foreign policy or there would at least be a reference to it. Yet, bizarrely, Iraq doesn't rate a mention.

It's not a major element of Australian foreign policy, yet the resources devoted to it give it an importance it doesn't warrant. It's likely that people have their own ideas on Iraq, and they may even raise them unbidden by a briefing paper.

The Australian media analysed and dissected John Howard's every move in an attempt to discern the political advantage he or the Liberals would gain.

This didn't make for good reporting or sound analysis, but it did reflect the opaque and centralised nature of decision-making under Howard.

In contrast, Kevin Rudd's summit has been breathlessly embraced as an exercise in bipartisanship nation-building that is above the day-to-day reality of what politicians do.

Embraced by whom, John? It's been derided as one long PR extravaganza in the pieces I've read. More straw men?

Under the Liberals, the ABC, the ACTU, and Australia's public universities guaranteed that opinions different from those of the government would be aired and disseminated.

Oh come on, this is a lie. You know this is untrue. The Howard government made ad hominem attacks on those who said what it chose not to hear, and behind the scenes thwarted their current jobs and career aspirations.

Now, with Labor in power federally and in every state and territory where will those opposing views come from? They're unlikely to come from a summit of 1000 hand-picked participants.

Again, I doubt that any of the one thousand attendees would be bound never ever to disagree with the government about anything at any stage.

Opposing ideas are unlikely to come from the Liberal Party or the Eye Pee Yay, either, for the reasons described in the post below. They don't respect ideas or the sort of people who come up with them.

One can speculate on a participant's chances of success if they suggested at the summit that Canberra should have less power rather than more, or that there are bigger issues confronting the planet than climate change.

One can look at the list of names cited above for a good number of people who suggest - or even assert - these positions. Besides, after Stern and Garnaut and all that's transpired, you need to do more than merely suggest something bigger than climate change, or centralism.

There are strong incentives for those at the summit to co-operate with Kevin Rudd. He has an approval rating of 70%. Brendan Nelson's is 9%. Labor doesn't look like being dislodged from power across the country any time soon. Given this stark reality, the question is how many of those attending the summit will be able to afford to disagree with the Government?

And why should they wish to approach the national capital with swords drawn, John? Is this not a gathering of goodwill, of working with what's before you? Have you not, in your recent experience, seen support for entrenched and seemingly popular governments evaporate quickly? Have you not witnessed honeyed words not followed through, discrediting both words and speaker on the way through?

You don't get a seat at the table talking about the future by demonstrating your intellectual staleness and your insistence that the previous government represents the only template from which you are allowed to discuss government going forward. You can't complain about the lack of variety in public debate when your own contribution is so feeble and presented in a manner repellent to public support. Those opposing the government may need a forum other than the all-too-soon 2020 summit to get some clues. This will be easier once the Rudd government makes some decisions to criticise; easier still once you get a position from which you can criticise.

Mixed messages as usual

The only country that could cut itself off from others and survive is China. The United States would die if it walled itself off from influxes of people, goods and ideas, and so would Australia. China is a nuclear power and is enormously powerful militarily. When John Roskam talks about getting tough with China, what (if anything) does he mean?

IF THE priority the Rudd Government attaches to an issue can be determined by the number of media releases about it, then halting Japanese whaling is more important than stopping Chinese repression in Tibet.

Why on earth would press releases be any sort of indicator of importance? A press release is a device to attract the attention of the media. Kevin Rudd put together his entire government over the summer, and the only thing he put out a press release about was the accommodation of his family pets.

To his credit, Roskam concedes that the capacity of the Australian government to stop repression in Tibet is limited. To his discredit, he does not think about this in protesting that the government has done what it can, where it can, using press-release diplomacy.

When it comes to Tibet, so far there's been nothing more than a quiet plea for "calm and restraint by all parties". Relations between Australia and China are business as usual. When the Prime Minister was asked whether he would mention Tibet on his visit to Beijing, he refused to answer. He also refused to respond when asked whether he would urge China to allow international observers into Tibet.

That paragraph could have been written at any point over the past thirty years, about any Australian Prime Minister serving over that time. However, some things do change:

Discussion about a possible boycott of the Olympics has highlighted the changing moral certitude of our past and present politicians. Malcolm Fraser advocated sporting sanctions against South Africa and a boycott of the Moscow Olympics, but now believes that the Beijing Olympics should proceed uninterrupted.

In 1980, when the world was very different, Fraser took a policy on the Moscow Olympics that he has since recanted; he admits that a full Australian boycott would not have made a damn bit of difference to the actions of the Soviet Union, in Afghanistan or anywhere else. His attitude to the Beijing Olympics seems to show that he has learned his lessons from that time.

China aint South Africa. The success of sanctions against the apartheid regime has encouraged people to apply this as a universal cure for repressive regimes. In the case of China, it's a mistake.

It's interesting to speculate what would happen if a small proportion of the effort the Australian Government allocated to getting publicity for its opposition to whaling was instead devoted to encouraging China to strengthen the political rights of its citizens.

No it isn't. Bugger-all would happen, and there's nothing interesting about that.

Certainly the situation of Tibet is complicated because both the Coalition and Labor accept Chinese sovereignty over the province.

If the Dalai Lama can concede that a free and independent Tibet is a non-starter, so can John Roskam.

While he didn't quite commit to pursuing an "ethical" foreign policy, he loudly proclaimed that Australia would do more to uphold international standards of human rights

It shouldn't be too hard to eclipse John Howard's record on upholding internationalist conceptions of human rights, and I would be surprised if this isn't achieved at some point over the next few months. Rudd may pick some area other than Tibet to do this, and at this point it's still fair to give him the benefit of the doubt.

He's not even willing to do the most basic symbolic act, which is to raise the subject.

Refusing to answer the question of a journalist, refusing to flag his punches before he gets there and refusing to fritter away any good he may do in other areas, is not the same as actually refusing to do it (he hasn't even arrived there yet, John). Rudd may do all that without, as Roskam has admitted, achieving anything for the people of Tibet anyway. Roskam has held Rudd to standards to which neither Rudd nor Roskam adheres.

Given that the Prime Minister makes so much of his special relationship with the Chinese Government ...

Does he? I think that others, opponents and allies alike, make more of it than he does.

... it would have been thought that the Chinese would have at least listened to him, even if they ignored what he said.

And they may yet do so, John. It's too early to blame Rudd for something that hasn't happened yet. If you're going to set Rudd up to fail, or look like a hypocrite, you'll have to work harder than that.

Mixed messages are the norm in foreign relations. Diplomacy involves keeping it light and vague as a cover for more concrete action. Clear, unambiguous messages are rare in foreign policy: war, or the sort of contempt reserved for Robert Mugabe, are exceptions to the rule of positive-sounding ambiguities. This is true of the current Australian government, and previous ones: it is true of other countries' governments too, including that of China.

John Roskam can criticise Rudd for action or inaction in certain areas, but doing so pre-emptively on the basis (or absence) of press releases is silly. It helps to be clear about your own position, too: could I suggest that John Roskam's interest in Tibet is not of long standing, and that Kevin Rudd has forgotten more than Roskam has learned about the subject?

Polly filler

John Roskam doesn't understand the sovereign role of the majority of voters in setting the direction of government in this country, apparently.

Keating had dragged reform of economic policy along at a cracking pace. Issues such as Mabo, the Redfern speech and the republic threatened to do so with social policy. The whole idea of John Howard was to ease the pace of social reform and see which elements really were unsustainable, and which were just victims of Keating's sharp tongue.

Howard showed that the republic was not an issue that burned in the national soul, and that Australia wasn't so desperate to be shot of the monarchy as the old Fenians in the NSW ALP Right. Howard thought that 1950s paternalism was an idea not properly tried in Aboriginal policy. He thought that unions could be legislated out of the employer-employee relationship. He thought that processing a refugee application required the refugee him/herself to be "processed". He thought that if the Americans went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Australia should send a deployment that was big enough to attract political attention from Washington yet small enough to minimise monetary and casualty cost.

Howard has now outlived his usefulness. He was wrong not to apologise to the Stolen Generation, those who were removed from Aboriginal families for no reason other than they were Aborigines. He was wrong about refugees, the incarceration of people within a legal void is a poor preparation for life in Australia or anywhere else. He was wrong about Iraq and Afghanistan has developed to a point where Australian forces are no longer required.

Good policy doesn't turn into bad policy overnight.

No, but an idea that upset a majority of the population was never sustainable. The Rudd Government's policies on the matters Roskam identifies as the core policies of the Howard government surprise only those who dismissed the very prospect of a Rudd Government until it actually came about.

If key policies can be ditched so quickly after what, in the end, proved to be a relatively narrow election loss, voters will inevitably ask whether Liberal MPs ever believed in those policies in the first place.

Those policies were imposed on Liberal MPs, who did not question them closely. They accepted Howard's assurances that they were both good policy and that they would lead to electoral success, and are now bearing the consequences of his failure of judgment. Roskam feels that they should bear this and other failures of judgment in perpetuity, like the rock of Sisyphus.

There's also the problem of what replaces the old policies.

This is a pressing problem for the government, which promised to replace them but was less than precise about what; they are responsible for governing, and responsible also to their Labor base. They have to replace WorkChoices with legislation that is acceptable to the Labor base but which is also sustainable across a diverse national workforce in a growing, changing economy. Good luck!

The Liberals have been excused the pressing responsibilities of government. They have to come up with a policy before the next election, and can learn from the mistakes that Labor are making. They needn't be hurried as John Roskam would wish, and indeed Roskam does himself no favours by urging them to do so. This lot are busy exercising the freedom to think for themselves, a precious quality that must be nurtured over time.

None of this is to say that policies cannot ever be changed. When circumstances alter, policies should be altered.

This assumes that WorkChoices adequately addressed the challenges facing Australia in 2005, much less in 2007-8. It didn't, and doesn't. It was a policy for 1985, when the ACTU and the H R Nicholls Society were at the peak of their influence.

What's notable about each of the Liberals' recent policy changes is that each was done in a hurry and each was done in reaction to something that Labor did.

Sounds like the Liberals are getting used to Opposition, John.

The Liberals can't afford to be put into such a position again.

This is why they shouldn't have frittered government away, and should act as an incentive for them to get it back again.

But at the moment there's every chance that the Liberals will respond to Labor's moves on the republic in the same way as they responded to Labor's initiatives on the apology and the Pacific Solution.

This is true, they run the danger of following Kim Beazley into reactive, crumbling opposition. It took Beazley ten years to get to that point, not ten weeks.

Many Liberals would say that the very last thing they need is a divisive internal debate about the republic. But if you can't have a divisive internal debate when the party is in opposition, federally and in every state and territory, then it's legitimate to ask when would be a better time.

Well said. Some debates cannot be fobbed off an it is poor political management even to try.

The best thing for the Liberal Party would be if the decision on the republic were taken out of their hands: if the voters decided on a republic, Liberals would have to decide whether they really wanted to be part of a governmental process from which the Crown was absent. Some Liberals feel they should take an active role in shaping the republic, but it would be extraordinary - too much to expect, really - for any Liberal leader to do that and keep a united party at the same time.

It will probably take three years for the Liberals to arrive at some sort of position on the republic. The advantage of starting the debate now is that they'll have the time to engage in analysis and reflection.

This assumes an environment tolerant of differing opinions, and the Liberal Party is the opposite of that. Moderates found this out in the late 1980s when they started losing preselections, political death being the ultimate form of censorship. Roskam has no excuse not to know better.

It's something the party hasn't done enough of since November 24.

Nor for the decade-and-a-half before that. There's the flaw in your argument John. For some time yet, debate within the Liberal Party will lumber and lurch like awkward teenagers learning to dance (the presence of cretins like Sophie Mirabella won't help). Clapping your hands in annoyance and insisting they all bounce and glide like Nureyev might make you feel better, but any sensible person knows it will be a slow process - until the next Leader comes along, with a gang of enforcers compelling everyone to shut up.

Roskam's despair of the political process is echoed by his colleague Chris Berg, and reflects a tendency of denigrating democracy itself - not just the odd dodgy decision, but the very idea of having government policy responsible to and reversible by the popular vote. Insofar as the Eye Pee Yay warrants concern, this is a worry and deserves close attention.

Think about it

It seems that John Roskam's straw-man work has spread throughout the organisation he heads, the Eye Pee Yay. Thankfully this peanut holds an honorary title, but it's the thought that counts: the thought that attacks can be prefabricated, targetted at imaginary abstractions and used to develop useful perspectives on government and society - abstractions that seem to wheel back and smite those who launch them. Chris Berg shows you don't need to be a committee to produce poor outcomes.

There is a strange fantasy held by many serious people in politics that if you get enough experts in a room, some sort of magical consensus will emerge and everything will be wonderful.

Really? Where, whom?

Given that it is unlikely the Rudd Government will adopt any of the summit's proposals - at least, none they weren't already familiar with - the 2020 talkfest is unlikely to do too much harm.

What a silly set of givens this is. The government is expected to commit to ideas that haven't been thought through yet, so that even Chris Berg could go them.

No doubt the proposals from 2020 will be as pedestrian as those produced by the half-dozen "future-oriented" conferences around the country each year. That is, we should do more on climate change, spend more on education, infrastructure and innovation, engage more with Asia, the republic is the most important issue facing Australia today, children are our future, and on and on and on.

Not much credit due for foresight there - where is the straw man who seriously believes that the republic is that important? I suppose that any progress on these issues will be step-by-step, incremental changes to the forward positions of individuals under their own locomotion - i.e., pedestrian. Berg's use of the word seems to be pejorative. Strange.

So if the only big idea behind Rudd's education revolution was to set up an education committee at a gigantic conference, it's hard to avoid wondering why we bother having revolutions at all.

Assuming that was the 'only big idea', Chris.

We've just had 11 years where any idea that departed even slightly from an already-decided official line was attacked, not on any intellectual level and not in terms of competition, but in petty, sub-Keatingesque ad hominem attacks on individuals who dared question that the policy of the incumbent government was in any way sub-optimal. Nobody expects this hundred-flowers thing to go ion indefinitely, but getting people's ideas engaged with the machinery of government will be a nice change from what had gone before. If you're going to have an education revolution, for example, you need the whole unruly bunch of educators involved. That's revolutionary, and that's the point, Chris.

After all, what great idea ever came from a committee?

Well, I won't count those wackers on Mont Pelerin if you won't. Do the Wright Brothers count as a committee? Does the IPA? Led Zepplin? The Diet of Worms? The AIF? Geelong Cats?

The dirty secret of Australian politics is that conflict makes good government.

Not really. The Howard government ramped up the conflict, and government got worse rather than better. "The blame game" is only a game until it becomes tiresome, which it has.

The idea behind Federation was that the states would compete to develop the best public policy and that the Commonwealth would do the things that the states didn't. If they start working closely together, as Rudd has assured us will now happen, it will only further erode our critically weakened federal system.

I'd love to see an example where this competition yielded positive results: a better way of teaching maths, or running hospitals, anything would do. You have 106 years of examples from 1901 to 2007, go to it Chris. Give us something to be sorry for that which has disappeared, other than a vague dream.

Similarly, trying to get business and government working together is fraught with difficulty. Usually, the only things business want from government are money or protection from competitors. The only thing governments want from business is help achieving political goals.

And when the government works with the "community", it inevitably ends up consulting special-interest groups who harbour ideological views not shared by the community as a whole. It is us, as citizens and consumers, who get the raw deal.

Yep, that governing is difficult Chris - not sure what solution you're offering there, if any. It's difficult, therefore not worth doing?

I liked this self-defeating argument best, the intellectual boomerang that smacked Chris Berg on the back the head thus:

It would be easy to run a country on consensus if everybody shared the same views. But not only do people disagree on means, they also disagree on ends ... special-interest groups who harbour ideological views not shared by the community as a whole.

Having established universal agreement as a fantasy, he then criticises government for not even attempting to struggle toward a fantasy, which would, one assumes, make it easier for someone like Chris Berg to complain.

The 2020 summit is more than just a happy-clappy approach to governing.

Is it? I thought you started your article saying it was exactly that, that and nothing else.

Rudd has to be careful that his eagerness to build "consensus" doesn't leave the Government open to interest groups and poor policy.

But could you expect anything else from a government, Chris? If so, what would it be?

- Andrew Elder is a Senior Mountebanke and Pifflemeister-General at the Politically Homeless Institute, similar to the IPA but less well funded and much more poorly edited.

Red, white and Roskam

If you love a bit of straw man work, you can't go past John Roskam's latest:

Australians are starting to realise that maybe America is not so bad after all.

Australians never thought it was. Study after study has shown that there's real affection for the USA in Australia - sure, tinged with occasional frustration and despair/mocking poor choices, but these are characteristics of all real and deep friendships.

Most commentators on the US have been blinded by their contempt, and in some cases their hatred, of George Bush.

21,000,000 Australians, John: you'd be surprised how few are commentators, or have their political opinions shaped by commentators.

So far those same commentators haven't acknowledged that the country that gave the world George Bush, might also give it Barack Obama.

Depends who you mean by "those commentators", John. I'd call you a commentator, and I'd probably have to wear the accusation were it flung back. It's easy to acknowledge that the country that gave us Eugene V Debs also gave us Curtis LeMay, John F Kennedy/Lee Harvey Oswald, Ludwig van Beethoven/Heinrich Himmler, do your own false dichotomy.

Were Obama somehow to become president ...

Uh, by winning a plurality of votes in the Electoral College?

... we can be guaranteed more paeans of praise.

Yeah, because when the United States elects a new President they tend to be fairly laid back about it, lukewarm about the new guy, etc.

One immediate result of his election in Australia would be that our Australian political parties would be forced to start looking for their own Obama. Charisma would be back in fashion.

The demand for charisma isn't the problem, it's the supply, John. Anyway, "forced" is too strong: the Rudd Government would take to an Obama Administration with little apparent difficulty. Which other (state/territory) government in this country would be destabilised by an Obama Administration in Washington? Is there a charismatic politician in state/territory politics, and if so who?

If Obama or Hillary Clinton becomes president, America's critics will be forced to think again. The American people won't be able to be written off as an assemblage of religion-obsessed, gun-toting, rednecks.

Again, John, nobody does. The Bush Administration has crafted its message to appeal to said people though, and it has been re-elected twice. The commentary I've read is that the outfit that gave rise to Dicks Cheney and Perle, amongst others, is some sort of dastardly trick against an otherwise decent people.

Most likely, America will come to be regarded as the repository of all that is enlightened, liberal, and tolerant.

I wouldn't say all, John. It should, however, display more of these qualities in its foreign and other policies than have been apparent for the past eight years or so.

a country can't be judged by its leader. As much as any elected politician would like to be able to speak for "everyone", the reality is that they cannot.

When a person reveals their nationality, their position on the leadership of that country and perceptions thereof become part of who they are. Australians may or may not vote for John Howard, and may or may not have participated in, say, Tampa or SIEV-X, but it is fair for foreigners to ask Australians about the sort of country that would do such things.

Americans also regard themselves as living in a classless and egalitarian society. Whether that's true or not is hardly the point. What matters is that it is believed to be true.

Actually, it is. If a country is governing itself according to principles that no longer apply, it is kidding itself.

The fact that the population of the US is 15 times larger than Australia's only partly explains the differences between the countries ... Australia has had 26 prime ministers. Every one of them has been a male of Anglo-Celtic background.

Never mind larger, the population of the US has always been a lot more diverse than that of Australia. Until World War II Anglo-Celtic Australians made up well over 90% of the population, so it was almost inevitable that the Prime Minister at any point throughout should share this characteristic: a characteristic shared by McCain, Romney, Huckabee and Clinton. Australians have had as many female Prime Ministers as the US has had female Presidents.

It's difficult to imagine any Australian political party allowing anyone who is not a party member to have a say in that party's selection of candidates for office. Yet this is precisely what happens in the US.

Sure it is, it's called a branch-stack. You don't think the far right of the Liberal Party in NSW get their candidates up on their sensible opinions and broad community engagement, do you? The primaries process renders political parties irrelevant.

If a John Roskam article doesn't stand up to the kind of feeble scrutiny applied above, it should not be published. Whether you are the editor of The Age or John Roskam, it is time to reassess the value of a John Roskam article in better understanding the world in which everyone except John Roskam lives.

Cease from mental fight?

With this, it's clear that John Roskam wants to write about religion and politics, and wants to be quite swinging and fearless, yet he can't do so without either looking absurdly equivocal or deliberately missing the point.

OVER these Christmas holidays it seems as though religious leaders have been happy to talk about anything other than religion. In Australia, climate change and refugees have featured prominently in church sermons.

Who's trying to drive a wedge between the sacred and the profane now, John? Roskam is implying here that religious leaders are using the pulpit to talk about non-religious, secular issues.

When talking about the family domiciled in a barn using a manger for a cradle, it is entirely germane to talk about refugees. Hospitality to the stranger is a central feature of the Christian message. It should demonstrate that religious belief is not confined to events of two millennia ago, but should be something that the avowedly faithful practice in their everyday lives.

Climate change can be linked to entirely Christian notions about greed and carelessness for the bounty which God has given us.

Tony Blair was right when a few weeks ago, on the eve of his conversion to Catholicism, he said that any British politician who talked about religion ran the risk of being regarded as a "nutter". He drew a comparison with the United States where politicians were not afraid to discuss their faith.

In the US, many avowedly religious politicians are nutters. Show me a wacky or dangerous idea in US politics and I'll show you some tendentious piece of theology used to deflect criticism.

Worse than often-harmless craziness is outright hypocrisy. When US Senator Larry Craig was caught sexually propositioning another man in an airport toilet, he defended himself with a flurry of religiosity. US politicians seem to do this often: it may well help them in troubled times, but it looks like a ruse, a con, and religion is devalued accordingly.

It isn't patriotism that is the last refuge of the scoundrel, it's religion. It isn't that a religious politician might be considered a nutter, but that comments about religion might be a diversionary tactic.

In Australia, there is certainly a chance that a politician who talks about God (or even a god) will be laughed at.

This is an extraordinarily weak construction to build an article on. Does it mean that anybody at all who mocks any expression of religious faith, however disingenuous, takes a dagger to the heart of all religion anywhere? Who does more damage to religious faith: the mocker outside or the fraud within? Is religion in Australia so weak that no criticism can be tolerated?

It's just as possible that anyone who admits that their religion influences the way they vote in parliament will be accused of being a dangerous theocrat intent on introducing the moral majority into Australia.

"there is certainly a chance ... It's just as possible" - oh, please. It's just as possible that a politician who supports official discrimination against gay couples and goes on about Christian families cruises for gay sex, like Larry Craig.

It is not just risible, it is profoundly anti-democratic to use religious faith as a means for a legislator to deny to the populace what the legislator enjoys. It is profoundly anti-democratic to imply that any profession of religious faith must always be free of any criticism at all.

The evidence that a politician who talks about religion faces such a threat is widespread. It is obvious in the treatment of Tony Abbott, tagged by the Canberra press gallery as the "mad monk"

Tony Abbott talks at election time about an "epidemic of abortions" in Australia, yet as Health Minister he has presided over hundreds of them. His criticism that Bernie Banton was not "pure of heart" was an inescapable religious criticism; which is all the more ridiculous when you consider Abbott's lack of purity, and lack of interest in purity, in much of his dealings as a politician. To mock Abbott is not to deride but to respect religious faith.

the ABC has labelled Catholic social groups, such as Opus Dei, as semi-secret organisations.

Opus Dei is a secretive organisation. If you are hypersensitive to an form of criticism I suppose you'll find it somewhere, somehow, particularly if you show the bellicosity that goes against the central message of Christianity and other religions. If your faith is weak then you'll need that opposition to keep you going, to justify a tendency for quick-fire spite rather than to inspire a capacity for the hard work of love.

Morality simply cannot be taken out of politics.

No it can't, and nor is wearing the brand of religious faith the kind of total defence against any criticism for which politicians yearn, and are not entitled.

Any discussion of religion immediately brought with it accusations of how Howard government ministers pandered to the conservatism of the Christian evangelical churches.

In recent years claims such as "God is working for the Liberal Party" and "an extreme form of conservative Christianity now has real influence on our politicians and their policies" became the stock-in-trade of the Liberals' opponents. The problem with these theories is that Howard's critics struggled to provide examples of this supposedly pernicious power.

If the Howard government thought it could get political advantage by adopting certain policies, it is legitimate to criticise them for seeking advantage in this way - and yes, to criticise the religious organisations for allowing themselves to be so used. Who exactly said that "God is working for the Liberal Party"?

Australians are not antipathetic to religion, they are antipathetic to cant. Religious cant is no better than any other form of cant - but not all religion is cant, and this is why it is possible for religion to take its rightful place in the debates of our country. Religion has always been criticised and it should not be surprising or appalling that this should continue. For a politician to invoke religion is not a lightning-rod, but nor is it a free pass.

Criticism: it's part of public debate in this country John, not some aberration to be stamped out with Kulturkrieg.