A study in character

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At an impasse

Impasse (n.) a situation in which no progress is possible, especially because of disagreement; a deadlock

- Oxford English Dictionary

There are two ways to analyse the absurd situation in which the Parliament has put itself. Firstly, against an ideal, and assessing who came close or fell well short; and secondly its opposite, to look squarely at politics at its most amoral, who comes out of this looking cool and calm and in control and who lost it in the face of a big challenge.

Firstly, the ideal.

We need a situation where people who are unable to live in their country can establish a claim for refugee status (as a substitute for the legal status of a citizen to live within his or her country) and be resettled in a place where they might live and work and be entitled to a future of the type denied to them in the country of their citizenship. Australia is such a country; since World War II many thousands of people have come here fleeing persecution, and I want an Australia where that keeps happening (taking persecution in other countries as a given, or at least beyond Australia's control, rather than something to be encouraged).

In the short term, Australian naval/border patrol/other policing assets need to focus on saving lives and bringing people here to be helped, assessed, and either accepted or else sent elsewhere as required. This would be a powerful humanitarian statement and would give us strong standing in the long term in working toward a regional solution for dealing with non-nationals seeking asylum.

There is also more to be done in consultation with the Indonesians that most Australians, lacking understanding of that large and complex country, can barely imagine let alone realise.

Malaysia and Nauru are insufficient in themselves, and by themselves. The government must go through the Bali Process to engage other nations in Southeast Asia to work toward a longterm solution with and among those countries.

The government responded best to the impasse by offering to change its policy. Had it acceded to Nauru and TPVs the only question would have been the tactical one (of why it hadn't done so sooner) rather than the practical one (of whether these measures work as well in 2012 as nostalgia would have it). It did the right thing in asking an expert committee for ideas; several parliamentary committees have looked into this issue over the past 10-20 years or so and their efforts appear to have been wasted.

The Greens insisted on human rights protections above all other considerations:

• Human rights abuses in Australian detention centres count against our ability to insist on such protections from others. 
• The assumptions behind the UN Convention on Refugees 1951 are those of Europe at the end of Word War II as the universal human experience on this matter, a question that could do with re-examination to say the least. 
• The Malaysia proposal promised greater scrutiny of human rights in that country than had ever been the case, as I said at the time. 

Still, you've go to start somewhere, and where the Greens started was with legalistic quibbling rather than practical concerns as to where you start, and with what. Having more asylum-seekers settle here is one part of a longer-term solution but it is irrelevant to the immediate urgency brought on by matters of life and death.

Perhaps the government could have got them onside by bringing them in to a wider solution; perhaps not. The Greens were happy to have wider and longer-term solutions that were bound at the outset by high-level but stringent human rights protections. The government would have found it difficult to negotiate such an outcome with many southeast Asian countries, especially given our less-than-spotless record, but I can't agree that it was better to not try at all than to sell out a scintilla of any such protection.

Sunili Govinnage is right to say that the bill before Parliament overlooked the immediate need to save life at sea. The Greens should have insisted that it do so, and offered to pass it on condition that the government thus amend it. It is understandable that they rejected the bill - you can only vote on what's in front of you, though a bit of initiative would have been nice and might have forced the government's hand.

She is, however, dead right when she says:

If, however, we, as a nation, genuinely want to stop asylum-seekers getting on to boats and risking their lives, we need to give them a viable option. A real "regional solution" is not about getting our neighbouring countries to process asylum-seekers so that we can get on with complaining about our First World Problems in peace. It means properly supporting the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to fulfil its resettlement mandate and encouraging other nations to do so do. It also means increasing our humanitarian intake.

But it is pretty clear nobody wants to touch any of that ...

Now that is grounds for weeping, of which more later. It will mean relatively fewer people coming here under a legal cloud, and more with every right to expect the promises of this country will apply to them, which might be more of a challenge than we seem prepared for.

The Oakeshott bill did not give members of Parliament the quick fix of immediate, practical action, nor the longterm satisfaction of capital works and a relatively secure policy over the years ahead. If the government was serious the Prime Minister would have moved this bill ad she would have worked with the Greens and gotten around the Coalition like she did in September 2010. As with the proposed gay marriage bill by Labor backbencher Stephen Jones, the independents will know the government's heart is in a policy when they take it on themselves.

The Coalition simply insisted that its policy be accepted in full as an exercise of raw power, combined with intellectual laziness in insisting that what worked in 2002 must and will work in 2012. It confused its position with a focus on human rights in Malaysia while ignoring those issues with Indonesia (and insisting on measures that the Indonesian government has flatly declared it will not accept) shows that it is not ready to govern this country.

Secondly, the politics.

Abbott's ploy all along has been to jam the workings of government and then assume control of them, to make the government look like it's doing nothing - or worse, stuffing up - while creating the impression that he can lead a government that will Set Things Right. This is what Tim Dunlop was getting at, and if he had written it at any point between about Easter 2010 and this Easter just gone it would have been another spot-on article from one of Australian politics' most perceptive commentators. Here, he's attributing more power to Abbott than the man himself is exhibiting.

Since Kevin Rudd was comprehensively defeated for the Labor leadership earlier this year, Abbott has been a diminished figure. Abbott was ready for a Rudd victory, or a Gillard victory by a slighter margin than she achieved; but not for Labor to unite so comprehensively behind a leader they knew was under pressure but whom they did not believe was finished. Since then he has cracked hardy by insisting that refugee boats can be sent back to Indonesia against their wishes, and at the same time that his government would teach their languages in schools (provided the budget ... but you've heard this before). He has moved away from his impetuous comments about proud Whyalla but in doing so he has not moved anywhere that people will follow.

When he stood at Geelong today watching a handful of fertiliser slip through his fingers it was as though the local candidate was trying to cheer him up, to give Abbott the support he was meant to be giving her. Abbott has lost his spark and there's a story there, journalists: go get it and tell us what it is.

Until recently, it was sufficient for Abbott to invoke nostalgia for the Howard government, talk down the incumbents, link himself to Howard and against the evidence and generally bluff his way past an adoring media. By digging his heels in he isn't looking strong, he's looking like a piker out of ideas (although he has somehow succeeded in getting the media to stop asking him about Thomson-Jackson and Slipper-Ashby).

In this article which you can read for free on Google News, Peter van Onselen offers this telling vignette:

One well-placed Liberal source told The Australian that Abbott would rather see Labor continue to bleed politically with ongoing boat arrivals. If that means deaths at sea continue, he said, so be it. Perhaps Abbott thinks such tragedies reflect more badly on Labor than his own side because the government appears responsible for the mess courtesy of changing John Howard's asylum-seekers policies in the first place.

If someone had said something like that about John Howard, he'd have denied it forcefully and acted all wounded. Behind closed doors he would have gone through the parliamentary party like a dose of salts until he tracked down whoever said that, and dealt with them with great vengeance and furious anger.

Abbott just lets it go. He has no power to do anything else - same with this. This time last year, or two years ago, no Liberal would have dared say such a thing because of the premium on sticking together with government so close. That quote shows confidence in Abbott is not as strong as it was within Liberal ranks, and mitigates against the idea that Abbott is a strong leader headed for inevitable victory.

The firebrand who almost took the Coalition to victory in August-September 2010 and who kept the pressure on the government has not been completely neutered - not yet - but he is less than he was. A second wind can only come from an appealing set of policies.

Yesterday's Insiders showed Michael Keenan, Joe Hockey and Senator Sarah Hanson-Young acting all emotional over refugees while voting for the status quo. Some of the nation's most experienced journalists wrongly declared they were "obviously sincere", despite such obvious facts as:

• Keenan distributing material in his electorate inciting fear and uncertainty over "illegals" (it is not illegal to come to this country and seek asylum), the very people over whom he suggestively scratched his eye;
  
• Hockey was a minister in the Howard government, when all that he would "never support" was done - and worse. Hockey might not send vulnerable people to Malaysia but like Crocodile Tears Keenan he would tow them to Indonesia, or as with Shayan Badriae, neglect them on our soil. Hockey was mentored in his career by Phillp Ruddock. He is a relic of the promising young man I knew and a mockery of the leader he could have been had he principles to stick to; and
• Hanson-Young showed that she has not made the transition from activist to legislator by her set-up of the straw-man "Hussein" and refusing to do anything that she couldn't have done as a bullhorn-wielding outsider.

All of those people offered what was most personal to them - their emotions, and their reactions to matters of life and death - as human shields to monstrously inhuman policy positions. Each of those people had the standing within their party to force change, and show their leaders that you can be politically flexible without having to be a moral weather-vane. Their failure to get over themselves is failure indeed.

Speaking of Insiders, weren't they gutless over their mate Steve Lewis? People who've seen hordes of weasels come and go should be better at spinning, but Malcolm Farr and Fran Kelly were clearly caught napping. Here is a heresy that only a blogger can admit: Lewis is entitled to the same presumption of innocence that Craig Thomson is. Oh yes.

Abbott is right in saying the Houston committee shouldn't tell the Coalition what its policy is - Howard would have sounded more defensive had it been his place to say such a thing. Abbott is wrong to maintain, at a time of impasse, that his policy is the only policy. He risks being outflanked by nimble diplomacy, of which Gillard and Carr are increasingly capable, and of which Morrison and Bishop are not. Abbott has painted Gillard as a bullshit artist, and evidence for this is receding further into the past to the point where such an accusation is an occupational hazard for all politicians. Gillard was sensible to deny that Abbott would really abolish the carbon price, the sort of shirtfronting Abbott badly needs. Labor celebrations that Whyalla had not gone the way of Pompeii or Gomorrah are a small step in turning that attack back on its originator.

Abbott has promised a lot and delivered nothing, and his continued appeals to us to vote him out of his loserdom are growing increasingly plaintive. He told his Federal Executive that he staked his leadership on rolling back the carbon price, an indication the position really is in play. Kim Beazley said the same thing about the GST, and my wasn't that a winner (well, it pumped up his polling position, which isn't quite the same thing - experienced political journalists, please note). There are plenty of examples where a Prime Minister gains credit for doing the right thing without having to be popular, which is why Gillard's personal polling matters not a jot (again, any press gallery journalist with a track record has no excuse).

If Labor succeed at painting Abbott as the bullshit artist, he's finished: he is supposed to be the action-man, not the loser who gets stymied all the time, on every issue. He is the doer with an eye to the future: not the Field of Dreams guy who not only thinks the world before the Global Financial Crisis can be resurrected, but that he's the one to do it. His line that roads symbolise progress in the 21st century was nothing short of pathetic. Abbott is not going to be defeated in some do-or-die clash but he is being ground down, bogged down, his worst nightmare (because he and his party are powerless to turn it around).

Every party conference will feature a colourful piece of dissent as a show of democracy in action. Labor has the power to deal with pantomime from a Paul Howes or a Doug Cameron because ultimately the party has the clout to pull them into line if need be: the party is bigger than them, they need the party more than it needs them. The Liberals do not have the ability to discipline Palmer, he knows it and so does every member of the party.

For Abbott to lead his party to take the opportunities over the next year or so he will need to draw on both rolling successes and popular support that is non-existent and not in prospect. In a situation framed as an impasse, one in need of new answers, Abbott isn't filling the vacuum with his substance, because he has none to offer. Why he can't slake his thirst for service in some other capacity isn't clear, and is ultimately not our problem. The momentum is with the government and not with Abbott: the polls don't measure that so the journalists don't, which is why they aren't talking to us or with us in any meaningful way.

From rescue to recovery

The Opposition claim to have fifty fully funded and costed policies ready to go, according to this paywalled article I read via Google News. Immigration isn't one of them as you can see from another paywalled article you can access for free via Google News.

Scott Morrison believes "the time for talking is over" because he has run out of ideas. Immigration is such a contentious issue in the Liberal Party that the only way it can keep a lid on the internal debate is by reverting to the Howard government's policies, and a time when concerns about humanitarianism could be and was shunted to the margins. The fact that the Howard government was voted from office is a technicality that hasn't sunk in yet, or which can be ignored in the hope of reversing it.

The small number of votes to be had from intolerance and deterrence of asylum-seekers is easily quantifiable by mouth-breathers like Mark Textor, whereas the wider credit accrued to people like Malcolm Fraser for resolving actually exising problems in a humane way is just too hard for poll jockeys like Morrison and Abbott. Appeals to humanity and the national interests are wasted on those guys for that reason.

Morrison has no real idea about his portfolio. The only suggestions he offers are like the worst discussions of defence policy, a focus on hardware specs with "redeployment of naval assets ... and potentially expand our aerial surveillance capacity" etc. Lumping asylum-seekers in with piracy and drug-running is stupid (when a small fortune in China White goes to the bottom of the Arafura Sea, it does not need or get rescuing by the armed forces). He stumbles upon the idea of a regional solution but again focuses on military assets rather than the much-needed comprehensive involvement of governments, NGOs (including the United Nations) and private firms which have something to offer.

Nauru is not a solution because no asylum seekers start their journey to Australia from there. People would have to be taken there by Australian authorities. It is more accurate to describe this as a costly charade rather than "the Coalition's proven policies", particularly if you don't give the Coalition credit for "stopping the boats" during the time of relative peace and prosperity around 2005.

My favourite part was this:

The survey area and the frequency of surveillance must also be expanded and include the Indonesian coast, to enable vessels to be tracked more regularly, even from their point of departure. Where necessary, we should seek agreement from Indonesia for such surveillance.

But only where necessary, mind you. If we absolutely had to respect Indonesia as a sovereign nation, then Scotty can probably rustle up a bit of respect from somewhere. Seriously, which country is going to give up control over its territorial waters to that extent? You know that he hasn't even had a conversation with anyone in Jakarta about that. The insult to our neighbour is compounded by the blithe way in which he raises this: oh yeah, and we might discuss it with the foreigners if we must. And we're expected to have this guy as a minister in our government?

Now do you see why the Coalition's Asian languages announcement is a joke?

My least favourite part was the passive-aggressive way in which Morrison put his refusal to deal with his fellow Australians in the incumbent government:

• "Sadly, this government has become the problem ..."
• "Regrettably, I have no confidence that this government can fix this problem. Too much has happened ..."

If he can't deal with his fellow elected representatives in the Australian Parliament - if the harsh words of Judi Moylan, Russell Broadbent and Mal Washer within the Liberal Party room fall as boiling oil upon his head - then he has bugger-all chance in dealing effectively with people who come from completely different countries and have totally different priorities. Sadly. Regrettably. Pfft.

There are three major issues with the Liberal immigration policy that Morrison would need to deal with, and fast, if he faced real scrutiny from the media as well as a minister with his eye on the ball:

• He still hasn't worked out the contradiction between his professed concern for human rights protections in Malaysia, which hasn't signed the UN refugee treaty, and his lack of concern for those same rights in Indonesia, which also hasn't signed the treaty; and
• Morrison hasn't worked out the contradiction between the Liberals' domestic agenda (a professed concern for those with pluck and courage in business and a scorn for those who just sit back and fill out forms and want help from the government), versus his position on asylum seekers (scorn for those with pluck and courage in getting to Australia by any means necessary, and a professed concern for those who just sit back and fill out forms and want help from the government); and
• Just what sort of deterrent is Australia supposed to put up? We're dealing with people who have been driven from their homes, families and communities by really significant disincentives. Short of machine-gunning people in the water there is no real disincentive you could put up to make refugees stop coming here. It's those darn "pull factors", Scott! If you think this country has gone to the dogs, wait until immigrants stop coming.

If Chris Bowen was not so overrated he would have torn Morrison apart over these contradictions, and in doing so revealed the Coalition as less prepared for government than Paul Kelly and others would have you believe. If journalists were exploring Morrison's lazy, muddle-headed approach to policy detail and his glib approach to serious big-picture international issues, it might actually be a bad thing for so many to be downsized.

The government should quarantine a minimum of 5000 places for the offshore special humanitarian program, in addition to the 6000 for mandated refugees through the UNHCR. The balance of the program should be available for onshore applicants. Where the quota of 13,750 permanent visas is exceeded, only temporary visas should be provided until a place under the program is available. If someone is going to wait for a permanent visa, it should not be those who are so vulnerable they cannot afford a bus ticket, let alone a plane to Jakarta and a boat to Australia.

The time for talking is over.

That paragraph is full of administrative arrangements that are eminently suitable for negotiation among people of sense and goodwill: 6000 of this and 13,750 of that and various programs and classifications, the very sort of horse-trading that pollies do all the time. The declaration that follows, at the start of Morrison's final paragraph, is just another attempt to make obstinacy look like decisiveness.

The Coalition declared that both the carbon price and the mining tax were dire threats to the economy and the nation. In a hung parliament they failed to stop either. The Coalition declared that Craig Thomson and Peter Slipper should not stay in their positions, and that Kathy Jackson and James Ashby were heroic for speaking out; they failed to remove the former and the latter have (to say the least) let them down. They can't win a trick.

In tonight's news Abbott was photographed chatting amiably with spoilt boy and convicted thug Nick D'Arcy, and was later reported to have done to a fat guy who owns the LNP something similar to what he did to Mark Riley. Peta Credlin is really losing her touch. This is the very time in the electoral cycle when deep, entrenched attitudes that can't be shifted in an election campaign take hold. No wonder Abbott wanted to fast-forward straight to election day.

Morrison was sent out to play the hits and memories of a non-policy that apparently strikes a chord. It has attracted all the votes it is going to attract. Those who are opposed are becoming less sullen and silent, as Malcolm Fraser demonstrates, and is starting to repulse those who are unsure. It also feeds into a wider narrative that Abbott is an insensitive dickhead, and that if Morrison is any example then the whole Coalition government will be like that. Imagine Morrison encountering in one of his talkback radio appearances an Australian who "cannot afford a bus ticket", and consider how far his humanitarian pose would extend.

Morrison thinks he's whacking a piňata of popular support but he's really flaying a beehive, and is unprepared for what seems inevitable. Being incorrigible doesn't negate this silliness, it compounds it. There is a need for a regional agreement, but any joint command arrangements follow, not lead, such an agreement. Morrison and Julie Bishop have shown that they lack the flexibility to develop such an arrangement.

In NSW Bob Carr showed himself a past master at taking credit for what the Coalition hinted at dimly and pulling it off before they could weigh policy options with their limited skills and attention spans. Unless he's lost his touch, Carr has what it takes to carry the dead weight of Bowen with him, and give the Prime Minister another of those get-out-of-gaol-cards that she gets instead of credit.

Having declared that "enough is enough" and "The time for talking is over", it's puzzling that Morrison complains that the Prime Minister and the Minister for Immigration haven't called him. They haven't called me either, Scott. Must be all that governing they are busy doing.

This is not to say that the Gillard government will do a great job with asylum-seeker policy (particularly under the current minister) but the Coalition definitely can't and won't.

Journalism beyond newspapers

I watched with glee while your kings and queens
Fought for ten decades for the gods they made
I shouted out, "Who killed the Kennedys?"
When after all it was you and me

- Mick Jagger and Keith Richards Sympathy for the Devil

If you're just a little fish within the Main Stream of The Narrative, then your sacking would not constitute "loss of diversity". If you've ever complained that anyone can get a blog without so much as a by-your-leave from MSM HR departments, then your removal from a non-job does not constitute any threat to democracy.

Gardeners know that newspapers make excellent mulch. Pet owners use newspapers to line their pets' beds or cages. When I was a child, fish shops wrapped their products in newspaper (it's against health regulations today). There's no doubt newspapers have their uses. Now that the twin towers of Australian newspaper journalism, Fairfax and News Ltd, are finally crumbling both the nostalgics and denialists are having their day. The question that needs asking now is: what should be pulled from the wreckage? What can be safely left there as economic and journalistic mulch for another time and purpose?

Just because the business model of newspapers has been declining for quite some time now, this does not mean the end of journalism; people might miss a particular restaurant when it closes, but they don't starve. It doesn't mean the end of a diversity of voices; the diversity of voices available to Australian media consumers has never been greater, so long as your definition of "media" isn't restricted to platforms available fifty or a hundred years ago.

It doesn't mean the end of a well-informed populace in a democracy, because journalists are no longer gatekeepers of important information. Go through each article in a newspaper and consider: is there a way that I can find this out without having to rely on a journalist to tell me? Sporting results are available from the websites of the contest organisers or even the clubs involved. Press releases and other information is available from the websites of government, companies and interest groups. Business news is required to be reported to the stock market and other regulator authorities under disclosure requirements - very rare is the business news story (or any other kind of media story really) not cobbled together from publicly available information.

In many cases newspaper articles, and spots on radio/TV news, are nothing more than rehashed press releases - once you have read original sources the magic goes off journalism quite a bit. The bombastic insistence that everything the media does all the time constitutes "high quality journalism" (this assumption underpins media organisations' reluctance, if not refusal, to admit error) is fatally exposed.

This story is an example where professional journalists abused the respect and trust that is due to those who put in the work and report from where the action is. The sad thing is that these jokers assumed nobody (let alone Annabel Crabb!) could ever - or would be able to - call them on their bullshit. With this, Dennis Shanahan's reputation for veracity is gone. In 2007 he became a laughing stock for insisting that Howard's poor polling would turn around, an error of judgment compounded over at least a year and still unaccounted for. Nowadays Shanahan is cited by right-wingers keening for validation; but after putting words into the mouth of the EU President he is not just past his best, but finished as a reliable source of information about federal politics. Add him to your list of departees, Mr Williams, and choose some other old lag to mentor the youngsters.

This report provides another example, without the integrity issues of the previous example. The news that Julian Assange was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London was available from numerous sources - e.g. the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry. By standing outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Lisa Millar was doing what she was assigned to do - but she added nothing to the story by being there, another example of the sort of waste that has bled private media to the point of unsustainability.

Political journalists relying on anonymous sources may have the only stories that cannot be obtained other than by journalists, so they'd want to be good - and mostly they aren't. So, the same half-dozen Labor MPs who are hard-core Rudd fans are worried about the enduring unpopularity of the Gillard government, again? So senior Coalition figures are worried that the public have twigged to the fact that Tony Abbott is a boofhead? Is this a make-work scheme for the mutually irrelevant, or are the journalists right and this is the very essence of high quality journalism?

Compounding this lack of judgment is the delusion that only journalists can judge what quality journalism is. In every other profession outsiders at least have a seat at the table. Indeed, journalists insist on scrutinising other professions: Michelle Grattan has never been a politician, Greg Sheridan no diplomat, Francis Leach never played top-level football; I could go on but basically all insist on their right to scrutinise and their expertise in having done so. Look at how they carry on at the prospect (the spectre!) of any form of government regulation. Any journalists who so much as questions my right to scrutinise their output can go and boil their heads. If journalism is important then it is too important to be left to its practitioners, however their number might decline.

This explains why the ABC's Media Watch can only be presented by somebody who is or has been a journalist. The fearless independent broadcaster would collapse in on itself were that show to be fronted by someone who is well-read and has a broad general knowledge of government, business, sport and entertainment, and who is eminently capable of sorting shit from chocolate when it comes to media output without resorting to the snobbery we have come to expect from Stuart Littlemore or Jonathan Holmes. Journalists have a hard time accepting Media Watch at all, and any journalist involved might face accusations that they are letting the side down; but a non-journalist would send the poor little petals into meltdown.

Let us have no more nonsense about charters of editorial independence, because that is just a licence to bullshit on the part of journalists. Fairfax's heterodoxy produces only slightly more reliable news and opinion than the Juche-like orthodoxy of News. Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood is a former journalist and News Australia CEO Kim Williams isn't, yet both find themselves in a similar place in terms of their impact on journalism and journalists.

The economic historian Robert Heilbroner wrote that Schumpeter "was the most romantic of economists, and capitalism to his eyes had all the glamor and excitement of a knightly jousting tourney". The same can be said of Sinclair Davidson, a tax-eating ivory-tower academic with no more practical idea about business than the most committed Marxist, as seen from his statement that:

One of the benefits of a takeover is that inefficient and ineffective work practices get abolished.

Former Fairfax and now ABC journalist Jonathan Green skewers this pointy-headed dreaming with two decades of practical experience at Fairfax. Going into debt to fund media takeovers is itself an inefficient business practice. Assuming that rationalisations that apply to other industries can simply be applied to journalism while maintaining sales and "quality" (don't get me started) is inefficient. Decisions about what is or isn't efficient are distorted by the very process by which those so deciding came to be in a position to make such decisions.

One decision that successive middle managers made was to allow PR people to pitch stories to journalists. The reason why this made journalists so angry isn't because the assumptions are behind it are offensive, but because they're true. As Yes (Prime) Minister is to public servants and executive government, as In The Thick Of It is to press secretaries, so there is a darkly humorous TV sitcom to be written about PRs and journalists. Tina Alldis could be the person to write it.

Middle managers could have decided that if PR people wanted their message in the paper, they should pay for it, and had they stuck to such a principle the financial positions of media companies would be better than they are. Media content would be more reliable than it is, and the demand for an objective source would sting less than it does. Too late now. Why did middle managers wreck their employers' value proposition in this way?

The decline in newspaper organisations correlated with a rise in middle management. Old-school newspapers were fairly flat organisations, with journalists having few layers of management between them and their editor, and between editors and owner/managers. An increasing number of middle managers faced decreasingly realistic career prospects within newspaper organisations, so they built bridges to PR companies across which many travelled to greater reward and less stress than allowed in traditional editorial careers.

The great trick that media middle managers made in encouraging PR dollies to pester journalists with prefabricated stories which bore or mislead readers is that they made journalists accountable for those problems. Journalists do not tell PR people where to go because of the pressures placed on them by middle management - and because they too might need to step across to PR career-wise when newspaper middle-managers reveal themselves to be so inefficient as to send Sinclair Davidson into a tizz.

Getting back to political journalism, I know I was meant to be appalled by this but like Oscar Wilde at the death of Dickens' Little Nell, I laughed:

You probably missed this story, on page 15 of today’s Australian Financial Review, overshadowed by all the big media moves and staff cuts:

“The parliamentary bureau of the 86-year-old Canberra Times will close as part of the restructure of Fairfax Media … Journalists were told The Canberra Times’ ‘focus in future would be on more local news’.”

Let’s parse that news. The only daily newspaper in Australia’s capital city, where politics and government is the main industry, will no longer have its own bureau or its own dedicated journalists covering federal parliament and all its entrails.

Of all the white flags raised by Fairfax this week ... the decision to close the parliamentary bureau of the national capital’s proud newspaper is, in symbolic terms, one of the most depressing.

This is newspaper that, in its heyday, attempted to model itself on the Washington Post as a serious broadsheet that covered the capital’s local news and national affairs for a unique audience in the company town of politics ... The unravelling of quality journalism doesn’t get much closer to home for federal politicians than this.

Oh, please.

Firstly, no amount of hype casts a shadow. That's what distinguishes hype from its opposite, substance. Secondly, the notion that even though we don't deserve to be in the club of those hand-wringing about the future of journalism (the patronising if statistically-verifiable assumption "You probably missed this story") but we're being invited into the club anyway, by the sheer good grace of the editorialist.

Thirdly, in Canberra many of the decisions that affect locals are taken by "the permanent government"; senior public servants who serve both Labor and Coalition governments equally, rather than blow-ins who are foisted upon Canberra from elsewhere in the nation. These people wantonly blow away painstaking work by legions of honest Canberrans with ill-chosen remarks or parish-pump campaigns against "tax-eating shinybums with no idea about the real world". If The Canberra Times turns its back on standard "political journalism" and builds a substantial practice examining government as it is practised then it will put the press gallery to shame.

If scrutiny of government processes rather than press gallery hoo-ha is what The Canberra Times means by local news (and truly emulating The Washington Post at its best), that can't be a bad thing. If it's not, and if that means The Canberra Times is just going to become another suburban rag, it will be eaten alive by The Riot Act - a case of the MSM delivering itself up to its worst fears about the internet.

Crikey's notion that Canberra is "closer to home" for federal politicians than their constituencies (and particularly suburban rags therein) is telling.

Morning radio and TV largely reads out stories from the newspapers. These media will have to develop their own journalism to get stories that enfeebled newspapers can no longer provide.

How to be a journalist

To do journalism today, the first thing you have to identify your sources. Link to or nominate a press release, a wire report, whatever. No journalist should expect to be taken on trust. Anyone who gets up on their high horse against this is not some noble defender of Truth, nor even an analogue Quixote; they can just piss off.

The second thing is that you have to develop the courage that no jobsworth has: the courage to say that your boss lacks judgment, and that you are going to pursue journalism without their imprimatur because your judgment is better than theirs. I don't know how to pay for it either.

The third is to find a way of linking your story back to people's lives. I don't care if you have a killer quote or inside tip, if you've got 600 words of bullshit you can keep it.

Yes, yes, there's more to it than that; but if you've seen so-called professional journalists at work, not much more; not nearly enough.

Goading and politics

When I was a Liberal Student in the late 1980s, you knew you were a proper Liberal if you put up a proposal that goaded the lefties. Proposing something like privatising the refectory or rolling your eyes at condemnations of racism could reduce someone with a big title on a student association to gibbering about Baudrillard while you represented yourself as Addressing Real Student Issues. In a non-compulsory election where you could hold an office with multiple winners, all on less than 50% of the vote, such a position was a winner.

I've moved on from then, and so have most others who were students around the same time; but the small numbers of people who think that represented the model of what politics is and how it should be conducted have not. One of these is the alternative Prime Minister of Australia.

In recent days he has gone in hard against asylum seekers and given verbal support for Gina Rinehart's bid for Fairfax. Neither of those positions will win the Coalition a single extra vote. Nobody who voted Labor in 2007 and 2010, or who voted for Wilkie or Windsor or Oakeshott, or who voted for Katter's mob at the Queensland election, will vote Coalition next time as a result of those positions.

Observers who shake their heads at NSW Labor winning state election after state election should consider how much help they got from the Coalition. In 1999 and 2007 the Liberals deliberately pursued policies that drove up the Coalition vote in the seats they already held but which effectively forfeited marginal seats. This pattern is being repeated federally; it is increasingly likely that the Coalition will make some of its safe seats very safe while starving marginal seats of the few votes they need to displace Labor/Independent incumbents.

Why Abbott and the clowns who consider themselves Coalition Strategists (and who, alas, are thus considered by others) are stuck in defence is unclear. The media narrative is that Abbott is always on the front foot against the government, perennially confident, dukes up and toujours l'audace - but reality can't support that narrative. When such differences open up it is the narrative that is unsustainable. In the polls, and as far as press gallery consensus is concerned, the Coalition have the government by the throat. This is the point when the Coalition should have the courage to try out new ideas.

The Coalition has put all their eggs into the basket of stunts and skulduggery rather than policy. That's all gone now, egg on faces all 'round (well, it looks like raw egg - that's as close an analysis as we need, thank you very much). That debacle means the Coalition is left with nothing. One reason why you don't risk winning ugly is because losing ugly is so unbearable. The Coalition will have years to repent both the sugar-rush that gave them such great polls in 2011, and the fact that they did so little with them.

At the equivalent point in the electoral cycle in late 1995, shadow ministers started floating ideas so that claims by Labor during the election campaign that the Coalition stood for nothing fell on deaf ears. Abbott is supposed to be emulating Howard but only in lip-service terms, which is all very well for journalists (and voters) happy to take Abbott at his word. Voters happy to take Abbott at his word are fewer in number in marginal seats than in electorates where they are already surrounded by people who think as they do.

A focus on non-issues is exactly the wrong thing for them to be doing right now - nobody will believe anything they bring out during the campaign. This is why Phillip Coorey is wrong when he thinks the next election is a reprise of 2007. Coorey assumes that the Coalition have the policy heft and temperamental stability to convince people that the answer to the present malaise (such as it is) is a Coalition government. There are no grounds for anyone to assume that, and blowing away that flimsy assumption is a far easier task than that facing the Coalition - which they and the press gallery appear destined only to realise too late, too late.

NSW Liberal patriarch Sir John Carrick always said that you can't fatten the pig on market day. Right now the only fattening going on is in that most ephemeral and unreliable of indicators - the polls. Abbott and the generation of Liberal strategists gathered around him are mounting a much more substantial challenge to the Liberal Party's received campaigning wisdom more than they are to Labor's incumbency.

That lack of strategic nous is the only explanation I can find for this nonsense. One of the Coalition's most relied-upon tacticians seems to have all but declared his intention to sit out the next election or cruise through it in second gear, rather than go all out for a serious shot at governing the country.

If Liberals are ambivalent about the prospect of an Abbott Government, what makes anyone think swinging voters are at all exercised by the prospect? Nowhere are Liberals more ambivalent about winning government than in the nation's most marginal seat. A heavy hand with "counselling" will see Liberals stay at home when the hard graft of setting up a campaign is to be done over the next few months. I've been in election campaigns where it is hard to rally the party faithful let alone the undecideds, and that's what we are looking at here. People busy fretting about what an Abbott Government might (not) do should really get a life.

Look at the new government in Queensland. They do not have to win any more votes, and so far the only decisions they have made have been leftie-goading: development against the Barrier Reef, cancelling literary prizes and defunding HIV education programs. No votes lost or won from any of that for Newman, but the difference with Abbott's crew is they're not in government. If Abbott creates the impression that he's going to stuff cronies into every crevice of government and fiddle with a few programs, there's no incentives for swinging voters to shift their vote from Labor.

Labor supporters plead for voters and the media to have some sympathy for the government, to admire the sheer pluck of Gillard and Swan and to recognise that they are doing their best. Such sentiments will follow, rather than lead, a perception that the Coalition are just not up to governing the country. People want to feel good about their decision, but most voting decisions are made in private on cold calculations of advantage. Keating won in 1993 because the Coalition made people feel greedy and stupid about voting for Fightback! - he did just enough for people to create post-facto justifications for giving him one more chance. This worked far better than dewy-eyed pleas for forgiveness like Kevin Rudd offered in 2010, or the damn-the-torpedoes bluster that tipped out both John Brumby and Jeff Kennett from governing Victoria.

Supporters of the government, whether rusted-on Labor people or not, need to wait out this aberration whereby Abbott gets to goad people who are better than him. There will be a time to give it to Abbott with both barrels, but it is too early for that. Simply by executing the carbon price with the same steadiness that killed the anti-GST campaign the government will have done enough to put the Coalition off its game of winning over those who have voted Labor.

Before Hawke it was accepted that Prime Ministers didn't have to be popular in order to win elections. Nobody outside his family loved Menzies, for goodness sake. Now popularity is assumed to be essential, the oxygen without which a Prime Minister cannot function, and someone who keeps on going without oxygen must be a freak. That assumption requires you to forget how quickly both Howard and Rudd made the rooster-to-feather-duster transition. Gillard will win for the same reason that Fraser and Keating both did: nobody loves them but the other guy is hopeless. If you must goad you do so after you win, not beforehand; premature goading can make people standing with you feel that their judgment is poor, and they may not be there when you are challenged to do something more than lazy culture-war bullshit.

Abbott is being defensive when he should be attacking, but he has nothing to attack with. The usefulness of his stunt strategy evaporates when doorstops go feral and have to be cut short. Nonetheless, there are still people who insist that he's going to be Prime Minister, it's just that they are already the sorts of people who would never have voted anything but Coalition anyway. The fact that those people can't relate to those who voted Labor in 2007 and '10 is why the Coalition are going to lose. Labor haven't consistently been able to relate to them either, but consider how much easier their task is and add the benefits of incumbency.

Goading people who don't rise to your bait make you feel like your judgment about people and situations sucks, and judgment about people and situations is the very essence of politics. If Abbott can't snatch government from Labor, only a journalist would believe he'd have anything to offer in terms of gentle and substantive persuasion over the long term.

Shoe leather fetish

This piece of fluff is designed to make journalists feel good and important, which is why so many of them tweeted and retweeted it. Apart from the feel-good aspect it doesn't really work for the same two reasons that any piece of journalism fails: it lacks perspective and it has no powers of observation.

It is wrong on almost every level. First is the straw man that new media such as Twitter and blogs don't do journalism but that newspapers do.

The mainstream media decided, for whatever reason, that the biggest story this year is what one backbencher allegedly did with a work credit card back in 2005. I dare any editor to produce any evidence whatsoever that the public is clamouring for more and more details - the more prurient the better - on Craig Thomson's activities. Nonetheless, that's their story and by heavens aren't they sticking to it, sticking to it like oh never mind.

None of McKenzie-Murray's idealised journalists are doing a fraction of the work that Peter Wicks and his small team are doing. What's worse is that there is a kind of embarrassment on the part of the so-called professional journalists that there is more to the story than they had managed to uncover. Walking from the press gallery to a press conference and back again might satisfy McKenzie-Murray's definition of "shoe leather" expended, but it isn't good enough.

How much "shoe leather" was expended by Channel 9 in getting an interview with that prostitute? Is that team more likely, or less, to be recognised by their fellow journalists than Peter Wicks?

Like any industry sliding into redundancy, it's silly to claim that the problem is that the workers aren't working hard enough. The problem with Australian professional journalism (and I mean that strictly in the sense of getting paid for what they do) is that they are working on the same things. The idea that the two most scrutinised politicians in the country in the country right now are a former Liberal backbencher and a former Labor backbencher (neither of them ever ministers) is an absolute joke. You don't understand politics if you believe that, so therefore we can conclude that almost all editors and political journalists do not understand politics. Perhaps that's why McKenzie-Murray doesn't praise journalistic brains, or their ability to explain complex situations simply - just the donkey-work of "shoe leather endeavour".

As to Watergate, it's getting a little old. Imagine if every doctor who botched treating a patient could simply invoke Christiaan Barnard, implying that they were in that league simply by doing the same job, and leave it at that. Keep in mind that Mark Felt approached Woodward and that much of the work done by him and Bernstein was basically transcribing what Felt had said. Nice work if you can get it.

Imagine if burglars were caught red-handed in John Curtin House (Labor's headquarters in Canberra) or Robert Menzies House (the Liberal Party's equivalent). It would be covered the following day as follows by any press gallery journalist you care to name:

A group of burglars wearing business suits were arrested last night at [building name], the head office of the [relevant] Party.

The Party's [Federal Director], [name], expressed his disappointment at the burglary and hinted that it was not a standard property crime.

A senior official in [the other party] said that it was "preposterous" that anyonre in their party would be involved. "Ha ha, you're just being paranoid!".

"I'm not here to discuss burglaries", said [the leader of the other party]. "I mean, that's a state issue".

(end)

And there the story would rest, unless a blogger followed it up, whereupon the media would refuse to follow up and admit their errors.

Anyhow, back to McKenzie-Murray:

For the other side, much of our political reportage is dross, the web versions of our major newspapers are disheartening and publishers seem increasingly confused or cynical in their response to a haemorrhaging model.

Is it really too much to ask for a de-drossing? I'll take my chances with Schumpeterian creative destruction any day, but increasingly I think supposedly experienced journalists who become editors are the problem rather than the solution. It would only take a few to wake up to themselves to turn things around, but failing that let's have dotcom startups moving into Holt Street and displacing, say, Greg Sheridan. It will be less of a tragedy than anyone might imagine, and therefore more of an indictment of the politico-media complex and its impact on our democracy.

The public goodwill that newspapers have developed - and the imprimatur they confer to their journalists - has allowed for an access to public figures and institutions as yet unavailable to our notional "citizen journalist".

If you want to find out what is going on, how we are actually governed, the last place you would go is to Parliament. The idea that a press secretary is all-knowing, or even capable of being a human search-engine, is both an assumption that underpins the way modern journalism works and an absolute furphy.

You'll find the same skills and institutional support were vital in making sense of the Wikileaks cables. That's why Julian Assange gave them to four reputable newspapers - The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and The Guardian - well before their public release, so trained journalists could corroborate and contextualise them for their readers.

Those "trained journalists" have barely scratched the surface. It was Assange who did those outlets a favour by according them a relevance they simply didn't have. Proof of this lies in an account by the then-editor of the NYT, Bill Keller, who wrote an astonishingly petty piece about dealing with the man who made his career. No wonder Mark Felt avoided the NYT if clowns like Keller were working there.

People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook.

- US President Richard Nixon addressing newspaper editors, 17 November 1973

If Bill Keller had been at that function he would have declared those words good enough to dump any Watergate investigation his paper would have done, and distinguished himself with a bitchy piece on Felt as post-facto justification. When Martin McKenzie-Murray goes on about his US-based studies and tries to extrapolate them to Australia, Bill Keller is the epitome of the wise and good editor that the shoe-leather fetishist could want. Keller recently embarrassed himself by comparing Facebook to Murdoch's hacks.

One of the curious demarcations in the culture wars is that between "mainstream journalists" and independent writers. The line is most hurriedly and observably drawn on Twitter, where bloggers and journalists boorishly defend their turf. Not all, mind you. Many writers and journalists realise it's an increasingly fatuous distinction.

It's what's called a straw man, Martin.

High-end journalism is being eroded the world over, and the democratisation of micro-publishing isn't an antidote.

No-one said it was. But when you acknowledge the role of subject-matter experts and people with perspectives that the media cannot hope to capture, there's little to be lost that should really be missed.

David Simon, a former Baltimore newspaperman and creator of the television series The Wire, testified at a Senate hearing into the future of journalism. He said: "You do not, in my city, run into bloggers or so-called citizen journalists at City Hall or in the courthouse hallways or at the bars where police officers gather. You don't see them consistently nurturing and then pressing others."

Well, of course not. There is nothing, nothing to be gained by hanging out at City Hall. Nothing to be gained by joining a press gallery, or even following a politician around a shopping centre or some other public event. That's not where news is. Everyone who says otherwise, or invokes bullshit like "newspaper traditions", is mistaken. No-one wants to pay for that crap, and everyone who has spent their working lives honing those unnecessary skills is facing a bleak future.

We live in a country beguiled by possessive apostrophes whose blogs are given to repetition and apoplexy.

You won't see my dinkus atop this blog, Martin, and unlike some "professional journalists" I could name I actually know how to use an apostrophe properly (name me a professional journalist reporting/commentating on politics who uses apostrophes possessively less than I do). That leaves "repetition and apoplexy", and good luck in your endeavours to establish that the media is free of those qualities.

Perhaps, if newspapers continue to be squeezed and liquidated, we'll all be unveiling Captain Emads and AWB scandals in our spare time, but I doubt it.

"Captain Emad" has left the country. It ill almost certainly be a "stringer", a person whose business model is closer to that of a blogger than a journalist, who tracks him down, rather than a journalist who only knows less about Australian immigration law and practice than Scott Morrison does.

As for AWB, plenty of journalists had plenty of opportunities to look into the role of government in that debacle. Plenty of them could and did call up John Howard, Alexander Downer and Mark Vaile to get a quote, but none have really drilled those guys on (to employ a Watergate-ism) what they knew and when they knew it. None of them asked Kevin Rudd, who built his profile on AWB, to look into the archives. Mind you, Woodward and Bernstein didn't interview Nixon, either.

Martin McKenzie-Murray regards "good journalism" as though it's something of which he has experience and familiarity. He's patronising and dismissive about journalism outside media organisations, especially when it's those people who are carrying the can right now. His attitude toward "good journalism" should be more like that of Gandhi's attitude toward "Western civilisation" - a good idea to be worked on and not clouded by false dichotomies, pulled punches on your colleagues, and other examples of dishonest thinking. I can only assume that he fetishises shoe leather so much because he has gotten used to the taste, what with his foot being squarely in his mouth.

Sinodinos exposed as a lightweight

Arthur he does what he pleases
All of his life his master's toys
And deep in his heart he's just -
He's just a boy
Livin' his life one day at a time
He's showing himself a really good time
He's laughin' about the way
They want him to be

- Burt Bacharach Arthur's Theme

I believed all the commentary about Sinodinos adding some sort of heft to the Coalition's offering on economic policy until I read this paywalled article that I read on Google News. It was standard hackery when real policy substance is so badly needed.

This is a time of promise and opportunity - yes, it is. The biggest criticism you can make of governments over the past ten years or so is that they have mismanaged the opportunities and failed to translate them into tangible benefits for people, including opportunities not provided directly by those businesses which Sinodinos and others regard as "wealth creators". Government has a role in redistributing private largesse across the economy, and the trick is to do so in such a way that it creates more opportunity than the "wealth creator" could have provided had they kept their money.

When I started reading Sinodinos' article, that's what I was looking for: a sense of an alternative future for our country and confidence in the means to make them real. A comprehensive policy document would not be necessary, but a critique that clearly tapped into wider themes would have been nice.

Last week, Joe Hockey made the basic politico-media error of fronting the press without having anything to say. Sinodinos has compounded the error, showing that the Coalition's problems go deeper than a slip by one person.

WAYNE Swan should have used last week's national accounts to reposition the government's economic message.

He should have been upfront with Australians about the reasons for their lack of confidence and should have offered a positive plan for tackling the nation's economic challenges. Australia cannot afford Labor's inconsistent approach to economic management.

As far as I can recall the main news to come out of the Budget was that Swan followed through on a long-standing commitment to deliver a surplus. Of all the criticisms that can be made of Swan, the idea that he was some sort of flake changing with the prevailing winds was a new one. I looked for Sinodinos to back this up - nothing.

The Treasurer's celebration of the economic data may be short-lived. National accounts statistics are necessarily backward looking and are not reliable indicators of future prospects.

That second sentence is more than a little rich when you consider Sinodinos' main schtick is as a nostalgia act for the Howard Government, and that the central message of Abbott is that he can and will reprise the happy days of that bygone era.

As to the first - well it may be, and it may not. Talk about a stinging critique right there. All he has left is a bit of quibbling about messaging, and precious little of that.

Much of last quarter's economic growth occurred in the mining boom states of Western Australia and Queensland, and the Northern Territory.

Non-mining states such as NSW and Victoria continue to experience anaemic growth.

The politics of this is interesting:

• The state with the worst economic growth, Tasmania, cleaves most strongly to the incumbent Labor government.
• The next two worst-performing states, Victoria and SA, are pretty strong for the incumbents and highly suspicious of The Situation.
• NSW, simplistically written off as a "non-mining state", is fifty-fifty for Labor, probably better disposed were its leaders not familiar Sydney types.
• The parts of the country that do best under this government - WA, Queensland and the Northern Territory - are those parts least likely to vote for the incumbents.

The more the government does what Sinodinos would have it do, the less successful it would be.

This shows why it's all very well to have pollsters telling you what people said in response to the questions they asked them - but never ever should pollsters have any input to policy substance, and nor to the circular process by which messages are crafted and sent to those whom they poll.

Swan has struggled for months with the sluggish state of the non-mining economy. He had publicly agonised over the cost of living, families doing it tough and the patchwork economy.

Substitute "Swan" for "Hockey" in the above and it rings true. The difference is that Hockey has a lot of simplistic answers, and enjoys the luxury whereby journalists don't call him on assumptions like the idea that getting rid of the mining tax will be good for the economy.

Ongoing turmoil in Europe led by Greece and Spain, its impact on the US and Chinese economies as well as the regulatory uncertainty resulting from minority government continue to weigh down on business and consumer confidence. In an era of reduced asset values and wealth, voters are grumpy and do not feel wealthy or optimistic.

Nor has the Coalition given them any reason to feel less so.

Australia tends to be culturally oriented toward Europe and North America while being economically oriented toward Asia. This has been some sort of quirky paradox for decades, but now it's a seismic fault that requires government to lead the cultural reorientation process. Tony Abbott isn't the guy to do that, either.

Rather than lay some basis for hope, Swan has sold aspirational Australians short with his class-based rhetoric, scapegoating the miners and playing at Robin Hood. He should adopt a more positive framework for managing the resources boom. It should be about maximising and spreading opportunities to create wealth rather than stoking the politics of envy.

If you're going to maximise and spread economic benefit beyond the holdings of mining companies and other wealth creators, this will involve some recourse to the tax system. Rinehart and Forrest and Palmer squeal like stuck pigs at the prospect of having to pay tax, and you can anticipate the pantomime of them wailing that the Liberals have sold them out by levying any kind of tax on them at all. That pantomime will be further away than the polls indicate, but the lazier journos can start drafting their pieces on it now.

Empowering workers and entrepreneurs should be the name of the game. People feel more secure the more they have control over their own destiny.

Job security cannot be mandated. Equipping workers and entrepreneurs with a global mindset and a capacity to cope with change is necessary to create a sustainable competitive advantage.

The existence of the public sector workforce in this country shows that people do and will trade away higher incomes for what they perceive to be job security. As a career public servant, Sinodinos should have more sympathy for that than he exhibits here. That mentality extends into the private sector, too.

I've been a contractor for most of my career and Sinodinos is employed under a kind of six-year rolling employment contract with the public sector, but the fact is that not everyone can or does get the global entrepreneurial mentality that Sinodinos would wish. That mentality is at odds with the hankering for security and stability that pervades your polling, Arthur.

Once you come to grips with that contradiction you will finally understand what we are all up against with the politics of workplace relations.

The costs of providing new infrastructure in Australia are blowing out compared with overseas. The Business Council of Australia estimates the cost blowout compared with the US to be about 40 per cent for resource projects overall. Australian airports are 90 per cent more expensive to build than in the US and for hospitals the differential is 62 per cent.

The BCA study released last week is an important reminder that, in a global marketplace, Australia must benchmark its competitiveness and productivity against not only developed economies but also emerging economies in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

You there, stop sniggering at the BCA.

The USA did not skimp on skills education like the Howard government did, Arthur, and its high unemployment has pushed down the cost of labour. It also doesn't have an undersupply of housing, the resolution of which is pushing up prices here. It, like emerging economies in Asia, Africa and Latin America, also features "burdensome and unnecessary regulatory requirements".

Australian entrepreneurs and companies continue to highlight that, in many industries, the cost of doing business in Australia is anywhere between 20 per cent and 40 per cent higher than for our main competitors.

If returns weren't also much higher, I suppose the capital inflow and economic growth would just stop dead. The fact that these haven't stopped dead should force a rethink, and render the once economically rational Sinodinos embarrassed to spout such guff under his own name.

Firms that cannot pass on new taxes will have to reduce investment or employment. Labor has failed to even acknowledge that possibility. Some businesses have already started reducing their investments and employment levels in anticipation of the July 1 carbon tax start date.

No examples? No sentences beginning with the phrase "Now if the Coalition were in government, we would ...".

Now is a good time to go full throttle on genuine economic reform to grow the supply side of the economy and lift the speed limits on growth.

Yes, it is. This will involve more debt and taxation though. You're up for that, aren't you Arthur?

Arthur?

The Grattan Institute has laid out an economic reform program based on lifting female workforce participation, increasing the retirement age and a big-bang tax reform that builds on the Coalition's reforms under the new tax system. Extending the GST to food, health and education is not politically palatable in the present environment of new taxes.

What he's saying here is that he is not committing to the Grattan Institute proposal, or any other reform really. Still, he thinks it would be nice if Labor went all out so that he doesn't have to.

Dealing with female labour participation requires an examination of how the various family-related payments interact to provide consistent incentives while preserving a capacity to support young children at home if that is the family preference.

This is a work of sheer piffle, doubling back on itself and strangling whatever meaning it may have had. Howard, and any other minister worth their salt, would have sent that back for a rewrite. Sinodinos might have been a legend behind closed doors in Canberra, but even in the safe and shallow waters of The Strain he is exposed.

If it is the family preference to support young children at home, that family had better have the economic means to provide for that preference. Single-parent families and almost any couple living in Sydney will not be able to do this. There is no reason why the social welfare system should provide half-hearted and half-witted measures that nod in this direction but don't actually facilitate it. Conservatives who would provide some part and tokenistic payment for stay-at-home parents and/or domestic nannies have no grounds to claim that they are shrinking the tax burden.

Given that the issue of some families' preference for raising children in the home is a minority one, and not congruent with or particularly relevant to the economic agenda item of increasing female participation in the workforce, let us now understand that childcare is essential. It has to be flexible, given the demands for flexibility in the workforce, and it has to be of high quality. Where are we going to get a whole lot of highly skilled and committed people who care about little kids and who'll work for very little money, Arthur? No, me neither. Thought you'd have some answers by now.

Another support mechanisms for greater workforce participation include national schemes for disability and income support. Shame that Sinodinos' sorry excuse for a leader has put that on the never-never. When your own leader is not serious about mechanisms for increased workforce participation, maybe you need to broaden the scope of your review.

There are other issues behind increased female participation in the workforce, and I haven't asked them either because I'm just a blogger. If I were a Senator for New South wales I'd ask my female constituents the questions that Sinodinos shows no sign of having asked.

Labor's trend towards means testing such payments at relatively low income levels can create poverty traps, particularly for secondary income earners, most often women, wishing to re-enter the labour force or work longer hours. Comprehensive reform of such payments will need to be part of a larger tax reform package.

Yes, I suppose they will. This is not to say that means tests should be abandoned, because that would mean welfare expenditure would blow out and we can't have that.

Increased competitive intensity and more flexible labour markets are central to creating a culture of continuous improvement based on closer links between wages and productivity at the enterprise level.

Yes.

To increase "competitive intensity" would mean a reversal of the longterm trend in the Australian economy toward oligopoly in many industries; I assume this means a greater role for anti-competitive behaviour on a level that makes Alan Fels look like a piker. You can be competitive and constantly on the lookout for new opportunities, or you can be relaxed and comfortable, Arthur: take your pick.

More competitive markets encourage innovation as firms seek first-mover advantage. This approach should also extend to greater contestability of service provision in the public sector to improve performance.

Australian firms know that first-movers are suckers; the second mouse gets the cheese. For Sinodinos to assert the contrary proves a principle that has to be repudiated if his career is to succeed: that shinybums in Canberra have no idea how things work and are undercutting, not supporting, those of us in the real world with their honeyed words.

Swan should focus on accelerating reform rather than class warfare; no ticker, no start.

That line worked against Kim Beazley 15 years ago, sort of: it might work again, but if not ...?

Arthur Sinodinos should not have let that go out under his own name. Wyatt Roy or some other inexperienced MP might have gotten away with this sort of drivel but better should be expected of Sinodinos, given the sheer gulf between the wraps he gets and the evidence herein. Sinodinos has been exposed as a lightweight; far better to be imposing behind closed doors than to expose yourself on the public record as just another guy who doesn't really think about stuff or talk to many people who aren't already like him.

This guy is meant to be one of the titans in the next Coalition government, one of the people of real substance. Maybe he doesn't respect the public enough to level with them (a charge he levelled at Swan). If you really think Wayne Swan is a hack and a lightweight, then you can't produce a lightweight piece of hackery in response.