Category Archives: Politics – national

Saving the furniture that really matters: the ALP challenge for the next decade

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The picture of Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership painted over the weekend by former speechwriter Jamie Button ought to be fatal to Rudd’s leadership bid. It jibes with a number of other assessments, including some just this week by senior Cabinet ministers like Nicola Roxon. To the best of my knowledge, Button’s is a pretty accurate picture:

“The truth is, Rudd was impossible to work with. He regularly treated his staff, public servants and backbenchers with rudeness and contempt. He was vindictive, intervening to deny people appointments or preselections, often based on grudges that went back years.

“He made crushing demands on his staff, and when they laboured through the night to meet those demands, they received no thanks, and often the work was not used. People who dared stand up to him were put in ‘the freezer’ and not consulted or spoken to for months. The prodigious loyalty of his staff to him was mostly not repaid. He put them down behind their backs. He seemed to feel that everyone was always letting him down. In meetings, as I saw, he could emanate a kind of icy rage that was as mysterious as it was disturbing.

“He governed by – seemed almost to thrive on – crisis. Important papers went unsigned, staff and public servants would be pulled onto flights, in at least one case halfway around the world, on the off chance that he needed to consult them. Vital decisions were held up while he struggled to make up his mind, frequently demanding more pieces of information that merely delayed the final result. The fate of the government seemed to hinge on the psychology of one man.

“As I watched this unfold in Canberra, I tried hard to put aside my own poor experience of working for Rudd. I had also been a journalist for more than 20 years, and I knew that just because three people complain about something or someone it does not make it true. When 30 or more witnesses do, you can start to believe it.”

That account is all the more compelling because Jamie Button has a deserved reputation as an upright and decent journalist. And he’s the son of much-missed ALP hero John Button to boot.

The move to reinstall Kevin Ruddd as prime minister is frequently described in terms of “saving the furniture”, a way of saying that Rudd will lose the ALP less seats than Gillard at the next election.

But Labor’s biggest problem may not be that it will lose a lot of seats at the next election.

Losing a bag of seats is pretty much a given. The 2012 or 2013 election will almost certainly not repeat the events of 1993, with Labor coming from behind to score an upset win. (If Labor did come from behind, it would probably require the sort of dubious policies – notably those cancelled L-A-W tax cuts – that helped hand Labor such a big loss one election later, in 1996.) Labor’s fate at the next election seems written at this point.

But winning the next election is not the only game the ALP must play. Labor’s biggest problem may instead be something worse.

Consider. Two of its past four leaders – Latham and Rudd – have been in their different ways dysfunctional. In both cases, but especially in the case of Rudd, that dysfunctionality has now been pretty well documented in a way that will linger for years. And still today, many in the ALP are talking more loudly in public about the need to beat Tony Abbott than they are about the need to run a good government.

In short, the ALP now faces a “good government” challenge as big as the “economic management” challenge it faced in 1975. In the wake of the Whitlam government, Labor’s greatest struggle was to convince voters it could be trusted with the economy. After Rudd, its biggest problem may be that voters do not trust it with the machinery of government. After the ructions of the federal and NSW parties, voters may start to worry that the ALP will install someone who can beat the Coalition regardless of whether they can run a government. If that happens, Labor will start to find that it doesn’t matter who they put in the leadership: the ALP brand has been so damaged that voters start to be much less trusting of whoever is leader, and whatever ideas they offer.

“Good government” has never been one of the ALP’s most beloved phrases. When you speak to the ALP, you speak of being a “reforming government” or even a “crusading government”. The party has an underdog mentality: it thinks that when it gets in, it shakes up the place and then, in its favorite tragic story, inevitably loses.

That mentality needs to change now. In the past 40 years the ALP has been in government as often as out of it. It won’t be easy, but “good government” is now a quality the ALP has to add to its brand.

That’s an argument for keeping Julia Gillard as PM, no matter what she polls. But more importantly, it’s the challenge for the ALP to 2020 and beyond.

Sorry, Jon: How political interviews should work

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Last week I was ready to write off ABC Melbourne interviewer Jon Faine for ill-judged rudeness and inadequate research. Now he’s gone and redeemed himself with a Tony Abbott interview.

Faine at his best is smartly, aggressively prosecutorial without actually being rude. Abbott at his best takes questions seriously and tell people what he thinks. They were both (mostly) at their best here, and the result was an interview that reminded me of many of Abbott’s good points even while reinforcing my view that he doesn’t present convincing responses about the economy.

The interview’s single best point is that Faine challenges Abbott about quantities. Asked about a string of high-profile job losses, Abbott starts to explain the claimed impact of the carbon tax. Faine pulls him up, noting that the high value of the Australian dollar is more important to firms like Qantas. Abbott responds coolly that while he accepts the carbon tax is not the only factor in these companies’ problems, it is a big problem. Faine asks him to address issues other than the carbon tax, and Abbott’s response is to start talking about cutting government waste. “If you succeeded in abolishing every single instance of waste in the federal government,” asks Faine, “what effect do you think that would actually have on the Australian dollar and interest rates?” Abbott says he’ll leave the modelling to the experts. Faine argues that most economists think it would make a minimal difference, and that the real issue is the mining industry’s effects on other sectors.

Note to journalists: keep asking not just what good a policy would do, but how much good it would do.

Abbott sounds tired (listen to him saying “good morning” at the start of the interview) and yet very much on his mettle here. The reason he does not come off better is that the weight of evidence suggests Faine is right: the commodity-bound $A and other outside influences are driving most of the job losses; removing the carbon tax and the mining tax and hoeing into “government waste” will, even on the best interpretation, make little improvement to national outcomes. I suspect Abbott knows this, too.

There’s a quality to this interview that is a credit to our democracy. It’s getting to the heart of important political claims and economic arguments. It’s intellectually confrontational discussion between two smart people who don’t very much like each other, all the better because both participants are working to keep a lid on their natural aggression.

Last week I said Faine was turning into a left-wing shock-jock. That was unfair. Sorry, Jon.

On Reading Dennis Glover’s “The art of great speeches: and why we remember them”

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I bought my daughter a very enjoyable book The art of great speeches: and why we remember them by my friend Dennis Glover for Christmas. The book manages the triad of rhetorical tasks very nicely – it delights as it instructs as it persuades – and so I read it too.

Be that as it may, its many examples of fine rhetoric simply confirm my existing view that there are two, perhaps three orators that I know of that stand above the pack. Dennis cites JFK, whom I’ve never liked as a speaker. I never liked him because the rhetorical tricks are too formulaic. “Let us not negotiate out of fear, but let us not fear to negotiate”. Thanks JF, but behind the cutsie juxtaposition it’s a pretty banal thought. So too, “Ask not” is no great shakes IMO. As for choosing to go to the moon because it is hard, not because it is easy, spare me. We didn’t choose to build submarines out of popcorn and use them to invade Russia, but that would have been hard too.

By contrast, as the book points out, his quintuplet “let them come to Berlin” (the last time in German) in his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech is a good example of JFK at his best and of anaphora at its best. See me slipping into the rhetoro-lingo that Dennis bathes us all in as we read his book.

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Why is there no liberal party?

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At the Economist’s Democracy in America blog, Erica Grieder suspects that "the biggest untapped constituency is people who are fiscally conservative and socially moderate or liberal." Grieder links to a post by former Cato research fellow Will Wilkinson where he explains why he is not a libertarian:

Here are some not-standardly-libertarian things I believe: Non-coercion fails to capture all, maybe even most, of what it means to be free. Taxation is often necessary and legitimate. The modern nation-state has been, on the whole, good for humanity. (See Steven Pinker’s new book.) Democracy is about as good as it gets. The institutions of modern capitalism are contingent arrangements that cannot be justified by an appeal to the value of liberty construed as non-interference. The specification of the legal rights that structure real-world markets have profound distributive consequences, and those are far from irrelevant to the justification of those rights. I could go on.

Wilkinson now identifies as a liberal. He writes: "I am interested in what it means to be free, and the role of freedom in flourishing or meaningful or valuable lives."

In the US, no major political party or movement stands for this kind of liberalism. The same is true in Australia. According to Greg Barns: "The Liberal Party, in the Howard and Abbott incarnation, is a socially conservative force which also believes that the state should play a paternalist role in steering the economic direction of the nation." Oddly, the most enthusiastic supporter of "the the role of freedom in flourishing or meaningful or valuable lives" seems to be the Australian Treasury.

Riding the asylum seeker merry-go-round

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Gillard government – Not a time for political point-scoring but the sinking is all that mongrel Abbott’s fault for refusing to vote for our Malaysia Solution amendments.

Coalition -  Scott Morrison says “the tragedy confirmed the Coalition’s worst fears” but restrains himself from expressly blaming Labor until tomorrow, when he’ll assert for the umpteenth that it would never have happened but for Labor’s abandonment of Saint John Howard’s  Nauru and temporary protection visa policy.  Morrison will embrace the safe bet that a supine media will fail to point out that consistent strong DIAC advice is that the Nauru Solution simply won’t work nor notice that the tiny island nation has had three different prime ministers in the last three weeks, the first of whom resigned after corruption allegations which are unsurprising to anyone who remembers that Nauru survived for some years after the guano ran out by turning itself into a tax haven and laundering billions plundered by the Russian Mafia.

Convulsive conspiracy theorist Tony Kevin  instantly and despite a complete lack of evidence claims conspiracy and “cover-up” by ASIO and Kopassus to sink the boat deliberately to frighten and deter asylum seekers (viz re-run of his SIEV X conspiracy theories for which there was also no evidence).  David Marr can be expected to launch into a prissily sanctimonious version of the same refrain in the next couple of days.

Ian Rintoul of the Refugee Action Coalition and Sarah Hanson-Young of the Greens claim it’s both major parties’ fault for “demonising” people smugglers and failing to realise that the best policy would be to make it easier for them to use safe vessels.  If only those heartless government bastards didn’t confiscate the smugglers’ boats and burn them, they’d be able to charter really big and seaworthy vessels (like old cruise liners for instance) and make even bigger profits transporting the yearning masses to Australia in thousands at a time.

Peter van Onselen makes the most sense on Twitter:

“Bottom line is the arguments of the simplistic left & right on this issue don’t provide answers & moralizing about deaths at sea won’t help.”

I still argue that some version of the Malaysia Solution with adequate assured human rights safeguards + an expanded Australian humanitarian migration target of 20,000 per year (now official Labor policy) would be the least bad ex tempore solution, but the chances of Malaysia agreeing to adequate safeguards (because it fears making itself a magnet for asylum seekers in the guise of waiting room for Oz migration) or Abbott voting to enable such an approach (despite urgings from even the Murdoch press) are remote.  Merry Christmas?

An exceptionally fine blog post …

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I don’t imagine we’ll be running Best Blog Posts this year.  Certainly I won’t have time to be involved.

Moreover, we never actually anointed an annual winner in any event, just an undifferentiated group of 30 or 40 of the best from the non-MSM blogosphere.

However, if I WAS selecting a single best blog post for 2011, I wouldn’t have even a moment’s hesitation.  It would be Australian Exceptionalism by Scott “Possum Comitatus” Steel published this afternoon on Crikey. I had to stop myself from running into the street and shouting  “YES!!! EXACTLY!!! WHY COULDN’T I CRYSTALLISE IT ALL SO POWERFULLY? WHY CAN’T JULIA OR (GOD FORBID) KEV?”  It’s worth reproducing a substantial extract over the fold but do yourself a favour and read the whole thing. Moreover, although it’s a paean to Australia’s general excellence, all governments since Hawke/Keating and the Australian people generally are entitled to the credit:

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Ken Henry and conspiracy theories

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I paid a visit to Catallaxy earlier today after my Google reader informed me that Rafe Champion had awarded me and Jason Soon something called the HL Mencken Award. Although it’s evidently not intended ironically, I was a bit taken aback given that my last interaction with Rafe involved threatening to sue him for defamation for falsely accusing me of conspiring to secretly alter a blog post about global warming.

In any event that seems to be ancient history now.  Rafe even graciously apologised, while I’ve restored his commenting access here at Troppo (a magnanimous impulse I may live to regret next time we host a global warming thread).

While I was over there, I noticed that some of the Catallaxians seem to have a bee in their collective bonnet about the constitutional validity of the Gillard government’s appointment of former Treasury head Ken Henry as a special adviser to the Prime Minister under Constitution s 67.  See this post by Sinclair Davidson and this one and this one by Samuel J.

I’m not at all sure why they’re worried about it.  Presumably Henry is seen as a class traitor for taking a job with Juliar.

In any event the discussion provoked my interest because I’d never looked closely at s 67 before. Samuel J’s argument appears to be that s 67 should be regarded as a transitional provision whose effect was spent once the first Public Service Act was enacted in 1902.  He appears to rest that argument mostly on the introductory words “Until the Parliament otherwise provides, …” .  However those words also appear in s 96 (Financial assistance to States) and no-one argues that the Commonwealth no longer enjoys the power to make grants to the States under it.  It’s certainly true that section 41 (Right of electors of States) was held to be a transitional provision whose effect was spent once the Commonwealth Parliament met and enacted the first comprehensive electoral legislation to provide for the franchise for federal elections.  But that’s essentially because it was clear that that was the Founding Fathers intention.

By contrast, it is abundantly clear that the Founding Fathers did NOT intend s 67 to be a mere transitional provision.  See the relevant part of the 1897 Convention Debates starting at page 916. As the ANU publication Public Sector Employment in the Twenty-First Century relevantly observes:

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