And so it seems to be with Tony Abbott and the NBN. His mumblings are starting to sound like his policy on our telecommunications future is “rollback”; to regress, to move backwards. His latest hysterical suggestion to drop the NBN like a hot potato because of the floods seems patronising and misguided; a cry and a gasp for a headline. What right-minded government, having secured a mandate for an infrastructure project at two separate federal elections, and having already signed numerous contracts binding the nation to agreements to the tune of billions of dollars, would dump the project at the first sign of unexpected external financial issues, or at the suggestion of their political opponents?

One wonders what Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull really thinks about the National Broadband Network, and his leader’s cock-eyed approach to opposing it. What one doesn’t wonder is what Julia Gillard thinks about the Coalition’s “duh….rollBACK!?!!” broadband policy for the years heading toward 2013. Two thumbs up?

Crossposted at Larvatus Prodeo.

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Week two of the “Me Too” election and Abbott and Gillard are like contestants in a three-legged race, middle legs lashed together, each with an arm desperately gripped around the other’s shoulder, fingers digging in, careering over the political landscape, determined never to be separated.

Same policy on asylum seekers, same squib on the environment, same anxious sidestep on gay rights.

On the magnificence that the belligerent focus on certain marginal seats has delivered us:

Since it’s all about attracting the voters of marginal seats, such as Lindsay, you do wonder why the rest of us even need to be involved. Why not just opinion-poll everyone in Penrith’s High Street and do whatever they reckon is the right thing?

And finally, on where this is headed:

Julia Gillard cites the Welsh socialist Nye Bevan as her political hero. Maybe it’s time she remembered his most famous quote: “We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.”

The average Australian punter may not have a grasp of the finer details of public policy, but they have a built-in sixth sense when it comes to political disingenuity, aka bullshit. The baseball bats needn’t have been out for Labor just yet after only three years, but one just gets the sense after all this bickering, dilly-dallying and lowest common denominator marketing, a fair few are now going to be pulled out in the marginals on August 21.

Come on Julia. Give us all a reason to vote for you!

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• crucial for the future of our nation
• we are already a weaker nation
• Increased cost of living pressures
• Massive debt, Budget deficits, waste and mismanagement
• unnecessary uncertainty
• there’s too much talk and not enough action.
• taking real action and delivering real results
• Our Action Contract with Australia
• real action to strengthen the economy
• Budget back into surplus
• Australia’s border security, raise education standards
• improve local health services
• It’s time to get things done and get Australia back on the right track.

I wonder who decides what phrases in these condescending, paper-wasting template letters should be highlighted in bold because apparently the author believes these are the only bits people are likely to read?

Also, does anyone else thinks that the “Support Real Action” campaign jingle sounds a lot like “support re-election”? A damn fine idea.

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Even considering the disorganised thrashings of the last few weeks in Labor Party circles, Tony Abbott and the Coalition will head towards this election as clear underdogs. Centrebet has Labor at an almost unbackable $1.22, with the Coalition not looking like a bad bet at $4.10, to be quite frank. This is not an election campaign much like that waged in 2007. This is not going to be an election campaign with a distinct choice, or clear water between the Government and the Opposition on a number of issues. Given recent events, most Australians would harbor some fairly strong negative thoughts about both major parties. It is only natural under the circumstances to be feeling a bit confused and uncertain about who to vote for. On the one hand we have a Labor Government which promised the world, has delivered on some levels and failed notably or reneged on some others, and still has a reasonable proportion of its original to-do list outstanding. On the other hand, we have an Opposition defined almost exclusively by what it does not stand for, as opposed for what it does, lead by a politically divisive figure in Tony Abbott.

In her noon press conference announcing the election date, Julia Gillard was organised, precise in her language, and confident. She looked and acted like a Prime Minister. She was convincing, but her mindless re-iteration of Labor’s election mantra du jour, “moving forward”, felt forced and was truly grating. The new Labor leadership team has made it clear over the past few weeks of their intent to distance themselves from the failings of Kevin Rudd; they really should be wise by now to the fact that people are sick of simplistic election slogans like this one. It should be possible to be direct and straight-forward without reducing your communication with the public to the level of a glorified infomercial.

The Prime Minister declined to make any new policy announcements, only promising that any new measures announced during the election campaign would be offset by savings in other areas. Politically speaking, this is a smart move, and pushes Tony Abbott into a very small space in which to operate. It mimics the “I’m an economic conservative” promises made by Kevin Rudd heading into the election campaign in 2007. Abbott’s natural instinct as a blue-blood is to either conserve the public dollar or to transform it into a private dollar, but to differentiate himself from the government, it might well be that he needs to fight that instinct and put some sizable spending measures on the table.

Tony Abbott’s response was mixed. For starters, it was made in a somewhat off-the-cuff fashion in an anonymous hotel in Brisbane, leaving him looking a bit like a hotel management trainee who stumbled into the wrong function room. He should have known given all the media speculation that an election date announcement was imminent and stayed in Canberra over the weekend. This was a mistake, right off the bat. His delivery was mostly quite assured, if seemingly not well orchestrated, and he actually did make a few good points that will resonate with voters, namely:

• Why should we trust Julia Gillard if even Kevin Rudd evidently could not trust Julia Gillard?
• Why should we trust Federal Labor if we have no idea who will fill the key ministerial portfolios in the government until after the election?
• Why should we treat Julia Gillard and her team as being any different to the team lead by Kevin Rudd, given Gillard’s senior role in the Rudd Government?

These are all fair, thoughtful, and credible points. Unfortunately, the Opposition Leader did not deign to back them up with any positive policy announcements of note, or any real measure of what the Coalition’s agenda would actually look like if elected.

For the moment at least, the Australian people face a real conundrum. We have a decidedly second-order, tactical election on our hands. There are no grand visions, there are no inspirational plans. It seems certain that who people dislike more as a leader will largely dictate who they vote for on Saturday August 21st. Meanwhile, the Greens look set to win the balance of power in the Senate, and will likely pick up 1 (Melbourne) if not more seats in the House of Representatives. What does this mean for federal politics? I am not sure it is going to mean very much at all, at least beyond the symbolic.

It is difficult to see any future Gillard Government or Abbott Government wheeling and dealing very much with the Greens, particularly given that party’s staunch unwillingness to give some ground in order to gain some ground in terms of negotiation. Despite the likelihood of a record vote for the Greens at the election, I am more convinced than ever that the major parties, presiding somewhat slothfully over the middle ground of Australia, are going to be dictating the policy agenda over the coming parliamentary term. The marginalisation of the environmental left that took grip after the failure of Labor to deliver an ETS and the failure of the world to reach a meaningful deal in Copenhagen looks set to continue.

Given the recent performance of both majors, and the over-reliance of the Greens on Bob Brown as a credible mouthpiece, it’s hard to look forward with an enormous amount of optimism about the health of politics in Australia. Federal politics, arguably, has never looked more like state politics than it does at this very moment.

And if that’s not a put-down, I’m not sure what is.

ELSEWHERE: Mark’s views on the opening gambits over at Larvatus Prodeo are well worth a read.

Peter Brent echoes my thoughts on the odds being offered for a Coalition victory over at Mumble.

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The situation is complicated by the former Prime Minister’s obvious predilection for a high-profile foreign affairs role:

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd is reportedly determined to take on the foreign affairs role, if Labor is returned.

He has been telling journalists that as a former prime minister “he deserves the job”, ABC Television reported on Sunday.

While I can understand Julia Gillard’s decision not to “rock the boat” before the election, I also see a number of drawbacks to this approach. If Gillard were to take her new, finalised team to the hustings and subsequently win the election, her team would have received a proper imprimateur from the public to govern the country, and would inherit a certain significant amount of public good will as a result. Under the assumption that the team of Ministers that Federal Labor currently has in place is set to be scrambled and subjected to fairly thorough recomposition post-election, I think that people are right to feel a little uneasy. Do we know who the Gillard Government’s Minister for Foreign Affairs will be after the election? No. Do we know who the Gillard Government’s Finance Minister will be after the election, with the resignation of the wonderful Lindsay Tanner? No.

It is almost certain that the Coalition will exploit this sense of uncertainty with respect to Federal Labor’s team in the lead-up to the election. One may well not like Tony Abbott’s team, but at least one can be fairly certain of what Tony Abbott’s team will look like if elected. I am not sure that the general public is particularly enamoured with the idea that the archaic factional engines responsible for turfing out the old Prime Minister will also be responsible for deciding who will govern the country – not them.

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While I agree with Mark at Larvatus Prodeo and Possum when they suggest that the Lindsay polling results were irrevocably contaminated by the weekend state by-election in the seat of Penrith, I feel its too simplistic to dismiss the poll entirely. Federal Labor is, make no mistake, on the nose with Howard’s battlers at the moment. Tony Abbott’s straight-talking approach intrinsically appeals to that peculiar strata of the population who thought they saw someone fresh with a dab of economic blue-blood in Kevin Rudd in 2007, and switched their vote from the Coalition to Labor. Abbott is seen to be a man’s man in a way that neither Brendan Nelson nor Malcolm Turnbull was, and Rudd, at least to many, has revealed himself to be a bureaucratic ditherer who does not speak their language.

There are no simple answers to this problem; there is little doubt that Federal Labor’s pollsters and advisors are burning the midnight oil trying to find it. The Prime Minister needs to pay more attention to people in seats like Lindsay and endeavour to do a better job of explaining the achievements of his government to them, and why they should vote for him again.

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There were rumblings in the media today about the Coalition’s (of course, unfinalised, “non-core”) plans to enhance restrictions on access to welfare; most specifically to force welfare recipients to take a job if it is up to two hours away from their home, up from ninety minutes. Apart from the fact that this “announcement” adds another couple of “will he, won’t he” proposals to the basket of such proposals that the Abbott Opposition has floated into the public arena in recent months, it is an idiotic dog whistle of an idea. It would only serve to increase the stress on Australia’s dilapidated social contract with the disadvantaged, whilst saving little, and disenfranchising many.

The reality of welfare is that there will always be cheats; there will always be people who try to rort the system, and there will always be some who get away with it. Although we can certainly work at discouraging and minimising such behaviour, to a certain extent, there will always be a price that society collectively must bear – if indeed we are to have a fair, reasonable, and well-ordered welfare system for people who really do need the services and support of government in times of need.

In the not too distant past, when I was unemployed for some time, the bureaucratic inanities associated with receiving welfare payments on an ongoing basis made the whole prospect too daunting and too laborious to pursue. If I as a qualified professional find the prospect too painful, lord only knows how many Australians who can’t find work feel about Centrelink and the process for obtaining welfare. For all the so-called nameless, faceless “bludgers” out there that the Coalition so loves to charge after, there are thousands of other fair-minded people left high and dry by a system that discourages engagement, discourages people from seeking meaningful work germane to their talents, and encourages isolation, despair and frustration.

Is forcing people to travel two hours each way for a job one may not even be suited for sensible, particularly given that the costs of such travel would reduce the wages on offer below the minimum wage in many instances? Tony Abbott spent a few days in the outback a few months back; maybe its time he spent a few days on the mean streets of Sydney or Melbourne or amongst the back blocks of the outer suburbs, to understand how complicated and deep set the personal and social problems some people have are.

Sometimes screwing people over and around is not the best way to get them to do the right thing.

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While there is plenty of juicy material to draw on when it comes to negative lines of attack on the Opposition Leader, it would be a mistake for the government to rely exclusively on Tony Abbott’s failings for political sustenance. If federal politics turns into a gigantic mud-slinging match, the government stands to lose more from the exercise than the Opposition. Whomever holds government is by association responsible for the general tenor of debate. If things turn really ugly between Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott, it will be Kevin Rudd who will be ultimately held responsible for the poisonous state of federal politics, not the Opposition Leader.

As I see it, there are a few crucial positive points that Federal Labor needs to address in order to reclaim its ascendancy over the Opposition:

1) Mapping out a credible path on climate change

The government needs to outline a more thorough roadmap towards the implementation of its emissions trading scheme – or in the very least, a credible roadmap on climate change. The current policy – to shelve the proposed scheme until 2013 – is, by itself, a very weak platform to stand on. There has been some suggestion that Federal Labor has dropped the scheme as a kind of fig leaf to Australia’s centre-right base – but in truth, dropping the scheme has only damaged the government’s record and won it no new support.

2) Defusing asylum seeker issues whilst retaining a humanistic approach

The current situation, with boats arriving every other day, is simply not politically sustainable, but nor is the government’s absurd, ad hoc policy of temporarily freezing claims for asylum by Sri Lankans and Afghans. A new strategy is required that mixes fairness with firmness, and is designed to shape the volume of arrivals in tune with the number of asylum claims that Australia can be readily expected to process annually.

3) Finding common ground on the Resource Super Profits Tax

Federal Labor can not wage an election campaign while the mining industry is filling commercial television ad breaks with deceptive, one-sided advertising. Fighting ads with ads is counterproductive and won’t work, particularly given the government’s past angelic stance on government advertising. The only realistic option is for Labor to reach out to the mining industry through its industry contacts and seek to broker a compromise deal that retains the core income-generating potential of the RSPT whilst offering some further reasonable concessions to industry.

4) Reclaiming the government’s record

One of the biggest problems the government has is that many of its achievements are either “works in progress” due to their considerable scope and cost, or are somewhat intangible, such as its performance during the worst of the GFC and its more symbolic achievements. The government’s leadership team needs to make a more conscious effort to defend its record, and explain to the public what it is achieved, and why certain significant items it has promised have not been completely delivered (e.g. the National Broadband Network, the CPRS).

In short, it needs to publish a kind of scorecard which lays bare the government’s record and explains why certain promises have not been delivered on. In numerous instances where promises made have been broken, there are reasonable, rational reasons why that the public need to understand better.

5) Selling health reform

It really is crucial for the fate of its proposed health reform package that Federal Labor reclaims its record. At the moment, the public generally does not feel as though it can trust the Rudd Government to embark on such a costly, complex, and ambitious program of reform, when several of the large policy promises previously made have not been delivered on, three years on. The spectre of the home insulation scheme also still looms large on the national consciousness, despite the fact that culpability for the more disastrous repercussions of the scheme’s introduction does not realistically rest with the government.

Presently, the public does not really understand all that well what the government’s health reform package is all about, because it is quite a complex, multifaceted package. There is no simple message, because while the Federal Government would take control of majority funding of the public hospital system under the proposed reforms, there is still a 60:40 funding split between the federal and state governments. It is difficult to credibly argue that this set of reforms will “end the blame game” once and for all, but it certainly does appear that it may be a step in the right direction.

In short, I don’t think the Rudd Government can hope to outgun the Opposition in terms of negative political warfare, despite the rich vein of material Tony Abbott has provided it since he became Opposition Leader. To win, Federal Labor needs to retain its essential positivist voice, and demonstrate that it has both a plan for the next three years and the ability to deliver on its plan.

A strategy that centres upon the exaggerated and prolonged slagging of Tony Abbott is a strategy that only hacks the government a path towards political ruin.

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This week an alleged people smuggler speaks exclusively to Insight about why he thinks more boats are arriving. And his comments are explosive.

…

“People see Australia as easy. After three or four months it’s done.  The important thing is we definitely get citizenship.  We will become Australian citizens immediately.”

Meanwhile, Malcolm Turnbull has emerged from the backbench to remind Tony Abbott he is still around, sticking in a few knives into his own team for good measure:

Referring to the Coalition’s announcement on boatpeople, Mr Turnbull said “ideally” new policies should go to the partyroom. He said push factors played an enormous role.

“There are literally millions and millions of people who have refugee status or would if they arrived in Australia and sought refugee status be granted it under the UN rules,” Mr Turnbull said. ” So the push factor is gigantic.”

The Federal Government needs to get on top of this issue, or it stands the possibility of copping a real pasting as the election draws near. It needs to come up with a fundamentally new approach that retains the essential humanity that the centre-left want from Labor, whilst making it quite clear beyond our borders that we can only accept genuine claims for asylum, and we can only accept so many.

The government’s current approach is, unfortunately, dysfunctional.

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When we launched the ARM, the monarchists quickly retaliated by forming a group called Australians for Constitutional Monarchy (ACM). Its chairman was Lloyd Waddy, a Sydney barrister, and a number of well-known conservatives were among its founders, including Dame Leonie Kramer, Chancellor of Sydney University, and, more improbably, Michael Kirby, very much a small-’l’ liberal and President of the New South Wales Court of Appeal.

The ACM was pretty ineffective until it hired Tony Abbott as its executive director in 1993. Abbott had been a speechwriter for Liberal leader John Hewson and was an energetic, if somewhat erratic, advocate of the status quo.

And there is this (p.26):

The monarchist campaign was largely directed by Tony Abbott, who had now left his job with the ACM to take up a seat in Parliament. One of the strategy documents prepared by Abbott encouraged the monarchists to attack me personally. ‘As their public face Turnbull is arrogant, rude and obnoxious – a filthy rich merchant banker, out of touch with real Australians. He is the Gordon Gekko of Australian politics.’

Strong words. I wonder how both parties view their interactions during the late 1990’s now? Certainly Abbott would likely view them with a healthy dose of triumphalism. It seems that the life and times of Malcolm Turnbull for the past fifteen years or so have been bookended by two quite separate and quite personal defeats by the Federal Member for Warringah.

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