Guy Beres

It would seem that in our modern, heavily tactical form of democracy that voters are only given a right to vote for the party of their choice when that party decides it is politically worthwhile running a candidate. As Phillip Coorey reports for the SMH, it is looking like Federal Labor is not going to run a candidate (or else only half-run one) in the Mayo by-election forced by the resignation of Alexander Downer. This strikes me as little more than political cowardice from the government, coming as it does a mere eight months after its thumping general election victory. While it may be a foregone conclusion that the Coalition will retain the seat (it is a safe Liberal seat, of course), one wonders why Federal Labor is avoiding the opportunity to try and make this by-election a referendum on Brendan Nelson’s leadership. A few months ago, Kevin Rudd seemed pretty much indefatigable in his role as Prime Minister and Brendan Nelson had all the pressure on his shoulders, his senior peers walking around with sharpened knives at the ready. Does the government really fear that this has changed and that any opportunity to further pressure the Opposition has been lost? Does it want to look to the punters like it is running scared?

The decision to only pursue the by-election halfheartedly seems to be centred around a desire to starve the Coalition of any potential political oxygen. It goes without saying that by far the most likely outcome in Mayo is a victory for the Opposition, and that therefore some positive news coverage for Nelson would eventuate if Labor field a candidate and lose convincingly. From a purely political standpoint, this rationale is not without credence, and certainly we have here in the UK an excellent recent reference point for Labor in the recent Henley by-election in Oxfordshire. There are some telling similarities. In Henley, like Mayo, the by-election was forced by the resignation of a popular, high-profile conservative figure (Boris Johnson, now London mayor), in a safely held seat. Labour decided to field a candidate in the Henley, but did not put very much effort into the campaign, producing a truly abysmal result; fifth place behind the Tories, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the British National Party. Embarrassingly, the combined primary vote for the UK Independence Party’s Chris Adams and Bananaman Owen of the Monster Raving Looney Party superceded that of Labour’s Richard McKenzie.

In the Henley case, then, fielding a candidate and running a half-hearted campaign was indeed a disaster. There is little chance that Labor stand a chance of doing quite so badly in Mayo. Crucially, Labour’s Gordon Brown is polling at subterranean levels currently, whereas by comparison, Kevin Rudd and Federal Labor enjoy a comfortable lead in the polls, and have done so for the past eight months. In this sense, we are really comparing apples and oranges with these by-elections.

I really don’t think that this is the right time for Federal Labor to give into political convenience and go on the defensive by steering clear of Mayo. The Rudd Opposition was successful in the general election last November in part because of its aggression, exemplified by the gambit of fielding Maxine McKew in John Howard’s once blue-ribbon Liberal seat. Federal Labor also won support by taking a noble line on issues like electoral reform and transparency in government (hat lift: Senator John Faulkner) in stark contrast to the grubby politics that the Howard Government accustomed itself to. It may not strictly speaking be the most politically expedient course of action, but fielding a candidate in Mayo and putting some energy and resources into the campaign is both the smart and the right thing for Federal Labor to do here.

If I was Kevin Rudd I would be quite royally pissed off about all of this. Perhaps its best for Belinda Neal and/or John Della Bosca to both fall on their swords in advance of any inquiry findings. Federal Labor has been damaged enough by this tawdry episode as it is.

Dear Mr Rudd: Ideas For A Better Australia is a compilation of short essays served up by a decent cross-section of “leftish” Australian writers, edited by Robert Manne. The book, which has been criticised in The Australian as a “wish list” and Manne as a “nervous suitor writing a love letter”, seems to hope to offer Australia’s new Prime Minister a sense of progressive direction in relation to several key policy areas.

The opening piece by Associate Professor Mark McKenna from the University of Sydney sets the tone for the book by looking first to the republican debate. While I would consider myself a fairly staunch republican, like the Prime Minister, I do regard the republican debate in Australia as something of a second order issue. I do think the time is right for Australia to set the wheels in motion and move the country towards its preferred republican model, but I also think that when we talk about a republic we are talking primarily about symbolic change. Removing references to the British monarchy from our constitution and our processes and symbols is a necessary evolution if we consider ourselves a truly independent nation, but it hardly puts food on the table of people living in poverty or does anything to ensure that the next Australian generation of adults is the best-equipped to participate in the global economy in national history.

McKenna, perhaps unsurprisingly given that one of his primary research interests is the history of Australian republicanism and monarchy, seems at least in his expression to take a somewhat more aggressive view on the republican debate. Take for example this synopsis of people’s feelings after Federal Labor’s victorious election campaign last year:

If I were asked to choose one word which reflected the feelings of many Australians following the election of the Rudd Labor government in November 2007, the word I would choose is hope. It is a cautious hope, but it is hope nonetheless. One reason for this hope is that Australia might finally build a national consensus on the two great nation-defining and still unresolved issues of the last two decades, the declaration of an Australian republic and the achievement of reconciliation with Aboriginal people.

I think McKenna is spot on when he talks about the election result restoring a sense of “hope” to federal politics in Australia, but I think his partial attribution of this hope to the republicanism and reconciliation questions is debatable at best. Even in view of the government’s triumphant apology to the stolen generations, it is personally quite hard for me to imagine that either reconciliation with the Aboriginal people of Australia or getting rid of incoming Governor-General Quentin Bryce keeps too many average Australians awake at night. These are issues that some Australians feels strongly about, and rightly so, and I suspect that the majority of Australians have formed some sort of opinion on them. However, I do believe that the majority of people out there are basically ambivalent about these two issues that McKenna so bravely describes as the two great nation-defining issues of the last two decades. It’s perhaps a little painful as a progressive to think about them in this way, but I think all in all, Australia would classify reconciliation and the Australian republic as “nice-to-haves”, and not definitively crucial for the immediate governance of the nation.

McKenna goes on to discuss the next step for republicanism in Australia, which he believes to be the adoption of a new constitutional preamble:

The next part of the republican story involves the task of defining the core values of Australian democracy in a new constitutional preamble. A preamble is necessary, not because of some out-dated Jeffersonian obsession with grand rhetoric, but because the time has passed when Australian can assume its values are understood.

I am not sure how this short excerpt strikes other readers, but it strikes me as completely the wrong approach if Australia is to successfully pursue the republican question; McKenna is engaging in the Jeffersonian obsession he speaks of perhaps even without realising it. The Australian constitution is not like the constitution of the United States of America; it does not play a central role in the civic life of ordinary Australians. Australians do not cite clauses of their constitution in everyday life as Americans do with their umpteen amendments. Revising the Australian constitution to add a preamble as a step in isolation is likely to mean a lot to a few Australians with some vested intellectual interest in that document, but next to nothing to the vast majority of them without such an interest. To be honest, I am not sure there is any way that proponents of an Australian republic could more effectively expose the soft symbolic underbelly of their arguments for minimalist change to their opponents.

If the average Australian is interested in Australia becoming a republic, they are interested in it because they want a truly Australian head of state. This change must form the heart of the republican proposal that is put to the Australian people; proposals that deviate from having this basic change at its core are doomed to failure. Like Rudd’s moving apology to the stolen generations indicated, Australians from all cross-sections of the population are prepared to embrace symbolic changes if they are framed in the right way. The push for an Australian republic must bear this clearly in mind if it is to succeed; even the most cynical Australian is prepared to accept largely symbolic reforms and gestures, but these reforms and gestures must sit comfortably in alignment with what they really want, with minimal deviation in deference to elite opinion.

From a blatantly partisan perspective I guess I am somewhat pleased that the RBA has deigned to stick its neck out and suggest that the Rudd Labor Government’s first budget is “mildly contractionary” overall. As Scott Murdoch notes for the SMH, this is manna from heaven with respect to economic credibility for the government. Certainly what we have seen over the last few months is that different economic commentators have interpreted the budget differently, with the result that the mainstream media outlets have been polluted with mixed messages. Inherently this sort of environment benefits the Federal Opposition, with Shadow Treasurer Malcolm Turnbull needing only to reference the expert opinion of some of the commentators who heavily criticised the budget to score some points. The government can of course reference the expert opinion of other commentators who offered begrudging approval, but the result of such a rebuttal is that the average observer is left feeling unsure of who they should really believe.

In this modern era of economic conservatism, of course, the opinion of the RBA board is held in markedly higher esteem than your average economist, and it is likely that Federal Labor is going to be able to dine out on this little “mildly contractionary” comment for some time. The “is not”, “is too” squabble between those two argumentative siblings in parliament (Wayne and Malcolm) has arguably just been settled for the time being; settled by the booming voice of an angry father that leaves Malcolm somewhat chastened and Wayne quiet, but vindicated.

Part of me can’t help wondering, though, whether the RBA board has gone too far by including an explicit summary interpretation of effect of Labor’s budget policies in its public minutes. The crucial line from the minutes is as follows:

Measured in terms of the change in the surplus, fiscal policy was expected to impart a mildly contractionary effect on the economy in 2008/09.

It is one thing to suggest that a certain policy measure is likely to be on balance inflationary or inflationary, and quite another to suggest without rigorous and public explanation that fiscal policy is on the whole inflationary or not inflationary. To be honest, I would have thought it was bordering on misleading to attempt to interpret fiscal policy based solely on the state of the surplus, without at all considering the associated policy measures that the government has implemented.

It’s likely that this little observation from the board was included flippantly rather than because the board’s impartiality is in question, but either way on the whole I don’t think it is particularly helpful – except for making the government feel a little good about itself.

Farrah Tomazin reported in The Age last week that the Rudd Government appears to be getting just a bit cheeky with another one of its election promises, this time in relation to the provision of individual computers to all high school students in Years 9-12. Education Minister and Deputy PM Julia Gillard seemed to be engaging in a spot of pragmatic goal-shifting when announcing the funding in Essendon a few days ago:

“In the first few rounds of this program, we are taking schools to a ratio of one to two,” Ms Gillard said as she announced the long-awaited funding at Essendon East Keilor District College yesterday.

“Schools that have participated in this round will be able to apply in other rounds for further resources, but we wanted, in the initial stages, to make sure that students around the country benefited from a ratio of one to two.”

Tomazin does not shirk from interpreting these comments as effectively a broken election promise in her story. However, even without considering the financial aspect, for plain and simple operational reasons it makes sense to roll out the promised computers incrementally. Allocating 100% of the computers required for a small subset of schools in this first phase of the funding allocation (the current allocation has a five year budget) would mean that some schools may miss out on funding altogether until the final phase of the process. It would also immediately burden schools (particularly those with limited existing infrastructure and resources) with a small cache of computers with considerable maintenance, power and access requirements, requirements that need to be met as soon as possible in order for full value to be derived from the venture.

In short, I don’t think this announcement from Gillard reflects a true shift in either rhetoric or intentions. What I think is far more likely is that the financial and operational considerations associated with introducing over $1 billion in computing equipment to schools across Australia have forced the government to be pragmatic about how it delivers. Until the delivery has been fully completed, the jury should remain out on the question of whether this particular election promise has been met. I don’t think Tomazin is being fair in jumping the gun here, and nor do I think there is much to be gained for the Opposition from the current situation with this policy.

I have to confess I am a bit bewildered by Greg Sheridan’s column in The Australian today and his likening of Kevin Rudd’s foreign policy style to that of former Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamad. Paul Keating might have publicly expressed his disapproval in relation to Rudd’s Asian union proposal this week, but I hardly think that he would view Australia’s Prime Minister in the same light as he did Mahathir.

The following synopsis contains the gist of Sheridan’s argument:

Kevin Rudd is in danger of turning what should be his greatest strength into a serious weakness. I refer to his weird and increasingly ratty habit of announcing foreign policy initiatives of soaring ambition and utterly amorphous content on the run, half baked, with nodetail and no credible prospect of success.

…

If you announce twice a week that you’re going to save the world and you manifestly lack the means to give the slightest effect to your pronouncements, the world soon loses interest. The chief casualty is your credibility.

I don’t think anybody is seriously anticipating that Kevin Rudd is single-handedly going to “save the world” by throwing these proposals out there, or is even remotely attempting to. Being an international political superhero is clearly not the intention of the government in being expansive; realistically, the intention of the government is to make hay while the sun shines and try a few things that might actually serve to improve the global political scene and Australia’s corner of it. I have little doubt that some of these proposals will not actually result in meaningful improvements to the current situation that Australia finds itself in. I also have little doubt that some actually will.

In writing this column, methinks Greg Sheridan must be suffering from some form of foreign policy initiative starvation syndrome, no doubt a symptom of the hopelessly uncreative and unadventurous Howard/Downer years. Over its decade in office, the previous administration increasingly lost interest in trying bold new things and trying to “seize the day” in its policy pursuits. Comfy stagnation was rejoiced in by the government and in the mainstream media. A certain thematic routine with respect to foreign relations was established and adhered to, evolving gradually into a wholly uninspiring policy norm.

In trying to play catch-up for the last decade over the past few months, the Rudd Government can hardly be blamed for being expansive and throwing some ideas out there. With respect to foreign affairs, there are certainly a number of norms out there that the previous government established that deserve to be smashed. The progressophobia that Sheridan seems to be lamenting the loss of in his column today is one of them.

The Rudd Government’s foray into the car manufacturing industry looks set to divide expert commentators. The Australian is already running what seems to be a fairly strong editorial line in opposition to the $35m subsidy granted by the federal government to Toyota towards the development of a hybrid Camry, on the grounds that Toyota was going to fund the development regardless. It goes without saying that your average economist is probably going to be very sceptical that such a grant amounts to much more than rank economic protectionism; an approach that should have been buried last century. On the other hand, one would imagine that the average environmentalist is going to feel generally positive about the grant, which has been matched with another $35m from the Victorian Government.

Philip King’s observations in The Australian exemplify the orthodox economic argument:

There’s only one winner out of the announcement that $35 million will be handed to Toyota to produce a hybrid Camry in Melbourne. It isn’t the Government, the car workers, the environment or the Australian consumer.

It’s Toyota.

…

It means threats by a senior executive last year that Toyota might quit Australian manufacturing can now be put on hold, for a few years at least.

Beyond that, the dividends look dubious in the extreme. Toyota was on track to make the announcement in a few months anyway and claims it already had the business case sewn up.

I am neither an economist nor an environmentalist in the formal sense, but I am a little sceptical about the real benefit that this grant will bring. By the sounds of things this grant has been made to Toyota effectively as a kind of reward for exhibiting willingness to pursue the development of hybrid technology. It does not seem that Toyota’s work on a hybrid Camry was contingent on receiving the subsidy; it was going to happen anyway. However, now that the company is to receive the subsidy, it has also been burdened with a greater degree of public responsibility with respect to green car development. Toyota is directly receiving funds from taxpayers, and I am sure that the Rudd Government and indeed taxpayers will make it clear that they want something in return for their investment.

This first grant from the Rudd Government’s $500 million Green Car Innovation Fund does represent something of a watershed, and it does fly in the face of the established economic orthodoxy. It will make the usual suspects angry as a result, but I am not sure we can seriously expect a workable alliance to be built on climate change issues without some give from both industry and the taxpayer. That this grant also represents a pork barrel salve for Australia’s slowly dying car manufacturing industry is perhaps too politically convenient for Federal Labor for comfort, but the mere fact that this is an economically unorthodox step does not mean it is a misstep. Over the coming days, I expect that we will see a number of conservative economic pundits make the mistake of rebutting the rationale for the grant based on a dogmatic argument rather than a reality-based argument.

I have to admit that while I think the humble guestbook is a neat way of annotating the worth of a museum or gallery exhibition to its visitors, for whatever reason I very rarely leave a comment when I visit one. Perhaps part of the reason why is that when it comes to summarising my thoughts, I am simply unable to reduce what I think and feel to a single sentence or two. I am not sure if that is more a failing or more a virtue. It is a failing, of course, because a certain crucial aspect of the skill of using language is being succinct. The writing of folks like who make a virtue of their prolixity aside (e.g. take for example Marcel Proust), it is usually better to use ten good words rather than one-hundred sloppy words to get across what you are trying to say. On the other hand, it is a virtue, because I am sceptical of the notion that your average guestbook comment provides anything more than a virtually content-free expression of either “it was good” or “it was bad”.

It is with these thoughts in mind that as someone who writes and is a bit of an armchair student of language in public life, I thought that this comment left by Kevin Rudd in the guestbook of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park was beautifully phrased:

“Let the world resolve afresh, from the ashes of this city - to work together for a common mission of peace for this Asia-Pacific century and for a world where one day nuclear weapons are no more.”

Not only does this single sentence express a clear abhorrence for nuclear weapons, but it also gracefully alludes to a point often implied but rarely talked about explicitly in the mainstream media: the spheres of power in the global political economy are set to shift quite dramatically in the coming decades. Thanks to the growing might of China and India and also the importance of Indonesia, Asia is indeed looking set to be the most dynamic and influential arena for political and economic debate amongst the nations of the world in the 21st century. The era when Europe and the United States dominated the political and economic affairs of the globe is not precisely over, but it does look set to ebb.

The statement also ties in neatly with the Prime Minister’s bold announcement for a new International Commission of Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. Although the government has been criticised in the media of late for going committee and commission crazy since assuming office, there is little doubting that new frameworks for international co-operation are required in order to progress debate beyond the status quo on nuclear disarmament that currently exists. One would also hope that the government works to ensure that its position on uranium trade does not serve to fatally undermine its good will in establishing this commission. We must remember that it is easy politics to establish commissions; whether or not the government has done the right thing will depend on whether the commission achieves anything of worth. The outcome is what, at the end of the day, we should judge, not just the intention.

UPDATE: From this report, it seems that the commission’s goal will be to deliver a report to a conference of experts in the field in 2009, before serving as input to the planned 2010 review of the NPT.

It certainly feels as though it has been a long time coming. Over five years since Australia’s original commitment of combat troops to Iraq, helplessly in lockstep with the Bush Administration, our troops are finally coming home. It is perhaps a relatively small achievement for the Rudd Government, a decision that once made, become more of an operational matter for the armed forces than anything particularly difficult in political terms. On the other hand, in the withdrawal we have right in front of us another example of Federal Labor’s modern approach to governance. In a word, it is managerialism.

In its first six months in office in Canberra, Labor has set about ticking off several of the boxes that it had neatly outlined on a crisp white page prior to the election campaign. This is an approach that has numerous obvious advantages over the ad hoc, politically motivated operational agenda that the Howard Government ran with, particularly in its final years. One gets the palpable sense that this is a government that is planning for the future and acting on its plans, not just a government that plans for its future and acts accordingly. Perhaps as a consequence of this intensive emphasis on “planning, and then doing”, the Rudd Government does feel to me to be a little constrained by the goals it is setting; by the bullet-points on its page. While there are a few big ticket, “big picture” items on its to-do list (e.g. the national broadband network), the majority of the government’s first term agenda probably feels like well-meaning ephemera for many.

One of the core challenges that the government will face in the latter half of its first term is defining a provocative but winnable political narrative for its next term in office. The Opposition is well and truly down under Brendan Nelson, of course, but hardly out. In contrast, the Rudd Government still holds much of the political capital that it gained during its victorious election campaign, boosted as it has been since then by Kevin Rudd’s swift move to ratify Kyoto and his bonafide apology to the stolen generations. The scope exists for a somewhat aggressive political agenda to be laid out for the government’s next term. Clearly issues relating to climate change and energy management are going to be high on the agenda, particularly once the Garnaut Review delivers its final report at the end of September 2008. The funding issues that currently plague the nation’s schools look set to be addressed at least in part by some groundwork during the government’s second term. Additionally, the government’s lifting of the Medicare surcharge threshold in this year’s Budget offer some hope that more reform of the nation’s disjointed and two-tier health system is on the way.

There are clearly a large number of potential reform avenues that many would like to see this new government explore. After a decade of oft neglect, I think it is fair to say that many of us have perhaps unrealistically high expectations of what the Rudd Government should be doing. Six months really is a drop in the ocean when it comes to the processes of government and the implementation of lasting reform agendas. Still, it will only get harder, particularly as the Opposition slowly becomes more competitive, and the government inevitably trips itself up a few times. Indeed, despite the fairly odd stories suggesting otherwise (what hard-nosed voter ever thought the public sector didn’t need to be pushed a bit harder?), Kevin Rudd and his team need to do the proverbial and make reform hay while the sun shines. It sure won’t last forever.

I was disappointed to read that it appears that Federal Labor has made its first significant bungle on the governance transparency front: it has emerged that a $60,000 media contract for the 2020 Summit was awarded without public tender to a company that until recently was run by Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon’s media advisor, Christian Taubenschlag. The incident is now going to be investigated by the Government Staffing Committee, which is a good sign, but there still seems to be something of a potentially less than squeaky clean character going on here.

The government has previously defended the tender-less awarding of the contract using the argument that there was not enough time to conduct a tender process in this case. As Bernard Keane so succinctly puts it for Crikey, though, that’s nonsense; something approaching a tender process could still have been carried out. Corners were clearly cut and cut crudely. While this contract does fall within the Commonwealth Procurement Guidelines with a value of under $80,000, there are numerous existing precedents for contracts of this size going out to public tender.

Certainly the role of Christian Taubenschlag in all this is not yet completely apparent. As Jewel Topsfield reports, Taubenschlag seemingly did indeed made an effort to clear the decks financially when he joined Fitzgibbon’s staff:

Mr Taubenschlag said earlier this month that he had not played any role in the company after starting his job at Mr Fitzgibbon’s office, other than starting the process of giving up his stake in CMAX Communications.

“I began divesting myself of all interest in CMAX Communications from January 2008. This process was fully finalised in April 2008,” he said.

On the other hand, this observation from the same story seems to undermine Taubenschlag’s comments completely:

A spokesman for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Mr Taubenschlag ceased playing any active role in the company when he joined the Defence Minister’s office and the company was now run by his wife, Tara Taubenschlag.

Now is it really accurate to say that one has divested one’s interest in a company if one’s partner is now running the company? This is a joke, right? In fairness, it is not clear whether there has really been any impropriety in this instance, but in the very least the awarding of this contract has a questionable odour about it and looks ugly for the government. It contradicts Special Minister of State John Faulkner’s recent admirable emphasis on transparency and good governance, and quite frankly I think if the government is to maintain its good image it needs to act quickly here.

This matter needs to be investigated and the investigation completed as soon as possible, and I think it is only reasonable that the position of whoever was involved in cutting corners with potential contract candidates be reconsidered as part of this process.