Dead man still walking

After some initial excitement even Dennis Shanahan appeared last week to be starting to have his doubts on Costello's imminent return to the leadership and that maybe The Australian's world historical mission to shape Australian politics is going to have to wait for another day. The Costello threat seems to have settled down to the story that he doesn't want the job if handed to him on a plate, but he would want it if someone else challenged for it. Work that out.

It is funny to see how it is always posed as 'someone' challenging Nelson when we all know that they are just talking about Turnbull. That's what all this is about. The old leadership has seen the erosion to the 'brand' that has happened under Nelson and for the last two months has tried to do something about. Nelson has had to 'toughen up' against Labor, going in hard on, er, alcopops and web-sites that list petrol prices.

The problem for them, as arises when they try to act on it in the Senate, is that they have no real convincing agenda from which to oppose the government's fairly anodyne agenda. Standing up for Gippsland loggers who like a Bundy tipple does not really constitute a new base to launch a political fightback. In fact when it gets serious, such as on emission trading, the hard line is actually unpopular (nobody appears to suggest that this may be one reason why Nelson has drifted backwards in recent polls).

The political dilemma for the old leadership comes down to personnel when they try to replace Nelson. The problem for the old leadership is that they do not have a candidate that make a strong enough case in the party to challenge Nelson without letting Turnbull in. So, in a delicious irony, they have had to make one out of nothing from someone who they spent years denying the job. It doesn't matter that the polls suggest Costello would turn even more voters off the coalition. It is just enough that he is popular among Liberal MPs for the same reason that coalition voters like him, he reminds them of a period that only a few months on is beginning to feel like the Lost Golden Age.

Costello's interests in going along with this for the moment are pretty obvious – he needs to sell his book. Given that his political career has been one of a never-even-has-been, the only real interest in the book would have been the bitchy things he would have written about Howard. Linking it to the fate of the Liberal leadership is a god-send promotion for a book that otherwise might have given the publishers a bit of a challenge. For those in the media who have made a career over the last decade around the gaping hole that has become right-wing politics in this country, their interests in going along with this whole charade have also been painfully apparent. The trouble is, what happens after the book comes out?

The mythical truisms of Australian politics

What seems to be one enduring legacy of the Howard era has been the decline in political commentary in this country. It's not a fault of JWH himself, more a product of the same factors that put him into power - the exhaustion of the major parties' agendas and the collapse of the narrative through which Australian politics used to be understood. In the past, political commentary used to be broadly of two types: the 'insiders' who would spill the beans on the hard internal politics of Canberra and the 'narrators' who would have a grasp of the broad themes and story of the evolution of Australian government.

The insiders have now been overcome by a strange naivety of how politics is working these days that makes them see political power plays where there are none happening, and makes them blind to the ones that are.

For the narrators, they seem to be replaced by those whose analysis is little more than the constant retelling of 'truisms' on Australian politics, that are unproven, unexplained and usually untrue. Last year these truisms were used to explain away the polls and why Howard's defeat was not possible. Such iron laws as the power of the hip-pocket nerve and the incumbency factor were used to argue that it would be inconceivable for a well entrenched government to be thrown out in the middle of an economic boom despite all the polling evidence to the contrary.

Howard's defeat has caused a respite in this peddling but one of them has now returned, the myth that the Australian electorate will not vote for the same government at state and federal level. Those with a memory spanning back longer than a year ago will remember that this was used to explain how Labor could be so well entrenched in the state capitals while Howard looked so permanently in power in Canberra. It was especially a favourite after the 2004 election when Labor seemed unelectable in Canberra but the states fell to them one by one.

When Howard turned out to be not so well entrenched, this truism went underground for a while. But now with Rudd in Canberra and poor polling for Labor in WA and NSW following the swing against it in the NT, it is back.

The most obvious point is that, as far as NSW is concerned, to suggest Rudd's arrival in the Lodge is the main explanation for NSW Labor's polling slump over a period that has seen war break out between the Premier and his own party and cabinet over electricity privatisation, a new round of scandals in local government and the suspension of a key Minister, seems a bizarre conclusion from someone who calls himself that state's political reporter.

In fact, the drivers behind the shenanigans in NSW would explain why it is not only unhelpful to lump NT, NSW and WA together, but also why this myth of a federal/state dichotomy was exposed as such last year.

We now know that rather than Labor's state victories ensuring that Howard would remain in power in Canberra, it indicated why he would lose it. The Labor sweep showed both how the end of the traditional political agenda was not only undermining the Liberals, but also driving a transformation of the ALP from a union-based party to a largely technocratic one. With government in Canberra naturally more influenced by international events, it just needed a change in the international climate and the fading of the political power of the War on Terror to expose it.

Without being too schematic about it, Labor's transformation has been one of moving from the Modern Labor Model Mark I (the business-union model of Hawke, Wran and Cain) to the Mark II model of breaking ties with business and unions to be seen to more closely align directly with the functions of the state. When looking at NSW, WA and the NT then, it is possible to see Labor at different stages of it.

What is distinguished about NSW Labor at the moment is that rather than being at the forefront of Australian politics, this time it is lagging it. As the most successful of the Mark I Labor models, it never went through the traumas of the others during the recession of the early nineties when the union link became exposed as useless and the business link discredited. It was their ability to take power at a time when Howard was doing the same in Canberra that led to this dichotomy theory from those Sydney-centric commentators who failed to notice the opposite happening in most of the other states.

Labor's problems in NSW now stem from that transformation being underway. However, because it is so late, it is happening in government and requiring a much sharper break with the traditional power bases of the party as well as the apparent destruction of the national party's most powerful faction than was necessary in the southern states. It is because this is happening without the discretion of opposition but also involving the most important power bases in the party, that is is so bloody.

Because this is in the middle of a major transformation, it would seem a bit premature to call how the situation in NSW will eventually pan out. Bear in mind the reason why this is happening in government, is the decrepit state of the Liberals which should have otherwise won the election last year. Certainly Iemma is much more in control of the situation than commentators give him credit for and why all the talk of the imminent coups such as that so confidently predicted by the SMH a month ago, keep fizzling out.

WA Labor could roughly be said at the tail-end of this process for which the break with the old union/business model centred around dealing with Burke's influence. As anyone in WA Labor will tell you, no-one was more surprised at their victory in 2001 than the WA Labor party itself. It was not just the surprising result like in Victoria, but unlike to the same degree in Victoria, their lack of preparedness for government given that there was unfinished business in the party. Labor's didn't see much further progress with this unfinished business in its first term, requiring intervention of the judiciary in the second.

NT is the end result. A party that can make the opposition look irrelevant but has limits to how much it can entrench itself. Without a real social base to call on (other than perhaps the public service sector that is a mainstay of NT) there are strict parameters to what it can get away with, unlike the CLP government that preceded it. Political manoeuvres, like sham early elections (on a pretext that didn't work that well when the opposing party tried it in 2001) are no longer really possible. It is why this latest version of Labor is so much disposed to handling the normal functions of party-based democracy like fund-raising and election timing to the judiciary. It also means that there is little for its leaders to call on and if any Labor leader in the country is under threat it might be Henderson.

Australian politics moves across the tiers of government not by some mythical iron laws but in response to the changes in the role of the state, social groups and with a lot more influence from international events than generally acknowledged. What we are seeing now is how the political landscape accommodates to the end of the major traditional parties that is occurring across the country at different paces and by different paths. What has been the constant so far since Federation is that it is Labor that has driven the political changes while the non-Labor parties have more reacted to them. It is the change in Labor that is causing such problems with the media's understanding of Rudd. The Australian's NSW political reporter very kindly reminded us in other states that we may not be aware that Labor's poor polling is big news because NSW is the country's natural Labor state. He seems the last to be aware what the rest of us already know (especially those that come from a state that thought it was the natural Labor state); it just doesn't mean very much any more.

The Senate: A Club to beat the Liberals with

In their continual practice of seeing the present through the past, media commentators are missing the different way the Senate is being used by the Rudd government. For The Age’s Michelle Grattan, the government’s minority in the Senate is a political problem because it is a barrier to the government implementing its program.

What exactly was that program again? Even the government admits that FuelWatch is no more than a little help at the margins. The difficulties the government has had with FuelWatch stemmed mostly from admitting its limits before establishing the political grounds to do so, and this has been more of a problem for the press than an electorate that has a better grasp of the real situation. The wise tactic for the Liberals would have been to expose it as nothing more than the consumerist gesture it is and leave it at that.

Unfortunately they have gone too far and by opposing it, have made it to be a bigger deal than it is. This not only undermines the main charge against the government that it doesn’t have an agenda of substance, but gives Rudd an opportunity to turn the Liberals’ obstruction against them. There may be arguments doing the rounds as to why FuelWatch will make prices higher. However, it is not immediately obvious to most people how letting them know the price of petrol will be bad for them. The apparent common sense behind PetrolWatch makes it fairly easy for the government to allege ulterior motives for opposing it. The Senate’s opposition has in effect given Rudd an opportunity to make an anti-politics charge against the Liberals as though he was in opposition again.

It is the fact that this is more about making a political attack rather than implementing a program that determines the government’s tactics in the Senate. If it was serious about bringing this in then it would be looking to the Independents and the Greens to pass it. Instead, as Rudd has said repeatedly, it is the Liberals the government is targeting as the obstruction while it by-passes the minor parties.

The problems that Rudd can create for the Liberals on this are fairly obvious. The charge that they are defending the oil companies could stick even if it is probably not that credible as the Liberals’ hard-line position is being more driven by internal needs than anything else.

However, the problems they can create for the Independents may be more subtle but are there as well. Xenophon and Fielding are less in the Senate because of anything they particularly stand for than as a reaction to the old two-party system (supporters of both, for example, might be surprised that they had such a strong commitment to support small petrol retailers, which they used to justify their opposition to FuelWatch). It is the lack of real basis for their election that requires them to be such publicity hungry performing artists.

Yet while the Independents were elected as a reaction against the two-party system, their influence relies on it and this is what, for now, makes their two votes count more than two votes from two coalition senators. If Rudd succeeds in breaking the old partisan system down, these two media tarts may find there is less interest in what they have to say, which by the look of it, is not very much.

Everyone’s favourite guinea pigs

Listening to Germaine Greer discuss her essay ‘On Rage’ last night on Lateline, it became clear why it is always so hard these days to follow what she is saying. She desperately gets into contortions trying to make humdrum mainstream views sound radical. Her plan to send indigenous men on what looks like a mass anger management course is doing no more than carrying on the grand old tradition of presenting indigenous affairs as a behavioural problem. Even when she blames their anger on what has been done to them, she contradicts it by saying this destructive anger needs to be dealt with. If the conditions they are living in are still the same, what’s the point?

Greer’s intervention shows that anyone can try out any old crackpot psychological theory on indigenous people and they are given a credible airing in the media, no matter how sweeping or unsubstantiated. Hers is a variant of what are becoming the rather old-fashioned ‘psychology of despair’ theories that were used to make the lurid and unproven claims of the “All Children Are Sacred” report sound credible. Against this we now have the latest more sophisticated version coming from the right of ‘self-responsibility’. This is a strange type of self-responsibility that does not seem to be up to indigenous people themselves whether they exercise it or not. It sounds more like the responsibility a parent gives a child to clean up their room.

Psychological and behavioural theories are fashionable for indigenous affairs because they reflect the intellectual and political class’s lack of confidence that the state can actually do any good. The argument between the left’s victim psychology and the right’s self-responsibility are really dressing up in behavioural jargon the more fundamental question not just whether the state should intervene to improve conditions but whether it can. What is striking about Rudd’s approach to this question is that he has so far largely treated indigenous affairs as a straightforward exercise in service provision, more like a departmental head than a politican worried about the integrity of the state.

It's just a shame that he has done so on the back of the assumptions of the intervention and so kept in place the welfare restrictions that came from its paternalism. After all, if Greer is so desperate to be controversial she could just ask what so few are asking; why, after a year of monitoring and health checks following the claims of a child abuse epidemic, have they not found any evidence of it?

The pointless search for a narrative

In Federal terms, it would be tempting to say that if the Gippsland was just a local election in one seat, then the NT election was a local election in two. Even the CLP and the media have struggled to explain the 9% swing. Paul Henderson tried to put it down to the mantra that “third terms are tough”. This is a highly fashionable theory at the moment that has little basis in Australian political history but seems to fit with how governments are perceived nowadays, not on the basis of whether their agenda suits the time, but how long they have been in and whether they are ‘fresh’ or ‘stale’. The NT electorate didn’t have any trouble electing the CLP eight times in a row before Clare Martin’s narrow victory in 2001.

Labor’s victory in 2001 came because the old basis of Territory politics, federalism through the prism of race and land rights, had lost their edge and Labor’s more apolitical technocratic government made more sense. But Labor’s government has never had the basis of solid support like the CLP did. The legitimacy of the government was even further hollowed out by the NT intervention. This is why the explanation of one Federal Labor Minister, the election’s early timing, may not seem sufficient (snap elections have been held before and their success rate has never been poor enough to discourage governments from risking them), but it is as good as any. Certainly if you are not going to be political anymore, best not to do political manoeuvres like calling early elections (a reason why fixed terms are becoming more acceptable among the political class). The point is not that there was a real reason for the swing but that a government with no firm basis of support doesn’t need one to be vulnerable.

Even before the NT surprise, this flaw in Labor’s technocratic model was coming to the surface following Keating’s criticism of the Rudd government's lack of a ‘narrative’ on The 7.30 Report, eagerly picked up by the media like Michelle Grattan in The Age, or translated by more right-leaning columnists as Rudd being all spin and no substance.

Keating’s commentary last year was welcome in that he exposed the myths of Howard and Costello’s reform agenda. However, Keating created some Howard myths of his own. These largely relate to explaining the 1996 loss and why his own narrative was a flop. Last week Keating again pushed the line that it was Howard’s appeal to ‘baser’ instincts in the Australian electorate that turned voters away from his more noble purpose. Howard’s mysterious ability to tap into a deep primal strain in Australian voters was a myth that was used to explain his electoral success and was clung onto by the right and feared by the left until the bitter end (ironically when the ‘Tampa’ factor did emerge in 2007, the unproven claim that indigenous parents were guilty of widespread child abuse, it was willingly believed by right and left).

Curiously this political power of Howard had a strange tendency to evaporate in the mid-term polling slumps but magically re-emerged every time he faced Labor in an election. It would suggest that Howard’s tenure and his 1996 victory lay less in his own political prowess but what was happening in Labor. Even leaving aside the record of Keating (and the Socialist Left’s Gerry Hand) in setting up such Howard-esque things like mandatory detention camps, the problem Keating faced from the moment he took over from Hawke (in fact the reason why he was able to do so) was that Labor had squeezed the last of its relationship with the unions and there was no real basis for an agenda any more. This was disguised in 1993 when Hewson didn’t get the point that this meant economic reform from either side was over, but picked up by the little man in 1996 when he knew that Keating’s attempt to find a replacement had failed.

The trouble with Keating’s agenda was that as it didn’t really reflect that of any social base, it always ended up drifting back to whatever suited the political class. The republic, which should have been a basic democratic issue, ended up being something that Keating and much of the pro-republican political class ended up only being comfortable about if the President’s choice was confined to them, leading to the referendum’s defeat. Similarly the apology, which should have been a straight–forward acknowledgment of wrong by the major parties, became something that was about rehabilitating them by making us all guilty.

If there is one thing that distinguishes Rudd, and infuriates the media and clearly annoys the old Labor luminaries, is his refusal to create such a political agenda from thin air. Rudd's purpose is to accomodate to the political vacuum. Otherwise, there is only one driver to Rudd’s agenda, the international political one, on anything else he has no fix view and treats them on their merits like a public servant would. It is why practically every political decision on domestic policy is being subject to review by the departmental heads.

Will this work? The NT election shows the sand under Labor’s feet but also that they can rely on the coalition having an even tougher time dealing with the political vacuum. The media clearly hates the lack of a narrative that only they can receive first hand and pass on down from the hill to the rest of us. It is why they pick at things like the petrol and grocery watch, which would seem like a fairly anodyne, sensible measure that lets people compare prices. For the media, this isn’t policy, it’s trivia. But it was interesting watching Gillard tell Barrie Cassidy on Insiders that such a view was out of touch and that it wasn’t trivia to those who check supermarket ads for that reason. Of course in terms of a national agenda it is trivia, but Gillard could put Cassidy on the defensive yesterday because she was reminding him that if the government doesn’t have an agenda to pose against such mundane concerns, neither does anyone else.

Bring back Costello, now!

This is starting to get boring. Dennis Shanahan continues to try to make something out of extremely little, although his latest speculation on a Costello return did contain the gem that Christopher Pyne has tried to quash speculation about his friend on his Facebook (!) site, with this stirring call to action:

Christopher Pyne thinks Peter Costello's position is clear and unchanged since November and wishes everyone would move on and get stuck into the ALP. Who arehopeless! (sic)

But despite The Australian’s attempts to make it seem like an unstoppable momentum is building, did one of their journalists let the cat out of the bag? The Australian’s Samantha Maiden talking on Sky News said that Costello’s father-in-law comments on Monday were the first “genuine” confirmation that he was at least considering the leadership. If that is true, what has all of this speculation over the last month been based on?

This speculation is getting boring because it is about Costello, a lightweight politician. It is also boring because it is not about Costello, but how some sections of the media and the political class get their heads around the political crisis in the Liberal Party. Just as the implosion of Howard’s leadership last year was seen as a Costello challenge, now the implosion of the Nelson leadership and the stalemate between the Turnbull and old leadership is turned into a return of the World’s Funniest Treasurer. It is why the likelihood that he will take the job bears little relation to his interest in it.

This use of Costello to avoid having to look directly at the Liberal party’s problems is best summed up by Gerard Henderson, whose writings since the election have shown the trouble he has had with the Howard defeat and the collapse of the sham ‘cultural wars’. In his latest lauding of Costello’s virtues, he dropped this in near the end:

It seems likely that Costello would have accepted the Opposition leader's position late last year if he felt the Coalition had a chance of winning in 2010. That seemed an impossibility eight months ago. However, the Coalition's chances look somewhat better now that they did then - despite the afflictions which have occurred under Brendan Nelson's leadership.

Well yes. The Liberals’ position in last year’s NSW election against an unpopular Labor government was good, despite the afflictions of Debnam’s leadership. Their chances in Queensland in the last election against a tired Beattie government were good – despite the afflictions of Bruce Flegg’s leadership. In WA they are looking in a very good position in the next election against Carpenter’s scandal ridden government – despite … well you get the idea. In fact all around the nation they are looking in tip-top shape, despite the afflictions of pretty well every leader and the party they lead.

The trouble is despite the strong position the Liberals should theoretically be against some unpopular Labor governments, it still doesn’t mean they can win, because just as in Perth, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, the problem in Canberra is not a problem of leadership but the party they are leading. The ALP is a lot weaker than they often appear, it is just that they are simply not in the chronic conditions of the Liberals, a condition that was disguised under Howard (while the states collapsed one-by-one) but since November has now come out.

You would have thought that given the way these ideologues were so disappointed with Costello’s impotence during the crisis that engulfed the Howard leadership in its last months (does anyone talk about that these days?), that they might be a little more clued up on how effective Costello would be now.

The first thing that would happen if Costello took the leadership is that all the tired old fallacies of the Howard era would be dusted off, after a year of being battered by reality, and have another airing. It is also quite possible that rather than the ALP having a fit of nerves, that they would be galvanised, as already seen by the ‘dossier’ that Labor is supposed to have compiled. For a brief while, both sides would rerun the same old tired battles and Australian politics would mimic last year’s political tragedy with this year’s farce. This is why, for the sake political clarity, this blog has now joined the campaign to draft Costello. It would be fun to watch.

Poor Costello, used again – a reprise

The campaign by The Australian to have Costello installed as the Liberal leader makes sense from many different viewpoints – except for Costello’s. He only turned down the job eight months ago and the position has hardly become more enticing since then. The Queensland branch has collapsed under the guise of a merger, the West Australian branch couldn’t decide whether they looked more a joke getting rid of a leader than keeping him and the national ‘brand’ has seen its main virtues eroded. You would think his only concern is to make sure his book sells well and to build up the suspense before it comes out.

However, this is not about what Costello wants, it is about what the old leadership and their supporters desperately need to get out of the mess they are now in. Whereas Costello was used by Howard to ride the vacuum, he is now being used to allow the Liberals to avoid having to acknowledge it, nicely summed up by one Liberal MP as being ‘paralysed until Peter Costello makes up his mind’.

What is interesting about all the fuss being made about someone who is giving every sign that he doesn’t want to lead the party, is how it is ignoring someone who is giving every sign he does. It shows that this drafting of Costello is being driven by the old leadership and just how weak now Turnbull’s position is in the party. The old leadership is in a mess because in getting what they wanted, the end of the Turnbull threat, it has exposed the crisis in the top ranks of the party.

Nelson has been the cheap hammer used to batter down Turnbull but has now been broken in the process. We are getting more detail on what happened last week, especially from Peter Hartcher’s excellent report which, like his account of last year’s implosion of the Howard leadership at APEC, gives the best inside feel for the dynamics at work. He was correct that the crucial moment of last week was at Monday’s policy review meeting at which Turnbull and Minchin, but not Nelson, were present:

The critical moment of the Monday meeting came, participants said, when Minchin asked whether climate change policy was at issue, "or are we talking about other agendas?" With the sort of politeness the Liberals specialise in, this was taken to be a euphemism for asking whether Turnbull was turning this into a leadership play. The Liberals' deputy leader, Julie Bishop, responded that everything she had observed was that no mischief was afoot, and that the point of the exercise was purely to establish a consistent, credible policy position. The group spent some time, as one later put it, "making sure Nick was comfortable with the policy" that Turnbull and Hunt were seeking to defend against Nelson's proposed change. If he had not been, "then we would have been having a very different debate".

What happened here was that Minchin, representing the old leadership, was essentially getting Turnbull to declare his hand for the leadership. Turnbull’s refusal to do so removed the need to push the issue in the subsequent shadow cabinet meeting and the party get-together. Turnbull was indulged at the cabinet meeting and then a fudge agreed on with the backbenchers with lots of ‘probablys’. In reality Nelson had adopted the old leadership’s line, not Turnbull’s as the press reported it, but it would have been less immediately apparent had Kerry O’Brien not pressed the issue with Nelson on Wednesday. Turnbull had been politically defeated in a way that avoided a confrontation, but at the cost of making Nelson look like an idiot.

The problem here is that neither side can convincingly make its case. Turnbull has the electoral argument but not the answer to the Liberals’ more pressing problem of what they stand for. The old leadership is more intent on preserving the party’s agenda, but is discredited by their electoral loss. Nelson’s leadership has rested on that stalemate, but over the last month has had to respond to the old leadership’s increasing concern over the party’s ‘brand’. Unfortunately he has had to bear the problems of the old leadership’s line (it is electoral death) and from this weak position and all the vacillating this has meant, has destroyed his credibility in the process.

In this situation, Costello is overwhelmingly preferred by the Liberals because he best allows them to avoid their current dilemma by appealing to a mythical past. It is a past of respected leadership, of economic reform and polling leads in economic management that mattered, and ‘cultural wars’ that tapped into the concerns of the Howard battlers. The reality of course was a government that had no reform agenda, a meaningless reputation as economic manager and cultural values that had so little hold on the Australian electorate (despite what the liberal intelligentsia claimed) that Rudd could sweep them away in a matter of months. It ended with its leader going to a humiliating electoral defeat presaged a few months earlier by a leadership implosion.

There is nothing in Costello’s actions in the Howard government’s crisis of last year that would suggest he can make any difference to the Liberals’ crisis now. However, there are a couple of reasons it may appear he can. The first is a media that never got their heads around what caused Howard’s defeat last year. For them, Costello will allow them to replay all the old myths again and there is no doubt he will come in with a fanfare.

The second is the ALP. News that they are preparing a ‘dossier’ on Costello’s IR extremism says a lot more about the state of Labor than Costello. It is notable that the Liberals’ lurch on climate change over the last month has re-energised a government that was starting to drift. Labor’s need to respond to the Liberals’ dreaming of the past by following them there and digging up an IR agenda that they can all be against, could only be explained by internal reasons (especially when unions are complaining how Rudd has kept so much of Howard’s agenda). There is hardly an electoral reason for trying to scare people about someone widely regarded as a political lightweight leading a party that is struggling to stand for anything.