Review of 2008 – Labor

It is not easy to review Labor in 2008 since politically, the party seemed to make barely any impact. While Liberal shenanigans made most of the headlines, Labor party manoeuvres were rarely reported as such, even if they remained very much a feature of 2008 politics.

The Labor party throughout 2008 was dominated by the small clique of Ministers around Rudd. This may not appear that different from the Hawke/Keating governments before, but the narrow grouping around the earlier Labor Prime Ministers was still against a backdrop of a union movement that had a key role in Labor government policy. This new Labor government was very different.

A sign of this was the leadership's relationship to the party’s factions. Rudd came to power as the first Labor leader not sponsored by a union. Coming from the right as is traditional, but the first not to attend their faction meetings as leader (with Gillard also being the first deputy not to attend hers). At the election, we saw so-called ‘celebrity’ Labor candidates brought in by Rudd over the heads of the branches and the factions in unprecedented numbers. After the election, we saw the appointment of the first Labor Cabinet member, Peter Garrett, not to be in a faction. All of this produced a Labor government less aligned with the party’s power bases than any in the ALP’s history led by its most detached leader.

Yet behind detachment there is always conflict. Rudd’s alliance with left figures such as Gillard and Tanner was not based on their program (indeed there is little evidence of the left’s program when Gillard oversaw the introduction of the most anti-union legislation in the party’s history or Tanner started almost immediately cutting spending at a time of surplus). Rudd’s alliance with the left was based on their view on the party’s factions and the old political order. Those of the left who had the least to lose from the end of the old party power bases aligned with a leader who owed least to them.

It was the political assault on the old power bases of the party that was the underlying theme of federal Labor in 2008 and it was centred around three initiatives. The first was the attack on party programmes and spending plans that started even before Rudd came to power, at last year’s election launch and then was reinforced immediately after victory by over-hyping the inflation threat. This period running up to the May Budget saw the leadership clamp down on any party spending plans under the guise of controlling inflation and the importance of keeping election promises even as the US slowdown started to hit.

Generally the media seemed to take the inflation crisis at face value, although you have to wonder whether the right–wing press, like The Australian, that also took up the anti-inflation cry were not also aware of its political implications. If that was so, the media’s campaign would be unlikely to be targeted at merely discrediting the former Howard government, who had already been defeated, but surely more those on the Labor side whose hands were now supposed to be closer to the levers of power. There was probably no clearer sign of the defeat of the party than its acquiescence to dropping any new spending plans while preserving Howard’s tax cuts.

The second initiative was more symbolic but probably far-reaching in message and that was the 2020 Summit. While viewed as a celebrity stunt, the message from Rudd’s speech opening the 2020 summit that the major parties, including the one that was supposed to be governing, were politically bankrupt and had nothing to say for the long-term future of Australia was real enough.

The third initiative was much grittier and more fascinating to watch, the destruction of the party’s most important power base, the NSW Right. This largely centred on the NSW government and Iemma’s attempt to break with the unions over electricity privatisation. It was a move that destroyed the influence of the NSW Right in the process. However, in doing so the unprecedented toppling of a serving Labor Premier has not resulted in the resurgence of the party base and the unions either. Instead NSW now has a vacuum at the top occupied by the man from nowhere, Nathan Rees.

The role of Canberra in all of this is a bit cloudy. Certainly Rudd never came to Iemma’s rescue like he promised he would while in opposition. Partly this was because he did have an interest in the destruction of his former faction, but also reflecting his lack of a support base in NSW from which to have much effect, certainly the current state of Labor in NSW would not be his ideal. But his approval of Gillard’s hounding of Neal over Iguanagate, so also damaging her right faction boss husband, made it clear that he saw what happened in NSW as a necessary evil.

The story in NSW is not over. From being the most entrenched and successful model of the union-business model Labor model of the 1970s and 1980s and the last to change, NSW Labor has crashed straight through the technocrat models subsequently adopted by other state Labor governments and ended up in a vacuum. However, that sense of a vacuum end-point was also felt in other state Labor governments in 2008, most notably in WA and NT, where Labor governments suffered large swings against them. Not because the Liberals were reviving with an alternative; as seen in WA when they scraped into power, they had none. Nor because of an inevitable swing back to the Liberals now Labor is in Canberra, a mechanical formula that has suffered a bit of a hit with the latest round of state polls. But because at the end of the day, being a technocratic organisation without a social base may make it more suited to the functionary role state government has become, but also leaves it vulnerable to being turfed out for the most trivial of reasons. This is a lesson that has not been lost in Canberra. Busy, busy.

Review of 2008 – The Liberals

If there has been one key development driving the federal Liberals over 2008, it has been the faltering grip of the old leadership. Imploding in the run up to the loss last November, the last minute withdrawal of Abbott’s candidacy and the fumbled attempt to reassert itself under Nelson in the winter this year, the Liberals are left at the end of 2008 in a vacuum with a leader that has no real base of support in the party but with the old guard yet unable to get rid of him.

No doubt the media assessment of Nelson’s brief tenure in the end-of-year round-ups will not be glowing. But Nelson probably did the best in a dire situation. He had two problems. The first was the presence of the old guard that made clear he owed their victory to them, while no doubt being less clear why their own man couldn’t get the chance to use his people skills. The old leadership have influence because they are the only ones that can convincingly assert party values at a time it need to be told what it stands for. As Howard sat in his suite at the Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices, just down the corridor from Nelson’s, he could ring around the party and call Nelson in to remind him what the party stood for and keep him on the right track.

The one small problem with what Howard would have had to say, however, was that it no longer won elections. No-one in the party seems to want to admit it publicly but they had just lost the election under his leadership and his policies. It wasn’t even that they were that unpopular, more irrelevant to even the party’s own business backers.

This would have been bad enough to handle but the political environment made it even worse. Rudd had come into power on the fact that neither major party had anything especially relevant to say to Australia in 2008 and so we had the New Sensitivity; bipartisanship, avoiding political ‘argy-bargy’ and feeling everyone’s pain. While this touchy-feely was anathema to an old guard trying to assert itself, Nelson actually didn’t do a bad job given the pressures on his back.

Nelson’s compromise was to do Sensitive, but go in ‘hard’ at the same time. Probably his most memorable performance was during the height of the petrol kerfuffle. The Liberals never sounded that convincing even when some of them were trying to chip in with any mid-market car models they could think of (Julie Bishop helpfully came up with a Tarago).



This and ‘every mother loves her baby’ may be excruciating to watch, but such Sensitive gestures prevented Rudd getting a grip on Nelson even if it made him a figure of mockery for the media. So Labor’s lead drifted away during the winter, but it left Nelson a political laughing stock.

The damage to the ‘brand’, as senior Liberals cutely called the party’s rationale, became too much to swallow and by June there were clear attempts to push Nelson to a more distinct position. That had to centre on the one thing where they still felt to have an advantage, the economy, and that was the basis on which they pushed a harder line on climate change. The argument was that there would soon be electoral resistance against climate change action as it hit the hip-pocket. Something you could see resonated in the right wing press until they had to confront the shocking polling evidence that the public thought no such thing.

The return of a more open climate change scepticism may have made the party feel good, but also reinvigorated a drifting government. Anyone listening to Parliament during June would have heard the way the government suddenly came back to life after being bogged down in petrol price tedium.

Such a move was obviously a challenge to Turnbull and he had to respond. With Nelson losing his grip, the old leadership needed to draft in the ghost of a Costello leadership challenge to keep Turnbull in place and we saw the return of that pantomime a full six months before Christmas. Stuck in the middle, Nelson had no choice but to respond and bring things to a head. Despite the backing of most of the old leadership, he narrowly lost.

Turnbull’s arrival represented the old guard’s defeat rather than the arrival of a new order. That is why he has had no impact on policy despite telling anyone who listened that he would start doing so by the year end. In fact if anything, his side of the party seems to have gone backwards (anyone heard from Greg Hunt lately?).

In reality Turnbull faced the same problems as Nelson, but even more acute. He still faced the New Sensitivity rules of play, and like the hard luck stories he gave on arriving to the leadership he was only a bit less awkward at doing it than Nelson. He still faced the Master of the Game on the opposite side. Despite the media claiming the ‘game is back on’, if anything the government’s drift reversed from the day he took over.

He also has the old guard to deal with. Their setback with Nelson’s loss may have brought on a temporary respite that might have looked like unity to some, but the problem for them is getting even more pronounced after the right fell over themselves to support the bail-out. The last few months have seen a scramble right across the party to recover what they lost in the October panic.

There are now little signs that this will mean the old guard are getting ready to dispose of their second leader. Being Liberals, they do things less directly. The first way they begin targeting the current leadership is through its weakest point, the deputy. While Bishop is unaligned with Turnbull internally, mutterings about Bishop are an indirect way of complaining about the leadership performance as a whole. Now we have the rebellion in the Senate, where while all the focus has been on what the Nats did, the real challenge came from what senior Libs like Nick Minchin did. Maybe the media is right after all, it does look as the game is back on.

Climate change tactics

The general media assessment of Rudd’s 5% emission target is that if it places him in the middle between unhappy Greens and climate sceptics, it is the right place to be.

It is not. First of all, the government is not in the ‘middle’ of such sentiment. Every poll shows that far more think the government is not doing enough than too much. Stepping up climate change action keeps being discussed as a ‘brave’ decision but is actually very much in line with what the mainstream electorate thinks.

The myth that climate change action is a tough area for government largely comes from the media’s incomprehension that the voting public would ever think beyond its hip-pocket. This seems to be a media prejudice built up in the latter years of the Howard government that ascribed his political genius in winning elections through the handing out of bribes. They forget that Howard’s ability to stave off the regular mid-term polling slumps rested on the exact opposite, namely the perception that he could make unpopular decisions that could give him the authority to strut around as a conviction politician.

Rudd has come to power as a pragmatic response to the fact that Howard’s little bag of tricks lost their magic and he was exposed at the end as politically bankrupt, despite some last minute attempts to appear otherwise. But, no matter how pragmatic Rudd is, he still needs issues to give the government a sense of purpose and a reason for existence. The difference for Rudd is that this is more likely to come from the international arena and that Rudd was better positioned to follow the change in that international agenda from the War on Terror to climate change.

Rudd certainly began that way but appears to have lost momentum on climate change as the year progressed. One of the reasons appears to be the slowing economy. There is an overwhelming view that an economic downturn will make action on climate change more difficult. The opposite could be more easily argued. For a start there is the practical synergy between the two. As Andrew Bolt pointed out a few weeks ago, a recession can be quite effective at reducing carbon emissions. There are also political synergies. Climate change is about making a virtue of austerity and slower growth, useful political tools in the event of downturn.

However, there is an even more fundamental synergy. In case it should happen that the money does run out, and this slowdown begins to appear like others (i.e. lower revenues, no money, spending cuts), having the political authority to make the tough decisions is useful, as can be seen with the NSW government, where that moment has already arrived and it has none. One thing that political history shows is that when times are tough, Australian governments need all the help with authority they can get.

This political issue is not necessarily about the practicalities. Rudd may very well be right that a 5% emission cut is equivalent, per capita, to a 30% cut by the Europeans. The trouble is that it doesn’t seem like it and the Greens charge that the government lacks courage has a little bit of bite. Business may be happy, but then they don’t have a government to run with all the political considerations that entails.

If the government has not done its own authority many favours by appearing timid, it does at least help it deal with the Liberals. If you listened to Turnbull a year ago you would think he would charge the government with not doing enough. If you listened to him a few months ago you would think that he would claim the government is doing it just about right. Yet yesterday he was again forced to position himself on the sceptic side. If there are a lot of people thinking the government is not doing enough, there are certainly not many thinking the government is doing too much.

What is changing is not Turnbull’s view on climate change (probably) but the increasing tenuous position he is finding himself as he rises in the leadership of the party that at the same time is having increasing doubts as to what it stands for. As someone who cannot even deliver better polling numbers, Turnbull is in no position to take on those in the party using the climate change position as a means of asserting the party’s core values. It may be doing so, but is at the risk of achieving the singular feat of making the Liberals look unpopular and opportunistic at the same time. In doing so, they already helped to destroy Nelson’s leadership. They are not doing Turnbull’s any favours now.

Unity can be death too

Every now and then a poll comes along that doesn’t so much suggest a change in political reality, than force the media to accept what the reality has been all along. The 59/41 Newspoll during last September’s APEC Summit was one that made the media finally accept what had been staring them in the face all year, the Howard government’s defeat. Another Newspoll last week giving Labor the same margin has finally forced the media narrative to adapt to the political reality that was apparent from the day Turnbull took to the leadership, the Liberals are as unelectable as ever.

If anything, just going by the polls, Turnbull has in fact reversed the narrowing that was achieved under Nelson’s leadership. Things are a bit more complicated than that, the political environment has changed. But if anything it seems to have led to the economy dominating the political debate which we were told was supposed to be Turnbull’s strong point.

In reality the economy has not dominated political debate because there has been no economic debate. There has been a debate about process, who advised who, what, when, but no debate over whether the advice was right or wrong. There have been Liberal mutterings, but any serious criticisms were shut down by Labor asserting the superiority of the nation’s public officials over anything the political class might have to say.

Tony Abbott (and much of the media) thinks the government is ahead because of the cash hand-outs. This is the same contemptuous view of the public that thought Howard’s big tax hand-outs would save him last year. The point is not so much the hand-outs, but that it is being presented as an economic response, which is why Rudd gives it the grand name of an ‘Economic Security Strategy’. Howard’s cash hand out just looked like the political ploy it was.

Looking like you have an economic strategy is the name of the game, and this is where Turnbull’s problems lie. You would think the Liberals in opposition would be in their element now. The economy is turning down and Labor’s plan is to spend its way out of it. This should be exactly the time that the Liberals should be united. Against all the things that divide them, they are supposed to be against big government spending especially when times are tough. Cutting back spending and taxes is supposed to be one of business’s favourite responses to a downturn.

The trouble is that business doesn’t seem to know where they stand at the moment. If anything they are keener on government spending than anyone else. Nor have the political right been giving them much ideological direction. So we have drift and a unity that is standing for nothing, representing the collapse of the old leadership than Turnbull putting something new in its place.

Despite the facade of unity now looking less believable, nothing has really changed. The big rebellion from the old leadership last week was not against big spending, but the opposite, opposing Labor’s attempt to save money by dipping into funds already set aside. The Nationals’ opposition made political sense, the Liberals’ disunity meant nothing more than its leader is losing control.

What damage a dying government did

Whereas the early phase of Industrial Relations Reform, say through to Waterfront, people could see a set of pre-conditions for those reforms existing, that is, yes our tax system is ageing or yes, our ports are grinding to a halt. There was no such, there was no pre-existing set of opinions or ideas like that with WorkChoices. Why are we doing this?

Mark Textor The Howard Years

Howard may have stuck his jaw out and pretended that WorkChoices was a political problem because it was a tough decision, like his other ‘tough’ decisions, but his pollster put his finger on it. The problem with WorkChoices was that it was irrelevant and signalled that the Howard government's limited program had come to an end.

The last episode of what has been generally an unrevealing series did at least remind that there were two agendas going on in Howard’s last year in government. It was not just that the fading of the effectiveness of the War on Terror again revealed a government bereft of a programme as it was in its first term, but that all the symbols with which Howard had defined his government were turning against it in its core constituency. Rudd’s ascension accelerated not only Labor’s progress in the marginals, but was also eroding support in the Liberals metropolitan heartland.

That was why in 2007 the Liberals ran two campaigns; one for show that looked like the traditional election campaign focussed on the marginals and a less obvious real one to hold onto its heartland. So we had Howard the conviction politician doing U-turns on Hicks, WorkChoices, the Murray and even by the end, on reconciliation, while banging on relentlessly about the one issue that still had resonance with its base, the unions. Combined with a very ordinary Labor election campaign, the coalition’s tactics in the last year prevented a humiliating loss becoming a political catastrophe.

The strategy over the heartland was the only real political substance to the tiff between Howard and Costello, with Costello offering no way to win the election but at least adapting the program to less upset the voters in seats like Higgins and Wentworth. In the end, Howard’s U-turns and his still better popularity with Liberal voters were the political reality that meant Costello would never get support. Nevertheless the Howard Years stuck to the Liberal script that they only really lost because the leader was looking old against Rudd’s fresh face. Well, we have had two fresh-faced Liberal leaders since then and what a lot of good that has done them.

Other than shoring up the heartland, Howard still needed to find an issue to give the government purpose, or a ‘rabbit out of the hat’ as it was popularly known. The politically astute former Treasurer had his own way of putting the problem:

From midyear on we were dancing and skipping and asking the electorate to take a look at us, but they’d latched onto another act and it was the other act that had taken their imagination.

On the 18 June 2007 that dancing and skipping by a desperate dying government hit a new low. The government seized on a report commissioned by the NT Labor government that made unproven claims of widespread child abuse by indigenous communities. Enter Mal Brough:

You stand in a community and you hear of 15 men that have committed the most heinous crimes, and there’s only 90 of them in the community. And you go back to that community and you hear of 10-15 year olds raping six year olds. I’m sorry. [Breaks to cry] And people think this shit’s not real.

Now given Mal’s tears, no one would like to claim that he is the lowest order of political hypocrite. It is just that there is this question; why did he not react when the evidence showed that this ‘shit’ wasn’t real? Namely that the 11,000 child health checks conducted in the year after the intervention led to no increase in the number of referrals of indigenous children and not a single arrest. Either the screening was ineffective and he should be up in arms at all those child abusers not being brought to justice or, far more likely, the incredible stories of widespread systemic child abuse that rose up around the Wild report were unbelievable because they simply weren’t true. If apologies are so in vogue, maybe here’s a chance to apologise to all those living now who have had such a slur made against them and clear their name, much like Lateline was forced to apologise to the parents of Mutitjulu over similar allegations that started the whole thing off two years ago.

Of course, no apology will be made because the net of those implicated in what happened last year is spread so wide. It wasn’t just the Coalition that went along with this beat-up, or the Labor party that supported the intervention. With friends like the indigenous communities had, they didn’t need enemies in the government. The high opinion these ‘allies’ of the indigenous communities actually had of them, was summed up in the program by long-time indigenous do-gooder Sue Gordon, who was drafted into the intervention:

You can’t have a community of two and three thousand people, or three hundred, without police. And then there’s anarchy running you know riot in your community. How the hell do you think you’d live?

As though any community, let alone an indigenous one, would start abusing their kids if the police weren't there.

Under the Rudd government, the child abuse allegations have been quietly put to one side and it has all been turned into just a health and services issue. But the smell still lingers. A little recent whiff has come from the distasteful reaction from some quarters over what will happen when some of the Great Unwashed get their cash hand-out from Rudd's fiscal stimulus. Not all were as lurid as that loveable maverick Barnaby Joyce:

It’s not going to be a boon, it’s going to be a disaster. With a big amount of money turning up at certain households at a certain day, we’ll see an increase in the effects of alcohol that can turn into assault, that can turn into rape, that can turn into the wasting of money, that can turn into the payment of drugs.

Tony Abbott, who coincidentally happens to be the (reluctant) opposition spokesman for indigenous affairs, put it more delicately:

I don't begrudge families doing it tough this extra money. But certainly, there are very credible fears that at least some families, particularly in some areas, are gonna be spending this money on booze and gambling and so on, and that's a pity.

Certain households, some areas. Now, who can they mean?

An irrelevant and useful distraction – an update

Those incorrigible Nats! And that Barnaby Joyce, such a maverick!

We heard enough of the word ‘maverick’ to know what it means these days, i.e. someone from the right side of politics who is embarrassed to be associated with it, but with nowhere else to go. Barnaby Joyce might portray himself as a tearaway but he is very much in the tradition of the Nationals in opposition. It never makes too much sense for the Nationals to compromise their standing in the rural regions when they are unbound by the practicalities of government, especially when they are fighting for their survival.

Surely it made sense for both parties in the coalition that, since they did not have to pay for it, the Nationals may as well have voted against the government’s dipping into the rural telecommunication fund to pay for broadband while the Liberals supported it. The Nationals could go their way and defend their vote in the bush, the Liberals could go their way and not let the government accuse them of wrecking the broadband plans. The media commenting that Howard would have never let the Nationals wander off because he would have given them money is moot, since in opposition Turnbull doesn’t have any money to give them anyway. (Howard was hardly a model for controlling the Nationals while in opposition!)

So why the fuss? Shanahan in The Australian thinks the Nationals have posed a major challenge to Turnbull’s leadership authority. What is striking in the press coverage is how it has shifted focus onto what the Nationals did and away from the real challenge to Turnbull’s authority, what the Liberal front bench did.

Maybe Turnbull should think of appointing someone with a stronger bladder as his Leader in the Senate, because the current one, Nick Minchin, seems to have a problem with his plumbing. Missing the vote because he had to go to the toilet and have a cup of coffee (not very helpful), he then turned up after the vote, according to Bob Brown, without realising there was a second one and fled again. In the end the Liberals split between some voting for the government, some against, with most following their Senate leader and staying away.

The story shifted onto the Nationals because the way it was being told, the Liberals’ three-way split was apparently just a mix up of confused text messages. But Laurie Oakes gives a clearer picture as to why such a last-minute organisational shemozzle occurred - Turnbull faced a rebellion from his own party. The last minute text messages only came after Heffernan told Turnbull that his Senators were furious about supporting the government. So an issue that Andrew Robb was insisting was a critical issue in the House only hours before, suddenly became a ‘Mickey Mouse’ one, leaving only ones like the Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate, Helen Coonan, doing Malcolm’s duty and voting with the government.

Reported complaints from Coalition senators that Malcolm had a lot to learn about politics may be true, but the charge they he runs the Liberals like a company CEO say more of style than the reality. Turnbull may be detached because he has little control and little base within the party to manage it through. So Parliament ended with, as one coalition senator described it, “the clip over the ear that Malcolm had coming”.

That is why the focus has shifted on to the Nationals. Just as a merger with Nationals became a surrogate under Nelson for the more tortured debate over what the Liberals stood for, so now the Nationals have become the focal point for a Liberal party detached from its leader but unable to replace him. Nelson’s position suffered from being a hostage to the right, but Turnbull’s is even worse, his leadership was opposed by them (including Minchin). So Joyce is made into the Great Rebel when all he is doing is what the Nationals should be doing when making the transition from government to opposition (which is why someone who was an outsider in his party under Howard’s coalition is now very much in the party’s fold).

Focusing on the Nationals’ rebellion is also useful for those in the media who thought Malcolm was the last hope of the Liberal party. The idea that Turnbull’s hold on the party is even weaker than Nelson’s must be uncomfortable for those who mistook the temporary defeat of the old leadership after Turnbull’s win for unity. Let’s also give Malcolm the benefit of the doubt and take it as the reason he did something so politically daft as to offer Joyce the front bench position over coffee in Sydney’s lively Oxford St. No wonder he turned him down, who would want to get on that boat?

Tetchy

Julie and Peter are having this huge fight because Peter asked Julie to help with his homework and she said she would but then she got her friend Murray to do it and he just went and copied it from someone else, who got the answers wrong anyway. Julie is also really cross with Dennis because he has been telling everyone that nobody likes her. She is not even speaking to Julia who is just being mean to her but the other day she really got back at the other rude boys in her gang who were calling names with a really dirty look. Andrew says he likes Julie but Kevin told her that he was saying rude things about her behind her back. Malcolm has been sticking up for Julie and told Julia to leave her alone, but we all know that he’s only being nice because he doesn’t have any friends and needs all the ones he can get. Wayne is just glad everyone has stopped picking on him.

The irritable end to this sitting of Parliament does suggest two things. Firstly, the government is getting on top of the Liberals. Malcolm’s complaints that Julia and co. are being nasty could only be taken seriously by anyone who forgot that the attacks on Bishop started from her own side and whose memory doesn’t span beyond a few months ago when it was Swan that was being targeted. Not because of what he was doing, but on purely personal terms, that is he didn’t come across as confident in the job. Swan had a reason to be nervous, this is the first Labor government without a real base to any economic policy, i.e. a relationship with the unions.

Labor is now starting to realise that the Liberals don’t have any base to their economic stance either, other than they just happened to be in government when times were good. Now that times are not so good they have nothing to say. This economic guilt by association was why Turnbull’s initial response to Labor’s admission of a deficit was good, namely to remind everyone that Labor’s last deficit coincided with the last downturn. The problem is that the Liberals did exactly what was expected and took it too far and made a principle about not having a deficit. This is so unconvincing that even the only Liberal in the country who actually has a Budget to manage, Colin Barnett, doesn’t agree with it. The federal Liberals are making a big deal over the deficit because they need to find some ideological position to have on the economy, especially after their recent cave-in. Barnett doesn’t have that problem, the Premier of any state these days is little more than a bureaucratic functionary.

Turnbull’s need to duck and weave on the ABC the other day over his stance on the deficit at a time when the government should be vulnerable, illustrates the pressure he is under to take meaningless ideological positions to manage his weak grip on the party and his tin ear when it comes to political tactics. The media have been critical of Bishop’s inability to take on the government over the economy but they might consider the lead she is getting from the one who was equally ineffectual in the same position. The media might start finally to take notice of the polls and come to the conclusion that Turnbull may look more like an opposition leader than Nelson but is no more politically effective.

This is the second reason why both parties are getting increasingly unpleasant to each other – both sides are heading into an unprecedented economic crisis with little in the political arsenal to handle it. Having said that, Labor looks in a better position to manage it and new initiatives like the RuddBank at least suggest signs of new thinking. Joining the fashion of getting personal, Labor’s strengths can be summed up by two people, the first is Gillard. She is getting a lot of favourable press these days based on her performance in Parliament. It is effective but very much in the tradition of what we have seen before, think of Costello with brains. Her most important role is internal. Her background from the left, and what people like her and Tanner have done with it around phoney issues like Workchoices, has kept the factions in control and the pressure of old ideological debates off Rudd.

But for attacks on the Liberals, Rudd is still the one to watch. It is not that Rudd is that interesting in Parliament, generally he is not. He waffles on the Global Financial Crisis and even on foreign matters he has not learnt the Howard trick of walking into the chamber dressed in the accolades of international affairs. Where Rudd really shines and is at his most savage against the Liberals, far more than Gillard, is on his one true love, anti-politics. It can come out in the most surprising places. The GFC may bore but COAG got him really fired up. This comes from a tirade against the Liberals on Monday prompted by a question from Andrew Robb:

The political agenda of the member for Goldstein is politics first, second, third and last in every single equation and the political agenda of those opposite was as follows: they wanted simply to preserve a political agenda to blame the states on every occasion possible, a tired political script of which every family and every community group in the country has, frankly, had a gutful.

The Liberals’ internal political game-playing such as around Bishop has left them vulnerable, but there is probably no other politician in Parliament who can so convincingly accuse another politician of being political as Rudd can. This is because there is no-one so detached from the political processes of both sides. There is also no-one who will be so capable of dumping the traditions and practices of the old political programmes should circumstances require. This will be useful for what’s coming next.

Clinging to the wreckage

It is understandable that Mumble’s Peter Brent has criticised The Howard Years as seeing the past through the prism of the present. Although without the benefit of a time machine, it is hard to see how it could be viewed in any other way. In reality it’s the present, rather than the history, that’s the problem. While the series is undoubtedly letting the Liberals re-write those early years of the government (only because the journalists like Fran Kelly seem to see it that way too), the problem is less how Howard gets away with being a conviction politician then, but how he gets away with being seen as one now.

What has not happened the way this blog thought might is the tearing up of the Howard legacy after he led his government to a resounding defeat. If anything, The Howard Years shows that he is revered by senior colleagues as much as ever. There has been a dumping of some his core policies, like Workchoices, a key idea of a government that had few, but it does not seem to have led to any reassessment of Howard. Howard is still being lauded as a conviction politician despite the way the party has distanced itself from much of what he had a conviction about. In fact it seems the more the Liberals ditch what they stand for, the more they cling to Howard the man, rather than what he was supposed to stand for.

There are probably two areas left now where there is still agreement on the right that Howard’s convictions were correct. The first is national security. It was interesting in The Howard Years to be reminded how Howard initiated the series of events in East Timor by his call to Indonesia for East Timor independence. Howard, whose government at the time was grasping at one issue after another to give the government a sense of purpose, promised to Downer that their letter to the Indonesian President would create a situation that would be ‘big’. But then after Habibie caught them off-guard by calling a referendum on Timorese autonomy, Howard was ready to leave the East Timorese swinging until the US pressured him to sort the mess out. The left may have not liked the interference in the affairs of Iraq and the right’s argument that troops should stay to sort out the mess they helped create in 2003, but they had already ceded both in principle in East Timor four years before.

Yet if Australia’s right to interfere in another country’s affairs has agreement across the political spectrum, there also appears to be unanimity that when it does, it is not with the commitment it likes to pretend. Just as Howard doesn’t like to talk about how the US forced him to commit to East Timor, so one of the Things That Cannot Be Mentioned in Australian politics is that the country’s military commitment to Iraq was never more than minuscule and inconsequential, even when pointed out eighteen months ago by the current President-elect. Rudd’s withdrawal of troops from Iraq is as irrelevant to what is happening on the ground as Howard’s commitment was in the first place.

The Howard government’s national security posturing is made possible by the political consensus. So also are its economic credentials - at least for now. Dennis Shanahan has followed up his earlier reports of mutterings from senior Liberals about Julie Bishop’s performance as the Liberals’ economic spokesman against what is supposed to be the Rudd government’s weak link. But he might also point out that her predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull, didn’t exactly shine in the job either. In fact, if Andrew Robb’s performance on Insiders is any guide, her likely successor also doesn’t look much better. If Swan, Turnbull, Bishop and Robb are all floundering in the economic role, might there be a problem these days with the portfolio?

We may soon find out. The Howard government pretended for a decade that the budget surpluses were a result of a political strategy rather than the economic boom. It got away with it because neither side can admit that it is no longer really possible for any major political party to bring about fundamental economic reform. It has left economic debate narrowed down to nothing more than whether a government should or should not go into deficit and that suits the Liberals fine.

Based on the idea that Labor will be hamstrung if things do get worse, wise Liberal tactics would be to keep up their mantra about the deficit and blame Labor for departing from it when things go wrong. The problem is the last few days are raising a doubt that they can do this for long. The Rudd government may not have anything up its sleeve after the money runs out, but it is becoming a bit more obvious that the Liberals don’t either. Contrary to that believed by those who think nothing has changed in Australian politics over the decade, the election of a new Liberal Premier has not broken Rudd’s ‘new federalism’ but reaffirmed it. Last week’s CAOG meeting shows that the state governments have little to rely on than government hand-outs, whether Liberal or Labor. In doing so, Barnett has blown the gaffe on his federal party’s deficit ruse and probably his party’s last chance to score a point over the economy.