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pathology_docDebating the Greens could chop them down to size.
The author of this article used to work for former Prime Minister John Howard, so his opinions need to be taken with an appropriately sized grain of salt. My comments, as always, in bold - and then a reversion below the line for the final discussion, to save your poor bold-blasted eyeballs. Let us begin...
Spartacus cannot believe his luck. He was just trying to save the furniture on the good ship Liberal. Now he could be prime minister and admiral of the fleet. He's had a good week and is hitting his stride.
"Spartacus" here seems to be the writer's nickname for Tony Abbott.
In politics, as in war, there's nothing like momentum. It is swinging his way. The much vaunted Labor machine is seizing up.
And has been doing so ever since Kevin Rudd became moribund. Possibly since he took on the miners in his do-or-die attempt to make a name for himself.
The Labor apparatus is a superb, slick, clever machine for delivering jobs and patronage to its supporters. Certain unions exercise disproportionate influence over its deliberations and safe seats are now rotten boroughs doled out to reward faithful apparatchiks. The branches are moribund and no longer have a genuine say in policy or candidate selection.
No better proof of this exists than the presence of Peter Garrett in Parliament. He was chosen, I suspect, to gather the youth vote (and the fans of his former band, Midnight Oil, and the supporters of his previous political affiliation, the Nuclear Disarmament Party). He was then parachuted into a safe Labor seat over the heads of the local members, who had selected and put forward one of their own, and promptly found himself having to publicly disown many of the things he'd campaigned for as part of the NDP (e.g. opposition to uranium mining) and screamed and yowled about from the stage as lead singer of Midnight Oil (who were well known as a far-left-wing protest band from the get-go).
No wonder young, energetic idealists and activists of the Left are flooding into the Greens and GetUp!
GetUp! is a non-government organisation that in my view is basically a front for the Australian Labor Party - it is certainly toxically hostile to the Opposition. As for the Greens, anyone who knows anything about them and still seeks to join is IMO either devoid of rational thought or engaged in an attempt to reform them from within. As far as I'm concerned, anyone trying to do the latter is the m-preg lovechild of Sisyphus and Don Quixote.
Labor's slick and shiny machine has no engine under the bonnet. The driver has changed but she seems stuck in neutral. In trying to move forward, she has only succeeded in going backwards. The best her mechanics can do is borrow parts from her opponents to convince punters she can drive as well.
In the meantime, central platforms she is trying to push - a refugee processing centre in East Timor that the Timorese government does not want, and an inactive processing centre in Nauru that she will not reactivate despite the encouragement of that island's government - continue to plague her. And then there is the matter of a recent series of damaging leaks whose source (or sources) cannot be identified, and which purport to cast doubt upon her commitment to her policy platform elsewhere. This includes a scathing accusation that she allegedly opposed a pensions rise because pensioners tend not to back her party.
In Sunday night's debate, Spartacus made his case against the government without being overbearing or nasty. La Gillardine was smooth as silk most of the time but could not resist a jab at her opponent's "naivety". She had the better ending with its tone of optimism and confidence in Australia's future. But Monday's Newspoll would have rocked her and encouraged Tony Abbott.
La Gillardine must now pull a big fat rabbit out of the hat. She is in real danger in NSW, Queensland and Western Australia. The state Labor parties in the former two are lead in her saddle bags and mining is a killer in the third.
NSW Labor is mired in a seething pit of fail. The last two premiers have not been chosen by the electorate, and are the direct result of the deposing of their predecessors; one Labor MP has been tried and convicted for paedophilia and drug offences involving teenage boys; another has been removed for corruption (and her seat was promptly lost in a 35% swing against her party); another lost his ministry post over an adultery scandal; another lost his post after he was caught cruising gay bars in a government car while his wife languished at home with cancer; other ministers have resigned their portfolios under the weight of their personal fail or quietly slipped away before the full horror of disasters under their reign became apparent; and so on.
Her mining tax compromise is unravelling in front of her eyes. The Greens now threaten to raise the tax further when they grab control of the Senate.
They will not control the Senate but they will probably hold the balance of power - unless they overstep the mark and reveal themselves for the unthinking, pie-in-the-sky extremists that they are. If they do this, the electorate will slaughter them as it did the Australian Democrats, the last third-way party which allowed itself to drift far left under young and inexperienced leaders. Their position on the cusp is a very bad thing, because it will mean that anything which doesn't have bipartisan support will require their co-operation (at a price) to get through.
If Abbott wins and is faced with an obstructive Senate, particularly if the Greens unmask themselves as power-hungry lunatics, he will almost certainly do what Rudd lacked the guts for - deliberately put forward unpopular legislation twice, have it rejected in the Senate, and call a double dissolution at which the Greens would be punished for their extremism. Personally I hope there are enough sane independents in the Senate for the Green vote to be made irrelevant. Two elections in a short period of time are not what the country needs, and generally not what the electorate likes.
La Gillardine is incapable of standing up to them. She failed to woo green voters back last week. Her shiny new climate change policy was thin gruel for the environmentally conscious.
And for the technologically enthusiastic, and anyone who doubts that climate change is predominantly anthropogenic, and anyone who holds that cap-and-trade = crock of shit.
The bright young thing at Labor HQ who thought up the citizens' assembly has been watching too many reruns of the Hawke telemovie.
Probably just got too many stars in their eyes, or thought a rerun of Kevin Rudd's useless and ideas-bereft 2020 Summit was in order.
La Gillardine has pleased neither the Greens nor the small miners, who have finally revolted. They were they locked out of the negotiations with the government and now face a further Green levy.
The Greens here are not "Let's force business to be sensible about the mess it makes" Greens. They are "let's put every impost on business that we can, and despise mining for its own sweet sake" Greens.
If Labor is re-elected the Greens will dictate much of the parliamentary agenda. Abbott should debate Bob Brown to put his policies in the spotlight. The Coalition cannot afford to win the election only to be frustrated daily in the Senate. Can Julia Gillard resist participating in such a debate?
Probably not. In this, I agree with Bob Brown that he should have had a place in the Leaders' Debate. He could have put his mad-as-a-hatter policies up to be smacked down and/or laughed at, and that would have been the last we would have seen of the Greens.
Oddly enough for an article which refers to them in the title, this is the last we see of the Greens.
Abbott has virtually sown up a processing centre on Nauru thanks to the meeting between his shadow ministers and Nauru's Foreign Minister in Brisbane on Tuesday. It looked like direct action, in contrast to the prospect of protracted negotiations with a reluctant East Timor. Labor has definitely lost this issue. Every day Spartacus is banging on about boats is another day lost for Labor.
Meanwhile such boats keep on coming, and Defence personnel and their families are allegedly being kicked out of their quarters so that those quarters can be made available for illegal entrants (genuine or not). This, if true, is disgraceful.
The gender gap, although diminishing, did show up in some early polls. Even Abbott raised it on Sunday night. Labor strategists seem happy to run a campaign that Abbott has a "problem" with women voters. The implication is that Abbott's views are not "mainstream". He is a throwback. That is the whole point of La Gillardine's "Moving Forward" slogan. It is a negative wrapped in a positive.
So of what does he stand accused? That he is a Catholic who will foist medieval laws on Australian women? He will abolish condoms and subsidise chastity belts? There are Christians on both sides of the house who will bridle at the implication that having religious beliefs is somehow unusual or weird. In any case, many of the matters raised sotto voce are the subject of conscience votes in the parliament.
Abbott stands loathed because he refused to authorise the abortifacient drug RU486 as a substitute for dilation and curettage, and because he questioned whether it was really appropriate for 75,000 terminations a year to be done on the public purse. He got jumped all over because he's Catholic and expressed dismay about the number of terminations that are performed every year.
I'm not fond of the procedure either, and I think it'd be far better if the unwanted pregnancies which represent a fair proportion of those terminations were prevented at the preconception or morning-after stage, but I'm not about to suggest it be banned. Neither was Tony Abbott, it seems, despite having a friendly upper and lower house in the final term of the Howard Government. He could have done it if he'd really wanted to. He didn't.
The other thing he got into trouble for more recently was for his statement (when asked) that one's virginity is the greatest gift you can give someone else, and not to give it away without careful thought. This caused the feminists here to jump all over him and accuse him of "wanting to control women's sexuality". Bullshit. He was saying that he'd advise his daughters to use discretion over who they slept with, which is something any sensible young woman would do.
People spooked by Abbott's adherence to strong social values should relax. A pragmatic Spartacus knows that he must govern for all of us. Swinging voters of both sexes will be more interested how he would make their lives better.
I think he'd love to build a hundred billion dollars' worth of power and water and transport infrastructure, as well as introducing sweeteners like paid maternity leave. Unfortunately the current government spent all that money, and IMO they spent it badly and wastefully. This leaves Abbott having to levy businesses clearing over 5 million dollars' annual profit in order to pay for the latter. God only knows how he's going to pay for the rest, but I think his first priority if he wins will have to be going through the books, seeing how bad the situation really is, and then paying off Kevin and Julia's brutal and wasteful hammering of the national credit card. 100 million a week, I think the figure is. Or is it a day? The figures make the mind reel.
He is also getting stick over the industrial relations policy formerly known as Work Choices. He is accused by some of selling out on core Liberal beliefs while Labor point to his dark intentions to reintroduce the policy. The trade unions are keen to propagate this idea as it justifies levying their members to fund pro-ALP advertising. Their dream is a re-run of the 2007 Your Rights at Work campaign.
If Gillard wanted an election on the WorkChoices issue, she should have knifed Rudd way back in early 2007 and run against Howard. Abbott has stated categorically that WorkChoices is dead. Labor and the Unions can persist with their scare campaign if they like, but eventually people will start to wake up to the fact that they're flogging a dead horse. In the meantime, changes to youth labour laws and minimum work hours mean that some teenage kids who worked an hour or two between when school finished and their small-town shops shut are now out of a job. That's right - their employers were forced to sack them, or be in breach of the law, or go on operating long after it was profitable.
It won't work this time. During the Penrith state by-election the ALP tried the same tactic. It failed dismally. While state issues were very strong, so was the toxicity of federal Labor and Kevin Rudd.
The former remains. The latter also, depending on who you think is really leaking all this stuff.
In a federal poll views about the competence or otherwise of the incumbent will prevail over tired old scare campaigns.
What Spartacus has done in effect is to rule out the abolition of the take-home pay guarantee in the Fair Work Act. This is the latest version of the no-disadvantage test that applied under the Reith industrial relations regime that preceded Work Choices. The Building Commission that has finally tamed the construction industry will stay.
The construction industry in this country was notoriously militant and corrupt - so much so that even a Labor government (which was originally formed by and for the unions) was forced to deregister one of the major unions, the Builders' Laborers Federation.
Small business will be afforded the full protection available under the Trade Practices Act. Industrial disputation is rising as economic recovery takes hold. A Liberal government would take a less permissive attitude to such activities.
For "industrial disputation", read "ambit claims for more money".
Spartacus was also copping grief for wanting to raise company tax to pay for his parental leave plan. He has now promised to cut company tax. La Gillardine was starting to mount an effective argument that the tax increase undercut the Liberal attack on Labor taxes and would push up the cost of groceries. Labor is offering a small reduction in company tax in exchange for a rise in the superannuation guarantee (and labour costs) and a net increase in mining taxation. Has the Treasurer modelled the combined pricing impact of these changes?
The implication is that he hasn't, but the Treasurer is widely regarded by those on the opposing side as not having a clue how to do his job - as opposed to the last Labor treasurer, who stood accused of knowing his job but making the wrong choices.
Finally, the Rudd factor will not go away. It is not an opposition beat-up or a figment of Laurie Oakes' imagination.
Laurie Oakes is an Australian political reporter who has been around since before I can remember. He has always been there; he always will be there. Oceania is at war with Eurasia, etc, but even Oakes is not immortal. Kevin Rudd is said to have been his house-cleaner, and former Labor leader Mark Latham thought him Oakes's man on the inside.
Nor is the question of who will occupy the important portfolios of foreign affairs, defence and finance if Labor is returned. Voters have a right to know who will occupy what and its implications for the competence and unity of a re-elected Labor government.
The first of these jobs is claimed by Rudd as his own, but his disastrous performance as Prime Minister and his tendency to overdrive his staff and play the prima donna (primo uomo?) make him a poor choice. The ministers in the second and third are resigning from the Ministry and from Parliament respectively at this election, regardless of who wins, and there are no plans as yet to replace them. This is bad - they should be standing down now or at least announcing their understudies.
Rudd made the method of his removal an issue in the electorate. At his late-night press conference Rudd vowed to fight on because he had been elected by the Australian people.
And then promptly waived his right to a leadership ballot, with Gillard replacing him unopposed.
That this line is biting in the electorate is shown by La Gillardine's junking of the formula that the government had lost its way. Labor is now pushing the loyalty card. She speaks of having to choose between the ex-prime minister and her loyalty to the Australian people. She could have added "a loyalty exercised at the direction of the factions in the light of the opinion polls".
The factions are Labor's greatest handicap. It makes them, by definition, a party divided. Right and/or Left factions in various state branches can make or break a Federal leader (the NSW Right branch is notorious in this regard), and failure to be loyal enough to yours can lead them to dump you (as Rudd found out - most of the people responsible for his removal are from the NSW Right). The Labor Party had a huge problem with communists in the 50s and 60s. Once they were gone, and the vainglorious but intellectual and broad-thinking Whitlam had done his dash, Labor was able to settle down to a decade or so of pragmatism. Then it became fatally infected with hubris.
Now it seems infected with politically correct, poll-driven, power-seeking narcissism and a tendency to select a Cabinet with all the right social credentials (women, non-whites, gays, and sometimes all three in the one package) but a complete inability to design and manage a program that isn't awash with waste, corruption, inefficiency and worse.
All in all, I have to admit this article wasn't what it seemed to promise. Its author started off talking about the Greens and couldn't resist veering off into a general discussion of Coalition vs. Labor politics. The Greens were shunted off to the sidelines (which is where I think they belong).
The author of this article used to work for former Prime Minister John Howard, so his opinions need to be taken with an appropriately sized grain of salt. My comments, as always, in bold - and then a reversion below the line for the final discussion, to save your poor bold-blasted eyeballs. Let us begin...
Spartacus cannot believe his luck. He was just trying to save the furniture on the good ship Liberal. Now he could be prime minister and admiral of the fleet. He's had a good week and is hitting his stride.
"Spartacus" here seems to be the writer's nickname for Tony Abbott.
In politics, as in war, there's nothing like momentum. It is swinging his way. The much vaunted Labor machine is seizing up.
And has been doing so ever since Kevin Rudd became moribund. Possibly since he took on the miners in his do-or-die attempt to make a name for himself.
The Labor apparatus is a superb, slick, clever machine for delivering jobs and patronage to its supporters. Certain unions exercise disproportionate influence over its deliberations and safe seats are now rotten boroughs doled out to reward faithful apparatchiks. The branches are moribund and no longer have a genuine say in policy or candidate selection.
No better proof of this exists than the presence of Peter Garrett in Parliament. He was chosen, I suspect, to gather the youth vote (and the fans of his former band, Midnight Oil, and the supporters of his previous political affiliation, the Nuclear Disarmament Party). He was then parachuted into a safe Labor seat over the heads of the local members, who had selected and put forward one of their own, and promptly found himself having to publicly disown many of the things he'd campaigned for as part of the NDP (e.g. opposition to uranium mining) and screamed and yowled about from the stage as lead singer of Midnight Oil (who were well known as a far-left-wing protest band from the get-go).
No wonder young, energetic idealists and activists of the Left are flooding into the Greens and GetUp!
GetUp! is a non-government organisation that in my view is basically a front for the Australian Labor Party - it is certainly toxically hostile to the Opposition. As for the Greens, anyone who knows anything about them and still seeks to join is IMO either devoid of rational thought or engaged in an attempt to reform them from within. As far as I'm concerned, anyone trying to do the latter is the m-preg lovechild of Sisyphus and Don Quixote.
Labor's slick and shiny machine has no engine under the bonnet. The driver has changed but she seems stuck in neutral. In trying to move forward, she has only succeeded in going backwards. The best her mechanics can do is borrow parts from her opponents to convince punters she can drive as well.
In the meantime, central platforms she is trying to push - a refugee processing centre in East Timor that the Timorese government does not want, and an inactive processing centre in Nauru that she will not reactivate despite the encouragement of that island's government - continue to plague her. And then there is the matter of a recent series of damaging leaks whose source (or sources) cannot be identified, and which purport to cast doubt upon her commitment to her policy platform elsewhere. This includes a scathing accusation that she allegedly opposed a pensions rise because pensioners tend not to back her party.
In Sunday night's debate, Spartacus made his case against the government without being overbearing or nasty. La Gillardine was smooth as silk most of the time but could not resist a jab at her opponent's "naivety". She had the better ending with its tone of optimism and confidence in Australia's future. But Monday's Newspoll would have rocked her and encouraged Tony Abbott.
La Gillardine must now pull a big fat rabbit out of the hat. She is in real danger in NSW, Queensland and Western Australia. The state Labor parties in the former two are lead in her saddle bags and mining is a killer in the third.
NSW Labor is mired in a seething pit of fail. The last two premiers have not been chosen by the electorate, and are the direct result of the deposing of their predecessors; one Labor MP has been tried and convicted for paedophilia and drug offences involving teenage boys; another has been removed for corruption (and her seat was promptly lost in a 35% swing against her party); another lost his ministry post over an adultery scandal; another lost his post after he was caught cruising gay bars in a government car while his wife languished at home with cancer; other ministers have resigned their portfolios under the weight of their personal fail or quietly slipped away before the full horror of disasters under their reign became apparent; and so on.
Her mining tax compromise is unravelling in front of her eyes. The Greens now threaten to raise the tax further when they grab control of the Senate.
They will not control the Senate but they will probably hold the balance of power - unless they overstep the mark and reveal themselves for the unthinking, pie-in-the-sky extremists that they are. If they do this, the electorate will slaughter them as it did the Australian Democrats, the last third-way party which allowed itself to drift far left under young and inexperienced leaders. Their position on the cusp is a very bad thing, because it will mean that anything which doesn't have bipartisan support will require their co-operation (at a price) to get through.
If Abbott wins and is faced with an obstructive Senate, particularly if the Greens unmask themselves as power-hungry lunatics, he will almost certainly do what Rudd lacked the guts for - deliberately put forward unpopular legislation twice, have it rejected in the Senate, and call a double dissolution at which the Greens would be punished for their extremism. Personally I hope there are enough sane independents in the Senate for the Green vote to be made irrelevant. Two elections in a short period of time are not what the country needs, and generally not what the electorate likes.
La Gillardine is incapable of standing up to them. She failed to woo green voters back last week. Her shiny new climate change policy was thin gruel for the environmentally conscious.
And for the technologically enthusiastic, and anyone who doubts that climate change is predominantly anthropogenic, and anyone who holds that cap-and-trade = crock of shit.
The bright young thing at Labor HQ who thought up the citizens' assembly has been watching too many reruns of the Hawke telemovie.
Probably just got too many stars in their eyes, or thought a rerun of Kevin Rudd's useless and ideas-bereft 2020 Summit was in order.
La Gillardine has pleased neither the Greens nor the small miners, who have finally revolted. They were they locked out of the negotiations with the government and now face a further Green levy.
The Greens here are not "Let's force business to be sensible about the mess it makes" Greens. They are "let's put every impost on business that we can, and despise mining for its own sweet sake" Greens.
If Labor is re-elected the Greens will dictate much of the parliamentary agenda. Abbott should debate Bob Brown to put his policies in the spotlight. The Coalition cannot afford to win the election only to be frustrated daily in the Senate. Can Julia Gillard resist participating in such a debate?
Probably not. In this, I agree with Bob Brown that he should have had a place in the Leaders' Debate. He could have put his mad-as-a-hatter policies up to be smacked down and/or laughed at, and that would have been the last we would have seen of the Greens.
Oddly enough for an article which refers to them in the title, this is the last we see of the Greens.
Abbott has virtually sown up a processing centre on Nauru thanks to the meeting between his shadow ministers and Nauru's Foreign Minister in Brisbane on Tuesday. It looked like direct action, in contrast to the prospect of protracted negotiations with a reluctant East Timor. Labor has definitely lost this issue. Every day Spartacus is banging on about boats is another day lost for Labor.
Meanwhile such boats keep on coming, and Defence personnel and their families are allegedly being kicked out of their quarters so that those quarters can be made available for illegal entrants (genuine or not). This, if true, is disgraceful.
The gender gap, although diminishing, did show up in some early polls. Even Abbott raised it on Sunday night. Labor strategists seem happy to run a campaign that Abbott has a "problem" with women voters. The implication is that Abbott's views are not "mainstream". He is a throwback. That is the whole point of La Gillardine's "Moving Forward" slogan. It is a negative wrapped in a positive.
So of what does he stand accused? That he is a Catholic who will foist medieval laws on Australian women? He will abolish condoms and subsidise chastity belts? There are Christians on both sides of the house who will bridle at the implication that having religious beliefs is somehow unusual or weird. In any case, many of the matters raised sotto voce are the subject of conscience votes in the parliament.
Abbott stands loathed because he refused to authorise the abortifacient drug RU486 as a substitute for dilation and curettage, and because he questioned whether it was really appropriate for 75,000 terminations a year to be done on the public purse. He got jumped all over because he's Catholic and expressed dismay about the number of terminations that are performed every year.
I'm not fond of the procedure either, and I think it'd be far better if the unwanted pregnancies which represent a fair proportion of those terminations were prevented at the preconception or morning-after stage, but I'm not about to suggest it be banned. Neither was Tony Abbott, it seems, despite having a friendly upper and lower house in the final term of the Howard Government. He could have done it if he'd really wanted to. He didn't.
The other thing he got into trouble for more recently was for his statement (when asked) that one's virginity is the greatest gift you can give someone else, and not to give it away without careful thought. This caused the feminists here to jump all over him and accuse him of "wanting to control women's sexuality". Bullshit. He was saying that he'd advise his daughters to use discretion over who they slept with, which is something any sensible young woman would do.
People spooked by Abbott's adherence to strong social values should relax. A pragmatic Spartacus knows that he must govern for all of us. Swinging voters of both sexes will be more interested how he would make their lives better.
I think he'd love to build a hundred billion dollars' worth of power and water and transport infrastructure, as well as introducing sweeteners like paid maternity leave. Unfortunately the current government spent all that money, and IMO they spent it badly and wastefully. This leaves Abbott having to levy businesses clearing over 5 million dollars' annual profit in order to pay for the latter. God only knows how he's going to pay for the rest, but I think his first priority if he wins will have to be going through the books, seeing how bad the situation really is, and then paying off Kevin and Julia's brutal and wasteful hammering of the national credit card. 100 million a week, I think the figure is. Or is it a day? The figures make the mind reel.
He is also getting stick over the industrial relations policy formerly known as Work Choices. He is accused by some of selling out on core Liberal beliefs while Labor point to his dark intentions to reintroduce the policy. The trade unions are keen to propagate this idea as it justifies levying their members to fund pro-ALP advertising. Their dream is a re-run of the 2007 Your Rights at Work campaign.
If Gillard wanted an election on the WorkChoices issue, she should have knifed Rudd way back in early 2007 and run against Howard. Abbott has stated categorically that WorkChoices is dead. Labor and the Unions can persist with their scare campaign if they like, but eventually people will start to wake up to the fact that they're flogging a dead horse. In the meantime, changes to youth labour laws and minimum work hours mean that some teenage kids who worked an hour or two between when school finished and their small-town shops shut are now out of a job. That's right - their employers were forced to sack them, or be in breach of the law, or go on operating long after it was profitable.
It won't work this time. During the Penrith state by-election the ALP tried the same tactic. It failed dismally. While state issues were very strong, so was the toxicity of federal Labor and Kevin Rudd.
The former remains. The latter also, depending on who you think is really leaking all this stuff.
In a federal poll views about the competence or otherwise of the incumbent will prevail over tired old scare campaigns.
What Spartacus has done in effect is to rule out the abolition of the take-home pay guarantee in the Fair Work Act. This is the latest version of the no-disadvantage test that applied under the Reith industrial relations regime that preceded Work Choices. The Building Commission that has finally tamed the construction industry will stay.
The construction industry in this country was notoriously militant and corrupt - so much so that even a Labor government (which was originally formed by and for the unions) was forced to deregister one of the major unions, the Builders' Laborers Federation.
Small business will be afforded the full protection available under the Trade Practices Act. Industrial disputation is rising as economic recovery takes hold. A Liberal government would take a less permissive attitude to such activities.
For "industrial disputation", read "ambit claims for more money".
Spartacus was also copping grief for wanting to raise company tax to pay for his parental leave plan. He has now promised to cut company tax. La Gillardine was starting to mount an effective argument that the tax increase undercut the Liberal attack on Labor taxes and would push up the cost of groceries. Labor is offering a small reduction in company tax in exchange for a rise in the superannuation guarantee (and labour costs) and a net increase in mining taxation. Has the Treasurer modelled the combined pricing impact of these changes?
The implication is that he hasn't, but the Treasurer is widely regarded by those on the opposing side as not having a clue how to do his job - as opposed to the last Labor treasurer, who stood accused of knowing his job but making the wrong choices.
Finally, the Rudd factor will not go away. It is not an opposition beat-up or a figment of Laurie Oakes' imagination.
Laurie Oakes is an Australian political reporter who has been around since before I can remember. He has always been there; he always will be there. Oceania is at war with Eurasia, etc, but even Oakes is not immortal. Kevin Rudd is said to have been his house-cleaner, and former Labor leader Mark Latham thought him Oakes's man on the inside.
Nor is the question of who will occupy the important portfolios of foreign affairs, defence and finance if Labor is returned. Voters have a right to know who will occupy what and its implications for the competence and unity of a re-elected Labor government.
The first of these jobs is claimed by Rudd as his own, but his disastrous performance as Prime Minister and his tendency to overdrive his staff and play the prima donna (primo uomo?) make him a poor choice. The ministers in the second and third are resigning from the Ministry and from Parliament respectively at this election, regardless of who wins, and there are no plans as yet to replace them. This is bad - they should be standing down now or at least announcing their understudies.
Rudd made the method of his removal an issue in the electorate. At his late-night press conference Rudd vowed to fight on because he had been elected by the Australian people.
And then promptly waived his right to a leadership ballot, with Gillard replacing him unopposed.
That this line is biting in the electorate is shown by La Gillardine's junking of the formula that the government had lost its way. Labor is now pushing the loyalty card. She speaks of having to choose between the ex-prime minister and her loyalty to the Australian people. She could have added "a loyalty exercised at the direction of the factions in the light of the opinion polls".
The factions are Labor's greatest handicap. It makes them, by definition, a party divided. Right and/or Left factions in various state branches can make or break a Federal leader (the NSW Right branch is notorious in this regard), and failure to be loyal enough to yours can lead them to dump you (as Rudd found out - most of the people responsible for his removal are from the NSW Right). The Labor Party had a huge problem with communists in the 50s and 60s. Once they were gone, and the vainglorious but intellectual and broad-thinking Whitlam had done his dash, Labor was able to settle down to a decade or so of pragmatism. Then it became fatally infected with hubris.
Now it seems infected with politically correct, poll-driven, power-seeking narcissism and a tendency to select a Cabinet with all the right social credentials (women, non-whites, gays, and sometimes all three in the one package) but a complete inability to design and manage a program that isn't awash with waste, corruption, inefficiency and worse.
All in all, I have to admit this article wasn't what it seemed to promise. Its author started off talking about the Greens and couldn't resist veering off into a general discussion of Coalition vs. Labor politics. The Greens were shunted off to the sidelines (which is where I think they belong).