Australians crave change. But this election won't deliver it

Extract from The Guardian

David Marr

What lies ahead is a gruelling and expensive campaign that will leave the country much as it was before

Malcolm Turnbull on the campaign trail in Brisbane on Monday. ‘When he returned from Government House on Sunday, he delivered a campaign speech that might have been given anytime in the last past decade.’ Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian

Tuesday 10 May 2016 08.05 AEST

We’re off to the polls again. Australia has so much in abundance: coal, sunshine, iron ore and nine parliaments for 24 million people. There is always an election round the corner.

Yet for all this endless political activity, nothing much gets done.

Government should be so easy in this prosperous, orderly country. But it is remarkably hard. Parliaments are short. Leaders don’t last. Power is fragmented. This is the land of unfinished political business.

Each election campaign is much like the last. Only the faces change.

This time Malcolm Turnbull, a former barrister and Goldman Sachs banker, faces Bill Shorten, a lawyer who climbed swiftly through the ranks of a big trade union to lead the opposition.

Political cartoonists can’t resist the caricature: the hard hat v the top hat.

But when Turnbull returned from Government House on Sunday after the rituals of the dissolution of parliament, he delivered a campaign speech that might have been given anytime in the past decade.

The mantra was “jobs and growth”; the mood was upbeat; the only threats Turnbull saw on the horizon were refugees (“Australians know that we will keep our borders secure”) and the Labor party “with its higher taxing, higher spending, debt and deficit agenda”.

The banality was staggering.

We do executions better than solutions. Turnbull is Australia’s fourth prime minister in five years

He had not a word to say about global warming. Yet despite him, that will be fought over again in this campaign as it has been – unresolved – in the last three national election campaigns in this country.

How could it not be? We’ve had another summer of record heat; half the Great Barrier Reef has been severely affected by coral bleaching and we continue to belch CO2 into the air.

Australians want action. Polls year after year have shown we believe climate change is real. We know Australia isn’t doing enough. We are more uneasy than ever that it’s Australian coal destroying the atmosphere.

But the political system can’t deliver a solution.

So we head into yet another election campaign – and this the longest anyone can remember – arguing over familiar problems with little hope that the next election will be any more use than the last in solving them.

Education standards sag; life grows steadily worse in remote Indigenous communities; marriage remains beyond the reach of the LGBTI; multinational corporations operate largely untaxed; and budget deficits deepen year after year.

We do executions better than solutions. Turnbull is Australia’s fourth prime minister in five years. Australians want this leadership churn to end. They crave continuity. But victory no longer guarantees survival.

Since John Howard went to his reward in 2007 – losing even his own seat after 11 years in office – politics in the antipodes have proved volatile, brutal and repetitive.

Kevin Rudd was an opposition leader of genius. After the dull and fractious Howard years, he seemed to promise the country a more modern, more open future under Labor. Australians loved him. He lasted 30 months.

His nemesis, Julia Gillard, a politician of amazing resilience, led a mildly reformist minority Labor government until Rudd returned to tear her down a few weeks before the 2013 elections.

Tony Abbott then inflicted on Labor the worst defeat the party has suffered in generations. His Liberal National party Coalition won 90 of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives. The new government seemed set for a long and deeply conservative existence.

Abbott lasted two years.

Almost from the moment he was elected, Australia was gripped by what the pollster Andrew Catsaras calls “buyers’ remorse”. Opinion polls showed, despite the hash Labor had just made of government, that the party would be welcomed back with open arms under its new leader, Bill Shorten.

So Turnbull executed Abbott.

The new prime minister’s eight months in office have seen almost nothing done in Canberra. Even in a political system where modest achievement might seem the norm, the bare record of the Abbott/Turnbull years is embarrassing.

Turnbull can only talk about the future. He wants to harness Australia’s hopes for change. Those hopes are strong. That so little happens here is taken by many to mean Australians flinch from change. That isn’t so.

The mood of the country is more progressive than its politics.

On his return from Yarralumla on Sunday, Turnbull repeated the message he delivered the day he toppled Abbott: he is on the side of the future and unafraid of change.

“We live in a time of remarkable opportunity,” he said. “We live in an era when the scale and pace of economic change is unprecedented through all of human history. The opportunities for Australia have never been greater.

“There are many challenges. But if we embrace this future with confidence and with optimism, with self-belief and a clear plan, then we will succeed as we have never succeeded before.”

Opinion polls show Australians back equality. They want better protection for human rights and a clearer separation of church and state. Euthanasia and marriage equality enjoy the support of more than 70% of the community. Backers of a republic outnumber monarchists two to one.

Australians want a fairer tax system, a federal anti-corruption agency, better regulation of campaign funding, constitutional recognition of its Indigenous peoples and, it’s worth repeating, effective action against global warming.

Turnbull once backed nearly all these positions. He poured millions from his own fortune into the 1999 referendum on the republic. As leader of the opposition under Rudd, he staked his political future on addressing global warming.

That a man with such an outlook had become prime minister made him extraordinarily popular in his early months. Shorten looked finished. Labor was said to have no hope next time at the ballot box.

Then reality bit. Turnbull leads a big mainstream party, the Liberals, with little enthusiasm for reform which governs with a little party of farmers and miners, the Nationals, that is almost comically hostile to change.

Abbott was their man. Turnbull secured Abbott’s downfall by agreeing to continue to back most of his policies – including an expensive plebiscite on marriage equality that threatens to open faultlines between old and new Australia.

As Turnbull’s entrapment became clearer over the summer, his popularity collapsed. He remains the man the country wants as prime minister but half the electorate is dissatisfied with his performance and, as the campaign begins, support for the government and opposition is running neck and neck.

Though it is eight weeks until we gather in the kindergartens and church halls of the nation to vote – and nearly all adult Australians turn out to do their duty by democracy – key outcomes are already clear.

Australia will continue to imprison refugees in the Pacific.

The camps on Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island have seen rape, assault and murder over the past three years. Two desperate refugees have set themselves alight. One died. A Somali woman of 21 is fighting for her life in a Brisbane hospital.

Set up to block refugees from reaching Australia by boat, the camps cost a billion dollars a year. New Zealand has offered to take hundreds of these trapped people but Australia refuses to allow them to go to such a soft destination. No other country is offering to take them off our hands.

Yet the government and opposition are in lock step here. The country backs them. Only a few brave Labor MPs and the Greens speak for that minority of Australians appalled at what is being done in their country’s name.

Not even PNG ordering Australia to close its camp provoked fresh political debate in this country. The PNG supreme court had declared that holding refugees prisoner there was in breach of the right to liberty guaranteed in the country’s constitution. The refugees are still behind the wire on Manus as the two nations squabble over their fate.

Barely contested in the campaign will be the revenue-busting generosity Australia shows to its most prosperous citizens

In this campaign there is also no contest between the government and the opposition over the forest of security laws that has grown up in the past few years, provoking criticism from legal authorities on the threats they pose to media freedom and fundamental rights.

Bret Walker, a distinguished barrister and former independent national security legislation monitor, told the Press Council last week: “We have a national addiction when we see a problem for throwing a law at it, or 53 laws at it. We have more anti-terrorism laws than any other country on earth and I think I’d win a bet if I said more than every country put together.”

And barely contested in the coming campaign will be the revenue-busting generosity Australia shows to its most prosperous citizens.

Australia is not, of course, alone in this. And the damage done doesn’t match the budget carnage in Europe and the US: federal government debt is expected to peak this year at a modest 18% of GDP.

But so much has been given away for so long – particularly through the great mining boom that ran almost uninterrupted from 2003 to late 2011 – that one of the most prosperous countries on earth is left scrambling to pay its bills.

We have no death duties. That’s about $10bn forgone each year. Capital gains are taxed at half the rate of income. Family homes are exempt entirely. Last year, that one concession, according to the leftwing thinktank the Australia Institute, cost the revenue $46bn.

Income taxes are among the lowest in the OECD after huge cuts offered by Howard – and essentially matched by Rudd – in 2007. Company taxes are a little high by world standards but Turnbull is proposing to cut them by billions over the next few years.

For decades, landlords have been allowed to write off losses on their investments against general income. This negative gearing costs the revenue about $8bn a year. And superannuation – though compulsory for wage earners – is supported by massive tax breaks that will cost about $47bn next year.

This is unaffordable. We’re not broke. It’s nothing like that. But another reason politics is so hard in this prosperous country is that so much energy must be devoted, year in and year out, to addressing problems we never needed to have. We’ve given away our room to move.

In 2016 the government and opposition will bicker over the revenue, as they always do in election campaigns. But neither side of politics will approach the underlying problem here. Preserving Australia as a paradise for the prosperous is their joint enterprise.

‘Bill Shorten is a man of little magnetism but he’s a professional. He doesn’t make mistakes.’ Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian

Minor adjustments are allowed. In the budget he brought down last week, Turnbull proposed to cap superannuation concessions for the rich. Shorten has promised to rein in negative gearing if Labor is elected in July. But the few billions such measures might collect won’t come near fixing the revenue.

And Turnbull has turned on Shorten’s proposal the formulaic rage that’s been used to thwart decades of attempts to address the nation’s generosity problem. According to the prime minister, the opposition is bent on destroying the property market.

“Labor, claiming to speak for fairness, but in really speaking for nothing more than increasing taxes, stands in the way of Australians getting ahead.”

The shouting has begun.

Australians like their leader to look like a prime minister. Abbott didn’t. Turnbull does. Shorten might. He’s a man of little magnetism but he’s a professional. He doesn’t make mistakes. He’s as friendly to capitalism as a former trade union leader can be.

He has reshaped the political contest by arguing policy. That’s a novel approach in Australia. Usually, an opposition would only begin rolling out its policies now as the campaign begins. But Labor has been campaigning for a year.

Along the way, Shorten began to earn respect. The easy victory predicted for Turnbull has evaporated. The government is in trouble in Queensland and New South Wales. Pollsters don’t rule out the possibility of defeat for the Coalition.

Party loyalties are dying. More than ever, Australians will take good government from wherever it comes. The usual hyperbole is in the air about a country at the crossroads and the crucial importance of the choice to be made in July.

But it isn’t going to make or break the nation. What lies ahead is a gruelling and expensive campaign that will leave Australia much as it was before. Power may shift. Leaders may be humiliated. But neither side is offering what both know is wanted yet politics finds so difficult to deliver in this country: change.