Extract from The Guardian
Perhaps
it was just an opening gambit, a shouty curtain-raiser to get
everyone’s attention. But by reworking Joe Hockey’s “lifters and
leaners” lines in defence of the same old budget cuts Scott Morrison looks like he’s starting the 45th parliament oblivious to the lessons of the 44th.
It sets up the same old, same old – the government blaming the opposition parties and the Senate crossbench if the cuts are blocked again, or the blindly complacent voters who just won’t face up to the need for “tough choices” on the economy. Or it might be the media’s fault, or all due to the Business Council of Australia not cheering sufficiently loudly.
Malcolm Turnbull, by contrast, is asking the new parliament to meet him in the “sensible centre”, which is exactly what voters want it to do, but until those words are put into practice it’s hard to know what they mean.
And the treasurer’s economic speech suggests the government is still missing a big part of what went wrong in the last parliament, and in the unexpectedly close election. That it’s not just their opponents fault, it’s their own.
By picking up where Joe Hockey left off, tweaking the script to replace “lifters and leaners” with the “taxed and taxed nots”, Morrison is ignoring the fact that we’ve been through this umpteen times since the 2014 budget and gotten pretty much nowhere, and that it’s his job to find a way around that.
Here’s a shorter version of what has passed for Australia’s economic “debate” in recent times, just to recap:
1. Government explains that we need to reduce the budget deficit. Which, of course, we do.
2. Government calls their own solution “reform”, because that suggests it is unquestionably worthy and good, and then insists this is, in fact, the only possible solution to the problem.
3. Government ignores alternative ideas to solve the same problem and berates opposition parties for “sabotaging” the budget and jeopardising the future if they don’t support the government’s proposed spending cuts.
4. Government chastises the voting public for enjoying now unaffordable benefits and for failing to comprehend the problem and for not backing the government’s policies to fix it.
5. Policies don’t pass the Senate. Nothing happens.
6. Repeat.
We’ve been around this same circuit so many times no-one is listening any more. We all know some of the savings about to be presented have been rejected by the electorate as inequitable and will almost certainly continue to be. We all know there are alternatives and compromises to be had, with broad support, if this was really just about finding solutions. Business and civil society have already had summits to pave the way. Think tanks have written reports. We’ve been talking about it for years.
There’s every sign the voting public is prepared to consider alternatives and would almost certainly reward a government that tried to tackle budget “repair” in a cooperative or bipartisan way. There was no great voter backlash against the winding back of negative gearing proposed by Labor, for example, despite the Coalition’s best efforts, nor a groundswell of opposition against reduced superannuation tax breaks. That was more a problem in the Liberal’s own branches.
There was certainly plenty of self-serving political tactics in Bill Shorten’s National Press Club offer of a superannuation compromise last week, but as Liberal backbencher Russell Broadbent was brave enough to say to my colleague Katharine Murphy, there were also a lot of good reasons for the Coalition to consider it. Morrison, battling internal dissent on the issue, ruled it out immediately, preferring the simplistic rhetorical binary of spending cuts versus higher taxes, to the possibility of an outcome.
So the policy debate continues to do donuts. Lots of screeching about looming trillion dollar deficits. Lots of blowing smoke. Little progress. And budget repair isn’t the only policy going around in circles.
Again it’s possibly pre-positioning, or expectations management, but the new environment minister Josh Frydenberg’s first pronouncement in his new portfolio was that there would be no substantive changes to Direct Action. Once again, we’ve been through this so very many times before. Without substantive changes the policy cannot meet Australia’s promised emission reduction targets. Insisting that it can, over and over, does not change this fact. Not even if you change the minister. Labor’s 2016 election policy held out the prospect of a bipartisan compromise, based on the Direct Action model. It’s just unclear whether there can be a sufficiently long cease fire in the climate wars for the government to take it.
Similarly the terrible dilemma posed by offshore detention of asylum seekers requires the government and the opposition to be slightly flexible with solutions.
These political stand-offs are major practical problems in themselves, but they also have a broader impact on the system as voters tune out of “debates” that have no obvious conclusion. Who can blame them?
There’s been much written about the low primary votes for both major parties in 2016 and the fact that nearly a quarter of the electorate opted for minor parties or independents – the populist offerings of some of those parties, the economic anxieties in parts of the electorate.
Even before the election a survey by the the Museum of Australian Democracy and the institute for governance and policy analysis at the University of Canberra showed levels of trust in government and politicians were at their lowest levels since 1993 and that 74% of the electorate thought people in government would look after their own political interests, rather than do the right thing.
Perhaps the election result was also a simple reaction to the inability of the parliament to get things done, to enunciate a problem and then make the compromises necessary to get on and fix it. To do its job. To find the “sensible centre” instead of just talking about it. Reciting the same economic arguments with slightly reworked catchphrases will probably mean the policies hit the same walls as last time. That would only exacerbate the disillusionment spiral.
It sets up the same old, same old – the government blaming the opposition parties and the Senate crossbench if the cuts are blocked again, or the blindly complacent voters who just won’t face up to the need for “tough choices” on the economy. Or it might be the media’s fault, or all due to the Business Council of Australia not cheering sufficiently loudly.
Malcolm Turnbull, by contrast, is asking the new parliament to meet him in the “sensible centre”, which is exactly what voters want it to do, but until those words are put into practice it’s hard to know what they mean.
And the treasurer’s economic speech suggests the government is still missing a big part of what went wrong in the last parliament, and in the unexpectedly close election. That it’s not just their opponents fault, it’s their own.
By picking up where Joe Hockey left off, tweaking the script to replace “lifters and leaners” with the “taxed and taxed nots”, Morrison is ignoring the fact that we’ve been through this umpteen times since the 2014 budget and gotten pretty much nowhere, and that it’s his job to find a way around that.
Here’s a shorter version of what has passed for Australia’s economic “debate” in recent times, just to recap:
1. Government explains that we need to reduce the budget deficit. Which, of course, we do.
2. Government calls their own solution “reform”, because that suggests it is unquestionably worthy and good, and then insists this is, in fact, the only possible solution to the problem.
3. Government ignores alternative ideas to solve the same problem and berates opposition parties for “sabotaging” the budget and jeopardising the future if they don’t support the government’s proposed spending cuts.
4. Government chastises the voting public for enjoying now unaffordable benefits and for failing to comprehend the problem and for not backing the government’s policies to fix it.
5. Policies don’t pass the Senate. Nothing happens.
6. Repeat.
We’ve been around this same circuit so many times no-one is listening any more. We all know some of the savings about to be presented have been rejected by the electorate as inequitable and will almost certainly continue to be. We all know there are alternatives and compromises to be had, with broad support, if this was really just about finding solutions. Business and civil society have already had summits to pave the way. Think tanks have written reports. We’ve been talking about it for years.
There’s every sign the voting public is prepared to consider alternatives and would almost certainly reward a government that tried to tackle budget “repair” in a cooperative or bipartisan way. There was no great voter backlash against the winding back of negative gearing proposed by Labor, for example, despite the Coalition’s best efforts, nor a groundswell of opposition against reduced superannuation tax breaks. That was more a problem in the Liberal’s own branches.
There was certainly plenty of self-serving political tactics in Bill Shorten’s National Press Club offer of a superannuation compromise last week, but as Liberal backbencher Russell Broadbent was brave enough to say to my colleague Katharine Murphy, there were also a lot of good reasons for the Coalition to consider it. Morrison, battling internal dissent on the issue, ruled it out immediately, preferring the simplistic rhetorical binary of spending cuts versus higher taxes, to the possibility of an outcome.
So the policy debate continues to do donuts. Lots of screeching about looming trillion dollar deficits. Lots of blowing smoke. Little progress. And budget repair isn’t the only policy going around in circles.
Again it’s possibly pre-positioning, or expectations management, but the new environment minister Josh Frydenberg’s first pronouncement in his new portfolio was that there would be no substantive changes to Direct Action. Once again, we’ve been through this so very many times before. Without substantive changes the policy cannot meet Australia’s promised emission reduction targets. Insisting that it can, over and over, does not change this fact. Not even if you change the minister. Labor’s 2016 election policy held out the prospect of a bipartisan compromise, based on the Direct Action model. It’s just unclear whether there can be a sufficiently long cease fire in the climate wars for the government to take it.
Similarly the terrible dilemma posed by offshore detention of asylum seekers requires the government and the opposition to be slightly flexible with solutions.
These political stand-offs are major practical problems in themselves, but they also have a broader impact on the system as voters tune out of “debates” that have no obvious conclusion. Who can blame them?
There’s been much written about the low primary votes for both major parties in 2016 and the fact that nearly a quarter of the electorate opted for minor parties or independents – the populist offerings of some of those parties, the economic anxieties in parts of the electorate.
Even before the election a survey by the the Museum of Australian Democracy and the institute for governance and policy analysis at the University of Canberra showed levels of trust in government and politicians were at their lowest levels since 1993 and that 74% of the electorate thought people in government would look after their own political interests, rather than do the right thing.
Perhaps the election result was also a simple reaction to the inability of the parliament to get things done, to enunciate a problem and then make the compromises necessary to get on and fix it. To do its job. To find the “sensible centre” instead of just talking about it. Reciting the same economic arguments with slightly reworked catchphrases will probably mean the policies hit the same walls as last time. That would only exacerbate the disillusionment spiral.
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