Extract from The Guardian
It will be a sombre old gathering of the clans over at the Liberal party
as the executive meets in Sydney on Friday to consider the cumulative
impact of the fractured period since Tony Abbott’s victory in 2013, and
the election campaign they almost lost in 2016.
Andrew Robb’s campaign postmortem documents a host of problems, and unfortunately for the Liberal party, many of the problems are much easier to identify than solve.
The Robb review will inevitably kick off a new round of positioning, hand-wringing and duck-shoving; more distraction for a government already in serious trouble, always on the back foot, and, periodically, surly in the service. The prime minister is beginning to carry the reflexive irritation of a man who feels permanently misunderstood.
The government’s travails loom so large on the political landscape, other issues are routinely crowded out. We can lose sight of the fact that challenges exist everywhere, even if they are more modest in scope and play out rather more quietly behind the scenes.
Labor has been flying at comfortable cruising altitude for much of the post-election period. The positioning, the messaging and the campaigning are hitting the right notes, and the ALP is being rewarded by positive polls.
But behind the edifice of Bill Shorten’s permanent campaign, the
party is beginning the challenging process of recalibrating key policies
for this term in opposition.
To express the emerging dynamics most simply, there are influential people in the labour movement, in the party’s left faction, and at least one prominent rightwinger, the former treasurer, Wayne Swan, who believe that Labor has to go to the next election with more muscular policy responses to inequality.
The opening phase of this debate has centred on discussion of the “Buffett rule”, which would see very high-income earners pay a minimum rate of tax. But there are more sorties to come, both inside the parliamentary party, and externally.
The ACTU, under its new leadership, has signalled a disposition to either go hard or go home. The movement thinks the base can be rallied with a battle cry about fairness – and it thinks concepts such as Buffett, are, to quote one backroom type, eminently “campaignable”, particularly against a government wedded to trickle-down economics.
The battles around Labor’s new policy agenda will carry more than a lick of old-school labourism – but also in there fighting for influence is new-fashioned, thinktank, progressivism.
On that score there’s an interesting tie-up that will play out over the next 12 months between Labor’s thinktank, the Chifley Research Centre, and the Australia Institute, which is both influential in progressive circles and politically savvy.
Chifley has been driving the inequality and inclusive growth debate within Labor since 2015, and the new hook-up with the Australia Institute broadens the issue beyond the internal dynamics of the ALP.
The two groups are running a research and discussion project considering the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Events this year will focus on specific policy issues that need to be reconfigured a decade on from the GFC.
In February next year, there will be a joint conference with high-powered international speakers focusing on the rise of populism, and that theme again – inequality.
The shadow treasurer, Chris Bowen, knows full well there are significant internal and external forces marshalling with a view to making Labor’s policy offering more assertively progressive and redistributive.
With that context in mind, he’s attempted to cut the “Buffett” incursion off at the pass. Last week, Bowen told me during a wide-ranging conversation that a Buffett rule “won’t be part of the policy we take to the next election”.
No, ifs, buts or maybes. Buffett over my dead body was the message.
The unqualified nature of the pushback surprised some colleagues, given the reality is the internal debate is a long way from over.
Bowen is viewed suspiciously in some quarters of the party for being insufficiently committed to the post-GFC inequality agenda, and being too wedded to Keating/Hawke pro-market economic centrism. Hence all the prodding.
The shadow treasurer would point out in his defence that he is the architect of two of Labor’s most progressive and redistributive policies – the current positions on negative gearing and capital gains tax.
This is entirely true, but still, some doubt his bona fides.
Bowen’s aggressive line-drawing on Buffett reflects two things. He genuinely doesn’t like it as a policy option. He thinks there are more sophisticated ways of carving up the pie, and he’s signalled both in his public interview with me, and internally, that he’s open to other propositions.
It also reflects the political reality he finds himself in.
Bowen, as shadow treasurer, will want to keep control of the economic policy debate, and shape the conversation. The alternative is to be run over by 100 flowers blooming.
To do this he needs several things: clear internal authority, Shorten solidly in his corner, and his own institutional base, the right faction, not splintering in hard-to-manage ways.
Some inside Labor think Bowen may have drawn his line in the sand on Buffett as a necessary precaution with Shorten. In internal discussions, Shorten has a tendency to be Delphic, resisting nailing his colours to the mast, leaving colleagues guessing about where he might land on any given issue.
Shorten has backed up Bowen in ruling out Buffett as an option, in public and privately – but the inequality issue has a way to run, and the Labor leader will face appeals from a number of quarters.
By going out hard, and early, Bowen has, by extension, put Shorten in the position of backing his treasurer when it comes to setting key parameters for economic policy for the coming term – or not backing him, which would be somewhat nuclear.
Bowen is diligent to the point of relentlessness, and wonkish, but in the last period of government, during the tortured Rudd/Gillard period, he wasn’t averse to dabbling in strategic power plays when necessary.
And sometimes, in politics, the only way to test the limits of your authority, is to test them.
Andrew Robb’s campaign postmortem documents a host of problems, and unfortunately for the Liberal party, many of the problems are much easier to identify than solve.
The Robb review will inevitably kick off a new round of positioning, hand-wringing and duck-shoving; more distraction for a government already in serious trouble, always on the back foot, and, periodically, surly in the service. The prime minister is beginning to carry the reflexive irritation of a man who feels permanently misunderstood.
The government’s travails loom so large on the political landscape, other issues are routinely crowded out. We can lose sight of the fact that challenges exist everywhere, even if they are more modest in scope and play out rather more quietly behind the scenes.
Labor has been flying at comfortable cruising altitude for much of the post-election period. The positioning, the messaging and the campaigning are hitting the right notes, and the ALP is being rewarded by positive polls.
To express the emerging dynamics most simply, there are influential people in the labour movement, in the party’s left faction, and at least one prominent rightwinger, the former treasurer, Wayne Swan, who believe that Labor has to go to the next election with more muscular policy responses to inequality.
The opening phase of this debate has centred on discussion of the “Buffett rule”, which would see very high-income earners pay a minimum rate of tax. But there are more sorties to come, both inside the parliamentary party, and externally.
The ACTU, under its new leadership, has signalled a disposition to either go hard or go home. The movement thinks the base can be rallied with a battle cry about fairness – and it thinks concepts such as Buffett, are, to quote one backroom type, eminently “campaignable”, particularly against a government wedded to trickle-down economics.
The battles around Labor’s new policy agenda will carry more than a lick of old-school labourism – but also in there fighting for influence is new-fashioned, thinktank, progressivism.
On that score there’s an interesting tie-up that will play out over the next 12 months between Labor’s thinktank, the Chifley Research Centre, and the Australia Institute, which is both influential in progressive circles and politically savvy.
Chifley has been driving the inequality and inclusive growth debate within Labor since 2015, and the new hook-up with the Australia Institute broadens the issue beyond the internal dynamics of the ALP.
The two groups are running a research and discussion project considering the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Events this year will focus on specific policy issues that need to be reconfigured a decade on from the GFC.
In February next year, there will be a joint conference with high-powered international speakers focusing on the rise of populism, and that theme again – inequality.
The shadow treasurer, Chris Bowen, knows full well there are significant internal and external forces marshalling with a view to making Labor’s policy offering more assertively progressive and redistributive.
With that context in mind, he’s attempted to cut the “Buffett” incursion off at the pass. Last week, Bowen told me during a wide-ranging conversation that a Buffett rule “won’t be part of the policy we take to the next election”.
No, ifs, buts or maybes. Buffett over my dead body was the message.
The unqualified nature of the pushback surprised some colleagues, given the reality is the internal debate is a long way from over.
Bowen is viewed suspiciously in some quarters of the party for being insufficiently committed to the post-GFC inequality agenda, and being too wedded to Keating/Hawke pro-market economic centrism. Hence all the prodding.
The shadow treasurer would point out in his defence that he is the architect of two of Labor’s most progressive and redistributive policies – the current positions on negative gearing and capital gains tax.
This is entirely true, but still, some doubt his bona fides.
Bowen’s aggressive line-drawing on Buffett reflects two things. He genuinely doesn’t like it as a policy option. He thinks there are more sophisticated ways of carving up the pie, and he’s signalled both in his public interview with me, and internally, that he’s open to other propositions.
It also reflects the political reality he finds himself in.
Bowen, as shadow treasurer, will want to keep control of the economic policy debate, and shape the conversation. The alternative is to be run over by 100 flowers blooming.
To do this he needs several things: clear internal authority, Shorten solidly in his corner, and his own institutional base, the right faction, not splintering in hard-to-manage ways.
Some inside Labor think Bowen may have drawn his line in the sand on Buffett as a necessary precaution with Shorten. In internal discussions, Shorten has a tendency to be Delphic, resisting nailing his colours to the mast, leaving colleagues guessing about where he might land on any given issue.
Shorten has backed up Bowen in ruling out Buffett as an option, in public and privately – but the inequality issue has a way to run, and the Labor leader will face appeals from a number of quarters.
By going out hard, and early, Bowen has, by extension, put Shorten in the position of backing his treasurer when it comes to setting key parameters for economic policy for the coming term – or not backing him, which would be somewhat nuclear.
Bowen is diligent to the point of relentlessness, and wonkish, but in the last period of government, during the tortured Rudd/Gillard period, he wasn’t averse to dabbling in strategic power plays when necessary.
And sometimes, in politics, the only way to test the limits of your authority, is to test them.
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