Analysis
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Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton only managed to get three words into a substantive interview on Insiders last weekend before he started talking about the Opposition.
The
question was about who had leaked classified documents from his
portfolio. But his answer was all about how Anthony Albanese was only
asking questions about the leak because he was trying to distract
everyone from Labor's problems.This would have to rate somewhere between "marvellous" and "magnificent" on the irony-o-meter, since the only thing anyone in the Government seems to want to talk about at the moment, particularly this week, is the Opposition.
You know? The mob that actually lost the election, not the mob who won it and who are supposed to be springing into action with plans to lead the country forward.
The main topics this week have been the Government's planned tax cuts, the imminent collapse (according to Mr Dutton) of Australia's migration regime as a result of a Federal Court decision about the legislation on medical evacuations from Nauru and Manus Island, and the ongoing battle over the future in the Labor Party and the trade union movement of union official John Setka.
The political mechanics of this are worth noting: on both tax cuts and medevac, the Government's strategy is to try to ramp up the political pressure on Labor — rather than the crossbench — on the issues it wants to press when Parliament returns.
This is despite the fact the crossbench has now become much easier for it to deal with: the Government's done better in the Senate than expected and only needs four out of six crossbench votes for any particular piece of legislation.
This is hardly impossible given two of those votes are One Nation and one is Cory Bernardi (in whatever guise he takes after his just-announced deregistration of his political party).
But if you are a government elected unexpectedly and with no real agenda, it seems your only real option is to try to define yourself by what your opposition does or doesn't do.
You've got to hope — perhaps rashly — that these habits of politicking are just a hangover from the election campaign and the Coalition's internal difficulties before this, and that it will knuckle down to the task of actually running the joint at some point soon.
New hands tackle wicked problems
It is not necessarily well equipped to do this. The desperate straits the Coalition was in before the election, and the widespread expectation that it would lose, meant the Government lost a lot of experienced staff before the campaign and a lot of inexperienced staff got promoted into positions they might not otherwise have.Equally, we are still yet to see whether the re-elected Government can really do what Prime Minister Scott Morrison says and focus on issues that matter to voters, not invest time in conducting ideological fatwas that are of little interest to voters.
It really needs to able to shake off these staffing and ideological impediments if it is going go deal with what confronts it.
Sure, there are the obvious issues like energy policy and meeting its commitment to surplus in a floundering economy.
But there are also the bigger issues that have been left exposed by the federal election.
One of them is housing. The election result has revealed how much both the politics and economics of the housing market have changed in recent decades.
In the days when governments set interest rates — and for decades after they deregulated those rates — interest rates generally were primarily discussed in politics in terms of what they meant for home owners, and particularly for first home buyers.
It was a tired cliche which ran too long. For example, retirees relying on fixed interest incomes certainly didn't think lower interest rates were better.
Even a sustained period of historic low interest rates seems to have had difficulty cutting through this mindset in much of the media's coverage of interest rates.
Negative gearing now political poison
Yet think about how Labor set up its case for changes to negative gearing of established properties as an intergenerational equity issue, designed to help young people into the housing market. And think about the election result and its interpretation.Whatever the realities of why people voted for the Government, Labor or, significantly, the minor parties who determined the final result, the outcome has been seen as a rejection of Labor's negative gearing and franking credit policies.
That has broader implications than the obvious one that no-one is going to have another go at negative gearing in the short term, or that it will represent a significant drag on government coffers as a result.
The political message that comes out of that reading of the result is that the negative gearers — investors — are now at least as important in the politics of housing as first home buyers, and that they will need continuing appeasement.
That's not just depressing if you are a young person wondering whether you can ever afford a home, but has massive implications for the future role of housing in our economy.
As a nation of home buyers, we have always been seen as over-investors in housing. The confirmation of the holy writ political status of the negative gearer only increases that trend.Economists have lamented the focus on housing investment by Australians — rather than more productive investments — for decades and various shifts in policy have been designed with the hope of easing it: changes to capital gains tax and the introduction of compulsory superannuation being two of them.
But instead, we have gone the other way and doubled up.
That is not just a pity for investment, but a real constraint on the efficacy of economic policy levers.
We have so much debt tied up in housing that changes in interest rates don't necessarily work the way they once did.
Are our politicians up to fixing this?
The options for trying to stimulate the economy are equally challenged.Reserve Bank Governor Phil Lowe reflected earlier this year on some of the dynamics in the housing market, observing that when the market was rising, "the rigidities on the supply side, coupled with investors' desire to benefit from a rising market in a low-interest-rate environment, amplified the price increases".
Which leaves the question of whether price decreases are also amplified.
He also noted housing prices affect consumer spending, directly and via the so-called "wealth effect", by affecting small business's access to loans through the impact house prices have on collateral.
The dilemma for governments now is that Australia's love affair with housing gives us a very unbalanced national portfolio of investments and a whole lot of equity issues.
Dealing with that though, if you can't find a way of incorporating it into an attack on your political foes, may well be beyond the scope of our politicians.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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