Extract from ABC News
Analysis
The prime minister posted a picture on social media this week of his cabinet meeting in Parliament House.
"Starting the week with my team in Canberra," Anthony Albanese's Instagram caption read.
It seems a long time since we have actually seen a picture of the cabinet — or for that matter, any cabinet — all present and at work in the same room, let alone the Cabinet Room in Parliament House.
Government, for the past couple of decades, has become such a transitory business. Cabinet ministers as often as not work out of their home towns.
These days, Canberra is a place you only come to when parliament is sitting.
Since the time of John Howard, prime ministers have been stuck in a world of permanent campaigning, which means they are forever on the road to locations around Australia to meet and greet potential voters.
There is an annual political complaint-fest about prime ministerial travel overseas during what is known as summit season.
But it is the constant domestic travel — and geographic separation of the government as an entity — which is arguably a much bigger concen, not because of cost but simply because people don't get to sit down in the same place and consider things in any sort of unpressured way.
As often as not it is the capacity to have broader, casual conversations rather than necessarily just ones about whatever is on a formal meeting agenda, that are important.
It feels very olden days to remember when quite a lot of ministers actually spent a lot of time working, or even living, in Canberra.
Things have not been very pretty post-referendum
The change has knock-on effects, too. Ministerial staff and offices were once firmly based in Canberra. Apart from anything else, that increased the likelihood of senior staff — and their policy experience — being seconded from the Canberra-based public service.
Posting the photo seemed to suggest the PM's social media team knew they needed to get it out there that the government "team" was hard at work.
This week marked 18 months since the last election — technically the halfway point for the parliamentary term even if the next election date is never set in concrete.
Things have not been very pretty for the government post-referendum.
Most recently has been the apparently chaotic response to the High Court's decision on indefinite detention. After the repeated rollovers to the Coalition on a legislative response to the decision last week, the government was confronted with an immediate High Court challenge to the legislation, even before the court had published its reasons for the original decision.
The government might hope that both sides of politics are seen as the authors of a legislative response which was under challenge so quickly, but things rarely pan out that way: governments always get blamed.
But the government is dealing with an economic situation it doesn't really control: the main day-to-day to narrative about how government policy in the broad is affecting individual voters is being driven by decisions of the Reserve Bank.
The situation in the Middle East — highly fraught in its own right — has also been both weaponised in domestic politics and required political leaders to tread a delicate path through the sensitivities of many of Australia's communities.
One way or another, the result has been a growing sense that the government is not in control of events.
A clutter of crises
There have been big stories undermining confidence in institutions of all sorts which are not of the government's making — but which have had to be responded to — like the Optus crash.
When you are halfway through your first term, there tends to be a build-up of reforms, reports, changes that you commissioned early on in government coming home to roost, at a time when people have moved on a bit and can't remember what the issue was about in the first place.
The results of these reviews are being launched into a political landscape cluttered with the current crises of the day.
A shambles of announcements have recently be made either to remind voters about what the government is doing about the cost of living, or just because it is getting towards the end of the year and things need to be released.
The impression left, though, is of a government throwing out lots of chaff, as they say in the military. That is, small clouds of metal countermeasures designed to confuse incoming guided missiles.
It's unfortunate because some of these reports are important and worthwhile subjects for serious discussion.
This week alone we've seen reports on overhauling secrecy laws, and cybersecurity. There have been new plans for e-safety, the odd breakthrough on the government's omnibus industrial relations legislation, and a Productivity Commission blueprint for reforming the childcare and early education sectors.
Possibly most significant has been the release of the government's plans to massively expand its underwriting of green generation and storage: plans that require the sign-off of the states, who were meeting with Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen on Friday in Perth to discuss it.
The exhaustion with energy and climate change politics — no matter how vital they might be to the electorate — seems to have meant the significance of the government's proposals, and the shift they represent, haven't really been understood outside the energy and climate change nerd belt.
A significant breakthrough
The important thing to know is that the underwriting tender for new energy being proposed does offer the prospect of overcoming a market failure — for want of a better term — where investors in new generating capacity don't want to invest until they are confident other forms of investment (like coal and gas) are coming to the end of their life.
Labor's new route to net zeroThe underwriting gives investors the confidence to know they will be covered if prices crash because of extra supply coming online. The design of the scheme also gets around an intractable problem of different states having conflicting views on the ongoing role of coal and gas in the energy transition.
Of course, plenty of problems remain in the design of our energy market. But the proposal seems to be the most significant breakthrough — at least in expediting clean energy capacity — that we have seen for some time, and at a time when it has been floundering.
Next week will be the last full sitting week for the House of Representatives for the year. There will be even more reports added to the pile as parliamentary committees hand in their work: everything from electoral reform and transparency to the delivery of job services.
Whether any of them get much oxygen in the turmoil of a political landscape that seems to be dominated by populism, let alone an electorate that doesn't seem to be listening, is anyone's guess.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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