Category Archives: Politics – Australian

Having done my civic duty off to drown my sorrows

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Another reason the Liberals are going to lose is the ballot paper for the Upper House. To vote above the line, and no doubt below although I didn’t look, the fold-out ballot paper has the liberals on the far right, and the way it was handed to me, you have to open it up even to see where the libs actually are. On the other hand, you get to the Liberal Democrats on the first page.

The worry is that the Liberals here, and possibly everywhere, are infected by people who could just as easily fit into the Labor Party. I only wish the reverse were true as in earlier days it was.

Anyway, we have done our civic duty and are now off to Carlton to drown our sorrows. My only wish is there had actually been a campaign, because if there was one, it never crossed my path.

What Abbott said and the media heard

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Having actually listened to the same speech that is being reported in the paper today, I am not entirely sure those who are doing the reporting quite cottoned on to what the Prime Minister was getting at. The AFR, for example, starts its story on Tony’s speech thus:

Business leaders have told Tony Abbott to sell his own budget, spurning the Prime Minister’s invitation to be more vocal in backing the government’s agenda.

A business association will never back a political party, or will do so only at great risk to its own future. The ALP is little more than the union agenda in a Parliamentary setting, but business and business associations have to work with everyone and in doing so stay politically neutral. Even I, in my occasional days in the media representing business, could criticise Paul Keating and live to tell the tale because, but only because, I never strayed outside our own council-determined policy position.

If I may therefore interpolate, what the PM was saying was that if business wanted to see some of those things that business would like to see – a smaller deficit, lower taxes, a more open industrial relations environment, improved trade relations, or anything else where its own agenda happens to coincide with the Government’s – then it should start pushing these issues harder. The point is not to back the government’s agenda but to back its own, and make it known that there are certain things that business wants the Senate to pass because it will make Australia a better place.

And as just one place where business might find itself assisted by the Government’s agenda, there was another story in the AFR today, No pay rises without efficiency talks, under planned law, which in the paper was titled, “Coalition moves to keep lid on strikes”. It begins:

Ways to make workplaces more efficient would have to be discussed as part of every wage negotiation under a law proposed by the Abbott government.

I promise you this. No other conceivable government in this country will be trying to get such a change made. If business doesn’t back a government which will make such changes they may find themselves dealing with a government that under no circumstances ever will. They need only support the policy but they can do it by whispering it to each other where no one can hear or can say so in public where their support might count.

Barnacle Bill

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Tony Abbott has asked nervous government MPs to maintain internal discipline in the face of the ABC funding controversy and bad polling, reassuring them he will knock “one or two barnacles off the ship” before Christmas.

Other than with the title, I’m not sure there is much of a lesson for us moderns other than that sensibilities do indeed change. This is from 1935. Anything similar is unimaginable today although I was shocked to see Olive Oyl playing the field as she does. But for all that, thinking of our leader of the opposition as Barnacle Bill does have an appeal specially when presented as a menace as he is here.

Should also mention how well the PM’s speech was yesterday. In fact, I was sitting next to a minister assisting the minister and was saying just that to him when he said why don’t you say it to Tony. And there he was passing by as he was leaving, so I said it again to him. The speech was reported in this morning’s AFR with the headline, “Abbott puts the onus on business”.

Tony Abbott on Wednesday night appealed to the business community to help the government sell its economic agenda foll­owing a decision to dump or water down key budget measures and new evidence the budget is far more vulnerable than previously thought.

The Prime Minister told the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Australian Business Leaders’ dinner last night that the success of his government depended partially on strong business backing.

“My hope is that you won’t just be interested but engaged in 2015. You matter and your voice is heard,” he said in a similar plea issued recently to the Business Council of Australia. “Reform or stagnation, budget repair or endless deficits. More tax or less. Your choices and your statements count.”

Prosperity travels through business; there is no other way. Crony capitalism is not the free market; it is a reversion to the mercantilism Adam Smith is supposed to have seen off the lot. Barnacle Bill is playing with fire. They created the mess that will sink our living standards while they pretend it has been those who are trying to repair the damage at fault.

UPDATE: The imagery is complete. Viva [many, many thanks] in the comments noted that Abbott is being portrayed as Popeye by Moir in his cartoons!

abbott as popeye

Having dinner with the PM

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barnacle bill

Along with about 400 others. But do not worry. I have my binoculars and my hearing aids are turned up to max so it should be all right.

Most interesting for me is to see what he’s going to do about Barnacle Bill, how he’s going to scrape those last few barnacles off and get on with governing. He has all the makings of a great Prime Minister but needs to get untracked. As the picture shows, he is just warming up.

The one news item that I found relevant about tonight’s dinner was the front page story in The Australian. Where I will be tonight is at the dinner of my previous employer, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. ACCI is to employers what the ACTU is to unions. It does much else but I have even presented the National Wage Case on occasion which is something of a career highlight. And the story in The Oz was, “Business raises the case for workplace change”. Goodness knows we need it.

Labor along with many others perennially confuse the need to improve the lives of working people with the need to make unions more powerful. I am no enemy of unions but it is essential that their power is contained if an economy is ever to succeed. Slush funds and such are only just the start of the problem. I wrote six reports on the failings of the current industrial relations system while Labor was in government (here’s one) and with none of the legislation as yet changed, the problems continue.

The Government has been promising a review of the IR system by the Productivity Commission, which is what today’s news story was about. It is certainly time this was called on, if not actually long overdue.

Not quite as simple as ABC

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I know too little about media policy but as I watch the manoeuvering by the ABC Board, I am reminded by something my cousin told me when I visited Canada in July. He is a sound technician with the CBC in Toronto and the Chairman had just given a speech in which he had said that of the eight priorities the CBC had, television and radio came last. Here is a story from The Globe and Mail from around that same time that seems to show a kind of parallel shift taking place in our own ABC with that in Canada. It’s a story titled, Why does the CBC compete with newspapers? Here’s what I think is relevant:

The CBC strategy calls for TV/radio to be the lowest priorities and Internet and “mobile” services to be given the highest priority and predicts that by 2020 twice as many people, 18 million per month, will use CBC digital/mobile services.

Until a year or two ago CBC was open about its ambitions to compete with daily newspapers for readers. Here are some past statements by Hubert Lacroix, president of CBC, which show that his current strategy was developed as early as 2008:

“We must be a content company. Don’t think of us…as simply a radio or television broadcaster.”

“…we are now much more a content company than a broadcaster.”

“That means offering audio, video and text content on multiple platforms… We are an integrated content company.”

Compare and contrast with this from the editorial in The Australian today:

The creation of ABC Digital Network is a reckless development, pushing the broadcaster further into the most dynamic area of the media world. Start-ups like Mamamia and Buzzfeed, the entry of Guardian Australia and others, and expansion into apps by traditional media, among other innovations, mean there is more media competition than ever. The ABC is not there to compete against and crowd out new and existing entrants in ultra-competitive areas.

I can only say to you folks in the commercial media you are being surrounded by a billion dollar octopus that will put you out to pasture if it can. A bit of self-interest by the commercial media operators would go a long way to contain what will be an overgrown ideological monster that will be very hard to contain if it is not stopped now.

And just to remind us of the stakes for the Coalition, ABC cuts: Bill Shorten vows to increase funding. There are many ways to get rid of Murdoch and a free press, but the best one of all is to compete them to death through government funding its own media organisation.

Unlike promising no carbon taxes, nobody voted for the Coalition because they promised not to touch the ABC. Circumstances change, and if this is not strangled at birth, you will live to regret this for a very long time to come.

ABC reports Julie Bishop’s criticism of Obama

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julie bishop president

From Radio Australia of all places. They must have thought criticising Obama is a bad thing:

Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop criticises US president Barack Obama for a speech in Brisbane last weekend in which he claimed climate change threatened the Great Barrier Reef. It is highly unusual for an Australian foreign minister to openly criticise a US president.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has criticised US president Barack Obama for a speech in Brisbane last weekend in which he claimed climate change threatened the Great Barrier Reef.

Speaking to 7.30 from New York, where she is attending a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, Ms Bishop said “there was an issue regarding [Mr Obama’s] statement” and she could “understand the Queensland Government’s concern”.

In a speech at University of Queensland, Mr Obama had said that: “Here, a climate that increases in temperature will mean more extreme and frequent storms, more flooding, rising seas that submerge Pacific islands … The incredible natural glory of the Great Barrier Reef is threatened.”

Ms Bishop told 7.30: “We are demonstrating world’s best practice in working with the World Heritage Committee to ensure that the Great Barrier Reef is preserved for generations to come.

“I think that President Obama might have overlooked that aspect of our commitment to conserving the Great Barrier Reef.”

I also like the picture, not from RA, projecting forward, no doubt, to the day we become a Republic.

Losing the unlosable re-election

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You know that one about “if you build a better mouse trap, the world will beat a path to your door”. The point is that no one will even notice which is where marketing comes in. Whether it is better or worse, unless it comes to the attention of others, it might as well not exist.

Both in Victoria and Federally, the Coalition has run rings around their Labor predecessors. Here in Victoria we have had three years of ultra-boring but very competent government. No dramas, no screw-ups just no-frills governance. Labor left behind its desal plant and Myki ticketing which are billions of dollars forms of waste for which no serious explanation for the expenditure has ever been forthcoming. There is nothing similar with our present government, but in about ten days they will apparently become the former government of Victoria, the first in more than sixty years to lose after only one term. And they will be losing to a socialist left Opposition leader who’s in the pockets of our most left facing unions.

Federally, the government is trying to turn around the good ship Titanic before it hits the iceberg. So many horrors left behind by Labor that it’s hard to add them up. The debt, the deficits, the boat people, the NBN and on it goes. Yet even a year later, they are in the box seat to win the next election.

Now I realise that as a mere citizen, I am not at the edge of politics. Political judgement is the major asset anyone in government must develop if they are to achieve anything beyond dogcatcher. So I have to assume that you guys are the professionals etc etc.

But here’s the thing. In the modern era – probably in every era – a government must campaign throughout its entire period in office. Labor, in the same way as Obama, never stopped campaigning even if the product was useless and only did harm. The Coalition, on the other hand, is slowly but surely putting things right across a very broad front. Yet just doing the right thing is clearly not enough. Putting your case before the public – EXPLAINING WHAT YOU ARE DOING WHILE YOU ARE DOING IT IN THE MOST FAVOURABLE WAY POSSIBLE – is a crucial part of governance. No whinging, no whining, just explaining is what is required.

Maybe you are doing it. I never watch TV, I only read a couple of papers, I get most of my news on the net so I may not be as plugged in to the max. But if you lose the unlosable re-election, whatever you may think you are achieving at the moment will be washed away in the succeeding nine years of the Shorten-Plibersek horrors what will follow. And however bad they are as an actual government, their marketing you may be sure will be supreme.

Obama knows so little about so much

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This is what you don’t get in the mainstream press in the United States:

THE Queensland government, as host of last weekend’s G20 ­summit, is incensed over what it sees as an ill-informed, insulting speech from Barack Obama about climate change, the Great Barrier Reef and coal.

The idea that there might be an ounce of honesty in what Obama says or does is one of those myths that will not die. He has only one ambition, which is to do down our way of life and wreck it as comprehensively as he can. His mentor was Saul Alinski, his closest associate was the “weatherman” Bill Ayers, and he sat in the front pew of Reverend Wright’s church for twenty years. And if that doesn’t convince you, why don’t you just look at his economic, immigration, defence and foreign policies. Is it just chance, do you think, that every single thing he has done has made matters worse?

I only wish that being insulting and ill-informed was the worst of it. It is also interesting to see the issue of climate change and energy come up in this same story.

Tony Abbott told the G20 session that the “four-fifths” of the ­developed world that had used fossil fuels for economic growth could not now deny “the other fifth” ­access to coal to generate electricity for the hundred million people who were without it.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi picked up on the theme yesterday in his speech to federal parliament, calling for new-generation energy “that does not cause our glaciers to melt”. . . .

French President Francois Hollande, the host of the Paris climate change conference next year, spoke for eight minutes exclusively on climate change. Mr Modi talked of the need for access to electricity for the world’s poor.

Meanwhile the ill-informed President of the United States brought this message with him:

Mr Obama said on Saturday that climate change “here in ­Australia” means “longer droughts, more wildfires” and “the incredible natural glory of the Great Barrier Reef is threatened”.

He knows so little about so much.

Why not shirtfront Mark Scott

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Not, of course, one of those robust run at someone at full tilt while they’re looking the other way kind of shirtfront, as they do in AFL, but merely the grab ’em by the lapels version as they do in that girl’s game they play in Sydney. [OK, OK – just kidding.] But seriously, if even Leigh Sales thinks it’s juvenile and beneath contempt, why isn’t the government starting to take the idiocies of the national broadcaster seriously. Without the ABC, the ALP wouldn’t win an election for ten years. Here’s the story:

LEIGH Sales, presenter of the ABC’s flagship current affairs program 7.30, has suggested she argued strongly against the program showing a five-minute skit that made fun of Tony Abbott’s effort to “shirt-front” Vladimir Putin over Russia’s role in the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17.

In response to tweets about The Australian’s story today in which Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull described the decision to show the skit as “baffling and disappointing”, Sales tweeted: “I can robustly make my case in editorial meetings but ultimately, I have to present what’s commissioned.”

The ABC has defended what it called a “lighthearted” skit that went to air on Tuesday night previewing “the showdown of the century” between Abbott and the Russian president over Russia’s role in backing Russian separatists who downed MH17. Thirty-eight Australians were killed in the crash.

It’s not funny, and just because it’s done by a Liberal Prime Minister doesn’t mean it is automatically wrong.

Paul Keating, my part in his success

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Paul Keating has written an article, Shining a light on the record, in which he takes credit for the economic direction during the Hawke Labor Government the direction of which, according to him, Hawke played no significant part.

In 1988 the business was dominated by the huge May statement, which included the seminal change in the tariff structure driven by me and bringing forth an August budget with a record $5.5bn surplus. While in 1989 the agenda was dominated by a bursting economy, rising interest rates, a May 2 statement with tax cuts to prevent a major wage breakout and a budget surplus of $1.9bn.

The public record — that is, the newspaper record of the major dailies covering all of those events — makes clear that I was the progenitor of the policy responses to those issues throughout the five years. I cannot for a second ­believe my three former colleagues have forgotten the magnitude of these events or how the cabinet stewardship of them was conducted.

Well, my own personal recollection, which I admit may be faulty, is that it was me that made all the difference. All Keating did was follow the ACCI pre-Budget submission which I had written. It worked like a charm until, moronically, Keating decided the economy was overheating and brought on the recession we had to have. I told him not to do it, but by then it was too late. He had decided to follow Treasury’s advice instead of mine. It was all downhill from there.