Those who think the government has an economic policy will struggle to find one in this Budget. Indeed anyone who thinks there was an economic problem to apply it to will have trouble finding that too. Despite all the talk of the ‘cancer’ of inflation, Swan’s expectation that inflation will fall back to 3% next year is even more benign than the RBA which expects it to happen a year later. Read more »
There are a couple of features of Troy Buswell's farcical tribulations that highlight the state of decay of both major parties, but especially the Liberals. Read more »
There is starting to be some fairly tortured analysis doing the rounds in the press in the run up to next Tuesday’s Budget. The basic argument seems to be the same: Swan faces some tough decisions in the Budget and will have to do some careful juggling if he is to balance the highly complex demands of Australia’s current economic position. Read more »
The problem with the republic debate was that there used to be two debates rolled into one. On the one hand there was the debate we always heard about, the one within the political class and their supporters over the best way for them to be represented here and overseas. While they would no doubt like to stand on their own two feet, they have had too little authority to do so and so have had to cling to a Monarchy on the other side of the world. Read more »
I will also be taking a proposal along to the Summit for discussion.
K Rudd at the Sydney Institute 16 April
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In nearly all the commentary of Swan’s rocky start in Parliament, the blame is being put on his nerves and lack of training, etc. No-one seems to think it comes from a problem with what he is saying. They should. It is not just that he keeps going on about an inflation crisis that doesn’t exist. His solutions for it don’t make much sense either. Read more »
Rudd's talk of an independent Australian diplomacy may have excited Australian foreign policy experts, whose jobs presumably rely on there being such a thing, but as he tours the globe, Australian foreign policy continues to look as though it will be doing what it has always done for the last 60 years, follows the US's as closely as possible. Rudd can present it as a new way only because US foreign policy itself is undergoing change as it tries to recover what it lost through the Bush presidency. Read more »
The National Party is dying. Some would say commentators have been saying that for years – but those commentators would be right. This has been a long time coming but the unceasing decline in the Nationals' federal representation during the Howard years has made it impossible to avoid.
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While the government probably has not caused the latest collapse in consumer confidence, it certainly has not helped. In the last week, there has been a notable shift in the economic debate. Worries about the first crisis, inflation, are starting to give ways to worries about the second crisis, an economic slowdown. Read more »
They know not what they did. It seems this blogger under-estimated Howard’s eagerness to speak out after getting thrown out - he clearly needs the money. He has followed his heroine Thatcher on the lucrative US speaking circuit for foreign conservative leaders. Read more »
There seems to be a very confused reaction developing to Rudd’s 2020 Summit in Canberra. On one hand it is being constantly described as nothing more than a ‘talkfest’ (despite Rudd’s insistence that it isn’t), on the other hand some people are getting awfully worried who will be in it. Read more »
Wow. This guy moves fast. Rudd’s announcement that 1,000 of the ‘best and brightest’ will come together in Parliament House to discuss and set out concrete proposals for key areas of national policy comes just two months after the nation may have been under the impression it sent 150 men and women to the same building to do exactly the same thing. Read more »
The very amiability of senior Liberals on Monday’s Four Corners indicates the mess they are in. No one had any particular axe to grind or any agenda to pursue. Nor did anyone have any strongly held reason as to why they lost, which suggests no-one has any strongly held idea how they can win. Costello pouted over the call offering him the top job that never came, and so denying the Liberals their chance of salvation. But nobody else seemed to believe it did. Read more »
If there is an iron law of Australian politics, it is that the fate of the political class and the indigenous issue are intimately intertwined. Whether it was colonisation, the White Australia Policy or the modernising period of the last forty years (and Howard’s attack on it over the last decade), indigenous affairs has been the fulcrum around which the political class reorganises itself. Read more »
The inflation crisis is starting to get out of control. Not the inflation (which is only 3.6% for chrissake!), but the political management of it. Read more »
Any doubts that apologising for the stolen generation, nearly forty years after the practice was considered unacceptable and stopped, is more about the political class’s self-image than indigenous people, must surely have been laid to rest by the row over Rudd’s vow to set a date for saying sorry. Read more »
BARRIE CASSIDY: Paul, good morning. Budgets these days, are they essentially housekeeping or are they more than that? Read more »
If there is one iron law of internal Labor politics it is that if you need to take it to Conference to win an argument, you have already lost it. That union leaders have needed to rely on delegates to embarrass Iemma over his privatisation plans shows less their resurgence than that they have already lost control over the party leadership. Read more »
It would seem on the surface that the Liberal leadership has descended into fantasy with talk that the politically astute former Treasurer could be a serious contender only six months after having turned it down when offered it on a plate. Read more »
What we are looking for from this Summit are new directions for our nation’s future. And if we succeed, what we are looking for is also new insights into how we can govern Australia, a new way of governing our nation. Because the old way of governing has long been creaking and groaning. Often a triumph of the short term over the long term. Often a triumph of the trivial over the substantial. Often a triumph of the partisan over the positive. Read more »
Nature might abhor a vacuum but that doesn't mean she can necessarily fill it, and Nelson is living proof. Rumours that Nelson could be replaced are not coming to the surface because the alternatives are any more credible than they were five months ago when he was elected, but as a gut reaction to the political bankruptcy that Nelson has helped to bring to the open since then.
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Maybe the Chinese were too polite to ask, but they may have wondered why the high-powered delegation to a meeting in Beijing that would form the centre of Australia's foreign policy did not include the Foreign Minister but did have the Minister for Climate Change.
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What on earth is Rudd on about with his 'middle power' diplomacy? Australia may be ranking 14th or whatever, but international diplomacy is not the City to Bay Fun Run. No-one cares how far down you are in the ranking, you are either in the leading pack or not, and Australia is not.
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Given it was written by a political reporter who has spent so long cheering the ALP, Alan Ramsay's latest article shows a remarkable naivety of how that party works and, indeed, of politics in general. Read more »
The media are now proposing that Rudd’s honeymoon with the electorate could come to an end when the next Budget is being handed down. Does this sound familiar? Read more »
Rudd’s main achievement in his first 100 days was nicely summed up when Piers Ackerman got caught out on Insiders on Sunday. Dismissing Rudd’s actions like ending the Pacific Solution and the apology as meaningless, he was reminded that he didn’t seem to think so when they were issues under Howard. Read more »
Every minority needs a symbolic gesture in Parliament and the Liberals seem determined to get theirs. Their plan to block Labor’s abolition of AWAs has little practical significance of course. Even Julie Bishop on Lateline the other night admitted that after a decade of Howard trying to flog them, they were still only 8% of employment contracts (higher than some other estimates). Read more »
They do things differently in NSW. In the genteel southern states we had nice clean financial collapses to trigger a change of state Labor from the business/union partnerships of the 1970s and 1980s (politely known as ‘modern’ Labor) to the technocratic organisations of today. The first, and arguably most successful, of these ‘modern’ Labor parties, is now undergoing a similar process, but in a much more messy way. Read more »
To get a feel for how the political landscape has changed since Rudd’s apology speech, you only have to compare his confident performance on Thursday’s Lateline with that on The 7.30 Report a week earlier. Read more »
Given the state of the media on this day, it is unlikely that when Messrs Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating arrive at Parliament House today they will be asked why, in the quarter of a century that spanned their governments, they did not get around to making the apology they have come to watch and support. It is a shame, as it is a good question. Read more »
The Liberals have been getting into an intriguing mess over the government’s plan to make an apology for the Stolen Generation. And what a mess it is. Find two senior Liberals and you have two different positions. Read more »
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