EDITORIAL : THE AUSTRALIAN, AUSTRALIA

A postmodernist parliament

IF that was the new paradigm, we must now have entered the postmodern paradigm.
After an unproductive 10 months relying on the support of independents and a Greens MP to form government in the lower house, Labor now faces a Senate where the Greens have the balance of power in their own right. With a postmodern disrespect for the notion of objective truth, parliament has become an unpredictable body where each party deals only in its own perceived version of reality when it comes to weighty issues such as promises, responsibilities and mandates. We jest, in part, but the ability of our politicians to deal seriously with these new arrangements is yet to be seen. Discussing the new "green power", Greens leader Bob Brown has shown hints of a smugness he will need to keep in check. Now is the time for Senator Brown to ensure his party exercises power in the national interest. We have argued that many Greens policies would not be in the national interest and that therefore voters should ensure they are "destroyed at the ballot box". Now judgment time is arriving. The party that took an all-or-nothing approach and deliberately rejected earlier efforts to put a price on carbon now has a chance to compromise on Julia Gillard's carbon tax plan. The Greens can also support Labor's revised mining tax instead of demanding it is raised to a debilitating level. They could put an end to their dalliance with xenophobic fearmongering about the foreign investment upon which our nation's prosperity relies, and drop the jejune anti-American and anti-Israeli sloganism of their foreign policy pronouncements. They could even support some strong budget measures, taxation reform and sensible labour market deregulation to help put our economy on a surer footing. These would all be steps towards proving what Senator Brown refers to as "the hate media" wrong. The Greens leader has revealed in his interview with Dennis Shanahan that he understands the limitations of a balance-of-power party and has grander ambitions. Because of its irresponsible policies, it follows that the mainstream will not come to the Greens -- their best way forward is to exercise their power wisely and move to the mainstream. So far, the indications are they'll pass up that chance and, as Labor is wont to do, abandon the mainstream to Tony Abbott.




An unreal performance from a PM under pressure


WHAT was Julia Gillard thinking when she tried to tell us on Thursday that her carbon tax is not a tax?
As an exercise in how not to govern, the Prime Minister's effort to rename her contentious plan was hard to beat. Her double backflip -- by yesterday she had re-embraced the original nomenclature -- risks damaging her credibility. It has been a bad week for Labor in a bad year. Ms Gillard appears calm, although her tax snafu suggests she may be rattled by polling showing Labor with a 30 per cent primary vote.
The Prime Minister has sometimes shown poor judgment in these matters: her "real Julia" promise during last year's election has dogged her since. Like her carbon comment, it insulted voters, implying they could not tell the difference between authenticity and Alice in Wonderland. Ms Gillard has forgotten the pledge she made last October to step back from the 24-hour news cycle and engage more deeply on issues. Spin is the norm, with no one in Labor apparently able to counsel a more considered and consistent approach.
Such a reactive approach to governing shows an administration unable to pause and assess the consequences of its proposals. High on the list of ideas that could have done with more forethought are the East Timor detention centre and the Malaysian solution. Labor appears to have learnt little from the Rudd years when no one in the "Gang of Four" -- which included Ms Gillard -- seemed to apply the brakes to their then leader. The present Prime Minister is also in desperate need of more experienced advisers. Last month's ban on the export of live cattle to Indonesia highlighted the weaknesses in Labor's modus operandi. That the Foreign Minister was effectively out of the loop when the ban was decided demonstrates the dysfunctional relationship between Kevin Rudd and Ms Gillard. The suspension of exports has caused friction with Indonesia and revealed a lack of diplomatic understanding. While it had little option but to take action of some sort after the images of animal cruelty seen in the ABC TV Four Corners report, the government finds itself in damage-control after reacting to a Twitter and email campaign. This week, the Prime Minister tramped around the Northern Territory, dispensing money apologetically to the cattle industry. Labor's "team Australia" approach to the trade issue is as unconvincing as "real Julia" and her non-carbon tax. A co-ordinated and integrated approach would have been useful when Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig stopped the trade. Now, any talk of teamwork simply draws attention to Labor's lack of it.
Just as in the East Timor and Malaysia exercises, it is hard to believe the Prime Minister thought she could blithely re-label the carbon tax without voters noticing the gap between reality and rhetoric. Earlier this year, Ms Gillard dismissed as "semantics" the idea that she broke an election-eve promise ruling out a carbon tax. Not so. Then, as now, the debate is about more than words. In the age of new media, some in Labor confuse the medium with the message. They imagine a message of 140 characters or less will be enough to convince voters of Labor's policies. It's time for them to stop tweeting and get back to governing.




Lifting the quality of debate

ROSS Garnaut, the Gillard government's former climate change adviser, is entitled to his view that News Limited newspapers, including this one, have fallen short in reporting such a complex, controversial issue.
With due respect to the good professor, we beg to disagree. If, however, the charge is that we have published views at odds with Professor Garnaut's, we proudly plead guilty since good public policy relies on covering all aspects of the debate and keeping the circle of discussion as wide as possible.
Ironically, Professor Garnaut was speaking at the two-day Economic and Social Outlook conference in Melbourne, a high-level economic and social policy forum sponsored by The Australian and the Melbourne Institute. Professor Garnaut lamented that the media's reporting of climate change was inferior to the coverage of the major economic reforms of the 1980s. But unlike the broad consensus back then, the climate change debate involves a greater divergence of political, business and academic opinion, so the coverage reflects this.
The Melbourne conference produced high-calibre discussion about Australia's major challenges, including climate change and the need for a productivity agenda. One of the most significant contributions was the blunt presentation by Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson, who showed that living standards would deteriorate without a new wave of economic reforms. Dr Parkinson's warning that the mining boom had masked a decade-long slide in productivity and that the benefits flowing from the rise of China and India would not fall our way automatically stood in contrast to Wayne Swan's idle boast about "the magnitude of our reform agenda" which, he claimed erroneously, was one of the "toughest" in a generation. Rather than showing that he shared Dr Parkinson's concerns about managing a fall in our terms of trade over the next 15 years, the Treasurer preferred to play politics, claiming that sections of the media evaluated government policies on the basis of "what's bad for the Australian Labor Party."
Two days' debate of a quality rarely heard in our parliaments showed the need for workplace and other economic reform and the importance of a more mature national conversation drawing on a wider range of expertise beyond the political class. Good debate, however, is hampered when major players show their glass jaws.