I’m writing to you with regards to your son Barrie. We here at Norbridge High School are increasingly worried about his lack of progress this year. As you are aware, he has had some discipline issues stretching back a few years now, issues that, at our last meeting, we agreed were primarily caused by some of the other children he was spending time with. In particular we felt that, while Barrie knew that many of these students were doing undesirable things, things he wouldn’t have done in the past himself, he was finding it hard to resist peer pressure, especially among such a strong minded bunch of kids. I feel it pertinent to inform you then that the leader of this group, Andrew, was recently expelled from the school, and while in the past we know that Barrie was sneaking out of school to hang out with Andrew when he was suspended, we are hoping, now Andrew will be in class at his new school during the day, that that will no longer be an issue.

The senior staff here at Norbridge High all feel that this should mark a clear opportunity for Barrie to refocus his studies and commitments to what is important at school. In particular for Barrie, we feel that he’s become confused as the point of attending school. Given how much time he likes to spend talking and hanging out with his friends, it would appear he thinks that is the sole reason for attending school, hence his frequent truancy to spend time with his friend Andrew. We feel it’s important to remind Barrie that, while it’s fun to spend time with friends both in class and on the playground, the primary point of school is to learn the knowledge and skills that are needed for life.

To give you some perspective, I draw your attention to some of the extracurricular programs we are running this year. This year the drama company is producing a play written last year by one of the graduating drama students called “Hungry Beast.” It’s a little experimental, including all kinds of video and music elements not traditionally found in plays studied in class, but from what we’ve seen it looks quite clever and entertaining. Similarly, for a number of years now, a boy called Tony has been running a lunch time debating club. We’re quite impressed with his efforts to get students to attend who we wouldn’t have picked as being interested in such a thing, even if the room gets rather rowdy and loud at times.

We like to encourage all students to strongly consider participating in these kinds of activities because, while it’s not currently mandatory for earning a school leaving certificate, these programs do add to the general life and vitality of the school environment, which then leads to better overall performance by the student body across the board. Additionally, we find students that include extracurricular options tend to, individually, be higher achievers in general.

Of course, if Barrie decided that he’s rather just focus on the classroom subjects he has selected that would be quite acceptable. There’s nothing wrong with allowing a student to focus on the necessities and really excel at them. Our primary concern at this stage is that Barrie regains his focus on what is important and is better able to judge if the kinds of friends he’s hanging out with, or if the activities and games he plays in his free time, are really in his best interests.

I look forward to hearing from you again.

Sincerely,
Bill Sullivan
Deputy Principal
Norbridge High School

Now, to echo some points by m’colleague Keane, we live in a profoundly individualist and atomised society, in which people build identity through media and markets. Everyone now realises that this creates a cultural crisis of meaning. The Right deals with that by fusing free-market individualism with conservative ideals — patriotism, etc — which free-market individualism undermines.

Labor offers a pallid version of this. Sooner or later it will have to come up with something else — a genuine program which posits new ways of putting society together to respond to human needs and desires that atomised market life cannot offer.

Guy Rundle on the Labor Party strategic review | Crikey

(behind a paywall, can be read if you sign up for a free trial)

So this has helped me to clarify where i diverge from Grundle and others on the left who use this kind of rhetoric.*

I don’t think we quite have “a cultural crisis of meaning,” i think there is a general inability to fully articulate the meaning of contemporary culture and events but that’s more an issue for ideologues (and others) who have a need to define and tie down ideas into various camps. Yes we’re going through a period of dramatic change but that change is infused with all kinds of meaning and fascination beyond people being “atomised” because of teh markets. Hindsight is pretty well a requirement for the best understanding of meaning, although we can give it a pretty good shot without it.

I also disagree with the implicit notion that we’re in a world, so devoted to individualisation and, once again, teh dreaded markets, that we are left in a mindset where there is almost no such thing as society left but people “building identity through media and markets.” Firstly I agree with a comment here that that is a bit of a straw argument made by those on the left, although one which i have some sympathy with given the rhetorical emphasis of the right. Secondly, i don’t wander around during the day, lamenting that society only values me as a consumer of products. I’m pretty sure most people don’t think like that, and those that do wouldn’t think that way all the time.

I am on the left and a significant part of why i say that is because i believe in many collective solutions to problems, e.g. Medicare. I acknowledge that the last two to three decades have seen a movement away from these kind of solutions towards more individualisation and less intervention by governments, and i acknowledge that a political climate geared in that direction makes it harder to advocate for collective solutions, but i think the general thrust of these reforms in Australia has been a net positive, even though i really can’t be sure in many respects, because of my age and experience (or lack thereof.)

Finally, i read this statement, “a genuine program which posits new ways of putting society together” and i’m left thinking that, sure, a government may look to re-arrange society in some ways, but they don’t actually have to put society together. Society does that itself. And it actually does it reasonably well by its own accord.

*Although now i have written out this response i’m also left with a lot more of questions of myself. Hmmm.

(cross posted from tumblr)

The point about multiculturalism is it emphasises what divides us more than what unites us. It was a term useful when arrivals to Australia were basically from the same culture. Multiculturalism has never encompassed what Australia actually is. Australia is basically one culture. It is a Judeo-Christian liberal democracy.

John Roskam, Exectutive Director of the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), on the7:30 report on Thursday night.

Before i really get started, this statement is self-contradictory to the point of absurdity; John claims that multiculturalism is a term that was useful at a time of mono-cultural immigration, and uses that as an argument against multiculturalism in a time of poly-cultural immigration. This makes less sense than the Chewbacca Defence.

Putting that aside, John is wrong about what Multiculturalism was and is. Multiculturalism as a term was first used in 1973 and as a policy was really kicked into gear by Malcolm Fraser’s government (1975-1983). The cliff notes to Australian immigration policy include that there was a large influx of migrants after world war two from various countries in western Europe and that there was a bipartisan consensus in the seventies, under Malcolm Fraser’s Prime Ministership, to accept higher numbers of immigrants from Asia, and in particular, refugees (including those coming by boat) from Vietnam. So at the time that multiculturalism became official policy, Australia was already accepting new arrivals from a range of cultures.

Indeed, the idea that there was ever a time “when arrivals to Australia were basically from the same culture” is highly questionable. It certainly wasn’t the case with the wave of western European migration after world war two and i’m pretty sure it wasn’t the case when there was an influx of migrants around the gold rush of the 1850s. One may even question if it was the case in the early colonial years when there were tensions between the government and rebel Irish Catholics, but the use of “basically” might get John off the hook here.

Additionally, Roskam’s proposition that “Australia is basically one culture. It is a Judeo-Christian liberal democracy” leaves me to only assume that he doesn’t actually know what culture is. It’s reasonable to make an argument that Australia’s political culture is centred on a broad principal of liberal democracy but “Judeo-Christian liberal democracy” doesn’t go anywhere near to implying, for example, what music, foods, or values are popular or common in Australia, let alone anything about the less tangible aspects of culture. Australia hasn’t contained “basically one culture” for at least tens of thousands of years.

All that said, i do agree with John’s comment at the conclusion of the piece

We should have this debate and it is good that we are talking about it, but we can’t talk about it without identifying what multiculturalism is, how it worked in the past and how it can work into the future.

This is a good idea. I would invite John Roskam to identify what culture is, what multiculturalism is, how multiculturalism was conceived as a theoretical alternative to assimilation, and how it has evolved from theory to operate in practice. Or at least get one of his research fellows to prepare a paper on the subject for him to read. Once he’s done that, and when he’s willing to base his arguments in facts instead of indulging in fantastical mythologising, i’d be happy for him to appear as the main contrasting interlocutor to Malcolm Fraser in a story about multiculturalism and immigration policy.

(Cross-posted at Groupthink)

Politics, that word has many different meanings. The one many are most familiar with relates to party politics and trying to get elected. Under that definition we get talk of Labor v Coalition, polling, and endless horse-race journalism etc etc. But ultimately, what party apparatchiks have been forgetting for so long, and what we now see the political journosphere has also forgotten, is that the point of politics, and for most the point of government, is to try and change society in some way for the better.

Clearly people have different opinions about what that means but i’m pretty sure one thing we could all agree on is that helping people in a natural disaster like the Queensland floods is priority number one for anyone involved in politics or governance. Even for the most hardened party hack, who could only see the NBN or the stimulus spending as part of a re-election strategy, even that person would surely see this kind of tragedy, this scale of tragedy, as a time when their first role in life, their first instinct, is to help others.

In that context i find it incredibly sad that people can respond to Annabel Crabb’s latest and say “oh well, she only does politics/political analysis.” How is it not the job of someone who writes about politics and government to mention more about Anna Bligh’s efforts than the half sentence fourteen words here

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has suffered this week for two reasons; first, she was compared to an extremely useful colleague (Anna Bligh, whose ability to convey public information tautly and effectively made her indispensable), and second, she was unable to come up with much by way of national reassurance beyond the usual platitudes about hearts going out and so on.

Seriously, how caught up in the false construction that is the game of Federal Politics would you have to be to talk about a disaster as something that can be “buggered up?” How can someone write this piece and not pause halfway to think, hey, maybe there’s more to life right now than who wins the next federal election.

I don’t want to appear naive, i understand that Federal Politics is a game played 24/7 blah blah blah, and that politicians probably are thinking about their electoral prospects as this is playing out, but i really can’t comprehend how someone who doesn’t have to worry about such matters could bang out a column where they think about nothing but these kind of issues. There HAS to be more to life and political culture than who’s winning elections otherwise there is literally no point in the exercise.

As it says in my bio, I am a musician. Living in Sydney, I play in four bands three of which are the kind of bands you regularly see playing in pubs and similar such venues. In years gone by it would’ve been considered normal, I guess, for someone in my position to be dreaming of getting a record contract with a respected record label and to graduate from there to rocking around the world. That’s certainly the conventional narrative. Personally, that’s about the last thing I want to get involved with.

It shouldn’t really be news to anyone to say that the business model of the recording industry is rather outdated and useless. It relied upon a whole bunch of artists desperate enough for exposure that they’d be willing or ignorant enough to saddle themselves with tens of thousands of dollars of debt to a record company in exchange for a small chance that they would be one of the bands that are successful, a relative term at best – even bands that sold many copies of their records could have large amounts owing to the record company. The model also required a distribution and marketing system that was controlled by or at least sympathetic to the record companies. This was not just record shops but radio stations and other media that would provide space for both paid and unpaid promotion of bands and artists.

The growth and mainstreaming of the internet along with the digitalisation of music has done much to undermine this business model on the distribution end, while the increasing power of personal computers and programs such as Apple’s Garageband and Pro Tools has reduced the need for musicians to submit themselves to recording companies for the privilege of making a reasonable quality recording of their songs. While it wouldn’t be true to say that record companies are dead and buried, they are under assault on a number of fronts and, as they say, desperate times call for desperate measures.

The reason I write this is that, this morning on twitter, journalist Margaret Simons posted on twitter some questions from her university students. One question asked was “are print journalists biased against social media. e.g. @grogsgamut.” Two interesting replies I saw came from Nick Hodge

“traditional” journalists are worried about how they will earn a living in a world of free. Social Media is latest vector

and Nina Field

be crazy not to feel uncomfortable abt someone offering what they do as professionals for free

While contemplating those answers it occurred to me that there are similar issues being faced by the media and the music industries as a result of changing technology and, more specifically, the internet. In both cases the access to platforms for publishing are similar for both professionals and amateurs, old business models of the large employers who formed the backbone of the industry are under serious threat and may be fatally flawed, and those in charge of those companies often seem hopelessly lost, unable to imagine a way to adapt to the changes, left resorting to protectionist urges and defensive positioning, stances that are only serving to distance them from their customers.

As a musician who doesn’t have the backing of a monolithic record label, I have no choice but to accept that people will share any music I record for free, reducing the amount I can earn from selling copies of those recordings. Also, there are a lot of pretty ordinary bands playing in pubs that are probably willing to play for little to no decent pay thus under cutting the ability of quality bands to demand more reasonable rates for our hard work. Indeed, I’m a part of the “problem” in that I and my bands will play those under paying gigs if it means we’re playing in a good venue to a decent audience.

We’ll even play at gigs like this where no one is thinking about making money but just enjoying themselves and stretching the boundaries of what people consider to be a valid music experience. That particular party had about seven or eight different stages going making it, in one sense, a bigger production than the big day out festival. To extend that further, in multicultural Australia, there are many other examples one can think of where non-professionals play music, sometimes singing and dancing and carrying on like they’re having fun, for no financial reward what so ever. To view musical expression exclusively through the prism of being a paid professional would be to severely limit the nature of cultural expression. Similarly, to view engagement in public affairs as a matter of professionals producing product to be bought by customers in a one way transaction is a limiting and dated view of public life and political engagement.

As a musician, I know I have to have a diverse range of skills and be creative (outside of musical composition) if I want to make a living in the music industry. Many people who I know who play in bands, who want to work in the industry, work as music teachers, in music shops, for staging and event production companies as roadies, instrumental techs, and in other roles requiring technical expertise. In addition to that, even though there are many musicians that work for peanuts, many people still value the kind of quality that you get from a professional musician who has studied their craft

Yes journalism is going through a series of fundamental changes, yes that is a threat to the fundamental business models and structures of years gone by, but the way forward for professional journalism lies in accepting that the world has changed, that that change will not be reversed, and that there will be valuable opportunities and roles for those that can adapt the way they work and operate.

Australians know that a deadlocked election has left the country without a government and the situation is serious.

Australia has been “without a government” for the past six weeks, why is the situation suddenly serious now? Is there some evidence that the procedures for sorting out the situation will not work this time?

But the three non-aligned MPs who will play the key role in deciding which party governs have looked about as serious as kids in a toy shop.
In the days following the election – and particularly at the National Press Club on Wednesday – Bob Katter, Tony Windsor, and Rob Oakeshott were suddenly at the centre of things and loving it.

Because they’re the only ones that would enjoy being taken seriously for the first time since they’ve entered parliament. Also, kids in toy shops, they’re actually being very serious, about having fun, which is pretty much what you do when you’re a kid. These three are serious about wielding their influence, which is what you do when you’re a member of parliament.

Every thought bubble from an independent became a headline. Whatever they said, no matter how flaky, was soberly reported – even Oakeshott’s nonsense about unity governments and Kevin Rudd possibly serving in the foreign affairs portfolio under prime minister Tony Abbott.

Once again it’s the politicians’ fault that the media has no sense of perspective.

But plenty of punters recognised it as tosh, and said so on talkback radio. You could feel respect for the so-called Three Amigos slipping away.

Because talkback radio audiences are a perfect sample of the opinion of all Australian voters.

AND by week’s end, as a result of their antics, the independents were getting the blame for the lack of progress in forming a government, even though it had nothing to do with them.
Talks could not begin in any meaningful way until the make-up of the new House of Representatives was clear. The hold-up had nothing to do with grandstanding by the independents and everything to do with the slowness of vote-counting by the Australian Electoral Commission.
But people were asking: “When will this circus end?” And it was the activities of the independents they had in mind.

Are we still talking about talkback? Did any of the presenters explain to the panicked callers that this was the reality? Or that the AEC always takes this long to finalise the last seat counts, just that no one normally notices as the result of the election is clear?
Or are we talking about people in the media doing the talking? If so, did those doing the writing and the talking provide a reasonable viewpoint or were they just fueling the News Ltd campaign, as identified by many people including Laura Tingle, to undermine any minority Labor government that may form?

Andrew Wilkie, the former intelligence analyst and Iraq War whistle-blower elected as an independent in Tasmania, and Adam Bandt, the Green who won the seat of Melbourne, have been rather more circumspect.

Wilkie has only been confirmed as a winner in the last couple of days and Adam Bandt is a representative of a party that has an existing presence in the federal parliament, that is already taken seriously as a political force. Is this a surprise?

The truth is that preparations for the horse-trading that will give us either a Labor or Coalition minority government are well under way.

So why not say that in the first paragraph rather than the tenth?

The decision by Abbott to allow Treasury to cost Coalition policies and then brief the independents on their impact on the Budget bottom line was a significant breakthrough.

Breakthrough by who? If you answered, the Labor party and independents for applying heavy political pressure on Tony Abbott, you might make a point.

It means the cross-bench group who have to make the choice that voters failed to make last Saturday will at least do so on the basis of proper information about both parties and their programs.

That it will. And since you agree it’s important for them to have this information, instead of putting any delays down to them, perhaps you could look in the direction of the person or people who have been holding back this relevant information.

Abbott’s agreement to the process also suggests that Greens leader Bob Brown and others are wrong in suggesting the Liberal leader’s aim is to force Australians back to the polls.

Abbott’s agreement, after days of looking like he’s got something to hide, after being called out on that point by the independents themselves, oh yes, that agreement. And how do you think it would look going to another poll if they were still refusing to release their costings to scrutiny? I don’t think this means what you think it means.

“Nobody wants another election,” a shadow minister said yesterday.”We’re all tired.” The parties are also broke.

Really? You need an unnamed source to tell you that, after five weeks of campaigning, some politicians are a little tired? How long have you been in this game for?

So, while Abbott has been less fawning than Gillard in preliminary dealings with the cross-benchers, he is no less keen than she is to win their support. Negotiations begin in earnest next week.
In the meantime, there are a few things worth keeping in mind.
Abbott claims the coalition should form government because it received around 500,000 more primary votes than Labor. Gillard says Labor should get the nod because it got a majority of votes after preferences.
But these arguments are simply spin for ears of the independents.

Pretty stupid spin if you ask me. I’d think the independents would be all too aware of the myriad of considerations they need to weigh up to decide who gets to have their confidence in the House of Representatives. Perhaps the questions of competence and fiscal responsibility might be a part of it?
Could it be that this is actually spin directed elsewhere, perhaps to the electorate to manage perceptions of legitimacy? Even if you don’t agree with that, is that at least a possibility?

Tasmanian Governor Peter Underwood, who had to sort out a hung Parliament situation in that state earlier in the year, wrote that “the total number of votes received by the elected members of a political party is constitutionally irrelevant to the issue of who should be commissioned to form a government”.
All that matters is “who can form a stable government”. In other words, support in the Lower House.

Again, why wasn’t this at the top of the piece?

The Coalition claims it will have 73 seats at the end of the count, ahead of Labor on 72.
But Tony Crook, the West Australian National who defeated Wilson Tuckey, is included in the Coalition total – and Crook himself has said he is “clearly an independent” and will not sit with the Coalition.
That would seem to put Crook in much the same position as Bandt from the Greens, who is supporting Labor.
In which case, Gillard and Abbott can be viewed as having a starting point of 73 seats each.
Abbott has good reason to be less lovey-dovey in dealing with Windsor, Oakeshott and Katter than Gillard has been. According to a Liberal source: “He doesn’t want to be seen by his Coalition partners crawling to three National Party rats.”
Coalition disunity, papered over when Abbott became leader, would quickly re-emerge if he were seen in any way to be kow-towing to the trio and granting them concessions the Nationals have failed to win.

Would re-emerge? It already has.

Abbott needs to ensure that any deal he does with the independents is not seen by the Nationals as contrary to their interests.

That’d be pretty hard as the independents represent, better than anything else, the irrelevance of the National party. Any deal done with a bunch of former Nationals to form government makes the current Nationals look pointless.

Abbott’s excuses for initially refusing to let Treasury cost his policies for the independents were ridiculous.

So how does this link with your earlier comment about a “significant breakthrough?”

First, he claimed that “it is very difficult for the public service to understand opposition policy with the same insight and depth that it has of government policy”.
In that case, why did the Howard government introduce a Charter of Budget Honesty that requires oppositions to submit their policies to Treasury for costing in election campaigns?
Excuse No. 2 was to claim that a leak a few months ago indicated corruption in Treasury. This from the party that, until the forged email scandal last year, had the notorious Godwin Grech as its own highly placed Treasury mole.
Gillard’s sudden enthusiasm for parliamentary reform – one of the things the independents are keen on – exposes her own hypocrisy.
During the election campaign she rejected outright proposals to improve Question Time, even though they were similar to ideas she herself had put forward when Labor was in opposition.

So, having established that both major parties are blatantly hypocritical, how does that impact on the current circumstances, where we have neither party with a majority in their own right? Do you think many of those talkback callers are clamouring for more hypocrisy?

Now comes the crunch. The leader who signs up three independents will be prime minister. The sooner the better.
Until that happens, cross-benchers in the Lower House will revel in their unaccustomed relevance – and envious Senate independents like Nick Xenophon and Steve Fielding will do their best to gatecrash the party.

Now comes another crunch; with the existing political world being turned upside down, with new entrants in the debate reveling in their unaccustomed relevance, who will meet this challenge and who will be left to gatecrash the party?

This morning i tweeted

TBH, the line “Der! Australian ppl din’t vote for a hung parliament” is like the “Der! You don’t elect a PM but a local member” line.

Someone asked me to expand this beyond 140 characters…

The “you don’t elect a PM by a local member” line is from the Labor party’s leadership spill earlier this year. The line was used as a reply to people who felt they had been denied an opportunity to vote on Kevin Rudd/Kevin Rudd’s government. Of course, by the constitution, we don’t have a system that directly elects the head of our federal government – we have a system where 150 electorates each elect a representative to the house of representatives and the prime minister is the leader of the party that can secure a majority of members of the house of representatives.

This literal translation however fails to take into account the reality of contemporary electoral politics, i.e. that many people do vote for a party because of the assumed leader(s) of that party. I’m sure many people voted Liberal or National between 1996 and 2005 because they wanted John Howard to be prime minister and in 2007 the Labor party ran a campaign that was heavily focused on Kevin Rudd as their leader and candidate for prime minister.

Similarly, it is true that no one voted for a hung parliament.* Each of us as individuals made a decision to vote for one party or candidate to be our representative in parliament. However, it is usual for people to try and interpret election results one way or another. In any kind of representative system, i would argue, at some level this is necessary – when we elect members to the HOR we expect them to make decisions on behalf of us with the proviso that we get to review their performance roughly every three years. A consequence of this is that politicians, as part of their job, need to learn to “read” their electorates.

Similarly, i think it also makes sense to interpret elections to examine the general mood of the electorate – elections can put in a context, to give them some meaning and relevance. When doing this, one must be careful not to make wild or unsubstantiated assumptions and to always be open to having assumptions and interpretations challenged.

Looking at the results of this election;

- The Labor party has lost enough seats to not have a majority
- The Liberal/National coalition haven’t gained enough seats to have a majority in their own right either
- On the raw primary votes, the third largest party, the Greens, have increased their national vote by about 3.7% to around 11.5%
- The combined Labor, Liberal, and National vote in the HOR is currently at 82.05% compared with 85.15% in 2007, 84% in 2004, 80.53 in 2001, 79.28 in 1998, and 86.01 in 1996
- Likewise the Senate votes are 2010 74.28%, 2007 80.24%, 2004 79.76%, 1998 74.99%, and 1996 80.12

Those results, combined with the polling we had seen before the election, leads me to feel it’s fair to observe that Australians were dissatisfied, on the whole, with the major parties to a greater degree than we have seen in a while. Based on that, a HOR with neither major party having a majority is probably a reasonable outcome.

Even if you disagree with my conclusion, i don’t think it’s entirely accurate to say that there is no such thing as a national mood and that each electorate only votes for a local member without consideration for how that will determine who forms government. Whatever system is used to elect a government, discussions of that system should be held in context of the overall perception of the system, not just the technical/literal aspects.

*although i guess you could argue that some people might have voted to try and achieve a hung parliament – the bottom line is that there isn’t a box to tick labelled “hung parliament.”

In the past this has often been the opposition’s best opportunity to embarrass the government – Labor senators John Faulkner and Robert Ray were considered masters of the art under the Howard government. More recently, it was estimates hearings last year that led to the utegate scandal that so undermined Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership of the opposition. I think it’s probably fair to say that the current opposition has been a bit of a disappointment for many political watchers with their lack of preparation and tendency to focus on ideological lines of attack rather than using the hearings to closely scrutinise policy.

To participate in the fun that is senate estimates you can watch or listen to the action in any of the four committees via the Australian Parliament House website’s live broadcasting page. Another great way to enjoy it is to follow the #estimates tag on twitter. There are enough nerds out there that there’s usual one or two people live tweeting what they’re watching at any one time with spikes for some of the more popular committees. The timetable of sittings and some other goodies can be at the Senate Estimates page of the APH website.

If one was to only tune in for one session, the most attention this week will probably be directed to the appearance of the head of the treasury department, Ken Henry, this Thursday morning at the special time of 7:50am. The opposition have taken to publically attacking and questioning the treasury and Ken Henry personally with rather intense sessions last year when the government’s stimulus package was before the economics committee. Indeed Joe Hockey last week indicated that, should the Liberal party win the next election, Henry’s contract would be unlikely to be renewed despite him serving in his current role under the previous Liberal government.

Seriously, as i write this the video of Abbott on the 7:30 report has been up for at least 16 hours and the best Labor can do is having static images on a black background being voiced over from someone literally phoning it it?

Sure, there won’t be many people watching this clip, but given how often minute specks of “news” get blown up these days, i’d have thought that Labor would be better off putting in a bit more effort than this. Even if this clip gets mentioned in a positive way for Labor, how much better would the message be sold if it at least had a voiceover done into a regular microphone?

The contradiction that Kerry highlighted was between Tony’s statement in February that “We will fund our promises without new taxes and without increased taxes” and when he launched his parental leave scheme, saying it would be funded by a new tax. Bernard Keane, speaking on ABC Tasmania this morning (audio may crop up here sometime), offered a possible answer to the question, basically saying that Abbott could’ve explained that we can’t have everything all the time and that the tax would be a temporary levy. I also think, when caught in a bind like that, a politician can also explain that circumstances have changed and so therefore their policies have changed to suit.

Neither of these options are very palatable for the Liberals however as their mantra against the ETS and Labor in general was one against a “great big new tax on everything.” By setting themselves so hard against new or increased taxation they essentially cornered themselves, leaving very little flexibility for the funding of future policy proposals. This was especially the case as they’ve also being arguing so hard against debt and deficit.

The real issue here isn’t “ZOMG, a politician lied” but that Abbott and the Liberal party had boxed themselves into a rhetorical corner. This is a problem that many politicians make for themselves and i believe it’s largely as a result of an instinct associated with managing stories in the media than as expressions of policy ideas or philosophy. As much as the Liberal party has been using the “debt and deficit” and “great big new tax” lines, i’m certain, and this episode only convinces me more, that the Liberals are really only opposed to these things when they’re labor’s ideas.

One thing anyone who’s not a politician should take out of this is that we’re asking for trouble when we insist politicians rule too many things in or out. We should work to encourage a political culture that respects the fact that circumstances can and will change (e.g. Kevin Rudd saying the “reckless spending must stop” in the 2007 election campaign but then along comes the GFC) and that really bad outcomes can come about when otherwise sensible policy options have been ruled out for short term political gains.