Chris Berg – Page 66

Moving forward mantra Gillard’s biggest mistake

In retrospect, Julia Gillard’s big mistake wasn’t calling the election so quickly, or negotiating with the miners, or even announcing the climate assembly.

It was using the phrase “moving forward” 20 times at her election announcement.

The sense that Gillard is stage-managed and unreal has lasted almost through to polling day. You can tell the Labor Party is still concerned about it, and the Coalition is convinced Gillard’s public image makes Tony Abbott look very good.

It accounts for – although does not really explain – Labor’s bizarre decision to pretend Gillard’s campaign launch speech was off-the-cuff. That backfired when the press cunningly took a photograph of her typed speech on the lectern.

Off-the-cuff-Gate is completely inconsequential. But the fact that, as late in the campaign as the campaign launch, the ALP thought it had to deceive for Gillard to be seen as passionate shows just how damaging this initial impression was.

After all, it had been a good two weeks since ‘real Julia’ took over.

If Abbott initially struggled because the Liberal Party had spent the last twelve months preparing to defeat Kevin Rudd, Gillard suffered because it appeared ALP strategy consisted of the phrase “moving forward” underlined twice on the back of an envelope.

Perhaps as a consequence, the Labor policies announced in the first few weeks were gimmicky and easily ridiculed. Not just the climate assembly – an insult to the national intelligence, even considering the carnival atmosphere of the global warming debate – but also the $2,000 trade-in payment for gas-guzzling cars, which comes with its own derogatory nickname, cash-for-clunkers.

That’s not to say there haven’t been strong ideas from the Labor side.

Gillard’s education proposals are easily the biggest and most substantial of the campaign. It helps that they’re actually good too. Performance pay for teachers, devolving greater budget and hiring powers to principals, bonus funding for schools showing the greatest improvement – these are policies which push us closer to a dynamic and competitive education system. And, dare I say, a bit of a “market” one as well.

You get the impression Gillard is genuinely energised by education policy.

That, and WorkChoices was bad.

For a short time last year the causes and consequences of the Global Financial Crisis sparked a passionate ideological debate in Australia. But the sparring between Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd over the role of the government in the economy is a distant memory.

Abbott and Gillard were barely participants in the debate over the stimulus.

The two current leaders’ views about government aren’t that different. On many issues they converge. Abbott is a big government conservative. Gillard is a market-leaning social democrat.

The attempts during this campaign to revive the stimulus debate have seemed hollow. Abbott, for his part, is much more comfortable talking about pink batts and school halls than Keynesian fiscal policy.

And Gillard has struggled to fully adopt Kevin Rudd’s policies as her own. Moving forward provides little opportunity to look back. Not only the stimulus: we’ve heard very little about Labor’s expansive health reform plan.

One notable side issue of this campaign has been gay marriage.

Neither major party has altered its position at all, of course. But the consistency with which gay marriage has been pushed at the candidates at every stop shows it is now a mainstream question.

Both Gillard and Abbott have had to fall back on reminding listeners that their governments have made substantial progress removing lots of other discriminatory policies against gay people and gay couples. They’re right, but marriage has gained almost totemic status in this campaign.

It’s hard not to see Election 2010 as a turning point. The case against same-sex marriage is looking weaker and weaker, and opposition to it looking more like stubbornness than principle. International experience suggests that gay marriage can be legalised without complete social and moral disintegration – after all, doing so makes it legal, not mandatory.

Gay marriage is unlikely to swing many votes. But Julia Gillard’s atheism makes her hostility to altering the Marriage Act look somewhat insincere – a bit too politician-like, a bit too focus-grouped.

For better or worse, that’s not a charge you could level at Tony Abbott.

Abbott is a self-described weather vane, sure. But when he changes his mind on policy, even for purely political reasons, he’s the first to tell you about it. Abbott has always treated his political career as an opportunity to share his feelings and grow. It’s very odd. But it’s disarming.

All year, the Liberals had been planning to depict Kevin Rudd as a poser who was more interested in polls than effective governing. Abbott was to be the opposite: the more-real-than-real candidate.

Who’d have thought that plan would work just as well against Julia Gillard?

NBN: Crippling government regulation to blame

At the Labor Party launch on Monday, Julia Gillard made the National Broadband Network central to her pitch for reelection.

And if you were introduced to the broadband debate this year, you’d be forgiven for thinking there wasn’t really an alternative to the government’s plan.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy described the opposition’s broadband plan as a “failure of imagination”. The fact that this seems like a powerful critique shows how stilted the debate over broadband has become – apparently the problem with the Coalition’s broadband proposal is it doesn’t soar with the eagles.

But think back: just a few years ago Telstra was begging the government for permission to build its own super-fast broadband network. At no cost to taxpayers. Completely free of government subsidy. If the previous government or the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission had allowed it, there’s a good chance the private sector could have been building the broadband network already.

After Tony Abbott’s performance on the 7:30 Report last week, you bet he regrets the previous government didn’t take broadband policy off the political table.

There was a stickler of course. Telstra was asking for a regulatory holiday – that is, to exempt its new fibre investment, for a time, from the requirement to share it with its competitors. Failing that Telstra wanted the ACCC to nominate the price that the company would be compelled to share its new network, before they built it. After all, telecommunications networks cost a lot of money. The ACCC sets the price competitors pay to access Telstra’s network, and Telstra wanted some assurance it would be able to charge a price sufficient to recoup its investment.

The ACCC refused to do so. The Howard government wouldn’t make any legislative changes. Telstra ramped up its rhetoric, attacking both the government and the ACCC chairman, Graeme Samuel.

Into this bitter quagmire stepped the Labor Party and Kevin Rudd’s open chequebook.

NBN boosters like to say there is a “market failure” in telecommunications. But the government’s regulatory framework is the problem. It’s not the marketplace which has failed to deliver broadband. Government failure has.

The NBN plan tries to sidestep the regulatory failure, by having the government assume responsibility for telecommunications investment now and into the future. That’s exactly what Telstra’s privatisation, way back in the 1990s, was supposed to leave to the market.

So Australia is still struggling to break away from a century of nationalised communications. And doing so will mean making peace with an independent Telstra.

There is widespread anti-Telstra sentiment – not only from the Labor Party, but also from rural Liberals and the National Party, who imagine the high cost of providing telecommunications services in the bush is just thinly disguised anti-country bigotry.

On the other hand, many Liberals are understandably reluctant to be brutal to Telstra because the Howard government encouraged everybody to dump their life savings in Telstra shares.

The Labor Party has taken to presenting broadband as if it is simply a giant present from government to its people, and anybody who objects to the NBN must hate the internet. And the opposition, afraid of looking too close to Telstra, is trying to ape Labor’s approach without completely surrendering its debt and deficits attack on the government.

At least it’ll be cheaper, I guess.

Here the absence of a cost benefit analysis for the National Broadband Network is telling. Does anyone doubt the government wouldn’t like such an analysis (if it was flattering) to help defend their policy? Or NBNCo? Or the many firms which will get some of the huge amount of money the government is about to dump into the telecommunications sector?

As the tech publisher Grahame Lynch said in The Australian last week, it is “astonishing that not one … has mustered the modest resources required to prepare a credible cost-benefit analysis that attempts to measure the claimed externalities for the NBN in areas such as telecommuting, e-learning and telemedicine that are bandied about ad nauseam.”

It seems certain at the very least Treasury would have made some effort to look at the costs of the NBN relative to its benefits.

If it truly hasn’t happened – if Treasury really haven’t bothered to investigate whether this investment is worth the money – then the government is extraordinary negligent. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, and say they’re not, and the results just haven’t been released.

So the absence of the cost benefit analysis in the public sphere is a very strong hint the government’s broadband spend doesn’t really have much of an intellectual case. Julia Gillard and Stephen Conroy can talk all they want about how broadband will boost e-health, productivity, education, and things we haven’t imagined yet.

But if only the government had dealt with its crippling telecommunications regulations, the market could have been boosting all that already.

Budget honesty charter corrupted

IT’S that time in the election campaign when it disintegrates into arguments about which party has been most careless ensuring their budget numbers add up.

The Charter of Budget Honesty, introduced by the Howard government, allows the opposition to give Treasury its election promises to check the policy costs are correct. If they don’t, the government clobbers them for avoiding scrutiny.

But this week Treasury analysis of the opposition’s promises was leaked to the press by someone in Treasury or Wayne Swan’s office. Swan has played down the leak’s importance. The Treasurer claims he just wants the opposition to submit its policies for his bureaucrats to dissect. That’s because he knows this part of the charter overwhelmingly favours incumbent governments.

The government has had three years to consult with Treasury’s nearly 1000 staff about future policies, test policy assumptions, and get Treasury’s recommendations. Much government policy is formulated by Treasury in the first place.

By comparison, an opposition is just a few people in a room thinking up ideas.

As Ross Gittins wrote in 2004, when it was Peter Costello savaging the Labor opposition over its policy arithmetic: ”The government is largely feeding back to the bureaucrats their own costings, whereas the opposition runs a high risk of slipping up somehow and being monstered by the Treasurer.”

From government, Labor is playing the same game against the Coalition that, for a decade, the Coalition played against Labor.

Swan knows it well. In 2007, he too waited to the last minute to submit his policies.

But this isn’t just about policy costing. The integrity of Treasury is in question.

Secretary of the Treasury Ken Henry masterminded the government’s controversial response to the financial crisis. Treasury’s role formulating the stimulus package has been highly political. It even had to release a statement admitting a graph in the 2010-11 budget, which the government claimed showed the success of the stimulus, was misleading.

The Coalition has accused Henry of partisanship for years. In May, Joe Hockey refused to say whether Henry would keep his job under the Coalition. Henry and his subordinates are political players now. Their fortunes are coupled to the fortunes of the Labor government. Shadow finance minister Andrew Robb said Treasury was compromised by a ”political agenda”.

The leak seems to confirm this. Sure, the opposition’s figures would have been released eventually (that’s the point), but it’s likely someone in Treasury is openly batting for Labor.

It’s concrete evidence of the corruption of the charter.

Hockey should commit to sacking Henry if he wins government, and leave Coalition policies to be scrutinised by the press and public.

Without the incumbent’s resources, opposition is hard enough. The Charter of Budget Honesty is a trap, cynically laid by the Howard government and now being embraced by the Gillard team. Hockey is right to refuse to walk further into it.

Telling it like it is

Who knows, perhaps deposing your leader, saying your government had lost its way, then rushing to an election, wasn’t the great idea it seemed at the time?

All the criticism of the campaign and the media during the campaign – justified and unjustified – has its origin in this bizarre plan.

So don’t blame the press. Blame the ALP soap-opera they are covering.

This weekend saw an intensification of the criticism of the media that has been a constant feature of this campaign. A Julia Gillard press conference on Saturday, where she offered $4,000 training entitlements for older workers – to compete with Tony Abbott’s employment subsidies offered earlier in the week – and new regulation on reverse mortgages.

None of the press’s questions after were about the policy. Only one was about any policy at all.

But could the Prime Minister really have expected anything less?

Gillard had just returned from a meeting with the man she deposed a few short weeks ago. All that was provided to the media was brief footage of the two awkwardly pointing at a map. It would be a fair guess that more things were discussed between the two than the topographical features of the Australian coastline.

And, to add to the carnival atmosphere, Mark Latham was skulking around in the back of the press conference, exclusively for 60 Minutes.

The Labor Party seems determined to eat itself. It’s sucked all the air out of its campaign from the first day.

Latham has clearly imagined himself to be a journalist for some time, regularly divulging conversations which he had with the current Labor team in his pieces – obviously without their consent. Mark Latham’s columns in The Australian Financial Review are witty and entertaining, but are rarely little more than bomb-throwing.

The campaign opened with a spat between Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. Blanche D’Alpuget couldn’t have timed her new book better.

The contrast with former Liberal leaders couldn’t be stronger.

John Hewson pops up on Gruen Nation comfortable in his role as the kindly old uncle with an amusing backstory for the rest of the panel to tell jokes about. Apart from a few sly and embarrassed jokes at Tony Abbott’s expense, it’s hard to see how Hewson could ever be portrayed as undermining the opposition leader’s cause.

Malcolm Fraser has that weird, peculiarly Tory sense of honour – try your best not to talk about religion, politics, or the fact that you no longer vote for the party which you led to victory three times.

It took nearly six months for Fraser to reveal he had left the Liberal Party late last year. When asked on ABC radio last week why he believed that the Coalition was not ready to govern, instead of explaining, Fraser told the interviewer to read his book. Gruff, sure, but not damaging.

And Malcolm Turnbull has managed an extraordinary balancing act during this campaign. He’s simultaneously not a threat to Tony Abbott and supportive of his election, while being open and comfortable with the fact that he a) opposes one of Abbott’s major policy planks and b) has all the intentions in the world to be the future leader of the Liberal Party.

Turnbull is even campaigning with candidates around the country – he’s a full blown leader in exile – but hasn’t yet impacted Abbott’s election strategy one bit.

It would be quite funny if 60 Minutes sponsored Brendan Nelson or Peter Costello to follow Tony Abbott around the campaign trail hurling abuse. But that isn’t going to happen.

Doing so is a peculiarly Labor thing, evidentially.

Here’s a further clue that the vacuousness of the campaign isn’t the fault of the press: not even the standard campaign gotchas are getting much traction. There’s no laughing about how some candidate doesn’t know the price of milk. Or that a senior candidate can’t explain the “Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment” in a concise sentence. Or that some policy hasn’t been costed perfectly.

In less dysfunctional times, these are the sorts of flufferies that distract from the bigger picture.

It’s not that this campaign lacks the material: there’s much silly policy error this year. The government’s cash for clunkers program assumed, for some unfathomable reason, that the program would be undersubscribed. Of the 200,000 maximum buy-outs the program was to allow, the government assumed that only 180,000 would actually occur. This assumption seems to have been premised on the belief that Australians don’t like free money.

And it leaves cash for clunkers badly undercosted.

Similarly, there are serious questions about Abbott’s spending and savings commitments.

But the destructive personal relationships between Labor’s celebrities won’t even give enough space for either party to seriously pursue these sorts of failures.

Labor’s factional kings seem to think that eliminating a piece from the political chessboard means eliminating them from the political arena. Clearly, they’re wrong about that.

A rule of thumb in Australian politics is that every former leader, Labor or Liberal, eventually gets a weekly column, or a regular commenting gig.

But Labor’s internal culture means that when they do, they are so bitter and angry they are a major liability.

Greens find growing up is hard to do

It’s pretty certain the Greens will hold the balance of power in the Senate.

But the prime position the Greens are about to hold in our democracy will be a big change for the party. It’s going to be a very steep learning curve. The Greens are still a niche party, with niche party idiosyncrasies.

They’re about more than climate change and fast trains. Niche parties are easily captured by interests within their membership that insist their peculiar obsessions get aired and adopted.

So the Greens are the only party with an ”animals” policy. With 24 points, it includes things like a plan to ”foster community education about the needs of animals and our responsibilities to them”. Not even the Nationals have an animals policy, and you’d think they know a little more about animals than the Greens do.

Nevertheless, the Greens’ policy approaches have matured a lot from even a few years ago. Take information technology. In 2004, they were calling for ”democratic, egalitarian operation” of the internet – as if a citizens’ assembly should determine the internet’s architecture – but in 2010 they merely want the government to renationalise telecommunications.

They’ve been burnt in the past. The Greens are now quick to argue they don’t support drug legalisation. But the case for drug legalisation is a lot more sensible than the case for, say, putting a tax on global currency transactions, or abandoning free trade agreements, or forcing corporate boards to be more ”diverse”, or reducing foreign investment in Australia.

It’s always going to be messy when a party with a lot of members with radical views tries to refine itself for mainstream consumption.

Many commentators have said that with the balance of power, the Greens could fall into the Democrats’ trap – haggling over legislative process undermines niche party brands. But that has already happened.

The Greens’ brand was seriously devalued when its parliamentarians voted against emissions trading. We have heard their reasoning: the government’s plan was ineffective. Of course it was. Any Australian plan would be ineffective without global action.

Yet there is no question that the emissions trading scheme, if implemented, would have evolved. Subsidies to polluters could have been phased out over time and emissions reduction targets could have increased.

Now the Greens are, quite rightly, blamed for blocking any climate change action. Sceptics like Barnaby Joyce couldn’t have been more effective than the Greens.

A speech for Tony Abbott

Kevin Rudd had happier times.

The former prime minister used to have great fun claiming that the Coalition was a crazed group of neo-liberal ideologues who would love nothing more than to ban the union movement, destroy the social safety net, and build leaky nuclear power plants in Western Sydney.

Rudd argued the Coalition, and 400 years of liberal and conservative thinkers, have sought to undermine the great institutions of community and society.

He said that “neo-liberals” idolised a world where individuals are self-sufficient and shorn of any personal connection to each other – at least outside the shopping centre. He called this a “Brutopia”.

But eventually Rudd dropped that overbearing rhetoric, just like he dropped so many of his other policy brainwaves.

Who knows? Maybe he realised he got it all wrong.

Peter Costello once said that he wanted to see Australia be everything it could possibly be.

I too have a vision of a diverse, pluralistic, Australia.

And I believe only the principled liberal conservatism of the Coalition – rather than the make-it-up-as-they-go technocracy of the Rudd/Gillard Labor Government – can deliver that.

The great conservative thinker Edmund Burke spoke of society being formed out of “little platoons” – families, clubs, sporting associations, non-profit organisations, political parties. And – yes – even churches.

These institutions build the trust necessary for a healthy, plural society.

Without a thriving non-government sector and community organisations, we will not be able to adapt to the changes of the future – the cultural and social changes brought about by technology and the global marketplace.

In the last few decades, political scientists have been calling this social capital. It’s the value that is created by our interactions in voluntary organisations – from the family to the sporting club to the church. Political scientists been pointing out that this social capital has been disappearing rapidly the Western world. We no longer join bowling clubs. Our sporting clubs are in decline. Our political parties are no longer representative – not enough Australians want to join them.

Social capital theory is a popular area of scholarship right now.

But liberals and conservatives have understood the idea behind social capital for centuries.

Kevin Rudd was wrong. We’re not becoming a less cohesive, less familiar, less networked, more individualistic society because of “neo-liberalism”.

We’re becoming a less cohesive, familiar and networked society because of ever-growing government.

The Coalition recognises that big government isn’t just bad because of debt and deficits.

Red tape, bureaucracy, and the nanny state are eroding away the institutions of civil society that have made Australia great.

Across Australia we have amateur sporting clubs which are dying because bureaucrats have told them they can’t serve spectators beer.

Volunteers with the Red Cross can’t help make lunches for volunteer firefighters, because they might breach the rigid and extensive food handling codes imposed by governments.

Jam can’t be sold at fetes without labels detailing every ingredient. Lemonade can no longer be sold by children on the side of the road.

Street parties are so over-regulated that they have virtually disappeared.

And no wonder. To host a street party you have to go through a mass of bureaucratic hoops. There is paperwork to be filled out, emergency plans to be coordinated, supervisors to be nominated, acoustic engineers to be hired to monitor the decibels of stereo systems, and qualified electrical engineers needed to plug the stereo in.

The Australian government needs to take a good hard look at itself.

That’s what a Coalition government will do.

There’s too much acceptance that every problem should be fixed by a new law or a new regulation. But those laws are stifling the development of the Australian community.

They’re preventing social capital from building. They’re forcing the little platoons to disband.

The Coalition will challenge this trend.

And, of course, we’ll act.

One of the first tasks of an Abbott government will be to commit to removing as many of these unnecessary, harmful and counterproductive laws and regulations which have built up over the last century. And we will work with state and local governments to help them do the same.

More than that, we reject the paternalism of the nanny state. We reject the plethora of health bureaucrats and activists who seek to limit individual choices, and erode individual responsibility.

A Coalition government will respect your right to individual choice.

I don’t believe Commonwealth bureaucrats know what’s best for you – the Coalition doesn’t believe how many slices of cake you eat is anybody’s business, but your own. We don’t want government bureaucrats leaning over you as you decide how many chips to eat with your fried barramundi.

I understand this is a controversial view.

We live in a world where trusting people to make decisions themselves about their own health, their own lifestyle, is controversial. Even radical.

Politicians of previous generations faced great challenges. They had to figure out how to jettison 100 years of protectionism. They had to figure out how to open their markets to the world – even as an army of special interests opposed it. They had to privatise and deregulate.

But our challenges are different to the challenges faced by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Bob Hawke and John Howard.

The government no longer owns the great state owned enterprises of yesterday. Nor does it want to.

But instead it tries to manage them – to regulate, to manage, and to oversee every aspect of the economy and community.

We have to get the boot of government off the neck of society. We have to allow individuals to make decisions about their own lives free of government interference.

We have to get government out of the way. A Coalition government will let Australia’s little platoons flourish.

The dichotomy of Wikileaks

Does Julian Assange understand the significance of what he is doing? Perhaps not.

The Australian editor in chief of Wikileaks has published some extraordinary material in the past, but the release of the Afghan war logs is a big deal. The 91,000 classified documents – only 75,000 have been publically uploaded so far – cover six years of the War in Afghanistan.

The meaning of it all isn’t yet clear.

At Slate, Fred Kaplan has written “Just because some documents are classified doesn’t mean that they’re news or even necessarily interesting.” But if nothing else the documents provide a portrait of a war which hasn’t been going well. There may not be any smoking guns of conspiracy here. But there is a lot of murkiness.

This isn’t the way Assange sees it. On Thursday’s Lateline, Assange said the documents revealed “negligence that’s on a massive scale”. He told Der Spiegel the material “shines light on the everyday brutality and squalor of [the Afghan] war”. It will “change public opinion”.

With Wikileaks Assange is trying to pursue two missions at once. And they clash.

The first mission is to provide a repository of data and documents. Wikileaks is where whistle-blowers can dump raw material – everything interesting and uninteresting.

But Assange is obviously trying to match that with political activism. In this case, activism against the war in Afghanistan.

He’s welcome to walk and chew gum if he can. But the editorialising necessary for his activism undermines Wikileaks’ integrity, and ultimately weakens the site’s power.

Nothing illustrates the perils of this two sided approach as well as the Baghdad air strike footage. Released in April, three months before the Afghan War Logs, the footage depicts a 2007 American attack against insurgents and what appears to be unarmed individuals, including two journalists.

Wikileaks released two versions of the footage.

The original, unedited version was 39 minutes long. The other version was an 18 minute highlight reel. Opening with a George Orwell quote – “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind” – the film, titled “Collateral Murder”, broadcast Assange’s opinion proudly. (The video’s provisional title, “Permission to Engage”, was discarded.) The audio was edited carefully to avoid viewers making an emotional bond with the American soldiers.

As they say: don’t telegraph your punches. Let the material speak for itself.

Instead, by editing it he made the video into a political football. Supporters of the war were able to dismiss the leaked video as nothing more than anti-war hype – they focused on what was edited out, not what was left in.

Wikileaks risks being dismissed as just another partisan media outlet.

It’s a shame because the site couldn’t be more important.

The biggest barrier to the scrutiny of government is their monopoly over information. Governments like secrecy a lot. It’s a precautionary thing. From a political perspective it’s far safer to claim something is confidential, or of too great importance to national security to be shared with the public. You never know how information, once released into the public domain, could create political problems.

So it’s easier not to release information at all, if you can avoid it.

Last month, the Australian Attorney General’s Department gave a very clear example of how pervasive this risk-averse, secrecy-first attitude is.

A freedom of information request focused on the federal government’s plans to have internet service providers monitor the surfing habits of consumers. The request was successful. But the document which was released by the Attorney-General’s Department had been almost entirely censored – 90 per cent of what was released had been blacked out.

In a supporting letter, the department claimed censorship was necessary because releasing more information “may lead to premature unnecessary debate”.

Obviously the government thinks it better to encourage uninformed speculation.

The South Australian government recently kept an embarrassing list of defective bridges secret, claiming that the information could be used by al-Qaeda.

Wikileaks has the potential to disrupt this habitual secrecy once and for all; an institutional counterweight to the government’s monopoly over its information.

Yet it seems that for Assange, Wikileaks is instead a new media venture, and comes complete with an editorial stance. Those 91,000 documents are the supporting material for Wikileaks’ investigative work.

Talking to The New Yorker, he described this practice as “scientific journalism”, comparing Wikileaks to academic scholarship: “If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required … to submit the data that has informed your research – the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it.”

But some commentators have pointed out Assange had to pitch his story to The Guardian, The New Yorker and Der Spiegel to get publicity, rather than rely entirely on his site.

Assange should take that as a compliment, not a criticism.

Wikileaks has done some amazing things since it was founded four years ago.

But its success so far shows how much the world needs an unedited, unfiltered, and above all studiously neutral, depot for data and documents, much more than it needs another new media editor with a political campaign.

Talking the talk on walking the beat

Tony Abbott’s “Action Contract” has always sounded like it might be a gimmick to sell tickets to a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. This week, we learnt more about the plot: a crackdown on gangs.

In Melbourne on Thursday, Tony Abbott proposed an anti-gang squad (no doubt comprised of misfits and ne’er-do-wells with shady backstories) under the auspices of the Australian Crime Commission.

Law and order is an old political favourite. The Coalition is offering millions of Commonwealth dollars for closed circuit television (CCTV), a knife action plan, and a database of gang activity.

Julia Gillard, in Melbourne on the same day, promised that her government would clamp down on the importation of exotic weaponry.

They’re already hard to import; she would make it slightly harder.

It says a lot about the condition of Victoria that the two leaders launched these policies here. If Sydney voters are uneasy because there are too many people, we’re uneasy because we think too many of those people want to stab us.

That’s the aim of retail politics – to sell you more of the anxieties you already have.

But law and order is a strange topic for a federal election campaign. After all, policing is a state issue. It’s one of the few mostly state issues left. The federal government doesn’t have operational control over the forces – and without police, you can’t be serious about crime reduction.

So, we’re getting minor proposals puffed up as major policy changes, as the parties try to own an issue they cannot.

Abbott said he would seek to “work with the states” to expand police-search powers. But in Victoria, the Brumby government is already giving the police more extensive and draconian powers for warrantless body searches. So what does Abbott think the Coalition is offering?

Certainly, there are things the federal government can control, such as customs and federal police.

But all that’s really happening is the feeding of a perception that state governments have lost control of their streets. Pity there’s little either federal party could really do about it.

This week’s duelling law and order announcements by the national leaders also gave us a small peek into the banality of local politics.

In their own electorates, federal candidates on both sides obsess over the number of officers at police stations, whether certain intersections need right-hand turn arrows, and the “scourge” of graffiti. One Liberal proudly states on his website “we need to put more police on the streets”. If he gets the role in federal Parliament he is auditioning for, we can only hope he’ll write a passionate letter to his state counterparts suggesting just that.

If federal politicians really want to talk about law and order, they could always copy John Brumby – leave Canberra and move into state politics.

Otherwise, it’s just talk. No real action.

Greens’ population policy no better than the others

Bob Brown didn’t manage to get in the leaders’ debate, to the annoyance of his supporters. In a way, that’s a shame.

Sure, the Greens treat human society as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment. But they do try to present clear policy where Labor and the Coalition just waffle.

They’re definitely against the internet filter (although admittedly they chose the person responsible for the filter, Clive Hamilton, to run as a candidate). They’re definitely for climate change policy (although admittedly they voted with the Coalition against the emissions trading scheme).

A fourth body on the stage could have made the debate a little less of a sixty minute slogan slog.

Nevertheless, on the big issue of the campaign so far – immigration and population growth – Bob Brown offers nothing but equivocation and confused messages.

First: equivocation.

In response to the intergenerational report last year which famously projected Australia would have nearly 15 million more people in 2050, Brown called for … wait for it … an inquiry. A review. Another report.

Speaking in March, Brown asked, “How they think we’re going to handle 35 million, I don’t know, but if they think we can, let’s see the plan. It’s just really saying let us have the knowledge base that responsible policy making should come out of.”

The Greens are obviously learning the politics of policy from the big kids. Kevin Rudd would be proud.

Then confusion. In her Twitter feed on Sunday night, Sarah Hanson-Young, the Greens senator from South Australia, tried to claim “Compassion is key to any discussion of population growth”.

Certainly, the party’s approach to asylum seekers is clear cut.

The Greens want to increase Australia’s refugee intake, which is good. Their asylum seekers policy is one carefully refined after years of activism and involvement with refugee protests, and driven by dissatisfaction on the left with the major parties.

Yet the party is as rife with contradiction as any of the majors they despise: the Greens also want to cut back other immigration.

And they’re clearer than the ALP or Coalition about who the bad guys are in the population debate – skilled migrants.

Oh well, the Greens were never going to get much of the business vote.

Hanson-Young has argued the skilled migration program could have some “fat” trimmed from it. (Masterchef has made food metaphors cool.)

Indeed, the best comment this week came from a regular Masterchef guest, Neil Perry, responding on Twitter to the opposition’s similar promise to cut migration: “great can’t get enough people to work now!! Guess I should think about closing restaurants not opening them!”

Perry’s comment applies as readily to the Greens’ proposed immigration cut as it does to the Coalition’s.

Our current immigration program only partly alleviates business needs.

There is a genuine demand in the Australian economy for skilled and semi-skilled workers right now. No amount of high-handed rhetoric about the need to train local workers will change that fact.

And the lucky migrants who get into Australia benefit from our high living standards, stable rule of law, and liberal democracy.

So how is stopping people finding a new life in Australia, as the Greens would like to do, in any way compassionate?

Let’s be clear. If you are a refugee fleeing persecution, then a Green government will embrace you. But if you are fleeing something as banal and commonplace as poverty, economic hardship, low wages, a lack of opportunity or jobs, or if you’re just looking for a better life for you and your family – then the door to Australia is closed.

The Greens are torn. On the one side, they have supporters who value Australia’s role accepting more refugees and providing opportunity for migrants.

But on the other side, they have supporters who see people as the ultimate environmental problem. Each Australian has a relatively high carbon footprint. So, for some environmentalists, the goal should be to make sure there are as few Australians as possible.

That means keeping foreigners out. Poor people are better for the environment. They can’t afford gas guzzling cars, or always-on-standby plasma televisions, or gaudy McMansions with heating and cooling systems.

Anyway, that’s the theory. Many people holding this view say we should increase foreign aid, but they are convinced the effective path out of poverty – immigration – should be blocked.

Bob Brown has to negotiate the terrain between these two views. It’s clearly uncomfortable. (Refugees settling in Australia have growing carbon footprints as well, but that’s best not spoken about.)

Brown’s hedging means the Greens are no better on population than the Coalition and the ALP. No party wants to embrace the high immigration which has been the fuel of the Australian economy for two centuries.

Spending cuts in the obvious places

The government spends a lot of money on a lot of things.

Not all of it wisely. It’s easy to be careless when you’re spending other people’s cash.

So credit where credit’s due: in the unlikely event there is an Abbott government in Canberra at the end of next month, the Opposition has proposed some genuine cuts to the federal budget. Tuesday morning they released another list of “savings” – some $1.2 billion worth – which they claim would help get the budget back into surplus.

Some of them are so stultifyingly obvious it’s amazing nobody has committed to scrapping them yet.

Retooling for Climate Change was announced by a fresh looking Rudd government all the way back in 2008. The government pays selected small businesses to upgrade to more environmentally friendly machinery.

In the two years the program has run, it has been taken up by just 65 businesses.

So it probably hasn’t made a substantial impact on global carbon emissions levels.

The Green Building Fund, a program to upgrade buildings in a green-ish manner, is even more expensive, and just as futile. The Opposition says scrapping it will save $400 million over the next few years.

The United Nations Security Council bid was another of Kevin Rudd’s attempts to aggrandise himself on the world stage. Dropping the bid, and keeping the $5.7 million the Coalition claims it would have cost, should be a no-brainer.

Every budget cut is controversial. Even this one. After Abbott announced his hostility to the UN bid, the Australian foreign policy establishment was decrying that doing abandoning this would undermine our “prestige”.

We’ve spent a lot of money in the past trying to enhance our “prestige” in the world. Remember the Sydney Olympics?

Indeed, if Tony Abbott is in the mood to kill some sacred cows he might consider abandoning Australia’s bid for the World Cup. We’ve given $45.6 million to Football Federation Australia to manage the bid so far. The cost to the Australian economy will be extraordinary if we win: PricewaterhouseCoopers has estimated hosting the Cup will cost at least $2.9 billion.

Supporters of the World Cup claim we’ll recoup the money through tourism and other miscellaneous sources. But a mega event which pays back is an extraordinarily rare one, despite the fevered dreams of their advocates. Let’s cut our losses while we still can.

Community cabinets, which Abbott also wants to eliminate, were always bit of a joke.

Sure, they flattered those communities which had a turn meeting senior politicians and complaining to their face. But if the Labor Party wants to run focus groups, it should pay for them itself.

And Rudd’s community cabinets were absurd when you realise that his actual cabinet was being marginalised. Senior ministers couldn’t get a few minutes of Rudd’s time to discuss major policy – so spending an hour with the PM at a community cabinet meeting was probably as exciting for his colleagues as it was for the dutiful citizenry.

The Opposition claims that, when added to the savings already announced before and after the May budget this year, it adds up to $23.8 billion of cuts. The federal government spends around $350 billion per year, but you have to start somewhere, I guess.

Nevertheless, we should dwell on the net effect of these savings. Both the Government and the Coalition believe that they will bring the budget to surplus by the 2012-13 financial year.

And projections of what the budget will look like in 2013 are, well, projections. Economic circumstances change. (After all, recall that as the global financial crisis was beginning to hit, the Rudd-Swan-Gillard-Tanner team were still saying our economy was doing too well, and pushing up interest rates.) And political circumstances change; governments decide they have new spending priorities.

So there is reason to be optimistic about these proposed cuts.

The Opposition could go a hell of a lot further. Here’s another idea for them to mull over: if a program appears on the AusIndustry website – as Retooling for Climate Change does – that should qualify it for immediately abolition. The site lists 53 separate government programs: all of which funnel money to favoured industries and lucky applicants who have mastered the art of filling out paperwork.

Of course, when the Opposition claims that it is dedicated to reducing “Labor waste” they are being too disingenuous by half. The Howard government was no stranger to waste. Their Regional Partnerships Program defined for a generation what pork-barrelling looks like in Australia. When Abbott claims “this reckless spending must stop” he is just redeploying Kevin Rudd’s powerful critique of Howard.

And Abbott is putting new pressure on the budget too: yesterday he announced more tax rebates on education.

No party has a good record on cutting spending. But every promise to do so counts.