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.

Rudd is gone, but he’s still the focus

Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard agree: Kevin Rudd must not be allowed to win this election.

The former prime minister will not be a big participant in the campaign, but it seems he will be its primary focus.

Labor candidates across the country have photoshopped him out of their campaign photos. We can now see the results: in the western Sydney electorate of Macquarie an ALP flyer is being distributed that features Gillard rejecting a ”big Australia”. The bogyman on that flyer is not Abbott, but Rudd.

So far, all Gillard’s policy announcements have been Rudd-centric. She’s backed down on Rudd’s mining tax, she’s toughening up the refugee policy she inherited from Rudd, she’s fudging climate change as much as she can.

The statement to the Canberra press gallery this week that her campaign would be frugal sounds responsible. But it has to be frugal. She, and Rudd, and the rest of the kitchen cabinet have used up all the government’s money already.

One thing wasn’t about Rudd. Last week she announced, with the sort of pomp and ceremony befitting a declaration of war, that school uniforms would be eligible for the education tax refund. Whether that’s a good policy or not is immaterial; it’s not much policy at all.

The ALP seems to be asking for three more years to retract the last three. ”Moving forward” is, well, a little backward looking. And it’s not a lot to hang a campaign on.

Gillard has no lack of issues she could pick up. The former prime minister’s irritable policy-making style ensured that.

If there’s a slow news day, she could jump aboard any of the few hundred recommendations from the Henry tax review, the Preventative Health Taskforce, and the 2020 Summit, or the health reform, or the Asia union. She could even take up the entirely futile and entirely noble campaign for nuclear disarmament.

At the very least, Gillard will have to decide which of Rudd’s proclamations she wants to support or discard.

Spare a thought for Tony Abbott.

The Coalition wanted to run against Kevin10. Their policies on refugees, population, the mining tax and climate change are concentrated to capitalise maximally on his weaknesses.

Rudd was the Coalition’s best asset. Soldiering on, Abbott has started referring to the ”Rudd-Gillard government”.

But with no Rudd, the Opposition Leader appears to be just hoping Gillard will break something.

With the failure to lock in a refugee processing centre in East Timor, Gillard may have.

Yet surely what’s more memorable about the Dili solution is that the new PM is – again – repudiating her predecessor’s approach.

Rudd is skulking around, pretending to be the political powerhouse he isn’t.

But now the election is on, both Gillard and Abbott are going to have to face each other directly. Doing so will take serious policy creativity.

Climate change: healthy debate not a health debate

Want the earth to be cooler? Unleash the psychologists.

At least, that’s the argument presented by one of the keynote speakers at the 2010 International Congress of Applied Psychology, being held in Melbourne this week.

According to Robert Gifford, a Professor of Psychology and Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, the profession needs to help scientists and policymakers overcome the psychological barriers to action on climate change – things like the public’s limited understanding of the dangers of global warming, ideological reluctance, and mistrust of government.

He’s not alone: it’s a developing area of study. The American Psychological Association has a Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change. In a report last year, it too found psychologists should try to overcome our psychological barriers to saving the planet.

Of course, all this assumes that having governments take aggressive action on climate change as soon as possible is inherently desirable.

And if you don’t think so, well, you have psychological problems. Or, at least, we as a society do.

In other words, if we think the costs of climate change policies could be greater than the benefits, if we think there are better uses for the money governments want to spend on the environment, if some of us don’t want to make the lifestyle changes necessary to cut carbon emissions by 80 per cent, then we need psychological treatment.

Case closed.

But there is serious debate to be had about climate change. Debate about the best response to the changing climate and the degree to which we are responsible for that change. Debate about how we can adapt to a warmer or colder environment. Debate about whether Australia should bother trying to “lead the world” if the world isn’t interested in following.

Instead of tackling those questions, many climate activists would prefer to treat the existence of public uncertainty about the origin, costs and consequences of climate change as not just wrong, but corrupt, immoral, and, now, unhealthy.

This attitude has the stale whiff of authoritarianism. Not to the degree that dictatorships have used psychology as a tool of political power, jailing dissidents in mental institutions, sure. But it is distinctly authoritarian to respond to a political disagreement with a medical diagnosis.

The Australian Psychological Society claims the profession has a “special responsibility to be proactively involved in fostering more ecologically sensitive and sustainable behaviours and lifestyles”. This seems a little outside its brief.

Yet it accords with the trendy view that lawmakers should team up with psychologists to manipulate our decisions. People apparently need a little help from social engineers to ensure they make the “best” choices about their personal diet, finances, and lifestyle.

Thus the huge range of personal values and opinions held by individuals can be treated as if they are deviant in some way, and need professional and legal treatment.

No-one is disputing the electorate has misguided views about many public policy questions.

In his 2007 book The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, Bryan Caplan documented the four big economic biases – views held by the general public but rejected by economists who have spent years or decades studying them.

People tend to underestimate the value of labour-saving practices. They overlook the benefits of free trade. They believe the economy is always in decline, and they undervalue the social benefits of the voluntary interaction in the marketplace.

These beliefs account for much of the harmful demagoguery which surrounds economic debate.

Yet neither the Australian Psychological Society nor the American Psychological Association has a section on their website dedicated to the psychological barriers to sound economic policy making, as they do with climate change. Nor do their conferences focus on diagnosing the impediments to international support for lower tariffs.

Instead we all rightly treat economic policy as a legitimate area for discussion and disagreement. Climate change policy needs to be approached with the same open attitude.

The way the debate over climate change has developed has encouraged this sort of public policy dogmatism.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been promoted as the last word on climate.

The IPCC process is a bold attempt by a small number of experts to distil an enormous amount of scholarship into a single document, with enough coherence for politicians to act upon.

So the IPCC’s reports are not just dispassionate reviews of the scientific literature. They are riddled with economic assumptions, political judgements, and ethical and moral assessments.

That the general public is sceptical the IPCC has reached scholarly perfection – to question some of its judgments – is not an indication we all have psychological issues. It’s healthy debate.

Chris Berg is a research fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs and editor of the IPA Review. You can follow Chris Berg on Twitter.

Strange bedfellows make for better government

Something strange is happening in Britain. When the Conservative Party failed to get an outright majority in the May general election, it was forced into coalition with Britain’s (distinctly left-leaning) third party, the Liberal Democrats, to take government. But here’s the strange part: the coalition seems to be working.

The Liberal Party in Australia should be watching this embryonic alliance closely. David Cameron and his Liberal Democrat Deputy PM Nick Clegg are getting along like a parliament house on fire. The two men are even proposing to address each other’s national conferences this year.

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It’s more than just a personal relationship. Surprisingly, the coalition seems a lot stronger than you’d expect from a marriage of convenience.

If it holds, the UK could see a dramatic ideological realignment. After all, David Cameron’s project to soften the Tory image was about more than just looking green and modern.

No party calling itself ”conservative” will ever be a fully libertarian one. Social conservatives who’ve voted Tory forever would not look kindly upon mixing social liberalism (gay marriage, for example) with its Margaret Thatcher-style economics (lower taxes, smaller government).

But while the Tories are in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the government could get close to that philosophical union. At their best, the Liberal Democrats are socially liberal and civil liberty-minded.

The dynamics of coalition with the Liberal Democrats gives influence to social liberals in the Conservative Party. It also gives power to those Liberal Democrats who want to cut down the size of government and deregulate.

So the coalition could be a generally centrist, modest and mainstream government, but one that cares about individual liberty – a new ”liberal conservative” government. That’s what seems to be happening.

Clegg is working on the Great Repeal Bill, a suite of legislation to clear away some of the restrictions on civil liberties, government intrusions on privacy, creepy government databases, and nutty nanny state laws that built up in the Labour government’s decade in power.

The government is eliminating the compulsory national identification card scheme. They’ve promised to stop detaining asylum seeker children. They’re talking about devolution, giving more power to local councils and communities, expanding school choice and pushing public sector reform.

Sure, there are big things the two parties disagree on. On immigration there is tension. But Labour has evidently decided disaffection with foreigners was the reason it lost government. So while Labour is going after British National Party types, the Liberal Conservative coalition can temper its own position.

It is early days for the Cameron-Clegg partnership. But it looks good so far. So if the Liberal Party isn’t paying attention, it should be.

When Malcolm Turnbull was rolled last year as Liberal leader, there was a minor sub-genre urging him to start his own party – a party for social liberals and economic dries. Sounds delightful. But not many of the people who proposed this new party would vote for it, let alone join.

Turnbull may be all loveable and cuddly on climate change and Bill Henson, but such a party would also have to be economically pretty dry. Imagine a party with an industrial relations policy to actually deregulate Australia’s workplaces, rather than, as with WorkChoices, just smack around trade unions a bit. Or one that wanted to do more horrifying things: privatise Australia Post, cut taxes, abolish the Australian Institute of Sport.

Of course, the chances of a breakaway party are pretty slim. But it is a central tenet of the Australian Liberal Party that it’s the party of individual freedom, small government and personal responsibility.

The Cameron-Clegg alliance is a real-world test of the marketability of a government that cares about individual liberty in both economic and social spheres. It’s a style of government with promise. The Australian population is becoming more liberal on social issues every year. Gender and sexual equality are no longer debatable. Even multiculturalism, so controversial in recent decades, is widely accepted.

Yet many on the Australian right believe the reason David Cameron didn’t win big enough against Gordon Brown to hold government on his own was because he was insufficiently conservative. He could have talked more about immigration, for instance. The lesson from Britain, they argue, is that Tony Abbott needs to tack right, and tack right hard, to be credible.

But the new British coalition could offer a very different example for the Australian Liberal Party. If Cameron and Clegg can make it work, the combination of social and economic freedom may not be such electoral poison after all.

Chris Berg is a research fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs and editor of the IPA Review.