Tag: The Sunday Age

The Weight Of The Word

Are Julian Assange and WikiLeaks really doing anything that unusual? After all, leaks are one of the foundations of contemporary journalism. Leaks are one of the best techniques we have to peek behind the curtain of government. So the aggressive political reaction to WikiLeaks is very disturbing.

Governments, whether democratic or totalitarian, do not deserve a presumption of secrecy. Few people objected on a philosophical level to the leaks out of Labor’s cabinet during the federal election. Few people have principled objections when the press releases documents they’ve received from whatever legal or illegal source.

There’s no question Assange is a media publisher. He describes himself as a journalist, albeit of an unconventional type. So the only material difference between what WikiLeaks is doing and “normal” leaking is scale. The diplomatic cables have dominated global politics for two weeks, but we’ve only seen the contents of just over 1000 of them. There are 249,000 to go.

The slow (and for US diplomats, excruciating) drip-feed is far from the “data dump” critics have accused Assange of doing.

Few of the cables have been released without first having been given exclusively to the mainstream press. The Sunday Age has some today. These papers have been vetting the documents for sensitive or risky information.

WikiLeaks only publishes the edited cables. WikiLeaks even asked the US State Department for help editing unnecessarily risky documents, a practice common when the press deals with classified material. The State Department refused. The Pentagon has had to admit there is no evidence anybody has ever been harmed due to a WikiLeaks release. Yet the WikiLeaks cables depict more than just “gossip”. They reveal things we didn’t know and shed substantial light on things we thought we did.

For instance, it’s one thing to hear commentators and self-aggrandising leaders in the Labor Right say Kevin Rudd was a control freak. But it’s quite another to read it in a private internal memo of our closest ally. We now know that Rudd’s freakishness was affecting our relationship with the world.

Since the cables have been released, we’ve learnt that: Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin have a relationship bordering on corruption, US diplomats have been asked to spy on UN leaders, the same US diplomats believe a disturbing number of foreign leaders have mental health issues, and the US pressured Spain to shelve human rights cases against American officials. There will definitely be more.

To oppose WikiLeaks is to oppose freedom of the press and, more critically, free speech. Strip away Assange’s revolutionary libertarian rhetoric and inflated sense of self, and what we have is a media outlet that’s innovative but is not really doing much different from what the press has been doing for centuries. Which makes the events of the past week particularly significant.

Corporate support for WikiLeaks is being stripped away. Amazon.com, which was hosting WikiLeaks for a short time, dropped its account. The company had received calls from staff of the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security: asking “Are there plans to take the site down?”

Another company, Tableau, which was providing software for WikiLeaks to visualise the data, was also contacted by congressional staff. They severed their relationship with the site too.

Visa and MasterCard followed suit, banning donations to WikiLeaks. So too did the Swiss PostFinance, which held a WikiLeaks bank account. PayPal suspended payments to the site because it felt threatened by a letter implying WikiLeaks had broken an unspecified law.

There are too many volunteers and donors and copies of the site around the world to fully shut it down. But these political attempts to choke WikiLeaks’ funding and foundations are a clear breach of freedom of the press. They illustrate the use of political pressure to silence a media outlet that has done no more wrong than cause embarrassment to the United States government.

Sure, PayPal and Amazon.com could have refused to co-operate. It is not at all clear that WikiLeaks has broken any US laws. But put yourself in their shoes: would you defy Congress, the 535 members of which could destroy your business model with the stroke of a legislative pen?

After all, if we give governments power to make or break businesses through tax and regulation, we also give those governments power to threaten and cajole those businesses into co-operating with their political aims. This is a far more disturbing turn of events than highly publicised rantings of bloggers calling for Assange’s assassination.

Assange may be reckless. From the US government’s point of view, he is virtually stateless.

And the retaliatory attacks by the independent internet hacking group Anonymous on those corporations gives WikiLeaks an unjustified veneer of illegality.

Yet it is not the job of journalism to make the diplomacy easier, or to grease the wheels of communication between foreign leaders. Nor is it to protect diplomatic privacy.

The US government was unable to secure its internal communications. Whatever the long-term repercussions of the diplomatic leak – and they may be substantial – that colossal failure is to blame; not a journalist who, having received newsworthy information, publishes it.

The last thing we want is our media to be deferential or subservient to the interests of the state.

Of course, the battle between governments and the press is an old one. In a moment of well-timed irony, this week the US Department of State announced it would be hosting World Press Freedom Day in 2011.

No matter how new the medium, or how irresponsible its publisher, it is an absolute and fundamental infringement of free speech when a government tries to gag a media outlet it doesn’t like.

If Marriage Is So Good, Why Not Invite Everyone In?

It didn’t take much for a wave of pro-gay marriage sentiment to echo through the socially liberal wing of the Labor Party.

A Greens motion that politicians should “gauge their constituents’ views” on gay marriage (which you’d have thought was their job anyway) has led a growing list of Labor MPs to declare their support. And Julia Gillard has brought Labor’s national conference forward six months so her party can debate the issue next year.

That’s Labor. What about the Liberals?

You’d think conservative opposition to same-sex marriage would be a no-brainer. Resistance to major social reform is seen as part of the DNA of Australian conservatism. Certainly, no Liberal politicians have stuck their necks out. Malcolm Turnbull, who you’d think would be the best bet, has made it clear he believes marriage is between a man and a woman.

Yet there is a strong conservative argument for legalising gay marriage. Conservatives who decry the decline of marriage as an institution are right. Straight people have been undermining the sanctity of marriage for decades. This is a bad thing.

Marriage is a private form of social welfare. Spouses insure each other against sudden loss of income. Married couples are less vulnerable to financial stress than single people.

The benefits of marriage on mental health and wellbeing, income and happiness are widely acknowledged. Married people tend to lead more stable lives. Their relationships are more durable.

There’s justified concern Australia is losing “social capital”; that the bonds of the community are weakening. And the evidence suggests married people integrate better in communities and the workplace.

So extending the marital franchise to gay and lesbian couples would multiply the number of Australians who can join this crucial social institution, spreading the positive impact of marriage on society.

The most common conservative case against gay marriage is that the very idea is an oxymoron; marriage, by definition, is between a man and a woman. But this seems less about protecting the sanctity of marriage and more about protecting the sanctity of the dictionary.

Conservatism isn’t opposed to change. It simply seeks to make change manageable. And if the symbolic value of the word “marriage” is important, then the social benefits accrued by that symbolism should be available to same-sex couples. On the other hand, if the word is merely shorthand for a utilitarian contractual relationship between two rational, calculating individuals, then barring gay individuals from signing such a contract is obviously discriminatory.

Conservatives have one more question to be answered. Doesn’t gay marriage hurt straight marriage? That’s an empirical question we can measure.

In their book Gay Marriage: For Better or For Worse? What We’ve Learned From the Evidence, William Eskridge and Darren Spedale look at the effect that recognition of same-sex relationships – marriage and civil unions – has had on Scandinavia since Denmark introduced registered partnerships in 1989. The authors found that after nearly two decades of registered partnerships in Scandinavia, social indicators, if anything, were getting better. Total divorce rates were lower. There were higher rates of straight marriage, fewer out-of-wedlock births.

Caution is worthwhile. These changes aren’t due to same-sex unions – just because two women get married doesn’t mean you’re more likely to stay with your opposite-sex spouse. But it does suggest gay relationships do not undermine straight relationships.

In the past few years, a number of countries have adopted gender-neutral definitions of marriage. Opponents of gay marriage should reveal how they predict straight marriage will be harmed? Early indications suggest it has not been harmed.

The conservative case for gay marriage is one that respects and venerates the institution of government-approved marriage.

A more radical answer to the gay marriage question would eliminate government’s role. There are, after all, two distinct aspects to marriage in Australia. There’s the religious and cultural aspect: marriage is a sacrament, sanctified by religions, families and friends. Then there is the legal aspect: marriages are stamped and approved by the government.

Why do we need the latter? Marriage could be privatised. There’s really no need to have any central authority deciding who is married and who isn’t.

This is, of course, not an approach the Greens or the ALP are likely to adopt. Nor is it the most conservative approach.

If marriage is so socially beneficial, why not encourage as many to join it as possible? The choice is between excluding gay people from the foundation of strong families or inviting them in.

An Illusion Of Safety

Here’s a way to make driving safer: make it riskier.

A German safety expert recommends we raise speed limits on our roads, not lower them.

Ulrich Mellinghoff, head of safety at Mercedes-Benz, argues that raising the top speed on long stretches of Australia’s roads to 130 or 140km/h could help combat driver fatigue.

Mellinghoff’s argument is counter-intuitive. It will definitely make driving feel less safe, but it could result in fewer accidents. And it fits in with an increasing body of knowledge that suggests government attempts to protect us are have the opposite effect – making us less safe and, crucially, less able to manage risk.

We’ve had widely owned, personal transport for more than a century now. And we’ve learnt a lot about safety in that time. The University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman famously studied the results of the American 1966 Motor Safety Act that mandated new car safety standards. Instead of making driving safer, Peltzman found, the new standards prompted drivers to be more reckless on the roads, and endangered the lives of pedestrians. Other risk analysts have found the same occurred when seatbelt laws were introduced around the world.

Economists call that ”moral hazard” – when people feel they are insulated from the consequences of their actions and behave differently as a result.

In 2007, a researcher in Bath, England, attached proximity sensors to his bicycle to see how car drivers responded to his bike helmet use. On average, cars came nearly 10 centimetres closer when he wore a helmet than without. Drivers acted much more dangerously because they assumed the rider was safe. These problems aren’t limited to road safety.

The insurance industry is acutely aware that some customers fail to protect their property when it’s insured. Bushwalkers venture further away from civilisation if they believe search and rescue will be there to help them.

Researchers have even found the introduction of improved ripcords on parachutes did not lower the incidence of skydiving accidents. Instead, they just encouraged skydivers to pull their cords later.

We saw the moral hazard dynamic play out most dramatically in 2008, as the global financial crisis looked set to sweep away the entire world economy. Wall Street made riskier and riskier financial trades and employed ever more complex and precarious financial instruments because of an assumption, cultivated over decades, that if they got in too much trouble the government would bail them out. It would be bad if they lost their financial gambles. But they wouldn’t lose the business over it. They were too big to fail.

Calling a company “too big to fail” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The marketplace starts to imagine the company is unsinkable and relies on it.

Having bailed out other firms, the market really went into free fall when the US government declined to bail out Lehman Brothers in September 2008, dramatically reversing that assumption.

It wasn’t the government’s failure to bail out Lehman Brothers that caused the panic. It was implying they would do so, and at the last minute whipping the protective blanket away.

The long-term cause of the financial crisis was the suggestion the government would do anything to protect bankers. The short-term cause was that it didn’t.

This isn’t an argument against seatbelts or bike helmets. Seatbelts combined with drink-driving laws, education and cultural change have reduced Australia’s road toll significantly. But it should be a warning: many of the well-meaning attempts to make us safer are counterproductive, making us more likely to take risks, and less likely to think about the consequences.

There are solutions. In a revolution in traffic management across Europe, a number of towns are removing traffic lights, stop signs, and other road markings. Once eliminated, drivers enter intersections more slowly and more attentively. Instead of focusing their attention on signs, they make eye contact with other drivers. They negotiate. Accidents in these towns have dramatically declined.

The Dutch have been experimenting with “shared streets”, where the barriers between pedestrian walkways and roads are eliminated. Again, this sounds abominably dangerous. But when guard railings between the footpath and the road were removed from London’s Kensington High Street, accidents fell by 47 per cent.

A spontaneous order emerges when people feel they are fully responsible for their own driving. And it’s a safer one than in a traffic management system that tries to push drivers along pre-determined paths, barking orders along the way.

It’s like the spontaneous order that emerges in society and markets when people are responsible for their actions. So let’s hope risk and reward can be rejoined in the financial sector too.

We talk a lot about helicopter parents who over-parent and insulate their children from the world. The obvious downside of this kind of parenting is that children learn nothing about managing danger.

Perhaps it’s time to talk about helicopter governments as well: always hovering above their citizens, ready to swoop in the moment they stray off the safest path.

Silenced In Court

Andrew Bolt is getting sued. Don’t applaud yet. There’s been a lot of outrage about the federal government’s proposed internet filter. But lawsuits like the one now faced by the prominent conservative Herald Sun columnist are as much a restriction on freedom of speech as anything Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has come up with.

Nine people are suing Bolt for an article that claimed their Aboriginal self-identification was “fashionable”. He had said they all had part-European, part-indigenous heritage (and fair skin) with an opportunity to describe themselves as a range of nationalities. But, he wrote, they chose to describe themselves as Aboriginal. Doing so gave them “political and career clout”.

At worst, Bolt is deliberately and provocatively disrespectful.

But as their lawyer has pointed out, there are two tests of whether someone is Aboriginal. The first is an objective genealogical test: a fairly clear cut question of whether they have Aboriginal ancestors. The second is subjective: whether a person chooses to self-identify as indigenous, and whether they are “communally” regarded as such.

Bolt’s columns criticised political appointments and government awards that pivot on an individual’s Aboriginality. They’re absolutely within their rights to apply for those grants, prizes and positions. But like it or not, by sponsoring things like indigenous-specific art and literary awards, the government makes what constitutes Aboriginality a political question.

And it’s a question academics have been trying to unpack for decades. Universities teach courses in the “concept of Aboriginality”. Surveying the literature in 2002, the Parliamentary Library could only conclude “an individual’s ethnic identity is always to some degree fluid, multiple, differing in degrees, and constructed”.

Of course, Bolt tackles the issue with trademark belligerence. The merits of his argument will now be tested in court. But put aside the conservative commentator. This isn’t about the collected works and opinions of Andrew Bolt. And put aside the complexities of racial identity, Aboriginality and reconciliation.

This case is troubling because of what it says about our right to freedom of speech. If successful – or just really expensive to defend – this lawsuit could have a stifling effect on political debate.

The 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that only by airing contested views publicly and freely could the truth be known. Societies need free speech if only to test and challenge controversial opinions.

And we’re not going to have those necessary debates while legal action stifles one side. No matter how wrong or misguided that side may be.

Silencing Bolt doesn’t just silence him. It potentially silences the speech of others who might be afraid of being similarly dragged through the legal system.

After all, Bolt and his employer can afford to defend themselves. No doubt they have lawyers on call. Newspapers know their way around court.

By contrast, bloggers, amateur journalists, Twitterers and Facebookers commenting on sensitive political issues – for whatever reason, with whatever motives – are much more exposed to punitive legal action than newspaper columnists are.

Should only the rich be able to have controversial views? If anything is going to suffocate the blossoming citizen media, it will be lawyers.

Bolt is being challenged under the federal government’s Racial Discrimination Act. But that’s hardly the only law on the books that has a damaging impact on free speech. Our politicians have a long and shameful history of using Australia’s defamation laws to sue their critics – threatening someone with a defamation suit is a public relations tactic.

In Victoria, our Racial and Religious Tolerance Act, introduced in 2001, has been co-opted as a stick for religious groups to hit each other.

First, the Islamic Council of Victoria took the fundamentalist Christian Catch the Fire Ministries to court. Then a Wiccan prison inmate took the Salvation Army to court. Then the Australia-Israel Jewish Affairs Council threatened to take the Islamic Information and Services Network of Australasia to court.

That’s a shabby record for a law supposed to promote tolerance, not division.

Suppressing offensive views can be counterproductive. The churches and mosques targeted by the Victorian Racial and Religious Tolerance Act were able to say their beliefs were being persecuted – attracting more followers. The victimised dissident is a hero, not a villain.

To his credit, Bolt is a prominent critic of Victoria’s vilification laws. Last year, the Human Rights Consultation Committee faced the task of recommending what should appear in an Australian bill of rights. It struggled to balance our right to free speech with a new “right” demanded by some – the right to not be offended by the speech of others.

But there are an infinite number of ways people could be offended. How could we possibly prevent all outrage?

You can have the right to free speech, or you can have the right to be protected by the government from the offensive speech of others. You can’t have both.

There are other ways to respond to distasteful views.

Refuse to buy the Herald Sun. Tell your friends to do the same. Condemn it in other opinion columns. The solution to bad speech is more speech. If something is offensive, it deserves to be condemned, loudly and often.

This week saw the first Aboriginal member of the federal House of Representatives sit in Parliament. Ken Wyatt is a Liberal. He promised to advocate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Parliament. His mother was one of the stolen generations. In his maiden speech, Wyatt thanked Kevin Rudd for the 2008 apology.

That’s a genuine step towards reconciliation. Wielding the legal system as a weapon to try to silence critics isn’t – no matter how offensive they might be.

Savaging a popular policy a tricky task for Turnbull

Malcolm Turnbull’s elevation to the shadow communications portfolio may be just what the debate over the national broadband network needs. It could be just what the Liberal Party needs, too. But Turnbull has a hell of a job: to persuade the electorate that a gigantic, government-subsidised gift of a super-fast internet is a bad idea. An Essential Report poll late last year found 65 per cent of Australians thought it was important the NBN was built. Sixty per cent of Coalition supporters did, too. As a general rule, Australians like free stuff even if eventually they have to pay for it through tax.

Both the government and the opposition have lined up their new portfolios in time for the next sitting of Parliament.

The election is over and Lab or wants change, not continuity. Julia Gillard has tried to eliminate all traces of the embarrassing Kevin Rudd era.

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On the other side, the Coalition did astonishingly well at the election. So, Tony Abbott’s thinking goes, why fix what’s working? Turnbull’s move to communications is the only significant change.

The Coalition’s broadband message was an unmitigated disaster during the election – the biggest problem with an otherwise robust campaign.

It’s possible that Abbott is laying a cunning trap for his rival. From now on, the debate over the broadband is going to be intimately linked with Liberal Party leadership questions. And who would want to be saddled with the job of opposing one of Labor’s most popular policies?

But Abbott needs Turnbull to do well. Ever since he took over in November 2009, Abbott’s leadership has burnt fast and hot. His strategy was to barge into The Lodge. Now it seems likely the Coalition faces a full term in opposition. Abbott has to turn off his fast burn and apply slow, indirect heat to the Gillard government. He will need his shadow ministers to break down government policies bit by bit, not try to blow them up as quickly as possible. In other words, Abbott is relying on Turnbull to make the broadband network look like insulation, not the mining tax. Turnbull may be able to do so.

Since 2007, the government’s Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has successfully portrayed any Coalition critic of his broadband plan as a Luddite, as if they were opposed to the very idea of the internet and just a sledgehammer away from machine breaking. Conroy won’t be able to play that card now. You couldn’t parody Turnbull’s love of technology. He was not just the chairman of Ozemail; he recently released an iPhone application dedicated to all things Malcolm.

The Coalition can’t stop the broadband network, but it will be able to show how poorly thought through the project has been. After all, the network the government is building is not the network it took to the 2007 election. That first plan failed.

On a now infamous flight between Canberra and Sydney in April last year, Conroy used the time he could get with Kevin Rudd to explain their $4.7 billion scheme wouldn’t work. The two men sketched the

$43 billion scheme we’re getting now.

If we’ve learnt anything about the internet, it’s that we always find new uses for it and we always want more speed. But that doesn’t mean this specific network at this specific price, built in this specific style is the best way to get it. And it doesn’t mean the network has to be built by government. Before the 2007 election, Telstra was desperate to roll out high-speed broadband itself. Had the Howard government made some regulatory changes, we would already have the network at no cost to the taxpayer.

There’s a catalogue of problems with the NBN. A decade after Telstra’s privatisation, the government has taken responsibility for telecommunications.

Unfortunately, the Coalition’s alternative policy does little to resolve the deep regulatory issues that have held back Australian broadband. But right now, the burden of proof is on the government to show its NBN is worth the price tag.

The Liberals need their old, discarded leader to knock serious holes in the national broadband network.

Chris Berg is a research fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs.

Life under Gillard could be an expensive business

If Julia Gillard holds government, the alliance she will have cobbled together will speak in one voice on one major issue – climate change.

Andrew Wilkie’s addition to the Gillard side on Thursday afternoon confirms this. The new independent from Tasmania had ”a price on carbon” prominent among his 20-point list of priorities for action.

Despite many Greens being uneasy with a quasi-market approach to climate change, Melbourne MP Adam Bandt and his party have embraced an emissions trading scheme.

And Gillard will be looking to keep the nine Greens holding the Senate balance of power in her government’s tent – a task made much easier by the lower house agreement she signed with Bob Brown this week.

Let’s say Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor fill up seats 75 and 76 in favour of the Labor government.

Oakeshott is clearly for climate action. In February, when the government’s Climate Pollution Reduction Scheme was looking ever more hapless, Oakeshott called its collapse ”a pox on both the major parties” and a ”disgraceful failure of so-called leaders in this country to tell the story of climate change and energy security”.

Tony Windsor has said that a price on carbon is inevitable, that he supports it, and doesn’t believe it will be a disaster for the bush.

Anyway, that’s the maths. Bob Katter may end up supporting Gillard, but does Bob Katter strike anyone as a team player? The member for Kennedy thinks Sir Nicholas Stern and Ross Garnaut are ”lightweights”, so it’s unlikely the government could count on his support for climate legislation any time soon.

Assuming the Labor alliance can survive the next three years – and that Gillard’s leadership will too – the precariousness of minority government will leave the prime minister looking for a policy win. An emissions trading scheme is an obvious candidate.

And not just any ETS. The 2009 model reflected the need to negotiate with the Liberals in the Senate. A new ETS would reflect a deal with the Greens, who rejected the last one as too weak, and the independents – Oakeshott has shown a reverence for Garnaut’s original, ”pure” emissions trading scheme.

Hung parliaments can be funny things. Despite the low profile of climate change in the 2010 campaign, and despite not gaining government in its own right, the ALP may now be more able to enact the policy it most wanted to last term.

But the debate over climate change policy has regressed badly. In 2009, Parliament was discussing the mechanics of the government’s elaborate cap and trade scheme. But in 2010, we’re stuck on this simple phrase: ”price on carbon”. It makes it all sound so simple.

But what would its target emissions level be? When would it start? How should trade-exposed energy-intensive industries be compensated, if at all? Should low-income earners be compensated?

Not to say anything of the main policy crunch of November and December 2009 – the failure of the Copenhagen summit. An emissions trading scheme cannot achieve its goal without being part of a global agreement.

The notion of putting a price on carbon is popular. Around 50 per cent of Australians believe climate change is a serious problem that should be tackled by government.

Yet actually paying that price is substantially less popular.

A poll by the Lowy Institute has tracked the willingness of Australians to pay extra for electricity. The number of people who refused to pay anything to tackle climate change has increased from 21 per cent in 2008 to 32 per cent in 2010. And less than a third of those who believe that there should be a significant price on carbon report themselves willing to pay a significant price for energy.

Even if the federal government manages to get an ETS through Parliament, the key to emissions reduction is to slowly but perceptibly increase the cost of emitting.

Recent elections have shown us Australians are inordinately sensitive to real or imagined cost-of-living increases. Few governments would be eager to deliberately ratchet up the price of electricity every single year.

Supporters of emissions reduction argue that new technologies will fill the gap and keep prices down. To a degree, that’s true. But the pace of technological change is not guaranteed. There’s no reason to believe that the price of wind power will drop in concert with a rise in the carbon price.

In her deal with the Greens, Gillard ditched the much-ridiculed citizens’ assembly. Instead, she plans a climate change committee, formed under the auspices of Parliament, and including only those committed to a price on carbon.

Her alliance may help Labor get emissions trading through Parliament. But the emissions trading model the climate change committee devises may create more political problems than it solves.

Chris Berg is a research fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs. Follow him at twitter.com/chrisberg

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.

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.

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.

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.