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  • Is this what politics has come to?

     

    The end result was nothing if not unfiltered. Indeed, it was almost completely incoherent, as Wilde struggled to provide any semblance of moderation and the leaders alternatively answered random tweeted questions or fired campaign pledges into the ether.

    The potential positives for this new style of debate are immediately evident in terms of engagement and participation. Following the #penrithdebate hashtag was like leaping into the warm bath of democracy: raucous and disorderly, but also robust and diverse. Ill-considered quips and confected outrage jostled happily with witty puns and even the occasional balanced and intelligent remark.

    But the disadvantages of such a chaotic medium were just as apparent. Watching the tweets tumble down my screen, I was struck by the sheer avalanche of unmoderated information that Twitter makes available. Even in this age of “partial continuous attention“, the brevity and rapidity of Twitter is exactly the opposite of what one might hope for in an enlightened democratic dialogue. The tendency for candidates to ignore each other and simply to repeat their talking points; the morass of bathetic banter; the trolls and sock puppets: none of these show democratic debate in its best light.

    On the other hand, the same criticisms have been levelled at democratic processes since the time of Pericles. Indeed, one imagines a reanimated Pericles transported into the future would not feel out of place trying to make his points amidst the dull, chaotic roar of a Twitter stream.

    Why participate in the debate anyway, moderator Kevin Wilde asked at the beginning of the debate. “cos KK refused to participate in a debate organised by the Penrith Business Alliance” Barry O’Farrell fired back, in the first of several well-turned tweets.

    What can we draw from this brave exercise? A few key observations offer themselves.

    Firstly, Twitter offers new models for geographically distributed debate. Today’s debate did not require the leaders to assemble in one forum. Keneally was at a Penrith cafe, Rhiannon was at her electoral office, and O’Farrell was on the move. Twitter offers not so much a lack of geography as a multiplicity of geographic simultaneity. Insert your favourite new media metaphor here.

    Secondly, a new medium offers a new challenge for politicians. The first televised US presidential debate in 1960 offered voters a radically new way to engage with their leaders. Listeners on radio thought Nixon won. Television viewers thought Kennedy won. Many blamed Richard Nixon’s five o’clock shadow for the result.

    Today’s Twitter debate offers some intriguing glimpses into a future in which a quick wit and rapid touch typing skills could be just as important as good hair and an appropriately tailored suit. To my surprise, I decided that Barry O’Farrell performed best. His tweets were more direct and even betrayed the occasional flash of humour whereas Keneally seemed capable only of anodyne campaign pledges. Rhiannon seemed most at home in the medium, but also struggled to get a consistent message across.

    Thirdly, the new medium will stimulate a rapid evolution in political tactics appropriate to it. Indeed, we saw a number in their nascent form today. For instance, Keneally showed her political discipline, staying on message with a series of boring — but at least clear and comprehensible — campaign talking points. Another tactic that could emerge is to flood the channel by engaging large numbers of supporters or party members to bombard the Twitter stream on a particular hashtag. Twitter also offers the opportunity for savvy politicians to simply overwhelm the debate with large numbers of tweets; unlike a live TV interview, no-one can say “I’m going to stop you there”.

    It may take audiences and media professionals just as long to understand and adapt to the new medium as politicians. The messy and difficult debate will look a whole lot smoother once it makes the news tonight.

    Perhaps the tweet of the debate was from Daily Telegraph blogger Joe Hildebrand, who observed “Exclusive: Twitter debate confused, nonsensical and unproductive; perfect representation of NSW politics.” It will take more than a few Twitter debates to sort out the mess that is state politics in New South Wales. Genuine democracy is never neat or clear-cut.

  • What went wrong for Kevin Rudd

     

    The title of David Marr’s June Quarterly Essay, Power Trip, points to some answers. Rudd began his maiden speech in federal politics with the words “Politics is about power.” Well, yes and no. Power is complex. It comes in many forms, from coercive power, with its threats and bribes, to the authority to give orders and expect to be obeyed, to the power to persuade people to see a situation as you do and agree with your line of action. And in liberal democracies like Australia, the power of any one political officeholder, even the prime minister, is limited. Marr quotes a shrewd old bureaucrat who has worked with a few prime ministers and wonders if Rudd really understands the way power works at the top. “He isn’t afraid to pick a fight, but doesn’t then behave like a prime minister: he involves himself so much; puts himself on the line so quickly; doesn’t exercise authority by keeping at a distance.”

    This is Rudd of “the buck stops with me,” who presents himself as the fixer of last resort of all the nation’s problems. This is the Rudd who rushed in to take the blame for all the problems of the insulation scheme, and whisked his notebook out of his top pocket to note down the names of worried insulators, reassuring them that there would be another phase of government largesse once the problems were sorted out. Why did he think he had to take all the blame? There were a few other candidates – like shonky small business operators. And no one really expects the PM to act as everyone’s local member, sorting out each person’s problems with this or that government scheme. But having promised something he then found he couldn’t deliver, and he only has himself to blame when he walks away and people are angry. There is a failure of judgement here as he promises too much and delivers too little, both in small things like the promise to the insulators and in large policy reversals like the emissions scheme. I am sure we will see a similar pattern in his attempt to fix the blame game in the nation’s hospital system.

    Implicit in these failures of judgement is a fantasy of concentration of power in the office of the PM. Bucks stop – or not – in many places in liberal parliamentary democracies like ours: in particular with individual ministers, with state premiers and, behind the scenes, with senior public servants. Marr shows convincingly that Rudd is driven by a genuine and deeply held commitment to making Australia a decent place for children to grow up in, a commitment forged in the hard years after his father died. Because his father was a tenant farmer, the family lost its home after he died, and he endured two terrible years as a boarder in a Marist College that instilled in him an icy hatred of the school. Rudd’s determination to make Australia a place in which kids didn’t have to suffer like he had was accompanied by a determination to re-make himself from a fussy little kid on the margins of other people’s lives into someone who was both unassailable and at the centre of things – which is where, he thinks, he now is.

    But the problem is that, having got there, his hold on power is slipping faster than anyone could have imagined. He has become, Marr argues, the choke point in the government, just as he was in Goss’s government when he ran the cabinet office. Rudd’s micromanagement and need to be on top of every detail also has to do with owning all the outcomes of government; he treats senior public servants as underlings, patronises caucus, ignores advice and bypasses his ministers, hogging all the big announcements for himself. And, in the judgement of a former staffer, “For all the effort he doesn’t come up with particularly interesting solutions to problems. His policy positions aren’t breakthrough, not particularly new or exciting. After all that work they are dull.”

    Because he thinks power is all about him, he seems unable to give others the space to be creative, which means that he can’t draw on the wisdom of those who are perhaps less clever than he is but have richer life experiences and more understanding of what makes others tick. And he seems to think that all he has to do is to make announcements. Power is also exercised through persuasion, and here he seems to have a major blind spot. As we know, he is very sensitive to voters’ opinions, but seems little interested in that of stakeholders. It is mind-boggling that his government decided to introduce a new mining tax without any prior consultation with the industry. Ambushing Australia’s most powerful industry in an election year is about as smart as Ben Chifley’s taking on the banks. Doesn’t he remember that the Australian Mining Industry Council’s advertising campaign killed the Hawke government’s commitment to national land rights legislation in the 1980s?

    The battle with the miners has erupted since Marr finished his essay, but it is in character with the man Marr presents, a man for whom power is a brittle exercise in control and who has little understanding of the limits of what one person can do, even when he holds the highest office in the land. Perhaps Rudd will read Marr’s essay and learn from it. He does have deep intellectual and emotional reserves. And with an unelectable opposition, we would all be grateful if he showed signs of a maturing political judgement. But the concluding scene does not bode well for such an outcome.

    Marr and Rudd have been chatting and Rudd asks him about the likely argument of the essay. Marr tells him that he is pursing the contradictions of his life, and wonders aloud if his government will go the way of Goss’s. Rudd explodes with controlled fury. It is, says Marr, the most vivid version of Rudd he has yet encountered. “Who is the real Kevin Rudd?” he writes. “He is the man you see when the anger vents. He’s a politician with rage at his core, impatient rage.” Marr’s essay is brilliant: it has all of the sharp observation and unexpected angles, and the lucid, supple prose, that make him such a fine interpreter of Australian political life. •

    Judith Brett is Professor of Politics at La Trobe University.

    r

  • Teflon and the haters of Rudd

     

    Paradoxically, we see that the same mistake is being made by the neo Rudd-haters as was made by the Howard-haters, who in many cases are one and the same people. The more vitriolic or unreasonable the attacks, the more they work for the Prime Minister, as voters inclined not to like him pause, take stock and decide their misgivings are really not so grave that they need to join the frenzy. Distaste for the attacks soon turns to regard for the victim.

    As Noel Pearson once described it, the Teflon which coated Howard for so long was made from the spit of his opponents. Rudd may soon discover similar Teflon attaching itself to his thick skin.

    But in the upcoming election Teflon will be an equal opportunity protector, since the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, has always been the most obvious beneficiary of the Howard-hater effect. In fact he inherited many of Howard’s enemies who, if it is possible, have become even more unhinged in the face of Abbott’s intellectual version of pragmatic social conservatism.

    Abbott has focused attention so astutely on the government’s failings that the spittle has barely had a chance to land on him yet.

    But, as government hard man Anthony Albanese signalled on the ABC’s Lateline on Tuesday night, with his blitzkrieg on Abbott as “a throwback”, “a huge risk to our economy”, “a huge risk to national security”, “the most extreme ideological leader” the Liberal Party has ever had the misfortune of harbouring, it’s clear Labor’s election strategy will be to destroy Abbott personally.

    Labor’s only glimmer of light in fading opinion polls has been that Abbott has not benefited much personally from the Prime Minister’s catastrophic loss of popularity, even though the party he leads is in a competitive position for the first time in three leaders.

    But, just as interpretations of Rudd’s decline have been skewed in favour of a progressive storyline, so too has Abbott’s success. They’re hating Rudd for the wrong reasons – all emissions trading scheme betrayal, not a prosaic cocktail of voter disappointments, from a cigarette tax to electrocution by pink batt, from a $600,000 education revolution canteen to FuelWatch and GroceryChoice, from record numbers of unauthorised boat arrivals to the new mining tax which threatens to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

    The line on Abbott’s success, even from some within his own party, is that he is simply the beneficiary of luck and good timing, having arrived at the leadership at the precise moment that Rudd’s fortunes were heading south; further, that his fundamental shortcomings are the reason he has been unable to turn Rudd’s popularity to his own advantage, as if any opposition leader engaging in hand-to-hand combat with a once-popular prime minister has ever emerged unscathed.

    An opposition leader who acts like a statesman and stands above the fray, enlisting henchmen to do the bruising work, may burnish his own reputation, but he doesn’t shift the polls like Abbott has. People expect you to have your own skin in the game.

    But this reluctance to give Abbott credit for the plunge in the government’s fortunes encourages potential challengers such as Joe Hockey and the failed opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, seen by the Fraser rump of the Liberals as the last hope against conservatism in the conservative party. Their chutzpah is astonishing.

    Thus we have a reinvigorated Turnbull giving a speech at the weekend containing a carefully worded sideswipe at his leader, while ostensibly criticising Rudd over climate change.

    ”Our efforts to deal with climate change have been betrayed by a lack of leadership, a political cowardice, the likes of which I have never seen in my lifetime.” There wouldn’t have been a political junkie in the country who didn’t think he was talking as much about Abbott as Rudd.

    Equally unhelpful to his leader, the former head of Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy, was news at the weekend that Hockey has rekindled the republic debate, for no apparent reason, by beginning talks with the Australian Republican Movement. That’s called wedging yourself.

    With the government bleeding on so many issues, on the eve of what was always going to be a crucial two weeks in Parliament, the weekend contributions of two of the opposition’s most innocent-eyed politicians were self-defeating, to say the least.

    In the case of our Prime Minister and Opposition Leader, if Teflon is the protection they receive from the hatred of their enemies, then mischief by their friends is the Kryptonite that makes them vulnerable.

    devinemiranda@hotmail.com

     

  • The duffer’s guide to the Resources Super Profits Tax

     

    The Government says the old tax system has failed to keep pace with the spiralling profits generated by the big miners. The miners believe the new tax is not a tax on “super profits” but on very mild profits.

    This is how the tax would work.

    Under the current system, mining companies pay 5 per cent of annual income to the state where they operate as royalties.

    A company earning $300 million in revenue would pay royalties of $15 million.

    It then pays federal company tax. This is calculated by deducting operating expenses of say $100 million, another $95 million for depreciation of equipment and $5 million for interest on money borrowed to pay for day-to-day running of the business.

    Related Coverage

    It also subtracts the $15 million royalty paid to the state. That gives a figure of $85 million which is taxed at 30 per cent – a total of roughly $26 million.

    When added to royalties it leaves a total tax bill of $41 million, (41 per cent tax.) Under the proposed super profits tax, companies still pay the same amount for royalties.

    The super tax kicks in after a company earns more than the government long-term bond rate (currently 5.7 per cent).

    To calculate the super tax on $300 million a company deducts the $100 million operating expenses, $95 million for depreciation and a capital allowance from the Government to offset set-up expenses of about $5 million.

    That leaves a total of $100 million, taxed at 40 per cent – or $40 million. The royalty already paid is then deducted, leaving a total of $25 million.

    Company tax at the new lower rate of 28 per cent is then calculated using the existing equation, except the $25 million super tax is also deducted, leaving a total of $60 million to be taxed.

    That would mean the company owed $17 million.

    When the royalty, super tax and company tax are combined it comes to $57 million – or an effective tax rate of 57 per cent.

    If a company fails to turn a profit, the government would reimburse 40 per cent of its initial investment.

    Lowering the company tax rate to 28 per cent means miners who make a small profit will pay less tax.

    The tax is retrospective and will be applied to projects already underway. The Government will reap upwards of $12 billion in the first two years, with a third going to a scheme to lift superannuation levies from 9 per cent to 12 per cent.

  • Labor facing by-election annihilation

     

    Related Coverage

    State Labor has leaked polling showing it expects to cop a record swing of up to 27 per cent this Saturday. The by-election also comes amid a backdrop of two ministers quitting over scandals.

    Premier Kristina Keneally has only bothered to visit the electorate four times thus far, while Mr O’Farrell has been there on more than 20 occasions.

    The Premier has said the demands of her job have stopped her visiting more but there is no doubt Labor probably does not want to see her associated with a large loss.

    She told The Daily Telegraph this month she expected a “very big swing” in the seat. “What’s concerning is they continue to raise with me what Karyn Paluzzano did and what’s been interesting is people will even say to me, ‘she was a good local member but she lied’,” she said.

    The by-election is being closely watched by federal Labor strategists, who acknowledge that Mr Rudd himself might be an issue, despite it being a State seat.

    A senior Labor source revealed internal Labor polling had shown many voters were now fed up with the Labor brand generally, both at a federal and state level, which could have serious implications for the Federal Government in NSW when it goes to the polls later this year.

     

  • Revolving door costs taxpayers millions

     

    One employee, understood to be Graeme Wedderburn, a former chief of staff to former premier Nathan Rees, was terminated after working 10 months but received $139,000 rather than the standard $35,500. Mr Wedderburn’s contract stipulated that he would be paid half of his annual salary if he was dumped.

    The second, who worked for seven months, received $96,000, $74,300 more than the guidelines.

    Mr Achterstraat said the Department of Premier and Cabinet should follow its own rules when spending taxpayer dollars. “The rules are clear on severance pay. There should be no special deals,” he said.

    ”The severance pay guidelines are a bit like the salary cap and like a salary cap they work best if everybody knows the rules and everyone sticks to them.”

    The report found most terminations followed the 2007 election – despite there being no change of government – the resignation of Morris Iemma in 2008 and the rolling of Nathan Rees last year.

    The director-general of the Department of Premier and Cabinet, Brendan O’Reilly, rejected the recommendation that severance should be paid only according to the guidelines, saying he intended to keep his right to make exemptions ”when appropriate”.

    Yesterday Ms Keneally said there were now no staff on a special deal. ”Nobody in my government has those sorts of arrangements,” she said.