New government of quiet achievers
February 2nd, 2008 Posted in Pets Guide Rudd the diplomat and bureaucrat has his government working
hard but without drawing attention to itself.
TOMORROW marks two months since the Rudd Government was
sworn in. Would you really know there’s a new government running
the country? Of the four other new governments to have taken office
federally during the past 40 years %26#151; Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke,
Howard %26#151; surely this one has had the quietest induction.
Gough Whitlam was in such a hurry straight after the 1972
election that he set up a two-man ministry with deputy Lance
Barnard and set about working through a long shopping list of
changes before the full cabinet was established. The media, the old
political elites and a fair-sized chunk of the voting public were
shocked. In 1975, well, it was 1975 and the burners were on high
for a long time courtesy of the Dismissal. Everything was
contentious, and the Fraser government was able to present every
single thing it said or did as a necessary part of its massive
restoration job after the destruction of the Whitlam years.
The next Coalition government followed a similar tack. Within
days of the election of the Howard government in 1996, a number of
senior public servants were, in career terms, taken outside and
shot, and the term “Beazley’s black hole” was coined %26#151; a
tremendously effective political epithet. At the same time, John
Howard reframed the public debate as he championed the end of
“political correctness” and the lifting of restrictions on what was
acceptable for public discussion.
During those first few months under Howard, the message from the
Coalition was that terrible wrongs were being righted; a sense of
barely contained rage at the awfulness of the Keating years was
never far away from the Howard government’s pronouncements. The
message was very clear to the public and to the bureaucracy:
there’s a new boss in charge and things are going to be done
differently.
As for the previous new Labor government, headed by Bob Hawke,
again it was all hands on deck. Only days after the election, Hawke
unveiled a hitherto unknown budget blowout and used it to attack
the Liberals’ economic credibility. Preaching consensus, Hawke
talked crisis. Within six weeks of being elected, he gathered
together the leaders of the business community, welfare groups and
the unions for a five-day national economic summit that issued a
joint communique on what was needed to regenerate the economy.
So far we’ve had nothing like that, and the truth is, we’re not
going to. Even allowing for the Christmas-New Year holiday period
that’s fallen during the Rudd Government’s first two months, it has
to be said that the strong early signs are that this will be a
softly-softly administration. That’s not to suggest it’s done
nothing. The first order of business was ratification of the Kyoto
Protocol, followed by the dismantling of the Pacific Solution, a
slightly more aggressive approach towards Japan on whaling, the
confirmation of the pullout of combat troops from Iraq, the
reintroduction of the permit system on Aboriginal land and, most
controversially, the proposed apology to the so-called stolen
generations.
On the practical side, the Government hasn’t had the option of
miraculously discovering a shocking budget shortfall; the Treasury
now consistently underestimates projected revenues. Consequently,
it’s sought to establish its economic supremacy by approaching the
issue from the other direction. Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner’s
attack on the Howard government’s spending patterns and his
warnings about spending cuts have been quietly effective chiefly
because a good proportion of the public had worked out that the
Coalition had lost its rigour on expenditure in 2006-2007. It
appears that Howard and his ministers spent $200 million on
advertising in their last year in office. Even for the least
engaged voter, that’s hard to miss.
Simultaneously, the news on inflation %26#151; an underlying rate
of 3.6 per cent %26#151; is allowing the Treasurer Wayne Swan to
slowly build a case that the economic legacy of the Howard
government is not all good. Swan has toggled between mild gloom and
restrained optimism in recent weeks, his choice of message
seemingly dependent on the latest piece of macroeconomic or market
mini-data and the audience to which he’s speaking. With the boom in
China and India powering our economy along, he has a fine line to
tread because our problem is too much growth. If Australia
continues to overheat, the consequences could be terrible.
In the hands of other politicians coming into office after 11
years in the wilderness, the temptation to establish dramatic new
rhetorical beachheads would be too much to resist. But the
judgement by not just Rudd but by most of his senior ministers is
that what most Australians want right now is an understated style
of politics, one built on clear processes and results.
That’s why each day seems to bring a new round-table meeting of
state and federal ministers. It’s also why, in contrast with
Howard’s 1996 night of the long knives, all public service
mandarins have kept their places and why Swan’s criticisms of Peter
Costello’s handling of rising inflation in his final year as
treasurer have so far been, in the context of the normal Australian
political argy-bargy, relatively mild. In a real sense, the
Government’s focus needs to be on policy delivery rather than the
politics.
This is because Rudd, Swan, Tanner and Deputy Prime Minister
Julia Gillard all know that in the electorate’s mind a question
mark remains attached to Labor’s capacity to guide the nation
through rough economic times. There seems little doubt among most
voters that Rudd, at the very least among his colleagues and
certainly compared with Howard, understands the big challenges of
health, education, climate change and security. They’ve also bought
his argument about the economy too %26#151; about capacity
constraints and innovation.
But can he deliver economically? Rudd knows he has to, otherwise
this stint in office won’t last long. In essence, the Government
has cleared the decks for its first year. Defeating inflation
through spending cuts, introducing as much as possible of its
industrial relations framework and formulating a response to the
Garnaut reports on climate change are the goals.
Expect meetings %26#151; lots of meetings. Don’t expect anything
like Whitlam’s crash-through-or-crash or Keating’s
downhill-no-pole-one-ski. Unlike the orator-negotiator Hawke or the
lawyer Howard, Rudd’s formative years were spent as a diplomat and
a bureaucrat. In both fields, there are two operating principles:
that it’s preferable that a lot of your efforts don’t draw too much
attention and that you work towards the medium to long term. That’s
how Rudd will govern, until political necessity forces him to
change.
Shaun Carney is associate editor.
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