One way or another the Government was determined to get the focus back on health today.  Throughout the week Question Time had been a back-and-forth between a Government grilling itself incessantly about health – whether its own health policies or those of Tony Abbott as Health minister – and an Opposition determined to steer discussion onto insulation, boatloads of asylum seekers or school construction projects. Read more »

Bass is the electorate in the north-east of Tasmania, based on Launceston and including the Tamar valley to the north, the rural north-east, and Flinders Island. The middle class suburbs of Launceston are the largest strong Liberal area in the state; if Tasmania had single-member electorates like the rest of the country, this might have been the only place the Liberals recently would have won any seats.

Downtown Launceston

This year, however, they’d be winning seats all over the place. Labor is on the nose, and that’s clearly in evidence in the north. Liberal (and Greens) posters, for example, all feature the name of the party prominently, but Labor posters just have a small and inconspicuous Labor logo down at the bottom. Read more »

Senate obstructionism as a political theme remains fairly unexplored under this Government, for a couple of reasons.  We’re all innately sceptical of Governments’ insistence that the Senate quit amending or blocking their measures.  After all, we saw what happened when the Howard Government, in a splendid example of being careful what you wish for, got a Senate majority. And if we put aside 2004, voters appear happy with the idea of the Senate acting as a brake on executive power.

But there must by definition be a line somewhere between acting as a responsible check and improving legislation, and outright obstructionism. The idea of a government “not being allowed to govern”, with its hints of 1975, is a potentially powerful one if a Government is popular – which this one still remains. Read more »

This afternoon the Prime Minister announced that Peter Garrett has lost control of the home insulation program to Greg Combet, who will oversee the new program as part of Penny Wong’s enhanced Climate Change and Energy Efficiency portfolio.  With Parliament not sitting for a week and media coverage of the affair falling away, Rudd has moved quickly to ensure the wind-up of the current program – likely to continue to cause political difficulties for the Government – and the roll-out of the replacement renewable subsidy program announced by Garrett last week are overseen by a safer and less controversial pair of hands than Garrett’s.

Combet is clearly Rudd’s Mr Fixit: he played a similar clean-up role when brought in to Wong’s portfolio last year to negotiate amendments to the CPRS after Wong had lost control of the debate over the Government’s emissions trading plans.  His trade union background and his long experience of negotiating with businesses makes him the ideal minister to oversee the Government’s efforts to placate workers and businesses affected by the closure of the current program. Read more »

This morning I dashed into Medibank in order to (finally) take out private health insurance and avoid (another) 2% bump in premiums before my birthday tomorrow.

And then I logged on to the Age to read (another) op-ed telling me (again) what I already believe: that private health-care is an evil publicly funded leech that plays on people’s middle-of-the-night fears and that if we had any guts we would crush it beneath our heels instead of continuing to invite it to suck our blood.

Or, as Kenneth Davidson more elegantly expressed it, “its major purpose is to give its customers the chance to jump the queue for elective surgery while allowing providers to over-service and over-charge their patients.” Read more »

When Tony Abbott was attacking Kevin Rudd yesterday over the Government’s despicable $500m handout to free-to-air television, suggesting “it looks like an election-year bribe”, he neglected to mention his own recent dealings with media moguls.

Crikey understands that Abbott had a secret meeting with News Ltd supremo Rupert Murdoch on Sunday morning and had breakfast with him.  Murdoch was in Australia to celebrate his mother Elisabeth’s 101st birthday last week.

“I think there’s nothing wrong with ministers and moguls having meetings,” Abbott told talkback radio this morning.  “That is probably a natural part of life and it’s probably a good thing that they meet from time to time and I don’t think it’s necessary that there be a tape recorder going that we all get access to, but I guess it’s not a great look when it looks more like a social encounter than a business meeting.” Read more »

Only one thing is certain from the foil insulation debacle – Peter Garrett must go to prison.

Apparently the mere act of providing funding for a voluntary program of household insulation makes Peter Garrett guilty of manslaughter, according to an Opposition furiously and sanctimoniously overplaying its hand.  “If Mr Garrett were a company director in NSW he would be charged with industrial manslaughter,” says Tony Abbott.

Also, according to Abbott, in Arabia, if you don’t burp after a meal they chop your head off.

Garrett - off to Long Bay, baldy! Read more »

In the Crikey email edition today I lamented how poorly this Opposition was pursuing two of the biggest scandals in what has been a relatively trouble-free term for the Rudd Government: the outrageous handover of $250m from taxpayers to the free-to-air TV networks under the guise of assisting them to meet the local content obligations, and the bungling of the Green Loans and foil insulation programs by Peter Garrett’s Environment Department.

There was more than a trace of blood in the water around Garrett as he called a press conference right before Question Time today.  Several journalists wondered whether he was going to resign, although given the lack of pressure from the Opposition, it didn’t quite scan that Garrett was either going to offer his head or was going to be pushed by Rudd.

In fact Garrett had called the press conference to announce a full auditing of houses affected by the foil insulation issue, took a number of aggressive questions, then raced off to Question Time where, it was expected, he would face a grilling. Read more »

Very interesting post this morning by Peter Brent at Mumble. Under the heading “Rhetorically Challenged”, he says:

During the Howard government’s first term 1996-8, it attracted the label “rhetorically challenged” several times, usually from disappointed supporters. (Coined by Michael Duffy?) You could say the same about this lot. … Lindsay Tanner alone seems able to get an economic/political message across without dumbing it down.

It’s a good point, but I’m not sure “rhetoric” is quite the right word here. To me, calling the Howard government “rhetorically challenged” calls up echoes of the stuff that Paul Keating was able to come up with – soaring and inspiring one minute, witty and incisive the next – but that Howard and his team couldn’t. Read more »

The nasty maternalistic state

Sole parents and the unemployed beware! Jenny Macklin is trying to take half your income away. From July in the NT, and 2011 for the rest of the country, she wants to implement the most drastic change to our social security system ever. And almost nobody knows about it. She is expecting support from the very conservative Opposition front bench to have the legislation passed quickly so she can impose these new measures as soon as possible despite almost universal opposition from a wide range of groups. Read more »

Doing a disservice to many schools and their efforts is probably the worst sin of both the My School website and the various media efforts to interpret the results.

The major sin is that there is little in the available in the figures that show what value the school adds to the mix of children that attend. There is not much merit in a school that takes in mainly bright children with considerable advantages and turn them out as still bright children with considerable advantage. There is considerable merit in a school that takes in children who have not had the advantages and substantially increases their life chances. This type of input is not measured, although education bureaucracies have value adding scores for their schools.

We also do not have a cost benefit score, which looks at how much is spent on children both by parents and public funding, so extra financial resources and facilities are not included. Some estimates can be made by looking at student staff ratios and non teaching staff supports which are not highlighted in the present reporting.

And there are other problems!

Read more »

Sri Lankans have been voting today in a “tense” presidential election. President Mahinda Rajapakse has another 22 months of his term to run, but – most unusually for presidential systems – he has the power to call an early election, and did so to cash in on his presumed popularity from the defeat of the Tamils last year to end Sri Lanka’s civil war.

Unfortunately for Rajapakse, he is being challenged by the one person who could claim equal credit for the military victory, General Sarath Fonseka. Both candidates are promising national reconciliation, and in both cases (but especially Rajapakse’s) that needs to be taken with a very large grain of salt. A close contest is expected. Read more »