Re: Aus Federal Politics thread (XII)

[Bradman]

Maybe. Now get a politician to say it.

[horace]

more chance of them spitting on the flag

[horace]

First Dog's take the MM's Cabinet Kerfuffle.... erm...reshuffle

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/22/-sp-the-reshuffle

[JGK]

Quality from FD.

snigger @ "wide on".

[JGK]

Meanwhile Macquarie Radio (skullys' shock jock heroes) merges with Fairfax Radio (bunch of pinkos).

Should be fun.

[horace]

aye...Expect Hadley to be more red faced than usual. The Parrot will be in a flap

[JGK]

aye...Expect Hadley to be more red faced than usual.  The Parrot will be in a flap

Actually, I can pretty much guarantee that he won't be in one.

[horace]

I really do not get spiv radio...radio here, aside from Mitchell and Jack Elliot's little boy is pretty calm

[Ethics? The Gall!]

I really do not get spiv radio...

its designed to appeal to people like skully. of course you dont

[horace]

Yesterday the mean and trickys cut the funding to peak homelessness and housing organisations ...who wants national attention on homelessness let alone an evidence base about it?

[embee]

ACCUSING governments of not having a narrative is probably the most common criticism made of them.

There is an evergreen truth that governments must be able to reduce a broad variety of complicated policies into a simple story or narrative.

To be effective, the story must follow the standard literary conventions established by the earliest three-act plays. The familiar linear narrative structure should have: a beginning or setting (Act 1); a problem (Act 2); and a resolution (Act 3). But whereas novels have hundreds of pages to develop the narrative, a government must explain its setting, problem and resolution in a few sentences.

So the task is to explain everything you are doing across every part of government with a setting, conflict and resolution story, encompassing a theme everyone is familiar with and understands — in a few sentences. This task was hard enough for government when everyone read the same few newspapers, watched the same handful of television news channels and had no internet, or YouTube, or Twitter.

Messaging from government is much more difficult now because any single person is able to reach wide audiences effortlessly and instantly via social media. It is small wonder that governments get criticised for failing to deliver a narrative in the age of the 24-hour news cycle with its multiple platforms, obsession with personality and conflict, and the preference for the news of the day over more detailed analysis of policy issues.

That political narratives are now harder to communicate does not mean that this government does not have one. Tony Abbott’s is a thematically familiar, very old and resonant story, full of wisdom about the human condition. It is that of the Ant and the Grasshopper and was first told by Aesop in ancient Greece. The setting (Act 1) is the end of Australia’s age of easy privilege. Just as Aesop’s grasshopper spent its long summer of uninterrupted privilege failing to prepare for difficult times ahead, so did Labor mishandle the good times.

Australia was driven quickly out of the global financial crisis, more by China’s stimulus package than by our own. Chinese domestic construction drove superheated resource prices and supported our mining construction and production. The terms of trade under Labor were as good as they have been in our modern history and our privileged position continued to drive good revenue growth and employment.

But the good times were never going to last forever and, even in their midst, the warning signs of future difficulties were detectable. Instead of fixing the roof while the sun was shining, Labor failed to engage in substantive economic reforms aimed at reversing a decline in productivity; instead it committed to big spending increases that depended on a mining tax that earned no money. It also structured into the budget huge spending increases, which might win votes but presumed against all common sense that resources prices and the revenue they generated would stay freakishly high forever.

The problem (Act 2) for us on coming to government was simple to comprehend but tough to fix. There exists a dynamic global economy where a whole range of Australian goods and services that previously had been relatively sheltered are being swiftly exposed to intense global competition. This new economy developed at a time when Labor created a diabolical budgetary mess, believing that the nation could continually spend more than it earned without consequence. The crux of the dilemma was that just doing nothing to arrest the Labor path to $667 billion worth of debt and $123bn worth of deficits meant we would end up spending $2.8bn worth of interest every month to service the debt. This in turn would make the debt worse and before long would seriously limit the nation’s ability to invest in infrastructure (a key to productivity growth).

The solution (Act 3) is tough, and has two parts. First, the Coalition set to work to address productivity issues. We removed the drags on the economy caused by the mining and carbon taxes, producing the biggest drop in electricity prices on record. We have stopped the long years of wasteful spending on corporate welfare and finalised free trade agreements that Labor let drift; Australian companies have a fighting chance in key new markets. These FTAs cover 73 per cent of our exports and so allow services, agriculture and manufacturing to get at the markets they need to grow. The Coalition also has removed $2bn worth of red tape and 57,000 pages of legislation that was contributing to slowing productivity. It is taking the tough decisions to sell assets such as Medibank, raising $5.7bn and reinvesting the funds in infrastructure. Our infrastructure package involves committing $50bn and leveraging $125bn. The government also has moved through $1 trillion worth of environmental approvals, abolished 76 wasteful authorities and boards and reinstated employee share schemes.

Second, Joe Hockey is doing his best to fix the budget and stop paying the mortgage with the credit card. This is a difficult and far from popular process, with Labor opposed to $28bn worth of savings including, bizarrely, $5bn of savings it proposed. The Prime Minister’s story is real, consistent and well known. He is the ultimate Ant, prepared to face the fact the Grasshopper’s long easy summer is over.

Christian Porter is parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister

[Bradman]

That masters in political theory was not wasted time

[skully]

While in Govt Bill Shorten happily called Tony Abbott "Dr. No" for 6 years. In opposition he's adopted the role of "Dr. FO" (Fark Orf - I wanna fark this country big time)

[Bradman]

More importantly he wants to fark the country on Tony's watch and he has surrogates to do most of the dirty work.

[skully]

Aye Q, the sad reality of Politics.

[Bradman]

The harm one does to a man must be such as to obviate any fear of revenge.

[horace]

MM makes surprise visit to the os troops...hardly a surprise!

I expect they would be delighted to see a tory PM continuing in the brown shirt tradition of sending troops overseas for meaningless and un-winnable wars and then turning up for p[hoto opps. Tho they may have felt a bit churlish about the lack of adequate pay for their efforts

[lardbucket]

Has he been more than Rudd and Gillard already?

[horace]

less is more Lardy...Rudd was/is uber bright and had influence internationally....Gillard did not make waves and went with the flow...neither pursued policies I was comfortable with.

By contrast, the MM is a figure of fun internationally...with even the most conservative of Pomgolian Tories describing him as "Flat Earth Tony". We have also managed to offside the Chinese, which is pretty hard to do.

[lardbucket]

Rudd was and is a bloated caricature, a balloon of barely contained bile and pus, and was as you know detested by all his minions. He had all the sincerity of Eddie McGuire; the classic 'mudguard', shiny on top and all shit underneath. I haven't detested a politician on either side of politics more.

[horace]

Aye. I have loathed him for close to 22 years. (I met him when he worked for Goss as a bureaucrat and before my exile in QBillyland). Even then he was a complete egotistical maniac.

But he was smart and as PM did no damage internationally. In fact he was able with all his chuzpah to wield some influence. He should have immediately pulled the troops from the disgraceful war in Iraq but played the US lapdog as ljh had previously done

[Bradman]

Great man, great policies, opponents who took bastadry to hitherto unheard of extremes, horribly struck down in his prime. We have never seen, nor will we see his like again.

[horace]

???....I agree we will not see his like again. But have you jettisoned reason for 2015.

Of course the brown shirt born to rule types gave the ALP stick. They can never accept not being in power.

Yes he he had some decent policies. However he was nigh on impossible to work with and possessed an ego a mountaineer could not scale.

Being a smart qbilly seemed to have left him with the classical chips on both shoulders as deep as open cut mines

[Bradman]

Actually I was writing the first few lines of MM's eulogy as given by Bolt. Of course he'd have to thank Noel Pearson (or Noel's speechwriter).

I should be a good boy. I've been asked to do some work for his dept.

[horace]

no speechwriter could infest Noel's speeches as well as Noel himself

[Sponsored content]