The Queensland takeover of the federal ALP campaign is really starting to pay dividends. Consider the budget. My impressions of the media coverage is that whatever Costello and Howard deliver will be regarded as just a gambit to win the next election. It won’t matter whether it is good policy or not, it will be tainted.
Queensland takeover? I’ve just been watching coverage of the Labor Day march in Brisbane, and while you couldn’t miss Rudd, you also couldn’t miss Wayne Swan walking one row back. One of Rudd’s most critical acts after he won the leadership was his reconciliation with Wayne Swan. This reassembled two of the crucial pieces of the team that pushed Wayne Goss to victory in Queensland in 1989. A campaign that was characterised by almost flawless execution of “search and destroy” rhetorical exercises.
That’s the sort of rhetoric that is being applied against the Howard government, and it’s working.
Take tax cuts. You can’t logically criticise the federal government for being the biggest taxing in Australia’s history, as Swan does, and at the same time oppose tax cuts. But that’s the thrust of Labor’s attack. Tax cuts, we’re told, will lead to higher interest rates. They’re backed-up by market economists and treasury bureaucrats, whose grasp of inflationary theory is in the grip of some long-dead economist. When you don’t have indexed tax rates, tax cuts aren’t just inevitable each budget – they’re a right.
And if governments raise more money than they need for committed expenditure, then they have a duty to refund it, rather than find novel ways to spend it just because they have it. It’s not inflationary to return assets to their rightful owners!
Howard’s problem is that he isn’t applying the same focus-group honed rhetorical warfare that Labor is applying. If he doesn’t invest in some armaments soon he’s definitely going to lose the next election. There’s no way he can spend his way out if every and any sort of fiscal action is branded as being “mean, tricky and out of touch”. Now who said that?