The standard Labor criticism of last night’s budget is that it is a “clever” ploy by a government which will do and say anything to win the next election. As I noted in my last post, such “search and destroy” rhetoric can have a devastating effect.
But Labor wants to be careful. A logical extension of suggesting that the budget is all just about politics is to leave yourself open to the charge that it doesn’t matter what the government says or does, Labor will never acknowledge even one good thing.
One line of rebuttal for the Prime Minister and Treasurer, and a theme they might consider developing over the coming months would be to say:
“According to the Labor Party everything we do is just about winning the next election. Now I happen to believe that if you govern well the people may reward you at the next election. So a consequence of a good budget is that you are more likely to be re-elected if you deliver one. Would anyone suggest that a party in power should do anything else?
Good government isn’t a clever ploy to win the next election, it’s what you are elected to deliver.
Australians should ask themselves why Labor is so certain that everything we do has only one purpose. Is it because they themselves would say and do anything to get into power? It’s one thing to promise, another thing to deliver.”

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?

I wish I had, but then, not being German, perhaps I couldn’t have, written it, that is. I’ve just come upon this piece courtesy of a new service called StumbledUpon. “Evil Americans, Poor Mullahs” by Claus Christian Malzahn, Spiegel Online’s Berlin Bureau Chief lays bear some of the stupidities of “intelligent” European thought, specifically German thought, on the US.
His opening paragraphs give the flavour of it:

Forty-eight percent of Germans think the United States is more dangerous than Iran, a new survey shows, with only 31 percent believing the opposite. Germans’ fundamental hypocrisy about the US suggests that it’s high time for a new bout of re-education.
The Germans have believed in many things in the course of their recent history. They’ve believed in colonies in Africa and in the Kaiser. They even believed in the Kaiser when he told them that there would be no more political parties, only soldiers on the front.
Not too long afterwards, they believed that Jews should be placed into ghettos and concentration camps because they were the enemies of the people. Then they believed in the autobahn and that the Third Reich would ultimately be victorious. A few years later, they believed in the Deutsche mark. They believed that the Berlin Wall would be there forever and that their pensions were safe. They believed in recycling as well as in cheap jet travel. They even believed in a German victory at the soccer World Cup.
Now they believe that the United States is a greater threat to world peace than Iran. This was the by-no-means-surprising result of a Forsa opinion poll commissioned by Stern magazine. Young Germans in particular — 57 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds, to be precise — said they considered the United States more dangerous than the religious regime in Iran.

Click on the link above, or here It’s a brilliant, self-lacerating read. Oh, and I stumbled upon StumbledUpon because they were directing significant amounts of traffic to OLO, but they’re worth checking out as well.

(more…)

An example of when the “A” list should be given the “Big A” is this gem of an interview with the newly pre-selected Labor Candidate for Boothby, Nicole Cornes. When Mrs Cornes saw the photo of herself from the interview she said ” . . . first thing in the morning when you wake up, you think ‘oh god, I should have had my eyebrows waxed’! As my mum says, when you look after the pennies the pounds will look after themselves. Good to see Nicole’s got her priorities right too.
And I did notice that the press conference occurred straight outside a Beauty Salon, so perhaps it was a doorstop.
The Liberals aren’t taking anything for granted and are said to have already approached the Labor Party with the idea of a reality TV show involving Cornes and their rumoured star candidate for Griffith, Paris Hilton. To be a fusion of “The Biggest Loser” and “1 versus 100” the major stumbling block appears to be the time that it will take to process Ms Hilton’s refugee status, somewhere on an impecunious South Pacific Island, so that she can become an Australian citizen in time for the election. This has led to suggestions that the parties should buy into the Survivor franchise.

The “enlist the ‘A’ list” trend in the ALP is proceeding apace with the decision to remove preselections from the hands of local branch members with the avowed intent of placing people like Greg Combet, George Newhouse, Colonel Mike Kelly and George Williams into key seats. It is further evidence for what I call the “corporatisation of politics”, and I’m unsure whether it is good or bad news for democracy.
While there is no certainty that local pre-selection councils or plebiscites will elect good candidates, the need to woo and win over locals ensures that candidates have grassroots political skills and decentralises power within party structures. It doesn’t prevent “star” candidates being preselected, but it makes their road a little harder, and it broadens the definition of who might be considered a star.
A centralised party undoubtedly is easier to manouevre. That might work in your electoral favour when a party’s administration is solid and skilful, but can condemn a party to a downward spiral when it’s not.
Whether or not it’s good for democracy, it does help to tip the media balance more in favour of Rudd. To get on an “A” list you have to be good at media manipulation, amongst your other communications skills. One of the factors in Wayne Goss’s win in Queensland in 1989 (apart from the Fitzgerald Commission!) was the perception that Labor had rebuilt itself and put good candidates into place. However, while some of them, like Goss, became stars I can’t think of one that fits the celebrity bill like some of the names being hawked around by Rudd.
Whether it tips the electoral balance is another thing. Lining up 100s of “A” listers to support the Republic was one reason the referendum went down. Australians only have to see a tall poppy and they’re itching to rev-up the Victa mower.