Political leadership not up to the tasks at hand

Does Julia Gillard think all she needs to do in the new parliamentary paradigm is manage the political delicacies of minority government?

Does Julia Gillard think all she needs to do in the new parliamentary paradigm is manage the political delicacies of minority government?

If she does then she should think again.

Treasury's blue and red books lay out the challenges ahead, and they are anything but minimal.

From infrastructure and productivity growth requirements to question marks over planning for initiatives such as the National Broadband Network, to concerns about the bipartisan race to the bottom on population growth, Treasury has made it clear the next mining boom won't be all beer and skittles.

Our two-speed economy will need attention from the politicians. Policy settings will be all-important.

Treasury has done more than just lay bare the challenges ahead. It has also highlighted the failures of Labor's first term -- an indication that Labor was right to punish former prime minister Kevin Rudd by stripping him of his job.

He had, quite clearly we can now see, done a poor job and will go down not only as one of the shortest-serving PMs, but one of the worst.

Gillard and her entourage argued that they deposed a first-term prime minister because he couldn't sell Labor's message, but the truth is more complex.

Rudd had to go because he had failed to follow through on initiatives, and failed to correct problems previously identified.

The former are matters of mismanagement once in power -- errors that new, inexperienced line-ups in government often suffer from.

The latter reflect a failure of political courage. Rudd pointed to failures from the John Howard years when he was in opposition: low productivity, profligate spending that was only sustainable because of revenue streams from the mining boom, and lagging infrastructure investment.

But once in power, Rudd showed little ability to target areas in need of fixing. His scattergun approach left too many tasks unfulfilled. Now Treasury warns our prosperity is at risk because of that.

It would be easy to go on highlighting problems Rudd didn't address because he was too consumed with winning the daily news cycle -- a case of winning the battles before losing the war (his leadership) -- but the two most profound aspects to Australia's underperformance of late relate directly to Gillard and her new line-up, as well as Tony Abbott and his.

Neither inspire much hope. The mutual focus on parliamentary tactics to either hold power or grab it, depending on one's perspective, will distract from achievements in this term in office. Every failure of Rudd's was Gillard's too. She was his deputy prime minister, one of the gang of four with direct policy responsibility for waste and mismanagement in areas such as the school building program.

In fact, perhaps Rudd's biggest failure -- backing away from putting a price on carbon and being prepared to fight an election on the issue if prevented from doing so by the opposition -- was as much Gillard's as his.

She was behind the decision to dump the emissions trading scheme, a decision that removed business certainty and cost Rudd his job (ironically giving Gillard a promotion).

On the other side of the parliament, Abbott built his political success with profligate spending and big-government initiatives, such as his direct action plan for climate change. On the campaign trail, he proposed spending more than Labor and his purported budget savings were helped along by erroneous accounting, such proposing to sell Medibank Private to pay off debt while simultaneously continuing to use yearly dividends from the organisation for future spending.

One of Australia's biggest challenges, as the next mining boom is upon us, is skills shortages. So what did the opposition do? Fuel a debate about cutting immigration for base political point-scoring. And a weak government happily played along.

The opposition spruiks its worth based on the qualities of the Howard era. In theory that would seem to make sense, as Abbott points out many in his team were part of Howard's team.

But Howard's period in government was defined by reformist successes in the first half of its life and a sometimes lazy approach later. Like most governments, it helped to grow Australia with good public policy initiatives in its first two terms -- a goods and services tax, trade reforms, industrial relations reform that didn't go too far and bank regulatory changes -- before battening down the hatches and focusing on winning elections.

The Abbott Liberals left over from the Howard years by and large made names for themselves in the second half of the Howard era -- the poorer period in office.

The names who did the heavy lifting in the first half, Peter Costello, Peter Reith and David Kemp (he tried on the education front but that was a bridge too far even back then), are long gone from the parliamentary team.

Even Abbott only entered cabinet on the eve of the 2001 election, in workplace relations, where the hard work had already been done by Reith.

So as we contemplate how to manage the mining boom and the many challenges the nation faces -- such as tax reform and abandonment of inefficient industries such as manufacturing -- we are left to rely on weathervanes like Abbott and political scaredy cats like Gillard and Wayne Swan (who appears better suited to winning promotion than policy arguments). It is hardly a recipe for raising expectations.