Rudd's 2007 list of commitments may be too long

STYMIED on carbon trading, Labor appears unwilling to call a climate change election.

MANAGING expectations is important in all professions, but it is particularly important in politics.

This sometimes creates a conundrum for politicians seeking election. They need to make themselves appealing, which can involve over-reaching on election promises.

But if elected, expectations will be high and that is the point at which the hard task of fulfilling commitments begins.

On the evening of the 2007 election, I was involved with the Channel Nine election night coverage. In the pit, as it is known, a number of political operatives from both sides of the major party divide take their seats to help analyse the data on the seat-by-seat contests as the results trickle in from the Australian Electoral Commission.

Once it was clear Kevin Rudd had defeated John Howard and the Liberals, one of the Liberal operatives made the point that while first-term opposition was difficult, "Rudd has set himself some pretty hard to achieve KPIs". That's key performance indicators, a fancy term for election commitments.

He was right, the list of commitments is a long one. Rudd claimed he would introduce an emissions trading scheme by 2010. Even before the Coalition blocked his scheme (after Malcolm Turnbull said it would support it, not much certainty there) Rudd had put the starting date back to 2011.

Rudd said climate change was "the greatest moral challenge" of our lifetimes.

Yet with his emissions trading scheme blocked twice in the Senate, he appears unwilling to risk fighting an early election on this issue of such importance.

We were told the winding back of WorkChoices would not trample over conditions and flexibilities negotiated and passed over the preceding decade and a half. Yet once elected, Labor went about unwinding reforms negotiated with the Australian Democrats in 1997 and reforms enacted by Paul Keating in the early 1990s.

These included flexibility in the non-union collective agreement stream, and the potential now for pattern bargaining.

In the area of health reform, Rudd committed to "fixing public hospitals" and said that if he had not made progress towards that aim by mid-way through this year he would take a plan to the people by way of referendum for a federal takeover of public hospitals.

On Monday, at the Council of Australian Governments, Rudd did nothing more than reannounce health funding measures from the last budget, and we are no closer to hospitals being "fixed" than we were two years ago. A federal takeover is still not on the agenda.

As opposition health spokesman Peter Dutton says: "Kevin Rudd now sounds just like another Labor state premier -- promising to fix health at an election but then not doing anything in between elections."

Throw in broken promises to retain universal private health rebates and Rudd hasn't lived up to his election commitments in what is supposed to be a core Labor policy area.

There are many other election commitments Rudd has not fulfilled, such was his overreach when making promises to ensure he won his way into office.

But the policy areas mentioned are of particular interest to business leaders, whether we are talking about companies planning for an ETS, businesses trying to rearrange their employment contracts or organisations in the private health sector.

While the public has become used to politicians over-promising and under-delivering, the business community needs certainty in government decision-making.

Good business practice necessarily requires planning for the future. That is one of the reasons businesses hire well-paid former political operatives to give them advice on government matters.

These political insiders don't just open doors to ministers' offices, as is popularly alleged. They also use their knowledge of government and individual ministers to help business organisations understand which promises are "core" and "non-core", as Howard famously distinguished between his election commitments of 1996.

But Rudd hasn't learned his lesson after more than two years in power. He continues to rhetorically overreach with his policy commitments, leaving businesses to navigate their way through the uncertainty of which announcements will ultimately become law and which won't ever get there.

The decision to take over the national broadband network is a case in point. The private sector didn't warm to the NBN because it saw it as uneconomic, so Rudd decided the government would go it alone and build it at an initial cost of $43 billion, seeking private investment down the track. Some commentators doubt it will ever happen, or if it does it will not reach the 90 per cent of homes and businesses initially promised.

In a hi-tech economy that is the kind of uncertainty businesses, in particular, do not need.

At a superficial level, Rudd looks like a prime minister who has lived up to his promises. He ratified the Kyoto Protocol, apologised to indigenous Australians and embarked on an education revolution (or skirmish depending on what value you place on laptops and school halls). But the detail of what Rudd delivers on big policy commitments is less impressive. In time, Rudd may be seen to have over-promised and under-delivered on the major reforms he pledged to achieve.