Campaigns characterised by complacent timidity

Nicholson cartoon

THIS election marks a new trough in Australian politics with the near death of substantive issues and the coalescing of Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott around the same slogans and positions.

It is hardly a surprise because both sides are driven by their party research and that is essentially the same. The collapse of communism and the market imperative from globalisation heralded the eclipse of party ideology a generation past.Yet the dominance of party polling and safety-first campaigning has now corrupted even the leader's process of seeking an election mandate in the cause of policy belief.

The results are stark. Gillard has abandoned any pledge to address climate change by pricing carbon following Abbott's assault on such a tax. Abbott has abandoned any industrial relations reform agenda next term and accepts Gillard's Fair Work settlement because of his research-driven fears over the Work Choices bogy. In both cases the negative campaign proved too powerful. Gillard now brands herself a strong border protectionist like Abbott. She wants an offshore processing centre and said in Sunday's debate there is "a fair bit of agreement" with Abbott on boatpeople. On immigration, both leaders shun a big Australia in favour of a sustainable Australia. Gillard even points to BIS-Shrapnel forecasts to suggest little difference in the actual numbers.

Beneath conflicting rhetoric on the economy and fights over the magnitude of the stimulus, both sides occupy the same return-to-surplus trajectory. Indeed, on economic policy there are few differences on macro strategy. Liberal and Labor remain on the same personal income tax page. On foreign policy the differences are hardly significant and on the Afghanistan war their positions are similar.

There is nothing wrong with bipartisanship. But this election is conspicuous for lack of ambition in policy agendas and lack of frankness in addressing the issues. It reveals a complacent nation, politically timid, psychologically divorced from the economic crisis across the North Atlantic zone and reluctant to canvass the dilemmas inherent in its success as a high immigration, high growth, China-dependent, flexible economy, short on savings and deficient in infrastructure investment.

It reminds us again that reform is driven by crisis. Australia's success in Kevin Rudd's first term of avoiding recession during the global financial crisis may become our next great curse, bequeathing a mood of self-deluding drift. It is hard to date the change in our national debate but it may lie in the China-induced terms of trade boom that began in 2003, at the time of Howard's last term.

The historic post-1983 reform era is terminated. Australia was re-cast in economic and social terms as a more open and competitive nation during the Hawke-Keating-Howard period. Beneath the clashing interests of this age there was an abiding commitment to a new national direction.

It is striking how far the character of politics has changed even since the recent prime ministerships of Paul Keating and John Howard. While ruthless pragmatists, Keating and Howard were conviction politicians. In 1998, Howard ran on a GST-led tax reform, becoming the first incumbent in the democratic world to succeed on such a platform. His political advisers had warned him the GST was a dangerous negative. In 2007 Howard ran on the Work Choices reform, again defying his best political advice, only to be sunk spectacularly. If there is another possible date for the end of the reform era it is the Work Choices debacle both in its misconception and its defeat thereby turning the clock backwards on labour market reform to the early 1990s.

The legacy is a more risk-averse climate. The problem stretches beyond polling methods to the fading of party faiths. Just consider climate change and labour market reform.

In 2007, Rudd made Labor the party of the future by enshrining climate change action as integral to Labor's DNA. The surprise, however, is that such belief was merely cosmetic: when Labor was asked to fight for this faith as it had fought over past decades for better working conditions, it melted. Rudd and Gillard walked away, afraid of community resistance as shown in the polling. Gillard's speech last Friday is a milestone in this retreat.

She has now made pricing carbon hostage to a "community consensus", institutionalising investment uncertainty and confusion. Incredibly, she used the example of Medicare to justify this indecision. Yet the Whitlam and Hawke governments introduced Medicare in the absence of the consensus Gillard invokes. The truth is that Whitlam introduced the bills, saw them rejected in the Senate, called a 1974 double dissolution election that he won, watched the bills defeated again and then put them through a joint sitting against a sustained campaign far more intense than anything Gillard faces today on climate change. The comparison is shattering.

For the Liberals, labour market reform has been a generation-long economic policy faith since Howard pioneered the cause after the Coalition's 1983 defeat. A flexible labour market is basic to efficiency and fairness in a globalised world, as distinct from the regulation, awards and centralised umpire that Gillard has rekindled.

After its 2007 loss the Coalition had three years to devise a far more modest yet still reformist position. It failed. Abbott's retreat now is understandable yet testifies to the extent of Liberal intimidation and retreat on its core values.

Indeed, it is likely Labor's new laws will not be reversed until a future economic crisis assaults Australia.

Yes, there are some differences. Witness the mining tax, Abbott's opposition to the national broadband network and to Labor's proposal to lift superannuation contributions to 12 per cent of income.

Gillard is a committed leader astute in pushing the Labor Party interest. It is revealing, however, when asked in the debate to nominate examples of her courage that she picked the MySchool website and process.

This initiative should not be belittled but the idea that it defines Gillard's reformism is sad proof of the shrinking domain of political action.

This penetrates to the central issue for Labor: how persuasive is Gillard's pitch for re-election? While Gillard talks of a strong economy and sound health system, and attacks Abbott for cutting services, she offers little by way of reform, ambitious new policy or vision. It is as though Labor is shrinking into the market research.

Gillard's campaign lacks the energy and optimism of Rudd's in 2007 mainly because she carries the baggage of Labor's first term.

In a wider sense the timidity of Gillard and Abbott reveals the limits of modern politics, but Australia will pay the price from any slide into complacency.