Politics
Political productivity
“Political productivity is booming”.
So starts Chris Wallace’s essay The might on the hill in the Saturday Paper. Wallace, from the University of Canberra’s school of business and government, applies a productivity approach to politics, and gives the government top marks for the smoothness and efficiency of its political management.
His essay is also about the government’s policy productivity. It’s getting on with the job of public administration.
His assessment would no doubt be even more positive had he written it after the Prime Minister’s attendance at the G20 and APEC meetings.
We would probably have to back to the early years of the Howard government to find a government so competent in its political management.
Analysis of a political threat ignored
The Coalition’s misfortunes have lessons for all political parties.
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age are running a three-part series on the Morrison years. This first instalment – Only one man could save Scott Morrison from himself. And he chose not to – is on an open site (the others will be paywalled).
In part it’s about the relationship between Morrison and Frydenberg – probably of interest to political historians.
But it’s also about how Morrison, and some others close to him, failed to appreciate the electoral threat of its neglect of climate change.
They just didn’t want to face up to the issue of climate change. One reason is that the Coalition had (and still has) a large number of seats in Queensland – 23 seats before the election, and still holding 21 of the state’s 30 seats.
The established political wisdom is that a party cannot afford to lose a single seat, but that idea can make it hard for a party to sacrifice some seats in order to make greater gains elsewhere. The same can happen to any party that has a geographical concentration of support.
The other reason is that denial of climate change became part of the Coalition’s defining identity. They didn’t want to see it, even when it was setting fire to the country.
There are plenty of things our politicians don’t want to see – worsening wealth inequality, and the need to raise more public revenue, to name two.
Refugees’ hopes dashed once again
Remember Labor’s pre-election promises of major reforms of refugee policies? Remember the way we celebrated the release of the Nadesalingams – the so-called Biloela Family? Surely this was the first move in a more morally defensible approach to refugees.
But it wasn’t.
Martyn Goddard, writing on his Policy Post, explains that Labor in government is continuing with the previous government’s policies to refugees: Labor on refugees: just as nasty and even more secretive.
His article explains the politics of our approach to asylum seekers, the hurdles they face in seeking permanent settlement, the extraordinary times some refugees spend in detention (1275 days for Afghans) and the huge budgetary costs we have incurred in trying to break people’s spirits ($9000 a day offshore).
Boat arrivals stopped abruptly in 2013, but there has been no let-up in the greater number coming by air. There are now close to 400 000 people in Australia on bridging or temporary protection visas. Third-country settlement, which never provided many places, has virtually stalled.