Politics

Serving and former bureaucrats are glued to the hearings because the evidence has ranged beyond details of the unlawful debt recovery scheme to the wider culture of the federal public service and how it has interacted with executive government. What’s being exposed reveals how dramatically that relationship has deteriorated.

In my recent two-month travels across Australia, my most painful experience was the meetings with the refugees. People from all backgrounds and legal statuses, long after release from offshore camps, are still grappling with the Australian asylum system.

Australia has reached a pivotal point. There is very strong and increasing demand for government to provide a wide range of services, support and policy frameworks, coming to a head at a time when the federal budget already has a $37 billion hole and we are approaching $1 trillion in debt. This calls for a mature debate about priorities.

This week Anthony Albanese trod where many thought he would never dare: he raised taxes on excessive savings held in superannuation. While he did it in a way that can wedge his political opponents in the run-up to the next election, he also handed them a big stick with which to beat him in the meantime.

The bells had barely rung for the first sitting weeks in parliament when Opposition Leader Peter Dutton cracked open the playbook of his predecessor Scott Morrison regarding women … Bang. There it was. Us versus you. Right versus left. A reflexive deployment of partisan weaponry, with a Morrison-style ‘people in glass houses’ flourish.

Not surprisingly, with so much on its plate, the government can afford to treat the Aston byelection as something of a sideshow. It sees it as secondary to getting on with its three ‘Rs’ of ‘relief, repair and restraint’.

Dutton has decided to leave any final decision on the Voice referendum until after the Aston byelection. His carefully crafted apology does enough to leave the impression he is more sympathetic to the referendum than his naysaying would suggest, without locking him in to supporting it.

The ultimate reason for that is the big brutal fact that the DSR almost certainly evades: we will face the dangers of the decades ahead alone. The Albanese government doesn’t understand this any better than the Morrison government did. Richard Marles often talks about ‘self-reliance’, but he doesn’t mean it.

It is little wonder, then, that when the embattled former cabinet minister Alan Tudge finally announced his inevitable departure from parliament on Thursday, Liberal leadership speculation flared.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has written an excellent, thought-provoking essay in the latest edition of The Monthly. It attempts to set his budgetary process, which he began last October and will advance in May, against the background of recent crises and in the context of the broader economic, social and environmental circumstances of our time.