Politics

‘The first thing Josh Frydenberg should do in next Tuesday night’s budget speech is say sorry,’ says Wayne Swan, the man whom the Liberals cut no slack after he failed as treasurer to deliver Labor’s promised budget surpluses. Neither a global financial crisis nor a massive collapse in export revenues were acceptable excuses to the Coalition back then.

Tony Abbott has a lot to answer for. The former prime minister’s judgement on the national broadband network, climate and energy have led to costly and embarrassing failures. Now Scott Morrison is left to pick up the pieces – trying to reposition his government to be more in tune with the situation contemporary Australia is facing.

Two weeks ago, during the last sitting of the federal parliament before the budget early next month, Anthony Albanese decided it was time to take up the fight against the government on the economy. The Labor leader sensed the prime minister and his treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, were embarking on a course of action that would see jobs and economic management become the key issue at the next election. Rather than it being the Coalition’s strong point though, Albanese saw what could be its fatal weakness.

Scott Morrison emerged from last Friday’s meeting of his national cabinet a defeated leader. His hastily constructed vehicle to co-ordinate a coherent response to the coronavirus pandemic crisis had fractured. The prime minister announced that the notion of ‘100 per cent, absolute consensus on any issue’ is not the way ahead. The notion was his entirely but if consensus meant everybody agreeing with Morrison, it was always doomed to failure.

On Wednesday, when the national accounts confirmed Australia’s biggest economic contraction since the Great Depression, the federal government had a ready and credible excuse. But it was of little consolation to the one million Australians already out of work, or for the 400,000 people who the government expects will lose their jobs by the end of the year.

The reason Australia doesn’t have a death tax – when almost every other developed nation does – can be traced back 40 years to a fear that old people would move to the Gold Coast to avoid paying one. On such absurd grounds, Australia has forfeited hundreds of billions of dollars and inequality has deepened.

Red-faced and contrite, the minister for Aged Care and Senior Australians and minister for Youth and Sport, Richard Colbeck, apologised in the senate and offered his ‘sincere condolences’ to hundreds of grieving families. That he cut a sorry figure in the red chamber, though, was not all his own doing. This government, with its failures in aged-care policy and delivery, must share a good deal of the blame.

Last month, the University of New South Wales published on its website an interview with Human Rights Watch Australia’s director, Elaine Pearson, who also holds a position as an adjunct lecturer at the university. The interview focused on how the international community can respond to Hong Kong’s new authoritarian national security law imposed by China. UNSW posted a link to this article, with a quote, on its Twitter account on July 31. By that evening, individuals on the Chinese social media platform WeChat were encouraging one another to get on Twitter and demand the university delete the post.

Any notion that ministers, state or federal, are responsible for anything much appears sunk in the wake of the Ruby Princess. And the ramifications are significant for the quality of our democracy and what we as citizens can rightly demand of our elected representatives and the governments they form.

The prime minister’s post-Covid-19 plan is to roar ahead with a slate of mega-projects that would be delayed by any proper consideration of their environmental and Indigenous heritage impacts. While the EPBC Act rarely leads to any project being given the thumbs down, it does require environmental impacts to be assessed, and this takes time. The government’s solution? Get rid of the federal assessment.