Comment

The public’s expectations for the review of the Reserve Bank were high. Some hoped it would mean an end to crippling interest rate rises. Others saw the prospect of staff and board members being held accountable for the false and misleading forward guidance that had suggested interest rates would remain around historic lows until 2024.

In any other context, the Albanese government could have expected to be wedged between national security and social security this week – with a debate on spending priorities and its willingness to do so much in one area and so little in another.

As the May budget draws closer its outlines are becoming clearer. It looks like it will embrace the incremental ‘don’t scare the horses’ approach that has so far defined Labor’s first year in office. Revenue gains will be largely banked, but otherwise efforts at budget consolidation will be modest.

In the report, the words of people on welfare are set in italics. The letters are thinned slightly and pushed off-centre, as if after being written down they are still straining to be heard.

The latest news of the growing aged-care emergency, with the closures of three more homes in Sydney by Wesley Mission, has been written up as a ‘shock’ announcement and attributed to ‘workplace pressures’ imposed by the Albanese government’s industry reforms.

Something truly bizarre is happening in the federal Coalition under the leadership of putative Liberal Peter Dutton. With him in charge, the conservative parties have embarked on a cunning plan to abandon metropolitan voters in favour of rural and regional ones.

There was a moment of light relief towards the end of the Q&A following Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong’s address to the National Press Club on Monday. The Canberra Times’s Nicholas Stuart prefaced his question, the penultimate of the day, by commenting that it had been ‘a wonderful speech’, to which Wong quipped: ‘You’re the first person who’s said that. I was starting to get a bit paranoid.’

The review of the Reserve Bank of Australia delivered this week is, according to one economics professor, ‘a watershed moment in Australian economy policy, on par with floating the dollar in 1983’. That’s probably an overreach but, hey, it’s okay for economists to disagree about things.

This is the grift. Peter Dutton flies to Alice Springs and says they should send in the federal police. He meets with a white bakery owner who is concerned about crime in the town. He says there are no consequences for “kids and adults”.

This growing willingness to write off the Liberal Party is a sign of something dangerous. It’s fair to dismiss the party as out of touch after resounding defeats in the federal election and more recently in the Aston byelection. But these failures, and the apparent inability to learn from them, are deeply unsettling.