Comment

The economy roared back into view as the major focus of contention this week, with some weird developments adding extra drama to the pain and usual blame game that happens when the going gets really tough for millions of Australians. The pain came with the Reserve Bank of Australia continuing its aggressive round of interest rate hikes. The weird came with the nation’s biggest business and industry groups jumping at shadows.

Labor’s litany of recent political decisions continue to invalidate the promise of the Voice. Despite all it says about ‘closing the gap’, ‘reconciliation’ and ‘better outcomes being achieved when Indigenous people have input on the decisions that affect them’, there is not yet any proof this Labor government is curbing its contempt, no glimpses that it can in fact be cured.

It’s a disturbing feature of our leadership over the past several years that major policy challenges have been allowed to drift, despite all evidence of their magnitude and urgency. This drift has been an important factor in the loss of trust in government, and in the dominance of issues such as integrity, transparency and accountability in the most recent federal election. In practical policy terms, these unaddressed problems have become so big that they will require dramatic policy responses, which may prove difficult to deliver.

The Albanese government spent the past week coming to grips with theory versus reality in government. The vast gap between the budget handed down by Treasurer Jim Chalmers and the media’s reporting of it is still being processed by government MPs. Labor’s first budget was a restrained affair: fiscally responsible while fulfilling some specific election promises, and squarely directed at fixing the mess left by the Morrison government. What could possibly go wrong?

These have been an extraordinary five years. In that time, we have seen a new wave of discussion and debate about women’s safety, equity and right to respect in the workplace, the family and at large. We need to celebrate the big wins – the adoption of so many of Kate Jenkins’ key Respect@Work recommendations, for example, with better support for childcare and longer paid parental leave. But there is still work to do to bridge the gender pay gap, and to make women safer outside work, particularly in the domestic setting.

The appalling allegations of racist behaviour towards Indigenous players at the Hawthorn AFL club are a stark and disturbing reminder of the latent racism that unfortunately seems to underlie the attitudes of some Australians and many institutions right across our society.

Shorten had flown to Brisbane for the first day of hearings at the royal commission into the robo-debt scandal. He had been relentless in his determination to expose the full extent of what he calls the ‘greatest failure of public administration and social security’. 

Thirty years ago this week, something extraordinary happened. In two judgements issued on the same day by the High Court, a central democratic principle – the implied freedom of political communication – was explicitly recognised for the first time. 

Morrison can argue that Albanese has never held an economic portfolio and can’t recall key economic data. However, Morrison would have to concede that his opponent is better able to manage industrial relations, with a Bob Hawke-like capacity to pull employers and unions together for accord-style discussions and pathways forward.

Unfortunately for the prime minister, he himself is a known known, with a record over the past three years that he is having great difficulty defending or explaining. How sweet must be the memory of the blank page that he presented the last time he faced the voters.