Your regular politics-free thread.  Discuss almost anything, just not politics.  As Pavlov’s Cat reminds us, today is Halloween and that just makes me out and out homesick for our time in America.  I went into my first Halloween over there as a first-grade sceptic and only did it, of course, because my son wanted to.  But I came away a total convert: it (and the other two times we did it) were fantastic nights, really lovely community events where people went to enormous trouble not just with costumes but in dressing up their houses and making sure everyone had a great time.  The other thing that made me nostalgic for American this week was seeing the Red Sox win the World Series.  Almost the best thing I did in the US was spend the relevant week of 2004 in the lounge room of friends who were arguably the biggest Sox fans in the country and watch the joy that swept over them when their team won for the first time in nearly a century.  Such a hoot.  Anyway, open thread....

Sorry this one is a bit long, but bear with me.  There are a number of issues involved in the current kerfuffle over Labor’s comments about signing a new Kyoto Protocol and most of the media reporting on the issue—thrilled with the implications for the political horse race—has confused rather than clarified the issue.  Of course, the politicians themselves haven’t helped.  Such is the nature of policy debate in the rarefied atmosphere of an election campaign.  So this is just me trying to work what is going on and I hope people will chip in with any corrections or further information.

Kevin Rudd tried hard on the 7:30 Report last night to defend statements about Kyoto 2 made by his spokesperson Peter Garrett and then his own “correction” of those comments after the fact.  I don’t think he was terribly convincing in some of the things he said.  But in order to understand the discussion, a couple of points need to be made in advance.

So we all know that there is a Kyoto agreement that the Howard Government refused to sign.  Labor wants to sign it.  The government’s argument has been that signing will be bad for the economy, though more recently they have suggested that they will, under certain circumstances, sign onto the proposed new version of the Protocol.  Those conditions involve—and this is a key point—having China and India also party to any such agreement.

Labor’s argument has been that unless you sign the original Kyoto Protocol, you are excluded from involvement in the negotiations on Kyoto Mark 2.  Here’s Kevin Rudd speaking to John Laws about the topic:

LAWS: You talk about Kyoto, it’s set to expire I think in 2012, why would you bother to sign up now?

RUDD: Well you see in December in Bali we have a conference which will occur on the future of Kyoto and in fact that conference will be two meetings. One of which are those countries which have ratified the Kyoto Protocol and another meeting being held semi-simultaneously involving those states which have ratified the International Framework Convention on Climate Change. That all might sound like gobbledegook.

LAWS: It does.

RUDD: But let me just go to the core of it. If you haven’t ratified Kyoto you don’t get to vote. That’s the problem and I want to be an international voice for Australia which is carving out the future arrangements, not just between now and 2012, but post 2012 as well.

Okay, so I hope all that will make the following discussion a bit clearer I think.

The allegation is essentially that Peter Garrett erred in his comments about Labor policy and that Mr Rudd had to “pull him into line”.  Some people have gone further and said that, in fact, in “clarifying” Mr Garrett’s comments, Mr Rudd was actually contradicting Labor policy, that in fact, Mr Garrett had it right in the first place and Mr Rudd was taking the opportunity to “me-too” the government’s policy.  People claim—and the claimants include the prime minister—that Labor’s position was to ratify an updated Kyoto Protocol regardless of whether developing nations (China and India specifically) signed on as well.  Whether that claim is true or not seems to me to be the key question.

On the specific issue, then, of what Mr Garrett said in an interview he gave the AFR, this was the exchange between Mr Rudd and Kerry O’Brien on the topic on Tuesday night:

KERRY O’BRIEN: Let me put to you what Peter Garrett is quoted as saying in the ‘Financial Review’ yesterday in an extensive article.  A Labor Government could commit Australia to a new greenhouse gas reduction target under the Kyoto protocol, that’s the new one, the second round, even if the deal didn’t immediately require commitments from developing countries.  It said that Mr Garrett would not consider it a deal breaker if developing nations refused to immediately sign on for reduction commitments of their own and further says, asked whether the outcome would be a deal breaker from a Rudd Government’s point of view he said, “No, I don’t think it can be.”

KEVIN RUDD: And Peter’s point there, quite logically, is that if you got to that stage you would force people back to the negotiating table to get an outcome which had commitments both for developed and developing economies. That’s the core point here. Post 2012.  Our problem in Australia, because of Mr Howard’s stuck in the past thinking on climate change, is that we are a mile away from all of this because of our refusal to ratify, our refusal to take on binding targets for this commitment period and therefore the fact that we’re not party to the conference or party to the protocol itself which meets in Bali in December.

Therefore our ability to apply leverage on key major emitting economies like China in the future, is undermined, particularly as the Chinese publicly use the argument that with developed countries like the United States and Australia refusing to take binding targets for themselves, that allows them or lets them off the hook for the future. That’s the core point here. Our position has been consistent throughout this and Peter was simply stating the obvious that if you got to that point you’d get people back to the negotiating table to make sure you could deliver that sort of outcome.

So Garrett was apparently saying that just because developing countries wouldn’t initially agree to emissions reductions that that alone would not mean a Labor Government would not...well, what?  The key phrase seems to be “deal breaker”.  I think in normal parlance the phrase refers to something that would put an end to the deal.  By saying that the refusal of developing nations to agree to reduced emission was not a deal breaker, Mr Garrett was suggesting that Labor would sign anyway.

Mr Rudd, on the other hand, is interpreting “deal breaker” in a different way, suggesting it would just mean that they would merely “force” the parties back to the negotiating table.  So their refusal to agree to reductions is not a deal breaker in the sense that Labor would still be willing to negotiate.  But Mr Rudd further says that they would not sign a post-2012 agreement unless developing nations (China and India specifically) agreed to reductions.  So their ongoing refusal to commit to reductions would mean Labor would then refuse to sign.  In other words it would be a deal breaker, at least in what I take to be the more usual meaning of the phrase.

As I say, I don’t think that is a convincing interpretation of what Peter Garrett was saying.  But the more important point is, has Labor’s position on the post-2012 Kyoto agreement always been, as Kevin Rudd says, “consistent throughout”?  In other words, has Labor always been committed to not signing a post-2012 agreement unless the likes of China and India are also signatories?  Surely that’s the key point.  If Mr Rudd has previously said that ratification will depend on developing nations also signing up, then not only was Peter Garrett wrong in what he said, then the charge that Rudd has somehow changed policy because of the current kerfuffle is also wrong.

If we go back to that John Laws interview I mentioned at the beginning, Kevin Rudd does seem to make a Labor Government’s ratification of Kyoto 2 conditional on India and China being involved as well:

LAWS: I don’t quite understand how signing Kyoto will protect Australia’s environment?

RUDD: Well it puts you, if we are serious about dealing with climate change into the future. What we do nationally, within our own borders on emissions trading entitlements is important, but what is fundamentally important is the international regime and how we bring China and India on board. You know what the Chinese say, John, about why they don’t accept emissions targets, they say that when you’ve got modern industrial economies like Australia and the United States who haven’t ratified Kyoto, why should we accept those disciplines ourselves.

LAWS: It’s not a bad argument.

RUDD: And that’s what I’m very concerned about because unless we in this country fix the China emissions problem with an international set of rules which bind those economies as well, then frankly our future is deeply compromised.

The interview was done a couple of weeks ago and in it he does make clear that China and India should be party to “an international set of rules which bind those economies as well”.  This suggests to me that Mr Garrett was wrong in what he said in the AFR interview and that the charge of me-tooism—that Rudd just changed his position this week—doesn’t hold. 

Anyway, as I say, this is just me trying to make sense of the current stories, so feel free to use comments to offer corrections or any other relevant information.

We talked the other day about the Howard Government’s relationship with extremist Christian cults, most recently Mr Costello’s meetings with Danny Nalliah from the Catch The Fire group.  Mr Nalliah is parading his credentials again today with the news that he has been addressing the far-right, anti-Jewish group the League of Rights:

Pastor Danny Nalliah, the head of Melbourne-based Catch the Fire Ministries, has confirmed he addressed the group, despite being warned that they were “anti-Jewish”.

...Australia Israel and Jewish Affairs Council executive director Colin Rubenstein last night expressed dismay about Mr Nalliah giving credibility to the league. “No one claiming credibility should dignify the podium of a body like the League of Rights with its track record - to give them any sort of Respectability or legitimacy,” he said.

But Mr Nalliah last night did not rule out further meetings with the League of Rights, denying that speaking to the group gave it credibility.

“I thought maybe it is a good opportunity to go and speak and I can change some of their thinking,” he said of his October 2005 speech.

“Let me be honest and truthful - if I am invited again, I will go again. I am not going to talk about anti-Jewish and anti-Islam; my message is about Christ and salvation.”

Mr Nalliah said he was warned before he went that the League of Rights was anti-Jewish. “One guy in the crowd put his hand up and said ‘Do you believe in the Holocaust?’,” he recalled. “I said ‘To deny the Holocaust would be like saying there will be no daybreak tomorrow morning’.”

...Mr Howard’s office declined to comment. Mr Howard has previously said that “association with the League of Rights is unacceptable”.

A spokeswoman for Mr Costello declined to say if he would distance himself from Mr Nalliah. “The Treasurer has been a vocal, public and lifelong critic of the League of Rights.”

Mr Nalliah praised Mr Costello again yesterday, saying he appreciated both he and the Prime Minister taking “a stand against multiculturalism”. “One thing I love about Peter and John Howard is saying people who come here should not try to change this place to their own nation.”

Well, in his objections to multiculturalism he’ll no doubt find some common ground with the LofR.  Perhaps he was concentrating on things that unite them rather than the things that divide them?

Actually, I don’t really get why guys like Mr Howard and Costello are so keen to stay on the good side of Catch the Fire and EB and whoever else.  It’s inevitable that they cross paths with such representatives in the course of their day jobs, but to openly court them and offer them cover in the way that they do is surely above and beyond the call of that duty?  Is it really just a matter of vote gathering?  Are there that many votes in it?

This issue was mentioned in comments the other day and there has been a few emails about it too, namely the story that the Commonwealth takeover of the Mersey hospital in Tasmania was going to “collapse” because of a requirement for staff to be put on AWAs as per the Howard Government’s WorkChoices legislation.

Originally, the Tasmanian Solicitor-General expressed the view that staff could only be seconded from State to Federal employment if they went onto AWAs.  The problem this created was that Federal Government had said that their takeover of the hospital would not require that:

Tasmanian Health Minister Lara Giddings says WorkChoices will be to blame if the takeover collapses.

“Technically on November 1, we may see a situation where the Commonwealth take over the bricks and mortar of the hospital but don’t have any staff to employ,” she said....

“Now the fact is that they could employ people but they can’t because they won’t employ anyone under what they know are very nasty, very unpopular industrial relation laws at the federal level. That’s the AWAs.”

The Tasmanian solicitor-general has told the State Government staff can only be seconded to the Federal Government if they are employed under workplace agreements.  Two months ago, Mr Abbott said staff at the Mersey would not be placed on AWAs. Ms Giddings says that means the state government cannot transfer staff to the Commonwealth.

“They’re on our payroll and we will maintain them in that sense but on November 1 they ought to be actually moving across to the Commonwealth, who should be their employer but that, at this stage, it looks as if it’s going to be a very difficult hurdle to overcome,” she said.

The state and federal governments have been trying to find a solution for weeks.  Mersey Interim Advisory Committee chairman Neil Batt says there is a simple answer to the stalemate.

“One of the things that is obviously being looked at is the possibility of a third-party employment arrangement and I think that’s worthwhile looking at,” he said.

However, he was not forthcoming about how this would fix the problem.

“If you’ll forgive me, because these things are all being negotiated, I think it’s not appropriate that I should be involved in debate about the details as long as I keep my focus on the main issue and that is that the problem will be fixed,” he said.

Mr Batt has been speaking to Mr Abbott’s office and says the Federal Government will cover the cost of the State Government continuing to pay staff until a solution is found.

From the beginning Mr Abbott has said there isn’t really a problem and now, after the PM became involved, a temporary solution has been put in place:

...federal Health Minister Tony Abbott says a Prime Ministerial decree now means staff can now be employed on a temporary agreement until July next year, when a hospital board will take over.

“The Prime Minister has made a determination today that will enable the staff at the hospital to be employed as Commonwealth employees as of the first of November, on precisely the same terms and conditions as they currently have from the State Government,” he said.

Well, that’s the quick fix that ostensibly gets it out of the way until the election is over, but what happens once a board takes over (presuming the Howard Government wins the election) is still unclear.  The problem remains that new Commonwealth employees are required to be employed on AWAs.  Sounds like there is still more to be heard about this.

UPDATE: The handover to the Feds has been delayed.  Very professional.

Matt Yglesias, writing at The Atlantic, picks up on this piece in The Washington Post by Joshua Partlow which deals with the experiences of soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division.  Here’s a brief extract before I get to Matt’s comments:

Next month, the U.S. soldiers will complete their tour in Iraq. Their experience in Sadiyah has left many of them deeply discouraged, by both the unabated hatred between rival sectarian fighters and the questionable will of the Iraqi government to work toward peaceful solutions.

Asked if the American endeavor here was worth their sacrifice—20 soldiers from the battalion have been killed in Baghdad—Alarcon said no: “I don’t think this place is worth another soldier’s life.”

While top U.S. commanders say the statistics of violence have registered a steep drop in Baghdad and elsewhere, the soldiers’ experience in Sadiyah shows that numbers alone do not describe the sense of aborted normalcy—the fear, the disrupted lives—that still hangs over the city.

...Many of the soldiers from the battalion are on their second tour in Iraq. Three years ago, they were based in Tikrit, the home of Saddam Hussein, a city they entered expecting to fight a determined Sunni insurgency. By the end of their tour, with much of the violence contained, many of them felt optimistic about progress in Iraq.

“I honestly thought we were making a difference in Tikrit. Then we come back to a hellhole,” Marino said. “That was a playground compared to Baghdad.”

The American people don’t fully realize what’s going on, said Staff Sgt. Richard McClary, 27, a section leader from Buffalo.

“They just know back there what the higher-ups here tell them. But the higher-ups don’t go anywhere, and actually they only go to the safe places, places with a little bit of gunfire,” he said. “They don’t ever [expletive] see what we see on the ground.”

This begins to capture the basic disconnect that has entered discussion of Iraq, especially here in Australia, and it is this that Matt nicely articulates.  Since the Petraeus media offensive, what has tended to happen is that the actually existing mess that has arisen in Iraq since 2003 is conveniently ignored and alleged “improvements” in security are touted as evidence that we have to keep doing what we are doing.  Thus supporters of the invasion seek to wash their hands of what has happened—sometimes hiding behind lame, euphemistic acknowledgements that “mistakes have been made”—and tell us we can only talk about the future.  They pretend that if we leave that that will be the cause of problems that already exist.  Matt says it well:

This is the basically fraudulent nature of the American enterprise in Iraq. We’re told we can’t leave because of the civil war that would break out or intensify or whatever if we do. But our troops aren’t really capable of meaningfully impacting the result of the sectarian conflict anyway. Instead, they’re just being plopped into the middle of it and exposed to harm, so that when the conflict eventually ends (as conflicts tend to) we can call the results “victory” and stay in Iraq forever. If the violence waxes, that shows the war needs to continue. If it wanes, that shows that we’re winning and need to keep on keeping on. Meanwhile, in the real world the civil war and ethnic cleansing we’re supposed to be preventing are things that have already happened.

For more on what the future of Iraq is likely to look like, this piece by Marc Lynch is worth reading:  “Instead of getting sucked into debates over body counts, or clutching at whatever good or bad news crosses the headlines each morning, the national debate should be looking at the big picture.  It isn’t about how we are doing day to day - what are we trying to achieve?”

The two biggest announcements of the last few days have been the government’s tech colleges policy (pdf) and Labor’s Great Barrier Reef policy (pdf).  The former is spread out over ten years and largely involves converting secondary schools into tech colleges.  Most of Labor’s $200 million plan goes into a new Water Quality Grants Scheme.

Labor has also announced some stuff on women’s health and roads.  The government offered policy on funding transport to and from Tassie (pdf) and said they will uncap the Work Skills voucher scheme (pdf).

If you open any of those government policy pdfs, you’ll be greeted by this photo (amongst others).  See, they really are best mates and a team:

Meanwhile, Peter Garrett and Kevin Rudd had a difference of opinion, or something, which was enough for The Australian to declare “PETER Garrett’s political credentials were in tatters last night after Kevin Rudd forced him to issue a humiliating clarification.”

At the Ashburton Primary School in Melbourne, Peter Costello told students that “God made everything, so God made cactuses.” (It was unclear whether the Treasurer credited God with low unemployment as well.) In other godesque news, Family First kicked out one of their candidates for allegedly posting pictures of his penis on a website, though the candidate said, “That’s not my penis”, and that “I might have been drunk off my face or my political enemies might have drugged me.”

Family First and some Christian lobby groups are also annoyed about the Greens-Labor preference deal for the Senate.

Here in Adelaide, Democrat Natasha Stott Despoja argued that the major parties didn’t take women seriously, specifically in regard to paid maternity leave.  Queensland Dems Senator, Andrew Bartlett, continues to be the easiest to track with his comprehensive blogging, where you can find all the details, including the party’s ”package of measures aimed at the housing affordability crisis.”

Only four more weeks to go…

Another Tuesday another Newspoll so another open thread in which you can pick over the figures (pdf).  The primary vote figures are 42-48 in favour of Labor; the two-party preferred estimate is 46-54 Labor.  Dennis Shanahan comments excitedly here, arguing that the “Government is back in the election hunt”, while Sol Lebovic says the government has gone from “disastrous to bad”, and that the “trend at the moment is that not a lot is changing and Labor remains in a very comfortable position.”

Elsewhere, Possums Pollytics calls it “business as usual” while the Poll Bludger provides a variety of opinions.  Over at LP, Mark suggests that Newspoll have changed the way they calculate the 2PP vote, but offers further discussion.

UPDATE: The network has had technical difficulties all morning making it impossible to access the site, leave comments etc.  Sorry about that.  Seems to be all system go at the moment though.

SWAN V. COSTELLO UPDATE:  Both men played to their strengths and made predictable points.  I think it is harder for the incumbent under such debate circumstances and it’s pretty hard for the Treasurer to run away from the fact that interest rates are rising after he and his party made keeping them low absolutely central to their last election campaign.  It’s equally difficult for the challenger to counter the claim of lack of experience, though I think it was the first time I’d heard a Labor politician make the obvious point that if you followed the logic that only elect those with x amount of experience you would never change governments.

According to most commentators it was draw.  Ostensibly that’s a bad result for Mr Costello as he was such a favourite going in, even amongst conservative commenters on this site.  Mr Howard has declared that Mr Costello “creamed” Mr Swan, a verdict he delivers with all the credibility he has become famous for.  The worm on Channel Nine (which I didn’t watch) gave it to Mr Swan. 

This sounds like an interesting idea:

It was a land sale with a difference only households earning less than $100,000 could enter. And they could walk away with a new three-bedroom house and land package for less than $300,000.  Almost 100 houses in the yet-to-be-built suburb of West Macgregor were snapped up by nervous bidders yesterday.

...West Macgregor is a greenfields site in Belconnen, to the west of Dunlop and Macgregor. The houses are being built by the Village Building Company, which targets the lower to middle end of the ACT market. The first round of house-and-land packages, which went under the hammer yesterday, was only open to families earning less than $100,000, and the prices were set. A three-bedroom house on 350sqm, with one garage space and no ensuite, cost about $300,000. Two-bedroom townhouses were $270,000.

Hundreds flocked to the sale at a function centre in Gungahlin. They waited anxiously for their names to be called out, signalling they had passed the test and could choose a house. People gasped, clutched hands and beamed as their names were read out. Some waved their arms in victory after the paperwork was signed.

I’ll see if there is some more detail around.

The Australian Electoral Commission has released their final figures on who is enrolled to vote on November 24 and it reveals a couple of interesting results:

The Australian Electoral Commissioner, Ian Campbell, said that 13,645,073 people were on the electoral roll, an increase of 623,843 from the 2004 election.  NSW has the largest piece of the electoral pie, with just under 4.5 million people eligible to vote, or a third of all voters.

However, the proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds who are eligible to vote has not increased since 2004, remaining at 80 per cent, compared to 95 per cent for the rest of the adult population.  Despite an advertising campaign to get young people on the roll, about 340,000 aged from 18 to 24 will not have their say.

The majority of those missing out will be aged 18, 19 and 20.

That’s a bad result for young voters, and while some of the blame can be slated to the government’s new laws that allowed the electoral rolls to be closed earlier than usual, they probably don’t explain the entire shortfall.  Still, it is more than passing strange that any government would seek to make it harder for people to enrol by closing registration early.  Especially when they have committed themselves to a ridiculously long campaign....

Kevin Rudd and Labor have had a pretty easy run in the election campaign so far and shouldn’t confuse that with any sense that are becoming a sure thing to win the election in—when is it?—four weeks time.  They still need around sixteen seats to form a government and that is a big ask.  Still, the government keeps playing into their hands and the length of the election campaign itself is perhaps one of the factors contributing to that. 

The idea was that a long campaign (and it is long) would expose Mr Rudd and Labor to such pressure that they would “crack”, a la Mark Latham in 2004; but all it seems to have done is expose the government’s internal fault lines.

Dennis Shanahan reports this morning that “senior Liberals fear John Howard’s focus on defending his record is hurting the Coalition and creating tension within its campaign, putting the Government on the back foot as it enters the third week”, and it is a fear that is well-founded.  A very bad debate performance, the problem of rising inflation putting pressure on interest rates and exposing past election promises, and all the revelations about Malcolm Turnbull arguing with cabinet over environmental matters have left the government looking like a rabble with Mr Howard in particular looking rattled.

Comments from Deputy PM Mark Vaile (quoted by Shanahan) show the problem:

Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile yesterday called for “absolute cabinet solidarity”.

“Obviously some people are less disciplined than others in these matters, but it’s a central tenet of any government that’s managing this country that cabinet discussions remain inside of cabinet,” Mr Vaile said, amid claims Mr Turnbull leaked details of his cabinet push for Kyoto in a bid to save his seat of Wentworth in Sydney’s east.

What this delightfully overlooks is that the whole idea of “cabinet solidarity” is a farce as far as the current government is concerned. 

Does anyone—least of all the Deputy PM—really need reminding that on the eve of the election campaign proper Mr Howard asked his cabinet whether he should quit as leader and almost to a person they said that he should?  Some solidarity.  The fact that Mr Howard dug his heels in (again), refused to take their advice, stayed on against their wishes, and that between them they then cooked up the idea of a post-election resignation and a handover to probably-but-not-necessarily Peter Costello, all padded out with the fiction of the “Howard team” as a campaign strategy, should tell anyone with eyes to see all you need to know about their “cabinet solidarity”.

The Turnbull revelations—that he wanted the government to sign the Kyoto Protocol as well as adopt the equivalent of Labor’s targets for reducing greenhouse emissions and then (allegedly) leaked the story to the press in order to shore-up his own green credentials to help him win back his own seat—are not the cause of the problems in cabinet but merely a symptom of it.  You don’t get a much bigger rift than a cabinet that wants its leader to quit and the leader refusing to go.

As to the interest rate issue, the PM and some other commentators (like Piers Ackerman) are badly missing the point on that one.

Finally confronted with the deception of the government’s campaign on rates in 2004, the PM originally tried to squirm out of responsibility in the most transparent and Howardesque manner:

JOHN HOWARD has urged voters to forget about a Liberal Party ad from the 2004 election campaign that promised to “keep interest rates at record lows” because it only ran for two nights and he never made the claim personally.

..."Interest rates are not at record lows now. I understand that. What I said personally before the last election was the interest rates would be lower under the Coalition than under Labor.”

..."At no stage did I make the claim that interest rates would be at record lows. My words in the election campaign were very clear.”

Try not to laugh.  The PM was saying that claims of record-low interest rates didn’t really count because the ads had only run for two nights.  Ah yes, the Ritchie doctrine: just as we all know that you are only once, twice three times a lady, election promises only become binding if the ads run for three nights.  And if that fudge wasn’t bad enough, the PM was also trying to argue that the ads didn’t count because he hadn’t personally uttered the claim, an argument that was, um, undermined somewhat when footage was found of him actually uttering the claim.

Confronted with this information, the PM told us all to “get real” and is now arguing that interest rates really are low, that they are lower than they were under Labor, and that they always will be.  But as I say, this misses the point.  And reinforces the problem.

The damage this is doing the government has less to do with the level of interest rates and almost everything to do with the election commitment itself.  People understand that interest rates go up and down and accept that.  What they don’t accept is a government pretending they can do something about it when they can’t.  They resent that the government took credit for the low rates in 2004 but are now trying to eschew all responsibility for their claims, with interest rates rising five times in the intervening years.

Perhaps the electorate would be more understanding if this was the first example of Mr Howard fudging an election promise; his problem is that it isn’t, and his attempts to rationalise those 2004 ads simply reinforce the view people already have of him as economical with the veritĂ©.

Anyway, and back to the Shanahan article, the government’s brains trust think they have the solution to all this early bad form:

...despite the concerns in the Liberal camp, senior party members still believe the Coalition can win the election in the four weeks left in the campaign if the Coalition builds on public concern about union domination of the Labor Party and links the fears with “economic risk” and poor management.

So expect four more weeks of negativity and attack ads.

Beautiful day here in Adelaide; we even had some rain earlier in the week (hope it’s not the last for the summer).  Anyway, this is is usual weekend open thread where you can talk about stuff we’ve missed or skipped over during the rest of the week.  Keep it civil and don’t just cut and paste long swathes of text: use a relevant quote and provide a link.  I wasn’t quite sure what music to put up this week as I’ve been listening to a bunch of stuff.  But here’s a bit of classic Townes van Zandt:

This is a request.  Someone mentioned in comments the other day an article by psephologist Malcolm Mackerras about Malcolm Turnbull’s seat in the upcoming election.  I think the thrust of the article, according to the commenter, was that there was a movement against Turnbull (bc of the Tassy pulp mill?) and that they wanted to vote him out—but—what was likely to save him was the fact that they wanted him around to take over as leader (once Mr Howard was gone and in preference to Peter ‘tsunami’ Costello).  Or something like that.  If you have a link or other reference, I’d appreciate it.  Google isn’t bringing it up.

UPDATE:  Just spotted this.  It seems to contradict the view I outlined above.  So maybe I’m remembering the whole thing wrong…

I haven’t had a close look at this yet, but it sounds like a good idea, especially for all your political junkies out there and, I guess, students working in the field.  The University of Melbourne has just launched a new online archive that collects Australian political material from 1901 until the present.  Their blurb says:

Election campaigns are usually focused on the short-term – the hectic 3 to 6 weeks of the formal election campaign. This website instead allows you to see elections as a continuum; to look back over time to see what the parties and their leaders have said (and promised) in the past. The website includes material dating back over a hundred years so that visitors can recall recent campaigns or compare current events with historical ones.

The Soapbox archive is a work in progress. Video, audio and other materials wil be added as they become available.

From what I’ve seen there isn’t an enormous amount of material available as yet, but some of it is certainly interesting.  So, for instance, if you click through, you can read Stanley Bruce’s concession speech from 1929, when he not only lost the election but lost his own seat, still the only PM to have achieved that particular double:

Canberra, October 17th 1929

“The result of the election in the Flinders electorate has come to me as a deep disappointment. I have represented that constituency for 11 years, and I had hoped that the degree to which I have established myself in the confidence and goodwill of the electors would have been sufficient to ensure my return, notwithstanding the general pronouncement against the industrial policy of the Government. The electors have, however, decided otherwise. I accept their decision as the fortune of war, and I offer my congratulations to Mr. Holloway upon the success which he has won.

My principal regret is that the result will involve my exclusion from the Parliament and the public life of Australia at a time when the economic and industrial life of the nation is beset with so many difficulties and dangers. I feel confident, however, that as soon as another opportunity arises the electors of Flinders will reverse their recent decision and choose me again as their representative in Parliament. In the meantime, I trust that I may be able to find some other avenue through which I can be of service to the country.

I am deeply appreciative of, and grateful for, the help I have received from those willing supporters in Flinders who have stood by me so loyally throughout my Parliamentary career, and particularly those who have worked so enthusiastically and untiringly to secure my return on the present occasion.”

Source: Compiled from the Sydney Morning Herald, October 18th 1929, page 11 and original documents.

Pretty gracious really.  Anyway, the archive is a great idea and worth a look.

Sadly, another Australian soldier killed in Afghanistan:

A Special Air Service (SAS) soldier has become the second Australian to be killed in combat in Afghanistan in less than three weeks.  The soldier, whose name has not been released, was fatally wounded in a firefight with Taliban militants in a remote valley of Oruzgan province today.

It’s understood he is a married father from Perth and was recently awarded a medal for gallantry.  No other Australian casualties were reported, and there were no details of any Taliban killed or wounded.  Head of the Australian Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, said the soldier had been shot while launching a ground attack on a Taliban “sanctuary”.

Obviously, full details will be released later.

UPDATE: The GG pays tribute and releases the soldier’s name:

GOVERNOR-GENERAL Michael Jeffery has paid tribute to Special Air Service (SAS) soldier Sergeant Matthew Locke, killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Sergeant Matthew Locke is the second Australian Digger killed in Afghanistan in three weeks.  Major-General Jeffery, speaking in Sydney, expressed his deepest sympathy to Sergeant Locke’s family and friends.

One of the more interesting developments in the current election campaign is that the Liberal Party has chosen to turn their main webpage into a virtual anti-union hate site.  The sheer unAustralianess of this attack, while unfortunate, is hardly a surprise given that WorkChoices itself is arguably the most anti-union legislation written in the Western world in the last hundred years.  Mr Howard’s personal antipathy towards the union movement is long-standing—he has always wanted their role in Australia workplaces minimised—and we all know there is no hater like a conservative politician venting against unions.  Makes so-called “Howard haters”—that regular strawman invoked against those who happen to disagree with Mr Howard’s views on matters political—look like a bunch of amateurs.

That this sort of class-based abuse should be unacceptable is easily illustrated by the fact that you can imagine the horror that would greet the Labor Party if they devoted their site to a similar demonisation of business representatives.  We would be treated to homilies of outrage from here to eternity if they ever did such a thing.  Why the abuse of legitimate representatives of a certain percentage of the workplace should be acceptable—let alone a key election strategy—is beyond me.

The sheer hypocrisy of the PM and his party’s attitude is illustrated by their attack on Joe MacDonald.  Despite the fact that a Western Australian court cleared Mr McDonald of charges against him, the government continues to run an ad abusing him and the PM spent some of his press conference in WA yesterday defending the attack.  However, when lifelong donor to the Liberal Party, businessman Richard Pratt, actually admitted to illegally rigging of prices in his business and thus ripping off other businesses and ultimately consumers, Mr Howard went out of his way to defend him, playing down the crime, refusing to countenance a toughening of the law, and taking the opportunity to remind us all what a wonderful philanthropist Mr Pratt was (see my earlier post on the topic here).

It seems that to Mr Howard an acquitted trade unionist is more contemptible than a guilty businessman.

How effective such a strategy—union bashing—is remains to be seen, though I suspect that even amongst those for whom there is no particular goodwill towards the union movement are somewhat embarrassed by the government’s persistent smearing of them during the campaign.  As political scientist John Warhurst points out, key aspects of the government’s case do not impress ordinary voters:

The Government tries to scare the electorate with allegations of union power and control. McAllister demonstrates that this won’t wash. The electorate, in 2004, actually feared the excessive power of big business (71 per cent) much more than the excessive power of trade unions (41 per cent), though 41 per cent is still no small matter.

The fact that the government gets their facts wrong with their accusation simply underlines that their attacks are emotional and deep-seated rather than rational. 

You don’t have to be a particular fan of unions to acknowledge the role they have played in civilising working conditions and achieving gains that we now take for granted, everything from maternity leave to superannuation.  Love them or loathe them you know where they stand, and even Mr Howard would have to acknowledge their achievements, and perhaps he should thus temper some of his party’s attacks.  Besides, as Mr Keating also pointed out, contrary to Howard Government claims that there will be a wages breakout under a “union controlled” Labor Government, the unions helped achieve wage restraint during the last period of Labor government and thus helped lay the grounds for the reforms that are the basis of the economic prosperity we enjoy today and for which Mr Howard and Mr Costello tend to take the credit.

The government’s most recent attempts to scare us about unions and Labor are nothing more than a ploy to deflect attention from the way interest rates have risen since their failed reassurances of the last election campaign.  As Bob Hawke said the other day:

Mr Howard’s attack on the unions was “the most disastrously unfair and baseless accusation and propaganda that has ever been used by any leader in the history of Australian politics. I say that deliberately, that’s not exaggeration,” he said.

“Every single Australian is indebted to the Australian trade union movement. How dare this man attack the trade union movement. There is no institution in Australia which has done more to flesh out the concept of a fair go, to give it reality, than the Australian trade union movement.”

You don’t even need to go back in history to understand the balancing role unions can play.  The Howard Government themselves, despite denying the need for it, now boast about their so-called “fairness test” as way of ameliorating the worst excesses of WorkChoices.  But of course, had it not been for unions pointing out the unfairness of WorkChoices in the first place, the government would’ve continued to pretend that such a change was unnecessary and persisted with the myth that the only problem with WorkChoices was “perception”.

The fear and smear campaign the government has been running against the unions, particularly in this election campaign, doesn’t speak well of them.  A government confident of its achievements and its arguments would not need to resort to this sort of attack and would simply run on their record.  Are unions perfect?  Of course not, but attempts to demonise an entire group because of that is as unfair as tarring every business person with the sins of a Richard Pratt.  When Paul Keating says, “I can think of no more noble thing to do than to serve the working people,” he offers a necessary defence of a worthwhile institution. 

It would be good if the government dialled it back a bit and offered a fairer view of the role unions play.