A policy wish list

That master psephologist, Malcolm Mackerras, tells the story that after wrongly predicting that Queensland Premier Sir Joh Bjleke-Petersen would lose an election, the victorious Sir Joh sent him a parcel. On opening it, all he found was a scrubbing brush. Telephoning Sir Joh, he asked why he had sent him that. Sir Joh replied: “That’s to scrub the egg off your face.”

I am asked to do two things: predict the result of the next general election, and suggest what I think the new government should be.

To answer the first, I must reveal, somewhat immodestly, that I have not been wrong in predicting a general election, Australian, British or American, since 1993. I suspect this is more the result of good luck than any predictive ability on my part. And at the risk of getting egg on my face, my prediction for the next federal election is that Mr Howard will have his fifth victory - indeed I would not be surprised if he then were to try for a sixth. And why not?

As to the opinion polls, these are no more than the answers a sample of people are prepared to give to questions uninvited on which many have had no time to reflect.

One criticism must be that pollsters do not always prominently publish their margin of error. Their allocation of preferences may be historical rather than the declared present intention of the sample. There is a further matter - the tendency of respondents to give the answer which the bien pensant would be expected to give.

In the 1992 British election campaign, pollsters reported an enthusiastic endorsement of the Kinnock policy to increase taxes for worthy purposes. But that was not the way the electorate actually voted. The last polls were out by a margin of around 8.5 per cent, and to the surprise of the pollsters the Tories were returned.

With vast amounts of egg on their several faces, they began to refer to a new phenomenon, the “shy Tory factor”. In 1999 we Australians saw a “shy monarchist factor”. Are we now seeing a “shy Howard factor”?

The fact is that while polls create excitement, even panic, in political and media circles, the general public are indifferent to them. Predicting a Howard victory against Mark Latham in 2004 was easy, even with the support he had from much of the media.

Predicting a Howard victory over Kevin Rudd is more difficult. While he has not yet been tested - he has had a dream run from the media - he seems to be the most formidable federal Labor Leader since Bob Hawke. Paul Keating for one lacked Kevin Rudd’s sangfroid and his stability. Indeed, Mr Rudd appears to possess the apparent self control, and abstemiousness that has marked leaders like Howard, Menzies, Chifley and at least in the war, Curtin.

Australians live under one of the world’s oldest, and most democratic constitutional systems. They are not swayed by flamboyance, abuse, displays of temper, emotional outbursts and vulgarity in their leaders, and they particularly abhor lack of modesty and conspicuous consumption.

Provided the political leader exhibits dignity and gravitas, they admire him if he can speak with authority, and style, as Sir Robert Menzies could. His apparently ex tempore messages were seen to come from the heart. Indeed many on the left secretly admired Menzies when he spoke for Australia, just as they shuddered with embarrassment at the performance of one or two of his successors.

It will come as no surprise that the commentariat does not share these rank and file tastes. While they loved Paul Keating, the reaction among the populace at large was negative, ranging from embarrassment to anger. The sort of contributions made in Parliament which today win the approval, even adulation, of the sketch writers is quite often that which is disliked and at times despised by the rank and file.

Australians want dignified, abstemious statesmen not self indulgent spruikers. John Howard still has a remarkable ability to reassure the nation, even if he does not have Sir Robert Menzies’ golden voice.

Mr Rudd is not Sir Robert, but he may possibly be another John Howard. He certainly shares with the Prime Minster the willingness to engage continuously with the broadcast media. Mr Howard had to do this to override a hostile media but Mr Rudd has had no such need. So far the blow torch has not been applied to him: it is only recently that a fatigued commentariat has turned away - for the time being- their torches from Mr Howard, for the simple reason that they had so lamentably failed to inflame our stoic leader.

So I would make a tentative judgment that Kevin Rudd appears to pass the character test for an Australian prime minister. If he can maintain this, and it appears over time to be more than skin deep, the competition will move to policy differences between the leaders.

To date he has tended to avoid the more difficult issues by having, as they say, a bet each way. He is all things to all men. This has kept his left wing happy, which is important in a faction riven party. Let loose, the left would make the federal ALP unelectable - they need to be disguised as centrists.

Mr Rudd must become an antipodean version of Tony Blair - that is a conservative Prime Minister who lets the left have its head on such matters as  the Australian equivalent of fox-hunting, or whatever it may be. Perhaps this will involve saying "sorry", if that is not now passé. He will also have to ensure that Labor will not be seen as the puppet of the declining union movement and that it will not suffer from the Labor tendency, at least from Whitlam on, to spend far beyond its means.

However, Mr Rudd may find that at some time he will be called on to demonstrate that, as chief-of-staff, he in no way condoned the extraordinary “shreddergate” scandal which still haunts the Goss cabinet, and which raises issues fundamental to the rule of law.

This brings me to the agenda I would prefer to see adopted by the next federal government. This is in the context of an extraordinary development, where the global warming industry has the public now fearful of climate change - as if the climate always stayed the same.

Far from being made wiser by technological advances such as the Internet, the public, especially our youth, seem more susceptible than previous generations to secular predictions of some or other apocalypse. Chesterton predicted this sort of consequence would come with the general decline of religion. He wrote that: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything.”

This proposition is demonstrated in the surprising acceptance of the message from the global warming industry. This came principally in a film presented by a failed presidential candidate who flies around the world in an executive jet and more recently in a declaration, urbi et orbi, from an assembly of international bureaucrats and scientists in Paris.

The message is that man is principally responsible for global warming.

While the Parisian assembly desperately wanted to anathematise climate sceptics, they balked at making a declaration of infallibility and claimed instead that the link was 90 per cent proven.

People may be initially alarmed by this onslaught of propaganda with little to challenge it in the mass media. This may be confirmed in their minds as they live through the “worst drought in a thousand years”, or as one Sydney editor declares it, not a drought but structural climatic change. But once the drought actually breaks, as it will, the fear about global warming will begin to dissipate.

In the meantime the politicians will feel they must be seen to be “addressing”, as they put it, the issue of man-made global warming.

Apart from sensible measures to reduce pollution, which should be undertaken anyway, the danger is in succumbing to the demands of the global warming industry that there be massive transfers of income and assets away from ordinary Australians. With the reinforcement of a mainly gullible and campaigning media, this demand is in the process of becoming a firm instruction to the politicians. And it is to be achieved in several ways.

One way will be to give the people’s assets and income to other countries by burdening or closing down industries. Another will be to extract even more in taxation, and by calling it a carbon tax, hope that the people will be tricked into accepting it. Another will be by giving it to the usual carpetbaggers, who are already licking their lips, and call this theft “carbon trading”. Yet another will be higher prices for water through a “free” market, and substantially increasing the cost of electricity.

The problem in all this for the craftier politicians will be in being seen to be “addressing” the issue without actually doing too much, and hoping that any new burden is accepted as being for the common good.

If one party promises to do anything serious, they may make Professor Flannery feel better but they will probably lose the election, as they should.

Of course governments should propose and take measures to reduce pollution of course. But they mustn’t destroy the economy, or put unnecessary burdens on the people to enrich themselves or others because of some passing Malthusian fashion.

What else would I like to see in a new government? I would like to see a federal government which withdrew to its core functions and did them well, while significantly reducing the taxation burden on the rank and file.

Of course the genuinely needy should be protected, but there is absolutely no need for middle class welfare, especially the odious churning of tax into welfare. Apart from the removal of choice from the citizens and increasing the dependent mentality in the recipients the cost must be appalling.

The federal government should retreat to truly federal matters and leave the states to their functions as intended in the Constitution.

Take just one example. Has university education been improved one jot by becoming effectively a federal responsibility? And why are the best universities in the world concentrated in a country where the federal government does not control them - the USA?

Why are we always told the answer to any problem is to hand it over to Canberra? Central uniform control is not always a virtue.

It is obvious that one state will be more effective than others in delivering education, or health, or providing a satisfactory standard of law and order, or compensation to the victims of accidents. By setting up a national standard it removes the possibility of the public making comparisons and of any resulting competition between the states.

Were we not a federation, we would still have those odious death duties which only farmers and widows with a family home and a few assets seemed to pay. We have Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen and the federation to thank for their removal. At that time, elderly Australians voted with their feet and moved to Queensland in such numbers that the politicians in the other states and the Commonwealth had to accept that the game was up.

In retreating to federal matters - defence, the currency and so on, the states should be ruthlessly cut adrift. They should be forced to find the greater part of their finance from within the state. The American Founding Fathers warned against what is called “vertical fiscal imbalance”. They recognised that federation would only work if the government spending your money was the one who raised it from you and, most importantly, had to answer to you for what they had done.

Australians are confused about who should do what. This has come about not only through the decisions of those centralist judges who have long decided that the Constitution means what they want it to mean, but also because of those corrupting understandings between power hungry federal politicians and weak state politicians who prefer the federal government to take the blame for the taxes they spend.

This was no more evident than with the GST windfall which the state politicians accepted, and often misspent, while simultaneously attacking John Howard’s courageous and, to some, inexplicable decision to fight an election on it.

Until we restore the constitutionally intended demarcation between the Commonwealth and the states, and make the states responsible for their own funding, we shall continue to deny ourselves the advantages of good government.

There is an inexorable drive to centralise everything in Canberra and if it does not stop even garbage collection will be administered from there.

The states are still sovereign, even if the High Court has failed in its duty to protect them. And yes, we could do with a few more states - New England and North Queensland, for example.

If the federal and state governments and parliaments did what the people want them to do and return to their constitutionally enshrined core functions, and raise the taxes for these themselves, the people would understand clearly who was responsible for what.

The resulting higher quality of government, especially at state level, would mean that much of the social and infrastructure decline in this country could at least be arrested. It is ironical that this decline has occurred just as the country has achieved a standard of technological advances and economic well being inconceivable not only in 1901,but also when we emerged victorious from the two world wars in which Australia had taken such a significant role.

My hope is that the next federal government realises that it can best perform its core functions by concentrating on them, by restoring the states to their proper place and not subverting or bribing them, by not seeing centralisation as the answer to all problems, and by not engaging in social engineering or wasting time on some current elite obsession such as the three “R’s” - republicanism, reconciliation or refugees.