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Showing posts from 2007

2004 Federal Election Diary One for the Golden Oldies

29th September, 2004    - Richard Farmer   Certainly one for the golden oldies. Not just Medicare but Medicare Gold! Labor's policy launch was cleverly designed to stress one of its strengths and blunt one of its negatives. The strength is Medicare itself. If Mark Latham can make this election a referendum about Medicare he will win it hands down. Health is the one issue that every poll by a margin well out of the range of three standard deviations of error has Labor trusted far more than the Coalition. Every day that Labor can make some aspect of Medicare the issue of the day the greater its chances of victory. The negative is that older Australians seem less impressed by the young Opposition Leader than they are by the pension age Prime Minister. Hence the choice of linking Medicare with Australians 75 and over. There is a danger, of course, that things will not work out as planned. Promising immediate and free hospital access to those 75 and over raises the fear that t

Results Confound Pollsters Numbers Meant Little In The End Were People Lying To Them?

Saturday, 24th March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   State Opposition Leader Peter Debnam, and anybody else hoping for a Liberal victory in NSW today, should get a copy of the Toronto Star of 28 June 2004 where those headlines appeared above a story describing how the Canadian Liberals won an election. As Stephanie Levitz of the Canadian Press Agency put it, "Canada's electorate appears to have confounded the pollsters. Weeks of speculation, number crunching and supper-hour phone calls to more than 25,000 Canadians over the last five weeks meant little in the end as the Liberals beat projections that they were headed for a sound thrashing in the election..." That Canadian election was a wonderful reminder of the power of the underdog effect and a lesson in why election watchers should studiously ignore the opinion polls. For weeks the Canadian pollsters and pundits were predicting a massive decline in support for the governing Liberal Party with the opposition Conserv

Sunrise on a Receding False Dawn

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Saturday, 14th April, 2007    - Richard Farmer   Kevin Rudd Do you doubt Kevin Rudd’s Honesty? That’s the question the Sydney Telegraph posed this morning at the end of its story on Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd having told a porky about neither he nor his staff being involved in plans by Channel 7’s  Sunrise  program to stage a "fake" dawn service at Long Tan on Anzac Day. The Tele’s anger is understandable. It broke the story of the Sunrise shenanigans on page one on Sunday under the headline "Rudd's insult to Vietnam vets" and accompanied it with a blistering editorial criticising the Labor Leader for cheapening the Anzac day of remembrance - "a national disgrace" and evidence of "miserably flawed leadership". Vietnam veterans, the paper reported, have been offended by Labor leader Kevin Rudd's request for a "fake" dawn service so he can commemorate Anzac Day live on Channel Seven's breakfast show from Long

Do as I Say Not as I Do

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Thursday, 12th April, 2007    - Richard Farmer   Kevin Rudd should be hoping this morning that members of the Government really have become reluctant to attack him on personal grounds. For yesterday the Opposition Leader exposed himself as a politician not prepared to practice what he preaches when it comes to the climate change caused by global warming. In short, Mr Rudd showed he is a hypocrite. While outlining plans for the rest of us to change our lifestyle to lessen carbon dioxide emissions he drives himself around in a gas guzzling Ford Territory. According to the assessment of the Federal Government’s Green Vehicle Guide it would be difficult for some one concerned about environmental damage to make a worse choice than the Territory. It rates but 2.5 stars when CO2 emissions, fuel consumption and air pollution are taken in to consideration. The Toyota Prius, which Mr Rudd incorrectly pretended on radio yesterday that he could not get on the government’s freebie motor car

A Jolly Chinese Aid Party

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Thursday, 12th April, 2007    - Richard Farmer   Annmaree O'Keeffe In Beijing at the end of last month a group of Australian government officials got together with some counterparts from the Chinese Department of Commerce for a celebration to mark 25 years of co-operation. Annmaree O'Keeffe, AusAID's deputy director general and Yu Jianhua, director of the Ministry’s Department of International Trade and Economic Affairs toasted the $1 billion given in foreign aid to China since the first Aussie dollar was spent in 1981. With China now having some trillion dollars in currency reserves and having become the largest lender to Africa, reportedly loaning at least $8 billion to the continent, it might have been an appropriate occasion to mark the end of this aid relationship but it was not so. On the future direction of Australia's programs Ms O'Keeffe told the happy gathering "our partnership will be focused on supporting equity in China's deve

Dysfunctional Defence

Thursday, 12th April, 2007    - Richard Farmer   The black tie the Prime Minister wore yesterday to announce that Australia will be sending troops to actually shoot their guns in Afghanistan may well reflect a sense of foreboding about giving an increased task to a military when a government report released last week claimed "the current range and nature of military operations is causing stress in Defence, and excessive pressures on senior people." The damning report released late on the eve of the Easter holidays, and thus barely reported so far in the press, certainly warned John Howard that all is far from well in the Department of Defence which was described as an organisation which "has confused its accountabilities." The Labor Shadow Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon was not exaggerating in describing the report of the Defence Management Review as highlighting "the dysfunctional relations between the Minister, his staff and defence planners and m

A Contract to Say Farewell With

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Thursday, 12th April, 2007    - Richard Farmer   Andrew Peacock, AC Andrew Peacock, the former Liberal Party Parliamentary Leader, Foreign Minister and Australian Ambassador to Washington, retired back in February from his position as President of Boeing Australia. In early March the Minister for Defence, Dr Brendan Nelson, made the surprise announcement of a decision to spend $6 billion with Boeing on a batch of Super Hornet fighter aircraft for the Australian air force. That Boeing should win a major contract is not surprising. The American company, after all, is the world’s leading aeroplane manufacture and a substantial supplier of defence equipment to countries around the world. What has made this acquisition different, and the recent connection of Mr Peacock to Boeing potentially embarrassing for the government, is the direct involvement of Dr Nelson in making it. For the purchase of the Super Hornets is not the result of some orthodox procurement policy where tea

The PM’s Younger Look

Wednesday, 11th April, 2007    - Richard Farmer   He might be a New South Welshman but Prime Minister John Howard made sure he was captured by the television cameras on Sunday night in the winning ACT Brumbies’ dressing room with the great George Gregan and not next door with the pathetic losers from Sydney. There was a little light hearted banter about the rugby union world cup to come later in the year and the PM having something else to do around that time but the significance of this rare weekend visit to Canberra by Howard was his dress not his words. For on this night at the football John Howard abandoned his tie. What the gentlemen of the Australian Rugby Union thought of a tie-less guest in their hospitality box is unknown but the casual look is not the normal one for officialdom at this code where even the long haired Canberra coach and his staff wear suits while supervising the pre-match warm up. No one would be aware of the protocol better than Mr Howard who has

A $300 Million Pre-Election Advertising Spree?

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Wednesday, 11th April, 2007    - Richard Farmer   ** From budget estimates Based on the experience of the last two years there is a good chance that next month’s budget will see $300 million allocated for spending on advertising by the Federal Government in the coming financial year with most of it concentrated in the period before this year’s election is officially called. From the $46 million paid to media organisations in the first year of the Howard Government, the current budget provides nearly $251 million for putting messages on television and radio and in print. The startling growth in the efforts of Government to manage public opinion through paid advertising is shown in the following table kindly sent to me by a Labor staffer who has updated the figures prepared by the Parliamentary Library I referred to earlier this month. Spending of this kind certainly gives a great advantage to an incumbent government but the published figures understate the actual adverti

Murray Darling Agreement Still Leaking

Thursday, 5th April, 2007    - Richard Farmer   The spur of the moment decision by Prime Minister John Howard to try and take over management of the Murray Darling River system is looking more and more like one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time. At the moment the Victorian Government is still refusing to agree to the Howard plan that was developed without even going to Cabinet and the Secretary of the Treasury, Ken Henry, according to this morning’s Australian Financial Review, has given  a scathing assessment  of the Howard government's recent water and climate-change policies. Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull is the man with the difficult task of rescuing what his leader planned as a key plank in his efforts to establish the environmental credentials of his Coalition Government. Yesterday Mr Turnbull was down by the river in Victoria trying to persuade irrigation farmers to back the $10 billion Commonwealth plan but, as  the Age reported , he w

A Reminder of Catch 22

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Thursday, 5th April, 2007    - Richard Farmer   Yossarian, as portrayed by Alan Arkin I am grateful to Brian Miller, one of my esteemed readers, for the following extract from Catch 22 where Yossarian was told he could go back home, released from the army, on one condition: Colonel Cathcart: All you have to do is ... like us. Lt Col. Korn: All you have to do is be our pal. Colonel Cathcart: Say nice things about us. Lt Col. Korn: Tell the folks at home what a good job we're doing. Take our offer Yossarian. Colonel Cathcart: Either that or a court-martial for desertion.

Bad News for Unions Not Bad for Labor

Thursday, 5th April, 2007    - Richard Farmer   Confirmation by the Australian Bureau of Statistics that the trade union membership decline is continuing apace was bad news for union leaders but not necessarily for Labor Leader Kevin Rudd. For a start the union movement knows that the coming election will be a last chance to stop sliding to virtual irrelevance. The return of a Coalition Government would increase the trend which has seen the proportion of Australian workers in a union fall from 35% to 20% since 1994 so there is no point in keeping money in reserve. Every available dollar must be spent by the unions in an effort to get Labor in to office. This should see Kevin Rudd in charge of a record advertising war chest. With the figures on declining trade union power so stark, the Opposition Leader has the opportunity to tailor the Labor Party message on industrial relations law changes to the broader community. He himself looks a lot different from the traditional labour

Waiting for the Positive Ads

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Wednesday, 4th April, 2007    - Richard Farmer   The biggest electoral advantage of the Liberal-National Party Government is about to unfold and the television industry is looking forward to it with an eager anticipation. The pre-election Government campaigns are now in the final stages of preparation and the spending is about to begin. Advertising managers for the commercial networks expect that the next six months will see a new expenditure record reached and there is no reason to doubt their prediction. Every pre-election period seems to bring a greater need for the public to be informed of government projects than in the pre-election period that preceded it. Accurate figures on government advertising expenditure are difficult to establish but the Parliamentary Library produced the following summary: The Parliamentary Library research found that the 1993, 1996, 1998 and 2001 federal elections were preceded by sharp increases in government advertising outlays: • the b

Listen Out for Healthy Forests While Fanaticism Spreads

Wednesday, 4th April, 2007    - Richard Farmer   The influence of that little worm Australians were introduced to when the Nine Network started televising political leadership debates is growing. Measuring the immediate public reaction to words is now beginning to dominate the public debate as our leaders embark on their triennial effort to confuse and obfuscate. We can gauge the findings by listening to the daily grabs on television and for the Liberals the latest in word is fanaticism. Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull started using it during television interviews on Sunday as in this description of climate change: "Labor is verging on becoming fanatical about this issue in the sense that they do not care how poor we have to become as long as we become pure. I think religion is a very poor guide to public policy." Mr Turnbull was repeating it again this morning on ABC Radio National: "The problem with labor is that they have locked themselves into essential

The New Motherhood Statement

Friday, 30th March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   When in doubt, relate it to jobs. Maintaining jobs. Creating jobs. That is the current Prime Ministerial message. John Howard is speaking about jobs everywhere. Yesterday protecting Australian jobs was the reason for not endorsing the views of the visiting British climate change guru Sir Nicholas Stern. The Stern views are clearly too stern for Mr Howard. Some of them "if implemented would do great damage to the economy" and his government was not going to agree to prescriptions "that are going to cost the jobs of Australian miners." Earlier in the week in was Work Choices where Mr Howard brought out jobs as his defensive weapon. At  a Kirribilli doorstop  he rejected criticism of his industrial relations policies in this way: "We're not going to be making any changes of substance to WorkChoices because we believe WorkChoices is a very good policy and we also believe on the first anniversary of WorkChoi

Sending a Chinese Back Home

Wednesday, 28th March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   In March last year, according to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor of the United States State Department, the United Nations Special Rapporteur Nowak reported that Falun Gong practitioners accounted for 66 percent of victims of alleged torture while in Chinese government custody. In its Country Report on Human Rights Practices, the US Bureau gave no judgment as to the truth or otherwise of that allegation but it did have this to say about the way adherents to this rather strange organisation are treated in China: Falun Gong members identified by the government as "core leaders" have been singled out for particularly harsh treatment. More than a dozen Falun Gong members have been sentenced to prison for the crime of "endangering state security," but the great majority of Falun Gong members convicted by the courts since 1999 have been sentenced to prison for "organizing or using a sect to

Finding Kevin Rudd's Patsy

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Wednesday, 28th March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   Doug Cameron - prepared to be Kevin Rudd's patsy. Every Labor Party leader needs a patsy when it comes Federal Conference time. At some stage of the managed debates, the script will call on the top dog to assert himself. An opponent will be allowed to bark out an objection or two before being crushed by a decisive vote in the leader’s favour. For next month’s conference, Doug Cameron, the federal secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, is being prepared for this essential and ritualistic defeat. As a self proclaimed spokesman for the left, Mr Cameron will be allowed, even encouraged, to argue for Labor to return to its past support of protection for manufacturing industry. Delegates will hear him urge the banning of free trade deals and public private partnerships. There will be a call for the removal of tax on superannuation payouts because it weakens the traditional pension safety net for retired workers

He Wants to be But Will He?

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Tuesday, 27th March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   Greg Combet - Determined to show he was more than a trade union official. Any doubts I had about Greg Combet wanting to be a member of parliament disappeared last November in the Adelaide Town Hall when I heard him deliver the 9th annual Hawke Lecture for the University of South Australia's Hawke Centre. The words were those of a man determined to show he was more than a trade union official with the one track mind dedicated to defeating John Howard's new industrial relations laws. This ACTU boss portraying himself as the man to return Australia to the "shared aspiration for economic prosperity, security from external threat, and the attainment of a fair and just society" that John Howard had undermined. "Our enduring historic consensus", Mr Combet told his audience, "has been overwhelmed by policies that must invite our deepest attention and questioning. Are we truly convinced that economic pr

Big Brother is Getting Closer

Tuesday, 27th March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   The ability to discover which street a person walked down five years previously, which pub they stopped at and what they drank is closer than we think. The Royal Academy of Engineering yesterday released its report "Dilemmas of Privacy and Surveillance - Challenges of Technological Change" noting that digital surveillance means that there is no barrier to storing all CCTV footage indefinitely. Ever-improving means of image-searching, in tandem with developments in face and gait-recognition technologies, allows footage to be searched, said the Academy, for individual people. "This will one day make it possible to 'Google spacetime', to find the location of a specified individual at some particular time and date." As if to reinforce the point that Big Brother is getting closer, Britain’s police chiefs reacted to the report by revealing they wanted to be able to easily download picture data from privatel

Time for a Little Treemail

Tuesday, 27th March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   If Kevin Rudd does become Prime Minister at the end of this year it is a fair bet that from 1 July 2008 he will find himself having to deal with a Senate in which the Greens hold the balance of power. The likelihood of that Senate outcome, in fact, has increased considerably with the decision by the Opposition Leader to back away from the pro-trees policy of his predecessor Mark Latham. Whereas Mr Latham opted to lock up substantial areas of old-growth forests in Tasmania, Mr Rudd, according to this morning’s Australian, supports the existing Tasmanian Community Forest Agreement, announced in May 2005 by John Howard. Mr Rudd, writes Steve Lewis, has committed to consulting with unions, industry and the state Government on a "sustainable" forestry plan. Which translated means that the Greens alone will be campaigning this year as the protector of old growth forests. That should enable them to maximise their own Senate v

Political Delusions

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Tuesday, 27th March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   Peter Debnam The capacity for self delusion among politicians has no limits. That was shown by the reaction of NSW Liberal Leader Peter Debnam on Saturday night when his concession speech sounded like a man who had achieved a great victory. What in fact happened was a Liberal Party disaster. A very modest increase in the Liberal vote was not enough to win even one seat from Labor. How Debnam can even contemplate continuing as Opposition Leader is beyond me. Premier Morris Iemma, by contrast, on Saturday night was admirably restrained. He looks to me like a man who actually believes what he says about having heard the criticisms of a people disillusioned with the way they are governed. He will be a more formidable opponent in four years time and that's another reason why any decision to keep Debnam would be completely foolish.

The Three Way Split in NSW

Tuesday, 27th March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   That Australia is moving away from a two party system was displayed in the weekend’s New South Wales election. There is clearly a third force to challenge Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition: the "Anybody but Labor and the Coalition" grouping is supported by almost a third of the electorate. In polling for the lower house the third force received 23.9% of the votes and really showed its strength in the upper house election by reaching 32.7%. No wonder the operatives of the major parties spend so much time trying to make preference deals with the minnows. More than ever before it is the number two on the ballot paper that determines which of Labor or Coalition becomes the government. These days Labor gets a big start in that department because of the emergence of the Greens as the biggest contributor to the third party vote. On Saturday the Greens gained 8.8% in the lower house (up half a percentage point on their

Better Future Plays the Better Now

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Friday, 23rd March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   It is no accident that there is an unfunded liability for superannuation payments to be made in the future to public servants. The liability was accumulated as the result of deliberate decisions by past governments. Those decisions reflected two beliefs: that while future generations might be inheriting this government debt they also inherited assets paid for by the taxes of previous generations; ignoring future payments made life easier for a Treasurer. Peter Costello was the Treasurer who decided to break the unfunded tradition and there was some sense to it. He, after all, presided over the sale of the assets that previous governments had notionally counted on as being the other side of the balance sheet. The so-called Future Fund, even though it contains only a small proportion of total asset sales by this Liberal-National Government, stops a fair dinkum unfunded superannuation liability eventuating or at least minimises

Creeping Away with Privacy

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Friday, 23rd March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   NSW Senator Kerry Nettle -"ASIS has been mired in controversy in the past about alleged spying on Australians. It now seems the government is formalising ASIS's ability to do so." The Senate yesterday morning was considering what the Government describes as a little technical matter - the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2007 which, among other things, will allow the Australian Security and Intelligence Service (ASIS) to secretly access information held by the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre. Which is another way of saying that the spooks whose job is meant to be spying for their country in other countries can have a little peak at the financial records here at home of any and all Australians. Why ASIS needs the new power has not been explained during the debate and the Opposition is not objecting. Just mention the words national security these days and Labor ru

Sacrificing Tasmania

Friday, 23rd March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   For the Bob Hawke of 1983, writing off Tasmania was easy enough because there was no state Labor Government to worry about, the prospects of picking up House of Representative seats was negligible and opposing the damming of the Franklin River was a wonderful way of gaining support from the environmentally concerned on the mainland. The strategy worked like a charm and throughout the 1980s Federal Labor courted votes by defending the trees of the island state. Difficulties only started arising when, from the mid 1990s, State Labor was safely back in office. Mark Latham was a victim of the tension between the chop-the-trees down policies of a development minded State party and the protect-the-trees policy which best suited Federal vote getting. Latham dithered around for months and when he finally stuck with what was most likely to win the greatest number of votes outside Tasmania it was too late to gain any benefit from doing so. N

Have the People Stopped Listening?

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Thursday, 22nd March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   John Howard gave his underlings a history lesson yesterday – a run down in the party room on when Australian governments changed and why. From the defeat of Chifley Labor in 1949 through to his own magnificent victory over Paul Keating in 1996, via McMahon’s exit in 1972, Whitlam’s loss of 1975 and the Fraser departure of 1983, the PM drew two conclusions: the governments thrown out of power "were not seen as competent or people had stopped listening to them." Now one part of this tale of the failure of governments, Mr Howard explained, did not apply to his team at the moment despite what the opinion polls might be showing. In the history according to Howard "this Government is seen as a competent government." Which leaves the unanswered question: have the people stopped listening? Mr Howard must be hoping they haven’t but his whole thesis is open to questioning. Ben Chifley’s lot became unpopular wi

Handling the Poisoned Chips

Thursday, 22nd March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   The environmental bureaucrats in Canberra, and their minister, would have been very pleased with themselves back in 2004 when they concluded an agreement with the Tasmanian Government that would see a Tasmanian enquiry cover the Commonwealth requirements to ensure that a planned pulp mill in the Tamar Valley was environmentally sound. Anything to do with trees and Tasmania is a political horror for federal politicians and fobbing things off to a Resource Planning and Development Commission headed by a respected retired judge was a wonderful way of side stepping problems until the Tasmanian Government decided to get rid of the Commission’s enquiry. The problem is now right back in the lap of the new Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull and dealing with it will be a major test of his political skills as well as those of Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd. Both men will face the very same pressures that were on John Howard and Mark Lat

What, Me Worry?

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Tuesday, 20th March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   Alfred E. Neuman John Howard has become the Alfred E. Neuman of Australian politics. He bounded down the steps of his VIP jet with a cheeky grin as if he did not have a care in the world. The old fellow even carried his own bag and kept the minders out of sight. The image was a Prime Minister capable of doing things on his own; a PM keen to get on with the job of running the country. The fit and sprightly picture was not a new one. Every day we are reminded that age has not wearied him. Australians have got used to their track suited leader striding out every morning. But on this visit to the war zones of the world Mr Howard did give us a new look. A brown leather bomber jacket replaced the sports coat as he mingled with the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Not exactly the style of a modern youth but at least an advance to a look of the 70s. Off the plane and in to a television studio with Kerry O’Brien where the smiles c