politicalowl

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’...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 benef...

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 ...

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...

Tuesday, 20th March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   The thesis of ANOP's Rod Cameron that playing the man is turning voters off the Howard Government looks even more plausible after this morning's Newspoll so in Parliament this week we can expect a little less of Tony Abbott's aggro and rather more discussion by Ministers of matters of substance. Prime Minister John Howard will be much better served by the major speech he plans on the future of Iraq and Australia's involvement in that country than sniping at who Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd has spent his time meeting. And that is despite the general unpopularity of Australia's involvement in the Middle East. A Prime Minister who keeps plugging away at the disastrous consequences of a collapse or Iraq in to total anarchy might not convince a majority that he is right but he might gain a grudging respect for being a man with the courage of his convictions. So too with his industrial relations changes. Keep describ...

Friday, 16th March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   The accuracy or otherwise of the assertion by market researcher Rod Cameron on  ABC Lateline Wednesday night  - that attacks on Kevin Rudd have rebounded on the Coalition and it will soon stop them - will quickly become obvious. According to the man who was such a key contributor to all the Labor victories during the Hawke years, focus groups conducted by his ANOP company have left Australians puzzled. On Lateline Mr Cameron put it this way: Well, they are looking in bewilderment at this mud-slinging issue. They hate mud-slinging. They hate it with a passion. In election campaigns they don't like it because it is negative ads, but at least they get the message. Outside of election campaigns, they can't understand why mud is being slung. They don't understand what the issue is all about and therefore, it is rebounding on John Howard's character. For the last for all of John Howard's political life, the...

Thursday, 15th March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   If there was any doubt about the Coalition Government continuing to probe away at the personal foibles and supposed failings of Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd then the Health Minister Tony Abbott has surely dispelled them. With Labor still crying dirty politics and reports still fresh of polls showing Labor increasing its lead, Mr Abbott used a column in this morning’s Fairfax papers to keep questioning Mr Rudd’s honesty. The basis of this latest attack is Mr Rudd’s recollections of the events surrounding his father’s death when he was an 11 year old child. The Labor Leader recently told a television interviewer that one day he would like to study the inquest documents to see if there was any truth to suggestions that the care dad received in hospital after an accident was not of the highest standard. Others have saved him the trouble with the record being closely examined and Piers Akermann in the Sydney Telegra...

Thursday, 15th March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   John Howard is focussing on the economy. He told us so yesterday in Tokyo; five times in three sentences. As he said at his daily doorstop, "I will be focussing, and my colleagues will be focussing very heavily in the weeks and months ahead on the way in which Labor has sought to frustrate the very prosperity they will seek to exploit in their pre-election promises. Their starting point will be the strong economy which they opposed arriving and I will be focussing on that and I will be certainly focussing very heavily on the risk that Labor represents to the Australian economy, particularly in the area of workplace relations where the destruction of our changes will set the economy back, reinstall the unions as the driving force in the management of labour relations in this country and return the spectre of unfair dismissal laws for small business. Now we will be focussing on those things, but we'll continue to ...

Thursday, 15th March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   The battle of the keywords is now well under way as Labor and the Coalition struggle to damage their opposing leader. For Labor the recent task has been portraying John Howard as one of those clever politicians who are too tricky by half. For the Liberals the emphasis is on the words judgment and inexperience as they search to find a way of turning Labor's superman leader back into a mere political Clark Kent. Treasurer Peter Costello was at the forefront of the attack a month ago – Labor is drawing inspiration for its economic analysis from a Donald Duck magazine. This is the evolutionary cycle of the Labor Party. We have moved from Mark Latham's roosters to Kevin Rudd's ducks. Managing the Australian economy, which is a $1 trillion economy, takes experience  and commitment and you do not get your analysis from Donald Duck comics. 11 February 2007. Prime Minister John Howard recently stepped up the desc...

Thursday, 8th March, 2007    - Richard Farmer   We are in to the second week of the Coalition campaign to remind people that all politicians stink and things are going marvellously well. The spotlight might temporarily be off Kevin Rudd and there are some residual casualties on the Coalition’s own side but the public standing of politicians can rarely have been lower. That is precisely what was needed to take the gloss off the new Labor Leader. Welcome down to the depths with the rest of us Kevin where we can all splash around in the mud until election day. The only winners in this process are the independents who can pretend not to be politicians at all. The one prediction I will make about the coming election is that the combined vote for the Coalition and Labor parties will resume the downward trend of the last 20 years that was interrupted by a slight rise in 2004. It augurs well for the Greens to end up in control of the Senate.

Monday, 26th February, 2007    - Richard Farmer   The real purpose of the McKew candidacy is to irritate and annoy the Prime Minister. A good journalist does not necessarily make a good politician said Tony Abbott this morning as Maxine McKew was welcomed in to the world of electoral politics. As a former editorial writer for The Australian, the Health Minister should know. In recent memory Abbott has gone from being seen as a potential leader of his party to just another useful bully boy of a minister. Which is a role Ms McKew is unlikely to ever play for her adopted Labor Party. She is much too refined and nice for that – perhaps too much so. Candidates who dare to tackle a Prime Minister in his own seat can expect the going to get tough and it is yet to be seen how the dignified interviewer from ABC television adapts to a bit of rough and tumble. As the weeks go by Ms McKew will find obscure details of her past dredged up for public examination. It is ha...