Drawing the economic battle lines
The largest stimulus package in Australian history, a war-time style national television address from the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the declaration of a National Economic Emergency. The introduction of a centred on nation-building infrastructure projects and consumer confidence-building tax bonuses has also ignited a rancorous political debate conducted outside the norms of the theatrics of parliament and fuelled by genuine personal animus. This political conflict appears real rather than phoney.
Both Malcolm Turnbull, the opposition leader, and Kevin Rudd deployed the military vernacular which seems a regular feature now of Canberra debates. In committing his party to voting against the package, Mr Turnbull accused the government of firing off all its ammunition in one go. The prime minister fired back by saying: "Cheap politics lies in just throwing a few potshots from the side and kind of turning around in 12 months' time and saying 'I told you so'."
To stick with military-speak, the battle lines are drawn for the next federal election, which has to come before mid-April, 2011. Kevin Rudd is trying to portray the Liberal Party and its leader, Malcolm Turnbull, as do-nothing obstructionists and reckless free-marketers. The government regularly reminds the electorate that Mr Turnbull was a merchant banker, and thus, it implies, one of the millionaire authors of the present crisis. The opposition says it will block the stimulus package because, as Mr Turnbull points out: "Someone has to stand up for fiscal discipline."
Along with the declared aims of protecting jobs and boosting domestic demand, Kevin Rudd seems to be spending big and spending early so that there will be tangible signs of improvement in the Australian economy before the next election. He has also gone for voter-friendly measures like improvements to schools, free ceiling insulation and tax bonus for the hard-working Aussie 'battlers', that election-deciding demographic. The money has also been used to advance the government's policy agenda: financing what it calls its "education revolution" and pushing some environmentally-friendly, energy-saving measures.
Malcolm Turnbull appears to think that the downturn will be longer lasting and that he will be able to pin the blame on the Labor Party, which the Liberal Party has traditionally tagged as economically inept. He is hoping that Kevin Rudd will become that rarity in Australian political history: a one-term prime minister.
This week the government declared that the mining boom is over - which is particularly worrying since this China-fuelled exports bonanza has helped furnish 17 years of uninterrupted growth and been a vital source of revenue for a badly-depleted Treasury. The government is going to run up huge debts - a A$22bn deficit this year alone, the first time the Australian budget has gone into the red since 2002.
Despite this massive government intervention, Mr Rudd claims still to be an economic conservative, a boast at the last election which helped reinforce his message of risk-free change. But in his , a magazine which he has used in the past to frame the terms of the intellectual debate, he clearly views the present crisis as an ideological turning point and the end of what he has taken to calling "extreme capitalism". But both Mr Rudd and Mr Turnbull clearly view this as a political turning point, as well, and this, the first week of new parliamentary term, felt very much like the first week of an election campaign.
For all the talk of "national economic emergencies", the Aussie sense of humour continues to break through. certainly made me chuckle.
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