Mining, masterchefs and masterstrokes
Perhaps I am misreading the mood of the nation, but there seems to be more public outrage directed towards the producers of Masterchef, Australia's most popular television show, for bringing back three rejected contestants, than the powerbrokers of the Australian Labor Party who cooked up the plot to oust Kevin Rudd, Australia's one-time most popular politician. The thinking behind the Masterchef manoeuvre was to lengthen the run of a kitchen-based reality show that has delivered ratings riches to one of the big four networks here, Channel Ten. The thinking behind the hatchet job on Kevin Rudd was to dramatically shorten the run of a prime minister whose ratings were plummeting at a hurtling pace. In Australia these days, prime ministers, like primetime TV shows, live or die on the strength of their ratings. For Masterchef, more cooks means more shows, and more profits.
All of which neatly brings us to the issue of the day, reached between the new Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, which she'll view as something a political masterstroke. On becoming prime minister, she announced that reaching a compromise agreement with the resources giants would be her number one priority. She has achieved a breakthrough by end of her first full week in charge - a deal celebrated with a trolley of wine and champagne, which was wheeled into the cabinet suite in Canberra where the negotiations with three mining giants, BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xstrata had taken place.
By slashing the super profits tax rate from 40% to 30%, the government will lose an estimated A$1.5 billion in projected revenue, but reap a political dividend. The proposed mining tax was hammering the Australian Labor Party in the resources-rich states of Queensland and Western Austalian, the home of the many of the key marginals which the government has to win to retain power at the forthcoming election. The Minerals Council of Australia reportedly had a war chest of A$100 million dollars to prosecute its opinion-shifting television advertising campaign. Now there will be a truce.
In a country often called the quarry of the world, where many people daily monitor the value of their BHP Billiton shares, Julia Gillard needed to neutralise this as an election issue. With the mighty resources giants welcoming the government's climb-down, that she has now done.
As an aside, sometime we should rework that Australian power list that I blogged on in mid-May. Mitch Hooke, the head of the Minerals Council, the country's most powerful lobby group, would definitely feature high up (actually, he was included in my first draft but then got biffed by the shopping centre magnate, Frank Lowy). Julia Gillard would move from number five to number two. And arguably, the top slot would be shared between the ALP powerbrokers who conspired to remove Kevin Rudd, such as the New South Wales Senator Mark Arbib and the Labor MP Bill Shorten.
For all that, the Australian people will soon get the chance to assert their own primacy. The deal with the resources sector surely brings the federal election closer. Next week will see some more political housekeeping from the new prime minister with an announcement on asylum seekers, another toxic electoral issue. Expect the same kind of political equipoise that was achieved over the mining tax.
By delivering a big bounce in the polls, Julia Gillard is proving to be something of a Masterchef herself, not least because she has such a keen sense for knowing exactly what the Australian people will find politically palatable.
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