Jonathan Green hosts Sunday Extra on Radio National and is the former editor of The Drum. His latest book is The Year My Politics Broke (MUP 2013). Jonathan Green has worked in public radio, at Crikey, The Canberra Times, Melbourne Herald, Herald Sun, Sunday Herald and The Age, where he was a senior writer, daily columnist, night editor, sections editor, Saturday edition editor and editor of the Sunday Age. He tweets at @greenj.
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The two sides of politics revealed as little as they could about how they would address the big issues before the last election, and instead favoured clichés and slogans.
Now, pledges to "build a stronger economy" and "stop the waste" don't appear to have been shorthand for deeper ideas and plans, but simply shallow rhetoric.
And we have to take some responsibility for that and for allowing governments to coast on their campaign rhetoric when in power, despite the challenges ahead.
Topics: government-and-politics, federal-election, business-economics-and-finance, tax
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Could that be right? Could workers, employers and government come to some sort of enduring understanding beyond the trivial short-termism of the political cycle and its automatically generated conflicts?
Why would it not be to our broad benefit to remove as much of the bluster and tired ideological posturing as possible from our discussions over how best to grow enterprise, opportunity, employment and mutual return?
It's disturbing that a little lateral common sense can have such an arresting and headline-grabbing effect, but Paul Howes might be on to something with his ambition for a New Accord.
Topics: unions, industrial-relations, business-economics-and-finance, federal-government
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Modern politics is a reactive contest for popular appeal, in so many ways the enemy of intelligent, vigorous and challenging policy and ideas.
But at times this can work in favour of a broad common good.
That same middle ground inertia that keeps us from dealing imaginatively and energetically with many of the core issues that confront us may at least do us the great favour of keeping the racial radicalism of the aggrieved and vocal right at bay.
Topics: abbott-tony, indigenous-policy, reconciliation, constitution, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander
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Call me old-fashioned, but I would like to think this of my Prime Minister: that he is a man of intelligence, independent thought and creative intellectual flexibility; a man who knows, trusts and expresses his own mind.
Call me trivial, but I'll never be able to convince myself that Tony Abbott is any of those things while he keeps wearing those blue ties.
To me it marks him as a politician compulsively obsessed by the finest detail of political messaging; a man prepared to surrender even something as small, simple and silly as the choice of a tie to the necessities of political craft.
Topics: abbott-tony, federal-government
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It is hard to imagine a more feeble response to the international flow of people than simply stopping the flow of boats between South East Asia and Australia.
Yet "stopping the boats" is the simple totality of the political proposition in this country - all that need be done.
If our politics neither interrogates the means by which this is achieved and its implied cruel and extreme deterrence, then that is not the failure of our political practitioners, but those among the Australian people who allow the issue to be defined so tightly and inhumanely with such an evident eye to political self-interest.
Topics: federal-government, refugees
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The Holden issue was a debate framed not economically, but against the traditional values of our politics, with the government and Holden squaring off in a tense stalemate this week.
In the end, the government was spared and no doubt pleased that blame might be sheeted to its predecessor.
But the end of Holden is not the end of this moment of continuing complexity and adjustment for our economy, and - hopefully - our politics.
For all of us, the era of tough decisions is only just beginning.
Topics: automotive, federal-government, business-economics-and-finance
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Madam Speaker, what an honour it is to at last stand in this place, an elected member of the Australian House of Representatives.
There has never been a better time to practice the profession of politics, never a moment when we have been so in control of the circumstances that propel the rich but safely contained drama of this place, that so richly reward and benefit each and every one of us.
And that is honesty in politics, Madam Speaker, that in truth there is no honesty at all. No honesty, no principle, no belief. Madam Speaker, we are free at last.
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''You can vote Liberal or Labor and you'll get exactly the same amount of funding for your school,'' said Education Minister Christopher Pyne pre-election.
"As far as school funding is concerned, Kevin Rudd and I are on a unity ticket," said his leader, Tony Abbott.
Snap forward to this week and that unity ticket has famously expired. But while trash talk and calculated deception can bring a party to power, once it is there, these ploys are empty and ultimately self-defeating.
Topics: federal-government, education, schools
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The bind for Prime Minister Abbott in the Indonesian spying scandal is very real. To not soothe the Indonesians is, as we saw yesterday, to threaten cooperation on boats.
But to make a too generous conciliatory gesture might betray the sovereign interests of Australian intelligence, but also offend the sensitivities of Mr Abbott's own domestic political base.
Elsewhere the Abbott government has also been more than happy to cop whatever consequences might come from pursuing domestic political self-interest on the international stage.
Topics: security-intelligence, defence-and-national-security, foreign-affairs, abbott-tony, human
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Everything that is fraught and contradictory in our public life is nested in Kevin Rudd. The calling, the calculation. The common good, the narrow self-interest.
He had humanity; you could see that last night in the choked, tearful delivery of his speech of departure. You could see his utter bastardry as well in the self-absorbed campaign of vindictive spite that filled the three years after his forced departure in 2010.
And now that we come to muse on his legacy, it's a tough call as to whether he was a builder or a destroyer in progressive Australian politics.
Topics: rudd-kevin, federal-government
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As former prime minister John Howard revealed in his speech on global warming, we have departed from the evidence into a realm propelled purely by political necessity.
By this relentless political logic, it can only be a matter of time before we have a group of politicians who fully accept the truth of climate science and the dire possibilities that it entails, then act against the dictates of that scientific certainty for narrow short-term advantage.
That would be a high point in modern politics, a moment that might achieve a blissful state of near political perfection and something close to outright evil.
Topics: climate-change, howard-john-winston, federal-government
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The tragedy of the local conversation is the way in which our politics of climate change operate in some parallel universe to the physical realities that confront us.
The sad fact is that our political process stands as our only organised and collective means of addressing this issue.
It would be no bad thing to politicise the discussion of our climate if only the resulting politics revolved around the search for some sort of solution rather than just the narrow testing of power and advantage.
Topics: climate-change, environmental-policy, emissions-trading
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The Coalition was elected to "cut the waste", but voters have found that this set of pollies is just as prone to trough-snorting self-serving excess as the mob they replaced.
While the media pack might be inclined to politely move on from the story any day now, the Prime Minister might find the public is much less forgiving.
And with the blogosphere continuing to dog and expose, the outrage of these ordinary taxpayers - long duped into funding weddings, triathlons, anything - might be stoked for some time yet.
Topics: abbott-tony, government-and-politics, federal-government
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For three years the asylum seeker issue has been represented as a crisis of urgent necessity that Australians needed to fix for themselves, never mind all this talk of namby-pamby regionalism.
But this week we have seen a weird re-imagining that cast the man responsible for this strident campaign as the man who could, through diplomatic resource, humility and cunning, rephrase this discussion as a cooperative regional venture.
And so Tony Abbott, on his return from Indonesia, has been applauded for defusing bilateral tensions that he more than anybody else had created.
Topics: world-politics, federal-government, abbott-tony, refugees
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In opposition, every boat was numbered and paraded for full political effect. But this week this issue moved from the noisy clamour of opposition to the quiet whirr of industrious government.
No daily updates, no eagerly set upon numbers around the steady flow of boat arrivals.
In another master class in political craft, border protection was now a military operation, an area in which secrecy is a commonplace. Loose lips sink ships.
Topics: federal-government, refugees, abbott-tony
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The notion of community is being reshaped by a revolution in communication. It's a process without a visible endpoint, and with almost limitless implications.
In the face of that sort of change, why should we assume that any institution or framework is impervious? If this has implications for media, why should it not also have implications for politics?
And so, in a world in which appeals to tradition and the loyalties of the last century have lost their effect, the Australian Labor Party may or may not have a place.
Topics: alp, government-and-politics
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Just as we learn from our mistakes, so do we learn from the triumphs of others.
The Labor Opposition may take the view that the way forward is to harden up, play the man, be filled with determined and remorseless intent. After all, that worked for Tony Abbott.
We can only hope they reject the hard arts of denigration and contempt in favour of the harder, slower road to office.
Topics: federal-elections, alp
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Why is the Coalition trying to featherbed parental leave? And why is Labor advocating cruelty to asylum seekers?
Conservatives still cling to a steady doctrine of small government, free markets, and individualism, while ALP continues to espouse its belief in big government, the redistribution of wealth, and the protective social merit of unionisation.
But both parties are more than happy to leave their political convictions behind when it comes to appealing to the only voters who matter: the marginal ones.
Topics: federal-elections
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Much of the bluster around the Murdoch campaign against Kevin Rudd is based on the assumption that there is an audience that is susceptible to influence of the offending newspapers.
Chances are that is a pretty big assumption, one that might flatter the vanity of the proprietor, and say more about the impact of mass circulation tabloids than is merited in a time in which trust in some quarters of the traditional media is in strong decline.
The simple fact is that fewer and fewer people actually believe the Daily Telegraph and its ilk, a necessary precondition, you might imagine, for vote-turning influence.
Topics: print-media, journalism, media, federal-elections
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In 2010, constant heckling from within her own party damaged Julia Gillard, probably fatally, perhaps taking from her the possibility of a majority in her own right.
Three years on, through a strange karmic twist, this same animus has deprived the ALP of the chance to run on its recent record on education, health and disability, because doing so would mean giving credit to that most hated of political figures, the former prime minister.
It's a payback of a sort, a resonant tragedy of jealousy and spite, of how animus brought down one campaign and then carried through to steal possibly winning thunder from the next.
Topics: federal-elections, rudd-kevin
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Despite the growth of a wonkish niche in the serious media, fatuous trivia and distorted polemic still trumps discussion of the big issues.
Take this week as an example: Rudd allegedly cheats with notes in a debate, but it turns out Tony is not the suppository of all wisdom, while Kevin Rudd's son smokes a cigar, and dammit, you've got sex appeal, you minx. Oh, and homosexuality? It's just a phase you're going through.
Somewhere in there the Pre-Election Fiscal Outlook hinted broadly that the federal budget was anything but sexy - in fact, it is closer to suppository, if truth be told.
Topics: federal-elections
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In trumping the traditional authority of the ALP caucus with his broader popularity, Kevin Rudd has ensured this presidential progress now unfolding.
This Labor campaign is an effort that will live or die with him, that will be propelled by his stamina, that will falter and fail on his efforts alone.
The federal election has now become a test of the thin strength of charisma against the slower appeal of calculation and reserve.
Topics: federal-elections, rudd-kevin, abbott-tony
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Conventional progressive shorthand sees the political obsession with asylum seekers as a dog whistle to race politics.
But to pass asylum politics off as disguised racism is both flattering to the foetid little rump of true Australian racists and an underestimation of the issue's broader impact: as both a proxy for all manner of uncertainties and policy failures and as a distraction from them.
The boat debate can be taken at face value but it also speaks to ill-defined unease in the electorate and goes some way to absolving government of responsibility for the policies that might address them.
Topics: federal-government, community-and-society, immigration, refugees, government-and-politics, elections, federal-elections
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We seem to be watching a great national forgetting, in which everything that happened over the past three years, all its plots, gender-positionings and quaint hand-crafted kangaroos, has been swept under the rug.
Will it be Tony Abbott's tragedy that he was a political character formed in that period, that term of bitterly contested minority government and the protracted backroom power play of two party organisations waging war?
In the end, it may not say that much about us that is flattering if in our eagerness to forget three years of ugliness, we turn instead to a man whose influence lay malevolently beneath it all.
Topics: rudd-kevin, leadership, federal-elections, alp
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Tony Abbott suggests that an emissions trading scheme is "a so-called market in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no-one".
This is either a case of nasty political Tourette's or a precise statement that might reasonably by parsed for political intent.
That intent seems clear enough: a nod to the people, both voters and those in his own ranks, sceptical of climate science, for whom the idea of "taxing air" has always been a semantic thrust at what they see as the absurdity of climate change.
Topics: climate-change, abbott-tony, federal-government, federal-elections
