![He looks how we feel: NAB chairman and former Treasury boss Ken Henry.](/content/dam/images/g/u/j/q/x/q/image.related.afrArticleLead.620x350.gujp9p.png/1487834072941.jpg)
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It started within minutes of the Fair Work Commission's Sunday penalty rates decision being handed down on Thursday.
The Coalition wanted everybody to know the review of penalty rates that led to a decision to cut Sunday penalty rates in the retail and hospitality sectors a bit was all Bill Shorten's fault. Bill Shorten wanted everybody to know it was the Coalition's fault, and Malcolm Turnbull's fault in particular.
Somewhere along the way someone might have mentioned "the independent umpire".
But there weren't a vast number of politicians out there explaining what the decision actually said, or talking about the pluses and minuses, or reminding people that there is a reason for – and long history of – having an "independent umpire" on wages and conditions.
Both sides of politics can point to steps along the way to argue that the FWC's consideration of Sunday penalty rates was all the other sides' fault. But the fact that is what the brawl is about just says everything about the dire state of Australian politics.
Well, not everything. Ken Henry had quite a lot to say about it on Thursday too.
The Prime Minister has, of course, been busy this week, attending not less than seven events with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu: a truly extraordinary level of sucking up, even in the context of Australian politics' long history of sucking up to Israel.
"Netanyahu doesn't get that sort of applause at home," Herb Keinon, a reporter from the Jerusalem Post chuckled to The Australian Financial Review's Luke Malpass at a function at Sydney's Central Synagogue.
Context is everything
To put it in to context, the President of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, is scheduled to arrive here on Saturday for his first visit. He gets a press conference and a dinner and leaves again.
Widodo's visit, of course, doesn't offer as many domestic political benefits as the first visit by an Israeli Prime Minister. It's just a visit by the leader of the country, which is forecast to shortly be the fourth largest economy in the world.
But back to the world of domestic policy debates, which both sides of politics seem to be so spectacularly abandoning.
Ken Henry – now the chairman of the National Australia Bank and former head of the federal Treasury – may have made the usual noises on Thursday that you would expect from "business leaders" about cutting the company tax rate, and lifting and broadening the GST.
But what was much more significant was what he had to say not just about the damnable state of politics, but about what everyone else should do about it.
Henry is hardly the first person to lament the dysfunction of our political system, though not many from the business establishment speak of how "populism supplies the munitions" of a political trench warfare "designed merely to cause political embarrassment".
Business should get on with it
But he is an even greater rarity in essentially saying business should basically get on with running the country, at least in some areas where politics has driven us in to a complete and utter dead end.
Business may not be able to fix the budget, but Henry argued that two of our biggest challenges – climate change and infrastructure – are things that business can, and should, effectively fix itself.
After all, business has been pricing carbon, and the effects of climate change, into its balance sheets for years.
"The biggest challenge confronting the energy sector is that climate change policy in Australia is a shambles," he said.
From Henry's perspective, it might not be beyond the realms of possibility that industry could establish its own emissions intensity scheme in the energy sector. It might at least create more certainty for the businesses involved.
Similarly, while politicians stuff around about infrastructure, business has the capacity to get on and do something about it.
What would the business community's incentives be for essentially taking over the issue of doing something about climate change or about infrastructure?
Well, Henry puts a lot of it back to a subject that is largely a taboo in the Australian political debate, "our strong rate of population growth", growth that has seen the population grow by about 2 million in the last six years alone.
Population growth, he notes, is one of the few areas where there is a divergence between the community and the business sector about the goals for Australia's future with "considerably less support for a larger population" among the broader community.
"People are concerned about the impact of a growing population on traffic congestion, urban amenity, environmental sustainability and housing affordability.
"And they worry about our ability to sustain Australian norms of social and economic inclusion," he notes.
Big Australia redux?
Business, on the other hand, thinks population growth is a good thing. So, Henry argues that "Australia's business leaders have to accept responsibility for ensuring that strong population growth, and the investment opportunities that go with it, lift economic and social opportunity for all without damaging the quality of the environment we pass to future generations".
"That means that we have to take an interest in traffic congestion, housing affordability, urban amenity and environmental amenity, including climate change mitigation and adaptation.
"If we want better access to skilled domestic workers, then we are going to have to offer those workers the prospect of better lives.
"If we want modern and efficient infrastructure, then we are going to have to take an interest in the design of our cities; we are going to have take an interest in regional development; and we are going to have to take an interest in the planning of new urban centres."
In short, "topics that we have traditionally assumed to be in the domain of public policy, and not the stuff of business, are going to have to become our constant preoccupation".
Not that the former Treasury head was going to let the government off scott-free on the budget, scathingly questioning the Treasurer's long (but crumbling) contention that the problem with the budget is spending, not revenue, noting that a fiscal strategy that relies on fiscal drag "to lift revenue by about 3.5 percentage points of GDP – more than $60 billion a year – over the decade to 2019-20", also has a revenue problem.
It is striking that Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe had made a somewhat similar plea to business on Wednesday to step up to the plate on infrastructure to give the RBA space to end the ultra-low official interest rate policy that is fuelling risky house price growth.
While the circus goes on in Canberra, our institutions may just get on with running things themselves.
Laura Tingle is The Australian Financial Review's political editor.