The ALP can apply this Tolstonian injunction by retaining Julia Gillard as prime minister as part of a stratagem of having Labor statesman Simon Crean effectively lead a “No” case in the constitutional referendum to help Labor actually win the September 2013 federal election.

Dr. David Paul Bennett argues in this article that political leaders nearly always have to choose between good and bad and in opting for the former they can actually prevail against seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

(The text that is bolded is done so to denote the urgency of the current situation).

The Australian Labor Party (ALP) victory in the October 2007 federal election was due to elements within the coalition undermining the Howard government from within in pursuance of their rent-seeking agenda. As such, the government of Kevin Rudd (2007-2010) was mainly there to implement a pre-arranged policy agenda as there are also rent-seeking elements within the ALP which collude with similar elements within the coalition.

Moves to transition Australia to a rentier state were manifested by the Rudd government proposing a Resource Rent Super Tax (RSPT) in May 2010. Such a tax would effectively have allowed the three mega mining companies of BHP-Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xstrata as well as Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting Pty Ltd and Clive Palmer’s Mineralogy Pty Ltd to legally minimize the profits that they had to declare to render the RSPT ineffective as a revenue raiser.

The real and intended impact of the RSPT was to give the above cited mining companies an unfair competitive advantage by enabling them to enter into operational arrangements with State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) so that profits in an Australian context could be legally minimized to a bare minimum. The ineffectiveness of an RSPT as an actual tax revenue raiser was illustrated by the relatively little that the Minerals Resource Rent Tax (RSPT) on iron and ore profits has raised in revenue (A$ 126 million) for the 2011-2012 financial year.

Despite the ineffectiveness of super-profits taxation on Australian mining, the rent-seeking Greens persist in advocating such a policy. Perhaps the Greens believe that they can be a part of a future economic-political elite by supporters of theirs sitting on the boards of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) which revenue from super-profits into taxation on mining would be figuratively poured. SWFs are statutory bodies which have government and private representatives on their management boards and which are responsible for the investment funds from private and public sources.

Singapore and Norway have very successful SWFs. Indeed, an important factor which militates against the PRC transitioning to a multi-party system is because an electoral democracy would undermine the political and economic power that shadowy forces within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exercise by manipulating such funds.

In the Australian context SWFs would be ineffective because of the dud nature of super-profits taxation on the mining sector. Rent-seeking advocates apparently still fail to recognise that beside the PRC gaining an unfair trading advantage over Australia derived from an RSPT, insufficient revenue from mining could be raised from such a tax to go into SWFs. Nevertheless, rent-seeking measures, such as the carbon tax, are still being applied to increase cost pressures on primary and secondary industry so that there will be an over-reliance on the mining sector.

Economic Diversity: The Foundation of Australian Prosperity and Democracy

The antithesis of rent-seeking in an Australian context is economic diversity as manifested by there being strong primary and secondary industries with a viable service component generating high levels of employment. This balance has been the secret to Australia’s high standard of living since the export of Merino wool in the 1800s.

Respective attempts in the 1800s and 1850s to establish a political concentration of power based on control of a particular resource in the respective aftermaths of the Rum Rebellion of 1808 to 1810 and the Eureka Stockade Rebellion of 1854 were thwarted. Consequently, Australia developed the scope to become a democracy with the economic diversity necessary for economic prosperity and a fair distribution of wealth.

Australian federal and state governments can safeguard the nation’s high standard of living by consistently seeking to protect and promote economic diversity. Unfortunately, since the ALP won the 2007 federal election, there has been a tendency to look to “quick fixes” such as super-profits taxation on the mining sector and raiding of superannuation funds to facilitate government revenue to help create the conditions for economic prosperity.

That such a tendency within the ALP has existed since their coming to power in 2007 is not surprising due to the unusual circumstances and underlying reasons why the coalition lost office that year. Because the ALP assumed power in 2007 primarily as a result of political chicanery by rent-seeking elements within the federal coalition, the two federal Labor governments have since struggled to find their way in terms of fully pursuing their own independent agendas.

The moves by the Rudd government in May 2010 to introduce an RSPT and fatally undermine the financial viability of Australian states by the Commonwealth “clawing back” Goods and Services Taxation (GST) revenue from the states were driven by then Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner and Treasurer Wayne Swan. The ascension of Julia Gillard to the prime ministership in June 2010 helped federal Labor gain a degree of independence from the rent-seekers and lateral policy direction.

Indeed, in the three years since Julia Gillard became prime minister, the federal government has undergone a process of finding its way- i.e. developing a policy agenda free from a rent-seeking ethos. This has not been an easy process to undertake due to discontent over the way in which Julia Gillard first became prime minister and due to the ALP being in minority government since the August 2010 federal election.

The non-leadership challenge by Kevin Rudd on March 21st 2013 virtually completed the process by which the prime minister has gained control of the federal government. However, the federal government is not immune from the final spasm of leadership de-stabilization in the June sitting of parliament with speculation regarding a possible Rudd return.

If Kevin Rudd does return as prime minister, the Abbott Liberals will be able to run the devastatingly effective line that most of his parliamentary colleagues do not really want him. Consequently, Abbott will be able to put a valid case during the federal election that, if Rudd did win the federal election for the ALP, during the next parliamentary term he could again be deposed as leader. The effectiveness of such a campaign would ensure that Abbott won a federal landslide similar to New South Wales and Queensland dimensions.

If Julia Gillard were to lead the ALP into the 2013 federal campaign, this election could be the first one since the 2004 federal election in which - whether a ruling party either wins or loses an election - is not determined by inter-party collusion by rent-seeking elements within the two major parties.

Even though Prime Minister Gillard is asserting the independence of her government from rent-seeking, the federal Treasurer Wayne Swan is still too powerful. As Treasurer in the Rudd government Swan, despite his background with the moderate Australian Workers’ Union (AWU), has pursued policies based on class envy. The most notable example of this during the Rudd government was Swan’s advocacy of an RSPT, even though such a tax ultimately would have benefited mining companies with strategic links to the PRC.

Swan’s moves to in effect raid superannuation funds of the wealthy Australians reflect a mindset that there are ‘magic pudding’ panaceas by which revenue can be raised to somehow quickly put the budget into surplus. Because Swan had helped ensure that the Rudd government unnecessarily in-debted the nation, it is perhaps too much for him to realize that long-term prudent fiscal management is required to put the budget eventually back to surplus.

Even though Swan’s original superannuation policy has been modified to officially apply to the nation’s top strata of superannuants, his policy intentions still set a dangerous precedent. Australians expect that superannuation will not be tinkered with by government, particularly not in any retrospective context. Nevertheless, the possibility that bracket creep (paying higher taxes due to substantial increases in income) could still ensure that too many superannuants later lose their tax breaks.

The Super Importance of Superannuation

The importance of superannuation to Australia cannot be over-emphasised. Not only does compulsory superannuation circumvent what would have been an unsustainable burden on public pensions but this policy helped to vitally capitalize Australian financial institutions. Furthermore, the utilization of funds from superannuation funds to help capitalize Australian financial institutions was a vital reason why the so-called “cash splashes”- economic stimuluses following the 2007 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) were so unnecessary.

Indeed, compulsory superannuation was the greatest public policy accomplishment of the Hawke-Keating era (1983 to 1996) even if the initial motivation behind the initiative was less than altruistic. An important initial reason why superannuation was embarked upon was the desire of left-wing trade unions to gain control of millions of dollars of industry superannuation funds.

Left-wing unions and senior members of the Socialist Left (SL) of the ALP- particularly after the passage of the Industrial Relations Act 1988-ensured that their long-standing ideological policy of trade union amalgamation was implemented. The economic-political dividend of union amalgamation was that industry unions gained control over millions of dollars in newly created industry super-funds.

The SL and the left of the union movement acquiesced to the neo-liberal “economic rationalism” (sic) of the Hawke government in return for union amalgamation and compulsory superannuation, the latter policy which could not have been achieved without the support of part of the right of Australia’s union movement.

With regard to the political right of the Australian union movement, the nation’s then president and secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), Simon Crean and Bill Kelty supported the introduction of superannuation to bolster trade union amalgamation. They were both backed by the industrially militant but ALP Right aligned Storeman and Packers Union, which is now known as the National Union of Workers, NUW.

Nevertheless, the ramifications of the introduction of superannuation have been stupendously positive. Millions of Australians, including low income earners, have been able to comfortably retire because they have compulsory superannuation funds as a savings pool which they can fall back upon. Most of the superannuation funds have been professionally managed with funds more often than not going into safe investments.

As previously mentioned, investments by superannuation funds in Australian financial institutions crucially helped capitalize them so that credit lines for Australian banks were not threatened by the 2007 GFC. This financial insulation was also due to the impact of the prudential controls that former coalition Treasurer Peter Costello instigated with regard to the four pillars bank policy.

Overall, Australia has much to be thankful for with regard to the positive ramifications of successful superannuation policy. However, because the nation’s financial situation has been undermined by ill-considered policies since 2007 due to the influence of rent-seeking on Australian public policy, politicians from both sides of the fence may attempt to appropriate superannuation funds to help bail out the nation or help establish a rentier state. If Australian politicians really want to defend and promote Australia’s genuine national interest, then safeguarding the integrity of everyone’s superannuation is a must.

Simon Crean: The Guardian of Australia’s Genuine National Interest

It is fitting that former federal minister Simon Crean, as the father of Australia’s superannuation recently thwarted Swan’s recent attempt to alter current superannuation, arrangements. It is rare for a politician to be in the position where he or she can intervene to protect their positive policy achievements. Simon Crean’s role in safeguarding superannuation also raises the broader issue of his recent actions in the context of contemporary politics and the direction of the Gillard government, particularly with regard to its election prospects in September 2013.

The present paradox of Simon Crean is that his prestige is at an all time high due to his sacking effectively preventing a possible Rudd return as prime minister in March 2013. His prestige has been since further enhanced by speaking out against Swan’s proposed superannuation changes. Now the time has come for Simon Crean to again step up to the mark by (with Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s support) being front and centre of the ALP’s August/September 2013 re-election campaign.

Simon Crean has the deserved trust of millions of Australians such that votes seemingly destined for the coalition in September 2013 could re-direct to the ALP to secure the Gillard government’s re-election. The basis upon which Simon Crean could win votes for the ALP would be by campaigning for a ‘No” vote in the referendum concerning the recognition of local government in the Constitution.

The theme on which Simon Crean leads a “No” case could be anti-politician - one emphasising that more power should not be ceded to Canberra. ALP parliamentarians and candidates can denote their alignment (and substantially increase their individual prospects of electoral victory) to the Crean campaign by supporting a Labor “No” case.

The paradox of the current situation is that Abbott is on track to ensuring that the “Yes” case prevails even though a majority of his parliamentary colleagues are pro-state. This situation is reflective of Abbott’s skill in fashioning the political settings to his advantage so that he manages to impose his will in an apparently adverse environment. With constitutional recognition of local government in place, a Prime Minister Abbott will again be able to impose his will on his party by dismembering Australian states.

The Nationals’ capacity to resist an Abbott government’s dismemberment of Australian states will be fatally undermined if the pro-“regionalization” Barnaby Joyce wins the House of Representatives seat of New England and shortly thereafter becomes party leader. Under a Joyce leadership, the Nationals will become complicit in selling out their constituents’ interests.

The dominance of PRC SOEs combined with the use of SWFs in a “regionalized” Australia will help create a regime where the traditional family owned farm will make way for commercial agro-businesses and mining projects as Australia becomes an economically dominated Beijing quarry. The Nationals, having previously failed to defend their supporters’ interests with the post-1983 onset of “economic rationalism”, (sic) have seen their electoral base accordingly contract. This decline process will inevitably consolidate unless leading members of the Nationals re-connect with their base in September by supporting the “No” case in the referendum.

It would be statesmanlike if Malcolm Turnbull came to the fore by supporting the “No” case but it would be unfair to expect him to take such action to help ensure that the Gillard government is re-elected. This scenario can come to pass if Simon Crean strongly supports a “No” case this September. A benefit of such Crean support for a “No” vote would be to bring to the fore inherent contradictions of Abbott supporting the dismemberment of Australian states (despite protestations on his part to the contrary) against his base’s wishes.

The salvation that members of the ALP desire from a Rudd return as prime minister will not be forthcoming. Such deliverance would more probably occur under the leadership of Simon Crean leading a “No” vote in the September 14th referendum. The time for Kevin Rudd to again lead the ALP to victory has passed. The opportunity of Julia Gillard to win the September 14th election is there should Simon Crean step up to the mark.

Prime Minister Rudd: The Control Freak Without Power

For reasons that have been detailed in previous Social Action Australia articles, Kevin Rudd was effectively installed as prime minister by rent-seeking forces. The potential of Kevin Rudd to be an effective, if not great prime minister, due to the power that was thrust upon him in 2007, was not lived up to.

The Rudd failure to be a capable prime minister was ironically undermined by his concentrating too much power within the so-called “Gang of Four”. Members of this clique included the then prime minister, the then Treasurer Wayne Swan, the then Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner and the then Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard. As deputy prime minister, Julia Gillard was then the education and training minister as well as minister for employment and workplace relations.

Instead of compensating for his inadequate power base by establishing a diffuse power structure, Kevin Rudd made the fatal administrative and political mistake of concentrating power with the so-called “Gang of Four”. Consequently, the prime minister lacked a capacity to objectively assess policy options so that he could make informed policy decisions.

The disastrous prime ministerial decision to undertake the unnecessary stimulus spending packages was due to the influence of Treasurer Wayne Swan and Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner. The short-term negative consequences of the spending spree was manifested by the pink bat home installation fiasco and the blow out in spending on schools under the so-called Building the Education Revolution (BER).

The longer terms negative ramifications of squandering a $A45 billion dollar budget surplus to help ratchet up a present day budget deficit of over $A43 billion and a public foreign debt of over $A244 billion (when there was no public foreign debt in 2007) was economic vandalism on a grand scale.

The contemporary ALP claim is that that the above spending and consequent in-debting was necessary to avoid an economic catastrophe wrought by the 2007 GFC. This argument is wrong because Australian banks were probably better positioned than any other financial institutions in the world to withstand the GFC for reasons that have been previously cited.

While Australia’s net public foreign debt is comparatively low by international standards at 10% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the nation’s debt burden is still dangerous. Net public foreign debt is always dangerous when a nation develops an incapacity to repay, which eventually threatens the continued viability of its lines of credit. Public spending in Australia is currently being squandered on paying compensation for the carbon tax and there is now the potentially fatal phenomenon of money being borrowed to pay interest on the existing public foreign debt.

The Disaster of Australia’s Public Foreign Debt

Australia’s foreign debt situation reflects the major policy failing of the Gillard government: an unwillingness to come to terms with the flawed Rudd-Tanner-Swan legacy of high debt. This unwillingness to address the nation’s public foreign debt is probably also reflective of a Labor refusal to recognize that the GFC stimulus packages were as unnecessary as they were detrimental to Australia’s long term financial position. Even if the stimulus packages saved Australia from the GFC inflicting an economic crisis, the point has been reached where the levels of foreign debt must be addressed by the federal government beginning to pay down debt levels.

Alternatively, if not inversely, the very positive achievements of Julia Gillard’s prime ministership have been overcoming the adverse short-term consequences of the Rudd-Tanner-Swan legacy. Prime Minister Gillard has shrewdly devolved the exercise of power to cabinet members, members of her parliamentary caucus and the public service. Indeed, in distinct contrast to the Rudd period, Prime Minister Gillard has treated members of the public service with great respect and a collaborative environment has been created with regard to policy formulation and implementation.

For all the disrespect with which Kevin Rudd treated the public service, there was still the irony of senior public servants such as Treasury Secretary Ken Henry making policy which the then prime minister attempted to implement from on high, such as the RSPT. Policies that have been formulated and implemented by the Gillard government due to its firm but respectful collaborative process have been positive and sensible.

The fact that Prime Minister Gillard runs an administratively coherent government not only stands in vivid contrast with her predecessor but is all the more an amazing accomplishment due to the federal government being in a parliamentary minority. Nevertheless, there is still an air of incompetence which has been attached to the Gillard government due to the reporting tone set by The Australian newspaper’s editor-at-large Paul Kelly.

Kelly has cited the recently proposed changes to superannuation and the proposed de facto censorship regime as evidence of the Gillard government’s dysfunction. These two areas of public policy were however indicative of Prime Minister Gillard overcoming unpleasant political realities which can be traced back to the Rudd period.

The proposed superannuation changes reflect the continuing power of Treasurer Wayne Swan. The Treasurer refuses to admit to the policy fiascos of the Rudd period for to do so would entail an admission of his culpability. For this reason he insisted, until recently, that the budget would go into surplus.

The unsustainability of the above claim led to Swan’s belated admission on the eve of the May 2013 budget that Australia would probably be in deficit for another four years. His attempted cash crab with regard to superannuation tax policy probably reflected a mindset that quick financial fixes can be achieved if one has the political will to take on wealthy vested interests.

However a Swan directed superannuation raid in the short term could have had potentially fatal short-term electoral consequences for the ALP because so many people are understandably protective regarding these funds. In the longer term, wealthy Australians could (and still can) move their funds off-shore if they believe that superannuation arrangements are unsafe. Furthermore, such a development could adversely affect the nation’s long-term financial position by undermining capital funds from been deposited in Australian financial institutions via way of superannuation investments.

The Gillard government’s overall competence was reflected by Bill Shorten the financial services minister (who is also the employment and workplace relations minister) announcing a policy modification restricting the superannuation changes to a very small number of superannuants*. Due to considered and lateral policy formulation as a result of administrative competence and procedures being in place, the Gillard government had the capacity to avert a major policy bungle.

(*Nevertheless, bracket creep in the future could provide a future context which encroaches on the security of more superannuants. Henry Ergas in his column in The Australian, 5th of April 2013, page 10, has warned that the federal government’s modified superannuation reforms which will supposedly affect only 0.5% of retirees could actually hit 20%).

Overall, the federal government’s proposed superannuation reforms are too financially detrimental and electorally risky for them to be passed should the ALP win the September 2013 federal election).

The other instance of the Gillard government avoiding a policy and political disaster due to it having the capacity to move to a fall back position was in regard to Senator Conroy’s intended de facto censorship framework. Because of it being in a parliamentary minority, the Gillard government probably had to go through the motions of implementing Senator Conroy’s de facto censorship framework to placate this very powerful party factional warlord.

It is improbable that Prime Minister Gillard genuinely supported Senator Conroy’s de facto censorship framework. Having repealed the Howard government’s Work Choices (No Choices) industrial relations legislation in 2009 to replace it with the appropriately named pluralist Fair Work Australia (FWA), it is improbable that Julia Gillard would have compromised her integrity as a civil libertarian by supporting press censorship.

Due to most ALP caucus members being opposed to Conroy’s censorship framework, the government had to formally adopt and advocate this policy in a heavy handed and quick manner redolent of the Rudd period. As terrible (and probably unconstitutional) as the proposed de facto censorship framework was, the hope of most ALP parliamentarians came to pass in that enough of the *independents conveyed their intention to vote down Conroy’s censorship framework. Consequently, the four contentious aspects of the bill were thankfully withdrawn at the March 21st sitting of parliament.

(*It is noteworthy that the Greens with a member of the cross-benches in the House of Representatives and the balance of power in the Senate intended to pass Senator Conroy’s de facto censorship framework. The Greens could not let go of their hatred of News Limited even though they are a pro-civil rights party that voted against protecting freedom of expression.

Had Senator Conroy’s de facto censorship framework become law, some on-line publications may have moved off-shore to circumvent the loss of press freedom. Under such a scenario, Australia’s international image would have suffered great harm).

Who Has the Public’s Trust Has Their Vote

Because of Senator Conroy’s influence, Prime Minister Gillard could not have been upfront with the public about her opposition to the Victorian Senator’s proposed censorship framework as her actions to defend free speech could not be transparent. This is unfortunate because the prime minister needs to gain the trust of the Australian people to which she is actually entitled.

The importance of the emotion of trust cannot be overstated in regard to affecting Australian electoral voting behaviour. Mis-trust in the 1950s and 1960s that the ALP was an extremist party following the 1954-1955 Evatt Purge cost Labor federal and state elections that it could have won. An important reason why Gough Whitlam was able to lead the ALP to election victory in December 1972 after twenty-three years in federal opposition was because the gravitas and authority that he projected helped win the trust of a sufficient number of voters.

A fundamental reason why Whitlam lost the December 1977 federal election despite a stellar campaign performance was because too much of the electorate by now did not trust him following his leadership of a shambolic government between 1972 and 1975. Whitlam apologists will claim that a gullible electorate was taken in by the Liberal Party’s last minute “fist full of dollars” commercials promising tax cuts. However, the near replication of the 1975 coalition landslide election victory reflected a deeper public feeling of mistrust toward a Whitlam led Labor.

Despite the ALP waging an effective 1977 election campaign, it was impossible for Labor to overcome the widespread feelings of mistrust toward Whitlam. The 1977 Liberal federal election campaign aired television commercials with rats representing inflation devouring a map of Australia should the ALP return to power to reinforce the belief that Whitlam could not be trusted.

That is not to say that the ALP national campaign was not unaware that Whitlam was mistrusted by the electorate in terms of his being able to stand up to wayward elements within his party. For this reason, the ALP 1977 federal election campaign prominently featured the Opposition’s Treasury spokesman *Bill Hayden.

(*In one way or another, the ALP during the September 2013 federal election must for their sake of its survival, if not possible victory in this year’s election, have Simon Crean accorded the prominence that Bill Hayden was in the 1977 Labor campaign. In other words, let Simon Crean in 2013 be the 1977 Bill Hayden of Julia Gillard’s 2013 Gough Whitlam).

Bill Hayden was trusted by most Australians as a competent man who was and could be again an effective treasurer. Although the federal opposition in 1975 were ethically correct to utilize their numbers in the Senate to defer supply bills due to the Whitlam government not adhering to due process, Hayden’s proposed budget was generally well regarded.

Had Whitlam somehow survived the deferral of supply bills in late 1975, his government might have gained a sense of competence and direction with Hayden continuing on as Treasurer. Indeed, had Whitlam continued on as prime minister into 1976 Bill Hayden probably would have succeeded him that year following revelations of Labor financial links to Iraq’s then ruling Baath Party. That Hayden did not replace Whitlam as Opposition Leader in 1976, following revelations concerning Whitlam’s knowledge of financial dealings with Iraqi Baathists was due to there being a strong sentiment toward him within the ALP parliamentary caucus because of his dismissal as prime minister the previous year.

Lingering Labor Party sentiment could not preserve the leadership of the former prime minister after he lost the 1977 federal election and Whitlam stood down in favour of Bill Hayden. For all the tumult of the Whitlam era, the leadership transition to Bill Hayden as the new ALP leader was smooth. Hayden was an effective, if at times whingeing opposition leader whose reputation for competence was recognized by most of the public.

While it is said that there are no prizes for second, place the ALP’s strong showing under Hayden’s leadership in the October 1980 federal election with the campaign slogan “Raise the Standard” was impressive, considering the number of seats which were clawed back. The coalition’s 1980 campaign message - based round emphasising that a minerals boom was to be harnessed to guarantee Australia’s prosperity-was sufficient to help secure a relatively narrow re-election victory.

The 1980 election result helped position the ALP to win the next federal poll due in 1983. Hayden probably would have won this election but due to the ALP unexpectantly losing the Flinders by-election in late 1982, party leaders were taking no chances that they might lose a federal poll. Consequently, Hayden was effectively deposed as party leader in favour of the charismatic and popular by Hawke in February 1983.

Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s boast that his calling an early election was an occasion where two Labor leaders were politically eliminated in one go might have become accurate had Hayden not magnanimously acceded to Hawke becoming leader. Important Hayden supporters within ALP federal caucus, such as Peter Walsh and John Dawkins, were prepared to resist a Hawke assumption of the Labor leadership that, had Hayden not graciously accepted the leadership change, his party might have been de-stabilized to the extent of ensuring a coalition victory in the March 1983 federal election.

The ALP landslide in the 1983 federal election was not only facilitated by Hayden’s acceptance of his party’s leadership change but the result was also due to Hawke winning the trust of the electorate by campaigning on the theme of ‘consensus’. In the 1983 election campaign, Hawke effectively offered something for nothing by claiming that he could bring ‘everyone’, (i.e. business and unions) together to produce harmony and prosperity.

The hallmark of Hawke facilitating ‘consensus’ was an April 1983 National Economic Summit of Australia’s leading business, political and union leaders in which they (with the exception of the then Queensland Premier Johannes ‘Joh’ Bjelke-Petersen) broadly committed to support a policy mix of high economic growth and wage restraint.

The impact of the April 1983 National Economic Summit was to forge a de facto corporatist regime between big business and the leadership of a union movement who wanted trade unionism to be re-organised along amalgamated industry basis. This corporatist regime did succeed in helping bring down inflation by achieving union wage restraint. However, the strong economic recovery that Australia enjoyed in the second half of 1983 was mainly due to the drought breaking and the flow on effect of the 1982-1983 wages pause that the Fraser government had engineered.

The long-term viability of this economic recovery was jeopardized by the Hawke government’s decision to float the Australian dollar and remove controls of capital flows at the end of that year. The 1985 plunge in value of the Australia dollar was symptomatic of how the so-called ‘economic rationalism’ (sic) of the Hawke-Keating era threatened the nation’s high living standards.

The federal coalition might have reaped the political benefits of the negative socio-economic ramifications of the Labor government’s policies had it not been for chronic dis-unity within the Liberal Party between Andrew Peacock and John Howard and for the fact that the latter generally supported the government’s general neo-liberal direction. The lack of unity of purpose within the Liberal Party due to the Peacock-Howard discord was reflected by the former virtually being abandoned by the latter’s supporters during the campaign for the early federal election that had been called for December 1984.

Andrew’s Peacock’s campaign performance during for the 1984 election was a stellar one as he showed determination and verve despite being written off by commentators as being doomed to lead his party to a landslide defeat. The federal Liberal campaign did however run a brazen television scare campaign warning elderly Australians that their pensions were threatened by the Labor government. Despite the disingenuousness of this scare campaign, it did reflect an underlying reality that the long-term direction of the Hawke-Keating government was detrimental to Australia’s socio-economic interests and living standards due to the adoption of the ‘economic rationalist’ policy paradigm.

The apparently plausible prospect that Peacock would win the next federal election due in 1987 was undermined by continuing tension with Howard who was then his deputy. The Hawke frontbench relentlessly pursued a parliamentary strategy of stirring up supposed leadership tension between Peacock and Howard throughout 1985 that this actually became a reality. In September of that year, Peacock tried to remove Howard as his deputy after he refused to give an undertaking that he would never under any circumstances challenge for the leadership during the current parliamentary term.

After the Liberal Party federal parliamentary partyroom voted to retain Howard as deputy leader, Peacock subsequently resigned even though the overwhelming majority of his colleagues preferred that he remain as leader. Even though the circumstances surrounding Peacock’s fall were bizarre, his resignation as leader was the only viable option, had as Howard’s retention as deputy had made the ‘colt from Kooyong’s’ position unviable.

If Peacock’s 1985 resignation as leader was unavoidable following his deputy’s retention, then it was similarly inevitable that Howard would progress to become party leader following his predecessor’s departure. Howard therefore found himself parliamentary leader of a party where most of his colleagues preferred that Peacock be their leader. This peculiar position probably did not unsettle Howard because he believed that he possessed the necessary leadership skills to prove his mettle.

There is no doubt that Howard’s masterful grasp of policy detail enabled him to be a formidable political leader. However, the policy direction which Howard wanted to take Australia in was essentially the same as Hawke and Keating’s in that he wanted to submit the nation to ‘economic rationalism’ (sic) in which the nation’s domestic economic and employment capacity was threatened by removal of necessary protection.

The major policy difference between Howard and Hawke/Keating was with regard to industrial relations as the former was determined to effectively undermine trade unionism and overall employee rights. To be relatively fair to Howard he did in contrast to Hawke and Keating recognise the great danger of allowing public foreign debt levels to spiral and the cruel impact of indefinitely keeping interest rates at high levels to help service that debt.

Howard’s precarious political position helped give rise to the fanciful but still politically destructive ‘Joh for PM’ campaign that the then Queensland premier waged between February and May 1987. Even though Sir Joh shared Howard’s destatation of unions, he nevertheless tried to exploit concerns about the growing divide between rich and poor under Hawke which conveyed an implicit repudiation of ‘economic rationalism’ (sic).

The destabilizing impact of the abortive Joh campaign undermined Howard to the extent that he was virtually abandoned by his party colleagues in the 1987 campaign because they believed he had no hope of winning the July election. However, Howard fought a gusty election campaign which was eerily similar to the Peacock campaign nearly three years earlier. Despite the embarrassing highlighting by Keating of a major arithmetical mistake in Howard’s tax policy, this underdog leader still could have won the 1987 federal election of the 11th of July.

Howard was in contention to win the 1987 election because of widespread public unease concerning the erosion of standards of living and economic security caused by the neo-liberal economic policies of the Hawke government. The opposition leader’s economic package offering significant tax relief had an appeal that went beyond the hip pocket nerve. This proposed tax relief was a de facto social contract between Howard and the public in which he promised a policy agenda where they could ‘get ahead’ instead of enduring Hawke’s socio-economic uncertainty.

To win re-election, the 1987 Hawke team utilized a catchy campaign tune declaring that “no-one every got anything by changing horses in mid-stream”. This aligned with the overall ALP campaign theme of “let’s see it through”. The implicit Labor message was that all the economic pain was going to have a gain so long as the people stayed the course with the Hawke government.

For all the slick professionalism, if not razzmatazz, of the 1987 Labor election campaign and the political turmoil which had engulfed Howard since Bjelke-Petersen unexpectantly won a majority in the November 1986 Queensland election, the ALP would have lost this federal election had it not been for the so-called “whingeing Wendy” television commercials aired in the last week of the campaign.

These commercials had a suburban housewife warning of Howard introducing a GST. The “whingeing Wendy” commercials swung the election for the ALP in the key marginal seats which had previously been lavished by targeted government largess. Ironically, it was in the safe ALP seats where there were substantial swings to the Liberals.

Hawke and Howard: The “Economic Rationalist” (sic) Ascendancy

Even though Hawke won the 1987 federal election inspite of and not because of his neo-liberal socio-economic policies, his government became even more committed to ‘economic rationalist’ (sic) policies as reflected by it embarking on micro-economic reforms in which ‘competitiveness’ was consolidated as the new orthodoxy. The Hawke government’s inclination toward its policy paradigm was reinforced by the Liberals failing to offer a viable alternative.

Due to his impressive campaign performance, Howard defeated a post-election leadership challenge from Andrew Peacock. Displaying a degree of strategic nous which had been conspicuously lacking in 1985, when Peacock foolishly lost the leadership, he moved to a fall-back position of successfully standing for federal Liberal Party deputy leader.

Even though there was really no reason for the nation to be cheered by Hawke’s 1987 election victory, it was probably better that the ALP won that year then have Howard become prime minister. Even though the Liberals had lost this federal election, there was still the hope that Peacock might retake the leadership during the parliamentary term and subsequently win government after defeating Hawke at the next federal election.

As it was, the above cited scenario almost came to pass. Peacock was able to regain the Liberal Party’s leadership in May 1989 due a series of mistakes which Howard made between 1988 and 1989 in relation to Asian immigration. His statements regarding the supposed need to take into account racial composition with regard to Asian migration levels were at best unnecessary and at worst racist.

Ensuing public unease concerning Howard’s immigration stance created such uncertainty with regard to his leadership that leading Melbourne businessman John Elliot was touted as a possible Liberal Party leader aspirant. The probable reality was that Elliot was never really interested in becoming prime minister (as much as he probably believed he was much suited for the position) but rather in siphoning off some Howard supporters to reinstate Peacock as Liberal leader so that he (Elliot) could become a key power-broker in a future coalition government.

A Peacock government might have been a success as the returned Liberal leader had a Reaganesque capacity to bring the best out of his associated supporters. Peacock had previously shown a skill in synthesising the potential abilities of his supporters, such as when they were plotting to depose Howard between late 1988 and early 1989, that he could have mastered leading an ideologically diverse cabinet. Although Elliot would have utilized his influence with a Peacock government to orientate in a pro-business direction, he nevertheless possessed sufficient broad mindedness to have potentially helped curbed the excesses of an ‘economic rationalist’ (sic) policy direction.

That there was to be no Peacock government was partly due to the Liberals’ failure to present a coherent ideological alternative to the Hawke government’s neo-liberal policy direction. The February-March 1990 Liberal federal election campaign tapped into causes of discontent by declaring that there were questions ‘that just had to be answered’ which aligned with the campaign slogan of “The Answer is Liberal”.

However, there was a lack of clarity as to how a Peacock government would answer the questions to the nation’s problems due to a glaring absence of policy specifics. As with previous federal campaigns, that the Liberals’ veteran federal campaign director Tony Eggleton had run, there was a *consistent theme to the 1990 election campaign. This theme was that there needed to be a change in policy direction because the promised returns for the economic uncertainty of the Hawke era had not yet materialized.

(*The anti-inflation theme of the 1977 election campaign had virtually re-assured that the Liberals’ massive parliamentary majority from the 1975 election campaign would be retained. Although the Liberals did not win the 1984 and 1987 elections, the consistency of the respectively Eggleton directed themes of no new taxes for the former campaign and the average person finally getting ahead in the latter campaign staved off possible ALP landslide election landslides).

The major problem with the 1990 federal Liberal election effort was that more was needed than having a campaign based on a polished Andrew Peacock. Perhaps this blandness might have sufficed had Hawke not won the 1990 election television election debate. Except for his failure to ask Hawke any questions as the format allowed, that is not to say that Peacock performed badly in this televised debate. However, Hawke won the contest with his devastating line toward the end of the encounter that “you cannot govern the country if you cannot govern your own party”.

This Hawke declaration reminded most Australians that Peacock had failed to rein in some of his key supporters who had boasted on a 1989 Four Corners programme how they had deposed Howard in May of that year. The Hawke line conveyed the unsettling reality that the Peacock-Howard divisions within the Liberal Party had not really been surmounted and perhaps never really could be until one eventually gave way for the other.

The major positive spin of the 1990 ALP election campaign was Hawke’s assertion that under his government Australia was becoming known as the ‘clever country’ instead of the ‘lucky country’. This assertion conveyed a disingenuous optimism that the neo-liberal economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s had somehow born fruit.

Even though the ALP had retained office in the 1990 federal election with a nine seat majority, the Hawke government had only won by a few thousand votes. This fourth consecutive Labor election victory belied widespread discontent with the ALP’s ‘economic rationalist’ approach to socio-economic policy. The ALP’s re-election was also due to the remarkable political discipline of the federal government due to the co-operation between Hawke and Keating.

However, the Hawke-Keating political alliance was predicated on the then secret Kirribilli House leadership pact of 1988 in which the former undertook to make way for the latter as prime minister in the course of a fourth term should the ALP win the 1990 federal election. Hawke’s refusal in 1991 to make way for Keating as previously agreed caused the then treasurer to challenge for the leadership in May that year.

Although the May leadership challenge was unsuccessful, it set the scene for an ensuing six month leadership destabilization campaign which resulted in the ALP parliamentary caucus reluctantly and narrowly deposing Hawke as prime minister in favour of Keating in December 1991. The ‘economic rationalist’ (sic) Paul Keating had a small and dedicated popular public following which belied his widespread unpopularity.

That Keating won the March 1993 federal election was therefore ironic because he tapped into the public unease concerning the Opposition Leader Dr. John Hewson’s super ‘economic rationalism’. The free trade Prime Minister Keating dubbed Dr. Hewson ‘Captain Zero’ to both project his opponent as a dangerous economic radical while deflecting attention from his own neo-liberal public policy record.

The 1993 election scare campaign centred upon Dr. Hewson’s advocacy of a *GST which frightened a sufficient number of swing voters to opt to remain with the ALP. The opposition leader’s confused explanation in a debate with Keating on A Current Affair regarding the application of a GST to cake ingredients and assertions during the general campaign that the horse racing industry would be destroyed by such a tax derailed a very probable coalition election victory.

(*Ironically, Paul Keating as treasurer had advocated a GST at the July 1985 Tax Summit).

Former prime minister, Malcolm Fraser (1975 to 1983) categorized the coalition’s 1993 election defeat as the worst in the Liberal Party’s history. Although this categorization was correct, the worst election defeat for the Liberals would have been to have also lost the next federal election. Another election loss would have imperilled the Liberal Party’s status as one of Australia’s two major parties by confirming a fear that the party could never again win a federal election because the metaphorical glue which had kept the liberal and conservative components of the Liberal Party together would have fallen away.

From a counterfactual historical perspective, Hawke probably would have been better positioned to have engineered Liberal Party disintegration than Keating. Hawke had only narrowly been deposed by Keating in terms of caucus vote numbers in December 1991, that had the latter failed, he would undoubtedly have exited from parliament in the first quarter of 1992. Such a development would have cleared the way for the telegenic Hawke to re-assert his leadership authority to possibly win the 1993 federal election.

For all the allegations of narcissism which were made against Hawke, he probably would have been sufficiently politically grounded to have better exploited the Liberals post-1993 election instability to win another federal election. Had Hawke called an early election during the faltering leadership interregnum of Alexander Downer (May 1994 to January 1995), the ALP could have clinched the sixth consecutive federal election victory which would have challenged the Liberal Party’s continued viability.

Even in the early days of the recycled Howard leadership after January 1995, a still Prime Minister Hawke could have exploited political uncertainty within the Liberal Party to win an early federal election. By contrast, there was too much hubris on the part of Prime Minister Keating for the ALP to have called or to have won an early federal election. Having won the March 1993 federal election against the odds, Keating really believed that he had delivered a victory for the ‘true believers’ who represented those Australians who supposedly looked to the ALP for protection and advancement.

The reality was that the ‘true believers’ did exist as a swinging voting demographic which held the balance of power in federal and state elections. This electoral force represented upper paid blue collar workers/average paid white collar workers and small businesspeople within society who intuitively appreciated the role of government in being able to make their lives financially bearable or not.

The continuance of a high interest rate regime and the effects of the recession that the nation ‘had to have’ converted Keating’s ‘true believers’ into ‘Howard’s battlers’ by the time of the March 1996 federal election. The coalition’s election campaign was masterful because it tapped into a widespread feeling of social discontent toward a zealously politically correct prime minister whose ‘in your face’ republicanism crucially helped alienate the critical mass of ‘true believers’ into becoming the ‘Howard battlers.

The coalition’s 1996 “For All of Us” election campaign was probably as brilliant as Whitlam’s 1972 slogan of “It’s Time” in terms of encapsulating a mood for change. In relative fairness to the ALP, there was a realization within party ranks that their party was headed for an election landslide defeat should Keating be retained as leader. Towards the end of 1995, there was a move to replace Keating with Finance Minister Kim Beazley to militate against the scale of electoral defeat or possibly even win the 1996 federal election.

While Beazley probably had the numbers in late 1995 to depose Keating (whom most parliamentary caucus members found over-bearing), party power brokers believed that it would probably be better to have Beazley pick up the pieces following a landslide defeat than be too tarnished by having briefly served as prime minister.

That the ALP did lose in a landslide was probably not just due to Keating’s unpopularity but that the 1996 Labor campaign was centred round the personality of the prime minister and the alleged personal inadequacies of leading coalition figures. The ALP’s then National Secretary and the 1996 election campaign manager Gary Gray (a strong Hawke supporter) acquiesced to ‘leadership’ being a centrepiece of the Labor campaign.

While the 1996 landslide election defeat undoubtedly jolted many in Labor, the ALP better adapted to defeat than what the Liberals did to theirs in 1983. This was due to the smoothness of the leadership transition to Kim Beazley who for a time was a curious phenomenon, a popular opposition leader! The mistakes that the Liberals made in office with regard to the spate of ministerial resignations between 1996 and 1998 undermined the viability of coalition rule. However, the 1997 appointment of the brilliant Arthur Sinodinos as Howard’s chief of staff helped steady the coalition to make the transition from long term opposition to government.

Indeed, Howard’s repudiation of his previous (non-core) promise never to introduce a GST in addition to facilitating the largest first term swing against an Australian government in the nation’s political history almost resulted in the ALP winning the 1998 federal election. The ALP probably would have won an amazing election victory in October 1998 had it not been for the unanticipated emergence of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party.

The Hanson phenomenon was a manifestation of lingering mistrust on the part of the nation’s ‘true believer-Howard battlers’ toward the ALP for the ‘economic rationalism’ of the Hawke-Keating era. In this context, it had been politically shrewd of Howard not to issue an apology to the stolen generations of indigenous Australians for to have done so would have been perceived by the ‘true believer-Howard battlers’ as a capitulation to Keating type political correctness which was associated with “economic rationalism”.

Hanson herself had been a Liberal candidate for the ultra-safe federal Labor Queensland seat of Oxley based in Ipswich. Her dis-endorsement as the Liberal candidate during the 1996 campaign for publicly criticising Aboriginal welfare had the inverse effect of ensuring a massive local sympathy vote such that she was elected to parliament. Had the National Party acceded to Hanson’s desire to join their parliamentary ranks, she probably would have become an interesting but by no means necessarily politically influential MP.

The member for Oxley probably would have languished as a relatively obscure independent MP had the unpolished but polarizing maiden speech attacking Asian migration she made in September 1996 not been given saturation publicity in the print and electronic media. The momentum that Hanson received was such that the One Nation Party she launched in April 1997 had a viable national following.

The vitriolic attacks that Hanson was subjected to by the media and the chattering classes was such that she gained strong support amongst swathes of true believer-Howard battler voters that One Nation garnered over 800,000 votes in the October 1998 federal election. The impressive electoral showing of One Nation was derived from the lingering mistrust of many former usually Labor voters that had gone over to the coalition in 1996 refraining from supporting ‘their’ old party due its political correctness being associated by them with the ‘economic rationalism’ (sic) of the Hawke-Keating era.

If the One Nation Party had had a preferencing strategy, it could have determined the 1998 federal election outcome. As it was, the relatively high vote which One Nation garnered saved the coalition from defeat because enough votes were diverted from going to the ALP (which won the popular vote) that the Howard government survived the biggest swing against a first term government in Australian political history.

The immediate post 1998 ALP expectation that Labor would win the 2001 federal election was seemingly confirmed due to the massive unpopularity of the GST in 1999. There was consequently a fear within coalition circles that they would be wiped out in the 2001 federal election in a manner similar to the near annihilation of Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party in the 1993 federal election when that ruling party was reduced to two parliamentary seats!

Fears that the Liberals had of a Canadian scenario receded as the year 2001 progressed as the inflation neutral GST raised revenue which the Howard government utilized for patronage distribution. The scope to avoid a landslide defeat was converted into the potential for a coalition election victory in 2001 by the so-called Tampa incident.

A Norwegian freighter which had compassionately rescued over 400 hundred Afghan refugees was denied landing rights in Australian territorial waters with special army forces boarding the ship to take ensure a transfer of the Afghans to Nauru where they were held in detention without refugee status. This action was retrospectively sanctioned by legislation (the ‘Pacific Solution’) which the ALP initially opposed but eventually approved.

The political potency of the Pacific solution was also reinforced by the so-called ‘children overboard incident’ of October 2001 in which another refugee vessel was intercepted by an Australian navy boat on what was later found to be the specious claim that the children were being thrown overboard. The Tampa and children overboard incidents were adroitly utilized by Prime Minister Howard as ‘dog whistles’ to former ALP voters who had supported the One Nation Party in 1998 to support the coalition in the November 2001 federal election instead of returning to Labor.

These 2001 cynical political manipulations of Prime Minister Howard were manifestations par excellence of a Lasch political strategy where lower to middle income earners were conned into supporting a centre to hard right political party by appealing to negative prejudices. The tragedy of the 2001 coalition election victory was that the scene was set in late 2005 for the Howard government to betray the interests of the so-called Howard battlers by passing the anti-union/anti-employee No Choices legislation.

The Tampa and children overboard incidents might have been relatively acceptable as exceptions to the rule had the Howard government subsequently honoured Australia then proceeded to honour the international treaty obligations toward refugees. This might seem a remarkable, if not naïve, expectation considering that a tiger rarely changes its stripes.

However, after the 2001 federal election, the coalition did not need to resort to a Lasch strategy to remain in power due to substantially improved economic conditions. The progress which the Treasurer Peter Costello made in paying off Australia’s public foreign debt and in eliminating the budget deficit as well as brilliantly utilizing the GST revenue bonanza to help engineer the necessary domestic conditions for the mining boom gave the nation a sense of economic security not experienced since the Menzies era.

The problem was that it just was not in the Howard government’s DNA to be politically magnanimous to wage earner Australians who could be (if they were not already) unionised. The growing economic prosperity and higher living standards combined with general public unease with Mark Latham as opposition leader ensured that the coalition won the October 2004 federal election.

While the 2004 federal coalition’s victory was not really surprising, the virtual implosion of the Australian Democrats created an upset where the Howard government effectively gained the numbers in the Senate in 2005. This opportunity from a neo-liberal perspective was not squandered by the Howard government which at the end of that year passed the No-Choices industrial legislation.

The passage of the No-Choices legislation was a fundamental breach on Howard’s part with the Australian people. Howard had previously consistently maintained that under his industrial relations regime no Australian worker under his system of individual contracts would be detrimentally affected because the award safety net would be retained. Due to the Australian Democrats retaining the balance of power in the Senate following the 1996 federal election, individual contracts (Australian Workplace Agreements, AWAs) was introduced under the 1996 Workplace Relations Act (the 1996 Act) which had to pass ‘a no-disadvantage test’ with regard to the award safety net.

The 1996 Act in providing for AWAs and having provision for non-union enterprise bargaining agreements (which had been first introduced under the Keating government’s 1993 Industrial Relations Reform Act) possessed sufficient de-unionising scope which should have placated the Howard government’s neo-liberal prejudices.

Therefore, there was no need for the coalition in late 2005 to go the extra mile under No-Choices to effectively abolish the award safety net, prescribe potential bargaining outcomes and unfairly restrict union workplace organising activity. The 2005 passage of the No-Choices legislation was a fundamental repudiation of the Australian ethos of ‘a fair go all round’ which consequently set the scene for the demise of the Howard government in the October 2007 federal election.

Howard’s Way

Had the Howard government not proceeded with the No Choices legislation and its anti-states agenda, then a positive case might have been put for its retention. Brilliant economic management in which there was more than enough spending money combined with no public foreign debt and a budget surplus by 2006 were impressive policy achievements. The revamping of the previous Commonwealth Employment Service (CES) into the Centre Link social welfare regime created effective employment case management that contributed to there being more jobs available than jobs toward the end of the Howard-Costello era.

There was also a shift under Howard and Costello toward middle class-welfare such as generous Medicare rebates-that the quality of life for the average Australian was enhanced. Nevertheless, the No Choices industrial relations regime by contrast was setting groundwork for wage earning Australians to eventually be consigned to the status of the working poor while insulating the economic interests of middle to upper income Australians. Such a scenario was possible if wage earning Australians were in the long term effectively denied union representation, award minimum coverage and basic bargaining rights.

The No-Choices industrial relations regime tragically ensured that Howard forfeited his potential to be the greatest prime minister since Sir Robert Menzies and to surpass the Liberal Party’s sixteen years in power during his second period as Australia’s national leader. To be really cynical about Howard’s political career, he could have appeased his own neo-liberal instincts and those of his hardline supporters by retaining the potentially de-unionising 1996 Act by claiming that he was adhering to his previous long standing commitment that the award safety net would always be retained.

Howard also squandered his potential to assume the Menzies mantle due an anti-states agenda which was derived from an inexplicable personal hostility towards Australia’s wonderful federal system of government. In the 2000s, Howard had undermined the potential for Liberal Party state divisions to win state elections on the assumption that the Australian people would retain a Liberal federal government as a counterweight to ALP state governments.

The clearest manifestation of the above Howard political strategy was the New South Wales Liberals ‘throwing’ (i.e. deliberately losing) the March 2007 state election. What Howard did not then realize was that elements within his party’s state divisions would eventually become a part of the rent-seeking forces within the coalition to ensure that he lost the October 2007 federal election.

Kevin Rudd To Lindsay Tanner:The Transition That Never Occurred

The virtually pre-ordained election victory of the ALP in the October 2007 federal election saw the prime ministership of Kevin Rudd which was really a prelude to Lindsay Tanner becoming prime minister. Had Julia Gillard not replaced Rudd as prime minister in June 2010, then the rent-seeking Abbott undoubtedly would have allowed the ALP to comfortably win the federal election later that year so that ‘regionalization’ (sic) could be introduced under a Prime Minister Lindsay Tanner.

The parliamentary retirement of Lindsay Tanner in 2010 meant that the mantle of leadership of the hard left has passed to Anthony Albanese. The Transport, Infrastructure and Regional Development Minister (Albanese) may believe that he can assert political power with an Abbott government introducing “regionalization” (sic). This is a misassumption because the previous anticipated scenario was that a re-elected Rudd government in 2010 would safeguard Labor interests as “regionalization” (sic) was introduced with the Liberals’ interests being represented by their control of New South Wales after 2011.

The fact of the matter will be that, if Abbott becomes prime minister after the 2010 federal election, the ALP will not have sufficient institutional leverage to protect its interests as “regionalization” (sic) dismembers Australian states. Avowed Rudd supporters such as Anthony Albanese and Joel Fitzgibbon do not realize that they will lack sufficient leverage to prevent a Prime Minister Abbott from introducing “regionalization” as he see fit. Consequently, possible regional bailiwicks of Sydney’s inner-west (for Albanese) and the Hunter Region (for Fitzgibbon) could become springboards where Lasch type parties such as the purported DLP consolidate within a new tier of government to help ensure that the ALP never rebounds as a viable competitor for national office.

The above scenario is one which relates to a future possibility while with regard to past scenarios, the question would have been whether a re-elected Kevin Rudd in 2010 would have been afterwards gracefully eased out as prime minister to assume a prestigious international diplomatic posting or whether he would have been unceremoniously deposed by invoking the excesses of the spending splurges associated with the Building the Education Revolution (BER) and the pink bats fiasco.

It may seem a strange proposition that Abbott could have politically advanced himself by deliberately throwing the 2010 federal election. However, Abbott’s party power base is essentially with the Liberals’ New South Wales division which were bound to win (as they indeed did) a mega-landslide in the March 2011 federal election. Consequently, Abbott would have had the capacity to have both remained on as opposition leader and to have his party factional interests accommodated as a New South Wales coalition state government co-operated with a Tanner federal government to ‘regionalize’ (sic) Australia.

The ALP’s transition to Julia Gillard as prime minister in June 2010 in many ways upset the proverbial rent-seeking apple cart because it coincided or actually precipitated Tanner’s effective political demise. Unfortunately, the rent-seeking elements within both the ALP and the coalition maintained their nerve following the Julia Gillard succession to the prime ministership.

Prime Minister Gillard as an astute political operator knew that inter-party collusion had effectively determined the October 2007 election result and could well determine which party won the August 2010 federal election. It was on this basis that the prime minister was coerced into making her unambiguous verbal declaration on the eve of the poll that no government that she led after the 2010 federal election would introduce a carbon tax. Had this declaration not been made by Julia Gillard, then rent-seeking elements within her own party would have ensured that the coalition won the federal election.

Having gained the potentially fatal promise from Julia Gillard that they knew was a poisoned political chalice, the Abbott Liberals-via collusion with their rent-seeking members of the ALP-compelled the prime minister to renege on her pledge in 2011 not to introduce a carbon tax. The introduction of this tax has not led to an economic catastrophe but higher electricity prices and the sense that Prime Minister Gillard had broken a solemn undertaking has produced the political impact of discrediting her government such that it languishes at approximately 30% in the opinion polls.

Speculation over the ALP federal leadership in regard to Kevin Rudd possibly returning as prime minister has added to an air of manufactured political instability. Indeed, the pro-Rudd sentiment within the Canberra press gallery has morphed into the unexpected phenomenon of the media generally being pro-Abbott even though the overwhelming majority of journalists are left-wing!

With regard to the above cited sentiment, most journalists are following the lead of the Paul Kelly, the press gallery’s doyen. Kelly is one of the nation’s leading ‘economic rationalists’ (sic) and even though he was probably an ALP supporter during the Hawke-Keating era, he has probably shifted to being a coalition supporter in terms of wanting to see the ALP lose the 2013 federal election.

The Gillard government has actually been administratively competent and policy lateral as reflected by its Gonski education funding model and its National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS, Disability Care). However, the general tone of media reporting combined with Julia Gillard’s 2010 coerced breaking of her no carbon tax promise has created the context of the ALP heading toward a federal election landslide defeat on September 14th of this year.

To be sure that for ‘regionalization’ (sic) will occur, an Abbott government still has to gain sufficient ALP collusion. For this to transpire, rent-seeking elements within the ALP will have Prime Minister Gillard hold a constitutional referendum simultaneous with the September 14th federal election in which local government is recognized in the Commonwealth constitution. This will create the necessary capacity to introduce ‘regionalization’ (sic) because GST revenues from the states will be diverted to new local government authorities which will eventually become ‘regions’.

Rent-seeking elements within the ALP delude themselves into thinking that they can afford to sabotage the Gillard government’s 2013 re-election by their eventually having local government bailiwicks to fall back upon. This assumption is delusional because an Abbott government will harness the network of *Peter Reith to fatally undermine union effectiveness and with it the ALP’s continued viability as a political party.

(*Peter Reith, who was initially an avowed monarchist, declared himself to be a direct electionist republican for the November 1999 referendum and as such advocated a ‘No’ vote on Australia becoming a republic on the supposed basis that he opposed a president who was effectively appointed. In a similar contemporary vein, Reith could very well position himself as an opponent of the constitutional recognition of local government to pre-empt a genuine case from being advanced).

Under an Abbott government, there would apparently be little scope for the ALP to be co-opted into the ‘regionalization’ (sic) process because Labor holds office in the smaller states of South Australia and Tasmania where the coalition, particularly with regard to the latter, seem well on track to winning government in the future.

However, the narrow parliamentary margin by which the Victorian coalition government of Denis Napthine holds office places the state ALP in a relatively strong position to represents Labor’s interests with regard to ‘regionalization’ (sic) being undertaken by an Abbott government. Indeed, the esteem in which the Victorian federal front bencher Bill Shorten is held within the ALP endows many within Labor with the confidence that Labor’s relatively strong position in Victoria will safeguard their interests with regard to ‘regionalization’ (sic).

The misperceived ultimate safeguarding of ALP interests with regard to ‘regionalization’ (sic) centres on the misassumption that, in industrial centres such as Newcastle, Wollongong in New South Wales, Whyalla in South Australia and/or safe Labor voting areas such as Melbourne’s western suburbs, new ALP voting regional bailiwicks will be created. Under this scenario, it will eventually be irrelevant that the ALP has been reduced to a rump at a state parliamentary context in New South Wales and Queensland because this tier of government will give way to a new regional level of government from which Labor can return to office federally.

SWOT Analysis

Because a probable Shorten-Albanese leadership team in a post-Gillard led ALP will not be very challenged by an Abbott government undertaking regionalization (sic) a comparative Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis of the probable next prime minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, is undertaken. This SWOT analysis will be comparative in that a similar overview of the respective traits and potentials of Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull is also reviewed so that an objective framework of what is before Australia can be established.

The Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis assesses the external and internal factors of the above cited leaders in a political context as opposed to a business environment. The assessment is conducted within a subjective framework of the assessor’s political attitudes and orientation but a satisfactorily objective result is still achievable because negatives and positive attributes are directly assessed.

The Tony Abbott SWOT

Abbott’s personality and leadership capacities are the first to be reviewed because he more than any other Opposition Leader in Australian political history has so profoundly fashioned the nation’s political settings that Prime Minister Gillard’s leadership capacity must be assessed within the political framework that the Member for Warringah has set. This SWOT analysis is undertaken with regard to possible personal strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the three selected leaders with regard to their probable impact on Australia.

Strengths

The Opposition Leader’s major strength is a capacity to shape the environment in which he operates. This is a formidable strength, particularly as Abbott has usually done so in a context of prevailing hostility ranging from his time as a university student politician through to his being Opposition Leader. He obviously has a strong belief in himself and the necessary discipline to focus on taking the next step to achieve his goals.

Abbott is a maverick in that he aligned himself with a range of Australian political actors ranging from BA Santamaria to the unfairly underrated Barry Unsworth, Labor New South Wales premier between 1986 and 1988. The diversity of political leaders that Abbott has associated with has probably endowed him with his own near unique capacity to apply observed leadership traits to various situations that he has been confronted by. As a result he is probably highly self-reliant and resourceful at finding solutions to apparently intractable problems.

As someone from a relatively early age who has been consistently associated with leaders at the cutting edge, Abbott is probably an astute judge of character. The personal staff he has assembled is therefore probably one of the most impressive in Australian history. This personal staff is not only individually formidable but on a collective basis provides him with reach to the various corporate, media and political sectors (including Liberal Party HQs across the nation) of the nation which probably exceeds that of the prime minister’s own impressive staff.

A discernable leadership skill of Abbott’s is that he is a team player not only with his personal staff but also his shadow cabinet. With regard to the latter, its cohesion can be traced to Abbott’s skill in synthesising different perspectives and parlaying this into a coherent parliamentary strategy which has consistently given the government a run for its money.

Due to his co-ordination skills, Abbott can usually ensure that his individual will prevails. He probably has an excellent intelligence network within his parliamentary ranks such that he can accurately gauge their mood, thereby making a sudden leadership coup or inner party destabilization campaign an impossibility.

Furthermore, Abbott’s sense of tactical and strategic timing is also near impeccable as evidenced by his leadership coup against Malcolm Turnbull in late 2009. While Abbott has a previous reputation for impetuosity, he would now rarely act impulsively and probably consults widely to carefully assess the ‘pros and cons’ of a given situation. This approach can often lead to inertia but in the case of Abbott bold action is subsequently usually undertaken once the probably outcomes have been identified.

As someone who has doubtless had to struggle to get to where he is, Abbott has converted potential weaknesses into strengths. Therefore his previously cited inherent inclination toward impetuosity has been converted into discipline and careful strategic consideration. It should go without saying that Abbott is intelligent however *media hostility has led to a tendency on the public’s part to underestimate his intellectual depth. This would be a fatal mistake because Abbott is very well read with a broad range of knowledge of Australian and international history.

(*For all the media’s hostility toward Abbott, there is now an orientation on the Canberra press gallery’s part to attack the federal government as the pro-Rudd sentiment has converted into an overwhelmingly anti-Gillard bias).

Having a very lateral mind has probably led to a defensive tendency on Abbott’s part against being perceived as actually being an intellectual. Even though he is a Rhodes Scholar in economics, Abbott has not refuted the inaccurate assessment of himself as an economic ignoramus. His understanding of other areas of public policy also encompasses broad band policy even though the Opposition Leader is disingenuously modest about his actual knowledge.

False modesty on Abbott’s part is not due to personal insecurity but rather a tactical device by which to lull actual and would-be opponents into a false sense of security. Consequently he has the capacity to advance by retreating. It is not beyond the realms of reality that he actually covertly supported the introduction of the RU 86 abortion drug in 2006 so that he could publicly condemn the high rate of abortions so that he was deprived of the jurisdiction as health minister to authorize this drug’s entry to Australia.

Even though the authorization of this drug was considered a defeat for Abbott, it is possible that he secretly favoured its introduction but still ultimately kept a pro-life constituency on side which he might otherwise have let down. Although this scenario cannot be empirically validated, it warrants review because a legally trained mind such as Abbott’s could have envisaged a chain of causation arising from his Adelaide speech leading to the eventual authorization of the RU486 pill.

Identifying the potential trait of duplicity is arguably not a personal political strength however the broader point can be made that Abbott is so tactically and strategically flexible that he could achieve results that he actually desires but conceals from the broader public. A person who conceals their personal strengths or is prepared to face ridicule probably has a strong sense of self-possession which is often reflective of a capacity to be cool and collected in a crisis.

Abbott is not only cool and collected in a crisis but also well grounded with regard to the settings in which he operates. The groundedness and mental discipline that Abbott undoubtedly has is also reflected in his sporting prowess which helps ensure that his physical prowess aligns with mental agility.

This politician is also media savvy in that he knows how to attract attention with a media stunt to set the political settings that he desires. In television and radio interviews, he usually ‘bests’ the interviewers when they take him on as he is verbally articulate and normally in command of policy detail which is usually effectively conveyed.

The Canberra press gallery have therefore found Abbott to be their best friend when onside and their worst enemy when crossed with regard to media interviews. The intestinal fortitude which Abbott has with regard to the media also endows him with a formidable capacity to withstand personal attacks which the Labor machine is undertaking to unhinge him in the desperate forlorn hope that his leadership will somehow implode before the September federal election.

The ALP should appreciate that, regardless of what opinion polling says, Abbott is in a politically strong position because he is actually popular with the Australian people. He is perceived as a man who will ‘tell it at as it is’ and therefore can ultimately be trusted. As a politician, Abbott can actually get away with qualifying election promises as part of his being ‘straight with the people’. The high levels of net foreign debt and budget deficit have provided Abbott with the scope to qualify or rescind election commitments so that a context is created in which he paradoxically gains public trust.

The overall strength of Tony Abbott is a capacity to establish a framework which is strategically and tactically beneficial to himself. This specific strength is pertinent to have when your principal opponent is Julia Gillard. Her main strength is courage. *Julia Gillard’s incredible tenacity usually enables her to master difficult situations such that, with the elapse of time, she normally triumphs.

(*Julia Gillard’s strengths will be assessed in more detail in her SWOT).

The above cited skills of Julia Gillard can ultimately be irrelevant when Tony Abbott is your major opponent. His particular skill in establishing particular frameworks/contexts enables Abbott to prevail in that he can lose every battle except the last. Unless Prime Minister Gillard can establish an overarching framework which is antithetical to Abbott’s constructed context, she will lose the federal election to him on September 14th 2013.

Weaknesses

Tony Abbott’s major weaknesses can be misperceived as a strength: a tendency toward personal ruthlessness. This can be a weakness if and when personal ruthlessness descends into political chicanery in which pursuit of the genuine national interest at best becomes an extra option. His role in deposing Malcolm Turnbull who had acted with integrity by gaining prior partyroom approval for an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) was a vivid example of how ruthlessly Abbott can act in concert with shrewd political operators.

Even though Abbott has been such an effective Opposition Leader, there is still a broad question as to what his metier would be as prime minister? Abbott’s major weakness is that he may not actually have a positive agenda/objective for when he becomes prime minister. There is also a question as to whether he will be a cipher for external rent-seeking interests or will he even be ruthless enough to defy his powerful backers to pursue an agenda which has yet to be shared with others? Such uncertainties concerning Abbott’s ultimate intentions will be canvassed in more detail in the threats sub-section in this SWOT analysis of him.

The probable overriding weakness in Abbott is that he may become very disorientated when political actors he has manipulated into contributing to the framework/context he has established ultimately do not follow the game plan then he has set. In this regard, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has singularly failed to date to effectively counter Abbott who is strategically on track to winning the long game.

Opportunities

The aforementioned probable personal strengths of Abbott would possibly make him an excellent prime ministerial chair of cabinet with a corresponding capacity to implement avowed policy into action outcomes. A formidable personal staff would also give a Prime Minister Abbott an inside run with regard to ensuring that his decisions are implemented as well as affording him an understanding of necessary public policy detail.

There is a high chance that Abbott will actually fulfil his promises to pay off the public foreign debt and pay down the budget deficit. This would be of great assistance in ensuring Australia’s continuing economic viability. *If Australia’s fiscal position was restored under Abbott, there is a chance that social welfare will be expanded to assist the middle class alleviate every day cost pressures while also still being of help in assisting the poor out of poverty.

(*The above cited scenario is improbable if the Abbott government constructs a rentier state).

As prime minister, Abbott would probably cultivate particular public servants who are onside to help him keep tabs on ministerial performance so that it would almost be impossible to ‘put one over him’ in cabinet as had been the case when Sir Robert Menzies was prime minister for the second time. Another Menzian trait that Abbott would probably emulate would be to maintain contact with ‘everyday’ people to gauge the popular mood to therefore expand his policy range from beyond the confines of Canberra.

Indeed, Abbott as a physically fit man would undoubtedly as prime minister energetically travel across the nation to assess, and if need be, keep ahead of the national mood to proactively set popular sentiment. Due to an inclination toward being grounded via extensive travel and possessing an impressive memory, Abbott would be well positioned to bring people into public policy implementation who might not otherwise have been utilized. This potential trait is already evident with regard to Abbott’s passion to improve the lot of the nation’s indigenous population that their well being might actually be advanced.

With regard to foreign affairs, Abbott’s extensive general knowledge and personal charm when he chooses to exercise it could lead to him being an *important world leader in a way which Kevin Rudd aspired to be when he was prime minister. As an excellent networker, Abbott could very well establish a range of beneficial international contacts that would serve Australia very well, to say the least.

(*Perhaps only a national leader of a middle ranked power nation such as Australia could be the circuit-breaker in regard to the terrible situation in Syria by fulfilling the role of “honest broker” between the great powers of the United States, Russia, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the European Union (EU) with regard to foreign intervention in that country.

The most important and immediate objective concerning Syria is the formation of a provisional government which is acceptable to most of the warring factions, excluding the Al-Qaeda inclined Sulfists. Even before there is possible foreign military air intervention, powers such as the United States should be first trying to assemble a provisional government for Syria. The American intervention and occupation of the Dominican Republic between 1965 and 1966 would not have been such a success had Hector Garcia not served as Provisional President during this period.

Hopefully the United States will undertake the vital preliminary step of finding a Syrian equivalent of a Hector Garcia before participating in an international air campaign similar to the one that occurred in Libya in 2011. Washington will hopefully communicate to the émigré factions (which now constitute Syria’s interim government in exile) that it will exercise military air power to incapacitate Bashar Assad’s regime only if they agree to support a future provisional government containing Baathist elements.

Similarly, the United States should now hopefully discreetly communicate to elements of the Assad regime it is prepared to support them serving in a post-Bashar provisional government to help safeguard the future of the Alawite and Christian communities.

Presently, the Bashar Assad regime will not negotiate because its military capacity enables it to withstand the courageous uprising. Indeed, the Assad regime possesses the military capacity by resort to gas warfare to crush the rebellion but thankfully, will dare not do so, for risk of incurring American air intervention.

The use of the Lebanese Hezbollah militia in Syria is turning the tide in favour of the Assad regime. The expeditious supplying of weapons to the moderate Free Syrian Army by the United States will, by denying the Assad regime their current capacity to win the war, create the necessary scenario which compels the Baathists to desert Bashar so that they can participate in a new provisional government which is generally acceptable to the Syrian people. Limited American led air strikes against offensive military action by the Bashar Assad regime will create the scope to stop either side from winning or losing so that a new provisional government in Damascus can be created.

An outright victory by Bashar Assad will consolidate Syria’s conversion into a satellite of republican Iran so that a new power bloc centred in the Middle East is created which will ultimately threaten Russia’s national interests in its Caucasus region. Due to President Putin’s support for Bashar Assad, the ancient Chinese saying: “I have conquered the world, I rule the world” is proving to be correct.

The Syrian Baathists will not withdraw their support for Assad to join a provisional government which will supervise a transition to democracy. Moscow’s refusal to support the formation of a Syrian provisional government by easing Bashar Assad out is a mystery which will ultimately rebound on Moscow because republican Iran will eventually be empowered to threaten Russian interests in the Caucus region and beyond.

With regard to American policy toward Syria, it is ironic that the Obama administration is currently too wary to undertake military air intervention unless and until Bashar crosses the “red line” by resorting to gas and germ warfare so that, an impass exists, which manifests as Syria’s civil war. The Assad regime will therefore probably resort to limited gas warfare to intimidate the people but deny doing so to avoid possible US-led foreign military air bombing intervention.

The importance of American air support can also not be over-emphasised with regard to Afghanistan. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) airbases in the neighbouring former Soviet Central Asian republics can be utilized to protect Afghanistan from a Taliban takeover once coalition ground troops have withdrawn in 2014. It should not be forgotten that the “post”-communist regime of Dr. Mohammed Najibullah held out following the withdrawal of Soviet troops in February 1989 due to Soviet air power that was provided from air bases in then Soviet Central Asia.

Concerning the use of American military air power, it should not be forgotten that the genocide that occurred in Cambodia between 1975 and late 1978 could have been prevented had the American Congress not cut off financial funding for American military air support in August 1973 which had been provided to the Lon Nol government in Phnom Penn from US air bases in neighbouring Thailand. Due to the brutality of the Taliban the Obama administration will hopefully consider providing air support to Afghanistan to prevent these maniacs again coming to power.

With regard to Syria, if the Obama administration discreetly but proactively helps forge a new provisional government with Baathist elements, the Assad regime will probably become unviable as crucial defections ensue. At the very least, the United States will hopefully supply the Free Syrian Army with sufficient weapons to either precipitate the formation of a new provisional government (which would include Syrian Baathists) or to actually win the war.

It is probable that, should the fighting continue until Assad falls, then the Free Syrian Army will subsequently have to fight a civil war against the Sulfists. This scenario therefore makes it even now more important that the United States more than adequately arms the Free Syrian Army. With weapons from Russia and republican Iran and troops from the Lebanese Hezbollah (to make up for a comparative lack of manpower), Bashar Assad is unfortunately now on track to winning the Syrian civil war.

Should Assad militarily prevail, then Syria will integrate as part of a nuclear armed regional configuration encompassing republican Iran and Lebanon which threatens world peace. It is also not out of the realms of possibility that a consolidated Tehran led military bloc would enter into an opportunistic alliance with Al-Qaeda to threaten Saudi Arabia.

Alternately, however, the Assad regime will become definitely unviable should there be an American led air campaign similar to what occurred in Libya in 2011. Ultimate success was achieved in Libya because there was a moderate democratically inclined opposition on the ground which the EU and the United States could support. This is not necessarily the case in Syria because the strong Sulfist component amongst the oppositionist forces may result in an extremist government succeeding the Assad regime.

If however the Obama administration choses to stay on the sidelines with regard to Syria, extremists in that nation may make cause with fellow Sulfists in Iraq to also help precipitate trouble in Lebanon and Jordan so that the Middle East becomes embroiled in a massive conflagration.

Although international diplomacy in the Middle East tends to be unsuccessful, a paradox is that this area of the world has a critical mass of diplomats to utilize to assemble a highly capable future provisional government in Damascus that will receive vital assistance from the Arab League.

Because Syria is at the geographical and ‘nerve’ crossroads of the Middle East, it is ultimately in Moscow’s interests to ensure that a capable and democratically inclined provisional government is formed in Damascus. A key performance indicator of the success of such a government would be its success in conducting democratic national elections. Undoubtedly, a pro-Moscow neo-Baathist Party would do well in such elections due to stalwart support from Syria’s Alawite, Christian and Shiite communities).

Threats

Ironically Abbott will threaten the nation as a disingenuous monarchist/covert republican. Since losing office as prime minister, John Howard has advocated that Australia become a ‘Crowned Republic’ (sic) which is a stance that Australians for Constitutional Monarchy (ACM which Abbott was the inaugural executive director) currently advocates. Unde a “Crowned Republic” (sic) the Governor-General will be constitutionally recognised as Australia’s Head of State instead of the British monarch.

So-called monarchists such as Abbott and Howard have argued that such a constitutional recognition will codify an existing reality. However, this reform could usher in a non-elective de facto republic. It has been canvassed that, under a “Crowned Republic” (sic), the position of Governor-General will eventually be renamed ‘president’ and that the British monarch will no longer have the power to confirm the prime ministerial nomination of that position.

Furthermore, the effective severance of a constitutional connection to the British Crown will imperil the continued viability of the Governor-General’s reserve powers so that Australia’s ‘Head of State’ will become a cipher of the executive government. The ensuing concentration of power with Australian politicians will render obsolete the constitutional protection and the political liberty that the direct connection to the British Crown has afforded Australian citizens because constitutional conventions will effectively lapse for lack of a reference point.

Australians will need as much constitutional protection as possible under an Abbott government because such a regime will convert the nation into a rentier state. Crucial to the establishment of a rentier state will be the establishment of a special economic zone in northern Australia which transcends the north of West Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland by the ‘regionalization’ (sic) process.

It is too difficult to detail the particulars of how such a special northern economic zone would actually operate except to say that it will be conducive to rent-seeking. More than probably under an Abbott government, state mining royalties will be replaced by a form of a new mining taxation regime which will be conducive to the three mega mining companies and the respective privately owned corporations of Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer entering into ‘sweetheart’ trading deals with PRC State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) which will also be conducive to legal tax minimization.

An Abbott government, despite Abbott’s protestations as a previous Work Choices sceptic, will undoubtedly be anti-union. Having a northern special economic zone with cheap foreign labour brought in under ‘liberalized’ 457 working visas will be vital in undercutting the wages and bargaining power of Australian labour. The establishment of such a special northern economic zone will also set the scene for ‘regionalized’ regimes to be established across the nation in which an apparent decentralization of power will ultimately lead to political control over economic resources.

It is therefore not beyond the realms of possibility under an Abbott government that ‘regionalization’ will eventually ensure that extensive privately owned rural properties make for corporate agribusinesses with links to a mercantilist PRC. Such a transformation will take a while to happen but it will eventually happen because a ‘regionalized’ regime under an Abbott government will lead to a concentration of political and economic power at a regional as opposed to a state level.

Australian states themselves will be phased out by GST revenue being clawed back by new regional authorities as state government bureaucracies and agencies are progressively transferred to new regional authorities. The danger of regionalization encompasses the Labor side of politics as evidenced by the role of the former Victorian state government of John Brumby in April 2010 ostensibly initiating the claw-back of GST revenue from the states under the so-called hospitals plan.

The unfortunate fact that ‘regionalization’ (sic) is on its way is reflected by the Gillard government’s May announcement that a constitutional referendum will be simultaneously held in conjunction with the September 14th 2013 federal election proposing that local government be recognised in the Australian Constitution. Should there be a constitutional financial recognition of local government ‘regionalization’ the necessary groundwork for ‘regionalization’ (sic) will be established. Under such a regime it will be possible to clawback GST revenue from the states to new local government authorities.

Constitutionally recognised local government authorities will be able to receive GST revenue and Commonwealth grants so that Australian states can effectively be phased out. Although ‘regionalization’ (sic) ostensibly denotes a decentralization of power, the reality will be otherwise because party-political/factional forces will control such regional tiers of government so that there will be a concentration of power.

As previously alluded to, such a concentration of power will set the scene for:

- a dud-super profits mining tax regime (due to the abolition of state royalties),
- an over reliance on the mining sector (which will cause environmental degradation)
- a disadvantageous trading regime for the mining sector vis a vis the PRC,
- utilization of SWFs
- PRC SOEs gaining de facto control of extensive agricultural properties,
- steep hikes, as well as an extension of the application of the GST, due to local tiers of government being too rapaciously over-reliant on this tax.

Under regionalization’ (sic) via constitutional recognition of local government, rural and regionally based Australians in particular will be adversely affected. In this context, it is potentially shameful that the Nationals Queensland Senator Barnaby Joyce is advocating a ‘yes’ vote in the September 14th referendum. However, this is not surprising because rent-seeking elements within the coalition parties are at the forefront of supporting ‘regionalization’ (sic).

Although National Party parliamentarians more often than not provide excellent service to their constituents, there can be times when they seek to advance their interests at the expence of their constituents. The ‘regionalization’ (sic)/rent-seeking agenda that is now being foisted on the nation is providing the scope for National Party Members of Parliament to sell out their constituents’ interests.

National Party parliamentary support for a ‘yes’ vote in the September referendum will help co-opt rural and regional Australia into supporting rent-seeking. Indeed, the importance of the September local government referendum proposal is being down-played by the nation’s major political actors so that the Australian people will endorse it as an ‘important but uncontroversial reform’. Due to probable bi-partisan support for the ‘yes’ vote, this position will probably prevail in September.

Nevertheless, rent-seeking elements within the coalition are taking no chances with former Workplace Relations Minister, Peter Reith, probably advocating a ‘no’ vote for this year’s referendum. While this appears an ostensibly a positive development, the reality will be otherwise. Reith (who has an extensive anti-union political network) will run a dud ‘no’ campaign to ensure that a ‘yes’ vote prevails. His leadership of ‘the no’ case, which will probably include ostensible support from the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), will pre-empt genuine proponents of states rights from running a genuine campaign against constitutional government recognition.

Probably no other political figure in Australia is more adept than Reith when it comes to referendum politics. He successfully co-ordinated opposition to the Hawke government’s constitutional reform proposal questions in the 1988 referendum. Furthermore, commendably, if not deviously, Reith helped thwart the ‘yes’ vote from prevailing in the 1999 referendum to make Australia a republic by posing as a direct electionist politician to help bolster the ‘no’ vote.

Tragically, the history of Australians usually voting ‘no’ in constitutional referenda will help ensure that the ‘yes’ prevails vote because constitutional recognition of local government will be presented by rent-seeking politicians on both sides of the fence as a sensible reform which should not be obstructed by an historic disposition to vote ‘no’.

Yes, in and of itself, constitutional recognition of local government in the Commonwealth Constitution is inherently worthwhile but the existing rent-seeking agenda makes such a constitutional change profoundly dangerous. Furthermore, it will, alas, be very challenging for anyone who is genuinely pro-states to advance (beside warning of the prospect of there being higher rates of an expanded GST) a bona fide ‘no’ campaign in a succinct and cogent manner because of the concealed nature of the rent-seeking agenda that constitutional recognition of local government entails.

Useful idiots within the ALP will support a ‘yes’ case in the deluded belief that ‘regionalization’ (sic) will enhance their power in the long term. Local trades halls in industrial centres such as Newcastle and Wollongong will not however become the locus of power in a ‘regionalized’ Australia if and when an Abbott government utilizes the Peter Reith network within its ranks to fatally undermine Australian trade unionism. Furthermore the application of a Lasch strategy by an Abbott regime in a regionalized Australia will undermine the potential ALP effectiveness.

The potential for an Abbott government to apply a Lasch strategy exists as there are political parties such as the purported Democratic Labor Party (DLP), Family First, *Katter’s Australia Party (KAP) and the Palmer United Party to prevent the pendulum eventually swinging back to the ALP after a possible decimation following the September 2013 federal election. Smaller parties also have the potential to establish power bases at a regional level which ultimately undermine the ALP.

(*These two parties, the KAP and the Palmer United Party, at the very least in New South Wales and Queensland, can contribute to a federal coalition landslide by being part of a preferencing stream).

The Abbott government would be less of a threat to Australia’s genuine national interest if there is no constitutional recognition of local government. It ultimately makes no sense for the Gillard government to do what Abbott’s own backbench would not allow him to do if he was presently the prime minister- hold a referendum to constitutionally recognise local government.

It is therefore tragically unfortunate that the Gillard government is effectively doing Abbott’s dirty work for him by proceeding with this constitutional referendum. the Gillard government will hopefully resist holding a referendum on the recognition of local government. Nevertheless, it should be emphasised that Julia Gillard has personal strengths in her own right which go beyond frustrating a would be-Abbott rent-seeking agenda.

Julia Gillard- Strengths

Julia Gillard’s chief strengths are her personal integrity, intelligence and focused discipline. It is not however a contradiction to say of Julia Gillard that she is also a pragmatist. From her days as a university student politician, she was at the forefront of practically organising campaigns at the University of Adelaide which were focused on achieving or defending existing supports for university students. This activist focus placed Julia Gillard broadly on the left of Australian politics but paradoxically on the centre-right of student politics when taking into account the far left polity of the nation’s then peak student organisation, the Australian Union of Students (AUS).

As AUS national president in 1983, Julia Gillard was considered right-wing by the far left student factions associated with that organisation so that her later attempts to join the Socialist Left (SL) of the ALP were stymied for about a year. By the same token, her association with the left of the ALP and her tenure as AUS national president marked her out as some-one of the far left by Australian Liberal Students Federation (ALSF) and genuinely moderate student groups which sought the then national students federation’s demise.

In reality, Julia Gillard in terms of ideological placement within the framework of student politicians was a centrist. Centrists often opportunistically straddle the centre and as such gain a reputation for shifty untrustworthiness. This was not the case with Julia Gillard who helped make AUS into an organisation which was relevant to addressing students’ concerns for the year (1983) when she served as its national president.

Her success as AUS president helped her secure a paid administrative position with the Melbourne based Socialist Forum organisation between 1984 and 1986. Julia Gillard utilized this job to help support herself to undertake her law degree at Melbourne University in this period of employment. Being a member of a Marxist organisation such as Socialist Forum usually should be a matter for censure but during this two-year period Julia Gillard demonstrated that she was independent thinking and acting.

Socialist Forum was formed in 1984 at the instigation of Bernie Taft who had been the leader of the Victorian branch of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). Having closed up the Victorian communist branch in 1984 Taft instigated the formation of Socialist Forum so that former CPA members could subsequently join the ALP.

In essence, Socialist Forum was an entréeist organisation so that the former CPA members could have a membership base within the SL faction of the Victorian branch of the ALP. Interestingly and ironically, the entrée of former CPA members into the Victorian SL led the hard left of that sub-faction to later split and form ‘The Pledge’ sub-faction which entered into an alliance with the moderate Labor Unity faction of the Victorian state ALP.

During her time as a Socialist Forum employee, Julia Gillard gained a reputation for administrative efficiency as a proficient typist, grammatically correct composer of memos and declarations and organiser of meetings. For all Julia Gillard’s earnest diligence, her strengths were often underappreciated (to say the least) by former CPA operatives because she struck them as too independent in that she did not conform to their Leninist conceptualization of Democratic Centralism (sic).

The major pragmatic dividend for Julia Gillard from her time as a Socialist Forum employee was that it undoubtedly helped her gain employment in 1987 with the SL connected law firm Slater and Gordon and eventual entrance into that ALP faction. From the outset Julia Gillard as a Victorian SL member was perceived as a future threat to factional leadership luminaries such as Lindsay Tanner and Kim Carr because she was not necessarily beholden to them.

The closest approximation that Julia Gillard had to an organisational base within the ALP was her serving as the president of the inner-Melbourne suburb Carlton branch of the ALP between 1985 and 1990. The location of the Victorian Trades Hall Council within Carlton and relative proximity of the offices of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) enabled Julia Gillard to interact with unionists who belonged to the Carlton branch of the ALP.

This interaction via the ALP Carlton branch with unionists probably helped endow Julia Gillard with an acute interest in issues relevant to Australian trade unionism. Her commitment to trade unionism was undoubtedly further enhanced by her practice at Slater and Gordon, of which she became a partner in 1990, as an industrial relations lawyer. In this capacity, she demonstrated respect for low paid employees such as textile workers which her law firm represented.

As a Slater and Gordon law partner, Julia Gillard also had to act as an astute manager when it came time to downsizing the law firm due in part to the challenging operational environment created by the Kennett ascendency in Victoria after the coalition won a landslide state election victory in October 1992. Julia Gillard entered the hostile milieu of Victorian state politics in 1995 when she became chief of staff to John Brumby, the then Victorian Opposition Leader.

This tenacity and personal strength that Julia Gillard displayed since being involved in university student politics was uncannily similar to that of Tony Abbott. However, veterans of university student politics can often either become in their political careers ciphers for powerful political interests such as big business/big unions or alternatively utilize their time in student university politics to be steeled to be independent political actors.

A comparative assessment between Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard indicates that the federal Opposition Leader has opted for the former role while the prime minister has chosen the latter role. The independent streak that Julia Gillard has shown has probably been reinforced by passions which she developed while in the thick of ALP politics for improving school education and industrial relations.

These two policy passions of education and industrial relations were probably nurtured by Julia Gillard’s involvement in ALP branch and administrative politics where, as a member of the powerful state branch’s administrative committee, she was involved in the ‘hurly burly’ of helping determine federal and state party pre-selections. Her own pre-selection and election to federal parliament came in 1998 and three years later she was elevated to the front bench. A shadow cabinet position as the federal ALP spokesperson for health came in 2003 and, after Labor lost the 2004 federal election, she was mooted as a possible federal parliamentary leader.

Julia Gillard’s rise in the ALP’s federal parliamentary ranks was undoubtedly due to her excellent verbal debating skills and mastery of often complex policy detail. She also gained a reputation for trustworthiness and was crucial to keeping alive the inter-factional parliamentary group which was first supportive of Simon Crean as Opposition Leader between 2001 and 2003 and then Mark Latham between 2003 and early 2005.

The member for Lalor’s success in helping maintain a sense of cohesion amongst the Crean/Latham forces was the main reason why Julia Gillard was a leadership option in early 1995. Out of probable loyalty to the Labor cause, Julia Gillard supported former leader Kim Beazley returning as Opposition Leader in January 1995 which meant acquiescing to her factional rival Jenny Macklin remaining as Deputy Leader.

The option for Julia Gillard to become Deputy Leader (a position which between 2001 and 2010 denoted de facto leadership of the federal SL) became an option in late 1996 when Kevin Rudd sought the Labor leadership. Rudd had the parliamentary support of a minority sub-section of the Right of the ALP, which was mainly composed of the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Assistants Association (SDA) which, combined with a united parliamentary Left, provided the necessary numbers for the Rudd-Gillard ticket to prevail.

The red scare campaign which was run against Julia Gillard in the October 2007 federal election campaign due to her previous involvement with Socialist Forum essentially fell flat due to her general popularity with the public and because the Howard government was pre-destined for election defeat due to internal sabotage.

The Rudd-Gillard government commenced with great flourish in part because of Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s effectiveness and popularity as Minister for Employment Relations and Education. These were in effect two super ministries where Julia Gillard as the responsible minister surpassed expectations.

As Education Minister, Julia Gillard introduced the National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) in which national curriculum tests were administered on a nationwide basis. The benefits of these tests were that education benchmarks were established which transcended socio-economic status and from the test results objective data could be analysed to determine education gaps.

The NAPLAN tests were veraciously opposed by teacher unions because they created the scope for so-called league tables to be published in which academic rankings could be ascertained. This comparative analysis was opposed by teacher unions on the basis that teaching performance could potentially be assessed in a bad light.

For all the attacks that Julia Gillard was subjected to by teacher unions - over NAPLAN she stood her ground on the basis that the best hope for all students- regardless of socio-economic background and even intellectual capacity having a realistic chance to reach their potential lay in of teachers transferring their skills to pupils and in turn helping endow them with newly acquired skills.

It cannot be emphasised enough that the most important determinant in whether or not a school student receives a first class education is the quality of teaching. Having established a framework via NAPLAN for students to have a degree of leverage with regard to potentially receiving a quality teaching experience, Julia Gillard as prime minister is taking the next step by now supporting the school teaching profession by increasing funding in line with the recommendations of the Gonski Review. The provision of extra and targeted funding creates the scope for teaching quality to improve across the nation under the Gonski Review to benefit all school students regardless of their socio-economic background.

The cumulative progress that has been made with regard to eduction since the ALP came to power in 2007 is reflective of Julia Gillard’s personal strength of ensuring that a particular passion becomes a public policy reality. In this regard, Julia Gillard is a rarity among politicians in that her determination to make a passion into a policy reality has given her a sense of purpose and persistence.

Had she not developed a passion for school education as a means of opening up opportunities for all students from her time at AUS, she might not have endured the subsequent travails she experienced within the ALP. These progressively encompassed party factional pre-selection politics, leadership intrigue within the parliamentary caucus and finally the challenges of being a senior minister and then prime minister. Throughout these different periods, Julia Gillard demonstrated tenacity and persistence.

It can be argued that even the most venal of politicians and leaders can have the attributes of tenacity and persistence. This perspective is correct which is why a leader’s (or anyone for that matter) motivation is such an important factor is assessing personal strengths. In essence, Julia Gillard has consistently demonstrated that her tenacity and persistence is sincerely motivated by a determination to serve others.

Consequently, in utilitarian terms, Julia Gillard is a national leader that Australians can derive benefits from in their everyday lives in terms of policy improvements. This was demonstrated with regard to industrial relations where the ALP with Julia Gillard as the responsible minister repealed the appalling Work Choices (sic, No Choices) industrial relations legislation in 2009 to replace it with the Fair Work Australia (FWA) statute.

FWA essentially revived Australia’s long-standing beneficial industrial relations system of arbitration and endowed it with pluralist flexibility by establishing the scope for enterprise bargaining. Under FWA, not only are minimum wages and working conditions protected but there is latitude for productivity to be achieved by positive employer-employee/union bargaining interaction which belies the neo-liberal version of ‘flexibility’ in which wages are cut and working conditions and employee rights eroded.

Positive ‘employer-employee/union bargaining interaction’ can entail employee representatives/unions and employers coming to mutually agreed beneficial workplace arrangements and pay which can actually boost productivity. An important reason why the Federal Republic of Germany (FGR) is such an economic success story (besides the dominance of the euro) is the nature of its industrial relations system where business and unions jointly focus on achieving increased productivity so that employees can ultimately benefit.

The rationale underpinning the FGR’s industrial relations system subliminally existed since Australian arbitration commenced with the passage of the Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1904 (the 1904 Act) and the Harvester Judgement of 1907. This pluralist system of arbitration could not have come into being and lasted for so long had it not been for employer support. The ‘flexibility’ that this system needed was facilitated by the introduction of enterprise bargaining in the 1980s and 1990s during the Hawke-Keating era.

The major problem with the transition to an enterprise bargaining system during the Hawke-Keating era was that it was commensurate with de-unionisation due to the policy of union amalgamation being undertaken. It is probably not possible to ‘unscramble the egg’ of union amalgamation but the FWA focus on enterprise bargaining creates the potential for rank and file activation so that union democracy can be generated to, in turn, help facilitate union renewal.

Should the Gillard government be returned in the September 14th 2013 federal election, there is every chance that Australia’s tradition of a pluralist (and productive) industrial relations system could continue for another one hundred years despite hostility from strong neo-liberal rent-seeking forces. In this regard, Julia Gillard’s personal passions concerning industrial relations will have translated into long-standing public policy outcomes that have stood the test of time.

Another personal passion which Julia Gillard is trying to translate into public policy is Disability Care (the National Disability Insurance Scheme, NDIS) which is, similar to implementing the Gonski Review, a work in progress. Although the public generally supports these two programmes there is perhaps an under realization that, if had it not been for Julia Gillard’s mastery of policy detail and practical application in seeking their implementation, they might not even have become viable public policy options.

The apparent unpopularity of the prime minister despite her fighting for popular but complex projects such as Disability Care is due to Abbott’s overall success in constructing a context in which the government is unpopular for breaking the promise not to introduce a carbon tax. The Opposition Leader has also tapped into a widespread community sentiment that the verbal articulateness of many ALP politicians, particularly that of Julia Gillard, is spin.

The counterpoint to the above phenomenon is that there is style to the government’s substance as reflected by achievements in education, industrial relations and with regard to works in progress such as implementing the Gonski Review and Disability Care. In regard to this gap in relation to public trust and confidence in the prime minister- she is doing what has to be done- persisting with lateral policies that can positively impact on people’s everyday lives.

In contrast to the Scullin government (1929 to 1931), the Whitlam government (1972 to 1975) and the Keating government (1991 to 1996) which were voted out in landslides, the Gillard government has not yet ‘lost its way’. Despite the formidable challenges of operating in a parliamentary minority, a pro-Rudd press bias and very effective de-stabilization by Tony Abbott as Opposition Leader, the Gillard government has consistently and very competently functioned.

This high level of government competence has undoubtedly been due to the leadership example of Julia Gillard. She has consistently shown personal respect to public servants, cabinet ministers, government MPs and MPs on the cross-benches. She is also probably the most accomplished parliamentary performer since Sir Robert Menzies. Furthermore, debate has not plumbed the depths as occurred when Keating was prime minister.

The question therefore arises as to why Julia Gillard (if the opinion polls are to be believed) is such an unpopular prime minister who is headed toward an electoral rout in September 2013? The overall reason is psychological in that most Australians do not trust the prime minister personally and perceive her government as incompetent even though Julia Gillard is widely perceived as too clever by half.

The vital, although frustratingly intangible challenge, that Julia Gillard faces between now and the federal election is to win the people’s trust. The scope for her to achieve this is analysed in the opportunities section of the SWOT but, before this review is undertaken, potential weaknesses of Julia Gillard are now examined.

Weaknesses

Similar to Tony Abbott, Julia Gillard’s strengths can alternately be perceived as weaknesses. As previously mentioned, Julia Gillard’s verbal articulateness has been perceived by many as Labor spin in which a politician tries to con people into thinking that the situation is better than it actually is. This widespread public attitude toward Julia Gillard is derived from an overall short to medium term strength which can ultimately be a fatal weakness- heroically persisting in an overall hopeless context.

From the time that Julia Gillard made her promise just before the August 2010 federal poll that no government she led would introduce a carbon tax, she has been on a long term trajectory to election defeat. Rent-seeking elements within both the Liberal Party and the ALP knew that, once they subsequently coerced the prime minister to break that promise, her capacity to win subsequent re-election would be fatally undercut. By the same token, Julia Gillard knew that unless she made such a verbal undertaking, rent-seeking elements would ensure that she lost the 2010 federal election.

The virtue that Julia Gillard made out of necessity with regard to her promise not to introduce a carbon tax created the contemporary paradox that she is in: mastering a difficult situation over a three year period even though the ultimate outcome is ultimately against her. Conversely, Abbott has been prepared to sit out three years in opposition knowing that, by collusion with rent-seeking elements within the ALP, he could place Julia Gillard on a course in which she both prepares the way for rent-seeking and election defeat at the expiation of the federal parliament’s current term.

Having been manoeuvred by Abbott into an ultimately untenable decision, Julia Gillard did not help her own cause by sticking with Wayne Swan as Treasurer. Having virtually gained the reprieve of a three year parliamentary term by making a fundamental promise that she knew she would have to eventually break, Julia Gillard needed competent senior ministers who could gain the public trust so that she could defy the odds to win the subsequent federal election.

For the situation that Julia Gillard found herself in following the August 2010 federal election was to have the worst Commonwealth Treasurer in Australian history in the person of Wayne Swan. Due to his role under the Rudd government in creating the terrible fiscal position that Australia is now in, Swan should not now be the person to guide the nation’s financial destiny.

Swan perhaps understandably has a vested interest in not owning up to the colossal disaster of the Rudd government’s legacy of in-debting the nation by unnecessary stimulus and spending packages. However, this does not excuse him for his continued financial mismanagement vis a vis the MRRT, abortive raids on superannuation funds, unnecessary (and expensive) carbon tax compensation packages and linkage of this impost to a near moribund European Union (EU) Emissions Trading Scheme to establish a flawed carbon floor price.

With the considerable benefit of hindsight, Julia Gillard should have shifted Swan (who is the ALP’s federal deputy leader) from Treasury to the Defence Ministry so that someone such as Stephen Smith could be Treasurer. Even with the adoption of a carbon tax, having somebody capable such as Stephen Smith could still have ensured that by fiscal prudence and discipline the federal budget was returned to surplus. In a context of a budget surplus, the impost of the carbon tax would have been less unsettling to the public.

Instead, under Swan as Treasurer there was the incessant mantra that the budget would go into surplus. The repetition of this impending outcome by Swan was probably made to re-assure himself as much as the general public that all would be fiscally well. When of course this predicted budget surplus did not come to pass, the Gillard government’s general credibility was undermined so that the negative impact of the broken promise regarding the carbon tax was compounded.

Perhaps Swan really believed that a budget surplus could really be achieved despite the generous and expensive carbon tax compensation package been paid out. He probably believed that the money would magically appear to take the budget into surplus by income flows from the MRRT. Even though this tax was a watered down version of the notionally more extensive RSPT, Swan still possibly believed that under an MRRT there would be a financial windfall to take the budget into surplus. The grim reality was always that both the RSPT and MRRT were dud taxes which were at best deficient in raising revenue.

Having already near fatally undermined public confidence in the government by promising a budget surplus that blind Freddy could see could never eventuate, Swan further frightened the electorate by contemplating a raid on the superannuation funds of the very wealthy.

The Treasurer probably believed that, expeditiously and extensively raising much needed revenue could be achieved by raiding the superannuation of the very wealthy. He also possibly thought that such a move would win popular acclaim. Swan should have realized (as Rudd apparently did when he was running for prime minister in 1996-1997) that Australians are overwhelmingly fiscally conservative so that any public policy remotely perceived as determinantal to personal saving is totally unacceptable to them.

Not only would a superannuation raid have been unacceptable to the public, insufficient revenue could have been raised and millions of dollars could have been moved off-shore by the wealthy to protect their money thereby potentially contributing to capital de-capitalization of Australian financial institutions. In many respects, Swan’s would-be raid on superannuation was an attempt at a dud tax mark two.

A fundamental weakness of Julia Gillard’s government is having Swan as Treasurer. This has been reflected by the carbon tax that was legislated in November 2011 going to a floor price that will be linked in 2015 to the EU’s ETS which is estimated to soon fall to the equivalent of $A3 a tonne!

With regard to the present, the adverse impact of the currently high carbon tax is not yet apparent due to the government having lowered the number of emitting companies initially from one thousand to five hundred and because of the off-set of the generous carbon tax compensation packages. Nevertheless, the carbon tax is raising insufficient revenue to adequately cover the costs of the compensation packages so that Australia is further in-debted.

Furthermore, in the next three years the costs to industry of the carbon cost will eventuate in higher unemployment and discouraged investment in Australia. These adverse impacts of the carbon tax have not yet eventuated. However, a growing public realization that the carbon compensation packages are being financed by further overseas borrowings and the inadequacy of the EU floor price are feeding into a mis-perception that the Gillard government is incompetent.

This widespread mis-perception that the Gillard government is incompetent is reflective of Abbott’s success in setting the overall context in which the prime operates. His strategic success of manipulating most of the public into believing that the Gillard government is incompetent is reflective of Abbott’s overall success into pursing a rent-seeking agenda be it the breaking of a pre-election promise by Julia Gillard that there would be no carbon tax or brilliant exploiting Swan’s glaring inadequacies as federal Treasurer.

The tragedy of Julia Gillard’s failure, despite her tactical strengths, to overcome Abbott’s strategic advantage becomes apparent when analysing the potential opportunities that would have come Australia’s way if Labor were to win a majority at the next federal election in conjunction with the ‘no’ vote going down in the constitutional referendum.

Opportunities

(Due to the opportunities for Julia Gillard’s political progress via Senator David Feeney serving the genuine national interest, a bolded section pertaining to him is included in this sub-section).

The tenacity and formidable capacity that Julia Gillard has demonstrated in the context of being a prime minister leading a minority government implicitly convey how effective she would be for the nation’s benefit if the ALP won a majority of seats at the September federal election. Should Labor somehow win the September 2013 federal election, then the Gonski review into education and the NDIS will probably become realities.

Should the above two cited policy initiatives become realities under a returned Labor government, this would be a testament to Julia Gillard’s disciplined focus in which she will have mastered an array of major and minor policy detail. It is rare for a national leader to demonstrate commitment to policies over such a long period and then to ensure their implementation. Prime Minister Gillard’s commitment to implementing the Gonski Review and Disability Care indicate that she not only has a heart to advocate these policies but the head to have them implemented.

Furthermore, should the Gillard government be returned, then Australia’s traditional pluralist industrial relations system as encapsulated by FWA would be consolidated. This legislation similarly substantially reflected Julia Gillard’s policy passion when, as Employment Relations minister, she moved to repeal the reviled No Choices legislation of the Howard government.

FWA has achieved a balance between flexibility/productivity and protecting employee/union rights by placing enterprise bargaining front and center of its industrial relations system. There is ample scope under FWA for employees and/or unions to contribute their input to help facilitate productivity gains while still respecting employer prerogative.

By contrast, there is still a policy obsession within the coalition led by figures such as the Shadow Employment Relations Minister Senator Eric Abetz and a supposedly retired Peter Reith to return to a No Choices industrial relations regime. The essence of the former No Choices system was the virtual abolition of an award safety net. There is scope under the coalition’s proposed industrial relations policy to nullify the award safety net via their particular version of *Individual Flexibility Agreements (IFA) by removing the Better Off Overall Test (BOOT).

(*Why there was institutional scope under FWA for IFAs - which potentially approximate to the now defunct Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs)-is a mystery).

Even though a majority of the federal coalition’s front bench are adverse to a No-Choices industrial relations regime, the Abetz/Reith forces have had their way due to Abbott’s leadership skills. The Opposition Leader is sufficiently political adept to ‘talk the talk’ regarding his supposed aversion to the previous No Choices legislation that he has convinced his party that he can successfully assuage public concerns by presenting the image of an industrial relations moderate.

Due to Abbott possessing the skills to establish a rentier state hostile to independent organisations such as trade unions, Australia will forgo an opportunity to safeguard its future genuine national interest by not re-electing Julia Gillard in September 2013. This context reflects that Julia Gillard as a prime minister who is an independent political actor can at least shield Australia against the forces of rent-seeking and has the potential to withstand the Abbott onslaught.

In her own right, Julia Gillard is administratively very competent with a formidable capacity to simultaneously juggle a complex array of policy challenges. It is therefore unfortunately ironic that Abbott has been so successful in mis-portraying the Gillard government as incompetent and untrustworthy. This success of Abbott’s can mainly be attributed to the introduction of a carbon tax, the continuing negative aspects of the Rudd government and Wayne Swan’s continuing power within the federal government.

Tragically for Australia, despite the positive achievements of Julia Gillard in still managing to lead a functioning government in a very difficult environment, it seems almost inevitable that she will lose the September 2013 federal election by being perceived by the public for what she actually is not- an incompetent and untrustworthy person.

Indeed, the federal ALP’s capacity to win the September 2013 election essentially hinges upon the Gillard government winning the trust and confidence of the Australian people as competent and reliable. The ALP figure that has the capacity between now and the September election to gain sufficient public trust is Simon Crean. Even though he was (and is) an avowed Rudd supporter, the role he fulfilled in June 2010 and in the March 2013 non-leadership challenge were crucial with regard to Julia Gillard’s respective political successes.

To repeat, if Prime Minister Gillard is to have a viable chance of winning the September 2013 federal election, then Simon Crean must fulfil as prominent a role in the federal election campaign as what Bill Hayden did during the 1977 federal election campaign when he supported Whitlam. Simon Crean can fulfil a vitally prominent role in the 2013 federal election campaign either as a reinstated minister or as a continuing backbencher.

It should also be emphasised that, if the ALP is to have a chance of winning the next federal election or adapting to the formidable challenge of opposition, it will need the political shrewdness of David Feeney. He is a determined person who, should he depart from politics, an ideological chasm would be created which would deprive the ALP of the ideological diversity and support base required to remain politically viable.

David Feeney first made his political impact apparent in Australian university politics as a stalwart of the Labor Right. It can be said of David Feeney that he is a searcher- some-one trying to find his way by going down unconventional pathways. He certainly was this in regard to student politics in that he was determined that there be a right-wing presence in student politics which was linked to the ALP.

In the late 1980s, David Feeney joined the right-wing social democratic ALP Club at Melbourne University. It may seem contradictory to have a university campus Labor club which was “right-wing” but this was the case with the Melbourne University ALP Club due to the influence of the anti-communist social democratic academic Dr. Frank Knopfelmacher. In contrast to many of the one-time ALP club members who went on to be leaders of the anti-union New Right, David Feeney was so determined to fight for the ALP and moderate trade unionism that he refrained from entering this political force.

David Feeney throw in his lot with the Victorian Labor Right in the 1990s by working as a staffer for the courageous Ian Baker who was then the Victorian Agriculture Minister. Due to David Feeney’s political skills, he helped ensure that there was a Labor Right operation in student politics which eventually formalized as a faction in early 1992 called Student Unity. Without Student Unity support, it could not have been possible for many moderate student activists to have operated.

During the late 1980s and into the 1990s, David Feeney was often on the look out to recruit student moderates from non-ALP backgrounds into his party to bolster moderate forces to reinforce his party factional base. It should also be said that David Feeney was more than a “numbers man” at this time- he actually had an ideology. His philosophy in this field of politics was that university students receive quality services from organisations such as student associations/unions.

This then student politician was at his best when he had sympathy for others who similarly struggled against the political tide. It would therefore be ironic that when David Feeney climbed the political ladder that some people who had once scorned him by refusing to join the ALP when the odds were against him later tried to ingratiate themselves when his position within the Labor Party was relatively strong.

Members of the Socialist Left (SL) who belonged to the National Organisation of Labor Students (NOLS) appreciated that, if it were not for David Feeney, there might not be a viable Labor Right in student politics. Many of them therefore felt a great sense of glee when David Feeney had to forgo his employment as a staffer for Ian Baker after the Victorian ALP went into opposition in 1992.

David Feeney being David Feeney remarkably rebounded when he became a staff member in 1993 for John Brumby when he unexpectantly became Victorian State Opposition Leader that year. Although David Feeney had to forgo his staffing position with Brumby in 1994 as part of a factional deal, he had established a sufficiently strong party base that he found political employment elsewhere, including serving as a National Industrial Officer with the Transport Workers’ Union (TWU) such that he, eventually became Victorian ALP State Secretary between 1999 and 2002.

As much as the Victorian Labor Left personally disliked Feeney, they did not appreciate that he was always prepared to honour a deal with them. In the 1990s, he actually handed out how to vote cards for state parliamentary candidates of the far-left Pledge faction as part of a factional deal with them. This alliance between the Pledge and Labor Unity allowed the latter to establish a once seemingly impossible strong base within the state ALP that Brumby and Steve Bracks who hailed from their ranks went onto serve as premiers of Victoria.

Although David Feeney has power bases in surviving small trade unions, such as the Health Services Union (HSU), his mainstay of support is the Victorian TWU along with the general backing of the AWU and the SDA. His position within the ALP would have been stronger had the Groupers associated with the Gerald Mercer and Jim Hewat led Social Action not lost control of the Victorian branch of the Federated Clerks Union (FCU) in the 1991 union election.

Had the SL consolidated their control of the FCU in 1991, then this industry union could have paradoxically supported a swag of smaller craft based unions against the onset of trade union amalgamation in the 1990s which caused massive de-unionisation. With a wide array of smaller viable unions, there would have been a critical mass of moderates who David Feeney could have recruited into the Victorian ALP to have consolidated the state’s Labor Unity faction.

Alas, the current state of affairs with regard to Labor Unity is that its viability and strength is reliant upon Bill Shorten. His undoubted talent has brought many recruits into Labor Unity on the basis that he will eventually become a very successful prime minister. This scenario is plausible but inherently risky because of his industrial power base with the AWU.

The AWU is a confected trade union in that its coverage encompasses what employers have ceded to it to help keep militant unions out. At the time that Bill Shorten became Victorian state secretary in 1998, this union was on the brink of disintegration due to a previous debilitating internal dispute. Bill Shorten bolstered the AWU by reconciling with the Queensland based AWU National Secretary *Bill Ludwig, re-assuring employers and conciliating with the hard industrial left which is led by industrial unions such as the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) and the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (AMWU).

(*Shorten became joint AWU National Secretary with Ludwig in 2001).

Should the ALP lose the 2013 federal election and there be a move toward “regionalization” (sic), the AWU will lack the requisite industrial strength to resist left-wing industry unions moving against its areas of coverage. These industry unions could move against the AWU whose power has been traditionally derived from its links with moderate MPs in the ALP caucus. A pincer movement by a Reith inspired attack on the AWU from the right and the industrial unions on the left could imperil moderate unionism in Australia.

It is therefore not only imperative that Julia Gillard win the 2013 federal election to avoid such a scenario but that David Feeney become the next federal member for Batman. Feeney has the political skills and inclination, because the SL hate him so much, to ensure should the ALP lose the 2013 federal election that Shorten has the necessary political back up support should the hard left led by Albanese decide to move against the AWU.

Shorten himself would not be in the relatively strong position that he is now in had it not been for David Feeney’s past support. These two were actually once leaders of the Labor Right faction within the youth wing of the Victorian ALP called “Vanguard”. A personal-geographic split between Feeney and Shorten saw Vanguard disappear to be replaced by the Shorten-led Networkers faction and the Feeney inspired Centre Forum. The distinguishing dimension between these two youth wing party factions was that the mainstream of the latter was involved in student university politics.

Young Labor politics being what they were, Shorten fell out with his former protégés within the Networkers faction when he went to work as a lawyer for the pro-Labor Right law firm Maurice Blackburn when he tried to mentor its leadership. The bitterness of this dispute was such that, having established a base in the Victorian branch of the National Union of Workers (NUW, the old Storemen and Packers Union) former Networkers unsuccessfully tried to thwart Shorten’s entry into federal parliament in 1998.

Shorten would not have been able to have overcome post-Networker resistance to his entry into Parliament had it not been for his durable alliance with David Feeney in which his former Centre Forum base provided invaluable support. The strength of the Shorten-Feeney alliance is such that not only did the former enter parliament in 1998 but that the later took up a Senate seat in 2009. Therefore, to put it bluntly, there can be no moderate ALP right without the Shorten-Feeney alliance.

There may be those within the SL who would welcome a political termination of David Feeney’s power so that their faction can become dominant. For those who think this way in the SL, they should be warned that without a moderate wing within the ALP, very powerful forces within Australian society will ensure that the ALP does not regain office for the foreseeable future. Should Tony Abbott become prime minister after the 2013 federal election, he will have the political skill should he have the necessary backing to ensure that his Labor opponents remain in de facto permanent opposition.

It is consequently an indulgence on the part of members of the SL to oppose David Feeney’s pre-selection to the safe ALP Melbourne seat of Batman. Affirmative action policies should not be used to deprive someone as talented as David Feeney from being pre-selected. Even though David Feeney is overwhelmingly hated by the SL he himself has always recognised that it is actually in his political self-interest to support rival factional talent if the ALP is ever going to go anywhere.

Consequently, the Victorian State President of the ALP Cath Bowtell (who is a leading member of the state SL) is making a terrible mistake by publicly opposing David Feeney’s pre-selection for the seat of Batman. There are many Labor Right people who are supporting her bid to re-contest the federal seat of Melbourne against the Greens’ Adam Bandt. If the ALP is to have any chance of winning the 2013 federal election, then there must be party inter-factional reciprocation.

David Feeney has the necessary skills and experience should who chose to exercise them to organise a Simon Crean “No” vote in the constitutional referendum. Not only could a Feeney directed campaign help ensure a victory for the “No” vote but he could also help engineer a flow on effect of the ALP actually winning re-election in 2013. For such a scenario to be viable, Senator Feeney would simply have to ignore the bad blood between his fellow faction men, Senator Steve Conroy and Simon Crean. Considering the high stakes, riding over such inter-factional disputation should not be an impossibility on Senator Feeney’s part.

The SL should also realize that it is in their interest to support David Feeney in 2013 as his ultimate ambition is not to become prime minister but defence minister. Feeney would undeniably be an excellent defence minister that he could even serve under a stalwart SL prime minister. For there to be any prospect of there being future Labor governments, the SL must give their support to David Feeney this year in helping Simon Crean run a “No” case in the September 2013 referendum.

A prominent role for Simon Crean in this year’s federal election campaign - combined with Julia Gillard continuing with what she is actually doing- pressing ahead with the Gonski reforms and Disability Care as part of pressing ahead in general terms with a positive public agenda - offer the ALP a realistic chance to possibly win the upcoming federal election.

Despite the apparently bleak scenario of massive electoral defeat which confronts the ALP, the Gillard government is nevertheless -for the first time since the second Menzies prime ministership- is actually making a positive impact in people’s lives by establishing sound policy settings. That this opportunity will probably be foregone is due to Julia Gillard’s failure to overcome the political ascendancy that Abbott established in the closing months of the Rudd prime ministership. Abbott’s political advantage was reflected by Prime Minister Rudd adopting the anti-states hospitals agreement and a rent-seeking super-profits mining tax regime.

The main reason why the current federal ALP government has survived since 2010 - despite the continuance of the Abbott ascendancy - is ultimately because it suits the interests of the rent-seeking elements within the two major parties for Julia Gillard to remain on as prime minister until the September 2013 federal election. In the eyes of the rentiers as led by Tony Abbott, the major role that Prime Minister Gillard now has to fulfil until the next federal election is to ensure that the *referendum on the constitutional recognition of local government takes place so that an Abbott government can introduce ‘regionalization’ (sic).

(*The referendum will be conducted simultaneously with the September federal 2013 election).

The only substantial opportunity for Prime Minister Julia Gillard to now serve the nation, if not win the next federal election, is to ensure that the ‘No’ case prevails in the September 2013 federal election. The scope for steep GST increases - and a concentration of power with rent-seeking parties such as the Reds (aka the Greens) if constitutional recognition of local government is achieved - might sway conservative inclined voters, particularly in Queensland and Western Australia, to vote for the ALP.

If political circumstances are such that Prime Minister Gillard cannot publicly advocate a ‘No’ vote - particularly as her government ostensibly supports constitutional recognition of local government- then she should at least allow Labor politicians and union officials the right to do so. Coalition MPs are ostensibly being allowed the right to opt to either support a ‘Yes’ or a ‘No’ case.

As previously mentioned, by running a dud ‘No’ campaign key party factional allies of Abbott, such as Senator Cory Bernardi, will duplicitously advocate a ‘No’ case in the constitutional referendum to help ensure that the ‘Yes’ case prevails. It is noteworthy, (as previously mentioned) that important coalition Abbott supporters such as Nationals senator, Barnaby Joyce, are actually advocating ‘Yes’ case because he can actually affect voting patterns.

Already reverse psychology is being applied with commentary that the ‘No’ case will prevail because the Gillard government has called the referendum too late and because state ministers in the Victorian and Western Australian governments are publicly opposing local government recognition. An effective counter message will be put out by rent-seeking political forces that the Australian people should stop being so re-active by opposing any constitutional change that a majority of voters in two-thirds of states will ultimately support the ‘Yes’ case.

Ostensibly, there is nothing inherently wrong with local government being constitutionally recognised. Furthermore, it is next to impossible to make an explicit case detailing, or more to the point, alleging the covert rent-seeking agenda that underlays constitutional recognition of local government. However, it is legitimate for anti-renting seeking politicians to be upfront with the Australian people by advocating a ‘No’ case on the basis that the constitutional and financial viability of Australian states is threatened.

Julia Gillard as a person who fundamentally respects the rights of people to forge their individual destinies should at least avail herself of the opportunity of allowing Labor Party political allies opposed to rent-seeking to fight a genuine ‘No’ case. If coalition politicians are allowed to decide whether to opt to support either ‘No’ or a ‘Yes’ case, then this right should be extended to the Labor side of politics by the prime minister.

Indeed, it is absolutely imperative that Julia Gillard allows (if not overtly encourages) support for the ‘No’ case by elements within the ALP and the moderate components of the Australian union movement. The only realistic potential for the ALP to avoid a New South Wales or Queensland type electoral wipe-out and to possibly even win the 2013 federal election is for ALP parliamentarians, candidates and moderate trade unions to vigorously support the case for a ‘No’ vote in the constitutional referendum.

With Tony Abbott supporting a ‘Yes’ case in the constitutional referendum and Julia Gillard being unfairly regarded as so personally unpopular, ALP parliamentary candidates will desperately need an escape strategy to ensure electoral success. Although most ALP federal parliamentarians, particularly those in marginal electorates, have usually done an outstanding job as contentious local MPs, this will be insufficient to save them from losing their seats.

Federal Labor parliamentarians and candidates will need a substantial issue which distinguishes them from both Abbott and Julia Gillard in a positive vein. Because the Australian electorate is inherently conservative, many swing voters and coalition orientated supporters may opt for an ALP candidate on polling day if he or she supports the ‘No’ case. The Nationals’ Barnaby Joyce’s support for the ‘Yes’ case creates such a potential for anti-renting seeking ALP candidates to win over the support of coalition inclined voters.

For the prosecution of a ‘No’ case to have the flow on effect of swing votes to anti-rent-seeking politicians, the national campaign itself would have to be well run. This could be achieved by ALP anti-rent-seekers *supporting a genuine Turnbull led ‘No’ case campaign or - failing Malcolm Turnbull making such a case - running their own race. Time however is of the essence but, given the wonders of modern social media technology, a viable ‘No’ case with flow on political electoral ramifications is still viable.

(*Supporting a genuine ‘No’ case will result in ALP anti-rent-seekers keeping away from a dud campaign run by Peter Reith or organisations such as the IPA).

As it is, the ‘Yes’ case is unfortunately on track to prevailing because the potential for rent-seeking remains undetected and because both the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader will probably advocate endorsement of local government by the time of polling day. With regard to Abbott, his timing will be diabolically brilliant and poised.

The Opposition Leader will probably remain relatively quiet regarding his declared support for the constitutional recognition of local government as politicians within his camp ostensibly battle it out on the referendum question. Consequently, when Abbott comes down more vocally on the side of the ‘Yes’ case, he will be able to ensure that this option prevails by making it look as though his endorsement is based on its inherent merits. This statesmanlike approach will have enhanced credence because he will ostensibly be agreeing with Prime Minister Gillard against whom he will have been in election combat.

Threats

The major threat that Julia Gillard poses to Australia is a probable failure, if not incapacity, to overcome a disadvantageous overriding situation. In this context, her strength in persisting despite adverse circumstances on-a day to day basis - becomes a weakness because this occurs at the expence of her mastering the overall situation. It is therefore a plausible scenario that the prime minister will go into the September 2013 federal election not only advocating a ‘Yes’ vote but denying her side of politics the option of supporting (if not constituting) a genuine ‘No’ case.

The threat to Australia of this prime ministerial failure to overcome the negative overriding context of the ‘Yes’ case prevailing will be that the constitutional groundwork for ‘regionalization’ (sic) will be established. The negative political ramifications for the ALP of this development will be that Lasch type political parties, such as the purported DLP, will, with assistance from rent-seeking elements within the coalition parties, entrench themselves at a regional level to undermine the capacity for the ALP to make up for lost ground should this party lose the 2013 federal election in a landslide.

Already, within coalition circles, there is talk of a new ‘genuine’ Labor Party emerging out of a decimated ALP subsequently splitting. An important reason why Australia has usually had a two-party system since 1910 has been because the political two-tier nature of a federal-state structure has been inhospitable for smaller parties to emerge.

There is merit in the argument that an entrenched two-party system leads to an undemocratic duopoly. However, recent Australian political history would indicate that future minor political parties such as Palmer’s United Party will actually contribute to a potential Abbott Liberal Party monopoly by siphoning votes away from the ALP or, more to the point, discourage disillusioned coalition voters from opting for Labor.

Even KAP which, despite probably being genuinely anti-economic rationalist, will eventually serve the purpose of helping the Abbott Liberals perpetuate in power by stifling the ALP from re-bounding from opposition. Entrenchment of parties, such as KAP, in a regional tier of government will contribute to this process of consolidating ultimately anti-Labor political parties within the mainstream of Australian politics.

The scope for the above political scenario to become a future political reality for Australia will reflect the threat of Julia Gillard losing sight of the ‘bigger picture’ so that the strategically orientated and tactically skilled Abbott prevails against the prime minister as part of his establishing a rentier state.

When the future political history of Australia is written with regard to political leaders who attempted to stop Abbott from establishing a rentier state, Julia Gillard will be categorized as a tenacious leader who still ultimately failed to overcome the socio-political framework that the Liberal leader had established. In relative fairness to *Rudd, he too for a while attempted to resist Abbott’s reconfiguration of Australian politics and economic settings.

(*Kevin Rudd’s public silent treatment of then state premier, Kristina Keneally, when they met to discuss the Commonwealth appropriating control of hospitals from New South Wales was the closest that the then prime minister came to resisting the onset of rent-seeking).

However, short-term political successes are just that- short term- when an opposing protagonist prevails in pursuit of their ultimate objective. Ironically, the political leader who has the potential to successfully block Abbott’s rent-seeking agenda is the man that he deposed as Liberal leader, Malcolm Turnbull. The reason that the term “ironic” is used in regard to Malcolm Turnbull is because the formidable political skill set that Abbott has utilized since becoming Opposition Leader was first manifested in having the member for Wentworth removed as Liberal leader.

Due to Malcolm Turnbull’s important role as a political actor with regard to the beginning of the Abbott ascendancy and due to his potential to end this phenomenon, a SWOT for the former federal Liberal leader is undertaken.

Malcolm Turnbull

Strengths

It is uncanny that Malcolm Turnbull is similar to Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott in that he too posses a high powered mind which can almost instantaneously comprehend a complex array and substantial volume of information. Similar to those aforementioned leaders, Malcolm Turnbull can juggle a wide range of demands and he is also verbally articulate. In summary, Malcolm Turnbull, Julia Gillard and Abbott have the uncanny capacity to put their ideas and objectives into action.

However, because Abbott has had a head start in pursuing a rent-seeking agenda he has had the jump on Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull. In terms of a comparative analysis of the respective strengths of these three political leaders, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott have had the initial advantage of having more developed political brains than Malcolm Turnbull. That is not to say that Malcolm Turnbull does not have an outstanding mind and that, should he decide to orientate his incredible talents in an even more focused political direction, he could best both Julia Gillard and Abbott.

In saying that Malcolm Turnbull’s political skills have not been as finely tuned as Abbott’s and Julia Gillard’s, this does mean that he does not have a political brain or long-standing political experience to brilliantly re-assert himself as Sir Robert Menzies once did. As a university student at Sydney University in the 1970s, he was a member of the Liberal Movement *(LM). This political movement was a Liberal Party break away. The factors which gave rise to its formation were essentially derived from factional struggles within the state branch of the Liberal Party of South Australia. Nevertheless, the LM attracted ideologically liberal political activists around the nation to its ranks between 1973 and 1977.

(*Members of the LM split in 1976 as some stalwarts returned to the Liberal Party while others threw their lot in with the Australian Democrats after 1977).

Malcolm Turnbull was a liberal activist who joined the Sydney University LM Club but ultimately did not utilize his time in student politics to establish a continuum which was a pathway into parliamentary politics as Julia Gillard and Abbott did. His interest in politics from his time in student politics was manifested by Malcolm Turnbull becoming a political journalist which probably led to his professional legal association with the business tycoon Kerry Packer.

It was as a high powered lawyer that Malcolm Turnbull demonstrated his talents, most notably with regard to his successfully representing the former MI5 agent Peter Wright in 1986 against the Thatcher government so that his memoirs Spy Catcher could be published. The stellar legal success of the Spy Catcher case probably cleared the way for Malcolm Turnbull to establish a merchant bank operation, Whitlam Turnbull & Co, the following year in partnership with Nick Whitlam, the son of the former prime minister with the same surname.

That former Labor New South Wales premier, Neville Wran, eventually became a partner in Whitlam Turnbull & Co led to snide remarks by some Liberals that Malcolm Turnbull was an ALP supporter. However, as his previous support of the LM and his backing of former members such as himself later joining the Liberal Party proper, indicated that Malcolm Turnbull was always at heart a Liberal.

Malcolm Turnbull’s sense of conviction, for what he believes in, is a personal strength which he shares with Julia Gillard. As a consequence, these two leaders have the orientation toward pursuing public policy objectives based on principle - as opposed to short-term political gain - which can ultimately only *benefit the nation. Because Malcolm Turnbull has a strong sense of himself in terms of what he believes in, he has been prepared to work professionally with people whom he that is politically different.

(*Admiration for Malcolm Turnbull and Julia Gillard’s idealism does not denote my support for their stated objective of establishing an Australian republic or agreement with the latter concerning her stance on abortion).

In a Liberal Party context, Malcolm Turnbull realizes that the Liberal Party is a combination of conservatives and liberals. Although Malcolm Turnbull is undoubtedly in the latter grouping he has made a conscious and deliberative decision to work with avowed party conservatives for the purposes of party unity and for the genuine national interest. This should augur well for the Liberal Party which has usually been well served by leaders such as Sir Robert Menzies and Malcolm Fraser who transcended the Liberal Party’s *conservative-liberal divide.

(*Howard ultimately did not successfully transcend his party’s ideological divide. Had he had also cultivated support of party liberals, Howard would have been in such a strong position that rent-seeking conservatives within parliamentary ranks and the party machine would have dared sabotage him in the 2007 federal election).

Former Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull has already aligned his liberal beliefs to fight for what he believes in. His opposition this March to Senator Conroy’s censorship framework (which Julia Gillard also covertly resisted) shows that Malcolm Turnbull is prepared to fight for what he believes in even if it means protecting the interests of a mainly ALP biased press. As federal Opposition Communications Spokesman, Malcolm Turnbull has also spoken out against the incredible blow-out costs and oligopolical potential of Senator Conroy’s NBN Co.

Not only does Malcolm Turnbull speak his mind (but within a context in which Liberal Party unity is not compromised) but he does so in a very articulate manner. He is probably one of the few politicians in the world who it pays to listen carefully to because you might actually learn something. His interview answers often provide an insight into the topic in question by his outlining a broader context as part of his explaining his policy position. The listener often not only gains insight into the relevant subject but is also often critically persuaded by the logical way in Malcolm Turnbull his explains position.

Weaknesses

Malcolm Turnbull’s major political weakness is tactical. He was first deviously outmanoeuvred by ALP operatives who probably worked in collusion with rent-seeking elements within the coalition in the so-called Godwin Gretch affair. As Opposition Leader, Malcolm Turnbull was comprehensively outmanoeuvred by rent-seeking elements within the ALP and the coalition working in collusion with each other to ensure that he was deposed as leader in late 2009.

In relative fairness to Malcolm Turnbull it would have been very difficult for any political leader to have survived such a well-co-ordinated leadership challenge even if he was only deposed by a one-vote margin. The prior broadcast of the ABC’s program Four Corners - in which the climate-change sceptic views of party conservatives such as Senator Nick Minchin were propounded - and Joe Hockey’s vote-splitting leadership candidacy were co-ordinated to ensure that Malcolm Turnbull lost the leadership to Abbott.

Had Malcolm Turnbull not lost the leadership, the political dynamics would not now be such that Australia has had to endure a hung parliament, a carbon tax and the very dangerous prospect of a referendum on constitutional recognition of local government which, if passed, will lay the groundwork for rent-seeking and the effective destruction of Australian states.

Perhaps had Malcolm Turnbull as Opposition Leader assembled as formidable a personal staff (as what Abbott has as Liberal leader) he might now be prime minister. There is a potential that Malcolm Turnbull might still become prime minister but the scope for this might have been thwarted if he has been co-opted by the Abbott forces into accepting their ascendancy which includes the dismemberment of Australian states.

Nevertheless, there are still major opportunities for Australia to be saved from rent-seeking should Malcolm Turnbull choose to exercise his leadership talents.

Opportunities

Malcolm Turnbull has the capacity to effectively lead a ‘No’ case in the September referendum on local government. As a very tech savvy individual with superlative management skills, Malcolm Turnbull can assemble a nationwide team to win a ‘No’ vote campaign. The issues that such a team can campaign on could range from a concentration of power with politicians at a local level - higher levels of GST rates as a result of new regional tiers of government needing to have proceeds from this tax passed on to them- and to create the necessary conditions for the general political balkanization of the nation.

Because a strong ‘No’ case can be made, rent-seeking elements within the coalition have arranged for political figures such as Peter Reith to run a dud campaign for the referendum. Although Reith may the ignominy of leading a losing campaign, his political dividend will be to ensure that his network of anti-union operatives within the coalition is activated to ensure that an Abbott government eventually and effectively destroys the Australian union movement.

The current referendum dynamics are that the constitutional recognition of local government is exciting such little political passion , despite the avowed opposition of the Victorian and Western Australian Liberal state governments and of the IPA, that the ‘Yes’ campaign will unfortunately prevail. General political apathy combined with having the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader advocate a ‘Yes’ vote should ensure that the constitutional referendum passes.

Furthermore, with avowed conservatives such the Nationals’ Barnaby Joyce advocating a ‘Yes’ vote, voters in regional and rural Australia could well vote for the constitutional recognition of local government. The socio-economic rent-seeking regime which will arise from such a development will vitally contribute to traditional farms being phased out in the future in favour of agro-businesses and/or making way for mining projects such as coal seam gas exploration.

The scope also tragically exists for unions such as the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) to support a ‘Yes’ vote in the constitutional referendum. Leaders of left-wing industry unions may believe that their power will be enhanced by their controlling new local government bailiwicks. However, integral to an Abbott government facilitating rent-seeking with ‘regionalization’ (sic) in place via constitutional recognition of local government will be Abbott’s goal of achieving the elimination of Australian trade unionism.

Should Abbott become prime minister, and should Malcolm Turnbull have supported an effective ‘No’ case, he will be in a position to make a Prime Minister Abbott honour his pledge not to introduce a No Choices industrial relations regime. The high regard in which many Australians hold Malcolm Turnbull should he help lead a successful ‘No’ case will convert into sufficient political capital for him to be the nation’s de facto co-leader should the Liberals return to power under Abbott.

Liberal Party MPs and members have been given the right to support either a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ case in the referendum which endows Malcolm with the capacity to seek to protect state rights. As political insiders know, it was Malcolm Turnbull’s support for state rights which led to his deposition in late 2009. The successful safeguarding of state rights would protect Australia from the formidable, destructive, rent-seeking agenda that Abbott is planning to inflict on Australia as prime minister.

Ultimately, it is up to Malcolm Turnbull to decide if he utilizes his potential to help save his nation from rent-seeking. He has the capacity due to his past referendum campaigning experience his current business contacts as well as his political and media connections to put in place a successful ‘No’ case for September 2013.

The political success of the Liberal Party more often than not has been dependent upon having talented political leaders. Nevertheless, Sir Robert Menzies - the most talented of Liberal Party leaders - had to overcome incredible internal treachery (within the context of the United Australia Party, the precursor to the Liberal Party) to stage his Lazarus type political comeback to become Opposition Leader in 1943, found the Liberal Party the following year and to win the December 1949 federal election.

Alas for Malcolm Turnbull, he was politically overwhelmed by a formidable rent-seeking cabal which deposed him as Liberal leader in late 2009. Because Liberal Party unity is paramount to Malcolm Turnbull, he has exercised the virtue of loyalty to subsequently support Abbott as Opposition Leader. He will not endanger Liberal Party unity or his party’s prospects of winning the 2013 federal election by leading a ‘No’ case because, as previously mentioned, Liberal Party MPs and members have the freedom to decide which option they support in the referendum.

In essence, Malcolm Turnbull can stifle the rent-seeking forces - who previously brought him down as party leader in late 2009 without undermining Abbott’s chances of becoming prime minister or the Liberal Party’s interests - by supporting a ‘No’ case in the September referendum.

At the very least, Malcolm Turnbull stands a very good chance, if not an inevitability, of being appointed Communications Minister following the next federal election. Going by his performance as opposition shadow spokesman in this portfolio, Malcolm Turnbull will make an excellent Communications Minister. His technical mastery of his portfolio is superb and he has displayed a near unique trait of taking into account the particulars of a specific subject and aligning his policy position to broader national interests.

Australia’s economic position is such that the nation simply cannot afford to go into further public foreign debt by allowing NBN Co’s current broadband roll-out. The model that Malcolm Turnbull almost ingeniously devised as a broadband alternative is infinitely more cost-effective than - and ultimately as technologically effective as - the current broadband project.

Malcolm Turnbull would not only do an excellent job as Communications Minister but serve the nation’s genuine national interest as a senior cabinet minister. If he had been the Industry Minister, Malcolm Turnbull would have exercised his skill in balancing the particulars of a specific policy with the broader genuine national interest.

There is little doubt that, if Malcolm Turnbull was Industry Minister, Ford would not be closing down its manufacturing operations in Australia in the second half of 2016. As Industry Minister, Malcolm Turnbull would have balanced the particulars of his particular portfolio with the broader national interest by ensuring that government subsidies for Ford would have ensured that this car company produced popular smaller cars for the domestic market while also manufacturing left-hand drive cars for export.

The overriding fact is that Ford’s impending Australian closure is due to its own strategic mistakes as reflected by Toyota Australia and General Motors Holden domestic and international manufacturing successes. The levels of subsidies that have been provided by successive federal governments of both political persuasions to the Australian car industry are actually relatively modest by international comparison.

Nevertheless, Ford’s impending manufacturing departure from Australia will provide so-called ‘economic rationalist’ policy makers with the pretext to end subsidies for the still Australian based car industry. Such an outcome would align to the continuing ‘economic rationalist’ general policy outcome of measuring success by de-industrialization and the adverse impact on employment which inevitably ensues.

Although the Abbott Liberals are currently ‘talking the talk’ about having a viable manufacturing sector, the reality will be a focus under an Abbott government on wealth distribution for and to a narrow rentier elite overly reliant on the mining sector. With the current wind back of Australia’s minerals boom, the Australian dollar is now depreciating in value. This should be good news which could enable the nation to adapt to the end of the mining boom by now being able to export manufacturing and agricultural products.

The ‘only ‘ problem with the above cited scenario is that Australian manufacturing industry is winding down due to public policy mis-direction which is ensuring that ‘economic rationalism’ (sic) and rent-seeking coincide to ensure that the economic mismanagement of the *Hawke-Keating era will be consolidated by an Abbott government

(*This economic mismanagement by the Hawke and Keating government was admittedly arrested by Howard and Costello paying off Australia’s public foreign debt and introducing a non-inflationary GST revenue stream).

Because Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull have the nation’s genuine national interests at heart, there is potential for the so-called ‘economic rationalist’ (sic) policy paradigm to be terminated. Unfortunately, because Prime Minister Julia Gillard is restrained by the dynamics of operating a minority government, she is not fully exercising her potential to lead a government of the calibre of a hypothetical Turnbull government.

There is scope to compare the potential opportunity of a hypothetical Turnbull government to that of Peter Costello’s failure to have become prime minister. Although Peter Costello was an ‘economic rationalist’ and an industrial relations hardliner, he still paid off Australia’s foreign debt and managed to generate effective full employment, albeit with too high rates of casual and part-time employment.

If he had ever become prime minister, it is interesting to speculate if Peter Costello would have aligned his government to the interests of small to medium business as Sir Robert Menzies did. Had this become the case, then a Costello government would have had a constituency which extended beyond the ‘economic rationalist’ (sic) perspective of Canberra public servants. As the Howard government lacked the support of such a powerbase, it was ultimately dispensed with in 2007 by rent-seeking elements within the two major parties.

Having shrewdly avoided the trap of deposing Howard as prime minister just prior to the 2007 federal election, Peter Costello not only avoided the novelty of been one of Australia’s briefest serving prime ministers (despite being the nation’s longest-serving Treasurer) but he gained the potential to live again to become prime minister in his own right.

Peter Costello’s decision not to assume the Liberal Party leadership following the coalitions’ self-inflicted 2007 election defeat - and again in 2008 when Dr. Brendan Nelson’s leadership faltered - were personal matters of judgement which were his call. However, the rent-seeking ascendancy which now confronts Australia due to Abbott becoming Opposition Leader were potentially avoidable had Peter Costello ‘done a Menzies’ by stepping up to the mark.

The question that must now be put to Malcolm Turnbull is whether he will do a ‘Menzies’ or a *’Fraser’ by harnessing his innate talent to lead the ‘No’ vote in September 2013 referendum?

(*Doing a ‘Fraser’ refers to the then Liberal leader’s courage in keeping the Whitlam government to account by deferring supply in 1975).

Australia is already heading toward the precipice due to the ramifications of Malcolm Turnbull being deposed as Liberal leader in late 2009 that it is ironically fitting that he is the only Australian political figure beside Prime Minister Gillard who can still save the nation. A failure on Malcolm Turnbull’s part to “step up to the plate” would not only be a squandering of his talent but a threat to Australia’s genuine national interest.

Threats

Threats in the context of Malcolm Turnbull exist on two levels: threats to his political person and threats to the genuine national interest. With regard to the threat to

Malcolm Turnbull’s political person, the maxim is correct that it is better to exercise your potential power instead of being co-opted. The rent-seeking brains trust which supports Abbott’s leadership have followed a strategic pattern of co-opting or neutralizing potential forces which might put up a genuine ‘No’ vote in the September 2013 referendum.

This Abbott rent-seeking-would-be-Liberal Party-elite leadership clique a has been prepared to allow Julia Gillard to serve a full parliamentary term so that there will be a constitutional referendum on local government recognition so that ‘regionalization’ (sic) could be introduced following a successful ‘Yes’ vote in the 2013 constitutional referendum. It is difficult to prove but probable - due to the high stakes involved that rent-seeking elements have sought to co-opt Malcolm Turnbull into at the very least remaining quiet with regard to this year’s referendum campaign.

History shows that political figures that are neutralized by co-option when they have power are later dispensed with after they have squandered their opportunity to be politically effective. Even had Peter Costello become Opposition Leader in 2008, he would have been deposed by rent-seeking elements within the coalition by the time of the next federal election because he had forfeited a golden opportunity to realize his long held ambition to become Liberal leader following Howard’s deserved political demise following the 2007 federal election.

Similarly, Malcolm Turnbull will eventually be squeezed out in an Abbott government to deny his potential of being an alternate prime minister. Again, as recent Australian political history shows in the case of the former Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu, leaders who surrender their power can at best only buy a little time until they are dispensed with.

With regard to Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership threatening Australia’s genuine national interest, there is the threat that the nation will suffer from his not leading the ‘No’ case in the September 2013 referendum and later utilize any lingering political capacity to support Australia becoming a republic coming in.

Dr. David Paul Bennett is the Director of Social Action Australia Pty Ltd.