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June 2, 2008
John McDonnell in an op-ed in The Australian makes an interesting point:
the Rudd Government is really a government of substantial reform. The Howard government took the view that the private sector generated wealth and the states delivered services. The role of the commonwealth was to collect revenue and distribute it and to maintain national security. The Rudd view is that John Howard was negligently passive and that the commonwealth should be active and ubiquitous, including having a major role in service delivery.
That seems to be not right with respect to the Howard Government. How about the GST? Or the reform to the labour market? Why aren't these considered to be reforms?Is this revisionist history?
There is also a question mark over the Rudd Government being big on structural reforms. What we have seen in the last six months is there being lots of activity that captures the 24-hour media cycle through tight news cycle management but which ultimately amounted to not much in policy terms. Oh, there is lots of talk about reform.
Spooner
Is this revisionist history an attempt to avoid The Rudd Government being seen as, and becoming akin to, the Carr, Beattie, Rann and Bracks state Labor Governments? These were-- and are--electorally successful over successive polls, but they cannot be considered to be seriously reformist governments. On the evidence so far the Rudd Government increasingly looks to be in the Beattie/Bracks tradition rather than that of the Hawke/Keating (market-driven modernisers) or Whitlam (socially progressive) reformist one.
Certainly Rudd Labor, on the evidence so far, is socially conservative rather socially progressive. So that leaves the option of being market-driven moderniser. Is this likely?
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Last week the conservative media's commentators ran a narrative of "political crisis", which they had written in large letters over Fuelwatch, over leaks, over threatening the public service. They formed their own little echo chamber full of reverberation of a government in big trouble.
It was fictional. They made it up. The media re increasingly about their own narrative.