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September 2, 2010
The Canberra Press Gallery do go on about a hung Parliament. They cannot seem to accept that the vote in the general election was pretty well 50-50, that the number of seats in the House of Representatives reflects that, and that the politicians need to work with what they've got to form a workable minority government. What is difficult to understand?
Forming a workable minority government means forming coalitions for the right of centre and the left of centre parties in the context of emerging problems. It means different political voices to the two old dogs driven to barking and desire to one eat one another other, by their political unconscious.
Somehow, for many in the Canberra Press Gallery, forming coalitions is bad. According to Peter Hartcher at the National Times:
Labor's primary aim must be to win over the three rural independents to give it the numbers to form a government.Yet by formally embracing the left-leaning Greens in a power-sharing agreement, Labor has now made it harder for the trio to justify to their conservative constituencies such a deal with Labor. Labor's economics are good. Its politics are woeful.
Hartcher claims this, even though Tony Windsor says it is not a consideration for him; Andrew Wilkie has said that the Labor/Greens deal does not influence him either; two of the three country independents have said they supported a price on carbon before they were voted back in; and each party in the Labor-Greens coalition or alliance would maintain its own agenda. Hartcher is spinning hot air not arguing.
Meanwhile, The Australian continues to rage on and on about the anti-mining Greens sinking the mining sector with their push for an increased mining tax and a high price on carbon. This is part of News Ltd's partisan campaign to delegitimise both Labor and the Greens, and to demand another election.
Update
Wilkie has decided to support Gillard Labor. Labor offered him modest government investment in upgrading the Royal Hobart Hospital through proper process, federal action on pokie reform and bringing forward the proposed investments in public hospitals.
Wilkie is supporting Gillard Labor in a minimal sense for supply andf or reckless no confidence motions in the government. On everything else he would vote issue by issue. Wilkie in practice, a ''prickly'' supporter of Gillard and the ALP, because of his strong concern for ethical government. Does Gillard Labor have any idea what ethical government means? If not, then storms lie ahead.
Gillard's decision to tackle problem gambling won't go down well with the NSW Right who have strong links to the pokies lobby hostile to a system of mandatory pre-commitment in which every player is mandated to register for a non-transferrable USB stick pre-set with a maximum loss of $50 day per day. This will use a smart card technology in all pokies, which will allow gamblers to control how much they spend before starting.
What we have currently is the Productivity Commission's estimate that there are 160,000 problem gamblers nationally who generate about $4 billion of the $10 billion in annual losses.
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The Coalition had said that they would deliver a stronger Budget bottom line than Labor. Their claim was that they would improve the budget by $11.5 billion over the next four years.
They dodged having their election promises costed by Treasury and the Department of Finance---Treasury, they claimed, was partisan, couldn't understand Coalition policies and was no better than a mid-tier accounting firm.
They folded as a result of pressure from the 3 regional independents, and submitted their numbers for costing to Treasury and Finance, who estimated the improvement to the budget bottom line from these promises is just $863 million over four years, not $11.5 billion claimed.
Mark Davis says that a:
This is a good reason to establish an independent Parliamentary Budget Office modelled on the United States' Congressional Budget Office.