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January 25, 2011
The Australian has delivered its judgement on Tasmanian politics. The new premier, Lara Giddings, must go for growth with practical plans, reduce government outlays and get the state back into surplus. Tasmania sorely needs to reduce its dependence on government spending.
How is this growth to be achieved? By standing up to The Greens of course. What else.
The editorial says:
The challenge for Ms Giddings is to demonstrate she has a plan to expand the economy, not just schemes to please the Greens. Her challenge is to manage the state in the interests of all Tasmanians, which inevitably means standing up to the Greens, first across the cabinet table and then on the hustings.
The implication is that going for growth is through austerity politics, privatization (selling Hydro Tasmania and Forestry Tasmania?), and allowing the private sector to do its magic, once the government gets out of the way with some good old slash and burn.
The implication is that the old style resource based growth is the way to go ---not the new fangled way of developing an information economy by installing the National Broadband Network and investing in education to improve school retention rates, as argued for the previous premier David Bartlett. Or turning Tasmania into a food bowl in the context of climate change.
Greg Barnes in State of crisis at the ABC'S Unleashed makes explicit what is implicit in The Australian's editorial. He says that Tasmania is in a mess:
Tasmania is again in crisis, as it was in 1989. Then Labor Premier Michael Field, ironically a long time mentor to Bartlett, slashed, restructured and reformed the role of government in his two and a half years of premier. If he had not done this, then it is unlikely that Tasmania would have survived as anything more than a Canberra dependant outpost. Giddings will have to look to Field’s example and she will have to bring the Greens with her. Tasmanians might not like the tough medicine but they cannot be spared it any longer.
Nothing is said about the reducing the corporate dependence on the public purse, a characteristic of Tasmanian style of corporatism.
An austerity politics is designed to derive a wedge into the Labor-Green alliance in a political context where the Liberal refuse to work with the Greens. I do not see how this kind of austerity politics will make the ALP more electorally popular.
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Old style Labor want to govern in its own right. None of this alliance nonsense. They fancy that they can still do if they dump on The Tasmania Greens.
Presumably, dumping on The Greens---their deadly foes-- will restore the ALP's primary vote so that the ALP can govern in its right.
I reckon Old Labor are whistling in the wind.