A vision worth voting for

Australian politicians have lost the will to embark on ambitious and meaningful reforms.  Instead, the default position of governments is to tax, regulate, and micromanage.

Our governments appear to have become be so afraid of voters -- or bad opinion polls -- that Australia has fallen into a policy vacuum.  Coherent policy vision has been replaced by stunts dressed up as policies, and tactical media responses to the issue du jour.

Take Prime Minister Gillard's announcement of the flood levy.  The problem with the levy is not the cost it imposes on Australians, which is fairly minimal for most of us.  The real problem lies in the fact that it is more evidence of lazy policy, designed as a quick fix to an unanticipated budget hole.

A supposedly one-off, short-term levy is not a solution.  It's a band-aid, and it's about temporarily convincing voters that the Government are good economic managers who can return a budget surplus.  This is the politics of maintaining appearances and disguising the underlying reality;  it's like your 30-something-year-old colleague with the BMW who still lives with his parents.

Australian aversion to long-term reform is particularly evident when it comes to tax policy.  The Henry Review represented the first serious effort at tax reform since the GST was introduced in 2000, and even then it was a compromised enquiry, hamstrung by an unwillingness to consider changes to consumption tax, and further compromised by the Government's unwillingness to deliberate some of its more politically difficult recommendations, like flatter income tax rate schedules.

Of the very few Henry Review policies the Government did consider, the mining tax became decidedly less of a priority the minute it met with opposition.  Those voters who believed in the necessity of the tax must've been gratified to learn that ensuring ''all Australians get a fairer share of the benefits of the boom'' was only a priority as long as it looked like an easy sell.

We could go on.  The Rudd/Gillard Government has represented a disappointing nadir for conviction-based politics.  The strategy is achingly simple:  identify a perceived source of voter concern;  implement a band-aid solution with much fanfare;  quickly junk the policy when it is revealed that it costs too much, doesn't fool enough voters, or is obviously completely ineffectual.  To wit, Grocery Watch, Fuel Watch, the pink batts scheme, Green Loans, and most recently, Cash for Clunkers.

This is not to suggest that the Opposition is any better.  Tony Abbott is keen to brand the Government's flood levy as a ''great big new tax''.  And that would be fair enough, if he were consistent, but voters don't seem to be buying the rhetoric.  Perhaps the public might be more tolerant of the Opposition's war on taxes if it hadn't proposed quite so many.  Abbott's memory might be short but voters have not forgotten such gems as the Ansett levy, the gun buy-back levy, and, a personal favourite, the milk levy;  because the dairy industry couldn't possibly survive the vagaries of deregulation on its own.  Abbott also manages to conveniently leave out the Opposition's own paid parental leave scheme, which, as a 1.5 per cent levy on company incomes over $5 million, certainly qualifies as ‘great', ‘big', ‘new' and a ‘tax'.

Tony Abbott can make legitimate complaints about the Government's willingness to increase taxation without engaging in substantive tax reform.  But when his own record -- in government and in opposition -- is so poor, his complaints tend to ring a little hollow.

As we become more confident with perceiving ourselves as consumers in a global economy, so too do we tend to commodify our politicians.  More than ever, we are unwilling to give our politicians the benefit of the doubt when it comes to poor performance;  it seems we've realised that we can indeed vote for new ones after only one term.  Political brand loyalty has gone the way of the Nokia phone.

For some, this may seem to lend credence to the current political strategy of appeasing short-term voter irritations.  But this is a paternalistic view that conceives of voters as self-interested and unable to see a few months past their noses.  Voters are smarter than that.  The 2010 federal election was a perfect example of just how uninspiring the current brand of politics is:  a non-result for an election characterised by non-policies.

One would've thought that both the Government and the Opposition had learnt in 2010 that we expect more.  And yet, last Thursday at the National Press Club we saw exactly the same dispiriting cycle.  Cash for Clunkers quietly and unceremoniously dumped, masked by the announcement of the flood levy -- a cover-up policy, a lazy tax to disguise an unwillingness to make budgetary cuts.  From Tony Abbott, even more of the same, opposition without an alternative.

The challenge for both Government and Opposition in 2011 is to give us a vision worth voting for.

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